In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Zander Fryer about his morning routine, energy, how to be a better person, journaling your negative thoughts and more.
In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Zander Fryer about his morning routine, energy, how to be a better person, journaling your negative thoughts and more.
Ryan
Hey guys, it's Ryan real quick. So my mission with the Morning Upgrade blog and podcast is to raise the awareness of morning routines and personal development. And I now have two products that are also helped me with this mission. The first product helps you start a 20 minute morning routine. And the second product is a book that outlines how to use personal development to upgrade your life and business. You can get full details on both products over at morning upgrade.com. Thanks for letting me share and now on to the show.
Announcer
Welcome to the Morning Upgrade podcast with Ryan Cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.
Ryan
Zander, welcome to the Morning Upgrade podcast. How are you?
Zander
I'm great, Ryan, thanks for having me.
Ryan
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you and dive into all things personal development and morning routines. First Please tell my audience that I like to call the morning upgraders. Please tell us you know who you are, what you do for a living and then some of your hobbies?
Zander
Absolutely. So my name is Zander Fryer, I run a company called high impact coaching, we actually help coaches build their businesses. So it's about a three to $4 million company. We've been growing and scaling that for about the last five years and some of my hobbies, besides just hanging out with my wife and puppy love, love long walks on the beach. And that is not a joke that is absolutely serious. Working out rock climbing anything, anything fun, and travel.
Ryan
What do you do for your energy? Yeah, I can tell you have high energy and just from the website to look at your pictures. How do you feed your energy? Just curious?
Zander
That's a great question. I think it's, you know, maybe an even better question is how do I not feed fatigue? I think a lot of people actually just, you know, feed their fatigue a lot more than they feed their energy. For me one of the biggest things is I actually, don't drink coffee, people, a lot of people use coffee for energy. And it's actually also an emotional scaffolding for a lot of people. That's why it's so addictive. But you know, coffee itself will give you a huge boost in adrenal boost, and then you'll come crashing down afterward. So that's actually one of the things that I don't do because I don't feed my fatigue. I also make sure that I'm actually getting plenty of sleep, which I think you know, a lot of people think you know, as an entrepreneur or any form of a successful person, you have to be able to function on like four hours of sleep. And you know, I've interviewed 1000s of entrepreneurs and co-founders, the majority of them get eight, even nine hours of sleep, or workout a lot. I eat really well. And the one thing that I do in the mornings, is I'm a huge fan of cold therapy. So I'll do I'll meditate and I'll do cold therapy every single morning I actually have a cold plunge in my backyard that I'll jump into every morning and you have one of those you never have to drink a cup of coffee again.
Ryan
Let's dive into your morning routine but I'm curious about that cold plunge. I've seen I think Tony Robbins has that in his documentary plunged into this hole with cold water in it so that you build it into your backyard like what is it just a hole to jump into?
Zander
It's literally like a mini Jacuzzi like a one-person Jacuzzi that instead of being like 102 degrees is actually like 38-39 degrees it's not warm Yeah. I won't be staying in for in the mornings are normally go in for about three minutes. Sometimes I'll do some extended ones where you know I can go on for you know anywhere from you know 10 to 12 even 15 minutes but that's you know more I'm working on a kind of like spiritual practices meditative states being in there for that long.
Ryan
Wow, very interesting to your neighbors or your neighbors wonder what the blood-curdling screams are coming from your backyard?
Zander
Sometimes. Yeah. But you know, they come over and they check it out and they make sure that I'm okay and that it's just me nothing, nothing illegal happening. And then they're good to go. So most of them are aware of what's going on now.
Ryan
So yeah, let's talk about your morning routine. So you do the cold plunge. The study, meditate as well. What else is your morning look like?
Zander
Oh, that's a good question. So I'm normally up at the crack of dawn, I'm normally up at 4 am. The first thing that I do is I normally do some breath work, some yoga, some physical therapies, and PT work just to get the blood flowing through my body, get the lymphatic system flowing, and kind of wake everything up. And then I jumped straight into I do a form of Vedic meditation. It's kind of like Transcendental Meditation, 20 minutes of that, and then visualizations right afterward, which, you know, for anybody who's not visualizing their future, I can tell you right now, the one reason that you're not where you want to be. I always tell people like, you know, high performing athletes, professional athletes, Olympians all know that you know, what you visualize is what you create in your life. So, you know, if you want to be a high performer, make sure you're visualizing what you want to create. It just works. So visualize. And then right after that, I go straight into that cold plunge. So the cold plunge, is basically what it does, most people don't know this. It actually gives you a perfect combination. You're horrible. Hormones give you a perfect combination of what's called norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, which is actually the liquid combination of motivation. So when people refer to being motivated, it is actually this combination of norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain. And you can actually trigger that by going into cold so cold showers, cold plunges, things like that. That's why you do it. I'll tell you right now, that going into the cold sucks every single time. But when you come out of it motivated to accomplish whatever you want to in your life, it's worth it.
