Grow Out of Five Figure Business Habits

This is the Momentum podcast. This is not easy for me to do, but let me give you some context here, so I'm actually in Montana here in a rented condo with a pretty cool fireplace at George Bryant event. And if you don't know George. He is a master at customer journey. I just watched you, George, for the last couple of days go an inch wide and a mile deep on customer journey like so intense to see how he encourages businesses to take a customer or a member and walk them through a process that is caring and nurturing and helps them and helps them feel confident really creates momentum in the process. And George actually had me out here to speak. And so yesterday morning, I got to speak and shared some insights about the entrepreneurial personality type, about who we are as entrepreneurs, and how we're different. And one of the other speakers that he had was somebody I've never met before, but very quickly became friends with his name's Brian Bogard, and Brian speaks about emotions and emotional triggers and what happens when we're triggers and triggered as entrepreneurs. And his speech really affected me. He said something during his presentation as he was talking about emotions. I started to get embarrassed and I'll tell you why in a second. But he said something in his presentation. He said, You know, we can't help our emotional triggers. Our emotional triggers are not our responsibilities, but preparing for our emotional triggers and when we get triggered, you know, I know for me, when I experience an emotional trigger, I can be in the middle of the conversation with Cadey. I can be talking to one of my kids. I can have something going on and there's something that triggers me and takes me outside of the present context and into a context where I'm not aware I'm not present, I'm not really behaving like I should be behaving. And when I was younger, I used to, and sometimes even now I would be self-righteous about triggers. You know, triggers can make us feel self-righteous. It's like I'm angry, so I must be right. So the people around me must be wrong. And that's how I lived a lot of my life. And when I started realizing that emotional triggers take us out of the present moment when I realized that the emotional triggers make it so that we're not really reacting to what's going on, we're reacting to something that happened to us in the past. It changed a lot of my behaviors. But you know, when Brian was talking, he was talking about emotions, you know, and he was talking about how it's important that for us as entrepreneurs, we not only feel our emotions, we understand where our emotions mean, you know, an emotional trigger means there's something to work on. An emotional trigger means there's work to do. An emotional trigger means that there's something in your past that's affecting your present, and it helps us understand where we need to change things. And while Brian was speaking, I started to get kind of embarrassed because the day before I was walking around with this shirt that we made and I'm pretty sure we gave to our members. And on the front, it says hashtag momentum. I wear a lot of shirts that have white writing with the hashtag and on the back it has this statement. Keep your feelings away from my momentum and no one gets hurt. And I was so embarrassed. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could have a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. I can tell you where this shirt came up. I did a presentation at some event mastermind on the entrepreneurial personality type, and I was talking about how as evolutionary, how we feel differently. We don't have the same types of feelings as the rest of the world. And afterwards, somebody made a joke and said, Oh, Alex, I'm having all these feelings, and I said, Well, you keep your feelings away from my momentum and no one gets hurt and the whole room laughed. And in context? It was funny, but I had it printed on a shirt because I thought it was so funny. And as Brian was talking, I realized that I had been walking around the resort. This resort with this shirt yesterday and I got more and more uncomfortable and I realized I had to make a repair. You know, when you cause damage, you should make a repair. And I'm like everyone who has ever gotten this shirt or seen it from me or seen me posted something on Facebook to know something. This is a damaging statement. It's uncomfortable to even admit that it's a damaging statement to say, keep your feelings away from my momentum, it's a damaging statement to tell anyone to deny their feelings, in fact. You know, when I think about the mastermind that we have. Well, let me not go there first. You know, I think what happens to a lot of thought leaders like me, what happens to a lot of people who have a public persona like I do, although it's not as big as some other peoples, is that you make a statement like this and then due to commitment, deep commitment to consistency, you double down on it and you might evolve past the statement, but you don't ever tell people have a bomb past the statement. I no longer believe this because at one point people thought it was cool or funny or wore that shirt or were part of it. And I want everyone who's watching this to know that that statement's a mistake to put on a shirt. That statement's a mistake to put anywhere. And as someone who has a public persona, as someone who has a following and who is someone who you follow or maybe check in with every once in a while, I want you to know I made a mistake. I think it's as in the position of a speaker, in the position of an expert, in the position of an entrepreneur. It's hard to say I made a mistake, but by saying I made a mistake is the only way I can stop this from perpetuating forward and never put something like this on a shirt again because. You know, here's the reality about that, the members I have and about the clients I have and about the