Episode 1418: Interview with Dom Teich About His Unique Journey from Fighter Pilot to Business Owner

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining us

[00:00:01] on episode

[00:00:01] 1, 418 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:07] Dom Teich: Hey, I'm Dom Teich. Fighter pilots call me Slice. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling.

[00:00:18] Having the ability to develop your mindset is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend, Scott Maderer.

[00:00:36] Yeah, so Scott, you know, I, I noticed as we were writing these stories and, and putting them to print, you know, I thought, well, this is about money because I want to make some money, but it's not really about money. It's not money for us, but we were giving the money away to a, um, a children's cancer nonprofit.

[00:00:50] And that really helped kind of channel our, why, why are we doing this? You know, it was to, to impact [00:01:00] multiple different avenues, whether that's

[00:01:02] Scott Maderer: Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling.

[00:01:17] In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself. Invest in others and develop your influence so that you

[00:01:26] can impact

[00:01:27] Scott Maderer: the world.

[00:01:31] In today's podcast episode, I interview Dom Teich. I asked Dom to share with you about his journey from fighter pilot to business owner. Dom also shares how his faith journey has deeply influenced his life journey. And Dom also gives you some tips on how learning to think differently like a fighter pilot.

[00:01:49] Can help you succeed in life. I've got a new book coming out

[00:01:54] Scott Maderer: called Inspired Living, assembling the puzzle of your call by mastering your

[00:01:58] time, your talent, and [00:02:00] your treasures. You can find out more about it and sign up for getting more information over@inspiredstewardship.com.

[00:02:08] Scott Maderer: Inspired Living. That's

[00:02:10] inspired stewardship.com.

[00:02:12] Inspired living Dom Slice. Teich 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. As an Amazon best selling author, a business owner, an entrepreneur, a civilian, and a military instructor pilot, he knows that busy individuals and teams struggle with information overload.

[00:02:40] Since 2002, Slice has guided hundreds of students towards their goals. His blueprint is called Single Seat Mindset, an impactful group of 40 plus fighter pilot guides with a combined experience of more than 700 years. There's proven formulas and life advice that's shared to the [00:03:00] Insider Circle community to ensure success and big goal achievement, all while avoiding overwhelm, overload, and flameout.

[00:03:07] They dive deep into the productivity world to provide guidance through short, impactful

[00:03:12] Scott Maderer: steps.

[00:03:18] Welcome to the show,

[00:03:19] Dom Teich: Dom! Hey, good morning, Scott. How are you?

[00:03:22] Scott Maderer: I, it is great to be here. It's hopefully going to be a good day. I think it will be it's always interesting in the morning to get up and be like, okay, what's today going to be like is this, is it going to be a good day or not?

[00:03:35] But I had the advantage. I talked to somebody in Australia yesterday and it was already tomorrow. And they told me it was a good day. So today has to be a good day. See, yeah, no, he didn't, but he could. So Dom, thanks so much for coming on the show. I I covered a little bit in your intro. You've been a lot of different things.

[00:03:57] You've been a fighter pilot and now you guide[00:04:00] other folks and use that thinking and that learning and that thought to work with. Other people not just fighter pilots, though you work with fighter pilots as well.

[00:04:11] Would you share a little bit more

[00:04:13] Scott Maderer: about your journey and what brought you to this realization and this idea of sharing what you call the single seat mindset?

[00:04:24] Dom Teich: Yeah there's probably you could sit down with the beverage of your choice and talk for hours, but I think the. The thing that kind of came to mind is I was, I said a couple of prayers before we, we recorded this morning was where do we want to go with this?

[00:04:40] And the first thing that kind of came to mind was envisioning your future. And that can be a really tough thing to do, especially as a little kid. And that was something that I think is a little, it's a little bit of a lie that. People say and you got to, can you visualize it and envision where you're going?

[00:04:57] And it's no, I can't, I'm seven, [00:05:00] but I know I want to be a fighter pilot, or I know I want to play professional. I wanted to be a professional baseball player or a fighter pilot. And so I had a, maybe a little bit of a calling earlier than most, and that's something that I worked for my whole life.

[00:05:15] And it came to reality, but I grew up out in the country and shooting BB guns and riding dirt bikes and. Working on my uncle's construction crews and downhill skiing and all the, all of the things that I look back that, frankly, probably a lot of kids don't get to do so in that regard, I really look back and think about my childhood and how cool it was just to live out in the country and be free to roam.

