Start With A Win - Befriending the Inner Beast to Overcome Fear and Create Success

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam and SWAW producer Mark pick up the conversation about Adam's first authored book, Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success. Adam covers the main takeaways from chapters two, three, and four. He explains how experiencing both successes and failures is necessary for personal and professional growth. Failures serve as learning opportunities, while challenges develop opportunities to create success or learning moments. Adam outlines the two questions you should always ask yourself as a leader:1) How do we create an environment in which people want to perform at their highest levels?Tip: Create a trusting environment where it’s okay to fail. 2) How do you unlock potential instead of pushing others to barely get by?Tip: When it comes to performance and earning wins, pushing others creates resistance. Encouragement and enthusiasm result in increased drive, efforts, and performance. Adam discusses how fear is the reason why people do not try to pursue new endeavors or challenges. This mental roadblock creates self-limiting beliefs, hesitation, self-doubt, often resulting in imposter syndrome. Adam breaks down the concept of fear as an inner beast that resides in everyone. The first step to overcoming fear requires acknowledging and befriending the beast, which requires self-love and acceptance. As a leader, it is crucial to be a sponge for knowledge—learn from others, nurture your mind—and reciprocate that wisdom to others.Pre-order your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.amazon.com/Start-Win-Lessons-Personal-Business/dp/1119807077https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/start-with-a-win-adam-contos/1138838681https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/start-with-a-win-tools-and-lessons-to-create-personal-and-business-success_adam-contos/28078881/#edition=58850831&idiq=46017298Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Hey Adam. Yeah, Mark. Let's talk about Start With A Win, the book, chapters 2, 3, and 4. Sounds good. Let's do it. Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, that start with a win book dance from adam contos was that a drone in your hands that was a drone it's the what is that the drone dance that's that was the drone dance you had the book you know i had the drone nice I had the drone. Nice. The Mavic Mini. That looks like fun. Can you fly between your face and the camera here?

That would probably not be advised. I might chop up my face or crash it into the camera. If you're not watching this on YouTube, head over to YouTube and watch this ridiculousness. Yeah, we're talking about, I mean, I hate the book, the book dance. We've been talking about the book dance. That's right. I do a lot more of the book dance.

But hey, you want to talk about the book today, right? I do. You know, as we kind of lead up to the book coming out this fall, I think there's a lot of great lessons that we can kind of share with people and get them excited to pre-order that book and maybe order a few for their friends because all the proceeds of this book go to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. And so it's just a great way for you to help out some kids and get some great content at the same time. So that's right. Who doesn't love helping kids? When we sell a book, author proceeds from that book sale, go to

Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. I look forward to writing that check. So, uh, widely publishing will send me a check and then I will turn it right around and Children's Miracle Network Hospitals will benefit as a whole. Uh, usually Children's Miracle Network Hospitals is a great, it's a great charity for everybody to begin with. Um, it puts your donations actually in your local market. But what I've done is I've set this up so it kind of disperses throughout all of their hospital network. So it'll help everybody. But anyhow, yeah, so chapter two is really kind of a foundational aspect for Start With A Win. Because what we talk about is, and the title of the chapter is, our missions set the

playbook. Because everything we do creates a memory. It's programming for our brain. And you got to think of your brain like a computer. And ultimately, when we have a struggle in life, we reflect on those things that are within our brain, within our memory, in our computer upstairs there, and try to figure out an answer to those. And those answers are the result of programming that we give ourselves. The programming is from successes. It's from failures. It's from education. It's from intimidation. It's from feelings, from interactions, things like that. But ultimately, that's the foundation for how we start winning is understanding that what we put

in our head is how we will react and we need to dictate and understand those different parts of our lives. So it's pretty interesting when you start looking at it that way. Yeah. And I think too, it's like, um, just that idea that our, our brains, um, can't separate fact from fiction a lot of the times, right? That's when you sit, you watch a scary movie, you get scared. When you watch a sad movie, you get sad. Or one of those amazing Olympic Johnson and Johnson commercials, you're crying, you know, it's so sweet. But none of that's real, right? This stuff isn't actually real, but our emotions are just responding to what we're putting in. And so I think it's so important, right, to, if you're

putting in good stuff, that the right things are going to come out. If you're putting in the right thoughts, the right emotions are going to come out. Exactly. And it's really important for us to understand, Mark, that we don't want to just, I mean, you don't want to have an easy life. And everybody's like, I've had a hard life and I'd rather have an easy life. But the reality is you need to experience all of life. You need to experience successes. You need to experience all of life. You need to experience successes. You need to experience failures. Why? And I talk about this in the book.

What is a, what's a failure? A failure is a learning opportunity. What is a challenge? A challenge isn't a burden on your shoulders. A challenge is an opportunity for you to either create a success or create a learning moment. So how do we take and look at everything that we're doing in life? Like for instance, I talk about the day I went to Marine Corps bootcamp and you've seen it in the movies. Everybody's seen different movies where you get off this bus and you go stand on a yellow footprints and they're yelling at you. You maggot, line up. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, that's it.

