Most people assume that achieving success also means finding your state of contentment, but it is not a guaranteed outcome. This is exactly what happened to Alasdair Cunningham, whose life went into a downward spiral after getting overwhelmed by his mid-career success. Joining Daniel Weinberg, he shares how he invested in himself to get rid of his negative thinking, self-sabotage practices, and money-hungry desires once and for all, allowing him to unlock the most fulfilled version of himself. Alasdair also talks about finding his main purpose in life by becoming the founder of Tell The World, a program focused on confidence, visibility, and personal transformation for his fellow founders and entrepreneurs.
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Telling The World With Alasdair Cunningham
In this episode, we speak to Alasdair Cunningham about why men stay invisible.
Alistair, good to have you on the show.
Thank you for having me.
The accent. Where are you right now?
I am in the UK right now, but I am Scottish. Born and bred in Scotland, from a little village in the back end of absolutely nowhere. I now live in England. Yes, primarily.
Finding Success And Depression At The Same Time
I am really excited to talk to you about your journey, the lessons you have learned, and what we, as men, can learn from them. I am not going to start at the beginning. I want to talk about how you grinded it out and created success for yourself mid-career. Even after going on that journey and through the struggles, which we will talk about later, you achieved financial success, yet you went into a depressed state post-achieving that.
Can you help me understand how one strives for performance and financial success? You are on your journey there, but you start hitting your stride. Yet you are not elated, you are not feeling great about yourself. It is the opposite. Talk us through that experience of what you felt leading up to it, and I guess falling off the cliff with it.
They say astronauts, when they finally get to that mission of going to the moon, they come back and they go into a state of depression, don’t they? Astronauts are known for it because they have worked all their lives to do that, and they have done that. It is like, what else? Yes, now what? I think, look, I was not born an entrepreneur. I was born into a very working-class family whose attitude was get a good job, and you will have a job for life. That is fine. Do not get me wrong. That is really solid advice, back in the 70s and 80s, because that is when it worked.
Not anymore.
The hardest workers are not the best paid. That is a fact. I went to school, and I was taught by my father, who is a joiner. He said, “Look, get a trade. You will always have a job.” I went, and I learned how to fix buses. I was a bus and coach commercial vehicle mechanic. That led me down a certain path of using my hands to make money. I realised very quickly I was not going to make loads of money doing that. I would have a nice life, but I would not have loads of money. One day, I just quit my job.
I said, “I am not going to do this. I went on a whole mission of understanding what I did not know and learning what I did not know. I am a great believer in you not knowing what you do not know. Do not think you do. When I hear people say, “I know that already.” I am like, “If you know already, why are you not doing it?” The reality is, I did not know a lot of what I know now. That sent me on a big journey, but that journey was primarily about things that I was too scared to venture into because it is very scary doing new things. Two, I was always told from a very young age that you are a mechanic.
That is your job. You are a mechanic. You are a tradesman. You fit in this box. Who the fuck are you to try to go out of that box? Unfortunately, that is what happens in life. We get pigeonholed in these boxes of what our family teaches us to go into. Sometimes it is very difficult to escape that box. It is the whole scenario of crabs in a bucket. I do not know if you have ever heard a scenario where, if you put four crabs in a bucket, eventually one of the crabs will try to climb out of that bucket, but the other three crabs will pull it back, say, “Where are you going?”
We are often pigeonholed in boxes that our family teaches us to go into. Sometimes, it is very difficult to escape those boxes. Share on XThat is the kind of life I had. I was from a working-class background, and I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs, the mindset that I had around my family, my friends or my peers was, if you are going to make lots of money in order to do that, you have to trample on people who are not making money. It is a very backwards, screwed-up way of thinking.
Anyway, I had to develop a lot of skill sets, and I did, and it was really scary. The biggest thing I had to develop was myself. I had to understand my mindset. I started to get some success. I started to get a lot of failures. I can guarantee I have had more failures than successes. That is what a lot of people do not understand. A lot of people think that everyone has become a millionaire or whatever. They think that it just happened like that.
That is the big one, I call it the overnight success that happened over twenty years.
The overnight success story that took twenty years to happen.
They always say, “He did really well.” It is like, “Yep. I worked for twenty years.” He walked behind the scenes when nobody knew what he was doing for twenty years. It is the whole scenario. People say, “Alasdair, you got lucky.” I want to punch them in the throat. I really do because was it lucky that I put myself in the networking events where I was really uncomfortable and shitting myself? Was it lucky that I went to eighteen-hour work days, and I was driving all over the country viewing properties? No, that was determination and drive and ambition. Look, I was used to making two and a half to 3000 pounds a month. I do not know what that is.
