Why Success Terrifies You More Than Failure with @BrandonEpstein_

There's something in your life that you're afraid of right now. You might not call it fear. You might say you have nerves. You might say I'm worried. You might say I'm concerned. Fear is like, for me, number one obstruction to flourishing.

I'm curious with the athletes that you work with, and I'd love to hear, you know, I know you work with one of the Cy Young winners and Shane, I forgot his last name, Shane Kiebert.

Bieber.

Bieber.

Yeah. Yeah. Like J Beeps.

How do you help athletes get back their edge? Like when, when they are off track, like coming back from a major injury or, you know, they've failed in the clutch. Like I think of, you know, one of my favorite stories is Ben Simmons and the, do you know, did you see him flub it up in the NBA playoffs back a few years ago with the 76ers? And then he was traded the next year. He couldn't make a layup. Yeah. And he, it was just all in his head. And, and he hasn't been the same player since. So yeah. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, I want to get— I don't know if you feel this way, but when you see those stories, I'm like, can we actually get Mike in there?

Get Mike in there. 100%. I see all this stuff like the Netflix documentaries on the tennis, the golf. I'm like, you guys, if only you knew me. Yeah, I know. I know, right? Oh yeah.

But what's your process like to help them reprogram and recalibrate? And get their edge back?

Yeah, it's, it's really the same that I give in the book. Like, it's it, but it's just individualized to what is going on in their body in that moment. And like, so many of these guys haven't been— no one's held the intimate space for them outside of the mind, but really in the body, the emotion, the nervous system. They haven't held that intimate space. And when someone does, so when I do, it's like, boom, it comes up so fast. It's like, whoa, it's like, whoa, what is that, dude? Like, that's intense. So it's usually right there beneath the surface, and that's why it's so visceral. That's why it's causing them issues. It's not like in this stuff that we're talking about, I wish I could say it's a complete panacea, but like, it's not either, you know, because two people could show up being their best. Like, I work with a lot of fighters, UFC fighters, boxers. You might have all your mental locked in and you might still lose. You know, yeah, just because some things are just skill, experience, it's life. Like, I don't know, God might have just a different path for you. Like, we see in UFC all the time, like, yeah, Michael Chandler is about to fight Conor McGregor. The dude's lost so many times and he's like saying, well, if I didn't go through all that though, I would be to where I am today, right? So I want to say that is like, I'll speak for myself, I don't have a magic pill, but what I do is I get guys to perform their best, period. That's a— and yeah, and for a lot of guys exactly at the highest level, that's the best they can ask for. So I think it'd be helpful for us to even go through some examples because you said, how do I help them? It's like I could even talk about some examples of what guys have gone through and how that helped them, and, and I think that would give everyone a good idea of what we're really talking about here.

Yeah, yeah, I loved, you know, as you break down one of the examples, I love Like, I think of a lot of this work that we do. I mean, most of my clients are just high achievers. So like, my core target audience is high achievers, and that falls obviously in the entrepreneur space and executive space. So I probably am very heavy in that space, and I love it. I mean, but I'm curious. So I think of it as like the right ingredients. Yeah. Like, I love, for example, that you got a lot of good meditations to support. As I looked at your page, I'm like, boom, that's spot on, because we gotta anchor those things, anchor the patterns, anchor your nervous system back into the state and visualize it, feel it, all that. But if you were— if you don't mind breaking down an example and then let's, let's unpack the, the magic recipe that you've created for amazing transformation for so many people.

Yeah, I am the magic recipe at its core. It sounds funny, but I am. That's right. I am. Because you can't give someone what you don't have, right?

Yeah.

