How To Identify Your Internal Fears - Corey Wilks

Up to 76 percent of people, they lay on their deathbeds with the exact same regret: they lived in mediocrity. They're like, "I wish I would have taken certain chances. I wish I would have faced my fears and went left instead of right, but I chose to be complacent. I chose to let fear stop me from living the life that I wanted to live and knew I was capable of doing; it just was too scary for me to do."

For the people that are watching, you will see that I'm back in my usual setting. I'm back in the UK. You'll also notice that I'm hand-holding a USB microphone, uh, and everything's just a little bit different. That's because I've been slowly fisted by British Airways over the last 24 hours. I left Austin about 24 hours ago, um, two hours late. Got to London Heathrow; that flight left another hour and a half late. Neither of my bags arrived, and then I've just got one bag, and thankfully in that one bag is this USB microphone. I've been able to sort of piece together this very sort of rough-hewn way of putting stuff, but the show goes on, Corey. That sort of [ __ ] doing okay. You're [ __ ] professional, correct? I've extracted British Airways from my my back passage, and now we're going to record a podcast. I'm glad your rectum is clear. Let's [ __ ] go.

Yes, let's [ __ ] go, man. So you are somebody that's transitioned from being a therapist to now being a coach. And one of the things that I find that's interesting about that is the fact that you've obviously dealt with people that were subclinical, I think is the term; so people that were suffering with, uh, issues getting them from, um, illness to wellness rather than wellness to high performance. Um, and what I'm very, very interested about is what the common challenges are that you found that high performers deal with that you were never dealing with with your previous clients when you were working clinically and you were getting people from some sort of, um, social anxiety disorder, depression, whatever it might be, to get them back to the normal world. What is it that the high performers are dealing with that you didn't see? And also, what are the similarities between the two?

Yeah, so back when I did therapy, you know, therapy is all about dysfunction, right? So helping somebody overcome clinical depression or panic attacks, things like that. So before you can really flourish or start to tap more into your potential, you have to deal with that baseline functioning level of [ __ ] first, right? Because if you are, you know, acutely suicidal or, like I said, if you're having panic attacks so bad you can't leave your house, there's, I mean, your ceiling for potential is is pretty low, right? So that's where a lot of therapy is about is how can we just help you function, period, to get you out the door and to just go to like a regular nine-to-five or just do, you know, just basic functioning [ __ ], right? With a lot of high performers, they may may struggle with like mood symptoms occasionally, right? Or they may have anxiety; everybody has anxiety to some extent in some situations, but it isn't necessarily crippling, right? So with a lot of the people that I work with and with coaching in general, it's much more about the assumption is you you already function pretty well; what you need is these small tweaks to really optimize. Okay, so you know, sleep, diet, and exercise; those are probably pretty dialed in; your stress management is probably relatively dialed in. So at this point, it's like, okay, what do you need that just that little bit extra, that edge to really go further, faster? That's really that the main distinction is that they're just they're at a higher level of functioning overall.

What are the commonalities? Tell me the commonalities between high performers, because everybody looks at the guys that go and get coaching from people like you and they think, well, their problems may be very different to mine, uh, but increasingly as I've spent time around people that are super high performers, I realize that a lot of people's issues, they scale up; they might get bigger, and the, um, consequences of them messing up might become larger, but the problems tend to usually fall into similar sort of categories.

Yeah, and you know, I heard this this quote the other day: "New levels, new devils," or "Different level, different devils," sort of deal, right? So like as you level up, you new problems kind of come your way, right? On a base level, we all kind of want the same thing, right? Like we want connection; we want to feel that we matter, and we want to do something that on some level is meaningful or fulfilling for us, right? So whether you are, you know, so like, you know, we can go into my story, you know, at some point, but like, you know, I grew up on like welfare, like food stamps, public housing, you know, and again, like in America, we don't have free health insurance, right? So the fact that I had free health insurance meant I was poor as [ __ ], right? And like, so you would think, oh, well, you you're from this like lower echelon of society where people they can't even think ahead of, you know, they they don't want the same things as as multi-millionaires. They do. They may not believe it's possible, but most of us want the exact same things; it's just what that looks like for each of us may differ, right? But again, we all want connection; we want fulfillment; we want to matter, and that's what ultimately I I've seen that we all strive to achieve in some form or fashion.

What about when you're speaking to people that are at the absolute peak of their game? What is it that they're coming up against overall? Because, you know, those people, fundamentally, what they want is tomato to feel like they're contributing to a project that they care about and so on and so forth, but what about the the the fears or the doubts that those people have? Do they fall into into common buckets as well? The sort of inner monologue, the texture of the environment that their mind goes through?

Yeah, so this kind of gets into what I call the four horsemen of fear, right? So the the four most common limiting beliefs that people struggle with: right, fear of failure; we we're all familiar with that, right? And this is one of those things where no matter how much you've achieved, that fear doesn't necessarily go away; it changes, right? Like I've I've worked with people, again, tens of millions of dollars of, you know, millions of YouTube subscribers, all these other things, and one of the things you hear from so many people is it's almost like the exact same phrase they say: "I'm afraid it's just all going to go up one; it's just all gonna collapse one day," right? So I'm gonna go up and smoke; like all of a sudden one day I'm gonna be left with nothing. And like, logically, that that isn't gonna happen, right? Because like even if all of your, you know, your your accounts just went tits up, you still have what's in your bank account; you still have the skill set, right? It's highly unlikely that you're going to just be [ __ ] the rest of your life even if all of your businesses today collapse, right? But that's the sphere, right? Well, I've got, you know, 20 different income streams and this and that, but what if tomorrow it all fails? A lot of people struggle with that one. Another big one is is fear of uncertainty, right? This whole idea of which path is right for me, which decision should I make, right? Well, I don't know if this if, you know, with delegating, I don't know if this person can handle these responsibilities, right? Which direction should I take my company? So that's a huge one, right? Is this fear of uncertainty? So what happens with a lot of people is instead of, so they're at a fork in the road, right? So instead of risking making the wrong decision, they just sit down and make no decision; they become complacent; they stagnate, right? That's a big issue a lot of people struggle with. Another one is fear of ridicule, right? So what will other people think or say? How will people react? How will my audience react, right? Um, until they, you know, look with with lower-level people who aren't as as high achievers, if they haven't achieved success or anything yet, a lot of times the fear is what will my friends and family think, right? After you build a brains, you're not as concerned with that. Um, so a lot of times people stay small, right? Like you've talked about embracing your weirdness and things like that, right? So this whole idea of, um, you know, I I don't want to risk ridicule, so I'm just going to be as normal as possible, be as basic and just, you know, mediocre as possible to avoid, you know, that negative reaction from the public. But the biggest one that people aren't aware of that holds so many of us back is actually fear of success, right? You think, Corey, why the [ __ ] would I be afraid to achieve the thing that I claim to want? And for so many people, if you haven't achieved major success, whatever that means to you, most of us see success as a binary thing of before and after. If you've never achieved major success, the only version of you that you know is pre-success, right? So you drag your feet; you overcomplicate; you self-sabotage to prevent you from from achieving success because a lot of us think that, well, once I achieve success, I'm going to change, right? What if I lose my ambition, right? What if I become a completely different person, right? One of the people I worked with, he's a Web3 founder, and he's like, "Look, man, I've been the underdog my entire life. What happens if I actually achieve this and I'm no longer that underdog? What if in my in my niche I'm given too much authority to where my word carries way too much weight? I am afraid that, you know, the whole idea of power corrupts; I'm afraid I won't be able to to handle that level of responsibility and and sway." How do I deal with that? So that's a huge fear a lot of people really struggle with, so they say they want certain things, but they not even actively but they sort of like subconsciously self-sabotage to prevent them from facing these things that they're deeply afraid of. So those are the things that I see a lot regardless of of of how high of an achiever people are; the most common limiting beliefs all kind of fall into one of those four those four buckets.

