The School of Greatness - How to Turn Any Desire Into Reality | David Bayer

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

The gap between what you want and where you are isn't bad luck. It's a belief you made as a kid. David Bayer, author of A Changed Mind, calls it the Golden Equation: desire plus non-resistance equals ...your result. The block isn't the wanting. It's the meaning you attach to not having it yet. Somewhere between 40 and 60, the exact strategy that made you successful starts to suffocate you. Bayer calls it the Core Program, the compensation you built around a childhood wound that's finally asking to be healed. He spent years numbing himself with drugs, alcohol, sex and pornography before hitting bottom at 33. What got him sober wasn't willpower. It was learning to stop fighting his own thoughts. You don't need more hustle. You need less resistance. This conversation shows you exactly where yours is hiding. David's Website David on Instagram David on YouTube Take The Limiting Belief Assessment! A Changed Mind: Go Beyond Self Awareness, Rewire Your Brain & Reengineer Your Reality Amazon Audiobook In this episode you will: Learn the Golden Equation for turning desire into consistent results without hustle Discover why your Core Program hijacks your success between ages 40 and 60  Overcome limiting beliefs using David Bayer's Decision Matrix from A Changed Mind  Recognize the difference between primal states and powerful states in your nervous system  Build a personal relationship with a higher power through David's communion journaling practice For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1954 More SOG episodes we think you’ll love: Lewis Howes Solo [Ignore your limiting beliefs] Price Pritchett Katie Clarke Get More From Lewis! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Everywhere I go, airports, events, walking down the street, people stop me and say, Lewis, this show got me through one of the hardest seasons of my life. And it's one of the coolest things when people come up to me. So if you see me, please come up and say hi. And let me know how this show, the School of Greatness, has impacted you. It lights me up because our mission at Greatness Media is to impact 100 million lives every single week. So if today's conversation hits home for you, do me a favor and push the follow button right now. it means that the next conversation will be delivered to you
Starting point is 00:00:32 and will find you exactly when you need it. Again, thank you so much for being here and listening to the School of Greatness. Make sure to follow right now to stay up to date on the latest and greatest. Desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. So whatever your desire is,
Starting point is 00:00:54 if you want to make more money, if you want to heal your chronic health condition, if you want to find your soulmate, it doesn't matter what it is. You can become psychologically and emotionally non-resistant. to the desire, 100% of the time consistently and predictably will crystallize that desire into reality. He's an entrepreneur, best-selling author, and an expert teaching people how to unlock
Starting point is 00:01:13 their potential by helping them raise their frequency. Please welcome David Bayer. The moment you have a desire to things enter your awareness, number one is, of course, the thing that you want. But number two is the absence of it. And the brain will give a meaning to the absence of it. Well, it's not there because there's not enough time. Well, it's not there because I'm not good enough. Well, it's not there because money is hard to make. If you can identify what the resistance is and do the inner work to transform it, you now become completely aligned and congruent with the outcome itself. What is the program or the belief that most human beings live by today? Well, I think there are two. So, welcome back. Everyone of the School of Greatness,
Starting point is 00:01:55 very excited about our guests. We have the inspiring David Bayer in the house. Good to see you, man. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Welcome to the show. If someone watching or listening right now it's feeling stuck in their life. They're feeling like they have a big scarcity wounds. They feel like they're just low energy, or maybe anxiety consistently in their life. What would you say are three actionable steps they could take right now to get out of that scarcity state and feeling more abundant? I mean, I think the first thing at a root cause level is to get into personal growth, right? Like really start to understand the dynamics of mindset, how you think, your belief systems. because that malaise and that anxiety and that depression is,
Starting point is 00:02:38 it's being driven by one thing, one thing only, which is your thoughts. Right? Your thoughts create your emotions. Your emotions produce your results. And so, you know, if somebody is feeling stuck in their life, they've got to get in a personal growth, right? And that's a process. Normally you start with the books and you become a card-carrying member of personal growth
Starting point is 00:03:02 and then you start going to events and you find the tools that work for you, you start living in a community of people who are focused on their personal growth, but that's really important. I think that's the second thing too is it's counterintuitive, but if you want to become abundant and you want to start feeling better, you have to hang out with abundant people, or people at least focused on abundance and people who are committed to feeling better. Right?
Starting point is 00:03:25 So number one is understand, you know, get into personal growth. Two is surround yourself with other people who are headed in the same direction. And it's really common sense. I think when we look at any other area of our life, it's like if I want to get good at yoga, I go to the yoga studio and I hang out with yogis. If I want to get good at recovery, which was part of my story, I want to get sober, you start going to 12-step meetings
Starting point is 00:03:45 and you hang out with other people who are trying to get sober. But for the most part, we don't really think about that in terms of our emotional states. And frankly, it's not as easy. It's like, you know, there's no personal development store that you walk into. Right.
Starting point is 00:03:59 Right. But we are seeing more and more emergent communities. Your communities that you've built, community that I've built, right? So I would say that's the second thing. And then the third thing, which is really related to getting into personal growth, is just begin to audit your belief systems. Because you are creating your reality. We are creating our reality.
Starting point is 00:04:22 We create through the mechanism of our habit of thought, our habit of emotion. And those are driven by our beliefs, right? that people call those, you know, programs, traumas. And so if you want to change your life, if you want to start moving out of scarcity into abundance, you've got to take a look at the programs that are driving those emotional states and creating that reality temporarily in your life. What is the program or the belief that most human beings live by today? Well, I think there are two.
Starting point is 00:04:50 So let's talk about the, you know, you asked about abundance. I think it's important for someone to answer this question, not overthink it, but it's a really simple way of doing an audit or an inventory. And that is to answer the question, when I was growing up, money was blank. Right? When I was growing up, money was blank. Do you have anything come to mind for you? I know you've obviously changed your money consciousness. But when you were growing up, money was what?
Starting point is 00:05:19 Scary to me. Yeah. Was what? Scary. Scary. Yeah. I don't understand it. It was scary.
Starting point is 00:05:26 It seemed like it was better than me. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the... It caused tension in the family. Like, it caused stress. Right. All those things.
Starting point is 00:05:34 So if that's what money is, if powerful subconscious levels, your entire system is going to keep you away from money. Yeah. Right? About 70% of people who just heard that question answered scarce. So it's the number one answer. And so for most people, when they were growing up, money was scarce. which is an interesting way to complete the sentence
Starting point is 00:05:55 because we don't use scarce a lot in our day-to-day language. Unless it's like there's no food. Correct. Yeah, yeah. Correct. Food scarcity. But that's, I mean, I've asked that question to tens of thousands of people, whether it's online, offline speaking events.
Starting point is 00:06:10 And scarce is far and away the most common response that people have. Around money. Around money. Yeah. Which explains why we see a handful of people with all of the money in the world and most people are without, because if your beliefs are creating your reality, that would just make sense. You ask for the belief that most people have. Belief of the program.
Starting point is 00:06:31 Belief of the program. And so it varies, right? Scarcity is a big one. I would also offer that another really powerful program that does vary from person to person, although we see about 18 to 20. It's called the core program. It's really your core trauma. And it's, in fact, your personality is a compensation.
Starting point is 00:06:51 mechanism for this early trauma. You actually have become who you are as a way to cope with this trauma. Original trauma. And that is to answer the question. When I was growing up, I never felt blank. When I was growing up, I never felt blank. So, for example, my answer is safe. Never felt sick. When I was growing up, I never felt safe, which is interesting. I mean, I grew up in an upper middle class, Orange County family. My parents were not physically abusive, sexually abusive. I didn't experience any type of physical or sexual abuse growing up. But there was this sort of constant hum of like, don't make a mistake, like, don't do it wrong. My mom never felt like she was good enough. And so that created this emotional climate where I never felt
Starting point is 00:07:31 safe, right? I always felt like I was going to make a mistake or that I was never good enough, right? So that, those two, right, really drive a lot of human behavior and a lot of what we create in our reality. Yeah, I think that was probably, if I was going to answer that question, it'd probably be the same for me as well. So when I was growing up, I never felt safe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:53 Yeah. Maybe like safe or seen or supported, but I think safe is the core wound. Yeah. And it is for a lot of people. Now, how that then compensates into our personality varies. So someone might be a people pleaser. Yeah. Another person might chase success.