[00:05:44] But then stepping through end up in college. And again, a little bit different than most, I got my we moved to Tucson, Arizona when I was 16 and when I was growing up, there was a program, a running start program where you [00:06:00] could essentially go to high school and college at the same time and graduate with a two year degree.

[00:06:04] They're not AP classes. It was a different program, but then Arizona didn't have it. So I went down to the college and the lady sitting behind the desk, she said you're not graduated from high school. You can't start college classes. So I went and got my GED. And started college at 16 and.

[00:06:24] I was a civilian flight instructor at 18, and then at 19, I graduated from college, and then I applied to the Air Force to be a fighter pilot, and they said you have to be 21 to be an officer, so then I just, for the next several years, I kept applying. I had to apply three times because somehow my paperwork didn't work.

[00:06:45] But when I was 21, I joined the joined the air force through officer training and got picked up for a pilot slot and the rest is history.

[00:06:55] Scott Maderer: So I want to go back to the beginning of that story for a second. You said you wanted to grow up, you wanted to be a [00:07:00] fighter pilot or a professional baseball player.

[00:07:02] Yeah. Granted every kid wants to be a professional something play. player. That's a real common. You hear that from a lot of young kids, but those are not alike in some ways where did those two come from? Why such a diverse set?

[00:07:20] Dom Teich: So I think and I think a lot of people, and I give credit to all the people around me my mom, my dad, my uncles.

[00:07:29] I think it was because I just had I like to play baseball, so that was, it was just a fun thing to do, but then we live close to Fairchild Air Force Base, which used to be B 52 bombers used to fly in there and they would fly right over my house. Out in the country on final approach.

[00:07:50] We got to see little airplanes. There were people flying around on little ultralights and stuff like that out in the country. So I just, I was fascinated by [00:08:00] aviation, but then I also really liked to play baseball because it was a challenge. And I was a little bit of a quieter kid. The way that I like to do things was like I'm not going to talk about it.

[00:08:10] I'm going to go. And I think the envisioning piece getting circling back was, I never thought that I would write a book and own businesses and be a fighter pilot instructor and do all of this stuff and be a dad and a husband and have kids never did that really cross my mind, but as I think you are stepping along in your journey, that's just the thing there's just get up every morning and do you maybe do one thing that day that means something to you and eventually after 365 times of doing it, you're going to be another year older.

[00:08:41] And you'll do it again. So just do one thing at a time. And for me, that's what I did was I didn't know how to be a pilot, but my plan in my then 14, 15, 16 year old brain was I'm going to go to aircraft maintenance school, and that's how I'm going to meet pilots. And then I'm going to start flying.

[00:08:58] And then that kind of fell [00:09:00] apart. And I ended up going to flight civilian flight school. But I was just doing one thing at a time. I was just if somebody said that I couldn't do it, the first question I would ask myself is are you a pilot? If somebody said, Oh, you can't be a pilot or you can't be a, an air force officer, the only people telling me no, or the people that didn't do that.

[00:09:19] Conversely, the people that were telling me, yes, we're fighter pilots and we're people that were going, yeah, you should do that. I think you'd be just fine.

[00:09:28] Scott Maderer: So one of the things too, that we talk about on the show a lot is I think sometimes we think about, our assignment or our role and in terms and I try to separate that a little bit from our calling in that our calling is often that deeper drive behind it the purpose behind The role that we have, when you think about all of those roles, because you just listed off about 15 or 20 rapid fire, when [00:10:00] you think about all of those different roles that you've had at different points in your life and that you have now, have you been able to look and see what are some of the common threads in terms of the why behind it?

[00:10:10] What, why did you want to become a fighter pilot? Why do you want to be a good dad? Why do you want to start businesses? What's the why behind that for

[00:10:18] Dom Teich: you? Yeah, so I, I think there's been, and another kind of thing I was thinking about this morning was something that came up in my men's group, which if you're not part of a men's or women's group and you're listening to this, I think that has been one of the most impactful things to have, because if you're married, your spouse should not be your sounding board for airing all your dirty laundry.

[00:10:44] It's too heavy, right? So if you have the opportunity to have. Yeah. To be part or even start one yourself that has been really helpful. And during one of our meetings one of the, one of the gentlemen in the group, he said [00:11:00] we should really be asking, are we doing things good, better, or best?

