Episode 40 – How Purpose Is The Fastlane to Profits With Adal Bermann

Introduction    00:00:02    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.   

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:26    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth of our marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones. I’m your host Tudor and today I’m joined by Adal Bermann, the founder and CEO of coach.today, a software and marketing agency helping life coaches attract more of their dream clients and solve their business problems. Welcome Adal.  

Adal Bermann    00:00:52    Hi, how are you doing?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:55    I’m doing very well. Thank you. How about yourself?

Adal Bermann    00:00:57    It’s great to be here. I’m honored.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:00    That’s awesome to hear. So thank you for coming on. Would you like to start by telling us a bit about your story and how you got started with coach.today and really how you’ve progressed to where you’re at now?  

Adal Bermann    00:01:14    Gladly. I’m happy to share that. Essentially. I had been a web developer for about 10 years and that evolved from me being just a freelancer on my own to eventually growing a team and hiring some very high quality people so that together we could deliver brand design website, design, custom WordPress work, and so on, and so forth. And this went on for about a decade. And after about a decade of that, I had a realization that life is too short to just work for the money and that it would be nice to actually take something to the next level. And first I was a little bit confused about what that would be, to be honest. I think that my initial motivation was mostly financial. I had the desire to live a life in which I had built a scalable business, and that had a lot of income from work that I could delegate to a larger team and that we could scale our offering to a larger audience, which I believe is a pretty common desire for entrepreneurs.  

Adal Bermann    00:02:26    Absolutely. And in that process, I picked one niche, which were the lodges of freemasonry in America. And I saw that a lot of them needed websites. And I had worked on a previous project where I could help them. And we were doing that for California exclusively. We had built a platform that makes it very easy to build websites for lodges of Freemasonry in California. So I thought, oh, well, we can expand that. But when I went networking to meet the people, although I met a lot of very incredible people who are living inspired lives, I did not feel a strong personal connection with the population. And so I continued my search and eventually I stumbled upon life coaches and unlike the previous population, as soon as I met life coaches, I immediately felt that I was in the right place. And so I proceeded with building a software platform that would make it easy for life coaches to build their websites.  

Adal Bermann    00:03:35    We researched what kind of features life coaches typically use, like calendar appointments, setting automation, uh, basic email marketing intake forms, simple sales funnels, and mostly brochureware. And so we built out some templates and we made that really easy for life coaches. And then when it became time to market what my team and I had built together, I started exploring a little bit more the details of this target population that I had picked the life coaches in the process. I read Simon Sinek’s book Start with Why, and that really started a journey for me that was a lot deeper than what I had imagined. And it made me ask some really fundamental questions about why I connected with life coaches and why I wanted to. Initially I was really just trying to craft a story to improve the marketing of our company, something that they could connect with.  

Adal Bermann    00:04:39    But what I discovered was really more about myself. And I think that this is fundamental for anyone who wants to make a project become big, is that ultimately the motivation should come from deep within. So for me personally, it made me remember a lot of my childhood, which was an extremely difficult childhood. I essentially was raised by two parents who did not have a good grasp of reality and who did not receive the education and support that they needed to feel safe and loved. And you show up in the world in a way that is ideal to raise children so much. So that a story that I do like to tell is when essentially the conflict between my parents got so extreme, that there were some life-threatening situations. And ultimately we moved to a different continent with my mother and then from there to another different continent to the law, essentially the police who were looking for a missing child, that was me.  

Adal Bermann    00:05:47    So I really did a deep dive into exactly why it mattered to me to support life coaches. In that process, I realized there was a hurt little child inside of me that really wished that my childhood had gone a different way. I came to the conclusion that if my parents had received the type of support that life coaches can offer, they would have been able to heal their wounds. And they would have been able to actually feel safe and loved and connected to themselves and others. And they would not have done any of the things that they did that resulted in the sufferings of my childhood and that of my sister as well. And in sharing this story, I realized that I was definitely not alone in having this type of past and trauma. Absolutely. And so getting in touch with that reality has given me a lot of clarity on what exactly the purpose of coach today is.  

