211: Using Fear as a Springboard to Success with David Neagle

This is The Intentional Advantage podcast with your host, Tanya Dalton,
entrepreneur, best-selling author, nationally recognized productivity expert
and mom of two. In this season, Tanya is continuing to open up more
conscious conversations to help you awaken to who you are and become the
best version of yourself. Welcome to Season 17: Awakening. Are you ready?
Here’s your host, Tanya Dalton.
Hello, hello, everyone. Welcome to The Intentional Advantage podcast. I’m
your host, Tanya Dalton. This is episode 211. We are now deep into our season
on awakening, and this has been an incredible season already. We have
talked about Universal Law. We have dived into manifesting and today I have
a really great treat for you because I have David Neagle on the show today.
And truly when I was mapping out my season, David was at the top of the list
of who I needed to have on the show because I just knew you would learn so
much from him. So if you’re not familiar with David Neagle, let me tell you a
little bit about him. He is the founder of the multi-million dollar global
coaching company, Life Is Now.
He has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, experts, and self-employed
professionals gain competence and find the right mindset to increase their
revenue and turn their endeavors into seven and eight figure ventures. He
has been in the coaching and mentorship industry for over 20 years, and he’s
worked alongside of well-known mentors like Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins, and
he has been a coach for many successful people, including Jensen Sarah, the
New York Times number one best-selling author.
Because of the results his clients have achieved, David’s been featured on
Forbes, CBS, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and Fox. He is the
best-selling author of The Millions Within, a book focusing on intention, focus
and awareness to build your dream business and life. And I think you can tell
just from listening to his bio right there, David and I are going to have a lot to
talk about on today’s show.

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So let’s go ahead and dive into this conversation with David Neagle.
[Tanya:] David, it is so great to have you on the show today. Thank you so
much for coming on. How are you doing?
[David:] I’m really glad to be here.
[Tanya:] I am thrilled because we have, you know, I was just telling you before
we went live, when I was curating this season, I’m really intentional about
who I have as my guests on the podcast. I really try to make sure that this is a
good person for the topic that we’re covering. And when we started thinking
about this season on awakening, the first person came to my mind was you,
David Neagle. I was like, we have to have David on the show. He’s going to be
amazing.
Your story is phenomenal. And that’s really where I think I want to start
because you are. I mean, you’re a mindset coach, just some of the most
successful entrepreneurs out there. And you started your career driving a
forklift. It’s a little bit of an unexpected path. Let’s be honest, but I would love
for you to tell a little bit about your story. How does somebody who goes from
driving a forklift go to, to really teaching and coaching and working with
some of the most successful people? You know what I mean?
[David:] I was a kid that kind of in a way, raised myself on the streets of
Chicago and was making decisions based on survival. Mostly I really did not
have a solid enough upbringing to guide me into what I would call being able
to live a responsible adult life.
So I quit high school when I was 17. I worked a lot. I got married, very young,
had a couple of children, and quickly found out that I was absolutely not
prepared to be a responsible husband, a father. I mean, I could barely take
care of myself. So things were progressively getting worse. Now I was, I was
working very hard.
In many cases I was working multiple jobs, but even with that, it was like I
had no common sense around the idea that the more I increase my
responsibility, the more I need to be able to live up to that responsibility. And I
had no education. I had no skills. Like you said, I was driving a forklift because
I couldn’t get a better job.

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I mean, I just could not get a better job. I was really lucky to get a job, you
know, doing that. And through my frustration, I had a moment of
breakthrough where things changed so dramatically for me in such a short
period of time that it caused me to question what I had actually done to
experience this. And, long story short, I was very frustrated. We went
bankrupt.
Car was repossessed, had to leave the apartment in the middle of the night,
we were living in a low-income neighborhood, literally on food stamps for a
year. And I had like an emotional meltdown at work one night, right? I was
loading trucks with the forklift and I just was sobbing in the back of this
forklift.
I did not know how to change my circumstances as much as I was trying. I
was, I was really trying, but from the aspect of only of what I knew, so it was
work harder, work harder, work harder, but when you’re making $11 an hour, I
mean, you can’t work hard enough to get ahead. There’s just, there’s no way.
