Episode 15: Reframing Fear And Making It Work For You, With Brian Muka

Fear is a forgotten and overlooked Superpower, the gatekeeper of everything we want is on the other side of this feeling. Meet Brian Muka, the Fear Sherpa himself, former US Navy Special Operations Officer, Bomb Technician, and published author of Your Secret Superpower, Tame Fear to Thrive. He has written a book on how to harness fear and make it work for them, instead of against them.

Having to face his fears on a daily basis when he was a Navy special operations officer, Muka says, “Overcoming fear is a tremendous waste of a potent fuel.” In his new role as a performance coach and speaker, he doesn’t teach or recommend simply overcoming fear. “I inspire others to harness fear by commanding it and its minions: stress, worry, doubt, shame, guilt, procrastination, regret, workaholism, and perfectionism.”

Muka teaches his clients how to dance with courage. “It’s what’s on the other side of what feels difficult where our next breakthrough lives, and it is where our best life is waiting for us to leap towards it,” he explains. Brian employs nutrition, and mindfulness when it matters most, and teaches his clients: 1. breathe, 2. smile, and 3. gratitude as a powerful reminder of how to be at our best when it matters most.

What the podcast will teach you:

  • How Brian began thinking about how to transform fear during his time in the Navy, and how he got his unique title of the Fear Sherpa
  • How Brian’s unusual background helped him learn to reframe fear or anger and replace them with gratitude
  • Why Brian takes a systematic approach to his work and helps his clients overcome their fears
  • What common fears many seven-figure business owners have to face, and why “imposter syndrome” is a major hurdle many must cross
  • Why the fear of the unknown isn’t the problem, and why the problem is the fear of leaving the known
  • How the lessons in fear Brian learned in his military career translate to the kinds of fear entrepreneurs face
  • Why the longer you procrastinate and avoid facing the thing you fear, the more the fear grows exponentially
  • Brian shares a profound quote from American author Marianne Williamson that addresses our fear of our own power
  • How to connect with and work with Brian or to learn more about his coaching work, his book, or his teaching

Quote:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. You playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. –Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

Resources:

I’m here with Brian Muka, who is the Fear Sherpa. I’m excited to dive into our interview. Brian, as we discussed, what we do in the show is shared with seven-figure business owners the things they need to know to be able to grow their business. A lot of these seven-figure business owners get to that million-dollar mark. They may get stuck somewhere between $1 million and $3 million in revenue typically and have some problems breaking through getting to that next level. We are thrilled to be able to bring them experts like yourself, to be able to learn some of the mindsets, the skillsets, the tools, and anything that would help them move forward in that seven-figure growth journey. We are excited to have you here with us. Thank you for joining us, Brian.

It’s my pleasure.

Tell us about this awesome title that you have, the Fear Sherpa. Tell us about that.

Hard earned, the idea of overcoming fear was something that I found triggering. I was a bomb technician in the United States Navy. I was a Platoon Commander. It’s a very special thing, and I got to dance with courage and fear often. I would hear these performance coaches and podcasts people talking about, “Overcome your fear.” Interesting, that never resonated. Instead of overcoming fear, what if we could harness it?

That’s the first part of the Fear Sherpa, being able to transform fear and focus into fuel, even as a friend. The Sherpa is an interesting word as well. Oftentimes, Sherpa and porter are confused. Porter is someone who carries some heavy things up a steep mountain often in Nepal. Sherpa is a name of a tribe and also the name of the strategist that helps climbers get to the top of the world.

It’s the only word I found that was both strategy and community, and combining fear and Sherpa together was exactly my mission. Let’s harness fear and build a community of other Sherpas who empower the people around them to dare, greatly break through limiting beliefs, and become whoever they want to be, utilizing and owning fear instead of running from it and trying to overcome it simply. Overcoming theory is such a waste of a potential superpower. What if we could harness it? There’s a forgotten source of power that the untrained don’t get to enjoy. Those untrained are leaving a lot on the table. That’s the genesis of Fear Sherpa.