Adal Bermann    00:06:47    And from there, we have been able to communicate with our target audience in a way that really resonates with them. And it is a world of a difference between now that I’ve done that exploration and been very vulnerable in a public way with a lot of my target audience and shared with them in ways that invited them to share with me versus before that exploration, when essentially it was really about marketing and business. And I think that there are a lot of great technologies and methods, and there’s a lot of knowledge in the field of marketing that are critical to success. And especially once a company has a clear identity, being able to express identity online through social media, through websites, by hosting events, uh, to automate as much of the communication as possible and to have a staff to basically do the sales and connect with the clients is critical. 

Adal Bermann    00:07:54    But what I’m passionate about is the foundational aspect. Understanding before we implement all of these things, which can be gimmicks if they’re not based on a good foundation, giving that foundation to people. And so working with quite a few coaches now we have helped them in a lot of different ways. We’ve helped them with their logos, with their websites, with their marketing automation. But what has really, really allowed me to understand better, what was needed was mostly the one-on-one coaching that I have done with them. And through that, we are developing a new product that brings all of our services together in one elegant package. And that I believe is what separates us from the competition. Is that rather than just saying, okay, we’ll build your marketing for you. We help coaches. One-on-one do the type of deep, emotional dive that I had to do myself and ask themselves, why do they want to be life coaches? What is that part of them that is essentially still traumatized by a difficult and challenging situation that brought them off center that made them lose touch with the original joyful child that they were, whether that was as early as two years old or 12 years old or early in their adulthood, what was it that threw them off course? And that ultimately gave them the motivation to want to help others?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:36    Well, awesome. This is really fascinating. And I mean, you’ve given so much detail here. There’s so much that I want to explore with you. Let’s start with the beginning. So you said that at one point you had a realization that life is too short to work just for money. So what brought about the realization and was it something that happened all of a sudden, was it gradual or how did it actually come about?  

Adal Bermann    00:10:06    That’s a great question Tudor. I think that I’ve always struggled with the concept of money. I think that the idea that money is something that I have to earn in order to live the life that I want to live is something that was always somewhat upsetting to me. And as someone who’s extremely creative and who was raised by parents who did not set very clear rules and who did not set boundaries and who also do not respect authority, I always found it difficult to enjoy a job. And I always had some resentment for the managers that were above me and told me that things need to be this way and very, very quickly in my life. I acted in rebellion to that. So in university, for example, I stood up in the amphitheater in France where the hierarchy between the student and the professor is very established and I would just stand up and interrupt them and disagree with them and challenge them to answer my question.  

Adal Bermann    00:11:13    And often they couldn’t answer that question. And eventually I got noticed and some people asked me if I wanted to be elected. And so I ran a campaign and I won and it was actually a landslide. It was beautiful. Uh, we beat the national student associations for the first time in the history of my university, because I was driven by purpose. It was not about me wanting to win, it was about me wanting a better education for the psychology students in France. And I expressed that and we won and eventually the direction of the university, which tolerated me in their counsel for about a year and a half. I was forcing them to make changes. So we actually succeeded at that. They finally figured out how to kick me out. They, they, they found some kind of loophole and they put me through the loophole and kicked me out. So I’ve always been very rebellious and I was rebellious in general to the idea of working for money.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:15    That’s something that’s also very similar and resonates deep with me as well. I’m somebody much like you, I’ve also never had a job working for someone else. And I also always had this resentment of real authority and especially authority that would try to enforce itself over you. And it happened very early. I mean, since school and since university, for example, I remember projects in university where I used to work with people and I would see a lot of the decisions that were being made were made for, let’s say, political reasons, you like that person or whatever, and not for any reasons other than that. And I really detested all kinds of authority and enforcement over your freedom. And I think that this is actually something that’s common for entrepreneurs generally, not just the two of us,  

Adal Bermann    00:13:11    I believe so. And that’s cool to learn that about you Tudor. I did not know that, and I’m not surprised that we connected  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:18    Well, yeah, that’s also fascinating. So, I mean, this is very interesting to me. So you had that realization and how long after you had this realization, did you decide to start working with a particular niche first with the lodges and then with the coaches? Was it something that happened immediately or did you sort of brute over it and then realize that this is what you have to do?  

