Jonathan Cohen is a highly regarded speaker, attorney, endurance athlete, and the host of Inside the Inspired. With a commitment to continuous learning, his career accomplishments and multifaceted skill set encompass law, aviation, business, and health and fitness–all embodying a spirit of constant growth for peak performance. His philanthropy, courses, and podcast featuring interviews with world-class professionals are designed to help you lead an inspired life.
Before launching his business, Jonathan spent five years in public service as a combat soldier in the Israel Defense Forces and as a prosecutor for the Special Victims Unit in Bronx County. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, a high school tour of concentration camps in Poland inspired him to enlist in the Israeli army for 20 months. He then graduated from Muhlenberg College and earned his JD and MBA from Touro Law Center and Graduate School of Business in 2018 before landing a job in the Bronx County District Attorney's Office. While there, he prosecuted hundreds of domestic violence cases in a high-stakes environment.
Jonathan is a father to two beautiful girls and a husband to the love of his life. He also serves as Associate General Counsel for PNY Technologies.
The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss
Mental Fitness and Peak Performance Under Pressure with Jonathan Cohen
Insights from Jonathan Cohen on Mental Health and Fitness
As a dynamic speaker whose career spans several domains, Jonathan Cohen has always brought resilience and purpose to the table. His podcast features conversations with high performers across multiple industries who provide their insights and strategies to help people overcome obstacles, shift their mindset, and live with intention. With over 100 interviews of individuals ranging from fighter pilots and Navy SEALS to best-selling authors and nine-figure entrepreneurs, he's built an audience of over 30,000 across social media and provided different strategies, tools, tips, and tactics they can leverage to lead a higher quality of life.
In this episode of The Dealmakers' Edge, Jonathan discusses mental fitness as foundational for effective high-performance in deal-making, emphasizing resilience, reframing stress, and managing limiting beliefs. He presents practical frameworks to help individuals build self-awareness, overcome impostor syndrome, and maintain mental fitness under pressure. Jonathan also confronts mental health stigma in organizations, challenges leaders to foster supportive environments, and reveals how you can cultivate mental fitness from the moment you wake up.
6:06 – The persistent stigma around mental health in high-pressure professional settings
7:57 – How to break the silence and shift the culture and conversation around mental health
12:41 – Mental fitness as both a practice and a form of professional competency
18:01 – The role of leadership in supporting mental well-being for their employees
23:22 – The passenger seat exercise and its roots in inner child work
28:13 – How the evidence framework challenges imposter syndrome and encourages growth
35:16 – How naming your sacrifices helps you strategically manage suffering to achieve big goals
39:07 – The future self framework that provides insight and provokes reflection
Mentioned In Mental Fitness and Peak Performance Under Pressure with Jonathan Cohen
Inside the Inspired with Jonathan Z. Cohen | YouTube | LinkedIn
Connect with Jonathan Cohen on Instagram
Principles and other books by Ray Dalio
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Transcript
A.Y. Strauss: You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders.
Hello, everyone, welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. Today, I am really excited to have our guest, Jon Cohen, who is a dynamic leader whose career spans law, business strategy, podcasting, public speaking, from his time as a combat soldier in the IDF to being a Bronx prosecutor to his current role as Associate General Counsel.
Jon has brought resilience and purpose to really every chapter of his career. His podcast is called Inside the Inspired, which now has over 150 episodes featuring conversations with high performers across industries. The show is filled with insights and strategies to help people overcome obstacles, shift mindset, and live with intention. Be sure to check that out.
We were lucky to have Jon present at our law firm, a CLE focused on mental health and mental fitness. I was blown away by it, and we were excited to continue that conversation today.
I know we're primarily talking about deal-making, but deal-making without your mental fitness in check will never be at optimal speed. So this is really critical. It's more of an edge episode versus deal-making per se, but it all does tie together.
Here, besides talking about resilience and reframing, stress-managing, identifying and challenging limiting beliefs, cultivating the growth mindset, we actually talk about very, very practical frameworks, real tools to help build resilience and help grow in that way. I think people talk generically, but Jon really gets into specific, actionable means to help make that happen. So without further ado, we're going to get right to the episode. I hope everyone enjoys.