[00:11:04] And I think at least Christianity for me. And I would imagine if somebody is really trying to live a Christian life, it really pulls that out of you. And so where I'm at now in my life is I'm on a pause because I've been doing a lot of. I would say more or less good things not to cheapen them, but I look back and those the, why a lot of times when I was growing up, I didn't really have enough time or didn't spend enough time to think that, like, why do I really want to be a fighter pilot?

[00:11:33] Because it's cool, right? Because I want to rage around in an airplane and blow burnt up dinosaurs out the back end and shoot things. And it just sounded very intriguing and cool. And it is, it's been. Literally my dream job right now that I'm in, I'm actually still a fighter pilot instructor.

[00:11:53] And I still love doing it. I really don't want to go to the airlines cause it sounds boring to me not to,[00:12:00] not to cheapen that from anybody else that's doing it, but I'd rather just fly fighter jets, but the Y piece of that is where. Is where in about 2020, about four years ago, I went through what maybe you would call a spiritual reversion to Christianity because I was not living a Christian life and that really put the brakes on a lot of things that I was doing.

[00:12:23] So I finished some things out, but this year is really the year of kind of no, and I don't know if you saw that, but thank you for your patience to record this podcast. But this has been the first podcast I've recorded in many months. Just because I'm saying no to a lot of things because now I'm going why am I even doing that?

[00:12:45] And it's questioning myself. So I got a lot of these things going that are good. The single seat wisdom series book that has 50 fighter pilot stories. We give all of the money to a children's cancer nonprofit. Those are all good. But is that my big calling here [00:13:00] on earth and I don't, it's not I'm a dad, I've got kids and I need to raise my kids.

[00:13:05] So that's where I'm at right now is I'm focusing on the family, and just sitting back and praying through that and going where, what's the next step? What's the next big thing? What's the best thing that I can be doing with my life to have the most impact.

[00:13:23] Scott Maderer: Okay, so the answer is, you're trying to figure out that why right now,

[00:13:29] Dom Teich: I think we all are in some regard, right?

[00:13:32] Scott Maderer: And it is a journey. That's again, that's something I talk about, and I talk about in my book too, is that idea that I think that's the other mistake we make.

[00:13:41] We think of calling as the end the destination. And it's no. Calling is the whole journey. It's not just, it's not just you don't just get there and then it's oh, I've arrived. This is it. This is the perfect place. It's more of the evolution and the journey becomes important, I think.

[00:13:58] You've touched [00:14:00] on faith a few times as you've been answering. Talking about your prayer journey and the men's group and a reversion to Christianity, talk a little bit more about your faith journey and how has that intersected with your life journey along the

[00:14:14] Dom Teich: way.

[00:14:15] Being a fighter pilot, I think because my dad said this many years ago, he goes, when you were growing up, I didn't really. You didn't really fit that profile that the Tom Cruise profile, which does have some truths behind it in a kind of funny comedy way, but you'd be surprised that's acting.

[00:14:36] That way is actually not the way to be a good fighter pilot. It's not humble. It's not approachable. But being a fighter pilot and being just be a civilian pilot, even too, it learned, it teaches you how to think. With a checklist, how to think on your feet or in the air, if you will and make those decisions.

[00:14:57] So what Christianity has done is [00:15:00] I, as I became a civilian pilot, and then I went through military training. I got pride took hold. And I remember walking out of church one morning and I was not leading a Christian life. I was a very lukewarm the worst of the worst, right? Where you're dipping the toe in, but you're not fully in.

[00:15:23] You're an admirer, but you're not really a follower type of thing. And I looked at my wife and I, it's funny now, but God has a way of calling you. In the direction you need to go. And I said, I'm going to prove this all wrong. I like, I, it does. And that's when I started my first one year Bible study, which led into another Bible study, which led into a men's group, which led into holy cow, like reading somebody like St.

[00:15:48] Thomas Aquinas, or some of these big brains of the Christian faith. And just, it makes me laugh now because I'm like, wow, I know I'm not the only one that's ever said that or done that, [00:16:00] but I couldn't really, I couldn't. After all of these years, right? Thousands of years of Christian teaching and reading the Bible.

[00:16:08] It is I thought the Bible was irrelevant to our era and it couldn't be further from the truth. It's very relevant. We're just living, we're just living it over. And this is not shocking to you, but it was to me. Because reading the Old Testament, you're like, Oh my gosh this is happening in our day and age right now with all the craziness and all the confusion.

