This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. It may still contain transcription errors.
Intro#
James: Hello, and welcome to Graduate Theory on Graduate Theory. We’re all about providing resources and lessons for graduates so they can have a successful and fulfilling career. And on today’s episode, I speak to someone who is a really funny guy and someone that really has a lot of experience speaking to people who operate at a very high level.
In this episode, you’re going to hear me laugh quite a lot. You’re going to hear some great insights. We speak about so many things in this episode, all the way from imposter syndrome, how do we deal with situations that we feel like we don’t deserve, also, how we deal with emotions?
How can we deal with unpleasant things that happened in the office? How can we deal with roadblocks that might be keeping us down and how can we deal with situations that seem to keep reappearing in our lives. Today’s episode a little bit spiritual in some ways, and is certainly one that I really enjoyed recording.
And one that I feel has so many really deep lessons, if we can truly receive what is in this episode. So thanks so much for tuning in today, and I hope you enjoy
hello and welcome to Graduate Theory. Today’s guest is a sales coach turned behavioral psychologists. He coaches people how to sell, how to speak and how to ask better questions. He’s written books such as don’t be a Dick and more sales, more profits. Please welcome to the show today. The mindset master Dan flooding.
Good. I
Darren: Joined. How are you doing?
James: You’ll someone who’s had a fantastic career and has gone many different places, explored many different habits. I want to stop asking you, we can delve into these details of where you’ve actually been the way gone, but
Did Darren expect to be a performance coach?#
James: Did you expect to be where you are when you first started at university?
Darren: Did I expect to be here? No. Did I want to be? Yeah, absolutely. I worked with the C-suite. I coached them. I train salespeople pre COVID. I was doing that right around the world. Then COVID but did I expect to be here? I hoped like, hell I would.
But I certainly wanted to be yeah. Yeah.
James: And tell us a bit about your career story in general. So you’re a coach, like you just mentioned the C-suite coach and doing all these things like sales mindset, all this kind of stuff. When did your career
Darren: Start from? When I left school way back in 1992, I reckon that was before you were born.
The prime minister at the time was Paul Keating and he said, this is the recession. We have to have a, so I entered the employment market in 1993. Unemployment had a double digit sort of thing. Interest rates were about 10%. The economy was like, somehow I got a job in one of Sydney’s top law firms.
They were Paying me to go to uni that I pay my uni fees. I was assisting barristers in court. Fly me around the country. Life was really good. And then one of my external to the law firm mentors said to me, Darren, just remember no one ever calls their lawyer and says, Hey, I’ve had a great day.
Can I tell you all about it? So I stopped studying. They sacked me. The only job I could get was selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Now I’m not going to say that job sucked cause that’d be a terrible pun, but it was not a lot of fun. I did that for 12 months, then graduated and did two years of telemarketing.
Then three years of telephone debt collecting. I have had all of the good jobs and along the way, I’ll rep for multinational companies with a multi-million dollar budgets reporting to the overseas sales office. I was working in a company in Melbourne called. Alfa Val and the CEO who was in the company, his job was to turn the company around, was either start making money or one, the company up and send the money back to Colin in Denmark.
And he’d been there for 12 months or so. And he brought everyone in for a conversation. This is what has happened. He’d got rid of underperforming people and products, and somehow I was still there and he called everyone in and he stood at the front of the room and started droning on about what he’d planned to do for the next five years.
I looked at him and I thought you are awesome at what you do, but you suck at selling it to. So as a mature age student, I went back to uni, got myself a degree in psychology, combined it with what I knew about thinking, speaking, and selling. And now I get to hopefully when the borders open up again, I’ll get to travel the world again, clever people, how to communicate and how to sell and sought their mindset out.
So that’s my 92. I left school as 2021. So that’s 30 years old. Will you be the stage one, one day two. Yeah,
James: No, you’re spot on, there and I think it’s fantastic. It’s just fascinating to say like how your career has transitioned over time. And you’ve been able to go really deep into multiple different areas. I think it’s, they’re all intertwined to create this really awesome,
Darren: Awesome value.
It’s a great Steve jobs, commencement speech, I think it was in 2005. He gave it. Have you seen that at all?
James: I think I’ve seen snippets of that.
Darren: Steve jobs, commencement speech, I think it’s for Harvard or Yale or one of them. And he talks about how he dropped out of school and went off and did dumb things and blah, blah, blah.
And 30 years later when he produced the first computer, it had beautiful graphics in it, which literally changed the world of computing. Cause you could never do things on the computer worldwide changing. And the reason that happened is because he went to a calligraphy class at Reed college when he dropped out of his degree and it just stuck with him.
So my journey has been everywhere. I didn’t think selling vacuum cleaners door to door or telling marketing or telephone debt collecting would be one of the mainstays and strengths of my practice. But it is because I’ve been there, I’ve done it. It gives me street cred. And I draw on what I learned in those times and share it with my clients for a fair commercial exchange.
James: No, I think that, that is really cool. And it’s great to hear that, you started from like the warfarin, selling vacuum cleaners, I’m sure. Yeah. Getting to where you are today. Very stark difference. And it certainly. Definitely opens your eyes. What you can achieve for you are
Darren: One of Sydney’s top law firms, a boutique law firm, but a very well placed one.
It doesn’t exist anymore. Yeah, that was humbling. I think they call it in retrospect. I don’t think it was at the time.
James: Yea sure,
I think one thing I want to ask you too, is you’re a lot of what you do at the moment is a solo or, some of them are self-employed with a load of things you do.
How has that shift going from being an employed and, doing sales, like you’re saying the board meetings and things like that versus going out on your own and then having to get your own clients and managing your own business and everything like that. What was that transition like?
