#906 - Erwin McManus - What It Takes To Live A Courageous Life

you said you've limited your impact in the world because of a lack of self-belief. Tell me the story then.
Well, you know, I think when I was young, I had the view that some people were just naturally heroic and some people were just naturally born cowards. And I fell into that category.
You know, if I look back when I was young, I was afraid of everything. And some of it was experiential.
You know, we got attacked by a dog. So I was terrified by dogs all my life.
I had a seatbelt break on a roller coaster and almost flew off the roller coaster. And so I was afraid of roller coasters or anything fast.
And I began realizing that I began accumulating fear. And the problem with fear is that it doesn't stay in a category.
It permeates throughout your whole soul, your psychological well-being. And I began realizing that I was more defined by fear than I was by almost any other emotion.
And I didn't really have a strategy. We didn't have what we have today, so many ways of accessing insight and ways of understanding mental structures and mind shifts.
But so I had to make my own decision. I had to decide how would I affect this? How would I change this? And so I developed a strategy to use fear as my life compass.
Whenever I felt fear, I just moved toward it. Whenever I felt afraid of something, I actually moved more aggressively in that direction.
And what I discovered by the time I'd finished my 20s is that there were actually international magazines and documentaries that were flying in to see what I was doing because they felt I was fearless. And I thought this is so ironic that I was being defined as someone who was fearless.
And in fact, my favorite superhero is Daredevil, the man without fear. And it was because I iconically longed to become that person because I knew how my whole life was captured by fear.
And so I learned how to take negative material and turn it into a positive asset. And I think that for me is the key is that I've lived a pretty adventurous life, traveled to nearly 100 countries, gone to some most dangerous places in the world, you know, walked the streets of Damascus, dropped into Pakistan and throughout the Middle East, different parts of the world that very few people ever go to and very few people ever survive.
And one of the most interesting things for me is that in those moments, I didn't feel captured by fear at all. And a huge part of that was because I'd learned how to take this emotion, this experience called fear, turned it into a positive fuel and used it as a way to motivate me to move forward in life.
How can people work out if they are being ruled by fear in their life? Well, I don't think it's that difficult to teach. I think most of us know just intrinsically that when we're afraid, but it's usually related to when we have a dream,

an ambition, desire, or goal, and we're more afraid of the consequences than we are the benefit. And so when we're paralyzed, moving into our best view of ourselves or our future, that's when we know we're controlled by fear.
yeah the fact that

the potential pitfalls

are more terrifying than the potential outcomes are enthusing, the fact that you've got this sort of running away from something that you don't want as opposed to running towards something that you do want, and the balance between those two energies is really interesting. Yeah, and one of the things we have to realize is that one of the things that's unique about human beings as a species is that we're interconnected to the future.
Every other species from the best that we can tell is completely existential. They live in this moment.
They're surviving the Serengeti. They're surviving the hunt and the the fight for survival but human beings are inseparable from a relationship to the past and the future and when we live in the past we tend to live a life of regret but when we live in the future we have two options we have an option to either live a life that would be described as as a life of faith or a life of fear because the future is unknown.
And from my perspective, it's uncreated. I'm not a fatalist.
I'm not a scientific determinist that thinks everything is mathematically already predetermined. I think we have choice, that we have creative agency as human beings.
And so then we're connected to this obscure, mysterious space called the future and how we engage that, whether we have a sense of optimism and hope, or whether we're filled with fear and trepidation, that will shape the way we experience life in the present. You see faith as the opposite of fear? I do.
And if faith is a hard word for someone, I'd say optimism. every highly spiritualized word has a very non-highly spiritualized word, but we all have them.
And, you know, some people, well, I don't believe in faith. And I go, well, you psychologically live by faith.
I'm getting on a plane today to go to Salt Lake City. I'm putting my faith in that pilot.
I'm hoping he had a great day. I'm hoping if he's married, his wife really loved him or her husband really loved him and that he's not depressed.
Every day, I'm putting my faith in something that's outside of my control. And I'm working from a framework that everything is going to move in my favor.
Let's do some inversion for a second. Imagine that you have somebody who is, they've maybe got a bit of a predisposition for fear, but you wanted to get them to spend their life being as fearful as possible, to be as terrified, as trapped, as paralyzed as they could be.
What are the things that you would get them to do? What are the ways you would get them to think? What are the sort of mindsets that you would get them to embody? Ironically, if you want someone to be paralyzed by fear, you don't get them to do the thing they fear because it's the fear of the reality that's more powerful than the reality itself. And so my fear of roller coasters was far more powerful than the roller coaster when I finally got on it.
My fear of dogs was far more powerful than the reality of dogs once I started spending time with them. And so the irony is if you want to be trapped and paralyzed in your fear, stay away from the thing you fear.
Yeah. There's a lyric from a Beartooth song song the first song on the new album that says all my worries were a waste of time i've got that written i've got that written on a post-it note above my desk at the moment that you know whether it's we suffer more in imagination than reality whatever trite you know version of this you want to sort of rebring up but it is wild how much worse our minds are able to make anything than even the worst that reality would be able to deliver to us it was so all of the extremes everything's maxed out at 10 the way that people are going to see the way that people are going to judge us the lack of forgiveness that the world's ever going to give us the the way that they're going to know the way that it's going to define us the way we're never never going to be able to get over it, so on and so forth.
And then usually that thing doesn't come to pass. And even if by some obscene chance it does come to pass, it's nowhere near as bad as we think.
And we get over it more quickly and nobody else really cares that much. So yeah, I think the fear of fear is the biggest one.
Absolutely. I don't know if the study still holds true, but so many of the studies show that the number one fear people have is public speaking, which I think is amazing because when you speak in public, even if you're terrible, usually no one shoots you.
There are no physical or violent ramifications. You just have a bad moment.
I've been I've been speaking for 45 years and early on, which is so ironic, I actually began speaking in the middle of government projects, in the middle of drug cartels, in the middle of gangbangers and assassins and criminals. And so I actually had a genuinely dangerous environment.
So the fear of speaking was way down the list. It was the fear of surviving those 20, 30 minutes that was actually more real for me.
And I've had the opportunity to speak in front of maybe 80, 100,000 people in a moment. And what's interesting to me is when I'm thinking about myself, I become consumed by fear.
When I'm thinking about others, the fear is completely gone. And so there's an interesting relationship to fear is about self-preservation.
And early on in my life, I made a decision that I would not make my life goal to exist, but to live. When you live a life of fear, you're moving towards safety and security.
You're moving toward preservation. You're moving towards survival, but you make every decision that will extract from you life.
You will not be filled with hope or joy or excitement or adventure. And I do think that we have to make a decision to either exist or live.
And that's the difference between, in a sense, fear and faith. Who are some of your favorite people that you've either worked with or people from history or stories that have sort of embodied this desire to overcome fear in their lives? Well, it comes to my mind right away, and this is sort of an ironic moment, because I was invited years ago to go to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and I watched the premiere of Braveheart.
I had no idea what this movie was. This was way before there was any publicity or trailers.
And I'm watching this movie about William Wallace Wallace and I end up writing about William Wallace

