Good Neighbor Podcast: Cooper City
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors of Cooper City
Good Neighbor Podcast: Cooper City
EP #316 - The Limitless Institute with Josh Magro
Have you ever wondered what makes transformational experiences actually stick? Most of us have had those lightning-bolt moments of clarity that feel life-changing, only to find ourselves slipping back into old patterns weeks later. In this profound conversation with Josh Magro, co-founder of The Limitless Institute, we explore what true, lasting transformation really requires.
Josh reveals the three essential ingredients missing from most personal development approaches: the emotional connection to our insights, the disciplined practice he calls "praxis," and the courage to implement immediate behavioral changes. Through his own compelling story of deciding he was "no longer the shy guy" after a workshop, then systematically taking every opportunity to be in the spotlight until that new identity became real, Josh demonstrates how transformation becomes embodied rather than merely intellectual.
The heart of our discussion centers around vulnerability—why it feels so dangerous and yet remains the doorway to our most authentic connections. "Vulnerability precedes trust," Josh explains, detailing how The Limitless Institute's programs create safe containers for people to drop their emotional armor. We explore how Camp Lionheart transformed my own teenage daughter in just one week, and Josh shares brilliant insights about nurturing that growth as parents without overwhelming our kids.
Perhaps most valuable for daily application is Josh's framework for emotional conversations: first validate feelings before offering solutions—a simple but revolutionary approach that transforms how we might interact with everyone from our children to our partners. His metaphor about monsters under the bed perfectly illustrates why logical explanations fall flat when emotions are running high.
This conversation isn't just theoretical—it's filled with practical wisdom about breaking free from limiting beliefs, catching yourself in negative self-talk, and building the emotional agility to navigate life's challenges. Whether you're a parent struggling with a teenager, someone on your own growth journey, or simply curious about deeper human connection, Josh's insights offer a roadmap to living more authentically and fully.
Visit TheLimitlessInstitute.com or call (321) 278-2098 to learn more about their workshops, teen camps, and coaching programs.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Jeremy Wolf.
Speaker 2:Well, hello, hello, friends, family, great community, wonderful universe. We are back and, as always, we are better than before, and I must say I am feeling incredibly grateful this morning. Our guest today is someone that I've known for many years now, and over the course of that time we've done quite a bit of work together and I've come to trust and respect him on such a deep level. He truly is a special human being. Many of you know that I have a teenage daughter. She just turned 13.
Speaker 2:And if you're a parent out there with a teen, you would know that these years can be formidable for both the teen and the parents, and our daughter is no different. We've been going through it. We've had quite a few challenges. When I heard that our guest had a camp specifically designed for teens around the work that he does, it was just a no-brainer. I was like sign her up, let's do this. And in just one short week's time, the differences that we saw in our daughter, I mean it's nothing short of profound. I mean we were truly blown away. So I felt it incumbent upon me to get the word out.
Speaker 2:People truly need to know about the work that is being done over at the Limitless Institute. So today I'm here with Josh Magro. He is the founder of the Limitless Institute and you know, josh, we don't see each other too often Heck, we don't really speak too often but I must say I consider you a brother for life and I am truly grateful to know you, brother. So thank you for your time, thank you for coming on the show. I am excited to get into this. Good to have you. Yeah, thank you, yes, okay. So, without further ado, for those out there that don't know the Limitless Institute, why don't we start there? What would you say? Your mission is in one sentence.
Speaker 3:Well, let me back up a little bit. So I'm one of the co-founders of the Limitless Institute. There's four of us that run it, so Denise McCarty, alicia Carrasco, my wife Michelle Magro and myself. The mission is actually a little challenging because we do everything. It's evolved over the last two decades.
Speaker 2:Okay, it doesn't have to be one sentence, just speak freely, my friend.
Speaker 3:The focus of it is it's personal empowerment, it's personal betterment, it's helping the world function in a more fully alive way. I think is the essence of what we try to go for, and all of our programs are lent to that direction of helping people feel completely and be whole and empowered people to live their lives. You know, in totality. You know chasing dreams, healing trauma, you know living more fully. For our teens, it's like giving them communication tools and leadership tools and the ability to actually like, leave fingerprints on the world that leave it better as opposed to worse. That's all of our programs. Everything that we ever do is always focused in that direction.
Speaker 2:Love it and somebody that's been through a lot of these programs, this stuff, as you're talking about it, I'm getting goosebumps and it resonates so much with me. But for those out there that aren't familiar, like I am, can you walk through a little bit about the different types of programs? I mentioned the camp, what are some of the other things? I know I've gone through the P3 program. You do a bunch of different things over there. Can you kind of walk us through the different types of programs that you have?
