Welcome to the Love, Sex, and Leadership podcast, where you can discover simple tantric teachings to embody your true power, awaken your soul's wisdom, and live an inspired life as a natural, intuitive, and heart-centered leader. Welcome everyone to another episode of Love, sex, and Leadership. Very excited to have a friend, Joshua Wenner here with me. We knew each other actually from many years ago in the world of LA and self-development and transformational work and kind of been following each other's journeys through the years and had him as one of the speakers for the integrated masculine symposium several years ago, kind of a, a COVID offshoot that uh helped people when they were in the uh the comfort of their home and uh. Yeah, I know you've just released a powerful documentary and super excited to to have you on uh on board here for this conversation. Welcome. Thanks so much, A, really appreciate it, brother. Yeah, yeah, and you're in, uh, you're in Austin right now. Austin, Texas, yeah, I've been here about 2 years now, and I really enjoying it. Oh, great, great. So, I know one of the things that you really um support people with is in the realms of what you're calling emotional resilience and, uh, you know, I do a lot of work with emotions and helping people navigate this human experience. But to you, what, what, what defines emotion emotional resilience like that, what would you say to someone who doesn't really understand that concept? Yeah, great question. So I, I look at our ability, our resilience is the ability to bounce back. Like how quickly can we bounce back? How elastic are we when something happens? Emotional resilience is emotionally, um, how much flexibility do we have? And so oftentimes without the awareness of the nervous system, many people are majority of the day deregulated and emotionally reactive and making choices and decisions from an emotional part of their brain or the survival part of their brain. Which has decades of neurons that are fired together and wired together to replay out the same habitual patterns. And so when we can really master our emotional resilience, and that's why I even call it emotional resilience training, because it's continual repetition of the same fundamental frameworks, um, we really move into a place of thriving because we access a different part of our brain. So one, we can bounce back, we can stop. You know, has anybody ever said, hey, don't do X. Don't eat the food, don't yell at my spouse. Don't go to porn. Don't, you know, don't eat the, you know, don't take the nicotine, whatever. Don't choose that reoccurring unhealthy partner. Whatever it is, don't go back to an ex when they treat me like shit. Like there's something we say not to do. And then if you track it, you'll notice there's an emotional reaction. And in that time of emotional reaction, we do the things that don't always make logical sense, or aren't always aligned with our values. And often creates internal shame. And so, if we can develop high levels of emotional resilience, we actually become aware and conscious in those moments. Um, it's not that we're taking over our emotions, we're just necessarily starting to move to a different part of the brain. We're moving from activated habitual reactionary to more of a regulated place where it's more responsive and we have choice. And so when we can live in that place, one, we see ourselves very differently in our relationship with our own selves, cause we're present. To, we're able to spatially look at the environment and notice who's regulated or disregulated and so it removes us reacting to unfortunate circumstances in our environment and we're able to lead those environments, lead our partners, lead our companies, lead the different environments in our lives because we're present, aware, conscious. So it's really that quickness of you being emotionally hijacked or actually having control over your, not it's because it's not control, it's more around awareness and um That part's not running the show anymore. You're in more of a thriving thriving part of your life. Mm, yeah, great. Well, what I'm hearing what you share is really the capacity to, to pause. So like notice that split second time when you're about to react from the habitual patterns that's been kind of overlaid and deeply embedded in the cells in the body and being able to, to pause and make a change and a shift in the trajectory of life moving forward. Correct. Yeah, it's even that I, I have a framework that's called CPR and it's, it comes from, because I work with a lot of fire, police, military, and so I, I, I took the metaphor from when somebody's unconscious, it's typically when we would traditionally use CPR. And so, when we recognize that our emotional habitual patterns are unconscious reactions, we're unconscious. So CPR stands for one conscious awareness is the C. So being able to recognize what are our signs and symptoms that were regulated or the environment's disregulated. The P is pause, so you hit it right on the nose. We actually build in strategies around the pause, so that in certain habitual patterns where we react, we learn to go, oh, this is that happening. Here's my built-in pause. So that I can actually move into the R which is then get regulated. And then once we're regulated, we get back into our body, we get back into our heart, and we can actually now solve those situations. So, yeah, you're right on, right on track with the. Beautiful. And, and, you know, doing this work, what percentage of humans do you think in this world are actually in their body? I would say very late. I would say like. I mean, 99% of people, if I had to take like, like 90%, if I'm looking at the global population, a, a very small percentage, um, maybe 90% are not. I had to like give it broader, but most people are just not aware of their nervous system or the emotional reactions. Um, and so a majority of people listening to this are not going to have nervous system awareness. And if they do, I'll, I'll give one distinction. A lot of times people learn it to, to like, oh, in deep levels of of emotional dysregulation, they go, oh, use the tool when I'm highly dysregulated. But what they don't realize if you're not doing it every day, um, you're not aware majority of the time. And so you're much more likely to get hijacked. So there's a very big difference between daily, like I, I trained to do it multiple times a day, twice a day minimum. So when you're doing it every day, twice a day, you see the world very differently, and then you're usually like, oh, I couldn't see. From where I was before. So even, even I've had people that I've trained that are like, oh, I know, I know the language, I know how to regulate, but they just weren't doing them daily. Um, they were still caught up by their emotions and letting it dictate their, even if they had awareness, they still weren't living at the place they could be living. So, I'd say majority of people. And even those that are practicing still get this regulated on a regular basis, but you can just come back to Baseline much quicker and get back to your body a lot faster. Hm. And, you know, there's someone listening who's like, well, what do you, what do you mean I'm not, not in our body? Like, of course I'm in my body. Like, how do you, how would you describe that like sensation and awareness. So I see that a lot in their groups and their treats, and it's like there's a certain moment that happens when people are like, ah. I'm, I'm experiencing the world differently, but how, you know, especially working with military and, and, you know, service individual people, and I come from a military world as well. But how do you even communicate that to people that there may not be in their body? Like that phrase that understanding can almost get a little bit lost in perception in a way. Yeah, it's a it's a really good question. I like your your angle on it. It's, it's like, Most people are living from their heads and without the awareness that they're living from their heads. And so, Um, the disconnect is what, you know, grief and trauma, when you get into the world of grief and trauma, from my lens, everything stems from unprocessed grief, just cause I have so much experience in the grief world. But, um, oftentimes, the trauma