The Road To Self-Mastery! Feat. Ryan Blair

Authentic Leadership podcast. A podcast where we're seeking to lead change while also seeking to understand we're all set as a platform for leaders to come together to unite, to develop and empower other leaders in the areas of business, family and community. I'm your host, Lafayette Lane, joined by co-host John Lebrun Today we are joined by special guest Ryan Blair. Put those hands together, put those clap emjo's in the comments section. Ryan has joined us to have an amazing conversation today about the road to self-mastery. Just a little bit about Ryan Blair. Ryan Blair is the number one New York Times bestselling author and cellular entrepreneur. He is also the former CEO of Isols, which Blair sold in 2012 for $792.4 million, and was named Ernst and Young 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year. Ryan has devoted the rest of his life and career to helping people breakthrough in their mind, body and soul through a proprietary curriculum that he offers and his new company, Altar Call. It's a day Ryan has joined us right here on the unscripted, authentic leadership podcast. Ryan, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Let's just jump right into the conversation. Very excited about this. We're talking about the role to self-mastery. I'm interested in starting off and hearing your own back story of your own self-mastery story. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I I guess so. I came into the world with some parents that were anything but on the path of self-mastery, so it was the perfect environment for me to see what not to do. My mother was an alcoholic, my father was a drug addict, my father was very violent and my mother bear the brunt of his violence, as in many of my brothers and sisters. So it was a very traumatic start. And I got to see my family disintegrate, we were in the middle class. I got to see the house get foreclosed on, the cars get repossessed and I got to see how when you go from a position of being in the middle class and having that status connected to it to poverty, which is where my mother and I went to and my dad left, I got to see how you're treated. And I got to see that the difference between the middle and poverty. And then by the grace of God, at 17 years old, my mother introduced me to a man who became my mentor and he taught me about entrepreneurship and he lived in another class. He lived in the wealthy class. And so now all of a sudden, I'm getting to see how the wealthy operate. And so I was exposed to the three class systems that we have in this country poor, middle and wealthy. And then I was exposed to, you know, poor beliefs and poor behaviors. You know, through my parental upbringing and then was exposed to, you know, solid beliefs and solid behaviors through my mentor. And so I got to see both sides of the coin pretty early on and then made the decision that I was going to pursue a life of self mastery and through entrepreneurship. And I haven't always been on the path. I've learned a lot along the way in my journey, but I can tell you for the past several years now, I've, you know, I've made it my life's commitment to pursue self-mastery. That is that is an amazing back story. And I just want to make sure that we are super clear for our audience. Can you define to us what self-mastery means when you talk about this whole element, this whole terminology of self-mastery? Mm-Hmm. Well, you know you if you break it down, you have mastery of your body. And there is an element of self-mastery there where we have to push our body to the limits. We have to know where, you know, our body breaks. And I've certainly done that martial arts and writing in other athletic endeavors to understand, you know, and know my body. So that's one element of it. On the cognitive side, we have to know our thoughts. We have to know the stories that we tell the language that we share and we have to understand and know our emotions . And so to master your thoughts and your emotions and your language and the stories that you tell is an element of self-mastery on the cognitive side and then the spiritual side of it, it's it's mastering and deepening your understanding of your purpose for being your your, you know, your your soul's mission and your soul's journey, your faith and your connection to your higher power. If you don't if you get all three of those mastered, you know, it's I'm a work in progress, so I can't say that I'm perfect in anything, but I've just committed to mastery in those three buckets. And then I guess the fourth thing that I would add, which is a spiritual expression in my opinion, and that would be mastery in business, but you're at a, you know, business is the output of what you do and input comes from learning and from growth and from your experience in a variety of other sources and businesses and output. So I don't see business as separate from my spirituality. I see it, in fact, as a way that I can enter the marketplace and bring my faith and bring my my, my wisdom to the marketplace. But business would be an element of mastery. You know, if you want to look at it in terms of buckets. Sure, sure. Go ahead, John. So I hear echoes here, a lot of people saying, I just want I just want