scenes. Team members are working here. I love that. That's awesome. So what's new for you guys? We
talked several months ago. I was super excited to have you on. I'm even more excited now. You're now
episode 103. So that'll be fun. What's new? Yeah, a couple of things, Jackson. We just executed the
first part of a training with a ski and snowboard group. So we're working with a resort up in the
northeast. So it was a lot of fun. You know, it's a different audience than what we're used to because
we've spent a lot of time working with military le and fire rescue, but mostly military. We do
have a big military training camp coming up with the Air Force with their training wing. So I'm
super excited about that. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Calame. I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there. Hey there. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live. I'm your host, Jackson
Calame, founder and CEO of First Class Business. And I'm really excited to have Steven Robinson
on. Now we do this intro the same way almost every time, but this time I accidentally clicked
the button to interrupt Steven. I didn't mean to do that. And I just want to highlight that because
everybody in life makes mistakes. You know, and it's so important to be forgiving of yourself and
centered when things like that happen. I know a lot of entrepreneurs and high performers who
cave under the types of pressure like that. They don't know what to do next. And we're actually
going to be talking to Steven about high performance for leaders, athletes and resilience. And some of
the times when that is hardest is when the pressure is on the most, when you're in the limelight,
when it's time to show up and do things right. How do you recover and how do you move forward?
So while I've got some abilities to do that, he's king of helping people unlock that within
themselves. So I'm excited to dive into that. But before we bring Steven on stage and we talk
about his bio as well, I also want to highlight the sponsors that we have here. It is thanks to
ColdClick, for instance, that we connected with Steven Robinson. We have a LinkedIn automation
set up through a couple of programs. We use Ulink. We use Octopus. You're welcome to look these
brands up and use them yourself, of course. And then Art Hoffman of ColdClick helps us make sure
that we're abiding by the algorithms of LinkedIn itself. He's also somebody I mastermind with.
He's very good at sales and he's very good at messages of attraction. And I'm very good at
messages of nurturing. It's very important for me to take my hat off sometimes or look at other
perspectives and say, you know what, what are other people doing and how can this work to our
benefit? And so we have a great harmony and dynamic for how we go about that. What it does is it
connects me to hundreds of people so that the right people who are in the right position to create new
relationships can move forward more naturally. And then I'm not, I'm not stuck trying to force
somebody into a program. And I see too many business owners stuck doing that because they're
not distributing themselves wide enough. I hope that's helpful for you. In addition, if you're
newer to the game of entrepreneurship, you're getting yourself established. I highly recommend
Simply Fast websites as one of the entities that you either interview or look to as a potential to
start your website. And here's why I spend a ton of money and a ton of time on my websites. When I
got started, I have not used Simply Fast because I don't need it anymore. I've got a team to build
web developers, web designers. I know what I'm doing too in there as well. So we're able to
collaborate and build things that it does cost a lot more money. But if I was just starting out,
knowing that I had an entity that can design websites at 179 bucks, I would have probably
been his most pointed direct difficult client ever to say, Hey, Shane, I need a website. I'll
spend 107 bucks. Do your best. Here's my concept. Let's get going. I'm not spending a dime more
on that. If I could have done that when I'd gotten started, it would have saved me thousands of
dollars and allowed me to focus on greater initiatives. So as we come across different
solutions that we see for leaders and business owners who are trying to move their brands forward,
we always like to share that. Sponsorships is one of the ways that we do that. It's not necessarily
a paid sponsorship like is the case with those two. So again, use that in your evaluation as you
move your brands forward. As far as causes, we also always want to raise awareness for the things
that matter. And the Water Project is my go-to source for everybody who's new listening. I repeat
this story every single time because of how important it is to me. If you've heard it a
hundred times, I hope you make your donation today to the cause or you click and you share
the Water Project so other people can. We're talking about millions of people who don't have
access to clean drinking water. Something that we have access to in abundance every single day.
If you're listening to this podcast, you likely don't have to wonder where you're going to get
your next source of water. These individuals do. We're talking about kids leaving school to go get
water for their community that may not even be safe drinking water. Imagine your kids happen
to go through that. Now what's cool is you get to see the community that you're affecting and how
many people are going to be affected by it and your contribution as it goes directly to that
community. You get to see the story of what's going on and then you get to see the outcome
and the experience of what it's like for them to have their well or their sand dam. And you
get to learn about the process probably more than most people want to know. But I love learning
about the experiences that we contribute to. So if that inspires you to contribute, I will rest
happily tonight. If you have another cause that you want to see supported because there's a lot
of stuff going on in the world, by all means, please drop the link in the comments. We've got
8 billion people to help in this world. And I find that we do that. We work together on the process
and we become aware of the opportunities to serve. So with that said, Stephen Robinson also
has an extensive background in the service of one method or another. And in, in, in what's where I'm
looking for while he did not serve in the military, his background of serving people in the military
had me ask him, you know, wait, did you serve in the military? Not. And he didn't, but he served
leaders and did debriefs with military leaders to ultimately help them overcome the stress that they
deal with and understand how to perform under high stress situations. And as you know, war is
probably the greatest stress there is in life. Maybe that and having a child. I don't know. I
haven't, I haven't pulled the world on that before, but those two dynamics are certainly dynamics
where I can only imagine the type of anxiety that somebody might face. So we're going to, we're
going to bring Stephen on stage here in just a minute. I want to, I wanted to showcase his
bio. We're going to bring that up while we talk though. Stephen, thank you so much for being on
Vision Pros Live. It's awesome to have you. Thank you, Jackson. Appreciate you having me. Glad to be
here. Absolutely. I don't know if you know this, but I used to be on the team for short stint with
Flow Research Collective. Also a high performance group that, that has a very impressive backlog
of the types of clients they've worked with, working with the defense department. The reason
why I mentioned that is not to steal your thunder, but it's to say, when I saw even Pulse and what
you were doing, I was like, whoa, here's another Stephen Kotler. Like here's somebody who's performing
at the greatest levels, who's got actual research to back what he's doing. And I bought, I bought it.
