Dilon Danecha
Lance Wantenaar: [00:00:00] Welcome to thinking like a genius podcast. I have the privilege of having Dilon Danecha on the call with me today, and we are going to have a slightly off the wall topic instead of diving deep into psychology. We are going to talk about things more from a esoterical and also from a social aspect, we are going to talk about.
[00:00:47] Creating wealth, some systems and processes, and some conceptualized thinking behind it on how to be successful and how to be collaborative in your approach to learning and developing yourself. So, Dylan, can you give people a bit of a introduction about yourself? Your past your history and how you developed and got to the point where you are now, where you’ve started to create your own tribe and what it is that you do on a day-to-day basis.
[00:01:18] Dilon Danecha: [00:01:18] Sure. I guess, first of all, thank you so much for having me on just before we , came on. I wondered why I was on a podcast that is titled thinking like a genius. I hope that I can demonstrate some thought and indeed, , some genius, but, your tribe. I’m, Dillon Danecha, I’ve had quite a, portfoliod.
[00:01:38] Background a lot of it. in deep distress and deep failure, I started out and my parents came to the UK as refugees. So I had a really interesting upbringing particularly around money, particularly around place in society, our place in the community. and then kind of went through a whole period of, Experiences that resulted in me giving everything up in 2011.
[00:02:01] So quite a while back now, I’m going to volunteer for the United nations in Rwanda. I’d already done some work with kind of big tech out in Africa, looking at how to use technology to bridge the gap between the rich and poor. And ended up kind of doing quite the opposite of what my dad suggested. I ended up actually in effect, joining the poor to try and help them.
[00:02:21] And you absolutely must never do that. That resulted in some quite disastrous financial decisions. So I went on this period of volunteering and the common thread through it all and through my life has been, certainly up until the last few years has been this inability to reconcile. Making money and making a difference.
[00:02:38] And of course, we’re in 2021 right now where the idea of social impact through entrepreneurship, the idea of using wealth to do good in the world, the idea that companies would link all of their product sales to some form of charitable endeavor. The idea that it is the eco-friendly. Organizations who are doing really well right now and growing and booming.
[00:03:00] And the idea that we should be carbon neutral or net positive as human beings, that’s pretty acceptable right now. But only years ago when I was working in corporate or when I was working in the, charity sector. The two are very different. The idea of making money through business and the idea of operating as a charity.
[00:03:16] We’re very, very different organizations. Didn’t want to think like charities and charities. Certainly didn’t want to think like organizations. And I think that divide is, It’s being closed right now. My did my Ted talk back in 2010 on some of the work we’d done in Africa to try and bridge those two sectors.
[00:03:34] And it was kind of quite novel in those days. And I’m just delighted to see that gap is now. Being closed so fast forward to today. And you know, essentially what I do is really coming from an economics background. So I studied economics undergraduate. I did kind of a huge amount of post grad work in behavioral economics, which is some of the stuff we were talking about started recording.
[00:03:54] And then I’ve got a kind of a deeply, I guess you could call it. a deeply spiritual background and upbringing through my Vedic culture. And so bringing all of that together, the behavioral economics, which is how people think about money and how they operate around money. Certainly what money decisions.
[00:04:11]The Vedic and the spiritual influence, which is, what is our part in the cosmos? What is our part for people, planet flora and fauna, and then there’s kind of hardcore economics, financial trading background. So I was featured on the front page of the independent on Sunday money section back in 2002 for being one of the UK first online traders.
[00:04:29] So kind of bringing all of this together into a model that really helps individuals understand. How to redefine money in our lives, in our society, in our world, in our global economy, as a flow of love, as a force for good, and this fuels for further impact. And I’ve got a model is everybody seems to have a model in a step-by-step process these days for, sharing that.
[00:04:51] So I I’ve got a process for sharing that with like-minded entrepreneurs.
[00:04:55]Lance Wantenaar: [00:04:55] You touched on a really interesting point because the approach of. Associating money and using that for social good is almost in direct opposition to each other. And it’s really quite challenging. I know people say you don’t have to be poor to help the poor.
[00:05:13]No, you can still
[00:05:15]be wealthy and help the poor by being wealthy, you being more responsible because you financially managing your resources correctly to then be able to use that, to help other people, which is two ways of doing it. There’s one of consistent. Social service like mother Teresa or somebody in that position where they giving of themselves and a very caring and deeply loving way to help their, environment, their people, their family, their culture in a way that’s really driving change forward.
[00:05:46]And there are some, some stories which I’m trying to think of the article quite a while ago. It was a lady in India. She couldn’t have any children so her. And her husband started by planting trees. Every time she had some money, she would buy a tree and to plant trees along this road. And by the end of 40 50 years, she had built up this whole forest, this massive, massive wooded area, just out of the fact that she did something as simple as planting a tree. now that
[00:06:18]Might not sound like a big change, but if you take 50 years of planting trees and the same area, you going to change a landscape. Absolutely dramatically. There was also another case. I think it was India as well, where one of the locals,
[00:06:35] there was a patch of land,
[00:06:36] which was very desert and very spot the sparse.
