SPEAKER_01 0:36

Okay, then uh today I'm talking to Tony Blauer. Tony, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Gaz, how are you doing? Good to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah, no, it's an absolute pleasure. Tony, I often start my podcast with a bit of a dialogue about the people I'm speaking to. Um, and I always am quite excited by the people I get to speak to, and that's the beauty of my podcast, really. For me, it's it's always a conversation that I'm purposefully choosing to have. I'm never getting given guests that I don't want to speak to, and today's no different. So I'm super excited because I know that your background and I know the value that you've got to give to the people listening today. Um, and so that's what excites me. But um, do you mind sort of giving the listeners for those that will know you? Some of you, some of them will, I'm sure, but maybe some won't, and and a bit of your background and your journey to where you are now.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Yeah, so you know, where to start? Um there's there's like the two big things that I do, or three big things that that I do. If somebody just looked at me as as a corporate entity, as opposed to so Tony, Tony Blauer, the brand, what does Tony Blauer do as opposed to Tony, the human, the dad, the husband, the the uh um owner of five dogs that are more maintenance than my three children? Um I teach people how to change their relationship with fear. I believe if you change your relationship with fear, you can change your mind almost on cue as you as you need it. When you change your mind, you can change your life. I teach people how to defend themselves using the most um organic approach to self-defense, and that's you as a human weapon system, understanding how your body moves naturally, this blend of physiology, kinesiology, and psychology. And uh in terms of where your background was and and and my audiences are the entire world, but specifically, you know, tier one military, SWAT teens, police, trainers, and it's uh shaping instinctive movements around operational needs. You know, you're you're you're not gonna have to do a flying arm bar when you're arresting somebody. You're not gonna do a spinning hook kick during room clearance. And and so people sound it sounds like I'm I'm criticizing martial arts. I've been a martial artist uh my entire life. I'm 61 years old now, and uh I've been doing stuff since I'm seven. So, so when I say that, I don't say that like to put down martial arts, it's it's understanding where the weapon system goes and then the neuroscience behind designing. And the third thing I do is I teach people uh how to do uh realistic and relevant scenarios because that's how you manage fear and develop uh appropriateness in your skill set. So my background, having said that, understanding my background will explain those three verticals that that are now the the Blauer brand, if you will. One is I grew up as afraid of everything all the time. Afraid of my mother, afraid of my father, afraid of school, afraid of, but you wouldn't know that as a kid. I was an outgoing kid. I I was uh physically fit, I was athletic, I was on all the teams. But if I was wrestling, I was afraid of losing. If I was doing gymnastics, I was afraid of falling. If I was afraid if I was doing playing uh bat uh uh uh football, not soccer, football, right? Uh American football. Um and uh I was afraid of like dropping the ball and letting down the team, or if I got tackled, you know, am I gonna get hurt? But I I performed. I I and I I performed at at a at a uh at a high level that I was like one of the guys that oh Tony will be the captain, or let's pick Tony or whatever. So I wasn't like like this meat kid that was like, you know, you'll be the water boy. So I want to explain that to people because a lot of us go through lives carrying the weight of fear and worrying about how we're going to be perceived, uh, if we're gonna make it, if our kids are gonna make it, is I'm gonna, and we we don't realize how draining and how exhausting that mindset can be. And and just as going off in a little rabbit hole with that, think about anyone listening to this. Anytime you were waiting for what could be bad news, good news, alone to start a new business. Uh, will somebody marry you? Are they gonna say yes? You're waiting for a blood test to come back, and you're like, holy shit, I hope everything's okay. And when you got the good news, what did at a at a non-conscious level what happened to your mood, your energy, and also the levity of the body? You get good news and people jump up and they're like, Oh my god, right. And so I talk about what is the way to fear? We don't realize how much fear weighs us down, and and when you get good news, you're like, Oh, thank you, and whatever it is. So I carried that around for for decades. And when I started teaching self-defense in 1977, is when I had my first student, and then 1980, when I was paid for the first time. So I was a became a professional in 1980. Uh I taught them block-based training, which is uh, you know, a fancy term for understanding the difference between brain-based and block based, uh, block base. Uh block base is how we learn everything. Step one, step two, step three. Oh no, you can't do this move until you learn this move. Uh, brain-based is why are we doing this? Brain base is uh what's the outcome I want? You know, what what are all the conditions here? And you start to weigh and consider, and you put uh pressure on performance, and brain base is obviously the way to go. I intuitively figured that out in the 80s, uh, after one of my students lost a fight. And it's a story I'll get into a bit later. But I want everyone to understand my background was I hated the fear I felt living life. So, and it could be like I'm dancing, I'm in a good mood, I'm walking around like Connor McGregor doing this the McGregor swagger, you know, before Connor McGregor was even like a thing. I'm joking. And I'm and then someone goes, Oh, hey, who are you inviting to the prom at school? And then all of a sudden my heart would race and I go, I want to invite Lucy. Are you gonna talk to her? Yeah, is she gonna go with you? Like, I don't know. Like, and then you don't do it because you don't want to be rejected, because you don't want her to say no, or you don't want her to say yes, and then you go, you don't know what to do with that because she's the hottest girl in school. I'm just giving again examples that I hope people can relate to. Uh and it's funny, I I remember uh doing a fear management seminar in New York City many, many years ago, and I shared a cab back to the other side of town with one of the attendees, and he's sitting in the car with me, and he's like staring at me, and he goes, uh, he goes, Man, and the seminar was five hours long, whiteboard, like just understanding the neural circuitry of fear as I've reverse engineered it. Yeah, and he says, What is it like to have no fear? And uh I look at him and I go, I go, Are you talking to me? And he goes, Yeah, I said you're talking to me. And a lot of people won't get this, particularly in the UK. But do you remember the yeah, taxi driver? Thank you. Yes, somebody younger the neuro classic, right? A lot of people who are are uh a lot younger than us have no clue. And so with the joke being the joke being, I'm in New York, I'm in a cab, and I go, You're talking to me, you're talking to me. And so um, some of the your audience is smiling, other people are going, what's this guy talking about? But here we go back.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Switching off, switching off, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:27

So so I say to the guy, you're talking to me, he didn't get it, he was too young. I said, De Niro, taxi driver. He goes, Oh, okay. And I said, Do you think I have no fear? And I I realize now in in in retrospect, I'll have to grab one. I I should have worn my no fear shirt for this. Um, but we spell no fear Know, right? Know. And and a lot of your listeners probably know of or have heard of the no fear brand. It's an adrenaline company, it's the NO fear, and there's this kamikaze type A personality, you know, macho adrenaline, fear, I ain't afraid of no man. That like anybody that that is that emotional and passionate about saying I'm not afraid of anything is afraid of something. And and it's not a lot of people confuse skill set and courage with managing fear. They're there are completely different skill sets. Managing fear is a very cerebral thing that says, Wow, kind of like have a little bit of anxiety about about this conversation, about the have okay, what are you know, what do I need to understand here? What do I need to think about? What should I be focusing on here? And you can still move towards the danger or the goal, but if you're just in alignment with what your fear is, there are things in life. Uh, when I asked my wife to marry me, uh I was nervous. My heart was racing, and it wasn't like it wasn't like, oh my god, like I'm not like those of you who know me, like the whole start of flinch, weaponizing the start of flinch. I didn't walk up to her and go, Do you want to get married? Like it wasn't that, but it was like okay, so right, you get in, and that's managing fear. When I look back, it's an organic, intuitive path that I never wanted to get hurt. I was afraid of fighting, I was afraid of self-defense, I was afraid of fear, you know. I asked the question, and our courses if you didn't fear fear, what would you do? And if people get it, and this is the cool thing when someone says, I've got stage fright, I'm afraid of public speaking, to explain to them that they understand how to think, they understand how to see, they understand how to look at people, they understand how to form words, right? So I go, Do you know how to talk? Yes, then you should have no stage fright. Like, what is so we peel that onion so they realize, well, I'm afraid of rejection, I'm afraid of look bad, I'm afraid of forgetting my speech, and and then you start to work on it. But anyways, I'm all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

