In his early 30s, Peter Teuscher left behind a thriving business in Canada to start fresh in Germany, overcoming limiting beliefs that once held him back. Through this bold move, he discovered true happiness by confronting those beliefs. Now, Peter shares his powerful journey and the strategies he uses to help others break free from their own limitations and unlock their full potential. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about embracing change and finding fulfillment.
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Overcoming Limiting Beliefs Through An Epic Move With Peter Teuscher
Introduction To Peter Teuscher
Welcome back to another exciting episode of the show. I am honored to be joined by Peter Teuscher, who’s joining us all the way from Germany. Exciting. Peter, tell us who you are and what you do.
Zander, first of all, great to be with you. Thanks so much. I’m here in Hamburg, Germany, but I’m originally from Canada. We’re both West Coast, you’re in LA, I think. Yes, I’m a coach. I work with people to help them find their own highest potential. I work with people, everything from CEOs and top managers to everyday people who are just looking for change in their lives. I’ve actually more recently started working with youth, 16 to 20-year-olds. I sometimes think if I’d known my full potential back then, or if I had someone to help show me the way, how great would that have been?
I try and mix it up. I’ve written a book called Rethinking Happiness: and The Beliefs That Guide You because I think that the biggest roadblocks we have are the beliefs and the habitual thoughts that we carry with us. That’s how I made a massive transformation in my life back when I decided to leave Canada, travel the world, and then end up in Europe, I found the way forward was really changing my beliefs and changing the way I think. Hopefully, that helps people be more epic.
I couldn’t agree more that we are, as I say in my book, “The meanest person in your life is you.” This idea is that for some reason, we are not kind to ourselves most of the time. We tell ourselves what we cannot do. We buy into limiting beliefs. We say mean things to ourselves. I marvel sometimes when I’m working with people. I’m like, if your best friend said, “Just one of the things that you say to yourself on a daily basis, how would you feel?” A lot of them are like, “That would be devastating.” I’m like, “Yeah. Why are you doing this?”
You wouldn’t let your best friend speak to you the way you talk to yourself. It’s time to be kinder to you.
We all have that inner voice, the inner narrator. I heard it called a lot of different things and there are lots of it. A lot of psychologists will talk about it and that comes from sometimes it’ll be the worst things that we heard from our parents. That’s not blaming the parents. It’ll be like some of the worst messages that we internalized. Obviously that’s meant to be a mechanism to stop us from making mistakes and so on, but often it gets out of control.
It actually stifles us and gets in our way. That’s part of this habitual way of thinking that we have. We have that negative chatter that we have. We also have the way we judge people in situations and we have these fixed mindsets that tell us, “This is the person I am. I cannot do this. I don’t know how to do this.” Those are all super limiting. When we start to recognize them and bring them to the level of awareness, then we can start to make a shift and change them.
I know from my own life, some of the epic things that I achieved. I started off and I’m like, I have no idea how I’m ever going to do that. Yet I’m like, “Maybe it’s being naive or something.” Just saying, “I’m going to try and realizing that failure is part of the journey. We’re not going to get it 100% right. I think so often people, there’s something big that they want to do.
Failure is part of the journey. We won’t get it right 100% of the time, and that’s okay.
They want to make a change. Maybe it’s changing their career or write a book or run a marathon or doing something like that, and they off themselves out of it before they even get there because they’re like,” I don’t have all the steps.” Here’s what I’d like to say. Peter, you got up this morning. I know it’s later in Germany. You. Even if they’ve been through your whole day, but when you got up this morning, did you have all the answers to all of the questions and things that happened to you today?
Absolutely not. I start my day with morning routines to try and visualize how I want my day to go but it never goes exactly according to plan. Neither does life.
Yet you still got out of bed, right?
Yeah.
When we’re talking about our careers or our dreams and our goals, we stop ourselves.
Yeah. Sometimes we like to leave things as a dream and don’t make it a goal. It’s within our comfort zone. It makes sense. We dream of one day being a writer, as you said, and writing a book and we procrastinate and put it off into the future because it’s just a lot easier to do it that way. I’d like to look at things like the mindset that we have and especially when we catch ourselves saying, “I’m not good at that or I cannot do those things.”
I have a 10-year-old here. When she says that she’s really good now. When she catches me saying, “That’s not really for me.” She’ll point it out. Kids are great for that thing. Those are practiced habits that we have. I’ve worked myself a long time to get into a growth mindset of thinking about things in terms of I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m not good at that yet. I think that gives us the optimism and the courage to move forward.
