Show Notes

• Common characteristics of successful people
• $50 and a little red wagon
• The inescapable storytellers in our brain
• Dianna’s deep commitment to adding value to people
• You can’t get to better until you get to different
• Why the stories we tell ourselves are so important
• The link between failure and success
• Why it’s important to focus on significance versus success
• Leaving a positive legacy

Connect With Dianna Kokoszka

✩ Website: https://www.becomingmorebook.com/
✩ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dianna.kokoszka
✩ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DiannaKokoszka
✩ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diannak

Additional Resources

Book: Becoming More: You Can’t Get to Better Until You Get to Different

Summary

In her 13 years as CEO of KW MAPS Coaching and Training at Keller Williams Realty International, entrepreneur and author Dianna Kokoszka played a pivotal role in propelling the company to become the largest and most profitable coaching enterprise in the real estate industry. Dianna discusses her new book, Becoming More, and shares why it’s important to focus on significance versus success.

Full Transcript

Brian 

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. 

Dianna Kokoszka is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, author and mentor in her 13 years as CEO of KW MAPS Coaching and Training at Keller Williams Realty International. She played a pivotal role in propelling the company to become the largest and most profitable coaching enterprise in the real estate industry. Dianna is also the creator and author of the KW Bold Experience and Coaching Skills Camp, which helped her company to be recognized as the number one training company in the world. Her entrepreneurial spirit and industry renown have resulted in many industry honors and awards, including the Stevie Award for the best sales coaching program, and appointment to the President of the United States Business Advisory Council, Denver Entrepreneur of the Year and Denver Business Woman of the Year, which she won multiple times. She is a board member of Growing Leaders, which is a John Maxwell Leadership Foundation organization and actively participates in the strategic coaching training program. Her greatest passions, though, revolve around developing leaders and encouraging individuals to recognize and harness their innate potential. Now, anyone who knows Dianna knows that her genuine concern for the welfare of others serves as the driving force behind all her endeavors. Dianna’s recently published book “Becoming More” will help you to exponentially enhance your relationships, career, and other areas of life, and also empower you to uplift and inspire the growth of those around you. I’m so excited for our conversation today. Welcome, Dianna and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Dianna  

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’m excited to add value today in any way that I’m able.

Brian  

I’m certain that you’re going to do that today. Dianna, you are a phenomenally successful entrepreneur, business person, coach, mentor and real estate investor; you wear a lot of hats. You’re not only successful yourself, but you’ve also been very intentional through the years about surrounding yourself with and learning from others who are also incredibly successful. I wonder, in your experience, what qualities and characteristics do successful people have and what do they do that causes them to achieve success both personally and professionally?

Dianna  

Wow, that is such a great question. First of all, we become like the people we hang out with; so birds of a feather flock together. Scientifically, they’ve actually proven this. It’s called the phase of entanglement in physics. It’s where, when we’re around people, we take a part of them with us. And a lot of it is the way that they think can actually start being the way that we think. We can take on their characteristics, take on their way of thinking. So I made it a point, mainly because of my mother and father that told me, that you be careful who you take advice from. In fact, my dad sold tickets to the American Motivational Society and we would have people like Zig Ziglar, Cavett Roberts, Norman Vincent Peale, many people that have passed on, they were at our kitchen table having dinner with us. Zig Ziglar told me a story once Brian, where he said, you know, Dianna, I was going to Memphis, Tennessee and I was a little lost so I stopped at a service station and I asked the attendant there, hey, can you help me get to where I need to go? He says, certainly. And boy, he told me meticulous directions, which I wrote down and I followed those directions. Well, when I got to where he said I would be in the town, I was actually 45 minutes farther away. See, he meant well, but he didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, I’m going to give you some very good advice; be careful who you listen to. So I took that to heart. I started looking and watching, observing people. Brian, I wanted to know do I want to be like them when I grow up or do I want to be like them in business. I found people that loved people and used things and I found other leaders – there were a few – that loved things and used people. I knew exactly who I wanted to be. I wanted to surround myself with the people that I wanted to become like them – because I knew I would. Now, what characteristics did I look for? Part of the things happened when I was writing the book, I wanted to look at attitude and mindset and why they were different. And when I went into mindset, I Googled it, over 150 different mindsets showed up. I started looking to neuroscience books, talking with doctors; many, many different mindsets. So I went to…when John Maxwell interviewed many, many leaders, I was part of what was called an inner circle; it was a mentorship – this is many years ago, about 20 years ago –  I went back to all those people he had interviewed and I read through them word for word what was showing up, what patterns were showing up. I wasn’t that intentional at the time, yet, I became very intentional about things that really mattered. Did they have an abundant or a scarcity mindset? Did they have a positive, humble, curious mindset? Those were the people I sought to be like, so therefore, I sought to be around people like that. That’s why I attend a lot of the conventions that you attend as well. We get to be and to see and to experience those types of people with those characteristics.