and one of my books and going to Scotland

and kind of like digging up some of the history there

and Robert the Bruce and all that era of history.

But what struck me is that moment

when Mel Gibson shouts out freedom

and gives up his life.

I had this exhilarating moment

and this incredible moment of awareness.

It fell out of my life. And I had this thought, I cannot let the most exciting moment of my life be when I'm sitting in a chair watching someone else's life.
And so when you, you know, when you ask me who are the people I admire the most, I think ironically, most of the people who have motivated me were in stories, were in film, were in novels, were in science fiction. And I think that was what really began to instigate inside of me a desire to not simply read about other people's story, but to live one.
Yeah. There's this odd sense, kind of like a, I don't know, like inspirational melancholy.
I've got that before when, you know, you're looking at a story. I used to get this when I watched my friend's bands perform on stage.
So I was friends with a bunch of like quite big bands and, you know, I'd go and see them play and it would be, you know, thousands of people sold out and this adoring crowd and i remember i'd be stood at the back of the room and i'd be looking at you know this person not only conducting their own music but conducting a room filled with 3 000 5 000 people and getting them to do this collective effervescence getting them to dance the way that they wanted getting that if that if that person turned up in this way, the rest of the crowd reflected that back to them. And I just remember seeing it as so competent, so admirable, so powerful.
But then very quickly after that, it throws into harsh light the places that you're not doing that. So you have this odd sense of inspiration and melancholy happening at the same time.
You say, oh my God, that's so amazing. I'm so happy for my friend and I'm so inspired by what they do.
And I want to be more like that. But as soon as you get to the, I want to be more like that, you then begin to think, well, that's an ideal.
And as soon as I posit an ideal, I find myself comparing myself to the ideal and by design, I find myself lacking. Oh, and the lack makes me feel like insufficiency and it makes me feel fear and it makes me feel inwardly turned and introspective and ruminative.
And yeah, it's odd how inspiration, it's a bit of a double-edged sword in that way. It is, but one of the things I think is important to come to grips with is that human beings experience depression because we're the species that can imagine a better version of ourselves.
You cannot be depressed if you cannot imagine a better version of yourself or a better life or a better world. And so the dissonance is the ideal we long for and the life we have.
And I find the gravitational pull of that. So even with depression, I mean, I've struggled with depression.
I struggled with it from a very young age. And I realized that I moved toward depression when I accepted this fallacy that I had no power to change my life.
And so depression wasn't really about my state of being. Depression was about my belief that I could not move toward my ideal.
And the moment I actually took any step in the direction of the person I wanted to become or the life I wanted to live, that depression was gone. Now it was replaced with exhilaration and excitement.
And I hadn't even achieved anything yet. I was just moving in a direction and it changed my inner dynamic.
Yeah. Action is the antidote to anxiety is something that I wrote down in my 20s.
And it's so true. You're not scared of the future when you're moving toward it, regardless of how slow it is, regardless of how kind of useless, or even in retrospect, how completely pointless the actions were that you took.
There's something about that forward momentum that does help to fix it. I remember hearing you speak last year and you talked about a factory defect, the fact that every positive emotion flies through you and every negative emotion sticks to you.
I want to dig into that. Yeah.
When I look at us as a complex human system, it is fascinating to me that all my positive emotions dissipate so quickly and all my negative emotions stick with me. I mean, they stay with me long-term and you have to fight for those.
And if you look at the gravitational pull of, let's say, character, it's astonishing to me that if I do nothing, I become the worst version of me. It would seem like I would just naturally, if I do nothing, I should just naturally become the best version of me, right? If I choose nothing, I should move toward hope, right? If I choose nothing, I should move toward love.
If I choose nothing, I should move toward compassion and generosity and integrity. But when I choose nothing, I become the worst version of me.
And so when you look at it, I think we actually are factory defects because when we choose nothing, we move toward depression. We move toward anxiety and stress.
We move toward suicidal imaginations. When we choose nothing, we lose our integrity.
We lose our generative nature. And the longer you choose nothing, you're choosing the worst version of you.
And even when it comes to emotions,

I've had incredibly exhilarating moments. Yesterday, I celebrated 41 years of marriage.

