The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Daniel Elliot: From Overcoming Vices to Inspiring Fitness Transformation

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Daniel Elliot: From Overcoming Vices to Inspiring Fitness Transformation Delliottfitness.com Show Notes About The Guest(s): Daniel Elliot is an entrepreneur, online fitness coach, and motivational speaker. He is the founder of D Elliot Fitness and has dedicated his life to helping clients improve their fitness habits and mindset. As a single father, Daniel won custody of his son in a custody battle, which served as a turning point in his life. He realized the need to make positive changes and developed a strong mindset to overcome his vices. Now, he uses his own experiences to inspire and guide others on their fitness and personal development journeys. Summary: Daniel Elliot, an online fitness coach and motivational speaker, shares his personal journey of overcoming vices and improving his mindset. After winning custody of his son, Daniel realized the need to make positive changes in his life. He quit drinking and smoking and turned to fitness as a way to channel his energy. Daniel emphasizes the importance of self-accountability and the impact it has on personal growth. He offers online coaching programs that focus on both physical fitness and mindset development. By dropping vices and adopting healthy habits, individuals can achieve a stronger mindset and improve their overall well-being. Key Takeaways: Overcoming vices requires self-accountability and a willingness to change. Fitness can serve as a positive outlet for energy and help individuals develop a strong mindset. Dropping vices is essential for personal growth and achieving a higher level of well-being. Mindset training is just as important as physical fitness in achieving long-term success. Setting a positive example for children is a powerful motivator to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Quotes: "Your actions dictate where you're gonna head in life, and in order for that to change, you have to change what you do." "Vices are obstacles that let us know if we fall victim to them, we're losing. But if we overcome them, we're winning." "Fitness is a lifestyle. There's no turning back now. You're either all in or you're all out." "Kids see everything. It's important to set a positive example for them and be aware of our actions." "Start by dropping your vices. Focus on getting rid of your issues before adding things to make your life better."

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Today we have Daniel Elliott on the show with us today. He's an entrepreneur and online fitness and fitness coach and motivational speaker. He's joining us today to tell us his story of his journey and how he helps people improve the quality of their lives. He's a single father of a six-year-old son. He won custody of his court of his son in 2022 in August and he's been working every day to help people develop a strong mindset and mental habits to improve their lives through elevating their negative energy into positive and using it to complete their daily tasks. Welcome to the show, Daniel. How are you? No, well, Chris, thank you for having me. How are you doing? I am doing awesome. Welcome to the show. Give us your dot coms. Where can people

find you on the interwebs? You can find me at www.delliotfitness.net and also on my Instagram at D Elliott Fitness, Facebook D Elliott Fitness, TikTok D Elliott Fitness 1 and Twitter as well at D Elliott Fitness. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you do and how you do it. Well, I'm an online fitness coach, and what I do is I help clients better their fitness habits and as well as get their mindset straightened up and get them in a better perspective in life because kind of the stuff that I've been through

kind of helped me shape my life for the better and actually wanted to give that to other people and basically have clients who come in and instead of just getting them physically fit as well but also have a mindset shift and get them a get them on the right path to just not be fit on the outside but as well as on the inside there you go get it fit on the inside and the outside so you you coach clients i notice you have a big tiktok and instagram channel that you're daily i guess promoting stuff promoting your your workouts and and inspiring people yeah have all my tiktok and my social media pages I do a little short form content where I speak to people on motivation and also post my workouts that I do daily.

There you go. And so people can check that out. They can see your diet, your supplements, some of the motivations. So give us your hero's journey, your life's journey. What were some of the things you went through in life that got you interested in fitness and how to motivate it to help other people well one of the main things that happened in my life was whenever my son was born that was really like the main pivotal turning point for point for me because before then i wasn't you know i wasn't living too well you know drinking smoking and you know living lustfully and you know womanizing and all that stuff and whenever