to understand how to make much money. How do I just be successful, like financially successful? So whenever someone says I just want to be successful, I might well, let's break that down. Because what? What makes you happy? Why? Why is self-mastery so critical to long term success? Well, money is a good thing to learn, and it's very important for us to understand. The energy of money for us to understand how to create it, how to make it, and I highly recommend people learn how to make millions upon millions of dollars, as I have learned, because my relationship with money is much different because I've created it out of thin air a number of times and in a substantial amount of it. And so I recommend people learn and master that skill as well. I learned I put a lot of energy into the mastery of that skill early on, and then I found that in order for me to keep the money, I needed to learn some other skills. But I first spent the majority of my first part of my career in terms of learning how to make it. And so it's extremely important to learn that skill and to realize that it's a skill and that you should learn how to master that skill. The the the art and science of actually creating money, especially as entrepreneurs. But then, conversely, to keep money and to be happy with money, you have to learn self-mastery. I had heard you. You kind of broke down once on another show. I don't remember exactly which one. Maybe with our friend John Anthony, you're talking about. The difference of chasing time slash energy versus chasing money. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, you could. You could you unwrap pack that again? Yeah. So the formula in the framework that I utilize is real simple. So energy creates your time and it creates the meaning of your time. It creates the productivity of your time, creates the efficiency and effectiveness of your time. Energy is time, basically. And so if you want to be more productive and have a better use of your time, then you've got to work on your energy. And when you work on your energy and you dial on your energetic system, which is your nutrition, your physical activity, you know your emotional well-being and states that you operate in and you really master energy in your own personal energy and get to a level of mastery where you can turn on whatever state of consciousness you're seeking to turn on and whatever emotions that you want to turn on. If I want to turn on gratitude. And I'm tired, I can turn on gratitude. If I'm tired, if I want to, you know, turn on divisive decisiveness, I should say I can turn on decisiveness so I can turn on whatever emotional state I'm seeking to turn on because I understand my energetic system and I've prepared it and I planned it. And that means that when I approach a unit of time, I can be much more efficient than I used to be when I didn't have control of my energetic state. And if you master energy and you master time, more than money is going to happen by default because as a result of the mastery of energy and time, money has no choice but to appear because you will, by process of elimination, eliminate those things that drain your energy and drain your money and eliminate those things that drain your time and drain your money. Hmm. Now we're talking about that was a yeah, that's a le moment, just let it fall literally. We're talking about the road to mastery you mentioned about, you know, you're not perfect or striving and we know about the success and also the failures. But what is the biggest lesson you learned from your greatest failure? Hmm. You know, not the greatest failure that I ever had, you know, publicly, I went through a custody battle and and, you know, I I basically divorced society. And what I learned from that was the things that we think that matter. They really don't matter at all. You know, the status that we're seeking, the opinion of others, the there's the stuff that we get caught up in politics and none of that stuff really matters whatsoever. The stuff that truly matters is your faith and your connection to your higher power and your connection to your. In my case, my child. And my connection to nature. And my connection to my true friends. Those are the things that really matter. And all of the other things that I thought mattered. The trophies that I had, the awards, the, you know, the the good opinion of, you know, so many people, all of that stuff didn't matter whatsoever. You mentioned your son there. How was your son or how did your son's autism play a role in your healing journey? You know it. My my son has been my greatest teacher, and I have been able to take him alongside of his mother through a healing process where now he no longer shows any signs of autism whatsoever. So I know definitively that love heals and that faith heals and and I saw him change when I took him through a baptism process. And when that happened, I saw his eyes change and I saw whatever was inside of him, you know, start to believe. And as a result of that, he's now accelerated. Socially, he's accelerating. And, you know, every category and it's like, I have an entirely different child than I did when he was really struggling deeply with his autism. So the key lesson that I learned from that is that love