 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So a while ago, Adam and I and Justin, the three of us, the three amigos. No, the three amigos, and I wasn't there. No, you were? No. I was there, but I was talking to another person. You were sitting in a different table. No, you were at our table. Was I? Yeah, you sat at our table. Remember you and I talked shit to somebody? Who was it that said this? That's when someone made a comment. I know, I remember. Yeah. The speaker at Spartan said something, like asked a question, and Josh Trent's hand shot up to answer it. And then you are like, and then Justin out of the door is like, I know things. Totally embarrassed. We were laughing so hard. But you were at our table, so I was sitting next to this very bright-eyed woman with lots of energy. And she was just, I could feel her vibe. And so me and her started talking, oh, this would happen. I said something about conquering your fear. And she said, no, no, no, no, no. She goes, don't conquer fear. She goes, you need to have a good relationship with it. And I said, why me? Let me correct that, sir. She says, be intimate with it. Yeah, be intimate with your fear. And so we started talking about this. And she told me that she was named the world's most fearless woman. At one point, she was a world champion at downhill mountain skiing. This is when they drop you off with a helicopter at the top of a, no joke. It's some gnarly shit. Dude, we watched a video of her on YouTube yesterday when we interviewed her. And these are the videos that you send to your friends. Well, we should do magic. It's the Red Bull videos. These are the ones where like avalanches are coming after you and stuff. She was sponsored by Red Bull. We'll definitely have Jackie post one of her videos. She's got so many great videos. The other thing that was cool is that we're at this, that Spartan event. That was Joe DeCena's private dinner. And there's, I don't know, maybe a hundred to 200 influencers. Everybody in there are CEOs and big, big name people. Bad asses. Yeah, a bunch of bad asses. And she was the old- Which is weird why they invited us, but anyway. She snuck in. She was the only one that I think intrigued the both of us so much. So we're like, we got to have- Oh, I got her phone number right then and there. I'm like, we need to have you on the show. And she told me that she wrote a book called The Art of Fear and it's about, you know, developing a good relationship with fear and her techniques that she learned from Zen masters and years of study that she now coaches athletes and professionals on to improve the performance. Dude, she was untouchable for 12 years. For 12 years, her records and shit were untouchable. It's how dominant she is. I heard that like even a lot of females now are just learning how to do what she did years ago. She was doing that on like, like those that understand skiing and stuff like that. These are like the old school skis. Like technology's come up. Those skinny ones. Yeah. It's came a long way. Like the skis that these guys are riding and girls are riding today versus 25 years ago and stuff. Totally different. She was doing shit that people are barely learning to do now. She was doing it back then. When was she doing this? It was, I think it was 10 or 15 years ago, but nonetheless- 15, yeah. Yeah, she's a bad ass. And she did all this stuff and then found herself in this strange situation where she hated skiing. She was having all these weird, you know, like physical effects and she had to stop and figure out what was going on with her. And it was really her relationship with fear. The same relationship that propelled her to do all this crazy stuff was the one that she needed to fix so that she could live the rest of her life. Fascinating story. We have a great interview with her. We asked her a lot of good questions. We challenged her on a few things, but I highly recommend this book. I've already started it and it's gonna be one of my favorites I can tell. So this, we're talking to Kristen Ulmer. That's the person we're talking about. Her website is Kristen Ulmer. That's U-L-M-E-R dot com. She does coaching on this kind of stuff. I think you can get her book on that site. If not, I'm sure you can find it on Amazon. It's The Art of Fear, Why Conquering Fear Won't Work and What to Do Instead. She's also on Facebook, Ulmer dot Kristen is how you find her. I also want to mention this month we are giving away the NoBS six pack formula with the enrollment of any bundle. Now here's a few things you want to know about maps. If you want to build maximum strength and muscle, enroll in maps anabolic. If you want to sculpt your body like a bodybuilder, physique competitor or bikini competitor, we'll then enroll in maps aesthetic. If you want functional athletic performance, broad spectrum athletic performance, that's maps performance. If you like to work out without any equipment at all at home or on the road, that's maps anywhere. And if you're a personal trainer that wants to up your game when you train your clients or if you're a person interested in alleviating some of your pain and correctional exercise, that's maps prime and prime pro. And what we've done with the bundles is we've combined several of these programs and discounted them like 20 or 30% off. And they're based on particular goals. For example, if you want to get real serious and you want to have a whole year planned out for you, that's the super bundle. But we offer other bundles. Any bundle enrollment, you get the NoBS six pack formula, which is a maps program designed just for your midsection or your core to build visible abs. You get that for free when you do that. You can find all of those at mindpumpmedia.com. And without any further ado, here we are interviewing Kristin Ulmer, the author of the book, The Art of Fear. When I met you at the dinner, it was at the Spartan race. We started talking right away and I looked at Adam like, I love this lady. She'll just say whatever's on her mind and Ty was great. And so we're happy to have you on the show. But a little bit of background, Kristin, you have an interesting background before we get into fear and what you wrote about in the book. Can you tell everybody a little bit about what you, you were like one of the top skiers in the world? I was recognized as being the best woman, big mountain extreme skier in the world for 12 years. And then I was also voted the most fearless woman extreme athlete in North America by the entire outdoor industry, beating women in all sports disciplines, not just skiing. What? Okay, so let's go, let's back up for a second. What is that category, big mountain? Extreme skiing. So basically I risked my life on skis for a living. Like if it was a, you fall, you die, descend or a big cliff jump, that's what I did. And it was during the 90s though on skinny skis. And I was definitely way before my time, like girls today, 25 years later, are just starting to do the things that I used to do on skinny skis on the new ski technology. So is this the skiing that you see? I'll watch these YouTube videos where it looks like just someone's just going off the side of a mountain and it does look extremely dangerous. That's what you're talking about. Yes, I risked my life. You did that, but you did everything following me. Yeah, I was on the US ski team for moguls as well at the very beginning and very quickly I had to make a decision in which what do I do? They're two completely different sports. And so I picked the big mountain extreme skiing, which was definitely the road less traveled at the time. Wow, now you did this in a relatively short period of time. I heard you say in another interview that like you started, you picked up skis at a relatively old age compared to other people who do this their whole lives before they get to that level, you started like 20, right? Or something like that? Well, I skied since second grade but I'd never had any formal training and I skied in jeans until I was 20, which is another way of saying I wasn't very committed to the sport. I wouldn't even, and I didn't have rich parents and it's really rare to find a skier, professional skier who didn't have rich parents, right? Especially on the US ski team. And so I'm kind of the poster child for it's all mental because I became world-class at two completely different sports, mogul skiing and extreme skiing without any formal training. And I was competing against girls on the US ski team or in the world that had had the best trainers their whole lives, had gone to high school ski academies. It was very unusual how successful I became without any training. Well, now doing this kind of competition and sport, now your book is the art of fear and so you're writing about fear and how to handle it and work with it and all that. Was this part of your training doing these type of races and sports? Was that where you developed some of the concepts? Being a fear specialist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a scientist. I just have at this point, 30 plus years of practical real world in the dirt experience of dealing with a tremendous amount of fear to draw from. And then also studied with a Zen master for 15 years has I've been operating as a mindset sports coach for the last 15 years. And I've just really had some real world experience of experimenting with what works and what doesn't work in super practical terms. Did you go to learn all this stuff because you were battling with some issues? I find a lot of times when people are very proficient in a particular area, it's because they had to figure it out for themselves. That's what at least would drove them to, like you said you were with a Zen master, were you dealing with something for yourself that drove you to that? Absolutely, I was called fearless. I felt fearless, I didn't feel any fear. It never even occurred to me to be afraid out there, which is bizarre. And it seemed like the media was more fascinated with that than even my skiing itself. You know, this thing that I could do with fear. And what I realized later is that I was not only not fearless, but fear was behind every single moment of every single decision I made, both as a motivator is like the thing I was chasing, I was actually addicted to fear, but I was also repressing fear to the extreme. And we can, you know, the language conquer, overcome, let go of fear, like I was just really good at that. And you can get away with that for about 10 years. And then all of a sudden your life just starts to go south, become unraveled. And for me, I started having PTSD because I'd seen a lot of near-death experiences, accidents, I'd had a lot of near-death experience, seen a lot of friends die in the mountains and I didn't know how to deal with the emotions properly. I was burnt out because I was fighting a war with fear and it was taxing all my resources. I became injured quite a bit because I became such a rigid stoic person to not be afraid. And when you think about trees, you know, if trees are rigid and there's a heavy wind, you know, they break and so I was so rigid and like the slightest bobble at past a certain point, I would just break in half, you know, and that's where my injuries came from. And I also just started to hate skiing. Like there was just something seriously wrong in my undercurrent after about 10 years and I quit skiing in order to figure out what that was, which was a bizarre choice because I had