Brian  

It’s so important, the people we’re around, isn’t it? I talk, as you do, and write about surrounding yourself with success. You certainly have done that in your own life. The other thing you’ve done is that you’ve become one of those people that people want to be around and that people ought to be around because you model a lot of the behaviors that we’re going to talk about in this interview. You have such a fascinating background in real estate and life. As CEO of KW MAPS Coaching, you trained and empowered hundreds of coaches and also transformed the careers of probably thousands of real estate professionals. Tell us how you got started in real estate and then, if you could, share how you shifted from real estate agent to investor and then to coach, eventually building the most powerful coaching and mastermind program in the industry, which is really remarkable.

Dianna 

Well, I’m glad that you asked because anyone listening to this, literally this will give them so much hope because when I got into real estate I really couldn’t afford a real estate school. I was up one night with one of my children who was not sleeping, who was sick, and I turned on television to stay awake. Well Brian, PBS was having an auction and it was music to my ears when I heard they were auctioning off a real estate school course. I immediately grabbed my checkbook, and I don’t think you should ever have your checkbook do your thinking for you, only I was in that position of my life that I looked at my checkbook and I could afford 50 bucks. I went $50, this is like a $1,200 course and yet I could hear my mom and dad in my ear saying, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was two o’clock in the morning so I thought why not? I called up, they helped me make the bid and later that morning, I heard guess what? I’m going to real estate school and I was so excited. So I went to school and once I passed though, I had another obstacle, see, it was a man’s world back in Denver, Colorado – in real estate anyway – back then in the 70s. I literally went to 12 offices before someone would hire me. Once they hired me, once again, I was so excited that I made it that far. Then I woke up the next morning and realized, what did I do? I can’t even afford a babysitter, are you kidding? So I put my kids in a little red wagon and I started going door to door meeting people and working to be the realtor of choice. So whoever’s listening to this, think about what is your red wagon? What are you willing to do that…a lot of people made fun of me. I didn’t care. It was that I wanted to help people. Well, that year I was so blessed. I sold 104 houses and I like to say I helped 104 families. The average agent was helping five families; selling five houses to 104. Well, people started saying what did you do? See, no one ever told me you couldn’t sell 104 houses. I used to sell home care products and, heaven, I was selling thousands of bottles of home care products every year so I just assumed you sold a lot of houses. I think a lot of times we allow other people’s thoughts to penetrate into our head and literally keep us from doing what it is we desire. Now I learned you could make a lot of money selling real estate, yet I heard you could actually get rich investing and owning real estate so I started going in that direction. It was kind of a game I started playing to where I wanted to buy ten homes and when I got to ten, I sold one and paid one off. I just kept doing that as I would accumulate properties and continually working to pay them off owning them free and clear. So that got me into the investment. And then of course, because I had done well, I started doing things like going with Michael Gerber – I had read the book “The E-Myth Revisited,” – became a consultant of his, got certified in his program and from there, Keller Williams called and asked me if I would like to interview for taking over the MAPS program. At that point MAPS was losing money. They had four people there before I went to interview. I always like a challenge, I love turnarounds. I figured I could do a pretty good job at it so I took the job and of course, grew it to a $500 million company, had 357 one on one coaches, 80 group coaches, 57 coaches that went out and coached and trained people in the offices. We had 175,000 people go through the Bold program, which is what I was known for. It was the first program that ever brought mindset into the real estate business. Up until then, Brian, everything was about, gosh, training, sales; it was all about sales. And I brought something different into it, the emotional part of the selling process; what were our people going through? So I would say I went from not affording a babysitter to becoming a CEO, by asking a question, what is not being done in our business that if it were being done would dramatically change the way we do business? I was constantly looking for different. What was missing? Where was the gap? How can I fill that gap? And so that’s what I would offer to our listeners today is what could you be doing different that no one else is doing that would dramatically change the way that your business runs?

