"When you listen to your intuition, it guides you to make the right decisions and has you step away from those decisions you shouldn't be making and it's ultimately up to you that when you trust it it moves your life forward and opens up the doors of opportunity and when you don't, there's consequences for it." — Sunil Godse
This episode is brought to you by the Rapport Mastery Complete Virtual Sales System. Click here to get over 60% off this course, designed to help you book more appointments, close more deals, and recover lost revenues.
Curt Mercadante interviews Sunil Godse, who helps business owners create trusted brands by implementing a process he developed called intuitive branding that helps them unleash the power of intuition to make decisions that earns the trust of their employees and customers in under 14 seconds.
"If you look at your brain like an iceberg, 90% is below water, that's the subconscious part of your brain. And the conscious part is the 10% above water. So we have billions and billions and billions of data points of things that have happened in the past that your intuition draws from," said Godse. "So when we talk about these 'what if' scenarios, this is where like I did, I went back to the past to say, 'Okay, when did I make a decision that went right? And when I made a decision that went right, what did it feel like in that moment?' And those are these things that we call positive intuitive signals. And these are the signals that would've told us that this is the right decision. So for me, for example, that feels like a flow or the dots connecting and each one is going to be different. It's very unique because all of our experiences are unique."
"And then there are negative intuitive signals. So to figure out what those are, I get people to say, 'Okay, when did you make a bad decision? And what did that feel like?,' he added. "For me, those bad signals are getting that 'gut feeling' or the first trigger is I lose my peripheral vision and I get hyperfocused and my eyebrows cross. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm looking at something that's bad. It could be that I'm thinking about making a decision but it's not the right one. And when that starts to happen, I know, whoa, I got to pause."
Sunil is also the author of the books, Gut! What it is. How to trust it. How to use it, and Fail Fast, Succeed Faster.
As an entrepreneur, Sunil generated more than $20 million in revenues before moving on to helping a significant number of businesses go from 6 to 7 figures in revenues as well as being trusted to help major companies such as Citibank, SAP, Rogers Wireless and Western Digital, his advice simply works.
FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE:
Speaker 1:
Sunil, thank you so much for joining. As you said, long time no see. I just had the honor and the pleasure of recording an episode on your podcast. It's such a pleasure to have you here today.
Sunil Godse:
Thank you so much. Thanks for inviting me and hope to enlighten people on the nuances of intuition and drop some knowledge bombs and some really good tips on how people can improve their intuitive abilities, starting with listening to this podcast episode.
Speaker 1:
I can't remember but on LinkedIn you had shared someone's, maybe we were connected and I reached out and that one word, you had me at intuition because it's something, and we may have discussed this on your episode. Back in the fall, as you become more aware and we'll talk about that, I guess, in these intuitive signals, you start to pay more attention to things that it's probably your reticular activating system, putting things in front of you and now you're more aware of them. And there was one day where it was just, I was in a seeking mode of direction and the word intuition came to me three or four separate times on a day. I read it, someone brought it up to me, actually, I think it was my acupuncturist and then later to that night, I was listening to a speaker and he just kept saying, trust your intuition. Be guided by your intuition.
Speaker 1:
And so that word has stuck with me and every morning it's one of my affirmations. I am intuitive, to teach me to tell me to tell myself to pay attention to it and be aware of it. And then I saw you pop up and it was the algorithm. There's a one in whatever; I have 30,000 followers. So there's a one in 30,000 chance that I would see it and I saw it and I said, "I got to reach out." So I appreciate it and everything you do, because as I had mentioned, I was binging your content and it just really speaks to me. So thank you for everything.
Sunil Godse:
I appreciate you taking the time to find out what I'm doing and the purpose of what I'm really trying do. And you're right. Intuition is one of those things that is, because it's subconscious in nature, it's not one thing that you really think about. But what I've done is really taken a deep dive into really understanding what it is and with my experience using it in businesses and helping other businesses, that's [inaudible 00:02:16] But intuition doesn't know the difference between your personal life and your business life. It's just got these characteristics to it, which we'll dive into, which are really unique to each and every single person. But ultimately when you listen to your intuition, it guides you to make the right decisions and has you step away from those decisions you shouldn't be making and it's ultimately up to you that when you trust it, it moves your life forward and opens up the doors of opportunity. And when you don't, there's consequences for it.
Speaker 1:
Now if you're okay with it, I'd like to start with a story that you've told before, a painful story even to listen to about your friend. I believe it was in college. And it was really a stark lesson to you, I guess, on why you should or at least a wake up call or paying attention to your intuition. If you'd be willing to share that with our listeners and viewers, I would appreciate that.
Sunil Godse:
Yeah, absolutely. And this was when I realized, and I just want to backstep a little bit in terms of getting me to think about those incidences, and it was really after I wrote my first book called Fail Fast. Succeed Faster where the premise of that book is really okay, if I've listed a bunch of failures that other people have gone through, then if you were to read that book, then conceptually or theoretically, you should be able to succeed faster because somebody else has already gone through the failures. And one of the things that I kept getting asked was, "What is the one thing that's going to help me overcome failure?" And of course, with a 400 page book, I said, "This is a thick book here, it's not one thing." But what tied things together when I went back to the audio recordings was that 80 to 90% of those who I interviewed had used some form of, "I should trusted my intuition. I ignored my intuition. I knew what the right decision was." That's what got me started thinking, "Okay, what is this thing called intuition?"
Sunil Godse:
So one of the incidences that you're talking about was when I was reflecting back to the times that I ignored it. This was one that screamed out to me. So this was a friend of mine who was actually being stalked at the time and I was in engineering and I was doing some personal coaching. So she said, "Sunil, I need some advice." And sure enough, there was something nudging me which now I now know our intuitive signals, were saying, "Meet with her that afternoon. She needs your advice right away." But I had a couple of people convince me to go for beers and say, "Come on." And this is where that trust in relationships comes into play and I saw I let these guys convince me to go for beers. So I asked my friend, "Do you mind if we meet a couple of days later?" And as a good friend she was, she said, "Yeah, sure." And what ended up happening is the very next day that same stalker walked up to her at a bus shelter and put a bullet through her forehead and killed her instantly.
Sunil Godse:
That's when I start reflecting on those types of really key parts of when my intuition played a really critical role in my life. In this case, it could have saved my friend's life had I listened to my intuition.
Speaker 1:
When you tell that story, and when I was listening to it earlier this week, one of the things that I think about is trusting your intuition but also the interesting notion of proving a negative, meaning they always say if you bring your umbrella, it won't rain but if you leave it at home, it will rain. And you could never prove that because you brought your umbrella it didn't rain because you can't prove a negative. You see that in society a lot, "It would've been far worse had you not done this." How do you know that? How can you prove that? When you talk about trusting your intuition, if you had met with your friend and that instance had never occurred, you would never know it.
Speaker 1:
So it's an interesting piece of that's what I was thinking about, how do you know how to trust it versus not trust it versus sometimes I'll be like, "I know I should go but..." I like to try and get it a state of flow, but determining between laziness; "It's not in my essence. I feel like just waiting at home tonight." And it's knowing when it's intuition versus something else.
