How to Overcome Fear in Difficult Conversations with Tony Blauer

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at AI, we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

The first and most important negotiation is the one with yourself.

Hey everybody, before we get into this episode, I just want to give you a little disclaimer. This was a fascinating episode. Tony is an expert at managing fear and his advice is really practical. And even for me, who still studies this type of stuff, I learned so much from this episode. Now, Tony keeps it real and so there is some colorful language in this episode. But like I told him, I want him to flow, I want to get the information from him and I want him to be himself. And so the team is going to edit as much as we can. So if you're listening with children, it might not be the episode for you. And if you are new to the podcast, just know this is us experimenting with something new. This episode is longer and it is very raw, but still very practical because one of the biggest things that's going to hold you back in these difficult conversations is your ability or inability to manage fear. And so Tony is an expert in the field and he brings a really different lens because he's coming at it from self defense. And so the situations he's dealing with are very raw. Really just raw humanity here. And so this is a very, very clear trigger warning I am giving you as you listen to this episode because he has to talk about situations of viol or sexual assault or anything like that in your past. We will be talking about some of those topics in this episode. So I just want you all to have a very clear disclaimer before you go in. But I stand by the content in this episode. I learned a lot and I'M hoping that you all can use the content from this episode to overcome your fear so you can be more effective in whatever it is that you're trying to do day to day. But of course, staying on brand, especially as it results to your negotiations and difficult conversations. Let's jump into it. How did you get into like the, the self defense work at the beginning?

The, the kind of. The origin story is interesting. When I was 12 years old, I got jumped by two guys and they've got my hands behind my back and they went to do this bolo punch and everything went into slow motion. I was scared. And they were much older than me. Kind of one of these things where they just built a new high school. The year before I was graduating elementary school, I grew up in Canada and I'm leaving a pickup game of baseball behind the school. I'm all alone, kind of like 12 years old. And hey kid, I said, all these older kids, wow, like, they want to talk to me. I run over to them, little did I know. And hey, when are you coming to high school? And I was like, oh, next year. And they go, well, welcome to high school. And I'm like, thank you. And they grabbed me and spin me and then it's this bolo punch and I scream. I'm like, ah. Like anticipating this impact. I was a really good athlete as a kid. I wrestled track and field. I was, I've been skiing since I'm three years old. I was really good shape. So, you know, they got my arms behind my back. I'm trying to struggle to get back so my abs are as locked on as they can be. Like, you couldn't ask for more contraction. They hit me, I don't even feel it. But the anticipation of the impact makes me scream. And I, I screamed with like, I thought I was going to die because they were like, you know, they were like, let's say 15, 16, that's a big difference. And so I screamed this like, like blood curdling. I'm gonna die. And it hits me. I don't feel anything, but I felt when I screamed, the guy holding me, I felt his pressure change. Like, oh my God. We didn't want to hurt this kid. We just wanted to scare this kid. I felt a reaction to my scream and it was like this intuition. I immediately screamed again, faking it, just totally acting. I went and I started gagging like. And the kid dropped me and they both took off. And I'm on the ground, like on all fours, you know, going, watching them run away when they turn the corner, like, I stood up, fix my shirt, and I was like, what the hell just happened? Then I went home and I told my dad. He goes, I was the game. I go, dad, I just got beaten up by two guys and I had like no marks on me, my shirt's not even torn. And it's like kind of like, like the joke I make. I don't know if he said this, but it was like kind of this. Like, was it a pillow fight? Like, what do you mean? Like you got beat because there's no marks. And, you know, I told him I was so scared and this and that. And he says, well, you got to learn some self defense. And it was just on the threshold of the Bruce lee craze in 1973 when, when Bruce passed away. And there was one taekwondo school in our area about a mile from my house, went and watched the class and signed up. I was so fascinated with martial arts. Some backstory to that that probably makes this more relevance in terms of my journey, my passion, my calling is as a kid, I was fascinated with every single show on TV where somebody used some sort of self defense to right or wrong, to just, you know, so it could have been a western. It could have been, you know, and I, and I grew up in the, in the 60s when, you know, black and white was becoming color and, and, you know, it was the iPad of our generation, was your little TV downstairs. And I was there and I'd be watching the original Wild Wild west with Robert Conrad or Mannix and the streets of San Francisco. And there was always a bad guy and there's always a good guy. You know, the formula. And at some point, the good guy did some sort of, you know, lame karate chop or some sort of punch or. And of course, the original Batman and Robin and, And Green Hornet stuff on so very, you know, the choreography was horrible, but it was still to like a six, seven, eight year. I grew up in the 60s, I'm 62 now. The, like that fascinated me. So there was this immediate full circle of. I'm. I didn't know what they were doing was martial arts in the 60s. You just, you know, you just never talked about it. And. And then when the fight happened, I finally found the school. I went in there and I was like, oh my God, like, this will solve all my problems. Of course it didn't, but, but it, it was. I became a fanatic. I was, I was obsessed. And, And I felt like it was going to fix things. And then Serendipitously I guess it did. You know, here I am decades later and our company trains everyone all over the world, from tier one operators to the soccer mom to business executives. And it's not just true silver lining. And I think the part that may be most interesting to your demographic is in my pursuit and study and trying to truly understand how to manage violence. You realize at some point that you can't manage violence if you can't manage fear. And that led to a very, very different rabbit hole in understanding the difference between the biology and physiology of fear and the psychology of fear and that pursuit and understanding that it's the psychology of fear that we all need to wrestle with. The movie in our mind going in my ass kicked now or, or I'm not good enough for this job or I can't quit this job because I got a little security, but I'm miserable and I, or a negotiation where you're, you know, you, you thing, you know, the guy you're trying to pitch is standing up behind you talking to you and you're like, oh my God, he's got the high ground. And your head just starts going all, like all the little subtle behavioral tricks that, that master, master negotiators have figured out. And, but that was truly, truly the, the serendipity of it because here are years later and I'm wearing a shirt for those of you who are just listening on audio. It says no fear on it and it's spelled K N O W. And this idea that when we get to know fear, we can self actualize, we can lean into a problem differently. But if we unconsciously or consciously avoid fear, fear will always present itself when we're moving just outside our comfort zone. So, so it's, it's a, it's a fantastic reframe, but there's no. I say this and hopefully everyone gets the joke. I'm not trying to be pedantic about it and make people feel obsequious. And I use two words. I, I use two words that most people have no idea. Like, like, what the hell did he just say? Let me get a thesaurus out. A lot of. And I say that, that jokingly because a lot of the people who teach about performance and psychology, you feel small and uneducated around them. It's, it's very academic as opposed to practical. Can, can I listen to this guy or do this program and, and make a different choice like 90 minutes later because of something that I heard? And, and that's my goal. The, the, my goal when I You know, as a lifelong martial artist, I realized most of the stuff that we practice and teach in martial arts is impractical for sudden violence. That it needed to be super, super simple and it needed to resonate with the, with the behavioral, psychological distraction of oh my God, I'm gonna get my ass kicked. Oh my God, I'm about to get r Ped. Oh my God, I'm. I'm getting. This is a home invasion. Like when you go to. If you've ever done martial arts and you're in the dojo or the mat room, there's, there's ceremony and there's procedure and there's, there's nothing. You're not stress inoculating anything for sudden violence. All of this is intertwined and hopefully that makes sense. That was a 37 hour answer to you. How did you get started?

