Leadership & Legacy of Bad Bosses with Tony Wilson

Andy
Hell yeah!

Ange
Hey, before we get into today’s show, why don’t you come and meet Andy and I in person at Lifestyle Tradie Live this September. 

Andy
There is a better way to run a trade business if you know the right structure and systems. Register now at lifestyletradie.com.au to get your free ticket. 

Ange
Yes, we’re coming to a capital city near you. This is an event for every trade business owner who wants to implement systems to their business, change chaos to control, get back their time and make more profit. 

Andy
With the ever changing economy and the interest rate rises, there has never been a more important time to get your business structure right. Go on, you know you deserve more freedom. Now, let’s get on with the episode. Okay, this is gonna make you stop and think. There’s an interesting stat on the website of our guest today. It says 70% of leaders are unapproachable. 

Ange
No way. That is such a high number. All right. Hello and welcome to The Tradie Show for what is going to be an eye opening episode. Before we begin our conversation with Tony Wilson, who is the founder of Performance Lab, I want to ask our listeners a question. So, trade business owners, you’re all leaders, or you plan to be when you employ others. Do you think you’re one of those 70%? Are you unapproachable? 

Andy
That’s an interesting question, Ange, and I guess that is what we’re going to learn more about today with our guest speaker, Tony Wilson. Tony has spent more than 10 years working with elite athletes and sporting teams here in Australia and in the USA, including the Queensland Bulls, the Queensland Reds, and also the Brisbane Broncos. 

Ange
Yeah. He applies his degree in high performance science to put a unique slant on leadership and high performance in today’s workplaces. And you know what? Tony recently spoke at one of our Lifestyle Tradie Live events just recently, and I know that everyone was completely captivated from start to finish. 

Andy
Yeah, I actually commented that the information he shared was so highly relevant that it was one of my all time favorite speakers to date.

Ange
Absolutely. And after hosting live events as part of our membership for the past 14 years, that is a seriously massive compliment. 

Andy
It is. 

Ange
So, Tony, thanks so much for joining us on The Trade Show today. There is absolutely no pressure for you to live up to that comment from Andy. 

Tony
Thanks for having me, guys. I love working with you. We’ve done two different conferences now for you guys and absolutely love both of them. Thank you. 

Andy
Yeah, mate. Absolute superstar. You know, what you’ve done for our Lifestyle Tradie community has been huge and you know, it’s always so good to chat with you. And even after the last event, I had so many people coming up and saying, Tony is the man. So, 

Ange
A wealth of knowledge. 

Andy
Yeah. So today we’re going to start with a simple question that I’m sure many of our listeners are keen to hear you explain. What’s the best way to define high performance? 

Tony
Well, it’s interesting, mate. When we ask that question, we get a lot of very outcome based answers, right? And within your business, there’ll always be some outcome based answers. There’ll be some certain standards that you want to achieve and that sort of thing. But when I talk about high performance, I really like to break it down to things we can do every day, right? And so my definition, the way I like to describe it, is in terms of our behavior. And so that description is that high performance is just doing the harder thing, when the harder thing gets us a better result in the future. That’s the best way I can describe it. 

Andy
Love it. 

Ange
So, that being said, what’s the difference between the people who consistently perform at that high level and those that don’t?

Tony
I think the biggest thing is kind of this notion of intention, right? To do the harder thing, we have to be really, I guess, cognizant of what the easier thing is or when we kind of just fall into that. And when we can really switch on and choose the harder thing instead. And the majority of what we do every day is habitual, right? We kind of run on this autopilot every day and that’s really easy to do. But our greatest performers constantly challenge that. We constantly sort of identify when that’s happening and when we would be better served kind of, doing the harder thing or just stepping outside of that comfort zone in that autopilot.

Andy
Yeah, I love that. And that is something that all of us tradies, we get in that zone, sometimes we just do it and we do it every day. But there’s a lot of people out there that you and I both know and, and, um, and we’ve dealt with many trade businesses over the 14 years. And there’s just some people that are happy to do the do, and then there’s some people who are like, I’m happy to do the do baby, but you tell me what the next level is. Then I’m going to smash it out of the park. And they’re the ones that are always peaking at that high level. Aren’t they? They’ve got it. They’ve got it in them. 

