Heroic Interview: Become a Warrior + Get Fearless with Steve Chandler

You're listening to Become a Warrior and Get Fearless, an optimal living interview with Steve Chandler and Brian Johnson. All right, well, I'm so excited to be with Steve Chandler for this chat. He is just extraordinary, one of my favorite teachers. He's one of the few authors for whom I've written four notes in my Philosopher's notes series. And just an extraordinary integration of a lot of my favorite teachers and work. Super fun, funny, practical, and just my kind of teacher. So, Steve, I really appreciate you taking the time and I'm excited to dive in today.

Well, thank you, Brian. I'm really flattered that you have me today.

Well, wonderful. Let's jump straight in. And some of the, the last couple books of yours, Time Warrior and Wealth Warrior, which I loved both of those books. We've got notes on both of them. I wanted to just start right there. What's it mean to be a warrior? Why are we using warrior in these titles and what's it mean? Why is that an important part of optimizing our lives?

Well, what I had run into with so many of the people I was working with, my clients and groups I was teaching and individual coaching clients, was this kind of passivity that had set in that was covered up by a story of spirituality. In other words, I'm just going to let the universe do this and I'm going to wait here and let the universe deliver things unto me as if those things were going to happen without participation. So there was going to be no dancing, no interacting with the universe anymore. It would just be, I will picture things, I will imagine them, I will shift my internal vision and that ought to be enough. And so this led to people gaining weight and losing money and all kinds of real world ego problems. And I wanted to do something that over corrected on the other side. And that's why I chose the word warrior, just to wake people up and to just distinguish what I was teaching from the more passive law of attraction type stuff.

I love it. Which is one of the reasons why I'm such a huge fan of you and your work and how you articulate this wisdom of, you know, there's a lot more to it than just visualizing getting that vision board and all that stuff. There's something called hard work and discipline and the warrior ethics certainly captures that. Which leads us to another one of my favorite ideas. And we've shared this and it's actually one of the most popular big ideas we've shared this. The idea that when we look at that phrase from the Bible, I never Knew this before you introduced me to the idea. But that idea that the meek shall inherit the earth, can you tell us about that mistranslation and how it really means something closer to the disciplined shall inherit the earth?

Yeah. When you don't really get into the real nitpicky kind of etymology of where the original words come from and how they wind up in the King James version, it really meant something a lot closer to the discipline shall inherit the earth. Which is a completely different meaning. And discipline is a word that usually in our society means a grind or a rigor or forcing myself to do something that I don't want to do. But even that word has a gentle underside to it. And that is, it's related to the word disciple. So when I'm disciplined, I become my own disciple, or I become a disciple of something I've chosen to become a disciple of. And that's really the source of discipline, not so much the drill sergeant in and An Officer and a Gentleman. Not that picture.

Yeah. One of my other favorite teachers, a guy named Michael Beckwith, talks about the fact that when you really engage in it from that place of joy and gratitude and you do the hard work as well, that discipline turns into blissipline. And there's a level of joy to it. It's not that harshness. And I love that root of disciple. And just so cool. The difference between the passivity that we were talking about versus the warrior and the meek versus. Versus the disciplined and those who have self mastery. Such a great concept. And that ties to another. One of my favorite ideas of yours is creation versus reaction. You play around. I never noticed that they have the exact same letters in them. And that seems to be a really powerful through line in your work is moving from reaction to creation. Can you talk about that and why that's so important?