Everyone will understand what that is. That is your currency that you were owed. Most would call it a working-class wage. In my mind, you are living month to month. You are not saving much. You are putting food on the table. You are renting. I am in the place, and you might be able to go two hours away for a holiday in the summer.
That is what my mindset taught me in a customised way to begin. All of a sudden, I started this business in property, and I went from making $30,000 to $40,000 or pounds a year, to in my first year, I literally banked over half a million pounds. It is scary.
That is life changed. When that happened, when you got a little bit depressed about that?
Yes, not so much depressed. I would not say I’m not so depressed. When I started making that money, I got more fearful. I will tell you why I got fearful, because I learned this from one of my mentors. People are aloft, and they are scared of failing, but they are also scared of success because they have got a whole heap of responsibility. Now you have got to imagine, I have gone from 30,000 to 40,000 pounds a year to making 30,000 to 40,000 pounds a month. Now I am like, “I am going to fuck it up.”
I have got the fear of going back to making two and a half to three thousand pounds a month. Honestly, that really played with me. I had to really work on myself as a person to understand that, “I actually deserve this.” I never believed I deserved this. I never believed for one minute in the early days that it would happen to me. I believed that success was available and that success was out there. If I am being truly honest, I did not believe it would happen for me or to me. When I started happening, I was waiting for it to fail.
I am literally, I am planning how it is going to fail. That is just a mindset issue. It is massively a mindset issue, and it took lots from me to get over it. I was kind of self-sabotaging myself because I would have opportunities, I would have deals, I would have opportunities for investment, opportunities for deals, but I would take myself out of the game because I just did not know if I had the right confidence or the right structure or the right belief in myself to actually see deals through.
After one year of him being in the property, I bought like seven houses, and I ended up with a nice, healthy bank balance. I am not going to lie, like for about 3 or 4 months going into year two, I did not really do much because I sort of took the foot off the gas, because there is another scenario where I see this all the time, where people start to see success, they do not fully believe that it is going to last. They are not used to that level of money. They take their foot off the gas a little bit. They slow down. The results stop coming.
You start selling yourself this story. “See, I told you, Alasdair, it would go away.” The reason why it slowed down was that I slowed down, because I did not believe in myself, because I did not have imposter syndrome and many things. I did not want to keep pushing forward to get deals done. I thought it was a one-off, like I got lucky. I allowed other people’s mindsets to get into my mindset about you, must have got lucky, Alasdair. That is what I kept telling myself. Simple as that.
When you say that, would other people say that to you?
Yes. “Listen, the UK is a very different place from all the places in the world.” Entrepreneurship in the UK is backwards. It really is. You can be driving down the road in a Porsche 9/11, and you will just assume you’re a drug dealer, or you have gained that by illegal means. Nobody will actually stop you and say, “Wow, that is a beautiful car. How did you do it?” I had massive success in year one and then year two, but it slowed down until I had to develop myself, and I invested. I went into a mentorship program with somebody who was ahead of me, and he repositioned a lot of my thinking on it. It was a personal development program that I did. It was not a business development. It was not property development. It was a PD many months working on me for many months.
Building And Selling His First Business
We are going to. I want to pause you there because I want to start a bit from the beginning.
Go on.
You are working as a mechanic. You had always been told growing up, “This is going to be your life. You get up the courage.” How old were you at the time?
26, 27.
You get up the courage to quit with less than 500 quid in your bank again. Which is fuck all. This is all about, they say, growth happens when you just push yourself always just a little bit beyond your limits, and you just quit. Obviously, you’re swimming against the tide there, which I do not think would have been well received by the folks around you, by the sounds of things. What gave you the courage to do that, and what were you thinking?
Everyone asks this because you know I was 25 at the time.
Which is young, I guess you can make higher-risk decisions at that point in your life.
Here is what was going on. You know, I had a young family, I was married, just got married, two kids, and I was working for a bus company in the UK, and I remember being underneath a bus one day with a gentleman. He was twenty years older than me, and his name was Phil, and we were basically exchanging the war stories of life, business and the job and things like that.
We happened to get speaking about paychecks, and he was twenty years older than me, and that particular week, he only made about a hundred pounds more than me. As he was speaking, I remember thinking he was really happy about it. I am like, “Mate, you are 45 years old, and you are happy about making a hundred pounds more than you were when you were 25 years old. How messed up is that?” It is like, now all I am thinking about is, “I am going to be working here for twenty years to make that.”
You were enjoying the work.
