BUILT BY SOCIAL MEDIA - INT'L SPEAKER AND ENTREPRENEUR
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Three Keys From This Episode
- Have Fun!
- How to stand out amongst the noise, especially on Social Media
- Integrate video into your marketing plan
Complete Show Notes
Doug: Welcome back, I am super excited today to have Dai Manuel as my guest on the podcast. I met Dai a year or so ago at a event he was speaking at, I was so impressed with his presence, his presentation and his life story.
Dai is an award-winning digital thought leader and he’s an author. He’s an executive performance coach and certified life mentor who empowers people to live a fun-ctional lifestyle, emphasis on the fun; Fit life through education, encouragement, and community.
Dai models his work based on the five F’s; Fitness, family, finances, faith, and over-arching roof on fun, built on a rock solid foundation of health.
Dai is a super dad. I love following his travels on the internet as he’s traveling with his wife and his family. He’s a fitness nutrition and life coach. He’s the founder and former COO of Fitness Town. A key note speaker, a professional blogger, spokesperson, brand ambassador for DaiManuel.com, fitness writer, podcaster, cross-fit athlete, BC Children’s Hospital Ambassador, and he’s the publisher of the “Whole Life Fitness Manifesto”. He has appeared in numerous publications as a writer/author, had several TV interviews, speaks at local fitness events. You can find him in Forbes Huffington Post, Distance Magazine, and a whole long list of other places.
So, I don’t want to take my entire time telling you how great Dai is, but I want him to tell you how great he is and what he’s doing. So, over to you. Is there anything that I’ve missed in our introduction?
Dai: It is such a mouth full, isn’t it? Well, thanks Doug, for one, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to reconnect with you after our last conversation just over a year ago. And, obviously, we’ve remained in contact through social, but it’s nice just to have a conversation and connect with your audience, as well.
I think the biggest piece is, and the one that I like to highlight all the time when people ask me “Well, what do you do?” And I’m like “Well, what I do isn’t so much important, but why I do it is.” And it really comes down to family. You know, I’m a dad, first and foremost. That’s who I am. That defines me. And I’m also a loving husband to my best friend, my wife of a long time now, Christie.
And, so, those are my big pillars, as you noted. Family is one of those, and we’ve just been honored to have the opportunity to travel the last couple of years together. We’re continuing those travels into the next year or two. And traveling around North America and most recently overseas to spread our message. You know, we’re really trying to help people create a lifestyle by design, you know, honestly. Just build something fantastic on the foundation of health. And I think it doesn’t matter how long your bio is, it’s hard to communicate that effectively. But at the end of the day, I just tell people connect with me online. Type my name into Google, you’ll find me. Reach out, and I will respond. And, yeah, I’m here to help.
Doug: Two million, I think, responses when I did a Google search to see how many times your name showed up. So, yeah, you’re definitely easy to find.
Dai: It’s out there.
Doug: I think one of the really cool things, watching you with your business, is that you emphasize the fun factor. And lots of times, depending on who you listen to, there’s certain people that talk about grind, grind, grind. You have to grind. Put in your time. And I agree that you need to work hard, but you also have to have fun. My theory is always have fun, make money, and you definitely convey that. You look like you’re having a blast as you’re traveling around.
Dai: Thank you. It’s important. And if we’re not enjoying what we’re doing, why are we doing it? You know? My daughter, she’s awesome. Brie’s 12 now and she’s the YouTube generation, right? Like, that is her favorite TV channel, is YouTube. And she follows a number of celebrities. I wouldn’t call them celebrities, they’re YouTube celebrities, or YouTube stars. And there’s this one kid and he’s got this saying that he always closes with “If you’re not smiling, you’re doing it wrong.” And I love it. I just think it’s so fantastic. But it’s right. You know, he’s so right. You know, here’s this kid of like 13 years old, so wise. And it always sticks with me.
Doug: So, share with us a little bit about your strategy for marketing and branding your business. One of the conversations we had before we started recording was putting the social back in social media and I was so impressed that you’re not only a great speaker and presenter, but you’re also reachable. People can find you, reach out, and surprise, surprise, when you send off a tweet, or an Instagram message, you respond back.
Dai: Yeah. Well, I guess if we start off with how I began with social.
