Rebuilding Yourself from the Inside Out | Mike Wood (EP 147)

Chapters

• 0:15 Loving Who You Are
• 0:55 Meet Mike Wood
• 1:51 Dyslexia, Shame, And Early Beliefs
• 3:55 Reading At 25 And Finding Gifts
• 5:24 Fear, Fighting, And A Father’s Story
• 8:16 Success Without Peace
• 9:38 How The Subconscious Really Works
• 12:12 Chasing Validation Vs Inner Work
• 12:57 Breaking Point And Turning Inward
• 15:18 Present Moment And Rewriting Memories
• 19:22 Therapy Limits And The Role Of Forgiveness
• 22:40 Oxytocin, Cortisol, And Instant Compassion
• 24:29 Attachments, Ego, And Identity Ornaments
• 27:38 Acceptance, The Farmer Parable, And Patience
• 31:47 Emotional Intelligence At Work
• 33:44 Quieting Thoughts With Breath Work
• 39:27 Portals Into Now And The Power Of Breath
• 45:20 Gratitude To Flip The Chemical Switch
• 51:08 The Grateful Game With His Son
• 56:21 Unconditional Love And Self-Forgiveness
• 1:03:23 Detaching From Thoughts Through Meditation
• 1:08:55 Daily Practice, Triggers, And Safety
• 1:16:07 Program Overview And Lasting Change
• 1:18:40 Where To Find Mike And What’s Next
• 1:21:07 Closing Reflections And Takeaways

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

This episode is about learning to genuinely love who you are. We're joined by Mike Wood, the COO of an$100 million construction company who also pours his energy into helping people break free from anxiety, depression, and old beliefs that run their lives. Mike didn't learn how to read until he was 25 and spent years battling anxiety, but ultimately rebuilt himself from the inside out. In this conversation, he breaks down the tools that changed everything for him from box breathing and gratitude to rewriting the subconscious stories we all carry. It's simple, it's honest, and it's full of things that you can start to use today. I hope you enjoy the show. Who is Mike Wood and uh how does he spend his time today?

SPEAKER_02: 0:52

I spend my days working for Jarrett Companies. I'm a COO of a hundred million dollar a year construction company, and spend a lot of my time trying to give back these days. Built a 10-week program, just life coaching, teaching people how to get rid of anxiety, depression, visit prisons, try to work with people who've got time to work. Yeah. Um just just trying to give back. That's what I my my focus is these days. That's what I want to do when I grow up, is give back.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24

Yeah, yeah, and giving back. And also, too, you've had your own battles with anxiety, with depression, which is kind of how you got into this work in the first place.

SPEAKER_01: 1:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35

I I guess take us through that. I guess your journey with that and how you even got into this space of coaching other people.

SPEAKER_02: 1:44

You know, I I kind of grew up I grew up in LA County, and I have a rare form of dyslexia. And I kind of grew up, didn't learn how to really read past the second grade level until I was 25 years old. And with that came a lot of negative core beliefs that were created when I was really young that just haunted me. You know, it haunted me until I was 27, 28, or 48, 49 years old. And you know, I'm 50 52 now. And you know, having these negative core beliefs that you're stupid, it it just it kind of just haunts you. And it it was it was pretty troubling for me, to be honest. You know, it I I knew I was smart at some level, but the voices in my head kept telling me otherwise, and I didn't know how to deal with it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:36

Yeah, you know, I uh when I was young, I struggled with reading too. Yeah, I would have to leave class at certain points to really dig in and practice my reading. I would have teachers send me home with reading passages to practice over and over and over again. Yeah. And uh really that really didn't help. I was just memorizing these passages until I started I just started reading faster because I was memorizing what I was reading. But yeah, um, yeah, I struggled with it, and I do think that it did have, you know, an effect on my kind of self-concept around school, around learning, right?

SPEAKER_02: 3:15

Yeah, your self-confidence, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:17

Yeah, yeah. It made me kind of try to develop other things to make me valuable, uh, be a class clown and act out a lot, you know. But very interesting hearing your story and kind of mine, and and it was definitely some things that I know I had to break from from that early childhood. So I know for you, so it sounds like you kind of until around 25 or so is when you kind of start to have a breakthrough and a little bit of a.

SPEAKER_02: 3:47

With reading, yeah. Yeah. You know, I I had a job where I'd put out lane closures on the interstate so everybody could go to work, and then I'd have all this time. All I'd have to do is stand up cones the rest of the day. So I'd have hours sitting by myself. And and I just started reading the front page of the USA Today. And then, you know, after a while, I would get past that front page and I would go to whatever what intrigued me. And it was politics at that time, politics and sports. And I just kept reading and reading and reading, got to a point where you know I was comfortable reading. I I still have reading comprehension issues, but you know, with every curse, you know, which dyslexia uh you could say is a curse, but I've been able to do math in my head since I was three, and it's problem-solving math, you know, like uh being able to do simple equations in your head, and it's really benefited me doing the job that I do now. And, you know, so it's just you know, the lesson of of life is to understand that not every every curse is is a bad thing, not every bad thing is is bad, and not every good thing is a good thing. It's there's gonna be a yin and yang with everything. So not knowing how to read left scars, and I had to end it and go through that, but you know, the other side of that is there was a gift there that I just needed to learn how to take advantage of.

SPEAKER_00: 5:06

It sounds like some self-de self-acceptance there, right? Yeah, and I know the tagline you have is is learn to love being you. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 5:17

Yeah, you know, so what uh I got to about 45 years old, you know, and I had some other issues, you know, that you know, you we talked before we started here about young men, you know, just trying to find their way. And one of my other issues that I had and I struggled with for a very long time is being afraid to fight. As a young man growing up in Lancaster, California, at the time, the this town I was in was going through a recession, and they had all the air airplane jobs, manufacturing jobs left town, and so all these empty homes got filled with inner city kids from Watts, LA, you know, just all these troubled areas. And so we went from being a poor middle class town to having gangs, guns, and in our schools just like instantly in junior high. And I I didn't realize it, but sometime in in junior high, I just started being afraid of fighting, you know, and and I didn't know why, I was terrified of it. I could I could put a helmet on and run full speed and smash into somebody all day long, but I was scared of a fist fight, and it didn't make any sense. And I so I would run from fights, and the shame of it from like 12 to 18 made it to where I was so ashamed that I wouldn't ever run again. I actually learned how to box. And so for the next three or four years, I fought in the street probably 70, 80 times, and I realized that I didn't like hurting people, but I was I was fighting my own demons, trying to figure out how to make that fear go away because I could never make the fear go away. So I started boxing, getting in the ring, taking into a healthy place, but I still could never get rid of that fear, and I realized the reason the whole reason I created this course is rewriting old core beliefs. And I realized when I'm 49 years old, that the whole reason that I fought all that time is because my dad, who left when I was one and a half years old, came to Tennessee and hung out with him, and he was drunk one night talking about how he never went down in a fight, and it created some core belief because I got into an elevated emotion and a clear intention was what he was telling me that you you can't look bad in a fight. You have to you have to stay up. And I and I created this core belief that all of a sudden I'm terrified, not of a fight, I was terrified of losing a fight. And it took me 30 years to freaking figure that out, and a lot of fights and a lot of ignorance and just a lot of emotions that didn't need to be there, but they were all created off of a core belief that I rewrote and it all went away just that quick. And it's it's how the subconscious mind works. And over the last seven years, since I kind of went on a spiritual journey here, it didn't start out as a spiritual journey, it started out as being sick and tired of being sick and tired. You know, I I had achieved every goal in life that I that I wanted, you know, when as I was younger, I wanted a house, you know, the the wife, the perfect wife that's beautiful, your best friend. And then you want enough money so she could stay home with the kids, and then enough money to just every next step that I set out there, I achieved all those goals. And I would be happy for about a month, and then the voices in my head would get louder and louder and louder, and I became more miserable after each goal, and I had reached about every goal that I could have possibly imagined money, everything by the time I was 45, and I was still miserable, and I realized there was no achieving anything in the outside world that was gonna make me happy. And I told my boss, the owner of Jarrett, a while back, I told him, I said I was gonna quiet my mind by any means necessary, and I meant it. I mean, I just turned my focus inward, and over the last seven years, I think I've just really understood what the power of the subconscious mind and and how it actually works. You know, we all drive a car, but nobody really reads the owner's manual, right? We're operating something far more intelligent with this with these bodies that is infinitely more intelligent than per virtually any computer that's on the planet, and we don't know how it truly works. In the subconscious mind, like we we breathe automatically, right? But we can take control over it, so it's it's happening subconsciously, you know. We walk subconsciously, we drive subconsciously, and we react subconsciously 95% of our days. Scientists have basically say we're living like zombies 95 of our days, yeah. And as I start to understand like the rules of how the that the supercomputer that we are the programmers of, it works. Now I can manipulate it. Now I can wake make it work for me. I could re I could reprogram it and and make it work for me. And it it's like, oh my gosh, this is a gift. You know, when I figured it out, I just want to scream it from the mountaintops and and share it with the world.

