The Healthier Home Studio Podcast

There and Back Again. Featuring Kevin Winebarger.

• Chris Graham • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Chris Graham:

Why am I making a business podcast for people that work in and around recording studios? You don't need to listen to my previous podcast for this podcast to make sense. But you do need to understand the context. I was on this business podcast for people that work in and around recording studios, creative freelancers. We had a bad breakup. I left the show. I started focusing on advocacy at the Ohio State House. And I started doing that because I had gotten into therapy and had found out that when I was a kid, I had been an altar boy, yada, yada, yada priest shit. And I decided to come forward to go public, and when I came forward, I found out that Ohio has the worst laws in the country. The detective I filed my police report with he found a witness who saw this priest chasing me after this thing that I'd remembered happening. When he told me there's a witness, but case closed, has the worst laws in the country. I did a thing. And when I came forward, the reporter was asking me questions And at one point we're talking about Ohio having the worst laws, and I just sort of burst out and said, I'm gonna change these fucking laws. And she made that the headline and that was the front page. And I'm partway there. I've changed a couple laws, And I did that by taking what I learned as a producer and learning how to get people on board with a creative vision. And I started just showing up at the Ohio State House with my producer hat on my coaching hat, so to speak, and, um, started recruiting legislators to make laws. I, I have this background in business coaching. I've worked with I Grammy and Tony winners. And I'm, man, I'm having this realization that the stuff that I taught on the six figure home studio 99.9% of that is all transferable skills that you can use in other places for other things, including changing the laws in a state where every legislator that I met with had told me it would be impossible. Except for one. Shout out to you, Senator Antonio. So I've been going to the Ohio State House and just pitching, doing the same thing you would do as a producer as a producer, an awful lot of your job is to cast a creative vision and to get people on board with it. And so that's what I did at the Ohio State House. As I was gonna the, the Ohio State House, all of these survivors of this stuff started reaching out to me. And at one point there was an episode of the six Figure Home Studio podcast that no joke came to me in a dream this episode about Steve Jobs and pivoting. This episode came to me and it was like, this is the pitch, that you're gonna use to change your first law. And I went to the Ohio State House. I made the pitch, to representative Sites, who was like the dude you had to convince. He was like the one man log jam is what they call him. He's fascinating. He's a really interesting guy. And, I got the Scouts Honor Law off the Ground. And what the scouts honor law did is survivors of Boy Scouts here in Ohio were gonna lose up to 70% of their bankruptcy settlement. because what had happened to them, had happened in Ohio, one of the worst states in the nation for it to happen in. because we have one of the shortest statute of limitations for these sorts of crimes in the developed world. I And I used this episode for a pitch to start changing these laws, And when I made this pitch, I got all the right people on board and I began to produce this legislation and yada, yada yada. It became the law in Ohio. It recaptured hundreds of millions of dollars of justice for survivors of Boy Scouts And then Indiana, the state of Indiana, saw what we did and copied it. And then the state of Alabama saw what we did and copied it. That's thousands of guys. That's thousands of guys that were on the wrong side of a statute of limitation that I used my producers, I used the techniques that I used to teach on the six figure home studio to build a coalition of legislators, advocates, survivors of Boy Scouts here in Ohio to accomplish this impossible thing to do. And once we got The Scout's Honor law passed by the Ohio House Senate, and then signed by the governor, we ended up passing another even more important law. You see... here in Ohio. It's totally legal for a husband to rape his wife but I got to help change that law too. And that law had been in the works for 40 years. There had been generation after generation of legislators that tried to change it. I got to be, one of the people holding the hammer that put the nail in the coffin on this stupid ridiculous bullshit law that the rest of the developed world passed years ago. Great Britain passed that law like 35 years ago. one of the things that was really heavy for me, through this process as I'm watching these skills that I learned in the studio blossom into ridiculous change, absurd change. And I'm realizing that though, a lot of the stuff I taught on the six figure room studio worked in the State House, there's quite a bit of stuff that I taught that I don't agree with anymore. And this creates an awkward situation because virtual me from 4, 5, 6 years ago, is still out there on that podcast promoting ideas that I no longer agree with. And that's awkward because, my old podcast host and I, Brian, we don't talk anymore and I think part of the realization I've also had is that the healthiest version of me, the very healthiest version of me, is in a recording studio. I'm making records. I'm writing, I'm playing my guitar, I'm making the music for this podcast, I'm recording this podcast. I'm doing things where I'm creating, and I'm understanding that the path forward for me is a balance between working in and around recording studios and volunteering in and around state houses. I'm gonna do both that's what this podcast is about. I have so much stuff that I need to reteach. Well unteach from the six Figure Home Studio, I've learned a lot about statecraft and really a great producer is an expert in statecraft, whether they know it or not. I know that our industry, that people that work in and around recording studios have super powers. That outshine every other industry on this planet because music on a daily basis changes the world and the music that's changing the world gets recorded in recording studios it. It is a place of alchemy where lead is turned into gold, and people transmute their trauma into beauty. I am convinced that the key to at least 80% of the change that we need here in this world starts in a recording studio, and that means teaching people about making a vibrant, healthy kick-ass living, doing what they love in the studio, but also doing it in the healthiest way possible, because here's the crux; when I got into therapy and I started going to yoga and I started meditating and I started to heal. When I started doing all of these things, I had a realization. And the realization is that when you work on yourself instead of for yourself, it makes everything easier. going to therapy is performance enhancing, meditating, is performance enhancing, yoga is performance enhancing, but there's a learning curve. It takes a bit for it to kick in. and if you go full blast into maxing out your mental health, magic fucking happens. Guys, I've been instrumental in making laws in Ohio, Indiana, and Alabama, and I did it in my free time, a few hours a week. It was just recording studio shit. It was just like producing a recording session. okay, I'm sitting with the vocalist, we're recording. I wanna get this vocalist to step into deeper waters, to lean into the fullness and trueness of who they truly are, and to let that shit out while my little red light blinks on my computer. And then I'll have'em do that a few times and I'll comp it together. It's not that much different from going to the state house, figuring out the legislator that you wanna work with and saying, Hey, think we should make a law together. I think this would change your legacy, and I think this is what you were made for. I think this is your hit song. What do you think? I'm still wrapping my mind around this. I have to set the record straight now that I have grown, now that I know better and can do better, I get to teach you guys what I've learned. And so I'm back. This is the healthier home studio. And so Kevin, let, let's talk about this. Um, but first let's share a little bit of context of like how we know each other, what your business is, and how we started working together and how I started being your business coach.

