As a guest on the “Go All In” podcast by Robert Brus, we discussed what it takes to truly succeed in business, including topics like:
- My personal history and early experiences in business
- Overcoming personal doubts, disabilities and setbacks
- The importance of Personal Leadership
- The relationship between Emotional Intelligence and income
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Podcast Transcript
Robert Brus: Welcome to The Go All In Podcast. I’m your host, Robert Brus, and I’m proud to be bringing you these stories of commitment and success, from every day heroes right here in Sydney, Australia.
Robert Brus: Today, on the show, our guest is Daniel Tolson. Now, all of us, we have an internal voice inside our head. Sometimes it’s the devil on one shoulder, and the angel on the other, especially when we’re torn about a decision on what to do. Now who hasn’t felt that before, right? I think maybe I’ve been listening to the devil a little too much in my life.
Robert Brus: Other times, your internal voice is a very, very harsh critic’s, and at times, it might be the harshest of all critics. And often, that internal voice will tell you that you’re just not worthy, or you’re not good enough, to do whatever it is that you’re trying to do.
Robert Brus: Our guest today is Australia’s number one business coach, and he’s worked with more than 3,500 companies and individuals, to help them break through those unconscious and conscious biases that people have. In the process, he helps people to redefine themselves from the inside out, and the results that he achieves are nothing short of absolutely incredible.
Robert Brus: There are many ways that you could measure the success of what Daniel does. One way to measure it is that he creates double-digit bumps in sales numbers, and he couples that with a new and much deeper understanding of one’s inner self. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s the way to experience personal growth and personal development. Double your sales numbers, and feel good at the same time. Who wouldn’t want that?
Robert Brus: As you’ll hear, Daniel is an expert in social and emotional intelligence. He’s written and produced more than 250 audio and video learning programs, including Total Emotional Mastery, The Business Breakthrough, and Business Growth Strategies, which have influenced business owners all around the world. Daniel delivers more value than you could hope for in this podcast, so get your pen and paper ready, and make sure you come on back and listen to this show more than one time, to get its full effect, because it is absolutely epic.
Robert Brus: I’m excited he’s here, so please help me in welcoming Daniel Tolson. Well, good day, Daniel! Welcome to The Go All In Podcast. It’s great to have you here, mate.
Daniel Tolson: Thanks, Rob. Glad to be here, mate.
Robert Brus: All right, I’m really excited about this one. We’ve got Australia’s number one business coach, but before we talk about any of that stuff, and get into any of this crazy goal and mindset stuff, I want to get to know you a little bit, and just want to start off by asking, whereabouts are you from? Because you’re an Ozzie, but you’re displaced as an expat in a, well, in a country that I don’t know anyone else is from there.
Daniel Tolson: Well, today, I’m in Taiwan, which is just off the Chinese coast. It’s below Japan and above the Philippine. And tonight I’ll be back in Sydney. So I’ve come home for a week, after a four-week stint in Sydney, and I’ll be coming back to Sydney, to do the hustle tonight.
Robert Brus: And Taiwan is home for you, right?
Daniel Tolson: Taiwan is home. I moved to Dubai in 2007. I stayed there till 2012. My wife felt pregnant, we moved to Taiwan, and we loved the food, we loved the lifestyle. So we decided to stay.
Robert Brus: Nice one.
Daniel Tolson: Yes.
Robert Brus: How long’s the flight between there and Sydney?
Daniel Tolson: Tonight, if there’s a tailwind, eight hours. If there’s a headwind, it’ll be 10 hours. So that’s pretty close. The average Ozzie drives about eight hours a week, so why not fly?
Robert Brus: That’s not too bad, is it? That’s, it’s actually pretty reasonable. You go direct, or you go by Singapore or something?
Daniel Tolson: I always go direct, so China Airlines. Australia had a sitting 10:30 p.m. flight out of Sydney, lands in Taiwan at about 4:30 a.m.
Robert Brus: Very nice, very nice. And so, you’re a business coach. What were you doing before you’re doing what you are now? What’s your background? Have you got a corporate background, have you got a trade? What’s your background?
Daniel Tolson: Well, I was in pawn for 17 years.
Robert Brus: Not the type of porn you’re thinking in, Mr. And Mrs. Listener, behave!
Daniel Tolson: No, we had a family pawnbroking business. So we had seven, eight years’ experience in pawnbroking. My brother and I developed a clothing brand that was international. It was called Liquid Militia, we spent a decade there, and also, a lot of time at 17,000, cabin crew for Emirates Airline, which was the last formal corporate job that I had before I commenced my business coaching business.
Robert Brus: Right.
Daniel Tolson: So “achieve” always makes these people, people’s ears perk up.
Robert Brus: I love it. That’s an interesting mixed background, because people are usually from one side of the fence or the other. But you’ve got the small business and the business background, but you’ve also got the corporate background as well, so you got a nice eclectic mix of things that are going on in there. Did that kind of set you up nicely for the role that you’re in now?
Daniel Tolson: Absolutely. If we go back further, my father was a farmer. He grew citrus and potatoes, my grandfather grew watermelons and mushrooms. And my mom was a hairdresser, my grandfather was in the Air Force, but they’re all entrepreneurs. So having that entrepreneurial blood in me, and then moving into corporate, enabled me to see both worlds totally different, and also experience the stress of working in corporate, in comparison of coming to the freedom of having your own business.
Daniel Tolson: So, over the years, it’s, it created a very unique mix of business coaching, because I can see it from a very global perspective.
Robert Brus: Yeah, I’ve encountered a couple of business coaches in the last couple of months, in the business that I run, in my podcast booking agency. And some people have a really broad range of experience, and it’s really interesting, because some folks have got a really really narrow focus. And I just honed right in on that one little niche in the market.
Robert Brus: It kind of eliminates a big market for them, but they’re really, really good at what they do, and I was sort of like, I kind of… I look at my background, it’s impossible not to compare yourself when you talk to people, right? And I see that I’ve got a broader eclectic mix, as well. It’s really cool. When did the coaching journey start for you, was it recently?
Daniel Tolson: Coaching, for me, started back in 1997. So I was an Australian wakeboarder in 2006. After being on the water for 22 years, that I was a very good coach. And I remember, there was an article written in Australian Water Skis Magazine, and it was an interview of me and my brother. And they asked me what my brother’s strengths were, and they asked my brother what my strengths were. And his response was, “He is a great coach.”
Daniel Tolson: So I was coaching people older than me, younger than me back in 1996, people who went on to becoming world champions. And what I was able to do, Rob, I was able to look at a trick, and break it down into small bite-sized chunks, and then being able to feed it back to the rider, people who were much better riders than me, but they didn’t know how to do the tricks.
Robert Brus: Right.
Daniel Tolson: Where I could break it down in my head, that I’ve been doing that since 1996. And then, Jack and Dion Ellison, they had a show called The Greatest Show, on H2O. They used to do events down in Darling Harbor. They brought me in to coach their clients on how to wakeboard, and how to water ski. So, since 1996, I’ve been coaching. But then-
Robert Brus: That sounds like you’ve been part of that community, that wakeboarding community, since it really started, right?
Daniel Tolson: Huge. My dad was a champion barefoot water skier, so it was already in the bloodline. We were out on the river, as young as we could be. So, by the time I became an Australian champion, I think it was like I’d been on the water for 22 years.
Robert Brus: Well, very long time. Very long time. [crosstalk 00:07:53] And for the international people that are listening in, that’s kind of a normal thing for an Ozzie. We live on an island, for Heaven’s sake, and we do grow up by the water. I grew up slightly differently, but also in the water, my dad was a mad keen swimmer. He was always part of a swimming club, so we used to go and do that, and I got really good at swimming at school, and whatnot.
Robert Brus: When I was, I think I was about 13, we went up to the Great Barrier Reef, and I went on my first scuba dive. And I fell in love with that then, and ever since I was 13, between the ages of 13 and about 16, I was diving every moment that I could. Nighttime, daytime, with people, scabbing lifts, scabbing money, to go and get cylinders filled up and whatnot. And I found myself in the Navy, and wanted to be a diver in the Navy, and I was lucky enough to go and do that as well.
