Stories of Transformation from Mental Health Leaders

Mental Health Advocate Jake Shannon on Living a 10x Life and the Importance of Self-Care

Michael:  I think the thing to take away from it more is cuz the vast majority of people have not wrestled Jake; I think we both know this. But I do wanna say that the thing I want people to hold onto in this is like life whether or not you fucking, like it is an individual sport. What you do has nothing to do with me, as much as I wish I could blame Jake for how bad my life sucks, how much I can't get the thing I want, no matter what, it's like, go and take inventory of your fucking calendar. Go look at the way you spend your time, your money, your effort, your energy, right? And look at the way that you present yourself into the world as the person that you are and have a willingness to look in that mirror, man, because that was the pivotal changing point for me too. And look, I don't wanna be fucking preachy cuz people have heard this before, but it's like, listen to this show, pay attention to people's stories like yours, Jake, because we all have something in common. We all had to get the fuck out of our own way.

Jake: A hundred percent, dude. But so, here's the other angle to that though, right? The thing that took me a while to earn as well. So, I do think wrestling is probably for me is, and grappling and martial arts, the greatest personal development tool that I ever really got involved with in the first place, right?

So, this is what I call the five pillars of greatness. I don't know, I'm listening too much to this personal development shit, so I'm coming up with my own. So, the first is like that get real that rock bottom, that man in the mirror moment. The second is getting obsessed. The third is taking calculated risks, right? Which I think hopefully we've talked about all these. The next one is that massive fucking action. And the thing that I was missing out the most that I have recently come to, and maybe it's as I approach 50 in my testosterone decreases, or I don't know what the hell or, because I got so many damn injuries, I can't really do what I used to do, but people is the fifth pillar and I had ignored it for a long time because I wanted to do everything myself, because exactly what you said, people let me down all the time, nobody worked as hard as me. Didn't do it the way I did it to my standards. And I did a lot of great stuff with those first four pillars. I did a lot of fucking cool stuff like I said, I started the mace, the whole fitness mace movement, which still blows my mind to the stand. I'm like, I still have to be like, oh, that was me shit.

Michael: Dude, I saw some video on YouTube, or I might have been TikTok a reel, whatever these things are the other day and I meant to send it to you and I was like, in passing and it had like 500,000 views and it was, or maybe you posted it, it was a girl with a mace just like doing this mace work. I was like, I know the guy who made that.

Jake: Yeah. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? Like, I'm like, I still am like wow. So, I was having massive impact, but I mean, I want like really massive. I want legacy, dude. I wanna die and have my like immortality. I don't want physical immortality. I want my shit to live on for like generations. Right? Like that's what I want, that's crazy.

Michael: But your shit is impact.

Jake: Yeah dude. So, that's gonna take people and that is that fifth pillar is you have to really learn to be a leader. And here's the irony. So going back on my story to when I was in college and I ended up going to college. So, when I got sick, I think I was a sophomore, it was between sophomore and junior year. I got sick and I just was like, fuck, I can't be physical right now. So, I doubled down on academics and I did great. Okay. Because I didn't have anything else to do, right? I ended up going to the University of Colorado on a scholarship, first person in my family to go to college, first person to get a scholarship like awesome, okay. I go on a prestigious leadership scholarship, right? I think it's like 50 out of the 10,000 incoming freshmen get chosen to be in this program. And I'm in this leadership program and I'm a loser dude. I'm like doing drugs. I'm like, pick the easy way out and I get in this leadership, and here my buddy, who's just this scrappy little skateboarding kid is getting mobilizing all these people to build skate parks and do all this stuff. Right. And that was the real lesson for me. Is if I wanna have big impact, like Thrasher level impact, right? Jake Phelps, the guy who ran it, who my friend took over from like that guy blew that shit up, it's live past his life, right? Like that's where I'm wanting to go with scientific wrestling and all this crazy shit that I do.

So, I think I might have done that with the mace, but the mace was just kind of a side project that was like luck in a way. I mean I did it and it was designed, but also it wasn't my intention. I was aiming over here and I hit over here, right? So, I'm like, okay, I need to do this with the wrestling thing and that's gonna take people. So, that is where the leadership component comes in. I do think that you have, I've started now in the last probably five or six years really taking that serious, like how do I get people to actually get into what I'm doing and how do I create a mutually a positive sum game? What Grant Cardone calls the Winners Exchange? Okay, that's awesome. But it's just a simple idea of win-win. How do I align people's interests with my interest? Like with what I wanna do? So that's really where I've gone in the business of this.