I was like, man, I got to talk to Stephen Robinson and find out more about your solutions and what
you're up to. So I'm, I'm amazed at what you've built and I'm excited to dive in further. But
if you were to quantify for us, who should be listening right now and why should they be listening
to you? You know, anyone, Jackson, who's interested in a higher level of performance, and I think
most of us to some extent are driven to get a lot out of life and our engagement with it.
And I think what many of us don't recognize is the decrements or the things that hold us back from
that. And that can be stressors. Those can be our little red wagon, as I call it, that we're pulling
behind us and anything that holds us back from living not only fully in the present moment,
but moving forward toward our dreams and visions. I think our team and I are good at that,
very good at that in terms of helping people see where they want to go, but also understanding
what tends to hold them back into their own past. Absolutely. And that, that leadership dynamic
then applies to everybody from entrepreneurs to principals of schools, as well as military,
as you mentioned, athletes, and our, our, some of those people who are trying to hit their,
their dynamic best, you know, at particular moments, but they're also striving to give
their best performance in almost every minute of their day. So as we, as we look at what you're
striving to accomplish for those that you serve, what's your vision for them? What do you want to
see them achieve? We call our primary training, Jackson, optimal performance under stress.
And that's really the vision of what we want to help people do is to become more resilient,
more able to move through adversity and reach their highest potential of who they can be.
Good. Okay. Let's expand on that further. So what does that look like for some of these people?
Well, we work in every area of really the human experience ranging from mind, body, emotion,
and spirit, to the sense of who we are at the deepest level inside of ourselves.
We do that through a methodology we call base R and it's a, an acronym, which of course fits
the military audience really well, since we work with them a lot, but it helps bring them into
alignment with these things that many of us might consider more conceptual or esoteric. What is
exactly does it mean to connect with your mind, body, emotion, spirit, that we frame it in a
circular model in which each one of us is in the center of not only who we are, but how we engage
with life. So we work to create a nexus between our internal experience and how we relate to the
external around us. Awesome. Okay. So diving out of the business world a little bit,
you've got a long life ahead of you could be 50 years, a hundred years, five years,
maybe beyond that. What's your vision for you? What do you want to accomplish? What do you want
to see for yourself in the future? Well, I've got a couple of books in process, one in particular,
that's connected to the military special operations world. I have another one on sports mastery that
I've been working on and at least laying out conceptually how those will come together. So
that's maybe a KSI retirement project, but I also anticipate spending a lot more time hiking and
doing a lot of the things that many people, if you're in the entrepreneur world, which I know you are,
often our lives get so consumed by the work and this kind of never ending slog of, I gotta keep
moving in what I do day in and day out. So how do I live in a new way in which I've got free time
on my hands or the ability to do what I want to do. So that's one of my key visions I'd say,
whether it's for the next five or 10 or 20 years or however long I'm here is to really enjoy the
freedom and ambit of being able to move out into the world and do some things that I've had to put
on the shelf for the last 20 or 22 years. Hey, very well said. I mean, we do have a generational
gap a little bit, which I'm grateful for because you got wisdom that I can't, but I don't have
access to. On the flip side, because of the generational gap, I was lucky at a young age,
I grabbed the book, The Four Hour Workweek. Have you heard of it? Oh yeah, for sure. I mean,
so many young entrepreneurs have had the opportunity to read that and to find that new
rich. So when my kids were little, we did a 41 day road trip up the California coastline with them,
went to Disneyland, hit a bunch of beaches and all that. And that balance process,
I'm grateful that we've had kind of more of an opportunity to open our eyes to the reality that
can exist. But at the same time, I'm super glad to hear you say that you're going to be doing more
of that. I also see you as kind of a balanced guy, man. When we were talking, you're in a log cabin.
I mean, it was a beautiful background. So it seems like you've lived your life quite well.
Yeah, it's gone pretty well so far. We live out on some acreage in a very, very quiet valley.
Not quite at the moment outside. We're having the water feature worked onto the entrance to our
business operation. But we spend a lot of time outside, tend to the gardens, we have chickens.
I enjoy being out. I work on prepping the wood for the winter. So I'll even be doing that later
this afternoon. I'll have the axe and splitter and chainsaw out and be working on some wood to
prep for the cold weather ahead. Nice. Well, I want to ask you about that too. So you've got
the appreciation for the hard work and the grind, the corporate culture that America built for a
long time and still is certainly stable. And I guess it's stable, it's strong and performing.
