 Well, welcome to the show, Sterling. We're so happy to have you here. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be here. John and I love talking about discomfort and the clients who join us in our programs often encounter discomfort through the coaching, as it's a big part of getting to the other side of success that we're all looking for. And you've had quite the journey through discomfort as you share at the beginning of the book. So can you share a bit of your background with our audience and some of the discomfort that you've experienced along the way? Certainly. Yeah, it wasn't discomfort that I was choosing early on. You know, I'm an entrepreneur, founded a company with my dad, very long, dramatic story short. We sold to a group in Silicon Valley where it became part of this massive conglomerate that was like the Apple Pay before Apple Pay. It worked very similarly except it was a little sensor that sat next to the credit card terminal, no phone needed, took your fingerprint there, and we raised hundreds of millions of dollars, $550 million, multi-billion dollar valuation for a while. I was thinking, you know, who needs discomfort? I'm living a scene out of the Wolf of Wall Street if you've seen that movie, right? Like models of the office, parties at the Four Seasons, offices all over the world, 700 employees. I'm like, you know, it's only a matter of time until I crowd myself the next Steve Jobs. And what I usually say is if you're not hunting discomfort, discomfort is hunting you. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing came crashing down. Housing market collapsed 2008, 2010, somewhere in there. We grew bigger than we could organically sustain with the business that we had and the whole thing went bankrupt. And thus began one of the darkest, hardest journeys of my entire life. For a while, continuing to avoid discomfort and then eventually bottoming out at my parents' house in my early 30s, which just isn't a good look if you're forced there. No. And realizing that avoiding, denying, or surviving discomfort was the reason I had bottomed out. And I turned and started stepping into discomfort and that was really the beginnings of building myself back. Now, was there a clear moment in your mind when you had this realization that I'm running from this discomfort instead of confronting it? A very clear moment. So my mom had all these things when I was a kid and she still has them. But the one that came back to me, probably because I was living in her house during this dark time, was the way out is through, if you've heard that before? Oh yeah. Robert Frost quote, to me it's always my mom, right? When I say it, it's my mom's voice saying it. And I'm sitting at the computer one day and that quote comes back to me and I'm like, you know what, Sterling? You've created this facade of success for too long. You know, I didn't embrace the discomfort or better said, I avoided the discomfort of telling friends, communities I was a part of that I had bottomed out. And it locked me into this rock bottom with no escaping. I said, okay, mom, if the way out is through, let's put this thing to the test. It's almost like as I'm having this epiphany, the email dings, and it's this just junk mail from a conference in Singapore. I'm sure they sent it to thousands of people. And I'll never forget, like the thing that scared me most at that time was speaking in public. It was something about being on display or the fear of somebody seeing me for what I really was. And in the time, I didn't just think I knew I was a failure. I'd been part of losing all this money and it bottomed out, go from the penthouse to my parents' house. And I said, okay, if the way out is through, I'm gonna go through this fear. And I hit reply and I said, why don't you have me speak best Sterling? Still have the email by the way. I don't know if the star is aligned or maybe it was one of those situations where I had nothing to lose but a lot to gain. But I ended up talking this guy into being the keynote speaker of their conference. Not like a breakout room, not a table talk, but the keynote speaker of their conference. And it wasn't until I got the legal agreement and I committed that I realized how crazy this thing was. I'm like, you've got this big failure on the resume. You don't know what you're going to say. Not to mention, you're terrified to do it. So I signed it really quick and sent it back. And it was really that moment of understanding the way out is through that I started going after the things that scared me most. And I attribute that and only that to the any success that I've seen today. I would imagine before the bottom fell out, before the 2008 housing bubble burst and everything else came crashing down around it. With having all of that success upfront, there had to been things that you were avoiding that you had felt those are now beneath me, but looking back hindsight being what it is 2020. Are there things that you would have faced now looking back that you thought at that time were definitely beneath you? I think there were probably two stages of it. One was the professional collapse and then the second stage was the personal collapse. And professionally it was the avoidance of difficult conversations. And I think that was a nail in the coffin of our ultimate failure even before the bottom fell out. Not willing to have difficult conversations with each other, with investors, with clients, so much. So I remember one Friday afternoon, we knew we didn't have the money to pay payroll that following week. I'm not proud of this by any means, but we didn't tell anybody until like the morning when they're checked and show up in their bank account. Like we just avoided those things incessantly. And by the way, spent the night drinking the worry away, right? Like numbing the pain, numbing the worry, numbing any of those feelings because, well, it didn't feel good. And then on the personal side, the discomfort that I would have hunted is asking for help. You know, I had all these millionaire friends and they're going on these trips and going out big dinners, which I joined them on sometimes. And after the company collapsed, I didn't have any income anymore. I didn't have a job. And for a while, I continued to say, yeah, I'm gonna go on those trips. I'll go out to the dinner until I'm driving myself into debt. I don't have the cash to go anymore. And I don't tell them I need help. I don't tell them that I've got a problem. What I did is I said, I'm busy. And what I was busy doing is keeping up this facade of success while my entire life fell apart underneath. And I wish, well, let me, two parts of this. One is I'm really grateful for everything that happened exactly how it happened. Like I learned a ton, the connections that I've made, where I am now, I wouldn't trade it for the world. And at the same time, I wish I had just maybe even told a couple of people, like, hey, I need help. I'm in a bad spot. I need a job, I need, I need some community to rally around here and get me back on my feet. I'm really happy that you highlighted those two discomforts because as we're gonna get through the book, obviously a lot of people view discomfort as physical, right? And we've had a lot of guests on the show who talk about physical discomfort, but difficult conversations and asking for help are two huge discomforts for many of us right now as we listen