We are really pumped to spend some time with you today. I got to tell you, for those who don't know, Jon was recently a visitor to our firm and did a world-class job on a CLE presentation he gave to the attorneys at the firm. And he's going to reframe a lot of that for the business community. But what you've done in your career, what you've accomplished, and all the incredible insights you've developed on some of my most favorite topics—mental health, resilience, impostor syndrome, managing the voices in your head to be successful—I was blown away by it. And I think our listeners are really going to be pumped to hear about it.
It's not a traditional episode, so I have to caution people a little bit. It's not talking about deals per se, although you have been involved in a lot of deals as well. So we're going to get into a lot.
Maybe we can just sort of have you kick us off with a couple minutes' background, which we could spend a lot more time on, but we're going to fast-track that to get almost to the meat on the bone. You've been in the IDF as a soldier. You've been a prosecutor. You're Associate General Counsel. You've done a lot of intense things. Maybe you can give people a couple-minute framework of your background, and then we can get right into it.
Jonathan Cohen: 100%. Aaron, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. It was a pleasure being at the firm as well. You guys hosted so graciously, and I love working with you guys. So, this is really a treat and a privilege to talk about these things with you as well.
So, a little bit about me. Father to two beautiful baby girls, husband to the love of my life. I spent five years of my life in public service in two different countries as a soldier and as a prosecutor, as you pointed out, infantry combat in Israel, SVU in Bronx County.
Over time, I've accumulated this experience of interviewing 100+ high performers on these topics of emotional control, thought control, self-regulation. And those individuals range from F-16 fighter pilots to Navy SEALs, global bestselling authors, creators with millions of followers, and seven-, eight-, nine-figure entrepreneurs, thought leaders, business leaders, and more, all with this through-line of: "How do you overcome the hardest thing that you've ever been through?"
My background as a podcaster has led me to build an audience of over 30,000 across social media, which has been really humbling. And it continues to grow for, I guess, my effort and whatever reason people find value in the ideas that these people share, that I share, and talking about different frameworks, strategies, tips, tools, and tactics that people can leverage to help lead a higher quality of life.
By no means is this clinical. It is more anecdotal in a lot of ways, but also what I would argue is psychological in the sense that I largely focus on these ideas of what's within our control. So stress management instead of stress elimination is a big theme of what I've centered my career around.
I speak to hundreds and hundreds of attorneys on an annual basis in formats of like with you, in boardrooms, for government entities, for big corporations, not just in CLE formats but otherwise, talking about these ideas.
So, how can people reframe the situations that they're dealing with in their life to overcome burnout, to overcome anxiety, to manage these things more effectively?
Along the way, I've also done some intense endurance challenges that we could touch on if they come up. But I've raised tens of thousands of dollars for multiple organizations, putting my mind, body, sweat, blood—whatever it takes—to help raise awareness for causes that mean something to me.
So at a high level, that's what I'm about. I'm a speaker, a podcaster, a lawyer, and here with you today.
A.Y. Strauss: That's awesome. I want to just hit off that, again, our listeners know it's The Dealmakers' Edge. Sometimes it's pure deal-makers. Sometimes we always slip the edge in. This is going to be more of an adrenaline focus—just edge—which I think really ties into deal-making as well.
You come from a family of deal-makers, as you mentioned too. You're in a deal-making family. You've been involved in a lot of big deals as well.
But maybe we just hit on one question to start. This conversation around mental health in professional settings, there's still a stigma. What's the cost of staying silent? How can we start to shift the culture and conversation so that you can still be very accomplished and also balanced, and be vocal and make yourself vulnerable to talk about managing those collective voices in your head?
I mean, how do we shift that conversation to embracing it versus kind of brushing it under the rug? It's more and more prevalent each year, I find.
Jonathan Cohen: It's a great question to start off. At a high level, it all comes down to awareness, recognizing that, to your point, there's a stigma around these conversations.
Just to give some context and color around it, the stigma is that 82% of firms say that they take mental health seriously, but only 16% of institutions actually do anything about it, from a policy perspective, from a training perspective, or otherwise.