Robert Brus: So it’s a pretty normal thing now. I live, where I’m sitting, I’m 100 meters away from the water on the beach. So it’s a really cool Ozzie story, I love to share that with international listeners, because I know that a lot of people are like, “Hey, send me some more photos of where you live in Cronulla,” because it’s a really beautiful place where I am, and always making them a little bit jealous like that. But that’s what Ozzies do. That’s kind of cool.
Daniel Tolson: And scab is such an Ozzie word as well.
Robert Brus: Yeah, it is, right? Yeah, you don’t get to hear that slang much, because of where you are.
Daniel Tolson: I did for a decade.
Robert Brus: Old school. Well, Daniel, thanks for sharing that with us, here on the front of the podcast, letting us get to know you a little bit. People come on over To The Go All In Podcast to learn more about others that have gone all in. So if you could, mate, could you please share with us your biggest Go All In story or stories, and the lessons that you’ve learned from your commitment to success?
Daniel Tolson: Well, for me, the biggest Go All In story is the ability to overcome a lot of mental blocks that I had when I was younger. I remember going to school, I felt the same as everybody else, but I just seemed to be so much slower than everybody else, and it came to second and third class, and I remember, I’d look at the board. And I’d see all these words, and then I’d start writing something else in my textbooks, and the teacher would keep asking me, “Is everything okay?”
Daniel Tolson: Well, I thought I was okay. I saw words on the board, and I saw words on my book, but none of them connected. And I’d learned that I had this learning disability, called linear sequential learning disability. And basically, I couldn’t learn in a linear way. And what I saw was something totally different to what resembled in my mind, and what resembled on the paper.
Daniel Tolson: So by the age 11, I was sad to learn that I had some physical disabilities. I had curved spine, my hips were out. I would be running like Forrest Gump and my legs would just collapse. And I was sad to realize that there was something wrong with me. I started to lose my vision, and I was always just in pain, and eventually at age 11, my body just collapsed. And that’s when I had to go all in. I realized that there was something wrong with my body.
Daniel Tolson: The pressure from my neck, which was twisted, pressure on the cranium, and the platelets in the brain were pushing down… the platelets in the head were pushing down the brain, and it was creating these problems I had cognitively. I couldn’t think properly. So I had to gamble, and I had to play catchup. I had glasses that were thick. I was in what was called The Space Lab at school, and I was just behind. All the other kids were so much further ahead than me, and I couldn’t catch up. I had to learn how to read again, had to learn how to write again.
Daniel Tolson: I had a visual, very good visual memory, which we all do. But I visually remember mistakes, so I could repeat to you the perfect mistake 100 times. And it didn’t matter how many times you’d told me it was wrong. I just keep repeating the same mistakes.
Daniel Tolson: So I was a straight C, D and E student. The teachers told me that I was a good student, only if I applied myself, so I just was convinced that I must have been stupid. And I remember, that I was pretty stupid at age 11, because it was too much. I felt guilt. My parents were constantly taking me to therapy. Mom would have to leave work early. I’d go into a room and sit and watch a ball fly around the room.
Daniel Tolson: I’d go to these other therapy places, and I would just draw a figure eight, on a giant butcher piece of paper, and I would sit in room, just doing nothing. That was rewiring the brain. And it was costing the family a lot of money, and I thought, “You know what? Maybe I am stupid, maybe I’ve just got to call it quits.”
Daniel Tolson: So after school one day, I walked out to the side of the street, and I said, “This is over. I’m going to all in and I’m going to throw myself under a car.”
Robert Brus: Gosh.
Daniel Tolson: And so, I just launched myself out in front of the next car that came along. But I mean, the teachers were right, Rob. I was stupid. I did it at a zebra crossing. Luckily, I had stopped! But they were right about one thing. That’s when I realized, I just had to play catchup. Through school, I was always kicked out of the classes, because I was using color pens. I was creative, I used color, and the teachers didn’t like it, so they kicked me out.
Daniel Tolson: I couldn’t learn like everybody else, and what I learned was that I was told I had learning disabilities. But I soon figured out that the teachers had teaching disabilities. They couldn’t teach mew how to learn!
Daniel Tolson: So, through high school, I was just kicked out of the classes, and by age 17, all the stress built up, and I developed the Chronic Fatigue and Epstein-Barr virus. And I got so sick that I just could not go back to school. So, I did year 10, started year 11, that was it. I was out of school and never went back, so… from then, that was just the start of the journey.
Daniel Tolson: I had to, over the next 11 years, learn how to learn. And it wasn’t until I was 28 that I actually finally figured out how I learn. And once I got to 28, my world turned around. So I realized that I was actually very intelligent. I had an IQ in, I think, in the top 5% of the population. But [inaudible 00:13:48] how to learn and recall information, I couldn’t access all that knowledge.
Daniel Tolson: And as soon as I learned how to learn, the following two years, I read more than a thousand books, and I started to love it. Because I learned how to learn, so for me, it’s all in just about learning. That’s really, for me, where it’s really kicked off.
Robert Brus: Yeah, that’s a really, it’s a very heartfelt story. Thank you so much for sharing that, and I would echo what you said there about teachers not knowing how to teach you. That happens. I had the same very experience with my daughter, just last week. She came home and she threw her hands up, gave me a report. She’s last in the class for mathematics, and I’d got her school book out, and I said, “Show me what you’re working on.”
Robert Brus: Sat her down with YouTube, in one three-minute YouTube video, and about 20 minutes of pulling apart the problem that she was working on, on of all things, parallel lines. It was relatively straightforward. And just, somebody explaining to her clearly on YouTube, and her stopping and rewinding, and going back and forth… after 20 minutes of it, she had it, and she nailed all the problems, answered all the questions.
Robert Brus: And I said, “See? There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re just as smart as everybody else, it’s just the way that they’re communicating the message to you is not getting through to you.” Did any of the teachers, at all, recognize that they weren’t getting through to you? Or were they just saying it was your fault?
Daniel Tolson: Well, I was reading the reports just last week in Sydney, and it was all about me. It was, “Daniel’s got the problem. He doesn’t pay attention. If he paid attention, he’d be a good student.” But there was nothing about, there was no report on the teacher about their learning, their teaching ability. It was all about, I just felt stupid. My parents were paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for private education. They would ring my mom up all the time.
Daniel Tolson: The Senior Master would ring up. “Mrs. Tolson, this is the Senior Master of Boys. We have a problem.” And she said, “Is it with my son again?” “Yes. You need come down to the school.” And so, I was always kicked out, but the problem was always me.
Robert Brus: Were you a naughty kid, getting into trouble?
Daniel Tolson: I was, I’m just plain terrible!
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: Look, I was a very keen student. I wanted to learn, but also, I would always get things wrong. I was probably a frustration to the teachers. They always said, “He was a very pleasant person,” and when you read through the reports, it shows that I’m very emotionally intelligent. But I didn’t have that IQ that they’re looking for at a grammar school. There was no focus.
Daniel Tolson: On sports, hey, I was an Australian champion athlete, and they wouldn’t even care about developing that.
Robert Brus: Gosh.
Daniel Tolson: You know? I’d been selling newspapers since age nine, but they didn’t measure your ability to sell, or to have confidence, or interact. It was all about, just the test, just the test results.
Robert Brus: So what’s really interesting is, I see my children going through the school system now. My eldest son, [inaudible 00:16:38], left high school. He’s at university now, so he’s kind of in that system over there, doing what he has to do.
Robert Brus: But, as my son Travis is in year 11, here in Australia, and as he’s moving through that school system, you see the pressure kind of mounting up, and the workload comes to him thick and fast, particularly in the subject of mathematics. You know, he’s doing four units of maths, it’s a lot of work, and it just keeps coming at him thick and fast. And he either assimilates it, or the curriculum just marches on, whether or not he assimilates it.
Robert Brus: And it’s, I think that’s a real kind of, failure of what you’re teaching a child, and how you’re teaching them to be in the world. It’s not like, the curriculum of life just marches on, and you can’t, you just get left behind. You’ve got to go with it, you’ve got to stay with it, you’ve got to be with it, you got to be present with it, you got to make it happen like that. I think it’s so unbelievably important.