to this, this avoidance of dealing with those conversations with our partner, with our friends, with our coworkers, with our teammates, and those compound and put you in a massive bind. And then the flip side is when you're backs against the wall, oftentimes that's the biggest discomfort we could face is just saying, hey, I need a helping hand. I don't have the answer. I don't know how to get through this. Can you help? I think there's three, I call them the discomfort defaults, three ineffective ways of dealing with discomfort that many of us just get naturally, right? Discomfort doesn't feel good. So we turn to these defaults and it leads to a bad place over time and it ultimately leads to the ghosts of regret, right? Wishing that I could have, might have and what those three things are, are avoiding it, sitting on the couch and watching Netflix instead of having that difficult conversation, denying it, you know, maybe drinking the worry away or being angry about it. That's denying the discomfort in a way or just surviving, which is kind of what I did where you totally shut down, you batten down the hatches, you don't talk to anybody, you don't do anything, you just kind of keep everything on the surface okay and underneath you're like a duck, like just paddling like hell, trying to keep yourself afloat, right? And it turns out those discomfort defaults, a Norwegian study found, left people unable to act in accordance with the knowledge that they already had and I think that's certainly the case for me and it is the case for many, right? Like I know what to do to grow my business. I know what needs to be done in this relationship. I know what needs to be done to lose some weight and yet I find myself not doing it and oftentimes the remedy seems to be like hyper-discipline and don't get me wrong, discipline's huge, you need it, you must have it, it's a huge component but discipline alone won't get you there. It's unsustainable over time until you're willing to really address that underlying discomfort, you're gonna be stuck with some version of the status quo that you already have. Now that first point, avoidance, there's a funny nuance that we've experienced with a lot of our clients and that avoidance can manifest itself in the pursuit of more knowledge and information. Yes. Yeah. You're still sitting in the discomfort but you're gonna listen to that next podcast about entrepreneurship or starting a conversation or flirting or you're gonna watch another YouTube video instead of taking the action that you know you need to take. Yeah, exactly, the biggest thing I hear from people when they hear about my book and hunting discomfort is they're like sterling, you gotta look at my business, my relationships, my bank accounts, like I don't need to hunt discomfort, I'm surrounded by it. And my answer's always the same which is you're not hunting discomfort. It's hunting you. You're living with it and to your point, you're probably rationalizing why you have it and coming up with all these things you need to learn, all these new processes that you're gonna put in place, it's like you're taking a page out of Shakespeare's book where it's like tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow but tomorrow never comes, right? You can be a PhD in swimming but that doesn't matter so much if you get pushed in the pool, right? There's that conversion of purely intellectual to moving through the discomfort to actually embody that knowledge and that's what drives change. Yeah, and that realization for many is that place of rock bottom, unfortunately. It's easier at the bottom to will yourself through that discomfort than it is when, well, everything else seems to be going okay, right? It's like, I got a great job, my family's really supportive but there's this one area of discomfort. I feel lonely because I don't have a significant other or I feel like I know a lot of people but I don't have a wolf pack and close friends and that'll keep you up at night, it'll keep you worrying but it's not that rock bottom because everyone around you is, hey, that's not discomfort, that's not a big deal. Everyone's facing it. How can we start to make that identity shift around this discomfort, not from a place of rock bottom and obviously it's a very valuable lesson if you have to go through that but I hope many in our audience don't have to hit rock bottom to have that realization. Right, and to your point, when you start rationalizing why certain things are okay, it's a very slippery slope and it will lead to other things, like, oh, I'm not gonna talk about this thing, I'm uncomfortable to say to my significant other and then all of a sudden it translates into work, and you're like, oh, I'm not gonna talk to my boss about this thing I'm worried about and oh, maybe I'm not gonna go to the gym this morning and all of a sudden, over time, first slowly and then it speeds up, you end up at some version of rock bottom, whatever that looks like for you. I think what's important to understand here is that discomfort is discomfort. Have you ever experienced physical discomfort? I'm sure, like you stub your toe, right? Physical discomfort, emotional discomfort, maybe somebody's afraid to speak in public, afraid to have a difficult conversation, afraid to ask for help. It turns out physical, mental, emotional, the brain and the body process them almost identically. The research is on the University of Michigan. So much so, maybe you know this already, you can take a seat of medifin, Advil, and it will help you with emotional pain. All the disclaimers about that, I'm not a doctor, I don't suggest that, that's not a biohack, but what I do suggest is we can take the next step, which is if where you meet discomfort is the same anywhere. We can grow our capacity to deal with it everywhere. It's a muscle you build. If you wanna build your biceps, you go to the gym. Well, if you wanna build your resilience, your courage, your breakthrough results, you hunt discomfort no matter what form it's in. The confidence, the will to not hit that snooze button, avoid the discomfort of getting out of bed in the morning, right? That's gonna translate into more strength to get to the gym. Strength to get to the gym is gonna translate into more courage to have that difficult conversation. The courage in the difficult conversation is going to turn into maybe make it easier to let go of beliefs, limiting beliefs about yourself or others that are no longer working. And as we can turn ourselves away from avoiding that discomfort to looking for it, to opening ourselves up to it anywhere and everywhere, yet not only will build ourselves back from any rock bottom, but is the recipe for any breakthrough growth? We've been rationalizing why we haven't been taking action and there's a reason for that. We can go there and the other thing I wanna discuss is changing the lenses to get different perspectives on these beliefs. But in the book, you discuss that some of our beliefs get set in at a very early age. Some of those beliefs at seven years old in our conversation with Chuck Weisner, we were discussing standards and how those standards come to be and a lot of them we just accept due to the environment that we are raised. The same could be said about these beliefs. And now there are things that I have heard throughout my life on a podcast, from a friend, from a song, from a history book that had