Tony
Absolutely, mate. And this is what I love about the community you guys have created. When your members get together, they get to see that, right? They get to challenge themselves because they see other people in the room who are maybe, you know, more successful than them in whatever, you know, definition you want that. Even your most successful financially people can probably step back and learn some other things from some other people that may not make as much money or be as profitable, but they have a hundred percent. So that’s what I absolutely love about that. It kind of brings that awareness to people. 

Andy
Yeah. No, you’re a hundred percent in saying that. And you talk about like, there’s a lot of people that have different mindsets. So yeah, you mentioned once before, what are the four mindsets that help us stay in that high performance zone?

Tony
So do you know what, when I’ve spoken at your conferences, I’ve kind of drilled down into the almost subsets of these. So what I want to do here is I want to actually tell you the four kinds of overarching principles that we talked about when we spoke about. We call this the rules of performance, right? And they’re the four mindsets that sort of overarch all the stuff that we’ve talked about before.

The number one and the most important one is just that all that matters is what you do, right? That is it. Doesn’t matter what other people do. Doesn’t matter how you feel. What matters is what you execute. Doesn’t matter what you think. And you can start thinking, planning about things all the time, but what matters is what you actually do. Sometimes it actually doesn’t even matter what the outcome is. This is what you do, right? Because sometimes we can do all those things right and yet there’s sort of external things that sort of influence our outcome. So in order to have really good performance over the long term, we just have to keep doing those consistent things. We know we’ll get the outcome, you know, eventually. So I think that’s number one. 

The second one I talk about, is this concept of broad focus, narrow focus, right? So every now and then you alluded to this just before. Sometimes we can’t see the next level unless we take that time to sort of step back and go really broad, right? And think. What is the next level for me? I’m doing really well here or this thing’s going well for me, but what could be even better? So stepping back and getting that broad focus, but then after we do that, we go really narrow. There’s a million things that we could do every day, but we need to make sure we’re doing the things that have the biggest impact on whatever those big broad goals are, right? So, I think that’s number two.  

Number three is what we call just being in the moment, you know. I think one of the things is that all of our anxiety, frustration, stress comes from worrying about the past or being anxious about the future. And so, when we can focus on right now and we can focus on the next positive thing that we can do, that’s when we have our best performance because it’s not clouded by all this sort of external focus. And then, probably the last one is, we talk about this mindset of facts over judgment. And this is really good to kind of understand when we think about facing adversity and those sorts of things. We get really hung up in a lot of emotional brain stories, if you like. Stories that say, you know, you have to do this certain thing or you’re not good enough or the next year is going to be terrible or whatever it is. But it’s only when we step back and have a look at the facts and we call this concept truthful thinking, right? We look at facts and the evidence and what it tells us. And maybe we even get a chance to reflect on our history. Like you’ve got a lot of successful members in your, you know, in Lifestyle Tradie. I’ve worked with a lot of successful athletes and performers and they all go through these moments of feeling really anxious, worried about, you know, their ability and their competence and all that sort of thing. But it’s when we stop and think Even in the past with this truthful thinking, you know, the things I’ve achieved before, the fact that I’ve been in business for X number of years, that I’ve faced these moments before and gotten through them. When we can think in those facts, then all of a sudden the judgments don’t take over and that emotional brain doesn’t have as much of a hold on us. 

