We need to talk.

All right, so I wanted to restart the podcast and my reasons for doing so will probably become clear through this episode and maybe later episodes But I want to caveat this by saying it isn't scripted. It's not going to be particularly polished or maybe even very well-produced But I do believe it's more important now than it's ever been and I think that's all of the explanation it needs so let's kick on I was at a conversation actually earlier today like truly earlier today With a couple of guys now for obvious reasons. I'm not going to name them not gonna talk about any of their specifics But to really really awesome guys One of them has served in the special forces for an extended period of time The other is Really quite close to the top of the food chain overseeing 10 to millions if not billions of dollars of sales Across the world in a certain industry And when you think about a conversation like that is very easy to think it might all be bravado and ego and You know sales numbers and fucking like button turf want a better phrase But the the truth couldn't be further from that it actually Stemmed into a two and a half hour conversation It was annoying those two and a half hours because only paid for an hour on my fucking parking So I did get a car parking ticket for the for the luxury of this conversation But if I'd known what I was going to gain from that conversation, I'd pay 10 car parking tickets Like that really that the value that came from it is a lot of what I want to talk about today When you're sat with those kind of individuals and you know There are people of that kind of work that I work with and that coach and that kind to mine But when you just sat with them, I guess kind of friends and contemporaries and equals It's probably the most remarkable profound and wonderful thing when they take their mask off and what I mean by that is Everyone talks about men needing to talk But let's be pragmatic like firstly Somebody needs to want to talk and secondly they have to be talking to somebody that they feel is going to Make them feel safe on that conversation. I want to stop me there before you click off before you think fuck he's got on about We always talk about doing hard things and Instagram was a place where it's for rife for people to be posting about the necessity for men to do hard things and You know, I've done some pretty hard things. I think that's safe to say Marathon to Cyblus, Jungle Ultra, podiuming the ice ultra attempt in the Arctic spine at rate with less than 3% completion rate all these things And I can fucking hand on heart tell you that from those accolades and achievements to scaling into the business that I now have All of those things pale in insignificance to having the fucking minerals to talk about how you're really feeling and You sat at a table with someone who you know spent over a decade in international operations kicking doors if you want to call it that if that gets you excited Somebody else who who travels the world prolifically And handles huge accounts and does all our stuff and all of his unanimously came to the agreement that We fucking need to do more of this and it wasn't superficial vulnerability of oh, no If I'm my high rocks class quite hard to do not that they they might not have done they might have done who knows But it was it was true Non-performative removal of the ego and discussion about things that connected is as fucking human beings And I guess what triggered it is I'm going through a lot of things in my life at the moment and I guess I'm really grieving When I talk about going through a lot of things many of us are guilty of believing that unless we had a capital T trauma of something really fucking bad Happened in our childhood that we're not worthy of talking about Issues we face or things we struggle with or feelings that we have to suppress and that's not true at all now for me I actually did go through Some really challenging situations in in earlier life that I'm working to make sense of and sometimes you know You just go through periods of grieving where you you have to take a knee and you have to look back and you have to consolidate and make sense of those things And as part of that process I actually went to a breath work session a couple of weeks ago and it was fucking revolutionary It was so so so good The lady called Lily She runs a studio called loving life Lily you'll you'll find out in Instagram So if you're anywhere on the south coast or even if you want to travel I would suggest following her because it was a fucking game changer and it's not what you might expect It's everything that you probably usually run away from the studios bike fucking pink. She's a louder than live character and she's remarkable But it was it was an awesome experience very difficult very challenging, but an awesome experience and In kind of going through that breath work Um, I said to her at the end that you know what like Your your studio your business you as a person have built a fucking remarkable community of women Men need something like this And she looked at me with a I guess an inquisitive but suggestive look which was well, maybe you need to fucking do something about that Probably in a softer and kind of way though But that's what their measures that I received and I