Turning Fear into Success and High Performance

On this episode of Next Level American Dream, Abigail and Sean are joined by Gary Harper. Today Sean and Gary talk about fear, its impact on performance, and how you can use it to drive you forward into greater success. Gary has amazing insight on this topic and we were so thrilled to get to share it with you.

Key Topics

• ​How does fear impact your performance and success?

• How can you use fear to motivate yourself and drive performance?

Connect with Gary:

• https://sharperprocess.com/

• Follow along with episode's transcript:

  SUMMARY KEYWORDS

  fear, people, deal, life, write, thinking, control, replacing, mindset, identify, mind, exercise, Multifamily, talk, business, Gary, respect, anxiety, step, pleaser

  SPEAKERS

  Sean Thomson, Abigail Thomson, Gary Harper

  Abigail Thomson 00:00

  Welcome to the Next Level American Dream podcast brought to you by Thomson Multifamily Group. Your hosts, Abigail and Sean, will discuss how you can take your American Dream to the next level through real estate investing, business practices, and personal development. Join us as we share our experiences as a father daughter duo who are trying to accomplish our goal of financial freedom. We hope you learn more about how to define and achieve your American Dream. Here's another episode of Next Level American Dream. On today's episode of Next Level American Dream, we welcome Gary Harper for his second appearance. Today, Gary and Sean talk about fear and its impact on performance and how you can use it to drive yourself into greater success. Gary has amazing insight on this topic, and we're so thrilled to get to share it with you. He also has an incredible experience helping businesses develop and scale, if you're interested in his company. Check out the description below for more information about Sharper Business Solutions. If you're interested in learning more about Multifamily Investing, visit our sponsor's website at www.thomsonmultifamilygroup.com.

  Sean Thomson 01:07

  Hi, Gary, welcome back to the Next Level American Dream Podcast. I appreciate you coming back. How you doing?

  Gary Harper 01:12

  Good, good. Sean, I appreciate you having me on. Man. I would love to be on this as often as you guys would have me, for sure.

  Sean Thomson 01:19

  Well, you know, we don't get a lot of time to talk. So this I'm going to schedule as many of these with you as I can just so we can hang out and talk a little bit. You know, this seems to be the only time that both of us have a free time to get to get together anyway. Yeah, well, today I want to talk to Gary, we still haven't talked about your your core business, which is processes and systems, you know, we felt we had you on before to talk about your family, because you have a lot of family in your business. And I want to talk to you today about fear. And how fear can be you know, something that holds you back and something that can propel you forward to depending on how you use it. Yeah, so if we can, so let's talk about fear, and then we'll we'll have you on again, and we'll talk about processes and systems, I promise we'll get to your your core business at some point.

  Gary Harper 01:58

  Well, I say that fear is a part of that from a core perspective, because I always tell people, we see businesses that fail to scale fail to grow because of four major reasons. One of them is fear. And fear is probably the number one reason we see. So that this is very much in line with what we we discuss when we're helping clients, I always tell people, we can't help you with your systems and processes. And they only help you with the other three things, which is fear, mindset and connections, a lot of times people fail on those areas and system processes will make the difference.

  Sean Thomson 02:28

  Yeah, and that's kind of what that's kind of what happened to me was, you know, the fear for me was something that I didn't recognize that I had. And I was trying to implement the processes and systems in my business. And the really, the broken piece of my puzzle was me. And realizing that I had these fears and worries, it was it was changing the way I was conducting my life. It was changing the way I was conducting my business. And I wasn't really focused on what was core important to me. And so the fear was actually holding me back. And so that's what I had to identify. But I was going to just talk a little bit. So my, the way I came to this was that you asked me to come to one of your training sessions, the CEO training CEO and CEO training. And Keith cowling did a talk there about fear and worry. And in my life, you know, I'm older guy, and I'm not you know, I'm not a young guy. So I've kind of established my personality stuff. And in my life, I didn't recognize that I had fears and worries, you know, I just get up every day and go do my work and everything was fine. And then you we did that key did that talk at the thing. And I kept thinking well, I'm I'm kind of I'm experiencing some of these things. And and I've been wondering what was going wrong in my business and trying to figure out what it is. And the exercise that you did was you had everybody write down their fears. And I actually, as I was writing my fears down, I had to stop because it got too intense, you know, and these things just sort of came flooding out of me that I didn't know that I was even carrying around. And so these fears and worries were so powerful that they I just couldn't even I couldn't even write them down. That's how strong the emotions were with them. Yeah. And the fact that I had these just just as I'm wandering around every day, and just carrying this weight, and didn't even realize it was sort of an epiphany moment in my life, saying, hey, I need to deal with this. Because this is a lot of weight that I'm carrying around is slowing me down. It's keeping me from progressing. It's keeping me from from achieving my dreams. It's keeping me from all these things in my relationships are burdened by this stuff, everything. And so the fact that you had me come to that thing, and we talked about that specific topic, it was sort of I don't know, which is kind of the perfect timing for everything for me. And so since dealing with those fears, it's changed the way I do everything. But anyway, so that's that's the story. That's why it's important to me about talking about fears and I think there's a lot of people out there that can benefit from a discussion of fears and I know you're excellent at sort of synthesizing this information and can can give people some helpful things to talk about or do too, that can change their life in the way they do their business. So let's start with kind of what what is the fear? or How would you define it?

