The X-Factor for Winning in Business and Life with Zander Fryer

Transcription

Yuri Elkaim:                         Hey guys, welcome to the show. Today I’m joined by Zander Fryer, and I’m excited to have you on the podcast with us, because we have never met before this, but we obviously have a lot of mutual friends and you’ve done some amazing stuff in the health and fitness space, coaching coaches and helping them grow their business, and you’ve got a really interesting background as well because you did some pretty high-level stuff for Cisco and meeting with executives from Disney and NBC, and you had a really interesting, I guess, journey up until this point, which has really equipped you with some amazing capabilities to help others grow their businesses.

Yuri Elkaim:                         But before we dig into that, let’s break the ice with something for the audience. What’s something that a lot of people don’t even know about you. Who is this Zander Fryer, really?

Introducing Zander and his goals, philosophy, and journey

Zander Fryer:                     So to be honest, I think most people actually know a lot about me because I tend to be a pretty open book, but I think one of the things that has become very important in my life … Somebody asked me the other day, they kinda asked me, “Zander, what’s your personal development goal?” And I really had to think about it for a while as a coach and as someone who’s been such a big fan of personal development for so long. I really thought about it and I said, “Honestly, my big goal is actually personal undevelopment. It’s kinda re-becoming that four-year-old me.”

Zander Fryer:                     So I think something that most people don’t really know about me is, I do everything I can to just be a kid again.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice.

Zander Fryer:                     Everything from … I mean, you can on the video, I’ve got Nerf guns in the background. I’ve got …

Yuri Elkaim:                         I didn’t know they were Nerf. I just thought they were real guns.

Zander Fryer:                     Nope, they’re Nerf guns. I know we’re in America, but these are Nerf guns.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     But no, so everything that I do, I really love to embrace that kid again in me, and I think honestly it’s been a big reason for a lot of our success as a business as well, because just being able to find fun and find joy in absolutely everything. If you were an entrepreneur and it was all about work and you didn’t have fun doing it, there’s no reason, right?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome.

Zander Fryer:                     So I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t know about me, is just if I could be four years old again, I probably would.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ve got three boys who are five, six, and eight, so I kind of spend most of my time at that level.

Zander Fryer:                     Oh, perfect.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s very true though, because life can get pretty serious pretty quick, and I think when you’re running your own business, it’s important to have fun, because what’s the point of doing what we’re doing if we’re not? So that’s really cool. So what does fun look like for you?

Zander Fryer:                     Oh, man. Mostly, I definitely spend a lot of time with my girlfriend right now. She’s from Australia, kidnapped her from Australia and she’s living here now. So just been doing a lot of different fun stuff with her, whether it’s traveling, whether it’s dinners and date nights, hanging out with our family or my godson or my nephew, so spending time with the kids as well.

Zander Fryer:                     But for me personally, I have a lot of other activities I love to do, whether it’s rock-climbing, boxing, or kickboxing at the gym is a big one for me. And then probably mostly for me, beach time. I’m just a total beach bum, hence me being in San Diego. We spent a couple of weeks out in Toulon last month, but if I could spend majority of my days facedown in the sand, that would be ideal.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. Good for you, man. That’s great. Wicked.

Zander Fryer:                     Yup.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So talk to us about this journey, because you started off in corporate America, kind of lived that whole executive lifestyle. Talk to us about how that started, what you learned on that journey, and why you decided to no longer do that.

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah, absolutely. And I think for me, I kinda look at how I got into the corporate world. It was not necessarily an accident, but I was just kinda following everybody else, right? So before I actually started working for Cisco, I went to UCLA for electronic engineering, so I was an engineer by trade, but while I was at UCLA, I was also in Air Force ROTC, and that’s kinda where I really learned to love mentoring and coaching and leading people.