response is a disconnection from our bodies so that we, we, we don't feel safe in the body, we go to the head. And so, um, and even women, I mean, I train a lot of women now. I train men, I train high performers. Like, I trained so much. The same recurring pattern occurs where most of the time, you can tell. Where you're living from, because are you usually thinking through problems, or are you usually feeling through problems? And, and so often are you finding yourself, and that's why I train on the trauma signs because it's a lot easier to recognize the sign than it is to even see yourself when you're in the head versus the body. But if I can see a sign, I can go, oh, there's a signal. It's like, I use a metaphor of like a truck. And when I'm training men, men like fast cars. So it's like, hey, imagine you're a high performance Lamborghini. And if you're a high-performance Lamborghini, and the more stress you get, the more load, and most of men's work is learning how to carry more load, right? And so as we're taking on more load, the more responsibility you get, it only gets harder. So you need to build more emotional capacity to take on more. You're redlining. So, so imagine driving that vehicle fast. You're going down the, the street and you're burning at high red lines. But imagine if you're not filling up the tank with gas. So the way I use the nervous system framing is, imagine you're driving and you got a trip to go on, but then you run out of gas. What are you having to do? It, it's, and that's an emotional reaction. Something throws you off. You're now in the head, you're now trying to figure out what I have to go do. You're emotionally reactive to a situation, a person, an event. It's ruminating consistently in the head. And when you're doing that, it's like you go, I ran out of gas. I don't have to grab a gas, gas can, go fill up. The gas can come back to my vehicle, do this whole work to get back on my trip again. So, the gauges or the trauma signs or the things that start to pop up to go, oh, engine light's getting low, or, or gas light gauge is getting low. And then you see the light and you go, oh, I need to pull over and actually get some gas. It's still a pain in the ass because regulation practices are not fun. Um, they're not hard. They just take time and habitual patterns to create rituals around them. But when you're constantly putting gas, you can keep going the distance without running out of gas. So, it's just an easy metaphor if somebody's listening. How often do you get emotionally triggered by something in your day, and, hey, let's say you set a strong goal for your health goals, and then you eat the shitty food. Or let's say you set savings goals and then you blow past your, your spending limits and end up in debt again, or you're wanting a healthy relationship, and you say you won't. Um, let your partner treat you that way, and then you get run over, right? Cause you emotionally got reacted, something happened, you went back to an old familiar pattern, which is a a a way of coping with that. Pain essentially, and then that took a big part of your day. So, what would you be if you didn't have all these moments where you're emotionally triggered, affecting your day on a regular basis, you'd have a lot more presence. You have a lot more time and space in the body and, and maybe to give another signal. When was the last time you really enjoyed a moment? Like, like, they like, take in the sunset, feel the sun on your skin, feel the wind on your, on your, you know, across your face. Like, are you able to feel the subtle sensations on your body? And, and are you appreciative and grateful for your body? And how often are you doing that? I find often the more stress we have, it's like, ah, sunset, let me get back to task. Like we're so mission-focused, especially men, that if we're so mission focused, there's no time to slow down. So we're constantly problem solving. We're constantly assessing situations and just running at that overdrive. So that may be a good question for somebody is, how easy is it for you to slow down? How often are you slowing down? And if you're saying, I don't have the time, you actually, when you start to regulate regularly, you don't change time, you're just presence, you're actually 10 times more effective. So you can still be emotionally effective getting things done, but actually super aware of your body and the environment. So, So does that, does that kind of grounded in a little bit for what? Yeah, absolutely. No, no, I, it's, I, I love it and I, you know, in, in teaching and working a lot in, in somatic therapy and nervous system regulation, it's, it's a, it's a joy to hear, especially I'm appreciating a lot of your analogies that are connecting the dots, uh, to, to men in like these very like sports stars. And filling up the gas and, you know, the very practical ways of assimilating and understanding how our nervous system is escalating and how we can actually learn to to navigate it more gracefully. I, I, I'm really appreciating it. Thank you. What if I added one other piece when you talked about somatics you've talked a lot about somatics, to me, somatics are changing the oil. So if you think about the oil, if we don't change the oil, it becomes this dark. That, you know, this really dark um fluid, and if you actually don't ever change it, your engine will cease. So, so what happens when you change the oil is you're transmuting, you're releasing the dark sludge of oil that you've just used in this high combustion engine. You're releasing it and you're putting this golden new fluid to lubricate everything. And so, when we look at what we're actually doing with somatics, it's the same thing. We're getting regulated to then go, oh, what's going on with my vehicle? What, where does, where do I need to transmute some of this dense energy that I'm actually feeling? And when I can get into the wounding, when you can move that through your body and actually move those through your body, you clean the tank. You, you just changed your oil and your engine can run smoother again. So, so they're, they're one and the same, but it's maintaining your vehicle. And most, most humans, I find, don't know how to maintain the vehicle from the nervous system reactions, the somatics, because it's just uncomfortable. I mean, it's really like, we haven't been taught it. Men as a culture have been told it's a no go zone to go into anything emotionally related. Um, and so there's a lot of wounding that are just like under the surface, stuck in the center column. They're like kind of building up here. And so, it just, I see it kind of stacks on top of the diaphragm or under the diaphragm, and it builds up into, like here. So, that's why we can't, we're stuck here because this is like, oh shit, if I get present for a moment, I gotta feel all this stuff I haven't dealt with. So let me just stay focused, especially high achievers. Those in high achieving professions, uh, successful entrepreneurs, um, High stress careers. Like, if I slow down for a moment, there's way too much. So let me just stay busy. I can hide behind all the success that I have. I can stay behind all my projects, but really, you're hiding from yourself, and you're hiding from that well of emotions that if you did get present, It's here and um just one more analogy because it's coming through. Um, another visual, cause the visuals I find for me were been so helpful to try to understand some of these like outside the box, um, topics, but imagine if I say emotional capacity. So imagine you have a bucket, and you have these big rocks in the bucket. And if I'm holding a career that I'm passionate about driving, if I'm handling a wife or a partner, if I'm handling kids, if I'm handling my body, I have all these big rocks that require emotional capacity for me to continue to drive back to the vehicle, my engine at a high speed. So, if my, if those buckets are full, emotionally, Then one little thing on the top of it, I'm gonna get this regulated. I'm gonna go to the back of my brain. I just don't have capacity. I blow my engine. So, your ability to just regulate the analogy I use is you keep removing the top rock off that, that bag of rocks, and that top rock just goes, oh, I got one other thing that hit. Wife came