i had my son it was the pivotal point because unfortunately i had to deal with the custody battle aspect of everything and at that point that turning point i had to figure out at what led me to this point that got me here and instead of trying to fight the battle externally, I had to sit down and think, what actions led me to this point? I couldn't sit here and blame the other person for why things were going the way they were going in my life. So I had to sit down and basically do a look in the mirror to try to look at myself and let myself know, OK, your actions are what led you to this point and in order for you to change something in your life you have to change what you do you have to change your everyday actions you have to look at yourself and call yourself out be accountable for everything that you've done so as far as the drinking smoking lusting i had to look at myself and say okay those are the actions that led you here your actions

dictate where you're going to head in life and in order for that to change I had to make a change on my vices there you go and those vices sometimes are the things we use as a distraction to hold us back right oh all the time like more than what we know oh yeah oh yeah I mean sometimes we're just trying to we're just trying to console our feelings or console you know well i don't want to i don't want to procrastinate i want to i don't want to do that so i'll do this for fun for now and you know it ends up taking time and getting you off your game and off your life's purpose so you said when your son came into your life that's what really changed for you where you kind of saw focusing or concentration of your of your goals and what

you want to achieve in life yeah just dealing with the battle that was the main thing dealing with the custody battle that was just the that was the thing that was just like on the forefront of my mind because he's my only son and dealing with that i knew that i had to in order to change the external of your life you need to sit down and change the internal. So one thing that I had to come to terms with and understand is like drinking and smoking and all those things that you have, all your vices, you must drop them. Because whenever you like you were saying earlier, you want to procrastinate. You don't want to do nothing. That's an obstacle that's letting you know you need to overcome that and I had to figure out

what obstacles that I needed to overcome in order to make a change in my life because if I'm if I was gonna do the same thing over and over and over and expect a different outcome that's the definition of insanity like nothing's gonna change you know you have to yeah you have to change your internal world so I slowly but surely tampered off with drinking and smoking first. It was a lot harder than I thought because I was one of those people who smoked weed all the time. And I had that mindset of, oh, it's just weed. I put this here for me and you. It can't be that bad.

And I was one of the idiots that had that mind frame. So as I decided to get off of one i still had that withdrawal feeling so i tried to you know sip a little liquor here and there but i was like getting over one but i was getting more deeper into the other one and i was trying to sugarcoat one by you know getting over the feeling of another one then i was like well you know what i'm getting over weed but now i'm getting heavier on drinking which is kind of productive because now i'm getting rid of one problem and now i'm having another yeah one distraction for another right exactly there you go and and you know we do that we do this faustian bargain with ourselves you're like

well i'll i'll give up this but i won't give up that and i remember doing that with drinking and you know and you do that with you know when you're procrastinating and stuff well i'll make a concession here and concession there so how did you overcome it get your son back in your life and what sort of example do you try and set now as a father etc well overcoming it i just had to i understood that there was no bargaining with what i wanted to get out of life i was like i can't bargain with this i gotta i gotta face myself because that's the battle that we have every day everybody is battling themselves whether they know it or not because you know in the custody

battle i could blame the other party all i want but at the end of the day it was the man in the mirror that i was fighting the most. It was that person that I had to fight. I had to defeat him. I had to be like, look, you need to quit this. And if you quit these things, you'll be surprised. And what you quit on the internal is going to reflect on the outside. So having a more, being more aware of sitting in my issues sitting in my problems

you know and whenever you know time came for the battle or whatnot i was able to at least sit in front of the judge and be more coherent and more understanding and you know better with my wording that we had to deal with dealing with the custody battle. So when I was going through that, that helped me better become a better father to my son, because it let me know that if I can do this, then anybody else can as well. True. Very true. And so being self-accountable made made all the difference for you then oh that's the that's the main thing i mean every day we have issues every single day like it doesn't a day doesn't go by where i still want to smoke or drink i mean it doesn't i mean drinking is not really my big thing but smoking like i i can't lie i enjoy it but i know that it's like i can't do it it's not what i need to be doing i can it. You know, and that's the thing about vices.

You know, they don't go away. They're like our inner demons. Like, we need them. They're obstacles. You know, we need those obstacles in life because they let us know if we fall victim to them, we're losing. But if we overcome them, we're winning. You know, it's kind of like I use the analogy of a Nintendo game, like the old school Nintendo back in the day. Back in the day, there was no Internet.