The question I have for you is how did you manage to escape that grind to a degree where you did
have a balance? And you've prioritized some of these things. Most people don't know what a
chicken looks like these days, let alone raise them. And then you got this water feature that
you're building your house. There's some depth to your design and your purpose of branding,
your identity. Where does that come from? A lot of what we teach, Jackson, is built around
performance and recovery. And I discovered this years ago, I was a tennis professional for many
years and played pro tennis for a while. And what I didn't realize at the time and wish I had known
is while I was super focused on getting stronger, faster, better, everything around how to perform
better on the court, I also did a lot with martial arts and was fascinated by, you know,
how do you become an early MMA fighter even before there was such thing as MMA? Oh, yeah.
And I was so into the performance side, I didn't realize how big the recovery side is.
And so we met the neurologist who worked with us for about 18 years. I didn't really understand
it at the level of the nervous system. How do you reset and recover? And over the years, I've
started to realize, and especially when I met my wife, Elizabeth, and we started to work together,
we said, hey, can we develop a model that reflects performance and recovery? And that's really what
we've done. And so I do my best to live that as a lifestyle in terms of backward planning my sleep,
looking for those intermittent rests during the day so I am actually functionally recovering,
so I'm ready for the next thing. Working with nutrition, of course, hydration, you mentioned
the Pure Water Project. I mean, I think that's such a great, great thing to tie into because
most people don't realize how important water is. Or even if we're aware of it on a knowledge level,
we don't have an understanding level that having congruence with the fluids that we drink and that
we're drinking pure clean water and plenty of it is hugely important to human health.
But when we're dehydrated, it actually is a stressor. And we have enough stress already.
So I can be dehydrated all the time. I can tell how many people are dehydrated out there.
Yeah, that soda and that energy drink may not be the best go-to. But I'm not here to judge,
just here to educate. And that's really what it's all about too. So it's funny,
one, I've never met somebody who can say I'm a pro tennis player and I'm also a professional UFC
fighter. That's cool. Okay, you're not a professional UFC fighter perhaps, but those dynamics don't
often mix together. That's fun. So two, you reminded me of a company that I am very much
a passionate fan of called Love Every. And Love Every is a, they send you these boxes for your
children at different ages. And I'm not going to go down that point, but one of the things that
they've very focused on the science of becoming a better parent. You want to make a parent mad,
tell them how to do their job. You know, people that tell them they're not doing a good enough
job as a parent. But Love Every has this amazing capability of helping you see how much you have to
learn in that role of parenthood in very subtle ways. And it makes you go like, oh my gosh,
I wish I had thought of that. Things like, and I'm going to give one example. When you're potty
training your child, putting the waterproof mat down first, right? And then of course the
bed sheet over it, but then doing it again, putting the next one on. That way, if in the
middle of the night, the child has an accident, you're not stressed getting out to exchange all
of them. You just take the layer off and you let them sleep on the next layer below that. I was
like, oh my goodness, four children. If I had thought about that four children ago, I would
have been so much more prepared to handle the stresses of fatherhood. I mentioned that because
your brand, while it's more adult level, you're helping people unlock these hidden secrets and
gems of high performance that are probably somewhat, oh my gosh, why didn't I think of that?
But they're life changing. Do you mind walking me through a couple of those?
Yeah. Well, first and foremost, I mean, I think you hit a couple of things in potty training your
child because really I think to unlock a higher level of performance and human potential,
you almost need to view the brain from the standpoint of the limbic system, which is the
mid or emotional brain and the brain stem, much like you're training a dog or you're working with
a child because that little child up till seven years old is primarily more of a midbrain and
brain stem than they are a fully functioning neocortex, the upper part of the brain. And that
doesn't really come online powerfully until about age seven. And so seven to 12, it explodes and it
starts to prune back a little bit, even though by the time they're 14, they think they know all that
can be known and more than you'll ever know. But the reason I bring that in, we're actually working
with some military working dog handlers coming up down in Texas through the Air Force. And one of
the themes that we're going to hit hard with them is that in order to make positive changes,
you need to understand that you have to train your brain as though you're training a canine
because this midbrain and lower brain function very similarly to that. And part of the problem
for us as human beings is that our subconscious, essentially our body in relationship to these
lower brain centers often is referring us to the past. So it's like the dog who maybe somebody
beat that dog and they had a beard and a hat. Well, from then on, their brain is so devoted
to beard and a hat equals pain or threat, they're going to be ready to bark or run or whatever.
And we're the same way. A lot of our patterning is built through our earlier life experiences that
we're often stuck in. So how do we get out of those? And a lot of that is coming back into the
present moment. Because you're talking about with the potty training is having consistency
and showing up and saying, I'm putting the sheet down again, I'm setting myself up and that child
up for success. And if you think of your brain in that way, this is part of our internal child,
if you will, that we're coaching it and retraining it so it's not stuck back there. But it's now
right here saying, I act with power moving forward and who I am now and what I'm claiming.