home and fucking attacked me. Oh. I have a little bit of bandwidth here to hold this, actually lead this conversation so it doesn't turn it out. I'm gonna handle that cause I have a little bit of capacity to do it or don't feel like eating that actual meal meal plan I did or the diet. I'm gonna order the food. I don't have capacity. I have a little bit more capacity to get up and handle that. That task. So, when you get informatics, what you're actually doing is removing all the rocks or more of the rocks. So you develop much more actual capacity to take on a lot more of life, because you're not bogged, emotionally by all the past debris that's stuck in this center column here. Yeah. Yeah, I love this, the, the analogy I look at, which is quite similar. It's, it's like a kind of a, a pipe, you know, and this pipe there's all this coagulation, so to hear you speaking of the oil, it's like clearing out that pipe and like the, the old rusty places where water can't flow anymore. And then through, you know, I, I look at emotions as this. Kind of flooding the body with this emotional uh energy is actually like flushing through this pipe so that life force and the aliveness and and all of that can actually begin to flow more. So I'm, I'm curious cause it's something that, you know, I work a lot around with is is sexuality and where sexuality meets emotionality and the nervous system. And I'd love to hear, you know, I'm enjoying some of your analogies, so I'd love to hear some of how, especially for clients you're working with and individuals, we're often not conversations of sexuality, especially with men, you know, I, I run pretty extensive deep dive men's retreats and containers and You know, I see men like so afraid to meet these like deep emotional wounding, and they're talking about the sexual wounding. It's like most of them never even touched that in their lifetime. So I'm, I'm curious from your side, like how you navigate into this conversation, especially with clients around this connection point between emotions and sexuality. Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. So, so there's a lot of shame with men tied to sex. And, um, it can be anything from sexual abuse to which a lot of men have. I found like in my retreats, I found it was much higher than I initially anticipated. I mean, I have my own, and I also found, it seemed like 30-40% of men have some sort of sexual abuse, either by a man or a woman. Um, and Compare that when men get really vulnerable and start sharing some of their deeper wounding, there's wounding around performance. There's wounding around releasing too quickly, erectile dysfunction. There's all this wounding around the sexual, which to me, the bottom of that is inadequacy. And so I find we have these two primary wounds, recurring wounds that show up, which is either abandonment or inadequacy. And inadequacy to broaden that could be, you know, uh, I'm not good enough, I'm rejected. I'm not loved. At some level where We're gonna be, if, if we're not loved, then we're gonna be abandoned, and if we're abandoned, then we're not gonna be loved. And so those two basic premises, I find is when the wound happens in childhood. So, we go through these worlds as emotionally free children. And we're free in the world, and then all of a sudden, the wound happens, right? We get just enough, old enough to actually recognize, oh, mom and dad, I'm needing something, they're not giving it to me. And then as little kids, we don't have the brains to go, Ah, Mom and dad just regulated, they have their own life and they love me, and I'm not getting my needs met. So we look around and go, I'm the only thing here. It must be my fault, so we often blame ourselves for why we didn't get our needs. And then that leads the trajectory of our ego or identity of we're trying to be enough in the world to fill that gap of feeling inadequate or not enough. So as an example, that fill that gap, you see a lot of high achievers that are very high achieving to feel enough. But if you're driven by the not enough wound, it's never gonna be enough cause there's always somebody bigger. There's always, always somebody that has more status or makes more money. And so this, it's this relentless hamster wheel of inadequacy. So, I wanted to preface that first because when we now translate it to sex. If you haven't gotten really, if you haven't gone into your wound of inadequacy and learned to get comfortable there, like that's your actual source of power. Instead, we're avoiding it or unconscious to it or letting it drive us. We're we're essentially fighting this dragon within us. And this dragon is who we're constantly fighting, oftentimes with dad for, right? So we're fighting this external dragon that if we're finally enough, then we'll feel better. But it drives us and it's empty. So we just keep driving. Once we start to address and fight the dragon, You'll start to find that there's these deep wells of grief, and there's these deep wells of shame, and there's these deep wells underneath that inadequacy. And when we're able to get into the body and feel that, What it does is, metaphor we use as you go from fighting the dragon to riding the dragon, and it becomes your source of power. And so, Two things I'll say to that. Um, one, let's say I had an inadequacy, let's say I haven't even dove in anything sexual. I find most men. Because the inadequacy wound is so present, they either think they're God's gift to women, and they're like, they're like, I've made her come 7 times. I've done, they're saying these things, but if I'm attuned, I can't even feel, half the time their partners are just trying to make them feel better, aren't actually, they're not actually feeling their partner actually really connecting with their partner. They're performing to feel adequate and highly attached to if their partner got pleasure from like the performer side. Um, or something else is happening and they're just almost avoiding it. So they're, they're not talking about sex, they're not talking about desires. They're not talking about anything. And so they don't learn anything, they don't get better, and because of the inadequacy wound is driving it. So, To, to kind of lead into that. One, if we're emotionally regulated, we can start to attune to ourselves. We can attune to our partner because we're present. You can feel the little subtleties of her nervous system if she's contracting or expanding to see what she likes or doesn't like. Um, secondly, you can see your own contractions and start to uncover your own pieces of, um, oh, I have performance anxiety, or I have to perform or I have to be in control, or you can kind of uncover that. And I find beneath that, Well, is there like deep vulnerability. And underneath that deep vulnerability, that's typically I find what your partner is deeply craving for you is your heart. Um, and, and so if you can start to access that, that's the connection pieces and, and allows us to be in a lot more. Um, attuned, connected, a lot more creative. Like, I see a lot of men who have never, they're like, I do my business, I do this, but I've never done my wife because I'm, my inadequacy of getting rejected, that unconscious fear of if I do this and she doesn't like it, or when we met, she had somebody previously rape her. And so, any little thing I did, she told me this was reminded it. So I just, they, they wanted a nice guy. In their relationship sexually, and so they've been fearful or afraid of being unloved or abandoned or rejected. So they don't even engage in the conversation versus getting really curious, asking a lot of questions, um, starting to be attuned, figuring out what creates safety. Um, and so for me, there's kind of a couple components of nervous system attunements, the foundation, and then there's getting curious, asking questions and having creating enough safety to have needs, desires, boundaries, conversations. So if you know the boundaries, you can keep her safe. If you know needs and desires from both of you, and what's comfortable, you can start to lead into there. Um, and then there's a whole other world of like play that you can have where you can have so much range of connection and expression once you know those things from each other, but it takes deep vulnerability. Um, and you're gonna have to go into the wound because you haven't, most often they haven't been sharing their actual truth, because they've been fearful of rejection. And what you'll actually find is when you can create safety to go there, there's deep intimacy. And there's such a deep connection that happens, and then you start to really get clear, and then you're able to start to move into it. So, it's a super loaded question, cause when you asked that I initially went into like, So many guys have cock shame. They have inadequacy issues. They have like there's so many things sexually, and that's all wound up down here below all of our, you know, trauma in the center column underneath all the armor that our heads are in. So, like, to get down to there, you almost have to do this long pathway of like, moving through the traumatic debris, unpacking the armor, and going down to some of the deepest sources of pain for men, which is around sexual, the sexual piece. Am I inadequate? Can I not please my partner? Can I not? Um, and that feels frightening if you haven't done any of the top-level work. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah, I love that, and the couple of the key pieces, um, and I love the things you're bringing in cause I just was this last week teaching a master class on embodied mastery in the bedroom and boardroom and one of the big pieces is around like the deep listening. And the attunement and so to connect the dots to what you shared before with the slowing down to be patient with the body, is if the man can be patient with his own body, then he actually has the capacity to be patient and listen deeply to the body of another. But that, you know, often gets uh overwhelmed by the, the high performance desire to try to give her something. And so even though they wanna be this performer, they wanna like, you know, give her all the orgasms, but that desire almost is, is what is driving their nervous system to be this regulated because they think they're trying to get somewhere. And so really what I hear you sharing, and I love this, is the slowing down to listen more deeply and to be in the spaces in between rather than the paces that are always just trying to do everything and to be with the uncomfortable edges inside. When it's, I would, um, yes, 100%. And I would also add one of the primary, cause I just look at patterning, and then I kind of build frameworks around the patterns, reoccurring patterns. And one of the consistent ones I see is men are often unconsciously looking for nurture, and women are often unconsciously looking for safety, if it's in a mask, you know, man-woman dynamic. Um, but with that, when I've tracked it, this huge need of leaky energy, this energy around consumption, this energy at some level, I think we're just trying to get nurture. And it's what we've learned to get it. So like, oh, if I can perform at a deep level. Extract, I get these brief moments after that of feeling I can open up a little bit and be a little bit vulnerable or get a little bit of nurture. And it's because we haven't learned to nurture ourselves. And so we're looking for some external source to make us feel better. And if we get it, if I performed, I got a little bit of validation hit. If I got a little bit of sexual energy, I got a little bit of this aliveness because I haven't learned how to access that in my own body. I haven't learned how to slow down, feel even my own body, feel the sensations and aliveness and pleasure in my body without getting it somewhere else. So we're often unconsciously stuck in co-dependent dynamics where it's a transaction where I'm gonna give this to you, and then I'm gonna get, you're gonna give me nurture, I'm gonna give you safety, right? And so, and, and so at some core level, I find as men, it's our job to learn how to nurture ourselves and to slow down and Um, create aliveness in our body, which is, which is present. It's just deep, deep presence with the body. It's deep attunement with the body, um, deep pleasure within the body, and then we can, we can now start to bridge that cause we're present. And I find it's the flip side for women. It's actually learning to get safety in their bodies. It's learning to get safety with themselves in relations so that we're more moving out of co-dependency into more independent. Um, and it just we can't still create it for each other, right? So I don't think that they're like separate. Um, I just think that our own personal practices to both have containment and aliveness, give us like a such a powerful mixture to now meet, actually meet somebody and, and go really deep because I think people are great depth and intimacy. And they're lacking it dramatically because they're There's a gap, there's a hole in their heart, and they're trying to fill the hole constantly with something that'll make them feel better. But we, we have to fill that up first with ourselves or with love, or with, like, there's so many ways to fill it up. But it's that, back to what we said earlier, it's actually connecting with the body. So if we're living here and we're Trying to fill it, fill it up from here, the body's like, I'm right here. Like I did just see me. Just connect with me. I'm constantly with you. But there's a huge disconnect between our head and our body. So the more connected we get in the body, which we have to be present, and then we're gonna have to deal with all the years of disconnection. And that's how I find where the, the break is, is we just have decades that we haven't done it. We have decades of Moving through the world, trying to feel enough, trying to, trying to gain significance, validation, something so that we're worthy in the world. So learning to flip it around and go, how do I see and love my body worthy exactly the way it is? Because the body is the teacher, um, is really the work. It's really hard and takes a lot of time and energy. Yeah. It requires a certain level of, uh, commitment and, uh, willingness to dive in. You know, when, when it comes to high performance, I, I see, uh, a lot of what, especially in a self-development world, there's these, you know, high performance pieces that are very much trying to be ingrained and driven into, you know, the overachiever and and getting things done and being in this constant level of of doing. So I'd love to hear your perspectives to to me the way I'll frame it is this is this line and this dance between The doing and the being, you know, and especially for men that, that we're we're so we're we're looking for that, you know, that nurture from the, the doing this. But how without a man fully having a, a midlife breakdown, which unfortunately happened for a lot of men who are always just doing and they have to literally slow down to put their feet in the sand. But where, what are some of the, you could say, the practical tools for especially a man to be able to have this deeper balance in his life so that he doesn't blow out his nervous system with the the doing this that wants to be the provider, that wants to make the money, that wants to meet the goals, and wants to be the achiever. And, and the beingness, which doesn't always have the same level of happy chemicals that we think are coming with that. So where, like, what are some of the tools you feel like people should utilize to have a healthier balance between the doing and the being? Yeah, it's a, and I love how you frame that it's another way to say what I said earlier is the nurture is the same frame of doing, I'm out in the world busy doing, achieving being is I'm just being present, I'm, I'm learning to nurture myself and create more aliveness. So Um, really, it's the same fundamentals we're talking about, but I'm happy to give a couple of examples. So, one, if, if we're not regulating daily, we, we, we're not even present to see where we're at. And so, uh, you know what, I think I'll lead with a story around this because I think that'll help kind of ground it in like a high achiever, where they were before putting the tools in place, and then how they saw the world differently and how that show. And then from that place, they can start to see the difference and then what are the actual tools they use. But I think the story will help it, it land a little, a little