Kevin:

Rewinding way back for me so I was a music pastor at a church for about eight years. the time I was dealing with anxiety and depression and was just in a really rough place. I had some musical talent at that point, but I didn't know anything about business and I definitely was super insecure about starting something And I saw a random ad. On Facebook, and it was, I think for a blog about the Six Figure Home Studio I was listening to this podcast every week and just working in my room while we leaned on my wife's income and lost a lot of money and just had a bunch of dreams and hard work and was just gonna go for it. And years later, I'm now an award-winning producer I've written number ones, I've won awards, And I've helped hundreds of artists market their music the irony in growth is that sometimes you actually have to cut back on things to say yes to stuff. And so this is actually when I started meeting Chris. I had worked with a different business coach who absolutely changed my life. And one of my favorite things he taught me is that a sign of growth isn't the elimination of your problems, it's actually trading your current problems for bigger and better problems. And I was in bigger and better problems. And so I ended up talking with Chris and he coined something that he called pivot pressure. And I'm sure a lot of you that are listening to this feel some of that right now thinking, how am I gonna move forward with what I have going on? I feel like I have too much going on.

Chris Graham:

To talk about pivot pressure for just a minute, I think for a lot of people listening, they sensed this call that it is time to do a new thing. You were right there. You knew you had to change what you were doing and your health, everything in your life really depended on it. You were thriving to death, right?

Kevin:

Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. I had grown so much that I was working, about 65 hours a week I'd gained 25 pounds. I was just working an average of at least three nights a week past midnight. It was crazy. And I ironically, I used the gratitude of how awesome the circumstance was to mask the fact that I wasn't caring for myself for the long term. And so I was just like, I'll just buckle through and work through this.

