What does it take to become a truly transformative leader? Is it about having the right strategies, the perfect team, or just plain luck? Or could it be something deeper—something forged in the fires of personal adversity and honed through the relentless pursuit of a vision that refuses to be extinguished?
In this episode of Sticky from the Inside, I dive deep into the life and philosophy of Dan Tocchini, a leadership coach whose story is nothing short of extraordinary. From his early life tangled in the chaos of street gangs and addiction to working alongside SpaceX rocket engineers and enduring the unimaginable loss of his young grandson, Dan’s journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of embracing suffering.
Dan’s philosophy challenges us to rethink what it means to lead. He believes that true success isn't found by avoiding discomfort, but by leaning into it—by facing our darkest moments and emerging stronger, wiser, and more connected to those we lead. This isn’t just a leadership lesson; it’s a life lesson.
In this episode, I explore how his tumultuous past shaped his views on leadership, why vision is the key to transcending circumstance, and how embracing the hard stuff can lead to truly authentic connections with your team.
Whether you’re a seasoned leader, an aspiring one, or simply someone who’s navigating the ups and downs of life, this episode has something for you. So, grab a coffee, settle in, and get ready to explore the depths of leadership with a man who’s lived it all. Trust me—you'll want to listen to this episode in full via the player below, or dive deep into the following transcript. If you're anything like me, it’s a conversation that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading or listening.
Episode Transcript
Employee Engagement and Leadership Insights
00:00:10 - Andy Goram
Hello and welcome to Sticky from the Inside, the employee engagement podcast that looks at how to build stickier, competition-smashing, consistently successful organizations from the inside out. I'm your host, Andy Goram, and I'm on a mission to help more businesses turn the lights on behind the eyes of their employees, light the fires within them, and create tons more success for everyone. This podcast is for all those who believe that's something worth going after and would like a little help and guidance in achieving that.
Each episode we dive into the topics that can help create what I call stickier businesses. The sort of businesses where people thrive and love to work, and where more customers stay with you and recommend you to others because they love what you do and why you do it. So if you want to take the tricky out of being sticky, listen on.
Okay then. Today we've got what I think will be a truly thought provoking and inspiring conversation lined up for you today in Sticky Studios. I'm delighted to have with me Dan Tocchini, and he's a leadership coach and founder of Take New Ground, who's been transforming the way people think about leadership, vision and personal growth. Now, Dan believes that effective leadership isn't just about the position that you hold, but about the vision that you carry and the way you handle the inevitable challenges that you're going to meet along the way. And based on a very special email I received from Dan, we're going to explore a powerful concept that I think might just change the way you approach both your personal and your professional life.
So think about this for a sec. What if true happiness and success aren't found by avoiding discomfort, but by embracing it? What if the very suffering we try and escape is actually the doorway to deeper wisdom, stronger relationships, and ultimately enables the ability to create something truly beautiful out of madness and chaos? Now, with Dan's help, I reckon we'll take a journey through these ideas, sharing how a person with a vision can totally transcend their circumstances if they can embrace the concept of exile, and why that exile might actually just be the key to becoming the leader and person you're meant to be. We'll also discuss, I think, how standing and taking this space allows us to properly break free from, I don't know, traditional co-dependency, really meet others where they are and connect with them in ways that are properly authentic and powerful.
So if you're ready to rethink what it means to lead, to suffer and to thrive, stick around. Because I think this episode is going to challenge, inspire and maybe even transform the way you see your own journey. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Dan Tocchini on Transforming Leadership and Company Culture
00:03:14 - Dan Tocchini
Oh, thanks for having me, Andy. I've been looking forward to this for some time.
00:03:19 - Andy Goram
Me, too. And I want to discuss this email in a second, but before I do, because I won't stop once we start getting into all of that stuff, my friend, do me a favour. For the listeners, just give us a little bit of a brief background into you, what you've been up to, what you focus on today.
00:03:36 - Dan Tocchini
Yeah, a couple of things. I am a consultant, basically. Coaching is something I do as part of it. And given that, when you say you're a coach, that could mean so many different things. We're very specific about what that means with our clients, but we basically deal with three areas where leaders get stuck. One is basically dysfunctional team stuff, like silos, that kind of thing. Another is transitions, like post and pre merger transitions. Any kind of time you're going to shift a leadership, make a leadership shift, what are the things you need to be aware of? How can you actually have it work in your favour and what's it take? What are the conversations that are going to come up in the culture that are going to be… that either going to contribute to or take away from the performance of the team and the meaning of being on a team? And a lot of times, leaders don't want to face those kinds of issues. And the third one is just performance management. Most people have KPI's, that kind of stuff and rocks, et cetera, but they don't know how to have the conversations, or they don't want to have the difficult conversations that inevitably arise when you're working with somebody's performance. And how do you have those obstacles to actually become possibilities? That's what we do.
