Episode 20
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I'm going to go ahead and get started.
Welcome back to the Women in Writing podcast. My name is Christina. I'm your host. I'm a six figure freelance writer and I'm so excited. I have the wonderful Gail here. She has a lot of life experience. She's one of the most interesting guests I've ever talked to. She will share everything about like her journey, kind of like taking drugs and being like a high school dropout to like really creating millions and this abundance in her life.
She will definitely inspire you.
Hello and welcome to the wonderful Gail Taylor. Hi, Christine. Thanks for having me. How are you today? I'm doing great. I'm excited to interview you. [00:01:00] You are like one of the most inspiring like women I was, talking on here all the time because you basically went from like a high school dropout to a financial advisor.
To self made millionaire to like following your passion for music. Is that correct? Yeah. I'm not sure if I got the order, right? That's how the journey went. Yeah. So what happened was I was working as a financial advisor actually for 25 years. And. I loved it. Like it was a passion.
I really loved it. But then when I was in my late fifties, I started taking piano lessons and I had no background in music. I had never had a music lesson in my life. I had no background and oh my God, I just fell in love with it. And so after a couple of years of playing the piano, I thought, you know what?
I'm going to retire a little earlier than I had planned, and I'm going to study music full [00:02:00] time. I was financially independent, so I was able to do that. And yeah, so that's what I did when I was 61. I sold my practice, and I started studying music full time. And two years into that, I thought I'm going to reinvent myself as a musician.
And when I told folks that, I kept getting, Oh my God, that's so inspiring. I'm going to go do, but eat something they had put on the back burner. Yeah. And Mr. God, Christina, when I heard that so over and over again, I thought, Whoa, I'm going to come out of retirement. I'm going to start my own business, Gail Taylor music.
And I'm going to help folks become their best selves. I'll be a keynote speaker and I'll use my music and my personal stories and help folks become their best selves. So yeah, that's how I got here as a, as an empowerment advocate for anyone that's trying to level up. I love that because, [00:03:00] just looking at you, it's just crazy that, like how much life experience you have and everything, right?
Yeah, there's no doubt. There's 40 years of studying personal growth and peak performance that I can share. Yeah, we talked about Tony Robbins as well, because last year in 2023, I was in one of like his programs. Like it was the first program for me, Unleash Her Power Within. So it's like a. Yeah.
women's program that went over several weeks and there was like the kind of like digital ticket, because of my little one, I couldn't make it live. But one day I really want to make it live. And I think that's inspiring, and you started in the 70s, or basically like when he started out Tony Robbins, you were like right there and learn from him, right?
That's actually when I started studying personal growth was around the same time he started teaching it. So yes, he was one of the earlier. I call them gurus, [00:04:00] although I know he says, I'm not your guru. But he actually started with Napoleon Hill, think and grow rich. And probably a lot of your listeners have read that book because it was yeah, it was very cutting edge at the time.
And so I continued with that. I continued with, Napoleon Hill, and Deepak Chopra, and Norman Vincent Peale, and Tony Robbins, and then I continued on into, I still, I just finished listening to the Four Agreements. The book while I was at the gym. And yeah, it's a very wide range of material.
And I didn't really just read these books. I studied them. I really learned from them. I practiced what they were offering and was able to design the life I wanted because of it, which was pretty cool. And that's so amazing. So basically the Like life you created like the [00:05:00] money that you created when you were younger was all from being a financial advisor, correct?
Yeah. Yeah, and what happened was Like you mentioned earlier in the call that I was a high school dropout. What happened was my father died when I was 12 years old and had a really hard effect on me. My mom moved us from a little town in northern Ontario To a city to Ottawa and the city pretty much swallowed me up.
I was doing drugs. I was doing alcohol. I was engaging in high risk behavior before my 13th birthday. And yeah, I was pretty messed up. And then I quit school when I was 16. And I kept like with this mind altering substance use and partying for 10, 15 years. And then I woke up one day in my 20s and thought, man, there's gotta be more to life than this.
And that's actually when I started on this [00:06:00] journey of trying to create my own life. And it's funny because you get a dysfunctional 20 year old that's, using substances every day. What's their focus and goal going to be, right? Going back to think and grow rich. Pick your passion. Of course, mine was, I wanted to be financially independent.
I wanted the sports car and the nice coat and Yeah, so I literally went on a quest. I started studying how people that are wealthy became wealthy. And I literally went on a quest to find that out. And during that journey, that's when I ended up discovering that I would like to be a financial advisor and do the education and the training and the work that I had to do in order to be that.
So how did your family react to that? that change? Was it then, like back at the time, like really welcome? Did they believe you? Did they support you? Or like, how was that? [00:07:00] Definitely they supported me. And even though I I'm gonna put a caveat there, they were, my family has always been behind me and always supported me.
