Daniel Dipiazza: Episode 616

Transcript

[0:00:24] EG: At the start of a new relationship in his 20s, Daniel DiPiazza and his girlfriend worked out together and it didn’t take long to realize, it wasn’t just their fitness that was improving, their lover grew too as they spent quality time together and learn to communicate and trust each other. Daniel knew he was on to something and collaborated with personal trainer, Micah Morgan to create a fitness program that could help other couples get in shape and increased their intimacy at the same time. The result is a program they’ve detailed in their new book, Strength of Seduction: The modern couple’s guide to building intimacy through fitness. In our conversation, Daniel described the process behind choosing exercises to help couples connect on physical, emotional and spiritual levels. He shares some of the juicy questions that drive deeper intimacy. I’m in conversation today with Daniel Dipiazza, author of Strength of Seduction: The modern couple’s guide to building intimacy through fitness. Daniel, it’s such a pleasure to have you on Author Hour.

[0:01:25] Daniel Dipiazza: It’s wonderful to be here, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

[0:01:29] EG: Me too, I can’t wait to dig into your book because reading it, I’ve realized, this is such a brilliant, doable program. You don’t need any special equipment, you don’t need any special — anything, can just go at this with your partner and build intimacy and get fit along the way. It’s so elegantly done and doable.

[0:01:51] Daniel Dipiazza: Yeah, I mean, the concept behind it was, we wanted to create something that would be fun and it would be effective. I think we really hit it with this. We really got the right combination.

[0:02:02] EG: Let’s start by giving your listeners an idea of the origin story behind this book? How did you land on this as being a helpful idea to others?

[0:02:12] Daniel Dipiazza: Well, you know, we’re in 2021 now as we’re recording this, depending on when you're listening and we’re going to go back in our podcasting time machine to 2012, which is coming up on a decade ago. This concept for strength of seduction was an idea that came up with two moves ago when I was living in Atlanta. I’m now in Oregon and I’ve just graduated college a few years ago and I was trying my hand at coming up with ideas that I thought would be a good business idea and you know, at the same time, I had just met a new love interest. Over the course of the next six months, I had this idea that maybe there is a way to combine this love I had for fitness, this new relationship, and this business idea into one and what I ended up doing was, coming up to – I reached out to one of my old college friends, Micah and we developed this program in 2012. You know, we wrote the whole manuscript for the book down or at least the bones of it. We came up with the idea for shooting the visual component of it, the DVD component of it and you know, we had this big vision for it but at that time, which is young, you know, I’m only – I’m in my early 30s now so I was in my early 20s then. I just didn’t have the resources or the know-how to move the project forward so it kind of sat on the shelves for a while, you know? Years went by, I moved away from Atlanta to California and while I was there, I was just working on building my career. You know, I quit my first job or my last job I should say and I was going full-time entrepreneur. At that point, I was writing, I was doing talks, I was just trying to develop myself and I hadn’t thought about Strength of Seduction in a while. Meanwhile, you know, Micah was having kids and building relationships and building his gym, which became extremely successful. Just very busy. Over the next few years, Micah picked up the idea again, still an interesting concept and he decided to shoot the content for the product, which started as the book and then became the visual element of it. You know, partly, it was just because creatively, I think it’s really fun to be able to express that way. I know you know; we both are very creative guys. I think he wanted to do it just to see the vision come to fruition and also, you know, he wanted to continue to push the business vision forward. This was around 2015. He shot what you know, basically we had bootleg trailer of this, you know, with just our local crew and this is back at our home town in Tampa and he put it on his personal Facebook page, this is back in 2015. He put it out on his personal Facebook page and this trailer video exploded. Over the period of maybe six months to a year, it got about 10 million views which really counts for something, especially on Facebook organic in 2015, you know? It was not really surprising because it’s a pretty hot program, you know? It’s not hard to see why that would pick up but at the same time, we weren’t prepared at all to turn this into a business because I have since moved on to California. Micah was just testing this and so, for a while, you know, he started to produce some of the DVD’s and he was just producing them out of his house, he was just pressing them literally in his house and he sold actually a few thousand like that. But over time, he decided to shelf it because it was just too much to do for one person. It wasn’t until 2019, we both kind of made full revolutions around the sun, both that come with new experiences. I got married, Micah was a father of two incredible boys now and we decided to just go for this, to really go for this with the knowledge that we had, I’d already released a book, it did really well so I had some knowledge there. Micah went off and got a master’s in entrepreneurship and kept running his gym, you know? We decided to go for this and we started working on this book again, we finalized and we put it out there and now we’re ready to show it to the world.

