E62: The Hidden Power of Identity: How Changing Your Self-Perception Transforms Your Life with Ken Cox

Most entrepreneurs kill their growth prospects by ignoring one crucial element: their identity. 

Ken Cox, a seasoned entrepreneur and author of Loading Identity, reveals the mind-transforming power of mastering your "super why" to unlock peak performance and resilience. In this episode, Ken shares how his journey through the Flow Research Collective helped him rewire his identity, conquer addiction, and elevate his coaching and business to new heights.

Connect with Ken:

https://loadingidentity.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

The best gladiator is the one that fights with no armor. Ken studied with Steven Kotler and became obsessed with one thing: how to access flow and perform at your highest level. But here's what really stands out. How do you handle failure when people are either cheering you or booing you? Because even when you lose, you still have to carry yourself like you didn't. This one hits identity. I've been called a failure, told I'd never graduate college. And when your identity gets ripped away, it can feel like death. But if you're choosing to evolve, you don't wait. You take control of who you are becoming. It sounds simple, it's not. Let's roll right in. All right, welcome to the Work Sucks But I Like It podcast. Today we have Ken Cox. He's a seasoned entrepreneur, the president of River City Internet Group, and the visionary behind multiple ventures, including Austerian and Vendor Review. He owns a boxing gym and is the host of Clicks in Bricks Podcast and uses stand-up comedy to build better teams. Ken, welcome to the show. How are you doing today, Tony? Awesome, awesome. So Ken, define work for us today. Work.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Oh boy. Define work for us today. So I I look at um I look at work a bunch of different ways. And I don't really consider myself working very often, but um I consider myself practicing more or training for work more than I actually work. So um my my Monday through Friday, nine to five is my job, right? But I love doing it. I'm in the data center all day. Um, it's a ton of fun. I play with computers and stuff like that. So I would call that work. Outside of that, if we're gonna talk about boxing and comedy, we do a lot of training and we don't work that often, right? So um for example, I'm I did comedy Tuesday night. That was training, that wasn't work, and I'm and I have a job that's paying me Friday night uh to go do comedy, right? So um, you know, work is a trade, a deal that you make with yourself or somebody else that you'll do a task and trade for some money.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Love it, love it. And you kind of explained already, and I want to really dive into this. So, Ken, before the show is um kind of reviewing your profile here, and I love the fact that you went through Stephen Cotler's flow program, right? So you're familiar with the Flow Research Collective. I love Stephen Cotler, I love me hi chick sent me high. Walk us through, because I talk a lot about flow on the podcast. Why did you want to join that group and learn more about flow?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Okay. Um, so when I went through that program, great program, by the way, lots of neuroscience and a lot of other things. I was just discovering the power of identity as a whole. And I had discovered identity with my boxing team. And this is where I just really started playing with um, you know, flow state and subconscious programming and programming with language and neurolangual programming and these kinds of tactics, right? Um, I had run teams before, but never was I presented with a goal of an eighth grader that's being picked on to become a boxer that's gonna step into a ring and compete at a high level, right? And knowing that he's gonna have to walk down an aisle with half the crowd booing him and half the crowd cheering him. And if he they lose, they're gonna have to stand up, put their head high, and walk out of that ring without feeling bad about this and feeling proud about themselves, right? So, how do you do that with it with an eighth grader? And so I went to the flow collective uh to learn flow coaching. And I had already, I'd already done some identity work with some neurolinguistic programming and stuff. And I had some concepts. Now I have some very, very firm beliefs, right? Uh loading identity.com is my new, my new book that's coming out that talks a lot about all these things. Through that whole process, I also was struggling with alcoholism and took a lot of the stuff that I learned through the flow coaching, working with my students, working with the identity work, the neurolinguistic programming, all of these, coupling them together, and then really changing the identity of these kids and myself with addiction, changed my life completely when I stopped identifying as an addict and started identifying as a sober man. Right. Though those kinds of things made massive changes in my life and you know, put me in a position to where not only am I training eight, eighth grade kids, I've got some of them competing at a national level now, right? So not just uh, you know, in my gym, they're competing at the highest level in the in the country. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

I love it, I love it. So why do we need identity today? Because I feel like, you know, we go online, we have our social media accounts, we identify with our profile pictures and our descriptions and our resumes and our CVs. Why is identity so important for what you do today?