So we start by becoming aware that there's an actual stigma associated with people. For example, when I give these seminars or CLEs in rooms of 50, 100+ people, and I ask how many people have struggled with impostor syndrome or how many people deal with a form of anxiety, you can imagine less than a third of the room raises their hand, which isn't necessarily reflective of the data that shows that 58% of attorneys between the ages of 24 to 44 struggle with some form of burnout, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, all of that is rooted in survey analysis from the International Bar Association, Krill Strategies, the New Jersey State Bar Association.
So over time, this information has created awareness around the gravity of the issue. So we start to shift the conversation by, A, creating—it's called psychological safety at a high level—making people feel safe. Which is, you know, calming their nervous system so they're not in fight or flight, just so they could feel comfortable to share some of the things that are maybe going on with them personally.
Now, it's a nuanced thing, right? You don't want to have people overshare to the point that they think it's a social setting. But who we work with, we spend most of the time with. So it's important to remember that we're all human.
So I personally think that, in ways that I have experienced, creating this aura and this environment of psychological safety is creating space for it. That can be something as simple as, when you're in a room, have people sharing their wins, losses, and intentions that they have for the week, for the quarter, for the year, and then being held accountable to the things that they say that they want to do.
So the first thing, and that can be professionally and personally. I think that's one way, just so people feel that they are seen, that they are heard. That is a way to make someone feel "psychologically safe."
Now, it's kind of a buzzword, and I'm not the biggest fan of it because, for better or worse, I came up in cultures of grind and hustle—whether through the Bronx or through the IDF. So for me to hear "psychological safety," it feels a little bit too, for lack of a better way of putting it, soft.
So it's really about making people, my perspective is more about getting people to feel comfortable sitting in tension and recognizing that it's less about eliminating all of the problems and learning that problems are inevitable. How you handle yourself in those moments of tension, of discomfort, is normal.
So another reframe to consider is not seeing stress as the enemy. Think about stress as resistance. Reframing these words, considering different perspectives.
So, for example, I just sat down—ironically released the episode this week—with Dr. Jonathan Leary, founder of a company called Remedy Place that has four locations: two in New York, one in Boston, and one in LA. It's a social wellness club centered around the idea of community wellness. The idea is to create space for human connection.
One of the things that we talked about is that as someone who's building a nine-figure-plus company, whenever he's dealing with a situation, he tries to reframe it as someone's like, "Oh, you must be dealing with a lot of stress right now." He's like, "Well, I'm facing a lot of resistance, but I'll overcome this resistance." So he doesn't necessarily see it as stress; he sees it as resistance.
So basic ways to get to the crux of the question would be learning how to reframe basic words in your life that you perceive as negative—such as stress—as a form of resistance. And also learning that problems are inevitable. How you respond to them is a choice. Kind of accepting that reality. Then lastly, getting comfortable sitting in tension. That's an okay thing.
A.Y. Strauss: That's awesome.
Jonathan Cohen: Not every day is going to be perfect, and you shouldn't want it to be. So those are the words.
A.Y. Strauss: No, 100%. You said it best when we sat in person and you had a great quote, that's an original John Cohen quote. So I'll read it here:
"The best sides of who you are exist on the other side of the hardest things you've ever done."
And I've been sitting with that quote since we met in person a few weeks ago. It's just buzzing through my brain. And it's powerful. It kind of draws you to the pain.
And I'll say one more quick thing. I once heard Tim Grover, who's the famous basketball guru—the big trainer—he was Michael Jordan's personal trainer. Hearing him speak is electric. I mean, this guy's on fire.
He said, "Stress is good." He's like, "Stress is just pressure not being dealt with." In other words, the way to reduce the stress is do the things you need to do, and it will go away. It will dissipate. But it's not going to make it easy, per se.
Then, of course, after that whole speech, he made a whole debate about whether any one of us could have been Michael Jordan's trainer and had him be successful because he was Michael Jordan, that's beside the fact.
The fact is, it's a reframing, stress and pressure as other sides of the point, to the point you're making. I want to ask you another thing as well, and we can go a long time. I'm trying to be specific and focused in the conversation because I want to get to the tools as well.
This idea of mental fitness as a form of professional competency, obviously, you're an attorney, you talk to a lot of attorneys. The people on this podcast, I would say most of them are not in the legal profession, but I'm sure some of them listening will be. It's a dealmaker's podcast.