So good, it's it's interwoven into every single aspect of our life, like implicitly, right? And so, you know, we I I used I know the t-shirts, no fear. You don't see so much of them really anymore. I think it was maybe a 90s or 2000s things, right? And um, I was growing up and I saw them, I was like, no, that's what I want to be. I want to have no fear, right? But I didn't feel it inside. I didn't that that honestly was in everything that I did, and same stories with girls, same stories with football teams, and we're talking proper football now. Um, and same thing, same thing with uh any career choices that I made. I felt the fear and I thought, well, am I not am I not am I not courageous like the people that I want to be like, you know, and I understand it now and I understand how to navigate it and to control it, to recognize, well, this is the this is the start of something beginning to get it get interesting, and this is where it it kind of drives me. And this is I've always pursued that feeling. If it's if I've got the motivation to go towards what it is that uh is the other side of that, and um I've learned a ton, and I and I feel like that's the difference to a lot of what I've on the face of it achieved. And it's still being completely authentic on the show, it still inhibits me with a number of things too, because guess what? I'm human, right? And this is something that we all like feel, we all need it, we all need to recognize it and become more self-aware. I talk about self-awareness every single day of my work in life with the clients that I work with, because people are just in this blinkered state, not even aware of the things that are affecting their lives on so many levels because of the choices they're making, because of the feelings they've got. And so I know you've got a ton of thinking on this, and this is why I'm excited to kind of unpick it. But Tony, how did you kind of recognize these gaps? So, what we've spoken about there, some people go, yeah, that's obvious. Some people go, I've got no clue what you're talking about. And anytime I do think something, I'm just petrified of making a fool of myself. So, how did you recognize the gaps and start to form this business within this space?

