The Not Drinking Alcohol Today Podcast
Meg and Bella discuss the ups and downs of navigating an alcohol free life in Australia's alcohol centric culture. This highly rated podcast, featuring in Australia's top 100 self improvement podcasts, is a must for those that are trying to drink less alcohol but need some motivation, are curious about sober life or who are sober but are looking for some extra reinforcement. The Not Drinking Alcohol Today pod provides an invaluable resource to keep you motivated and on track today and beyond. Meg and Bella's guests include neuroscientists, quit-lit authors, journalists, health experts, alcohol coaches and everyday people who have struggled with alcohol but have triumphed over it. Our aim is to support and inspire you to reach your goals to drink less or none at all! Meg and Bella are This Naked Mind Certified Coaches (plus nutritionists and counsellors respectively) who live in Sydney and love their alcohol free life.
The Not Drinking Alcohol Today Podcast
Mike Shennan; finding Power and Strength in Sobriety.
Mike Shennan joins us to share his remarkable journey to sobriety and how it has laid the foundation for his fulfilling career in coaching. From growing up in a family culture where drinking was routine to facing the challenges of social drinking during his university years in Canada, Mike offers a raw and insightful look into his personal transformation. As he transitioned into marriage and parenthood, his commitment to being a present father starkly contrasted his own father's absence, inspiring a shift towards sobriety and emotional growth.
Listeners will uncover the profound shifts that come with overcoming alcohol dependence. Mike and I discuss how influential works like Annie Grace's "This Naked Mind" and Belle Robertson's "Tired of Thinking About Drinking" helped us transition from a willpower-centric approach to one focused on emotional change. Mike also discusses men who choose sobriety, and the strength it shows when these men do the work and make this momentous change!
The episode wraps up with an exploration of reclaiming power through self-awareness and energy management. We delve into the transformative power of silence and inner peace, reflecting on how mastering self-coaching can lead to personal growth. Mike shares his passion for meaningful coaching conversations and how they open doors to personal empowerment. Whether you're seeking inspiration for your own journey or looking to understand the dynamics of personal change, this episode offers a wealth of insights and heartfelt stories to ponder.
Mike Shennan:
Website: www.trailblazerlifecoaching.com
Insta: @trailblazerlifecoaching
MEG
Megan Webb: https://glassfulfilled.com.au
Instagram: @glassfulfilled
Unwined Bookclub: https://www.alcoholfreedom.com.au/unwinedbookclub
Facebook UpsideAF: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1168716054214678
Small group coaching: https://www.elizaparkinson.com/groupcoaching
BELLA
Web: https://isabellaferguson.com.au
Insta: @alcoholcounsellorisabella
Bi-Yearly 6-Week Small Group Challenges: Learn more: https://www.isabellaferguson.com.au/feb-2025-challenge
Free Do I Have A Drinking Problem 3 x Video Series: https://resources.isabellaferguson.com.au/offers/JTFFgjJL/checkout
Free HOW DO I STOP DRINKING SO MUCH Masterclass: https://resources.isabellaferguson.com.au/offers/7fvkb3FF/checkout
Online Alcohol Self-Paced Course: ...
Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. Today I am really excited to have my friend and fellow coach, mike Shannon, on. Hey Mike, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm awesome, meg. I'm really excited to join you today. I always love talking about this and I know you and I have a lot in common in a lot of areas that we can sort of talk about. That are going to resonate with both us and, hopefully, the folks that are listening, so I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well, can we start by you sharing your story?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, with regards to my alcohol story, which leads into my coaching story, which then leads into where we are today, like a lot of people, I started drinking, experimenting with alcohol, in my teenage years, when I was in high school, into university. You know my parents both drank, they were both. You know I came from a family where my parents were both Scottish and that doesn't mean that they that doesn't. You know, it's not a reason, but it's a, it's a from a, just from a clarification, from a background point of view. You know alcohol was always around. Whenever they had parties, they've smoked, they drank. That was just part of what they in the world they grew up in. It was just normal part for the course in the seventies where I grew up and, um, and so when I went off to school and I got older, I just assumed that when I, you know, it's part of being an adult. So I was going to experiment with alcohol in my teens and had some really, you know, like a lot of people, some really bad experiences went off to university, um, when I was actually here in Canada at the time I was not, I live in just North of Toronto in Canada, um, ontario, canada. Um, when I went off to university I was 19. And at that, at that point, that's the drinking age here. So I turned 19 in July and went off to university in September. And so I was.