easier. So, um, I had a client that, a very high achiever that was achieving well. Um, kiddo, wife, you know, took care of his body in a great shape, very high achiever, very like what you call a personality that was handling things, but it was like, I noticed there's some blowouts happening with my wife. That was kind of the leverage, um, of like, I'd like to live a better life, yet I still have goals to keep growing in my business. And, um, when we started doing the work, he started regulating every day. And so, We'll get to that in just a moment. But he started regulating twice a day, so he started catching himself. So he started saying like, oh wait, when I'm in high drive, overdrive, without regulation, I just blow through things as they come up. There's no, I'm not using the front of my brain, which is rational thinking, compassion, empathy. I'm in the back of my brain, which is get the job done. As soon as they come up, push the task out of the way and go. But when he started regulating every day, he was able to self-assess and go, oh, you know what? When I have the most emotional capacity, I'm gonna do the hardest projects cause I'm faster at them. And if something comes in outside of that window, I'm gonna move it to another part of my where I am resourced. So what he found is like, oh, if I finish the end of my day and some stressful thing comes in, and I go handle it at the very end of my day, that leads over into my evening, and I'm bringing that stress into my environment, and I'm becoming the villain. And it's actually attacking my primary goal, which is to have this amazing household and a deep connection with my wife, and a really good connection with my son. And so when he started fighting is, wait a second, if that comes in at the end of the day, I value this so highly, I can actually just bump it to first thing in the morning. And, and so that I'm regulated to actually really do what matters most, to spend that quality time. Because he noticed, if I'm present with them and we're really good, like, I feel better and I actually have more capacity to handle those other tasks. So, that was like one big shift that happened. Um, also, because he's thinking differently, he's much more present and he started to value the time with family. So, previously, he was working all the time, little bits of time with family. But the more present he got, the more he started to uncover and we did a lot of work going into the wounding, figuring out what some of these habitual patterns were, some of the somatics to move that through his body. He cleaned up more capacity, and then it flipped. Then it flipped where he's like, oh man, I want to spend all my time with my family as much as I can. Doing things that matter most. Like, what's the juice of life? I want to be spending time with my son doing quality things. I want to be spending cool trips and cool things with my wife. Even just really being present at night with my, with my family is so valuable for me. So then how do I find ways to shorten the amount of time I'm working and get really creative? And so he ended up finding a way to double his business and extend the time with his family, because it just flipped his priority. So the way he was thinking wasn't just make more, make more with my limited time. It was more like, how do I keep growing the time with my family and creatively think of ways to leverage and scale my business. And so it flipped. And so, so I just want to give a couple of examples where I often see the same pattern is, you're able to scale your business, spend more time with your family, take better care of your health when you get regulated and when you start to move through some of that past debris, because you start to live a thriving life. It's almost like, imagine you've been eating. Actually, I'll use a different metaphor. Imagine you've been, I work with a lot of high achievers that have financial freedom. When you're first starting, and you don't have a lot of money, you're in survival. So when you're in survival, like, you just have to grind, you have to get it done. But as you start to accumulate more wealth, to reach the point where you're like, oh, I got my nest egg. I can live, my, my savings pays for my bills for the rest of my life. You're actually financially free. There's this relief that comes like, I can kind of do what I want. And that, uh, that financial freedom gives you so much access. Think of the same way we're doing emotionally. I find most people are starved emotionally. It's like they've been eating Taco Bell, so they don't even have a perspective of what a thriving emotional life looks like, cause they've been living a survival life, and then you go to like a really nice fine dining dinner and you taste all the food, you're like, I want that. It's what's been happening. We, we just have been, we've been living an emotionally survival life since childhood. And when you can start to experience that, the game changes. So, so a couple key pieces, just active tools. One is, um, the primary tool I teach is just daily emotion regulation through breath. And it's just a real basic, I call it CPR breathwork, but it's 46 breathing. So it's just an in breath of 4 and an out breath of 6. Sounds really basic, but the exhale is when you're actually turning on your nervous system or your, your vagus nerve. And the key is you have to do that for a minimum of 6 minutes. So, the protocol I use is you're doing that twice a day for 6 minutes, and you build that into your ritual, meaning you can do it while you're doing other tasks, but you don't miss. And, and then in addition, When you notice any form of dysregulation, either from you or somebody, your team, your spouse, your kiddos, you also then use CPR where you take a moment to pause, get regulated, so you can then navigate that. Um, there's a couple other primary ways of cold immersion, um, physical contact to co-regulate with animals, um, massages, even with your partner if you guys both get cursed in this practice. Um, exercise, vocal sounds, that's why I like chanting or even when you get into somatics, making noises, really gets you back into the regulation. Um, or the primary, I teach 5 primary ways of it. Um, and that's kind of like the first pillar. Second pillar is really moving into the somatics. So it's learning to go, OK, if I'm regulating every day, then you start to notice the subtle things that you are reacting to. And then you use CPR, you become aware of those, you pause, and then you start to go into those actual emotional reactions somatically and start to feel what's actually going on with you through anger practices, um, somatic grief practices, movement practices, sound practices. And what they do is they give it a voice, it gets you in the body, and then from that place, you, you start to actually move that energy. And you actually get to your actual needs and boundaries. And so you're able to start engaging with the world, because now you can feel what you need. You can feel a need, a boundary, you can feel a desire from your heart's desire. Or another common thing is a lot of men will realize they've been wearing, wearing masks everywhere in the world, and they haven't been authentic. And then you start to break that down and go, oh, I'm wearing a mask here. Pause, regulate, what's underneath that. Oh, and then you can start to get, what's my authentic core? And how do I start to make that the primary place that I'm living? Cause again, going back to the inadequacy wound, we, we're brilliant as kids, and we learned to survive childhood. And so if you have a chameleon side, or a nice guy side, or even a savage man's side, they're just parts that have come online to protect us from kids from being. And that's our survival mechanism. So when we start to uncover those, And access our true self, and make that actually lead and get confident in that. That's when the game changes cause we put needs and boundaries around the things that don't work. Um, we were able to communicate with a lot more love, and, and then we have a lot more compassion for other people's needs and boundaries because we have them. So we highly start to value like, oh, this is how you get closer to me. Let me teach you how to love me and teach me how to love you. And so it provides