From Peak Performance to Peak Fulfillment: How the Fully Alive Mastery System Transforms High Achievers into Whole-Life Leaders with Larry G. Freeney

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down from peak performance to peak fulfillment, how the fully alive mastery system transforms high achievers into whole life leaders. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Larry G. Freeney into EO Fire Studios. Born in controversy, baptized by tragedy, tempered through extreme endurance, Larry is a cognitive engineer, life design architect, endurance athlete, radio host, visionary, autodidactic, educator, husband, and father.

0:38And today we talk about the success paradox, the arctic gap, the four states of being, discovering the soul print, the life operating system, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Larry and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Larry, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:24What's up, Fire Nation? This is Larry Freeney here. And one thing that I would think is different than the majority of entrepreneurs out there, how they think about success, if you will, is that the success that we chase, the external validation through business, through sales, through titles, is not the real goal. It's not the real game. The real game is transformation. The real goal is how did I grow? Many times we're trying to get that job. We're trying to get that promotion. We're trying to sell a million dollars of this. But at the end of the day, how did you grow. If we make success about how did we grow, it doesn't matter if we get fired.

2:03It doesn't matter if no one buys our product yet. How did I grow? How did I learn? Sometimes we have those moments in life that are just unfortunate. We have relationships that break up. We have groups, friends that no longer serve us until we go our different ways. But in those moments, there's so much fertile growth. There's so much fertile experience for transformation that I feel that many of us don't use because we're seeking that external status. And when we don't get it, we then set our lives up for the sense of failure. Because if I don't sell a million of this, then I consider myself a failure.

2:37That means 99 % of the time, I will be hard on myself. I will see it as a failure instead of no matter what happened, whether I made it or I didn't, how did I grow? So it's about setting those goals that are so far out of your reach that you have to become a new person to even step in the ring. Fire Nation, I'm sure you've already sensed it, but this is going to be a special episode because Larry's a special guy. And we're talking about peak performance to peak fulfillment. And I want to talk about the success paradox. Why do so many high performing entrepreneurs, they hit their goals, they crush their metrics, and they still feel that deep sense of emptiness inside?

3:16I think it's here that many entrepreneurs suffer from what I like to call spiritual schizophrenia. What I mean by that is that there's this soul fragment problem. Many times we externalize the best parts of ourselves in our identity, in our job, in our roles that we play. And what happens is we stretch ourselves in all these different areas. Monday, we're the CEO. Tuesday, we're the deal closer. Wednesday, we're the podcast, the podcaster. But by Friday, we forget who we are. Deep down, when you remove the titles, when you remove the roles, when you remove these things, we forget that we haven't integrated.

3:52Many people think success is what we do externally, but success is the natural consequence when we are integrated, when we are aligned with our core four values, what I call our soul print, when we have our guiding star, which is our life purpose that is guiding us through the wilderness of plotting our path. See, many of the beginning entrepreneurs are what MJ DeMarco calls the dreampreneurs. They're the ones who want life. They want life on the silver platter without doing the work. So they have this dream, but they never turn it into action. So here, it's about stopping. And it's not about achieving more.

4:29It's about figuring out, who am I? Who am I called to be? If you take an acorn, that acorn will only, and you plant it, it will only grow into an oak tree. No matter how much that acorn wants to become an apple tree, it never will. So many of us are acorns, but we're trying to be apple trees. We're trying to be lemon trees. We're trying to be something other than we have been created and designed to be. See me, I love speaking. I love teaching. I love being in front of an audience. My best friend, that's one of his biggest fears. He's the guy who's in the back of the room, who's got the spreadsheets, who's nerding out on the data.

5:03That's what he loves. But so many times we adopt the values. we adopt the external validation markers of success that others tell us are important when we are misaligned with ourselves. Many of us don't know what our core four values are. We don't know what those intimate values are that if we don't give them life, if we don't give them oxygen, then a part of us dies. So at the end of the day, we look successful because we have the title, we have the car, we have the corner office, we have everything that everyone chases. But we don't have internal fulfillment because we never learned how to integrate.