Speaker 2:I went off to university and I was legal. I could go into bars, I could go into the liquor store, the beer store, you name. It Made me very popular with my fellow residence mates at the time, but it also set me up for, you know, a real sort of baptism by fire into the alcohol world and socialization. And you know I was awkward. I was. You know, I was always kind of socially a bit of an introvert coming out of high school, didn't have a great high school experience, and so went off to university and it was like party on, and literally for the first year and a half that's what I did. My academics struggled, struggled.
Speaker 2:I then went on to, you know, sort of pull my boots up a little bit in my last two years of university, you know, got my degree and in the process of doing um, you know, stumbled, as I say, into a relationship with my wife in my last year and who, or at least the woman who would become my wife, Um and, uh, you know we started that, started our relationship off, so going into university, kind of, you know, transitioning through the social aspect of drinking and then, you know, coming out into the real world on the other end of it, um, we got married about a year after we graduated from university, had no money, very, you know, rudimentary basics let's pay the bills, let's get the. You know we had, we had the mortgages and well, first we had rents and then we had mortgages to pay, we had car payments, we had insurances, my wife had student debts to pay off. You know, we, we didn't have a lot of money and you know, money is something alcohol is not. Drinking is not an inexpensive habit. And so, you know, I used to always joke that our big night out was, you know, getting a submarine sandwich, a 12 inch submarine sandwich and a six pack of beer, and we split that and that would be the limits of what we could afford. And so, and that was, you know, pretty well, par for the course for the next, you know, I'd say, five, 10 years.
Speaker 2:And as my children came along, five years later, my first son, um, about five years after we were married, and another one shortly thereafter, got into parenthood, drank, you know, didn't drink as much. Right, I was responsible for them, obviously, taking care of them, but also I didn't have, you know, again, focus, and you know we didn't have a lot of money to spend on that sort of thing. And so, you know, I dove into being a very active father, um, again, largely because I was comparing myself to my dad, who was a doctor and wasn't always home when I was a kid. And so I told myself part of my programming was I'm not going to do that, I'm going to be very active, I'm going to be the opposite of that. And so I was a sports coach, um, you know, a scouts leader. I was very I got come home from work early to take them places and drive them all over the place and do that sort of thing. Um, and you know, once again, I didn't, I wasn't drinking, cause I was. I was very responsible in that aspect. And so, you know, fast forward a few more years to their teenage years.
Speaker 2:Like a lot of parents, kids get less reliant on us, right, they become more independent. Um, I have more time. I'm now 15 years into my career or so, or, you know, moving on, I'm successful in my career. I was a research scientist for 25 years, um, up until 2021, when I stopped to become a full-time um, this naked mind coach, but the uh, you know I, I was successful in my work and, uh, you know I, just it got me to that place where, you know, the my sons weren't um relying on me to drive them places anymore, and so I sit on the couch at home and I'd have a night off.
Speaker 2:And you know my guardrails and I think you're probably the same. You know we all have those internal guardrails around. I'm not going to drink. I'm only going to drink on Friday nights and Saturday nights. I'm not going to drink on work nights, I'm not going to drink on our school nights or whatever it might be. You know, those guardrails kind of got weak, a little more inflated, a little less guardy, to the point that, you know, I went from drinking beer on the weekends occasionally to over the next three or four years, up until, you know, in this case, 2014, 15, 16, up until I was drinking, you know, every night of the week with beer.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, tolerance went up. Beer change, you know, beer changed to something. I went through a brief phase with wine, because I'm not a wine drinker, but it was heavier and it was easier and my wife drank it so I could sort of hide it a bit. And then I went straight to hard alcohol and that's when kind of the gloves came off in my mind and it became. I remember having this. I remember telling myself you'll know, you have a problem when you're pouring yourself a rum and Coke on a Wednesday night, and that was, that was a guardrail. I remember telling myself that. But I went right through that guardrail, right, I think of it. I think of it like going off a cliff, like a car going off a cliff, through a guardrail, to the point that I was drinking.