Zander Fryer:                     Really excelled in Air Force ROTC, was actually gonna be a fighter pilot in the US Air Force, and then my senior year, I actually made a really dumb decision of driving home after a couple of drinks out with friends, and I got a DUI. So my senior year of college, got kicked out of the Air Force. I had my next 20 years of my life planned, and got kicked out of the Air Force and everything changed at that point, so I think I lost a lot of confidence in myself to really pursue what I knew what was right for me.

Zander Fryer:                     So I did what any 22-year-old kid, lost kid does, right? You take your great degree and you take all these skills that you learned, and you take them into the corporate world, right? So basically, went and joined the corporate world, went and joined Cisco, which was a phenomenal job. Great place to work, phenomenal job, made a lot of good friends there. And over about six years while I was working there, made great money and kept rising through the ranks, getting promotions, getting raises.

Zander Fryer:                     It wasn’t like it was a dead-end job. Kinda like you mentioned, by the time I left, I was covering companies like NBC, Disney, Facebook, DirecTV, Sony. I had a standing meeting with the Disney CIO. As a kid in his mid-twenties, that’s just weird. But I had basically what everybody was telling me was success. You had the title. You had the luxuries. You had the income. I was driving around in a BMW. I had all that stuff, but I never felt successful. I never felt fulfilled or happy in what I was doing.

Zander Fryer:                     I’d get a raise and I’d get this sharp peak of joy and then it would just dull out, and I’d just be hungry for more and I was just kinda like, “What is going on here? There’s gotta be something more.” And I think a lot of this world feels that, right? I think a lot of this world has changed after what society and culture has told them what success is, and they chase after it and they achieve it, and they notice that it’s not what it’s supposed to be, but not a lot of them are willing to admit that something’s wrong and they need to go another direction.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     I look back at my life and I was not far away from being a lifer in the corporate world and it was actually a conversation with a mentor of mine that really shifted things for me. He basically asked me one day … and he was an entrepreneur, traveled the world speaking, and he asked me one day, “Zander, you could do a lot of things. What would you do if you couldn’t fail?”

Zander Fryer:                     And my answer to that was like, “Well, ever since I got kicked out of the Air Force, I really miss mentorship. I really miss coaching people, leading others, having that impact.” And I think that’s one of the big words that’s always resonated with me, is “impact.” And he asked me, “Just because you’re on this path, does that mean you should go down it?”

Zander Fryer:                     It wasn’t like I was in a dead-end job. I was gonna be one of the youngest directors in Cisco’s recent history. And he’s like, “Just because you’re on this path, does that mean you should go down it? Just because you’re good at something, does that mean you should do it?” And I was like, “Well, I get what you’re saying, but I have so much momentum. I make such good money here. I don’t wanna pass that up.”

Zander Fryer:                     And he said something to me that kinda really shifted the way that I think, and shifted it forever, essentially, and how I live my life now. But he basically said, “Zander, one thing that you learn when you get older is the one resource you can never get back is your time.” And he’s like, “You’re either living every moment, you’re either living on purpose or off purpose. And every moment off purpose is a moment wasted.”

Zander Fryer:                     And he said, “The difference between you and me is I’m actually living my dream, and ever since you got kicked out of the Air Force, you’re just dreaming one.” And that conversation just rocked my world, because I was such a confident kid, and he basically just looked me square in the eyes and was just like, “You’re just a scared four-year-old, basically.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s great advice.

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I don’t think too many people have the type of mentorship … I mean, it’d be great to have that kind of wisdom from a parent, but I don’t even think most parents have that type of wisdom to impart on their kids, so that’s …

Zander Fryer:                     Absolutely, right?

A fixed mindset versus a growth mindset

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. So, I’m a big believer in success leaving clues. You mentioned you were going to be one of the youngest high-level people at Cisco. What is it about you or what you did to help you achieve that level of success?

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah, that is a great question. To me, this always kinda comes back to one instance in my life when I was seven years old. So we’re gonna have to go back a bit for that one.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Sure.

Zander Fryer:                     But have you ever read the book Mindset, by Carol Dweck?

Yuri Elkaim:                         No. No, I haven’t. But I know the premise of it.

