Detective Dave Sweet's Guide to Conquering Challenges in Your Work and Life

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Shogers. All right, you're in for a treat today. Dave Sweet, homicide detective. Yes, his investigations have been on many TV shows from Canada. His first book, he actually put out skeletons in the closet, 101 Things You Can Learn from Being a Homicide Detective. and dang his perspective is different today wait to hear some of the stories of investigations and how they did it you know the fact that uh he is he says i'm a salesman i sold life sentences how he is in his investigations would convince people to really i guess tell their story uh but tining gangs organized crime all that stuff dave sweet is our guest today distinguished service award you name it the guy's done it in investigating and policing i can't wait for you to learn his view on success his days so dave with all the background how do you define success today uh well for me i guess i measure success uh wholly around the idea of what kind of impact we're making as people in the lives of people.

1:28Yeah. And I believe that what really matters is how we engage with individuals and people that come into contact with our lives. I think if we're doing that, we're living a life that matters and a life that should be counted. Yeah. You know, contributions that we're making and serving with people themselves. I measure success really on impact and what we're doing with people. So take me back then. As a young man, it probably was a little different. How did your definition of success grow over the years to get to that point? I mean, I think it's through the service of community, recognizing that there's need everywhere.

2:16and then just realizing that you have a big part to play and sort of hopefully filling some of those gaps of need and realizing that to do that is going to be coming in with sort of a positive attitude, good mindset every single day. The best thing that I could possibly do is kind of come to work every day with an attitude of gratitude. So hang on, let me ask though, Dave. every day you're seeing the worst of the worst how did you stay positive with that around you oh because you know it's a great question it's a question that's asked all of the time it's sort of this idea about you know how do you deal with dark terrible things and you know in the in the time that I worked in a homicide you know for almost 15 years I was involved in over 600 death investigations i've seen pretty much uh all the different ways people can be horrible to one another but um i kept a positive outlook and i and i and i really started with this none of this was about me it was always about the person that was servicing right so like if if i if i always remembered that that this isn't this isn't my tragedy right that i could focus on the in and then believe it or not in even the most heinous of crimes there are these beautiful silver linings that come out um of sort of hope and some positive that can come as a result of even the worst things dang well yeah there's a great book that's come out of all these years 25 years of policing and 15 years of dealing with that let me go backwards a step though in your life you chose success somewhere was it as a young boy as a young man was it when you got into the force where did you choose that you were going to be successful no matter what you did well you know it's i was so fortunate broad i was in a i i to be born into the family that i was born into yeah you know um and so it was really from a very young age that I don't know that I like the idea that we do choose success.

4:29I like that as an idea. And I actually believe that we do. However, I will also say that I was gifted a family of successful people. My father was a very well-known and well-thought-of paleontologist.

4:50Hang on, what's a paleontologist? Give me that one. yeah so he was he was a fellow that actually he studied more of the fauna versus the dinosaurs got it got it so essentially but you know around the the dinner table at at night on a sunday we had all these incredible people that would come by to talk and and and visit and be with my dad and they were all successful you know the guy that believed that dinosaurs were evolved from birds he showed up you know the the fellow that found the uh crater in the mexico area that believes that that's where the sort of mass extinction event began these are people that graced my table and so to follow success uh or the idea of success it wasn't hard because i was surrounded by successful people yeah and and so from a very young age i just i didn't i didn't really ponder anything else but dad always used to say if you're going to be a ditch digger be the best damn ditch digger you can be.

5:47And I believe, I believe that. I love it when families give you some, a level of belief in yourself and a level of belief in success. So over the years, you've developed a lot of formulas, which we're going to go into a bunch of them in the book, but what is in your mind, the components of success? Like what makes some, what makes success happen yeah so like no so for me um there's a few things i think first thing is is defining what success actually means to you i think that's the most important part you know um you have to define what it is actually going to mean to you and then once that's figured out uh surrounding yourself with other successful people is huge because we learn you know there was there was no there was no mystery a lot of the people that i worked with uh over the course of my career we followed each other around you know um he went to the same areas uh regularly and it's because we as a group as a collective group knew we were stronger together got it and i worked with incredible number of successful gifted people over the over my career but we followed each other all the way through And that's where that surrounding yourself with successful people.

7:09And then I think the next piece is, is that recognizing that one of the most important things is, is that you have to set into motion things that are going to cause your lucky breaks a place to land. And so what I mean by that is you can't win the lottery in the play, right? and um i think successful people put into motion a number of different things that allow those what we would call lucky breaks a place to land later and i have a story about that actually it's sort of a it's an interesting one but i kind of give you an idea and it it so years ago we were involved in an investigation where a young man had been murdered at a house party and in the investigation ensued, we learned that our offender, after the stabbing had occurred, it fled from the residence in a vehicle and it threw in the knife that was used in the stabbing out onto a roadway.

