424 Dame Doria “DC” Cordova: Entrepreneurship for Social Good

We hear a lot of talk these days about how to move from scarcity thinking into an “abundance mindset” – that is, how to manifest abundance in all areas of our lives. What does abundance mean to you? What would abundance look like in your life?  And what happens even to the wealthiest among us when we are stuck in a scarcity mindset?

MELINDA

I’m Melinda Wittstock and today on Wings of Inspired Business and as you probably know by now my mission with this podcast, my retreats, my trainings and everything to do with Wings is to inspire a shift among entrepreneurs to a higher consciousness and abundance mindset where we as women truly lift each other in business and life – we promote each other, buy from each other, mentor each other, invest in each other.

Today we meet one of my supersheros – an inspiring entrepreneurs and global consciousness leader who has elevated hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to wealth, purpose and abundance.

Dame Doria Cordova – better known as DC Cordova – is the founder and owner of Excellerated Business Schools®, a global organization with over 118,000 graduates since 1979. Her Money & You® program has inspired some of today’s greatest wealth experts – including Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield and Robert Kiyasaki, and her Money & You Book Series and online classes have been used by millions to reach financial success.

Doria calls herself an Ambassador of New Education. She is a humanitarian, philanthropist and her mission is all about creating social entrepreneurs – that is, people who are using business as a canvas for global impact and consciousness to solve our biggest challenges on the planet.

I had the privilege of meeting the inspiring Doria (who is better known as DC) at the Evolutionary Business Council – an organization of influencers and thought leaders dedicated to global consciousness of which we are both members – and I can’t wait to share this interview with you.

make sure you take a moment, follow Wings of Inspired Business on facebook @wingspodcast, Twitter @MelindaWings and Instagram @melindawittstock2020. And if you like what you’re hearing, please review us on iTunes so more women can find these amazing interviews and soar in business.

Now back to the inspiring Dame Doria Cordova – philanthropist, global thought leader, PhD (Hon.) CEO, Global Business Developer Sustainability Entrepreneur Ambassador of New Education Mentor of Nurturing.

The essence of Doria’s calling is to help entrepreneurs focus beyond the bottom line and profits … to offer products and services that add value to humanity. The list of notable graduates of her Money & You program reads like a “Who is Who” of today’s wealth experts – Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield and many more among them. Owner of the global Excellerated Business Schools® for Entrepreneurs – Doria is a true pioneer. She’s the only Latin woman together with Marshall Thurber and Bobbi DePorter who first began the development of the transformational, experiential, entrepreneurial training industry some 33 years ago.

She takes her inspiration from the legendary Buckminster Fuller who inspired her to create products and services asking this question: “How do we make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone?”

Doria is now expanding her work to the renewable energy field in partnership with billionaire Huang Ming, one of the world’s leading green entrepreneur who built the only Solar Valley in the world in China.

You may know Doria too as a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council (TLC), for the book and online program Access to Cash, or as a contributor in the Think & Grow Rich for Women book. She’s also the author of the comprehensive systems manual, Money Making Systems; and she’s been featured in dozens of motivational films, TV and radio shows, podcasts and more.

Now she’s at work on a global women’s platform – Women, Cash & Divine Matters – where women can connect and support one another, mentorship and coaching, inspiration, and practical business-oriented education.

There is so much MORE I could say about Doria – and all the details of her bio you can read in the show notes at wingspodcast.com – so are you ready for Dame Doria Cordova? I am. Let’s fly!

Melinda Wittstock:         Doria, welcome to Wings. It’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Doria Cordova:                 Thank you, thank you and congratulations. You have a beautiful platform and wow, to the people that you have interviewed.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh. Well, thank you so much. You know, it really is a calling, a mission. There’s something so wonderful about connecting on a really deep level with women who are doing extraordinary things in the world. There’s so much to talk with you about, Doria, and I want to start where we first started our conversation.

I met you not so long ago at a retreat of the Evolutionary Business Council and we were talking about the concept of abundance and what it would take to get women from scarcity into abundance where women are really showing up for each other, helping each other, mentoring each other, really investing in each other and being there for each other. You had a beautiful way of telling me what was required. I would love for you to repeat that here.

Doria Cordova:                 Okay. Thank you. Well, let me first say that I learned this from the great Buckminster Fuller, for people that don’t know, he was the beautiful man that put in the world, the idea from moving from scarcity to sufficiency to abundance. He was known as Time Magazines one of the Top 100 Influential People of the 20th Century. He created the geodesic domes. What people would know him the most by coining the world synergy.

Buckminster Fuller was our mentor. He was the one that inspired me when I was 27 years old and I didn’t have any of this language and I realized through the years that people get a little bit confused because they think they can move from scarcity to abundance. That’s impossible with experiencing sufficiency first.

Sufficiency is having enough. One of the women that put Buckminster Fuller on the planet was a woman by the name of Lynne Twist. She’s my dear friend now. I ended up-

Melinda Wittstock:         I love Lynne. Lynne is wonderful. I went into the Amazon Rainforest with her and The Pachamama Alliance on the Founder’s Journey.

Doria Cordova:                 I met Lynne 11 years ago, but I was inspired by her way back when I was 27 years old. It was all a concept in my head. It took years for me to really get it and experience it and then, of course, I then became an avid proponent of teaching that around the world and because entrepreneurship is so key in my heart and here, I have to tell you a little bit about my background. I grew up in the legal system. I was first an assistant legal secretary, then I was an interpreter, a legal interpreter in the court system and in hearings and for doctors and things. Then, I became court reporter. An official court reporter in the LA legal system and later, in Hawaii. I was going to grow up to be an attorney.