was like yeah fucking loud and clear So a breath was there today, you know, we've been for a run been in the sea Having having excessive amounts of caffeine and through through the means of cortidose which is my personal favorite now It's kind of started to come up and be like hey, how are you doing and rather than just say the default gal gel free liner but yeah, I'm good mate fucking works busy, you know, enjoy my fears fucking getting amongst it I was really honest I was like yeah, mate. It's actually been uh been a rough few weeks Um going through a bit grief in a moment um, trying to make sense of early experiences Had remarkable breath work session a couple weeks ago, and tell you what like I was a I was a snotty mess I was I was a bubbling bubbling baby, but something really shifted and I'm feeling I'm feeling awesome as a consequence And you know what like the energy that I've got uh to take into my work the things I feel I've put down My understanding of a pattern that's been really fucking harmful to me has changed and um, yeah like Doing good like thank you for asking That was the initiation that was the trigger for it allows to not just you know, be like, yeah, I'm fucking do as busy at work Yeah fucking yeah smashing it It's actually like yeah fucking bearable mate. Tell you what like actually my misses gave me this breath work track a couple of weeks ago I didn't want to tell anyone, but first time I did it I actually cried a couple of times Uh, and you know then I feel those better about it now and I feel amazing because of it And the other guys kind of like well, you know what like actually I need this chat because I've got it and it It grew arms and legs like I said two and a half hours Uh, there was lots of laughter. There was lots of yeah fucking piss taking and and waxing lyrical I'm talking about the fast and putting the world to rights and you know Given our honest opinions about Instagram, which is probably a whole episode for another day But the core and the centerpiece of this was people who were not afraid to be seen And actually I think I'd spend almost my entire life being afraid to be seen And people will see you on Instagram and I'm in maybe a rare position in that there's tens of thousands of people who see a character on Instagram And somewhere along that line you can kind of lose yourself in that But I think I'm in a very common position in that all of us are known for for something And I think this is prolific in men. I'm guessing it happens for women too But I've never authentically been one so I can't speak to that with any authority or or experience But I think it happens a lot for men that somewhere in a early experience we We learn a lesson that we have to earn love and that we have to prove worth and strength and and consequently We get ourselves into the situations in life where we we assign the weight of the world to ourselves And we buckle under the pressure of feeling like we have to have it together all the fucking time And in doing so In feeling like we can't like just take a knee or you know let emotions move through us or speak to have a bloke about it We make life so fucking hard for ourselves Like needlessly fucking hard for ourselves Whereas the opposite of like talking about it as soon as you start doing it as soon as your nervous system Registers okay like I've told people that I've gone to breath work on working with a therapist or I'm struggling with something No one's run away no one's been like That sounds fucking Of word I probably can't say in a podcast that sounds like Something that is beneath what I want to do As soon as you recognize it doesn't happen and the nervous system feel safe with that It fucking changes the game Like you know, I run a business called uncharted performance and a lot of what I do is about getting the human to thrive If we look at human performance we're going to start by maximizing the human And let's break that down into a few core tenets. Let's look at physical mental emotional just for the sake of Ease we talk a lot to mental performance talk a lot to physical performance from robustness as a society But we never really touch on the emotions and emotional health And I think for many of us like we were legitimately Not given anything to model in terms of here's how you process an emotion So what do we do? We like we avoid them we distract ourselves from it and When you couple that with this belief that we have to earn love and prove our worth Like you just create this monster who inherently doesn't believe it is good enough And who thinks he can get validation from this working super hard And then you've got someone who just like loses himself Like absolutely loses himself and then feels that they're not allowed to talk about it and that completely congests all of the emotional capacity and spills over into everything else. Like that shit is stored in your nervous system, that spills over into your physical capacity, it spills over into how you approach eating food, like your energy to train, your ability to recover, how restful your sleep is, like how fertile you are as a man, like your interest in sex, your libido, the expression of your libido, looking elsewhere because you're not dealing with things at home, like mentally, like you distract yourself, you're spending