The Dina Dwyer-Owens Interview With Matthew Kelly
Matthew Kelly:
Hi. I'm Matthew Kelly, and welcome to Profoundly Human. Today, my conversation is with Dina Dwer-Owens. Dina, welcome.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Thank you, Matthew.
Matthew Kelly:
Great to be with you.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yes. Exciting.
Matthew Kelly:
Very serious questions to get started as always. Are you a coffee drinker?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I shouldn't answer it this way, but most people prefer I don't have coffee because I have enough energy and they're like, "No, don't give her caffeine."
Matthew Kelly:
Oops.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So I love the taste of coffee, but I am, and it's a decaf coffee, typically.
Matthew Kelly:
What would happen if you were mistakenly or purposely given regular coffee? What does that look like?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Well, honestly, I might have to run to the bathroom pretty quick. So that's just the truth of it, but yeah, my, I don't know if you call it hyperactivity, and hyper communication just goes up a notch and people are like, "I haven't even had my cup yet. Could you just chill?"
Matthew Kelly:
Now, do you drink decaf all day or is it a morning thing or what does that look like?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Typically one cup of coffee is fine, and I do it more for the flavor than I do for anything. I don't need the caffeine.
Matthew Kelly:
Okay. Very good. What about favorite food?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
That is a really tough one because I love food and I keep trying to tell myself I love healthy food. I try to plant that positive seed, but gosh, pizza's pretty dang good. I like pizza.
Matthew Kelly:
Favorite brand of pizza-
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Oh, now you're putting me on the spot-
Matthew Kelly:
... or restaurant?
Matthew Kelly:
... because I come from the franchising world so I better stick with a local.
Matthew Kelly:
You better stick with a local.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
My husband's pizza on the green egg. There you go.
Matthew Kelly:
There you go. Very good. What about favorite movie?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I've got a three-year-old granddaughter, and The Sound of Music has just come back as my all time favorite. So it come and gone, but it's back again.
Matthew Kelly:
Good. It's a great movie. What is happening in your life at the moment that you're excited about?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Gosh! I am the grandmother of three. So I know you've got a young family, but now I'm the grandmother, but I've got a three-year-old granddaughter, Millie, almost two-year-old grandson, Ryder, and a 15, 16-month-old granddaughter Dela Sofia. So they're just the love of my life right now and will be forever.
Matthew Kelly:
Yeah. What are they teaching you?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Oh, to enjoy life. Really, the things that they pay attention to is amazing. They also are teaching me to be a better listener. In fact, my little Dela, I can be holding her, the 15-month-old, and have not really engaged in the conversation she's having with me when she can't even really speak yet, she will move my face to look at her. So it's just amazing, just being engaged in who you're with, and hearing the birds, and noticing the sun, paying attention to the flowers and stopping and smelling them. I could go on and on. Just grandkids are incredible.
Matthew Kelly:
That's fantastic. Tell us about childhood. Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. So come from a family of six, Catholic mother and a father. Most of my siblings were born in New York, so just outside of the city. I was actually born in Connecticut. So I was on the third. So there's Donna, Debbie, Dina, Donald, Darren, and Doug, so all Ds. My dad's Don and he likes the whole D thing. So raised in a very Catholic family. My mother was the one who really took the responsibility, though, of making sure that we went to mass on Sundays because my father was providing for us and worked a lot, traveled a lot, was in entertainment business initially, so that was a tough business to be in raising six kids. CCE, and all the right things, my mother made sure we attended as children growing up.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
My siblings are my best friends. My father always said that, "If we live in an environment where they have to play together, they'll be friends forever." We all still live in the Waco and surrounding area. That's where we ended up landing about 50 years ago, and we're all still in the same area, but really had a wonderful childhood with some challenges as we've all had, but my father was big on building people up to believe that they could achieve anything if they were willing to work hard enough.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So he always taught me that whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve and put me in front of the greats, whether it was people like, in the old days, Robert Schuler, possibility thinking, just lots of Paul Meyer with SMI, Success Motivation Institute. He would pay me an allowance, in fact, Matthew, in late elementary school and junior high, "If you'll listen to this," and it was on the old tape recorders, "If you listen to this tape six times, you can answer my questions, I'll bump up your allowance."