And what led you to decide to do that?
Darren: Yeah. What was it like long? What was it like hard. It’s character building. So I always wanted to do what I do now, the reality is when you graduate from high school at the 1819, no one wants to employ an 18 year old, 19 year old to learn your lessons of life, better off knowing what’s actually, even when you graduate from uni at 22, 23, you know, squat, like you got a piece of paper, what do you do?
Give me 20 years in the workplace, then I’ll listen to you. I was in June, 2011 when I went out on my own, but I had my practice for a number of years before that. And I would work during the day and my day job. I used to work at the bureau of statistics. It was my last job. I used to count the number of people who went to libraries, art galleries and museums don’t fall asleep.
It was a lot more exciting than it sounds because we had to count archive as well. Pardon me? That was a boring job, but it was a great place after a divorce. So Hey, So I would work full time. And then at night I would work on my practice. Then I went from full-time down to, I think, about 92% FTE, my wife and I, we both worked long days. And under the guise of one day, a week off, we would look after the children because like back in the day we were paying more in childcare than we were on our mortgage.
And, we bought a house in the burbs and it was like, it was 1200 bucks a fortnight or a month for two kids in childcare. And I think that was a fortnight yeah, stupid amount of money. So we worked long, really long day. I would run Edwards and people would send me inquiries. I talked to him, I would go to work at the abs on Monday and I would, I’d have to write an article or something stupid.
Like the number of people using libraries across regional Victoria. Blow your brains out boring or o’clock I would leave. I was the bottom run four o’clock I would leave. I would go to the airport, I’d get on a plane. I’d fly to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, wherever, staying like this really swish hotel.
And then, I was even allowed to have room service or breakfast in the restaurant. Like this was like, holy Molly, where am I? I would spend the next day with the CEO of some company telling him what I knew then I would, and he would make plenty of notes or she would make plenty of notes and I’ll do this, I’ll do this.
I’ll do this Then I would get back on a plane, fly to Adelaide Wednesday morning, go to work at the bureau of statistics. And they say, now, Darren, this article about people visiting the library, or you’ve got your comma’s in the wrong spot, like this was my life for about 18 months.
James: Wow.
Darren: So how did this do your heading Talk about imposter syndrome so at work you’re being treated like a, numpty like someone who doesn’t know squat, or you put the comma in the wrong spot. You don’t know how to analyze numbers. Probably don’t didn’t really care. And then, oh my goodness, this person who and I was on, I don’t know, back in the night, I think when I left there, I was on 70 grand a year.
So when I would go in a planes, stay in a hotel, this CEO would listen to me. I would be sitting there going home. He Molly, what if I’m don’t know what I’m doing? Oh shit. And what I found out over the last 10, 12, however long I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing, everybody’s feeling that everybody’s thinking outside of physics, chemistry, biology, everything is made up, literally everything is made up.
What do we drive on the left-hand side of the road? Someone at some point in the past decided we would, yeah. Why do we have a prime minister, not a president, a bunch of old white men sat around and decided. It’s all made up. It’s all bullshit. The laws, the governing our country, they’re made up.
There’s no divine thing coming down and they just all made up. And what happens is you go somewhere and you’re going well, I don’t know what to do you, the reality is you don’t realize everyone else is thinking that too. I do a lot of public speaking presentation skills training for everywhere from frontline staff, right up to the exec team.
And what I know is they all sit around the table because I have one-on-one conversations with them and they’re all sitting around the table thinking, oh, I wish I was as good as that person. Oh, I like the way she speaks. Oh man. She’s awesome when she stands up and speaks, I wish I could be as good as that.
And every person is saying that about everybody else, but we’re sitting there going, oh my goodness. I’m no good Everyone wants to be as good as you, but because you’re on the inside, you’re looking out you don’t see that sometimes we’re too close to ourselves to see how good or not we are. That’s why we have people who are absolutely useless.
I may see some of them in our federal parliament they know what they’re doing and other people who are incredibly amazing what they do, scientists for argument’s sake holding back, or I’m not quite sure because you’re not always in the best position to judge what you need to do or how good you are.
James: Yeah. I think that’s very true. There’s this article it’s cold, but someone described that as almost like the spotlight effect where like you think that everyone’s watching what you’re doing all the time and everyone’s paying all this attention to what you’re doing. Yeah. Everyone thinks that, so everyone’s out there thinking that everyone’s paying so much attention to them that because everyone’s thinking that in reality, no, one’s really thinking what you’re doing.
Darren: I’ve got teenagers, 14 aged kids and they think everyone’s watching them. I can’t wear that to school because everyone will see it. And everyone is thinking that everyone thinks the world revolves around them. But it doesn’t, I’m still going to have on my tombstone, who will a real world revolve around now.
James: Oh, that’s amazing. One thing I wanted to ask you about too, is public speaking. You mentioned it just then has been something that I know that cause I know you well, you’ve really, that’s been a cornerstone of a lot of your life almost. You’ve been a part of public speaking to some degree for a long time.
When did you start doing that and how do you think that has shaped. Your career and allowed you to get you to where you are today.
Darren: So in year 12, so 1992, I was going to John Terry Catholic high school in Campbelltown, in Sydney. It used to be out in the boondocks.
Now it’s in a city. You almost, and the mind maths teacher was also the religion coordinator. And he said, Darren, at the end of the year, you, at the end of this school, EMS, you will be doing a rating. I said, no, I’m not Mr. Price. I’m not doing it. He said, yes, you are. No, I’m not your site. I ended up doing it probably only 200 words or something I had to read out, but I was shitting myself about it.
