Confidence Classic: Discover Your Calling! With Ryan Blair Founder Of AlterCall

0:00I've had some major miracles in my life and the very fact that I'm alive here today talking to you and sharing this with you as a miracle. So I think the first step to bringing more miracles into your life is just to start to recognize those miracles around you and then opening your heart to the fact that if you're open to miracles, they can actually come to you. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week?

0:37We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do.

0:53I'm so excited for you to meet my guest today. He's Ryan Blair, number one New York Times bestselling author and serial entrepreneur. Blair went from a gang member to businessman with over$2 billion in company sales. After decades of building successful companies, Blair began his latest company, AlterCall, which uplifts and helps entrepreneurs scale their companies using spiritual modalities. Blair is the former CEO of Buy Salus, which is known for the Body by Buy 90-Day Challenge. In 2012, Blair sold by Salas for$792 million. Ryan is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the book, Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain.

1:35Ryan, can't wait for you to break this down with us today. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me. Perspective is a powerful thing. And I did not have a great childhood. And so for the majority of my life in corporate America, I never spoke about it. And then to read your bio and hear that you were in a gang and just this perspective shift of no matter how hard someone might have it, there's always somebody out there who's had it harder. Can you get into a little bit of your backstory and what your up and coming gang years were like? Yeah, that was a long time ago. But, you know, there's a lot of things that I reflect on to this day.

2:15And I was raised in a I started out in a middle class environment. So I had all the perfect situation. I had a pool in my backyard. I had new clothing come school time, lots of presents underneath the Christmas tree. And by the outside, it looked like we had the perfect family. But on the inside, my parents were addicted to alcohol and drugs. My father was very violent. And as a result of him becoming addicted to drugs, he disappeared on us when I was 14 years old. And my mother was faced to raise me on her own. He never sent a dollar child support and never gave her any assistance. And she didn't have any career skills or corporate skills whatsoever.

2:56So she had to try to raise me at 13 years old on her own. And as a result of that, I rebelled. I rebelled as a result of the way I was raised. I knew there was something wrong with my family, although I was forced to lie about it. And, you know, to put up with this whole charade, basically, that we were, you know, this perfect family when we weren't. And so I was forced into a gang at the time. This is the 1990s, mid-90s, early 90s. And gang violence was glorified. You know, it swept most of the nation. You know, the movies and the music and the things that we grew up on were basically inciting violence.

3:39And so next thing you know, I found myself involved in that. And I spent a couple of years involved in a gang. And the gang that I was involved in was very violent. You know, they were involved in all kinds of criminal activity and murdered, you know, drive-by shootings, all kinds of things like that. And so the experience that I had growing up was, you know, anything but normal. And as a result of seeing the middle class and then going into poverty, I think that it gave me a unique perspective, one that I would leverage to quickly move through the middle class in my adult life and then, you know, shift into the wealthy class.

4:13How were you able to get out of a gang once you were in? To me, that sounds like it must have been a very hard challenge. When you're involved in a gang, they really bond you to it for a variety of things. One is protection. Two is, you know, your friends and your community. You also get some power from it. So, you know, people are intimidated by you. They give you respect. And so there's a lot of things that bond you to that environment. it. And it's also a way of making money. So, you know, it pays the bills. And as a result of that, there's a lot, it's very difficult to break that bond. I had made a deal with God.

4:52I'm very spiritual and I always was, although I strayed from it, but I'd made a deal with God that I would leave the gang when I was granted leniency in a sentencing. I was facing four years for a strong armed robbery and I begged the judge for leniency. And when he gave it to me, I made a commitment that I was going to leave the gang. And so the first thing that I did was I started working nonstop. Generally speaking, a gang won't hold you accountable for working. But if you're in your house and you're not showing up to the required events, they're going to come get you and pull you out of your house or intimidate you to get out of your house.

5:31But if you have a job, and in my case, I had a job because I had to pay restitution for some of the criminal activity I was a part of, if you have a job and you're forced to work, otherwise you go to jail, they'll tend to give you a pass for that. And so my strategy was simple. I was going to work as many hours as I possibly could, as far away from the neighborhood that I lived in, to get as far away from the gang as I possibly could. Wow. How did you get people outside of that gang community to take you seriously? And how did you start seeing yourself differently in order to move into more of a business culture?