8:12And so I live in Canada, Calgary, Alberta. It's snowy here. This event happened in February. We had snow piles up six feet along the roadways. And we learned about this knife being thrown somewhere along his route away, you know, a couple days later. But the investigator in that case said, you know what? We need to go out and try and find this knife. And I thought, there's not a chance this is going to happen, right? It's like looking for, you know, a needle in a haystack. but yet he sets into motion a, a, um, the steps that needed to be taken to, uh, begin to search the area for this knife. And so I was assigned to go out there and sort of help supervise the search.

9:02And so I get out there and, uh, one of the police officers that was there, he had his, he had a police van and he got stuck in our snow bank. and as he's sitting there spinning his tires and we're all laughing at him because that's what we do we like the you know laugh at somebody else's misfortunes that way when it comes to our own guys and as he's spinning his tires in this snow bank wouldn't you believe it brad i'm not joking that nice came out in two parts the handle and the blade and landed right at her feet but that perfect example i think about what it to you know put into motion things that are going to cause our lucky breaks to land somewhere yeah now did you get did they get the conviction on that one we did get a conviction yeah it was uh it was back and forth for many years but you know that knife was very very important it had both our offenders dna on it it had our uh our victims dna on it so it was good but well for me you know if we hadn't have done that we never would have got the knife if we had looked at the situation and said oh the snow's too high you know there's not a chance not even worth doing it right and successful people know that right they put into motion they're gonna make themselves successful and then i think the last piece to being successful for me anyways when i think about it and i think about all the people that i've worked around over the years, it's not that hard to be a little bit better than average.

10:33I really believe that. So, you know, it's not that hard to, you know, if you're walking to the grocery store one day, everybody else has walked by the little piece of paper that's been sitting on the sidewalk or on the median or what. Yeah, it's not just to, you know, bend down and pick it up and throw it in the trash as you get to the grocery store for an example right but um successful people know it's not hard to be a little bit better than average and they do that every day i've always been intrigued by the relationship of failure and success and as a homicide detective failure and success are not too far apart how do you see the relationship between the two yeah no i mean it is absolutely true i i believe that you know uh failure is part of the evolution towards success and uh probably come of no surprise that you know when we get involved in some of our investigations we may have a victim that had you know had been murdered that's and in the and and then when we sort of start to do their background realize that there's a number of people that would have likely wanted to have murdered him.

11:47Yeah. And, you know, you can have a suspect list of 10 or 15 people. And how that sort of applies to us is this. As we go down each rabbit hole and follow each sort of red herring, you might feel like you're not getting any further. But as you start to dwindle that list from, you know, 15 down to 10 and then 10 down to five because you're able to clear people through alibi and things of that the case against your number one suspect just gets stronger and stronger and strong right because he's the one person you can't so um that's sort of how i sort of view uh sort of the evolution of success and failure yeah you're on the big success podcast we're going to be back dave and i are going to start diving into a lot of the cases and what we learn from the cases But if come back with us in a moment, make sure you hit that subscribe button and we'll get on to more success.

12:45Business empires are where most people create the vast majority of their initial income and wealth. Through Brad Sugars is Entrepreneurs event, you will learn how to turn your companies into valuable and sellable assets. Visit Brad Sugars dot com to attend this program as a standalone or as part of Brad Sugars is Entrepreneurial University. All right. So, Dave, 15 years homicide, 25 years policing. how are the skills of homicide detectives relatable I guess into normal everyday life I mean when I when I read through the book 101 life lessons I think that it's pretty amazing how some of these things you've translated how do you see that as as being relatable yeah so I mean I'll give you an example one of the things that you know I came to learn was when it comes to interviewing or interrogating, a lot of your listeners, people that are out there right now, are in sales positions.

13:45They're selling houses, they're selling cars, or stocks, or what have you. And what I ended up doing is I sold life sentences.

13:58I sold life sentences. I'm going to name the podcast that. I sold life sentences. Well, and I really, truly did. I really feel like I did because what ended up happening, and where it's relatable is, is that unbelievably, when you kind of look at what an interview process is like, for an example, a lot of the strategies, the techniques that we use in an interview to convince or have somebody accept that by talking to us, that that is actually a good thing, right? at um it gives them an opportunity to tell their side of the story and all those kinds of things but it comes at a great cost yeah the cost is is they're going to go to jail for the rest of your life yeah yeah but many people do it yeah you know and how that happens is very similar to the way it happens like if you were to walk in and and try to buy a car um a lot of the same kinds of things are occurring in an interview as they are in the sales room floor.