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yeah, so great question. And and you know, uh there are so many things I wanted to say when you just talked about yourself there and how you still, even today, are inhibited by fear. Um, if we looked at fear as something external, uh like this, if we could pull it out of our head, we'd then do, oh, oh, oh, that's why it's not working. It's stuck here. Uh and that's almost what you need to do. Uh, you know, there's only one situation in life uh where you can't do that, and that's like a sudden violent encounter. You can't pause, meditate, do go in some, you know, nasal breathing, some intentional breathing. So you shift back into a parasympathetic state and meditate and go, oh uh, so I was making the the joke that almost everything in life you can call a subject matter expert, and and if you get the right one, get some good advice, some guidance or some assistance. Uh and so there's only one situation in life where you don't have time to dial 911 or whatever your emergency code is in the UK. Uh, and and and that is in personal defense when somebody's suddenly attacking you. You know, you can't get hold on a sec, I'm not ready. Okay, now you can stab me. Um, and the reason I bring that up and how I tie that to answer your question is, and this is wonderful serendipity, and I think it's it's something that everyone should meditate on. I develop my fear management by as my as a result of my passion and obsession, and they're different. My passion and obsession with trying to help people uh learn to defend themselves. In 1980, one of my students got his ass kicked in a fight. He was a 15-year-old kid that I've been training for a bully situation in school, and they had some words, the guy poked him, and my student grabbed him, slammed him against a locker bank, and said, Don't ever put your hands on me again, blah, blah, blah. And the guy dropped him with a left hook. And uh, when Mitch, this 15-year-old kid, is is with full of rage telling me, fuck that guy, and this I said, Mitch, when he threw the punch, like, why didn't you parry it? Why didn't you slip it? Why didn't you check it? All the stuff that that we've been working on. Because I've been training him for three months. His day he was my first paid student. His dad hired me, friend of my family, said, Mitch is having a bully thing in school. I don't want my son to get hurt. I know you're into martial arts. What'd you teach him? So I was teaching him how to box and how to kick. I'd been boxing, love boxing, eclectic martial arts uh artist, you know, Taekwondo for for almost 10 years at that time, no uh seven years at that time. So I was teaching him how to kick, how to punch, how to slip, how to move. I was teaching him block-based training. As I said earlier, block-based training isn't scenario-based training and it's not brain-based. So you're not learning how to juggle emotional distractions, psychological distractions. And now you're just thinking about where should my hands be? When should I move? When I said to Mitch, how did you get like, why didn't you do anything? He goes, I don't know. I just all of a sudden I got hit. I said, Well, what do you mean? What were he said, well, I was holding him with my left hand and I had my school books, my bag in my right hand. And as soon as he said that, I was like, and I make this joke that the god of self-defense hit me with a lightning bolt. And in that moment, Gaz, I changed self-defense forever. And I said, We teach self-defense wrong. And I said it collectively, we. And it and and I immediately looked at the guy. First thing I said to my student, I'm 20 years old, it's 1980. He's 15. I said, Mitch, I am so sorry. He goes, What are you sorry for? I didn't do anything you taught me. I said, No, I didn't prepare you for this. And I'm and I want everyone to understand, and you'll understand this as a coach, as a mentor. Our job as coaches, as mentors, are is to inspire performance, not to get people to memorize a formula and go, do it like this. That's all bullshit. It doesn't work. And I uh people need to, it's what we call the three eyes, my instincts, my intuition, and my intelligence. I need those to marry up because what's right for you might not be right for me. And I have so many great examples. If I look at you know, coaching fighters, you look, you look into a uh you go into a UFC or a boxing or kickback boxing match, and I've been in all three changing rooms before a fight, and there's one guy sitting there like this, and there's another guy who's walking around and he's he's pacing like this, another guy's punching his face, somebody else is like against a locker bank, just doing this. Everyone has different pre-fight rituals based on their personality. One guy's listening to Metallica, another guy's listening to rhythm and blues. And a buddy of mine, Maurice Smith, he was a UFC champ, he was a K1 champ, but one of the best fighters in the world. And I would interview over so over decades, I've interviewed uh victims of violence, victors in violent encounters, pro fighters, military uh people active and retired. And I was always in my interviews, it wouldn't say, like, where did you put your thumb when you were holding the gun? It wasn't which fist did you hit that guy with? I would I would create a conversation so that I could secretly extract, and then I was looking for the threads between victim and violent uh victims of violence. And this is important because and I'm telling two stories, I make sure I finish the Maurice Smith story and tell you, tell you about like my my student Mitch and what happened there. As I started to teach more, I realized this. When I would interview a victim of violence, and I go, Well, at what point did you fight back? Well, you know, I realized this, and my kid was with me, I wasn't going to get home, or I thought about this, or and I was looking at each each one of those individuals found something that triggered indignation. And indignation is a very special type of anger. It's like, guys, get angry now, and you go, no, think incredible hulk. And you go, ah, and then I go, indignation. You go, indignation, what's that? Indignation is that how dare you? 9-11 created indignation and unified the world, right? 100% and and so all my students for decades have been taught you need to find that indignation, but it's not just fortune cookie. Oh, I'm I'm someone's trying to drag me to a secondary crime scene and kill me. Indignation, it's not a button you push. You need there's there's actually a protocol that we teach people to extract and create what's theirs. So we come back to it's got to be unique to you. I can't tell you what it is, you can't tell someone what it is. So here I am. Mitch tells me he gets dropped, he's saying like this, and I realize, oh my God, he had a bunch of tools. It's like I give you a nice toolbox and it's got a hammer and a saw and an all and a whole bunch of things, but you don't understand blueprints, you don't understand architecture. And so I realized very quickly that I needed to teach people what is the timeline of violence, what is the architecture of violence? And I started to put together scenario-based trainings back in the 80s, and nobody was doing any of this. You know, like it was just it was replicating and reverse engineering and then looking at violent encounters and going, This is what happens, and here's a trained person that didn't do what they were trained to do. How is that even possible? Because when you go up and you get stage stright and you can't talk, it's not like I went in your brain and did a lobotomy and now you have no words. Because when you walked off stage and you bombed, you went, motherfucking shit, I can't believe I forgot that. Like suddenly you can talk again. When you when you fail at in a in a sport and you freeze in a boxing match and you you get you get your ass kicked, or on a you know, Olympic lifting, or whatever it is, you had the skill before you went out and you have got the skill after. So what happened? So I would tell people on game day, all that changes is your mindset, your belief in yourself, your ability to manage fear and use fear as an asset as opposed to as an it's there as an opponent of yours. So, all of this coming back to the question you asked me 15, 20 minutes ago, you know, uh, we're regarding the mindset and fear stuff. I want your audience and I want you to to deeply understand this that I created a system to manage fear in the most dangerous moment in your life, which was a violent encounter. So when Mitch lost his fight, I didn't go, well, dude, you shouldn't have compromised your hands. Never compromise your hands, right? You're like, like that would be like a fortune cookie thing that we tell people. Why is your hands in your pocket? You're his bodyguard, get your hands out of your pocket. Oh, you're holding your drink with your right hand. That's your transition hand to your done. Hold your drink with your support hand so you can access a weapon. Oh, okay, thank you, sir. But those are all mechanics. If you still shit your pants because the stimulus happened too quickly, because you didn't have good situational awareness, why don't you have good situational awareness? Is because you don't have good self awareness. And self awareness creates critical thinking. It's it's it's the gateway to keep critical thinking. So I immediately with Mitch, I said, Are those your books? He goes, What? I go, Are those your books on your table there? He says, Yeah. I said, Grab. Them, grab your books, grab me, show me what you did. And we reverse engineered the whole thing. And I never said, Don't stand here, don't do that. I put my arm on him, I said, Okay, sucker punch me the way he did to you. I started and I started to see what was the body doing when I was caught off balance. When we added speed and intensity, when we figured out the lines of motion, how the natural kinesiology and physiology worked, when we accelerated it to a real-time, real speed event, what changed activation was where the head was focused. I hope this doesn't hit me. I wonder if this is going to work. And now, and listen, I explain it very elegantly now. If a stimulus is introduced too quickly and it's way outside your comfort zone, your executive function gets hijacked. Your executive function controls your cognitive complex motor skills. You don't have access to them for a micro moment. You need to recalibrate your brain. But guess what? Your reactive brain through the limbic system and the amygdala and a whole bunch of other cool shit that you can't see and don't understand will take over and deploy a startle flinch, which is like a body's organic airbag to push away danger. And we figured out a way to weaponize that. Like, right? That's a cool sentence. I wasn't saying that in 1980 or 81 or 85 or 87. I've now figured out how to explain that. But here's the key thing. I started doing scenarios in all my classes. It was no longer, let me show you the punch. It was no longer, let me show you. We would do that, but we'd say, here's why you're going to do this. Here's when you're going to do this. And then we started to factor in what I called primal protective tactical. And primal protective tactical, primal, what does your body want to do before any training? Protective, I'm picking up some danger. And tactical, where I go, okay, I'm going to move first. Anticipatory self-defense. Whack. And the same, the movement patterns were based off the same uh genetic startle flinch cross-extensor chain. So I had this like amazing system where I went, I can make the world safer because I can teach literally teach people how to protect themselves better in a day, because this is based on how the body naturally moves. Most people to this day don't understand what we do. So it's fun to be able to explain it here. And most people wouldn't believe it because they they confuse learning a martial art, which you do for your whole life, with learning how to defend yourself. I can give someone a fire extinguisher and say, see that little hook there, that little pin. Pull that out. Okay, now it's hot, good to go. Grab the hose, squeeze, spray it at the fire. And you know to use a fire extinguisher. You don't need a black belt and fire extinguisher. That's learning how to use a fire extinguisher. That doesn't mean you're a fireman. So learning simple self-defense can be literally done in hours. Yeah, it just doesn't look fancy. Now, what holds people back is always up here, the fear. And so this is the whole point of this very, very long answer. And I apologize for that. I just get fired up. Is while I was developing the scenario training in the 80s, I noticed I could have we started doing these. It was like the equivalent of fight club. Literally, we were it was legendary. People would come in, we'd put on, I didn't have my high gear suits at the time. Uh those I those uh developed in 1993. We launched our first one. But in the 80s, we would use like a hockey helmet, hockey gauntlets, taekwondo chess guard, baseball shin guards. It was this Frankenstein suit. And we would get together and we would do these scenarios where I'd say, Gaz, go send over there. And then I'd say to these two role players, I'd whisper in their ears, you're gonna and you wouldn't know what it is. And I'd say, you're at a bus stop. And you had to morally, ethically, legally navigate the violence. And then if it got physical, you had to defend yourself. And I saw people would come in, it was like open seminars, you'd sign waivers, you'd come in, we'd have 10 or 12 people in the seminar, but there'd be like a guy with cauliflower ears and a busted nose who's a dorman at a rough club in downtown, right? And then there'd be a girl there uh who was maybe uh 130 pounds, and she was coming there for cathartic reasons. She'd been a uh a victim of sexual assault. I'd heard about our program. And I would see, and I'm just using these two as an example, I'd see the guy who'd been in a hundred street fights freak out in a scenario and turn and run or give up. And I'd see the 120-pound girl who is a rape victim fight and stay in the fight. And I was like, wow, like if we were just betting, and I'd go, Who are you gonna bet on? And this wasn't like mono a mono, they were like full-on interesting scenarios. We judge books by covers, so we go, well, obviously, the guy with this battle wounds uh has more experience, he's gonna do well. And I started to figure out that even though I was teaching a very practical form of movement and we were doing really pressure testing and and stress inoculating, I would see, like, why did this person perform like this? And I started again deeper, deeper into the mindset psychology piece. When I tried to research it, reading books, sports psychology, and shit like that. I was like, half of it was like, oh, I'm boring. I don't get this. This doesn't make any sense to me. So I started interviewing people. What were you thinking there? And just a simple thing like, why did you keep fighting there? And it was like, you know, the girl would say, uh, even though I knew this wasn't real, I just I never want to get raped again. Okay, let's go deeper. So, but why did you keep fighting? Why didn't you just give up? Well, I just got so angry at what had happened, and it was that indignation piece and the fear management. And so after literally 10 years of doing scenario training, I put together what became the cycle behavior, the neural circuitry of fear, understanding of scenario, and it's a really cool uh uh mind map on how to navigate and make decisions under duress. That morphed into the no fear program, the KNOW. If I get to no fear, I get to manage fear. Uh, if I if I run away from fear, if I pretend that doesn't help me, uh or or you know, I have no fear, whatever, then it's always there like a little boogeyman in the back of your mind. What is the weight of fear? So all of that answer is I want everyone to lit to understand that the most dangerous moment in your life isn't a job interview, asking somebody to marry you, telling somebody, hey, our relationship's over, sorry, I want a divorce, quitting a job, starting your own. And these are all the things that plague people in the real world, right? That create hesitation and doubt and and and you know, you why are you so miserable? Well, I hate my job and I hate my boss and I hate my wife and I hate my kids. And you do that for five years or 10 years. And there's an emotional psychological block that prevents people from fixing that. That's that's the whole fear loop. I stay in the fear loop. And if people knew that that there were ways to get more intimate with it and that vulnerability isn't a weakness, like I've got to go into this, and then that becomes a strength. But I wanted people to understand that that I discovered this through studying violence, and I think there's something serendipitous about that because I've said to people, clients of mine who I'm coaching or mentoring, whatever, and they're like, I'm so nervous about uh, you know, like an actor friend, this audition. I go, hey Rich, is there any chance that during the audition the director's gonna go, I tricked you, we're actually gonna kill you right now. Right? He goes, No. So you've trained with me, we've done the self-defense, you know that you're never gonna get dragged to a secondary crime scene, you've made that decision, right? Yeah. I said, then you're not gonna get murdered at the audition today. So everything, you're okay, right? But it's like, and and people like they they laugh at that, they go, uh, you know, and I and it you, you know, again, the the the the system is has evolved to the point where now, and I and I just love this line. I think it's it's it's it's so potent. You can't be brave if you're not afraid. That inside of the if you looked on the on the on the ingredients panel of courage on the side of your your cereal box or your drink, okay. What's in this drink of courage? It's going to say number one ingredient is fear, right? And it's gonna say maybe it'll say gluten-free. Uh, pro be careful if you're allergic to peanuts, because this drink was I'm joking now. But um, but it's fear and then a goal. My goal is to get the safety, my goal is to rescue that person, my goal is to be happy, whatever it is. But if I'm gonna make a change outside my comfort zone, I'm I'm going to encounter fear. And if I've no one ever said to me, that's okay, you're supposed to. Like I've said to fighters, hey, how do you feel, kid? Uh good coach, nervous. You're supposed to be nervous, you're about to get in a fight, right? In like in 15 minutes, you're gonna the guy's gonna try and knock you out, you're gonna try and knock him out. If you didn't tell me you were nervous, I think there'd be something wrong with you, right? And you could see the fighter just okay, and start shadow boxing again because you've recalibrated their brain a little bit. But one last thing here. Oh, I know you're about to jump in there. Like you're going, I'm waiting. I got something to say.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

