Daryl Wizelman is a dynamic originator-focused senior mortgage banking executive whose background reflects over 32 years of standout business leadership. His passion, direction & vision have been a transformative force at each of the organizations where he has served. At Draper and Kramer Mortgage, he leads, manages, and recruits loan originators and support staff in Nevada and California.
Daryl possesses an exceptional talent for developing people and organizations alike. He has an accomplished record in strategic planning, operations improvement, business growth, and cultural leadership. Integrity, loyalty, initiative, and dedication are central to Daryl's leadership philosophy. He is the author of Heart Leader: A Personal Journey to the Heart of Business and Life, which details his unique personal and business experiences and his lessons on positive leadership.
“Humility is essential for successful people because luck, opportunity, and timing play a significant role in both success and failure.” – Daryl Wizelman.
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I have a guest for this episode. We bring on these guests and there are a few people probably that I bring on that I know pretty well and I'm just excited. As with a lot of our episodes, we don't have a lot of planning. It's fun for me to sit back, ask questions, and see what unfolds, but I'd like to introduce the Insight Interview world to my friend Daryl Wizelman. Daryl, welcome to the Insight Interview World.
Steve, thanks for having me on.
You bet. Daryl, we kick off in certain ways. I'm going to ask you some questions. The first one, it's pretty simple. It's simply as we come into the show before we even get to know who you are and what you're all about. I want to know what you're excited about and what you're grateful for.
Maybe I'll start with gratitude first. I'm in my late 50s and it's become more apparent that friends, coworkers, people that I know and even family members have faced issues, whether it's financial, physical, or emotional. My personal opinion is that everybody's in pain and that is physical pain, emotional pain, and/or financial.
When I think about what I'm grateful for, it’s my pain not being so great that it disables me from being a good father, husband, friend, co-worker, and leader. That's the first thing that I'm grateful for, my health. I believe that my health is key because if I'm not healthy, I can't be a service to the people that I care about.
The first thing that I'm grateful for is my health. Second, I would say is the health of my wife Dominique and my three children. I've also seen and heard and in a leadership position, some of it is like the Mel Gibson movie, What Women Want. You think you want to know what other people think and feel until you hear what they think and feel, then you're like, “I'm not sure I wanted that.”
In my role, I listen to a lot of people in a lot of pain and I say, “Thank God that my wife, children, my parents, and my brothers are healthy.” That is at the top of my gratitude list. Way down our smaller things like the opportunities that I have and the place I am in life. My desire is to continue to work on myself to improve things like this, but overwhelmingly, my gratitude lies in my family's emotional, financial, and physical health.
I feel like we could just go, “Everyone, have a great day. Thanks for reading.” One of the things that jumped out at me about that. Daryl, the way you expressed it that you're in is not so great. One of the things that I liked about that is you're not sitting here saying, “I don't have any pain in anything.” It feels like we all do. You said that. I appreciate that.
One thing about leadership, Steve, that I've learned over the many years is transparency and vulnerability are the two keys to relational success. Both vocational and personal. The people who are, we can refer to them as posers, are doing a disservice to themselves. Whether we talk about ego or the lizard brain or however we marry these things up.
Transparency and vulnerability are the two keys to relational success, both vocational and personal.
Being self-aware and, to some degree, self-secure can amount to being open to transparency and vulnerability to say, “I'm no different than you. I'm in pain. I'm scared. I have issues and problems, just like you do. They may be different, but their issues and problems nonetheless.” One thing that I certainly heard as a leader and this is not about me as much as it about the position that I have. People think, “Daryl doesn't have any problem.”
It begins to separate me from the people that I want to have relationships with. When I share my issues and problems with them, it draws them in and lets them say, “Daryl, I'm not alone. Daryl has issues and problems, too.” A cornerstone of good leadership is transparency, vulnerability, and telling people what is wrong, what hurts, and what you're scared of.
Again, I knew it would be like this. I could take that down so many cul-de-sacs. It's crazy. Before we do, you've already brought up leadership and stuff. Do us all a favor. I could read your bio and again, I know quite a bit about you and some of your background, but it's helpful to hear from you. How do you see your background? Would you mind taking maybe 2 to 3 minutes? I know it's a huge story and it's a big one and a great one. It got all kinds of ups and downs, but it’s your story. Practice telling us your story in the whole 2 to 3-minute sketch.