I grew up as an entrepreneur. I have multiple businesses. My grandfather came over from the old country in the early 19… it's the turn of the century, 1900s, and opened up grocery stores that became movie theatres. And I grew up in the movie theatre business, and my father had theatres and that kind of thing. And I ended up starting that way and then branched out, bought real estate, made, you know, was in the shipping business. I have a tech company, that kind of stuff.
00:05:39 - Andy Goram
I love that this. This part time gig I have of doing a podcast. I get to meet so many amazing people, and it never surprises me that there's always connections between people you've never met before, things they've done, and things that happen in your life. My late granddad, God bless him, he was in the movie business, but in the cinema side, he ran like The Empire, Leicester Square and the Curzon in London and stuff. And I remember as a kid going to the back behind the cinema, right, where all the cameras were. Wow, absolutely amazing. Amazing stuff.
The Role of Philosophy in Leadership Development
00:06:15 - Dan Tocchini
And when I say movies, I meant, I mean cinemas. My dad has about 200 screens up and down the west coast.
00:06:22 - Andy Goram
Yeah, amazing, amazing. Now listen, your background has to have an element of philosophy in there as well because, I'm going to talk about this email in a second, my friend, because when I… This was no ordinary email that I received from you. Just trying to bring the listeners in. So I have a process when we do this podcast. I really like to try and meet my guests before we come on and chat, just so we get a bit better acquainted, have a little bit of a chat about what we'd like to talk about. Inevitably, sometimes that chat turns into another episode, but sometimes diaries don't always match up. So sometimes there's a bit of an exchange on email or what have you, as to, you know, what we might want to talk about. And, well, firstly, before I get to that email, there is philosophy in your background, right?
00:07:12 - Dan Tocchini
Oh, yes. So as a young man, I went through a very… I came out of a pretty traumatic background. My mother was a schizophrenic and bipolar and I became the go between at a young age. I'm the oldest between her and the psychologist, so pretty traumatic upbringing. And right out of high school, I had some college offers to play baseball and football. I went and tried to play football. I got hurt. Parents split up and divorced at 18. Just a lot of craziness. And eventually just got deep into cocaine. (Wow). And I've been clean now 41 years. But when my son was born, that's when my wife just came to me and said, look this, if you want us, you got to stop this. I know what you're doing. I was living it, I thought a double life.
00:08:05 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
00:08:06 - Dan Tocchini
And she was hip to it and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. But coming out of it, got very involved with recovery, and then found that these psychological approaches weren't as effective as things like the inventories you take with AA or CA. And I really got into understanding that. And my dad enrolled me in a human potential movement training called Lifespring, and I went to work with them, eventually. My dad said, you're going to love this. You know, you're an entrepreneur, but you're also a priest, you should go do this. But why I went to work there. I ended up going to work there at a young age. I think I was 24, 25, maybe 26. And I went and I started going to school, going back to school and I started studying Phenomenology at Berkeley and under a guy named Hubert Dreyfus. And it was part of a work extension program and got deep into it over the years and found that Phenomenology just means the study of human becoming. How people become who they become. Like, if you want bringing a vision into reality, but around who you are. Right? And of course, if you were a cocaine addict and dysfunctional, you're looking to become something that's going to be, you can grow a family out of it, not some dysfunctional mess.
00:09:30 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
00:09:31 - Dan Tocchini
So I got deeply into that. And I. And then later on, I think in the late nineties, I started studying neuroscience and I started to see how Phenomenology, which is a hundred years old, maybe 150 years old, was describing things that neuroscience was discovering.
00:09:57 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
Phenomenology and Neuroscience: Understanding Leadership Behaviour
00:09:58 - Dan Tocchini
You know, and so, like, for instance, you and I, our current state, the way we show up, our spirit, our attitude, is a result of the future you think is coming. Most people think it's a result of the past, which is an Etiological view. That's a Freudian view. And it's very interesting to note that even in the school of psychology, the Vienna school of psychology, which is Freud, Jung and Adler. Adler and Freud were at each other all the time because Freud was so anchored into past. And Adler was a phenomenologist, which I didn't know until later, when I started reading a story. So he didn't write as prolifically as Freud did. And Jung was kind of between them with his typology and, you know, archetypes and that kind of stuff, and dream thinking, which is really beautiful stuff. And of course, all three of them are brilliant. But Adler believed that it was the future you thought you're going to have will determine your state.
So one way to think about that is if you and I are chatting and you think you're going to double your income this year, like you believe it, and I believe I'm going to half my income. We're going to have very different ways of being, or states of being in that moment, because of the future we think is coming. And so rather than using the past as a guide or as a, you know, as a marker. And that doesn't mean you don't have the past. You don't look at the past for lessons and so on. And, but you, but guiding this, see, well, where am I now? Well, okay, I look into the future. If I can really identify the future I'm committed to, then that becomes my standard. Rather than I want to do better than I did before, because if what I did before didn't work, well, I want to… Well, what future do I want? And then I want to relate how I'm with you and how I'm impacting you with that future. And that requires some real nuances, but that's kind of the simplistic in a nutshell difference between a psychological point of view and a phenomenological point of view.