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more. And we will be right back after this. Man, I love this. That couldn't have been any better. This is great. I mean, that serves right there as our introduction. And you're so right, because my first book was called Finding Confidence in Conflict. It's all about helping people overcome those internal barriers to difficult conversations. Because I say it doesn't make sense to give recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen. You can Google negotiation all day. That doesn't mean that you have the, like the emotional fortitude to overcome those internal demons to actually perform under, under duress. So that's what the whole first book was about. And, and it's critical because people really struggle with this. You talk about how we struggle with it in the physical world and you've seen it working with business professionals about how we struggle with it in the business world and in our personal life. Right. So let's go deeper, let's talk, let's talk more about it. If somebody's listening to this.

Yeah, you just Said something there that, that, that made me think of kind of a metaphor and rant that I do when I'm working with professional athletes and even a metaphor that I'll use for moms, dads, entrepreneurs, business owners, team leaders. You'll see like, like professional athletes from a golfer to a boxer perform miserably on one day. And they're in their, in their interview after, they're like, hey man, it wasn't my night, it wasn't my day. I don't know how I missed that. Well, you and I know how they missed that. Their self talk changed their potential for flow state. Like that connection between. I'm just doing this because this is right, right now. And there's a flow state when you're in a speech, there's a flow state. Like 5 minute answer was a flow state. Like I was reliving and connecting and goosebumps and it was, you know, so how do we do that in a meeting? How do we do that? You know, when we're on a date? How do do that when we're negotiating a deal? Because that flow state is a, according to psychologists, it's like the, it's. We're optimized when that's happening. But it's also, I believe this, it's contagious in the rapport, confidence stage. Like if I talk to you, if I got on this call and you. And yeah, we're talking to fear management expert Tony Blauer. And Tony, you know, tell us what's going on. You look like you're in a hotel room and I'm going, hi guys, excuse me. So excited to talk to you about fear. And the number one fear is public speaking in the world, you know, and you're going, what, what is wrong with this guy? Oh my God. Like have you ever watched a friend go to compete or get up on stage or play either in a band and you're more nervous than they are. You're like, you're sitting in the audience. You're going, oh come on man. Well, right. Could you imagine if while you're like you're, let's say you're watching your kid about to sing in the school play, or a buddy is about to do a guitar solo in a band and. Or a friend is competing or your kid is competing. And I've had all of that, my son playing basketball, my daughter up on, on this or whatever. And I'm like sitting there, I got butterflies in my stomach. I'm like, I'm doing this. Could you imagine if Somebody when you had the butterflies in your stomach, if they came up to you and they said, kwame, Tony, right now, sing this tune. Do this combination. Do like. You'd be like, what? Huh? Because you're not ready. There are lots of people who, you know in where I'm going, in this kind of like circular metaphor is you said a couple minutes ago, we've got the physical and then there's this emotional, psychological, mental component. There are lots of people who get world class at the physical dynamics, but when they get outside their comfort zone because they're, they're what's happening. And I love the acronym, I'm sure you use it or seen it. The acronym for fear, false expectations appearing real. So it's been around forever. I've got a little kind of paraphrase on it where I explain to people, this is when you're visualizing a future event that's debilitating you in the present, which means it's messing up who you are in this meeting. It's messing up who you are on this date. It's messing up who you are. As you stepping through the, the ropes in the ring and you're thinking, I'm going to get my ass kicked in about three minutes. Can I last three minutes here? You know, if I lose this deal here, I mean, that's it. When you're focusing on the future, you can't hit flow state in the present.

