 Hi and welcome to Bright Minds from TickMill. I'm your host Patrick Munley and in this series we're setting out to answer some of the most commonly asked questions around investment and trading through entertaining and insightful conversations with seasoned insiders. In the world of finance, fear is everywhere. A recent carry-wise survey on investment behavior found that 14% of respondents feared losing money. Over 5% feared trapping their money in investments and 11% feared investing generally due to a feeling that it's too complicated. Many people have fear around their personal finances. A recent Capital One survey showed that 77% of Americans are anxious about their financial situation and this will inevitably hold people back from investing. Fear, along with greed, is a leading force in the trading and investment world affecting both our personal investments and the market at large. On a personal level, fear can make us act in ways that are not conducive to success in the markets. From skittishly abandoning our long-term strategies to missing out on amazing opportunities due to excessive anxiety. Changing our relationship to fear can help us overcome these worries and evaluate the markets and our place within them more accurately, leading to better decisions and therefore improve performance. Today we're joined by Tony Blair. Tony has been on the forefront of martial arts and self-defense education for over 40 years. He founded Blair Tactical Systems in 1985 to focus on performance psychology and tactical training and his spear system, which focuses on psychology, physics and physiology, is used by law enforcement organizations globally. Tony now runs fear management seminars which aim to change our relationship with fear in order to rethink and improve many aspects of our lives both professionally and personally. In this episode we'll be discussing fear, how it changes our actions and decisions and how we can manage those effects. We'll be finding out what happens in our minds and bodies when fear takes hold and how we can control and harness fear to our advantage when trading and investing. Tony, welcome to Bright Minds. Could you start by telling us a little bit more about you and your career so far, your personal experience with fear and what made you want to study it? Hey, Patrick, thanks. Great to be here finally. What an interesting opportunity to speak to your audience because it's so counterintuitive, right? You hear Tony's done stuff, law enforcement, military, martial arts. I've worked with pro fighters, amateur fighters, but the single most important area we focus on, which I think is the most neglected for all of us, is understanding how to manage fear. We have an expression in our system, the people who manage their fear manage to fight, to fight being the operative word. It doesn't guarantee victory, but it guarantees you're in the fight and that way you can perform. So my history, to go back to your question, I've been afraid my entire life. I'm 62 years old right now. I'm still afraid of shit, right? I've got three kids. My daughter's out on a trip. My other daughter barbed my car. My son's flying to Paris. I'm going, okay, everything okay. It's just nonstop. And it was weird from zero to 10 years old, from 10 to 20, from 20 to 30, looking back as we've developed our program, for those of you watching, I've got a t-shirt on that says no fear, but it's spelled unconventionally or counterintuitively. It's spelled K-N-O-W. And the idea was, and I wish I'd learned this lesson when I was a kid, because my life would have been different, is that when we get to no fear, when we want to no fear, when we decide to no fear, we can turn fear into fuel. And if fear now becomes more of a stimulus to take action, then we can actually use it in a positive way, because most of us, as evidenced by the very detailed introduction, have a negative relationship with it. And if I think about specific events, like as a kid, I was an all-round athlete, but I was never the best athlete, because I was always worried about what I make the team, what I let down my dad. I can remember always being afraid, Patrick, of what's the score? Are we going to win? Are people judging me? Are people evaluating me? And I think most people carry that around their whole lives. We do that as adults, before you go to a meeting, if you're going to a social meeting, you're looking in the mirror, you're fixing your hair, you're deciding, I shouldn't wear this, I should wear this. When you create the self-awareness to understand where that is coming from, it's a superpower, because now that self-awareness inspires some critical thinking. And the combination of self-awareness, critical thinking actually is like a superpower to situational awareness. And that has direct application in all our lives, but particularly in investing and finance and so on and so forth. But to wrap this up, because I could talk for the whole show on how fear, I've dragged around fear my whole life, let's assume that I would still have become the self-defense guy, the fear management guy, and I'd still have this career that brought me to here. Had I learned that fear can be a positive thing, in fact it's almost always a positive thing, that all that would have changed in my life is I would have worried less. I would have made decisions faster. Like my mission right now is to get parents and teachers and kids to understand the psychology of fear, not the physiology of fear, and that will change everyone's life. Why do you think it's such a motivating