The Single-Seat Mindset w/ Dominic Slice Teich

What can we learn from fighter pilots regarding success and peak performance?Dominic 'Slice' Teich is a Fighter Pilot, Multiple Business Owner, Combat Veteran, Civilian & Military Instructor Pilot, Entrepreneur and 2-time Amazon #1 best selling Author. To fly a fighter jet, you need a PLAN, a COACH, and the right TRAINING. Living life in our hectic world requires all 3.Dominic brings his fighter pilot background and applies them to guide pilots, athletes, business owners, and students with afterburner techniques that American fighter pilots use to ensure mission completion. He applies these principles to his businesses to guide driven individuals looking to succeed, define their purpose and learn from fighter pilot guides that share their wisdom to the insider-circle. Since 2002, “Slice” has guided hundreds of students toward their goals. Dominic's blueprint is called Single Seat Mindset; an impactful group of 40+ fighter pilot guides with a combined experience of 700+ years. Proven formulas and life advice is shared to the insider circle community to ensure success and big goal achievement all while avoiding overwhelm, overload, and flameout. They dive deep into the productivity world to provide guidance through short, impactful steps.In his book, Single Seat Wisdom (Volume 2) is a collection of life advice, stories, tips and challenges from 20 more American fighter pilots. Written to guide and inspire the next generation of American heroes, Single Seat Wisdom is also an ideal read for business owners, entrepreneurs, athletes, coaches, and teams who want to become #1 in any category!In each chapter, you will read the exciting and emotional stories from the men and women who protect the United States and share afterburner life lessons for goal achievement, unique stories that provide strategies to avoid flaming out, when it's safe to ignore external barriers to your plan and a brand NEW way you can design an environment that ensures success.100% of the profits from this series are donated to the Anna Schindler Foundation (a children's cancer non-profit).Listen to Dominic as he shares:- apply fighter pilot strategies and lessons to all aspects of life- use fighter pilot wisdom to redefine your purpose- how fighter pilot principles can be applied to the real estate business- how to work with others to achieve your goals- the 'Hamster Wheel of Achievement' he fell into- lessons learned through pain- how to define your identity- developing the right perspective in life- pros and cons of individualism- being 'Free From' vs 'Free For'- daily habits that will change your life- the meaning of intentionality...and so much more!Connect with Dominic:WebsiteWebsiteAdditional Resources;"Single Seat Wisdom" by Dominic 'Slice' TeichFREE resources, including accessing the Insider-Circle.Feel free to reach out on:FacebookInstagramEmail: roberta4sk@gmail.comYouTubeKindly subscribe to our podcast and leave us a rating and a review.Leave a rating and a review on iTunes and Spotify:iTunesSpotify

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, and also improve your mindset, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Today, we have a guest who will help us to not only shape our mindset, but give us the step-by-step.
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practical guides and how to not only set goals, but achieve them. And he is the author of the Single Seat Wisdom Volume series and the founder of Single Seat Mindset. Please help me welcome Dominic Teich. Hi Dominic. Hi Roberta. Thanks for having me on your show. Thank you for being here. I'm excited about our conversation. I think it's going to be exciting. Like I said earlier, it's going to sound like some top gun stuff. It'll be right up your wheelhouse.
00:57
Right, welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so I am a dad. I have a wife, lovely wife. She's the drive behind a lot of the things that I get to do. And we've got four little munchkins here at home. And currently, I'm a full time fighter pilot instructor in one of the school houses for the F 16 here in Phoenix, Arizona. I've been a civilian flight instructor, I own several businesses I currently own two
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And the most exciting one that gives us a lot of purpose is single seat mindset. Cause not only do we get to give back for all of the experiences that we've had in our lives, either that as a fighter pilot or other life experiences, and we take all the money from single seat mindset, that company, and we give it to a children's cancer nonprofit. So that's kind of a nutshell behind that business, which is why I'm smiling so much because it is not about money for me per se, but we've been able to give back.
