Transcript of Why Leaders Stay in Their Comfort Zone and Stop Growing Their Business

We're listening to another episode of the Vault Unlocked. And today we're going to jump right into it because we have the man himself, Peter Sage. Instead of me telling you how great he is, I think he could do a better job than I can ever do. Peter, welcome to the show. For our audiences that maybe not know who you are, just give us a little brief, if we can, who Peter is and really what you represent.

To be honest, there's always the tendency to people to put you on a pedestal. I'm just a guy, just same as everyone else, trying to put one foot in front of the other as best I can. But the path that I've led really has centered around being an entrepreneur since I dropped out of school at 16. I've spent 35 years now being unemployment and building multiple different international companies. Some have worked, some have failed majestically, some have been great ideas and should have stayed ideas when I was wrong, all the other stuff. Seen a lot, done a lot, made a lot, lost a lot, had a lot of fun. But what I love to do is I have a passion for personal growth and understanding human behavior in the mind. So that's really what's led me as a parallel career as well as international business, to really be an authority on what makes us tick. How do you get up in the morning and swing the bat with joy rather than with gritted teeth? So really, that's me. And I've been known to I throw myself in certain situations to demonstrate that. And that's probably where some of the people come across me.

I've had the privilege of working on and off with yourself as well, Kaveh on, for quite a few years now. I think this podcast was a long time coming.

It is. I'm excited to get into it because I know, I mean, We're being humble right now, but we're talking Peter Stages has been on stage with Tony Robbins, some of the top experts, multiple TEDx speaker. I mean, there's so much we can do today, but the Vault Unlock is all about coming discovering the one thing. And that's why I'm really excited because I know for you, your one thing is personal mastery. And if we even went deeper, it's really the mindset mastery of that. So I love the story. I just listened to your last TED Talk. I thought it was amazing. I mean, you can even see the awe in the audience. You never really get an awe in a TED Talk, and you did. So tell us what you just did. Why did you do it? And the pain and everything, I mean, I really want to understand this because I think it's pretty crazy. I'll even say this before we get into it. When I was listening, I don't even think I'd last 24 hours. Even if I could put my mind and will set to it, I just don't see how I could last more than 24 hours of doing this.

Well, I think for the audience listening, thinking, What the hell is this guy doing? Or what do you do? I'll set the scene very briefly. I've done a lot of ultra-endurance athlete stuff from running across the Sahara. I just recently, a few weeks ago, completed the North Pole Marathon on there. But all of that pales in comparison to the adventure I took on with my best friend last year, in fact, last December, and so about a year ago. We took on something called the World's Toughest Row. This is what's known as an ocean rowing boat, which imagine a beefed up canoe with a couple of little cabins stuck on the end that you can't really stretch out in. You're sitting six inches off the and you're rowing unsupported, meaning no one's allowed to touch the boat. You've got to take everything with you. From the Canary Islands, 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Antigua in the Caribbean. And it's the same route that Columbus took from the same place. It's commemorative that way. But you're talking about a rowing boat. We're not talking sail. We're not talking engine. We're talking about arms and ores for 3,000 miles.

And that took me just under two months. And the The impact for that really is understanding that because it's a rowing boat, if somebody's not rowing, you're drifting. And so in order to actually make the boat move where you want it to move, somebody has to be rowing at all times. And the best schedule that's been discovered really for that is two hours on and two hours recovery. So I row for two hours and then I recover while Lee rows for two hours. And that's 24/7 for just under two months.

Yeah. I To me, it's just insanity. Am I going to be honest with you? Why would anybody sign up for such a crazy thing? I really want to talk about this because I think it's so important here. People can't stay disciplined for a week. You had to stay disciplined two hours on, two hours off, life-threatening. I mean, you're in the middle of the ocean, and there's no, I You don't want to quit. You've made that decision. You have to do it. What first gets you to wake up and go, What's the hardest thing I can do? And just, I want to just go do that today.