Adal Bermann    00:13:46    It was definitely the latter. It took me years to come to terms with how I felt about it. And there were a lot of steps in the rebellion before I actually got to the point of wanting to commit to a niche. In fact, I believe it was back in 2016. I even went through a bit of a midlife crisis and I sold my business by selling the hosting accounts that I had. I quit a job that I had just started in an attempt to stop my business. I was working for a solar city. I wanted to sell solar panels to help change the world by reducing our carbon footprint. But I was disgusted by the corporate culture, essentially, even though they’re doing a great thing, the people I was working with were not aligned on that mission. Yeah. I actually had a period where I lived, I built out a van before it got super popular and this was back in 2015 and I lived in it for two years and then I bought a property and I lived off the land. I focused on rock climbing, so my rebellion had a lot of different steps to it, but it was after I stopped alternative lifestyles. This was three years ago and I moved back into city apartment life. And that I felt like I had scratched my rebel itch in a certain way that I had taken it far enough in trying to just avoid money altogether, I guess, and that I needed to instead focus on finding a smarter way to make money.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:34    This is really fascinating. Really? Your story reminds me, sorry for interrupting. Your story reminds me of Michael Singer’s book. I don’t know if you know it, The Untethered Soul.  

Adal Bermann    00:15:45    I don’t, I need to read it. Thank you for the recommendation.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:47    Yeah, The Untethered Soul and also The Surrender Experiment. So it’s really fascinating because Michael was not interested in money. So he was a software developer and he built a billion dollar company from the woods. You know, he would, he just wanted to meditate all day, but all these things happened to him almost. He tells us the story, the story in The Surrender Experiment. And it’s really fascinating because I think that entrepreneurship and building a business, especially from the ground up can be, and often is a spiritual journey because from my experience, the biggest things that are holding you back are always internal. So how do you feel about that?  

Adal Bermann    00:16:29    I could not agree more with that statement. I’ve written down the names of those books and I’ll probably devour them right after this call, but regarding the fact that first of all, an entrepreneur’s motivation stems from their life. I think what I just shared shows my agreement for it, but also the fact that the growth of the entrepreneur themselves is 100% correlated to the growth of the company is something that really strikes me. I can bring, for example, a very simple anecdote to illustrate that. I, like many humans, have probably an unhealthy need to feel that I’m in control of my life and that results in me often feeling the need to be in control of the business. And when I do not take care of that need and it shows up because for example, my schedule is too busy and I don’t feel like I have enough time for myself.  

Adal Bermann    00:17:30    So I want to regain control. And this literally happened last week. So I want to regain control of my life. It shows up in the way I interact with my staff, where all of a sudden I jump in and I try to take control of some of their work and micromanage what they’re doing. And any business owner, any manager knows that this is the worst thing possible. The whole point of a leader is to empower his employees and his team and staff and partners to do the best that they can do in the work. That’s their role.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:18:09    Yeah, absolutely. I think that, and this way, I know that you will really love Michael Singer’s book. So in the books here, he gives the example of having a thorn in your arm. And what we tend to do in our lives is that we build our lives around that sword. So rather than take it out, we prefer, let’s say metaphorically, not to hold your elbow on the desk. Right? So that the thorn doesn’t hurt. We prefer building a protection around it, avoiding anything that would trigger it. And I think that that’s true for a lot of us. Instead of actually solving those problems, we try to avoid them, which only of course makes them worse. And it’s, it’s especially visible in business because I mean, you can’t avoid being honest with yourself in business, sooner or later, the truth is going to come up.  

Adal Bermann    00:19:01    Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:19:03    So I think that this perspective of your company’s growth being dependent on your own personal growth, I can’t agree more about that. And it’s definitely been my own experience. You know, I’ve grown a lot ever since I got started. I also started first like you as a freelancer and then opened the marketing agency and all the rest of it. But the thing is that definitely the limit on my growth has been my own personal growth, which I find fascinating. So you mentioned that you’ve learned a lot from one-on-one coaching. Have you done one-on-one coaching yourself?  

