Your relationship with fear determines the way you exercise courage. In this episode of Acta Non Verba, Tony Blauer reveals how to identify fear-based decisions in your everyday life, and what you can do to follow your intuition and exercise your courage muscle. During our conversation Tony and I discuss self-awareness, processing fear, and why managing fear does not guarantee victory.
Coach Tony Blauer is a personal defense and fear management expert. He is one of the only combative experts who has successfully affected training across all combat-related communities, from self-defense and combat sports to the military and law enforcement sectors. His research on psychology and mindset as it relates to confrontation management has influenced over four decades of reality-based martial arts.
You can connect with Tony via his website: https://blauerspear.com/
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions and not words. If you wanna know when someone truly believes, don’t listen to their words, instead observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Coach Tony Blower is a personal defense and fear management expert.
01:02
and one of the only combatives experts who has successfully affected training across all combat related communities from self-defense and combat sports to the military and law enforcement sectors. His research on psychology and mindset as it relates to confrontation management has influenced over four decades of reality-based martial arts. And listen, the research that he’s conducted wasn’t some bullshit lab of people wearing coats waxing philosophical about theoretical solutions.
01:29
Tony’s research was conducted in a raw and unflinching laboratory of unbridled violence and unadulterated fear. Tony Blower’s teachings have influenced me for decades, but not only as a martial arts and as an entrepreneur, his body of work is a living breathing testament to how philosophy can be both pragmatic, practical and tactical. Tony Blower, thank you for being on my friend. Marcus, thank you. I’d love that intro to go on a little bit longer. You know, it’s funny when people.
01:58
read parts of the bio and you read some of it right off our kind of a website bio, but then you, you know, especially at the end, added a lot of thoughts, your own personal thoughts and that in thoughts about the fear and the connection between like theory and practicality and evolution, all that. And when I listen to it, it’s weird. It’s surreal to me, man, because I go, is that, is he talking about me? Did I do that? I’m actually doing this stuff.
02:26
It’s weird, man. Well, you are. You have been for a long time. It’s interesting. Two weeks ago, I flew to Quantico, agency outside of Quantico. And I don’t normally teach. I’ve got 11 trainers that I have mentored on my mobile training team. One guy’s been with me for 21 years, another 15, another 19. And they’re all either active or ex-male or law enforcement. And this particular organization said, no, we want
02:55
Tony Blower to teach. And I said, well, I don’t really teach, right? No, I mean, I do, but I teach my guys. And I actually tried to say, look, let’s just do something online. Like, pay for me for the day, I’ll talk to you guys. No, no, no. Are you available to come in? I went in, but I hadn’t taught a five-day course like this. I taught one for a unit in Australia a few years ago. But all my other courses, I would send.
03:23
a lead instructor and then I might come in for a day, take everyone out to dinner on Thursday. But I talked for the first time. This is a really weird intro to the like, your name is our topic. But while I was there, it was like this out of body surreal thing because it was, it was all these guys, man. Like when you say, Hey, you know, Tony, you’ve influenced me for decades. I’m like, well, because I don’t feel like we know each other. We connect. There’s definitely a reciprocal.
03:51
vibe and mutual respect and stuff like that. When we do meet in person, it’ll be like, wow, dude, like we’ve known each other for years. But I meet a lot of people who go, you’ve influenced me for decades. And like, so in this class, we’re all 20, 30 year veterans of this particular organization who are now, you know, they’re still alive. And now they’re in the training phase, trying to make…
04:20
you know, future generations safer with lessons learned. And it was so neat to have them there. Cause I brought in one of my top guys with me to balance. I said to him, I said to him, I use a retired chief. I call him chief. I go chief. I said, I don’t want to stand for eight hours and talk. So I’m going to talk for a little bit. And then you kick their ass on the mat. But these guys, like by day two, we’re going, when’s Tony coming back in? Cause I wouldn’t come in for the training.
04:47
was where I’m just rambling over place. It was so neat. They wanted the philosophy behind the psychology. They were less interested in, tell me about fingers played outside 90. And, you know, what do you do if a guy’s got a gun? They didn’t, they wanted a little bit about that, but they’re really interested in what was the origin story to the spear? And how can they in a short period of time infuse their lesson so their student got this?
05:17
In fact, their director on Thursday comes up to me and shakes my hand and says, let’s change the world together. He was talking about his organization, but I got Marcus, I’ve never heard a chief police or a director or whatever, like come up and say something like that. You know, it’s usually some platitude like, my guys are really enjoying the training. Thank you, sir. This guy comes up to me, shakes my hand and says, let’s change the world.