5:36We never learned how to stop and listen to who I was called to be. And here's the thing, we have to integrate before we expand. So many of us expand and at the end they try to integrate, but that doesn't work. The way our neurology works is every time you make a decision, you are either reinforcing a neuronal path. Remember, Eb's law is neurons that fire together, wire together. So every time work calls, if I answer the phone, I have strengthened that neuron. Or every time an opportunity calls, I answer, even if I'm with my family, then that means I have created a brain that is now adapted to choose clients over family.

6:14Larry, I want to break in here because we have a lot to get to today and we just got to keep on moving. I mean, I love that analogy about the acorn and the oak. I can remember so clearly as a child planting acorns in my front yard and just being like, I cannot wait for these to grow into an oak tree. And guess what? It didn't happen the next day when I woke up and checked on them. It's one of those things where what seeds are you planting right now, Fire Nation, that are going to grow in the future? Not today, not tomorrow, next year, five years, 10 years from now. And I want to talk about the erratic gap.

6:43You talk about something very powerful, this erratic gap, but I don't think Fire Nation's heard of it. So what is it? And how is it different from being stuck in both a regret about the past or fantasy about the future? So the erratic gap is a Larry Freeney trademark. You know, this is something that came up. It comes from the word arete, which is first spoken about by Aristotle. Nice. And so arete is basically excellence in all things. The English equivalence is flourishing. So the erratic gap is this distance between who we are in actuality right here, right now, Fire Nation, and who we are called to be.

7:18Now, the bigger the discrepancy between that gap, the bigger the difference between who I am and who I'm called to be, the more negative emotions we'll feel. Science, neuroscience shows that when we have unmatched or unlived potential on the table, the pain center of our brain lights up. So unfulfilled potentiality actually hurts us. So what's cool about the erratic gap is as you grow, as you close that gap a little bit, you'll notice that you never actually get to close it. because we will never reach our full potential. So it's asymptotic. We get closer, we get closer, we get closer. And like planting the seed and watering it, it takes time.

7:58Now the erratic gap is, like I said, between who we are now in actuality and who we are called to be, the retro gap is the past. Now we have to be anchored in the present before we go visit the past. If not, we get stuck there. We get stuck in regret. We get stuck in the coulda, shoulda, woulda, or we get stuck in the glory days. Back in high school, I was the quarterback. I was the man. What have I done with the last 20 years of my life? And the future gap or the future trap is just as dangerous. It's that someday fantasy, right? Either we live in the past, regretting what we've done, or we live in the future, fantasizing about what will happen.

8:35But the only place that can happen is right here in the Reddit gap. We have to get comfortable with that discomfort. And this is the only place that we can do the actions to transform. Fire Nation, we have a lot to talk about. The four states of being, engineering transformation, discovering the soul print, and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. It's January and that means new goals for your business. And because I know you actually want to hit those goals, it's time to stop messing around and start knowing exactly what's happening with your money. It's simple. Without visibility and control over your cashflow, decisions get delayed, bills pile up, and opportunities slip through the cracks.

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12:07So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Larry, we're back, and I want to talk about the four states of being. Break these four states down for us. Of course. So there's the unmade man or woman. There's the man or woman in the waiting room. There's the hollow hustler. And there's the final, the pinnacle, the architect. Now, the unmade man or woman is the individual who has all the opportunity, all the potentiality in the world, but they never realize it.

12:46Either due to laziness or fear, they stay stuck in the present. so they don't close that erratic gap because why? It's uncomfortable. The next step is going to be the man or woman in the waiting room. So they're waiting for the perfect opportunity. They're waiting for JLD to reach out to them to give them opportunity. They're waiting for someone to call them, but they're not going out there. They're not networking. They're not bringing it in. So typically they are waiting for lightning to strike, knowing that someday, getting into that future trap will never come. Then you have where most entrepreneurs are, and that's the hollow hustler.

13:19This is the person who has externalized their success in such a way that they've basically, they're playing as a slot machine, but in their life. So what you notice is the first time you you're successful, you get that dopamine hit, you feel good. But now for that next hit, you need a bigger success. You need to go bigger. So they're the hollow hustler. They're empty inside, but they're chasing that dopamine release, just as many people do at the gambling casinos. so finally the one that we really want to get to is the architect this is the one who aligns with the core four values the soul print which we'll talk about in a little bit who has their guiding star who has everything in alignment and is building the life of their dreams so basically what they're doing is they're here in the present and the future version of them right positive psychology says this is one of the most powerful techniques you can do the future version of them they imagine you in five years who has made every single right decision comes to visit you and gives you one piece of advice for you to be where they are.