Robert Brus: That kind of brings me to the next point I wanted to ask you about, which is, you’re an expert on emotional and social intelligence, and maybe you can just give some context, and tell us a little bit about your business, and how you help people, and how you help companies, and then, pull on that thread of emotional and social intelligence for me, because I think that is one of the things that should be taught at school. And it’s not.
Daniel Tolson: Yeah.
Robert Brus: And I’m just like, I’m baffled. I’m baffled why it’s not part of our society, and I’m baffled… well, it’s good for your business, and it’s good for what you do, but I’m baffled that it’s not part of what we do.
Daniel Tolson: It’s got to be there. As a business coach, I provide my clients with business growth strategies, and it’s to help with, increase their sales. And we will see companies increase their sales by 250% inside of 12 months.
Robert Brus: Wow.
Daniel Tolson: Now, I was working with [Sound Mat 00:18:20] Australia, and by applying emotional, and then social intelligence techniques into their business, they grew their revenue streams by 75%, in 60 days.
Robert Brus: Huge.
Daniel Tolson: It’s massive. And emotional intelligence is to understand why you think and feel the way that you do. So that there’s five key pillars.
Daniel Tolson: The first key is self-awareness, and this is understanding what you like, what you don’t like, what you’re good at, what your weaknesses are. That’s the first place you’re going to start.
Daniel Tolson: The second place is self-regulation, and this is the ability to manage your thoughts and your feelings. And through the various studies of the past 20 and 30 years, we’ve learned that our thoughts predict 95% of our feelings. So if you have self-awareness, and you understand how you think, and then you’ve got self-regulation, you can capture those thoughts, before they turn to fears of rejection, fears of criticism, fear of loss, fear of the unknown, and that’s what emotional intelligence gives you.
Daniel Tolson: It also looks at motivation, and everybody in business is motivated. And we know that, because you’d be stupid to get into business if you weren’t motivated. But motivation, in this context, think of it like a boxer. It’s the ability to take the hits, it’s the ability to get knocked down, and get up more times than you get knocked down.
Daniel Tolson: And what we find in business is, a lot of people get knocked down, and they never get back up. So there’s the first three pillars. When we talk about social intelligence, these are the final two pillars of emotional intelligence, and that’s empathy. It’s looking at the other person, and understanding why they think and feel the way that they do. And if you’ve got very high levels of emotional intelligence, you’d be able to read the emotional makeup of somebody else. And this is the heart of selling. It’s understanding how that person thinks and feels.
Daniel Tolson: The final part of social intelligence is your social skills. This is the ability to communicate your message. This is the ability to convey the benefits, the results and the improvement of your service, and all of that makes emotional intelligence. In emotional intelligence, the latest research shows that it equates to about 58% of your success in business, and in your personal life. And, as our clients grow, we talk to them about 1% strategies. And I think all Ozzies, all Ozzie business owners, all serious professionals need to know that, for every 1% improvement in emotional intelligence, you’ll see a corresponding increase in salary of about $1,750. And we know this globally.
Daniel Tolson: If you have a higher level of emotional intelligence than somebody else in the same field, on average, you’ll earn $37,500 more per year.
Robert Brus: It’s interesting when you can tie it back to a revenue model of some sort, right?
Daniel Tolson: It’s the only thing that you can tie back into revenue.
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: Grow your emotional intelligence, your income will follow, immediately. And it’ll happen straightaway, because you’re at 100% control of your emotional intelligence. You don’t have to worry, you don’t need government legislation to improve it, the police can’t take it away from you, and the government can’t tax you on it. Because it’s yours. You got it for life.
Robert Brus: Beautifully said. As you kind of set the frame there for me, I just want to back up on the timeline there for a second. After you left school, and you struggled with your learning at school, did you have… because, you know when people have things that are wrong with them, that are not functioning quite right, if you didn’t have a right hand, then you’d be very skilled with your left hand, even though you’re not a southpaw. You’d be good at that. Your body compensates for those things.
Robert Brus: With your learning disabilities, and the difficulty that you faced as a young kid, did that translate that into anything else? Did that translate into emotional intelligence, the ability to sell, when you left school? Because you kind of gave up on school, trying to move on from there? What did you do when you first left school?
Daniel Tolson: The first thing I had to do is, because I had to, I overcompensated with action. Now, although I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, I could outwork everybody else, because I was just prepared to work harder. And that’s also an inborn attribute. And an inborn attribute is something that is in my blood. My father’s a farmer, and you get up before the sun, and you only come home when the job’s done.
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: So I would out-succeed people, by sheer levels of action. And then, what happened was, I had some very good mentors, and these mentors, I think, they were just a little bit like me. They were street smart, and they were very good with people, and they learned by demonstration. So my uncle, he took me under his wing, and brought me into real estate. And he gave me a book by Brian Tracy, and on the inside cover he said, “To Danny boy, this is your blueprint of success,” and he just demonstrated and showed me what I had to do.
Daniel Tolson: And I had to feel smug, because I thought, “This is really easy to learn this stuff.” But I learned it, because he showed me, and then I acted on it immediately. So I overcompensated with action, but I found people who could teach me experientially, and that was the defining moment. And what happened was, in my first six months of real estate, my uncle gave me a blueprint for success. He said, “If you do these actions in this order and sequence, you’ll be in the top 10% of people in Australia.”
Daniel Tolson: I followed it, I took too much action, and I ended up in the top 1%, and by 19 1/2, in… remember, the teachers told me I was stupid, I dropped out of school, I finished business college, because I got, had a couple of knee reconstructions… but six months into real estate, I was in the top 1%, and I’d bought my first home at 19 1/2.
Robert Brus: Is that a clue you didn’t know any better, or is that because you’re overcompensating?
Daniel Tolson: Because I was stupid.
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: But what I know is, it’s not stupid, it’s actually what’s called being literal. I’m a very literal person. If somebody says, “Walk out of the door and knock on it,” I’ll do it. But if they suggest something to me, I won’t follow through on the suggestion. If they said, “Don’t you think it’d be a good idea to knock on the door?”, I’d say, “I don’t know.” But if you told me to do it, I’ll do it. So, a very literal thing, and I think what happens with the intelligence IQ, people are too smart for their own good. They are so intelligent.
Daniel Tolson: I remember hearing a story recently, a friend of mine, she could read at 2,500 words per minute, and she had a 95% retention rate of all that information, yet she couldn’t apply. She was too smart, IQ, for her own good, and the EQ was too low. So, coming back to the question was, I had to develop my emotional intelligence. I knew who I was, I knew what my weaknesses were. I had doubts about myself, but I took so much action, that those doubts couldn’t turn into fears.
Daniel Tolson: And because my motivation was high, because I was so far behind everybody else, I just took so much action, that I stopped looking and comparing myself to others. And then, because I was in front of people, empathy. I just started to read people. I was street smart. I’d come from the pawn industry. You were street smart. And then, I could also, I had confidence, and wit and charm, and I could make recommendations to people.
Daniel Tolson: I didn’t sell to them, I just made recommendations: “This is your situation, this looks like it’s how it’s hurting you, and if you do this, it’ll help you, and you’ll feel really good.” And people would say, “Well, that sounds good to me.” The other interesting question is, “Well, when can we begin?” That’s how literal I was: “When we can begin.” “Well, does now sound like a good time?” And away you go.
Robert Brus: Then off you go. And what about your uncle? What was he doing? Was he just watching from the sidelines, cheering you on, or was he saying, “Go far”? Was he pushing you?
Daniel Tolson: Yeah. Well, my first job was as a paper boy, and he gave me the three-step sales plan. “Daniel, at your age, I was nine, by the way,” he says, “here’s your newspapers, there’s the door, go make sales.” And that was-
Robert Brus: “Come back with an empty barrow.”
Daniel Tolson: But 10 years later, he had refined them. He had learned from the best, and he took me under his wing, but like a mentor, he didn’t walk the path for me, he stayed next to me. And he showed me what I did right, and he showed me where I was going wrong, and gave me ideas on how to improve my performance. He got me regular feedback, but he also went out to listing presentations in real estate, and he said, “This is what worked, this what didn’t work, this is what you’re going to do next time.” And I would learn immediately. I’d go into another presentation, I’d make the $7,000 sale, and walk out.