I had an enlightenment experience when I was 26 years old, which took me into this path of looking for something I had heard, which is that I had a job to do. I had no idea what that mean and when I met Buckminster Fuller when I was 27 years old and I was still in the legal system and everything that he said tapped into what I knew to be true about what were the biggest challenges on the planet. First one being starvation at the time and in the 70s, people just thought, we were going to have this whole, all these problems because of population and people were going to starve to death everywhere.

Well, long story short. I had a combination of that realization of the principles taught by Buckminster Fuller and then, all these business background that I had learned in court and also, from my own family that was quite entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial women, not even men but women. When I attended the first business school for entrepreneurs of this kind in 1978 and they were all about teaching what we now call social entrepreneurship or social capitalism. It was a combination of the teachings of Buckminster Fuller and it was all about moving people from scarcity to sufficiency to abundance. Except, we didn’t quite use the words that way, but is how can we create business people that could have products and services that could help solve world problems and have huge profit and very healthy bottom line. That’s what I’ve been doing for literally 40 years.

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s an amazing calling and it’s so important and I see the evidence of that now, where the companies that really do have a more evolved or conscious mission or even a business model around, say, buy one give one or a social good. Some people call it conscious capitalism, some people call it evolved enterprise, but those companies do so much better. Just even on the bottom line good for business type metrics, they outperform the companies that are doing it the old way.

Doria Cordova:                 Oh, and there’s so much evidence. This morning, I was watching a show that I had recorded from this young man that has created and I will do my best to remember the name of the sneakers that he has created, but basically, they are now using this material that comes from sugar and what they’re doing is that they are using it instead of using for all the sneakers that get made, the running shoes. That actually absorbs things that are bad in the environment. He went from selling millions to now being … He has a bottom line of over a billion. He’s getting to be known as a major social entrepreneur.

Then, there was the young man, I’ll think of his name in a minute, I’m very expanded right now, so I can’t think of names but he also was the one that transformed Las Vegas. He went in and spent millions-

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, goodness. Tony Hsieh from Zappos.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes, yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Selling Zappos to Amazon for a $1 billion is fascinating to me because what did Zappos do that was different from what Amazon already did. I mean, they had this amazing culture, right?

Doria Cordova:                 Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:         They treated their employees totally differently. That’s a $1 billion business just creating a great culture where you treat your people well.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes. My mentors, they literally created the financial literacy industry as we know it today. Marshall Thurber, Bobbi DePorter. Marshall is the genius. Bobbi is pretty genius too and she was the power behind what looked like the man that knew it all but actually, without organization, without the business structure, nothing goes anywhere.

I give them credit both of them because one was the genius that created left and right brain experiential teaching techniques that is now used worldwide in the training industry by learning directly from Georgi Lozanov, who was the man who created super learning. Then, I inherited that work six years later. I was a student, then I became an assistant, then I became a partner, and then, when they were ready to go in 1985, then went on to do other things including supercamp.com by Bobbi DePorter. Marshall went on to work with Edwards Deming and working with big companies on productivity, genius systems.

I inherited this work and Robert Kiyosaki that a lot of people know from Rich Dad Poor Dad was a student of our programs, had joined our instructor’s training program and I looked around when I inherited this work and who was the person that could make the best partner and that was Kiyosaki. Then, it was my idea for him to write his first book, which was called, If You Want to Be Rich & Happy Don’t Go to School. It was question mark. We made that into a best-seller in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and later, years later when we were no longer business partners because we completed it after nine years because we were going in different directions, Sharon Lechter, his next future partner ended up being able to sell Rich Dad Poor Dad even more easier because he was already a proven best-selling author. Even though it had been done overseas, he already had a little bit of traction.

But there’s also something to look at here. Marshall Thurber, Bobbi DePorter was the woman behind. Then, I was the woman behind him. Robert Kiyosaki, I was the woman behind him and his wife, Kim Kiyosaki. Then later, Sharon Lechter, his business partner of the next 10 years was the total power behind that whole empire.

You have to start noticing that in the past, you have had these brilliant people that are putting amazing work out there, but yet, you’ve hardly heard of these women behind them. This is the shift that is happening now in the world. Like my Sweetie, he’s so beautiful, German genius, gorgeous man and he says, “Women are taking over the world.” Well, we’ve been planning it, so we might as well take over.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, you know, I like to say that we’re stepping into the light.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         It’s been interesting because I think a lot of women, I don’t know what you think about this Doria, but a lot of women, I perceive, have a fear of success is to step into the light and shine brightly risks on some sort of deep subconscious level being kind of cast out of the tribe. Some people call it the tall poppy syndrome, right?

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         If we shine too brightly, we’re afraid of how others will perceive us or we’re just afraid that we’re going to be too strong for any man, like we won’t have a date, that kind of thing. You see this already, see this in people’s behavior. It’s so sort of written into our culture. It’s the phenomenon behind mean girl stuff in middle school.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Do you perceive that this is changing?

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Because I do. I think it is really changing. I think women really crave deeper connection with one another. They’re making their voices, all of us are making our voices heard in a more powerful way.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes. Well, at first it was a reaction.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah.

