The first and most important negotiation is the one with yourself.
Hey, everybody.
Before we get into this episode, I just want to give you a little disclaimer.
This was a fascinating episode.
Tony is an expert at managing fear and his advice is really practical.
And even for me, who studies this type of stuff, I learned so much from this episode.
Now, tony keeps it real, and so there is some colorful language in this episode but, like i told him, i want him to flow, i want to get the information from him and i want him to be himself, and so the team is going to edit as much as we can.
So if you're listening with children, it might not be the episode for you, and if you are new to the podcast, just know this is us experimenting with something new.
This episode is longer and it is very raw, but still very practical, because one of the biggest things that's going to hold you back in these difficult conversations is your ability or inability to manage fear.
And so Tony is an expert in the field and he brings a really different lens because he's coming at it from self-defense.
And so the situations he's dealing with are very raw, really just raw humanity here.
And so this is a very, very clear trigger warning I am giving you as you listen to this episode, because he has to talk about situations of violence or sexual assault or anything like that in your past.
We will be talking about some of those topics in this episode.
So I just want you all to have a very clear disclaimer before you go in.
But I stand by the content in this episode.
I learned a lot and I'm hoping that you all can use the content from this episode to overcome your fear so you can be more effective in whatever it is that you're trying to do day to day but, of course, staying on brand, especially as it results to your negotiations and difficult conversations.
Let's jump into it.
Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of negotiate anything.
Thanks for joining us today.
With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world.
I'm your host, Kwame Christian.
I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of the American Negotiation Institute.
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And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.
How did you get into like the self-defense work at the beginning?
The kind of the origin story is interesting.
When I was 12 years old, I got jumped by two guys and they've got my hands behind my back and they went to do this bolo punch and everything went into slow motion.
I was scared and they were much older than me.
Kind of one of these things where they just built a new high school the year before i was graduating elementary school.
I grew up in canada and uh, i'm uh leaving a pickup game of baseball behind the school.
I'm all alone, kind of like 12 years old, and hey kid, i saw these older kids.
Wow, like they want to talk to me.
I run over to them, little did i know, and uh hey uh, when are you coming to high school?
And i was like oh, next year.
And they go.
Well, welcome to high school.
And i'm like, thank you.
They grab me and spin me and then it's this bolo punch and I scream.
I'm like, ah, like anticipating this impact.
I was a really good athlete as a kid.
I wrestled track and field.
I was, I've been skiing since I'm three years old.
I was really good shape.
So, you know, they got my arms behind my back.
I'm trying to struggle to get back.
So my abs are as as locked on as they can be.
Like you couldn't ask for more contraction.
They hit me.
I don't even feel it, but the anticipation of the impact makes me scream.
And I, I screamed with like, I thought I was going to die.
Cause they were like, you know, they were like, let's say 15, 16.
That's a big difference.
And so I screamed this like, like blood curdling, I'm going to die.
And it hits me.
I don't feel anything, but I felt like When I screamed the guy holding me I felt his pressure change.
Like, oh my God, we didn't want to hurt this kid.
We just wanted to scare this kid.
I felt a reaction to my scream.
And it was like this intuition.
I immediately screamed again, faking it, just totally acting.
I went, ah, and I started gagging like, oh, oh, oh.
And the kid dropped me and they both took off.
And I'm on the ground like on all fours, you know going ah ah, watching them run away.
When they turned the corner, i like i stood up, fixed my shirt and i was like what the hell just happened.
Then i went home and um, i told my dad you know he goes, how was the game?
I go dad, i just got beaten up by two guys and i had like no marks on me, my shirt's not even torn, and it's like kind of like like the joke i make.
I don't know if he said this, but it was like kind of.
It's like, was it a pillow fight?
Like what do you mean?
Like you got beat, there's no marks.
And uh, you know, i told him i was so scared and this and that.
And he says well, you got to learn some self-defense.
And it was uh, just on the threshold of the bruce lee craze in 1973 when, when bruce passed away and there was one taekwondo school in our area about a mile from my house, i went and watched the class and signed up.
I was so fascinated with martial arts, some backstory to that that um, uh probably makes this more relevance in terms of my my, my journey, my passion uh, my calling uh is.
As a kid, i was fascinated with every single show on tv where somebody use some sort of self-defense to right a wrong, to just you know.
So it could have been a Western.
It could have been, you know, and I grew up in the 60s when, you know, black and white was becoming color.
And and, you know, it was the iPad of our generation was your little TV downstairs.
And I was there.
And I'd be watching the original Wild Wild West with Robert Conrad or Mannix and the streets of San Francisco.
And there was always a bad guy and there's always a good guy.
You know, the formula.
And at some point, the good guy did some sort of, you know, lame karate chop or some sort of punch.
And of course, the original Batman and Robin and Green Hornet stuff.
So very interesting.
You know, the choreography was horrible, but it was still to like a six, seven, eight year.
I grew up in the 60s.
I'm 62 now.
The like that fascinated me.
So there was this immediate full circle of I didn't know what they were doing.
Was martial arts in the 60s?
You just, you know, you just never talked about it.
And and then when the fight happened, I finally found the school.
I went in there and I was like, oh, my God, like this will solve all my problems.
Of course it didn't, but I became a fanatic.
I was obsessed and I felt like it was going to fix things.
And then serendipitously, I guess it did.
You know, here I am decades later and our company trains everyone all over the world, from tier one operators to the soccer mom, to business executives.
And it's not just true silver lining.
And I think the part that may be most interesting to your demographic is is in my pursuit and study and trying to truly understand how to manage violence.
You realize at some point that you can't manage violence if you can't manage fear.