What I write about in my book, and people really seem to resonate with people, which is really cool because I like it, is not yet. These two words. Peter, have you finished your book? Not yet. It doesn’t mean that you’re not. As you know, writing a book is an incredibly difficult and long process between the actual writing of the book and the editing and stuff of the book.
It’s like, has your book come out? Not yet. I mentioned marathons. I’ve run some marathons in my life. People are like, “Have you run your marathon?” “Not yet.” People get it because it’s like, no, that isn’t happening until November. People are like, “That makes sense.” I’d like to use the example of when you are in school like, let’s say you start university, you don’t ask someone who just started school a month ago, “Do you have your degree yet?” Because we accept that it’s it takes 4 or 5 or 16.
Like there’s a time period that it takes for you to get it and yet in the rest of our life. People are like, “Have you finished this?” We tend to say no, which is such a hard stop. It makes it sound like it will never happen. For me, the not yet is so optimistic because it’s like, I’m working on it. There may be things in our life that are, I would love to get my private pilot’s license. Have you done it? Not yet. I haven’t even started and yet I still hold that out as something that I would like to achieve.
Shifting From Obligation To Choice
I find another thing that really catches us up is doing things out of obligation. Now you hear people talking a lot about I have to, I should, and I find it’s far more motivating when you take control of that. I talk to people about whenever you’re planning to do something, you want to do something, you look at it in terms of can I do it? Do I want to do it? Will I do it? That’s the final one is the commitment. You can ask yourself those questions.
Can I do what I want to and will I? When you change your language, I think that makes a big difference as well because, “I really should get onto writing this book or I really should get onto getting more fit.” If you make that switch in your head where it’s your choice and you’re empowered to either do it or not do it, it gives you the responsibility. When you start talking about things that way in terms of I can, I want to and I will, then it gives you much more motivation and puts the onus on you to get it done.
I also think the things that we want to do, let’s say you’re like, “I need to have exercise in my day.” Then we start to hear the litany of excuses of why it cannot happen. They’re literally arguing for the limitation. I’m like, no if it is important, you will figure it out and put it into your day. People who exercise every day or five days a week, they do it because they simply said, here’s where I’m putting it in my schedule. We are all busy. We all have stuff that we have to do but very few people are actually working 24 hours a day. Honestly.
If it’s important to you, you’ll make it happen. If not, it’s not a priority.
Why Prioritization Is Key
No, exactly. When people talk about that in terms of I don’t have enough time, the first thing I ask is, it sounds like a silly question, but how many hours are in your day? We all have 24 hours and it’s about what you choose to do with those hours. It’s about making priorities and so many people will say, “I don’t have time for that.” I encourage them to talk about it in terms of that’s not a priority for me. That’s okay, right? I mean, we all have things that are more important to us, but to recognize, I’m prioritizing binge-watching over this goal that I want to achieve. Then you start to look at why I am doing that. Then you can start digging into what are the fears that are holding me back and that thing.
Also a few things. First of all, I think especially as adults, children don’t forget this because children remember that they have a choice. I’m choosing not to eat my peas or whatever. As adults, we forget that we actually do have a choice. It doesn’t matter how far down the road. Let’s say you’ve been in the corporate world for 20 years, but you’re just like, “I’m not happy.” Just because you’ve done that for 20 years doesn’t mean that you don’t have the choice to go out and make a change. Is it scary? Yes. Is it unknown? Absolutely.
You have the power to change your life, no matter how far down the road you’ve gone. You always have a choice.
There are a lot of people who will come for coaching exactly for that reason. They’ll say, “Look, I’ve been to university, I’ve got my career. Maybe they have a relationship and a family.” It’s almost like they’ve ticked these boxes and they’ve followed this roadmap that society lays out for them. Then they wonder why they’re not happy because at some point they didn’t figure out what my values are and what I really want. It’s not that they’re not happy with their partner or their family, but for whatever reason they’ve made choices that were not their own. They’ve been influenced and so that’s another thing.
Happiness As Feedback
If you want to pursue something, it’s really important to be passionate about it, but it’s important that it lines up with your values and who you are. I talk a lot about happiness, but happiness because I find it’s great feedback. The choices I’m making, if I have lots of moments of happiness in my life, then I know the choices I’m making, that’s feedback for me. It’s this emotional guidance system that we have that helps us to know the way that I’m living my life or the way that I’m seeing the world, is it accurate or is it in line with my values and my needs?
