You may never know looking at all that David Henzel, a serial entrepreneur focused on conscious capitalism, has accomplished, but he was once an extraordinarily fearful introvert. Today, he’s let his shy past fall by the wayside, and keeps himself sane through living a life filled with good habits.

[00:00:16.470] – TAMAR:
Hey everybody, so excited. I have one of my old online, but I don’t know how to describe it, industry entrepreneurial type friend dudes here. David Henzel. I don’t know the best descriptor, but I’m really excited that you’re here. And thank you so much for joining us.

[00:00:38.190] – David Henzel:
Thank you for having me, Tamar. It’s good to catch up.

[00:00:39.300] – TAMAR:
Yeah. So, yeah, it really is. We have been doing that a lot lately, so I’m excited. I hope we can keep that cadence going.

[00:00:46.680] – David Henzel:
I hope that we will meet at conferences again on a regular basis as we did 10 plus years ago.

[00:00:51.630] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Well 10 plus years ago, because it’s funny, because once I had started having kids, I stopped traveling and then covid kind of kept you from traveling. So now we’re really looking forward to having that face to face. So I’m looking forward to that, too. In some way, we’ll have to figure out way that’ll happen. Hopefully there will be a South by Southwest next year. That’s something that that’s always exciting. Yeah. So where are you in the world? So let’s talk about our distance because we do have some.

[00:01:15.390] – David Henzel:
Yeah, I’m from Germany. I lived in Los Angeles for 8 years and now I live in Bodrum, Turkey.

[00:01:21.900] – TAMAR:
What, Turkey? I don’t even know, I didn’t even know you were in Turkey now.

[00:01:25.690] – David Henzel:
Yeah, after we sold MaxCDN, my wife wanted to go back to Germany so we’re closer to family and our daughter grows up with family. But I couldn’t go back to German weather conditions after eight years of L.A. and so we decided to move to somewhere that’s close to Germany but warm. My initial thought was Spain. But my wife has Turkish parents, so she preferred Turkey. Even though my my Spanish is much better than my Turkish, we decided, “happy wife, happy life,” [so] we decided to go here and we’re very happy here.

[00:01:59.580] – TAMAR:
Very nice. So what’s the city in Turkey? I never heard of it.

[00:02:03.390] – David Henzel:
Bodrum B-O-D-R-U-M. Um, it’s it’s a vacation destination where the wealthy Turks have their vacation homes. It’s as far south as far west as you can be in Turkey, close to the Greek Islands. We’re like twenty minutes from Kos.

[00:02:17.700] – TAMAR:
So how many languages do you know? Because you talked about Spanish and Turkish and English, German, I assume.

[00:02:23.910] – David Henzel:
I mean, English and German, then some Spanish and some Turkish.

[00:02:30.570] – TAMAR:
Wow. That’s pretty impressive. And you picked up Turkish?

[00:02:36.010] – David Henzel:
Yeah, I mean, my Turkish is very basic. I like go to restaurants and stores and say, “hey, how are you doing? blah blah blah,” like small talk stuff. No deep conversations. Initially, I was very ambitious when we moved to got like a a private tutor one hour a day to learn Turkish, but since all business is happening in English and abroad, I just lost interest.

[00:02:58.330] – TAMAR:
Oh, well, yeah, I’m starting to learn Spanish with the help of Duolingo and I feel it’s actually cool because I feel like maybe my level of Spanish is your level of Turkish, because I could like I could read things on signs. It says like viernes [Friday]. They talk about specific days of the week and when things are open and closed. The one time I had to understand and I didn’t understand, it [said] you have to wear a face mask, and that’s like it’s a weird word, but I’m getting there. Yeah. That’s not something that they teach you in like level one of Duolingo, the face mask part. But yeah, that’s cool. That’s cool. I guess if you if you ever wanted to get a little more fluent, you can either obviously, you can talk to the natives, but I don’t know if you have any reason to at this point, but Duolingo seems to supplement that pretty well, except you do have to execute. You have to actually talk.

[00:03:49.650] – David Henzel:
Yes, I like the app, I used it for a while as well. That’s cool.

[00:03:53.530] – TAMAR:
Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, I know we met, but I couldn’t give you the right introduction. I’m sorry. I know that some podcasts they have this lengthy introduction. I like to wing this. I want to make it casual.

[00:04:07.770] – David Henzel:
That’s totally fine.

