Emotional Fitness: Working Through Your Feelings With Tyson Sharpe

Working through your feelings, through everything that’s going on inside of you, is an essential skill to achieve success. All these feelings, without understanding, have the potential to bring about chaos in your life. Tyson Sharpe is an emotional fitness coach who works with business owners. Together with Ben Baker, Tyson gets down to brass tacks about how your emotions affect you, and how you can, in turn, make them work for you. Let Tyson grant you a way to the emotional clarity you’ll need to get out there and take over the world.

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Emotional Fitness: Working Through Your Feelings With Tyson Sharpe

Thank you for being my wonderful audience. Thank you for reading. Thank you for tuning in and connecting with me on iTunes, iHeart and Spotify. The audience are growing and I’m loving it. It’s because of you guys that you share, you comment and you email me back, and tell me what you love and what you don’t love. The more that we can become a community, the more valuable the show becomes because it’s all about giving you guys something to think about. That’s what this show is about. It’s about what’s your story. I’ve got Tyson Sharpe coming from Melbourne, Australia. Tyson is an Emotional Fitness Coach and we’re going to let him get into that because I will never do the justice it deserves. Tyson, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

You and I have been friends on LinkedIn for forever. It seems like I say this almost every week, “I met so-and-so on LinkedIn.” It is amazing to me amass of people and the fascinating diversity of people that I meet on LinkedIn. You and I met probably about a year. I love what you do because being an emotional fitness coach, and we’ll get into this, but starting a business is easy, running a business is hard. Tell me where you came from, where you are, where are you going? Tell me the evolution of how did you become an emotional fitness coach and what is it?

It’s a pretty intense journey. It’s cool. Meeting people online provides us with a huge tool. We connected with everyone in the world. It’s off that tool that I’ve built my business. I’ll explain a little bit about emotional fitness in terms of the way it resonates with my clients and I’ll get into a little bit of how I got into it. How I describe emotional fitness and what makes emotional fitness coaching powerful for business owners, for entrepreneurs, for anyone looking to achieve that next level of success. What I found with coaching hundreds of online business owners one-on-one and diving deep into their unconscious mind is that I’ve found the patterns that separate those who succeed and those who don’t.

What I’ve found is one of the biggest patterns that hold people back is they’re trying to achieve the next level of success because at some level, they’re trying to fill a void within themselves. They’re trying to achieve that next level. They’re trying to get more income, more freedom, more clients, more passion, more whatever because at some level, they think getting that will help them feel enough. It will help them feel more worthy of love or even achieving that next level of success will help them feel an emotion of joy, abundance, love, happiness, whatever it may be. They’re trying to achieve something external for how to fill a void internally. I find that pattern, it relays you in two camps, gives you two options.

Some people are chasing something external to fill a void internally. Share on X

One, it cuts off all of the creativity and resourcefulness necessary to achieve that level of success that you want. Two, you find a way to achieve it but then all of a sudden, you live in fear that you’re going to lose it because either way, you place something externally and attributed to how you feel internally. That’s the pattern. That’s the mental and emotional pattern that a lot of my audience, my online community and my clients find themselves in. That’s where they get stuck. Shifting that on its head is where my work comes into. Shifting that consciousness where we’re no longer trying to achieve something externally for how we want to feel internally, but we fill that void within ourselves with the only thing that can fill it. That’s the deeper connection with ourselves. We’ve resolved those internal conflicts that occur. When you resolve those internal conflicts, what happens is you’re no longer trying to use business to achieve the next level of success. You’re using business as an avenue to spread and expand what you already feel inside.

That’s the consciousness shift that I love creating. That’s the consciousness shift that I love spreading. I find that when that happens, people’s business starts taking off. I thought not only feeling how they want to feel internally, but their success is therefore a byproduct instead of something they’re trying to hustle and achieve so they can feel something internally. That’s where my work is different from a lot of the people out there who are teaching principles of success. That’s what emotional fitness is all about. It’s all about resolving the internal conflict within you and doing the inner work. You don’t only achieve the next level, but you also do it in a way where you feel abundant, freedom, joy and love and the emotional patterns that you want to feel internally.

It makes a lot of sense because of your happy thinking. I do a lot of mentoring up at the universities. I’m going to be doing it again. You’re right, the Millennials and the Gen Zs have this, “I need to be a senior vice president. I need to be the CEO. I need to be the chief marketing officer. I need to do this by the time I’m 25 or else I’m nothing. I need to be in the top 30 under 30. I need to own this big house. I need to have this fancy car. I need to have $1 million in the bank or whatever it is, or else my life is nothing.” That scares me. If we don’t have the trappings, the title, the money, the toys, we’re never going to be good enough. I’m a big believer if you’re not enough without it, you’re never going to meet enough with it. I love what you’re talking about because we need to sit there and realize that things are just things. They can be taken away.