Chris Graham:

Once you start to learn about the art of business and how to keep your clients happy and coming back and how to find more clients how to make more dollars per hour for each hour of time that you invest in the studio, as you start to learn and wrap your mind around that, it's easy to get so focused on the business side of things that you ignore the soul craft and you ignore your own health and you ignore your relationships. And so Kevin, as I have healed and grown, it has pained me, to remember the man that I was. I look back at the man that I used to be before I got into therapy and before, I found my voice. I look back at that guy and he was operating at a place of so much pain and I was compensating in so many ways. And it just, it made my relationship with with Brian, with my last cohost, a challenge. But not only that, it made my relationship with everybody in my life a challenge. And so I'm coming back to you guys on the other side of, I'm divorced now, and I used to talk about my ex all the time on my last show and about how to be a good husband and, all of this stuff that I look back at now and I'm like, whoa, my life before, it feels like it was just a dream. And it's a really weird feeling. as I'm learning more about what does it look like to move forward in my own life, one of the things that I have to do for people that work in and around recording studios, the stuff I've got to teach you guys, it's not just gonna change your business, it's gonna change your life, and It's gonna make it much more likely that your art is going out there and having an impact on people and changing their lives. I want to help people wield the power of a recording studio to the greatest effect possible.

Kevin:

It's interesting because what you were doing in those early days in your studio is giving people their voice. You are actually empowering them and now your advocacy work is for people who don't have a voice at the table. what you were saying earlier about transferable skills, that's part of why there's so much skill and favor and passion there, because really in some ways it's the same thing. And in many ways, the six figure home studio, the six figure creative, The reality is when you scale your business, you scale your strengths and your weaknesses. You scale all of the good things and the bad things about it at the same time, it inflates it all. And then you have to deal with things on a higher. Capacity, and it's really important that you do this in community. So many studios, whether they're a brick and mortar or they're working with people online, I just talk to so many people that are siloed into their own echo chamber, their own world. We can learn either from our mistakes or we can learn from mentor's mistakes. And for me, I'd much rather learn from the latter, right?

Chris Graham:

what I want to do with this podcast is to be able to share the point of working in a recording studio is to make an impact. And an impact means that there was some connecting thing that happened, that people were like, me too, man, I fucking love that song. That connection that music can create is absolutely incredible. It is the closest thing that we have to real magic here on planet Earth. And shit, I'm bouncing all over the place here. You said a thing earlier that, that blew my mind. And I'd never put this together before, but when you work in and around a recording studio, your job is to help the artist, find their voice. That's it. Full stop. And the theory is that if you help the artist find their truest, most authentic voice, that song will be a hit. It's really hard to do. It's really hard to help somebody be who they truly are through a song or a podcast for that matter. This is hard, but the advocacy work that I've been doing at the State House, exactly the same thing. Helping people find their voices, I've helped, I think it's nine people go public. With shit like mine that happened, when they were kids. Some of those people are legislators, and I'm learning that the work I do to help people find their voice at the State House is the same damn thing that I have been doing for years in the studio, Being good at helping somebody else find their voice is a very valuable skill. Kevin, it's been one of the highlights of the past two years for me working with you you said this other thing a minute ago that was absolutely amazing. You said that when you begin to grow a business or in business, parlance scale a business, you're scaling the good stuff, but you're also scaling the bad stuff. And truer words, man. That is so poignant. And I was so proud of you. I was like, over here listening to you talk, and I was like, yes, young Pawan, excellent. You are learning the ways of the force and well done. Impressive. So when we first started meeting, you were in a position where you had been producing for years and years. You'd been writing, you had had number one hits, and you had started offering marketing services to other musicians, people who put their music out on, Spotify and iTunes and yada, yada yada. And that wanted to find fans. And so you launched this business, courage, music, marketing, and people would come to you and you would work your magical marketing ways and you would get them shitloads of new followers for frankly not enough money. You didn't charge enough. And when you first started working with me, your problem was that you were crushing it, you were making well into the six figures, but

Kevin:

was crushing me,

Chris Graham:

Exactly.

Kevin:

and then I couldn't crush it at a faster pace. I had to slow down

Chris Graham:

You hit a plateau of doom in your business and stay too long on the plateau of doom, it'll kill you. The FOMO and the inability to say no to the wrong client. And you did something that was really interesting. I remember we were probably five calls in, on our first batch of coaching calls. And you said something that blew my mind. You said, I've hired like four business coaches and they've all told me the same thing. Raise your rates. And I never have. And I remember being like, okay, my job here is very clear. Get him to raise his rates, or he is going to be very miserable for a long time. And, you were also at a spot where you were at the beginning of a journey where you were realizing that you were limited by your lack of healing. You were paying a therapy tax. And that tax comes in the form of not being able to fully function at your highest capacity because a significant portion of your energy went into just coping and you started down that journey. And to watch you go from spending most of your time on sales calls, trying to get a couple hundred bucks to walking you through million dollar plus proposals that you are making to your clients and watching you grow your business in the most amazing and wildly cool ways, while making more space for your art, for your voice, for you to create songs that are your craftsmanship and that are on mission for what you wanna do here on planet Earth.

