Is Everything You Think True? | Ep 5

Speaker A

00:00:00.400 - 00:40:31.790

This is episode five, and I'm going to dig into the most effective framework for understanding where your mindset might be short circuiting your business and potential. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. All right, week five, we're digging into Mindset today.

The goal of this series is to help equip you on growing your business and growing it with sustainable results. Typically, that's profits, that's revenue, that's time off, that's less stress. Those are the goals.

That Bottleneck Breakthrough method is geared towards direct delivering and. And to me, mindset is at the top of the six growth levers because it is the most important of the six growth levers.

I think without mindset, without sorting out the stuff going on between our ears, we're just always going to be driving down the road with one foot on the brake and we're always going to have things come up that are holding us back. And I think this quote is really pertinent today that our life is what our thoughts make it. And it's really recent.

This guy named Marcus Aurelius said it about 2,000 years ago. And as Solomon says, there's nothing new under the sun. And we've obviously been dealing with these challenges as humans for quite some time.

And the reason I like Marcus, his stoic approach to dealing with mindset, that there's so much in this statement that our life is what our thoughts make it. And we're going to get into a framework here in a second that really highlights that it's actually a little deeper than our thoughts.

But our thoughts are what we're aware of, and our thoughts are how we interpret the world based on the operating system that is actually driving. As Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, says, our moist robot or meat computer, because at the end of the day, we are programmed from childhood on.

Some of its inherent.

Some of it is environmental and nurtured by our parents and by our friends and our family and the people in our lives and the kids at school and whatever that shape us through our lives and even shape us after we're adults. But. But so much of it happens when we're in our formative years.

When I talk about mindset, it's not the hoorah stuff of daily motivation and daily affirmations and all that stuff.

I think that there's plenty of room in the world for that stuff, but I don't think that really is what drives results in improving our mental state and improving our ability to lead an organization.

And so the framework that I learned from Justin Ferriman and I've talked a lot about him, I reference him in the book, I talk about him in the Facebook group. I worked closely with him for about three years straight. We're still good friends, we still talk regularly.

But he gave me this outline and betdar, it's an acronym and I'm going to march through it right now. And this is where I think we get the more full picture of what Marcus Aurelius was talking about and that our thoughts create our reality.

And so the foundational part of this is our beliefs. And these are things that it's not stuff around religious beliefs or political beliefs or things like that.

Those are part of beliefs, but this is more around identity beliefs, things that you believe about yourself or about how you fit into the world. And this is subconscious stuff. This is stuff that is driving us our operating system, and we don't even realize it.

So for me, early on in my work with Justin, one of the beliefs that I had that was a couple two beliefs. My first two beliefs that came out that didn't serve me in my goals to be a consultant to help grow businesses was that I was a fraud.

I believed I was a fraud. And I think a lot of us suffer from this. It's called imposter syndrome.

And for those of us that are non narcissists, non sociopaths, it was a very common belief to have that we're not capable or that we'll be found out for not being as good as we think we are, or that we're going to stumble and find some point where things fall apart.

And so I felt like I was a fraud in that I had some belief deep down that somebody was going to expose that I really didn't know what I was talking about.

In growing businesses, even though I had lots of case studies, lots of success, still had plenty of failures with clients that, to be honest, I didn't know how to get them to follow my lead.

I didn't know how to arm wrestle with them and get them to stop arguing with me or telling me that they didn't want to do what was necessary because that's what it takes for my clients to be successful. They have to do what I say at the end of the day. And it sounds arrogant, but I know that I'm really good at what I do.

And I know that all of my clients that follow my lead get Results. And so I had this belief that I was a fraud. And then I had another one that was kind of insidious.

You don't realize it, but a lot of us especially I find in the community of Perry Marshall, he's a great guy, he's a great leader, he's a great, great person to follow. He's very generous. But there seems to be a trait in that community that over humility, too much humility, lack of willingness to receive praise.

And that's for me it was, I was unworthy of praise, I believed I was unworthy of praise.