I love the work. I love that. I love fixing things. I am a very mechanical, hands-on person. I remember hearing that story of Phil, when he told me about how he only made like a hundred pounds more than me per week. 400 pounds a month. I am like, “I am not working twenty years doing this nonsense for an extra $400. Absolutely no way.” I actually quit my job that day. I literally, after my conversation with Phil, I had a little moment to myself where I went to have a little wander around the yard, and I just said, “What have I got to lose? What am I going to lose? There is nothing to lose here.”
I am like, screw it. I went to the office, and I just said, “Look, thank you for the opportunity, but I am leaving. I am giving you two weeks’ notice, and I am at the end of next Friday.” I had no plan. It was my only plan was that I was not going to stay in this situation. That was my only plan. I knew that was what I was not going to do, but I did not know what I was going to do. Look, I had £500, £600 available to me. I thought, “I have to get to work.” I got to do something. I thought, “What do I know? I know buses, I know how to fix things.”
I jumped on eBay, and I started looking for vans. I ended up buying an old sort of Ford Transit van for like $500. I borrowed a couple of hundred pounds from my mom and dad. That is it, I went on, and I bought a really banged-out old van. I threw all my tools in the back of it. I just started driving around all the bus, coach and commercial vehicle garages, the lorry companies. Started giving out bits of paper that had my name and number on them. The first six months were hell. They really were. No business, very little money, working all hours.
After about six months, I got a phone call from a bus company about two hours away from where I was working. They got my number from somebody else, and they heard I have a good reputation. I started doing work for them, and I ended up signing a hundred thousand dollar, a hundred thousand pound a year contract with them about eight months into my self-employment journey, which gave me a little bit more security. That contract was for me to maintain their fleet of eight vehicles. It wasn’t the best money for them at work I was having to do, but it gave me the vision to see what I can do. I essentially took that, and I grew with it. I ran that business from 25 when I started it till 34. Here is the killer. I actually sold that business to Phil, the mechanic who you had played with me.
That is brilliant.
He ended up about nine years later. He is still at Stagecoach, and he is still working at the bus company. He just got divorced, and he had loads of money in the bank. He came up to me one day, and he said, “Look, I really love what you have done. Do you want to sell your workshop?” I ended up selling him the business, not for loads of money. I made a little bit of money, not a lot. I believe things happen in life for a reason, and I believe they happen at the right time. I believe I was meant to have that conversation with Phil, and I believe nine years later, when I got that opportunity, I had something telling me, “Alasdair, you have got to take this because there are bigger things waiting for you.”
Things in life happen for a reason and at the right time. Share on XAnd?
Going Into A Downward Spiral In Life
I sold the business. These bigger things never happened straight away. That is the reality because I sold the business, and I was 34 or 35 years old. The reality is, from that moment, I kind of went into a massive downward spiral. I will tell you why, because for me, I knew buses and coaches. That was what I knew. I knew it inside out. I was the best at what I was doing in the area, and I was thriving. It seemed to me like I built this business where we ended up with three members of staff, we ended up with contracts, we were doing about 600,000 pounds a year in turnover, making really healthy profits, and it was good.
All of a sudden, I went from having a business which was doing well to being respected in the space of two months. I went from my mobile phone ringing 25 times every hour on my phone. I was constantly busy until suddenly nothing happened. It was like nobody was ringing me. I have got no, none of my clients is contacting me. I have got nothing going on in my life with regards to business, and yes, fine. I have got this little bit of money I made from selling the business, which was not a lot of money. I went through a phase of about 6 to 8 months of really not doing a lot.
I was trying to find myself, and the money was dwindling. It was coming down and down. I was having to use that to live. I was getting to a situation where I was down to my last sort of 10,000 to 15,000 pounds. Now that it starts to get serious because it is like, “Alasdair, six months ago, you were running a business. You were making a lot of money. Now you have got $10,000 to $15,000 in the bank. You have got no idea what you want to do with your life. You are not employable because I find that when you are an entrepreneur, you are very unemployable.”
I have got the pressures of my family, my wife, my children, being a man, all that sort of stuff. It just started to get on top of me, and it did. It got massively on top of me, and I started to feel really worthless. I started to feel like not a man. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? I believe in traditional rules. I believe that our man should be a man. The man is your job is to look after your family, to provide, to protect.
Yes, your job.
If you are not doing that, then I believe you have to look within yourself and figure that out. I was getting into a situation where I was not making money and was running out fast. I had no idea what to do. Everything I tried seemed to fail. I could not even come up with ideas because I had a big fog in front of me, and I could not even think of an idea. I just could not. I am entrepreneurial, but every time I think of an idea, I think of a thousand reasons why it will not work. That was it. That was my life. Three, four, five months went by. Money is going. I am now getting into a horrible state.