05:46
So I just, you can’t see it, but I got goosebumps now just reliving that because I’m 60 now and that’s all I wanted to do is you know this story, you’ve heard me talk about it before. I was asked when I was 20, what do you wanna do? So I wanna make the world safer. And to meet like-minded people, on Friday when I left his office, I said, I just wanna confirm again that I heard you correctly yesterday. You said you wanna change the world. He said, yeah. And I looked at him, I said, try to keep up with me.
06:16
Right? It was like a, it was like a challenge because dude, that’s, that’s all I’ve been doing for fucking 40 years, trying to change the world. That’s what I love about it. Cause we talk about philosophy and again, platitudes, a lot of philosophy is just, you know, bullshit. It, it sounds pretty and that’s what I’ve hated about it. I’ve loved the parts of the martial arts that I’ve learned that makes sense, but a lot of it, if it’s just this, so it’s like it’s coming out of a fortune cookie.
06:44
That’s not going to help me when this guy’s trying to punch me in the fucking face. I need something that’s going to work. And then I need the ability because like with you, you’ve, you looked at what the human body does, no matter what country you’re from or what religious background or philosophical ideal, you look at it and you say, this person flinches, let’s weaponize that. Let’s make that serve them. So how do we weaponize the mentality that goes with that? How are we able to do those things? What a cool question that I don’t know if it was like 10 years ago, there’s, there’s a book that came up on flinch and it was a business book.
07:14
I’ve heard of it. Yes. So the guy actually interviewed me. I think he’s from Montreal or something, which is where I was written from, but maybe he’s not. But he interviewed me because he’d heard about me. I don’t know. Maybe he did some boxing and he’d heard about me. And his whole idea was like splinching in life, flinching in business as a medical. So I wrote about this the other day. Got some really good traction online. It was, it was that meme that I shared that if you don’t know where you want to be in five years, you’re
07:41
And I made it very clear in there. That’s not how I live. I don’t have a five year plan. And a lot of people do, and they’re very effective, and they’re very successful because I’m not that guy. I’m a scream of consciousness instructor, you know, me and Joe for recording. You know, you okay with long form? And like every answer is long form for my wife rolls her eyes all the time. She’s like, you know, she’s like, do you want me to order for you? Because we could be here all night. They’re going to close soon. Everything is long for, should I have the salmon or the chicken or the steak? Should I like
08:11
So your question about life and business and everything is what I wrote in that thing is I said, my work, the body of my work as I’m best known is weaponizing the start of flinch. But that has always been for decades now a metaphor for life. A stimulus gets introduced too quickly. There is a flinch. The brain startles, the body flinches. It’s what you do next that determines how long you are the victim, how long you are getting your ass kicked.
08:40
how long you are hiding under a table, how long you are hiding in the shadows in the corner. And so it’s one of the things with the whole No Fear program, KMLU Fear for people who don’t know how I spell No Fear, is at the foundation of everything, I believe there’s this non-conscious fear filter, almost like a membrane that we can’t see. Like they’re discovering like the relationship between our second brain, our gut and the mind and they’re discovering amazing things. So part of my
09:10
intuitive contention is that everything we do runs through a fear filter. And so it’s like, should I… Like I had another shirt on before I started the podcast, buddy of my company, Captain and Keyless. I wear their shirts and I said, you know what, should I wear this shirt or this shirt? Like what is Marcus’s new podcast? Should I have my company? Like it’s just a silly conversation, but it’s fear. It’s not paralyzing fear and it’s not startle flinch fear.
09:40
It’s, honey, I’m hungry. What do you want to eat? Your brain is going, I don’t want to eat the wrong food. I want to eat the right food. At a non-conscious level, I’m thinking, what am I in the mood for? Now, some of you listening to this might go, like, he’s really pushing this whole fear thing. It’s the fear of making the wrong decision. How many times have you eaten too much or you’re craving a pizza and you wanted cards, but then you knew…
10:07
I’ll just have one piece and then you have three pieces and then you get some ice cream and then you get a beer and then you feel sick and you’re like, you know what? I really wish I hadn’t had that. Well, I always say, hey, fear whispers in our ear and then our cognitive dissonance, our ego, our pride, our whatever, tweets it, shuts it down and reformats it with something else. So my big thing for years now has been…
10:35
when we get any type of fear spike, and the fear spike is a question that is born out of some element of doubt, right? I’m you right now. Should I start a different podcast? Like you’re not afraid to, you’re a great speaker, you like podcasting, you like interviewing people. Should I change the name? Remember when you were, hey, what do you guys like? This picture, this picture. That’s all fear. And we can semantically.