And so when those two came out, my, one of my first sessions with Justin and I could look at them and realize, wow, these are really deep down in there and these are really sabotaging my ability to step into my brilliance and step into my highest capability that I started realizing, wow, there's so much of this programming in here that drives us and it's our beliefs and that's what dictates the operating system in us. And obviously I cleared those.

And Justin has great techniques that you can go to flow-masterry.com and I think it's twelve hundred dollars for his eight or twelve week or year long program. I don't know. But you learn the technique to clear these limiting beliefs and it's fantastic. And I use it with my clients.

I've got permission from Justin with my one on one clients to walk them through it and clear it. And I do it for friends and family and it's amazing in a two minute exercise that they are short circuited and gone.

And another interesting belief that I had was, that came out later was that it's ungodly to store up money. That money is like manna from the Old Testament story of Moses taking the Israelites through the desert.

And that they would try, they'd have mana fall from the skies and it would feed them for the day, but if they stored it up, it would spoil. And somehow somewhere in my childhood it got anchored that storing up money would spoil, that it was ungodly to have money.

And clearly I didn't agree with that logically, but it played out in my life that I always only had enough money right at the last minute to pay taxes for unexpected expenses. Just the right amount of money would show up in my life.

And so that was again a dysfunctional belief that got anchored in there that I never would have known without my work with Justin that it was affecting my decisions and my operating system. And so I think as we look at beliefs, a Lot of people throw out. Oh, you struggle with limiting beliefs.

And a lot of people in the coaching and business development, business growth space use that as a catch all for anybody that's resistant to their offer. And I think it's overused. I think it's one of those bastardized terms that it gets abused and becomes an attack tool.

But for me, I know that I've cleared probably 100 limiting beliefs that go all along the lines of what I've shared, that I'm a fraud, I'm unworthy of praise, storing up money is ungodly. It's. I can't even think of all of them. I've got them on a list, and I could go back and share them. But those.

By clearing those, then it's like it lifts the anchor that's holding down my full potential. And it's amazing once they get cleared, how I didn't even realize all the ways that they were affecting my life.

But from there, then we look at emotions, and really it's not just our feelings of. In a moment, to me, it's more of.

These represent emotional traumas, and there's a line because the beliefs and emotions are subconscious, and we'll get to what's next, where the conscious mind stops, starts getting in. But when we look at emotional traumas, this is where things that happen in our lives stick and they change. They create emotions that we have later.

The most extreme versions are what we would call ptsd, that you're in the Marines and you're walking through Iraq and a woman walks up with a vest on and blows up your bus, where you get blown back 20ft like my cousin had.

And maybe that creates an anchor of an emotional trauma that every time you see a woman that looks like her, you have this anxiety and you want to shoot her or something. I mean, that's a very, very extreme case. But I think we have these all throughout life, and they're very pointed situations.

And so for me, the first time I started clearing emotional trauma was around following up on invoices. I found that every time I would follow up on an invoice with a client, I would get anxious, and I would fear that they were gonna fire me.

Even though I'd already delivered what they asked for, and even though they were happy with it, if they hadn't paid, there was something in the back of my mind that thought, maybe they don't like me anymore. Maybe they're gonna take their ball and go home. Maybe they're not gonna pay me. Maybe I'm Gonna get screwed.

And so I would have all sorts of anxiety around following up on invoices. Even one point, a buddy of mine who's got a big, high level consultant, and he wanted me to do this small little project for a client of his.

It was two grand. I delivered it and I sent the invoice. And I waited a month before I followed up on it. And I said, I emailed him, his name's Dave.

I said, dave, can you see if they sent the invoice or the payment? And he's all, oh, I'm sure they paid it. I said, well, I didn't get it.

And so he checked with him, he emailed me and the payroll billing person or payments person. And she's like, yeah, I sent it right away. So the post office lost it.

But I took a month to follow up because I was so anxious of them being upset on me following up on a $2,000 invoice for a $40 million company. Right? It's just unreal, right? Overthinking the trauma that I was living through around following up on invoices.