Starting point is 00:08:07 Another person may actually just be living in depression or anxiety as a result of not feeling safe. Or all of them. Or all of them. Right. Or all of them. And so, and this actually isn't a problem. You know, I'm, what we have seen is that whatever happened in terms of the original wound,
Starting point is 00:08:28 once transformed, becomes your superpowering your gift, right? So give an example. Yeah, so part of my core program is that there's something wrong with me. That's how I felt when I was growing up. I remember when I was in before fifth grade, when my parents moved me into this sort of gifted in a talented education program with the other nerds. Like, I always felt like I didn't belong in the regular classroom. I always felt like there was something wrong with me.
Starting point is 00:08:59 I also grew up with a dad who was, you know, was the best dad he could be. And according to a lot of measuring sticks, a really good dad. My dad was an attorney. He was super smart, critical thinker. We would describe him today as not having a tremendous amount of emotional intelligence. And so he was a great problem finder. But when you're on the receiving end of that, you sort of experience like, I'm never doing it right.
Starting point is 00:09:24 There's always a better way to do it. There's something wrong with me. So I grew up with... There's not much affection or there's... Right. It's more results driven. Results driven. Yeah, it's a great way to describe it.
Starting point is 00:09:33 So part of my core makeup was there's something wrong with me. And... Did you say it out loud or was it more just an internal feeling? It was an internal feeling. I didn't have a self-awareness. until probably my early 30s when I was running a venture back technology company. I was chasing success. I was like everybody expected me to be really successful because I was a bright kid.
Starting point is 00:10:00 And I felt like I needed to do that in order to be loved. So like I was always kind of good at my career. But as that overdeveloped itself within me, and as I continued to not realize that below the surface, there were these wounds that needed to be healed, I was dealing with it through drug, abuse, alcoholism, sex addiction. And so in my early 30s, when I hit my bottom and I got into recovery, I started becoming aware that, wow, in all these different areas of my life, the observation that I'm making subconsciously is there's something wrong with me. So I started becoming aware
Starting point is 00:10:42 of it in my early 30s. And then what was also interesting was in my late 30s, and ended up getting a variety of like odd health challenges. I think it was in 2016. I ended up discovering I had really high levels of mercury from an all fish diet. And then I started getting mold and mold exposure and like all these things. And my reaction to these health challenges was there's something wrong with me. So there's something wrong with me was manifesting into my body. And you were you were reinforcing it and experiencing it by finding evidence. Correct. as well. Yeah. That's described as a psychosyberetic loop, right? It's like you have a belief system, and so that's what your brain focuses on, right? There's that part of the brain in a particular
Starting point is 00:11:29 activating system. You find evidence for it. You ignore all evidence for it and it just continues to build momentum. Yeah. So how did that transform into my gift, right? Was the question. And as I've done personal growth work and healing work, I have come to realize there's not only nothing wrong with me, but that I'm really amazing just the way that I am, that I'm loved by a power greater than myself, that there's actually not only nothing wrong with me, but there's nothing wrong with anything that happens in my life. All of it is really designed for my greatest growth, my greatest prosperity, my greatest evolution. And so I sort of transformed this idea that there's something wrong with me to, I can accept myself for who I am and I trust life, right?
Starting point is 00:12:23 So I was living in this consistent fear that I wasn't good enough. But as I was forced to confront that, it became the resistance training for a development of an unshakable faith that's been building inside of me, faith in myself, faith in my higher power, faith in life. And I think that's one of the things that I came here to learn. Like, I'm a big believer that we sort of choose what our outcome is as we come in. And we're born to parents who will set us up for that journey. There are experiences that are almost predestined in our life that occur. I very much see it as the resistance training module that we go through in order to become
Starting point is 00:13:03 the opposite of the environment that we were born into in these original core programs. So we're born into the contraction, which some people might describe as the shadow side. And at some point, it becomes unbearable. Yes. And we start seeking a solution to it and we transform that shadow into what some people might describe as the light, which is the expansive energy. And then we ultimately become who we came here to become. Yes.
Starting point is 00:13:26 Or we perish. Or we don't take the call to adventure. Correct. We don't go on the journey. We don't do the healing work. We go darker into whatever the addictive abuse it is that we're into. Correct. And we lose ourselves.
Starting point is 00:13:40 Correct. Which is also okay. Because we get to the end of this life. and we reflect upon it. And we learn from that experience, which then motivates a desire for the next life and we play the game again, right? Hopefully.
Starting point is 00:13:54 Yeah, hopefully. But it would be nice, you know, that's kind of like playing Super Mario Brothers and having to do the same level over and over and over again, right? It would be nice to progress. And we have more access than ever before to this progression technology, right? Because, yeah, I think about my parents' generation,
Starting point is 00:14:10 I mean, they don't really have, maybe someone could stumble into a Jim Rohn seminar or, you know, find some new thought movement book, right? And there are those folks, and you see that their kids have been raised fairly well versus most of us. But I think that's what's so amazing about, you know, what you're doing and the technology that's available and social media and YouTube and all of these things is that consciousness and the laws by which consciousness functions and how this game works are more available to us than ever before. And that is a part of this
Starting point is 00:14:38 awakening that we're seeing, which is occurring simultaneously to this massive breakdown of the old system, right? These two things are happening simultaneously, which makes this a really exciting time to be alive. 100%. 100%. You know, I think a lot of people can resonate with what you shared around being really good at accomplishing success but not feeling good at loving yourself. Do you believe that success is enough for someone to overcome their wounds, their traumas, their insecurities to actually love themselves? Like making the money, accomplishing the big dream.
Starting point is 00:15:14 No, clearly. Is that enough? No, clearly the answer is no. And we, you know, from a coaching perspective, you know, those are the huddled masses that end up in our seminars, right? Our, you know, a segment of them are very successful people. High achievers. Right. Right.
Starting point is 00:15:28 And that are really mess with your head because when you think that that's actually the solution and then you get there and it's not. You're like, I just spent 20 years chasing this thing. Yes. And I still have an empty hole. Correct. I mean, one must imagine it's a terrifying moment, right? Horrific. Yeah. It's like the worst feeling. Yeah. Right. And so, and there's an opportunity, which is a lot of what you do to like even slow down for a second and go like, well, wait, what are we even talking about with success? What is success? Right. What is greatness? Because it's a good portion of the world that is, you know, measuring it by how much money is in your bank account still. But I think we would talk about it in a language of like, you know, being authentic, being vulnerable, being in the service of others, being willing to do the unconsorough.
Starting point is 00:16:15 comfortable healing work that allows who you truly are to emerge, right? Like that's perhaps the best definition of greatness is like you actually become who you came here to become. And the beautiful thing is it's not about going out there and trying to figure out how to cluge together who you were meant to become. It's all here. It's all there, right? Which, you know, there's a distinction that we teach that I'm so grateful for because,
Starting point is 00:16:41 you know, having been in personal growth and healing for the last. I don't know, 15 years and doing all the stuff, reading the books, going to the seminars, you know, I remember walking in the landmark forum the first day that I did that and going to Tony's events and, you know, then getting into meditation and breathwork and dragging my poor wife
Starting point is 00:17:03 who was my girlfriend at that time to India because I thought, well, maybe, you know, some monks can solve my problem for me, or doing the ayahuasco or the psilocybin or the therapeutically facilitated MDMA. Like the whole thing, all the stuff, right? The stuff.