How Vision Shapes Leadership and Company Success
00:12:24 - Andy Goram
Right now, me knowing that and knowing that about you helps me make sense, more sense of the email that I got from you than I did initially, because I had one of those kind of mind blown moments when I read the email and I was like, “What? I need to understand this.” And so I'd asked broadly… because we'd had a previous conversation on the Engage For Success Radio show, right? And we had a connection. And we're like, “Let's talk a little bit further about this in more detail.” And we got this email back. I want to read this email to you because I think in today's episode I want to break down what I've interpreted, the kind of four or five pieces that I took out of this email.
When I read this email, I thought it was some sort of philosophy poem that had come through. Right? And that may just be my inability to read stuff properly. But, anyway, look, here it is. This is literally, listeners what I got back.
“A person with a vision is never held hostage by history or circumstance. Want to be happy? Learn a suffer for your vision. Suffering introduces us to exile. Exile introduces us to wisdom. If we allow ourselves to belong to the exile, belonging to exile opens the ways to others where we stand in exile, we can meet others not only just to belong to what they do for us, but to stand in order of chaos and release beauty.”
00:13:54 - Dan Tocchini
“Stand to order chaos and release beauty.”
00:13:56 - Andy Goram
There we go. Now picture my little, addled brain at that point going, “I need… wow! Where's this conversation going to go?” So the way I interpret that, I loved it. I thought that was about the most profound email I've received. But it covered to me an exploration of leadership, vision and personal growth and the sort of interplay between, I mean, I really want to dig into this, suffering, exile, and what that means. And then the guess the pursuit of and ownership of and use of wisdom and still being able to and using all those things to really authentically connect with your people. I mean, that's the sort of key bits I took out of that, that email. Have I interpreted things? Have I missed anything in that?
00:14:49 - Dan Tocchini
No, I think that's really thorough. If I just put it in normal conversation, it's like, look, I deal with some really heavyweight leaders, right? So they want to produce results. That's what we're about, is producing results. But they want meaning. And it's really interesting because I don't think a lot of people connect where meaning is in an organization where you're committed to producing results. And what I put out there are the principles I think, or view something from, and invite leaders into the same conversation. We did a turnaround some 14-15 years ago with an organization and the CEO, she's amazing girl, she broke the record on Wall Street with a number of roll ups, 61 roll ups in a year. She took the company, a $3 million a year revenue, revenue of a package delivery company in New York, rolled up multiple other companies like it, and sold it for $250 million four or five years later.
00:15:58 - Andy Goram
Wow.
00:15:59 - Dan Tocchini
So she hired me to come in and do a turnaround right off, right after the.com bubble burst. Anyway, when I started talking about what I was going to do, because she was really up against it. Her partner's from England. He grew up in, in Africa. I forgot which country, but he was going to have to go back to England if they… because she was thinking about dissolving this current company she had started. And she was worried that they weren't going to be able to make it. The DC firm that had given them the money took a flyer on, like a tech play. They were in the bios kind of biotech field. And now the.com bubble was burst and they wanted to dissolve the company and close the tranche. And we were able to turn that around.
But when I first started talking to her, she said,
“I know you're making sense, but it sounds like Chinese to me.” And I said, “That's all right. This is because you're used to listening differently. Within a few months, you're going to catch this.”
And now she's one of our biggest advocates, right? Because a lot of people are afraid, “Well, you're going to get into some philosophical conversation.” No, actually, I'm going to use the philosophical thinking to have very difficult conversations that are going to, they're going to produce meaning and productivity. Those are the two things. Meaning and productivity. Because that's what keeps people in the game. That's what they want. They want to overcome something they initially may think, “Oh, there's no way we're going to overcome it.” They want to accomplish what they didn't think was possible but long for.
And if we can get people, work with people in a way that they can come together like that, synergize their efforts, et cetera, it's a big pop. Everybody knows that. But how do you navigate? Because there is human psychology in this. How do you navigate and create a language, a narrative that can help people handle whatever psychological issues emerge when you get up against circumstance. So when somebody commits to do something, the minute they make a commitment to do something specific and put out a deliverable, there's a crisis. That's a crisis. And the beautiful thing about crisis is it reveals. And most people want to hide from the crisis, which keeps them from embracing the revelation that the crisis is bringing. Like, it's a very stoic point of view. It's the obstacle is the way. So, you know, there's a difference between what's actually happening and what you are making up about what's happening. And so when we state the commitment, the crisis comes up, and now we can start to explore, intervene, stand with, however you want to put it, whatever phrase, with whatever they're thinking about the crisis. And whatever they're thinking about the crisis is how they're going to behave.
So if my thought is, “Oh, this is going to destroy my career, I need to get out of this”, there's a whole different set of pathologies that emerge than if somebody says, “Okay, got it, I can't wait, we're going to solve this. I don't know how.” And they start to resource the team to do that, and themselves and circumstances, they start to… because they're clearly committed to having something turn out. Think Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, anybody who's accomplished anything great, they just have an ability to marshal their energy to find the possibility and resource that exists in the moment that is relevant to the vision.