Well, as I mentioned in the title, there was two real reasons I wanted to take this on. And the first is that I've been teaching self-mastery for a long time. It's just a reality of life. If you can't master your mind, you will never master your life. If you can't understand self-discipline, if you can't engineer your own, kick up the butt, no one's coming to save you if you go down the wrong spiral. So putting yourself in a situation where there is no choice is usually a great way to find out what you're made of, because there is no choice. And I wanted to... I thought, think of this scenario, and by the way, this happened a lot. Imagine that you're a thousand miles offshore. The nearest human is in the international space station. The nearest land is five miles underneath you. You've not seen a another boat or anything for weeks. You are tired, sleep-deprived to the point of hallucinating. It's four o'clock in the morning, pitch black. You're in a raging sea. You've not eaten for 24 hours because you're seasick. You've got salt blisters covering most of the contact points on your body, including your hands and your ass.

And your alarm goes off. You've managed to get about 45 to 50 minutes of your downtime actually asleep once the cortisol has gone out of the body from previous row, and you got to go out and row backwards in the dark in a bad sea. At that point, your mind is going to do what it's meant to do, which is to give you every single excuse to pull the plug, open the trap door, say, I don't want to go to school today. And it's in that moment I wanted to find out where I'm at. Because you can talk about it. You can sit on a podcast and brag about it. But theory does not cover the price of admission to the higher levels of greatness. And that's why we say, greatness is thrust upon people. It's not something that's usually chosen. It's thrust upon you because you have to step up. So I wanted to find out in a real situation at that level, did I start to cry and say, I don't want to go to school today, or am I going to get out and suck it up?

What would happen And was there even a choice when you're in the middle of the ocean, say, six weeks in? Could you even wave the white flag? It doesn't seem like that's even a possible opportunity.

If there was an emergency, and we had a few emergencies, right? Lee, my my rowing partner, best friend from childhood, Royal Marine Commando for 22 years, good mindset, good strong on the ores like I was. He got knocked out twice while he was rowing just after the About 10 days, we were into the row, and we got a rogue wave that slam the boat. I was in the cabin. It sent me spinning. But it hit his head on the side of the ores. The power of the wave was that hard. And I look, get out, and He's incoherent. He doesn't know who he is, where he is. There's blood all over the boat. I think he's gashed his head. It turned out to be a laceration on his hand, but he couldn't row for three and a half days at that point. So I'm rowing solo, and he's not even coming out of the cabin. And they almost... I called it in over the satellite phone to the safety team and the safety officer. But the nearest rescue boat is usually about four days away. I mean, you got to figure this out. Yeah. Is there a way you could quit?

They almost went to send somebody for him because if it was a bad concussion head injury, then he needs medical attention. And we were trained in first aid in basically the space of a large coffin, which is all the boat is. It's not a normal first aid scenario. If you got recovery positions or you're doing this. But he came out of it after three and a half days. He was back on the horse. And then about Now, 10 days from the end, it happened again. And he got slam, same part of the head. And this time, not only was he unconscious and concussion, he lost the vision in his left eye. Oh, my God. And so at night, again, three and a half days to four days where he couldn't get on the oar. So I'm rowing solo. Again, I'm rowing 11, 12 hours a day in daylight. And then what I do is I tie up everything on deck. The ores, the everything. If you get capsized, it's not tied to the boat. It's gone.

Yeah, Including you, by the way.

If you're not tied on at all times, if you go overboard, the wind or the current or the waves can move you away from the boat faster than your buddy can row.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Meaning that if you're not tied on, you go overboard. You're going to see your friend disappear over the horizon.

Absolutely. It's interesting because you said earlier in the show, if you don't stop rowing, you're drifting. So how did you know you were hopefully drifting in the right direction? I mean, even if you went to sleep three, four hours, how much did that take away from where you're going?

You set the boat up as best you can with the rudder in the direction you want. You hope the current is going to be in your favor. But first night, we lost about 12 miles.

Yeah, it's just what it is. Wow. I mean, we can talk. This whole episode can be just on this. But I really want to talk about really everything that you stand for. I'll say it, Even being able to work alongside with you, all of that. You've even helped me with my mindset. And just one of the things I want to go back to, because it's one that I always remembered, and I feel like this is your content, and it It was so simple. I still teach people this, and I say, I'm still stuck on this level, and I don't even know how you get to that next level, which is the to me, the by me, through me, and I think it's the as me. I think it's so important. I think that for that level of consciousness, I think it's such a base level of knowledge that I don't think most people are conscious to. They don't even understand that there's levels of consciousness, and it's not actually that hard to understand what these levels are, but it's a whole other world to live them and to become them and to actually be them.