Speaker 2:You know, at the end of it, when I got to the, at the end of my, my journey, so to speak, or when I knew I had to make a change, I was drinking straight rum, right out of the bottle. So there was no mixing, no-transcript middle, the middle management was let go and I was a senior scientist with the company, and so those two things happening in rapid succession caused me to really my an uptick in my drinking and really caused me to, you know, to lose control, basically complete control, um, and so you know that year 2017 was not a fun year for me. It was very. I was struggling, I was looking for work, but I was also, you know, rewarding myself for 20 minutes on my of networking in the morning with the bottle in the afternoon. And, uh, you know, that took me until the end of 2018, sorry, 2017, when I decided I had to make a change.
Speaker 2:And that's when I consciously decided that I had to stop, and, you know, it sounds like I stopped cold turkey. It sounds like I just woke up one morning and had this moment of clarity and, ah, I'm just going to stop. But it was, you know, two or three years, or five or six years, as I said, of lead up to a morning where I ultimately just said I can't do this anymore. I just can't. And so, the way I tell my story, I basically, you know I had left a bottle the night before on the kitchen counter that I used to be high, I used to be a hider, I used to hide all my alcohol. I left it on the counter and my wife was up the first. She was the first one up in the morning and she came downstairs and found it sitting there and she, she didn't do anything, didn't say anything. She went any other room and we'll get her breakfast and was watching TV, um, with a cup of coffee or something, and I came in and I looked at it and I went, that's it, the gigs up Right, and I walked in and I said right to her that I'm going to, I'm stopping drinking right now and of course, you know, as you can imagine, her response was uh-huh, okay, okay, we'll see what happens. But yeah, I mean, last time I checked that was, you know, over 2,500 days ago.
Speaker 2:So, um, without with a couple of, you know, like a lot of people experience when they stop drinking, occasionally somebody will accidentally serve you something. But other than that and you know that's been it, um, but I, that in a lot of you know that's been it um, but I, that was the first six months were me doing it myself and kind of putting together, you know, quit lit and reading books and trying to discover things, um, and then in that process, about six months in um, I discovered this naked mind, um, annie grace, the book. At that point it said right on the cover control alcohol, which was exactly what I had, because I was, I was six months sober but I wasn't alcohol free. I was still thinking about it every single day in those six months and I was starting to get wobbly. I was starting to feel like I was heading down a road towards. You know, I can't keep doing this. You know my, it's like willpower. The muscle was starting to fatigue a little bit.
Speaker 2:Um, and then I read the book and you know the mindset shifting that came with that, the. You know, wait a minute, I don't you mean, I don't have to do it this way, I can do it another way. Um, and that opened the door to that way of sort of more emotion-based behavior change as opposed to behavior-based behavior change. Um, and it just kind of took off from there and you know, this is where I kind of used my for people that watch Seinfeld, the old thing, yada, yada, yada. I then went on.
Speaker 2:I then, you know, from that, I was so empowered in my own world to sort of want to share the gift that I had discovered around, the freedom that that brought me of this, the peace that came with that mindset.
Speaker 2:And so I reached out and was very fortunate to become one of the very first certified coaches with this naked mind in August of 2019.
Speaker 2:And I've been doing it ever since and it started out as a side hustle. It started out as sort of the thing I would do on the side, because I said I had a full-time job as a research scientist but with COVID and with the pandemic and just the world I was working in was not a fun place to be, with plexiglass and masks and everything I just got to a place where I thought I'd give this well, this is, I could do this, you know, virtually, in addition to doing it in person with some people. And so I was able to, you know, transition in a very short time, in a couple of years, to a place where I thought I'd make a go of it of myself. It's just as a with my one-on-one private coaching business, in addition to working in contracts with this naked mind and yeah, and so I did that in 2021 and you know, I've been doing it ever since and I absolutely love what I do.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. There's so many similarities. I, you know I meet a lot of people, but yours is the tolerance as it grew for you and you went from beer to you know I had the same thing. I was probably three years behind you and you know a few things happened to me and it was just right, I'm just going to drink that away. So I totally, totally understand. And then I did the same thing for six months, quickly did my own sort of program, um, and same as you it was. It was um, the thoughts were still there. You know I love that. You said you were, you weren't alcohol free. It was that the, the thinking about drinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I was. It's exhausting, I mean, I know, and it's, and it's funny because the very first book I actually read was a book called tired of thinking about drinking, and it's a book by an author named bell Robertson. Um, and she has. She had a coaching program which was entirely email, like the email, like pen pal site type based, where she would basically email people, kind of one-on-one coach them, but via emails, as opposed to like live coaching, kind of like what we do now. Um, but that book resonated with me because she was Canadian for starters, um, but she never. You never saw her face. She was.
