EntreLeadership - FEAR NOT—One of Our Core Values

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Tune in to hear Dave Ramsey and Daniel Tardy respond to some business owners' fears around Coronavirus.   Give us your feedback on these daily, COVID-19, bonus episodes: Text DAILYBONUS to 33444   Want to bring in Alex Judd and experience an EntreLeadership Workshop with your team? Click the link below: https://www.entreleadership.com/workshops   Get access to the EntreLeadership Weekly Report Tool, FREE, for you and your team for 3 months: Text TEAMHEALTH to 33444 or visit entreleadership.com/weekly-report   Follow us on social media to stay plugged in to everything we’re doing to help the small business owner win: LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Twitter YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, Daniel Tarty here at Entree Leadership. You guys know we teach the importance of core values. I hope you've got core values. And at Ramsey Solutions, we definitely have them. But they're no good if you just put them on the wall and you don't talk to the team about them. And so about once a month, we take one of our core values and our entire staff in our staff meeting. We unpack one of those core values for them. So what you're going to hear today is me teaching our team here at Ramsey Solutions about the core value of,

fear not. Now, this doesn't have to be your core value, but you got to listen to this talk, because when we're feeling fear and we make bad decisions as leaders, well, this stakes are really high. There's been a lot of fear right now. And so our team felt like it would be appropriate to pull this out of the archive and dust it off and let you guys, our entree leadership listening audience, hear this core value talk about fear. Check it out. All right, so I have a bit of a reckless personality, and I've almost died a lot of times in my life. My wife is surprised that I'm still here. I've done a lot of stupid things where I've almost killed myself.

And I want to share with you guys a story about one of these times that it was almost really, really bad. And it happened in the mountains. I love the mountains. Anytime I can get to the mountains for vacation or a trip, there's just something about a connection that I feel to God when I'm out in his creation, especially in the mountains. How many guys feel me, right? Incidentally, if you could take a trip, beach or mountains, how many guys would go to mountains over the beach? This is my kind of people.

I love the beach, but I really love the mountains. These are the Flatiron Mountains just outside of Boulder, Colorado. And I've hiked in these mountains with my family. I've run on trails in these mountains with some really good friends. I have so many memories from this spot right here. And about five years ago, we had a live event that we were going to do in Denver. And I thought, oh, this is great. I can get the night before the event, I can get up to Boulder, and I'm going to go run one of my favorite trails.

And so my flight gets in, it's getting dark, and I think, okay, I don't know if I have a headlamp. So I go to one of the outfitters there in Boulder, and I get a headlamp, and I go over to the trailhead, and I take off for a run. And it's dark. The moon's kind of out. There's a little bit of moonlight, and I'm on this path called the Boulder Creek Path, and it's just gorgeous. The whole path goes along the side of this. creek. We would call it a river. It's really significant, and it's just like this constant white noise the whole time you're running. It's just ch-sh. I just felt so much peace. I'm running up one of my

favorite spots, and it's an out and back, unlike a loop where you can kind of run around and come back to the same spot. However far you run out, that's how far back you're going to run, because there's only one way up through the valley of this particular part of the mountains. So I'm running, having a great run, just thinking about how much I love being in the mountains. I get to the point where I'm ready to turn around. It's been a couple miles. And I turn around. I run back about 100 yards. And my headlamp sweeps over and I catch this thing that kind of flickers over here and it didn't feel right. And I stop. My instinct said, hang on. And I look back and I'm like, is that a deer? I'm like, no, it's not a deer. And I see these two eyes. And they're looking at me. And they do not look like a deer.