[00:04:07.770] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Yeah, but but I can’t really give you the right introduction because you’re like this dude who does all the things. So talk about that because you have, when I talk about career trajectories on the podcast, some people are like, oh, a lawyer now a baker, and then I have, you. I don’t know what to do there because you’re everywhere, you do all awesome things. Tell me, how do you want to describe that?

[00:04:33.150] – David Henzel:
So I describe it by: let me tell you how we got here. Initially, I co-founded MaxCDN, the content delivery network, this is also how we met. I think back then you were at Mashable and we were the CDN providers for Mashable. I think this is how we got together, or via the WordPress community. We sold MaxCDN and I moved to to Bodrum, Turkey. And then I read this book called Conscious Capitalism, which talks about that the old way of doing business is that a business has to increase shareholder value, it has to make the owners of the business rich, and the new way, the conscious way of doing business is you take care of all stakeholders, meaning suppliers, employees, customers, community, the planet’s environment, all these things. And if you do this, then the business is the best vehicle to have a positive impact in the world. I thought that’s pretty awesome. I decided to go back into business and start an outsourcing company called LTD plus, we provide live chat agents and support agents for ecomm and SaaS companies.

[00:05:38.500] – David Henzel:
Then I bought TaskDrive, which my business partner Samir, who is also business partner at MaxCDN started because it’s also a people business. It’s lead research if you do outbound sales. Then I invested into shortlist.io to become a co-founder there, which is a agency for SEO and backlinks, and somehow ended up with a few more businesses that I invested and that I started. So I have this portfolio of businesses. Then I started to coach the leadership teams of my businesses to make sure they’re on their A game, and I couldn’t find the software that was doing what I wanted to do, and so I took the CTO of one of our businesses and to build me something which ended up being this coaching platform called Upcoach.com. And I showed it to a buddy of mine who is a very well-known coach. His name is Todd Herman. He wrote the book The Alter Ego Effect and I showed it to him, I’m not a coach by trade, but a business coaching software. What do you think about this? And he’s like, “that’s amazing. I want to invest and make this big” and I do want to end up with another business. And I’m really passionate about Upcoach, I think I’m most passionate about this one, because this allows me to have a positive impact in lots of people’s lives, because I can empower coaches to help more people better. And that’s why I’m super stoked about about this one.

[00:07:10.160] – TAMAR:
That’s awesome. Yeah, I didn’t realize that it was the impetus of that was reading this book about this conscious capitalism thing. But I think it’s so important and I mean, especially when we see the distribution of wealth right now and some of these variety of companies and how especially in the context of covid, the rich getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I never like to make it too political, but I think it’s true. It’s true. I like the way that you’re philosophically aligned in a way that builds, that’s focused on the whole company versus the people at the helm. So I love that. I love it. I had no idea.

[00:07:47.720] – David Henzel:
Yeah, I do like being a net positive in the world, you know, even if you would take good care of your employees, etc.. If you sell cigarettes, then I think it’s it’s also not a good thing. You also I should do something that actually doesn’t harm the people or the environment and provide, I want to provide lots of jobs to lots of people. That’s why I picked an outsourcing business. My goal is to get to ten thousand employees. We’re only at three hundred right now, but steadily growing. So at some point in our 10 year goal is to to get to at least ten thousand and to provide a cool job, remote job with a good culture and put food on lots of people tables. This is like something that just gets me excited.

[00:08:32.870] – TAMAR:
Well, if there are hiring links, you want to bring yourself from three hundred to ten thousand, let me know. I’ll put in the show notes.

[00:08:40.610] – David Henzel:
Thank you. I appreciate it. Actually, we’re bringing everything together. I don’t know when this airs. Right now, I have all these different businesses and I’m bringing it all together under one umbrella, which is howwesolve.com, which is currently just a podcast. But I’ll have different resources, like my portfolio companies that help people scale their businesses, then content, blog, podcasts, webinars, etc., and then also masterminds around several topics to help people scale.

[00:09:11.390] – TAMAR:
I love it.

[00:09:12.350] – David Henzel:
It will be on howwesolve.com.

[00:09:14.480] – TAMAR:
You need to talk to the Gravity Forms guy. He also did this thing very overtly. I’m sure you’re familiar with who he is. Dan? I don’t know.

[00:09:23.090] – David Henzel:
I’m familiar with Gravity Forms.

[00:09:25.100] – TAMAR:
Yeah. So the background is for anyone who knows: he basically shirked his salary so that everybody can get seventy thousand dollars in his company. And I love that. It’s the same concept. It’s just one guy has the potential to make a million dollars and his staff has the potential. They’re making 20, 30. But if you could change that, if you can skew the scale and make it so that everybody’s on an equal level playing field, it changes everything and it makes people happier to go to work. Because you believe in, obviously the boss believes in you to do that and you believe in the company to show up. It does a lot of things.