[00:06:40] It was near a river and he did the same thing. He’d started planting trees and every time you had a chance and he actually turned it into a forested. Richly environmentally significant area, just due to the fact that we had so much care for his environment, that he changed it through doing something as simple as planting trees and planting plants.
[00:07:04] And that had that actually got him a recognition for making a big change in his local environment. And it’s two posing. You could say approaches, but the end result is if it’s done right. And if it’s done consistently, I think it’s one of the topics we spoke about is this matter of consistency, doing something longer, if we’re consistent enough, you’re going to have dramatic results because you have a compound effect which kicks in.
[00:07:31]So just to get a bit more background, what was your association and your thoughts around money when you went down to Africa and how things changed afterwards, what was that shift for you?
[00:07:43]Dilon Danecha: [00:07:43] So, I guess there’s a couple of, key points around the experience, but there are also a couple of, key things around the philosophy of this idea of, wealth and economics and trickle down and, and how capital rather can be used to alleviate poverty.
[00:07:58] And it’s all, interconnected. I’d spent between 2008 and the end of 2010, beginning of 2011. I been out there. funnily enough, my first, instance in Africa was in, Stanton at the Hilton Stanton in Joburg. And co-chairing a conference called the digital Africa summit and that summit, was essentially bringing together 200 of the continents, leaders in tech.
[00:08:21] So these were the ministers of ICT. They were the director generals of some of the, communications regulatory bodies. And they were the C-suite executives of some of the bigger telecoms companies. So the likes of net one in Zimbabwe, the likes of MTN So we’re all in one room, Looking at how to use technology to bridge the gaps between rich and poor.
[00:08:40] Now, in those days, you’re talking about SMS. notifications to farmers in rural villages of what the price of milk is in the city that day, so that they wouldn’t get ripped off by the transporter that was collecting the milk from the villages and bringing it to the markets to sell so that the farmers would get the text message for the milk price, which meant that the intermediary.
[00:09:03] Couldn’t rip them off. So it was really basic stuff. I mean, we’re talking 2008, nine and 10. So, you know, we’re very early days in, in connectivity across the continent. So that was great. And phenomenon loved every minute of those interventions and those interactions. And I loved working with these organizations.
[00:09:19] I loved co-chairing the event and it was just amazing. What I quickly started to see. was. We had, at the summit, a delegation, always have free tickets that would go out to, some of the leading NGOs across the continent as well, who were doing things like, working on youth employment services, for example.
[00:09:38] So everything that was related in those days to the millennium development goals, which are now of course, As you might know the sustainable development goals. And I was naturally drawn to these individuals. I was naturally drawn to talking to these guys during the breaks and at lunch times, and I would spend my evenings talking with the, the NGO delegates.
[00:09:54] And it was interesting because the corporate delegates would stay on one side of the restaurant on one side of the bar and the NGOs would group in another side and never the Twain shall meet. It was very obvious that the two worlds were quite distinct. Now here’s an interesting fact in order for trickle-down to work an interesting philosophy, maybe not a fact in order for trickle-down to work this idea that people at the top should like Adam Smith.
[00:10:18] You know, it is the obligation of people to look after their own self-interest with tasks best for, for society. That very much depends on wealth at the top being released as capital. That it can flow down the hierarchy and it can be used to create more jobs. It can be used to create infrastructure. It can be used to create essentially a better livelihood, more jobs, more infrastructure at the bottom, but that doesn’t happen.
[00:10:42] Wealth is still very much locked at the top of the wealth is not being converted to capital. So I started to see that there’s a huge divide here and that’s essentially what led me to thinking surely, what we need is individuals from this end of the room, metaphorically to go and work with individuals from that end of the route metaphorically.
[00:11:00] And if no, one’s going to do it. And I tried to get, the NGOs invited into some of the board level meetings at the telecoms companies and it just wasn’t happening. People were interested. I talked to some of the people like USAID and TROCARE. Oxfam, NOVIDS. So some of the people that put heavy funding into these guys or talking to them about how we should be bringing everyone together, and the response was Dilon, you know, that’s not really our business.
[00:11:21] Our business is charity and that was something I kept hearing our businesses, telecoms our businesses, charity, our businesses business, our businesses, charity. Cause all right. here’s what I need to, I’m just going to give up all of my paid work. I was in a fortunate position of having lots of debt.
[00:11:36] And that means that you have great credit limit, which means that you can live off credit. And I was young and pretty naive in those days and a bit reckless around money for sure. And I thought, well, I, can deal with this for a few years, actually, that wasn’t the case. I dealt with it for a year and we can talk about that a bit later, but essentially what happened when I volunteered for the United nations, this is when I started to see.
[00:11:56]The behavioral economics that you and I now talk about the behavioral economics that we now understand through the work of Dan Ali and Daniel Kahneman, the Noble prize winner. understand now how fear and guilt and greed and scarcity. It plays into people’s economic decision-making two thousand and 11. I am 33 years old, 32 years old.
[00:12:19]which in the tech startup space feels like a granddad, but I still felt pretty young then. And I haven’t done. A lot of the study that I’ve done in the last 10 years around behavioral economics. So I didn’t really understand why I was not helping these NGOs raise money as my job was supposed to do to help them fill out their strategic operational plans and their funding applications.