That's awesome. And thanks for sticking with the analogy and the concept as well. I appreciate
that. There's some personal benefits in there for me. Another thing that you talked about there was
training your brain like you train a canine or like you train a dog. And what I think some people
have a hard time hearing in that, or when you talk about training a child, I've met a lot of people
throughout my career who say, don't treat me like a child. You know, or say you talk to me like I'm
a child. And it's a it's a hard reality for me to deal with. I've learned to become more diplomatic
with how I respond to that. But I'd love your I'd love to know if you're on the same page with me,
or if you feel the opposite. Never hesitate to argue with me, Steven, please, of course. And
in in relation to this, I've always thought, I'm not I'm not training this person like a child.
This is how I would want to talk to you. If I was learning these same concepts. I mean, I'm
I'm nurturing through this process. And some people have a very strong resistance to that.
But you've you've kind of hit it head on. I'm like, hey, if I need to learn something,
and it's easier to learn it, because you're telling me to sit and stand and sit and stand
there or shake hands like that sounds like there's there's different training dynamics that are
appropriate for different types of learning. Is that correct? Or am I off base? Oh, no, 100%.
I think that many of us don't understand how we learn. And so one of the things we seek to do in
training is help people decipher what's my learning style. You know, am I more auditory,
more kinesthetic tactile, I know a lot of people have said, well, the whole VAK visual auditory
kinesthetic thing is out the window. But at least I found as an athlete, and someone who's been in
the human performance space a long time, for me, having some level of understanding of how I relate
to and connect to learning different types of information, you know, if it's something that
requires a very strong visual sense, and I'm studying something that requires visual focus,
I do need to activate my visual centers, right. But at the same time, if it has a physical aspect,
for me, I'm very kinesthetically oriented, so I get a body feeling for it. And I would often say
to people, I'm getting a feel for it. And so I learned over the years of coaching, I would listen
to people's cues and say, you know, they might say, I didn't understand that. Can you say it again?
Or what I hear you saying is, or I'm starting to get a feel for this now, or I'm not feeling it yet.
So things like that, or if they were visual, I don't see what you mean. So
Or if they sound audio oriented, that sounds nice to me. Yeah, exactly. That rings a bell.
And it's sometimes hard to pick those up, unless you're training and training yourself to listen
to the cues that people give you. Yeah. And just to riff on that, you know, I think one of the
places people will resist sometimes is when they were growing up, they heard or saw or whatever.
And a lot of times, the example the adult may have given them was not in their learning style.
So for them, they say, you're treating me like a child, but they were being spoken to or shown
something and they couldn't relate to it in the style of teaching or conveyance that was coming
their way. Correct. Right. And it's our responsibility then as leaders to be able to recognize that and
adjust as well so that we can ultimately communicate and achieve the objective at hand, which is usually
not, I hope it's not to cause harm. Our intent is usually to help build people up. So that's very
helpful. Thank you for that. Now, we're going to dive in for some of the visionaries who are
listening in. We love to dive into the worst business experiences that you've ever had.
Everybody's had those types of moments that are difficult. You're welcome to branch outside of
business. But also, if you have one related to even pulse and growth, feel free to double down.
I'll let you choose. Okay. Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I think the most difficult or
challenging worst business experiences I've had had to do with selection of some personnel early on
and basically having people come in who were on their face, perhaps a decent fit, but not really
recognizing just because someone showed up and they had a certain set of skills that they were
the right person for the position. And, you know, I think when you surround yourselves with great
people, but you also have people who fit the culture of the organization, but you can also
start to unpack, these are some of the things that might be problematic with this particular
individual or group of individuals working in that capacity in the company. That can be a real
problem set. And especially in this particular set of circumstances that I'm referencing,
it had to do with the delivery of a large scale contract that also was problematic in itself,
which tended to bring out the worst in everybody. You know, it is, it's a classic for a company in
the resilience business. There are people who had lower resilience because of some of the roles they
were in, faced with situations that were high adversity that required even more resilience.
And then some rugs being pulled out from under us from the customer at the same time,
it made for complete disaster in certain ways. And yet we still got through it and got great
marks from our end users. Wow. So it was difficult. It was the worst and the best at the same time in
many ways. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny, some of the people who come on and share their
worst leads to them uncovering their best. Cause they realized they've got the spread years. It's
funny. You actually had it, y'all made it through the end, much like a fourth quarter that goes into
double over time. You know, and then it's like, man, this really sucks. But if you went on the
other end, like, cool, you know, we, we, we finished the job. That's fun. Any, any other worst
business experiences that you feel prompted to share, or you want to dive into the best experience
that you've had thus far? Yeah. You know, first in bridging the gap between that particular
experience, that was 14 years ago, we've had a lot of water under the bridge. You know, I would say
that the single greatest challenge time that was also kind of a worst experience was having gone
through that process that I'm talking about, this was in 2009, 2010, but coming out of that,
not really having the resources to rebound very effectively at that point, that made for a
tremendously challenging couple of years after that. The best part of that though, as it turns
out, was that made us even more resilient. And then through the process, we're now kind of 22
years to overnight success, the company's doing the best it's ever done. And, you know, I'd say,
in the last couple of years, we've had some singular great trainings that stand out for me.
