In this Tactical Empire episode, Jeff Smith and Shawn Rider explore personal growth and how the power of manifestation and stillness can shape your reality. They emphasize the importance of focusing on positive outcomes, building emotional maturity, and being proactive in your growth journey. The conversation highlights daily practices that enhance awareness, the value of accepting responsibility for your circumstances, and the role of stillness in decision-making. Jeff shares helpful resources for personal development to guide listeners in their journey toward self-improvement.
In this Tactical Empire episode, Jeff Smith and Shawn Rider explore personal growth and how the power of manifestation and stillness can shape your reality. They emphasize the importance of focusing on positive outcomes, building emotional maturity, and being proactive in your growth journey. The conversation highlights daily practices that enhance awareness, the value of accepting responsibility for your circumstances, and the role of stillness in decision-making. Jeff shares helpful resources for personal development to guide listeners in their journey toward self-improvement.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Wardrobe Choices
03:03 Manifesting Your Destiny
08:01 Daily Practices for Awareness
15:06 The Role of Stillness in Decision Making
20:07 Empowering Responses to Life's Events
24:53 Recommended Resources for Personal Growth
@realjeffsmith (00:01)
Welcome to another episode of the Tactical Empire. Today I'm joined by none other than Sean Ryder. How are you my friend?
@shawn_rider_ (00:08)
I am extremely upset. Jeff just had the perfect size shirt on, probably a medium, fit his body perfectly and he changed into a bigger shirt. Jeff, you need tighter shirt.
@realjeffsmith (00:22)
It was definitely,
definitely a large. I don't have any mediums in my possession ever. So that would be inaccurate. yeah, Sean got to witness ⁓ a quick change to make sure that we had the right, ⁓
Wardrobe in place.
@shawn_rider_ (00:45)
take all
the mediums. I am a medium guy. did, ⁓ when we were at App State Baseball the other week, ⁓ they were throwing out free t-shirts and my wife picked up our four-year-old son and put him on her shoulder so they tossed one right to him and it was a adult large shirt and I wore it around the house the other day and it's just like there's something about a large that like it's too loose.
Like I don't know like if it's the art I just I just like tight shirts on my arms, you know, you got to make ⁓
@realjeffsmith (01:17)
Yeah, man,
you. I get you. I love it. I love it. Well.
@shawn_rider_ (01:23)
I'm gonna start putting it out into the universe that Jeff Smith is going to start wearing tighter clothes. I cannot wait
@realjeffsmith (01:32)
I 215 pounds. can't wear mediums no matter what. there's just no, it's not happening. Six foot.
@shawn_rider_ (01:36)
How tall are you? How tall are
you weigh 215 bro I'm 511 and a half I weigh 191 and that's on creatine if I got off creatine I would immediately deflate to 182 like I 182 but when I'm on creatine dude 191 minimum
@realjeffsmith (01:46)
Yeah. ⁓
Yeah, I used to have a saying about people that were not grown man weight and that's 200 pounds. 200 pounds. I don't care what your height is. It's 200 pounds if you're not grown man weight.
@shawn_rider_ (02:05)
Hey, hey go to Hey,
go to Google and type in Sean rider app state and you will see me at 205 my My second year of college after a full year of training with the national championship football team My traps are to my ears and I look miserable
@realjeffsmith (02:17)
Okay.
I love that. That should be you right now. All you need is
three steaks a night, a couple baked potatoes, every day.
@shawn_rider_ (02:37)
Man, yeah, I eat enough protein, but not enough to mass out. I eat probably 150 to 185, but no, we're good. We're good. This is not the fitness episode, but I'm gonna come out of left field, because I didn't tell you what the topics were today, but the reason why I'm gonna put out into the universe that Jeff is gonna wear tighter clothes is because Jeff is a big believer at doing just that.
putting things out into the universe. has read a handful of books about such topics. And so I'm actually just gonna sit back, relax, and let Jeff pontificate around the metaphorical RV park bonfire. Jeff, imagine you had a few ⁓ Miller lights in you and someone asked you about your thoughts on the universe. What would spew out of Jeff Smith's mouth?