Sunil Godse:
Actually, the very, very first step that people, when I often do these podcasts or on stage, one of the things I get people to think about is go through those what if scenarios. So when you look back in your past, because one of the biggest parts of intuition that I think is misunderstood is there's a lot of pattern matching with what's happened in the past. And one of the four types, which we'll get into is called experiential intuition. And with experiential intuition, what happens is when you're born, and there's a research paper that shows that infants as young as two months old, have been shown to have intuitive tendencies. When you're born and when you're very young, we go through five to 6,000 experiences per day. And when you're older, 28,000 to 35,000 experiences per day depending on the research paper you want to follow. But the issue is that every single piece of that learning experience that you have goes into the subconscious area of your brain like a library, which is where your intuition is.
Sunil Godse:
And if you look at your brain like an iceberg, 90% is below water, that's the subconscious part of your brain. And the conscious part is the 10% above water. So we have billions and billions and billions of data points of things that have happened in the past that your intuition draws from. So when we talk about these what if scenarios, this is where like I did, I went back to the past to say, "Okay, when did I make a decision that went right? And when I made a decision that went right, what did it feel like in that moment?" And those are these things that we call positive intuitive signals. And these are the signals that would've told us that this is the right decision. So for me, for example, that feels like a flow or the dots connecting and each one is going to be different. It's very unique because all of our experiences are unique.
Sunil Godse:
In fact, I had one CEO that had this omen pop up on his right shoulder and he's now run two multimillion dollar businesses, two separate areas. One was online shopping in Canada, the other one ISPO clothing, which is now international, based on this omen that pops up, which is a positive, negative signal. And the other one are negative intuitive signals. So to figure out what those are, I get people to say, "Okay, when did you make a bad decision? And what did that feel like?" For me, again, those bad signals are getting that gut feeling or the first trigger is I lose my peripheral vision and I get hyperfocused and my eyebrows cross. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm looking at something that's bad. It could be that I'm thinking about making a decision but it's not the right one. And when that starts to happen, I know, whoa, I got to pause.
Sunil Godse:
Either I got to back way that from that decision, I may need to get more information. I may need to talk to someone. I may need to inform myself before I actually move ahead with that decision. So it doesn't necessarily mean that the decision is right or wrong yet. This is where the four types of intuition come in which we'll get into a little bit. But coming back to sort of the what if scenarios, that's what was happening to me is going back to say, "Okay, wow, my friend got killed and I could have prevented that. Okay, hold on. But there were other times. So what about the time where I got into engineering for the wrong reasons?" I'm Southeast Asian. So doctor, lawyer, engineer, or failure. Those are the only four career doors you have. My dad's saying, you got to be an engineer or doctor, what have you. So I fell into the trap of societal norms and cultural norms and I became the engineer. Although everything in my intuition was saying, "Be an entrepreneur."
Sunil Godse:
In fact, when I was five years old, I remember I wanted to buy these video games and my dad said, no, you can't have them. They're too expensive. And I distinctly remember exactly where I was standing. I was in a forested area, looking at my sneakers and thinking about my dad's decision not to buy video games. And this voice pops up and says, "Sunil, go door to door to raise money." So as a five year old kid, I went door to door to raise money and that weekend I raised, it was a Saturday. I raised $200. A hundred dollars went to my dad to buy those video games and the other hundred dollars went to a charity that my school was doing because I loved that, that purpose they were doing made me feel really good. So there was that entrepreneurial spirit when I was young. And everything else I did up to then, anything entrepreneurial in nature whether it was selling, helping with the bake sale, trying to get some customers, helping people do this or that, anything entrepreneurial in nature, I always became really successful at.
Sunil Godse:
Although I didn't look at connecting the dots going back, which is what Steve Jobs says is, in his Stanford address. So when I connect the dots going backwards, I suddenly think, "Okay, intuition was there." And when I trusted it, I raised a couple hundred bucks. When I ignored it, I went into engineering when I should have been the entrepreneur. And when I trusted my intuition after getting into engineering, and this is where you can ignore your intuition but then come back because your intuition never leaves your side. When I started to trust it, it got me to quit engineering. I lost my relationship with my dad. I never spoke to him for a number of years. But I then became a part investor in a Mexican restaurant chain that came up to Canada. And within a couple years I was making five times more in dividends doing something part-time on the side than being a full-time engineer. So I just dove head first and that started my entrepreneurial career, 20 million in revenues through a various number of businesses.
Sunil Godse:
And then people caught wind that I was doing something crazy. So they asked me, "Sunil, can you help our businesses?" And pretty soon I started helping others go from six to seven figures. I had SAP, Western Digital, Rogers Wireless contact me, Citibank. And now I've compartmentalized it. Because of the pandemic, we've gone into the more course work coaching model called intuitive branding. There's a number of people that don't want to give their testimonials because of confidentiality and they don't want their competitors to know that they're they've hired me. But of those who have given testimonials, a website, collectively they've gained over a million dollars to their bottom line. And again, it's down to this power of this intuition in making the right decisions that earn the trust of the people around you and that's what intuition's really there for.
Speaker 1:
You mentioned in a few cases there about the Steve Jobs quote about you can't connect the dots moving forward, only going backward. And I love that. And to do that takes, I guess, the trust of the intuition, some would to say a leap of faith, that they're all going to connect. I think Steve Jobs even said that. When you do that, I find one of the biggest challenges that I find with my clients and even for me sometimes, is and I think I stole this quote and I want to say from Jack Canfield, if it was Wayne Dyer or someone else, apologies, sue me, but it's "Don't let the how get in the way of your what."
Sunil Godse:
Right.
Speaker 1:
So there's a lot of people who want to know specifically the dots moving forward before they go. And sometimes I feel like that obsession with the how and a lot of times I find they're a calculating behavior style or a steady behavior style. I'm a disc certified trainer. And it's like, "Okay, let go. Define where you want to go," which in the end, does that require you to allow and let go and trust that intuition without getting so obsessed with, "No, I need to know the exact steps forward to get there."
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. And one of the things that I commonly say is when you take care of the inputs, the outputs take care of themselves. And what that means is that let's say we take that what if scenario and we've figured out what our intuitive signals are and the inventory which are unique to each one of us. Then what we know is every decision that we make is going to be filled with either a positive signal or a negative signal. And it comes from one of four types of intuition. Let me just share the story before we dive into the four types of intuition. But what happens is when you get into that situation where you understand you strengthen all four types of your intuition and you know what these intuitive signals are, then whatever decision in front of you, you're going to make is going to be the right one based on what's worked in the past for you, for you. Not for everybody else. What happens is sometimes we're too concerned with other people's journeys where we think we want to be successful. Social media is a really bad place to do this.
Sunil Godse:
There's nothing wrong with wanting success in your life but if you're going to do it by looking through the lens of other people or going through their values and not really making sure that it's where you are supposed to be, where you're supposed to be led, then you're going to be always unhappy because intuition is there to guide you on your path, your purpose and move that forward. And that's done one decision at a time. A great analogy to this is one of the fellows that I interviewed is a fellow by the name of David Dame. David has always dreamed, always dreamed of, so he's had cerebral palsy all his life. So he's been in a wheelchair and wanted to go on the beach. But every single time he would go on a vacation with his family or his wife, he would be in the back somewhere and everybody else is playing on the beach and in the water and he's always doing that what if that you and I were talking about. And one day his intuition got so strong to say, "David, you're going to do it."
