Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - Turn Your Fear into Freedom - 062

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

Every single entrepreneur fears something, and learning to cope with that fear could be the single most important thing you do, both for yourself and for your business. In this episode, Bedros Keuilian speaks with fear management expert Tony Blauer, who shows you how to manage your fears and live up to your entrepreneurial potential. Watch or listen now to discover why self-awareness is pivotal when it comes to facing and overcoming your fears. “My reason why was big enough to help me overcome my fears.” - Bedros Keuilian Here’s what you’ll discover: 4:36 - Where the fear that entrepreneurs face comes from. 9:31 - Why you need both passion AND self-awareness to face your fears. 11:12 - How to unlock a deeper level of self-awareness in yourself. 15:25 - How to recognize what’s holding you back from living out your dreams. 23:45 - The four letter acronym to help you remember how to overcome fear. “Fear can be used as fuel, or it can stymie your growth.” - Tony Blauer

And I said to my wife, I stopped working for my dad and open up a martial arts school and teach self-defense. And she looked at me and she went, how are you going to do that? And as soon as she said that, I knew we were getting divorced. Like within a year, we were divorced. Welcome to another episode of the Empire podcast. This is an episode of The Inside Look. I'm Badros Kulian. And I have a very special guest today, Tony Blower.

Tony, how are you? Good, buddy. How are you? Good. Very good. Thanks for coming over, man. So we just got done with you, T. teaching fear management to my team here at Fit By the Boot Camp headquarters.

And of course, the Empire podcast is all about entrepreneurial growth, building empires. And you not only are an entrepreneur, but you have a very unique job as an entrepreneur. You work with some high-level people in the military, as well as entrepreneurs, who have to manage fear. Tell us what you do. My main business is really training law enforcement and military, professional martial artist, how to teach people of self-defense. And what I realized probably about three decades ago is we can have all these theories

about the mechanics of self-defense and how we do stuff, but if we can't manage our fear, we can't make stuff happen. And that evolution and that research led to the development of a program called No Fear, K-N-O-W Fear, and just understanding how fear influences

everything we do in our life and how it changes. It can be used as a fuel or it stymies your growth. So I kind of branched out in that entrepreneurial spirit of like, well, my passion for four decades has been training professionals how to teach hand-to-hand self-defense. I saw a greater calling and a bigger thing and how do I make the world a little bit safer in this epiphany one day was, man, if we taught people how to look at fear differently, that would change their lives. What helped you get that epiphany about fear? Just I was struggling with it from day one.

You know, I get asked all the time, how did I get started? And, you know, I say, well, my dad told me I should sign up for self-defense. But, you know, you peel that onion. You go, well, what made you want to take self-defense? Well, I wanted to be like Bruce Lee. Well, Bruce Lee wasn't, he didn't have his movies out at that time. So what was it? It was, I was afraid of getting mugged or attacked or kidnapped.

Or I had these crazy visions as a five-year-old, a six-year-old, a seven-year-old. So it was my fear and emoting that, sharing that with my parents. My dad said, well, why don't you take, you know, self-defense? and then studying the stuff, I realized that no matter how good I got as an athlete kicking, striking, blocking, I still have the same fear. I was like, well, that's wrong. Like, now that I'm good, why am I still scared? That's a huge epiphany because dad says, hey, go take self-defense and you're going to be better. Right.

You're not going to have this fear anymore. Well, you know how to kick and strike and defend yourself, but there's still this fear. So what made you start digging deeper into it? Like, what gives you this introspectiveness that you use? dig deeper and find out where fear comes from. And you hit the word nail and head there introspective. I was always, you know, whether you look at it as a gift or a curse, you know, if you say to me, hey, let's go to lunch, where do you want to go?

I'll go, where do you want to go? And you go, where you were? Like I'm, I overthink things to a fault, but the, the, in some areas of my life, that's a problem. In other areas, it kind of gave birth to this, where, you know, I would ask somebody, you know, what if he has a gun? if this happens? What if there's multiple saline? And their answer didn't satisfy me. And they'd say, well, you just do this. And my heart would start racing. I'd get adrenaline.

And I go, there's like something's wrong here. It's like all the research now coming out on breathing. And the relationship on your exhale and stuff. That's trial and error where people are like using technology like heart rate monitors and going, hey, when you do this, you downregulate your system. But this is like how long we've been breathing for? Like as a species. Right. But now it's only now. that all this research is coming out. So I just did that same stuff for 30, 40 years studied violence and it didn't matter what was going on. I was still look at the behaviors of a soldier, of a cop, of a citizen, and I started to notice that what made things happen was how they managed their fear, not what their movement was. Gotcha. So let's move that now into the entrepreneurial space.