15:03So, for example, there's going to be a period of time where there's some rapport built, right? Starting to understand and get what people's interests are. You know, there's going to be some theme building that goes on top of that. You know, in an interview setting, for example, one of the things that I always think of, and when I do workshops on this, I always remind people, you need to just listen because if you listen, you'll hear what a person is concerned about or what they fear. They give it to you. You know, not that long ago, I was talking to a kid, and he really was a kid. And his whole entire question was not whether or not he did the murder.

15:45He was worried about whether he was going to have a cell by himself

15:53and, you know, what it would be like inside a jail. What he's really telling me is that he's scared. He's scared to get hurt and all of these kinds of things. And so as an interviewer, when I hear that, I need to address that in some way, shape, or form and reframe his perspective of what jail is. And so it might be, well, in this particular case, it was just reminding him that jail is a great place for a timeout. It's a place where we need to go. we know we won't you know yeah i need a 30 year time out but it it for them it makes sense in the moment right yeah you know no different uh than in a sales situation you need to know when you can push when you can pressure when you need to lay you know lay off a little bit if you're going to close it is all about sort of the way you kind of move through some of the strategies in the interview room practicing empathy versus sympathy all of these kinds of things and uh i spent quite a bit of time you know again like talking about this but you see the relatability between the two skills yeah the only difference um i'm selling somebody on the idea that it's their opportunity to tell their story and that somebody else would be selling that like i said our house or what have you yeah yeah so you talk about uh the bogeyman type thing that idea of fear and people facing their fears um tell me more about that and success because i think that's a really important aspect of getting to be successful.

17:39Yeah, totally. I mean, I, yeah, you know, fear is sort of a, it's really a, it's almost like a three headed monster to me. You know, some of it is, is we have these fears that we learn. Actually, it's interesting when it comes to fear, you know, experts have suggested that we're born with only two fears, fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. So every other fear that we have in life has been learned in some way, shape, or form. And, um, when we come to like acknowledge that we can, if we learn, we can hopefully unlearn it in some way, shape, or form as well. Um, and, and so one of my jobs always as an investigator is to hear somebody's fear and help them try to overcome it in some way, shape, or form.

18:28Yeah. Right. This is worried they're going to get beat off or they're going to be killed because they're a witness to a crime right it's more you have to explain to them why i don't believe that wolf right you know dave i i watch a lot of crime shows and i always think how that guy's just gotta be stupid you know why didn't he i didn't realize just how much you as the investigator are selling them dang i never really thought of it that way. It's, and you know, you're selling it and there's a little parrot on their shoulder going, don't buy it. Don't buy it. Don't buy it. That would be, that would be the lawyer, right?

19:08But they still buy and it's, it, it, but it is a, it is a fascinating relationship, but I really do believe that it is, you know, the things that I learned in a universe, in a, in a interview room are so universal to the larger, the bigger piece. And that's why I so much enjoy talking to people about business leaders and people like that. I talk about the strategies because I think they take away a lot from discussion. Yeah. So let's dive into, you discuss in the book a lot about cause and effect and you talk about the jury and you had to explain that to a jury one time. Tell us more about cause and effect and why that's an important lesson?

19:52Well, I think cause and effect is something that's really important because a lot of us never think kind of three steps ahead of what our action is going to be, right? Like when we get this into motion, what is that going to look like three steps down the road? We can usually anticipate what it's going to look like immediately, but what is it going to look two or three steps down the road? If you're not considering that, you may not put the same action into place, for example. Like, I'll give you one. I believe in creating win-win situations all of the time myself. So I don't like to lose, like, nobody likes to lose.

20:34But I accept that sometimes you do. And that sort of acceptance of failure is part of the evolution to success. But I try to create win-win situations. So go back to the interview, for example. When I walk into an interview room and there's a guy who's sitting there, he's been arrested for murder, and he's sitting in my chair, right? My comfy, fancy chair. Am I going to ask him to move into his chair or am I just going to accept that that happened, right? I would never fight somebody over a chair because if I said to the guy, I'm moving to the other chair, and he says no, what am I really going to do?

21:14Dump him out of the chair? You know, it would not look good. It wouldn't be right. And I would lose that whole entire thing. So knowing that that is going to occur, and I could get into a fight that I'm not going to be able to win, I end up sitting in his chair and continuing the interview right from the very beginning. For example. Right. And the relationship of cause and effect, though, overall, is we rely on as police officers all the time. You give sort of a certain stimulus in one instance, and you see kind of how it falls out further down the road. What I talked about in the book was the CSI.