14:17What is that advice? So this architect doesn't do things willy-nilly. They have a plan, they have an intentionality, and they have a goal and a purpose. Now the thing about these states is you can't just jump from one to the other. And sometimes we'll go back and forth, but the goal is to finally get up and understand that discomfort is the name of the game. If you are comfortable, you are not growing. If you are discomfort, if you are uncomfortable staying in that state of discomfort, you are challenging yourself. And the only thing that's on the other side, whether it's a goal or anything is growth.

14:47And I'll tell you for one thing, if you're uncomfortable, growth is on the other side. That's the architect way. Fire Nation, value bombs are being dropped and we're still rocking the roll and cruising ahead to talk about engineering transformation. I mean, you talk about forced transformation events. You call them FTEs. Let's talk about how someone can intentionally create breakthroughs instead of waiting for a personal or maybe professional crisis to shake them awake. I have a love-hate relationship with FTEs. I love them because they force you to transform. You are fundamentally a different person than you were after an FTE, but I hate them because they are so uncomfortable.

15:28In January, I partook in the Spartan Winter Death Race, which is a crazy endurance race that is one of the most challenging in the world. Of all the 10 million people in the world who have done a Spartan race, only 19 of us were crazy enough to do it this year, and it was the second coldest year. After 56 hours, no one completed it. It was the first black class. Now, a winter death race, and I can get too much into it, but basically, our food froze. We had hypothermia. We had frostbite. We were so far outside of our comfort zone, there's no name for how far out we are. But it was in that moment I was falling down a mountain, literally falling down a mountain in Vermont at midnight after being frozen, after being in pain, after doing God knows what for the last hours, losing all track of time and self.

16:14I encountered the divine creator. I had this transformational event that basically said, you're enough. You got what you came here to get. You can go home. And I wish I could adequately describe what that experience was like for me. But that allowed me to see my world, myself as a father, myself as an entrepreneur, myself as a leading in this company that I work for. All of this together, it showed me a different side of myself, and I could never go back. It was the chemical change. So four transformational events are events, and I think we should do at least four a year, once every three months, that pushes you so far out of your comfort zone that you're forced to transform.

16:52That can be a Spartan death race. That can be running a marathon. That can be climbing a mountain. Something that when you sign up for it, you immediately think, oh, God, how can I do this? When you talk to your friends about it, your family, they should think you're crazy. If they don't, you're not aiming high enough. This is the true pinnacle of feeling human because we get so comfortable in our world today that we miss out on being human. But doing a force transformational event, an FTE, that is when we really find out who we are and what we're made of. Let's talk about discovering the soul print.

17:25I mean, you teach that every single person has one of these things, a soul print. Four core values wired into their being. So how can Fire Nation, how can entrepreneurs identify those and stop violating their own design in pursuit of success? So going back to the seed analogy, I believe each and every one of us is a seed. And in those seeds is the potentiality for four main values. And your life is the perfect arena for those seeds to be watered, cultivated, and to grow. Here's the thing about your soul print are these four values. And every time you interact with somebody, people have an impression of who you are.

18:03That's your soul print. It's the essence that you leave on individuals when they encounter you. Now, when we violate our soul print, our core four values, say my value is honesty and I'm lying. or I'm in a job where it encourages lying. One, I'm at misalignment with myself. I'm not honoring my beautiful creative side and who I'm called to be, but also I'm going against that. Remember, values are a part of you that if you don't give them love, if you don't honor them, a part of you dies. So instead of the soul print, we leave what I call as a shadow print, what is the dark side of who we are. It's us at our worst rather than us at our best honoring who we are.

18:42So instead of honoring and fostering collaboration or insight or innovation, we will foster greed. We will foster an all or nothing mentality. We will foster lying, dishonesty, whatever it takes to get ahead. So our core four value, everyone's is different. One of mine is radical generosity. I love helping those. Metamorphic growth, right? You should know that from the FTE. I love schema shattering experiences. That's really important to me. And finally, genuine human connection. Everything I do, I want to make sure that I'm honoring these core four values. Because if I don't know what my values are, then I become a value borrower.