Let's say I'm an entrepreneur and I've got this great idea for a product or a service. Now I know I don't know there's other products like this out there and I want to go out there and sell it on the internet and demonstrate it using social media, but I've got this fear of, well, I don't want to look stupid on the internet. I don't want to create a Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channel and people start judging me and criticizing me. I certainly don't want people to hate on me. I mean, I want their approval. I want their validation. What makes people fearless as entrepreneurs? In other words, you said some people can use fear as fuel and others get stifled by it.

Have you figured out what stifles some and fuels? others? A lot of people like to say things like this guy was born to do this or this guy. If you look, if you really research like greatness, you'll find that, there may be some like freaks, like you can say, hey, Mozart was a freak. Like at the young age, he could do that. But if you study, I don't know if you had a chance to read the book, The Talent Code, and some of these other books on neuroscience and learning, but you find out that there's actually, there was actually an experience and a condition that that, that, that, that, you know, that, predisposed the person to that.

Now, there had to be some passion and some art and all that. And so to come back to the entrepreneurial side, I think a lot of it is just when you, you know, figure out what your why is, which is I'm really passionate about stuff. And I ask people, you know, a lot of times I'll say to, like my team, I'll go, if there was no money and there was no rent and there was no food,

what would you be doing? Like, would you still be, would you still be getting people in shape and teaching people how to run their lies and be better, you know, like I said to you, you know, what a great crew, great energy. And, you know, you thank you. You say, yeah, they're great. And I look at that as a businessman. I go, that's on you.

It's how you lead them that inspires that. It's not just them. And so you remember the author, Wayne Dwyer? Yeah. Right? So he asked the question. He says, if you looked in the mirror and you didn't know how old you were, how old would you think you were.

I remember reading that going, holy shit. And then he says, if you didn't know where you lived and you looked at all the places in the world, where would you want to live and why aren't you living there? And if you didn't know what you did and you looked at all the things you could do, you know, what would you do? And why aren't you doing that? And that's all beautiful, but it comes down to what our talk is always about. It's fear. Like, why aren't you moving? Why aren't you getting this job?

Why aren't you? And so no matter what somebody wants to do, whether it's I got a better widget or I want to start an Instagram, what causes the hesitation is. is always fear. And there's no secret. People always go, what's the secret panacea? My father-in-law asks me now for, I've been married for 25, 26 years. And every year he comes to me and he says,

show me a move, show me one move. I go, Fred, there is no move. Like everyone's looking for the secret move. And there is one. What there is is self-awareness. You know, just really going, you know, what's holding me back here? Why aren't I doing this?

Because you could have, like, there's lots of guys that have access to money, but they can't be entrepreneurs, right? And there's some people who think that like entrepreneurship is like it's a gene, you gotta have, you gotta have it. So that's an interesting discussion too. Well, for me, I know it's a learned behavior because I don't come from a line of entrepreneurs at all. Right.

Going back to what you said, my why is so big, my need for freedom and experience and to give my kids the lifestyle that I never had, being an immigrant to this country, I'm willing to deal with any kind of hate, criticism, loss of reputation, loss of money, loss of market share, all those potentials for the upside of what if I don't lose reputation, what I don't lose money, what if I don't lose market share, then oh my gosh, I can give my kids and my family the life and the experiences and the freedom that I didn't have because I know I'm just fundamentally, I'm unemployable.

Like no one will give me a job. The two jobs that I've had in my life, I got fired from both. And I knew that I had to go create something where I could be my own boss. Right. But like everyone else, I was afraid of the what-ifs. Now, there was no Instagram then in Facebook. It was just, what if I actually create this software? My first thing was called high-tech trainer.

My first product is a software product. What if it fails and what if I get laughed at by the fitness industry? Because it was an online workout software back in 2003. Wow. But then I would always weigh that out against my big why, which is, well, if I don't do it, I'm going to have to go out and work for someone, which means now I've got a nine to five, which means I can't control the lifestyle and the experiences and the money that I'm making, which means my kids are going to grow up, probably broke or living middle income like I am. And I didn't want that. So my reason why I was big enough to help me overcome my fears. Do you find a person's, if there's someone, someone's really clear on their reason why that helps them overcome their fears?