I would love to just deep dive into that a little bit, if that's okay. Sure.

The original model came from Michael Beckwith. When he channeled it through in a class, he told me this personally in the '80s. But I've expanded on it a lot because it does provide a real strong framework of understanding, because most people are familiar with the concept of biological maturity. You're going to age. You know somebody who's in their 40s versus someone who's in their 20s. But emotional maturity is different. Emotional maturity is a choice. Most people have never been trained on how to take that on, which is why there's a lot of emotional teenagers out there running around in some pretty old bodies. But if we look at it through the lens of Albert Einstein, who's a pretty smart guy, never met him, but he said something that was pretty profound. He said, You cannot solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that created the problem. Now, he didn't say, You can't solve a problem at the same level of intellect. He said, The same level of consciousness. So looking at it through that lens, if we take this nebulous word, this 13-letter anomaly that science hasn't figured out consciousness. Science in a biological way is still trying to think the brain produces consciousness when the reality is the brain doesn't produce consciousness anymore than a radio writes music.

So when it comes to- Isn't that interesting?

Here we go. Okay. I'll let you keep going. But wow. Yeah. Okay.

So four levels. The first level, the lowest level of consciousness in humanity right now, which is very ubiquitous. It's quite prevalent along about 70% of the world. By design, that's a different podcast, one that you'd probably had more with Kevin and Katie previously. But the level is called to me. And it's called to me because the mantra of that says, I would have the life I want, I would have the car I want, the body I want, the girl I want, whatever. But everything happens to me. Or if only this hadn't happened to me, then I would be this, that, the other. If you had my parents, then you'd understand, or if you had my boss, you'd understand, all this BS. So it's the quintessential level of victimhood. And the challenge with victim is that nowhere in the universe is the role of victim ever supported. You doubt that, go to the Savannah in Africa and see what victims are about. So most people in our sphere, especially people listening to this podcast, are past that. They get that being a victim doesn't work. They don't want to be a victim. They They want to take personal responsibility.

They want to go out and try to create a better life. They are seeking answers, whether that's online through podcast like this or whatever. They want to open the vault to find out what they got to do. That gets us to the next level of consciousness called by me. And buy me is the mantra of if it is going to happen, it's going to happen by me because to me, ain't working. So I'm going to set some goals. I'm going to go out of the market. I'm going to go hustle. I'm going to do what I can. I'm going to work on self-improvement because if I am going to get my goals, it's going to happen by me. And rather than stand on the shore of the river of life complaining about the temperature or the current, you dive in and you start fighting the current, swimming upstream towards your goal. That's the achiever mentality versus the victim mentality. And the vast majority of personal growth cave on, initially, if we go back to the Tony Robbins in his early days, it was catering for what I call the to me, to buy me crowd.

In other words, Stop watching infomercials at 2: 00 in the morning. You sad sod. Pull your thumb out of your ass. Go set some goals. Go get them, cowboy. I'll show you how. Get motivated. And it was like, how do you get people from complaining at life to creating a life? And that was how person development for the has entered the market, certainly in Tony's side. The challenge with that is that personal growth as an industry pretty much realized that there isn't a lot of money in that because there's more people in to me are committed to keeping their problems than outgrowing them. They have what's called secondary gain. They have a way to validate their own significance by the size of their problem. They get their connection through connecting with other people that are victims groups or blaming the government or blaming this or blaming that or whatever. So a lot of people are more happy being unhappy than you realize. It's crazy. But those Those that are ready to go are the ones that would pull up their credit card and say, I'll buy that program because I'm looking for a way out.

But it's a small number of that pyramid. The vast majority of personal growth today is what I call the low buy me to high buy me. It's somebody that's committed to wanting to do better, but they want to... What's the hack? What's the hustle? How do I 10X this? How do I get the Lambo instead of the Beamer? It's the low buy me to high buy me crowd. Low achiever to high achiever. And that's your typical, Tony Robbins more in that space these days, your Grant Cardones, your Gary Vee's, your Dan Pennears, you pick one. That's the vast majority of personal growth in the industry on Instagram with your Muppet standing next to your fake Lambo profile picture trying to sell somebody a course on how you can make more money. You get the idea? Yeah. My market is different. My market speaks to crossing the bridge to the next level of consciousness. And the next level of consciousness is what we call through me. Through me is where you're no longer swimming upstream, fighting the current, but you're actually aligning with the current and allowing life to take you to where you should go.