Sunil Godse:
And he said, "Yes, I'm going to trust my intuition. I'm going to finally do it." He gets wheeled to the edge of the sand water barrier and that fills his toes and he's in bliss. And he gets them to stand him up. And then his biggest fear happens. He falls flat on his face. And he has wondered about the embarrassment. What are people going to think? Boy, do I look stupid. But that's when his intuitive signal says, "Dave, get up. You can take a step in the water." And he does. Then he listens to another intuitive signal. Even though the fear is there, it's starting to subside. "Dave, take another step." Okay. "And a third step." And he continues to live in the present moment, listen to the signals in the present moment saying, "Take a step, take a step." And then he points to his chin and he says the water gets up to the chin level. Then he turns around and he was blown away by how far he had come.
Sunil Godse:
So when you listen to the signals in the present moment, you can have the goal of going into the ocean but you have to act today. You have to listen to the signals that your intuition is telling you in the present moment and that's how you connect the dots moving forward to get to that goal and that's when you can reflect back, "Oh, I did connect the dots because I trusted my intuition."
Speaker 1:
I'd love to get into the four types but before, something you mentioned that was when he got wheeled up and he got up and he fell and his greatest fear came to play, he fell into the water. Do you find trusting your intuition can lead you forward in a way that connects the dots in a way that perhaps you want to go and is right for you, but do you ever find, and maybe this is off track of this discussion, that when you are so focused on that which you fear, that I find in some cases... Yesterday, before we started recording, I told you about the trying to tape my podcast and the dog kept coming out. It kept continuing. And then later I uploaded the podcast and we have horrible upload speeds here. You may notice that I may go out a little blurry. But as I uploaded, it took an hour and a half. And at the end, I was waiting to go somewhere. It told me file too big. After an hour and a half.
Speaker 1:
It was almost this series of things but the more my frustration grew and I started off before I taped with, "I hope that dog doesn't come out," I find that on a regular basis, I've had things where I woke up anxious and I'm not kidding you. Every electronic device around me goes on the fritz, including I went to buy something at a store and they said, I don't understand it. The Stripe, it's not a cash register anymore. It's a tablet, isn't working. Do you ever find that, that if you go the opposite way of your intuition, if you're so focused on your fear and the wrong and your negative intuitive signal and going in that direction, that it comes true sometimes?
Sunil Godse:
Yeah, absolutely. This is something that's really common when I've interviewed and I've interviewed now probably over 1,500 people formally for my podcast and the intuitive branding stuff that I'm doing. But if you were ever to go back and that also depends on how far you're willing understand that cause and effect. Some people don't want to go that far and others will say, "Yeah, absolutely." Every single time I remember when people, people didn't trust their intuition, things like this happened; either things went on the fritz, they allowed bad people into their lives, they stopped their success or failed. They went bankrupt. Some people ended up going homeless. Got into abusive relationships. Whatever the case is when people did not trust their intuition, bad things happened. So I'll give you a really good case study of this, and this is another thing called opportunity cost as well. So when you don't take the time to listen to your intuition, the cost is actually twice to you. So if you look at a fellow by the name of Vinh Giang, this is in 2016. This guy is an international speaker, a keynote speaker, an international magician.
Sunil Godse:
He was making seven figures in 2016 and speaking to a hundred thousand people, 80 stages around the world. You would think this guy is on fire if you were to look from an external perspective. Yet in 2016, his intuition got so loud saying, "You are a broken man. You really need to fix this because you are getting so caught up in the extrinsic motivation that you've forgotten the intrinsic part of why you're doing what you're doing." And he told his wife, "I got to fix this." And he goes off to New Zealand and he starts putting up these values up on the wall, what he thought values were. And then he takes a look at them and he says, "Wow, that's what my wife wants. That's what my manager wants. This is what the crowds want. These are what my friends want. Where the heck am I?" And he takes down those pieces of paper and then he starts putting up pieces of paper of what his values are. So conceptually, he thought this is going to be a cathartic event. I'm going to love this because these are my values.
Sunil Godse:
But he said it was haunting because for the first time and ever in his life, he was living his life on his own terms. And he came back renewed, knowing that he's going to trust his intuition and he falls back in the same old pattern again. Same old extrinsic motivation. Same old fake friends, brand names, doing stuff for others. And then six months go by and his parents come up from Australia and his mom pulls him aside and he's got a Vietnamese background and he said his mom told him this Vietnamese saying that when you hang around squid, you're going to get ink on you. And she said, "You have a lot of ink on you. This is not my boy." And that was the intuitive wake up call moment that needed. He cut out all his friends. He sold his downtown LA apartment, went down to a minivan, forgot the brand name stuff, moved out to the suburbs.
Sunil Godse:
And he said, "If I don't love my wife, I'm going to quit loving her. I'm going to divorce her. If I don't love speaking anymore, I'm going to quit. I'm making seven figures but I don't intrinsically love it." Luckily, he stayed with his wife and he's transformed what he's done in business but he had to make that decision to shed all the extrinsic motivators out of his life. So when it comes to opportunity costs, one of the things that I told him was that, "Vinh," and that was a six month timeframe. "It wasn't just the six months of time that you lost ignoring your intuition. It's also the six months of time that you could have gained by trusting your intuition. So in fact, you've actually lost a year of your life. And if you've made a career helping 100,000 people a year improve their lives, how many people did you leave behind? How many people did you not help?" And he said, "I've never ever thought about it like that, Sunil."
Speaker 1:
I know we keep pushing off the four but you keep saying wonderful things that I like to play on. I love that quote about the ink and the squid and I think we talked about this a little bit when I was on your show but I've said for the last several years, more than that and it has nothing to do with what's happened over the last two years in the world, that two of the greatest threats to humanity are conformity and apathy and one feeds the other. When I was on your show, I used to be in advertising and talked about some specific advertising as designed specifically to get us to turn off our intuition. You trust your intuition over here but you're just one wonder drug go away or one product away from doing this, even though your intuition goes over here, that programming is the ink from the squid. What do you think in terms of that?
Speaker 1:
For instance, in his case, do you think that's from societal programming taking over his subconscious so that he was acting when he put the values on the wall without even knowing it? It's just robotic. And then I feel guilty about wanting something for myself.
Sunil Godse:
It's so hard to... It's not hard. I think it's hard for us to get us to do that and there are a lot of what we consider norms that happen or get dashed away, we start to strip away the people that are around us. We start to not live our values through other people. And although conceptually, it sounds really intriguing to do, I think people just have a hard time of letting go of what homeostasis is. It's tough work. It's rewarding work. But those people who do that go through that toughness or that fear, they break through the fear. And when it comes to fear, there's two types of it. And with your intuition being in the amygdala area, it's really your fight or flight area. So either you're going to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger or you're not. And if you're going to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, it's very simple. You have a negative intuitive signal. As long as you've done the homework on what that signal is that is specific to you, then it's going to warn you to take a step away and walk away from that situation.