You're right. It makes a lot of sense because it is, in fact true, as you know. Right. And so the key is figuring out how to overcome that fear. If we are in a situation, we're trying to perform at a high level. Let's just think about any kind of distraction. Let's just keep it super simple. If there's somebody doing jumping jacks in the side of the room and playing a tuba, that's going to be distracting. It's going to lower your ability to perform whatever it is that you're doing. Most likely, if you're trying to speak, you're trying to do, to negotiate, initiate, have a difficult conversation, that distraction is going to take you off of the path. Same thing. The fear operates as a distraction. It is taking us out of our flow state. And when you're in a flow state, you have to be in the moment. When we're thinking about the, the flow state, like the psychology of the flow state. The. We have the author of the book called flow, Incredible book. But you're, you're in the moment. And it's almost like you said with the example with you when you were a child, things seem to almost be happening in slow motion. I know when I'm doing my trainings, when I'm keynotes, I tell people, it feels as though when they say, all right. And coming to the stage, Kwame Christian. I feel like I stay seated and my body goes up and I'm watching myself perform with everybody else. And so we have to get to that point where we're comfortable enough to just flow and operate. But a big challenge is going to be that fear. So how do we take these initial steps to overcoming that fear?

What's interesting is back to, you know, the origins of self defense, where I realized. So my incubator period was the 80s where I did, like, crazy. I was doing fight club type things before Fight Club was a movie. We do scenarios we'd put on. I grew up in Canada. We'd have, like, hockey helmets on, gauntlets on, you know, martial art, chess guards, baseball, shin guards, and we'd beat the crap out of each other. We'd film it with vhs, like, just trying to understand things that were outside of just sparring. And what I noticed about five years into this, I did this for about 13 years straight. I noticed that once a month we do this open seminar. People come in, sign a waiver release, and it'll be like a street fighter, a boxer. Some of my students, people from the outside who got this reputation. You'd see some people coming in and we all size each other up, right? We judge books by covers, right? We look and we go, this guy's big. Oh, he's got cauliflower ears. Is that from rugby or is he a grappler? Holy. Like, you're having this conversation with yourself and this is part of it, right? And I'd see some people who I had went, that guy is going to do really well. Or I'd see, like, a female come in and, like, she's nervous and she's like, got tears in her eyes and. And she. I want to do this, this. This course. And, you know, as a victim of sexual assault. And I think this is going to be cathartic for me. And. Okay. And. And I'm going, oh, man. Like, should we let her do this? She looks scared. Sh. And she's like, like fighting, like, with this ferocity. And this other guy, the big guy who was a, you know, came in and went, yeah, I'm a doorman at this club and I've been In, you know, 100 fights is like tapping out, running, because we, we didn't do sparring. We did these crazy like realistic scenarios. Three guys approach you in an alley and you know, you'd have to do the dialogue. We always wanted to be moral, ethical. Legal is a really different way to approach self defense. And your question was, you know, how do we manage our fear in real time, in steps. What I realized, and this is why this, this background is important because I didn't, I didn't like go to school and get the same degree and then come up with a new acronym to create a company. Like, like, like this is, this is truly organic and I want your, your audience to appreciate you laughing and get, because there's, there's like, there's so many influencers and experts and people and it's just like, it's just a new acronym, it's a new filter. And you know the joke, there's like a thousand people online that say, hey, send me five grand and I'll teach you how to run a business. And they're like 11 years old and you're like going, you haven't even, like, you don't even have a business. Your business is taking money from other people. That's your business. And there's some really, really good people and I've got a bunch of business mentors out there, but they've grown businesses, they've lost businesses, they've rebuilt. When I talk about self defense, and this is the connection to the fear management piece because I want everyone listening and if I just reach one person, it's the insights and what I'm about to share in terms of the steps of learning how to manage fear were derived from studying violence, which inarguably might be the worst day of your life, right? You could have bad financial news on one day, but you've got maybe a month, three months, a year, two years to figure that out, to get out of the tailspin, right? Sudden violence you can only tie into dial 911. And in that split second of making decisions there, and this is What I discovered in 1985ish, the people who manage their fear managed to fight. I'll say that again because it's a very specific sentence with a very specific cadence. The people manage their fear, manage to fight. And so go back to these two extreme scenarios. This 5 foot 420 pound sexual assault victim who's sitting there with tears in her eyes reliving what happened in the past is this ferocious animal instinct, primally driven. In the scenario, like doing like not doing technical martial arts, just fighting for life in this scenario and discovering an inner strength and power because she used her fear as fuel. The other guy, and we'll come back to that pin. The fear is fuel. The other guy who I went, this guy's gonna kick. That guy's who ends up getting hit and turns and covers and then pushes away the danger and falls down and taps out through the scenario. His fear he allowed to consume him. Customato was Mike Tyson's original boxing coach. As this wonderful metaphor about fire. He says fire. And I'm paraphrasing it. You know, what he wrote was more elegant than this, but he says fire can warm your home and cook your food, or if it's not controlled, it can burn your house to the ground. Right? And it can burn you, it can harm you. And the metaphor here is fire is fear. And so that's why I say fear is fuel. If we get a fear spike, if we get that adrenaline dump and the cortisol spike and the, the racing thoughts and we don't have the self awareness to realize that's our nervous system shifting from parasympathetic to sympathetic. And there's going to be a whole bunch of physiological changes that are in many cases designed by our survival system to protect us. If we don't know how to harness that or control it, we start giving into the movie in our mind. So something happens when we break down in our system. When we break down fear, we break it down at two levels. One, there's like the hardwired fear of, let's say your son's seeing a spider and he immediately is scared of it. They're creepy looking, I'm not a fan either. And immediately you get a, an adrenaline dump because it scares you. That's at an instinctive level, hits your physiological system and you know, neurochemicals start firing and you're in a fear state. Well, what your psychological system does at that point is it takes that input and turns that into a movie in your mind. This spider is going to crawl inside my mouth and get inside me. This spider is going to crawl inside my ear. And then, you know, you remember all those, you know, growing up like the person who got bit by the spider and then they gave birth to spiders and like all the, all the crazy things that kids believe. And that's the movie in your mind. And that moving your mind, if you let that movie grow, what happens is, and this is all part of our no fear program is I explain, you're the, in the movie, your mind, you are the screenwriter you're the director, you're the producer, you're the casting director. And you've cast yourself as victim number one in a horror movie where you kill yourself off, right? And instead of casting yourself as the superhero, right, like, you know, I'm the hero in my story. That whole thing that Joe Rogan made famous, right? But we do that all the time, man. You've done it. I've done it. Like you do something to your back and you go, oh my God, my back's out of me. Won't be able to do this, won't be do that. You know, you hit some traffic on your way to a gig and immediately you're going, I'm going