Doria Cordova:                 At first, it was a reaction to, “Okay, dudes.” It’s like, “I’ll be making you look good for freaking 10 years and I’m going to be bypassed because I didn’t speak up. I think that what happened was women finally started taking responsibility and moving from a sense of victim hood and I’m going to say something so rude and [crosstalk] edit this if you like but in my personal future book that I might write when I’m 140 years old. I have to wait for a few people to die.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. Just get it now but you can be rude. It’s okay.

Doria Cordova:                 Well, but I’m going to have a chapter which is called and most people believe the opposite to be true but there’s a chapter that I’m going to say that this is the rude part, this is the name of the chapter, the things that women have given up for orgasms.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. Okay.

Doria Cordova:                 Okay.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. What have we given up?

Doria Cordova:                 Well, you know what happens is that we, quote … It’s not really true so much about orgasms but I want to be shocking because the problem is that people that I find so many women that give up everything including my mother, who doesn’t mind me sharing this story for love and for relationship. I mean, I met them in Singapore. When I lived in Singapore for four years, my best workers were that I found by putting a little three by five at the US embassy for women that have given everything up, so that they could follow their husbands to Singapore because they were so afraid that they were going to run off some young Chinese girl.

I mean, I had one woman that came into work for me part-time. I paid her something like 10 or $15 an hour, that had been running literally a corporation and made millions a year, had stock options and had the most amazing future. I just had to go out to lunch with her a whole bunch of times and I wanted to understand. I asked her very bluntly, “You have the most fantastic marriage on the planet. Is this man so amazing that you couldn’t figure this out?” She says, “No. I’m actually thinking about getting a divorce.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh my goodness.

Doria Cordova:                 She says, “You saved my life. I now have something to do four hours a day that bring me sanity instead of having to deal with things that I haven’t dealt with for years.” That’s an exaggeration right now. No, no. I didn’t exaggerate about it. What I meant to say, that is an exaggerated example but it’s a true example and she was telling me that there was hundreds of women like that, that she knew right there in Singapore and they’re called expat wives. They have expat magazines and they have expat clubs.

It’s the culture. It’s for real. I don’t know what is happening there right now. We’re talking about 20 years ago but it was there that I began to … Because I had a different reality, honestly for myself, and then, I began to look around and I thought, “Oh my God, what women have given up and instead of them enrolling their husbands, who maybe would’ve been happy staying home and doing whatever, our DNA is of service.” We want to be of service. We’re willing to do whatever to be of service. That has begun to shift because of social entrepreneurship.

Now, we know that we can be of service and we can have beautiful wealth and bottom line, very profitable bottom line and do good with that money and that there are many men out there that are willing to be our partners, hangout with us and happy to play a different role because they may be a little bit different than a high-achieving guy.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, here’s what I think is really interesting, Doria, when you have the Dalai Lama say that really, the secret of global consciousness, the seeds of it are really in the hands of the Western Woman. I think in a way, that when we step into that authentic feminine power, We help to heal men as well in healing ourselves.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Because men are so much in this trap as well. I mean, they’re forced to kind of be a certain way that doesn’t necessarily serve them. In us taking, just being authentic to who we are and stepping into that, it’s I think, actually better for men as well in an evolved state.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes. They love it. I mean, I’m very close to many men and some of my best friends, I mean most of my best friends.

Melinda Wittstock:         Your best friends are men.

Doria Cordova:                 Best friends.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, yeah. I’ve always had a lot of male friends. I mean, I don’t know, you and I are of a generation where probably, I’m just going have to guess that you were often the only woman in the room.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right?

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         I mean, I know I was. Certainly, even as a financial journalist in the early days for me, as a technology entrepreneur, certainly, so often. There were so few female role models that it was really easy to take on all the characteristics of men because you thought you had to be like that to succeed, but I just had great, great friendships with men. I always have quite easily, in fact. But the type of men that don’t mind a strong woman.

Doria Cordova:                 That the men also share what really is happening with them.

Melinda Wittstock:         Right. They’re emotionally available. Yeah.

Doria Cordova:                 Just to come back for a minute here, this is really important. What I want to do is I want to give a gift to your audience you can put the link there, wherever it is that you put links in your beautiful site. There’s a little eBook that we created that has two things in it. One of them is the Business Success Model, which is the core teaching of our Money & You program and our Global Excellerated Business School for Entrepreneurs. But the second one is a thing called magical exercises that comes from my access to cash book.

I wrote this little book, Access to Cash and in there, there is a chapter called Magical Exercises. I’d like to give it to your audience as a gift because it brings up a thing called “deservability”. This is what woman have been dealing with and I can actually tell you that from standing in the back of rooms and in the front of rooms. In the back of rooms for over 40 years, in the front of rooms, probably 30 years, I have been standing and watching and learning and absorbing, observing and seen that people … That men are trained to have a much higher deservability level than women, but both of them can have that challenge.

There are three stages of money. One is are you in the process of making money, keeping the money that you managed to make or growing the money that you managed to keep. Women actually have a tendency to grow money more than men because it’s also in our DNA to care for families and children even if we don’t have them. It is our tendency to save for the future. Men have a tendency, not all men but some, most of them have a tendency to be very hooked with a thing called the drama hook.

We teach you all about this in our Money & You program. What happens is that they get the same rush that you get from playing very, very tough sports or doing dangerous things and or being intimate with someone. The same chemicals get activated in our bodies as when people are in the search for money. It’s a very interesting thing. A future book will have a whole bunch of communications about this.

