Fear Based Decisions & Yellow Lights

So the. I woke up this morning wanting to share something that I see going on in the community and something that I see going on among a lot of entrepreneurs. And.

The idea is being thrown around in our circle, in our world, that.

If you hustle through this, if you grind through this, that you'll come out on the other side, right? That you'll, that you will. You can basically push through right now as if things are normal and they're going to go back to normal. And I have a different opinion about this. My longest standing mentor is named Travis Sago. And Travis Sago has a saying that he likes to call yellow lights. A yellow light. What's it designed for? What is a yellow light made for? A yellow light says slow down. Now, how do most people approach yellow lights when they see them? Do most people slow down? No, most people step on the gas and slam right through it. That's what most people do. Most people just burn through the yellow light. And right now we are being faced with a lot of yellow lights. We have yellow lights in the economy, we have yellow lights in our personal lives. We have yellow lights that are being thrown around. And so the temptation for a lot of us who are hard charging, who are excited about business, who are moving towards something, is to sprint through all of these yellow lights, is to, is to hurry up and blast through the yellow lights that are in front of us. Sometimes that can be really, really valuable.

When you are compelled towards something. When you feel compelled towards something, sprinting to it with all guns blazing is the appropriate thing to do because they're impulses that are driving you, that are pulling you forward. But as I have kind of sat with this over the last few days, I realized that for myself, seeing how many yellow lights have, have come up, of how many times I make decisions simply based out of fear. And so I sprint through the yellow light. I'm afraid of being late. So sprint through the yellow light. It's kind of taking inventory recently of the things in my life that I'm, that I am paying attention to, the things in my life that I want to be more aware of and seeing how many of those things that I'm concerned about are fear based interactions that might be better to just back away from. So, for example, in the case of entrepreneurship, in the case of business, the fear of losing sales, the fear of business going away, the fear of our livelihoods being under threat, the fear of.

Financial stress, the fear of having to sacrifice what it is that we do in order to get a certain result that is often the fear that's going on right now.

I hope I can communicate this to you accurately in a way that resonates with you.

The fear that we have around that, the fear that we have around it all going away is really the fear of the stress that we will feel if such and such a thing happens. And so we are literally dipping into the future, dipping into the future fear, the future stress, and pulling it into the present and operating out of that place as if it already happened. Ah, dang it. Hang on. What just happened?

That's weird.

Can you see me now?

Hey, we're back. That was weird. Hey. And you all stuck with me. Thank you for that. Chris. Edit that out if we.

All right. So.

Many of us, many of us who are entrepreneurs who are operating from this fear based place.

We'Re fear of some sort of a loss in the future. And so we are playing that into right now. Whereas what we really want, what you really want is to be free to create from a place of ease, to create from a place of abundance, to create from a place of happiness. That is why you are in this game. You want the passive income so that you can be easy, so that you can be stress free. You want to have the business so that you can operate from a stress free place.

You want the exit so you can have a pile of money, so that you can relax into ease and flow and creation.

In fact, this comment that just showed up.

The slavery of the comfort zone.

I look at it just a little bit differently.

I think it is.

The addiction to the fear based zone because most of us have never experienced consistently operating from a place of creation and ease and fun and flow. Now the reason I am telling you this is because right now we are faced with a very clear contrast because the world has slowed down. Our temptation from a fear based place is to hurry up and sprint through it. Is to hurry up and try to blast through that fear based place is try to hurry up and grow through it. And I think there is opportunity from that for that and that there is healthy approach to that if you are in the place of creation and service and happiness. The contrast to this is that because the world has slowed down, you have an opportunity to back off the yellow lights and slow down for half a second in order to rediscover the happy creative zone that you are playing this game for in the first place.

The reason we are capitalists, the reason why we are entrepreneurs, the reason why we want business and passive income and all of this stuff is because we want to feel a certain way. Because at the end of the day when we sell the business and we invest the money, or at the end of the day when we have the $10,000 a month in passive income, or at the end of the day when we have the big pile of money or the big flow of customers, the goal that we have on the other side of that, the reason we're doing all of this for.

Is to feel at ease, to feel happy, to feel content, creative. For us to pursue the things that show up as impulses. That seems interesting. And now I want to pursue this. That's what freedom is. The freedom to pursue your own impulses and then being in the active pursuit of those impulses. But most people are treating business as the route in which they will get there. And so by doing so, they are putting off the feeling of ease and flow and excitement. But if you start today.

Pursuing that.