Yeah, I I've spent a lot of time around some really competent people. I was at Michaela Peterson's wedding this weekend, and the table I was sat on was me, uh, Jordan Peterson, CAA agent, Re Michael Mallis, Douglas Murray, just coming off the back of a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller and Amazon number one bestseller, Rob Henderson, who's like the hottest thing in social psychology at the moment, and two other people that were fascinating as well. And one of the things that I realized is I was having a conversation with these people, they have a lot of self-belief, and I can't work out whether the self-belief came before the success or the self-belief was driven by the success, um, but I get the impression, certainly from having spent time with some of them, Douglas especially, he is so certain of his capabilities from years and years of iterating on what he does, and this may have always been that, but certainly from iterating millions of reps, right? Millions of words that he's written throughout his career: five columns a week at a thousand words per column for the New York Post, America's longest-running newspaper, and for the Spectator in the UK, and you know, huge publications, and he simply doesn't have any of these four horsemen. I believe that he would be pretty open and honest; he may have had them in the past; they may creep up every so often, but it's not the sort of crippling inertia that it causes a lot of people to have. And I wonder whether you find many people that have one of them or whether most people have either all of them or none of them.

So some people, there's typically one that sort of rises to the top, but for a lot of people that actually cycles, right? So like as you're going up and you're achieving success, and and a big caveat to all of this is these fears tend to kick in when we're doing work that we deeply care about, right? Um, because one of the one of the people I've worked with, they said, "Well, when I had my job like I don't I wasn't really afraid of any of this; like none of these fears really kicked in." It's like, yeah, because if you don't connect with your work, these fears don't really kick in as much, right? You're just you're kind of going through the motions, right? Why would you fear failure about something you don't care about?

Exactly right. And so it's this idea of the the the more you're doing work that resonates with you, the more likely these are going to come up at some point, but different ones may come up at different points, right? So you're saying with this guy, he's he's he's seasoned, right? Like he's been through all this [ __ ] before, but more than likely as he was coming up, he did struggle with these, and as he found ways to deal with them, to conquer them, they like that kind of became like a voice in the back of his head, like way back; he kind of muted it, right? Rather than screaming at him. But no, that's a super good point, because like with with this fear, a lot ultimately we fear the unknown, right? With any kind of fear, right? What are people going to say? What if I fail? What if I change? But once you face this fear, you realize, once you make the unknown known, you realize that it really wasn't as bad as you had made it out to be, right? So then the next time that fear comes around, you're like, "Listen, [ __ ], I've already dealt with this," right? Like because even if I fail, I know I can recover; even if people don't like what I did, I know I can recover, right? Even if I succeed, I know how I can stay humble and and keep, you know, grinding it out and keep this this level of achievement that I know that I'm capable of having. So that's probably, I would assume, the transition, the transformation he's went through, right? I'd love to hear more about his story.

Yeah, it's it's very strange to look at these guys that are super, super competent now, and I think a lot of the time one of the challenges we have as younger guys and girls listening to people like your Rogans and your Petersons and your Sam Harris's and your whatevers and looking at them to model our behavior off is that the realizations that they've come to now, they're kind of shouting down from on top of a mountain that they've walked up one step at a time. And Ali Abdallah, mutual mate of ours, said a really, really good idea that you want to be teaching somebody that's two steps behind you, not 10 steps behind you, because when you're 10 steps ahead, you can't remember the challenges that you had all that time ago. You know, if you're at the top of the mountain, as somebody that's lectured in front of students for three decades, how much really can you resonate with someone that's got a fear of public speaking? A genuinely, you can resonate with them conceptually, but you don't actually know what it feels like; it wasn't it wasn't last year, right? And I think that that's just something that I'm increasingly sort of trying to put a filter on when I'm hearing people, whether it's investment advice from Warren Buffett or lifestyle advice from Jocko Willink or something like that, that that's something that they've arrived at and works for them at this stage of their life with this degree of realization with this amount of experience under their belt, etc., etc., but that wasn't the route that they took to get to where they are. And sometimes I think that the path that people say is where they're at now, they believe is a more expedient way to get there, but perhaps the long way.

Yeah, perhaps you have to take the stairway to Mount Olympus; perhaps you can't take the elevator; perhaps you have to do this step by step by step, and um, maybe earning your stripes by getting through ridicule and fear of failure and uncertainty and success and stuff like that, maybe those are the trials and tribulations that you've got to go through in order to get there.

Well, exactly right, like we all have to kind of earn our way, right? And that's, I mean, that's the issue you see all the time online is like all these [ __ ] hacks, like life hacks, psychology hacks, and here's how to just, you know, [ __ ] one, two, three your way to success in, you know, two weeks or whatever, you know, six-pack abs in 10 days, all this [ __ ], right? Because people want the results without the putting in the work, right? And that's the thing is, one, you have that a lot of people looking for these hacks and these shortcuts and then getting disappointed when they don't work, but even when you when you're talking about somebody, you know, like Jordan Peterson, Jocko, all these other people who are proof that it works and they know what they're talking about, right? And they've built this huge following of people who because they they're they're trustworthy, right? But you know, like I'll take Jocko, right? Jocko, you you know what Jocko is going to say, right? Like back in the day, you had those, you know, WWJD bracelets, right? Like it's it's that [ __ ] now with Jocko; are like, "What would Jocko do? What would Jocko say?" Right? You know what Jocko would tell you to do, but knowing and doing are two different things. So just because somebody like like Jocko or Dr. Jordan Peterson or somebody tells you exactly what you need to do, which is the correct [ __ ] answer, until you own that, until you actually put that [ __ ] into practice, it doesn't [ __ ] make a difference. And that's the huge issue with with anybody with any modicum of success is like, "Look, I ate [ __ ]; I grinded in obscurity for [ __ ] years, right? And then I got to where I'm at, or then I achieved this." And that's just that's the the [ __ ] reality is you have to go through that period of just eating [ __ ] and grinding to get to the same [ __ ] place, the same answer that somebody gave you five, ten years ago. Like think of all the [ __ ] that you and I were told in our early twenties that it took us until our early thirties to be like, "[ __ ], that was right."