too much time on your phone, your caffeine uses too high, again, it goes on and on and on and on and people will continue to pursue optimization through means of books and podcasts and hacks and biohacking and it's like you're just piling, it's like a game of buckaroo, like you're putting more pressure, more stuff, more tactics, more hacks, all that are trying to like, piece together this Frankenstein model of you to the world that you're hyper capable, hyperforming, strong robust, capable clever, high worth, high net value, whatever it is that you're trying to communicate, but you're none of those things, I was none of those things, because emotion are so congested, there's so much consumer in this capacity that I was just running away from, literally metaphorically, and it doesn't always or even often have to be like a talking therapy, a lot of the guys I work with have been to therapists and tried to work of them, they're like, hey, just did fucking wasn't for me, like I didn't feel heard, didn't feel seen, didn't feel understood, and that's fucking okay, because so much of loss to the society, thanks to the social media and a loss of our high-trust society and loss of religion and many of the different things, is we've lost fucking community, and if we rewind like even a couple hundred years, like people would have sat around and talked, and you know, certainly before the industrial era, which made productivity going completely wrong direction and was probably net negative for human health altogether, like when I say that, I mean in terms of stress and stuff like that, we had community and people would have talked, people would have sat and like had dinner together and fucking laughed, not in the presence of alcohol, and so they kind of kept their emotional, let's say gutters for one a better phrase, I don't know if that's really fair to say, they kind of kept their emotional space fucking clear, so it didn't really get chance to spill over and to dysregulate in the nervous system or do any of those kind of things, that's not to say people and didn't struggle, like I'm not saying that at all, and who are any of us to say that, you might be the most adaptive story in the world, but you won't alive then, so what the fuck do you know, like we can only be curious about that experience, but certainly for me, like the past at least 10 years, like really pursuing optimization and peak performance and all that sort of stuff, it oftentimes has like created this outward persona of someone who can do anything, who never, you know, who never sways and is rock solid, and I 100% didn't see how that would have been the case externally, and many times I actually believed it for years at a time, until you go through this quote unquote, I actually know the word to use this here, until you find yourself in a valley where you've climbed this first mountain of life, where you've made the money, you've built the business, you've proved everybody wrong, you've enjoyed a degree of success, you've run the race, you've done those things, and then all of a sudden you just get swept off and you're in this valley being like, what am I supposed to be doing, like what now, and then things can come up, like challenging moments can just find their way to you, and you start thinking things you didn't use to, start questioning why you're pushing so hard, what does it even mean, is it worth it, and anything can trigger that, you can have, you know, a death in the family, you can have a divorce, a relationship break up, a new relationship start, a new job, move country, anything, on all of a sudden you're evaluating life in an entire different way, and it's terrifying, and what you're looking at is the second mountain ahead of you, the second mountain where you recognize that actually you are greater than your ego's ideal, the ego that wanted you to create this character to show to the world that is strong, capable, muscular, fit, can earn great money, has the car, it's Peter fucking perfect, the ego blocks real connection, like when you turn up to a conversation with the boys and they're like how are you doing, how are you, tell me, they're curious about your experience, the ego feels is needs to want, yeah, fucking good mate, fucking busy at work, I can get amongst it, smashing the fears, fucking got this, but once you've gone into the valley and you start climbing the second mountain, I think you just sit in my life, and it's non-judgmental, it's non like you've got to be so below me, in your spiritual trajectory, it's not like that, it's not, I'm not going to, no one needs to start wearing hemp and having a man burn and like showering at you for whanking, but just to be like how are you really mate, like recognizing that there might be something behind that, you know, we don't have to apologise everything, but it's so fucking healthy when we can sit down, like yeah man, actually, you know, fucking, not doings are great, like fucking taking me, and when you can sit there at breakfast with a couple of guys who in their own rights are, if we want to use the word impressive, some of the most remarkably impressive humans in existence, and I'm saying like, you know what, I really need this chat because I've been really fucking struggling with something, and you can just be curious