Digital Social Hour - Dangers of Adult Content, Ayahuasca and Beating Anxiety | Zack Blakeney #234

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

On today's episode of Digital Social Hour, Zak Blakeney gets vulnerable about his previous addiction. APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's not a lot of information about this out here. And even then, the professional community is still debating on whether this is an addiction or not. Hundreds of thousands of studies right now that are showing you how damaging this is for human beings. How is this not even a debate? Money. Absolutely. So, **** is a $100 billion industry. But they found that about one in four actors that are inside of **** are not there by choice.

Seriously? They have been sex trafficked. Or they've been manipulated to believe that they're not being sex trafficked, but they are. Welcome back to the Digital Social Hour. I'm your host as always, Sean Kelly. Got with me a very cool guest for you guys today with a powerful message, Zach Blakeney. How's it going? Doing well, Sean. It's an honor to be on the show with you, brother. Yeah, man, you got a crazy story. I don't even know where you want to start

it, but I'd love for you to lead it off. Okay, so let's just go straight to it, man. I was addicted to for 16 years of my life, from the time I was 14 until 30. And at the time, you know, when I was 14, it was the year 2000, right? So this is where we moved from dial-up internet, if anybody remembers AOL, into broadband. And with broadband internet and high-speed internet came an absolute flood of video. Because now we have, you know, a higher capability to process these videos. And it was really the birth of the video industry. Well, for me, it was a perfect timing, right? So I'm 14 years old, and I'm curious. I'm, and I have access, right?

So I started diving into it. Now, I didn't realize at the time that that was going to turn into something that absolutely destroyed my life. But as I continued to do it, I started to notice things about myself. I started to notice changes inside of myself. So when I was in high school, you don't really have, you know, you got your parents that they're watching you and everything else.

So you don't really have the freedom. Once I got into college is where it got bad. Where I started watching three or four times a day, you know, and I'm telling my roommates that I'm studying. really, I'm locking my door and I'm going to town on. Yeah. And what's interesting about is that you'll start watching something that is, let's just say pretty normal, you know, let's say heterosexual sex. I'm a heterosexual man, right? So that would be my flavor. But as you continue to watch it, those type of scenes start to lose the attraction to them. Because on the biological level,

it's not producing the same amount of dopamine as it once did. So then you start searching for something different, right? Just to get that dopamine hit. And is like a jungle of genres, right? It can bring you down all sorts of, let's just say, different ways of experiencing and watching sex and it takes you so far away from what it actually is to have sex with for me a woman right so then i start watching all these different types of genres bdsm bro i got bdsm it's like um i don't even It's like, I don't even know the name for the acronym,

but let's just say it's domination. Okay. Think about chains and somebody dominating somebody else. I actually started watching gay. You watch gay? I watch gay. I am not gay. So this is just setting up how far it can bring you away. Right. So I start watching

all these things, but then I start experiencing something in real life, which I started to experience a lot of social anxiety, a lot of performance anxiety, and I'm a pretty good looking dude. So I was actually, you know, with women, but then I started to experience something called induced erectile dysfunction. And this is a real phenomenon. And what happens is, is that when you watch, you're activating a different area in your brain, you're actually activating the visual center of your brain and you're mapping your sexual attraction to a visual center with sex. It is a body experience. It is a soul body experience. Matter of fact, you're not really going to be thinking a lot because you're so wrapped up in the pleasure. Well, then when those mental imagery

starts to become things that aren't even attached to your sexual orientation, then we start to see a big division in what happens. So I'm in my early twenties, man, and I'm taking CX to get right. But even with that, I was thinking about a**hole images for me to achieve a**hole. And then when I was with a woman, I was thinking about a**hole images to a**hole. Wow. These are some symptoms of a**hole addiction.

Like how far it takes you in. So I'm in my 20s, in the height of my sexual prowess as a man. And I'm literally having problems getting a**hole with a woman. Think about, for me, the mental dialogue that I had and the self-deprecation that I was experiencing. I mean, I was saying things like, what's wrong with me?

You know, why am I different from every other man? Why am I experiencing these things? And I would cry out to God in pain. Well, over time, I would find myself escalate. And I just want to talk about dopamine escalation. So the reason why now, after I've healed, I watched all these different types of genres, even gay, is because it's just a new form of dopamine.