100% and then there are still lots of people who Have the talent or the passion, but something's holding them back. That's why I always say there there's no situation awareness without self-awareness And the self-awareness part is that ability to say to yourself or to a confidant like I'm really scared to do this and then having People around you that go well, that's why you need to do that but it all comes back to you know you could have created like software for something else But while you were saying that, like internally, I'm smiling, going, you've always been physical, I'm guessing, and you like working out. And if you were in your previous life, if you were frustrated with shit going on and you just, you know, you just got fired from that job, you probably went to the gym and hit the weights and hit a bag and did some stuff. That was your intuition. That was your self-awareness that went, you know, I'm not going to code and build a website company.

I'm going to code. I'm going to figure out how to build a fitness app. was just an intuitive leap. And then you had the self-confidence. There was some clarity there, but that clarity is a self-awareness. So my big thing now is trying to get people to understand how important self-awareness is. And then self-awareness will actually create clarity to the fear spike. The fear spike is now the beacon of where you've got to go.

So I've got this theory that most people are actually self-aware. They just dilute it and make their self-awareness fuzzy. by taking other people's opinions into consideration, other people's thoughts into consideration. But most of us, if you're kind of going back to the onion, you peel away everything. Everyone knows what they need to do, what they need to do, but they go, yeah,

but my friend says I should do it this way, or society says I might want to do it this way, or I should go get a job and stay there for the next 20 years and retire with the gold Rolex watch and a pension plan. Even though the self-awareness says, you know what, you are unemployable, and you've got this amazing idea, and it can gain traction.

as an entrepreneur. So how do some people go, you know what? This whole software thing right now that I'm making, because this is what happened. I was making high tech trainer. I didn't know how to software code or program, so I found one of my personal training clients whose husband was a software programmer.

And I said, hey, if I give you 25% of the business, will you take this vision that I have? I'll make the workout videos. But then would you make it work on a, at the time it was a Palm Pilot? This is pre-Iphones, right? Would you make it work on this Palm Pilot? For those of you who don't know what a Palm Pilot is,

just do a Wikipedia search. these days and it's probably in the history archives. And so, but when I would get stressed out and freaked out over the idea of how the fuck do I make software work, I would go back to what was my true north, which is, you know what? I'm going to go get a win right now. A win is I'm going to go to the gym, train legs, train back, train chest, train shoulders, because that's where I'm good at. That's my zone of genius.

Get the endorphins, get the dopamine, get the happy hormones going, and then come back and tackle this bullshit of a software product, which I know is going to have a positive outcome in the end because I'll be helping people, but the process of code and technology, I'd rather eat a bullet, right? And so people, I believe, are aware, self-aware, but they override it with other people's thoughts. How do they stop that? So while you're talking, I remembered when the iPhones just first came out, and I'm an Apple junkie, and there was this guy, this buddy of mine, and so he sees me and like, I'm going, I'm loving my iPhone, it was first generation. So he goes out and gets one. And he shows up and he goes, I really like it. I'm really digging it, but the sound on

it is horrible. So he's using it. He gets a call and he's talking and he goes like, I can't hear shit. You know, I mean, I can hear the person, but it's really muffled. And he's using it. And I look at it and I go, peel the plastic off it. And he goes, what? And he just had never noticed. And so So my vision here is he had awareness, but there was another deeper level of self-awareness that plastic didn't come off. So I'm like that too. Like for example, I've been writing for 30 years and everyone asked me, when are you going to put your book out?

And I'm so creative with stuff that I'm like this artist that can never finish a painting because I have a new idea. Instead of going, you know, I remember reading years ago a maximum art is never done. So my self-awareness, like I have this clarity goes like, you just need to write your book. Why do you keep, I get my own explanation, but if you were my publisher, you'd have said, hey, give me back your advance, you suck, you know, you're committed to do this. So I get that, I agree with you. I have that self-awareness, I have it committed to stopping everything else and I'm just writing

the book, you know. So it's, I don't know if that Apple phone thing popped into my head and it was like, I think I think I'm using this right. I think I know what I'm doing. But no, there's another, there's another true. That's so true, isn't it? So the guy knew intuitively, like, how to use the phone, and he sees so much greatness in it. And he's still, you know, because you can still use the touchscreen was still working. The phone would ring. But he's just going, like, it just doesn't have the right volume. We just have to peel away other people's opinions, other people's suggestions, or just us trying to do the right thing. There's always another layer in this metaphoric onion where you get

down to and so I've gotten to the point where for me I don't have fear of writing the book I'm a good writer you know it's it's just when am I going to prioritize it with all the other things I think are super important you know and so again going back to the entrepreneur who's saying all right typically on the Empire podcast where you know hey Bedros hey Craig give us some tactical stuff to to market to increase the the volume of sales to increase the lifetime value of a client well all that happens once you've overcome this of building the product and selling the product. So the fear component, the mental component,