I walked up on stage and put it down on the altar. I kid you not my legs. You could just be out here. The bones shaking. I was that nerves. I was holding onto the alter or the lectin or whatever they call it and church. I mumbled out what it is that I was reading and I got to the end of it.
And I said, please stand. And 300 people stood up and I went, oh my God. They’re listening to me, because I always get at school. It was the punching bag. I didn’t have many friends at school. I wasn’t one of the cool kids. And so I went through the response or is, I would say something and then they would chant back.
And by the end of the item, might’ve been on stage for three, four minutes, whatever. And by the end of that, I knew where I wanted to spend my life. I wanted to spend my life on the stage. I was shit scared of speaking, but I knew the person on the stage had the power. How has that changed my life? I was the kid at school who didn’t have any friends or many friends.
Didn’t have lots of confidence, but I said about learning public speaking. One of the greatest things you can do is learn to speak in public because you can have the greatest ideas, but if you share, they go nowhere and you look at that nutcase, Barnaby, Joyce, all right. Not a thing between the ears, but he’s got the platform speak.
And now he’s the current acting prime minister. God help us all.
James: Oh, that’s hilarious. So you were speaking about, how you coach people in public speaking and that sort of something that’s definitely intertwined with what you do. What are some things that are common tips that you give out and what are some common mistakes that you see people making that you’re like, okay, that you can fix it by doing X,
Darren: Common tip is have fun.
It’s a lot of fun being at the front of the room. You may not think that, but it actually is a second common tip. I’ve been giving this one out a lot more of light is I believe that everything in life is happening right now, perfectly for you to progress to the next game in life. Yeah. I don’t know what video games are like these days, but when I was a kid, I used to pug in it.
You wouldn’t even know what a cassette is. Would ya bloody hell. Yeah. So you get the computer looked a little, it was just a key pad and you’d plug it in your TV. This is where we’re going up and you play the game and you’d go through and you play the game. And I remember the one we had was hunting of some sort or other.
You had to Dodge the species as well. This is 1980s. When the native throw, imagine this sort of shit, the right to grow up with, and then you run towards, and all these speeds keep coming at you. And if you get past that level, you get into the next level and you get to run up the side of the pyramid and they roll bone was Danny had to go left.
He had to go, and if you died in that second level, you went back to the start of that level. You didn’t have to go back through the speed. You just had to go through the boulders and you get through the boulders and you’ve got the snakes. And that’s the way it was. I assume games are still the same these days.
That’s all wrong. The way I reckon life is you go through, you get to a level. And at this level that you’re at, you need to overcome certain problems and the universe goes, okay, Jane, do you want to get to the next level? Awesome. You have to be able to conquer these issues and everything happens for you in life.
So you do so person in on who’s listening to this podcast or quad casts or whatever you, young people call it. Shit is happening in your life. It might be public speaking. It might be the crap of divorce or a relationship breakdown of who knows what terrible stuff you car was stolen. Your partner cheated on you.
This is shit you have to move through to get to the next stage of life. And if you don’t move through it, it will continue to turn up time and time again, we see this with people, with the patterns that they have in their life. You ever noticed someone who keeps constantly having financial problems, there’s just enough money to get to the end of the month.
If something else happened you’re buggered and, you can decide for six months you’re save. And then all of a sudden something goes wrong. And the cost to fix that just happens to be the same amount of money you’ve got saved away. And there it goes. Why? Because there’s some shit you got to work through around your money.
How does it relate to public speaking and presentation skills? So the N so what happens when were these events happened to us? We have an energetic rushing us. It might be fi it might be anger. It might be excitement. We need to let that energy out. Sorry. We need to experience that energy, letting it out.
It’s not the goal we need to experience. It is the goal and the way we experience it is to just feel it. You have to stand up and do some public speaking. The person is speaking and you’re going to go up and speak next and you’re over on the side and you’re home. My God. This is scary.
You just let that energy experience it don’t try and push it down. Don’t suppress it. I’ll just look at a mob picture of naked or I’ll just push it down and I’ll get through or don’t express it. Oh, I’m no good at public speaking. Please bear with me now. Just experience that energy. And once you’ve experienced it, the computer game goes tick.
You can move to the next level. This is the seat. This is actually one of the secrets to life, man. I wish I’d have known this 24, 3 feeling that you have is to help you move to the next level. And you must experience that energy and let it go. Even for the things that you like. You have a loved one.
She’s beautiful. He’s beautiful. That energy you got to let it go. Just experience it. And when they’re not there, you don’t feel it. That’s fine. When they come back. Do you feel that again, experience it because if you hold onto it, what happened is by the time you get to my age, Jane, you turn around and you look at the way, love was today.
When you met someone, you’ve known him for two years and there’s lots of drinking and sex partying. You get to my age and the idea, maybe you just want to watch a seven 30 in use and go to bed at eight o’clock on awesome night. And you’re doing that. And then you look back and you go it was a lot more fun back then.
There’s loves different. Maybe I don’t love her anymore. We’ve grown apart. And then you end up leaving. No, that don’t do that over 20 years, your love is going to change. It has to change. We all see those sad, pathetic individuals who are my age. You still go out to the nightclubs until two, three in the morning, every Friday and Saturday night, try and pick up the young girls.
Why? Because they haven’t let go of that part of life. Let that energy go. And you’ll see that the energy that you have in the relationship when you’re my age, you think it’s good now when you’ve been with someone you love for that length of time? Oh my goodness. It’s just amazing.
But you can’t see what’s coming in. If you’re holding onto what was So let go, what is today? So you can get what is happening tomorrow.
