123. Jake Kaufman - Letting Go Of Control To Create Your Greatest Success

"Are you ready to shift into your next evolution. Your next level is going to require a different version of you!"

On this episode Colette sits down with Jake Kauffman a High Performance Coach & Business Mentor to mission driven coaches & entrepreneurs.

Jake explains that our true success is hiding in our pain and that addressing our pain from the past will set us free from repeating the same patterns year after year. 

Unless we address the pain from the past, we will only recycle it in the present. Jake shared his deepest, darkest trauma that unlocked more love, purpose, and abundance in his life. 

He knows that in order to face this version of ourselves, we need to embark on a state of not being in control. Otherwise our ego keeps us in control in the same patterns over and over.  

Jake hosts retreats for men to challenge them let go of control and face their pain, so they can start building the next version of themselves for greater abundance in life.

Jake suggests we consider: "if my greatest strength is a compensating strategy, what is my greatest strength for?"

Get to know Jake:

Deep down I knew that I was only scratching the surface of my potential. I always knew I was supposed to have a huge impact but I felt like there was something holding me back that I wasn't aware of. No matter how hard I worked...or what I tried I couldn't seem to reach that next level in my coaching business...I was overworked and overwhelmed. Despite all of my success I felt unfulfilled...It left me sad & frustrated.

Ultimately I realized that it had nothing to do with my business and everything to do with me...It was my personal issues and subconscious self-sabotage that was preventing me from creating even greater success and having the impact I knew I was capable of!

Inspired to reach your greatest potential check out Jake's work here:

Website: https://www.awakewithjake.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jake.kauffman.923

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


Jake's Book: Let Love In: The Pain Stops When the Truth Starts: https://www.amazon.com/Let-Love-Stops-Truth-Starts/dp/B0C1J3FDPX/

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Connect with Colette:

Instagram: @wellnessbycolette

Website: Wellness by Colette

Thank you for listening to the Limitless Healing podcast with Colette Brown! It would mean the world if you would take one minute to follow, leave a 5 star review and share with those you love!

In Health,
Colette

Transcript

Colette Brown [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Limitless Healing podcast, where everyone is welcome to take a front row seat and listen in on inspiring conversations, stories of healing, and action steps to help you live your best life. My name is Colette Brown and I am passionate about all things wellness, mind, body, soul. Inspired by my own personal transformation from unwell and not knowing where to turn to thriving and flourishing, and motivated to help you do the same. I share this platform with medical doctors, wellness practitioners, chronic illness survivors, meditation and mindfulness gurus, innovators of products from food to technology, and more. Think of it as a one stop shop for wellness resources where you can listen to professionals from around the world to help you thrive. Join me Mondays and Wednesdays while sipping a cup of tea or making your favorite meal as we explore the world of wellness together. This is the Limitless healing podcast. Our next guest challenges us to examine our lives, things that we know, but also things in our subconscious.

Colette Brown [00:01:18]:
He believes that the outer world is a reflection of inner happenings. One of my favorite quotes of his is our greatest strength is actually an adaptation or overcompensation to avoid experiencing pain. Author of Let Love in the pain stops when the truth starts. It is my great honor to welcome Jake Kaufman. Welcome, Jake.

Jake Kauffman [00:01:42]:
Thanks so much, Colette. I'm happy to be here.

Colette Brown [00:01:44]:
It's so good to have you. And your interview that I heard with Michelle Rios was just moved me so deeply. And I'm so happy to have you here and to be able to share on my platform your wisdom and the work that you're doing. So the first thing I like to do is get to know you a little bit. So why don't you tell us about where you grew up and maybe a favorite childhood memory or a memory that led you to where you're at.

Jake Kauffman [00:02:12]:
Ooh, great question. So I grew up in a really small town in Michigan, a rural community of around a thousand people. So it's really tiny. Arguably sheltered my favorite childhood memory. I have a lot of them. I loved growing up where I did.

Colette Brown [00:02:26]:
Were you on a lake?

Jake Kauffman [00:02:27]:
I was on Lake Michigan.

Colette Brown [00:02:29]:
Lake Michigan.

Jake Kauffman [00:02:30]:
In many ways, it felt like the ocean because it's so large.

Colette Brown [00:02:33]:
Yeah.