People are doing deals. They're under the gun. They're under a lot of pressure to close on transactions, finance, deal with workouts, close deals as brokers and whatnot.
Can we talk about the mental fitness as a form of professional competency? In other words, if you're off your game mentally, you're not really going to be able to transact.
So we talked about it in the context of lawyers, I wanted to talk about that in the context of the business community. Perhaps somebody listening to this is really focused on their goal, but they're becoming a little unhinged. So how do you kind of push the issue as a means to say, you need to be mentally fit as a tool in which you'll be able to leverage for further success, as opposed to being a burden on people to focus on?
Jonathan Cohen: Wow, what a powerful question. I'm going to tell you why.
A lot of what we do in life is reactive. We don't become intentional about the things that we want to do. As we know, intent—defined in the law—is about a conscious objective. And so what that means is, for lay people, for the dealmakers, for the businesspeople, you know what you want.
And part of knowing what you want is about being in the moment. It's about being present.
Mental fitness is this idea of, at a high level, self-regulation, this ability to manage your thoughts, feelings, and emotions in a way that you're not letting them govern you, but you being able to govern them.
Your first thought, "Okay, that's going to come." But your second thought, how you respond to that initial thought is on you. We let ourselves spiral out when we're under the gun and under pressure and we don't have the awareness or the intention to slow down, to breathe, to consider that "I don't have to accept this first thought as truth. I can question it. And I can step into another truth. I can focus on the task at hand."
So anytime I've undergone any big challenge or any deal or any case or anything where I start thinking about, "Oh, what's my adversary going to think?" or "What's the client going to think?" or "What's the person on the other side of the boardroom or the table going to think?" or "What if something goes haywire?" or "What if this isn't in my control?"
Well, a big part of it is bringing it back to the things that are within your control, which can be your effort, your attitude, your perspective. All of these things are choices that you can control.
So even though it's kind of Personal/Professional Development 101, the practice of these things is where most people fall short. Everyone likes to show that they know what to do, but how many people actually do it?
So I try to talk about resilience or happiness or any of these ideas at a high level, not as a destination. It is instead a practice. Mental fitness is a practice.
Just as you exercise your body, you have to exercise your mind. Part of exercising your mind is having the discipline to not pick up your phone for the first 15, 30 minutes of the day, so you can step into the world instead of reacting to what the world is asking of you.
You can warm up into the day. That's one easy way to cultivate mental fitness from the second you wake up. You start thinking about where you see your day going.
You start saying, "Okay, I'm going to be on time for work. I'm going to make sure that I deliver value on this deal. I'm going to set the intention to be the type of professional and person that my family needs, that my job needs, that I need."
Those are subtle ways to serve yourself first without even stepping foot into a gym or doing anything physical. You're visualizing your day. You're setting the intention—that conscious objective—for your day.
And instead of letting life happen to you, you start happening to life. So at a high level, mental fitness is that ability to have emotional control, thought control, self-regulate, so you can actually be intentional about the things that you want to do. So at a high level, that's how I define it.
A.Y. Strauss: I like that answer a lot. Honestly, I'm liking all your answers. I could talk to you all day. We're trying to keep within a certain framework of time, but I just love hanging out with you.
That reminds me of a famous quote—I think it was Jim Rohn, perhaps—who said, "Either you run your day, or your day runs you." So either you run your mind, or your mind's going to run you. Set that intention from the framework we talked about, the breathwork, the guided meditation, and all that other good stuff.
Before we get to some tools, which I thought were really, really cool and which I want people to hear about, maybe we'll hit just a little bit on—from a leadership perspective—if you're listening to this and you're a leader of an organization, like I said, includes me, I've got to pay attention to this answer, what responsibility do firms have today—whether they're brokerage houses, investment houses, private equity firms, law firms, it doesn't matter—if you're in a position of management, what responsibility do you have in that role for supporting the well-being of your team?
If, in fact, you are in that role and you're trying to guide people who are feeling stuck, or anxious, or burnt out, impostor syndrome, almost like, what's the first step to break through if you're going through that? It's kind of a dual question, but I want to throw them both up to you.
Jonathan Cohen: Going back to that idea of creating space to make people feel seen and heard is probably step number one.