You get on this bus at Marine Corps Recruit Depot and they're yelling at you. What are they doing? They're intimidating you. They're trying to intimidate you. I mean, there's really no finer specimen on this planet than a Marine Corps drill instructor. I mean, their uniform is perfect.

They're in like outrageously perfect physical shape and they scare the heck out of you. I'm six foot three and these guys, even if they were like five, 10 or whatever, I'm looking up to them and they're intimidating the heck out of me, but they're trying to do that. So I programmed my brain to understand that intimidation is okay. It's okay to be challenged. It's okay to be pushed. It's okay to find failure. And they push you to failure over and over and over again, because here's the reality. If your heart's still beating and you're still alive, you can still go win. Right. So it's, it's fascinating when you start building foundational aspects of your life and looking back, everybody did, you know, maybe you were playing soccer as a kid,

or maybe you were running down the street playing tag with a friend, and you went face down and just beat the heck out of yourself. You know, road rash, scraped up your face, or broke a bone, or who knows what it is. We've all been through all these different challenges in life. How did we deal with them? Yeah. How did we deal with them? Yeah. How did we deal with them? Yeah, it was, you know, we recently had Patty McCord, you know, on the Start With A Win. She's worked at Netflix, all these other places. And it was interesting to me in the conversation, she had said when, you know, she went back and interviewed all the people who were really

successful and really liked their job, they were people who had overcome difficult things. And as a team too, like when you overcome things with your team and you do something that's difficult, you find reward on the other side of that. Exactly. And let me throw at you two questions that we should be asking ourselves all the time. Because I know we're doing several chapters here, but chapter two is probably one of the longest chapters in the book. And then we get into, so chapters one and two lay a foundation for creating success. Then beyond that, we have what's called the toolbox, which are all these different components or thoughts and processes that you can recognize in your life. Like how, I mean, fear, dealing with fear. That's one of the future chapters here we're going to talk about today. But ultimately, there's two questions that you should ask yourself. And that is, how do we create

an environment in which people want to perform at their highest levels? Okay. I mean, you have to create a trusting environment, an environment where it's okay to fail. And how do we unlock someone's potential instead of pushing them to barely get by. So have you noticed that if you, you know, when it comes to somebody's performance, when it comes to winning and maybe it's your own, if somebody pushes on you, you take your foot off the gas and you create resistance to that. But if they encourage you and you have that enthusiasm,

you outperform even what you would have done if they were driving you hard. Right. So it's interesting. Pushing on people backs them off. Getting in front of them and encouraging them to follow you increases their probability of success and their effort to do that. That's good. So that's two. Then we got three. What's the title of three? All right. So moving on from the foundation to really what is the number one problem,

the number one headwind that people run into when it comes to achieving success. And I'll just say it in one word, fear. Fear is the number one reason. You could say overwhelm is fear also. So fear and overwhelm. The number one reason why somebody doesn't even try something. And think about it.

So if you're in sales right now, what's the number one reason why a sale fails? Why somebody does not complete a sale? Buying a car, buying a house, just buying anything. It's fear and overwhelm, fear and overwhelm. That is really the biggest situation that the consumer goes through that prevents the sale from occurring. That's why you have cart abandonment online. That's why you have bounce rate on a website. That's why you have these different transactions. Crumbling is people that manage a sales process or lead a sales process with the consumer don't educate them

to overcome that fear, provide the clarity and the communication and the trust to do so. Mm-hmm. So we all live with fear. I call that fear the beast. The fear is the beast. And inside of each of us lurks that beast. You can think all the way back to when you were a child. You're laying in bed, it's dark, and you have to get up and go to the bathroom, but it's two in the morning and you're like, I'm scared because it's dark. I felt that way. I heard the noises in my closet. It's dark in that shadowy area. I don't know what's under my bed. Run up from the basement and shut off the light real quick. Right. There's an entire movie made after this called Monsters, Inc. for crying out loud. Okay. I mean, this is inside of each of us. There's a beast inside of each of us. Well,

guess what? When we became adults, it didn't go away. It just reshaped itself. So what that beast does is that causes us fear and overwhelm. That beast causes us hesitation, causes us to doubt our skills. It causes us to think, I'm not the right person for this. That's called the imposter syndrome, by the way. When you start doubting yourself and go, I'm not the right person for this. It causes self-limiting beliefs. It causes all these different challenges that we have that I have yet to say something that is truly a game stopper for you. But you have all these same problems. Everybody does. We have this beast. So we fear this beast if we don't know how to put ourselves in a position to take advantage of this

beast. So what you have to think about is through that door of whatever that opportunity is that you have, maybe it's as a kid going to the bathroom, maybe it is as an adult going into that meeting or presenting to your board or whatever, that beast is in that room. That beast is there. You can choose to either be afraid of the beast and fight the beast, and that will limit you because you're tied up fighting the beast. You're so full of anxiety and trepidation.