What happens is that our deservability level as women because of our nurturing nature and with men, they also need to clear it because a lot of them make a lot of money but can’t manage to keep it and then, don’t manage to also grow it. You have this cycle of drama. The magical exercises clears past decisions that we have made, that we learned from school, from church, from family, so that you can have a clear, powerful decision that what is money to you, what are finances, what do they mean. You have to release a lot of your most negative financial experiences.

I think that your audience would love it if they take the time. All the instructions are there and it really creates a shift to bring up deservability.

Melinda Wittstock:         Gosh, thank you so much for your generosity in offering that because, I think all of us have these money … They’re called money mindset problems, right? We all grew up with these phrases like, “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” or we saw our parents arguing about money or something. I see in business, Doria, so many women doing things like this. Underpricing themselves, over delivering and burning out with that or sometimes not even sending the invoice or not asking for the sale.

I think, so many women really do actually struggle with that and I like how you say deservability, that we think we’re somehow not enough. What do you think is going on with that with women?

Doria Cordova:                 It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter where it comes from. What matters is that even if you are very rich, you need to clear it because some of the poorest people that I have met had been rich people. This has to do with back to the first conversation we had, which if is a human being doesn’t have an experience of sufficiency, it won’t matter how many money they have. Long ago, in the early 80s, there was a student, she was the richest girl that I ever met at the time. I have met many, many since then but she was my first one and I’ll never forget her. She was an heiress and she was due to inherit $200 million. She was only one of many, many children. Her family was true billionaires old money.

She was arguing with me over $1,000. She refused to pay for something that she owed. Then, all of a sudden, it just hit me and I said, “Oh my God,” and I actually said it to her out loud. It was in my head, but I just said it out loud. I said, “Oh my God,” I said, “You have totally forgotten that you’re going to inherit $200 million.” I said, “You are arguing me and you’re fighting with me over $1,000.” I just looked at her and I said, “Oh my God. You are so poor.” It shocked her. It shocked me that I said it because I was having that realization that it didn’t matter how much money you had. She was having that realization that, “Oh my God, it doesn’t matter how much money I have. I am poor.”

The two of us had this epiphany and believe me, she paid it in five minutes and realized and it was the beginning of my … This is early 80s. I think it website 82. I was only 32 years old and me going into the discovery process. Look, money is not going to solve money problems except the current problems that you may have, but when you have a lot of money, then you have a thing called “rich people problems”. We did this whole with taxes as we always do because we are good tax paying human beings and then, I said to my team, “You know, I’m just really happy that I have rich people problems.” They laughed. “Thank God I had rich people problems,” and they laughed. I go, “No, seriously. I’m really, really, really grateful that I have that kind of a problem.”

Problems don’t go away and that’s the biggest lie about money and yes, your current money problems do go away if you start making a lot of money and everybody that has money loves it but it doesn’t take away the problems until you begin to put money and wealth in that perspective of sufficiency. That’s why we’re going to have in our courses, people that are billionaires sitting next to a little guy that took a train across China to get to our program and be able to get complete value for each one of them because it has nothing to do with how much money you have but with what is happening in your consciousness.

Melinda Wittstock:         This is so true. You mentioned Lynne Twist a little bit earlier in the podcast and I think the thing that really revolutionized my relationship with money, the first thing was reading her book, The Soul of Money.

Doria Cordova:                 That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:         Because I think we all think that money is something to aspire to, like a destination. Like, “Oh, when we get here and we have X amount of money,” or say in an entrepreneurial context, “When it’s suddenly a seven-figure business, when it becomes an eight-figure business, when this happens, when that happens, bracket, I’ll be happy.” It’s so false. There’s no real destination. Really, the revolutionary thing for me was that moment in my life where I was like, “Okay, money is just an exchange value. It’s not actually really a thing. It’s something that can be leveraged. It can be used to do amazing things in the world.”

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         That’s when I started to begin, for the first time in my life, to feel that I deserved it. I had the kind of money pattern, Doria, where I’d make a lot of money but it would slip through my fingers just as quickly.

Doria Cordova:                 I was watching Melinda Gates and her husband, Bill Gates. They have a way of being able to communicate to the mega-rich about being philanthropic.

What we, as women, to come back to the conversation, we have to clear these blocks or these mindsets or these decisions that we have made. It is our obligation to clear ourselves first and then, create very successful businesses and be a social entrepreneur and help solve problems, social problems because it’s in our DNA. Just, there are so many tools for people to have. Look, you’ll use my magical exercises that I learned from my teacher, Sondra Ray, back in 1977.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, I love Sondra Ray. She wrote another book that was phenomenal for me called, The Only Diet There Is.

Doria Cordova:                 Oh, yes. She’s reissuing the book, I Deserve Love, which I think that whoever created the word deservability probably learned it from that. I can’t remember who made up the word deservability. Somebody [crosstalk] and I said, “Can I use that word?” They said, “Yeah. It’s out there.” I go, “I never heard of it until I hear from you.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, it’s a really great word because … I mean, I think way back, in a more unconscious rendition of myself, the reason I let money slip through my finger is just by buying things I didn’t need or you know, going on expensive holidays or whatever it was I was doing. Right? I thought that was the thing to do, I thought that would make me happy. It’s because I think deep down-

Doria Cordova:                 [crosstalk]

Melinda Wittstock:         No, because deep down, I think I didn’t really think I deserved there. I wasn’t enough for all this money. It’s fascinating. I had Christy Whitman on this podcast and we were talking about this theme of abundance and money and all of that. She had had a similar pattern in her life.