a lot more deep intimacy and In team environments, just to give one more example of this for high performance, so many times we're cracking the whip to like, get results. It's like, here's the top line revenue, here's the bottom line revenue, and we're like using force, um, and like, higher and higher work. And people are so disregulated now. They're like, we got dopamine addictions where people are stuck on their phone all the time. We got high stress. Like life is like, so much work, and people are disregulated when you actually start to realize that. And you start to build cultures where people start to regulate their emotions, um, even doing conflict with each other, the whole game starts to change cause they get present, they become more alive, they get higher productivity, you reduce turnover, like you really build the culture of an organization where the organization drives for you versus you cracking whips. You actually increase, I think the recent study I looked at was like, you increase productivity by 19%. Just by actually putting these systems in place, because if I'm alive in my body and I like what I'm doing and I'm productive, I'm gonna get a lot more done than if I'm sitting there like exhausted, like, I gotta get the task done. And I've looked at it 20 times, and it took me 2 or 3 times as long, cause I was just regulated versus, you know what? I'm chopping down a tree with this ax, and I've been using the same ax. Let me go take a couple minutes to sharpen the ax. And then, like, take my time and cutting down the trees versus working harder and harder and harder. So, that's just an easy analogy. Think of emotional regulation as sharpening your ax every time you notice it gets dull for productivity. Well that, yeah, and I, and the uh the place of where that can translate into the business world and our capacity to um Take care of ourselves and still be productive and and not need to to burn ourselves out. I mean, I feel like burnout is such a high alive topic in conversation and and really what hear you share is that through this there's a lot less propensity for that and more of a capacity to listen more deeply. It's beautiful. Um, I, I'd love to transition into, you know, I saw that you're, um, The documentary that you created is uh is coming up soon and it's called The Gifts of Grief. Uh, it's quite a personal, I mean, I haven't seen it. I'm, I'm excited to check it out. I, I, I remember you speaking about it a while back, so I'd love to just hear like maybe obviously the some of the inspiration, like the, the big why and, and just some of the excitement around it and and what what's alive for you with that. Thank you. Yeah, I'm, I'm really excited. It's been a 10-year journey, so I, I've been documenting my journey for a decade. And, um, it, it originated after the loss of my brother. My brother came to me for help in 2007 and said, I've been shooting needles. I got to come live with you. I've been shooting heroin. I told him no, because I had a startup company and I couldn't take care of him. And he went back to Reno two days later and died of a drug overdose. And that really put me on this trajectory, um, of grief and loss. But at the time, Um, I went to go work with Tony Robbins, and that's how I initially dealt with it and learned all the NLP mindset tools, peak performance tools because that was my whole way of being. I wanted to achieve, and I wanted to succeed because of my own inadequacy wound. Um, and I thought I fixed it. I used all the tools. I would change my state when I didn't feel good. I would change the meaning of the story that I was creating. Like, I would use the tools, thought I had achieved it. But I didn't know, I was, I was just an empty shell that was moving through the world, but I'm totally emotionally disconnected. Um, And then I started the film to go, well, well, actually I got on grief forms, cause I think our purpose keeps showing up. And one of my deep purposes has been helping people around grief and loss. And I got on reforms, and I'm like, all right, let's actually fully go into this when I left Tony, and I, I got all these tools, I'm gonna help everybody. I started grabbing people to help, and then just failed miserably. And I was like, I thought I knew what I was doing. Like, I just worked with the best in the world, and what am I doing? And, and then I started researching grief and loss. And, um, started interviewing some of the experts, trying to help people in grief forms, cause I was fixed, and how do I help fix their grief? And what I learned really quickly is like, oh, I was the one that hadn't dealt with my grief. And It led me from first from some frameworks to understand it deeper, um, and learning to like allow myself to be OK with grief and loss, cause some of the deepest work I've learned about grief is it's not about fixing it or getting better or getting over it. It's about learning to love those parts of you and like create space in your heart to be with the griase. And some of it may never go away over the course of a lifetime. And to become really compassionate and gentle with that. And, and then that's when I started learning about the somatics to get in and feel and be with the grief and be with the anger. Um, and it actually brought me into my heart. All the things I was searching for externally, when I went inward, I almost, I started to feel the things that I'd been craving through my external achievements, but never, like you said, an achievement, you get to the top and then you're like, what's the next thing? Like, it's not really satiating. And then by going in, I got into these states of like, I'm just seeing, like, talk about being. I was like, oh, I'm seeing the world, I'm seeing the aliveness, I'm like, I came back to life again. And so that's what inspired me to go into men's work and spent the last decade in men's work, you know, helping men refrain grief and loss, and using semantics to get in the body to offload that, which then led into the first responders training fire, police, and military. And so, the story documents that process over a decade. So you do see me going through that process when I'm in my head, you see me learning some of the semantics and how I literally shift over the course of a decade. Um, and then it has men's work and showing that in men's work, it shows it in first responder work, and then really showcasing my family because My mom hadn't touched my brother's room in a decade. Um, and so showing her journey and my dad's journey, and so it just shows like, uh, uh, so for me, the kind of the central theme about, about the film is like, um, grief is a natural response to loss. And the, the only way out is through it, and it's through grief. So it's more, more of a case for a more grief informed world where, um, trauma, trauma informed has now become this big kind of buzzword. Are you trauma informed and I'd really like that to happen around grief, cause to me, that's the central theme, theme that I see. Um, and so it's, it's, yeah, it's taken a decade. Um, it's a long journey of like getting it to where it's at, but I self-funded it. I just kept recording and, and then I went through my own deep forgiveness process at one of my, the men's community. I built some of the guys, held the retreats, some of the guys coming up, and I went to support, and they ran a forgiveness process. And I actually got to some deeper grief after teaching a decade of forgiveness, I got to these deeper layers of Recognizing and I'd blame myself. And in that moment, um it shifted me and like it moved to like completion and so I was like, oh, now it's about putting this into the world and Um, so now it's art, now it's art that I'm using to really just bring more awareness to people. I think if they, through the story format that I go through, I think they'll see their own story of where they may still have unprocessed grief and build a, a stronger case to find different people that, and I have a ton of resources for people to go to. And here, hey, find your, find your jam. Find what works for you. Find a place that feels safe to go. Um. So it's really, uh, um, You know, the mission. So I'm gonna be essentially promoting the, the launch for the month of November. And then on my brother's birthday, December 