Jake Kauffman [00:02:33]:
So it's a really beautiful place to grow up. But I would say one of my favorite childhood memories was the first time my dad ever took me to a Bulls game. Because if you're familiar with the history of the Chicago Bulls, back in the early 90s, they had Michael Jordan. They were at the height of their greatness and their championship run, and so got to attend a basketball game with my dad, at a really young age, probably six, seven years old, I imagine. And having grown up in a really small community, a really small town, going to Chicago and the United center was just mind blowing, to be honest with you. Here I am growing up in the country, surrounded by farms, despite being on Lake Michigan, and I'm in the big city. And it was just such an incredible experience, especially because of how amazing Michael Jordan was and being able to witness.

Colette Brown [00:03:24]:
A great. That's a great memory. And what was that feeling like? Because I grew up in a small town, too, and I remember visiting big cities, and it was exciting and overwhelming a little bit, but it also enabled me to know that I could navigate wherever I would go in the world despite growing up in a small town. So what was the feeling for you?

Jake Kauffman [00:03:47]:
I think we're all wired for transcendence, and in many respects, large cities represent that because there's so much diversity, there's so much culture, and it's so much bigger than us. And so it forces us to see the world in a very different way outside of the tried and true, because it forces us outside of that, in a sense, because we're confronted by all of these various different things, different cultures, different people, different ethnicities, different ways of living, doing, being. You have people from all different backgrounds, all different faiths, cultures. And so it really exposes us to things that you just can't get when you grow up in a smaller town or this very insulated environment.

Colette Brown [00:04:29]:
So where did that take you from coming small town? Where did you go to college? How did you start venturing out into the world?

Jake Kauffman [00:04:37]:
So it's interesting because we all talk about how you grew up in a small town. Everybody, there's always this conversation around getting out and moving away, but no one ever really does. And you go back and you visit and you see the same people year.

Colette Brown [00:04:52]:
After year, people who have never left.

Jake Kauffman [00:04:55]:
Most people who have never left. I was one of the kids that always talked about leaving and did.

Colette Brown [00:05:02]:
Yeah.

Jake Kauffman [00:05:02]:
So I went to school in Minnesota, which wasn't that far away, but it felt very far away because now, all of a sudden, I went from living in a town of around a thousand people to living in the twin cities. And so that really shaped me in a profound way, because I was no longer visiting these large cities that were filled with cultural diversity and all these other things. Now I was actually living in it. It was an active part of my life where I was surrounded by it daily. And that created this fascination with other belief systems, different religions, different cultures. And so I actually ended up going to school for international business, and I got a double major in sociology with an emphasis in cross cultural relations. So I became deeply fascinated with how other cultures operate and their traditions and what they believe and how that causes the people within those cultures to live their lives. I found it deeply fascinating.

Jake Kauffman [00:06:03]:
I've always been innately curious. I've always been one to not reject anything, but really try it on, contemplate it, consider it, metabolize it, and then decide what to do with it. Whether I take it on as my own, whether it's like a part of my own belief system or my way of living at that point, or whether or not, I hate to say, reject it, determine that it's not for me.

Colette Brown [00:06:29]:
So you go to college, you're double majoring, you're exploring the world. Did you go to college abroad?

Jake Kauffman [00:06:35]:
I studied abroad in Amsterdam.

Colette Brown [00:06:37]:
Okay.

Jake Kauffman [00:06:38]:
Which was a really beautiful experience, because, again, you talk about a cultural melting pot. Amsterdam is one of the most diverse cities in the world. And it was deeply fascinating for me because I studied abroad shortly after the tsunami in Thailand. And it's interesting that we're just now really starting to have this conversation in the United States. But even back then in Amsterdam, you could go into the red light district. Because my studies were in the red light district. I was a volunteer at a nonprofit organization. The class was called the Urban Church.

Jake Kauffman [00:07:12]:
And it was to really examine how these religious institutions and nonprofit organizations were having an impact in the city. And so I was partnered with this nonprofit organization that specifically worked with drug addicts, the homeless, and prostitutes or sex workers in the red light district. And what I found to be deeply fascinating is that. I shouldn't say all, but the majority of the sex workers in the red light district had been brought over from Thailand, where the tsunami is.

Colette Brown [00:07:45]:
Wow.

