Welcome back to Tuff Love with Rob Kandell. In this episode Rob interviews Tripp Laneer from the New Man Podcast about getting out of your comfort zone. Tripp has been coaching for 10 years. He has worked with men and women all around the world, but primarily works with men and especially with folks who want to do good work in the world. They want to make a great living doing good work in the world but there’s resistance and fear to get out of their professional comfort zone or level up to the next place for them.

Tripp’s podcast, The New Man Podcast, has been going for 10 years and has over 1 million downloads. He started it because he was learning all this life changing material, but realized it would never help the people he knew that were really struggling in their life because it wasn’t presented in a way that was accessible for them. It was for the guys on top of the mountain who already understood this codified language, so Tripp decided to translate it into a language that the rest of us could appreciate and use. When he did interviews, he imagined two people in his life were there in the room, which would help Tripp ask better questions and make the interviews much more practical and useful.

Tripp grew up with a sense of having to know everything and play it safe. Every guest inspires him to move out of his comfort zone, but on in particular was Vernon Reed from the band Living Color. He seemed to grow up with a mindset about creating life and taking a stand for being creative. His approach to just going for what he really wants and being a professional creative artist really inspired Tripp. He took that message to his own life: take risks and be willing to try things instead of needing to have it all figured out beforehand.

Having been a professional musician, Tripp found it stopped being fun when it became about trying to get somewhere. He burnt out and lost the love of it for a while, but these days finds it a lot more fun now that his self-worth isn’t attached to it. He has learned that you don’t get to decide if people are going to like what you do. You just get to make your think and hop you find your audience. Make it about loving the thing, getting better and growing and expanding that way.

Tripp has been on the path that lots of his clients are now on. He ran a media production company for 10 years, which he started so he could be a musician and not starve. But he went through a big shift personally and spiritually where he realized he felt like he was playing a role professionally. There was the Tripp that went out and made money in the world, and then there was another Tripp that had other interests, and he wanted to align the two.

Tripp realized after he started coaching professionally that it was something he’s always been doing. He loves being in conversation with people around what really matters and what they want to actually create in their life. He urges people to apply the personal development stuff they do to all aspects of their life. Aligning who we are and our values with the work that we do means we’re going to bump up against a lot of different areas when it comes to being comfortable.

Tripp deals with this comfort zone stuff in a lot of ways:

The first thing to recognize is that it’s an ongoing process. It’s not like ‘I got out of my comfort zone in 2014 and now I’m done.’ If we’re on a growth path, then we’re always up against our growth edge.
Get out of isolation. When we’re talking about this stuff with other people and we hear the stories that come out of our mouths that don’t add up, it’s powerful. We need that mirror and to get out of our own little bubble. Just sharing what we want to do in the world can be transformative in and of itself.
As a coach, Tripp believes in working with other coaches and other professionals,