SPEAKER_00: 10:35

You know, first, because uh we we definitely gotta dive deeper into a subconscious mind, right? But uh, you know, listening to your story, I think it's something that a lot of men go through, right? You know, I think of Val, you know, as a young kid, we you get these beliefs, or you know, folks tell you, hey, if you don't get girls, right, then something is wrong with you, right? And so now you try to do everything you can to get the validation and approval of women, right? And then you get that, and then you realize that this didn't make me feel better, right? I still feel empty. Talk about money, right? You get this amount of money and you make this, then you will, you know, you're the man, right? And so you do everything you can to get this amount of money, and then you get it, you know, you look at your life and you're not really excited about the direction you're going, right? You get an apartment or a certain house, and it's kind of the dream house or the dream apartment, and then, you know, six months, a year, two years down the line, you're like, you know, at the end of the day, it's just kind of just a house, and uh I've gotten used to it and I just don't feel it doesn't, it hasn't done what I thought it would do for me. For a short period of time, these things feel good, but then you still are back to where you were. And so it found it sounds like you go through a journey that a lot of a lot of men go through. Yeah. And then you realize that, oh, the journey is the the inner journey, right? The mind, right? Yeah, that spiritual journey of of looking to kind of find you know the love for yourself and and you know from source, right? Yeah. And you went down that journey yourself.

SPEAKER_02: 12:26

With with a serious intensity, man. With an intensity. Oh my gosh. I I I was meditating three or four hours a day.

SPEAKER_00: 12:36

Right. So tell me this, was there a where was there some type of pain that made you kind of go through this inflection point, or was it frustration, right, that you felt that made you go at this intensity?

SPEAKER_02: 12:49

I guess what I oh my gosh, it was like a breaking point, you know. So like it, I I started, I got this job. I've been at Jarrett for about 12, 13 years now, and we grew a company from two and a half million dollars a year to a hundred this year. And it's it was on a tremendous growth curve. Most companies go broke growing that fast, 3,900 growth in in 13 years. And in the middle of it, we had some problems. And we I dove in and was fixing problems and got to the other end of it and realized how many mistakes that I made. And so once I fixed all these problems and systems using the problem-solving skills that I was gifted with, and I got the business kind of structurally sound to where it was double checks on everything, is basically the systems. And we got all those things in place, and then I realized how many mistakes that I had made because I did an autopsy of everything and took extreme ownership of whatever was going on. And when I got to the end of that, I was like, dude, this is miserable. Like, I am miserable. I I am making more money than I ever thought I would make. And my brain just won't shut up. It was like with every achievement, the noise in my head was getting louder and louder and louder. It I knew I was doing good, I knew I had everything, but I didn't know how to turn the voices off in my head that were telling me I was stupid, unworthy, and unlovable. Those were my three major ones.

SPEAKER_00: 14:17

Say it one more time. What were they?

SPEAKER_02: 14:19

Ugly or not ugly. So there's four major that we all have in common, but the first one, ugly, I didn't really have an issue with, but unworthy, unlovable, and stupid. Like we all, those are all universal for everyone. We we all have issues and they all fall into all four of those categories. Yep. Wow, and they're and they're and they're powerful, but once you understand it, it's just it's just like we're computer programmers. That that shit that's coming on in our head, it's just coming from a program, and it's easy to change once you understand. You know, it takes courage. You have to have the courage to go face those fears because it's scary and it's hard, it's not easy, but the process is easy. I've created a writing program that you could do, you could rewrite one within an hour by yourself once you understand the the all the the process of being able to do it. Yeah, it's so for me, you know, it it wasn't one point, it was an accumulation of a life lived of trying to feel better, trying to achieve all the things and do all the things and listen to the world and say you got to achieve this and do all this. A lot of what you said, you said it a lot better than than I did, but it's all of those things, and then realizing you're still freaking miserable. And I have everything that I needed, and I was still miserable, and it was even getting worse. It was it was getting worse. You know, there's stories of billionaires, people that set out their goal to become a billionaire, and two years later they're ready to commit suicide because they thought that was gonna fill the hole, and it doesn't, you know, it it it just doesn't. The only thing that's gonna fill our hole is living in service to others and quieting the mind, bringing 100% of our attention into the present moment because that's the only place that peace is found. One of the things that the subconscious mind does is it pulls us into it, it lets us know that the future and the past is all a lie. The only thing that it truly exists is the present moment. Right here, right now, talking to you, this moment is the only thing that's ever happened. Everything that's ever happened to us has happened in the present moment. So when I was in kindergarten and I couldn't spell my name like everybody else, and I realized for the first time everybody else was smarter than me. I got into an elevated emotional state, and I got I left that moment feeling stupid. That's when I started spelling Mike instead of Michael because I couldn't spell my name. In that moment, I programmed that I was dumb. That was the first time that that happened. Now I would have lived with that for the rest of my life, feeling that way, because it happened in the present moment, and the subconscious mind is trying to protect us from ever feeling that way again. So it puts us on high alert, like scanning the room. So I'm never gonna feel stupid again. And in doing that, it makes us the noise of being on high alert. One, it pumps cortisol, which is literally killing us all and making us sick. But then two, it it pulls us into the past instead of being able to be present in the in the present moment. So it's the subconscious mind literally has no concept of time. Everything that has ever happened to us is still happening right now. It's kind of powerful because it's it's it's a curse and it's a gift, and it's the curse because it's the pain is still happening now. But the beautiful thing is that we can go back, we could use our imagination right now and go back to any moment that was negative and filled with negative and fear, a moment like that, and we could rewrite it. We could use our imagination, give compassion, love, and forgiveness for everybody involved. Like, so if let's say my dad did something to me, or my you know, a student or something made me feel a certain kind of way, I can go back to that moment with my imagination because the subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between five-year-old me and now, and I could use my imagination, reframe the whole thing with compassion, love, and forgiveness, and all of a sudden it moves it out of a fear bucket to where the subconscious mind doesn't have to protect us from it anymore, and now all of a sudden that memory is gone, and I don't have those all those bullshit thoughts coming in my head all day long, every day, telling me I'm not worthy, I'm not love lovable, and I'm stupid because that memory is gone. That old core belief is yeah, it's gone.

SPEAKER_00: 18:51

Yeah, so you talked about first being in a heightened emotional state, which left the imprint of whatever moment it is. Yep, that's how it gets created. Right. First, it's that it's that high emotional state. Yes. And so now, and then you realize that the subconscious mind doesn't have a time stamp, right? It it is now there to protect you. And pretty much it develops like this container of capacity, right? You start to go a little bit there, don't go, don't go too far, right? We don't want you to feel like this again, right? Yep. And so then you are saying in order to reprogram it, you need to imagine it, right? Yep. Almost put yourself back in that emotional state and reimagine what should have happened or something that was more of benefit to you to reprogram that into a more positive imprint as opposed to a negative imprint.

SPEAKER_02: 19:59

You were following along.