Robert Brus: Very nice one.
Daniel Tolson: So he was always there next to me.
Robert Brus: Very nice, very nice, and what did you learn about yourself as your confidence started to build? Because seems like, school and your adolescence was really, really tough, and some kids have it tough for various different reasons, and you had it tough for the reasons that you explained, but as you get into the workforce, and you start to get a bit of momentum behind you, get a bit of cash behind you, you buy a house, for Heaven’s sake, that’s a pretty remarkable achievement for a man.
Daniel Tolson: Yeah, and then you go do it again, and two years later, buy your second one. Well, and I think, for me, what happens is, when you start comparing yourself to other people, your self-esteem and your self-worth drops down.
Robert Brus: It does.
Daniel Tolson: So, I had to overcompensate with action, and the problem is that you start to feel superior. And I felt superior to my teachers, because I was earning probably double what they were, and they just told me I was stupid. So, in some ways, what happened was, I wanted to prove them wrong, and I wanted to stick up them. But then you wake up and you realize that nobody even cares. Nobody’s even watching. They’re getting on with their lives. What they said to you, they don’t even remember, so I exhausted myself trying to prove to other people that I was superior, and I could do it.
Daniel Tolson: And I learnt one day that nobody’s watching, and you should only do something for yourself. So I really had to reset, and I did have to remove a lot of my limiting beliefs. And when you have a lot of limiting beliefs about people’s opinions towards you, you actually don’t like yourself. So, for a long time, I didn’t like who I was. So, I remember, at 22, I gave away my real estate career, and I went traveling. I went traveling to nine months, and it was just soul searching: “Who am I, and what do I want in my life?”
Daniel Tolson: And I’d succeed, and I knew if I did that, I could do something else. But I didn’t know what that other thing was. And so, through travel, and living and working in Europe and America, I’d come back to the decision that my next goal was to become an Australian champion wakeboarder, at all costs. So I had to get through that self-worth, and I had to start to increase that level of self-belief. And one of the reasons why I wasn’t an Australian champion at that stage is, I didn’t feel worthy of that success, because I’d had so much trouble in the past, and then I got so much success so fast.
Daniel Tolson: I thought, “Can I replicate it? Do I deserve it? Do I need it? Will people like me?” So I had to go through all those mental and emotional blockages. And this happens as you raise the bar. You have to face different styles of fear. It can be the same fear, but at a different level, so this is self-concept psychology, and I had to change my self-concept. I had to change the way I think and feel about myself. I had to change my self-ideal. Who do I want to become? What does that person look like?
Daniel Tolson: I had to change my self-image. I had to get rid of those things that I didn’t like about myself, and that all came from increasing the level of self-esteem, and self-worth.
Robert Brus: It’s such an unbelievably important explanation. Thank you so much for sharing that with the audience, by the way. Well, it’s not an easy thing to say, but it’s something that people say often, and sometimes, they can’t take it back when they’re going to go all in on something. That means you’re totally committed, you’re totally… when you say that, people that are hearing it intuitively know what you mean, they know that you’re going to commit, they know that you’re going to go for it.
Robert Brus: One of the things that I’ve written here as a question is… When you go, when you decide to go all in on something, and you announce it to the world, then suddenly you’re accountable to the people that are around you, and it’s like, you have a bit of imposter syndrome maybe sneaking in, and things go wrong, and there’s a little bit of fear and trepidation that happens there. But when you peel back the layers of that onion, what happens is, you end up being really overly critical of yourself. I think we’re all intuitively like that. That’s just part of the human experience. That’s what it is.
Robert Brus: I know that I’m my worst critic. Sometimes, I do a podcast like this, I feel like I’m shouting down an empty hallway, just talking to the guests that I’m with, and I’m like, “I finish it all, I produce it all, get it all out there, and go, ‘Gosh, it could have been… I should have asked him that, or I should have said this, or I should have said that to that lady.'” I’m always really critical of myself, trying to be at my best, and trying to outperform myself every single time. But the reality is, it’s pretty damn good. The feedback I get is really solid, and people love what I’m doing, and they’re like, “No, Rob, it’s great, it’s great.”
Robert Brus: What is it that’s… what is the inner critic? Why is the inner critic so damn harsh to us, to you, to yourself?
Daniel Tolson: It’s a lovely question, and it’s about expectations. And there’s four levels of expectations that we have throughout our lifetime. The first expectation is of, all from our parents. As we grow up, our parents put certain expectations on us. The problem with a lot of parents is that their emotional intelligence isn’t very high, because we’re just coming into this part of the worldly experience where we’re learning that. So our parents say to us, “You know what? Just go to school, keep your head down, stay out of trouble, and just get a job.” And that’s the only expectation they have of us.
Daniel Tolson: So what happens is, we will live up to or down to our parents’ expectations. And if your parents have a incredibly high expectation, too high, what will happen is, you’ll never make that expectation, and you’ll always feel that you’re not good enough. If your parents have a very low level of expectation of you, you’ll meet that, and you’ll never stretch beyond it.
Daniel Tolson: Because what happens is, the males, for example… if your father earns $100,000 a year, internally, our barometer is set to $100,000. And if we start to earn more than our father, we start to feel shame and guilt. We think, “Should I actually do this? Is that right for me as a son, to outearn my father?” So we will adjust our expectations, based on our parents.
Daniel Tolson: Now, according to the studies in USA, 95% of the prisoners in the prison system were told by their parents that, one day, “You’ll end up in prison,” and they lived up to that expectation.
Robert Brus: Gosh.
Daniel Tolson: Or down to it. So that’s the first one. The second expectation is the expectation of the teacher. Now, my teachers had a very low expectation of me. They said, “Daniel, you’re never going to succeed. You’ll never do anything with your life.” And we’ve got to remember that teachers are lovely, they’re very passionate about what they do, but a lot of them don’t have worldly experiences. They’ve stayed in school their whole life, so they don’t know what it’s like to stretch. They don’t know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. They don’t know what it’s like to face success and failure, and all the things that come along with running a business.
Daniel Tolson: So they just say, “Look, just get your good grades. Get into the high school that you want, get into the university, and just get a job and stick to it for 20 years. And get your long service.” So that’s the second expectation, and remember that the teacher can’t have a higher expectation for you than they have of themself. I can’t give you 100 bucks if I don’t have 100 bucks in my wallet. If I’ve got 10, I can give you 10, that’s it.
Daniel Tolson: The third expectation is the expectation of the first boss. And most of our bosses have a very low level of expectations for our first career. You know, we’re doing a part-time job, they’re self-employed, and they don’t ever expect that you’re going to do really good, so they don’t train you. And I want to people to know that, if you’re working for somebody, and they don’t invest in you, they don’t believe in your potential. So you got to go find somebody else who’s willing to invest in you.
Daniel Tolson: You’ve served in the military. They invest in you, because they believe in you, and if they didn’t believe in you, they wouldn’t hire you.
Robert Brus: And you’re expected to achieve.
Daniel Tolson: And you’re expected. You’re told to serve. And the fourth level of expectation is the expectation you have on yourself. So what we’ve got here is four expectations, and you should always have a very high expectation on yourself, but not so high, that it sets you up for failure. You have to incrementally increase the bar. So, if it’s your first podcast here, the expectation should be very low, but then, you should only, going to stretch it by 1%. But because we have aspiration to factor in, you’ve got kids, you measure them up against the kitchen wall-
Robert Brus: Positive.
Daniel Tolson: And stand them on their tippiest toes, and say, “Dad, you know, I’m five foot six,” and you say, “Come on, put your heels down. You’re only five foot four.” We always feel that we can go so much further, and when we don’t get there, we feel disappointed, and it’s because we’ve fallen short of those expectations. So we have to set realistic expectations, all things considered.
