Your Nervous System Is the Foundation for Everything

Most men keep asking the wrong question. Not how do I get more, but why can't I hold what I'm already calling in.

In this episode José Alejandro breaks down why your nervous system is the foundation for everything, your business, your relationships, your impact, your health, and why no amount of strategy, mindset work or hustle will fix a capacity problem.

He gets real about what contraction actually looks like. The money comes in and the system tightens. The opportunity shows up and you sabotage it. The love is offered and you push it away. Not because you don't want it. Because your body wasn't trained to stay open when it arrives.

He breaks down the difference between knowing your why and actually embodying it, why most men are living in a chronic stress response running on old data, and what it actually takes to expand the container. Including his own ten year daily practice and the specific tools he uses to train his nervous system every day.

This isn't about staying calm. It's about building a man whose body can hold the vision his life is asking him to live.

This episode is for you if:

• You keep hitting the same income or impact ceiling and can't figure out why
• You expand a little then contract fast every time momentum picks up
• You're ready to stop building strategy on top of a system that can't hold it

"If your nervous system can't hold it, you can't scale it. Build the capacity first."

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

So a lot of us keep asking the wrong question. We're stuck on how do we make more money? How do we grow faster? How do we get more clients? More impact. How do we get to this destination in a shorter period of time? Whether it's business, relationships, health, whatever it is. But the real question is why can't I hold what I'm already calling in? Because here's what I see over and over and over again. In my own life and in the lives of a lot of men, money comes in and the system tightens. Opportunities show up, and you freeze, overthink, you sabotage. Love is presented, offered, and you push it away. And this is often not because we don't want it, but because our nervous system wasn't trained or doesn't isn't resourced enough to stay open when it arrives. And to sustain and deepen. And this is what this episode is about is about it's about capacity, about why your nervous system is literally the foundation for everything, your business, your relationships, your impact, your health. I'm Jose Alejandro, and this is the initiated path. More than working on taking on any more information. Your relationships, your finances, your impact, your health, all of it. I've learned this the hard way, and I've also learned it the good way by doing practices that help me deepen the resourcefulness of my nervous system. Let's use business as an example. So sustainable growth in business literally comes from systems that can sustain it. You can't scale what your infrastructure can't hold. And most entrepreneurs know this, not all, but I remember reading a book called Built to Sell. And it's an incredible book. If you're a service provider, I highly recommend it. This is something I read back in 2018 when I was working to come out of corporate, starting off with a marketing agency before I went into coaching, but it still applied. And one concept that he spoke about in the book more than anything was how a business is more valuable based on its systems. Why? Because the owner can leave, and whoever buys that business can continue to scale it and grow it and sustain the standard, the level of output, the quality assurance, because systems are in place to do that, right? Most entrepreneurs don't apply that same logic to themselves and their lives. Your nervous system is your infrastructure for your life, the same way that your business systems are for your business. It is the system underneath every other system. So if you can't, if it can't hold more, you won't be able to hold more. No matter how good your vision is, no matter how clear it is, no matter how many books you read or podcasts you listen to, or information you take in or knowledge you have from the introspection and the processing that you've done in therapy, if your nervous system can't hold it, you cannot scale it. Period. Your vision. Now, a lot of us understand that systems develop business growth, but very few of us understand the role that our nervous system plays in sustaining that growth. So even in business, there is also a gap that cost a lot of men everything. Now, let's talk about the nervous system that is running the show. So here's what's actually happening underneath. Your nervous system is like your body's control center. So it helps you handle stress, helps you handle emotion, pressure, uncertainty, and different experiences impact your nervous system in different ways. So some things like breath work, meditation, time in nature will help calm it down. They'll help signal safety, they'll help you open up, and other things like a never-ending fucking to-do list, conflict that you can't resolve or are not approaching in a different way. Money pressure, visibility pressure, which a lot of us just want a crave to be seen. So we're fighting against the algorithm every day. These things will activate it. They'll trigger your fight, flight, or freeze. Right? And we all have a window of tolerance, and that window of tolerance is different for different things based on our journey through life. But here's the most important part that a lot of us miss. Most of us are living in a chronic state of heightened stress response. So it's not bad to feel stressed. Stress is actually a beautiful way to get to create movement. You know, in your body and growth. When your body's under stress, sometimes it does these really beautiful things that will help save your life, right? Like an adrenaline rush. But when it's chronically under stress, that's where we are diseased and we start creating disease, right? So not necessarily because life is dangerous in this moment, but oftentimes because the body is running on old data is the reason why we're feeling stress chronically. So your nervous system will respond to high stress situations with memories it embodied from previous traumas, fears, limiting beliefs, old experiences, whether you consciously remember those experiences or not. Whenever I'm leading a holotropic breath work journey or some sort of somatic experience, I always like to say that the memory lives, the the story lives in the mind, but the memory lives in the body or the nervous system, right? So it doesn't necessarily get stored in the body. There's some new studies that show that the memories aren't stored in the body, the trauma isn't stored in the body, but your nervous system is programmed and directly connected to your brain, right? So there's memories that are course that that shoot that send electric currents through your nervous system and tell your body to respond in certain ways that it's been responding since that memory was created. While your mind is trying to