Counseling and Processing the Past

But that's what I see. That's what we're just doing. We're thinking we're doing something like bodybuilding because it's going to make us better, but you're just basically using bodybuilding as a plaster for a wound that's not healing. Yeah. And I didn't realize that until I went through counseling. And I went through counseling, went to a trauma counselor, and I hate this phrase, but, you know, it does make sense, first world problems type of things, you know, something my mom said to me when I was like 19, and then that got linked up to a bunch of other stuff that then made me have this feeling of I'm not good enough, and you get that little voice in the back of your head. And so I tried to use the pursuit of success in bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman, business. I tried to use that as a crutch. And it works for a while, but it doesn't work forever. And I finally had to face the fact that I needed to go see somebody to help me unpack that shit. And I'm glad I did because that gave me, I can have a level of empathy and understanding with people going through the same thing. And I can, with conviction, go, hey, I'm seeing some red flags. Maybe you should go talk to somebody about that. Here's an ACE score sheet. Let's just see how many things you click. oh, you clicked seven out of ten, let's refer you to somebody and find you some help. And it makes it such an easier path to getting them there because if you haven't done it, you can't speak from a level of understanding. And then people go, well, I don't want to go see a counselor. I'm not crazy. If you can be relatable and say, yeah, I wasn't either, but I did have some shit in my brain that wasn't able to be processed, I think you would benefit by going and seeing somebody. well I mean many of you who follow me on Instagram know that I obviously put out a daily good morning message with thoughts and people always ask me where I get these things from I'm like it's my observations on my own life because I feel like the more you can understand yourself as a person and understand these things we want to shun away from the more you can then relate to other people because you see patterns I can now see when someone's got low self-esteem or doesn't have that belief in themselves because that was me in a nutshell and to some degree it still is and then i think as a coach it makes you better because you're like hey i can see this coming up but then you also know how to talk to them in the right way about it because some people don't want to have these conversations no it's very easy to just bury things away because it's we'll do it tomorrow or that's not important or why do i need to bring up stuff that happened 20 30 years ago yeah but that makes you who you are today yeah but like we're told as men we're told not to do this we're told we have we you have to be men stop crying i'll give you something to cry about and there's part of it that's like okay we don't want to coddle young men but we also don't want to suppress young men to where they feel like they can't speak for themselves well this all goes back to what i saw people of like you need to be able to yeah so be in a position where you

and talk about these things, but don't let them become your whole identity. I don't want to use the word, but I'll say out there, but we've got a space where we have very kind of like hyper-masculine men, and then you've got these soy boys on one end. But we need a balanced, we need a balance of both. It's the pendulum swing. And a couple of points, like you're a prime example of this because you had cancer. It would have killed you. You got hit by a bus. It could have killed you, and you've used that experience and you've used it as fuel to move forward and help other people. And that's what you should be doing. Like, you don't want to wallow in self-despair and go, oh, whoa, it's me. I got cancer. You got cancer, but you fucking survived. Great. What can you learn and what can you teach others? I got hit by a bus. I'm like, yeah, but you survived. Now you take that and you fuel it to help others. It's exactly what you do. People need to learn from that and say, okay, yeah, we all have problems. We've all had near-death experiences. We've all been in – a lot of us have been in places where we've slept in our car because we couldn't afford rent. or we had to eat tuna and crackers because we couldn't afford food. You have people fucking out on the street homeless. And it's like you can look at that as woe is me or you can use that as an opportunity and try to learn from it and figure out how do I get better. But I look back at the 80s when I was a kid, and you can't really blame people because they didn't know any better. It's true. You think about people in the 70s, men in the 70s. You go back and look at pictures. They got these great mustaches and beards that ride motorcycles. Like it was a whole different world. And you had like a kind of manly men thing. And these guys became fathers. And they didn't really understand how to balance out that whole, you know, 1970s man with like now being a father. And so we kind of went one way too far and created entitlement, kids that were aggressive, violent. And that's when we started swinging that way. But then we hyperreacted and now we're going the complete opposite way. It's like, guys, we need to move back that way, but we need to stop at a certain point and not push it all the way over there and then not let it go all the way to the other side. But it's the same thing in the fitness industry where you see the pendulum swings one way, it goes the other way, and it never stops in the middle. And we have to start getting better at dragging things into having more balance. Yeah.