Speaker 2:It was very cryptic. I'm not sure it's, I'm not sure it's, I'm sure it's not her real name, but she had a book. That book basically described the first hundred days and it went through what you're going to experience in those first hundred days and she had this concept of the voice in her head which was, she named Wolfie, after the two wolves, parable right, the good wolf and the bad wolf, and the little boy and his grandfather, which are, however it's performed as you know, which one do you feed? Oh, you know, the good wolf and the bad wolf. The one that you feed is the one that's going to, that's going to persevere, um, and so she named this, this angry voice, as the bad wolf, kind of like Wolfie, right, and she would talk to it and and a lot of the other things. You know reward, rewards along the way, and you know counting days and all of the things that were in that really got me through those first hundred days, which for me was, you know, three to four months in um and kind of gotten handed me off to the next part, but that concept of tired of thinking about drinking, much like.
Speaker 2:Ironically, the cover of this naked mind has a big old word, control on it. And again that word, and it's on, I think it's on the. If you look at the spine of the book too, it that's what word is like bigger than this naked mind. It's actually the word that gets a lot of people um, to really, uh, to really go to that. And you know that's what this has been about for me.
Speaker 2:It's it been a journey of, I mean control has a negative, was the, was the fact that you know the predominant methodology, or you know community, that was out there, um, one of the primary drivers and one of the primary um steps in that process was give your. Give your power to somebody else, was give it up to a higher power, and in my head it was like I don't have any power left to give. I'm you know the concept. I mean not rock bottom, but I'm exhausted, right, because I've been, I'm thinking about this for so long and it's just, it's wearing me down and I'm just, you know, I just don't have the, I don't have the fight to sort of, you know, and if I give it, if I give anything else, I'm just going to be, I'm going to be a puddle on the floor of well, what's the opposite of that?
Speaker 2:Well, if that's not what I want to do, then when I want to go on a journey of self-empowerment and that's, you know that that wasn't conscious to me in the beginning, but I think now it's, particularly after I got, you know, I got my legs under me a little bit and got a year or two into this journey I really started to elevate that and started to spill it off into relationships and you know a lot of different areas of my life and but yeah, that you know that the fatigue and energy I mean power and energy are the two biggest drivers for me and the most almost everything I do now and you know, recognizing who has it and who doesn't and what kind of energy you have, and you know is it, is it something that's you know toxic and is going to, is going to be really negative, or is it like a more enlightening right, because I talk about energy vampires and energy generators in my coaching right?
Speaker 2:There are people around us and things around us that suck our energy, and there are things and people around us that provide us with energy, right, and we can be those things too.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, definitely. Oh, there's so much because I read the Snake of Mind as well and I have learnt so much since then about myself and, interestingly, part of it was learning how to how control was a part of my life and how to actually let go of that. But when you spoke about Belle Robinson, I just lit up because she was the first person. So 2018, I had my first break and she had one minute messages. I don't know if you know about them, but her I have all the little cards.
Speaker 1:Oh, honestly, I want to go find her now because she changed my life like that. Those messages every day, hearing her voice, wolfie, all of that, oh my God, absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I know she, cause she had the. She had little mail out cards, little like laminated cards that you could, that she mailed out and so and it'd be, and basically you'd look at one each day and it was the same idea. It was like the one minute messages, but it was just motivational. I have them in a drawer somewhere and I have like a little stack of them. Same same thing again. That was that was me pre.