instantly changed my perspective, how I looked at a certain task to where that belief shifted changed automatically. We were mentioning that education and gaining those different perspectives will help with the lenses there. So to go back to the beliefs section, I'm sure there was beliefs that you had held due to that early success, so you never had to challenge them which caused a lot of problems upon everything crashing down around you, trying to navigate that. Yeah, certainly. And I think when we talk about lenses of beliefs, there's like three categories that they fit into. One are the beliefs about yourself, right? My personality is this, I wanna be accepted for that. Here's the situations I fit in and here's the situations that I don't, right? The beliefs about yourself. And then there's beliefs about others, others as individuals or groups. Could be I don't like my company culture, I don't like this particular political affiliation, right? These groups I've identified in this way. And the third is the world, right? How I look at the world, the world's good, the world's bad, the world's out to get me, or the world's really supporting me, right? And those three sets of beliefs are really driving everything in your right, Johnny. I mean, for me, it was actually something that happened in fifth grade. I was giving this presentation on Harry Houdini. You remember the famous escape artist we all learned about in middle school, yeah. I had told the teacher that I wanted to be last because I was preparing and I had handcuffs that I was gonna slip out of like I had this whole thing and I'm like, I'm gonna be the grand finale of this fifth grade project. And I remember getting up in the front of the room and somebody put my handcuffs on behind my back and I'm looking out at, I don't know, maybe 30 kids all in those chairs attached to the desks and a giant like 80s camcorder facing me. And I'll never forget that red light clicked on and I forgot what to say. In that moment, the teacher I'm sure it was just like, oh, Sterling, go get your notes and try it again. For me, it was the end of my life. I'm bad, I'm a terrible public speaker, I thought I was gonna be good, I'm wrong, I should never do this again. And I actually don't remember giving that talk, I'm not sure if I did, but from that point on, in fifth grade, through my early 30s, I was afraid to speak in public because I didn't want that happen to happen again. I had that limiting belief. What's fascinating about this, starting with that first category, beliefs about yourself is how many of these beliefs are built on faulty, inaccurate data and very small data sets, usually one experience, maybe two experiences. And I came from a science background. There is nothing I would present in the lab with only one experiment, no multiple data sets, no preponderance of evidence, just one time the Western blot didn't turn out, therefore the protein's not there. And I'd be laughed out of my lab meeting, but so many of us build these beliefs, these limiting beliefs about ourselves based on how one person reacted to us on that first date or that classroom where we had to get up in front of the room and say something or that conflict at work where we shut down instead of speaking up and then we self-label and we live into that belief and we embody that belief and play small. Yeah, and it's almost always that something happens. I've never heard of a baby coming out of the womb and being like, oh, this one's afraid to speak in public and this one's afraid to ask for help, right? Like you're a clean slate when you come out of baby, which means that discomfort or that lens of your belief, that limiting belief is set in somewhere. For me in public speaking, it was fifth grade. For other people, it might be something that their parents said to them, a teacher said to them, a friend said to them. And for whatever reason, that was a defining moment for them where they didn't just let it kind of slide through, but they grabbed onto it and said, this is true. This is me and this is what I'm going to define myself by. And the more that you can meet that limiting belief and get to the root of it, understand where it started, the more you can dismantle it from the source. The second category, the beliefs about others, what I find really interesting there is again, a lot of rationalization back to the first belief. So they're tied together. It's like, if I believe that I don't have this ability, then I will start to judge or believe others who might have that ability in a negative way or have certain views around them because of my own inner belief. Is there a process of working inside out? Do you feel like the first limiting beliefs we need to put some discomfort towards are the ones around ourself? Almost always. One of the practices I find that's a lot of fun and typically pretty uncomfortable is when you find people, individuals or groups of people where there's like something about them that annoys you or you don't like, or you know, like we all have that one person and they're like, I just don't like them. Take a step back from it and say, okay, well what is that and how do I exhibit that trait? Maybe identically or maybe the inverse of it. Turn it back on yourself and say, okay, is that a belief that I can maybe shift, I can let go of and give myself a little more freedom? It's got a lot of power, but it's one of the harder practices to do. As we go through the book, the discomfort that you talk about, there is a range and I think many might, in viewing some of this, think, oh, you're just an adrenaline junkie, you're just seeking out danger. So I'd love to describe for our audience the difference between discomfort and danger because we're not talking about just jumping out of planes for the hell of it, we're actually talking about a very structured manner of pursuing that discomfort, working our way through it to come out the other side with growth. Exactly, yeah, and it is a very important difference just to kind of set the playing field here. I am not an adrenaline junkie. I'm just not. And again, that might be a limiting belief by myself, but I put myself in these really uncomfortable situations, skydiving, trekking the Sahara, riding a bike across the Rocky Mountains, not because I love riding a bike and not because I love the adrenaline push, right? I do it because I understand that discomfort is a muscle and every time I'm doing one of those things, I'm getting stronger, it's getting easier for me to let go of any of those limiting beliefs and grow into something greater. Now, to your point, discomfort and danger often aren't really correlated. For example, the actual danger to myself and arguably even to my career from speaking in Singapore is nothing, right? Like I don't even have to worry about the audience throwing tomatoes at me, right? Like everybody's gonna be very kind, especially in the Singapore culture, right? Everybody's gonna smile and nod. And I knew that, but that did not diminish the fear. I was still terrified to the point where I'm ready to black out. Same can be said for skydiving. I'm terrified to jump out of the plane, especially after I've signed like 18 different release forms, but the actual danger of jumping out of the plane is actually less, much less than the danger of driving my car over there. Now, funny enough, I wasn't afraid at all to get in the car and drive