What people need to understand first is how it started. I come from a household with an alcoholic mother and a drug-addicted father. I was subject to physical abuse for many years. I was the leader of my twin younger brothers, starting about nine years old. This was my first leadership experience leading these two people. They still work for me now and I'm still leading them, which is ironic and interesting.
Not the smartest person you ever met. I have ADHD. I struggled tremendously in school. Unstable home life and ADHD paired me to go down a path of independence. Relying on myself wasn't great as a younger person because I didn't do well in school. I barely graduated from high school. I went to Junior College before graduating from a health dates school in which I charged that entire education on a City Bank visa I still use.
After College, I floundered around law school and some other things, not knowing what I wanted to do. I met somebody and we started a little mortgage business, just two people in 1990. Even there, I charged the rent on the same bank Visa credit card I used to fund my college education. That business, which started small, grew into a $3 billion a year and $60 million revenue business.
I like a lyric from a song that says, “The mighty Mississippi River starts in Minnesota with five steps down.” Everything is a puddle at the beginning, but when you look at my business and the success of the business, I refer back to something you and I discussed a number of times called the Success Pie. It's for equal components, look, opportunity, timing, and me.
I would say from the time we started the business in 1990 for the growth period, the significant growth period over the next ten years. We had luck, opportunity and timing in our faith. I don't want this to seem like, “Here's the guy who's so smart. Everything he touched turned gold,” because the truth is luck, opportunity, and timing played a much bigger piece in our success than anything I did.
However, I was a component but probably not the most significant component. Anyway, we grew this company to about 600 employees. We sold the business in July of 2007 to Countrywide. I live in Calabasas, California. Countrywide was headquartered in Calabasas. We sold the business to them and in an all-stock deal. About weeks later, the stock went from $37 to about $4. We all know that story. It led to a lot of stress because we had migrated all our 600 employees to Countrywide as the financial meltdown occurred. A lot of these people began getting laid off and losing their jobs.
People would be emailing me and calling me, “Daryl, can help me get another job,” at a time when you are getting another job. The industry was basically dark. I woke up one day and had some bumps on my torso. In addition to being a mortgage guy, thanks to WebMD. I'm now apparently also a doctor and I self-diagnose with shingles.
It wasn't that painful. I went to work that day and had lunch with a friend at a restaurant. Eating that lunch with shingles and having a low white blood cell count and low immunity led to me getting bacterial meningitis and almost dying in the hospital. I received the last rights and said goodbye to them. In that experience, I got through that few days in serious condition. I ended up being in a hospital for a couple of weeks, but I asked for a pad of paper and began writing what I'll refer to as the book that I ended up riding, which is called Heart Leader.
It's about being a leader who leads from their heart first and head second, which there is a big lack of in Corporate America. Anyway, I wrote this book and ended up publishing the book. I ended up getting out of the hospital. I was speaking around the book for several years, then got back into the mortgage business in 2010.
Now, I have been at Draper and Kramer leading the West for years and I'm happy. I'm married. I have three kids. I live in Southern California and am connected to living a balanced life. As much as I love my work, which I do, I also think living a balanced life is essential, especially if either you or someone close to you has been touched, as I have with a significant illness and facing death. It restored. It reminded me how important life away from business is.
The only problem Is I got this divine and this is why I don't prepare for these things. I used to do that, “Here's the ten questions I’m going to ask.” I get to one. There's so much I could go back to there. I am particularly intrigued by your quadrant model. When you said that, I wrote that down and made a little circle that looks like a bullseye. It's got a cross in it that has these four quadrants, luck, opportunity, timing, and me. It struck me when you were saying that. As a coach, I'm sitting there going. There's only one of those things that you can ultimately have a direct impact on.
That's why when people lead with arrogance and I would challenge, I'll say close to 100% of successful people to look at luck, opportunity, and timing and say, “Humility is essential because just as luck, opportunity, and timing have played such a significant role in your success. It could also play a role in failures,” as it has in my life.
After selling my business in 2007 and what happened, the mortgage banking world and the financial crisis. That wasn't me. That was bad luck. It was a bad timing, but I got to look in the mirror and say, “You're the same guy who built a big business, who sold it at the wrong time.” I did the best I could and made the best decision I could at the time, but luck, opportunity, and timing, I would say, for any vocational or relational entity is crucial.