Along that line also is you talk about happiness and I think happiness is super important. It’s also from a psychological standpoint, incredibly motivating. Who doesn’t want to do things that are happy? If you think about your favorite meal. It’s your favorite meal because it brings you joy and happiness. It tastes good to you. It’s what you like. It’s what you want. You think about it and go, “Yes, I really love to have whatever that meal is. It’s so great. I get to have this meal.” You’re happy and you’re motivated to try and have more happiness. I don’t really know too many people who are like, “Bring on the misery. I just wow, that was miserable. Let me go do more of that. I just want to roll around in the misery.” No.
I’m glad you’re also someone who loves food because I love going to Italy. They really have this food culture, but yeah, happiness is really in that moment. It’s enjoying that great meal or whatever. Unfortunately, a lot of people make happiness in this destination they’re going to get to when I get the promotion or when I achieve this goal, then I’ll be happy but if you’re not enjoying the journey, I think that is really part of the life’s journey is epic as long as you make it that right. If we’re ignoring that feedback that something’s wrong or we’re off track because we’re not really feeling happy because even the tough times, every challenge you overcome, there’s this fulfillment that really, I don’t know about you, but when I overcome a challenge, I feel happy. I feel great.
Frankly, you probably, because you have to struggle to get to it, it’s that much more rewarding. There’s so much more learning that happens in the struggle. Peter Coyle in The Talent Code talks about people practicing. They practice and they practice. It’s when you make a mistake and you struggle, if you were trying to play an instrument, let’s say you’re playing the guitar and you want to play, I don’t know, stairway to Heaven or something. If you just sat down and banged it out. Yeah.
Great but if you struggle with your missing chords and your miss fingering and miss-strumming when you finally get it, you’ve actually probably learned a lot more about the guitar and how to play and stuff. I also think because my own experience of running half marathons and marathons is so focused on finishing this race but when I got done, there was honestly just a short window of elation of, “I did it.”
Then it’s gone. Then you’re like, “Yay. I finished a marathon. That’s awesome.” Now what? I think, yes, if I get that promotion if I only, if I do this, so many people, we all are at the now what? Of course, we’re at the ‘now what’ yet you reached your destination, but that’s not the end of the road. It’s not like, “I finished a marathon. Now I’m just going to sit down and I don’t have to do anything more for the rest of my life.” We didn’t get here as human beings because we’re like, “Okay, I achieved my goal. That’s it. Thank you.”
I think that’s the sad thing. A lot of people will treat happiness like it’s this. There are these real peaks and momentous occasions in life. That’s when we’ll be happy and fulfilled and they treat the rest that’s in between like filler. That big holiday, then I’ll be happy then. Then I’m back to the grind. How sad is that? If you only have a few of those really big moments, but you have so many other quality moments in your life.
This is what I love about the work of, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the American Hungarian psychologist who talks about flow and part of this flow state and part of really being proficient and being a high performer, it’s this combination of challenge and passion for what you’re doing, thus allowing you to focus. Without the challenge, you become bored, and then happiness goes away. It’s important to define for yourself what happiness is. Some people will talk about it in terms of just pleasure. I cannot relate to people who think that retirement is not doing any work, sitting on the beach and drinking umbrella drinks.
That for me is, I cannot imagine doing that. I cannot imagine not working because I’m passionate about what I do. I know not everybody’s there, but everybody has the opportunity to do something meaningful, even if it’s not their main profession or whatever. That whole sense of when you said the challenge and the struggle to accept me, how he says that you have to have a certain amount of challenge to avoid the boredom so that you can really focus. That will get you on this road to really achieving your potential.
Enjoying the journey. In my book, I talk about the 97/3 rule, which is I honestly believe that 97% of your day today was really good, and up to 3% wasn’t as good. Yes, there are days where it may be high or something bad happens. I get that but in general, and yet, when you ask people how their day was, they’re talking about the 3%. Ignore the 97%.
I take that further. I really came up with this when I was an internship for my mental health license, and I was working with middle school and high school students. A lot of them had academic issues and they were seemed to be focused on all the things that weren’t going right. I’m like, “There’s so much going well.” I asked him this question, and I’ll ask you this question, “In school, what was your least favorite subject?”
Almost all of them. I mean, I did well in English and history, but those are the only two that I remember. Everything else was like negative.
Like math. For me, I really didn’t like math. We’ll take math. If you got a 97 on a math test, how would you feel?
I’d feel pretty damn happy.
Exactly and you’d be telling your parents and your friends. You’d be focused on the three points you didn’t get Peter?
No.