  Gary Harper 05:10

  Well, I mean, fear is a form of a mindset. I mean, fear is usually, you know, anxiety or worry about the unknown. To where fear comes from, I think the world has probably experienced that a lot more in the last 12 months than we have in the last hundred years. Really, I think, some of us it's a, you know, it's something that we live with every day, where others of us, it seems to us radically show up. And I think there are obviously different ways to approach fear. You know, my whole thing is like, when I'm when I'm dealing with fear, personally, and I think, I think I'll probably talk to this more from a personal level today than more from a coaching level. So fears always been something in my life that's that I've struggled with, and, and, and to that, you know, whether it was when the kids were born, and you're, you know, you're growing a young family or something like that, the fear of like them getting sick or getting hurt, and, or, you know, is, you know, God forbid, you know, even kidnapped right, like, I mean, that those were fears that would would resonate in my mind as a young man. And, and I had, and I think fear really showed up for me the first time with a good friend of mine, kids the same age of ours, and I went to college with him, and he got a brain tumor, and he passed away, like 23 years old. And then, about a year after that, I had another friend with young kids, and he got, he got cancer, and he died at like, 26 years old. And, and I had like three friends in my 20s that all die from cancer with young kids, even his wife and widowed and the kids growing up, you know, you know, without dad, and I, you know, so battling that fear, and then, you know, then later, you know, started having success and career and, and work and I think corporate America does a really good job of implementing fear to keep you like locked in and not leaving and things like that, you know, you don't want to lose this cushy job, and what about those health benefits, and, you know, and all that, and, and, you know, always wanted to be an entrepreneur, knowing that those really what I needed to do, I couldn't make that jump because I was the fear, right. And so fear holds you back. You know, it stops you from, from from, from enjoying the current state, right, like the here and now. And it's it's always, I always feel like fear is one of the things that robs us of our peace of mind in the moment. And usually, we're borrowing from tomorrow's problems, when we create today's fear. You know, and that's probably for me, like, the biggest definition of fear is, you know, what's holding you back? What's because fear manifests itself in two ways you alluded to this a little bit ago, either causes you to do something, or not do something. Right. And so first, I think you got to evaluate what does it cause you to either do or not do? Or some of us like, for me, it would hold me back, right, it would stop me from moving forward, or move forward very cautiously, if you will, you know, I'd still progress, but I would progress at a slower pace than others. Because, you know, I was scared of like the outcome or what, you know, Zig Ziglar is called the what if thinking, right? So it's like, what if this happened? Or what if that happened, you know, that word of thinking can be paralyzing at times? You know? And I don't know, that's it. So I think when we talk about it, Shawn, you talked about that session, and or, you know, I'm talking about in general, now, we're taking we're leaning more towards a holding us back kind of mindset, right? Or, yeah, fear on the other side causes people to, you know, power through walls do things. And and I'm not saying one is better than the other, I definitely still feel that even when you have the fear, and it calls you, it propels you forward. I think sometimes that causes us to make decisions, harshly or even in a rushed manner, when we when we allow fear to be the driver of it. And sometimes it's not the best decision either. So, you know, I think it can harm us in both ways. But you know, identifying first and foremost, the root cause of it is probably one of the most important things you can do.

  Sean Thomson 09:07

  Yeah, I think fear that's exactly yeah, the fear. Fear can sort of control your level of performance, right? So it can it can prevent you from from doing things that really shouldn't. And it can cause you to do things that it shouldn't as well, right. So fear can control your performance and it can, it can guide you into places in your decision making and the way you make life decisions in the wrong direction. Either by holding you back or causing you to do something propelling you forward in the wrong direction as well too. So fear, it's all driven by you know, just your body and your mind wanting to kind of keep you safe, right keep you sort of contained in their comfort bubble and your mind doesn't want you to very outside of what what it knows for you to be comfortable and safe, right? And that's not how you make How you make big things happen in your life, you can't, you can't do things that are, you know, epic or are going to be life changing without without fear, right? It's just going to be a component that has to be there. And if it's if you're allowing the fear to keep you from doing those things or doing the wrong thing, it it's a massively negative impact on your life. But you can use you can't like I said, you can use those fears to propel you in the right direction as well, if you're if you're harnessing them properly. So I think the biggest problem with fear is that it affects it affects us in in just the level of performance that we can do. And like you said, it keeps you you may still move forward, but it may be very slow, you know, and measured, you know, you're kind of worried about something so you're not you're not, you're not going as fast as you could be when there's really nothing to worry about.

  Gary Harper 10:48

  Yeah, I know we have we have different views on on this a little bit. You know, biblically, I always tell people that the Bible says, Do not fear 365 times. It's interesting for me that it actually, you know, I've had that counted before, that it says it 365 times because it's like it's one time for every day of the year. Right, right. Like, because we're gonna have fear every single day, every day. Yeah. Yeah, I've actually studied that. And I've studied the translation of that back to Greek and Hebrew and stuff. And, and it's funny, because it's when it's talking about that as its talk when it talks about fear talks about, you know, a form of respect. And so think about that for a second. Like if we put a different twist on it, like, I think fear is it when it reaches a level of fear. It's crippling, I think there's deeper levels of fear. I think there's anxiety and panic and depression. I think all those stemming, I'm not a doctor, but I think those are stem from fear. But I think there's a healthy level of respect that you can still have for something, and then not let it translate into fear. Right. And, and so what it says when it says do not fear, I think what it means is to respect like, I don't think you should fear firearms, I don't think you should fear certain things in life, like COVID, for example, I don't think we should fear it, I think we should respect a lot of respect for things that could hurt us, right, that could that could damage our well being and damage or not only our physical health, our mental health, you know, all those things, I think it's I think it's a level of respect that we need to have, and creating a balance around what to respect versus what fear. You know, and and I think that's where that's where I think you start to take control of it, if you can, you know, is to give it the respect is to do without getting into the fear of what it could be.