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quite a bit already in the first couple of years. When you say it's not about money, anyone listening and thinking, but I wanna be successful, what's this guy gonna teach me how ambitious this can be? Yeah, I mean, running a business, it needs to be about money, right? Cause if you don't have cashflow, then the business will fall out. However, if it is only about money, that business will not.
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be on the right track. You'll be making decisions based on money-based decisions versus a bigger purpose outside of who you can serve and what you can give back. And whether that's your investors or people that are receiving your product or what have you. Very well put. I don't know if you've heard of the term quiet quitting. I've recently just heard it. You have people saying, do I really wanna go back to this miserable job or?
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I'm looking for something with, like you said, more purpose, more fulfillment. What nourishes my soul? Is that what you're observing as well? I mean, you hit the nail on the head with that, Roberta. Back in the dot com boom era, so late 80s, early 90s, you could pay people to do things, to be gone all the time. My dad did that. He was gone all the time on trips. He made a lot of money. But I found that, like you're saying, after the pandemic, because I also own...
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some multifamily apartment real estate here in Phoenix and people don't want to pay their rent. They don't want to go to work. These aren't new concepts, right? If you read Victor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, yeah, you're going to find a lot of the same human characteristics and traits and traps that we fall into as a humanity. And I think people are just looking for purpose. Like what purpose do they have? What significance is the job that they're in right now that they're making a lot of money in?
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Is it giving them significance and purpose? Do they hate waking up every morning to go deal with that boss that you talked about that is going to bark at them and make them feel terrible, but they're doing it for money. So I think there's a lot of value and a lot of insight behind that is our economy. The capitalistic economy is good, but if it's only about money and it's only about just climbing that corporate ladder, you're seeing it now it's starting to kind of fall apart. And I think it'll reset because we're America, right? Americans will figure out how to reset that.
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But there's a lot of shifting priorities right now. That's true. You own real estate and sometimes people don't pay rent. Is it because they don't want to go to work? Or is it the stimulus checks? Yeah, it is. I don't think it's any one thing. I think it's the economy. Maybe people had a rough time in their job. Maybe they lost a family member during COVID. Maybe they think the landlord isn't being fair with them. I mean, every excuse under the sun. Now, Arizona and Phoenix specifically,
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That isn't happening to everybody, but it does happen. And what I've seen is that people just, they're kind of sick of the grind. And then a lot of people adopt a victim mindset, right? And they kind of give up. Yeah, it's unfortunate that we're here, but I don't think it's any one thing. So the red rays, let me chase and climb the corporate ladder to be successful. Is the world redefining that meaning of success? Happiness, which means then chase,
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climb, make more money, then you'll have the big house, the picket fence and travel to the Caribbean for two weeks of the year. And then your life is perfect. Yeah, that's not how the real world works. And I think to answer your question, this is just my own perspective. I think it's only gotten more muddled. People are having an even more difficult time understanding what success is, what happiness is, because if you just look at your cell phone,
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that's constantly blowing up with all of your social media posts and everything that may or may not matter. Most of the time it doesn't. If you're watching the news, all you're seeing is bad news and how everybody else is having this amazing life on social media. And then you get this big dopamine rush to go do something great and you find that, well, I don't even know where to start. So you just sit there and you binge watch YouTube or Netflix.
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It's gotten even more confusing because of just the sheer amount of information that is accessible through all of our smart devices. Here's the thing about information overload. It's not that you didn't care what your neighbors thought as much as you didn't know. Your brain didn't register that information, right? But now everything is in your face. And that's why mentally we are all going crazy. Some people, they pretend to be in Paris and then Arizona.