My background is in traditional business, you know, brick and mortar operations. I was a founding partner of Fitness Town, as you brought up earlier. And we had eight retail stores. We still do. We have eight retail locations in Western Canada and a couple B to B businesses, import/export, and all sorts of stuff, right? But, marketing has changed a lot in the last 20 years. And my business partner was 20 years my senior and very accustomed to the traditional models that were available. You know, radio, TV, print. And so we vested heavily in that over the years and had tremendous success. But all of a sudden you see these returning, the return online investment was dwindling, and dwindling quickly. Especially around 2005, 2006, 2007, and it was right around 2007 that I stumbled across, well one, Twitter. Based on some people telling me “You really gotta get on this platform. This is why it’s so cool.” And, so, I started tweeting, and started diving into this new thing.
And then I discovered Gary Vaynerchuk. That’s ten years ago now, and I [inaudible 00:05:50]. On a plane ride, actually, to Toronto from Vancouver and I was enthralled with the content, the information, the message, just the whole …
Listen, Doug, like you, I like to serve people. I serve my communities and I’ve always done that, but I’ve done it from a traditional brick and mortar in a trade area. A fixed trade area, right? I was Vancouver Lower Mainland. Here was a way that I could impact a greater audience. No more boundaries. And really connect with people, you know? To serve and help them with creating these lifestyles by design.
So, I embraced it. I started to dive in, initially, just to be able to grow the Fitness Town brand. But, at the same time I started to develop my own personal brand, because there are certain personal opinions I have that wouldn’t be appropriate to share on a corporate channel. It’s just the way it is.
I promote the idea of the best way to workout is using your body as a piece of equipment. That way you’re never without, you know? You’ve got that gym with you till the day you die. And you can either maintain it or you don’t.
You can imagine being in an equipment based industry, that sells equipment, as I became more and more prominent in my position, both in a corporate space but also on the personal space, like my personal brand outgrew our corporate brand by 2012.
So, in that five years, my personal brand, obviously, had no boundaries any longer. It had grown. My blog was getting a lot of traffic. My social channels were growing and getting lots of engagement, because I was responding. I was connecting. I was having conversations with people, you know? “Woah, what’s that?” You know? I wasn’t using it as a tool to broadcast a message, I was using it as a way to share a message, but engage in a conversation about it. And I think that is the social piece. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about adding value, adding value, adding value, and that’s what I did. I just did that because it serves me. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life, so it wasn’t a big deal. It’s just now I was doing it online.
Doug: Yeah, but how do you come to the realization? I mean, I’ve been in the space a long time, as well, and I look at people … and I was just making some notes as you were talking and I’m saying there needs to be a shift in social media. People, now, are signing up and using social media like it’s broadcast media, which doesn’t work. So, obviously, a long time ago you figured out “Hey, this isn’t get 10,000 Twitter followers and blast my sales message.” This is engage with people and help them.
Dai: Well, every channel’s noisy, right? And it’s only getting noisier. Especially the big ones. Like the big five. They’re noisy. There’s lots of traffic. There’s lots of posts. There’s incredible amounts of both inbound and outbound messages. And how do you sort through all of this stuff? Sure, they introduced hashtags, find conversations that are relevant to you, but still it’s still noisy, you know?
So, I think the question really is, is how do you stand out amongst the noise? And the only way to do that is to really cut through the noise directly and start engaging with people one on one. And I’m not looking to cast a wide net. I’m looking to connect with that person, make a difference, and then hopefully do that again, and again, and again. And based on referrals, and people sharing the message, and embracing it, and joining my programs. I just grows organically. I don’t spend any money. I spend nothing on Facebook or Google Ads or anything. I boost the occasional post on Facebook. That is the extent of my marketing spend. It’s funny, my business coach, and my other coaches, and people I’ve connected with over the years, they are blown away that I don’t spend anything on marketing. But, I don’t. It’s all organic, you know?
Doug: It’s amazing when you provide value. I mean, we heard Darren Rowse talk once about blogging and he said he spends zero money promoting his posts. He runs ProBlogger, and it’s all about providing content, and value, and people will find you, and engaging, and you’re living proof of that, that you don’t need to spend you budget on Facebook and Google ads. Just serve the people.