SPEAKER_00: 20:01

I'm following. I'm following. Yeah, I'm following. And so I think, you know, we we talk a lot about therapy, right? You talk a lot about going in and spending some time for healing to go back to a lot of these moments, right? And I think a lot of people are either afraid to go back into those moments or they don't spend time there. They they talk about those moments, but they don't necessarily reprogram it, right?

SPEAKER_02: 20:32

That's that's where my struggle. I I I think therapy, traditional therapy is is great for a lot of reasons. It helps you understand dynamics, it'll help you understand somebody's a sociopath, or you know, it lets you understand the dynamic and helps you navigate relationships. It's beautiful for that. But going back to heal, just going back and talking about your old trauma and not reprogramming it is it does nothing for you. You could talk about your trauma all day long and all you're doing is digging it up and staring at it. You're not doing anything for so a lot of what I I have a I have a hard time with traditional therapy for uh some reasons. Because if you just if if a kid was you know molested as a kid and you just dig it up and you and you just having them relive it, that but it's almost gonna make it worse on them. Now it might it if once you bring in forgiveness, now all of a sudden you can start the healing process, right? And it's in every major religion, like it Jesus talks about it, like he was on the cross, right? And and as he was getting nailed to the cross, he said, I forgive you, for you know not what you've done. That didn't do anything to absolve what was happening to him, but it freed him from any pain that I was causing because it's all mental. When you free somebody, I started practice unjust instant forgiveness for everyone a while back. And I started practicing in the car, right? You're on the way home back to work, somebody's gonna cut you off. Like it's it's inevitable. Somebody's gonna cut you off, do something silly. I instantly started forgiving them the moment I would get cut off because it freed me from that pain. I would just make up a story like, oh man, this kid's got to this dude's gotta get home to his kid, his kid's sick, you know. He I hope everybody's safe and well. I, you know, I wish him nothing but the best. Now I I'm maintaining my own peace in my head, and we can get into this too, but there's two chemicals that are being produced at any one time, and the they get produced based off the content of our thoughts. So if I'm having negative, fearful thoughts, it's producing cortisol. If I'm having compassionate loving thoughts, I start producing cortisol. And there's a switch in your brain that's going to go off and get flipped it after two minutes of having either one of those thoughts. So if you just constantly maintain compassionate loving thoughts, you're over here in a in a drug-induced state of happiness, right?

SPEAKER_00: 23:05

So you said first I I what you said cortisol, and then what was the second chemical oxytocin? Oxytocin, right? Yeah, that's the love, the love. The love drug. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 23:15

Yeah, I believe that we are built in a way that the opposite of love is not hate, it's fear. Because that's how our brain is designed. It's chemically designed to react to fear, and and this is how the the brain works. Like it's designed, everything about all of this is designed to protect us. So let's imagine that you're a two-year-old little boy and you're walking along the edge of a pool and you fall in, right? You you get air, you get water in your lungs, somebody picks you up out of there and you're freaked out. You can tell you, you know, you couldn't breathe for a second, somebody saves your life. The subconscious mind is gonna tell that little boy to hold that memory at a high level. So the next time it's walking along the edge of the pool, it goes, Oh, hell no, I can get on there to that pool. I'm freaked out by it. And it and it forces you to stay over here so you don't fall in the pool and drown the next time. That's how the subconscious mind is designed to protect you. The problem is, is it's going to protect you from everything that you put everything that you attach to your ego. So, like, Josh, what do you do for a living? I work in IT project management. All right. So I'm gonna say something, I'm gonna say something mean. All right, but you just it's just a it's just a little trick. All right, let's do this whenever I'm coaching with somebody. All right, Josh, if I tell you right now that you are the shittiest IT guy that I have ever met, yeah, in your gut right now, did you just feel a funky little feeling? Like it's like you have a physical reaction, yeah. Okay, so that's that's your subconscious mind protecting you because you have attached being a good IT guy to your to your ego, what I would say your Christmas tree. You hung the ornament on your Christmas tree that says you're a good IT guy. Now that's just an attachment. So the subconscious mind is trying to protect you from any attack on that, the same way it would that little boy falling in the pool. They're not the same thing. So if I tell you right now, Josh, you are the shittiest attorney I have ever met in my life, that you have no physical reaction, yeah, because you don't have that on, you've not attached that to your tree. So the problem with the subconscious mind now is we're all running around here since we're two years old. We start putting attachments on ourselves. I'm a football player, I'm a friend, I'm a good son, I'm a husband, I'm a dad, I'm a I'm a I'm a friend, I'm all of these things. And now, if any of those things get attacked, I have that physical response in my belly. Yeah. And and so, like one of the one of the biggest things that I ever took off was being a husband. And so when my wife came to me and she would have a moment of like, hey, what are you doing here? What's going on? Because she stays at home and I'm at work with a lot of you know young, beautiful people or whatever. And she asked me a question. In the past, I'd be like, Don't you know that I love you? Don't you know I give you everything? I would have a physical response because I was trying to defend myself. But now, when I take that off my map, when she calls me, if she has any kind of rough moment, I could simply just be calm with her and go, okay, baby, help me understand what's going on so I can make you feel better. What could I do? You know, so because I don't have that physical response that you just had in your gut, right? Because I I remove all of my attachments. You know, I started out with removing a shoe guy, you know. When I did it the first time, I'm not gonna be a shoe guy anymore because I wear Jordans every day. With this outfit, I wear Jordans over to work, but and then I took off being a Titans football fan because it was making me miserable every time they lost, and then I took off politics. You know, I used to be a big old Democrat, wanting to argue and come home and watch football or watch you know, MSNBC or the news, and it was making me miserable. So I I literally in one episode, I took off all three of those things, and it's so simple to do. All you gotta do is say out loud that I no longer identify with being a Titans fan. Yeah, I I I enjoy watching football, but I'm so much more than a Titans fan. And all of a sudden, it can't affect me no more. As long as I'm you just told the subconscious mind that's that's an ornament that's no longer on your tree. And so within a week, my life changed just by doing removing those three things. Now, when my shoes got dirty, I didn't care. I was like, it's just shoes, it's wonderful. I'm grateful I'm wearing these shoes. I don't care if they get dirty, they're they're meant to get dirty, you know. So those attachments is what's the subconscious mind is in conflict with because that's not really a threat to our life. None of those things are a threat to our my life, but the subconscious mind is defending it as if a gun's being pointed at my head. And so that's what creates all this turmoil in our body because that that physical response that you had when I said that to you, it's it's 99% of the people that I say that to, they have the exact same response because anybody who cares about their job has now attached that to their ego. And now the subconscious mind is gonna do everything it can to protect you because it thinks that's your life, it thinks that's who you are as a physical being.

SPEAKER_00: 28:21

And you know, we talk about uh attaching ourselves to you know a lot of things, you know, your your career, um like you said, how you stand politically, yeah, you know. Yeah, it's a big deal. Yeah, what you do for a living, yeah, like you mentioned, your water, your race, religion, right? And so you feel the need to defend it. You don't even have an open mind to other folks and other people, right? And you have this, it's almost like you are trying to prove that your way is the right way, right? As opposed to kind of just letting go and and flowing, right? Yeah, and and protect honestly, it's almost just self-protection from the emotional charge that you feel, right?

SPEAKER_02: 29:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 29:10

When you have conversations and different things like that, it's almost like poison. They talk about kind of poison that you have inside of you, you know, as opposed to just flowing with love, right?

SPEAKER_02: 29:19

Yes, yeah, yeah. Because when when you do release all of that, you know, I I could literally ask anybody, and the answer is always the same. You I may have to ask it multiple times, but like, all right, what's your what's your goal in life? Somebody's gonna say, you know, I want to retire, I want to make this much money, I want to find this person, I want to do all that. But at the end of it, you want that to be happy, right? That it's for you so you can find peace and and joy. Well, peace and joy is right now, you can find it right now. We don't need to search, we don't need anything for it. Like all that stuff in the 3D world, everything out here that you can see with your eyes open, it's not gonna bring one ounce of peace. It's how we process the information as it's as it's working through the system that's gonna bring us peace.

