Podcast Interview – “The 4 D’s of Success” with Daniel Tolson & Gavin Preston

Gavin Preston (00:00):

One thing with anger is why most people don’t succeed is biggest. I don’t get angry enough. I don’t get frustrated with where they’re at in emotional intelligence. The third pillar of emotional intelligence is motivation. In the unfortunate part about living in the UK or Australia or America is our middle class is so big and the majority of people can live a very nice loft without having to try very hard whatsoever. So, the comfort zone is so big that people, they go, “You know what? I don’t really like my job but I don’t hide it.” So what happens is I get stuck in this rut and it’s still good enough and they get rewarded for underperformance. So I say, before people start to really move out of that comes on, they go to get really frustrated. They got really angry about not hitting their goals.

Narrator (00:51):

Welcome to the Business Mastermind Podcast with business strategist, speaker, and author, Gavin Preston. Tap into this meeting of minds between everyday business people on their journey to master business growth. Join them as they share strategies, insights, and shortcuts to help you survive and thrive in business and life as you scale your business and achieve a bigger impact.

Gavin Preston (01:20):

Gavin here. Welcome to Business Mastermind Podcast. And it’s episode 86. Today, we’re talking with Daniel Tolson, it based in time one originally from Australia. He shares with us the four D’s for success, desire, decision, determination, and discipline. And Daniel is an expert in emotional intelligence and he shows that actually how we can channel some of our emotions for good, for example, aggression and anger. There’ll be a few people to say the least at the moment with the Coronavirus being frustrated or even angry, what’s happening to them, their families, and to the business world and economy around them. And Daniel shares what we can take our emotions such as frustration and anger and channel that in a positive way. So yeah, positive interview around desire, decision, determination, and discipline. We have Daniel Tolson. Hi, and welcome to the business mastermind podcast. Today, I’ve got the great pleasure translatable across the other side of the world cause they come that lunch and trans-Pacific. Across the Taiwan to speak to Daniel Tolson. And Daniel, good morning. Hello.

Daniel Tolson (02:26):

Gavin. Good morning. Thank you for having me here. It’s a true pleasure.

Gavin Preston (02:29):

So Daniel, tell everybody about your area of expertise, and then once you’ve sort of talked about the area that we’re going to talk about in terms of emotional intelligence, can you just share with us a bit about your background, please?

Daniel Tolson (02:41):

Well, thank you for having me here. My speciality is emotional intelligence and over the past decade, I’ve worked with more than four and a half thousand business people to help them increase their sales and also their emotional intelligence. And in the past three years alone, I’ve delivered more than 1,350 insights into emotional intelligence. And these case studies have been with startup businesses all the way up to publicly listed companies, worth about 35 billion, 35 billion US dollars. So, I have the pleasure of working with people on all levels. And that’s uh, that’s my area of specialization, which I’m very passionate about.

Gavin Preston (03:20):

But you’ve had a very interesting entrepreneurial career starting in a family business. You knew from an early age cause you want to just, do you want to take us through your, uh, little bit about your career background?

Daniel Tolson (03:31):

Both my mum and dad were in porn in that they had a pawnshop. So my brother and I, we started at a young age and we were learning to trade and in the pawnbroking days, when we started in the early nineties all the goods that we would bring in their way, our shop were purchased from auctions. So, from an early age, my brother and out the and my brother and I were trading, buying and selling secondhand goods, learning to negotiate, finding the bag and finding margins, reselling pricing, adjusting marketing and what he’d been involved in the family business for 17 years. And we must have sold at least one of everything that’s ever been available for that business. And in the morning you might be lending money, in the afternoon you’re probably trading gold and silver and precious gems and everything in between. So, we got really good at trading. And whilst we were trading in the second-hand goods, we will money lending, which was incredible.

Daniel Tolson (04:31):

And then my brother and I were also Australian champion athletes. So we were, we’re kind of, we’re trying hard and we realized that we could turn us off into a business. So we started a company called Liquid Militia and we ended up having our clothing goods manufactured in China in factories were importing. And then we have distribution network with more than 50 retail outlets across Australia. Fantastic day. And what was your thought? The sport was wakeboarding, which was very popular there in the UK, but predominantly around, you know, thought park where I used to work back in the early two-thousands.

Gavin Preston (05:09):

Fantastic. So from, from your clothing business, where did you career move then?

Daniel Tolson (05:15):

So, from the clothing business, we started to produce videos and this was in the very early days of the internet and we didn’t have Facebook at that stage. We had MySpace, so we were creating videos, our video camera in the early two thousands or yeah, early two thousands, I think that video cost us camera cost us $6,000 back then. And that’s probably worth about 20 grand now. And there was no drones and we were lucky that my uncle owned a helicopter. So, we would ring my uncle and say, going wakeboarding, we want to film, can you take the doors off the chopper? So he would take the doors off the chopper and we would hang outside of the chopper, whilst we’re filming now, all of that today is done by a drone that’s worth $600, but we’ll hang out the side of helicopters. So when people look at our videos today and they see a chopper in where we’re filming from that’s hovering, you know, just 10 foot above the rider, they’re freaking out because you just don’t see that anymore.