Doria Cordova:                 A lot of people do.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. Then, once you kind of heal that and I think, the really big shift for me, one of them in stepping into sort of a higher consciousness around this, was actually realizing that, “Wow. Why am I an entrepreneur in the first place? It’s because I want to improve the world. I need resources to be able to do that.”

Doria Cordova:                 That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:         Everything really changed for me at that point and I love how you’re connecting that to where we’re wired, really, for that. We can see things and see opportunities that not all men can. We have this wonderful archetype of feminine intuition. That lovely, you we’re talking about, right brain left brain balance where we can really tap into that right brain in a, oh gosh, in more of a systems thinking, pattern recognition kind of way. That creates whole new business models and whole new ways of doing things.

I didn’t mean to go on for so long about this but you’ve just really triggered such a deep passion in me because I do believe that this is the way forward for women in business.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes. We were talking about that, that we trigger each other [crosstalk]. That’s what we have to do. You have to hang out, you have to be in masterminds, you have to hangout … I want to give a really big shout out to the Evolutionary Business Council. I loved it. I loved it. I loved my Transformational Leadership Council, the TLC. I have had a mentor or have been part of a mastermind since I was 27 years old and I have been around, surrounded by people that have picked me up and inspired me.

There’s no such thing as a solopreneur. That’s one word I don’t like. That’s impossible. There is no such thing as a solopreneur. That’s a very, if I may say, American old, old, old fashioned.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah. It’s all lone ranger. It’s that kind of mythology that I can do it all. No. No, no, no, no.

Doria Cordova:                 It’s very male, where as girls, we like to hangout with our girlfriends.

Melinda Wittstock:         Well, we need to and yet, here’s the conundrum: So many women in business really fight this isolation. I don’t know whether it’s tied into a perfectionism that like, “Okay, I’m going to work really hard with my head down. I’m going to make it really perfect before I show it to the world.” It’s what I used to observe with my Mom used to clean the house top to bottom before the cleaners came. I see a lot of women doing the equivalent of that in business and it’s very isolating.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         Encouraging them to reach out and work alongside or collaborate with other women is really, my gosh, when we do that, we lift each other up. Oh, it’s the best thing.

Doria Cordova:                 It is and that’s why you have to learn. The middle booklet that people are going to get, there was a thing called the Business Success Model and I just want to go through it very, very quickly.

Melinda Wittstock:         Yeah, please.

Doria Cordova:                 This is the core of a successful business or really, or a nonprofit organization. The first layer, think of it as the pyramid and then, you have these little steps. The first step is to learn from masters and that’s what you’re doing. Your passion is to bring in all these masters and these influencers. Earlier, we were having a conversation that I’ll tell the story a little bit later about when I had the opportunity to sit down with Fidel Castro at the height of the Cold War back in ’84. My mentor took me on a little mission from the United Nations. Five of us sat across from him. When I had an epiphany that I was to be an influencer of influencers but it took me six years in order for me to meet my first influencer because my deservability level was not high enough yet, even though I was sitting across Fidel Castro and had already created, manifested and attracted that experience.

It took me years to get used to for my migration of field pick up the way I really started working with amazing influencers that then open up every door for me and began to meet additional Prime Ministers and things like that. I learned from masters. You learn from masters.

Then, the next step in the Business Success Model is you create niche. If we’ve got any Australia, down under, it’s niche. They say niche down under. Niche, a niche is something that you are very much the only one or you have made a variation so stupendous from something that already is very successful that you have to have a niche because you’re marketers. For marketing purposed, you have to differentiate yourself from anybody else. Then, that particular niche, can be leveraged and leverage is a word that when my mentors started the first business school for entrepreneurs of its kind, that word only used to be used on Wall Street, in financial circles.

It was my teacher, my mentor, Marshall Thurber, that began to use that word in circles of business and entrepreneurship. I can honestly say that, honestly, honestly, he was the first one because whenever he would bring up the word leverage, the financial people in our Money & You programs in our business school, would say, “What a brilliant way to use that. I never heard it used in an entrepreneurial sense because they were only thinking of leverage on leveraging money in a different way in the stock market.

Leverage is a word that gets used a lot but it’s one of those words. When people do our Money & You program, they get so shocked that they never learned what leverage really is, so the word system, the word love and the word leverage are the three most misunderstood words in the world, in any language because people don’t really know what the essence of that is. You have to really understand leverage because when you leverage yourself, you leverage your product, your services, that is the key to creating wealth.

Then, you do that through systems. Systems is something that people think that they understand. The key to system is to have it be self-correcting and duplicatable. If it was self-correcting and duplicatable, when you set something up, it is not a system. It can be a guideline. It can be many things but a system is something that inherently, you have to be able to. It has to be able to self-correct. The system itself will tug you when he needs to be fixed and he has to be able to be duplicated. That creates leverage.

That then, the next step of the Business Success Model is a thing called team enlightenment. This is the part where solopreneurs doesn’t work. If you win the lottery tomorrow and somebody gives you a $100 million US that you now have in your bank account, less 35% that the US government-

Melinda Wittstock:         Right.

Doria Cordova:                 You now 65 million. Still a lot more than you had yesterday.

Melinda Wittstock:         Still a lot of money.

Doria Cordova:                 You need a team. You’re going to need good accountants, good bookkeepers, a good person to teach you how to do a foundation because everybody’s going to be asking you for money. You need a team that will teach you how to buy real estate, how to buy gold, how to buy crypto-currencies, how to tokenize your company, how to use technology to grow that money because again, remember the three steps to money. You’re either in the process of making, keeping or growing the money. You’re going to lose it really quick if you don’t have that.