I loved every aspect of the way you broke that down. When we talked before, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize where maybe your interest in all of this began as a bomb tech. First of all, thank you for your service. Secondly, I’m glad you are here with us. Not everybody walks away from that moment, so thank you. I sincerely mean that, and thank you for making time to be with us to share what is a unique perspective, whether or not they can put themselves there by themselves. I’m going to try to help our readers realize how much their journey as a seven-figure CEO is like scaling Everest.

EEP 15 | Reframing Fear

Reframing Fear: Let’s harness fear and build a community of other Sherpa who empower the people around them to dare, break through limiting beliefs, and become whoever they want to be, utilizing and owning fear instead of running from it and trying to overcome it.

 

It’s like climbing to the top of the world. Most people don’t make it. Most people don’t even go to the mountain, first of all. This is why we call our elite business entrepreneurs because it’s only about 3% of businesses in the US that ever make it to seven figures, ever make it to a million in revenue. They are breathing elite air, as we like to call it. As a Fear Sherpa, I can help them see things that would keep them from going higher and achieving greatness.

I love the concept, love the analogy, the metaphor, and the imagery. It’s all awesome. Let’s talk a little bit more about anything from your background that you want to share. I’m fascinated by the bomb tech comment. We don’t need to get sidetracked by that but anything from that you want to share. Interestingly, it would be fascinating for you to connect the dots between that time of your life and any other stuff you’ve done to get to this point where you are now helping other people see fear in a new way.

It’s relevant to talk about failure and understanding that the old map that got us to this moment is not going to be the map that gets us to where we want to go. Take responsibility for the old map and all the learnings that happened in catastrophic setbacks. I call them avalanches. A quick story, I didn’t have long-term fear handled. The reason I’m so incredibly passionate about this work is if it’s okay for me as a Special Operations Officer and a bomb technician, Navy free-fall parachutist, and Navy diver to admit that I have fear and wrestle with it every single day. It’s okay for you to admit the same thing. There’s no hierarchy. It’s fear.

It’s also interesting to note before I was in the Navy, I spent a lot of time performing. I was a trumpet player and a singer. I played Tony in West Side Story, so I don’t fit the mold of a typical Special Operations operator with a lot of different backgrounds. One of the things that acting and performing taught me was that terrible feeling of stage fright.

If I look at that as a feeling and not as a story, the butterflies in the chest, the tingling in the fingers and hands, what if I could take a deep breath, and smile, I can change my physiology and the whole relationship to that resistance. It will take pressing through these resistances, this feeling of discomfort in achieving something that we’ve never had before.

Your audience is breaking through seven figures. There are going to be some uncomfortable things that have to change to do that. One of the things that I learned in my medical sales career, as was building Fear Sherpa off the side of my desk. As you can imagine, there was a lot of overwhelm that happened. I’m sure, audience, you can relate to feeling overwhelmed certainly from time to time. If I can change that story, the breath, the smile, and gratitude, if I’m feeling gratitude, I can’t feel fear or anger.

In changing the story, so nervous and excited look the same under MRI brain scans. It’s the same physiological changes. What’s different? The story. What I learned on stage was the physical feeling of butterflies and that anxiety. What if that was a feeling I got before I did something awesome. Later on, I would learn when I felt uncomfortable, and my teacher was there. I have the opportunity to grow through the discomfort. That was a huge revelation.

Losers make goals. Winners make systems. Click To Tweet

That was how I was able to graduate from military free-fall school that included five nighttime skydives, the last few involving the rucksack, 02 masks, and a weapon. The Navy has had a way of taking the fun out of everything since 1775, and that is hard flying with all that stuff. Every bit of that, what I told you about performing on stage, I needed to be at my best, and this is an idea that will come up. I want you to perform at your best when it matters the most. It matters how we show up, what emergency procedures we’ve already written for in the moment of fear and discomfort, and how we review our actions and systems afterward, so think of an explosion.