Starting point is 00:17:18 When I became aware of was a really simple equation for me, and this is what we teach, that distills down all of personal growth and success principles into one formula, which is desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. So whatever your desire is, if you want to make more money, if you want to heal your chronic health condition, if you want to find your soulmate, if you want to have more intimacy in the relationship that you're actually. in, if you want to become Prime Minister of Canada, whatever the desire is. It doesn't matter what it is. If you can become psychologically and emotionally non-resistant to the desire,
Starting point is 00:17:56 100% of the time consistently and predictably, you will crystallize that desire into your reality. What does that mean? How do you do that? You have a desire or a dream or a goal. Yeah. And you become non-resistant to what? To the desire itself. Because what happens is the moment you have a desire to things enter your awareness. Number one is, of course, the thing that you want. But number two is the absence of it. The lack. Yeah. It's not there yet. And the brain will give a meaning to the absence of it. Well, it's not there because there's not enough time. Well, it's not there because I'm not good enough. Well, it's not there because money is hard to make. Well, it's not there because there's something wrong with me. Well,
Starting point is 00:18:33 it's not there because other people have it and there's a limited amount of it in the world. There's an explanation. That's we're great explainers. Yeah. Right. And that explanation is actually a limiting belief. And as long as that limiting belief exists, it's not that you can't produce the result because reality is very gracious with us. Like nobody has a perfect mindset. But if you can identify what the resistance is
Starting point is 00:18:58 and do the inner work to transform it, you now become completely aligned and congruent with the outcome itself. So give me an example of this around either love or money or... I'll give you a personal example for me. Yeah. I started my podcast back in,
Starting point is 00:19:12 July 4th. It was the 4th of July in 2023. Okay. And I was recording an episode every single day. Sorry, every single week. Every day. Can you imagine? I was recording it's kind of me. Almost. Yes, I can imagine. Almost every day. Yeah. And it was about a year. And it just wasn't performing the way I had expected it. Once a week for a year. For a year. I'm just, I'm putting an episode out there. And I'm like, I don't really understand. I took some Ali Abdal, you know, YouTube optimization course. And, You know, I'm doing all the best practices and I'm, and I'm looking at the content. I'm like, it's good content.
Starting point is 00:19:48 The hook is good. And I'm looking at other shows. I'm like, I think it's as good. Maybe it's even better than this other stuff. Why isn't it performing? That's all the resistance. The desire was a podcast that reaches a lot of people. The resistance was, why isn't it reaching more people?
Starting point is 00:20:04 What's wrong with me? What's wrong with it? Why isn't it happening sooner? I mean, to fix something. Maybe it'll never happen. My son was born. And when my son was born, I stopped really paying attention to a lot of other things in my life.
Starting point is 00:20:18 Because my son was here. He's what mattered. And I stopped making the underperformance of my podcast matter, because that was the resistance. One of my mentors said, what you make matter becomes matter. Right? That's what we do. We're human beings.
Starting point is 00:20:33 We are able to take something and create it nothing and create it into something. And so when I was making matter was the underperformance of my podcast. As soon as I withdrew my attention from the underperformance, in other words, I dropped the resistance. And I redirected my energy over to my son. Within 90 days, my podcast took off. Right? And this is the challenging thing.
Starting point is 00:20:53 We're supposed to, as Napoleon Hill talks about, have a burning desire for something, but then not pay attention to the absence of it. And be kind of unattached. And be unattached. Yeah. Which is hard to do when you focus your energy on a desire that you want something.
Starting point is 00:21:10 Correct. and in some ways you should be obsessed about it in some ways to be like I need to master this and develop consistent habits and actions towards it I need to you know conspire the world and people around me to support me in this in some ways but also not be attached to the result correct and the lacking of the result not happening right now yeah it's the challenging art of a human being it's a challenging you know Neville Goddard talks about this right he's like ignore your reality right have a desire But then ignore your current situation.
Starting point is 00:21:42 Because if you keep paying attention to your current situation, you keep paying attention to the absence of the thing that you want. Yes. And you get locked into the absence of the thing. So what do we do instead? Instead of the focusing on what we are lacking, no matter how hard someone's working, how much they're trying and it's failing and it's not working yet, the podcast, the relationship, the financial success, the health, whatever it is, how do we detach from the result not
Starting point is 00:22:05 being in our lives now so that this shows up now? Well, I mean, the first step is understanding what we're. we're talking about. You know, the greatest challenge human beings have is that we don't understand how reality works. We don't understand that we are given the right to have a desire and that if we get out of the way, 100% of the time the desire must produce itself. Now, some people will think that that means, okay, my desire is a million dollar business, and so I'm just going to write it down on a no card or visualize it, and the Amazon delivery guy is going to deliver a million dollar business to my front doorstep while I'm watching Netflix and eating cheesy poofs on the sofa.
Starting point is 00:22:39 But that's not what I'm saying. So we are meant to take daily consistent action towards the goals that we have. But notice when we start to move into resistance. And what does resistance actually look like? Is it an emotional feeling? Is it a frustration? Is it a thought? It's a great question. Is it a lacking of action? What is that? I have a feeling I'm going to give you three distinctions. Okay. The first one is desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. I would call that the golden equation. That's how all. all outcomes are produced. So the question is, well, how do I know when I'm resistance? And for that, we go to a distinction called the two states of being. Primal versus powerful states. Yeah. Right? There are only two states of being, primal states and powerful states.
Starting point is 00:23:25 Primal states are states of being that don't feel good. States like stress, anxiety, overwhelm, anger, jealousy, depression, anxiety, boredom. That's when the sympathetic expression of the nervous system is active. We're in fight or flight. And then there are powerful states of being. states like joy, curiosity, excitement, enthusiasm, peace, calm. Those are states of being to feel good, and that's when the parasympathetic state of the nervous system is active. You are always in one state of being or the other. You're never in two states of being at the same time. And what's interesting is that
Starting point is 00:23:56 what determines what state of being you're in is not the experience, it's the meaning you're giving the experience. It's the thoughts that you're having about money, the thoughts you're having about yourself, the thoughts that you're having about life. Why is this important? Because everything that you want to create, all change that you desire, your vision board, your dreams, your goals, those will be produced from a powerful state of being. That's when you're connected to intuition, inspiration, health, vibrancy, prosperity, abundance, presence, intimacy, connection. It's all in a powerful state. You don't get any of that when you're in a primal state. And so when we're on a primal state, we're in resistance. So if we're playing the game called desire plus non-resist,
Starting point is 00:24:38 resistance equals desired result, what we start paying much more attention to is what state of being am I in? And a root cause foundational way of starting to navigate life, which is a practice I'm in, not all the time, but a lot, is noticing when I've moved into a primal state, knowing that the only thing that is moving me into a primal state is my own thoughts and my own beliefs, and then observing those thoughts and beliefs and using whatever tools I have to move back into a powerful state of being. That's the practice. It's wax on, wax off. If you do that consistently, eventually you'll produce the desired result. What is the thing that gets you in a primal state of
Starting point is 00:25:22 being the most? Me? Yes. Physical sensations of my body that I don't like. My health has been one of my mountains to climb. Like pains or like heart palpitations, aches, pains. So it puts you in more of a fear mind rather than a powerful frame of... Correct. It moves me into a primal state. But there's plenty of things that move me into a primal state. You know, I have expectations on how my Tuesday is going to go. And it doesn't go that way. You know, somebody doesn't do a thing that they're supposed to be doing or marketing campaign
Starting point is 00:25:58 doesn't work the way I expected it to work. And I'm moving to a primal state, right? What does that feel like when you go to primal state? Is it a anxiety? Is it a depression? Is it I'm not good enough? Is it something's wrong? What's the...
Starting point is 00:26:12 Sure, it could be anything from frustration. So emotionally, let's back up because thoughts generally create emotions. The thought might be, why aren't they doing what they're supposed to be doing? What if this doesn't work out? How come they did it this way? Am I doing something wrong? all of those thoughts are conducive to some sort of what you could call a negative emotion right a primal state the emotions for me that are habits are frustration anxiety some other form of fear shame and guilt right those
Starting point is 00:26:52 those are my go-toes and really what we're talking about in all this work there's so many ways to describe personal growth but what we're talking about is building a different neurology Right. I think about how amazing it is as human beings. We're able to use our minds to reorganize and rewire our nervous systems and our brains. Yeah. And so every time you catch yourself in a primal state and you observe the thought and you we have a great set of tools, but there's a lot of great teachers out there to sort of interrogate the thought and you actually see that the thought isn't necessarily true, you're building a new nervous system. You're building a new capacity. So many people want to have more in their life, but like are you capable of handling it? Right? And so this is this is a beautiful logical process that whatever you believe our creator is created for us, which is, you know, we we start to see the deep unreality that we've been living since we adopted those early age programs. And you start to reorient yourself to a proper perception of reality. And the reward for that is you get to create more of what you want to create. But the real reward for that is you start living in joy. Joy, peace, harmony, abundance, freedom. freedom.