Embracing Discomfort for Personal and Professional Growth
00:19:38 - Andy Goram
I want us to try and break down, I think, into those elements of vision, suffering, exile and wisdom and authentic connection if we can. So, you've mentioned this “A person with a vision is never held hostage by history or circumstance.” So, what's your meaning behind that, the importance of that vision? And where have you evidenced that in your work, my friend?
00:20:02 - Dan Tocchini
Okay, so, all right, so vision comes from one of two things. It either comes from a wound, something you've lost and mourned, and that you faced the morning in such a way that it ignites a desire for it. So in my… I have a very strong family now, but when I was a cocaine addict, I was in the midst of a family that's falling apart. And I was the oldest. And I think the divorce really affected me deeply. So, the addiction was trying to get away from that exile, that sense of not belonging, that sense of being cut off, that sense of being alone, looking for my tribe. And so the addiction would numb that hole, if you will, metaphorically speaking, that sense of loss. So by facing into that, that's how I recovered from the addiction. The desire for family grew in me huge. I want family. That's why I was so, “I'm hurting”, because I don't think it's possible. So why look into it?
So now I create basically like a prison. And I've done a lot of work, I have a curriculum. I developed one of them. It's the most studied curriculum for kids coming out of gangs in America. I went and trained and implemented it with an organization called Straight Ahead Ministries on the East Coast. And this was many years ago, and it was just something I do to give back. Cause I came out, I was involved in the street quite a bit, given my home life. And so kids in prison, anybody in prison doesn't want to talk about what the future they want because they don't think it's going to happen, so why talk about it? In fact, they get pissed off.
And the other thing is, they don't want to talk about anything they care about. Because if people know what you care about, they could use it against you. They could attack what you care about. So that tendency’s not just with guys in prison, that's a human reaction. A survival reaction. Fight, flight, follow, fool, or freeze. If I'm not aware of that, I will begin to pull away from the very things I long for. Right? So it takes courage to transform from a reaction machine to a what I call legacy machine. Or somebody who can order chaos, like, I can stand and the chaos starts to order. That's what a leader does.
It's not like a personality type. It can be introverted, extroverted, but it's the willingness to stand and keep your eye on the vision and continue to create narratives that invite people into it so you can identify who's on the team that's going to be beneficial based on the vision, who's going to get value from going after that vision from standing for that vision and those who aren't, and those are the people, you got to pay attention to those. So you got to be clear about the future worth having. That's like, what future are we going to have together? And what are we committed to and that we don't have it yet?
The Importance of Resilience and Commitment in Leadership
00:23:11 - Andy Goram
The bit about being held hostage. Right, or circumstance, is it because people aren't looking far enough ahead? It isn't a big enough of picture. It's too close to reality. What's the defining factor here?
00:23:25 - Dan Tocchini
Well, I think that's a great question. Well, what I think is that when people… you fail, we were talking about this earlier, we fail more than we succeed. If you play golf, and I play a lot of golf, I love it because it's a game that you're going to fail far more than you succeed often. And you've got to deal with those failures. And if you don't face those failures, you're going to get pissed off and walk off the course. It's going to go sideways some way, and nobody's going to play with you, that kind of thing. Well, life is like that.
I think one of the biggest things we tackle in my business with executives is apathy or cynicism. Because they failed enough. And rather than go after what they really want, they go after what they know they can get. And that's really, that's a state of despair. It doesn't know itself as despair, but it finds a level. That state of despair is what Kierkegaard says.
“The most pernicious despair for human beings is the despair that they can tolerate. And they call that happiness.”
Because they don't want to put themselves at stake, because the minute you get at stake for something you care about, you come alive because, because something could be taken from you. And rather than feel the disappointment of not succeeding, most people will mitigate that vision down to something they know they can get. And so when they accomplish it, it doesn't bring that juice that when you accomplish something you didn't quite know is possible brings, you know, like that.
00:25:01 - Andy Goram
I absolutely love that. “The vision that I know I can get.” I mean, that just makes so much sense. I just think that then that piece around relative happiness in light of that, I mean, that makes, just makes so much sense. Settling on all fronts. Settling for the vision I know I can get. Settling for the relative happiness, right?
00:25:24 - Dan Tocchini
That's a default future. You're going to have it anyway. It's going to come, you know, it's going to come. That's the default future. And if you don't make any shifts, that's the future you're going to have. You know, you get into a company here, you're making big money, you got VC's, you got a Board, you know, you got all this stuff going on. It's very easy to react to those pressures in a way that you find that default future, and that's all you play. And what happens is you lose the very… People who are really talented, this is what I love about Elon Musk. I've done work with his companies and people that have worked with him very closely. Tom Mueller, who was number one employee for 18 years, he invented the rockets, was one of my clients. And these guys are really exceptional people because they… Musk talks in his life story, talks about this guy, Tom Muller. He wasn't the best or brightest of all the engineers he talked to, but the guy never gave up. He was willing to go after what he didn't think he could accomplish. And that's the guy who put together and came up with this incredible rocket system. It's the most successful rocket ever created. And this guy, Tom Mueller, was really the guy behind it. And I had the privilege of coaching this guy for a while. He is a remarkable guy. But, you know, he says, you know, “Elon just doesn't give up.” And if you weren't willing to do that, if you kept trying to tell him it was impossible, well, he could take you off the team. I don't want to hear that.
