Tough love, when done right, can be used as a tool for preparing a person for the long journey of life and all its aspects. This is a great way of disciplining yourself when setting a goal in life, business, or your career. Today, Juliet Clark interviews the CEO of ThinkReactLead, Dom Faussette, about some of his most personal life experiences that molded him into who he is today. Dom explains how your behavior at home and your relationship with your family are related with your performance in the workplace and your relationships with the people you work with. He also shares the different steps you can utilize in goal setting to ensure they become achievable as soon as possible.

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The Discipline In Goal Setting With Dom Faussette

Our guest is Dom Faussette. He is a military veteran and a prior police officer with ten years of experience in corporate leadership. He is the CEO with ThinkReactLead, a company dedicated to pushing people past their limiting beliefs by bridging the gap between their mind and heart for increased success. Welcome, Dom.

Thank you. I appreciate you bringing me on. It’s a pleasure. I’m excited to get this ball rolling.

I met Dom and his wife. They’re members of the Aaron Young‘s Inner Circle. We got to sit at the same table and he brought his dog. He was amazing. I won’t have you retell the story. His dog is in doggy jail.

Toretto, he’s in jail right now.

Tell us a little bit about your background and how it brought you to what you’re doing because it’s interconnected.

A lot of people talk about the background and I’m going to bring that up, but I’m here where I’m at because of my background and my foreground. Having a vision and knowing what your purpose to do is extremely important. I’m going to go back before I was an adult. Both my parents are military. I grew up in an environment that was tougher in today’s standards. I call it the ‘80s, growing up. My mom was a drill instructor. My dad was intel. There were certain standards that we were forced to have in the household.

Growing up, it was tough at home but it was tough love. Once I got into school, it was tough. I grew up in an environment where you say the wrong thing you can end up dead or you can end up with loose teeth right before algebra class. You go on about your business, but that prepped me for the world. It prepped me for working for what I want, working for what I have, not expecting people to hand things to me, and not getting my feelings hurt when somebody tells me no as a grown man.

I jumped into the Military Air Force. My plan was to be a Pararescue Combat Controller, which is Special Forces, but in my last swim test, I failed by seven seconds. Those seven seconds changed my life. It took me about 10, 12 years to get over that failure. I ended up getting K-9 in the military. When I got out, I jumped into law enforcement. It wasn’t about serving and protecting. I wanted to carry a gun. That was the only civilian job that I could have where I would be considered a tough guy.

There’s so much more than the uniform and the badge that a lot of men and women hide behind or titling. I thought I was tough then but it wasn’t until I got out and had to address things like PTSD many years later. I missed the boat on that one. I was in the corporate space and I was probably about seven years into the corporate space. I was doing well for myself and I found myself sleeping in my closet. I have a nice house. Everything was good on the outside, but at night I would come home and I’d have my Benelli shotgun with me in my closet and my Glock 26 under my pillow. Every single night, I’d sleep in my closet. I was afraid of my own shadow.

It wasn’t until I started getting some professional help that I realized, “This is PTSD. I got it.” I thought I liked sleeping on the floor because it’s quiet in here. These are the things that we tell ourselves, whether you’re a veteran or not, everybody has a thing that brings them to the line. What I realized as I got into the coaching practice is that I found a way to get past the line and obliterating obstacles. It started with increasing my confidence. It started with understanding what I was capable of and not taking everything personal. That’s it in a nutshell.

Inside of your business, I know you help speakers. You help a lot of different people. What sets you apart from everyone else who’s out there?

There are a couple of things that set me apart. The primary thing that got me here was I found myself kicking doors and serving warrants. Intel would tell me there are three people inside and I figured I go by myself. As a cop, I did a lot by myself because that’s one report I have to concern myself with. You kick in the door and it’s no longer three, they’re six people. Life is not a video game. You can’t press pause. You can’t say, “Why don’t you guys hang out here? Leave all the weed, all the guns, leave everything out. I’ll be right back with some more adequate assistance.” That’s not an option. I had to understand my position. I had to understand what my obstacles were. I had to understand what my next move was going to be in a millisecond.

Utilizing that skillset in my coaching space, I don’t know any coaches personally that have faced death like that and engaging. If you look at society as a whole, most people struggle with making decisions. One thing I’ve never struggled with was decision-making. What sets me apart is everything that I coach on I’m already doing. I wasn’t doing it years ago and I’m not planning to do it years from now. I’m coaching it now. I’m a little tough as a coach. I’m an executive coach, that’s how I got into the business. It’s what I bring to the table in the past years of living. Getting deployed, having a bomb dog, doing presidential supports and kicking in doors, but then being in a place where the toughest thing I’ve ever had to deal with was accepting Dom. Understanding my emotions. Loving myself was probably the toughest thing that I’ve ever been faced with in my life. Back to your original question, what sets me apart is having run the gambit probably more than I needed to, and then coming out on the other side and knowing that it’s cool to love somebody else, starting with yourself.