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah, so I actually had this conversation with Tom Bilyeu as well and he said this was actually the same single … He had a very similar single point when he was a kid, that was a massive shift in the way that he viewed the world. So one of the things that Carol Dweck talks about, she talks about the difference between what’s called a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset.”

Zander Fryer:                     So for anybody who hasn’t heard of this, check it out. If you really start to just live this idea … If somebody were to ask me, “What’s the number reason you’ve been able to do what you do?” It’s actually just that.

Zander Fryer:                     And so the way that I look at it, you have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. The fixed mindset is this belief that with what you’re given, in any area of your life, on a scale of one to ten, you’re given that. It’s set in stone. It’s concrete. So on a smartness scale, if you’re a level seven out of ten, you’re forever a level seven. Right? If you’re a level ten out of ten, you’re forever a level ten. And maybe in communication or relationship-building, or like you and I were kinda talking about, sales or something like that, right?

Zander Fryer:                     Now, if you have this fixed mindset of being this set level, you never wanna push yourself. You never wanna show everybody … If you’re a level five out of ten in the intelligence scale, you never wanna show somebody that you might not be smart enough to do something because then you’ve shown everybody your level is a five.

Zander Fryer:                     Now, the growth mindset is this idea that if you’re given a level five … and I do believe that we’re all kind of given a certain level at a certain point, nature versus nurture, whatever. But if you’re at a level five, you could grow to a six or a seven, or even eight or a nine or a ten. But to do that, you have to go try something new, get out of your comfort zone, make mistakes, fail.

Zander Fryer:                     But when you realize that, “If I’m a level five and I need to be a level eight to accomplish this thing that I want to accomplish, if I go try at a level five and fail, then I’ll become a six if I learn from it, and then I can fail again and become a seven, and fail again and become an eight, and then I succeed.”

Zander Fryer:                     And I learned this when I was seven years old, accidentally. I’ll ask you, do I come off as a really dumb person? You just met me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         No, not at all.

How we make decisions in life and what is required to make them

Zander Fryer:                     So when I was seven years old, I was actually the slow kid in class. I had a below-average IQ and I was actually gonna be held back, so I couldn’t learn, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t do math. I had a very low IQ and they were basically like, “We’re probably gonna have to put Zander through second grade once again, maybe twice again.” And my mom, amazing parents, just loved the hell out of me, were like, “Oh, he’s cute. He’ll get by in life anyway. We don’t really mind.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         He’ll figure it out.

Zander Fryer:                     So, amazing mom. Just wanted to support and love me. But I remember my teacher, Linda Legrange, I remember this so vividly. When I was seven years old, I remember her sitting me down and saying, “Zander, if you want to be smart, you really have to work hard at it.”

Zander Fryer:                     And I was like, “Huh.” And she said, “Zander, do you want to be smart?” And I said, “I really wanna be smart.” She said, “Do you promise me you’ll work hard at it?” And I said, “I promise.”

Zander Fryer:                     I ended up working my ass off that year. I passed second grade. I passed third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade. By the time I was going to middle school, I had to go to high school to take math. By the time I was going to high school, I had to go to the local college to take math.

Zander Fryer:                     So there was this moment when I was seven years old where I made the decision that I could get better at anything that I really wanted to, if I was willing to do the work, get out of my comfort zone, go make mistakes, and frankly, mess it up.

Zander Fryer:                     But as long as I was willing to grow and I had this belief that I could grow, I could do it. And that’s basically carried over into how I’ve applied myself, whether it was in the Air Force, whether it was in Cisco as an engineer, being able to quit a job cold turkey with no network, no experience as an entrepreneur and being able to grow my coaching business very quickly, all stems from this belief that even if I’m at a level one, if I put in the work and I focus on learning, I can get to a two, three, four, five, six, seven, all the way up to a ten, if I really wanted to.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. Yeah. When you work with a lot of people, you start to see certain patterns, right? You start to see the same things happen over and over again.

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah.