Starting point is 00:28:04 I think a lot of people don't feel free in their life. You know, and if you grew up not feeling safe, that means you don't have freedom. For sure. Right. For sure. And at least that was for me. I didn't feel free. And it's like I wanted to create my own sense of peace and freedom.
Starting point is 00:28:19 That not feeling safe and not feeling free is pervasive in the nervous systems of human beings. And so, you know, not only do we create our own realities where you end up in a career where you don't feel safe. You end up in a relationship where you don't feel safe. You end up with a bank account where you don't feel safe. You end up in a body where you don't feel safe. Yes. But look at what we're collectively materializing at a macro level. Does the world feel safe?
Starting point is 00:28:43 No. No. I mean, you could pick whatever you want. You could pick the war in Iran. You could pick what's happening in Gaza. You could pick the way the government is run. You could pick inflation. You could pick all of these things are crystallizations of the unsafety
Starting point is 00:28:55 that we have not as human beings yet learned to metabolize in our nervous systems. So we don't, we're never going to change that out there. we will change in here. And as we change in here, those changed people will have new thoughts and new ideas to create a new system that feels safe for everyone. But that's the big mistake right now.
Starting point is 00:29:12 Is everybody, you know, there's a war on terror, there's a war on drugs, there's a war on this, there's a war on that. It's all more resistance. But we're told, and by the way, you know, my equation is a derivative
Starting point is 00:29:22 of the great teachings, right? We're told to be non-resistant. Like Christ says, turn the other cheek. Right? That doesn't even make any sense. You're telling me when, when I'm confronted
Starting point is 00:29:31 by something that I don't like in the world, I'm actually supposed to turn the other cheek, give it my cheek. And if you really look at what I think that teaching is, it's when you notice something in your life that you don't like, or you notice something in the world that you don't like, which would be your enemy, you turn the cheek,
Starting point is 00:29:48 which is you turn your attention in the other direction. You use the contraction or the problem in your life as an inspiration for a new desire and a new solution that you can now crystallize into reality. Right? It's a beautiful teaching. Yes. But they're all there, right, whether it's Buddha or Christ or whoever, and you could pick your guy or your gal, right, non-resistance.
Starting point is 00:30:07 But now we can see that just, it makes sense because behavioral psychology tells us what you believe you think, what you think you feel, what you feel you do and what you do are the results. And so if you're thinking and feeling resistance, you're going to produce a resistant reality. Yes. Right. So it all starts with a belief or does it start with healing the past so you can create new beliefs? My own journey was starting with my beliefs. And you were at around 30s? In my early 30s.
Starting point is 00:30:42 You were successful in your career, making money, accomplishing. I wouldn't even call it successful. I would say, like, look, if you think a guy running a venture back technology company is successful, fine, but that same guy was only paying himself $80,000 a year, had $3,000 at his bank account, two homes and foreclosure, and had been single for 10 years. Like, how successful is that? Gotcha. Right? But yeah, I guess if you took a quick look. Right.
Starting point is 00:31:05 But, you know, I was the craziest thing. I was at Miami International Airport. And I just, I'd gotten about 18 months of sobriety under my belt. And I was like, man, if I can change this much, like, because I never thought I was going to stop doing drugs and alcohol and sex-aying and everything that I was doing. And how were you then? 33. 33.
Starting point is 00:31:25 Right, especially pornography. I mean, pornography. I was like, I don't think there's any way this is going to stop. And it stopped. And it didn't stop because I tried to stop it. It stopped because I was healing myself through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's a phenomenal healing framework. And not only was I looking at my limiting beliefs and my resentments and healing them,
Starting point is 00:31:49 but I was also, as I was clearing out, starting to find a relationship with a higher power. I didn't grow up in a family with a higher power. So I had all of that. And I was like, man, if this is possible, like, what else is possible? Like, maybe I could actually become wealthy. Maybe I could actually find a soulmate. Maybe I could actually. And so I was in this inquiry and I went to Miami International Airport.
Starting point is 00:32:12 I was flying somewhere. And you ever have that experience where like there's a book on the bookshelf and it decides it's going to have a relationship with you? Like you just feel it. And I walk over and I grab this book and I look at the back cover and it had four statements. It said, life is full of suffering. I was like, okay, I couldn't relate to that. The suffering is going to happen to you.
Starting point is 00:32:31 There's a way out of the suffering. And the way out of the suffering is the eightfold path of virtue and I was reading the four noble truths of buddhism and I turned this book over and it's called awakening the buddha. It's got Lama suria Das. I buy the book. I read it cover to cover on the airplane. I was like, holy cow, the message here with this eightfold path of virtue of Buddha is very eightfold, what is? Eightfold path of virtue. Eightfold path of virtue, right? It says eight steps. And I was like, this is almost the same as a 12th stats, an alcoholic's anonymous. And I get back to my office and my social media manager at the time left me a book. And I was not a real. And I was not a
Starting point is 00:33:05 Peter, right? So these are miracles. And it was a book called Kingdom Principles by Miles Monroe where he's explaining the teachings of Christ. I'm like, it's the same steps. And so I go to Barnes and Noble, and I don't think I'd ever been into a bookstore, to be honest with you. I go to the little lady at the front desk and I'm like, do you have a place for people who are like trying to get their life sorted out or whatever? She's like, oh, the self-help section. I'm like, what a wonderfully named section. Yeah, yeah. And there was a little book laying on the floor in that section called Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I just picked it up. So I, I, You know, I came into healing through thoughts and beliefs.
Starting point is 00:33:41 I think eventually you go back and look at where these beliefs originated and you find forgiveness or you find proper perspective and you heal it, right? But you don't have to go back there because those things that happen then are showing up in your life right now. Yes. You know, every man you meet is dad and every woman you meet is mom. And those are your conflicts. And, you know, if you're living with a chronic health condition or you're living in financial scarcity, your reaction to that reality are the same programs that you had back then. So we can work with the program at any level of the timeline, right? I do think eventually we end up going back and cleaning up those early misunderstandings.
Starting point is 00:34:26 Sure. But to me, that can be a little bit harder than just working with the raw material as it's showing up on a day-to-day basis. It's right there for you. Yeah. You know, you don't have to get into a depopnosis or get into EMDR. All great tools, right? But like, hey, it's showing up right now with the thing on Tuesday. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:34:44 What would you say then is the number one habit that most people are living and living by on a daily basis that they think is positive, but is actually harming them in some way with their energy or their frequency to creating more. Again, it will vary from person to person. But if we focus that question on high performance, because I know there's a lot of high performers that listen to the show, you're a high performer. It's this, let's look at a bad equation. It's desire plus hustle and grind equals desired result. It's desire plus sacrifice your health and relationships for success equals desire and result.
Starting point is 00:35:24 And so, and that's reinforced by a lot of hustle culture. I mean, you can throw a stone and find it on YouTube or Instagram. Like, you know, if you're not working somewhere someone is and when you meet them, they will win. And like, I'm like, okay, well, maybe, but probably not. Because Christ said my yoke is easy, right? So, like, there's got to be an easier way. There's got to be prosperity and abundance and possibility available for all of us. And so that was a big part of what I'm still down regulating my nervous system towards, right,
Starting point is 00:35:57 is this idea of like, no, I just need to be do more or there's not enough time. And people are living in time scarcity all the time. Like you can't even breathe. And so again, going back to what I have come to learn is like, no, my, I don't need to hustle grind. I don't need to find more time. I don't need to do anything that would insert itself into that desire plus other than non-resistance.
Starting point is 00:36:20 And everything that shows up in that space that is not non-resistance is the resistance that needs to be worked on. What would you say is the number one limiting belief of most people then? I'm not enough. Yeah, being not good enough. And it makes sense when you look at what happened when we were children. So, you know, you've got beautiful eight-month-old daughters. I've got a three-and-a-half-year-old.
Starting point is 00:36:48 And what I see in my son is his expectation, rightfully so, of unconditional love from me. So we all expected unconditional love from our parents. But I don't care who your parent was, how good they were, and there are plenty that, you know, weren't great on paper. But your parents are never going to have unconditional love for you. They're conditional, right? You have the condition of your career. You have the condition of your relationship with your spouse. You have the condition of being a single mom or a single dad.