James: You think that was a great point about the yeah, like about the partners that, that can sometimes run our decisions and run our relationships and, maybe we’re running into at work, running into the same kind of situation where it’s, like we nearly get something, but we talk ourselves out of it or whatever it might be.
I think that was really cool about exactly all that technique you have of letting go of, because I think that’s just it, like you said, it really fundamental in terms of breaking through those barriers that can happen in many different areas of life.
Darren: I one of the earlier jobs that I had, so I was at law firm for 18 months.
I was At another company caught all merchandise selling like furniture, hardware. That was a really good job. I was there for about 18 months, two years, tele marketing, and all these jobs were around the 18 month, two year mark. And I was talking to one of my mentors and he, I said, I keep picking dickheads to work for, after 18 months I just can’t stand them.
I highlight him and he was wise, I’m Andy stroke, his beard, Darren, what’s the commonality between all of those jobs sales and they’re here, they’re in this energy, that energy, you said that you’re the only commonality between each job. Something’s going wrong at each job. And it’s a similar sort of thing, it’s you.
And when you realize that you go, ah, that means I’m actually in control of fixing it.
James: I think that’s really cool. I’ve heard a similar analogy where someone was saying like, yeah, I’ve been in five times accidents this year, everyone on the road is such a terrible driver, but it’s okay, who’s the telephone driver, if you’re getting in that many activities and it’s similar to what you were just saying commonality.
Yeah, exactly. And I think yeah, like you said, it was saying like the letting go stuff, in terms of, realizing you have that barrier, even for your example, what were the steps you took then you’ve realized now that, okay, I’ve had these different bosses and I get annoyed by all of them.
Somehow the problem is something to do with me. What were your steps after that to did you like, did you ever work through that?
Darren: Yeah. Worked through it. The beautiful coach out of Sydney, her name’s Lorna pattern. I only started working there about four years ago. Basically she beat into me like with brutal honesty, no, Darren, your, the problem.
No. More, ex-wife’s doing this and the kids are doing that. And that’s what no, Darren, you’re the problem. You’re the Keno. But don’t you see at work? These have no Darren, your, the problem she did built into me for this 12 month coaching program that I was the cause of everything.
And when you accept that, that’s a beautiful thing because what it means if I’m causing all this shit, I can change it. So if you go back into the world of psychology, back to Freud in days, so this is late 18 hundreds. Vienna Freud was the father of modern psychology and he had the theory And basically an ideological view of personality and what’s going on today.
His theory was basically, you are the person you are today because of what happened yesterday. The way you carry on today is because you can get a hug when you were a five-year-old sit down and tell me all about it let’s work through it And at the same time was Adler and he had a tele illogical view of what life was about, which is looking into the future. He said, you’re acting the way you are today. So you can be the person you want to be in the future. Now, I don’t know whether Freud’s 80 logical view or Adler’s tell you a logical view.
Either one is correct, but I reckon Adler has a great position. That is, it gives you control. If you look at fraud, you’re a victim. If you look at Adelaide, you’re in control and I reckon there’s a wonderful way. View.
James: No, I definitely, I think, you can’t really solve a problem until you take responsibility and, once you take responsibility, then you can go and change things.
If things that happen, aren’t your fault and it’s something that’s external, it’s something that will just continue to happen. Then you can’t like until you accept responsibility for those things, it’s difficult to get. Then, be the one that decides to change it when the thing that’s happening is out is like literally by definition, not inside your control.
Whereas when you take responsibility, it’s now in your control and then you can go and work through those things. I think that’s a great way to look
Darren: At mark when you outsource control to other people, when you know what other people have got planned for you. Not much, I don’t care about you. We humans have such a weird ass relationship with control.
We don’t control what. We try to control what we shouldn’t and then we take responsibility for things that we don’t control. Have you ever been fishing? James? Have you caught a fish? Have you caught a fish now?
James: I’m not efficient on usually I
Darren: Believe you have caught a fish. Say what happened did you got in the boat?
You went out the person through the pick over you, put the hook on the rope and on the wire and the string and whatever. It’s gold twine on the line. You put the worm on it, you threw it over. And then the fish went bit you reeled it in and said hey I caught a fish. But to me, the defining factor in there was whether or not the fish bit, the hook, if the fish didn’t bite the hook, you wouldn’t have caught a fish.
True. So that’s you trying to take credit for things you have no control. over You didn’t determine whether or not the fish bit the hook. It says it’s its own sentient being, it will decide whether or not it wants to bite Now, how does this apply in the real world, particularly for salespeople or people, managers, we try and control things that we don’t have the right to control.
We, as sales people say, I sold that to the customer. How can I get them to buy more? You didn’t sell it to the customer. The customer bought it. Oh no. Darren, you don’t get it. Darren. I stalked him on LinkedIn for six weeks. Then I approached them. I spent three months trying to get in through the door.
I sent them gifts. I did that. I followed them on LinkedIn and blah, blah, blah. And I put forward and they looked at it. We negotiated terms, great conditions. They signed it. I sold it to them. Yeah, all of that happened, but it was the customer who decided to buy not sales person who sold So the reason this is important is for the second thing of control, we try and control things that we can’t, we can’t control other people.
So when we say, how can I get them to buy more from me? You’re asking the wrong question. You’re better off to ask the question. How can I be worth buying more from, and can you see? how that is so different.
James: Yeah, definitely. I think that something similar that I’ve heard before this book called atomic habits about there’s this distinction between goes, yeah.
James clear difference between a goal and a process where, something like, whether let’s say you’re in sales and your goal might be, I want to sell a hundred thousand dollars of this autumn of this year. Whereas that’s something like you were saying, that’s I want to get the fish to get on my hook.
