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Your perspective changes when you realize that the greatest leaders in the history of the world get beat up. Failure is not the problem. Anxiety is not the problem. You have to learn to rehearse the things that we want and to fail in the process of achieving those things. Anxiety is a byproduct of growth. We can either embrace it and use it, or we can run away from it. What

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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. They share with you today their learning lessons from stories in their experiences over the past 10 to 15 years and share with you right here, right now.

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Let's get into it. When I woke up this morning, one of the things that I was thinking about as I went about my routine, I went to get a coffee, began to write. Because every day I sit down and I write before I do anything else. And I thought, for some reason, I feel like I want to talk today about how to deal with anxiety, because I feel like one of the currencies of your growth, one of the currencies that you use to trade for positive momentum, is your ability to handle pressure. Now this is not going to be one of my clean, like this, pastoral, like, organized things, because I just decided to talk about it this morning. Okay, like, I didn't, like, prepare and go and read a bunch of to talk about this. This is just something that it was on my mind. I was compelled to talk about it. And then I made that post, and then people have been messaging me like this is something I need to talk about. So let's just dive in and talk about anxiety. First and foremost, let me give you a list of of of circumstances where you will not experience anxiety. If your goal is to avoid anxiety, to sidestep anxiety, to prevent anxiety altogether. Let me list a couple of ways that you can do that. Sound good. You're like, Yo, I'm on this call Taylor, because I want to know how to never deal with anxiety again. Okay, cool. Number one, you're not allowed to grow. Make the decision now

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that you will not grow. You just

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have to make the decision, I'm not going to grow. I'm just going to stay put at my current size, with my current perspective, with my current limitations. If you're if you're number one, chasing, optimizing for no anxiety, don't grow. Number two, if you want to avoid all anxiety, all together, do not progress. You can't progress because when you progress, you experience and encounter unfamiliar terrain, and when you experience unfamiliar terrain, it can trigger anxiety. So if you would like to prevent anxiety, you have to make sure that you just don't progress. And the third thing you have to remember, if we want to not experience anxiety, is you can't fly. You can't fly. Some of you all, some of y'all, are setting big goals. Some of you guys are setting big goals that require you to get up into the clouds, and you're trying to climb mountains, and you need to stop doing that, because if you're going to set big goals, you're going to have to fly higher. And if you fly higher, the only way to get off of the ground is to experience turbulence. And turbulence is the resistance the wind thrust that comes against you when you make a big decision to move forward. So stop doing that. No flying. Stop doing that. And for the rest of you that are still here, if you're interested in learning how to tackle anxiety, then let's dive in. But I just wanted to give an out for those who were just wanting to experience no anxiety at all. This is how you do it. No growing, no advancing, no flying. Set smaller goals, set longer timelines, Forget trying to do big things and simply be happy with your little existence, then you will not experience anxiety. Now, three different things, three different areas that we tend to focus on. Remember, we have three categories, the past, the present and the what the past the present the future. That's right. When we look in the past, we tend to have the obstacle of regret. When we look to the future, we tend to have the obstacle of anxiety. And when we focus on living fully in the present moment, we tend to have stillness, the ability to think clearly and to organize our thoughts appropriately. This is why meditation is so powerful when you're when you study meditation, meditation tends to insert distance between our past and our future. It inserts. Distance between us and our past, and inserts distance between us and our future, and it sinks us into the present moment. So as you know, I woke up today with a little bit of anxiety, and I've learned to to recognize anxiety. I feel anxiety when I am deviating from what has become normal, when something happens, and I have begun to deviate from what feels normal to me. I begin to experience a little bit of anxiety. How many of you seen Lord of the Rings? You have the scene in Lord of the Rings with Samwise Gamgee. They're running and he stops. Everybody looks back and like, what are you doing? He's looking at a line in the ground. And he says, one more step, and it will be the farthest I've ever been from home. One more step, and it will be the farthest I've ever been from home. As entrepreneurs, as leaders, as producers, as managers, as power players, as dreamers, as thinkers, we are perpetually in this state where we have to pause, look at the ground and think one more step, and I'll be the farthest I have ever been from home. And when you realize this anxiety, anxiety and fear can tend to show up in your life because you have deviated from what is normal to you. Now here's the problem with the human brain, if it's left to its own devices, is we are 10, we tend to be wired