Sunil Godse:
Or if it's just fear because it's taking your life in a fresh new direction that is really meant for you, that fear may come in. But if that's paired with a positive signal, again, if you've done your homework on what your positive intuitive signals are, then you go through that fear because your intuition's telling you. And as you continue to do that, the fear starts to subside over time because you're trusting something that's so natural to you which is your intuition. And that's how you break free of that. And with Vinh Giang, he got so caught up in the ego stroking. He's a young guy, look at me, look at the world. He was lying to himself. And his intuition knew. One of the things with negative intuitive signals is they start very subtle in nature and they start to get louder and louder and louder until you can no longer ignore them anymore.
Sunil Godse:
So 2016 was his breaking point but his breaking point should have been much earlier than that, 2013, '14, when his career was on the rise and he started to surround himself with falsehoods and Keeping Up with the Joneses and all that stuff, thinking that's the secret to success. And then this [inaudible 00:27:27], pushed by crowds, feeding his ego and clapping him and here's a Mercedes-Benz and here's a downtown LA apartment, I live at this zip code and all these egotistical things that he used as props to boost his ego were moving him farther and farther away from who he was. The people who recognized him for who he was, was his parents saying, "This is not my boy. Who are you? You are lost." And some people make the decision to continue saying you don't know what you're talking about and that's when you're still on that slippery slope or that slippery slope starts getting steeper. And what happens is your intuition never leaves your side. It's always giving you these signals.
Sunil Godse:
But what happens is when you're so concentrated looking down on that slope going down, you don't have time to go up and look to see those intuitive signals or that rope that's going to pull you out of that situation. The time that you actually get to look up is when you're at rock bottom because there's only one way to look and that's up. So when I used to do my podcast interviews, we started your podcast interview with the question about how do you define intuition? What are your signals? But when I first started my podcast interviews, my first question was, "How has intuition played a role in your life?" And 100% of the time, the story that was told was at a time that they were rock bottom; they became homeless, they got into car crash, they were in the hospital.
Sunil Godse:
In one case, I had one person who she just didn't want to be on camera, was very nervous. I actually wanted to interview her to find out how she trusted her intuition to be an IFBB champion on stage. That was my angle. So I said, "Don't look at the camera crew, just talk to me and we'll make it conversational." And I popped the first question, "When did intuition affect your life?" And she goes, "I ignored my intuition. I was sexually assaulted."
Speaker 1:
Wow.
Sunil Godse:
And we spent the next 45 minutes talking about the signals starting from the very first time it said, "Move away from this guy," to the time when she got over overtaken and then assaulted. It's a totally different direction.
Speaker 1:
That's amazing. As a segue into the four types, you mentioned doing your homework and you also mentioned early on that the research is found and your research and other research has found that as little as what you said, two months old, intuition. When you go back down to that basic level and a toddler, two months is I guess, still considered an infant, right? Could the homework be as simple as I touched the stove and got burned. Therefore, intuitively I know for the rest of my life, for the next 95 years, that was my homework, that now I know intuitively not to touch the stove.
Sunil Godse:
Absolutely. That's what one of the four types called experiential intuition is which we were talking about earlier. You touch the stove and it gets hot and maybe you touch the metal and it gets hot. You touch the fire, it gets hot. And so each one of these data points or these points of failure, so to speak are, again, data points that are going into the subconscious area of your brain to say, "Okay, you can do that again, no problem. It's your decision. But I've told you just because this oven is white instead of black, if you touch the fire, it's going to get hot." And then all of a sudden, hmm, now as when you're younger, you're, again, putting the data points together. And it's similar to walking. Children fail but they get up and they do it again and we encourage them, "Come on, come on." We hold their hands out to get them to walk. And eventually, they do.
Sunil Godse:
So once again, through trial and error, what they've tried, maybe it's the angle, maybe it's using their hands, but they're intuitively learning along the way. And the more data points that you can put in in your brain, the more learning you have, the better the quality of the decision you're going to make because of that signal. So if you have no experience in business and you haven't bothered to take some courses or get mentors such as yourself or myself, what have you that have the experience to guide you along the way, you're shooting in the dark. And so there's no wonder why 91% of businesses fail in the first two years and 99% of them are gone in the first five years because they just haven't trusted their intuition to make the right decisions or get the right mentors on board.
Speaker 1:
You mentioned the experiential. Let's dive into the four types.
Sunil Godse:
Yeah, absolutely. So the way that I look at how intuition works is that it's like driving a car. And so we talked about the signals. So you get in the car, you push a button, turn the [inaudible 00:32:28] and you listen to the engine roar and you keep running. Yu don't need to be a mechanic to drive a car. You don't need to know about compression ratios, gears, all that stuff. What I wanted to do is take a peek at what's under the hood of this thing called intuition. And what I noticed is after doing some research with the academic research and interviewing these over 5,000 people was I noticed that there were four types of intuition. The best way I can explain the four types of intuition is actually through a case study of a non-believer. One of my friends was a fellow by the name of John Rothschild and this fellow was an investment banker. So this guy, data, spreadsheets, everything, ruled his world. Because he was a friend of mine, he was one of my very first interviews. I said, "John, would you mind talking about intuition?"
Sunil Godse:
Now at that time, intuition was seen as coming from the cosmos, voices from God. That's fine if that's how you define intuition. To me, it doesn't really matter what your definition is. I'm here to say you've got some signals; where they come from is up to you to define that. But for him, he's like, "This thing does not exist. Come on. What are you talking about?" So I said, "Okay, John, do you mind? [inaudible 00:33:44]" He said, "Yeah, I haven't seen you for a while. Let's just talk about this thing you want to talk about for intuition for five minutes and we'll grab a coffee and we'll catch up." So I'm driving down to see John and I'm thinking, "Okay. I wonder how this interview is going to go." It's one of my first ones. So we sit down, I actually turn on the camera and I start telling him about these signals. And I told him about the CEO that sees the omens on his right shoulder whose now run two multimillion dollar companies on that signal.
Sunil Godse:
I also tell him about another entrepreneur whose left earlobe gets hot whenever he is about to make his bad decision which is his positive or negative intuitive signal. And he's saying, saying, "Yeah, omens and these, I would really like to shake their hands. But any decision you make in life is about your learning and experience." So this is when I start telling him about experiential intuition. And I told him about what experiential intuition is. And I said, "In some cases, John, your intuition actually has you go against the data." And he goes, "That's really funny, Sunil, you mentioned that. I actually have something like that, that happened." And I said, "Okay, please tell me." So he said that was a time when he was looking to put a franchise location in; that's what his business was in. So if you put in a McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King, there would be a team in place that would look at whether that franchise is going to be successful by looking at traffic patterns, demographics, and develop into the areas as examples.
Sunil Godse:
And his team would use a benchmarking system out of 10. So a 9 or a 9.5 out of 10 meant that this is a great place for a franchise. So he walks into this area of Toronto which is a crappy area of Toronto. And now we've moved on from experiential intuition to now situational intuition which is the second one. And we've all been to that situation where we walked into a room and say, "Huh, something's off here." And that's your situational intuition saying something in this environment is not right. So John and his business partner walked into this area of Toronto where his team said, "This is a 5.5 out of 10." And he goes, "Huh." And now he's telling me, "Perhaps it's my intuition, I'm not sure. But something saying that, no, you know what? It is going to be successful here." And he goes against his team's advice and he puts a location there. That ended up being something called the Beer Market, which was the most profitable franchise brand under his whole portfolio of brands ever in the history of his company. Then at some point, his purpose changes.