Matthew Kelly:
Wow.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I'm thinking, "This is so stupid. This stuff is so stupid, but yeah, I'll listen to it," and I'll take the extra allowance. So I'd listen to it. That repetition is the mother of skill is what we learned later on. Boy, those seeds he planted at an early age really have benefited me, continue to benefit me today. So really, I was encouraged by my father. He didn't spend a lot of time with us when we were young, but he said, "I had a lot to offer them and I can put them to work."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So I went to work at the age of 12, worked at a car wash, on the front line. I had to pump the gas and sell the polish waxes and the detailed jobs because he wanted me to learn sales early on. I wanted to be on the back of the line with the cute boys doing the detail work and getting some exercise, but he wouldn't wouldn't hear of it. All of my siblings and I worked in his businesses. He was always very entrepreneurial.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So on Saturday mornings, I wasn't going to hang out with my friends and sleep in late. It was be at the car wash at 8:00 and get started. So I didn't always like him very much, but I loved him, but he was tough on us kids at an early age, but taught us work ethic that has served me well.
Matthew Kelly:
Yeah. What instigated the move from the East Coast to Texas?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. So he was in the entertainment industry, as I stated. He had a nightclub on Huntington, Long Island, and ended up being the manager of the band Steam, that produced the hit record Na Na Na Na. Everybody knows that song, right?
Matthew Kelly:
Yes, they do.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Still played at the football games or chanted at the football games.
Matthew Kelly:
Wow.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So he made it big there and decided to follow the industry out to California. So he moved our family to Thousand Oaks, outside of the Hollywood area, and quickly learned that raising your kids during the late '60s, early '70s in that area probably wasn't a good idea and got out of the entertainment business and got involved in Success Motivation Institute, so became a distributor.
Matthew Kelly:
Okay.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Then from there to Waco because he did so well that Paul Meyer, the founder of that company, invited him to be VP at one of his companies, the Leadership Management Institute company.
Matthew Kelly:
So when you get moved from California to Texas, you were how old?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Going into fourth grade.
Matthew Kelly:
How did you feel about that?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I was excited thinking about we're going to be in chuckwagons and lots of cowboys and tumbleweed, and it wasn't quite like that. We did live on a dirt road initially. So I had my brothers and sisters. So it wasn't a tough transition for me. Came from a very large elementary school in California to a really tiny country school called Bosqueville just outside of Waco. I think there were 16 kids in my entire grade.
Matthew Kelly:
Wow.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Coming from a school of 2,000 from K to sixth grade in California.
Matthew Kelly:
What about your mother, when you look back on childhood and your mother's role in your life, her influence in your life?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
She taught me and continues to teach me all the basics of what is good. I get emotional because she's special. So even the little things, please and thank you, as kids, she taught all of us how to say please and thank you to everybody and to appreciate people, respect them, show everybody dignity. Today, she still, 87 with dementia, still teaches amazing lessons. So yeah, she is special, and she's the one who made sure I attended mass on Sundays and just really helped me fall in love with our faith, our Catholic faith.
Matthew Kelly:
You mentioned your siblings a little earlier. What were you taught about being a sibling by your parents?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Well, we each, the three girls were the oldest and the boys were the youngest, so we each had a responsibility to one of the boys. So if we'd go out shopping or something, we didn't have leashes on them necessarily, but we were each responsible. She taught us responsibility. We also had chores. Back in those days, every kid had a chore. So Saturday mornings, no cartoons were coming on until, if you had dusting today or you had vacuuming, you were going to do that work. We really worked together well, and she did that. She really helped create the strength of our family. She's really the glue that held us all together, and she would take us to the farms. We'd have a wonderful outing after we did all of our chores and we get to go to a local farm and see the baby piglets, things that you just never forget.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
My mother helped me see the beauty of life and taking the greenhouse, and we had to all help pave the greenhouse with bricks and just the mortar in between the bricks, and we did that together, all six kids and mom, and it was the most beautiful greenhouse ever. There'll never be a prettier greenhouse in the world because we were involved in it.
