Day 236: Phillip Gornail
“I think what I’ve been able to do in the last year for myself is to quiet the noise and to listen to the whispering voice on the inside of me. I’ve often told people that that voice only needs to whisper because it’s powerful. Power does not need volume to have an audience, and the audience that is really important right now in our lives is the audience of one – you.”
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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Phil, for agreeing to be part of this Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?
Phillip Gornail: My name is Phillip Gornail. I am a New Yorker through and through. I believe in pinstripes because I’m a Yankee fan, and I never apologize for that.
Toni: Fantastic! Well Phil, when you think of that word inspiration, who do you think you inspire, and how might that happen?
Phil: Anyone that gives me the time to be in their presence and be a listener. I think that throughout my life I’ve been a magnet to help others. People come to me with their challenges. They come to me … I have very strong friendships because it’s not at the surface – and I’m sorry if that phone ringing in the background gets on the recording …
Toni: It’s quite all right.
Phil: Yeah … but anyone, and it seems broad and generic, but from friends, family, cousins, my children primarily, I hope I do a really good job in inspiring them, because I firmly believe in inspiration being the catalyst of perspiration, and my intention is to have people take action.
Toni: Can you give me an example of how you believe that you might have inspired someone or what your intention was? What happens when someone’s with you?
Phil: Well, you know, because I’m one of these individuals where life has always been … well, maybe like everyone … it’s always easier to see life outside looking into someone else’s issues. So for me for the longest … my life was probably going down, and I was able to spend a lot of time helping other people; not helping myself. So where I think I’ve been able to help people more is because I discovered that I needed to work on myself about four … six years ago now. I started doing that work, and now I’ve become a living testimony for other people to say “Dude, how did you do that?”
So any opportunity that is given to me by the grace of God to have someone notice something and then come to me wanting to know how I did that; first, I do my best to discover what’s missing for them, because they have it within themselves to do it all. So it’s not because I did something mechanically, step one, step two, step three that I got some results. It’s the fact that I found it within myself to want to do it that I think is most important. So I do my best to listen for where it is in others that there’s something that’s not occurring to them.
And then there are those people who are so have-at-it and going for it and their nose to the grindstone, and they’re doing all of the mechanical stuff because they are driven. I tell them “Keep going; you have it. There’s nothing more to learn. You have the drive. You have the passion. You speak eloquently about your dream and that thing that’s inside of you. There’s nothing more to do. Perhaps there’s just someone to hire, because the mechanical part is not what you need to learn.”
So in any given time that I have the space, someone allows me in to be in communication with them, to be in community with them, I think I do a really good job of listening.
Toni: How might you then, using those talents and gifts that you work with others – and also I love the words “living testimony” – how do you then believe you help people to explore their own potential?
Phil: Wow. I’m writing a book right now called Inside Out: Discovering Your First Person Point of View, and I think what I’ve been able to do in the last year for myself is to quiet the noise and to listen to the whispering voice on the inside of me. I’ve often told people that that voice only needs to whisper because it’s powerful. Power does not need volume to have an audience, and the audience that is really important right now in our lives is the audience of one – you.
I don’t know why you came to be on earth. I have discovered my own purpose and am continually rediscovering what it is and then creating from there. If I can do that, then it’s possible that you can also. I am not here to be judge or jury for anyone else, but perhaps supporter. I’m realizing and recognizing more and more that all of the things that occur in the world are meaningless. I’ve gone through seminars and trainings and listened to speakers who said that, and I thought I believed that, but I didn’t really understand it.
So I really, truly understand that what’s important for me to help someone understand is … it’s a very simple question: “How are your beliefs working out for you? What are the results that you’re getting?” So if you believe a thing and it’s working for you, keep believing it and run with that; in fact, fly with it.
In the beginning of the book The Divine Matrix, the writer – and his name escapes me and it’s going to bug me. I’m not home, so I can’t reach behind me where I know the book is – but there’s a poem that I have to paraphrase where the people were at the ledge and they said “No, it’s too far.” And the teacher is saying “Go” and “No, we’re going to fall,” and he’s saying “Go” and then they keep saying “No, no, no,” and then he pushed them, and then they flew. They didn’t even know that they had wings.
Toni: But he did.
Phil: But he did, right? So for me, it’s helping individuals really get for themselves. Don’t take my word for it. It took me this long to get to where I am. That’s why I consider myself the recovering know-it-all.
Toni: A recovering know-it-all?
Phil: Absolutely.
Toni: Well, that leads beautifully into the next question, which is, what inspires you, and what do you need to be inspired. And being a recovering know-it-all, does that play a part in that?
Phil: Yeah. That all came about taking a self-assessment. I’ll answer your question by saying this: What inspires me is creation. What inspires me is the ability to actually take a thought and have it occur. And so, I probably spend the bulk of my time now – and I just previously shared with you – the better part of my day is spent on my radio show, “Marvelous Mondays with Harry and Phil” with my good friend Harry Shade.
And when I say “better part of my day,” a lot of people take that reference to mean quantity of day. I just mean the best part of my day is in the creation of that show, which is around positive-news-only information and people.
