Brett Kistler — Welcoming Fear in Extreme Sports, Business and Relationships

The relationships and the connections that I have now feel much more real and much more robust than they often used to be when I was holding and carrying this belief that I had to hide my fear from the relationship or it would damage it somehow. Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson.

Hi everybody, this is Joe Hudson.

And this is Brett Kistler.

And welcome to our podcast. Uh, today we're gonna do things a little bit differently. This is the beginning of a series that we've put together, and the series is all about how self-discovery affects the rest of your life. And it's particularly around interviewing CEOs who've had a moment of self-discovery that has changed their life and their business. So Brett, what's the self-discovery that you want to talk about? What's the breakthrough that you feel has changed your life in the way that you've done business?

Yeah, so like many breakthroughs, this has been one that I've just had repeatedly over, over time, over years, but it has been related to my relationship with fear and that fear is something to be welcomed rather than overcome.

Yeah, I remember at one point we were talking and you said, "Oh, I used to think that I wasn't scared. And now that I realize that I'm scared all the time." What did you mean by that?

Yeah, so growing up, I kind of developed this self-concept of like being brave and courageous. So I kind of judged the fear in myself, judged anxiety. I judged anxiety in others and just felt that I was not an anxious person. And of course that wasn't true. Of course there was anxiety all the time and it was controlling me in a lot of different ways. But like where a lot of that went in my life is that I started to do a lot of things to prove that I didn't feel a fear and that I was conquering it, which was, you know, I got early on, I got really into rock climbing and then I got into skydiving and BASE jumping and other air sports, which helped me feel like I was in control of my fear initially. That was sort of my initial approach to it.

Awesome. And how did it affect your business at the time?

Well, yeah, at the time, I mean, even before business in like school, I, you know, presented with like ADHD and I had a really hard time concentrating a lot of the time. And I now recognize that when that's occurring to me to this day, it's generally because there's something unfelt. Often some form of anxiety that I'm just not letting myself feel. And the avoidance of that is just like decreases my working memory and makes me go distracted. So, you know, switching apps left and right or going to the fridge 3 times in 20 minutes, those are all really good signs that, you know, there's something going on on the surface and it's usually something fear-related.

Well, that's an awesome recognition to be able to see what your body does and what your habits do when you're in fear. One of the things that I've noticed in fear is that my mind becomes binary, that I start thinking of answers as this or that instead of the thousands of answers that are usually available with any issue. What a great tell that is. So that's how it was in school. And how did the ADHD affect your business, or how did the fear and anxiety affect your business before, while you were still trying to overcome it, or while you were still conquering it?

Yeah, well, I mean, my business started out as I was doing programming freelance. So, you know, in order to focus and concentrate on programming, I kind of needed to feel somewhat like clear on what I was doing. So if I started to fall behind or if there started to be something that just wasn't going right with the project or something with a timeline or something with scope creep or expectations, you know, I would start to get anxious. And I wouldn't let myself feel that anxiety. And so I wouldn't recognize that it was affecting me. And then suddenly I just wouldn't be able to focus on what I was doing. And then that would snowball the entire process. I'd like keep this whole, like, keeping it together attitude of like powering through and, you know, staying positive and staying task and goal-oriented, but That would be a farce because I would actually be doing anything but my work in those states.

And how did it affect your business when you started interacting with people besides yourself, when you started having employees and you started to take on bigger clients? How did the fear that you were trying to overcome find its way in there?

Yeah, it's interesting. The fear itself would start to magnify because my problems would become bigger. And, you know, failure modes would be harsher and more money involved and more people involved. And so even more so, starting to become a CEO from being freelance started to be like, okay, my job is to keep it all together. My job is to make sure that nobody else is afraid. So like everybody just believes that everything is going according to plan. And that also didn't work very well. It definitely blew up in my face a number of times.

How did it blow up?

Yeah, ways that would blow up is like people would start to bring fears and concerns to the surface and those concerns would be uncomfortable and inconvenient and I might even see them as potentially damaging morale or distracting people from the goal of the project. And oftentimes those concerns were very, very valid. And if they weren't valid, the feeling that somebody had around them was also very valid. And if it wasn't addressed, led to them feeling disconnected from the project or from the team. So in either case, the fears were very important signals that by ignoring them or by trying to change them into some kind of positivity or like sometimes even just like boldness or courageousness, like, okay, we're afraid, but we're just gonna do this anyway. Like stepping on the signal and not listening to it. This occurred over the course of like 15 years of my business at different levels. It's like, this is one of those things that I continue to learn on a new level every time the business grows and I jump into a different, a larger version of the same picture. I then have like a new layer to feel through of this, like welcoming people's fear and welcoming my own fear and also holding space for it in a way that allows it to be processed and, you know, not just resisted and turned into low-level anxiety in the team.