to miss this flight if I miss this flight. You can do that. And you've created this, this stressful nightmare where now your immediate self awareness and situational awareness is compromised. And now maybe you get into a car accident, you start speeding. You're not, you're not, you know, using your turn suit because you're, you're now two days away from event, worrying about like compromising relationship with a client because. And then you. And then you realize, oh, the traffic was like, it was five minutes, there was a cop giving someone a ticket. But you're freaking yourself out. That's a lame example because we do that with our health. We do that with relationships. We misread something that a loved one does and then like a week later, you know, a week's gone by and we get into this huge fight only to find out we misread something. There's a huge connection between our self awareness and critical thinking. And then our self awareness, critical thinking and situational awareness. And that is so intertwined and misunderstood by people. And you know, for us, for us to do better as good humans, we need to improve our critical thinking. The only way you improve critical thinking is if you improve your self awareness. Where you look at something and I go, hey, check this out, man. And you look at it and immediately go, man, I don't like that at all. I disagree with Tony. Therefore I don't like Tony. Therefore I don't want this relationship. Like. And we have all these like, dominoes that hit because we had a judgment. F. Scott Fitzgerald said many, many years ago, a true sign of intelligence is your ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your mind without judgment and analyze that unconscious bias I love to joke about. I'll be talking to somebody, I'll go, well, you know, we can't have a conversation because you've got this unconscious Bias? How could you say that? Well, we can't talk about it because it's unconscious. So you don't know, right? And they're like, you're messing with me because it's unconscious. I'm making a joke here because the self awareness piece is critical in all this. Because if you can sit back, you know, last night I was having a meeting and someone said to me, we were talking about our kids and he said, you know, my son wants to do this. I said, I just had a talk with my, my son and he wants to do something in. He wants to start like a T shirt company and he's got these ideas for T shirts. I didn't even know that he could draw. He's 31 years old. Like, like he's drawing these sketches. And I'm like, hey, who drew these? And he's like, oh, I did. I'm like, holy. And he wants to start this, this brand. And I catch myself going, hey, you're like a world class fitness trainer. He's a, he's an amazing coach. He, you know, and that's such an important thing in this day. Like, you know what, obesity and people don't understand diets and training and it's an epidemic all over the world, but especially in the US and he's more important than a doctor in many, in many ways, right? Because if you understand nutrition and fitness, you can change a lot of the, a lot of the that's going on with change if people just took better care of themselves. So his role as a fitness consultant is huge. And then he goes, and it wasn't a pivot, it wasn't like, I'm giving this up. But he started talking about, But I caught myself, caught myself, man, wanting to say, as his dad, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And if you are going to do that, do it this way. And you know, you should be. Watch out for this. And I just zipped my mouth because had I said any of that while he was so excited about this, I might have killed his passion. But it was only my self awareness that changed my critical thinking. And the connection to situational awareness was my son was sharing something important to me. And I was about to, you know, like, be that parent who goes, well, you didn't go to school for this and you really want to do that. You should go get a new job. She got a real job and do all of that. And here's the, here's the neat thing, man, is why would I as a parent or why Would you, you go to your boss and you go, hey man, I got this idea for this change in our marketing or branding this or opening this or whatever. And the guy goes, yeah, interesting stuff. But we don't have the budget for that. And that's not going to make sense. Why do people shut anything down or redirect anything when you peel the onion? Oh, we don't have this, we don't have that when you peel. Let's use me and my son as an example. Your dad. So this, this will be more powerful to you. You and my. I got three kids, my son's turning 32. I got a 25 year old and a 20. What's the one reason that I would say, hey, if you're going to do this, you know, I wouldn't do that. Invest over here, speak to these people. Did you go to school for this? Did you like all that that we throw on people? Am I wrong? Who knows? Am I right? Who knows? But why am I doing it? Because I don't want him to fail. Peel the onion. What do you mean you don't want to? Because he's going to borrow money from me if he fails. Whatever the whole. It's fear it comes down to. And that's the self awareness piece. I was afraid for him. I want him to be happy, but I was afraid. And then I would manipulate because of life, if I had lack of self awareness, I would rationalize, you know, the play on word. Rationalize a rational lie. I would tell myself a rational lie where I would say to hey, Nicky, I know you want to do this man, but you, you need some money in the bank and you got to build this up here and you got to. I would have projected on him my fears in an eloquent way and he probably would have done it anyways, but he would have hated me for it and it would have changed our relationship. It was only the self awareness that, that kept me from opening my big mouth. This is, but this is how powerful that was. What I mean by, by the no fear. So learning to manage fear is like getting in shape. You know, if I told you, hey man, you need to be able to bang at a hundred push ups in a row. I want your son to see you bang. You might go, oh geez, like I'm not really good at push ups. We'll do a hundred now in front of him. He's going to watch that and go, I'm never doing that. My dad was crying, he was struggling, he was going, I can't do it. But how do you. How do you run a marathon? You start off, you, you start off walking, right? You, you, you. You build up to a mile, then you try and do two miles. Then you do four miles. You want to do a hundred pushup. You do one pushup, you go, that wasn't so bad. You do 10. At 10, you're like, your form is breaking. So now it's not good for your back, your neck. So you go, I can bang out 8. And then when my body adapts and my mind Adapts, I'll do 10. And then one day I'll do a hundred. Might take me six months. I do this fun talk on the difference between capacity and potential. Most of the world lives in the future fixated on potential. And so I try something, I crash and burn. And someone goes, you can do better. I know I can do better. And you need to be a unicorn, a special human to deal with that type of failure on a regular basis. And this isn't the Thomas Edison said, you know, I didn't, you know, fail a thousand times. I discovered a thousand ways to. Not yet. I don't think he said that. That should be fact checked. But anyways, you know what I mean? It's like, it's like, it's great. And maybe he did say that and he's a unicorn, but I guarantee at the 50th time, he was like, here comes a beat for you guys, where he goes, then he goes into the house and, you know, has dinner and goes to sleep. And. But his resiliency, his determination, he. He starts again the next day. We need to bring motivation, inspiration and fear management, like, down into a gutter fight where it's just plain language. You got a comfort zone. You're wondering about something else, that's your discomfort zone. Someone says, what about that? And I call it the holy zone, right? Because that's fun. People laugh when I teach that. You know, keynote comes up and I go, let's talk about the whole zone. People are laughing because that's not pedantic, that's not academic sounding. I go, listen. Things you're comfortable with. That's the comfort zone. That's where your life stagnates, right? The discomfort zone. Are things you think you can do, but you're being careful because you're just outside your discomfort zone. And then there's the holy zone. And that's where growth happens. And the more you work in your holy zone. And this isn't cavalier, like, I don't like those memes do one thing that scares you every day, right? Like, there's a lot of.