And then the other part of the chemical reaction in is when you actually, your body produces oxytocin. oxytocin is a binding chemical so you actually create a relationship with and when the guys i'm working with i say actually your mistress wow because they treat it like a mistress yeah they hide it they don't tell any about it especially not their wife and but also they've created a relationship based off a false sense of love by into it so that binding chemical creates them coming back to it over and over and over again. And that's something that's very different from being addicted to or alcohol. Oxytocin isn't normally released with alcohol, but it is with. Right. So once I got into like

my late twenties, I actually got married. Right. So I met i actually got married right so i met my ex-wife and when i met my ex-wife uh it was like fireworks i don't know if you ever met somebody like that or if anybody's ever had a relationship like you right it's like there's something about you yeah and i was just so deeply in love with her that i actually stopped watching wow and i was like oh she healed me yeah right but then the relationship started to fizzle out in a sense of, at the beginning, it's all butterflies and rainbows. But then you start to settle into things. And that's where that pattern started to come back in.

I started watching again. So we were running a business together. And I started to notice things that I really didn't understand at the time, but I do now, that there was a level of restriction inside of myself energetically where I couldn't move past it. Like I was feeling contracted. I didn't know what that was. Well, the three most common fears that come from this are the fear of loss, the fear of rejection, the fear of failure. And when these fears as an energy are creating your behavior,

which is really these are caused as fears and affects being the behavior. You don't expand. You don't go after the bigger goals and the visions that you have for your life because you're experiencing the imposter syndrome. You're experiencing the shame. You're experiencing the guilt

that keeps you from going for them. So I didn't know that at the time. So I just kept self-sabotaging, right? I would say that I want something, I'd start working towards it and then I'd blow it all up. And I'd say, I would want something, I'd start working something, I'd blow it all up. But I didn't understand this pattern that was happening. So fast forward to really the two most painful experiences of my life in addiction. And there's a relation to this on like really starting to understand how it occurs is me and my ex-wife were leaving the gym.

And she says, she grabs my hand and she says, we need to talk. Now, if anybody's ever been in a relationship, you know those four words. You know that something serious is about to happen. And for me, it stimulated so much anxiety. So we walk out to my truck and we get in and she has to see my phone. And I reluctantly gave it to her. And she goes to my in-private browsing and she hits in-private browsing. And my recent searches started to show up. I've told this story before, and this was 2017. It was a droid during that time in-private browsing saved it. Right. And she says, what's this? And I look at her and I say, I don't know. That's not me.

She says, this is your phone. Who else could it be? I said, I don't know. Somebody hacked my phone. It wasn't me. Now, while this is happening, there's another voice inside of me that I just got in tune to saying, tell her the truth. Tell her the truth. She asked a third time. if you don't tell me the

truth right now, I'm going to leave you. And my reaction to it was still, that wasn't me. But now I'm crying. And I come out and I said, but I did watch that. And it was such an interesting experience for me because during the time I didn't really have any self-awareness. I wasn't awake to anything other than my mind being my thoughts and that's who I was. But it was the first time I got associated with a different part of me. So as I'm leaving, I'm driving and I'm going home and it was the first time I actually seriously considered committing. Wow. So there's a sporting goods store that's close. I'll go, I'll buy a gun, I'll end it all, right? Well, while I'm thinking about this,

that voice speaks up again. And it has a question for me. Who's listening? Who's the one listening to these voices inside of me? And this question was really profound for me at that time because as an addict, especially when you're in the middle of addiction, you feel like you are victimized by

your own addiction. You feel like you have no control, right? There is no awareness to that. And this was the first time that that opened up for me. About four weeks later, we started working through things and I actually went to see a therapist and I went to start to go to like PAA meetings, addiction anonymous. And she comes home and I can tell she doesn't want to talk, right? Yeah. But at the time you could classify me as anxious attachment. Anxious attachment communication style is, I need to talk about it right now. If I don't talk about it right now, I'm not okay.

Right. And she was anxious avoidant, meaning that, I don't want to talk about it right now. We'll talk about it when I want to. It's a terrible communication style to be in a relationship with. Yeah. Well, I kept pushing and I kept pushing and I kept pushing to the point where she locked herself in our closet. Wow. So I'm sitting on the other side

of the closet door crying, you know, pleading with her, you know, please don't leave me. Don't leave me. I'm working on it. And all of a sudden she swings open the door and she says, I want to die. And then she starts running for the kitchen, presumably to grab a knife, right? So I get up really fast, and I get in between the doors. I say, please don't do this. Please don't do this. I'll go. I'll go. Now, in that moment, though, two things happened. One, I had to be faced with the truth that my actions and my behaviors had led to the person that I love the most want to end her life. That was a lot of trauma to work through that I love the most want to end her life. That was a lot of trauma to work through once I started healing.