  Sean Thomson 12:35

  Yeah, and that's what I was going to talk about next is how to reframe those fears, so that they can be used to sort of help you through life, right, you can use your fears to navigate life in a more positive way. You know, I think the problem that we have is when we let the fear sort of take over, and and overwhelm us, right, so the fears that we have, there's a quote, Seneca quote, it's, we've, we suffer more in imagination than we do in reality, right. So that's, I butchered that quote, but it's that's kind of it, you know? Yeah. And we we fabricate, not necessarily fabricate some of the fears are founded in, you know, in something real, but we sort of fabricated these stories in our minds a lot of times that are that are much more bigger problems than then the real, the reality of it, right? Yeah. And I think we worry ourselves into these, these fears, that, that we don't need to have this this large of an impact on our life. And I think if we can, if we can reframe how we look at our fears, then we can, you know, deal with them, or take care of them or learn to, you know, learn to overcome them. And it's a matter of looking at them and what the, I think most people and this is what my issue was, is that I didn't even identify that I had fears, right? I didn't know that they existed in my life, I just was kind of cruising along. And I just, you know, I knew I was afraid of snakes and flying didn't I don't like flying, you know, there's certain things I know that I'm afraid of, or don't or uncomfortable with. But you know, like losing a loved one or getting sick with cancer and you know, lupino, leaving your family, those fears are there with you all the time you carry those things around, whether you realize it or not. And I think if you can, number one, acknowledge that they exist, identify what they are, and then get them out somehow write them down, talk to somebody about them, and then come up with a plan to sort of either technically deal with them, or emotionally deal with them, you know, on a one by one basis, you can start to get through those fears and get beyond it. Yeah. So talk a little bit about if you don't mind you talked about I think you were starting to get there with how to sort of reframe those fears, so that they're not controlling you. You You said you convert them from fears to something You respect so you, you've identified it, and you say, Okay, this is not something I have to fear. But I need to be aware of it, I need to like COVID, you need to take certain measures to be aware of it, respect it, treat it, you know, you know, where your mass or whatever you're going to do to, to give it its respect. And so how do you how do you kind of know, when you have a fear and move it through this system for you?

  Gary Harper 15:24

  Well, first of all, I have to eliminate the things in my life that might be aiding me in having fears, right. So that's the first thing for me, I need to make sure for me I use I make sure religion is a part of it for me, I, I make sure I get a good night's sleep, right? Like, I think I'm the worst the next morning or the next day, anxiety, fear, those things tend to tend to have more power when I don't sleep well, right? Yeah. Good music helps aid me and giving me the right mindset to overcome and have the right fear, I use that humor, I, you know, humor is big for me, I have a verse that I keep, and it says a mare heart is good, like American medicine, but a broken spirit drank the bone, right. And I love that statement. Because it's like, you know, humor can can often can be the opposite of fear, you know, it could be the opposite of anxiety, and worry. But these are the things and then for the things that if I do those things, I still find it showing up on my life, you know, I want to then identify where they are, what they are, right, like so a lot of times we can have fear and anxiety and thoughts of that what if thinking if you will, if if we don't, we could have those and then not know where they're coming from almost similar to what you experienced right there there, but you just their underlying, you kind of push on the back of the brain just keep pushing forward. So we do an exercise. And a lot of things I do is around the the number three, like the three I have a philosophy called three, three, right. And whether it's read three books a week, whether it's big three goals, quarter, whatever, like a lot of things I do is on the minds of three. But that mindset has led me to an exercise that I've created. And that I do. And it's a little bit of a twist from other exercises that I've seen in the past, but this is what's worked for me and and you got to find what works for you. But the first thing that I want to do is I want to identify, I think I take 10 minutes and I write down everything negative or fear based that I have going on in my mind. And I just it's not like I sit there and dwell on it, I describe a piece of paper and I start writing down like whatever the mind brings them on my my forefront of my head, whatever would come to the tip of my tip of my tongue. Like instead of saying I just write it down.

  Sean Thomson 17:30

  It's just like a data dump every Yeah. How often do you do that?

  Gary Harper 17:33

  Every Friday.

  Sean Thomson 17:35

  Every Friday?

  Gary Harper 17:36

  Yeah. So I call I call it a mind dump. Right? It's funny data dump, I actually actually refer to it as a mind dump. And I just dump it all out, like good. But I mean, it's just random. I mean, he has no, like, you know, logic to it, it just flows out, like and it could be everything from, you know, broken arm to like, you know, like, you know what, I always use this analogy, but one that really ever really jumped out at me one time was I was writing it was like 12 year old shot. Like, wow, like, why did I just write that I got I found myself thinking about where did that come from. And it was the news. I mean, like it had something I had heard on the news is were close to Chicago, 12 year old, and it just stored in the back of my head, like it was weird how it placed itself in my brain, and just kind of took up residency, if you will, and just kind of sat there, right. And it's just it, you know, just just a random thought that came to my mind as I'm writing. And I just continue to do I do about 10 minutes. The next thing I do from there is I The next step is I actually start writing down everything I'm grateful for. Right? Going back to that mindset of Mary Hart with like a medicine but a broken spirit drive the bone, I don't want to remove anything negative, like I want to, it's almost like removing the venom out of the brain, right. And then I want to replace it with everything that's positive of nature. You know, what, whatever I have, whatever, I'm blessed with what or you'll see posts from me on Facebook and stuff like that used, especially on a Friday night, most of the time. You'll see I'm sitting here tonight, you know, thinking about how blessed I feel are this. And what it what I'm doing that that second part of that wave of that 10 minutes is, as you know, just completed and I just, you know, I want to be thankful for half the humble, I want to be confident, but I want to stay humble. And so something I tried to do regularly is to remind myself of the blessings that I have. And so first is taking all that negative stuff out, replacing it second next 10 minutes with all that positive things, anything I'm happy about grateful for things like that. And then the last one for me and typically between step one, step two, step two and step three, I get pretty tired. I don't know about you, if you've ever done, you know when you did this, but I get you know, pretty fatigue. It's kind of like this, like weight just came off. And I'm just like Well, I'm Higher, you know, and I just sometimes it'll close my head or close my eyes, drop my head a little bit and just kind of take a quick nap. Sometimes a nap will last a minute. Like, it's weird how sometimes just that shutting down the brain for that a little bit of time can refresh. And it does that for me. And sometimes it's longer, but usually it's no longer than 15 minutes. And then I take my last 10 minutes and I write down innovation, right, I write down, I'm a visionary. I feel like when you get that clutter out, and you replace it with, you know, you kind of I feel like that the positivity is a cleansing almost. And then when you get all that out, it's just free flowing. At that point, my mind starts to race with everything I could do and what all that fear has been trapped in holding back, like, what can I do better? What can I do? And how can I get stronger? How can I get and do more to help others, you know, all those things start to flood my mind at that point. And I just start trying to capture them as fast as they flow out. Right. And so I do those three things.