[00:16:27] It turns out we're still people. Yeah, exactly. We just have computers. We haven't actually evolved that much more. It's sad. We just have nicer

[00:16:35] Scott Maderer: houses now. 2000 years ago and it turns out we're still people and we're still doing the same stuff that we did back then. Yeah. Turns out still that when you put money towards saying your heart goes there too.

[00:16:45] Yep. Yep. That's still true. Yep. We still do that.

[00:16:48] Dom Teich: Yep. Yep. But that's the Christianity, I couldn't prove it wrong. And then I grabbed onto it because it's, it makes so much sense. And it's, if you are actually making [00:17:00] those decisions through your daily life all of the other stuff is so easy when you wake up in the morning and you start your day with prayer.

[00:17:09] And really what you're doing is in the absence of, if you're a non religious person, people still do this. They call it intentionality. So you set your intentionality for the day. You're doing the same thing your day, it has a, it's not, maybe not light, but you're guided, right? You're walking in the right direction that you need to.

[00:17:30] And then when you are hit with something big that day, you've already mentally prepared for that. So I think that was to answer your question, that's been the biggest thing with the faith, is that as I try to make these decisions throughout the day, if they're guided. Incorrectly, it manifests itself in that way where it's like, Oh, I made the wrong decision there because I wasn't doing it based on.

[00:17:55] What I've learned as a Christian and what is good [00:18:00] and beautiful and all the things that the Christian faith really highlights.

[00:18:05] Scott Maderer: So you talk a little bit too you mentioned the single seat mindset books and that idea of the single seat mindset, let's unpack that a little bit.

[00:18:15] And then I'd also like to tie that into. the faith part of it in terms of how does that mindset affect your faith and how has your faith affected what you see that mindset to be? So talk a little bit about what you mean when you say the single seat mindset.

[00:18:29] Dom Teich: Yeah. So fighter pilots are just trained to make decisions that 800 plus miles an hour on a daily basis, but that doesn't happen right away.

[00:18:37] You, it's a learned behavior and that's how everybody think about it. If you're in high school, you had to go through kindergarten and first grade and all the different grades and learn stuff. So we. We learn

[00:18:46] Scott Maderer: how to make a surgeon learns to make those decisions in the moment.

[00:18:49] Exactly the same

[00:18:50] Dom Teich: way. Yeah. Yeah. A CPA, a guy that runs a podcast like you in a business and a life and a teacher you make all those decisions and you learn over time. So it's a learned [00:19:00] behavior, but we what I noticed the single seat mindset, where that comes from is that these.

[00:19:06] The way to think is developed and learned, and it's really useful in high performance professions, right? In, in 2020 I was on a mountain bike ride and I thought about what COVID was doing. And there was a class that was going through of F 16 students, and they were really struggling because of lack of face to face interaction, all this stuff.

[00:19:31] So I started a website and what eventually became the Competent Wingman Program. And what it does is essentially it trains you how to think. And these things that I learned as a fighter pilot, we just put that into a little online program it's that single seat mindset. com. And the students then I would send them emails and I didn't really, it was very clunky.

[00:19:54] So then I automated it so that they you could sign up yourself and read through it. But then where [00:20:00] that kind of led was I started asking a couple of my fighter pilot buddies. I'm like, dude, when you go to the airlines or when you retire, your story is going to die. Do you have a story that you, a short little story you could read in 10 minutes that you'd be willing to put in print?

[00:20:12] At that point, I had already published a book for one of my investing companies. And I was like, I've already done the book thing. I already have a website. I already have this all set up. All you got to do. Is write the story and I'll put every, I'll deal with all of the painful things that go along with writing a book and they're that birthed single seat wisdom, the series of books.

[00:20:33] And so the first book, we got 20 fighter pilots on board and they all wrote a story. And yeah, so Scott, you know what I noticed as we were writing these stories and putting them to print I thought this is about money because I want to make some money, but it's not really about money. It's not money for us, but we were giving the money away to a.

[00:20:52] A children's cancer nonprofit. And that really helped channel our why [00:21:00] are we doing this? It was to impact multiple different avenues, whether that's, children going through a cancer treatments in the inland Northwest in the U S or to put our stories into print so that really anybody can read the stories, but I would say the targeted demographic for our single seat wisdom series are probably high school kids.