11:02
this argument and discuss it. But I would go, in some ways, no, no, I just, I wanted the audience to self-select the one that resonates. That’s fear, because at the end of the day, you, as much as you’re doing this for yourself, it’s also part of your business. It’s part of your relevancy in the world. And so I love this idea where I say fear throttles everything we do. And throttles an interesting word, because you can hit the gas.
11:32
or you could stop everything, right? So is my fear a, oh shit, I start a flinch, convert, move towards a danger, or is my fear, shirk away from what I have to do next? So to come back to your question, in this book reference when I got interviewed, it’s like anything in life can be a stimulus that’s introduced too quickly. My original study was, you know, if we go back in time, we said it was gonna be pandemic, we’re gonna close shit down, and a lot of you are gonna go,
12:02
bankrupt, you’re going to lose your business. That’s going to happen next week or would you like it to happen in six months? Well, everyone would have said six months because then we would have bought toilet paper in advance. We would have bought water in advance. We would have borrowed money. We would have laid off people. We would have hired. We would have done stuff. We would have figured out how to best prepare for this stimulus that we’re going to introduce, get into too quickly. So it’s interesting.
12:31
philosophically redefines fear as the actual fear spike. And you go, any stimulus that creates doubt will create hesitation and doubt and create hesitation consume time. And time is the only thing I can’t get back. And if you just stop there, that statement can begin to change your life and how you process things in advance. Yeah, sure. Right? So…
13:00
I don’t even know if they answered your question. No, you answered it beautifully. I love that you come from that philosophical ideal because you and I were very much influenced by Bruce Lee and he had a Taoist mentality, but it was more about this. He says, I use whatever works and I steal it from wherever I can take it, which more eloquently later became absorb it is useful, discard it is useless and have it specifically your own, which I think as a modern entrepreneur or anybody that can serve everyone, but you’ve taken that truly.
13:28
to your soul as opposed to worrying about looking good or because I remember reading your material when I first, you know, black belt magazine and everybody else is saying do a jumping flying sidekick against somebody’s head in the snow. If it’s multiple opponents, I’m like bullshit. I don’t have time for that. Right. That doesn’t work. And then I remember you talking about the psychology of fear and what the adrenal state does to a person. And I was like, this fucking guy knows what he’s talking about because I’ve been there where you’re in an altercation. You get punched and then finally you wake up. You’re like, oh, I need to do something.
13:58
And then, but those are only the situations where you’re lucky to survive. The first couple of seconds dictates everything that happens after that. And had it been more serious or more people or a weapon, we may not be talking, right? That was that post yesterday. We’re working your surprise. That’s exactly it. And it’s kind of it’s funny how that works, because I wrote that. And I went, I can’t wait to have a conversation about this. And it’s got like almost zero light, like two on it.
14:28
And it’s weird because I’m going like, hey, the litmus test for efficacy is whether it works. And I’ve been studying real violence for 43 years, and most of the stuff people practice and therefore are taught doesn’t work. It works in a demo. Right, in a controlled environment. As does everything. Right? But it doesn’t work when the bad guy’s resisting or starts to fight more importantly. And so, but I’ve been saying this fricking since the 80s.
14:56
And people still are like, no, blah, blah, blah, things. And I’m like, no, this is evidence. You’ve heard the word evidence, right? And so we always say our system is one of the only evidence-based systems out there. In fact, every training iteration we do in our force on force and stuff like this, we’re using body cam, helmet cam, CCTV. We’re saying, listen, we’re gonna do this, but we’re gonna replicate this and we’re gonna do it exactly like this. And how do we know?
15:23
that shit like this happens, because we’re going to watch it happen. This really happened. We’re not going to frigging dance around and go, because I always tell people it’s not what you believe. It’s what we see. Exactly. And what we see with CCTU, evidence based, morally, ethically, legally driven self-defense. Now, you know, we could talk for hours just just on that element. But what what emerged out of that observation in the 80s when I started experimenting in this is a pre fight club. Right.
15:53
We had fight club going on every month. We get together and beat the crap out of each other. We filmed and we, you know, of course we were equipment and stuff like that. But I learned two things. One, when the scenarios were realistic and we didn’t do like douchebag sparring. What I mean is like a lot of fights are just douchebag fights. What that means is it’s like, you’re looking at me, what are you looking at? And then we get in a car and we get in a, you know, I’m talking about like carjacking, a home invasion or like a robbery at an ATM, a rape.