There’s the pre-blast. Did I do the mindfulness training? Did I set up the systems? Do I have my team in place? Am I well fed, hydrated, slept or learned? Everything prior to the explosion. There’s the, in the explosion that is taking a deep breath, the smiling, the story of, “I got this. I know what to do.” I’m focusing on what is most important while turning down the cost of that cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline. When it’s all over, what did we learn? What can we do better? From a system thinking mindset, I studied Electrical Engineering and Reliability Engineering, so I think in terms of systems and how do I apply systems?

Losers make goals. Winners make systems. That’s what we are going to talk about. How do you create your own emergency procedures and systems of takeoff and systems of landing the airplane at the end of the day and evolution? It was all reinforced with running a Special Operations platoon with very brilliant men who worked for me, and how do you harness a team like that?

My mind is going in a lot of directions. Let’s think about some of the fears that some of our audience might be experiencing and whether or not you want to contribute to the list. Here are a few that I know many of them are experiencing. One of them is, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know how to go from where I am to where I say I want to go. What if I fail?” There’s this fear of failure or fear of the unknown. “I have never done this. Maybe I’m a fake, and maybe I’m tapped out.” That’s one of the fears.

Another fear is, “What if I lose a key team member or I know I need to make a change. I have a team member that’s pulling us down but I fear what will happen to the rest of the team from a workload standpoint and me if I do the difficult thing and let go of that person? I don’t want to go through all the pain of finding somebody else and all the pain of picking up, not just the slack but nobody is there to do that work. Somebody else has got to do it. Maybe that’s me.”

There are other fears, not just fear of failure but fear of having something go wrong financially. “If I take a risk on an investment, I fear what could happen and what if that doesn’t work? What if I can’t make payroll as a result? What does that do to me and my family’s financial viability going forward if the business falls or fails?” I named a few common ones that I know have been across some of our readers’ minds, at least at some point in their life, if not now, as they read this. Are there any other fears you want to throw into the mix of, “Here are some things that seven-figure business owners might fear,” before we talk about how to deal with them?

The imposter one is huge. I was hoping that would come up. I will adjust that. I have a story about if I make a personnel change and how it affected my deployment and the financial risks and addressing it. Specifically, it’s not always good to run from fear. Sometimes it’s good to honor it. Sometimes fear is the thing that’s going to keep us alive. There’s a difference between worry and terror. There’s a great book called The Gift of Fear, and it gets into that discrimination between what’s imagined and what’s real. I will tie all those things together. Those are the main ones.

EEP 15 | Reframing Fear

Reframing Fear: Nervous and excited look the same under fMRI brain scans. It’s the same physiological changes. What’s different? The story.

 

The Imposter Belief syndrome prevents us from taking new actions. What if I’m not an eight-figure business owner? What if I’m not part of the 3%? That prevents us from seeing options that would be available to somebody like, “I got this. It’s painful but I can work through it.” I mentioned how I came here part of the first time we chatted. I didn’t get to take my team to Afghanistan for my second combat deployment and did not have long-term fear handled. That is the Imposter syndrome.

It felt way too serendipitous and synchronous how I was 1 of 17 officers that were selected from this program by Navy ROTC around 2006. I never believed that I would say things like, “I can’t believe that this is my dream job like James Bond.” That, ultimately, left me running for eighteen months. I would manifest the early end of my career in the Navy. I will never forget the day, and I’m sharing all this because this is how Fear Sherpa was born and why I’m so passionate about sharing this stuff.

I get to be the example, don’t do what I did in not having a plan and a relationship of long-term fear. I walked into my boss’s office. He looked haggard, “Brian, I lost a lot of sleep over this but you are not the man to take your team to Afghanistan.” Heartbreak doesn’t even come close. That’s where the phrase avalanche came from. It was so crushing. It was certainly dark. I felt alone. I had no idea which way was up that which a man’s fear grows. I was fearful of being an imposter.