So I did a clearing exercise with Justin, and this takes about five minutes to do. And what I found was going through these memories of this anxiety. It tied back to when I was 16. I had my first real job.

I was working at Easton Cabinet Shop out in the sticks in central California, south of Fresno. And I drive out there every day. It was about a half hour drive out to the country.

And I worked with this guy Louis and his assistant Monty, who'd worked with him forever. And we did kitchen cabinets and kitchen overhauls with cabinetry. And I loved woodworking. Woodworking was my passion through high school.

I took woodworking as much as I could. Every year I took it, had it twice, two electives of it, my junior and senior years. And so I think this was between my sophomore and junior year.

I was 16, and I did a lot of grunt work, and it wasn't the funnest. And the first week of August, Louis took the week off, went on vacation with his family.

So it was just me and Monty, and I just was done with racking wood and sweeping up sawdust that had built up over years. And I really just slacked. And I just wasn't hustling, wasn't working hard, and took long, took long lunches.

And Montloui got back that weekend and he went to our church, and so he knew my. My parents. And he called me at home on a Sunday afternoon. And he was kind of a gruff guy. Looked like Kenny Rogers. And he said, hey, Monty.

Said you were slacking off this week. I said, yeah, sorry, Louie. I just got tired of racking wood and shoveling sawdust. And he says, well, don't come back in. And then he hung up.

And so I got fired from my first job at 16. I was going back to school in, like, two weeks. So I had maybe two more weeks.

And maybe that was his way of dealing with losing me at the end of the summer, because we did get along well and we liked working together. But I had this emotional trauma set over a $5 an hour job when I'm 16 years old. And that was what set me up to be anxious.

Following up with money, with people and talking about money.

And I realized after I cleared it all the ways that this affected me and my businesses, that when I negotiate with people, I'd start by saying, you know, I really hate talking about money and I really hate negotiating, but we need to get to it. Well, guess what?

I always took the short end of the stick because I started by saying I didn't like talking about negotiating and I didn't like talking about money.

And so you can see that these beliefs and emotions are running things below the surface and affecting all these ways of how I operate in life and all this anxiety. And I'm not a panicky kind of guy. I've had one panic attack in my life, and it really wasn't a panic attack.

It was just I couldn't breathe from a lung infection I had a few years ago and then woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't breathe. And it was the beginning of feeling like a panic attack. But I've never had anything like that.

Naturally, I don't suffer from this stuff, but I would still get anxiety following up on invoices and asking people about money and pricing things out and negotiating and all of these things that are kind of really important skills to have in business. They were just driving the ship under underneath things. They were driving the show. They were part of my operating system.

So clearing those beliefs and emotions are important because they drive all of our thoughts. And that's what we look at, is our thoughts, and that's what we think are right all the time, because we're thinking them, and so they must be right.

And one of the books I read, the Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, he uses what would be classically defined as a yogic process, following from the Indians and the in yoga and some of the philosophies around that early on in his book in the Untethered Soul, he says, the thing our problem is we don't know who we are. We think our thoughts are who we are, but we have a crazy person up there all day chattering about, and it changes.

And each of us probably has four or five different versions of that voice, from the inspired version that can conquer the world to the tired, exhausted version that gets cynical, to the anxious version when we're following. I'm following up with invoices at the time to the melancholy version that is bored. But those are all very different personalities.

And I think it was the Pixar movie Inside out that had each of those emotions represented inside the head of the character. I think that was a good start. But Singer says, well, those thoughts aren't us. Let's call it a soul, right?

Let's say we have a soul as the Western Christian perspective, that this soul goes beyond our physical existence.

And so his exercise that follows the yogic approach is asking when you have a thought that you're not necessarily excited about or think is great, ask what part of me is having this thought? And so then you become the observer of your thoughts.

It's almost like you step into your soul space, almost, and you observe those thoughts out in front of you, even though it's still within your head. And to me, that's when you start realizing, oh, something else is driving this. Which, again, is our beliefs and emotional traumas.