for survival. The brain is not is not wired for growth. The brain is wired for survival. And survival comes through homeostasis. And homeostasis is the presence of of normalcy, regulated baselines. So when you want to grow something, you have to step over 1000 invisible lines. Each one of them represent the farthest you have been from home, and your brain is not optimized to help you on this journey. Your brain is optimized to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's keep things normal and safe, and so anxiety is simply the brain's tool of protecting you from deviations. Do you understand this. There's a little bit of a Marcus Aurelius type of prospecting that I'm applying to anxiety. I'm breaking it down to its most basic components and its most basic parts. Anxiety is very different than your intuition. Anxiety is the brain's way of protecting you from deviations, both positive and negative deviations. So today I want to give you a couple of levers that you can have in your arsenal, some tools that you can have in your toolkit to be able to pull out and utilize when you are feeling anxious. Number one is perspective. So when you get to see what others have gone through, and you get to see the pain. This is why you guys, by the way, this is why you guys like it. When I show up and I'm like, yo, yeah, I got beat last month, you're like, it's not because you don't like me. It's because you're like, oh, he does. He struggles with it, too. Your perspective changes when you realize that the greatest leaders in the history of the world get beat up when you look at your life and there are patterns that almost seem to be coincidence. It's not coincidence. It's usually that you are heading towards a mountain, and the resistance coming against you is the turbulence necessary to get you up off of the grounds. Perspective gives you the ability to see that everyone else around me who is worth something, who has accomplished something, has gone through trials, frustrating tribulations, burned down buildings, patterns of failure. We don't even need to go into Abraham Lincoln like the dude failed all the time. Walt Disney. You realize Walt Disney? He went broke the first time when he turned 19 years old, and he almost went bankrupt every single year from the age of 19 to 54 Imagine going broke, almost declaring bankruptcy every year from the age of 19 to 54 the things that are causing us anxiety right now. They ain't that bad. They're not that bad. Sometimes you just need to compare, a comparison that can help reset your grid line perspective is the first lever. It's tremendously helpful for you. When you're feeling like you are going through the freaking battle, you're going through setback and disease and failure and whatever it is that you're going through. Pick up, pick up the story about Abraham Lincoln. Go into the portal. Grab it, turn it on and start listening. You'll begin to to feed on the perspective of other people all around you. All right. Number two. Number two expectations. This is the second lever that you can use to change anxiety, or rather, the effect that anxiety has on your life. And this is an important distinction. I believe that sometimes levels of anxiety are normal because our bodies and our minds go through these. Different seasons where we feel it, but whether you act on this anxiety or whether you don't is up to you. So expectations, twofold, two types of expectations. We're going to write these down and we're going to rehearse them later. The first expectation is, it's normal. We're the problem isn't that you're waking up with anxiety. Problem is you're waking up wondering why you have anxiety and thinking that your anxiety makes you different or or bad. The problem is not that you woke up feeling a little bit pressurized. The problem is that you woke up thinking that feeling pressurized is not good or is not normal. And we created this. Social media created this because all we see is influencers who are like, Man, I'm so fired up this Monday morning. Look, I I am consulting in those businesses, and I can tell you that most of the ones that are the loudest and the most obnoxious about how much money they make and how much winning they have are the ones that are struggling the most to keep that facade going to the real world. You don't see me talking about how much money I made before eight o'clock on a Monday morning. Most of us, you don't. Most of us, we're not like, that's not what we're focused on celebrating all the time. I like it. I like making money. Like, send me all your money. I will take it and I will do good things in the world with it. But the people who are typically the most secure and most secure and most confident. They're not the ones that are talking about it the most. So first and foremost, understand that it's normal to feel anxiety. It is normal to feel a level of pressure if you're moving forward. Number two, number two, this is the second piece of expectations. Is if you expect the worst, you get the worst. Expect the worst, get the worst. Expect the best. Get the best. One time, I was on a call with one of my executive coaches, and her name is Dr Julie, and I said, I'm struggling a lot six or seven months ago, said I'm struggling a lot with anxiety all throughout the day, when I wake up in the weekends and I don't, I don't know what's going on, usually a positive person, but I'm struggling with it. There were some traumatic things that were going on in my life at the time. There were some showdowns and some issues and some problems and things that are not good that you don't want to deal with. And she said, Well, why do you think you're your brain is doing this. Why do you think these guys showed up and said, you know, my brain can go in, and my brain has this phenomenal ability to do math and to work its