I wasn’t smart enough because I hadn’t done well in school.FOR ME, manning up didn’t happen overnight. The process that started in the doctor’s office took a long time. And it wasn’t just a process of doing specific things. It was a way of changing how I thought about things—including killing off a lot of negativity and damaging belief systems in my head that were holding me back.
That negativity had childhood sources. My family came to this country with nothing. And my dad would say, over and over again, “We’ll run out of money before we run out of month.” That became my mind-set: We’ll never have enough. Life was a series of tough choices: Do we pay for the water bill or gas bill this month? Do we buy a used car or try to find a better apartment that’s not in a gang-infested area? A nice dinner for us, even after several years in the country, was eating at Sizzler. We needed a really good reason to go out to eat. There was a lot of negativity in the house because of our financial situation. My dad didn’t mean to be negative or pessimistic, of course, but it was hard not to be gruff when we were penny-pinching that way.
As a kid, because of my family’s circumstances, I became obsessed with finding the cheapest way to do things. I told myself a few stories that quickly became the narrative of my life: (1) that I was a foreigner, and foreigners don’t make it; (2) that I’d always trade my time for money; (3) that I was blue collar and I’d stay blue collar; and (4) that I was a bad student, would always be one, and bad students don’t become successful. All of it led to poor self-esteem, poor self-image, and a lot of negative self-talk.
I had to fix this. One of the things that my mentor Jim Franco did was give me a sales cassette tape to listen to. He prefaced it by telling me I was terrible at selling (which got me angry) and then told me the tape would help (which got me interested). That tape led to other self-improvement tapes, books, and programs, and before you knew it, I was devouring the genre. If you name it, I read it, listened to it, or went through the course. Tony Robbins. Jim Rohn. Maxwell Maltz, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Les Brown, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Dan Kennedy. All of them. At one point, I remember standing in the corner of the gym and jumping up and down yelling, “I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!” Sure, I felt a bit foolish, but I also knew that I had decades of negative self-talk in my head that operated like a virus, and I had to throw every cure I could find at it. I had just learned about the power of incantations from a Brian Tracy book and I used it several times a day. Still do. There wasn’t any one thing that helped me—it was the whole batch of exercises that helped to turn the negative self-talk and limiting belief systems into positive self-talk, beliefs, and habits.
I even went into intense therapy after my massive anxiety attack. For almost three years my therapist helped me work through a lot of issues from my childhood. Things that had led to depression and anxiety had roots in my childhood, and it wasn’t enough to just try to mask over them with success. What I had to do was get at the source of the problems, to do so with a professional, and to deal with them. I tell you this not to say that you necessarily need therapy, but because a lot of the stories in our lives that control our self-image and self-esteem have old and deep origins that can’t be ignored until you process through them. Listen, here’s what I know to be true: We look at the world through the filters that we have on. Those filters have been shaped by your experiences from childhood on up. If you think that trauma, no matter the form—mental abuse, physical abuse, or sexual abuse—is something that you can simply “manage” and overcome without doing some serious deep work, then you’re in for a big surprise.
This is a big part of manning up: getting rid of self-limiting beliefs through a process I call “releasing the emergency brake.” When I first started to do the work on myself, I had to wrestle with the fact that a lot of what was in my head were negative statements about who I was:
I wasn’t smart enough because I hadn’t done well in school.
I was a bad provider because we seemed to always be on the edge of bankruptcy.
I was never going to succeed at business because I hadn’t succeeded in the past.
I was not a good leader or manager of people because I was introverted.
Until you take control of self-limiting beliefs, they will manifest in many different areas in your life. For example, you might have a negative money mind-set that your parents put in your head. Perhaps they told you that money’s bad, money’s for the rich, that other people have success and we don’t, that we’re the working class and will never be anything else, or that the rich have knowledge or opportunities that you simply don’t have access to. I guarantee you it affects your business. That negative belief system is crippling. After all, your beliefs dictate your habits, your habits dictate your actions, and your actions dictate your outcomes.
The negative self-talk in your head and your heart that’s been there for so long has got to change. Our childhood experiences shape us—and they shackle us. You might know the feeling. There are other pains from the past that can keep us in a mental prison. You might have been on the receiving end of a cruel comment from a school-teacher, family member, or other kids. Or maybe you got regular beatings from your dad, or maybe you were sexually abused, or had addicts for parents. All these things lead to trauma that when not processed and dealt with can limit your personal and professional success, happiness, and growth the same way a sports car can be neutered in performance when it’s driven with the emergency brake slightly engaged. Because of my trauma, I found a million reasons in my life to fail at things, sabotage my success, and reduce the impact I was making. Looking back, I failed at things on purpose. Procrastination was one of my bad habits ten years ago before I released the emergency brake. I’d have a good idea and set it aside for “the future,” and then never get around to it.