Speaker 3:Certainly, so P3, it stands for personal power and prosperity. That's sort of our flagship workshop. It's where everything kind of began. That workshop has been running for about 25 years now and it was sort of a spinoff of another workshop and it's just evolved over time. But the focus of it is learning emotional agility and being able to sort of review, edit and update the belief systems that we have about ourselves and about the world. So it's based on an Elyrian psychology and focuses a lot on the sort of templates that we create in early childhood and how they affect us moving forward. That workshop has been running for over two decades now.
Speaker 3:When I came on as a facilitator and then a co-owner of the organization, one of my experiences that I had when I was 18 was a camp. So I got to be a counselor at this camp. It was called Kids Camp Orlando at the time and it was sort of again very, very aligned with this idea of let's help people feel completely heal what's happened to them and move forward. And that camp stopped running for about 12 years. So when I became a co-owner I was like, look, this is something I want to bring back, this is something that I want. I want to rewrite the entire curriculum for it, update it and bring it back to Orlando. So that whole process of you know we named it Camp Lionheart. Bringing that back into the world was just massive. It was like giving our kids another opportunity to do this because of the P3 courses for adults.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of other things that we've done over the course of our organization. We've done retreats where we went to Colorado. We actually got to spend a month in Tuscany one time. We rented a villa, which was glorious. I highly recommend it. Tuscany is awesome. It was gorgeous. Yeah, so we do retreats that are all about like chasing your purpose and how to live more fully, and so forth. We've done a couples course. My wife and I facilitated a couples course to help people in their relationships.
Speaker 3:Currently, the other big thing that I've been working on is called the alchemy training, where I train people to be coaches and facilitators, to do kind of what I do. So helping either work one on one with people to help them navigate life's challenges and help them, sort of like, discover their own inner wisdom and figure out the solutions that they need, and then large group facilitation, which is God. That is my jam, the moment that there's more people in the space. Then you have the ability to attend to one-on-one, so you actually have to use the group energy for its own benefit. That's the stuff that I just love is helping communities come together, helping large groups of people sort of create this idea of communitas, where it's like there's this connection and there's this shared empathy and mutual benefit of everyone involved and there's a certain skillset associated with that. So we're currently doing our fourth year of alchemy training, where we're training facilitators how to kind of bring this sort of magic into the world and whatever flavor they choose.
Speaker 2:I love it, man. The fact that you're now training others to do what you do to help touch more people is just incredible, and this is something I was introduced to you by Brian, a mutual friend who's big in this space, and this just seems to be something that's also pulling me in this direction, to the orbit. This idea has had such a profound impact on my life when I started my spiritual and personal growth and development journey five or six years ago. It's something that has touched me so deeply that I feel like I'm inching closer and closer to being somebody that can facilitate. I'm just.
Speaker 2:I said earlier this year that I was going to start a local like men's group, like Brian did up in Orlando, down here and I. It's already August and I went for a run the other day and at the end of the run I said to myself whatever happened to the men's group? I never did it. I said, you know, I'm going to get it done. I reached out to some, some people and I got to get something going down here in South Florida, because the work that you're doing is just absolutely incredible and more people need to know about it. Truly, we throw the word transformation around a lot. Look, I have this manhood transformation t-shirt on from Brian's group. In your view, what does real transformation look like?
Speaker 3:I think, typically, what we think about when we talk about transformation is like the aha moment, the moment where it's like, oh my God, I never realized that I was a part of the universe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the light bulb goes off and it's like, oh my God, I'm forever changed. Exactly.
Speaker 3:I was always lovable and I was never deficient as a person, yeah, but for me that's only the first ingredient of transformation. Transformation has to have several different components to it. I have to be able to have the aha moment. I have to have a lot of emotion attached to that aha moment. Have to have a lot of emotion attached to that aha moment, like there has to be a lot of fuel for for the change. Because typically when we have the things that we struggle with old belief systems you know limitations, things of that nature there's a lot of negative, emotional, like negative, but like there's pain, there's suffering, there's hurt, there's trauma, the shame attached to it. If I'm going to have a new experience that is actually going to transform my life into a new trajectory, that also has to have a lot of emotion to it, because emotion is the gap. And then there's other things like follow through this idea we talk about it in our alchemy training this idea of praxis. I actually have to have disciplined behavior that moves this new thing forward. It's not enough to go to like a weekend workshop and be like whoa, I'm lovable and I feel it because I'm surrounded by all these people in the room who are telling me what a wonderful human being I am. What happens on Monday, when I go home and I wake up and I just do my normal same rhythms and I'm like running in the same steps that I normally do, that still perpetuate the old belief system? That's a core component of it and I think it's a piece that our society misses very often in the sense of like, yes, have the transformational experience, the aha moment and the big catharsis that comes with it, but then also, what am I going to do next? How will this translate into my life?