[00:10:06.200] – David Henzel:
You can do things that the CEO can only make certain multiple of what the lowest paid employee does to kind of like keep the scale. But with some companies, it’s like I don’t know, the CEO of the company makes like a few thousand times more than an employee.

[00:10:29.480] – TAMAR:
Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, I think it’s great and I love that you’re doing it and I’m definitely going to be following along, you know what you need to do. I think it’d be kind of fun. You should you should journey this, you should document this journey from 300 to 10,000, like something like that. That would be fun. It’s a good goal. But then again, if that’s a hard thing and it’s funny, I was thinking of creating a site that will also make me accountable to some of the things that I want to do in my life to do. I’ve done it, but I haven’t done it as overtly, and I think the overtness is going to be the accountability. You’re talking about, the Managing Happiness stuff that’s like an accountability component. I think everything in my life right now requires accountability.

[00:11:15.260] – David Henzel:
It just become so much easier if you have accountability in your life, for example, working out. I’m pretty driven to work on a regular basis. I work on three times a week like clockwork. But only since I got the personal trainer, I really became much fitter because he pushed me to do even more. When he’s not there, then it’s like, “yeah, I’ll just go running today.” I will not push me so hard. But if he’s there, he just murders me for an hour and a half and he always shows up at six a.m. in the morning. He’s in front of my door.

[00:11:47.060] – TAMAR:
Oh, wow.

[00:11:47.540] – David Henzel:
And then even though if I didn’t sleep well, I went to bed late or whatever, there’s like no excuses. He’s there and I just do it. [TAMAR: Because you got to make it happen.] It makes it so much it easier.

[00:11:56.090] – TAMAR:
Yeah. So I’ve been toying around with this idea. I know I talk about this in the context of Tamar the perfume brand, but my perfume brand is a mental health perfume brand. But I think mental health also comes from a component of physical health. So I’ve been thinking of like sort of an offshoot with this concept to kind of create a social network that kind of has the fitness and health accountability. So weight loss, if weight loss is your goal, or just fitness. I know Strava exists. I know MyFitnessPal exists. I want a hybrid of both with a lot more visuals.

[00:12:30.260] – David Henzel:
OK, you’ll like Managing Happiness, which hopefully you’ll join on the next cohort, which actually, I didn’t mention in the things that I’m doing. It’s a group coaching to help people to figure out their personal mission, vision, and core values, to figure out their goals, what they want to do the next 10 years, one year, 90 days, 60 days and this week to kind of really break it down and then the habits that they need to actually achieve this. Their goals, because I’m a big believer that habits determine everything in your life if you’re rich or poor, happy or unhappy, obese or in shape, it all boils down to which habits you cultivate. My big vision for Managing Happiness is to become something like Toastmasters for itself, organized groups where people hold each other accountable, that actually doing the stuff that they’re setting out to do, help each other to figure out what are these things, who do I want to be and to become, have a definite purpose in life, aka their mission and their vision, and having like a peer group that holds some accountability, move towards this. I think that’s super important that you don’t drift in life, that you kind of figure out what you want and that you go for it.

[00:13:40.430] – TAMAR:
All right. Yeah, no, I love it, I love it and, you know, so the thought process that I have is really like sort of like an integrated tool that you ask yourself questions, but it’s sort of like the stuff that you’re going to be coaching about. But like it’s in like the social network format where everybody is like it’s very feed driven. So I’m going to I’m going to I want to talk to you about this separately offline because it’s so early. I was reading, I have it on my desk right now Nir Eyal’s book Hooked. I don’t know why, it’s literally how to build habit-forming products. I’m not trying to build like when I was thinking about it, I was the only thing I had in my mind was the Tamar perfume. Tamar is a potentially habit forming product, but it’s not going to be a habit forming product, really. When I started reading this, it was about Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook and Google and the sites that people are using on a regular basis. All of a sudden, I hit chapter three and I’m like, wait a minute, I wanted to be accountable to myself in the fitness realm. And I am. I’ve been diligent since December 24, 2018. Every single day I show up and I walk and I run. But can I do more? Even those of us who are so committed to our health might actually have like a month or two where we really deviate from our path. Is there a way, and then and then all of a sudden either you spiral out of control or you get control, you redirect yourself and you actually start finding yourself. I want to potentially avoid those issues because if you spiral out of control, you might be totally screwed and I mean, if you’re redirected, you’re in a better place. I needed my own redirection. And this is a means—[David: I have some hacks for this.] Yeah. Yeah, I would love to hear it. We definitely should talk about this. This is not the context of the podcast, but maybe we should discuss it. I don’t want to talk about it now. I mean, totally. But I want to we probably should sync up as well. I want to run this this concept by you because it’s early. But I think habits and it’s mental health and mental fortitude and physical, all this stuff comes in tandem. Really, you and I, I know, we totally align with the stuff. So feel free to elaborate now if you want. If not, we can—

