July 10, 2025

What happened to me and the podcast

In this deeply honest and vulnerable solo episode, Michael breaks the silence and shares the raw truth behind his recent hiatus from the podcast and Think Unbroken. See show notes below...

In this deeply honest and vulnerable solo episode, Michael breaks the silence and shares the raw truth behind his recent hiatus from the podcast and Think Unbroken. From personal heartbreak and health scares to questioning the future of coaching and content creation, he opens up about the toll this journey has taken—and the radical accountability he's embracing in its wake.

Michael talks about compassion fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and why 2025 has become the year of alignment. He reflects on ending a major relationship, losing vision in one eye, relocating to Asia, and stepping away from things that no longer serve his mission or well-being.

Whether you've been with Think Unbroken from the beginning or are just tuning in, this episode offers a powerful reminder: healing, growth, and transformation aren’t linear—and sometimes, the most important work is done in the quiet moments of reevaluation.

Expect a shift. Expect more honesty. And expect this show to become something even more personal moving forward.

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What's up friends, I just want to come to you a bit raw here, and talk to you about a few different things that are happening not only in my life, but in the podcast and with Think Unbroken. So you've probably noticed, it's been a little while since I recorded an episode. And there's a lot of reasons behind that, many of which I'm going to get into right now, some of which I am not.

If you're watching on YouTube, thank you. If you're listening, thank you. I just want to say I appreciate you guys.

You know? here's the reality. This is the stark reality of doing this, trying to make this vision work for as long as I have of the podcast of coaching, of helping people with their mental health, and there is a toll, there is a price that I have paid, and I'm not trying to be a martyr here, by the way, there's just a price that I've paid mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually, to walk this path in front of me and, uh, do my best to attempt to help as many people as possible and their healing journey. And one of the stark difficulties of this process has been this painful realization that I am just, I have been emotionally exhausted and people talk about this thing called compassion fatigue which I felt it brutally and it kind of hit me hard over the last couple of months and. In the span of what 2025 has looked like, I've been through a lot.

I ended a relationship with someone that I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life with. I got viciously sick. And in fact, I lost vision in my left eye for a period of time, which was beyond terrifying. I moved back from South America to Asia, so I'm in my studio here, my office in Bangkok, one of my favorite places in the world. And I made the decision to walk away from, a lot of different things in my life that were not in alignment. And in doing so, I've had to put some checks and balances into my life to ask myself, you know, what do I really want? Do I really want to continue Think Unbroken? Do I really want to record the podcast? Do I want to help continue people, help people transform their lives? And a lot of those answers landed on “NO”, just to tell you the truth.

So a few things are going to happen moving forward. One, um, which you may have noticed is I'm probably not going to be launching new coaching programs anymore. It's very likely I may never launch a new coaching program. There are coaching programs that exist now that will just stay, because I have clients and commitment to them, commitment to myself to see them through. But big events like the Unbroken conference, big launches around new books, things like that.

I'm not saying never, ever, I'm just saying now, unlikely. As for the podcast, the podcast will continue. I love doing the podcast, it's something that I enjoy. In fact, because I'm moving some of my emotional energy, I very likely am going to move back to creating the podcast with frequency, which is something that I just enjoy doing, probably sharing more about my story, my journey, where I am, as well as continuing with the amazing guest interviews. In fact, we have a few really phenomenal human beings coming on the show here in the very near future. So I'm excited about that. But again, it's a shift about alignment and here's kind of the truth of where this came from.

I have had thousands and thousands of people come through my programs, and that's something that I feel very fortunate about because I was able to help a lot of people, millions and millions of you have listened to this podcast, which I feel incredible about because I've been able to hopefully give you some semblance of guidance or reassurance or hope and tens and tens of thousands of people have read the books and, and when I started Think Unbroken. It was really a thing that felt like a mirror for me, where it was like, okay, the more work that I can do and share and teach in the process, the better my life will be, the better other people's lives will be.

I will inevitably make a mark that lives beyond me and hopefully becomes some kind of compensation for all the pain, the suffering, the abuse, the trauma. I think that I've done that. In a lot of ways, I feel that to be true because of the messages, because of the text, because of the reviews, because of the people who've walked this path with me. But again, there has been a price to pay and people in my space. We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders, and it's a choice, by the way. And again, not being a martyr, I made the decision to hear and sit with and walk down some of the most brutal things you could ever imagine a human being going through.

And I did that because I had done it for myself, and I knew that if I could create. A different life and transformation. I could help other people do it, and I've been able to bear witness to that with tons of clients, with my family, with friends, with the impact I've made has been direct, but there's also, again, a price that I've had to pay, and that price has been vicious, it has cost me a lot. Now, anytime that you're building a business, which is, I've always said thing and Think Unbroken is not a charity, it is a business because those who pay attention and those who pay generally will see their lives transform. And so I made the decision at the end of 2024 to look at this and to kind of reassess where I'm at with things.

Yeah, and to narrow the focus a bit and to kind of more indirectly teach through this process of the podcast, through this process of the YouTube channel. Will there be other things to do? Maybe, I don't know, but here's the truth. There's a thousand episodes of this show, hundreds and hundreds of episodes of me as a guest, and three books. There are a ton of courses that are online that you can just do for free, and ultimately where I'm at today is I've just hit a wall. It's that simple. There's no better way to phrase it.

