Go from procrastination to peak performance as this episode’s guest empower you with his inspiring journey. Host Zander Sprague talks with performance coach Shane Perry about overcoming personal challenges and achieving big goals. Shane shares his own transformative experiences, from building a successful business to coping with tragedy. He provides proven strategies for setting meaningful objectives, breaking through mental barriers, and finding the motivation to keep pushing forward, even in the face of setbacks. This conversation offers a roadmap for turning dreams into reality. Tune in and begin your journey towards peak performance!
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From Procrastination To Peak Performance: Shane Perry’s Journey To Empowering Others
I am joined by Shane Perry. Shane, tell us who you are and what you do.
Shane’s Story
Zander, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. My name is Shane Perry and I am a performance consultant. I teach people how to effectively set goals and achieve them with a real focus on all things comfort zone. I got into this because I have been in a business. I have a business for many years now and I’ve been retired from that business. It runs itself. I just attended it now.
It’s a business where people need to come in and they need to find the motivation to go make it happen. It’s not a job. It’s more but 1099 kind of a thing. Years ago, I found myself just dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand why we behave the way that we do. Why someone could want something and have a goal, yet not be willing to get out of their way to go make it happen. I had my own struggles. I was a failure in my first two years.
I didn’t have any experience, but I did plow through it and find a way to get it done. What I did is I did a real deep dive into the psychology of people. YouTube wasn’t around back then, so I was buying college psychology textbooks. I was reading everything I could because I wanted to try to figure out, why do we as humans behave the way that we do and I learned a lot. I’ve found that I have a knack for people and how they behave. I didn’t realize it at the time but I put together a system and a process where most every one of my training meetings became half training and half mindset.
I ended up changing the whole face of my business. I built a seven-figure business for myself and I have produced countless financially independent people. I’ll speed up my story here, but about ten years ago, I started taking that and I knew some friends and they brought me in. I started teaching this process to everything from fitness to real estate and to anything that had people that needed to find the motivation to do something. It was a lot of fun for me. A few years ago, my nineteen-year-old daughter passed away.
I’m so sorry.
Thank you. When that happened, that’s a real paradigm shifting moment in your life. As the dust settled, I always know that I love helping people. I have a passion for this. It does make a dramatic impact, and I want to do more than just play around with it. I founded it Disruption Factor and I do a lot of speaking. My first online course is out there. A lot of coaching with businesses and individuals and that’s where we are. It’s a long answer. Sorry about that.
I get it. Our stories are our stories, Shane, and certainly, a lot there. To start off with this, which is perhaps take a moment and talk about that epic unexpected, which is losing your daughter. I am so sorry. I lost my older sister many years ago. Sadly, I know the shock. All of it. My question for you is, on that Journey that epic journey, what have you been finding helpful for you to be working your way through? Again, I will never say get over it because you don’t. We’re working our way through.
She had a she developed a seizure disorder when she was eleven, so she was fighting seizures. Unexpectedly, out of the blue, she had the big one. I am a person of faith. I don’t know where I would be without that. I’m very grateful that I do have decades of experience in mindset and understanding the behavior and things like that. I knew that ultimately I need to move on. My daughter’s name was Shaye. I knew that she would want me to move on and be happy. I’m happy but it’s a little bit of an altered happy.
Shane, I completely get you. What I say to parents and other siblings survivors because I do talk about this a lot. I’ve written two books on it about sibling loss and one for parents to understand their living child’s grief. In the last fifteen years, the number of parents who come up and know that I talked about siblings, say, “I lost my son or daughter, but I have other living children. Why don’t they cry?” I wrote a book.
Zander, I would love to get the link for those books. I will buy those in a heartbeat.
What I like to say is celebrate the rainbow that was his life because you could focus on that God on the end but that doesn’t get you anywhere. The fact of the matter is, your daughter had this beautiful colorful life. Why not celebrate that? Remember, you’re not forgetting but you are saying, “It’s not just that she’s not here.”
You’re right and we did. My ex-wife and I were very close. She became a real expert in all things child seizure related. We did start a foundation, the Shaye Lynn Foundation and that’s a big Outreach. We help a lot of parents that have children with seizures and that’s that has helped us cope a lot because we’re able to make a profound difference for people that have children with any type of a seizure disorder. That’s helped as well.