Even if you win the lottery tomorrow, you need a team. Just remember that. The next two steps are the most magical ones, which is the word that our mentor and teacher taught us, the word synergy. When you learn from masters, you create a niche, you leverage that niche through systems, create an aligned team that use a system, you’re going to create a thing called synergy.

Synergy is where you have unexpected results and the word synergy was created from Buckminster Fuller, seeing that you had one metal, M-E-T-A-L, and you had another metal that when you combine them, their strength became much more stronger than each individual metal. That’s what he discover and he brought to the world the principle of synergy. Then, you go to the next step. Once you have all of that, then you are naturally going to have results. That results, depending on the project can be that you have financial results, you are now providing a product or service that’s going to help the world and provide an answer to a major world problem or you’re going to have happiness or you’re going to have an amazing nonprofits that a bunch of people get behind it.

What you now have is this Business Success Model is like a tool. It’s a formula like the same way you learn how to make the best banana cake on the planet that your grandmother taught you. That is what business is. Business is a very simple thing that because people have all these blocks and beliefs and energy around money because of deservability issues, don’t get to see how simple is and to even make it more exciting, now you have businesses that technology can support you for you to really save the world because it won’t matter.

I have a billionaire business partner, who is the number one leading architect on the planet who has created that first solar valley on the planet in China and when he talks to the most wealthy and the most greedy, the most self-centered people, he says, “Good luck with all your money when our four rivers in China dry up and everybody’s having water wars, let’s see how good your money is going to do you then.” He was the guy that influenced the government in passing the first green law in China and now, for China to have invested 3 trillion Yuan in making sure that they went green because of survival.

Now, I went down this little rabbit hole for people to really have an understanding that business, entrepreneur, deservability, tools, generalized principles are key and women, have a bigger gift, which is the gift of service in their DNA, of being mothers. We’re the only ones that can give birth and it is that nurturing that is going to save the world and the world needs saving, boys and girls. Right now, the world needs saving. Get off you little bum and [crosstalk], find a niche, go to work, become rich and save the world.

Melinda Wittstock:         I love exactly how you said that. When both of us were at the Evolutionary Business Council, Doria, wasn’t this so beautiful that when we were talking about the UN Global goals, the 17 things that really, oh my God, need fixing, now, now, now, on the planet if we want to stay on the planet as human beings. The UN had said that it required a shift in global consciousness and evolution in consciousness to be able to solve these by 2030.

The Evolutionary Business Council, which is a group of incredible entrepreneurs and thought leaders and authors, many of us with podcasts like this one or best-selling books and courses and all the things that all of us collectively do, we have a pretty big reach. But we stepped it up and we said, “Okay, what’s the tipping point? What’s the 15% of the world’s population that we need to get into consciousness?” That’s 1.2 billion people. Let’s do that in the next year.

I love it. It’s a big moonshot and it’s something that requires a lot of collaboration and something that I believe that entrepreneurs are really beginning to step into that level of consciousness. Understanding that there’s a vision bigger than your own business, that there’s a way to take your business to create really, an ecosystem rather than a product, to collaborate with another to really solve a lot of these things. I see business really moving into much more of a collaborative sort of space, which requires a bunch of abundance thinkers, actually, to pull off. Right?

Doria Cordova:                 Let’s say sufficiency for now.

Melinda Wittstock:         Okay.

Doria Cordova:                 For now, let’s just say sufficiency, so that you really get it in your vocabulary and you need to know that you live in a world. Right now, if you were to turn on the TV, which I do every day and watch the news and watch all the-

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh gosh, I’m sorry.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes, I do because I was embarrassed a few times, and I really need to be educated in the news. I have to tell you that you need to remember that that is the old paradigm. When you see a bunch of White guys running the world, “running the US,” not the world because I travel all over the world, and you live overseas, so we know that not to be true.

When you see that in the US government, the fight that’s going on right now is between the old paradigm and the new paradigm but the new paradigm has already happened and if you go and look at the 17 UN resolutions, the things that they found that are key, just take one. I took one, which was because I was … The hunger project, which was put on the planet by Lynne Twist, Werner Erhard from the inspiration of Buckminster Fuller and his teachings. I took that one and mine has been to uplift humanity’s consciousness through socially responsible businesses. That’s my purpose. My mission has been to transformation the educational systems around the world and eradicate poverty and hunger. Hunger or poverty, whatever you want to say because they’re husband and wife. Poverty and hunger go right together.

When I took that on, and people say, “Well, do you have a foundation that provides food for the poor?” I said, “No. What I actually do is I churn out social entrepreneurs that will go back to their communities, will go back to their governments, will go back to their regions, find a problem and solve it. It’s my ultimate leverage. That’s what I do.”

When you look at Tony Robbins, we trained him when he was 23 years old for a year. You look at Robert Kiyosaki, you look at Paul Mitchell, the hair dress guy and Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul. These are all students of Buckminster Fuller. If they only think that they got … They’re students of Money & You and if the only thing they got was sufficiency, I did my job. My mentor did his job, mentoress did her job. What you now have is that just take the first steps because you don’t know what your gift is. I had no idea what my gift was.

When I talk about myself, I wish I had a picture, a holographic picture of me when I was 30 years old. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I knew, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I just put one foot in front of the other and just followed the masters and created a niche, leveraged that niche through systems, created a team, created synergy and created results with now, millions and millions and millions of people, knowing this principles not directly from me but from people that have done my programs. It’s your gift.