And that led to a very, very different rabbit hole in understanding the difference between the biology and physiology of fear and the psychology of fear.
And that pursuit and understanding that it's the psychology of fear that we all need to wrestle with the movie in our mind going to get my ass kicked now, or or i'm not good enough for this job, or i can't quit this job because uh, i got a little security but i'm miserable.
And i, or a negotiation where you're, you know you you, you come in and next thing, you know uh, the guy you're trying to pitch is standing up behind you talking to you and you're like, oh my god, he's got the high ground and your head just starts Going all like all the little subtle behavioral tricks that that master, master negotiators have figured out.
And but that was truly, truly the the serendipity of it, because here are years later, and I'm wearing a shirt for those of you who are just listening on audio.
It says no fear on it. and it's spelled K-N-O-W.
And this idea that when we get to know fear, we can self-actualize, we can lean into a problem differently.
But if we unconsciously or consciously avoid fear, fear will always present itself when we're moving just outside our comfort zone.
So it's a fantastic reframe, but there's no, I say this and hopefully everyone gets the joke.
I'm not trying to be pedantic about it and make words.
I i use two words that most people have no idea like like, what the hell did?
He just say let me get the source out a lot of and i say that that that jokingly, because a lot of the people who teach about performance and psychology you feel small and uneducated around them.
It's it's very academic as opposed to practical.
Can can i listen to this guy or do this program and and make a different choice, like 90 minutes later, because of something that i heard?
And uh, and that's my goal, the the my goal, when i, you know, as a lifelong martial artist, i realized most of the stuff that we practice and teach in martial arts isn't practical for sudden violence, that it needed to be super, super simple And it needed to resonate with the behavioral, psychological distraction of oh my God, I'm going to get my ass kicked.
Oh my God, I'm about to get raped.
Oh my God, I'm getting, this is a home invasion.
Like when you go to if you've ever done martial arts, and you're in the dojo or the mat room, there's ceremony and there's procedure and there's nothing.
You're not stress, inoculating anything for sudden violence.
All of this is intertwined, and hopefully that makes sense.
That was a 37 hour answer to you.
How did you get started?
Hello, my friends.
Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question.
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Man, I love this.
That couldn't have been any better.
This is great.
I mean, that serves right there as our introduction.
And you're so right.
Because my first book was called Finding Confidence in Conflict.
It's all about helping people overcome those internal barriers to difficult conversations, because I say it doesn't make sense to give recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen.
You can Google negotiation all day.
That doesn't mean that you have the emotional fortitude to overcome those internal demons, to actually perform under duress.
So that's what the whole first book was about.
And it's critical because people really struggle with this.
You talk about how we struggle with it in the physical world and you've seen it working with business professionals about how we struggle with it in the business world and in our personal life.
Right.
So let's go deeper.
Let's talk, let's talk more about it.
You just said something there that that that made me think of a kind of a metaphor and rant that I do when I'm working with professional athletes.
So even a metaphor that I'll use for moms dads entrepreneurs, business owners, team leaders you'll see like, like professional athletes say, from a golfer to a boxer uh, perform miserably on one day, and they're, and they're in their interview after they're like, hey man, it wasn't my night, it wasn't my day.
I don't know how i missed that.
Well, you and i know how they missed that.
Their self-talk changed their potential for flow state, like that connection between i'm just doing this because this is right right now and uh, There's a flow state.
When you're in a speech, there's a flow state.
Like five minute answer was a flow state.
Like I was reliving and connecting and goosebumps.
And it was, you know, so how do we do that in a meeting?
How do we do that?
You know, when we're on a date, how do we do that when we're negotiating a deal?
Because that flow state is a.
According to psychologists, it's like the it's we're optimized when that's happening.
But it's also, I believe this, it's contagious in the rapport confidence stage.
Like if I talk to you, if I got on this call and you went yeah, we're talking to fear management expert Tony Blower and Tony, you know, tell us what's going on.
You look like you're in a hotel room and I'm going, hi guys, excuse me.
So excited to talk to you about fear.
And the number one fear is public speaking in the world.
You know And you're going.
What is wrong with this guy?
Oh, my God.
Like, have you ever watched a friend go to compete or get up on stage or play either in a band?
And you're more nervous than they are.
You're like you're sitting in the audience.
You're going, oh, come on, man.
Right.
Could you imagine if, while you're like you're, let's say, you're watching your kid about to sing in the school play, or a buddy is about to do a guitar solo in a band and or a friend is competing or your kid is competing?
And I've had all of that.
My son playing basketball, my daughter up on this or whatever.
And I'm like sitting there, I had butterflies in my stomach.
I'm like, I'm doing this.
Could you imagine if somebody, when you had the butterflies in your stomach, if they came up to you and they said tune, do this combination, do like you'd be.
Like what?
Huh, because you're not ready.
There are lots of people who you know and where i'm going in this kind of like circular metaphors.
You said a couple minutes ago we've got the physical and then there's this emotional psychological, mental component.
There are lots of people who get world class at the physical dynamics but when they get outside their comfort zone because they're, they're what's happening.
And i love the acronym i'm sure you use it or seen it the acronym for fear false expectations appearing real.
So it's been around forever.
I've got a little kind of paraphrase on it where i explain to people this is when you're visualizing a future event that's debilitating you in the present, which means it's messing up who you are in this meeting.
It's messing up who you are on this date.
It's messing up who you are as you're stepping through the ropes in the ring and you're thinking I'm going to get my kicked in about three minutes.
Can I last three minutes here?
You know, if I lose this deal here, I mean, that's it.
When you're focusing on the future, you can't hit flow state in the present.
You're right.