I was different than all of the men and women that I served with. I wasn’t the same warrior class as these guys that work for SEAL teams and DEM crews. I didn’t have that handled. In the imposter thing, the more time we spend our resources on worrying, are we an imposter? We are owning it. I didn’t have the skills that I needed to leave that team in Afghanistan. I could have learned them if I had asked for more help and believed I was this level of a warrior.

I need a little extra training and could have taken different actions. The imposter thing is huge and peddled in my work. I call it the imposter monster. It’s there. “Who am I to think that I can do this?” The answer that should be immediately available is, “I’m exactly the person who needs to do this as I learned what I need to do to take my business to the next level,” for example, that’s huge. I’ve never done this before. That’s okay. That’s why you are here.

To do anything great, think of rock climbing. It takes a climber. It takes somebody handling the line called a bilayer. In that beautiful dance, the bilayer is the coach, and the climber is the entrepreneur business owner. You’ve never done this before. The person on the ground has a great perspective on where you are stuck, where the opportunities are, and they are there with you. “You’ve got this, Brian. Keep climbing.” You’ve got a nice handhold, one foot over your head into the left.

Sometimes the bilayer helps confirm what you already know. “Brett, it looks like I need to jump to the next level. I’m scared.” “Yeah. That’s your move. You’ve got this. I’ve got you. If you were to fall, I’m going to catch you. We got the safety net for that.” Sometimes, you take up the slack. Your presence there as a coach helps your person transition to the top of that climb. Sometimes there isn’t magic. Sometimes it’s business as usual. We can do a lot more when we travel together.

The imposter belief syndrome prevents us from taking new actions. Click To Tweet

If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, bring a team. That was huge. You mentioned the fear of the unknown. It’s not that we fear the unknown that’s more worried. Our imagination creates pain and suffering for us. That’s not based on any fact. Mark Twain said, “I’m an old man, and I’ve known a great number of tragedies. Few of which have come true.” Our imagination is left uncured, and that’s worry creating suffering. We are creating our own suffering based on unfounded fears and fears of the unknown.

What we are afraid of is leaving the known okay. It feels comfortable. It’s like the smallpox blanket. We know it, and slowly it’s killing us. It’s suffocating our growth. What we are called to do is to mitigate as much risk as possible. We will talk about that with the financial risks part of this. To honor what terror and real fear are sharing with us, make a plan and go through that door. Life is a series of scary doors. They feel scary when our toes are dangling over the edge, much like a ramp of an aircraft.

We are the most afraid and the safest. The great Will Smith video talking about skydiving recommends looking that up. The moment we are most afraid is when we are the safest, the night before, laying awake with our worry in bed. When we are the most excited is when we are the most dangerous. After the leap of faith, the air is there to catch us, and it’s there every single time.

The more frequently we can dance with courage and press through what feels uncomfortable, the bigger our lives will be. No kidding. It feels scary to take a walk through that threshold because if this was like a top-all map, all the way colored in with the terrain features and the lines and those things, the moment we step through that door, we are stepping into the unknown, the white space on the map.

The further we press, the more paint we are earning to paint our life’s masterpiece. It’s our body’s way of saying, “Pay attention.” For the same reason, when I skydive, I’m going to check my equipment three times and make sure my automatic deployment system, if I’m knocked out, is going to fire properly. All the lines are right. All the webbing is good to go. Thank God I have fear at that moment. I was changing that relationship, the breath, the smile, and the gratitude. I am so grateful that I’m expanding. That’s what this feeling is.

Maybe this is the feeling I get before I do something awesome. I said maybe it applies but in using language. I’ve got this. I trust myself. My relationship with skydiving is very different. Having done a ton of language work, speaking with clarity, and using architect language, the clearer my language is, the easier it is for my team to follow me. If I’m confused, they are confused. Before September, I was requalified for free-fall operations. I was wondering, “Would I be okay if that would be an emergency?”