A fire can come, a flood can come and those things will be gone. It’s being able to see who you are emotionally and being able to sit there and say, “Am I happy with who I am?” The question is, how do you start with that? We’re in a world where people are always being compared to everybody else on social media. Everybody’s looking at social media and they’re going, “So-and-so has a better job. So-and-so has a better title. So-and-so has a bigger car.” How do you get people away from that and getting them to look at how are they going to make themselves happy with who they are and be content with who they are?

A lot of this awareness is raised through the emotions that are coming up. When you think about working in your business, about that next level of success, about where you’re at, when you sit in silence, the question is what comes up for you? For a lot of people, it’s a lot of fears, doubts and frustrations are coming up. The coping strategies consciously or unconsciously that’s been conditioned in us to avoid, to react and to resist a lot of these emotions that are coming up. I’ll give you an example. If you’re looking to grow your business and you’re looking to get a message out there saying, “This is how I help people. This is what I do.” For some people who are starting, that brings up a lot of fear. It brings up a lot of judgment, risks, fear of failing, fear of being wrong. All of these different fears come up.

LBL Sharpe | Emotional Fitness — Emotional Fitness: One of the biggest things that hold people back from achieving the next level of success is that they only do so to fill some void within themselves.

What happens is we genuinely consciously, unconsciously avoid those emotions. They’ll come up and we’ll distract ourselves. We’ll do something else. We’ll watch Netflix, eat, drink, talk to a friend or go out for a walk. We’ll do something that distracts ourselves from that emotion. Two, we resist it. Meaning we’re at a fight with ourselves. When it comes up, we make it wrong. When that emotion comes up, we think something’s wrong with us. We think it needs to be fixed. All these different things around, we’re in an internal conflict within ourselves because we think it’s wrong that we’re feeling this way. We think we should be feeling something different. The last option is react where we feel the emotion and we let it run our lives, decisions and actions, which can ultimately be a better option than the first two, but it’s not the end all be all.

What I found is that when you avoid those emotions, when you distract yourself or when you fight against it and resist it, those unconscious emotions start to grow unconsciously. They start to grow whether it be the fears, doubts, frustrations. They grow unconsciously despite feeling better on the surface because you’ve distracted yourself from it. Raising awareness around this and doing something different to shift this pattern is the process of being able to feel those emotions fully and welcoming them. Realizing that feeling fear isn’t a bad thing. In fact, feeling the emotion can get you a deeper connection with yourself. It can get you a deeper connection with yourself once you provide the loving, safe space for it to be there and for it to express itself in your body and to process. The reason being is because that fear that’s coming up, the way I describe it, it’s like a younger you. Let’s call it a five-year-old self. I call it a five-year-old self to get the visual representation.

You can imagine if a five-year-old comes up to you, let’s say you’re in the park and a five-year-old walks up to you, it’s not your five-year-old, someone else’s five-year-old. Let’s say they feel fear and they’re lost and scared. Would you say to that five-year-old, “Go away, little kid,” until you feel better?” Would you tell them, “You’re wrong for feeling this way, you should be feeling something different?” Of course, people would say, “No, I wouldn’t,” but that’s what we’re doing to ourselves when these fears are coming out. We are avoiding that in a five-year-old and we’re avoiding and resisting that five-year-old and saying it’s wrong and it should be feeling different. It should be feeling something else. It needs to be fixed, which is why we’re in a conflict within ourselves. When you add an internal conflict with parts of you, it cuts off the vast majority of your creativity and your passion, your resourcefulness that it does take to get to that next level.

What happens when you shift that and you start feeling all these emotions, feeling them from a loving, safe space and not needing them to live, but seeing them and feeling them, making sure they feel safe, heard, feel understood, making sure those sides of you feel loved, all of a sudden you resolve those internal conflicts. When you resolve those internal conflicts, you tap into deeper resourcefulness, a deeper side of yourself. A side of yourself that can allow more creativity, more passion, more patience, more determination, more love. That’s when you start to find yourself. That’s what emotional fitness to me is all about. That’s what I find a lot of the entrepreneurs, business owners are not doing this work. That’s why they find themselves being stuck.