Jake Kauffman [00:07:46]:
And so whenever there's a natural disaster, sex traffickers actually flock to that area with the promise of a job, a better life, and a chance to get out of this really terrible situation. But then, of course, they bring them over to Europe, or in this case, Amsterdam, and then they're stuck, and they have no choice, and they're more or less forced to go into the industry for the sake of survival. And again, it's very sad. Obviously not a good situation for anybody to be in, but again, just very fascinating to see and to witness this kind of unfold right before your eyes, where you're like, okay, here's this horrible tragedy, and then you have this melting pot, this amalgamation of people from all over the world but more specifically, just how the industry works and how it impacts and affects people in a terrible way, but at the same time, in this almost natural way, if you would, similarly to how animals hunt each other. Not comparing it to that necessarily, because there's the whole issue of morality. But it was just a shock. And that's why I find it deeply fascinating, because it forces us to confront something that we're not used to and we're brought into relationship with something. I was young.

Jake Kauffman [00:09:02]:
Yeah. I would have been 21, 22.

Colette Brown [00:09:04]:
Yeah. So to see this vast difference of how you grew up and then you're thrust into a whole different world that most people never see into had to wake you up.

Jake Kauffman [00:09:15]:
Culture shock. Yeah, exactly. Yep. It's this culture shock. And we often hear people experiencing this when they go to a third world country and they're brought into relationship with how the rest of the world really know. And in the United States, we've largely been able to remain ignorant of and immune to the effects of sex trafficking or the very reality of sex trafficking.

Colette Brown [00:09:38]:
It's not as sad. Yeah.

Jake Kauffman [00:09:41]:
It's happening under the surface, in the shadows. Where? In Amsterdam? It's right there in front of your face.

Colette Brown [00:09:46]:
Yeah. So you go through that and then what's the next step for you? And that gets you into this work that you're doing today? I want to know if there's like a pivotal moment that you see a need.

Jake Kauffman [00:10:00]:
Yeah. All of that started well before that, actually, well before I ever went to college, well before I ever moved out of my hometown, which I talk about at length in my book. That's how the book starts, was when I was roughly 26, 27 years old. Coming into acknowledgment and recognition of the fact that when I was twelve years old, I was sexually abused. When it happened, obviously, as a young adolescent, I did not have the mental resources to know what to do with it. So I did the most logical thing, which was run from it and suppress it, repress all of the emotions, not acknowledge that it happened. So there wasn't this dissociation that occurred where I didn't remember it. I remembered full well that it had happened.

Jake Kauffman [00:10:44]:
I just didn't acknowledge it for what it was. And in doing so, I didn't have to deal with the emotions attached to the experience.

Colette Brown [00:10:51]:
You just said it never happened and pushed it out of your mind. You knew it happened, but like you said, you didn't know how to process it. And was it somebody trusted?

Jake Kauffman [00:11:00]:
It was somebody that I grew up with. It was an older camper so I would have been in like eigth grade, maybe 9th grade at the time. And they were, I think, like several years older than me. They were about four years older than me. So they would have probably been a senior in high school. The unique thing about the situation, and this is true for all trauma, there's multiple layers of trauma. There's what happened. There's what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you.

Jake Kauffman [00:11:24]:
There's what was going on around you. There's what happened after the fact. Was there an empathetic witness that supported you in processing that experience? But nevertheless, the sexual abuse actually happened in front of all of the friends that I grew up with.

Colette Brown [00:11:40]:
Wow.

Jake Kauffman [00:11:41]:
And none of them tried to stop it. So the experience was very multilayered in that there was this anger and resentment towards the person who abused me. But then there was this humiliation and also this anger and resentment towards my friends for not having stopped it. And for me, it represented this very catalyzing moment where all of a sudden I started to wear these various masks and I started to act as if I had it all together. Act as if I was fine, act as if I was successful despite the fact that I was dying inside.

Colette Brown [00:12:15]:
Right.

Jake Kauffman [00:12:15]:
All of those things, though. And this is what ultimately led me to say the quote that you mentioned at the very beginning of this episode. Oftentimes our greatest strength is merely an adaptation or an overcompensation to avoid experiencing pain. All of those things were just masks, adaptive traits, compensating strategies to ensure that I was never taken advantage of in that way again. To ensure that the abuse never occurred again. So on the outside looking in, you would look at me and you'd be like, wow, Jake has it all together. And in many respects, at least externally, I did. I was a three sport athlete in high school.

Jake Kauffman [00:12:53]:
I excelled at academics. I was a state recognized artist. But all of those things were this egoic scaffolding that served as this protective barrier between me and other people. So unconsciously, I was holding people at arm's length because I was terrified. If I let them in, if I allow them to see me, if I say, for example, step into vulnerability, I'm going to get hurt. My relationship with love, connection and intimacy became incredibly twisted, as you can imagine, because love, connection and intimacy are these very inherently beautiful things that, in many respects, make life worth living. And yet, after the abuse, love, connection and intimacy, on a very fundamental level, started to feel unsafe. Right? And so these masks or this egoic scaffolding, same thing served as this protective barrier to ensure that I was not abused again, that I wasn't hurt in the way that I had been.