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yeah, and you know, I've I've had a lot of identity issues and crises in my life. Losing an identity that you weren't prepared to lose feels like death. And that identity will fight to stay alive, right? I mean, these are really big issues. And I believe that we're sitting in a time in America, at least, and probably across the globe, where a lot of people identify with their job. They are a lawyer, they are a doctor, they are um a legal assistant, right? That's what they do for a living, but they that's a big part of their identity. And, you know, those legal assistants are getting ready to have their identity stripped from them. And it's one thing to make a conscious decision to say, hey, I'm going to make this change in my life, it's a whole nother thing where somebody else has that, those, those strings and they can pull them on you and you're not prepared for them. So that's why I believe loading identity and identity work is so important right now in our world. Because if you if you can embrace it and take control of your identity, you can do massive amounts of stuff and you can have a very prosperous life. But if you allowed society and naysayers to control who you are and you believe them, I think you're just in for a rough ride.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Now, and I love how you, you know, realized that identity well, to solve this sort of identity crisis, you realize that you wanted to go to study flow. How do you use flow states? Uh so for you listeners, we'll we're gonna recap here. So flow has three antecedents. We need clear goals, there's immediate feedback, there's challenge to skill ratio balanced. Ken, walk us through how you've used this flow sort of formula to kind of navigate identity.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah. So one of the things, and I've been a hacker my entire life, right? Um, and I've always been pretty good at changing from one mask to the next. And and I spent a lot of time studying this, and this is why I went into comedy last year, was to really put my feet on the ground and try to figure a lot of these things out to write the book. Um, there's there's a section in the in the book loading identity, there's three different sections. There's knowing my super why for that identity, there's the armor that that identity either needs to wear or not wear, that whole section. There's going to war with that identity in your hand, right? I'm going to go do this thing now, and that's the proof and the pudding. When you're going to war, full immersion is hands down the best way to learn. Fully immersing yourself, we've all been in cultures where we didn't speak the language or we accidentally adopted a dialect because we're fully immersed in that world. So I believe, and I've I think I've proven multiple times, that fully immersing yourself into an identity, um, creating the hierarchy of values or the core values for that identity, and fully immersing will get you there the fastest. And the only way I know how to do that is to get into the flow state.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Awesome. So could walk us through like a kind of a technique that you use to trigger flow, right? Kotler talks about these hacking methods to get into flow. Walk us through one of yours.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Yeah. So some things that I do, and I'm making a whole series of different uh fireside walks that I do. They're all in my head today. But it really depends on what I'm gonna be doing. If I'm gonna be going into um, and and I apologize, I get a little struggly with my left and my right sides. Um, but if I'm gonna be going to do comedy, I know that I need to be right-brained thinking, right? I know I need to be kind of spiritual and fun and giggly. I don't need to be very analytical, right? I can't be thinking a whole lot about me. So I come up with these fireside walks or what I call fireside walks. And if I need to be more right-brained, then I'm gonna walk in a circle with imagining a fire on my left side. I'm gonna walk in that circle, right? I might have my book or my notes under my left arm, pressuring that down so that it's activating my right brain. Um, and I'm gonna do these things that are actively activating my right brain before I go do comedy. And it's gonna get me out of my ego side. And I'm gonna use language like um, you know, beautiful and desirable and stuff like that. I'm not gonna use analytical like sharp and get it done. And I'm just gonna have talks with myself as I'm walking in that pattern, and it really puts me pretty far in that, you know, almost a dream state. Um, quite the opposite. If I'm gonna be, you know, doing a podcast, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna imagine a fire on my right side, I'm gonna be, you know, really trying to activate that who I who am I as my ego and who is Ken Cox, not who is this performer person that's gonna go up and entertain a lot of people. So those are hacks that I have. And I'm coming out with uh, you know, a bunch of one-minute MP3s for Spotify that people can just download and kind of get right-brained, left brain at different stuff.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