way down, and it can almost protect me subconsciously from from almost everything, because it can figure out how it could happen in the reverse it. But right now, I'm waking up in the morning and my brain is figuring out what's the worst thing that can happen here. And it's like, not good. It's give it's feeding me a constant stream of worst case scenario. This is the worst case scenario. This is the worst case scenario. Have any of you felt like this where you're just like, Look, I just need to know what the worst case is, so I can prepare for the worst and then plan for the best. Anybody have ever done that? You sit down, you're like, what's the worst that can happen? And then you get that, and then you're like, Okay, so I can sort of handle that. Now I need to just back my way around. The problem is, if this turns into a pattern, it turns into what Dr Julie calls a loop, and I don't have time to get into that today. I can already tell you I'm gonna run out of time because of the topic. But Dr Julie said the worst case never happens unless you expect it to happen. I said, Cool, profound. Hold on. Let me write that down. Wrote it down, and she said, But listen, it's a statistical outlier. Worst case scenario is statistical outliers. It's never going to happen, but the brain is not going to accept your brain, particularly Taylor, is not going to accept trying to make it give you the best case. So what you need to do is substitute, what's the worst that can happen here? What's the most realistic case, not the worst case, but what's the most realistic case? And that worked for a while because it was a substitute. Substitution, but in going through the process and going over the next couple of months, I learned that there is a level of living that we can get to where we are creating our own scenarios through the expectations we enforce on the world around us. It's an unknown quote, but I'm going to give it to give it to you. You write it down because it's phenomenal. A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears. Now, people go into this and they think, oh, yeah, that's the mental side of it. That's a pretty good quote Taylor, because if you're afraid of it, you're already experienced. Think the fear of it, but we don't actually make the distinction that the things that we fear in our heads actually escape and make their way into the real world. There is a connection in the quantum realm between what we think and what occurs around us. I'm going to give you an example so you don't think I'm crazy. There's a case. This is it from the expectation effect. By David Robson, we explain this story to you. There's a patient. We'll call him Mr. A Minnesota, 2007 Mr. A was hurt by a recent breakup, and he had signed up for the clinical trial of a new antidepressant and the hopes that the new treatment could relieve his feelings of hopelessness, initially, he found that the pills worked well. They helped his mood improve, but the benefits did not last long, and in the second month of the trial, he decided to end it all. He ate 29 of his remaining capsules quickly, regretting his decision, he asked his neighbor to drive into the emergency room of the local hospital in Jackson. He said, Hey, you got to help me. I took all of my pills, he told the staff as he entered before he just collapsed in the floor of the hospital when the doctors examined Mr. A He was pale, drowsy, shaking, he had low blood pressure. They were actually putting him into like emergency room treatment because his blood pressure was so low, they attached him to a drip. And over the next four hours, his condition failed to improve. Yet there appeared under testing that there was no trace of the relative. Relevant toxins in his system. So the medical team called one of the doctors from the clinical trial to get some understanding, like, This guy isn't here dying. We don't see any toxins of an overdose. The doctor from the clinical trial confirmed that Mr. A had never taken the active drug. He was on a placebo for a blind study. According to his physiological science, he had nearly overdosed on dummy pills. Fortunately, after learning the news, he made a full recovery. So check this out. When we're talking about expectations, we're not just talking about mental mindset, Jujitsu. We're not just talking about positive thinking. We're not just talking about, oh, yeah, he who a man who fears suffering is suffering from what he fears already. Blah, blah, blah. No, we're talking about literal things that are taking place in our heads that will occur in reality. Crazy. So when you experience fear, what you are actually experiencing is a rehearsal of the thing you do not want to experience. And you are when you are afraid. It is because you are rehearsing over and over the thing that you do not want to experience that is fear, rehearsing what you are afraid of, creates what you are afraid of. The story in the Bible of job, he says, the very thing I have feared has come upon me. No, shit job, yes, because you created it. You overdosed on the dummy pills, and your body started responding. Dan Sullivan is an amazing source of insight. And Dan Sullivan got divorced and went bankrupt in the same day, he was 34 years old. He was 34 years old, divorced, bankrupt in the same day, he made a decision that every single day for the rest of his life, he was going to write down the things he wanted, everything he wanted. He was going to focus on the things he wanted, rather than the things that he was afraid of. And every single day for like, 50 years, he has been writing down what he wants. You know what happens to you when you begin to write down the things that you want. You stop being afraid because you're no longer rehearsing what you don't want. You're rehearsing what you want. This is making sense for anybody.

