David's Magazine Interview!
Today we’d like to introduce you to David Essel.
Hi David, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
A life is either filled with a lot of passion or for many people, or It can be very very boring. My life, as David Essel has been anything but boring!
I started out as a young basketball enthusiast in Syracuse, New York sleeping with my basketball in bed starting at the age of five every night and my only dream was to become an NBA star, unfortunately, as you can probably guess that didn’t happen but my passion for life began very very young and Sports was the answer.
I did go onto play for Syracuse University basketball for several years and it was one of the highlights of my life without a doubt, and then from there I went on and decided that I wanted to get into sports psychology so I got a masters degree started working with athletes 1980 and then around 1990 I decided to become an all faith minister, so I could do relationship counseling, addiction recovery counseling everything you can imagine in regards to mental health and faith And my life has been really, really blessed in so many ways being able to help people reach the next level of their existence.
But that doesn’t mean my life has been without challenges and I think this is an important part of every successful individuals life is that most of us have had immense challenges in life.
At the age of 12 I became an alcoholic, and used every drug you can imagine in the world From 12 to 22, and then I ended up utilizing alcohol and cocaine for a total of about 30 years as a way to escape my own reality, which was deep emotional challenges that I had had from a child, one of the many reasons why I chose the area of psychology to do my work because I knew what I went through in childhood was gonna be a great advantage later on in life.
And it has been!
Along with addiction recovery, which puts me into this amazing mindset of people who are struggling with any addiction in the world, for 46 years, we’ve helped people turn their lives a completely, regardless of how deep or how long the addiction has been carried on, so my experience with addiction has really helped me as a professional in addiction recovery.
Relationships have been a huge part of our work for 46 years, and after becoming an all faith minister I started working with everyone you can imagine who is challenged in their relationship. It didn’t matter what faith or if they had no faith. It became a huge part of my existence and I ended up in 1996 going through a very intense year training program on codependency, which really helped me raise my game to help more couples understand the world of intimacy dating and more.
And of course, as life goes on, things started to open up dramatically. I was traveling 40 weeks a year, a Speaker all over the world, a motivational speaker, still carrying some of my Demons around, but they were slowly slowly slowly fading away until 1990 when my world came crashing down….. I had a failed suicide attempt.
Now, how does a man, whose work is based in psychology, who’s on the covers of magazines as “Mr. motivation“, who has weekly segments on Lifetime television, Fox good day in New York in New York City, and so many other tv programs.
How does a guy who has all of these things going for him from an emotional, mental , financial point of view, find a reason to try to end his life?
Well, this was another incredible blessing, not only the blessing of surviving the failed attempt to take my own life, but what I learned in the next year or two from all of the different professionals I worked with allowed me now to really help people in grief recovery!
I’ve worked with so many families whose parents have taken their own life, families where teenagers, have taken their own life, and because of my past experiences once again all these challenges, I’ve gone through turn out to be blessings ……as my understanding, compassion and desire to help these people is through the roof.
Shocking successes are also coming along the way for David Essel lol, I have no background in broadcast journalism yet for 35 years I’ve hosted nationally syndicated radio shows with Westwood one and SiriusXM radio, I have hosted and been the cohost of television shows all over the United States, I have written 16 of books, of which six have become number one by sellers, but the wild thing about all this is that I have no professional training in these areas at all!
Please pay attention to this point!
Too many of us think well I don’t have a degree in literature so I couldn’t be an author I don’t have a degree in broadcast journalism so I couldn’t be a radio host or a television host or a television reporter and that is such extreme limited thinking!
I have no gifts above what you have other than a desire to really help this world heal. That is my greatest desire to do it in anyway I can, and when you find your life purpose, it’s amazing what doors will open even if you don’t have the experience necessary!
Never give up on yourself!
It doesn’t matter how crazy your dream is to open a certain kind of store or to become a life coach or to become an attorney or to open any other type of business at all, if people say that it will never work follow your gut, follow your heart, follow your soul, amazing things will happen.
Sometimes we don’t get what we want, but as we have heard and I have seen in my 46 years of work many times those dreams we have that don’t come true open up doorways that are even better for us.
The last thing that I’ll say about me as David Essel a person is one more challenge that I’ve had to face in the last several years, it was a combination of both my mother and father dying a year apart, and I was extremely close to them, and then my battle with workaholism.
I mistakenly took my passion to help people heal in life and to move ahead in life as the number one reason I’m on earth, and for 41 years of the 46 years in this business, I grinded , worked myself almost to death.
It was valiant in my mind! I was doing my life purpose,! How much better could it get!
But as my brother reminded me when I started the path of slowing down, which has been very challenging, I hadn’t taken a vacation in 24 years.
When you don’t take a vacation for 24 years, it’s going to catch up with you, especially when all of this comes crashing down and your mom and dad Are in hospice for four years.