It makes a lot of sense because it is, in fact, true, as you know.
Right.
And so the key is figuring out how to overcome that fear.
If we are in a situation, we're trying to perform at a high level.
Let's just think about any kind of distraction.
Let's just keep it super simple.
If there's somebody doing jumping jacks in the side of the room and playing a tuba, that's going to be distracting.
It's going to lower your ability to perform whatever it is that you're doing.
Most likely, if you're trying to speak, you're trying to do a, to negotiate, have a difficult conversation, that distraction is going to take you off of the path.
Same thing the fear operates as a distraction.
It is taking us out of our flow state and when you're in a flow state, you have to be in the moment.
When we're thinking about the uh, the flow state, like the psychology of the flow state, We have the author of the book called Flow, incredible book.
But you're in the moment and it's almost like you said with the example with you when you were a child, things seem to almost be happening in slow motion.
I know, when I'm doing my trainings, when I'm doing keynotes, I tell people.
It feels as though when they say, all right, and coming to the stage, Kwame Christian, I feel like I stay seated and my body goes up and I'm watching myself perform with everybody else.
And so we have to get to that point where we're comfortable enough to just flow and operate.
But a big challenge is going to be that fear.
So how do we take these initial steps to overcoming that fear?
What's interesting is back to the origins of self-defense.
Where I realized my so my incubator period was the 80s where I did like crazy.
I was doing fight club type things before fight club was a movie.
We do scenarios we put on.
I grew up in Canada.
We'd have like hockey helmets on gauntlets on, you know, martial art, chess guards, baseball shin guards.
And we beat the crap out of each other.
We film it with VHS, like just trying to understand things that were outside of just sparring.
And what I noticed about five years into this.
I did this for about 13 years straight.
I noticed that once a month we do this open seminar, people come in, sign a waiver release and it would be like a street fighter, a boxer some of my students, people from the outside, who've got this reputation.
You'd see some people coming in and we all size each other up, right?
We judge books by covers, right?
We look and we go, oh, this guy's big.
Oh, he's got cauliflower ears.
Is that from rugby or is he a grappler?
Like you're having this conversation with yourself and this is part of it, right?
If you're leading a lot of meetings or if you're in meetings back to back all day, you know how mentally demanding that can be.
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And I'd see some people who I had went, that guy is going to do really well.
Or I'd see like a female come in and like she's nervous and she's like got tears in her eyes and she'll, I want to do this this, this course, and uh, you know, as a victim of sexual assault, and i think this is going to be cathartic for me and okay, and and i'm going, oh man, like should we let her do this?
She looks scared, shitless right and uh, and she's like like fighting, like with this ferocity, and this other guy, the big guy who was a you know, came in and went yeah, i'm a dormant at this club and i've been you know 100 fights is like tapping out, running because we we didn't do sparring, we did these crazy, like realistic scenarios.
Three guys approach you in an alley and you know you'd have to do the dialogue we always wanted to be moral ethical, legal is a really different way to approach self-defense.
And your question was you know, how do we manage our fear in real time, in steps.
What i realized and this is why this, this background, is important, because i didn't i didn't like go to school and and and get the same degree and then come up with a new acronym to create a company like like, like.
This is this is truly organic.
And I want your, your audience, to appreciate you laughing and get cause.
There's, there's like there's so many influencers and experts and people.
And it's just like, it's just a new acronym.
It's a new filter.
And you know the joke.
There's like a thousand people online that say Hey, send me five grand and I'll teach you how to run a business.
And they're like 11 years old.
And you're like going, you haven't even like, you don't even have a business.
Your business is taking money from other people.
That's your business, and there's some really really good people and I've got a bunch of business mentors out there, but they've grown businesses, they've lost businesses, they've rebuilt.
When I talk about self-defense and this is the connection to the fear management piece, because I want everyone listening and if I just reach one person, it's the insights and what I'm about to share in terms of the steps of learning how to manage fear were derived from studying violence, which inarguably might be the worst day of your life, right?
You could have bad financial news on one day, but you've got maybe a month, three months, a year, two years to figure that out, to get out of the tailspin, right.
Sudden violence, you can only have time to dial 911.
And in that split second of making decisions there and this is what I discovered in 1985-ish The people who manage their fear managed to fight.
I'll say that again because it's a very specific sentence with a very specific cadence.
The people who manage their fear manage to fight.
And so go back to these two extreme scenarios.
This five-foot, 420-pound sexual assault victim who's sitting there with tears in her eyes reliving what happened in the past, is this ferocious animal instinct primally driven in the scenario like doing, like not doing technical martial arts, just fighting for life in this scenario and discovering an inner strength and power because she used her fear as fuel.
The other guy, and we'll come back to that pin, the fear is fuel.
The other guy who I went.
This guy's going to kick.
That guy's ends up getting hit and turns and covers and then pushes away the danger and falls down and taps out through the scenario.
His fear he allowed to consume him.
Customato was mike tyson's original uh boxing coach.
Has this wonderful metaphor about fire.
He says fire and i'm paraphrasing it, uh it, you know what he wrote was more elegant than this.
But he says fire can warm your home and cook your food or, if it's not controlled, it can burn your house to the ground right.
And it can burn you, it can harm you, and the metaphor here is fire is fear, and so that's why i say fear is fuel.
If we get a fear spike, if we get that adrenaline dump and the cortisol spike and the, the racing thoughts and we don't have the self-awareness to realize that's our nervous system shifting from parasympathetic to sympathetic.
And there's going to be a whole bunch of physiological changes that are, in many cases, designed by our survival system to protect us.
If we don't know how to harness that or control it, we start giving into the movie in our mind.