And honestly, the one I'm most excited about is the one we have coming up, which is often the case
for me, I'm always excited about what's next and bringing it and getting myself and the team really
energized to go out and deliver that. And it's coming up just in a few weeks right after
Thanksgiving. So that's what I'm anticipating is my next best experience. That's awesome.
Always good when those are on the horizon already. And you're not in the middle of the hurricane
wondering when it's going to end. But those hurricanes often do give us new strengths
that we're unaware of. And so you reminded me of a story I haven't thought of in years
that was so impactful on me. And it was about the trees on the north side of the mountain.
Have you heard of that? I've not. Oh, man. The trees on the north side of the mountain
in this story were the ones that faced all of the harsh conditions of the wind and all of the,
you know, the storms and how they came in, the trees on the other side of the mountain were
extremely weak and feeble because they didn't face adversity at all. So when the craftsmen would
seek this type of wood to create tables and whatever furniture they wanted to, those are the
trees that they went for because they had built a strength set due to the things they had to
overcome and accomplish. Well, we're no different human beings. When we go through adversities,
we gain strengths that allow us to then utilize that strength for our future challenges. So
you went through that. My business has certainly gone through that. And it is humbling to
take a breath and take a step back and say, OK, like, what have we learned in this process? Why
have we learned it? How can we utilize this to move forward? So on that note, that's my powerful
lesson. What powerful lesson would you share with visionaries? What can they learn from your
experience? And let's pretend that this is the last lesson that you could give us. What would it be,
Stephen? Well, I think it's bring it with everything you've got. When I went to Europe
the first time in 1985, and then I went back in 88 to play tennis, I was way out of my league
and over my head in terms of who I ended up competing against. And it was interesting. I had
set the goal coming out of college. I said, I want to be able to compete against players in the top
500 in the world. Now, notice I didn't set the goal to defeat players at that level or to
win tournaments over players at 300 or 400 in the world or whatever. But I set a general goal to
play and compete at that level. And that's exactly what I did. But the cool part, at least for me,
was that I went over there and I gave it everything I had for a couple of summers, 85 and 88.
And I became a much better player, actually not until about 89, 90, 91, 92 in that range. I became
much better. And it was largely because I was tempered by going over and playing against the
level of competition that was far beyond anything I'd ever played before. And while I got my butt
handed to me all over Europe many times, in the process, and over the next several years, I became
a much stronger player through it. And I would encourage anybody else who's a visionary out there
not to be afraid of your vision. And I think we've held it well. I've held it well. I think we've
held it well. I've held it well with Evenpulse in terms of starting this 22 years ago. And here we
are 22 years later. And we're, as I said earlier, hitting the overnight success. So being willing
and able to have the tenacity to hold on to your vision is a big deal. And a lot of people, I think,
give up too easily. And in this day and age of, you know, Gen Y, Gen I pad saying, I want instant
life and like Neo, I want to know Kung Fu like that or the episode of Chuck. It's like, well,
it'd be great if we can just neural link that and you got it. But I can tell you, from at least my
perspective, and somebody who's done some things fairly well, there's not any satisfaction in not
working for it. If you just get handed the prize for doing nothing, it's like, okay, we've seen
legions of people who've won, you know, won lotteries who lose the money very quickly, because
they're not ready to work with that level of energy and affluence. And the people who've worked
hard for it, they usually have much greater appreciation of the people around them who also
put in energy and effort, but also the reception of what they've received when they've worked that
hard. Well said. Powerful lesson. We got bringing it with everything that you got and stick with it.
You know, those are excellent principles. And knowing that as people, you may not, if you're
going through a lot of adversity right now, you're going to want to disagree with me, but we want
to adversity as human beings. We crave it more than we realize. And because it does condition us,
but let's just take soccer as an example. One sport, right? If you go out to the soccer field
and you're going to play and you're playing all alone and there's nobody, no goalie in front of
you, and you kick the ball into the net, the older you are, the more boring that sounds.
Because there's nothing there to prevent you from scoring. Right? Yeah, you can make as many goals
as you want. You can go tell your friends about it. And that's fun when you're two, or when you're
four years old, but eventually you realize that, no, the greatest satisfaction has come when you
actually overcome something and build something of significance. Your story about Europe, did you
ever face a moment where towards the end of the game or the end of a match that you were losing,
or maybe it was close, you're close to winning. I'm going to shift that gear. You're close to
winning, but you're intimidated by your competition and you quit inside, internally. Did you ever face
that? I'd say probably more than once. I just basically bagged out of matches. Those were
generally earlier than playing in Europe, but I can't tell you, I played one match against a guy
who was 125 in the world in a French prize money tournament. And I actually played great. It was
the best I had played the entire summer. I lost 6-2, 6-2, winning four games. I mean, granted, 125
in the world. I felt pretty good about winning four games, but he just blew me off the court.
Like whenever he wanted to, I could have him pinned deep in the backhand corner, moving backwards on
his back foot, three, four, five feet behind the baseline. Need to light one up at deuce down the
line into the corner. And it's like, oh, well, I guess that's why he's 125 in the world and I'm not.
