Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley

A friend of mine sold American Express at $5 a share during the financial crisis. Six months later it was $120. Panic turned a temporary loss into a permanent one, and that story is this entire episode in miniature.

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I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley

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Jim Lebenthal is a Partner and Chief Equity Strategist at Cerity Partners and a regular on CNBC's Halftime Report. Before markets, he was a Navy nuclear engineer who drove submarines. He thinks in systems and decades, and his core truth is simple: stay in the market. Jim ran the numbers on the last five crises. Invest the day before each crash, stay in, and your annualized return is about 10%. The people who got destroyed sold low and chased the market back up.

We get into why your emotions aren't the enemy, denial is. FOMO? Scratch the itch with a small buy and keep dry powder. Fear? Find the data. We cover diversification, why 80% of the portfolio he runs sits in tried and true companies, when an ETF beats stock picking, and what he found hiding inside ESG funds.

Then the big stuff: crypto, gold, and private markets (liquidity first), why he tells clients not to borrow to speculate, and why patience is the biggest investment virtue. He closes with a story he's never told before, about a client's financial autopsy, and the line I can't shake: your portfolio is a fingerprint of your personality.

Stay in. Size it right. Write it down.

This is the way.

Hanley.

Connect with Jim Lebenthal

Website: https://ceritypartners.com/team/james-lebenthal/

X: https://x.com/jlebenthal

CNBC: Halftime Report, two to three times a week, noon to 1pm Eastern

Book: How to Ride the Subway: Getting Around on Wall Street and in Life (Regalo Press, 2026): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVMJFJXL?tag=findingpeak-20

Follow Ryan

Website: https://ryanhanley.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley

I spent years believing the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was a work problem. Michael Bernoff calls it what it is: a language problem.

Michael has spent more than 25 years studying how language drives behavior. Jim Rohn mentored him from 1999 to 2009. His book Average Sucks took nine years to write, because he wanted a book people finish. His framework, Human Interaction Technology, is built on one idea: the words you choose program the results you get.

We cover why capable people stay stuck, the success script nobody handed you, and why confidence without competence is noise. Michael breaks down problem language versus solution language and what each does to your brain chemistry. Problems push your body toward cortisol. Solutions push it toward serotonin.

Then he drops the line I can't shake: "Work hard and be a good person. That's a shitty plan for a business owner."

We also get into the three words that rewire any limiting belief, up until now, and his missing Step 13: the way you talk about you is how the world learns to treat you.

This one changed how I hear my own self-talk.

This is the way.

Hanley.

Connect with Michael Bernoff:

Website: https://michaelbernoff.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michael_bernoff/ 

Text the word INFLUENCE to 480-800-8051 

Book: Average Sucks: https://amzn.to/3RzS1O3

Follow Ryan:

Website: https://ryanhanley.com 

Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley

Lee Benson pulled weeds for 25 cents an hour when he was six. By senior year of high school he was living on his own. Forty-six years later he calls himself an overnight success: a nine-figure exit after growing Able Aerospace from two employees to more than 500 across 60 countries.

Today Lee is the CEO of Execute to Win, and this conversation is a masterclass in what execution means. Not grinding. Not hustle. Creating objectively measurable value, and building the environment where every person in the company creates more of it over time.

We cover the 3% rule of strategy versus execution, why job descriptions fail your team, the compensation system that ended salary negotiations at Able (open books plus 22% of pre-tax profit paid monthly), earned decision rights, and the category Lee puts most strategic initiatives in: please do your job.

We also get personal. Kicked out senior year. Credit cards opened in his name. A thousand shows in a rock band. Why the struggle is the point, in business and at home with your kids.

And we close on AI: why the leaders trading their coaches for chatbots are getting amazing answers to the wrong questions.

If you lead a team, this one follows you into Monday morning.

This is the way.

Hanley.

Connect with Lee Benson: 

Website: https://etw.com 

Dinner Table: https://dinnertable.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lee-j-benson/

Follow Ryan: 

Website: https://ryanhanley.com 

Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley

Full transcript, clips, and more: https://ryanhanley.com/podcast/the-3-rule-why-your-strategy-sessions-die-by-monday-lee-benson

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe

Your strategy may not be the bottleneck. Your self-image might be.