This is all before the internet.
So my answer at the time was go back to school, but I didn’t have the time or
the money to be able to do it.
[Tanya:] You felt stuck.
[David:] I was completely stuck, completely stuck. I had this idea in my mind,
if I could just get to $40,000, everything would change. Of course, when
you’re at that stage of your development, money’s the answer to everything,
or so you think, but it would have definitely made a huge difference. If I did, if
I would have been able to advance it and I was trying everything that I could
to do it, and it was not increasing.
So I have this meltdown and in the midst of this meltdown, this voice in my
head says, change your attitude. So after trying all these other different
things, from a perspective of going out there and doing something different,
which I was trying, plus my attitude was crap at the time. So it was not
getting me ahead.
[Tanya:] It doesn’t help to have a bad attitude.

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[David:] It was terrible. Bad would be good in my scenario, but it was horrific,
actually. So I changed these three things in my attitude. Here’s what the
three things were: I started acting like I loved what I did. I did every job to the
best of my ability. And I started treating people with respect. Just those three
things. In a month, my income tripled and my opportunity exploded.
So I started thinking to myself, how is this even possible? At first, I was like,
this can’t even be real, Tanya. Like, I was sitting there with a check with the
equivalent of $62,000 a year. And I couldn’t even believe my name was next
to that number. I had never earned this much before. It did change the way
that we were living.
We were able to buy a house in a good neighborhood. Wasn’t much of a
house, but it was a house, and we started down a different, a different road.
But it caused this question in me of what I had done, because everybody that
was around me was like, you got so lucky.
[Tanya:] We love to blame luck, don’t we? We love to pretend like all we need
is luck.
[David:] Exactly. Nobody can make any sense of it. Also, I’m going to point this
out. I did not know anybody personally in my family or friends that was
making $62,000 a year. Nobody. So everybody around me was like, how is
this? You know, you just, you just got lucky. Somebody is watching out for
you. God blessed you that, you know? But I knew that it wasn’t luck. I knew
that there was something else and that I had done something. So I was like, if
that’s true, somebody must be writing about it or talking about it or
something.
And I decided that I was going to read every book that I could get my hands
on until I found out what I had done. So I was spending time in libraries.
Because I had to drive a hundred miles one way to work every day, I turned
my car into a library and I would get books on cassette tape and lectures on
cassette tape and seminars on cassette.
[Tanya:] Oh, I remember that; they’re like whole books so there’s like 32 plastic
tapes out, and then the tapes get in the wrong order. Yeah. That’s dedication
right there.

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[David:] Yeah. But, but that was, that was the, that was the door that opened
for me, that I walked through and began to change everything because I
took, it was a period of seven years that I did nothing but study. I kept
working at the job that I had, which kept getting better. But the income
really didn’t increase, my opportunity increased dramatically.
I started off as a truck driver and when I left to start my own business, I was in
charge of expanding the company across the country. So, and I did that
without any education; that was all just learning about myself and how to be
a much more mature, intelligent individual in my life.
And then of course, everything that I studied, you know, in different people
that I met led me down this road to find out that I actually had a gift in
coaching people. I was learning things that most people did not know. And I
was telling, I was just giving it away. Like people would be stuck in business
or in life, and they’d be like, what do you think I should do? And I’d be like, try
this, try that. And their lives would turn around.
So lo and behold, I started a business doing seminars. It wasn’t even coaching
at time. And that was 22 years ago. That was the journey.
[Tanya:] What I like here is you say you weren’t a responsible adult. Right.
Which I think a lot of people can associate with. A lot of people can see
themselves in that. Like, I wasn’t prepared for what adulthood was going to
look like. I thought it was going to be like, they show on TV shows. Right?
[David:] Listen, Tanya, I would have been irresponsible if I was 12.
Okay. I mean responsible for us seriously. I was, you know how they say, like, if
you go through a trauma in life, you get stunted at the age of that trauma or
something like that. So my parents got divorced when I was 13 years old and
life just got worse. From that point, I was like a 13-year-old in a 25-year-old’s
body. I mean, seriously.