That’s a scary place to be is to be stuck. Scotty Schindler, who’s been on the show, talks about 100 minutes, 100 days, 100 months, 100 years. We all have these 100 plateaus that we’re on. Take a look at 100 days for example, about a two-year process. You look at that in companies, I’m going to look at this as a scenario. You have a company that’s two years old. They’re barely starting to figure out exactly who they are. They’re barely starting to get there. They’re real customers that are barely starting to get some money, some traction underneath them. The owners are getting frustrated because they sit there and say, “I’m two years in. I’m not where I should be. I’m not making money. I’m not getting the customers that I want.”

You have to feel your emotions fully and recognize that your feelings aren't a bad thing. Share on X

They don’t see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. All they see is the panic and the fear of where they are that they haven’t reached that artificial goal that they’ve planted for themselves. How do you take somebody who’s in that period? Let’s face it, a lot of businesses fail at that two-year mark. How do you take somebody who’s in that place where they don’t know how to move forward and help them realize exactly where they are and help them move over that cusp?

It would help me if that particular person was in front of me so I could ask them some detailed questions. It’s a case-by-case basis of a particular pattern that holds someone back and a particular resolution that will help them move forward in a different way. What I can say from my experience of coaching with many people is that they find their own answers. There’s no real structure of saying, “This is how someone moves forward.” People in this call will be surprised at the answers they come up with themselves when they start to resolve these internal conflicts and start to pay attention to the emotions that are coming up and loving all sides of them. The reason being is when you do that, you let go of the stories of what you think you should be. You let go of the stories of what everyone else thinks of you. You let go of the stories of how much money you think you should be making.

You start to tap into a deeper side of you that says, “What contribution do I want to make? What difference do I want to make? How much love can I show within myself that can be represented in my world?” If you’re resolving the internal conflicts within yourself and you want to have this passion to share that, you may be thinking, “How can I live as an example of other people loving themselves as well?” You have all these different insights when you release the stories. In your example, when you’re saying some business owners get to that two-year mark and all of a sudden, they’re not hitting their targets and they feel this pressure that they should be succeeding at a different level. There are many stories that are encapsulated in that. There are many stories that they’re believing that’s attached to their worth, their feeling of being enough. When you tap into a deeper side of yourself and you build that relationship with yourself, those stories start to dissolve. Some amazing insights, some amazing resourceful ideas can come to you when you release those stories. They’re stories of what you think you need to be and what you think needs to happen externally in order for you to feel enough.

On the other hand, how do you start? How do you take somebody who’s living in a perpetual sense of fear, self-doubt and frustration and help them to even see that there’s a different way of looking at things? I’ve been there, I understand from where they are coming. You’re sitting there in this dark place, you’re in this hole, you see the dirt coming down on top of you and you stop seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. All you feel is, “I’m not going to survive. I’m not going to be able to move forward. I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough. Do I have something that people want?” How do you get somebody who’s at that point to realize that there are a different mindset and a different way of looking at things? We all have those dark, scary moments in our lives. I don’t care if you work for somebody else or you work for yourself. We all have those periods of self-doubt. How do you help people move beyond that period of self-doubt to a point where they can sit there and go, “I can see that there’s a different way of looking at things?”

One easy way, easy transition into that is when they have the self-doubt to realize the problem is not they have self-doubt. Their problem is they think they shouldn’t have self-doubt. The self-doubt is coming up to be seen, to be heard, to be understood, to be loved, to be released. There’s the pattern that leads to the downfall is when they think they shouldn’t be feeling that way, when they’re in resistance to the doubt. To answer your question, it comes from a place of acceptance. When you accept that it should be this way, you should be having doubt. There’s a five-year-old within you that’s scared. There’s a five-year-old within you that says, “If I don’t make it, I’m not going to be enough.”

This ties back to our childhood where these patterns are formed where we only have one fear as a child. That is, “If I’m not enough, I won’t be loved. If I’m not loved, I won’t survive. That’s all an unconscious little toddler is running around saying, “If I’m loved, I’ll survive.” That’s all they’re thinking. That’s all that’s going on in their head. As they grow up, as they go from toddlers and as they start growing up into four-year-old, five-year-old, kindergarten, whatever it may be, into school, as a young child, as an adolescent, we learn patterns. We pick up patterns of who we need to be and what we need to do to what we see as enough and worthy of love. That’s unconsciously tied to our survival.