heals and love is the ultimate healing energy. And we just have to, you know, if you look at all of the sickness and you look at all of the divisiveness and you look at all the sadness in our society, it's because of a lack of love. Wow, powerful, inspirational. And if if I remember properly, if you feel comfortable sharing. I think you mentioned that you had, I don't know if recalibrated or came for the first time, he sort of found your relationship with Christ about four or five years ago. Is that sound about accurate? Yeah, I always have had a relationship with Christ, but I put it as my my primary. You know, my my most important. My priority relationship. four years ago, when I made a decision that I was going to to purify myself and remove any of the damage that I had done to my myself and heal the the, you know, the transgressions and heal that the improper ways of thinking and the lustful nature lusting of money lusting of of women. You know, I made the decision that I was going to go deep into the healing work there, and Christ was my my sponsor in the new endeavor. Wow, that's very cool. So I know you, I know you're huge on meditation. I've been in several of your mastermind groups. And to be totally transparent. I never practiced meditation. I would practice like sort of like sustained thought or something like that, if that's even a thing, but not, you know, box breathing, which I know is sort of implemented in breathing exercises, but not really meditation. And I never did. I just wasn't interested. But it's not even fair to say that because I never took the time to understand meditation. And now, after understanding more and more going through some exercises, it's something I've been trying to implement a lot more. You know, before this, this meeting and so forth, teach my son who's ten, and he's getting some benefits from that, which is cool. Can you explain why meditation? Mean you can even talk about what it is? But why is it so effective? Yeah. And this is from a pure science perspective, but it's mentioned in the Bible a number of times, and it's been practiced by a number of different cultures, you know, for thousands of years. And so any time you see that something is practiced by multiple cultures for thousands of years, there's a benefit to it. And when you look at the science behind meditation, it will increase your IQ by up to 23%. There's a ton of healing benefits to it. It gives you greater clarity and reduces your dependency on distractions. Increases your focus. There's a ton of different benefits. And the way I like to just describe it is it's attention training, and we live in a society right now where there are a lot of very smart people trying to steal your attention. Oh, there's brilliant minds at Facebook and Instagram, excuse me, and LinkedIn and YouTube and Twitter and Fortnite and net and trillions of dollars of capital that is all trying to get your attention smart as human beings. The the richest human beings in the history of the world want your attention, and that's what they're monetizing and they want to steal it. They don't want to pay you for your attention. They want you to basically use their apps and they want to steal your attention away from their souls. Purpose away from your education, away from your family, away from you know what you came here to do. And you have to do everything that you can in your power to get that attention back. And meditation is the only way to train yourself to do that. And it's really unfair. You know, you think about it, there's there's 100,000 engineers trying to steal your attention right now or millions of engineers, and it's just you against them . And they're using any clickbait, any dopamine enhancement there. They're trying to move the buttons on your phone, they're trying to do whatever they can to try to capture as much of your time on their apps and on their devices and on their programing in keeping you away from the programing that's available to you through your connection with Jesus and the creator and do your connection with Mother Nature. Yeah, I can attest. I grew up. I wouldn't have been diagnosed ADHD because I was quiet. Right. I always think that kids tend to get diagnosed or the ones loud in class, they don't sit still. My son included and I just didn't buy into it. I didn't buy into the medication thing. I told him, No. But anyways, um, I I. But I am also that person because I was that person who if I was not interested in a topic or I was tired, just couldn't really stay focused. I remember being in college classes saying, OK, John, Focus Focus. I would spend so much energy trying to focus. I didn't hear anything that the teacher had said it was. It was ridiculous. Can figure it out. And then your first class, your first mastermind in Group B, I guess you'd call it first ultracool that I attended. I was tired at the end of the day because it was wintertime there. I was nine 930 my time and I had been through a long, twelve hour day and I was like, I focus. And then you started meditation thing and I thought, I feel weird, but John just dove in. Get out of your comfort zone. I thought everybody else to do it might as well, you know? And it was two to two and a half hours, and I was with it. The whole time