SPEAKER_00: 30:02

Yeah, you talk about these because you know, even we mentioned it before, right. We have all these different things that we feel like we need to obtain for a certain feeling or a certain emotion. You know, whether it's it's self-respect, whether it's feeling the feeling of being valued, you know, the three things you a few things you mentioned, feeling worthy, feeling lovable, right? Feeling smart, right? Yeah. Beautiful. And and feeling feeling beautiful, right? Handsome. So you you do everything you can to restrict your diet and everything like that. And put all this pressure on it, right? For for a feeling, for emotion, right? And like you said, you can feel these things in the moment. And then when you do do those things, you do it from a place of abundance, right? From a place of love, as opposed to kind of a place of gripping and grinding for it, right? You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 31:03

Well, you anything we try to hold on to is going to cause us pain. Doesn't matter what it is. I I realized I was doing this for a while, that I would go out and just randomly have the best night ever. And then that next weekend, I would try to mimic that night that I had the week before, and everything would just be a disaster. Everything nothing was funny like it was last week, nothing was natural like it was last week, everything because I was holding on to how much fun I had the weekend before, you know, and they were just signs. It was the universe trying to tell me, you know, that you can't hold on, and I just wasn't listening to the to the to the message. But anything that we attach to and try to hold on to it's is gonna bring pain. We we just this life is supposed to be lived like like we're in the middle in a kayak in the middle of a river, and all we're supposed to do is let the current carry us down. Maybe we need to steer away from you know rocks in the in the thing, or maybe you know, keep ourselves from hitting the banks. But so we do have to stay awake, but we don't have to, we don't have to paddle, we don't have to do anything. This this this the world is the universe is just gonna carry us down the river beautifully, and and it's not about a goal out in front of us, it's it's a journey, it's every step that gets us to that place.

SPEAKER_00: 32:20

Yeah, that's yeah. No, you I mean you hit it right on the head. I'm I'm thinking about one of the things when I came into this year, you know, I was thinking I wanted uh I wanted to be okay with things not going the way I wanted. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 32:38

It's acceptance, right?

SPEAKER_00: 32:39

Acceptance.

SPEAKER_02: 32:40

Yeah, this is Buddhism 101.

SPEAKER_00: 32:42

Not having, not necessarily having an agenda with certain things, right? And it's so tough. And then, you know, uh for myself, I it was uh it's it's been quite a few things this year that have not gone the way I wanted it to go and how I envisioned it to go. And what it does is it's it it is painful, right? Because I realized that I was attached to it, I had a kind of an agenda, but also too, what it what it's made me do is kind of step back in faith and look within and trust that something better or bigger that I couldn't even imagine or fathom is on its way.

SPEAKER_02: 33:25

You know, this brings me to a cool little, you mind if I tell you a little bit, but yeah, yeah, this is great. So, like it's wise old farmer, right? Back in the day, you know, a thousand years ago, there's a wise old Chinese farmer. And he had at that time, if you have a horse, you're rich. All right. So he's got his horse out there, and his horse runs away. And here comes the neighbor, the little guy, and he's like, Man, I can't believe this happened to you. This is this is terrible. You you know, you just lost your horse. This is the worst thing that could ever happen to you. And the wise old farmer just looks at him and says, Man, I don't know if this is good or bad. About a week later, his horse comes back and brings a mare with him. And here comes the little neighbor. Oh my gosh, you're so rich. You have two horses now. Your horse came back and brought you another horse. You're the richest man that I know. I you have two horses. And the wise old man just looked at him and said, I don't know if this is good or bad. So, about a week later, his oldest son is trying to break that bear and gets kicked off and breaks his leg. You know, the oldest son running your farm for you. You know, that's a big deal. Here comes a little neighbor again. Oh, that horse is the devil. I can't believe this happened. Like, what are you gonna do? How are you gonna farm your land with your without your help of your son? And the the wise old farmer just looked at and said, Man, I don't know if this is good or bad. About a week later, military comes to town, there's a war, and they're taking the oldest sons and drafting them into the military, but his leg's broke, so he ain't going. So, the moral of the story is just we don't ever know if anything is good or bad. And it it's not for us to decide whether it's good or bad, it's it's the journey, it's the ups and the downs. It's it that is what is important, is for us to accept it all as a gift that we're even living this life, the good and the bad.

SPEAKER_00: 35:19

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, you know, I've I've definitely heard that story before, but every time I hear it, it just makes me smile of like you don't know. And so just just just allow it, you know, and and respond well, right? Because uh, you know, some things that can happen to you, right? It probably wouldn't make you suffer as much. Oh, not anymore uh than things that would happen to me, right? But we we all uh everybody has their own thing that they're dealing with internally that makes them respond in another way or not, you know. And that story is just always uh amazing to me because we can look back on our own lives and look at certain situations like, man, if that didn't happen, this wouldn't have happened. If this didn't happen, then this wouldn't have happened. And so uh you can always even with the when you know we can put quotations, right? When the bad things happen, yeah, you can know that it's something for our benefit coming. Yeah, so let's attack it, let's attack this.

SPEAKER_02: 36:31

Yeah, yeah, let's enjoy this, let's let's be pay patient. Like, I don't know for you, but like for me, a lot of when bad things happen, I used to overreact and make them worse. I would compound it by my reactions instead of just being peaceful, calm, compassionate, not throwing any darts, not trying to defend myself. That would have made my life so much easier, and I would have moved through life a whole lot smoother. But you know, those reactions that I had that were were loud, emotional, they made me dumb, you know, and they and they do for everyone. You know, moving to a business standpoint, because I've kind of taken the spiritual world and brought it to work, right? And and I've used all this at work, every aspect of all the spiritual world. I use it at work, and and and the world is catching up. Forbes top 10 list of the most successful companies, they all just they rank emotional intelligence two times higher than your IQ. And the reason is because when we get into an emotional state and we get elevated, we just get dumber. So it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you're in a pressure situation, you that you're losing your IQ points by the second. You you literally become dumb when you become emotional. And those who are able to regulate their emotions and keep their emotions in check are the ones that are able to thrive in stressful situations and maintain their ability to think in the middle of a you know a pressure cooker.

SPEAKER_00: 38:01

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, we've all done dumb things. Oh, I have.

SPEAKER_02: 38:07

Oh my gosh. I got a laundry list. I hope we don't talk about all of them.

SPEAKER_00: 38:13

So you talk about taking control of your thoughts, and we talked a little bit about it, right? Yeah. But man, I can imagine as a COO of a of a of a company, how many thoughts go through. And then even when you talked about all the success, all these thoughts coming through. And I think a lot of men when they're living their day-to-day lives, they got all these different thoughts that come through. And thoughts, they don't even know where these thoughts came from, right? It's just crazy thoughts. I guess how have you found to be able to quiet the mind or or or calm the mind for yourself?