[0:06:19] EG: That’s amazing. Of course, one of the hallmarks of the book is that through fitness, you discovered that couples can find a much greater degree of intimacy. How did you come through with that connection?

[0:06:33] Daniel Dipiazza: That’s a really good question. Okay, I’ve always understood that there’s a connection between physically training yourself and your mental health. For me, I was always really big into fitness, I know Micah can say the same and it wasn’t until I met my now-wife, Sara that I had this idea that maybe, if we train together, you know? If we train together, not just in the same space but physically using those touch points, you know? Obviously, we know chemicals are released when we’re touching and holding hands and close to the people that we love and we care about. We know that children who experience the lack of touch end up sometimes having developmental problems. We know that touch matters. What if we can combine the physical exertion and the actual physical fitness of working out, the calorie burning, the physical benefit of working out with the psychological and the emotional connection and the intimacy that comes from spending time, you know, with each other. That was something I tested out with Sarah and I and we found that by essentially combining our workouts with meditations, with some affirmations, with combining our workouts with communication exercises, we kind of created almost like a curriculum for ourselves, almost a little – a training program for our relationship that becomes like just, I don’t know, a new form of couple’s therapy. They call this couple’s therapy, full body, you know? It really is. It’s training together, it’s praying together or meditating together, it’s talking, it’s listening and there’s a lot of trust building in this and it took a lot of experimentation, you know, and it was something that didn’t come overnight which is why it took 10 years to come up with.

[0:08:21] EG: You’ve detailed in the book, these nine values, core values that a healthy relationship share and I’ll list them off just very quickly. Trust, integrity, honesty, open communication, affection, empathy, friendship, humor and patience. How did you land on those nine?

[0:08:41] Daniel Dipiazza: You know, it was a combination of just what felt right and the fact that since, we did this kind of backwards, we originally started to write the book and then we ended up doing the physical fitness program, the DVD version of this product first, before the book ever sold a lot, the book is only now coming out. Because of that, we already had a customer base and so we asked our customer base, we said “You know, you’re obviously doing this workout program because you want to be close to your partner, because you want to build intimacy. What are the most important values to you?” We kind of got the feedback from our audience and you know, we took inventory of what made sense in our lives. These are universal things. You know, at the end of the day, these usually universal things I think most people could agree with being important in a relationship. Although, it’s you know, it’s one thing to say and it’s another thing to live it.

[0:09:29] EG: Yeah, absolutely. There are physical exercises in the book, which as you’ve described, stemmed from Micah’s experience as a trainer and a gym owner. Then there are also these emotional and spiritual exercises for each value. What disciplines did you draw on to create those?