How to inspire courage in others and what Zander does with his clients

Yuri Elkaim:                         There’s two really big things that I look at when we work with our clients … Actually, there’s three. Number one, you have to be really good at what you do. You have to be an expert and obviously be able to help people, but let’s just assume that’s kinda the first thing most people have.

Yuri Elkaim:                         But there’s two other really important traits that I find challenging to teach, other than through life experience. Number one is courage, and number two is self-belief or confidence. I mean, I believe your courage is such an important role. There’s actually one of my keynote talks called The Courage Code, because it’s like, what is it that … For one Zander, there’s probably thousands of others who are like, “No. I’ve got a good job. It’s secure. It’s safe. It’s whatever. I’d love to do this other thing, but I’m scared.” Right?

Zander Fryer:                     Yup. Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So, in your case, was it the self-belief that gave you the courage to leap forward, just because you knew based on experience, “I’ve done this before or something similar. I can do this again because I’m just gonna apply myself, figure it out as I go”?

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah. I’m so glad that you bring that up. I did a TED Talk about three weeks ago covering both of these.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice.

Zander Fryer:                     Because in my opinion, it’s kinda like the chicken or the egg conversation. What comes first, courage or confidence? I don’t know which one actually comes first, but they both feed into each other and it’s like, once you start that cycle, they both really do feed into each other, because you’re right. If you have more confidence, you’re going to take more courageous decision.

Zander Fryer:                     Our life is just dictated by a series of decisions, one after another, and every single one of them, we’re either choosing from a place of fear like you mentioned, or choosing courageously from a place of purpose. And every decision that you want to make purposefully requires courage.

Zander Fryer:                     And so, a couple of ways that I describe it, it’s like when I jumped ship, it was because I didn’t have confidence and I didn’t even know what I wanted to do at that point. I didn’t really have confidence that I knew how to build a business, I knew how to get this up and running. I didn’t have any confidence in that.

Zander Fryer:                     Like you mention, I had confidence in myself to be able to figure it out, which gave me the courage to face my fears. But how did I build that confidence to begin with? So I think that’s kinda what we’re getting at here. It’s like, for me, the way I explain it, it’s like poker chips. It’s like, if you have a really small stack of poker chips, you’re not gonna play any big hands. If you got like, ten poker chips, you’re only gonna play one poker chip at a time.

Zander Fryer:                     But say you play those poker chips and you start to win every now and then, and you start to build that poker chip count, that confidence. You start to have more confidence and you can play bigger hands, and you can play five poker chips or ten poker chips, so you can take bigger risks as you build that confidence pile.

Zander Fryer:                     But one of the things that I’ve seen, it’s this constant continuous buildup of confidence by surviving small risks, but to do that, you have to be courageous to begin with. You have to make the decision to be courageous, to build this confidence pile of poker chips.

Zander Fryer:                     So one of the things that we always talk about with our clients, you can start to take little actions today that will make you feel more confident. Do one thing that gets you out of your comfort zone. We do things in our program we call, “comfort-crushing challenges,” because once somebody goes and does it, they feel like they can do anything.

Zander Fryer:                     And it could be something as simple as giving a random person a hug or a compliment. It could be reaching out to a mentor of yours, that you think there’s no way that they would ever respond to you. So somebody who’s listening to this right now, make sure to reach out to Yuri. He might respond to you.

Zander Fryer:                     But one of the examples I give is, when I first quit my job, one of the first things that I did is I reached out to someone who is now my current mentor, one of my current personal mentors, Jack Canfield. Who on earth would think that a random kid in a corporate job could reach out to the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy and have a conversation with him, and end up the next day, flying out to Arizona to spend the next couple of weeks with him?

Zander Fryer:                     It’s not a normal thing, but just because I had the courage to reach out, I survived it and then afterwards, I felt like I could do anything. But it’s taking these little risks to build that pile of confidence so that you can go take bigger risks.