Speaker 3:I think a really good story for this for me. When I first took P3, I was like 23 or 24 years old. I first took this workshop and it was like life changing. It was all. It was transformational. And I left there and I'm like this is the brand new day. Old Josh is gone, new Josh is here and I don't know where I got this idea, but I said to myself up until this point in my life I've treated myself like I was the shy guy, that I was shy, I was introverted, I was just afraid of being seen. So when I left that workshop, I told myself I'm no longer the shy guy. That is not my fucking story. I'm done with this. I know who I'm going to be moving forward. That is not it. And I was like well, what will that mean in terms of behavior?
Speaker 3:So I made this agreement with myself of anytime there was an opportunity for me to be in the spotlight, anytime I was in school at the time. So anytime a teacher's like we need to volunteer, anytime there's anything like that, I just had this like already made decision of like I'm going to jump in. I'm not going to shy away from things, I'm not going to say no to opportunities to be in front of people. And then slowly like like I think it was like a month later I'm in like a counseling class and it's like the first day and they're like we need a volunteer for to be processed in front of the room, like a nightmare for anyone who has any sort of like like public speaking fear. Right, and I was like no, come and have a therapy session in front of 50 people. I was just like Yep, that's me, I'll do that. And I was like you're insane. I'm like probably, but like I didn't even have to think about it. It was like this is my new behavior.
Speaker 3:There was another situation where I was at. I was at a coffee shop with my then girlfriend, now wife, and it's like open mic night and the guy gets on the microphone and he's like, hey, the next two performers didn't show up. So does anyone know a song, does anyone have a poem? And I'm like I can do a Mitch Hedberg impression and they're like come on up and Michelle, my wife is.
Speaker 3:She was more nervous than I was. She's like what are you doing? This is a nightmare experience, like you're not prepared for this, and I'm like I don't care, I don't look whatever. And I think that's essential to transformation is like I actually have to now create a system of behavior that validates the very thing that I change, because if it's just existing in my head and in my mind, it's not going to stick, it's not going to change, and then it's really easy for us to go back and be like well, I guess that was just a cool weekend, but it didn't do anything.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's something that I've struggled with tremendously. I applaud your experience to have that aha moment and then actually have it sink into the point where you went back into and then actually have it sink into the point where you went back into society and said, fuck it, the gloves are off. I'm jumping in full force. Most people don't do that, myself included, and I think that these experiences, whether it's a powerful retreat, whether it's an experience with the medicine we work with, whatever it is, when you have these unbelievable moments, you get a glimpse into what things could be like. Right, you get to stick your head through the door and take a look around. You're like, wow, I didn't realize things could be quite this amazing. And then you go back to your regular nine to five job, whatever you're doing in life your family, your kids, the stresses, all this stuff and it slowly pulls you back and it pulls you away from the work that you know you need to be doing. And it's I think it's deeper than just I used to say to myself all the time oh, I got to do the work. After I have these experiences and like if somebody would ask me, what does that work look like to you. Oh, you know it's. It's the meditation every day, the journaling, the breath, work, gratitude, all this stuff, and that's part of the work. But those are just tools and those tools are what really allows us to kind of rewrite the programs in our mind and the stories that we've told ourselves for many, many years.
Speaker 2:For me, going back decades, that feed for me into these feelings of lack of worth and I'm not good enough and all this crap. And they say old habits die hard. Well, old programs die harder. And really kind of like coming to the precipice on that now, through this work and the level of awareness that I have around these things, like I'm catching things now, josh, in the moment, like if I, if I say to myself, oh, what's wrong with you If I do something stupid, like instantly, I'm like stopping myself mid thought. Nope, I don't talk to myself like that, there's nothing wrong with me, um, and it's just it's. It's. It's like the snowball effect keeps getting better and better and better and I feel, like I said earlier, I'm being pulled into my purpose through this work. So it's truly been incredible experience. I've used that word several times now, but it really is.
Speaker 3:And I love that. I love that example too, because I hear people talk about this a lot like as a therapist when I'm working with people this idea of like, but I just I just do it, I just do the old behavior and I just follow those patterns because they die hard right, and this idea of like I'm catching myself in the moment. I think the first step that usually happens for people is that I catch myself two days after I did the behavior and I'm like damn it Like I did it again.
Speaker 3:And then the more that we really dial into this and hold ourselves accountable to it. It's like, well, I catch myself two days later. Well, now, I catch myself a day later. Well, now, I catch myself. An hour after it happened, I realized, god, I feel awful and I, oh, I damn it, I did the same thing again. And it gets to a point where I catch it as it's happening and I'm like, nope, about to do the thing that I always do and I'm going to do something different and that's the incremental change that that is actually attainable. Like it's a lot to say, like, and I'm just gonna never do that again and I'm going to be this brand new person. It's like that sounds great.