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So this information overload, one moment we say, it's so good that the information is out there, I can learn how to code being on YouTube, I don't have to go to university anymore. But then this other side of the coin, how do we get that under control, if at all? We can go back to the early Greeks, even before Jesus walked the earth, even before Christianity was a thing. And what the Greeks talked about was discipline and virtue. And I think that those two things at an individual level,
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Humanity right now, not everybody, but a large part, and specifically in the United States, as we've weathered this long COVID hangover, people are lacking the discipline to put their cell phones down. Just simple things, simple techniques. If you're going to look at social media, don't look at it all day. Maybe schedule that for your brainless activity at 6.30 PM after you eat dinner, but don't look at it during the day, especially if you're trying to do something.
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Um, so in regards to discipline and mindset, having a disciplined mindset in the morning for five minutes, sit in silence, turn everything off, maybe have a pen and paper in front of you and think about your day, think about what you can do honestly, I think this was on Oprah, they did a show, the words that they came up with was intentionality. What is your intention today? So if you're a spiritual person and you're praying, you should have intentions to help charity or.
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Even simpler, I'm going to smile at three people today and open the door for one person. So you can even make it even smaller. Like I'm going to positively impact somebody's day by saying something nice to them that is meaningful. It's not fake. They deserve that feedback. And I'm going to make sure that I do that for them. I'm going to get outside of my own head and help some other people. So the discipline piece of it of charting your day, what does that look like? And then everybody does a little bit differently. My schedule's run.
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pretty tight because we probably have about 10 times as much going on as I did six to nine years ago, but I probably work about half as much. And that's just being disciplined throughout the years to find out what works, what doesn't and sticking to that schedule, because those things in your schedule that will come in and knock you off your track through your day, you have to have the discipline, the willpower and the mindset to be able to write your ship as it starts to tip over and go, Hey,
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That's an emergency for that person. That's not an emergency for me. For me. Yeah. Yes. And, but then also being able to see, Hey, their emergency that is, you know, my wife or my kid or somebody that really matters in my life, clearly. However, in a work environment, I had a boss on my first deployment. Everything was an emergency. Literally every time I talked to him, if the emergency was 10, he was at a 10 all the time. And so.
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The problem with that from a leadership perspective is that when everything's an emergency, nothing is. So anytime he would come in, it took me about two months because I was pretty young when I was learning this, but at for about two months and then month three, four, five, six, and seven of the deployment, I kind of ignored the guy completely desensitized to everything. And every time you talk to me, if your life is an emergency, well, then I'm probably going to stop talking to you because you increase my heart rate and I don't need that in my life.
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So to sum that all up, I think these are not new concepts, you know, social media, we're in the information age, there's all this knowledge everywhere, but people don't have the discipline to effectively and persistently apply that knowledge in a way that is impactful, purposeful, and gives them some significance. Most people want to feel like they meant something in this life, and if they don't, they haven't found something. That's what they are looking for.
10:15
It's totally true and everybody starts a different way. I would say what changed my life are two first businesses that we were buying and selling stuff. And the business was making money, but it was a lot of work and we were doing it for money, which is why I turned that business off. But the other one was real estate and my investors, I could serve my investors and they were my friends. They were fighter pilots. And that gave me a lot of intentionality and purpose because I was serving them and I was making.
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the properties that we bought nicer. So there was something more than just me and money in it. But what started this huge transformation for me, and this sounds very simple because it is, I went to bed on time. What I mean by that? Well, it depends on your life. At the time I had kids that would wake up at about five 15 in the morning. So I needed to get up at least an hour before them. So at four in the morning, I needed to get up, which meant I needed to get to bed on time so that I was rested and I could get.
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some work done before I went into my Air Force job as a fighter pilot. And that's really started a chain reaction of a bunch of different things. Going to bed on time allowed me to wake up early and I would get an hour to an hour and a half, a very focused work done in the morning at a minimum. I could sit there and look at my schedule for the rest of the week and go, what do I really need to focus on this week? Again, going into the week with some intentionality, but going to bed on time allowed me to wake up early, allowed me to plan.