transcended the ski industry. I didn't even have to ski anymore to make a living. Like I just had to show up at the parties and drink a can of Red Bull. I'd get paid, right? But I just couldn't take it anymore, so I quit. And I set out to figure out what had gone wrong. Wow, so what did that feel like? So you love doing it, you're kicking ass. What did it start to feel like where you started to say like, oh, I don't like it? How did that show up? What were the symptoms? Mostly just the burnout and just the hatred of skiing. Like I love to personify skiing and skiing had killed a bunch of my friends. I wasn't okay with that. Skiing was this thing that I actually dreaded doing after a while, which was crazy because it had given me such a wonderful life. And I just, I would say the burnout was the biggest issue. And I also had to sleep like 10 hours a night just to be able to function. What was up with that? So it's almost like you were in this high state of stress all the time and then your body needed to kind of broke down, needed to rest and recover. You know, it's with situations like yours, it's so difficult because the way you operated made you so successful at what you did. It must have been so hard to let go of that because that's what had made you succeed that whole overcome and not feeling fear. And now you're at this point where you're examining what you're doing, you hate it. How do you let go of what made you so awesome? Well, I was also embarrassed about who I was. I didn't like who I was as a person. I just felt like a fraud. Like there was something inauthentic about how I was living my life. And that's also another symptom of repressed fear. When did you start figuring out that? Cause I've heard you in interviews and, you know, when we talked actually what really piqued my interest is when we talked at the dinner, either I made a comment or someone else made a comment at the table of something like, how you shouldn't feel fear or how you can overcome fear or something like that. And then you spoke up and you said, no, that's terrible. Like don't ignore that feeling you need to, you're supposed to feel it and you need to embrace it. And then you kind of, we talked a little bit and it really kind of blew my mind. Like when did you start making that transition that understanding of how to work with fear? I started studying Zen and I was asked perhaps the most important question of my life right away by my teacher. And that question was, allow me please to speak to the voice of fear. And you guys don't know what that means, but it was voice dialogue and I kind of shifted and shifted and I couldn't find my essential fear. I didn't, I couldn't find it. And so I raised my hand and I said to the Zen master, I can't find my fear. And he laughed and he said, yeah, I kind of figured that. And he started talking after about 10 minutes, all of a sudden everything made sense. I had been repressing fear in order to ski the way I wanted to. And that's why I was having all these problems. And other people I've learned over the years, if they repress fear, some of the rampant problems that we have in our society like depression, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, PTSD, insomnia, underperforming, burnout, all these things are the result of the repression of fear. We're all in such a repressive attitude and approach towards fear and it's just not working. And then in order to not deal with our fear further, we then take medication to try and get rid of it further. It's like, we're like declaring war against ourselves. This war against fear is our war against ourselves. And so I'm kind of like the PR director for fear. Like we've, first of all, we've got to stop repressing fear. It's causing so many problems. It's not working. Even all the methods and modalities that we have to deal with our fear like meditation, tapping, positive affirmations, deep breathing exercises, float spas, all of that are just other ways to kind of get us through a moment and have less fear, but it's actually exacerbating the underlying cause of all the problems that we're seeking to solve through these methods. And so I, you know, my ears always perk up at the dinner table when somebody talks about fear and they use the word conquering and overcoming in the same sentence. I'm like, ah, you know, as a matter of fact, you know, maybe you might want to reconsider that. Wow, cause that's so, what you're saying is so opposite of what everybody else is saying, at least when it comes to fear. Now in terms of repressing feelings, if I were to tell someone, you know, don't repress, you know, like when people repress themselves sexually or when they repress other emotions, people will agree and say, yeah, if you repress yourself, you'll get like what's called a symptom eruption where it'll explode out in some unhealthy way, but you never hear that about fear. Instead you hear, like you said, conquer or here's how you don't feel fear, here's how you deal with it. Can you talk about some of the, some of the, I guess the current techniques and then how you would do it your way or why they're wrong? Like let's talk, like you just talked about like float tanks and stuff like that. Like how would you deal with situations then rather than, you know, going to a float tank or trying to breathe your way through it? Well, we'll get to that. Let's keep outlining the problem at this point. Let me give you one of my favorite analogies. So imagine that I love to personify fear and I sometimes see it as a roommate or a spouse or an employee in your corporation, but let's go with child. And imagine that you're a parent to a whole bunch of children and half your children, you've named joy, love, gratitude, forgiveness. And then you also have these children fear, anger, sadness, despair. Despite your best intention, would you be able to treat all your children the same way? Of course not. Right. And so what we tend to do, we have these love and joy and gratitude and forgiveness practices. And, you know, we kind of like to go with the light side of life to solve our problems. So we feed and nurture and show off to these, the world, these children, you know, this love, this joy, this gratitude. But on the other side, you know, what do we do with these other children? Well, we lock them in the basement and we throw away the key and they're down there, you know, with no food, no water, no love, no sunshine. And just imagine for a moment that you were one of those children. Like how would you feel living under those circumstances where everybody hates you? Oh yeah, you'd feel absolutely terrible. Right. And how would you act out? I mean, would you be okay with just being locked in the basement under these circumstances? No, of course not. You'd probably get a lot of tantrums and yelling and- You want to be heard. They're fighting their way out. Right. So that's what all of these kind of unpleasant negative experiences, you know, we push them down, we ignore them, we avoid them, we try to control them, we try to fight them, you know, the language around that. And they're down there in the basement and they're screaming and they're yelling and they're burning the house down doing anything they can to get out. They may feel depressed. Like depression is really interesting. Like Latin, the word depression is Latin for press down. You know, when you press down your emotions or these negative feelings, they become depressed and they're so too do you as well. And so, you know, you're now abusing this huge part of who you are. They're acting out. And next thing, you know, you're gonna have panic attacks. You know, the fear is showing up in the middle of the night, hijacking your mind and keeping you awake. Or maybe fear is showing up as anger instead or sadness showing up redirected in other ways. It's just such a bad idea to treat your children. How do you think one formulates fear as an emotion? How do you think that it comes about? So the amygdala, two almond sized nuggets at the top of the spine, determining safe or not safe. And it's the primary filter from which all information kind of comes through your brain. It determines safe or not safe. It's the manufacturing plant for fear. And fear is with us actually every single moment of every single day in nearly every interaction we have because life is a scary experience. Like even sitting here right now, like I'm afraid of saying something stupid or coming across as an idiot, right? So I feel afraid, of course I feel afraid. So it's the manufacturing plant for fear, the amygdala is, and then perceived threat and there's always a threat. We'll send a shot of discomfort to the body and that's what fear is. Fear is just a sensation of discomfort in the body. It's actually very, very simple. That's all it is. Do you think it's more responsive then? So, because that's kind of like the classical belief of emotions is that something happens and then this is a response that our body is giving versus it's constructed, which is something that I'm more subscribed to, which is it's not only that, but it's a series of events or things that have happened in your life. And then it's your brain downloading on, processing all that and then trying to predict what potentially may happen. Like what do you think? My experience with fear is that it's that sensation of discomfort in your body. And a lot of people think that fear is in your mind. We say things like it's false evidence appearing real. It starts to seem irrational and crazy and making stuff up that doesn't seem right or real or projecting the future or kind of like obsessing about the past. If that's how fear is showing up for you in that super complicated way instead of the simple way that I've outlined, then what probably has happened is you are repressing fear and fear is really, really clever at getting out of the basement. It will not be denied and it will hijack your mind and run its unfulfilled agenda in a loop over and over again and start to come out as irrational fear. Do you feel like that's because we treat it like a different emotion though because if it was just like any other emotion then you would be at comfort with it and you wouldn't suppress it like that, right? Well, you know, we kind of treat all the emotions in a repressive way. I mean, even joy. Like does anybody remember when? No, that's an excellent point. I really, I just had a breakthrough recently talking about joy. It's funny you've just pointed to that where I was talking to somebody and we were having this very therapeutic session where we're talking about my childhood and bringing up all these memories and I got really emotional and I was gonna cry and he says, okay, let it out. What's wrong with you? And I said, no, I'm not sad. It's actually, I'm thinking of a thought right now about my sister that brings me this overwhelming feeling of joy and it made me wanna cry and it made me realize that wow, even something that's happy and positive in my life that's joy, I had suppressed and was not allowing that to come out. So it's funny you went to that point. Yes, and I'll get to that in a second. Like when you feel joy, why do you cry? But the example I was gonna give was Tom Cruise jumping for joy on the couch when he met his future wife, Katie, and we considered him unstable because he showed his joy in a recessive way. We cry and we apologize for it. You say to mom, I'm afraid and mom says there's nothing to be afraid