Andy
Yeah, that is absolutely huge and there’s no doubt about it. I mean I love the way you broke that into four sections there and there’s no doubt the listeners out there are going, oh yeah, shit. I feel a bit like that at times as well. And you just talked about this high performance, like some of our best guys that are making profits, that are insane, ring me at times and they’re so low and I’m like, what are you even worrying about mate? Like, ’cause what happens is sometimes when you are a high achiever, You are always gunning for the stars, right? And sometimes you may not hit the stars. You may get to the moon, but then they’re disappointed that, didn’t hit the stars. And the thing for all of us is to take a step back. And you would have seen this Tony in our room on our first day. I do this whole reflect back thing because there’s a lot of people out there that focus too much of their time on the negative things that aren’t going well and the things they’re absolutely smashing it with. They give no time at all. And then it plays in their head and they play in their head and there’s a lot of challenges around that. And that’s where most tradies get in this position of, I’m over it. I mean, the amount of times I’ve had tradies ring me up and go, Oh, I’ve had a guts full of this. I’m chucking it in. And I’m like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Let’s just take some perspective around that and dollars and cents wise, they’re crushing it. 

Ange
Well, as a trade business owner, they do know that they’ve got responsibility. They feel to ensure that they stay in what we call this high performance zone, that the challenge is, they don’t really know how to execute that. So I know that this is your history and applying this thinking to athletes. And perhaps our audience is sitting there going, yeah, but Tony works with these amazing athletes and of course they’re going to do exceptionally well. How on earth does this relate to me? I’m just a normal human. And to your point, we do see this play out in our community. One of your mindsets you just talked about, Tony, was action. You, you said, they’ve just got to do the repetitive, you’ve just got to do it over and over again. Instead of procrastinating, you’ve just got to go do it because it’s through the application that you may fail, you learn something, but that repetition of the action is how they build courage and confidence and that repetition they’ll actually now have great results. So I can see connections where this high performance can actually truthfully relate to high performance athletes to what we can be doing for a trade business owner. 

Tony
Absolutely it doesn’t. People have this notion of, yeah, athletes in particular, but any really top performer, they never have those negative feelings and negative thoughts. They all do. And one of the things that I loved about that exercise that you guys do at the start of the conference where you reflect on those really great things is, you know, and you hit the nail on the head before Andy in saying that, too often, if you’re a high performer, you regularly want to achieve the next thing. So you’re looking towards that all the time and sometimes the gap between where you are and where that is, is really overwhelming. What we don’t do is we don’t stop and look the other way and think about the progress that we’ve made. And this could be one of our greatest motivators. With athletes, what we do, and again, it doesn’t matter how good you are, the night or two before a major competition, you get really nervous and you start to doubt yourself. You start to wonder if you can do it. So one of the things we do is the athletes keep a, uh, like a training diary. And every time they had a really amazing session, like a breakthrough session, they kind of highlighted that. And the night before the event, they just go back and look through all those things, right? They do that reflection on that truthful thinking of, look at this work I’ve put in and look at these great sessions I’ve executed. I’m actually ready for this and you know, the translation again to that for your guys is don’t wait to do it at a conference with you guys in the room forcing you to do it. Like make it a Friday ritual, right? Just sit down and go, I’m really happy with this week. Like, what do I feel like I achieved or at least sort of once a month. But if you could do that sort of really regularly, then that really helps with that kind of positive energy and motivation. 

Andy
100% with all of that and I think everyone’s got to look back, but we often blame a lack of high performance on a lack of motivation, you know? So what’s the problem with motivation? 

Tony
Problem with motivation is that it comes and goes for everyone. Right. So again, one of those myths about, you know, consistent high performers and athletes in particular is that they’re always motivated and they’re not. Yeah. They’re just not. So what we’ve got to understand is the key again to high performance and when I go back to that very first mindset, right, which is all that matters is what you do. Actually it doesn’t matter how you feel. What matters is what you do and what you can execute. And if you think about the things that make you really great at what you do and you can apply this to anything. So whether it’s your business or whether it’s your relationship with your spouse and your kids or whatever it is, if you think about those things that you do that make you really good at that, that represent high performance, the reality is that you can do those things regardless of how you feel. You could be happy, sad, frustrated, anxious, nervous, whatever it is, and you can still actually do those things, right?