Speaker 2:This naked mind for me, like that, like this. Obviously, this naked mind is what really sort of got me, but without her I wouldn't have never, I wouldn't have gotten to the point where I was ready for that. And so I have. I have a huge um debt to pay to her, even though I don't know her and I don't know. And if I was to approach her as a this naked mind coach, I don't know how she would approach, how she would take that or whatever, because you know I don't know how she would approach, how she would take that or whatever, because you know, I don't know, I have no idea, competition wise, how these things work or whatever. But um, yeah, she's absolutely been a huge part of my journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, same, and one of the pioneers, you know, leading the way because there wasn't. I'm just grateful that there was. There were people like her out there, but it was earlier days. So, yeah, I feel very grateful too. Like her out there, but it was earlier days. So, yeah, I feel very grateful too. And, like you said, for people on the outside it can look like, you know, maybe you just woke up and said this is it, but there was all that laid up and I think it was all so important to get us to where we are now. And you know I say that. And then I drank on and off through COVID and when I heard you say that you could do online things through COVID, I was like, oh, that would have been a brilliant time. Unfortunately, I was on the other end of that, still drinking, so my drinking got worse in COVID. But yeah, it's just, it's so good to hear your story. And so who do you work with now, mike?
Speaker 2:So good to hear your story. And so who do you work with now, mike? Well, right now, a lot of the clients. That, because for me there's a real vacuum when it comes to this kind of work in men. I think a lot of men.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a world where boys don't cry, suck it up, shake it off. You know a number of concussions I had as a kid was a kid when I was playing sports, where you know I got my bell rung, as they said, and they'd say, just sort of you know, getting to see stars at the whole thing. And now they used to have, you know, they used to have the little cartoons where somebody would get hit on the head and the stars would come up and it was funny, right that, going back in like just you know, just that, that mindset and you don't, you know, you don't ask questions of yourself. Okay, you just kind of go push through a lot of that um. So I do work with a lot of men, particularly particularly um, I'm very passionate, um, because of and this is this is where the emotions come up for me because of my upbringing and my dad and his you know him not being around and also, but also the he. He passed away in 2019, um, from coronary disease, which was brought on by by drinking a lot by alcohol, and so I know the impact that can have on a family. I know the impact that can have both from being the son of somebody and also now I can look back, look down on my own two boys who are 26 and 24 and realize when they stopped I stopped drinking when they were 19 and 17, and so you so so that I have a real emotional draw towards the, the power of these changes, and it's never too late, right, I'm, I'm fully confident that you know modeling where I am now and model, you know, over the last seven years coming up, it's coming up on seven years for me, you know, to not only my kids, but to their friends and to their parents and everybody, and the ripple effect around that the family systems aspect of this I'm really passionate about, but a lot of, a lot of, just because of my own personal story and, you know, being a man, you know, and predominantly I mean this naked mind is, you know, annie, as, as you know, annie Grace is not a man, um, and her story resonates with sort of women, working women, moms, et cetera. So the preponderance of not only people that go through her programs but also the coaches that work in her programs are are women, and so I look a lot, I kind of take some of that myself and I. So I work a lot with with men, but I also work with women, because this is this to me, this isn't gender specific at its core.
Speaker 2:The foundational concepts that we work with, that you and I both work with, you know, around this, around emotion-based behavior change. It's now Andy calls it affected liminal psychology now to sort of bring it into a more generalized state. You know this is, you know, evaluating our thoughts and our beliefs that drive our emotions and realizing that when you turn off the tap of to our emotions, we're not going to have the behaviors that are arising from those emotions, and you know the control that we have within that. And so, coming back to your original question, I mean, pretty well, you know I work with a lot of different people over the course of my coaching. You know I have had times when I focused primarily on men's groups and sort of men that have come to me, and I've had, you know, I did a podcast interview with Scott Pinyard, who used to be a head coach at the Snake in Mind, and we kind of went down that road of you know that this is a void. There's a place here that obviously you know, and opening that door to have people come and talk to me around that I'm always willing to do that.
Speaker 2:And again, I have a real passion for other men who are willing to get in touch with their feelings, so to speak, right and not not in that, not in kind of a woo-woo way, but just in a in a foundational way that we have so much more control here and we're taught this bill of goods when we're, when we're, when we're younger, right, that we're not supposed feel this way, we're not supposed to have these emotions. And there's reasons for that. There's obvious reasons for that. There's societal benefits to that. There's, you know. And if we're athletes, there's sporting benefits to that and there's things like that. But at what cost at the end of the day? And so, yeah, so it is. You know, anybody and I have a very analytical, sort of scientific mind around this logical way of looking at things. So people connect with me on that level, so I don't really like to drive it to a specific group per se.