[00:12:38] And I was just using my debt money to service their needs. So if they needed a couple of thousand pounds for the first, the first metaphorical check I ever wrote with $7,000 for an irrigation system for a, basically an agricultural cooperative. I remember having the conversation with this guy, Frank saying, what are the chances of us actually getting this money that we’re bidding for?
[00:12:58] Because what you’re making me put on this form is nothing. That you’re doing well, Dylan, or you have, we have to play the fundraising game. So even the NGOs are playing games around raising funds. All right. What’s the chances of, I felt highly uncomfortable about that, but what’s the chances. If we submit the form that we get the money 50, 50.
[00:13:13]Okay. It’s not really great odds for the amount of work we’re putting in. What is the chances. If we get the money that we’ll get all the money, 50 50. Okay. So this is an agricultural cooperative in Rwanda. We’re pretty close to harvest. They get to harvest in Rwanda. We’re pretty close to the second harvest of the year.
[00:13:28] Now what’s the chances. If we get the money and we get all of the money that we get the money on time, 50 50. So 50 50 on 50 50, on 50 50 as a financial trader, that’s like really bad odds. So I’m going to put money on ever whether I understand behavioral economics or not. I understood probabilities. And so I did, but these aren’t good odds at all, Frank and I know that he was being quite jestful, but there was a serious underlying point to this and it was the consequences of them not getting the money.
[00:13:55] So what’s the consequences that you don’t get the money. And so he started talking to me about how they hadn’t had. The money on time. They haven’t had all the money. And in some instances they haven’t had any of the money over the last six harvest. So you’re talking three years and the consequences of that are that people in the village die and the way that they would tally up the deaths from not making harvest would be how many elders did they lose?
[00:14:18]And how many youngers did they, lose? And this was kind of standard practice now in the co-operative. How many elders did we lose? How many youngest did we lose last year? Cause we didn’t make one of the harvest or both harvest. And so when you start thinking about the consequences of your actions and linking those to the survival or not of a human being.
[00:14:38]Who essentially is a brother or sister. I mean, there is no difference between any of us we’re made of the same stuff. Scientifically, let we start thinking about that. The idea of borrowing $7,000 from a, credit line that is already bursting at the scenes, what price do you put on a life?
[00:14:53] And so I started doing that and they started doing that and it started doing that. So I was doing that right through to the end of 2011. And in November, 2011, by the third week in November, something like that, I literally ran out of all money, nothing available to me at all. All my credit cards are full.
[00:15:08] My overdrafts are full. I’ve taken out a number of car loans in inverted commas in those years. And if you have great credit, you could literally apply for a car loan online. And if it’s within a certain amount, you get the loan and there’s no more cars that I could buy. And That was the time that I really started to consider, two things.
[00:15:25] Number one, transforming my personal relationship with money and trying to understand why I had made all these really self-sabotaging decisions around money, giving that money away to people who I thought needed it more than me and did need it more than me, but needed it in a sustainable fashion. And so this idea comes back to creating wealth, converting that to capital and having that as a sustainable fuel for impact.
[00:15:50] This is what led me to that realization that yeah, I could borrow money and I could go cap in hand or I could find big finances like Gandy did, and like mother Teresa did or I could use all of my skills to create the wealth that I could then turn into capital and be a more sustainable flow of love, fuel for impact and force for good.
[00:16:12] So that’s why that realization began. I can’t tell you exactly when the realization came, but that was certainly the root. And the second thing was about transforming our human species relationship and. Interactions with money because there’s two things here. I can’t do this alone, my wealth and my capital alone can’t solve the challenges which we now refer to as the sustainable development goals.
[00:16:35]But if we transform my relationship with money and I start to redefine money in my world as a flow of love a force for good and fuel for impact, and then we start to multiply that. Across more and more and more people in more and more and more territories. And everybody starts to see money in this vein.
[00:16:51] And we start to shift the energy of money away from fear and greed and scarcity and guilt towards courage, congruence, creativity, compassion, love forgiveness. All of a sudden, we begin to do two things. We begin to shift the energy of the economy. We begin to really transform the energy of money, but here’s where I started making some, some bigger links when I started making links to kind of individual self-actualization and self-transcendence descendants and the evolution of our species, because I started to see in myself that I became much less compulsive.
[00:17:24]Once I started looking at money in this way and dealing with money in this way, I became much less compulsive, not just in my financial decisions, but in all decisions, in what I eat, what I drink, how I move, how I breathe, who I interact with, what I read, what I listened to life became. I started to feel liberated through discipline, and that stuff I’m from transforming my relationship with money.
[00:17:47] And I also see that happening to people who transform their relationship with food. In that when you become a bit less compulsive in these relationships that are traditionally very compulsive, because there’s so many triggers out there, it kind of expands out to the rest of your life. So I started to see that I began to feel like I was
[00:18:03]rising up the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you look at that as one simple, I started moving beyond survival needs in all areas of my life. I started feeling like actually that there is a route to self-actualization and I’m nowhere near that yet, but there is a route to being the best I can be for me.
[00:18:23] And beyond that Maslow talked about self-transcendence being the best you can be for everybody else. And so I started then to think about my economics background and what I’d learned at university in economics and what I’d experienced in economics, in financial services. And this idea that the economy keeps our species all 7.8 billion of us locked in fear is a reality.