Yep. Yeah, it's like you hear a lesson, and then over time, like a parasite, it gets inside of you, and then stares out through your eyes and tells you that it was correct all along. Um, there is no way, I think, to expedite believing something, right? You need context; you need, um, stress testing in real life; you need buy-in; you don't get that from just hearing it. You know, if all it took was the pithy aphorism tweet to tell you what to do, everybody would be a millionaire because "How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky" from Naval has existed for forever, right? And it's the Almanac of Naval Ravikant's one of my favorite books. Okay, well, why is it that I can't just take this set of instructions and then lead my life off the back of it? Was it's because I need to believe it enough to motivate myself to make the behavior change? I need to work out what that strategy means in terms of how I apply that to my own life. You know, there's so many layers of filtering through this stuff, and I do think that this is one of the reasons that simple instructions like Jordan Peterson's "Clean up your room," they resonate a lot because you go, well, it actually it's something that you can do right now, today, in front of you, and maybe it's symbolic, and and downstream from that good stuff happens, but you don't really need much context: is the room clean or is it not clean? You know, you understand what a clean room looks like and what an unclean room looks like. Crack on. The ones that are more complex, the ones that understand about delegating and leverage and about how to help other people to raise you up and network, all that stuff, very difficult to to bring into your own life. So yeah, I think I think that when we're looking at the solutions that people give us, it's very easy to say, "You idiot, you knew this; you knew this already, and you continue to not..."

Take the advice, and yet you also need to give yourself a little bit of a break, because that's literally how everybody works. If it was a case, if it was simply the case that the person who had the most information was the most successful, the person that reads the most books would be the richest on the planet. That's not the way it works. It's about taking stuff in; it's about understanding the context; it's about having the bind and the motivation that allows you to then deploy that; and it's about working out how this fits into the broader framework of your life and how you operate. But even this [ __ ] conversation you and I are having right now, somebody's gonna watch this episode and then in 10 years be like [ __ ], Cory and Chris were right. Yes, maybe, maybe, maybe that'll be us; maybe we'll look back at this episode and go, "You [ __ ], you [ __ ]." All right, so we've got failure, ridicule, uncertainty, and success. Talk to me about how that relates to self-sabotaging behavior, right? Because that's that's a fear; that's something conceptually that's going on emotively inside of our brains. How does that manifest in people's real-world behavior?

Yeah, so you know, for me, most self-sabotaging behaviors are actually rooted in fear. So a lot of people don't even realize that they have this fear that's holding them back, but they can't identify their behaviors, right? So imposter syndrome, imposter syndrome and perfectionism, to me, are sort of two sides of the same coin, because both of these are rooted in a fear of ridicule. You're not a perfectionist; you don't just have like a high bar for quality. Okay, most people have a high bar for quality, but your quote-unquote perfectionism is an excuse to not hit publish, to not put yourself out there, to not put your product or service out there, right? It's an excuse. Because the longer you say, "Oh, I'm a perfectionist; I need to tweak it a little bit more," all that is is doing—as a psychologist, we do, we do what's called a functional analysis with, with a behavior—all that means is what function does this serve? What purpose does it have? So the function of perfectionism is to allow you to continue to avoid this fear of ridicule, because the longer you, you put off hitting publish, the longer you tweak it, the, the longer you can avoid it actually being out there in the open. Okay, imposter syndrome's the same [ __ ] thing. Oh, you know, people are going to think that I don't belong in this room, or people are going to think that, you know, I'm wrong or I don't know enough. Okay, and either they do or they don't. If they do, they're [ __ ] [ __ ], and they're not in your corner, and why the [ __ ] would you respect somebody or seek approval from somebody who's a [ __ ] bag? Or they're not going to think that because they're going to understand either you're new or they're there; they want to build you up because they've been in your same shoes. Like that's the other thing, because like I remember when I was in grad school, we did this—and again, I originally went for therapy—so we did this outreach event for people experiencing homelessness. So this was in like West Virginia, like rural Appalachia, in December. It was cold as [ __ ], and we were doing it out back in this church. So people experiencing homelessness, they would come in; they would get like a medical checkup; they would get clothes, food, whatever it was—the school of psychology, medical school, all these other schools, right, of health professions. So all these people were there fighting for their [ __ ] lives, right? Like it's sub-freezing temperatures, and they don't have a house, and I'm like, "Look, I get that they're here for a medical checkup or for clothing or whatever, what the [ __ ] am I here to do?" These, these people do not need deep-breathing techniques; they're fighting for their [ __ ] lives. Okay, so I went up to two of my, my supervisors who, between them, had like 50 years of experience. I was like, "Look, when does this feeling like I don't know what the [ __ ] I'm doing go away?" And they were like, "We'll let you know." Right from that day, literally from that [ __ ] day, I never had imposter syndrome again, because I'm like, "Nobody knows what the [ __ ] they're doing." So using that is all I have. Imposter syndrome, that's a [ __ ] excuse; that is allowing you to avoid facing your fear of ridicule. So like those are two that I see all the time, right? Or I see people like, "Oh, yeah, just I really struggle with procrastination." No, you [ __ ] don't. You know what you need to do; you are perfectly capable of doing that when there's a deadline, right? I hear people, you know, like friends and [ __ ] all the times like, "Oh, you know, at work I'm really high-functioning, but then in my personal life or trying to do this side hustle thing, I just, I can't; I keep procrastinating." That's a [ __ ] [ __ ] excuse. What the [ __ ] are you afraid of that procrastinating is allowing you to avoid, right? Because if you're ultimately—what a lot of times is—people are afraid of failure. Well, I'm afraid it'll fail, so as long as I just drag my feet long enough, I don't ever risk failure because I never put anything out there, right? So like these are some of the most common self-sabotaging behaviors you see from people, and it isn't the behavior; the behavior is a symptom. What the [ __ ] are you afraid of, right? So anytime I start to see like myself that I, I'm seeing that I'm dragging my feet or I'm overcomplicating something or I'm taking on too many projects, I say, "Hey, how might this be rooted in my fear? What the [ __ ] might I be afraid of that this is allowing me to avoid?" Because the sooner I can pinpoint that, the sooner I can start to take action to, to break down this fear, to, to try to overcome it in some way. Because once that fear isn't holding me back as long—like once I rob that fear of its power over me—that behavior, that self-sabotaging behavior, no longer serves a function because I'm not afraid to face that fear, so then that [ __ ] goes away.

