Hey, quick question for you. Have you ever been afraid of taking action? It’s a serious question. Have you ever been afraid of failing? Have you ever been afraid of taking a forward step in an unknown direction, hoping that the result is going to be good? I think if you answered yes to any one of those three questions, this is a really important message called bad tapes are bad. What do I mean by that? Watch this video to find out.
My Own Bad Tapes
I had some bad tapes growing up. I had a mom that man, I love her to death, she’s 89 years old today, and I think most parents do the best job they can with what they got. But my mom came from a pretty bad dysfunctional family, came from a family that had a lot of intensity, divorces, and even some alcoholism, and it was hard.
I was the first son and I think like a lot of parents, when you have your first child, you think, I want this boy or this girl to turn out perfect. Well, as I grew up and, and as I began to do things in my life as a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 13, 14, 15, even in high school, my mom infused me with a negative tape. And the negative tape was that I wasn’t worthy and that I was a failure. And in some cases, she came right out and just said, “Why did you fail at that?” And I think for me, it was a lot about self-esteem. It was a lot about why would my mom who loves me be giving me these messages.
I joined the swim team and I could never swim the right way. I could never swim fast enough. I went to a camp where you had to do a lot of rigorous physical exercise to qualify to be a camp worker, which was going to be my summer job. I didn’t qualify, I wasn’t in good enough shape, and my mom had to drive up to pick me up and bring me down and all the way down she’d berated me. And it was hard. It was hard to grow up with a bad tape that made me feel bad. And what I began to do at the age of 16, 17, I began to understand that attitude is a choice. I began to understand that you’re not a failure. Something you did may not have worked out, but you are not fundamentally as a human a failure. On the other hand, you are a miracle.
Think of Yourself as a Miracle
And so I began to think, well, how would a miracle treat a situation like this? Or how would a miracle handle this or that, or whatever. If I could just go in my head from being a failure to being a miracle, would that change the way that I operated? And I believe it did. I had a moment where my grandmother and I were talking about attitude and she gave me a really powerful book that was called Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude. And I think for me, I began to understand that if I choose a healthy attitude, if I choose the fact that as a human being, I am a miracle, there’s nobody else like me on the planet and that’s probably good and bad in different ways, but I am who I am and I can accept that, I can embrace it, or I can let it overwhelm me.
Why People Feel Terrified
We recently had our High Trust Sales Academy and had 250 mortgage and real estate professionals attending for four days. And I remember at the end of the first day, when I talked about the power of vision and the power of dreams, people came up to me and the word that was used repeatedly was, I’m terrified. Terrified was the word. And I think I heard it about 30 times that first day. And I asked a question, I said, “So what about this terrifies you?” And the answer was, “I’m not sure I can do it.” All right.
And that’s fair. When we talk about succeeding and scaling up, and we talk about going from making $50 an hour to $1,000 an hour. When we talk about going from working with the worst real estate agents out there if you’re a lender, or high maintenance buyers and sellers if you’re a realtor, to working with only the best, that can most certainly induce some level of fear.
Fear and Failure are Uniquely Tied Together
A lot of people, myself included early on, would interpret failure as identity, would interpret failure as my future, when in fact, if you don’t know how to handle failure, because you have bad tapes, then your future will be more negative than it could be positive. You will not achieve what you could otherwise achieve if you had a positive outlook.
And so somewhere behind this idea of what are we afraid of, and then taking a look at what terrifies you about succeeding, and then somehow answering why is success important to you in the first place and marrying why you want to be in the commission world, period, whatever it is that you sell. It’s an interesting phenomenon because as soon as you realize that everything that you end up doing wrong is either a lesson teacher in the healthiest way, or it can be a future crusher in the most unhealthy way.
Understanding The Stages of Fear
And so my message to you is to understand the stages of fear. One is F-E-A-R stands for False Experiences Appearing Real. This happens in call reluctance all the time where we think maybe we’re going to make a call and somehow or another, we’re getting nervous about it. And I understand that. I mean, especially if you begin to target the right people and upgrade who you’re going after in business and so on and so forth, there can be fear around that. But if you start to prepare and if you change your paradigm, one of the paradigm shifts is in making calls, don’t make calls because you want to get, make calls because you want to give, when all of a sudden you have something to give, instead of something you want like a sale from or a referral from, it changes the entire dynamic of the sales call. You can go from call reluctance to call excitement. And that’s really powerful.
Facing Your Fears
When you start thinking about a different modality, then fear moves to this idea of I’m going to face my fears, F-E Face Everything, And Rise A-R. F-E-A-R, Face Everything And Rise.
So what happens is when we do what we’re afraid of, and we make progress, we’re not as afraid to do it the next time. And so the more important message here on bad tapes is you can fix bad tapes by micro moments of success. Every little moment is a victory. Every forward piece of progress is a victory. Every way you figure out how not to say something is a victory. Everything you learn not to do because you’ve done it and it’s caused pain, is a victory.
And then the final illustration of fear is you’re going to go from false experiences appearing real. I’m not going to give my power away. I’m not going to say this is going to be a bad call before I make it. I’m not going to say, I’ll wonder if this is going to work. I am not going to interpret something in the future as going negative when it hasn’t even occurred yet. And then I’m going to muscle up and I’m going to learn, and I’m going to practice. I’m going to skill, and I’m going to face everything and rise. And then as soon as I get competent, which is the big equalizer for fear and failure, as soon as I get competent, then I’m feeling excited and ready, F-E-A-R.
Replace Bad Tapes with Good Tapes
So the bad tapes. We all have them, we all have them. They trigger us at moments every single day, in some way or another. And my message to you is to replace the bad tape with a good tape. I am in control. I got this, I can do this. I’m excited about doing this. This is going to change my life.
Those are the positive modalities. You need to just pour into your mind and the dopamine and the serotonin and the oxytocin and the endorphins are all going to kick into gear. And as soon as you do what you’re afraid of and it works, you’ll want to do it again, and you’ll do it better and better and better and better. Bad tapes are bad. Good tapes are good.
That is a message worth owning.