Ryan
Yeah, I do the cold showers. I'm recording this in New Jersey. So the cold is really cold, but not like in the winter when, when it's wintertime and the ground is frozen
Zander
Cold water? Yep, that'll really get you going.
Ryan
Have you always been into personal growth, even back to like your engineering days, when you had a corporate job?
Zander
You know, when I was in college, I was actually an engineering college electrical engineer at UCLA. But I was also an Air Force ROTC. So that was actually something you know, in the military and in the Air Force, you know, they're teaching you a lot of leadership. And they started to introduce me to a lot of different self-development ideas and self-development practitioners. You know, one of the things in the military when you're gonna become a leader, they make you read a lot of John Maxwell, right? John Maxwell is one of the best leadership practitioners and also one of the best self-development practitioners in the world. So that really opened me up to a lot of self-development at a young age, which was pretty great for me, and then kind of led me down that path, even while I was in the corporate world. You know, I was at Cisco Systems for five years, and being a huge personal development fan, consuming books, consuming audiobooks, podcasts, you know, eventually, there's, there's only so long you can spend in the nine to five before you realize that you were meant for something more. And that's, you know, it was the fact that I was a self-development junkie that really led me to become an entrepreneur.
Ryan
And why'd you pick the business here in coaches? Like what drew you to that?
Zander
That's a good question. Why didn't start off the way I was, you know, obviously, when I first quit my job, I didn't know how coaches would be successful. I just wanted to coach, you know, that was one of the big things when I was in the Air Force, I was leading other people and mentoring other people. I actually got a DUI my senior year, and that's why I was kicked out of the air force. So I went into the corporate world and was very successful there. But I wasn't aligned with the work I was doing because I didn't get to mentor or lead or coach anyone. So eventually, I just quit cold turkey and did the, you know, super cliche, millennial quit corporate job to become life coach, I quit my job to become a life coach, no idea what I was doing. The only difference was I knew how to sell. And I invested about $35,000 into different mentorship and coaching programs to learn in the world of online entrepreneurship, marketing and copywriting and sales, and all of these things. So I was actually able to build a life coaching business in about three months, I had six-figure coaching business. And within about 12 months, I had my first six-figure month as a coach. So I had a lot of other coaches that I had started to network with health coaches, life coaches, career coaches that were all like, Dude, what the hell you just did in five months, what I've been trying to do for five years, then so they reached out to me to see if I could actually help them build their business. And I helped a handful of them, they all got amazing results. And they started to tell more people. So started to expand that and kind of realize, like, Hey, this is new, kinda like what you and I were just talking about earlier before we started the show, I realized, Hey, this is a way for me to have a, a much bigger impact, right? If I can, if I can teach, you know, for every coach that I can teach how to get their business up and running and make six figures, multiple, six figures, half a million, or even seven figures, know, they're going to go on to help hundreds or even 1000s, or maybe even millions of people in the future. And so for every one of them that I can help, I'm going to have an exponentially larger impact. So we shifted to about to that about three and a half, four years ago. Now we've helped over I think 750 coaches build six-figure multiple six-figure and seven figure businesses. And the impact is just growing and scaling. So that's how we got there.
Ryan
Yeah, it's a great ripple effect. And think about that many coaches and who they're helping. You said that you were getting people saying to you, you did what we in five months, five months, what we were trying to do in five years. Yeah, what’s missing? What weren't they doing? I know that probably a big answer, a long answer, but in general, like what weren't they doing? They didn't know how to sell or was it something else?