To me business is an ethical system, it's a moral system, right? Because I look at like human interaction. I like your unbroken shirt and I can either trick you or and steal it from you somehow, or coconut on the head and take it. Or I can give you 20 bucks and if the shirt is worth less than the 20 bucks, I have you give it me your shirt's worth more than the 20 bucks and we're both a win-win, we're both happy for the exchange, that is where I've been spending the last five or six years, almost entirely in business. So outside of the wrestling; the wrestling's, like my obsession, the wrestling is what has educated me, what has fulfilled me and is my life purpose. But just like I said, I'm aiming for that and I hid elsewhere like I've started all these other companies and like I started the first reverse mortgage consultancy.

Transform Your Life with Tyson Durfey_ Strategies for Making a Massive Shift

Michael: When you think about this journey for yourself and the path that it's now laid in front of you. How can people who have these massively abusive experiences in life and they haven't yet stepped into their power, they haven't yet stepped into the ability to be that person they know they're capable of being like, what does it really take? Because people are always like, it's motivation and its action. I'm like, no, there's something else there, and I'm wondering if there's something else there for you as well? 

Tyson: So here's the deal. I made the realization that my trauma doesn't define me who I am. Right? And if I play into that, I'm just a broke kid and I got beat up, every fight I got in, I lost. I'm not like you, not six four. I was like 85 pounds right at the time, you know, the low man on the totem pole, you know felt like, I know they love me, but they didn't really show it that much at the time and they were stressed out. And I think the truth is I realized that if I said yes to all that trauma, then I'm saying no to the rest of my life. And the truth is, I am not gonna let that happen. Right. So, I tie things to everything, right? I wanted to go and win and apply myself because I wanted a way out of the life that I was living, right? And every day I heard you're dumb as a box of rocks, you're not gonna amount to shit, you're dumb and I mean, that wasn't just my father, that was just like how everybody talked to people back then. I'm like, they would say that and I noticed myself starting to accept it just a little bit, kind of soaking back. And when I was 13, I went into my dad's room, I grabbed his 30-30 lever action rifle, and I put it in my mouth and I went to pull the trigger. And I just remember being like alone, you know. In that moment, I think it's the grace of God, even though I didn't believe in God at that point that pulled that gun out of my mouth and realized to say, no more, no more am I gonna let these labels affect the rest of my life because if I say yes to this decision, literally with the gun of my mouth, I say no to the rest of my life. But it's the same thing holding onto regret, it's the same thing holding on to past failures. It's the same thing holding on somebody who cast a label on you and you accepted it, it's the exact same. So, realize that you must say no to that so that you can say yes to the rest of your life. You cannot let it define you.

 Michael: Yeah. I would have the goosebumps sitting here hearing that because I resonate with that in such a deep way looking at 26 years old hitting this massive rock bottom dude, just as low as I could possibly ever be, and realizing it was a truth that I had to accept that I was being exactly what everyone ever said I would be. It's what you just said, man, I was like, fuck, dude. I am literally such a loser. I'm such a loser. And look, that's a hard moment to have with yourself. And it's not about, for me in that moment, it wasn't even like I'm beating myself up about it, it's like, dude, you are a loser because look at your decisions, look at your actions, look at your friends, dude, look at the people you're spending your time with. Do you think that these people are ever going to grow into what they have the potential to be? Because all they're doing is getting high snorting coke, getting drunk, and I'm like, what are you doing? And that identity shift is everything. 