[00:15:44.760] – David Henzel:
Yeah, really really quick. I have a restart routine once I fall off the wagon, I’m not sticking with my habits. I have this self-care restart routine, like get the massage, get a haircut, whatever, get a manicure, pedicure. I would do something that’s good, makes you feel good: self-care. And then from next day I’m jumping back onto your game. OK, now we have reset and then I jump back on the good behavior. And I have an early warning sign for my habits, which is my inbox zero. If I’m not at inbox zero for like three or four days or a week, then I know that I’ll have too much on my plate and have to kind of reconfigure stuff, take something off my plate. Otherwise I will fall off the wagon with my good habits. [TAMAR: Yeah] Like the canary in the coal mine that tells me that I’m pushing it too much.

[00:16:36.140] – TAMAR:
Interesting. Interesting. So I’m an inbox zero person and I get it. I have to do the same thing. I have to snooze my inbox so I get it out of sight, out of mind and it gives me like a refresher. So that’s my little hack for that. Self-care is always a big part of my life, but, I can’t figure out if, for example, if I feel like I have to have some chocolate, sometimes that chocolate will be a few days longer than I expect, so I don’t know how to reset myself mentally for that. But if you were to, the thought process of where I’m going in, this is if you were to articulate to yourself why you’re having this food and then you ask yourself how you feel after that and you start reinforcing the good and the bad, and hopefully it becomes more habitual. There’s some science to it. There’s some stuff that I’ve been kind of reading and studying up on in the last 12 months that lends itself to that. I’ll share also this concept with you a little more.

[00:17:26.120] – David Henzel:
Yeah, please, looking forward to it.

[00:17:27.590] – TAMAR:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would love to, if I assume I end up doing something like this, I would probably need some beta testing, so I’ll send it out to you. I’ll keep you posted. We’ll see. I mean, this is this is the first time I’m talking about on the podcast. It’s literally like something that just hit me and I’m like I should have been an end user for this. I’ve been thinking about journaling, this kind of stuff anyway. If there’s a means of having a journal that’s more community driven and aggregated and everybody supports each other, that ties into the Hooked philosophy of social reinforcement. Why not? So that that was anyhow, that’s where I was going. Yeah. All right.

[00:18:03.260] – David Henzel:
Cool.

[00:18:04.670] – TAMAR:
Let me deviate and shift on the podcast side. I know we talked about your rise above adversity, which is something I think is very relatable for a lot of people. But I think at the same time, we like it’s very unique because we struggle. A lot of us struggle. I do, even. So talk about your story.

[00:18:27.140] – David Henzel:
So I used to be very introverted or shy, which was holding me back a lot in business especially. I noticed this when I moved to America. And, you know, people here more are more extroverted than people in Germany. I felt it was really holding me back, I was even uncomfortable in a conference call. It was ridiculous. Actually our mutual friend Syed kind of like really showed me how he went to a lot of conferences and [from] where he was as well, and seeing how he was networking and how he was just acting. It was like, “holy cow, this is so effective.”

[00:19:02.770] – David Henzel:
And it’s actually fun. So I want to really change this introvertedness to to be more extroverted. And I did it by two things, which, one was kind of exposure therapy, doing, going to networking events, two a week in L.A. and just like talk to everybody and their mom until I was kind of over it. And then Toastmasters, which is like a club where you learn how to public speak. toastmasters.org. It’s pretty cool. It costs next to nothing and they’re pretty much everywhere. I did this also twice a week and it’s kind of helped me to overcome. But the real change happened when my yoga teacher said “everything in life you have to do out of love or fear, and if you do it out of love [it’s] the right path and fear, the wrong path,” and this was something I always knew deep down inside, but I couldn’t articulate it. And she gave me the tools to articulate this.