That’s the trigger that is coming to the conscious surface. When a business owner is hitting that two-year mark and they’re not hitting their targets, they trigger is, “If this needs to happen, I need to succeed at this. If I fail, I’m not going to be enough. I’m not going to feel enough. If I don’t feel enough, I might not be worthy of love.” Unconsciously, that means, “I won’t be out to survive.” It’s silly when you think about it, but it’s why when you think about a business coming down, it triggers your fight or flight response. Why would that trigger your fight or flight response? It makes no sense. You’re not in physical danger. You know you’re not going to die. You know you’re set up in a society that’s going to allow you to thrive once again. You’ve got many amps of opportunity and yet we have this fight or flight response.

We don’t see it that way. When you are in the throes of a business failing or a business not doing as well as it should be, you’re not thinking of, “The world will go on and I will rise from the ashes and see something else.” You’re realizing, “How am I going to pay salaries this month?”

If you’re thinking, “How am I going to pay salaries? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that?” and you’re feeling this fear, the first step in what you’re asking and the first step for anyone who’s in that situation is to feel that. Instead of resisting it, avoiding it, reacting to it, just feel it. Feel that five-year-old coming up that says, “I’m scared.” Feel it in your body. Don’t need it to leave. Don’t need it to go anywhere. It’s the same as five-year-olds walk up to you in the park, you wouldn’t say they’re wrong. You wouldn’t say go away until you feel better. You wouldn’t believe them that they are scared and think the sky is falling. You would be that loving, safe space for that five-year-old.

Not only would you be the loving, safe space but you would also allow them to feel what they want to feel from a loving, safe space. That’s exactly what happens when you allow for this fear to come up. Your internal five-year-old, allow them to come up and be there and provide that loving, safe space for them. What unconsciously happens when you do that is you become the parents you wish you had when you were younger. You become the loving, safe space you wish you had when you were five. That’s how these internal patterns, these internal conflicts are resolved, is when you finally become that parent you wish you had.

People tend to find their own answers. Share on X

You finally become that unconditional love. From that space, you can come up with some incredible ideas. Some incredible insightful ways in which you can pay those salaries, which you can take your business to the next level in which you can love yourself because you love your clients. You can come up with ideas on how you can collectively create a culture around this. There are unlimited ideas on how you can succeed, unlimited ideas on how you can get to the next level. It’s limitless.

What you’re saying is that fear can be a great motivator and can be a great inspirer? If we sit there and we embrace our fears and we understand what our fears are and accept them, not try to run away from them and try to deny them. We can use that as a way to motivate ourselves to create and to look for different opportunities to move beyond where we are.

It can be a motivator. It can be an indicator of the sides of you that you’re not loving unconditionally yet. For example, if you have a fear that you’re going to fail, you’re at the two-year mark and all of a sudden the business is going down, you have this fear come up. What’s coming up is the side of you, you haven’t loved unconditionally yet. You haven’t loved the side of you that can fail. You haven’t loved the side of you that can make mistakes. You haven’t loved the side of you that can look bad. What happens is when you love that side of you, when you feel that five-year-old and you hear them, see them, understand them, the fear will start to diminish within you.

All fear will continue to exist as long as it’s not seen. As long as it’s not seen and not understood, the fear will continue consciously or unconsciously. The moment that it’s come out, heard, seen, understood and loved unconditionally is the moment where that pattern can finally be released. That fear can finally dissolve within you. This can happen in a matter of 5 to 10 minutes. When that fear drops away, so do the stories that that fear holds. That drops away, fades away and dissolves within you. What’s left is more room for creativity. You can breathe in a different space. What’s left is more resourcefulness. It’s from that space that you can come up with insightful, creative ideas. That’s what I find when people tap into that side of them, that’s where they take their business to the next level. It’s not that they don’t have fear, it’s that they truly do understand what fear is representing.

Fear is coming up because it’s a side of you that needs to be loved. It wouldn’t be coming up if it wasn’t ready to be released. There are still many unconscious patterns that won’t consciously make it to the surface yet because you haven’t provided the safe space for it. The reason why this fear of failure is coming out is that it knows that you have provided a space for it to be released. What I’ll find is that many people will have the fear of failure and then they’ll resolve that internal conflict and they’ll take some action because that internal conflict has been resolved. They’ll take action and they’ll take action time again. All of a sudden, more fear will come up around judgment and they say, “That’s a different fear. That’s a different side of me. I’ve let go of the side of me. I’m willing to fail, but I had this fear of judgment. I need to love the side of me that can be judged.”