I am putting on loads of weight. I am gambling, I am chasing quick wins. I am going down to the casino, and I am thinking, “If I can just turn this $300 into $1,000, I will pay my mortgage this month.” That is ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous. When you start gambling, you start drinking, you are letting people down at that point, and you know you cannot leave the bar. That is the problem because the pain that you are going through and the pain that you are experiencing is so deep, it is like having a ton of bricks just holding you to your ground.
Did you share this with anyone?
No. I shared it with me, myself and I, because I am a man. I believe that we men, listen, my views now are very different. I am talking back then. I was like, “Look, if it is not bleeding, if it is not broken, if it is not hanging off, it is fine.” I genuinely thought mindset, stop being a fucking pussy. That was my genuine belief. Listen, I am telling you right now, guys, listen to this. 4 I know guys are tuning into this who think the exact same thing. Please take this from the bottom of my heart, please.
I mean this with the greatest of love and the greatest of care. Just drop that attitude, drop that whole thing that you cannot talk to people about what’s going on because you cannot. Look, I remember, for about a month, I barely left the house. Literally barely left the house. I would stay in bed most of the day, watch TV, pigging out. My wife was going to work, and my children were going to school. I was becoming an embarrassment.
What did your wife say to you during that period?
Nothing. She was supportive as ever.
Did she not say, “Honey, try and get your shit together.”?
She tried to encourage me. I had a lot of what was going on. She did not know. She did not know we were running out of money. She thought we were really successful. She still does not to this day know how much I sold the business for because I hid that from her. She thought we had loads of money, and we were getting into debt. There are a lot of things going on that I did not tell her, and that is on me. I was trying to be the man. I was like, “No, it’s my problem. I will deal with it.” She did not really know a lot. She thought I was just resting from running a business for the last ten years. She did not know. I will be honest. She did not see the tears. She did not see the pain. She did not see that. Get good at hiding it.
That is hard. To put up that facade, that is pretty hard.
That’s what you have to do. That’s what men do. That’s what we’ve always done. That is what I was like. I was doing that. Eventually, I went to the doctors. It is only because I saw on a TV program, I was watching TV, and I saw something on TV which just made me think, I need to get out of this rut that I am in. I remember I went to the doctor’s and I met my doctor, whom I had never met before. I do not think I have been to the doctor in about twenty years, to be honest.
Finally, I went, and I remember going into the surgery and into the clinic, and I got called in, and the doctor said, “Mr. Cunningham, lovely to meet you,” shook my hand. He goes, “What is the problem?” At that point, I froze, and I was like, “I am not. No. I am a man. I can deal with this.” I said, “I am really sorry, I have actually completely wasted your time today. Thank you, I am all good.” I got up to leave, and the doctor said to me, “You are here, you have got fifteen minutes, come on, tell me what’s going on.”
Obviously, he knew something was going on. He said, “Look, what is the problem? What’s up?” He goes, “How are you feeling?” I remember for like the next 45 minutes, I just like to let everything out. Just let it all out. He basically just told me what was going on in my life, and he basically just said, “Look, it is all right, it is okay to not be okay and all that stuff.” He put me in touch with some counsellors. I went to get some counselling, and I just sorted myself out. I started accepting that mental health illness is a thing. It is not made up.
It is not a fake disease or a fake illness that people say they have just to get out of work. It is actually real, isn’t it? It really is. I went on a journey after that. I basically started getting some treatment. I am very proud to say that I never ever took proper medication. I was given them. I actually still have the blister pack, and I have never opened it. I am happy that I managed to become who I am today by just being open about speaking about who I am and who I wanted to be. Look, the next 6 to 12 months were for me a journey. It was a journey of me learning about myself.
Getting Rid Of A Negative Mindset
What did you do? Use the practices you experimented with and tried to explore. Where did you go?
A little thing. I used to be really negative. I went to a one-day training event down in London. There is a mentor there, his name is Blair Singer. He gave everybody a little, do you know these little elastic bands you get around, like little wrist bands you get around your wrist? He gave everyone one of them, and he said, “Look, every time you have a negative thought,” he goes, “I want you to stop yourself. I want you to pull that really tight and let go of it.” He goes, “I want you to associate negativity with pain.” He goes, “You will soon stop being negative because you start to get a very sore wrist.” Look, to me, that was like, that worked.
That is like a mini act.
It is just a little act. Just associate negativity and look, you have just got to realise that your thoughts lead to your feelings, your feelings lead to your actions, your actions lead to your results. If you wake up in the morning, you have a bad thought, I want you to just realise very quickly that it is there and do something to change it. I believe we live in three states. We are in a physical state, a mental state and an emotional state. If you change one, you change them all.