didn't break nothing and it was crazy to me. I got off and I and I was like, Man, I was engaged the whole time and then I. Then the next week, when you did it again, I thought, I wonder if this has something to do with how I was able to just sort of hone my attention for two and a half hours with no problems, just sip in the water and pay attention. Yeah, when you do it in a group, you know, as the as the the biblical quote goes, where two or more are gathered? Yeah, right. And when you do it as a group, you're you know, you're inviting the Holy Spirit into. And you know, there's a lot of us that are very spiritual part of this group. So, you know, you got a bunch of spiritual people that have a big calling on their hearts to be able to make an impact. And God knows that God wants us to receive the blessings, you know, that are in store for us. And so the Holy Spirit comes in to these sessions. So there is a metaphysical benefit to meditation far beyond the scientific benefit. But I always try to start people on the scientific benefits to it. And after you really, you know, get through the scientific piece of it, then you can start to really connect, you know, to the spiritual piece of it, which, you know, the way I like to describe it is meditation is is downloading in prayer is uploading . Hmm. And so when I'm praying, I'm sitting on a message, I'm saying, thank you. You know, I'm making commitments, whatever my prayer structure is. And then when I meditate, I'm downloading and I'm listening for God's word. That's good right now, you stir the preacher in me, I'm not going to let him loose all the way up to be a preacher. I don't think I told him I love him and he's really good. It's awesome being a preacher growing up in church my whole life. I'm very interested in hearing the story behind the name altar call. Now I've heard that, you know, countless times in church, you know, you get to the end of the message and they have it all took off. You know, you actually start a company, a whole movement called Altar Call. What was the whole ideology behind that and was the whole purpose built? Well, I spelled the name a little different in that it's al tr. So the idea is we have to alter in order to answer our calling. And you know, the whole world needs an altar call moment right now where everyone is going to altar by altar. I don't mean I mean small, tiny changes. It's like putting on getting a suit tailored. You have to you have to make small changes to the way you behave and to your habits and to your routines and so forth. And when you make those small changes, you create the space necessary for you to answer your calling. And so our mastermind helps people do just that. We help them out to their lives so that they can answer their calling. And that was the inspiration behind it. And being a Christian and being very familiar with the term altar call it felt like I would align with it in that. Yes, we are. You know, we are. We are here actively creating altar call moments, but we're just doing it very specifically and helping people affect change, you know, of themselves and in themselves so that they can affect change externally. Brilliant, brilliant. Thank you. On the. On that same note, then, as far as altering, you said, altering your habits for change and so forth. There's a lot of people talk about starting your day off, right? Which is a which it's really hard to change getting it going from getting up late, last minute, early, whatever. I know you have a very structured morning routine. What recommendation there is like one or two things that someone choose to do every day to really start their day off properly. What would you recommend when I start my day and I as soon as my I wake up, I immediately go into prayer and I thank God for blessed me with another day and then I, you know, my god, let's go. What do we what do we got in store for today? What's the plan, right? You know, I'm ready to go. You know, what are we going to learn today? What do I need to do today? Right? You know, I'm ready, so I make this deal with God. That's that's. And then I next step, as I examined yesterday what I learned. What do I need to let go of? You know, we need to let go of yesterday so we can maximize the opportunity of today. And so I do so by just saying what I learned and sometimes I learned, you know, around myself too hard or I was tired or, you know, I learned something about my energetic system. I need to make some adjustments. I need to be better at meal planning or whatever the case is like, you know, I might look at yesterday and say, here's four or five things I learned, and I want to, you know, make some adjustments and apply to today. And it might be that I need to resolve a conflict or that I've, you know, I've got something that needs to be healed. Then I'm, you know, I'm looking at it yesterday and I need, you know, I need to work on that. So that's what I call examination. So I examined yesterday, I let go of whatever I need to let go of and then I enter today. Then the next thing I do is grow. So I immediately turned to a book and I'm either reading a book, a spiritual book or a book on, you know, form of skill or elevating my consciousness or something that's going to inform you as a leader or