SPEAKER_02: 38:57

That the best and easiest way for anybody to do it is with breath work. The the one I teach in week one, I basically want everybody to start is is the box, Navy SEAL's box breathing, right? I don't know how if everybody that knows it's listening to it, but basically you just inhale for four seconds, you count in your head, and then you hold your breath for four seconds, and you exhale for four seconds, and you hold again, and you just keep that cycle going. The Navy SEALs it's a very rare elite group, right? And the Navy decided they want to figure out how to recruit these special individuals that actually make it through. Because they had like a 350 people show up for a for a training, a three-week training course, and like six, seven, eight people make it through. That's it's it. And so they'd need more Navy SEALs to do things in the world, so they'd want to find more. And they did a they they interviewed every Navy SEAL for 15 years and did a study. They found out that they had two things in common. The only two things that all of them had in common. Some were big, some were small. So it it size nothing, nothing matched up except for these two things compassion for your fellow man and mastering the breath work that they teach you. And and the reason why is because they both quiet the mind. If you and I became friends in the in the Navy SEALs, right? We're both in there, we're two weeks into a three-week program and we're miserable, right? We hadn't been sleeping, we hadn't been eating, they've been running us, working us out 18 hours a day, we we ain't got that much food in us. And if your brain, if you and I are on a 10-mile run and you're like, F this man, I'm I'm done, I can't do this and shit no more. If your brain starts telling you to quit, you're gonna quit, right? But if I'm running alongside you and you know you're my friend now, and I'm like, You ain't quitting, Josh, you ain't quitting. If I gotta carry you to the finish line, me having compassion for you now, just turned my brain off. Right now, I'm not thinking about quitting, I'm not thinking about how painful I am. I'm just gonna keep moving. And the breath work does the same thing when you bring 100% of your attention into that Navy SEALs box breathing technique, just a simple focus on your breath, it turns the brain off. It's a simple trick and it brings you into the tension into the present moment where there are no thoughts, you're just present in the in the moment, and now all of a sudden, all the anxiety comes down, and your body will just go, it'll just continue to go. David Goggins has proven that the body will just go and go and go if you don't let it stop, right? So that's what it's about is about turning off that mind. So the the trick that I use now, because you know, I sit in I got seven different companies, right? And so one of the things that's uh integral is a double check on everything. So we have morning meetings for two or three hours every single morning, starts at six o'clock and go into eight or nine o'clock every morning, and that's the meat of my day. And some of these meetings can get boring, but we go over every job, we touch on everything, and so we write all the notes on the day, and that they don't do it next week. I can do it, so I can manage seven companies by sitting in those meetings in the morning. But if I lose focus or I can get in there and just you know, lose it, but I'm nobody even knows that I'm doing it, but I'm just in there doing my box breathing. I do a different form of it, but I'm just in there focused on my breath. And I leave those meetings, I feel revived, refreshed, amazing when I leave the meeting because I haven't had any thoughts for the last two, three hours. Yeah, you know, and I just go back, go back to my breathing, go back to my breathing through through the time. So for me, that's an amazing way. But there's there's Eckhart Toll has a great book out, The Power of Now.

SPEAKER_01: 42:47

Power of Now, yep.

SPEAKER_02: 42:48

Yeah, and it's it it he calls them portals into the now, and there's hundreds of them, there's thousands of portals into the now. Like everybody's ever heard everybody's heard the phrase stop and smell the roses. That's a portal into the now. If you just close your eyes for a second, take in whatever smells you can, try to identify them. You're in the present moment. The brain is turned off, all you're you're focusing on your senses, you've just now turned your brain off and brought yourself into the present moment. Like there's literally hundreds and hundreds of ways to just bring your attention into the present moment. But but breathing is, you know, every rel every major religion on the planet talks about this, but it's it's that's where the breath of God was was breathed into us. The the breath is how you access everything. Like I can control my lungs or they can breathe subconsciously. So I I can't physically make my heart beat faster by focusing on my heart, but I can take control of my lungs and make my heart slow up, slow down, or speed up. Same thing with the pulse in my brain. Like it it beats at three or four times the rate of my heart. But if I slow my breath down enough, that calms down. And after about 15 or 20 minutes, I can make them pulse at the same rate, which does something pretty amazing. And it's it's a whole meditation and whatever. The the deeper you take it, the further you go inward, it just keeps opening up and opening up and opening up, and you just gain more access to a hidden world that's that's pretty powerful and amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 44:24

100%. And you, you know, I the breath work thing, I've I've really gotten into it. I would say maybe over the last two, three months or so of kind of meditation, breath work. And obviously, I've heard of breath work and meditation, maybe most of my life, honestly. And then you kind of go through these ebbs and flows, right? And then, you know, now, you know, I actually did some breath work this morning for five minutes. I mean, it's called called a uh psychological sigh, where you take a deep breath in, hold it, then you take another short one in through the nose, then you let it out through the mouth, right? You do that for five minutes. And obviously, box breathing is is amazing. Yeah, but you know, I guess you saying it, I didn't realize how much how it does make you more present, even than just meditation itself, right?

SPEAKER_02: 45:22

When you just sit there, you know, you still kind of yeah, it brings you into the present moment, tells you it tells your entire system I am safe. It it literally tells your entire system that you are safe. Your subconscious mind can relax because you've just switched it all over and let it know that the true self is here, we are calm, we are in control. I got this.

SPEAKER_00: 45:43

You got it, yeah. And and I think this is such a big tool for men to listen to because your mind spirals, and then that's how you talk about the anxiety and depression and getting into these low states and almost kind of uh uh creating these things in your mind, right? Spiral, and these are just kind of just stories and a lot of times illusions that you're telling yourself. You know, Mark Twain has a great quote where he says, A lot of bad things have happened to me, and some actually happen, right? Something along those lines. Yeah, only some of it actually happened, right?

SPEAKER_02: 46:23

Yeah, and because it's all a segment of your memory.

SPEAKER_00: 46:25

Yeah, he says, you know, I a lot of things have happened to me, but only a few actually happen, right? And so a lot of times it is our mind spiraling and our mental and these stories that we've told ourselves over and over, and if you can have these tools of kind of regulating your nervous system, calming your mind down with breathing techniques, things that can take five minutes, right? Out of your day.

SPEAKER_02: 46:50

Oh my gosh. Yeah. So here's another quick little one. So we that when you just said that, you know, your mind starts to spiral. The reason our minds spiral is a cortisol, it's a drug-induced state. Well, the reason why it spiral, because cortisol is designed, it's that fear state that it puts you in. So, like cortisol is designed. Let's say you and I we're gonna get paid a million dollars, right? And we got to go stay in the woods for one night. The catch is there's a hungry lion in the woods, right? So we're gonna go out there, we're gonna get some sticks, we're gonna climb a tree, and we're gonna we're gonna be on high alert, right? The lion's not there, but we're on high alert. That cortisol is gonna be pumping through us because cortisol is designed to keep us alive, it's designed to keep us on high alert. Because if we just got crawled up in the tree and fell asleep, the lion's gonna come eat us and we're you know, we're dead. But if we're prepared, we might be able to fight the lion off and survive. That's what cortisol is designed to do. The problem is now we got all those attachments and we got these things that that that subconscious mind is defending. And when that cortisol goes in, it puts you on high alert, it wakes you up. That's why sometimes you you're laying in bed thinking about shit and you can't sleep. You're ruminating on the same thing, the same thing. It's cortisol keeping you awake. It's a it's a drug that's literally killing you, it's poison into your body, but it's keeping you on high alert for a potential threat. And the one of the best tools that anybody can use, and it's kind of corny for men. Men, let's get over this. It's a little corny. I'm gonna let you know this is amazing and it works every single time because at two minutes of compassionate loving thoughts will switch off that cortisol and you'll be able to go right to sleep, right? If you if you're having a hard time going to sleep, get out a pad and paper and start writing at right at the top of the paper. I am grateful for, and then write a dot and say, I'm grateful for the air in my lungs. I'm grateful for my family, I'm grateful my kids are healthy, I'm grateful that I could see, I'm grateful, and just write whatever it is you can think of that you're grateful for for 10 minutes. The first two minutes, it's gonna flip that switch in your brain. You're gonna stop making cortisol that's keeping you up and not allowing you to sleep, you're gonna start producing oxytocin. Then after another eight minutes, you're gonna have enough oxytocin, you'll be able to go right to sleep. Won't even have a problem doing it. And it's just because you change the content of your thoughts and then thus changing the chemicals that your brain is making, and it allows you to go to sleep. So on random days, I'll still wake up and I won't feel very good. I'll go to work and I know something's in there in that stomach, like we we identified earlier, because I live in oxytocin so much. Now, if I have a random bad feeling, I if I'm left alone with it, I'm gonna chase it down to its source and make it go away. But on random days, I'm at work, I don't have time, I don't have the silence, whatever. I'll just grab my notebook and start writing what I'm grateful for for 10 minutes, and that's gone. It it won't it won't haunt me no more or it'll go away. My stomach will feel amazing, everything is safe, I'm beautiful, and I'll just move on with my days. The thing that happens, so I I teach this in my program in in week one. One of the two of the major things is uh a gratitude journal and box breathing or one of these other tools. And if you do, there's lots of ways to program a subconscious mind. One of them is auto suggestion. So if you do something every day, like learning how to walk or drive or whatever, you become really good at it, right? It just all of a sudden starts to change who you are, and now all of a sudden you drive and you don't think about it. Well, if you wake up every morning and you write for 10 minutes what you're grateful for, you're just gonna start randomly having thoughts that you're grateful for stuff in the middle of the day without even trying. So you're gonna program your mind to just be grateful all the time, and then you'll just be in this drug-induced state all the time, and you're gonna feel amazing. And you ain't even gone back and healed anything. This is just a manual shift if you're feeling bad, where you could start to do this and it works. You know, we should have all been taught this in in first grade, you know, kindergarten. This is stuff that we could all do. And my when I when I realized how powerful this was, my son was seven and he'd come upstairs for the first time, freaked out, like in tears, snot coming out of his nose, and he's just freaked out the boogeyman was gonna get him. And I've been doing a gratitude journal for about three months at the time. And I was like, Tuck, I know what's wrong with you and I can help you. And he's crying, he's like, Oh, okay, well, what are you gonna do? I said, Tuck, you just gotta play a game with me. And he he said, Okay, but I don't know how to play. I said, It's really easy. All you gotta do is say what you're grateful for. And he's still crying, like, but yeah, I don't I don't know how to do that. I said, It's easy, I'll go first. So I said, I'm grateful for our house. He said, Okay, but I don't know what I'm grateful for. I said, Well, what about your cats? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm grateful for Leroy and Nala. All right, so now we're going. And he's grateful for his mama, and then he's grateful for his room, and he's grateful for all these things, and we we're going after about two minutes. He ain't crying no more. I'm like, wait a minute, is this really working right now? After about five minutes, he's smiling. After about 10 minutes, we're laughing, we're having a good conversation. 15 minutes in, and I'm like, Holy shit, this little boy was just terrified. Yeah, and he is happy, smiling, just going nuts. And I'm like, All right, Tuck, time to go back downstairs, get in bed. Gave me a hug, went downstairs. I never heard another word from him. And that was the day that the Grateful Game was born in my house where we play the Grateful Game whenever he's not feeling good or whatever, or we'll just do it randomly because you know he's a young kid and wants to play a game with his dad or whatever. But I was just blown away. I knew it was working for me, but I just watched a little boy go from panic stricken about the boogeyman gonna get him to going to sleep 15 minutes later. I never heard of that, like, but it's just a simple switch of the content of his thoughts made the chemicals in his brain switch, and he's ready to go to sleep. He's drug-induced happy 15 minutes later.