Adal Bermann    00:19:41    Yes, absolutely. I do one-on-one coaching in both directions. And that I have coaches who coach me as well as mentors. I have some mentors who are successful business owners who are older than me. I have a life coach who I meet with once a week with whom we can discuss just about anything. I actually also have a dedicated business mentor for my needs, uh, once a week or twice a month. And I also surround myself with life coaches. They are my target audience, but they’re also my friends. I also give coaching. I provide business coaching to life coaches. And the one thing that I enjoy the most is building trust with them to create a very safe container and then inviting them to explore the deeper reason behind their motivation to be OSHA’s. But then obviously that unleashes the creative juices. And I think it’s gorgeous to witness a human being, whether it’s myself or another, who finally sees something inside of themselves, which is typically a memory with an emotion or just the emotion itself and is able to see, as you said to face that truth, it’s gorgeous because the liberation that comes from it, it’s like a chemical reaction.  

Adal Bermann    00:21:14    There is an energy that’s contained inside of an element, which in this case is a person. And as soon as you allow that energy to exit, it doesn’t disappear. It transforms. And in the case of humans, it transforms into creative energy. And so when we release that energy, I immediately hand them the recording of that session along with a lot of prompts. And typically the next week I see they have written so much marketing material and it is so good and they’re authentic, it’s authentic and it feels so good to them. They are so full of life at that moment. They’re just bursting with joy and everyone sees how happy they are. And they’re so clear. And then the last thing I want to share about that, which I think is particularly beautiful as well, is that when you see yourself, clearly you see others clearly you’re no longer and meshed and their stories and their reality. You just see it for what it is. And that level of objectivity is critical for a leader, whether it be a life coach or an entrepreneur. Being able to see yourself in others, I think, is one of the most beautiful gifts that we can have.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:22:35    I absolutely agree with you on that. I mean, the capacity to see clearly I think is a key of the entrepreneurial puzzle, for sure, because if you can’t do that, then you can’t take the right decisions. It’s fascinating how you tell the story with the coaches and when they have that big shift and suddenly after that, they see things and you, they have a different energy about themselves. And what they do is actually authentic. And of course, we need to think it actually works with the market. It’s not just as you called it before a gimmick that you’re doing, you know, a marketing gimmick that you’re doing to get a few more customers. If you follow what I mean.  

Adal Bermann    00:23:17    Absolutely. I’m glad that you’re aligned with that. I think that, unfortunately, there are some people who are lost in the world. That’s not very genuine where they’re going through the motions and it’s, it’s sad compared to witnessing entrepreneurs or people in general who are genuinely connected with themselves and with others and who naturally attract the right clients.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:23:41    Absolutely. I mean this idea because in circles, right, you have two different styles that you see very often. And I noticed this almost with everybody. I can put them in one or the other. So you find two styles. One of them are the ones who say you must hustle, hard work as much as you can. Blah-blah-blah that Gary V types basically. And then you have types who are more like yourself, or like Michael Singer who take the effortless path to growth. That’s based in typically some form of spirituality and authenticity to oneself. And it’s very interesting to see the two camps and how very different the perspectives can be. And at the same time you see people achieve results on both hints.  

Adal Bermann    00:24:30    Yes, absolutely. And that, that is a little fascinating. And mind-boggling that both can work when they’re so different. Are you familiar with the thinker and public figure who has died, but his name was Buckminster fuller.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:24:46    Not really. I know him, but I haven’t actually studied anything by him. I’ve heard his name, but other than that, not much, I’m working with some people though currently who are quite big fans of him.  

