The Cost of Real Authority: You Can’t Lead What You Haven’t Lived  Suffering in and of itself is meaningless. We give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. Authority doesn't come from having more money. Authority comes from going through trauma and not letting it win over you. You only have authority over the things that you have personally wrestled with. I have the freedom to choose how I'm gonna respond to this, and I have the responsibility to use this in other areas of my life. What if you could build a business in the modern world as big or as small as you want without having to compromise the things that were the most important to you in the very beginning? This is the Wealthy Consultant Talks podcast with Taylor Welch and Mike Walker as they share with you today, their learning list. Sense from stories in their experiences over the past 10 to 15 years and share with you right here, right now, let's get into it. Um, this is about moving through. So we all have these situations. And if you, by the way, if you don't have situations that like, just be real, real honest, like if, if you don't have moments where you're like, should I even keep going? You are not really doing great work for the world, and I'm just gonna put my stake in the grounds on that because I believe that with great power and with great influence, you have testing. You have trying and you have the greatest of all time, have have all talked about it. They've all mentioned it where there are these lessons that come at great price and a great cost. And so, uh, we have to learn as, as people of influence how to let the past go in a way that has utility. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about how he. He, uh, Viktor Frankl talks about different ways and strategic initiatives for making it through trauma in difficult seasons, but I wanna actually change that around to getting the past to be where it belongs and getting the future to be at where, where it belongs. And turning the past into lessons. He writes this, and we're gonna just kind of pick back up in part of the, the research, terrible as it was. My experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of my key ideas, that life is not a primary quest for pleasure as Sigmund Freud believed, or a quest for power as Alfred Adler believed, but rather a quest for meaning. I. The greatest task for any person to find, meaning is in his or her life. So putting it at the very top of like, if, if we, if we wanna actually organize the needs of the human species, he's putting meaning you, you knowing why you're here at the very top of the list. And we're gonna go into why I saw three possible sources for meaning in work. Love and encourage doing something significant in my work. Caring for another person via love E Courage, especially during difficult times, suffering in and of itself is meaningless. We give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. He is got some notes that support this idea, which you can read through in, um, the research. But we'll talk real fast about this idea of suffering in itself being meaningless, and rather it's the meaning that defines the level of suffering. How many of you have been in a situation that was not your fault, you didn't cause it, you didn't ask for it? And in hindsight. There were things that you learned from it that you needed to do good work in the future. The answer a hundred percent of the time is, yeah, you have some of these things, but do we think about them? Do we pay attention to them? Do we collect them? Like, uh, my daughter collects quarters right now because when we go eat at Mexican restaurants, they always have. These games that you put quarters in. And so she'll just snoop around. The first time she gets in a car, she did it with like, even if it's not her car, she's looking for quarters. Like, yes, okay. That's not ours. Uh, but you know, my, my, yeah, my daughter's, she's on the hunt for something because is she's, she's searching for something. How many of us are looking in hunting for lessons the same way that Kate searches for quarters in cars that aren't hers? This is the secret to being impenetrable. Being able to mobilize everything in a way that is productive, is being open and honest and searching for the lessons that that show up in everyday difficulties. Uh, Frankel talks a lot about the polar polarization. Of freedom and responsibility. We're gonna go through this quickly, and you can write it down and we'll, we'll discuss it, but the, the idea of freedom and responsibility are two polar, uh, polarizing ideas that he says create control in a person's life. Freedom is an internal state, is not something that can be taken away from you. If you go all the way to first principles and, and the, the first word, consequences, we all control. Via our responses. Think about what a response is. Is response a choice? Yes. That's why when, when you'll hear me talk about difficult times, I'll often reference the freedom that comes through choices. If you can choose to respond to something admirably, then you wrestle authority over it. Authority doesn't come from being stronger. Authority doesn't come from having more money. Authority comes from going through trauma and not letting it win over you. You only have authority over the things that you have personally wrestled with. That's it. You can manufacture and cheat and hack your way to a place of authority, but unless you've dealt with it