Speaker 1:But I have coached those groups. For those reasons I just I love the perspective for men because even on my podcast it's predominantly women and that's not because we chose that it's because there's predominantly women and that's not because we chose that it's because there are more women. I think in the self-healing journey you know it's more acceptable socially and so I love that you're talking about it and I think I know for me on this journey the strongest men I've ever met are the ones doing this. So we need to take away that stigma because there is so much strength in doing this work and there's courage, like it's a. If you look at the way society looks at men as you know, strong physically and yeah, we don't cry, and that actually it's kind of the opposite, and so I love that. That's what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I've discovered that, and particularly in you know things that I've worked through in the past several years around. You know what is power like, looking at empowerment, and you know, sometimes we assume that we have to be aggressive, especially from a male perspective. We have to be aggressive to show power when, in actual fact, some of when I, when I think of the people that I really respect, I think of that, are really empowering to me. Most of them, you know, I mean you can, you can go back in history and you know, depending on where you are in the world, there's always going to be those people that people migrate to and a lot of them are not the biggest, toughest. You know they're not the. You know the. You know the. You know the the body builders of the world, and you know there's. They can be, obviously, and physical strength is a component of it. You don't want to be, but some of them are. You know you can go to Mahatma Gandhi if you have to, right, I mean you can. You can go to people like that that are, that's, some of the most powerful people that just understand these concepts. And you know there's an aspect of stoicism in this and there's an aspect of you know, just logical, analytical thought to this, and you know the peace that comes from you know, and the positive energy that you can bring to something right, whereby you know, you just show up in a different mindset and you bring.
Speaker 2:You know, sometimes saying nothing is way more powerful than getting into a conflict with somebody, right, and sometimes it's the things you don't say that, actually, and the way that you respond when people, you know whether, whether it's somebody saying something to you, know, at you, to you. This is where I'm, you know, this is where a big book for me right now is the Mel Robbins, the let them theory. Yeah, yeah, um, which is, uh, you know to me, is you know it is this is that. This is the thing, right, this is what it is it's about.
Speaker 2:You know, people can scream and yell and stuff, but they don't have any power until you respond, until you give them something that you have right, and so there's a when you so and then they're and they're going to give you their power. So, when you're talking about strength and power and peace and quiet inside your own body, yeah, I think you know, sometimes the quieter you are as opposed to the more bombastic or loud you are, the more powerful you become, and again, this is something that is completely counterintuitive to everything I was taught until about five years ago, and I'm now 55. So I spent a half a century on this planet in a completely different mindset place, but it's never too late to figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, I'm. I'm loving let them, the let them theory as well. And just yesterday I was listening and she said you know most people she was talking about men, I think and most people won't do this kind of work, but the ones that do. I'm so excited because even just working on ourselves, it does change things. You know, we respond, we don't react. There's a whole lot of things that will have that ripple effect, but it's definitely something I'm enjoying.
Speaker 2:And again, to me, it's not, I mean, it's perception, right, if you're, if you're, you know, I, I, I ask people, when I coach them, I ask you know, if there's a word that is that keep coming out for them and they keep getting hung up on it. You know what is strength to what is? How would you define strength, right, when somebody, when you close your eyes and say, when you know, sometimes when they do that exercise, they'll, they'll come up with you know, they'll think of wrestlers. And you know the rock and I only mentioned that because I noticed Mel Robbins the other day, like freaked out when the rock followed her on Instagram or something. But you know, maybe somebody like that, right, we think of like the physical, but then we also think of the. You know, to me, like the, you know the, the really strong intellectual people, the people that are just, don't take any guff from anybody some people who figured this stuff out. I think of somebody like mark manson, right, he wrote the subtle art of not giving a blank um, I don't know if I can say the word on your, on your podcast or not, but this is a lot of not um, but he, you know, there's somebody who I really admire because of the fact that he's like, he's mentally really strong and there's so many other people like him. Um, but he wasn't always. And you know he, like a lot of us, was a hot mess at one point.
Speaker 2:And you know to be able to pull yourself to a place where now and it's not about you know imparting wisdom on people, because you know you can preach and preach, and preach, and preach and preach, and people get sick of being told things. But when you live your life a certain way and it becomes so, other people are drawn to you. Right? That's how you gain power, right? It's not by telling everybody how great you are, or you know imparting your power on people, or you know pushing your power out on people. It's bringing yourself to a place where people want to be around you and want the energy that you're bringing. And that's why I said power and energy are connected.