16:21
Those are real fights. So I define a credible confrontation as one you cannot avoid. In other words, it’s happening with or without your involvement. In other words, me involvement, I mean, you’re trying to defuse it or defend. So if you’re deer in the headlights at an ATM, the robber with the knife or the gun is still going to rifle through your pockets and get your shit. If you’re doing this or you’re trying to fight them, there’s a fight. But what I realize in my…
16:51
evolution of scenario training was two universal truths emerged from that. Everybody flinches. It didn’t matter male or female. It didn’t matter rape victim or experienced security at a club. So I remember telling stories like, hey, got this woman over here. She’s, you know, five foot three, 120 pounds, and she was sexually assaulted. And she’s in the seminar. Here’s this guy here. Guy’s got a scar on his nose. She’s got a couple of, you can see, busted nose.
17:21
tough, looking around, very, very kind of like head on a swivel guy. And I could look at those two pictures and if I said to you, you know, you know the story. But if I said to you, without you knowing who I am or without framing it, I said, Marcus, these two people are going to do a force on force scenario in self-defense. They’re going to be attacked by professional role players. You can only bet on one of them to do well. Who are you going to bet on? This guy who’s got the scar on his eye with a broken nose, his head on a swivel and he’s the…
17:50
lead doorman at this club or this woman over here, the sexual assault victims. 99% of people are going, well, obviously the doorman, he’s got 100 street fights in the head on a swing. I’ve seen those guys turn and flinch and cover and power and tap, and I’ve seen a sexual assault victim go fucking ape shit in eight. So a lot of it is this, the people who manage their fear manage to fight. The people who manage their fear manage to fight.
18:21
Now, I need a caveat that by saying that doesn’t guarantee their victory. But I guarantee if you don’t manage your fear and you don’t fight, you guarantee your defeat. Right? And so this is a very subtle thing. So I don’t know if listening to this, let me repeat this again. Kind of told two things here. I’ve seen over a 13 year period, I did seminars for 13 years straight force enforcement. That’s a lot of reps running them.
18:50
It’s a lot of observation, empirical observation. I’ve seen the doorman guy, because we would have the black belt, the boxer, the street fighter, it was like an open underground thing where people would come in, we didn’t advertise it, but you know, word of mouth in Montreal and people come in and do it. We’d have anywhere from 10 or 20 people at each seminar. And it was like the first UFC was in 1993. It was kind of like that. People would come in and want to see, you know, it was boxer versus
19:19
set in your mind. But I was intuitive enough to ask people where I’d say, okay, Marcus, fill out this index card and you had your name on it. And I would do things like this. I go, what is your biggest fear in the street? And if you happen to write down, this is as I got better at this, attacked by two people, one of your scenarios was two people. So I was like, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, that’s why you asked that question.
19:47
And then I would do things like, I would say, what’s your go to move? What’s your favorite move? And if you’d say headbutt or uppercuts, or I would let my role players know. So let’s say you’re from Scotland and you loved headbutting. I would tell them, don’t get close to this guy. What I was trying to do, I was trying to fuck with your comfort zone to inform you and us about fear management and adaptation.
20:17
This was what I was trying to inspire this type of emotional psychological growth in students. What are you learning if I set up a fake fight and let you do your headbutt, you know, with helmets on and you go, oh, that worked again. I needed to, you’re going to love this. We never talked about this. Are you going to love this? And it’s got a big smile on my face. I would always say, Marcus, the term you may be, you may be familiar with. I would always say,
20:45
everything works in a demo. But can you fight from a position of adversity? So you Google the word adversity, you may be able to create a movement behind that. You might be onto something. But I would literally I would say position of adversity. And we would do things we used to have a term, can you fight off balance on purpose? Because in our real confrontation, you’re going to be off balance emotionally, physically and psychologically.
21:14
So we would create drills where you would fight off balance on purpose. And that was specifically goes that really position diversity. So we would do things like weird angles, fight up against the wall, be across the car, start here. I would do things where someone would have a weapon in your hand. And then I’d say, when I say this word, you’ve got to drop that weapon. So they’d be fighting maybe knife, gun. And then I’d say like the code word, which is usually drop the weapon, something really high tech like that.
21:43
And, you know, they’d be in a position like this going, get down on the ground, drop a weapon, right? And now the role player was like, Russian, it’s like that weapon just malfunctioned. You got it. You got injured. We were doing all sorts of things. Now, out of all this training, involved my psycho behavior, my no fear program. I didn’t know it at the time that my research into studying bonds for an aggression would evolve and then export.