of. Which is a lie? It's total bullshit. Of course there's something to be afraid of. Anger, we don't do that. We definitely repress anger. Now, back to your point. Like why do we cry when we feel joy? Well, the emotions are so connected and if you repress one, you kind of repress them all. You can't selectively repress an emotion without affecting them all. Like for example, modern anger. What we know as modern anger, 95% of it is just undelt with fear locked in the basement coming out instead of anger. Kind of like the child who has a really horrific home life. He doesn't want to feel afraid. It feels powerless. So he's angry instead because it makes him feel more powerful. So when it comes to crying tears of joy, that's kind of a combination of joy plus sadness. Like I was watching the voice and the winner, of course crying tears of joy is when they won. And yes, you're happy and you're feeling joy but the emotions are so connected. They're also crying for the last 20 years of struggle and how hard it was to get to this point where they just won this important competition. So when you're crying tears of joy, there's also sadness. Like with your sister, maybe you were like sad that you didn't get to spend more time with her. And that was where the tears were coming from. So tears of joy are joy plus sadness. Well, that's interesting. It actually makes a lot of sense. Something you said that really blew me away about suppressing fear and erupting and panic attacks and stuff. I've known several people who suffer from panic attacks. And each time they've had them, it was according to them out of the blue. Like I was talking to them and I said, well, what happened? Why did that? Because then of course they think they're having a heart attack. They think it's some medical emergency. They go to the emergency room. They do all the tests and they're like, no, you're totally fine. You're not dying. You're having a heart attack. And then I talked to them afterwards because I care about them and I'm like, what did you eat? What did you do? Was something scary happening? And they'll be like, I don't know. I was just sitting there in traffic where I was just at a coffee shop. And then all of a sudden I felt this, like I was having a heart attack and it was a panic attack. And it's literally like it's an emotion that you're repressing, repressing and it just explodes at it. It feels like out of nowhere because you're not connecting it to the fact that you've repressed it for so long. And a lot of these emotions are undesirable. I mean, it looks like we, it sounds like from what you're saying it makes perfect sense that we tend to repress any outward expression of emotion, but definitely the quote unquote negative ones. You know, those are definitely the ones we try to hide. Do we really just different for everybody? Well, let me tell you what panic attacks are in no uncertain terms. If you're not dealing with your fear in an honest way and you're pushing it down in your system into the basement, I say the basement, the basement is really your body. Like imagine a balloon that just gets more and more full of undelt with fear. All of a sudden it just pops and explodes into your system all at once. So the repression of fear is the cause of panic attacks. And I've talked to a lot of people and what they're given is prescription drugs, anti-anxiety medication. Benzos, all this. Right, or they're told to go and talk to a therapist. And the thing is emotions are felt in the body and they're meant to be dealt with emotionally. But when we go to a therapist and deal with our emotions intellectually and we try to rationalize them away or use our mind like a sword to conquer or overcome them, it's just false evidence, that kind of thing. You're now dealing with your emotions intellectually. And it's just a bad idea. And actually talk therapy exacerbates the problem. So the way to not have panic attacks anymore is actually turn towards your fear and start to have what I call a fear practice where for me emotional intelligence is our ability to feel our emotions. Not think about them, but feel our emotions in an honest way and have them help us come alive. So, and I wanna tell a funny story too while we're at it. I was in the Walmart parking lot the other day and I saw this guy, I was right at dusk and he seemed distraught. He was looking for his keys, I helped him out. We couldn't find him. I finally said, well, let's retrace your steps. Where'd you last see your keys? And he said, well, you know that bar over on State Street? I said, sure. And he said, well, I parked outside, went inside, had a beer, walked back out, no keys. I'm like, well, that bar is like half a mile from here. Why are we looking for your keys here? And he said, well, the light's better here. What? Okay, I made that story up, obviously. But. I'm like, wait a minute. But it illustrates a point. It's like we go and try to have these gratitude practices and meditation to feel better and float spas and we think that this is gonna calm us down and it's just crazy, it's a story. It's like we're looking in the light for what we're trying to find and really, whatever it is you won't look at is actually the key to freedom. If you're willing to look at your fear, then you will address your panic attacks. If you're willing to go into the darkness, you'll find your keys. Well. I think you can say that about all emotions. I think not just fear, I think they're all that way. If you have this ability to just learn to feel them and understand them, then you have the ability then to unpack them and figure out where is this stemming from. Now question I had, because it's all jumped right into like your adulthood, the book and skiing. I'm actually really curious about more of your childhood because many of the people that I have met that I think that are fearless have had something that either one happened to them or a upbringing that has forced them to look at fear differently than the average person. And it's become like very easy for you to do it. Like you said, I just started skiing and it wasn't like I was overcoming fear at the time, you just were able to do it. Did you have something early on in your life that you can recall? Have you ever unpacked it that deep and thought, why was I so unique that I was able to even start heading down this path where most people would be just totally stopped because of fear? Well, remember before I said that beneath my relative reality, I didn't say it this way, but fear was with me every single moment of my ski career and I didn't realize it. I felt fearless, remember? Well, it turns out I had a really crummy childhood. I was really lonely. I didn't have any friends. My parents were checked out. I had such a deep fear of being invisible or fear of not being loved. I'll tell you what, you jump off a 70 foot cliff. People will recognize you. People love you, you are no longer invisible. And so fear actually was my greatest motivator. And so if you even talk to anybody that's accomplished anything and if they're willing to be honest with themselves, they'll admit that their insecurities, their demons, kind of the dark side of life, the negativity is actually the thing that's motivating them. You know, our greatest wounds are our greatest treasures. I also became addicted to fear during my ski career. Oh, what do you mean addicted to fear? Well, people call people like me adrenaline addicts. Well, beneath the adrenaline is fear. We actually should start changing our language around this, these people are fear addicts. Let's get this straight. And you know, I loved feeling fear because it made me feel alive. Like a neurochemically fear and excitement feels exactly the same way. Like if you're feeling excitement, for sure fear has something to do with that. And if you love feeling fear, you won't feel fear, you'll just feel excitement. But it was pathological in me. Like I was as addicted to fear as a heroin addict is addicted to heroin. And it became super dangerous and I'm really lucky to be alive. Do you think that's because of the result that it was giving you? That was because going back to your childhood and feeling almost unnoticed to all of a sudden, now all of a sudden you're doing these things that people are looking at you like, holy shit, she's a badass. And do you think that you were more addicted to the end result than actually the fear itself? Do you think it was what you were receiving because of that, because you were neglected of that for so many years? Well, I just felt so dead inside when I was a kid and this made me feel really alive. So it was an over compensation, like a big pendulum swing. And I always say that, you know, you hit a kid upside the head with a frying pan enough times when they're a kid and they might just be motivated enough to start, you know, the most or to run a, you know, two minute mile or start a great business and just work a hundred hour work weeks. You know, there's always some sort of pathology behind our motivation. And you know, this is actually a good segue into fear of failure. So take fear of failure. Some people are super motivated by fear of failure. Bill Gates actually credits fear of failure as being a motivator for him. But then look at the guy that sits at home but firmly planted on the couch and he blames fear of failure for holding him back. Like what's the difference between these two guys? Well, it's a very, very simple difference. If you embrace fear, if you enjoy feeling fear, if you become intimate with fear, it's a motivator. But if you're resisting the fear, if you don't want to have anything to do with it, it'll hold you back. And actually I've learned through this whole process that that super unpleasant icky feeling that we associate with fear, that's actually not fear. What that is is your resistance to the fear. It's your, I don't want to feel this. I wish this weren't so. That's the icky feeling. Fear is actually awesome. That's why I think it's so much of it. You stims back to the childhood because you've got comfortable with that feeling. I know I've been known, people have called me fearless before and I'm like, I don't really think of myself fearless. But when I start to look back all the way to my childhood, I also had a rough childhood growing up. And so the things that scared me as a kid, when I look at the things that scared me now as adult, I just kind of like laugh at them. Really like talking like this. Like, yeah, so I might, the first time we got on a podcast, the first time I had to do something in front of a camera like, hell yeah, I was scared. But I've gotten so comfortable with, well, what's the worst case scenario here? I embarrass myself, people make fun of me. So what, who gives a fuck? I mean, as a kid, losing a father at seven years old and dealing with abuse and dealing with all these other things, like that was way scarier, being seven, eight, nine years old going through that. So I think that I've just become accustomed to being comfortable with fear being a part of life, just like any other emotion of happiness, sadness, joy. It's just another emotion that's giving me feedback about what's going on. Like that's the way I think that it is. And I think a lot of people that didn't, that have been maybe sheltered growing up and that weren't maybe forced into a situation like that, struggle with this conversation right here of, it's so easy for you or I to say, just go after fear, embrace