Jake Kauffman [00:13:58]:
But of course it ensured that happened, because as long as I'm holding people at arm's length, I never give them the opportunity to fully accept me, to embrace me, or to love me. So I'm essentially rejecting them before I give them the opportunity to reject me. And that's what eventually drove me to go to therapy, because I started noticing this as a pattern. I started to notice that it was showing up across different relationships. I started to experience various interpersonal struggles at work, because work can or does include or require, depending on what you do or what industry you're in, a high level of connection, collaboration, and working together with people, all of that requires connection. Whether it happens within the context of a romantic relationship, or a platonic relationship, or a work relationship, all of that requires connection. But as previously stated, connection felt very unsafe. And so, in an effort to continue to self protect, what did I do? I self sabotaged.

Jake Kauffman [00:15:03]:
Which is to simply say, I self protected. That's what self sabotage is. At a very fundamental level, self sabotage is simply self protection. And what did this tangibly look like? It looked like pushing people away. I would only be able to go so deep in connection before it started to feel incredibly unsafe. It would trigger my trauma because I hadn't reconciled my pain. So what did I do? I was just recycling it in the present moment, and it prevented me from being as successful as I knew I was capable of being. So that drove me to therapy.

Jake Kauffman [00:15:36]:
And that's where the book kicks off, was me going through and working through these issues with my therapist, and finally coming into recognition that, oh, this incredibly painful incident that I experienced when I was twelve, that was abuse. And that set me on the path to doing what I'm doing today. Because the moment I came into recognition and acknowledgment of what had happened, then I needed to do something about it. And I fell down the rabbit hole of the personal development. Rabbit hole, if you will, became obsessed with transformation and the idea of bettering myself and working through my internal blocks and barriers, my unconscious limiting beliefs. And the more I did that, the more positive benefits I started to experience, the more successful I became in business, the better my relationships got across the board, with my friends, with my family, but also with my romantic partners. And so stepping into it as a profession, as a vocation, was a no brainer. And that was almost six years ago now.

Colette Brown [00:16:38]:
Amazing. So you were, how old were you when you started therapy.

Jake Kauffman [00:16:42]:
So I would have been 26, 27 when I started therapy.

Colette Brown [00:16:47]:
Over a decade after the abuse happened?

Jake Kauffman [00:16:50]:
Yes. So I'll be 38 here in a few months. Over a decade spent working on myself. And I still do, because like any muscle, if we don't use it, we lose it. If you don't work out your muscles, they start to atropy. The same thing is true for us in terms of our mental fitness or our emotional intelligence. Our brains are actually wired to a victim mindset. That's our natural default setting.

Jake Kauffman [00:17:13]:
That's called external locus of control. Blaming other people or other things outside of us for our results. Internal locus of control, which says that I am responsible for all of my results. That takes work, that takes coaching, that takes therapy. It takes consistently working on yourself and increasing in your emotional intelligence to continue to remain fit, if you will, in that area. But if we don't continue to do that, if we don't keep it up, just like if we don't keep up and are consistent in going to the gym, what do we do? We start to become weak. We start to lose that strength. In this case, we start to lose that mental resilience, we start to lose that emotional intelligence, and we naturally will gravitate back towards a victim mindset, which is why I'm a huge proponent of doing this work as a lifestyle.

Colette Brown [00:18:03]:
Yeah.

Jake Kauffman [00:18:04]:
Not simply a life event.

Colette Brown [00:18:05]:
Do you know what percentage of, let's say, Americans are abused as children? Do we know that number? I'm sure it's high.

Jake Kauffman [00:18:13]:
They say that one in three women will experience some form of sexual abuse or sexual assault at some point in time in their lives. They say that with men, it's one in six. But the reason for that is we have a reporting problem because less than 1% of men ever report their abuse.

Colette Brown [00:18:31]:
Yeah, I believe it's probably equally the same number, but not reported.

Jake Kauffman [00:18:35]:
Yeah. I can tell you from having worked with hundreds of men over the years that it absolutely is. It absolutely is pretty much equal. It just looks slightly different for men. It looks like physical abuse as opposed to sexual abuse, or verbal emotional abuse as opposed to sexual abuse. I think women, if you were to take a deep dive into the statistics, are probably more likely to experience and see, this is the big thing about trauma. Trauma is not primarily about what happened to you, it's about what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you, or in the absence of an empathetic witness. It's about the stories and the beliefs that you make up about yourself.