When you mention fireside walk, is this like a casual walk or is this like uh I'm walking on coals? I guess what's the visual that's gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

No, this is all just in your mind, right? So because you might be in a lobby at a you know Harris Casino getting ready to go to do a speech, right? You've got to prepare for that. So it's all in your mind. I just imagine, you know, if I if I need to activate my left side, I imagine a fire on my right side and I walk in circles. And if you ever see me before I get on a stage, you'll see me pacing a bunch, walking and talking to myself and those kinds of things. And that's just me preparing my mind for the activity that I'm getting ready to do.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Now I love that imagery. So the fire is kind of like bringing light to kind of warming you up almost in some sense. Yep. I love that. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

And for me, it was a way to say, how do I activate that side of my brain? And we know if we do the opposite side physically, it activates the other sides.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

So I loved your sort of like three levels here. You've got your super why, the armor, and I guess going to war. Walk us through this, the importance of, I guess, is identity wrapped up in that super why? Walk us through the super why concept.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Well, this for the and and I I'm not a very analytical guy. Um, so I couldn't tell you what all the super whys are right now. But the very first thing that in the super why is stripping the identity that's not going to work with the new identity, right? And there's a slight difference between stripping and and killing an identity. Um there's both of them. Uh, I don't recommend killing an identity unless you have a shaman involved or some other um help there.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Other rituals going on, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It it is wild stuff. I mean, this is who you identify as as a person, right? In a in a lot of cases. Um you know, you you talk about um, you know, I I deal with a lot of people from different backgrounds. So like bikers, right? They identify as a biker. That's part of who they are as a person. Um so getting them to change that, you know, the to set that identity to the side so that they can be a father or um a business person or something like that, or even a calm, level-headed man, right? Sometimes is is hard. So um stripping the identity is a big part of it. And then knowing why you're doing what you're doing, and it's gotta be a super why. It can't be I want to be rich. It's gotta be something that is you know super to you. Um and that's gonna be different for everybody. For me, it's so that my son never lives in an institution.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

So walk us through then this armor that that kind of builds up in this process of establishing our super why. Why is there armor around us? And how do we, I guess, climb the walls here or break through the armor? What's the imagery that we're looking for? Use the the fire to burn it down.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah, there's there's a lot of different philosophies, and and what I teach my fighters is um, you know, the best gladiator is the gladiator that fights with no armor and goes out there. And that's when you know that you've really mastered whatever craft that you're doing, right? But for me, example, I went into comedy, and before that, I know that I'm an aggressive guy. I know that I've been a boxer my whole life. I know that I can get frustrated easily. I had to put on the armor and learn how to take real-time criticism back without going into that physicality, right? I needed that armor to play that role for a period of time, right? And then understanding that armor and putting it on and taking it off when needed is an important part in part. For a big part of my life, I would wear my business armor home, right? And not acknowledge it. And, you know, the people that I love the most, I'm treating like business partners, not like, you know, family and understanding your armor, knowing when to put it on, when to take it off. What role are you currently playing is, you know, is really beneficial. Now, hopefully you're acknowledging all these things and and you can live a life without armor. You can just be your genuine self all the time. But we know that that's not you're gonna have, you know, you're gonna sit in front of pastors and judges and lawyers and and in-laws and these kinds of things that expect you to, you know, behave a specific way doesn't mean it's less you, but just means that you might not be able to be as as relaxed as you could be. And I I think that's a bit of armor.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

So the war that you talk about now, so now we've got sort of we're stripping away the armor. Sometimes maybe we need the armor, right? If you're going against the lawyers and stuff. Um, I guess walk us through why is it a war right now? Why is it this sense of like, walk us through that? Why is why do you why do you call it a war? What are we going to fight? What are we going to do?