Experience, that emotional experience of ease and flow and creation, then everything that you do from now forward is the pursuit of the impulse that makes you happy. And here's the ironic thing, ultimately ends up making you more money. That is the weird paradox of this is if you can operate from the place that you want to be in in the first place, you will end up getting all of the accoutrements and the bling bling and the money and the flow and the fame. And all those things come added to you as well. A question that popped up is, so use this time to slow down to create from happiness. Kind of yes. Kind of yes. If you are in the place where things are popping and they're building in the way that you wanted them from the first place, then this is the time to hurry up and get busy. For example, we look at a healthcare worker right now who signed up for the task of taking care of those who needed help.

They're getting real busy right now.

They're getting. They're getting maybe more than they thought they were asking for.

If you are an entrepreneur who creates medical equipment and that was what you wanted to do in the first place, you're getting real busy right now.

So it depends on where you are on this journey. Have you, have you started something at the beginning.

From a creative place of service in the first place, have you owned a problem and have created something that is in service of other people that makes you real jiggy, makes you real excited that the process and the growth of doing so? Or if you're an entrepreneur, if you are just jazzed about the journey that you are on.

The way that you plow through this or get through this is getting real insanely curious about your customer.

In other words, your question was so should you use this time to slow down to create from a place of happiness? Let me reverse it.

Use this time to slow down.

So that you can serve.

Most people are operating from a fear based place and as a result they are not serving anything except themselves.

So they operate from a place of lack in the first place. I don't have enough money. And so what they do is they build a business that is designed in their mind to make them money. And right now, while the world is melting, they see all of these yellow lights that they are trying to plow through in order to get the result of more money. It's like trying to create something for other people that is really just a mask for you to get what's yours.

But if you are good, like if you're happy.

If you're enjoying the process, if you are abundant regardless of what your bank account is.

Then you can operate from the place of service all the time. And what happens when you create from a place of service is that you end up getting paid for it, you end up getting the bank account, you end up getting all of the things added unto you later. So it is not so much about slowing down to pursue happiness. It is that when you are happy, when you are at ease, when you are calm, you are able to create something that is in service to other people, that naturally takes off and makes money and does all these things.

So this time, right now, the contrast between these times is can you operate from the place of I'm good and I have something to give and I'm curious about what other people need and I'm curious about my own impulses and I'm curious about what is out there in the world for me to pursue that's powerful right now. And 90 plus of the world is more in like what is going to happen to me mode. Most entrepreneurs are operating from a place of what's going to happen to me mode. It would be natural, it would make sense to operate from that place right now. Especially if you are paying attention to news media projections, exponential curves upward of the of the virus spreading. But if you can be good.

If you can be okay with it all.

Then you're in a very powerful position to be able to create and serve the clients and customers who follow you and depend on you or the ones that you want the most.

So can you be good without the thing that it is that you're pursuing?

If so then you're very powerful right now. If you're active in business right now, this is the time to be insanely curious about your customers. This is not the time to try and hurry up and push things that are on your shelf to your customers unless it is abundantly clear that that is the thing that your customers need and want. Right now.

Things have shifted monumentally and I'm not sure we're going to go back. I'm not sure that we're ever going to have a normal again.

What I think instead is that we are going to shift the game entirely to force us to have to give up things from the past in order to have a new future. And right now, those are showing up in the form of yellow lights. Reasons to pause, reasons to back up, reasons to slow down. If you can take this time right now to ease up and slow down. And instead of trying to force what you thought was going to work through the marketplace, instead observing the marketplace from a place of I'm going to serve this crowd.

Of I'm going to. And one of the ways that we serve, by the way, is creating from a place of ease and flow and abundance and happiness.

So if you slow down and be real curious right now, if you can, rather than try and predict what is going to happen, simply observe what is happening.

You have a superpower right now. I've never experienced that in my life in which the contrast was so abundantly clear, but it is right now. It's very clear right now.

So we're given. Being given a really interesting choice. During this time.

I'm seeing some people put out a lot of content about how to survive through these times, how to thrive through these times. All of that is fear based.

All of it's fear based.

And there's plenty of value to that if it calms fear. Because the whole point of satisfying that thing in our brain that is like, I'm afraid, I'm afraid, I'm afraid what's happening in the world. The whole point is so that you can then go back to the place of creation, which requires you to be operating from a place of ease and abundance and happiness and all that. And so how do you solve, how do you survive? How does your business grow during this time? By you not being afraid.

By you being able to pause, slow down, and look at what, what's going on in the world and what's going on with my customers, what's going on with my clients, what's going on with the people around me, and what do they Need. You have to be good first.

You have to be in the place where you are good and abundant first. It's the only time that you can create something that is of value to other people, that is of service to other people, so much so that they want to pay you for it in spades. That's when you get rich, by you first being in the place where you're like, I don't need anything right now, I'm not afraid of anything going on right now. Because if you are trying to operate in a place that fixes your fear, you will perpetuate it instead.