Zander
It’s you know, honestly, it's a combination of things for starting coaches, the way that I always tell people, right, it's one thing to be a self-development fan. And it's one thing to be a coach and a servant leader. It's a totally different thing to have the entrepreneurial mindset and like you mentioned, to be able to sell and to market. I always tell people right to build a successful coaching business. Think about it build a successful coaching business. Well, you have to have expertise in two things. You have to have the expertise as a coach and you have to have expertise in the business. And the reason is to have a successful coaching business, the expertise in business actually has to come first. Because if you can't, if you can't find the right niche position and message yourself, well lead generate enroll people, you never have clients to coach. So I think it was Huffington Post who did a study and found that 90% of all online coaches end up quitting within the first four months, that's nine out of 10 coaches who end up quitting within the first four months. Because they might be great coaches, but nobody ever taught them how to do business. So they never get the clients they need, they're never able to charge the prices that they really deserve. And because of that, they're never able to do it full-time. Maybe they make a little bit of coffee money here and there. But you do that long enough. And you're still in the nine to five, you end up burning out and wanting to give up.
Ryan
I think, yeah, that makes total sense. I want to stay on this topic. One more question for me that I want to talk to you about your habits. When you're helping your coaching clients. How much of a role does personal development play? Or, you know, obviously, you can't force them to take that seriously, but if they're working with you, they probably will do whatever it takes.
Zander
So how are we oh, we actually can force them to take it seriously. Okay, I'm not worried. You're right, though. I mean, here's the truth, right? Like you and I both know that the reality is like I could give, but you know, let's say we have a coach, Coach Lisa, and coach Leslie right. So Coach Lisa is focused on personal development focused on is an action taker being decisive getting out of her comfort zone, pushing herself to new heights. And Coach Lesley is hesitant and decisive, wants to stay comfortable, unwilling to get out of her comfort zone fears being judged fears being criticized, I can give, I can give Coach Lisa and coach Leslie both the exact same system skills, frameworks, tactics, everything, but only one of them is going to succeed. Right? Coach Lisa, because if coach Leslie is going to hold herself back, doubt everything, be hesitant, indecisive, not an action taker feared criticism, fear judgment, she's never going to be able to implement the things that you need to implement. So you know, one of the things that we tell people, there's a lot of people out there that you know, claim to coach coaches, and most of them just kind of put out some marketing tactics and sales tactics and hope that people get results. And the reality is when we work with people, we actually literally have to come in, we do a lot of psychosomatic programming, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. But we literally have to unprogrammed people's brains. So we go back, you know, all the way into their childhood and unprogrammed. A lot of the bad habits, a lot of the bad beliefs, the bad, the subconscious programming, our subconscious is 95% of our brain and dictates a majority of our results. So we actually have to go back and unprogrammed their brains and reprogram them to be entrepreneurs, before we can actually give them the tactics. But that's the reason that we see the results with our clients when nobody else does is that we actually start with self-development. When people go through our programs. You know, they go yes, we have the top marketing and sales and copywriting tactics in the world. But 60, maybe even 70% of what we have to do is literally unprogrammed people and reprogram programming them to be able to actually use those tactics. Interesting, but I figured you're, you're gonna say it, there's a lot of personal growth and development strategies and what you do. So So why, what why I wanted to have you on the show, but it's Yeah, it really was good. It went that deep into mindset and program and programming people we get, yeah, we get, we get people that come to us after having been through 234 different programs, having spent 10s of 1000s of dollars, you know, 30, 40, 50 grand on different stuff and have gotten zero results. And then they come to work with us. And you know, within the first couple of weeks, they start rolling high ticket clients, because we actually take the time to focus on what matters first, which is, you know, as you know, that space between your ears.
Ryan
With happiness, do you think it's something that you can get? Or is it something that you just need to decide to be happy? Like, what's your definition? What's your approach to happiness?
Zander
That's a really good question. I think most people would say that's something that you can get and then don't get me wrong, like, you know, my I drive a nice car and that car makes me happy every time I get in that car. But the reality is, I'm able to get that car because I was a happy person, to begin with. So I think being a happy person being a grateful person, being an action taker being someone who puts love and gratitude and appreciation out into the world, you know, gives me more things to love more things to be grateful for, and more things to appreciate. I'm a true believer that you know, who you are, is going to be what creates your future, not the other way around. You know, a lot of people say Oh, once I have XYZ once I have a six-figure coaching business, then I'll feel free and fulfilled and it's like no, you have to feel free and fulfilled and worthy. Before you can have a six-figure coaching business. I believe that too. I listened to I heard it was on a podcast recently. But the person was basically saying like, like how you carry yourself the energy you put out, like if someone's reacting negatively to it negatively to you just to look within and are you acting negatively to them without even knowing it? Like what kind of energy or attitude Are you bring into that person that's causing them to react the way they are, I thought was interesting and makes me attorney more present and how I'm showing up around people, you know, I've found that there's always, there's always a way for me to show up at a higher level, more joyful, more appreciative, more engaged, no matter what else is going on around me. So I think it always starts with no.