I certainly want to hone in on the me part. I'm curious to hear from you, given the previous years of the economics and not even the mortgage, many other industries but mortgage. That's your world. How relevant is equal thinking now? Aren't people nowadays like, “Is it going to be five years and we're going to be talking about 2022 and 2023 as if like that was bad timing?” How relevant and how much do you speak to other people now, maybe about the me, luck, timing, and opportunity thing?
Constantly, more now than when things are going well. With some salespeople, I almost prefer that they think it's all. That will then propel them to more success since they think they're 100% of the reasoning behind that. In challenging times like now, I want to remind people who get so down and want to lay in bed with the covers over their heads. When you look over the last twenty years, fifteen plus of them have been good to the more banking.
You can't expect every year to be great. You still need to do the foundational things that build and maintain your business, but you can't control interest rates. You can't control the number of houses that are on the market. Do the best with what you have but, at the same time, find some things in life that allow you to hyperlink away from your anxiety and fear about where you are in business and to enjoy stuff, whether that's working out or reading or traveling or a sport or some type of entertainment, movies, or TV. We all need a place to go to get away with luck. Opportunity and timing are not in our favor.
Do the best with what you have, but at the same time, find some things in life that allow you to hyperlink away from your anxiety and fear.
I almost feel like we could dissect. That's your next book. There's a work in you. I see a book cover. It's got that quadrant on it somehow. Maybe I got to look at it again. What acronym can we make out of that? MOLT. I don't know. We'll figure something out there. I almost feel like you can take each one of those and refer to yourself and see yourself when lucky there goes one way or another. What is your narrative about that or about opportunity when it feels like it's not? What do you think about that? I know it's a bigger thing, but about each one of those. How do you see yourself in those?
I see myself lumped in with everybody else because in my experience in life, it has shown me that every dog has its day and every dog has days that are rough and because of that, you got to recognize that although we may be different relationally or vocally. We’re not that different. In other words, if you took the person out of the mortgage business and he or she sold shoes in Nordstrom. There would still be ups and downs. There would still be luck, opportunity, and timing involved. It's all the same thing.
It certainly gets exacerbated when things are going poorly because we tend to put the spotlight on ourselves. The power behind this success pie or failure pie depends on how you want to look at that. Similar pie. It's exactly the same because it's 25% me. Success is only 25% me, but failure is only 25%. This is more crucial now. Certainly, there are almost no recession-proof businesses.
At some point, people have to suffer. Looking at the success, I resonate with people and I say, “When I reflect and look back, you're right. This opportunity came. This timing was good. I got lucky because I met this person or this account fell in my lap.” If people are honest in their reflection, it's 100% true that luck, opportunity, and timing are the main components of success or failure. That is 100% outside of your control.
When you embrace that, you get to a more peaceful and joyful place. I don't like the word happy. That's a strange word, but I'll say joyful and peaceful, which is, I believe, at the core of what we're all looking for. When we look in the mirror and say, “I'm ugly because I'm not doing X amount of business.” I would say, “You're the same handsome person you were when you were doing a ton of business. You're the same person doing the same things, but they're outside components that lead to success or failure that are 100% outside of your control and you got to embrace that.”
You have to utilize other things relationally hobbies to try to get yourself out of this negative vortex that we tend to be in especially the longer the downturn goes on more. If it's a month or 2 months or 3 months, it's not that big of a deal. It's tough to maintain positivity and keep your head on straight when business isn't coming in. It's challenging financially. Maybe you are faced with other problems as well, physically and emotionally. Maybe even some of these things are tied together, so it's even more important to focus on a balanced life during these times.
I thought you were very kind when someone said, “Things are going bad and I'm ugly.” I thought you were going to say, “Even when they go good, you're ugly. Come on, let's get honest.”
I only say that to myself.
I also heard that you're helping people with some math. It's only 25% you and you win. It's only 25% you when you lose. If it's 25% you and you win, 50% you when you lose. That's some bad math. When we're on an episode like this, it's fascinating to talk about these things but you're in the arena with people. Not that I want to go focus on it, Daryl, per se but you can share this with people. You're saying every day, there are some people that are in the vortex, and these wise words and thoughtful pinings, great.
You’re still getting people going, “This is brutal.” Maybe there are people with the covers over their heads. What are some other things or ways that you've helped people be in the vortex? I heard one, which is buying something else outside of it. Don't keep focusing on it. You got to hear them all the time. How else are you helping people, men and women, who are in your employ, maybe your friends or some of the supermarkets in the vortex? What are some other things that you can think of to go, “Here are some things that we can do in the vortex?”
