How learning to talk to adults got Dan thinking.

The Strategic Coach Team

Dan Sullivan is the founder of Strategic Coach. A visionary, an innovator, and a gifted conceptual thinker, Dan has over 40 years’ experience as a highly regarded speaker, consultant, strategic planner, and coach to thousands of business owners. But his journey to helping people reach their full potential began long before he’d ever thought of setting up in business.

Dan was about six years old when he realised he had what he would now call a Unique Ability. When he was growing up on his family’s farm in Northern Ohio, he didn’t have any playmates. ‘There’s a big age gap between me and my siblings, and there were no children my age on neighbouring farms’, he says. So he learned very quickly how to talk to adults.

‘I developed the ability by learning how to ask questions of older people’, Dan says, remembering his visits to his elderly neighbour, Mrs Wetzel. ‘I’d spend hours with her in her parlour, asking her question after question about her life. I was fascinated by her stories about what it was like to grow up on a farm when she was young, where you didn’t have electricity or tractors or even trucks…I could picture life when she was a young girl my age’. Dan soon realised that this keen interest and ability set him apart.

‘When I got to school, I noticed that the other children were just thinking about themselves, the things in their lives and the people in their lives’. By talking to adults and asking questions, Dan had come to understand how people can think differently.

‘I realized that I could actually look at how I was thinking; I could watch, like a movie, what my brain was doing, and I could change how I thought about things. It was a valuable skill, because I was reacting and responding to adults who had experiences way beyond childhood experiences, and I was constantly being introduced to things that I didn’t know existed in the world’.

Everything for Dan was driven by conversation. When people would talk to him, he’d respond, ‘That’s a really interesting way to think about things’, which would lead to questions such as, ‘What if you thought about it this way instead?’ These are skills that Dan still uses as a business coach today; it’s the foundation of The Strategic Coach Programme.

Strategic Coach is all about your thinking.
As a Strategic Coach Programme participant, every 90 days, you’ll enjoy protected time away to focus on your business instead of in your business. This is a day among your peers, with an entrepreneurial coach who’ll guide you through concepts and thinking exercises to stimulate your thinking and give you a big-picture view of your business and your future.

Everyone’s thinking is informed by a vast number of past experiences, which the Programme provides access to in a way you’ve never had before. These powerful thinking tools shift your mindset to be more successful and productive and allow you to see things in an entirely new way.

You can get a better return on your experience and a better return on your creativity without gaining new knowledge—all you need to do is gain the tools to help you think about your thinking.

Find out more about what Strategic Coach can do for you.