Daniel Tolson: Like you said before, if somebody’s missing a left arm, you got to face the reality that it’s a reality, you don’t have a left arm. You can box with one, and you’re a great boxer for one, but don’t expect to go up against Muhammad Ali, or you will set yourself up for failure and disappointment. And that’s the expectations theory, that we got to remember, at any given time.
Robert Brus: Yeah, that… again, beautifully said, there’s just value bomb after value bomb. Thank you so much, Daniel, I really, really appreciate that. One of the things that, just so… on the same vein as children, because I know there’s a lot of parents that communicate with me about this podcast, and I think they kind of connect a little bit with my military style. Not my militant style, although it can be quite militant, as the platoon sergeant sometimes is.
Robert Brus: But it, the style of things that I’ve got going on, and one thing that I recognize that happened, as a parent, recently, was… I think I mentioned it to you before, that emotional and social intelligence is not taught in school. And I don’t think it’s something that… I mean, I feel like I’m pretty emotionally intelligent, and socially intelligent, and I can tick a lot of boxes, and whatnot.
Robert Brus: But I think I’ve got a, quite a different mindset to most people. I’m kind of like, the all in guy, so my mindset’s got to be a little bit different, and it is. I know it is, because I know, when I go outside at 4:30 in the morning, there’s no one else around. And I know that when I’m out training at the gym, at 11:30 at night, there’s no one else around. My mindset’s just different to other people, and that’s because of what I’m doing, and I recently come across a buyer who I actually interviewed on this podcast.
Robert Brus: His name’s Brian Cain, and he does all the mindset coaching for athletes. He does a lot of athlete stuff, and I downloaded and I listened to his audiobook. It’s called The 12 Pillars Of Success, and I listened to it, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s, that was really cool.” And like most audiobooks that you listen to, you kind of listen to it, and you put it aside, and you go, “Oh, what’s the next book I’m going to listen to?” You know, you don’t do anything with it, and I stopped myself. And I said, “What if? What if I sat down every day, for 12 days, with my daughter, and did one of those things every single day?”
Robert Brus: And if you’ve listened to this audiobook, and you hear what’s in this book, you’d go, “Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty cool, yeah.” You’ve heard it all before, right? You’ve heard most of it before. He’s just kind of packaged it in a way that’s really easy to understand, and it’s really easy to deliver. But as I was sitting there, it’s kind of like life coaching. Pillar number one is an elite mindset. “Here’s how an elite person thinks. Here’s how an average person thinks,” and it’s in the context of sport, right? Because that’s what he is, he’s a sports coach.
Robert Brus: I’m saying these things to my daughter, expecting her to know, and she’s not, never heard these things before. And she’s 12 years old, and I’m like, I’m installing this elite mindset in her mind, you know? And pillar number two is the MVP, and pillar number three is, “Time is ticking,” pillar four, five, six, seven, eight, and then, 10, 11 and 12. And you know, installing this in a young plastic mind like that is such an empowering thing to do, as a parent, and what I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to get rid of all of the bias that I have, as her dad, and I’m trying not to impart any of the bias to her, as a child.
Robert Brus: And I think that’s pretty emotionally intelligent, to be able to recognize to do that, that’s what I mean. And it seems to be working, because she’d… I’d done some stuff, and she’s like, “Hey, Dad, that’s… you said, summer bodies are made in winter. Why are you doing it in those Tim Tams-type thing, you know? That’s not an elite mindset, Dad, you know?” She’s checking me. She’s like, my accountability buddy that lives here. I’m like, “Damn it! I just wanted to have a Tim Tam Slammer with my coffee, for Heaven’s sake!” It’s kind of funny.
Robert Brus: What could you say to some parents listening, about their kids, and installing them a mindset like that, about emotional and social intelligence?
Daniel Tolson: Well, you can’t give what you don’t have, and you can’t expect to raise emotionally intelligent children, if you haven’t applied the principles to your own life. And children, their bullshit detector, it operates, [inaudible 00:39:44]. It operates 24/7, and they know when you tell them something that you don’t apply in your own life. They look at you, and you lose points.
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: So they know. So there’s four Dds to success. And I think if parents cam implement these four Ds in their own lives, because the child looks up to you, and the child goes through three development periods. First of all is the imprint period, where everything the parent thinks and feels, the child experiences and does themselves. That’s the imprint. That’s like at, pasting dough, and you’re the cookie cutter.
Daniel Tolson: The second stage would goes from age seven to 14, is the modeling phase, and this is where kids do exactly what their parents do. Not what they say, what they do. My daughter, she’s come into it now, she’s six and a half. I’m shaving in the shower, what’s she doing? She’s got the shaving foam all over her face, and she’s shaving. She’s out there putting my wife’s makeup on.
Daniel Tolson: And then we come into the socialization period, and you want to make sure that they’ve implemented all these Ds, before they get to that socialization period. Because what happens, Rob, we’re Dad, and our daughters look up to us as the most important man in their life. Now, once again, with that imprint period, all of a sudden, we’re replaced by a young fellow, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, gathering tattoos, driving fast cars. And all of a sudden, Dad’s not cool anymore, and Dad has no influence.
Daniel Tolson: So if we’re thinking long term here, we’re going to implant this in their mind. So let me give you the formula. There’s four Ds of success, and I think they’re the four Ds of Go All in. First of all, you have to have desire. You have to have desire. You have to know what you want, and you’ve got to go all in.
Daniel Tolson: The second thing is, you’ve got to make a decision. And what we know psychologically is, if you have a Plan B, and you can, if you think about that Plan B for as little as 10 minutes, that’s enough to sabotage your entire success.
Daniel Tolson: So the first D is desire. You have to want it. You have to want to bleed for it. You’ve got to get up at 4:30 in the morning, and freeze for it. You got to make the decision. And the only way that you truly get what you want is if you make a decision to go all in. So you got to make the decision, and there is no plan B.
Daniel Tolson: You then got to have discipline, and this is what you would have picked up in your years in the military. It’s discipline, it’s doing what has to be done, whether you like it or not. When it hurts, you’ve got to keep doing it, and then the final D, the fourth D, is determination, and once you start, you can’t stop. And you have to go through all the ups, and all the downs. You have to go through all the wins, and the short-term setbacks, and if you’ve got enough determination to see it through to the end, you’ll be a big success.
Daniel Tolson: So, the four Ds, one is desire. Mom and Dad, you’ve got to have desire for your career, or for your business. You got to make the decision that’s all you’re going to do for the rest of your life, or until you achieve that goal. You then have to have the discipline to do what is hard, and if you do what is hard, life will be easy. But if you do what is easy, life will be hard, and remember, your children are watching. If you do what’s easy, they’re going to do the same thing. If you do what is hard, they’ll have that desire and the discipline to do it.
Daniel Tolson: And then fourthly, you got to have the determination. You got to go all in, and you do not stop. Even if it hurts, even if you spend all of your money, even if you lose your house, you got to keep going on until you get you want. And if you instill that into your children, you will have emotionally intelligent children, and they will be resilient. All the other kids will fall down and cry, and they’ll be wrapped up in cotton wool. Your kids will behave, as they’ll bust their chins open, and they’ll get up, and they’ll get back on the bike. And that’s what you need.
Robert Brus: Beautifully articulated, and perfectly said there. It’s very hard to do those things as a parent, because your kids are always watching. Always. Always watching, and you forget that they’re watching, and it’s easy for you to slip, because there’s no such thing as a perfect person, of course.
Robert Brus: My daughter, I just want to kind of pull on this child thread here a little bit with you, because the emotional intelligence stuff, I think, is so important to install into children, and there’s just so many parents that listen to this podcast.
Robert Brus: My daughter said to me, “Hey, Dad, can I come up the park and go jogging with you?” And I was like, “Hell, yeah, of course you can. Get your shoes, let’s get going, come on!” Like, you’re talking to an infantry guy. Of course, I want to go running, and we get running, and in her mind, she wants to do it, and in my mind, I’m like, “Don’t make this awful for her, because she won’t want to do it again. Just go easy, remember, she’s only 12 years old. Just take it, take a gentle, maybe make it a bit fun-type thing.”