about their experience, like mate, like I see you, like how's that telling up for you, how's that impacting you, and everyone leaving me and like, fucking, I'm like, that did the world a good day, what, like, should we go for a cycle next week, we'll stop off like coffee shop and just fucking scoff loads of brownies, and do it again, yeah, 100%, like it's so good for us, and there are for sure people who be listening to us, you have that community, and honestly, like I'm so, I'm so happy for you, you should be so fucking proud of what you've built if you have that, and you ought to feel so grateful that you have people who are curious about your experience, and that you've got people who are willing to share their experience with you, but for many of us, me, like, we're lonely, like, because when I return back to my pattern of like, and I have to earn love, I've got to prove my ability, I've got to show up as being strong, and all these kind of things, I'd often isolate myself, I'd say I wanted a great friendship group, or amazing relationships, but I was always chasing the rainbow, kind of chasing two rabbits, and you catch none, so like, you say you want connection, and you want people to really know you, you're not willing to drop the ego, and say, actually, I'm not doing so good, or hey, I really love this, or hey, this means the world to me, or use your actual fucking voice, and I get it, because for me, growing up, for many of us, it's the same truth, using our voice wasn't actually safe, like, it just wasn't something we could do, like, to say like, oh, I need this, we were so afraid of upsetting somebody, or displeasing somebody, and then we're getting told no, we're getting told off, or being avoided, or being neglected, do we just learn to stop using our voice, and we started learning to mirror, to chameleon ourselves, and this becomes a survival mechanism, and we get celebrated for it, like, you get celebrated, we've been able to read the room, and you know, pitch your products so well, and do all this sort of stuff, where it was a survival mechanism once by time, and we've celebrated it, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but let's just get down to the truth here, like, don't be afraid to use your voice, to say what you really honestly feel, and if it makes someone feel uncomfortable, like, I'm not responsible for their feelings, I'm responsible for turning a bit of a way that makes them feel like they're safe here, but I'm not responsible for their feelings, and that's fucking okay, maybe that's a bit of an inflection point for them, that maybe they need it, but again, back to the crux of it, like, you've got these fucking hyper impressive guys, and they recognize that if you want to talk about performance, you've got to maximize the human, I don't even like the word maximize, if you want to improve performance, if you want to perform sustainably for stock, you've got to look at the human, and in order to look at the human, that human has to be seen, and the question I kind of had is, like, how many men actually don't have the courage to be seen, like, they want to be seen as the character they've created, I did, I can now, he's got like, Skinner, Nectar II, Call of Aryan, which be fucking double-eyed, don't fuck with him, like, he's got it all together, he's successful in this, he makes this much, he's got these many clients, you kind of want to be seen for that, because you feel like that's safer, and the other side of that is vulnerability, now vulnerability is mis-marketed, but it's really hard of being like, actually, this is who I am, and this is what I believe to be true, and this is what I've struggled with, and this is what I'm going through, and the reason this morning's conversations start to be so much, the reason it's inspired me to do this and start this podcast again, I talk about this sort of stuff, it because I recognize there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of men around the world, who are facing all sorts of problems, they're showing up as maybe performance-related issues and challenges, but actually comes down to, like, are you willing to be seen? Do you just fucking need to be seen, because I did, but I was so afraid of it, that I had indexed on hyper-individuality, perfectionism, protecting myself by withdrawing, shutting down, not communicating with partners, not saying how really felt, not using my voice, and we all talk about the needs to do hard things, sometimes men do, like, I needed to do the races that I've done, because they were what agitated this within me, they shook the snow globe to help me recognize that this character was not going gonna get me where I wanted to go in life. Apologies, my laptop went into sleep mode and I had to put the password into the locket again. But actually, like, in doing those hard things, they were physically very, very hard, but they're certain. And I think what so many of us struggle with is an uncertainty of, if I use my voice, if I stand here and I allow myself to be seen by saying what I really think, what I really feel, what I'm really struggling with, is this person gonna run away? It is this person gonna be like, I fucking get it, dude. And that's why I won't start this podcast again. Because I know, I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it