Right. So in those moments where maybe that defeated you, what was the difference? What were
you doing before that experience or during that experience that unlocked you and allowed you to
do what you just said, where you said, bring it with everything you got? What are the disciplines
that you teed yourself up with? Well, I think having an attitude of learning, constantly learning
is so important, which of course means that's an open loop. If you're in a closed loop, you're over
here where I'm in this box. I live over here because I do what I do, but I'm not taking in
new information or learning or growing. And I think when I say bring it with everything you've
got, you take what you've marshaled already in your life and you go forward with that learning
attitude of continuing to expand your arsenal. My wife just did a workshop this last weekend
on mastering public speaking and doing all sorts of things around how do you develop your internal
process to grow yourself to a different level. And I was super happy for her to get a couple of days
with like-minded people, like-minded women who are working in that same process.
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a coach. There's actually a Netflix documentary on it.
Tennis coach Patrick Moratoglu. I think I said his name right. We might have talked about this
last time. I'm going to drop this in the comments for people. Maybe Patrick will see and reach out
to you and be like, Hey, Steven, well done on the tennis court. But he talks about that. I don't
remember what term he used, but the one we were just talking about where his players just start
to give up and tank in the process. Well, there's a term for that in corporate and it's called quiet
quitting. It's been taking off and it's one of those things that people are even starting to
kind of celebrate within themselves and they're celebrating the destruction of their own virtue
and ethics. And it saddens me. It makes me really like, Whoa, like they don't, you're not quitting
on your company. You're quitting on yourself. And how damaging can that be for somebody?
As we shift gears into unlocking resilience and that high performance for leaders and athletes,
I'd love to just kind of correlate the two and hear your thoughts on both ends of the spectrum.
Let's help. I would say the masses tend to gear towards giving up on situations where the
resilience could save them, move them forward. But then let's shift gears, of course, into if
you're in that high performance territory and you want to take it up a notch, what do you do?
Feel free, Steven, take the mic from me and go whichever direction you want.
Yeah, I think first and foremost, it's saying, okay, what would it be like if, and if I brought
everything I had to this and I stay with it, what gains will I realize? What experiences can I have
and what will I provide to this organization or to the people I'm serving that's going to make a
change for them? When I look at kind of the broad brush of resilience, I think a lot of people are
not necessarily willing to embrace the discomfort of what it takes to go for a higher level. It's
maybe a little bit easier for entrepreneurs or at least entrepreneurs who are successful because
they do embrace that. And it is uncomfortable, as you know, if you're a visionary and you say,
okay, this is where I'm going in this field, but maybe somebody's blazed that trail before and you
can use them as a model or you can even talk to them and say, what would you do if? But maybe
somebody hasn't blazed the trail you've been on. Like for us, we brought together a human performance
and stress resilience package, this neurophysiologically oriented, and nobody had
ever done anything quite like it. And we're still really unusual to the point I'd say unique in the
marketplace as a result. It's created a kind of a conundrum because one side of it is it's not as
easy to sell that because people like they look at it and they go, what is this? We've never seen it
before. So it's welcome to the blue ocean, Steven. Yeah, yeah, it's a big blue ocean out there. And
people say, well, you know, this, this is something I can't quite describe, but I like it.
Yes. Yeah. Well, you'll, you'll overcome that. And that, you know, that's that it's going to require
a lot of resilience, but a lot of, for those visionaries who are out there, if you're diving
into the blue ocean, I mean, you're diving into a danger zone because you're the only one in it.
Yeah. You know, you have to get everybody over there. The red ocean is what, you know, a lot of
people teach to get out of, but the beauty of the beauty of a red ocean where everybody's already at
is you just have to stand out and, and be the best option and, or one of the best options. And if you
are, people will constantly gravitate towards you, but there's a, there's a tremendous value.
We're, we're also a blue ocean company. There's a tremendous value in, in paving the way for a
legacy where, you know, this path is going to be a dramatic difference in change for the lives of
those who follow it. And, you know, you're pioneering something important. So let's try to
break that down for people who don't understand it. What, what is it that makes Evenpulse so
important? And, you know, what, what does the process look like from saying, hi, Stephen, how
are you doing? And, and what do you do? How do we get started with you? What does that look like?
You know, first, let me just frame the larger rap of it. And we're teaching both stress
resilience skills. So how to, how to respond to life with perhaps less stress, or even when it is
very negatively stressful, how do you move through that deal with the adversity? And then on the
other side, how do you perform at your best? So we, we follow a theme of performance and recovery
as two sides of one coin, as I was talking about earlier with Elizabeth. The process we use, we,
we do an intake process, we develop a relationship with the customer. And generally, much like a lot
of people who would follow your show, we tend to find customers who are visionary oriented.
They see something that is not there, and they gravitate toward our blue ocean product as a
result, because they say, this isn't an existence within our organization or within our market
sphere. How do we get that? The next thing we do is we look for how can we serve that particular
market and area of interest. So I'll just give you an example. In the military, we've done a lot of
work with security forces in the Air Force. And one of the things that they have to do, they carry
a gun for a living because they're essentially sort of military police, but also outside the
wire, they do the light infantry mission. So for all intents and purposes in the Air Force,
they're kind of like a light infantry operation combination with KSI cop. But they carry a gun
for a living, so they got to be able to shoot. So we've adapted our training, teaching them how
to shoot better using self-regulation skills, but then building off that saying, hey, and become
you've learned these skills, you can apply them over here in communication with the people on your
staff. You can apply them over here in writing more effective reports or dealing with a domestic
disturbance situation. You can use them over here with your family members. Maybe one of your
children or your spouse has an issue going on. And so we help them see that what they're learning
in that one discrete area has applications everywhere else in their life as well.
