Daniel Gefen is an online entrepreneur who has had crazy, wild successes. He seemed to know what he wanted at the crucial times, how to hold out and when to move on. Yet, he’s also had times in his life when he felt burnt out and unsuccessful. Daniel truly knows how to connect with people and how communication can help you and can boost your business.

Contact Info

• Website: www.DanielGefen.com
• Blog: FB: DanielGefen Instagram: @IPickBrains
• Podcast: Can I Pick Your Brain
• email: Daniel@DanielGefen.com

Most Influential Person

• Rabbi Gersey

Effect on Emotions

• When I’m in a mindfulness space, so my emotions are calmer. Mindfulness doesn’t necessarily take away an emotion, but it kind of calms it down. It makes the emotion just a little bit more manageable.
• So a person could be really angry and you can get into a mindfulness place and it doesn’t mean the anger’s going to go away.
• You have a right to be angry sometimes. There’s reason to be angry. The difference between being angry and out of control and [rooooooar] I’m just going to smash everything down and I’m going to break relationships and I’m going to regret things that I do and then there’s [deep breath], I’m feeling angry but it’s okay.

Thoughts on Breathing

There’s a few things I would say about that. Number one is, scientifically, the more we breathe, and the deeper we breathe, the more oxygen we get. First of all going through our blood and to our brain.
Scientifically that by itself biologically calms the body down. It’s impossible for the body not to calm down when you just breathe deeply and you slowly let it out, like when you breathe and breathe and breathe, the body just feels calm. The other thing that breathing does which is really good is it gives you time to respond and reflect. A lot of times I might be in a situation where I kind of just … the classical example is the one I gave [earlier] when I could have just opened up the door to my house and just gone in, would have literally head-butted the chaos.
I would have just gone ‘boom’ and it would have been reactive. It would have been an argument. It would have been a fight. And there’s fight or flight. It would have been a fight, or me just leaving the house because I just can’t deal with it. Instead of the fight or flight, I was able to create a space of time where I just became aware that I don’t need to fight and I don’t need to flight.
I could just be in the moment and bring, through my energy everybody else into the moment with me, into my calm. In other words, you can either be pulled into someone else’s chaos or you can pull them into your calm. You try to pull others into your calm rather than let others pull you into their chaos.

Suggested Resources

• Book: Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson
• Book: Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• App: Switch off the phone

Bullying Story

I was bullied in high school. I was bullied emotionally. I had this big mole on my face and it had hair growing out of it. As you can imagine, as a high school kid, that’s not fun. All the kids would point at it and make fun of it.

They’d call me spider face and all sorts of names. My teeth stuck out and they would call me Goofy. When I got braces I was made fun of for that. I was actually kept down a year for my misbehavior and also they said they didn’t have room in the year above. I don’t know how true that is.

It happened to be that my younger brother is a year younger than me so I ended up being in the same year as my younger brother. People would ask us all the time; “are you twins?” And I would say, “no, I’m a year older than him”. And so they would say, “oh, so you must be really dumb”.

I remember walking into a new class once and there were a few seats available, but everyone put something next to them so I couldn’t sit next to them. That was my wonderful, beautiful, high school experience.