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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
I want to tell you a story that you can probably relate to in some way or find some parallels in. And then I want to discuss how we can use the lessons of this story to increase our productivity, make positive, meaningful changes in our lives and come from a place of more consistent joy and happiness in what we do.
This is the Indian story about the musk deer. There is a [00:01:00] deer that is frolicking throughout the woods when it becomes aware of a really beautiful fragrance, a scent that is so strong and beautiful and arousing that the deer feels called to it.
to investigate the source of this beautiful scent that has arisen so much positive energy and emotion inside of it that it has to know where this scent is coming from and it feels compelled to search and it puts everything else aside in search of this scent it travels long distances it sacrifices its own well being It puts itself into premises of danger.
And eventually in search of this fragrance, the deer makes a fatal mistake and it falls off a cliff. And as the deer is [00:02:00] lying there,
realizing that these moments are going to be its last, it has another more vivid realization that the scent that it had been searching for had actually be coming from its own navel. The entire time that it was actually the source of the scent that it had been searching for. If it had just realized that it was the source of the scent all along, it wouldn't have gone on this treacherous journey and sacrifice so much of its quality time and put itself through all these difficult trials and tribulations and eventually made the mistake that took its life If it had just realized that it was that sense of joy and beauty and purity all along, I think that we can all relate to this story in some [00:03:00] way, because the reality is many of us are poorly defining the things that we truly want in life.
We're not actually chasing things in life. Things won't ever make us feel any better for any permanent amount of time.
What we're chasing, what we're searching for our feelings, the feeling of fulfillment, the feeling of passion, the feeling of meaning, the feeling of joy. We're searching for the way that things can sometimes make us feel, even if just for a moment. We do this in many areas of our lives.
We do this in our relationships. We do this in our businesses. We do this in our jobs. We have goals that we're trying to attain. And a lot of those goals, we prescribe this idea of things and outcomes to our goals. If we get [00:04:00] here, we can afford to do this. We can afford to buy this.
We can afford to go here. Maybe we're saving up for a really big vacation. And in order to take that big vacation, we're working extra hard at something we really don't find any meaning or purpose in. So we can make the money to go and escape that feeling of stress and pressure and doing something we don't like.
The reality is. We can feel what we're going to feel on that vacation all the time. We have the ability to feel the way we want to feel without chasing the things that we think are going to make us feel that way. Because all of our things, the feelings we get from things are simply temporary.
Talk about this. Ad nauseum talk [00:05:00] about all of the things that I've chased in my life that have made me feel good for a little bit of a moment in time. Everything from sports cars to the alcohol that we drink to feel a certain amount of pleasure for a certain period of time. But ultimately those luxury cars will just become cars.
And the next morning we'll wake up and be hung over and we'll feel different. We will have paid for chasing things in order to feel a certain way. And so rather than put your focus on things, if you put your focus on feeling the way that those things make you feel already, a couple of things will be true.
One, you'll be massively more productive in your life. Two, you will be able to attain those things, but you'll be able to attain them from a place of [00:06:00] already feeling the way you want to feel. Vacations are great. I love going on them. I don't love going on them as an escape from my normal life. Because what happens is when you go on a great vacation and you're trying to escape feeling a certain way, stress, burnt out, hating what you're doing, guess what happens?
You get to the airport and you're so excited And then once you get to where you're going, every little thing that doesn't go right makes you feel more stressed. Have you ever been on a vacation that you get back and you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation because things didn't go exactly the way that you in your head imagined them going and now you've set an expectation and you're constantly stressed and disappointed because it's not playing out that way.
And that's because you put so much pressure on yourself. On this experience to make you feel a certain way because it was your escape from not feeling that way in your day to day life. And [00:07:00] even if the vacation goes really well, what starts to happen is as soon as you get on the plane to come back. you start to feel that tension, that stress and anxiety, it all comes back.
And you realize that that feeling was just an escape because you're not feeling that in your normal life every day. And so now you've got to go back into that whole stressful feedback loop to just try and work at the thing you hate doing again, just to save up enough for the next vacation.
We're chasing a feeling that we don't organically find within ourselves, but it is there. And when we find it and we manifest it and we harness it, then you have vacations are great. But we're always coming from a place of joy. A million things can go wrong on your vacation. It's not your preference, but you're still joyful.
You still enjoy being there and being alive because you've chosen to feel that way every day, regardless of the circumstances. And I understand that [00:08:00] that can feel very surface level, that choosing to feel joy, choosing to feel fulfillment, It can be very difficult in times of legitimate stress and legitimate hardship.
I'm not discounting that in any way, shape or form. We tend to feel joyless and purposeless even when things aren't going wrong. We just haven't found our true sense of purpose and meaning. We're not doing things that we truly love and we can choose to bring joy. to our daily lives. And we can choose to see our purpose, whether or not we work the perfect job or have the perfect career path or have a perfect marriage, or we're doing exactly what we thought we'd be doing at this point in our life.
Every day we can get up and feel purposeful and joyful, and we can practice those things and we can make an impact on others in our world. And that will bring us more fulfillment, more meaning, No matter what the outside circumstances are. And by the way, when we do this, our productivity will actually increase and our ability to [00:09:00] achieve our goals, our ability to attain those things will go up.
And there have been many studies that have shown this one was just published recently, just last year in management science, where they studied the happiness correlation to people's productivity with salespeople, people that are coming from a place of happiness in their work.