@realjeffsmith (03:20)
Hmm.
man, man, this could go any direction. But I am very, I don't know if you call it spiritually connected to the universe. I believe that there's energetic fields and ⁓ we have the ability to manifest kind of our own destiny ⁓ with our brains and that we can do that positively or negatively.
that most of the things in your life, like your phone and your television and your Miller Lite are just jamming up your signals and ⁓ causing you to not ⁓ truly connect with getting all of the spiritual downloads from the universe that you should be getting. think most people don't spend enough time quiet enough to listen and figure that shit out.
I mean, that's why one of our biggest exercises is when we start is a vision exercise. And most people have not ever even done that. And then once you start doing a vision exercise, you also, it's hard to deny like what I'm talking about here because you get better and better at it. And then you start manifesting more and more of those things into your reality. And then if you do look back in a few years and you do see these things that you were thinking about,
⁓ and focused on coming to fruition in your life in one manner or form. Sometimes it's not how you envision it, but then you sit there and you have this aha moment. You're like, I got exactly what I wanted. It just didn't look like I thought it looked when we first thought about that, right? And ⁓ that happens all the time, like, because you get what you actually focus on ⁓ over time.
And this, like I said, it happens positively and negatively. That's why you got to clean up what is going on in your head most and make sure that you're not focused on the negative things to an extent because you're, you're magnetically attracting things to you at all points in time, good and bad. And I mean, you can believe this is all spiritual woo woo and stuff like that, which I mean, that's fine. But at the end of the day, there's too many examples in my life and in
other people's lives that I watch that things happen based on where your head's at and where your focus is. And so, I mean, just got a phone call earlier with a guy who had made a, what he deemed a dumb decision. It was out of character for him, out of his general lane, if you will. He's not a risk taker and he took a risk and it ended up not being
catastrophic, but he's still like mentally beating himself up about it just because it was a decision that's out of character for him. but but he's allowing it to dominate today, which is then affecting other areas of his life. It's it's negatively affecting his business. It's negatively affecting his bank account. It's negatively affecting how he's interacting in his relationships right now because of. His inability to.
deal with the shame of the decision. And so that underlying emotion has now manifested itself into making him attractive to all these other negative things. so, I mean, there's instances in our lives that I'm sure we can all point to, to where you get in your own head and you start either not wanting something so badly that it happens because that's your focus, right?
I don't go broke, don't go broke, don't go broke, I don't want to go broke. And like all that happens is your money keeps slipping out the back door because you're focused. That is your focus. Even though you feel like you're not negatively focused, that's all you're focused on. As opposed to being focused on the gains. This is where the gap in the game comes into play too. If you can look at it on a macro level, ⁓ you really have to be careful where your thoughts are aligned and
Because where that energy flows, you're going to get results flowing back to you. ⁓ So I don't know where you wanted me to take that, but that's my two second.
@shawn_rider_ (08:01)
⁓
How does that actually look in your life? What do you proactively do? ⁓ You know, I think anyone that knows Jeff knows that he doesn't walk around like as Someone else would describe like happy go lucky or woo-woo or or like high energetic Affirmative affirmative positive thinking just be happy like that's not you but like
then they're taken aback when we go to these meetups and the first exercise we do, you're trying to turn off the lights and tell people to close their eyes, right? And people laugh because they're like, where the fuck did this come from? So when Jeff's back home at the RV and he's just living his day-to-day life, because I know just because you think this way, I think the universe is going to provide what you put out there, it doesn't mean that you don't have hard times. It doesn't mean you have hard thoughts or you don't run into struggles with your investments. What does the tactical...
day to day or week, like what does this actually look like? How do you go through this process? How do you go through this exercise for yourself? How regularly and when and why?
@realjeffsmith (09:07)
But.