Sunil Godse:
This is now we're going to get into the third of the four called relational intuition. What relational intuition does is it only allows people through a thick intuitive filter that gets you to listen to those people that you absolutely trust. You know that they're going to be there for you through thick and thin. They aren't yes people, they will give you constructive criticism but their intention is to lift you up. You and I have met hundreds of thousands of people, I'm sure between the both of us through our lives. I've got two, two people out of all those hundreds of thousands of people I've ever come across who I intimately trust. And it doesn't mean that they're static. They can move. Their lives will change. Their values have changed. Mind may change. That is an ongoing; some people come in and out. But that's how really strong your relational intuition is. So in John's case, he wanted to move away from our three to 4 million a year career to run a business.
Sunil Godse:
So all the people he surrounded himself who were full of ego, money, fame, high end restaurants, that loving lifestyle said, "You're an idiot." But only one person actually to find out why. And that was his wife. And his wife asked "John, why? Why do you want to do that? You're so successful here and you want to just start from ground zero?" And he goes, "Because this just feels right." That was his intuitive signal. And then you would think that when you look at creative intuition which is the fourth, this gives you the risk level of the decision that you're going for and which you should be able to tolerate. So if you're turning at the left lights left or you're eating a sandwich, it's not a very risky decision, your creative intuition's pretty low. But in John's case, you would think that intuition would hand him a business to run that's has healthy cashflow, strong balance sheet, good profits. Nope. His intuition says, "John, you're going to run this tiny bankrupt little restaurant." And this is exactly what I'm going to paraphrase what John is telling me.
Sunil Godse:
So an hour before this particular statement, he says, "Intuition doesn't exist," half an hour before he says, "Perhaps intuition, I'm not sure." Now when describing his decision to run this tiny bankrupt little restaurant, he looks at me and says, "Sunil, you can have all the data in the world but you have to trust your intuition." And he walked into that tiny bankrupt little restaurant. That restaurant was East Side Mario's location number one. And over the next 20 years, he grew that to over a thousand locations, $2 billion in revenues before he retired just after I had the interview with him, all because it felt right. That's the power of intuition.
Speaker 1:
That's an amazing story. Something you've brought up, a word that you've used several times across several stories is the word ego. It's interesting, when you look back, whether it's the Daoists, whether it's the Stoics, whether it's the Buddhists talking about the difference between ego and the identity, we hear a lot about identity today in a variety of context. I identify as a Republican or I identify as a Democrat or I identify as this and that. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between your ego or maybe not just the difference but how it's easy to confuse our ego with who we actually are? And if intuition is a greater... I was going to say signal but there are intuitive signals, a more of a signal about who we truly are versus our ego.
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. So when I looked at the academic definition of ego because I wanted to really dive into the science, there was two sides to ego and it's very similar to there's a Dr. Uecker that does a... I'm not pronouncing her name correctly, but anyways she looked at self-awareness which is who we are, how we see each other. And what the research shows is that there's two types to ego. The first is one where you put on a mask and you're being who you are not. And where intuition comes in is it's going to tell you whenever you're in front of people and you're putting on a mask, you're being someone you're not, you can sense that because you intuitively know because it takes effort, energy to put on that mask and then you start filtering all your words and how you behave through that mask. But you intuitively know that that's not who you are.
Sunil Godse:
And you can just take a look at if you want to, even video yourself, take a look at how you are with someone else and when then the door closes, take a look at your demeanor afterwards and take a look at the parody or the difference between one versus the other. And the second side was narcissism. And there's a fine line between being narcissistic and being self-confident. Being self-confident means that you have the experience to back up the advice you're giving. But if narcissism is really about if you're just sort of blowing hot air to make yourself look good, then your intuition is basically telling you, you don't know what you're talking about. And this is where trust becomes really important because intuition is a two way street. It's not just the signals that your intuition is telling you but it's also the signals that somebody else's intuition is telling them about you. So when you are egotistical and you're putting on a mask, not only is your intuition saying you're being fake but the others are looking to you and saying, "This is not someone genuine."
Sunil Godse:
So they may be your friends. They may be in your circle, your coworkers and maybe it's great to have a beer with you or a coffee or have walks with you have good chats but will I allow you into my inner circle? Absolutely not because you are not true to yourself. And when it comes to narcissism, and I'm sure you and I have looked at people talking about the things that they think they know and quickly you know that they don't, so in your earlier example of shutting off intuition when it comes to branding or some of the messaging, this is exactly where this comes, where you've got something that stops the scroll and gets you into something that's, "Oh, this emotionally triggers me." But what happens is there's no consistency in the journey that gets you to say, "Okay, this was the promise that's being made but it's not being delivered." So yes, you may get people to buy your products and services but you're getting people who are possibly desperate, who are not in touch with their intuition.
Sunil Godse:
And this is when I say your bottom feeding when it comes to fishing because you're getting the people at the bottom that are kind of half dead and no disrespect to them, it's just that's what you're reeling in, when you should be reeling in the bountiful fish that's going to feed your family, that's going to feed the village and you're completely missing it because your hook is in the wrong place. And those people that are that the bountiful fish that are trusting others, your hook is like, "I don't trust that hook." So you never get to it. So that's what marketing should be like. That's what sales should be like. And when you are true to yourself and your company's purpose is really going through the lens of the true core values and you're being intuitive and you're being authentic and you're being empathetic and you really care about the products you put out that's solving real problems and you care about the people that you work with, that's how you attract people to come to your company.
Sunil Godse:
That's how you attract customers to your brand. And these are highly talented employees, fiercely loyal customers. And when they come to your brand, guess where they're coming from; your competitors. And if trust happens in under 14 seconds to make that decision to support your brand, it takes them under 14 seconds to leave your competitors. And that's how you eliminate them in under 14 seconds which is the tagline for intuitive branding.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. You mentioned in your website and the book, the 14 seconds in that decision. But when I was on your show, you also mentioned a stat that was I believe 33 milliseconds.
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. That's [inaudible 00:45:01] starts.
Speaker 1:
Can you talk in terms of the difference? Is there a difference between the 33 and the 14? Does it depend on the experience and what's going on?
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. So the 33 milliseconds is based on how we can measure the brains today with the MRI technology that we have today or a number of years ago when the study was published. When they looked at people trusting others to exchange, in this case, it was investors, so exchanging money, the part of the brain, the amygdala that lit up where it's talking about trust or it was mapped to trust, started lighting up at 33 milliseconds. And by the time the decision was made to actually exchange money with that investor or make that investment, that happened in 10 to 14 seconds. So you actually start gathering, the four types of intuition actually start gathering information in as literally as 33 milliseconds to make sure there's consistency in body language and tone in somebody not being egotistical, making sure the situation is correct, making sure the experience is there. So all the four types of intuition are starting to assess in 33 milliseconds what the right decision is so that between 10 to 14 seconds, it's ready to say, "Yep. Go ahead with that decision."