Congratulations.

And it's amazing to the same woman. And I say that somewhat hesitantly because she's not the

same woman. She's changed at least 30 to 40 times.
And so I always say, if you want to be with someone

Thank you. And 41 years of marriage.
And in those, we've had some incredibly exhilarating moments, some beautiful moments. And those moments become memories, but the experience of those emotions, they pass very quickly.
But if you have a fight, those emotions stay with you a long time. And so we have this incredible, beautiful memory of our honeymoon.
But two days ago, she threw away my apple turnover. and oh my god do not touch a man's apple turnover you know and and it was on our anniversary and i'm like hey i bought this apple turnover at this really great place and i bought you something too and she goes i threw it away and i realized all these negative emotions It was like the world was just absolutely being destroyed by Thanos because she threw away my turnover.
There's something about negative emotions. They cause an instantaneous reaction.
They go expansively and they go deep and they stay with us, which is why when you're in therapy, you're not working through, I don't know how to stop forgiving. I don't know how to stop having optimism about the future.
You're struggling with, I don't know how to forgive. I'm holding onto this bitterness.
I don't know how to let go of this past hurt. Negative emotions stay with us.
Positive emotions flow through us. And what we have to realize, and to me it makes perfect sense because there is nothing worth achieving in life that doesn't take hard work.
So why should we think the best version of us would not take hard work? And so you can only become the best version of you. I can only become the best version of me if I'm willing to put the work in to become that person.
If I don't want to put the work in, I become the worst version of me. Yeah.
There's no seminars on how to be more depressed or how to have less confidence. All of those things come so easily, so naturally.
We don't need any more coaching. We're already black belts.
Yeah, we're naturals. Yeah.
Yeah, it's wild. It's wild.
I wonder, you know, I wonder how universal this is. The different people have different constitutions and different set points.
But for a pretty big cohort of people, this is the thing that they're going to be battling with. It's the fact that for some reason, they seem to always be swimming against the tide when they're trying to get themselves toward a good state, toward a hopeful state, toward something that appropriates optimism or abundance or a vision for themselves that isn't based around fear or around concern or worry or anxiety.
And yeah, being able to somehow reprogram that, being able to step in and fact check your own mind is I think the battle that a lot of people have got to contend with. Yeah, and when you say this may not affect everyone, what's interesting to me, Chris, is the people who experiences the most are the people who experience the most success.
You would think it'd be the other way around. The people for whom a good mental state comes the easiest are the ones that end up getting to the highest point.
Yeah. And it's not, it's the other way around.
It's because success tends to have something that pushes you and something that pulls you. And I find this dynamic over and over again, people who are highly successful have something that's pushing them, a fear of poverty, a fear of insignificance, a fear of not being loved, a fear of not having value or having worth.
And it's like a darkness that eats away at them and it pushes them to accomplishment. And then hopefully there's something that also pulls them, a desire to make a difference in the world, a vision of a better humanity, an opportunity to alleviate human suffering or to make life better for other people.
And what I look for when I'm coaching a lot of young entrepreneurs is, has the pull become more powerful than the push? Because when the push is more powerful than the pull, they're positioned for self-destruction and for things to fall apart in their life. And so the irony is almost the less determined you are to become the best version of you, the highest expression of yourself, the less aware you're going to be of the tension in your soul.
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That's rpstrength.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Isn't it fascinating that the people that we admire the most have got the least admirable internal states? You know, the people that we all look up to that are the best known, the most notorious, the most successful, richest, famous, whatever it might be, on average are going to be the ones that you wouldn't trade places with the inside of their mind.
And I think that's something we haven't really talked about enough in the world because we keep admiring and idealizing people's outcomes rather than their essence. And what ends up happening is that we want their outcomes.
And so without even being aware of it, we also embrace their essence. And then we come to a place where we succeed and we hate ourselves.
Is there a level of success that you get to where you don't deal with overthinking? No, I haven't found it. And in fact, it's really interesting.
There's a minor league football league called the USFL. And I was working with that league.
And the number one question I got from the quarterbacks and the different players were completely on overthinking. And that same week I was meeting with Sean McVay, the head coach of the Rams, and I had the privilege to work with him.
And I was telling him the story. I said, Hey, Sean, you know, on Monday I was working with the USFL and, and they were asking about overthinking.
And I'm wondering, is the difference between a player at your level and a player at their level that your players don't overthink? He goes, no, the number one thing I have to deal with is overthinking. And I moved on to start talking about his life and where he was at.
And he goes, no, no, go back. What did you tell them about overthinking? And I realized there is no level of achievement where you break through that dilemma of overthinking.
And what's interesting about overthinking is we never overthink positive scenarios. Yeah, I'm really not overthinking, oh, I wonder if my wife's going to love my gift too much.
And I'm not overthinking, I hope this podcast goes better than, oh, I'm so worried that this is going to be better than I thought, right?

And we're always overthinking negative scenarios.

And so that's one of the things that I think is really important to realize is that almost

the best way to counter overthinking is to begin to overthink positive scenarios and

realize, oh no, this is not my brain trying to solve a problem.