However, I come from, there's six of us, right? So I have five siblings and myself. And with my mom, with my dad dying, my mom was in her mid thirties. When that happened, she ended up having five teenage daughters. At the same time as a single mom, and so the path that I ended up veering on was quite a bit different than my sisters all live in the country, and they love it and they embrace it.
And they, they're very much environmentalist they care about our world so much, but in a very different way. From a very different perspective, I'm the corporate city girl and they're the the more country and down to earth folks. And so I did feel like a [00:08:00] black sheep in my family.
There's no doubt. I felt like an outcast, but that was internal. That was something that I had to work through myself because they weren't projecting it on me. They were very accepting. That's amazing. I love that. I definitely resonate with that feeling. Like when I like started from my writing journey, like a lot of people in my family would be like, what, we are not writers, like only hard work pays off, like all this stuff.
But I think it's for a lot of people. Because, writing and like being creative, for you, obviously your financial career was something like they could be proud of, like in a traditional society sense, it's sometimes when you're like creative and go they might not understand, like, why are you changing directions?
And that would have been like one of my questions as well. So how was it when you were like 61 and you started to go like full time into music? Like, how was that for them also [00:09:00] and for you as well? Oh, I think they were all pretty good with it because that's part of my personality. So they expected it out of me.
In fact, a really interesting thing happened. I needed people to practice with. So a couple of my sisters had played piano for a lot of their lives, like just little tinkering with it. And one of them was a singer. So I got them to form a family band. So the three of us were in the band so that I could practice in front of audiences.
So we get laid together, maybe 35 people and we do our songs. And then the other two sisters thought, Oh, I want to, I want in on this. So one learned how to play the guitar and one learned how to play the drums. And the next thing, the five of us are. Or in a band called the Howlin Wannabes, and we did, we only played we practiced regularly together and then we played once a year.
For all the family [00:10:00] and now they're still at it. I had to back out cause I got too busy with the, this new career of mine, but they're still doing it. And now they're playing with open mics and they're just, it's just awesome to, to have a family that all engages in music now. I love that. That's amazing.
That's really inspiring. And who's singing? One of the sisters. Yeah. One of my youngest sisters. Can you sing as well? Or no, I can't. I did take during that two years that I was studying bass, guitar, keyboard, songwriting. Vocals. Ear training, like I was encompassing the whole gambit, but I did, I realized that my voice wasn't, I can hold a tune like I wasn't sitting off key, but the quality of my voice wasn't a natural and the amount of work that I would have had to do practicing every day.
My preference was to practice on the piano. I love the [00:11:00] keyboards. I love the piano. And the songwriting came natural to me, and that was my superpower. And I think it's because I talk so much. And songs are really just stories turned into lyrics. Yeah, that's amazing. So what are you doing in your company right now?
What is your like, what is your main focus? Is it because you're also like a keynote speaker with all the personal growth, personal development, like all the kind of like life experience you have? Is it the keynote speaking, or what is it for you that's your main focus right now? Yeah. So right now it's the keynote speaking, and I actually have a booking agent that's in the process of booking me out for the next 18 months.
So the keynote speaking is a big focus, but when I'm on stage doing the keynote speeches and I share a story with you. Often there's a song that was inspired by [00:12:00] that part of my journey. And so on the big screen on the stage, I'll play that song with the video that's in the background, get the audience up dancing to it and get a few people out of their comfort zone, get some dopamines going.
So I do use I believe that in music as a healing And so I do use my music in the keynote speeches. And the whole purpose of the book that I'm writing is so that the folks that hear my speeches will have a takeaway, they will have something that they can continue on with over the days to come to keep studying the tools and implementing them into their lives.
So what are the kinds of events that you're going to? Typically, so, so the three topics, my three main topics are mental health and addiction. So I talked to folks about how to love an addict. [00:13:00] So part of my journey, because I used, I would, I abused substances for 10, 15 years. I also had a son that became an opioid addict.
And right now I don't know about. England, but I know in North America, we have an opioid epidemic and people are overdosing and dying like in Canada alone. We lose like 2022 people a day. Wow. That's crazy. A day. I just know I shared that with you. My husband is from the U S I'm from Germany and it's just crazy.
Like comparing just the two worlds, because, like the people that went to like high school with me, no one was really using drugs, like maybe People would like smoke weed or something, when they were younger or something, but my husband said there's at least 22 people in his the same age as him that graduated with him that overdose already.
And I was shocked by it that statistic as well. [00:14:00] Yeah, the United States and Canada have a very similar statistic. Yeah, it's because the opioids like that a lot, especially the middle class kids that are using it and young people or even a little bit older people are like, they want to be doing the pharmaceutical ones, but what they do, the dealers are doing these pill mills where they're.