Not passively. If you're in a boat in a river and you're not, trust me, if you're not in control of your rudder, you're going to drift to where you don't want to go. But rather than using your energy to fight the current, if you use your energy to position yourself better in the current, that's a better use of energy. And most people in by me start off as Alan, the achiever. They move into stressed out Simon, get to burn out Barry, hopefully avoid heart attack Harry, drop into to me to catch their breath when their next hustle doesn't work, realize that's not who they are, get back on the horse and start galloping again in by me, and they rinse and repeat. There's like a glass ceiling. There's like, what's the code I'm not cracking? And code you're not cracking is understanding that, as Einstein said, you can't solve a to me problem at a to me level of consciousness. Victim is not going to be solved by victim. Victim will be solved by achiever. But you can't solve and achieve a level of problem at an achiever level of consciousness. You have to rise above.

And when you start aligning with the natural flow of the river, when you start understanding the rules of the road when it comes to the non-physical rule set. See, by me is outer-world-centric. To me is outer-world-centric from a victim-reactive perspective. By me is outer-world-centric from how do I How do I control my reality and how do I get it to fit my pictures with force. Through me taps into a power. Through me is different. Through me is where you give up the need for control because you understand a fundamental truth that has been taught to the elites for centuries. And that is outer world follows inner world, not the other way around. You got chaos in your outer world, check your thinking. You're chasing money. And here's a great question for people listening in, because the answer to this question becomes self-evident when you hear the question, but most people have never asked themselves the question. And the question is this, would you rather make money or build wealth? Which one?

Well, I mean, personally build wealth.

Of course. Once you ask the question that way, the answer is self-evident. So why aren't people building wealth? I'll tell you, because they're too busy trying to make money. So when you realize that if If you are trying to make money, most people are coming at it from a scarcity mentality. Or outer world follows inner world. The biggest number one law in personal growth that I've discovered in 36 now years of doing this, I can sum up in one phrase. You will never rise above the opinion of yourself.

It's interesting. I say to my sales guys, You will never outsell your identity.

Yeah, same thing.

It's the same, yeah.

So if you've got a financial comfort zone around 50 grand a year, and that's how you identify yourself. And all of a sudden you start getting involved in an opportunity that could bring you 150 grand, A, you're either going to self-sabotage it, or you're going to find a way to get rid of that other 100 grand when it shows up in your bank account because you'll never rise above the opinion of yourself. What you want to be doing is, how do I raise my financial comfort zone? How do I raise my financial thermostat? And a great example of this. You go back into my side of town in terms terms of the England in the 400 years ago when it was a feudal system, meaning that you didn't have the gift or the ability to be an entrepreneur. You were either born in the lucky sperm gang or you weren't. You were a landowner, a baron, a landlord, and your family was set for life, or you were a peasant, you worked on the land that the landlord owned, picking the stuff out of the fields. That's the game, right? Imagine that you're a servant in the landlord's house, they had servants, they had maids, they had butlers, what have you.

And the landlord is having... The land baron is having a party for some of his wealthy landowner friends. And you're serving the meal with the other servants. So you're dressed in your servants gear, you walk in, you place the plates down, you lift the dome off, you disappear quietly. And let's say that you'd made friends with the land baron's daughter, who was six, seven years old, because you were her maid, you helped her get dressed in the morning, you made her bed, you played with her toys, what have you. That was part of your job. And the daughter sees you bringing the food to the table. And she says, Oh, Daddy, Daddy. Let's say that the servant's name is Jane. Can Jane join us? Jane, please come sit next to us at the table. What's Jane's immediate thought?

No. I'm not good enough. I'm not one of them. I'm not supposed to be at this table. I'm not allowed at this table. And then the worst one, I just want to... I'm not worthy. Enough of being there.