they do not look like a bear and I start to go what is that? And I look away and I take a few steps and look back and it's gone and I look away and I look back and then boom

there it is. And I thought you know, I hope this isn't but I don't know I've seen signs here that say look out for mountain lions and I don't know

what to do with a mountain lion is this one of those things where you go like yell at it and get really big or do you get small and play dead? Do you do you kind of scream at it and hope it runs off? Is it one of those are like, it's more scared of you than you are of it? And I'm like, I don't think so. I think I'm more scared of it than it is of me. And I just freeze. I just, I stop. And for like five minutes, I'm doing this thing. I look away and I look back and it's there. I take a couple steps. Look away. I don't see his eyes. And I'm totally frozen. And I don't know

what to do. Five minutes, six minutes. My heart's beating out of my chest. I'm like, this could be it. This could be the moment where God's going to take me home. At least it's in the mountains, in a place I love. And I reach down and I get a rock. I'm getting ready for like, I don't know if this thing attacks me. Like maybe, is it like a shark where you have to hit it in its eye and hope for the best and then take off? I don't know what to do. And so I finally make this decision. I go, I've got to get back. I can't just do this all night. And I'm going to hope that in going back, this thing's going to run away. And it was one of these situations where I actually had to get a little bit closer to it

to get down the trail before I could get further away. I'm thinking maybe if I just start yelling and throwing some rocks and start kind of running back this direction, maybe it'll scare it off. And then I'm going to run like hell and hope for the best. And so I start going, hey, hey, and I'm yelling at this thing. I start throwing rocks and the reflection kind of disappears. And then I look again and the reflection's back there and I get closer. and I'm like 60 feet away, 50 feet away, 40 feet away.

And then I look and I go, wait a second, what it? And it's not moving. And not only is it not moving, but I look underneath. And there's this shape I can start to make out with my headlamp. And I realize, like, this is a weird looking animal. This doesn't look like an animal. This is, there's a pole and there's like this square. And I get a little close from like 20 feet now.

And I realize that it's a sign for a trailhead. And these are two little stupid reflectors on the sign. Guys, I almost got killed by a trailhead sign. I laugh and I run back to Boulder. How many of us have had that moment where something in our instincts, we hear something, we see something, we have a thought, and it triggers fear in our body. And then our imagination starts to create a situation where we don't feel safe.

When we don't feel safe, we make really stupid decisions. Now, if you actually see a mountain lion for real and you run, that's a wise decision. But so many times we make decisions based on fear when we don't have the facts. And we make stupid decisions based on our perception of what our imagination is telling us, this is a situation that you're not going to be safe in instead of what's actually true. You know, what's funny about imagination, you know, I could take away your fear, but you would just have to give me your imagination, right? But you don't want that because our imagination,

not only is the thing that causes us to feel fear, it's the same thing that allows us to feel hope. See, as humans, we have this unique gift. We have the ability to think out into the future and to see a different reality. And sometimes that's a positive future. Sometimes it's negative. When it's negative, we feel fear,

but when it's positive, we have vision. We have the ability to create. We have the ability to see something that's not here, have a vision in our mind and bring it to life. Dave's talked about having to have a vision for this building before it was ever here in the physical. It was here in the spiritual, and then in the mental, and then on paper,

and then it was built. And so if I said, hey, after this, if you'll come up, I can take away your fear. All you've got to do is make me a trade. I'll take your imagination. I'll take away your fear. None of us would take that deal because I'd also be taken away your ability to have hope.

so imagination is really, really powerful, and it does some crazy stuff when it comes to fear. So fear becomes paralyzing when we feed our imagination with lies. You know, fear can protect us. If there's really a mountain line there, we need to run. But if we start to feed our imagination with lies, we get paralyzed. So we have this core value. It says fear not.

And I've got to tell you guys, I've heard this core value for 15 years. And for about 10 years, I personally really, really struggled with this core value. I thought about, you know, said, hey, tardy, can you teach a core value? And I said, oh, let me do one that I'm really good at. Shooting sacred cows. I like shooting sacred cows. That'll be easy. I feel like I'm good at that one. And I feel like God said, no, you need to share the one that you really struggle with. For 10 years, I've dealt with fear at a really debilitating level. I've had so much fear in my body at times that I've been completely incapacitated. I've had anxiety attacks. I've had overwhelming

fear in the middle of the night where I wake up and I don't even know where I am. I've gone to the hospital a few times thinking I was having a heart attack. And it's hijacked me. I don't like it. It's not my personality. I like positivity. I like, you know, believe in better things. But there's times when fear is so real in my life that I can barely breathe. So when I hear fear not, for the last 10 years, I hear fear not. For the longest time, I thought, you know, that kind of sounds like, suck it up. Shake it off. But I think I'm a little bit more like what I imagine the disciples were like in the boat when the storm's coming in and they're freaking out and they go we're going to die and jesus goes fear not you know i think the disciples were probably not in that moment