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Hopefully

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it's anybody glad that we woke up and decided to talk about anxiety? Mark Batterson says this powerful author, he studies human psychology, he says the cure for fear isn't success. The. The cure for fear of failure is to fail in small enough doses that we build up an immunity to it. The cure for the fear of failure isn't success. The cure for the fear of failure is failure in small enough doses that we build up an immunity to it. Failure is not the problem. Anxiety is not the problem. You have to learn to rehearse the things that we want and to fail in the process of achieving those things. Here's the third lever. You ready for it? Number three, timelines. Timelines. You know, I've taught the morning formula to like, I don't like probably 100,000 people or more. I don't know. I'd have to go look. Don't quote me on that. I have no idea. I'm just making up a number. I think it's a lot. And one of the most dangerous parts of the morning formula is that the morning formula begins to line up your identity with a future version of yourself, and at some point, we'll do a book study on be your future self. Now it's a book by Ben Hardy. We'll do that in the future, and it'll change your It'll change your life. But one of the most dangerous parts of the morning formula is that if I'm not careful, every day, I wake up and I try to review this document that tells me who I am and what I have and what my life looks like, but as a byproduct, there are sometimes moments of anxiety where I'll read the morning formula and I'm like, but this isn't what my real life is like. Has anybody had that, just me? Anybody else experience that like I'm reading my morning formula, but I don't have three planes. This isn't what my life looks like, and there's some anxiety. You know, I don't have these things. I don't I don't have this money, I don't have these assets. This isn't what my life looks like. And this is the most this is a this is a chilling part of the process, but this is always due to two reasons. When I'm feeling this way, I'm feeling this level of anxiety is due to two reasons. The first is that I failed to realize that everything I'm reading has already happened. It's already happened. Whatever you have written down and whatever you have decided to experience has already happened. Now, if you change your mind, that's on you. If you're the one that changes your mind every time you turn around, well then you have no future. But to the to the people of us in this group who are certain they have decided it's already happened. It's just happened in the future, and your job is not to force it to happen. Your job is this, write this down, to enjoy the climb, to enjoy the climb, to enjoy the climb. It's not my job to read that morning formula go out and force it to happen. It's my job to read it and to enjoy the climb. It's already happened and just enjoy the climb. The second thing though, that could cause anxiety, the first is a failure to realize that it's already happened. I just gotta enjoy the climb. But the second thing that can mess me up with the morning formula is if my timelines have gotten a little bit too fast and my brain is trying to protect me from making a dumb mistake. So sometimes, when I get into this posture, what I'll do is I'll slow down. We got to learn to slow down when we're feeling anxious. You know what most of us do? Speed up feeling anxious. Oh, I gotta go. Awesome. I gotta figure this out. I gotta I need feedback. I need this. Slow down is the opposite when anxiety shows up. Slow down. What if you take it slow? How does it feel? What if you extend the runways? How does it feel? What if you 10x the runways? How does it feel? What if you don't work on this today? What if you would just do it, enjoy the climb. How does it feel? So your timelines? I've talked to a lot of you in here already about how your timelines can really cause anxiety, and sometimes the easiest way is not to lower your goals, but it's to just lengthen out the timelines. Let's keep going so I don't run out of time. Experiences, experiences. This is the next lever. You should go back and revisit Theodore Roosevelt when he was just like, I'm just gonna expose myself to crazy things and deal with trauma through the unwriting and rewriting of new experiences. There's a book called trauma the Body Keeps the Score, and it talks about one of the three ways that you can undo trauma is through extreme physical experience. So my cold plunges are really good. Like people who are, like, naturally high strung and deal with a little bit of, like, a little bit of anxiety, as is, like just their personalities, cold plunges, cold showers, strenuous workouts, marathons. This is why you see so many I'll never forget I was listening to a book by Bob Iger, who's now his back at Disney as a CEO, and he he runs Disney and incredibly stressful job, incredibly. Stressful. We think our we don't get it. We don't understand. Like, we think our jobs are stressful. We're like, well, I just have to make more money. It's like, Yo, try. You're controlling 180,000 employees. Like, imagine that level. There's so so much stress. And I was reading the audio book, or listening to the audio book, and he said, Every day he wakes up and he runs like, nine miles before breakfast, and then his patterns everywhere. Theodore Roosevelt Iger, maybe the only one who doesn't do this right now is, I think, Elon Musk. He just doesn't have he doesn't do that. But most of your like power players at the top, they are, like, physically