Absolutely. Of course, it's not her place. And even if the daughter insisted and the land bar says, All right, put her a seat there, how's she going to feel sitting at the table with all the other wealthy people?

Good, uncomfortable, all that.

100 %. Now, the question I have for your audience is simple. What table are you sitting at? Because Jane's very happy at the servants table downstairs. That's where she belongs. There is no difference in physiology. Same two arms, two legs, same nervous system. The difference is where do you feel comfortable sitting? And you get to decide that. If you're in a village like that a few hundred years ago, and the King rides into town with his people, the whole village is a stir. Oh, my God. It's a human being on a horse.

Yeah.

The difference is mental.

Would you agree that it's easier said than actually practiced? Of course.

If it was easy to practice, we'd all be sitting here the massive paper.

Yeah. Because actually, what you're saying, too, it That goes along with a quote I heard in your TED Talk. You said something about comfort versus growth-centric experiences.

Yeah. It's coming back to what I said about my role in this industry is helping frustrated people in by me cross over into through me. The invitations to the table feel natural. How do you engineer that from an inside-out perspective rather than hunt for it from an outside-in perspective, which is never going to work? And so And the fourth level, by the way, which I'm not qualified to talk about, is called ASMI. That's your nondenominational oneness, non-jewality.

I love... Peter, as much as you're the expert, one of the leading experts in space. This is what I love about you and what the difference between the real and the fakes are is called humility. And for you to know that there are four levels of this highest level of consciousness, and that the fourth level is, it's not that it's unattainable, it's in a different world. I call that, it's funny, I tell people when I teach it, the monk level. That's like monk. I don't even know, personally, if I even aspire to be even at that highest level. But I sure as hell know I want to aspire to be as the through me level. So for those people like me, I mean, full on honesty, who's at the top by me, at the top level, sitting on the cusp, understanding understanding that there's this little... There's this thing called surrender, where you still have to trust yourself, but also let go and trust the outer world and be able to flow, and I call it flow like water. How does someone cross the chasm when they want it? So when they want it, they understand it, but they find themselves like they're just sitting there and maybe it's the fear, maybe it's just the unknown, but they're sitting there paralyzed of actually taking that last little leap that probably changes everything.

It's the one thing that gets you through me. What would you say to that person, a. K. K. Vaughn?

You're pointing in the right direction. Surrender can be heard from at different levels of consciousness. You hear the word surrender as a victim into me, and you hear the world be dominated by. If you hear the word surrender in by me, you hear it as failure. You hear the word surrender in through me, and you're surrendering, letting go of the need for control. Now, I didn't say control itself. I'm saying the need for control. And again, there's different levels of consciousness that people will hear this from. I'll give you another insight. The real starting point of power, the genesis of true power, is the second you recognize you don't need it.

Yeah.

There is a letting go at that level. There is a point where people will look at you because you're no longer craving significance or external validation and think, wow, I want what they have. In other words, you're getting it by osmosis because you don't really need it. So when you give up the need for control, you actually get more control over the situation because now you're working with unseen forces, if you like, that are conspiring in your favor. And let's go back to Einstein. He said, The most powerful question you could ask or answer in your lifetime is, do you live in a friendly or hostile universe? Now, think about it. You think you live in a friendly universe, then things are happening for you. If something goes wrong, you're excited to find out why it didn't fit your pictures and what's going to come good of it. You're looking for the silver lining in the cloud. It's like, Okay, so that wasn't my outcome, but I'm excited to see how it turns out. Because I live in a friendly universe, therefore it must It must be happening in my favor. I just don't see it from this level yet.

There's an expectation, a positive expectation. You're not complaining, you're not being sucked back to victim. But if you think you live in a hostile universe and something goes wrong, you've just got evidence as to why life's a bitch, and then you Why? Why it sucks, why here you go again. And they're two very different lives that you would live. As an example in a relationship, if someone leaves you in a relationship, you're going to say, Well, I'm no good. So they left me. If you live in a hostile universe, if you live in a hostile Universe. If someone leaves you and you live in a friendly universe, you're going to say, well, thank goodness they left. So they made room for somebody who's right. Same break up, different pathways moving forward into two different versions of life. Twelve months down the line, one person is doing great, one person is still crying. So to just touch in, what's the reality there? Do we live in a friendly universe or do we live in a hostile universe? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. We live in a self-reflective universe. Two men sat behind prison bars, one saw mud, the other saw stars.

