How I use MENTORS to change my life | Trauma Healing Coach

If you've been around personal development and like any capacity at all, other than just this podcast, you've probably heard this old saying that coaches have coaches, mentors have mentors, educators have educators. Right? And that is so true to me. You know, one of the things that I really recognize that has played such a powerful and practical role in my life is that if I was willing to look at the people who have already done the thing that I'm trying to do, then that gives me someone to model. And as human beings, modeling is one of the most important things that we do because if you think about it and you rewind your life and you look at a lot of your behavioral experiences dating back to childhood, you recognize that there are these patterns that you pick up, that could be from like tying your shoe to the way that you talk and you enunciate words to how you communicate with people physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Right. We as human beings are a species that we look at and we measure what's in front of us and we model it. Now, one of the things that's unfortunate about modeling, and especially in our adolescence and in our developmental years, is that modeling can sometimes be with the wrong statue, right?

And so, if I go look at my life as a child, my modeling for communication, for family, for intimacy was bathed physical, mental and emotional violence. Right. I remember multiple fights with my brothers as a child and communication because in disagreement, no matter what it was, we would turn to violence. In fact, I've actually broken my hands on both of my brother's faces before that is not something I'm proud of. So let me be very clear about that, I'm just making context here.

You know, with my friends in, in middle school and high school fighting all the time. One time I stab this kid with a fork, right? I mean, that's because we watched and we witnessed violence growing up and we perceive that that is the way that you communicate frustrations and anger in being hurt emotionally and using my words verbally I was incredibly abusive to people the way that I talk to them, the way that interacted with them. And that also came because that is how my parents were, it was not uncommon for them to call me stupid or dumb, or you name one of the million different things that they said in the course of my childhood. And so, because of that, I picked that up as a behavior pattern, I modeled that. Right. And when we model, one of the things that happens in our childhood is we don't understand what we are mimicking that turns into modeling, that turns into mastery because it's just what is in front of us and as children, and of course we don't know what we don't know. So, it's very uncommon for many of us, especially if you grow up in a traumatic household, to be able to look at the circumstances of our childhood and go, oh, wait a second this shit is not right, something here does not make sense. And so, let me rewind, so as I was in my late-stage adolescence and we were homeless and I was living with all these different families, one of the things that happened is I started to notice that some of these homes were filled with kindness and love, grace and compassion, the very opposite of what I understood.

So, at 8, 9, 10 years old, a little seed was planted in my mind that told me, actually, maybe there's something wrong or not really on far with reality in my home because there's people over here doing it another way. I'll never forget, one time I was at this house and this kid talked back to his dad, he didn't get phoned through a freaking coffee table, and I was like, what the fuck just happened? This is a thing. You can do that. And so, what happened in that is I started recognizing, look closer at my life in my family and the people in it and going, wait a second, this is wrong.

Now it would take a long time and a lot of work to start to change the behavioral patterns I had in the way that I communicated with people. This probably holds true for you as well. So, I'm gonna tell you how I was able to do this, and this is really my journey, right?

So, I go and I look at this transformation that started to happen in my twenties, getting deeper into therapy, really starting to assess the whys of everything. I kept myself, why do I behave this? Why am I mean? Why am I abusive? Why am I an egomaniac? Why am I selfish? Why am I stubborn? Why am I this? Why when people treat me this way, I respond like that? Why when I get upset, this is a coping me mechanism? Why, why, why, why, why? I was really trying to get deep into the understanding. And in that time window what happened is I also started to get access to other information, this is where modeling starts to really make sense, because what happens is if you are looking for people who have done the thing that you're trying to do and you go and you learn from them, you will then in turn be able to do what it is that they have done. So, how does that happen? Well, first and foremost, I had to create massive clarity in my life. I had to look at it and assess it and say, what do I actually want? I want a healthy body. I wanna lose 150 pounds. I wanna quit smoking and quit drinking every day. I want healthy relationships. I want good friendships. I want mend the bridge with my brothers. I want to be able to all of the things, right.

And so, I just started consuming information and content from it. Now, when you think about it at first, and one of my mentors, Brendan Dawson taught me this is it's the 3M’s Mimic Model Master. And so, where it began as I was just kind of mimicking what I thought it was that people were doing, and the mimicking came in this form, in this sense of I would consume content. I would read books, I would watch videos, I would go to conferences. I would be at seminars. I would take an obscene amount of notes, and I would always ask myself, what can I apply to my life today in this that I can start doing? Because the action is really the thing that you have to do in order to see the other elements start to change and transpire in your life. And so, I just start mimicking trying the things every single. As I got deeper into the journey, I started to model them in a way where I was doing all, not all of it, but a lot of the things that the successful people that I looked up to were doing. So, when I got deep into working with people like Tom Bilyeu, Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, Dr. Caroline Leaf, Judd Brewer, you know, the list goes on and on and on, all these amazing people starting of course with Brendon Burchard, Gary Vaynerchuk and Eric Thomas and these just killers Anthony Trucks, he's speaking out Unbroken Con if you're coming, it was really about modeling and following through, because success leaves clues. You hear this all the time. There's something that if you're paying attention, you're going to be able to pick up. And so, for me, modeling became, okay, this is exactly what these people are doing, so I'm going to do exactly what they are doing. Now, what's fascinating is about this some of the things that these people were doing just did not bear any weight on me, brought no value to my life in any capacity, so I stopped doing them. Some of the things that these people were doing made my life so incredibly better that even to this day, I do some of these things every day. Every single day, I meditate and I journal, right? Every single day, I move my body in some capacity unless I'm injured, and that can just be going for a walk, every single day I write down my goals, every single day I do certain things, but some things I don't do. I try getting up at 4:00 AM it sucks, it's not for me. I'm never gonna do that again. So, I get up at 5 or 5:30 that hour makes a difference for me, I like going to bed at 10. Right. That makes sense. I started taking out other things that really, really didn't benefit me like certain diet elements, certain books that I was reading and I started just focusing and I got narrow. Right.