So we shouldn’t blame this emotion, which is motivation, on being unable to do those things. So I think the thing we’re going to wrap our heads around is despite how I think and feel, I can still execute those things every single day. And if we take that approach, it doesn’t matter if motivation goes up and down. One of the greatest things that I was ever told was by a coach of mine who said, he explained this concept to me, he called it the rule of thirds, right? And it basically said this, a third of the time, you’ll be Unbelievably motivated. You’ll show up, you’ll be super excited. A third of the time, you’ll be the exact opposite, right? You’ll turn up, you’ll go, this is terrible. I don’t even want to be here today. And then a third of the time, you’ll just be like, I could take it, leave this. Like, it’s just going to be completely average. What you have to realize is that’s just the process.  That’s what happens to everyone. That is the process. So what you’ve got to know is when you hit those meh or feeling crap days, If you just get through those, there’ll be some of those good days coming again. So all you gotta do is just do your best and get through those, and there’ll be more motivation coming. You’ll feel better about the whole thing. And I think if we can understand that’s the process, that’s the process for anything, right? If I’m trying to build my business or lose weight, right? Yeah. Money’s not going to come in every day. I’m not going to stand on the scales every day and be lighter. That’s just not how it works. That process goes up and down. And if we’re going to understand that, those days where we don’t feel good aren’t as hard to get through. 

Ange
I think you can apply this so well to something so basic that all of us would understand, like this whole, I just want to get fit, you know, as we get older. And at all times throughout our life, you’re always like, I just wish I could be a bit stronger or whatever. So you start saying to yourself, well, I’m just going to go to a gym. I’m just going to start training. So it’s so easy to wake up some mornings and go, Oh, I can’t be bothered, too tired, went to bed too late last night or, you know, for whatever reason that lack of motivation kicks in and therefore you don’t go. But if you set yourself up well and you’ve got your clothes to wear and you go to the gym and you know what you’re going to do when you get there, whether you want to do it or not, if you just show up and get it done, even if it’s only 30 minutes and every day you just go, I’m just going to go do 30 minutes. That consistency of showing up and just acting, just doing it is going to be so much better for you when you know what you’re doing in the gym, it becomes a bit habitual about your training. I know, you know, a trainer will start going, yeah, but you’ve got to mix that up Ange. But my point here is so easily that lack of motivation can kick in and go, I’m just not going to go. But if you can be so true to that, I’ve just got to go do that action. I’ve just got to keep it up. It could be so much different to your life. 

Andy
Yeah. Just push through it. And I think if we relate that back to tradies out there listening with work, I mean, there’s definitely days where we just go, Oh my God, I don’t want to get out of bed, you know? And then there’s days where things are going well, like I’m loving what I’m doing. We’re having the best day ever. And then there’s massive chunks of time where it’s like bleh. So when you explain that, I was thinking to myself, there’s so many people out there just listening to that going, yep, that’s me. And I think the big thing that you’re saying there, that is okay. That’s life. I think sometimes people see that as a real problem, but you can’t be this, this highly motivated hundred percent game all day, every day, can you? 

Tony
You absolutely can’t. And if anyone tells you they are, it’s a myth. Yeah. Like, you know, I watch you, Andy, at these conferences and you are up for those two days, right?

Andy
Definitely am, mate. 

Tony
I’m a hundred percent sure that there’s a moment where you sit back and you go, Oh my God, I have to do this again. I don’t know if I can, I just don’t have the energy or whatever it is. 

Andy
A hundred percent. I just say that because I had someone go, but you’re always a hundred percent on. You never stop. And I go, yeah, but you’re not with me 24 hours a day, buddy. You know, my job is to be a hundred percent on. You don’t want to see me down. So when I have these events, I am game on, baby. 

Tony
Absolutely. Absolutely. But the most important thing that Ange said in her going to the gym analogy was being really clear about what you are going to do. That is the most important thing. So, for your tradies, they need to, again, be really clear on the things that make them most valuable and have the highest impact. If I’m really clear on that, then again, it doesn’t matter if I wake up, I feel like crap. I can still go do those things. Because they’re really clear to me. But if I have to make the decision, If I have to think about it and go, what can I do now, then I’ll default to something that’s just comfortable. Right? Yeah. If I haven’t decided what I’m going to do, you know, as soon as I walk in the gym, I’m going to go and I’m going to sit down for a while and look at my phone and try to work out what to do. And then 15 minutes has gone and then my workout’s shorter and then I’ll just decide to do something easy. But if I know exactly what it is that I can do, the same is true for your guys when they show up every day for their business. 