You can decide whether you're being punished or you can choose the fact that you're being prepared. And if you want to start the journey into through me from by me, Having something as a driving force in your life that is bigger than you often by me is driven by insecurities, the need to prove, the need for certainty, the need for significance. And just making one switch, when you change from trying to validate your own significance, which you don't need, by the way, it's just your ego that needs it, to raising the significance of others, you switch that spotlight from, look at me as the star of my movie, aren't I doing great? Please tell me I'm doing great, to how to make somebody else feel amazing in their movie. I was recently with a former guest you just had, Kevin Trudale. Kevin and I were having dinner. And one of the things I love about Kevin is when you watch him interact with people, he is constantly making you feel the most important person in the universe. He is constantly shining the light back onto your stage to make you feel the star of your movie.

It's a rare and beautiful trait that you don't see many people do. But when you do, when you give up the need for significance and you replace it with raising the significance of others, a lot of other people hold you in a very high level of significance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and this is... I mean, we do sales and everything. And I tell people, when you put yourself first, you end up on the bottom. When you put the prospect first, you end up on top, right? And you hear this, right? And I think it's self-development, right? If you want to do good, make it about you. If you want to be great, make it about others. And I agree, it's hard, right? It's one of those things where you can understand it, logically, and you can even believe it, I would say, emotionally. But then there's the highest level of consciousness in that that surrenders, or like we said, gives up control around that and believes it authentically. I think that there's a fine line there, and the universe knows.

It's not so much the fact that it's hard. It's simply exposing where your friction points are. When you drive down the freeway and you're not You're paying attention, luckily, there's something called a rumble strip. That's to get your attention so you don't go off the verge or into the central reservation and have a bad day. Well, life has its built in rumble strips as you're driving down the free way of life. If you just use a simple health example, If you're listening to your music in the car and you're drifting off and you're having too many cheeseburgers or you're having too much ultra-process food, and at some point you get out of breath walking upstairs or your pants size go, it's a bit of a rumble strip. It's like, oh, it's at your attention. Ignore it. You could go off the verge. And of course, what most people do, oh, that's interfering with my music. I'm going to turn up the music. I'm going to get a pill. I'm going to go to Ozempic, and I can carry on driving the way I want. It doesn't work that way. But on a mental perspective, if you want to get into through me, you want to trust the universe a little bit more.

You want to grow out of your ego's need for internal validation, sorry, external validation, then the resistance that you come up with is simply the rumble strip that is showing you, okay, now I've got to work on From being able to be less self-centered. I've got to work on trusting that if I fall, the universe is going to catch and I've got some level of cosmic overdraft protection. I'm going to have to work on the fact if something goes pair-shaped, there's a better reason for it. Napoleon Hill quoted very emphatically, Every adversity carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. The challenge with most people is that they're so focused on the adversity, they don't water the seed. You've got to have a different mind frame. You got to understand that you are the star of your movie, and most people are giving up their power to star as an unpaid film extra in the big budget disaster movie they see going on online on the news or anti-social media.

You said in your TED Talk, your latest TED Talk, you said the quote was, You got to have cheerfulness in the face of adversity.

It's a superpower. And I break it down because the biology of that is critical. If You start getting angry, upset, scared, fearful, or what people in by me like to call stressed, because they don't like owning those words, right? You have a biological reaction that is inbuilt as part of our evolution, and it serves you because danger, that most people's minds don't understand the difference between fear and danger. There's a big difference. Fear is designed to get your attention evolutionarily to point in the outer world to something that could be mortally dangerous. You get fierce in front of a tiger or a snake in a tree or standing next to a thousand foot drop on a cliff. Fear is useful to get your attention to point towards something in the outer world that you need to take advantage, to take action on, to avoid you being taken out of the game. Now, we don't have many snakes and tigers these days or thousand foot drops outside of our front door. So So that fear has been replaced with psychological danger, the fear that I'm not enough, the fear I don't have enough, the fear I can't pay my bills, the fear that somebody doesn't like me, the fear of rejection, fill in the blank.