6:06Well, it was a transition. I got a mentor and he gave me some personal growth lessons and tapes. He gave me Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale, Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man in Babylon, a bunch of Tony Robbins related material. And I was about 18 years old, you know, I'm tattooed and I was listening to, you know, gangster rap basically. And he bribed me, he persuaded me and he told me he'd buy me clothes so I could get rid of the gang uniform and I could actually get a job if I was able to master this content. And I listened to these tapes over and over and over. I would sleep to them. I would play the cassette tape at the time we had cassette tapes.

6:46And when it would pop, I would wake up and I'd flip it back over and hit play again. I wanted to reprogram my brain. I didn't know this consciously, but that's what I was doing on a soul level. I knew that the information contained in this material would change my life. And I'll never forget, I was playing basketball one day. I had my Walkman in and at the same park I'd play every day. And one of the lessons was from Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale. And it talked about a vagrant going from a park bench to becoming a millionaire. And at the time I looked over across the park and I saw a person that was a vagrant that was sleeping on a bench.

7:23And I thought that person could become a millionaire. And if that person could become a millionaire, I could become a millionaire too. And I'll never forget the chills rushed over my body. I believed in that moment that I could become a millionaire. If a homeless person could become a millionaire, so could I. That was a simple logic that that wisdom had given me. And I believed it. I get the chills right now just sharing it with you. And from that point forward, I stopped listening to gangster rap and started listening to old 1950s audio tapes. I reprogrammed my vocabulary, my thinking. At the time, you had to go to a bookstore and you had to rent audio books.

8:00I couldn't afford them, of course, because I was poor. So I had to go to an audio book store and rent the audios and listen to them. And I would just absorb this content nonstop, 24 seven until I mastered business vocabulary. I started getting into science. I started getting into all kinds of different extracurricular activities. And then eventually I went to college and went to business school. Did you know, or do you know, that this is so similar to what Sarah Blakely did when she's launched Spanx? No, I have not heard her story. So I'm, but it doesn't surprise me. I think that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

8:36Oh, it's so true. So you mentioned faith being a big part of your journey and I know it's a huge part now, but you said that there were different times and different transitions through your business career and your relationship with your faith. Can you take us through what that looked like? Oh yeah. I always had a spiritual calling in my life. My grandmother, best thing I could tell, describe her as a saint. She lived 99 years and she never cursed. She never drank caffeine. She never drank alcohol. She lived a high vibrational life. She always had joy, would always sing. You know, she was just filled with joy and happiness.

9:11That was my grandmother's spiritual walk. And so she was an example. And I would always ask her questions. I would always, always was a seeker. I'd ask her for explanations about the Bible. I'd question things. I would always bring to her my interpretations of you know biblical stories and so forth and so I had that in me from the time I was born and I would seek that out all the time but when I lost my father and when I witnessed what he was doing and I witnessed what was going on in society as a whole at the time I thought you know I really questioned my faith and I doubted it and I became anything but faithful I became a predator basically so you know I have to tell you that I ventured away from it.

9:53And then, you know, by the grace of God, and I didn't even see this pattern, a mentor comes in my life. I received mercy and grace, and I didn't see the pattern of God's hand in my life, but it came after a lot of prayer. So I would pray, miracles would happen, but I wouldn't kind of equate the two. I wasn't smart enough to see God's hand in my life. And then I'd venture away, and then I'd be, you know, hit a rock bottom again. And what I've come to realize is that rock was God, basically. So I'd strip away all the worldly desires, get close to my faith, and then I'd rebound in life. And then I'd do that again.

10:27And then I'd rebound. I'd do that again and rebound. And so my journey up until I was 40 years old, I'm 45 years old, was a constant growth through, you know, growing, attracting worldly material things, and then getting on my knees as a result of the circumstances and crisis in my life. And then, you know, reconnecting to my faith and then growing and then attracting worldly things and ego things and then going back to my knees and then growing again. And if you look at the trajectory of my life, it's, you know, it looks like I went straight up from poverty, but there was a lot of this. It was a lot of a rollercoaster ride.