All of these were stories—narratives I had sold myself on. And I had to shed them to reduce the mental friction in my life. It’s no different than when you lower the e-brake on your car and all of a sudden it performs the way it was designed to perform. You’re clearing out the clutter in your mind so you can make room for beliefs, habits, and actions that will help you and not hold you back. You’re going to do that, at long last, by releasing the emergency brakes that have been holding you back.
EMERGENCY BRAKE #1: FEAR
I have witnessed fear and self-limiting beliefs stunt the success of more of my coaching clients than any other factor, just as I’ve experienced the grip of fear in my own life.
In 2005, I applied to speak at the National Strength and Conditioning Association conference and the IDEA Fitness conference. I wanted to speak not about personal training but about the business of personal training. There are lots of people who can get you fit; I knew how to take that whole operation and turn it into a profitable business. I was politely rejected from both.
It made me mad to get rejected—so I decided to create my own event: The Fitness Business Summit. My wife and I built it together. I basically assumed there were a lot of people out there like me who had the personal training part down, but needed improvement in client management, marketing, and business management. It was a good idea, until we saw the sticker price for hosting an event like that. It was enormous. Our personal circumstances didn’t help matters. Di was pregnant with our second child. We had just moved into a new home. We didn’t have the resources we have now.
But we decided to go for it. Come February, we had a conference—with fewer than half the attendees we expected and less than half of what we expected to charge. I wasn’t an authority in the industry yet, so that made sense. But at the time, it made me freak out. Add to that my biggest fear of all: public speaking. I hate it. It terrifies me. Every night for two months before the conference, I took NyQuil to go to sleep because I had crippling fears about speaking at the conference. I feared for my reputation. I worried people would laugh at me, that they would hate the event, that the fitness industry would shun me, and that I would be broke.
I was awash in fear. But guess what? The event wasn’t the success of my wildest dreams, but they didn’t banish me from the industry because of it, either. We barely made it work financially, but we did it. The fears I had were utterly out of proportion to the possible negatives.
What I’ve learned over a lifetime of similar experiences is that fear and insecurity guarantee failure. If you’re looking left as you’re driving a car, you’ll pull the steering wheel left, even if you don’t mean to. Same goes with fear and insecurity. If you’re fearful, you’ll give in to those fears. That’s why FDR’s line rings as true now as it did when he said it at the height of the Great Depression: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We should be afraid of fear, because it will hold us back.
It might be that you’re afraid of criticism, afraid of what other people might say, afraid of what your family might think or how they’ll judge you, afraid of failure, and even afraid of success.
Instead of going all out and being the high-performing human you’re meant to be, you hold back because you’re being selfish and protecting yourself from what others think.
When it really comes down to it, the only thing you legitimately have to fear is the possibility that you’ll allow fear to prevent you from taking the necessary action required to reach your life goals. You will have to think hard about what you’re afraid of and then design a plan to deal with it. This won’t be easy, and honestly, you might do what I did for so long: avoid dealing with these fears.
But on the other side of that work is freedom. It’s the freedom to do what you were actually meant to do. The freedom to walk around without the weight of the world on your shoulders. The freedom to enjoy your success and push through your failures—without feeling like everything is going to collapse around you.
EMERGENCY BRAKE #2: POOR MANAGEMENT OF TIME AND ENERGY
Before I manned up, I was the master of procrastination. All my early businesses—the DJ business, the supplement company, the personal training—all of them suffered because I would put things off. Fear led me to waste time and energy by putting things off. I would choose going to the beach over preparing for the next day’s work. I’d stay up late and watch television and then wake up late and hit the snooze button. I had horrible work habits.
I did a lot of busywork. A good example: One minute, I’d have an idea. And I’d use that one idea to pull me away from working on the others. I’d flit from thought to thought, business to business, all the while not getting any single big thing done. I’d tell myself that I was “working on my business,” but I wasn’t. I never went far enough down the road on a specific task to execute on anything meaningful. I was stalling. I wasted all kinds of time, money, and opportunity. And I blamed everything but my poor time and energy management.
Listen, if you play the blame game and claim to be too busy and overwhelmed to get what you want out of life, then slap yourself silly. That’s an amateur belief system and it’s not serving you well. It’s an outright lie that you tell yourself—and the people around you.
It all boils down to time, energy, and priority management. You make time for the things that are important. What’s important to you? The truth is that right now, it’s very likely that the things that you are prioritizing over doing your life’s work are downright embarrassing. The time and energy you spend on recreational “fun” activities, screen-sucking social media, useless emails and text messages, and binge watching TV shows, or taking unscheduled calls and meetings, are killing your business. They’re killing you!