So something happens when we break down in our system.
When we break down fear, We break it down at two levels.
One, there's like the hardwired fear of, let's say your son's seeing a spider.
And he immediately is scared of it.
They're creepy looking.
I'm not a fan either.
And immediately you get an adrenaline dump because it scares you.
That's at an instinctive level, hits your physiological system and neurochemicals start firing and you're in a fear state.
Well, what your psychological system does at that point is it takes that input and turns that into a movie in your mind.
This spider is going to crawl inside my mouth and get inside me, this spider is going to crawl inside my ear, and then you know, and you remember all those you know growing up, like the person who got bit by the spider and then they gave birth to spiders and like all the, all the crazy things that kids believe and uh, that's the move in your mind.
And that move in your mind, if you let that movie grow, what happens is and this is all part of our no fear program is i explain?
You're the uh, um in the movie in your mind.
You are the screenwriter, you're the director, you're the producer, you're the casting director and you cast yourself as victim number one in a horror movie where you kill yourself off, right and uh, instead of casting yourself as the superhero, right.
Like You know, I'm the hero in my story, that whole thing that Joe Rogan made famous.
Right.
But we do that all the time, man.
You've done it.
I've done it.
Like you do something to your back and you go, oh, my God, my backside.
I won't be able to do this when we do that.
You know, you hit some traffic on your way to a gig and immediately you're going.
I'm going to miss this flight.
If I miss this flight, I can do that.
And you've created this stressful nightmare where now you're immediate self-awareness and situation awareness is compromised.
And now maybe you get into a car accident.
You start speeding.
You're not, you're not, you know, using your turn signal because you're.
You're now two days away from event, worrying about like compromising relationship with a client because, and then you, and then you realize oh, the traffic was like it was five minutes.
There was a cop giving someone a ticket, but you were freaking yourself out.
That's a lame example because we do that with our health.
We do that with relationships.
We misread something that a loved one does.
And then, like a week later, you know, a week's gone by and we get into this huge fight only to find out we misread something.
There's a huge connection between our self-awareness and critical thinking.
And then are self-awareness, critical thinking, and situational awareness.
And that is so intertwined and misunderstood by people.
And for us to do better as good humans, we need to improve our critical thinking.
The only way you improve critical thinking is if you improve your self-awareness, where you look at something and I go hey, check this out man.
And you look at it and you immediately go, man, I don't like that at all.
I disagree with Tony.
Therefore, I don't like Tony.
Therefore, I don't want this relationship.
And we have all these like dominoes that hit because we had a judgment.
F Scott Fitzgerald said many, many years ago a true sign of intelligence is your ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your mind without judgment and analyze that.
Unconscious bias I love to joke about.
I'll be talking to someone.
I'll go.
Well, you know we can't have a conversation because you've got this unconscious bias.
How could you say that?
Well, we can't talk about it because it's unconscious.
So you don't know right and they're like you're messing with me because it's unconscious.
I'm making a joke here because the self-awareness piece is critical in all this because, if you can sit back, you know, last night i was having a meeting and someone said to me we're talking about our kids and uh, he said, you know, my son wants to do this.
And i said i just had a talk with my, my son, and he wants to do something in um, He wants to start like a T-shirt company.
And he's got these ideas for T-shirts.
I didn't even know that he could draw.
He's 31 years old.
Like he's drawing these sketches.
And I'm like, hey, who drew these?
And he's like, oh, I did.
I'm like, holy.
And he wants to start this brand.
And I catch myself going, hey. you're like a world-class fitness trainer.
He's a, he's an amazing coach, you know, and that's such an important thing in this day.
Like you know what obesity and people don't understand diets and training, and it's an epidemic all over the world, but especially in the U?
S.
And he's more important than a doctor in many ways, right.
Because if you understand nutrition and fitness, you can change a lot of the, a lot of the that's going on with change.
If people just took better care of themselves.
So his role as a fitness consultant is huge.
And then he goes, and it wasn't a pivot.
He wasn't like, I'm giving this up, but he started talking about it.
But I caught myself.
Caught myself man wanting to say, as his dad, I wouldn't do that if I were you.
And if you are going to do that, do it this way.
And, you know, you should be watch out for this.
And I just zipped my mouth because had I said any of that while he was so excited about this, I might have killed his passion.
But it was only my self-awareness that changed my critical thinking.
And the connection to situational awareness was my son was sharing something important to me and I was about to you know like, be that parent who goes.
Well, you didn't go to school for this and you really want to do that.
You should go get a new job.
She got a real job and do all of that.
Here's a neat thing, man is, why would i, as a parent, or why would you, go to your boss?
And you go hey man, i got this idea for this change in our marketing or branding this or opening this or whatever.
And the guy goes oh yeah, interesting stuff, but we don't have the budget for that and that's not going to make sense.
Why do people shut anything down or redirect anything when you peel the onion?
Oh, we don't have this, we don't have that when you peel.
Let's use me and my son as an example.
You're a, I got three kids.
My son's turning 32.
I got a 25 year old and a 20.
What's the one reason that I would say hey, if you're going to do this, you know I wouldn't do that.
Invest over here.
Speak to these people.
Did you go to school for this?
Like all that that we throw on people.
Am I wrong?
Who knows?
Am I right?
Who knows?
But why am I doing it?
Because I don't want him to fail.
Peel the onion.
What do you mean you don't want it?
Because he's going to borrow money from me if he fails.
Whatever the whole, it's fear.
It comes down to, and that's the self-awareness piece.
I was afraid for him.
I wanted him to be happy, but I was afraid.