00:26:54 - Andy Goram
Yeah. Real commitment, resilience to that. I want to move into the happiness thing, which is kind of related to this, this thing about suffering. I mean, you mentioned, “To be happy, you've got to learn to suffer for this vision.” And so, I think we're just starting to sort of hear about that, what the sort of commitment it takes, and I guess the pain in going after something. But just dig into that suffering thing for me.
00:27:19 - Dan Tocchini
I will tell you a personal story.
00:27:21 - Andy Goram
Great.
Leading Through Crisis: Lessons from Personal Tragedy
00:27:22 - Dan Tocchini
About two and a half. About two years ago, not quite, my two-and-a-half-year-old grandson was killed instantly in his house. A Redwood fell in his house, almost blew my son out of the house, and killed my grandson instantly. (Oh, Dan). And it was an incredible… The character my son has. He couldn't get the tree off his boy. He tried to get a truck, and he wrecked the truck trying to push the tree off. It wouldn't move it. So, he got a neighbour, and they sawed both sides of the tree, took it off. Rolled it off him and my son's… You know, Eon was my son's son. And Eon was... There was no blood, nothing. He just was on the couch. And I guess it just killed him instantly. But his body was intact and just a little bruise, and that was it. My boy carried him to the EMTs, and, you know, it was incredible.
And that event was probably… My son said to me,
“I'm so glad you're”, I'll never forget this, “you're my father. Because you taught me to look into the abyss until I see possibility. Until I see Christ”, because we're believers, “’till I see Jesus.”
So, we spent two months together, our whole family. My son, his ex-wife, her fiancée, his kids by her, his wife, the wife who gave birth to Eon, my daughter, her husband, her kids, my wife. And we spent two months in the same rental and just looked into the abyss. The rules were simple. If you don't want to talk, no problem. When you want to talk, great. If you want to cry, you cry. If you're angry, whatever comes up, we just look into it. We're there. We're there to hold it. And what came out of that, it was the deepest connection I've ever had. And the meaning of Eon’s life took on a whole new level for us. And we started to realize how the paradox of such a tragedy is that there's something in there, that God's doing in the tragedy. Not that he caused the tragedy, but in the tragedy, there was a connection that we had never experienced.
And I have found that to be true in every business I’ve ever been in, that if I can open handedly and I’ve blown it. I know about what the downside is, because when I was a young man, I shattered a company because I was unwilling to have the hard conversations I needed to have about the way where I had completed what I wanted to do. Id worked in this company for 18 years or so that I started. I wanted to get out of the company. I could have, you know, instead, I tried to be some noble guy doing the right thing for everybody, working for me, instead of just being straight about, “I'm done”, and figuring out a way for them to either take the company, to sell it to them. Or to sell it to somebody else. I didn't do that. And it really hurt other people. And in a very obfuscated way, is lying to them, because I was trying to be something. I was trying to be somewhere I really wasn't committed to being.
And so at that point, I started to learn, you know what, I need to have the conversation anyway. And if I hold into the conversation, if I look into that abyss, because I don't know the suffering of not knowing, of not really being clear. But I know this isn't what I want, and getting clear about what I want. Bringing that to the table is a big deal. And knowing who to bring it to. I have a very clear framework now of how to have those conversations and so that we can explore and make them purposeful. That was all something I explored as I made that correction after I blew that company up. And so that led me to teaching my children the same thing. And so when this occurred, automatically we were there in a day. Boom. Everybody was on top of it. And we helped, you know, we did, you know, we just took care of the funeral and everything, everything that went around it and brought our family in, and it worked out powerfully well.
That's no different than when a company changes leadership or, you know, you're going to make cuts and people are going to be leaving, there's a mourning that goes on. And leaders want to go, “Well, that's going to get in the way of business.” No, actually, that's going to deepen the sense of purpose if you do this. And, you know, I could get vulnerable about what you're up to and why you're choosing to make this decision. It may not be the right choice, but to you, you got to be true to your conscience and stand. And I think in this world that we live in, people get way too political. You certainly don't want to be cavalier or anything like that, but you want to have an authentic conversation. And most people don't spend enough time preparing for conversations, and so they go in and wing it and they incur damage. They didn't mean to. Suffering that was unnecessary. So that's one of you. Just the fear of that is enough to get you, for me to sit down and prepare for the conversation.