[00:18:46] And it doesn’t matter whether you are the richest person in the world who is fearful of losing it all or losing a big chunk of it or your, the street kids that we. Look after essentially in India and Latin America, that live in the sewers who are fearful of never having enough. It doesn’t matter whether you’re at the top of the bottom.
[00:19:03] The economy keeps us locked in fear. And so there’s, I mean, we could go down so many angles. I just we’ll wrap up this, this short not so short piece. I apologize, but I’ll just wrap up this piece with, if you look at what Bitcoins done. You know, Bitcoin started out as the people’s money. It started out as the money that would change the world, the money that would change the very way that we transact the very way that we deal with money, the way that we think about money, the way that we look at money.
[00:19:29] And it didn’t do any of that because fundamentally the psychology that is trading Bitcoin buying and selling Bitcoin, thinking about Bitcoin is still the psychology of the survival instinct. It is still fear, greed and scarcity thinking. It’s 7.8 billion Chimp minds that have created. And they are perpetuating the economy and we see that Bitcoin has suffered exactly the same fate and it has now become an asset.
[00:19:57] It’s not a medium of exchange anymore, as it was, as it was initially intended to be. It is now an asset that is no different on the, on the markets. And we’ve got the chance opening. There’s no different to gold or silver or the footsie or the Dow or the NASDAQ, because it is just driven by fear and greed people buy when they feel like they’re missing out.
[00:20:17] They capitalize crystallize losses. When they, again, when they fear, fear, fear losing anymore. And you see that unless we change the way that people think about money. And the way that they transact with money, we will never, ever, I don’t think evolve beyond our survival sensory perception of the world. So that’s kind of a very, very war and peace answer to what was the sensitive question?
[00:20:42] Lance Wantenaar: [00:20:42] You said it in a
[00:20:42] really interesting way, because you’ve given a lot of context behind it, which I think is useful, I think is valuable. The points that you made touch on a lot of really interesting behavioral aspects, because in the end of the day, the essence of it all is people’s behavior to money.
[00:21:00]One of the things i read its a there’s booklets that somebody’s written from a finance company called the Psychology of money. I’ve did a couple of talks on clubhouse talking about psychology of finance and, money in general. And what makes it so challenging is that money is incredibly personal to people its a very very.
[00:21:19] Phenomenally strong attachment to money because when you have something like money, it gives you options. It gives you choices when you’ve had no choices and you’ve suddenly got choices. You want to preserve that ability to have choice. You’ve got to say it’s a bit of a dichotomy. It’s a power struggle more than what it is, money, but money in essence is power.
[00:21:41] It’s a way of manipulating other people because of
[00:21:45]a resource.
[00:21:46]Depending on how you look at it, but essence, it’s it’s power. And it’s either fear that you don’t have enough or it’s fear that you could potentially lose, which ties into Kahnemen’s work. And some of the other aspects of behavioral psychology, which you refer to, which I think is really interesting.
[00:22:04]Now, the crux of the matter is how do you shift that perception? Towards money to go instead of looking at, it from a power struggle that satisfies the need of control because in essence, that’s what it is. It’s a need to control the better you’re able to control it. The more you’ve got this need kind of met and matched until it gets to a point where it no longer becomes.
[00:22:25]A need that you have to match. It’s more of a resource that you need to manage. And that’s something that I’ve seen in myself as when I started tracking my finances a lot more granularly, and I started monitoring it over time. My association with money changed, I became a lot more disciplined and I become a lot more respectful of it, but it doesn’t mean I was wasting it.
[00:22:48] I just became a lot more. Responsible. And how are you started using money? And I think that’s a lot of the challenges a lot of people have is that because they, in a loss situation, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t matter. What I do is situation’s bad or you’re in a position where you have something it’s like, no, not going to do it because I don’t want to lose this position that I’m in.
[00:23:10]So how do you get to a point where you change people’s perception to see that. It doesn’t have to be a stagnant thing, resource item that you have to hold and control. It’s something that can.
[00:23:22]By energizing
[00:23:23] it and changing our association to it. How do you get people to shift that mindset? To actually look at it as a flow of something good instead of something that’s about control?
[00:23:34] Dilon Danecha: [00:23:34] So it’s an interesting question. I think it starts way beyond, or way before the kind of the mechanical management of the money that you have, or that you don’t have. And the fundamental distinction is, you know, are you in the grip of money? Or are you in the flow of money in the same way as do you hold tightly onto money with a grip or do you allow it to flow or are you the conduit of money or are you in essence allowing money to stagnate in your world?
[00:23:58] And when it stagnates, it doesn’t come in and it doesn’t go out. But when you are a conduit of love and a conduit of money and a conduit of knowledge, you allow it to come into your world and you allow it then to, to kind of flood out to the rest of, people planet flaura fauna, but that’ll get it. It’s all very esoterical.
[00:24:14] So how do you do it practically really in four distinct steps. and this is about breaking through some of the illusions of our role in the world, but also some of the illusions of the economy and the illusions of. Essentially, what we had to do in the first illusion is the illusion of scarcity.