there, but the plane I was. So reconciling that difference and understanding where is there actually danger? Danger according to the laws of physics, right? There's science, there's math, there's hard things that back this up. And what might make you uncomfortable is a really good combination to start being able to grow, but doing it in a safe way. It's also a good way to shake the box. I mean, they get different perspectives about things. It's to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and look back. It changes your wiring of how you see yourself. And then of course, once you change how you're seeing yourself, it's changing how you directly, how you see others. And of course, that has an effect on how you see the world. Funny, I work with a lot of leadership teams and leaders in general about reaching greater potential. And I think many of us has something inside of us that says like, there's more for you, kind of like Neo in the matrix, right? There's that scratching thing like, this isn't it. There's something more for me. The emotions of like love, joy, happiness, peace, like all those positive emotions are fantastic. But if you're denying or avoiding the more difficult ones like fear, anger, grief, shame or embarrassment, you're actually avoiding half of yourself. How can you ever reach your potential if you're only using half of yourself? It'd be like trying to ride a two wheel bicycle with one wheel, like it's just impossible. You need those difficult emotions just as much as you do the positive ones. Discomfort is actually what connects us. It's counterintuitive, but we're not actually connected to people who have the ultimate comfortable lifestyle. In fact, we don't go to movies looking for comfort. We look for discomfort in the stories that resonate with us. The heroes all face a level of discomfort. And we have so many clients come to us who say, I'm boring, you're not boring. You're not talking about the discomforts. You're not choosing to work through the discomforts. You're choosing comfort and that's what's leading to the boredom and that's what's leading to the boredom coming across in your conversations. But if you actually take the lens of, well, where am I feeling some discomfort? And can I hunt it? Can I push against it? Can I work through it? Can I do hard things in my life? All of a sudden you're no longer boring. It's much easier to connect to you. Your story resonates and you become memorable. Awesomely said. Yeah, I think about it like a rock wall. I don't know if you've done any rock climbing in your day, but if you've got- Yeah, a little bit of bouldering. Yeah, so if you've got like a perfectly sheer granite face, there's nothing to grab onto. You know, I saw that in myself where I keep up this facade of everything's perfect. I'm successful. I've got this in the bank account. I live in this place. I'm dating this girl, right? There's nothing for anybody to connect with me on. And then I'm wondering, well, why is my life falling apart? Why am I lonely and why do I have no new results? Well, as soon as you open yourself to that discomfort and better yet share it with somebody or somebody's, right? It starts to create little handholds on that wall for you to grow and for other people to connect with you. And I think that perfection of a sheer granite wall is something that maybe feels a little bit aspirational for some, it certainly did for me, but it's a facade, it's not real. It's really the sharing, the going through deep discomfort to your point AJ together that connects us and helps us grow in personal life, professional life anywhere. Now in the book, you walk us through five main discomforts. I'd love to go through them with our audience and then we can talk a little bit about each of them. As I know, John and I both have some opinions on a few of them. Yeah, fantastic. Well, the first one we've been talking a little bit about is confronting the lenses of beliefs that you have, right? The discomfort of facing reality, not the reality that you see, how you see it, right? That's the limiting beliefs of I have this personality and you're like that and the world's like that, right? You've got to be willing, I think that's the key, willing to look at those things in a new way. And it can be hugely uncomfortable and massively unstabilizing but critical. There's something to that as well. And I think all the turmoil that the West is facing at the moment, whoa globally with COVID and all where people have an idea of what's going on but they're not, they don't want to listen to anyone else's ideas of what's going on. And it's like, how could you be so angry about how somebody else sees something you can't even still man their argument. You have no perspective from their shoes of what they are seeing. So how can you be so angry? And so anytime that I get pushed back for any of my beliefs or the lens that I'm viewing things, I'm like, well, tell me how I'm seeing it. I want you to still man that my argument because I want to know that you have a grasp on it if you're going to criticize me. And there never is one, but the people that I can have a real conversation with and we can have some pushback and back and forth. Well, those folks can still man my argument and we can have an adult discussion. And in order to change your lens, you're going to have to take in consideration other people's perspectives and allow them to have them so that you realize that there's another way of looking at the problem. Yeah, and be willing to change your own and the other person being willing to change theirs. I found some very humbling brain science where if you look at your unconscious mind and compare it to what your conscious mind is actually processing and understanding at a verbal level, right? That voice that's in your head. And it's something like we're point, I'm going to get the number wrong, but you'll get the point, it's 0.00000046% conscious. It's next to nothing. It's like a drop in a swimming pool. And for any of us to look at any situation or even look at ourselves and say, I know that's the truth and there's nothing else is incredibly short sighted. To recognize that all of us know almost nothing about anything is a place to stand to say, okay, I know some things, I have some facts, but let's have maybe an uncomfortable conversation together to find a greater truth. Part of getting to the resolution of that truth is experimenting, is actually going out and getting data and interacting with more people and different perspectives, not your own shared perspectives. And all of that experience that you end up gathering just puts that resolution from as you're saying, one pixel to 4K to 8K to really understanding who you are, seeking the feedback on who you are and how you present yourself, which is a lot of what we do in our coaching programs, but then also putting yourself in more situations. So if you have that belief about yourself in this one situation, well, have you tested it around different people? Have you put yourself in that discomfort in other ways? Or have you felt it once and then retreated? Well, I think that's a perfect segue into the second major discomfort, which is self-doubt. And self-doubt stops many, many times in my own life, but it's that self-doubt of people being worried about proven wrong because they've staked so much on this is my identity, this is the truth, this is the only way it