emotion? And so far as, I mean, I think I've read previously that when you grow up as a child, if you're in an environment whereby your parents are constantly saying, no, don't do that. That's dangerous. Come back from the edge. Don't go too near the water. Is it that that gets so ingrained in you from an early age? And then without that being corrected or you having the self-awareness or someone giving you the the input that, you know, that's not the way to face the world, that that just sticks with you and progresses throughout your life. And a bit like you say, eventually becomes something that's almost debilitating. Yeah, no, 100%. Obviously, there are there are certain they believe there are certain fears that are like DNA level, like a fear of snakes, spiders falling. So we know to to walk to the edge of a cliff, like going, Oh, that looks like a big drop there. We know that you're in the woods and you hear what looks like a rattlesnake. You don't look to your buddy and go, Hey, is that a small tambourine band? Or does that sound like like, like, you know, like your body just knows. But other than that, there's a theory out there that almost all other fears are learned or taught through society or your your guardians, your parents, your mentors. So there's quite quite a famous trading psychology guy, not with us anymore, Mark Douglas. One of the analogies he gave in one of his early books was about a child and a parent meeting a dog. So the parent had grown up in a situation whereby every dog was deemed to be, you know, a hound of the Baskerville was going to slaughter you where you stood. And he taught then about the child who meets the dog without the parents around him. So without any influence from the parent, the child will meet the dog and the natural instinct is to want to embrace the dog. Whereas that same child with the parent who's overtly protective or had had a bad experience in their childhood with dogs, immediately the hand goes on the arm and they're pulled back. And it's and it shows how just that one simple act can craft your response and almost like a fear response to an animal that, you know, may or may not be a threat. It just really drives home that idea of how, like you say mentors or your care, get your primary caregivers, really shape that early phase of your response to potentially threatening situations, not necessarily threatening situations. Yeah, 100%. And there's an interesting and more subtle aspect to fear. We could argue that there are no bad fears because if there's true danger, that fear spike is like an alarm sounding in our body. If it's imagined danger, and I wrote an article on this recently that the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat is only the threat, but the impact on the body and the mind is the same. You know, it's interesting because there's that classic belief system of like, you know, money is the root of all evil, right? Sure. But nobody in finance and investment believes that because they wouldn't be in that business. Sure. You know, and so someone introduces you to somebody in a business and you're going to like pitch them this idea of Hey, let me represent you, let me invest your money. If that person grew up with the mom that was afraid of the dogs, but the dog was afraid of money, yeah, they might look at you and nod and then they're not returning your calls, right? And it's just it's an imagined fear. But the result in terms of behavior is exactly the same. So there's a story I tell in our no fear seminar of growing in growing up in Canada, you're either a skier or skater, you know, and in my family grew up on skis, my parents were both very famous in the ski patrol. And I was skiing when I was three years old. And I was really, really good. But I never won a race. I'd always wipe out. So people would say, like some people go, you're self sabotager. Well, no, I always showed up on time, I skied my ass off. But I would always catch a tip, I would always wipe out. And I realized that my ski coach wasn't a ski coach, Patrick, he was a ski trainer. And I think this is application for all the parents listening, but also the managers and leaders. Yeah, is is sometimes you think you're mentoring people. But really, what you're doing is just teaching them steps and stages. And then you can't figure out why they're not rising to the occasion. The rise to the occasion element is a more of an emotional psychological flow state, where, where that individual is unconsciously or consciously using their fear of an outcome to drive them towards the outcome, if that makes sense. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Totally agree with that. And that brings me to the next point I wanted to speak with you about. I know we talked about it off camera before about the victims vocabulary, and how that can really negatively impact performance. And, you know, that like self talk loop that starts going and, you know, takes you down a pretty dark path, really. Yeah, so I always make this joke that, let's say you're having like a really good day, and then tomorrow's a really good day, we start to think like, man, like, okay, what's what's what's up, what's going to happen? Because this is like, everything I'm doing is touching the goal. We start to almost start thinking something's going to happen. Like, when I get a big opportunity in business, I it's an unsolicited thought that goes, Oh, man, okay, how's this deal going to go south? What's going to happen here? Yeah, because, because as entrepreneurs, we work on way more deals that