Daniel Tolson (06:18):

The way ended up selling thousands of these videos and we would do entertainment and help entertainment companies with, you know, wakeboarding. And we would do demonstrations in front of up to 10,000 people. It was perfect. We were the brand, we were the face, we were creating our own marketing material. The internet was starting to wake up. We were doing videos on, on by space, which just wasn’t heard of. We created cult following and our marketing budget was everything that we created. Okay. So we were known globally. I was traveling in in Brunei of all places, a very rich Royal country in the middle of Asia. And I was walking through this village and it’s called the floating village. And this guy comes out of his house. He looks at me and he said, I just saw you on television. I said, no to my girlfriend.

Daniel Tolson (07:09):

And I said, he’s pulling my leg. She said, well, go in and have a look. And he took me into his house and wakeboarding was on television. It wasn’t made that he saw it was my brother. And he looks very similar to me and he spotted me in this Asian country in the middle of the world. Amazing, amazing. But that was really cool. And then I ended up working with Emirates airline and I call it a team of 17,000 the cabin crew. And I used to get at fans of our brain come onto the aircraft and they’d say, yo, Danny, danger, it’s going to be Daniel danger. When I was wakeboarding. And I’d look around and there’d be people on the aircraft wearing the brain that I’d started call me Danny danger would stop. And you know, it was 40,000 feet in the world. I’m living in the middle East and those people still remembered us.

Daniel Tolson (07:57):

I still get people, you know, 15 years. I see people wearing product that we created 15 years ago. They connect on Facebook and they say these shorts that are bought for $60 is still in mint condition. Wow. Wow. Inside, we still connected with our clients. You know, we, we, we started that in the early two thousands. Fantastic. And we still connect with them tonight. Right. All right, so now I’m living in Taiwan. You run a training speaking, coaching business, and your area of speciality is emotion intelligence. Yeah. And emotional intelligence is key for business success. 75% of the world’s fortune five hundreds are actually investing in emotional intelligence programs. And what they’re realizing is that the people with the highest level of emotional intelligence are the most effective in their roles. So there’s significant return on investment for companies. If you’re working on emotional intelligence and being a person who grew up with significant learning disabilities.

Daniel Tolson (08:59):

When I was young, when I found emotional intelligence, I actually felt really smart for the first time in my life because this form of an intelligence is not measured at school. Sure. At school they worried about your IQ and IQ is set by age 15 and you’ve got what you’ve got for your whole life. But emotional intelligence, it’s fluid and it’s measured differently and it’s your ability to get along with people. It’s your ability to communicate and it’s the ability to understand and improve yourself in this type of intelligence is so important for people who really didn’t succeed or who never felt smart at school. And what do you see in terms of applications in the world of business then of being you know, emotionally connected, emotionally intelligent? The first one is, if we’re talking about selling, no sales are possible without empathy. And empathy is your ability to read the other person’s emotional makeup.

Daniel Tolson (09:57):

It’s the ability to look at your prospect and to be able to walk a mile in their shoes. It’s being under understand intimately their present situation and how it’s impacting them personally, how it’s impacting them financially and non financially and without that type of emotional intelligence, no sale or business success is possible. If you can’t make a sale business fails and it’s selling a Google product or service, or whether it’s in a negotiation or whether it’s persuading a member of your team to do something, you’re making a sale on you. Absolutely it, you know, it’s the transfer of an idea. And as a leader or a business owner, if you can’t read the emotional makeup of your people, if you can’t understand where they’re coming from, if you can’t understand their thought process in the emotions that are present, it’s impossible to communicate your ideas.

Daniel Tolson (10:53):

So empathy is absolutely critical. We call it emotional intelligence. We’ve known about it for years. We used to call it street-smart, but now I’ve just labeled it and measured it. Yeah. So somebody wants to improve that emotional intelligence. Can you say it’s fluid so you can presumably work on it, you can develop it. That will increase your effectiveness, effectiveness in sales and in persuasion. So where would they start? What were the things that you need to look at? The Greeks had been saying this for thousands of years and they call it no thyself. Okay? About 36% of the population can catch the thoughts in the feelings that they’re experiencing at any given time. So the place to start improving your emotional intelligence is starting with self-awareness. And you’ve got to understand why you think and feel the way that you do. One of my clients today, she called me up incredibly successful, multimillion dollar business and she said, Daniel, I’ve got this fear of rejection.

Daniel Tolson (11:56):

If she says, I don’t know where it’s coming from, I haven’t experienced it for a long time. So some personality styles are more susceptible to the fear of rejection and others are more susceptible to making a mistake and they have a fear of making a mistake. Other people fear failure where other people just so worried about people leaving them. So with your personality style, you’ve got to understand what your style is. You’ve got to understand the emotions that are present that helped you become more successful. For me, aggression and anger are actually strong emotional drivers for me and I can’t let the negative effects of those emotions hold me back. I have to use them to propel me forward. Other people that had fears of making mistakes now that fear of making them in the state is also what makes them very successful in their role. Because I help other people making mistakes. Chicken don’t understand your personality style, which is critical in emotional intelligence.