If you change your physical state, your emotional state will change. When you know you have got a bit of negativity happening. Just do twenty star jumps. Go outside, go in the fresh air, change your environment. For me, whenever I am feeling low, I go for a drive. Whenever I am feeling low, I go and sit in the shower with no distraction, and I have water, because I am a Pisces, I love water, I love water all over me. It just changes my environment. These are little things that I do even today, like when I am having bad days.
Give us the list of hacks.
There are loads. Number one, you need to understand that you can speak. I want you to speak to somebody about what you are feeling and what’s going on, but not from a pity party point of view, from a look, this is what’s happening right now. How can I fix it? There is nothing worse than focusing on the problem. Whatever you focus on expands. Whilst I accept we all have problems, every single one of us has problems in our lives.
There is nothing worse than focusing on the problem. Whatever you focus on expands. Share on XWhat good is it to constantly regurgitate that? It is not. Ask better questions. Instead of complaining about your situation, say, “Look, how can I escape this?” That is what I had to do. I was in a situation where I wanted to make more money, I wanted to be more successful, and I wanted to get some more purpose. Do you know something? Money was not even the big motivator. The purpose was.
I actually read something recently about men who have done studies on men who retire early and no longer do anything, and to die much younger than those who stay on and continue being engaged in whatever, does not necessarily have to be making money, but they are actively involved in whatever missions they are on.
There are like three big things that I did. When I started pulling myself out of this depression, there were three things I did. Number one, I made a conscious effort to stop being so negative. Any time that I had a negative thought or I wanted to say something negative, I would stop myself. I know it is going to come. You just stop yourself. Just do not do it. I believe words are very powerful, and what we tell ourselves every day is ridiculous because here is the thing. We will tell ourselves every day we are not good enough, we are too fat, we are too thin, we are too young, we are too old, we do not have enough money.
We do not deserve this. Other people are better than us. We will tell ourselves all these limiting beliefs every single day. Here is the thing. You would not allow your children to tell themselves that. Why do you allow yourself to tell yourself that? I had to realise that because I remember Lisa, she is still my wife, but we are not actually together anymore, we have got a brilliant relationship, a really good relationship, and we have got a very solid family.
Lisa always said to me, “Alasdair, you tell yourself all this negative shit every day, but you would not allow Isabelle or Yasmin to tell themself that. Fucking build a bridge and get over it.” Here is the thing. I had to turn my negativity into positivity, and I had to start thinking differently. The other thing I did was I really understood that if I want to develop myself and my business, and if I want to develop into somebody else, I have to become somebody else. You are not going to grow a business with a 9:00 to 5:00 mindset.
You are not going to grow a business with a negative mindset. You are not going to grow a business with the same attitude, beliefs, and actions that got you to where you are today. You have to become something different. Now, for me, that meant I had to do a journey of education. I had to go to seminars. I had to immerse myself in a world of education. I could only do what I could afford. I did not have loads of money. It was like, “Whenever I made a little bit of money, I would put it into that, and I would gradually keep levelling up.”
Just like you continue investing in yourself.
Constantly. This year alone. We are now in what, May? I have already invested $100,000 myself this year alone, just in me. Just in education. I have done 100K just this year.
Tell me, like, why? What costs 100K?
I will tell you that in a minute. It is just mentorship. I believe in partnerships. I believe in mentorships. Since I started in the world of business and property, I have invested over $300,000 in myself, such as working with people who are way ahead of me. I have just taken on a mentor who is worth $800 million. I have paid to work with that person for a year to build my business. They are way ahead of me. They own 85 companies. They are building massive success. I have been wanting to work with this gentleman for a number of years. I finally put myself in a situation where I can afford to do that. I have been able to do that this year because I know that by getting out of my comfort zone and working with somebody who is way ahead of me, all I am going to do is level up.
How do you find someone who has a ton of money and say to them, “I will pay to work with you?”
Just ask them.
Will they take money from you to work with? How does that work?
Easy, because you just change your network, right? This is what I said earlier on. Number one, I changed my negativity into positivity. Number two, I got into rooms that I was not comfortable in, so I went to seminars. Number three is that I understood the principle of the more you learn, the more you will learn. I invested heavily in learning stuff. Also, I took a lot of action. I built a property business. That property business, I started it, I only had less than $10,000 left in my bank account, and I had to learn property strategies that did not require a lot of money.
I primarily started an agency selling investment properties to investors. In my first year, I did over half a million dollars, and I made loads of money doing that, and that allowed me to then start buying assets for myself. Long story short, that property business is still very active today. That creates both passive and active income for me, and it allows me to have a very free life.