Andy
Love it. 

Ange
I think for trade business owners. To be honest, everybody, but as a business owner, you definitely make more decisions in a day. We as humans make thousands and thousands of decisions in a day, but as a trade business owner, it is far more impactful. So I love that lesson that you just need to know exactly what it is you’re working on because decision fatigue will set in as a day goes on because you just get so exhausted that if you actually know what you’re going to go and execute, it’s just far easy just to go and make that thing happen. So, Tony, I just want to change tact for a second and I know you’ve talked with our group before about positive and negative thinking. I’d love you to talk about this whole positive and negative thinking or I’ve heard a phrase come from you which is called truthful thinking. Can you share what you meant by that and how that impacts on us as business owners? 

Tony
Yeah, that truthful thinking piece is a direct reflection of that facts over judgment mindset, right? So, it’s especially true when we face adversity, but here’s what we know, right? We know that in most things in life, except for a couple of career paths, we know that pessimists don’t perform as well as optimists. So, we know positive thinking There is some good to it, right? Definitely. We know that positive thinking can get in the way if it’s a bit delusionary. If I wake up and say, today’s going to be a great day, but I’ve got no idea if it’s really going to be a great day or not, or if I know today’s going to be really hard, but I try to put on a positive attitude despite that, that actually works against me. I’m better off waking up and saying, you know what, today’s actually going to be really tough and I need to be prepared for that. So, I, I, a great analogy for that is, you know, if Andy and I needed to lift a table, if we expected that table to be really light, we’d approach it one way. But if we expect it to be really heavy, we’re going to get in there. We’re going to kind of, you know, lock in our core and really try and sort of lift the table. And the same is true that if we know something’s going to be really hard and we say, this thing’s going to be really hard, we kind of prepare ourselves for it. So we face it a lot better. The alternative to both positive and negative thinking is this concept of truthful thinking. And truthful thinking, like I kind of mentioned before, is just about understanding the facts. It’s stopping and taking a realistic view of the world. Sometimes that’s really hard to do, especially when that emotional brain is switched on. It tells you emotional brain stories, right? This thing’s terrible, or maybe this thing’s wonderful, or this person’s an idiot, or whatever it is. Yeah. So, sometimes we actually need someone else to help us with it. So, if you’ve got someone to sort of bounce this off a little and sort of ask them what their opinion is, then all of a sudden they can give you some of that truthful thinking, right? Some of that evidence. 

Ange
A bit of perspective. 

Tony
Yeah. And, and, you know, we, there’s language that we use that reflects sort of positive and negative thinking. Like, we say things like, this always happens. Now, if you actually sat down and thought about it and wrote down all the times it’s happened versus the times, you’d probably say that it’s maybe 50/50 at best, probably 30%. But one of the weird tricks that our emotional brain plays on us is that we always remember negatives more than positives, right, they have a bigger impact on us. So therefore, when we get into this kind of negative thinking spiral, we start to think that everything’s bad or nothing’s going to go right and we kind of talk in those absolutes. Whereas truthful thinking would give us that more pragmatic evidence-based approach, right? It’d actually say, you know what? It’s not as bad as you think it is. Like there’s been these times where it’s actually gone really good. Like I said before, if you think about this, this has happened in the past, right? And where are you now? You got through it. You did really well. What did you do then? Exactly. Let’s base our next action on that evidence. And if we can think like that, when we, then we start to shut down that emotional brain and we start to make better decisions. 