My question, my questions are stacking up, and I've only got about space for two more.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

So this is such a fun story because that what I just said to you was actually like verbatim what I said to this kid, Sean, that was fighting for a kickboxing title back in the 80s. And he said, I'm nervous, coach. And I said, You're supposed to be. And I said, Hey, the guy's nervous, even like like outside. When I remember me growing up, afraid of everything. This was this was me standing on the sidelines waiting to get picked. Right? I don't look nervous because the facade was there, right? But inside, my physiology's going, my heart's racing a little bit. Are they gonna pick me last? Are they gonna pick me first? Am I that good? Do I suck? Or why am I scared? Uh, whatever it was. And then, so back to this kid, Sean, and this is so important. When you understand that people who truly help others navigate fear, understand how to create conversations and ask questions so the individual can identify as accurately as possible exactly what they're afraid of. Because if I say to you, Gaz, how do you feel? You're going to be nervous, I go, You're supposed to be nervous. That's performance anxiety. That means you're alive. And people do they're like, That's that is so superficial. Yeah, that's not what it is. I looked at Sean and I said, You're supposed to be nervous. He said, Thanks, coach. He starts shadow boxing, moving around. And I sat back down, gloating at my answer. This was in the 80s. I'm going, that was a pretty good answer. You're supposed to be nervous. The other guy. And something started to nag at me. And I always tell this story because I want people to understand, like that I said it earlier, the three eyes, instincts, intuition, intelligence. My intuition was trying to whisper something in my ear. And our intuition talks to us all the time. Everyone in listening to this call has been in a relationship, in a business deal, screwed over in this, betrayed somehow, uh, got mugged, whatever it is, got lost. And then after the event, when they survived it or got through it, everyone has experienced this moment where they went, you know, I knew that was going to happen. Where where their intuition tried to say, hey, pause and assess. But our ego or arrogance, our desire to rush or win, say, let's go. And so I'm trying to teach people how to cultivate a relationship with their intuition, and that becomes intelligence, right? And so my intuition, I was 26 or 27 years old. I'm sitting there, something's nagging at me. I mean, I realized I said to Sean, like just that fortune cookie answer. The difference between the hero and the coward is what they do with their fear. Both feel it. Costamato, Mike Tyson's original boxing coach. So I look at Sean, like, Sean, I apologize for that answer. He goes, What are you talking about? It relaxed me. I go, Yeah, but but it was it was like fortune cookie. He goes, No, it was good. It relaxed me. I go, what exactly are you nervous about? He says, nothing. It's stupid. Nothing it's stupid, right? If you're afraid of something, that's going to weigh on you and it's going to distract you. It's going to dilute your focus. I said, it's not stupid. Tell me. He goes, nah. He says, like, he says, I can go 10 rounds. I know I sparred for 10 rounds. In amateur kickboxing, the title fights are four rounds. All other up until you fight a title fight are three are three round fights. So in Canada at the time, there was a four-round fight. He had never done it, it's his first, it was a title, uh, he was fighting for the title. So in his mind, he's going, Can I do four rounds? I know, of course I can do four rounds. I can do 10, I've done 10 rounds. And he says this, he goes, I've done 10 rounds in the gym, but it's not the same as in the fight. You know, we're using 10-ounce boxing gloves in the gym. And this is like now like a six-ounce glove, and and holy shit, or eight ounce or whatever it was. But he's boring about all this shit. So I just look at him and I go, Wow, I would never have guessed that. What are the things that could distract you? Your mom's sitting ringside for the first time. You injured your rib and don't want to tell the coach. You didn't sleep for two nights and you're worried about something. I look at him and I said, Sean, can you do two rounds? He's like, Yeah, of course. I said, So just do two rounds twice. And he pauses, he turns his head, he says, okay, and he smiles. At the end of the second round, I look at him and I go, Sean, can you do two rounds? He goes, Yeah. I go. What I did is I had broken down what he had to do in manageable bites, right? And so I share that because that's what the system does. We got to give people things they go, oh, I can do that. Because nothing breeds success like success itself. And I've talked for too long. I'm not saying another word in this.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