And then I would manipulate because if I had lack of self-awareness, I would rationalize, you know the play on words, rationalize a rational lie I would tell myself a rational lie where I would say to hey Nikki I know you want to do this man but you you need some money in the bank and you got to build this up here and you got to I would have projected on him my fears in an elegant way and he probably would have done it anyways but he would have hated me for it and it would have changed our relationship it was only the self-awareness that kept me from opening my big mouth But this is how powerful, this is what I mean by the no fear.
So learning to manage fear is like getting in shape.
You know, if I told you, hey man, you need to be able to bang at a hundred pushups in a row.
I want your son to see you bang.
You might go, well, geez, I'm like, I'm not really good at pushups.
We'll do 100 now in front of him.
He's going to watch that and go, I'm never doing that.
My dad was crying.
He was struggling.
He was going, I can't do it.
But how do you run a marathon?
You start off walking, right?
You build up to a mile.
Then you try and do two miles.
Then you do four miles.
You want to do 100 pushups.
You do one pushup.
You go, that wasn't so bad.
You do 10 at 10, you're like your form is breaking.
So now it's not good for your back, your neck, so you go.
I can bang out eight and then, when my body adapts and my mind adapts, i'll do ten.
And then one day i'll do a hundred.
Might take me six months.
I do this fun talk on the difference between in the future, fixated on potential, and so i try something, i crash and burn and someone goes.
You can do better, i know i can do better.
And you need to be a unicorn, a special human, to deal with that type of failure on a regular basis.
And this isn't the.
Thomas edison said you know, i didn't, you know, fail a thousand times, i discovered a thousand ways to not.
I don't think he said that.
That should be fact checked.
But anyways, you know what I mean?
It's like it's like it's great.
And maybe he did say that.
And he's a unicorn.
But I guarantee at the 50th time, he was like, here comes a beat for you guys where he goes.
Then he goes into the house and, you know, has dinner and goes to sleep.
And but his resiliency is determination.
He starts again the next day.
We need to bring motivation, inspiration and fear management like down into a gutter fight where it's just plain language.
You got a comfort zone.
You're wondering about something else.
That's your discomfort zone.
Someone says, what about that?
And I call it the holy zone, right?
Because that's fun.
People laugh when I teach that.
You know, keynote comes up and I go let's talk about the whole zone.
People are laughing because that's not pedantic.
That's not academic sounding.
I go, listen, things you're comfortable with.
That's the comfort zone.
That's where your life stagnates right, the discomfort zone are things you think you can do, but you're being careful because you're just outside your, your discomfort zone.
And then there's the holy zone, and that's where growth happens.
And the more you work in your holy zone and this isn't cavalier, like i don't like those memes do one thing that scares you every day right, like i, like there's a lot of of.
I don't mean to insult anybody or offend anybody, because some of you might have that tattooed on you.
Or you got a big sign over your desk and you're like I got to turn this off now because I'm gonna have to get rid of that poster.
You don't need to do one thing that scares you every day.
But here's the difference.
And this is so cool.
Every day, there may be something that scares you and you need to contemplate facing that.
That's leaning into fear and turning fear a fuel.
In other words, I'm not seeking adrenaline.
I'm going through life.
And then you know, I go to this nice restaurant and I order my steak medium rare or, for people who don't like meat eaters, your fish, your salmon medium rare, rare.
Did you see how polite i was and how inclusive i was there?
And it comes back well done salmon.
Well done is like, tastes like rubber and smells steak well done.
All the nutrients are.
I asked this question at will return food that's not cooked to your liking?
And in a group of 50, there's only ever two or three or four that put their hand up.
Everyone else sits back and smiles and giggles and I go, what are you giggling at?
They go, nothing.
I go, no, come on, tell the group.
And they go, yeah, I don't want my meal to come back with some special sauce.
And, you know, like I'm not returning it to the kitchen.
That's false expectations appearing real.
I'm visualizing something happening in the kitchen that hasn't happened yet.
That's changing. what I'm about to eat and put in my body and pay for with my hard-earned money.
And I'm doing that because I'm afraid of a confrontation with a waiter who really is trying to be nice to me so he gets a better tip.
It's so f***ed up, right?
If I say to the waiter, let's say you are my waiter, and I go, excuse me, call me, right?
Yeah.
What kind of restaurant is this?
You tell the cook that I think he's rushing and he's going to get a bad review from me.
Now return this steak, peasant, and bring me a cook.
If I do that, guaranteed you're getting special sauce because you're berating and belittling and you're
But if I say to the guy hey man, I know you guys are busy and everything, and maybe the cook mixed my steak up or whatever.
I'm not saying to kiss somebody's ass, but if you're just nice and go hey, this is too well done for me.
Could I get this?
Just be nice.
That's a simple example.
It's not a violent encounter.
Right.
It's not, you know, me pitching a deal to a company.
I'm not negotiating a sale.
It's not a big deal.
And this is what I mean by you can practice managing your fear.
I use another term.
You practice courage.
That's how you manage fear. hey return like you asked you asked your son earlier i don't know if you'll keep that in the show hopefully you will but you you asked your son earlier hey what are some of the things you do and he hesitated because what he experienced there was fear of public speaking and as he knew what the answer was when you reminded him right away you went oh yeah but he was like you really you're making me dad you're making me talk on your show to a stranger and like that's that's a a notice you hesitated there you don't need to hesitate you don't need you don't need to um you know you just need to be polite be yourself that's how people get to to know you and like you and trust you uh of course trust your intuition you don't have to talk to everybody you don't want to like like being friendly whatever but it's like it's a conversation about like i guarantee that if if uh i bumped into you at a bar one night and i was with a couple of people and i went hey call me this is my friend uh uh Bill and Sean that you wouldn't go you'd smile and stick your hand out because you're a good public speaker and you interview people so you've you've created that you've learned to manage the fear of that type of interpersonal communication so it's a it's a fascinating thing but it's all I you know so I've been teaching managing violence for decades and I work with like I mentioned earlier swat teams military law enforcement ems mental health professionals like that's my main business the no fear vertical in my company which which i've been teaching fear management since the mid 80s when i realized that the people who manage their fear managed to fight doesn't guarantee victory but it guarantees that you're in the fight which means if you lose the fight you still have your dignity and self-respect you went i was in the fight Right.