You hit on it at the start of this call, which is gratitude. When things are challenging, we tend to fall into a place of sadness and maybe even, “Why me?” We lack gratitude. We lose sight of the abundance of great things in our lives. This part of my therapy counseling of people who work with me is asking them overtly, “Tell me about the blessings in your life, your children, your spouse, your parents, and what it is in life that you're grateful for?”
Is that more or less important to you than earning X amount of dollars? I would say legacy is built on relational success. Not financial success. I like to remind people that living in a state of gratitude and having faith can be challenging. I speak because, as you know, it's been challenging for me. To believe everything is going to be okay and utilize what I would refer to as social proof.
When I talk to people who have been in business for several years and I say, “Have you attain some success? Yes. Are you grateful for that success? Yes. What's the difference between then and now? You're the same person but not doing as well because of market conditions like we talked about.” You still got to live in a place of gratitude. You can't mistreat the people closest to you.
I would say in a downtime like this in the mortgage banking business, it's almost more important to have additional gratitude. To say to people around you, “I realize that because I'm struggling in my business, I may not be as present, as loving, as good of a listener and as good as when things are going. I want to tell you how grateful I am to you for hanging with me through the ups and the downs.”
To answer your question, gratitude the cornerstone for everything because when we're all upset, upset begets upset, anger begets anger and we get into this negative spiral instead of coming back, recalibrating and focusing on what we have in our lives that we can be proud of. It starts with the people that are closest to us, spouse, children, siblings and gratitude.
There's that vortex again. That's incredible. I wrote down it's more important to have additional gratitude. You've made me think of a word again. We're writing books together, you and I.
How about compounding gratitude?
I'm going to swipe into that one and call it my own. I'll give you no credit for that.
Tiny font.
That's great. I've been trying to practice this. I'll practice this with you. I'm not quite great at it yet, but I've been trying to do this where I ask someone. You have all these things in your life. I'm doing this with you now. Let's say you could think of every aspect of your life, which we can't because it's pretty complex and layered. You think of all the things in your life like you mentioned, your kids, your health and the tough stuff.
Let's say tough and good. If there were some mystical way to have it all out there and you can see it all, it added up to 1,000 things, good and bad. You could only get a thousand. You were able to lay it out in front of you. What's the score? Everything. The little things like I like chocolate. I see a puppy. I love the everything. Everything that's good and everything that's rough and tough. You can only have a thousand. Is it 500 to 500? What's your score now and everything?
I'm going to tell you the honest answer, which is I don't know, but I'll tell you my perception. It may not be right, but I'll tell you what I choose to believe in my heart that it's about 950 to the good. It might be higher than that.
In good times. It's probably 975 and in bad, it's 950. I've tried to play that math because we all have days, like you say. I swear, there are some days where I'm going, “It's 300 to 700 now for the bad.” What I hear you saying is that's because I have an amplified. I'm not talking about making stuff up, either. I'm talking about reality. The reality of all the good and the bad. By the way, I loved your score. 950. It doesn't imply there aren't bad things. What would it look like for us to do that math well? I don't mean to chalk it up to a math problem because that's ahead. Not a heart thing, but even the math can jar me into going, “You know it's 980 to 20, right?”
Whether it's childhood or society, there's something that encourages many people to focus on what's not going right instead of what is, then it becomes 95% of the time focusing on the negative and almost no time focusing on the positive. That's a paradigm shift that needs to occur. I don't want to appear Pollyanna. I'm in pain like the rest, but happiness is a choice. You can choose to be happy or be miserable. That's up to you.
Happiness is a choice. You can choose to be happy, or you can choose to be miserable.
If you're in the vortex, though, you would be maybe convinced that the three other quadrants are choosing for you. That's the interesting thing about being in the vortex. What we're saying makes sense now. When you're in the vortex, it's weird. We can't do math.
I bring you back to the success pie, instead of using it on a vocational level. I ask you to use it on a personal level. With your spouse, Rafa, who I love, is luck, opportunity, and timing of some components and the success of your marriage. I'm going to guarantee that the answer is yes. Now, are you part of it? Yes.
Don’t even do that one. Luck takes a 90% part of that.