The second part of it is it's like my life flashed before my eyes like a movie. It was like all the choices I had ever made up to that point led to that point. And it was like I was watching myself as a character in the movie. Like a near death experience almost. Yeah. I mean, I was experiencing, it was that intense of an energetic experience right right well that experience subsides i go sit on the couch and i'm sitting in all the pain of what just happened but guess what happens that voice activates again and it has another question who's watching if i'm the character of the movie and i'm watching this happen, who's the one that's watching? Yeah. So those two questions,

who's listening and who's watching drove me to want to understand what happened to me throughout the addiction. One, in a sense of the biological sense, what I've talked about in a sense, the biochemicals that happen inside of addiction, and then also understanding neuroplasticity and epigenetics and all the things that really started to give me a good understanding,

but there was still something missing. And what was missing was a substantial foundation to fall back on. And that's when this new experience of spirituality and God came into play, where I answered those two questions, that those two questions are who I actually am, which is the observer of my thoughts, my emotions, and my actions. And what connected me to God in this sense, in spirituality, is that God is also the observer, observing all of us, what we're doing, right? And then it brought me to an even deeper truth, and what I call an experiential truth. So an experiential truth is something that every human being on this planet experiences.

One of them is that they can observe. The other one is that we have the God given right to choose. So once I found these two areas inside of myself, which seem very rudimentary to me now, when I look at this, I'm like, duh, right.

But when I was in it, I didn't feel like I had these things inside of myself, but through observation and choice and empowering myself with knowledge, I was able to heal myself through this process without going through PAA, without going through therapy, using these spiritual principles to really transform who I was. And that's what brought me to who I am today. That's an incredible story. And even after the divorce, you were prescribed anxiety, right? And you were on all sorts of medications. Yeah, yeah. They started me with a little bit of Xanax or Clonazepam or something like that.

And I was taking it, but my soul, right? Intuitively, I was like, there's something wrong here. There's something wrong here because I'm relying on an outside source to put me into a state that I believe is achievable without it. So once I actually had that experience of understanding, no, you created this for yourself. You created the addiction. I created the addiction through my own choices.

I created that much suffering. That also means I'm powerful enough to create joy, happiness, and love in my life. And I can do it without the need of an Outside source. So that was actually another awakening for myself to say no, I don't need these. Yeah, I can do this by myself I'm, not a fan. I got prescribed anxiety in college Uh, they put me on clonazepam at first and then xanax got addicted for like two months taking it every day dosage kept going up I quit cold turkey one day, ended up having a seizure from withdrawal. And I'm like 20, 20 years old or something. And I almost died.

Yeah. I mean, benzos have the worst withdrawal symptoms. And yet it's the most, one of the most prescribed that we give to our American population, depowering them, taking away their power to realize not only can you heal yourself, but ultimately you can access any state that you want to access when you're equipped with the self-knowledge to do so. Yeah. Going back to the addiction, I saw a graphic on your Instagram. It's more damaging to watch than it is to take to your brain. Yes. So this goes into the impulsivity and the availability of, right? So the gray matter in your brain is the area that's associated with critical thinking. Also the area that's associated with being able to persevere through challenges to reach a higher

goal, right? So that's what the gray matter is doing well one creates such a large biochemical release into your body right through the dopamine the oxytocin but also the stress hormones that once that happens and you're also being able to access it on your phone so i want i get right i want i get and ultimately you're not training that part of your brain that says, hey, wait for the higher reward. Hey, pause and be mindful and think about this before you do this thing. Your brain is just like a muscle. So if I want to get bigger biceps, then I do reps to get bigger biceps. If I want to, I guess you could say, make a brain healthy in an area that it's responsible for, I need to use that part of my brain. So without that, it starts to atrophy. And what they've shown on brain scans is that a

addicted brain is worse than an addicted brain. And to me, that goes all the way down to this reward center and the dopamine that's going through the process of understanding that without the ability to pause and say, hey, I'm going to wait for a higher reward and how available is compared to, right. If I wanted to, as I've done before, I could watch six times a day. Uh, I'm not an addict. I've never done it before, but I imagine it's more difficult to find. Yeah. Right. So it's the repetition over time, over time. I must've watched 10,000 times plus over the 16 years I was addicted.