Adal Bermann    00:25:00    Okay. Well, the reason I bring him up is because when you said the path of least effort, I immediately thought about him. He spoke a lot about how essentially when we find genuine alignment with our purpose and what the universe wants for us in a certain way, um, then we can do more with less effort. So the extreme, where he was even positing, that we can do everything with nothing, that essentially there is a flow to the universe that everything is energy that gets knotted up into a specific format. And that if you can feel what that energy is drawing to you, uh, or drawing you to, and you can dance in that vibration, then essentially there is no effort at all in the words of life coaching or the burning man community. I would say that you manifest a reality in a way that feels magical.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:26:04    Well, that’s fascinating. I will definitely look into him because this sounds right down my alley. So I mean, the way I think about this is that either you have to work very hard and come from when he goes week position, and the reason you need to do that is because you lack the leverage that you would have. If you align yourself with deeper powers and deeper currents of life that are already happening around you, because this is exactly what Michael Singer did. You know, he aligned himself with deeper and more powerful currents of life. And then things happened for him almost effortlessly. He built a billion dollar company in medical software without actually aiming to do this. He was a guy who had the meditation temple and he was living in the woods. He built his company from the woods. And this approach is actually fascinating for me because I mean, to me, intelligence means the capacity to use as much leverage as you can. And I think that this is about leveraging the life that is happening around you instead of fighting it, you know, instead of saying, this is where I want to go and they’ll get there no matter what, you know, you let go and you let the flow take you somewhere, which is actually going to be a lot better than what you imagined in the first place.  

Adal Bermann    00:27:29    Absolutely. What you’re saying also reminds me of an interview with Timothy Ferris or someone who asked him about his morning routine in the context of everyone having this really intense, uh, 5:00 AM club style routine. When you wake up early and you start running and then you do all these things. And by 6:00 AM, you’re already doing more work than the average human being. And Timothy Ferris had a really a comical, but on point answer where he basically shared that he just woke up pretty much whenever he felt like it and took his sweet time, taking a shower, walking on the beach, and I might be misquoting a little, but essentially eating breakfast and taking care of himself and reading the newspaper until eventually he got to a place of calm. And that the one thing that he really focused on was wondering what is the one thing that I can do? That’s going to change everything. What is the one point of highest leverage that I can work on that will make all the other things that I wanted to do become just totally irrelevant. And I think that’s a beautiful way of seeing things that I strive towards and have a lot of progress to make on.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:28:52    I’m very similar to you on that. I mean, this taps into the 80 20 principle finding the 20% that gives 80% of the result. And I definitely believe in this Pareto principle, and I believe that you can achieve a lot more once you learn to use your intelligence rather than brute force, because if you use brute force, I mean, things can work out. I mean, just look at somebody like David Goggins, but there’s just a lot of suffering and pain in the process. And I’m just not sure that that’s actually necessary. It feels good to the ego because the ego wants to say, oh, I went through so much pain to get this and therefore I am great. Right. And the ego can say, oh, this just happened to me because I’m married. Right. Okay.  

Adal Bermann    00:29:43    I mean, that’s interesting that you bring that up. So a week ago I was in Yosemite for two weeks and rock climbing is one of my biggest passions. Yep. And we warmed up by climbing a big wall, a 1000 foot cliff at the summit of the mountainous, but south face, that was our warmup. And we finished the week by climbing the Northwest face of the halftone, which is a very historical route. Royal Robbins had climbed it to basically prove himself to the world as maybe the best climber in the world. Obviously it was a lot easier for me to climb it, uh, with modern technology and all the knowledge and just the inertia of all the people who’ve already done it. It, it, it really takes the spice off of it. But I can tell you that I suffered a lot during that climb. And, uh, there were definitely moments where I was wondering, why am I doing this?  

Adal Bermann    00:30:39    And when I came back from it, I was speaking with my life coach. And I literally had tears, uh, pondering the same questions that you are bringing up, which is why do I feel the need to suffer so much in order to be proud of myself? And I am proud of myself and not a lot of people are proud of me, but I think what you’re talking about is very on point of how our ego makes us do things that make us suffer so much. And I mean, ascending a vertical cliff, I think, is a very good metaphor for going against the flow or swimming.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:31:15    Absolutely. And I think that in the end, the reason why the ego likes doing things, they require a lot of suffering is because it can draw pride out of them. Right. I can feel proud, oh, I overcame this. Whereas if you go with the flow, you don’t really have a reason. And he has a quick reason to feel proud, right. It just happens to you. I think this is the core difference at play.  