[00:19:51.510] – David Henzel:
And, you know, ever since, you know, I used this, for example, being on the podcast or speaking on stage in front of a lot of people, I would have never done this before, but now if I do this, I can give a good presentation when I think about the audience and how I can provide value to them and make it about them. Like what they can see. What I say here can help them in their life and their business or whatever. I provide value to them, then I’m acting out of love, versus if I’m acting out of fear, and only think about me. I think, do people think I have a weird German accent? Do people think I look weird? Do people think what I’m saying is stupid? Then I freeze and I can’t give a good presentation. So that’s the thing in my mind that just makes everything easier. In sales, I used to hate sales with a passion, because I always felt like a used car salesman, but if I sell out of love because I know this product, what I have here can really help you to help you in your life and your business, then I can even be pushy and say, “hey, Tamar, freakin buy this. Freaking do Managing Happiness, I think you’re going to get a lot out of it” versus if I sell out of fear because I sell because I have to hit my numbers, I have to pay my mortgage, whatever, if is the motivating factor, then it’s going to be super hard for me to do it. And the other person will also feel where I’m coming from. I could go on with examples about this, the love and fear thing, but that became my mantra and has been really powerful for me to get easier through life.

[00:21:23.620] – TAMAR:
I’m actually a big fan of Toastmasters, it is close to nothing. It’s like thirty dollars a year. And you have weekly meet ups with a specific agenda and you public speak, you talk in front of people. They’re very mindful of how you talk, so you have to avoid those filler words like umm, you know, and like. You get scored on these things based on, the audience listens. So now you’re making me think I have to start talking like a Toastmaster instead of casually. That might change my podcast philosophy here. You’re supposed to avoid saying things like saying things like saying things like say—you want to avoid those types of things as well, repeated words. That was intentional, just in case you were wondering. And it’s very, it’s great. It happens to be very difficult to do. But you do have to make more of a conscious investment in your articulation, which to me is not very natural so you can’t really do it normally. But at the same time, it’s the fact is you are standing up in front of a group of people and there’s some sort of agenda whether or not it’s prepared or more improvisational, that’s the difference. So I think that’s great. Are you still involved in that?

[00:22:39.530] – David Henzel:
I haven’t done Toastmasters in a long time, I looked at the one here. They have only one in Istanbul, an English speaking one in Istanbul. Where I am, there is none. I would have had to start one and didn’t feel like doing this. But yeah I love Toastmasters, I think it’s totally cool.

[00:22:57.240] – TAMAR:
I was actually thinking of doing one as well in an area that was a little more convenient to me. Not that the one that is is not. It’s literally like a mile and a half down the road. It’s just the timing and stuff wasn’t so great. So I stopped doing it. I also just, I gave birth to my child. So it just like I couldn’t. I had to choose one over the other. And I guess the easy decision was that. But globally there are much more difficult to access and you have to put an investment in that. I was curious to know, given that you’re not involved in any more, you don’t really know. I was curious to know how how they transitioned in the context of covid.

[00:23:35.730] – David Henzel:
Oh, I’m still in Facebook groups of the previous groups. They just do them on Zoom.

[00:23:42.630] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Yeah. So it seems like it’s more practical for it to be more global reaching. It was always one of the things you had to do it in person. And I always thought, “oh, we need to do it face to face.” I didn’t want to do the face to face thing and I always wanted to do the remote thing. So I wonder if what they’re seeing and in terms of attendance, based on the fact that people it might be more accessible to other people, especially locals near you, who might be interested in such a program like that where they don’t have a local chapter which is close and is able to serve them. I wonder.

[00:24:19.680] – David Henzel:
Yay remote work. The positive side of covid.

[00:24:23.940] – TAMAR:
Yeah. So how did you, just curious, going back to the networking thing. How, I mean, finding those, just to get two a week. I mean for me, right now I can’t even fathom one a week. How did you, we’re in April 2021, so it’s seems just so far off to have these networking events. But how are you finding those? Just were they random? Were they aligned with your business?

[00:24:52.680] – David Henzel:
Yeah, yeah. It was always like some marketing thing, SEO thing, tech thing. In Los Angeles, it was like a meet up. There used to be meetups like there’s no tomorrow or conferences, etc. So there was a lot of stuff to go to.

[00:25:07.710] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Well, I guess L.A. lends itself to a lot of that as well by nature of where it is. I never pursued that in New York just because right now I don’t live in the city, but I always knew that there were always things I just was never so keen on. It would be commuting wise, would just be already like two or three hours. [David Henzel: Can’t do that.] I don’t live that far away. It’s just that, you know, just the nature of the beast. Even though I love those events, I consider myself pretty introverted, too. I don’t know if I could get from where you go from introvert to extrovert. I think I’d be in the middle. But there are sometimes where there are events. I’ll have a conversation with one person. I’ll be like, that’s a win.