Ange
I can see this playing out in a team environment where, say, the owner is, call it a positive thinker, so it’s constantly upbeat, you know, like, I apply this to, say, Andy and the team when we had Dr. Drip. We’re positive people, so we’re like, this, everything’s going to be great, everything’s going to be perfect. But if you have someone around you who is a negative thinker, they come in going, oh, today’s going to go so bad or whatever. That it’s tricky for Andy just to, he will always come in guns blazing like, of course, life is great. Everything’s positive. But what I’m taking out of what you’re saying is don’t come in with that thought process because it will actually not influence the thinker of someone who does actually naturally talk in the negative. Our son is a bit like that. He talks in the negative. He doesn’t mean to. We’re trying to teach him. He’s only 13. But that’s not a natural reaction for Andy and I. And in a team environment, I can see the benefit of someone who would label themselves as a positive thinker that they need to apply the language that you just suggested about truthful thinking so that it drags that negative thinking person who is Say down at a zero that you can bring them up to like a five and now will apply themselves well, you, you might not ever drag them up to a 10 if, you know, if the scale was zero to 10. But at least they’ll actually understand that there’s some truth to the fact that things aren’t actually so bad. I can see the application of this in a work environment very, very quickly.

Tony
Yeah, absolutely. And I think with both of those types, whether you are positive or negative, if you’re a super positive thinker, but you’re big picture, then you sometimes won’t apply the detail to make it positive. So, some of the best things we can do, you know, and we talk a lot about operating on our emotional autopilot brain versus our thinking brain, right? And one of the ways we switch on our thinking brain is if we have to answer questions, right? So that negative person, they come in, they go, this is going to go terribly, that’s their emotional brain telling them a story. And one of the ways we can change that is by just asking questions, by saying, why do you think it’s going to go terribly? All right, what do you think the things that might happen that will make it terrible are? How could you change those things, right? How could you make it go well? If you think it’s going to go terribly, if there’s a gap between that and it going well, what do those things look like? Just get people thinking and once we do that, again, we switch off that emotional brain and we start acting more pragmatically. 

Andy
Mate, that is just gold what you said, right there, because, you know, that is something you need to do when the people are talking negatively. How do you switch? And Ange’s right. I come in bouncing off the walls. We’re going to do this and this and this, and this is what we’re going to do today. But as you said, and this is the moral of the story, there’s no use knowing it’s going to be a really tough, hard day. You’re going to be digging all day in the hot sun, or it’s going to be a tough day. You’ve got to be realistic. Guys, it is going to be a tough day, but if we put our music on and we get our shirts off in the sun and we have fun and we’ll have a break at this time and let’s just get stuck in and get into it. You can turn it into that fun day. 

Tony
Absolutely. I love that mate. 

Ange
All of this conversation is highly applicable to trade business owners. And as we all understand, Tony, they have put their hand up to actually be leaders. For their team, they have to take on responsibility to earn good profit, not just to support their family, but for their entire team on-going. And they all have a dream to be a little bit larger, you know, growth or scale, for instance. So, that being said, what is the critical skill we all need to master as leaders? 

Tony
I think probably the biggest thing that we need to do for performance, leadership, you know, whatever that looks like for you, is just taking responsibility, right? That is probably the biggest thing. It’s so easy for us to blame things like, I don’t have enough time, or my people just don’t get it, or this person isn’t motivated, or the economy’s bad, or whatever it is. And those things might be true, but the situation doesn’t get better. Unless you decide to change something that you do. 

Andy
A hundred percent. 

Tony
Do you know what I mean? The economy is a really good one. Like, we can kind of just sit on our hands and go, you know what, there’s nothing else I can do. The economy is bad, but I’m sure there’s a heap of things you can do. Whether that’s just business management point of view, whether that’s changing the market you’re trying to serve, changing the product mix that you have, whatever those things are, we’ve just got to take responsibility for that. Now, the thing we always say is, the situation you find you’re in isn’t always your fault, but getting out of that situation is always your responsibility.

Andy
Yes. 

Ange
Oh, I love that. 

