JC: What were you afraid was going to happen? What was that based in? I think this really speaks to so many people who have that fear. It’s that ultimate rejection if people don’t agree with what I’m doing or people don’t like what I’m doing. 

JW: It was this mob mentality belief. I had this image and this whole thought that there’d be a mob of people that would hate me and hunt me down with pitchforks and torches. Not even joking. All of a sudden there’d be a club of people dedicated to hating me and taking me down. If you wanna go super woo with me for a minute, I’ve actually been told that that type of stuff happened to me in past lives by multiple people, so when I hear it more than once It sounds a little interesting. That was always just something that was really scary to me, that a bunch of people would gang up on me. Power of numbers.

Jen, when I freed myself from that fear, it the most freeing thing for me ever. If you’re not a sociopath, I think we’re just so imprisoned by the bars of our prison.

The approval of others.

The opinions of others.

The need to be liked.

The need to be loved.

The need to be accepted.

At what cost and why do we make this so important? Why do we need everyone else’s love, approval, appreciation, and acceptance and we treat ourselves like sh*t? When it’s so the opposite! The only person’s opinion that matters is yours. I know the sounds like a cliche Hallmark card, but it’s so true. When you start to go really down the rabbit hole and you realize that what anyone says about you is just a reflection of yourself… that really gives you a little mind trip. 

JC: Yeah, it only resonates for you and triggers you if it’s something that you believe. I remember reading The Voice of Knowledge and it was talking about how if somebody comes and touches your skin, it’ll feel nice. That physical touch is nice. But if you have a gaping open wound on your skin and somebody rakes their hand across it, it’s this horrendous amount of pain. He was using that to speak to the emotional body and that when someone triggers something, they don’t even know they’re triggering it because it’s something that you’re actually holding onto and it’s creating that pain for you. 

JW: Here’s here’s an example just to get really groundless because… what a beautiful metaphor! We’re running this ad right now and I know that when I go look at the comments for this ad, there’s gonna be some people that want to call me names, but that was intentional and it was by design.

Something like accomplishment and external success isn’t stuff that’s important to me. I feel like I have to talk about it a little because people want to listen to people that are more successful and I want people to hear my message. I’ve been doing this for 12 years and we did the math recently and I think total I’ve done about 35 million generated over that time. That’s total sales, it’s not like I have 35 million sitting in the bank or anything like that. It’s over a 12 year period. We employ a team of 16 people today. We have all of these millions of views on YouTube and podcasts and done some cool stuff.

I don’t sit here and doubt my success, but I also define my own success, so I don’t need an external validation for it.

A great example of this is if someone says, “You’re a scammer.” If I was starting out and this was my first ad, I think I would get really triggered by something like that because I’m probably doubting myself and saying, “Who am I to be doing this? Am I just a scam? I feel like a fraud!” I hear that all the time. There’s none of that within me. We have a person on our team whose primary job every week is to collect every testimonial from all of our groups. Just this last week alone (this is not to brag – it’s just a really cool thing) he collected 17 testimonials from our community, of paying customers! It was awesome. You get that feedback and you get that reinforcement, so there’s no wound there of, “Yeah, I’m a scammer!”

There wasn’t a reaction. Okay… cool… peace.

JC: And then you were trolling them right back and it was absolutely hilarious! That was actually getting people to learn more, and through your modeling, getting to see who you are, your sense of humor, and that you don’t take things seriously, whereas most people would be freaking out about that. It just gave you even more influence over the people who actually do want to work with you, which I think is so beautiful. 

JW: The whole ad was about a free e-book I created called Hardwired for Entrepreneurship. Talk about downloads and inspiration… this thing came to me so fast that it scared me in that I wrote it so fast and I was four hours in and I like, “Where have I been?!” I wasn’t done with it but I took a break and I couldn’t go back to it. I was too afraid that I wouldn’t be able to finish it and it wouldn’t be good enough, so resistance came up.

The whole message there was (and this is my hypothesis that I’m making) is that why so many people struggle with being an entrepreneur is that, in the most simplistic sense, we’re not wired for it.

What do we mean by wiring?

It’s our programming and our belief system.

We’ve been conditioned and trained to be good little hardworking, permission-seeking employees… and entrepreneurship is the antithesis to that.

You have to unlearn and undo everything you think you know about working hard and would be the success strategy for an employee when it comes to business. It’s just completely different. Your relationship with money, your relationship with work, your relationship with value, with selling, where you spend your time, and where you spend your energy. It’s just a completely different strategy if you were to go work for somebody else versus working for yourself.

It was a list of all these things that are the mind of a successful entrepreneur versus that of an employee. It’s not to wrong an employee. People thought I was shaming employees. There’s no shaming, but the argument is like taking the rules of soccer and applying it to football. You’re not gonna do very well! It’s what works or what doesn’t. That’s why I believe a lot of people are struggling. Then they apply common sense (well the common sense comes from what is common – the common knowledge) and what’s common is NOT entrepreneurship. It’s the upbringing of being a good hardworking employee.

If you just did the opposite of whatever you were thinking, you’d probably be more successful.

SO counterintuitive!

The point is that it stirred up a lot of controversy, but it pointed out my point. It demonstrated my point in action because it created sides. People were saying, “This isn’t true. Some people aren’t capable for being successful and they’re just born this way and they’re stuck.” Well if you believe that, you probably will never be successful.

It was really great and yes, people call you names and I like to have fun with it. I have a lot of fun with it because when you free yourself from that need of needing to be liked, so much more becomes POSSIBLE for you. There’s so much more expression of who you are.