Yeah, it is. And you know, a few years ago, I was teaching a course in that distinction. I can live a life of reaction, or I can live a life of creation. And when it was first pointed out to me that the letters and the two words were the same, my first thought was, I'm glad I'm not taking acid at this moment. I could have been lost in that for about a year. But I think there are two very distinct ways to orient myself. And when I orient myself in the mindset of creation, then I can use whole brain thinking. I can introduce all kinds of energy and innovation into whatever I'm doing and really have a lot of fun and really be at the source of. Of the Action. When I'm reacting, on the other hand, I mean, then I just wake up and I check in with the news to see what's happening and I check in with all the people in my life to see how they're treating me, whether they still like me. And my whole world is a series of emotional reactions to other things. And after a while that gets very depressing and nerve wracking and not a very good life if I can remember that. I always have a core shift in that. Instead of saying how do I feel about this awful thing, if I ask myself what do I want to create given that this thing is happening, then all of a sudden I'm back on track and I'm enjoying my life again. So creation is so important. It's really what we were put here to do. It's what kids do very naturally. They're always creating things. They're not self conscious. You don't have to talk a child into drawing. They don't turn around and say, oh, I can't draw. When you give them crayons and things, they just jump right in. And that's where, when an adult can get back to that, then great things happen.

Well, on that theme, one of your books, the that I again just loved Fearless and Creating the Courage to change the things you. Can you talk about fear versus courage versus fearlessness. Can you unpack that for us? I love your distinction around, you know, courage is great, but why don't we move beyond that to a level we don't even have the fear in the first place? Can you talk about that for us?

Yeah, that's really what fearlessness is, is just an unselfconscious dance with what's going on. And so there isn't me deciding how I feel about it or me being aware of me even. It's just joining the flow. So when you hear about people doing these amazing things like throwing themselves in front of someone else when the bullets are flying, when you ask them later, they say, you know, I didn't even think about it or I didn't even have time to be afraid or it's what anyone else would do. There's never any real sense that it took courage. And that's the state. That fearless state is what I'm really interested in cultivating and expanding and getting to when it comes to the things that are important to me. Whereas courage is like I'm pushing through something that scares me and I don't want to do it, but I'm doing it anyway. And that's Admirable. But I want to go further there. I want to get beyond even that.

I love it. So how do you do that? So if someone has fear around doing something in their life, how do you encourage them to move beyond that fear, through courage, to a state of fearlessness?

Well, there's only two ways that I have ever experienced or anyone I've worked with. One is actually to do that thing until it becomes boring, and it's in your muscle memory, and you can do it in your sleep and you're not even thinking about it anymore. And that's what I did for myself with public speaking. I had the greatest fear. I had a greater fear of public speaking than anyone I've ever known in my life. I mean, I went to more extremes to avoid it than anyone I've ever known. I had greater fear around it. But I passed through that with. There was a lot of courage period, then there was a totally fearless period at the other side. And that was by doing it so much that it just. It was like, boring. It was like walking or breathing or drinking water. It was no longer significant as an event. It no longer meant anything about me. It was no longer a threat to me in any way. That's one way. The other way, the other I found. And Byron Cage really helped with this as well as the Eastern religions, and that is to absolutely challenge and inquire about the thoughts and the beliefs that are producing the fear. So the best way for the Western mind to do this is Byron, Katie's work. She's set up her work so that a Western mind can do it like a defense attorney would challenge a witness. So it doesn't involve meditation or a wild attempt to think. Nothing. But it's really just plays into the ego's own hands, and the ego ends up deleting itself, unwittingly or wittingly. And it's such a. Such an ingenious system she's created. And it's the same thing that Romana might. Maharshi recommends when he says inquire. Just inquire. Inquire. If a thought scares you, ask about it. Ask about it. Find out if it's really true. So those are the two ways.

That's great.

They both work. They both work. Yeah.

That's great. And then the second one, you get to a point where I think I've heard you describe it as. It's kind of like that. You think you see a snake, then you realize it's just a. Just a twig or it's just a Rope. And you realize that absurdity, that moment of enlightenment, that moment of awareness. Through the inquiry, right?

Through the inquiry, exactly right. Because the thing that you believed that I used to believe that this would be a threat to me or this would hurt my career, or I need this money to survive, or money is oxygen. If I don't have money, I'll die. Beliefs are inside people like that, and they make no sense. They're not really rational. They have no connection to reality. But they live their lives based on these beliefs and these thoughts. So the trick is to trace the thought that's producing that bad feeling in you, track it down, challenge it, do the work with someone who's good at doing it, or do it by yourself.