And my favorite exercise of doing that, questioning what part of me is experiencing this, was about six or seven years ago. I'd say about seven years ago. Yeah. My kids were probably three and five, maybe it was four and six, my two oldest. And it was a Sunday morning.

It was gorgeous. In California, it was crisp. Spring day. My wife had bought a Styrofoam glider. It was like three feet long.

And she got it at the dollar tree for a couple bucks. And I was chucking it out in the cul de sac and it would go flying and glide down.

And Chloe and Caleb, they're two years apart and they're thick as thieves and they're super competitive with each other. And so sure enough, they'd run to it together.

And I started getting really irritated because I was frustrated they were going to step on it because they're four and six years old, and they were going to break it. And so I started getting irritable, really snappy, like, hey, stop it. One at a time, take turns.

And I just said, gosh, what part of me is having this emotion, having this thought of frustration. And it was like, instantly, it just lost all its power. And I could look that, well, gosh, this is what my dad used to do to me and my sister.

My sister is 18 months younger than me. We were competitive, and he get angry over everything.

And there's a whole lot of stuff on that front I can talk about in other discussions, but that was what was patterned to me, was my dad getting angry when my sister and I were getting competitive and something, possibly somebody getting hurt potentially, or something breaking, but not realizing that I could choose a different path. And so by asking what part of me is feeling this, is thinking this right now? It was like, instantly it lost its power. Instantly.

I stepped into the observer space and I could go back to the root of, oh, well, my dad was this way. Well, I don't want to be that way. And I could let it go. That was actually rather simple in the moment.

And so I kept chucking it, and I stopped and I got down on their level and I said, hey, guys, I think it'd be better if you took turns, because I don't want you to step on it and break it. And then our fun's over on this. And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah. But they were 4 and 6.

And so after 30 seconds, they were back to competing with each other. And bet you'll never guess what happened. They stepped on it and they broke it, and I couldn't fix it, and our game was over.

But I wasn't mad, and I didn't get mad at them because it was a $2 glider, and we got 10 or 15 minutes of fun out of it, and we moved on. And so this is where most people spend their existence.

Having thoughts, thinking they're right, thinking they're the best thoughts, thinking whatever they're thinking and feeling in the moment is true, is reality, is what needs to happen. I feel this way. I'm having these thoughts. I'm right.

And they have no concept of observing their thoughts or understanding that there's beliefs and emotions driving things below the surface.

And so to me, that's the beauty of this framework with betdar is that our beliefs and emotions drive our create our thoughts, which then drive all of our decisions, which produce our actions, which end up creating our results. And so as you go through this framework, it's really, really simple.

If you don't like the results you're having today, the best way to change them is not to change your actions and do Tony Robbins and take massive action plans and write all these goals and Muscle through it and all this stuff because you're fighting against the upstream current. Go back and work on your beliefs and emotions.

And so to me, this is why I felt like my investment with Justin from 2015 to really mid 2018 was the most valuable investment I've ever made in myself, because I was able to get rid of so much toxic stuff, as Perry likes to call it, Perry Marshall likes to call it head trash. And I think that's a good quick label.

But the reality is it was bad programming, it was faulty beliefs and emotional traumas that I had to clear at 35 to 38 years old to become more of a whole person and step more into my potential and realize more of the potential that all of my friends have said forever.

That, gosh, Josh, you're too smart to not be making money or you've got so much more potential or so much more value to add to the world and you're just short circuiting yourself. And so this, to me, is the most useful way to reprogram, clear your head.

Get back to our infinite unlimited potential that we're born with that only gets pulled down by our existence on Earth. And I don't know why it's wired this way. I don't know why we get beat down as children and then get a chance to rebuild, but that is the best path.

And then there's a second tool that I've talked about in the Facebook group with called Biofield tuning. And I just got introduced to this from Justin with another provider in December of 2019.

And it's really fascinating that the philosophy is that this gal that invented it back in Boston area, she just takes a tuning fork and holds it over parts of your body organs, meridians, chakras, whatever, that where energy is stored. And the Chinese medicine belief is that each organ represents an emotion. I think kidneys are fear, lungs are livers, anger. Lungs are grief, I think.