Zander Fryer:                     Because like you mentioned, for me it was like, I had to have courage to leave that corporate world. But to have that courage, I had to have confidence. So over many years of making a lot of mistakes and surviving them all, whether it’s the DUI or all the little things along the way, being like, “Well, I’m not gonna die if I do this,” eventually you’re just like, “Okay, I can just do this and we’ll figure it out.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         Completely. Really good insights there, and I think a lot of times … I mean, I see this a lot in entrepreneurship, because that’s pretty much what we deal mostly, but I think in life, people are so afraid in general, that they’re looking for what everyone else is doing. They’re looking for the social proof. They’re looking for, “Show me that this works for other people, whatever that thing is, before I step out.” And it’s like, “Hold on.” It’s actually the opposite way around. Entrepreneurs create amazing things, tangible things, out of nothing.

Zander Fryer:                     Out of nothing. You have to be a leader. You have to be willing to go first.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, and you have to believe it before you see it, but I think a lot of people are looking for the seeing before they believe, and how do you train that? How do you get someone other than, is it really just a matter of accumulation of courageous moments over time? Or is there a way to get people, even if they’re later on in life, to the point where, “Hey, listen. If you spend $10 a day on Facebook ads and they don’t work out, are you gonna be okay with that?” Or whatever the situation might be. How do you get someone, in your experience, to the point where they can have more courage to do the things that they might be afraid of, but they know they need to do them?

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah, and it all comes back, to me, to understanding the mind and how the mind actually works, because most people don’t know this, but your subconscious is 95-98% of your brain. Most people, when they hear that, they’re like, “What?” But it’s true, right? 2-5% of you is the conscious thinking you. So you’re only like, 2-5% of a person. That’s mind-blowing to a lot of people.

Zander Fryer:                     The rest of you is run by this subconscious autonomous process, which is exactly like a computer that can be programmed, and it’s constantly being programmed by other people around you, by things around you, by your environment. What most people don’t realize is your brain is five times more likely to be programmed by negative experiences than it is by positive ones, because it’s our survival instinct.

Zander Fryer:                     As ancient man, the amygdala, that part of your brain kept you alive. It kept you from being eaten by a saber tooth tiger, but we don’t really have to worry about that anymore because there’s no saber tooth tigers around. But that part of our brain still runs our life, because we think … For example, going up on stage or public speaking. We know we’re not gonna die if we go up on stage and speak publicly, right? But our body reacts as if we’re about to be eaten by a tiger.

Zander Fryer:                     Blood rushes to your extremities so that you can run really fast. Your heart starts pounding. Your adrenaline beats really quickly in case you need to fight the tiger. You start to sweat so that you taste bad in case you get bitten. All of that is your fight or flight response to prevent you from dying.

Zander Fryer:                     And so the way that I explain this to people, it doesn’t matter how young you are or how old you are, as soon as you make the conscious decision to understand that your life is run by subconscious processes, that’s it. It doesn’t matter who you are. I don’t care how strong that 5% of your brain is, it will never overpower the 95%.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, for sure.

Zander Fryer:                     If you have five horses running towards your goals and they’re tied to 95 horses running the opposite direction, who’s gonna win?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Oh, it’s like putting a married man in a brothel and having him spend all his days there.

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Eventually … That’s a bad example, but you’re not really setting yourself up to win.

Zander Fryer:                     I think it’s a perfect example, man. Yeah, so it’s a losing battle. So I think the first step that I tell everybody, it doesn’t matter how young you are or hold you are. The first step is make the conscious decision to accept that the 5% you will never win unless you get the 95% you on board.

Zander Fryer:                     And so really, it’s all about conditioning new habits, new ways of thinking, new habitual thought processes that start to serve you. The reason we do comfort-crushing challenges with every single one of our clients is because we’re basically conditioning the habit of getting out of your comfort zone.

Zander Fryer:                     If you get comfortable getting uncomfortable, then making a decision like that, spending 10 bucks a day on Facebook, even if you’re not bringing in a bunch of money, then you’re like, “Okay. Well, that gets me out of my comfort zone a little bit, which means it’s probably a good thing for me because I’m growing.”