Because I systematised it and automated it, I probably only spend 10 to 15 hours a week working on it, if that. I have got a lot of free time. That is what led me to people starting to ask me how to do it, and I started working with them. I started having to level myself up because I am working with other people. It is just a vicious circle, but it is a great circle.
Spreading Inspiration Through Tell The World
That is how you have to tell, like you’ve created a platform called Tell the World.
Yes.
What Tells the World?
Tell the world that I believe every single person can become whoever they want to become by becoming more visible, more valuable, and more vocal. I believe a lot of people who actually really could be genuinely great entrepreneurs are just so scared to put themselves out there because they do not know how to, and because they have so many limiting beliefs holding them back. Tell the World for Me is a personal development training program that I put together. I only run it once a year, and I put it together to help my clients overcome themselves.
What are the typical things like that you’ve observed with the people you’re working with? What are the top three sorts of obstacles that they need to overcome? Obviously, we’re generalising here, but I’m trying to get some common themes that are very apparent. Basically, you have already mapped that out because you are targeting those things, because they are the most common ones that are popping up.
Yes, absolutely. There are 2 or 3 common things that always come up. The whole event is mainly focused on you overcoming your limiting beliefs and the things that hold you back. I will give you real-life examples. That is going to be better than generalisation. The clients that I will talk about, they are finding me talking about this stuff, by the way. I had a gentleman called Joe Nicole, who came to my first ever Tell the World, and he was a young man who used to, all of his background, he experienced a lot of physical, mental, and sexual abuse from his family growing up, and various people growing up, so in his childhood.
Now that leaves scars, that leaves trauma. That was really restricting his belief in himself. That was four years ago, when he came to my first-ever training program, Tell the World. I remember during Tell the World, we helped him just deal with some of these things. We helped him just confront them and realise that, “It is okay, you can deal with it, and you can put processes in place to overcome it and move forward. That was four years ago. Joe never really believed he could build a business.
He never really believed that anyone would value him. He now has 118 properties in the UK in four years, and he has built a three million pound a year business in the UK, and that was four years ago. I have got another gentleman called Ryan. Ryan came to me because he was a young man in his early to mid-twenties. He has been on antidepressants all of his life, and he said to me, “Alasdair, I just do not feel anything. I am flat like.”
That is typical, when you talked about before how you got yourself better without taking any medication. That is what medication does. Exactly what you just keep you in the band. It’s never too happy. Never too sad. Just numb.
It’s magnolia, isn’t it? The magnolia of everything. It’s neutral. I remember he came to tell the world that he had been through his whole life of just never feeling anything. He came to tell the world because he wanted to feel something. He wanted to feel happiness. He wanted to feel that it was okay. He wanted to feel something. Anyway, we worked together for the whole event for four days. At the end of the event, he grabbed hold of the mic. I said, “Who wants to share?”
He shared, and he stood up, and he was crying his eyes out. He goes, “This is the first time I have cried in fifteen years.” He goes, “I do not know what the fuck is going on in my body right now.” I am like, that is your feelings coming back. That is energy. He again went on to build a successful business with his girlfriend Courtney, and they built a very nice, successful life together. I cannot go through the exact processes we do because that is not fair. I have a confidentiality thing with everyone. I am certain they do not tell me what we do. My point is that there is no medication involved. It is just talking, and it is just giving you the belief that you can do whatever you want to do.
Rewiring.
The way I describe it is like, if you have got a laptop and you have had it for ten years and it slows down anything and it takes forever to boot up, and that is your life. Tell the world, you come to it as if getting your fresh brand new laptop that is ready to work and ready to take action. That is what Tell the World is. I could tell you hundreds of success stories like this, where people have come, and they have had complete transformational experiences, and they have gone on to do amazing things, not just business but also personal.
I have had both men and women come to it, and you know I had a lady come to it, and halfway through she came up to me crying her eyes out, and she goes, “Alasdair, I need to go home.” I said, “Why?” She goes, “I need to go and save my marriage.” She goes, “You have literally made me see my life if I do not change, and if I do not change, I am not losing my husband because of how I have been behaving. I need to go home.” She gave me a hug. She is like, “I love you. I thank you for everything you have done for me.”
She went home, and she fixed her marriage. It is like, it is all because I showed her what life would look like if she did not change. She knew she was sabotaging things. She knew she was doing it, and they are still together to this day. That was three and a half years ago. Tell the World is about the, it is about you overcoming yourself. It is about you realising that, you know what? You are your biggest problem. If you realise how to deal with it, you can overcome it. That is what it is about.