[00:25:58.010] – David Henzel:
No no no, I talk to everybody.

[00:26:00.250] – TAMAR:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Good for you to be able to do that. Do you have any advice on anybody trying to get there? Besides the steps that you’ve taken? Because that thing your yoga teacher taught you about doing things out of love, out of fear, how to break out of that mindset, that was it for you. But what do you think for other people?

[00:26:23.340] – David Henzel:
For me, when I talk to another, before I was taught, again, love and fear. I talk to somebody who they think that they probably don’t wanna talk or they probably think whatever I’m weird or whatever. The fear aspect. But if I see this person, I see, “oh, there’s another human that I can provide value to,” and ask a few questions to see if there is like a hook that I can bring in my area of expertise or like if I can help this person. It’s always about like, how can I provide value to this person. If this is what you think about, then the fear of introvertedness goes away at least for me.

[00:26:58.210] – TAMAR:
I like that. I think everybody wants to help. So I think it’s true.

[00:27:02.971] – David Henzel:
When you can provide value.

[00:27:04.220] – TAMAR:
Yeah, and I will say I’ve gotten a lot of help from you and I’m very grateful. So thank you. And you’re like you’re extraordinarily altruistic in many, many ways. There’s a lot to emulate, because you’re just very inspirational. So very cool. Thank you.

[00:27:22.600] – David Henzel:
Thank you so much. Make me blush. I’m German. I can’t take compliments.

[00:27:27.050] – TAMAR:
We can’t see each other anyway, because right now I do see your, we’re on Skype for the record, and I see you’re holding a tiger head or something.

[00:27:36.740] – David Henzel:
Oh, that’s you remember the MaxCDN mascot. [TAMAR: Oh, it’s a MaxCDN.] The MaxCDN cheetah. It’s a real live thingy. It’s actually really funny story. We had an intern back then. I think it was even South by Southwest. I think where we saw each other last. We had the the cheetah costume and we were preparing the GDC Game Developers Conference and we were preparing the trip, and the booking, the tickets for people, etc., all the stuff that we need for the booth. My intern at the time reads through the list of people who are attending and he speaks out loud, “I wonder who’s going to wear the cheetah costume.” And he goes like, “fuck” because he realized it was him. Sorry for cursing on you, on the show. Yeah.

[00:28:23.920] – TAMAR:
Oh, yeah. I didn’t realized that because it’s sort of cut off. But yeah, that’s reminiscent and it’s funny. I guess, have you gotten a haircut yet since the last time we saw each other because you have very short hair [in the icon].

[00:28:38.680] – David Henzel:
I have covered hair. I had my first haircut today in like a year and some. I have really long hair though.

[00:28:45.940] – TAMAR:
Is it still long? So you’ve got your covid haircut. That’s still long. You just got to trim.

[00:28:51.190] – David Henzel:
I just got it trimmed. It’s still really long.

[00:28:54.550] – TAMAR:
Okay, well, good for you. Yeah. [inaudible] So I don’t even remember you, this is such a long time ago. This is what happens with this technology that’s that still works for podcasting. And yet it’s really old technology. Like you said, you haven’t used Skype in years. I only use Skype for, well, that’s actually interesting, I work with some Asian companies, Pakistan, and they’re still using it, but there’s the software that I use happens to do good stereo recording if I use it only on here. I can’t do it on Zoom. The Zoom quality doesn’t meet my criteria and I can’t do it on Google Meet. So this is it. And I’m happy with it.

[00:29:34.230] – David Henzel:
But it works. It works.

[00:29:36.040] – TAMAR:
Exactly. All right, cool. Yeah. So let me let me ask you the final question, because I know you talked about how your make yourself accountable. Self-care, I guess, fitness for you is part of self-care. Working out. Talk about a little bit more about your self-care regimen, what you do when you work out, for example, and what that looks like.