it. Because we've been embracing it since we were young, but somebody else who's maybe been sheltered their whole life and they're now in their 30s and they're scared to death all the time, that's what's keeping them from coming out. Really tough for them to make that connection. It sounds like it's a skill, like anything, I guess you gotta practice it. It's true. And if you feel fearless, one of two things is happening. Either you are merging with fear and it's not showing up as fear at all, but rather excitement or focus or sharpness. Kind of like Bambi, let me give you a great analogy. So animals have a great relationship with fear and Bambi's eating grass in a field and all of a sudden there's some rustling in the bushes, the amygdala perks right up, sends a shot of fear to the body and so she perks up and her hearing's better, her eyesight's better. She's totally in the present moment, like the zone, flow, all these things that we talk about and her hearing's better. She's there, it's a tiger, right? She starts running, she becomes a super athlete, like Bambi plus fear equals super Bambi. She runs faster than she ever has in her life because of the fear. Then she's back eating grass in a field somewhere as if nothing had ever happened, she doesn't have PTSD, she's not paranoid that it's gonna happen again because there's this whole system in place and she has a healthy relationship with fear. And she's not, like fear just can show up for people and just make them uber humans, okay? So that's a super healthy relationship with fear. That's one way to be fearless, you know, because the fear is supposed to come into, through and out of your system in between 10 to 90 seconds for as long as the threat is there and then it's gone. So it's the dwelling that's really, you know, the problematic part of fear. If you recognize the fear, you stay in the fear but then you anticipate the fear going forward and that brings the anxiety, does that all the process? Saying that suggests that you have some control over this whole process, like, so let me now tell you another- Do you believe we don't have control at all of it? Either happens or it doesn't? I believe that the only control that we have over fear is our perception of it. If we see it as a good thing, it'll be an asset and an ally and one of the greatest experiences we have here on earth, helping us come alive and be in flow and in the zone and all that. If we see it as a negative, we will spend our entire lives fighting a war with it, a war that will ultimately prove unwinnable and whatever you try to control winds up controlling you. And for example, like, let's say you're my fear. I said that I love to personify fear. You know, you're my roommate. You know, this is how most people talk to fear and you're my roommate, you're permanent. Like, we're gonna live together for our entire lives. We would have a lot of fun, by the way. Right, we would. Because out of all of us in this, I'm the coolest one to hang out with for sure. It's so obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. All right, so this is how most people talk to their roommate called fear. Like, I hate you. You know, you're to blame for all of my problems, all of my holdbacks. I want nothing to do with you, you're dead to me. You know, I'm going to do everything I can to just ignore you, block you out or avoid you. You know, how does that make you feel? Me talking to you like that. Yeah, it makes me feel this big, you know? Yeah. Okay, so it's, you know, that's how fear feels and fears, you know, will not be denied and will start to assert itself and scream louder and louder like I talked about. Now, I'm going to talk to you the way that I talk to fear now. Like, hey, I'm so sorry I abused you in the past. You know, I didn't realize how magnificent you were. I'm gonna spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I wrote a book about how great you are. You know, let's go out and be magnificent together. Let's go have some adventures. Like, you're what makes life worth it. Right. We're excited. Right. Yeah, we're gonna have fun. Right. So, however your relationship is with fear is the relationship you have with yourself at your core. So if you have a hate you attitude towards fear, you actually hate yourself. If you're embarrassed by your fear, you're embarrassed by yourself. If you fight a war with your fear, you're fighting a war with yourself that's being carried out in your unconscious mind that's taxing all your resources. Right. Makes perfect, complete and perfect. The ironic part though about even like a metaphor like that is that a lot of these words are just made up words. I mean, when you look at like the world, there's some emotions that we describe that don't even exist in other cultures. And fear happens to be a popular one across the board, but we're the ones that have constructed this idea of what fear should look like. And for some reason for so long, our society has decided that it's a sad or a scary thing. Why can't it be a positive thing? Why can't it be something good? Why can't it be like joy? Why did we have to separate it and that be an evil emotion that we feel when it has all the, we can show examples all over the place of where people have been extremely successful because of this emotion fear. Right, we've just gotten in a really, really bad habit. And I wanna come full circle because I mentioned there's two different ways to be fearless and I kind of left everybody hanging on that. The first way to be fearless is to become intimate with your fear and then it doesn't feel like fear at all. The second way to be fearless is, and you mentioned that you don't have big issues with fear, just pay attention to my words and just see which one are you. Because for me, when I felt fearless during my ski career, I would have guessed that I was intimate with fear and that was true, but this other thing was also true. I had a bit of a paradox going on which I both loved fear and chased it, like a Labrador chases a ball and I also hated it and repressed it to the extreme. And when you make your life all about one thing which I was during my ski career, you can have a love-hate relationship with it. Like anybody that's married knows that you can love and hate your wife at the same time, right? So the second way to get to fearless and this is how most people try to get to a state of fearlessness where let's say you have a difficult job and you're afraid of screwing it up. Of course you're gonna be afraid, of course you're gonna feel fear and we call it anxiety because it's easier to say anxiety than fear but anxiety is just another name for fear. So you have a lot of anxiety at work and short of quitting your job and sitting in an ashram and singing Kumbaya all your whole life, that's just part of the deal, you know? You are gonna feel fear, especially if you're doing something important with your life. So what people tend to do is they get to work with the breathing exercises and the meditation. They exercise a lot and they do all these things. They see a therapist to try and feel better and it works. Otherwise these things wouldn't be taught. It gives them temporary relief. They think, okay, well I feel better now but it's kind of like, if you ever had a fork sticking out of your eye and if you meditated and took three deep breaths and focused on the parts of you that don't hurt and had a gratitude practice, you're gonna feel better, right? But guess what? You still have a fork sticking out of your eye. So there's still this fear, you're now repressing it, you're exacerbating the underlying cause. Fear will not be denied. It'll start to become harder and harder over time to not deal without fear. And God forbid you even take a single day off of meditating and you're just gonna feel like shit all over again, right? Next thing you know, you may be fearless at work but then you come home, you bring it home and you're arguing with your wife. You're kicking your dog, you're road raging. You have insomnia. All of a sudden one day you have a panic attack and all of a sudden you realize in order to save my marriage or in order to save my health I either need to take medication and then lock my fear 10 feet in concrete below the basement. That'll do it. Or I need to quit my job and give up my hopes and dreams because you're still fighting war with fear. It's just a really bad route. And so what I'm proposing in this book is that we find a way to make friends with fear. We have a fear practice. We're willing to go into the darkness to find our keys, what we're looking for and maybe this would be a good transition to that next. Yeah, you mentioned something. You said facing your fear not intellectually but emotionally. Like we try to do it intellectually instead of emotionally. What does that mean? Cause that sounds interesting to me. I've found that there are four different ways people deal with fear. The first way I've been outlining they repress, repress, repress. And it works, but there's consequences for that. The second way that I see people dealing with fear and this is definitely a step in the right direction is that I mentioned it comes into through and out of your system in 10 to 90 seconds. You want to accept the fear as normal and natural. It's not a sign of personal weakness. It's just what it means to be a human being where fearful creatures, life is scary. Like you're still in your head though. It is a step in the right direction because you're reframing the way that you see fear. And like I said, neurochemically, fear and excitement are the same thing. Like all of this is just kind of intellectual understanding that fear is actually not too bad. Like I need to stop repressing it. Like, but we're still in our heads. So next step would be to learn how to feel fear. Like to deal with our emotions emotionally instead of intellectually. And our brains are so good at figuring everything out. Like we definitely put our thinking minds on the job to figuring out emotions. But if you're in your head thinking about your emotions, that means you're not in your body feeling them. And so once you learn how to feel fear that quite organically takes you into your body and out of your mind. So if you're a super heady guy and you're in your head all the time, monkey mind, monkey mind, right? That's also a sign of not dealing with your emotions or a way to not deal with your emotions just by thinking all the time. So learning how to feel your emotions is where I start with clients. Like I help them have a fear practice where they just notice the sensation of discomfort in their body. We can do it right now. Yeah, please. But there's one more step. So we don't forget about that. Because you're explaining me when you talked about the heady guy. I'm like, that's me. I want the answer. All right, so let's bookmark the last step and just focus on this one. So I want you guys to just maybe close your eyes. And I just want you to find any sensation of discomfort in your body. And you don't want to think about the sensation. You just kind of want to drop into your body and find it now and give it a name. Like for me, I feel anxiety and I feel it in my chest and my throat. What do you feel? And even if it's not fear, if it's anger, if it's sadness, if it's frustration, you know, fear has something to do with it. If it's a feeling of like for some people that's listening, maybe worthlessness or powerlessness or self-esteem