This is my brain trying to control an outcome. And I do not have control of the outcomes.
Yeah, it's strange to think that you don't get paralyzed by overthinking about positive outcomes. You only overthink about terrible ones.
And yeah, again, if you were to say, well, it's the people that are the most positive that end up with the best outcomes in life. So why are so many high achievers plagued by overthinking? They're not overthinking how well things could go.
They're overthinking all of the different errors and potential vectors for weakness and that thing over there. They're vigilant.
They're permanently vigilant to all of the different ways that these things could go wrong. Yeah.
Overthinking can also be a superpower. Again, it's about taking negative material and turning it to positive energy or positive force.
And so if you find yourself overthinking, go, all right, I'm going to give myself 20 minutes to overthink and I'm going to write down every potential scenario and I'm going to create a solution for every one of them. Because all I need is one more solution that I have a problem.
I mean, success is really just about having one more solution than you have a problem. You can't outthink your problems, but you can wonderfully have a creative process of finding solutions.
I think most of the solutions that I find in my life, I've already found way before the problem because I've thought about the problem before I ever faced it. And so a lot of people think, oh, you're so good at making decisions in the last minute.
And I go, nah, I had this minute five years ago in the shower when I was overthinking the possibility of the scenario. What is it that you're saying to the people that you work with, the athletes, et cetera, when they come to you and they say, I just cannot stop overthinking.
I feel paralyzed by it. It consumes me.
It's stopping me from enjoying the things that I want to do. It's stopping my performance from the very thing I'm supposed to be overthinking about.
Now I have a relationship with my overthinking. I'm not even thinking about the thing.
I'm thinking about my overthinking. How do you interject there? How do you pattern break it? Action.
The best way to overcome overthinking is immediate action. And what you find, I would say 90% of the time, when you're working through a scenario, your first solution is the solution you come to after overthinking and thinking through another hundred solutions.
And then you come back to that first solution.

That first solution is usually so clear and then it's the consequences. And so what you have to ask yourself is, am I trying to mitigate the consequence or am I trying to find a solution? And if you go, I have, it's just like when you're playing quarterback, it's amazing to me how, when you're watching like a Joe Burrow or a Josh Allen, um, you know, or Patrick Mahomes, what you're finding is someone who can make the decisions really quickly.
I mean, that's the thing to me about like watching Tom Brady. It's how fast he makes his reads and he makes a pass and he may throw to the, his second option and his fourth option ends up being wide open.
He doesn't worry about that.

He finds the first option that's open. What you find with quarterbacks who have incredible athletic ability, but they don't seem to have

that decisiveness, is that they end up rolling out of the pocket to create more time for

themselves because they missed an earlier opportunity that was actually there.

You know, isn't it?

It's kind of amazing when you're watching something like pro football and some quarterbacks seem to never have a receiver open and other quarterbacks seem to be able to throw the receivers open. And to me, this is the thing with overthinking.
Action is what destroys overthinking. Move forward, make a choice, make it fast.
And because your brain only listens to one language and that's action. And it's, it's even true when it comes to personal life change.
You know, it's, you know, we've moved into 2025 and, you know, you can have all these different resolutions and all these different goals. And I can tell myself, this is the year at 66 that I'm going to get in the best shape of my life, you know,

and this is the year I'm going to make these decisions, these choices. But the people in my life, if I've made those resolutions before, they know I'm lying.
Even if I don't know I'm lying, they know I'm lying because they've heard it before. But you know who really knows I'm lying? My brain.
My brain knows I'm lying because it's heard me say this over and over and over again. The only way my brain is ever convinced I'm not lying is action.

The moment I act differently, my brain is now hearing a language that has integrity. And it's the same way with overthinking.
I say, look, trust your instincts. If you've achieved a level of excellence or of greatness or competency, your first instinct is

probably the right one. And then if it doesn't work out, you have a better chance of succeeding

the next time than you do with overthinking. It's interesting sort of bringing it back to

the fear thing that fear doesn't keep you safe. It's keeping you trapped.
It feels like it's

keeping you safe, but what it's actually doing is it's keeping you trapped and being trapped.

The paralysis is precisely the thing that's going to keep you fearful.

Yeah, that's why I love describing it this way, that your freedom is on the other side of your fear. Because if you're afraid of heights, you stay low.
If you're afraid of people, you stay alone. If you're afraid of the dark, you stay in the light.
Your fear establishes the boundaries of your freedom. And so when you're defining your fears, you're actually defining your personal boundaries.
And I'm absolutely convinced that the freedom we all long for is on the other side of our fears. And our fears becomes a psychological boundary that holds us captive and tells us that it's too dangerous to go there.