One of the things early on in the healing journey that we'll do will be very wide. Right. And at first, like if you go look at some of the certifications I have, they're freaking all over the place. I got family systems and alcohol abuse recovery and this and that, and this and that, and it was like what I needed to do was have that information so I could learn. But in time, I've narrowed the scope down more because I've discovered that if I'm stretched too thin, it's just too much to bring in. And so, instead of going to 20 conferences a year and reading a hundred books, I go to four conferences a year and I read 10 books, right? Getting very narrow. I listen to the same podcast, in fact, really one of the things that I do, I listen to the same episodes because what I've discovered is you really, if you just keep consuming, consuming, consuming, you're not learning. And so, the modeling in it came from, all right, I'm gonna just keep learning and focusing on this group of people. And even though I know there's more amazing information out there, it was like, I gotta pull it back. I gotta hone it. And by honing it in that led to mastery, right?

One of the things that I've been able to become known for is being one of the leaders in trauma education and coaching, because I got mastery in it through doing it, through putting in the hours, through investing the money, through working with the experts, through getting certifications through them, through also, and probably more important than all of that stuff, changing my own damn life. Right. I got mastery through showing up, through giving myself the permission to be successful. And so, if you're in this place and you're like, Okay, I don't really know where to start. Well, if you mimic, just go and look at what people are doing, it can be a lot of people, but if they're in the direction that you want to go, find out what they're doing and then you model it at a deeper level, which means that you do have to get integrated into their systems. A lot of times that's financially so you get the behind the curtains look. I mean that's a big reason why if you go and look at the coaching program that we offer through Think Unbroken at the Academy that entry level course is a paid course because we wanna make sure people are taking it seriously, right? We've got a thousand hours of podcast and a thousand blog posts and I don't know, 5,000 social media posts, and that all has content, but the people who come in and they really step into the modeling and they follow the system, it's incredible how they see their lives change. And then mastery comes through you narrowing down even deeper exactly what it is that you want and who you want to work with, and repeat that ad nauseam. Most people will go and learn something from one person and I've been guilty of this so it's very different. Learn something from one person and then jump to person, to person, to person, to person, person, and suddenly they've been learning from 37 different people, where in actuality, one of the most important things that you could do is get down to the core like if you can find a person that's really ideal, but if you can get three people now you're talking because you don't have all these people in your ear all the time telling you something different because you guys know this. And especially if you've made it this far into this episode, I'm not for everybody. My coaching style is very different than most people. I'm a little bit more aggressive. I'm a little bit more data driven. I'm a little bit more analytical. And so, is there an emotional capacity? Yes, of course, but I'm not emotion first because for me, I've always looked at it very simply and gone, has somebody done the thing I want to do? Great. How do I learn it? I'm gonna go and do it. And so, there is, while always there will be an emotional healing element, and we go through this deeply in not only the conferences we do, but in the programs and the books. But in coaching, I'm really like, let's get down to the thing that actually changes your life and that's action.

And so, that's the thing that you have to figure out like who fits what you are looking for? Can you create clarity about what you want? Can you mimic a group of people who at first seem to do it and then model by getting deeper into a select few people's courses, seminars, conferences, books, and then get super narrow to master what they do by going and relearning the same content again and again, and like when I wrote Think and Unbroken early on in the book, it says, you need to read this book again. You need to read a book, this book 50 times until you understand the concepts at depth, that's the same thing that I do with some books that I read, some podcasts that I consume, a lot of the education I bring into my life because I wanna have mastery over it because when I have mastery over it, it gives me mastery over my life and it helps me give the tools to you to help you have mastery over your life as well.

So, my friends, just something to think about today. I've used these mentors in my life, these amazing humans like Tom Bilyeu, Grant Cardone, John Lee Dumas, Liz Benny, Caroline Leaf, Amy Porterfield. I mean, I could just literally name drop all day long. But the thing that I know for sure that has benefited my life the most is getting mastery with just a couple of them, and that is what's been able to propel me further and faster than I have before.

So that said, my friends, thank you so much for being here. I hope that you're coming to Unbroken Con, go to unbrokencon.com to register. It's free to watch live, and of course, leave a review because if you take that 10 seconds to leave a review for this podcast, that means that you can help someone else find it. Also, at the end of October, I am picking someone to do a free one-on-one coaching session with, which is a $500 value from the new reviews for the month of October. So, if you have not left a review, go over to iTunes, look up, Think Unbroken Podcast, click the five stars, leave a review, let us know what you truly, genuinely think, and then at random, I'm gonna pick somebody on the end of the month for a coaching session.

All right, my friends.

Have an amazing day.

And Until Next Time.

Be unbroken.

I'll see you.