I think you're right about procrastination and the linking with some of this stuff. I would say that there's definitely times in my life and in the people that I've worked with who are struggling with procrastination simply due to a lack of focus or bad habits or ease of distraction. So I don't think that this is necessarily the only reason procrastination; I don't think only ever comes from fear. Exactly. But perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control; that's what I see a lot of the time—that people are scared of shipping their work, and the way that they can inoculate themselves from failing publicly is by assuring their failure privately. It means that nobody ever actually has to see them potentially fall flat on their face, and the way that they can stop that from happening is by never actually going out under the stadium floor. And that's something that's very difficult to get past. And a couple of the things that have been really effective for me that I can reflect on with this show—because that is me, man—I spent six months vacillating about how I was going to start the show, on when I was going to start, in what the name was going to be, and all of this stuff. And then once you get past that first little thing, the momentum continues to carry you forward. A couple of the things that I found that have been really effective for me in terms of continuing to keep me accountable and to not allow myself to slip back into that is to have a regular cadence that I do the work at. So Modern Wisdom episodes go out Monday, Thursday, Saturday every single week; they have done for two and a half years now. Before that, it was Monday, Thursday; and before that, it was every Monday. So I built that up over time; the first year was one a week, the second year was two a week, and from the third year onwards it was three a week. I built that up slowly over time. I also had external accountability. If I, if I don't put an episode up, I'm gonna feel like the audience is saying, "Well, hang on a second, like, knock knock [ __ ], where's the episode? I was expecting to listen to something." And you're also—you've got a sense of Parkinson's Law comes in there—and that you've time-blocked things off; you need to get it done by a particular date. It's the same reason that people like me did their university assignments the night before they were due in throughout our entire university careers. Um, the same thing happens with my newsletter. So I wanted to start a newsletter; I'd been told for ages that it would be a good idea—own your audience, have direct access to them, send them stuff that's interesting and blah blah blah—and I've never written regularly before. Ever. Two years ago—it's about this week actually coming up—will be newsletter 100, so almost exactly two years, and I had never written anything that was regular. So I did a couple of things there: I made it really short, so it's Three-Minute Monday, which is three minutes to read, so it's about 900 words on average, which takes now around about 90 minutes to write—ish—as long as I've prepared some stuff during the week that I actually can draw on. Uh, and I did it every week, same day, same time. I tried to write it at a similar sort of period; it happens between a Friday and a Monday when I'm going to write it. All of that stuff again—accountability externally to the audience, a sense of sort of obligation and almost fear and embarrassment. You don't, you can utilize embarrassment to kind of propel you to go forward, because I don't have to make up the excuse about why it's not happened, and I've never missed one; I've never ever missed one. And I'm the exact type of person that would be the sort of person that would miss one, right? And it's, it almost blows my mind that there are other parts of other domains of my life—training, right? If I don't have a coach that's looking after my programming, I'll miss sessions all the time. Or diet; if I don't have somebody that I'm checking in with with regards to my macros, I'll break my diet all the time. But the few things that I've stuck to—those principles—regular cadence, um, build it up over time in terms of sort of difficulty or frequency, and have external accountability—you know, have something, someone, some group, some audience that's there in the back of your mind, and you think, "Not only do I want to do this, but I'm also going to be a little bit embarrassed if I don't do it." So those are some of the things that I've used that have helped me get past procrastination and the perfectionism side.

Well, that and the uncertainty, right, man? So on with like exercise and eating right, right? So many people are intimidated by getting in shape, whether it is, you know, "Well, what exercise should I do? Should I do, you know, this, you know, top-down or like how many reps, how much weight, all this other [ __ ]," right? What you did, it sounds like, was instead of trying to figure like perfect, like find the perfect workout, you know, regimen, you said, "I'm just going to outsource that [ __ ]; I'm going to remove the uncertainty by hiring somebody. Just you tell me what the [ __ ] my workouts are for the week; you tell me what macros I need to hit and give me some food, some diet templates, and I'll plug and play," right? So instead of you trying to, to face that fear of and trying to, you know, engage in all these self-sabotaging behaviors, which is what most people do, right—of, "I am uncertain; I don't know what is right for me"—and they just, they, they sit there; they spend forever and a day, you know, googling [ __ ], or they just decide to do nothing and put it off and, "Well, around New Year's I'll try it out," right? Into the whole New Year's, you know, um, resolution [ __ ]. You're just like, "[ __ ]" all this uncertainty; you just tell me how to do it. You removed that fear. It's strange to think about one of the challenges that entrepreneurs have and, and people that are sort of uh, solitary go-getters generally—there's always two problems: the first one being that you have to go and do the work, but the second one that actually occurs before that being you have to decide what work it is that you're going to do. So it's such an unseen pain of being a solo entrepreneur or a content creator or somebody that just wants to go and do something different and on their own and forge their own path. And you're right, wherever you can just outsource that stuff, right, you're going to need to do that a lot for yourself. So on the things that you can afford to not do that by getting a coach or someone to write a program, just do it. That, and the biggest, you know, advice I can give with the whole like creator, entrepreneur journey and the fears that that will inevitably, you know, provoke is instead of seeing it as either I'm going to fail or I'm going to succeed, if you can learn to see it as more of an iterative process, that takes care of a lot. Because like you said, like you need to do the work yourself, but you need to figure out what work is worth doing, or you need to create the content yourself and figure out what the [ __ ] content do I create? If you, instead of seeing it as, "Well, either it's going to be a super success or a complete failure," of, "How can I iterate? How can I just take that one [ __ ] step and figure out what is, what data, what's the data telling, what's the market telling, what's my audience telling me?" And slowly iterating from there, that makes it way more approachable and allows you to be way more consistent rather than this pass-fail, false dichotomy people make it out to be.