Zander Fryer:                     So your comfort zone is never stagnant. It’s either growing or it’s shrinking. So if you’re comfortable, your comfort zone is shrinking. If you’re uncomfortable, it’s growing. You’re becoming bigger. You’re becoming better, and that’s the only way you’re ever going to achieve the things you want to achieve.

Zander Fryer:                     So to me, number one, it’s just basically making the conscious decision that the 5% will never win, and then starting to ingrain those good habits that’ll get you to that next step, whether it’s constantly getting out of your comfort zone.

Zander Fryer:                     Like we’re talking about, every time you face a fear and make a decision, you’re building that confidence. You’re building that conditioned habit to face your fears, rather than allow those fears to destroy you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s so good.

Zander Fryer:                     So it’s all about those habits, in my opinion.

Changing your relationship with rejection and the word “no”

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. So I wanna segue into selling … We’ll spend a few minutes talking about this, because you’re terrific at sales.

Zander Fryer:                     Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And we both agree that it’s probably the most important skill you can develop as an entrepreneur, or even just as a human in any area of life. I believe that the number one thing holding people back is the fear of being disliked. I believe it’s one of the biggest crippling fears that most people are not even aware of.

Yuri Elkaim:                         They’re afraid of putting themselves out there on social. They’re afraid of asking tough questions in a conversation, because what if that other person says no? What if they reject me? What if they get pissed off because I’m probing too deep? I think that’s the single biggest reason that holds people back.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So, if you were to give somebody two, three tips. And I hate the word tips. Hacks, nuggets, I hate that stuff. But for the sake of time, if there were two or three things that you could tell someone to become a more effective … I don’t wanna use the word “salesperson,” but more effective at selling. What would those be?

Zander Fryer:                     That is a great question. I think for me, the first part, most importantly, it basically comes down … and the reason why you said, “I don’t wanna say a salesperson,” because “sales” has, like you mentioned, a very negative connotation from years of frankly shitty people using it the wrong way.

Zander Fryer:                     So “sales” has a very negative connotation, which is why people think if they come off salesy, they will lose people liking, no liking and trusting them, right? This goes back to the amygdala. Evolutionarily programmed, we wanna be part of a community for our survival. If people don’t like us, we die.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     So that goes right back to that. But the way that I explain it is, the first tip that I would give everybody is understand what sales actually is. Sales is not a good or a bad thing. Sales is just a tool that can be used for good or for how bad.

Zander Fryer:                     Now, if you’re a good person and we talk about, in the coaching space or in the health and wellness space, and your job is to bring good and value to people, you actually have a moral responsibility to sell more. The way I explain it, it’s like, most people don’t get this but one of my favorite salespeople in the entire world, Martin Luther King.

Zander Fryer:                     Most people don’t think about this, but Martin Luther King was one of the best salesmen of an entire generation. He sold an entire country, and frankly the world, on an idea. If you go through his “I have a dream” speech, it’s all marketing copy, influence, sales strategies. He uses urgency to really get people to move forward. It’s a beautifully-written sales page. It’s phenomenal. Now, would you say Martin Luther King was a good person?

Yuri Elkaim:                         I think so, yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     I would, right? If he was afraid of people not liking him for a message he was putting out there, where would we be now? And I think that’s something that, first and foremost, I want everybody to understand. If you’re doing something good, you have a moral responsibility to sell your idea, to sell your services, to sell your products, because sales is just a tool.

Zander Fryer:                     So you need to get over the relationship that you have with sales, because it’s not good or bad. It’s just a tool, and I believe everybody listening to this is probably a good person, and they probably have something amazing that they need to get to the world. So the first thing that I want them to ask themselves is, “What am I holding myself back for when truthfully, if Martin Luther King was worried about people liking him, we would not be where we are today?” Right?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup, totally.

Zander Fryer:                     So I think that’s number one. Number two, I think would be … and this kinda goes back to what you were just talking about. People are afraid of rejection. People are afraid of hearing the word, “no.” One of my favorite books in the entire world is the book Go For No. I don’t know if you’ve read that one.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Go For No?