can be to be able to question themselves is just too painful from an identity standpoint. So that the self-doubt becomes incredibly limiting in and of itself and kind of reinforcing point one of your limited views. I think a big problem and we've talked about this a few times on the show is this idea that more successful people don't face self-doubt because we don't celebrate self-doubt as a society. We don't have that difficult conversation openly. We, as you say, only try to paint ourselves as that slick granite wall, that duck who's just effortlessly swimming across the surface, not realizing that the people we look up to, they're facing incredible amounts of self-doubt. Yeah, no doubt. And the third is kind of all tied in, all discomfort kind of reinforces itself. That's the fear of exposure. You know, it's somebody going to see me for what I really am. And it's fine for most everybody, for others to see the successes, but those failures or those things you're embarrassed about or worried about, those are something that just naturally many of us will tuck away and hide and will again end up like that duck where we're swimming like crazy underneath and on the surface it's, ah, everything's fine here. I think what strikes me in that and I'd love to get your viewpoint on this is how much of, again, we try to talk about all these other layers of discomfort, but actually handling your physical health, starting with your own body and the way that you show up in the world, tackling the diet, the exercise, the moving your body and strengthening from the inside out, how much that creates the opportunity for all these other beliefs and growth that we've talked about. Yeah, there's no doubt. I think it's how do you see the world and that's one of the lenses of belief and if you see it as something that's out to get you or you have no opportunity or no chance to reach the level that you're at, then it's going to start undermining the actions that you're going to take because who would take actions towards something that's seemingly impossible? Nobody, right? Like it just wouldn't make any sense. Definitely some insanity, right? Exactly. Yeah, and as you can get your physical health in shape, I think that's a really great litmus test for how you see the world. Like you build some belief in yourself saying, yeah, I am going to be here for a while. My health is important and the things that I want to achieve from this healthy state of body and mind are important, they're achievable to me. Yeah, it creates that solid foundation to build on all these other areas that we've talked about. So what is the fourth discomfort? Challenges, something we all know very well, right? Never heard of it. It's one thing to talk about limiting beliefs and say it's all limiting beliefs, which it is, but at the same time, there's hard realities in the world of the physics that we have to deal with, right? There's only so much money in your bank account right now and you can go look and check. There's only so much time in a day. No matter how hard I work, how much I change my limiting views, I can't change the number of hours that I have to work with. You need to be able to overcome those things or maybe better said, work through those challenges, not view them as dead ends and where I need to stop and up. I've hit this challenge, I'm done, but it's instead a place to really kick in and dig deep for some creativity, some determination, some innovation for yourself, for your company, rather than just saying, eh, it's not for me, I can't do it anymore. What I love about this is the more challenges you face head on, the easier it becomes to deal with the future challenges, right? It's like the more you run in the opposite direction from these challenges, avoid them, ignore them, or pretend that they're not there, the next challenge after that is gonna be even more difficult for you to face. Yeah, I think about it, I'm sure you've heard this before is if you're not facing any challenges, what are you doing? Like you're definitely not growing and best case scenario, you're doing the things that somebody else has already proven to work. Fine, but you can't expect any breakthrough results from that, it's only once you start questioning the status quo and how everybody has already done it. Even if there's a successful best practice, does it start opening the door to some incredible breakthrough results? Well, what I really appreciate about your story and your message is that many of us feel that if we reach a certain level of success, we can fortify ourselves from a lot of challenges that we face. And I think the pandemic has shown us it doesn't matter what the zeros are in your bank account, we're all facing this unique challenge completely across the globe. And this idea that once I hit this, once I check this box, once I reach this level in my bank account, then it's gravy. Then it's just smooth sailing and coasting along. Life is an infinite amount of challenges. Every day you're on this world, on this planet, you're gonna face challenges. It is a game of survival ultimately, and there's no cheat code to get you out of those challenges. No, I speak with a lot of entrepreneurship groups and early stage companies do a lot of mentoring, that kind of thing. And what I hear most often is exactly what you just said, AJ, which is I want freedom. And once I hit a million dollars or I have this relationship or this client, then I'm free. And I can tell you from knowing people that have made tens of billions of dollars, freedom doesn't come from a bank account. It doesn't come from a client. Freedom comes from being free of discomfort and you can do that right now. In fact, it's the only real and sustainable freedom that there actually is. Let's unpack that a little further because that's pretty profound. I think it's easy to externalize what freedom looks like. It's very sexy. Like, oh, I want seven figures and once there's seven figures in my bank account, I log into Capital One and I see a million dollars in there, then I can relax. But what you don't realize is that your life is going to change and you're going to change the point to get to that million dollars. You're going to be a different person and you might look at that bank account when you have a million dollars and say, well, actually I need 10 now because I have this house and this business growth and this significant other and this many kids and I gotta pay for college and I gotta pay for this car and all these things. A million dollars isn't enough and so you're on this treadmill, this rat race of looking for freedom but looking for it in the wrong place. Now, when you free yourself from the attachment to those things, thinking that freedom exists in the tangible world, you're all of a sudden playing a different game. You don't need a million dollars, 10 million dollars, a hundred million dollars, any dollars to give you the freedom to do the things that you want to do by breaking that discomfort, by becoming free from the discomfort that is limiting you now. It's not the money, it's the discomfort, it's the self-doubt, it's the challenges, it's the fear of exposure. By breaking free of those things, you will get the results that you want. You'll hit that seven figures in your banking app and you will not be restricted or restrained if something happens, the housing market collapses again, there's inflation, there's