  Sean Thomson 20:58

  What was the third one? Gary, tell me the third one again?

  Gary Harper 21:01

  The third one I do is is I sit there and think about innovation.

  Sean Thomson 21:05

  Innovation? Okay.

  Gary Harper 21:07

  And so like improvement, right? Like, what what, what would I do now that the, you know, what would I do now that the fear is gone? I think a lot of times we is trapped mentally just because we have ideas. And then, you know, there's a lot of books about this, as a matter of fact that and people talk about that as soon as your mind thinks about opportunity, within five seconds, it starts telling you all the negative reasons why you shouldn't do it.

  Sean Thomson 21:31

  Right, right. But you've just dumped all that out. So it's, the innovation has more time to kind of sink in, I think, yeah, and the gratitude too.

  Gary Harper 21:41

  Yeah, and the gratitude kind of comes out from you know, so it's not just about removing it, but it's also about flushing the toilet. And so you know that last up is cool for me, because then I just start writing now all these innovation bots. And they're there to write, they've been trapped back in the back of the mind as well. So they're there and they're just waiting to be discovered. So those three steps are really important for me. Now, if they're, I look back at my list, my wife, we're all the fear removed. And I like to put it in two categories, right, I like put her in category of everything, it's in my control, and everything that's not in my control. And, and a lot of people over the years have like drawn a circle and you put all the the ones that are anger trolling, you're in the middle and everything is not controlling outside, and everything I have inside of my control, because you know, if it's in your control, you're not going to let it go. Ultimately, if it's your fault, or you cause it or, or you have ability to fix it, you're going to it's going to stay with you to some degree. So what I like to do is then I like to time block the amount of time I'm going to spend on it at that point. Like how much time we're going to spend on replacing this fear. And then I always tell people that we replace fear with knowledge. That's where fear comes from fear comes from you said you're scared flying. My biggest fear in the world has always been flying. Like I people laugh at me when I say that, because I've flown like 1700 times I fly three to five times a week. I'm scheduled for flight today. And you know, and they're like, Really? You're like yeah, like every for every single flight. Now, how do I get on these flights? How do I I mean, I'm not talking about little fear. Yeah, people are scared of fret afraid of snakes, and they're scary. They're like my wife is definitely a very sneaky bright stapler within five feet over she's running like she'll scream and run. I told her I consider that a very similar fear to how I fear flying. And the first hundred times I flew man, I'd literally have a panic attack over and over again on the plane. And nobody knew that I wasn't running up and down the aisle screener and they had contained it within myself but it was still very real and loss of breath and like it was gonna pass out shaky hands going on like all that all the symptoms and and i i found that the way I've been able to help myself and control that over these years that was when I was a lot younger is replacing fear with knowledge right? When we fear something the more knowledge will recombinant the better we feel about it right and what more we can push through the fear you know thing let's use an I don't mean to use this COVID over and over again but let's use that right now like when it first came out people locked down right like we we shot we're not just the government but like people put in their houses they locked down toilet paper was bought out like Why fear fear of the unknown not knowing that people are dying and a real fear to be honest with you like this is not made up. This is gonna This is real this isn't goes on. And and then as we have become more knowledgeable in it. What are they cracking up is going on Facebook, and everyone's like, told you so 6% blah, blah, you know, all these different things and they're like, we messed up with each other. And they What are they doing? They're letting that anxiety release Finally, right everybody thanks for being belligerent, but they're not they're just it's a form of breeze of anxiety. They finally have enough knowledge to validate to free their mind from the fear even before when they're like this. You know? When we go to fear that one of the first things we do is we, we create doubt we got we we almost we almost resist the change or the thought of like, you know, is this real, you know, and this belief and things like that. And and so that's one of the things that happens when people start to come out now they're going, you know, we're getting knowledge, we're understanding how this thing works. We know what that how to treat it, we're starting to get these, these these, you know what they call vaccines? Yeah, and what do we need? We need knowledge? Is everybody going to go get a vaccine or not? No? Are they going to go back to work eventually, and start getting by life back to normal? Yeah, we have to Oh, and how was it? how's it gonna happen? replacing fear with knowledge?

  Sean Thomson 25:41

  Right, I want to unpack a lot of what you said, Gary, that's that was a that was a ton of very, very important stuff, the everything you just said is like, that's the, that's the pattern for success and controlling your fears. But I want to start with the control. So I think what you just you were just talking about, you think about the things that you can control. And then you come up with a way to, to act on that, that you can control. So your fear of flying, for example, the fear is there, and it's going to be there no matter what, but then you have you've come up with these techniques, have things that you know, you can control the way you get on the plane, the way you sit, you know, these things that you can control, you've taken those and you've empowered yourself to, you know, use those things, you know, you can control to give you some level of comfort, right? To give you some level of Hey, I can I can do this, because I can take these three or four steps that I, I know, I can control, I can't control the plane, the pilot that anything else, but I can control these things that make me as comfortable as possible to get on this plane. Right? So I think that asking yourself, I this is a question I ask myself all the time is, do I control this? And the answer is no. I always ask myself, what do I control? And then I start I take those steps to create a positive impact in my life for whatever situation I'm dealing with. Right? That's that's the second phase of this. The first is if if you ask yourself that question, do I control this? And the answer is yes, then you should take actions to solve that problem. Right? But if the answer is no, then you should find those things that you do control that that'll help you get beyond that, that moment in time and beyond that fear, right? So I think that's that, that's what you just said in the, in your, in your fear of flying comments. But I wanted to kind of just frame it in a way that people can say, hey, do I control this? And if the answer is no, then you want to find those things that you do control. And the example it's a flight example, again, to the one that I hear all the time is you're at the airport in Denver, and you're you're trying to get home and your flight is delayed by three hours or you know, you don't know how long it's going to be the you know, you can get mad and start yelling at the ticket agent, you can start you know, you can do all these things that aren't going to ultimately impact what's going to happen. Or you can say, hey, I need to take this time to read the book that I was going to read or make the phone calls, I was going to make it because I was going to be on a plane, it could make my phone calls or I was going to you know, I wasn't gonna get a chance to eat. So I'm gonna go eat, you know, you can take the opportunity to do something positive for yourself that is going to change the way your experiences with that particular incident. Right. And fear is a lot a lot of that as well.