Sunil Godse:
And then if we look at how soon this happens between the actions or decisions you make, further research has shown that your intuition actually acts on average seven to 10 seconds before you actually make a decision. And new research coming out of University of Toronto, I haven't laid eyes on it so I'm just going by another colleague who is really into the work that I do. She was saying that I think a neuroscience research researcher has shown that happens in sooner than 23 seconds; 23 seconds before you make a decision, your intuition's already telling you. So whatever the number is, to me, tomato, tomato. What I'm saying is that your intuition will always give you the right decision within fractions of seconds before you make the decision. And it's up to you whether you listen to it or not. So you can have a half an hour interview when you're hiring and within the first 14 seconds, you'll actually know whether you trust that candidate or not.
Sunil Godse:
And you can try to, in the next 29 minutes and 46 seconds, you can try and bolster that or find holes or find out things that your intuition's not sure of. That's when you take the rest of the interview to maybe bolster something that you didn't know about or actually find something that yeah, this person is deceptive. And that's how I advise people hiring, for example, in using those four types of intuition.
Speaker 1:
You mentioned earlier there's some people who, when you talk about intuition, take more of a spiritual metaphysical bent and then there's some people who are, "No, there's no way." And you look at the Dao or you look at some things in even Hinduism and think thousands of years old and people would say for those thousands of years, "Ah, that's just mumbo jumbo. That's just crazy." And then a hundred years ago with the dawn of quantum physics and quantum mechanics, it's almost in a lab, they're proving. Whether it's the observer and the observed, they're showing the things that they knew about thousands of years ago. And some people will say, "Aha, that was tested in a lab," when you look at those things. When it comes to intuition and you're 14 seconds or 33 milliseconds there, what do you think is going on? Because someone who says, "Ah, that spirituality, no. Mumbo jumbo." But that same person will say, "I got a bad vibe." Whether it's spiritual or just a physical bad vibe, what do you think is going on there? Is it an exchange of electromagnetic impulses? Is it something deeper?
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. So this is, again, where how far you want to stretch that belief. And this is why to me, it doesn't really matter how you talk about intuitive signals. Like my fellow, John Rothschild, if I was telling him about manifestation, this guy's probably going to call a psychiatrist and give me an appointment versus others who as you talk about [inaudible 00:49:14], you're very much into Eastern philosophy. And I absolutely believe that there's an element of that is coming from messages from God or, or whatever your faith is. And if intuition's also being carried, I interviewed a Buddhist monk who said that intuition is also carried through your genes and you can look at research and epigenetics to use that as a backbone to see that intuition gets carried on. So this is where I'm a bit ginger in terms of really saying, "Okay, where does intuition come in?" My personal belief is, I have a strong Hindu faith; I believe there's messages from that perspective. I also am rooted in science, obviously, so this confirmatory one there. And I just know for myself that it happens.
Sunil Godse:
So when people are, for instance in John's case, going from zero to hero in an hour, was really about me educating him on things like signals, things like how the four types of intuition really manifested itself in his life. So it's really about his experiences, his definitions, how it acted in his life, looking back at connecting the dots. And when he understood that halfway through, he's saying, "Perhaps it's intuition," and all the way through, he now knows that's intuition. And when we actually shut the video off and I shouldn't have, when I turned the video off, this guy was like a kid in a candy store. He said, "I had no clue this was what intuition was like. And Sunil, I can tell you so many more instances where I've made decisions like that nobody's ever understood but I just knew it was the right decision." And that's why he's really successful today.
Sunil Godse:
So this is where I take people on a journey backwards to figure out those, again, we're talking about those what ifs but really coaching it in what they understand and how they want to extend it. So I've had a former NHL coach tell me that intuition comes from the cosmos. So if you think NHL coaches just look at data on spreadsheets about the players that they put on the ice, he's made situations where he put one of the weakest players in a really important game for the last penalty shot that was there to pick the game and everybody and his coaches, assistant coach are looking at him saying, "I think this guy needs some help." And lo and behold, that person goes on to score the winning goal. And he said that was all intuition. No stack told me. He was the worst player on the ice. So from a statistical perspective, he was crazy. But from an intuitive perspective, it was the right decision to make at that important point in that game.
Speaker 1:
So as a playing on that and talking about business, I'd like to give you two scenarios. One is you have someone who works at a large corporation. They're either the VP of branding or they're the CEO and their intuition is telling them one thing and they internally feel, however, I have a responsibility to this. It could be a public company. It could be a very large private company. We have all these employees. We have people who rely on us, shareholder value, all that, all that's going on and all the data says go one way. And my team, who I hired to trust, is showing me all this data but my intuition I have learned whether it's the omen on the shoulder or the hot ear or whatever, goes this way. What would you tell someone like that? Because that's a steep hill to climb.
Speaker 1:
And then the second case study, I'll give you the question, would be an entrepreneur who doesn't have the experience but whose intuition says start this company. You have no experience. So the first one though, that CEO or the corporate exec who has to go against the green like that NHL coach you said that's crazy, that's a lot of, well, if I put this guy in and he misses the goal, I'm the goat. What would you tell an executive like that?
Sunil Godse:
So first of all, I think executives are really, again, show me the data. Everything about intuitive branding is about earning the trust of your employees and customers because they are directly responsible for your success. So being a leader means to provide leadership and making them feel trusted and respected. And when that happens, the data shows clearly with the things like the Edelman Trust Report that has been spending years looking at trust, and the stats show that when have employees that trust you or trust the leadership, they are 37% more productive. They are six times more creative. And 31% of that 37% goes directly to profits because of the increase in productivity all because they trust you. And customers are no different. When you create messaging and treat them like customers rather than dots on a graph, they are nine times more likely to buy from you again and typically they're buying almost twice as much. And there's so much research behind this level of trust. So if you're a CEO, you have a duty and responsibility to make that decision.
Sunil Godse:
And absolutely, your short term profits might take a hit but you got to take a look at where's the long term gain and to convince the shareholders. And if there's anything, if you look at what the Great Resignation is all about, when I talk to my friends who are CEOs of companies, they are directly telling me either on podcast interviews or behind the scenes because they don't want to tell anybody, that the reason why this is happening is that so many companies have done things the wrong way in treating the people that the pandemic is helping people say, "Okay, what do I value in working for a company?" And these employees are now saying, "No, I want to work at a place where I am really valued." So for every single one of my buddies, it means they're going to have to pay a little bit more. It means they have to interact with their employees a little bit more. So those who are successful in doing it are saying, "I have to do that. I've been doing that for a while."
Sunil Godse:
And that's why he attracts a lot of talent or that's why she attracts a lot of talent. And that's helping them put more products and services in the hands of their customers and they actually choose their customers based on whether these are the right customers to work with because if they're going to treat their staff like that, then they said I don't want that as a customer. So they're using that same tactic in using intuition to figure out we need to treat people the right way. And if you don't, then you are going to be, again, bottom feeding because you're going to get talent that are just there because they need a paycheck. They don't care about you. They don't care about your products and services. They don't care about your customers. They're there to use you as a stepping stone to another opportunity. So do you want to be a company or do you want to be a rug that people stomp on? So what kind of company do you want to run?