Speaker 2:But and we all do that, we all say that all the time and then we fall back yeah, so, so yeah, and something happened the other day which extended beyond me and I thought this was pretty profound as well. Uh, where I'm sitting at the desk and I did something I can't even remember what it was. I did something and I and that thought came in my. I was walking to the kitchen and I said to myself what's wrong with you? And I caught it. I said nope, and I asked myself a lot of times, when I speak to myself like that, would I talk to my family that way, my people I love? I said, would I talk to my son that way? And in that moment it dawned on me that I've actually said those words to my son before. When he did something wrong, I'd say like, dude, what's wrong with you? And granted, I'm kind of saying it a little bit in jest, but no, I'm literally programming his mind to be like I was for all these years. And I caught myself and I went and I sat down with him and I had a conversation around it and I talked to him from the heart about my experience, and it's those types of lessons that I'm learning, that I'm trying to instill upon my kids to right some of the wrongs that I've done over the years, cause we're we're obviously not perfect. Parenting is hard and we're going to get frustrated sometimes, but, man, when I lose it, I calm myself down. Now, at the worst, within a minute or two, whereas before, like you mentioned, I'll get aggravated. It would wreck my whole day, sometimes my whole week. I'd be a disaster over some stupid nonsense. That happened no more. No more, brother. That's beautiful.
Speaker 2:I want to talk a little bit about the camp, because this is this is something that I knew. I knew deep down inside when we decided to send my daughter there that this was going to be great for her, but part of me was also thinking what if she doesn't like it? Because I know it's not all fun and games. There's a lot of work that you do at the camp with these teens and I said no, trust, have trust, have faith. I know this is going to be the best thing for her and I told everybody that, and it was like in the past I used to. If I told somebody about the camp, I would say, yeah, it's going to be great, but you know, if it's not, we'll do this, and I found myself not saying that there was no caveat. It was like this is going to be the best thing for her. I know it. This is how it is.
Speaker 2:And she got there and there was some resistance. After the first day she communicated back with me. She wasn't thrilled initially but, man, some of the text messages that I got from her along the way, some of the feedback that I heard, was just like my wife, I didn't get to go pick her up, but my wife came to pick her up. She said that some of the campers shared their experience and I was told that Emma kind of shared the experience that she had. She was one of the first ones to kind of raise her hand up and talk about the experience she had and just to see that kind of it's almost like she found herself. Right, she had gotten away from herself and in just one short week she found herself.
Speaker 2:That being said, what we just talked about, right, one week doesn't cure all. It's a lifelong journey. What are some of the things that I can do as a parent now, having gone through that experience, to work with her, walking away from that experience, where I'm not like micromanager. I'm letting her figure it out herself, but I'm there to kind of guide her further down this path because I don't want to overwhelm her. Right, that's how we, that's how we ruin things. Kids have a great experience and then you put too much pressure on them and then they burn out. They don't want to do it anymore. So I'm cognizant of that, but I'm so excited for her.
Speaker 3:Right, like, how do I walk that line? That's a really good question. My initial feeling with things like this is that it has to be led by the kid, and that's kind of like our, our, our energy at camp as well, is very much about autonomy and agency. Like, you are the leader of your life, you get to take ownership and authorship of your process, so we can offer things, and you also have the right to say no, I don't want to do this exercise or I don't want to process this emotion or whatever the case may be. So when kids go home, the best thing we can be doing to sort of nurture that same process along is are you willing to tell me, like, what you got out of this experience?
Speaker 3:And then whatever she's able to say like well, you know, it was really amazing to feel like I could actually like share my ideas and my ideas were welcomed by those around me, and I was, like, is there any place where I'm not doing that lately as a parent? Is there any place where I might be contributing to this idea of like that your ideas aren't welcome, you know? Is that okay that you call me out on that? I would really like to know where I might be doing that and where I might be like stopping that process. Or you know, what sort of ideas have you not shared lately? You know just to like grab that thread and pull it a little bit further and see if she's willing to go with you.
Speaker 3:So she starts the energy, she starts the process, she starts the conversation of like, yeah, this is something I got from camp, or this is a big change that I'm noticing, that I really liked and it's like great. How can we nurture that? How can I keep going with that in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming? But also make sure that I keep this year of your life to look different.
Speaker 2:Good stuff. Yeah, I've noticed that with her. When I truly engage her, I forget. As parents, we forget that our kids are independent agents. We think they should just do what we say. They have a hard time listening to us and what I've found is, if I can get in there and ask some some really question really good questions and and really show interest in what she's doing in her life, she tends to open up. So that's been really useful for me. Rather than just telling her things because you could tell her, you could tell somebody all you want, but you know if they're not listening, it doesn't doesn't do much good well, and this is the, I think, the the flaw of most human communication.