Brian

Well, that’s a great story. That’s a very powerful question and it’s one that we can apply, not only to our careers, but we can reframe that question just a little bit, just tweak the wording and apply that to even certain areas of our lives. What can we be doing in our relationships that would make a tremendous difference? Or what can we be doing in the area of health that would make more of a difference than anything else? Or what can we be doing in fitness or again, any areas of life? I love that question. Dianna, as you think back to your days of carting your children around and the little red wagon and all the remarkable things that have happened since then, what are a couple of the biggest takeaways from your incredible career in life?

Dianna  

Now, that’s interesting, because I discovered that we all have what I call the inescapable storytellers in our brain. They live in our head rent free and there are four of them. I discovered one that I call the devious storyteller. And this is the one that is always telling us what we can’t do, what we’re not good at, oh, that’s not going to work, oh, people are going to make fun of you. It talks to us and holds us back with all the negativity that it wants to feed that we’re willing to listen to. And, of course, it keeps us up at night. We have no solace. It reminds us of the boss’s snub at work or something that a friend said or maybe an argument we had with our spouse, or something that our kids said. I mean, it’s going all night long making up stories, and this devious storyteller, we want to quiet. The second one, though, is called the flattering storyteller. Let me tell you how I learned both of these. See, Brian, it sounds like I did really well all the time and I’ve got to tell you, anyone that has had a lot of success has had a lot of failure. One of my failures was that I kind of believed that flattering storyteller. At one time, I started believing my own press. I mean, I was selling homes like nobody’s business, I was selling more than anybody. I had my own assistant, which in those days wasn’t even heard of. I had what was a buyer’s agent, we didn’t even know what to call him when I brought him on, he showed property for me. I started building this team that…nobody liked teams back in those days, now, they’re pretty prevalent. Yet, I was always doing things differently. And because I was Businesswoman of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year four times, I mean, I was living high, I was making a lot of money. I didn’t watch my money. Well, four offices that I owned, property management, 72 houses, the person who was watching my money only watched it go into their bank account. I woke up one morning with 72 house payments three times over, because all those homes were going into foreclosure. My bank account was empty. My car was repossessed. It was not a good time in my life, especially because we didn’t have caller ID so I had to take every phone call. I sold everything pennies on the dollar, went back into selling. I’m not against bankruptcy, I just couldn’t do it personally. Now, the silver lining of all of that Brian, is I became a fierce negotiator with the banks and mortgage companies and I paid all the sellers back. It actually built my character very, very strong and I watch my money to this day. But see, that flattering storyteller got me in trouble, and the devious storyteller wanted to keep me down. Now there was a third storyteller that I developed and that was called the reasonable storyteller. Oh, that was the one that could give me reasons as to why it happened. It gave me excuses as to why it happened. Only, my dad had always taught me that when you point the finger at somebody or something, there are three of them pointing back at you. So odds are 3-1, it’s your own fault; take responsibility and move on. And that’s when I discovered the best storyteller of all; that’s the empowering storyteller. I learned that not only did I need to empower myself and take a stand for my own greatness, I needed to take a stand for others’ greatness, and I needed to stand for their greatness more than they would stand for their limitations. I did that by empowering others. It’s such a great feeling to go from success to significance, where you’re helping other people, you’re feeding them, you’re helping them grow. When I stepped down from being CEO, in over a year or so 22 of the people that had worked with me stepped away and 21 of them literally took leadership positions in other companies. That just thrilled me, because Billy Hornswahl said that the best success that he ever had were those of other people. And I love that statement, success of other people that you helped along the way, that’s the best success that you can ever have in your life. So I hope that helps somebody out there; which storyteller are they going to listen to?