conceptualize how you want to show up as a leader, as a partner, as a man, your nervous system is literally hijacking the situation and responding in the best way it knows how, through contraction, through defense, through patterns that it learned a long time ago that were necessary for survival. And what this does is it creates a misalignment that most of us cannot name. We know what to do, but we just can't do it. It's like knowing exactly how to shoot a three-pointer, but not being able to make the correct movement to do so, right? And that might mean because there's some muscle memory that you haven't created yet, but it could also mean that your body's taking the shape of the shame that you felt when you missed that three-point shot that lost you the game at eight years old, uh in eighth grade, right? So it's really a nervous system problem more than any more often than not. Now there's a famous niche quote that says, He who has a why to live can bear almost anyhow. And I do believe it's powerful, it's heavy. I talk a lot about purpose and how important it is to have a purpose and how having a why gives you the drive and the energy and the motivation and the commitment and the devotion to show up for the thing, for something that matters for others, right? But here's the thing the quote doesn't actually bear the how. The quote doesn't do it for you. I work with a lot of impact-driven men, purpose-driven men who are deeply committed to a powerful why. They have a purpose that's clear the moment they come in. They're clear on that purpose, they have a burning desire to bring it to life and bring this burning desire to the world. They say they're committed to take on anything for the sake of that why. They have been taking action, but they still procrastinate, they still freeze at the threshold, they still collapse under pressure, they call something in and then aren't consistent with it, can't hold it. I'm guilty of that. It happens when we are approaching a threshold. It often also happens when we've taken in a lot of information and it's time for us to integrate it on a deeper level. And oftentimes we end up feeling like imposters in the exact moment when we need to show up. Why is this? Because knowing your why is simply not enough. You have to be the leader who embodies the why in your body, in your nervous system, in the way that you respond when the pressure hits. And that's the gap between men who talk their vision and men who actually live it. Now, it doesn't mean that there's no man that will ever move towards their vision perfectly. Right? That's not the point here. Even when you have the capacity, you will make decisions that will lead to quote unquote failures, right? But it it definitely makes the difference between a man who can show up for something, stay steady, respond rather than react. Right? And more often than not. So it's it's it's it's the capacity to hold the vision rather than the clarity. So I want to make this real by sharing how every time I hit a new threshold, and I mean every fucking time this shows up for me. So let's say the money comes in, instead of receiving it, my nervous system would tighten. I'd start overworking immediately because some part of me didn't trust that it would last, not really because there was more to do. I would create things to do. Opportunities maybe show up and right when it mattered, and I'd self-sabotage them, and not in obvious ways, but in subtle ways. I would get inconsistent, I would get distracted, I'd play small right before the breakthrough. Same thing can happen in relationships. The love that I craved, right, would be offered and I'd push it away, or I I would pull back. And this isn't because I didn't want it, but because my nervous system wasn't trained to stay open when it wrapped. Or, this is another piece, my nervous system was trained because I have done a lot of training on my nervous system. I have been able to show up for similar moments to this, to thresholds like this. But I wasn't resourced in that moment. And rather than communicating it, rather than letting my partner know, letting my my co-founder know, letting my clients know that I wasn't resourced or this is what I was available for, I pushed through and I try to show up at the hundred percent that I offered the week before, the month before, which really was rooted in shame of not being enough if I didn't, and I would then collapse. So that's another form of a lack of capacity. We are never going to be completely resourced the same way all the time. And the resource that we have for one area of our life is not necessarily going to show up the same way for another. And this is what contraction actually looks like, right? So most men don't recognize when it's happening, but contraction looks like overworking because you don't think it will last, right? So you're hyper-focused and moving forward, forward, forward, and actually enjoying and appreciating the work that you are putting in, the work, the the the the thing that you're creating. Maybe you feel pressure, and the the the as soon as the money hits the bank account, right, you feel that pressure of like fuck it's gonna go away, it's gonna get lost, right? So your nervous system isn't yet ready to hold that level of abundance. And sometimes the practice comes in creating more money and then learning how to manage it. But I've experienced this where I've had a big lump sum of money go into my bank account, and then I contract because it's it's scary to see that much money, and I'm afraid that it's going to go away. I focus more on losing it than I do on making more. Maybe you play small right before a breakthrough, right? So you you called something in. There's an opportunity to be on this platform, to have a conversation with a potential investor, to get on a stage, to go on a podcast, to uh launch a program, to launch a business, and then as soon as the opportunity is there, you play small. Like you are not enough to move forward. Maybe you get inconsistent the second that momentum picks up. I mean, I've also noticed this as well for myself. I'll be super consistent, consistent, consistent. There's momentum that's building up, and then I feel the momentum, it gets overwhelming, and I subconsciously sabotage and don't show up for the thing the following day. Maybe you panic about losing what you've gained, and then you actually push it away and you sabotage. We sabotage at the moments when we're about to get exactly what we've been calling in. So none of that is strategy, none of that is mindset. I mean, some of it can be, but often, very often, it is your nervous system trying to keep you safe based off of old patterns, based on old experiences that taught your body that abundance wasn't safe, that visibility wasn't safe, that being seen and then losing it was too painful to risk again. So you keep building more shit, more offers, more funnels, more relationships, more uh diets, you fucking name it, regardless of relationship, business, health, etc., you just jump on to the next thing thinking is going to be the solution for the problem you keep