Andy
I love that. Absolutely love that. And because being a leader is hard, you know, there’s no two ways around it. You’re dealing with people who all have different perspectives, you know, based on their upbringing, their culture, their beliefs and the like, and they all have different expectations. So, I mean, this has been incredibly helpful for leaders of a trade business to focus on the things that really matter. 

Ange
Take absolute responsibility for their business. Don’t blame others because your situation in life will remain exactly the way it is unless you stand up and make a difference. 

Andy
Yeah. Tony, before you go, mate, we always play this little game and we’re going to ask you three rapid fire questions, are you ready?

Tony
How rapid do my answers have to be? 

Andy
Within 30 seconds, nothing longer. Is that right?

Tony
Okay. Okay. 

Andy
The first one is, what is one strategy you use to start your day right? 

Tony
There are a few things that are part of my morning routine. They would be some form of exercise, some form of mental or emotional growth. So that might be reading or meditation or something like that and planning my day. Those three things have to happen by 8:30 every single day. My morning’s a very different day to day, depending on what kids have got and that sort of thing. So 8:30 is my deadline. If they’re done by 8:30, that’s been a good start to the day. 

Andy
Love it. 

Ange
I like the deadline. All right. Next question, Tony, what’s something that made you smile recently? 

Tony
Do you know what? Just on the weekend, I was watching my twins play basketball. My twins aren’t super confident, right? And I don’t know what came over one of my twins, but he caught the ball baseline, drove past two guys and dunked on another guy. Like he’s never done that in a game before. It was just, it was amazing. Like the whole, like the whole school stood up and cheered him and that sort of the best thing I’ve ever seen. Yeah. From kids that aren’t super confident to just that thing coming out. Like the coach even turned around to me and went, who’s that guy?

Andy
Yeah, like, hey Tony, have you been working on that kid? What’s going on? 

Ange
They can surprise you sometimes, these little people, can’t they? 

Andy
I love sports. I know I say it so much. I have a tear in my eye when I listen to stuff like that. It’s just so awesome. I love my family. Last but not least, what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Tony
And I have a lot of them, to be honest, a lot of them that I kind of reflect on almost every day, but probably the most important one that I’ve learned over the years, and maybe it’s just reflective of where I’m at, is this concept of consistently good beats, occasionally great, right? That morning routine’s a great example, right? When we think of morning routines, and one of your guys at the last conference had this, like, wildly complex morning routine. 

Andy
3:30 in the morning. Ice bath, two hours of reading, like it was just hardcore, right? 

Tony
But that’s incredible, right? But that’s what in literature, they call that a heroic effort, right? We have these kinds of big things that we want to do. Whenever we set goals and we think about our ideal morning or morning routine or day or whatever it is, we go really, really high. But sometimes it’s more about what is the thing that I can just sustain? What is the thing that I can do every single day that’ll add up over the long term? Like those heroic efforts are great, but if I can only really do that a couple of times a week, then that has nothing compared to me just being able to do those couple of small things every single day. So consistently good beats occasionally great. I think that is the greatest advice I’ve had.

Andy
I love that, mate. 

Ange
That is a great quote to live your life by. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Tony. You have seriously gone above and beyond sharing your knowledge today, and we really appreciate you joining us and no doubt our listeners have too. 

Tony
Great. Thank you guys. 

Andy
Mate, you’re an absolute superstar. So I just want to say a big thank you. Everyone loves you here. Um, the team at Lifestyle Tradie, our community loves you and listen, we need to work more with you. I know all of the listeners out there listening today would be thinking, Oh my God, I got so many takeouts there. So buddy, a real big thank you. 

Tony
No problem. Thank you guys for having me. I love what you’ve created. I think it’s amazing. So congratulations to you too. 

Andy
Thanks, mate. We’ll chat soon. 

Ange
Thanks so much, Tony. 

Tony
Thank you. 

Andy
Well, that’s a wrap for this week’s episode. 

Ange
Yes. If you’re keen to learn more about high performance, you’ll find Tony at the performancelab.com.au And we’ll stick a link in the show notes.

Andy
Have the best week, crew. 

Ange
As always, thanks for listening. See you next week. 

Andy
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