Interview with Daniel Mangena: Dream with Dan

I’m groovy Shane, how are you doing?

I was born and raised in East London in the UK. I made three attempts to escape the UK, and it didn’t work. And then when I finally got out the last time in 2002 1018 I just hadn’t returned there. Now I call Cabo Mexico pretty much home here. My son was born here back end of last year, so we’re probably going to do Mexico for at least a little bit.

It’s also one of the few places where it still feels like it’s not a communist ration, not to get political. So I kind of like that. I can live my life on my own terms. So yeah, we’re here.

I’ve got a six-year-old stepdaughter. My wife is Russian American.

Fun fact: I didn’t know this when I got married—did you know that the highest mortality rates of wives killing their husbands is Russian women killing their husbands.

So, okay, I do my best to be a really great husband because I like to be alive. And yeah, I write books, speak, podcast, and love hanging out with cool people like you and just serving people in coming to an understanding that abundance is our birthright. It’s not something unnatural, it’s not something mystical that we have to chase after—a hustle for. It’s a natural state that we can return to, and that’s what I get to do.

So my mom’s got five kids, my dad’s got about 16, but we didn’t grow up with all of them. I grew up with two of my half siblings being around, but not any of the older ones. So five, I’d say seven of us growing up on a regular basis. My older half sister’s got two kids. My brother’s got three kids. My mum’s kids include two girls and two boys—four kids. My sister’s got two. There’s me with two, the sister beneath me hasn’t got any, and my little sister’s got one. And then my nephews and nieces are now old enough to have kids, so I’m a great uncle as well, which is cool.

No, 16 all together. All together, but I say actively—yes, seven of them actively—and that’s awesome. Hi, you’re a brother or sister. How you doing?

Yeah. But maybe small wins, maybe I’ll just disappear.

Covers the place. Yeah, there’s lots of ocean for me to swim in and never come back. The thing is, I think growing up in East London was really interesting because the pocket of East London where I grew up was a cross-section—a cosmopolitan mix. I was in Stratford in East London, near where they have the Olympics. But then my school was a little bit deeper in a place called Plaster. In Plaster, you’ve got predominantly Filipino community, Bengali community, Pakistani community, white British, and then Caribbean immigrants. So this was a real melting pot. I think, what would you call it? I don’t know what you call it in America, but up to about 10 or 11—I don’t know, is that grade school? Yeah, great school. It was like a melting pot. There was this great mix—everyone was there.

Then my parents moved to a predominantly white area when I was, I want to say, 11. And it was a culture shock for me—like, “Oh, okay, I guess that we don’t do that.” It was really interesting because in high school, when I closed out high school, they took a picture every five years at my old school. There were 880 students and staff in this picture, and I was senior prefect, so I was in the front row on the side of the teacher and head teacher. There were 18 ethnic people in the entire picture, including students and staff, out of 880. It was really interesting because now, as I’ve grown up, I’ve spent years almost being the envoy of ethnicity in areas where there wasn’t much cultural diversity, and it’s been that way in the craziness of combination.

I dated a girl whose family is from India, and I remember once I was invited to her house. I don’t think her mom quite knew who was in the car, but she said, “Oh, your friends in the car invited more chocolate than you were expecting.” And I found out afterward that there had never been a black person in the house before—ever—and her granny was in the house. Then her granny came down and fell down the stairs, saying, “Why is that black person in our house? What happened?” Then it turns out—I speak some Hindi and Tim ODU—so I was chatting with Granny, and she said, “What the fudge? There’s a Hindi with me.” And then I got invited to stay for dinner and all that. And afterward, NAMS was like, “Yeah, nanny’s never spoken to a black person before.” It was really interesting that I ended up being the first interaction.

Fast forward to what I do now. I kind of find myself being around a different way of looking at abundance. I’m bringing that new approach into people’s lives and giving them the opportunity to play with something that maybe wasn’t a part of their world before—maybe was off in the distance. And you had these ideas where people said you have to work hard and it has to be a struggle, and it doesn’t happen like that. I’m not worthy. Getting to be the person that brings that difference into people’s lives is really, really yummy for me.