So you're training your brain to be impulsive. You're training your brain to not push through challenges that ultimately are your higher goals that you want to achieve. Have you gotten your brain scanned? I haven't gotten it yet. Now that we're talking about it, I'm like, man, this would be really cool to see what it looks like at this point. It'd be cool to see if you cured it, right?

Yeah. Do you think that damage is permanent? Well, now I find myself to be very patient. Now I find myself to be very loving. Now I can find myself to experience fear, but then step into courage and then still push towards something. So although I haven't seen a brain scan physically, I can say that the effects that I experience now would tell me that my brain is healthy in those areas. Nice.

Right? So the three most common fears when it comes to and what they actually create, when I was talking about that fear of loss, fear of rejection, and fear of failure, when that shows up in your business, you will not push past a certain point. If you have a goal to have a multimillion dollar business, you will not push past a certain point. If you have a goal to have a multimillion-dollar business,

you will keep finding yourself stuck in the same cycle of not getting past it because to do that, you have to put yourself out there. Case in point, when I put myself out there to ask you if I could come on to this show, I was experiencing fear of rejection still. It didn't go away. I was like, I could get rejected this. But most people will allow that fear of rejection still. It didn't go away. I was like, I could get rejected this. But most people will allow that fear of rejection to not actually reach out.

So by doing so, you're already rejecting yourself. You're already experiencing the fear of rejection because you're not there. So for me to bring this mission forward, I have to push through my own limitations to expand it out to get the reach of the millions of men that are suffering from this. And whatever it is,

that is your higher vision for your life. You have to have the skill of being able to push past your own fear, step into courage. But without the awareness that that's happening, as I talked about before, I felt this energy constriction while I was running my business. I couldn't identify it. So I didn't know what it was.

So that's a level of why of self-awareness. And. And that's why self awareness is the most important skill for an entrepreneur to have to be able to create what he wants to create. Wow. I never thought it could affect the business world too. Yeah. I mean, it'll be intertwined. Well, really. So when we think about is an effect, so I'm going to use this spiritual principle or the universal law of cause and effect, right? So a behavior is an effect, but there's a thought or an emotion that is causing that behavior, right? So porn, what happens is, is that a lot of guys will be experiencing, and I do want to say that is affecting women as well, but since I just served men, I'm talking about men here. So when we start experiencing stress in the present moment, stress is cortisol and norepinephrine, right? That stress, we want to escape from it. Well, we want to escape to something that feels good. Well, it produces

dopamine and oxytocin, right? So you escape from it to feel good. The stress is probably a challenge that you're facing. And instead of facing that challenge and going through it to reach the dopamine on the other side of facing the challenge, you go for the quick hit. When you get done with watching, you'll know it's a problem is if instantly you felt guilty as in I did a bad thing. And because I did a bad thing, I feel shame. I am a bad person. Now you bring those emotions back into your present moment.

So you're compounding the stress in the present moment. Shame is unworthiness, right? So now in the causality of it, shame and fear, if I'm coming from that cause, I create effects of watching. I create effects of not going after higher goals. I create effects of not being open and communicating and talking to my, if we're talking about a romantic partnership, being open and talking to my partner

about what I'm experiencing. Right. And all that does is constrict you back in so that you feel like you can't move and you get stuck in these patterns of loops of feeling like you're going somewhere, like you're walking down a trail, but really you're just walking in circles, doing the same thing over and over again. That's crazy. Man, I'm just picturing a lot of my friends might be addicted and they don't even know. And that's the hardest part, right? Is that there's not a lot of information about this out here. And even then the professional community is still debating on whether this is an addiction or not. And i'm like uh there are numerous studies at this point hundreds of thousands of studies right now that are showing

you how damaging this is for human beings how is this not even a debate money absolutely it always comes back to money right so it's a 100 billion dollar industry the sex trafficking industry is 150 billion dollar industry wow they intertwine together and that's another thing when i am is a $100 billion industry. The sex trafficking industry is $150 billion industry. Wow. They intertwine together. And that's another thing when I am working with men that have daughters. Studies are studies. And what I mean by that is that there's always one rivaling the other.