[00:21:26] Through maybe a couple of years out of college just to either inspire you or to give you a a vector if you need one if you're really running in a direction and you're trying to get somewhere in life. But that's, and then as we wrote the first book, we wrote volume two. So there's 20 more chapters.

[00:21:45] Then we wrote, we just finished volume three. And on Veteran's Day, we published that in 2023. And so now there's 50, 50 fighter pilot stories in print, which is not something that I thought would even happen when I started out. [00:22:00]

[00:22:01] Scott Maderer: So when you think about that, yeah you've. You yourself have started several businesses and you talked about working with people and high performance jobs and I would assume entrepreneur is on that list.

[00:22:13] Or at least some entrepreneurs are on that list. When you think about what you've learned as a fighter pilot and through the starting the businesses yourself through teaching others and doing all of that. How do you think that has positioned you to be an entrepreneur in a different way than maybe the typical?

[00:22:33] Air quotes around typical entrepreneur.

[00:22:36] Dom Teich: Yeah. I think it's pretty, at least it's simple in my mind now, but the questions that Really changed where I was going with things is not, I can't, but the word how, and I think if you change your, I don't remember who said this, but if you change your vocabulary, you can change your life.

[00:22:58] Absolutely. So [00:23:00] instead of saying I can't make I don't know if you're wise, correct. You can say things like I can't make a million bucks. What how, and then when you ask how could I do that? Then ask yourself, why? Okay. Because if your why is just about making money, you, there's a good chance that if you're driven, you'll be successful, but then you'll be sitting there with a million bucks in your hand or whatever.

[00:23:23] It's the typical, Hey, I bought, forty apartment buildings and now I have 20 million, but I sold them and now my why wasn't deep enough and I have all this money and now I'm in Vegas gambling or the inverse of that is I bought these apartments. I made 20 million so that I could X, Y and Z and then it leads into something else bigger and better.

[00:23:46] I think those are the things that I learned as a fighter pilot is yeah, how to read a checklist, how to mission plan, I think is a big one, how to execute at a really high level, and then more importantly the [00:24:00] debrief once you're done with something. Is sitting down, taking notes and asking yourself those difficult questions that even if you were successful, Scott, like you, you've probably done this in the past.

[00:24:09] I've, it's definitely happened to me was, Hey, that went really well. Was it luck or cause there's sometimes I've been lucky and being lucky is nice. It's an intersection of hard work and good timing. However, sometimes it doesn't go well. And then that's really, I think where a lot of people lose their lessons.

[00:24:30] And one of the fighter pilots, his call sign is Dirty and his last name is Bird. So Dirty Bird, who's a, that

[00:24:37] Scott Maderer: was, that was just like, that was an easy one.

[00:24:41] Dom Teich: He wrote a chapter in Single Seat Wisdom Volume 1 called The Art of a Fighter Pilot Debrief. And he even has like a. A little squiggly chart.

[00:24:50] Hey did your plan did your mission planning and your execution go as planned? If the answer is yes, then there's other questions to ask yourself. If no, then, Hey [00:25:00] was it your plan? Was it your execution? He steps you through that. And to lend some credibility to him, not only is he as a fighter pilot, not only is he an instructor, not only did he go through the air force equivalent of top gun school, which is what we call weapons instructor course, right?

[00:25:15] He's a weapons instructor course. Instructor. And now he's even, he's gone to a different fighter jet airplane. So the dude has been around, he knows how to teach fighter pilots at a very high level. And he's been in those types of situations. But I think if I were to say how to answer your question, how has the background really helped me think in a different way as an entrepreneur it's the debrief or it's the after action report or whatever you want to call it when you're done with something, even with your day.

[00:25:49] Cause dirty even talks about that. He's at the end of your day, as you're driving home, debrief yourself or go through a little bit of reflection on what just happened and how you can do that better. [00:26:00]

[00:26:01] Scott Maderer: Yeah, that it is a powerful, that idea of I think we forget a lot of times.

[00:26:06] So the way I frame that is I talk about plan, execute. Review, reflect, revise, repeat so that the idea of do something, think about what you're going to do it. But then actually look at what happened and then reflect on what happened. And again, like you said, there's doesn't matter if it worked or didn't work, you're still reflecting.

[00:26:31] And then you may want to revise and then try again repeat that idea of that kind of feedback loop is powerful in our life. At, and again, at any grain size, whether that's looking at your day, what they're, that's looking at something you did in the last hour, or whether that's looking at.