Tyson: Yeah, man, you're hitting the nail right on the head and it takes a person with a little amount of pride or so much pain that allows it to squash the pride to say, Hey, you know what, I'm not doing this right. I'm not doing this right at all, you know what? It's my fault. It's not their fault. It's like whenever I was growing up and I was in every learning disability class for a while, I believed they said, you're done, you're no good, you're boxer rock. Well, no wonder I was in every learning disability cast ‘cuz I was a little kid and that's what I heard and I came from a broken home. So, I'm like, I don't care to read, I don't care to apply myself in school. But when I quit listening to that and I said no more. I drop my pride, I drop the labels and say, Hey, let's go. Let's go. And like most people think this turnaround is like three years, five years once you get the accolade, like I'm a world champion and I'll be honest with you, it means shit, it doesn't matter ‘cuz I will not allow label to define the rest of my life, whether it's world champion or dumbest. I put one foot in front of the other and realize that change happened the moment you decide, the change in your life happens in the moment you decide, not three years later, and when you have that in your brain, it's like, I'm winning right now just by taking this step in the damn right direction.

 Michael: Yeah. I wanna go into that because think this is really important because there are people, I promise you, dude, I've been doing this long enough that I know. There are people listening right now who are like, these two assholes are victim shaming and I'm like, no, we're not. What we're doing is simply telling you the truth, and that's what people are so terrified of. There is something innately within us that wants to hide and avoid reality so that we feel safe. People ask me all the time, they're like, what does it mean to actually heal trauma? And Tyson, my answer is always this, it's to stand in your truth without apologizing for it. And what I'm wondering is people have this notion, they're like, man, I know I can change. I believe it in me. I listen to Michael and Tyson all the time. I read the books. I'm in the chorus. I'm doing all the things, but my life isn't indifferent. Why isn't their life different? 

Tyson: Check your surroundings of who you're around. You see, when I left the Midwest, again, my dad and I had a knockdown drag out. I had enough at that point and I grabbed him by the throat and I was choking him to death. He wouldn't even remember this because he was so out of it. Right? Thank God somebody pulled us apart or else I could very well be never doing this, I could never have the family I have, I could never have anything, right? I moved almost 1800 miles away to Washington State as far as I could get away for new surroundings. I had nothing. I had very little money enough to put gas in the tank. I had a few things I had put in the back of my pickup. I had nothing, I had nothing, but I was willing to do everything to get new surroundings. Guys, if you're struggling, if this is you right now, I feel like, man, my relationships are bad, I'm in around a bad group of people like, get out, get out. I say it to people all the time. See, I had the ability to live that urban lifestyle and the country boy lifestyle, right? If you're in an area where there's high crime and your kids aren't having a chance and you say, well, I fit in here. I wouldn't fit in; in a rural community, bull crap. Get somewhere where you can change, where you can shift, where your family can be safe, where you can grow, get around people that take you to the next level ‘cuz here's the deal, if you don't get around those people, you're better off to be alone, and that was my journey for a long time, was alone because I liked listening to Tony Robbins, I liked listening to Les Brown, I love Scott Thomas like, I love these. So I'm like, none of my friends like this stuff.

Exploring the Transformative Power of Writing and Vulnerability with Ross Gay

Michael: Have you experienced anything like that in your journey of, and not even necessarily as whether it be a person of color, whether it be as a man, as an athlete, as a poet, but as you discover who you are, what power has writing given you?