Gavin Preston (12:57):

So you mentioned there that key sort of drivers or motivators for you in the past have been aggression and anger. Presumably in your sporting career you learn that was a massively powerful asset for you and you learn how to channel that. And you honed that for many, many, many hours on the border. But for those in business that might get frustrated, who might be competitive, who might find themselves experiencing feelings of aggression or anger, how can they channel it in, in a productive way?

Daniel Tolson (13:28):

Well, one thing with anger is why most people don’t succeed is because they don’t get angry enough. They don’t get frustrated with where they’re at. And in emotional intelligence, they’re, the third pillar of emotional intelligence is motivation. In the unfortunate part about living in the UK or Australia or America is our middle class is so big and the majority of people can live a very nice life without having to try very hard whatsoever. So the comfort zone is so big that people, they go, you know what? I don’t really like my job but I don’t hate it. So what happens is they get stuck in this rut and it’s still good enough and they get rewarded for under performance. So I say before people start to really move out of that comfort time, they got to get really frustrated. They get really angry about not hitting their goals.

Daniel Tolson (14:23):

So when you look at your goal in your fall short, you’ve got to use that emotion of anger to move you forward. You got to feel frustrated that you’ve had to go without. And so that’s the main thing. So as people are becoming more successful, we talk about the four D’s you’ve got to have desire. So you’ve firstly got to understand what you want and you have to have a burning desire to get that. That’s the first day. The second day is after you know, you want and you’ve got that desire. You have to make a decision. And when we make a decision, we have to burn our mental bridges. We don’t burn the physical bridges, we don’t burn people. We burn the mental bridges and we say, I refuse to go back to doing what I was doing. I was sick and tired of that and feeling that way.

Daniel Tolson (15:10):

I’m never going back that ever again. But you’ve got to make the decision. The third part is determination. And most people start, but they never see things through to the end. And that’s a major problem. According to Napoleon Hill, the majority of people give up on their goals before the very first attempt. So when you get that frustration, you’ve got to use it to move forward, to get yourself back up. There’s an old Japanese proverb, fall down eight times, get back up nine times. So you’ve got to have the determination to start things and finish it and see it all the way through to the end. And then the fourth D, which you must have the success. And if this is not present, you’ll never succeed is discipline. And you have to be willing to do what is hard. And like Les Brown says, if you do what is hard?

Daniel Tolson (16:04):

Life will be easy, is easy, life will be very hard to you. And in some of the latest and best researchers coming out of the university of Sydney is that the most people who get what they want get very angry. And a lot of people are spending time in therapy to try and get rid of this anger. What they should use. It isn’t going a different direction to propel them forward, right? So you’ve got to have those four days and you’ve got to put it in the right place. So design, decision, determination, and then discipline. Discipline, they’re the four days of success. Without that, nothing’s possible, right? So if, if a danger of oversimplifying it of the low forties, this is a one area where you find most people need to pay attention to desire. I give my clients a task and this, this task is worth $52,000.

Daniel Tolson (17:00):

I now at books, I have a text message here. What happens is with desire, we have to have reasons for success. And most people have a reason why they want something that most people don’t have enough reasons to get that thing. And we call these reasons fuel in the tank. So what I do with my clients, when they start with me, I tell them, you have to write down a hundred reasons why you must succeed. And they go, that’s a lot of reasons. And I’ll say, well, you’re going to fail a lot. So you need more reasons to get back up. Yeah. And then I also tell them, you have to hand have a hundred reasons why you must not fail. So with human motivation, we’re motivated towards what we want the carrot. And we’re also motivated away from what we don’t want, which is the stick.

Daniel Tolson (17:46):

And most people don’t know what motivated by. So some people who are motivated by loss or fear, they need to have these reasons why. They must not feel why they must not fail. So when I give my clients this task, a hundred reasons to succeed in a a hundred reasons why they must not fail, they start to understand the true reasons why they want thing that that true desire. And I had a young guy this week, 19 years of age, he had his first one hour coaching session. He went out and he wrote down his a hundred reasons why you must succeed. You write down a hundred reasons why he must not fail. And then by Friday of last week, he sent me a message and he said, I’ve just closed a $52,000 deal. Never done it before, but he had so much desire because he knows his true reasons why he must succeed in my, he must not fail. And that’s a 19 year old. So he can do it and he can’t even grow a beard yet, but he can do 19 year old

Gavin Preston (18:48):

Closing a $52,000 deal. Yeah. Yeah. And he’s only ever going to grow and grow in leaps and bounds from that place. Now

Daniel Tolson (18:58):

100% he’s got, he’s got desire, wants a burning desire. So you build [inaudible],

Gavin Preston (19:05):

You get that flame roaring in a F. And then I think the decision pro bit problem, it comes very easily after with that level of desire. 