Speaker 3:It's very true with with teenagers especially, because I mean this reason why we work with 13 to 17 is that that's around the time that the prefrontal cortex starts getting developed and you're like I don't have to listen to you, you're not the boss, like all that autonomy starts bubbling up. So it's those moments where we want to nurture that Like okay, you're becoming your own person, you're making your own decisions. Let's see if we can help you make really good decisions and ones that align with who you are. But the biggest issue with communication and human beings, I think, if I had to boil everything down of conflict resolution and ways in which we talk to each other, it all boils down to when there is an emotion present in a conversation. We need two sort of things or steps, and the first one is we need to be emotionally attended to, I need to be empathized with, I need to be validated for what I'm feeling. I need to be acknowledged and given space, enough space to be able to feel all the layers of what that emotional experience is. And then I need, second, accurate information, problem solving, like the logical stuff, and I need them in that order. And so often what we, what we do, I think, is we try to do the a lot like accurate information, problem-solving, the logical talk and we skip over the emotional piece and people can't hear that when there's an emotion present, because emotions are not logical, they're, they're deeply irrational, but they feel real, they feel like our entire experience and like the metaphor I like to use for this is like if you go into a kid's like the kid like wakes up, they're crying, they're like I can't go to sleep. And like you go into their bedroom and you're like what's, what's going on, sweetie? Like there's monsters under the bed and I'm pretty sure there's one in the closet and we need to turn the lights on. Is hey, bud, monsters don't exist. And, by the way, if they did, you think light is going to stop them? We are screwed. If monsters exist, you think I don't have any weapons in the house. What are we going to do? We're screwed.
Speaker 3:Accurate information it's like hey, this doesn't exist, you're being ridiculous. Go to sleep and what's the likelihood of that kid Just like, oh, thanks, dad, appreciate it, it's the error of my ways, flick, you know, but we have to attend to the emotion. It's like look, yeah, you're scared. I know this is like the first week that you're sleeping in your own bed and it's hard to get used to and it's dark and it's scary and this house has a lot of sounds. You know what? I'm going to check under the bed. Let's check with me, okay, like, let's go to the bed, let's look in the closet. You know what I'm going to keep a nightlight on and I just want you to know. Also, I would never let anything happen to you. I lock the doors, I make sure that our house is safe. I'm never going to let anything happen to it. It's okay to be scared. It makes perfect sense. Sometimes I can't even get to sleep and I'm an adult. It's like bonding with them, connecting with that emotional experience Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's almost like you're diffusing the emotional charge and building trust with. That was such a great analogy. I love that You're so good at communicating, josh. See, this is why you're so good at what you do. I got my job, you got yours. Well, look, I'm supposed to be communicating with people. I should be a killer communicator.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I've come to learn as I get older I've come to realize that many of the beliefs that I've held for my whole life are not accurate, things that going back 10 years ago, I would have died on the sword over right, I would have argued to the to the ends of time, and it turned out that I was just dead wrong on that belief.
Speaker 2:So I've kind of applied that to how I deal with other people, because when somebody comes at you with a belief that they have, you have to understand that they're coming from their own perspective and that's something that there's a reason why they arrived at that belief, and my goal is always to try to understand the lens that they're seeing things through, to find out why they look at things that way, to see where we have common ground, and then, who knows, maybe my view is wrong, and I've been more and more open to that and I think that's done wonders in my own life and it's something that I'm very, very pleased to be at that state right now, I must say.
Speaker 3:It's a profound shift, what you're talking about, because most people respond to differences of opinion with judgment.
Speaker 2:It's a trigger right. You get somebody that disagrees with you or something and you feel the emotion is palpable. It comes up and your first reaction to that is you have to defend yourself. Yes, the claws come out.
Speaker 3:This is actually a mark of intelligence.
Speaker 3:I can't remember who originally said this, but it's a mark of intelligence to be able to hold two opposing worldviews in your mind simultaneously that I can have my worldview and how I see things, what I know to be right and true, no matter what, and someone else's that is potentially conflicting with my worldview, and that I can have enough mental space, real estate that I can hold both of those simultaneously without them actually combating one another. That is a mark of intelligence that I can understand that your worldview is completely different than my own and I respond with curiosity and I would like to understand it even more. Tell me what it's like in your world. It's different from my own, but that's okay.
Speaker 3:I want to know what it's like to be you. I want to know what it's like to look through your eyes and the lens that you see the world through, and it's a. It's a profound space of being able to navigate conflict and it's the source of like. Where so many misunderstandings happen is because we don't just have that level of curiosity of like. Wow, so you feel like you're all alone in the world and no one understands you. Tell me more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a wonderful training exercise as well to do just what you said, right To straw man and steel man arguments, right when you take a position that it's opposing what you believe in, and you really have a discussion to support the position that you don't believe in. It really kind of sharpens the knife, if you will, in your mind and again you learn things about your own perspective through doing that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Good stuff. We actually did this in our couples course, my wife and I. It was one of the exercises we included and we originally weren't going to, but we were having an argument in front of our two co-owners. We're at their house and we're having this argument and as we're like going through our triggers and I'm feeling all this kind of stuff and we're navigating it, eventually our conversation shifts to where we were both arguing for the other person's position. It just sort of naturally happened where I'm like I'm arguing for how I feel and I don't like this and I'm triggered and all this kind of stuff. And eventually it got to the point where I'm like well, it makes sense that you said that, because I know, I know you really care about this thing, and like we started switching positions and so we incorporated this into the couples course of the steel man argument and and what it's like.