a war in Europe, like all of these things are not going to stop you. You still have freedom, you have autonomy because it's not tied to physical things. Does that make more sense? Yeah, and I think it's an important perspective to not only hear but also to see you embody and realize that much of what we are seeing in pop culture and in Western media, this definition of success, this idea is attached to that net worth because it's the easiest way for us to measure ourselves against others. So we put way too much weight on that number, not realizing that, guess what comes with that six figures, seven figures, eight figures, nine figure headaches. There's more challenges ahead. The more successful people we've met, the bigger the challenges they're facing, the larger weight on their shoulders. Yeah, no question. And oftentimes, I wouldn't say exclusively, but oftentimes they feel less of that weight because they're free from being tied to looking for success in the tangible physical world. And that freedom makes it, gives them the ability to handle whatever weight on their shoulders because they know, no matter what happens, they'll be able to deal with it. I think you said it right there. That money allows you to pay somebody else to deal with your problems while you go do something else. But once that money goes or that person leaves, that problem is still there. And it will stay there until you actually physically, mentally, emotionally deal with that problem. And this goes back to something else that you were mentioning, that in order to get the seven figures in the bank account, you have to become a person that can put seven figures in the bank account. Which means who you are, your beliefs, how you go about things, the lenses that you use in order to achieve that will become what you need to do that. And so we have, I hear it all on the phone all the time, of oh, I have the perfect mindset for this, I just can't do any of these things. Well, if you actually had the right mindset, you would be able to do these things because you would have the beliefs that you would have said that sentence. Right, so this goes back to that you have to change your beliefs and your lenses in order to make these things a reality. That means that you have to commit to overcoming the challenges that allow you to change those beliefs. In the book, you encourage everybody to commit to something, and I would love to go into that now, because it was the only self development book that I had read where you give an argument for tattoos, and I love this, so go for it. Yeah, but just briefly, so we don't lose the thread, the fifth discomfort that everybody deals with is the discomfort of the unknown. And we live in this facade of thinking that we know what tomorrow will bring because we've got the weather report, traffic report, stock reports, like everything tells us tomorrow's gonna be pretty much like today, except it's gonna be 70 degrees, not 60. But ultimately, tomorrow's not promised to any of us. At any level, and that's a discomfort that you might not be dealing with at a conscious level, but you're unconscious, maybe an earlier version of yourself definitely has to deal with, and it's probably running from that discomfort. Now, I think, Johnny, back to your question, one of the greatest ways to deal with that is to make commitments. I call it get a tattoo, right? Commit in a way where there's literally no going back. I used to read those Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid. I think I read these. Oh yeah. This will tell you partially how I got into the rock bottom that I did, but I would read those books and whenever there was a choice, right? Go down the hallway or go through the door. I would keep my finger on that point and read both of them and then decide which way I wanted to go. And then, of course, I get to another decision point and I keep my finger there again and all of a sudden, I've got all my fingers in the book. I can't remember where I am, what all the options were and I'm stuck and I don't think I ever finished any of those books. Now, there's this illusion that having this freedom of, maybe that's the wrong word, having the optionality of all these choices is a good thing. So you should play your life and your business to maintain the most number of options as you possibly can. And if you're somebody running your life and business like that, my money is on, you're probably feeling pretty stuck because just like me with those Choose Your Own Adventure books, you get overwhelmed. It's a little bit like the paradox of choice. I've got all these choices, I can't decide, I'm not gonna make any of them and now I'm stuck. When you commit and you pick going down the hallway or opening the door, you pick that investment or you make that proposal or you commit to your friend or whatever it is, it actually simplifies life and it progresses you forward. Now, it might not be exactly where you want to be, but it will be somewhere other than where you've been and that's the important part because from that new vantage point, you're gonna see things differently and there will be new commitments and new steps you can take. Well, what I find so fascinating about that and this uncertainty piece is so much of our time as we switch from just needing to survive as humans, like where's my next meal gonna come from and how do I avoid that run-in with a bear to this planning mindset? Johnny and I laugh because we talk to clients who are stuck, but they're stuck constantly planning and it's this sequential thing in their mind and it's like, well, when I buy the house, then I'll get the coaching. When I get the NFTs, then I'll get the coaching, then I'll get the relationships I want and they're in this constant state of waiting. They don't see it as waiting because there's something that feels good about planning and something that feels good about strategizing and gaming out all of this. It allows this self soothing of the anxieties and the discomfort around us, but it's not actually fixing the discomfort that's holding you back. For survival standpoint, I'm glad you brought that up, but had our ancestors avoided the discomfort of being scared, they wouldn't be our ancestors, right? They built the house or they found a cave or if they avoided the discomfort of being hungry, they just wouldn't eat, right? Survival forced them to deal with the source of that discomfort, what it was coming from. And if you didn't solve it, well, you'd probably perish. Now today, thanks to the luxuries of modernity, which I'm very grateful for, for many people throughout the world. It gives us this option to say, yeah, I'm not gonna deal with that discomfort. I'd rather sit on the couch, watch Netflix in order of pizza. Don't get me wrong, I've done that plenty, there's a time and place for it, right? But if you do that too much, you start stacking up these problems in your life, discomforts that you're avoiding, and it leads speaking from personal experience just to massive anxiety and fear and worry and all of these things because you haven't solved anything. When you get to the source of that discomfort, you dismantle it from where it started, it gives you freedom, it gives you autonomy, it gives you more results because you're actually solving things and moving forward. It's not rocket science, but it does take something to kind of think through how that