Sunil Godse:
And if you're so shortsighted that you're a slave to the stock market and the short terms, good luck because if that is internally going to rip you apart. And if you look at anything, if you look at these people who are super successful, the majority of them are so unhappy, so unfulfilled and they end up regretting way too much later. So 80, 60, they're regretting when they're about to die or they've done everything, that's not the time to regret. The time to regret is today, that you haven't made the decision to move you forward. Why do you want to wait until you're 60 or 80 and waste all that time? And again, there's an opportunity cost that comes in.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. By the way, before we move on, are you okay on time?
Sunil Godse:
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:
Okay, cool because I know we ran up against the hour.
Sunil Godse:
Yeah, that's okay. I'm good.
Speaker 1:
So the other scenario is an entrepreneur. And let's say it's an entrepreneur who, I've worked with entrepreneurs who are now gun-shy because they quit their job, corporate job; their intuition said, "Quit it and start this business," but they don't have the experience to know how to do it. Their intuition was correct but that next step of maybe getting help of doing those things led them off a cliff or backed them into a corner and so now they're like, "I did that once. I'm never going to do it again." What would you tell that entrepreneur?
Sunil Godse:
So if their intuition has really told them to quit and not because they have a caustic work environment and because they've been oppressed at work, be very careful that's the reason for leaving that workplace or that career because it's not out the right career. If your intuition is truly saying that you have something that you want to put out in the world that's going to help, improve the lives of somebody, you have a product or service that's going to do that, then that's the first thing I would take a look at, is make sure that's exactly what his or her intuition is saying. The next step is to say, "Okay, why? Why are your products and services going to move the needle to help extend or increase the value or increase the convenience in someone else's life? What problem are you solving?" So those are the types of questions you want to ask because that's exactly why you're creating those products or services in the first place, is to make someone's life easier in some way, shape or form. That's the messaging that you need to put out there.
Sunil Godse:
And so make sure when you put out that messaging, that people are willing to say, "Yeah, I want that," and they're willing to pay you for that. And you have to also get away from the big spike when you have family and friends saying, "Absolutely, I'm going to support you." Then that's great because that's a spike of hope and then you've got the valley of, "Oh my God, I actually have to go out and sell this thing. I actually have to tell people about it." So the next thing is, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, "Let the market dictate whether it's valuable or not." Are your sales coming in or is your messaging wrong? Have you really found a problem that is going to affect a lot of people? Because you also have to take a look at that. So when you have that messaging that really drives someone home, the things that I buy that create value in my life are because I get that emotional trigger that I'm buying that for something that's helping me intuitively want to buy that. So that's the story that I'm in.
Sunil Godse:
So you have to reach people like me with that story and when I come in to and I attach myself to your story, now I am intrigued and that's going to get me to now say, "Yeah, that's going to increase my value in my life," or "It's going to help my kids," or "It's going to help our family," or "It's going to help move my business forward." Absolutely, I'm going to invest in that. So the tools that I use in my business and the things that I buy for my family or for myself are things that move my life forward in some way, shape or form and the that's an emotional thing. So your job as an entrepreneur is to make sure you craft messaging around that. Once you get that customer, treat that customer right. If you're bringing on people, make sure they believe in your vision and they're excited, you treat them properly to make sure that they add to the creativity of what you're doing, especially in the first startup stages. And that's how you move your business forward. That's all based on intuition.
Sunil Godse:
So a lot of the products that you see are the customers or the products or services that you see have all come from a purpose, a story. And that story changes. There's a really good a book by April Dunford on positioning. One of the things that she talks about was that she was selling a database when she was at IBM and if it was like, "Okay, we're a database, we're faster, better than you." So IBM got lost in the noise with this database but when she actually said, "No. Actually, we're more of a data warehouse and actually helps you make business decisions." And then people, the customers intuitively connected that to say, "Oh yeah. So you're actually not a database. You're actually a data warehouse. It helps us make business decisions that makes our business move forward. Yeah, can I have one of those?" We're talking about very expensive ones. And to give you a personal example of where I've taken an entrepreneur from zero to hero, one of the people I met here.
Sunil Godse:
In 2007, I met her and she had gone through a time in her life where her boyfriend called her up to his apartment and she walks in and there was blood everywhere. He locks the door behind her and said, "I'm already going away for one murder, might as well make it two." He had just murdered their best friend in the bathtub. So she was assaulted. She was choked. She was asked to clean the blood. And her intuition kept her calm and kept him calm. And then her intuition able to find a window to escape and it said, "Run now." So she ran, went down 18 flights of stairs and survived because of her intuition. But she was never able to leave her apartment because she was so afraid. PTSD. She used to go to the gym every single day, she stopped that. She put wood all over her apartment because she couldn't stand all the other stuff, what made her feel safe. So she was afraid. We had met through an entrepreneurial event that she got invited to and instantly, we connected. I got her story and she wanted to write a book.
Sunil Godse:
So I said, "Okay, let's take you through this journey." So she went through my intuitive branding program and she put her book, and all the things that she talked about, how she healed from trauma was what the book was all about. And through that journey, she learned a lot about her signals. I took her through the seven day challenge that finally got her out of her house to just go to the gym, to just talk to people. So she was able to trust the signals that she had, cut out a lot of people in her life. Now she's got a website with her book and she sold over 10,000 books now from not being able to open the door all because she's taken that intuitive branding or how to earn the trust of people to reach people. So she's putting out blogs and blogs and she's connecting with people and I get text messages from her every day or every second day, someone else, her boyfriend just committed suicide. That happened two days ago.
Sunil Godse:
Someone else just left an abusive relationship and they're reaching out to her. So her purpose is to help these people. She's got a full-time job as well and she's got this on the side and she's making some money doing this and she's helping people heal just by her words of what she went through and the types of messages that she's showing with me and shared with me are transforming their lives. So that instead of them being suicidal, they're now looking to, "Okay, I'm okay." And she's the vehicle through, because of that, because of the time she puts in to talk to them, because of book that she has, because of the blogs that she puts out. So her purpose of helping other people, it happens to be a book that actually moves them ahead and she didn't have an investment to make but she trusted her intuition to invest in what I was doing and this is where we are at. And now we're in the process of putting courses together and coaching because she's getting asked a lot about that.
Speaker 1:
What is her name? I'd love the link to that and read the book.
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. Her name's Ashley Michelle. So you can go to Ashleymichelle.com and her book is called Finding Strength Through Tragedy. It's just a horrific story but how intuition actually saved her life. Now she's getting booked on podcasts like crazy because of that story. So coming from someone who thought that she was worthless and couldn't get out of an apartment to now writing blogs and saving other people's lives and getting on podcasts and doing blogs and blogs in a span of about a year.
Speaker 1:
Wow. One final question and I think it's something important that you mentioned, I know it is. At the beginning of this last answer or response was when I asked about the entrepreneur who wants to leave their corporate job and do that, the first thing you said was knowing the difference between I want to start my own business because I have value to offer the world versus it's a toxic work environment. Can you delve into that a little bit? Because that's so hard to know if it's toxic and makes the wrong career, maybe it's a toxic job. What do you tell that person? Because they may need some sort of change but they swear their intuition to saying start a business. How do you help them discern what the reality is there?