21:56And that's that whole idea that what we see on crime shows it could actually happen in real life and what that is doing is it is training and educating members of the public that sit on degrees of unrealistic expectations when it comes to investigation itself like why couldn't you get the license plate number of the vehicles screaming away i saw it on a csi episode yeah i think if i watch csi episodes i'm like there's no way i'm ever going to commit a crime because they can find my DNA on any damn thing. You know, it's like, I think it's educated people to not do it. Let's go to your inner Jedi then because I think that's another interesting aspect of what you look at.

22:43Yeah, I really like this idea of, you know, unleashing your inner Jedi. And what I believe is that we're all influenced by these, you know, social lore. I think we work to do. and once you understand um what those are you're more able to uh use them in a as a way of sort of persuading people into um you know long on the ride with you right and it helps you influence more positive outcomes in your own life so a lot of um what unleashing the inner jedi is about is a lot has to do with what Robert Cialdini originally spoke on when it comes to persuasion and the power of it. But there are a number of things that we are persuaded by or used to persuade us.

23:38Scarcity is the salesman's secret weapon, right? If you don't put down payment on this lot today, there was three other people that were coming by to look at it later. So what do you do? You put the down payment on the lot. Why? Because you feel compelled that you need to do this now. The deal's only going to last a certain period of time and then it's going to be gone, right? Yeah. Uh, that's why people have limited time offers, all of these things kind of based around this idea of scarce. Um, and so if you want to pressurize somebody, you create scarcity, uh, in, in the way you use your language, whatever that would be right in an interview room, for example, when I'm talking to a bad guy it would be along the idea that today is your day you're not going to get another day to to explain uh what happened or give your side of this free those kinds of uh but yeah once you understand persuasion and some of the the influencers likability reciprocity um this sort of idea of conformity or group sync uh there's a there's a variety of them but they all um behave in a way that actually uh changes the way we behave in different ways and we and you can see it plays out in all sorts of our lives a really benign example if you go to the mall later today and somebody opens the door for you as you're walking in the mall i know you're going to get clumsy and all out of sorts but you're going to jump forward to open the door for them on the if it's on the second door yeah yeah yeah you know you do it and why do you do it because we don't like the feeling of owing something yeah to somebody else um this year i was giving out christmas just a few christmas gifts to different people uh just something a little ball of wine or what i went to one house and i gave them a bottle of wine and you knew that they didn't have anything for you but they had actually five or six presents stacked up right by the tree with a card on it and they said here you go it was a box of chocolates right but it's because they didn't they don't like that feeling of owing something just or receiving a gift that they can't reciprocate back so they actually go out and buy five or six boxes of chocolates and just leave them at the door or anybody that does show up like me give them a bottle of wine got it right got it it's funny yeah you're on the big success podcast we're going to be back in just a moment we're going to dive into a couple of specific cases and the lessons that Dave took from them.

26:12Make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'll be back. With 25 years of policing experience, Detective Dave Sweet has investigated some of Canada's most heinous crimes. In 2023, Stark Publishing launched Dave's first book, Skeletons in My Closet, 101 Life Lessons from a Homicide Detective. To learn more about Dave Sweet, please visit unconventionalclassroom.ca. Way back. Dave, I gotta ask. First of all, I do love the fact that it's Dave Sweet and Brad Sugars on this podcast. That's kind of a very cool thing. And, you know, although your career is definitely a lot more fun stories. There's one particular case.

26:51Well, let's go back. Longest case to get a conviction. How many years was one of the longest ones? Oh, you know, probably three years. How do you stay patient or persistent? So how do you just keep going with that? What's your theory on that? Well, you know, there's really, you don't have an option not to be patient. You know, it's just, but.

27:29Yeah. So the one that I'm thinking of was a young man that was, he was, he was murdered on Christmas Eve, I think of 2015. And we were made arrests, I believe in 2018. But he had been murdered. It was, he'd been involved and caught up in the darker side of life, lived it on the fringes. And he was robbed. So money and drugs happened. And he was killed and left in a vehicle. and for months actually I was going through that process and going down these different rabbit holes and following different red herring it was kind of working out and then eventually we got a favorable crime lab finding that came in that sort of pointed me in the direction where my suspects would be and so over the course of the next several years we had to construct this is something we do in Canada that's different than in the US but we constructed a whole world of around him of undercover police officers and and it over time they built up a relationship and he ended up you know eventually confessing to the crime to them but it just took a lot of time and patience all the way through that and although it might be difficult for me think about the family you know the family's in this situation they are also having to be incredibly patient.