Speaker 3:We basically set up the whole thing where it's like pick a really big topic that you feel like a lot of trigger around in your relationship, and then we flipped it and we're like now argue for your partner's side of it, and the phrase that we use was, of course, over and over again, like, of course you feel angry with me because I didn't listen to what you like. You made this request before time and time again and I didn't acknowledge it and I just kind of negated it and that must've made you feel like I didn't respect you and I didn't care. I mean, of course you wouldn't feel respected. I mean, look at how I behaved. It's just taking the other person's side completely and making their argument even stronger. Yeah, and I'm still. I still marvel at like how quickly that dissipates conflict, because it's it's causing us to say, you know what, my worldview maybe not that important right now, let me hold yours in really high esteem view.
Speaker 2:maybe not that important right now, let me hold yours in really high esteem, yep, something else that I found the other day.
Speaker 2:I was talking to my wife about something.
Speaker 2:I won't get into the nitty gritty of the details of the conversation, but she, she said something that I totally misinterpreted and, based upon my interpretation of what she said, I said what was logical to respond to, but because I had misconstrued her meaning, it didn't land very well and it almost turned into an argument over the thing.
Speaker 2:Got to the end of the argument, if you will, much like the experience that you had, we realized that we were actually both in agreement the entire time, and what sent us astray was the fact that I simply misinterpreted the first thing that she said to me, and had I clarified that and made sure of what she said, it would have avoided the whole exchange. So I thought it was interesting and I figured how many times have I gotten into a heated argument with my wife where we actually agreed on the end result? Probably more often than not, probably. Okay, so I know it can be difficult. Okay, so I know it can be difficult holding space for people, right, when you're doing this for lots of people, how do you stay grounded yourself?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. I think for me, a lot of it goes into preparation beforehand. Mm-hmm, I think for me a lot of it goes into preparation beforehand. Interestingly enough, before P3 workshop, one of my rituals in terms of getting ready for those workshops is that I need to connect with something that elicits tears on my face, like I need to cry, I need to actually like I don't know. I almost consider it like emotional stretching in some ways and it seems almost kind of counterintuitive. I'm like, well, that's not very grounded to like be in your emotion, but for me it almost feels like it, like it lubes up the dial a little bit so that my ability to access my emotion is more flexible, it's less rigid and that allows me to kind of attune to the room and what other people are feeling in a way that doesn't feel like it hijacks me, it doesn't like hook me where there's unprocessed stuff that I'm feeling. That gets triggered by the room, by the people that I'm with, and I think that's the core of it is.
Speaker 3:I hear a lot of people talk about being an empath and like taking on other people's stuff, and I have a sort of love-hate relationship with that term. I think, by the way that most people define it. I too am an empath, but I would never really like, wouldn't want to like carry that badge necessarily because I also feel like I'm responsible for my emotional experience. Badge necessarily because I also feel like I'm responsible for my emotional experience and the parts of me that can empathize with other are parts that exist in me. Like if you started expressing anger or frustration or sadness right now and I felt that that's a reaction that's happening in me, it's not like I'm feeling your emotion, I'm feeling a response to it. So, either, if you're feeling sadness and I start feeling sad, you're reminding me of grief that I have, you're reminding me of the sadness that I possess within me. If you get angry and I start feeling angry, then that's also mine.
Speaker 3:If you get angry and I react by feeling like you're not allowed to yell at me, it's like, well, that's an old trigger of mine. Then it's like, well, that's an old trigger of mine, that's like, well, my dad used to yell, so I need to defend myself, or I feel like I'm in danger, or something like that. But all of those reactions, all of those responses, are mine. So for me, it's about having this mindset of what, what is my shit, what is your shit.
Speaker 3:Like when we go to the grocery store and you put all your shit on the conveyor belt and you like slap that bar down and you like, like, look at the person behind you, like this is my shit, that is your shit, that bar, that bar is a pillar of society that holds everything together. Because, like, if you think about the way that we go about emotional process sometimes we don't have that. We don't have that separation of what's what's mine and what is yours. And if we commingled it all, you know what I'll get. Your groceries too. I don't know what are you getting? Milk? Half and half, I'll throw it in, it's fine.
Speaker 3:I'll get you next time, whatever you know, it starts to get a bit like blurred and enmeshed as opposed to okay, I can feel that you're feeling something and I also I'm. I'm sensing something inside of me is waking up and if I could be attentive to that, if I can really tune into that. It doesn't feel like something that is hijacking me. It doesn't feel like something that's getting in the way. It just becomes another part of my work. And so often I find, like my wife will say, like I come home from my like my one-on-one sessions, especially if I'm working with couples I'll come home and I'll talk to her and I'll be like babe, I need to apologize to you for something I did seven years ago, cause I saw it play out in a couple in front of me and I heard that.