a father or a person. And so I'm always reading at least, you know, 1015 pages, sometimes longer. But you know, I'm getting ten pages or so in right away. So I've learned something first thing in the morning, then I go into my meditation and prayer and then I go into my workout routine. By the time I show up to my first meeting, I've already won the day. Mm-Hmm. Right. I can literally do nothing after that workout. And I've already grown for the day. Everything else, I'm running the score up. I mean, you mind if I run one more after that, that'll piggyback off a vote, whatever. Okay, and then I'll let you ask your questions. Sometimes I steal a moment. I don't mean to. So on that same getting the day started, I like to do this exercise sometimes like I want on one, but I've not done it on this show much, which maybe we should call it like the index card exercise. I hear a lot of people say, I don't I don't know my way or my purpose and things like that. I think I'm supposed to be a teacher. I'm like, Well, that's kind of an avenue more than a y, but OK. And so I learned a long time ago answering these two questions really helps find that. And it's the index card. You take it on one side, you answer, you write down to answer the question Why do I get up in the morning? So why does Ryan Blair get up in the morning? And then on the other side, you flip it over and you write down and you answer the question. What keeps me up at night? So why do I get up in the morning and then what keeps me up at night? Well, you know, I think we all are teachers, I'm here to teach my son. You know, I often think that, you know, I have the next president of the United States on my hands. And you know, and I treat him as such. And you know, I really do treat him like he's the next president. United States and God has given me the gift to bring home, you know, erase a leader. And that's my job is to, you know, to raise that leader. So that's why, you know, I get up in the morning is, you know, because I I've retired for a period of time and my son came to me and said, Dad, you need to go back to work. You're not happy. And I'm like, Well, I get to spend all day with you and we get to play video games and watch TV. And he goes, You're just not happy. You need to go back to work. And so, you know, I mean, I'm here to raise my son and be the best father I can be. And by being the best father I can be, that means that I need to be the best leader I can be. And by being the best leader I can be, that means that I need to effectively lead my company, my team members, my community and so forth. So by setting the intention to be the best father that I can be, I by default have to become a great leader. And as a result of that, I have to be good at business, right? So I try to simplify things and break them down that, you know, the answer is nothing keeps me up at night. There's not nothing there. I sleep like a baby. The the thing that excites me if I were to, you know, but I'm very trained. I trained my mind. You know, there is actually, believe it or not, I don't think I've ever told you this, but we have a light switch in our brain. And when you meditate, you will find it and you will learn how to turn it off and you can sleep on command any place, any time, anywhere you want to. When you meditate, you find these spots inside the brain and I can go to that switch and I can. I can take a 20 minute nap and I can tell myself,

35 tomorrow and my brain will wake up at 4:35. I don't need an alarm clock, but that's because I've explored the inner workings of the brain, you know, for many, many hours that I've been able to get to that place where, you know, I'm I'm not. Nothing's keeping me up at night. But if if I were to break from my discipline and start thinking about stuff that would keep me going, you know, I would think about there's a level of consciousness that we all are going can potentially obtain that we have not yet. And when you start to ask yourself, what does the world look like from my next level of spiritual consciousness and how does my existing reality that I'm now operating in change as a result of this new level? You know, that can be quite an exciting thing. Like what? What will I come to the determination of as I continue to elevate my thinking? And I've done a lot of thought exploration on that subject because I've witnessed as I've spiritually matured, I've witnessed my reality change and my connection to my past change changed my connection to my body and my friends and my family. And I've witnessed these beautiful changes as I've matured spiritually and knowing that I'm just a baby in my spiritual maturity, that there's many other levels of consciousness that I have yet to ascertain. I get excited thinking about what those levels will bring. You mentioned about being a great leader, being a leader to your son. Everyone has many definitions of what a leader he is and of course, we have books and seminars and courses and things like that. But what is your personal definition of a great leader? Well, we as human beings are spiritually designed to grow. And it's a shame that we don't grow like the plants in our houses. You know, you give the plants the right water, the right sunlight and the right soil, and they