Ross: You know, I mean there's all kinds of ways that, you know, like sort of carrying on some of the previous ways that I was sort of answering, you know, there's ways that when I'm writing something, I'm writing with a question, I'm writing and you know, I write about things that I do not know or do not understand, and the writing is a kind of way to engage in some way with what I do not understand. So, there's a way that my writing life, my engagement with writing is a way of sort of coming to understand myself and other things more deeply. But there's this other thing I think, and that catalog of Unabashed gratitude book I feel like is beginning to sort of get to that. And I have this book called The Book of the Delights, where every day for a year more or less I wrote a short essay about something that delighted me. You know, it's a full book, it's not just delightful because it's written by a person. And one of the things that I sort of am finding more and more is that I mean, a couple things. I mean, the first thing is that like in writing this book of the delight, you know, I'm writing every single day almost. I don't do everything every single day like a job. But one of the things that I find is I'm like, I eventually found out that, oh, my question is joy.  Joy is my real fundamental question, you know, like delight is interesting and it's kind of like a segment or some kind of participant in joy, but joy is my real question. And joy to me is like this profound and like sort of grave emotion actually. And partly it's grave because joy to me is like, its kind something registers as joy or you enter into joy when you're also deeply aware of the fact that we're going to die that we're in the process of dying. And there's some kind of like holding of that understanding with each other, it requires witness, you know, profound witness that, and I'm saying the word with like with but I hear it, it’s sounding a little bit like witness which is interesting to me at this moment. But there's a kind of holding each other's, whatever you call that, you know, fleetingness passing this tenderness which is soft, and it is vulnerable. And it's also, to me, it is this kind of reaching, it's a kind of routine that to me, constitute the reason to be alive, you know what I mean? And so, and this is stuff that I'm sort of think, you know, I'm learning this in therapy and I'm learning this in conversation, but I'm also learning it and studying it in my writing. So, that in a way, if I were to talk about a kind of power that I'm sort of learning about in my writing, it's in a way, and power is a word that, you know, I would never say it, but it's an interesting word. What I feel like I'm learning is how fundamentally, fundamentally entangled I am with you, with everything. How fundamentally entangled we are? How we are not without each other, you know? And that to me is a kind of, you know, there's all these words for it, one of the words is gratitude to know that we do not exist, we do not exist, you know, without the tree out this, like, without the biome, without what we do not even recognize is there, we do not exist. And to sort of like inhabit this sense of sort of perpetual, oh, I'm in a kind of beautiful debt constantly or I am beholden constantly. I am not without all of this, which is to say, and that the word for that, you know, one of the words for that is gratitude. One of words for that is to me, joy, you know?

Michael: Yeah. That's so beautiful. I'm actually enamored by you saying that because I resonate in such a deep way, because I look at the world as interconnected and the fact that it is so much a part of our community through human connection that brings us together and my experience as being this kid who was very much lost. Right? Very much on the wrong side of the track, just seeking something would find myself completely displaced by writing and deep within books and I would be the kid who would elect to take the library class in high school. So that in the library, I didn't have to exist within the frames of the scope of humanity. But the irony in that finding the joy in book reading, being my connection to humans, right? And thinking about this thing as, wow, okay, these words resonate because as writers, now as a writer, and looking at this and thinking about one, the power of a challenge, the fact that you wrote every day, or almost seemingly every day, to create something for no other reason than the fact that to create, it brought you something that felt good or powerful, or whatever that word might be that you would use, it's enthralling to me. What I'm curious about, and if you don't mind if I can push you a little bit, ‘cuz I think that people would appreciate it, is how do you even step into that level of vulnerability with yourself to sit down and take the things that are on your mind and put them into a place where they exist?Not necessarily forever, i.e.on the internet, but just out of you and onto the world?

Ross: I mean, in one way it's like, there are things probably that I don't, you know, that I keep private, of course. In another way it's like, I guess as a writer part of my sort of, one of the ways that I sort of exist in the world is to like, I'm gonna share my questions, you know, I'm gonna share my questions. I think your question is like, how do you get to that point of that vulnerability, if I hear you right?

Michael: Yeah. Within yourself.

Ross: I don't know. You know, I'm inclined to be like in community, I have people who I love hold my work and whose work I hold. And so, people who can kind of like see what I'm trying to do and be like, this is worthwhile, you know, these questions, this action or whatever thisthis thing is good ‘cause I actually that matters to me. People I love and trust being like, yeah, that's good.

The Peaceful Man's Journey of Healing and Transformation with Brad Mewhort

Michael: And so, what I'm thinking in real time, it's like, how do you even combat that? It's like the same conversation around sex, like it's everywhere, but people don't talk about it. So how do you navigate when you're like, man, I'm always feeling triggered, I'm always feeling in hypervigilant and I always feel outside of my body, but it's everywhere like, Brad, what do you do, man?