into it. And the reason why is because as long as they can keep what they're doing to themselves as more stressful than what outside, external circumstances are doing to them. They're still in control. You have Theodore Roosevelt, who would get mad and he would snap, go out into the woods and run for 40 miles. He's like, nobody's going to be harder on myself than I am. Nobody's going to be nobody's going to treat me in a way that is more stressful than I'm going to treat myself. And you can look at this, and you can be like, oh, man, that doesn't sound too healthy. It's like, well, you weren't president of the country, and you don't run a public company. And if we look at your life, the reason your life is the way that it is is probably because of how accepting and tolerant you are of yourself, rather than doing what I'm saying and putting yourself into physically strenuous activities in rewriting the circuitry in your brain. This is like, I'm taking this from books. I'm not a doctor. You can't use anything I'm saying is legitimate. I'm just saying. I'm reading this from from smart men and women who are saying, Yeah, you know, physical resets are a very easy way to undo trauma and re create the experience trauma expert Dr Peter Levine says this. He says, trauma is not what happens to us. Trauma is what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. If you read about trauma, you realize that there are two Divergent Paths with trauma. There's PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, and there's PTG, which is post traumatic growth. Psychologists say that you have a choice to make when you go through an adversarial or a frustrating or a traumatic time at the end of that season, you can either succumb to PTSD, or you can choose and cling to post traumatic growth. That cliche, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. That is a decision about whether you want to live by that or not. So here's an easy lever. Just pull in some new experiences. Make sense? Here's the final piece. Here's the final piece. You ready for it? Look at us. We're gonna end on time, action, action. You want to write notes next to action. You can put in parentheses, do your job. Just do your job. Stop thinking, do your job. Stop complaining, do your job. Do your job. There are two times when it's important to do your job, Bullet point number one. Bullet point number two. The first time it's important to do your job is when you feel like it. Oh, boy, you know where this is going. Bullet point number two, the second important time to do your job is when you don't feel like it. You do your job at all points, at all times, when you feel like it and when you don't feel like it, when you feel excited and when you don't feel excited, when you feel inspired, and when you don't feel inspired, the greatest juice you will ever get out of your life is when you are actually participating in number two, how you feeling today, doing my job? Are you inspired today? And people like sometimes, people, sometimes people think that that I always feel like writing. I always feel like hopping on and doing arena calls with you, no offense, but sometimes I don't want to be on these calls. Sometimes I'd rather like go to the lake or just sit down for a second. Jesus. I want to just settle down. But I do my job when I feel like it, when I don't feel like it, when life is good and when life is bad, when, when we are advancing and when I'm getting beat up on all sides, I do my job. Why do I do my job? It's not because people depend on me. That's that's obligation. Don't take it the wrong way. But people depend on me all the time, and sometimes I'm just like, well, you should have done better. Goodbye. Right? It's not because people depend on me. That's not sustainable. It's not sustainable for you to do your job just because you have employees. That's not sustainable. Why do we do our job? Because that's who we are, that's what we do, and if I don't, I feel anxiety. It's a lever that you pull. Ben Hardy says, if you pay the pay the pied piper every single day by making small and consistent investments, you'll get a massive bargain. He's talking about the future state. Did you know CEOs? There's a study that CEOs and senior executives have the energy equivalent to professional athletes. C suite CEOs and founders run the energy equivalence of a full time NFL quarterback. It's the same level of energy to run your company or to run your department, and so we have, when you look at quarterbacks, they have the physical conditioning that is required for them to do their job. We're going to have to be the same way if you want to truly advance, you want to truly grow. And never forget one time a client, they were like, Oh my God, you're just so much better than me. And blah, blah, blah. And I started sending her stuff, and she looked at the amount of content that I create and the amount of work that goes into who I am and what I do, and she was like, holy, you have done the work. It's not that you're smarter than me. It's not that you're smarter than anybody else. It's that you have done the work. You have done your job for so many years that to the outside mind, it looks like you are head and shoulders above the rest, but you're not any smarter than the rest. You're just more consistent than the rest. You right when you don't feel like it, and when you do that was an altering moment for them, their trajectory altered. The same thing is true for you. Do your job. Do it when you feel like it. Do it when you don't. Anxiety is a byproduct of growth. We can either embrace it and use it, or we can run away from it. You.