issue, any kind of unpleasant feeling beneath that, you will find fear has something to do with jealousy. Beneath the jealousy is always gonna be fear, all of that. So just find any kind of discomfort now and tell me what it is. I can say I have anxiety and it feels, I can feel it in my chest a little bit and it revolves around being a good, I just went through a divorce two years ago and I have dual custody with my kids. Now, hold on, I'm gonna interrupt you. You notice what just happened? You immediately went into your head. I did. And you found a reason for it and you're trying to understand it and you're trying to justify it and explain it. I did. Like all of a sudden you're in your head, you're dealing with your emotions intellectually, okay? So just drop back in. All I want to know is what you feel and where you feel it. I feel my heart pounding faster than usual. Okay. I feel discomfort in my stomach. Like I don't know if it's frustration related or what. Right. And even if it's a physical discomfort, like the pain from an old broken leg, there's always some sort of emotional discomfort around it too. Lower back pain, for example. It's neck pain, that kind of thing. Shoulder pain. Like you can go and get that massaged away all you want until you deal with the undelt with emotions behind that shoulder pain, the knots are just gonna come back. I've seen that so many times in clients as a trainer, so many times. Right. So a lot of what we feel that's so uncomfortable in our body is the resistance. And I talked about that before. I have an equation in my book, suffering equals discomfort times resistance. If there's no resistance, the discomfort is not a problem. Picture somebody getting a tattoo. There's people that are addicted to getting tattoos, like pain, if they're completely merging with the pain, becoming intimate with the pain, it actually is a gorgeous experience. But if they're in resistance to the pain, it's a horrible experience. And it's the same thing with uncomfortable emotions. So notice your reaction to that emotion, that discomfort. Do you ignore it? Do you avoid it? Do you fight it? Do you try to rationalize it or talk about it with a therapist as a way to try to get rid of it? Just notice your reaction to that emotion. And then let's just stay here right now. And we could either spend some time feeling our resistance to it, which is one experience. Cause if the resistance is bigger than the discomfort itself, that's the bigger issue. Like for example, I had to give a speech, let's bulletproof. I gave a speech at Bulletproof Conference. And I speak about fear and anxiety and I'm about to go on stage and I'm absolutely pickled in fear and anxiety. Like what the heck? And I don't teach fearlessness. There's very few people that are willing to call themselves fear specialists because they feel like they have to teach fearlessness and they have to be fearless themselves. It's not only not possible, but it's actually undesirable. I was gonna say, you wouldn't want to be fearless just like you wouldn't want to be without any other emotion. So, but you know, when you're about to go on stage for an important conference like this and give a speech about fear and anxiety, you kind of don't want to be having a panic attack, right? Like that would be really embarrassing. So what I did is I ducked behind the building 15 minutes before I was about to go on. And with my equation in mind, suffering equals discomfort times resistance. First of all, I closed my eyes and I realized, okay, it's normal and natural for me to feel this way. This is a difficult thing I'm about to do. It's not a sign of personal weakness. And that kind of realization can be huge for people. Just that alone, you know, there's not something wrong with me in that I feel this way. And then I noticed what I felt, which was anxiety. It was in my throat and it was a level 10 out of 10. And then I noticed I was resisting it. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to feel this way. And it was also a level 10. So then I spent some time just feeling my resistance and I just repeated over and over again without trying to get rid of it. I don't want to be here. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I just want to be home with my husband on the couch, watching a movie. I don't want to be here. I don't want to do this. And it's kind of like a whining child. You know, you give a whining child your undivided attention, they calm right down. And so my resistance calmed down to a level one. And then I spent some time feeling my discomfort, my anxiety, which we're going to do next. And I gave it my undivided attention. And without giving it away, let's just do that now. So just close your eyes. And I just want you to feel that discomfort without trying to get rid of it. That's the key. If you're doing this as a way to try and get rid of it or calm it down, it won't work. If you're too smart for that crap, you just feel it. Our audience is like, what the fuck is going on? They're doing it with us. Yeah, just do it with us. And I'll keep talking, I'll keep talking softly. So just spend some time feeling it without trying to get rid of it. Give it your undivided attention. It's been trying to get your attention. It has something to say. The words don't matter. The feeling is all that matters. Just pay attention to that feeling. And when you're ready, just tell me what's happened. I mean, I feel like it lost its sharpness or edge. Exactly. And that's what happened for me. I then felt my anxiety. I gave it about a minute and it went down to a level one. And so I mentioned there's two ways to get to fearlessness. One just consumes your whole life. And it becomes harder and harder to do. And then you have to take medication and you have to compromise your dreams and your relationships go south and you start having depression and panic attacks and PTSD and all that. And it's just a really tough route. But if you actually turn towards your discomfort and learn how to feel it, then it kind of goes away. Interesting, it's like you're taking away its power. Yeah, but even that is a little disrespectful to fear. And I mentioned fear's too smart for that crap. It's like I'm giving it some love. That works better for me. I'm giving it some love. Who do you feel has the hardest time with this? I know you work with professional athletes and that being like one of their mechanisms to drive them for being successful and also simultaneously repressing fear, how do you work with the transition then to maybe they're retiring or they just want to be more balanced? Like how do you work with a high performer like that? I've found that the most difficult people to work with are the people that are in their heads all the time and they've built a shrine to their thinking minds and their intellect, like super smart people because they want to put their intellect on the job towards fixing all problems. And that's why emotional intelligence in our society is actually seen as our ability to cognitively understand our emotions and control them, which is crazy. And so if you're really invested in your intellect as being the solution to all problems, it's kind of like, I have a bunch of tricks. This is one trick, picture, like how old are you? 36. 36. So for 36 years, you've put a dollar a day into a jar of money and you're very invested. Wish I could ask shit. That's right. You're very invested in who you believe yourself to be. You're very invested in your revelations about fear, your beliefs about what to do about fear. You're very invested in your intellect as being the solution to all sorts of problems. And so getting you to have a different experience is like asking you to throw away that jar of money. Right. Right. So people are very invested also having gone down the same path of a repressive attitude towards fear because I mentioned it works. You know, it makes you feel better. It gets you through a moment and people have done some great things by repressing fear. My ski career was done through repressing fear and I was the best in the world for 12 years. It's like people can be very, very invested in their way that they found that works to deal with the unpleasant side of life. And I find that only when the, because there's payoffs of having that repressive approach towards fear, only when the costs of doing that exceed the payoffs will somebody finally reach out to me and be willing to do the work. Now it's a lot of work to repress fear your whole life and it will consume your whole life. Anything that you won't deal with you give magical powers to. It's also work to make friends with fear but it's actually a lot easier than you think. And the first step is me kind of getting people to throw away that jar of money, throw away that investment that they have down this one path and consider traveling down another route. Well, I'd be a headache for you for sure. Oh. No, you wouldn't. I love a challenge. I do my best work with super heady guys in particular. I have all sorts of tricks. So I have, where the challenging part I have is that I think that much of this is based off of the belief that the classical theory of how emotions are made, which is that it's a reaction to something versus that it's something that we've constructed in our heads, which is more of what I believe is that, so, cause if you were to take two kids that were seven years old and one kid saw, you know, just happened to be watching ESPN and saw the one crash all season on downhill skiing and the girl killed herself. And then also saw some other accident in extreme sport and got really, really hurt. And then the first time they got on skis, you know, had a really bad experience with it. And then asking that person to do something like a downhill ski may be a different feeling of emotion than the person who saw the opposite. Saw, watched ESPN, saw the girl stick the landing, fucking people celebrated, they put a ribbon on her. And then the first time they got on skis, they were a natural, they fell right into it. Now those two people are gonna experience this emotion that we're calling fear right now around downhill skiing completely different, wouldn't you agree? Yes, and this would be a good time to talk about PTSD. PTSD is when you go through a difficult experience a horrific experience even, which will happen to you, you will come in contact with horrible people, you will see horrible things, nobody is going to be immune from that. I actually like to redefine PTSD as instead of post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic repressive disorder. And PTRD equals traumatic experience times resistance or repression. Like I don't wanna deal with this. And so how can two people see that horrible crash and one person, all of a sudden, it kind of has them wind up being one of the more interesting turning points in their life where they now kind of turn over a new leaf and maybe they start a new company and it makes them come alive and it kind of gives them meaning and purpose in their lives and et cetera, et cetera. And somebody else, they just collapse inside and they just go numb and they can't deal with it and they're panic attacking all over the place and they're depressed and suicidal and they don't know how to deal with it. It's really just how you react to the trauma. If you don't wanna deal with the emotions around it, if you lock them in the basement and throw away the key, like I said, you give them