So I'm gonna dig a little bit further here. What specific, can you give us something really specific? I know a lot of people out there would be very interested very much an understanding of what you're saying. Like, they can resonate with it. My question is, like, can you give us something really specific so potentially somebody who is still in that place where they don't think they have the fear might be able to recognize it?

Yeah, one good example was on, you know, this project where I had been leading this project before, and then, like, one of our heads had been leading the project later. And then the company grew and we started to get bigger clients. And so myself and him started working on bigger projects with a bigger client and we needed somebody to take over this smaller project. And so we kind of put together the people that were available and like gave them the task of taking over this project, diving into it, understanding it, and then meeting the next year's goals. And along that process, there were fears that were brought up by a number of people in the team like, I'm not sure if I quite have enough handle on this, or I'm not sure if, you know, the time zone is working well between this other team member and myself. I'm not sure, like, what exactly milestones we're trying to achieve here and what, what's going to look like. And a lot of that stuff I just kind of felt, like, brushed off a little bit as like, oh, it's okay, the team is going to figure it out. I know this is a little bit, like, rough, rough beginnings, but It'll all get sorted out. And as a result of not listening to those things, things started getting— the project started getting off track. And ultimately the fears were realized and we started to have issues that were starting to be pretty big issues for the client. And we corrected course. And the process of correcting course was me just having this breakthrough of, oh, Everybody's actually been saying very important things all along that I wasn't listening to. And that I wasn't bringing into the conversation and I wasn't permissioning.

Right, what I'm hearing is that what they said would bring up a fear in you that you didn't wanna feel and therefore you, I think you said it as step on the signal.

Yeah. Yeah.

So before we move on to the next section, which is how you made the discovery and what that process was like, I would love to just understand how your relationship to fear in the past affected your relationships. What did it do with your relationships, say, with lovers or family or friends?

There's a couple of things that I could get into there. I mean, one is in relationships with partners, you know, like there might be a fear of being engulfed and then just not naming that fear of being engulfed would lead to just putting up walls. And then those walls would lead to lack of connection, lack of charge. And early on, really, in my relationships, I just had a hard time actually having any relationships because I was constantly so afraid of doing something wrong or scaring somebody away or just being weird. So that's the relationships. But something that's also really interesting that is, it's interpersonal, but also out of the business context, was in like air sports and in BASE jumping. There'd be like a group of us on top of a cliff at an exit point preparing to jump together. And there'd be, you know, we're like, you know, young, early 20s, mostly male. And there'd be a lot of, you know, like ego and just kind of like signaling and wanting to fit in. And so a phenomenon occurred a lot where somebody or even everybody on the exit point would be feeling a particular kind of fear about something. Like, "The conditions really aren't that great right now. They were great while we were hiking, but now they've deteriorated and I feel uncomfortable about this. But nobody else seems to feel uncomfortable, so it must just be me. And I don't want to be the one that like suggests that we go all hike 4 hours back down this mountain." And that led to some really, like, really uncomfortable situations at best, and at worst led to fatalities. So that's where some of these breakthroughs really comes in, when it's like, I love these people and here we are together. And because we were trying to be something for one another, that was some vision of courageous. Because of that, now somebody's injured and they're in the hospital. And it could have been us, you know, it could have been any of us. That was really where this particular kind of breakthrough really started happening for me.

The first question that comes to mind for me, particularly if I'm thinking about the audience, is what is the difference in your mind and your experience in your body between overcoming fear and feeling fear?