We can help people. I put all the personal development training that I have done into Tell the World. I put my life into it. For me, Tell the World is my purpose. It is my purpose. It is my purpose in life. I can tell you all about my businesses. Look, it is, it does not mean anything. It does not mean anything. Fine, I make seven figures a year, who gives a fuck?
It means nothing without purpose. I would give it all up. I would throw it all away. I would give it all up today. Honestly, if I could give the whole lot up, if I could just be that guy who helps people get purpose. I believe that when you help everyone get what they want, or when you help anyone, somebody gets what they want. I believe you will always get what you want. When you take money off the table, you will find your purpose, I promise you.
The universe is rewarding you for what you’re putting out there.
I hope so.
It certainly sounds like it.
All I will tell you is that my life is good. I have got ample of what I need in my life. I am not greedy. I am very humble. I am very down-to-earth. Just this weekend, I have been running a three-day bootcamp with 50 of my clients here in the UK. Do you know, we get to the end of it, and like, I am seeing the transition of when they come in to when they go, I see like they have all levelled up, and now I am starting to see all the Trustpilot reviews and all the reviews coming in, and you are seeing people now coming through.
They are like, “I have only spent three days with Alasdair, but his energy is infectious.” Just seeing how they have just levelled up their life just a little bit, that gives me purpose. It really does. I know that if I keep doing what I am doing, I am made. I do not necessarily mean made financially. I am made with my heart.
You mean your cup is overflowing.
That is exactly it. My heart is full. My soul is full, and I know I am doing a good thing. For the first time in my life, I am content. I am just going to leave it at that. I am content. I am content with where I am.
I can feel it. I can see it.
I just want to emphasise that there are going to be people tuning in to this, and they are money-hungry. They are money-hungry. I was that guy. Let me just ask you this question. If you could take money off the table and not have to think about money, comfortably make £5,000 a month, and never have to worry about it, what would you really do in your life? If money were not a big factor, what would you really do in your life? Most people are not doing what they want to do. They are doing what they have to do to keep the bills paid. If you could create income, passive income, and active income, but doing something you love, what would you do? What would it be? Who would you help?
How To Reach A State Of Contentment And A Feeling Of Purpose
I’ll ask you then to finish wrapping it up. If you were to give one bit of advice to the audiences out there about what they can do to get to the state, what’s one action they can do to start the process of getting to where you have just described, which is a state of contentment, a feeling of purpose, a feeling of also what I am hearing of giving, being opened up, not being invisible, but in just in general, where you are at, which is just contentment and giving and like doing what you feel great about doing.
What can one do when they are in your situation, two kids at home, needing to be the provider and the protector? That’s often the biggest pushback I get is easy for you to say. You’re successful. That’s that. That’s what they would say to me. Of course, you’re coming from a position of like, you’ve done. No, they’re like, “I am not in that situation. I have got a mortgage. I have got all the things you talked about in the earliest.” Didn’t we all have that? Give us give audience. Number one, what are your things that are actionable this week?
I am going to give you three things, not one. The first thing is, I want you to understand that the speed of implementation is the key to success. There is no such thing as someday. Someday never comes. Make it now, not tomorrow, not in an hour, now. Whatever you want to do, do it now. Stop putting things off, stop coming up with bullshit excuses for why you cannot change, stop telling yourself the story that is keeping you where you are, and say, “From this moment onwards, this is my new story.”
That means drawing a line under the sand of whatever bullshit you are telling yourself to why you are at where you are at, whatever excuse you keep coming up with, get rid of it, accept it, and move on. We cannot change anything on that side, but we can only change something on that side. First things first, now is the time, not tomorrow, not next week, not next month. The second thing is to stop thinking about what you don’t have and start thinking about what you have got. We all focus on lack. Listen, every single person has a mobile phone. If they have not, they have got bigger problems.
The reality is that most people listening to this will have a mobile phone because they are listening to something. This is your meal ticket. Who do you know on your phone that can help you do something? Who do you know on your phone that can just listen to you for five minutes and help you overcome something? Number one, now is the time. Number two, write down every single day everything you have around you that can help you.
Be so grateful for what you have got and not what you have not got. Number three, pick something, one thing, and stick to it to improve it. We get too attached to trying to change too many things. When you try to change too many things, you end up changing nothing. Pick one thing you are going to work on right now and do nothing else until you have improved that. For me, I had to improve my mindset. That is all I did.
When you try to change too many things, you end up changing nothing. Pick one thing you will work on right now and do nothing else until you have improved it. Share on XI focused on improving my mindset, becoming more positive, and then, when you become more positive, do the next thing. Do not overwhelm yourself. If you take on too many things, you are going to overwhelm yourself. Overwhelm is a thief of execution, which means you are not going to do anything, and you are going to stay in the rut, not going to happen. Just get out of your own way and just do something.