SPEAKER_00: 52:56

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 52:57

Yeah, focusing on the good, yeah, focusing on the good, but it has a it has a physical response, you know. Right, we're back to green screen. I don't know if you can see that.

SPEAKER_00: 53:07

Yeah, I do see it on my end. I'm I'm back on green screen for folks who are listening. Okay, here we are. Yeah, and so you really you you are focusing on the good. Yeah, and I think a lot of people when they get into a rut, they are in this state of constantly thinking about the bad. Right. You get into a rut, everything is negative, everything is ah, the world is against me, ah, they keep nagging me. Ah, I can't catch a break as opposed to, man, it's a lot of good. You just gotta look, you just gotta focus on that. Yeah, right. And then all that other stuff, you know. You like you said, I love how you you said it, you switch the flip. I mean, you you flip the switch, right? Yes in your mind, right?

SPEAKER_02: 53:51

Yep, and you start it your brain chemically starts producing different chemicals, like it's science, like science has proven that when you do this, it switch it changes the chemicals in your brain. It's like, why do we not know this? It's because they're selling drugs to us and nobody wants to, that you ain't gonna make no money off. Everybody learns how to play the grave game. There's no these drugs are going away.

SPEAKER_00: 54:13

These drugs will go away. All these drugs. And you know, I uh you you said another big thing. I think, you know, learning to love being you is forgiveness, self-forgiveness. Yeah. And I think it's so much in my life, so many things. I'm like, man, I wish I would have done this instead. Uh man, I wish, you know, I, you know, maybe took this a little bit more serious. Maybe I would I wish I would have focused in here a little bit more. Man, I wish I wouldn't have said that in that moment, you know. And so we got all everybody who's listening to this, you and I, we have a lot of things where we can go back and wish we would have done things differently. And when it comes to that self-acceptance, when it comes to loving yourself, I think it's some self-forgiveness that has to come in play.

SPEAKER_02: 55:09

Forgiveness is everything. And for me, that was one of the hardest things for me to do. And it took me about nine months of a process to kind of get there. And it didn't start with the focus on me. And and one of the things was the trigger of it, is I I kind of just had this, you know, we all have beliefs and we have knowings, right? We know we're talking here right now, but people have beliefs about religion and and what we're all here for and whatever. But it this the fact I I I believe this is this is a knowing for me, what I'm about to say, is that we're all connected, we're all one, right? Yeah, we're we're this is the essence of God in all of us is is this is God experiencing itself through us as individuals, like it's having all these experiences. We're it says it in every major religion, it says it in Buddhism, but when it when it became a knowing for me, when I started to experience it, I I started to realize that when I say something bad or something negative, I started having a major aversion. Like I would feel terrible. And it I started to realize, well, this is another subconscious mind thing. The subconscious mind doesn't know that anybody else exists or it truly understands that we are all one. Because if you say something negative about anyone, you are going to have a negative physical reaction to it. You may not know it because we may not be sensitive enough to feel it. But if you live in oxytocin enough and then you say something negative, it is going to immediately pull you into cortisol and you're going to feel it. But if you live, if you live in cortisol, you're never gonna know the difference.

SPEAKER_00: 56:51

Yeah. It's just like food, right? It's just like food. If you used to eating a healthy diet and you eat something bad, you'll feel it, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 56:59

If you're sensitive enough, you're you're gonna you're gonna feel it. So for me, the way that I was able to finally start to have love and compassion for myself was giving unconditional love to everyone, doesn't matter who it is. If somebody's doing something to me, I love them anyway. So most of us don't truly understand unconditional love till we have a kid. But why shouldn't I love my kid the way that I love my kid? Why shouldn't I love you the same way? Why should I hold that love back for you? You know, I just met you, I don't know you, but that love that I gave my kid was amazing. I didn't ask for anything in return. I just I loved him from the moment I saw him. Well, why shouldn't I do that for you and everybody else that I meet? And when you actually start to practice that out into the world, then you're gonna start to realize, oh man, I messed up here. And well, wait a minute, I just forgave everybody else for the last six months for everything that they did and their their mistakes and their errors. And well, what about me? I I I deserve that too. And and for me, that's how it came full circle for me the a practice for the last year, two years of unconditional love for everyone, which isn't easy. But once I was able to make that a practice in my mind and actually try to implement that, then when it came back around to me, all those mistakes that I've made, all those regrets, well, hell, I've done forgiving everybody else for all of their stuff. Now it's easy. And when you realize that we're all connected, you can't do one without the other. You can't forgive everybody else and not forgive you, or you can't forgive yourself and not forgive everybody else as well. It's it's symbiotic. We have to forgive everyone, and most people have a problem with one or the other. The people that I've worked with that have gone through my program, that typically have a most people have a harder time forgiving themselves because most people are willing to just help people, they'll give them the shirt off their back. Most people are genuinely kind and want to do for others, but they don't give themselves the same grace and forgiveness. They don't, they just never practice that. So when you have those core beliefs, you're like, okay, yes, I want to help everybody else. Because obviously, Josh, you deserve it, but I, you know, I got these thoughts in my head that tell me I'm not worthy, but you know, you are, of course you are. But it's it's a symbiotic thing. We need to do it for everyone, and then it makes it easy to do it for ourselves.