Brian  

Oh, it definitely does. Those are great stories. Each of those four stories are present in all of our lives at different times. It reminds me a little bit of the story of the wolf – and I won’t go into the whole story – but the punch line is which one wins? It’s the wolf that you feed, it’s the same with the story. Which story are we going to allow to be the dominant story in our lives. Also, your definition of success is terrific, measured by how much we help others to be successful, rather than just holding that in or or achieving it ourselves. I love that. Dianna, we’ve known each other for several years through our mutual friend John Maxwell, of course, and there are two things I’ve always admired about you. Everybody who knows you would say this to you; one, you’re always learning, and secondly, you’re deeply committed to adding value to people. You just talked about that in your definition of success. These values are also very important to me. I wonder where do those values come from for you and why are both so important?

Dianna  

Well, I think the adding value started when I worked in my mom and dad’s grocery store. Literally, when I was five years old, I was over at the magazine rack. When a gentleman would come in and pick up a car magazine, I would find any other magazine that had a car on the front of it and say, if you like that one, you ought to buy these too, adding more. When I went to the cash register, as people would come through, if they had ice cream, I would say, oh, do you need chocolate topping or caramel or whipped cream and nuts to go with that ice cream? Or how about some cantaloupe?  In essence, we were taught to add something to people. So it became very natural for me that when in leadership, you’re always adding value to others because we value them as people. Now the interesting part is it didn’t come natural for me. I literally, to this day…it started before we even had phones that we could put our calendar in. At 7:00 am, my phone goes off, and it says, what will you do today to add value to others? At 7:00 pm it goes off and it says, what did you do today to add value to others? I used to write it in my calendar, that it was a way for me to literally be intentional about adding that value. It’s so important, as a leader, to serve others.

Brian

That’s terrific. I love the putting that alarm in your phone. There are other things you can do; I use Post-its and just put Post-it notes around that remind me of different things. Even my computer passwords, I add phrases that are either affirmations or just questions that remind me of things, and think about the number of times you key in a password every day. Every one of those is an opportunity. You could have a random 12345 or you could have a question that’s an empowering question or an affirmation that’s a powerful statement that helps you to do those things that are important to you. What about the learning piece? Because you are…I’m a learner and that’s one of my strengths. When I look at you and see you learning – I’ve seen it many, many times in different settings – you always sit at the front of the room, you’re always taking notes, and probably have more notes than anybody else in the room. I’ve always thought that I took a lot of notes, but I always see you over there and I say wow, Dianna, she is the epitome of a learner. Where does that come from and why is it so important?

Dianna  

So interesting…well, it’s the one thing no one can take away from me. Some of the things I’ve been through, people can take a lot away from you, they cannot take what you’ve learned. You have to let them into your mind. Maybe that was it, it was something that I felt like, wow, I’m in charge of this. See, I just learned something from you and I hope our listeners did as well. Put an affirmation and use that as a password. I think that’s a fabulous idea. That one little thing, because what we’re doing is we’re etching that into our brain every time we type that password in. Now, I love the phrase of Gandhi that said, I’m going to learn like I’ll live forever and live like I’ll die tomorrow. That’s been a phrase I’ve used. I think it’s important because how do you add value to others? We can’t give what we don’t have so if I want to add value to you then I’ve got to have something to give. When we started hearing about the documentaries and everything that were being done, I got so excited about learning from those. There’s something about knowing something that can help me become better because I can add value to you and you get to choose if you want to become better or not. You added value to me and I chose – I’m going to go change some of my passwords today – because I want to use that, it’s such a great learning and that’ll help me.

Brian  

Well, I’m learning so much from you and I know our listeners and viewers are too, so I appreciate that we’re able to add value to you as well. Dianna, your new book is entitled “Becoming More:  You Can’t Get to Better Until You Get to Different” it’s the result, obviously, of years of experience and countless hours of research. I read the book cover to cover and highly recommend it. It was very clear to me that you were not only drawing from your own experience, but you went out and conducted a tremendous amount of research. The book is over 300 pages of stories and practical strategies that readers can implement immediately. I’m intrigued by your assertion that we can’t get to better until we get to different. Tell us what that means exactly and why daring to be different is essential in order to become more.