Yeah, it's fantastic. And you use the metaphor of an attorney, right? Just challenging the thoughts. Challenging the thoughts. Challenging the thoughts, actually, yes, that's.

And then with my clients when I'm doing coaching, I become the attorney because they'll tell me something like, I had a client tell me I never finished anything. So now that's the belief he has that he never finishes anything. Well, obviously that's not true. And so I began immediately to ask him, did you. Are you dressed right now? He was on the phone. Yes. Did you start getting dressed in the morning? He said, yes. And I said, did you finish getting dressed? He said, yes. And we went through about 20 really mundane things. Did you finish high school? Yes. Did you start high school? Yes. Did you finish it? Yes, I did finish high school. After a while, I said, you know, you know what? I can't seem to find anything that you haven't finished. So yet you've told me that you never finished anything. So either I'm barking up the wrong tree or you're not telling the truth. So he wasn't telling the truth. There were just a few significant things that he had not finished. But one of the reasons he never finished them was because he walks around thinking, I never finish anything. So we have all kinds of beliefs in us like that that screw us up and are totally unnecessary to carry around.

That's fantastic. It leads us to kind of that action side of things, right? Of what's challenged their beliefs and then what's. Take effective action. And your. Your emphasis of this throughout your work is something else that really inspires me. And you have a really funny description of how to deal with procrastination. You know, do the things you're procrastinating on and just taking decisive action and kind of, you know, marrying the change of the beliefs with effective action. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Well, yeah, you know, so first thing I want to see is procrastination is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a reflection of the rebellious soul that's in me that doesn't just do things because somebody thinks I should. So there's a part of me that's rebellious and beautiful and independent and fears nothing that shows up as procrastination. It's like nothing is going to tell me what to do until I'm ready to do it. That's not a negative part of you that's expressing itself. But we have a belief that all procrastination is bad and it's a reflection of a character defect and all of that. So almost everyone I know thinks they have a problem with procrastination. The first thing I want to show them is you don't have any problem with procrastination. That's something you walk around believing, but you don't. So there's something you're not doing for a very good reason. Let's find the good reason instead of figuring out why you have a problem with procrastination. It's a lot more fascinating for people to collect a bunch of negative psychological defects that they believe they have that have been caused by various genetic and environmental influences that are not dictating present day behavior. That's what they want to bring to the therapist and to the coach. Instead of just a spirit of rebellion that's saying, no, I'm not going to do this today. What are you going to do? Sue me?

That's great you talk about that too. Just the difference between doing those archaeological digs and thinking about everything that's wrong with us. I think you told a story of the absent minded professor who had a dirty apartment. And was it because he had this inner turmoil in his mind, or was it simply because he had ineffective habits as they related to ineffective routines? I think was the word you used as it relates.

Yeah, you're right. And it wasn't. I mean, this guy was a brilliant genius. This guy was a mentor of mine. And he noticed for years and years and years his apartment was always messy and he was embarrassed bringing people over and he thought there was something wrong with him. He was never taught organization. He's not a neatnik. He's never in his left brain. He had all these explanations and then finally it hit him. What's really missing here is a routine. Just a simple routine. If I would put a routine in that, I would Make a routine of mine in the morning, just like this is my morning routine. I would have a clean apartment. So he decided that I think it was for 20 minutes every morning as the coffee was brewing and everything was getting ready. He would just in a very lazy, ineffective way, pick one of the rooms and start tidying up every morning, whether it needed it or not. Tidying up for 20 minutes. And it became part of his routine so he didn't have to think about it. It didn't take self discipline after a while. It was just a routine he followed. And next thing he knew, he always had a nice tidy apartment. Always, forevermore, forever after. And so he realized that often what's missing in our lives is a simple little routine. Not some transformation of a deep character defect or something like that where we've over dramatized ourselves to the point of never changing anything.

Yeah, I love that. And again, we can get into that drama and that deep, deep decades long archaeological dig or we can find a couple more effective behavioral patterns and routines and habits. Love that story. And I'd love to talk about. There's a couple other big ideas that I want to hit and I want to talk more about kind of your own routines and your patterns and you know, the challenges that you've moved through and where you were then, vis a vis now, et cetera. But one of my favorite visual images that you created for me in your work was this idea of a hagfish. Can you talk about a hagfish and how we create them in our psychological lives?

Well, tell me what you mean by, you know, I have a disorder I have to confess to you about. And my disorder has me writing books all the time. Even after I swear that I'm done writing books, the next thing I know, I've written two more this year. So in one of my books I must have this. Is it in the relationship?

You know, it's in time Warrior. And you tell this story about how when we have resentments about the past and worries about the future, that they can kind of eat us from the inside out. You say that there's this creature in nature called a hagfish, that deep water eel like creatures is how you describe it, that darts into the orifices of their prey and devours them alive from the inside. And I just thought that was such a great image.

Yeah, it is great. Thank you for bringing it back, reminding me of it. I've got that book on my nightstand. I've been meaning to read it for a long time.

I heard it's good. The author is pretty cool. You should check it out.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's right. That's really it with disorders and things like that. The Time Warrior. The whole Time Warrior thing is we attempt to live linearly, like on linear time, where we predict things and it's all one line from birth to death. But the world doesn't really. Time doesn't operate that way. Time is explosive and full of vertical leaps and wild things and we don't even live as if that's true. And the real way to live is inside the present moment. Because inside the present moment we can rise up really high. But living on a linear plane, it's restricted what we can do. So I really highly recommend that whenever I work with a client and they tell me what they want to do in the coming year, that's interesting. And that informs what we're going to do. And that is, how do you create your perfect day? What's your day going to look like? Because that's all I'm interested in is continuously reshaping your 24 hour period. Because that's, that's where I want to work. I never want to go up beyond that with you because that's where everything happens. That's really where the future gets created. When you move into nonlinear time management, which is what Time Warrior helps people learn how to do.

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's a core part of my work, influenced by you and some other extraordinary teachers. Dan Millman describes it as carpe diem is great, seize the day, but the reality is the only thing you can seize is this moment. Carpe punctum, he says. So you know, and that moment to moment to moment choice is where those, those growth moments you're describing occur. And yeah, I just love that frame of okay, yeah, it's nice what you want to do this year. It's nice what you want to do this quarter and even in many ways this day. But how are we going to string together as many of those empowered moments as we possibly can? Right on. Well, love that. And then I want to talk a little bit about failure. And you know, people, when we talk about fear, courage, fearlessness, so much of it comes down to this idea of failure and this paranoid sense of what would happen if we ever fail. You talk about why we need to embrace failure. Can you talk about why that's so important?

Well, because failure is always somebody else's word. So it's a judgment by someone. So when someone is afraid of failure, I want to Find out, by whose standards would that be a failure? If you call someone and offer them your services and they decline, by whose standards would that be a failure? Because it certainly wouldn't. By mine. By mine. It would be just like a waiter showing up at the table and asking if you'd like to see a dessert menu. And you say, no, we're not going to have dessert tonight. Is that a failure on the part of the waiter? By your standards as a salesperson, that's a failure. And so what I want people to see is this story called Failure. This imaginary ghost and this made up monster is a figment of our imagination. And it really is a way to stay out of action. It's a get out of life free card. So people are really proud of their fear of failure. I mean, it's kind of like they love to confess it because it's like the thing that explains or why they didn't do something. And so I like to say there is no failure because that takes that away from them. And so I think that what other people see as failure is just simply somebody else's attempt to put a label on something. And that can go on forever. And you can get more opinions on it, and you'll be hung up on opinion, judgment and labeling. You won't be dancing with the universe at all, ever. So I think this obsession with, did I succeed? Did I fail? Am I a success? Am I a failure? You'll never know any of that. That's all. Compared to whom? Compared to what? What's your standard? Why even bother living on that level? Such a shallow, gossipy level anyway. Hmm.

Yeah. So powerful. And you talked to you about. The idea just came to my mind of flipping a coin. And if you told someone they'd get 100 bucks every time it landed on heads, they wouldn't be worried about it ever landing on tails. They just flip the coin again and again and again. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. It wouldn't be like, oh, shoot, I failed to hit a heads. It would be like, no, it's part of it. It's part of it. So failure is if you're going to think in terms of success, you have to fail. It's part of it. Just like if I'm going to flip a hundred heads, I have to get tails along with it. It's part of it. You cannot separate it. It goes with it. Alan Watts used to use the word goes with. He put those two words together for things like this. People are always trying, like he said, like on a bar magnet. People are always trying to cut off the north end so they'll only be south. And you can't. Every time you cut some of it off now you've just got a shorter magnet, but you still have north and south. And the same is true with success and failure. They try to eliminate failure. And every time they try to do that, it just can't happen. It's a fool's effort. I might as well willingly, happily fail in the name of learning something that's so great.

And then the other theme there, that I want to get a couple more little nuggets from you. You said that yes lives in the land of no. I just love that phrase and that idea that it goes with, as Alan Watts shared, this is so great. Success goes with failure. Failure goes with success. What a profound insight to orient our lives toward so great. And again, we can talk for, you know, weeks on end about all these ideas, but in the spirit of this more wisdom and less time context, I want to focus on one more idea and then chat a little bit about you. So in your personal story, the focusing on getting versus giving and you know, the stress that comes when we're always looking for the big get, can you talk about the importance of orienting ourselves around what we can give?

Well, trying to get things, putting things up on my treasure map on the wall and dreaming about them and picturing them and spinning around my bedpost at night like Julie Andrews in my nightgown and singing about the future. This is an attempt to fill something in me that I don't think I already have. So anytime I'm even thinking about attracting a mate or attracting more abundance or doing more meridian tapping for abundance, or aromatherapy for abundance, or meditating on the abundance of the universe so I'll have more money. All of that starts with the premise that I'm not enough and I need to get something from someone else and they're more than enough and I need to go get some of their something. Now that's a really unhappy life. And that never really works very well because when you have in mind to get something, people see you coming a mile away and their sales resistance goes up and you never really make any contact with anybody. If I really got and really understood that I have a lot to give, then I wake up asking myself, who can I serve? And when someone comes into my world, what can I give this person? What can I, what can I contribute that would help them? And people who come from that orientation, a life of give versus a life of get, are the People who really don't have problems with money or relationships or things that other people have.

Beautiful focusing on giving rather than the big get again, moment to moment to moment. So one of the things that I've gotten feedback on in my work, I've described some of the challenges that I've been through personally. And I think a lot of times people have this sense that people we admire have never gone through challenging times and they're just kind of perfect. And I think a lot of people in the self development world often kind of put out that pretense. And one of the things I really admire about you is your vulnerability. And you're just not even vulnerability, but just your transparency on. Look, these are the challenges I've faced and this is where I'm. What I've kind of worked on and what's working for me. Now. Can you describe some of that and kind of your process and a little bit on where you've been and obviously these tools have helped you get to where you are, but I just, I think that's really powerful for people to hear that, you know, you didn't come out of the womb and be glowing with the radiant enthusiasm and joy that you experience in your life. Now can you talk about that a little bit?

I came out of the womb and wanted back in. Give me back in there as fast as you can. Yeah, I had a miserable life. I was the, I mean, miserable from the outside, if you were judging it on terms of achievement. I was the worst underachiever. I was just went into all kinds. I won't depress your listeners with the whole litany of things. They'll just, you know, question whether life is even worth living after hearing my biography. But I just went through everything. Alcoholism, divorce, bankruptcy. Just, just never wanted to ever work. I never believed I, I could work. And it was really life, it was really long. And. Then I would go to a company and they'd say, what are your credentials? And I didn't have any credentials. And I would just be honest. Okay, Alcoholism, bankruptcy, divorce. I would list all these things and then they would say, well, that's not I ideal, but can you help us? And I trained over 30 Fortune 500 companies not because of my reputation, it was because I was willing to answer the question, can you help us? That was really. And that's what I found out was all I would ever have to do in life was to be able to answer that question and not have this big resume. And I went to Harvard and then I was a Rhodes scholar and Then I became this and I became that. And then I worked with Gandhi for years and I became Mother Teresa's personal assistant. And then I began to train. I was a personal trainer. Ken Wilber and all these people, these lists of things. And it's just, there's no need to pump yourself up. All this credibility stuff is nonsense. And the only real question is, can you help? That's the only question.

Beautiful. And so that's become kind of a. Guiding, has been a guiding theme for you. And we've talked about a lot of the kind of the practices that you engage in your life. Do you have any fundamentals? I'd like to talk about the fundamentals and kind of that discipline aspect in optimal living 101. Do you have any things that you do kind of day in and day out that keep you plugged in that if you didn't do them you'd have some of those challenges again?

You know, I would love to say that I did. It would make me sound like I had my act together and wow, I want to be like Steve Chandler. I have some routines I follow. What I love to do is find heroes for myself and then try to be like them. I used to do that as a little boy and I found it still works. So when I was a little boy, I wanted to be Superman. I wanted to be mighty Matt Campbell or Alan Watts or Ken Wilbur and be like Byron Katie or things like that. And so I would just take people who inspire me and I will allow myself to get obsessed by that and try to follow their path. That's really what I do. And the heroes keep shifting and changing and some come back into my life, but it's fun for me. I put their pictures up and it's like today I'm going to be Bruce Lee. I'm going to be like water and I make some Bruce Lee movements. I picture myself as Bruce Lee. So I know what you were really looking for, Ryan, was some fundamental spiritual practices. And I do my meditation and then I do my yoga, then I do my aromatherapy and then I do meridian tapping for abundance and then I work out and then I go to Indian feed the poor and I come back and do charity work for the environment. And then I set my solar panels up and do my self sufficient home and eat nothing but vegetables and then go to bed.

I hear how you are. You've got Iron man tomorrow, Spider man the day after that.

We're good.

That's great.

You know what? So my new thing today that I do is every Morning, I wake up and I read the words do it without the rope. And it's on my Facebook page. You can look at it with a little symbol of Batman underneath. And it's from the movie the Dark Knight Rises, the new Batman movie. There's a really profound scene that put tears in my eyes when I saw it. And everyone who saw that movie will know what I'm talking about. But it's a way of living. It's a way of doing something. And so that's my latest thing, do.

It without the rope. And I know exactly what you're talking about.

And.

Beautiful. Tell me, just unpack that for a moment. What does that mean for you? Like when you feel that? What's the energy behind that for you?

The energy is okay. Leave habituation behind. Leave the same old way I was going to live today in order to please other people and win their approval. Leave that all behind. Now what do I want to create? What do I want to create that's really extraordinary, that really has no attempt to win anybody's approval? That's what I want to avoid. Always.

Love it. That makes. Makes perfect sense and I love that extension of it. And I appreciate you unpacking that for a moment. Let's wrap it up. What's your. And you might have a playful answer to this as well, which I would love. What would you describe as your number one tip if you had to give someone as they're approaching their life or whatever stage they're at? What's the number one tip you would give for them as they look to optimize their lives?

That's very hard to do because I would want to know the person first. I would want to know what was in the way. So what we would do is get that out of the way so you can express yourself. So find out what's in the way. Find out what you are doing to keep what's missing out of your life. Find that out and then do what it takes to get that activity or that mindset out so you can express yourself. And that's not a very salient tip, but that's what I would say. That's what I would do.

I think it is a salient tip and I think it's something that we can always look for. What is in the way. How do we get that out of the way and. And take the next steps in life? Well, Steve, I really appreciate you taking the time and thrilled to be connected and thank you for all the work you've done in your life and continue to do.

You're welcome, Brian. Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit BrianJohnson me for more.

Sam.