actually works. It gives you relationships, a better relationship with yourself and a better ability to communicate and build relationships with others. You're not bonding over watching that latest Netflix special. You're not bonding over your Domino's Pizza Order. You're actually bonding over the experiences that you have that involve you facing a level of discomfort and admitting that there was discomfort there. We don't connect with the perfect version of someone else and they're not gonna connect with the perfect version of you. So it's about time you start looking for ways, as you say, to hunt down this discomfort in your life, to face it in meaningful ways. If people remember back to a time when things didn't go as planned, right? They were uncomfortable, something went south, a trip went bad, the flight got canceled, the embarrass yourself on your stage, whatever it was, I'm willing to bet that at least some of those experiences you look back on as some of your best times. Absolutely. Right? Like in retrospect, you're like, wow, that was a great experience. If it all went perfect, you're probably not even gonna remember it. It's just something like, I did that thing again. But as you get into the discomfort and you use those challenges or things not going as planned, as an opportunity to create something new, you turn towards the discomfort, not away from it. It is where there's this profound depth and meaning and connection. And well, I think it's where all the fun in life is as well. I wholeheartedly agree and you said it best right there of when you have meaning and purpose or you're looking at these otherwise horrible events that happened to all of us, the plane trip or the following on stage or any of these things. Right. When you look at them through a philosophical lens or the lens of learning or experience, they are the most profound moments of your life. They're significant. They stand out. Each one of those events has changed you in some way for the better. One of my favorite things about gaining different perspectives and why I love philosophy so much is because it gives me many different lenses to view that experience from. And one of my core values is always to find the humor in anything. So there's a learning piece to my core values, seasonal signing, but also finding the humor. And once you have pulled something that can make you a better person, they go back and have that lens of humor to laugh at it and laugh about it. And then that allows you to share this moment with other people so they can all have a laugh at it because they've experienced it. And maybe they didn't find it so funny for themselves going through it for that time, but hearing about it from you, they're like, oh my God, yes. I had that happen to me as well. I'm not the only person that the world is coming crashing down on. Right. And it might give that person some freedom to share their story and connect with somebody else like that. It is definitely a community build there, but I want to go back to something you said, Johnny, which is those moments of discomfort. Yes, all four looking back on them as a moment to laugh or to learn and everything along those lines. But I also think it's those moments of discomfort that give us the ability to unshackle ourselves from the beliefs of the past. Right. I think especially on social media, I see all these mindsets like have a growth mindset, positive mindset. I'm like, you can't just change your mind most all the time. I can't just decide I'm no longer afraid to speak in public. I can't just decide that I'm no longer gonna have any self doubt, right? Like the human body and brain don't work that way. But when you go into that discomfort, it's a mechanism to help free you from that discomfort and shift your beliefs from the source. And that's the only way to do it, right? If you're just saying, ah, intellectually, I think this, it won't work. You gotta go deep. Anyone can be positive-minded when they're comfortable. Can you be positive-minded when you're running out of rations and you still have a lot of this hill to climb? Can you still be positive when your plane just got canceled and it's gonna be by the skin of your teeth that you make the wedding? Yeah, exactly. And I think it's worth talking about the two kinds of goals that humans can have. And the first are finite, very important, just specific things that happen at specific times, right? I wanna make this much money. I wanna travel to these places. I wanna launch these NFTs. I wanna have these connections. Great, you need those. You must commit to those and you must do everything within your power, going through the challenges, the self doubt, the fear of exposure, the unknown, to go through those and achieve those finite things. But what I've learned really from a lot of the community that we built here, that no matter what community, is that they're not the most important things. They might be necessary rungs on the ladder of growth, but what matters at the end of a life and what matters at the end of the day are not those things. And you're hearing that from somebody that's thought about getting there a little bit early. It's the infinite things like love, joy, gratitude and peace that somewhat ironically, no matter what happens, cannot be taken away from you. That become the most important things. And to your point, Johnny, when you bring those infinite mindsets, those infinite emotions, love, joy, peace, gratitude, all those things into the moments of discomfort, the moments of uncertainty, you transform everything standing in your way. Things look differently and I guarantee you you'll at least see some positive actions to take to take steps forward. I'd love to speak to you now is a lot of clients that we see in our program and I'm sure a lot of listeners have this very lone wolf mindset and they avoid the discomfort of exposure. So they go hard on the physical and they love climbing mountains alone and going at life and facing life's discomforts alone. And then they start to rationalize, well, I don't need friends. I don't need a social group. I don't need a street gang as you call it. And they find themselves tangling up in this idea and this identity that I can face the world alone. I'm a lone wolf, that's my identity and they hit another discomfort that they weren't expecting and they realize at that moment in their life that they really need that street gang. They really need that wolf pack. It is not enough to face the world alone. Let's talk to that member of our audience because I know Johnny and I work with them a lot in the X Factor Accelerator and I love this concept of finding your street gang because I think it's so key. Yeah, well, what you pointed to is actually a fear of exposure in disguise, right? Like I'm not willing to trust again or I'm not willing to put my fate in somebody else's hands for something big, something small and you end up living into this illusion that you can do it all yourself. Well, I promise you you can't. You don't know how your cell phone works or how the internet goes or how to raise your cattle to take care of the food needs of your family, right? Like we need people, modern society to any degree requires many, many, many, many people around you to support the life that you have and thinking anything but anything other than that is just a lie, a lie you're telling yourself probably because you've