But the moment we go there, we realize, oh, my goodness, you know, this is what I've been dreaming for of all my life. I grew up incredibly shy and reclusive and introverted.
I was in a psychiatric chair by the time I was 10 years old, Chris, and being tested for mental disabilities. And I was a straight D student, first to 12th grade.
My English teacher, last day of high school, asked me if I thought about going to college. I said, maybe.
She said, you will never make it. I didn't go to school right away.
I worked construction. I was a carpenter.
I worked as a lumberjack. I made pizzas, flipped burgers.
I had no direction, no future in my life. And a huge part of that was this fear that I could never accomplish anything meaningful.
And so what I ended up doing is I did nothing so that there was no proof that I was not good at anything. And what I had to really begin to realize is that fear was the debilitating element in my soul.
And I had this very odd kind of experience years later as an adult. My son was around 15 years old.
He wanted to meet my stepdad that he'd never met. That's where I had my name, McManus.
And we flew across the country. I tracked him down.
I hadn't seen him in almost 20 years. And he said to my son, I don't know why he said this.
He goes, I don't know what your dad told you, but he was just average. He goes, I don't know if he, you know, he's talking about athleticism and sports and different things.
He goes, you know, I don't know what he told you. Now talking about athleticism and sports different things he goes you know I don't know what he told you now his brother was exceptional but he was just average and I remember um saying to him dad I don't know what you think I would tell him I I was just average and as I was leaving what really hit me was he was absolutely right I hid in average.
The one way to remain invisible in life is to be average. And I was trying to cover all my insecurities and all my self-doubt by just being average.
Because if you become extraordinary, you now become the target of other people's critique or criticism or evaluation. And one of the choices I had to make in my own life is realizing I want to make a difference in the world.
I want to do something that matters. And I remember I had an uncle who drove me to college about 15 hour drive.
And he saw me years later, goes, hey, do you talk now? And he didn't mean for a living. He meant, do I actually talk? He goes, I drove you 15 hours.
You never said a word. I was so introverted.
No one would have ever guessed I would end up speaking to millions of people around the world. And what I can tell you, Chris, is that what shifted for me wasn't that I wasn't afraid to walk up on a platform.
What shifted for me was I didn't walk in that platform for my ego and I didn't walk in that platform for my need or search for self-worth, but I wanted to actually help people find freedom from the fears that had held me back. And I looked at myself and I thought, if I've been trapped in fear at such a profound level and have found my way out, I'm convinced most of humanity is trapped in fear.
And if I can just help people find just enough self-belief to break out of that prison that they've created themselves by believing

these things about themselves, then for me, my life has been well spent.

Where does that self-belief come from or that courage?

For me, it came really deeply rooted in what later I found as a faith.

I grew up irreligious.

I didn't have any spiritual contacts. I didn't know there was a God or believe in God.
And when I was 20 years old and I was in college, I was studying philosophy and was just trying to find meaning in life. And I was on a desperate search to figure out whether my life had any significance.
I was drowning in a personal nihilism that life had no meaning, that existence was just arbitrary, that human action was empty and hollow. And then to consider this narrative that we're created by God and that we're created in his image and that what gives God pleasure is for us to express goodness and to live a life of love and to elevate the value of other human beings.
And for me, I found that in the person of Jesus. and what helped my self-belief was this possibility.

And, you me, I found that in the person of Jesus. And what helped my self-belief was this possibility.
And I know you can have a lot of scientists and philosophers and for me, it's just very, very personal. The possibility that my life actually mattered was overwhelming to me.
And I wish I could say I made this incredibly scientific, academic, mathematical decision. It wasn't.
It was, for me, more of a, God, if you're out there and my life matters, I'm in. I just want to make a difference in the world.
I want to serve humanity. I want to help people live a life that's fully alive.
And my self-belief came in this conviction that my life wasn't about me, that my life had to be bigger than me, and that I could actually shift the course of human history by living a life that expands love and hope and faith. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep.
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What happened over time with your relationship to Phil? Well, it was really kind of interesting because I was driving in through a city that was at that time, the highest murder rate, highest crime rate in the United States. And I was considering going down there working on a project, but I was scared.
I mean, out my mind. And I'm borrowing my girlfriend, who is now my wife, Kim's yellow pinto.
So I'm in the hood in a yellow pinto. I'm begging to be killed.
And my heart is pounding against my chest. I'm 24 years old, and I'm terrified.
And I stopped the car in the middle of the street and I'm kind of new in this whole faith thing. And I just started reading the Bible and I kind of stopped and prayed.
I said, God, I can't come down here if I'm scared to death to get out of the car. And all these people of faith were giving me these great verses that were so encouraging, you know, and, but none of those came to my mind.
There's a particular statement in the scriptures where it says, to live is Christ and to die is gain. And I had this deep sense in this moment that said, Erwin, if you'll just die right now, I'll take you on a life journey that only dead men can walk.
And in that moment, I had a personal funeral and I told myself, I am dead

to all my fear, to my existence and to my doubts. And I spent the next 10 years working in the middle of drug cartels, walking into houses or projects owned by cartels, Uzi, machine guns everywhere, cocaine stacked to ceilings.
And I can tell you, Chris, I never felt fear because I sat across from a guy who sent me a letter in prison telling me he would kill me the moment he got out of prison. And when he got out of prison, I went and found him and walked into the room he was in.
And it changed the way I could approach life because you couldn't take anything from me. And then 40 years later, I had stage four cancer and had prostate bladder and lymph node cancer that had been undetected and had metastasized and had six and a half hours surgery, not knowing if I would live.
And the craziest thing in that season, Chris, I never felt fear one time. And my family will tell you this, that, and the reason is because fear became my ally.
It could take nothing from me. I had given it everything.
And I'm 66 now. And every time I move into a new decade, I find myself strangely more fearless.
And in fact, my family, they asked me if I would just slow down or be a little more