And that's the duration podcast. Thanks for listening, everyone. So I'm joking. So there's a ton of stuff that I've got to say to that, Tony. And just right at the end there, you were talking about um breaking it down. And this is something that I've preached to people time and time again when they're looking at a big challenge, right? It's about understanding the ways that they can break it down to view it, to frame it differently, right? Uh good friend of mine, Dean Stott, he was one of the first guys that I chatted to 18 months or so ago. Um, he cycled from the southern tip of South America all the way up to uh Alaska. So, and you know, he broke the world record at the time. He wasn't even a cyclist. He's a former colleague of mine. He basically said to himself, I know I can thrash myself for four hours. And he just thrashed himself repeatedly for four hours, took a break. Four hours took a break. You know, it was 12,000 miles he cycled in the end. And, you know, from where I am to Australia, it's that plus another three or four thousand miles. It's ridiculous. But he couldn't look, that was too big a problem to see in one go. And he and he found a way to break it down what he could he knew he could do. Um, there's a ton of you know, there's a ton more stuff that he did, but it's it's it's the same principle of understanding that sometimes the problem seems too big, and that's that's gonna cause us a problem. Let's break it down and let's kind of make it a little bit smaller. And again, we we can all do that if we can stand back from the problem and be a little bit more uh deliberate in our thinking about it. But there's a that's just at the end, there's a ton of stuff. So you're talking about fear, and there's so much there that we can all relate to. Um, you know, I know my experiences are probably I'm sure it's why some people choose to speak to me because the extremity of it. Um, but the some of the things that people recognize, the the the things at school, you know. I I had an experience when I was maybe 13, 14, and I wasn't the I wasn't the worst child at school, far from it. I was a pretty good kid, but I got into a couple of scuffles and uh I performed horrendously, which was a surprise to me because I I couldn't have watched Rocky any more times than I had, I could have than I had, and performed in front of my bedroom mirror more than I than I did. But when it came to the actual situation, I was way short of where I expected myself to be, right? And this is this, and I recognized that, and I was like, well, what can I do about this? Me and my friends before UFC, before MMA, we went and bought a load of gear that we could get our hands on and just beat each other up in the back garden. And you know, because I wanted that feedback, I wanted to understand what was going wrong, and it was a situational training that I was kind of trying to generate. And I wasn't trying to be tough, I was just wanted to be able to protect myself better. Uh, that that indignation that I'd suffered was was something that I wanted to address. And it and it motivated me to go that step further than others, I guess. Fast forward uh some years, I'm I'm in the military, I'm in the Royal Marines. Um, and we used, well, they probably still do, uh not so much, some people do anyway. Um, we used to deploy to Northern Ireland, the troubles in Northern Ireland, you know, it's working alongside the police there and riot training, public order, things like that. And uh I was I was working down on the borders and it was it was known as bandit country. It's actually hilarious calling it that now, but at the time that's what it was known as. And um, there was a few incidents that we got involved in. But some of the pre-deployment training that we did, um there's this specific place down on the south coast that they used to take us to, and uh, I had a couple of tours over there, and they used to put us through brilliant situation scenario training, like our fundamental training, learning how to shoot, learning how to move, learning how to breathe, all that stuff was taught. But then the situational training they put us into was stuff we'd never seen before. Um, real teams of people throwing petrol bombs, real kind of scenarios indoors of having to interview people like a policeman would for the first time. And we just never practiced it. And and we never performed how we expected to do, even though our fundamentals we thought were was brilliant. And the worst thing for us, but best thing that could have happened, they actually filmed the situations. And you know, this was late 90s, and they by the time we reset, we went back to the headquarters afterwards, and they play these videos in an auditorium full of about 150 of us, and the th the mistakes we made were shown to everybody, and like the worst kind of feedback you can get is your peers, your friends, your people you care most about getting to laugh at your mistakes and the indignation that you've spoken about already that you felt at your mistake and being on the big screen, and like the last thing you wanted was for it to be you on the big screen, getting ripped for your mistakes, right? But the lessons that we learned and were then able to carry forward were phenomenal. And again, my career is pretty what would call us a bit of an outlier career, really, when it comes to military career. But all it is is just tons and tons of experiences, both training and real-time experiences, that have forged my kind of understanding of these mechanisms and given me the feedback and that self-reflection. Again, fast forward another kind of six, seven years, let's say the first time I went into Afghanistan, my fear, um, and and the fear I felt because of all these narratives that I was hearing about the place. You know, my first time I ran off the back of the helicopter, I've told this story before to people that I've worked with, was my my performance was awful and nothing bad happened. Fortunately, even though the evening was pretty kinetic, my my performance again, I viewed myself as performing badly. And again, which is quite key, a good friend of mine gave me a bit of a ribbon for something I did. He'd been out there for six months already. It was my first day. Um, that cut me to the bone, caused this indignation. I am not I am not that person. It's not to prove myself to others. Well, I guess there is a part of that, but really the the real thing that was motivating me was to prove it to myself that I was good enough to be in this organization to perform and do the the hardest tasks that I could put myself in. That's what I wanted to prove to myself. And and the the indignation was was running through it all to motivate me to keep going because there's plenty of people that checked out, right? There's plenty of people three, four years that went, you know what, this is actually pretty tough, and I'm probably going to go and do something else. And there's no shame in that. But there's a the there's some of us that stuck around for a full career, and um, it was that desire to be a part of that you know, high-performing team, call it what you will, but really being in that organization and and understanding this at the very end of my career, uh towards the end of my career, I should say. And uh we got a performance psychologist in. Now I've navigated all of what you've described kind of in my career and had to understand it, improve my self-awareness um and manage that. Towards the end of my career, we got a performance psychologist in and said, Gaz, you know, we're in a room full of people. And I was one of the most senior people in the room at the time. He said, Gaz, you know, when you're in the back of the helicopter and you're flying to um wherever you're going, and we we'd know that it was bad wherever we were going, you know, that's why we were going. Um he said, What are you thinking about and how are you dealing with it? And I was like, Well, that's uh that's an amazing question that in all my years' experience, I'd never shared with anybody sat either side of me, whether they were new. Whether they were experienced or not. And I was like, that's pretty important stuff, actually. And how am I controlling that fear? Because I'd learnt to, but I'd done an awful job in ever coaching and mentoring people through those problems. And this is where I love your um schematics and the principles that you've got with it, because it just makes it so real, it makes it so obvious to people when you talk about it. So, you know, firstly, Tony, on the back of what you've said, like for you, again, a bit of the biology for people, but the what is fear? Firstly, and and you've got something that you call the cycle of behavior. Do you mind talking kind of the listeners through the cycle of behavior a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 45:15

Sure. Um, yeah, and it's fascinating when you at the end of your story there, when you got asked the uh the question, what are you thinking about in the back of a helicopter? I remember I was doing um uh a private course for a SWAT team, a full-time SWAT team, and most SWAT teams aren't full-time. So if you're you know on a on a full-time SWAT team, you're you're in a really big city with good funding where a lot of action happens. And I'm sitting there one day I I I say to the group, I go, if your point man, and for those of you who who are listening to this and don't want that, is the first guy in the door. If your point guy is uh going through a potential divorce, just found out that his one of his kids is uh, you know, uh doing drugs, might be getting a divorce, having domestic issues, you know, do you want him talking about that to you guys? Do you want him sharing that before a mission? And their immediate action, their immediate action, their immediate answer was no, keep that to yourself. You know, offline, you want to talk fine, but I don't want to know about it here. You stay focused on the mission. I go, well, what if this person has been for three nights not sleeping, sleeping on the couch, fighting, totally distracted? Do you really want that person going in first if they're not a hundred percent focused? And if they're afraid to communicate about what's going on here for the betterment of the mission and for the team, are you sure? Because if we can all do each other's jobs and you go, Hey, why don't you breach? And I go, Oh, I hate breaching. Then I go in last, whatever it is, but I'll breach if if I have to. But I want to also be able to go up and say to somebody, going, Hey man, uh, I didn't sleep at all last night. I got some personal shit going on. Let me breach today so I go in last. I'll got rear security number three. You go number one, whatever it is. I want to have that relationship with people where I go, Are you okay? Like, why don't you just stay back here and do comms? And I tell people, like, you know, some of you listening to this might be going, uh, these guys are talking military shit. I'm listening to this for business stuff, I can't relate. The metaphor is this. You're in some scenarios in your life, you're the victim. And you're also the hostage rescue team. Nobody can save you. You got to figure that out. There are people that can coach you and mentor and guide you and go, what about this? Try this, try that. But what if you suddenly said, you know what? I'm autonomous. I don't need in as a business model, this isn't a good business model for you or I. It's like, hey, you don't need us. But I always, when I work with people, I go, I want you to be your own coach. I don't want you to call me up at two in the morning and go, what should I do here? I want you to go, oh, I know what to do. And you because you figured out the map, which is the cycle of behavior, which I'm going to get to. But it was interesting when you said that in that last question that you had created a pre-fight in-flight ritual that had value to junior uh operators that you had never shared. Now I started talking about Maurice Smith like a half an hour ago, one of the fighters, right? And so I'm going to finish that story here and it just works out beautifully. I asked Maurice, I said, Hey Maurice, are you nervous before fights? He looks at me and he says, Uh, let me ask you a question. And I'm going, I say, okay, I was interviewing you, but go ahead, interview me. He says, Uh, do you have a job? And I said, Yeah, I do. He said, Are you afraid to go to work? I said, No, I'm not. He said, Me either. He'd gotten to a point in his career where this was his job. This is how he feeds his family. Yeah, going to work today, uh, might get knocked out, might not, right? You know, uh, and and and he goes. When I tell that story, I have people who go, Oh, wow, that's so cool. Like, imagine that as a line in a movie, right? You know, hey, you ready? Are you scared before the fight? Uh, you have a job? Yeah. Are you afraid to go to work? No, me either. I'm going to work. But if I took a new fighter who had less than 10 fights, and I said, Maurice Smith said this to me, and by the way, this is the soundtrack that Maurice Smith listens to. It's rhythm and blues. And this is what Maurice Smith looks like before a fight. And this kid is still at this point in their career, right, walking around like this, punching himself in their face. And I said, Hey, you need to sit down on the massage massage table, lie down, and listen to you know, Barry Manilo or Barry White, or no, no, no, no, man. I need Metallica and in other words, and this is an interesting thing. Your mindset 16 years in might not be relevant to me if this is my first deployment. This is and this is a heavy thing because a lot of times what we do is in the in the performance books, we interview the guys that live through it who are now the unicorns, and they go, Well, this is what I do, what I do. And I for some reason I always had this intuition where, and I would always tell, so when I I coach a lot of coaches, and and I tell them, you need to understand the difference between the physiology of fear and the psychology of fear. If I hear somebody else say catatonic, fight, flight, freeze, all like all that, I'm like, who cares? That's all post-mortem. You only notice that after the event. Oh, they ran, oh, they fought. In real time, I need to understand what's going on here. And as much of the homework I can do in advance, like if I tell you meditation and intentional breathing practice can help with your aerobic capacity as well as self-regulation, you can't do that in real time. Like that's cumulative work, right? So you got to do the work that's the scenario training. So segueing into the the cycle of behavior, uh, and I'll and I'll get you a graphic for it so you can share it with your audience and stuff. Um, but what I started doing, this happened back in the 80s when I realized this, you know, studying people who are performing well in the scenarios versus not well, I realized that the ones that's that messed up had some sort of performance anxiety. So you jump off the airplane, uh the helicopter, you you you you're you've got enough self-awareness to know that you up. And one of your mates says, dude, yeah, if you do that again, I'm gonna shoot you because you're gonna get us killed, or whatever he said to you. Right? It'll be safe.