more and more and more and I fucking bin through it. And I have no judgment for if someone's early in this process and think, "Pfff, fucking wet wipes, "you fuck up, I get it!" If you told me I'd been doing those 10 years ago, Jesus Christ, I would have laughed you out of the room. I've done so many hard things, but yeah, the process I've been on over recent months has been the hardest thing I've ever done. Yeah, weirdly, I'm quite grateful for it. I'm a measurably grateful for, actually, for people who showed belief in me before I believed in myself to become the man I'm supposed to be, need to be, want to be, grateful for the clarity it's given me over what I'm doing, where I'm going and what that yellow brick road is, the future of me, my life, my relationships, my company, my coaching, my friend, all these things, I can remark and be grateful for it. So if you're early in this process and it's a little bit, I guess, off-putting, that's honestly, that's fucking fine, man, I get it, I genuinely fucking get it. But just know this podcast here, if you ever want to return to it. If you kind of go through something in a minute, like I wonder what it would be like, if you had the courage to just fucking take a big deep breath into your balls and be like, I'm going to tell someone how I really feel. I'm going to do that. Or I'm going to reach out to a friend that I've distanced myself from, or I'm going to fucking reach out to anybody, somebody, not to apologize you or say, but just like, mate, can we catch up? I'm going to nurture my friendship group. I'm going to index on kindness rather than corporate development. I'm going to fucking stand up and be me. And the fear a lot of times, certainly for me, is that people are going to think you're fucking weak. That may be your message of, for example, where you think, oh, I'm not going to be masculine enough for her. She's going to leave me, or my girlfriend's going to leave me, or I'm not going to get a partner wherever it is. Through my experience, I've learned that we over index on physical safety. That we think if we can be physically formidable, then we're going to provide physical safety for a partner. And to an extent, that is important. But I just want to ask you, if your mid-30s, mid-40s, older, younger, whatever, when was the last time you got on a physical vacation and had to physically defend your family? Exceriously. You know, just be fucking pragmatic about it. And we're going to talk about that in later episodes about the place of physical health and wellness in this journey and stuff, and what it means, and what training looks like under this perspective. But we over index on that need to present physical safety if I've got a look fucking hard. So if I'm out for what my miss is, and someone looks at me, I'm not fucking smiling, if I'm on the train, I'm not holding onto the fucking handrails, I'm fucking double-eyed, I don't need to balance. We've all fucking done it, that's, to be honest. It's kind of silly, but we can laugh at it now. We over index on that physical safety, and we massively under index on the emotional safety. The way you make people feel emotionally safe is when you've been able to turn up for yourself and you're fucking rock solid by means of your consistent, like your consistent in how you give care, how you receive love and talk and communicate. You just got fucking consistent, and you can't really do that if you're not willing to talk about what you've got to go unemotionally. Or if it makes you feel icky, if someone tries to hug you, I'm like, "Fucking hell mate, what are we doing here?" And that's been me, swear to God, years ago. If you did give me a hug, I'd have given you about point three of a second before I was like, "Ugh, busy day, best be getting on then." Thanks for that, see you later. Like, "Oh, fuck it, I'm hitting that guy." I laugh now, but for many, it's their experience, so baby, I shouldn't, shouldn't, but, you know, like, this is the reason we need to have these chats, is if we want to talk about your fear of, you know, people are going to think less of you, or they're going to think you're weak. Like, you know, you're not there to create physical safety, you know, you're not a fucking bouncer to your family's life all the time. Like, if you've got a bit about you and you fucking strength around in your fear, you're going to be sweet mate. Like, just be honest, like, if you live in America and you think you're going to fist fight your way out, you're going to get fucking shot. Do you think in the UK, you're going to, like, get into, you're going to be able to come over someone in the middle of an old occasion in the street, they're going to stab you to fucking death in front of your family. So, like, get over this idea that you can be a fucking superhero in that way. Like, the way you be a superhero is, you know, you're playful at home and you give your children something to model that you never had. I never fucking had. I didn't have the model of how a man turns up in conflict or in love or in any way, really, give them something to fucking model. Give them something, something to model about how they deal with their anger. Give them something to fucking model about how they turn up when they feel sad or when they feel stressed. Give