  Gary Harper 28:21

  I think that's what crosses it over into mindset. So then now that's a mindset shift. Right? Right. That holds us back then it does create a ripple down effect and the mindset and the mindset is either how are we going to approach this or we're going to be positive in our book, Zig Ziglar actually, says, Tom of exhibiting or friend but and one of his statements, he said that when he was at the airport waiting and flight found those flights delayed in he looked up the stewardess who had just been hollowed out by five other people in front of me. And she says, He walks up and he says, so I'm on that flight my flyspray tunes. Yes, sir. Your flights delayed too. And he goes, Well, thank you so much for making sure our flight is is delayed. And she looked at and really puzzled like what she does, he says, I can't be more grateful for you making sure our flights late today. Just don't be smart alec. And he's like, No, I'm serious. Jesus in His statement was there's either a problem up there or a problem down here. And I'd much rather be down here if there's a problem, right? So it's a mindset thing. Right? I'm going to approach this the right way. And ever since that ever since I heard that I tried. Whenever I find myself getting upset asking that question like, Am I using fear or having the wrong mindset that's driving me to be frustrated? Right? Or am I not replacing the fear with knowledge? what's creating this anxiety was creating this fear? First, Know yourself, right? know who you are, know what those fears are? That exercise helps me in a really big way to identify what those things are. But then like now deciding which bucket are they long? Do they belong in the bucket of do something about it? Because I control it? Or does it belong in the bucket that I'm borrowing from tomorrow's problems and this You know, and one of the ways that I test this against myself is whenever I have a fear whenever I have a thought, whenever I get anxious, I always ask this question I go is what I'm thinking right now true.

  Sean Thomson 30:13

  Say that one more time, please.

  Gary Harper 30:14

  I was asked, this is what I'm thinking right now. Yeah, true. Because I need to first identify whether or not it's a valid concern. And something that needs to be dealt with are my borrowing from a potential problem. See, the thing is 90% of what we fear is the unknown, right? So it is borrowing from tomorrow's problems. How many times john in our lives? Have we been up all night or worried sicker, wondering if this and what if that, only to find out it never happens, right? Yeah, it never comes true. We're flying home the other day from Boston, Massachusetts. And I'm looking at the weather and I get I don't like flying. So I'm looking at the weather. And I'm like, you know, we're gonna find the bad storms, that hurricane just came across the Midwest, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, we're gonna fly through some really crappy storms. And we're supposed to be coming over Chicago. And it's like, they had a severe thunderstorm watch and warning starting to pop up. And I'm looking at it about the time we're supposed to be landing was the hot of the heat of the storm, right? And so I'm thinking, Man, this just got this terrible. And I said, Well, what if we get delayed? And what if we have bad turbulence? What if we have to fly around and all these water thinking? And then I just I stopped myself and Gary, is what you're thinking right now true? And the answer was, is it possibly could be, but also could change? How often are they wrong with the weather? And would you believe Shawn, as we flew in the storms never developed? Right? Right. Like it was actually, we flew, they flew around a couple of storms that were from the hurricane, it was one of the most peaceful flights I've ever been on. Yeah. You know, what's wrong? Why do we borrow from tomorrow's problems? Right? And I think that's really important to know. First of all, what do you have control over? What do you not controller? Does they have control over I want to replace it with knowledge. Things I don't have control over. This is my funnest thing to do. That weekly thing that I write all that stuff down. And then I've looked at it and go, what are the things I have control? or What should I be working on? What should What are in my bucket? I tend to take time to make sure those get taken care of, but the things I don't and again, I'm working not just to have fear of them, I'm working to convert them to respect right? I'm working to give them knowledge so that they're I respect them not fear them. Right. Again, studying and then what I do on the stuff that I don't have control over my favorite thing to do. I don't know if you remember this, but I typically rip that top of that piece of paper off. And I burn it. I love burning that type of sheet.

  Sean Thomson 32:43

  You just release them.

  Gary Harper 32:45

  it's the coolest feeling in the world. Well, I mean, I'm not a narcissist. But you understand, I do love to watch that sheet of paper burn. Right? It's something which is very relieving a huge relief for me to watch it just kind of go up in flames and dissipate.

  Sean Thomson 33:06

  And well, I wanted to I wanted to circle back to we talked about the the control issue, but I wanted to circle back to because this, this exercise that you're doing is this is the this is a life changer for many people, I guarantee it. And so writing those, let's circle back to writing those things down, you know, the power that that has, you know, our minds carry these things around, whether we ask it to or want it to, or whether we're thinking about it or not. And in my case, I had all these fears, but I had, I had just sort of hidden them in my brain, and was not dealing with them at all. But they but they never left, right, they never left. And there has to be a way for you to sort of get these things out. To discover them so that you can deal with them or discover them so that you can like you said, turn them to respect and educate yourself about them. Or just release them right. Yep. And writing them down is such a powerful thing. You need to you need to say them out loud or write them down or something.

  Gary Harper 34:05

  Yes, I won't say them out loud. And I have a really particular reason why I want to hear why Yes, I don't. I won't say my law because I said I feel like giving things putting things in word for you don't give it power.

  Sean Thomson 34:19

  Yeah, that's true. That's a good point.

  Gary Harper 34:22

  You know, sales. I've been in sales a lot of my life and I've always telling people that I want people to say it. I want them to say it's a good deal. I want them to lie because when we hear it, we believe it.

  Sean Thomson 34:33

  When we hear ourselves say it we really believe it.

  Gary Harper 34:35

  Yeah.