[00:24:29] So we have to, in essence, break through the illusion of scarcity and help people see the reality of abundance, because what happens when people live under the illusion of scarcity is exactly that they think if they let it go, it will never come back. And it starts even before letting it go. Because they operate from a scarcity mindset.
[00:24:50] Quite often, they’re not able to create that financial wealth or capital in their lives, in the first place. So essentially they live in fear of losing something. They don’t have. They live in fear of taking risks that they really ought to take. because if they took the risks, it wouldn’t have a huge negative impact on their life.
[00:25:08] So they live in fear. They operate through a scarcity mindset. Don’t take the risks that they need to in order to create the wealth and the capital. So they never actually get to the stage where they can deploy wealth and capital because they didn’t take the risks to get there because they operate from a scarcity mindset.
[00:25:21] It’s about more losing what I have, even though I don’t have much, I might lose what little I do have. And even if I’m in a lot of debt, if I do this next thing, it might land me in more than, because I think in a scarcity mindset, I never actually believe I’m going to pay that debt down. Now I don’t want to get into any more debt.
[00:25:41]and so it’s helping people to see that, you know, the world is abundant with opportunities. The world is abundant with resource. The world is abundant, with people that want what you have and the world is in need. Of your unique skills and talents, whatever they might be once you help people to kind of see that.
[00:25:59] And there’s a few different. Prongs to that. And this is kind of where some of the esoteric work comes in. Some of the theory of work comes in some of the, if you like the spiritual or the pseudo spiritual work comes in, and it’s about helping people to accept the world for what it is, for themselves as who they are, the world is where it is.
[00:26:13] I am where I am from here. I will rise. You know, that’s the very first step. That’s why often when people think in a scarcity mindset, they’re operating in such friction with the rest of the world that, angry at the way that the world is they’re disappointed with the circumstances, they’re trying to fight a global economy that they don’t realize they’re part of because they are operating through greed and scarcity.
[00:26:32] They’re trying to, they’re trying to maybe fix the world’s problems, but coming at it from a place of friction, once you accept the world for where it is, because there’s no point fighting the world for where it is because you’re operating in a force of friction, you know, accept that. And then you stop beating up yourself and you accept you for who you are and where you are and what you’ve done and what you’ve been and what you are and what you ever will be.
[00:26:55]Come to a place of acceptance around that. Now you’re in a position to rise. Now you are in a position to find flow with the environment around you. So acceptance comes first. Number two, then you plug yourself into the present moment. So it’s about having an acute awareness. Of the present moment, you know, not living in regret and resentment, and not living in kind of future fantasy or future fear
[00:27:18] and the third aspect of this is slightly more esoteric as well, but it’s understanding where your ancestral lineage, the part that your ancestral lineage, plays in the identity that you have for yourself today. And I think I mentioned earlier on, you know, my parents came to the country as refugees and once I didnt, I feel that I wanted for anything.
[00:27:38] I also didn’t feel like we had everything that other people had. I also had, huge. Issues around guilt that, I’ve got these new pair of trainers, but that means that that isn’t going to buy the shoe. So we’ve gone from the shoe shop where I had my new school shoes bought for me and my new trainers bought for me.
[00:27:54] And then we’ve gone to the guy who is going to put a new heel on my dad’s shoes and why didn’t my dad get new shoes? And I’m a young kid at this time, but these arepart of the money story and what start allowing people to do once they accept the world for wherever it is, and then who themselves are, who they are, they plug themselves into the present moment.
[00:28:12] Then they appreciate where their identity came from. And some of it’s good. And some of it’s not so good in terms of this kind of ancestral DNA. Now you can start understanding your money stories. What did you see? What did you hear? What were you told? What did you experience, what did you get? What did you not get?
[00:28:33] What did you see other people get? So I think I mentioned on our, on my Instagram message to you, I run a five day experience called the love money miracle. It’s a free challenge of free experience for people to join. And the first thing we do is we start unpicking those money stories, because unless you understand where your paradigms come from, you can’t necessarily.
[00:28:55]Delete them and then start reprogramming yourself with new paradigms. It’s not necessarily about digging into years and years of trauma. That was not what this is about, but it’s about understanding those practical experiences, those feelings that you felt defining what those money stories are. And here’s the thing.
[00:29:12] I mean, we just did a, an experience for 200 people and everybody in the group was just utterly blown away and fascinated by how similar people’s money stories. are, particularly in developed economies, it’s very different in, the developed parts of the world or developing parts of the world that we operate in as philanthropists and charities, but certainly in the developed world than people’s money stories are the same, you know, money doesn’t grow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:29:38] So you’ve got to change the way that they think about the world, the way that they think about themselves and then the way that they think about money and it has to happen in those, in that order, because you can’t change the way people think about money. Unless they fundamentally understand what they think about themselves and they can’t really shift how they think about themselves, unless they fundamentally understand what their paradigm of the world is.
[00:30:00] Do you see the world as a place of fear and scarcity, or do you see the play the world as a place of abundance and opportunity? Do you see yourself as somebody who can, or somebody that can. those kind of characteristics, there’s building blocks of who you are, what you stand for, what you stand against, what you act for, what you don’t act for fundamentally shape the way that you think about money.