[0:09:48] Daniel Dipiazza: No, it’s a great question and I’m really happy that you’re asking this because this is the first time that I’ve really had to think through these types of questions because for so long, it’s been internal, it’s been either Micah and I or me and my team or me and myself or me talking to Sarah. But having to really think through the origin of all of the stuff is actually pretty fascinating. You know, these spiritual exercises and the communication exercises came from – well, I mean, one, just years of work with people. You know, I spent a lot of time in just in coaching and consulting and talking to people to understand what makes relationships work. These aren’t even romantic relationships. I am not a therapist, I’m not a life coach or a love guru. But what has made sense to me has always been that relationships are so important that they should be front and center. When your relationships are front and center, you know, you have certain values that are going to be the most important. Trust, integrity, empathy, all these things are like the building blocks of the relationships in your life and so, these are the same things I want in my family as well. But in a romantic relationship to become even more important. There are couple of different programmatic things in the book itself. For the communication exercises, we’re using what we call “dyads” and dyads are essentially tools for helping to open up dialogs where people can feel truly heard and a lot of times in relationships, questions go unanswered, things go unsaid, ideas go unexpressed, emotions go unexpressed. It causes like an emotional constipation of sorts where it’s really hard to almost sometimes understand why you’re feeling what you're feeling because over years in our relationship, when you have years of things that go unsaid, it’s very difficult to untangle the knots and it’s often because we aren’t allowed to freely express ourselves and we aren’t allowed to just speak without feeling like the other person is you know – Without feeling like the other person is truly listening. Dyads are exercises where essentially, we’ve developed probably, I don’t know, 50 or more really interesting, engaging, I would say revealing, important props that you will learn to pose to your partner and the idea is to pose it in a way where you’re not interjecting your own opinions and you're allowed to just listen without giving a response. For example, I might say to you, I might say, “Tell me something about yourself that you’d like me to know but that you don’t tell others?” This might be difficult if we’ve known each other for years. That is my job to sit back and listen and let you just fully express yourself. As you speak, I’m only allowed to say a few things, I’m only allowed to say, “Speak up” if I can’t hear you or “Please clarify that” if I don’t understand you or I might say something like, “Please summarize that” but I have no response, I don’t have any challenges for what you’re bringing up. I don’t have any of my opinion. I just receive and then after I received, I say, “Thank you” and that’s it. When you start to ask questions about your relationship in this way and the other person is allowed to truly express in full form how they feel and then to be truly heard and then the other person gets the opportunity as well, it creates some shifts and I mean, this sounds very basic and I didn’t come up with dyad but it sounds basic but these can unlock blocks in a relationship. I was just doing this with my wife a few nights ago and it can truly unlock blocks, even if you’ve known each other for a while. Those are the communication exercises and we build the curriculum around that and then of course, there are some more spiritually connected exercises, where we’re working through affirmations, meditations, prayers that you guys can do together to connect yourselves more spiritually and of course then, physical exercises, which really we’ve put together a workout program for you to do together in the book and it’s supplemented of course by the app, which is in all of the app stores and the DVD, which you can get a few of that as well and that combined, gets you in shape.

[0:14:04] EG: What was it like to create these three different facets of exercises that sort of made synergy toward one value? If we were to pick one value, do you have any stories of times when you struggle to come up with exercises or times when that went really well?

[0:14:21] Daniel Dipiazza: Yeah, I mean to be honest like you know, when I first originally wrote the manuscript in 2012, you know you have to understand at that time, I was pretty fresh out of college. I was still, you know, I was a few years out of college and I was thinking very much from an academic perspective of, “Okay, I know exercise are good, they will help your health and mental health is good and this shit works, scientifically this should work.” But I knew there was something there but I didn’t have the glue for it. I don’t really understand how to make it work together where it was something that consumers really care about. You know, I understood there would be something there but I didn’t know how to make it work and I think that’s just why I took a little bit of time because over the next 10 years, I just got more experiences and I actually had you know, the longest relationship of my life and the best relationship. I work through a lot of stuff with that and then just obviously, learning about everything and the same with Micah and so when we came back to it, you know we realized, “Okay, the physical exercises are great. Those are good from the get-go” like we figured it’s pretty easy to figure out how to do partner slots and figure out how to do different work outs like you can program it. You can train that but you know, for the emotional stuff. For the stuff that really like digs to the core, you know, both us, Micah and I both in our relationship have gone through relationship counseling at the time. So we have both gone through hard shit and seen the highs and the lows of relationships and then understanding the types of values that takes to get through relationships and to improve and to have relationships that blossom. You know, it takes about that 10 years of experience and through that, you know, obviously I have been training a lot. With, you know, on like the coaching side a lot with emotional management and leadership training and so I learned some of these communication exercises and these different emotional exercises and that’s in the dyads that is when I was learning to do the dyads for my own practice. I thought I could feel the fusion happening in my head. I said, “Oh this is the type of exercise that couples need to be doing because this will create the clarity.” When that clicked, the rest started falling into place because I realized if it’s like mind-body-spirit and we already have the body figured out, the mind is the dyads process and the spirit, well, I think back to, you know, all of the stuff I’ve been learning over the past, you know a few years especially with meditation. I’ve been going through some crazy rabbit holes. I’ve been to this Joe Dispenza, oh man I should tell you about that in another podcast. But I mean, the world of spirituality is wide and there’s a lot you could dig yourself into and it goes all the way from the woo-woo to the religious but there is an element of it that really connects to the heart and that’s the important part. So what we did in this book is we essentially took a few different elements of spirituality. We did some of the traditional prayers, which is nothing wrong with prayers and I wouldn’t consider myself a Christian. But at the same time, praying is dope. We have some prayers I know that you can do as a couple. We have some meditations, you know some of this, some people listen to this and figure out in the book, maybe the first time you have meditated before so that’s cool because we have some basic meditations. We have a couple like affirmational things where you’re saying positive things to each other. We also have some stuff that includes some – I would say sensual touching in the meditation, which we derive from Kama Sutra, you’re welcome, so you know, and all of these stuff we just study. You pick it up along the way like we research it and then we put them together and it’s not a – we didn’t come up with a new formula. We just took the element of the stuff that really works and we said, “You should do this together with your spouse. It works,” you know?