There was no cell phones or nothing. It was like landline. That was it. So if you got stuck on a video game, you were stuck. There was no YouTube where you can say, hey, how do I get past this part? There was nothing. You were just stuck until you figured it out and the only way you knew that you got to a new place in that video game even if it took you weeks or months or however long you were stuck

is when you saw new enemies new bosses or a new place that you haven't been to then that told you like oh hey i'm actually making progress i'm somewhere i haven't been before so that means i'm going the right way so you know you use your vices the same way you know if you overcome them every single day day in and day out because they don't go away then you know that you're making progress internally most definitely and so now you've how did you get into fitness what motivated you become a fitness instructor and and motivator well once i i've i've always liked fitness i've always been a person that would jogging and stuff like that and of course like back in the day i would get high and go jogging

that was a good idea you know like smoke weed and go jog and just you know feel good about myself and at that point you know once i finally quit smoking and quit drinking i had to dive deeper into something else because that energy had to go somewhere or else it was just going to nag at me all day long. You know, and I couldn't just sit in it. I had to I had to exert my energy some way somehow. So I chose the fitness route, which was one of the which is the reason why I got to fitness as well. And I wanted to enhance my physique because, you know, you see like a lot of bodybuilders and guys and stuff like that. But I didn't want to go like I didn't want to, you get into steroids and nothing like that because i'm not being on another drug you know so i decided to go ahead and do the fitness route and get my body right and actually

achieve that goal of looking aesthetically pleasing because you know what i can do that so i went ahead and tackled that goal and it takes everything in you to sit down and focus and be aware of what you put in your mouth how how much you eat, not to overeat, not to undereat, count your macros, have a routine, wake up, go work out. And if you don't feel like it, go do it anyway, because, you know, that's that's where you're trying to get to is on the other side of what you don't want to do. So fitness was the thing that gave me that driving force that push behind what i needed to let me know hey you don't need these substances over here but what you need to do is get yourself right and that's why i use fitness to help me stay away from drinking and smoking there you go i mean it's it's why is it important for a man to go to the gym and exercise i mean do you have any thoughts on that why it's important for men to go

do that yeah i mean it's it's amazing what a man can push himself to like physically and mentally like you don't know what you can do until you can do it because it's not a it's not a one month and then you're done you know what i mean it's not a six month or one year then you're done yeah you can reach a nice physique in one year or whatever, but if you stop in one month and just decide to eat whatever, then it's all over. Like you're back at square one. So it's really important for a man to see what his body is fully capable of, you know, push yourself to your limit. Like whenever you, you know, get to your age where you're priming push yourself all the way and and and see like how strong your mind is how strong your body is and once you hit those limits you can push past

the limits because there is no limit there's only limitations you put on yourself so you'll hit a ceiling which you think is a ceiling but then you push past that limit and not just physically but financially emotionally all these different things play a key component in your physical fitness if you're able to drop your vices along with it you'll have that mental fortitude plus that physical strength as well to go along with it and you'll just start to feel unstoppable there you go there you go and pretty inspiring when people need to to do more and be more. So what keeps you going every day?

Honestly, now it's a lifestyle. I can't quit. You know what I mean? I can't stop. There's no turning back now. You're either all in or you're all out. There's nothing. There's no reason for me to stop.

I came this far and it's kind of like you go so far out and when you look back at the people behind you and the things behind you you're so far away from it but when you look at where you're trying to get to in front of you it's so it seems like it's so far away so you're in the middle and you're like well there's only one way to keep going i don't want to go back so keep going forward and it's a good it's like a good look for my son you know my son gets to see a good role model in me and he even actually told me the other day one time he was we were walking after we had got something to eat and we had walked past this i guess like this place where they were gambling or whatnot not like a bad place but just like a little in a shopping center and they were outside smoking i guess in between the card game or whatever he was like oh nasty they smoke daddy but you don't smoke and it kind of hit me i was

like he never saw me smoke before yeah i was like i have to keep that going because you know i've smoked all my life and you know he doesn't know that about me so i have to keep that going there you go you know it's funny i don't think i don't i don't know what most parents think but i'm pretty sure i know that most parents don't realize how much of an imprint their behavior their actions their morals the the way they put themselves into the world the way they interact with their children of course too sets an example it's just a standard you know children grow up to be like their parents because they're around them all the time and a lot of parents think they can lie to their kids and they

can be like hey don't tell lies kids and then you know they'll see them lie or they'll see them pull a stunt at the store or be deceptive and and they don't realize the kids watch they see that stuff they pick up on it they're not not stupid. No, not at all. Kids see everything. Yeah, they see everything. Parents need to realize that. My parents are good people. We don't realize that kids grow up.