coming back to. And until that changes, you will do the same dance. You'll expand a little and contract fast. So, how do we actually build this capacity? How do we build embodiment? Well, I always like to reference Kobe. Kobe used to uh talk about how he would visualize his shots, his three-pointers, his free throws, over and over and over and over and over in his mind. And then he would do the same thing over and over and over with his body in practice but without a ball. And then he would do it over and over and over again with a ball, actually practicing practicing the shot. Notice how there's three stages there. He wasn't just practicing the shot, he wasn't waiting until game day. That's just like uh a rookie move, hence why we do practice. But he was he was actually doing it in his mind and in his body without the ball, visualizing it happening happening and creating the motor skills. The simplest way that you can build the capacity for the life that you want to create is a morning practice. So a morning practice sets the tone for who you're going to be that day. It is literally like going to basketball practice before the game. It is the training. Even uh when you see a game about to start, right? The finals, you can see right before the finals, everyone on the team is practicing their shots. They're doing drills. Why? Because it's a mini practice and training before the game starts to warm them up and refresh, like freshen up their memory, their muscle memory for the game. For the last 10 years, I've had some sort of morning practice every single day. Some days it's five minutes, some days it's longer, but the non-negotiables stay the same. Breath work, movement, meditation, some sort of gratitude practice or prayer, and that's it. Now, I also do some more elaborate practices, uh, either in my mornings, sometimes on a Sunday morning, or a couple times throughout the week, or midday as well. But something as simple as a five to ten minute practice. You don't need a long, hour-long protocol with cold plunges, fucking backflips, just the non-negotiables, movement, breath work, meditation, prayer, gratitude every day is going to make a drastic shift in your life. Here's why each one of those matters. So, breath is one of the fastest ways to shift your state of mind, of body, of emotion. The depth, the speed, and the rhythm of your breath and your breathing can literally change how you feel, how you think, how you show up. And within minutes, so it's one thing you can do to consciously control how you feel and shift your nervous system. Think about it. Whenever you feel a certain emotion, your breath shifts. So if you feel excited, if you feel anxious, if you feel sad, your breath will change according to that feeling. That feeling is moving through your body. You're expressing, you feel an energy in some part of your body when you're moving that emotion. You can hijack your nervous system by doing breath work first, consciously. So instead of waiting for your breath to change based on your mood, you use your breath to shift and engage your mood, to shift your state. Movement engages your nervous system as well. So think about going on a run, going on a workout, going to the gym, right? It's going on a hike, which combines it with nature. It brings you into your body instead of leaving you stuck in your head. And that's where energy starts moving, you start clearing things that are stagnant, combine the two together, and you're not just starting your day, you're training yourself to be more present, to be more open, to be more available to the people in the mission that need you. Meditation will still your mind, will cultivate conscious awareness, will create space between stimulus and response. It will help you develop more metacognition. Metacognition, just high level, is the practice of observing your emotions, observing your thoughts, right? Rather than getting lost in them. You're the observer of your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And this helps you really create space between what happens and how you react. And that space is where your leadership actually lives. Because a great leader is not one that knows what to do, but is one that can take action and live with the consequences. Show up for those consequences. Now, for me, prayer fills my heart with gratitude, with humility, and with conviction. My prayer practice has developed a lot over the last five years, even more so this last these last two. And it's really about surrender. But if we, you know, if prayer is something that maybe uh, you know, you don't resonate with, prayer is really about gratitude, right? So instead of just asking for what you want, it's really being grateful for what you have. And you could have the shittiest fucking month in your life, and giving thanks for what you have will shift the way that you perceive your situation. Studies have been made about the impact that gratitude has on health, on stress, on results in your goals and the things that you're moving towards. There's no debate there. So it might sound gratitude, it might sound like gratitude is woo-woo, but gratitude, prayer, there's also studies around prayer as well, and how people heal when they're feeling prayer around them in their uh hospital beds. Same thing with petri dishes, there's been tests that show prayer um uh activating things in plants in petri dishes, kind of supporting uh germs getting uh uh uh uh consumed by the the like enzymes and stuff. And really the reminder that prayer offers for me is that I'm not. Doing this alone and I'm not doing it for myself. So every morning I move, I breathe, I meditate, I pray with intention, not just warming up the day, but becoming the man that my vision requires, that my relationship requires, the man that my mission requires. I reflect on that man. I say what that man is. That man is a bold and devoted man of God who fathers his vision and plays full out. And I pray like that man, I meditate like that man, I breathe like that man, right? I move like that man, I do some qigong, right? There's different ways that we can do it, but I do it boldly, fully expressed, devoted, and then I submit to something greater than myself. I give thanks for another day, and I step the fuck into it. Not perfectly, but it's not complicated, just a non-negotiable. Now, going a layer deeper beyond morning practice. Okay, so like I mentioned before, there's embodiment practices, right? Um I like to I've I've been doing a lot of embodiment practices since maybe 2019. Um and embodiment practices are more prolonged practices, sometimes a little more strain on the nervous system. There's some stress training there, and here's how they work. So often more often than not, they also include breath work, they also include movement, right? So breath work, stress training, somatic practices, sharp mirrors are also a form of building capacity. With breath work, like I mentioned, fastest, most accessible tool that you have, the depth, frequency, the speed of your breathing can literally shift your state of mind, of body, of emotion in real time.