Dianna  

I love that question. You know, Albert Einstein said that insanity is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, if we’re going to become better, we have to be different otherwise we’d still be crawling around. We wanted to become better so we learned how to walk. And of course, we fell a lot learning, which a lot of people don’t want to fail or do things wrong, they just want to have everything perfectly done. We know that can’t be done; the becoming more needs different in it. Let’s look at Blockbuster, Sears, RadioShack. What did they have in common? I mean, they started to falter, they failed and they faded away because they wouldn’t do something different. Blockbuster had the opportunity to actually buy Netflix and said, oh, that’s too different, people aren’t going to want that. Yet, which one is alive, well, Blockbuster’s gone. When I put my kids in a little red wagon, people said that’s crazy. Yet, it was different and generally the people that are different…I was speaking before this podcast, and we were talking with Brian about what happened in the south and the north when black football players, who were outstanding players, but people didn’t want to bring them into the south to play. Well, somebody had to take a stand, somebody had to do something different. With the first girl that went and played little league baseball, she was different. Who is taking a difference and making a difference in the world? Those are the ones that are willing to do something different, to speak out different than everyone else, who doesn’t have to go along with the crowd, who is willing to say, hey, here I am and I’m going to take a stand for something that’s different. It may be just a little thing that you do each and every day that makes a difference in your life and helps you become more than you were.

Brian  

I really appreciate that last thing that you said, because as you’re describing these large societal shifts, like African American athletes playing in the south, I was thinking how can we apply that to our own lives? I think that last thing you said about just something small that’s different and unique, you think about your real estate career and you mentioned the little red wagon, but also the the buyer’s agent and having an assistant and the team approach, so those were four things that were different. Actually they ended up being pretty big things in terms of the effect that it had on your career and your life, the effect that it’s had on the real estate industry, because those weren’t things that you just kept for yourself. Now I’m not sure how many real estate agents are carting their kids around in little red wagons, but they’re doing the equivalent of that today as they’re getting started, but certainly they have assistants, and the team approach, as you said, is very prevalent. Buyer’s agents have, of course, also become very prevalent, so I love that. So much of your book is about mindset, and you’ve mentioned mindset a couple of times, I want to explore that a little bit, and deciding how we want to be and who we want to become. I interviewed a little while ago, mental performance coach named Brian Cain and one thing that he said really stuck with me. Much of his work is in athletics with professional athletes, elite athletes, but he also has business clients; he indicated that 80-90 percent of athletic performance is mental. But if you ask an elite or a professional athlete how much time they invest in the mental aspects of performance – whether it’s in practice, or training or education – it’s less than 20 percent of the time. I thought that was really interesting. It also, of course, applies not only to athletics, but also to other professions. Why is how we think and the stories that we tell ourselves so important? What can our listeners and viewers do to reframe and position their thinking for growth, abundance, success, and making a difference in the world?

Dianna  

Such a great question. First off, we are finding that we used to say 90 percent of your success is your mindset. Now they’re saying 95 percent of your success is your mindset and five percent is the skill. So that 95 percent, how much time are we spending on our mindset? Do we even understand what our mindset is? Because our mindset, it lives in the subconscious area of our mind, attitude is in the conscious area of our mind. Now, I don’t know about you, Brian, nobody ever asked me as a kid, hey, do you have a positive mindset? They would say, do you have a positive attitude? I was intrigued with what the difference was. I found that an attitude, you can change that fast. Yet a mindset, you have to work on a mindset; your attitude helps you set a goal, it’s conscious, yet your mindset helps you obtain the goal in your subconscious. Because see, you can sabotage yourself if you don’t believe you deserve the goal. So how do you get those two in alignment? I worked to come up with an assessment. The assessment comes with the book right now, eventually, of course, we’re going to charge for it, it will tell you the percentage of the liberating mindset that you hold, and the percentage of the limiting mindset. We all have some of each. It’s like the law of duality in physics where you have, like heads and tails on a coin let’s say; you can’t have a coin without heads and tails. It’s just which one are you going to focus on? Well, the book gives you the assessment, you find out. Then let’s say that you’re more into a scarcity mindset than an abundant, it will give you seven different steps that you can take to go from the limiting mindset to the liberating mindset, little steps you can do every single day that will help you change the way you think in your subconscious mind. You could actually use them as passwords on your computer, those things that you’re to do each and every day, that way we train our brain. One of the things I think people don’t understand is they have trained their brain to think the way it thinks right now. For some reason, people think they don’t have any control over that. See, I studied the brain since eighth grade, quite frankly, because my brother and sister both had brain tumors, and I wanted to help them. My brother learned how to walk and talk four different times in his life. That’s why it was so important for me to understand what was going on in his brain. His tumor was in the reticular activating system and cerebellum, where I learned about that portion of the brain, and my sister’s brain tumor was wrapped around the optical nerve in the prefrontal cortex area and the neocortex and the limbic system. I learned about how those areas of the brain work together. You can learn a lot about reading about things, like wars, but you learn a lot more by being in the foxhole under enemy fire. I was literally in that foxhole every day studying brain scans, looking at things, wondering how I could help them. It really helped me in my life to understand that people are doing the best they can, we can just help them think a little bit different. The book “Think and Grow Rich” is a great book. It’s not do and grow rich. It’s not hey, have a lot of stuff and get rich. It’s “Think and Grow Rich,” and I think a lot of people just don’t understand how important thinking is. Something came to my heart right now, I want to…I hope it helps somebody because it came so strong, back to that little degree of difference. At 211 degrees water can make you hot tea, can make you instant soup, can do a lot of things. But at 212 degrees, it can make steam and that steam can take an ocean liner around the world. So just that one little degree of difference every day, adding to our thinking, adding to our learning, adding to whatever it is that we’re doing, can help us change the world if that’s what we desire to do.