Daniel Tolson (19:15):

Interesting thing there. Gavin is a motivation as a driving force has a motivational force of 1.0 in terms of power, but the fear of loss, the fear of missing out has a driving force of 2.5 fear is such a, such a strong motivating force. And so when you know it, what happens is you don’t have to wait until somebody takes something from you. All your reasons are inside of you. So it’s just automatically you start to get fired up because you’ve thought it through.

Gavin Preston (19:46):

Yeah. So yeah, I’m very familiar with the concept of the, towards and away from motivating. But that distinction there that I had not heard is that the impact of the away from to motivation, moving away from what you do not want and why you must not fail is two and a half times stronger than the moving towards the goals that you do want.

Daniel Tolson (20:06):

And so when we all know this carrot and the stick, cool, and some people think they’re, they’re just a carrot person. But the reality, we’re both, and if we have looked at the most successful people in the world, they have equal balance of towards hand away from, because what happens is once you get far enough away from the pain that doesn’t propel you forward, that only gets you away from the pain. So you’ve got to have the desire in the carrot. So you start to turn and then focus on what you want. Because this also becomes very suggestible to the unconscious mind. If you keep focusing on what you don’t want, the mental law of attraction and the mental lower mental equivalency kicks in and you become, you think about most of the time. So if you keep focusing on that fear, eventually you attract that so you’ve got to get away from it and then you’ve got to get clarity on your goal and this was when your reticular activation system kicks in in the reticular activation system locks on to your most dominant thought, that thing that you want out in the future and it becomes like a heat seeking missile and you just remain laser focused but you’ve got to move away from that from the old and you’ve got to focus on the new year.

Daniel Tolson (21:14):

But these are all psychological principles that have been around for 6,000 years and we just rediscovering,

Gavin Preston (21:20):

Yeah, we can periods of uncertainty, you need to look for the certainty that is in your business and around you and you also need to look for opportunities where you can possibly pivot how you committed, analyze risk and downside and actually how importantly you can survive and thrive through testing and challenging times. I help people do this all day long. In terms of my business and I’m [inaudible] next month, I’ve got a book coming out without very title survival, fried full of case studies and stories of how I’ve done that. But if you’re feeling that actually you could do a dose or what do I need to do now to survive and then swiped and do get in touch and I’ll be able to help get you and your business to navigate the best course through potentially stormy waters to get to the point of thriving and making a difference to the customer base and potential future customers that you serve. Drop me an email Gavin at Galvin, preston.com we’ll jump on a call and find out how I can help you. Slice Galvin out, Galvin, preston.com so with that burning desire, the decision but follows a and imagine that it fueled the determination. I think discipline is an area that trips people up, isn’t it?

Daniel Tolson (22:32):

In inherently, there’s seven things that drives all human behavior and it’s called expedience, and humans are expedient by nature. In the first thing that all humans have in common is laziness. We’re very lazy and people hear that and say, Oh, they know that’s bull crap. Let me ask you, what’s more enjoyable to drive a car with electric windows where you just press a button and the window goes down by itself or the old style where you got to wind it up? Laziness. We’ve come up with these inventions. What about cruise control? I used to drive from Sydney to Northern Queensland to go wakeboarding on a Friday night, 800 kilometers, and I’ll tell you what, the day that we got cruise control in our car, I never went back to driving a car with no cruise control. So we’re all lazy and we’re always looking for an easier way to do things that unfortunately most humans, they get rewarded for their laziness.

Daniel Tolson (23:27):

You go to work for 40 hours a week, it doesn’t matter how bad you’ve done your job. It’s almost impossible to get fired in Australia these days. As long as you show up and at school and it starts at school, Gavin, we are rewarded for poor performance. In Australia. We say PS equal pass marks still get distinctions. So even if you just pass, you still get rewarded and there is no difference between you and the high performer. Everybody gets the same certificate. So we’re rewarded for laziness. And then when people start their own business, they have to break life long habits. And laziness is a habit, in my opinion. I think it’s even a disease. So how do you, how, how do you coach people to break that lifelong habit to overcome that disease and and be disciplined or develop that discipline? Well, the law of incremental improvement is ultimately important here.

Daniel Tolson (24:23):

And with emotional intelligence. I talk about the comfort zone in our body temperature we’ll just say is set at around about 37 degrees. Maybe point here in point. They’re are different, but this was called homeostasis. It’s the temperature of the body. What happens is if our temperature goes up by 10% and it goes from 37 to 41 we go into what’s called a hyper [inaudible] state, and the body starts to cook itself. And what we naturally do, we put cold packs, we put Luke warm water on ourself to bring our body back down to 37 degrees back into homeostasis, back in to the comfort zone. The body temperature drops by 10% it goes into a hypothermic state and the body foragers. And what we try to do is we try to warm it back up, but only to the comfort zone, 37 degrees. So the first thing that people have to be mindful of is that if you want to make a change, you’ve got to move from what we call your comfort zone.