And 2025, at the beginning of the year, was looking at a word of the year, and that word was alignment. And the word alignment to me meant, taking inventory of my life and where I'm at, and who I am and what I want. Getting crystal clear about all of it, removing what I don't want, need, desire, require, and then only focusing where I need. And that has been amazing for me this year, to tell you the truth. I've spoken at zero events in person. That's not true. I've done a couple of masterminds. Other than that, I've not done any traveling majorly being a road warrior. I have not been a podcast guest almost at all. I have not been working on any projects or anything other than myself, and I allowed the space for the podcast just to kind of sit in the ether.

And instead of just making content for the sake of making content, we just went into hiatus. And as I'm filling the energy, coming back and out of the hiatus being here in this space is, uh, kind of two things. One, you'll see that this becomes a bit of my personal journal in a way, because I want it to be, because it's my platform and because I think that my stories and my journey help people.

And I know that for some people they won't enjoy that. And personally, just tell you the truth, that's fine. I don't really care. But my mission as I record more content here in this capacity is just to talk about more of the story, more of the journey of my life and my experiences. And then the other side is to continue to bring on amazing guests who both inspire me and teach me, and will do the same for you. And what will come of that? I have no idea. But what I will tell you is that, you know, I just don't care to do anything other than exactly what I want to do moving forward with this show. I think for a while, because it was hype and because it was a show that I mean, God, we were nominated Podcast of the Year for Men. I think we won Podcast of the Year for Men. We won podcast of the year for mental health. You know, it's been a top 25 show consistently for a very long time, millions of downloads, number one in like 20 countries. Every guest worth a note, who's been around for a while has been on. And I was just playing the game of just like, all right, cool.

Let's just go find the next person whose celebrity can leverage. What do I have to do to get them on? And, and that's a part of it, by the way like, I'm not saying like, that's not a part of it. You have to do that. That's how you build a podcast, right? But all that said, I really just want to share where I'm at with my life and maybe you guys become my semi-public sounding board, which is something that I hope you're okay with. And if you're not, good luck. I hope that you find the human in the world that you connect with the most. But like I said, the last few months have sucked, they've been really, really, really difficult. And I'd argue that they've probably been the hardest four or five months since I was in my mid twenties.

So we're talking about 15 plus years and they've been so difficult because it's like I thought I had it all figured out and I thought things were working well. And then as I often tell my clients and you guys who listen, life is going to life and life shortens life like it really did and I needed the pause and I needed the step back.

And on the backside of coming out of it, and getting a lot of clarity and getting a lot of things settled that needed to be settled and really evaluating what I want for my future, here I am. And so I don't know the frequency in which I'll do this. I have no idea. it, it might be daily, it might be 10 times a day.

It might be once a month. I have no idea, but I am going to share more about myself and my story and my journey, especially about where I'm at, not particularly about where I've been 'cause I think that we've covered so much of that. Like, I don't know. I don't know what else to say about the past.

But right now and in this present moment, you know, my focus is around a few key elements around my health, around business and around relationships and dating and seeking my person. I'm gonna read something I wrote yesterday because I feel like it kind of really fits where we're at.

I wrote this:

“The hard truth about life that no one wants to hear is that all of the problems in your life are your fault.”

Yes. Bad things have happened to you. Yes, sometimes it feels like the world is against you, and yes, even sometimes the world is intentionally against you, but if you don't do something about it, there's no one else to blame but you. When I figured that out, that's when my life actually changed. It was a hard, sobering truth that took a long time to shape my current reality.

Trust me when I say that I have nothing but empathy and grace for people who have suffered because I'm certainly one of those people, as are you. But if your life is trash and the only thing that you're doing is complaining about how trash it is, you may want to reconsider your complaints because nobody cares.

And worse of all, you are one of those nobodies. And that's where I'm at. You know, I think that a lot of the things that transpired over the last few months were my fault. Actually all of them, I take full accountability and responsibility for them from the relationship ending to, uh, financial things, shifting to health, things happening to, uh, instability, to the podcast, to all just, I go, yeah, it's my fault, all of it, every bit of it. And you could tie it back to decisions I made 10 years ago. Right. I can go back 10 years ago and be like, yep, that's why I can go back 10 months ago. That's why 10 days ago, that's why. And so when I'm in this space and I'm looking at what I'm in front of now, it's just like this feeling of, okay, if we want our lives not to suck and trust me, like it's not the world like even though last three months being really sh*tty, like I'm not dead.

Right, I guess five months. I'm not dead. Nobody died. My family's good. In fact, my family's crushing it right now. I'm so proud of them. I'm super happy. I love being back in Asia. It fills me up. It's one of my favorite places in the world, friends are healthy. Like all things considered not that bad.

But as I look at what's in front of me and what I want, radical accountability at a deeper level comes to mind. And I leave you with that. Like thinking about where in our life we have to take more accountability, where in our life we have to really look at it and be like, this is my fault. All of it.

And even the things were like, that shouldn't be my fault being like, yep, it's my fault. 'cause I put myself in this situation or position at some point on the timeline to get to this place. And then the questions like, what do you do about it? Right. And I've always been a fervent believer in the idea of moving forward no matter what, and that's what we're doing here.

We're moving forward. I don't know what forward looks like. I haven't identified it. I've written some goals and ideas, not quite tied into it, but it is coming, and hopefully you'll be here for the ride.