people that I've helped is that one of the big things we help people do is understand their emotions. When the big things we work with people on is understanding that emotional triggers and the frustration that you feel in the present takes away your momentum. And to say you keep your feelings away from my momentum and nobody gets hurt is just crazy. I think of how many times in our high level mastermind we've had one of our members come in and talk about doing EMDR therapy or some other type of therapy and realizing that they had these suppressed emotions or for suppressed feelings that were affecting them on a day to day basis has happened over and over again. And you know, one of the things I talk about all the time is doing EMDR and discovering your feelings and your emotions and processing those feelings and emotions and processing the triggers that you have. So you can be more present and aware as a leader so you can show up in a better way for your team, for your family. And so to say, keep your feelings away from my emotions and no one gets hurt is just crazy because more than once in our normal events, more than once in our high level mastermind, we've had a member break down in tears in our class because or in our event, because they realized that they have emotions that they haven't been feeling or they had emotions in our event. I would never tell them, Hey, you keep that away from here because we're in momentum. I actually shut the event down. I'll stop everything if somebody is having a breakdown, if somebody is having a period of emotions, a period of reactivity. I'll stop everything and we'll talk to that person and see what they need and what's going on. And there's a reason, as entrepreneurs, you know, we deny a lot of our emotions. We stuff things down. In fact, Brian had this wonderful analogy that, you know, our emotional triggers are like weeds in a garden. And when you see a weed in a garden, do you stop and pick it? You stop and see how deep the roots are. Do you stop and like, yank it out of the grass? Most of the time we don't. In fact, I know what I do when there's a weed in the garden, and I just wait until Roberto, our gardener comes by once every week or two weeks and he just mows it down. I don't think he picks it either. And the analogy that Ryan gave was when you take an emotional trigger and you don't examine it, you don't look at it, you don't understand why you have that trigger and you mow over it. The roots just get stronger. They get deeper and then it grows again and you mow over it and the roots get stronger and it gets deeper and after un route that emotional trigger to understand what's going on. And yesterday, I told the story of the first day that I ever met Shaun Stevenson and. Why we became such close friends so quickly, this was probably 2013, and I was at an event out in California, out in Arizona with Genius Network and Joe Polish, who ran the event, asked like, Is there anything anybody needs? Is there anything anyone wants from someone else? And you know, people are saying things like, I need help with a lead magnet. I need help with this. I need a relationship here. I need something there. And Sean and I were sitting at a corner of a U-shaped table. I was on one side and he was on the other and I didn't really know him. We had said hi when we walked in, we hadn't really talked a lot or had any type of connection. And Sean, did one of the bravest things I've ever seen an entrepreneur do. In a room full of high level entrepreneurs when people are saying, I need this tactic or that thing to build my business. Shawn Stevenson said, You know, Joe, I've been having nightmares and I've had them for several nights in a row and it's been going on for seven nights. And he said it's been going on for a while and I wake up in the middle of the night screaming and I don't understand what it is. I've worked with enough entrepreneurs. Then I have an understanding of nightmares. I've been there, I've woken up in cold sweats, I've woken up yelling, I've woken up and woken my wife up and I told them I would talk to them about it later. And as we were talking, I leaned over and I said, I think I can help you with this. He just broke down and started crying. And I got on my seat and I kneeled next to his wheelchair and I hugged him and I sat there holding his hand for probably 10 or 15 minutes. While the rest of the line just went on, Joe just kind of left us alone, and he sobbed on my shoulder. Can you imagine if I had said this to shine that day? I'm embarrassed that I did that I can put this on a shirt because. This type of a statement from a thought leader is emotional bypass, it's like, you know, stop feeling your emotions and change your state or stop telling your emotions and only think positively. And that's where we push things down. That's where we we leave the weed in the garden and we mow over it and the roots get stronger and they affect the grass around it and things get worse. And you know, for us as entrepreneurs, when we do that with our emotions, we affect the people around us. We affect ourselves, we affect our bodies when we don't admit what we're feeling, when we don't let things out, when we don't realize that emotional triggers are a message that we need to look at or work on something to understand something better in our lives, we affect everyone around us, our families, everyone and. George today said if it's coming up, it's coming out and you should let it come out. And I totally agree. You know, it came up fresh on that day and I connected with him later and we had some conversations and I shared with him what I know about lowering pressure and noise and. And getting into your body as an entrepreneur and, you know, I had an effect on me and it helped him and. Just like, like timing was so perfect last night. Part of the reason I'm doing this video, I went out with George and the group of people here. There are VIPs. And one of them happens