SPEAKER_01 52:14

Words to that effect, words to that effect, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:16

Right. And and you like, ah, yeah, but to your credit, which doesn't surprise me where you've taken your career now, and I want you, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, you probably have because you're very introspective. Uh, but that was your psychological gift, is that you wanted not just to be part of this elite organization, but you wanted to be the best you could be. And it while you couldn't put your finger on what it was, you knew in real time you didn't like how you were running, how you're moving, that your reaction time, whatever it was. Uh, and that would you off so much that you would practice or think about it or introspect or peel your own onion. And and uh, but so but that's important. How many times? And and everyone listening to this, you know, body language is 60% of communication approximately. How many times have you walked into an office or a home and seen somebody who you can tell is like sitting under a dark cloud, right? Something's really bothering them, and you go, Hey, yeah, what's up? And they look at you and they go, Nothing, why? They have zero self-awareness that they're in a funk. And then three days later you find out, you know, when it's just eventually they explode with, I'm so angry, I'm so scared, or I'm whatever it is. So self-awareness is the most important thing that we can help people cultivate. Psycho behavior is huge. It's a it's a it's a map. When you get a fear spike, meaning something gets introduced too quickly, you read a tweet. I was in the UK teaching 52 cops at one of the biggest courses ever when uh when President Trump shut down America, right? So last year, over a year ago, I get up in the middle of the night to go to the can, and my phone is just lighting up. And my kids, I got an 18-year-old, 22-year-old, and a 30-year-old. My kids only text me if there's a problem or they need money at this point, right? And if they need money, there's a problem. So, so I'm joking, but mostly, right? So uh my phone's lighting up. It says Nick, Olivia, Madison, Nick, Olivia, Nadison, Jesse, my wife. And I'm like, hey, are you okay? Are you gonna be able to get home? I'm like, what's like I don't know. They're closing the borders. They're and I'm like reading this shit, and all of a sudden, a movie starts playing in my mind that I'm stuck in Europe, that we run out of money, that we that it's the zombie apocalypse. I don't know if you get the show The Walking Dead in the UK. It's a great show, actually. Uh if you if you like follow the the the the the the message, and uh and the message is at the end of the day, people will kill people for anything, right? And uh and and and and power corrupts. So uh what I want everyone to understand is here I am a fear management expert. For over 30 years, I've lectured at hospitals, but you know, billion-dollar corporations, the entrepreneurs, fighters, tier one operators. And here's this fear management expert that is going, the borders are closed. How are you gonna get home? What's going on? Dad, I'm scared. The virus is spreading all over the world. Uh I and I sat down, I got goosebumps right now thinking about it. I sat down, my heart starts to race, I break into a cold sweat, and I'm entertaining this movie of like this movie starts in my mind. I'm gonna be stuck here. How do I get home? How do I save my family? And this happens like in like 30 seconds. Then the fear management guy says, Dude, what are you doing? And I want to share with your audience inside the cycle of behavior something we call the fear loop. In life, life is a scenario. Every day is a scenario. How you handle your day determines how you handle the week. How you handle the week determines how you handle the month, and the algorithm goes on. Suddenly realize, yeah, I had a shitty year or might a shitty life. Or you start to figure out how to circumvent these things through self-awareness. And I sat there, and the first thing I did is I took a deep breath. I stood up, went to the bathroom, got finished what I was doing, what I started, came back down, and then I started to research and I started to analyze. And then I said, okay, can I get back in the States? Yes, I'm an American citizen now. I got a passport, I can get it. Then it was like, and then another movie started. I'm not gonna be able to get out of Heathrow. It's the only airplane that that's open. Everyone's gonna be there. And then it was like, should I stay? Should I go? What should I do? But just like you talked about earlier, I my mind was creating this massive problem. And I needed to break it down just like I did with my fighter. Don't try and fight four rounds, just try fight two rounds. You already know you can do that. And then at the end of two rounds, just like your cyclist friend, I can go hard for four hours, I'm gonna do that forever until I reach my destination. I and I tell people like who likes to run a mile? Most people don't. I go, but can you run 400 meters? Yeah, well, just do that four times. And at the end of that, guess what? That was a mile. Good job, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:35

Tony, Tony, with with the so again, I I've done a lot of thinking on this, and with the fear loop that I I know you're sort of talking about now. And sorry to interchange. You've got the self-awareness, you've been coaching this for years, and you know to break it down into a sort of a smaller problem. How do you intercept the thoughts in the first place? So, where where does that so I I call it a circuit breaker? How do you create that circuit breaker to the to the thought of this is gonna happen and recognize I'm doing what I'm telling people not to do, right?

SPEAKER_00 58:10

Yeah, so so one the first thing that I tell people that's that's super that's super important. I'm just opening up my keynote just to show you a quick graphic and then we'll we'll we'll share it with you. Um, in the in the strip map that I create, it's interesting you use the word circuit break because I call this the neural circuitry of fear. And it looks like a strip map. And I tell people if you focus too hard in one area, meaning you overload that area, that creates fixation. You need to move, you need to move your mind, and the mind navigates the body. So if you want to, if you want to run, your brain has to say run, otherwise you freeze, right? You sit in the corner with your thumb in your mouth. Um, and so, and I'll show you here on on the uh on the cycle of behavior. Tony, I can get that up. I can get up stumbling. So, so what that what there is is the duress pass. So, so what happens here is this is the strip map, and this is looks like an electrical circuit. So, if you look at it, like the current has to continually flow clockwise in this metaphor. And if you focus too much on, like, so here's a business example. If I focus too much on, oh, I want to be rich, oh, I'm gonna build my own company, and then I don't break down the tasks and the steps and the goals, then it's like five years later, and I go, hey, did you ever write that book? Did you ever start that company? We're still in the scenario, right? So we got to break it down. So, but what happens here in specific to fear management is we get a sudden stimulus. In in the story I was telling about the UK, my stimulus was was, yeah, my stimulus was all these tweets coming in from my family that alerted me because right away, like that was an anomaly. And then it was like, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. And I entertained, and this is the big part here the the fear spike is the stimulus that gets introduced too quickly. The neuroassociation is a big fancy word for how your brain links up a symbol. So, you know, when we hear uh uh lockdown, virus, Italy, everyone's dying, uh, closing the border, these are all ideas for, and this is a really, really powerful metaphor in my system. We talk about the this this movie studio in your mind, where suddenly you're the director, you're the the the screenwriter, and you're the star of a horror movie that's playing in your mind, and you've cast yourself as victim number one. And that movie can last five minutes, five hours, five days, or five years. And so all of us entertain negative movies all the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:41

Constantly.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:42

I could say, I could say, uh, hey guys, you got to try out this new restaurant here. It's this type of food. And you go, you might not say anything to me, but you go, last time I ate at a place like that, I got food poisoning. Uh right. But it's a movie that's playing in your mind. They go, Hey man, you want to go on this blind date? And you go, uh right.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

The exact Tony, the example I use is I I every single morning I wake up and I walk to the bathroom normally, and my knees, my ankles, my hips, I feel like an old man first thing in the morning. And I and I I hammer myself, Gaz, you are getting old. You know, it's not it's never a positive message, but it's recognizing, well, there's a reason behind that. You know, I've got some miles on these old legs of mine, right? And so I can justify it. But yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