Matthew Kelly:
So then you get through high school, and what happens then?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. High school was a ... I want to stop there just for a second because I had the opportunity to lead in high school. My father always said I'd be a leader, but I was a cheerleader, and it wasn't the kind of cheer leadership that you might see today, which is tons of tumbling and competitive. It was truly about cheering people on and really caring about other people and showing you cared for them regardless whether it was the football team or it was the person sitting beside you in a classroom who was struggling.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So I became a ... I learned leadership lessons at a very early age in the role of being a cheerleader and also learned about sales. We had to sell ribbons. There's so many ribbons that had to be sold each week for the games. So I learned a lot about sales and, of course, I was competitive. So I had to always sell the most ribbons. So high school was good. It was another a very small country school. I didn't get very smart from being at that school, but I learned a lot about good people and hardworking people.
Matthew Kelly:
You are a competitive person. How has your view of competition changed over your lifetime?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. I compete against myself more than I compete against anybody else these days. Yeah. So it's interesting. Leaving high school and going to college, I didn't even know what the SAT test was. This is how small our country school was. We didn't have college counselors. I just thought it was another standardized test and so I did poorly, very poorly on it. Couldn't even get into a college. So my competitive nature started going, "Wait a second. What do you mean I can't get into college?"
Dina Dwer-Owens:
My siblings primarily didn't go to college except for one sister. She went to a local community college, and my father really wanted me to go to college because he thought it was a great place to learn, but to meet other people that you could network with for life, and he thought that was important.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Basically, we had to beg the president of Baylor University to allow me to go to the first six weeks of summer school and see if I can make the grade, the GPA. I'm like, "What's a GPA? I mean, really, Matthew, I didn't know anything about college. I struggled through that first six weeks and I did make it, but I didn't finish. I didn't complete college because I was working full-time for my father, 30 hours a week in his businesses and going to school full-time. It just wasn't fun. At that stage in my life, I wanted to have fun. So I finally just said to him, "What am I doing here? This is not good."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
He said, "Well, why don't you take a semester off from school, work with me side-by-side and then make a decision, but in the meantime, get your real estate licenses. So that's the kind of schooling you could do right now is just to get your real estate license," because he was building quite a real estate company.
Matthew Kelly:
Got it.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So I never went back, never went back to college other than going to teach classes on franchising and entrepreneurship at Baylor University without having had a degree.
Matthew Kelly:
Wow. Now, do you ever regret not finishing college?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I really don't. I learned so much from my father, and not that I always enjoyed working with him because he was very tough on me, but again, I'm grateful for those lessons now. Back then, it was hard.
Matthew Kelly:
Him being tough on you, how did that manifest?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. Well, it just made me a better person overall, a better leader. I mean, he put me in situations that ... One example is we went through the savings and loans crisis. So we had a lot of real estate, a lot of commercial multifamily properties, and the occupancies were 60% and we couldn't make our mortgage payments. He said, "Look," called me into his office one day, he said, "Look, I need you to go to the bank. Tell them that we can't make our payments so they can either take the property back or they can discount our mortgage by 50%."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I was mad. I said, "What do you mean? You agreed to pay this mortgage. You can't tell them you're not going to pay it."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
He said, "Well, what you don't understand is we don't have the money to pay it. You can't do that at a 60% occupancy rate."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I was furious and embarrassed that I had to go to the banker to have this conversation. Want me to finish that?
Matthew Kelly:
How old were you then?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I was 20, probably 22, 23.
Matthew Kelly:
How did that go?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Surprisingly well. The banker said, "Thank you for being honest with me. Let me go to our committee and see what we can do." Came back two weeks later, discounted the mortgage by 40%, not 50. He said, "But the other 10% we want you to put aside into a reserve fund. So if you've got roof leaks or you've got other maintenance issues that need to be attended to, that money is set aside just for that so we know that the property's being taken care of."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
What a lesson, but he just wanted me to be honest. I thought he was breaking our values by asking me to do something that was against what he had signed, but at the end of the day, he was just being honest. While other people were just giving their properties back, the bank didn't want another property.