Speaker 2:And once again, the scientific mind of me, you know, do we talk about the? You know there's, there's, there's a concept called the first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It's only its form can change. And I think about that as, like the world we live in kind of like a currency, like energy exists. We can't create it. We can only manipulate it and, you know, change it from one form to another.
Speaker 2:And if we're living in a really low energy state, you know we're going to need to acquire it from other people. But when we ourselves are somebody who is in a higher energy state and we're feeling more confident, we're walking around. You know things aren't bothering us as much. You know we're choosing where to give, you know where to place our bets each day on what we're going to care about. Right, we're going to have a much more residual. You know we're going to be, you know, a much higher sort of resonance from an energy point of view, and you know, and people are going to migrate towards us and generally, then you know that's going to raise our energy level. And so we become like that beacon for people.
Speaker 2:And I think for people and I think of people like that, that I am drawn to in my current state, in my current mindset, because if I'm drawn to people now, I know that, because you know there were people I used to be drawn to that I can have seen through.
Speaker 2:Now, right, and now I see a lot of people who have leveled up and I'm sort of migrating to that.
Speaker 2:So energy, power, all of that stuff, it's just it's.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I've really discovered more recently is there's so much peace in the power when you look at it through that lens, when it's a cleaner energy, when you're looking at it through a more positive way of looking at the world, not toxically, not like everything is awesome, but through a, you know, just having a mindset that's, you know you feel almost bulletproof to what people can say to you, to do to you, because you can process it right, and they're just words, and you can disempower words by breaking them down into letters, and you can disempower sentences and thoughts into letters and words and it's just a thought, right.
Speaker 2:And again, we do that a lot of work. For that work and the work that we do as coaches you and I both as Certified this Naked Mind coaches, you know is to explore thoughts and beliefs and challenge them and put up an alternative and just ask the question is it, is there an alternative that's equally as likely? You don't have to believe it, but if you can just come up with a, you know, an alternative that sort of seems reasonable, it's you're like huh, it dissolves. It dissolves or diffuses the power of the first one, and that's you know. And then you can start to step back and, you know, go about your day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, oh, there's magic in that. You know we've both done that, that work, and it's certainly, you know, it's changing your thoughts is such an important part of it, and that's what we've learned and that's what we can teach and help other people do, which is very powerful. So I'm still learning, like I have a big belief we work on beliefs, you know that or a big struggle when things aren't fair, and I am consciously working on that. But one thing I have noticed in my journey is that I truly am at a point where I'm not worried what people think of me anymore. That's been massive for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and not doing it through a lens of sort of just whatever, not doing it through or through a sort of, you know, defeatist kind of. You know, because to me that's acceptance Right, but it's not resignation, it's not, you know. You know kind of deflecting it as if like whatever you know, because you know to me that's acceptance right, but it's not resignation, it's not, you know. You know kind of deflecting it as if like whatever, you know I don't care, um, because we do care anything, that anything, anytime somebody brings negative energy towards us, it's going to rattle our cage a little bit. But the difference is when you can get to a place where you can quickly do a quick. You know a transformation or a turnaround in our mind, and you know we talk about this in our coaching around. You know that's not that alternative. Like you know a transformation or a turnaround in our mind and you know we talk about this in our in our coaching around. You know that's not that alternative. Like you know, all you have to do is just come up with an alternative. Like maybe there's, maybe they're having a bad day, maybe this isn't about me at all, right, just sometimes that little thoughts like that, when somebody says something to me, you know, or comes at me or or disrespects me, or maybe it's just an oversight as opposed to it's something personal, when you because, when you can depersonalize it in that moment, right, the meaning and this is the big part of you know, a lot of the coaching we do is around what we're making things mean. In that moment, when you can disarm the meaning, it takes it back to it's just words, it's just a thought, right, words, words, words in any way. And I have a little. I have a little thing, a little activity I do with some of my coaching clients where I say, you know, right now, you know what's what's bothering you today, and they say, and they'll come up with, well, this, this, this, this, this. And I say, ok, I want you to dissect each of those down into a single word Right, maybe it's mother-in-law, right, and I always hate throwing mother-in-laws under the bus. But here we go, you know mother-in-law, and maybe put her name down, right, and then look at it and then close your eyes and say, okay, what are you making that mean right now? Right, and then take, turn the page over and write the first letter, capital or small, depending on how you want to do it of her name. How does that make you feel? Right, you may still have a slight association, because it's you're, you're thinking, you're going through those little, you're breaking it down, but maybe you know what. If it's, you know, it's just, you realize it's just a letter, it's just a name, right? Can you think of some another person of that same name that you don't think the same way? Right, we're associating a meaning in the moment, in the context, in the situation, and, and we can break those down. And you know that to me, you know when you can do that in real time, and that's the.