Like this many times when that’s something that’s not in your, you can’t control that. But what you could control inefficient example is I can put my line in the water a certain amount of times and I can do it at the best that I can. And then the fish will decide to bite the hook or not. So in the sales example, you would say the process is I’m going to call, 15 to 20 people or whatever the number is every single day.
And that’s my goal. Something that you have direct control over.
Darren: That’s true, but it doesn’t, it as someone who has spent a lot of time, tele marketing, I know that just straight numbers doesn’t work. So in my last year of psychology, I had a job with my cleaning services selling. Carpet cleaning. So he called people in the neighborhood.
And how long Mr. Jones, we were in the area. You want to buy some carpet clinic, no bang in a three hour shift for sales on average, I would get one, maybe two. Yeah, not good. If you’re in selling and you need to make a budget on the Monday, I got into work this Monday and the boss came up to me.
He said, Darren, you figured that they’ve been terrible if you can’t get up to where they should be by the end of the week, but you have to let you go. I was at uni, my wife to be was at uni, no money. I remember what that was like. Smile and dial smile and all over the three hour shift I got one sale.
Came back on the Tuesday, smile and dial three hour shift, got to Lisa number, the hidden in the right direction. I was only working three days or three shifts a week. And then the last session I thought I’m going to go in and got nothing to lose. Cause this is my last shift. And I went in and I thought I’m going to apply one of these techniques that I learned in this rapport building course that I did and what it was, it was about being welcoming for the person on the other end of the line.
So I was worth talking to, and the way that I did that, and I just simply matched their voice. Smile and dial the phone gets picked up and a little old lady goes, oh, hello. I instantly dropped my energy. Hello, Mrs. Smith. It’s Darren from my cleaning service, blah, blah, blah. And what I found is people bought because I was worth talking to.
Because I met them where they were, you know, if I called Mr. Jones and Mr. Jones answered. Hello, Mr. Jones, I would say hello, Mr. Jones, Darren from my cleaning service here, and then moving down in that last shift, I got nine sales. So more in one shift than I should have gotten in the whole week. As Atlanta come back the next week or at 12 and 13.
So I went from being the guy being sacked to the guy being held up as be like him. Why? Because I changed what I was offering. Just simply hitting the numbers, isn’t going to work. How could I, instead of how can I get them to buy more carpet cleaning? How can I be worth buying carpet cleaning from
so we try and take credit for things that we don’t control. I caught a fish, we try and control things. We have no right to control. You buy more and the third is we don’t control things. Yeah. How long do you brush your teeth for? Do you brush your teeth for two minutes?
Because that’s what the Australian dental association says we should do. Or do you brush your teeth until the electric toothbrush vibrates at you and said you’ve done it for long enough? Or do you brush your teeth until they’re clean? You see That you see the difference. We’re outsourcing what it is for how long we brush our teeth.
And what time do you leave to go to work? You’ll get you’re working from home. Do you leave for work normally at say seven 30 or 7 45, whatever it happens to be, or do you leave for work? When the alarm on your phone says, leave for work. And do you get that when you leave based on the alarm, you’re outsourcing control of your morning, ordinarily it’s do all your tasks, make your lunch, you get dressed, all that sort of jazz, keeping an eye on the clock, leave on time.
Whereas the other one is just keep working until you’re told to go with. We need to take control of everything in our life, otherwise our outsourcing at all.
James: Yeah, I think that’s really cool. And I think that goes back to what you were saying earlier about, literally if you just take control of everything, which can be difficult, but there’s all these little things, taking control of as much as he can.
It brings a lot of the power back to yourself and it means that then you can go and those areas that you want to improve in that you can now go and do.
Darren: One of the programs I run with my client is radical responsibility. How do you remove the blockages that prevent people? Formance every trainer in the market, James clear, what’s he about?
He’s about habit stacking. You want to get fit well, every time you go to the toilet, flush, wash your hands, go outside, do two pushups. If you’re down there doing two, you probably can do 3, 4, 5, go to the toilet five times a day, you’ve done 1500. Or Milton Fogg. He’s all about the smallest discernible part, which is you want to go to the gym tomorrow morning.
Why don’t you put out your gym clothes before you go to bed? So there’s less friction. What all of these trainers and everybody else does it. What all the training is about is you’ve got a heel in front of you. You’ve got to get over. So let’s scaffold you to get over. We’ll put all these systems in place, so you can get over your hill.
And we do this in business by, you’ve got to put in your weekly report. We go out, we monitor people and we actually have people managing the people, making sure they’re doing the things that support their job. And you gotta do all these tasks before you actually start doing your job.
All right. You’re exhausted before you even get to work for process. So instead of scaffolding you over the hill, why don’t you just get rid of the hill? The Hill’s not there. You don’t need all that scaffolding shit. So why do we need all these scaffolding? Why do we need milton Fogg. The smallest discernible parts. The reason for it is we have an internal resistance. How is that resistance felt? Or you want to do something you want to go to the gym, it’s been a long day. How do you feel the resistance internal feeling of, ah, couldn’t be bothered.
Couldn’t be staffed. I’ll go tomorrow. And you have this feeling of feeling as yeah, I don’t really want to if everything in life is perfect and happens for a reason, you are experiencing this for a reason, and that is an energy will come up in you. And then you can experience that energy, the energy of, I couldn’t be asked and then you’ll hear you’ll feel it, and then you’ll find it much easier to go because there’s an energy within, inside you that stopping you.