Daniel Tolson (25:23):

And we’re going to go through discomfort until you get to your new level of success. But as soon as you start to move out of your comfort zone by 10% as soon as you start to earn 10% more, what happens is you start to go into self sabotaging behavior. People set the goal to increase their income. All of a sudden they’ve got this extra money and they didn’t set goals for what they’ll do with money. So they start to spend it, they start to spend the extra money, and all of a sudden they’re earning, they were earning, let’s call it $100,000 now they’re earning $110,000 they’ve got an extra 10 grand of cash. And they see, and what they find is that their expenses rise to make the new income. Sure. The studies, most people who were when they were 18 and got their first job, had the same financial problems 20 years later when they’re earning twice as much in their full time career.

Daniel Tolson (26:13):

So knowing human psychology, what we have to do is we have to incrementally increase their level of success. And so what happens is they don’t go into sabotaging behaviors and you have to retrain success habits as they slowly move up. But you can double your income in 30 days. You can triple it in 30 days. But what happens is you’re so far out of your comfort zone, most people freak out and they go back into the comfort zone. So inch by inch, it’s a cinch by the yard. It’s hard. So how do you change it? Just one habit, $1 million habit at a time.

Gavin Preston (26:50):

Be a good start. In terms of the first habit for people to look up.

Daniel Tolson (26:53):

Well, unfortunately 97% of the population don’t have goals and 85% of our motivation comes from the the expected outcome, their behaviors for the future. So what we know, and this has been proven since the 70s by Mark McCormack in his book, what they don’t teach you at Harvard is set a goal. As soon as you set a goal, three things happen. As soon as you set a goal, your body gets a dopamine rush. And this is a Euro transmitter, comes from the brand, it floods the body, and all of a sudden it’s like your focus. You’re away, you’re alive, everything becomes brighter and you get excited. So dopamine is released, released from the brain, and as you start to move towards that goal, you start to get adrenaline in your body. It’s like you’ve got this big goal, your David dares Goliath. Then you’re ready for the fight and you start to move towards this goal.

Daniel Tolson (27:49):

You’re excited. Obstacles come up, you don’t care because the heart’s pumping and all of a sudden, once you have just the smallest little win you experienced success in, you start to smile. And when the lip curls up in the eyes, rise up, the brain releases serotonin and these three things in nature’s happy drugs and with dopamine, with adrenaline, and with serotonin, it is impossible to feel depressed and you’ll feel invincible. And what will happen is you’ll get an objection, you’ll get a little bit of rejection. You’ll say, I feel like Superman, I don’t care. And you’ll keep moving forward. So if you just start to write your goals down, set your goals, write them down. You’ll be doing what, 97% of the other population and not doing sure. No, I haven’t ever met a successful person who does not have goals. And I’ve never met a failure who’s had goals. Yeah. And so just do what other successful people are doing. And eventually with practice you’ll get the same result.

Gavin Preston (28:46):

You obviously achieved a pinnacle of success early in your life in terms of your sporting career. For some people won’t, you’ve achieved that success. The discipline can fall back. You can get a little bit. So the complacent where you are, how did you find catch you keen and sharp? Was it always the competition that was chasing it, your heels or what was in the work to keep the discipline there and keeping a sharp

Daniel Tolson (29:15):

Probably stupidity. Okay. When I went to school I had learned disabilities and I was always told that I was stupid. So when I set my goals for sports, people would say, Oh, you’ll never achieve that. But you know, the smart part of stupidity is just, you stop listening to people. So I just didn’t listen to people and I set a goal and my reticular activation system just got hooked on to becoming the Australian champion. And it was like an obsession. And it took me 10 years to achieve that goal. There was two major knee reconstructions, broken arms plates in my arms, broken noses, torn ligaments, and I just kept going until I got what I wanted. And so those four things were present, the desire was there. I was very clear on why I wanted it. I’d made the decision that I would get it and nothing would stop me out.

Daniel Tolson (30:13):

I had the determination because every time I had a setback, I got back up on the board. But I also had the discipline. And the discipline here was incredibly important because in my sport of white boarding, it was very easy to become good fast. Okay? And so you could go out there and you could learn high level tricks without learning the basics, but it only seemed to get most people two or three years into the sport. Okay. What I mean by this is when I started, I learned by jumping the wake and then I learned how to do it. Coming back the other way, these are basics and people hate the basics that I learned it all. One 80 this fight. And I won it the other way. Yup. While stall was fluxing on the foundations, other people were coming in and doing a flip and a twist.