28:57When I think of families and patients, I think of the families out there that never, ever get an arrest in their case. You know, in Calgary, we still have about 85 % of our homicides. That sounds pretty good, but that means that two in 10 families are about two in 10 families. Don't ever get answers. Yeah. You know, there are cases out there where we have found bones, for example, there's just not enough evidence to ever suggest how this person died in the first place. Imagine the mystery kind of is around those families. Yeah. How patient they have to be waiting for an outcome. Yeah. Now, it's a weird way to look at it, but there's part of what you focus in on the book is it's almost goal setting, but like solving the puzzle, you keep going because you have a goal of actually deciding this thing.

29:54Does that make it easier or harder? What's your perspective on that? You know, you've got to solve this thing. I mean, the goal is obviously always want to bring resolution to the family. Yeah. And it is actually true. Like the thing that motivates us, it's not a boss that's coming down and screaming down your throat point and you need to solve this case, right? It's this internal thing that's just in part of you that says you need to do this. but there I have to tell you Brad there's no there's no better feeling in the world than to call a family after years of them waiting for an answer to be able to provide them that answer over a phone or having them come down to the office and you sit down with them and talking to them yeah that's what every investigator waits for and lives for is that opportunity to kind of give them some answers to a lot of the questions they didn't have prior and so that is actually the very motivating force, at least it was for me when it came to investing in tribes.

30:55Yeah, it's kind of interesting, though. And one of the things you allude to is actually having the goal or knowing with absolute clarity, this is the goal. I need to find a solution for this. And the motivation behind it is one thing. But I think that, you know, if I look at what you teach, people aren't clear enough on their goals, I think, is probably the point you've made how do you help people get even clearer on their goals i mean for you it was was obvious this guy got killed we got to find someone that did it type thing how do you help people get much clearer on their goals well i mean it's always reminding ourselves of our purpose there's a this really great um i mean it goes back to ancient times i think it was aristotle he came up with this idea of a personal ethos i don't know if you've ever heard of an ethos but it's hand the paper, writing it all out.

31:51What is your purpose, right? And if you have a clear vision of what your purpose is, then achieving goals become so much clearer and easier to do, and things can be overcome. Like one of my purposes, and it's a very simple personal ethos that I have, it's love people. If I remember to love people, even the bad people, you know, that's what allows me to build connection in an interview room yeah that is what allows to deal with a family that is what allows me and drives me to be a servant to my community is this whole idea of being people and it's a very very simple ethos but it's what my purpose is and so when I talk about resiliency and how to become adaptable or remain adaptable things of that nature what i'm asked as or ask people to consider is writing out what their purpose is yeah and then it can change over time but it is uh it is a really good way of um kind of coming back and leveling what you're doing you know uh a good way of um keeping you thinking forward now yeah when kevin first connected us and i read that about you that your ethos is to love people I'm like, I'm not sure I would be that strong.

33:14Last question for the homicide side of things. How did you keep your life and the homicide life separated? Because every TV show I've ever seen, the homicide detective is messed up and crazy because of that. How did you do that? How did you keep that balance, I guess, in your world? yeah i mean i i'll tell you i've had some a few scrapes and some bumps and bruises along the way of course um but i was able to i mean you always thought about the cases that you were working on they came home with you regularly but uh no i had a i had a i had enjoyment out hobbies outside of work that it involved policing and that kind of thing one of the one of my escapes always was coaching you know I had the opportunity to coach myself hockey for years and that was just sort of they just got you away from the office yeah but it was such weird dichotomy because you know I could be at the autopsy of a young person that morning and that evening having a birthday party or celebrating a birthday or going to a hockey game or or what have you it was such a weird like there was just pots of these trends you know but for whatever reason I was able to kind of move through them relatively flawlessly.

34:35And some people would say it's because of our ability, or at least my ability, to fundamentalize. So I was able to worry off the really terrible things that happened through the course of the day and fill those terrible things in with sort of positive things. And that's how I maintain it in a few ways. Dave, final question. What's the best advice you ever got or the best quote you ever read on the subject of success? yeah so actually i thought long and hard about it and i have to go back to my roots as a kid born in 73 um do or do not there is no try yoda and that's a master yoda from empire strikes back yeah but i think i think that that is um a really good way of summarizing sort of how i view success and i've always viewed it yeah this is the big success podcast i'm brad sugars your host.

35:30Make sure you're back with us next week for more on success. Make sure you follow Dave, learn, keep reading, keep studying and success will come to you. Oh, and hit that subscribe button. And that's the Big Success Podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for.

36:03Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.