So, if it’s creating a video to promote the show or the person that we’re going to be interviewing, if it’s creating a note around the subject matter, whatever it is around that, that’s what inspires me, because I know that I will be living my intention to be a positive person in the world.
Toni: Okay, okay. Well let me ask you then, have you always been like this? You’ve alluded that maybe you weren’t, I’m not sure. But what’s happening with the Get Inspired! Project and it seems from my perspective – people will have their own obviously when they listen or read the transcripts of the interviews – but from my perspective, there are a lot of people that are struggling to really get to that place where they know, they know what they need to be doing, and there’s either been a process, an evolution, or a moment. What part of that did you go through? Was it a process, was it an evolution, or was a moment?
Phil: It was all three. Again, how’s that working out for you? I had to take an assessment of my life and say “If you know so much, why does your life look like this?” And I’ve said this before to other people – this is not a judgment. It’s just an equation. It’s like “Well if I know this much, why doesn’t this match up?”
I had to take responsibility. I had to take 100% responsibility for my life and say then perhaps there’s more to know, there’s less to know, there’s more to discover, there’s faith, there’s belief – there’s a lot going on that I had to take a look at.
The moment was really my divorce, which caused me to really be in a funk, depressed and didn’t want this. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand where I was in my life at that time. Business was failing. It was post 9/11. I had low esteem for myself, a person who has been a highly confident person all his life. So it wasn’t matching up.
The evolution was after losing it all, after being at my own personal ground zero, but having enough love for God, love for my children, and knowing that there was a greater purpose in my life caused me to start doing the self-analysis. From that, it’s just been an evolution of discovery of self.
I think the more aware I am of who I am and where my power is and what my gift is for the world based on the gifts that God has given me or that I chose in the throne room before I decided that I wanted to be human being on this earth and these were the parents I was going to come through. If you understand that language, then you understand where I’m coming from. If you don’t, then I ask you to go look someplace else. I’m not the teacher, but I can say that I am so comfortable in my skin right now, it really doesn’t take much to inspire me; it’s just keep living the intention that I have to be a positive impact in the world.
Toni: Are there tools or resources that you tend to reach for on a consistent basis when you may wake up a certain day and say “Yeah, you know, I’m looking for a little inspiration here today?” What do you tend to reach for?
Phil: That’s a great question. Two things – one, silence. It is the greatest equalizer for my day to be still, and I’m saying this as someone in the hall is vacuuming; there’s planes coming by. I can probably hear the floor creaking beneath me if I choose to hear the noise, but at the same token, while all of those things are going on, I’m very present; very present to this moment called now.
There are a lot of things I would like to be doing. My kids live in South Florida, and I’m here in New York. I’d love to be hugging my daughter right now. I get very present to hugging my daughter, to hearing her laughter in my mind, to beam with my sons playing ball. I get very present to those things that I most want that don’t involve materialism. It doesn’t involve some extreme, extraordinary circumstance for it to occur. I can be very present to it. I can be present to the best tasting cinnamon bun or hot fudge sundae that I’ve ever had in a moment called now. It doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking about where I am presently, but I’m making the best out of the moment.
And then the other thing that I do to really get inspired is I’m an extremely competitive person, so I either grab my pool stick, my bowling ball, my ping-pong paddle, I call a friend of mine and we set the time to go duke it out, you know, because winning for me comes in a number of different levels. It’s not just winning the game out of beating someone, because I love playing with people better than me. It’s the way I learn the most. The competitive part of me says “I don’t mind that you won; I’m just not crazy about losing.”
Toni: So what are you doing then to continue to explore your own potential to continue to live with that intention?
Phil: I keep meeting new people. I think … you know, one of my favorite phrases from one of my previous mentors, a pastor of a huge church here in New York, on New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve, he would say “Okay, great, this year is over, we’re going into this new year; make new mistakes.”
So I’m doing my best to meet new people and discover their points of view to have some new reference I didn’t even know was possible. I deliberately make sure that the mistakes that I’m making, which, you know, we’re human, we make mistakes, right? But it’s a new one. I’m not revisiting some old way of being.
So creating new habits, creating, discovering ways that people succeed in the world, so what can I pick up from that, and concentrating on what I’m great at. I’m not interested in people pontificating on my errors or the poor ways of being or the things that aren’t working. I discover it for myself; I’ll work on it. But what I found was – it’s an old mantra of mine, it’s still my creed, it’s at the bottom of all my emails – “relationships precede resources.” When you lack a resource, work on your relationships first.
So I look at my life from “Here’s what I give to the world, and here’s what I need – who do I need to know?”
Toni: Fantastic. What a great interview, and in such a short amount of time the amount of value that you have given for people to learn from that are listening or reading this interview from all around the world, and for being here today and being present with us with the Get Inspired! Project, we cannot thank you enough.
Phil: I am deeply, deeply honored. My hand is to my heart, and I send you tons and tons of love and blessings.
Toni: Thank you, Phil. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Take care of yourself.
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For more information about Phillip Gornail: MarvelousMondays.info, energy2synergy.info, mypleasur.info
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