Speaker 2:Obviously this comes with repetition, right, one of the one of the key foundational concepts that we coach around. You know, repetition builds mastery. You want to do it over and over and over again, right? Well, confidence comes last. You have to build up those muscles, but when you do that, somebody can say something, somebody can do something, and you can almost and I think of it as self-coaching, right, you can self-coach yourself around that. Is it true? Is it really true? Is there an alternative truth that I can explore that'll make me that I may find believable? And when you can come up with one. You're like, okay, yeah, I can see that possibly being something that may not be true.
Speaker 2:I'm going to move on to the next thing, and it's just, you'd slide through it and so disarming those words, making those words. You know, and I'm sure everybody has a name or a word or something in their mind that's dominating their thoughts all day long and they're walking around all day long with this name in their head, whether it's a friend, whether it's a person you see on TV, you know, a person on the news, whatever it might be. When you reduce it to that level, it's really empowering, or just right, disempowering for them, but really empowering for you to realize that it is just a word, right, a sentence is just a sentence is just. You know, it's just a string of words. A word is just a string of letters. As I like to say, letters are just 26 little little chicken scratches on a piece of paper. Everything else is the meaning, right?
Speaker 1:Yep and predominantly our thoughts are stories we've made up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, but they come from, but they come from an honest place. They come from our experiences and our beliefs and our foundations, and you know things that are passed down to us, and you know part of this. You know the part of the concept of the let them theory is it's not really applicable to kids, because, you know, kids are dependent on their adults to give them good vibes, so to speak, to give them good ethics, to give them good morals, to give them good information, and sometimes that breaks down. And so, you know, we learn these things when we're, you know, five, six, seven years old, and then we carry them all the way through unless they're disrupted. And so, you know, we make these things mean something because there's usually a value in them. Maybe it connects us to a group or an associate. You know we have like, whether it be you know, things like religion, things like politics, those things there's benefits in. You know sports teams, whatever it might be. You know we grow up in a certain place. We're going to support a certain sports team. That's just the way. It is right Generally speaking, and it's it can be disruptive to support their arch nemesis if you live in a certain city, right, so, but you can do that if you want to challenge it and if you see a reason for it.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, a lot, a lot of these.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of the beliefs that we have and these stories as you mentioned, you know there are stories, and owning them and accepting them and realizing that each of the little decisions, each of the micro decisions we make on a daily basis lead us to where we are in this moment in time and that was another foundational part for me was realizing I'm going to own that.
Speaker 2:And when I own that regret, an amazing thing happens regret disappears, because they're all learning things, they're all learning opportunities. Yes, I did something. You know, I can say I can reframe a mistake as something I did with the best intentions or there was a reason in the mindset. I was at the time and now I'm, you know, now I'm, now I'm, I'm going to own that and say, yeah, I could have done this, I could have done that. Not, I should have, I could have done this, I could have done that. I chose this journey and this is where I ended up. As a result of that, when you actually can and when you can like where you are right now makes that a lot easier too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely so awesome. Well, I love that, mike, so much, so I'm sure there are people listening that would love to reach out. So where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, well, I have my coaching company, which is generally the easiest way to get me is. The company which is generally the easiest way to get me is Trailblazer Life Coaching. So at Trailblazer Life Coaching on Instagram, at Trailblazer Life Coaching on Facebook, or Mike at Trailblazer Life Coaching on email, and I'm always open to you know, to have conversations and to open up those new doors.
Speaker 1:Amazing and I will put that in the show notes so people can find you. But thank you so much for coming on and speaking. It's been amazing to speak with you and hear you talk. Thank you so much for sharing.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been a pleasure, Meg. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