and struggled with it, you don't have real authority over it. This is why sometimes when we'll talk with clients or friends of mine, they'll be going through something awful and it's a, it's an area that I believe they have a mission. A calling to deal with, but because they've never actually dealt dealt with it, they have no authority over it. How are you gonna help somebody else if you've never stared it didn't face yourself? We wake up in the morning, we're like, oh yeah, I'm super motivated for impact, like impact, impact, impact, impact. But if you're super motivated by impact and you're unwilling to go through difficult situations, you are full of shit that people could call you fraudulent because you are. Motivated by something, but you do not wanna actually pay the cost of authority to get control over. Does that make sense? Solid. So whatever it is, whether it's you're going through divorce or you've gone through the, the loss of a child or a loved one, or you've gone through issues in your business, or you've been, you know, whatever it is. Keep this in mind that you are going through the process of getting authority over something that you are likely called to help other people deal with. It's not happening to you. It's happening to equip you, and this is that idea of freedom and responsibility. I have the freedom to choose and I have the responsibility to use. You write this down if you're taking notes. Freedom to choose responsibility to use. I have the freedom to choose how I'm gonna respond to this, and I have the responsibility to use this in other areas of my life. Maybe you should get, we should get, uh, sweatshirts or hoodies with that. My freedom to choose responsibility to use. There are, there are people that go through difficult moments and difficult seasons. You know, imagine, imagine somebody going through. The situations that these people went through, and right when they got to the very end, they survived all the way through prison. They made it all the way through, they were finally released, and the day that they were released out of prison, they decided to die. Well, what would you think about that? You just say, whoa, why? Like to make it through the atrocities and through the. The shame and the, the pain and all of the things that you have to go through. These people literally got to the very end. They made it to the very end, and then they, they died as soon as they got out or they gave up or whatever. But we, we are easy to judge that situation, but every day in our lives we do the same thing. We'll go through a season in our business. It's so hard that we decide to give up, but we didn't realize that. We had just crossed over that pinnacle point where things are gonna be mobilizing for you. So it's not up to us to know when the end is. We have the freedom to choose and the responsibility to use the things that we're going through. And then he also makes a big deal at the end about about inner strength coming from testing a, he took the line from Nietzche that says that, which does not kill me, makes me. Stronger and we love it until we're the ones getting stronger. Yeah, exactly. It's an interesting dichotomy here where it's like, you know. Doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, which is great. We love to tell it to other people, but we, we wrestle with it when we're going through, through it ourselves. So let me give you some of the ways and we'll package this up. That, that, uh, he has organized in his, in, in his writings on ways to make it through. And then after we're done with that, we're gonna do a reverse engineering of fear. Because if you are honest with yourself, the biggest battle you have when you make it through something. Is the fear perpetually fearing having to go through it again, will cause it to happen again, and you cycle. Okay, so here are ways to make it through. You guys ready? This is, uh, this is a practical list from, uh, the survival of one of the hardest things that's ever happened to another human being. Number one, humor. Humor what this is talking about, surviving through concentration camps, and he says one of the number one easiest ways to make it through is humor. He says, I practically trained a friend of mine who worked next to me on the building site to develop a sense of humor. I suggested to him that we would promise each other. To invent at least one amusing story every single day, and it could be about anything. Most often, some incident that could happen one day after our liberation. Here's a guy who's being literally tortured, worked to death, and he's training people around him how to develop a sense of humor. Amazing man. If you can laugh through it, you can make it through it. This is interesting when you'd actually go into like, so this is Viktor Frankl. These guys didn't have access to like what I would call more cutting edge science that we have today, which is like collective consciousness and quantum energy and entanglements and. Well, they, they didn't have all of this, and so they were tapping into these different levels that were beyond their understanding of it. Mm-hmm. And what's funny is when we look backwards at this and diagnose this, Schumer actually integrates you into an energy field that is separating you out from a, a state of victimhood. Do you know any victims who laugh? No. Not a one. Because victimhood is all about the world against me and why me? And but when you have the ability to laugh