[Tanya:] And the thing is though, what I love about your story is that you took
ownership over it. You know, it’s so easy to blame luck. It’s so easy to say, Oh,
God smiled down at me. Moses parted the water. It’s easy to blame things on
luck. It’s another thing to say, I have some ownership in this. I can change
things. Something I did was a catalyst. And I think for you, those, those three
things that you talked about, you decided to love what you did. You did your
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job to your best of your ability. You treated everyone with total respect. I think
those three things are so important because, too, I know for you that you say
love is a verb. You have to choose it. So you’re doing a job doing a forklift. You
have to love it, even though you don’t love it. How do you even do that?
[David:] I would pretend. So here’s the honest to God truth. I didn’t love it. I
actually hated what I did every day. So I remember when I decided to do this,
I’m like, okay, I’m going to start this tomorrow. So the next day I’m on my way
to work. And automatically those voices are in my head like this sucks. And
you know, all this stuff. I said, how am I going to do this?
And I thought, what is it? What do I, I love without any effort in my life? And
one of the things that I loved was the, in my childhood, probably the, one of
the most peaceful times in my life was that in the summertime, almost every
weekend, usually every other weekend we would go to Wisconsin and we
would go up on the Wisconsin River and we would boat and fish and camp
and, you know, do all that stuff.
I loved that. So I literally would pretend that my drive to work was like driving
up to Wisconsin. And when I got to work, my forklift was a boat. That was a
trick I played in my mind. And then I felt, I felt a joy, right? That I didn’t feel
before and I didn’t have to force it. And that’s how I was able to do it.
[Tanya:] It really is these little tiny tweaks to your mindset that can just unlock
and open things, right. It’s, it’s really opening yourself up. And I, I would say it’s
opening yourself up to, to those, those universal laws that we’ve, we’ve talked
about here on the show. That’s a big part of, of what you teach. You talk about
being aligned with universal law, right? Can you explain what that means for
my listeners?
[David:] Understand this: What really happened to me was that when I
changed my attitude, I changed my perception and it took me a long time to
find that out. Right. But I changed my perception, meaning that I could now
see something that was already there that I did not know was there because I
judged everything as being terrible.
So that law is the Law of Polarity, and the law of polarity states that
everything in the world or in the universe has an opposite side to it. It’s not
only is it equal and opposite, but they’re connected. Meaning that if you don’t
have something, you also have it, whether you can see it or not. And it was, it
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was one of the very first laws that I learned, which I was like, there’s laws? Like
I had no idea that there were, that there were laws that exist both in science
and religion, right?
[Tanya:] Oh yeah. Because they go hand in hand, the universal laws with
science and religion. Yeah.
[David:] Yes. The perpetual transmutation of energy is the first law of thermal
dynamics in science, right? I mean, they’re the, they’re the exact same things.
They’re just expressed differently. And when I began to learn these, I learned
that there are seven basic laws about how the world works. And if you
understand these laws, you can train yourself to think, according to that.
Now the premise of the laws is that these laws exist so life can exist. Without
these laws, life does not exist. So, they’re for more life. And when you learn
how to think on that basis, you’re thinking in the exact way you need to think
in order to be successful. And I believe that all forms of life are born to be
successful. You don’t see anything in nature that doesn’t have a purpose.
What you don’t see in nature is that animals, plants, bugs, viruses, they’re not
confused about their purpose. They don’t even question it.
Because human beings have this great power, which is the ability to choose,
we question everything to death. And if we create a false narrative around
what we’re questioning, and that becomes our truth, then we’re
automatically headed in the wrong direction and we’re blind to it, which is
what happens with most people, right?
They don’t know that they don’t know. And unless something happens in
their lives to cause them to think like, you know what, maybe something’s
wrong here. And maybe it has to do with me. You automatically assume that
it’s everything else.
[Tanya:] Yeah. The universe is against you. The world is against you. You’re just
unlucky. There are all these things that we want to blame when really it’s
taking ownership, acknowledging these laws, and stepping into them fully.