SPEAKER_01 15:32

I don't think that you can walk into anything. Full immersion is a big part of it, right? That's how you're going to get there quickly. As, and I'm I'm wildly guilty of this, and I've never seen it more in front of me than I have this last year, right? Whenever I started this project to write this book, I gave myself three years, right? And I had two goals. I had never done stand-up comedy. And I said, Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give myself three years to write the book and produce a one-hour show. Well, within five months, I realized that, you know, I went to Orlando for PodFest and I got to do stand-up with Paul Veto on stage. I've been paid for comedy. I've produced now seven one-hour shows um in five months. About three months in, I realized that, oh, I did go to war. I did all the things that that persona would do, right? But I didn't go with the with the mindset of finishing it. I went with the, oh, I've got three years to do this, right? Um, had I gone at it with the I'm gonna do this as fast as possible, if I would have gone at it with a war mentality instead of a ladder mentality of I'm gonna climb every rung and make sure I'm stable before I go to the next rung, which is a strategy that is needed for a lot of things. But if you want to change your identity quickly, you're gonna miss some rungs. You're gonna do full immersion and it's going to war. Because if you don't look at it like I have to win this, you might be successful. Yeah. But if you go at it with everything you have and you look at it as a war and you know why you're doing it, and you have the proper armor, you will win.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

So, one of the things we talk about, Ken, on the show, is that success is not a matter of good luck, it's good skills. When we talk about going into this war setting with I love it, the intention to win. What is the skill that you recommend to people to go in with that mentality? How do you develop this skill?

SPEAKER_01 17:34

Lots of um acceptance and grace.

unknown 17:39

Right?

SPEAKER_01 17:41

You're going into a world that is unknown to you and in an identity change, right? I'm gonna go and I'm gonna change, I'm gonna do something wildly different than I've ever done before, and I'm gonna try to do it at a very, very high level. Um, you're gonna fail. You're gonna like um be very graceful with yourself on those things, like, oh yeah, man, this is, you know, my I'm three weeks in and I did this really stupid thing and I know not to do that again, right? So just a lot of grace for yourself, a lot of empathy, and an open mind that says, hey, I'm trying something new. It's okay that I screw up, it's expected, right? And and maybe I'm not taking the um traditional path, right? In comedy, I didn't take the traditional path. A lot of people don't like me because of that, and some people love me because of it, right? But um I didn't take the traditional path. So there's a lot of things that I don't know. But now I'm to a place where I'm like, okay, I can make money doing comedy right now. I can now step back a little bit and go back and polish up some of those rungs that that maybe I missed when I went to war with this thing, right? Um, just understanding that amount of grace.

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Those two words, acceptance and grace. And especially it's interesting coming from you as a boxer, right? Like you do go into the ring, I imagine, with this sort of acceptance that you've trained and this grace, right? There's a flow to it, and I love that description. So, Ken, walk us through because this culture is so hyped up on perfectionism and hustle culture, and I gotta everything's polished and whatnot. How do you navigate burnout? How do you navigate burnout?

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Burnout's tough. Hustle culture is something very, very real. Something that I think had had subsided for a very long time from when I was young in the dot-com startup phase, it was very brosy. Go, go, go. We sleep in the office. You know, the reward was how long have you ever worked without sleep? I'm 76 hours, right? Um, in the office. You know, these are like things that we would wear as medal honor. Um, so one, I think having that tenacity is a big part of not having the burnout. Knowing why you're doing what you're doing is a huge part of not burning out, right? Oh, I can always go back to that memory. And, you know, visualization is a very, very important piece of all of that. Being able to visualize that why, um, hopefully in a positive way, um, is a big one. And you know, having the proper armor for the job that you're doing and giving yourself rest when you need it. Um, back off when you need it. I'm a big believer in teams and and community. So having a team that you can talk to about what you're going through at all times. Um, if it's either a small group or, you know, a best friend, a wife, or husband, whatever, um, somebody uh an AI, I don't care. Something that you can talk to and get the everything off your chest and get some feedback is very, very important.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