Starting point is 00:37:22 You have the condition of your own trauma. You have the condition of so many things. So there are always going to be times when a child expects the parent to be present for them and the parent is absent because of conditionality. In that absence, the child subconsciously believes it has something to do with them. And so that is why we find I am not enough or I'm not good enough everywhere because it happened to all of us. But, and this has become one of my passions, like really understanding the structure of reality and the structure sort of like, structure sort of like a metaphysical version of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. Like, what's really happening here? Because if reality is loving, how do we explain all of these things
Starting point is 00:38:05 that seem to be absent of love? How do you explain it? Well, my own experience and what I've seen consistently with other people is that that not being enough creates a compensation, which we talked about before, that becomes your personality. And so you embarking. And so you embark upon this journey with a nervous system that to prove or to prove or to please or to whatever yeah um and what's what seems to happen is that compensation that comes out of feeling like you weren't enough which is your personality works for a while mm-hmm it's a good strategy yeah it's a it's a strategy and it and it has strengths it has gifts um but also remember it is a neurology it's a nervous system And so as it works, it starts to be applied into more and more areas of your life.
Starting point is 00:39:01 Yeah. And what happens is at about 40 years old, there's this emergence of what we would call the core program. It's between 40 and 60, where people would describe it as, I don't understand the thing that I've always been good at that got me to where I am is starting to be the thing that's suffocating me. It's making me a prisoner. That's the core program. Yeah. It's overdevelopment of that neurology. and that will bring you to your knees. So people have their long dark night of the soul or they hit their bottom. It doesn't have to be with drugs or alcohol. It's like I just can't keep pleasing people. I've given no time for myself.
Starting point is 00:39:38 And so now the aspects of myself or my health are starting to degrade. Or someone has built up this personality that is, I'm the one who's able to bring order to chaos. But now there's so much chaos that chaos just beats them down. And in that beat down, which again is a byproduct of this overdeveloped aspect of your nervous system, you are incapable of solving it on your own. So it doesn't matter what great personal development tool that you have. It doesn't matter what pills or potions you take.
Starting point is 00:40:13 It doesn't matter what shaman you find with a great playlist. None of it works because that is meant to actually bring you back into relationship with the higher power of your own understanding so that you can finally experience the unconditional love that is there for you but was never meant to be given to you by your parents. And what's beautiful about that is when you reach that inflection point
Starting point is 00:40:35 and you start to find that unconditional love, the next natural step is to forgive your parents. Because it was our misunderstanding. Understandably so, right? We were kids. Trying to survive. But it was our misunderstanding. And so the core program is not actually,
Starting point is 00:40:50 Like if you think about the super limiting belief that emerges between the ages of 40 and 60, it's not a thing that you're meant to get rid of yourself. You're meant to surrender it to your higher power. And now you get into this concept, which I think a lot of people don't understand, which is surrender. And so it requires these pieces, right? Surrender to what, to who, to a higher power? Well, how do you find that relationship? Well, you hit a bottom and you have nowhere to go other than look up.
Starting point is 00:41:13 Yeah. Right. So this is all this beautiful arc of how every human being's life emerges. And the challenging thing is when you don't understand the arc, it's like trying to fight an invisible boxer in a ring. Because you have no context for it. And that's why I think so many people who get into personal growth or the work that we teach, they're able to actually start changing. It's not just about going, yeah, okay, I know I have my limiting beliefs, but how do I change them? Right?
Starting point is 00:41:41 It's not about like, yeah, I understand that forgiveness would be good for me and resentment is bad. But how do I actually forgive? That's the integration piece that I think up until now has been missing. and a lot of the historical motivation and inspirational part of personal growth, right? Yeah, because when someone is feeling, typically, when someone's feeling pain, resistance, stress, overwhelm, if they don't go to God or a higher power, they go to some other numbing mechanism. Correct. Drugs, porn, sex, alcohol, success, money, whatever it is, workaholicism or whatever it might be.
Starting point is 00:42:16 And you realize after five, ten years of doing, you realize after five, ten years of doing, doing that strategy to try to numb and feel better, it doesn't work. It's not giving you the peace or the harmony, the results that you want. And it's by going more into that and people are going to let you down and addictions are going to let you down and all these things are going to let you down from giving you that unconditional love. So that's why we either need to be broken down or we need to create some type of awareness when things are good before it gets bad to say, oh, I'm not having everything I truly want
Starting point is 00:42:48 inside of me, let me connect to a higher power. Yeah, amen to that. Yeah. The higher power thing is interesting, too, because we have a lot of, there are a lot of people who, it's where I started. I think I probably would have considered myself atheistic and then agnostic. And then I started building a relationship with the higher power. And for me, the higher power was the universe.
Starting point is 00:43:09 But what I've learned over time for me, I'm not, don't have to put this on anyone else, is, uh, I was really inspired by the story of David in the Bible. I was like, I want that. I want that personal relationship with God. I want to be able to stand up to the Goliath of my life and say, you know what? I know who my father is. I know what he does for me.
Starting point is 00:43:30 And today I'm going to show the whole world that there's a God in my life, right? I wanted that. Because prior to that, it was the universe. Like, I was in New Age and Law of Attraction and all that stuff is great. Like, I'm a huge Abraham Hicks fan. Like, all those things are amazing. They're a part of the journey. But I felt like there was a difference between having a real thing.
Starting point is 00:43:48 relationship with the Creator and the created. The universe is created. By the creator. By the creator, right? And so I didn't really know where to find that. And I just started, you know, but I had seen in my life that when I ask, I receive, there is this response. Not always as quickly as I would like it to be, but. And so I started just really saying, hey, I, I want to know what it looks like. What can I do? What is available to me to have a personal relationship with God? And what shot up for you? Well, we talked about like, you know, my mountain is my body and my health, right? And so I... It's 50 now, right? I'm 50. Well, that's not why, but yes. No, but you're starting to feel...
Starting point is 00:44:27 Yes. Well, yeah, no, there's a real thing, which is why, you know, focusing on longevity, like we talked about is so important. But in 2019, I had this ayahuasca ceremony that I did. And it was probably like my 12th ceremony that I had done, right? Well, people counted as days. So it was like three or four ceremonies because some of them were... more many many days, right? And it was super intense. And about three weeks later, I lost my sleep.
Starting point is 00:44:55 I just couldn't sleep. Oh, man, that's not good. Yeah, it's not good. So my sleep has gotten better over time, but I still wasn't sleeping great. And so I'm in this inquiry of like, I want to have a personal relationship with God. And I had a week or two or I wasn't sleeping well. And my wife was like, why don't you just get up early in journal? And, you know, rather than just go back to bed. I'm like, I don't want to get up a five o'clock in journal. Like, that's when I kind of squeeze in a few hours of sleep. Then I had revisited Paramahansa Yoganando's autobiography of a yogi, and an autobiography of a yogi, Paramata wakes up early and he writes. So it's like, okay, I'll wake up early and right. But I was like, no, no, no, that just doesn't sound convenient. Then I did a breath session,
Starting point is 00:45:35 a very deep, transformational breath session remotely with a woman that I work with. And in the breath session at the end my body sits itself up my hand comes out with like with a pen in it and I start writing and I was like okay three times I don't need to get struck by lightning so the next day I get up and I go down into my podcast studio which is like my man cave and I just start writing and it just came out it started out with dear father thank you and I started I started thanking God for all the beautiful things in my life and it was such a unique experience because I've written gratitudes before, but this was like a love letter that had been building up for for 48 years.
Starting point is 00:46:15 And I was just like, thank you for all these beautiful things in my life. And then I started asking for things. And you know, it's interesting. When my son asked me for something, he's 100% convinced he's going to get it. There's no doubt because I'm his dad and I can deliver on anything, right? He's like, no, I went. And I started writing and I felt this frequency of like, I know who I'm asking. So I know I'm going to get it.
