150. Fear and Excitement in Leadership

Foreign. Welcome back to leadership in a nutshell, cracking the code of the driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny chapman. Today, episode 150. We made it. You joined me 150 episodes of your life. Thank you so much for being here. I'm just so honored. When I started out to, you know, come to you once a week in a solo cast format just to get you to think about your thinking, I didn't know that I would do this for three years. And it's just such an honor to serve you at the highest level through a platform like this where you can just take a step back and think about your thinking. And with that, today, episode 150 is fear and excitement regarding leadership. Fear. Fear and excitement in your own leadership. And these are both critically important. And, you know, last week I talked about the fact that fear is really underlying from stress, and I. And I talked about stress is actually fear in disguise. Now, this week, I want you to embrace that fear and think about, like, not from a repetitive standpoint, but fear is a necessary component to growth. Fear is a necessary component to life and living your greatest life, influencing your greatest team, building your greatest company, enjoying your greatest self. Fear has to be a part of it in certain levels, and fear has a space and a reason, and excitement is right there. How many of you like to be excited? I know I do. I'm excited to be here with you right now. Do I have a little underlying fear that I'm going to be able to find the right word, say the right thing? Sure. I always have that fear when I come to you and decide to lay down a recording as I stutter on my words right there when I say it. Right? So. So ultimately, that's what it's about. Fear and excitement. They're both there, they're both playing together, they're both kind of playing badminton off of each other and going back and forth. That's where it's all. That's the zest in life, that's the zest in leadership. It's. It's why you've shown up to play the game at the highest level of creating influence, creating impact, and enjoying making things happen. You make things up, you make them real, and then we want our teams to make them recur. And so, you know, today I'm going to share kind of four main components with you around this and four thoughts that I want to really have you investigate in your own mind around fear and excitement. What does this mean to me? Number one, fear and excitement, they're the same thing. They're really the same thing. The same chemicals get released in your brain. Whether they're fear or excitement. There's like, there's adrenaline that takes place. The heart starts racing, you're elevated. You know, sometimes the body gets warm, your heart is elevated a little bit, you start thinking, you know, the, the reality is it's the exact same thing. Perception is the only difference. And there's a, so what I want you to think about in the brain, there's a fine line between what I call Disney and disaster. Right. So, so what do I, what do I mean by that? A lot of our team at blue collar lives in, in Florida and you got one of the largest, maybe the largest park in the, in the world there, around, you know, in Orlando with the Disney compound and whatnot and all the, and people spend all this money in order to go have the excitement and the fear. You understand if you're at the amusement park, you understand if you're an adrenaline junkie, you understand when you jump out of an airplane, you understand when you drive super, super fast, when you race cars, when you get on, you know, there maybe there's a difference between the riding around in the little teacup at the amusement park versus going through, I don't even know the latest rides. Christy and I haven't been there in a long time. But you know, whatever. The most fear based rides are like roller coasters that trip people out and the different gets your adrenaline up, it gets you a little scared and a little. And here's the deal, that's part of leadership too. So let's embrace that. What if I could save you? Let's say I don't know. What's a ticket to Disney cost today? 150 bucks. Maybe for an adult ticket. What if I could save you 150 bucks five days a week? I mean $750 a week, three grand a month I'm gonna put in your pocket. Cause you don't need to go to Disney now. Don't tell your kids I said that. You still gotta go. Take them and do your. You can get the fear and excitement. You're having it every day anyway. As a leader. What's going to happen? I don't know. How are the, how are people going to show up? I don't know. I'm a little scared, I'm a little excited. Here's the deal. You know, you're on the right path. Write this down. If fear and excitement are both present, if you have fear and no excitement, you've got a challenge if you have excitement and no fear, you're probably playing too small. Let that land for a moment. It's important to be a little bit concerned, a little bit afraid, and. And yet very excited. And that's where we. We have these, you know, this. This societal agreement and belief that. No, no, I'm not supposed to feel that or that's. That's. I'm. You know, I'm not. No, we want. You've got to have resistance to grow. When you go to the gym and you work out, you've got to have. You got to put the muscle under some strain. If your brain's going to