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July 12, 2022

E359: Becoming Unbroken, Clarity and Tapping Into Your Super Power After Trauma | Trauma Healing Podcast

Many people would share their stories, experiences, triumphs, failures, and all the things in between because it is a continuation of a conversation about trauma, success, and failure. If you want to start creating a clear vision around something you...
See show notes at: https://www.thinkunbrokenpodcast.com/e359-becoming-unbroken-clarity-and-tapping-into-your-super-power-after-trauma-trauma-healing-podcast/#show-notes

Many people would share their stories, experiences, triumphs, failures, and all the things in between because it is a continuation of a conversation about trauma, success, and failure.

If you want to start creating a clear vision around something you are interested in, you must begin getting clarity on that vision while working towards this new chapter of your life. I hope that you'll take some time to listen here today. 

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Transcript

INTRO

How do we get to your goals? How do we create the person that you want to be? How do you take the understanding of yourself from the past to understand where you are to create a pathway, to understand to where you want to go? And that's what personal development is, can you subjectively and objectively at times, look at yourself to create a pathway to where you want to be.

 

YOUR SUCCESSES AND YOUR FAILURES DON'T DEFINE YOU

Michael: And so, when you're thinking about where you're at in your life now and this is why I'm asking if this hits home for you or not is have you had to define the person that you are today? Was there a practice? Did you write something? Did you create something like how did you become the Collin you are today?

Collin: Yeah, a lot of it had to do with not necessarily like, writing out, or mapping out or defining like who I am, but realizing what things don't define me. And I think that's where things really changed, you know, so early in my career and even in early and entrepreneurship, like I let my successes in my mistakes or failures or whatever you want to call them challenges. I let those sort of define me and that can really take you to a dark place, you know, so if it was a great month, then I felt great, if it was a bad month, I felt horrible. You know, and so, you got to learn that those things don't define you, right?

So your successes and your failures don't define you and that can be a hard thing to actually conceptualize because we're so accustomed in six site in society like – to be defined by what we have or how much is in the bank or how great we look on social media or how many likes and comments and engagements we got or how many downloads and listens we have on our podcast like we let a lot of those things define us, positive things and negative but those are all just like a lot of vanity metrics and like, yes, we all need money and we all want to be successful and we all have these big goals that we're trying to accomplish and we need fuel to move forward towards them but it's a emotional roller coaster. If you let those things define who you are and how you actually feel about yourself.

 

LIFE IS A JOURNEY, IT'S NOT A RACE

Michael: How do you correlate this idea of creating purpose while understanding that achievements are okay and not get lost in the scope of it all?

David: Yeah. I think that's where we're guys have to do is really seek to find their purpose where they have it within where my validation comes from within because then what happens is, you can go for the achievements, you can make achievements happen because those don't own you, those don't bring that sense of validation. So, when you make an achievement, you're excited because of what it does for everybody, not just you, you benefit from it, and that's not a bad thing. But your purpose is not the validation, it's kind of like the difference between a race and a journey. What I tell a man is life is a journey, it's not a race, there's really not a finish line that you cross, it's not going to be that, you know, ‘Hey! When you hit 50, if you're independently wealthy and can retire anywhere in the world, you've won, no, you can’t 50, you may have a lot of money, but why else do you have? And that's what we have to understand is that for every man, life is a journey and they want to do a journey that's worthwhile.

Almost every man, I've talked to in coached and helped they want to do something worthwhile with their life. It may not be changing the world but it could be changing their community. It could be changing their family.  It could be changing themselves so they can impact other people. Some men that I've worked with, get to that point where they realize I'm a selfish pig. All I do is think about me and that's a huge revelation for them, especially if there's someone who has a family, and if they start focusing on their wife if they start focusing on their kids, what can I do to impact their life? Then they will be completely transformed because they have kind of taken themselves out of the picture and they see themselves living for that of the person. So, they may get the achievements they want, they may get a happy marriage, they may have great kids, who love them, and they have a good relationship with and those are great things, but they get those not because they're just trying to do that because they're trying to make a big purpose in the world and change other people.

 

HONESTY IN THE JOURNEY

Michael: There are so many people who right now, they have this dream, they have this idea and they haven't gotten honest with themselves. How much has honesty played a role in this journey for you?

Adam: That's huge. I think that's one of the most important parts of it, you know, there's a lot of little components of living your life a certain way to get certain results but if you can't be honest with yourself, you're going to stay stuck in a paradigm that doesn't serve you, going on a loop, right? Because I've had conversations with friends who have been in challenging positions and my first thing that we get down to it because they're going well, because of this because of that and all these things I'm like, buddy, Mike, you're blaming everyone but yourself, I'm like, you have got to be able to look in the mirror and be honest about who you are, why your life looks the way it is and that you're the only one that is responsible for it, based on the decisions that you make right?

A lot of people don't want to sit down and feel the emotions tied to unpacking the past or looking at who they really are and why, because it's uncomfortable sometimes. But until we can do those things, we cannot be fully accountable, and then we can't make decisions from a more honest genuine place that will serve us, right?

Michael: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think honesty is this beautiful cornerstone for understanding what's possible in your life. Because if you're really honest with yourself, you'll look at it, you'll make assessments very much like this self-assessment that you've been doing and be able to identify.

And I want to get clear about this because it's probably going to be beneficial for someone.  I don't think about honesty, and, in terms of, I'm going to beat myself up but honesty in terms of okay, now, I've identified places in which I can improve, right? And I think about the skills that you have to attain to move forward being so intertwined with that. And yet people will still go through, they'll sit down, they'll do these exercises, they'll have the journal, they have 12 journals, but look at it, they’ll write it down, they'll talk about it, but they won't take action. Now, how do you start to go from this place of am thinking about it? So, I'm actually going to take action against it.

 

DEPRESSION AND STRESS MANAGEMENT

Michael: So often about this relationship between man and nature and the importance in that and managing and mitigating stress, depression, anxiety, all those things, you know, and looking at this and consideration of this mismatch that were now living in these forest bathing animals now, being in concrete jungles, what are the consequences of that?

Frank: Right. Well, we have a whole cluster of consequences and the most obvious one is now that we're exposed to chronic stress versus what we had in prehistory, which was in general, episodic stress, and that's the way the body works best is that you have this autonomic nervous system, that scans the world for threats and maybe you encounter a predator, maybe you have some this highly stressful and you survive it, you go back to camp and you rest for a few days in a low-stress set in and nervous system resets itself and then you go back out hunting and gathering again.

So that episodic stress is a normal pattern for humans and non-human animals, but now in the modern world, we have a completely different set in and stress tends to be chronic for people and the autonomic nervous system now is working overtime to compensate for that. And as a result, we tend to be hyper-vigilant, we tend to be anxious and ultimately exhausted and depressed. So this cluster of symptoms and afflictions is actually really understandable. When you look at it through the lens of mismatched, it's not at all surprising that people are experiencing these things now, what is surprising is that so many people do manage to adapt to the modern world. And the life lesson here is really clear that if you are experiencing these symptoms, there's really nothing wrong with you and it's to be expected, you take an animal, you take your dog, and put your dog in the garage, for two weeks, he's living in an alien environment, he's going to have behavior problems, he's going to have other kinds of problems, and that's absolutely a normal reaction of a normal animal to an abnormal environment.

So, the life lesson here is to give yourself some compassion and give the people around you some compassion as well because we're all fighting the same battle here, we're all trying to integrate into this alien world and some people do better than others.

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Michael Unbroken

Coach

Michael is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, speaker, coach, and advocate for adult survivors of childhood trauma.