Brian 

That’s so powerful. Thank you for sharing that. It struck me as I was reading the book, the extreme amount of of science that you brought into it. It makes sense now with your family background and wanting to learn about how the brain works and about things that were impacting your siblings. How did you make the…that totally makes sense…if we have health issues in our families or with ourselves, first thing we start doing is…well, of course, now we Google it. You had to do other things and actually look at books and maybe even go to libraries. But of course now what we do, any time we have an ailment, we go onto Google and we diagnose it ourselves and figure out how to treat it. At what point did you make the connection between what was going on with your siblings and what happens in the brain and the recognition that you could apply some of those same strategies and concepts and mindset into other areas of your life? So in other words, not just treating health issues, but actually proactively helping us to create the the results that we want to create in our lives.

Dianna 

I think the big thing is, when we have a passion to learn things just come to us. I mean, we find books that we never even thought about, all of a sudden people are recommending things. So knowing that I wanted to help my siblings, I had to read a lot, I had to ask a lot of questions. I went to doctors and asked a lot of questions. One of the things that hit me pretty hard, was a study that Dr. Daniel Amen did. It’s where they brought in 30 people and they had them write down all the things they were grateful for in about five minutes. Maybe it was hot water, a shower, your car, your house, I mean little things as well as big things. After about 30 minutes they did brain scans and it showed all the areas of the brain – the cerebellum where our intuition lives, our creativity, the learning part of the brain, the neocortex, the limbic system, the amygdala – everything was all lit up, joy and happiness areas of the brain. Then they took the same 30 people and they had them think about “what ifs.” What if my dog died? What if I lost my job? What if someone hacked my computer and took all the money out of the bank? What if somebody stole my identity? And then they did brain scans. Brian, nothing was lit up except for worry, anxiety, stress areas of the brain. I learned that by helping people stay in gratitude and thinking about what they were grateful for. Every time when my brother would start having a bad day, he would start texting people of how grateful he was for them and it was amazing how much better the world got for him and how much easier it became for him. Now for him to text was challenging because…he spoke, yet a lot of people – when he would call me – they’d say sounds like some drunk guy is calling you. I said that’s my brother and he’s not drunk. I can understand him. Well, for him to text was challenging because his hand would shake a lot. What you and I could do in 30 seconds might take him two or three minutes. Now my sister, the way her brain tumor worked was..as we know, that from one neuron a thought fires and it travels along an axon and jumps over synapses and all this stuff and it hits another neuron. But in that pathway of travel, it would stop midstream. She could not connect what she wanted to say so it was playing charades with her most of the time, working to figure it out. She had the thought, she knew what she wanted to say, she just couldn’t connect it. So I wanted to know, how do all these connections work? How does the science behind it work? How can I help her in little ways to get those things out knowing the creative side of her brain really did work. So she started drawing and she actually became a pretty good drawer, she could draw things out, we could figure out what she wanted to say. So there’s always something that we can learn and always some way that we can help others learn. I hope this is answering your question, because I know I got a little sidetracked there, as I thought about my brother and sister, God rest their souls, they are just such great, great people, it kind of took me back to some great memories, so thank you for that.