Zander Fryer:                     Go For No.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Okay. I have not. It sounds good, though.

Zander Fryer:                     It’s phenomenal. It’s like an 88 page book. You can read it on a lunch break.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice.

Zander Fryer:                     But the whole premise of it is, there’s certain levels of successful people in the world, and the most successful of them are the ones that are willing to hear, “No.” That same mentor that I just mentioned that got me to quit my job, one of the other things that he said to me, he’s like … He was making seven figures at the time. I was making nothing. And he said, “Do you know the difference between where you’re at first starting off, and having a seven-figure business?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “A million nos.”

Zander Fryer:                     That just shifted my idea of what it took to be successful. I just heard to go hear more nos. And so in the book Go For No, it talks about the five levels of no. It starts off with the ability to fail, or the ability to hear “no” or rejection. Everybody in the world can fail. Everybody can fail.

Zander Fryer:                     Now, the next level is actually a willingness to fail, a toleration of failure, because you know that you’re gonna need to fail a little bit to move forward and grow. So you can tolerate failure. About 20% of the world is willing to tolerate failure. That’s not enough. You need to actually want failure.

Zander Fryer:                     You go into that 5% of really successful people, whether it’s business owners, entrepreneurs, salespeople. You actually want to hear, “no.” Because you know that if you’re hearing “no,” that means you’re going far enough and you’re pushing yourself and you’re growing. You’re getting out of your comfort zone. So then there’s the people that want to hear “no.” That’s the 5% that will be truly successful.

Zander Fryer:                     Then there’s the people that not only want to hear “no,” they want to hear “no” faster, hear it more, and hear it bigger. They wanna fail big. They wanna fail fast. They wanna fail strong and hard, because they know that if they’re gonna fail, they might as well do it going after big, crazy goals.

Zander Fryer:                     And so, I think probably the next thing that I would give for everybody, is just start to shift your belief around rejection, because most people think rejection is on the opposite side of success. We wanna stay away from rejection and failure, and just go for success. It’s like, no. Rejection and failure is on the way to success.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally.

Zander Fryer:                     So that’s probably the second thing that I would give people.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I think just even there, just those two mindset shifts, we can talk about the mechanisms and scripts and all that stuff, but none of that stuff matters if you’re not willing to do what you just said. Look for the no. Understand that failure is part of the process. It’s not something you wanna run away from. It’s part of the journey, that you have those failures and nos.

Zander Fryer:                     100%. Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah, 100%, and I think in the end, it all comes down to that mindset and that belief. We’ve worked with companies. We’ve worked with individuals that have perfect sales “tactics” and strategies, but then once you start to shift some of the mindsets and the beliefs, and the intention and the energies, their sales will go from 30% to 50% to 60, 70%. They’re just like, “We’re still using the same script. What the hell is going on?”

Zander Fryer:                     It’s like, “Well, you’re approaching it totally differently. You’re not approaching it with this fear of rejection. You’re not approaching it like you’re a bad person for trying to sell this person. You’re approaching it like you’re saving this person’s life.” I’m sure a lot of the Healthpreneurs that you work with, honestly, their services save lives.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Life-changing, for sure.

Zander Fryer:                     It’s life-changing, and if you’re preventing yourself from having someone work with you, because you think that selling is bad, that’s what blows my mind.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. “But at least they’re not gonna get pissed off at me, and we’ll just part as friends.”

Zander Fryer:                     Yeah. “But at least they’ll like me.” That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally.

Zander Fryer:                     You would rather them be a friend for 45 minutes or for 30 minutes, than to change their life, and then they invite you to their wedding or their kid’s wedding ten years from now. That’s the type of relationship that I wanna have with someone. I wanna be able to look them in the eyes, call them out on their bullshit, help them move forward, so that we’re not friends for just 30 minutes. I actually get to be there for their wedding, for their first kid, for all these other things that are gonna go on, because I got to help them, really help them.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup, totally. Dude, this has been terrific. And guys, we can go down the rabbit hole forever on this stuff, but I’m hoping you’re starting to see this theme come up over and over again with these conversations and through all these different interviews that we’ve done. Zander, before we finish off, are you ready for the rapid five?