He was three or four not too long ago. And now he can... Whenever kids are smaller, we can get away with saying things around them because, you know, they can't, you know, hey, the C-A-N-D-Y is over there. Go get it. But now if I say C-A-N-D-Y, he's like, where's the candy? I'm like, you know, we don't realize they get smarter. You know what I mean? We are the dumb ones now.

They do. They get pretty smart and savvy. You know, they can read us. You know, it's kind of like my dogs. My dogs can read me. They know when I'm having a hard time. They feel my stress. I think babies and kids do too. They can tell when you're stressed as a parent. Oh, of course. They can understand what's going on. They can understand bills and everything that has to get paid.

So on your website, you've got a lot of different offerings. Let's talk about those and how people can onboard with you and what you do to help people On the onboard with me, let's see. So off the top of my head here we go. So the month-to-month is 300 So if you want to just try just to try it out for a month a month is 300 The more months you choose the cheaper it gets so three months would be $7.50 six months is $12.99 and a 12 month is $2,000 basically and with the onboarding is you know I will set you up on a diet plan a workout plan and you'll get access to my fitness app where I'll set you up with your

diet nutrition and macros and let you know what you need to hit every single day. And depending on which price plan that you choose, you know, I'll have it set up for that duration of time. There you go. And you have a few different trainings. I see a mindset training and nutrition. What are some of the various packages you have? Yeah. So the nutrition, the nutrition training basically is just kind of like the one I just stated, you know, and the mindset training is more of a constantly weekly Zoom calls to hold you accountable to basically keep you on your toes about your vices. Because you can be physically fit all you want, but if you still have vices, you're not going to hit the next level like you want to. You may look aesthetically good, but a lot of people, I mean, just like the world world right now a lot of people look aesthetically good but on the inside you know they're dying yeah it doesn't matter how good you look i mean on the inside if you still have vices i mean like if you if you just if if you're working and you have your job and you decide to go lift and

and do all these great things and get a great body. But then at your job, you get a promotion and you start making more money and all that good stuff. And then you turn around, but you still have that drinking that you're doing aside or whatnot. That's still going to hinder you. You can put that aside and take your mindset to a whole new level. It's where you just completely drop your vices because the mental fortitude is just as important as the physical. Definitely, definitely. So people can reach out to you on the website. They can watch what you're doing on the social media and all that good stuff there. Yeah, I post on my social media every single day from the time I wake up to the supplements that I take, food that I eat,

and the workouts that I do. So you basically can see what the program is all about by just watching me and then you can also look online and see like hey my coach is on it today and he doesn't stop and I can watch him to use him as like a like a like a competitive edge to go against because I'm competing against myself and you can use me as inspiration to compete with because if I'm up at 4 or 5 in the morning and I've already got to my workout and everything, you haven't started, well, you need to get on it. Most definitely. Well, it's been fun to have you on the show.

Give us your final thoughts in.com where people can find you on the interwebs. Again, you can find me at www.dlafitness.net. Just final thoughts. Everybody, if you're going out there, going through something, the best thing I can tell you is to start off by dropping your vices. The best thing to do is to get rid of things before you add things. That's the main thing that you're going to do. If you can focus on getting rid of your issues, then adding small things to your life to make it incrementally better and doing it as a daily effort it'll make your life a

whole lot better there you go well thank you very much for coming on the show we really appreciate it and thanks for inspiring us man thank you i appreciate it chris there you go thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortresschrisfoss linkedin.com fortresschrisfoss chrisfoss one of the tickety-tockety and all those crazy places we are be sure to be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time and that should