Of.

I don't mean to insult anybody or offend anybody, because some of you might have that tattooed on you, or you had a big sign of your desk, and you're like, I got to turn this off now because I'm gonna have to get rid of that poster. You don't need to do one thing that scares you every day. But here's the difference, and this is so cool. Every day, there may be something that scares you, and you need to contemplate facing that. That's leaning into fear and turning. Fear of fuel. In other words, I'm not seeking adrenaline. I'm going through life. And then, you know, I go to this nice restaurant and I order my steak medium rare. Or for people who don't like meat eaters, your fish, your salmon, medium rare. You see how polite I was and how inclusive I was there, and it comes back, well done. Salmon well done is like. Tastes like rubber and smells. Steak well done. All the nutrients are. I asked this question at every one of my seminars. How many of you, without fail, will return food that's not cooked to your liking? And in a group of 50, there's only ever two or three or four that put their hand up. Everyone else sits back and smiles and giggles. And I go, what are you giggling at? They go, nothing. I go, no, come on, tell the group. And they go, yeah, I don't want my meal to come back with some special sauce. And, you know, like, I'm not returning it to the kitchen. That's false expectations appearing real. I'm visualizing something happening in the kitchen that hasn't happened yet. That's changing what I'm about to eat and put in my body and pay for with my hard earned money. And I'm doing that because I'm afraid of a confrontation with a waiter who really is trying to be nice to me so he gets a better tip. It's so up, right? If I say to the waiter, let's say you were my waiter, and I go, excuse me, call me, right? Yeah. The kind of restaurant is this. You tell the cook that I think he's rushing, and he's going to get a bad Yelp review from me. Now return this steak peasant and bring me a cook to it. If I do that, guaranteed, you're getting special sauce because you're berating and belittling and you're. You're. But if I say to the guy, hey, man, I know you guys are busy and everything. And maybe the cook mix my steak up or whatever. I'm not saying to kiss somebody's ass, but if you're just nice and go, hey, this, this is too well done for, for me. Could I get this? Just be nice. That's a simple example. It's not a violent encounter, right? It's not, you know, me pitching a deal to, you know, a company. I'm not negotiating the sale of my. It's not a big deal. And this is what I mean by you can practice managing your fear. I use another term. You practice courage. That's how you manage fear. Hey, return that. Like you asked, you asked your son earlier. I don't know if you'll keep that in the show. Hopefully you will. But you, you asked your son earlier, hey, what are some of the things you do? And he hesitated because what he experienced there was fear of public speaking. And as he knew what the answer was, when you reminded him right away he went, oh, yeah. But he was like, you really. You're making me dad. You're making me talk on your show to a stranger. And like that's, that's a bonding moment for you guys after. Hey, did you notice you hesitated there? You don't need to hesitate. You don't need, you don't need to, you know, you just need to be polite, be yourself. That's how people get to know you and like you and trust you. Of course, trust your intuition. You don't have to talk to everybody and want them like, like being friendly, whatever. But it's like, it's a conversation about, like, I guarantee that if, if I bumped into you at a, at a bar one night and I was with a couple of people and I went, aquamans, my friend Bill and Sean, that you wouldn't go. You'd smile and stick your hand out because you're a good public speaker and you interview people. So you've created that you've learned to manage the fear of that type of interpersonal communication. So it's a fascinating thing, but it's all. So I've been teaching managing violence for decades. And I work with, like I mentioned earlier, SWAT teams, military, law enforcement, ems, mental health professionals. Like, that's my main business, the no fear vertical in my company, which, which I've been teaching fear management since the mid-80s when I realized that the people who manage their fear manage to fight doesn't guarantee victory, but it guarantees that you're in the fight, which means if you lose the fight, you still have your dignity and self respect. When I was in the fight. Right, as opposed to. I'm sure you've, you've met tons of people you know through your writings and, and meetings because of the books and the purpose of this podcast. You meet people who pull you aside and they go. And they don't say it like this. I'll just be dramatic for the show. I'm miserable where I am and I don't know how to get out of this rut. And what to talk about is like negotiating is the first and most important negotiation is the one with yourself. Do you know how to negotiate with, with your. Because your, your fear based self is saying, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And then your heart or your gut or your intellect is going, but I want, but I really want to do this. And then your fear says no, it's a bad idea. And it's almost like that story of which wolf do you feed? Right. You know that the metaphor of, of. But it's the. I was hoping you knew it. You just went, yeah, we'd blow by it. But, but it's this idea of, of like, like anger, anger or, or acceptance. And you've got. I can feed. And I go, don't let them do this to you, man. And like, and you're like, yeah right, let's. And I'm feeding the wolf of anger or I'm feeding the wolf of compassion or acceptance or. And you got to find the balance. There's, there's, there's like anyone who's happy all the time and smiles too much, I think has something wrong with them. Right? Like, I don't like him. He's always in a good mood. What's going on? This is the self awareness and the false expectations appearing real part. If I can't connect my self awareness to the future visualization of my failure, my pain, I can't course correct in the present.