[0:17:52] EG: You said, you know, clearly there are many of these exercises that you go back and repeat such as dyads. You said Sarah, you and Sarah use that the other night.

[0:18:02] Daniel Dipiazza: Yeah, a couple of nights ago.

[0:18:03] EG: What are some of your favorite exercises to do together?

[0:18:06] Daniel Dipiazza: Well, I mean you know the reason why the idea was first sparked in my brain was I just love working out with my girl. It’s fun and like that physical element to me is awesome and I think that a lot of couples really, really enjoy that. I mean you know, we sold 11,000 copies of just the DVD alone in the past couple of months just from launching this thing from basically the grave, you know, which tells me wow there is a real interest in people exercising together. That’s the first thing and so those are my favorites, I love working out with my partner. That’s fun and so throughout the book, we have just several different circuits you can do and complete instructions for how to put it together to have a really heart pumping workout. You know, this is as hard as you make it, trust me and I am a pretty good fitness guy and this stuff is still hard. Those are my favorites we have, that you are going to get your total body workout in that. Then with the communication exercises, which are most of the dyads, my favorites, I’m turning out such a creep, my favorites with the dyads and we have – I can’t even tell you how many questions we have honestly. It’s over 50, between 50 and a 100 questions but my favorites are the ones about sex and the ones about money. I like you know, just like the really revealing sex one because you can’t – because when you can’t respond, then it makes it even more revealing for the other person because you can’t save them by interjecting. By saying, “Oh…” you know you can’t. You know, you just have to listen and take it. The question might be like, “What’s a sexual fantasy that you’ve never told me that you would like to explore and why haven’t you said anything?” and you just have to listen to that or that is on the way on the sexy side. There is also a lot more, you know deeper, more philosophical things as well. It might be like – I am phrasing the question the way you would be phrased but the exact ones are in the book. But the question might be something like, “Describe one way that you feel misunderstood by the world?” and how often do we – I guess is we have to think about like being misunderstood by the world is probably something that most people feel like but never really take the time to articulate it because we don’t think anybody cares but you know what I’m saying? But if you are talking to your partner and they’re giving you that listening ear, then it feels really good. Sometimes that might be the first time you’ve ever expressed that, so those side are really – I like the ones about money too like I was saying. “Tell me how you feel about money?” just even an open-ended question like that. Maybe you’ve never even asked your spouse or your significant other before. Those questions are super fun and then with the meditations, we just have a couple really intimate ones where you – after the meditation you’ll feel much closer to the person not only physically but spiritually. Those are awesome and we do those a few times a month and there is a whole program that you can follow to just kind of put a boost in your relationship and give it a little bit of a makeover and improve. I never like to say, “Oh well, you know, fix your relationship” because that is a whole commitment of you have to be in it already to want to do that but this is definitely a tool to give you some vibrancy and especially for couples that have been together for a while. You know even if you’re maybe a new couple but especially being with each other, you know, a couple of years like it’s really important to always be introducing new, you know, healthy elements to the relationship.

[0:21:26] EG: Yeah and those questions are so juicy, how could they not, right?

[0:21:30] Daniel Dipiazza: Right, yeah.

[0:21:31] EG: That sounds fantastic.

[0:21:32] Daniel Dipiazza: Yeah, it’s fun, right? Don’t you want to know this stuff?

[0:21:34] EG: Oh yeah.

[0:21:36] Daniel Dipiazza: You know?

[0:21:37] EG: Yeah.

[0:21:38] Daniel Dipiazza: Aren’t you curious?