Daniel Tolson (31:01):

Okay. Unfortunate thing for them was they did a flip, no twist, but they could not do a one 80 to get them back in the right direction. And so they were doing these hard tricks that worth a thousand points. And I was practicing these tricks that were worth 150 points, right? But ultimately over time, my foundations were so solid that as I started to layer on harder tricks, nobody could compete with me. And I was doing tricks that nobody else was doing at that time. And they just couldn’t compete. I wasn’t competing against them. I was competing against myself, but they couldn’t do the basics. So they’re always held back. We had such a strong foundation and it’s the discipline to do those things that are boring. It’s like in sales the top sales companies around the world, they spend 80% of their time face to face selling where companies that are failing spend 11% of their time selling.

Daniel Tolson (31:55):

And the hardest part of selling is prospecting and finding new people to speak to because you’ve got to go through rejection. But the top company is say a part of success is failure. And a prerequisite is speaking to a lot of people who are going to say no. And if you speak to a lot of people who say no, you’ll eventually find a lot of people who say yes, of course. But it takes discipline to do that. And most people just want to fast track pass that. Just give me the leads. Somebody else can deal with rejection, but it doesn’t work like that.

Gavin Preston (32:24):

So back to the point around emotional intelligence, we’ve said [inaudible]

Daniel Tolson (32:30):

For these

Gavin Preston (32:31):

Decision, determination and discipline. Are there any other things that you find from an emotional intelligent point of view or absolutely

Daniel Tolson (32:40):

Invaluable to help achieve success there? There’s five key pillars of emotional intelligence. The first one is self-awareness. You’ve got to understand why you think and feel the way that you do. You’ve got to understand your strengths and your weaknesses. And we live in a society that says, just focus on your strengths. Forget about your weaknesses. That’s a lot of bull crap. If you’re driving a motor vehicle and it has four tires, I don’t care how good a driver you are. If one of those ties is flat, that vehicle is not going to perform at its best. I don’t care how good your affirmations are. I don’t care if you’ve got rid of all your negative emotions and mental blocks. I don’t care if you write your goals in the morning, if you’ve got four tires on your car and one is flat, that vehicle won’t perform and you have to learn to deal with it.

Daniel Tolson (33:26):

You’ve got to pull over, you’ve got to get the tire replaced. Sure. So that’s really important. Second part of emotional intelligence is so regulation and this is being able to manage our mental and emotional blockages. And I have a friend, he trains in the psychology of coaching and he said that there are reports out there today that demonstrate there is no link between feeling good and being a high performer. He says, because there’s a lot of high performers out there who drunk, they’ve lost their families, they’re doing drugs and they’re still getting huge results. So what we have to do is we have to learn to manage our emotions. We have to still be able to achieve our daily activities and actions even when we’re feeling bad. And that’s a key principle to success. If you’ve lost everything, if your family’s falling apart, you have to be able to manage your emotion.

Daniel Tolson (34:22):

You have to be able to manage your thoughts, and you have to be able to take those daily actions that eventually get you your outcomes. And that’s getting back to what I said about lesbian before. You’ve got to do what is hard. And that’s the important in the most important part about self regulation is managing your thoughts and feelings. The third area is motivation. This is the third pillar of emotional intelligence and motivation. I have never met somebody who’s lost a job. They’re having too much motivation. I’ve never met somebody who’s lost a client because they’re too motivated. What happens is people run out of motivation, they slacken off. And what happens in emotional intelligence. Most people don’t have the energy to pursue their goals. They hit an obstacle, they hit an objection, and they give up and you low auditing gal said, you know, 35 maybe 40 or 50 years ago, the average person gives up on their goal before their very first attempt, but we know if we tie it back into sales, 80% of sales are made after the 15th attempt to close the sale.

Daniel Tolson (35:29):

So you’ve got to be able to be motivated to keep asking while she getting those notice to keep finding a way to get the customer to buy when they say now at the start. Right. And that’s motivation. Yeah. The fourth pillar of emotional intelligence is empathy. And empathy is the ability to read other people’s emotional makeup. And if you can’t read their emotional makeup, you’ll have conflict after conflict after conflict. So you’ve got to get good at reading other people’s mental and emotional makeup. If you can’t read them, you can’t have clients, you can’t have team members. So you’ve got to have high levels of empathy. And we say that today, empathy contributes about 85% of your success in sales. If you can’t read the client, doesn’t matter how good your product and services that will never buy it because you don’t understand them. And people say, I feel that this person understands me.

Daniel Tolson (36:22):

And if the customer says that they’ll buy from me. But nobody ever buys from a salesperson who they say, Oh, this person doesn’t get me. They walk away. And then the final part is what we call social regulation. And this is communication. And if you can’t get your message across, people won’t buy from you. And in my opinion, and this is backed by research coming out of Harvard university is about 99% of the mistakes that we make in business today are based on communication errors. And that is not because I’ve made a communication error. It is also because the other person hasn’t heard me properly. And just biggest we can hear it doesn’t mean we can listen. So when we communicate, we going to be very clear and concise with our message. But the person who’s listening in receiving the information has to make sure that they’ve got clean filters and they don’t let their own perceptions change the information that’s coming in. So if you can learn to be a master communicator, if you can be learned to be persuasive, but you’re also got very clear filters for listening, ultimately you’ll succeed faster than anybody else. And these are all skills and it’s all attitude. Emotional intelligence is attitude. And the people don’t lose jobs because of positive attitudes. They get hired the skill and they get fired for attitude. But today, attitude is the most important thing.