Does that make sense
James: I definitely I think it does. I think I totally agree with you that there’s some things like whether it’s, getting a new guest for the podcast or whether it’s editing these afterwards or whether it’s, doing the reading, read a book every day or like meditating is a big one where I know there’s many people, it sounds like amazing thing and you can do it for a week or two, and then it slowly just dies off and you get that exact feeling where it’s oh yeah, I should meditate right now.
But then you just never do it. And I think, yeah, I think that whole resistance is something. If you can get over that, it’s really big
Darren: Steven Pressfield, he need his book, the war of art talks about, and he calls that the resistance that is that feeling with inside you of I’m not good enough.
The imposter syndrome, the feeling of I’m not going to go through this. And he talks about people who amateurs let the resistance control them. Whereas the professional controls the resistance and their discipline and their all these things. And that’s true. I love the book. I think it’s awesome. But what he doesn’t tell us is how do you move from being an amateur to being a professional and they, the way you do that is by letting that energy go.
So I’m
curious with that letting go what are some maybe you have an example of when you’ve done that or what’s like your actual process for something like that, because it is like hard to describe, do you know what I mean? Like feeling the energy and then letting it go. It’s quite an abstract concept, I guess once you’re doing it regularly, you know what it’s like, but yeah.
James: Is there any kind of technique that you can put to
that?
Darren: Yes, there is. I’ll tell you what, this is something that is so simple. Like it is breathing air simple. It’s so simple that we make it difficult. And what it requires us to do is the opposite of what we normally do. So you normally have an energy come up with. So for argument’s sake, you have to edit these videos. That energy comes up.
And what do you do? You go, there’s sort of a fuck this is really hard work except of course for this one, because like you’re interviewing me
Or, you’re at work, you’ve got to do your monthly report and you’re just that report. And then bosses know they have this and they chase you every month for your figures. And if you’ve done this and you’ve got that job that sits in your in-tray, like they used to be physical in trays, not like inboxing trains like physical in train and everything goes on top of it.
You get to it and you push it to the bottom of the queue because every time you go to it, you get that energetic rush. What we do with that energetic rush is one of three things. You avoid it. Oh, I’m just going to do the job later. I’m going to go to morning tea. You suppress it. Oh God. I just hate that.
Oh, I’m just going to do it. And I’m not going to enjoy Paul, George, you express it. Why do I bloody well have to do this monthly report? It’s garbage, which all that does is just let off steam. So you can then suppress it. Or as we mentioned earlier, you possess it or you feel something that is so good.
You just want to hold onto it. An example of that is something comes in to your, in tray and you go hot love doing this. I’m just going to jump onto the rules. And we express that energy. That’s what we normally do, but that is actually doing something I want you to do nothing the way you do nothing is.
That thing comes on your desk tomorrow, you have to edit this webinar. You have a feeling about that instead of suppressing expressing possessing or avoiding, just experience that feeling, just sit there. And what does it feel like? Is it a weight in your stomach that’s pushing down? Is it is a sense of that’s welling up with inside you?
Do you feel it in your left ear or right here as it happens to be? Do you feel it in the center line of your big toe? Where is this energy? This energy is inside you and pay attention to it. Because if you don’t read any of the Buddha’s work the Buddha’s work as though he wrote a couple of books you’ve got a podcast tuning.
What he talks about is send scars, which are blockages in our system, come up in the form of sensations. And all they want to do is to be felt. When you feel, when you experience it, it’s released, it’s gone. It’s off in the wind. But when you push it down, when you avoid it, when you were suppressed, when you express or when you hold onto it, it doesn’t get released.
And therefore it can’t be replaced with something different. So when you have that energy come up for something you don’t want to do, simply experience the energy, just experience. Is it a burning? Is it a sensation? Is it running? Is it moving? Is it spinning? Experience it for as long as it wants to be experienced, it will eventually subside the nature of the universe.
One of the immutable laws of the way the universe works is impermanence The Buddhist term for it is a nature. Everything rises and falls. There was a time prior to your birth where you did not exist. You are on this planet for a period of time and then you would leave and then you will not exist anymore.
Same for the building. You’re in same for the computer way using the country, the land mess, where on it rises and it falls. So just experience that energy. And it will dissipate. And when it dissipate, you’re going to be in a clearer position to determine whether or not you actually do want to edit, or whether you do want to go to the gym or do you want to do whatever?
And if you’ve got to do it by a deadline, it’s not going to be a chore. It’s just going to be something you do. It is so simple. We make this difficult. Yeah.
James: I think that’s very powerful. And it’s certainly something that I know in certain areas of my life. I have that resistance to things.
And then in other areas I don’t have it. I think that’s where I have that thing that I really want to do and have that desire. And I think that, letting go of those, even if it’s a good sensation, bad sensation, letting go and being present, I think that’s yeah. Really just, it’s just life-changing
Darren: To be honest, if you get electrocuted, it’s not the current or the voltage that.
It’s your resistance to it. That kills you. It’s the same in everything in life. Your resistance kills you stop resisting. Now that doesn’t mean you become a walk over and everyone puts stuff on your desk. It just means you don’t resist the energy associated with it. When someone puts some shit on your desk, your guru has turned up as that shit.
You’re learning a lesson from it. There’s triggered something within you. Let it go and just get through it. But the energy go. Yeah, I think that’s
James: Key. Let the energy go. And then once that’s done, then decide and want to do, rather than even what you were saying earlier about reacting to what time when your alarm goes off and things like that instead of the stuffing putting your desk and then you straight away oh, like getting angry, frustrated, whatever.
Yeah. Sit with it for a bit and let it go. And then, from a better place to decide what to
Darren: Do. Important to do in the moment, the best bodies to do it in the moment you’re having a conversation. You’re in a meeting your bosses, ragging on you, or there’s some stress, you can feel the energy coming up and flowing and you just let it go.