Starting point is 00:46:38 There was no doubt. there was no resistance. And then the third piece was once I felt that, I started asking for other people. I started praying for other people. And so this has become my, my journaling process. I call it communion journaling. I feel like I'm in a relationship with my higher power when I'm doing it. Do I do it every day? No. Should I do it more than I do? Yes. But it's there. And so that, that was the answer to the asking that I had. And it has really helped me deepen my relationship with with my God. What if you ask for something and it's not given to you?
Starting point is 00:47:12 You know, there's a great teacher in the early 1920s. I just did an episode about her Florence Scovel Shin. She wrote a book called The Game of Life and How to Play It. One of my top five books. It's a great book. Is she still alive? No. And she,
Starting point is 00:47:25 so she, you know, basically says, and I'm not going to do her affirmation justice. I just wanted to give her some credit. But the idea is, is like, if it's mine, it's mine. and if it's not mine, I don't want it. So if I ask for something, now I may go kicking and screaming for a while, but at some point I realize...
Starting point is 00:47:45 It's not for me. It's not for me. And at some point... Why do you have the desire on your heart then if it's not for you? Well, I think there's two types of desires. I think there's a desire that comes from a head and I think there's a desire that comes from the heart.
Starting point is 00:47:57 For sure. Yeah. I think authentic desires aren't things that we invent, they're transmissions that we receive. And, you know, that's part of the discernment that we develop as we do the healing work is you start to feel the difference. And so, yeah, you know, she has another really wonderful affirmation that says, what's, what was mine from the beginning is mine now and ever shall be mine. So whatever is mine can't be taken away. And whatever isn't mine, I don't need it.
Starting point is 00:48:25 Yeah, and at the end of the day, it's not yours anymore. Right. You know, whatever you receive, I guess you don't take it with you. I mean, not they're aware of. I mean, it's like you can't take the physical things with you. Yeah. So, no matter how much money or the relationships you have, like, that stays in this world. Right.
Starting point is 00:48:41 Right. Hopefully what we get to bring is who we've become, right? Which is why this work is so important. Yes. Right? Like your essence, your soul, your spirit, so that you can just continue to progress. And I think that makes sense. Like, if you look at a lot of the great teachings and you talk about incarnation and multiple lives, it seems to make sense.
Starting point is 00:49:00 In this life, I can see that I've gone through. many lives. And each time I've learned and each time I try to get better. And so it would just make sense that I would do that life after life and that we would actually do that as a collective consciousness as a way of just evolving consciousness. Do you feel like you've had your biggest transformation yet? Never really, never really thought about that. Does you kind of say like in your 40s to 60 you go through this big kind of wake up typically for most people? It's funny. It reminds me of something my friend said where he realized that every time he goes through a transformation, it's a contraction and then he gets into the expansion. So he's afraid to ask for any more
Starting point is 00:49:40 because it's going to be painful. Contraction. So have I gone through my biggest one yet? I don't, I don't know. Besides death, I guess. Probably, probably not. I mean, look, drug and alcohol and sex addiction was really challenging. That was 30 years of momentum that had been building up. Yeah, maybe there's something that's going to be 60 or 70 years of momentum that I'm not aware of. But I do feel like, you know, if you think about personal growth is almost like cleansing, that one felt like a pretty big, cathartic type of experience. How long were you addicted to drugs, sex, alcohol? I would, you know, I started looking at pornography when I was 13 and then college was you know was was was was drugs and alcohol drugs for me was marijuana but it was a
Starting point is 00:50:28 cocktail yeah all of it though i sex addiction was a really challenging addiction to overcome like i went to i went to a meetings and narcotics anonymous meetings not to take anything away from those programs but but the people that i saw in sex addiction recovery i could see why it was part of my intelligent design because unlike drugs and alcohol technically i could like not call my pot dealer or not go to the bar. But the neurology of sex addiction continues to deepen even if you fantasize. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:00 You're still living as a sex addict by not even having sex. Correct. And you're still deepening those neural networks. So it really required a level of psychological mastery. Discipline, mastery, awareness, shifting your attention constantly. Correct. And fellowship. Uh-huh.
Starting point is 00:51:20 I mean, there's no way, you know, I could have done it without other people. And I think that's a really important part of healing work. Yes. Is being in a community with other folks. You know, you and I talked about the stages that we're at where we don't, you know, aren't spending a lot of time with big groups of friends like we used to. But that's something that I realized recently I really need to get back into is,
Starting point is 00:51:38 is fellowship around personal growth. Wow. Yeah. What do you feel like is the core root cause of all addiction? Unresolved, emotional distress, you know. For anyone who's an alcohol, or sex addict or... Yeah.
Starting point is 00:51:56 Born addict or whatever. It always is, which is, there's a lot of ways to recover outside of 12-step. There's great programs out there. But that's what's so interesting is, like, you don't... The 12 steps aren't about trying to get you to stop drinking or drugging or sexing or eating or whatever it is. The 12 steps are about identifying the underlying root causes, which are the unresolved emotional trauma and transforming them.
Starting point is 00:52:23 right and so when you do that then you're no longer using in order to cope in the 12 the 12 step program it's with a a right 12 step program it started with alcoholics anonymous yeah when you have all these other anonymous groups yeah in the 12 step program in your mind what is the one step that if you didn't have the 12 step program wouldn't work obviously you need it all but if there what is the one step like okay if you had these 11 but this one was not there It'd still be an addict. It's not exactly a step, right? Because there's a step which is admitting we were powerless over our addiction.
Starting point is 00:53:05 And powerlessness is a funny thing for people. But it's just the acknowledgement. It was the acknowledgement that I have a problem. Really? Yeah. The acknowledgement that I have a problem. And I've been unable to solve a problem on my own. Do most people feel like they don't have a problem when they're addicted to something?
Starting point is 00:53:22 I mean, yeah, I think for the most part, that's, you know. They don't think they have a problem. Yeah, and the challenge with that is twofold. One, we've normalized drinking. No, man. We've normalized sexual behavior. And to some extent, for me, we normalized cannabis, right? And so there's this normalization of these.
Starting point is 00:53:43 You legalize it. Yeah, there's a normalization of these behaviors. And so that already creates a frame of allowance. and then it's a slippery slope. So you don't notice it's the frog boiling in the pot. Yeah. Right. So yeah, the majority of people out there either don't think they have a problem or
Starting point is 00:54:03 there are these glimpsing moments, right, like, of I have a problem. And it's like, ah, nah, it's not really an issue for me. I'm not really an alcoholic. I remember when I had a conversation with an outpatient treatment group in Winter Park, Florida, and I sat down with the counselor and he's like, you're an alcoholic. I'm like, come on, man. Like, that doesn't even make any sense. I'm not one of those.
Starting point is 00:54:24 Yeah. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm functional. I just go out on the weekend and I drink with my friends. Yeah. And then I chase girls and I smoke a little bit of pot. And he's like, cool, stop. You know, like, well, I can't.
Starting point is 00:54:33 He's like, you're an alcoholic. Yeah, you're an alcoholic. Yeah. Why don't you think you could have stopped? Well, I tried. You did? I had the awareness for years, right? There was a period of time where it's like, okay, I don't have a problem.
Starting point is 00:54:45 Then I knew I had a problem, but I couldn't stop. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Was it just if you stopped then what would happen? If you stopped the addiction, what would you have to face? I'd stop for a period of time. I'd stop for 30 days.
Starting point is 00:54:58 And then something great would happen so I'd celebrate or something bad would happen so I'd go cope. It was just, it was well worn into my nervous system. Wow. Yeah. When was the moment you felt like this no longer has a hold on me, this addiction? Or is it still like once you're an alcoholic, you're always an alcoholic type of thing for many people it is for for me I haven't I haven't
Starting point is 00:55:24 felt that way I don't you know I'm not particularly interested in drinking or smoking pot over the last 15 years since I've been sober have I done it yeah like on occasion I've had a glass of wine with my wife or you know I had a gummy at some event or something I whatever it was um pornography I couldn't treat casually for sure but that was my real addiction that was my core it was sex addiction. And so, yeah, it's just become a lifestyle. The other thing, too, is like, when you start allowing God in your life and then you start getting your mission from God and then you start seeing what the rewards are for, like,
Starting point is 00:55:57 living your mission in the world, even though that has its own challenges and its own insecurities that brings up, it's like, it's just a better game to play. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When did you feel like you got your calling from God? And how does someone, if they don't know what their purpose is,
Starting point is 00:56:15 tap into what their purpose from God really is for them. Okay, two-part question. So I don't know that I started that, my wife and I started, the current business we have, the coaching business that has really been what we've been portraying to the world, we probably started trying to do it in like 2015. We had our first event in 2017, and then we had a business. And I knew it was what I was. meant to do, I wouldn't describe it as a calling from God yet. The calling from God came in
Starting point is 00:56:49 2021. In late 2021, I had a, well, I don't even know if I was in my midlife at that point, but I had a crisis. Five years ago. Yeah, I had a chapter. Where, where, yeah, so we, we just moved. You're at 45 then, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. COVID had hit. Our business had to pivot to virtual. We were doing a lot of live events. financially the business was starting to contract. My wife was pregnant with my son. We were having a lot of friction. Some of it was chemical.