Without getting too far off the rails here, I do want to just say for you and anyone else who may have lost a child or a sibling or a grandchild. You don’t know about it. The Compassionate Friends of which I sit on the board, so full disclosure, is an awesome organization that is for families that have lost a child. I’m the sibling representatives, so if you have any other children, I can tell you it’s a sibling survivor. It’s a lonely experience. Everyone asks how but no one asks how we are.
I have three other children.
I just wanted to let and let anyone else out there know that if you have experienced this loss, there is an awesome organization that’s here to help you. There are local parent meetings all across the United States. There’s some in-person sibling meetings but we have multiple weekly Zoom meeting for siblings. It is awesome. We have a conference coming up in Bellevue, Washington in July. Shane, I would love to see you there because it’d be helpful for your whole family.
That’s great. I’m very interested.
Setting And Achieving Goals
I’ll talk to you more about when we’re not recording but I did want to put it out there because sadly, not as many people who need us know about this. Now, clearly in the work that you do with helping people perform. That’s a great interest to me. It is what I do with my epic begins. Epic does begin with one step forward and I do believe that the things that we want to achieve, we talk about it. We don’t do anything.
Oftentimes, it’s because we anticipate that it’s going to be so hard. I’m sure your experience is, if you just start doing it, you find out that the step by step is not as difficult as you thought. Yes, there certainly were but you need to start doing the work and then you go, “I need to just do this.” Look at that, I move myself forward towards my goal.”
I walk people through a process. There’s five areas of our life. There’s relational, spiritual, financial, recreational, physical or fitness. It starts with people realizing that anytime you have an area of your life, one of those areas that you want to take to a new level. For example, weight loss. That’s the number one goal setting. A lot of people don’t realize that’s a goal. Whether you realize it or not, it is a goal. Recognize that it is a goal and learn how to set a goal. You have to learn how to set and cultivate goals.
It’s a process. Take the first step but it starts with write down your goals, be very specific and then learn to cultivate those goals. Surround yourself with the end results so you’re reminding yourself where you’re going. Again, I’m a high-performance consultant but, to me, a high-performance individual is anybody that just sets a goal and follows through with it, and does what’s required to achieve and maintain that goal.
When I say performance consultant, a lot of people would think that I work with athletes or something over Nike. When they hear high-performance individual, they think I’m talking about an athlete. No, it’s just someone that has the mindset and goes through the process of setting and achieving goals and it’s not that easy, which is why 92% of all goal set aren’t achieved.
As I talked about in my book, you have your goal but you need to have the stuffs that you need to do. I’ll take the example of I wanted to run a marathon. I had no idea how the heck to do it and 26.2 miles is a long way. How am I ever going to do that? I joined Team In Training, which is a fundraising side of Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and I got handed to training schedule.
All of a sudden, Shane, it got so easy. I look at him and I’d say, “Today is Wednesday. Go run for 30 minutes.” I can do that. When I was done with that, that was what I needed to do. Tomorrow, I look at what I need to do. Saturday, I need to do a long run and it’s not that the runs himself were easy but what to do. People like structure and as adults, we forget that structures makes us feel comfortable. From a psychological standpoint, we all like structure. I’ll bring you back to high school for a second, Shane. After the first week of classes, were you stressed about how to get from your first period of class to your second period of class?
Not at all.
You didn’t have any. Why? It’s because you’re structure. You knew where you needed to be and when you needed to be there. When we’re goal setting, if we have structure, it makes it so much easier. It takes a lot of that stress. The stuff that we put our energy into is the actual activity or function that we need to do. If we have steps, you think about cooking or something. There’s a recipe. It’s not so hard if what you need to do in the order in which you need to do it.
That comes with you. You set specific goals and then you need to create the plan. The structure, if you will and those are the easy parts for people setting a goal and creating the plan. Leaving that comfort zone and sticking to it is where it gets dicey for a lot of people. That’s what I specialize in the most.
Setting a goal and creating the plan are the easy parts. Leaving that comfort zone and sticking to it is where it gets dicey.
Let Go Of Fears And Work On Your Strengths
Talking about weight loss. Yes, weight loss is a big goal for lots of people. I’ve been on some weight loss journeys on my own. What I found was successful is have some waypoint. When I have lost 10 pounds, my reward for that is I get to go do best along the way because you have the bigger goal. If we don’t have some shorter-term reward, it makes it hard. It makes it hard to stick with it, but if you’re like, “I just have to get to this point.” I was interested in your own life. What is what is an epic journey that you’ve been on? What were some of the intermediate goals that you set that helped you keep on that path?