Kevin:

It's funny, you would not think about growth getting you stuck, but but man, I just felt super,

Chris Graham:

You painted yourself into a corner.

Kevin:

Yeah. was disqualifying myself from talking to people about it because I felt like being stuck because my business had grown so much. I was judging myself out of asking for help.'cause I felt like it was too privileged. I was pushing myself in the corner and saying I can't talk to people about this. And what it was doing was, it was siloing me away from the opportunity towards, greater growth in health of course, but also greater joy in my business. And I could only have fractured gratitude'cause I could only be grateful for the circumstance. But it was hard to be grateful for how I was feeling in the moment because I was, thriving to death. And so when we started working together and you were helping me face, those things that I had resisted, that were going to empower me to serve others better, like raising my rates so that I can use that money to not work 80 hours a week and then do better quality less hours because I'm sleeping at night or using some of that money to hire coaches to get better at what I'm doing. Because the only way I was growing. At that time was trying my hardest, going a hundred out of a hundred all the time. And then just Eventually if you push too long at a hundred out of a hundred and you don't ever rest and recoup, that 100% starts to atrophy a little bit. And that's something that I had not realized until we started working together. And you, really taught me how to love myself better in my business and showed me that for myself not only doesn't compete with caring for my clients, which is what I thought in my head at the time, even though I say that out loud and I know it's irrational, but it wasn't just that, it was also me loving myself better helps me not only love my current clients better, but also have discernment on finding the right clients I'm supposed to serve.'cause just everybody that knocks on your door isn't necessarily the person that you're supposed to serve. And I know at first when you're sort of poor and you're figuring this out, the reality is you are hardwired in you being yourself to serve certain people. The very best. That actually leads me to a question I had for you with the old podcast is, what gave you the discernment to know you needed to quit and step back when do you take a leap into the deep end versus more of a transitional pivot?'cause you helped me a lot with that and I'd love to hear about how you process that for you.

Chris Graham:

Your question is challenging because to talk about why I left the six figure world, my, my previous podcast, I gotta acknowledge, something I did that I'm not super proud of. Brian and I, towards the very end of that podcast, it had become really clear that I needed to step away and focus on a new chapter in my own life. And. I kept trying to make it work, Podcast drama is just like band drama, you have a fight, with your co-host and it feels an awful lot like having a fight with a band member. And when Brian and I got in that fight, I made a post in our Facebook group, a long one, explaining that I was done with the podcast, and, I made it public really fast. And I really wish I hadn't done that. what I wish I had done, was reached out to one of our mutual friends, and asked them to help us navigate, healthy, steps forward. Rather than just kind of airing the dirty laundry and putting it out there. And so, uh, for that, I'm, I'm sorry, Brian. I wish I had not made that public. I was in this weird spot all I wanted to do was make records. For a living. And I got really good at it. And then I did a business podcast about that. And the business podcast became the most popular thing I had ever done. And it was weird because I was a podcast, bro. I was really attached to the ego of meeting somebody and be like, oh, what do you do for a living? I'm a, I host one of the, I host the biggest podcasts in the recording industry, the business podcast. Yeah. Kind of a big deal. Like, I was really into that and, Brian and I, we made this podcast and it started out as just like a friend thing, and it was just us hanging out. And then as it blew up, it, it was this like sophomore slump, the band makes a hit record and then they go back to the studio to make the next record and the next record blows. And the reason, for that often I think is that the band just has no idea how to emotionally process their own success.

Kevin:

Yep.

Chris Graham:

Where I was at I had come to this realization that, more success wasn't gonna make me happier and more success wasn't gonna help me heal. And more success more than anything wasn't gonna make me feel safe. And so I had this point where it was just like, I have to let go of this. And there is absolutely no way that I would've changed any laws while I was still doing the podcast. It required the fullness of who I was, to go through the fire, down there at the State House. When somebody is on the verge of being at the end of a chapter and the starting of a new one. Often at the end of the chapter, you can get clingy. You don't want to move on, you're afraid to do the new thing and that creates problems and tension and it breaks relationships. And I think for most people, they get in this situation where, they know something needs to change. This is exactly where you were. You knew that you needed an enormous amount of change in your business to keep your business, and your health viable. There were a lot of ways that you needed to grow and evolve, um, in order to. Yes, you may. Absolutely.