But they found that about one in four actors that are inside of porn are not there by choice. Not there by choice. Wow. They have been sex trafficked or they've been manipulated to believe that they're not being sex trafficked, but they are, right?

Which this is another way of thinking about this. Yeah. So when you're watching these scenes where you're thinking that these people are enjoying what they're doing, a lot of times they're not. Crazy. So this is something that needs to come forward.

Yeah. Because we need men, especially now we need men that are willing to take a stand in the characteristics of integrity and honesty and responsibility. And when we're hiding from these things, right, when we're using to hide, we're not stepping into the powerful men that we need to actually create actionable change in this world. And there's so many of us that are suffering from this way and are sitting back waiting for somebody else to change the world. But look at the nature of the world right now. We are divided, but we're also united. But the division is coming from the top down. And that creates this dynamic where people feel like they can't do anything about it.

And that's indifference. And indifference is truly the plague of humanity of not moving out. So that's what this is about for me. It's not just about the, it's about, it's about guiding men to discover who they really are. And if you really do have the courage to go down this path, I call it the warrior's path, right? To be open and vulnerable and transparent, something else comes forward, which is that you get to experience yourself as your authentic, limitless self. And at the very deepest level for all human beings, what we want is to be fully seen, fully heard, and fully loved. And if you have that in your life, you are also living a limitless life. I love that. Yeah. It have that in your life, you are also living a limitless life.

I love that. Yeah. It's not all about money guys. So obviously you're against, are you against? Well, I want to say something real quick. So I'm not, this is where I take a little bit of different stance. I'm not against. Okay. What I'm for is responsibility of what people create. So to give you a frame, when I started thinking about this, I was like, okay, what if I was responsible for creating the industry? I'm the one that created it. What does that feel like in my body? So I started thinking about it. I was like, what's the inherent problem? Well, the inherent problem is, is that you can create whatever you want to create. And it's on the user's responsibility their own choice to choose in or choose out right like think about a buffet you go to a buffet there's all these different things to eat you get to choose what you're going to do right that's your own responsibility but there's also responsibility

to the creator to know that when i'm creating something that is actually moving the world forward now we can get ethereal and somebody if I was talking and I've talked to OnlyFans girls, I've talked to people that run ****, and they'll be like, well, it's not my responsibility what happens to them. I was like, well, then you're not actually being of service to humanity. You're serving yourself.

And by serving yourself, you're a part of the problem. But I have friends that watch ****. It's not a problem for them. They didn't create the same mental construct that I did, the meaning behind what **** was to me. So there's a balance. Friends that watch, it's not a problem for them. They didn't create the same mental construct that I did, right? The meaning behind what is to me. So there's a balance. Yeah.

So I'm for one responsibility of the user of choose or choose not. That's really our free will choices are infinite power to create our life however we want to through our choice, right? Yeah. But I'm also thinking about the people that are creating, hey, what is your intention in creating? Because if the intention is to actually serve humanity, that's what I'm telling you is, hey, this isn't actually working. So I'm not against it, but it's faulty, right? And if you had a door and it had a door

hinge and it wasn't working, you wouldn't say that the door is wrong. You would just say it's faulty. Yeah. Right. So I just wanted to say that in a sense of I'm still for people with their own responsibility. I'm not against really anything, but it does take a level of awareness to understand what's happening to you. Yeah, that makes sense. I've seen you say men need to be more open with their emotions. Yeah. And a lot of men are kind of scared to open up. What caused you to have that mindset shift? Experiencing the freedom of it and also experiencing these emotions no longer controlling me. So I have a statement. This is another experiential truth that I use, which is what you repress will express. If you repress anger, it doesn't mean that anger is not going to show

up in your life. What happens is this anger shows up in all the different areas of your life that you don't want it to show up in. Somebody says something that really isn't off cuff but you take it as off cuff because you're angry already and you blow up right right passive aggressive behavior nobody likes you if you're passive aggressive right but people that are passive aggressive have deep-seated anger inside of themselves that they're not allowing themselves to express right right so when we think about emotions energy in motion emotion and i was actually watching the gentleman, obviously that was on the podcast before he was talking about the negative and positive emotions. And I have something to say about that in a sense of negative emotions are the things that get trapped in your