Matthew Kelly:
Sure. What about your husband Mike? When did he come into your life?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Okay. I'm proud of this story, but it's a funny story. So I've always been a goal setter. In fact, I love your book, The Dream Manager, but always been a goal setter. My father raised us to set goals, and my girlfriends probably thought I was an idiot. One Thursday night, had been at school, had been working, ready just to go out and have some fun. Love to dance. Called a girlfriend and said, "Hey, you want to go meet at the little hole in the wall bar by Baylor University called At Our Limits?"
Dina Dwer-Owens:
As we're driving up to the bar, I see this really cool looking yellow Jeep and I'm like, "I'm going to meet whoever ..." This is my goal setting to an extreme, right? "I'm going to meet whoever drives that yellow Jeep." So we're sitting there and it wasn't even about drinking. It was just about having fun, laughing, and dancing. We love to dance. So this cute guy walks up and says, "Would you like to dance?" and I said, "Well, only if my girlfriend can dance with us because we're here alone. I'm not going to leave her sitting here." He says, "Okay." Brings us two buddies over. So then the five of us danced the rest of the night. Walked to our car and guess who walks to the Jeep? Mike. So there you go.
Matthew Kelly:
It's the yellow Jeep man.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
It's the yellow Jeep man.
Matthew Kelly:
Was Mike working for your dad when you met him or that happened after you met him?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
No, he was actually attending TSTC, a technical college in Waco when I met him, and then, of course, my father was a great recruiter of my boyfriends. So when he finished school, got his HVAC license. My father recruited him to come to work for our Rainbow International. It's a carpet restoration and cleaning company. Back then, it was carpet dying and cleaning. So yeah, he came to work after we met.
Matthew Kelly:
What did your dad think of Mike the first time he met him?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I think he liked him. He wasn't afraid of work. So my father loved people who weren't afraid of work.
Matthew Kelly:
What about your mother? What was her first impressions of him?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I think it was good. Not a negative word came out of her mouth. It's interesting, back in those days, we didn't have cellphones, we didn't have any of that. I said to my mom, "How did you let us just go and do the things we did?"
Dina Dwer-Owens:
She said, "Look, I did the best I could to raise you in a Catholic environment, and then just had to pray you're going to make good decisions knowing that you weren't going to always make great decisions. So I'm just going to trust your decision making and you learn from the mistakes you make."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So I think she felt good about Mike because I felt so good about Mike. He was on my goals list, too.
Matthew Kelly:
He was on your goals list.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
I said that already, but I mean, I literally had him on the dream list, handsome, ambitious, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah guy.
Matthew Kelly:
Yellow Jeep.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So I got him.
Matthew Kelly:
32 years marriage, what advice would you have for a young couple just getting married today?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Boy, marriage encounter. Today, they offer programs right before marriage. In fact, I think required in the Catholic church and had to go through marriage prep, and I think dynamic Catholics got an amazing program that I wish I would have had when Mike and I were getting married. So I would say go through the program, go through dynamic Catholics marriage prep program because it's critical to really get to know each other before you get into your marriage, and then continue that.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So one of the best things Mike and I have done for ourselves, we did go to marriage encounter early in our relationship. We ran into some trouble in our relationship and went to marriage encounter, and it helped us learn how to communicate better with one another, but today, probably one of the greatest things we do together is we go to retreats. Mike would say, "Yeah. One of the greatest things we do together is go to silent retreats because Dina doesn't get to talk at those."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Seriously, though, it's just a time that we grow in our faith and we always grow closer. Every time we go to one of those silent retreats, we spend a lot of time hiking and walking together. We can pray together. So even though silent retreat, we do still get to pray together, and that's just really special. We didn't have that when we first got married. We weren't praying together. I was reading the Bible. He wasn't even a Catholic yet. So I would say, yeah, do the preparation work before you get married if you can. If you're already married, still, go through the programs and go to retreats. Make it a habit at least annually to go on a marriage retreat.
Matthew Kelly:
What's one of your favorite qualities about Mike?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
He likes me just the way I am. He's always been so supportive, Matthew. He's never been critical of me through the busyness of being a CEO of a large company, and trying to raise two kids at the same time, trying to keep our relationship strong in our marriage. Mike has always loved me and been supportive. Never, never criticized. I mean, criticizing stupid little things like around the house, but never criticizing me in my leadership role as a mother or as somebody leading a company.