[00:26:48] The last 10 years of your life. It's still, it still has value. So I love that. The other thing that came to mind while you were talking is. Circling [00:27:00] back, you mentioned earlier, these are learned skills. Does someone have to become a fighter pilot to learn how to do an effective debrief? I know that's a softball.

[00:27:10] Dom Teich: Absolutely not. It's a, you practice. And I would say it's less about. A lot of practice and it's more about perfect practice. So doing executing the best you can, and then it, you have to put your pride aside and I've been very bad at this. But again, learning through your life and eventually just going if I can eat some humble pie, other people can learn from this I'll learn from it and I'll just get better.

[00:27:41] So just fess up to it. Take your licks and move on.

[00:27:50] Scott Maderer: When you think about all of the work you've done, all of the teaching you've done, all of the different roles you've had, what do [00:28:00] you think? If you had to give somebody just one tip or one action to take is the debrief the one or what would you highlight as a sort of the golden nugget if you had to share

[00:28:13] Dom Teich: something?

[00:28:14] Yeah, so the debrief is important. The problem is if you're not doing anything and you don't know where your vector is, how do you debrief that? So I think the better question would be, and where my life changed considerably. So I would give this at least a chance. And I hate to say this, but I think Taco Bell had a one liner recently.

[00:28:36] They said, you're not a, you may not be a morning person, but it is morning and you are a person and what I'm getting at is. I started waking up earlier in the morning and I was not a morning person. Really early we're talking three 45 to four 15. That's when I, that's when the golden hours of the day happened for me because I was a [00:29:00] full time fighter pilot, but I was also running businesses.

[00:29:02] So I needed a couple hours in the morning to put out fires and to get going on the right track and to be just to be ahead, to be a couple hours ahead of everybody else every single day. But even simpler than that, the golden nugget would be going tracking back and looking at what I started to do was I just started waking up earlier.

[00:29:25] Which meant I went to bed earlier, which meant I wasn't watching junk shows on TV at night, which meant I wasn't going to have a beer and a bag of chips. So my health got better. My sleep got better. And as I woke up earlier every day, I'm now to a point where, you know I initially started with, I'm going to do 15 minutes of silence.

[00:29:50] And then I'm going to, okay, I'm going to do. I couldn't sit still. I just, there was so much stuff going on in my mind. So what I started doing was writing things down. And I think that what I've [00:30:00] learned is that you need to start your day. I call it the five minutes of whatever for freedom, for five minutes of silence, five minutes of prayer, reflection, whatever, but that helps you really set your intentionality for the day.

[00:30:13] And if you just, what I was doing for many years was I would time everything. So I would roll out of bed with enough time to grab my food. Get in the car, drive to work or do whatever. And I was literally sprinting through my day. And the problem with that is that if you don't ever pause, like you were saying to reflect and to go am I even going in the right direction?

[00:30:33] I was just at a full sprint all the time, which. I achieved a lot of things doing that, but then it led to a big mental crash about six or seven years ago. So I think that to summarize all that, the golden nugget would be the why behind it is you need to start your day and you wake up 15 minutes earlier than you normally do, and then just sit still for five minutes, close your eyes, pray, do whatever you need to do, but set your intentionality for that day.

[00:30:58] Go, Hey this [00:31:00] is where I'm going, because if you don't do that, then you're going to be, you're going to be floating through the day. You're going to be scrolling through all of your social media junk and looking at the news and you don't really have a plan like you said, there's plan, execute.

[00:31:15] And then all of the other steps. We even had a fighter pilot, a chapter called plan, execute debrief. So if you don't start out with your plan at the beginning of the day, even for five minutes if you don't have five minutes. Then maybe just be a floater float through life and you'll end up at on your deathbed going, what the heck happened, but if you want to get somewhere, you need to have a plan.

[00:31:39] And that plan starts at the beginning of every day and just five minutes. Now, granted, sometimes it'll take longer, but start with five minutes. It's that's the first step.

[00:31:51] Yeah,

[00:31:51] Scott Maderer: absolutely. So before I ask you a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests, is there anything else about the work you [00:32:00] do or the single seat mindset that you'd like to share with the listener?

[00:32:06] Dom Teich: I think for me learned behavior if you're more of a, I know type a personality gets a bad rap, but if you're more of a motivated person, it can lead to aggressiveness in your in your approach.

