#4 – Brett Solomano – Conquering Fear, Values vs Conditioning & Stress Adaptation

Every now and again I won­der why we cross paths with cer­tain peo­ple in our life, and why we keep the com­pa­ny we do.

Of course, these are very sub­stan­tial ques­tions, none of which I can answer in total­i­ty. But in case of my bud­dy Brett Solo­mano this ques­tion was answered when we record­ed Episode 4 together.

Wind back 14 years and we were crawl­ing amongst the kan­ga­roo poo (amongst doing oth­er things) in the Aus­tralian Army Reserve.

Since then there have been career changes, immi­gra­tions, busi­ness starts, busi­ness fail­ures and in gen­er­al a whole­sale evo­lu­tion of the peo­ple we’ve come to be. 

And yet when we recon­nect­ed after 14 years, it was incred­i­ble to dis­cov­er this new side to us and to learn and grow from it. I cer­tain­ly could not have fore­seen this!

Moral of the sto­ry? We are who we are at a point in time, and you just nev­er know where a rela­tion­ship can go if you give it time and a lit­tle investment.

Take a look at your con­tact list and recon­nect with some­one — you just nev­er know where the jour­ney could take you!

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Now, onto…

Conquering Fear

Humans don’t tend to have nat­ur­al preda­tors these days, unless of course you’re scu­ba div­ing with sharks and croc­o­diles in Dar­win Har­bour. Yet our brains have retained the same fear respons­es that char­ac­terised our sur­vival mech­a­nisms hun­dreds of thou­sands or mil­lions of years ago when we had all sorts of crea­tures to con­tend with.

Bless our brains for they have giv­en us great progress as a species, but the wires with­in are still ancient. 

So even though you’re not con­tend­ing with a sabre-tooth tiger out there, the thought of doing a pre­sen­ta­tion or a cold call or get­ting set on fire (in Brett’s case) will elic­it a sim­i­lar response from your amyg­dala. FEAR. Fight or flight. GTFO.

Although we can­not con­trol the ini­tial onset of fear, we can con­trol our response to it.

That’s why Brett’s insights into this top­ic were so valu­able — because his approach to con­quer­ing fear is actu­al­ly pret­ty-straight forward!

Breathe. 

Calm the mind through your breath, slow that heart rate down and voila.

Take it from a pro that get’s set on fire, or revers­es a semi-trail­er truck 80km, or risks it all to move to the oth­er side of the world with a dream! 

It’s so beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple and so effec­tive. Heck, you can even have tran­scen­den­tal, psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences with just breath­work. YOLO.

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Wait…did I say YOLO? 

Well, prob­a­bly like you it’s a term I do use with a laugh.

But Brett coloured it dif­fer­ent­ly, which I think i’ll adopt, and you should too — YODO. You Only Die Once, but you live every day.

💥🤯💥

Is there ever a state­ment that should exem­pli­fy an approach to life — it’s YODOBYLED. Ok maybe we’ll keep it digestible at YODO.

We know our time on earth is short. We know we’re gonna move on. We’re gonna die, guys. Until our con­scious­ness an be uploaded into a cyborg, it’s gonna happen. 

Yet why on earth do we pre­tend that time is limitless?

I don’t mean actu­al­ly pre­tend in our heads (if you did­n’t read the lines above, please back­track), I mean put things off aligned with our inner self, our pur­pose, to a future arbi­trary date.

That ‘tree’ or ‘sea’ lifestyle change? That dream busi­ness you wan­na start? That trip around Aus­tralia or the world? ‘Yeah nah i’ll do it in my 40s/50s/60s’. ‘I’ll do it after x or y’.

Prob­lem with that approach is, you, or your whole you may not be around.

Your health may deteriorate.

Your debt may be half the size of Tokyo by then.

Heck, you may be flush with cash, but what’s the point if you can’t enjoy it?

It can be a con­fronting realisation.

It shocks me when I think about some of the choic­es i’ve made — being locked in with so much debt, invest­ment prop­er­ties etc.

But the point is TO BE shocked by it. Because if you are, it forces you to con­front the real­i­ty at hand.

Since the mid­dle of 2022, I became so uncom­fort­able, so shocked that I just HAD to take steps to make changes.

If you can impart this think­ing and approach into every­day life, I will guar­an­tee you your dis­com­fort will get to such a lev­el that you WILL start mak­ing changes.

Just remem­ber, mon­ey can be earned, re-earned and recov­ered — your time cannot.

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Stay sane out there, lots of crazy sh!t going on in the world…just remem­ber your heart has the answers. Tune in to it.

May suc­cess be with you 💙 💚

Lis­ten to episode -> https://www.dancingwithdoubt.com/podcast/4‑brett-solomano-conquering-fear-values-vs-conditioning-stress-adaptation/

Watch episode on YouTube -> https://youtu.be/CTnoCe31mjY