So the suffering is the minute something doesn't go the way you think it ought to, you start the suffering. The minute something happens that, you know, when a plan meets reality, that's when you find out what you're made of. Because plans never do well in reality, or at least they generally don't. You might get lucky once in a while, but generally you're going to be making shifts.
00:33:13 - Andy Goram
Yeah, I mean, Dan, I don't really know what to say, my friend. I mean, firstly, thank you so much for sharing that very, very personal story and the way you kind of relate that back to businesses and lessons that you've taught your children. I mean, there are… There are, I don't think, any greater examples of leaning into something so uncomfortable and trying to find the pathway through it. It's cliche to say we never grow when we're comfy, but that's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.
00:33:52 - Dan Tocchini
Well, I have to be honest with you. The idea, the thought of what would occur if I didn't do that was more frightening than that. I think when we talk about vision, the second part of vision is current reality. Most people don't want to look at current reality because it's not at the vision level, but it's vision. The provision. The things for the vision are in the current reality, particularly the areas you don't want to look into. And what you're unwilling to face will eventually defeat you. So, you know, that's how I define the fear of God. Just like I, you know, that we're set up in a universe, in a reality that you do reap what you sow. Karma. Reap what you sow, whatever you want to say. Action, reaction. If you're not willing to face something, it will eventually come up and it will defeat you, because it creates a blind spot. And you're not prepared for what's wanted and needed to provide it. So you shy away from it. And then it starts to encroach on you and you become a reaction instead of a stand, if that makes sense.
00:35:03 - Andy Goram
It does. It does make sense, mate. My head is racing. I'll be honest with you. My head is racing with lots of things that you're saying and things I'm thinking. And I'm trying to stick with where I want to go because you're making me think so many things.(Sorry!) No, you must never apologize, because this is kind of what I expected in you coming on this show and why I was so keen to speak to you. Because in the brief moments I've had with you, you just make me think about things. And sometimes that’s a good thing, right? But, like, the suffering, sometimes that could be a scary thing. And I try to maintain the position of a host here and not dig into all the dark stuff I need to deal with. but if we think about the rest of this, I'm calling it the philosophy that you've kind of shared with me on that, on that email. I'm really curious to understand this perspective of, or the link between exile and wisdom that you talk about. So we've talked about having this vision that we're not settling for. That's something out there. We're talking about leaning into the dark stuff that's going to trip us up, and there we're talking about maybe taking a stand in exile to get some wisdom. Explain that to me.
00:36:15 - Dan Tocchini
So I'll put It in a business context.
00:36:17 - Andy Goram
Yes, please.
00:36:17 - Dan Tocchini
So the girl I was talking about who bought this concierge company, because it was the concierge company that basically developed the Black Card, and before she bought it, the CEO embezzled a million dollars, and so Amex let them go. So she picked it up and was going to do a tech play with it. And we got into it. We raised money, got the VC's in a position, restructured, $13.5 million in debt down to 1.5. There was all these things we did that really got this thing going. And we had a plan. And the plan was to be the first concierge company with a global footprint. What she accomplished. But in the middle of it, we had some failures. I'll never forget. We had. This failure had to do with Google. I won't get too much into it. Google's not a…. They're not… They don't play well with others.
00:37:11 - Andy Goram
I bet they don't. I bet they don't.
00:37:13 - Dan Tocchini
So we're in the middle of this upset, and it looks like it could break the company. It's that kind of upset. It's a few million dollars, but when you're only at the time… we took the company from about four or $5 million gross revenues a year, up to about 14 million in five years, and ended up selling the company for around 60 million and 70 million. But at this point, we're looking at death.
00:37:37 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
00:37:38 - Dan Tocchini
And God bless this woman. She had put everything she had into this thing, and now she's teetering on death, and she just disappears. And I know her. We've become good friends, and I just, I love this woman so much because she's just got big, big gonads. I mean, she's…tough. But now she's terrified she could lose everything that she had in this. Her partner might have to go back to England and all kinds of stuff. And so I know she's at home in her room, and she's either drinking wine or just trying to avoid what's going on. So I go to her house. Now, in my mind, I'm going, if I do this, this is going to piss her off. But if I don't do it, the vision goes down.
00:38:26 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
Overcoming Exile in Business Leadership
00:38:26 - Dan Tocchini
So she's in exile. She's in exile, yeah. Right? And what are you…? What most people want to do in exile, when something doesn't go, that you care about, go the way you want it to. The first thing you want to do is hide. Nobody can say anything that can make you feel better. You're in exile. It's like people are talking to you. You're disconnected. You don't know what to say. Whatever you say isn't enough. You feel the despair. There's no possibility that people get in. It's just a human state. It's just part of humanity.