So there's sort of a difference between fear and excitement, right? Like both of them show up similarly in the body as, you know, like cortisol and adrenaline making your body be ready to act swiftly and sharply, but there's different components of it. And if you're about to do something dangerous where you have to perform well to survive, there's gonna be some component of that that is like fear of actual danger. And your body's going to be like inhibiting itself from doing something dangerous. And then there's another part that's excitement of feeling competent and prepared and your body readying itself to be performing at its best. So there's, both of them are always present, but the difference that I feel between them is that when it's excitement, I'm feeling expansive and more aware and sharper. But if it's fear of something that like I should not be doing, if I'm in over my head or I'm like not paying attention to a variable consciously that subconsciously I'm aware is going on, like there's something wrong with my equipment or the conditions have changed and I'm just not letting myself see it, then the fear will actually feel more constricting and closing in. And so the difference between like overcoming it and welcoming it is the difference between standing on an edge and feeling the fear closing you down and just pushing through it anyway, or feeling the fear and then welcoming it and letting it and seeing how it transforms and how much it transforms into excitement. The same thing can be going into a meeting in business. The same thing could be going into a difficult conversation with a partner. Where it's like, wow, you know what? I don't know what's going to happen in this conversation right now. I may lose my partner and we may have a deeper connection after this. And, you know, my body's scared, but also I'm ready to step into my truth.

So when you feel into your fear in air sports, the signal seems to be whether you should do it or you should not do it at that moment. What generally do you find the, signal to be in the rest of your life?

The signal isn't just like a do it or don't do it, go or no go. It's what to be looking at. Like the signal is telling me, like if I listen into and feel into the signal, the signal is telling me what I care about. And the signal's telling me what threatens it, or at least what I perceive threatens it. And if I don't listen to that signal and I just want to overcome it, then I may assume that I understand what the signal is and ignore it. And that could be to my detriment. But feeling the signal and then being like, okay, I'm afraid of this happening. I'm afraid of losing this project. I'm afraid of losing this client. I'm afraid of not being able to support my team. I'm afraid of not being able to pay the bills. I'm afraid of my business collapsing. I'm afraid of being a failure. Then if I let myself actually feel those fears, then I can see what's on the other side of them. And just letting my body process those unwanted outcomes makes it that if I find myself in the direction of those outcomes, I have already sort of mapped the landscape and my intuition will be more calibrated to lead me in a workable direction.

It also feels like something that you're saying is that One of the signals in the fear is that there's like a self-care signal. It means like some, one of my needs might not be getting met and I need to address that.

Yeah, absolutely. And then like the attempt to overcome the fear is like the opposite of self-care. It's like this need of mine doesn't matter and I'm not listening. Instead, I'm going to prioritize this other thing. And sometimes that works, but on the long timeframe, if you do that every time, statistically it just doesn't work out as well as when you're actually paying attention to what all of your needs are, even if not all of them can be met at the same time every time.

Yeah, that's something that I see all the time with people is that this generalized anxiety that they have is perpetuated because they're not getting their needs met and they're not seeing the signal of their anxiety as, "Oh, I have needs here that aren't being met that I can ask for." Yeah, I've come to understand like sort of the difference between fear and anxiety in myself is that like something that I'm afraid of, there's usually something kind of specific and I could point a finger to it.

And if I'm feeling just anxiety, then it's general and I might be confused about what it is, or I might feel like it makes no sense. But if I listen to the anxiety, the first step for me is often just to feel my dissociation, to feel my numbness, because I have that patterned really deeply to like, my system just shuts down anxiety so that I don't feel it, so that I could continue doing whatever I'm doing, rock climbing or whatever. That was patterned in very young. But so like, I feel into that pattern, feel into whatever numbness or dissociation there might be in my body, And then slowly the anxiety will start to rise to the surface. And then I feel that anxiety and I'm like, wow, okay. Something feels like tingly here and like butterflies. And this feels uncomfortable. And then the more I feel it, the more that anxiety turns into some specific fear or constellation of fears that come with the signal of what it is that I actually need that I'm not getting.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering also, that story that I started out at the beginning, where you told me that I used to think that I wasn't afraid and now I feel like I'm afraid all the time. Tell me what that transition was like. How did you become aware that there was this constant fear? What was that journey like? And how could somebody who is right now thinking to themselves, oh, I might be that guy, I might be that woman who, feels like I'm not scared at all.

Hmm. Yeah, I started to notice it partway through the 18-month course that I did with you, and I found that there was like a period of a couple of months where I was paying very little attention to my work and to my business and doing a lot of like going to Authentic Relating workshops or circling or like just going to the teahouse and hanging out with people and talking about all kinds of things that were related to my business, but I wasn't actually taking action on it. And it just started to dawn on me that this was like, I was clearly avoiding heavily. And I was like, what am I actually avoiding? And through the tools that I learned in the program, I started to recognize that this was, that there was fear there. And I was like, "Huh, that's strange." I'd never thought of myself as being fearful. I had the exactly opposite self-concept, like building a life around being somebody who is in a deeply healthful relationship with my fear, or at least aspiring to be. And so this idea that I was living with low-level or maybe even high-level but not felt anxiety and just my day-to-day life in San Francisco, where I had all of my basic needs met, just sort of broke my brain to realize. And when I started to feel it, I realized like, oh, of course, I've always been feeling this kind of fear. This is why I used to be really awkward around women when I was really young, and why over time I've been working through discomfort and fear in business scenarios and with boundaries. This fear, this anxiety would be the thing that I wouldn't recognize that I was feeling that would make me walk away from an opportunity 'cause I was afraid of failing at it.