There are a couple great nuggets in there I want to talk about. When you’re in the business space or even in your personal space, you mentioned people have a hard time making a decision. Not making a decision is making a decision. A lot of people don’t acknowledge that in their lives They’re putting something off. That’s what I love about the think and react, you have to be solid about that.

For me, I look at it as life and death. Starting at the age of eleven, I was not allowed to use the words, “I don’t know,” in any of my conversation. I don’t use it. When I talk to somebody and they give me the, “I’ll get back to you.” Calling them to the carpet in that moment, male or female, it doesn’t matter. Getting them to understand what that means in their world. What other areas in your life are you saying, “I’ll get back to you?” One of the examples I use and I implement in my daily life is, when my eyes open up, I get up. If I go to bed at 11:30 at night but my eyes open up at 3:15, I get out of bed. I get out of bed for a couple of reasons. One, my body wants to do a thing. I don’t know what that thing is. I won’t know until maybe I step outside, get some fresh air, get on the ground, do ten pushups to get the blood flowing. That’s my body’s way of waking up. There have been a couple of times you look at a grown man breathe his last breath, you start to appreciate life in a completely different sense.

I’ve never met anybody that their body gets up at 4:00 in the morning, their alarm is set for 6:00, and they sit there from 4:00 to 6:00, waiting for the alarm to go off. They end up more tired through the day. That for me is a decision. My body has made the decision for me. Mentally, what am I going to do? Am I going to think and react and lead in this moment or am I going to try to fight sleep? I’m going to get up and I’m going to start my day whatever my body decides to do so. I don’t have my clients do this, but I implore them to start making simple decisions, void of emotion. There’s the thing that guys do a lot and I’ve never been a woman so I can’t say that they do it.

We know what we should do in a moment for our wife. Our body says, “Do it.” Three seconds later, our emotions kick in from something that happened years ago. We don’t do the thing that’s going to add value to our wife. We do it over and over, and then we feel that it’s right and we disconnect in our relationships and it starts at home. I tell at leadership all the time, “If you can’t lead from home, you have no business leading a company. Get things right at home with your spouse and your kids.” I have executives that go, “My employees don’t like me.” That’s because your kids don’t like you. Building relationship with your kids, it will transition over to a better relationship with your employees.

Goal Setting: Growing up through tough love can prepare you to work for what you want to have and not expect people to hand things to you.

Tracy Hazzard, my partner on the Monday Marketing, we had a big thing about those people who think about it for a year. You follow up, you call them and they’re like, “I know I need it. I’m still thinking.” That thinking doesn’t translate into action. How do you combat that with someone? If that’s someone that you know that you’re in that mode, what do you do? I don’t relate to it. If I think it, I’m all over it, which is maybe a bad thing too.

Fortunately, because of my background and because of my social media presence and the way I’m perceived, it allows me to call people out. I had a guy like, “I want to know more about this command presence thing.” I’m like, “Here’s the link. This is how much it costs. Have a 30-minute conversation with me.” He’s like, “Let me get back to you.” I told him, “That’s not what that means.” You either are going to or you’re not going to. We’re not going to do this back and forth. I’m like that in person. It’s not me being fake. I’m doing it from a compassionate space.

This guy is an executive. He has a family. It’s like this, you go to bed at 9:00 at night and you’re like, “I’m motivated. I’m going to get up at 6:00 in the morning.” Your alarm goes off at 6:00 but you sleep in. What other areas in your life are you hitting snooze on? I grew up in an environment where getting called out has been life-saving. I don’t know another way. I’m using the phrase “Call people out” but I’m bringing things to their attention. I’m telling them the things that nobody is ever telling them because most people that I coach, they’re the Alpha male in their environment. Everybody is afraid to go against the grain conversationally. Their spouses don’t say anything, male or female. I’m their drill instructor, but I don’t talk on anything that I’ve never done myself.