at something, you remove its power over you. It becomes a servant, not a master. So Victor's going through this life in prison, and him and his friend are coming up with something that is amusing every single day. Which is removing the level of victimhood and slavery that they feel in their everyday situation. So this, the number one step is this part of the process is learn how to laugh at it. Am I saying that we should laugh at atrocities and laugh at No. Not saying that the words in my mouth, shame on you. Back off of me. What I'm saying is that there's always something. There's always something in or around your daily life that you can amuse yourself with and find humor in. And when you actually read the text of this most days, the amusing story that they would share with themselves was made up. Hmm. They make up a story. Make each other laugh. It wasn't even real. But does the mind care whether it's real imagined? No, it doesn't study visualization and study the way that the imagination actually works. The mind doesn't care. The mind's receiving laughter from it whether it really happened or whether it didn't. It's power here. Uh, number two. Inner strength is this list of how do you make it through something inner strength. He said what was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude towards life. We had to learn ourselves. And furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were constantly being questioned by life. Every day, every hour. Our answers must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. So this is his, this is giving you a, a, an image into his definition of inner strength. I'm gonna read it again, just the pieces that I want to go deeper on. It really did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We had to think of ourselves as those who were constantly being questioned by life. Every day. Every hour. I. Our answers must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Here is how we build inner strength. If you want to, if you see people who just, they survive anything like bury them, they'll just dig out, strip everything away from them, they'll build it again. Uh, tarnish their reputation. They'll rebuild their reputation, lie about them. They will fix it, and the record will be corrected. You can't stop 'em. You can't slow 'em down. You can't demotivate 'em. You can't make 'em unhappy. They just roll through life with the force. It's called inner strength. Here's how you build it, right? Action and right conduct. This is straight from the man himself. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. So. When you see people online, they speak in a way that differences. It's different. There's a differential between the way they speak and the way they act. Know that this person does not have inner strength and it's just a matter of time before a life hits them and it's one hit too many and one hit too hard. Poofed, they're gone. So if you want real power aligned, the talk. With the action and the conduct. Does that make sense? So good. Number three, we have humor, inner strength, and number three is how do you make it through when something is expected of you. This brings you back to this idea of freedom and responsibility. Freedom to choose responsibility to use. He said this in, in talking about, uh, how he would, he would save people in the camp from committing suicide. And you know, like we just talk about it, like the world is in a place where there's a lot of anxiety and a lot of depression and there's even a lot of suicide. There's friends of mine that I actually know that like somebody. Took their life last week. It's a real thing. We can't discount it just because we don't understand it, but if you think about anybody who had like maybe a reason to, to commit suicide, like a real one, it would be, it would be being stuck in a Nazi concentration camp where death is potentially preferable to life. And what Victor would do is he would spend his time talking with these people. About, uh, why they need it to go on. In fact, if you're motivated by this, you should reach out to Mike. I think we're going to do a, a mental toughness summit in December for mental health, anxiety, depression. I think we're gonna call it Anchor. I. And, um, when you get to this time of year, there are people who really struggle and so you should go out of your way. Like, if everyone on this call and everyone in this program and group would just go out of their way to just talk to someone that they haven't heard from in a while, make sure they're okay. You know, we could, we could remove this as a real threat to society. The, the reason we don't is because we get self-absorbed a little bit. And so you've gotta always be breaking this pattern and getting out there. So, anyways. He was talking with people about why they should not commit suicide, and he said in all cases, it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them. Something in the future was expected of them. We found in fact that for one of the cases, it was his child whom he adored and who he was waiting for him in a foreign country. This programming here was perfect. This programming with people was perfect. Look, there is, there is something expected from you. You do not have permission to do this because there is something expected of you and your future, whether it's your children, your clients, your friends. Whatever it is that motivates you. He said in one case it was his child whom he adored and was waiting for him in a foreign country. This is the third way, is making it through situations that are trying to rob you of your power. You have to remember that there is something expected of you on the other side, and to keep those things top of mind. He says this real fast, uh, as, as an aside. So a man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him to an unfinished work will never be able to throw away his life. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears towards a human being who waits for him or to an UNFI unfinished work will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence, and therefore will be able to bear almost any how. We will lose motivation. We will lose staying power. We will lose the ability to move through if we forget that there are things waiting for us and we do not have permission to not get to them. It's important. Number four A. A deep desire to fulfill a purpose. Somebody say deep desire. What's a deep desire? It's like to eat tacos on Taco Tuesday. Is that a deep desire? Maybe for some It is for me. Yeah. You can get there. You can get there. A deep desire to fulfill a purpose. When I think of that i'd, it was like, like, hmm, I just think of margaritas on Taco Tuesday. That is my, that's Mike's purpose. That shows you where Mike's mind is at. Hey, just kidding. It was my example. A deep desire to fulfill a purpose. He writes this, and this is an example that we can use. He said, certainly my deep desire to write this manuscript anew. Because they stole his first manuscript to keep this in mind. When he was taken to the camp, they took everything he had and they ruined his books. They took his manuscript on the search for meaning. So he said, my deep desire to rewrite this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camp I was in. For instance, when in a camp in Bavaria, I felt ill with Tus fever. I jotted down on little scraps of paper, many notes intended to enable me to review the manuscript and rewrite it. Should I live to the day of liberation? I am sure now that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the Dark barracks of Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the dangers of cardiovascular collapse. They listen to him writing. It's like I have announcement for you. Like when you read this types of stuff, you're just like, it's not that big of a deal, guys like. He is talking about cardiovascular collapse and the, the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp and almost dying a million times. But we need this because when you're going through times that are trials or they try your soul, I. You have to have something that is mobilizing you towards the future in the state of desire. So notice he has two things that are future oriented, responsibility and desire. Both are important. Be careful that you don't get tipped too far, one side or the other. If your life is all about you, you'll lose your sense of purpose. If you're all about other people and never about you, then you will lose your sense of actual drive because you don't. Feel like you're actually moving forward. This is a key thing to keep in mind on both sides. Another thing I get from this, if we're being honest, is that there are times when you should begin working towards a goal. Even if it's writing down scraps on an on a piece of toilet paper in a Bavarian concentration camp. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to happen. So where are you wanting to end up 10 years from now, five years from now, eight years from now? What's one little thing you can do right now that is not the full thing, but it's in alignment with it? And that in and of itself will give you a bit of drive and a little bit of power. Maybe you wanna write a book but you don't feel ready for it, or write some things down. Maybe you wanna run an event. You don't feel like you can fill it yet, but go online and start finding hotel venues for it. Maybe one day you want to own a car or you wanna own something that is right now feels like it's beyond you, but right. What you could do right now is you could put yourself into alignment with that, and it's the equivalent of these little scraps of paper notes. Written in the concentration camp that keeps your deep desire to fulfill a purpose top of mind for you. Does that make sense? Love that man. And then the, the final, the final thing here is by inspiring others. So if you've ever like, um. Made a post or you've done a podcast and you just felt better afterwards. This is why, because there's a piece of you that will always get energy from lifting other people. I. All of these, by the way, they have the added benefit of reframing different situations in changing perspectives. So what all of these are doing is they're taking the situation, they're flipping around the perspective and making you look at it from farther away, higher up from your future vantage point. From a past vantage point. They're just rotating through perspectives so that your mind can fully comprehend it. In some way, he writes, suffering ceases to be suffering. The moment it finds meaning. And what I would write next to that is utility. If you can find utility in a difficult situation, the situation is no longer difficult. It's just necessary. He talks real quick about the, the performance anxiety loop. You can read this in the notes, um, ways to remove. Anxiety. But let's just jump right into the exercise real fast because I want you guys to grab this and we're gonna go through, um, an actual physical exercise. How many of you can take 30 seconds and come up with a list of things that you are currently. Afraid of. Okay, cool. Uh, another, let's do 60 seconds on this one. What I want you to do on this next part is I want you to write down the answer to this question, what good things can happen as a result of these fears coming to pass? We're gonna practice some reframing 60 seconds. What good things can happen either in your life, your career, your business? Your relationships as a result of these things coming to pass. 60 seconds. Alright, here's what we're doing. What we're doing. We're, we're finding utility in these things, and I'm gonna create the full loop here in a second. 