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have that quiet time in the morning and then to think and just be in my own thoughts and get those on paper and look at those and refine and think about my purpose and all that kind of stuff. And it didn't happen overnight. In fact, it took me years to get to where we are now, but again, going back to that discipline of doing that, it takes discipline to just go to bed on time. And then if you want some purpose in your life,
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you can go back to even like the theological virtues, which are faith, hope and love. I mean, even if you're not Christian, we can agree that having faith that the world can be a better place. Hoping in that and then loving our fellow man. Those are very simple concepts that have been around thousands of years. Of course. Yeah, if you take discipline and you take some of virtue and you add them together, I mean, these aren't new concepts, but they're difficult to do.
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Think about it. All we're doing is consuming information, consuming knowledge, and it can lead us down a path that I got caught up in, in my own life that we can talk about here in a little bit, which is what I call the achievement hamster wheel, and it just never stops and it'll eat you alive. Please tell us more about that. So as I went through my life, people from the outside, right, just like on social media, they will judge you and they'll look at you and what you're doing. Right? So as a fighter pilot, people went, Oh, Dom slice, he must be successful.
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I hadn't defined success, but I had achieved a lot in my life. By the time I was 19, I had my undergraduate four-year degree. I had been a downhill ski instructor. I was a civilian flight instructor. I had worked at several different jobs. I got promoted at my flight instruction job ahead of like 12 other guys. And so I was achieving things, right? I was just this. That's its own story, but I started college at 16 and getting to that point. That's a long story, but.
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I decided to get my GED and start college at 16 for what life had dealt me at the time. And so I started flying and by the time I was 19, I had achieved all this stuff, but I wasn't successful in my mind because I wanted to be an airline pilot or a military pilot. Okay. But then as I went down that path and became a military pilot, I had achieved that, but I wasn't successful. And then I became a fighter pilot and then I became an instructor pilot. And then I was teaching in the schoolhouse here.
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And everything fell apart. I had a breakdown of sorts where one day I was getting ready to step out the door to go fly, I was asked, Hey, is everybody ready to go fly? And I said, I'm not. And that was the first time in probably about 16 years that I'd been flying airplanes and I said, I'm not ready to fly and I don't know what's wrong in my mind, but up to that point, everybody that viewed me, I had two businesses, the apartment investing real estate business was going good. We were making money. I had a nice house, nice car.
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Yeah, I had achieved all of that right, but then I hadn't defined success. So then I define success as I'm going through and piecing my brain back together, right? As I'm in counseling and trying to figure out like what screw is loose, what am I doing wrong? So then I defined success and I realized that I had already gone through that. So I had been successful. I just needed to define it, but that didn't fix my problem because there wasn't a whole lot of significance outside of myself past that.
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Meaning I had achieved success, but there wasn't significance for the next thing. And I'm not saying to jump in and achieve more stuff. I'm just saying why? What significance did that have? What significance does that have to my kids? I mean, my kids aren't going to care when they're in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and they have their grandkids and they're going to be like, Dad was the fighter pilot instructor of the quarter in 2020. They're not going to care about that. Please. So we get wrapped up in all of that.
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And we start to assign self-worth to that. And we start to make that part of our identity. And my identity was turned on its head and I didn't have the purpose and the significance after even defining what success meant, the lessons learned from that is some people, if you're a goal setter and an achiever, you may fall into that trap, but that's not the end of the world, but if you're not wired like that and you can avoid that, the things that can help you is as you're achieving things, you don't have to say yes to everything.
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Right? Just because the world tells you that you don't have to. And then as you define success, make sure that as you're approaching that, as you're ending that story, if you're an achievement person, if you're a goal setter, what is your next story? And what significance does that give you? Otherwise you end up with these call it a midlife crisis. I think that's what it was. Right? I just crashed at this midlife point in my thirties and I was looking around going, I did it, I made it, I'm here. Why do I feel like garbage? Wow.