them something to model about how they deal with a difficult day at work without taking out on people around them without turning their fucking air blue. Like, give them, give them that. That's the emotional stage you want to index on. So, that first fear that, you know, your wife might think you're silly or you're weak or something, et cetera, let us speak to that. In terms of your work, think, and you've gone soft. Well, like, it's remarkable how many of us are celebrated for our survival mechanisms and then wonder why we're perpetually exhausted in a literally living in survival mode. And when you get out of that, the potency of your energy is entirely remarkably different. Like, when you clear that emotional gunk, like your capacity expands exponentially. So, you're capacity to deal with things. You're no longer dysregulated. And actually, what I've, I guess, seen personally, is the caliber of people we're working with, the standard of problem we're solving and the volume of people who now want to get help on that is gone through the roof. And I've seen it with the guys I consult, some guys managing directors, it's some of the biggest banks in the world on Wall Street. They throw in bonus after bonus because they're turning up in such a way. Lawyers, fucking business founders, all of it. Like, seriously, I've seen it. It's happening. People don't want the performative mass. People want someone who has the courage to stand there and say, I don't know, or I'm struggling with this. I need help. I need to, can you take this for me? Like, whatever it is, people who are telling the truth. And if you want to go on adventure, if you want to explore uncharted territory, let's start telling the truth to yourself, to look closer to you, to your friends. No more lies, no more ego, no more being small. The courage to be seen. The courage to stand up and use your voice. The courage to create community and connectedness in a world that is celebrating perfectionism and hyper individuality. So that's why I started this podcast. I've gone on for half an hour now, which wasn't planned. And I appreciate it's probably been a bit of a wild ride to follow the rollercoaster over my stream of consciousness. But if any of this is resonated with you, drop me a message on Instagram. We'll share it. That might be more impactful. If there's a man in your life, then that sounds super, can't say that word. And it sounds a certain way. If it's a fucking bloke, you know, part of your friendship group. Fucking send them this episode if you think it's going to help. If there's a woman you know, they might help. Fucking go nuts, get amongst it. And you can just save it and listen back to it when the weight of the world's on your shoulders. Fucking listen back to it. It's helped you, if I can tell me. Not because I need it, but because it might help you to begin to condition your nervous system. No, it's okay to say I've got this going on to reach out to somebody, all this sort of stuff. Like, I think the whole minute to talk thing is so stale and ridiculous and falls way short. And I think this whole thing of I'm going to run a million, a million miles backwards in a wetsuit full of my own fart to raise money for men's mental health. Come on, mate. This makes me feel like I might get a target to put on my back, but is it really for them? Or is it for you? And if it's for you, that's okay. But let's start telling the truth because the act of strength that so many people need to see and to find the courage to take, this is not fucking talking. And if this podcast can in any way initiate that, then fucking were away at the races. If only one person listens to it, thank you. That's very kind of you. If more listen to it, that's great because this is a message that I don't care about whether or not it goes viral. I care about it finding men who are like fucking hell, like I'm fucking struggling. And why do I feel like I've got to, I've got to have it all together. Like I don't know if I'm doing the right thing with my life. I fucking, my job is so stressful, but I can't fucking see a way out of that. And like I'm so in the weeds, I fucking can't zoom out. Like this isn't making sense, like I've lost myself. And it doesn't have to feel like crisis. It doesn't feel like, I feel like you, you know, you need to check into a mental health suite. It can just feel with desperation. There's something isn't right. There's a pattern in your life that you've seen. And you're like, I wonder why I keep doing that? Like, fuck, I wish I didn't keep doing that. Don't fucking wish they didn't keep like telling myself I'm gonna do something and not fucking doing it like all of this It's all it's all part of the same and when you start clearing the emotional capacity by having fucking chats and getting around people Not just going on the pub with the boys so that that can be really fun and sometimes in its own way quite helpful When you start having a real fucking chat of people who have like been amongst it been around it been through it It all opens up to you mate the world opens up. I fucking promise you it really does. So like I said if it's helped you It might help someone else to let them know about it. If you want to let me know that'd be awesome. I'd really appreciate it Let's keep this thing going