Jake Kauffman [00:19:17]:
That then dictate how you think, how you feel, your actions, your decisions, which produces all of your results. And this is why most people don't grow. They continue to repeat the same year, and then they call that a life medicating, right?

Colette Brown [00:19:34]:
Which just can destroy a life. And they're just trying to push down the thoughts that you've created in your mind, the subconsciously, that are probably not even true. And that's the sad thing. And it perpetuates, correct.

Jake Kauffman [00:19:49]:
It does. And that's why I would suggest that everyone's addicted. It's just a question of what are you addicted to?

Colette Brown [00:19:55]:
What's your addiction?

Jake Kauffman [00:19:56]:
Totally. It's very easy to demonize drugs, alcohol, pornography, because of the inherent negative side effects. But you can be addicted to shopping, social media, going to the gym, you can be obsessed with diet and your nutrition in a very restrictive and unhealthy way. All of those things looking good, all of the money, working, all of those things can be addictions. Obviously they all have their inherent negative side effects, but a lot of them have inherent positive side effects or benefits to them, but nevertheless, which is why they're much easier to justify and rationalize. But at the end of the day, they are still just that. They are still addictions, which is by definition is a coping strategy or an avoidance strategy that keep us running away from something. Most people think that they're running towards something, when in reality they're actually running away from something.

Jake Kauffman [00:20:54]:
At least. And in my experience, when it comes to coaching men, this is most oftentimes the case. Most men think they are ambitious, they think they are goal oriented or driven by success achievement, when in reality, I can tell you that most oftentimes that is just an unconscious attempt to claim victory over their pain.

Colette Brown [00:21:16]:
Wow, that's deep. And what is one of the first steps that you have individuals take when they might not know that, hey, I'm working, I'm a workaholic, and I'm doing this because I'm pushing down things from my past and the pain, what's a step that somebody can take in order to start rectifying that?

Jake Kauffman [00:21:40]:
Great question. And I will provide two different answers to that question, both of which are highly relevant. The first one is that the first and most important question that you can ask when it comes to doing self improvement, transformative work is what have you been doing with your pain? It has to start there. If it doesn't, all we're doing is building on top of a faulty foundation.

Colette Brown [00:22:06]:
Wow.

Jake Kauffman [00:22:07]:
Yeah, that's it. But to go deeper into that or to provide more nuance around that and to offer anyone who's listening like a tangible, practical step that they can take when it comes to analyzing the unconscious, limiting beliefs that hold us all back is, what do my results say? I believe about myself because your results always paint a perfect picture and they always tell a story about what you believe about yourself. And this gets, I shouldn't say complicated, but it gets tricky when it comes to people who are highly successful, because it's very easy, like I was when I was a teenager, it's very easy to look at them from the outside looking in and be like, oh, they're fine, they've got it all together. But how many people do we know that are incredibly rich in money but poor in happiness? Oh, yeah, so many people. Take Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, Robin Williams as perfect examples of this. People who are at the height or the top of their industry, who are highly successful, who are incredibly famous, who were revered and loved by so many people, and yet deep down, they were severely depressed and struggling. So this is a tale as old as time. And I would suggest that it has to happen that we have to be addicted to something only to realize that nothing outside of us can give us more of what we already have.

Colette Brown [00:23:35]:
Yeah. So the question what are you doing with your pain? What is the normal, I guess, response to that? Because it is a profound question, like you said it, and I was like, wow, I've never thought about it like that before. So what do you extract and how do you help people see what they are doing with the pain?

Jake Kauffman [00:23:58]:
All I need to do is know what you're struggling with, because once I know what you're struggling with, then the process is fairly easy. Then all I need to do is determine what is the belief beneath the behavior? What's the belief? Every behavior is driven by a belief. So if you have an external struggle or challenge. Now, granted, challenges are an inherent part of life, and it's very natural and normal to experience seasons of trial and tribulations. But if you find yourself continually and consistently repeating patterns or repeating challenging cycles, that means on some level, there is a payoff there, which means you are going to continue to do it. You will continue to repeat that cycle or that pattern of behavior because there's a payoff. And ultimately you doing so, you repeating that pattern of behavior allows you, or at least your ego, to continue to be right about something, right about a belief that you continue to maintain about yourself, other people, and the world. So it serves this, like, negative positive function.