Melinda Wittstock:         Doria, you are a superhero. My goodness. Something that you said there that was just so beautiful. You just put one foot, then the other. You weren’t even aware but you were listening to something. You had some sort of calling or some sort of purpose.

Doria Cordova:                 That’s right.

Melinda Wittstock:         Or some sort of belief I guess, because I want to just go back there to that 30-year-old version of yourself, where you don’t know then all that you’ve known now, but there must’ve been something guiding you. We’re you a very spiritual person at that time?

Doria Cordova:                 I was just getting into spirituality. I was scared, I didn’t know what I was doing but I knew one thing, which I had a job to do and you remember, this the early 80s. They didn’t even know how many children were starving at the time. There were anywhere between 45,000 to 77,000 because I remember it was 1977, I was 27. I remember that statistic that they thought that 77,000 children were dying daily of starvation and me being so shocked and having grown as a Catholic in Chile until my family took me to the US when I was 12, what I was told as a little Catholic girl, that this was God’s way of handling overpopulation. I was so shocked. I was five or six years old and I came running from church and I told my Mom, “How is that possible that there is a God that kills all these children?” I didn’t know the number of children, but that I knew all these children were starving in India and in China because I was very good student and they were already teaching us that in school.

I had these big eyes and my mother goes, she goes, “What happened?” It was like, “They told us that God is killing all those children because of overpopulation.” She says, “Where did you learn such big words?” “They were talking about it in church.” My mother looks at me and she goes, “Oh my God, how am I going to let this little angel go to church and be accepted in the community and her gift that she already has because she already knows the truth.” She says, “You don’t have to believe everything you hear. Okay? Just remember have your own experience.” She says, “Don’t worry about it.” Then, I said, “All those little kids that we see that are begging for food, are they going to starve? Do they starve? Do they go somewhere and starve?”

My mother was so desperate because all of a sudden, I had been told this. I thought we had starving children in Chile, which we didn’t. Thank God because people are very generous there. They don’t let anybody starve. My grandfather picked two children off the streets and I tried to pick one up. That’s another story.

I blocked that because it was so painful. Whenever I would hear these things and then I meet Buckminster Fuller, and he says, “The only reason we have the kind of starvation and hunger on planet Earth is because people feel scarcity and they think that there’s scarce resources and there was this amazing economist that the whole world follows called Malthusiest and then our world economy is based on the Malthusian that we are handling scarce resources whereas the world has changed so much and technology is not creating more than enough to feed everyone on the planet but it is that consciousness of scarcity that has created that level of scarcity and hunger. That’s what we have to change.” I went, “That’s my job.”

I love money. I love going to the best hotels. I love driving a beautiful car. I love my beautiful home that’s worth a lot, that has that ocean view, that the great spirit gave me for only $315,000 back in 1989 and now, it’s worth a lot. What happens is that when you commit yourself to the betterment of humanity, the great spirit will take care of you and you will have enough to have everything you want and you will have enough to also solve a world problem.

Melinda Wittstock:         Gosh. I know this to be true, personally. I do. You see it in every single person who’s successful. People who come on this podcast, at a certain time or another, they’ve figured that out and that’s what has unlocked, really, the abundance in their lives. The abundance in all aspects of their lives as well. I wanted to ask you, this move from scarcity to sufficiency to abundance. There are so many different aspects of a person’s life. Does one need to be fully balanced in sufficiency to be able to move into abundance? To have sufficiency in love, sufficiency in your-

Doria Cordova:                 Oh, no.

Melinda Wittstock:         All these different areas or in business, in money, in health, in all these different aspects of us.

Doria Cordova:                 I mean, there’s only certain aspects of it. It’s a lifelong process. For instance, a few years ago, I found out that I had scarcity of love with a mate, with a partner, with a beautiful man. There was no way.

I’m also known out in the world. At that time, I was known as DC and people would say, my teachers would say, “DC, you’re actually having a sense of scarcity of love?” I said, “Are you freaking out of your mind? I have the most beautiful family that adores me, I have friends that adore me, graduates of my program, friends and strangers that love me. Of course not. Then one day, I had this realization that I had this scarcity of love with a mate. For all the reasons we spoke about it earlier, a successful woman, and then, to make it even more exciting, I actually brought into my life, I attracted into my life the last learning experience before my beautiful true mate came into my life, which was a man that came in to literally hustle me for money. I had never had that before.

That’s an incredible story. We’ll do another podcast for women on that one. But I couldn’t see it. All my friends could see it and this man was actually like a gigolo, like a hustler that was going to live off of me and I actually couldn’t see it. He looked like he was going to do business and we’re going to grow this business together. When I saw it, when I realized it, I could not believe it. I did work with my spiritual mentors and with my mentors, I began to get a peek. I’ve been meditating transcendental meditation without missing it one day now for 10 years.

One day after my meditation, I went, “Oh my God. My scarcity is in that mate and I brought this amazing teacher of love to teach me that I was so blinded and I so wanted to confirm my belief on scarcity of a mate that I brought a man that never, in a million years, would I be with long-term and I already knew he was a hustler. I already knew he was a gigolo. I already knew he hustled women.” Women called me and wrote to me and did all these things to warn me. That’s another story. We got to do a podcast about that, but anyway. Then, I realized and I cried and I called my best friends and I called up my teachers, my mentor and I said, “That is my ultimate scarcity piece, when a beloved that I can be equals with at every level and will be with me and I began to go to work.” I began to do the clearings. I did the Feng shui love corner and then, poof, it appeared.