Are exponentially more likely to sell more in the same period of time. And now I understand that that's maybe not a perfect correlation, but we all understand that we perform better when we're in a happier, more joyful state. When you're in a down or stress.
or frustrated state. We make mistakes, we get analysis paralysis, we're sluggish, we're less productive. When we are happy and joyful and excited and we find purpose in what we're doing, we tend to be more productive . But . we wait so often in our lives to get happy once we achieve the goal, to get happy once we save up for the vacation, to get happy once our marriage becomes better.
If our [00:10:00] partner would just do this, we'd be more happy than we'd be a better partner. But that's not how life works. And if we try to make it work that way, we're in for a lot of suffering and pain over the long term. A really healthy alternative would be to wake up and find that meaning and happiness and joy and purpose every day.
And that's going to take a little bit of work on your part. That's not something that you're organically going to just be able to manifest without working on it. It does exist inside you. I can promise you that just like the musk deer, you can be your own sense of happiness and joy. there are many mechanisms by which you can do this.
One that I really love to utilize in my life is breath work and meditation. I start every day off with at least a 15, 20 minute quick session of meditation. And for me, that's incredibly beneficial because my joy truly just exists in the absence [00:11:00] of stress,
what meditation does for me is it helps to remove the stresses in my life for long enough that my mind can clear itself and allow the joy and the happiness to come back. The reality is there are many problems in life worth stressing about, ones that affect our immediate safety and health and security and things like that, but there are far more problems in life that are not worth stressing about that we allow ourselves to compound and make worse and magnify because of our stress.
And what meditation does for me is to right size that stress to the appropriate amount and allow my organic joy and happiness seep
in So that when I come back and go forth into my day, my mind has right size that stress to the perfect amount.
Where I can align my focus with it in a realistic manner to go deal with the issues and the opportunities and the obstacles of the [00:12:00] day without magnifying them. That allows the ratio of my happiness and joy to be in alignment in a way that's productive rather than coming from its over arching.
Place of fear and stress that everything is going wrong all the time. It's mostly not. And when you allow yourself to right size your fear and right size your stress, you allow your organic levels of happiness and joy to elevate.
If you haven't made a regular habit of incorporating breath work or meditation into your daily routine, I would highly encourage you to spend 15 to 20 minutes of quick meditation right in your morning routine.
You would be amazed over time at your ability to right size your stress levels to the perfect amount that you can go and focus on the things that are true obstacles in your world while allowing your joy and your [00:13:00] happiness to elevate and to carry you through the day.
We don't truly exist in a neutral state. The antithesis of joy and happiness is simply fear and stress. When we remove or we right size or reduce the level of fear and stress that we have in our lives, our levels of joy and happiness and fulfillment will naturally elevate. They'll come back into equilibrium.
We do a really poor job as human beings Creating the right fear response to the right level of danger.
We are organically wired to ascribe more fear than is necessary to the actual situation at hand. We do this just as an instinctive mechanism to protect ourselves from all kinds of dangers. And what happens is we used to have much more physical danger in our worlds as a younger species, a younger version of ourselves.
We had legitimate physical [00:14:00] danger in our world all the time. So we had to have a mechanism that really made. Our brains going to high alert when there is danger so that we could protect ourselves. And that's why we've survived so long as a species, even though we're comparatively weak to other species that are similar sizes to us because we have these high alert fear mechanisms that allowed us to protect ourselves for so long, but we never really changed.
That part of our brain over the centuries and centuries that we've been here, even though the physical danger in our world has greatly been reduced. And the real fear that we have is fear of our lives not working out the way that we want them to. Our business is not getting to where we want them to be.
Our jobs not giving us what we need from them. Our relationships not being fulfilling, our bank accounts not looking the way we'd like to. Us not feeling like we're keeping up with everyone else on social media. We have that same fear response to those kinds of stresses, which truly are intangible stresses.
We need to have the [00:15:00] appropriate fear response to legitimate dangers in our lives while not having an overblown fear response that triggers nothing but stress hormones over things that. In the end, aren't truly that important because all we're chasing at the end of the day are the feelings that we think our goals are going to get us, we can manifest those feelings really anytime we want.
That's why I appreciate the benefit of meditation so much. It reminds me and it helps me to come from a joyous and happy place by default. And it right sizes the level of fear and stress in my life so that I'm not shoving things off that are truly important. There are things that I stress about and that I need to take care of and focus on before they get out of hand.
But I don't let that fear and stress shut me down or keep me in a negative state because I know that my default state of joy and happiness and positivity is actually going to make [00:16:00] me much more productive. And that's why even on the more difficult days, if you're coming from a place of joy and happiness, you get excited about solving problems.
Those are opportunities to grow. Those are opportunities to experience what it's like to become the new version of you. You invite volatility, you invite excitement and adventure into your life, and you ascribe the right level of stress to those things. You already have all of the feelings that you're searching for deep inside of you. If you allow yourself to make a habit of letting them rise to the top and right sizing the things that keep you in a negative state, not only will your productivity go up, the happiness and the joy that you're truly looking to feel.
will be accessible any time that you want it to be. If you don't have a regular habit of meditation, I would highly encourage you to download any one of the amazing meditation apps. There's calm, there's [00:17:00] headspace, there's a million, or just grab a great book on meditation and take 15 to 20 minutes every day.
Start now. And do a little bit of breath work. Allow yourself to sink into meditation, get into a meditative state, see how you feel on the other side. And then imagine if you extrapolate that feeling over the course of the rest of your entire life, how much more productive would you be if you were always coming from the appropriate level of stress in your life and then everything else was pure and it was joyful and you were happy.
I guarantee you it would make a meaningful difference in your productivity. Give it a shot. Drop a comment. Get in touch with me. Let me know how it's working for you. I truly appreciate you spending time with me. Thank you for watching this episode and I will see you next time.