As opposed to I'm sure you've you've met tons of people, you know, through your writings and meetings because of the books and the purpose of this podcast.
You meet people who pull you aside and they go and they don't say it like this.
I'll just be dramatic for the show.
I'm miserable where I am and I don't know how to get out of this rut.
And what to talk about is like negotiating is the first step.
And most important negotiation is the one with yourself.
Do you know how to negotiate with your?
Because your fear-based self is saying I wouldn't do that if I were you.
And then your heart, or your gut, or your intellect is going but I want, but I really want to do this.
And then your fear says, no, it's a bad idea.
And it's almost like that story of which wolf do you feed, right?
You know the metaphor of but it's the.
I was hoping you knew it and you just went yeah, we blow by it.
But it's this idea of like anger or acceptance.
And you've got, I can feed and I go, don't let them do this to you, man.
And you're like, yeah, fucking right.
And I'm feeding the wolf of anger.
Or I'm feeding the wolf of compassion or acceptance.
And you've got to find the balance.
Like anyone who's happy all the time and smiles too much, I think has something wrong with them.
Like, I don't like him.
He's always in a good mood.
What's going on?
This is the self-awareness and the false expectations appearing real part.
If I can't connect my self-awareness to the future visualization of my failure, my pain I can't course correct in the present.
Yes, but go deeper.
Go deeper.
Yeah.
When I'm working with, let's say, an entrepreneur, who's dealing with, let's say, fear of making decisions.
And everyone has that, right?
Like we procrastinate, we oscillate and vacillate, you know, ruminate, right?
All those big fancy words.
But what we're doing is the...
This carousel of not making a decision is all rooted in fear.
I don't want to make the wrong decision.
I don't want to ruin my future.
I don't want to ruin your confidence in me.
It's whatever it is.
And you see that in managing violence.
Should I run now?
Should I strike now?
Should I try to diffuse and de-escalate?
Or should I just blend into the shadows here?
And move away from this, right?
The deeper element on this, and I don't know which direction deep you want to go, because self-actualization us becoming the best version of ourselves requires that, if you're thinking of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs metaphor, if our survival isn't being taken of self-actualizing.
But I believe that we don't understand how the psychology of fear, of worrying about this movie in our mind, which is this anxiety, is always about something in the future.
What if this happens?
What if this happens?
What if this happens?
And so when we get a fear spike for anything, the fear spike always produces doubt and we can't change that.
Doubt always creates hesitation.
Those first two stages of of creating the movie in your mind.
No one can control that.
So if I said to you, that's bullshit, Tony.
And I go, okay, let me give you a non-violent, no risk example.
Have you ever left a hotel room and, as the door closes, you go?
Oh, I think I left my wallet and my key in the hotel room.
And what do you do as soon as that happens?
You stop and then, in slow motion, you're like you hit your hands, bring your oh my key's in the room and then, while the door is closing, you do this acrobatic leap towards the door right now and you miss it.
Have you ever done that?
I do that every week tony, okay.
So, so everyone listening to this has that experience.
It could be locking your keys in the car.
It could be.
It could be uh um, you forget your phone somewhere.
You leave a restaurant and you're like my phone, and then you start doing this and you're like where was it bathroom?
But in the moment when you thought You were locked out,
You left your phone somewhere.
You left your keys somewhere.
What did you do?
There's a moment of doubt.
What's missing?
Something's wrong.
Your intuition's saying something's wrong.
What did you do there?
You didn't keep walking.
The moment you have doubt, you stop.
And now because you're walking, you're hesitating.
And in that moment, you're in your head, but your situation awareness is compromised.
And I make this joke and I've had people like literally rolling on the floor with this.
Where because because when I'm like I'm doing the seminar, I do the the acrobatic dive to the door.
Right.
I go walk.
I take two tests on my case.
I'm like jumping towards the door and people laugh because they've done that sort of thing.
And I go, consider how stupid that is.
You're in a hotel.
You're in a hotel and you left your key in the room.
What's going to happen?
What's going to happen?
Call me.
What's going to happen? you're going to go downstairs and get another front desk you but so what you could literally do is you could literally as you're walking yeah i left my key in the room not stop walking check your pockets while you're walking to the elevator now you're being efficient right you're not hesitating there's no doubt there's no fear spike there's no adrenaline there's no yeah how'd you pull your back at the meeting oh yeah twisted to go try and stop my door from closing um The efficient thing to do, the situationally aware thing to do, would be to go, yeah, I think I forgot my key.
I'm still walking.
Yep, my pockets are empty.
I forgot my key.
I'm going downstairs anyhow because I've got to grab an Uber to the event.
I go downstairs.
I go to the front desk.
I go, hey, I'm late.
I'll get my key later.
Like nothing would change, but nobody does that.
So a fear spike creates doubt.
Doubt creates hesitation.
Hesitation creates procrastination unchecked.
And i'm using the, the funniest example, just so people can relate to the simplicity i want.
I want people to leave this talk and if they never book me for a talk or or get our no fear program or or do anything, i want them to leave here going.