And so this gal takes the tuning fork and moves it over your body and where it goes out of resonance, the tuning fork doesn't change. But dealing with the energy in your body starts tipping off where you have either generational or emotional trauma stored that then they can release.

And so I did a session in December and it released a whole line of generational baggage that I had that went back down. My father's side went back five generations.

It was my great, great, great grandfather hypothesized in this session that he got screwed in business and lost a ton of money and took it out on his sons. And it was Just a lineage of angry men taking it out on their sons and their sons never living up to their potential.

And so when I had this session, I felt something significant afterward, after she's telling me this, but the fruit was instant, because my son, I've got two girls and a boy and my son, and he's been oil and water with me his whole life. He just turned 10 in December, and it's always been hard being his dad.

And I've gone to counseling, I've gone to parenting coaches, I've gone to friends who are great dads to their sons. I've sought everything I could, and I just figured I just have to grit my teeth and hope to not wound him at all, as much as I. I tried not to.

And after that session, I went in and I sat down to talk to my wife about it. And I'm sitting next to my son, and the feeling I had of the wall that I could never pinpoint before that was between us was now gone.

And I felt exactly towards him, like I felt exactly towards my two daughters. There was this barrier, this generational baggage was removed instantly. And it's been over two months and it hasn't come back.

And his and my relationship has grown tremendously.

And we've been able to talk about this stuff and really heal the damage of the first 10 years of our relationship that I just was short, I was irritable. I couldn't even help it. It was just like this compulsion.

And so these tools to me, biofield tuning and using the BETDAR framework and the belief claim clearing and the emotional trauma release exercises that Justin teaches, are what have allowed me to start this podcast, to have this series, to be able to step into the light more at 40 years old, finally, and be willing to put my neck on the line and not worry that I'm going to be exposed as a fraud or that I can't help people in their business, because I know I can. And I've got the track record and I've got all the ability, natural ability to do this that I've developed over the years.

And to me, this is what is allowing me to finally step into more of my potential and have my consulting business grow. And is the type of stuff that really moves the needle, really is the massive lever that makes all the difference in your life as a business owner.

And I think it's the beauty of the life we live and the time we live in that these kinds of tools are available, this kind of thinking is available.

And I really think business ownership Parenting and marriage are the three best crucibles to keep drawing this stuff out of us so that we can find the negative or the tweak or the reaction that can be noodled in on and worked on to get cleared and get healed.

And that's why I think the BETDAR framework is so useful, or Michael Singer's Observing the Thoughts, or the biofield Tuning tool, any of those, or whatever methodology, Reiki or whatever, where you're able to find a negative experience inside yourself.

Stress, anxiety, fear, loathing, depression, whatever it is that you have a tool now to inspect that with these frameworks that allow you to say, gosh, I don't feel right, I don't feel that well inside. Why am I putting up with this? What's being triggered, what's being squeezed, what's being pressed.

And then to be able to have the ability to dig into those and change them without just saying, okay, today I'm not going to eat chocolate, today I'm not going to eat chocolate, or today I'm not going to finish that can of Ben and Jerry's or whatever the vice is that you want to change the behavior of the action, or, now I'm going to finally follow through with my staff.

Well, it's like there's something preventing you, a belief that's preventing you from following through with your staff because you're afraid they're going to get mad at you if you discipline them. And so you don't have any discipline in your company.

Even though you're a good parent, you discipline your kids effectively because you know that's needed to raise them.

But for whatever reason, when it comes to money and employees and thinking that, oh, well, they're more like slaves, I don't want to tell them what to do because I don't want them to feel like slaves. I mean, these are all things I've heard from business owners over the years.

They're all beliefs and emotions causing dysfunctional behavior in the leader. And so to me, this is why the mindset lever is the most valuable, is the most important.

And the beauty is as you fix this stuff related to your business, it fixes all parts of your life. All relationships get better. I'm a better husband, I'm a better father, obviously.