Yeah, especially if you go back and look at Tim Ferriss's first episode, Rogan's first episode, my first episode—I'm recording it in the biggest, loudest echoes room, recording on an old iPhone with a Blue Yeti in between me and my buddy who's telling me about how he's gonna row the Atlantic naked. This is four and a half years ago. Um, I, I would say that there are certain things that if you're, if you're getting serious about something, do require a little bit of time. Branding is one of those things, because if you end up having a runaway success—that the show's been significantly more successful than I ever thought it was going to be—and if I'd locked in a name that I detested, that would be something that I would struggle with, right? I happen to love the brand Modern Wisdom; I think it's great; it does exactly what I wanted it to do. But I've got other friends that are content creators who have kind of created this monster that they're now sort of in the driver's seat of some huge locomotive; they can't stop it; they can't slow it down; they can't change it anymore, and every single time that they see their own name appear online, they sort of cringe inside a little bit. So I do think that there is a, there is an argument to be made; there's a kernel of truth in, "Look, spend a little bit of time thinking about what it's going to be, but just once you've got that, get to an acceptable level and go." There's this great Tiago Forte tweet from a while ago saying, "Um, most people uh, rely on perfectionism because it enables them to avoid shipping work at a rate that allows them to know what works." Basically, procrastination; perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control, and that the vast majority of people who are very, very high-leverage individuals, they have kind of a rough-edged, half-assed quality to their work because they understand that polishing something to perfection is a low-leverage activity. The difference between a 95-percent perfect and a 97-percent perfect podcast in terms of the impact it's going to have on the audience is pretty negligible, but the effort it takes you to get from 95 to 97 is probably the same as doing another 95 podcast. It's like an exponential curve of difficulty to work out all of those imperfections, you know, to remove all of the clicks, to remove all of the vocal t's. So one of the reasons why with this show I've never ever gone through and removed ticks, likes, filler words, any of that stuff—tons of podcasters—so you can even get algorithms now to automate that that'll go through and pull out all of that stuff, so it cleans up your audio. One reason is that I never wanted to have to rely on that; I wanted to walk the tightrope of that performance myself, because if I was lazy and relied on it, I would never actually build up the skill to be able to do it without that. It's like singing with auto-tune. And then on the other side of that as well, I think, "Well, how much effort is extra effort is that going to be for what is it going to add? Getting from that 95 to 97? Okay, well, maybe I, I go through and pick it out individually or whatever; I get an algorithm to do it now. Well, how about I just do another podcast?" And that really seems to work well. And then you've got complacency as well, because the thing that we haven't talked about is fear of success and how that manifests in terms of self-defeating, self-sabotaging behavior.

Yeah, so, so with complacency, right, for a lot of people, it's easier to say you don't care or that you, you quote-unquote have enough. And I don't mean having enough as far as like being content, right? Being content and being complacent are two very different things. Being content is means being grateful for everything that you have; being complacent means you have chosen to stagnate and say, "No, this is good like this." This isn't actually enough; this isn't actually where I want my life to be, but in order for me to attain the life that I actually want to have requires me to face certain fears that I would rather just stay on this side of fear rather than pushing past my comfort zone and actually putting myself out there to take these risks. I would just rather say, "No, I'm totally fine with my, you know, nine-to-five for 45 years of my life and the occasional week or two-week vacation once a year, because then I'll retire at 65, and then I'll really enjoy life." Okay, but statistically you're going to die around 80, so you're going to sacrifice 45 [ __ ] years of your life to maybe enjoy the last 15. That's complacency. Again, not for everybody; plenty of people [ __ ] love their jobs, right? I'm not demonizing a normal job, but for many people, they [ __ ] hate it, and they know what they need to do, but it is terrifying to actually do, so they decide to say, "No, I'm just going to lower sort of like my ceiling for what I'm going to tell myself is possible and just say, 'No, this is, this is good enough for me.'" Right? That's complacency for a lot of people. And what you end up seeing—um, and there's this Cornell University study that they did, and they found that up to 76 percent of people are on their deathbeds—they lay on their deathbeds with the exact same regret, which equates to they lived in mediocrity, and now they're on the deathbed; they're, they're full of regret; they're like, "[ __ ], I wish I would have taken certain chances; I wish I would have faced my fears and went left instead of right, but I chose to be complacent; I chose to let fear stop me from living the life that I wanted to live and knew I was capable of doing; it just was too scary for me to do," right? So, so those are are some of the, the biggest issues. Like for me personally, why, you know, I think you and I, we—the whole like memento mori concept, right? It's a big thing—Stoicism; a lot of entrepreneurs gravitate towards those because it's super practical—but that's a big thing for me, man, is with all these fears, right, whether you're afraid of success, failure, you know, whatever, ultimately one day you're going to [ __ ] die, right? On that day, what do you want? What kind of life do you want to look back on, right? Do you want to look back on a lifetime of regret, or do you want to…

Look back and be like, hey, I had some hits, I had some misses, but overall, I [ __ ] love the life that I lived. I loved that I took those chances; I loved that I didn't let fear stop me; I loved that I worked on myself and pushed through these self-sabotaging behaviors. Right, that's a big thing for me. Um, and I, you know, at some point we can get into my how I almost died last year and how, you know, my mentor really kind of took a a literal term for me, but but that's the big thing for me. It, man, is all these fears keep people from from doing the work that they're meant to do and that they are the mo the most unique person to do that work and to bring that value to the world, right? That's that's sort of like my whole mission in in life for me personally is to help people push past those fears, overcome those limiting beliefs, those self-sabotage behaviors so that they can actually reach the [ __ ] potential that they're capable of but have told themselves or society has told them that they're not.

It's so sad when you think about that, the fact that there are people who are born, live and die with fantastic potential, and then this thing comes in; it's it's like a like a weight or a glass ceiling that comes down and restricts what it is that they go to go and do. And it's not, it doesn't, there's nothing there. You go, you had the ability to do all of this stuff, and and for some reason you didn't get there, and that's sad. That makes me sad to think that there's a lot of people for whom that's gonna be their life. I I learned this story from Douglas while I was away with him in New York, and he told it on the podcast; it's so powerful. Had this friend who was um one of the editors of the first one of the first newspapers that he worked at, Clive, somebody, legend in the publishing and journalism game, and he decided that he was going to release a play on the West End about Prince Charles. The entire thing was going to be in rhyming couplets—perhaps not the broadest audience that he could tap into—and he didn't think that it even made it past opening night, or it was nobody left, including the cast, by the first interval. And Douglas went up to his friend and he said, "Clive, what if," he you know, this seems like a little bit of a an error, and he was destroyed. This guy was like destroyed by he thought he was really going to be doing well and so on and so forth, and took us, you know, how do you deal with the pain of putting up with this sort of very public failure on the West End? He said, "Well, I followed my instincts, and you know, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but your instincts are the only things that have ever led you right."