to be in our membership and I don't have permission to share this story, so I won't use his name. But last night, while we were sitting at the table, George, before we had dinner, asked everybody to go around and share one thing. They were grateful for it and it was awesome. Like, there was some profound gratitude at that table. And the last guy to go was one of the people in our membership. And he thanked George, and he stated some other things he was grateful for. And then he said, You know, Alex, I just want to thank you for recommending me EMDR therapy and for being so open about your emotions and what you've been through in your journey. Because I've had night terrors for a long time and I've been going to EMDR and I don't have them anymore and I've been able to process and I'm not feeling those things anymore. And right there I was like, You know what? That shirt that I was wearing yesterday, I'm going to tell everybody that this shirt was a mistake. I don't know if this is going to work. Maybe then they should watch them and set up the fire line. I'm going to tell you everything. This shirt was a massive mistake and that we never should have printed it and that if any of our members are still wearing it, that I made a mistake and I want to make a repair and say. If your emotions are coming up as an entrepreneur, it's one of the most important signals you're going to get from your conscious mind. Because when we stuff down our emotions, when we change our state or think positively or only think about the good things, we're actually denying the emotions we feel, we're actually denying who we are. We're denying what's going on for us and not denying will show up somewhere with entrepreneurs. I've seen that denial will show up as night terrors. I've seen it show up as I twitch. I've seen it show up as rashes. I've seen, she'd seen it show up as all kinds of challenges that we have as entrepreneurs. And your body will show you when you stuck down trauma. Your body will show you when you step down emotions and. I want you to know that if I if you ever heard me say anything like that or if you've ever seen me wear that shirt and thought it was funny. It's a mistake, and for us, as entrepreneurs, one of the most important things we will do is face our emotions, understand them and do some type of processing. You know, I've been in trauma therapy since I was 26. I'm 48 years old and I've done EMDR therapy. I've done somatic therapy, color therapy. I've worked through a lot of things. I processed a ton of stuff. I've done plant medicine and psychedelics to help me understand myself better. And I want you to know that's who I really am. And I'm the person who has done a tremendous amount of work on myself and part of the reason that I have the life that I have. Part of the reason that I have a wife, that I have my daughters, the properties that we have, the wealth that we have, the recurring income, the independent wealth that we have is because years ago I stopped shoving down my emotions. I stopped denying who I am. I stopped denying the trauma that I've experienced throughout my life. And I did a tremendous amount of deep work so that I can hold the space for the life that I want to have. And if you're ever in a situation where somebody tells you you just need to man up or, you know, put on your big girl panties and stop being emotional and start, you know, experiencing the emotions you have, you are in an unsafe situation. You are in a situation that is going to cause you damage. You are around somebody who hasn't processed their own emotions and that is not someone you want to learn from. That is not someone you want to absorb from. And so on. The converse of that, if you are feeling emotions, if you are having symptoms like night terrors or frustration or you getting triggered or reactive or you feel accelerated, this is an opportunity for you to go and get help. I have a podcast called The CEO's Secret Weapon on our website. You can search the podcast bar for SEO secret weapons. It's all about EMDR therapy. If you're open to psychedelics and plant medicine have been life changing. For me, MDMA therapy has been a complete game changer. Psilocybin has been a complete game changer, done in a therapeutic setting, with intention with purpose so that I could process more of what's gone on for me. And I'm telling you this because I want to be transparent about how you really get to be the person that you want to be, how you really start making decisions for the person you're becoming, not the person you are today. And I have this statement that I made to entrepreneurs all the time. If you don't have the business you want, you haven't become the person who can run it yet. And I want you to know part of that is admitting who you are, admitting the emotions you have owning up to the trauma you've been through, processing that in a healthy, productive way and being able to move on and create massive momentum for yourself, your team, your family, the people that you serve and the people around you because you'll be more present, more aware, more in your body and more capable of being everything that you want to be. And so. I'm not going to say that I'll never make another joke like you keep your emotions away from my momentum and no one gets hurt. But I want you to know that's the old me that said that. And that was an unaware statement for me to make. And it was a complete error. And so. Thanks for being here. If you know someone who can benefit from this message, please share this. You have my permission to share it anywhere. And I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you listening. If you're an entrepreneur who is feeling reactive or feeling like you are experiencing emotions, congratulations. You have an opportunity to get some help, do some work, massively improve who you are and become the person who can run the business you've always wanted. Thanks for being here with me tonight.