Number two would be training and education, making sure that... I approach this from the perspective of, I believe in empowering the individual and, in turn, the collective. Because most people, when they hear what I'm about or what I talk about, they're like, "Great."
I was talking to a high-level executive at a billion-dollar company last week, and she was like, "Great. Love what you're about. Everything sounds amazing, but now what?"
I was like, "Well, now I do the work." The idea is that you can know these things, but you have to do these things. And so you have to shift the culture.
We're living in an age where things are rapidly changing, and the expectations rise with that change. So if we have all of these tools—AI-based or technology-based—that help us improve our productivity and the expectations rise with that, instead of—I mean, look, the soft answer is going to be, be empathetic to the idea that just because your expectations are rising because of ChatGPT and Google and all these things, your to-do list won't necessarily get done, at a high level, you want to make sure that you have the right people who can handle certain levels of pressure and attention in their life and know how to prioritize and execute on things.
I was at a panel last week in Vancouver, and I was just listening for the first 30 minutes as people talked about the problems with employers not recognizing burnout in their employees. So, as a result, because these expectations are rising, literally for 30 minutes, I'm just listening to people complain and no solutions being offered. And it comes down to this idea that people love to blame circumstances.
I just don't abide by that ideology. I abide by the ideology of: power follows blame. So you have to point the finger at yourself. And when you accept that things are your fault and on you, you start to take control.
So when it comes from the firm perspective, the culture aspect is extremely important. What type of culture do you have?
Is it a place where people can—if you look at Ray Dalio's firm, he's the author of a book called Principles, and the firm is Bridgewater—it's a hedge fund, I believe. They have these ideas of radical transparency.
Are you creating a culture where people are free to speak and able to communicate their actual thoughts and opinions, and welcome the feedback in a challenging way, not a disrespectful way?
Having that type of place where people feel that they are having the iron of their mind sharpened, as opposed to just being told what to do... People want to have meaningful work in their life. They want to have a sense of purpose. So drawing the work back to the meaning helps also orient things.
For example, I had a law firm leader speak to me a couple weeks ago and he asked me a question about how he could reach a younger associate of his, without coming at the associate from a perspective of, "You know, back in my day..."
My answer was to make sure that he was aware—or helping the associate become aware—of the meaning in the work. "Who is the person or the entity that they are helping, and why is that creating a positive ripple in the world, if at all?"
When people have that purpose-driven perspective, they're guided and there's a desire to want to help, to be of service.
So from that perspective, it comes down to: how are you going to create an environment where you're helping people become better, radically transparent, work on things that matter? All of those things, at a high level, are how we can start to shift the conversation.
A.Y. Strauss: Awesome. Again, I don't want to move too rapidly along because these are really deep topics that require a lot of time. Maybe we'll do a part two, we'll see.
But I want to get into some of the frameworks and exercises, which we did touch upon when you came to visit us and did an awesome presentation.
One of the ones I really liked was the passenger seat exercise, which we'll hopefully talk about more. This kind of guided visualization of sitting beside your younger self that encourages, obviously, self-reflection and compassion and motivation.
You know, "What would you say to your younger self? Would they be proud of you today?" Looking into the future, looking into the past.
Maybe you can describe that exercise. It's a great framework. I personally loved it. I took from it. Maybe you can describe for the audience what that's about? We can talk about some other frameworks that can help guide people through these challenges.
Jonathan Cohen: 100%. So that idea is rooted in a concept called inner child work.
The idea is that we're all children at heart—whether you're an adult or a child—and we're all trying to heal whatever "trauma" we dealt with as we were in our youth.
So trauma, for the purposes of this exercise, or in general, how I like to define it and how I've come to define it based on an incredible book, The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, is about a lack of presence. Meaning, it's a constant focus on what was or what could be, and therefore not focused on what is.
So this idea of inner child work is about healing a younger version of yourself so you can become more in touch with who you are and become aware of why you make decisions.
At its core, it's a self-awareness exercise to help cultivate values, to help cultivate self-awareness, and just become aware of why you do the things you do, and what actions stem from the decisions that you make.
It comes down to being very intentional. The more you get to know yourself, that helps you hold yourself out in the world and be more comfortable in your own skin, no matter how far along in life you are.