  Sean Thomson 34:36

  Yeah, self talk is like 40 times more powerful than than someone else telling you something.

  Gary Harper 34:41

  That scares me to death to actually say when my fears out loud right? I'll say they'll be your ally like flying now because I've it's a respect thing. It's not fear anymore. I've overcome it right. Like I say, I say it as you know, to give you an instance or an example of what I feared in the past, but I I get on three to five times a week, right? Like it's not I don't let it control me. Right, right. So I still respect it. I still respect the thought, but I don't assign a controlling. It's not a fear anymore, right? So that's why I won't say it out loud. Like, we've talked about this before. You actually asked me one time you asked me. And I said, I'm not gonna tell you remember that you're like, you're like, will you write them down? Right, remember? And you're on to me? And I'm like, yeah, I'll write it down broadly, but I say no, like, I just can't like, I'm almost power. Yeah, it's a way too much power. You know, that's true. My mom used to say all the time, she say, she'd say, Gary, be careful, what you say might just might just happen. Your terrible shame, it might come true. You know, I don't want it I don't want those things come true. So I don't want give them the power that they don't deserve.

  Sean Thomson 35:46

  Well, I think writing them down is I think the best way to sort of get those out of your brain, right. So you have to get you have to find a way. journaling is a great way for people to do this. You know, you can take keep a journal like you do this every Friday. There's some people that keep a daily journal. Yeah, so there's, there's all kinds of ways to do it, I do it, I just do it periodically, when I'm sort of feeling a little overloaded, I'll sit I'll sit and just sort of go through this process as well. And I don't, I don't, I don't have a consistent, like every Friday kind of thing. But I do it, you know, every month or so and, and just kind of when I'm feeling like, Hey, I'm don't think I'm running all cylinders, here. Let's get some of this kind of out of my brain. And I'll do I have a journaling book that I keep, and I do it in my journaling book. But so I think just for someone that is that wants to identify fears in their life, I think Step one is to just sit down and just get those out, like you do, you know, every Friday, but you just sit down and get those out on a piece of paper, and just let everything come out. And you'll I think a lot of people will find that it's, it's, it's the first time you do it, especially for me, it was extremely, it's overwhelming. I couldn't I just couldn't do it. I had to stop. It took me it took me two or three months to get all my fears kind of out. You know, for the first time it was like that, that that unloading of the mind was was heavy.

  Gary Harper 37:05

  I'm sorry, that's why I do it every Friday, because I don't want to I don't want to build up. Yeah, I just don't I want to keep it as clean and as, you know, as minimal as possible. Right. I don't I don't want the boat up. Because the boat up for me. It's like feels like quicksand. You know, like, and I think it's harder to come out of that once built up than it is to just maintain that. It's kind of like anything in life. But But if you're journaling, you're probably doing that subconsciously anyway.

  Sean Thomson 37:33

  And then you talked about your step two was what was your step two is just that it's the write down all the things that were rejoicing, or attitude, right. So gratitude, right? Let's, I'm going to still deal with the fears for now. So we'll get back to the gratitude and the actions. But the fears once you have those written down, the step that I take next is to identify the like you said, the ones that I that I can control and the ones I can't control. And I look at my fears, in a couple ways, the ones that I do control, I look to see if it's something that I need to fix technically, or if it's something I need to fix emotionally, you know, like the loss of your child, you can't really fix that technically, I guess there is a technical component to it. But there's you want to deal with that emotionally? If this if this happens in my life? How am I going to react? How am I gonna feel how am I gonna sort of deal with it to get to get beyond it, or get past it or get through it. And you can kind of deal with that on an emotional level. And then one of mine, that's a technical thing, like I was always afraid that I would die and my my family would be left with, you know, all this real estate business that they didn't fully understand. So so one of the things that I was afraid of was not having an estate plan in place. And that's more of a technical issue. There is an emotional component to me dying, but it's it I was, I was worried about the technical part of it. So then you you know, you just go and get your estate plan worked out and all those things. But the most important thing is that you've identified the fear, you've identified how to address it, whether on a technical level or emotional level, and then take those actions that you need to take it so that you're, you're kind of dealing with those is that's kind of what you were just saying you you look at every Friday you write them down, and then you look at what do I control or not control. And then the third one is the ones that don't fit into that technical or emotional bucket. Those are just kind of fears that you shouldn't really be carrying around and you want to kind of release those. And your the way you do it is amazing, you know, burning that piece of paper, it kind of it kind of lets those all go right.

  Gary Harper 39:30

  Yeah, I love that part of it.

  Sean Thomson 39:32

  Yeah. So I think those those two things that you just talked about, that you do every Friday, which is amazing. I'm gonna have to really step my game up here and do do this more often. But I think if people can get those fears out, write them down. And then find the bucket that they fit into. And then work on the technical plan to fix it and take control of it or work out the emotional plan to take control of it or just release it. I think those three things Things will change their the way they look at their fears, and then it'll change. It'll definitely change the control that those fears have over their day. And their life. Right? For sure.

  Gary Harper 40:10

  Yeah. And if you're stuck today, if you're struggling, you're like, I've tried to implement systems. I've tried to do this in my business. I've tried to do that. It's, you know, I think Sean's a good testimonial to the fact that it's not that you don't need that it's just, they're not the first thing you need to work on. You know, the first thing you might need to work on is you and you'll hear in my teaching a lot, I will say you first, right like I'm always saying, you know, know myself, you know, know yourself right? You have no right to lead other people until you've led yourself first. And it's so important that we do that. A couple things I if you don't mind, I'd like to I'd like to give out to the to this podcast. First of all one is there's a really good book that me and my wife love and we've read many times, and it's called, "Do It Scared."

  Sean Thomson 40:50

  Yeah, you've talked about it before.