But by getting this stuff cleared out, that's related to what I thought was business, but it affected, it was really core on my parenting ability. And so I think there's nothing more valuable than leaning in here.

And I think the reason people don't lean in here is because there's black and white thinking.

I think a lot of people are all or nothing that if they think, oh well, I admit that I have a failing, I admit that I need help, then my whole life is a failure. I think there's a lot of people wired like that. And I'm grateful that my life is all gray. I have very little black and white in my life.

My whole life is gray. And it just depends is always my answer on what is right or wrong or the situation. And so I've always had a learning mindset.

I've always known there's room for improvement.

And I was grateful that my grandfather, my mom's dad taught me that the greatest skill in the world is problem solving and if you ever stop learning, you might as well die. So I had that fantastic foundation to be willing to work on myself and be more self reflective.

But I think the other reason a lot of people don't go down this path is it's painful. And when you bring up these traumas, these emotional traumas, some of the stuff I've heard from friends and clients, it's just jaw dropping.

Stephen King couldn't write some of this stuff and it's painful to bring that stuff back up. But to me this is where you grow through that season and you grow through that reopening that wound, but then it heals.

And the reason I lean into this stuff now when it comes up in my life is because I know getting on the backside of those wounds, on the backside of that healing, it feels amazing. It's worth all the gold in the world in my opinion.

The lack of and chaos in my head, the lack of overstimulated brain that can't sleep at night, the lack of drive to prove to the world that I'm right and to help everybody in my sphere and feel that it's my, my burden to take on other people's problems and fixing all of that like literally my brain is so much more calm. My, my thoughts are so much more relaxed.

My internal existence is so much more Zen, let's say more in flow that like man, that's worth all the gold in the world. And the funny thing is is it does take away a lot of the drive.

And I think this is where like I've seen years over the years, I've always seen the father wound that like John Eldredge talks about and wild at heart and the motivation of guys to achieve and prove and strive.

The Tiger woods, the Steve Jobs, the dysfunction, Michael Jordan's, the dysfunctional Achievers, they're driven by some little demon in them that just. They can't. There's no peace inside, there's no flow. They are always being chased by something.

And Mark Suster, he's a venture capitalist in LA and he worked for Salesforce, was a big VP there with success and he wrote a post that summarized it best.

He said, I look for guys with a chip on their shoulder that want to prove something in their, in their venture to get funded, but I don't want it to be such a big chip that it incapacitates them. And it's a chip related to their dad. Like he tied it all together and he said it exactly what I'd have always thought and seen.

And so yeah, you fix some of this stuff and that drive to conquer the world can often go away, but then you can move into more the freedom side of where is your upside, where is your true potential? And that's where I feel I'm playing at right now.

And I don't know where that leads to and I don't really care because it's all going to work out for good.

But and I think Michael Singer's second book, the Surrender Experiment, really highlights what can happen when you lean into that side of it and it's fulfilling and freeing the whole way.

And so to me that's, I think the more business owners I can help to get free and get clear of dysfunctional beliefs and emotional traumas and get them unhinged from the unhooked from the negative anchors that they're carrying around. The world is a better place and they're better bosses, they attract better employees, they help their employees grow through this stuff.

They're better husbands, they're better fathers, they're better members of their community and everybody wins. And so to me, that's why the mindset is such a valuable lever as you go to grow your business. And the beauty is it's always going to come back up.

As my mom says, when I was a kid, if I wasn't willing to deal with the lesson then God was just going to send me around Mount Sinai one more time. Like the Israelites with Moses in the desert for 40 years, going around a little whatever, 20 mile area. They just weren't getting the lesson.

And so for me, that's the beauty is if I don't want to deal with it now, it'll come back up and I'll get to deal with it later. But I've realized the faster I can deal with it, the sooner I can get into it. The more free I am, the better life is. So I hope this was useful.

I think, as I've said before in the Facebook group bottleneck breakthrough method, if you're not in there, I share resources like this. I link to guys like Justin. I link to people like Kathryn Quitner, who does the biofield tuning session that I did.