No. You’d be like, I got a 97, right? Yet in our life, we focus on, “I didn’t get those three points and totally ignored that you got a 97.” I’m like, why? There are so many good things. Again, it’s not these momentous things. It’s the little things. I woke up this morning. Not that I didn’t expect to wake up, but it’s a good way to start.
The thing is this too, but our brains are wired to see the negative too. It’s just the way our biology is that we look for the problems, we look for the things that have gone wrong. That’s the reason that we need to train ourselves to have a shift and create new mental habits that will help us see like that. That’s why I have a gratitude practice. Some people will do a gratitude journal and they’ll think of the things that they’re grateful for and just training yourself to see the good things. I’m sometimes amazed. I’m very fortunate.
I live in a part of the city where that’s very green and literally there’s a park area right behind my house and I’ll walk and the sun is shining and I’m listening to the birds and I’ll see somebody walk by me with a scowl and I’m like, how can you scowl? Just look around you. In their head, they’re just ruminating about something that’s gone wrong instead of being in the moment and going, how great is this? We really need to train ourselves to start looking at all the things that are working out and all the things that are going well for us because complaining is a habit too.
This complaining habit of looking at all the things that have gone wrong and then repeating those over and over. I had a client once who said, “This always happens to me.” I said, “Let’s look at when was the last time it happened?” Before that, and then it turned out it had happened two times in her whole life, but this negative thing was holding her back because it was so fixed in her mind as this thing always happens to me.
Also, I think, sadly, with all of the wonderful technology we have. We have this constant mirage of all of the things that are fire, flood, or blood. Like just the news, no matter how you consume it, there are all the things that are going wrong. It’s not that we shouldn’t know it, but in some ways, from a psychological standpoint, if all of the information you get is all of the things that are wrong and bad and dangerous and stuff, is it any surprise that that’s how we’re walking around?
Not at all. That’s why there are a couple of areas that I look at when we look at changing beliefs. We look at where they come from. One of the major elements is our environment and its impulses. If we have negative people around us, if we’re constantly watching the news, I think about how many people wake up in the morning and the first thing they’re doing is watching the news. How are you priming your brain? That’s why I encourage people to have these morning rituals that are, don’t look at your phone, don’t look at the news, start yourself off in a positive way, and then you will be resilient enough to overcome the bad news that you face and that thing. Our environment is full of these negative cues and negative details. If that’s what we choose to focus on.
Another thing that I love to share with people is I like baseball. I’m not a fanatic, but I know enough to say someone who makes it into the Hall of Fame has a batting average of over 300. That basically means for you to have a Hall of Fame day, Peter, you only have to get one-third of your day right. Let’s say there are nine hours of activity, be it work and family stuff. If you had a Hall of Fame day because you got three hours out of that writing, you could mess up six hours. That’d be pretty awesome. I think most people will be like, if I’m a superstar and only have to get it right one-third of the time, that would be pretty amazing.
I love that sports analogy because I used to coach basketball. I use those analogies all the time, because when you look at like an icon like Michael Jordan, arguably the best basketball player of all time. He missed more than half of his shots because he’s the greatest of all time. When you think about it in those terms, if you do one thing wrong out of all, out of ten things you’ve done right. You look at the one thing you’ve done wrong, you’re way better than Michael Jordan’s average on that.
Again, I think it does have to do with changing your perspective. I grew up in New England. I joke all the time that I have this, even though I hate it and I fight against the underlying pure tentacle belief system that basically in order for my life to have meaning, I have to be suffering. Anyone who’s lived in New England knows that the weather tends to be pretty bad. Most of the time it’s either humid or it’s snowing with an Arctic vortex in the forecast and snow and ice and being a Red Sox fan my whole life certainly that was until 2004 was a stellar example.
One strike away in 1986 of winning the whole thing and the ball goes through Bill Buckner’s legs. Somehow we all collectively accepted that that was our fate. We can get close to what we want. When the Red Sox won in 2004, I was sitting on the couch and my wife came in and was like, “They won.” I’m like, “I know.” She goes, “Why aren’t you more excited?” My answer was, this is terrible, Peter. I’m like, “I’m waiting for something horrible to happen. I cannot have this thing that I wanted.”
There has to be a counterbalance of some, the other shoe dropping some horrendous event has to happen to counterbalance. I cannot have this joy. It’s ridiculous. I fight against it. I go, no, I can have joy. I can have happiness. Frankly, I am pursuing it as hard as I can. Yes, there is sadness. There is all of that. But let me focus and go towards the stuff that brings me joy. It’s human nature. Yes, something that brings us joy is something that we want to go do. If we have a job that we enjoy, it’s just my job that doesn’t seem that hard. Your job probably doesn’t seem that hard. Why? Because you enjoy it.