going oh okay shake it off it's like taylor swift we're good no there's still a storm and if you could get rid of that storm please because you're god and if you're god you'll take the storm away then we'll stop you're just telling us to fear not is not good enough because if this boat turns over we understand you just start going for a walk and we go down. And I think the disciples looked at each other after Jesus said, fear not, and went, he's great. Are you still scared? Yeah, I'm still scared. I'm still scared. And so when I hear fear not, and I feel fear in my body and I tell myself, fear not, I have a confession. I still feel fear. It's not good enough for me to just hear fear not. And so in the next few minutes, I want to give you guys a few practical steps that I've learned that have helped me to

actually make fear really, really small. I can't make fear go away, but I can give you a formula that's worked for me about how to make the power of fear actually come off of you so you can make decisions based on faith and based on the future that's bright. That's what we've got to do here. So when I was about 10 years old, my dad started teaching me how to mow the yard. And I feel like that's too young because I wasn't big enough to really even push the lawnmower. It's funny how at 10 years old, just starting the lawnmower, your wimpy little arms, you can barely even pull that cord back. And it's this beast of a machine, but you also want to feel like, I'm a man now. I'm going to make Dad proud.

I'm going to mow the yard. And I could barely, you know, get the mower going down the direction just to cut the grass, much less keep it in straight lines. I was always amazed how my dad could make it just like perfectly straight, down and back, down and back. and I look at the yard when I was done and it was just like it was all shorter but it was just all over the place and my dad did not like weeds in the yard and so anytime my dad was mowing he came up to a dandelion he would stop the mower he would come around and he'd take a screwdriver out of his pocket and he'd get down and he'd dig around the route and he pulled the dandelion out and he'd stick in a little bag and put in his pocket and then he'd come back and he'd fire up the mower and he'd keep mowing well at 10 years old

I didn't care about weeds. I cared about getting the job done really quick. And so when I saw a dandelion, I just went right over the top of it. No problem, right? I didn't think it was a big deal. Well, after a couple weeks, you guys know what happens. You got these little puff balls. What's the puff ball? It's the seeds, right? What happens when you mow over the top of a puff ball for dandelion? Well, you just became a dandelion farmer, and you planted all these seeds back in the ground. So after a couple weeks of memo in the yard, dad looks out and goes, Daniel, why is there dandelions all over the yard? Have you not been pulling them the way that I, well, I didn't want to pull the weeds. I wanted to get the job done fast. And for the first few

hours, after it's all level, the weeds in the grass look the same. It looks good. But then more weeds come. This is how fear works. If you fire up the mower of your email in the morning, you fire up the mower of social media, you just start cranking the engine and you go and you go and you go. in the morning, whatever that little fear was that popped in your head, if you just mow over the top of it, and you don't confront it for what it is, it just multiplies. And every morning for the last 10 years, just about, there's a little package on my nightstand, a little present that Satan sent with one of his little demons. And I even have to get out of bed to reach over and go, huh, here's my little fear story for today.

It's always there. I don't know if you're like this. Some of you guys wake up, you're ready to go. You don't ever feel fear. I envy that. but if you're like me, every morning you have a chance to have something that you're worried about. And on the mornings where I get up and I fire up the mower and I jump into the day and I don't stop and I don't confront the fear that I'm feeling, that fear goes from my head down into my body

and I feel it in the form of anxiety all day long. But here's what I learned. It doesn't have to be that way. There's some steps we can take that actually makes the fear really powerless. The first step that you got to do is you got to name it. You go, there's a dandelion there. There's a weed. I have to call it what it is. Guys, so many guys feel fear and you don't even know you're feeling fear.

When you don't stop and go, what is that feeling in my body? What is that thing I need to acknowledge and go, there's something right now that feels off. I feel edgy. I feel angry. I feel frustrated. Maybe you feel afraid. And for me, this was the hardest step because I grew up in a world where it's Zig Zigler and it's positive thinking and you always speak life and the Joel Olstein thing.