What I realized was that if you allow fear to come in and tamp down your ability to tap into that intuition and that instinctual nature that tells you about very easily tells you what to do, tells you to cross the street, tells you to stay with that relationship, it tells you to change careers, move to a different city, the more that you don't listen to that, the quieter it speaks or the harder it is to hear, and over time you can habituate doing that less and less. And a lot of people that are very sort of cerebrally minded and love the cognitive stuff, they can think themselves into or out of pretty much anything. You you have to be quite smart to be able to convince yourself that the thing that every fiber of your being is screaming at you to do is not the right thing to do. Like, you have to actually, congratulations, congratulations, you've managed to outthink your programming and your gut, and you've managed to convince yourself that the thing that it's telling you to do isn't the right thing to do. But I do think that there's something to be said for allowing that instinct to kind of carry us through, and increasingly that's something that I'm trying to sort of tap into as well. Look, how how do I get out of my own way? So this and this whole idea of like metacognition, right? Like thinking about how you think, thinking about the language that you use with yourself, like your personal narrative, right? So like some people their their personal narrative is that they're broken or that they are a victim, regardless of what they've actually experienced one way or the other, right? Like, you know, back when I did therapy, some people they went through heinous [ __ ] some of them identified as a victim, some of them identified as a survivor, and that one [ __ ] word difference completely changed the trajectory of their lives, right? Because when you identify as a victim or you identify as broken or in some way unlovable, worthless, helpless, hopeless, that dictates everything about your life, right? We talk about like rose-colored glasses or whatever, but when when your internal monologue, when your personal narrative is super negative and toxic, that caps how what you think about yourself, your truth, what is true about your potential, what is true about the world, is the world dangerous, what you deserve, right? If you don't think you deserve something, you're not going to to reach for it, so you won't [ __ ] get it, right? But it's, you know, this whole idea, man, is like I'll take you for an example, like you know you've talked about how you know you're you you prioritize your physical health, you know you were a model, you did the whole like, you know, Love Island or whatever thing, right? Like aesthetically you're a handsome dude, right? Like that is like sort of like an objective objective thing, right? I know it's okay, but here's the thing, man, I promise you that if you every day, even just once a day, every morning as part of your [ __ ] morning routine you looked in the mirror and you said, "I am fat, I am stupid, and I am ugly," I if you did that every [ __ ] day for a year, at the 365th day your truth, quote-unquote, in air quotes, your truth would be that you are fat, stupid, and ugly, regardless of your physical [ __ ] appearance or intellectual capability, and that's some [ __ ] that so many people struggle with but don't even recognize that because of the skill of metacognition, of learning to to examine the [ __ ] thoughts that rattle through your head, because everything that you are capable of starts inside your [ __ ] head, because if you don't think you're capable, you won't strive; if you don't strive, you won't achieve. So everything comes, it originates in your [ __ ] personal narrative and the thoughts you tell yourself.

Something that I noticed in myself and coming from a working-class background, you may be able to resonate with this as well. Um, me and a bunch of my friends really struggle to spend money; I really really struggle to spend money. I'm trying to work this out at the moment; it's something like the working-class mindset or the the perils of the working-class mindset. And I had a fantastic start to the year; we've been working, me and Dean have been working super super hard on the show, and we had a great few few months of plays and and ad revenue and new sponsors and stuff like that, and I haven't bought myself anything in ages. Uh, so I thought, well, I'm gonna treat myself. I couldn't get a car in America because I uh didn't have a social security number, which meant that I couldn't go and get any finance, so I was like, well, did they do these electric scrambler bikes? It looks like an old-style cafe cafe racer motorbike, but it's actually just an e-bike that does 30 miles an hour, so you don't need a license, you can ride them on uh cycle paths, and they're they're pretty cool. Yeah, it's like I I have earned this; I spend hours and hours and hours in a room on my own researching, reading, editing, publishing, scheduling, all of that stuff; I deserve this. Bought it within two weeks, sent an email saying I I don't just cancel the order, take it back, because I for some there was something about me that couldn't deal with the fact that I was doing that. Now, today, the flight that was partly hugely delayed, I flew business class for the first time that I'd booked it in advance, and for some reason that felt a little bit different, but there's something about that working-class mindset: What do you deserve? Um, that means that you'll go into the supermarket, even as you're you know earning a very comfortable wage, and look for the multi-buy deal on the pasta sauce, which will take up five minutes of your afternoon which you should be spending working and earning way more than the saving that you're going to get on the [ __ ] pasta sauce, but it's the thing that you'll do, and it's so fascinating. I mean, do you find this in yourself, you know, going from somebody that food stamps and and sort of welfare state stuff to now being somebody with money, is this still a pervasive element of your spending habits as well?

Yeah, like, and it's also weird for me to like if it's if it's something for the business, I'm like, cool, right? Well, like I don't really fly right now, but like if it's like, oh, I need to get some new equipment or I need to do this or I need to take this new course, I'm like, oh, three-thousand-dollar course, [ __ ] it, fine, it's a business expense. But then if I'm like, okay, well, I can, you know, if I'm gonna get like the the Amazon Basics shorts like just to wear around the house or go to the gym, I'm like, well, [ __ ] okay, well, a three-pack is this much and a six-pack is is that much, like how much am I actually whatever. I'm like, I just spent three thousand dollars or seven thousand dollars on a [ __ ] course, but I'm I'm quibbling over like 20 cents or five bucks over here, there, right? Like, okay, well, you know, this rib eye at the store is you know 17.98, and then but this package over here is 18.24, like, is it really that much more? Like, it's like, what the [ __ ] are you doing, right? And like, because whether it's working class or you know poverty, whatever, because like growing up like my parents worked to a certain point, but then like they both had like significant like medical issues that that took them out of the workforce, right? So um for us it wasn't even like you know, oh well, you know, we're like, man, I remember the first girl I dated, her family made like 40k a year, right, which is like lower middle class, and I'm like, this [ __ ] is rich, because I'm like [ __ ] like we made we brought in like 12,000 for the year, right? And that sticks with you, I think, because that's very formative, right? Like how you evaluate what something is worth is is that right? And I think you've talked about this too, this whole idea of if you do client work, it's really easy to devalue yourself and not charge what you know you're worth, right? And so I think for a lot of people who come from like a lower or like middle-class income threshold, that is something that is really hard to overcome when you're going out and doing your own thing, building up your business, and and you you achieve a modicum of success, because like this is a thing of like you're still used to nickel and diming everything, and it's just no, man, like I'll struggle with it too. It does get easier. I mean, there was this one time where I remember I'd spent at least a minute looking at the working out whether I could justify the value or the finest range of yogurts in a supermarket; this was like five years ago, and that was a that was a formative experience; talk about strategic learning opportunity. I'll never forget that, staring at these yogurts going, "What on earth are you doing? You work all the hours that God sends and you're terrified of buying the slightly nicer yogurt." Um, so I think that you're right; I think that it's probably a combination of a bunch of different things, but it does get better. If there's someone that's listening that goes, "[ __ ] that's me down to a T," I I still really struggle to spend money on myself.

A couple of ways that you can get around that, I think increasingly try to justify things as facilitating um your passion or the thing that actually brings the money in. So for me it was much easier to justify the business-class flight because I knew I had this podcast with you today. Like, yo, if if I get even if I only catch four hours sleep on that flight over, that means I can properly do this episode with Corey without looking like a sleep-deprived zombie, right? And okay, well, that there we go, that justifies it for me; that feels a little bit better. So that's one thing. Uh, and another thing I think is to realize that you probably do deserve this like all of the time that you've spent working, all of the effort that you put in, all of the hours that you do stuff. But I mean, I'm saying this to myself as the guy that just sent back a a scrambler e-bike, the only thing that he really treated himself to so far this year. Okay, so we've gone through the different horsemen; we've gone through some of the ways that that fear can manifest in terms of activity. How can people inoculate themselves from this moving forward? What are the strategies that they can put in place so that they're going to mitigate these fears when they come up?