Dai: Exactly. Exactly. The funny thing is, too, you know, I’ve never really monetized a lot of my channels. That was a new idea to me back in, I guess it would be, 2013 or 2014. When I was first introduced, I had some friends looking at my metrics. And I’m analytical. I was always doing it for my business, but I didn’t really do it for my personal brand.
And then when I started diving into that stuff and talking to some people that, that’s what they do. You know, they look at the data and they make recommendations based on that, and figure out ways to make money from it. And they’re like “So, how do you monetize that?” What? Monetize? I think you remember that during my conversation at that … or presentation at Langley. I was blown away that, you mean I can get paid to do this stuff? Like, do what I’m doing and that I take great enjoyment from, you can make money from this? Okay, well let’s figure out how that works. So, I really just immerse myself in that whole aspect, at least as much as I could on the side, because I was already working in another career 50 or 60 hours a week. So, it was burning the candle, man, late night, and learning as much as I could.
Doug: That’s so cool. So, what are you most excited about today as it relates to marketing, say in the next six to twelve months?
Dai: Yeah. I think it really comes down to being, to take something from the retail world is omni-channel, you know? And this idea of really having multiple offerings and multiple ways of connecting with your audience, and realizing that there’s no right or wrong way. I really don’t feel there is. If you’re out there and you’re connecting with an audience, it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, they’re there. And if you’re connecting with the right people, and having the right conversations, great things can happen. But I really love, and if you talk about sort of trends, and you look at what’s been happening over the last year, you look at the big companies like the Google’s and the Facebook’s, and so forth, they’ve been acquiring lots of different types of video-based companies. And, especially, the live video component. The VR that’s coming down the pipe, you know? There’s going to be some big, big shifts in video. So, if you’re not in video, or at least not integrating video into your marketing plan, you better do that quick. And, because I see where the trends are going, that’s where it’s going. As much as a lot of these search engines say that they don’t favor the video posts or the others, I seem to get lots of traction when I do a live video, you know? As opposed to some of my static posts, where it might just have an image, or just might be textual based. There’s obviously something there because the audience is engaging with it. So, it really created that personal connection. So, I see a lot that happening in the next six to twelve months. It’s been part of our plan for the last six months, and we’ve seen some tremendous growth on our channels based on that video integration, and just being really consistent with it, you know?
Doug: Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, there’s … I’m sure you know Sunny Lenarduzzi in Vancouver?
Dai: Yep. Yes I do.
Doug: Yeah. So, you’re looking at her whole business model is really how to put together video and how to get video into your marketing mix. And, so, I totally agree. We’re in exactly the same space now, where we’re doing some studio stuff, and some hand shot stuff, and it’s going to be a huge momentum shift.
Dai: For sure. Absolutely. And for all the coaches out there, group coaching models, I think are still fantastic as long as you have a certain expertise and a certain way to move your clients forward in whatever endeavor they’re looking to shift through. There’s lots of opportunities and there’s so many cool tools out there that are free, that you can leverage to really help people. So, I think people are getting smarter with their tools and the way that they present their teaching, in such a way, to be more mentors than just coaches. The big difference I always see is a mentor tends to be someone that has a lot more experience and wisdom in what they’re teaching than just a traditional coach that has a lot of theory, a lot of knowledge, but it might not be practical knowledge. You know, firsthand experience knowledge. So, I’m seeing a big shift in that space to more of this mentorship type of role, versus just coaching.
Doug: Yeah. Totally makes sense. I have a quote written on the side of my computer that says “Never ask someone for advice who hasn’t done what you’re going to do, or is willing to pay the price that you’re going to pay.”
Dai: Nice. I love it.
Doug: And every time I step outside that, it doesn’t work.
Dai: Yeah.
Doug: Theory’s great, but someone who’s been there is, obviously, their advice is much more valuable.
So, what advice would you give our listeners who can’t pull the trigger, or have been hesitant? Now, I’m thinking because of your background in fitness, you’re seeing there’s a whole bunch of reasons why people don’t take that first step, and it’s probably not much different than when they’re looking at business or marketing or shooting video, “Hey, I don’t want to shoot video. I don’t look good on video. I don’t sound good on video.” So, what advice would you give them to take the next step?