Gavin Preston (37:46):

So one thing I find I encounter with clients of mine is that they’ve been in employing the forties, getting great results, achieving a lot, and then they get to a point of, of overwhelm because a lot of good stuff’s happening. And then there’s, there’s that, the success generates more activity that activity load goes up. They may not be as adept at sort of delegation, but what do you find works really well helping somebody when they’re in a place of succeeding but they’re overwhelmed and they’re, they’re almost at a point of self sabotaging to get out of overwhelm.

Daniel Tolson (38:24):

Well, the things you’ve got to make sure that your goals, your goals and people are setting goals today and they don’t really understand why they set the goals. I remember it was nine, I was 19 it 1999 my uncle said to me, Daniel, come and learn how to sell real estate. He said, come on, learn to sell real estate if you, if you get in the top 10 sales creators in Australia in the first six months, I’ll promote you to sales, but you’ve got to buy a house before you start to solve. We show that you have to understand empathy, the sales process and the stress of buying the house as well. So he set these goals for me. I achieved them. But in the back of my mind, all I wanted to do was chase women and go, wait. And I’m going to go with the office every day wearing a tie, selling real estate, working with 40 year olds and all I can think about is women and going wakeboarding.

Daniel Tolson (39:13):

And I found out I was getting very stressed. I was getting these incredible results, but I was working all the time and I just wanted to be out with my mates doing whiteboards. And the more success that I got in real estate, the more unfulfilled I felt in my own personal life. And at that stage somebody else gave me a goal. It wasn’t my goal and I pursued it. I bought my first home at 19, but it was more stressful than enjoyable. I bought my second house at age 21 and I’ve got, you know, close to, you know, maybe $400,000 back then in debts. And I thought I should feel successful, but I didn’t. And I was doing things that I really didn’t want to do. So I packed my bag and I came to the UK in 2002 and I took a job working with my mate in a bar.

Daniel Tolson (40:01):

I went backpacking and I was actually incredibly happy just traveling by myself. And what I realized was that the goals I achieved with somebody else’s goals, there are a set of goals that I probably should have said at age 40 not at 20 so how I dealt with the overwhelmed, I just escaped, right? And that’s not effective. So what I’d be doing, knowing what I now know, if I was to do a quick analysis, I’d go back and make sure that the goals that I’ve set are actually what I want. And normally if we’re setting goals and we’re achieving things and we don’t want them, we will feel incredibly overwhelmed. So it’s getting back to a source of values. What’s important to me here? What do I want? Is this my goal? And if it is, I’ll got to be congruent about it. In congruency, I call it all systems go.

Daniel Tolson (40:49):

The goal has to be good for you. The goal has to be good for your family. The gold has to be good for the business community and it has to be good for the planet and see those goals at the start. The goal wasn’t good for me. It wasn’t the right thing. I should have been chasing the girls and I should’ve been wakeboarding. I shouldn’t have sacrificed that. It was good for the business. It was good for the family because the family said, you know what, we need to settle Daniel down. Let’s get him locked in. We’re property in chilling out so he doesn’t chase the girls. It was good for the business, but overall it wasn’t good for the planet. And I like to make contributions, whether it to be my sport or my or my backyard. But owning a house, it just gave me a stressful personality and I wouldn’t have been a nice person to be around. My girlfriend at the time would have thought I must have been an asshole because I was always focused on work and all stressed. So coming back to a source of values and made sure it’s the right thing for you.

Gavin Preston (41:46):

Great. And then so once you’ve locked back on to a goal that’s right for you, and that helps to address some of the overwhelm because presumably if you’ve, you’ve gone off course and you realigned to your goal, then it becomes the excitement and the determination kicks in to address. The overwhelmed just disappears or it starts to dissolve.

Daniel Tolson (42:08):

Well, the first thing I found was I stopped watching the clock. I found when I had goals that weren’t in alignment for me, I was just watching the minutes and hours tick away. I’d be like, please just get to five o’clock, eight hours of slavery. I can escape. But today, you know, it’s 8:25 PM here in Taiwan and I would do a podcast every night till 12 o’clock because I’m talking about things that I love in the different is when you’re doing something that you, you love, you get peace of mind in the number one thing everybody wants is peace of mind. The number one thing that every body wants is to feel good. But so many of us are doing things that don’t make us feel good. That’s why I live in Taiwan. It makes me feel good. I used to live in Dubai. I was there because it used to make me feel good.

Daniel Tolson (42:57):

I love Australia, but I don’t feel good living there. I want to live here. So I set up my life based on what makes me feel good and that, and that’s the true test. Do you feel good? Yes, we’ll do it. If you don’t, have you heard of the who? The owners of Hawaii nano go and take detail. The Hooters of Hawaii, they live by a very simple code. If you ate it and it makes you feel good, then they ate more of it. If you eat it and it makes you feel bad, stop eating it. If you do it and it feels good, keep doing it. If you do something that makes you feel bad, stop doing it. And this is emotional intelligence. It’s also tuning back into ourselves and asking ourself the question, is this right for me? Yeah.