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It's funny because like I said, we've been sold that all the things you listed, that's what success is. But then at the end of the rainbow, when you're supposed to collect your gold and say, ah, Dominic, you made it. You felt completely the opposite. So it seems to me like what brought your feedback to the ground was having a family and children and it sort of shaped your perspective. It wasn't any one specific thing. It was accumulation of things. It was, I'm in pain.
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I'm not right. I'm going to get counseling. So just taking the next step because I'm an action taker. So I don't have issues getting motivated and I don't have issues laying out a plan and being disciplined and sticking with that plan. In fact, that's one of my faults is that even I will keep pushing the plan so hard and my life is falling apart around me. So knowing that I had to learn how to say no, because I was just layering.
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my life so full of stuff, so full of life, right? I had the business and then I was a fighter pilot and then we had a third kid and then now I'm trying to spend time with my wife and go on dates and travel and well, when do you stop? And now the kids are in sports and how do you learn how to say no? Well, that's a learned behavior and anybody can learn it. I did, I just had to go through a really hard crash to get there. Is that what's considered burnout lately? Because a lot of people are suffering from burnout. Yeah.
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people have been sprinting and I did too. I did it for 20 years. I flamed out, I ran out of gas and I just needed a good reset and I needed to like re cage like, Hey, where are we going? And then as you do that and you define that, you know, I talk a lot about pain as a good coach, as long as you don't run from it. In fact, my real estate business, I was like, at the end of the week, I would just be like, why am I so angry?
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And it was because of certain people that were in the wrong positions that I hired and as soon as I got those people out and a new person in, they started taking care of a lot of the issues that we were having. So, I mean, the pain is usually your first indicator of going, well, what's going on. But in regards to just simple steps, disciplining yourself not to watch an extra episode at the end of the night, going to bed at a certain time, sticking to a schedule. And then I would say one of the most helpful things.
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is that about two years ago, I had what you would maybe call a reversion to Christianity. So I basically on a spiritual level, rooted in Christianity, that really gave me some boundaries and some structure to what's important because I believe that there's something after this life. And so why else would I be trying to do all this good stuff here? And that afterlife isn't the Egyptian afterlife where you take all your gold with you. It's a spiritual afterlife. Not that I think, no.
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Again, that's a whole story in itself, but even that gave me some purpose and structure in my life to go, what are we doing this for? Is it really purposeful? Is it significant? Is it helpful? And when it comes to significance, people are saying, I don't want to be in this job that makes me unhappy. I want to do something fulfilling and it resonates with my soul. But the fear sometimes is it, is it going to be enough to pay the bills? Cause at the end of the day, we're still paying our rent with money. Yes.
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Yes. And I'm glad you brought that up because I've talked with a couple of outside of the fighter pilot community, cause I've found that in order to get to the school to learn how to fly a fighter jet, you have to have a significant amount of discipline to get there in the first place. So I'm not talking about that group. I'm talking about maybe the 22 year old that just finished college and he or she's trying to enter the workforce and they're not taking a job because they're worried about that's not my passion. Here is my thought process on that.
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Anything that is really fun to me now running a real estate business, raising my children, being a fighter pilot instructor, played baseball through junior college. None of that stuff was fun and I wasn't always passionate about it because it was a lot of work. But there is a certain point where the work starts to go down because you've practiced so much and you you have some experience and the passion kind of finds you. And so my thought process is even
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and you can learn something from it. Give it a rip, take that first step, do your homework and find the different, you know, maybe paths that you could take, but then pick one and get going. And guess what? You'll learn something there. You may just learn what you don't wanna do, right? And so you've taken that step, whereas you've got all the people back in this one camp that are sitting there figuring, I don't know, I can't figure it out.