It's pushing against you. Or you can go in and you can say, that beast is my friend. That beast is my friend. I'm going to go in that room and I'm going to party with the beast. Party with the beast. Party with the beast, baby.

So we actually use this in um in swat operations because i mean you're you're about to go on an operation that you can die on yeah okay yeah you're gonna kick down a door and you don't know what's on the other side of it you got it yeah you know what is fear the unknown okay so you can't let that cause you to stop doing what you know you're trained and capable of doing and confident in doing. So you have to love going in there to party with that beast. And that brings out our different emotions that we operate under. We operate under several emotions, fear and love. That's it too. Emotions, fear and love. That's it, too. Emotions, fear and love.

Everybody thinks there's like 12 to 20. Sure, you can list out all these different things, and you go, wow, there's so many emotions. I'm trying to realize what emotion I'm in. The reality is when you want to realize what emotion you're in, think of, am I in fear? Which is fight, flight, freeze, excuses. You start hearing people say but in their conversation

I would do this but fear or the other emotion is love love is unconditional giving love is saying I'm going to go into that room and I'm going to hug the beast I'm going to love on that beast because I love the opportunity that that beast is preparing me for

that, that strength that that beast is giving me. I love going and doing this. I mean, it's ultimately, that's all you have to say is I love doing this. Here's something, Mark, you've got kids. Yep. Three of them, three of them. I've got three of them too. So, um, you teach them this little trick and they will just absolutely dominate the conversations with you. So what happens when dad gets home and somebody didn't do their homework, they got a bad grade or all this other stuff, dad got home and then you go and you, Hey, you didn't do this. And you're like arguing excuses, things like that. Or somebody didn't clean their room

or they're having an argument with their sister or whatever it might be. You're like, stop doing this. And in turns, you know, what are you doing? So remember fear responses, fight, flight, or freeze. You're fighting right now. You are delivering fear. And then what do they do? They deliver fear back. So fight, flight, or freeze. They deliver that fear right back. You don't accomplish anything because fear with fear does not create anything but more fear. Right. What are you doing?

You end up with condemnation. You end up with punishment, things like that. You don't end up learning. Right. So what if you went in and you said something differently to them? Obviously, you have to inform them of the challenge that they've created here, but what if you taught them to come in and meet your love of trying to help them with this with love instead of arguing with you? So let's say you came home and you said, hey, you can't argue with your sister because it just does not solve

anything. I'm trying to help you here and, and make sure you understand how to manage these relationships, things like that. What if they, instead of arguing with you, but she did this, they said, thank you. Thank you. So what does thank you? Thank you is the deployment of gratitude. Thank you for sharing your passion. Thank you for the insight. Thank you for the perspective. Thank you for helping me. If your kids did that and then just stopped talking, you'd be like, okay, what am I doing? What do I do now? I mean, because you've just gotten from them what you wanted to, right? Right. Right. Which is acknowledgement of the help that you're trying to provide them. And it's the same thing with employees. It's the same thing with customers. It's the same thing with somebody you don't even know that you're at the cash register with, or

that you think is going to take your parking spot in the parking lot or whatever. Hey, thank you. Spot's yours. I'll get another one. Yeah. Have a wonderful day. What if we just deployed love? Yeah, whenever I accidentally cut somebody off or not see somebody as I'm merging or something like that, right, they zoom by and they flip me off and they're all mad. And I just kind of say I'm sorry, kind of bow my head a little bit and wave and I'm sorry, just trying to be nice instead of trying to flip them off back.

And then they kind of look at me and then they zoom off cause you're like, Oh, okay. This guy doesn't want to fight. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, if somebody comes running up to you and it's just really trying to, you know, sometimes they get out of their car and they run up and they're like pounding on your window. You're like, hi, Hey, I love your passion for this. I'm happy to have share that spot with you. You can have it.

What do you say if you're that person? I'm a jerk. I'm sorry you're having a bad day. I love your passion for what you're trying to accomplish here. So Mark, chapter four is an interesting tool in the toolbox. Because this is one that I think everybody takes for granted. you hear about the last time you ever read a book. A lot of people ever read a book was like when they left high school, left college. You're like, wait a second. Aren't you like 50? You didn't read it. You don't read books or anything like that. But, um, but the reality is I learned

this leadership lesson and this success lesson early on. And I think this is incredibly important. So back, I met Dave Linegar, who was my main mentor, great friend, co-founder of Remax. I met him in like the mid-90s. And I asked him, I said, what is the key to being a leader? He said, be a sponge. Be a sponge. And I said, oh, OK, so I should read a lot of books. He goes, no,

no, no, no. That's only half of it. That's half of it. The other half is you got to give it back. So let's unpack that for a second because be a sponge learning. What do people really want in life? They want to be better. Okay. I mean. They want somebody to help them unlock their potential. That's really what a coach does, is helps people unlock their potential. And we'll talk about coaching later on in the book. But the reality is you don't get better if you don't learn. Right. So I have a saying, leaders learn, learners lead. Leaders Learn, Learners Lead. And I also have a quote in this chapter. It opens with this quote. If you're not moving forward,

you're losing ground. So how do you learn? How do you move forward? You learn. That's the reality of being a sponge. And then, how do you lead? You give that that you learn back.