Yes. But go deeper.

When I'm working with, let's say an entrepreneur who's dealing with, let's say fear of making decisions. And everyone has that right. Like we procrastinate, we oscillate and vacillate. You know, ruminate.

Right.

All those big fancy words. But what we're doing is the, this carousel of not making a decision is all rooted in fear. I don't want to make, I don't want to make the wrong decision. I don't want you to. To. I don't want to ruin my future. I don't want to ruin your confidence in me. It's it's whatever it is. And you see that in managing violence. Should I. Should I run now? Should I strike now? Should I try to diffuse and de escalate, or should I, you know, should I just blend into the shadows here and move away from this? Right. The deeper element on this. And I don't know which direction deep you want to go. Because self actualization, us becoming the best version of ourselves, requires that. If you're thinking of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs metaphor, you know, if our survival isn't being taken care of, we're never getting to the tip of this metaphoric pyramid of self actualizing. But I believe that we don't understand how the psychology of fear, of worrying about this movie in our mind, which is this anxiety is always about something in the future. What if this happens? What if this happens? What if this happens? And so when we get a fear spike for anything, the fear spike always produces doubt. And we can't change that. Doubt always creates hesitation. Those first two stages of creating the movie in your mind, no one can control that. So if I said to you go, that's bullshit, Tony. And I go, okay, let me give you a non violent, no risk example. Have you ever left a hotel room and that as the door closes, you go, oh, I think I left my wallet and my, my key in the, in the hotel room. And what do you do as soon as that happens? You stop. And then in slow motion, you're like, you hit your hands or you're, oh, my key's in the room. And then while the door is closing, you do this acrobatic leap door, right? And you miss it. Have you ever done that?

I do that every week, Tony.

Okay, so. So everyone listening to this has that experience. It could be locking your keys in the car. It could be. It could be you forget your phone somewhere, you leave a restaurant and you're like, my phone? And then you start doing this and you're like, where was it? Bathroom. But in the moment when you thought you were locked out, you left your phone somewhere, you left your keys somewhere. What did you do? There's a moment of doubt. What's missing? Something's wrong. Your intuition's saying something's wrong. What did you do there? You didn't keep walking. The moment you have doubt, you stop. And now, because you're walking, you're hesitating. And in that moment, you're in your head, but your situation awareness is compromised. And I make this joke and I've had people like literally rolling on the Floor with this. Where. Because. Because when I like I'm doing the seminar, I do the. The acrobatic dive to. To the. The door, right. I walk, I take two tests. My key now. And I'm like jumping towards the door. And people laugh because they've done that sort of thing. And I go, consider how stupid that is. You're in a hotel. You're in. You're in a hotel and you left your key in the room. What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? Call me. What's gonna happen?

You're going to go downstairs and get another.