had a discomfort in the past and you're trying to just kind of strong arm it and ignore it. And to your point, it doesn't work. It might work for some period of time but there's going to come a point where it fundamentally doesn't. It's just not sustainable over time and what you need, what everybody needs to move through this discomfort and I would say move through life is what you said already is a streaking. I'm not suggesting anybody do anything unlawful, right? Like I know you've got kind of a rambunctious audience so I'm not suggesting you should do something that's against the law. You don't need a bandana, you don't need a switchblade but it's about surrounding yourself with people that are going to hold your commitments and your growth in a higher regard than your feelings in any given moment. And I think self-accountability is fantastic. It's necessary and I think a lot of speaking as a former to some degree still a lone wolf you say like, ah, I'm going to hold myself accountable for that. And I think self-accountability is perfect for maintenance. If I'm reliable to go to the gym five days a week I don't need Johnny to call me and check in with me every day, right? I'm already doing it. And that's usually where this accountability comes in. Like I already know I'm gonna do that but I'm gonna be accountable just so I can kind of have this facade that I'm reporting to somebody I'm doing the thing that Sterling said, right? That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm talking about make a big declaration, commit to something that you actually don't know you can do if you're commit to something you already know how to do, well, great. Like you're already doing that, right? It's that growth piece. If you do that and you ask somebody and I don't care if it's a significant other or a friend, a drinking buddy, what matters is that this person's gonna go toe to toe with you and not say, ah, you missed your deadline or you missed your wage or you missed your sales numbers. Sorry, we'll check in again next week. They're gonna go toe to toe with you and say, why? Where did you go wrong? Were you not taking the actions? Were you worried? Were the actions ineffective, right? How can we work together to figure out how to achieve that thing? And by the way, now let's set another checkpoint next week. And it turns out that the research shows when you're personally accountable to somebody specific day, specific time, specific deliverable you're not 80%, not 85, not 90% more likely to achieve your goal. You're 95% more likely to achieve the goal. It's insane. It's almost like if you actually want to achieve something, tell somebody about it and ask them to hold you accountable. You're way more likely to do it. I think that's such a powerful shift for those who are on this lone wolf path. And unfortunately, we hear it in some of our clients who are in their 50s and 60s when they join us in X Factor Accelerator and they say, I've gone alone for so long and I've checked all of those other boxes. I got the bank account. I got the safety and security that society tells me is successful. I don't have anyone to share it with. I don't have anyone to go out and enjoy all the fruits of my labor with and I don't know how to start now. And in large part, they sought out the comfort of, hey, I don't need this exposure. I don't need to trust others. I don't need to show that side of myself. I don't need to get into small talk and surface level relationships. But as you said, there becomes a point in every single person's life. And for some of us, it's sooner rather than later where you realize it's greater than just you. And all those self accomplishments that you've been paddling towards, you've been racing towards, you feel will fulfill you. They're empty. They're finite goals that you've set out and you've bought into society's rules and views that will make you successful. Yeah, and that's not where fulfillment is. It's not where freedom is. It's not where anything is other than maybe the specific thing. And you're not even guaranteed that. And so to your point, there's a couple other, let's call them street gang members that I think are important. Accountability is huge, right? Let's put that at the top of the list. But you also need inspiration, right? Somebody that's going to encourage you, help you, support you, look at things newly, maybe shift your lenses of beliefs. They're gonna inspire you, light that fire with inside you to want to go forward. It's not only knowing what to do, but it's caring and having some personal stake in why you're doing it, what your purpose is that keeps you going. You also need mentorship, right? And I don't care if we're talking about mentorship in your job, your spiritual life, your relationships, but somebody that knows that particular field with some level of expertise that's beyond your own. And they're going to be able to show you in a very tactical way how you grow in that area. And the last, but certainly not least, is you need love. And not necessarily romantic love, but through the journey of growth, you're going to fail. You're gonna mess up, you're gonna look bad. You're gonna have everything in your mind, again, speaking from personal experience that tells you you're not good enough, you shouldn't do it, turn back, this is dangerous. You're jeopardizing your entire life and career and your savings and everything else, right? But that person that's there for you from a love standpoint accepts you exactly how you are and exactly as you're not. And it reminds you of that self-acceptance that maybe you lost sight of yourself. And when you've got that, you've got kind of those four people around you, you become unstoppable. I'm not gonna say that you won't fail, you will, but they're going to be failures that point you in the right direction to breakthrough growth. So well said. And I really appreciate you sharing that perspective. I'd love for each and every one of our audience members to work to build that legal street gang in their own life. And I can definitely attest to the power it has in my own. We love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you think makes a unique and extraordinary Sterling? You know, I think it's having found discomfort as a muscle for success. You know, it's not something to turn away from or avoid, but latest research out of Yale at least directionally shows you're up to four times faster at learning. You know, had I known this, I would have been sitting in the front row on a bed of nails in college. You know, this is a little bit too late for that. It's going after some of that stuff myself and moving through those really uncomfortable moments. And I guess I can pat myself on the back here and say having the courage to share it with other people that not only is my X factor, but it's become what my life's about. Well, thank you for sharing your journey with our audience. Johnny and I really love the book. Where can our followers, listeners find out more about all the great work you're doing? Thank you for that. It's been a real pleasure. It's been a blast. You can find everything about the book and about me and the work we do with individuals and companies at sterlinghawkins.com. All my social media links are there as well. I'm fairly searchable though. There aren't too many people named Sterling Hawkins. Thank you for joining us, Sterling. Thank you.