unknown 23:46

Right?

SPEAKER_00 23:46

So I'm not talking about breathing to relax when it comes to embodiment, although that is a great practice as well. Sitting, breathing slow, deep breaths into your belly is a form of embodiment practice, especially it's a great practice to learn how to move energy through the body and not get overwhelmed by energy from your partner, from work, from challenging experiences. But I'm talking about using breath as a training tool. So exposing your nervous system to different states of intensity, of stillness, of expansion, so it becomes more rangey, more flexible, more capable of staying open under pressure. Another is stress stress training. So this is about exposing yourself to controlled stressors in a safe environment. So cold exposure is an example, hard physical training, right? Going to the gym is an example. Going to the gym with an affirmation, and you will embody that affirmation much more than you than you would if you say that affirmation in front of the mirror. Holding a difficult conversation you've been avoiding is another example. Doing the thing publicly before you're ready. Really, the goal here is not to suffer, right? We're titrating. Sometimes we're flooding, so titration is when you take small actions towards healing, right? Towards expanding your capacity. Flooding is when you flood your nervous system, but flooding without supervision and without the right guidance and safety and container can sometimes create more trauma, which leads to a shorter, smaller window of tolerance. Ultimately, the goal is to teach your body that it can move through discomfort and come out the other side safely, and that it doesn't need to contract every time something feels hard. Somatic practices, so movement, shaking, intentional, physical work that releases stuck energy from the body. Right? I do a lot of these practices in my programs, in my coaching, in my retreats. Um, if you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen me post some uh videos or photos of guys in poses where they're holding their arms up or something like that, right? So it creates this feeling in the body while also repeating an intention or being aware of you know, thinking about something you're holding or being present with in your life, and that creates some neuro uh neuropathways and muscle memory. Having sharp mirrors, coaches, brotherhood, community who believes in you, holds you to the highest standard that you can, men who can push you past your edge and into depths of deeper depths of embodiment, men who can ask you questions that crack something open that you couldn't crack open on your own. Speaking your truth even when your voice cracks, that's a somatic practice. So every time you say the real thing, the thing that feels too vulnerable, too bold, too much, you are also training your nervous system that it is safe to be seen. And all the strategy in the world means nothing if your body is in scarcity mode, if you feel contracted, if you feel defended, if you feel closed off for the next threat, you'll reject what you're calling in before you even realize it. The success, the abundance, the intimacy, the opportunity, all of it. Now I want to make sure I emphasize this on this episode. This isn't just about business or money, even though I have touched on that as the main example. A man's ability to regulate his nervous system and his emotions becomes the foundation of safety in his relationship. It sets a standard for how his partner, his family, his community feel seen, heard, and supported. And a regulated man creates safety everywhere he goes. His partner can relax in his presence, his kids, his family can feel him, his clients can feel the difference drastically. A dysregulated man, and every man gets dysregulated. So it's easy to think regulated man, dysregulated man as a destination, a before and after. But regulation and embodiment is a lifelong journey. And I'll give an example of how I've had to have home I've had multiple rude awakenings about that. But a dysregulated man, no matter how much he loves the people around him, creates chaos without knowing it. The energy leaks, the reactivity, the shutdown, the avoidance, the defensive response, it will affect everyone in his orbit. And this is why emotional regulation is not for the weak. It's not soft. Because in order to cultivate emotional regulation, you have to practice being with your emotions and not closing. Alright, so feeling the grief and not closing, feeling the anger and not closing or projecting. It is one of the most important leadership skills that a man can develop because a man's emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, which is a combination of