This week I am interviewing Dr. Dave Braun, co-founder of OOLA and author of three international bestselling books which have impacted over a million people in 43 countries. He recently launched OOLA Global with the mission of impacting a billion lives in the next seven years. Today he is telling us his story, all about OOLA and we’re sharing an exciting opportunity with you!

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Powered by Podetize

Living Life To Its Full Potential with OOLA Co-Founder Dr. Dave Braun

How did two guys with no experience writing, who never spoke on a stage before, build a global movement? I asked Dave to share their story and even if you’ve heard it before, I’m sure you will find it just as inspiring to hear it again.

“We’re super passionate about OOLA because it worked in our own lives.”

Dave and Troy, the OOLA Guys, have been friends for 25 years. “We’ve had a long history together, always saying someday we’re going to start some kind of business together.” They had no idea what it would be, perhaps a clinic since they were both in healthcare. It was the economic collapse in 2007-2009 that ended up being the birth of their business. 

“OOLA is really a lifestyle framework that will help you find balance in seven key areas of life: fitness, finance, family, field, faith, friends and fun.”

Dave learned about OOLA from Dr. Troy in 1997. At the time, Dave was working for Troy at his clinic. “All I knew is that I was working hard and he was going to the lake every day to a cabin and traveling. I’m like ‘what is this guy doing?’” 

After one year of residency at the clinic, Troy told Dave that he wanted to take him to Vegas to teach him this thing called OOLA. He told Dave “you’re a hard worker, you’re a good dad, you’re a good guy and I want to teach you OOLA.” Dave agreed because he saw that Troy was happy, connected, traveling, and living the life he wanted. He wanted to learn what Troy was doing.

So they went to Vegas and sat on the floor of the Hard Rock Hotel. Troy had seven stacks of white note cards and they were labeled the 7 F’s. “I’ve never heard of this in my life. I’ve set goals for like sports and getting good grades…but they were “where are you in the seven key areas? Where do you want to go?” Troy explained to Dave that there are 7 key areas to life. You can’t succeed in business and lose your family. You can’t have a great family and not provide for them. You can’t have a great family and money is great but then have a health crisis because you’re not taking care of yourself. 

“I had to get very real with where I was in these seven areas like finance.  I didn't have a job. I was just ready to graduate with my doctorate. I had $126,000 of student loan debt. It was bad. It was like a two on a scale of one to ten.”

The next step Troy asked him was where does he want to go next? What were his dreams and goals? After that the focus was on action steps and accountability. Dave said that by 1998 he was paying down his debt, successful in his business, his family was great. He just needed to continue to follow the system. Troy taught him that “there’s not a secret to success, there’s a system to success.”

Successful people follow a system. They identify what they want and they take daily action towards that. After following Troy’s system, Dave became successful. The 7 key areas worked. Dr. Troy became so successful that he moved his family oversees for a business opportunity and Dave and Troy lost touch for about five years. During those five years, Dave got a big house, he got cool cars, kids, family, business. He was running marathons and working on his faith. “For some reason though, I just quit doing OOLA.” 

“In 2007 I found myself in a motel on the bad side of town, going through bankruptcy, a divorce, losing everything in a crisis.”

Dave reached out to Troy who was fully retired by this time with multiple homes, married for 25 years, traveling, and had four kids. Troy asked Dave “what happened to you?” Dave explained that he quit doing OOLA. Troy encouraged him to get back on track and Dave made him a promise “if this works for me, we’re going to share this with the world.” 

By 2012, after a few years of really working hard on making sure his kids were good, paying off debt, and rebuilding his life, Dave went to Troy’s cabin. Troy asked Dave how he was doing and reminded him, as a joke, about his promise to share OOLA with the world. He asked Dave what his plan was. So they sat down and started outlining the process of OOLA just to see what happened. “We sat in the cabin every night for three days straight. We wrote out everything for OOLA. There are seven areas of life. There are three simple steps, where you are today, where you want to go, and how are you going to get there.”

There are also blockers that get in the way like fear, guilt, self-sabotage, anger, and laziness. There are also accelerators like gratitude, love, passion, wisdom, integrity, humility that move you forward. 

“We wrote it all down, we wrote stories around it and after three days it become our first book and we had no intention of writing a book.”

They sent the book to an editor and they decided to go for it and try to publish. They didn’t even talk to a publisher, they just self published it! Dave thought they were going to sell a million copies, and Troy was expecting maybe 40 to sell. Troy wanted to stay in retirement. “Troy made me write down on a list everybody who's going to buy a book. And I was writing like my sister, my mom, and the number was 47. So he said, you're going to sell 47 books. I said, I'm going to sell a million books. So I talked him into ordering 5,000 books and that was our initial order. 5,000 books. He had no desire to be part of it. If you have one of these books or you could find one there is a picture of the back of his head.

And the book came out and it just, it took 90 days, I think to get passed 47 books sold and then it started getting legs and it got into the NFL and there's a whole story behind that.

I got to some celebrities and then it just took off. And we had our first talks, pulled Troy out of retirement, signed a book publishing deal with the publishers of chicken soup for the soul and now three books and a coaching network and OOLA Global.”