This last time after finishing my book, after practicing breathwork and finding transcendence in ice baths, Wim Hof instructor. I teach breathing and how to find joy in ice baths. We are practicing panic and how I get my physiology under control faster comes in handy. I can show up with more when it matters because I’ve trained harder than most of the situations that come up. When I walked to the ramp of that airplane and my toes dangled over the edge, this Navy SEAL that I was jumping with, I gave him the thumbs up. “Time to jump.”

EEP 15 | Reframing Fear

Reframing Fear: We’re creating our own suffering based on unfounded fears and fears of the unknown.

 

My mind is, “I’ve got this. This is my skydive.” I did. We had so much fun. It’s such a different world, knowing that no matter what happens, I will figure it out. No matter what happens, I’m trained for every type of emergency, drilled and redrill. I know it. The amount of calm I was able to enjoy having gotten to know what terror was teaching me, “What if the parachute doesn’t open? What if it gets hung up? What if there are other skydivers in my way? What will I do?” I’ve already decided before I needed it. I wrote my emergency procedure and practiced it.

It’s the same thing. Every single moment, we can find the breath and the smile. We can invoke the gratitude of, “I’m glad this feels uncomfortable. I’m glad to be growing. I already know what to do.” At that moment, I had more available to me than anyone who was not trained. There are only two types of people when it comes to fear, those trained in fear response and who are untrained. The untrained are leaving so much on the table.

As busy and practical business owners, how do we go get some of this training, especially if we are struggling in our minds with, “This is cool to listen to Brian talk about these situations that most of us have never been in but facing a fear of flying through the air out of a plane, most of us aren’t doing that.” Where do we find some of this training that would be applicable to us as “normal everyday business owners?”

Are you asking where you can find the training stimulus to practice courage? Are you asking how people can work with me for me to teach them this?

I’m open to going either direction. I’m sitting here thinking if I’m trying to project myself into my reader’s heads, and some of them might go, “This is awesome to learn about Brian and what he’s done. I’m having a hard time equating jumping out of a plane with the fear I’m experiencing in my business. How would I learn how to manage the fear I’m dealing with?”

I use the skydiving analogy because it’s the most tangible analogy for jumping through that, which scares us. I’m sure you and your folks have a to-do list. As you think about your five-item to-do list, is there an item on there that has been there a couple of days, and I will get to it later, and now is not the right time that comes up at all?

Let’s talk about it in different terms. Usually, it’s not a couple of days, a couple of weeks or a couple of months. You stay there for a long time.

If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, bring a team. Click To Tweet

That’s your skydive. You don’t need to jump out of an airplane to practice courage. In fact, 2021 has been an amazing year of transition and growth. I don’t recognize my life. Part of the reason why that skydive was easier was that I trained harder. The inner work, the changing my beliefs and my identity, allow that jump to be easier. It’s the same thing with the to-do list, for example. “It feels scary. What am I going to do? I’m going to take a deep breath with a smile, and I’m going to be grateful for the clarity. I know what I need to do next.” It’s that item.

If I can string together days where I eat that frog first, there’s a lot less mindless work that I will do. It’s the busy procrastination. We have all kinds of opportunities to practice courage that doesn’t involve an airplane. If you are ever part of a conference, go over and, “My name is Brian Muka. I’m so glad to meet you,” and shake their hand. If I don’t do that in the first five seconds and I don’t get up the nerve to leave what I’m doing and meet that person, I’m not going to do it.

The fear grows exponentially the more time I give it. Turn this into a theory. I’m using self-talk on purpose and try not to sound too far over my skis but I call it Muka’s Law, the size of fear and worry grows the size of the container we give it. If we can highlight those things, that’s uncomfortable. It’s important. I am the person to do this. The more violent action that I use still uses planning, of course, and mitigating risk and those things. The less time I waste getting after that one item that I have been delaying for months, the more resources I’m going to have, and the smaller the fear and worry become.