For gosh sake , slowly dying and you’re this amazing workaholic who’s burned out beyond belief, those two combinations really made me change my complete lifestyle.
My life is so different now than it was five years ago, I have time for myself because I take time for myself, I’ve started doing things like teaching myself how to play the guitar so that I have something outside of work on my mind that I can release my creative talents in a new way. I’m not very good at all lol, but I have an absolute blast doing it.
I think this is a pretty good wrap up of who David Essel is, completely committed still, but now I’m doing it at a much slower pace, to help this world heal in any way possible, my mindset will never change. I may do a little less work on a daily basis, but my purpose will always be the same: to look to lift others daily.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I listed in my First very long description of who David Essel is many of my challenges. I’ll just make a very short list here:
Number one. Became an alcoholic at 12 years of age and struggled with addiction for 30 years, it’s been a long time since I have been completely in recovery.
I don’t call myself a recovered alcoholic or recovered anything. I don’t believe in that terminology. I think they’re negative in nature, I’m simply David Essel. No need to attach myself to anything in regards to past experiences or past addictions.
Number two. My failed suicide attempt in 1990, and what led up to that was extreme workaholism and also through that failed suicide attempt when I went through all kinds of mental health testing we found that I had since childhood carried with me depression/anxiety/undiagnosed ADD undiagnosed and ADHD.
The list of mental health challenges that I carried was immense, and so I covered up all of those mental health challenges with workaholism and addiction until it didn’t work anymore.
And the blessing that has come out of that experience carries with me today, I am just more grateful than ever.
Number three. In 2020 when Covid hit in our business went very south for a period of time, we did what I would recommend other people not do, that is we upped the amount of grinding myself and my team did.
We started producing new programs every week gosh I was writing a book every couple months we went crazy, trying to find ways to continue to keep our income at a certain level. It was impossible.
Depression started to sit in, not just because of a decrease in income, but because I had not paid attention to my need to take care of myself and was putting everything into work as I had done way too many times before.
On top of this workaholism and depression , my mom and dad were dying, I was very close to both of them, especially my mother, And you put all that together, and it leads to a very strong breakdown.
The good news about this? I learned so much about myself , about grief and dying, so I can help other people who are going through this. I learned so much about how to shatter work and alcoholism so I can help other people with that as well.
So all of my struggles, and there’s more than what I listed above, but all of these struggles have led to breakthroughs, and the same thing can happen to you. It all depends on how we look at our struggles.
If we look at them correctly, they’re teaching tools that radically change our life, or we can become victims and say this shouldn’t have happened to me. It’s our choice. I hope you’ll choose the right one, because it makes life so much better and so much more enjoyable.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
For 46 years, I’ve been a counselor, master life coach, author, radio host, television host, all faith minister, I think I’ve nailed it all but there’s probably things I’m missing. Oh yeah, motivational speaker for sure.
I absolutely love the world of counseling and master life coaching! I get a chance to work with people one on one, which is such a blessing to me, to help them with their mental health, challenges, addictions, relationship, challenges, health, challenges, Weight, challenges, career challenges, grief, challenges, creative challenges,… There isn’t a topic in this world outside of politics that we don’t cover in my one on one counseling and life coaching program.
I also work with professional athletes as well as high school in college athletes, and one of our top books is all about the mental mindset that athletes have, in order to accomplish the amazing Experiences they do in their sport.
We’ve had so many people who are not athletes, respond to that book saying that they learned so much about the need to be more determined , more disciplined in life……. even though they’re not athletes, they’re picking up some of the most important traits of athletes, which makes me really happy.
I hosted nationally syndicated shows for so many years starting with Westwood one from 1990 to 2000 we had a 10 year run that was unbelievable, 250 or 275 cities the show was listened to six hours every week. It was incredible and the amount of individuals I got to interview, incredible athletes, spiritual leaders, religious leaders, personal growth, experts, you name it we got them. Athletes, musicians, actors, actresses I mean it was just an unbelievable time for me. I learned so much I met so many amazing people. It was great.
One of the most influential celebrities I’ll actually mention two , but one of them was Jenny Mccarthy, she had a SiriusXM radio show and when my book came out “Positive thinking will never change your life… But this book will”, which is a very fun title by the way, she hesitated to have me on her show because she was such a fan of positive thinking.
But she brought me on anyway, and I ended up being a guest on her show after that like five more times, and she fell in love with my philosophy that positive thinking is never gonna be enough to change your life!
And then she was gracious enough to give us this quote that we still use. It’s so powerful:
“David Essel is the new leader of the positive thinking movement.“ Jenny Mccarthy
What a gift and what a special woman she is.
The other person that had a massive impact on my life , gosh I’ve had so many incredible mentors, Wayne Dyer. Dr. Wayne Dyer was someone that gifted me with his wisdom and knowledge and helped me in so many different areas of my life.