Most leaders train the craft. They study the market, improve the offer, tighten the process, and push for better execution. Then pressure arrives and the mind they never trained grabs the wheel.

Collin Henderson is a mental performance coach, founder of Master Your Mindset, author, and host of the Master Your Mindset podcast. His work has taken him from Fortune 500 boardrooms to Division 1 locker rooms, including the UCLA women’s basketball program.

Collin’s central argument is simple: You never outperform your self-image.

If you see yourself as the person who folds under pressure, avoids conflict, or needs permission, your behavior will keep proving that label correct. The first move is not another tactic. It is learning to question the beliefs running beneath the tactics. Is that thought true? Said by who?

We also get into the comfortable middle. This is the dangerous place where the bills are paid, the title looks good, and nothing is broken enough to force a decision. A leader can survive there for years while his ambition quietly dies of boredom. Collin puts a clean edge on it: “I have to respect your right to be average.”

That line will sting if it is supposed to.

I share why I have treated therapy as routine maintenance and how an accountability partner helped me build the systems behind a national digital commercial insurance agency. Adults celebrate coaching for kids and athletes, then act like asking for help becomes weakness after age 30. That is backward. Collin says, “Nobody should worry or win alone.”

The conversation moves from identity to environment, vulnerability, proximity, fear, flow, comparison, service, and ownership. It closes with one question that cuts through every excuse: “What are you doing for that?”

For founders and executives, this is not soft work. A shaky self-image can turn clear strategy into hesitation, defensive leadership, and inconsistent execution. Collin offers a practical operating rhythm: notice the thought, name the feeling, question the belief, choose the response, then use accountability to keep the new behavior from disappearing when the week gets ugly.

If your team keeps repeating a problem it already knows how to solve, the missing skill may be mental, not technical.

You do not need more motivational wallpaper. You need a mind, a system, and a circle that can hold up under pressure.

## Chapters

00:00 Opening

00:28 Why Mindset Is the Missing Performance Skill

05:27 You Never Outperform Your Self-Image

08:06 Why We Default to Negative Self-Talk

13:57 Conditioning and Automatic Negative Thoughts

16:19 How to Move the Comfortable Middle

21:59 Vulnerability Is Not Weakness

30:46 Accountability and the Power of Proximity

48:00 Reality Comparison and Flow

59:20 The Oz Method

 

## Connect with Collin Henderson

Website: https://www.thecollinhenderson.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/collinhendersonmindset/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collinhenderson/

Podcast: https://www.thecollinhenderson.com/podcast

 

## Follow Ryan

Website: https://ryanhanley.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley

This is the way.

Hanley.

Full transcript, clips, and more: https://ryanhanley.com/podcast/rewire-your-self-image-to-perform-under-pressure-collin-henderson

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I help founders & executives generating more than $10M in revenue find their Easy Mode. Start here: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ryanmhanley

The internet we use today is only half built. We spent the last 40 years digitalizing communication and content. Now, we are digitalizing value, intelligence, and work.

Matthew Le Merle, Managing Partner of Fifth Era and Blockchain Coinvestors, calls this the autonomous digital economy. And if you are running a business today, it is coming for your margins whether you are ready or not.

We break down why blockchain adoption feels slow when it is right on schedule. We look at the hidden taxes built into our current financial system and how tokenization removes that friction. We also look at AI agents doing work humans were never designed to do in the first place.

You can choose the axis of fear, worrying about what innovation will cost you. Or you can choose the axis of the innovator, believing new technology will solve today's problems and open opportunities we cannot even imagine yet.

This is the way.

Hanley.

Connect with Matthew Le Merle: 

Website: https://www.matthewlemerle.com 

Fifth Era: https://www.fifthera.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewlemerle/ 

Fifth Era LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fifthera 

X: https://twitter.com/BCoinvestors

Follow Ryan: 

Website: https://ryanhanley.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_hanley

Full transcript, clips, and more: https://ryanhanley.com/podcast/the-autonomous-digital-economy-is-here

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.