I’m a big believer of if you’re not comfortable in your own skin, if you don’t love yourself, if you’re not confident with who you are, you’re good, you’re bad and you’re ugly, you’re never going to be able to be the best able to serve either your employees or your customers. It’s knowing you’re good, you’re bad, you’re ugly and be able to embrace it all helps you to be a better servant to your employees, to your customers, to your vendors, to anybody that you’re around even your family. You have to love yourself, you have to be comfortable in your skin. That’s something that some people take a lifetime should be able to grab it. Some people, it’s something that comes naturally and God loves the people that it comes naturally to.

It’s something that I don’t struggle with it every day, but I’m conscious of it every day. We need to be better. We always need to sit there and say, “How can I be more in love with myself and be able to be comfortable with who I am, what I’m about and the value that I add to the world?” That’s great. I want to change gears and talk about your online community. It’s part and partial with who you are and your philosophy in life. Tell people about the online community you’ve created and why you created it.

It’s been more of a passion project. My online community consists of a lot of people in my Facebook group. It’s called Connect, Contribute, Collaborate. It’s a passion project of mine, which came out of meditation. One thing that I have embarked upon is the challenge of meditating two hours a day for 90 days. The reason being is because I wanted to dive deep into a lot of this work that we’re talking about. When I sit in silence, a lot of the emotions come up. All of my fears, doubts and frustrations come up. I allow them to be there and I look for them and allow them to surface and be felt and be understood.

What’s been emerging is these such resourceful and passionate ideas on how I can grow, how I can expand, what I want to contribute, how I want to serve. What’s come out of this online community is this Facebook group. It’s growing immensely and I believe because it’s coming from a place of authenticity within myself. I’ve created a community where it adds value on three levels. One is the online community in which a lot of online business owners are collaborating, connecting and leveraging each other’s networks so that they can all grow as one.

Two is that I’m organizing a lot of mastermind calls for experts to come in and share their expertise within the community and allow the community to add that expert to their business network. Three is what we’re talking about is the internal work. It’s getting on group coaching calls, transformational group coaching calls, providing content around what had transcend your fears, doubts, frustrations, limiting beliefs, all of those different things. It’s been a passion project. I’ve had so much excitement around adding value and creating a community that helps each other, that’s why it gets much engagement.

Fear continues to exist so long as it's not seen. Share on X

That’s why many people are willing to communicate with me and with each other and help out. I’ve only been working on in the last couple of months. It’s skyrocketing and it’s getting to about 900 members. I’m getting about somewhere between 1.5 and 2,000 pieces of engagement every month. It’s cool to see a free online community to be that engaged. It’s unique in this day and age. That’s been where this community kick started it because I’m doing the inner work and the success of this community is being the byproduct of the internal work that I’m doing. That’s the shift that I help my clients and my community do.

Two things, the number one thing is the best way for people to get in touch with you is through TysonCoaching.com?

Yes, you can do that. A lot of people connect with me on Facebook and things like that. If you want to go to TysonCoaching.com, I’ve got all my information there. I’ve even got the link to the Facebook group and things like that. All the links are on there for people to connect with me and see what I’m doing. That’s a good central hub to send people.

The last question I’m going to ask you and this is the same question I ask everybody. When you leave a meeting, when you get in your car and you drive away or hang up from a call, what’s the one thing you want people to think about you when you’re not in the room?

“That’s the guy that took me deeper,” in terms of thinking about things in a deeper way. Thinking about things the true ways in which I’m feeling and thinking. Deeper in terms of how I can succeed in different ways that I never thought of before. Providing a lot of light in terms of what’s going on. If I can be the presence, space for people to understand and think at a deeper level, then that’s what I want to have people see me as and talk about me when I’m not in the room is, “That guy took me deeper.”

That’s a great place to leave things because that’s what it’s all about. It’s about having people that can take you to a different level and get you to understand things about yourself that you can’t yourself. Thanks for being that person, Tyson. Thank you for being part of the show. Thank you for adding such value to our audience.

No problem. Thanks for having me, Ben. I love talking about all the stuff.

Take care and we’ll talk to you soon.

About Tyson Sharpe

If you’re like most business owners, you may find yourself looking to succeed, at some level, to feel ‘enough’ or ‘worthy’. This is what cuts off your well of creativity and passion necessary for success. It is Tyson’s mission to help business owners flip this perspective.

He believes business owners must set the base of love, joy, and abundance within, so they feel driven to use the avenue of business to spread what they already feel inside.

In the last couple of years, Tyson has coached hundreds of online business owners, one on one, helping them resolve the internal conflicts holding them back. In doing so, he helps them execute their business strategy with clarity, creativity and passion, allowing for consistent and predictable growth.

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