That's really what this chapter is about. And it goes back to thinking about, like if you take a class, everybody has to take a class sometime, okay? I don't know if it's continuing education, depending on your job, or maybe you're going to a business meeting. We all have like, you know,

different trainings that are annual in our organizations that keep your company out of trouble or teach you something new, whatever it might be. But the reality is you're going to class every now and then. Where do you sit in the room? Where do you sit? And I can tell you something. I do a lot of public speaking. I teach, I taught police academy classes for six years. So I would, I would go into the classroom and I would watch where students sit. And I kind of had this thought in my head of where do I sit? So I, I actually just took a training class on Saturday and I went in and I sat in the very front of the room, right in front of the instructor. Let's go. Yeah. And it was interesting

because there were only like, like I think a dozen or 15 people in the room, but there were probably 60 seats in the room. And you had some other people come in and sit in the very, very back of the room. And then people were sitting, it was weird. It was like a social experiment because some people were looking at me like, wait a second, he's sitting in very front. That guy's sitting in the way back. Oh, no, which one do I sit in? Because if one person sits in the back and nobody sits in front, it's easy. You just go sit in the back. But here's the reality of, and you can ask any teachers this, the people who sit in the front of the room perform better.

It's just, it's a reality. Makes sense. So, I mean, you're, you're more likely to pay a higher level of attention and effort to the materials in the room you're going to participate because you're face-to-face with the instructor. And we have this social contract that if I'm talking to you, you're probably going to talk back to me. So that's how instructors gauge that. But ultimately, having taught classes, the people who sit in the front do better. So if you're struggling in class, by the way, people, listeners, um, sit in the front of the freaking room. That's right. Okay. When I got my MBA, it was interesting because, um, I remember there was

like some like major soccer tournament on or world cup or something like that. And we had like the final four, we had all these different sports events going on during the two years that I was taking my MBA. And it was interesting because some of it, you could look in the back of the room and you'd see these people sitting back there and their laptops were open and they're like nodding their heads. Like they're listening to class. But I actually got, I got up to go to the restroom to leave the room, and I walked the long way around the room behind everybody, and they're all watching these sports events. And I'm thinking to myself, you're not a leader. You're not a sponge.

Now, you know, it wasn't everybody, but there were a few. I mean, I know some of you listen to this podcast. You know who you are. There's always an opportunity to grow and change, right? Yes. Yeah. I'm not judging you. Yes, I am. But you can, you can get better. So when you think about this, I, in the book, I took a look back at my life and I figured out where did I learn? How did I learn? I worked undercover narcotics for two years. I went to DEA, Undercover Narcotics School, which was incredible. And I'm like, that's how I learned sales, by the way, Mark.

I call it narc marketing. 101. Yeah, so I used to teach this class called Narc Marketing 101. Exactly. And it was, how do you go meet somebody, gain their trust and confidence, and then do a transaction with them that could possibly remove their freedom from

them? I mean, that's a big question. That's a lot of trust. So how do you gain that trust and confidence? Well, a lot of it has to do with just caring and listening and learning. That's good. So you think about that and you go, all right, how do I learn? Be a sponge. Think about that. How do I learn? And here's a question for leaders. I ask this question because we want people to behave the way that we behave as leaders. We want them to model the leadership that they see because that's what you do.

You enroll and influence people as a leader, okay? If they see you learning and you go and you deliver those learnings to them on a regular basis. So leaders, I know I can't see your hand if you raise it right now, but I'm going to ask you, raise your hand. If you give leadership learnings to your people that you lead at least three or four times a week, if you don't step it up and go learn something and give it back. That's awesome. That's awesome. Man, I'm excited for this book to come out.

And if you're listening to this and you've enjoyed this content, make sure you head over to startwithwin.com and pre-order your copy of Start With A Win, the book, because one, it's going to educate your brain and you're going to get inspired, motivated, and get some direction for your business and your personal life. But also by ordering the book, all author proceeds are going to go to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, and you're going to be able to participate in doing some good. So it's a win-win-win, as I like to call it. The triple win. The triple win the triple win that's right Adam thanks so much and until next time remember start with a win