So I light their torch. Yeah. I give them access to an experience, an energetic experience that it's like they're being touched by God, which is another fancy way of saying they're connecting to source once again. They're connecting to themselves in the present moment. And so I'm able to do that and I'm able to take them to that space and kind of light their torch, light their fire so they can be like, oh, that's right, there I am. That's me. Right. Yeah. And so, well, how do we get there? There's a lot of ways to get there and to reverse engineer. But the core thing I do is I'll get a guy and if someone's listening to this right now, if you're not, if you're driving, please don't do this. But if you're stationary, if you could do it, there's something in your life that you're afraid of right now. You might not call it fear. You might say you have nerves. You might say I'm worried. You might say I'm concerned. You probably have a little bit of fear, right? Fear is like, for me, Fear is the number one obstruction to flourishing. And so I want you just to give yourself permission just to feel the fear in your body right now. Close your eyes. And I'm thinking of an example right now of a client comes in really strong. This guy, he just felt this deep fear in his solar plexus area in his stomach. And we sat down there, you know, he told me that, oh, you know, I think what we came together for had nothing to do with the thing that we actually was a root issue. And so I never make assumptions. You could tell me whatever you want. You could tell me that's a problem. We'll find out what the problem is as we feel into your body. And so we felt deep into his body, into the upper stomach, the solar plexus. It felt like just a big boulder was living in there. I made him go sit right in the middle of it, feel the fear. And someone can do this right now as they're going through this process with me. And I asked him, what are you believing to be true It's making you feel so afraid right now. And when he sat in that, what bubbled up was, if I'm more successful, then everyone's gonna hate me. What? More successful, everyone's gonna hate you? So what comes up there? Well, this guy was a first-round draft pick in the NFL. Tremendous pressure to be the man from the fans, from the management, from everyone. And what he found was the more successful he was, the more judgment he was receiving. And we found that, you know, rationally, the story is all there externally, but we had to go into the body to find that. And so basically, he believed that the more successful he was going to be, the more he would be suffering, the more he would be facing all this emotional turmoil that he wanted to try to escape. And so it is as simple as this. We had him accept it. Yeah, that's right. Feel in his body and just accept that, yeah, the more successful I am, the more I am going to suffer, the more people are going to hate me. All of it, all of it, all of it. And this is where the me having my ego death helped, because what am I doing? I'm taking him through an ego death of sorts, of like, yeah, everything you're afraid of, let's make it true. And when we accept things, we can actually change them. What we resist persists. So it's like, oh, the energy starts to move through the body, and what happens is it actually gets released. It's like a big ball of energies in the solar plexus, and it gets dispersed and starts to move up into the heart. You could breathe more easy now. Okay, so we've accepted it. I like to imagine that this energy is on a timeline. So I'm putting together a lot of techniques, and people who study NLP will probably recognize some of these. Some people who do hypnosis will recognize others. And I'll take a cloud of energy in front of them, and I'll have them breathe in. On the exhale, imagine a powerful wind moving from right to left, picking up all this belief that represents that the more successful they are, the more pain is going to be and the more people are going to hate them. And we move that into the past.

Yeah.

And then there's this opening.

Wow.

And in this—

so good—

in this opening, in the present moment, energy can't be created nor destroyed. So we, we alchemize the energy, we transmute it by choosing the opposite. It's that simple. So the opposite is, I believe the more successful I am, the more people are going to love me.

Uh, dude.

Complete release. All of a sudden, everything in his life started to change because he was blocking himself from doing the things he needed to do to be his best. So all of a sudden, hey, I want to stay around and watch more film to see what I need to do for game week. Hey, all of a sudden, I want to be with my coaches and work on things. All of a sudden, I have more swagger and confidence and feel more like a badass on the field. So everything opened up from there because we released him from that fear and reprogrammed him to feel peace in the present moment. So there's an example in real time.

I love it. And then what do you do to anchor that in after that session?

So right afterwards, I like to anchor in a lot of belief, right? So I'll just go through all these examples of in his life where he's been rewarded for being successful. I'm like, this, this, this, this, this. And so the subconscious is like, yeah, fine, I guess it's true. And then there's a technique. I think I learned it from like the Silva Method. I don't know. I picked it up somewhere around like self-hypnosis. And so what I have them do is like, this wasn't the only belief. It was one of the biggest ones. But we came up with a handful of beliefs that he needed to transmute. And so we had him record a voice note on his phone just reading these beliefs with his own voice. And so he sent that to me. I edited it with some binaural beats behind it to help him drop into a slower brainwave state, have him listen to it every morning when he wakes up, every night before he's falling asleep. That's when we're in our most suggestive states. And then throughout the day, as much as you want. And through that repetition, the subconscious slowly, fully accepts it. And after a while, he doesn't even need to listen anymore. It's just a matter of fact. It is. It just is. And then there's nothing to talk about or think about. It just is.

So good. And I'm curious, based on what I see from your coaching, then you probably also have them do some meditations ongoing, maybe read some other books or whatever, and obviously you're coaching them regularly to anchor that in and seeing what else comes up and then moving on to the next thing.

Yeah.

To anchor in. Anything else you would add for your mix? Because I find like when we make those big breakthroughs, then we got to reinforce them on a practical basis so that they get solidified as well. And it feels like you do that in your, your coaching brand.

Yeah. I mean, there are different exercises that are also in the book that are kind of like a conditioning of the mind to do this consciously. Yeah, the subconscious stuff, the belief audio is the biggest thing. Have them listen to that until it really is stored at the subconscious level. That's the main tool. Meditations are great, especially for people who can't work with me one-on-one. That's what I really made them for. Like you said, there's over 100 available on YouTube, and it really is like being coached by me. And so that's why I made them specific for so many things. It was so cool, this guy sent me a video the other day, he listened to my MMA meditation, then he went his won his first amateur MMA fight. And so those things make me super happy because, yeah, it's kind of a way to like reach people that I wouldn't be able to otherwise. Uh, and sometimes I have my clients listen to them if I feel like there's one in particular that is fitting for something they're going through, um, especially if they're going through a hard time or they're overwhelmed. Hey, throw this on. Like you said, it's so important to anchor into the frequency they want to live in. And so If it's a high stress time, yeah, listen to this 5-minute meditation just to get present. I do that at times as well, but I'd say they're definitely secondary tools versus my goal for everyone is to get them to become meditation through doing the deeper reprogramming work. Love it.