He was a friend, somebody that I loved and we have so much in alignment, all the way from political to spiritual, to understanding of money, understanding of wealth and it happened. Every once in a while, I don’t have time now to go through my history but the reason why I don’t attach to money, my first love was killed a month before we were married.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh.

Doria Cordova:                 I had two miscarriages and I also lost my best little friend when I was six years old. I had anchored that. When first connected with this beautiful, gorgeous, German, word technologist, spiritual, Maui man. A couple of times he was late and it was like, “No, he’s not late. He died. He died.” It was like, “Whoa, I got it. That’s the old, that little 18-year-old and began to love her, nurture her and he would come home. Fine, he just got distracted with a friend that he ran into at the bookstore or whatever,” and I would say, “I just want you to know that I’m healing this part of me and thought that you died.” He was like, “Okay.” I would just be able to share that aspect and it would heal a little bit more, heal little bit more.

I can’t say that it’s completely healed when I’m completely so in love with him. We were having dinner last night and we were just having this amazing moment in this crazy little restaurant and I looked at him and I said, “God, please don’t take him away from me. I love him so much. Please don’t take him away from me.” I took a deep breathe and I go, “There’s my 18-year-old. I love her. It’s okay. Just let me nurture you. My little 18-year-old that feels that she’s going to lose him because she loves him so much.” I was just able to just be with me, didn’t tell him anything, didn’t share anything. I just nurture her, heal her right there. Kept eating my beautiful food and then it passed just like all emotions passed and then, I was able to be present with him again because we need to do the work on a daily basis and sometimes on a moment to moment because fear storms may not disappear until the last breath of our lives.

I don’t know, but I do know that when we encompass every aspect of ourselves, that’s when we begin to feel safe in the world and our fears, whatever it is, mine is of death, for others it’s something else. That’s when we begin to truly feel safe on the planet because we do our Ho’oponoponos. We do our-

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh, I love a Ho’oponopono. Ho’oponopono has revolutionized my life.

Doria Cordova:                 We have to do a Ho’oponopono together and that is what something that people really need to understand that no matter how successful you get, how much money you have, how much of an impact you have had in the world, those moment to moments of healing of self and of that inner child or that 17, 18-year-old that was so in love with her lover that was killed, that is the aspect of you that maybe you … Forever, I might have that 18-year-old, but at least I know what it is.

Don’t hide from yourself. Allow yourself to tell yourself what is your biggest fear because it is that, that’s going to allow you to be the Shero, the warrior, the one that’s going to go out and tackle the world and have everything that you want in your heart, whatever it is, because not everyone wants the same thing. Different people want different things.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh gosh. How beautiful. Doria, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours and hours. Of course, you’re going to have to come back on this podcast. I know that I’m going to want to listen to this episode again and again. Thank you so very much and I want to make sure that everybody knows, we’ll put it in the show notes where to get your generous, generous gift. Thank you so much.

Doria Cordova:                 Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:         How can people find you and work with you?

Doria Cordova:                 Well, I’d like for you to have link of all my different websites. I have too many. I’m very easy to find in Facebook. I’m still under DC Cordova. Even though I let people follow me, I’m almost at my limit and they can see about me and I’m very easy to find. I’m at dccordova.com. But I like to put some links in your site that will have about my Money & You program, the Global Excellerated program and the things that I’m moving into. I love technology. This comes from my legal background. People need to learn about tokenizing their businesses. They need to understand about the block chain technology, which by the way, totally is about collaboration. Totally, totally about collaboration. Definitely, we got to have that podcast.

Then, the thing is that I will provide some gifts for people and for those of you who very little money that are listening to this, if you just Google my name, there’s bunch of podcasts and I love it. I have all these people that come to me. When they go, “I’m here.” They like Money & You which costs $2,000, $2500, it depends where you do it. Right? I go, “Fantastic, I’m so glad you’re here.” They say, “I first heard your podcast three years ago. I had zero money. I went and Googled you the way you said and I’ve done all the exercises. Now, I have enough. I paid for this program upfront. I’m getting out of debt and I am now working on my life purpose and I have completely shifted my life, so I’m here for Money & You because I know this is the big one.”

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh.

Doria Cordova:                 Sometimes, I cry because these are people that for three years, they’ve done everything and they have now gone out of that scarcity mentality and they are now feeling good enough to begin to attract money. The ones that are really exciting are the ones that write to me and have become rich and some of the gifts I received, I mean, I’m not ashamed to tell you, I get amazing gifts in the mail and in places. Round trips to Hawaii, spa treatments, checks from people that have connected with people that I know nothing about and have connected with people either in programs or in Facebook, have done businesses together and they feel that I was the one that connected them.

It’s a gift that I think that I could give it and this is when you become truly philanthropic in your heart, you will be invited to the best parties, you will be squeezed by Bill Clinton and this a joke that I have. I have little joke. I went to meet Bill Clinton at a fundraiser. I wanted to take picture with him and he just barely touched me. He moved me over, so that I could take a good picture and I was so excited. I said, “Oh my God, I’m being squeezed by Bill Clinton.” That’s where that joke comes from. He really didn’t but I made it up. You get to go to the best parties and get treated as a little queen that you are but you have to do it from the heart.

People have transparent eyes. Everybody knows everything, so just drop into your heart, do the work, have fun and have a fantastic life.

Melinda Wittstock:         Oh. Doria, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us.

Doria Cordova:                 It’s an honor.

 

 

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