Kevin:

With my business, what you helped me do was the exact same thing. There were systems that were. Causing, not fault as in error, but fault as in dissonance with my business. It wasn't as flowy as it used to be, because as you work with more and more people, it gets to a point where, you know, within the course of four years, I've promoted over 3,400 songs on Spotify, over 1600 on YouTube. That's a lot of curators contacting, Hey, would you like to check out this song? That's a lot. And there's a saying, you can't move at warp speed without it warping you. And the reality is, sometimes your systems need to change. Sometimes your environment needs to change. Sometimes your clients need to change. Regardless of a fault, it's your responsibility to change your life. And what's really beautiful is we live in a world where I believe we want to help each other and we want to help each other grow and, succeed and, process each other's, pain and, dreams together. And so with that, I'm curious this isn't, a question to linger in regret or shade or anything like that, but just looking forward, what's the biggest problem left unsolved by your past work at Six Figure Home Studio and six Figure Creative in that whole era of your business?

Chris Graham:

That, thank God I have a really clear answer for, so one of the primary things that I'll be teaching on this podcast and the really, the reason for this podcast is that what I have taught in the past is that there are two forms that an organization can take non-profit and for-profit, right? And on the six Figure M studio, what we taught was this idea that, hey, we've read all these conventional business books, that speak about what a for-profit business is. And we're gonna apply that to the recording studio. Here's the problem with that. There's not just for-profit and non-profit, there's also a middle path. That middle path is called a mission-driven business. A mission-driven business is any for-profit business that does not put profit first and growing a mission-driven business in healthy ways where you can continue to scale in every way, shape and form that you could want to in your business. It is a totally different process for a mission-driven business than it is for a conventional, for-profit business. And inevitably, every single person that I have ever met that identifies as somebody who wants to spend their life making records working in and around the recording studio. Every single person I have ever met, I would say, is a mission driven business owner. Profits not number one. They had a magical experience when they were younger with music. It changed them. and they are trying to help other people experience that too It is a mission-driven business. And so to run and grow a mission-driven business requires a lot more than what we used to talk about on the six Figure Home studio because you have to talk about your priorities within a mission-driven business. You have to understand, well, profit isn't first, what is first and under what circumstances does profit, need to be a higher priority to keep the mission afloat? And at what point does continuing to scale begin to actually harm the mission? The growth itself of a mission-driven company can defeat it as it attempts to complete the mission. We didn't talk about that and that is the nitty gritty, it's complicated. And so you have to balance between, taking projects that help complete this mission that help create these connective moments and help people share in the human experience. But then you also have to work on projects that like pay your bills And you have to balance between the two of these so when we talk about this idea of a six figure home studio, that's the dream, right? I want a six figure home studio. I wanna work for myself. I wanna make more than the average dentist making art in my basement and it's gonna be amazing, Your dream is not to be a six figure home studio service provider. Your dream is to be a six figure home studio creator. You want to make things right? That's the real dream. That's the real dream. We didn't talk about that. We talked about being a service provider in a home studio, but the only reason that anyone's a service provider in a home studio was because they started out wanting to make dope shit. And so we have to acknowledge that in our industry, there is a really healthy and essential balance between being a service provider and being an artist. And if you lose, being an artist, being a service provider becomes pretty fucking miserable pretty fast. Let's talk about that on this podcast. Does that, does that answer your question?

Kevin:

Absolutely. I'm really proud of you for, knowing when you needed to step away

Chris Graham:

when you are unhealthy, when you have stuff you haven't processed, that's running in the background of your life all the time, it's using up your processing power, it's using up the ram that you've got in your brain, and you are functioning at a fraction of your potential. And so you can go around and you can do all these things to try to grow your business. You can do follow up sequence and use a CRM and you can, run ads on Google and Facebook and all that stuff. Taking the time to slow down and make the investment. To ask yourself the question, what would I look like at my very healthiest? And what do I need to do to get there? Because if you aren't healthy, you can't make great decisions. And if you can't make great decisions, you are not going to move forward for very long. So as I've been coaching people, helping people break through that ceiling, the answer has always come back to the same thing. The real underlying problem is that between your ears lies the most complex object in the known universe. 1 Trillion connections between all the neurons in your brain. It is a miraculous, absurd thing to even exist. our brains are complicated. Our minds are complicated. We've got our conscious, and our subconscious. And I have learned an awful lot about my subconscious because I, I had this like crazy form of amnesia. I had horror, movie level trauma in my childhood that I had no memory of whatsoever. There's just blocks of time missing in my memory, and that's really weird that the human mind can do that. as I'm wrapping my mind around that, there's this other piece that I gotta share, Kevin.