When I started the business, I started at 21 years old. I drove a beer truck for a living. I never went to college. I just knew I wanted more. It wasn’t necessarily. I didn’t care to make a lot of money. I was more focused on, I didn’t want to boss. I wanted to be my own boss. This business crossed my path and I didn’t realize it at the time, but now having done this for many years and teaching what I teach. One of the things I get people to do is I identify their character traits that keep them in their comfort zone.
Mine is I’m a natural procrastinator. I’m not lazy but I’ll procrastinate. I have an intense fear of rejection. I care way too much about what other people think or might say. I’m easily distracted. A little add going on. Back then, I didn’t know that. I didn’t go like, “These are my character traits.” I came face to face within a few months of quitting my job and doing this business to realize and be like, “I might not have what it takes,” because all these people are just mad men.
They’re out there prospect and talking to people. I’d rather eat a can of botulism and go talk to a stranger. I’m so fearful. Not only pushing myself through that but learning how to work smart and work. Instead of trying to fight my weaknesses, I focus on my strengths and I was able to do that. Besides able to do that and started some success, I then went on to realize that more people than not are built just like me.
They’re not the machines. They do care about what people think. They are a little procrastinated. This is not natural, so I’m starting to teach that to people. Not only achieving the success that I achieved but helping other people that I feel were a lot like me, which I find is most people when they enter something like that to get success. To me, that was the best journey of all when it came to that.
As a mental health professional, I can tell you, my experience is overly natural. As human beings, we tend to want to avoid the things that are challenging, difficult, painful, or whatever. When I was doing my internship, I was doing school-based mental health counseling for middle school and high school. A lot of my clients had academic issues. I came up with a thing to help them do their homework, where it was creating structure for their homework. I said, “Start off with the subject that you like least and work your way towards the thing that you like most.” That’s easiest.
Why? There’s two reasons. One, you have the most energy when you start off. Two, you get the unpleasant part or the painful part out of the way and now you’re working towards pleasant. In your business, if there’s something like cold calling or something I’m not wild about. I do that first thing in the morning because that’s the thing that I’m not as excited about. I work my way towards the things. That are easier and are more in my strength zone.
I agree that we should try and work as much in our strength. It’s possible. In your own business, in your own life, if you can have someone else who’s strength is whatever. If you can employ them to do that for you, it’s so much better. I’d like to say, I could change the oil on my car myself but I’d rather go to Jiffy Lube and have them do it because they know what they’re doing and it happens a lot faster. It’s just an example.
You mentioned earlier about just getting started. Getting out of your own way to go achieve something that you desire to achieve. It’s not going to be easy for anybody, but what people don’t realize is that when you do start doing that, getting out of your own way and doing the activity that you know you should be doing, maybe you don’t like it or maybe it’s uncomfortable but you’re doing it. The feeling you have, the feeling of accomplishment and it doesn’t even matter the results you’re getting.
The fact that you’re doing it. It’s so fulfilling. Its success in itself. It is. For so many people that hold back because they’re afraid to do or they don’t want to do or it’s not natural for them to do what they know they need to do to achieve. Once you do it, the feeling you have is amazing. That right there is going to keep you going in a lot of ways.
I get none of us want to fail but here’s the thing, Shane. We are all going to fail at things. That feeling of accomplishment of, maybe I wasn’t successful but I know that I tried. There’s a lot of personal satisfaction. I say in my book, the only thing you fail 100% at are the things that you do not try. There’s so much. We just got done the world series and you look at baseball. People have a Hall of Fame career and get into the Hall of Fame if they bat over 300.
Now, for all of you people reading, let’s say you have nine hours of activity in your day. Some work and some personal. Imagine you have a Hall of Fame Day if you only have to have 3 hours of that 9. Successful. Honestly, when we look at that way, that’s not a particularly high bar. I’ve got 9 hours to get 3 hours. I can do that.
Over the years, I’ve taught that exact same analogy to my folks. Someone’s going to make millions of dollars to live a great life, get famous and go to the Hall of Fame. They’re going to walk back to the dugout dejected 6.5 to 7 out of 10 times. They’re going to fail 6.5 out of 7 times. Every play in football is designed to score a touchdown. The reality is a team has a good game. They might have four that work out of 45 plays.
You never have the professional baseball player walk back to the dugout after striking out telling himself, “Maybe the baseball thing might not be for me after all.” They don’t do that. They just go, “I need to play it out. I need to work on it with some fundamentals. Maybe make some changes.” They don’t sit there and go, “Maybe this isn’t for me,” but that’s what we do when it comes to, again, any of those areas of our life that we try to take to a new level.