I love that calling out. One of the things that happened in my realm as a child was we weren’t allowed to say, “I can’t.” It was always positioned back as, “You can’t or you won’t.” That is painful because then you have to look at it and say, “The truth is, I won’t.” It’s ugly when you have that confronting, “Which is it?” That pushed a lot with me because it’s like if I say, “I won’t,” then what does that mean for me and my growth? You don’t say that as a child but as an adult, if you’d look back, you would have been, “That was my response.” It manifested itself in other ways. How do you get those people to take that action when they come to you? What techniques do you use? You talked about baby steps with that.

People overthink action. There are things that they think that they want to do and then there are things that they need to do. A lot of times this falls in line with goal setting. Most people don’t set goals. They do things based on what they feel is owed to them. For example, somebody has a long day at work and they feel they have the right to come home and sit their butt down and watch TV, yet they complain about the job that they have or they complain about the clients that they have. TV is a luxury. Every year we get fatter.

I’m saying we to be nice, but people in the world are. A lot of my clients are married, they end up blaming their spouse for their lack of results. They don’t get over things. That is the problem. It starts with goal setting. There’s this nine-step process and I learned it in the military. Most of the tactics I use are from paramilitary or even military. We pick a goal and then we write down ten benefits of accomplishing this goal. Number three, write down five reasons this goal has yet to be accomplished. Now you’re calling your self to the carpet. Number four, write down the names of people that will benefit from your accomplishment of this goal. Number five, pick three people that you are going to share your goal with. These people should and will hold you accountable. Five, write down four things that could potentially get in the way of you accomplishing this goal.

When you are setting a mission, you look at it like, “Do I go to the window? Do I go through the attic? Do I kick in the front door? If I kick in the front door, am I potentially getting shot at? Yes. I’ll go through the kitchen window because there are less people in there.” There are all these things to go through when you’re about to serve a warrant or complete a mission. Number seven, write down three non-negotiable that you will implement in order to guarantee you accomplish your goal. Most people don’t realize that for every one goal, you should have maybe 3 to 4 non-negotiable. People don’t have non-negotiable.

I love pizza and I love ice cream, not together but in the same day. If I want to lose weight, my non-negotiable are one, I’m not going to eat pizza and two, I’m not going to eat ice cream. The third one is I’m going to go to the gym four times a week. If I haven’t started going to the gym, I’ll start with 3 to 4 days a week. Those are my non-negotiable. A non-negotiable that we have that society has put on us, when you get to a red light, you stop. It’s non-negotiable to drive through the red light because you risk dying. That’s what not hitting your goals are. You may not physically die but internally, you’re going to feel dead.

Number eight, write down two ways you will reward yourself once you accomplish this goal. Most of us, especially people that are dialed in like us, we have already accomplished the goal 70% into it. By the time we accomplish the goal, we’re 30% into another project and we’ve never acknowledged or celebrated the win. That’s how you become drained. Other people have to tell you, “Dom, I saw your radio show, congratulations.” “Dom, I saw you on Fox.” It’s part of the things that we have to do to move the needle forward.

Number nine, write down one date this goal will be accomplished. I had to learn early on that I was not a drill instructor. I can’t tell people, “Suck it up. Don’t be a pansy.” Those things don’t work especially via Zoom call. I had to formulate something that somebody could see their own reasons for getting in their way. I have a master list of things that they can look at. People stop idea generating because they’re like, “I have all these goals.” If you use these nine steps for one goal, you’ll get rid of half of your goals because you’re going to realize the work.

That is true because that is the one thing when people come into our company, I would say 25% of them, their messaging is muddled. They have many things they want to do and they can’t decide on which is it they’re going to focus. It’s almost like they have FOMO, “I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that.” I love the book, Big Magic. It was written by the author of Eat, Pray, Love. What I love about that book is that she talks about when you get an idea, if you don’t act on it, it will move on to the next person. You’ll be the guy who invented Facebook before Facebook came out. There’s even a better example. There’s that new program out, the Messiah. Do you know how many people I’ve heard say, “That was my idea?” They never acted on it. For me, that’s why that focus that you do is important because if you get out there and you’re not focused, that idea is going to move on to the next person.

It can happen in 24 to 48 hours. It’s not 90 days later.

Goal Setting: If you treat your spouse as good as you treat your boss, you wouldn’t have any relationship issues.

How do you know you need someone like you? What’s going on with the typical client that comes in your door where they’re like, “I have to do this.” Do they have to hit rock bottom in some way with something?