They're cutting it with fentanyl, and they're making it look like the pharmaceutical ones, right? So it's like a fake. And so people are taking them thinking that they're just taking not a street drug, but a pharmaceutical street drug because they're still buying it on the street, but it's not it's cut with fentanyl and so yeah, these overdoses are going crazy.
And when somebody is inactive addiction, their personality changes a lot and they. are very challenging, like anyone with a mental disorder. So they so my speech is really about how to [00:15:00] how to love your addict and how to understand what codependency is all about, how to understand what enabling is.
And when you're you think you're helping your loved one addict and you're actually harming them, and how to set boundaries. I wrote this song called wings. So if any of your listenings are interested, it's called wings. And my band or my moniker name is Gail T as charged. So you can see it's G A I L T as charged.
And you could see on YouTube or Spotify or anywhere you could see all my songs and my music, but I actually had a call from a conference, a big conference on recovery in London. In your neck of the woods that phoned me up and said, we're doing it. We're having this big conference on addiction. And we want to know if we can open the conference with your song and your video to set the stage.[00:16:00]
And I think there was going to be like 500 people and it was like doctors and counselors and policymakers. And it was, a lot of folks that were in your world trying to figure out how to deal with addiction. On your end of the pond. And so yeah, so to speak at conferences like that. And then another topic I have is called empowering women and empowering women is, it's almost like you said you had gone to a Tony Robbins one I think that was.
So that type of an audience, it's an audience of women. I worked in a male dominated industry for that 25 years, right? Financial advisors are like 85 percent men and 10 to 15 percent women. And so navigating through that corporate world that in man's world industry I talk a little bit about some of the tools that you use and some of the ways that, that you can just fit in there perfectly.
It [00:17:00] doesn't have to be a negative. It really doesn't have to be a negative. And so yeah, so that's my other topic. And then my third one is leveling up. And leveling up is just helping folks become their best self. So it could be a conference of nurses, teachers, insurance brokers, dentists. It doesn't matter.
It's a speech about peak performance and how to Get yourself to the next level, how to understand why some people are successful and others aren't. What's the real triggers that, what are the tools that are being used? Yeah, that's amazing. Really cool. Yeah. I will definitely pump pop the link for your song below as well.
And you are on a book project and you will publish that hopefully by the end of the year or when do you have it planned? The plan is by the end of spring. I actually did a Kickstarter project as a fundraiser [00:18:00] at the end of 2023. And my goal was to raise 10, 000, which I did. And so now I'm in the process of Working with I've got the I've written the introduction.
I've written the outline. I've got all the chapters designed as to what's going, what stories are going into the chapter and what tools. And now I'm at the point of, am I going to write this entire thing on my own? Or am I going to find a ghostwriter to work with me because it's their livelihood? And, Want it to be a really powerful statement.
And so yeah, that's where I'm at. But whichever way I go I will have it out by the end of late spring. That's amazing. I love that. A hundred percent. And is it what will you share in this book? What is the purpose of that book? It's a combination of two genres. It's memoirs because it's all [00:19:00] these stories of my life.
And then it's tools that I used. So right from that very beginning when I told you about the journey that I had when I was 12 years old and what happened. And then how I was able to use the tools that I use. Now there'll be different tools at different times, but one of the most powerful tools is your self talk, right?
It's that internal dialogue. It's, you could go with Norman Vincent Peale and say, it's the power of positive thinking, but. I find that even when you use that term, people get turned off and say, you can't just start thinking positive. That's too hard to do. And so I try to present it as your internal dialogue.
And it's the conversations that you're having in your head. And that's huge. So if you make the decision, I made the decision that I'm [00:20:00] going to to write this book by the end of spring. So my internal dialogue is that I will have this book done by the end of spring. If I found myself in my head saying, Oh, how are you going to do that?
You have so many other projects on the go. Then I have to shift that's not an acceptable internal dialogue and there's different ways to do it. Over the years, I used to use a little mantra. I actually stole this from an Olympic athlete. She used to do it and it was, I used to say garbage in garbage out.
If I found myself in my head, the and Tony Robbins will say this. If you're in your head, you're dead. So if I found myself in my head giving some limited beliefs, I'd say garbage in, garbage out. It was good when I was in the car and I could just yell it. Because if you're on the street and you yell it, people start looking at you.
So anyway, I would say garbage in, garbage out. And then I would shift[00:21:00] what do you want to create? What's this book all about? What time are you going to put aside to be able to work on it? The other thing that I did as a musician and musicians make a lot of their money from their merchandise.
And so instead of doing the typical t shirt and stuff. I created a line of jewelry, so I'm actually wearing this pendant today that says, staying young. This line of jewelry is like a tactile trigger. So if you find yourself in your head, even if you wear it underneath your shirt or keep it in your pocket or wear it on your neck, it doesn't matter.