Matthew Kelly:
With your kids, how do you approach them differently? They're also unique, right? It's one of the things I'm learning, and you can't really be the same father or mother to each of them. You have to adapt. How do you see that with your own children?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. When they were younger or now or through the whole gamut?
Matthew Kelly:
Either way.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. When they were young, it was interesting. My son and I were so, so close. I mean, he was really, I don't say mommy's boy because my husband spent a lot of time with him too teaching him how to fish and hunt and those kind of things, but yeah, Mikey and I had a very special relationship. Now, he's become such a man. He has got a beautiful wife and a wonderful little boy and is doing just an amazing job as a husband, as well as a father.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So we spend time together, but not nearly as much. Normally, it's like, "Mom, can I go take a nap while you play with Ryder?" because he's busy. So we still get to do a lot of trips and things together, but the relationship is a little bit different now. He's a man. It's his life and he's independent. He's running it.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
My daughter and I, we were very close too when she was young, but she was very independent as a young girl. In fact, I remember the time she said, "Mom, I need some help with my ..." Probably it was English because I'm not very good at English, "Need some help smell with my English," fourth grade, and I said, "Okay. Well, can I study the chapter first and then I'll be able to help?"
Dina Dwer-Owens:
She goes, "Oh, forget it. I'll just figure it out." So very, very independent. Today, of course, we spend a ton of time together with the two granddaughters. We just have a lot of fun. Beautiful. I'm just blessed with two wonderful children.
Matthew Kelly:
They're both close to home?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Very close, minutes.
Matthew Kelly:
How did becoming a grandparent change your life?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Wow. So one of our favorite movies, the kids growing up, is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. So the best way to describe grandparenthood that I can think of is at the end of the movie when the Grinch' heart's busting out of his chest. That's how it feels to be a grandparent. I mean, you love your kids, but a grandbaby comes along and it's just this amazing ... It's hard to describe, really, but the best visual I can give you is just your heart just beats out of your chest, and it's just an amazing gift.
Matthew Kelly:
When you're holding your grandkids and you think about what's happening in the world today, where does your mind go there?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Prayer, right to prayer, just praying and also recognizing it. A priest was very good to me about two years ago. I went through a transition in our company and I was struggling with a few things, and this was one of the retreats, silent retreats. I had more time with the priest to really get even a bit of spiritual direction. I said, "I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to be doing with my time right now. I love being a grandparent and I love spending more time with my husband because I've got the time, but am I supposed to be out promoting values in leadership? What am ..."
Dina Dwer-Owens:
He said, "Look, do you understand the vocation of being a grandparent? It is ..." Today, it's even more serious than ever. It's always been serious, but he said, "That vocation, especially when they're young, is so crucial." It was like permission that it's okay for me not to have to go down and get busy doing other things, but just to focus on really playing the role a great grandparent should play in the lives of these young children.
Matthew Kelly:
What about faith? You talked about how your parents shared the faith with you and how did you in turn try to share the faith with your children and how do you hope to try and share the faith with your grandchildren?
Dina Dwer-Owens:
Yeah. It's just praying. So one of the things that I did early on with our kids is every time we'd get in the vehicle, we'd start with a prayer and it has to be fun, right? When the kids are young, it's got to be more fun for them to buy into it. So it was the, "Thank you, God, for a wonderful day. Amen," and then, "Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here," and we'd say us, "ever this day be at our sides to light, to guard, to rule, to guide," and then a really big Amen at the end and sometimes an Hallelujah.
Dina Dwer-Owens:
So my kids growing up, we did that, and they've retained that habit. As far as I know, they retained the habit, so have their friends, which is interesting, right? You get the kids who come in the car with your kids who are having to hear the prayer, and then eventually, I invite them to do it with us. I remember the one football jock who gets in the car, 16 years old or whatever. We were busy. I failed to say the prayer at the beginning of getting in the car and he's like, "Ms. Owens, we didn't say our pra