22:12
another product out of that all on managing fear. And I didn’t realize in the 80s that that was actually the protective sheet, the membrane, the basha, whatever metaphor you want that connected everything. And so it was when I realized, Oh my God, the people who actually fought, they didn’t have to do well. But I remember that one woman where she’s like on the side hyperventilating, are you okay? You want to sit this one out? Yeah, I got to go. She was doing this for cathartic reasons.
22:43
she chose this instead of therapy, right? And then I’m not saying which one’s better, but she chose, and this whole idea is like, when you understand that fear can be used as a fuel, that the biggest lie or misconception that so many of us have is this idea, and you’ve heard me tell this story with me as a competitive skier, is that I didn’t understand that the adrenaline that I felt raging through my body was
23:12
a biochemical release as my body was preparing for adventure and danger and risk. And it was the anticipation of this high speed event as a ski racer that was creating this. I interpreted the butterflies in my stomach and the nervousness as lack of skill. It didn’t occur to me because no one ever talked about it in the 60s and 70s and they still don’t do it properly with all due respect.
23:39
This idea is like, why do you think if I’m so good, why am I so scared? I’m fucking scared. And it wasn’t like for those of you listening, like a self-sabotage. I’ve heard that it wasn’t self-sabotage because I was showing up for the race. Yeah, I was really good. I was killing it in practice. I jokingly say self-sabotages. I come to the ski hill and there’s no holes and there’s no crowd. And I go, what’s happening? What do you mean? The race was yesterday. Oh, yeah, I must have. I must have wrote down.
24:08
I was trying hard, but I was trying too hard. I couldn’t get that proverbial flow state. But anyways, I didn’t know it at the time when I was really trying to find, I’m hesitating there because I wasn’t trying to find anything. I was following an intuition. Uncovering something. Yeah, I was like an archaeologist. I knew I was digging for something and I knew it was this direction.
24:38
When I did the sucker punch drill in 1987, I got the shit punched out of me by one of my students at the end of the drill. I’m like bleeding, I got a headache, I got a mouse under each eye. And I joke when I do our train to trainer courses, Marcus, I tell people, I go, if I’m teaching the class, I tell it in a different way than when an instructor is sharing the story. And I get much deeper, I go, how many of you would have continued doing a drill where you just kept getting punched in the face really hard? It’s not sparring. So it’s not like we’re sparring and it’s a give and take.
25:07
It’s like a drill where you’re trying to figure something out, but every time, like every couple of seconds, you’re getting like two, three, four punches in the face and you’re getting nailed. And the part of me was going like the guy who teaches who understands complex motor skills, wax on wax on again, this is pre-carotid kids. So I’m making a joke. You know, he does this, you do that. The guy who understood that was going, what the fuck is going on?
25:36
The archaeologist was going, what the hell is going on here? Right? And I kept doing it and I sat there after, we didn’t have digital to replay, I’d VHS. I don’t even know that I needed to look at the video because it was so clear in my mind that something was happening based on proximity. That at a certain distance I could intercept stuff. But I knew the integrity of the practice was that when Warren, who was beating the crap out of me,
26:06
closed, that he was in a realistic distance. I felt that if you and I were going to do this drill and I put on my gloves and put on my mouth guard and I walk towards you, you know, I’d be like, okay, ready? And I’d start to walk up and then I’d see you do something like this going, and I noticed like when he walked towards me, I would blade and then I’d brace and I go, and I go stop. You go, what did I do wrong? I go, no, no, no. I would notice. I would tell if I had a, if I had a superpower.
26:34
it was I had a lot of self-awareness, but it wasn’t like a self-awareness like, aha, I noticed that I’m clairvoyant. I’m, no, it was like, it was the self-awareness of like, I would notice biofeedback changes in my physiology and psychology, and then I would get deeply introspective and wonder what that was and what. So it was like that. I’d stop for an ideal. Hold on a second. So what was going on there? And he goes like,
27:02
know, he’s one of my students, I go, hey coach, did I do that wrong? I go, no man, all you did that was perfect. You walked towards me, but you looked like you were going to punch me, right? He goes, well, I was. I go, okay, cool. Oh, dissonance, situation awareness. But what I was doing is because I’m doing a drill, that energetic telegraphic-ness was amplified because I’m going to fight school studying fighting.