Zander Fryer:                     Let’s do it, man.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Actually, before we jump into that, what is the best place for our listeners to check you out online, stay up to date with what you’re up to?

Zander Fryer:                     Sure, yeah. So you can go to zanderfryer.com. Check us out on there. Our main offer is, we do high-impact coaching, so we work with coaches and help coaches build sustainable, profitable businesses. We also have our Instagram, @zanderfryer and @highimpactcoaching. Check us out anywhere there. Feel free to reach out to me on DM. I’m happy to answer any questions that you guys might have.

The Rapid Five

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome, perfect. Now, let’s jump into the rapid five. All right, so you’ve got no prior knowledge of what these questions are.

Zander Fryer:                     No, that’s what makes it fun.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Number one, what’s your biggest strength?

Zander Fryer:                     My biggest strength?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     Oh. To take it back to where we started this conversation, I would probably say my ability to just really embrace the four-year-old me, be creative, be silly and joyful and playful when I need to, but also be able to just let it … kinda like we’re talking, you can tell I’m pretty passionate about this stuff, but just letting myself really feel it. I think my biggest strength is honestly just being able to be a four-year-old kid when I want to.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool, love it. Number two, what’s your biggest weakness?

Zander Fryer:                     Biggest weakness. I feel like this is something that I’ve really been working on, but for me, it’s kind of counterintuitive but it’s always been a really deep fire, a really deep drive to achieve that highest vision, highest purpose of me, to the point where sometimes it has caused me in the past to push towards burnout. And we hear this with entrepreneurs a lot of times …

Zander Fryer:                     Push towards burnout, push yourself harder than you could see imaginable. Have to be super grateful for my girlfriend Maddie and everything she’s brought into my life, to really kinda bring me back down to reality. But I think that’s probably been one of my biggest weaknesses is just getting the blinders on, and just going full board ahead without any recognition of anything else going on in my life.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, nice. Well, you’re a true driver, right? For sure.

Zander Fryer:                     Yup.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Zander Fryer:                     It’s gotta be sales.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Zander Fryer:                     Somebody asked me the other day what the most important money-making skill was, and I would actually sum it up into persuasive communication, or influential communication.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For sure.

Zander Fryer:                     Because like I mentioned, you can be selling on a consultation or a call. You could be a good copywriter, where basically you’re influencing via your writing. A great speaker is influential in their speaking skills. Most of the time it’s sales copy. So I would say that influential, that persuasive communication for sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Zander Fryer:                     I go to the bathroom. First thing in the morning, first thing that I do is I have a quick little meditation breath work routine to warm up the body, and then I get right into my meditations, visualizations, affirmations.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Very cool. And finally, complete this sentence: “I know I’m being successful when …”

Zander Fryer:                     I know I’m being successful when I am coming from a place of love, growth, and purposeful action all the time.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Love it. Dude, Zander, thank you so much for taking the time, for joining us, for sharing your wisdom and your perspective. This has been great to connect finally, and I’m sure the audience and listeners and viewers are probably loving this interview, so guys, check him out, zanderfryer.com. Follow him on Instagram, and Zander, once again, thanks so much, buddy.

Zander Fryer:                     Absolutely. Thanks for having me, man.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Hey, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Healthpreneur podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, here’s what I’d like you to do right now. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes, and while you’re there, leave us a rating or review. It helps us get in front of more people and change more lives.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And if you’re ready to start or scale your health or fitness coaching business, and want to start getting in front of more people, working with them at a higher level, without trading time for money, then I invite you to check out our free seven figure health business blueprint training, totally free right now, and you can do so at healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For now, thank you so much for joining us. Continue to be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

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