In terms of delivery, we usually go to the location or we'll do a virtual live presentation.
We do have our courses available online as well. We often will tie that together as a blended
learning package so that that organization customer can have us come in person, perhaps
work with certain segments of the target population online, do some follow on coaching,
and then giving them access and tracking their progress through the
online courseware as well, and even giving them a chance to take the course again at the end so
that they can get a certification online after, say, a year's time.
Absolutely. I saw the amount of investment you guys made in the private research study as well,
which intrigues me. I need to take the time to actually dive in and look at that myself. But
there's a lot of companies right now, especially in the US, that are doing a lot of research.
A lot of companies right now is just talking to a marketer. She works with a lot of very large
companies. She said a lot of companies have been cutting their R&D process completely out,
and they haven't been putting any budget towards that process. As I talked to her about the
budgets that they should be putting towards it, she said $10,000 per month. I'm sorry,
$10,000 per year was what she said towards their R&D. You might want to find that research.
What went into it? How much did you guys spend on it? What do you know about those details?
Or is that a better question for Elizabeth? You can ask me. I was intimately involved in
the whole thing. Fortunately for us, we did not have to lay out the funds to do the study.
The Department of Defense wanted to find out if our training would confer the benefits that
we thought it did, which would be increasing resilience and improving a sense of well-being,
reducing stress, knocking down anxiety and depression, improving communication, etc.
What they found was exactly that. It was almost a three-year, $3 million study. It was run out of
part of the Pentagon. Three-year, $3 million study. I think it was actually about $3.3 million total
that they spent on the research. How old were you at the time? Let's see. I was 48. Okay. I want to
quantify this real quick because there's lots of 18-year-old and 14-year-old entrepreneurs out there.
Steven, you didn't pay the $3 million, but that was about 30 years of preparation
to put yourself in a position where that company, that government agency said,
you're the guy, you're the gal, y'all are the people. We want to have run this. Your investment
in terms of longevity and everything you've built up to that point is something that I think more
people that are listening need to hear. Go ahead and continue, please, now that we've established
that base. Yeah. Well, thank you on that. When we set out to do the project, we knew it was going to
be fraught with peril and challenges. What we didn't know is that this part of the military was
actually working on their own resilience and stress resilience human performance program at the same
time. We ran into that as a bit of a challenge point, but also just the pressure of delivering
it. I think we were already about $50,000, $60,000 out of pocket just in preparing for it. We bought
manuals and bought plane tickets for all the team members, had everything set up to go, and the
contract was going sideways. It hadn't even been signed yet, leading up to two days before the
contract was set to start. It actually got signed on a Saturday and started on a Monday. It was
enormously challenging. It was a conundrum or a sort of a paradox being in the resilience business
and having so much stress and having our resilience challenged on every level.
By the time we got through it, the feedback from the soldiers was incredible. The researchers were
quite surprised at how well they received it. But then as the data began to come in, and they also
did data with them downrange while they were overseas, they said, well, these people are
really using what you guys taught. In fact, about 40% of the soldiers said they used the training
every day in theater. We had one four-hour block of instruction with each company of soldiers.
We rotated them through this kind of fast-moving, hard-hitting process, and we had a bunch of
our service spec ops people on our team. It made for an interesting dynamic. But the real
gratitude I had at the end of each day was people coming up and saying, thank you, this really made
a difference. I really thought this was going to suck, but it turned out to be good. We heard that
coming a few times with people calling their wives and actually saying that on the phone.
Of course, absolutely. That's also sometimes very helpful when you think a movie is going to be
awful and you get there and you're like, hey, that was way good. Why? Because, well, you thought it
was going to be awful. So that's helpful too. But I can imagine sitting in a class is not everybody's
favorite thing to do. Mind, body, emotion, and spirit. Last thing we'll cover. Out of those
options, and when it comes to resilience, what are some of the surprises, if you don't mind,
in your program that key takeaways somebody might learn to help their life move forward?
Let's try to unpackage one of those right now. Are you okay with that?
Oh yeah. Yeah. First and foremost, seeing it as an integrated deal, your body, mind, access,
and your emotional spiritual connection, these four areas are operating all the time. We have
an emotional response to life, to our children, to the experiences we have. There is a sense of
spirit or that animation that lights up our relationship to things. We can feel spirited or
dispirited or what have you. A lot of different ways we can look at that. But one of the ways I
look at spirit in relationship to the body is the Latin etymology spiritus, spiritus is breath.
And so if we can become more attuned to the breath, we've got a direct connection between
our physical presence and what we think of as spirit. And the ancients even thought of it that
way, that when the spirit left the body, that was sort of our animation leaving us. Spiro,
spirari, spirui, spiritus from Latin. And if you understand that and really dial into expire and
inspire, those terms having to do with breathing, you get this grounding in your physical form.