00:39:00 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
00:39:01 - Dan Tocchini
And so I go to her house, and I start throwing rocks at her window. “I'm not leaving until you talk to me. At least talk to me.” And she let me in, and I said, “Just tell me what's up.” And she goes, “I don't want to.” I said, “No, no, let's just look into this thing. Let's talk about the worst case scenario.” Because if you can get people to voluntarily look into the worst-case scenario, they'll start and then say, okay, now let's say that happened. I mean, I want you to think dark. The worst you could think. I mean, I kept prodding her on, and she's getting depressed, and, you know, she's crying, she's upset. She gets angry. She goes to the bathroom. “Why don’t you come out?” “I'm not coming out. I don't want to talk about this.” “No, come on out. Let's keep doing this.”
Well, what happens psychologically, neurologically? This is actually a neuroscientific fact. If somebody willfully, they have to be willful. You can't force people to do this or you’ll cause trauma. But if they willfully look into what they fear most, they'll break through. They'll see as they see what they can do, the things they can do that they never thought of. They start to get wiser about how to stand. And as soon as somebody sees other possibilities, the passion to go again starts to come up, because they care about what's there. But the fear of loss is what causes people to go into apathy. They want to play not to lose.
And this is the biggest thing we have in our business to overcome with our clients is that most experienced CEO's will tell you the way that it is. And the minute they tell me that, I go,
“Okay, you're in despair.” And when I tell them that, they go, “What do you know? I'm a multimillionaire.” “You're in despair. You just don't know it”,
right. Because you're, you know, and when we get in that discussion. I just did this with a PE firm, and it really, it really got their attention. Really got their attention. Because after they argued with me for a while and I just kept asking questions, they started realizing, “yeah”, I go, “You're upset with this.” They have multiple businesses in their portfolio, and they were naming two or three that they really couldn't stand. I said,
“You're upset with them because they're not going after what they said they're committed to, but you're not willing to go after with them what you were committed to because you were afraid you could lose more. So you're now in a state of playing not to lose, and that is despair.”
00:41:32 - Andy Goram
That settling again on both sides, right?
00:41:35 - Dan Tocchini
That's right. Yeah. And nobody, it's not like you handle this once. You want to get familiar with this machinery in you, so it becomes an ally. It's not an enemy. Most people think… that's why I don't like personal growth kind of stuff, and we're not... you don't have to get rid of anything. In fact, everything that goes on in your body, the things that have sabotaged you are actually, you know what they are as an enemy. But if you can get really familiar with them as an enemy, they become an ally, because when they come up, they tell you about your blind spot. And then you can look into the blind spot and inquire what you would normally run from, and that's what produces the wisdom.
00:42:16 - Andy Goram
And this is where I think we now get to. Right? Because this is all beginning to make far, far more sense to me, listening to you. And we come to this final part, I guess, of the breakdown into making authentic connections with people. And the way that I'm interpreting this is, I think, much like why I, I know I have a connection with you because of how you make me feel and how you make me think and the conviction that you have in what you do and how you help people. This is where the authentic connection thing comes from, right? Stemming from that vision. You're not settling for having the conversations or the actions around the dark stuff to really get into it and face into it and make progress and, and challenge yourself in those difficult situations to bring good stuff out. If your people see you like that, they want to come with you, right?
00:43:06 - Dan Tocchini
Oh, well, they do. The ones who don't. It's okay. They got somewhere else to go. Yeah, but the ones you know, and the thing is, you're not, you're challenging your thoughts. You know, you know that saying, “Don't believe everything you think and feel.” You know, there's, if you can see it, if you can observe it, it isn't you. You're the observer. So if I can, if I'm feeling a certain way, and I, I don't have to believe it in a way that it takes me away, it takes my agency away. I can look at it. I can experience it. I can let the experience speak to me.
One of the things we talk about is, “What if emotions are thoughts trapped in the body looking for language?” And once you find language, you set free what the emotions are trying to tell you. Then you have that as an articulate. You have a narrative that you can invite other people into to help you work through, think about, invent, brainstorm, whatever you want to do.
Authentic Connections and Emotional Intelligence in Leadership
00:44:04 - Andy Goram
Is it, do you think in your experience, that… whether it's a physical or a mental connection, but that commitment piece, that belief and resilience, the things you've talked about and some of the characteristics of the people you've mentioned, your stories, is that one of those connectors for connection? Are those things that bring us in?
00:44:25 - Dan Tocchini
Oh, yeah. We think about it. We connect in the tough times. That's where people connect. And if you can be with somebody when they're upset and still be for them and not be offended by it and still intervene and connect with their suffering. Firstly, they see you connect with what they're up to. In other words, you're not offended by it and you're not trying to change it. You just want to understand it. You want to connect to it. When they see that, they'll unplug, their emotional state will go at least half. Does that make sense?
00:45:01 - Andy Goram
Yeah.
00:45:01 - Dan Tocchini
Now there's margin to invent narrative, to go deeper, deeper into where the possibility is, which is in, it's like the Joseph Campbell thing.
“The treasure you're looking for is in the cave you don't want to go into.”
You know, if you're not willing to go into those caves, eventually something's going to come out of them that's going to defeat you.
00:45:26 - Andy Goram
So, I mean, that is a great summary of this whole thing. I think. I think today, great summary.