Gavin Preston (43:39):

So simple and profoundly powerful. I’d love you to share a little bit about the culture in Taiwan. You shared with me just before we started to record and in terms of the community around neighbors and, and what it’s like for children to grow up in that, in, in that culture.

Daniel Tolson (43:56):

I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll draw the opposite. So in Australia, we’re an individualistic society. So in Australia when I grew up if my friends were arriving and it was coming up, six o’clock mum would say send them home. We can’t afford to feed them. In Australia, if you go to your mate’s house for a barbecue, you bring your own food. If you go to your mate’s house for birthday bash, you take your own beers. If you take 12 beers and you only drink six and take the other six home. Yeah, the city is true in the middle East and here in Taiwan. So we live in a communal society and we 26,000 head of population per square kilometer in Australia at 600 per square kilometer. So here you have to share everything. And when I go downstairs of my apartment block and I see the children, I don’t say, Gavin, that’s your child.

Daniel Tolson (44:51):

When I address the child, I’ll say the how may, may which, yeah, may, may means hello little sister. So I address the girl as my little sister. If there’s somebody who’s slightly older than me, maybe you’re a little bit older than me. For example, I’ll call you Gaga, older brother. If you’re the gentleman who’s serving me food and you’re significantly outta, I’ll call you shoe shoe, which is uncle. So we still have this culture where we’re including everybody. The little girl is my sister. The little boy is my brother. I don’t look at him as your child. It’s part of the community. So when I go down to the park, all the dads and the moms are playing with everybody else’s children. My children are playing with your ball and it’s not as if, Hey, that’s my ball. It’s our ball. This, this is our park.

Daniel Tolson (45:44):

You go to a restaurant and there’s 30 seats. If I’m sitting here, somebody wants it on the other side of the restaurant because there’s a community, they’ll just come in, sit themselves right next to me. Wow. And it’s an incredible place. I’m 95% of the population is Buddhist, and about 99% of the population is Taiwanese. So it’s, it’s one culture. It’s one understanding and it’s very spiritual. So I said to my wife the other day, I said, let’s go over and pray to this Buddha. And she said, Oh, you can’t pray to that. Buddha said, why not? She says, because this, this Buddha looks after the people of this community, we’ve got to go back and we got to pray to our Buddha because he looks after our community. Wow. So you’ve got these thousand different gods, and I have this chicken that’s at my front door and it’s this golden chickens got golden eggs and this, this golden chicken brings us wealth.

Daniel Tolson (46:38):

And because of funkshway, it’s gotta be in the right place. In the other day, my wife said to me, I’ve got to take the chicken home. I said, where are you taking it? She said, I’ve got to take it to the middle of Taiwan. So she took this golden chicken in the glass box and her and her cousin drove two and a half hours down into the mountains in the middle of Taiwan to take the chicken back to the Buddha, gave the butter a blessing. We paid back the money that we borrowed from the Buddha to start our business. We borrowed some more. It’s all part of the spiritual nature. We’ve got the blessing of the chicken and she bought the chicken home and it sits at the front door again. So it’s this whole spiritual world and we pray for our clients. So my wife will be down praying for the clients, I’ll be working with them.

Daniel Tolson (47:24):

She’ll be praying for them. We’ll go light a candle. And this represents success for our clients. So we have very spiritual here. We are very spiritual and this is something that I’ve never found anywhere else in the world. In there. Like I said before, I do what makes me happy and it makes me feel really happy. Ah, Danielle, what a real joy to have an insight into the culture there, but also to learn more from you. Around emotional intelligence. The four D’s are desire, decision, determination and discipline. And the five pillars of most intelligence and self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social regulation. If people want to find out more about you, what you do, your coaching, et cetera, how do they do that? And on my website, Daniel tulsan.com John Mo on my website, there’s a bunch of free resources there. You can download my latest book, which is called wind sales.

Daniel Tolson (48:15):

Now my wife and I also have daily podcasts on Facebook. So just typing in Daniel Tolson into Facebook. You’ll find me in that we’ve got two podcasts, one called wind sales now, and that’s all about business in sales success. But the other one which is ultimately important is called mental detox. And this is where we’re talking about the secrets to stop self sabotage. And I believe that if we can just deal with our mental and emotional blockages and then work on our business, we’ll be far more successful. And so that’s mental detox and that’s a great podcast. Fantastic. Danielle, thank you so much for your,

Daniel Tolson (48:53):

It’s evening and thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you, Gavin, and NA, thank you for inviting me on scribe. Pleasure. My pleasure. You’ve been listening to the business mastermind podcast. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review so that more people like you can get their business back on their own terms, enjoy more success and create more impact.