  Gary Harper 40:52

  Yeah. And it's it'll it'll create the life you love by overcoming the fear and adversity right that you by giving courage to face it. And it talks about seven different types of fear archetypes: the procrastinator, the rule follower people, pleaser, the outcast and self doubter, the excuse maker, and the pessimist. And so there's an assessment called www.doitscared.com. I don't know the accuracy of it. But anything that helps us understand us better is probably a good thing. Right? So whether you're 100% agree with or not, it's not kind of irrelevant to me, it gets you thinking in the right manner, right? Like what? Why did this even read that this is a majority, you know, one of my major fears, right are one of my top fears. Do a scared.com gives you that assessment to see like mine people pleaser. You know, it's, it's like 59% people pleaser. And I know that's a fear of mine. Like that's one of the biggest thing my fears are based in is, am I do I make people happy or help others and things like that. The other thing the last thing I'll say here is even though I only do the Mental Cleanse once a week, I do something every day and there's some statements that I like to say to myself, you know, we talked about not saying our fears, because when we say our fears, right, Shawn we we lose, we give a power? Well, these statements kind of give me the power give me power in a different way. Right. So I always say these things right here. I say there are no mistakes only lessons. Right. So it's a statement I like to repeat I I say these affirmations, I try to send daily. Miller says you probably wouldn't worry about the people what people think is one of my favorite ones, because I'm a people pleaser. So you probably won't worry about what people think of you if you couldn't if you knew how seldom they actually do.

  Sean Thomson 42:32

  Right. Yeah, right.

  Gary Harper 42:34

  Yeah. Now house me because I'm a people pleaser. Next one is, what do you think you can or you think you can't? You're right. No, no one gets thrown around a lot. But it's something that I remind myself, john Maxwell is, you know, i'm john Maxwell certified. I love this statement, it is easier to move from failure to success than from excuse to success. So that's another one I use that kind of helped drive me to more here, Shannon older says you're only a victim in the degree of what your perception allows. That's pretty powerful one for me. Right? That's that? What if thinking borrowed from tomorrow's problems? And then the last one is, yeah, that no, that was it. That was the last one I had. But there's, these are the ones in which I tried to give myself affirmations regularly daily, if I can, if I have time for it, I'll just quote these, I have them on a three by five card that I'm reading off here. And I keep those in my wallet just to kind of just to pull them out every now and then is kind of give me some give me some positive affirmations. And I love stating them. Because again, when I say it, it's true. Right? When my mind says it, my heart hears it, it becomes very true to me. So I don't know I hope that helps your your listeners today. I know it's an area of my life that I've struggled big time with. And and I'm not allowed it to cripple me or stop me. But I think if we all want to stand up and be counted someday and say, hey, it's fear of fact, this fear of problem or a factor of your life. I think we'd all agree that in some way, shape or form it shows up.

  Sean Thomson 44:05

  Yeah, and it's sometimes you don't even realize it, I was just completely blinded to it. I mean, I didn't even realize that I had that it was causing a problem for me. So just by just by trying these exercises and doing these things. It opened up a whole world for me that I didn't know, I even needed to open up you know, I knew I knew I was having trouble getting to the next level in my business and getting to the next level in my life and kind of having some of that clarity, but I didn't know what the cause was, you know, I assumed it was because I wasn't fast enough or smart enough or you know all those things you think I wasn't motivated enough you know, but but man I had I educate myself all the time about my business. I had motivation just coming out my ears, I couldn't get any more motivated. You know, I want my dreams bad. You know, I just couldn't figure out how to be more motivated. And so I was I was doing all the things that you hear about positive thinking all these other things, and I wasn't addressing the negatives in my life, you know, in the next negatives were actually like anchors and in holding me back from making the decisions that I needed to make or wanting to make to get to the next level, right? So these fears were there without even me even knowing it, you know, and it took it took me it took that the catalyst of that event to realize, hey, maybe this is something in my life that I need to deal with, and then doing that exercise. When I did that exercise, I knew I knew instantly this is a, this is a problem, you know, because I i'm not i'm not a super emotional guy. I mean, I do get emotional. But this was hard to do. You know, I mean, it was it was I haven't felt that sad, you know, in a long time, just and all I was doing is writing stuff on a piece of paper. You know, it seemed like such an easy thing I wasn't even taking its, you know, fully understanding the seriousness of it at all, you know, when I first started it, so I think if people can do get those exercises down, and just maybe try that, I think it'd be a big deal. You know, you mentioned a book, too. One of the books that I read during that time period was fear vahana. I think you've read that one too, probably. But it also it talks more about how to utilize your fears to sort of propel you forward. And that's kind of what I think I've done, I've taken my fears and reframe them in a way that they don't scare me anymore. They're not burdens. To me. They're they're kind of catalysts for success. You know, I, you know, we don't we don't want to look at our lives as short, you know, and sometimes dealing with those fears. Like, like I said, a minute ago, I was afraid that maybe I would die, my family be burdened with these things, but then you start to think to yourself, you know, life is shortlist, let's get let's get going, let's get to the happiness and success and fulfillment, let's get to these things, and not worry so much about your failures every day. And you know, and, and address those who deal with them and move move to success is what you want to do. So a lot of ways for Nirvana sort of talks about utilizing fear to be more successful. And that's how I that's how I like to think of it too is a Hey, let's let's use these things as catalysts not not not burdens, right?

  Gary Harper 47:07

  You know, there's one last step that I always tell people, you know, we've talked about fear, we've talked about knowledge and how to replace fear. And the last one for me, is I always tell people, when you identify the fear, you replace it with knowledge and sustain it with faith. Right? And you have to have faith in knowing that what the knowledge that you obtained is the right knowledge and that you're doing the right thing. And you know, you have to have faith in that right, you have to believe it. And and you can't go back to the what if thinking from there. So you start with identifying the knowledge, decided if it's something new, something about replacing with arm, sorry, fear, and then sign up for something, do something about replacing with the knowledge and sustaining with faith. And that's been at least the recipe for me. And I think it works. And and at least it worked for me, for sure.