never happen than deals that do happen. That is such a great link to investing and trading because more often than not, you're getting negative feedback from the markets or your the investments you're involved in whereby they're either not performing as you'd anticipated or they're stagnating. But then it's just that small percentage that work out and pay out. And as long as you can manage your internal states to go with the flow and let you know, let the good opportunities run and be don't have fear about cutting the bad opportunities, then that that balance of probabilities ultimately works in your favor in the end. So so an interesting thing, and I come back to this this article I wrote recently about the difference between real fear and imagined fear. They both can debilitate, they both can create what we call emotional inertia inertia. So inertia is like like a body in space and ability to move. Emotional inertia is I should be selling, but I'm hesitating or I should be buying, but I'm hesitating. Yeah. The difference between the imagined fear and the real fear doesn't change our physiology and our psychology. Yeah. But we only find out afterwards that it was imagined fear, but the impact and the toll on our body. So a really interesting concept and one that that we teach people to work through is if you could, if you could vet, in other words, you could evaluate and go, Oh my God, this is imagined fear, then you can get out of the fear loop faster. In terms of business and life, we imagine more fears than we experience. If I talk to somebody and I go, Hey, why don't you invest? I don't invest. Why money's the root of all evil. Okay. If you look at any belief system and you peel that onion, the core of a belief, especially the erroneous one is going to be fear. Why somebody does or doesn't do something is going to be fear. And I've been on negotiation podcasts. I've been on military podcasts. I've been on mental health podcasts. And it always comes out. How is it that I can talk about the idea of improving yourself awareness so that you understand what you're afraid of so that you can decide, is this a reasonable fear or what am I going to do with this information? How does that have ubiquitous application? And it does because, and I alluded this earlier, when we get a fear spike, a fear spike is is is a external stimuli or an internal stimuli. If I imagine it, it's in my mind, if it's external, I see it, then my mind starts to go right away. Yeah. When I go in the fear loop, what immediately starts to happen is without, and this is universal, regardless of gender, age, experience, doubt, hesitation, procrastination, those three steps happen automatically, and they can happen like in a nanosecond. Yeah. And I'll give you I'll give everyone listening to this, an example. We've all forgotten our keys, our wallet, or our phones somewhere to restaurant at a meeting in a bathroom. And as soon as you walk, there's a part of your RAS, your reticular activating system that goes my watch, my phone, my wallet, whatever it is. Have you ever you traveled? You've traveled, obviously, and you know, have you ever walked out of your hotel room? And as the doors closing and your two steps away, you realize you forgot your key in the room? Yeah. Yeah. But what happens? This happens, I'm going to act it out for people watching the show. You're like this, you're walking, and all of a sudden you put your hand in your pocket, and then all of a sudden in slow motion, you're like, and you try to lunge back with your foot with your hand. Now, here's what's so insane about this. You're, you're in a hotel, and there's 10,000 keys down desk. You know that if your wallet was in the room, security will come up with you. If you put your wallet on, you give your key, but we still dramatically go no. And we but here's the funny thing. It doesn't matter if that was about some war about some election. And you know, immediately that's going to impact the stock market. And now there's going to be real news and fake news. And you're going to decipher all that. And your, your, your clients are panicking. That's like closing the door closing with the key where you go, no. And you react. But what I want to explain everybody here in that single moment where a stimulus was introduced too quickly. Our brain goes to doubt, hesitation, procrastination. And then there's an immediate overreaction. But if you learn the system and you study it, you can go, wait a minute, you can woo so for a second and go, okay, wait a minute, this is okay. This is cool. I'll get my key downstairs. I've got my wallet on me. And you start to analyze, okay, what should be the next intelligence step? Specifically for our audience study, I mean, that is, is brilliant. I mean, it's something I was taught a long time ago is the difference between reaction and response. So the reaction is all emotion and adrenaline. But response comes from choosing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And is there a mechanism that you can internalize that means you can one recognize reaction and then to move to response very quickly. So the idea is, is can we use external and internal fear and see it like a hologram map that we're standing on or living through. And what I mean by that is I'm driving along and all of a sudden a stimulus gets introduced too quickly. I'm like, this is perfect. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to the airport. We're gonna get there. I got one hour to get to the meeting. This is perfect. And you get onto the road and all of a sudden there's like a traffic jam. Yeah. And immediately you feel your nervous system go, oh, shit, right? This happens. And this has happened to you has happened to me. Yeah. And this is what I mean by an external stimulus triggers a movie in your mind. Unless you go, Okay, what is the map? The map is this doubt creates hesitation, hesitation creates procrastination, unchecked, what I mean by unchecked, meaning I don't have a system to reflect and then dissect. Yeah. And that was the reaction versus response. Yeah. Yeah. And so we've we've heard of the react in this is from this is actually inspired from some military training with with a unit I was working with years ago, we would talk that everyone was always reacting to contact. And we said, look, we need to preact to contact. Right. Reacting is you've done good scenarios, you've learned the system, you understand what the emotional psychological system is going to do. Yeah. So if I know what my mind is going to do, like, for example, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, you know what, I want to practice my resilience today. I hope I hope something catastrophic happens. Let's let's hope for a crash today just to practice resilience and keep your like nobody thinks that way. In other words, we don't get intentional reps on how do we handle stress and duress? Yeah. And so part of the no fear program is actually we've we've a graphic that live that think of it as almost like a script map for the mind. Yeah, where we're talking about the I call it the neural circuitry of fear, how we make decisions under duress. And it starts with this idea that if self awareness is the holy grail of superpowers. Yeah. Right. So if I come into your office and you're sitting there like this, you know, doing this sort of thing, nervous twitching and I go, dude, what's happening? And you go like how many times if you said to somebody who you know, they're being bothered by something, it could be personal health, finance relationship. And you go, Hey, man, are you okay? And they look at you and they go, Yeah, why what's up? And their lack of self awareness. And this is so important. Everyone listening. Lack of self awareness of being in the fear loop consumes time. That time in the fear loop is time you can't get back and time is the only resource we can regenerate. I love the acronym. I'm sure you've heard it before. Fear false expectations appearing real. Yeah. And and I have a fun definition of it. It's when I'm visualizing something in the future, that is debilitating me in the present slowing down. And and listen, business love speed, right? And a lot of the stuff that you guys do in finance, there's no second place. No, no, I came in second like, no, no, no, second doesn't count anymore. This is this deals over. So so business love speed. And the only way we can compete is if we improve our self awareness, our self awareness, let's us know dude, you're in the fear loop when you're in the fear loop, you're consuming time. If I can manage the fear, I can help manage time. And that's like, I don't even know what that's worth to people is the ability to manage time. For our specific audience, the things you've mentioned there, Tony, I think are absolute pearls because for a lot of people starting out in trading and investing, this fear loop actually liquidates accounts. You know, people lose their sometimes it can be their life savings because of being trapped in this fear loop and not being able to have the level of self awareness to respond in a timely fashion to and I mean, there are lots of things within the markets that are outside of your control. But cutting a loser or letting a winning position run is within your control. And that is a response. Whereas the like you say, the fear loop is creating that emotional reaction where you make missteps and mistakes that that is a quite a common, quite a common theme within certainly within the retail investing community. So I think for this audience to really grasp what you're saying there and take that on board is is is gold dust. The application of everything we've talked about during today's session, I think will just be priceless for them. So really want to thank you for your your time today, Tony. And most importantly, is there anywhere that our listeners can go to to follow up on some of these concepts? I think you mentioned to me offline that you've got a quite a neat PDF that people can download. Like hopefully you'll share that with with with anyone listening. It's called Making Friends with Fear. And if anyone wants to talk, I handle all my social media. If you got a question like people are always trying to get me to outsource it. But I love communicating and talking to people. And if you've got a question or something that I can I can do just just hit me up and and we'll get we'll talk. Tony, thank you so much again for your time today. And thanks everyone for listening to Bright Minds from TickMill. If you found these conversations useful, you can find us at youtube.com slash at TickMill Global. Let us know any questions or comments below the video or get in touch directly at podcast at TickMill.com. While through these conversations, we offer tips and insider knowledge. Nothing on the podcast should be considered financial advice. And we encourage listeners to seek professional financial advice whenever they can. Guests, opinions are their own and not necessarily reflecting the views of TickMill Global. Once again, thank you, Tony Blau for your time and thanks everyone for listening.