Robert Brus: Anyway, we start off jogging, and she was complaining a lot. She was complaining a real lot. And it’s hard. Running’s hard. If you don’t run much, it’s very hard. It’s hard on your body, it’s hard on your heart and lungs, it’s difficult, and I was kind of happy it was so hard for her. Because it isn’t, life is just so easy. In the modern world, here in Australia, a kid has everything she wants, and we were doing something hard that was stretching her, and I was like, “Come on, let’s go a little bit faster,” and she’s complaining and complaining.
Robert Brus: There’s only so much complaining one dad can take, of course, and after, I think it must have been the second or third lap, we must have been a click or two into it, just around the park, and I said, “Look, you’ve got to get hold of yourself, get to get hold of your emotions, and you’ve got to stop complaining, and I know it’s hard. I know it’s difficult, but you’ve just got to look inside of yourself, and find that inside of yourself,” and it’s so interesting to see a little human being that I love so much trying to find that inside of herself.
Robert Brus: She had a real tough time of it, and she complained even more, actually, because it was getting harder, because the workout’s getting longer. And we got in the car, and I thought, “Well, that wasn’t really very successful, Dad. You didn’t do a really…” I debriefed myself for about 20 seconds. Then she got in the car, and I thought, “She’s never going to come and go jogging with me ever again.” And surprisingly, she said, “Next time when I go, I’m going to concentrate on not complaining so much.”
Robert Brus: I said, “Well, next time we go, it won’t hurt so much, because you’re going to get a little fitter every time, just that 1% or 2% more every time. And if you improve by 1% every day, if we go for 300 days in a row, you’ll be 300% better than when you started. And you’ll be sprinting around this park before you know it. You think this will improve, a little of that?” You just see it happening in her little mind, and it was just turning over, and it was happening like that for her.
Robert Brus: But it was hard, it was so hard for me not to impart that unconscious bias of the infantry guy going, “Just shut up, c’mon, hurry up, what are you complaining about? Get going, hurry up,” sort of thing. Because that’s what happens when you’re doing physical training in the Army, that’s kind of what it’s like, and I was a physical training instructor, so that’s a really, really interesting thing to see.
Robert Brus: What I would add to your four Ds there, for the listeners there, is to create a… I created a little creed with my daughter. We’ve got three things that we live by. Actually, we just introduced a fourth one, just this week, in fact, and the three things are, you always tell thew truth. You never ever, never, never, never, under any circumstance, ever tell a lie. And you help others, and you do the right thing, and the fourth one that we introduced was, you do what you say you’re going to do.
Robert Brus: She was having a real hard time at school, in primary school, she’s in high school now. She was getting bullied, and things weren’t right, and I had to figure out a way to help her get over those things, and help her to understand why she was feeling like she was. And I said to her, “If one of those three things is not quite right when somebody’s talking to you, meaning, they’re not telling the truth, or they’re not helping you, or doing the right thing, that’s when you’re going to start feeling off. And that’s when your emotions are going to take over, and they’re going to make you feel the way that you’re feeling.”
Robert Brus: And it was really interesting to see her, as she’s developing and maturing, that that has just built so much resilience in her. And then now, we’ve added that fourth one, because… you know, “Clean up your room.” “All right, Dad. I’ll clean up.” “Take the dishes out of your room.” “Yeah, all right, Dad,” and it’s like, now, we’ve got to introduce the fourth one. And now, number four, pillar number four, “Come on. Come on, little lady, let’s go.” I’m working it, an absolute [inaudible 00:47:57]. Do you have any little parenting ones like that, that you do?
Daniel Tolson: I think the most important thing that we got to be aware of is, we got to teach our children the difference between the emotions, and what they mean. So I was working with a Gold Medal athlete, and the Gold Medal athlete did not know the difference between anxiety, and excitement. In her mind, she had reframed anxiety into excitement. But the problem is, if you say, “That’s an,” if it’s an apple, but you say it’s an orange, you’re still eating an apple.
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s still an apple. And what happened was, because of her inability to identify the difference between emotions, she couldn’t regulate it. So, as parents, there’s five major emotions. There’s anger, but there’s actually 12 subsets of anger. There’s 12 different types of anger. So when the children are angry, we have to help them understand what they’re feeling. And what happens is, with anger, the body wants to get rid of it. So you’ll see the children stamping their feet and slamming their hands.
Daniel Tolson: But what you encourage your children to do is to stomp your feet, to go punch the punching bag, to go kick the ball. Because it gets the energy out of the body.
Daniel Tolson: Sadness is a very depressive feeling, and their energy lowers. So what you got to do here is, you got to teach them, “What you’re feeling now is sadness.” My grand, my wife’s grandmother just passed away, and my daughter was very close to her, and she didn’t want to cry. And I said, “Sweetheart, it’s okay to feel sad,” and want to cry, let it out, because your body’s going to release all that acid, all the toxins out of the body.
Daniel Tolson: As the tears come out, it’s getting the sadness out of the body. It’s okay to cry, and she’s like, “I don’t want to cry.” I said, “Baby, it’s okay. It’s because you love her, and you feel sad, because you won’t get to see her again.” And so, she released that. And we’re going to teach our children, not what we learned. You know, “A real man doesn’t cry, stiff upper lip!” Now that’s bull crap. We’re natural, it’s human, we got to release it. It’s natural.
Daniel Tolson: After that, we have fear. So we have fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of criticism, fear of success, fear of unknown, all these fears. And when we feel them, we got to get the children to understand, that there’s only one thing to cure fear, is to go and do the thing that you fear, until the fear disappears. So we’re going to encourage them, and we’re going to deal with them.
Daniel Tolson: Then we have hurt. See, when you get hit by a fist, it hurts your body. When you get hit with an emotional torment, like a word, getting called names, or called fat, called skinny, this hurts the physical body. It actually hurts the body and we feel it. So we got to teach the children that, if you have certain pains in the body, this can be connected emotionally. If you have a feeling down the front of your body, and the front of your body hurts, and you’ve got fear, the fear of failure is felt down the front of the body. The fear of rejection is felt down the back of the body.
Daniel Tolson: And then, the fourth one, the fifth one, is guilt. And we got to be very careful as parents not to project guilt onto our children. Because guilt, we now know, and your children, everybody here is a child, by the way… the emotion of guilt, if it’s left unresolved in the body, it ends up leading to cancer.
Robert Brus: So, really?
Daniel Tolson: Absolutely. Absolutely! The gift of life is that we can make sure our children are free of anger, sadness, fear, hurt and guilt. And especially guilt, because it lowers your healing energy, and it leads to cancer. And we’ve got to be very mindful of these emotions, but get our children to become aware of them. And there’s one thing, and it’s called the Hawthorne effect. I just want you to remember that word, the Hawthorne effect.
Daniel Tolson: Just by becoming aware of an emotion that you’re feeling is enough to dissolve the emotion immediately. That’s it! You don’t need therapy! What are you feeling? Anger. Oh, okay. What are you feeling? Sadness. Okay, I get it now. The emotion does its thing, and it’s released out of the body.
Robert Brus: Beautifully said, beautifully said. I think a lot of what we’re talking about here, you can encapsulate into a word, maybe it’s not the right word, maybe it has, not the right context or connotation, and it’s actually one of my favorite topics to talk about. And I call it, I would call this, all of this that we’re talking about, leadership.
Robert Brus: Because it’s about leadership of yourself. And leadership of yourself, you can’t lead anybody else or do anything to function as a human being in this society, unless you’ve got ahold of yourself emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and all of those things.
Robert Brus: This about leadership. Can you offer a comment on that for us?
Daniel Tolson: Well, the only word that I’d put in front of leadership is the word “personal.” It’s-
Robert Brus: No, absolutely, yeah.
Daniel Tolson: [inaudible 00:52:45] leadership. It’s the ability to be a leader in your own life. And once you can lead yourself, then you move on to strategic and to high performance leadership, and that’s when you lead others. And if you want my opinion on leadership, leadership is the ability to get results.
Daniel Tolson: And in personal leadership, it’s the ability to get results in your own life. It’s the ability to get the love of your life. It’s the ability to get a job, and stay employed, it’s the ability to earn the top of the money that you want. It’s the ability to get the body that you want. It’s the ability to get the health that you want.