11:02And at 40 years old, I said, how do I get off of this rollercoaster, this constant need for crisis and suffering to grow? And I went deep into my faith over a period of a, you know, two years where I did nothing but work on the internal. And now having done two years worth of internal work, you know, my daily practice is connecting to my faith. In fact, I do my best to connect to my faith in everything that I do all day long. What did that two-year period look like so that we can understand and possibly embrace that same practice? Not everybody's going to have picked up as much negativity and trauma and suffering as I had done.

11:41I pushed out my trauma and I thought success was going to heal me. So I thought, you know, yeah, I was abused. I was violated. I went through hell. I thought if I just win this award or if I make this next$10 million or if I do this, then all of the pain inside of me will be healed. And the best way to describe my energy was I was like a hurricane. I was just chasing success. Nothing mattered more than success in my life. And then I got success. And the more success I received, the more that the holes were amplified, the more that the salt came into the wound, so to speak. And so I realized the more successful I was, the less happier I was.

12:22And the more I had to get the next dose of success to try to feel alive and try to feel worthy. And so the two-year journey that I went through, not everybody has to go through two years worth of isolation. and my full-time job was meditation, prayer, and reconnecting to my true spiritual self. And that was because I picked up so much baggage, so much mud that I had to cleanse my vessel for two years. Not everybody has to do that, but I had two years worth of hard work to do. Now, some people have more than two years worth of hard work, truthfully. And truthfully, I'm still doing the hard work to this day, but I don't have to do it in isolation on my own.

13:02And during that two-year period, I did vows of silence. I quit working altogether, but I had the privilege that I had a home and a beautiful environment. I had a person, a housekeeper that would take care of me. I had great books, great access to content and information to study. I had hiking trails out my backyard, a gym. So I could spend two years doing nothing but fixing the parts of me that were broken. And basically leaving behind. A lot of people say, oh, you're not broken. I was broken. And all the pieces of me were on the ground. And I got to pick up the good parts and leave behind the bad parts and put myself back together again.

13:43And that's what I did during that two year period. meet a different guest each week

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17:01now as you move forward after going through so much and doing so much healing do you feel like that roller coaster ride is finally over for you and you can just continue to grow yes i've graduated from the teacher of suffering i no longer need suffering the same way that i used to, although suffering does show up. But when it does, I have a new perspective on it. And I actually learned from it. And I greet it as a friend. Every challenge that comes your way is an opportunity to grow. In fact, I'm going to be faced with challenges. I am faced with challenges. Being an entrepreneur with 30 team members and hundreds and thousands of clients is a challenge.

17:41And so every day there's something new that comes my way that I didn't anticipate I don't want to do, but I have to do it because, you know, in that challenge is the next version of me. And when I pass through that challenge and when I master that challenge and when I extract the lessons from it, then I actually step into a new version of me that wasn't there the day before. So it's not that suffering has disappeared altogether. It's that I greet it as a friend and I don't self-inflict it. I'm not looking to learn from the teacher of suffering. And so I constantly am preoccupying myself with trying to humble myself and keep my ego at bay and doing the things necessary to keep suffering away from me so that I can learn from the good of life as opposed to having to learn, you know, from a constant self-sabotaging suffering way of being, which is the way most people learn.

18:34When people are signed up for the teacher of suffering, I just give them a hug and love on them. I'm like, that's a better teacher than me because suffering will teach you more than anything else in life. But unfortunately, most people just never learn how to graduate from suffering. And so they're kept in a perpetual state of suffering. It's so true. And now you're teaching business people how to embrace faith. It's so interesting to me to see your teachings and the work that you're doing currently, because for so many years, I just know myself, you know, speaking from my own experience, I definitely saw it the way as, you know, focus on the goal, go after the money, tune everything else out.

19:13I never thought consciously about this idea of aligning your faith, your life, your business, and bringing everything together. Do you meet a lot of people who are so curious about that? Yes. There's an awakening occurring right now. Most business people, especially when you become, you know, successful, you start to question like, why am I doing this? Do I really want to be sitting inside of a room teaching and mentoring people so that they can make a living to give to their kids? And I'm not giving the sustenance to my children that I should be or to myself that I should be. And if you're really chasing money beyond a certain point, you're really not chasing the money.