It's this simple.
It's a script map.
It happens like this i get a fear spike, i will have doubt, doubt will create hesitation, hesitation will create procrastination.
At that moment it's between it's between doubt sorry, between hesitation and procrastination that somebody who truly understands the system and the, the intersection of self-awareness remedies extracts themselves from the problem.
You're tracking that.
So at that moment, i go, i go.
I left my key in the room.
I'm doing really dramatic on this.
And at that moment my self-awareness goes dude.
There's like a thousand of these keys downstairs at the front desk.
Yeah, but my wallet's in the room.
Dude security will come up and open the room for you.
You'll show them your there's a solution for this.
Get resourceful.
No, but my key now, i'm going to be late.
Well, you're going to be really late for the talk and angry and upset because you're standing in the hallway going.
I can't get in my room because i'm an idiot, right so?
But here's the big thing.
In bigger things in life, like this is a goofy thing.
Because you might be there going, I can't get in my room.
And you see housekeeping and you go, hey, can you open my door?
I left my key.
Oh, sorry, for security reasons, sir.
Could you please go downstairs?
Oh, that's right.
And you go down.
But what you did is this.
You wasted 37 seconds of your life that you could never get back.
What is the only resource we can't regenerate?
It's time.
Time.
When you understand fear management, you suddenly have a superpower to manage time.
Fear management equals time management in the most important way.
And that is why I am so passionate not passionate obsessed with getting this no fear program into parents' hands, into educators' hands, into leaders.
Because every time we are in the fear loop, we are consuming time.
It could be writing an article.
It could be a presentation.
It could be, you know, your tooth hurts you.
Do you call the dentist right away and go, hey, missed you.
My tooth hurts.
It's going to come in immediately.
Or do you wait and see if it gets better on its own?
Like unless most people will wait and then the doctor goes, why didn't you come call me last week?
Now you need antibiotics.
Another week we would have to pull this dude.
Right?
We wait.
Something happens with our car.
We wait.
We get a pain in our side.
We wait.
Fear makes us procrastinate.
Unless you change your relationship with fear and you go.
This is scary, but come full circle.
What if I used fear as fuel?
What if fear became the fuel, the ignition, the signal, the spiritual guide to move and lean into what I've?
You know I can get nerdy deep, but I want this to be functional and effective.
When you turn fear into fuel, you you you commit to practicing courage.
You do little baby things like I don't want to take the stairs in this building.
I like the elevator because I'm afraid to get tired.
Right.
Well, take the stairs.
Go slow.
Right.
I don't want to return food because I don't want special sauce.
Well, practice communicating more effectively, you know. negotiating a new stake.
Practice, make that deal happen, and do it in a way that you don't get special sauce, but you're practicing courage.
Here's probably my most favorite line in our program.
And as I do these things I go dude, nobody's going to call you up after because you're just telling them all the secret stuff on the talk.
But I'm obsessed with helping people.
You can't be brave if you're not afraid.
And everyone wants to be brave.
You're a good person, you want to be brave.
Have you ever seen something on the news where there's like a courageous bystander does something fire, car accident, stops a thief, whatever and you watch it and in the back of your mind you go i wonder what i had done.
I wonder if i had done that.
If you're wondering that, it's because you're afraid and you don't know.
If you're afraid and you don't know, you will have a fear spike if you were ever faced with the same stimulus and the only way that you could do what you need to do is to be brave.
It's not about the action.
Yeah, i ran and tackled that guy who, who punched that woman and grabbed her purse, and i've had enough.
I'm not suggesting people do that.
You could.
You could.
You do that from your heart.
Right, courageous bystander there's usually one in the crowd and and.
But courage is contagious and as a parent, As a team leader, as a business leader, courage is contagious, especially with all that's been going on the last few years in the world.
We need business owners and parents who are courageous and you can't be courageous without fear.
If I looked, if this was a bottle of courage and I looked on the side, there'd be one ingredient in here and it'd be fear.
And that's such a potent visual, man.
Why?
Because if you do something that required no courage, then there was no fear.
And so if I look at somebody and I go, hey, we need to be brave right now.
This is probably the biggest thing about managing fear and understanding fear.
And it's missed in all of the other systems and programs.
And I say that politely and with reverence.
It's this idea that people go into some sort of coaching, thinking that when they graduate they will be beyond fear.
You're never beyond fear.
Fear is the yin and the yang of competence and confidence and then fear.
When I work with people who need to lead other people and they need to get good at public speaking.
Number one fear in the world public speaking not getting dragged to a secondary crime scene, tortured and murdered.
That's not on the list, right?
I remember once I was doing this big talk at a university.
I had 400 students in the amphitheater.
And I said, what's the number one fear in the world?
And they all yelled out, public speaking.
I go, then what is it?
You know, death of a loved one, security, sharks.
And I go and I was brought in by the sexual assault committee to talk about situational awareness and fear management de-escalation, self-defense.
And I said does anyone here have a fear of getting the room got quiet?
What about getting dragged to a secondary crime scene and then murdered?
Is like that, not on the list?
Sharks, is there a land shark in here?
Like everyone laughed right and it's weird.
And i said to the group and you'll dig this, i said who here would like to come up on stage with me and make a speech or get dragged into an alley, and Which one would you rather do?
And they were looking at me confused.
I said, if you come up on stage and you're scared, we'll hear it in your voice.
We'll see it in your body language.
But if you tell us you're afraid, but you still want to share something, we'll be OK with that.
We are afraid to tell people we are afraid and when a lot of people manipulate vulnerability.
But you know this vulnerability is a superpower, as long as you're not manipulating, as long as you're not using it to manipulate people or yourself.