Dai: Well, a lot of the time it’s just getting out of your own way. It’s just these personal beliefs that people have. So, I’m putting my life coaching hat on right now, but a lot of people have these hang ups. They have these belief constructs based on past experiences and they’ve come to this place where they feel that this is true. And whether it be “I don’t look good on video” or “I can’t do video” or “No one’s going to want to watch me on video.” There’s all these reasons why they shouldn’t do something and they’re often founded on non-factual information. It’s just based on person beliefs or one bad experience. Or someone saying something that hurt their feelings. And I always say, really look back, and this is the only time I’m really backwards thinking when I’m a coach is, let’s talk about how you’ve gotten to where you are today. Let’s figure out exactly what’s brought you to where you are right now, what’s worked, what hasn’t, what have you learned from the things that haven’t worked? What can we celebrate that has got you here?
Now, we’re going to draw a line in the floor. You’re going to step over that line. Let’s acknowledge what happened, that’s great, we’ve learned from it. But, now everything moving forward is a clean slate. You know, [inaudible 00:15:50], man. Like, let’s draw your future out. Let’s figure out what the next play is because nothing’s predetermined, right? So, my biggest thing I tell a lot of people is, draw that line in the sand, jump over it, and just start afresh. Don’t worry about all these past beliefs, just start new.
And if you are really hung up, because I do, do some consulting with occasional businesses here and there and owners. If you have a team of people, there’s probably somebody on your team that could be that face, and could do some potential videos for you.
Doug: Sure. Absolutely.
Dai: Why not empower somebody on your team to deliver that message to become that face for your business? If you don’t want to do it, that’s totally cool, but it takes some training and you have to have trust that the person can convey the message the same way you would. Because that passion, you know, an owner/operator will always, always, always be more passionate. Even more passionate than their number one guy. You know, the right hand man or gal. The right hand person that’s their COO, you know, like though be passionate too? But they’re not an owner. There’s a difference, right? So, you still have to make sure that that message is conveyed in such a way that people connect with it.
Doug: Yeah. That’s so true. You’re right. I’ve always said that it doesn’t matter. Even when I’m helping clients, I’m doing marketing for their business, I tell them you’ll always care more than I do. And they kind of look at me. And it’s true. You know, I could tell you it’s not true, but the fact is it’s your business. You’ll always care more.
Dai: Yes. Correct. Absolutely. So, it’s just getting clear on what is it you want to achieve with your marketing initiatives. Setting realistic expectations and I see a lot of people think “Oh, I’m just going to get on these social channels. I’m going to start putting some stuff out there. I’ll put some dollars behind it. So, that means it will start making money.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I’m sorry. That’s probably not the way it’s going to work.”
I have a one year program I do with people that are looking to create a lifestyle business for themselves. Or fine tune what they’re doing to try to generate another income online and build a personal lifestyle brand. And I tell people it’s four to six months before we’ll probably even get to the point where you’ll actually start making some money from what we’re doing. Like, just realistically, there’s so much stuff you gotta do to set the stage. Especially if you are going to be that brand and you’re starting from scratch. It don’t happen overnight.
So, I think it’s really trying to be realistic with your expectations when it comes to marketing.
Doug: Well, I think people have a short term view. I look at it as a long game. And I’m far from a fitness expert, but one of the things I discovered very early on, when I wanted to lose some weight and get off my medication was, I didn’t get sick in a day, so why would think I could get fixed in a day? I’ve just had to acknowledge that it’s a lifetime decision. The decision is to be healthy for life, which means I’m going to have some good days and bad days. Which is no different from launching your business. It’s going to be a long time.
Dai: I love that. That’s so true. That’s a great way of putting it.
Doug: So, drawing a little bit on your fitness expertise. You know, I see business guys that are type A entrepreneurs that are running around with their hair on fire. They’re flying all over the world. They’re speaking, and doing all these things. And you can see that they’re putting on weight. They’re taking tons of medication. So, what advice do you give those guys? Because you’re on both sides, you’re in a really interesting space. You do business coaching to help people that want to grow their brand. You’ve had your experience in retail where you grew a really successful brand. You’re your own brand and doing really well on social media. So, do you work with people that are, say, that are looking to overcome their health challenge and help them grow their business that way?
Dai: Yeah. My program’s called the Life By Design Program. So, I do incorporate business, executive style coaching. But, mindset coaching, as well as life coaching, and I don’t interchange.