cautious or, you know, and, and I'm like, why the older I get, the less life you can steal from me. You know, and, uh, you know, and, and, and I've been in the most dangerous, violent, fragile environments in the world.
And I walked out of those. There used to be students who would put money on every day what day I would be assassinated.
You had your own Deadpool. I did.
And I look at it now, I go, what kept me safe was my lack of fear of death. This conviction that you couldn't take anything from me.
And even this killer who told me he was going to kill me when he came out of prison, looked at me and he was so confused by me. And he said, you and me are the same, which we're nothing alike.
But he said, I'm radical for evil and you're radical for God. And I found ironically safety on the streets because this guy sent the word out that if somebody touched me, he would kill them.
And just for respect for the lack of fear. And I think every human being is desperately trying to figure out how to be alive.
We're all trying to figure out how to break out of the malaise of existence and to be able to just drink deeply of this experience called life. And I want my life to be proof that that's possible.
And I think that's what all of us long for. Can you tell me more about the relationship with this guy, this criminal? Well, his name was William Westfall.
So he's a real human being. And he had gone to prison for slitting his girlfriend's brother's throat, but the guy did not die, but it did cut off his vocal cords.
And when he was in prison, his family had come to faith and he felt that I had infringed on his territory. So he sent me a few notes while he was in prison, letting me know that when he got out of prison, he was going to end my life.
And it's always nice to know someone's thinking of me, right? And so when he got out of prison, I like a letter as much as the next guy. Yeah, yeah.
You know, back then people did write, you know, and when he got out of prison, I decided I didn't want to be walking down the street and fear that this guy's going to come out of a corner. So I just decided to go find him.
And I knocked on the project door where he was staying. And there was probably 20 people in there.
And the moment I walked in, everyone ran out and it was just me and him. And he pulled out the switchblade because he was known for, he was a white guy who was really good with a knife, which made him very unique.
And he sat across from me, he goes, this is the same knife I slit a throat with. And he goes, police never got it.
He just laughed. And, and, and, you know, I just began to have a conversation with him.
I said, you know, you're at a prison, but you're not free behind every corner of somebody waiting to kill you. You're living a life of fear.
And I talked to him about how his life could change.

He wasn't interested. He wasn't interested in God.
He wasn't interested in faith, but he was fascinated by someone who wasn't afraid of him. And I actually think he was fascinated by someone who was fully alive while he was living a life of fear and violence.
and then not much after that, he was trying to choke his girlfriend to death and she took a pair of scissors and killed him. And not every story ends up with a good ending.
So that's the story of my friend, Bill. Wow.
Yeah. Just going through more of that sort of fear setting, you're about to go and speak on stage as somebody that was an introvert as a kid and wouldn't speak on a 15-hour car ride you're sat opposite somebody that's got a switchblade out who's sent you multiple letters saying that they're going to kill you what's happening inside of you what's the reframe what's the body feel like what's the mind feel like? What is it that you're saying to yourself? Because a lot of people will like the idea of this, like the idea of fearing less and being fearless.
And yet they step into a situation like that and they're just overcome with this wave, this tidal wave that they can't stop. Yeah, I'm not recommending my life to anyone in that regard.
And I'm not saying that even my choices were always the wisest. But what I would say is that whenever you look back on your life and you know your life has been informed and fueled by fear, you never feel that you've lived your life to the fullest.
So what I would say to someone is adrenaline is natural. Fear, when people say you shouldn't fear, I'm like, you know, if a lion is hungry and it's running at you, fear is the most reasonable emotion in life.
And so I don't think you should be, quote, fearless in terms of the experience of that emotion. You just have to have mastery over your inner world.
And you have to have intention in your life that's bigger than consequences. And that, for me, has been the big question.
Because it's also in business, right? And I've started a lot of businesses in my life. I've been an entrepreneur for 40 years and I've lost millions

and millions of dollars, which puts me in a very small group of people. Anyone can make millions, but losing them, that takes real art.
And I wouldn't have been able to do that if I'd let fear paralyze me. And so what I have always asked myself is, would I do this even if it fails? And when I can say this is worth doing, even if it fails, I can move forward with so much intention and fear doesn't have mastery over my life.
And I think the problem sometimes is we want to do things that succeed rather than things that are actually significant and meaningful for our lives. I don't really have goals the way other people have.

I don't have financial goals.

I'm not trying to make millions and millions of dollars.

I'm not trying to buy mansions or airplanes.

My life is really measured by, is this worth my life?

And if I fail, will I still find a deep sense of satisfaction that I tried this? Yeah. What's the line, draw this line between self-love, self-belief, and overcoming fear? Do these things fit together? Are they exactly the same or is there something different going on? Well, there's definitely a difference between loving yourself and being in love with yourself.

And one is very healthy and one is narcissistic.

And I think when you're in love with yourself, you refuse to look at yourself honestly and you lack self-awareness.

But when you love yourself, you see your flaws, you see your faults, you see your shortcomings, you see where you're deficient, but you do not let that be the basis of your worth. And I do think one of the significant shifts that has to happen in our lives is a lot of people are fighting for their worth and they're trying to succeed to prove their worth.
It's so much better to accept your worth and to move from your worth rather than trying to move towards your worth. And what I would say to most people about when it comes to self-love is really loving yourself is about understanding your worth and value without having to accomplish anything else in life.
This has been, for me, an incredibly liberating thing. And again, my faith is deeply rooted to that.
The idea, Chris, that there is a God and that he sees me, values me, and loves me without condition, then I go, okay, if I'm love without condition, nothing I do expands that love, elevates that love, or makes it more real. It's just there.
And so now I can live my life from that worth, from that value, and it's incredibly liberating. And I think I understand in the small sense, as a parent, I have a son, Aaron, and a daughter, Mariah, and 36 and 33, and nothing they do changes or elevates or increases how much I love them.
Now, I've been proud of them at different times, at different levels, for different things, but love is a different thing. I love Aaron and Mariah, and that's the baseline.
And if I'm capable of that as a really flawed, broken human being, I'm actually convinced that that is the driving principle of the universe, and that that is really the essence of who God is. And so that's how I begin.
Wouldn't it be lovely if we could love ourselves in the way that we quite easily love the people around us? It would, I think it's harder to love ourselves when we're really honest about who we are. And but if you cannot love yourself, you cannot really fully love another human being because that human being is flawed too.
And that human being is imperfect too. And if you're always trying to, in a sense, earn your own love, you're going to treat other people the same way.
And I think one of the most liberating things in the world is to realize that love is not conditional. That if love exists at all, love is unconditional.