Adal Bermann    00:31:42    I’m not one to really pick one or the other much in my life. I’m a very multi-passionate person. And I also love to see all the perspectives. And I think in particular, Tony Robbins also talks a lot about harnessing the strength within. There’s Wim Hoff, for example, as a practice that he does, where you’re essentially submerging yourself in, in almost dangerously cold water.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:32:08    Yeah. I follow in, I’ve done that.  

Adal Bermann    00:32:10    Yeah. And there are a lot of other things that you can do. I mean, the cold water is one Wim Hoff also talks about breath holding. And then Lex aura, a friend of mine has, um, do boards that you can stand on where you’re literally standing on a bed of nails. And that’s something I did recently at Burning Man. And I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t think that suckering and sharpening and working out our mental is only good for inflating our ego. I do think that there is a value in basically making ourselves stronger by facing challenge and hardship,  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:32:54    Discipline basically.  

Adal Bermann    00:32:56    And ultimately it does come down to a lot of discipline. That’s right. I think that it can all come back together because when you are, whether it’s climbing a cliff or standing on nails or holding your breath, which I’ve done, it’s easy to think like, oh, look what I did. But I think that also adjusting like Michael Singer was saying, it can be very much about surrender. So for example, recently I was at a fun event. I’ll spare the details. We ended up doing a breath holding competition, and some of the participants were Wim, Hoff practitioners. And one of them is actually famous for being an American ninja warrior. So there were some really, really high caliber people. And we did a breath holding competition in the swimming pool and not to boast, but I did end up winning by holding my breath for three minutes and 47 seconds. And the reason I achieved that result was not because I was telling myself like, I can do this. I’m good enough. I got this. It was because I told myself, I trust the people here. I trust that they won’t let me die and I will surrender my will to their will. I will let them tell me when it’s time for me to get out of the water.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:34:14    Well, that’s fascinating. 

Adal Bermann    00:34:14    And I, you know, I got through all these different parts of the experience where my body was fighting and I ended up having convulsions and it was a very intense experience, but it wasn’t that intense because I had fully surrendered. And I do think that if you approach challenges from a point of view of surrender, then it kind of ties the two realities together. And I do wonder if there are some people who from the outside seem like they’re driven by their ego and they’re proving to the world how strong they are and how much discipline they have, or if maybe some of them also are surrendered to giving the best of themselves to the world, to the cause to the mission and that it allows them to continue to do what they do in a way that from the outside maybe looks a little different,  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:35:10    Very similar to the other one. Yeah. I definitely agree with that. I mean, I don’t think that we’re able to judge just by looking from the outside, what’s going to be on the inside. We can sometimes guess at it, right? We can guess based on how somebody behaves, what emotions they’re feeling or what’s going on inside of them, but we never know for sure. And it only makes sense to me, for you to be like this because in the end they’re two different things. Ultimately, I believe that only the individual truly knows, you know, if he’s doing something for egoic purposes or not, and it’s ultimately one’s own responsibility.  

Adal Bermann    00:35:50    I would even say that sometimes personally, I don’t know. I don’t know that it’s critical to know, but it’s definitely nice to ask those questions and be exact. 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:36:04    It’s the process that really makes you grow in my experience.  

Adal Bermann    00:36:08    Yes, exactly. And as your company can grow, as we were saying earlier.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:36:13    Absolutely. So, I mean, it sounds like a lot of the things that we’ve been discussing are about finding your purpose. And it sounds like that has been the critical ingredient for you really in building your company to where it’s at today. So what advice would you give to new entrepreneurs who are thinking about starting a business with regards to finding their purpose? How can they go about doing that?  

Adal Bermann    00:36:41    That’s a very, very good question. I think that there are a lot of ways to find purpose. You can read books such as Start with Why by Simon Sineck, that’s a very good one. I also recently read The Traveler’s Summit, a beautiful book about harnessing that power and that purpose within. So that’s one way to go about it. That’s kind of the silent way. If you will, or you’re, you’re hiding and you don’t have to interact with anyone. I think that another way to do it on your own is through meditation, David Deida, famous men’s coach talks about literally leaving your life for a few days and doing something similar to, uh, what they discuss in that song, by the doors, which is going out in the desert and finding an empty place. And in meditation, it’s the same thing. And it’s trying to find emptiness. And after all of those little voices and their chatter, what remains, and ultimately I think the questions that you can really ask yourself are how do I feel, why do I feel this way?  