Yeah, so like I said before, ultimately we fear the unknown, so if you can make the unknown knowable, fear kind of loses its its power over you, all right? So fear inoculation for me, it kind of works similar to a vaccine, right? And I'm not that kind of doctor, but my elementary understanding of vaccines is you introduce a little bit of the bad thing, so then you can build up a tolerance or an immunity to it if it ever comes around again, right? So let's say you're afraid of failure; severe inoculation is, okay, let's assume you [ __ ] fail; your worst-case scenario actually happens. With that assumption in place, what the [ __ ] are you gonna do? How are you going to recover? How can you learn to see it as sort of like thinking like a scientist of it wasn't like a a pass-fail necessarily; of what does the data tell me? How can I like identify patterns and what worked and what didn't to take that and iterate for version two, right? Because again, like it isn't that you outright failed irrevocably so much as this one thing told you that your approach didn't work for some reason, right? So how can you make tweaks? How can you analyze the data and then do a v2 and iterate? If you're afraid of ridicule, assume whatever the [ __ ] you did, people are talking [ __ ] on or you're getting canceled or some other kind of [ __ ], right? With that assumption in place, how are you going to do damage control? How are you going to get ahead of the narrative, right? How are you even evaluating where this ridicule is coming from? Are the people ridiculing you people whose opinions you give a [ __ ] about in the first place? Most of the time they're not, right? There's this, you know, Nipsey Hussle quote: "You will never be criticized by somebody doing more than you; you will only ever be criticized by somebody doing less than you." So all these [ __ ] who are talking [ __ ], are they just miserable [ __ ] bags who want to troll and find something to be offended over, or is this an audience that you actually respect and you care about? If that's the case, how can you do damage control and learn from what happened, right? If you're afraid of uncertainty, let's assume you made the wrong [ __ ] decision; how can you course correct, right? How can you gain more information to make a better decision, right? Or let's say you're afraid of uncertainty to the point you make no decision, so instead of risking taking the wrong way, you you did nothing, and you've stagnated, and you made no progress for five years. Okay, what's preventing you from making progress? What is fueling this uncertainty, right? What is the minimum amount of information you need to move forward to take one [ __ ] step forward, right? This whole idea of just-in-case versus just-in-time learning, right? So just-in-case is you just collect all this information perpetually, right? You try to read 3,000 books a year or some [ __ ] versus just-in-time is, I am actively building something, and I have now hit a wall because I don't know what to do next. What is the one piece that if I found this information I can move forward? That's just-in-time learning. So how can you adopt a just-in-time learning mindset, right? With with success, let's say you succeed and you lose all your ambition or you become this super cocky [ __ ] that [ __ ] nobody likes. Cool, how can you develop humility? Who can you surround yourself with? Who are other high achievers who have already achieved big [ __ ] but continue to push themselves forward, right? Like you, I'm sure the people you hang out with now are different than the people you hung out with in high school or undergrad or whatever, right? As you level up, your circle—and I don't mean necessarily you have to find different people, but your circle tends to level up with you, right? That's a huge thing with the internet now; like the majority of people I've met that have have helped me in, you know, as an entrepreneur and a content creator or whatever, I've met since December 2020 when I got fired from my [ __ ] job, and other issues prevented me from getting another job, and I was like, [ __ ] I got to learn how to blaze my own [ __ ] trail, and I don't have a business background; my undergrad is a [ __ ] psychology; how do I do this? It was the people I met, right? So how can you surround yourself with better people who are humble, who are hungry, that can help you level up and go in the direction you want to go? So no matter what the [ __ ] you're afraid of, there is some way that you can inoculate yourself against it by saying, okay, if this happened, how would I recover? Because as soon as you realize that you can recover from any of these worst-case scenarios, that worst-case scenario is no longer terrifying; it can no longer hold you back because you know how the [ __ ] to deal with it.

One of the common challenges I think people face in situations like this is that they don't have an adequate support system around them and role models that they can look up to, especially ones that are close to them. And it's great to have a role model that you have a parasocial relationship with, right? You know, Jocko Willink or David Goggins or someone who's your hero and whatever, but there's a degree of importance to be able to have a dialogue with someone, right? To see them and to have a conversation with them, even if it's only over the internet. And um I was having this chat last week with someone who was asking me about what what you do if you don't have any good role models around you, and I realized that I kind of wanted a lot more positive role models when I was growing up too, and I was around a lot of people that I really didn't want to be like. Then I realized that that was actually a really good influence on me, like, okay, I didn't have many people in the town that I grew up in that were the sort of people that I wanted to grow up to be like, but I had a ton of signals that told me the sort of things that I didn't want to do. So this is the negative role model, the reverse role model, right? Avoiding stupidity can get you a really really long way in life; you can get really really far by just not having unforced errors that you continue to hit into the net over and over again. How many people do you know that got some girl pregnant that they weren't in a relationship with, or how many people crashed a car when they'd had a couple too many beers and now they're banned from driving and have got a criminal record on their license? You know, like easy things you can avoid to do, and all of these were examples that I had.

Said to me when I was growing up. So yes, it sucks if you don't have a fantastic role model. If you're not in New York or L.A., surrounded by interesting, cool people that can tell you exactly what you want, you know, if you're in the arsenal of Virginia or in the, you know, the town in the UK with the highest teen pregnancy rating, which it then lost, so it didn't even have that anymore. That was my state. We had that too.

Yeah, you're good. Nice high five. So the fact that you don't have that sucks, but the fact that there are tons of people around you that are showing you exactly what you don't want to do is equally useful. It genuinely is. Yes, it feels kind of icky, and it's annoying, and it's kind of, it's a slimy version of it because you feel like you're having to sort of trudge through it. It's not as inspirational or aspirational or sort of upwardly mobile, but it's one hell of a learning lesson, you know that. You know the mental model: never multiply by zero. That you can take five hundred thousand times by forty thousand times by ten times by three times by zero; if you multiply anything by zero, you get zero. So you need to avoid huge failures. You need to not be driving without your seatbelt on. You need to not get a girl pregnant or get yourself pregnant when you're 16 years old and you have absolutely no support system around you at all. Like these are things that are multiplying by zero, right, because they completely curtail tons of options in your life. That's a pretty good signal. So reverse role models aren't as inspirational, but they're certainly very useful.