Like, hey, don't say anything negative. you know, just say, God's got it, fear not. This flies in the face of all of that. To stop and say, I actually feel afraid right now and give it a name to actually say, I'm not okay. And I feel scared. And then the next thing is to meditate on what's true. The way we combat fear, the lie that we're feeding our imagination that paralyzes us,

the way we combat it is we stop and go, what's actually true? You know, scripture talks about this. and Philippians 4-8 says, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever's pure, whatever's lovely,

whatever's admirable. If anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. One translation says, meditate on these things. And the God of peace will be with you. What's the opposite of fear?

Peace. What do I have to do to feel peace? I have to meditate on what's actually true. And this is why we talk about the power of journaling. This is why we talk about a quiet time. If you don't stop the mower and turn it off and actually slow down and go, I'm going to journal this out. I'm going to get my head around what I'm feeling right now,

and I'm going to get my head around what's true, and I'm going to anchor my mind. One translation says, fix your mind, set your mind. It's an action. Not let your mind drift into the day, but set your mind on what's true. And then the third step to pulling out this weed by the root is to bring the fear into the light. I don't know about you guys, but any time I keep fear in my head and I try to battle it on my own,

I'm a three on the enigram, I'm a performer, I like to be independent, I like to do things on my own, I like to be right, and any time I keep fear in my mind and I just let this tape play over and over and over, it gets louder, and the dandelions multiply. And it takes a tremendous amount of humility. and swallowing my pride to come to somebody and go, hey, I'm not okay. I'm afraid right now. And I feel like I'm going to be bringing them down.

And I feel like they're going to look at me, like I don't have my stuff together when I take my mask off and I say, I'm not doing okay. A few weeks ago, Luke was over in my area. He said, hey, man, how are you doing? And I said, you really want to know? He said, yeah, I really want to know.

I'm scared. And he stopped and he said, tell me more. I said, well, I've been worried about this for several weeks. and it just, I've been waking up in the middle of the night with his fear and it's just been, it just keeps over and over. It just keeps multiplying in my mind. And I was so worried that Luke would go, dude, just shake it off. Hey, fear not.

Don't do that, man. Come on, you're okay. That he would care take me. Or I was also worried that he may just go, no, no, man, you got this. Or that he might try to give me a pep talk or he might try to bring some kind of logic to the situation. You know what he did? He said, I hear you, man. You're not alone.

And I've felt what you're feeling. and I'm with you no matter what, and whatever I can do to help you, I will. You know what happened to that fear in that moment? It went, shh. It's the same thing that happened when my headlamp hit the sign. There's no, it's in the light.

I see it for what it is. And all of a sudden the fear gets really small. You guys have a job when you come in here every day to advance these things. Every day, we are the champions of bringing these things into a world where there's pain and there's brokenness and there's hurt. But if we're paralyzed by fear, we can't do that.

We have to create and we have to envision a better future not only for ourselves, but for the people that we serve. And this is the reason that we have this core value. So fear not is not a core value about you don't have fear. It's about we don't make decisions based on fear. Because when we make decisions based on fear, we make really irrational, stupid decisions. They seem rational based on what the,

the imagination is telling us our fear is, but they're completely irrational based on what's actually true. This is why this matters so much. This is the price we have to pay if we don't conquer these demons of fear. We don't get to do these things. This is my family. My wife Emily and my girls, the oldest is Savannah and the youngest is Immigrace. This was actually last week. We're on fall break. We went over to Cummins Falls, and we had a good time. And Savannah's 10. Immigrace is about to be nine. And the story of how these two children came into our world could not be more different. The pregnancy and the labor experience and the delivery, Savannah was, she's very type A. She got here a little early. We barely made it to the hospital in time. She came out in 30 minutes,

and then they actually said, you guys can go home. It was like running errands. It's just like go to the bank, have Savannah, go to the store, go home, take a nap. Easy. No complications. Immigrace was more like, I don't know, like a Netflix docuseries with lots of drama, the pregnancy. There was some complications. We got to the hospital and they had to shift our room around a few times. And then it was a long labor. And then she pushed up against the umbilical cord and cut off her oxygen for a second.