The rational lie.
I've done talks where this is the example you said, if we go back, and how long ago, when you said okay, we've got physical skills, what about these psychological, mental skills?
You know, we've got physical fitness, what do we need to do for mental fitness?
So i've had people say to me hey, can you coach me on some public speaking?
And i go.
What do you need to?
What do you need to know?
They go, i have trouble.
You know talking.
You know in front of, in front of people go.
Well, you're doing a pretty good job right here talking to me.
What's the problem?
Because you're very lucid, they go.
Well, i'm not one-on-one like okay, so what you're saying is you have to text your wife and your kids At the dinner table.
Please pass the salt.
Could somebody cut my steak for me?
Because when you're in front of a group of people, you have trouble.
Seriously, Blower.
I know you're joking around here, but one-on-one, I'm okay with my family.
And what I'm doing here for everybody, unpacking this, reverse engineering this.
When you say, I'm afraid of public speaking, that's incorrect.
What you need to say is I'm afraid that when I do this talk, there will be one person in the audience that's going to judge me, And that judgment is going to affect my career path or my self-worth or my self-esteem.
I'm going to get fired.
And that's simply untrue, probably in 99%.
But when you realize that, you realize, oh, my God.
I know how to speak.
I know what I'm thinking.
I know what I want to say.
And it's just that one person over there that, you know, the CEO, he's coming today.
And I know that I'm up for promotion if I bomb this.
But that's the false expectations appearing real.
Now that we've identified, we peeled the onion to go, I am afraid of this because of that.
Then you don't say I'm afraid of public speaking anymore.
Now the challenge is more manageable.
And that's where the the interactive coaching and strategizing comes in.
Like i've had situations where i go, oh my god, so-and-so's in the audience.
Oh my god, that guy's like like such a good speaker and has two books out.
Oh my god, i didn't know he's gonna be here like, and i'm doing him screw.
And then i go self-awareness fear spike doubt hesitation procrastination, unchecked.
If i don't control it it can be non-clinical anxiety, and then i get up there and i bomb, or I figure out what I need to think or what I need to do, and then I fix it.
And that's really the science and psychology behind this is not to eradicate fear, because that's impossible.
It's again going back to when I said you know, those memes do something that scares you every day.
If you're seeking stuff, I'm afraid of snakes.
I'll go there.
Oh, I'm afraid of skydiving.
I'm going to go there.
I'm afraid of walking on fire.
I'm going to go do this fire walk.
But your self-awareness hasn't told you that you're afraid of interpersonal conflict.
And so you can't say you're sorry to your wife first, or talk to your kids about certain things, or right?
You know what I'm saying?
It's like the stuff that the stuff that is recurring every day you avoid because you don't have the self-awareness and you're just developing this adrenaline junkie relationship with external things that really don't change who you are as a human.
Yeah.
Tony, there is so much, so much good stuff in here.
I appreciate this.
This is really good.
And, I think, the listeners.
There's a lot out there that the listeners can take from this because, at the end of the day, we can listen to the podcast, we can read the books and you can learn about negotiation.
But if you cannot manage your fear, then you are going to struggle to perform if you even manage to show up, to perform in these difficult conversations.
So I appreciate you, Tony.
This was really great.
And before you go, can you let listeners know how they can get touch with you, work with you and about your programs?
Yeah sure, so my main website is uh, flower trainingsystemscom.
My last name b-l-a-u-e-r.
Trainingsystemscom, and there's the four verticals for our company.
If you're in here and you went, i'm going to learn how to defend myself.
There's info there.
And if you want coaching or more on the no fear program And so on and so forth,
So I'm all over, just punch my name in.
And there is a, I don't know if you'll be sharing the links.
My team should have sent you the links.
We've got an ebook which, of course, is a funnel full transparency, to try and get you to invest in the no fear program.
We've got a digital program where you can take it to the next level and bring me or my team in or work via Zoom and stuff.
It's amazing how fast some of this stuff can happen, because a lot of people don't realize when they're trying to change their relation with fear.
They continue to experience fear.
They think there's something wrong with them or something wrong with the program, and the reality is, if you're moving outside your comfort zone, you can always get out that little adrenaline and you just need to go.
Okay, that's what that is.
So that's what i mean by leaning into fear and making it your friend.
Your body is a share.
One last visual metaphor your body And your physical fitness, and everyone should be doing their best to stay in good shape.
Your body is the car in a metaphor.
And where you're going, your goals is your nav system, your brain.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to get here in life.
The gas that drives the car and the brain is fear.
Because if you have an audacious goal, if you've got, if you want something better, right?
You know, like my son saying, dad, I want to do this.
And I nearly accidentally said, you probably shouldn't do that right now.
You should probably focus on this.
But I caught myself, right?
Like that changes his relationship with the adrenaline, the fear that he has.
Folks, remember, you can't be brave if you're not afraid.
The next time you have a fear spike, Know that it can serve you.
It's there to help you do the best you can do with stuff.
There's a system in there, and I'm not trying to keep some stuff hidden behind a curtain.
I shared a lot there, but there's a little e-book that I wrote called Making Friends With Fear.
It will, to get it, it'll put you in the funnel, which will go, hey, do you want more information?
Just unsubscribe if you don't want more.
I don't know why you wouldn't want more information about managing fear.
I believe that when you change your relationship with fear, you can better control your mind.
If you can control your mind, you can control your day.
If you control your day, you control your day.
The algorithm extended fear management equals time management.
You're going to change your life.
Oh, man, I love it.
Tony, I appreciate you.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks, man.
Be safe.
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The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations.
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