[00:30:22]and so it goes a lot deeper than just, mantras and affirmations and some of the surface level money, mindset work that’s out there. And I think this is why, and that, you know, I’m not here to disparate anybody’s work necessarily, but I am here to maybe question. That two or three decades worth of publications.
[00:30:38] There are out there. And this is why I love the psychology of money. I know exactly the book you mean it’s called the green and white cover guy from client services, project common Barry’s name, but it’s got the green and white cover, brilliant book. I love the work of Daniel Kahnemen and Dan Ali you know, because it comes from an economics perspective and a behavioral science perspective, as opposed to just the spiritual law of attraction, abundance perspective, there’s a reason I think why that stuff hasn’t worked and it hasn’t worked.
[00:31:05] Because it’s been an isolation of the processes, the material aspects of money. So the metaphysical hasn’t worked because it hasn’t been done in conjunction with the material and nor has the material worked and necessarily for people budgeting, all of that kind of mechanical stuff, because maybe they haven’t mastered the metaphysical dimensions of themselves
[00:31:24] And so it’s understanding your metaphysical experience of the world and then mastering your material expression in that world. And the two things have to go hand in hand.
[00:31:34]Lance Wantenaar: [00:31:34] Yeah, there is something which I found for me was. Very much an eye opener, especially reading the psychology of money because ties back into some of the behavioral aspects, which I spoke of earlier, talking about tracking your monthly spending, not as an nth degree, I spend this much or that much is having an idea of what it’s costing you on a month to month basis tracking what it is that you spending and then looking overall, what is your long-term goal?
[00:32:02]Now changes your relationship with money instead of being very fluid and how you use it as a resource. You have a certain amount of conceptual understanding what your long-term plan is, what your long-term goal is, what is your responsibility to yourself? The end of the day? You need to be responsible to yourself and your future self to be able to fully understand the impact of your decisions.
[00:32:24] Because I think a lot of people make decisions either. Very, very short-term. If I do this, I can get this. If I can do this, this can help me do this. Instead of looking at it, longterm is what is this decision going to be on the impact of me in 10, 15 years time now, suddenly it start changing your association.
[00:32:41] It becomes a bit more strategic. You become wiser in your decision-making because now that you overriding some of the more, primal emotional decision-making,
[00:32:51] which can happen
[00:32:51] Dilon Danecha: [00:32:51] it can help the fact that suddenly we’re moving towards a place of consciousness around, I guess what we’ve seen in where are we to the 2000 and kind of 12, 13, I really entered this world.
[00:33:02] I kind of left the volunteering world and the corporate world permanently. And what I’ve seen is actually people academically understand the need to be more conscious around money and to do all of these things, to shift that relationship. But those practical elements I’ve seen, you can tell people to do, and you can teach people how to do them and you can give them the tools and the apps and the software and the spreadsheets and even bank accounts.
[00:33:26] Now help you track your spending. But you still find that people have a fundamental challenge with doing that until they change their relationship with money, or at least until they become aware of what that relationship is and what is sabotaging them. So it’s about saying in the past, what has stopped me from tracking busting journaling has been these things.
[00:33:49] And the reason those things have stopped me is because I can now see that when we went from the shoe shop and I got my training. So the cobbler’s where dad got his shoes repaired. I now see that that has scarred me with a sense of guilt around money and receive it. And that really did. I was really terrible at receiving anything because that underlying guilt.
[00:34:10] And I remember seeing, old VHS. And video eight foot footage. My dad would have a big, huge kind of video cameras on his shoulder and he’d be doing all of our birthday parties. And whenever I was given my birthday presents, you know, you would see this young boy my posture would change.
[00:34:26] I’d start going red. I’d open the gift in front of everyone. I wouldn’t know what to say. And now looking back at those experiences, I now realize what my fundamental challenge was around receiving money. so this was all down to kind of my pricing and giving too many things away for free. And I still do that to a large extent, but I know why I’m doing it.
[00:34:47] And I also know that there are times when I absolutely can not do that. And so if somebody had just told me and many people did in the early days, didn’t, you know, this is how you price in this industry. This is how you sell it in this industry. These are the product funnels. These are the product ecosystems.
[00:35:02]this is what you’ve got to do. I fundamentally understood academically that process but until I really uncovered these money stories and the guilt, the fear, the scarcity, whatever it was, that had scarred me in essence. I wasn’t able to see why I wasn’t pricing enough. I wasn’t able to see why I wasn’t able to, you know, price in that way or move people through these sales funnels in that way.
[00:35:25] And it was very different when selling from stage or when selling on a webinar. Like that, and that, you know, that’s actually worked in my favor. So it’s been a validation for me, but I guess what I’m getting at here is we can give people all the academic and technical, the processes and the apps and the software and the spreadsheets in the world to do all this stuff.
[00:35:44] But until we fundamentally help them unpick their relationship with money, not unpick the trauma, but unpick the relationship with money, those kinds of processes. Almost fall on deaf ears and fall on his passionate hearts. People have to be really passionate about it. and that’s really where you’ve almost got this two halves to the model.
[00:36:03] The first half is really understanding, as I said, understanding your metaphysical. Experience. So, you know, acceptance awareness, appreciation, identity setting, intention setting, and then really listening to intuition. And then the back half of the process is where you start getting into making better financial decisions setting if more effective financial direction.