[00:32:25] And I think if you can figure out how to. Soften those edges. I look back on many things that I did that were more or less successful, but how much quicker it could have happened or how much better it could have happened had I been a little bit humbler. approach. So just taking a pause.

[00:32:46] And again, this starts in the morning with that, the five minutes, just taking a pause and going, okay I'm about to say this or I'm about to do this. Does this make sense with my plan? And you'll know because you made your plan in the morning. So you've stepped through that. [00:33:00] So my brand is

[00:33:03] Scott Maderer: inspired stewardship and I run things through that lens of stewardship.

[00:33:08] And yet that's one of those words that. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So when you hear the word stewardship, what does that word mean to

[00:33:15] Dom Teich: you? So being in the military one of the concepts that I learned really young as a military officer is this idea of servant leadership.

[00:33:29] So serving others, and it can take on many different forms and you can talk and read about it all day long. But when you talked about inspired stewardship it took. It meshed in my mind as servant leadership, meaning I'm serving others. I think where yours were inspired stewardship levels up from servant leadership is that, what are you inspired by [00:34:00] Scott?

[00:34:00] So like, why do you call it inspired stew? Who is inspiring your stewardship? I think that would be the question that I would ask you. For

[00:34:08] Scott Maderer: me. For me, it's it is God. It's my relationship with God. It's the idea of there is something out there that is bigger than me.

[00:34:20] I'm not it it's the whole joke of the best day of my life was when I realized there was a God. The second best day was when I realized it wasn't me, because I think it's that idea of there's something greater than us and our relationship with that greater thing. Is for me the power and the inspiration

[00:34:40] Dom Teich: behind it.

[00:34:42] Yeah. And I think that is why when I read those two words, I was like, that is, it's so true because you can be a servant leader. And I think it's. It stinks, but the golden rule I think is junk do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I prefer the platinum rule.[00:35:00]

[00:35:00] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so go with the platinum rule.

[00:35:02] Scott Maderer: Yeah, so the platinum rule is do unto others as they wish to be done unto. Yes, perfect. As opposed to do unto others as I want to

[00:35:09] Dom Teich: be done. Yeah, but the problem is inspired stewardship. If you've got. If you let man read the Old Testament, if you let man run the show, we'll mess it up every time.

[00:35:22] And that's

[00:35:23] Scott Maderer: the biggest part. Forget reading the Old Testament. Look out your window.

[00:35:25] Dom Teich: Yeah, so exactly. And then in our day of modern day relativism where, Hey, it's good for you, but it's not good for me, or it's good for me. It's not good for you. It doesn't really work because the rules are always changing.

[00:35:40] Everything is relative and there's no absolute truth, and if you go down that route you end up with a lot of the things that we're facing in our own culture right now.

[00:35:48] There's, everybody is so confused and it's because of a lack of God. And it's because And oh, by the way, the rules that you learn and memorize today in this [00:36:00] crazy world, they're going to change tomorrow to fit whatever devious or crafty, or in air quotes, like I'm doing this for you, I'm doing this for your own good.

[00:36:11] Is it really aligned with the truth and the beauty and the goodness of mankind? It doesn't really align with that. And the answer is no. So if I think of. servant leadership. It lacks God. And when I think of inspired stewardship, I think, Oh if God's inspiring me to do this, then I just need to do it.

[00:36:36] I need to do his will. And I need to and it may not be light. It may not be fun. And I think it was Pope Benedict the 16th. He said something along the lines of you're not made for comfort. You're made for greatness. So even though you might be on good, better, best, you're doing the best thing that you possibly can.

[00:36:55] You're on that path. It could be really difficult. Look at mother Teresa in the streets of Calcutta. [00:37:00] That doesn't sound very appealing to me. However, that was the best thing that she could do. And she's a very inspirational, if you haven't read anything about her, that woman, holy smokes. Talk about you you aren't built for comfort.

[00:37:15] You're built for greatness while she was doing it.

[00:37:18] Scott Maderer: And she came from a position of wealth and privilege.

[00:37:21] Dom Teich: Yeah. I forgot about that.

[00:37:23] Scott Maderer: Yeah. If you actually look at where she grew up and how, what she quote could have easily stepped into, it would have been what most of us would look and see as a life of comfort and money and privilege and having everything you wanted.