[00:29:55.450] – David Henzel:
Yeah, self-care is more than just the workout. It’s a very key thing to work out on a regular basis. Just if you have little endorphins being produced and other things in your body that make you feel bad being destroyed. But for self-care for me, as I mentioned, I’m a habit nerd. Planning the next day, super crucial for me, so I know what I’m doing the next day. Inbox zero, super important. Eating the frog, meaning doing the task that I least likely want to do the first thing in the morning, are really important for me. Then yoga, meditation on a regular basis, also everyday. Not eating after 9pm, really important, because if I eat after 9:00 p.m. it’s not about gaining weight, it’s about getting an energy boost and then not going to bed until like 2am, and then, my trainer’s in front of my door at 6am, it doesn’t really work that well. Then I have a gratitude rock that I use every day in the morning. I pick it up and then go through the things I’m grateful for. And then at the end of the day, I go through the things that went great this day. And the Maui habit, which is from the book Tiny Habits, which is in the morning, you just get up and tell yourself “today it’s going to be an awesome day.” So this, you know, just kind of walks you through my habits of the day. This is the thing that makes me be on my A-game and feel good.

[00:31:23.280] – TAMAR:
I love it, I love it. I’m very aligned with you in so many different things. I use the, it’s an open source app right now called Loop Habit Tracker. Very, very obsessed with it right now. The gratitude thing. I have another app I’m looking at, Presently. I journal every single day what I’m grateful for and I try to make it different. I try to, every single day I want to realize that my life isn’t about like the same constant stuff to be grateful for my family, my friends, like, for example, I’m just going to open my app right now: What was I grateful for yesterday? A walk with a friend. Getting started on the thing that has been driving me insane. You talked about how you do the thing that you least want to do first thing in the morning. Well, I’ve been procrastinating on the one thing like I don’t usually do. I never procrastinate. But this is one thing that, like, is totally, totally giving me so much anxiety. I started doing that yesterday. So, like, those are like things that, you know, I articulate that. Inbox zero, very, very similar. All the things, though. I like that. I like that we’re very, very aligned in our goal settings and what we try to get done in it. It totally makes you feel better. One hundred percent. So really, really cool. And you have a lot of things, food for thought and you’re very succinct in how you articulate what you’re saying and what you’re doing. So it’s great.

[00:32:39.720] – David Henzel:
We have in Managing Happiness or in Upcoach, we also have a group habit tracker because we talked about accountability before, having this positive peer pressure where people see if you’re doing your habits or not. It’s like another reason to push you to be good.

[00:32:57.890] – TAMAR:
It is. It is. Accountability so important, I think people don’t realize that. I don’t know when you have to realize that, you have to hit a certain age, like in your 20s, you don’t care at all. But when you’ve hit your 30s and 40s, you’re like, “wait a minute. I can live my best life. I just have to do things the right way,” Live your best responsible life for your family.

[00:33:16.730] – David Henzel:
When you’re young, it’s more like negative peer pressure. And now, accountability equals positive peer pressure.

[00:33:22.280] – TAMAR:
Yeah, I like that. I like the way you put that 100%. And it’s so great, especially when you have a group, a regular cadence with individuals that that changes everything. It totally, totally changes everything. So my recommendation is for anybody out there who wants to do something, you have to have, first of all, it shouldn’t be one on one. I don’t recommend one on one. I think there should be a group of people. And you have to regularly reinforce that by showing up. So everybody needs to show up. You and I talked about this separately, but like, I have two accountability groups, one with four women every single Wednesday. It’s the accountability to myself as a founder, and then I have another one actually on Thursday has just ended and it’s seven guys and me. So I’m the only woman. But the fact is, once you start the rapport, in the beginning it’s just meh, you don’t really feel it. And then like maybe by the third and the fourth you’re like, “oh, I’m starting to derive value.” And then you’re like, that’s the one thing you might look forward to the entire week. It can’t be forced. It can’t be like a team meeting with your colleagues. You need to do this for yourself and not do it for everything else. And I think it changes everything in terms of mindset.

[00:34:35.120] – David Henzel:
Yes, it’s very powerful. I can confirm, it’s highly recommended. It’s going to push you to be on your personal best.

[00:34:43.070] – TAMAR:
Yeah. So take take take a look Upcoach if you want to build something like that, because David has has the solution for you.

[00:34:50.300] – David Henzel:
ManagingHappiness.com, in case if you want the mission, vision, values, and habits and also accountability coaching.

[00:34:56.402] – TAMAR:
ManagingHappiness.com. Yup, you got it. Cool. So I got I got one final question for you. And the question is, if you can give an earlier version of David some advice, what would you tell him?

[00:35:11.030] – David Henzel:
It would be figuring out the love and fear thing earlier and a very personal thing, but my mom passed away like seven years ago or so, eight years ago, and I wish I would have spent more time with her, not being so focused on work. And also, you know, we moved to Los Angeles and she was still in Germany. Well, one of the regrets that I have. I think, kind of being really mindful about what matters.