Brian 

I appreciate you sharing that, both on the show and in your book, I think it’s wonderful…it’s helpful to have that context. I think it’s so fascinating how a lot of the things that we know in the personal development and in the success world things that we ought to be doing but what you did really well in the book is give the the why behind it, the science behind it, even in your description just a couple of minutes ago, what happens in the brain. The difference between, or the effect in our brain when we hold ideas of gratitude or things that we’re grateful for, when we focus on that, because when we’re focusing on gratitude, we can’t be worrying. We can’t be anxious, or angry, you can’t hold those two thoughts at the same time. Gratitude is so very powerful. I love the science behind that too actually, what’s happening in our brain that causes that to happen. I think people really appreciate knowing that. Some people, they just want to know what to do and they go do it. If Dianna says to do it, then they’ll do it and take it at face value and other people, of course, want to know that reason why, and really understand that. I think for all of us, it really helps to understand what’s going on between our ears, not just know that if we do certain things we’ll get certain results and if we don’t do those things, then we shouldn’t be surprised when we’re not getting the results that we want to achieve. So I appreciate that. We talked about failure earlier and you address this in your book. Failure, Dianna, is something that most people try to avoid but you maintain that success and failure aren’t opposites. But rather they’re – and I’m quoting from your book – “a two lane road, side by side.” Would you share more about that? Because I think the role failure plays in becoming more is often misunderstood. Most of us want to avoid failure at all costs and so, of course, what we do is we don’t do anything and that’s not the right approach either.

Dianna  

Well, that’s true, we can literally be holding ourselves back thinking that perfection is the way to go and know we have such high expectations sometimes of ourselves. Yet, to me, when you find a successful person, you’re also going to find a big failure. When you look at all the failures that they had…people generally talk about the successes. I mean, look at sports. They talk about, oh, the winning shots that Michael Jordan made, yet he’s the one that brought to our attention how many times he missed the winning shot. And when we see them side by side, like Babe Ruth, wow, he had all these home runs. How many times did he strike out to get those home runs? That’s why I put the adaptive learning model in the book; we learn something, we implement it, we fail, and then we re-learn a better way and we implement it and we fail again. It’s much like walking. I don’t know about you, I stood up and fell back down, stood up, fell back down, stood up, took one step, fell back down, and yet didn’t keep me from walking. Somewhere along the line somebody told us that we weren’t supposed to fail, we weren’t supposed to fall down. I don’t know where that happens. Generally, it seems like about seven to nine years old, maybe even earlier nowadays. Yet, why is that? I love…and my word…I wish I could remember her name right now. A great lady. I think it was the lady that is over many, many fast food restaurants and…oh, my word I can’t think of it, I apologize. I am going to tell you though. Her dad, every night at the dinner table, would ask what did you fail at today? I thought, what a great, great question to ask our kids; what did you fail at today and what did you learn from it and allow them to understand it’s okay to fail. In fact, we encourage them to go out and fail at something, as long as they learn from it, it’s not failure. It’s when we stop and say, never do it again. Now, to me, that’s a set-up.

Brian  

That’s very well said. I was thinking about this very topic. I’ve been with my granddaughter, who’s ten months old, for the last three days. She’s just now learning to walk and she can pull herself up and stand and we’ve been practicing having her take steps. The interesting thing, and you talked about it, when we are children…infants take a couple steps and they fall down and then they get up and they take a couple steps. Well, not only does that happen…but I’m thinking about it, again, it’s very fresh in my thinking, that after taking a couple steps and falling down, the people all around her, they didn’t say oh geez, you failed or that was miserable or boy, that was really poor – we cheered, we cheered every time – when she would take two steps and fall, we would cheer, yay, that’s great. And we set her up again and she would take three or four steps and she’d fall down and we cheered. So we’re actually celebrating that failure – if you want to call it that in quotes – celebrating that, because we know that the more she does that, the more failure she has, the closer she’ll get to walking. Then pretty soon she’ll be walking and then she’ll be running right after that. So it’s interesting how, with infants, we all know that and we’ve all been around children, we’ve all experienced that failure and also the cheers, the celebration of that failure and yet, as adults, we’re hesitant to do the same thing. Or when we do fall down we don’t treat it the same way when we see it in others. We often don’t characterize it as oh, that’s one step closer to success; we think, oh, geez, what a miserable failure, another failed attempt, or people expected that to happen so it’s a confirmation of that. It’s interesting, the difference, because they’re exactly the same, the only difference is how we respond to it, as you said.