[00:37:36] And she literally chose, she didn't have to, she chose to go make the impact that she made for the poor of Calcutta. Yeah. So this is my favorite question that I like to ask everybody. Imagine for a minute that I invented this magic

[00:37:57] machine and [00:38:00] with this machine, I

[00:38:01] Scott Maderer: could pluck you from where you are today and transport you into the future, maybe 150, maybe 250 years.

[00:38:09] And through the power of this machine, you were able to look back and see your entire life, see all of the connections, all of the ripples, all of the impacts you've left behind. What impact do you hope you've left in the world?

[00:38:23] Dom Teich: That really doesn't that kind of question doesn't really bother me anymore, Scott, because the impact that I hope that I have is aligned with the mission.

[00:38:37] And like you've talked about earlier on in this interview, it's was I doing what I should have been doing? And it was that guided by God. And so if. If 150 years go by and people in this world come by my name, they're like that dude went through a lot of things. He was misguided and off, off [00:39:00] track many years of his life, but then.

[00:39:02] Like you said, I realized there is I've always realized there was a God, I was maybe agnostic at worst, but the next thing was the second day, like you said, realizing that I am not God and that I think to answer your question, my, what I'm striving for is not just to get to heaven.

[00:39:22] I don't want to slide into home plate and be called safe. Let's be saints. And how do we do that? And how do we live a life? In this day and age, which can be very difficult and every age has its challenges, but how do you live a good, solid Christian life? How do you raise your kids that way?

[00:39:39] And really it would be probably my great. great grandkids would be the ones coming across that and being like, Hey, grandpa was he did all these things, but hopefully we can high five him and sit around the campfire when we get to heaven.

[00:39:57] So what's on the roadmap, what's coming [00:40:00] next for you as you continue on.

[00:40:04] Dom Teich: So I think and I alluded to it before but life has been so busy that 2024, the year that we're in now is a year of we're maintaining. So we're maintaining the businesses we're. We're raising our kids the best we can, I'm just in, I'm in the year of like maintenance and I'm, and I've been praying about where I should go what's the best thing to take all of this stuff and package it neatly and then just go with that one thing and right now that, that answer isn't super clear to me.

[00:40:41] And I think it's important when it's not super clear to take the time, like you've said in your plan, execute, and you go down that roadmap to go what's my plan? My plan this year is to really just review everything that we've done to maintain [00:41:00] it and to keep listening and keep praying about what that next calling is and to go, Hey where are we really going with all of this?

[00:41:07] And it may just be a time of. Not relaxation, but just a time to pause and to reflect and to not be going 800 miles an hour, which is what I've been doing for so many years. But I've 2023 was the year of I've turned off a lot of projects. We finished publishing that book. There's some other business things that happened in 2024 is just okay, this is a maintenance year.

[00:41:30] This is a year to recharge and it could be a year, two years, three years. I don't know. However I'm comfortable kind of living through that and. Just resting in the fact that I don't need to be doing all of these other things that the world says I need to be doing, I need to focus on the things right in my own circle of influence, especially as we, you, man, you open a news feed and it's about all of the bad things so I need to focus on [00:42:00] what is good and what we've done in the past and just maintain and not to forget the things are going right in front of my face.

[00:42:07] My kids are growing up right in front of my eyes and I need to make sure that at this age that they're at and I'm spending quality time with them.

[00:42:19] You can

[00:42:19] find out more about Dom Teich

[00:42:22] Scott Maderer: over at SingleSeatMindset. com and of course I'll have a link to that in the show notes as well.

[00:42:28] Dom, is there anything else you'd like to share

[00:42:30] Scott Maderer: with the listeners?

[00:42:32] Dom Teich: Yeah, so if you've listened this far, if you go to SingleSeatMindset. com forward slash podcast gift, all on word.

[00:42:41] Singleseatmindset. com forward slash podcast gift. You can the first three listeners can sign up and get a free copy of Single Seat Wisdom Volume 1 sent right to your doorstep. There's no catch. You don't have to buy anything. I'm not going to sell your information, but you [00:43:00] can get a free copy of the book and check it out.

[00:43:02] Single seat mindset. com forward slash podcast gift.

[00:43:07] Scott Maderer: Awesome. Thanks so much for that. I'll make sure I put a link to that as well in the show notes. So I appreciate it.

[00:43:17] Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen. But act on what you've heard

[00:43:30] and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed

[00:43:34] Scott Maderer: this episode please do us a favor. Go over to inspiredstewardship.

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[00:44:08] Scott Maderer: the world.