Ryan
This is great. I do have one last question for you. And then we'll wrap up with you sharing with my audience of Morning Upgraders, you know, how they can reach out to you, connect with you, and learn more? My last question for you is your choice number one habit? Or number one personal development tip, which I guess could be one of the same, but you choose?
Zander
Oh, that's a really good question I have I have a lot of them. The one that I think is very little known, I also think is one of the most important ones, is something I call fear journaling. You know, for anybody who's in the mindset space, or anybody who's into self-development. You know, we're all aware of, you know, the law of attraction, and what you focus on you bring more of into your world. And I think that actually leads a lot of people to not do this, not do this. And it's probably my secret to success and a majority of our clients as well. So fear journaling, essentially, what it is, you know, we've all had anxieties or anger or frustrations or fears that come up for us on a daily, weekly, monthly basis around, you know, whatever it is that we're pursuing now. What fear journaling is, is, and I did this for literally every day for an entire year, when I first started my business because I had so much I've so many negative beliefs, so much negativity, so much anxiety, so much fear around quitting my job and starting my business and the judgment and the and the criticism and fear of failure and everything like that. And every day I would wake up and I would literally spend 10 to 15 minutes journey journaling out all of my most negative thoughts, not journaling positivity, not journaling, gratitude, not journaling, appreciation, journaling, negativity. Now, the reason this is so powerful is that most people don't realize that our emotions, then there is it's scientifically proven. There are encyclopedias of books written on this, the only way to move through emotion is to move through it, you have to move through the emotion, you have to sit in it. So what happens for most of us is when we feel some form of negativity, whether it's anger, frustration, guilt, shame, negativity, whatever it might be fear, we try to deny it, because it feels really shitty. None of us like that. Right? And what happens, as I mentioned, our subconscious is 95% of our brain. So if you try and ignore it, you're turning off that 5% conscious part of your brain to this feeling of fear, anger, or frustration. Well, where does it then go? If the only way to move through emotion is to actually sit in it move through it, that fear or anger, frustration just goes in marinates in your subconscious mind. So you're actually not getting rid of it. It's just sitting there marinating. And it is actually dictating the majority of the actions you take the beliefs you have the feelings you feel because it's just sitting there marinating in filth. And so you know, for most people that haven't learned how to journal through their fears or feel through their negative emotions, they end up making a majority of their decisions from these negative emotions. Now, if you learn to just get them out of your head and onto a piece of paper, you'll actually be fine. Now I moved through things like obviously quitting my job, I moved through things like my best friend committing suicide. I've been through so many different things over the last five years that this journaling process has helped me move through that it's not even funny. And what I found is every time I move through these negative emotions, I come out the other side more motivated, more inspired, more driven than ever before. So fear journal journaling is actually probably the biggest tool that I suggest to most of my clients. Definitely the first year or so.
Ryan
I appreciate you mentioned it doesn't make sense I think about like dealing with confrontation or small issues if you ignore it, it becomes like this screaming screaming toddler that you just can't ignore anymore so that's what you're saying. Yeah, Zander, this was great. Some want to reach out to you. What's the best way for them to do so?
Zander
Yeah, you guys can go ahead and check me out at www.zanderfryer.com. Especially if you're a coach. We have a lot of resources there for you. Feel free to check us out on Instagram as well at Xander fryer. And just like I was talking about Ryan, we do have our book you don't learn in college that's just coming out this next month. We actually have it on presale right now at Sedlecbook.com. We're giving away about $3,000 worth of programs and different pieces of training with book two but that book is designed to help anybody be able to design a life to make more money, more meaning, and more freedom. So those are probably the best ways to get a hold of me.
Ryan
Perfect. Yeah, we'll link those up on the show notes page. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Zander
Thank you, man.
Ryan
And Upgraders, thanks for listening. Talk soon.
Ryan
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