[00:36:25] Understanding the distribution of your assets. So they offer long-term protection and growth. And then that final kind of quarter of the model is very much around being a net positive human being. So, you know, being really conscious around your consumption, being conscious around your contribution and conscious around your conservation activities with the ultimate intention.
[00:36:46] Of leaving the planet, having left a net positive impact. And here’s what I found fascinating. When you plug people into a process of becoming what I call a net, positive human being, all the passion that they did not have for their financial management and making money and managing money and multiply money, it becomes automatic because
[00:37:06]they tuned into this idea of being a net positive human being. And they know that they can’t make the right conservation contribution and consumption decisions unless they’ve got that money that then leads to them shaping this identity of themselves that comes from within, not from without.
[00:37:20] So they start unshackling themselves from the identity that’s been imposed on them, the illusion that they need to be separate from the rest of the world, they start plugging into this idea of oneness and unity, and then they start seeing the world as a place of opportunity and abundance. And when you take people through this process, as we do on this five days, it just, it never ceases to amaze me.
[00:37:40] The people that have had challenges fundamentally with the idea of making money, the idea of making a difference, the idea of reconciling the two fundamental challenges around their personal finances, fundamental challenges around bringing money into their businesses, fundamental challenges about making the right consumption, all of that falls into place.
[00:37:58] And it’s because we bring together the metaphysical experience. With the material expression when you tie those two together. Oh my God. It’s just odd. It just blows me away. I’m very blessed to be in a place where I’m able to see that impact on human beings. That fascinates me really fascinates me.
[00:38:16] Lance Wantenaar: [00:38:16] You’ve highlighted the interesting aspect about process and how important processes, because something that I’ve been fascinated for a long, long time.
[00:38:24] Because I work in IT and there’s a lot of processes involved with automation, especially in information technology and without having these automations in place. A lot of the technology that we rely on on a day-to-day basis would never have been possible. Automation is built on technology has been built on industrialization, but if you take it a
[00:38:46]step further back, And you
[00:38:49]take it to your personal life.
[00:38:51] The brain develops its own processes for dealing with things. It builds its own automation on a daily basis to make life easier to reduce load on itself. And it shifts things into the subconscious so that you got more resources to be able to think creatively when you can. And that’s what I find fascinating is that unpicking those processes.
[00:39:14] And as you quite rightly mention as understanding your relationship, your belief systems, your identity, and once you’ve unpicked that, or you’ve got an understanding of that. It gives you clarity in your focus. It gives you understanding about yourself and it gives you an understanding of your relationship to other people, your past experiences, relationship with money, relationship with other people.
[00:39:34] Once you understand these thought processes. That’s like, as I mentioned before, I use the analogy of driving a car, unless you actually learn how to drive a car, conceptually, understand how a car works. Cause you watch your parents drive a car, you watch somebody else drive the car, you watch formula one races and you think, wow, that’s fantastic.
[00:39:52] How can I become like him? But until you actually learn the rules of the road and learn the rules of how to drive a car safely and effectively. You just going to be all over the place. You can have no control, you can have accidents. You’re going to put other people in danger and you’ve put yourself in danger and you’re causing yourself harm in the long run.
[00:40:09] Once you actually learn the skill, develop these automated processes. Then you start developing control. That’s when you start developing consistency, that’s when you start developing responsibility and that’s when you start becoming creative, that’s when you can do things like, you know, becoming a formula, one driver or becoming, an acrobatics driver.
[00:40:29] Become a drifter. If you really want to go down the nth degree of driving skill and you do things like on top gear where you do all these crazy things, but the fundamental concept is the same as learning the processes, understanding the processes of what are the mechanics, what are the rules? You don’t have to be
[00:40:45]really down to the nth degree, but if you conceptually understand them and you understand the rules and your relationship with them and how to manage them, that allows you to feel in control, even when, in essence, majority of the time when you driving. You aren’t really in control.
[00:41:00] You’re just directing things. You’ve got assemblance, of controls for braking and acceleration and driving. But in essence, what you’re doing is you’re turning a round thing in front of you for a number of hours. You’re not controlling you directing it. And that’s the essence of life is you’re directing yourself.
[00:41:16]You can either be destructive or you can be. Constructive, but you have to understand the processes and if you respect the processes that makes life a lot easier. And I think that’s, a good way of, you know, my analogy of, of the whole situation.
[00:41:30] Dilon Danecha: [00:41:30] I agree. I agree. And I think where a lot of people are particularly with.
[00:41:33]Economics and money and giving and social impact and making money. And all this kind of this, what I consider it to be now, now a very, beautiful, melting pot of financial activity, where most people are, because of the way that we’ve shaped the global economy around fear and scarcity and greed because of their money stories, because of this ancestral lineage and the crust of fear thats around the planet, actually, where most people are, is they are operating.
[00:41:57] Processes automatically or directing automated processes that essentially send them into a vicious circle rather than into this kind of virtuous vortex as they call it in a, in a contracted state rather than an expansive state. And so what’s going to happen is number one that we need to help people understand exactly as you say, what the processes are.