And then, of course, there’s Maharishi Mahesh Yogi , , the founder of transcendental meditation, who had another amazing impact on my life, and in a one hour interview, awakened me, yes, it can happen, awakened me to a deeper level of consciousness, just being in his presence, his energy, and his wisdom was off the charts.
Even without experience in literature, writing 16 books has been something I never imagined in 1 million years I would do, and every one of them has become my little baby. I love them all so much and I’ve learned so much along the way.
The first book that I wrote, took me about two years to write, And now in the last, probably 10 years, I can write a book in 48 hours!
Now I’m going to repeat that because it’s mind blowing, I’ve created a process of writing a book that you can actually finish the original manuscript in 48 hours!
What I found was the most important part of the book is the outline, so I teach people how to create really deep in-depth outlines so that when they go to actually start writing the book, they don’t have to think about a thing!
They just pull the outline out and they see the title they’ve chosen for chapter 1 , they see the eight bullet points that they want to talk about in chapter 1 and they just go through the eight bullet points and all of a sudden chapter 1 is finished!
I also don’t type a thing, I never have, I have my iPhone. I simply pull it out pull up an email hit the Speaker button, and I speak into it for a complete chapter, then I do a really quick edit on my own and then I send it to an editor to go ahead and clean it up.
I do this for every chapter and in 48 hours, the last six books have been completed. Now there’s editing to do after that but just to think that you can get the main part of the book done in two days is phenomenal.
As a motivational speaker, I cover every topic that you can imagine, and have loved doing that for over 40 years. I’m not traveling anywhere near as much anymore like I used to, but when I have the opportunity, it’s just simply a blast, and I feel so blessed to have been given the gifts that I have been given.
And because times are so crazy right now, we are offering anyone who would like a free 20 minute session on the phone with me simply to go to the website, www.davidessel.com at the contact us button, send us an email and my team will set up the Free Call ASAP.
We’re doing this now because we want people to know that there are individuals who are willing to help at no charge, whether you want to set a new goal, release a bad habit, whatever you’d like we can help you in that short period of time.
Also, because the world is so crazy and we want to be a major part of helping this world to heal, five of my top 16 best selling books are available at the website as well.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
I’m huge fan of reading books still the kind you’re holding your hand. I’m not into electronic reading of anything quite frankly , but I do really love reading many many different authors.
Joseph Murphy with the subconscious mind
Neville Goddard, with the power of the subconscious mind as well
Sanaya Roman regarding Love and money.
Power versus force by Dr. David Hawkins one of the greatest books ever written on human consciousness
You’ll notice that almost all of the books I read, including the book by Wallace Wattles in 1910 about money, they’re all older books.
And it’s not that the authors today like myself don’t have a lot to say that’s valid, but I really connect with the older writings for reasons that I may not even know, but they feel solid to me. There isn’t any fluff whatsoever in any of these authors that I’m talking about they just really go to the heart of the matter.
Paramahansa Yogananda , Autobiography of a yogi is a great book as well.
Anything by Thich Nhat Han with Zen Buddhism is phenomenal.
Think grow rich by Napoleon Hill, a phenomenal book probably one of the best books ever written on success.
And it’s not that I don’t read other authors that are more current, but this is where my focus is.
Every day I’m in the gym, and after I do my weight work, I jump on the treadmill and I’ll read one of these books for 20 to 30 minutes, then I’ll do a walking meditation, for 10 or 15 minutes, as a way to bring me into the spiritual world right after a workout.
I also will mention that one of the most crucial parts of my day is in the morning, where I take an hour and a half to two hours to practice very deep, spiritual work, from journaling, to meditation, to many different techniques that I write about and in several of my books.
I think the first hour of every day is crucial to be off of electronics as much as possible, no texting, no email, no news, no social media… Just you and a book or journal … And meditation… I think it’s the best way in the world to start our days.
Contact Info:
Sleep Talk? Anticipating Success? Healing VS Living?
Subconscious Power! Reframe Anxiety? Expect the Best?
Die to Ourselves? I Expect the Best? I love ME?
Vibrational Shift? Today is Life? Prayer for Others?
Suicide? Negative Thoughts? Sleep Issues?
We selected the videos below as a way to continue to share positive tools to stay grounded, successful and happy during these times! =) If you need help in any area of life, simply sign up for your free 20 minute session on the phone with David right here... https://www.davidessel.com/contact Have a fantastic day! David and Team David
Do we really think, that we’re making our own choices in life?
So, what is the matrix?
And are you stuck in it?
Are you even aware you’re stuck?
Would you like to get out?
Then you’re in the right place…
Stay young?? My Aunt Rita at 93 did 😊😊😊😊 WE CAN ALL BE LIKE MY AUNT RITA AT 93!!!! WE NEED TO STAY YOUNG IN MIND/HEART/ATTITUDE..