19:22I borrow the values of this entrepreneur that I admire. or I borrow the values of this company, Apple, or this other company here. And instead of being genuinely myself, instead of radiating or illuminating the light of the world, we are instead imitating. And there's already someone else out there who is them. You don't need to be the second them. You need to be the one you. We don't need more people who are trying to be like everyone else. We need people who are fully alive, are aligned, know their soul print, know their core four, and are out there and putting it to the test out there in the world.

19:58That is so true. And I think that just really dovetails neatly into the life operating system. How can we evolve from being randomly excellent? Like we wake up, oh, we did something good, but we don't really know how or why or what, and we can't replicate that to systematically excellent. So I created this system. It's a fully alive iOS that basically gives each day each week, each month, and then the one year, three year, five year of purpose. So start with the big picture. One, three, five, plan to see. So what it is, is you're going to go into the greatest detail you can using all five year census and say, where do you want to be in five years?

20:41What do you want to be doing? How much money are you making? Where are you living? Your relationship? How many kids? Etc. Then after you do that, then you go into as much detail for the three year. What has to be true at this three-year point for you to be on track for that five-year to be inevitable? And finally, do the same with the one-year. And once you do the same with the one-year, then every month of that year, you will visit and see how close are we getting to that one-year to make the three-year and the five-year. See, the goal with this whole operating system is to make the impossible possible, the possible probable, the probable inevitable, and the inevitable evident.

21:14And we can only do that through systems. So that's the one, three, five. Then in the morning, I have what you call your first light, your first flame and your last light. Your first flame is what am I doing today that's going to get me closer to my goal for the week, which is just going to help for the month and then the year. And finally, the last light is how well did I achieve that? What got in the way? What interrupted me? Which of the heads of the hydra of half living got in the way? And that's a whole nother conversation, but I just want to plug that in there because that's the enemy that keeps us stuck.

21:42Then every day, I give every day a purpose. So maybe you have deep work Mondays. Maybe you have worship Wednesdays. Maybe you have family Fridays. Each day of the week has to have a purpose. If I asked you what you did three weeks ago on Wednesday, you'd be like, I don't know. It was a Wednesday. But if you know it was worship Wednesday, you know, oh, worship. Ah, it gives you a sense. It gives you an ability to chronologue that day. So then your week, there's this thing called Virtues in Action, VIA.org, Character VIA. And they have 26 different virtues. So every week I have a virtue that I'm working on.

22:17Maybe it's courage. Maybe it's beauty and love of nature. So every week I'm working on that. Then every day, how in Family Friday am I honoring the virtue of courage? Then every month we have a symphony of the soul. That's another one of my frameworks. But there are 12 areas that we need for human flourishing. So each one, maybe it's going to be your heart set. So what are my emotionalities? What are the grudges I'm holding? What is stopping me from becoming my best self and living fully alive? Finally, every three months we have the FTE, the forced transformational event. So then you see your morning and your evening have a purpose, your day, your weeks, your months, your year, your three year, and your five year.

22:56You create a system that grows with you, that becomes more alive and forces you to transform. When you follow this system, you can't stay still. It's impossible. Larry, for those people who are listening right now who want to connect with you, who want to learn more about you, and I'm sure after this value bomb session, there's a lot of those. What is your call to action for Fire Nation today? If you're one of those individuals, and this is, like I say, fully alive, it's for everyone on the surface, but truly it's not for everyone. If you want to reach me, you can set up with a free 15-minute consultation.

23:34You want to have a conversation and learn more about the Fully Alive process, what it looks like, what coaching looks like with me. You can go to www.choosefullyalive.com. Now notice here, you have to choose to live fully alive, not once, but daily. So you do that. We can talk about the Fully Alive process. We can talk about the plans that we have, the programs that are coming out. and see if it's a fit for you. But once again, this is not for everybody because many people don't like discomfort and fully alive is about me being on that mountain in Vermont and sub freezing temperatures. You're gonna be uncomfortable.

24:08You're gonna face the hydro of half living. You're going to look at different ways to identify and understand who you are. You're gonna get in contact with those, that soul print, those core four values that you can live the life that you are destined to live. Because remember, you are the only you that's going to exist. And you have a particular set of skills and abilities that will fix the tattered tapestry of humanity. There's one specific spot that's got your name on it. Only you can fix it. And you got to have the right inspiration, equipment, and ability. And that's what it means to be fully alive.