6th, um, through December 12th, I'm gonna release it where we can do an online film premiere and people can watch it from everywhere and just, just put it into the world. I've won a couple awards and been in 7 film festivals and won a couple of best features. So it's, so it's cool, man. It's a cool kind of creative project, but I'm just happy to like have this in the world will be, uh, when it finishes this year, it will be 11 years. Well, like, when, when did you finish the documentary? I finished it end of the end of last year. And, um, got it down to a 60 minute film. And so taking like 14 terabytes of footage and then turning that into a 60-minute story was a lot of work. And so, I initially just shelved it, like, all right, I, uh, whenever this is supposed to come, it'll come. And then I got an inspiration to be like, oh, I'm ready to put this into the world on my brother's birthday. And um also launched like a one day summit just to provide support for those that are holidays can be really tough going through lots and I think what what people are listening to this, they often think grief and loss with like the death of somebody. But the reason I say it's the central theme in my work, I find there's so many losses. And the losses are actually what's affecting us every day, that we don't realize their losses. And the tricky ones, the easy ones are like the death of a loved one. Like, oh, I know somebody died and why I'm experiencing grief when my cat died, or, um, and then that you broaden the more direct ones. I lost some money in investment or I lost my job, or Something very physical loss. I lost a limb, I lost something, lost a relationship, a breakup, uh divorce, but the deeper ones. not, not more depth of pain, but the, like the trickier ones to identify, are like, oh, I'm grieving way back in childhood, the dream of my parents being together and then they got divorced, or I'm, I'm, I fell in love with men are safe in the world, and then I got violated, and then I have heartbreak and I can't trust men, or, or, um, um, you know, mom is gonna be my nurturer, and then she smothers me or avoids me, and I'm heartbroken around mom, or, um, Our body as we change. Oh, I used to be this young, fit guy that could eat whatever I wanted and snap back, and now my body's slowing down or I'm aging. So I'm actually grieving my youth. Or I have a dream of being a family and being in partnership and having kiddos, and I'm past the age I dream that vision. And so now I'm in, and I'm in grief. And so, there's all these tricky ways that grief is actually in our body, that we don't relate to as grief. And when we can learn to identify those and feel those. And, and grieve the vision we had that we fell in love with that didn't come true, or learn to grieve a loved one or a previous relationship and create space in our heart for that. That actually allows us to get present, get present again, back to the beingness. We actually feel the heartbreak, we get really present, and then we can create the new vision. And that's what it's like. Oh, but I still got this life. What's the vision for me now? But if I'm unprocessedly have unprocessed grief that I haven't addressed, Then I'm just, I'm just trying, I'm on the hamster reel trying to, like, I'm behind, I gotta get it done, I gotta get it done. And so we're just stuck in this, in this reoccurring pattern of resisting change. So the easiest kind of framing is, change is the one thing that's consistent in life. When you learn to get really good at grief work, you learn to move through change very quickly, which is back to the emotional resilience piece. It's like, oh, I can sense when something's coming and I can move through the death and reverse cycle. Um, and grief is the primary tool because we come in with it. Like, you think about how do we come into this world. We're, we're in this womb where all of our needs are taken care of. We fall in love with. I just float around in a nice little sack and I get fed, and I get relaxed, and it's nice and warm. And then we lose that world, and we, we, we, that dies, and we come into this world. And how do we come in? Do we come in laughing and celebrating and excited? No, we come in grieving. And so, if, if we literally enter this world grieving, shouldn't that be the fundamental tool? Or a motion that we learn to move through change, which is gonna be the primary thing that's constant. So I think when, when we can really understand that and learn to practice it and be together in community and be witnessed in it, that's lots of the deep healing takes place. Mhm mhm. Yeah, this principle of change and the, the change of form and, you know, the place of matter, just changing form and matter can't be created and destroyed. It's just changing form and I, I guess, uh, a question I have for that with you in, you know, this. Initial loss of your brother and what it set you on in this decade journey, like, have there been times when you've, you felt his energy there with you in the creation of this and you want to speak into that cause this is sometimes where it's like we're playing in this kind of space-time continuum of what gets created through the change through our lives and utilizing the tool of grief, but I I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, one of the traditional concept around men's work and, and the hero's journey is, is, you know, the cracks, if you will, the dark cave, when you resist going into the dark cave, but when you can go into the dark cave, um, and, and find what that is, it ends up being the gift that you bring to the world. And so, I can see very clearly from like a spiritual side, ah, that, that huge traumatic incident of grief. led me to doing this work and now it's the primary central theme of what I give to the world. Um, so I've been able to turn that pain into my gift, and he's just as much in it as I am. And so he's very much a part of, of the gift that I give and the co-creation of that. And I still had to go through so much grief, and it wasn't until I just learned to accept this may be here forever. Um, and really keep allowing the layers of that is what actually brought me grace cause, I mean, up until more recently, and it's been 15 years now, um, about, I guess 2007, so 27 like just, just under 20 years. Yeah, um. And, um, I'd still, the holidays would be miserable, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and I didn't, I'd always judge it for many years until I learned to be more graceful and accepting of like, OK, this is just, I have some sadness that comes up, and how can I learn to, to miss it. It definitely helped because I ran a, you know, we did a ton of things. I did a Burning Man camp with my parents dedicated to him, and it was called The Wonders Camp, which my brother's name. So we did tons of celebration. I, I interviewed, um, psychics, and that's part of the film, because we would look for the signs that my brother was still around and That was really a big part of our story, which gave us some like grace in the pain. Oh, I can still communicate with him. He is still here. I can look for his presence in all the ways his presence is here or carry his presence through my heart. I think one of the greatest gifts is we still, if we can still carry their legacy on by our love for them. And so, when we're able to be in the grief and celebrate them and continually talk about them and continually bring their love in, they're still alive. You know, I think one of the greatest examples of this is like, I look at Jesus Christ, right? Like, here's an example of Somebody there's so much love for in the world, and so many people have brought him into his hearts that, you know, a lot of cause I'm just now learning that path. I'm like, just, just new, kind of going down my own investigation, but I'm like, oh, so many people across the world are loving him and keeping his love alive. That they call him like living, like this living well to, like to bring from. And so, I see it through that lens of love. I'm like, oh, there's so much love in the world that they're keeping his love and his spirit and his story alive, but they're filled up from that love. And I, and I really think that it's like an extreme case of it, but I think it can happen on an individual level with a