So, I only work with clients who are looking to look at more of a holistic approach. So, they are people that are very much like what you’ve just described. They’re type A, largely. And they’re people that are used to being top performers in every aspect of their life. They’re full throttle, right? With the exception, somewhere along the line, they’ve realized that health is just way out of whack. And it has not been a priority.
So, we try to figure out ways that they can get the health back in check, bring it back into focus. And as a coach, that’s my goal to shine the spotlight on the areas that are your weaknesses. And when I say weaknesses, they’re just areas that have lost focus. You haven’t prioritized them, and we all know with health it’s one of those things you can only ignore for so long. That’s it, you can only go so long without giving it attention. And when it gets to the point that all of a sudden it now earns your attention, because it slaps you upside the head.
When I get people in that position, it’s interesting because now they’re ready, but they weren’t ready before. They had to get to the point where it was like “Oh, man. I’ve got to make some changes now, or I might die.” Or they start to see, more often than not with these kind of guys, they see that they’re getting diminished returns on their effort when it comes to their income, because they’re not producing the way they used to. They’re finding they’re sleeping poorly. They’re not performing. They’re losing focus. As soon as their health starts to dip, their income starts to dip, because they’re used to being top performers and they can’t perform at those peaks anymore because their health can’t support it. They’re not 20 anymore, they’re in their 40’s. And I’m sorry, you have done anything to maintain your testosterone levels. You haven’t done anything to really manage stress. And look at your waistline, you’re carrying an extra 30 pounds around the midriff. Man, you’re a walking time bomb as far as I’m concerned.
So, what is it worth to you? What does that investment look like? And people have to be ready to make a change. At the end of the day you gotta choose a change and if you’re not ready to walk the walk, well, I can’t help you, you know?
Doug: Well, it’s interesting that you talk about it in that way. Because as the executive, you’re the key driver of your business. And I see guys treat their cars nicer than they treat themselves. They’ve got the Ferrari sitting in the garage, and if I suggested “Why don’t we pour some crap in the gas tank?” They go “Oh, no, no, no, no. I only use premium, like, 94.” It’s like “Well, why’d you stop at the McDonald’s drive-through?”
Dai: Exactly.
Doug: You’re that Ferrari and when your motor dies, so does your business.
Dai: Yes it does. And it doesn’t take long for people to figure that out. And once you get to that point, if it gets to that point, I always … It pains me, because I just think “Man, all the lost time.” Had you come to me, and more proactive in your approach, even two to three years ago, just think how much further ahead you’d be now. And it’s one of those things. So, when people come to me it’s like “Listen, we’re only going to talk if you’re really serious.” If you’re not serious about making a change right now, we don’t need to have a conversation about it and talk about theory, because there is a big action that has to happen. And it has to be consistent action. And that’s the only way you’re going to see change.
So, I’m not a big fan of askholes. You probably saw one of my more recent videos and I’ve got a [inaudible 00:23:22] article coming out on it. We are in a society, you and I while we were offline, before we started recording, we were talking about just information today. We have access to everything. My youngest daughter taught herself gymnastics by watching YouTube. It’s remarkable. She’s doing forward flips, back flips, handsprings, like all this stuff from YouTube videos. So, we have access to information and we go to people all the time and we ask for advice. We as for input. But we rarely, I’m generalizing here, actually take what we’ve asked and what we’ve learned and taken these pearls of wisdom and applied it to our own life. And we go around this loop of constantly asking, but never acting. And that’s what I call an “askhole.”
You know those people. They buy all the self help books. I’m guilty of this, too, and this was why I can make fun of it. Where I’ve bought all of these great self help books and personal development books, they’ve gone on my bookshelf, and I say I’m going to get to these. I’m going to read these because I know they’ll help me. And it’s gone from self help to shelf help, because literally, they’ve just stayed on the shelf. And it’s frustrating, right? Because we all know we have an opportunity to really improve our lives, but we actually have to make a committed action to continuously do it.
Doug: I agree. I go to a lot of different marketing and business events and I see a lot of the same people at the same events. And you would think after you haven’t seen them for a year there’d be some progress. And you talk to them and they’re goal’s the same. I’m thinking, “Dude, what’d you do the last year?”
Dai: Yep.