00:45:33 - Dan Tocchini
If you're an entrepreneur, you better be a knight. You better be, you know, or, you know, a queen. You better be somebody who's courageous enough to look into the things that nobody else wants to look into, because that's where you're going to find the next possibility. And that's what was beautiful about if you read Jobs life and the way he progressed and how he evolved. Just beautiful. I mean, the guy just kept even into his own faults, how he lost Apple and what he did with Scully, he went through. He looked into his own demons, and it educated him. It educated him. That takes a lot of courage, man.
00:46:09 - Andy Goram
I mean, the whole thing takes courage, right? I mean, you've got to be willing to go over the top to get people to come over the top with you, I think, you know.
00:46:14 - Dan Tocchini
Right on.
00:46:15 - Andy Goram
Yeah. Oh, I just blinking knew this was going to happen. We have got to the part of the show, Dan, that I blatantly call Sticky Notes. Right? Which is an attempt to summarize. I'm laughing. In an attempt to summarize all the things that we've talked about in today's episode. What would you leave behind on your three sticky notes, Dan? What do you think?
Key Takeaways: Mastering Leadership and Creating Impact
00:46:40 - Dan Tocchini
All right, I'm going to say these in a little different language. Number one, you’ve got to master yourself before you can lead others well. And if you do that, you'll create breakthrough results, have a vision like we talked about, worth standing for, which means you don't have to worry about being disciplined, because fascination is the true and proper mother of discipline. If you get fascinated with something that you're committed to with your team, the disciplines will emerge because of the fascination. That's what sustains a vision, is the willingness to be captured by it and fascinated by it. And it's proper because it's not forced, you know? And so if, you know, I don't know if you ever read Big Magic, I forgot the author's name. She's a fantastic gal, but she wrote in the Tuscan sun and Elizabeth Gilbert, and she said, “If you don't pursue, if you don't court your vision, it will go to somebody else.” That's why I say fascination is the true and proper mother of discipline. And then what you refuse to face in that process, just know it will eventually defeat you. And if you stop and think about the ways it could defeat you in the future, you'll get motivated to do something about it, to look into what you're afraid to look into.
And the last one is, don't try to explain your way out of what you behaved your way into. It's not going to work. Just look at the results and that's what you got. And it isn't about you. It's about your vision. So what's about you is you get to be the one who's going to break, to have that vision come about. So pay attention to it, because the failures are calling something out of you you've yet been willing to give.
00:48:36 - Andy Goram
Oh, my goodness, Dan. I mean, three fantastic sticky notes there, mate, to round off a just fantastic, thought-provoking conversation. A different, in my opinion, more profound look at what really is behind leadership. And I think you so much for coming on, my friend, and spending some time with us.
00:48:55 - Dan Tocchini
Well, I thank you for having me and taking the risk because you never know what's going to happen.
00:49:01 - Andy Goram
No risk. No risk in this.
00:49:04 - Dan Tocchini
Really enjoy the connection. I hope we stay in touch. I love your podcast. I really do. I've listened to it quite a bit. I put it up there with Chris Williamson and all the other guys I watch. I think you're really authentic and committed to learning, and I learned from listening to you learn. So thank you.
00:49:24 - Andy Goram
You're an absolute sweetheart. Thank you so much. Thank you for being so generous in what you shared with us today. I really appreciate it. And you have now got me connected for life, my friend. So bad luck on that one.
00:49:36 - Dan Tocchini
Well, you know, if you're ever interested, we do a leadership training about four times a year called the revenant process. And you can find it on our website, takenewground.com, and in the, in the menu. And we have a leadership academy that goes over a 60 day period, https://takenewground.com/ and it includes a coaching, you know, certificate and all that. But we train a very specific framework and way of working with people that we talked about here today.
00:50:03 - Andy Goram
Well, I will make sure all of that stuff goes in the show notes, my friend, so that everybody can find you and find it and benefit from listening and learning about what you say and what you mean and what you're convicted to, because it's just. It's a brilliant thing. Brilliant thing. And I can't wait to see you again and speak to you again at some stage.
00:50:23 - Dan Tocchini
Same here.
00:50:24 - Andy Goram
Okay, mate. You take care.
00:50:26 - Dan Tocchini
You too. Bless.
00:50:27 - Andy Goram
Okay, everyone, that was Dan Tocchini. And if you want to find out about the things that we've talked about today, any of the references that Dan's made, just please go ahead and check out the show notes.
So that concludes today's episode. I hope you've enjoyed it, found it interesting, and heard something maybe that will help you become a stickier, more successful business from the inside going forward. If you have, please like, comment and subscribe. It really helps. I'm Andy Goram, and you've been listening to the sticky from the Inside podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.
Andy Goram is the owner of Bizjuicer, an employee engagement and workplace culture consultancy that's on a mission to help people have more fulfilling work lives. He's also the host of the Sticky From The Inside Podcast, which talks to experts on these topics from around the world.
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