Jake Kauffman [00:25:02]:
As an example, I was speaking with a client recently who has an incredibly difficult time, or he experiences a lot of resistance around marketing. Now he's an entrepreneur. You have to market yourself if you want to be successful and if you want to attract business. So now we know what the external struggle or challenge is. What is beneath that? What's driving that? What's responsible for the resistance? Right. So we need to come into relationship with the story, the belief, the internal narrative, because as Carl Jung once said, until we bring the unconscious to the conscious level, you will continue to run your life and you will call it fate.

Colette Brown [00:25:43]:
And does it normally look like going back to a childhood memory, a childhood experience or memory?

Jake Kauffman [00:25:49]:
Yes, absolutely. Because the majority of our cognitive development happens between the ages of two and seven. So this is when our identity, our belief system, is largely formed. Everything that we experience after that, especially once we move beyond our teenage years, simply serves as confirmation bias to those beliefs and to that identity that was created largely between the ages of two and seven, but all the way up until the age of 18. And there's a lot of science that speaks to this if you want a really beautiful read on it, the biology of transcendence is a wonderful read that talks about the brain development or the cognitive development in children and how that plays itself out from the time that they're born to the time that they're 18 and all of the various things that they need to experience to develop in a healthy way.

Colette Brown [00:26:42]:
Okay?

Jake Kauffman [00:26:42]:
Even if they do experience trials and tribulations, because, again, that's just an inherent part of life that's very natural and normal. And yes, once we determine the internal narrative, the story, the belief that is beneath the behavior, driving the behavior that's responsible for the external resistance that one is experiencing, regardless of what it's related to, then we have to determine where does that come from? When did that start? When do you first remember experiencing a significant moment of rejection? And this is what I ultimately came to with my client. Why does he struggle with marketing? Because in the process of self promotion and putting himself out there, because he's a service provider. So it doesn't require that he market a product. It requires that he markets himself. Right. So what is the story that he's making up about what might happen when he does market himself? When he does step into self promotion? Other people are going to judge me. Other people are going to ridicule me or condemn me or whatever.

Jake Kauffman [00:27:45]:
Okay, when and if that were to happen, what might happen after that? They're going to reject me. They're going to judge me, they're going to condemn and ridicule me and they'll reject me. Okay, so what is really driving the resistance around you marketing and promoting yourself is this fear of rejection. Okay, great. Now we've gotten to the truth. Now we need to determine where that fear comes from. When did it start? What experience, situation or circumstance is it attached to? And then we need to heal that.

Colette Brown [00:28:19]:
Experience and all the reinforcement experiences, right?

Jake Kauffman [00:28:24]:
Correct.

Colette Brown [00:28:24]:
I'm sure there's just, if it happened at seven, the rest of your life up until this point is going to be reinforcement of that. So there could be moments that you think, oh, this is when it happened, but actually it goes back a little bit further.

Jake Kauffman [00:28:37]:
Oh, yeah, I can guarantee you that whenever people tell me, when did that start? Oh, it happened in college. No, it didn't. I guarantee it didn't happen in college. The incident that you experienced in college simply served as confirmation bias to something that far predated that. And this is why we have a very robust intake process where we ask people about their childhood, very in depth discovery questions that allows us to go into the relationship already knowing all of the painful, traumatic experiences that has happened to that person, which is why we're able to achieve such rapid transformation, because we don't need to take one, two, three months of getting to know that individual before we can really start to make headway. We already know going into the relationship what is driving or what is responsible for their challenges.

Colette Brown [00:29:30]:
The work you're doing, I'm so happy that you're doing it and that you've done the work on yourself and you've seen how it's changed you and how you can show up. And the fact that you're now putting that into a program that you can actually help others is just so empowering. And I want you to talk briefly about your men's retreat that you have coming up in June because I know, obviously I haven't been to it, but I know that you're impacting so many lives by being able to do this work. So tell us a little bit more about your retreat and what you do there.

Jake Kauffman [00:30:07]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate you bringing it up. I would suggest that true transformation is really only possible when we are limited, constricted, confined or out of control. I think the truest word for that is suffering. And the reason I say that is because anything else is really just bogus self help on our own terms. It serves a purpose, it plays a part, it plays a role. There's nothing wrong with that. In the beginning, we all have to choose into this on our own, but eventually we have to be led by something or someone that we're not a match for.