27:28
where if I was on my phone outside and you walked up to me, I would not fucking notice that. I’d be like, yeah, hey, can I hear you? Hey, can I help you man? Yeah, buddy, you got the time. Sure, bang, you know, you get hit because our situation awareness is compromised when we’re in the real world. So that sort of shit fascinated me. A lot of people think I’m like, I’m just a fucking knuckle-draggers like spiting. I have more violence, which is why I study it. And the serendipity of all of this,
27:56
was that out of that emerged or evolved the no fear program, the Spear System, and high gear out of doing the scenarios where it was like everybody flinched, what is that? Let me do some other drills to isolate that. Remember, I noticed the flinch starting in the 80s, but I didn’t develop the Spear System until 87, 88. It was seven years of doing stuff where it was just percolating.
28:23
What’s that? What’s that? Why didn’t they do this? Why didn’t they do this? And I was trying to, I would do drills where I would literally put my hands in my pockets like this and be standing beside one of my students like this, who had gloves on and mouth guard, like this and have him go, you know, man, stand up fucking punching. Where I was trying to figure out like one of the isolation exercises was how close is too close.
28:52
I was doing crazy shit. People would look at it and go, well, why would you stand with your hands in your pocket and you’re there if you’re about to get hit? And I was doing like data. I want to know how it would be no different. When you’re in military, someone said, hey, this Barrett 50 caliber rifle is accurate up to a mile. And you go, what if the guy’s like a mile and an inch away? Well, then the bullets going to drop at his butt. Not exactly, but you get the cartoon example. What is the range of your weapon system? And then
29:23
But I was where everyone was focusing on what they could do. My focus was always, what can my opponent do? Yes. The enemy gets a vote. Yeah. It’s a two way rain quite as the expression goes. And so many people, even today, it’s like, that’s just like, like lip service on a wall and a shoot us. Right. Cause when you look at the training, the training is all, and it’s, this is fun.
29:52
99% of the training around the world is when he does this, you do that. And what that does is it predisposes your brain to wait for that data point, download and fire through, through, you know, the whole magic of the brain and the neurotransmitters shooting up. Like I was talking to you, muscles don’t have memory in the way we want them to. Right? There can be cellular memory, right? You know, like,
30:22
like when you were injured, part of you remembered how to walk, but part of you had to retrain. And so you come off an injury, your brain remembers how to throw a punch, but if you just had elbow surgery or your shoulders went out, your brain sees this, but your body goes ehh. Right? But it picks it up pretty quickly, not like a beginner. So at a cellular level, there may be memory, but I always say the muscles don’t have memory, because everyone uses the word muscle memory. I go…
30:52
I go, no, there’s no muscle memory like you’re talking about. If I put my gun, my CIRC pistol back in my hand and I put my finger on the trigger, and while I’m doing this, you cut my arm off. I was using this example, it messed up with your head. I’m about to shoot you, but you, one of your ninja buddies takes a katana, cuts my arm off, and my arm is down here like this on the table, disconnected from my body, will I still shoot? And you’re like, well, of course not. I go, then there’s no muscle memory.
31:21
And it’s a metaphor for if my physicality is disconnected from my emotionality and my psychological systems, the mind navigates the body. There’s no muscle memory like the way we want it. No awareness, no chance. You need to have situational awareness. I always thought if you have skill with no awareness, you’re still going to lose that point. If you have awareness with no skill, you’re still going to lose that point. Well, and you said so many times that situational awareness is necessary to have self-awareness and vice versa. And I think that’s why you had such self-awareness.
31:51
when you started doing this training because you had so much situational awareness, being aware of what’s going on, feeling the intention of that person’s body language, their looks, et cetera. But as I got older and continued to work on the systems, I realized that self-awareness informs situational awareness. That self-awareness is like a proverbial clean your glasses, right? You have dirty glasses, you don’t realize what you’re looking at. These glasses are self-awareness. You need to go, oh.
32:20
I’m an
32:50
Imagine if it was like a pill that would pop by with spinach and go, Oh, he fucking me get my ass killed. Right. And all of a sudden you’ve got, well, the closest you can get to courage on demand is by changing the relationship with fear. Because if you said, I’m now scared, I’ve got a fear spike. And then part of your brain went, Hey, dude, remember fear can be used as a fuel. Right. And this isn’t like some fun game like, like, Oh, Tony’s come up with a cool.
33:19
metaphor and an acronym and so this no fear is a fuel that and I love this you can’t be brave if you’re not afraid every person who has exhibited demonstrated courage was afraid before and I say this and you heard me say this man if you aren’t afraid before you’re about to do something then what you did didn’t need any courage that’s such a huge right that should be
33:50
If you’ve got a friend who has a death wish, who’s an adrenaline junkie, and he goes, let’s sky guys, you go down and say, no, come on, it’ll be fine. Come on. I hurry up. I gotta go base jumping on fire. Right. And you’re going, this guy’s crazy. Like, you know, I’ll meet you up there. I’m going to free climb the cliff and meet you at the top of the bay. Like, you’re going to this guy, that is not the person to teach me fear management.