grow, if your consciousness is going to elevate, you've got to have an ability to do so. And so I want you to think about that. So, number one takeaway today, fear and excitement, it's the same thing. It's just how you're thinking about it. Disney or disaster, you get to choose and you get to be involved in both. So number two, just be clear. I've kind of already talked about this, but we have them both all the time, and if we don't, we might want to check ourselves. And so if they both exist, then all we need to do is shift our perception. And so when I think about. It's the same thing. They're both the same thing, but I've got them both all the time. I'm a little scared, I'm a little excited. I'm a little scared. I'm a little excited. So that's cool. As a conscious human being, the key then becomes I get to choose if I've got them both all the time, and they're part of my makeup and they're part of my psyche, and they're part of what drives me as a business leader. It's part of why when I set a budget and a goal for the year, I'm a little scared we might not hit it. Anybody? Anybody with me? I'm a little scared. We kind of set a stretch out there. I'm not sure, but damn, I'm excited about it. I'm excited to go learn who I need to become in order to set that or hit that goal and accomplish that. It's exciting as hell, but it's terrifying sometimes. That's brilliant. That's what it's about. That's what gives us life. My God. That's why we became leaders, my friend. Don't bury that. Don't hide behind that. Don't wish it away. Don't wish it was something different. Lean into it. We've got them both all the time. So the third thing we want to do is shift it and turn the fear into the excitement. If they're both there and they're doing the same chemically in my body, my body doesn't care, by the way. Body doesn't care if it's fear or it's excitement because it's getting the same chemical release. The mind is where it trips out, right? And so how do I turn fear into excitement? Big part. Number like, think about this. My self talk. I set that big budget. Wow, that's a bit of a stretch. I'm a little bit worried about it. But what if. See, now we get into the what if questions. What if we don't hit it, Christy? Oh, my God. What if we don't hit it? And Christie's a genius, and she's brilliant at turning back to me and saying, but what if we do? What happens when we do? Because we're going to. What's that look like? Right? So when you kind of look and like, what's your self talk? Like, if you're in fear, your self talk is very negative. And there's all the studies, like 85% of our thoughts every day. First, they're unconscious, subconscious. Second, they're negative stories we tell ourselves, things we think about. It's probably not gonna. It's gonna keep me in fear if I shift that. Well, guess what? There's just as much opportunity for things to go right as there are to go wrong. And you think about, you know, so. So one is, it's the whole, like, you know, what if. What if this happens? Well, what if it goes the way that you want it to? The second thing I want you to do around this, Turning fear into excitement. Number one, check your self talk. Turn your self talk positive. Number two, just do it. Just get in the game. Take the action. Nike said it best. Just do it. One of the greatest slogans of all time. Just take the action necessary. That's the best way to deal with fear. And most of the growth that you do in your life is going to come from fear being involved. So just do it. Check your self talk. Just do it. Whatever that is that you need to do. And the third thing, get real data. Let's get some data about what this looks like. And this is around beliefs, too. So trust me, let's be clear. I'm not minimizing anybody's fear, anxiety things. They're terrified of any of this type of thing. But when you think about, you're afraid to fly. People that are afraid to fly. You've got to dive in and look at the statistics. There's so many more things that can kill you than getting in an airplane today. Is it possible that you'll die? Absolutely. Is it possible I'll die sitting here at this microphone in my studio recording for you? Absolutely. And we don't know what statistics are on which. But what I know is there's a really low chance that, that when I get on an airplane here in a few days that something's going to happen. It's possible, but I'm not willing to trade that possibility for the lack of living in fear in my life. Same thing with driving. Well, what happens? I might get in a crash. Driving is one of the safest actions that you can do in your life if you're aware, if you're paying attention. Sure. People get killed. Oh, Kenny, people get killed every. Yeah. And people get killed walking down the street every day, too. What are the things that are holding you back? Where are you leaning into fear? Where Maybe a little data would help you if, you know, if you need to justify in your own mind of what this is. Now, don't get me wrong. Data doesn't mean it's going to go away. That's where we go to the just do it component and get in the game. And so sometimes we have to have our limiting beliefs challenged. Like, well, I don't know if I can build that business that way. I know for me, gosh, in my old service business, I, we operated two years in a row at four trucks. I call it the four truck hump because a lot of companies