No, I love your concept too of like working with others, right? I feel like today the solopreneur, well, the solopreneur is all by themselves, but we have to work with teams. Walk us through how you use comedy to help build teams.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Uh, I started using comedy um as a way to show people how they can use AI in a different way, right? So most people haven't done comedy ever in their life, they've never written a joke, but everybody's got stories, right? And there's this concept of if I use AI, I'm cheating. But if you tell AI your story, just your legitimate story and say, hey, if I were a stand up comedian, how what are ways that I could make this funny? Right? Now it's your story still, right? But now you can tell it in a comedic way. You can do the quiet opposite and say, how do I make this dramatic and make a drama book, too? But um, I think comedy is a way that we can get together and we Can laugh about each other, uh, laugh with each other. And then when we're in a small team, what ends up happening is now you're you're getting to know each other in a way that you haven't known each other before. You're you're hearing stories about how somebody grew up or something like that. So in a small executive team, you know, we would basically say, hey, we're gonna do an open mic night together. I'm gonna sit with each one of you. We're gonna go over some stories, we're gonna feed it to the AI, we're gonna ask it, you know, we're gonna give it the rules of a comedian, right? We got your premise setup and punchline, maybe a callback or a tag. You know, we give it all those things, like, how do we do that with this story and get that feedback? And then we perform it for each other, which then, you know, we're just creating an environment of, oh, we get to open openly communicate, we get to tell our stories in a fun, unique way. Uh, we get to laugh with each other, which is a completely different thing. And then what I love about that is it takes some of the mystique out of the AI and it shows people how to how to use AI as a partner instead of a replacement for stuff.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

And it also like goes back to what you were saying with the armor. It allows people to take off their armor, right, instead of putting up the bad armor, I guess. So I understand you'd have good armor too, depending on what you're getting into. Yes. Now, there reminds me, Ken, of um a statistic in this laughter yoga book where they said that children will laugh about 400 times a day and adults less than 15. Isn't that crazy? Like we don't laugh enough. Why do you think that? Why don't we use laughter and comedy more in a good way, not laughing at people, right? Laughing with, I guess. How would you describe that? Yeah. I think I know exactly why.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

And and it's and it's unfortunate that humanity today leads from a place of fear and violence and and ego. And if we led from spirituality, abundance, and love, if that's where we started, if that's where our assumptions started, we would have a different outcome, right? But unfortunately, and and I know why, and I can't blame people. I mean, bombs are falling out of the sky, people are getting killed every day. It's scary, scary shit, right? Yes. But our reality is based on what how we perceive the world. And if we decide to, and I choose to perceive the beautiful side of our planet, and there's more than enough to be had, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Yep. So your idea of spirituality, some listeners might think, oh, he's getting a little woo-woo and like maybe religious. Walk us through what you mean. I know sometimes they think that shit. What is spirituality to you? And maybe it is religion. I don't even mean to say like that. I just want to get clear on spirituality, how you define it.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

So I I've done a lot of work in neuroscience, or not not a work. I've done a lot of study in neuroscience, AI, flow, all of those different categories and religion and history. There's one statement that I can always fall back to, and that's as above, so below. And um, you know, why does that resonate? I'm a I'm a spiritual being living a human experience at the moment. Um, I I I'm a pantheologist now. Um, I believe that whatever you believe will be your outcome when you leave this planet, and I believe that it can change. Right? Uh I've seen Jesus heal, I've seen Muhammad heal, I've seen Allah heal, I've seen God, I've seen them all heal real humans on this planet. So I've seen their existence. You know, the the religion that you are is the religion that you are. It doesn't mean that it's right or wrong.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

No, there's definitely something to be said. Yeah, no, I totally agree, Ken. So I'm, I guess, like I don't, I guess I would say I'm like a Taoist, if you will. I read a lot of Eastern philosophy. I practice yoga, you know, teach yoga as well, and I just resonate with the sort of the way of life, you know. And there is, I guess that's what we need more today, like you're talking about, less black and white, like you're saying earlier, the left side of the brain. We need more of this right side of the brain, right? For this art, this creativity. That's what we're lacking. So that's that's crazy. So, Ken, this is the work sucks, but I like it podcast. So, what sucks about your work today, and what are you doing to make it not suck?