But when you find yourself in your head, you grab the pendant and scratch where the engraving is and you use that To Oh, I got to do this shift. I got to do this mind shift. And so having that thing to that physical change. And you can say like one of the pendants says, I got this.
Instead of [00:22:00] the garbage in garbage out, it's, I got this. And then you start thinking in your, and you end up training your brain so that You don't have the limited beliefs anymore. It just becomes habit to create what it is that you're looking for in life. So yeah, that's one of the tools that I share.
And that was a game changer for me. That was definitely a game changer for me. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. Like doing so many different things in personal growth, was it for you always to keep going or like looking for the next thing? Or was it just because like you had such great results that you just.
wanted to keep going. It was a little bit of both. It was at the, when it started, when the journey started, it was to get away from a dysfunctional life. And then [00:23:00] I did make some huge mistakes. In fact, I forgot to quit. Partying right. I started on this quest to become financially independent and to have all this success.
So now all of a sudden I'm working hard and playing hard. It was the eighties. I was still partying and I didn't realize till many years later that I actually had a problem. At the time I still didn't even know I had a problem. I thought I just liked to party. And didn't know what addiction was.
Yeah. And so as I learned and as my journey continued, it ended up being a little bit of both, a little bit about continuing to take on new challenges. I have a type A personality. So all your listeners won't, everybody fits into a different category. So with my type A personality I crave productivity.
I just crave it. And I have since I was very little because that's how [00:24:00] I'm wired. So learning how you're wired is huge. A hundred percent. That's what I, are you familiar with human design as well? Yes. I am. Nice. I would be a manifesting generator. Yes. Manifesting generator.
That's what I am. That's a high energy people and like doing a lot of stuff and productivity. Yeah. I'm the same. Cool. Love that. Really cool. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Definitely. So what would be like one piece of advice that you would give the listeners to keep going, keep them motivated?
I think one, the one big thing, and again, this was, this is an important I, it's an important part of my life, but it's about giving back, right? I try to do an act of kindness every [00:25:00] day. And I find that by doing an act of kindness. It really gives you a real satisfaction of the type of person you are.
And it changes somebody else's day and it doesn't have to be a big thing. I'm talking about, you're going through the drive through to buy your coffee and you buy the coffee for the car behind you. Yeah. Yeah. You know how much you just. Added an uptick to their day. Yeah. Right that day my husband and I did sometimes as well.
And sometimes it's so cool. 'cause sometimes, you'll buy the coffee for the car behind you, so they'll buy the coffee for the car behind them, so they'll buy the, and it just continues and everybody gets a smile on their face because of this little act of kindness. It's like a ripple effect.
Or smile at a homeless person. Don't pretend they're invisible. Just smile. Sometimes when I go to the stores, I don't know about [00:26:00] what's happening in England, but in Canada, I'll go to the grocery store or some of the big box stores and they'll say, would you like to give an extra two dollars for some children's local sports event that they're trying to help some inner cities kids get sports equipment, for two bucks.
I've done my act of kindness for today. And I really believe that, yeah, if you're focused on out and you're looking at other people and not focused in it, it allows in to be a lot healthier. Yeah, 100%. That's so great that you say that. I love that. Yeah, because then you give and then you receive.
It's almost like it's like karma, right? Absolutely. And everybody has their different beliefs, right? I believe in the universal energy. Everybody has their God, their version of what [00:27:00] it is, their faith, right? But to me, that's that faith is very important. And, I refer to it as the universal energy.
So if somebody cuts me off in my car, I'll look up at the universe and smile and say, Oh, you owe me one. It's not it doesn't it doesn't have to be a negative. You don't have to have your mood shifted because somebody cut you off. Who knows? They might be speeding because their wife's in the hospital having a baby.
Yeah, I know what's going on. Or maybe it's something that, you know, you are delayed for, I don't know, two seconds and then, something bad would have happened or something. You don't know. Exactly. You don't know. Yeah, exactly. Very cool. Very inspiring. Thank you so much for that great conversation.
So I'll definitely pop your link below. Also like the link of the song wing. It was called wing or wings? Wings. Wings with an S. [00:28:00] Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Thank you. And like I said, like your story is really inspiring and it's. It's like crazy because a lot of people like when they have their career, they settle in and they don't keep going.
But like with you, like you said, like you went full time into a music career, retired early. And then you created something new from then, like from that point of view, and it's great to see that there's endless possibilities, right? And it's never too late. No, it's never too late.
Yeah. Passion and purpose. Live with passion and purpose. Love that. Thank you so much. That was all right. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Have the best rest of your day. We definitely keep in touch.
Thank you so much for listening again to the Women in Writing podcast. It was wonderful to have you again. [00:29:00] Hopefully, if you like this podcast, please share it, please rate it. I hope you had a lot of key takeaways from Gail. Mine was definitely to believe in yourself, keep going, and that you're never too old to start anything.
I'm going to go ahead and get started.