And I think the whole idea of the universal laws being for life means that
everything you go through, trauma, failure, disappointment, all of those
things really is for your own good. And it is changing your perspective, right?

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[David:] It is. It absolutely is because the same things that we go through that
we will determine are bad is no different than what nature goes through; but
[nature] doesn’t, it doesn’t determine it is bad. I often say like, if you, if you
watch a rabbit get chased by a fox across a field and the rabbit gets away, it
doesn’t have to go to a psychiatrist for trauma afterwards. You know?
As soon as danger’s gone, it goes back out. It lives its life just like nothing ever
happened, right? When human beings have trauma, we give it the wrong
meaning. And we spend 20 years on the psychiatrist’s couch, and we can’t
get out of our own way. And everything becomes dysfunctional. Now I’m not
saying, I’m not saying that there’s not trauma and all of that, but the way that
we deal with the things; looking at it like this: nothing in the universe has any
meaning other than what human beings give it.
[Tanya:] Right. The universe doesn’t judge! There’s no judgment.
[David:] Yes. Right, exactly.
[Tanya:] Well, and I know like failure, you’re talking there about the animals.
They don’t, they don’t need to go to counseling. They don’t, they don’t feel
guilt or disappointment or judging. They don’t. If they, if they fail to catch
another animal, they’re not going to curl up in a ball and say how terrible they
are.
[David:] Right.
[Tanya:] The fear of failure is not something that we’re innately born with. I
know this is something you speak about. I would love for you to talk about
that idea because people get caught in their failures, right?
[David:] Yes. There’s only two fears that we’re born with, in this 2
million-year-old reptilian mind of ours. That is the fear of falling and the fear
of loud noises. And actually, I would go as far to say, is that when we’re born
with them at all, they are startle responses. They’re not actually fears in the
way that we, that we have an idea of what fear is today. All other fears are
learned and you don’t even have to have the fear to learn the fear because
the subconscious mind can’t think; it can only accept something.
So let’s say you’re, you’re raised and one of your parents has a terrible fear
around something. The projection of that fear, just being in the environment
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of it, can cause that fear to go inside of your yourself and develop. And you’ve
never experienced the fear. All you have done is heard about it. So the
subconscious can’t tell the difference between what’s real or imagined, but if
it gets locked in our subconscious mind, it’s as if it was absolutely real.
[Tanya:] Well, and we get caught in that moment, replaying it over and over
again, and rehashing how we should have done things differently instead of
using failure as a resource, using failure as a way to drive us forward. Can you
talk about how we can use failure as a way to really drive us forward?
[David:] Yeah. So, you know, it’s, it’s interesting that you mentioned that
because it’s one of the most common questions that I get. How do you stop
that cycle of your mind going around those things? If you think about this for
a second, the reason it’s happening is because there is a fear or a threat
present in your subconscious mind. It doesn’t know how to resolve it. So it
just keeps cycling it and it tells you to always be on high alert.
The first thing that we should recognize is the only reason it’s doing that is
because we’ve given it the wrong meaning. If we change the meaning, and I
understand that for some people at first, this can be difficult because if you
take something really horrible that happens in a person’s life, like their raped
or one of their children die, or they lose something horrific and they say, what
is it that’s good about this, right? You’re never going to know what’s good
about it from the consciousness that you experienced it.
It’s only when you move through it, that you begin to see the other things
that are good about it. But what’s important to know is that if you understand
the law, the law of polarity becomes a premise for the foundation of the way
that you think. You don’t need to know what’s good about it right now. You
just need to know that there is something, and that as you continue to move
forward in a healthy way, you will find it. You will discover what it is.
[Tanya:] Oh, I cannot agree with you more on this. And actually, that’s one of
the things that I worked through over this past year was really looking at my
own trauma, my own rape, and seeing it as something that I have now
become, I wouldn’t say grateful for, but I can appreciate what it brought me.
Right?
[David:] Sure.