magical powers and they will take over your whole world. Well, that's why I think it's that trauma, that emotion is different for every person. It's gonna be unique. There's never gonna be two of the same people that feel the same emotion from the same series of events. So that's where it's like, you know, again, we take parts of the language and we separate one word that umbrellas all of these different types of potential emotions. If you look at like, and I forget what tribe it is, but there's a tribe that exists today and there's a culture around that tribe that's been around for a long time and the word sad doesn't even exist in their vocabulary. Like sadness is not an emotion. And then so we go like, oh, wait a second, you've never had somebody die in your family? Well, yeah, they have a term for when someone dies in their family, what that is. And so what about when you lost an event or you lost a kill that was supposed to be? Well, yeah, there's a term for when you were hunting something for survival and you fell short and you didn't get it. Instead of us umbrellaing it under like, all sadness is the same or all fear is the same. This is the part of unpacking and the heady part of me of why I think it's important to look at how it was constructed because it's gonna be uniquely different for everybody. And if you don't address that and you purely go off of this, trying to feel this feeling versus to understand it, where is it coming from? Why does it feel this way? I think that it's really tough to be able to communicate that across the board, everybody, cause we're also uniquely different. Well, what you've just done is taken something really simple, like sadness or fear or anger and made it very complicated, right? Like, what if when we're sad, we just be sad? And when we're afraid, we just be afraid. And when we're angry, like sadness is supposed to kind of break open our hearts to compassion and empathy. And maybe that's why I don't know anything about this. Why is it though? Why is it that way? Cause we've decided that way for so many years. Why can't it be something of more that like opens up joy and excitement for us? Why can't it, if we know, if you know, especially with your experience with fear that there's such a great positive side to it, why do we even look at all emotions? Why have we categorized them that, why does this emotion have to be so detrimental to us? Why can't it be a strength of ours? Or why can't it be a good thing when we experience these? Because we've built a shrine to our intellect and our thinking minds. Well, that or we've over years and years and years, we've accepted that this is the prevailing theory that, okay, this is how you act when this happens. When it's like, well, maybe if I reframe that differently in my brain, maybe I can, it can be a total different experience for me. Are you familiar with the multi-disciplinary association of psychedelic studies and the work that they're doing on PTSD? I'm a volunteer for that. Oh, so, because what you're saying totally, I mean, when you look at the studies that they're doing with like the MDMA trials that they just released with PTSD, it makes, what you're saying makes perfect sense in the sense that you have people with PTSD, and you know the studies I'm sure better than I do since you work with them, but they have people with PTSD, very difficult to treat, you know, forms of PTSD. They go in there, they take this, you know, the substance, and it allows them to feel or at least face what's causing these issues and they're getting cured at like a 70% rate. Is that what they're kind of finding? Is that kind of, is it helping them do what you're talking about? All right, so you've given me a tsunami of stuff to do. Let me try. This podcast is speeding up real quick here. My job is to simplify things because emotions are very, very simple. And I know that I'm challenging to go extremely deep, by the way, so I just, I love it. So let me kind of take you on a journey, you know, starting back, maybe our great, great grandparents, like you look at photos from the 20s and what do you see all these people standing around stoically, you know, we have been repressing emotions forever, us humans have a long history of avoiding anything unpleasant and emotions were actually seen, even joy and love is frivolous, love is not an emotion, but that's another conversation. So, like that's where we're come from. So our grandparents repressed their emotions and you know, especially if you have a hard drinking family, right, for sure you come from a lineage of repressing emotions. And life back then consisted of like, whether you caught two beavers or three beavers or you know, what do we have for dinner tonight? Like it was very, very simple. But now the world is sped up so much, more happens in 24 minutes than happened in that era in 24 years, right? And so the amygdala is manufacturing fear like Joey Chestnut eats a hot dog really fast, right? So there's just fear everywhere and the amygdala is freaking the fuck out, right? And so we have so much fear and we call it anxiety because we don't wanna call it fear. Like the guy on Wall Street would never say I'm pickled in fear, right? But he will say I'm pickled in anxiety. It's almost a rite of passage. Like if you're not pickled in anxiety and you work on Wall Street, then you're not working hard enough. So we're pickled in, we call it anxiety. It's really fear. And none of us know how to deal with it. You know, we've never known how to deal with it. And so this is a real turning point in our evolution. Like we can't keep speeding up and just dealing with this. And no wonder people are taking more and more drugs, opioids, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety. We don't know how to deal with this because what we've been doing, what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting something different. Right, that's what we're doing. The same thing over and over again with the tapping and the meditation. I mean, we're coming up with all these wonderful methods and modalities. And meditation helps people with PTSD tremendously because if you have a fork in your eye, a fork sticking out of your eye, you're gonna feel better. But it's just a symptom relief. It's not dealing with the underlying problem and the underlying problem is none of us have figured out how to feel our emotions. And we're getting more and more in our intellect and people are talking faster and faster and we have San Francisco and everybody's so smart and becoming smarter and we're so far out of the station of our essential core nature which is we are feeling emotional human beings. And the five primary emotions and when I say primary, it's kind of like primary colors like red, yellow and blue make up the entire color spectrum. Our five primary emotions actually make up our entire reality. Our entire human experience come from fear, anger, sadness, joy. And some people like to say sexuality but I prefer erotic which includes a sexual but isn't limited by it. So these five primary emotions which are feelings, simple feelings like you know your eroticism when you feel it, you know anger when you feel it. It's very simple. We have just started dealing with them intellectually and we can't understand them. So we do the next Bex thing which is we judge them. And our mind has gotten really good at tall, short, right, wrong, good, bad, right. That's a good emotion, that's a bad emotion. And so we put them in these boxes like fear bad, anger bad, sadness bad and then we get to work trying to control them. And it's just not working. And ultimately we can control them by medicating them away but there's consequences, there's cost to doing that. Now, why does MDMA or ayahuasca work with PTSD is because it gets us to turn towards the thing that we won't deal with, the thing that we've been ignoring or avoiding or controlling or you know fighting or trying to overcome or conquer, you know the language, I hate the word conquer and fear or the word overcome and fear in the same sentence. It breaks down that kind of defense mechanism or barrier between you and the ugliest, the darkness and brokers a conversation between you and that discomfort, that negativity in an inclusive way. It's like I'm willing to look at this for the first time in my life. And one session of MDMA can solve PTSD. You know, one conversation with your negativity or with your fear in this case can end depression, can end panic attacks and anxiety disorders. I've seen it happen. I'm kind of like a resource without the drugs. I've worked with people for just six hours and you know, a lifetime of depression lifts. It's crazy. I'll just conclude by a great quote by Bruce Lee. Oh, now hopefully I can remember the quote. The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be. It's a lot of effort to not deal with the negative side of life and all your shit that you won't look at and it ultimately makes you weak. It does take effort to deal with your shit and your fear and all that. It's a lot less effort. It's surprisingly easier than we thought and it will not only resolve your problems but it'll ultimately make you powerful. That's beautiful. I love it. So very simply, and maybe it's not, maybe there is no simple answer. But what are some steps people can take listening to the podcast to get them, you know, kind of move in the direction that you're talking when dealing with fear? What are some steps that they can take? So I mentioned feeling your fear and I said that that's only kind of the third step. I'm just starting to see people, there's just a few out there. Most of these people are leaders in their communities or CEOs of major corporations or the best athletes in the world at their sports because I ask a lot of people what's your relationship with fear? And they don't know anything about what I teach. And this is the word that I had in my book and thank God it's been confirmed by all these people but they say I would have to say that I have an intimate relationship with fear. Now, that is a gorgeous word. And if you learned how to feel your fear, you know, that's one experience but there's still some separation between you and the fear. It's like I'm feeling it. But when you have an intimate relationship with fear there is no separation between you and the fear. And you know, it's kind of this gorgeous experience that Bambi has, you know, taking her into higher altered states of flow and consciousness. And next thing you know, you come alive with fear. Next thing you know, you're not doing things despite the fear, you're doing things because of the fear. It's like fear becomes this gorgeous resource that makes us feel more alive, that makes us more motivated, that makes us more creative, that kind of is a sign that we're on the right path towards learning and growing because there is no learning and growing unless you step out of your comfort zone where there exists fear. So fear actually, you know, I have a long history of repressing fear and I look back on my ski career and if I had an intimate relationship with my fear back then, I would have been such a better athlete. I wouldn't have had so many injuries. Maybe, maybe you think. Well, you know, it takes you into a flow state though. It takes you into the zone and little else does. Like you look at extreme sports, you know, taking it back to extreme sports. Extreme sports are notorious for taking people into the zone. Why