Yeah. Um, and and what I would do if I were coaching you is I would go, you know, identify that that has a negative connotation. And and I go through that. I've had injuries in the last few years. I had an injury three years ago where for two and a half years I couldn't work out. I couldn't walk. I mean, I'm sorry, I couldn't run, I could walk, but I would have severe nerve pain every so often. Sometimes I couldn't walk for uh 10 feet, I'd have to squat, floss the nerves. There were times I'd walk down the stairs that my legs would seize up and I'd have to grab the banister. And I would, I'd, I'd try to go for a run, my fingertips would go numb. And like, I don't talk about this a lot, but I would sit there and I'd start crying sometimes because as a lifelong athlete, I'm going, like, what is going on? And it and it took me a couple of years of rehab of uh, and there's hey, you got to go have for spine surgery, you got to go. I didn't do anything, it was all natural because I'm scared, right? And here I am, Mr. Fear Management. But my intuition said, Have you exhausted all the natural, holistic ways? And now I can get off the show and go for a run, right? I can't run, but here's the thing, guys. I can't run like a deer, I can run like like an old deer, but I can run where and so I used to get up and go, I'm so old. Oh my god, this is this is the end of it. I'm not gonna and then I change that that inner voice. I change the movie, and so going back to the movie, it's the self-awareness piece, is is is and remember, I said fear management equals time management. Have you ever gone to a movie that sucks? You spent 20 bucks on popcorn, you parked your car, and you're sitting there going, This the preview is really good, but this sucks. And you sat there for 90 minutes and you left there. Someone goes, How was the movie? He goes, Horrible, but you stayed there for 90 minutes. You've now you've now thrown away 90 minutes of your life. Most people, when I ask this question in our seminars or workshops, most people don't leave a bad movie. They cognitive dissonance and rationalization says, Well, I paid my money, maybe it'll get better. I'm gonna eat the popcorn anyhow. I've walked out of so many movies where I go, you know what? If this doesn't get better, I'm gonna go for a walk or go read a book or go do something or go answer emails or go work out or go do something. And I've walked out of so many movies, even if I like the actor, I wanted to see a good fight scene, I wanted to see, you know, sex, I wanted whatever it was that I wanted to be entertained and distracted by. I've walked out of movies. And the message here, and I think it's it's powerful if you if you you meditate on it a little bit, is I can't get time back. And if this sucks, I need to change it. And only self-awareness helps you with that. And so the movie metaphor is this is what's the movie in your mind that's hijacking you? So we use the acronym false, the big acronym, the big one to get out of the fear loop is false expectations appearing real. It's a it's a very familiar acronym. Everyone uses it. I like to, in patting myself on the back and bragging, I like to go, you know what, it's just not a fucking fortune cookie acronym. We actually have a system that we can work on and layer so you build your capacity, so you reach your potential. Everyone talks about potential, but they don't teach you how to build the bedrocket capacity. And so I tell people this false expectations appearing real is when I'm visualizing something in my mind. It hasn't happened yet, so it's in the future, but it's so severe or negative or daunting that it's immobilizing you in the present. And so, what that's doing is fear, a fear spike creates doubt. That's uniform. I don't care who you are, 10th degree black belt, best tier one operator in the world, uh, a billionaire entrepreneur. Someone says, New stimulus. If you need to look at it, it creates doubt. What is this? Do I do I need to do I need to look at the market? Do I need to you know check the bank account? Do I doubt always creates hesitation? There's a pause. Now, really skilled people, right? You're about to go into a room and you go, okay, let me, oh yeah, okay, I got a round in the chamber. There's you wouldn't check if there was a round in the chamber if there wasn't a moment of doubt. In that context, doubt and hesitation are regulated. It becomes like an SOP that you're doing. But if it's unchecked and you're not sure, and now you're clearing, and this is the metaphor, and you're not sure if you have a round, that's going to distract you.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:08

And it affects your situational awareness. So I tell people self-awareness informs situational awareness. Self awareness leads to critical thinking. If I have a moment of doubt, I need to check that out. But I need to be able to, in the movie, if I'm visualizing what if I get in a gunfight right now and I don't have a round in the chamber, that's going to make me more reactive. I'm not in my, I can't be anywhere near flow state. So doubt creates. Hesitation. Hesitation creates fixation. Unchecked, that creates procrastination. I'm I'm I'm overthinking of this thing in the back of my head. And then if I don't clear it, it's non-clinical or clinical anxiety, depending on what the scenario is. But that little sequence, the domino effect of doubt, hesitation, fixation, or procrastination, that's the be those are all the ingredients of the movie in your mind. Self-awareness says, I don't like this movie. What are you going to do about it? And it stops and it analyzes it. And this is what I mean by leave the movie. And we've all seen the memes and the stories, be the hero in your story. So it's like I'm sitting here going, I've got a toothache. Do I have root canal and hate the dentist? Should I call the dentist? And I'll give it a couple of days. So now you've what you've done is you've entertained the movie, uh, the root canal movie, where you're the star getting root canal for three days. It doesn't get better. You go to the dentist, he says, dude, you got something stuck in your tooth. It's a guess what? It's a popcorn colonel. You went to a movie, you got a popcorn, you're not flossing enough. Take these antibiotics, you'll be fine. You don't need root canal. And you go, Oh my God, thank God. But you had three days of cortisol and fear because you didn't take care of business on day one. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:50

Uh, it makes perfect sense. The scenario I was imagining when you first started the movie I was playing when you were first started talking about it was where you're leaving your house and you know, you you've traveled a lot. So I know you've sort of spent a lot of time out of the country um on lots of occasions, and you're going to the airport, but then your head says, Have you locked the front door? Right. And you you get a chance to play the keep playing that through. Good luck on enjoying your holiday if that's playing around in your head all the time, right? Or you can take action. You can be on the back of the drive and go, I'm just going to go check it. I know I've locked it, I'm going to check it. You can end that, or you can be at the airport going, hey, dad, mate, friend, whoever, just do me a favor, just go check it. Because you can do something about most of these things. And that's that's one example that you know, we we talk about public speaking all the time. I know it's uh another sort of it's a it's a classic fear. People are more afraid of speaking publicly than they are of dying, right? Work that one out. And um, yeah, but it's normal and it means people can relate to it, and we can procrastinate over what's about to happen to the nth degree, because there is a billion and one things that could happen, right? Or we can prepare, and before we go, we can be as prepared as we're gonna get and accept that. And and I know you've got a ton of things that you'd probably help people with with regards to public speaking.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:06

Yeah, yeah. So um the I I think the power of of of this, and I'll get you the the the full one. The power of having this is uh I I tell people when you learn it and you learn to use it, I want you to see it as a hologram that's always under you. You're always walking around and things are hunky dory, and you're walking around like again, the Conor McGregor swagger and everything's good, and then all of a sudden you got a pain in your side, you get in a car accident, the bank calls you, uh, there's a uh a lockdown, two weeks to flatten the curve, and a year goes by, and you're worrying about your business or your family or whatever. And that moment of fear always causes doubt and hesitation, and we pause. And now I want you to think about that. You just hit the clock like a timer going. How quickly can you clear the fear? And that's it's it's think about this. You're in a gunfight and you get a stovepipe. Should you clear the your the the the malfunction slowly or quickly? Well, you want to do it as fast as you can. So it's the same metaphor here is the faster I clear the fear, the the faster I'm back into real-time movement, moving towards my goals in life. So it's a really interesting thing. And but I want you to think about this. It's a hologram that you're walking on, but if it's super bright, you can't see it. But if it gets dim or dark, you can see it because it's a hologram. And the metaphor I tell people is this is that when things go dark, when life gets dark, there's the fear map for you where you can stop, look down, and go, I just stopped moving. Okay, stop and breathe. Where are you? And you asked me earlier, like, how do you help people navigate the little blocks so they don't overload and fixate on stuff? Well, when you learn the cycle behavior properly, there are uh like self-reflecting questions. You go, what are my beliefs here? What are my neuroassociations? What what what stimulus is triggering this? And then there's again skills and drills you do so that you go, Oh, I need to move. And the single most important thing that I share with people is fear management isn't you have no fear. Managing fear is using fear. And if you happen to have a moment where where, like I'm not afraid of public speaking, I'm I'm doing a big event, there's gonna be four or five hundred people next week. I know I'm gonna be my heart's gonna be pounding, I'm gonna be nervous before the event. And it's not because I'm worried about my presentation, it's not because I don't know what words are coming out of my mouth. I want it to be amazing. And there's people in the crowd there that I hold in the highest regard, and I want them to come up to me and go, wow, that was amazing. Not wow, you sucked. How's that feel? Like, right. And so I'm putting all this pressure on me and it's creating this adrenaline. But I because I know what it is, I'm gonna navigate it. It's when we don't know what it is that it that it bites us in the ass. And that comes back to the self-awareness piece again.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:06