SPEAKER_00: 59:40

Yeah, you know, you you just said something big there because I know for myself, right? If if you and I talk about things not going my way, if things don't go my way or I make a mistake, or you know, things just they don't pan out. Yeah, I start to look inward at myself instead of looking at the full picture, right? Okay, what what are all the factors here of why it didn't go the way it did, right? Yeah, I think some of it is healthy to look at yourself. To grow, right? And then it sometimes it can get to a point where it's some shame there and you are not ready to rebound and keep going. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:19

And so it's hard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:21

Yeah. Yeah. And so what I realized is that I was having these beliefs of when things go wrong, I must not be good enough. Right. Yeah. Or I'm unworthy. Right. Yeah. And so I spiral. Right. And so it, you know, being able to be aware of that and kind of flip the switch, being able to talk with you and have a conversation with you is reminding me that, hey, let's look at the good, let's flip the switch, and we can always kind of look at our own internal beliefs and start to flip them. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:53

You know, there's a there's a basketball analogy, right? I grew up playing basketball, love basketball. Michael Jordan, he said a quote of his just shook me. I was like, oh my gosh, of course you're the greatest of all time. This one statement that he said, he said he didn't care if he ever missed a shot. How powerful is that? Because all of those old negative things were never haunted him. He did he just kept taking the next shot because he never cared if he missed a shot. Like that's unhuman. That that that if you could take the shot keep missing the shot and just know you're gonna make the next one and just keep taking the shot. That's that that's that's that's the secret sauce, right? But yeah, who has the power in the mind, mental power to not care if you ever miss a shot? Like to truly not care if you fail on the to hit winning the game, winning shot, right? Yeah, and that, but that's what creates the ability to be the greatest player of all time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:50

Yeah, 100%. And then I think that's what it goes back to of getting our our internal right. So, you know, when you're shooting these shots, whether it's in business, podcasting, whatever your endeavor is, yeah, you're coming at a from a place of abundance, you know. Yeah, whether you fail, whether you succeed, it doesn't get to your head. And when you fail, it doesn't get to your heart, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:14

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:14

And so, I mean, it's a it's a beautiful place to be in. So I'm thinking about subconscious mind again, right? You talked about gratitude journal, the gratitude gain, gratitude as a whole. Yeah, you also talk about breath work, being in the present moment. What else? What else is there to help folks in terms of meditation, man?

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:38

Like so you you got you got a handful of things, you know, removing things from your from your Christmas tree, removing ornaments, it's a big deal. Like you could go through all this stuff. You could I realized because I've rewritten close to 200 core beliefs, you know. I've done this whole process. I've imagined myself back into a painful place, reframed it with compassion, love, and forgiveness. And I now I mean I have a hard time finding new ones, right? It's a gift if I feel bad, so I can go find it. But then I realized some days I was still feel bad. I was like, what is happening? Well, I realized it wasn't an old core belief chasing me anymore. Now it was an attachment that I had. So then I had to really focus on attachments and give them get them get them away. So my program, it's 10 weeks because it's filled with there's a lot of things that make up a mentally healthy person, right? It's not just one thing, it's a lot of things. And the first three weeks of it is is manually taking control. So when you do face all the difficult challenges, you could manually bring yourself back into a peaceful place. And and because the first three to five core beliefs somebody does, it it stirs up the entire system and all these old core beliefs, they don't like it. Your system hates it, they hate all those negative core beliefs because there's like protector parts, and they call it internal family systems. Like so you have this hurt child that's three, and there's a protector part trying to protect it, and none of it wants to do it anymore. You you free five of them, and the system starts to go nuts, they all start to scream, and so you're two months into doing core beliefs, and you're you feel 10 times worse than you ever did. You know that you're healing, you know that you're on the right path, but without all these manual tools to actually calm it all the system down manually, you you'll quit. You won't do this. This is a challenging thing that that the program that I'm built, but this is the only way forward, like logically, these are action items. One plus one equals two, and this will work, it works for everyone. Now, there are some folks that I've run come across that are chemically imbalanced, you know, and they just need to see a doctor and they need to get chemicals because hormones throw things out of whack. But the healthy, miserable person, which is most people, will all benefit from this because we all work the same way, our systems are all working the same way. So I guess to answer your question, there's a lot of things that can really help. So gratitude, breath work. The next thing I move people to is meditation. And in the meditation, there's a beautiful moment when we have we're sitting there paying attention, we got our headphones on and we're meditating, and we're listening to a guided meditation, and we're following along, and then all of a sudden, squirrel, we're over here thinking about work tomorrow, and with and we realize we've been thinking about that for 30 seconds, and then that moment when you realize, all right, I'm thinking about work tomorrow, and I and I'm meditating. Whoa, wait a minute. I'm I got two thoughts there. There's a moment when you realize that you are somewhere other than where you're supposed to be, there's two thoughts there. Wait a minute, we can't have two thoughts at the same time, right? You ever have two thoughts? You can't have two thoughts at the same time. What is happening in that moment, though? There are two thoughts. And if you hold on to that moment, those thoughts in your mind's eye start getting further and further away. And you can only last for a second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, five seconds, five seconds, you you done hit the jackpot. And what I mean by that is because the further that gets away, you start to ask the question who's who's staring at these two thoughts? Who's witnessing these two thoughts? It's you, you are the witness of your thoughts. That's the true self. And it's really the first time for most people that they ever actually are in a place where they realize that wait a minute, I've just detached from my thoughts and sat in the witness seat, and and that's a that's a golden nugget. And so, like at the third week, we're we're meditating, or actually that's that's yeah, that's week two. And we we get that moment, we get that separation between our thoughts and our and our true self, and we get familiar with the witness, the true self. And that's a powerful moment because the way the brain works is like if you dive into an IT problem, right? So you got the problem here, and you take your mind and you just immerse in it, right? You are in it, you're not thinking about nothing. You you you in that moment, that's that's a form of meditation. Single point of focus is a meditation. So when you're diving into an IT problem, you are literally meditating. You probably enjoy your job when you're doing that because everything's calm, everything's relaxed, you're not thinking about the future, past, you're just in the problem. That's what the mind is supposed to be used for, but then we're supposed to take that tool, which is the mind, and put it on the shelf and let it sit there, right? That's what yogis do, that's why they meditate in in caves for 15 years, so they could put that mind on the shelf when they're done using it and then live their days in the present moment. But when they need the mind again, you grab that tool off the shelf and you and you immerse yourself with it. But most people don't have the ability to separate from it, so that is a major tool that I believe you could only learn through meditation. So it doesn't matter if you're good at it. Actually, sucking at meditation actually is a good thing because you you have more opportunities to catch that moment when you realize that you just got distracted and then hold on to it as long as you can. And when you get separation, now all of a sudden, that awareness, it's like Wizard of Oz when they pulled the curtain and it's just the little old man back there, he's not scary. It you your body has a system awareness that you can't undo. It's like seeing the little old dude back there, you're not scared anymore. And when when you when you have that moment where you've disconnected from your thoughts and you've it's kind of visceral, and you know from that point on, every thought you have, it's not yours, you're disconnected, you're the witness witnessing that thought. So if you're having a negative thought that you're unlovable, unworthy, you know, ugly, stupid, whatever it is, you can go, oh no, no, no. You can laugh at it and you can reframe it. And so that's what we actually do in week three is we start a writing exercise to practice reframing them. Because once you get good at coming up with imaginary reasons to change those thoughts, now all of a sudden it just starts working on a thing. My brain literally will catch a negative thought and reframe it before I ever think about it. Yeah, because it became it's it's just like driving. I I programmed my subconscious mind to catch them and reframe them, but you can't do that until you get separation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:47

Yeah, 100%. You know, I had a doctor on the show, he well, he's a psychologist, Dr. Eddie O'Connor, and he mentioned how all animals have a protective mechanism. And as humans, ours is worry, right? It's the mind. Yep, giving us work trying to protect us, right? And it was created that way because we needed it in obviously these pure prehistoric times where we need to be protected and where worrying was actually helpful, right? To have these protective thoughts. And now it's not necessarily as helpful, right? And so, like you said, we can separate from these thoughts. Oh, that's that's almost like somebody, you know, talk to me, right? And and also too when we start to detach and take these ornaments, like you mentioned, off the tree. Yeah, a lot of times these thoughts will stop even bothering us, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:43

Just like that. Just like that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:45

It'll stop that stop bothering us. If we stop to identify with certain beliefs, a lot of those thoughts wouldn't won't even make sense anymore. Like, yeah, that's that's yeah, yeah, you can laugh at it. Mike, tell me this. You you talked about three, so usually those first three weeks in your program seem to be the most powerful, right? Those first three weeks, kind of getting rid of or taking control of your thoughts. Yeah, the emotion. Yeah. So, and you mentioned obviously gratitude, breath work, yep, meditation. Is it anything else to help folks to take control of their thoughts, of their emotions?