No, I’m not a good rock bottom coach. Most people that hit rock bottom, by the time they get a coach, it’s their first coach. I’m coming from a law enforcement perspective so I don’t know, but when I hear rock bottom, I think nothing is going well. You need to seek professional help, a shrink, a psychiatrist. I was at rock bottom at one point in time and no coach was going to help me. I’m the guy that people come to when they’ve hired a coach that either wasn’t the same person online as they are in their coaching practice or they couldn’t get the results. I’m definitely not a good first coach. I have found that when I’ve slowly but surely involved my wife in my social media over the years, even though I’m a speaker coach and an executive coach, more of my clients come to me because of what they see my wife and I have. They say they want a relationship like that and I’m like, “No, you don’t.”

They don’t want a relationship with their spouse like this. If they did, they would know what to do. Look at it like this. A guy goes into a bar and he sees a woman that he’s attracted to. He’ll stand there. Maybe he’s naturally impatient. Maybe he’s naturally a curt or he’s a jerk. In that moment, all of those things and all of those negative traits go out the window because he knows what he has to do to get to the end game. She could be talking about how she got a music scholarship and she plays trombone, most guys don’t care about that, but he’ll listen. We get married five years into it, now we don’t listen. We don’t respond to text messages quickly. We treat our boss greater than we treat our spouse.

I guarantee you, if you treated your spouse as good as you treat your boss, you wouldn’t have any relationship issues. Every day you go to work, smile when you don’t want to. Do what you’re told because you have to, because there’s money attached to it. There’s your ego or fake pride attached to it, but then you go home, this is male and female, and you’re none of those things. When I tell people, “You don’t want it. What do you think it is that you want?” “You guys seem happy.” “We are happy.” I don’t get my panties in a bunch if she says something that rubs me the wrong way. My wife is a little tough.

She’ll call me out. My wife is not a social media person. I help people with branding. My wife calls me out on branding. We were driving and she said that and I said, “Dom, don’t say anything.” My first response was, “Who is she to call me? You don’t know anything about branding.” I was quiet, but then I realized she’s my ideal client. More often times than not, you’re going to learn more from your spouse, more about you that comes out of their mouth than you’re going to learn about yourself from what comes out of your mouth. Sometimes you don’t want to hear the truth.

That’s like the can’t and won’t. You don’t want to hear it. Tell us something about you that nobody knows that’s fun.

I live on social media so I wouldn’t say nobody knows. I love to skateboard. I have four skateboards. I’m into it. I do downhill longboarding. Here’s one. Milliseconds before I would kick in the door and right as I kicked in the door or push the door in, it’s a euphoric experience. I’m not going to bore you with the details. At any given moment, there were 1 of 2 songs that went through my head. This is something nobody knows. There’s a Wizard of Oz song. I forgot the name of the song because I haven’t kicked the door for years. The other one was Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys. Right as I would run towards the porch and take my first step, adrenaline slows everything down. That song in its cadence matched my adrenaline cadence as my environment slowed down. From the outside, I’m moving at a high rate of speed but that song flowed through and through when I was engaging suspects at that high level of law enforcement. I’ve never told anybody that.

Think React Lead: When Success and Accomplishments Aren’t Enough

It is scary when you’re doing something like that. It doesn’t surprise me. I used to repo houses in 2008, 2009, when everybody’s losing their houses. There’s a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, I’d always get the same two cops. It was scary going in and then they come out and they’d be laughing. They would play jokes on me. Not funny jokes either. I was funny to you guys. They passed this law in California, if somebody left pets and you foreclose, the realtor had to take possession of them. They came out one time and they told me there was a fifteen-foot boa in there. They cracked up and they’re like, “If you could have seen the look on your face, Juliet.” For them, it was almost a tension release. They didn’t know what they were going to find when they went in when we had a lockdown or lockout, but when they came out, it was always definitely funny.

Jokes and fun, and it’s not scary to us. Your goal is to always come back home and touch your doorknob. That’s something I used to tell myself. Every shift I just want to touch my doorknob but while you’re in the streets, you know it could be your last day, but you’re going to have a hoorah of a time while you’re doing it.

That sounds fun. This has been fabulous. Do you have something you want to give away to us?

I’m an author and I have a book called Think React Lead: When Success and Accomplishments Aren’t Enough. I finally put together an eCopy of the book. If you want it, you can DM me on Instagram @DomFaussette. There are many ways to contact people these days.

Thank you so much. You’re always so much fun and I appreciate you doing this.

Important Links

• Dom Faussette
• Aaron Young
• Big Magic
• Eat, Pray, Love
• Think React Lead: When Success and Accomplishments Aren’t Enough
• @DomFaussette – Instagram

About Dom Faussette

Keynote Speaker and Executive Coach… Best selling author, Radio Show Host Dom Faussette… has been to HELL and back.

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