The thing about goals is, there’s two things that every goal has in common for the most part. Number one, before you achieve, before you see an ounce of success, you’re going to get hit with a ton of disruption. Maybe even failure or pain. Depending on what it is. That’s life. Number two, the thing that ever goal has in common is, you’re rarely where you thought you’d be when you thought you’d be there.
When you combine those two things together, this is why people go, “Maybe I just can’t do it. Maybe this isn’t for me. Who am I kidding? Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe this is a pipe dream.” You have to put yourself in that analogy that you talked about the professional baseball player, they don’t strike out. Walk back to the Dugout and go, “Maybe this baseball thing isn’t for me.”
We’re all going to fail. Years ago, I was teaching at Risk Youth. I wanted to help change their mindset about trying and failing. I pulled it from Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten book, where he puts this list in dates of like literally this laundry list of failure. You read it and it’s like, “Ran for House of Representatives – lost. Wife died in childbirth. Had a business and went bankrupt. I ran for representative – won. Ran for Senate – lost. Whatever.” We get to the end of it, “1860 elected president of the United States.” It’s Abraham Lincoln. Not to get too political here but lots of people think that he was a pretty good president.
Adopting A ‘Not Yet’ Mindset
You look at that and go, “Any one of those things would totally be justifiable to go.” That’s it and yet he didn’t. All of us have fail to things multiple times. In this whole thing of, if I can’t be successful, I don’t want to do it. Guess what? You’re never going to do anything because there’s no guarantee of success. The only guarantee is if you don’t try you want to achieve. You said that you’ve read my show, which is great and I love this question. I love the idea of not yet because we get on these journeys and we go, “Have you finished your book, Shane?” Not yet. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to. It takes time.
When I was training to run my marathons. Have you run your marathon? Not yet, because the date for it hasn’t happened. I’m still training, and yet when we’re starting a business or trying something, have you done it? We say no. We’ll go back to school. If someone’s a freshman in College, you don’t ask them if they got their degree yet because you understand that they’ve got four years. It’s a process. What are some of your not yets?
Personally?
You personally, Shane.
I’ve developed myself into a doer. When I want to do something, I focus and I do it. I have not yet written my second book and that’s the book that I have my online course. It’s called from Comfort Zone to Success, which walks people through the whole process of setting and achieving goals and comfort zone. All that. Now, I’m writing a book to support that. I haven’t done that yet, but that’s in the works. That’ll be done by June of 2025.
I’m not yet where I want to be with my physical routine with my body, but I’m not where I used to be. That was a journey that I just started. I’ve always been athletic and then you turn 50 and things change a little bit. I woke up one day and said, “Enough is enough. I’m going to get on a mission to get in the best shape of my life,” since probably my mid-twenties.
It’s funny because I started that process, all of a sudden, everything I’ve been teaching people for decades, I had to now practice myself, which also helped launch this business realizing like, “I know it’s good but now I’m living it.” I’m not yet where I want to be there but I’m happy with where I’m going if that make sense.
Those are great. I think not yet should be your co-pilot, your passenger because I think it’s so important. For me, not yet has so much optimism because if we go, “Shane, have you finished your second book?” No. it’s such a hard stop, but the fact of the matter is writing a book is a process. We can say, “I think my book will come out in June,” but you get into the editing process and you find that even though you set aside, let’s say a month for it. It takes six weeks and it’s not that it’s bad. It just does.
You’re on your exercise journey. You have some goals. You might get hurt along the way being over 50 sometimes. It’s not that you have some spectacular story of how you hold that muscle or whatever. It’s usually something super stupid not in the gym but I was getting out of a chair and I wrench my back or whatever. It doesn’t mean you’re not going to get there. It just means you might have a month where you’re like I can’t go as hard because like I got a recover. I like that concept of not yet so much because I think it helps people on their journey. There are epic journeys were on that take time. It tells people, I’m working on it but I haven’t gotten there.
People need to develop and they need to understand it’s a process. They need to develop the patience. They need to understand that it’s not going to happen overnight.
People need to understand that success is a process. They need to develop patience and understand that it’s not going to happen overnight.
Continuing To Set New Goals
Another thing that I know I’ve experienced and I’m sure in your own life. Working with people, we set some big audacious goal and then we achieve it. It’s awesome for about ten minutes. You’re all excited but then you’re like, “Now what?” I cross the finish line on my first marathon. I dreamed about this. I was ecstatic but, honestly, about ten months later, I’m like, “That’s great. I’ve achieved this but now, what like? I’m in this great shape. Now, what do I do?”