Daniel Tolson: And leadership is just that, it’s the ability to get results. And personal leadership is in your own life.
Robert Brus: What would you say would be the one or two big locks that people have, as a generalization, about that personal leadership? Is it like, the fear of rejection? Is it them being too overly critical on themselves, or is it… how do you release the brakes, and kind of just go with it, just get going with it in your life? I feel like, so many people seem to be locked, and it’s like, “You’re not, you’re good. Just keep going, you’re all right.” They just all self-impose. What would you say, one or two things that they could do?
Daniel Tolson: Well, I think it comes back into the Go All In formula. First of all, it’s knowing what you want. What do you want? And most people, they don’t know what they want, and so, you got to figure what you want. And we call this a major definite purpose. What is that one thing that you want, more than anything else in your life? Just one thing. Do you know, there’s a billion things you can do, but people still can’t figure it out? So you got to make the decision, and your first goal is to decide what you want.
Daniel Tolson: The second thing is to decide what price you’re willing to pay. And there’s a lot of people who want to be a self-made millionaire, but the reality of becoming a self-made millionaire is that you’re going to have to get close to bankruptcy 2.4 times. You’re going to have to work an average of 60 hours a week for the next 20 years, and that’s the price that you need to pay.
Robert Brus: Yeah.
Daniel Tolson: So if you want to be a self-made millionaire, and you’re prepared to get close to bankruptcy 2.4 times, to work 60 hours a week for 20 years, go all in, and that’s all you need to do. And then, learn what you need to learn. Because you can learn anything you need to learn, to become anybody that you want to become. It’s that simple.
Robert Brus: Very nice, very nice. Beautifully said, beautifully said. Well, as we come towards the end of the podcast here, I want to ask the… I don’t do this often, but I want to ask the typical podcasting couple of questions here. And if I’d met you, Daniel, 12 months ago, how would you have been different?
Daniel Tolson: How I would have been different 12 months ago? Gee, that’s a good question. Well, my emotional intelligence wouldn’t have been as high as it is today. I wouldn’t have known myself as well as I know myself today. I could say that would be a fact, absolutely.
Robert Brus: Nice, nice, and what about, what’s happening to you in the next 18 months? What sort of goals have you got on your horizon? So, business is going really well. I know you’re coming back to Australia to open some offices here, and things are happening like that, that must be an exciting time. Is that the focus of the next 18 months’ worth?
Daniel Tolson: Well, over the past few years of living as an expatriate, I’ve acquired 3,500 clients into my consulting business, and I want to continue to grow that. On the short term horizon, myself and Brian Tracy are in the middle of authoring a book together.
Robert Brus: Nice one.
Daniel Tolson: So that’s going to come out before Christmas this year, and then, by the first or second quarter of 2020, I’ll be back in Australia. And really, my end goal is to train a million people to make more sales and more money. And we’re going to start in Australia, and I want Ozzies want to become rich. I want Ozzie parents to be able to have the freedom of choice, to give their children the best education. To give their children, not the old beat up first car, but a beautiful safe car, for their first car.
Daniel Tolson: And I want them to be able to have financial independence. And what that means is, that they never have to worry about money, ever again. Because they get their skill level, to such a high level, that they can go out, and they can write their own paycheck. And that’s what we want, in the short, medium and long-term. And I’m getting grayer, and I’m looking forward to going gray and getting more wrinkles, because that just says that I’m all weathered, and I’ve got more experience. I’m looking forward to growing old in Australia, so…
Robert Brus: Very nice, very nice. Well, the Australian sun will do that to you. You might notice, if you’re watching this video, that all of my gray hair is gone. And that turns out, the barber is a miracle worker, he just cuts it at a number one, and that’s completely gone. So there’s a little bit in my beard still, though. I’ve got to fix that, so… Well, it sounds like some exciting times ahead. I can’t let you go from The Go All In Podcast, without putting you in the hot seat for a little while.
Daniel Tolson: Okay.
Robert Brus: Just a couple of quick questions, and having a bit of fun here with you. It’s a bit random, no particular order, just tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe we’ll even kind of, maybe get to know you a little bit more. Here it is, first question. You’ve been to more than 100 countries, and you’ve traveled the world, do you have a favorite destination that you like to visit with your family?
Daniel Tolson: Yeah, I love Dubai. I love Dubai, and it’s a beautiful place. It’s hot, and like Lawrence of Arabia says about the desert, “It’s clean.”
Robert Brus: That it is. I was, the last time I was in Dubai was last year, but just in the airport, just on a stop through. But the time before that was when I was in the Navy, and it was in 1996, and it wasn’t like it is today. It was like, I was looking the other day at some photos from there, actually.
Robert Brus: And I think we were in one of the first high rise buildings, and we went up there and took a photo from it, and it’s just flat, just desert, absolutely nothing there. When you go there now, is it like the future? Is that what the future’s supposed to look like?
Daniel Tolson: Well, it’s the future in one main strip.
Robert Brus: It’s not that big, is it? It’s not as big as what people think.
Daniel Tolson: It’s so small. Taiwan’s small. We have 24,000 people per square kilometer, in comparison to Australia, who has about, I think it was 400 per square kilometer. In Dubai, it’s really, it’s one main strip, and then, you have a couple of roads off that, and that’s it. It’s tiny. There’s about eight million people in the entire UAE.
Robert Brus: Gosh.
Daniel Tolson: So it is small, but what they’ve done is, they’ve marketed it well, so you feel that it’s massive.
Robert Brus: And what’s your favorite part of Dubai? Is it what, the people, the shopping, the environment? And it’s clean, obviously. What’s your favorite part of it?
Daniel Tolson: Well, this is probably a little bit controversial, is that in a country like Dubai, everything is a privilege. Say, a job is a privilege, it’s not a right, and as an expatriate, what happens is, you go to Dubai, and you’re given a job. And you work, work and work. And when you stop adding value to the country, then you’re encouraged to leave.
Robert Brus: Right.
Daniel Tolson: Where one of the challenges with Australia is, everything’s a right. “It’s my right not to work.” “It’s my right to get Social Security, and I’m going to blodge.” There’s so many rights in Australia that what happens is, we’ve become a little bit soft. And we call this in Taiwan, the Strawberry Generation. And what happens with a strawberry, you touch it, and it bruises. So the thing I love about Dubai is that everything is a privilege. There is no right. You can’t claim a stake of land there. You can’t get the passport. Your job is go there and add value. And if you add value, you will get rewarded phenomenally.
Robert Brus: Very nice.
Daniel Tolson: And I would love to see more of that mentality in Australia. And this is why people know Dubai around the world, because it’s grown so fast, because everybody adds value. You can’t slack off in that country, and if you do, they reward you, with a free trip home.
Robert Brus: [crosstalk 01:00:25].
Daniel Tolson: Congratulations, you get to go home tonight.
Robert Brus: You’re out of here! See you, Chip! No scabbing off the UAE economy.
Daniel Tolson: No scabs! It’s against the law.
Robert Brus: Love it, I love it. All right, this is a question that, when I looked at your website, and I’d done the research for this interview, and I watched some videos and whatnot, I was like, “What on Earth does this guy read?” You’re a prolific reader, but do you have, like, a favorite author? Is it always learning that you’re doing, or do you ever sit down and read a fiction book? Or is it always nonfiction?
Daniel Tolson: I’ll never waste my time on a fiction book.
Robert Brus: Oh, really?
Daniel Tolson: [inaudible 01:01:02] it’s about business. And the reason is, what I used to do, Rob, was I’d read on everything. And what I felt, I was a generalist, and I had this breadth of knowledge. But there was no depth. So what I’ve decided in my life is that if there’s a topic of emotional intelligence, and it’s a credible author, I will read those books. If it’s social intelligence, I’ll read the books. If it’s selling, I’ll read those books. If it’s about sales, I’ll read those books, and I’ll attend those courses.
Daniel Tolson: And I’ve made a decision in my life that I only read things that are in alignment with my business.
Robert Brus: Nice.
Daniel Tolson: And I’m a specialist in emotional intelligence and business growth. Everything outside of that can wait till I’m retired.