It was really touch and go. And that was fine. And then she finally came out. And it was like, okay, she's here. This is good. And they hand me, Immigrace. I'm holding him. Grace, and there's a couple of, there's a doctor and a nurse in the room, a couple minutes go

by, and then alarms start going off. And within seconds, the room was filled with, I think it's 10 to 12 medical professionals, and something's wrong with Emily. And I don't know what's going on. I thought everything was okay. I thought Emma Grace was the one that we needed to be worried about, but all of a sudden, there's a problem. And a nurse looks at me and she says, you need to leave. You can take your baby to the nursery. She's cold. They can help you out.

And I walk and I turn and I look at Emily and I walk out and the door latches behind me and I freeze. And I stop. And I put my back against the wall in the hallway and I slide down and I'm hunched over and I'm holding him in grace. And my mind starts to churn. and this fear came in my body and my imagination fed it with the worst case scenario. When I was seven years old, my mom died of cancer. And so little seven-year-old Daniel's biggest fear is losing someone that you're really, really close to.

And this is my best friend in there behind that door. And that fear makes it hard for me to get close to people. I have to work on that. And it also makes it really hard for me when I'm close to somebody to not think about what could happen. if they're not here. And what felt like the longest 30 minutes in my life, this tape just played over and over and over that I'd probably just seen my wife for the last time. Completely irrational. She's got the best doctors in the world in that room taking care of her. There's nothing I can do.

She's got all the help she needs. But in my mind, I'm sitting here thinking about what's it going to be like to raise this baby without my best friend here? And I was paralyzed. I was scared out of my mind. and I was by myself the whole time. There was no one to say, hey, can you help me with this? I was all alone and I was completely scared. And I didn't even know what was true. And about 30 minutes later, a doctor comes out. She said, hey, she's going to be okay.

He goes down, she's so clinical. Like, hey, she's good. Walks off to the next thing. I'm like, oh my gosh. She's been dead for the last 30 minutes. And nurse comes out and says, hey, what are you doing? You're supposed to take him and grace down to the nursery. She's cold.

I had one job. Take baby to the nursery, 50 feet that way. But because I was paralyzed by fear, I didn't do my job. My job as her dad, the first 30 minutes of her life, all I had to do was take care of her, let the doctor take care of my wife. And I couldn't do my job, the thing I was responsible for. And so, guys, if we come in here and we're paralyzed by fear, we can't do our job. the people out there that need hope,

and we always talk about we exist for the people that aren't here. We can't do our job if we're paralyzed by fear. So here's what I want you guys to hear today. Fear not is not about you're an idiot if you feel fear. You're crazy if you don't. Fear not is about if you feel fear and you let it take power over you and you don't call it what it is

and you don't focus on what's true and meditate on what's true and you don't bring it into the light so that you take that fear and make it powerless. You will not have power on your ability. to do your job to spread hope to this world. And that would be a shame. So we have this value of fear not

because we serve a God who's in control. We serve a God who has a plan to prosper us and not to harm us. We serve a God who wants nothing but to use us to advance his kingdom in this world. And the only thing that will actually get in our way and keep us from doing that is if we feed our imagination with the fear

and we start to act like it's true when it's a bunch of lies. And the enemy would like nothing more than to take down this place not in a big, massive, dramatic event, but little by little, every morning on each of our nightstands saying, here's your package today, pick it up, pretend like it's true, imagine. But if we'll cut it off, we'll call it what it is, we can push back darkness with the light. And so I hope you guys don't ever experience fear at the level that I've experienced that I've dealt with it. It's been my demon

that I've danced with for 10 years. It's always there. But what I have learned is I serve a God who's much bigger. And you do too. And so I hope you guys today, wherever you're at, some of you guys are like, I'm good. I'm not feeling fear all the time. But I just know there's people in this room. I've had more conversations in the last few weeks with people talking about

oppressive fear and anxiety. And so for you this morning, I just want you to hear there's hope and you don't have to live that way. And there's a way to actually get all the way to the other side where every day you're coming into your work, doing your job, not from a place of, survival, not from a place of fear, but from a place of confidence and power, because we serve a God who's very, very powerful, and he loves you very, very much.