Get a front desk. You. But so what you could literally do do is you could literally. As you're walking. Yeah, I left my key in the room. Not stop walking. Check your pockets while you're walking to the elevator. Now you're being efficient, right? You're not hesitating. There's no doubt. There's no fear spike. There's no adrenaline. There's no. Yeah. How'd you pull your back at the meeting? Oh, yeah, I twisted to go try and stop my door from closing. The efficient thing to do, the situationally aware thing to do would be to go, go. Yeah, I think I forgot my key. I'm still walking. Yep. My pockets are empty. Forgot my key. I'm going downstairs anyhow because I got to grab an Uber to the. To the event. I go downstairs, I go to the front desk. I go, hey, I'm late. I'll get my key later. Like, nothing would change. But nobody does that. So a fear spike creates doubt. Doubt creates hesitation. Hesitation creates procrastination unchecked. And I'm using the. The funniest example just so people can relate to the simplicity. I want to. I want people to leave this talk. And if they never book me for a talk or get our no fear program or do anything, I want them to leave here going. It's this simple. It's a script map. It happens like this. I get a fear spike. I will have doubt. Doubt will create hesitation. Hesitation will create procrastination. At that moment, it's between doubt. Sorry, between hesitation and procrastination. That somebody who truly understands the system and the. The intersection of self awareness remedies extracts themselves from the problem. You tracking that? So at that moment I go, I go, I left my key in the room. I'm doing really dramatic on this. And at that moment, my self awareness goes, dude, there's like a thousand of these keys downstairs at the front desk. Yeah, but my wallet's in the Room, dude. Security will come up and open the room for you. You'll show them your. There's a solution for this. Get resourceful. No, but my key. Now I'm going to be late. Well, you're going to be really late for the talk. And angry and upset because you're standing in the hallway going, I can't get in my room because I'm an idiot. Right? So. But here's the big thing in bigger things in life. Like, this is a goofy thing because you might be there going, I can't get in my room. And there's. You see housekeeping. And you go, hey, can you open my door? I left my key. Oh, sorry. For security reasons, sir, could you please go downstairs? Oh, that's right. And you go down. But what you did is this. You wasted 37 seconds of your life that you could never get back. What is the only resource we can't regenerate?

It's time.

Time. When you understand fear management, you suddenly have a superpower to manage time. Fear management equals time management in the most important way. And that is why I am so passionate. Not passionate. Obsessed with getting this no fear program into parents, hands into educators, hands into leaders. Because every time we are in the fear loop, we are consuming time. It could be writing an article. It could be a presentation. It could be, you know, your tooth hurts. You do. You call the dentist right away and go, hey, missed you. My tooth hurts. Gonna come in immediately. Or do you wait and see if it gets better on its own? Like, unless most people will wait and then the doctor goes, why didn't you come call me last week? Now you need antibiotics. Another week, we would have to pull this dude next, right? We wait. The. The. The. Something happens with our car. We wait something. We got a pain in our side. We wait. Fear makes us procrastinate. Unless you change your relationship with fear. And you go, this is scary. But come full circle. What if I used fear as fuel? What if fear became the fuel? The ignition? The. The. The. The. The signal. The spiritual guide to move and lean into what I've got to do next. You know, I can get nerdy deep, but I want this to be functional and effective. When you turn fear into fuel, you. You. You commit to practicing courage. You do little baby things like, I'm. I don't want to take the stairs in this building. I like the elevator because I'm afraid to get tired. Right, well, take the stairs. Go slow. Right? I don't want to return food because I don't want a Special sauce. Well, practice communicating more effectively. You know, you're in, in the spirit of this show, you're negotiating a new stake. Practice, make that deal happen, and do it in a way that you don't get special sauce, but you're practicing courage. Here's probably my, my most favorite line in our program. And as I do these things, I go, dude, nobody's going to call you up after because you're just telling them all the secret stuff on the, on the talk. But I, I'm obsessed with helping people. You can't be brave if you're not afraid. And everyone wants to be brave. If you're a good person, you want to be brave. Have you ever seen something on the news where there's like a courageous bystander does something, fire, car accident, stops a thief, whatever. And you watch it and in the back of your mind you go, I wonder what I'd have done. I wonder if I'd have done that. If you're wondering that it's because you're afraid and you don't know if you're afraid and you don't know you will have a fear spike if you were ever faced with the same stimulus. And the only way that you could do what you need to do is to be brave. It's not about the action. Yeah, I ran and tackled that guy who, who punched that woman and grabbed her purse. And I've had enough. I'm not suggesting people do that. You could you do that from your heart, right? Courageous bystander. There's usually one in the crowd and, and, but courage is contagious. And as a parent, as a team leader, as a business leader, courage is contagious. Especially with all the, that's been going on the last few years in the world, we need business owners and parents who are courageous. And you can't be courageous without fear. If I looked, if this was a bottle of courage and I looked on the side, there'd be one ingredient in here, and it'd be fear. And that's such a potent visual, man. Why? Because if you do something that required no courage, then there was no fear. And so if I look at somebody and I go, hey, we need to be brave right now. This is the, this is probably the biggest thing about, about managing fear and, and understanding fear. And it's missed in, in all of the other systems and programs. And I, and I say that politely and with reverence. It's this idea that people go into to some sort of coaching thinking that when they graduate, they will be beyond fear. You're never beyond fear. Fear, it's. Fear is the yin and the yang of. Of competence and confidence. And then fear. When I work with people who are. Who need to lead other people and they need to get good at public speaking. Number one fear in the world, public speaking. Not getting dragged to a secondary crime scene, tortured and murdered. That's not on the list, right? I remember once at a. I was doing this big talk at a university. I had 400 students in the amphitheater. And I said, what's the number one fear in the world? They all yelled out public speaking. I go, then what is it? You know, death of a loved one, security sharks. And I go, and I was brought in for. By the sexual assault committee to talk about situational awareness and fear management. De escalation, self defense. And I said, does anyone here have a fear of getting. The room got quiet. What about getting dragged to a secondary crime scene and then murdered? Is like that not on the list? Sharks? Is there a land shark in here? Like, everyone laughed, right? And it's weird. And I said to the group, and you'll dig this. I said, who here would like to come up on stage with me and make a speech or get dragged into an alley, and which one would you rather do? And they were looking at me confused. I said, if you come up on stage and you're scared, we'll hear it in your voice, we'll see it in your body language. But if you tell us you're afraid, but you still want to share something, we'll be okay with that. We are afraid to tell people we are afraid. And when a lot of people manipulate vulnerability, but, you know, this vulnerability is a superpower. As long as you're not manipulating, as long as you're not using it to manipulate people or yourself. The rational lie. I've done talks where this is the example. You said, if we go back and how long ago when you said, okay, we've got physical skills. What about these psychological skills, mental skills? You know, we've got physical fitness. What do we need to do for mental fitness? So I've had people say to me, hey, can you coach me on some public speaking? And I go, what do you need to. What do you need to know? They go, I have trouble, you know, talking, you know, in front of. In front of people go, well, you're doing a pretty good job right here talking to me. What's the problem? Because you're very lucid. They go up, not one on one. I go, okay, so what you're saying is you have to text your wife and your kids at the dinner table. Please pass the salt. Could somebody cut my steak for me? Because when you're in front of a group of people, you have trouble. Seriously, Blauer. Okay, yeah, I know you're joking around here, but you know, one on one, I'm okay with my family and what I'm, what I'm doing here for everybody. Unpacking this, reverse engineering this. When you say I'm afraid of public speaking, that's incorrect. What you need to say is, I'm afraid that when I do this talk, there will be one person in the audience that's going to judge me and that judgment is going to affect my career path or my self worth or my self esteem. I'm going to get fired. And that's simply untrue. Probably in 99%. But when you realize that, you realize, oh my God, I know how to speak, I know what I'm thinking, I know what I want to say. And it's just that one person over there that you know, this is CEO, he's coming today. And I know that I'm up for promotion and if I bomb this, but that's the false expectations appearing real now that we've identified, we peeled the onion to go, I am afraid of this because of that. Then you don't say I'm afraid of public speaking anymore. Now the challenge is more manageable. And that's where the, the interactive coaching and strategizing comes in. Like I've had situations where I go, oh my God. So and so's in the audience. Oh my God, that guy's like, like such a good speaker and has two books out. Oh my God. Oh, I didn't know he was going to be here. Like and I'm doing him screw. And then I go, self awareness, fear, spike, doubt, hesitation, procrastination, unchecked. If I don't control it, it can be non clinical anxiety. And then I get up there and I bomb or I figure out what I need to think or what I need to do and then I fix it. And that's really the science and psychology behind this is not to eradicate fear because that's impossible. It's again going back to when I said, you know those memes do something that scares you every day. If you're seeking stuff, oh, I'm afraid of snakes, I'll go there. Oh, I'm afraid of skydiving, I'm gonna go there. I'm afraid of walking on fire. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go do this firewalk. But your self awareness hasn't told you that you're afraid of interpersonal conflict. And so you can't say you're sorry to your wife first or talk to your kids about certain things or. Right. You know what I'm saying? It's like the stuff that, the stuff that is recurring every day you avoid because you don't have the self awareness and you're just developing this adrenaline junky relationship with external things that, that really don't change who you are as a human.