There's a lot of patterns out there that I could quote. But when you realize that when you have a fear come up, the mind, the brain is evolutionarily programmed to respond as if there's a physical danger, and therefore you go through a whole biological shift, meaning The blood will be squeezed literally out of the front part of the brain to go to the mid-rear brain. Why? Because you have to work off reflex, and critical thinking is the slowest form of thinking. So if you're sat there thinking, Oh, that lines on its rear horns, which means It's probably going to strike from that angle and leave within this port to swip. Too late, your lunch. You're going to walk off reflex. So critical thinking shuts down. Your blood gets pushed to your... Your immune system drops through the floor because two of the biggest areas of energy consumption when you're stable and your cortisol levels are normal is digestion and immunity. So your digestion and immune system shut down to conserve and redirect energy to the muscle so that you can run Don't fight, flight, or hide. So when you get stressed, you go through a biological shift that essentially raises cortisol, pushes your brain waves north of 15 to 16 cycles per second or 15 to 16 hertz.

Your critical thinking stops. And that's why we've all said and done really dumb things when we're stressed, angry or scared, that we've then either regreted or had to apologize for later. Or you heard it. What was I thinking? You weren't thinking. You were scared, stressed, whatever. So going through the cheerfulness in the face of adversity is to wake up and understand, okay, what is it that I could do right now to to recognize that my biology is being hijacked and try to turn it around? Humor is a great one. We faced, after four days, we hit our first major storm. We hit 35-foot waves in a rowing boat. It was frightening. I was absolutely terrified at some point, but I had to-That's the real fear, right?

That's the real fear.

That's the real fear. That's the real stake in the tree, right? Yeah. I also knew that if I didn't get my cortisol under control, I would probably make the wrong decision on where to put the ore in the water, how to position the boat, how to work with the navigation, all of that stuff, all of the survival instinct. I wasn't trained enough to know unconsciously, competently So I had to do it consciously competently, and therefore I had to retain the front part of my brain and not get hijacked into fear or do something stupid. So it's... The cheerfulness in the face of adversity is a... It's one of the tenets for the Royal Marines, but it's a practice that can become a superpower if you allow it to. Now, there are certain times you don't want to be cheerful at your mother's funeral. Neither was I. There's times where you allow yourself to grieve or allow yourself to process certain levels of situation or break up or whatever it may be. But if you allow grief to take you down on its terms rather than use it to process certain emotions that require processing and time, then you will stay there.

And an example I give is that when my dad passed away, and it's always tough for a son to lose his dad, I struggled, but I processed. I understand that it's every parents wish that their children outlive them. I understand that there's a time and a place for everything. I understood that at some level, he probably wouldn't have left if he didn't think I was ready at an energetic level. I look for ways to process it so that I can still grieve, but do it on my terms. The person he was with at that time wasn't my mom, it was my stepmom. Fifteen years later, if you check her profile on Facebook, it's still him and her as the patron. Still hasn't got over it. Still grieves. Still misses him. Still missing. But part of life is you need to be able to move on. So you need tools to be able to acknowledge where are you in your journey of processing the past on your terms rather than get taken down by it. And that's where victim stories come in. And if you can't get out of that, it's going to own you.

I've seen, it's unfortunate as you say that in those exact situations or sometimes, which is the worst, is when the parent loses the child. And I've seen it play out twice, two different complete outcomes. The one side still to this day is their life's over. They just can't, you know what I mean? They're still living in that victim. And then the other one is like, you can't, you almost go like, how are you even acting like that? Hello, did you remember you lost your son? But there's this peace that comes with it. Obviously, there's a grieving process. But I love what you said is you can't let the grieving take over. You have to go through that process, but you can't let it take over and run or rule it. Because I always believe, and I tell people who go in these walls depression, the longer you stay in it, the higher those walls get and the higher they get, it's harder to get out. And you got to be on that. It's interesting because you brought the topic of your dad up, and the way you ended your Ted talk was you said something that, again, very simple, but I was profound, is make peace with death.