is that? Because there's fear. There's a real fear of death there. You can't avoid that. You have to get in the zone. And so these athletes, what they're doing is they're merging with fear. They're becoming intimate with fear. Do they know that that's what's happening out there? Definitely not. But these people are a lot more willing to feel fear than most of us, right? So there's some sort of love affair going on there. And so they merge with the fear and it's the fear that takes them into that heightened state of awareness and focus and bringing your A game, you know? That is, you know, and we know that with flow states, I don't know the number. I think it's like four or 500X. If you're in a flow state in your work, in your life, in general, in your sport, you are four or 500X more productive and magnificent. And we don't get that it's actually the fear that takes you there. And you said there was a pathology that you could create with fear, like some of these athletes were there. They have a relationship with fear that's different than the average persons, which is why they can get in that flow state. But then becoming addicted to fear can become pathological. And you said you had experience. That was that carrying over into like, when you weren't on the skis, was that addiction to fear, creating risky behaviors and stuff outside of the sport? Oh, yeah. My most extreme example was, I was heli skiing in Alaska and the, we weren't skiing, the weather was terrible. And finally I'm like, this is ridiculous. I'm just gonna go home. So I had to cash in my heli chips and I hitchhiked out to the helipad and I got picked up by a psychopath who threatened to rape and sodomize me. Oh, shit. He just murdered me and throw my dead body on the side of the road. And now keep in mind, I'm a fear addict and I've been sitting in this dumpy little Alaska town, just under stimulated for nine days. And my reaction to that was, thank God, something interesting is finally happening to me. And I, you know, and I wasn't giving the guy the power trip he wanted, so that probably saved my life and I didn't get raped and none of that, he dropped me off and down. He's like, she's not scared, it's the hell. Yeah, he's like, oh, this is no fun, right? She must be a cop. I just sat there smiling at him like, wow, this is great. You're like, take a left right here. Oh my God. And, you know, of course I didn't want to get murdered or raped or sodomized, but I just like was fascinated by the experience. And so I got dropped off. I'm like, there's something seriously wrong with me, right? How old are you right there at that point? Yeah, I was in my late 20s or early 30s. And so this set me on course to figuring out what that was all about. You know, that was part of, you know, I mentioned the beginning of this that I have 30 plus years of practical real-world experience dealing with fear and in all so many different levels. I'm like groomed by the universe to be the fear expert. I didn't study about fear in college, you know? I didn't study it about it in a lab. Like I've learned what is really going on just on a practical personal level, you know? And there's 7.5 billion of us and we have 7.5 billion different relationships with fear. I do not expect anybody to relate to mine, but I do have a fascination with brokering a conversation between people and their fear to figure out what is going on and is this the best relationship possible? And that's how I work with my clients. Yeah, it's probably why you see some people who, athletes or musicians or artists who seem to be addicted to this feeling and then they get addicted to drugs or bad relationships or whatever because it's pathological. So you want an intimate but healthy relationship with fear is what you're saying. Right, and you know, this brings up another point. A lot of people will hesitate to recover from these horrible problems that I've outlined that are associated with the repression of fear because they really are addicted to the drama that comes from their problems. I see a lot of people that don't want to actually heal their PTSD or their depression because then they wouldn't know who they are. They wouldn't have that kind of stimulus. And a lot of that stimulus comes from fear kind of recirculating from the basement and acting in a crazy way. You know, they'd be bored out of their minds if they didn't have that drama. Yeah, what do you think that is that makes people even seek that out? Like that they would want to keep falling in that cycle? Is it because it's comfortable for them? Well, subconsciously, obviously, because, you know, in the front of their mind, they're scared or it's awful or, oh, I hate being here, but you keep bringing yourself back here. So what is it that causes people to do that, you think? Well, let's look at a soldier, for example, who has PTSD. Now, more than likely if that soldier has PTSD after being at war, it started in childhood and how he was raised. More than likely when he says, I'm afraid, mom said there's nothing to be afraid of, which is the worst thing you can say to a child because it's just not true. And it's, I call it fear-shaming. And a lot of men, most of my clients are men, actually, because they've been emotionally shamed their whole life. So anytime you send a message that it's not okay to express or feel your emotions, even if they're coming out in an immature way, you know, that's fear-shaming. So that soldier then goes and has this devastating, horrific experience and then comes back, doesn't know how to, oh, and by the way, in boot camp, the image of the soldier standing there while the drill sergeant's yelling at him while he's just stoic, at least standing there is hard to miss. Even though it's not explicitly taught, it's kind of like it is explicitly taught to these soldiers. So repress, repress, repress. Otherwise, your emotions could get in the way of your job. And so then they go through this horrific experience. They don't know how to deal with the emotions. They repress them. The fear, the anger, the sadness, it's locked down there. And they also just went through this incredibly intense, exciting, fearful experience. They come home and a couple of things happen. They haven't dealt with the emotions from the horrific experience that they had. And they're also bored out of their fucking minds, right? Because they don't have fear in their lives anymore. But the only fear that they have in their lives is that recirculating PTSD fear because they're not dealing with it. And so even that can be really hard to move past because they're getting a payoff for having their PTSD. And the payoffs may be like, oh, well, I'm not bored, right? Or I don't have to now be vulnerable in my relationship or deal with my wife. Or I don't have to work. There's always some sort of payoff that prevents them from really wanting to seek help. And they take the MDMA or the ayahuasca and then they realize all this. It's like, oh my gosh, I haven't been dealing with all my shitstorm that's going on in my unconscious mind, helps them deal with it. And then that might or might not set them on course towards healing. Depends on if the payoff is greater than the cost or if the cost is greater than the payoff. Like that's kind of a simplification. Everybody's different, but that's kind of a general rule with PTSD that I see in soldiers. Go ahead, Stacy. Oh yeah, I was gonna say so. What is your role with the MAPS Association? Do you consult with them or what do you do with them? I'm a volunteer at Burning Man. Oh, oh, very cool. Yeah. Oh, interesting. That's a rough job. What's that like? Yeah. I'm also a big believer in ayahuasca journeys. Like I've done nine journeys myself and I think that MAPS is really onto something and also getting soldiers to take ayahuasca. But if you don't want to go that route, if you don't want to take drugs to kind of have an honest relationship with the negative side of life, I'm an alternative resource. I have a question for you then taking you back because we kind of just glazed over your childhood part that I'm very interested in. And I have a question for you going back to your kind of rough childhood. Can you give me something that you have received from your parents that you think has been a gift for you as an adult now? And then also something that you feel is not so much a gift that you've received from them. When I was six years old, I ran away from home and what that looks like to a six-year-old is I ran to the vacant lot next door and sat down on the steps and just refused to move for about five hours. And then that was such a poignant moment in my life because that was the moment that I realized like I'm just gonna have to raise myself. I'm gonna have to be tough and fearless and was I really aware of what was going on? No, but that was the transition for me. And that's where I learned how to just be stoic and arrogant and tough and strong and all of that and not need anybody. And so then when I, and it was based in my father and I really hated my father in that moment too. So cut to my ski career. I was this independent, strong, stoic, tough person who hated men and happened to be skiing. It's a man's sport with a lot of men and I wanted to kick the men's asses. Like people would come up to me and say, oh, you're the best woman skier I've ever seen. I'd be like, fuck you. I wouldn't be the best skier. Yeah, I wanna compare myself against the men, you know? And so I gave them the run for the money, the men. And that's why I got so good so fast and why I was so ahead of my time. And but just picture what kind of effort it takes to be that person that I've just outlined. Like it made me a really hard person, like very masculine. And I've spent the whole second half of my life since retiring as an athlete to kind of do a radical pendulum swing to find my femininity to kind of get past that kind of rigid stoic approach to life. And a lot of what it took for me to get to this place is to make friends with my emotions. And you know, it's funny, I used to cry a lot. And if you cry a lot and it's a deeply painful experience, that's a sign of repressed sadness and probably repressed anger and probably repressed fear. I used to get really, really angry. And that's a sign of the repression of emotions. Like if you have explosive, overwhelming emotions, that is a sign of repressed emotions. So just making friends with my emotions and having a more intimate relationship with them has made me a much softer person. And so for that, I'm grateful. Did you have a lot of animosity towards your father? I did, but when I was a professional skier, I didn't feel like anger. It just felt like ferocity and passion. Which feel good. Yeah, I didn't have any cognitive awareness that it was at my father. But the day that I fell in love with men and realized, oh, you know, they're not so bad after all, right? They're actually here to just kind of love on women. Like that was a big healing moment for me. But you know, when I work with athletes, it's important not to heal their demons and their wounds because all of a sudden they won't have any motivation to be the best in the world at something anymore. That's interesting. That resolves. So when I work with athletes, I'm very careful what I work with them on. That's interesting. Yeah, I don't want to resolve their pathology because that will take away their magic. Serve, you have to say, serve them very well for a long time. But