Yeah, man, 100%. Again, a scenario that jumps out of my mind. The movie I'm playing in that scenario again, put into a room with this performance psychologist that came into the unit and uh he played the sound of a helicopter that was about to take off. And I'd been in this situation thousands of times, but he turned the lights off and he made us just think about it. And the situation, the environment was a classroom. I'd never been in a classroom listening to it. He played on a loud speaker. And uh, first time in my life, I'd recognize my palms were sweaty, right? And I thought, why am I why am I palms sweaty? I've done this a thousand times, and I'd normally be wearing gloves in this scenario. There'd normally be a noisy, dark uh back of a helicopter, there'd be wind and the turbines blowing past me as I got back on it. I'm not I'm not assessing the the touch of my palms, but in a classroom environment, I'd done it where I'd never been. Um, I recognized for the first time, and and that I could have easily gone, and what what's this? And it could have panicked somebody if they've not got their self-aware. But this was my body preparing itself for the thing that it's done thousands of times. And part of that is to arousal is not a word that communicates to a lot of people, but to up my heart rate, to up its kind of preparedness for what I was about to do, despite because the brain can't tell the difference between a well-played movie and reality. Yeah, it was imagining I was on the back of uh a helicopter for real, right? And this is this is where I've taken, and this is how I tried to communicate myself or communicate to other people to recognize these moments where look, what you've done it, you've said it brilliantly. You know, what's the worst thing that can happen in a situation? You're not about to get shot and killed. That's just not going to happen. You know, it's it's fear of um making a fool of yourself, or it's it's it's the um possible judgment of people you care about, right? And have you been in that situation before? Can you have you navigated that before? Well, of course. And do these people never speak to you again? Well, not many times. So, you know, we've all been there. And yeah, so I absolutely love it, Tony. Absolutely love it. We have gone like already. I said I was gonna aim about 60 minutes. We are flying over that, and um, and I appreciate your time. I never want to take up too much of it, Tony. I guess I've got two kind of final questions. Um firstly, where can people that are listening? Because there is decades of stuff that we've not talked about right now, and where where is it that people can go to know more um but also um get involved?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:39

Um, yeah. So I've got uh a page, info.toniblower.com. Uh if you go on there, probably the the first thing I would tell you to do if this sounded remotely interesting, is go get my uh I've got an e-book I put together called Making Friends with Fear. It's only nine pages long, which means you will probably finish it because most people don't finish books. Nine pages long. I joke that it took me 43 years and two weeks to write. When I when I started writing it, it took me two two weeks to edit it down to just nine pages. I wanted it to be short, but it took me 43 years of studying violence, fear, and aggression to be able to formulate the the concepts. Um I'm gonna let you know that when you download it, it's gonna put you in my funnel. I'm gonna try and sell you my no fear course because I really believe in it. I think it's gonna, I think that if you change your relationship with fear, you learn how to change your mind. If you can change your mind, you can change your life, like I said earlier. So just be forewarned, I'm gonna try and get you to invest in yourself. Um, but that's where I would tell people to start. If you know, for for corporate, uh, for business, for stuff, if you just go to my main training page, Blauer Training Systems, B L A U E R Training Systems.com, that shows you all the different companies. So if you're a friend of Gaz's, you want to see our high gear suits or our force on force training, there's a link there. If you're corporate and you want to see what we do, but those are really the two the the two main pages um that that I encourage people to uh you know to go to and they get access to all of our information. But you know, we've got I've been on hundreds of podcasts, and I'm excited. This was a great conversation, so I'll add this to to to that. But uh so there's lots of if you just google Tony Blauer and you'll you'll find good and bad all over the internet.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:37

So yeah, brilliant. And and again, I'll I'll share all those links on the uh on the show notes um and all the mediums that I'll put it through. And one thing I all I'm gonna throw you a uh most people would say a hot potato here. I'm gonna say a grenade tone. But um, like I always like to leave people listening with something they can practically do. And so, you know, what would be the one thing that we've spoken about today with regards to whether it's their fear or their movie that they can they can start doing today that will have the most profound effect, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:10

Um, yeah, I'm gonna remind everybody of the line you can't be brave if you're not afraid. Very often, when we look at something courageous in the news or we hear about something, there's a little voice in our head, and it might even be unconscious where we wonder, could I have run into that building and saved that family? Could I have, would I have jumped into that icy water and swam to rescue that dog or that person? And I need you to understand that that if somebody does something and there was like zero hesitation in it, that's not courage. They're just doing it. So if you say to somebody, how did you run into that burning building? and then the person says, Well, I like running into fires, I'm hoping to die in a fire one day. And then when I got in there, I saw this kitten. I don't I like kittens, so I pulled the kitten out, and then the fire was up. You go, okay, that sounds insane, but I got nothing to learn from you. I make this joke. I don't want to learn skydiving from an adrenaline junkie 22-year-old Red Bull athlete. I want to learn from a 55-year-old jump master who's lived through a bunch of battles, who's jumped into gunfire, and now he loves skydiving, he's going to teach me how to do it. How do I know he's safe? Because he's 55. In other words, you can't be brave if you're not afraid. And and if you if you get that sensation, that physiology, the sweaty palms, and you feel that, look at that fear as a signal for you to investigate what's going on. And and I've got uh an acronym uh that's fuck fear. And the acronym stands for face it, understand it, control it, and know it. And so that's a moment where I go, okay, if I've got time, I got the fear spike. What is that? Face it, turn and face the danger, investigate it, right? And now the control part is significant because the control part is it suggests that I may need to complete this task while being afraid. And that's a huge reframe for people. People think if they train with you or they train with me, you go, hey, help me overcome my fear of public speaking, and they go, I was afraid yesterday. I paid you this one. It's that's a misconnect. You're there's nothing wrong with always being afraid. Sir Lawrence Olivier used to throw up before going on stage before every play. Tyson used to throw up before his fights. It's the body's physiology preparing for its performance. And and it doesn't mean that we need to throw up, but it just means we need to integrate and develop a relationship with how we respond to danger.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:48

Yeah, 100%. I I absolutely love that. Um, I think people have got this huge disconnect with what they see as people at the top of their game, their reality. We don't get that message. Instagram doesn't show us that, people don't present that to the world. And I love the fact that people like yourself, like I said, and I think you're someone that's incredibly authentic, you're sharing this information, you're a fear coach in many ways to many people, and you still feel it, you just recognize it, you can intercept it, and you manage that. And that's that's it, isn't it? Do we want to live in live avoiding it, or do we want to learn to manage it? And well, you know, again, I'd certainly argue that most people want to learn to manage it better. There's there's no negatives to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:32

So yeah, people are afraid of fear. It's a joke I make. I make fear fear management needs new management. The type A males in the world and some females are like, nah, I got no fear. I don't want to talk about fear. No, I'm I'm I'm good. I don't fear any. And I said it earlier, but we'll go on and on and on. Um, I I love this conversation, man. I want to thank you for your service and what you did. I want to thank you for what you're doing now. I I think it's an amazing thing. And we've got a couple of mutual friends, and and they're they're I'm I'm so glad we connected.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:01

Nah, Tony, no, it's been a pleasure. There's a ton of people out there that will have uh enjoyed this, and I'm sure I hope and I I urge people to engage in in what you do. And I know it's uh helping me get context to a lot of stuff, and you know, I know your reasoning behind it. Uh not just you want them in their funnel, because I am deep in your funnel. Um that sounds wrong, but you know what I mean. Um, and and uh I know that it can help a lot of people. So encourage people to get involved. Tony, thanks very much. Really appreciate it, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:30

Thanks, man. Be safe.