So I came up with this idea when I was commuting from New York to New Jersey, when I started at PMY for about a year and a half, two years. And I got tired of listening to podcasts. I'm not a big fan of audiobooks, and I didn't necessarily want to listen to music.
Sitting in silence is therapeutic, but I run without headphones, and I run for a long time, as you know. So it kind of gets to this point of, "I want to feed my mind something... but what?" I can't meditate or text or whatever when I'm driving.
So I came up with this idea of the passenger seat exercise, where I pretend that a younger version of me, that I felt needed to hear some of the guidance that a more informed version of me could potentially offer that younger version of me.
For whatever reason, I always go back to the 15-year-old Jonathan or the 17-year-old Jonathan. And I ask him questions. "Why did you make that decision?" "Why did you feel like you needed people to like you so much?" "Why do you feel XYZ about yourself?" and "Are you proud of you today?" "Do you think you'd be proud of me today?" "What do you think you'd grow up to be?"
So I just try to have this conversation with the younger version of me, trying to get better at asking those questions over time so I could elicit answers about me—to truly understand me—where my motivations were at a younger age.
So 15 and 17 for me were definitely inflection points. And here and there, I'll talk to the 2.0 version of me or the 3.0 version of me—whatever that looks like—to also understand, because me now could really help them. I wish that I had had some of that guidance. I had different types of guidance, but how I go about my inner work now—which I believe is an infinite game, something that people should always do, I never believed that we arrive at any particular destination, I believe in this infinite perspective, it helps me kind of rationalize the day to day, if you will—that is what the passenger seat framework is largely rooted in, inner child work and the ability to get to know yourself.
A.Y. Strauss: I love that too. Also, you've done it for the future self. Putting yourself in today's shoes, trying to talk to an older version of yourself as well, kind of playing different the Ghost of Christmas past, present, future type of thing. It reminds me of a famous quote. I think Carl Jung said something along the lines of, and I'll probably botch it but, "People follow the trend of their subconscious throughout the course of their lives and they call it fate."
We're kind of at the state of programming when we're younger. We follow those courses, but we very rarely actually deeply examine what they are. I think it's very important to look back and reflect and obviously to position yourself.
That leads us to another framework, which is, you know, for people who suffer, "Well, can I pull this big deal off? Can I achieve that? Am I overreaching? Am I crazy to try to accomplish this big, hairy, audacious goal?" as they say.
You also have a cool framework—the evidence framework—which is, and I'm not going to say it as well as you do, but collecting all the evidence why you should be able to achieve this big goal. You have not done it yet, so that's the voice in your head you're struggling with, and kind of reframing that impostor syndrome by asking, "Is it unreasonable to believe I'm unqualified based on the evidence I have gathered?"
It's kind of taking a very cold, calculated, diagnostic view—almost like a medical view, if you will—to challenge with evidence those voices in your head which try to undercut and undermine what you really think you could achieve. I love that. Maybe you could touch on that as well?
Jonathan Cohen: The evidence frame is this idea that, as you said, you're gathering all of the—David Goggins calls it the cookie jar—these ideas or these experiences that you've had in your life that help you reach it.
In Goggins' perspective, you have this jar and every single time you're struggling, you go in and you reach for a cookie. You take it out and you're like, "Oh, this is the time that I passed the bar," or "This is the time that I closed the $5 million deal," or "This is the time that I closed my first deal when I didn't think I could do it."
So you start to label all of these cookies. Sometimes, if you're in the athletic space, it could be that time that you worked out when you didn't want to and you were in a really bad mood, but after you did, good things started to happen.
It could be, for me, it was standing up in court and feeling insecure about how well-educated my adversary was on the other side of the aisle. And me having to pick up a case that I knew absolutely nothing about—because it was just handed to me—and stand up for the people of Bronx County and be able to make sure that the right thing, whatever that looked like for that particular case, happened, or whatever I believed it to be happened.
So what gave me the credibility or qualification? Was it that I passed the bar? Was it that I had stood up and done my mock trial? Was it that I got the job without any connections?
So I started to list everything about me that qualified me for that moment I was insecure about. And so it showed me one of two things, either how qualified I was and therefore a waste of time for me to focus on feeling these unnecessary feelings of anxiousness or frustration or insecurity, or it showed me where I had more work to do.