Well, and just this whole idea of, especially you know, when you're growing up in a toxic environment: do you want to be where these people are? Because if you do what they did, you will, for better or worse, right? Like this whole idea of: if you want to be successful, do what successful people do; if you want to be unsuccessful, don't do what unsuccessful people do, right? So like, even like with parenting, right? Like if you want to be a good parent, it doesn't actually matter if you have, if you had good parents or or toxic parents, because if you had good parents, do what they did; if you had toxic parents, do the opposite of what the [ __ ] they did, right? So no, I fully agree. Like you can draw inspiration from your environment one way or the other, but I do, and again, like I came from that environment, right? Like, you know, drug use and and domestic violence and a lot of you know [ __ ] up [ __ ] that was just, that was normal for me, right? And I had supportive family members and things, but I also had toxic ones, and I had toxic, you know, all of my friends growing up are in prison or been in and out of prison, right? Like I understand that life, but between that, you know, anti-role model or that reverse role model mental model, but also you can meet so many people online with [ __ ] Twitter or, you know, some whatever the [ __ ] you're, yeah, whatever the [ __ ] your preferred platform is, man. Like there's this whole idea of like it's not gated anymore; like there aren't gatekeepers like there used to be. Like I have met so many people either in cohort-based courses I've taken or just through Twitter in general, and these are people that, you know, whether they're they're major major players, you know, quote unquote, in the air in the space or just normal [ __ ] people who are supportive, you can surround yourself with with a digital community like no time before. There's no excuse as long as you have internet or you just have access to books or some kind of [ __ ] regardless of your current situation. I promise you there are ways for you to learn and grind your way out of it on some level. I hope that it makes people realize that that is an option. And it does make me sad thinking about how many people are in a place that doesn't support the goals and dreams that they've got, especially in the UK. This is something I've noticed that's a really big difference between the UK and the US. The UK is like really, really good at satire and taking the piss and making sure that people's feet are kept on the ground, right? It's great. The problem that you get with that is that it's a tall poppy syndrome; it discourages people from doing different things. Now in America, you end up with blue sky vision; you can achieve anything you want to; you've got the American dream is at your feet and stuff like that. Now that's great for encouraging kids to go and do what they want, especially when they're young. The problem that you have is when they grow up and they look around at the world and they say, well, hang on, this, this wasn't what I was promised. I was promised the earth at my feet, and I've got something else, and the delta between those two is is often painful. And I think that this is one of the reasons why the uh sort of victim culture mentality doesn't happen quite so much in the UK because that's kind of already been beaten out of you as a kid, but the problem that you have with that is that there's less enthusiasm and encouragement when you want to go and do different things. So I think that the blend is between the two, and I've seen this since being in America, that most of my British friends that have gone over to America have really enjoyed the culture and that their influence on the American people around them has been really good as well because it's brought them down to earth a little bit, and the Americans have sort of given the Brits a little bit of self-belief. So that is great, but it does make me sad to think about the fact, in the same way as the the fears and the limiting beliefs, they constrain somebody's potential, and it kind of isn't really a thing; it's not really something that exists, and yet it's able to restrict what somebody achieves in life is kind of the same thing with this lack of community supportive sense around them as well. You go, look, this person could be this, and yet due to no fault of their own, simply by the, you know, lack of fortune of the area that they're born in or the time that they were born, another street that they were born on, they don't have the support that allows them to do something that would make them lead a radically more fulfilled and different life.

On just, man, going back to this, this personal narrative idea, the simple sentence of, for the simple belief of people like me don't do that, right? People from where I'm from don't do X, Y, or Z. Like I, I wrote this article a while ago, this whole idea of, so I'm from rural Appalachia; like I'm, I'm from a town called Lesage, West Virginia. The only people who pronounce it Lesage are people from there; everybody else pronounces it Lesage, like some fancy French [ __ ]. It ain't; it's Lease-age. And I remember growing up, the people who sounded like me weren't entrepreneurs; they weren't, you know, doctors, right? Like those people, they spoke differently, right? We, we talk different. If you want to be successful, you need to speak differently. So when I went to college and I was, you know, with a four-year degree, I was the first person in my family with a college degree. Before your degree, I actively tried to lose my accent because I was like, well, successful people don't sound like me; like I'm from up a holler; nobody, nobody sounds like that; you're successful. So I actively tried to lose my accent and and sort of disconnect myself from my roots, from from my home. And what I realized was a lot of the people that I met at one, there's like, there's like a party where I'll add like a fraternity party at one point, and like all of a sudden people's accents started coming out; these people are drinking whatever, and we're like, holy [ __ ], like you're from someone, someone you know where you're from as well, dude, and everyone's like, holy [ __ ], and we realized all of us had tried to lose our [ __ ] accents to fit in, and like slowly I came to terms with that, and like I, I, I allowed more of my accent, my draw to come out, and and you know, the the article kind of ended with like, you know, my name is, let me introduce myself; my name is Dr. Corey Wilkes; I'm an entrepreneur, and I say y'all; I'm from up a holler, right? Like, and it's just this idea, man, it's like this, this, I think you and Ali Abdul talked about this, of having role models and people who look like you or people who talk like you; that's so [ __ ] important, man, and it's, it's such a glaringly missing thing, especially if you want to talk about like men and masculinity type [ __ ], but just that idea of like either finding these, these para-role models or, you know, whatever, or just trying to connect with other people online. I promise you there are other people who get where you're coming from who can help support you on the journey you want to take.

It's only since I've been in Austin that I've been around men's groups a lot. This isn't really something, I don't know, maybe they exist in the UK, but I, I, I've never heard about them or whatever; maybe they exist outside of Newcastle, which is where I'm living. Um, but yeah, you see these men's groups, and I've been to a good few of them now, man. You've got some of the most competent guys, who, people that have already retired that live in gorgeous mansions that spend their days investing in companies and doing cool stuff, and they still need, every single week on a Wednesday for four hours in the middle of an afternoon, they still need their boys to come around and for everybody to be kind of calm and and not playing games and and just a space that they hold for everybody else. You go, what is this? Is this some hippy [ __ ]? And yet it's the same guys that are absolute killers, uh, and that, that was kind of a bit of an eye-opener to me that you see people that you really wouldn't think would be the sort of people that would need a, broadly, a support group. You know, connection? Yeah, connection; that's one of those universal things, and we need connection. Yeah, you wouldn't think it. So yeah, man, it's, it's an interesting one. I, um, I really appreciate your work; I really appreciate the input that you've got; I appreciate the insight that you bring as well. I like the fact that you're bridging the the sort of the clinical with the coaching side too.

What have you got coming up? Anything that you want to direct people to? Anything they should know about? Um, so I'm actually finishing up the first cohort of a cohort-based course; it's called Intentional Life Design, so it's all about how do you overcome limiting beliefs, think bigger, and and do work that matters, to work that resonates with you. Um, Cohort 2 will probably come out around late August, early September, so I can give you a link for that, um, page for people to check it out. Otherwise, people just follow me either on Twitter, my website, whatever; my my handle is the same, Corey Wilkes ID everywhere. That's pretty much it. I appreciate you. Cheers, man. Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks, and don't forget to subscribe. Peace.