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So go climb a mountain and almost die and then write a book on that because that's more interesting than you laying on your bed and looking through social media. Those people a lot of times too, they end up losing their mind because their whole life is wrapped around their image. Well, what happens if they break their leg or gain weight or their face is scratched? Oh, my life is over. And it's like, well, it's because you built your life around your image.
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and success to you was your image and that's your identity. And now that that got shattered, you don't have any significance to your life. I did the same thing. I built this big identity around myself that was based on I'm a fighter pilot and I'm this macho thing. And that's fine to have. Those are pieces of it, but that can't be all of you that defines you because if that falls apart. Who are you? Yeah, who am I? Man's search for meaning, right? These aren't new concepts.
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So how did you get started on the single seat mindset series? Yeah, so single seat mindset. So as fighter pilots, the jets that we fly, they're single seat jets. And so there's a certain person and mindset that you can learn and that is trained to do that kind of job. And we saw a lot of problems when COVID early 2020s is when we had a class come through that was struggling quite a bit. So what I did was
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We couldn't hang out together and pass lessons learned like we normally do and the class was struggling. I started writing them their class, a two minute email so they could read it in two minutes and a short email with a message once a week after about six classes, we had kind of refined and tweaked the message and I say we, because we had kind of grown to more than just me at this point.
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But we took those messages, I put them into a blog and then I started single seat mindset.com and then I automated those messages and I started seeing people all over the U S download this program. We eventually it grew into what we call the competent wingman and it was really geared for the fighter pilots, but I realized that these aren't necessarily aviation specific concepts. They're concepts that I have messed up in my career because I've messed up way
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succeeded, I wrote on a platform of I messed up here. This is how you can avoid messing up. And then, Oh, by the way, if you do make this mistake, here's how you dig yourself back out of that mistake. And so that was the platform that I started writing on, which then quickly grew into this website and this automation and Roberta fighter pilots. We're not trained how to build websites and automate stuff and do this kind of stuff. So I was way out of my comfort zone.
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I actually would, you know, in some of the classroom instruction that I was doing outside of the jet, and then even after I would fly with some of the students, I would ask them, Hey, is this helping you? Do you enjoy reading this stuff? Because if you don't, I want to stop it. Cause it's a lot of work. I never got any negative feedback. Some of the feedback that I got was, you know, it's not directly for me. And typically that was from some of the much older students.
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Maybe that have had a little bit more life experience, but overall we had generally good feedback and so I started asking some of the fighter pilots that I knew if they wanted to write a short story and At this point I had already published two low-content books and I had published a book for my real estate Investing company called single seat investor and I said hey Why don't we write a book series called single seat wisdom and it's just a bunch of short Chapters written by fighter pilots and at the end of each chapter. There's some actionable advice that you can
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hood into action in your own life. And it's a fighter pilot's perspective. One of the chapters is called fighter pilot fatherhood. Another one's it's on debriefing. So, Hey, as you're going through life, how do you debrief yourself? How do fighter pilots debrief? And then how do you leverage that and use that in business and other aspects of your life? And so that's where the, the single seat wisdom series of books started. You know, single seat wisdom volume one, there's 20 individual chapters written by 20 different fighter pilots.
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and they all have their wisdom at the end of their chapter. And you can read each chapter in like 10 to 15 minutes. So you can use all those parallels in whatever aspect of your life, and they're still applicable, because the principles are universal. The principles are the same. I mean, one of the chapters is written by a fighter pilot who lost his wife to cancer. And so his chapter is on perspective. Hey, if you're going through life, if you think you have it bad, well, look around you, because there's always somebody that has it rougher than you. Worse.
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So pull yourself back up and get going again. You know, give yourself that day or whatever you need to kind of mope around and feel sorry for yourself, but address the pain, get your team back together and get going again. So the book series you're working with, the fighter pilots to put it together. Have you had any feedback from non fighter pilot readers? That's the majority of our feedback. That is what gives me so much purpose and significance behind writing these books.