SPEAKER_02: 1:11:27

You know, those that those are the manual ones because you know, after a meditation, you're gonna feel great, it's gonna calm the system down. The breath work, I highly recommend, you know, when you're driving around in a car, just practice breathe breathing. You know, it's like practicing for the big game. If you if you practice box breathing when it's calm, when you come into a high pressure situation, if you just let the emotions overrun you and you don't catch it before it reaches a certain point, like you're not you're not gonna box breathe, you're not gonna do anything to stop it. The the trick is to catch something before it gets too heightened. And so when you start practicing, I have I have people basically set a timer three three times a day, right? You set one nine, ten o'clock in the morning, mid-morning. Let's I'm assumed everybody has the same work schedule I do, right? So you you do the typical nine to five. So sometime after you get to work, you set a calendar reminder to go off every day, and then another one sometime after lunch, and another one sometime after you get home. And you when it comes on, it just says now. What time is it? The time is now. So you bring your attention into the present moment and you use one of five tools that I give them. But the most powerful one is is the box breathing. And so if you practice three times a day for two minutes, it's six minutes. I mean, everybody's got six minutes, right, to to calm your system down. But then when the emotions get high and you actually use it, let's just say you you got a boss that triggers you once a week. If you can use box breathing when they trigger you, and let's just say he triggers you and you go up to a seven. Well, then if you use box breathing to catch that before it gets to a seven and calm your system down, the next time your boss triggers you, it's only gonna go to a 6.75 because you just told the system I'm in control, I don't need to protect you as much. I see how strong you are, and so you're not gonna you're just gonna naturally start your ability to take control of the system and not respond in such a quick negative way. So if you continually do it, if you practice, it's one thing when you're calm and whatever, but if you practice when you're actually agitated, somebody cuts you off in traffic or whatever your triggers are. We all know what triggers us. Catch that and box breathe in those moments, and that calms the whole system down and just tells everybody, I am safe. You know what's her name? The most one of the famous self-help folks male robbins. Mel Robbins, yes, you just pulled it right out. That's that's Oprah's Oprah's lady, right? Yeah, she basically says that all problems are coming from we're not we don't feel safe. And when you breathe like that, when you calm the system down by breathing, you're telling yourself you're safe, and that's literally what it is. That guy that was talking about you know how the system is designed to put you on high alert because you need to be safe. He's a hundred percent right. That that is literally what we're doing. We're telling the system we're safe when we're using box breathing, and it's it's it's the most powerful way to do it because it slows the the the heart rate down, and in turn, your brain beats at a higher rate. After a couple minutes of doing this, the brain starts the the beat of your brain, the pulse of your brain, it starts to slow down, moves you into a different phase, and now every the whole entire system just says, I couldn't be in this place if I wasn't safe, and so the whole system just relaxes and calms down. And so if you just did box breathing and a gratitude journal, your entire life will be different. Your entire existence will be different because it doesn't matter if you heal, you're going to manually shift yourself into a place of abundance, joy, and peace just by by doing this. And the rest of my program, once you get to week six, seven, and eight, we actually teach people how to heal. You go back and and heal from the things that haunt us, and that's that's extremely powerful. We got about three weeks mixed in there that is perspective shifts. You know, you're an energetic being having a human experience, and you explore all of your energy centers in your body, and it it lets you know that I hey, wait a minute, there's shit going on inside of me that I had no idea was real, and and you it's a perspective change. Learn to love being you is a is is one week, it's a whole perspective change, and then authenticity is another one because that's a whole nother thing. If we could go, we could heal ourselves from everything, but if you're lying to yourself, you're gonna be miserable. If you're not being honest, like the body will physically respond in a negative way if you're not being honest with yourself, and and that's a whole nother thing. Like you could do everything in my program, do everything, but if you don't know how to be honest with yourself, you're gonna be miserable, whether it's the job you're supposed to be in, or if you're just lying to yourself, period. Like it, you're gonna be miserable. So I try to touch on everything that I've discovered to be able to bring peace. And I'm realizing I'm still learning and I could probably add stuff to my program, but you know, the the major things that people can get, and you're gonna have a joyful life and you are going to physically change. I've had people in my program that were on anxiety meds, the highest level of anxiety meds for three, four years before my program. And within a week and a half, they stopped taking their anxiety meds and they're done with them. They never went back, they never had any issues with it. And all they do in the first two or three weeks that actually helps them is the box breathing and and the gratitude journal. The gratitude journal just sets the day, it sets the tone and says, today's gonna be today, is a great day to have a great day. And and your body just responds and just takes off in that direction. So anybody who's struggling, you do got to heal, and there's all this stuff that you got to do, and it's scary, and it is what it is, but do these manual things that aren't manly, right? But the bot Navy SEALs are some of the baddest dudes on the planet, and they could do that stuff. We should all be able to do it, and that'll that'll calm down the anger, it'll it'll repair relationships, like like I was talking about with my wife before. Like, if I respond in a in a big bravado macho way whenever there's something emotional going on, like I I'm not the best husband, you know, it's it's the the relationships are gonna be filled with pain and and suffering, even though we all love each other and we'll battle through it, but it doesn't have to be that hard. And some of my biggest regrets were the were the pain that I caused to the ones who were closest to me because of the way I responded when I got into an emotional state. Box breathing will will help with all that, it'll build relationships, it'll help things be calmer and smoother, and and we won't feel the need to just you know respond with a with a fist, with ferocity, with emotion. It'll help us calm our emotions down. So yeah, that's that's pretty powerful stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:40

Oh, yeah. You I mean it your your program, it sounds amazing to kind of go in first. It's like here's where we're at today. Yeah, right. Let's let's fix today, and then let's go back and fix yesterday and start to untangle those those wires that we have, and then let's bring it back to today and to the future, right? So yeah, what else? What else is going on in your world? And where can people find you? Where can people continue to follow your journey?

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:12

You know, I my program can be found at learntelovebeing you.com, right? Pretty simple to find me. What's going on in my world? I've got a book coming out on all of this. It's my journey, you know, a lot of my struggles that we spoke about on here and a few more, just kind of me really opening up and showing my scars and and how I healed from them. Hopefully, other folks can relate with. But then you know, the book is is is really just the life's mission. You know, I well, I've actually got a manifestation program kind of working on in the background, and one of the most powerful things that anybody could do to manifest is to do for others, right? You can't manifest anything that's not in the greater good of at least two other people other than yourself. And most people don't understand some of these universal laws, but I've figured some of them out and I've been using them, and it's pretty amazing when you start to. But this is the goal, the the life's mission. If you truly want to be happy, you know, you live in service of others because we're all connected, we're all one. So when I'm being when I'm giving to the world and I'm trying to figure my my path out, it it's lighting up my world. So that's that's kind of the the next phase. That's what I'm doing with the next chapter of my life, is is really trying to figure out a way to uh just give back on on as many levels as I possibly can.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:33

Yeah, I love it. Well, like I said, you know, in the summertime when that book's drop, when that book drops, I would love to have you on. No, I mean we can dive, we could dive deeper into your story, right? We can kind of go deep into it and you know, really kind of celebrate the book. So I'm excited for that. I'm excited for that. Man, uh Mike, uh just you know, the time went by fast, right? We shared a lot, right? We shared a lot. And uh it was a lot of nuggets that you shared with us, and you know, really practical, right? Really practical and very simple. And I hope folks were able to follow it and you know they can listen to it a few times to start to use some things today that will help their lives. And so I appreciate you taking the time and joining us.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:20

Oh man, thank you for having me and your your questions and your dialogue. And yeah, you're a very intelligent man, and it this was a great conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:29

Yeah, I love it.