Just let it go while you’re having the conversation, just experience it. And what you’ll find is there’s James back here seeing the world going on and also noticing the experience. And when you can picture James back here experiencing what’s going on and interacting with the world, you’re present to the present moment, which is what all the gurus teach.
And it gets rid of the sanskaras, which means you’ll get through that level and the video game. So you can progress to the next level. How many levels per video game, who knows depends on how good you were in your previous one. And this one,
James: I think that’s a great mental model as well, to look at, if there’s saying like bad things happening or, maybe it’s relationships or you’re losing lots of money or whatever it is, it’s a great lens to kind of place those things into to realize that, this isn’t the end of the world, this is just another challenge that I’m going to overcome, then I’m going to continue, like it’s just a time for me to upgrade almost.
Cause I know you said at the very start of this thing, you lost your job at the more from, starting at your company on your own. Those were difficult times on some level, I’ve heard it described, it’s almost like a catapult where the time it goes down, can really be the thing that pulls back and lets you launch and go further.
Darren: Yeah.
James: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s really going combined with these letting go techniques and, in doing things that you do from a place of calmness and a place of, rather than reacting and frustration and anger and all these things, I think that can help you make better decisions and things like that.
I think it’s really fundamental,
Darren: Protesting around the country about lockdowns, right? All they’ve got is this energy running through them and they go I’ve got to go off and spend this energy. I’ve got to go protest because their voice in their head is telling me that I’m right. Don’t lose that voice in your head is not, you don’t listen to it.
And what happens if they just simply experienced, sat down for five minutes and experienced that energy, they wouldn’t want to go off. Being a protest for cause what Dan Andrews, ah, the approaches are far. We better let’s pull the plug on these lockdowns, go off. We were wrong. 300 people, protein. We must be wrong.
Okay. I didn’t even w in Western Australia, where in Primark, McGowan has closed the border. They haven’t had any COVID at all. They had anti lockdown this over there. Why I’ve got no idea, as he said, grow a brain. But what happens in this energy is running through them and they’ve got to do something with it and they don’t know.
You can never just sit there and experience it. If you sit there and experience it, it will be dissipated. And you won’t feel as though it’s stupid or you won’t feel as though it’s necessary to go off and do something stupid, like a protest. Then what you’ll be able to do is put that energy and focus into something you want to do to move to the next level of your video game.
That is life. So you can achieve on her investment property or in shares. Go write a poem or whatever it is more productive for you as an individual and therefore probably society at large. No, I
James: Definitely agree with that. So one thing as well, I wanted to ask you about something that you teach in your mindset mastery course, and something that I’m sure you teach him, whatever it is that you’re teaching is around this idea of like self doubt.
And we touched on as well imposter syndrome and things like that, these kinds of thoughts that can come into your head, let’s say the example of a role comes open at work and it’s a promotion. And then you think about applying for it, but you can talk yourself out of going for it.
Or you can talk yourself out of seeking your opportunities or doing a certain thing, even though that you could do it or you should do it even. What are some tips that you’d give to someone that’s thinking through those things?
Darren: That voice in your head. It’s not, you don’t listen to it.
What the hell do you mean that voice in your head? He’s not using it. It is an evolutionary throwback from when we were amoebas. Not you and I personally, but other people were look at plants. When like life started on this planet, about 1.3, 1.2, 1.3 billion years ago, plants were the first form of life and everything in the world, everything in the university is measured in energy.
How to plants get their energy. They stand in the sun, photosynthesis, light happy days. They don’t have to do anything to get their energy happy days. Somehow I wasn’t there at the time. So I don’t know exactly, but singled cells, celled organisms turned out. And they had to get energy and they had to develop a way to remember, because if you think of an amoeba, a single cell organism would go off and it would eat something subsumed into itself and it would die or get sick and had to remember to not, if he got sick to not eat that.
And then to go off and eat this bit of thing over here, that was, life-affirming had to remember to eat that life affirming, donate that life tonight. How did it do that? And it’s assumed that this is where the ego comes from the voice inside your head tells you to do stuff that you know will be safe. It is a trouble predicting machine.
It will find anything that could go wrong and tell you as though it will go wrong. And that’s why when that job comes up for you. That you’d be perfect for it screamed at you because you may not get it. Therefore you’re safer here where you are. So don’t listen to it, right? Sounds fence. But you know, There’s, my voice told me what to do.
That voice does not have your best interest at heart. Have you ever been sitting down on the couch? Watch TV, enjoying the show, whatever. And these things called ads came on every seven and a half minutes, like annoys the shit out of your facility ship. And in the evening, what would happen if you’re sitting there on the couch? Not a want in the world, everything’s happy.
You’re holding hands with your loved one, like good meal, happy kitchen’s clean. I can rip a life. Sweet. And then an ad for some ice cream. You hadn’t thought of anything watching your that’d be nice. So my ice cream in the fridge, I wouldn’t mind Amazon now trying to lose weight. Yeah. But nice.
Wouldn’t it. You ever done this? You have an argument with yourself for 20 minutes, whether or not you should have some ice cream you weren’t even thinking about. And then you come up with all of these excuses. You’ve been working hard while we’re in lockdown on the ladder of tree, buddy got all this beans half week.
If I can, I’m going to do it. So you go over next to ads. Come on. So you go and get the ice cream. And because you’re hardcore, you’re sprinkle a bit of Milo on top. And then you come back, sit down on the couch and you start eating it and it tastes beautiful. You get to the end, you’ve reclined, the chair, you reach down and you put the thing on the floor.