How much of you is so being refrained, restrained, and withheld because it’s more important what people think of you? Life just becomes so much more beautiful.  

JC: If every single person was showing up in their true authentic-ness and not worrying about what other people were thinking, what would the world actually look like? It really is incredibly profound what you’re saying right now and I just invite people to try that on. 

JW: Look, I love my wife and I really hope every day that she loves me back. I care that she loves me. That’s important to me. If she one day found a latin lover, a 20 year old pool boy, I would be devastated but I would have to let her do what she wants. This is not my wife in the slightest.. but the point is that the people that matter most to you, their opinions of you are not in question. They love you unconditionally, so they’re gonna let you be you and do you and not judge you for that.

A lot of times our identity and self-worth is in the hands of people that have these finicky opinions about you.

One day they like you, one day they don’t.

Does this person really matter to you?

If their judgment of you flip flops so easily, why are we giving them so much power?

This is just such a relevant convo for me because I went to Laguna Beach High School, and for anybody that knows, that was a TV show. They made a TV show about my school! It was a popular show. People would ask me what it was like going to school there. Basically everyone thought they were on a TV show. People walked around at that school thinking there was a camera on them at all times.

…I was not popular in old school. The reason I wasn’t popular was because I was so afraid of anyone’s opinion of me, so better to just hide so no one will have an opinion of me. That was my survival strategy and I took that into business! How you do one thing is how you do everything. I realized I can’t help anyone, I can’t grow, and I can’t make any money.

Today with a team, if I want to choose my small comfort zone James, now there’s A LOT on the line. I’ve got an entire team who have lives and families and mortgages and rents and meals. I can’t afford to do that. 

JC: You said so many amazing things right there. You were talking about giving over the power of what you’re gonna do with your life to somebody whose love for you is conditional.

Who are you really allowing to dictate your future and your life?!

I know for myself, my family was a little resistant, but they were still like helpful. They didn’t tell me, “You need to stop or we’re going to take away love if you keep going down this entrepreneur route,” but they would constantly remind me of their genuine concern. It was coming from a place of love, but it was incredibly frustrating to be battling my own inner demons and also having their input on top of it.

Today, you have these beliefs around your own success and you really are unshakable to a certain degree in this belief. This is how you choose to operate. You went from being invisible and being intentional about that for survival, to now being this incredible leader in a company with all of these incredible clients and the plans that you have for the future even more expansive and there is no hiding in that.

How did you get from one place to another? Was it one moment or was it something over time? 

JW: It’s all over time. I’m going to give a simple answer to this. There’s two types of breakthroughs in growth and transformations. There’s that one little baby step at a time and then someone who you see on Saturday and then by Monday it’s like, “Wow, you’re a completely different person!!”

I was the other one. I was the tortoise. For 12 years, I just put one foot in front of the other. 

JC: I feel like everything you do comes from such a high level of integrity and from a place of little or no ego. It’s really just coming from a place of, “I want to help people.” 

JW: Yeah, so that’s going to kind of lead into this answer to the fantastic question you asked. In one word, it’s vision. Creating a vision that is bigger than you, but then it goes deeper than that.

So what does that mean?

A vision that’s bigger than you.

A purpose, an outcome, a mission, work that you are doing that is bigger than you.

When you are fully aligned and in belief with that and it’s aligned with who you are and what you’re here to do, then that trumps every problem, fear, doubt, and insecurity that you have.

Every moment is a choice. Am I choosing to operate from my vision or my problems? Am I choosing to operate from the outcome and my commitment to serving people? Or am I gonna make this about me and my stuff? In every moment, that’s the choice. Am I going to play small or play big? You just do that every day.

Anytime something does get tough or scary outside the comfort zone, reorient yourself to, “Will this help somebody? Will this make a difference?” If the answer is yes, then what are we worried about? What what else matters? Okay, a thousand people don’t like me. Who the f*ck cares… if somebody else’s life was transformed?

I was at a party for one of our team members and they had all their friends there because it’s a party and that’s what you do. This person comes up to me and says they’ve been listening to my podcast. They’re not even an entrepreneur and this person is in tears choking up telling me how my podcast got them through a really tough time in their life. I could have a thousand people hate me for the same episode, but if it did that for that one person, that’s all that matters.

That’s what’s gotten me through anything and everything that we can call a problem, a need for approval, permission, judgment, all the stuff you listed, that’s it right there. That’s what makes me unshakable. If I could help one person, I can help a second. If I can help a second, I can help a third. And that’s what we’re doing. If I do that, I win, they win. and then what keeps that unshakable ness and that keeps the lid on that… is integrity.

Anytime I feel shakeable is if I’m out of integrity.

And that happens if I’m late to something or I forget to do something.

Your life gets so unshakable when you’re operating from integrity, which is doing what you say you’re going to do. You’re aligned with your word.

If someone is selling for the first time and they feel like a fraud, look… tell them what you’re selling. Tell them what they’re getting. Set the expectations and then just deliver on the expectations. And you are in integrity. Like, “Hey, you’re gonna get five modules and it’s gonna include this,” or, “You’re gonna get this thing and it’s gonna come with that,” and then just do THAT. If they’re unhappy, they’re unhappy. If they’re upset, they’re upset. We deal with it at times, but at least your integrity isn’t in question. I’m giving you what I said, right?

Operating from that discipline and that way of being in self-integrity is life changing.