John Murphy introduces a framework for recognizing and eliminating fear, resistance, anxiety, and stress. He teaches the 5 Whys root-cause analysis from Toyota and explains how the subconscious mind, processing 40 million bits per second, installs limiting beliefs by age six. He uses FUEL techniques like meridian tapping and meditation to delete these programs.
Chapters
All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm John Murphy, and welcome to the first episode of Fearless, or pronounced another way, Fear Less. So this whole series is about understanding fear and resistance, anxiety and stress, things like that. And I'd like you to think about it this way. Life's a journey. We're all on a journey, and we tell ourselves stories along the way. And if we were to get in a car to take a journey, a long journey, what would it be like if we took that journey with the brakes on the whole time? Probably not very efficient, right? And certainly not very effective. So, we're going through life with the brakes on. It's a good idea to understand how best to use the brakes. It's not to say that fear isn't important, but if it runs our lives, it gets in the way of real true progress. So, in this Series, that's what we're going to explore. Just what is fear? Where does it come from? Why do I feel certain resistance or anxiety or stress? As a business consultant, I go into companies all over the world and I teach things like root cause analysis. So in this episode, we're going to play around with one of the root cause tools called the 5 Whys. So you'll leave this episode with at least one tool you can play with. And my intention is in each episode to give you an opportunity to play with a new tool so that we can actually delete a lot of the stress and fear and resistance that we have. Okay, a little bit more about FUEL. I'm an instructor for FUEL. I have 2 courses with FUEL. One's called Beyond Doubt: 4 Steps to Inner Peace. And we can use that model, those 4 steps, which I'll share, to overcome all kinds of fear. And here's the thing, not just manage fear, You know, with stress management techniques and things like that, but actually delete it, eliminate it completely from our minds, because that's where fear comes from. It comes from the mind. It's never the thing out there that scares us. It's the mind. It's what we think of what's out there that scares us. So this is really about mind control. Okay? And when we think certain thoughts, We think about something that could go wrong. We think about embarrassing ourselves or making mistakes. We think we could fail. We think we could strike out in baseball. We don't even get up to the plate. You know, back in the day, Pete Rose, who was a great baseball player, he had the most home runs. He also had the most strikeouts. Imagine that. And so when we look at people like Colonel Sanders who went out and was turned down over 1,000 times with his Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe. Over 1,000 companies he went to, vendors, food companies, and he offered 50% of anything that sold. It was a no-lose situation. Over 1,000 companies said no. And yet, look where he took KFC now. Thomas Edison, maybe you've heard the story. A reporter asked him one time after 9,000 failures with the light bulb, How can you even continue after 9,000 failures? And Edison said, I haven't failed yet. I've learned 9,000 ways that don't work. That's a whole different way to look at things, right? So, a little bit more about my background. I was in a very boring dead-end job in Chicago in 1984 to '86. And, or no, excuse me, that was 1982 to '84. And Felt like, wow, you know, I did everything right. I got great grades in high school. I went to the University of Notre Dame. I did very well there. I got a couple of great job offers, took one in Chicago, a degree in finance. And after a year or two in this job, I thought, oh my God, I made such a mistake because I was bored. It wasn't exciting. And I thought, when did I sign up for this? So, guess what I did? Despite any fear or resistance or worry, I— Yeah. I changed jobs, I changed companies, I changed industry, I changed city, I changed state. I moved to a whole new state and I threw in a marriage just to spice it up a little bit. And then I had 4 kids. Here's the thing, Fear Less is about moving forward in life, recognizing that you're not always going to get it right, but you're always going to learn. Yep. You're going to learn 9,000 ways that don't work for a light bulb, so to speak. And that shift in mindset differentiates great performers from everyone else. Look at any great performer and they've stepped beyond fear of failure and stepped up their game. Now, one of the key practices in order to do that is practice, preparation. Because to walk up, I was a quarterback, and to walk up to the line of scrimmage, which is a lot like facing the day, it's full of uncertainty, right? So how do we approach that? Do we walk up to the line of scrimmage in football and even though we've got a play called, everybody knows what to do, we've practiced all week, we've studied the competition, we have a game plan and a strategy, the truth is when the ball snaps, We don't know what's going to happen. You could get hurt. You could lose yardage. You could fumble and turn the ball over, any number of things. So how do you approach the line of scrimmage? How do you approach the day each and every day? Do you? Are you timid? Are you worried something could go wrong? I'll tell you what: if if you're an athlete playing any sport, you're never going to perform at a peak level. Just no chance. So how do you get to that point where? You have faith over fear. You can't have both at the same time. You have trust in yourself and in the process that you're using, whatever that process is. It's a good process. And you've prepared ahead of time. So if you're giving a speech in front of 1,000 people and that makes you a little bit nervous, why? Why are you nervous? Is it because you're unprepared? Because there's a leverage point right there. Make sure you're prepared. So when you walk up to that line of scrimmage or step on stage or go into that job interview, or going in and sit with the doctor for a checkup, you're not afraid, you're not nervous, because all that does is draw more fear into your life. Think of it this way. A fear is a frequency. Einstein said everything is energy, and that's all there is to it. So fear has a frequency that's measurable. Science proves this. They can measure the vibration of the frequency of fear. It's like a radio. It's like a song on the radio. Every song has a different frequency, and like frequencies attract like frequencies. So it's like the saying, misery loves company. That's a frequency that attracts more misery. Fear attracts more fear. So if we're afraid of something, we're drawing more fear into our lives, into our experiences, and then our body responds. So if we think about something that's scary, we start to experience a shift in our body. Blood pressure, hormones are starting to flow, the cortisol, the stress hormones, the adrenaline. And then that tells us, our body tells us that we're right to be afraid. Think about that. So I want to invite you to use chat throughout this and have a little fun with that. One of the first things I'd like you to think about is just one thing that makes you anxious or nervous. One thing could be a relationship. You're in a relationship that's not good and You don't know what to do about it. Could be a situation you're going through, a divorce or a new relationship that makes you a little nervous, basically because of something in the past that may have not gone right. You're approaching a job interview or going into a performance evaluation. You've got a big event or project coming up. Could be anything. But just think about one thing that triggers fear. All right. And if you, if you'd like, put it in the chat. I'm curious about one thing. That triggers fear. Part of your journey. Where are you putting the brakes on? Where are you in a mode of resistance, nervous about stepping up to the plate, so to speak? Life's an experiment. We're experimenting all the time. What could it be? So I'll give you— I'll just— I'll give you an example. Let's just say you're in a relationship that's just not working. Your energy frequencies just aren't in harmony. All right. So, why you don't know what to do? Okay. Here's one from Alex. Hello, Alex. Nice to see you here. And nervous about slowing down. Finances. People nervous about, wow, how am I going to pay this bill? Or how am I going to retire someday? I've got nothing in my retirement or I've got a huge debt load. Okay. Good. Alex says, we're building a fast company. And I feel like slowing down is a form of failure. We want to keep going at full speed. We've got Claire saying health issues. Here's the thing about a health issue. If you are told by a doctor that you have an illness and you now fear that illness taking your life or whatever, guess what? You're drawing more fear in and you're drawing more pain and you're drawing more of that illness actually into your life. Misery loves company. Illness loves illness. Ego loves ego. So we start by identifying things that are troubling us, causing this resistance. Let's be very clear about that. And then we go into root cause analysis. Why? There's a tool I mentioned I'd share, one of the root cause tools I use. It's called the 5 Whys. I also mentioned it, I teach it in one of my Fuel courses. The 5 Whys. What in the world is that? It was developed back in the day by the chief engineer at Toyota, Taiichi Ohno. And the idea is we ask why 5 levels deep, not across, but deep. So for example, John is late for work and we say, why? And the answer is, well, his car wouldn't start. That's one level. We say, why wouldn't the car start? Well, the battery was dead. Why was the battery dead? John left the lights on. Why did John leave the lights on? Well, he forgot. Or there was nothing to remind him to shut the lights off. People make mistakes, you know, it happens all the time. Why wasn't he reminded? And what happens at this level is we get to a root, root cause. And all of a sudden, engineers can start saying, well, you know what? We'll put bells in there to remind John to shut his lights off. Or better yet, we'll poke-a-yoke it or mistake-proof it. And shut the lights off for him. He doesn't even have to worry about it anymore. And if you look around the world these days, there's PokéYokes everywhere. Foolproofs. PokéYoke means mistake-proof, all over the place. And so with the 5 Whys, we can use that on anything in our life. And with fear, if we say, why am I afraid of whatever, a health issue, slowing down, anything like that? Why am I afraid? I'll give you a minute to think about that. It's because I have a perception. I am assuming something's going to go wrong. If I slow down, the wheels are going to fall off. Okay? If I step up on stage, I might say something stupid. Why would I think that? Why would I think I'm going to fail? Now, what we're doing is we're exploring the mind to get to the root cause, because fear is a self-projected resistance. It's not what is out there scaring us. It's not getting up on stage or the business slowing down or a health issue. It's what we think of that. So it's all in the mind. What scares you doesn't scare me, perhaps, or vice versa. All right. So when we get to that point where we understand fear is useful as a tool, we need the brakes to slow down here and there and pause and maybe change directions a little bit, adjust. But we don't want to go through life with the brakes on. So I'll let you practice that 5-level deep, but also give you essentially a punchline. And that is we get down into this world of the mind. And I'll give you a couple of quick data points on the mind. We have the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is our will. I will lose 10 pounds. I will stop doing this habit. I will start exercising. I will whatever. And the power of the conscious mind is a processing factor of 40 bits of data per second. 40. Okay? And the other thing about the conscious mind is it's rarely present. It's the conscious mind that's jumping to the future. And I, oh, I got this big project to do. I've got this potential problem on the horizon that makes me nervous. Or it's in the past, thinking about, you know what, I made a mistake and I'm still beating myself up over it. It's in the past. No matter what it is we're thinking, past or present, if it's not positive, it's triggering our hormonal system and we're feeling bad. We're feeling anxious. We're feeling grief. We're feeling shame. Okay? We're feeling guilt, feeling all kinds of ego frequencies. So the conscious mind's all over the place while the subconscious mind's running most of your life. Now, I said the conscious mind processes 40 bits of data per second, approximately. The subconscious mind, 40 million bits of data per second. It's a million-to-one ratio. This is the research of Dr. Bruce Lipton and other scientists. And so, wow. The subconscious mind's that powerful. So when we will to do something, change a habit— I will not let fear get in my way. Well, I will not be afraid of whatever— if the subconscious mind's saying, yeah, you will. You've been afraid of that your whole life. And now suddenly you think you're just not going to be afraid anymore? Good luck with that. So what we really have to pay attention to is we use the conscious mind To identify these subconscious programs that we're running on. We're all running on programs, and it becomes our life story. And by the way, most of these programs are downloaded into our minds by the age of 6, which means we don't even really understand what they are. But from the time we were born, we could have been told, don't do that. Stay away from the pool. You might fall in and drown. Don't touch this or that. And we go through a whole series of years with don't, don't, don't. And we download a whole lot of fear. We also download something that I've struggled with for a good part of my life, which is the program of I'm not worthy, I'm not deserving. Every week I'd go to church, and that's what we repeated over and over and over again. I'm not worthy. So, when the conscious mind says, I should make more money, I have financial challenges, or I should be in better shape, I should be more fit or whatever. If the subconscious mind says, you're not worthy, you don't deserve that, you only deserve the life you have now, we just, all we do is repeat the past and we're plateaued. We never get to that level of peak performance. So, here's the drill. We start by identifying one thing that's holding us down, one area of our life where we're putting the brakes on a whole lot. And then we have to ask ourselves why, because we've got to get to the root cause to solve any problem in a sustainable way. A sustainable way. So rather than taking aspirins to deal with headaches— by the way, here's another case for the 5 Whys that you might find interesting. Somebody's got consistent chronic headaches and you say, why? Why? You don't just take aspirin or Tylenol or something like that, which is a band-aid for it. But say, why are you getting recurring headaches? What's going on with that? And a deeper dive says, well, you're not getting good oxygen to your brain. You're not getting good circulation to your brain. Well, why? Another level deep. Why not? Well, it's because you have inflammation, which any doctor on the planet will tell you is a root cause to any disease. Inflammation. Well, now you ask, why do you have inflammation? Well, it's because you're favoring one side. Your body isn't in alignment. And what do you mean? Why isn't my body in alignment? It's because your hips are out of sync. Your hips are out of sync. Why are my hips out of sync? Because you had an accident, you know, 10 years ago and you never had it quite the adjustment. So here's the trick. We think the problem's in the head, which is a symptom. When the actual root cause is in our hips. That just doesn't make sense to a lot of people. They just don't, they don't see that. We have businesses building more customer service centers all over the globe to solve problems that should be eliminated. Customer service reps. So the headache in business is a customer saying, I have a problem. Okay. If we deep dive that in business, we get the root causes often design, a process design that's flawed or a product design that's flawed. You can imagine all All the problems with that. And so it's somewhere other than the customer service center. So the idea here is to look at things from a systems perspective, identify what I call undesirable effects or UDIs. Headaches are UDIs. Poor customer service complaints are UDIs. Fear of things that really aren't something you should have the brakes on for is a UDI. It's undesirable effect. So, we take those UDs and now we do the root cause, the 5 Whys, and I'll share some other tools in future episodes to figure out, so where do I need to focus my attention and shift my thinking? And it's the subconscious mind. It's the subconscious mind because it's the programs you're running on. And so, rather than add with more training, more seminars, more, Unless that seminar is about how to delete subconscious programs, I'll teach that as well. And I teach it in my Fuel courses. Tools like emotional freedom technique, meridian tapping, meditation techniques, lots of techniques to delete programming in the mind so we don't— we're just not afraid anymore. Here's one. A lot of people are afraid of losing their jobs, right? I lose my job every year. I started my consulting firm in 1988, so it'll turn 36, 38 this year, 38 years. And as a consultant, I go in and out of businesses around the world, and usually my assignments are a year or 2, and then I'm done. And it doesn't scare me at all. Why? Because I have faith in myself. I have faith in a higher power. I have trust in my abilities, and I prepare. And I've been preparing my whole life. I'm a self-help junkie, if you will. So I want you to think— I'm going to take a moment just to look at some of the chats here. But I want you to think now about this, a program in your mind, something you're running on. Okay? The subconscious mind is called the habitual mind by people like the great Wayne Dyer and people like that, the habitual mind. The physicist Lester Levin said, if you want to know what's going on at the subconscious mind, Look at your tendencies. He'd use that word tendencies. So if you have a tendency to get impatient or nervous or afraid, define that tendency. And then the whole idea of processing, really it's about processing it, understanding it. What is this fear doing? It's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it's telling me to be cautious and I need to prepare more effectively. I'm not going to go into this situation and just wing it. Okay. So process it. Here's a Zen teaching I love. It's that any feeling you experience as a person, let it in the front door and let it out the back door, but don't invite it for tea. So that could be anything from grief, guilt that you're processing, shame, apathy, a sense of worthlessness. I'm not worthy. Fear. Go ahead, let it in. By the way, don't lock the front door, especially with fear, because if you lock the door and try to resist it and keep it out, guess what it's going to do? It's going to get stronger. Anything we resist gets stronger. So be careful with that. Allow it in. Process it. Why am I afraid? Why am I nervous? Do I think I'm going to fail? And I'll tell you something, high performers don't think that way because every failure, every mistake— we lose games, great golfers duff shots from time to time. It's a way to learn. So over the years, I've applied this now for 38 years as a consultant. And, you know, I go into countries, I don't speak the language, I don't know a thing about what they do. I'm working with military units making nuclear weapons and hospitals and surgeons, and I don't know a thing about those things. But what I know is how to problem solve in a creative way, how to pull teams together to get things done quickly. And the only way I can do that is to go in fearless. Fearless. So I want to just remind everybody this is possible when you learn these tools and these insights, and then you practice them. You practice them. So let me again take you