Dianna 

Well, as a leader, there was one time – you just brought back a memory – where a gentleman had made a big mistake and it cost tens of thousands of dollars. And he was going around saying, oh my goodness, I know I’m going to get fired, this is terrible. I mean, he was like almost ready to pack up his desk. Now, are you kidding? Why would we fire you? We just invested tens of thousands of dollars to teach you the best lesson you’ve ever learned. I mean, we could have somebody else come in and do the same thing; you’re never going to make that mistake again. So look at it as an investment versus oh my word, they made a mistake, we’ve got to get rid of them.

Brian 

Absolutely. Dianna, the last chapter in your book “Becoming More” is about legacy. I love that you close the book talking about legacy. Why is it important to focus on significance versus success in our lives, and to leave a positive legacy that adds value to others?

Dianna 

I’m so glad you brought that up because to me, I mean, that’s all we’ve got left when we leave this earthly realm. What are we going to leave? A lot of people think it’s all about money. When you Google it, legacy, it talks about money. Yet, what is it that you’re going to leave? The things that your grandkids are going to remember, the things that your children are going to remember. What did you pour into them? What did you pour into other people? Literally, in chapter five, I ask people to write out their eulogy and then reduce that down to a sentence or two as to what they want to be known for, and then live their life in a way that they will be known for that. You mentioned earlier that I work to add value to others. Well, when I wrote out my eulogy, I boiled it down to she made a difference and added value to many people. So that’s what gets me up in the morning and that’s what keeps me going. So I challenge anyone listening to this, write out your eulogy, reduce it down to one or two sentences, and then know that that’s the legacy that you’re going to live plus whatever else you decide.

Brian 

I love that and you certainly are adding value to people and making a difference in the world. Dianna, as you know, our show is called LifeExcellence. What does excellence mean to you?

Dianna  

Excellence to me means that you’re doing the very best you can and striving to become more every day. My brother’s excellence in walking was excellent for him; for somebody else, it was slow, too meticulous, too thought provoking to even put the step forward. For my sister to talk to somebody else, that was not excellent but to her, oh, it was absolutely excellent. So I would say wherever you are in life, are you doing the best that you can or are you just doing the best that you want to do? Is it the best that can be done? Are you striving to get better? Then I would say you’re pretty excellent.

Brian  

I love that. That’s one of those great end of the day questions; did you do your best today?

Dianna  

It’s a great question.

Brian

Dianna, how can our listeners and viewers get your book and where can they go to learn more about you?

Dianna  

Well, “Becoming More,” book.com is the place that they can go to get bulk orders or even to get to Amazon. It will tell you all the things that are happening; you can get resources, take the assessment, all of that. And then of course, on Facebook:  Dianna Kokoszka, on Instagram:  Dianna.Kokoszka, LinkedIn:  Dianna Kokoszka; love to have them follow me. And I just have to tell you, all the things that we spoke about today, you are exemplary in those areas. You are someone that strives for excellence, you are someone that I have watched become more year after year. You are someone that is adding value to everyone because of the podcasts you do and the people that you find to interview, and I just thank you so much for allowing me to be one of those people.

Brian

I appreciate you saying that. Of course, you’re my model for all those things so I just keep watching you and I think what would Dianna do, and try to emulate those things in my own way. Of course, all the contact information and information about the book will be included in our show notes. Dianna, thank you so much for our conversation today. I appreciate you so much, I hope you know that. I’m grateful for your willingness to come on the show.

Dianna  

I appreciate you very much. Thank you for this great privilege.

Brian  

Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Dianna Kokoszka on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.