Brad: Well, on a societal level, I think it's really difficult to combat directly, even that word I use combat it or fighting it. I think that the deepest solution, really the only long-lasting solution that's going to have a major impact is for individual men to go on their healing journeys, to do their healing work and for enough men to do that work to really shift the way things are, the perspectives. And you know, I think things have gotten better, let's say, in my lifetime and they have a long way to go, that's not to say we're almost there, not by any stretch of the imagination, it's like we're a little bit further along, but there's a lot further to go and I see that just individual men doing their deep healing work and really in a sense, overcoming their individual trauma so that they don't spread it. You know, you mentioned this, the patterns, the cycles of violence I think the violence that we see in some sense, it's all cycles that probably goes back centuries to the Middle Ages when things were, you know, ridiculously more violent than, than they are now, maybe even goes back further than that. And the way I see it, when a man experiences, let's say, when a boy experiences his body being disrespected, his boundaries being violated, that boy learns that bodies and boundaries are not something to be that need to be respected, he actually learns to do that to others. And this is not to say that all boys, all men who are victims of violence will go on to commit violence. And yet I'm willing to bet that there are not very men who act violently, who haven’t been victims of violence themselves. In fact, I would be willing to bet that it's extraordinarily rare for someone to commit violence who hasn't already been a victim of it.

So, this is where the importance I think of doing the healing work is men, you know, and I'm focusing on men because that's men doing their healing work because that's who commits the most violence and it seems to me, you know boys will be boys, the violence against boys and men is often kind of discounted or accepted. And so there's so much violence committed against men by other, other men, boys and men, and I think doing individual men doing their healing work is the way of breaking these cycles, such that on both small and large scales, this violence doesn't get committed against others and we break these cycles.

Michael: Yeah. And you know, I'd be hard pressed not to say that part of me knows that as humans, we are prone to violence, it's our nature. Go look at, we live in the safest time ever. This is what people don't understand. We live in the safest time ever. Humans have been so terrible to each, like, dude, it's f*** crazy what we've done to each other over the time that we've been here. And yet we live in the safest time of all time. And I think that there has to be a healthy expression of violence ‘cuz boys will be boys like I do think that, but there has to be this healthy expression of, that's why I love sports, I love martial arts, I love the discipline involved in it and that's how I fell into it. Right. Sports without martial arts, God knows what the kind of shit I would've really started to do, not that I didn't do some really f** up stuff. And I think about that today, how it served me. Martial arts has given me discipline, it's given me the ability to handle really difficult moments of my life. And also, here's what's really interesting, and I don't know if I'm curious if your military training has given you this because when I learned to defend myself, I realized I never have to use it and that's been this really beautiful journey for me. And getting into healing, and I want to go into your story a little bit more in depth here. I realized I was never violent physically in relationships, like intimate relationships with women, I was never violent ‘cause I saw my stepdad beat up my mom and I was like, I don't want to do that. But my God man, the verbal violence was unbelievable, not only what I would say to myself, but what I would say to my partners, to my brothers, even my friends, and it was like I hit this rock bottom moment. And I was like, you gotta change everything dude, you're destroying everything in your path. And I don't think most, and I'm gonna speak as a man ‘cause I am a man, I don't think most men realize it ‘cuz we grow up believing that it's okay to be this way. And then it's reinforced through society like we're talking and then in your home and bullying and things of that nature. And so, I'm wondering, it took my life becoming a complete disaster for me to address this thing that was destroying me. And I'm wondering what happened for you? Like what was your journey into healing like where did that begin?

Brad: Well, it really started in my first marriage, it was not going well and I was really, you know, specifically looking to, you know what, I take that back that actually that was actually kind of what came secondarily. I was having health issue and was getting nowhere, you know, dealing with them in kind of a medical, physical type of way, there's nothing there. It was actually a hypnotherapist who I first worked with, and it was kind of like as soon as I just started pulling back the cover on all of what I was feeling, all of the trauma that I just kind of like, put in a box and moved beyond in some ways, at least from on a superficial level my life looked like it was going pretty well at that point, but I wasn't feeling that I was struggling and I've in a sense always been very good at keeping my life together in terms of going through school, career, etcetera. So, it looked like things were going well, but they weren't really, emotionally I was kind of a mess and it was kind of the physical issues I was having that started to pull back the layers, and as soon as it did, it was just kind of like, oh, wow, yeah, there's a lot here that I need to work on. So, it wasn't so much of a rock bottom for me as what I had put away, repressed, just finding a way to the surface, not accepting the repression, which I think is the way it, you know, its repression is rarely going to be long lasting. And in a sense, you know, I'm glad it came out for me in as mild away as it did when I was relatively young so that I could be forced to work on it at that point, ‘cuz it certainly can go a lot longer, a lot deeper.