So even if I hadn't stood up in front of 50 or 100 or 200 or 900 people before, well, I've been speaking in public for years. I did it at piano recitals. I did it in college. I did it in law school. I did it in front of my parents.
Whatever I could reach for or stretch for to show that I have the reps of being someone who stands up and articulates a message that makes people feel good, that inspires, that educates, that motivates, that adds value in some way, I started listing all of those moments.
If I didn't have enough of them, I went and I started identifying partners and people that I have helped or could help that I would be able to add value in those situations based on, proportionally or disproportionately, wherever I had had or hadn't before.
So if you're looking to close a deal and you're dealing with these situations where it's an exorbitant amount of money or the clients have these crazy high expectations, realize that impostor syndrome, perfectionism, procrastination, all of these things are different forms of self-sabotage.
So you're hurting yourself by not focusing on the task at hand and being present. Going back to trauma, going back to the intention, you have to have that presence of mind to bring yourself to the moment. And whether or not you deserve it, it is your responsibility at this point.
So it is on you. You have a duty to see this through. And so you have to be as objective as you can—whether you're qualified or not—that you have to accept this is your responsibility and obligation. That you have more work to do, but nonetheless, here's where you are in this particular moment.
I sat down with nine-figure entrepreneur Matt Higgins. He was a guest shark on Shark Tank, an early investor in Resy. He worked for the Miami Dolphins and the Jets. He worked in government, like, fantastic dude.
We talked about impostor syndrome and he gave this awesome perspective of, "There is no final arbiter on belonging." Stop waiting outside of this room with a closed door like someone's going to open it up and welcome you in to say, "Oh, well, you're no longer an impostor. Here you are. You've arrived at this moment."
No matter how many miles I have run, it always sucks to wake up and run. No matter how many reps I've done, it always sucks to get up and train—even if I love it—because every day kind of starts from zero.
But you have to recognize all of these different moments in your life that you've cultivated the courage to go and do the thing. And that's what it comes down to, being able to look at that cookie jar, look at that list, create that evidence to help you overcome the impostor syndrome that you may be struggling with, and just accept you're the person that's going to save yourself.
A.Y. Strauss: Jon, this is gold. I love this stuff. It really speaks to me.
Jonathan Cohen: I appreciate it.
A.Y. Strauss: I mean just that quote alone, "There is no final arbiter on belonging." Just to let that sit with you and resonate for a second.
I think successful people say, "When I do this, I'll be successful. When I've gotten there, when this, this will happen." It's an everyday thing.
And I think you had this concept—we talked about it before—people who complain, and there's always an excuse. "Well, this is the problem. This is the problem."
Kind of the victim mentality versus a proactive ownership of where you are at your station in life, of where you want to get to. Unless you are driving the car, you're going to be a passenger.
I think you had a great quote that, you know, it's suffering strategically managed, right? I mean, life is not meant to be just pure roses and joy, and the workouts suck. The work sometimes sucks. Life could be very difficult. It doesn't mean that it's bad.
But essentially, what we're talking about here, you have to become the type of person who can withstand and endure and build resilience to accomplish those things, not hope that it all just works out on a passive basis. I think that's the core of your philosophy, if I'm not speaking for you.
We talk about as well, kind of name your sacrifices. And you have to give up something to get what you want. Increasing the clarity in the commitment by confronting those trade-offs on a very honest basis. So maybe you could touch on that framework and then also real quick on the future you, you know, visualize. You talked about talking to the 10-year younger self, but making sacrifice, visualizing the future, and managing in a way that's kind of holistically bringing it together.
Jonathan Cohen: Beautiful question. So the idea of suffering strategically managed comes from this Stoic scholar-athlete, Ross Edgley, who swam around Great Britain. Ironically, he's swimming around Iceland right now, but he swam around Great Britain in a little less than six months and he never set foot on land.
He wrote this book called The Art of Resilience, where he defined resilience as suffering strategically managed, not trying to attack everything all at once. If I've done any challenge or tried to get into a job at the DA or close any deal, it came down to, instead of looking at, "Okay, it's not about the billion-dollar deal," it's about the task that's in front of me at this particular moment.