Speaker 3:I'm like oh my God, I used to say that and I used to do that, and I'm like new awareness. It woke something up in me and then I need to process it. I think that is the primary skill of every facilitator is that your own work has to be up to date. We don't have to be enlightened, that's ridiculous but I have to be up to date. I don't need to have a lot of past stuff that I'm still towing behind me because inevitably it's going to get triggered by the people I'm working with.
Speaker 2:Have you ever doubted the work and if so, what brought you back?
Speaker 3:Oh, I doubted all the time. I was in the alchemy training this past weekend and I think it was on the second day I was, like I'm sitting here right now wondering if this isn't all bullshit. I have two sort of responses to that. One is I think part of that is a part of the imposter syndrome which is like there's a study called the Dunning-Kruger effect which shows, like the difference between, like confidence and competency, and we all navigate these like big peaks and valleys of like I feel like I got this, I feel like I understand it, and then like I don't know shit. There's so much more to understand about this and I'm just like a little tadpole in the pond. Um, I'm just ineffectual, just this stripped tooth, toothless cog in the working machine of society.
Speaker 3:The other side of this, too, is like is this all bullshit? Is this not right? Is a part of me that is skeptical for the sake of integrity? Like I have a part of me that really wants to make sure that I'm doing things in a way that actually helps people and I want to make sure that I don't fall victim to my own ego and my own confirmation you know, confirmation bias of like. Well, this is the model that I created and this is the workshop as I see fit, so it has to be right.
Speaker 3:Like there's a little part of me that's like are you sure you're not full of shit?
Speaker 3:Let's check our work one more time, let's go back and let's assess and let's get feedback to make sure that we're not doing this awful thing of like just believing our own sort of myth and and and believing the hype in some way, or just constantly like ignoring actual feedback and saying, nope, I know it's good and I'm not going to hear anything about it.
Speaker 3:So I I balance myself between those two of feeling some self-doubt and always kind of like I don't know if I'm good at this. It's like Josh, you've been doing this for like 20 years. Like yeah, I don't know, but maybe I can be better. And it's like there's that old part of it you know some of my belief systems. But then there's another part of it that it's like I know I want to make sure with some degree of certainty that what I'm doing feels right and I'm willing to accept feedback. I'm willing to even rake myself over the coals sometimes just to make sure that there isn't something I can improve and some way in which I can strive for just an incremental level of better mastery of this stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so people have a level of resistance to this work and I could say that throughout some of the work that we've done together, I mean I've never laughed harder, never cried harder, never raged harder, like all these motions that are kind of pent up and stuck within us. People have, like it's this thing with the ego right, like as a man like you, you can't cry, you can't show your emotions. Um then people have this, this resistance to that. But through doing the work, like for P3, for example, when I went to do the P3, I remember coming in there and, like you know, sitting down in this room, people and all these judgments came up and I'm like what is this, what are we doing?
Speaker 2:Then we got into some of the work. I'm like what am I doing here? What is this thing? And by the end of that experience I felt like I had shed so much negative emotion that I had stuck within me to my core. By just getting it out there with this seemingly random group of people, right, these strangers, I left the group with such a deep connection. It's not dissimilar to the retreats that we do with the medicine and everything that we work with. Why do you feel it is that people have such a resistance to vulnerability?
Speaker 3:I think, at its core, vulnerability feels. Actually, it doesn't even just feel this way. Vulnerability is dangerous. Yeah, like most of the, the ways in which, like the mechanisms that we've built up around ourselves in terms of our personality and our habits and the way that we operate, especially with emotion, these are protections. There are pieces of armor that we picked up along the way because we needed to like.
Speaker 3:For me as a, as a child, I I completely shut myself down from my emotions, and the reason was pretty simple. It's like one I got made fun of constantly when I was like really young, for having emotion like this was just like bullied out of me, and my father was extremely like stoic and not in like the cool philosophical way, but like shut down emotionally, had no like real affect other than anger sometimes. So I built up this like layer of of, like this armor, this, this suit of metal around me that said don't feel anything, don't be affected by the outside world, because if I do, I'll be, I'll be just like putting a target on my back. People are going to make fun of me, people are going to take advantage of me. They're going to, you know, exploit whatever those emotions are or demean my like personal integrity in some way, like there was a lot of reasons not to feel emotion. So when I started doing this work in real like the deep emotional catharsis kind of work, it was still kind of terrifying, because if I drop all the armor, I'm basically leaving myself defenseless. Yes, that's where the healing occurs, right, that's the idea of like molting the lobster shell and like you have to go hide behind a rock until you regrow the next one the lobster shell and like you have to go hide behind a rock until you regrow the next one. It's like we do that because we're growing and we need to shift into something else and the discomfort is the indication that that growth needs to happen. But it's still scary as shit. And every single p3, every single time we go through that process, I hear someone say something to this effect of like this is, like this is, this is really uncomfortable, this is terrifying. Why do we have to do this?