Jake Kauffman [00:30:42]:
Right. For me, and I talk about this in my book, this is what ultimately led me to write the book, was when I first posted my story on social media, my story of sexual abuse. Because in that moment, all of the masks that I had unconsciously taken on to prevent myself from being abused again were ripped away from me. Because now it's public information, this thing that I had been avoiding and therefore hiding from everyone else because I didn't want to have to confront the uncomfortable, difficult emotions attached to it, were brought right to the forefront.

Colette Brown [00:31:17]:
Were you prepared for that?

Jake Kauffman [00:31:19]:
No, absolutely not. I posted that story five years ago this month, in fact. So I had been working on myself at that point for four or five years, going to therapy, counseling, coaching, the gamut of seminars and personal development workshops. So I actually felt like I was in a really good place to talk about this and come at it from a position of perspective. What I was not prepared for was what you just alluded to, which was all of these masks and this protective egoic scaffolding was completely ripped away. And the level of connection. Right? Because connection, after my abuse felt unsafe. The level of connection just went through the roof and my nervous system collapsed.

Jake Kauffman [00:32:05]:
Because the level of connection or the level of input was simply too much, too soon, too fast. And so I suffered from what's referred to clinically as an acute nervous system breakdown. And I went through a series of health problems in the preceding months after the fact. And if you've ever been sick for a prolonged period of time, you know what that's like, because you don't have any control over it. There are things that you can do to influence it, of course, but you just have to let it work its way through your system. That can be really difficult, and that's, by and large, in many respects. What we do on these retreats is we take men out deep into nature. We remove all distraction.

Jake Kauffman [00:32:47]:
So we take away their phones. Yes, so we take away their cell phones. We take away alcohol, and we force them to confront the things that they have been, however, consciously or unconsciously avoiding. And we force this deeper level of growth upon them simply by virtue of them not being in control and them being out of the driver's seat. And that's why retreats can be so powerful, is that I would suggest that we all need at times to be out of the driver's seat to be out of control, because that's when we're forced to confront who we really are and who we've become as a result of what's happened to us. That is what reveals it. When we're in these moments where we're confronted by conflict, we're confronted by tension or intentional hardship, if you will. And that's oftentimes what we put men through.

Jake Kauffman [00:33:41]:
This is why in roman times, the concept or the practice of male initiation was so important, because it's what initiated boys into men, what was an inherent part of male initiation. They were literally put into hard situations. They were oftentimes sent out into nature with, like, next to nothing, and forced to survive and provide for themselves. Right. So there was this necessary suffering that they had to go through and experience to come out on the other side, to be graciously woken up to the bigger picture, which is that life is not about me and my life is not my own. We don't have that in the western world. In the United States, it's not common practice. And so you have men that are initiated primarily by two things, war and fatherhood.

Jake Kauffman [00:34:33]:
But when they are confronted by those things, they largely don't know what to do with the tension that those things produce, because they don't have someone guiding them through that initiatory process that allows them to come out on the other side of it. What do they end up doing? Oftentimes, they go right back to their addictions.

Colette Brown [00:34:52]:
Wow.

Jake Kauffman [00:34:53]:
And this is why most men medicating, correct?

Colette Brown [00:34:56]:
Self medicating, yeah.

Jake Kauffman [00:34:57]:
And that's why most men today struggle now more than ever with anxiety, depression and suicide. So these retreats are pivotal, even if it's only for men to experience a deeper degree of camaraderie, connection and accountability, because this will always remain true, that we are our own worst enemies and our biggest enablers. And so when we're around other growth minded men, for example, or other men who are committed to self improvement and self betterment, there's this forced change or this forced recognition or acknowledgment that says, this is what I'm struggling with, this is how I'm hiding. These are my addictions. This is where I've fallen short, or where I'm currently falling short. And that's when the process of alchemy can actually happen. Right? That's when true transformation is possible. Only in that moment when we come into recognition of the truth, this is how I'm struggling, or this is where I'm struggling, or what I'm struggling with.

Jake Kauffman [00:35:57]:
Here's the felt impact of that. How is that affecting me in this moment? And then creating a breakthrough around it, healing around it so that I can move in a new direction and create.

Colette Brown [00:36:07]:
A new commitment and having like minded people around you in the process, how beautiful is that? Because I know, for example, being an entrepreneur, it's not the average mindset. And so I find that sharing thoughts with people that are not can often lead to a lot of negativity coming in, saying, why do you think like that? Why do you do that? So this put it over into life. And it's the same thing on steroids, I believe, because it's even harder when it's that personal narrative and story that you don't even know is there, that you're medicating and you don't know what to do with it. So where is your retreat?