Adal Bermann    00:37:57    And what does it really feel like to allow myself to feel this? And I know this sounds very touchy-feely, but I think ultimately that is really a good way to do it, but the best way to find your purpose, which is I think the best way to accelerate pretty much any spiritual process is find a coach, find a mentor, find someone who’s genuinely excited to help you in this specific journey and allow them to create space for you. And to guide you through that process. Because when someone else is interacting with you, you can see your blind spots, people usually end up doing it if they get lost in the story. They get lost in all the reasons why and all the things that happened. And then I did, and they did. And they said, and those are really ultimately important because they’re factual, but they’re also huge distractions. And it’s really our mind trying to protect ourselves from having to re-experience pain. Because I do believe that true purpose typically is linked to very, very intense pain. And then having growth is linked to pain. 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:39:17    Growth is linked to pain generally.  

Adal Bermann    00:39:21    Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And pain is really scary when you’re on your own and not only is it scary, but it’s also, it feels a little unnecessary. I could avoid this pain. Why would I dive in? But when someone else is there to guide you and to keep encouraging you to go deeper into the pain, to really identify its source and understand it and feel it, it can go a lot faster. And once you actually face that pain, you realize that that pain is past, it is no longer and it feels incredible. It actually is this feud’s sense of relief. So that would be my best advice is start by reading some books, meditate, ask yourself the right questions. And when the itch is just too strong to itch it on your own, find someone else and make sure that they’re a trustworthy, qualified person that you feel comfortable around. That’s really the key and surrender to their guidance.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:40:25    This is really fascinating advice. So thank you for that. You mentioned books. What would you say your top five are generally for entrepreneurs looking to get started and really to grow as people,  

Adal Bermann    00:40:37    You know, I actually am working on an article about that. So let me bring that up.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:40:43    We’re going to be the first to know  

Adal Bermann    00:40:45    Absolutely for entrepreneurs specifically. I would say that one of the foundational ones would be Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:40:58    I love it. 

Adal Bermann    00:40:58    Yeah. Yeah. I think anyone who’s striving to succeed in any arena should read it and should not be turned off by all the talk about money in the beginning. And then I would strongly recommend it. I already mentioned it. Start with Why by Simon Sinek. I think it’s a very, very easy book on a very important topic,  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:41:24    But it’s very deep. It’s the kind, I’ve read it as well, but it’s the kind of book that you really need to spend time thinking about.  

Adal Bermann    00:41:31    Yes, exactly. Another book that’s more foundational and less than the details, but I think has really influenced me in a lot of other people is Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King and Haley Fisher, right, who are working at the university. And it’s based on a lot of research and Tribal Leadership is a very, very powerful framework that you can use to understand where people are coming from and how they relate to work and work relationships.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:42:06    Nice. I haven’t read this one. I will look into it.  

Adal Bermann    00:42:09    Yeah. It’s interesting how the final chapters of Tribal Leadership really tie in very strongly with Yvon Chouinard says, Let My People Go Surfing as well as Richard Branson’s, uh, Finding My Virginity because they both ultimately got to what Tribal Leadership would qualify as stage five, which is where you’re no longer working for yourself or to compete against others, but you’re really working for it’s a cause  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:42:42    Of higher purpose. 