34:18
Because he has none. He’s an anomaly. He’s a fucking unicorn. So it’s interesting that you can’t be brave if you’re not afraid. I love that’s great. I’m sharing it for your listeners. That’s right out of our No Fear program, because there’s a lot of people who believe and teach and particularly a lot of people who come from military and law enforcement who are now life coaches, you know, listen, and that’s great if you’re great, but it’s not a light switch for you.
34:47
It’s not a, you’re just going to do what I did and then you’ll be fine. You know? And so what I was getting at, like with your whole program and how this dovetails is I tell people courage is a muscle, like a muscle metaphorically that you can practice courage. How do you do that? Because you don’t want your most courageous act to be the day you saved a bunch of people in an active shooter scenario. How would you practice that? And why would you fucking ever want to experience that? Right.
35:15
So this idea of going, what’s the scariest thing that could happen and go out and kidnap my bandits and they’re taken here and then I saved the day and write over John Wickley here. Okay, like that’s not, this isn’t real. So I tell people like, one of the shifts like in our courses, I’ll go, how many of you always return your food if it’s not comfortable you like without fail? And in a group of 20 or 30 people, there’s usually one or two, maybe three people that go, yeah. And I go, the rest of you don’t.
35:45
And they’re like, everyone smiles because they remember some scene from a movie or they go, I’m not returning that food. I go, why? You don’t know what special sauce is going to come back. And I always joke and everyone laughs and I go, why are you eating at a restaurant where you think people may spitting your food? Maybe that’s another center. Maybe I’d have more people here. And everyone fucking laughs like you just did. But I go, why don’t you return your steak or your salmon or your burger or your salad?
36:14
doesn’t look at all like the picture, tastes like crap, you’re disappointed. You think this waiter or waitress cares that you return the salad? No. I said it’s how you return the salad that creates the problem. If I go, Hey, can you do me a favor? You know, I know they’re probably really busy in the kitchen, everything, but the salmon, I can’t eat it when it’s done like this. It’s overdone. It looks like a taste. Tell the chef the sauce looks great, but it’s just a little bit too overdone for me. Or,
36:44
I go, hey, come here. Obviously you’re not really educated in what you do here. You can smell by the way the salmon is overdone. Fish when it’s overdone gets a different smell. You didn’t smell that. That’s why you’re a waitress. Bring it back to the kitchen, tell the chef, get their shit together and they open up, yo, let’s like, of course it’s happening back there. You’re getting specialist goss. If not stabbed by the chef running out of the fucking, you know.
37:13
I’m giving you obviously too extreme. That’s how you ask. But something important happens before. When I say we’re at dinner the other night, and my wife’s fish ironically was overdone. And I said, like overdone, like you don’t want to eat it. We’ve been waiting a while. The restaurant was busy. She goes, no, I can’t eat this. I said, okay, we’ll get it fixed. She said, no, no, it’s okay. No, no, no, it’s not okay. So we’re at a nice restaurant. It’s 26 bucks. We’ll get it fixed.
37:43
right? And it’s not the money. It’s the fear. If I wasn’t there, she might have said, Oh, you know what, I was I ate too much of the appetizer because she didn’t want to create the confrontation. So everyone listening to this, this is how you practice courage. You recognize I got a fear spike about a confrontation that hasn’t even happened yet. That was the acronym that went viral when Michael Jervin interviewed him. False expectation, expectations
38:13
false fear, F-E-A-R, false expectations appear in real. It’s when I’m visualizing a future event that involves my pain, doom, destruction, a confrontation I’m gonna have. Hasn’t happened yet, but in my mind, it’s happening. And now that is derailing me or debilitating me in the present. And most of us at the safe level, this is the kind of joke I was making in the beginning.