Managing your energy, your sleep, and your health is just about as important as it gets. It’s the foundation for everything else in your life, and I’m telling you as someone who nearly died because of anxiety that if you don’t take care of your body, it won’t take care of you.
EMERGENCY BRAKE #3: ASSESSING YOUR TEAM
Nick was an amazing hire for Fit Body Boot Camp. He practiced jujitsu, he worked hard, and he was always happy. He knew how to coach our FBBC owners and how to get things done. Nick came in with a lot of good raw material. Unfortunately, he also saw, when he came into the business, that a lot of people around him didn’t have his discipline, enthusiasm, and work ethic.
I didn’t lead him well, not at all. It was a huge failure on my part. Over a three-year period, he fell into a funk. I blamed him. Only later did I learn that it was because of what I was doing—or more accurately, not doing. I wasn’t leading him. But he had the potential to be led and to become a really critical part of my business. It’s a real shame that he quit. (To his credit, he went on to start his own business.)
It was a real wake-up call for me when Nick left. Here was someone who could have helped me and my business grow. He could have worked up to a position of leadership and great pay, but he left because of my failure of leadership. I vowed never to let that happen again.
Fast-forward to 2013. A woman named Joan walked into my office. I could sense she was a killer. She was Nick-like—she had poise, self-assurance, and that instinct. This time, I wasn’t going to fail as a leader.
Up until that point, I had been doing a bad job of taking care of myself. From 2007 to about 2012, I lost my discipline. Even though I was a personal trainer, I stopped working out. I was stressed-out all the time. I started eating fast food. Predictably, I put on a lot of weight and lost my hard-earned muscles. I took NyQuil and Vicodin to go to sleep; otherwise my constant state of overwhelm would keep me up all night. But in hiring Joan, I knew those bad habits weren’t going to cut it: I couldn’t risk losing her due to things I could fix myself.
It took a lot of work. It took a lot of time in the gym and cleaning up my diet. It took a lot of clarifying my vision, figuring out the path, and telling myself over and over that it was time to man up. But a big part of what motivated me was the people in my life—my wife, my kids, and my team, including employees like Joan. Once I realized I was manning up for them—and not just for me—it became easier to stay accountable and get things done.
Often when people talk about their team, they talk about their employees. But I want you to think about your “team” broadly: Think about the people in your life. What do they add to your life? What do they subtract? Do they bring positivity, energy, and strength? Or do they suck your soul with complaints, excuses, and nonsense?
When you hire employees, are you genuinely excited about them or do you bring them aboard because you need to fill seats? Extend this to your friendships and personal relationships. How deliberate are you about the people in your life? We’re going to dive much more deeply into this later in the book, but it’s important to think about this as one of the emergency brakes in your life potentially holding you back.
These aren’t easy questions. But you need to ask them. You need to do a thorough assessment of the people you’ve let into your company and your life. And remember: You’ve let them in, so it’s on you to be honest about what they are doing in your life.
EXERCISES
1) Open up a document on your computer or take out a piece of paper. Divide it into four columns:
You may not get this all down in one sitting, but I want you to be brutally honest with yourself and write these things down:
FEAR: What are you afraid of right now that’s stopping you from getting what you want? What’s the feeling in the pit of your stomach?
OUTCOME: What happens if what you’re afraid of actually occurs? Be specific and detailed. Be gory. Give yourself permission to outline it in all its awfulness.
LIKELIHOOD: How likely is it that what you’re afraid of will happen? You can estimate in probabilities or you just can make a statement like, “It may happen sometime before December.”
WHAT CAN I DO TO PREVENT IT: This is where the rubber meets the road. Write down the tactical steps you’re going to take to prevent the outcome from happening. One way I do this is by going outside of myself by saying: How would I advise a friend if they approached me with this issue? I don’t care if the plans are tangible or pie-in-the-sky; write down every strategy or tactic you can think of.
2) Open up your calendar from the last two weeks and make a list of the people you spent time with. If you didn’t schedule the time, then write down their names. Stop when and if you get to ten people. (If you run a company, do this with your employees and partners, too.) Now stop. Take a look at those ten people and go name by name. Ask yourself these two questions: Are these people adding value to my life or business? Are they taking value and costing me time that can be better invested in others?
3) Sit down and write out three BIG things that must get done on a daily basis in order to keep your momentum up. Now refuse to waste a single minute doing nonessential time killers before these three are completed. Wake up in the morning and tackle these three things first. What should you choose? Let me offer some suggestions:
Meditating
Morning workout
Journaling ideas to exponentially improve your business or life
Sending a gratitude email or text message to three people you value
Improving one system in your business that will increase profits, service, or reach
Executing at least one thing every morning that will move the money needle
The truth is you can find what you need to keep your energy up. This process is about writing those things down and committing to them.