Jake Kauffman [00:36:46]:
So this year, in June 5 through the 9th, it's in Zion National park, which is in southern Utah. Really beautiful experience, but yes, to speak more into what you just mentioned, the ego hates to be challenged, because the primary goal of the ego is to maintain the status quo, but the masculine grows specifically by being challenged. So men, because I say that because most men are inherently masculine, the vast majority of them, the best way to elicit and induce growth is to put them in an environment where challenge is forced upon them.

Colette Brown [00:37:21]:
And I would say, I don't have boys. I have two girls. But I would say, if you're a parent of a boy, enabling is disabling. It's in the biggest way. I've seen that through different situations in my family. And, wow, you've got to let boys be challenged and grow and not coddle too much loving was one thing, and coddling and enabling is a whole different story there.

Jake Kauffman [00:37:49]:
Yeah, you got to let them fail. Saving people doesn't save people. As you mentioned, it only enables them. And that's why this work that we're doing with men, especially on retreat, because there's so much time for us to work with men in these very intimate containers that it's experiencing a year's worth of growth in five days.

Colette Brown [00:38:09]:
Wow. And do you have a support system for them from when they leave and they're working through these things? Because I'm sure, like you said, it's a lifetime.

Jake Kauffman [00:38:19]:
Yeah. So all of our retreats actually come with a series of follow up calls for integration and application and accountability and support purposes. We don't just take them on this intensive, and then we're like, okay, great. Thank you for coming. We actually follow up with them over the course of the preceding several months, in fact, to ensure that all of the breakthroughs that they experience on the retreat are then integrated into their lives. So it produces new behaviors, which is the precursor to new results.

Colette Brown [00:38:52]:
And would you recommend father son duos or friends? Or do you believe that it's best to go solo and not have any history with you coming into it?

Jake Kauffman [00:39:02]:
So we likely will do this in the future, but we have yet to step into facilitating retreats for fathers and sons. There's been conversations within our company about doing that, but for now, I can see it happening in the future. But for now, we simply do retreats with men. The age limit is 18 or older, so we have men in their early twenty s all the way up to men in their 50s coming on these retreats, embracing the growth available or possible for them when they're on the retreat.

Colette Brown [00:39:33]:
I love the work that you're doing, Jake. Can you tell people how they can find your book, how they can find you, how they can find information about the retreat?

Jake Kauffman [00:39:44]:
So the best place to find the book is, as you can probably imagine on Amazon, it's let love in. The pain stops when the truth starts by Jacob Kaufman. So it's my full name, Kaufman. You can also connect with me on my website, which is awakewithjake.com. Otherwise, the best place to communicate with me is on Instagram. And my handle is I am Jakehoffman. Again, that's K-A-U-F-M-A-N. If you're interested in the retreat and you're listening to this recording, just shoot me a DM on Instagram.

Jake Kauffman [00:40:14]:
We're working on putting up a page that's linked to our profile on Instagram. But for the time being, just shoot me a message letting me know you're interested, and we'll send you over all the details.

Colette Brown [00:40:24]:
Beautiful. And one of the questions that I ask all my guests at the very end is, if this was the last message that you had to broadcast out to the world, what would it be?

Jake Kauffman [00:40:36]:
I would probably simply have people consider, if my greatest strength is a compensating strategy, what is my greatest strength for? I think you will find more potential growth available to you in the space of that question than almost anything else, at least in terms of awareness. Because awareness is just the first step. Then we need to actually integrate that awareness and implement behavior change in order for it to produce different results. But that is awareness. Increasing in conscious awareness is the first step in transformation.

Colette Brown [00:41:09]:
That's beautiful. There's been so many profound things here within our conversation and I really appreciate your time. What you're doing, how you're showing up, how you're sharing the journey that you've gone on in this lifetime to create the impact that you're making today. It's very meaningful and I really appreciate you. Is there anything else that you would like to share with us today?

Jake Kauffman [00:41:36]:
No. I appreciate you for having me on. This has been a lovely conversation and hopefully we can do it again.

Colette Brown [00:41:41]:
Very good. All right. Thank you so much, Jake and everyone else. Until next time, be well. You just finished another episode of limitless healing where we dive into all things wellness. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you would share it with your friends and family. Together we can plant seeds of hope that leads to transformation in our lives and the lives of those we love. Let's get healthy together.