And for me, that is a basis of everything I do in my life.

I don't wake up in the morning going,

I need to find a way to be loved.

I don't wake up in the morning going,

I gotta go earn my value.

I do not wake up in the morning going,

I gotta go prove my worth.

I wake up in the morning going, I'm free and I'm alive and I get to choose and create. And this is going to be fun.
One of my friends took a medium dose of mushrooms in Australia and sat on a rock. And this question came to him, which was, do people love you for who you are or for what you do? And it's a difficult question to answer because what we want is for people to love us for who we are because if people love us for what we do it feels contingent and dependent and fragile and volatile and like if people love us for what we do not for who we are and we stopped doing what we do the love would go away with it but an even deeper question well, do you love you for what you do or for who you are? Because a lot of the time, I think we ask the world to show up for us in a way that we're not prepared to show up for ourselves.
Saying, hey, I want you to love me for who I am, not for what I do. Meanwhile, my self-love will be contingent based on my performance today, not my character over time.
Yeah. And I think that maybe there's a slight third option between loving you for who you are and for what you do.
They love you for who you are to them. And that's why we end up putting on so many different personas and have so many different masks.
And life can be so exhausting when you think that person loves you for who you are to them. And if that changes in any way, then that love changes as well.
And yeah, I actually think one of the greatest achievements in life, Chris, is to come to a place where you accept your own imperfection and you love yourself, not based on your own evaluation of yourself, but on the fact that you have been created with value. I mean, what is value anyway? I remember working with all these Wall Street investors and we're talking about economics.
One guy said, I only believe in economics. And I said, well, I would agree as long as you believe that economics are just simply an assessment of value, that we human beings decide what something is worth.
And he goes, yeah, no, I agree with that. And I mean, it's so random.
We decide gold has value. We decide diamonds have value, right? We decide avocados have value, whatever it is, right? And those things change based on our own preferences or our own opinions or perspectives.
But it's the same with human beings. When a human being has value to us because they contribute something to us, then we consider them to have value.
And if our personal value is based on what other people project our value is, we're slaves. We become absolutely captured by the opinion of other people.
And that's why you can't let someone else decide whether you're gold or diamonds or avocado. You have to decide your own value in life and go, I have value because I exist.

And I have value because I am a unique human being. And I can work from that value and I can work from that love.
And I don't actually know how you find that. And I'll admit my limitation.
I don't know how you find that without a relationship with God. And I think it's a very difficult thing because it's ethereal.
Like what is the outside determiner that tells you your value? And that for me has been so life transforming to go, I know I have intrinsic value. I believe I've been created in God's image and likeness, but I also believe every human being is created in God's image and likeness and that every human being has intrinsic value.
And so it's my responsibility and my privilege to treat every human being with that kind of value and that unconditional love. This episode is brought to you by AG1.
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Just going back to that difference between our expectations and our performance, how do you come to think about how people can balance that high expectations with the things that they need to be grateful for, with things that they do well. This sort of balance of pursuing perfectionism and also giving yourself grace when you fall short.
I think this is kind of one of the curses of competent or high-performing people. Yesterday, we have this space we call the arena where we do some coaching.
It's a mastermind. It connects around the.
And we talked about the tensions between gratitude and ambition. And so each one of these core-like virtues, like humility and the tension with confidence, and then faithfulness with the tension of proactivity, because there's some basic virtues that we want to have.
We want to be people who are humble and want to be individuals who are grateful, but we also have these attributes we must have, which are ambition and confidence. And sometimes we confuse humility and confidence as in opposition with each other, when actually they work in a very harmonic way.
That when you're truly humble, you have great confidence because you have a clear picture of yourself. And humility is not the same thing as a lack of self-confidence.
It's not a sense of insignificance. You can only truly be humble if you know your power.
Only a truly powerful person can express real humility. Otherwise, it's just weakness.
It's just timidity. It's mildness.
And when you know your strength, that's when you can actually be truly humble. And so I tell people, no, there's not a tension here.
This is actually synergy. Truly humble people are powerful people.
Truly grateful people are ambitious people. They're not in conflict with each other.
Ambition is not an anti-virtue. You know, people will say to me, well, be ambitious, but don't be too ambitious.
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Would you say to me, have integrity, but don't have too much integrity? Or would you say, you know, be loving, but don't be too loving.
Whenever we think something's a virtue, you cannot have too much of it. But we actually don't think ambition is a virtue.
But ambition is actually a virtue. It's just that selfish ambition is corruptive.
And so when we look at ambition, it is not in opposition with gratitude. Grateful people are more ambitious because they become more generative.
By the way, I don't think it's incidental that the word generosity comes from the same etymology as the word generative. You cannot be truly generous if you are not fully generative.
And so a grateful person takes full responsibility for all of their talent, all of their intelligence, all their potential, all their capacity, and optimizes that for the good of others. I think people who live only for themselves are the greediest people in the world because they have so much more capacity to do good for other people.
There's also a pressure that comes along with that, though. The fact that if you realize just how much you could contribute, that sets an even higher ideal, right? And then there's a pain when you realize, oh, even though I think I've been working hard, I've been working hard in a very particular kind of way, in a way that's very selfish, and in a way that was serving me and my shallow need for recognition, validation,

and to fill this internal void. And so the people think that I'm cool.
And so I can fix the wounds

from my past without fixing the wounds from my past by filling them in with the adoration of

those around me. No, absolutely.
I had this student who graduated from UCLA and he was from

El Salvador, which is the same place I'm from. I'm from El Salvador and as an immigrant, but his

parents were immigrants. So he's now the son as an immigrant, but his parents were immigrants.