Yeah, I’m here for now, for good, the next good year or two, we’re going to be here.

You’ve got a better gospel. What’s happening in different circles.

Funny, because growing up in a situation where my family didn’t have any of these stories—no stories about mixing things up—was unique. In terms of how we were all chopped and changed, there was nothing really around the racial thing. I never had that limiting belief programmed in my family, and in those formative years in kindergarten and beyond, everybody was just human. It’s really interesting that my first experience of that was people saying, “Oh my God, can I touch your hair?” And they would touch my hair, and that’s the story.

What was cool was being in a space where I didn’t have preconceived notions or judgments, and I was able to embody what it feels like not to have them. I could give people the space to let go of those judgments too, and being the agent of change through who I am ties into what I do now with abundance. I’m not putting on a costume to share this stuff—this is what I live. I share what I live and what I do, and I think that’s really helped people take it on as well.

If I’m having a bad day, I’m having a bad day, and I’ll share about it on social media. I was sharing on my call yesterday that I had a massive freak out. I made some massive investments in my personal development last month, then had a massive meltdown and had to hit pause, so I needed to chill. I’m a real person—real people do real stuff. Through the path I’ve gone, I can share it with them, and they say, “Oh, I’ve got permission too to hit pause. I’ve got permission to realize that I’m going to have panics as well. That doesn’t change when I get to a certain level.” Everybody goes through this, and they have permission to love and have compassion for themselves on that journey.

And then had lost it. I don’t call it an exact month, but we’re looking at—I was certified by February; it was gone, or March it was gone. It took me seven or eight months to get there, and within three or four months, it was gone.

I mean, here’s the thing. One of the teachers I share something I call the flow funnel. The flow funnel cross-sections reality as we look at it and examines the different aspects that need to be in place for anything to show up. Regardless of whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re always giving a direction—an instruction—the direction we’re going to be moving in. We’ve got a choice to consciously step in. For me, that’s one intention: consciously choosing the direction I’m going in, right? There’s got to be a direction, which there always is, consciously or unconsciously. There’s got to be an emotional capacity to hold the thing. I have to be in an emotional place that matches what I want. I need to believe it’s possible and have thoughts that lead to behaviors that lead to it showing up, and then I need to have an environment that supports it. I need to have actions and behaviors. I need to be around the right people, whatever the thing is.

Mindset-wise, my mindset was on point—you couldn’t fault it. I was reading Think and Grow Rich at 17 years old; I wasn’t out playing computer games. I got my first games console when I was 19. That’s one of the things I celebrated—really doing well in life. Before then, I didn’t have that. I was reading books, and that’s what I was doing. My mind had no doubt whatsoever that this is what I was going to do. But I had no experience. I was 19 years old, so I had no experience with money. And then I had no emotional capacity to hold; the lack of experience meant mistakes were made. I didn’t have the right licenses for the business I was in. I didn’t have the right business partners. None of us knew what we were doing—we were all running around like headless chickens. A clear intention and a mind that was on it was enough to get it out there, but not enough to hold it. I couldn’t hold the frequency of money, and I didn’t have the habits and behaviors to keep the money. And so, guess what—it went, and that’s just the way it goes.

Mentally, you were in terms of holding the vision and going to do the thing, yes. But mentally—and I would say maturity—I didn’t have any life experience. I was still a virgin when I made my first million, right? I don’t think I’d even gotten drunk, right? I don’t think I’d been out to a party or something like that; I hadn’t seen any life. So I would say the maturity, the capacity to hold, wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. And what dovetails is that because I hadn’t been tested in life, there was an arrogance that bubbled up—because all I’d really done was win until then. So even when I had that first hit, it didn’t shake me at all. I was like, cool, I’m going to go and do it again. I still, arrogantly, was like, alright, cool. I’m me. I’ve got the cheat code for the universe. I’m going to go and do this again. And I did. I think it took me a year and a half or something like that—not more than that—to be up again.

Everybody stole the money the next time.

Yeah? And so I tried to be clever. I was, yeah, I’m gonna be smart. They’re not gonna get it from me. I’m off their radar. Everything’s in that person’s name, and they’re, yeah, put it in my name. Who? Sorry, bye.