And what were some of the tools? What were the tools that helped you in this process? You speak about this 18-month course, but I mean, if I'm listening to this thing, I'm like, what tool, what can I do?

So a lot of what we did in the course was exercises that brought us into feeling different emotions and witnessing each other in feeling those emotions. And also this is alongside of recognizing that the world is a projection and that the judgments that we have of others is something that we're judging in ourselves.

So with those two things kind of superimposed, when I would see somebody in fear, I noticed that I judged it and I'm like, "Huh, interesting, interesting." Yeah, that's such a great hack in general is, when you really notice that all of your judgments are just a way for you to stop feeling something or to resist feeling something. It's this cool hack 'cause it lets you know everything that you're avoiding. Yeah, that's awesome. It's great to hear that from your perspective. And I have one perspective going through the course. It's cool to hear the other perspective.

Mm-hmm.

So you're going through this journey of understanding your fear. You have this recognition that actually the fear is always here. And then you have a recognition that there's a signal to the fear that's really important. And at some point there must be some transition from taking that information and acting on it instead of taking that information and trying to overcome it. Can you tell me about that process? Can you tell me about the process of learning to act on the signal of fear?

There are a lot of little moments that this occurred. You know, an example in air sports would just be like, I'd be preparing to do a jump of some kind and I'd have this like fear that was sort of abnormal. Not just the normal level of elevation, but like something else going on. But logically everything seems to be fine. So I'd ignore it. And then like we're about to jump and then somebody points out something that I had completely missed that was dangerous. And I'm like, oh yeah, that was the fear. That was what the fear was pointing to. So like having that little recognition was just like, okay, this is something I need to be listening to more. And it's a fine line between those different like signals of fear and excitement. And you never quite find the exact edge between them. And I don't even know if it is just a binary edge, but yeah, just having these kind of like close call experiences and also in business too, also in personal relationships, but just like recognizing how much the cost is of not listening to it. Not listening to the fear, not feeling it, how much the cost of trying to overcome it is. And then also the, another thing in flow sports with your body is that if you are, if you're second-guessing your body while your body is doing something, then it takes it out of flow. So to be feeling fear and then suppressing that fear is just a way of fighting yourself. And it decreases your connection to what you're doing.

So what I notice is that oftentimes when people start to recognize that, "Oh, I have this fear and it's telling me I'm not taking care of myself. It tells me that I have a need that's not met," there's another thing that they have to jump over, and that thing seems to be asking for their needs. And so you might be sitting on the top of the mountain and you might say, "Oh, right, I have that fear and probably nobody's saying anything. Maybe other people have it. It's really important to say it." But then there's the actual act of saying it. And then something like, Air sports makes sense to say it pretty quickly. You'd learn it 'cause it could be your death. It's a high consequence. But in a business environment, oftentimes people really hesitate to ask for their needs being met when they realize that the fear is indicating that there's something not being met. How do you do that? How did you learn that? Have you learned that?

Yeah, I mean, you'd be surprised how long you can go in air sports without learning this or continually learning it. I mean, also in business, like, yeah, actually I have a client who's also a very good friend and we worked on a project with them for like 8 years. And over time it started to get kind of grow old and stale. The tech was growing stale. There wasn't really money to be putting into it. And so like it started to just kind of reach this point where it was like, hey, we really need to be, rebuilding this from scratch. And it's also gonna cost a lot of money. And I don't know if you guys have that kind of money. And so like, I'm really scared to tell you that I don't know that we can even continue to work on this project without resources that I don't know that you actually have. And like, I really wanna do well by you. I don't wanna leave you like abandoned and like, I'm scared. What are we gonna do? I don't wanna be working the way that we have with the resources that we've had. And I apologize for continually trying to make more and more happen under the same budget constraints when my assumption is that that can increase. So that's one example of a kind of conversation that's actually happened a number of times in business. I've done a lot of business with friends and often there's just this, or with or without friends, often there's sort of like a caretaking aspect of, okay, now that I'm working on this project with you, I really want to, it's my responsibility my responsibility to make sure it's going well. And if you have business needs otherwise, then you should tend to those and I'll just make do with what we can. And that very often did not serve the clients in the end.