For me, I try to spend time quietly every day, whether that's walking in nature alone. ⁓ That's why it's so disruptive for me to have, and I've talked about this to the group numerous times, my five-year-old is in a season where she wakes up very early and she throws off all of that processing to an extent. I've got to be more deliberate and intentional about getting it other times. Ultimately, it's about
⁓ I'm kind of analyzing and I talk to the group all the time about awareness, right? What is that awareness? It's like stillness to think and to evaluate what's going on in your life. And then.
having the, I guess, grace with yourself to accept your responsibility in what's going on, right? So like if you're having friction with your spouse or your bank account doesn't look the way you want it to, ⁓ then you have to ask the questions on like, why is this and what role did I play in it, okay? And what have my activities looked like over the last three, six months that have led to this potentially? And... ⁓
and then accept that responsibility and then understand how you can move things going forward. ⁓ And so it's also having the openness to understand that sometimes, like I said, things don't turn out to look the way you wanted them to look, but then receiving all the gifts that you've got and then being like, this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing right now. And ⁓ I think people have lot of trouble with that.
level of acceptance, right? So like you wanted this particular thing and then it like gratitude plays a lot into it, right? Like I don't do a lot of gratitude or talk about a lot of gratitude. I spend a lot of my day gracious for what I have, no problem. like, that's what allows me sometimes to have these aha moments that like that turned out differently than I thought it would. I wanted something and then it's right here in front of my face, but I never realized that that was the answer to
wanting that particular thing and this is how it manifested itself differently than I anticipated but ⁓ nonetheless I've still got it and it's awesome right and and then so you also have to accept the resistance that you're facing in what you're doing right so like if you want to grow a company to a million dollars a year or whatever with 80 % profit okay that's that's what it could be a goal of yours but like you're not gonna get that
until you receive kind of the backside of that particular gift, which is gonna be all the growth and resistance necessary to make you that person ⁓ that is capable of receiving that. Or you're gonna get it and it's just gonna blow out the back door like we were talking about, meaning like you just, you got a million dollars and the thing went bankrupt the next year, right? And when that happens, you have to evaluate the situation and say,
the reason that happened is because you were incapable of maintaining that level at the time. So whoever you grew into to receive that was, was an incapable person to maintain that particular level. And so it really all that we're talking about here is like the, the journey of the human experience and what you're trying to do.
or what I'm trying to do is constantly expand my edges of this human experience. And when I go try to take on another objective and I fall short or I lose out and it doesn't turn out to be what I thought it was, ⁓ I have to realize that it's just a reflection on who I've grown into at the time. And maybe I was inadequate to receive that particular level of
whatever gifts, if you will. So it like, you can't really ever like, there's an equal and opposite polarity, usually in every single thing that we do, right? So you want all of these gifts, you want this great marriage, you want to be a great father, but then like, what what comes into play, generally first and foremost is all the resistance and friction first.
So like you wanna be a great dad, but you don't have the emotional maturity to deal with a five-year-old. Or you wanna be a great dad, but you've got all these other things pulling you in a different direction because you're disorganized and you don't do your work in an efficient manner. So which then raises your anxiety and then you yell at your kids and then you're not meeting any of these things where you wanna be, right? And so you have to kind of understand that like what you want
Like everything you want is on the other side of the growth that's necessary for you to go get it and so identifying your weak spots and your chinks in your armor is ultimately the number one thing you can do for yourself at all points in time because If you can start plugging those holes yourself with without having to have them pointed out to you all the time Then you can become this greater and greater magnet for the things that you want and then you can dream bigger
start bringing in bigger sums of whatever love money relationships all these different things and so. Wow I may not put it in like a lovey dovey hippie. Spiritual like package ultimately it is like it extremely spiritual. At its core because I think that.
When I talk about the human experience, our human experience is one of growth and pursuit of excellence and like being the best version of ourselves that we possibly can before our fucking light is snuffed out on in this particular realm or body. Right.
@shawn_rider_ (15:25)
Sure,
Well there was certainly a lot there. The things that stood out to me is I think stillness is important. ⁓ Some people will view that as literally sitting still, which it certainly could be. I don't think that's how it's manifested in my life. You take a lot of walks. You go out in nature. For me it's the same deal. I've said on other episodes is as soon as my wife and kids leave in the morning, the first thing I do is walk my dogs. Very rarely will I take my phone along.
I don't need to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on that walk most of the time. Sometimes I do. ⁓ But really I want to hear the awakening of the world around me. I don't live in a neighborhood. I don't live in a city. I live a few miles outside of town. ⁓ I hear the birds and a lot of quiet. I mean, it's really just the wind is usually what I hear. ⁓ And so for me, that's stillness. were on the, I did the April stoicism call.
last Wednesday and a guy had talked about this. We were talking about unbiased thought and how can I have unbiased thought and like part of it was recognizing your thoughts but you need space in order to recognize your thoughts and someone in the group brought up stillness and sitting still and going out and sitting in the woods and I brought up you know the other books that Ryan Holiday wrote which was The Obstacle is the Way which is external.