get to four trucks and they get stuck there. For me, nobody was bigger than four trucks in my market. I went, well, my God, guess what? I had to get over that to go to 12 eventually. And in a town of 85,000 people, like, well, gosh, I guess maybe four isn't the edge of it. Maybe there's more data there. I'm terrified to add my fifth because nobody's ever done it. But I'm going to do it and I'm going to see what happened. Guess what? It's either going to work out or it's not. But I'm going to find out. And that's the key. It's taking that action. Turn your fear into excitement by taking action. Third thing. Or that was the third thing. How about the fourth thing? Address the root cause. So when I think about fear and excitement, sometimes we're not conditioned to allow excitement. Sometimes we're not conditioned that things can be exciting. We're supposed to be afraid. We're taught from parents, peers and previous beliefs, previous situations, previous experience. I'm supposed to live in fear. I'm supposed to be afraid. That's dangerous. You better watch out. You better not do that. Well, what does that look like? What's the root cause that's causing my fear? Back in 2007, I'll date myself a little bit in my career. The lovely Christy and I embarked on a six month motorhome trip. We set a goal that I was going to leave the business for six months, not walk through the door, the front door, and see if this business could operate without me being there physically. And this is long before zoom and long before, you know, text message communication at the highest level and all the different things. Like the world is far more connected 15 years later than it was in 07, 16 years later, I guess. And so we said, well, we're going to go do this thing. We were, you know, it only been together for a while now and we weren't even married yet. We wanted to. Some of you judging me right now. Guess what? You're judging me because you're judging yourself. Okay, we talked about that on the last episode. But we opt in our motorhome and we took off for six months. And to a point, I was so committed to this goal. My sister got married while we were gone and she hit me up and she said, hey, I want to get married while, you know, in July. And I said, well, we're not coming back until August. She's like, well, I want to get married in your backyard. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, I'm not going to miss your wedding, number one. Number two, I'm not going to have a wedding at my house without us there. So Christy and I flew back to Grand Junction from. I don't even remember where we were at the time on our motorhome trip, took a plane ride, got back, hosted my sister's wedding at our house. I never went to the office. Think about that challenge. We drove by, my company was off of 25 Road in Grand Jun. I drove down 25 Road. I didn't even look down the street to see if the building was still there in case it was gone. And nobody told me right. But that was, there was an underlying fear when people were like, you can't leave your business for six months. I said, you're, you might be right. I don't know. What you know is you've never done it before and therefore you're terrified to do it. I'm underlying root cause. I'm looking at I want to live more than I want to be in fear. If that business can't sustain six months without me walking through the door, then I don't have a business. And if I don't have a business and I don't have the life that I desire and I'm going to have to rebuild it the way that I want so it can support that. Did I learn things? Absolutely. Was it broken? Absolutely. Did I learn that like certain. Yeah, that's. But guess what? You don't learn certain things if you don't take certain action. So when there's fear, what's that root cause? What's down there below that? And then ultimately going back to that judgment. Are you fear? Are you in fear because you're worried about being judged so much of the root cause of the difference between excitement and fear? I'm excited to go here, but I'm worried. You go to a new level event, you join the blue collar success group, you come to an event. I'm a little afraid to be in the room, but I'm excited to be in the room. Get out of your way. I'm afraid to write the check, but I'm excited for the growth that I might get. Whatever that looks like, my friend, lean into it. Fear and excitement, they're the same thing. We have them both all the time. Four key components. One, same thing, just said it. Two, we have them all the time. Just said it. Three, turn that fear into excitement with the strategies I gave you here today. And four, address the root cause. Sometimes it's not what you even think it is. Fear and excitement and leadership, they're both there. Lean into them. Shift it around. How about you get more excited than you are fearful and you have a hell of a lot more fun living with more enjoyment, with more zest, with more bliss, with more peace. It's just more fun to live this way, my friend. Can I get a yes from you? Yes. Okay, I'll fill it in for you. Do me a favor. Kick this episode to somebody that could use a little bit of excitement more than fear. Thank you for being with me. Episode 150. We made it. Join me again next week. 151 until we talk. Make it a better than fantastic week, my friend. I'm grateful for you. Share this episode Talk to you soon.