[00:42:15] And I do that through, in an essence, like part number seven of the model is effective decision-making. So we go through a model, I call it the MoneyMind model. And it’s the nine most insidious influences on your financial decision-making. That is essentially a distillation of the field of behavioral economics.
[00:42:33] You know, M stands for messenger O is for obviousness and it’s for norms, et cetera, et cetera. And so what are these influences on your financial decision-making and that’s fine, academically brilliant. And the process is before you make a financial decision, understand these nine filters through which your decisions are being manipulated D mask make a better decision, but of course that, Making a better decision as a process, can’t become automated unless the neural networks are built to make that better decision.
[00:43:01] That’s fine. So you keep doing that and you become very conscious about making that better financial decision because you filter everything through these nine elements and you make sure that you’re not being manipulated by any of the nine elements. And you keep doing that consciously. Until, of course the myelin develops around the neural network.
[00:43:17] And if you think about the myelin is, and I’m sure, you know, this, the myelin essentially is if you think about an electrical wire, your neural connection is the electrical wire. And then the myelin is the rubber insulation around that wire. And the more you conduct that process, the thicker the myelin gets.
[00:43:30] So the more protected that automated process becomes, and this is why people find it so difficult to stick to new financial habits, because they don’t conceptually understand that this is how I have to program my subconscious to undertake this process. Automatically, I have to keep doing it consciously. I have to understand the reasons I’m doing it.
[00:43:51] So the purpose of following this process, I have to also understand the paradigms under which I’m operating and the paradigms under which I’m operating have to be paradigms that help me escape from the illusions of the world and plug into the reality of the world. So I’ve got the paradigm, I’ve got the process.
[00:44:06] I understand the purpose. I’m going to keep doing it consciously until so much. Myelin is built that one day. I forget to filter my financial decision-making through these nine filters. And it just happens to be the right decision because I’m so now programmed to , following that process automatically, I think what’s happening at the moment is people, they built the neural connections for the wrong processes?
[00:44:27] Like I had, you know, I found it so easy to take on more debt to give money away. Like that was, I gave my Christmas presents away too. the Ethiopian band-aid famine appeal when I was six years old and that’s part of my money story. we had the national press round and the campaign team round that I’m six years old on the front page of the, local and national press again.
[00:44:48] And I got such accolade and such love, and I made this subconscious connection between giving and being loved giving and being worthy. And of course, that then led to me giving way beyond my means giving to the point of being stranded in a country, having to hitchhike across the Kenya Rwanda border to get back to Nairobi, to get my flight back home to England, because I didn’t have enough money to buy the internal ticket.
[00:45:13] So all of these situations I’ve got myself into can be routed back, or some of them can be routed back to part of the money story, which was attaching love and worthiness and significance and connection. To giving at six years old. And when you help people to understand these paradigms, they then find it even easier to keep following the processes.
[00:45:34] And when you then start plugging in the purpose, Bang the process has just become so easy to follow. And as I said, people will have such challenges with following processes around money and food are the two big things that I find people have real challenges, but you know, you, build this trifecta of process, paradigm and purpose, and it’s like overnight, changes in people and permanent changes.
[00:45:55]Lance Wantenaar: [00:45:55] Yeah. And that’s what I find really interesting is as you’ve. Said that when you get to that point where it all makes sense at all, clicks, perceptional shift, is dramatic. It’s like when somebody says, no, they went cold Turkey when they stopped smoking it wasn’t the fact that they suddenly just woke up and stopped smoking.
[00:46:13] It was a number of things which aligned, they aligned health benefits, the effect on their family, what they wanted to do long-term and that it was no longer doing them good. And that no longer serve their needs. And its just like I don’t need this and they can put it down and they can walk away and they never think about it again.
[00:46:28]And it’s that fundamental shift where you get all of those concepts that clicked together. And she was like, wow, That’s and that’s a really visceral shift,
[00:46:37] Dilon Danecha: [00:46:37] correct.
[00:46:37] Lance Wantenaar: [00:46:37] When you have a situation it’s such a fundamental shift that you see in people when, they do it, because it’ll be almost an instantaneous shift.
[00:46:45]It’s fantastic to experience. Cause I’ve had one or two experiences like that in my own life, when I’ve just had made a decision, it was just like, okay. it’s a very strong, real visceral. Experience Its completely unusual because if I could get that, refine that into a process where I can say, okay, this is what I want to achieve.
[00:47:02] And I can make a click like that on everything you could fundamentally transform somebody. Dramatically almost overnight because it’s, I find what you’re doing is absolutely fascinating. So yeah, definitely would be wonderful to see how things progress with, everything that you’re doing and definitely stay in touch.
[00:47:23] Thank you very much for your time.
[00:47:26] Dilon Danecha: [00:47:26] And likewise, you know, You are distilling this down into a formula and into a process. And what I see of your work is beautiful because what you’re doing is taking those visceral experiences and understanding. From your, from your psychology background and from your, even your cybersecurity background, you understanding, what were the triggers?
[00:47:45] Why did I feel that viscerally and, through mediums, like the podcast that you’re getting out there in, in some kind of formulaic process. So yeah, no, I absolutely love your work. Delighted to be here. Very privileged to have spent this time with you. Thank you so much, man. It was a pleasure.
[00:47:59] Thank you very much.