I think the physical is so important. And one of the things that makes Evenpulse unusual or maybe
even unique is we highlight the somatic or physical aspects of how all these things can
come to take roost in the body. And that was easy for me as not only a tennis player but a fitness
trainer and martial arts guy. I realized for me, I do my best to live in this, in my body.
But if we start to understand how we breathe influences our body, what we think about and
whether we have positive thought patterns, what we focus on influences how we inhabit the body,
including our posture. If we feel inspired, the chest opens up, the shoulders go back.
If our emotions are heavy, we feel heavy in the body. So if we keep coming back to that,
it helps us recognize too that the body is also a repository of most of your past memories.
So when we have stresses and traumas from our past, they can weigh us down to the point that
they show up in our body. There's tension in our back, maybe irritable gut syndromes,
all sorts of different manifestations. And if we address it there, we're not only addressing
the past, which helps us come into the present, but we can use the body itself as a portal for
a higher level of wisdom. Wow. I'm going to try to get this typed for everybody because oops,
and I almost made a little spelling mistake. There we go. Because that quote, our body is a repository
of our past memories, that's a very, very good imagery for the archive that it is. And like any
physical archive, there's going to be, you can weigh it down. You can put it into a position where
that's, it's not necessarily organized in a fashion that helps. And I've definitely heard some studies
on that process, but you also blew my mind a little bit in relation to espritu, or spirit,
and breath, and how sometimes we can leverage our vernacular in ways that is not effective,
that just convolutes with semantics, right? Blah, blah, blah. But the purpose of language is to
better understand our relevance in the present moment, right? And where we actually are in the
universe. And when you unlock depths of like, that hit me so hard because I don't think I've
stopped to think about how spirit and breath go together. And now I can be more intentional.
When I take a breath, I remember my spirit and my spiritual connection. And that little bitty
superpower, I already know it can have a dynamic effect on my life. Then you talked about the
expire in terms of breathing and inspiration, or inspiring, like that makes a lot of sense to me
too. So it was just like a number of bright lights just went off in my head and heart.
And I appreciate you for that. Beautiful. And let me tell you one other thing, if I might.
Even your heart rate variability is tied into that. So if I inhale, look at me raising up,
my chest lifts, my shoulders go up. So I'm filling that whole repository. I'm filled with
life itself. This is what's keeping us alive in this physical form. And when I let it out,
that dropping feeling, but it's also a sigh of relief. Like when you've put your foot into a
hot tub on a cold day, or in a cool pool on a hot day. But when we do that, every time you inhale,
your heart rate speeds up. So that's your sympathetic nervous system engaging. And every
time you exhale, your heart rate slows down. So you fluctuate in these waves, your heart rate
fluctuate in these waves. And most of us think of our heart rate as a steady thing, make a well,
I'm pretty fit and I'm at 62 beats per minute. But if you look at it on a heart rate variability
by a feedback mechanism, you'll see it flow up and you might go up to 75. And then down into the
50s or upper 40s. Somebody who's very fit and very healthy, we'll have wide smooth fluctuations of
their heart rate variability. And that's a measure of the autonomic nervous systems. So the more we
can help people understand that, and even start to become their own biofeedback device. That's one
of our goals in training. Huge. That's huge. And I was just watching a really bad movie last night,
actually. But not bad in terms of like horribly created, just kind of a violent movie. But the
shooter in the movie is waiting for his heartbeat to get to below 60 beats per minute in order to
take a shot. And he knows that's when he needs to take in order for XYZ. He explains it in the movie.
It's very, very crafty and ingenious how they document the process. But same thing with
somebody shooting a free throw. These elite athletes often take a breath in order to and take
some time and they have their rhythms that they follow. But if we can learn to pay attention to
that and get the training and guidance of how to do that for yourself in the moments where you need
it, your performance is bound to improve as you center yourself on your strengths. So awesome,
Stephen. That was great. I look forward to having Elizabeth on the show as well. So we're going to
have Stephen's co-founder and spouse too, correct? Correct. Yes. Yes. On the show. And she's going to
be talking to us about the recovery process more than the high performance process, which is equally
valuable and important. And I just want to say, I love the way that you honored her when we first
met. It's been a couple of months. So the exact memory is fuzzy, but the feeling is not. The
feeling of mutual respect and partnership was super high. And I was just like, wow, I cannot
wait to have this dynamic do on my show. So is there anything final thoughts you'd like to share
before we wrap up? Yeah, I can say Elizabeth inspires me every day. And I think the reason
we're a good partnership, a great partnership as a husband and wife team is we not only compliment
each other with the performance and recovery, but we constantly remind each other and hold each other
accountable around the things that we say are important. That's amazing. Stephen, send her my
regards, please. And Vision Pros, we're so happy to have you on. If you have any questions, we'll
always have in the show notes a way to connect to Stephen and find out about his programs more.
Also, feel free to leave comments for any questions that you have. We'll make sure to forward those to
Stephen so he can see them. And everybody who's out there that wants to share their vision,
don't hesitate to apply as well. Those links are also on the bottom. Give yourself a shot. As Stephen
said, bring it with everything you got. And we'll be excited to host you on Vision Pros Live.
Y'all take care, everybody. Have a great weekend. Thank you, Jackson. Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more
and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving