← Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall
00:45:13
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- [00:00]
Ryan Blair
I've had some major miracles in my life and the very fact that I'm alive here today, talking to you and sharing this with you is a miracle. So I think the first step to bringing more miracles into your life is just to start to recognize those miracles around you and then opening your heart to the fact that if you're open to miracles, they can actually come to you.
- [00:19]
Heather Monahan
Come on this journey with me each.
- [00:21]
Unknown Host
Week when you join me, we are.
- [00:22]
Heather Monahan
Going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow.
- [00:29]
Ryan Blair
I'm ready for my close up.
- [00:31]
Unknown Host
Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus Confidence Classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. Meet a different guest each week.
- [00:54]
Heather Monahan
I'm so excited for you to meet my guest today. He's Ryan Blair. Number one New York Times bestselling author and serial entrepreneur. Blair went from a gang member to businessman with over 2 billion in company sales. After decades of building successful companies, Blair began his latest company, Alter Call, which uplifts and helps entrepreneurs scale their companies using spiritual modalities. Blair is the former CEO of Buysalus, which is known for the Body by Vi 90 Day Challenge. In 2012, Blair sold Vice Alice for 7,792 million dollars. Ryan is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the book Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain. Ryan, can't wait for you to break this down with us today.
- [01:40]
Ryan Blair
Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me.
- [01:43]
Heather Monahan
Perspective is a powerful thing and I did not have a great childhood and so for the majority of my life in corporate America, I never spoke about it. And then to read your bio and hear that you were in a gang and just this perspective shift of no matter how hard someone might have it, there's always somebody out there who's had it harder. Can you get into a little bit of your backstory and what your up and coming gang years were like?
- [02:09]
Ryan Blair
Yeah, yeah, that was a long time ago. But you know, there's a lot of things that I reflect on to this day. And I was raised in a I started out in a middle class environment so I had all the perfect situation. I had a pool in my backyard, I had new clothing come school time, lots of presents underneath the Christmas tree. And by the outside it looked like we had the perfect family but on the inside, my parents were addicted to alcohol and drugs. My father was very violent. And as a result of him becoming addicted to drugs, he disappeared on us when I was 14 years old. And my mother was faced to raise me on her own. He never sent a dollar child support and never gave her any assistance. And she didn't have any career skills or corporate skills whatsoever. So she had to try to raise me at 13 years old on her own. And as a result of that, I rebelled. I rebelled as a result of the way I was raised. I knew there was something wrong with my family, although I was forced to lie about it and you know, to put up with this whole charade basically that we were, you know, this perfect family when we weren't. And so I was forced into a G at the time. This is the 1990s, mid-90s, early 90s, and gang violence was glorified. You know, it had swept most of the nation. You know, the movies and the music and the things that we grew up on were basically inciting violence. And so next thing you know, I found myself involved in that. And I spent a couple of years involved in a gang. And the gang that I was involved in was very violent. You know, they were involved in all kinds of criminal activity and murdered, drive by shootings, all kinds of things like that. And so the experience that I had growing up was anything but normal. And as a result of seeing the middle class and then going into poverty, I think that it gave me a unique perspective, one that I would leverage to quickly move through the middle class in my adult life and then shift into the wealthy class.
- [04:14]
Heather Monahan
How were you able to get out of a gang once you were in? To me, that sounds like it must have been a very hard challenge.
- [04:20]
Ryan Blair
When you're involved in a gang, they really bond you to it for a variety of things. One is protection. Two is your friends and your community. You also get some power from it. So people are intimidated by you, they give you respect. And so there's a lot of things that bond you to that environment. And it's also a way of making money, so it pays the bills. And as a result of that, there's a lot. It's very difficult to break that bond. I had made a deal with God. I'm very spiritual and I always was, although I strayed from it, but I had made a deal with God that I would leave the gang. When I was granted leniency in a sentencing. I was facing four years for strong armed robbery. And I begged the judge for leniency and when he gave it to me, I made a commitment that I was going to leave the gang. And so the first thing that I did was I started working non stop. Generally speaking, a gang won't hold you accountable for working. But if you're in your house and you're not showing up to the required events, they're going to come get you and pull you out of your house or intimidate you to get out of your house. But if you have a job, and in my case, I had a job because I had to pay restitution for some of the criminal activity I was a part of. If you have a job and you're forced to work, otherwise you go to jail, they'll tend to give you a pass for that. And so my strategy was simple. I was gonna work as many hours as I possibly could, as far away from the neighborhood that I lived in, to get as far away from the gang as I possibly could.
- [05:54]
Heather Monahan
Wow. How did you get people outside of that gang community to take you seriously? And how did you start seeing yourself differently in order to move into more of a business culture?
- [06:06]
Ryan Blair
Well, it was a transition. I got a mentor and he gave me some personal growth lessons and tapes. He gave me Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale, Think and Grow Rich, the Richest man in Babylon, a bunch of Tony Robbins related material. And I was about 18 years old, you know, I'm tattooed, and I was listening to, you know, gangster rap, basically. And he bribed me, he persuaded me, and he told me he'd buy me clothes so I could get rid of the gang uniform and I could actually get a job if I was able to master this content. And I listened to these tapes over and over and over. I would sleep to them. I would play the cassette tape. At the time we had cassette tapes. And when it would pop, I would wake up and I'd flip it back over and hit play again. I wanted to reprogram my brain. I didn't know this consciously, but that's what I was doing on a soul level. I knew that the information contained in this material would change my life. I'll never forget, I was playing basketball one day. I had my Walkman in, and at the same park I'd play every day. And. And one of the lessons was from Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale. And it talked about a vagrant going from a park bench to becoming a millionaire. And at the time, I looked over across the park and I saw a person that was a vagrant that was sleeping on a bench. And I Thought that person could become a millionaire. And if that person could become a millionaire, I could become a millionaire too. And I'll never forget. The chills rushed over my body. I believed in that moment that I could become a millionaire. If a. If a homeless person could become a millionaire, so could I. That was a simple logic that that wisdom had given me, and I believed it. I get the chills right now just sharing it with you. And from that point forward, I stopped listening to gangster rap and started listening to, you know, old 1950s audio tapes. I reprogrammed my vocabulary. My thinking at the time, you had to go to a bookstore and you had to rent audiobooks. I couldn't afford them, of course, because I was, you know, I was poor. So I had to go to an audio book store and rent the audios and listen to them. And I would just absorb this content nonstop 247 until I mastered business vocabulary. I started getting into science. I started getting into all kinds of different extracurricular activities. And then eventually I went to college and went to business school.
- [08:22]
Heather Monahan
Did you know or do you know that this is so similar to what Sarah Blakely did when she launched Spanx?
- [08:29]
Ryan Blair
No, I have not heard her story, so I'm. But it doesn't surprise me. I think that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
- [08:36]
Heather Monahan
Oh, it's so true. So you mentioned faith being a big part of your journey, and I know it's a huge part now, but you said that there were different times and different transitions through your business career and your relationship with your faith. Can you take us through what that looked like?
- [08:51]
Ryan Blair
Oh, yeah. I always had a spiritual calling in my life. My grandmother, best thing I could tell, describe her as is a Saint. She lived 99 years and she never cursed, she never drank caffeine, she never drank alcohol. She lived a high vibrational life. She always had joy, would always sing. You know, she was just filled with joy and happiness. That was my grandmother's spiritual walk. And so she was an example. And I would always ask her questions. I would always, always was a seeker. I would ask her for explanations about the Bible, I'd question things. I would always bring to her my interpretations of, you know, biblical stories and so forth. And so I had that in me from the time I was born, and I would seek that out all the time. But when I lost my father and when I witnessed what he was doing and I witnessed what was going on in society as a whole at the time, I thought, you know, I really questioned my faith and I doubted it and I became anything but faithful. I became a predator, basically. So, you know, I have to tell you that I ventured away from it and then, you know, by the grace of God, and I didn't even see this pattern. A mentor comes in my life. I received mercy and grace and I didn't see the pattern of God's hand in my life, but it came after a lot of prayer. So I would pray miracles would happen, but I wouldn't kind of equate the two. I wasn't smart enough to see God's hand in my life and then I'd venture away and then I'd be, you know, hit a rock bottom again. And what I've come to realize is that rock was God, basically. So I'd strip away all the worldly desires, get close to my faith, and then I'd rebound in life and then I'd do that again and then I'd rebound. I'd do that again and rebound. And so my journey up until I was 40 years old, I'm 45 years old, was a constant growth through, you know, growing, attracting worldly, material things and then getting on my knees as a result of the circumstances and crisis in my life and then, you know, reconnecting to my faith and then growing and then attracting worldly things and ego things and then going back to my knees and then growing again. And if you look at the trajectory of my life, it looks like I went straight up from poverty. But there was a lot of this, there was a lot of a roller coaster ride. And at 40 years old, I said, how do I get off of this roller coaster, this constant need for crisis and suffering to grow? And I went deep into my faith over a period of two years where I did nothing but work on the internal. And now, having done two years worth of internal work, my daily practice is connecting to my faith. In fact, I do my best to connect my faith in everything that I do all day long.
- [11:28]
Heather Monahan
What did that two year period look like so that we can understand and possibly embrace that same practice.
- [11:34]
Ryan Blair
Not everybody's going to have picked up as much negativity and trauma and suffering as I had done. I pushed out my trauma and I thought successful was going to heal me. So I thought, you know, yeah, I was abused, I was violated, I went through hell. I thought if I just win this award or if I make this next $10 million or if I do this, then all of the pain inside of me will be healed. And the best way to describe my energy was I was like a hurricane. I was just chasing success. Nothing mattered more than success in my life. And then I got success. And the more success I received, the more that the holes were amplified, the more that the salt came into the W, so to speak. And so I realized the more successful I was, the less happier I was and the more I had to get the next dose of success to try to feel alive and try to feel worthy. And so the two year journey that I went through, not everybody has to go through two years worth of isolation. And you know, my full time job was meditation, prayer, and reconnecting to my true spiritual self. And that was because I'd picked up so much baggage, so much mud that I had to cleanse my vessel for two years. Not everybody has to do that, but I had two years worth of hard work to do. Now some people have more than two years worth of hard work. Truthfully and truthfully, I'm still doing the hard work to this day, but I don't have to do it in isolation on my own. During that two year period, I did vows of silence. I quit working altogether, but I had the privilege that I had a home in a beautiful environment. I had a person, a housekeeper that would take care of me. I had great books, great access to content and information to study. I had hiking trails out in my backyard, a gym so I could spend two years doing nothing but fixing the parts of me that were broken and basically leaving behind. A lot of people say, oh, you're not broken. I was broken and all the pieces of me were on the ground and I got to pick up the good parts and leave behind the bad parts and put myself back together again. And that's what I did during that two year period.
- [13:46]
Unknown Host
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- [15:55]
Heather Monahan
Confidence I asked you to try to find your passion. Now, as you move forward, after going through so much and doing so much healing, do you feel like that roller coaster ride is finally over for you and you can just continue to grow?
- [16:12]
Ryan Blair
Yes. I've graduated from the teacher of suffering. I no longer need suffering the same way that I used to. Although suffering does show up, but when it does, I have a new perspective on it and I actually learned from it and I greet it as a friend. Every challenge that comes your way is an opportunity to grow. In fact, I'm going to be faced with challenges. I am faced with challenges. Being an entrepreneur with 30 team members and hundreds and thousands of clients is a challenge. And so every day there's something new that comes my way that I didn't anticipate, I don't want to do. But I have to do it. Because in that challenge is the next version of me. And when I pass through that challenge and when I master that challenge and when I extract the lessons from it, then I actually step into a new version of me that wasn't there the day before. So it's not that suffering has disappeared altogether, it's that I greet it as a friend and I don't self inflict it. I'm not looking to learn from the teacher of suffering. And so I constantly am preoccupying myself with trying to humble myself and keep my ego at bay and doing the things Necessary to keep suffering away from me so that I can learn from the good of life as opposed to having to learn from a constant, self sabotaging, suffering way of being, which is the way most people learn. When people are signed up for the teacher of suffering, I just give them a hug and love on them. I'm like, that's a better teacher than me. Because suffering will teach you more than anything else in life. But unfortunately, most people just never learn how to graduate from suffering, and so they're kept in a perpetual state of suffering.
- [17:52]
Heather Monahan
So true. And now you're teaching business people how to embrace faith. It's so interesting to me to see your teachings and the work that you're doing currently, because for so many years I just know myself, you know, speaking from my own experience, I definitely saw it the way as, you know, focus on the goal, go after the money, tune everything else out. I never thought consciously about this idea of aligning your faith, your life, your business, and bringing everything together. Do you meet a lot of people who are so curious about that?
- [18:26]
Ryan Blair
Yes. There's an awakening occurring right now. Most business people, especially when you become successful, you start to question, like, why am I doing this? Do I really want to be sitting inside of a room teaching and mentoring people so that they can make a living to give to their kids? And I'm not giving the sustenance to my children that I should be or to myself that I should be. And if you're really chasing money beyond a certain point, you're really not chasing the money. You're chasing the power, the fame. You're chasing, you know, something other than the money. Because after you get to a certain level of money, more happiness does not come with it. There's a diminishing return of it. And so what I have found with the clients that I work with is they're often asking the same question that I was, which is, why should I be doing all this? Why am I not just out there smelling the roses or hanging out on the beach all day long? And I did that for two years. For two years I did nothing. And that brought suffering with it as well. After a certain point, there was a diminishing return there in that I had healed and I no longer could spend all day long in tranquility and still feel alive and still feel like I was utilizing my God given gifts to make an impact. And so there's a balance that we have to have between productivity, generosity and the productivity is how are we productive as human beings and the generosity is how Are we being generous with ourselves, our friends, our family, and the world as a whole? And if you're just collecting money for the sake of collecting money, you're not going to have that productivity dialed in, or that generosity, I should say, dialed in. And as a result of that, you're going to be miserable. And all you're going to be doing is trying to get one dose of more money after next dose of more money after next dose of more money, and. And it becomes an addiction. And the high of money wears off over time, and eventually you're miserable, and you start sabotaging yourself by collecting things. And the more stuff that you own, the more that stuff owns you. And I'll tell you this. You know, I used to have homes all over the place, and then I had to worry about the people taking care of the homes, the people renting the homes, the value of the homes, the inflation in the homes, all of the stuff, right? All of those things that I owned end up owning me. And every day I just wake up having to maintenance all of the possessions that I owned. And that's no way to live. So there's a balance that we must find in productivity and generosity. And that's what I help entrepreneurs do.
- [20:50]
Heather Monahan
I know some of the work that you do is around helping people find their purpose. How do you go about directing people to find their purpose? Because it's something I hear people ask about all the time.
- [21:01]
Ryan Blair
Every one of us has a journey of the soul that we're on, and our soul has a purpose. And it's up to us to discover what that is. And we discover that through a series of experimentations. If you look at your past, you've already been doing these experiments, and each time you feel lit up and alive when you're doing something. Like, for me, when I'm speaking before an audience, when I'm writing a good passage, when I'm mentoring an individual, a new individual, giving them new awareness and giving them peace and awakening them to a new level in themselves. Like, I could do that all day long. And so when I look at the pattern of my past and I look at the things that light me up in there, I will discover the purpose. But what we don't realize is that each and every single one of us has the exact same purpose. We just have to utilize different vehicles to get there. And each of us has the same purpose, and that is to leave humanity better than we found it. Now, the way that we do that might be by being a great mother or great father or great citizen or a politician or a business person. And the objective is to leave wisdom behind in such a way that the world is a better place because you were in it. And so when you really simplify what a purpose is and you start to think about it in such a simplistic way, then you can challenge yourself each and every single day to just further your purpose, to contribute to the life of another person, to spread some light into someone else's life. And when you do that over enough days in a row, eventually you accumulate such goodwill that it'll be easy for you to live on purpose each and every single day.
- [22:38]
Heather Monahan
That is a beautiful thing. And I know it's something so many people are searching for. Today I was looking on your Instagram and I saw you speaking about the power of forgiveness and how it impacted your life. And it really resonated with me, and I was hoping you could share that story.
- [22:52]
Ryan Blair
Yeah, well, I'm a Christian, and so my spiritual hero is Jesus, and he taught three things. He taught forgiveness, he taught love, and he taught God's law. And, you know, I never really understood the power of forgiveness. I could understand love, like, okay, I get it, we should have love. Love thy neighbor, love each other. But, like, why do I need to learn this forgiveness thing? And then it dawned on me that I could not fully love unless I could fully forgive. And that the other half of love, you know, everything is a double edged sword. There's a negative pole and a positive pole. The other half of love is forgiveness. And forgiving ourselves means we love ourselves. Forgiving others means we love our neighbor as ourselves. And that, you know, that we truly love human beings. And being a spiritual person means we have two types of love. We have love for humanity and we have love for God. And in order to do that, we have to have forgiveness. And we have to seek forgiveness and give forgiveness as effortlessly and easily as we do pray. And so forgiveness is a very important modality. It's one that I remind myself each and every single day. And one that I teach even to my son, who's 13 years old. I share with him. Often I say, is there anything that you need to forgive me for? Because you know what? I'm a human being, and as a father, I make mistakes all day long. And forgiveness is an opportunity to clear a channel between another individual. And until you actually exercise forgiveness among each other, that channel will become distorted or blocked or it won't be a pure channel. So the more you forgive each other, the more, you know, you exercise forgiveness, the Clearer the channel is between the two human beings and the brighter light that can shine between them.
- [24:28]
Heather Monahan
I'm sure it was not easy forgiving your father. How were you able to make that happen or clear that channel?
- [24:36]
Ryan Blair
You know, when he passed away, I was shocked. I was in my bathtub. I loved taking baths. I was in a salt bath. I was meditating. And something. A voice came to me and said, you, father just passed away. And I hadn't seen him since I was 13 years old. He tried to reach out to me a number of times on Facebook, and I was so angry toward him. I blocked him so he couldn't reach out to me anymore. Even though he was trying to reach out to me in the best way he could with the best love that he could. He wasn't trying to pick a fight with me. He was trying to say, hey, I'm still your father. But I rejected that. I said, no. I never let him see my son, Reagan, his grandson. And so when he died, it just hit me like a ton of bricks that I'd never have that opportunity to give him a hug. I'd never have the opportunity for him to meet his grandson. And I denied him that. And I realized at that moment that I could have been a better man, that I could have just given him that, knowing that, you know, that there's still love between us and, you know, he didn't have to die with this uncertainty and this sadness around me. And I knew that I had made him die that way, that I had rejected him and I had withheld forgiveness from him. And all of a sudden, it became completely clear that if he was alive for 10 more minutes, I'd have given him that hug, knowing what I knew after he had passed away. And once I determined that, I said, okay, now I have to go and reconcile and forgive him for everything I can find. And I took out old pictures. I took out pictures of him and me, and there wasn't very many of them because I only had 13 years. And at the time, we didn't have cameras on us at all time, but I found as many pictures. I reached out to family members, and I got pictures of him as a child so I could deeply go into who he was as a child. When he was a victim, before he became a perpetrator, who was this man, this young man? And I connected to him there. And I did forgiveness exercises over and over where I bring up the good times. I tell him what I needed forgiveness for, because I cursed his name a number of times. I was not the perfect son by any means. He certainly wasn't the perfect dad. And I rebelled as much as I possibly could. And so I sought forgiveness. I gave forgiveness, and I repeated that for about two years. And I would do these exercises until anything that I could find in my heart that I was still holding onto, I forgave him for. And anything in my heart that I had done that I recalled and remembered that was wrong to him. Like, one time I shot out all of his lamps in the backyard with my BB gun because I was mad at him. So I went and broke every lamp. Like, every light in the backyard got a BB in it. And, you know, I felt justified at the time, but I still offered that up. And now I'll tell you that I have so much love for my father. I have a different perspective. I don't see him as a horrible person anymore. I just see him as, you know, for who he was. And I connected even to the journey that he had prior to me that I wasn't a part of. I have a deep sense of what he went through, and so I have deep empathy for him and compassion for him. And I laugh with him. I hear his voice all the time. I connect to him. And I have to tell you, it's been the most magical experience. Although he's not with me physically, spiritually, I feel my dad's guidance every step of the way. And, like, I can't. Even though there was a lot of bad stuff, I don't even focus on it anymore. The bad stuff, you know, to me, I just think it's got consequences of who he was and how my soul chose him because I needed the medicine that only he could give me. And as a result of the medicine he gave me, I get to be the father that I am today to my son. One that would never, you know, intentionally hit my son or harm my son or do anything like that to my son.
- [28:28]
Heather Monahan
It sounds incredibly freeing. So I'm so happy for you again. Definitely. I've gone through the forgiveness journey myself. Not the easiest thing to do, but when you can get on that other side of it, it feels amazing.
- [28:40]
Unknown Host
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- [30:52]
Heather Monahan
Asked you to try to find your passion. You brought up your son. I'm interested to hear about the role autism has played in your life.
- [31:02]
Ryan Blair
Well, for nine years, autism was the scariest thing that I could ever face as a human being. The day that I found out, I thought my son had hearing issues because I couldn't get his attention no matter what. I tried and he would go into these really difficult seizures and it was a really difficult situation. And I got him tested and I found out he had autism and it broke me. All a father wants, or mother for that matter, is a healthy child. Like that's all I wanted. And you know, seeing how difficult it was for him to learn, for him to socialize, for him to communicate, to use his words in comparison to all these other Kids that are excelling in school and doing this and doing that, and having to go through that experience was a very difficult thing for me, and 10 times, 10,000 times more difficult for him. So it was a lot of pain in my family system during that period of time. And I got him early help. I got him therapy, speech, ot, psychotherapy, every test that you could possibly imagine, got him into the right schools, got all kinds of help around him, changed his diet, and then started praying and meditating with him routinely. And during one prayer, one, you know, one moment, I witnessed a miracle happen. And I took him into a prayer, and he, you know, was going deep. And when he came out of the prayer, he opened his eyes and he didn't make eye contact with me. And for the very first time, he made pure, deep, intimate eye contact with me. And I saw a change happen in his eyes. And I kept going deeper into prayer, deeper into meditation. And the deeper that I went into prayer and meditation, the more that he was able to receive the light from it. And now I can tell you that my son doesn't show any signs of autism whatsoever. And in fact, they recently even changed his diagnosis. So, you know, I can tell you that it was a product of both doing the physical work, the therapy, the diet, nutrition, and, you know, the early intervention and then as well as the spiritual work. And now I don't have any worry whatsoever that my son will be 100% fully functional and productive as an adult. He's 13 years old now, and he is social, he communicates, he is very smart. He negotiates me at a video game points, you know, like nobody's business. I've never had anybody out negotiate me to the degree that my son can. And it's a miracle. And part of my journey, and my story is I've witnessed so many miracles like that. And that's why I'm so excited to share not only the miracles in my life, but to help people discover miracles in their life.
- [33:43]
Heather Monahan
That is an incredible miracle. I'm so happy for both of you. Talk to us a little bit about the science of miracles and what this.
- [33:51]
Ryan Blair
Means when we talk about science and spirituality. Science is taking an approach to finding evidence to support some of the things that we've known spiritually for quite a long time. For example, it's been in many spiritual traditions to meditate, and mentioned in Buddhism, not mentioned. It is Buddhism, it is Hinduism, and it's mentioned something like 23 times in the Bible. So meditation was always deemed as a spiritual practice. But now scientists have Actually started studying it and found that not only does it increase your iq, it increases your memory, it increases longevity, there's anti aging properties to it. So there's so many scientific benefits to meditation and prayer and breath work, and a number of spiritual modalities, voice and singing and vocal work, things that were, you know, done primarily as spiritual practices are now. We're now finding that scientifically that these things have a lot of merit to them as well. And over time, we're going to find that science is going to catch up with spirituality. And I think that there's going to be a perfect blending and harmony between both the way science looks at things, finding evidence to support the benefits of it, and the way spirituality looks at things. And that is to have blind faith in support of the benefits of it. And so I try to take both approaches to it and teach both approaches to it, because I think that looking at both approaches is the best way to actually come to the best practices that both science and spirituality have to offer.
- [35:18]
Heather Monahan
So how does someone bring about miracles in their life using this information?
- [35:22]
Ryan Blair
Miracles come when you're open to them. And if you're not open to miracles, they're not going to come. Miracles come when you're vulnerable, when your heart is open, when you are committed, when you are willing to do the work, when you're willing to step out in faith. That's when you start to see miracles. And every day is a miracle. And so, you know, part of bringing miracles into your life is just being connected to the, and having gratitude for the miracle of life that is all around you each and every single day. You know, the air that you breathe, the leaves that fall from the tree, the weather, you know, everything around us is a miracle. And so when you start to become present to the fact that just the fact that you are alive, that you are walking, that you are breathing is a miracle, then you can start to receive additional miracles. And pretty soon you'll start to see serendipity and synchronicity and a variety of things that are elevated ways of experiencing miracles. I've had some major miracles in my life and the very fact that I'm alive here today talking to you and sharing this with you as a miracle. So I think the first step to bringing more miracles into your life is just to start to recognize those miracles around you and then opening your heart to the fact that if you're open to miracles, they can actually come to you.
- [36:39]
Heather Monahan
Oh, it's so true. So good. Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned breath Work. And this is definitely something that is new to me, but I feel like everybody is talking about it. Are there certain types of breath work that you feel like are most helpful or needed, or is there a right way or a wrong way?
- [36:55]
Ryan Blair
Yeah. So this is another interesting scientific discovery. We've looked at different breath monitoring devices, and through your respiration, you can actually gauge your level of anxiety, your level of calmness. Respiration is an indicator as to how you're feeling. And so if you want to change how you're feeling, change the way you respire. And to respire correctly is to be inspired. Right? That's the word. The derivative of the word inspire is to respire. And so by focusing on your breath, you retrain yourself. And breath is an automatic thing. But breathing deeply and richly and fully expanding your lungs is not automatic. And we get conditioned and we start breathing very shallow because the content that we're taking in the work environment, the way we're operating, we start breathing really shallow. And we actually train our breathing to be shallow. And when we do that, we're not actually fully experiencing the energy that breath has to offer. And so breath work is basically going back and expanding and relearning how to breathe. And when you do that, you will release anxiety, you'll release emotions that are trapped within the body, you'll release old traumas, because the body keeps the score and it stores emotions and experiences in your breathing. If you're breathing very shallow, then what you're doing is you're basically trapping those emotions within the body. And so as you relearn to breathe and you learn to breathe deeply and you follow, there's a number of different types of breathwork that you can dive into that will expand the way you breathe and teach you how to breathe in a new way. And it's something that I have to do each and every day. I have to remind myself to breathe correctly because I get excited, I get energized, and pretty soon I'm breathing in a shallow way. And as a result of that, anxiety might pick up or I might get triggered or frustrated. And so when that occurs, I have to remind myself to ground myself and go back to the breath and relearn to breathe. One of the tricks that I do is in between sessions, you know, I might have a mentoring session where there's some heavy, heavy conversation and it might weigh heavy on me. And so I'll go take a quick breathwork session, say 5 minutes recenter myself, and then go back into the next session with my energy Cleared and breath. Work is one of the most powerful ways to clear the energy.
- [39:12]
Heather Monahan
What about people who are listening right now and saying, oh, my gosh, this sounds so hard. There's so much to do. How are people able to more easily incorporate these elements? Or what are the most important elements to incorporate that is feasible for someone?
- [39:26]
Ryan Blair
Yeah, that's a great question. And I use a technique where I have people first focus on removing something from their life. So what? You would be surprised. I did an analysis on my time the other day, and I'm actually teaching this to the entrepreneurs that I work with, where we look at all the things that bring us light in our lives, like catching a sunset, a sunrise, playing with my dog, right? All the things that bring us light and joy in our life. And you write all those things down, and then you write all the things that you have to do, like work, right? And stuff like that. And then, you know, you add up how long each of the things that brings you joy and then how much time it takes to do work, and then you try to find balance among, you know, the two groups and making sure that you prioritize your time for the things that bring you joy. Because work will eat up all of the available time. So if you don't have boundaries around the things that bring you joy, work will eat that up. And next thing you know, you'll be doing more work and more work and more work at the expense of actually having joy in life. So you have to have boundaries around that. You have to write out those things that bring you joy. And what I tell people to do is after they write up all the things that bring them joy, and then all the things that are required in the roles that they have, the work that they do, then we have to say to ourselves, let's make some space. And the thing that surprised me is like, 10 minutes a day is five days a year, right? So if you cut back on your Instagram for 10 minutes a day, if you cut back on reading the news for 10 minutes a day, you could do five days a year worth of breath work. You could do five more days a year worth of vacation. So when you look at the amount of minutes that you spend wasting time in life, you know, procrastinating social media is a big time waster. The news is a huge time waster. Netflix is a huge time waster. And you look at all the things that you spend time wasting. And if you start restricting those things, and I'm not saying eliminate them completely, but just cut them back in such a way that, you know, you're fine with that. It's like, all right, I'm going to spend five days a year reading the news, but if I spend an hour a day, that's like 20 days a year, whatever the number is. Right. That's a lot of days a year that you're dedicating to the news of all things. Right. And so we just don't realize how important 10, 20, 30 minutes of time is on a day by day basis. But when you add that up over the year, you'll find that you have a lot of time for the things that you're neglecting right now.
- [41:46]
Heather Monahan
Yeah. That is so powerful. And I love that idea of getting rid of something, cutting something out of your life, cleaning things up, creating some space so some more positive things can come. And I think that's super powerful. Ryan, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. How can people find you? How can they connect with you?
- [42:02]
Ryan Blair
I'm on Instagram, so I'm at Real Ryan Blair. And if you shoot me a dm, we can have a conversation or you can find me@altercall.com and it's a L T E R C A L l dot com.
- [42:14]
Heather Monahan
Well, grateful for you being here today. Grateful for you sharing all of this knowledge. We'll put all of your links in the show notes below. And thank you so much for everything that you're doing, Ryan.
- [42:23]
Ryan Blair
Thank you, Heather.
- [42:24]
Heather Monahan
Until next week, guys. Keep creating your confidence. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear.
- [42:35]
Unknown Host
Start learning and growing.
- [42:37]
Heather Monahan
Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone.
- [42:41]
Ryan Blair
You don't stop and look around once in a while.
- [42:44]
Heather Monahan
You could miss it. Come on this journey with me.