back to your exercise and just give you a moment to think about this. And if you've got questions, let's put them in the chat. I'll take what I can in the next 5 minutes or so. Your takeaway here is identifying something you want to work on this week or this weekend to start. I hope you'll come back next Friday and join me. But what is it and why? What program do I need to uncover and process and challenge that will change my life and my performance and my journey immensely? In my case, that one example was the program, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. So that was getting in my way my whole life. Okay. I was just tripping all over myself because subconsciously, I was like, let's call it self-sabotage. I was getting in my own way. And once I figured that out and I applied some of these tools to delete it, wow, all kinds of things changed. In next episode too, I'm going to ask you about your 5-year vision. 5 years from now, what's the picture look like? What's the story? What's the story? Where are you? What kind of relationship are you in? What's your body look like? How much money are you making? Okay. What are your relationships like? Paint that picture. And then anything in your mind that says, well, that can't really happen. You know, I couldn't, I can't be a multimillionaire traveling the world and working in relationships that are amazing and with a really fit body. I couldn't do that. That's the problem. That subconscious programming that says, I can't do that. I don't have the right education. I don't have the right skill set. I don't— the yeah, buts. No, that's what we got to work on to delete. Okay? That's what we got to work on to delete. So questions? What do we got over here in the chat in terms of questions? Anybody got a question they want to throw in here? See them. All right. So I'm going to share my screen and leave you with one more tool. And you should be able to see this. Okay. We go through life pretty much on that top line, managing behavior to get results. We all want good results. We all want to be successful. So we spend a whole lot of time managing behavior to get good results. We've also been taught that a positive attitude is important. You know, let's not give up. Let's hang in there. Let's get with it. But deep below attitude is this world of perception, how we see ourselves, how we see our potential, the world around us, how we see our boss or our partner. It's how we see the world, perceptions and assumptions and these boxes called paradigms that we live in, these limitations. So that is the world we want to get to in Fearless, is we want to get down to that level of the assumptions. What assumptions am I making about my potential, my future? And I'll leave you with one quick exercise, and it's this. If you tune in next week, I'll give you the answer. You can move 1 ring to form 2 separate straight lines of 4 rings. You can just move 1 ring to create 2 straight lines of 4 rings each. Next week we will reveal the answer if you, if you haven't figured it out. By the way, if you haven't figured this out, don't feel bad. Basically, I'd say in a typical workshop or speech that I'm giving, over 90% of the people, over 95% don't get it. And these are some very, very, very bright people. And the reason it's troubling to get the answer to this is because you're in a paradigm, you're seeing it a certain way, you're assuming certain things that limit you, that put the brakes on it. And that's exactly what's going on in life. We're running on these programs and we don't even know it. Don't even know it. All right. So with that, we are at our— we are at our time's up. And I see Alex saying, thank you. They said, excited to be here and continue learning, John. Thank you. All right. Thoughts, beliefs, actions, results, manifesting the life we want. Thank you. Great. Well, I look forward— I hope you'll sign up for next Friday with Fearless and invite your friends. Invite anybody who is struggling with this. Fuel exists to help people Learn and apply that learning to performance, to just a better life. Okay, more success. So we're all about helping you help others and build a community around sharing and learning. And I'll tell you one more tip. If you really want to be super successful at something, model people who are already super successful at it. I have surrounded myself for 40 years with audios and cassettes back in the day, reading books. I read a book about how to write a book before I wrote my 20 books. Think about that. Who is a good role model, a good mentor? And you don't even have to know them. You can invite anybody into your library, your house, or your car these days. And fuel is a great way to do that. because we've got great instructors, great courses, and I invite you to do that. With that, I'm gonna say goodbye and have a great weekend. And I sure do hope to see you next week with a whole lot more folks. And one more thing, maybe, just maybe, a year from now, 2 years from now, when Fearless is global, you can say, I was at that first lesson with Murphy. How about that? All right, happy weekend, everybody.