SPEAKER_01 26:19

What sucks about my work today, I would have to say this sound, this is the stupidest thing I'm ever gonna say, I think. What sucks about is the money. Having to deal with the finance side of it, and you know, it's big money. Um and, you know, some people probably hear me talking and they think I'm flippant about, you know, a$250,000 deal or, you know, I just we did a$1.7 million deal, and you know, there's times that we've lost a lot. So the flippedness about large numbers of money, knowing that a lot of society um doesn't look at finance as a tool. They look at it as how they eat and how they feed their children. Um, so that relationship with the finance to me is the hardest thing or the thing that I think sucks most about my work. If I could just do what I love doing every day and never think about the the roof over anybody's head or food on the table, I would love that. Um, but that's not the world that we live in today.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

But it's tough because like our society wraps that identity of what you do, right? Trading time for money with that. So we've got this, I agree, we got this weird relationship with money today. No, that's that's that's cool. So, Ken, I just I'm very curious with your podcast. You're the host of Clicks and Bricks. I haven't listened to it, and all I could think of was Legos. What is clicks and bricks? I just want to know from my own personal.

SPEAKER_01 27:46

The brick and mortar business in our country, I think, is one of the most important businesses in the world. There's a lot of brick and mortar companies across the planet that are quarter million to a million revenue. The owners are struggling and they don't know how to use technology in their brick and mortar to really grow. That was the concept behind clicks and bricks, and that's what I really want because I run a data center and I like brick and mortar business. Um, however, it's really become just founder stories, uh, business founders and and their life stories, what makes them an entrepreneur, and tips and tricks around that.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Cool. I love that. No, no, no. Now I get the clicks with the the online thing and the bricks of the mortar. My three-year-old brain was thinking Legos, but no, thank you. That's clarification. I could be less um symbolistic, I guess. No, I think it's great. I think it's great. No, I think that's a great show. So if Ken, if listeners of today's show want to reach out, learn more about you know that book, let's talk about that book. What would readers get from that book that you were talking about today? First off, what's the name? Where can we find it?

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Yeah, so uh I'll give you a little synopsis. So loading identity.com is where you can get the book. And it's three books. It's uh loading identity is the is the main piece of work. And what that is, it's the process that I used when I did the comedy. You can follow my comedy journey at cocksout.com. I I went and every night I did a stand, I did a stage. I wrote about that stage, what happened, how I got there, you know, what the emotions and everything were. So that body of journalism is the proof of concept for the systems of loading identity. The very first thing that I realized after it was done was that there's two very dangerous pieces of the book. And that's the first piece is stripping an identity. So I wrote stripping identity, which is a companion book. It's like 30 pages, but it talks specifically about stripping identity and killing an identity, when you should should and when you shouldn't do that, and when you should seek help. Um, and I very much recommend seeking help in that process. Um, and then the last one is integrating identity, right? We do a lot of these putting on masks every day for different people in different scenarios, but we don't take the time to integrate them or we think we can shatter them or just take it off. But really, that's not the goal is to have all these different masks that we put on. We want to have just one, you know, who we are as a person, um person that we walk through the day with. And unfortunately, that's challenging when we have different demands put on us at the grocery store versus the stage versus you know, the the trial bench.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Awesome. Well, Ken, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Identity isn't fixed, it's built. And most people build it accidentally. Ken talks about putting on the armor, but here's the twist. Sometimes growth requires taking it off. Think about it, like a skill tree. Like in Diablo 2, one of my favorite video games growing up, you don't win by doing everything. You win by committing, leveling up the right strengths, and leaning into what makes you effective. But when you shift identities fast, you're gonna miss a few rungs. That's just part of it. That's the cost of growth. Success is not a matter of good luck, it's good skills. And the skill today is take a strengths assessment and map your skill tree. Know what you're actually good at and double down. Don't fight every battle. Build for the ones that matter. Because the best gladiator is the one who doesn't need the armor.

unknown 31:20

And there's a win that blows across the flames, and it seems