Tony, there is so much, so much good stuff in here. I appreciate this. This is really good. And I think the listeners, there's a lot out there that the listeners can take from this because at the end of the day, we can listen to the podcast, we can read the books and you can learn about negotiation, but if you cannot manage your fear, then you are going to struggle to perform, if you even manage to show up to perform in these difficult conversations. So I appreciate you, Tony. This was really great. And before you go, can you let listeners know of how they can get in touch with you, work with you and about your programs?

Yeah, sure. So my main website is blower trainingsystems.com my last name b l a u e r trainingsystems.com and there's the four verticals for our company. If you're in here and you went, I'm going to learn how to defend myself. There's info there. And if you want coaching or more on the no Fear program, that's there as well. And I'm on, you know, LinkedIn and you know, Twitter and Instagram and so on and so forth. So I'm all over, just punch my name in. And there is a. I don't know if you'll be sharing the links. My team should have sent you the links. We've got an ebook, which of course is a funnel, full transparency, to try and get you to invest in the no Fear program. We've got a digital program or you can take it to the next level and bring me or my team in or work via Zoom and stuff. It's amazing how fast some of this stuff can happen because a lot of people don't realize when they're trying to change their relationship with fear and they continue to experience fear, they think there's something wrong with them or something wrong with the program. And the reality is if you're moving outside your comfort zone, you're going to always have that little adrenaline and you just need to go oh, okay. That's what that is. So that's what I mean by leaning into fear and making it your friend. Your body is share one last visual metaphor. Your body and your physical fitness. And everyone should be doing their best to stay in good shape. Your body is the car in a metaphor. And where you're going, your goals, is your nav system, your brain. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to get here in life, the gas that drives the car and the brain is fear. Because if you have an audacious goal, if you've got. If you want something better, right? You know, like my son saying, dad, I want to do this. And I accidentally, I nearly accidentally said, you probably shouldn't do that right now. You should probably focus on this. But I caught myself, right, like that. That changes his relationship with the adrenaline, the fear that he has. Folks, remember, you can't be brave if you're not afraid. The next time you have a fear spike, know that it can serve you. It's there to help you, you know, do the best you can do with stuff. But you gotta. You gotta. There's. There's a system in there. And I'm not trying to like, like, keep some stuff hidden behind a curtain. I shared a lot there. But there's a. There's a little ebook that I wrote called Making Friends with Fear, and it's nine pages long. And please read it, it's free. It will to get it. It'll put you in the funnel which will go, hey, do you want more information? Just unsubscribe. If you don't want more. I don't know why you wouldn't want more information about managing fear. I believe that when you change your relationship with fear, you can better control your mind. If you can control your mind, you can control your day. If you control your day, you control your day. The algorithm extended fear management equals time management. You're going to change your life.

Oh, man, I love it. Tony, I appreciate you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, man. Be safe.

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