grow and they grow tremendously. And if you left your house and it was well, your plant was well attended and came back a year later, maybe a foot or two bigger and you'd be like, Wow, look at the growth every human being should grow like a plant grows when it's well taken care of. And so as a leader, my job is to create a growth environment. I have to make sure that my son has the right growth environment and that I'm tending to the elements of that environment for growth. And that's what my job is. As a leader of a team at Altar Call is to make sure that I'm creating a growth environment for that team and that I too have a growth environment for myself and that I'm setting the pace of growth in my for my team and my family, and that I'm, you know, a pacesetter of growth. I'm not always going to be the fastest pace because we grow in spurts and, you know, we all have different seasons, but I'm always going to be a pace setter of growth. What are some of the some of the key things you try to make sure you implement or consider or principles when you're creating that growth environment ? What are some aspects that are necessary for that growth environment? When you have to have a solid set of principles because principles are like the operating system, it's it's the code that you call upon when something happens that you, you know, in life and you don't have an answer for it. So you've got to call upon a principle. So let's say, for example, I have two eyewitness two people arguing, you know, what do I do or do I start arguing with them? You know, what's what principle do I call upon in this particular case to, you know, to stop them from arguing right now, if I don't have any principles, I might join in the argument. Now you have three people arguing. But if I have a principle and one that coach John Wooden gave me is, it's not who's right. It's what's right now. Having that principle, I can tell the two people arguing, Hey, let's focus on what's right, not who's right and diffuse the argument and you know and go, you know, and move forward. I have hundreds of these principles that are my operating code for how I conduct myself in life and in business. And that's, you know, that's the foundation I've written and crafted a bunch of them myself. And I've also been blessed to receive a number of principles from great mentors, some of the greatest of all time imparted to me. There are principles that I have adopted as my own. So those are some foundation tools. You need to have principles. You need to have a personal understanding of your and your own integrity. This was something that I had not really crafted up until later in my life because of the way I was raised. I didn't have a clear understanding of integrity. And so I had to do a lot of trial and error to get to a place where I understood my own personal integrity. And, you know, and held true to my integrity and to my own personal values and my own personal principles. And so those are really the foundational aspects of it and then your rituals, your prayers, your meditation, things that you do, those rituals are really just to continue to guide you. And ultimately everything that we do is about being connected or we connected to our soul and how we connected to our heavenly father and our divine purpose . Or are we disconnected from that? So all of the things that we are doing are designed to deepen and widen our connection. Excuse me, our connection. And then there's many things that discussion you have to eliminate those things with disconnect you. Absolutely. No, Ryan, you have a documentary and also a summit coming up this month and you share with us and more information about your documentary and your leadership. So yeah, so I have a documentary that I've been working on. It's actually the second documentary that is chronicled a portion of my journey. The first one on YouTube, it's called Nothing to lose a documentary, and I've written two books that have that have also shared some insights into my personal journey like Tommy Rock Star and nothing to lose, everything to gain. And now I'm working on another documentary, which airs about the founding of Twitter for the purpose behind it and some of the hardships that I went through when I was battling and suffering. You know, I lost my mother. I'm dealing with my son's autism. I've gone through a custody battle, and I was blessed to have a lot of that stuff captured on film. And I share with people how I navigated those very difficult storms through doubling down on my faith and through, you know, just becoming like a, you know, a student and a servant of our heavenly father. Absolutely. Stay connected. Also with Ryan. Follow him on Instagram at Real Ryan Blair. That is real. Ryan Blair Instagram And we thank you again, Ryan, for coming on to have this amazing conversation about the role to self-mastery. Stay connected with us here. @unscriptedleadership on all social media platforms. You connect with us on our website, unscripted-leadership.com, And of course, this podcast is available on all streaming platforms, as always, and we pray that you'll be the leader that God has called you to be. We're here to build bridges and not walls. Bridges connect and walls divide. Until next time, God bless you.