Sunil Godse:
And this is where how quick they answer a question is my indication. So if I look at if they're coming out of a toxic environment, a lot of the story's around the people that they're with. So if you look at the percentage they're talking about that, and then, okay, so we talk about the career. So why did you go into this career? What do you like about it? And so I'd take a look at the tone, some of the adjectives using to describe it so that I'll know that, okay, so it's not the career. The career seems okay because they seem to be really happy in what they took at school or whether they got into a trade or whatever the case is. But if the decision says I want to be an entrepreneur and I'll ask why. If I start testing, so what does your product service do?
Sunil Godse:
And I don't feel that energy of this is really helping to solve a problem or is this problem big enough to solve, then it's something that you got to be careful about because if it's not something that's going to scale at some point or if they want that to scale, they don't have to a million dollar business, if they're happy with just paying their bills and just putting that out into the marketplace, that has to be gauged. So not everybody wants to be a millionaire. Some people just want to say, "Yeah, this is something of value and if somebody's buying it. I'm happy." So it's gauging that. So when I start asking specific questions, I'm using my intuition to try and pick up on, are they really in this for the goods and services that are going to change someone's life and why and who and how come? And a lot of those questions will get flesh that out and really listen to what they're saying. Look at their body language, see if they're trying to sell me.
Sunil Godse:
Sometimes I'll tell people, stop with your marketing and selling because some, they'll get onto a soapbox. Say, "Stop with your marketing, selling. Answer my question directly." I want to do this because if I don't ask in those ways, they're going to waste their money and time and effort and fail and I don't want to see that. It's really, really important to do that to make sure that it does. And I take my kids through that as well. So if you look at the art, some of you guys can partially see the art behind me. She's now 15, when she was 12, she went to India and she's an artist. She's been an artist since she was four. She saw these people who were painting with no arms. And she goes, "Dad, I want to do something for those people who are disabled or have illnesses. They're just normal people. And I want my art to do so to do something. I want to help with art." Her name is Avni.
Sunil Godse:
I said, "Avni, it has to come from inside. Do you really want to help or do you want to just help do a couple of paint nights or something like that?" She goes, "No, I want to really do something big." I said, "Okay, so it's got to come from your intuition." And six months later, she thought about it. This was in December. Six months later in June, a couple years ago, she whips her head around and says, "Dad, and I'm ready." And I had no clue what she was talking about because we were playing a board game and I said, "Are you ready? It's not your turn." And she goes, "No, I'm ready. I'm ready with that. You remember what happened in India?" And I said, "Yeah. So tell me what it is."
Sunil Godse:
And she goes, "I worked it out. So I'm going to sell my paintings and I'm going to have a fundraiser. And then I'm going to bring people together to paint who are disabled or have illnesses and I'm going to pay for all their supplies so they can just express themselves through art on the one day, just to feel special. I'm going to continue to raise money to do that through my painting and donations." And I said, "Are you sure? Because this takes a commitment. This is not a one time thing." And she goes, "Dad, I am." So to date, she's had her first fundraiser. We were targeting 2,500 and I said, "Think higher." And she said, "5,000." We got just over 5,000. We had a three hour event. She sold all her originals in under an hour. We actually had somebody FaceTiming from Scotland who bought a painting so we had to ship that off to Scotland; that was really exciting. And then she had her first popup event, it was called a popup event and she had people who had down syndrome, big brothers and big sisters, those in wheelchairs that come.
Sunil Godse:
But this is where the purpose comes in because this is where the purpose gets nailed in this one incident, this one thing. So there was a fellow who had cerebral palsy all his life. So his left arm kept shaking. He lost his interest in art ever since he was 18. He came to this event, he had heard about it through Facebook and he said, "Avni, please come here." So she came and sat stood right beside him and he said, "This is what your event is doing for me." So he takes his paintbrush and his left arm is just shaking wildly and his paint brushes in his right hand and he dips the paintbrush and the paint and puts it to canvas. And the minute it goes on the canvas, his left arm stops shaking. And he goes, "Avni, this is what you're doing for me. Thank you so much." The purpose was nailed right there. So she continues to raise money. She has her own podcast show. She does all the backend work for it. So she does Adobe Premier, she's up on Lipson.
Sunil Godse:
So you know the backend stuff that has to happen with the podcast? She does all that stuff by herself because she has to understand it takes to put that stuff together and she's raised over $30,000 now in two years and she continues to raise money for her nonprofit. And my other daughter wants to now raise money because she saw her bigger sister doing it. So she wants to do bookmarks. She's a singer. Taylor Swift is her mentor. She says, "All my friends are looking at devices. I want them to read. And so I'm going to design bookmarks and the money, I'm going to donate to sick kids because Taylor swift went to sick kids and spent her time." And I said, "If you're serious, then you got to raise 500 bucks." My wife and I told her. It took for five days. She did a Zoom session with my buddy, pitched to him, which I recorded. One of my podcast interviewees, because he was telling me about intuition and what I teach my children and I was telling him about this incident, he said, "I would like to be pitched by your daughter."
Sunil Godse:
I said, "Okay, I'll set it up." She pitched to him and he gave her a hundred bucks. But the thing is trusting your intuition to make things happen, to create value in other people's lives. Don't let other people say no to you. Age doesn't have the barrier. Gender doesn't have to be a barrier to these signals. And they've also used their intuition to move away from bullying behavior even before the bullying behavior started. So this is now being put into their personal and professional lives. And if I can give them that foundation, it doesn't mean they're not going to fail. It doesn't mean that my daughter's going to be a full-time artist when she's older. She can do whatever if she wants. But the foundation of what I'm trying to tell them about, living with purpose, creating value for others, listening to your signals, don't let what other people tell you, are all foundational elements, in my opinion, that are going to help them later on. As a father, what other purpose do you want to have? I don't know.
Speaker 1:
Sunil, I have about two more hours of questions we could do here. It's honestly, and I don't say this often, I've never said this. This is perhaps the most fascinating interview I've ever done in four years.
Sunil Godse:
I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:
You have a new fan in me and I'm sure you're going to have a new fan in a lot of our listeners. You can go to your Sunilgodse.com, get your books, subscribe to your podcast. I took a little quiz or assessment on your website last night, you can download the ebook. But can you tell our listeners who do you work with and how do you serve them? Do you only serve big companies? You've mentioned working with some entrepreneurs. If someone listening is like, "I got to work with him. I need his help." How can they do that?
Sunil Godse:
Yeah. So typically they're going to be early stage entrepreneurs who are willing to make the investment to really see them move forward. So typically they're ones that already have a business coming in, they're making five figures a year or six figures a year where the cost is not going to pinch them because it's a combination of coursework and coaching. So if they're willing to make the investment, then we just ramp that up. If you go on Sunilgodse.com, you've got a number of testimonials there from those who are willing to share their testimonials because a lot of my clients don't want their competitors to know that I'm working for them. But of those that are there who I say have gossiped about my services, they have collectively made over a million dollars. Ashley Michelle's there actually so she talks about the marketing aspect of the intuitive branding. So these are real stories of people that I've worked with. So if they really want to find out about how to use their intuition to earn the trust of others and really hit the ball out of the park, let's work together and we'll make that happen.
Speaker 1:
Sunil, it has been my pleasure and honor to have you on the show and I'm sure our listeners, our viewers love it as well. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Sunil Godse:
Thank you. I really appreciate it.