Starting point is 00:57:23 Some of it was just where we were in our relationship. We bought the home I told you about in Puerto Rico, but we were remodeling it. So we were living in an apartment in old San Juan with my mother-in-law. So you don't have stability. Correct. Your business isn't stable.
Starting point is 00:57:36 You're spending more money than it's coming in, the relationship. And I had a bunch of health challenges going on. Yeah, yeah. So it's all happening. It was coming from every direction. And I had this episode where like I felt all that stress in my body. I've tried to walk it off.
Starting point is 00:57:49 I tried to breath work it off and I couldn't shake it off. And so I got in the shower, cold shower, and I just started yelling because I needed to get the energy. So yeah, my wife and my mother-in-law come running in. They're all freaked out. Yeah, you can imagine, right? And so long story short, I had a bunch of really amazing people around me with a lot of different resources. But one of the people was my brother, and he said, look, right now your life feels unmanageable. Why don't you go back to where you were able to reestablish yourself when things got unmanageable before?
Starting point is 00:58:25 And I was like, that's a good idea. So I started going to AA meetings. I hadn't been in years. And I called up a buddy of mine and I said, hey, you want to work the 12 steps with me? And he said, sure. Are you drinking again? Are you sex in? I said, no.
Starting point is 00:58:35 I realize I'm a chronic worrier. So I want to work the steps around worry. So we work those 12 steps and man, I worked them seriously. And I saw things I had never seen before. Like what? Resentments that I had, limiting beliefs that I had, doubt that I had in my relationship with my higher power. And I also saw how the 12 steps connected beautifully
Starting point is 00:59:00 to the frameworks that I had been building. From the Golden Equation to two states of being to some other ones. And I, and so I, what came to me was, a 12-step structure for personal growth. It's called the whole human framework. And so we created this 12-step structure. And I started putting folks who've been in our community for years whose lives had transformed through this 12-step structure. And they were like, holy, like, this is the most transformative thing that we have ever gone through. It included the core program. That's how I discovered the core program was through this process. So we had people who would like, one guy was so funny, he said,
Starting point is 00:59:34 look, I've climbed them out with T. Harbecker. I've meditated with the Maharishi. I've walked the hot Coles with Tony Robbins. He goes, I've done it all. He's like, but this thing is what I've been looking for my whole life. And so as people started going through it, what we found was that they wanted to be in a daily rhythm and a practice around it. And so we created a community called the whole human network. And the network had the opportunity to facilitate the framework for other people. And so it just started growing. And what I saw, at the same time, I've sort of been a student of power in the world and how power works, centralized power. I had a lot of young kids who were conspiracy theorists who worked for me, you know, years ago,
Starting point is 01:00:14 and then I realized that there's nothing conspiracy, they're not, they're not making stuff up, right? Like, this is how a lot of the world works. And so I realized that like, hey, if we want to change the world at a macro level, we need to heal ourselves. And there's two things that are required to create an alternative system for humanity. Number one is we have to liberate our attention. because if you don't have attention sovereignty, you cannot consciously create.
Starting point is 01:00:38 And our attention is being hijacked all the time, intentionally. And in order to prevent the hijacking of your attention, the solution is heal. Because if you can metabolize fear off your nervous system, fear cannot grab you anymore. And now you become an intentional creator. So I was like, okay, if we can do this at scale, now we've got tens or hundreds of millions of people who have liberated attention who can direct it wherever they want. The second thing is we have to start building the scaffolding of a new system, regenerative financial system, regenerative health care system, a system that is not about extraction, but we're like one plus one equals three. And so, so that was the vision I had for
Starting point is 01:01:19 whole human. That God spoke to me. So that through that extraordinary compression and the vision that I've been given, which is what we're focusing on now. We have the coaching company. We have whole human. Whole human is this distributed economy of consciousness where people help other people awaken, utilizing this amazing framework, and then supporting entrepreneurship in an ecosystem that begins to become a parallel system to the one that's out there right now that's falling apart. What do people do if, thank you for letting me show that. I'm obviously super enthusiastic about it, but that's God speaking to me.
Starting point is 01:01:53 What does someone do if they're wanting to find purpose? Again, it goes back to the golden equation. Desire plus non-resistance equals desired result. What is your desire? My desire is I want to know what I'm here to do. I want to find purpose. I want to know what my gifts are and how to leverage them in the world. I want to become financially abundant.
Starting point is 01:02:11 I want to be in service of other people. But what, you know, it's inherent in all of us. What am I meant to do here? So great, desire. Now be non-resistant to it. Well, what does that mean? Well, notice if you start moving into, but what if I don't have a purpose? Well, why haven't I discovered my purpose yet?
Starting point is 01:02:27 Well, other people seem to have a purpose. Well, what if my purpose is already taken? What if my purpose has already passed? That's all the inner chatter. That's the limiting beliefs that is the resistance. So if you have a desire, meaning you ask and you're patient, you'll receive. It's 100% consistent and predictable. How will it occur for me, David?
Starting point is 01:02:47 Well, you'll have some thoughts and ideas. You'll see something on YouTube. Somebody will say something to you. An opportunity will show up. You'll have the courage to follow it. It'll be baby steps. It won't show up all at once. right but hold on to the desire to know your purpose and notice when you become resistant to that
Starting point is 01:03:08 desire and use whatever tools you can to drop the resistance give us some time like a dash of patience and you'll become clear on what your your purpose is how does someone know when they should continue on their purpose versus pivot on their purpose because when you are clear on your purpose or you feel called towards something, usually in the beginning there is some luck, there is some signs and people supporting you, or there is some, oh, I try this thing and it actually worked to get you going. But then there's usually some type of resistance or obstacle or challenge or hurdle or whatever it is. So how do you know when you're supposed to continue through the challenges and obstacles and continue the patience of all the challenges
Starting point is 01:03:57 and obstacles that may come your way versus this just isn't for me anymore. Let me pivot towards something else. Because also we change over time. Of course. Right. So you grow and evolve and so your purpose. Like look at mine. At first I thought my purpose was building a coaching company, which it still is. Now it's whole human, right? And looking at that story, I was running into a lot of friction and resistance with the coaching company. So it had to evolve. So it had to evolve. So it had to evolve and the answer is step away the answer step away like I don't I don't think I think we give ourselves a lot more credit for things than we deserve in other words you don't pivot the pivot happens to you and so how do you allow the pivot to happen to you it's like well like you
Starting point is 01:04:52 said if you're working through the obstacles and it feels exhausting you step away from the problem right and as you step away from the problem you disentangle yourself from it you give space for your consciousness to renormalize and in that space you'll have new perspectives new thoughts new ideas now you may go back to the same obstacles and overcome them you may move in another direction sometimes you move in another direction. Like I started Whole Human in 2021, it was too early. And I came back to the coaching business. But we're very rigid about these types of inquiries a lot of times too, right?
Starting point is 01:05:32 It's like, do I keep doing the obstacles or do I pit? It's like to relax a little bit, right? Give it some time. You're not going to figure it out today. It may not be this week. But we're learning, you know, Bruce Lee talks about being like bamboo, right? Bamboo is strong because it knows when to be rigid, but it also sways in the wind, right? So we're learning to do that as human beings because we grew up with so much rigidity.