Yeah, exactly. It’s funny because you alluded to expectations there. When you have this negative expectation, I think that expectation is a double-edged sword. I encourage people to rethink their expectations because they just set the bar so low sometimes in terms of what’s possible for them. On the other hand, things don’t turn out the way they expect. Then they’re discouraged and they’re down. I encourage people to set high expectations, but then let them go.
Then whatever comes, be happy with that. It’s trying to find that balance and not getting discouraged when things don’t work out exactly the way you want because you never know what good could come of it. Also don’t just expect that it can never happen. This can never work out. It’s just this limit about how good your life can be because it can always be better.
The people that we look at and we’re like, “Look at that person. They achieved this. They did this. They left their corporate job and they had no idea what they were doing and somehow they found success.” Simply be brave folks.
I took a step like that. What my brother and I, ‘d built a business in Canada and people thought we had, what a great life. Amongst all of that, I was in a, as much as I had achieved, I went into a major depression. The way I got myself out of it was by changing my beliefs and so on. People thought it was crazy giving everything up, leaving Canada, moving even when I got to Germany in my mid-thirties and they thought you left Canada because people here think it’s the greatest country and they all want to go visit there.
Then to come here with no job, nothing. They just thought I was crazy. Like, who does a thing like that? For me, it was like I wanted to change. I needed to change. It was the best thing I ever could have done. It was not easy. The first year was tough. Luckily, through my mom, I’d learned some of the language. There were cultural differences and so on, and then making new friends. It’s easy when you’re young, in your 30s, to meet new people and so on. I think the people that will want to keep you in this box are, I believe, being grateful for what you have, but that doesn’t mean you gotta hang on to it for the rest of your life. If it’s time for a change, it’s time for a change.
Have cheerleaders on your side. If someone is negative and tells you why you cannot do it, you don’t need that person in your life. Trust me. As I said at the beginning of our show, there’s enough meanness within you, which first of all, stop doing that. I don’t need any other people. I got enough voices in my head going sometimes, “How are you going to do that? Are you sure?”
I encourage people to do what I call self-parenting and assuming you’re not going to take the negative aspects of their own parents because no parents are perfect. If you could be the ideal parent, how would you be? Then start treating yourself that way because you want the encouragement, you want to have realistic guidance and support, but you want to have that support. You want to have that encouragement. How would you treat your kids? I think we would all want to have the best for them and want them to be happy and so on. Yet the way we talk to ourselves, it’s really hard to be happy with some of this stuff. The conversations that go on in my head.
Every day that is a practice. Make you pay attention to when the negative self-talk is getting too much. Peter, what an awesome time. I’m sure you and I could talk for three hours and still have more stuff to talk about but I want to thank you so much for coming on. If people want to get ahold of you, they want more of Peter, how can they get ahold of you?
Closing Remarks And How To Reach Peter
The best way is to have a look at my website. I write a regular blog once a week where I talk about these kinds of topics. The website is PeterTeuscher.com. There’s information about how to buy my book there and my blog and the coaching that I do. I’m glad to have these conversations because the reason I love doing what I do is because I love inspiring people to reach their own highest potential. Fantastic to talk about this with you.
Thank you again for coming on. I want to remind everyone that if you want to begin your Epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. If you go there now, you can get a free copy of my book, EPIC Begins With 1 Step Forward: How To Plan, Achieve, and Enjoy The Journey. As always remember, epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
- Peter Teuscher on LinkedIn
- Rethinking Happiness: and The Beliefs That Guide You
- Peter Teuscher
- EPIC Begins With 1 Step Forward: How To Plan, Achieve, and Enjoy The Journey
About Peter Teuscher
Peter Teuscher is a seasoned business and life coach whose book, “Rethinking Happiness,” delves into the complexities of happiness and offers a refreshing perspective on how individuals can achieve it on their own terms. His approach aligns with the goals to go beyond superficial checklists and embrace deeper, more meaningful changes that foster genuine mental health and wellbeing. Peter draws from his experience as an entrepreneur, executive in the corporate world, life/business/basketball coach, leadership trainer, and author. Peter’s personal development journey really kicked off when he faced serious mental health issues in his early thirties. He uses his diverse background and experience to help others discover their highest potential by becoming aware of and changing the thoughts, beliefs and habits that stand in their way.