So what I heard you say is that one of the ways in which you have learned to ask for your needs to be met is by being really vulnerable and speaking out saying, hey, I'm scared here and just owning the fear and then seeing how that lands. What other ways have you found to be able to speak your need or speak the fear that's happening in a way that can be handled by people or in a way that feels really true and authentic to you?

I mean, just drawing a boundary. Like, I have a need that I'm afraid it's not gonna be met, and it's gonna be difficult for me to be moving forward with this uncertainty of this, like not knowing if this need is gonna be met. So what I really need is this, or I need not to have this be happening.

What, if anything, was your way of becoming comfortable with drawing these boundaries that have potentially these huge consequences, losing lovers, losing business, losing friends?

Yeah, I mean, feeling the thing that I'm afraid of happening and then grieving that occurrence, like pre-grieving the loss. Like recognizing that, you know, maybe, maybe I am in a codependent relationship with a partner or a client and that the moment that I draw my— draw a boundary to make sure that my needs are met, they will attack me. That can actually really happen. And they might even leave and then badmouth to everybody. Like that could actually happen. You know, that's the situation that I've gotten myself into through avoiding fear. And so now is the time to feel it. And be ready for the consequences, which in the short term may hurt a lot, and in the long term, the result is living more authentically and having better relationships as a result, even if it's not the same relationships.

That's a great transition for focusing on the third part of this interview, which is how is life now? And if you were to ask the people in your life, whether it be business or your air sports friends or your relationships or your family, how would they describe the difference? They might not describe the difference as, "Wow, he seems like he's really in touch with his fear." They might not even notice that. But what do you think they do notice?

I mean, I've heard people describe me as being more confident. I'm not sure that's quite the right word for it. But like my internal experience is being more willing to feel afraid of whatever it is I'm stepping into. But, externally that shows up as, I mean, people see it as having courage.

How about the disassociation? You talked a bit earlier about your disassociation being one of the first things that happens in fear. What are people's reflections about your disassociation compared to before?

I haven't gotten a whole lot of feedback from people on my dissociation or lack thereof. I guess sometimes I do. People are like, "Where are you right now?" There's a way that I'm not, defensive about that. I don't have as much shame around being distracted or preoccupied by a fear. And so if somebody points something out to me and they're like, "Hey, where are you right now? Where's your— what are you thinking about?" It used to be the case that I would just kind of come up with some bullshit excuse or not excuse, but some like something that wasn't really what I was afraid of and like hide the fear. And now I'm much more likely to just share vulnerably what it is that I'm feeling. And it often just evaporates the moment I do that.

And what's all that doing to your sense of connection with your friends and relations and their sense of connection to you?

I feel much more loved for who I actually am. And I feel like my fear is much more like permissioned and welcome. And others feel that their fear is welcome with me. And that deeply increases connection and also leads to a lot more difficult conversations that are had earlier rather than later, you know, finding what's actually real. So the relationships and the connections that I have now feel much more real and much more robust than they often used to be when I was holding and carrying this belief that I had to hide my fear from the relationship or it would damage it somehow.

And how does that look at, say, in a business meeting? So what did a business meeting look like before you were feeling your fear and after you were feeling your fear?

Hmm, yeah, so extreme example, like before feeling my fear, I would overpromise, underdeliver, you know, speak to the positives that are going on in the project and be afraid of, sharing anything negative, and that went predictably poorly every time. And now there's just a much deeper sense of trust. Clients and I feel much more comfortable that neither of us are going to move forward into something that really doesn't work for us or that isn't set up for success. And there's also trust that if anything changes course, as something always does, that we will be able to have the conversations to correct course and flow with reality as it's coming at us, which leads to a much deeper sense of safety.

My experience of that is it's not just safety, it's trust, which I think you just mentioned. And so as you feel the fear instead of overcome it, what is your sense of trust in life? How has that changed at all, if at all?