Starting point is 01:05:54 So, you know, there's also that quote from Einstein that people quote all the time. You can't solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. So you've got to step away from your problems. And I would say get into solution frequency. What is solution frequency? Well, it's the beautiful things in your life. Because at one point in time, the absence of them were problems. Now they've shown up in their solutions.
Starting point is 01:06:15 And that's why when you're trying to hammer through an obstacle or you don't know whether or not to pivot and you go for a hike and running canyon, you have clarity. Yes. Right. You know, you go play with your furry friend and something hits you. Go get a good workout in and it hits you. But the other important piece in all of this is, man, give it some time. Like we're all living in so much time scarcity. And one of the things we teach entrepreneurs is to stop paying attention to time and start inquiring more around what creates timing. Because timing is so much more powerful than time. meeting the right person, running into the right opportunity, having the right resource show up. We all have 24 hours in a day. But time is a measurement of change. Timing is a measurement of
Starting point is 01:06:57 alignment, calibration. So if you can become aligned and calibrated, which is living in a powerful state, which is trying to live in non-resistant, as best as you can, we're not going to do it 24 hours a day, you start to activate timing, the timing of thoughts and ideas and coincidences. So if someone is trying to figure out whether to keep pushing through or whether to pivot, I would say step away. and see what happens. Yeah. And you know what? If you pivot,
Starting point is 01:07:20 you can always come back to it. And if you keep pushing through on something, you can always pivot. So we make it a much bigger deal than it is. I love the idea of timing versus being afraid of like times running out. And it's, you know, I guess we're technically,
Starting point is 01:07:36 I mean, I'm 43 or 50. It's like, all right, we're getting close to halfway done or who knows? You know, maybe there's more time, but it's not like we're seven years.
Starting point is 01:07:47 years old and we have all of our lives ahead of us, right? So we have to start looking at life with a different perspective, I guess, through a different lens where how do we not get scarce around time if you feel like it's running out or you don't have your whole life ahead of you and focus rather on timing? How do you do that when you're not 12 years old? Well, I think there's a couple of things. I was having a conversation with chat GPT that has all my labs and everything that I was doing and I said, hey, based on my labs and based on current, how long do I have to be? Based on current technologies, based on how healthy I am, because I'm actually an incredibly healthy human being. Yeah. And based on the current technologies that are out there, stem cells, CRISPR technologies,
Starting point is 01:08:29 all the stuff. And what's coming. And what's coming. And great, AI can hallucinate. Yeah. I was like, give me an estimate of how long I'll live. So in terms of like health span, like living well, 125 years. Wow. Okay. So that's my intention. If it's 125 years, I got 75 years to go. But like, I have such insane compounding interest at 50. Like if you ever look at how compounding interest works, right, if you were to set aside $100,000 a year, which is a lot of money for some people and it's not a lot of money for others, $100,000 a year and you just put it in some combination of the S&P 500, Bitcoin, gold, 8% average return.
Starting point is 01:09:09 You could have a defensive position because the world seems like it's a little bit crazy right now. But if you just get an 8% annualized return, And $100,000 a year that you put into that over 40 years, you're worth $22, $24 million. But what's interesting is that if you live 10 more years, it's another $32 million. That's crazy. So I'm just starting to hockey stick. So that excites me.
Starting point is 01:09:34 Like I don't think I can even fathom what I can accomplish. So I could look at it as like I'm almost halfway through. Or we got 75 years, bro. Let's go. you know so that's the way I look at it and again part of it is turning it over to my higher power like it's it's a very edging got out type of conversation to have but it's certainly i mean when i turned 50 believe me i had it with myself of like like where am i at and you know checking am i as far along as i wanted to be now and how much time do i have left and your mind will do this mental
Starting point is 01:10:06 calculation right but the mind doesn't understand the compounding interest so you know we just that's why longevity is so important yeah But I do think it is important to understand that no matter where you are in your life, the accumulation of your lived experience has set you up for such extraordinary growth moving forward. And we don't give credit to that reality. Yeah. You've got an amazing book out called A Change Mind, which is go beyond self-awareness, rewire your brain and re-engineer your reality.
Starting point is 01:10:39 This came out about a few years ago. What is the one thing in this book you feel like? If people took away one idea, it would help them more than anything else. I struggled with limiting beliefs for a long time. There were some that I had shifted, but others that I didn't. And I was in this burning desire inquiry of like, man, there's got to be an easier way to shift my beliefs. Like, what is it that I need to know? My wife and I were going for a walk one day.
Starting point is 01:11:07 And it's a two millimeter distinction. So it's easy to miss, but it is just absolutely dramatically changed the way I do my personal growth. And I see feedback from folks who have been in our work that it's this distinction. It's the distinction that beliefs are decisions. So when we were growing up, we came to the conclusion when our little buddy didn't show up at the drinking fountain that we can't trust people. But it was a decision. And as a result of that unconscious decision, we've been living in a hallucination ever since. We've only been paying attention to anything that supports that decision and we've been ignoring everything else.
Starting point is 01:11:40 And if that's true, then at any point in time, I should be able to identify limiting belief and make a new decision. decision. And so we have this wonderful process in the book called the decision matrix that helps people identify the limiting belief, make a new decision, which is always the opposite of the limiting belief. And then to ask a really simple question, which is what evidence do I have for the fact that this new decision is true? And what you'll do is you'll actually source those memories that you've been filtering out. And as you do that, you build evidence for the new belief. And most often, by the time you're done with that little process and you look back at the limiting belief,
Starting point is 01:12:16 it doesn't even make sense anymore. But the idea that beliefs are decisions, I think demystifies the concept of beliefs because we can get into trauma and this and that and all these things, but ultimately they were unconscious decisions. And as an adult, you have an ability to respond or responsibility when you find a limiting belief
Starting point is 01:12:34 and that is to make a new empowered decision. The decision matrix. The decision matrix. That's great, man. I've got a couple final questions for you. This has been really powerful. I want people to check out your work before I ask the final questions. They can go to your podcast called a Change Mind.
Starting point is 01:12:53 You're also on YouTube. You've got a great YouTube channel sharing a lot of this information. David Bayer 33 on Instagram and YouTube. And wholehuman.com slash greatness for anyone here watching or listening, your team has created a free assessment that identifies people's two biggest limiting beliefs and gives you a powerful tool to transform them. so guys can anyone can check out wholehuman.com slash greatness to check out the free assessment as well um this question is called the three truths imagine you live to 125 healthy whole human life
Starting point is 01:13:27 but it's the last day your creator says time to go here to the next place and you get to create and manifest anything you want from now until that moment but for whatever reason you have to take everything with you nothing can be left behind your book your work, your content, no one has access to this information anymore. But on your final day, you get to leave behind three truths, three things you know to be true or three lessons that you would leave behind. What would those three truths be for you? Oh, man.
Starting point is 01:14:00 I've heard you ask this question on so many episodes. No, I have to answer. I get to answer it. I think one truth or encouragement is to believe in the certainty of the goodness of the future. That would be one. The second truth would be that life is always working for your greatest growth, your greatest prosperity and your greatest evolution. And I think the third truth, well, I think Jesus said it best, all things are possible
Starting point is 01:14:31 to he that believe it. Yeah. I want to acknowledge you, David, for the journey you've been on. You know, for me, it's like you're 50, you have a child who's three and a half and you've gone through a big transformation in the last five years, you've got a lot of wisdom to share. So I acknowledge you for putting it in the book, for doing the weekly podcast, for sharing this information, and for creating frameworks around the suffering and the pain you've experienced to try to give peace and resolution for people in their lives so they can understand how to go
Starting point is 01:15:03 through the process better. And I think when people have gone through enough pain and shame and guilt and beating themselves up and have done the work like yourself and all the different programs, you can take kind of the best of those programs and share what's worked for you. So I want to acknowledge you for doing that work, for suffering for as long as you did, and getting through it on the other side, finding more peace and purpose in your life and helping so many people. It's been really cool to connect and hear more about the books. I appreciate that acknowledgement.
Starting point is 01:15:33 Of course, man. Final question. What's your definition of greatness? Greatness is becoming who you came here to be, living your authentic self. My man. That's for being here, brother. Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.
Starting point is 01:15:46 Yeah. Powerful. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media.
Starting point is 01:16:13 and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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