I Walked On Fire With 5 Thousand Of My Closest Friends… Here’s What I Learned.

Yes….yes…..yes….

The chant of thousands of people on their way to conquer their Goliath.

Yes….Yes……yes…..

12:12 in the the middle of the night, the only illumination coming from 1000 degree hot coals.

Yes….Yes…..Yes….

We’ve been preparing the entire day for this moment.

YES….Yes…..Yes…..

I step up to platform, hot coals before me, barefoot, determined and focused.

YES….YES….YES….

I get the signal, make my move and go…

yes.

In March of 2019, one my good friends and I decided to embark upon a conference called Unleash the Power Within by Tony Robbins.

Early on, I bought into the rumors that people would tell me about Tony Robbins. Dude, you’re not going to spend that much money to see the dude on the infomercials are you?

Uhhhh, yeah. You know, I’m going to give it a chance but I promise I won’t drink the kool-aid.

Plot Twist: I drank the kool-aid.

The experience was something that has taken me a full year to digest and understand. Every moment of the conference, no, the experience, was thoughtful and purposeful. As soon as you walk into the door, you are hit with a wave of positive energy that becomes intoxicating. You’ve never seen so many people smiling, jumping, singing in anticipation of the person that they will become by the end of the experience.

You know immediately that you will never be the same person at the end of the experience.

Everyone knows.

They feel it intuitively.

I once questioned the narrative of the caterpillar and the butterfly. Why must our journey and growth be parallel to the experience of the transformation into the butterfly?

The transformation into the butterfly only happens once. We have the choice to re-enter the chrysalis and emerge even more glorious and majestic than before. The butterfly only gets one transformation.

Our transformation should be perpetual.

We agreed that we would play full out and maximize every minute of the experience.

We jumped with, danced with, high-fived, laughed with, cried with everyone in our purview.

The message of the day was clear:

YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE CAPABLE OF.

Imagine every reason you cling to, justifying your fears, being placed before you and destroyed. So at the end of the night you are convinced without a shadow of a doubt that you can do the impossible.

You become obtusely aware that you have been living life at a 6, convincing yourself it’s the best that you can do. You get a glimpse of who you can be at 10 and you know who you were 8 hours prior, no longer exists.

I’ve never been so tired and energized at the same time. Never been so cold and on fire. Mainly because Tony keeps the arena at about 55 degrees.

I came in with my own expectations.

I traded them for appreciation. Appreciation for the moment. Appreciation for the people I get the honor of spending this time with. Appreciation for the opportunity to bring the best version of myself back to the people I love.

Through my own expectations, I constructed a blueprint of how I felt this experience should play out. It wasn’t until I forsook my blueprint and allowed myself to just experience each moment that I truly understood.

We have such a delusional idea of control. We believe that we control everything external to us. We expend so much time attempting to conform the world to our desires. The trick is that we can only control one thing; ourselves. Instead of spending so much time attempting to control the external, we should expend that energy controlling ourselves. Specifically, controlling our response to the hand that life deals us.

In the moment before I stepped out, I realized that life dealt me a hand that led me to step out on what I had long thought an impossibility. Isn’t that arrogant? To conclude that something is impossible just because I haven’t done it. Another exercise of fruitless control.

What have you concluded as an impossibility?

I believed that it was impossible for a man to walk on fire and not be burned….

YES…one step…YES…two steps….YES…three steps….YES…four steps…YES…nine steps…..YES….10 steps…YES.

I. Walked. On. Fire. Not a blister, burn, or scar. Nothing. I was able to conform myself to the situation. So in control that the burning coals didn’t burn me.

I am incapable of putting into words the level of elation that came over me in that moment. To defy the very nature of the world we live in because I chose to believe I could, is the equivalent of emerging from the chrysalis anew.

Emerging anew I realized that the only difference between whether you can walk on fire or not is your ability to communicate and control yourself in a way that causes you to take action, in spite of all of your past fear programming about what should happen to you.

Don’t allow the ‘shoulds’ of your life get in the way of your ‘musts’.

Set a new standard. You deserve to see your potential fulfilled.