  Sean Thomson 47:52

  Yeah. And that's, that's what I was going to talk about next is now that now that we've identified our fears, we've identified ways to take care of them or to deal with them. The most important next step is to start to say, okay, the gratitude is extremely important. What am I What am I grateful for in my life? What am I happy with in my life? What are the things that are going right in my life, and you want to start to reprogram or reframe your thinking, and put those things in your mind, you want to get the fears out, deal with those on a technical or emotional level. And then you want to start to put the things in that are good in your life and the things that you want more of right you want, you want more of gratitude, you want more success, you want those things. So I think that that third step is as critical. And like you said, also you want to start looking at you, in your, in your writings, you say the gratitude, and then you take the innovations or the actions, you know, these are some of the things I would really like to accomplish, right? I think those kind of go together, as the next phase in this process, where you've identified your fears, you've started dealing with them. And now Where do you want to go? and replacing your mindset with positive gratitudes and actions to get you to those places? I think that's what you were just alluding to, right? Yeah, yeah. So I think that's an that's an a critical step as well, and you want you want to do the same process, it's, it can be the same thing, writing those down. And with those, you want to actually start to, you know, read through those make those kind of programming into your brain. And those will help you sort of, you know, like you said, be a catalyst for success as opposed to some burden that's keeping you back to the things you're grateful for. And the actions that you want to take are going to be critical to get you you know, to get you going at a higher next level performance, you know, for your business for your life, your relationships, everything. Well, I think that's that pretty much sums everything up so that those are those are kind of the ways that I've dealt with it and ways you dealt with it too. And I think they're very similar. I I've seen this in a number of books that I've read kind of on trying to deal with these things for myself. You know, it's in religious teachings. It's in you know, I have a A lot of stoic philosophy thinking, the way I do things, it's a stoic philosophy is to deal with your fears. You know, that's like the first thing you had to do to get yourself right. So that you can so that you can go be successful. Right? So that's step one, I think this is step one, in sort of, in sort of cleansing yourself and moving forward is dealing with this fierce scenario. So I wanted to Yeah, I was, I was extremely happy you agreed to talk to me about this, you know, I know you and I share some of this stuff. And I, I also know that there's a lot of people out there that were like me, that just haven't even identified this as an issue in their life. And it's for me, it's, it's, it's taken such a weight off my shoulders so that I can move freer in my life, you know, and I wanted to share that with somebody. Hopefully, you know, if there's someone listening.

  Gary Harper 50:50

  If we help just one out of 100, you know, it's worth going. So yeah, you know, so it's, that's how I always look at things, you know, what, I'm not in this to help the masses, I mean, this, you know, one that can help the masses, right. And if we can make one impactful change, it can create a ripple effect or compound effect throughout. So that's, that's why I'm excited about being able to do this with you. And people are gonna listen to this go out fear anything, you know, I don't have that fear on what they're talking about. And I challenge you to look within yourself, I challenge you to just give the exercise 30 minutes of your time, sometimes a week, and see if see what it produces, right. Like, I would tell you that most people that did the exercise that day with you, Sean all started the same way with like, you know, maybe should I take the phone call instead of doing the exercise, right? Like, do I really need to take time to do this? And I think a lot of them that did found found it to be helpful. So hopefully, it's helped people on your podcast the same way, Sean, I so much appreciate you allowing me to be on here to talk about this today. Thank you so much.

  Sean Thomson 51:51

  Yeah, thanks. I appreciate you coming on, we're gonna have you back on again, I hope whenever you have free time, I want to have you on the show for sure. If you're one of my favorite people to talk to, you know, we don't get a chance to talk all the time. But it's a it's amazing. When we do I really appreciate it. And I guess we'll put we'll put your we talked to you before, we'll put all your sharper process website for people to contact you and things. You're an amazing teacher, and amazing business consultants. So I want to make sure people can find you if they want to. But we'll put all that down in the show notes. So people can reach out to you what maybe tell us a little bit about what you have going on right now what's learned, what are some of your upcoming things you have happening?

  Gary Harper 52:29

  Well, I mean, we're working with clients one on one every week, we're heading to LA today and then San Diego later this week, and then back home. And then the next week is our Couples Retreat. We have an entrepreneurial Couples Retreat once a year. And that one sold out, unfortunately, and unfortunately, I'd love to have more people with COVID, we were having, we had to curate a limited amount of seats. Gary Chapman, who wrote the five love language book is our guest speaker for the two days. And so we're excited about him being there and working with him for two days to hit the reset button in our relationships, you know, so we all take time to work on our business, we all don't take time to work on our relationships that help our business. And I'm a firm believer in if it's not right at home, it's not going to be right at work. So some of that we've added and i'm not i'm not a subject matter expert in it. But I do bring in a lot of subject matter experts to help us with it. Keith Callen, we have one of those people, you mentioned him earlier. And he's a leader and a coach around leadership and relationship building. And so we bring him in along with others to help with that. But yeah, that's what we have going on right now. And we have our next boot camp, we actually have a really cool workshop coming up and a couple months where it's going to be very interactive, we actually build a business in the room with the team that's there from scratch, and show you how to actually just like literally build a business and and from identifying your avatar, your marketing strategy, your vision plan, all that. Like we do all that together in one room. And that's exciting.

  Sean Thomson 53:51

  That's an upcoming event.

  Gary Harper 53:53

  Yeah, we have that coming up in Chicago,

  Sean Thomson 53:55

  Yeah. And people can find that at the sharperprocess.com

  Gary Harper 53:59

  Yeah, just go to sharperprocess.com, go to the bottom go to events, and there's only two events on it right now. You know, we're not planning any future events outside of that right now.

  Sean Thomson 54:08

  Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, awesome. Well, thanks, Gary. I really appreciate it. And let's talk soon hopefully.

  Gary Harper 54:14

  Thank you, buddy. Appreciate your time. I will see you later.

  Abigail Thomson 54:16

  Thanks for joining us for another episode of Next Level American Dream. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today, want to contact a team directly, or interested in passively investing and being a part of our deal room, head over to our website at www.thomsonmultifamilygroup.com. Before you go, please leave a review! Your comments help us create more episodes for you to enjoy.