Robert Brus: That’s never happening. Never!
Daniel Tolson: Not in this lifetime.
Robert Brus: Is there one book that stands out, that you would say, “Hey, if you haven’t read this, you should read this one!”
Daniel Tolson: Look, I think to get everybody on the journey, there’s a great book called The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. And I think, if you’re lost, if you’re looking for your path in life, get The Alchemist. It’s a phenomenal book, it’s easy to read, it will take you a couple of hours, but it’ll really start to stoke up that fire within yourself.
Robert Brus: Fair enough.
Daniel Tolson: And start there, and then, I think the best book that you should buy is the top-selling book in the field that you want to lead. So, find out who the top author is in the field that you want to read, lead in, and read everything that they write. It’s like myself with Brian Tracy. He’s my business partner, he’s my mentor, I’ve studied every one of his books for the past 20 years, and-
Robert Brus: That’s a lot of books.
Daniel Tolson: It’s a lot. There’s 75, and three of those courses, and I’d just study that. Because I look at him, and I say, “He got the results that I want, and if I just do what successful people do, in a short period of time, I will get the same results as the expert.” And that’s where I focus my energies. This is just coming back to the Navy mentality. It’s discipline.
Robert Brus: Yeah, very nice. Very nice, well said. All right, is there a skill in your life, that you haven’t yet mastered?
Daniel Tolson: Is there… probably to stop working. One of the things that I find very hard, although I teach time management is, I love what I do. And I’m willing to outwork anybody to be the best in my field. And I find it very hard to stop. My wife has to tell me when to come home from work. She says, “Daniel, it’s two o’clock in the morning. Oh, you need to come to bed.”
Robert Brus: “Get in!”
Daniel Tolson: Four o’clock in the morning, she’ll say, “You’re still not in bed,” and I’ll say, “There’s just another chapter to go.” So I will work 22 hours a day, just to win and beat the bastards. I’m all in.
Robert Brus: I love it, I love it, I love it! My brother says, we’ve had a business together for a long time, his missus is the same. Like, “Get home, what are you doing? You’re never here with the kids,” and he’s like, “Yeah, I’m at work,” and she’s like, “Don’t you ever want to have a break, don’t you ever want to go and do something fun?”
Robert Brus: And he uses the Grant Cardone response, is that, “Don’t you realize that I’m never more happy than when I’m at work? You don’t realize.” Because he just loves what he does, right, and it sounds like the same for you.
Daniel Tolson: If you meet me, and I’m working, you will see me at my best. But what happens is, if I’m not allowed to work, and it’s not even work, it’s just my life’s purpose. Why would I want to take time off from my life? I feel like, if I’m not doing something related to my passion, I feel like a greyhound in the box, and I just keep seeing that rabbit run past, and I can’t get out of the box. And this is my life’s purpose, and I don’t want a day off.
Daniel Tolson: I will create my life around what I want, and my family will come on the journey with me. What my dad taught me was just work. My dad’s 74, he still works, not because he needs to, because he loves to.
Robert Brus: Yeah, nice.
Daniel Tolson: And I want to be that same 74, I want to live to 100, by the way, and I’d love to have these conversations when we’re 100.
Robert Brus: Yes.
Daniel Tolson: I think, if you’ve got to have time off, Rob, then you don’t like what you do.
Robert Brus: Yeah. Yeah, agree, agree.
Daniel Tolson: I think [inaudible 01:04:58].
Robert Brus: Yeah, for me, it’s… I’m not really a big fan of a work/life balance. So I just think there’s life, and if you need a work/life balance, you’re probably not doing what you want to do with your work, because that’s not your life. And it’s not that work is life, it’s just got to be something that you’re kind of excited about, and you want to jump in and do.
Robert Brus: All right, what’s the last question here, for the Hot Seat Quiz? What’s the best piece of business advice that you’ve ever received?
Daniel Tolson: The best piece of business advice would have come from Brian Tracy. And he says that, he said, “Daniel, you can learn anything you need to learn, to become anybody that you want to become.”
Robert Brus: Beautiful.
Daniel Tolson: And I know it’s true in my life, and what got you to where you are today is only enough to keep you there for a short period of time. So, your job is to learn everything that you can learn. Now there’s been three million books written every year, in English alone. So…
Robert Brus: [crosstalk 01:05:51].
Daniel Tolson: What you got to realize is that your knowledge becomes redundant every, by 50%, every two and a half years. So you have to keep learning. In life today, there’s no such thing as lifelong employment, it’s lifelong employability. So the best advice is, you can learn anything you need to learn, to become anybody that you want to become. So just keep learning.
Robert Brus: I love it, I love it! I’m going to borrow that one. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Daniel.
Daniel Tolson: You’re welcome. [inaudible 01:06:17].
Robert Brus: I’ll borrow that one. That’s going to get put up, like, as a little thing. I’m only going to stick that on my daughter’s wall.
Daniel Tolson: [crosstalk 01:06:21]… Right out of stone burrow, they steal!
Robert Brus: [inaudible 01:06:24] longer to steal. Excellent. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on The Go All In Podcast, and spending an hour or so with us here. We really appreciate it. If people want to connect with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Daniel Tolson: Go to Facebook, and type in Daniel Tolson, and you’ll find me there. And secondly, go to my website, www.danieltolson.com. On the 1st of August, I’ll be releasing a new book called Fear Of Rejection, and there’s three proven ideas on how you can conquer the fear of rejection. And every month, my goal is to write a book every month, and I’ve already got eight thing, written at the moment, plus the one on writing, with Brian Tracy, so there’s going to be another nine coming here.
Daniel Tolson: So, start at my website. Look, they’re free, I want to give you great information. Go there, put your name in, put your e-mail address in, get the free book, read it. And then, like you said before, it’s like the 12 Pillars. Just apply one of these ideas every day, and you’ll grow.
Robert Brus: Beautiful, well said. Well said, and if you’re listening to this podcast on your phone, just have a little peek at your phone, and you will see all the links to Daniel’s website, and to his socials right there, so make sure you connect with him. Jump inside of his ecosystem, and make sure you opt into his e-mail list, as well.
Robert Brus: And if you’re watching this video on Facebook, or a YouTube, just scroll down, and you will see the links right there, to his website, and his socials are right there in the show notes, as well.
Robert Brus: Well, as we wrap it up here, Daniel, have you got a parting comment for us, mate?
Daniel Tolson: You become what you think about most of the time. So your job is to decide what you want. And think about that major dominant purpose, every single day, and then just decide the price that you’re willing to pay. And if you know what you want, and you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you will have what you want, guaranteed.
Robert Brus: I love it. Thanks again for coming on The Go All In Podcast, we look forward to speaking with you soon. It’s bye for now.
Daniel Tolson: Thanks, Rob. Cheer for now.
Robert Brus: Well, there you have it folks, what a show!
Robert Brus: I love how Daniel added the word “personal” in front of the word “leadership.” I’m sure that you’ll agree that nothing is more important to personal leadership than emotional and social intelligence.
Robert Brus: Please make sure you connect with Daniel. Just take a peek at your phone, if you’re listening to this show on your phone, and all the links to his socials and his website are right there.
Robert Brus: Make sure you get inside of his ecosystem, and connect with him, as he’s got incredible content, and he’s really, really well-connected, as well. And as you look in there, you will notice that Daniel has a little giveaway for you there, as well.
Robert Brus: So make sure that you pop on over and pick that up, as well, and take a look at his YouTube channel. He’s got some really, really fantastic interviews on there himself, and he’s got some great content that’s all freely available to you. So make sure you check that out.
Robert Brus: Okay, if you’ve got a question or a comment for the show, you can reach out via The Go All In socials, and if you want to send me an e-mail, just visit goallcomein.com.au for more info there.
Robert Brus: And if you like what you heard here today, please take a minute to leave a review, as that helps us out a whole boatload, as well. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. That way, you will always have some Go All In motivation, and entertainment, right at your fingertips, and in your ears whenever you need it.
Robert Brus: Well, that wraps it up for the show today. So, whatever it is that you’re working on, whatever you’re doing, get busy, get to it, and go all in! I’ll see you next time.