You didn’t give it as much container, according to Muka’s Law.

Yes. Keep worrying small and useful. Let it show you where the dangers are. I do an exercise called the fear flip. Let’s take that item on your to-do list and put it off for weeks. Start the stopwatch for five minutes or less but no more than five minutes. Write down everything you are scared of. What are all the things that could go wrong here? What we are doing with this exercise is finding the edges of what I am afraid of instead of trying to fill in all these nebulous details about the fear of the unknown. It will now occupy space on the page, and you can see it like, “Is this the thing that I feared? Getting into some stoicism there,” and we can create a plan for each of those things.

How can I mitigate the risk of this particular thing? What can I do to make it less possible? Let me turn down the frequency of that and address it all. Sometimes, I was working with a lady, and she wrote it down on her page, “What if I’m not smart enough to lead this movement?” I let her sit in there for a couple of minutes. She wrote down five other things. If you change one word, often you change a whole life. I had to cross out the word, “Not,” which is incorrect for grammar. She read it back before the question. She didn’t believe it yet. “What if I am smart enough to lead this movement?” She didn’t believe it yet.

I threw in the word, “I could totally be smart enough to lead this movement,” and then that progressed, “I’m so grateful to be smart enough to lead this movement.” “Can you believe that I used to think I wasn’t smart enough to do this?” It put a lot of distance between her whole identity. After that work, she was able to cross out the other five things they didn’t apply. One word crossed out the word, “Not.”

EEP 15 | Reframing Fear

Reframing Fear: The size of fear and worry grows the size of the container we give it.

 

Sometimes we are afraid of that new statement more than we are the others. When you turned it into, “What if I am smart enough to lead this movement?” Maybe now that’s a bigger thing, “I got to go do that. That could be bigger.” Sometimes we are more afraid of that moment than cowering behind the, “What if I’m not,” idea.

There’s a lot of social pressure in the United States, less than in other countries. It’s okay for us and how to share with our friends, “I am good at what I do.” In other countries, you can’t do that but there’s still some conditioning in, “Be good but not too good.” Don’t be too cocky. This is my favorite poem on fear. It ties right into this fear of not being good enough is not as intense as a fear of our greatest.

This is by Marianne Williamson, “Our deepest fear is that we are not inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frighten us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Who are you not to be?’ You are a child of God. You playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God or the universe that is within us. It is not in some of us, and it’s in everyone. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

A while back, let’s get a little more practical, and you did. I love the tool that you shared. Dump all of the thoughts out of your head around the fear, put some shape to it, and talk about things you could do to address it. That’s awesome. You were asking if I was giving you an opportunity to say, “If you want to work with me, how has that been done?”

I would love for you to share the best way for people to connect with you or learn more about what you do. Share your favorite website address or your social media channels or feeds. Where would you like people to connect with you if they want to learn more or already know, “I want to work with this guy?” How does that happen?

The easiest and most effective way is to go on LinkedIn and look @BrianMuka. That’s the home for Fear Sherpa. We can interact there, and you can ask me questions and set up a call. I very much enjoyed doing the virtual coaching one-on-one. If you are leading a team, you are a company, and I absolutely am in love with leading workshops for people to address their fears. There are a lot of partner exercises there. I found fear from the limiting belief perspective.

It’s like vampires. They lurk in our subconscious, and when we can be courageous enough to share with another, we hold that vampire out into the sunlight, and those limitations get burned away. There are so much healing and identity change that can happen that allows more to be available to us. It’s the whole idea of, “How do we be more and do less.” When we are afraid of doing things, we find all this busy work to help us feel occupied. If we eat those frogs first, we have the courage every day to do our daily skydive or courage practice. We are not going to have to work as hard. We have to work smarter.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. Click To Tweet

When the whole team is pulling the oars in the same direction, our whole organization can thrive, and it can start with you. You can be that example of the lights, the inspiration to truly lead with clear language and calm breathing. The goal isn’t confidence. The goal is to be calm when it matters. There’s so much more available at that place. LinkedIn is a great place. My website is FearSherpa.com. I am updating a lot of that now. LinkedIn is the best place to shoot me a message and ask me a question or schedule a twenty-minute phone call.