the emotional component is critical. Going back to peeling that the layers off. For most people, how many layers deep do you think the real solution is? The real answer, you know, that really depends on who that person is and what their upbringing was. You, being an immigrant, got exposed to a different, lifestyle and experience and a work ethic that the you know many of this generation entitled you know like get things fast you know quick fix you know

your your transformation would happen way faster than somebody else that grew up like you know silver spoon in their mouth I can't figure out you know why things aren't working and you know so so the so the real answer for me is like it's not automaton robotic like if you do this you know you're immediately successful and it's like here by my by my app it's you know you got to peel three layers right right this isn't this isn't like like a derm abrasion or you know so it's three layers for someone it's 30 layers for another right and and and and then you know and it's weird it's it's when you know like all the all the great stuff that that you put out in terms of like you've you guys have

have reverse engineered success and and those steps towards success and greatness I mean you study any great business person, there's certain pillars and milestones of behavior that when you reverse engineer it, they're consistent across all domains and fields. But why does this guy commit suicide? Why is this guy successful? Why does this have three, I have three hard attacks, but he's a billionaire? Like I've known people who are incredibly wealthy and they're incredibly miserable. I know people who, you know, they look on the outside, you know, they got all the shit going

and they're on their third hard attack. It all comes back to me, you know, is really about developing yourself. If I had a friend of mine, I play guitar, I'm not very good, but I was taking lessons years ago and this guy was, I mean, he played on session stuff for famous people and one of the best guitars I've ever seen. I would just sit there with my mouth open watching him and I said to him, there was Mark, I said, Mark, like, why aren't you on stage? You're like a guitar god.

And he was a stay-at-home dad. wife worked so that he could teach guitar and play sessions. And he said, I don't do drugs and I'm like parties. But he was so like, he didn't want to be a rock star. I wanted him to be a rock star. But he had clarity on what he wanted. He had self-awareness. So he didn't live, you know, he wasn't miserable that ever, like everyone would go, dude,

come to this party, you got to see that. I'm not interested. I'm raising my son. I play guitar every day. I teach guitar. And then when Sting comes to town, I play on his, you know, in the back of the, you know, the police and like he was working with like really high end yeah yeah and he was just happy i mean how many people go and take someone else's advice because you know you were just trying to be friendly

give him great advice hey mark why why aren't you on stage yourself right but he was so self-aware that he goes here's the three reasons why and so i'm happy right it all leads to happiness the end of the day i remember reading a study saying that if you ask someone why they're doing something so hey tony why are you working why is your whole life based on fear management, fear mitigation. And if we keep asking you why, you might say, well, why, because I want to make the world a safer place? Right, that was your first answer.

Well, why do you want to make the world a safer place? And keep asking why. They say, if you ask that seven to nine times, the answer is because it makes me happy. Ultimately, it makes you happy. In fact, the most selfish thing we do is donate to charities, even though it seems like the most selfless thing, like, oh, I'm gonna go help that charity,

I'm gonna build a well in their community, I'm gonna help a group of kids in that organization. But in reality, why do we do it? It feels good. Right. If it feels good, it makes us happy. Right. And so this guy knows that being on stage and drugs and late nights and alcohol is not his thing.

Yet people around him who see his talent who think they want the best for him go, hey, man, you should be on stage, rocking and rolling. Right. So so many of us listen to others instead of the inside voice, right, where it's concerned. And for entrepreneurs, I wonder how many entrepreneurs right now have jobs that are meaningless, dead-end jobs, but they have these amazing ideas that will never come to fruition, which means there's probably tens of thousands of people that'll never help

because they're listening to someone else about playing it safe with their job. And what's holding them back? Because I agree with you at that level, you know, that kid at home who's, you know, mom or buddy or wife or, I mean, my first wife, when I said to her,

I was teaching self-defense privately. I was working 40, 50 hours a week for my dad in the clothing. business and then I would after work finish at six seven o'clock drive to people's house teaching it was like the thing I asked like I said earlier if like we didn't if there was no money or food or anything like that what I'd be doing I'd be teaching self-defense I loved it it made me happy and so I'd still do that and then one day I said I'm gonna stop working with my dad and and I said to my wife I stopped working for my dad and open up a martial art school and teach self-defense and she looked

at me and she went, how are you going to do that? And as soon as she said that, I knew we were getting divorced. Like within a year, we were divorced. Because it was like, you don't believe in me. You don't, you don't. But that's also a level of self-awareness too, right? I had to do what I had to do. That is. You know, it's funny to say that. So I mentor a lot of entrepreneurs, about 1,600 entrepreneurs through various coaching programs, masterminds, or just private one-on-one coaching clients. And when I, it's funny, as I see entrepreneurs grow, I always clenched because if their relationship at home is not strong, there's an inevitable divorce coming. And it boils down to one thing.