60 more seconds. Here's the next question. How can I use these good things to get closer to what I want? How can I use these things to get closer to what I ultimately, I. Once 60 seconds. Let's go plug in. All right. How we feeling so far? Anybody wanna share? Um, just this part right here. How can I use those things to get closely to what I want? Mike, you have any or anybody wanna share in the, um, in the comments? And then we're gonna complete the loop. Yeah. So for me, how can I use these things to get closer to what I want? It was, I mean, to have context, I have, I guess you have to kinda understand what the fears were. But, um, it was basically in a nutshell creating more focused, uh, schedule of events with my daughter, planning things out, being more, um, structured in. In the planning of what we're gonna do, like thinking farther out, 3, 6, 9 months, creating intention around the calendar of things to do. Great. Amazing. Dustin says, my content will educate others, make them aware of their fullest potential. Word of mouth will spread. I will build rapport. Frederick says, one of mine is to prove to myself that I can survive anything a hundred percent. This is an interesting point, by the way. I'll just throw this in here. That one of the greatest inoculation against fear. Experiencing the thing you're afraid of. Just as a, a small, a small aside. And I think that, um, Frankl actually called this, um, paradoxical intention. Which is basically now called just like exposure therapy, right? You know, he called it paradoxical intention, which is like when you experience the thing you're afraid of, you realize it's not really that scary. And this is where you've heard the saying, the only thing to be afraid of is fear itself. That's what this is referencing is paradoxical intention and exposure therapy. Anytime you're exposed to something that previously scared you, as we talked about earlier, you get authority over it. How are we feeling? You wanna keep going? We got four minutes left. Let's go. Let's go. What this does right here is, is we complete this loop with this question. What goals are so big that they scare me? What goals are so big? That they scare me. You don't have to answer this live in off the cuff, but what you do when you go through this process is you get a list of things that are scary, and then when you have those, you have a new list of things that you are afraid of, and we have that list you can answer. What are the good things that can happen because of those things? When you have the answer to that, you can learn how to use those things to create what you want. And then the loop continues. If there's one thing that I've found holds people back, it is that they know what they want, but they are afraid of what they want and therefore they never move. And so this loop is based off of some of his, some of Frankl's work. And it's a way for you to produce utility inside. Of the things you are afraid of. And what you get at the end of the day is you'll, you'll have two types of fears and let me just show you how simple this is. The first type of fear are fears that are tolerable. What does this mean? You can withstand it. You're not too of it. Tim Fer is drug it fear casting. It's not that big of a deal. Like, okay, so what if your business fails? They're gonna drag you out and shoot you in the head because you had a failed business in front of your kids and family. No, bro. No. Last week I had a, I had a friend, or we weren't, we were acquaintances, we weren't friends and he had a lot of personally guaranteed that they came doing real estate and he's not, he's no longer here, two kids and a wife. The fear that he experienced, if he would've, if you'd go through this exercise, it's a tolerable fear. It's, it's, it's tolerable. You have the ability to withstand it. And then the second type of fear intolerable. I. This means it's not worth it. The juice is not worth the squeeze. When you go through this, you'll have some goals that you actually realize should not be goals of yours. You want me to give you the real secret? This will blow your mind. Then we have to end is most of the intolerable goals or the intolerable fears, most of the fears that are intolerable, you cannot withstand the fear I'm unwilling to sacrifice. That is because they're not your goals. They're someone else's. When something is in your heart. It will almost always be tolerable when something is being chased just because you saw someone else do it or you're comparing. Most of the time it's an intolerable fear. You just cannot get over it because it's not a fear that you are called to tackle, and if you can't find utility, you ain't gonna do it. Make sense. Love that man.