Answering Five Rapid-Fire Questions
Thank you. I am going to ask you five questions that I finish off every show with. I just want you to give me what comes to your heart and mind in that moment. Who would you like to say sorry to, given the chance? I did not say they were going to be easy.
There are just five questions. That would be Lisa, my wife.
What are you proud of being or doing in your life?
I am proud of the fact that I serve people. I am proud of the fact that I have people who look up to me and respect what I am doing. That is what I am proud of. I think mostly I am proud that I am happy that my children look up to me, and they are like I have got a social media presence and my daughter is nineteen, and a lot of her friends follow me. I know she is like, “That is embarrassing,” but I know deep down she is really proud. I love that. I am proud of that. I am proud of the fact that people look up to me.
When did you receive kindness while needing it most and expecting it least?
I have got a good friend in my life, and he is one of my original clients. His name is Joe. I mentioned him earlier. Joe is a really good friend of mine, and he has become really successful in property. You know, he reaches out to me all the time and just checks in on me, and not many people do that. I have got a few people in my life who do that. I have got Joe.
I have got somebody who works in my business called Adam. He is always looking after me and making sure that I am all right. When you are giving to a lot of people, it is very easy for them to forget, but I do have some people in my life who look after me and look out for me with no agenda. Does that make sense? We do not need anything back. It is really rare. I value these people massively.
That is your little tribe. What did your mother or father teach you that you frequently remind yourself of?
You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. I say it all the time. My dad taught me that all the time. My dad taught me two things. You can take a horse to water and never make it, but you cannot make it drink. That is what you have to realise. I can help your clients, I can help my clients.
You’ve got to help yourself.
Secondly, you cannot win an argument with an idiot.
That is a hundred. The last one is, what’s your superpower?
Directness. I can cut through the bullshit. I have severe ADHD. I have superpowers, I will tell you that. I do not even know what they are yet, but I know they are there, and I can cut through the noise, I can cut through the bullshit, and I can sniff it a mile off. When I have a client giving me a load of nonsense, I am like, “Time out, shut up, stop talking, stop bullshitting me, just give me the truth.” They love it.
Brilliant.
A Free Ticket To Tell The World Event
I want to leave you with one thing.
Actually, give me three.
It is up to you what you do with this, and if you want to utilise it or not. Look, there is no cost to this at all, but it is a gift that you can give to either yourself or one of your clients. I would happily gift you or one of your clients a ticket to my event because I know we can help them. Obviously, it is in the UK, so they have got to figure that out, but I would happily gift him a ticket to come completely complimentary on you, not me, because you have hosted. That is my gift to you and your clients.
What do you have to do? What am I doing?
Give one of my gifts a ticket to my event. Tell the world to you or one of your clients. That is my gift to you for letting me come on your show, and then you can do whatever you want. You can run it as a competition. You can help one of your clients with it.
I actually have someone in mind I’d like to give it to.
Your call. Mate. You can give it to whoever you want. We normally sell that.
They’re in the UK.
Entirely your call, but it is not from me. It is from you.
When is it?
January.
I will do that.
I know we can help people, and I know you might know people who need it as well.That is my gift. Look, I want to thank you for letting me come on. I am sure you like the show. I am sure your audiences are great. Listen, I hope I have given value.
Go out, take action, and get over yourself. Do something even if it makes you uncomfortable, and you will be a completely different person after 365 days. Share on XIf I have to do a lot of talking, it means I am doing a lot of direction here and making you go this way and that way. I was just listening for myself, to be honest. How was it? I forgot about the audience for a second. I am just like, “This is an interesting fella.”
Listen, I will give you three things. Go out, take action. Go out, get over yourself, and go out and please just do something every day that makes you uncomfortable. Even if that is speaking to a stranger, just do something that makes you really uncomfortable. Let me tell you something, in 365 days, you will be a completely different person.
Amen.
On that bombshell.
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About Alasdair Cunningham
Alasdair Cunningham is the founder of Tell The World, a program focused on confidence, visibility, and personal transformation for founders and entrepreneurs. Before building successful businesses and completing more than 550 property deals, Alasdair started his career as a mechanic, eventually walking away from security with no clear plan and very little money to his name. His journey through business success, financial loss, depression, and rebuilding became the foundation for the work he does today.
Alasdair speaks openly about fear, identity, self-sabotage, and the emotional cost of staying invisible even when you know you want more from life. His direct, no-polish style has resonated with hundreds of people seeking real behavioral change rather than motivation alone. Through his work and speaking, Alasdair helps people confront the internal patterns holding them back and build the confidence to take action before comfort quietly becomes a trap.