When I hear from them six months, eight months, 15 months later that having the process of getting a divorce, I'll ask why, even though I know the answer. It's because the entrepreneur had hope. He or she wanted to do something new, different, and bigger, better. He had hope. She or him, whoever the other spouse is, had doubt. And if they don't both have hope together, it's not going to happen. So I always see the common pattern.

Do you also see that if there was a, you know, it's like protein fat and carbs, right? You know, if in the metaphor, if protein is just, I want to make money and the fat is, you know, I want to have security and the carbs are, you know, I need more volume or I need more followers, I need more, if you don't have a proper balance, it's a work-life balance. But underneath all of that, there's got to be some synthesis and that's the self-awareness sphere management part so you know the the you know when i when i was 50 years old i lost a 12 million dollar company and we went for i went from making 500 000 bucks a year to zero from friday to monday in three days dissolve my company uh my wife is crying freaking out

we had our our green cards we were living in virginia and she's crying she says what are we to do. And she's thinking, we've got to move back to Canada, where we've got family and support. And I said, I was talking to a counterterrorism conference in San Diego, and I said, buy tickets for everybody, we'll move to San Diego. And she said, what? I said, yeah, I heard the weather's amazing there. If we're going to be homeless, let's be homeless in San Diego. So she starts cry laughing where I had vision and hope with it. I was scared shitless. But what, because, because she understood fear and fear management because of the years together, I was able to take her doubt and recalibrate that. So we were scared together, but we had hope together.

And that's really it. If we can end this podcast on any note here where fear management is concerned, we're feeling the fear and doing it anyway. It's about these four words. So I want you to kind of explain this to our viewers. I'm wearing a shirt. For those of you, listening to the podcast and not watching it on YouTube. I'm wearing a black shirt with big white font that says fuck fear. But as it turns out, as you taught us in the workshop here that you ran for our team at at HQ, fuck is an acronym. It stands for something.

Can you tell us what fuck stands for? So when you get a fear spike for anything, you know, in business and relationship, you're scared to say, I'm sorry, you're scared to say I love you're scared to ask for a loan. You're scared to tell somebody, hey, we need to move, expand, whatever it is. There's always a fear spike. A fear spike will create hesitation. Hesitation creates doubt. If you fixate on doubt, it will create anxiety, and now you didn't do shit.

And maybe you lost that opportunity, that window's gone. So I created the acronym, Fuck Fear. Obviously, it's part of our whole process of managing fear. But F stands for face it, because when you commit to face something, you then move to part two, which is to understand it. And now you're researching it, whether it's Google, a doctor, a mentor, you know, some spiritual guide, whatever. Now you're understanding it.

It doesn't eliminate the fear. It dissipates its hold on you because it moves from an emotional place to a more cerebral, cognitive thing. So the C is to control or confront it, right? And I've got to now try to control it, but it's very important that we clarify that it doesn't ever dissipate. It doesn't, you don't eradicate fear. And then the K is the no fear. Because everyone likes to, they want to get to that place of, I know, you know, no fear, no fear. And I go, it doesn't exist.

There's going to always be a new stimulus, a new concern that triggers some sort of physical logical response to it. And now we're back in that cycle of doubt, hesitation, panic, or avoidance. So face it, understand it, confront it, know it. Fuck fear. What a great way to end this podcast. Tony, if someone wants to get a hold of you, learn more about your programs and teachings, where would they go to learn this? Google us. We got a lot of free content online, but Instagram, Tony Blower,

Blower Spear websites. We've got a bunch of websites. If you just go to Blower Spear or Google, Tony Blower, they'll find us. Thank you so much for joining us for another amazing episode of the Empire podcast. Now, the greatest compliment that you can give to us is liking, loving, and sharing this episode with all of your friends. So please go to iTunes and give us a five-star rating and then share it online and social media with everyone that you know. And make sure to tag us because we love hearing from Empire listeners. And if you own a business that's doing half a million dollars or more in annual revenues,

and you know it's got massive potential, and you like myself and Craig Ballantine to help you scale it by 5x, 10x, and 20x in the shortest amount of time possible, then you might be a great candidate for the Empire Mastermind Program that we have. To learn more about the Empire Mastermind Program,

go to bedroskulian.com forward slash empire.