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is because nobody has put together a business model and a book series that highlights other people's stories in the fighter pilot world. It doesn't exist. There's fighter pilot books all over the place. I have yet to find, and I would love it if somebody would show me something that proves me wrong. I'll eat my words, but nobody has published books that have 20 fighter pilots in one place, and I would have loved that as a kid. Now, granted, I loved aviation and jets and that kind of stuff, but
26:29
The majority of the feedback that we get are from non fighter pilots. They pick up the book and it's just so radically different than what we're seeing. I would say it's kind of counter-cultural because even a lot of these fighter pilots are Christian. They put a Christian spin on, on their chapter or some of them own businesses or some of them had really tragic things happen to them, or they're just telling their story. There's a fighter pilot that wrote a chapter in volume one and he talked about his first deployment.
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His chapter is called ready. It mattered. And at the end, it's a fighter pilot story about being a fighter pilot and being deployed and in combat and being ready when it mattered. And it's given me chills because I love to read those types of stories. They're pretty short. They're just like a little battle story. And at the end, he wraps it all up. It gives us a lot of, you know, significance because those fighter pilots that maybe would have never, in fact, most of them would have never written their own book, some of them have written their own books.
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they now get to have something published and that gives them significance. And oh, by the way, for them to be part of the project, they send money and have to send me the receipt. They send money to the Children's Cancer Nonprofit before they can be an author. So not only are they giving their time, they're paying money to a Children's Cancer Nonprofit to be a part of our project. So they get even more significance because they're giving to charity and they're giving back in story form.
27:56
Yeah, maybe just significance. I'm achieving all this stuff. Let me define what success is. And then after I define it, take one extra step and say, what significance will this success have? And if it's about money or very specifically about only you, then maybe those are some questions that you need to go, I need to maybe retweak. What I'm doing right now is I'm achieving all this stuff so that when I do achieve success, it means more than me. And there's.
28:26
more significance and it gives me more purpose outside of just a very individualistic view of, oh, I achieved success. It's funny, how did we become so individualistic when clearly as humans in our very DNA, we've always been a species that's six connection. Yeah, man, I wish I knew the answer to that. But I think something that kind of comes to mind is that the American culture, our constitution, it supports the
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individual free choice, every citizen, which I think is absolutely fantastic that you have your own free choice because that's also a Christian concept. Now where it gets distorted and morphs into this selfishness is when you do get into individualism where it is only about me and it's only about my choice and we now ignore the other societal social constructs that are healthy. So
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An individual based society allows everybody to have a voice and to not be crushed down, you know, like other countries around the world. There's the good side, which is free will and free choice. And there's individualism, whereas it's only about me kind of like hedonism. It's I'm seeking pleasure and all I want is to feel better myself. As long as I'm not hurting people, but that hurts people because if you're just individually doing that, then.
29:52
I don't go to work. My four kids don't eat. My wife can't pay the house bills. And so now it all falls apart, but I do want everybody to have their own individual voice. Right? Cause that's what our constitution supports. That's what our country supports. But that voice needs to be a collective voice that also has some structure, right. And some guard rails. It's a analogy that I came up with. I'm co-authoring another book that I was invited to write a chapter in. And my analogy in there was.
30:19
It is my free choice as a fighter pilot to either put my seatbelt on and strap on my seatbelt connectors so that when, and if I need to pull the ejection handle and punch out of the airplane that's failing around me, those straps will hold me to my parachute and I'll live. Now it's my free choice to not put my seatbelt on and guess what? If I eject out of the airplane, I'm going to be very free. I'll be free falling right as Tom Petty would say.