body. And when they get trapped because you repress them, you don't allow it to express. So if you imagine your body right now is just like a silhouette and it's just energy, a negative emotion flows in. You don't want to feel that a negative emotion. So you push it down. Well, now it's actually trapped in your energy field. But if you felt that negative emotion on feeling angry and then you expressed it, let's say with a primal scream or let's just say you just need to talk about your anger. Yeah. Then the energy flows through your body and you're not holding onto it anymore. And it's my belief that our natural state as humans is loving awareness,

meaning that we are already love. So the more you try and be what you already are, the more you're going to fail at being what you already are. So under this premise, if our natural state is love, then there are anchors of negative emotions that hold us back from experiencing ourselves as love right right so that's the work this is shadow work and this is what happens when i work with the men that i work with it doesn't actually have to be every single time but the shame and guilt and anger they're holding you back from experiencing who you really are and once you heal from those things by first expressing them, transparently talking about them, then moving into understanding why it is the case that you think this way, feel

this way, whether it's associated with a past experience or whether you were told to be this way from an outside source, then finding the truth in that. Once you have the truth in that, then the forgiveness aspect, and then you heal. The only way I can sit here and talk about watching gay without being worried about whether people think I'm gay or not, or being able to talk about these experiences with my ex-wife is because I'm fully healed from them. Wow. Right. If I wasn't, I would hide it. Most people would. Yes. Yeah. So the one thing I want to cue people into on this, and this has to do with addiction, but it also is what I call the four walls of dishonesty.

And these four walls are creating barriers around who you authentically are. The first wall is hiding. Whatever you're hiding from in your life right now, you're doing so because you feel shame about it. So hiding is a symptom of shame. The next one is denying. Whenever you deny something, it doesn't make it disappear. It actually empowers it to have more of a hold on you. So as you sit there and say,

deny, oh, I don't want to feel that. I don't want to feel that. I don't want to feel that. Repressing it, you're still experiencing it. Your mind is just tricking you to believe that it's not there, right? So it actually starts to control you and rule your life. And then lying, right? Where are we dishonest in our life about? Who are we lying to other people to try and look better than we actually are? In porn addiction, a very common lie is, this will be the last time. Right? I can't tell you how many times I said this would be the last time. It actually wasn't the last time, or it was the last time when I stopped saying that. And then the last one is trying. The energy of try is interesting. And when I do this, I try to explain.

If I were to try and grab this microphone, I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm going to try harder, but I'm not actually doing it. So a lot of people say, well, I'm trying, which'm going to try harder, but I'm not actually doing it. So a lot of people say, well, I'm trying, which makes you feel temporarily better, but long-term you suffer because you're not getting the result that you want. So anybody listening, whether you're experiencing addiction or whether you're just feeling constricted and you're not yourself, use hiding, denying, lying, and trying in your own psyche

to find out where you're restricting yourself from being fully seen, fully heard and fully loved. Yeah. Cause you keep making excuses. It eventually becomes a habit and you don't even realize. Yep. Yeah. And that's the thing about energy, right? So if we look at this, uh, when I talk to the guys that I'm working with, I say, look, integrity, doing what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it is the number one driver results, whether I'm working with businesses, which I used to, or I'm working with guys now, but the result you want is done by you being your word. Right. But how many times you commit to something and then it comes to actually honoring

that commitment and reasons and excuses and circumstances pop up. And we're not dumb people. We make really good excuses for not doing something. But what happens is, is you attach your integrity to the excuse. You don't get the result you want. And then you're sitting in the same suffering, which is I'm not getting the result I want. So ultimately we're always in integrity, but when you're in integrity to your goals and you're willing to do whatever it takes to push through them, you're going to achieve it. But if you allow yourself to relent to your excuses, reasons, and circumstances, you're going to feel like you're a victim of your life and you're not going to go anywhere you want

to go. Absolutely. Zach, it's been a great episode. I've learned a lot, man. Anything you want to promote or close off with? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, you can find me on Instagram and YouTube. The handle is at Zach Blakeney. If you're listening to this podcast and you'd like a private area to talk with me, you can DM me social hour. That'll let me know that you're coming from the show. And I want you to know that I don't hold anything back, right? So I'm here to serve you. You can ask whatever questions you want to ask.

And then you can find the program for what I do with men. I am born free.net backslash get free now. Love it. Thanks so much for coming on Zach. Absolutely brother. It's my honor. Thanks for watching guys. I'll see you next time.