And I've had so many friends do it since with amazing results. I just love sharing this stuff. And so if you're unsure where to go next, the book has it in chapter 14.

The Facebook group gets content like this shared regularly. And don't hesitate reaching out, because I think this is, again, where all the gold in the world is.

And I'm going to continue digging into this as the podcast continues and maybe have people on that I can interview that talk about this stuff. And a question coming in from Dave.

Do I find different people in your life to share some of these things with other than your spouse, to help me with this process? Yeah. I mean, that's where the experts, like, I paid Justin. I probably paid him 30 or 40 grand over three years. I hire experts in this area.

And yeah, my wife is fantastic and she's totally on board and we've grown a lot through all of this stuff. But I find experts and I try to find. I just seem to find the best. I don't know why. I've never really gone to counselors.

And I know counselors are useful, but their process takes longer for most of the time, and there's a lot of ongoing support they can provide. But I've been fortunate that I came across Justin, and I had worked with a couple other people before him that were useful. And then.

So Dave's clarifying question, friends other than professionals, after I get the advice. Yeah, I mean, you could have. There are peers that you tend to attract as you go down this rabbit hole of getting healthy and healed.

But it can be lonely.

I've had plenty of seasons where I didn't have many people I could share this stuff with because I was getting healed and growing past the people in my life. But no, I've got some great friends that love digging into this stuff. Adam Temple is probably my best friend on Earth.

And around this we can go so deep and we've grown through so much. And. Which is completely hilarious because I worked with him back in 2012, and it was about 2012 and we ended horribly. I mean, it was scorched earth.

Ended on bad terms. And it was about three, four years later. About three years later, we Bumped into each other in an event, apologized, were cordial, but weren't close.

And then it was about two years after that, or maybe a year after that, he hit me up for coffee. And I just thought, what on earth is this guy going to talk about? And he apologized, had grown through similar stuff.

I had grown through similar stuff. And we now have of the best friendships I've ever had in my life. And it came out of just going down this path and growing through it.

And so it's rare error to be able to talk about this stuff with people. There aren't as many people in the business or church communities that want to dig into this.

It's painful, or they feel ashamed, or they don't know how to pursue it. They don't feel comfortable with it yet.

But I found now, five years later, after starting with Justin, four and a half years later, after starting with Justin, I've got four really close friends that I can dig in deep with this stuff. And, like, there's no judgment. There's no concern of what I'm revealing. It's all encouragement.

It's all digging deep, and it's all getting healed and healthy. And I find more and more of those guys keep coming into my life. So it is definitely a shift, and it can be lonely.

And that's why I think having worthwhile pros that you can go to to start on this path is so valuable and to help you get to the roots of this stuff so much more quickly. But great question, Dave. And it's all part of the growth process that as we improve the.

We move up the food chain, whether it's enlightenment or whether it's discipline or whatever we were moving up, there's less and less people. And that doesn't. I don't want to say, like, this is elitist or anything like that.

It's just the mass of humanity is wallowing in their thoughts and decisions and actions, and they don't realize that there's a better path or an easier path or a more fulfilling path. And so I just dangle carrots out. I don't talk about this stuff much publicly.

This is the most I've ever shared publicly on this podcast, and I'm excited to see what kind of response it gets from people because I'm sure there's more and more of you out there that are wanting this kind of insight. And I love that.

I'm not worried about any blowback I might get from people, from any haters or people that are triggered or that have their thoughts flicked by their beliefs and emotions that think I'm some kind of monster over it.

So anyway, looking forward to digging in next week at the final session of the six week Bottleneck Breakthrough Method series, and then the podcast will continue after that. So hope you got a ton of value. This is a meaty stuff. You might have to listen to this again.

And as I said, you can get more support on this from justin ferriman@flow-masterry.com and as well as the Facebook group Bottleneck Breakthrough Method. And looking forward to digging in with you more. Have a great day. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from Triptych of Snippets by Septahelix.

It's used under Creative Commons.