⁓ Ego is the enemy, which is internal. But then the third one that doesn't get talked about enough ⁓ is stillness is the key. And it talked about how all these emperors and stoics would find space. ⁓ maybe as you got talking there, and I know that you've been and are at the beach, ⁓ I've said this on other episodes too, but it's interesting how all these topics come full circle. it's like, I used to say, and really still, I'm not a beach guy.
I'm more of a beach guy because my wife is a beach girl, but I'm more of a beach guy now because I have kids and obviously kids love the beach. ⁓ But if anyone ever said like the easy question, beach or mountains? My answer was always mountains. And now it's more so if it's a long weekend, mountains. If it's a week with my family, it's gotta be the beach. And as you got talking there, you're talking about stillness, I kind of made this connection. It was like, why did I like?
Why do I like being in nature and being in the mountains, in particular the western North Carolina, than being at the beaches of North Carolina? ⁓ And it's like, when I'm at the beach, it's very noisy, right? Sitting on the beach is noisy. There's always wind and there's always crashing waves. And it's usually way more crowded ⁓ than ⁓ a spot in the mountains.
And when I go to the mountains, like, there's nothing better for me than sitting on the deck in the woods and literally only hearing birds and a squirrel jumping around. ⁓ And so I think I get to connect with myself there. But ⁓ it's been a while since I told this story. When I went to Rome, Easter of 2019, you know, we took a private, me and my wife took a private tour of the Colosseum and then we jumped over to the Roman Forum and Caesar's Palace was right before that. We walked up to this garden.
It was just ⁓ a rectangular, pretty big, maybe 50, 65 yards long, ⁓ rectangle of grass. And you could see the bottoms of pillars every 10, 15 yards. They were obviously broken, but you could see that there were pillars there back in ancient Rome. And they said, this is the Caesar's palace. This is the garden. Caesar would come out here and either ride his horse or walk his horse.
when he needed to make a tough decision, when he needed to think about the decisions that he has to make about certain things. And that seriously was one of the biggest things that stood out for me in those tours. And we toured the Vatican too, which was, my goodness, there was so much stuff in the Vatican. But the biggest point of connection was that moment there because that kind of like helped me connect the dots as why I always want more alone time because my work is a lot of thinking.
I don't do a lot of ⁓ proactive, let's say, manual labor with my hands, so to speak. It is thoughts. It's putting the puzzle pieces together and thinking, how can I put the pieces together to get the picture that I want, or as close to what I want? As you describe, sometimes people are just throwing other pieces on the pile, and then the picture turns out different than how you expected. ⁓ So I think that's important. I think something you described there as well came up on the call.
And it was a guy was going through some struggles and getting what and building what he's trying to build. And it was like, hey.
Everything looks like it's failing until it's not. Every strategy looks like it's not working until it actually yields the results. And that's one thing that I keep in mind. I think it does go back to Pareto principle that I've been harping on for months now, damn near a year, and keeping the main thing the main thing, and keeping things simple, and just doing the damn one to three things that are yielding the most results.
@realjeffsmith (20:21)
Yes.
@shawn_rider_ (20:46)
whether you describe it in the way that you do with kinetic energy and fields of energy and connecting to the universe, for me, think all of this, I think there's something to be said about the universe and what it puts in your path and what the destiny is for you. But then I also don't wanna downplay your own role in the game. ⁓ that was one of the lessons that I taught the men at Jacksonville Meetup was,
Hey, has anyone seen this formula? E plus R equals O. And I was actually really surprised when like literally no one raised their hand. ⁓ And they were, I said, well, the E is the event. The event plus your response equals the outcome. And I saw that in a personal development book. It's like, okay, things happen. An event happens. A situation happens. A scenario happens. And then you have a moment.
@realjeffsmith (21:31)
Mm-hmm.