Doug: I’m just reading “The Slight Edge” right now.
Dai: Oh, fantastic. Jeff Olson, right?
Doug: Yeah. What a cool book. And it’s just what you’re talking about. It’s just doing … You know, I think the point that really got me was he said “It’s just doing the simple things every day. The things that are easy to do.” He said “The problem is, they’re also easy not to do.”
Dai: Yes. Exactly. And that’s life, isn’t it? We’re full of those things. Yep. Well, it’s also, “The Compound Effect”, right? Darren Hardy. I love that book, too. I find those two are the ones I tend to recommend all the time to a lot of my clients as beginning, starting books, because if you do those little simple things every day, after a month think about how much you’ve accomplished. Compound that out and you do that for a year. Holy smokes. That is life transformation. But it didn’t take a lot of time. It really didn’t take a lot of effort. But, you spread it out over a year. But, people also put weight on the same way, right? That extra beer a day above and beyond what you need is going to translate to about five to eight pounds of fat gain in one year. One extra beer a day. Or one glass of wine. It’s that simple. That is the compound effect.
Doug: I have an easy way to deal with that, I just drink them all in one day. Then keep clean for the next six and I’m good.
Dai: Oh, and I’m not against it. You know what, because I tell my clients eat whatever you want. I teach them how they can eat the things that they like to eat, but it’s also learning how to create a lifestyle that allows you to do that, you know? And that way when you are eating something that you’re owning the decision. It’s like, I’m owning the fact that I’m going to either drink this or eat this right now, I’m going to enjoy the Hell out of it, and I’m not going to beat myself up for doing it. Because that’s what happens, right? And then people feel guilty, “Oh, I’ve blown my program. This week’s a write off. I’ll restart on Monday.”
Doug: That’s right. Everyone knows you can’t start a diet until Monday.
Dai: No. And it drives me nuts. I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, the clichés are all out there, but they’re all so freaking true.” So, anyways.
Doug: That’s why I love the way business and health ties in so much. They’re similar. It’s just about doing the small things every day in your business, or doing small things in your health. To over a period of time you’ve got this accumulation which will pay off big dividends.
Dai: Absolutely. Mass dividends, you know? Really.
Doug: A couple questions and then I’ll let you go back to your busy schedule. One is, who do you think is one guest that I should have on my podcast?
Dai: Oh man, that’s a great question. You know who I’m really impressed by is the last, I guess it’s almost two years now I’ve been working with the functional medicine practitioner out of Vancouver.
And for those that aren’t familiar, functional medicine it sort of takes this holistic approach to our health and it really gets down to the molecular and the DNA level, where they look at certain patterns in our bodies and they look at hormone levels. They look at vitamins. They look at nutrient density. They look at muscle tone. They basically paint a picture of what your health looks like. And from that, they figure out what are you lacking? How do we get you up to a foundational baseline where you can actually be normal? Because most of us are walking around and we have a lot of deficiencies. We just do based on lifestyle. And so they help you get to that ground zero and then from there they have this idea they call it their super-human protocol, where they then start to reinforce and add in extra of the areas that you’re weakest.
So, that whole idea of the weakest link in a chain is going to ultimately be the part that breaks you. And we see that with a lot of people’s health, right? They have this one issue.
For me, I have an autoimmune disease. So, I know that there’s certain inflammatory markers in my body, that if I don’t monitor and stay on top of, my autoimmune condition can knock me down. It did last week. I had a fever for three days. I was hoping I didn’t have to go to the hospital and I didn’t, thankfully, but last time I was hospitalized for eight days I had a fever. So, it’s a very serious condition, but I control it with lifestyle and through working with the functional medicine.
So, Spencer Coppin of Coppin Health, he’s also the founder of the Superhuman Summit in Vancouver, where they bring in some of the top [inaudible 00:28:52] in the industry. And they come into Vancouver every year, every fall, and they host this conference much Ted Talk style, where they’d speak about the newest and most innovative ways of biohacking, and optimizing your performance and health. It’s remarkable. So, I’ve been working with him personally on my own health, and I’ve seen tremendous changes.