Thank you, Brian. You characterize the work as being not as hard as we make it. There’s this thing we are fearful of. We procrastinate it. We came up with all the other busy work so we could avoid it. You talked about you don’t even have to work as hard, and we are going to work smarter. Let’s even assume that you do have to work as hard.

At least you will be working as hard on the thing that might matter most. You might get 10X the results from something that you have been avoiding, all the other stuff, and it’s not going to be any more work. It’s work. It’s time and effort spent on the thing that matters more than anything else. It’s an interesting way to think about and talk about that. Thank you.

It seems to be very much in line with your mission. A lot of entrepreneurs are at the seven-figure mark, my Coach, Mike Bledsoe, talks about 10X thinking, and that’s a lot of places too. It is possible to change my actions so I can work twice as hard. I could probably do that. What I’m suggesting and what we are talking about here in this interview, how to 10X your results?

That’s what it’s going to take to go from 7 to 8 figures, 10X thinking and diving into new areas that have been unexplored, taking advantage of forgotten superpowers like harnessing fear. Use the breath to find calm, to clearly articulate what the vision of your organization and mission is. That’s the stuff that’s going to move the needle. The amount of work will be the same but the amount of traction, we can exponentially grow.

You get way more progress. Brian, this has been exceptional. I appreciate it. To highlight a few things. Readers, I feel like I’m part of the group here as we talk. Many of us have to limit our thoughts about how to move forward. We may feel like imposters. We may feel like there’s no way I could make this happen if that key team member leaves. We may feel like the risk is too scary or great financially to make an investment. We believe it is the right investment for our business. There are lots of things that could significantly add to the barriers between you and what you say or think you want. Those barriers are knowable, and the emotional response or the fear that we all experience can be productively worked with or worked through.

I love that we have had some great wisdom drops by Brian Muka, the Fear Sherpa. I love that title because all of the things we’ve discussed are the things that make the difference between low or average performers and those who have breakout results. None of you are lower-average performers. You are all elite to get to the seven-figure mark but there are even fewer who go beyond.

We are here to provide for you the mindsets, the skillsets, and the tool sets. I believe firmly that what Brian has shared could be game-changing for you as a leader in how you think and in your language to be able to overcome the things that are holding you back from even more greatness. I will wrap up with that. Brian, do you want to say any parting words as we finish this up?

I do. The further I go down the breathing rabbit hole, and cold immersion, the more superpowers that we have that are forgotten. I wrote you a guidebook with a similar title. It’s called Your Secret Superpower: Tame Fear to Thrive. I wrote this as a result of my time as a bomb tech surviving two massive avalanches leaving the Navy, and separating from my partner. I created this for myself when I was 26. I didn’t know which way was up.

As a way to help other people through massive life transitions, all the tools are in there of how to start. You can start applying them. It’s a good narrative on the cost of allowing fear to make decisions on our behalf without us stepping up and becoming the commander of such a powerful force. Please check that book out. I wrote it for you, Your Secret Superpower: Tame Fear to Thrive, on Amazon.

I appreciate you making time. Brian, it has been a sincere pleasure.

The pleasure is mine. I appreciate this opportunity to share my story and hopefully lighten the load for your game changers. Thank you again for the opportunity.

This has been our episode. I hope that getting a ton of value out of these, and we will continue to bring great new topics and ideas and other elite entrepreneurs to share their actual stories of growing their seven-figure businesses. Stay tuned. Rate the episodes, share them, and appreciate what you are reading.

 

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