[00:35:36.970] – David Henzel:
Also maybe another advice: finding early in life what you really want out of life and what you want to do, because most people are like a leaf in the wind, and also figuring out what actually YOU really want, not what the dream of the world or society or whatever [wants], kind of keeping up with the Joneses or just gotta figure out what’s what’s your thing, and then everything becomes much clearer and easier. This is what what I would tell 15 year old David.

[00:36:09.470] – TAMAR:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s powerful stuff. And I’m sorry to hear about your mom and yeah, that’s tough.

[00:36:16.880] – David Henzel:
I have a condition called aphantasia. I think we talked about this.

[00:36:21.530] – TAMAR:
Yeah, we talked about this in a previous call.

[00:36:24.470] – David Henzel:
Yeah. I cannot in my mind, it can’t create images. So when I close my eyes and think of what happened, I can’t see anything. Everything in my mind is text based. And this also has a side effect for me because I have an extreme case of aphantasia. I can also not relive feelings. Which also makes it, I don’t have trauma. When my father died, when I was 12, it was sounds like a dick, but was not not really hard for me, I just accepted it. But my brother is still suffering from it, so it’s like a positive side effect of this condition.

[00:37:03.590] – TAMAR:
Yeah, yeah, wow, it’s crazy how everybody’s minds are like how they process things is so variable. And, you have some people who are like, oh, you know, they can never drink this habit stuff, this habit following Kool-Aid, which is great, Kool-Aid. It tastes the best. It’s the healthiest. But then there’s other people who are just like completely, you have to be in the right headspace, but I think there are some things that are changeable and some things evidently aren’t and it’s just insane. It’s fascinating all the same. Yeah, cool. So where can people, you mentioned a bunch of these websites, but if somebody wanted to follow or find you, contact you, what’s the best recommendation you got there? You can check out howwesolve.com, there you’ll find all my portfolio companies, they can also check out DavidHenzel.com. Actually, now you can check out Henzel.com which I just bought, I’m very happy about. I paid, I got a good deal, I paid thirty seven hundred. I would prefer my first name even though my first name is pretty common, don’t think this would fly.

[00:38:08.870] – TAMAR:
I know who owns it! I know who owns david.com.

[00:38:12.530] – David Henzel:
Really?

[00:38:12.950] – TAMAR:
Yeah, he’s in the industry. I met him at a few Mashable meet ups.

[00:38:22.460] – David Henzel:
Oh, David. It’s the founder of the phone system Grasshopper?

[00:38:30.650] – David Henzel:
Hold on a second. Why do I have? I haven’t spoken to him in so long. Gotta find this dude. David Blumenstein. Why do I say that? Yeah. So he’s not, he just, I don’t know what he did. But yeah, it’s funny, there’s so many people who have mentioned this that I’ve always said, “oh, I know the guy!” But I know the guy who owns it. I have a David. My son is David. My grandfather’s David. I’ve lots of Davids. There’s definitely a lot of people who want that domain. I can tell you that. Yeah, but Henzel is the next best thing. So yes.

[00:39:09.370] – TAMAR:
And you said howwesolve.com? I want to make sure because you said it quickly and I want to make sure it’s transcribed.

[00:39:16.930] – David Henzel:
Howwesolve.com.

[00:39:17.410] – TAMAR:
Yes. OK, perfect. Awesome. All right. Well that sounds good. Anything else you might want to add and share?

[00:39:25.190] – David Henzel:
No, just make decisions of love, not fear. Do yourself a favor and leave a comment and like the podcast. It helps to promote it. Do Tamar the favor.

[00:39:34.580] – TAMAR:
Yeah, absolutely. Share the podcast. I don’t really have buttons on my social posts. I guess you can go right on Spotify and iTunes. [David Henzel: on Spotify and iTunes]

[00:39:43.190] – David Henzel:
Go in there, leave a review.

[00:39:44.540] – TAMAR:
That’s a good point. Yes, good idea. Thank you for the recommendation. I don’t even I don’t promote it. I think about it on my platform versus on the platforms that I distribute to. So good thought. Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so, so much, David. This is fun. I enjoyed it.

[00:40:00.660] – David Henzel:
Likewise, Tamar, thank you very much. Yeah, forward to having you on the Managing Happiness group, and let’s chat soon

[00:40:04.890] – TAMAR:
Cool, thank you, all right, take care.

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