I will say that of all the athletes I've worked with, and I was a mindset sports coach for 15 years, so I've worked with a lot, 100% of the time, if somebody was underperforming, it was because they were repressing fear. And in many ways, that's the reason why I wrote this book about fear. Because I could have written this book about a lot of things, but I just realized that fear's the big one. Yeah. Do you find a difference between men and women in terms of the reception of this book? Because I know men are, we are taught to repress fear quite a bit. We can't be scared, right? We're never supposed to be scared. Do you find it being different between men and women? Is there a better reception among men? I know you said you work with a lot of male clients. I would say about 75% of my clients are men because they have a harder time with their emotions than women do. And the secondary question was, do I see a different approach towards emotions between men versus women? And the answer is, well, yes. I mean, we all know that women are allowed to feel emotions. And we kind of outsource fear, though, women outsource fear to the men. Like it's the men's job to deal with the fear. Like there's a bump in the night, the man gets up to investigate. But women are becoming more willing to kind of be their own, like they're willing to go and investigate the bump in the night. They're willing to feel fear. They're willing to have a more inclusive relationship with fear rather than outsourcing it to their men folk. And so that is the reason why women are becoming more powerful because that combination of being willing to kind of feel their fear, and plus they also have an innate nature where they're more willing to feel their emotions, period, is why women are starting to become more powerful than men. It's true. Right? Like men, you know, the best thing they can do to be more powerful at work or in their relationships is to have a emotion practice or in particular, it's like, okay, joy, great, sexuality, great, but fear, anger, sadness, like how can I have a more healthy relationship with these emotions? And it taps men into their essential vulnerability, which is kind of the heart of what it means to be human being. And men are just really seeking to have a vulnerability practice right now too. And a large part of what will get them there is to make friends with their fear, anger, and sadness. I was having this conversation maybe a couple of weeks ago with my girlfriend and we were talking about how typically, and of course there's individual variances that can be quite wide, but typically women have a much better time feeling things or at least they're more in tune to how they feel. And we're having this discussion debate and you know, you could talk about how society allows women to feel and men not so much. But the other thing is also is that, you know, men don't experience a drastic change in hormones like women do on a regular basis since puberty. So since puberty, women have had to feel more and practice more feeling. Whereas men were kind of like, you know, hormones kind of stay relatively baseline, you know, for a whole life. So we don't have a lot of practice necessarily with feeling so much. And that was just a theory that I came up with that I think makes sense. Hormones are like a steroid injection to your emotions. Yeah, right. Well, I want to take, Christy, I want to take you again. Sal keeps taking you back to the softball questions. I want to stay in the hardball stuff with you because I like to know more about what makes you tick. I mean, I already like you as a person. I already think you got a great book and I'm excited to read it. But I want to know more about what makes you tick and going back to your parents and you kind of gave me something that has something that served you really well is that the, you know, facing fear early on at six years old. But what about something that still rears its head on you or services from childhood that you still have to deal with today? Is there anything that comes to mind that challenges you to this day that goes all the way back to your relationship with your parents? Before I answer that, this is a really good opportunity to, you know, I keep going back to PTSD and soldiers and going through a horrific experience. Like we have this impression that we have to go back in time and start dissecting why we repress fear, like how our parents raised us, you know, relive the trauma that caused the PTSD. It's just really not only unnecessary, but cruel. And so for me, I look at your question and while interesting, you know, what matters more to me right now is what is my relationship with myself today? Because the past is in the past. Can't that be a way of repressing that emotion that's buried deep in there from childhood though too? Well, it's a way of not wasting time on things that don't matter anymore because they're in the past. It's like, yes, who I am today was shaped by how I was raised. And there's this thing called false self that's like a huge whole subject that influences me every day. False self is, you know, we call it the terrible twos for a reason. It's when you separate and become an individual. It's like you become a separate egoic being. And I'm not you, you're not me. I'm not mommy and daddy anymore. I'm my own self. And between age two and I say 12, you know, you can take on like a single sentence from somebody at school, like you're ugly and then you may think, you know, oh, I'm ugly your whole life. That if we heard that as an adult, you'd be like, screw you, right? Like, and it doesn't kind of go into our bone marrow. Well, except for the, except for the child that heard that, right? Right. The child that heard that. You or I see maybe we didn't hear that as a kid when we were, you know, during those most formative years for our brain didn't hear that, but a child who did hear that may hear it as an adult and it's still be an issue for them. But you and I, that's not a big deal. We don't look at it like that, which is why I think it is important to visit where that may be rooted from, no? Well, one of, when I work with a client, I work with them for only six hours to get them through the other side of a problem. This is super fast. It's not therapy. You don't have to pound on pillows or go back and dissect your childhood. I mean, it's just a lot of processing and a lot of work. And you will never get to the bottom of your well of shit of things to process. So I work with people in a really simplistic way. What is your relationship with fear right now? Are you trying to control it? Do you ignore it? Do you fight it? Like, can you make friends with it? Like, let's see what you're, you know, what's possible here. But I also spend some time helping people understand that there's this false self persona that we create between two and 12 that we kind of take on at our core, you know, that becomes the story of our lives and how we walk and talk and carry ourselves throughout the rest of our lives is based on that. And that's usually the third session that I do with people and it's really profound. And just being able to see that you're not it and it's not you is all it takes. It's like, I do a 90 minute session on this and it's kind of makes 20 years of therapy no longer necessary. And so just to answer your question because you have a fascination with my particular story, I would say that if I'm fighting with my husband, that's false self. It's his false self fighting with my false self. Like my 10 year old child is fighting with his 10 year old child and his doesn't make any sense to me and mine doesn't make any sense to him. Like, like, so that's there, but really dissecting it doesn't help. It's like, it's like understanding the universe. You're trying to understand the universe. Like there's three great mysteries in this world. There's outer space. There's under the sea and our own minds. And if you go to therapy to try to understand your own mind, it's like trying to understand the universe. It's just, you know, the second you get a grasp of something, it just changes anyway, you know? And it's just gone. And so I think therapy is great for some things, but when it comes to kind of having a better relationship with your emotions, it's definitely talk therapy in particular, not the right course of action because you're gonna get lost in that process forever. And so back to today, me, like I've done a huge pendulum swing since my ski career. Like I used to sell the sexy wild side of skiing. I was sponsored by Red Bull. I was outrageous, you know, I set outrageous things. And now I'm more feminine. I was very McMaskillan then too. Now I'm more feminine. Now I'm devoting my life to helping people. You know, I'm of service. I mean, I am, this book was, you know, like I was a lady of leisure before I wrote this book and now I'm working 80 hour work weeks. It's just crazy, you know, the sacrifice that I'm making just to help people. And, you know, I was so hedonistic and narcissistic back during my ski career. And so now I'm just, it's like I'm balancing that out and somewhere I'll land in the middle, you know? It's also an ego trip to write a book. You know, I'm always down for a good ego trip. But- We love those. That's where I am right now. Yeah. Okay, I'll let you, I'll let you off the hook a little bit. I just, I love, I mean, obviously you're a high performer and, you know, I think that it's really, really neat to unpack what makes these high performers go. And I think everyone's uniquely different. And I think the way you handle fear, even though you and I probably have a lot in common because maybe of our childhood and stuff like that could be completely different or you view it completely different than I view it. So I'm very intrigued by your story, not just your outlook on fear, but like what makes you tick because I think that in itself tells so much. I think people just may be interested because you're the author, you know what I mean? So people want to know. But I think it's fascinating. What you're saying is absolutely fascinating to me because I know some of the statistics on the success rate of, you know, traditional therapies and means for dealing with these things. And in Western societies, it's not good. It's not a good, we don't have a good track record. We have got to try something new. This is something new. This is so out of the box. This is the radical opposite of everything we've been taught about what to do about fear. And it's, I've found it works. It works and it's a lot easier. And not only that, you then get the fear hack too where the fear is actually the thing that helps you be magnificent. That's what I want. Well, thanks for coming on. Yes. That was awesome conversation. Really appreciated it. Yeah. Awesome. Period. Oh, well, thank you. We didn't even say it on the show that Sal and I got a chance to have dinner with you at the Spartan race and both of us when we walked out, like we were around, I don't know, there's probably a few hundred people maybe in that place and you were the only person that we were really interested to talk to afterwards. You made that much of an impression on both of us. There's that ego trip again. You guys are going to keep me trapped in hedonism forever. Keep talking like that. That's it up. Anyway, thanks again. Yep. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. 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