19:56You're chasing the power, the fame, you're chasing, you know, something other than the money because after you get to a certain level of money, more happiness does not come with it. There's a diminishing return of it. And so what I have found with the clients that I work with is they're often asking the same question that I was, which is, why should I be doing all this? Why am I not just out there smelling the roses or hanging out on the beach all day long? And I did that for two years. For two years, I did nothing. And that brought suffering with it as well. After a certain point, there was a diminishing return there and that I had healed and I no longer could spend all day long in tranquility and still feel alive and still feel like I was utilizing my God-given gifts to make an impact.

20:38And so there's a balance that we have to have between productivity and generosity. And the productivity is how are we productive as human beings? And the generosity is how are we being generous with ourselves, our friends, our family, and the world as a whole. And if you're just collecting money for the sake of collecting money, you're not going to have that productivity dialed in, or that generosity, I should say, dialed in. And as a result of that, you're going to be miserable. And all you're going to be doing is trying to get one dose of more money after next dose of more money after next dose of more money.

21:10And it becomes an addiction. And the high of money wears off over time. And eventually, you're miserable. And you start sabotaging yourself by collecting things. And the more stuff that you own, the more that stuff owns you. And I'll tell you this, I used to have homes all over the place. And then I had to worry about the people taking care of the homes, the people renting the homes, the value of the homes, the inflation in the homes, all of the stuff, right? All of those things that I owned end up owning me. And every day I just wake up having to maintenance all of the possessions that I owned.

21:43And that's no way to live. So there's a balance that we must find in productivity and generosity. And that's what I help entrepreneurs do. I know some of the work that you do is around helping people find their purpose. How do you go about directing people to find their purpose? Because it's something I hear people ask about all the time. Every one of us has a journey of the soul that we're on. And our soul has a purpose. And it's up to us to discover what that is. And we discover that through a series of experimentations. If you look at your past, you've already been doing these experiments. And each time you feel lit up and alive when you're doing something, Like for me, when I'm speaking before an audience, when I'm writing a good passage, when I'm mentoring an individual, a new individual, giving them new awareness and giving them peace and awakening them to a new level in themselves.

22:36Like I could do that all day long. And so when I look at the pattern of my past and I look at the things that light me up in there, I will discover the purpose. But what we don't realize is that each and every single one of us has the exact same purpose. We just have to utilize different vehicles to get there. And each of us has the same purpose, and that is to leave humanity better than we found it. Now, the way that we do that might be by being a great mother or a great father or a great citizen or a politician or a business person. And the objective is to leave wisdom behind in such a way that the world is a better place because you were in it.

23:14And so when you really simplify what a purpose is and you start to think about it in such a simplistic way, then you can challenge yourself each and every single day to just further your purpose, to contribute to the life of another person, to spread some light into someone else's life. And when you do that over enough days in a row, eventually you accumulate such goodwill that it'll be easy for you to live on purpose each and every single day. That is a beautiful thing. And I know it's something so many people are searching for today. I was looking on your Instagram and I saw you speaking about the power of forgiveness and how it impacted your life.

23:49And it really resonated with me. And I was hoping you could share that story. Yeah. Well, I'm a Christian. And so my spiritual hero is Jesus. And he taught three things. He taught forgiveness. He taught love. And he taught God's law. And I never really understood the power of forgiveness. I could understand love. Like, okay, I get it. We should have love. Love thy neighbor. Love each other. But why do I need to learn this forgiveness thing? And then it dawned on me that I could not fully love unless I could fully forgive. and that the other half of love, everything is a double-edged sword. There's a negative pole and a positive pole.

24:23The other half of love is forgiveness. And forgiving ourselves means we love ourselves. Forgiving others means we love our neighbor as ourselves and that we truly love human beings. And being a spiritual person means we have two types of love. We have love for humanity and we have love for God. And in order to do that, we have to have forgiveness and we have to seek forgiveness and give forgiveness as effortlessly and easily as we do pray. And so forgiveness is a very important modality. It's one that I remind myself each and every single day and one that I teach even to my son who's 13 years old.