If I'm 40 miles into a 58-mile ultra, it's not about getting to mile 45, it's about getting to mile 40.1. That's one foot in front of the other kind of mentality. Some days you win, some days you don't, but it becomes a decision about how present you're going to be in this particular moment. Get comfortable sitting in tension.
These ideas of naming your sacrifices are a way to build discipline, and then I'll touch on the future version. Naming sacrifices is a strategy to build discipline and control in your life, in the sense that you have to understand what you're going to have to give up in order to get the thing that you want.
When you do that, you're going to get clarity on how badly you want the thing. Now naturally, whenever you're training for anything or you're doing any kind of deal—if you want to climb the corporate ladder or whatever it is—there's going to be certain things that you have to give up.
Can you identify what those things are? Is it time with the family? Is it your health? Is it something that you may not necessarily want to compromise? Or if it is going to be a sacrifice, how do you make sure it's not a sacrifice?
Most people sacrifice their health for wealth, right? But why do we do that? Why can't we build our lives around our health and then watch wealth 10x from there? It might be a longer game, but if you understand that health is something that you're going to have to sacrifice to get the thing that you want, well, maybe you don't care as much about your health as you think you do. Or you're chasing the wrong things if it's extrinsic and wealth-driven.
Now, I'm not saying it's bad to want money. We all want to make the deal. But at the end of the day, when it comes to working on a big deal and being able to manage the expectations of yourself and of the people in your life, it's about understanding what you're going to have to give up in order to get the thing.
If I'm going to work from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM, I'm going to miss time with my kids. So how do I make sure I don't? Well, when they cry in the middle of the night, I'm going to be the one to get them. That's how I go about managing the things in my life that I don't want to give up time with my kids.
But if I have to do it so I could be with them in the future, then little things like making sure I'm the person that wakes up with them, because that's going to be the only time I get, it's not a sacrifice that I'm willing to make. I'm not willing to sacrifice time with my kids. So I have to create space for me to go and get that time back. That's one way that I've done it.
When it comes to managing the future version of who I am, well, the whole idea behind that question is rooted in Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich. He talks about a personal board of advisors. He tells you to pick like five people that you would ask advice from to give insight on how to handle a particular situation.
One of those people can be—or the only person if you want—can be the 10-year future version of you. Now, the caveat here is that most of the time, we think that when we seek guidance, we look for answers. But there's this notion of asking better questions.
So I pose this question of, "What would the 10-year version of you, 10 years from now, offer you as advice in order to get to where they are?" I pose this question to all the guests on my podcast, about 98% of them.
And so high-performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais—who works with high performers like Olympians, Super Bowl champions, Fortune 500 CEOs, and the like—when I asked him the question, he said, "Well, my future self wouldn't offer me advice. He'd ask me a question." And the question is, "Are you making a difference?"
The idea is that maybe the advice that we seek is in wisdom. It's asking better questions. So how do we go about, in this day and age, it could be ChatGPT or some other AI tool, to help you cultivate the skill of asking better questions?
But instead of seeking answers, seek better questions. So this way, the right answers can come to you. Maybe that future version of you is the person to offer that. So those are the naming sacrifices framework and the 10-year future you framework.
A.Y. Strauss: Jon, I almost feel guilty that we had to cram so much into just, you know, 30-odd plus minutes. I do try to keep these at length, but I could really talk to you all day and I want to continue.
Jonathan Cohen: Same.
A.Y. Strauss: But I think we'll wrap here. People can obviously check your podcast out, which I'll make sure to share when we do share this content. I think people are going to want to follow you along to see what you're up to.
I know you've had over 150 episodes of world-famous performance experts. I'm really thrilled you were on. I'm thrilled you presented. I hope your message continues to resonate and be carried and be shared with as many people as possible.
I hope you continue to do the awesome work you're doing. I guess we'll wrap here, but this has been an amazing conversation that I personally took away from, and I'm sure our listener as well.
Jonathan Cohen: Thank you so much, Aaron. It's awesome talking and hanging out with you. If you haven't already, rate, review, and subscribe to The Dealmakers' Edge, because I love what you guys are doing over there at A.Y. Strauss and it's a pleasure every single time I connect.
A.Y. Strauss: Likewise, Jon. I really, really appreciate it. And with that, we'll wrap. And thanks for all the work you're doing on behalf of everyone who's learning and growing alongside you.
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