My trust in life has deepened immensely. Like, for example, if I go through this like fear process of like, what happens if I lose a client? What happens if I lose the business? What happens if I lose everything? What happens if I break my legs? I have a much deeper trust that whatever happens, I have strong relationships. And even if I lose my relationships, I have an ability to develop connection anywhere with anybody. And that whatever it is that I have in my life is less dependent on the thing that I'm attached to that currently makes me feel safe. And I feel that I could approach a much wider range of possible scenarios and situations and unexpected curveballs and be able to navigate it with self-compassion and in connection with whoever is around me and just be much more resourceful than I used to.

So to wrap this up, I would love to hear about a specific example of something that happened in the last year where you had a big "oh crap" moment, a big fear moment, and you felt into it and what happened afterwards.

Yeah, several months ago, we had a really big client that reduced their, the team size for our projects. They had to go back to the drawing board and do a bunch of internal rewrites. And so, our contract with them, which was an ongoing, very large contract for us, was significantly reduced, which brought us from being cashflow positive to cashflow negative. And immediately I was just like, okay, well, this is COVID times, things are crazy, what are we going to do? And I just let myself feel that fear like, oh no, this is the end, everything's going to collapse, ah. And I just let myself feel that and it was just like, I laid down on my bed and just like let my body shake. Just like let my body just shake it out a little bit. And then like I came out of that and I was like, well, this is a really great opportunity. An opportunity for me to get out of the golden handcuffs of having, you know, one client bringing in most of the money and to start really leveraging some of the business development that we'd been doing and go out and find more clients and expand into new areas. And upskill. And that was a couple months ago, and right now we're in a much better position than we had been. And I'm really, really grateful for both that challenge and that experience, and also for having this relationship with fear that allowed me to just feel it. Because that could have easily been another multi-month avoidance fest that would have led to collapse in a previous iteration of myself.

Yeah, and I'm just so curious, how did you approach your team with this? So this big thing happened, you feel your fear, how did you come to your team? What did you say?

Yeah, that's also interesting. I think a previous way that I might have brought that to the team would have been like, okay, so this happened, but don't worry, we got this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then people would've been like, do we really got this? I don't know. All right. You know, but the way, the way that I approached the team with it, and also I just have a really great team. So they were, they were approaching me in the same way when we discovered this information. It was just like, hey, so, you know, this has happened. This is good for a lot of reasons. It's also scary and we're going to flow with this and do what we need to do. But like, there are many reasons that we are in a good position right now. And, you know, there's also uncertainty. And let's step into it and see what we can do.

And how did that go as far as like people getting nervous? I gotta leave, you know, like the fear that you have that, oh, I have to tell everybody it's all, I got it all together. It's all going good. Like how do people actually respond to that level of openness? Like there's good things, there's bad things. It's scary. It's uncertain. How do people react to it?

Well, there was a lot of excitement actually. I mean, there were some fears and there was some discomfort, but also there was a lot of excitement. Like, okay, this is awesome. Let's grow. Let's expand. Let's get into new markets. Let's find new clients. Let's like kind of get out of the comfortable zone that we'd been in. And of course there were some who didn't take that approach. Like we did have a couple people end up leaving and I'm not sure entirely what their internal reasons were. I think some of them were just getting a better offer elsewhere or maybe they just felt uncertain, so they left. But those that are, like those that are with us are fully on board. And it's led to a lot of, it's led to a lot of like really great team cohesion. There's been a number of difficult conversations and there's been a number of celebrations of like achievements and small wins leading to bigger wins. And now there's just a bigger potential for what the company can be now. And I think that a lot of us are feeling it.

And just congratulations on a 2-month turnaround from losing a huge client or losing a huge portion of your revenue. To turn that around in 2 months is pretty amazing.

Yeah, thank you. Also, there's pretty good timing with it too. Q1 is a pretty good time to, you know, a lot of hiring happens then. People have been starting to come out of the coronavirus thing, so timing worked out well for us. I had just recently hired a VP of Sales to start bringing in, you know, leads, so we had like a pipeline that was ready and just hadn't fully been capitalized on yet. But, you know, a lot of that came down to listening to earlier fears of like, well, what would happen if, you know, we lost a bunch of business? Well, let's be ready for that. So It was a bunch of stacked fears having been listened to that led us to be in a position that we could turn it around that quickly.

That's awesome. Okay, well, thank you very much for spending time with us. I hope it was enjoyable for you as it was for me.

Yeah.

It was good to share these other aspects of you with the audience and to learn so much of it myself. It's interesting how I've known you for years now and there's still so much of your life that is a constant surprise to me. So it was a pleasure. Pleasure to get to, get to see these aspects of you. Thanks, Brett.

Yeah, see you then. See ya. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.