30:47
but then I'm gonna die when I hit the ground, right? So asking yourself- So the consequences of your free individualistic choice, is that what we don't focus on, which focus on the pleasure that the individualist choice just brings right now? Yeah, and these are not new concepts. I mean, the Greeks talked about you're free from something or you're free for something. So I would be free from restraint, but my freedom for life would be-
31:15
off kilter because I would die when I hit the ground if I had to eject. So, you know, as you go from achievement to success to significance, as I ask myself the significance of, hey, I'm financially free, right? Because that's talked about a lot nowadays. I'm financially free. What are you free for? Are you just going to retire and play golf and not help anybody and just live this hedonistic life? Or are you going to be free for something? What are you doing? And these are concepts that have been around since the Greeks.
31:44
So they're not new. They talked about discipline, virtue, freedom for versus freedom from. These are all very simple concepts. And if you ask yourself these questions, you sit down and you just go, okay, I do finally get financial freedom, but I have gotten divorced, which can happen. I'm not putting those people down, but I'm saying if you are searching after money so badly that you lost your marriage, your kids hate you, you've lost all your friends, well, you're financially free. But what are you free for?
32:14
Now you don't have to go to work if you don't want to, but then you lose your mind because you have no significance. Like, what am I doing this for? Right now we're like discipline. There's a lot of discipline talk around fighter pilots, military, you know, even when parents struggle to raise their kid, much older teenagers, you have to go to the military to get some discipline. If we don't all sign up for military service, how do we at least get some discipline in our lives and be focused?
32:42
Yeah, cause there's so much knowledge around you, right? But that's not effectively applied anywhere. So the discipline, because it's maybe not framed correctly and people are like, you just need more discipline. Well, what's the how, how do I do that? Simple things. Get a good night's rest. Don't binge watch shows. Or if you do do it on a Saturday afternoon for three hours and then shut the TV off. Very rarely do I take my phone off of do not disturb. So not only do I silence every bit of social media.
33:12
My phone is on do not disturb. And there are only very, very few people that get to call my phone and it to go through my wife is one of them. All of the earth's emergencies can just wait, right? Because I have intentionality. When I start the day, I have a schedule that I want to keep and I want some significance and intentionality to my week, my day, my businesses and my life. And that requires a disciplined approach, a disciplined approach to plan, to have a schedule, to be able to say no.
33:42
to everything the world is saying you should do this, right? You don't need to post a selfie of you on your social media. What you do need to do is wake up early and get out the front door and take a walk and then start running a month from now and exercise. But that all takes a disciplined approach. What is your plan? And then as you write your plan down, because for some reason when you write your plan down in the silence of the morning after a good night's sleep,
34:08
You write your plan down when you write your plan down, it sounds kind of cheesy, but there's something about putting something on paper that helps you subconsciously hold yourself accountable to that. And when you do that a week from now, you'll look at what you thought was going to be challenging and it's almost already taken care of itself because you subconsciously put that in your mind and you've been intentionally seeking after that throughout your whole week and you didn't even have to really plan it out. But as you get better at it, you will be able to plan those very incremental wins.
34:38
So it's just a step at a time. And for me, I'm a very impatient person. So I had to learn how to be patient with the process because it took me a long time. We're talking years to get to where I am now, but man, was it worth it. Very worth it. Dominique Teich, the author of Single Sit Mindset and a fighter pilot instructor. Now, before you go, first of all, tell us where to purchase Single Sit Mindset book series and where to find you on social media.
35:06
Everything is at one spot. So it's single seat mindset.com. There's links to the books, you can access the insider circle there to get access to our other programs. Most are free. And then all of our social media is either at the footer of the web page or it's on the insider circle page. So single seat mindset.com. You can find everything there. That's the launchpad. Single sit mindset.com. Does the inner circle means just fighter pilots? Nope.
35:36
Right now it is open membership. We're not charging for it. There are special products that we're constantly refining and adding to there, but we now have over 40 fighter pilots on the Single Seat Mindset team, which is pretty exciting. So there's more to come. Awesome. Thank you very much, Dominique Teich for being with us today on the show. Thank you, Roberta. I had a great time. Thanks, me too.

The Single-Seat Mindset w/ Dominic Slice Teich
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