But if you operate from a place of I'm good, I'm abundant, I'm happy, things are easy right now, you will create in a way that magnifies that.

So this question came up of I'm racking my brain for the opportunity out of this corona fiasco.

That is your problem.

You're racking your brain for it.

You are. When you are racking your brain for an opportunity through right now, you are.

Paying attention to the fiasco.

If you are looking for the opportunity out of this, then you are in resistance to reality.

The opposite. The other way to look at this is, is to not try and find the opportunity that is here, but to look to where there is opportunity in the world. And there's a mismatch right now. Is there something that you want to create anyway that all of a sudden you just got the time for? Is there, are there businesses that you wanted to invest in anyway that are all of a sudden on a discount? Are there products that you wanted to bring to market that all of a sudden the world has a higher demand for?

That's the opportunity out of it or through, it might be a better word.

The fiasco is a weasel. Yes, it is.

So.

One of the things that I've noticed going on in the market in, in our little community is there are a ton of people making a ton of content. And that's going to be interesting because we're going to have more content than ever. And so the interesting thing is going to be, are you willing to use content to serve a very micro group of people like your customers and your followers and the people that pay attention to you already. It's going to be really interesting. So right now your job, if you are in this place where you are concerned and you want to like do things to make new shit happen.

Your job is to stop.

Because you're operating from a fear based place and you don't make good decisions and you don't make good content and you don't make good products. You do not create from a place of fear. You just, you just can't. What you get is up. You get scared money, you get scared followers. You just can't do it.

So your, your job, if you want something different out of this experience.

Is to stop paying attention to the things that make you afraid and to start paying attention to the things that make you really creative and abundant.

It means probably turning off the news.

You have this weird opportunity right now to see every yellow light and back off from them, to slow down.

Use that opportunity.

To slow down on the things that were making you feel the way that you didn't want to make you feel so that you can pay attention to the things that allow you to create the things that you wanted to create.

And then the pivot point between those two worlds is that you're happy.

Most people say, I will be happy when there is this pile of money out here. And so they spend five or ten years sacrificing happiness so that they can have the pile of money. When in reality, the way that you get the pile of money is by creating from a place on which you are satisfied. Your content really sucks when you're unhappy. Your product ideas really suck when you're afraid.

Your service to your customers really blows when you're operating from a place of I'm going to take from them rather than I'm going to serve or create for them.

But when you're in that zone in which you're abundant anyway, regardless of what is going on, the world opens up and people flock to you.

So if you don't feel inspired to write the copy, don't write the copy.

Wait for the inspiration to come through you.

Is there. Now there's benefit to writing and getting, like, publishing it out, even though it is not the best, and getting feedback and adjusting, that's part of the process.

But if you are creating something, you feel creative first.

Thank you for the hashtags. Greg Johnson.

I put a business on hold.

Put a business on hold, and I'm focused on building an audience based around one of my passions. I don't have a product to sell. I'm just taking the opportunity to do something I've always wanted to do. So this is the start of something. This is the start of something good.

Now you say in here, I put a business on hold and I'm building an audience. My question for you is.

Are the two things related? Because they can and should be. If your business was already Moving forward. And now you are building an audience around one of your passions. You are kind of saying that the business wasn't within your passions in the first place.

That leads me to conclude that your business was a route for you to have the money so that you could pursue your passion, which is probably why you've never done it in the first place, why it's on hold and didn't get off the ground.

Now, the fact that you are building an audience around one of your passions means that you would do it anyway. And you were finally having the space to be able to do it right now. And the end result of that is if you feel the impulse to keep doing it, you will be able to monetize it and grow it and you will have the freedom that you always wanted when you started this in the first place. So good move. Also, you can relate. You can connect businesses and passions and audiences. You can relate. You can connect all those things.

Okay, team, I'm gonna wrap for the day, but I wanna give you a house cleaning item. If you are watching this in the 1% Facebook group, I am. I'm gonna be going live more often during this time. It's one of my favorite things to do. And one. One of the things that I. I have said in the past is.

I think the way that we'll get through this collectively is, is when we focus on community and we focus on service to our people. And so this is the time that you get real, real curious and connected to the people around you, because that's how we're going to get through it. So.

I'm testing some new streaming software throughout all this. That's one of the hobbies I'm kicking around during my quarantine. So if you have any thoughts or feedback around how this displayed on Facebook and YouTube, it would help me navigate this. So thanks for hanging out with me and I will talk to you soon. Take care. Have a great day.