If you don't have a way to reconcile death that empowers you, you are I'm going to live disempowered because there will always be that thought of how do I avoid the reality, which is we all have a final scene in this movie. It's non-negotiable. I don't care how many vitamins you take, how much workout you do at 100 years. At some point, you're going to want to sell this old car. It's going to break down. So if you think death is the opposite of life, you're going to resist it. If you understand that death isn't the opposite of life, death is simply the opposite of birth, then You're going to see it as a transition. And we're very fortunate in today's society now that, 15 years ago, this didn't exist. But today, you could go on YouTube and there are channels and channels that are dedicated to near-death experiences. People that have gone through a near-death experience, some of them 30 years ago, and didn't talk about it because people thought they were crazy. And you look at it through the lens of an objective detective trying to piece together a case. So you're not trying to lead the witness, you're just simply looking at the evidence.

And it It is way too overwhelming from the amount of thousands and thousands of people who have crossed over and come back. And it shouldn't be called a near-death experience. It shouldn't be called a death experience because they died.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they came back, and every single one, they have nuances of how they describe it. But the commonalities between cultures, ages, backgrounds, different circumstances that led to it, all varied on all commonalities in the experience that happens afterwards. And you would have zero fear of death when you understand what it really is. And if you don't have a way to reconcile that through your religion or through some way of being able to make peace with it because it's going to happen- It is going to be people. Then you're going to be kicking and screaming all the way. And the biggest challenge, Kavon, is this. If people are afraid to die, they think that, well, it's healthy being afraid to die. But it's not healthy on how it shows up in this current movie, because how it actually shows up is in being afraid to live. Because you're going to make decisions based upon avoiding uncertainty. You're going to make survival-centric decisions rather than passion-driven decisions. You're going to avoid things that are going to light you up because, Oh, I don't want to increase the uncertainty. There's this hidden fear that, Oh, I'm scared of death.

No, you're afraid to live. It's going to own you. Swing the bat. Go out. You're going to get to the the end of this movie at some point, as we all are. And if you can turn around and say, now I have the privilege of choosing those words and say, wow, that was spectacular. That is a movie I would pay to watch again. That is something that I'm proud of I took those chances. You know something? I struck out a lot. Some of those business ideas didn't work. Some of those women rejected me, whatever it may be. But you know something? I played full out. You're going to get to the end? Because I've been around people that have come to terms with mortality, whether they've got hours, days, minutes, or weeks to live. I was just having a call before this podcast with somebody who is terminally ill and is making peace with that themselves. And I can promise you this, when the time comes, well, you know it's hours left or days left, nobody is going to turn around to the people near them and say, Please go fetch me my mahogany-framed MBA certificate.

Please go fetch me the keys to my Bentley. Please go me my stock certificate. No. What are they going to say? They're going to say, Please go get me the people I care about so I can tell them I love them one more time. We can reminisce about the amazing times we've had, about the time. You remember we started that business and it absolutely flopped? Oh, my God. Remember when we tried this thing and it didn't work? Do you remember when we did that and, wow, we nailed it? They're the stories you're going to be telling as you go to the end of this movie. Not like, Oh, wow, I managed to get the end of the movie, thankfully, and not have any stories to tell because I was too scared to try anything else. Make peace to your death so it doesn't own you. So you can go and live rather than live as if you're afraid.

I think that is where we ended. I was going to ask one last question, but I really think that that's enough there. Peter, I know people are going to be like, Where do I find this guy? How do I work with him? Where can people find you? And if someone is is really feeling and resonating this, how can they reach out and get your help?

I'm available online. You can go to my website petersage. Com. I try to put a lot of stuff on YouTube to help people with. I call it antisocial media because that's what it is for most people these days. If you're getting social media scrolling you rather than you specifically searching for things that you want, then it's antisocial. But I put a lot of stuff online to help people. If you want to play at a high level of the game, clearly, I have programs. I know you've even done some, Kavan. I mean, they're world-class, they're gold standard. I'm very proud to say we have the highest rating in the entire personal growth industry globally on Trustpilot. We've got over 5,000 reviews. We're at a 4. 9. And just go read what other people have said from the journey they've taken. And if you feel it resonates and you want to come play a life that threw me at a much different level, raise your financial thermostat, get rid of your limiting beliefs, live from a place of passion rather than fear, come play. I'm your guy.

I love it. Well, that's another episode of the Vault Unblogged.