And I think based on the business owners that you’re connecting with, and the marketers, and just the mindset of the people that you have, I think they would really find a lot of his knowledge very useful and very practical. Especially opening your eyes, because we all know, Canada and the U.S. especially, our medical system is far from perfect. And at most it treats symptoms, it doesn’t deal with root causes. So, we have to look at things differently. And that’s where functional medicine really is filling in the gaps. It’s taking a proactive approach to dealing with the issues before they become an issue.
Doug: That sounds so cool. I wouldn’t be surprised if that presentation would see Tim Ferriss sitting in the back of the room
Dai: Yeah. No. Absolutely. And they’ve chatted with him. I think, actually, Dave Asprey’s coming this year, and he’ll be speaking. It’s in October in Vancouver, and I know if I’m around Vancouver I will definitely attend. I spoke at the last two. I did the opening key note last year and then I was the MC the first year. It’s just a remarkable event. It really, truly is. I loved it because I was the dumbest guy in the room. As I said, I’m the lifestyle guy. You guys are the science guys. All I do is kick back and learn from you. And just some of these brilliant minds and some of the innovations that are happening in our world today.
Doug: That’s so cool. So, before we wrap up, why don’t you share with us a little bit about the programs you’re currently working on? I know you’ve been writing. You’ve got the books out there. And, just, you know, what are the programs? How can people find you and learn more?
Dai: Oh, thanks Doug. I really appreciate that. Well, you know, body, mind, and spirit. There’s this sort of three prong approach to everybody’s life, right? We have to pay attention to all three here, there’s not any one area. You can’t just focus on one area and expect the other two to also flourish. You have to have concentrated, focused time, and invested in each of those. So, my free program, absolutely free, The Whole Life Fitness Manifesto, people can go to join wlfm.com. Put in your name and e-mail, boom. You are in. You’ll start to receive a daily e-mail from me. It’s written every day. And it’s not canned. It’s not an auto drip. This is fresh content every day. A new workout. Along with daily mindfulness practice and personal development. And it’s only two percent of every 24 hours.
So, you have to be prepared to invest 30 minutes a day into your own health. Your body, your mind, and spirit. And I give you everything on how to do it. Plus you get access to a free community online, so you can start to develop some relationships with people that are also on a similar journey. So, that’s my free program and so there’s a few thousand people at any given time participating in that. Obviously, my book. You can go to any book store, or you can go on Amazon, and you can pick it up there. That’s The Whole Life Fitness Manifesto.
And if you’re someone that’s looking to really go to that next level, I have two programs. I have one that’s just for people that are looking to improve their health and their lifestyle. It’s a 12 week program, called The Whole Life Manifesto 12 Week Coaching Program. And it’s fitness. I customize fitness programming for 12 weeks, custom nutrition coaching, along with life coaching, and mindset coaching. So, it’s fully immersive. It’s done in small groups of 12 people only. And we only launch the program every six to eight weeks. And there has to be an application. There’s a 50% acceptance rate, so I just want people to know that. Not everybody gets in, just based on where you are in life. But we always have a call with each other, one on one, we talk for minimally 30 to 45 minutes, talk about you and what you’re looking to do and make those shifts. And we go from there. So, definitely, I know I provided you with the link on that, but there’s also more information on my website daimanuel.com.
And then one last quick one, for those that are business owners that are looking to create more of a lifestyle business for themselves, buy back some of their time, learn how to effectively use some of the tools that are available today, [inaudible 00:32:56] social media and business building practices, as well as improving health and life. I have a 12 month program. It’s one year only. I only work with six clients at a time and right now I have a couple spaces available as of September, but I’m always open to talking with people if that’s something that they’re interested in. Again, just reach out to me. I’m easy to find.
Doug: You are. Well, that’s super. Hey, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule. You are just crushing it out there. I’m just so amazed that you’re able to balance your life, and spend the time with your family, and give back to your community, and run your business. It looks like you’re just setting the world on fire.
I would highly recommend getting to Dai’s website. We’re going to put all the links in the show notes. So, all the stuff that we discussed, all of his programs, go to the show notes. They’ll all be there so you can just go “click” and carry on. We’ll have this transcribed and uploaded, as well.
So, hey, thanks so much for sharing your wisdom on your business and business and being healthy and living an awesome life.
Dai: Well, thank you so much, Doug, and you know what? Be well, guys. Just make life fun.
Doug: Yeah, have fun. Absolutely.
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