So he's now the son of an immigrant and his parents became incredibly successful in the

U.S.

And now he gets to go to UCLA.

They pay the tuition.

So they've paid an immense amount of money for him to go to school.

He graduates near the top of his class.

And after he graduates, he says to me, I'm not sure what I'm going to do

next. And I said, well, what do you want to do with your life? He goes, you mean to pay the bills? And I'm like, your parents just put hundreds of thousands of dollars to send you to one of those prestigious universities in the world, not so you could just pay the bills, but so you could start a company that employs a thousand people and provides food for 5,000 families.
And how could you ever graduate from UCLA and think your optimal goal is to pay the bills? And I do think it does put responsibility on us. And I'm okay with that.
I'm okay saying that when you have more opportunity, you have more responsibility. I'm okay putting that pressure on people saying, if you have been given a higher IQ, you have more responsibility to make the world better.
If you've been given extraordinary talent or capacity, some unique skill or ability, you have a high responsibility to make a difference in the world. And I do take that stewardship really, really important and seriously in my own life going, if I have any ability, if I have any intelligence, if I have any talent or any capacity, that hasn't been given to me so that I could revel in it and just enjoy myself because I'm so awesome.
If I've been given any unique capacity, it's because I have a higher responsibility to do good in the world and to help other people live lives that they could not live without my help. The responsibility of capacity is very interesting, but painful, right? Because again, with that, oh God, I've got this thing that I need to deal with and I need to grapple with it and it's more complex and it's going to cause me turmoil and the overthinking.
And now you're saying that I need to pay it forward. That makes it easy.
Absolutely. And your life will feel meaningless if you don't pay it forward.
I think that's sort of like the interesting catch 22 in this is that how many people have you met who have accomplished so much and accumulated so many things and they're just hollow and empty inside. I remember years ago, I was working a bit more in the film industry and I was trying to get some scripts produced and things.
And I got a phone call that this billionaire up in Beverly Hills wanted to meet with me. And by the way, he didn't know much about me.
So that was great because I could just come in as a writer. And, and so I, I, I drive up to his house and I get to a gate and I have to, you know, send them my name and they opened the gate and I drive up another road to go up into the hills.
I didn't even know someone could have that much land in Beverly Hills. And, and, and I'm sitting in his house and he shows up late and he sits down and he goes, you get 45 minutes.
I mean, there was no warrant. There was no, hey, it's great to meet you.
You know, so glad to have you here. It was very cut and dry.
And about 30 or 45 minutes in, he asked me a question and he said, can we meet tomorrow? And I said, yeah, yeah, we can meet tomorrow. He goes, how about two o'clock or something? And I said, yeah, I, we can, we can meet tomorrow.
He goes,

how about two o'clock or something? And I said, yeah, I'll be here at two o'clock. And I left so excited going, this guy's going to fund my movies.
This is going to be awesome. And the next day I show up and we're walking on his property.
He's like, this is where I think like Ben Affleck and all the boys come play volleyball. And he's just, you know, talking it up and everything like that.
and I said, so why did you ask me to come back up?

And he goes, when you walked in the room, you have this inner peace. And I've been searching for inner peace all my life.
And I have all this wealth that have all this stuff and I have no peace. And so I was just hoping maybe you could help me figure out how to find peace in my life.
And I know I'm always supposed to be a person who has higher ideals, and I'm always trying to help people at the deepest spiritual level, but I was slightly disappointed that he did not want to fund one of my films, but he was actually looking for the inner peace that I brought into the room. And I think this is the reality, Chris, is that when we spend our lives consuming,

we become emotional, psychological,

and spiritual black holes.

We just consume and consume and consume,

and it brings no joy.

It brings no meaning.

It brings no lasting happiness.

But when we live our lives to serve other people,

I don't think you can, you cannot get too rich. You can become too greedy.
You cannot have too much wealth. You can have, but you can be possessed by your wealth.
And so it really isn't about how much you have. It's about how much has you.
And when you live a life of generosity and live a life where you're determined to do good in the world, I don't think it ruins you. I think what ruins you is when it owns you rather than when you own it.
I love it. Dude, I'm just so glad that we got to speak today.
I've wanted to sit down with you ever since I saw you talk last year. Owen McManus, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you've got going on.
Oh, man. Thank you.
One, Chris, I have to tell you, I've become such a huge fan. I love your work.
I love your interviews. You have an incredibly brilliant mind.
And your ability to cut through all the chaos and lack of clarity is a real gift to the world. And so I just want to let you know that I consider it a privilege to come on because I'm a fan and I just love your work.
You can go to erwinmcmanus.com and access the different spaces we have, like the Arena Mastermind. And we do a conference or two here in LA.
I have a few books that I've written. My newest book is the seven frequencies of communication.

The book that you're actually, um, we're speaking to me about today was, is called mind shift

and about internal mental structures. Um, but if you just want to know more,

go to erwinmcmandis.com, but mostly I'm just really glad to get to be here with you, Chris.

Heck yeah. I appreciate you, man.
Until next time.

All right. Take care.