@shawn_rider_ (21:42)
to where you can have a response, whether it's immediate or days later or a month later, right? Depending on the scale of this. Those two things added together dictate the outcome. But I also, what I told the guys was I like to alter that formula from a mental perspective. And it is, I just want to change the mathematical formula and I want to divide the event mentally by two.
and I want to square it, response. So if I can mentally, exponentially increase the power that my response has and mentally downgrade the impact, again mentally, of what an event means in my life, ⁓ more so from a negative perspective, like this bad shit happened in my investment or whatever.
@realjeffsmith (22:39)
Mm-hmm.
@shawn_rider_ (22:40)
then I empower myself to have more control over the outcome. I don't know if that plays into what you're saying there. I definitely don't want people to just be like, yeah, shit will turn out. I don't think that's what we really mean here, but I do want to empower the individual to play into what the universe is providing to them.
@realjeffsmith (22:58)
Well, yeah, I mean, you have to play your role. You have to take action. have to do like part of what I'm talking about about being a person that's worthy of receiving any of this stuff. Like it is is built on the human being that you're becoming. Do you have the consistency to to bring these things into your world? Like that's where
That's where I think business gets easier and easier as you go. That's why it looks like the guy who's been in business 25 years is a natural at it. And it's just the rep count that they put in and who they've evolved into being. Because to your point, it doesn't take as much work as we anticipate it takes. It just takes working on the right things consistently long enough to yield the results that you're looking at or looking for, excuse me.
And so, but yeah, I mean, you play a monstrous role in there. Are you taking care of your body? Are you healthy? What are you feeding yourself? What are you fueling yourself with? Like, is your mind clear or are you filling it with bullshit? Are you fucking watching porn all the time? Are you watching the news all the time? Are you like filling, it's just like inputs and then outputs, right? but there's a level of.
sanctity that it seems that the universe knows on on what you need to be evolving towards or into to to receive the things that you're looking for and ⁓ which is which is super interesting, right and ⁓ So, I mean, I think we're all put here to be good humans and collectively help each other and I think if you're if you're not bringing that level of positivity
on regular basis, you're jamming up your ability to grow and receive and evolve into greater heights and different levels of awareness and receipt of things.
@shawn_rider_ (25:08)
Well, I think I'm going to call a hard time out because that ventures into my next question, which is going to be on the next podcast episode. It's going to play off of that. And it's going to be more specific to the individual and how they can help facilitate that side of things. Jeff, love it, man. Send. Do you have any resources, like a main book that kind of made the most impact for you in this area?
@realjeffsmith (25:40)
The Four Agreements is probably the easiest read and the most impactful bang for the buck. The Four Agreements is an amazing book. ⁓ doesn't get into the neuroscience of everything, but it's there and it's a really solid read. then Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, it does hit on neuroscience and ⁓ energetic fields.
things like that, the polarity of the universe. So it's a little headier book, a lot more sciency, but ⁓ those two are the two I would recommend right off the bat. And they're both very good reads.
@shawn_rider_ (26:26)
Well, I just purchased I know you that's the one that you've been posting about a couple months back breaking the habit of being yourself I think that was brought up at Two meetups ago and at least one or two of the guys bought that book So I know I have some audible credits and so I just confirmed One for breaking the habit of being yourself. That is going to be my sauna audible book for the next Few weeks Jeff. Love it brother. Send the people out
@realjeffsmith (26:43)
Here we go.
Love it.
Guys, we have a private Facebook community, or a free private Facebook community, the Tactical Empire community. We have a lot of resources out there, 200 plus, 400 plus YouTube videos, something like that. And hit us up if you have any questions about any of this stuff. We're happy to help. You can DM us on Instagram. It's the best place to get ahold of us. If you're looking to get into our programs, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
We have some new programs rolling out and ⁓ some new one-on-one coaching opportunities. We have an accelerator program. That's our on-ramp program where you get to work with both Sean and I for 12 weeks. And ⁓ another one, I'm opening up one-on-one coaching. Sean may be opening them up one-on-one coaching and a little higher ticket. It's a bigger investment, but we'll dig into your business, your life and everything else and kind of hold your hand and get unlimited access to us. And ⁓ yeah.
So hit us up if you're interested and have a kick ass week. We would love to hear from you if this episode made an impact on you or you had any good thoughts or wanted to share anything. Have a great week. Take care.