cat that dies, a dog that dies, um, somebody we love, a dream that dies. It's like, how do we turn that into something new that we plant? Um, and that starts to grow, that we can continually re-experience love from. Mhm, mhm. Yeah, it's a um it's a beautiful framing around uh the form in which love exists and and how it's the the acceptance of what is really and, and one of the moments I could really feel you there was a place of actually accepting and finding not only the the self-love, but really the, the self-forgiveness and that. And also just wanna um appreciate what I, I heard you share is going back and actually the community that you started going back and being a student of your own students in a way and, you know, something that I really um kind of pride myself in as well in the space like I always commit at least once or twice a year to go and be a student. And you know, teaching so many trainings and retreats and groups and things and like the learnings that come from that and the deep place, the humility that arise when you can do your own work and really show up in that way. And it's, it's one of the things I really appreciate, you know, I mean, you know, we've known each other on and off for years, but I really appreciate. That I can sense in what you're sharing around the nervous system and around the grief and all that, but this is really like the tools you've learned how to deal with and to move with and to find love, acceptance, and appreciation for this life's journey. And the result of that, teach and support others. So, yeah, just an acknowledgement in that journey of who you are, brother. It's beautiful. Thank you, brother. Yeah, and I, I find the same with you. I find that's who I most align with now. There's so many coaches and teachers in, in our community and our space and I find therapists, right? And I find like the difference between the quality ones and the rest, which is a lot of the rest, is the ones that continually do the work, right? It's like, the more you know, the more you know you know nothing. And so it's like you continually just try to get better and keep learning and keep being a student. And I think it like you keep learning more tools and it keeps broading your mindset and it keeps having you understand concepts at a deeper level. When you see it through a different lens, you're like, oh, OK. I know this or I teach it, but I'm gonna go do another one, and then you're like, oh, that one thing they thought, wow, just looking at it from this way, like, where it shows you where you've been out of integrity with something, or you like, oh, I taught that in the beginning, but I got so caught up in this. I haven't done these fundamentals. So it's like, I think there's just, I think that's the difference between somebody who, um, is like high value or integrated, is somebody who's committed to continually doing the work because You continually you're a student, and so you're continually humbled, like, all right, I don't know. Let me keep going. Absolutely. as well. And, and so the, this, they have a big release in December with this documentary. Anything else fun, exciting, that's really like inspiring to you that's coming out in the next, you know, couple of months or what, what else is alive for you that you'd like to share? Yeah, you know, I, um, I'll give a little pre-rement around it, but I'm, I'm now doing women's work and uh I have a program called The Sovereign Woman, which I'm really excited about, and it It birthed just from, I, I was, I used to believe men do men, women do women, and I was pretty rigid in that for a long time, over a decade. And then I started to see that one, the men I was training them, usually it's flip women bringing the emotional to the men, but I started to train the men because they were getting trained emotionally. They were starting to bring that to their relationships and being like, oh, my, I have all these tools. My woman can't meet me. Can we do some coaching? And I started to do couples coaching, and I noticed the women are just way, way more advanced than us emotionally. So they would pick it up faster, and they would actually be able to lead the relationship better emotionally when they have the tools. That was kind of my first inclination of watching that process happen. And then my own personal journey of the last 5 years, um, and working with women. I worked with men for so long, I did a lot of work on father woman. I did a lot of work on My own wounding and getting really complete, but I found men could only go so far in helping me in my own relationship path. And I got really curious about women, and that's been really what's helped me the most in the last 5 years is hearing like, really integrated women, giving me feedback, feeling how they feel. Uh, like so many little intricacies of that has really been like, allow me to level up and see the world very differently and women very differently. And so, I think with the rise of the Me Too movement and Just, you know, rightfully so, because we needed some accountability of what men have done in our culture. And that's also created like these, these recurring movements where there's still a lot of anger out there. Um, and I also see now men's groups forming like the red pill movement to counter that. And I just keep seeing things and it feels like there's a deep need for men, um, to hold a safe container for women to heal the wounding around the masculine. So, I have a program called the Sovereign Woman for women wanting a relationship with a high-value man. Um, and there's a couple of different phases. So, I have a phase where they're working on the same fundamental tools we've been talking with here, where they're learning to regulate their nervous systems. We're doing somatics to get in and take ownership for the body, and really learning how to identify the difference between a high-value man who's integrated and a man who isn't. Cause most of the time I find it's not being able to identify the difference, isn't really start out in the wrong dynamics. Or once they have the tools, there's another. Program where it's like, how do you really focus on dating? Where you get really good feedback by a group of women who are using the fundamental tools to say, hey, are you regulated? What's going on in your body? And so they can get women into their hearts to really start to self-assess what's going on and provide safe reflections and communities who are also doing the work because so often times people are like, throwing trauma wounds or projections or their own fears and inadequacies on others. And then that's leading to this debris. And I really believe If we heal the relationship with our heart. Then we can start to have healthier relationships and a partnership. And if we have a healthy partnership, we can really create healthy family units. And I believe if we do that, I really believe that changes the trajectory of the world. And so, I did men for a decade. Now I'm jumping into women, and I'm really, really passionate. So I have that sovereigno program that I'm super passionate about as well. Oh, I love that, love that last time I was in uh Austin, I was running weekend called The Art of Loving Men, which is a workshop for women about how to You know, move through all of their challenges with their grief and their difficulties, and get to know their own inner man, and kind of build in that inner marriage more just kind of the, the thread that I often drive with. So I love that you're kind of supporting the, the women in that way too. It's beautiful. I know. Yeah, amazing man. Well, I really uh appreciate you. I, I honor what you bring into the world. I love that this um documentary is impacting a lot of people's lives, and I'm looking forward to checking out myself coming up and, uh, yeah, just thank, thank you for your presence, thank you for your love, thank you for your commitment to being a beneficial presence on this planet. It's really a joy to witness and to, to experience you in this way. Thank you so much, brother. Yeah, it's been an honor. Thanks for having me on and always good to connect with you. Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you, everyone, and uh check in for the next time with love, sex, and leadership. See you next time. Yeah.