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[Tanya:] And it’s, it really is. You can’t do it when you’re in the muck. You can’t
do it when you’re in the thick of it. It is that whole idea, like you mentioned
earlier, of changing your perspective, stepping outside of it, choosing to break
that cycle of thoughts, and breaking free of that.
[David:] Well, it’s all pain and trauma at the time. That’s the only thing that
you can see because that’s what speaking the loudest inside of you, right?
[Tanya:] Oh yes. That’s so true. It’s so loud. You can’t hear any of the other
voices, any of the other thoughts that are happening. It’s like a blaring siren.
So it is almost like hijacking your thoughts and changing how you do things.
And when it comes to changing your perspective, sometimes it takes a
drastic thought. But for you, for example, I know you started coaching with
Bob Proctor. You had no money.
So this is back in the days where you have all those cassettes, I think in your
giant clamshells, and you have no money. But Bob Proctor says, Okay, you
gotta, you gotta come out when I, when I speak, you have to fly first class, you
have to hire a car. You have to do this, even though you don’t have the money
for it. Now I think there are people out there that are like, that’s completely
irresponsible. That’s crazy.
[David:] Right.
[Tanya:] Why did you agree to that? Why did that work?
[David:] He’d said that to me the first time that I had met him. I had been
studying him for a couple of years. And I saw the way that he lived. I saw what
he believed. I have learned a tremendous amount from him, but he said to
me, What do you want? I said, ‘I want to be a millionaire.’ And then so then he
told me, he said, So you have to do what I tell you to do. I’m not going to
argue with you about it. You just need to do it. That whole thing. That was
part of the agreement.
Because he said, I can’t coach you your way; I can only coach you my way. If I
coach a year where I become your assistant, we both get a result that we
don’t want. And I was like, Ah, there’s some sense to that. But I did not know
that this is what he was going to tell me to do. When we first started working
together and I thought to myself, Don’t you think you should teach me how
to earn some money first?

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Because I literally did, Tanya. I had to use credit cards and then get a second
mortgage on my house to be able to continue to do all of those things. I was
still working a job. And he said, you will never become a millionaire unless you
learn how to treat yourself like one first. He said, so I’m going to teach you
how to treat yourself like one first, and then you will understand how to
become a millionaire.
So while I would never tell somebody, just go spend all this money. It’s going
to teach you how to become a millionaire. I was being coached the whole
way through this, right? So what he did was he was taking the desire that
was already in me, magnifying that desire, making me step out of my
comfort zone, and what I became aware of was, if I can treat myself that way
here, I can also do the things to create the money over here.
But if I don’t have a need to do that, based on the idea that most people are
raised with, don’t do more than you need. Don’t buy more than you need.
Don’t use more than you need. You’ll never break out of that need cycle in
order to do something that’s uncomfortable that will allow you to have your
income explode, too.
[Tanya:] Let’s talk about, there was a keyword that you used there that I think
will get people’s hackles up a little bit. Maybe even that word desire, because
we feel like we’re not supposed to want, we’re not supposed to desire; that we
should feel guilty for that or that’s wrong or it’s bad. We’ve been taught that
by society. Tell me about desire. Is desiring okay? Is that something that we
should do?
[David:] Yes. I actually believe that it is. So, animals operate by instinct, okay?
Human beings are led by desire, if you learn how to follow it. Now that’s
different than want or need, okay? If you look at the Latin root of desire, it’s de
sire, it’s been loosely translated to ‘from the father’.
But if you actually look at the original translation, the etymology of the word
is from the stars and the early Greeks, right? So, their wisdom with language, I
guess, but the idea is that there’s something in us that’s telling us which way
to go. But you have to learn to be able to listen to it.
The negativity around it, if you look at the Buddhist religion, they all say that
all suffering is linked to desire. I would disagree with that. I would say all
suffering is linked to a want, from the idea that you’re never going to get it.
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That is the whole idea of, ‘Don’t be trapped by the want. Don’t be trapped by
the, you know, materialistic things of life, the ideas; don’t be trapped by it.’
The whole idea of ‘don’t be trapped by it’ is to not give those things a
meaning that you shouldn’t be giving them. But you can totally have them,
and they could be here for you to enjoy and to help you actually move further.