Troy told Dave that he would support him but he didn’t want to be on stages and now he is amazing at it. They drive across the country in a VW bus and collect dreams and go to book signings. 

Finding Balance

Another great point Dave made was understanding that things shift in your life and there are different seasons. There are times when we might focus more on business because we have a big launch happening or times we focus more on family because we need to. It’s important to continuously be working on all the 7 areas of life so that you can grow but you can’t expect all areas to always be perfectly balanced. Finding balance is more about being very aware of those 7 areas of life and understanding that in life you will go through seasons of opportunity and seasons of crisis. It’s okay to say “I have an opportunity in my business right now that if I work really hard at this for six months or a year, I can really set up our family.” The important thing is to have an honest conversation with your spouse about what that will require, what do your kids need, what do you need for minimum health and get your spouse on board with the plan. As partners, you can agree to shift your schedules, your home responsibilities to enable you to take on that season of opportunity as a family, understanding that it won’t last forever.

Dave described life as movement. It is constantly in flux and understanding that is important. We need to be able to pivot, make the necessary changes and move with the flow of life. Being self aware is key so you can say “this is an opportunity it's going to cause stress in other areas. I need to address that now, not hide it under the rug, or this is a crisis that I need to address and just keep it within the seasons where your life is out of balance for a moment of time.”

Self Awareness

On the topic of self-awareness, Dave recalled that day that he and Troy were sitting on the floor of the Hard Rock Hotel and Troy laid down 7 cards. “I grabbed the finance card and Troy said 1 to 10, how are you in finance? And me being self-aware at the time I said 8. Troy said ‘you’re an eight?’ I'm like, I have a doctorate degree, of course I'm an eight, I'm a doctor. And he goes, do you have a job? I'm like, no, do you have debt? And he had me write everything down. So you need to be self-aware of where you have to lift up the rug.”

“Where am I for real? What are my loves? What are my desires? What are my passions? What are my dreams? What are my goals? What do I truly want from life?”

Surrounding Yourself With the Right People

Another thing Dave said that I think is really important is when people in your life judge where you are at. If you are being honest with yourself, with where you are at and where you want to go, and someone is judging you for where you are in your life, “they’re not even worth having around. I know that it’s hard sometimes.” If you are afraid of someone’s judgment, then they aren’t quite the person to have around in that world. You need people who will hold you accountable and who understand that where you are is just where you are, it’s not who you are at the core. 

“But so many people are judging themselves. Like I'm going to write a book and then they're like, well, I don't know. I don't know if I'm smart enough. I don't know if I can do that. I'm going to start a podcast. What would I say? I'm going to look stupid. I'm going to look dumb. My friends are gonna think I'm dumb. You're judging yourself before you even create what you want to create.”

OOLA Coaching

I asked Dave to tell us more about OOLA coaching and his plan to impact a billion lives in the next 7 years. He said they realized that two guys in a VW bus would have a hard time reaching that many people but if they certify others to teach OOLA they can impact way more lives. “So we teamed up with a multiple New York Times bestselling author to create the OOLA Coaching Program and now we have coaches in 22 or 23 countries.”

This is really one of the reasons I wanted to bring Dave in here to share with us all because I know that those who listen to my podcast are business minded or thinking about starting a business. Being able to get certified as an OOLA coach is a great thing to have in your tool kit. It doesn’t mean you can’t be doing other things as well but I know so many of you want to serve and help make a difference in the world. 

What I like about the OOLA coaching certification, is they give you the framework and process that works. Dave lived the process first, he understands how it works and now he is teaching others the same thing. So if you have a coaching business or have been wanting to start one, Dave can give you that framework, support you along the way, and teach you how to coach, how to get your own clients and be paid as a coach. 

“We started interviewing. We probably spent two years interviewing life coaches. We knew all the places it was broken. They don't know how to market. They don't know how to sell. They feel like an island. There is no training. They don't know how to coach from day one, they're nervous. They don't know how to coach a group. They don't know how to get into corporations. They don't know how to be proficient at public speaking. So we said, let's take every broken piece and let's put all that into this certification so that people can come through and be certified and not only take our baby and help raise our baby, basically with the OOLA brand, but they can be successful from day one.”

Dave and Troy have also added a co-coaching program into the certification that helps coaches gain confidence more quickly. The coaches take surveys to give feedback and they have said that by their third coaching session they feel like a pro because of the support they get. It doesn’t take two or three years to feel like you have a career. You can become good at it really quickly using this process.

The Masterclass

So the big news that I am excited to share with you is that Dave and Troy are going to come do a masterclass for you! It’s called “How to Build a Wildly Successful Coaching Business on Auto Pilot”. And you're going to learn the secrets about how these two amazing guys built their business and how you can leverage this to build your own business. That's why you're listening to this podcast. You want to build your business and more importantly, on autopilot.

It’s happening May 17th at 8pm EST. You can register at the link below so make sure you claim your spot now!

OOLA Masterclass- “How to Build a Wildly Successful Coaching Business on Auto Pilot”

Important Links:

Knowledge into Profit

GROworkspace

The Power of Manifestation in Your Business Plus Bonus Tips on Creating Community with Ashley Gordon- Previous episode

Get on the waitlist for our next website masterclass!

Get on the waitlist for Digital Duplication Academy