About a minute later, that voice in your head goes, why did you eat that ice cream? You’re trying to lose weight, all that exercise you did during the week. And it starts ragging on you for doing what it wanted you to do. All that he wants to do is have your attention, because that way it feels in control.
Don’t listen to it. It doesn’t have anything useful for you most of the time.
So what’s the obvious question.
How do you not listen to it when it’s so present
good question. I’m glad you asked.
What do you reckon the answer is? I think
James: One, one on law days would be, you’re saying earlier about, building the scaffolding to get over the mountain. And I feel like it’s a similar situation where instead of just trying to avoid these points in your head, why can’t we just get rid of it?
And so it’s not there in the first place, but I don’t know if that applies.
Darren: I don’t think you’ll ever get rid of it. But if you spend two or three lifetimes meditating, like I only eat anyhow, you might
only one technique my friend. And that is to let the energy behind it go. So the aware, so there’s three things we’ve got the body, we’ve got our mind and we’ve got our awareness of the two our awareness goes to the mind, to the voice. The awareness goes to the voice when it fears the emotions and the feelings.
So the sensations that we have in our body, which are always there, you and I, we are made of atoms and atoms made of quarks quantum physics tells us this, that it’s just a little trickle impulse going backwards and forwards. It’s not even solid. Doesn’t that do your heading, everything in the world is made up of, but yet solid.
But does he hit him with, by the particle in a wave at the same time and acts as the same thing. So in your body, there is always sensations, but we have this concept in psychology that we called habituation. So you’ve been sitting down for the last half hour or last hour, and you can’t even feel the chair that you’re sitting on until I’ve brought it up.
There’s always that sensation. There, there is sense that you can’t even feel your shoes when your feet in your shoes, when you’re walking around. Until you decide to pay attention to it. We block all these signals out. So when we hear the voice saying, eat the ice cream, made the ice cream sense in your body for where is the energy sense that energy and just experience it and let it go.
And if you do that, the voice will go well stop talking about ice cream anyway. Or if it does want to talk to you about ice cream, you’re not going to have the energy behind it to get you out of the seat and walk over and invest in a diabetic coma.
Does that make sense?
James: Yeah, I think it does definitely. I think, trying to quiet the voice or at least listen to it, hear what it has to say and just take away that, that charge that can sometimes be that.
Darren: But just type the energy for surrender to the energy. So you’re at work and a promotion has come up, you hear it, you go has another 15 grand a year.
How cool is that? And I’ll get a bit of travel and the borders were open. Exciting job. I’ll be able to use my degree happy days. I’m not going to be able to do it. They’re going to choose someone else, just search out in your body where their energy is and experience it. It may get more intense.
May not. You might feel it as heat. You might feel it as tingling. You might feel it as a sinking feeling. You might feel it as a euphoric field. I don’t know whatever you feel it as is right for you. You’re in your body. I’m not. And then once that energy has passed, You’ll be in a position where you’re much clearer and able to see what your next best step would be.
Now, it may be that you look at it and you, without all those emotions running, you determine though it would not be worth your time in blind for it. If you want the job, I’ve always thought. Never apply for a job you qualified for you’ll only be bored and let them determine whether or not you’re qualified for it.
No, I think
James: It, that’s a great way to look at it too. I think, putting yourself out there. It’s certainly great. And I, and all of these tips, like absolutely fundamental, cause I think one of those, another thing that I’ve heard is today’s day and age, everyone can know all the things that you need to do any job, or you can know all the knowledge, but it’s these things now it should becoming more and more important is how can you deal with your emotions and situations?
How how can you remove these resistance to certain things? It becomes a lot more important. So yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying.
So the last question I’ve got for you, Darren, is when we’ve got the audience of graduates here. So one piece of advice that you’d give to someone, if you were graduating university this year, or one lesson that you would give to someone else graduating.
Darren: Get vaccinated now, as silly as that sound, it’s actually a lot deeper. So what we’ve had since world war two, and it’s been driven a lot by the us is the power of the individual. Okay. Oh my rights. I can do this. I’m going to be the top, blah, blah, blah. The idea of COVID and climate change. These are all existential crisis that affect the whole world.
Now I can put a mask on and I can get vaccinated and I can go like hippie don’t drive anything, but I’m not going to stop COVID by myself. And I’m not going to change climate change by myself. We need as a society to work together. So the people who were going lockdowns are bad. It’s not affecting me. My business has gone down the toilet.
You’ve got to change. They’re missing the tectonic shift that is going on in society. That is, we are moving from a collectivist, sorry, an individualistic society back to a collectivist society where we rely on each other. There’s an Ethiopian saying a traditional Ethiopian saying, if you want to go fast, go alone.
But if you wanna go far go together. And that’s where we are now that the mask and the vaccination is the metaphor for what we need to do. This is all about coming together. The knowledge that you have is great. It’s common, but it’s great. Your experience that you have from your life that have brought you here today is uncommon and needs to be shared as your knowledge, that needs to be shared.
I get vaccinated. He for no other reason we don’t get either.
James: No, he was born there. And I think that’s a fantastic note to finish today on get accidental. Everyone. Thanks so much for your time today, Dan. Fantastic lessons in there. Yeah. Thanks so much. Cheers buddy.
Thanks so much for tuning in to our episode today with Diane as I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, he is a wealth of knowledge and it was fantastic recording this episode with him.
If you’d like to connect with Darren further, you can do so via the links in the show notes his website, Dan fleming.com. If you’re listening on any kind of podcast platform that has some kind of comment or review system, I’d really appreciate it. If you could leave us a review or a comment, these reviews go a long way to helping the podcasts get out there so they can have more listeners and share this knowledge with more.
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