the nervous system capacity and emotion, sets the tone for his entire relationship. If you want to create more safety, trust, and intimacy, you start with your nervous system. Now, again, like I said, this is not before and after. This is not a destination. I have dedicated my life to building capacity and supporting other men and doing the same. But I have and I have done a daily practice every day for the last 10 years. I do a lot of embodiment training. Last two years I was in an embodiment training that massively deepened my capacity to keep my heart open in the midst of all the things that I was navigating in my life, to show up for my clients, to show up for this life that I'm calling in, for the abundance that I'm calling in. And I also over-identified with it, which is why sometimes online and even in this content, me saying dysregulated and regulated, it's important to recognize that it's not one or the other. We're on a spectrum and we're cultivating mastery. I over-identified as a man who can regulate his nervous system, right? And as soon as I felt dysregulated, there was uh in a really deep way my relationship. I spiraled out and I felt shame for the level of dysregulation I was experiencing. And like I always say, the more we make something a problem, the more we make ourselves a problem, and the more we make ourselves a problem, the more of a problem it all becomes. Right? And that's that's been an edge for me, right? Is is uh really having compassion for myself in the moments that I'm not dysregulated, and rather than focusing on being a man who's always regulated, being a man who's honest. Honest about his capacity, his limitations, his the available resource, the resource he has available, right? And also just being compassionate and recognizing his humanness. You are not a regulated or dysregulated man. You are regulated in moments depending on your capacity, your training, the window of tolerance that you have for that specific situation, right? I have a lot of capacity for a lot of different things in my life, and there's certain things that sometimes completely wipe me out. Right? And and and my capacity maybe goes out the window because of a deep childhood wound that needs more tending to rather than uh tending to to trying to force myself to tend to other people. Asking for what I need has been a practice for me. So just an invitation. Just because you can carry it, carry it doesn't mean you need to hold it, right? Doesn't mean you're responsible for it. Yes, you are responsible for showing up for those that you love. You're responsible for holding space for your partner. You're responsible by being in a relationship, you are taking the responsibility of showing up for the people that you love. And you can't make yourself responsible for everything and everyone. Sometimes you need to also ask for what you need and uh figure out ways to communicate how to offload that in other ways. So, with that, the question is never how do I get more. The question is how do I build the capacity to hold what I'm already calling in, what's already in my life. How do I build the capacity to deepen these things that are already present, to be more present with them? When you solve that, which again is not a destination, but when you continue to solve that, your business, your money, your relationship, your impact, they finally have the room to grow. And it's never because you worked harder, it's not because you found the right strategy, but because you expanded the container. You became the man whose body can hold the vision his life is asking him to live. Perfect example is you're calling in a gallon of water, you need a container that can hold a gallon. Because a cup cannot hold a gallon of water, it will spill over. Right? So you either do one bit at a time, you drink a cup at a time until you get through the gallon, or you expand your container to transfer it over. Right? Your next level requires a nervous system that can hold it. Start there. Rather than focusing on taking more information in, think about what you need to do in order to integrate the information you've already learned. And if this landed, share with a man who maybe he's keep keeps hitting the same ceiling, can't figure out why. This might be the thing that names it for him. For my newsletter, check it out at josealejandro.co slash newsletter for free resources, including my leadership edge quiz to identify what your leadership edge is right now. Go to josealejandro.co slash resources. If your nervous system can't hold it, you can't scale it, build the capacity first. And remember, you don't become initiated by accident, you become initiated by choice. I'll see you in the next episode. Peace.