Adal Bermann    00:42:43    Exactly. And tribal leadership is very good for entrepreneurs because it also allows you to identify in the interview process, what kind of spiritual stage of the person you’re interviewing as ad. And it can save you a lot of time by avoiding people who might not work out. And it also helps you encourage others to show up in a way that is most helpful. Um, also around people, I strongly recommend the culture code by Daniel Coyle. It’s also a very beautiful book about inspiring your team to do the best, most creative work possible. And he researched a lot of different companies and entrepreneurs to compile this beautiful book. And then let’s see a fifth would be competing against luck by Clayton Christensen. And I’m hesitating between competing against luck, which is perhaps a little bit redundant to the idea of finding the deeper purpose, which I’m obviously passionate about, um, or EntreLeadership, which I think for the budding entrepreneur might be a more hands-on book. It’s by Dave Ramsey. It’s really a no nonsense guide. That’s a little bit similar to the E-Myth, but goes into a lot more detail. And with a little bit more grunge, if you listen to the audio, the audio version, he’s got a really fun accent. And I think Dave Ramsey really lays the foundations of building any business with an entrepreneurial spirit. And he really gets into the details.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:44:25    I’ve read that one EntreLeadership. It’s actually one of my favorite books as well. So I’m glad that you mentioned that one. I think it can be really impactful. What I got most out of it is all the goal setting stuff and really getting your vision right as an entrepreneur, because a lot of people skim over it because you see all those big companies, which they have their vision in, just the placard on the wall and nothing more. Um, and many people get the mistaken idea about what it actually means to be an entrepreneur initially when first starting out. So I think that that book is a great recommendation.  

Adal Bermann    00:45:04    Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I think he did a beautiful job and I love how he also focused very strongly on the people and how the people in a way that makes them feel respected and inspired and loyal. Yes. And I find a thread between all of these books that I recommended is that ultimately business is all about people.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:45:27    Yes. I absolutely agree with that. And with regards to people, this is the second to last question that I will ask because they realize the time. But with regards to people, a lot of new entrepreneurs, they struggle with sales and particularly with getting their first client. So I was wondering if you can share some advice with regards to that, and also maybe share a bit of your own process, how you approach new coaching clients nowadays and that kind of stuff.  

Adal Bermann    00:46:01    Absolutely. I think that for the first few clients, it really can come from anywhere, but the easiest way to get the first few clients is typically by the entrepreneur, the owner of the sales person exiting their home and entering the space where their target audience is most likely to hang out and just showing up as their genuine self. Just be really curious to meet other people, make it about others. Don’t make it about you. Don’t go around, pitching your service before you even say hello, rather take the opposite approach, go out there, meet people, get to know the people that you want to serve and ask them what is going on with them. What do they need in their life? What are they experiencing? And when you create those bonds, the people will naturally ask you, well, what is it that you do? And there’s a, it’s just like, if you want to teach a baby a new word, there are two approaches. You can point out an object and say, that is a cup, success rate is about 10% on that one. Or you can wait until the baby points at the cup and you say, that’s a cup. It’s the same thing in sales. I really think it’s mostly about connecting with people and trying to find the right people and genuinely connecting with them and getting to know them. And from there, your first few sales should come pretty naturally.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:47:35    Awesome. So thank you for that. Thank you for sharing that. The final question that I wanted to ask is if you would like to offer anything of value, obviously we can put a link to your business in the show notes, but if there’s anything else of value that you like to offer to our listeners, feel free to share.  

Adal Bermann    00:47:56    Thank you Tudor for that invitation. I think that is ultimately a follow-up on what I just said, which is that I am infinitely curious about life coaches. I sincerely believe that life coaches as a whole, uh, as a large movement of inspired people have the power to change the world. I think that if we work together, we can help everyone on earth feel safe, loved, and connected. And I would love to offer a free conversation, any life coach, however new or established they are, and just talk about what they have been experiencing, why they’re inspired and what difference they want to make for themselves and for the world. And that is my offer. As an invitation to reach out, you can go to coach stop today, or you can go to Adalbermann.com and just book a time to chat with me.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:48:56    Alrighty. If you have a link, we can put that as well. You know, so they can book straight from the show notes if you want.  

Adal Bermann    00:49:03    Absolutely. I’ll provide that to you. Okay.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:49:05    That’s perfect. So it’s a really inspiring mission. And you’re an amazing guy and obviously you have a lot of wisdom. It’s been my pleasure to have you on. So thank you for coming on.  

Adal Bermann    00:49:17    The pleasure is mine Tudor. You host a beautiful show and I have a lot of respect for the work that you do and the way that you do it. So thank you so much.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:49:25    Thank you very much for that Adal and to our listeners. Stay tuned for the next episode. And until next time, remember to keep growing your businesses and providing massive value to the world. You are the reason why we’re all growing richer. Our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Thank you.