That's why even in downtime, we do have to focus on these gratitude components and choosing to be happy because I don't know of any problems that were ever solved using fear and anxiety.
That's some good neurobiology. By the way, there's a whole episode of just about that. There are some people who choose fear and anxiety as the catalyst. It's a short-term thing, maybe, but it's the ongoing catalyst and next thing, you're in the vortex.
I can see that.
That's why you can articulate it so wonderfully well. We might even call the episode 950 to 50 like that's the score. We’ll call it something. We're running out of time. I wish I could stay here forever with you, but you mentioned something at the beginning that you were grateful for and I want to return to quickly and its growth. You're ability to grow. My question for you is, where are you growing now? It may even be where you need to grow. What are you excited about from a growth perspective for you?
I always say, “Today, I hope to learn something that I didn't know yesterday about any area of my life.” I want to be open to growing in all areas of my life, mostly relationally. I would say that the most important growth component for me is to be as attractive as a human being as possible to the people that I care about.
Things like emotional intelligence, which takes into account how I respond behaviorally, are huge. I'm an emotional person. The response that I might have emotionally, I'm working on quelling to a calmness external. My behavior represents calm, even though inside, it's anything but. I would say the focus of my personal growth is on that now.
As funny and as wacky as this seems, even as something as ridiculous as graphic and people cutting you off or not signaling or driving, which I would say is poor driving or bad customer service, which exists in too many companies across this business landscape. What I'm trying to do is say to myself, “Daryl, I can't control what the other guy driving does. I can't control what this airline does. I can't control FedEx, but I can't control my reaction to it.”
Ultimately, how big of a component is it in my overall joy? When I look at it, it's infinitesimal. It's almost not. Who cares if a guy doesn't signal and pulls in front of you? Who cares? Emotionally, I'm getting into a red area, but externally, I'm working on keeping it calm all the time. I found that the older I get, the easier it is for me to do that.
I'm seeking the answer to that question, but I would say calm is a superpower. The calmer someone is, the better able they are to think clearly and make good decisions at the moment. Instead of being hijacked by emotion, I'm working on controlling my response to be more kind, thoughtful, and grateful, even if the recipient doesn't deserve it, because that's a reflection of my own joy.
That's a beautiful growth area. I have to laugh a little bit because I tell people, “If you want to practice emotional intelligence and you're thinking of some environment to practice. Go for a drive.” Driving, for some reason, in our world is this activity that everybody else other than us sucks at, which is funny to me. It must be particularly many for you because you were a professional race car.
Given that background, people drive with me, they say, “For the most part, you drive pretty calmly.” Although, you and I had an experience in a car some years ago that you probably wouldn't agree with that. Anyway, I say, “No one else out here knows it's a race but me.” When you're a professional race car driver, everybody knows we're racing against each other. They're all trained and licensed, but in the world, like I said, those people sitting in those cars have problems too, emotional, financial, and physical problems.”
We don't know what they're doing, so to judge them because they cut in front of us is more about our own angst and less about them because if you pull them over and say, “Did you know you did that?” I'll bet you in a great majority of the cases, they say, “No, I didn't even see it.” It's not about them saying I'm going to cut off Daryl.” They don’t even know Daryl. It comes back to us putting ourselves in front of a mirror and saying, “How can I be better in a situation where I'm entirely in control of my response?”
That's so good. I love that calm is a superpower. Maybe that's what our episode will be called or 950 or you suck at driving.
Somebody said that, too.
Thank you. This has been great. Before we sign off, off and we do have to go. Anything that you hoped I would ask you that I didn't?
Where to send the check for $20 million, but maybe we'll cover that on the next episode.
You're awesome. I can't even begin to thank you enough. I hope that people read this, one of the cool things about, I suppose, a show is it's evergreen. You can go back and re-read transparency and vulnerability. The quadrant itself is going to cause me to think, “I got to go back and understand that.” Hearing your story and knowing where you come from, there are so many insights. Daryl, I'm grateful for our time.
Thanks, Steve. I hope some people are inspired and learn some things. I hope we brought some joy and some clarity to people.
We did. As we always say, it doesn't matter. Daryl's thoughts, ideas, and insights matter, but it doesn't. It doesn't matter what mine are. What matters is you, as the reader, what are you walking away with? That's what matters the most. Thank you, Daryl. Folks, we'll see you next time on the Insight Interviews.
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