Speaker 3:My personal favorite actually is when people say, like well, if I feel my feelings completely, I'll be weak, and I always like to check this out every time this happens in one of the workshops when someone says this, because this is like a limiting belief. It's something that says this is an invisible rule I have to play by in order to be safe in the world. If I feel my emotions completely, I'll be weak. I usually check in with the room and when we do the p3 workshops, sometimes there's like 90 people in the room and I'll say how many people raise your hand, how many people feel that same thing, that if you expressed your emotions completely, that would be some form of weakness. Almost every hand goes up and then I'll, usually because by this point in the workshop someone would have been vulnerable, right. So I'll say so. When jan was expressing her feelings, how many of us thought jan is being really weak right now?
Speaker 1:not a single hand nobody.
Speaker 3:I was like, why not? It's amazing what we attribute to others in the why, why the incongruence? Like, if I'm going to be weak, why wasn't she, you know? And it's like, well, that was courageous. And it's like, why is she allowed to do that and not you? And it's like, well, it's courageous because it's brave, because it's actually saying there's a danger in this and I'm going to do it anyways and we actually admire it.
Speaker 3:So finding these incongruencies is part of the breaking down, the resistance of this idea of like, oh, I, actually I'm not super congruent on this idea. I think if other people were to do it, it'd be really amazing and I really want that for them and there's some part of my soul that just yearns for the integration of an emotional person. But for me it feels terrifying and I think there's wisdom in that sense that, like every single time we stretch, every single time we open ourselves up and we get vulnerable and we try to be more authentic, some better version of ourselves, we shed that skin over and over and over again. It's going to feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:I have not seen a version of this that's just licked on by kittens. It's not delightful, it's not enjoyable, it sucks. Every time I've been doing this for a long time it still sucks. It still feels like okay, I'm going to say the thing that feels real and I hope nobody stones me to death about it.
Speaker 2:And the fact that it sucks is the sign that it's useful and the work you're doing is meaningful. And that's truly where the magic resides is when you let go of expectation, you open up, you become vulnerable, you become authentic, and that is what resonates with people. Recently I went to a guitar workshop in Nashville. I've been playing the guitar off and on for my whole life and I've always had a hard time playing in front of people and God forbid, I had to actually sing in front of an audience. And during that workshop I went up on stage and, you know, in front of 60 people or so plugged in, and sang a song from the heart and it was so moving and so powerful and it's something that, you know, looking back, just a couple of years ago I would have never even thought I would have the courage to get up and do, and it's something that I've been missing for so long and I'm so happy to be in this place where I'm at right now.
Speaker 3:Man, it's just and I remember seeing the video for that like there's something so profoundly beautiful about people entering into who they authentically really are in a courageous way, in a vulnerable way, like when you're talking about, like leaving the workshop and feeling so connected to people.
Speaker 3:I really believe that vulnerability precedes trust, that when we get vulnerable and we take the risk of showing up completely, that builds trust in others. We're like, wow, you're willing to drop the sword and drop the shield Maybe I can too and people bond together in moments like that in a way that is unlike anything, like what you were saying earlier. It's like we haven't had a whole lot of experiences together, but I would die for you, and there's this profound sense of like no, we've emotionally gone to war together. We know the depths of our souls and there's just nothing that will ever eradicate that. It's a beautiful thing, and I think the thing that I love most about the work that I get to do is seeing that communities can come together, that we can put our differences aside and still deeply love and support, and in a way that just feels more authentic, more real.
Speaker 2:Yep, a hundred percent man. Okay, so we're going to have to leave it at that. We could go on for the for her quite some time on these topics. This is all very, very useful, very powerful stuff for anyone that's listening out there that would like to learn more. What's the best way to do that? Maybe share your website, your contact information. Let our listeners know how we can connect with you, josh.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the Limitless Institutecom is our website, and we're on social media and so forth as well. We have workshops that take place all over the place. We have online groups that are happening right now for people who are not in Central Florida, and we're willing to travel too. So we've had a lot of opportunities to do this kind of stuff all over. So if there's a workshop or experience that we're not doing yet, I'm always open to ideas. So perfect.
Speaker 2:We will, of course, drop a link down in the description below to all of your contact information Anyone out there listening. If you found this conversation useful, don't forget to like subscribe all that fun stuff. If you've had your own experiences with personal growth, development, spirituality, whatever that looks like, let us know about it in the comments. We're always open to hear about your feedback. Josh, truly, brother, my hat is off to you. Continue doing what you're doing. You are truly making an impact in this world and I appreciate you, brother. Thanks for joining us, thank you.
Speaker 2:Amen, all right. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We will catch you all next time. Everyone, take care and stay blessed out there. We only have this one life to live. Let's make sure we live it to the fullest. Everyone, take care.
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