Kevin:

What you got for us?

Chris Graham:

when I came forward about what had happened to me as a kid, I lost count of how many people that listened to the six figure home studio that reached out and said, me too. It was so many guys. And it got me thinking, it got me wondering about a lot of things. And one of those things was, why did I get into this industry in the first place? And here's my theory. I had a lot to say that I couldn't say as a kid, but I could say it with my guitar. I could say it with my piano and if I did that, I felt better. And so I had locked myself in my room with my Epiphone Les Paul special, plugged into my little tiny crate amplifier And I'd make music and it sounded like as, but man, it made me feel a lot better. And because it made me feel better, I spent a lot of time practicing. I played guitar and I wrote, and I recorded. Because it was therapy, it was a coping mechanism for me. And to quote my friend Emily Dolan Davies, it was a, coping mechanism that got outta hand because I got really damn good at it. I spent so much time processing with an instrument that it only made sense to try to work in the music industry because I was so much better at that than anything else in my life. Rather than healing, I did my best to cope with music. And because I got good at music, started doing music for a living. And as I scaled that business, I scaled to my level of unhealed. And when you cannot grow anymore because healing is the obstacle holding you back shit gets ugly and people implode. And often that looks like alcoholism or drug addiction, suicide. It gets fucking dark. And I cannot help but see an absolutely incredible parallel to this family of people that work in recording studios that I have. And so, as we try to figure out, okay, you're working in the recording studio business. You're in and around recording studios, you want to see your business grow. How do we go about doing that? What is the best, path forward, that will allow you to create the dopest possible art here on earth before you die? How do we get there? It's not just gonna be follow-up sequences and CRMs and, defining your avatar and all these business jargon and. things. These are all important, but they're all pretty small levers compared to the biggest lever, which is learn how to be fully present. And so that's why the Healthier Home studio, and that's why I think the Healthier Home Studio is going to help people who are trying to grow a business in and around the recording studio. Far more than anything else I've ever done before, which is not like me coming back at my old podcast and throwing shade at Brian or anything like that. It's just I've had epiphany after epiphany after epiphany and I feel compelled to come back and to share this with you guys. And I hope there is a renaissance, within and around recording studios of people finding their truest voice.

Kevin:

first off, I'm so excited for this podcast I think you nailed it with the goal of a healthy home studio is to be present. I was thinking about what all we've worked through. you can either scale to the level of your potential or you can plateau at the ceiling of your unhealed, and you get to choose that.

Chris Graham:

yeah, Kevin, that was incredible the way you summed everything up and the way you created sound bites around these ideas. I'm so excited about this episode and I wanna transition us to our last piece here. So one of the things that we're gonna do on most episodes, is at the end we're gonna talk about one of the most powerful performance enhancing techniques that I'm aware of. And it's a form of meditation. And this isn't about, leaning into my hippie side here. This isn't about woo woo or trying to convince you guys about any kinda weird shit like that. This is about looking at science where there have been studies around people that are high performers, who use meditation as a performance enhancing technique. When I began to learn yoga nidra, I began to learn it originally because, it was prescribed when I got outta the hospital. We'll tell, I'll tell that story another time. But when I was hospitalized, with PTSD one of the things they told me was, you need to be in as many yoga classes as you can get in. And the primary, yoga for people with PTSD is called I Rest, which is a western repackaging of this thing called Yoga Nidra. And so I spend hours, per day, and have for a couple years now, doing yoga nidra and it is through this performance enhancing meditation style, that I found the pitch that became the scout's honor law. It is where I came up with the idea for this podcast. It is a place of the purest creative energy I have ever experienced in my life. And I'm shook by it. And so that's another reason why I gotta come back I was teaching you guys about oh, Google ads and remarketing. Cool, nice trick, Chris. Yes, that will help you grow your business. But learning how to sit with a business problem in a place of total stillness, that is a considerably bigger lever, than everything I ever taught, leading up to this. Easily the most important thing that I've ever learned. It has been, yeah, and lived, it has been a door to a new world for me. Naturally your subconscious is gonna be like, what? Calm down, fuck you. Like that? That's the way my mind acts, when you lean into that and you begin to create peace between your conscious and subconscious you begin to experience, flashes of wholeness and moments of presence, you can bring the hard problems that you're solving in your life into this space and see them through a new lens. And so we're gonna do a yoga knee, your meditation. Probably would recommend not doing it while you're driving because our goal here is to get as relaxed as possible and to not multitask. This is an anti multitasking exercise. So go ahead and sit down, get in the as comfortable a position as you can get. And I want you to lean forward and backward just a little bit until you find that magical spot where your head just naturally balances on your shoulders. There's no effort to keep your head from falling backwards or forwards, right? You can just sit there in a restful position. And so once you've found that spot, we're gonna, do a quick breathing exercise, a really casual breathing exercise, and then I'm gonna do a guided meditation. And then we're gonna talk about what that was like, Kevin. And, for those of you listening, I hope that this, works for you, that you're able to at least get a sense of what's on the other side of learning how to meditate like this. And so let's start, we're gonna breathe in through our nose and then we're gonna make an H sound as we breathe out through our mouth. And we're gonna do that for a while at whatever pace feels comfortable. So breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth and just continue to breathe in and out. Try to only focus on your breath. Make it the only thing you are thinking of. Breath in, breath out, and just sit in that spot for a minute. And now we're going to do something called a body scan. I want you to start at your toes and focus on the tips of your toes as you continue to breathe. Relax the tip of your toes, and now focus on the balls of your feet and relax the balls of your feet. Now focus on your arches and relax your arches. And now we're gonna keep just doing a breathing exercise. And I want you to work your way all the way up to your head. I want you to scan every part of your body and we'll do this just on your own silently. I won't guide you through this next kind of 30 seconds or so, but just scan your whole body and release tension in each of the spaces that you're holding it. I Know for me, I tend to hold a lot of tension in my shoulders, and when I do a body scan like this, I often find that I've been tensing my shoulders all day. And so it, it's a wonderful feeling to just let that tension go. Just start to wrap up here. Finish your body scan and just continue to focus just on your breath. Now what I want you to do is to search within yourself and to find your emotional center of gravity. Just think about this spot within you that represents the nexus of all of your feelings. It's where all the things that you are feeling intersect, just go ahead and find that spot. And for me, it's right in the middle of my chest. And when you feel that you have firmly identified this spot, want you to breathe two more times. In and out. In and out. and then I want you to see if you can shift your emotional center of gravity down one inch. Let's go let's come back. Let's wake ourselves up, so to speak. And, uh, let's have a little chat about this. Kevin, what was that like for you?

Kevin:

Fortunately, a lot less awkward than it used to be. Those first few times. I'm like, what in the woo woo is happening right now? And also I had a much fuller tank of stuff to process I came to you in a, a mentally and emotionally bloated place. And so yeah, it was just clogged. And so now, I can receive it with more of a welcome to it. And each time you recalibrate like that, there's less of a distance to close.

Chris Graham:

Gets easier and easier. you have all these things coming at you, these decisions to make. Are they urgent? Are they important? Are they both, And as you're trying to figure that out, you have to get to a place of stillness, there's a piece of me that's screaming that this is urgent. Why is that? Where does that all come from? And I think it's. In places of stillness and in meditation that you can begin to understand what your motives really are. And that is profoundly valuable. And so one of the things uh, we'll continue to talk about on this show, is how to take a business problem into a meditation session. I am so excited to teach you guys more about that. And when I think about what does it mean to have an impact here on planet Earth where let's just, let's call it a round number where 10,000 people take the healthier home studio challenge, I. They decide to go full blast on growth and healing, they decide to go full blast in searching for their potential and in figuring out how to find their limits and shift them or remove them. That's exciting to me. what would happen on planet Earth if 10,000 people that work in and around recording studios got healthy as fuck, boy, that would change the world and it would never go back to the way it was. So that's the thought behind the He Room studio. And I'm so excited to just have opportunities to have these amazing conversations with friends and so it's called the He Room studio. It's pretty much just the Chris Graham and Friends show, so we'll hang out again, I'll have other friends on here and we'll have, conversations about what it means to them, to go full blast in their own growth and healing and to have the healthiest home studio that they possibly can.