The thing about goals, the thing about achievement is there’s always more. Congratulations on your Marathon. I couldn’t even imagine that. I’ve never liked running. That’s awesome. Now, you need to improve your time. You keep pushing yourself. The thing about almost any goal you have, again, the number one goal set in the world is weight loss. Someone lost the weight. That’s amazing. Now, they do know that you need to maintain that activity or it could reverse itself. Now, you’ve lost the weight.
You’ve lost the weight. Now let’s focus on getting fit because there’s a difference between weight loss and fitness. Although, for a lot of people that’s the first step and it’s probably the hardest step. Congratulations. If you’re disciplined enough, created the activity and you got out of your comfort zone. You’ve done enough to achieve your weight loss goal. I’m telling you, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.
Now, turn it into as far as the health genre. Pursue fitness. Maybe more weight lifting or some cross-training or a trainer to try this tone up. For some people, their goal might be something that once you achieve the goal, that’s it. I want to work an extra job until I have enough money to buy a motorcycle and you bought your motorcycle.
The thing about goal achievement is it is a process, Zander. You don’t just wake up one day and go, “I think I’m going to set this goal and go do it.” No. We’re talking and you got to set the goal. You got to create the plan like we talked about. You got to schedule it in. You got to do the activity. You’ve got to face that comfort zone and the disruption that comes when you leave that comfort zone. You got to understand the stuff.
You’ve got to fight the pool to settle like everybody else and come back in that comfort zone. Once you achieve, I promise you, I name those five areas of your life. I bet there’s another 1 or 2 areas that you’d like to take to a new level within your life. There are always other goals to set, so I would encourage people.
Again, once you become a high-performance individual where you are achieving your goal. You’re going to change a little bit. You’re going to realize and surprise yourself in a lot of areas. You’re only going to get hooked on the rush of pursuing something and achieving it. You’re not going to stop. You’re going to find another goal. “I want to do this.” It might be a hobby. “I’ve always wanted to play guitar.” That’s a goal. I would say keep going. If you’re a marathon guy, keep improving your time.
“I want to learn how to play the guitar because I want to learn how to play this song.” Once you achieve that, you’re like, “What’s another song I want to learn?” “I’ve got the acoustic. Now, let me learn how to play an electric guitar or whatever.” The now what I think is a great question because it acknowledges that you have a sense of achievement but you still want more. You’re not like, “I’m done.”
You gave the example of, “I want to buy motorcycle,” but they’re still a goal there. Now, I need to learn how to ride the motorcycle. Where am I going to ride my motorcycle? I want to take a tour. That consistent goal setting becomes a habit. “I know how to do this.” “Even though I don’t know how to do this new goal, I have experienced that lets me know how to do this.” All of that is excellent. I love the work that you’re doing, Shane. It’s great.
Thank you.
Connect With Shane
How can people get a hold of you?
I’d say the easiest thing to do is go to my website, it’s Disruption-Factor.com. You can see all my social media handles. My book is on there. My own show that I have is like fifteen minutes a week. Only mindset stuff and social media. It’s @RealShanePerry on Instagram. Go to my website and get a hold of me. Reach out. I have all kinds of exercises. Free exercises for people on how to set goals and how to get out of their own way. I’d love to talk to you.
Shane, I want to thank you so much for joining us. It’s an epic conversation. I want to remind everyone else that if you’re ready to start your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. I also want to let people know that I am developing a TV show of the same name coming up. If you’re interested in being a guest, reach out at EpicBegins.com because I love to have you on so we can talk about your epic journey. As always, remember epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
- Shane Perry – Facebook
- Disruption Factor
- Shaye Lynn Foundation
- The Compassionate Friends
- Team In Training
- Risk Youth
- All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
- @RealShanePerry – Instagram
- EpicBegins.com
About Shane Perry
Shane Perry is a successful entrepreneur who, after the tragic passing of his 19-year-old daughter, embarked on a mission to share his expertise beyond his own business. As an achievement coach, he is renowned for his deep understanding of human behavior and his ability to empower individuals to get out of their own way and finally achieve their goals. His system takes people from being stuck in their comfort zone to being able to not only recognize it but leave it behind and create a new zone where they’re doing what’s needed to build their ideal life. Shane’s passion lies in helping people break free from living a life of mediocrity and become high-performance individuals.