38:42
If I’m taking too long to get dressed because I’m deciding, Oh, I’m going to be in the room today. What shirt should I wear? That sphere of how will I look? How will I be perceived? It’s all of these nonviolent attachments we have. This is all self-awareness. And then it becomes, it doesn’t matter what shirt you have. Then it becomes, well, it’s a podcast. You’ve spent 40 years building your brand. Why not wear your company shirt on? Right? But
39:09
It cascades down that, but I need everyone to listen and understand this. Delt becomes hesitation, hesitation becomes fixation, fixation becomes non-clinical anxiety. We’ve been in situations, not you and I, but we the world have been in situations where I’m like, what’s the matter? Nothing’s wrong. No, no, no, something’s wrong. You’re biting your nails and spinning up. Tomorrow’s my big job interview and I can’t, I’m so worried. I want like, like all of us deal with fear, but we don’t categorize it as I’m being followed
39:40
I’m being attacked for. And so that’s the whole thing that got me super excited after decades of teaching people how to defend themselves was what emerged out of here was a program that can change self doubt and recognizing the link between I am now wasting time because I’m fixating my shit that doesn’t matter or shit that does matter, but I’m…
40:09
oscillating or vacillating, I’m not making a decision because of fear. So it’s like fear on fear and when you step back and realize, oh my God, I’m visualizing a future event that’s debilitating me in the moment and now I’m going to walk into this job interview or this meeting frazzled or my body language, which is 60% of communication, is going to convey a trepidation and it’s energetic. You’ve met people.
40:38
where they might be really skilled, but you go, hmm, something off about that person. Every victim of violence who lived to tell the tale said they had a bad deal and you filled the attack. There’s an energetic telegraphic nest of everything. Iggy Pop said something I love sharing this quote when I do my business mentoring, imagine if desperation were attractive, right? What a genius quote. Imagine if desperation were attractive. Never heard that, obviously. Because
41:07
You might go, let’s say it’s the end of the month and someone goes, dude, sales are down. You better do something. Right. There’s been lots of times where my wife says, hey, you know, we don’t have anything booked for the next two months or this sort of thing. And we’ve got all this shit coming in. I’m like, hey, you need to give me more than like two months notice to my government audience needs three months notice the book shit. You can’t give me two months. Sure. So I just found out.
41:38
And immediately my physiology starts to change because I’m, I got three kids and I got dogs and I got a team, I got a staff, and I’m the business development person. So here I am, a fear management expert in the fear of experiencing physiological changes. And my brain automatically goes, when you get a toothache, you don’t automatically go, you know, I miss my dentist. I’m so glad I got a toothache. I hope, I hope it’s.
42:06
root canal because I haven’t experienced that yet. I’ll wait about 10 days so it gets more infected and so I need an emergency surgery. No, but what do we do? We don’t call the dentist right away. We worry about whether it’s going to be root canal. Like they have the same conversation, but now it’s doubt creates hesitation. Hesitation begins fixation. Fixation becomes non-clinical anxiety and in some places clinical anxiety where people start freaking out about shit.
42:33
And then at the end of the day, think about this, you find out you got the job, you find out that the tests are fine and you’re okay with something else. It was stress. You find out that your kid finally calls you, their phone was stolen or the battery died and they were supposed to check in and you’re immediately, my son called me today and he never calls me. He always texts me. Right. He calls me today. I’m on another call. I text back, I’ll buzz you back. I call him. And while he answers the phone, he’s stretching.
43:04
So he answered the phone going, dad. I freaked me like my nervous system. Like it sounded, it’s literally sounded like, like he was in a trunk of a car being kidnapped and he got his phone. It was like, imagine like a big stretch. Hey dad. It was like, I was like, dude, are you okay? Yeah. Why? I said, dude, hold on a second. Yep. Do you see how the universe played that trick? And I want everyone to know like, here I am. One of the world’s warmest.
43:32
You’re a management experts, pure spike right away. Now, self-awareness, correct it, get control of my breathing, move from sympathetic to parasympathetic, everything’s okay. Self-regulate, right? Everyone here listening, if you drive, has sped by a police officer. This is a great example, great example. Fucking late, come over a hill, oh fuck, oh shit, check your seatbelt, slow down, and then you can see he’s looking down, he’s just finished writing a ticket.
44:02
You slow down, you do that, you check your rear mirror. Three seconds after you realize you’re not gonna get a ticket, what happens to your cardiology? Yeah, boom! It just rushes in. Yeah, so you can feel the physiological effects of fear, even when there’s no danger. It’s perceived danger. It’s perception. And that’s what our mind does all the time. So changing a relationship with fear can change your life. Absolutely agree. It can, it does. It does, it absolutely does.
44:30
That was part one of my interview with martial artists, personal defense, and fear management expert Tony Blower. You can hear part two of the interview on the next episode of Acta Non Verba, where we continue the discussion regarding the effects of fear. We also talk about overcoming adversity and how to practice being more courageous in all areas of life. Tony also opens up candidly about his friendship with Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon Lee, and his interactions with one of the greatest boxers of all time.