But if you follow the desire, it’ll tell you what you want to be, do and have in
life. And if you begin to follow it, it will lead you exactly into your purpose.
[Tanya:] It’s really tapping into your intuition of what you’re instinctively
wanting to lean towards. So desire, wanting things, wanting to surround
yourself with beautiful things is not bad, but we feel so guilty wanting more.
And you use a phrase that I really love that I want to touch on: receiving is
giving; let’s talk about that. What does that mean, receiving is giving?
[David:] Well, it’s the, it’s a, it’s the law of cause and effect. So if you want
something, what’s the cause? The cause is to give the equivalent. Problem is,
most people do not know what to give. They don’t think that they can. They
say, I don’t have enough to be able to give. So when they think that way they
have to, what they’re really doing in their mind is they’re trading. Every
human being has something to be able to give to another person, to
themselves.
Whatever, whatever you put out from you is what’s going to be returned to
you. So if you want to receive something good, you have to start giving things
good. Instead of saying, you know what? I’ll wait until I get something good
before I give something good back. That’s what I was doing when I was on
the forklift. Somebody, give me a job that gets me to $40,000, right? But
when I started giving, I went from $20,000 to $62,000. It seems very much
out of proportion, but it also shows just how fast it can happen for a person.
[Tanya:] Yeah. Yes. It really is. It’s putting good out into the world. It comes
right back to you. It really does. And then when the good comes, accepting it,
not just pushing it aside because we feel guilty or we feel like it’s wrong to
have these beautiful things around us. God is good. Nature is good.
[David:] Graciously accepting.
[Tanya:] Yes. Graciously. Oh, I love that.

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[David:] Yes.
[Tanya:] So David, this is, this has been an amazing conversation and we
certainly need to have you back on the show again another time to talk, but I
would love for my listeners to know where they can learn more about you
and where they can hear more about you because you do speak so well into
what so many people experience and helping them move past a lot of those
obstacles that are self-imposed because of our mindset. So would you mind
sharing the best place to find you?
[David:] People really want to learn about what I’m doing? They should go to
the successful mind podcast because they teach things there for free. They
can get a really good sample of who I am, what I do. And then they could go
look at our website, DavidNeagle.com, if they’re interested in something
more.
[Tanya:] Amazing, David. This has been incredible. I feel like your story is so
inspiring because it really shows that it is your mindset that is the key to
unlocking everything. That choice is within your grasp. And I think you
embody that and you teach that so well.
[David:] Thanks for having me.
[Tanya:] Wasn’t David an incredible resource? The way he talks and how he
integrates the universal laws into that conversation we had was really so
inspiring. But truly I think the heart of what we talked about here on the
show with David was this idea and this concept of changing your perspective,
which to me is ultimately at the heart of what we are talking about.
When we talk about awakening, it is waking up to your point of view. It is
waking up to other points of view. It is waking up to the idea and the concept
that you absolutely have ownership over your life. And you can choose to be
on the path that you truly desire. You know, I love what we talked about here
on the show, where we talked about these ideas of what it means to fear of
what it means to really desire and leaning into those things, holding the
lessons out of it, truly getting into what our intuition, what our natural
instincts are driving us towards when we tap in and we become so much
more with how we are choosing our future.

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That is when we start to have amazing ownership over our lives. And that is
truly when we can turn our shifts to going in the direction we want. That’s
what I’m excited about. So, as David mentioned, he has an amazing podcast
called the successful mind podcast. You should give it a listen. He’s a fabulous
person. David and I know each other outside of just this podcasting interview
world; he is truly an incredible individual. So I was thrilled to have him on the
show today.
All right, as we leave today’s show, and we think about the whole idea of
awakening, I want you to think about what trauma, what failure, what
mistakes you have made in your past. How can you use those as fuel to fire up
more desire for what you want and to drive you towards the life that truly is
designed and meant for you? Because when we awaken, when we change
our perspective and we choose the direction we want to go in, that is when
we have the intentional advantage.