[0:21:39] EG: Do you happen to know which exercises are your wife’s favorites?

[0:21:42] Daniel Dipiazza: Well, that’s a good question. You know what?

[0:21:45] EG: That’s a secret?

[0:21:46] Daniel Dipiazza: Yeah, well you know what? No, I don’t know. All I can say is that she definitely enjoys watching me squirm, you know? She definitely would let me squirm and I mean, you know sometimes it’s really – when you are asking these challenging questions, it’s like especially if you’ve known somebody for a while, you might have to really dig in that tool box of like dig in that memory. What can I tell you that you don’t know? It is interesting to have those conversations with each other.

[0:22:10] EG: That’s fantastic and clearly, there are thousands of couples now doing this together. What kind of feedback have you gotten on the program?

[0:22:19] Daniel Dipiazza: Well, I mean you know, as I said, we’re just launching the book and I can’t wait to get the feedback on some of the more – the juicier relational and you know, spiritual elements of it but as far as the physical program goes, we’ve been getting fantastic results and feedback and I think one of the things that’s driving it is just that it’s unique and I think people are familiar with the idea of workouts but they’re not necessarily used to doing them with a couple or with a partner. You know, the way that we’re positioning this as well, we’ve positioned this specifically for the African-American market when we’re doing our marketing not because it’s a black product but because it’s so interesting that with consumer goods, the most basic stuff, which gets overlooked by the market most of the time, you know often isn’t available in this shade that 50 million people in the US share and it’s simple things like that that make marketing opportunities for us. Because what we’ve done is we’ve just made this basically like, you know, Black P90X and that positioning has done really well for us and we can always expand. You know, the book isn’t like, “Here’s the black couple’s workout guide” but at the same time, you know we have that angle where we can be like, “Look, we are actively improving the lives of like 10,000 plus beautiful black couples in the past year” and the community loves that shit. Eventually, it wants to evolve because the culture always does but in the meantime, you know, it’s really been our unique in.

[0:23:41] EG: Yeah, that’s fantastic and so beautiful.

[0:23:43] Daniel Dipiazza: Yep, thank you.

[0:23:45] EG: Well, writing a book is always such a feat and in your case, it came with a book and a whole DVD course. There’s so many things happening with this that are so exciting. If you wanted people to takeaway one or two things from the book, what would they be?

[0:24:00] Daniel Dipiazza: That’s a great question. Well, I think one, love is a verb and if you don’t remember that, you lose the noun. It’s like if you don’t do the thing, you lose the feeling and I think that developing a practice and a habit around expressing yourself with your significant other is probably the number one best thing that you can do to improve the health of your relationship. Most relationships end up in a bad place because that you know, precaution isn’t taken and that initiative isn’t taken. You can certainly heal and not only heal but improve and safeguard, you know, relationships with just some – being proactive about how you’re caring for the person that you’re with and of course, we don’t want to set the bar at you know, basically the health barometer for relationships at just struggling and you know, just not being sick or not being divorced. We want to strive for excellence in our relationships, right? We want to – because there’s all sides, right? There is fixing that relationship and there’s also really improving ones that are already doing well. We want to shift the conversation from, you know, from therapy in relationships, which is great and awesome and useful but from divorce and from fighting to improving and enhancing, which you know, I think is important especially if you want to get, you know, even more timely with everything that’s going on with the world right now. You know, it makes more sense to be on the same page with the person that you love.

[0:25:33] EG: Yeah, that line, I remember seeing that line in your introduction and how it struck me. I think one of the ways you phrased it too was like, love is a verb and if you stop doing it, you stop getting it, like that is going to stick with me. Yeah, so thank you for that. Well, it’s been such a pleasure talking with you today and I’m so excited about this program, so excited for the success that can have and the revolution that can create in people’s relationships. Again, the book is called Strength of Seduction and besides checking out the book, where can people find you?

[0:26:06] Daniel Dipiazza: Check it out at strengthofseduction.com. You can find us in all of the app stores as well and yeah, just get ready to burn some calories and build some intimacy.

[0:26:17] EG: Beautiful, thank you Daniel.

[0:26:18] Daniel Dipiazza: Thank you so much.

[0:26:21] EG: Thanks for joining us again for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, Strength of Seduction, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as all of our other previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time, same place, different author.