The Journey of Healing CPTSD and Rebuilding Life after Addiction | with Goose McGrath

Michael: Hey, what's up, Unbroken Nation? Hope that you're doing well, my friends. I'm excited to be back with you. Today's episode with my guest, Goose McGrath, who is the host of the Wild Goose Chase Podcast, the author of Limitless: The Renegade's Guide to Building Wealth Through Property, and A guy who has an amazing philosophy about life and what it means to create not only a success but really embody this concept that we talk about here on the show all the time, how to be the hero of your own story. Goose, my friend, welcome to the show.

Goose: How are you today? Michael, it's such a pleasure. I'm delighted to be joining you. And I'm great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Michael: Yeah, it's an honor, man. It's funny because when I look at individual journeys who are on this path to both healing and success, there are some, Markers that we can look at and we can measure ourselves by and I think that anyone who can build a lifestyle and a business and kind of the way that you have and also do it so quickly says a lot about someone's drive, their relentlessness, their resiliency and their willingness to really go all out and I think that's a very difficult thing. And so I'm wondering how much of your success now is baked into, like your childhood and how much of your success now is a byproduct of how you grew up.

Goose: It's a really good question, and I've actually thought about this quite a lot, actually. And I think that a lot of who I am today is who I was when I was a kid and was shaped by the, those experiences. So a lot of the things that have defined my path over the last few years, noting that just like five, five years ago, I was an alcoholic drug addict. I was broke, I was homeless, I was living on my office floor. Like this has been a pretty swift transition to what's ostensibly a I think it's a fantastic life and extraordinary life, which is by design. And if I look at the characteristics that I lost and then re-found, along the way, there were characteristics that I was displaying when I was a kid, characteristics of curiosity and leadership and, entrepreneurialism in it, in its own way. And so I think also, I think everyone's got stuff from their childhood, like nobody's parents were perfect. Everyone's got shit that I dealt with to varying degrees. And I've got my own shit, but one of the things that I actually credit my parents with is that they never stifled my ability to think big, partly because I just would never listen to them anyway. And I didn't recognize it at the time. I didn't but they would like, I would have big ideas and they would actually encourage me to do those things, which was pretty unique. And, we didn't grow up in a I would say we were like working class family type scenario, but not, so we didn't have a lot of means, but nonetheless, they would still encourage me to aim high and dream big. And I think that's translated a lot through to today as well.

Michael: When you look at those moments with, you said something really important, he said life by design, and I think this is a concept that really gets lost on people is this idea that you can actually create this. And when I wrote, think I'm broken, the first book, one of the sub chapters of it is titled create you or a section title is called create you. And the reason why is because I fully believe in our ability to create our lives, to create both the positive and the negative, and yet here we are in this position of talking about success and you and I share a commonality. I've also been homeless, I've also struggled with drugs and alcohol, I've also struggled in not having the next step in front of me and continuing to go back to old behavioral patterns. What started to transpire in your life? Because here's, I'm asking you this question because I know that there are people right now who are listening who are struggling desperately. The alcohol is taking over, the drugs are taking over, the sex addiction is taking over, the porn addiction is taking over they're sleeping on the office floor, nothing is working. I want to paint a real picture here. What was happening in your life then, and then what happened that created the shift?

Goose: So there's a lot, there's a lot to unpack there. So let's maybe dance around this a little bit because I think there's a lot to unpack there. I think that if you're asking me like what led to me being in that position, I would say a complete loss of self identity. And in fact, I look at it, I look at it right now. I look at it now, objectively looking backwards. And one of the things that I didn't realize is that I'm exceptionally introverted, like my natural proclivities is an introvert and I'm socially awkward, and once growing up in order to fit in, I found patterns of behavior that people seem to deem acceptable, which were things like, get really drunk, get really wasted, be that kind of guy at the party. And that kind of gave me social acceptance, which proliferated a pattern that's how I should show up and interact with the world, and that pattern pervaded all through my 20s and that became like how I thought that became the person that I thought that I was, but it was never who I truly was. Which is obviously a massive problem because when you get disconnected from your true self and you start living a false self, there is no pathway through that doesn't lead to severe depression and disconnection and all of that kind of stuff. The other side of that, the other side of that coin though, is that, when you are suffering, when you are becoming disconnected from yourself, your identity, who you truly are, your true nature, who you truly are, and you start to experience depression and all this lack and loss and all of this kind of stuff. The other side of that is drugs and alcohol are very high, they're highly dopamine signaling. So these things that make you feel good as well, then also the thing that kind of leads you further away from the person you are. So you've got this vicious cycle of I drink, I take drugs, I feel better. I get to forget about that dissonance, that that disconnection, that discordance with who I truly am. Therefore, I get to drown myself in the process of doing that. You work for the further, walk further and further away. Now I had a lot of stuff, like I basically through my, I left school when I was 17, started my own business, did all that kind of stuff, but basically from like the age of 16 through to the age of 30, I was like tremendously abusing drugs and alcohol like at a gargantuan scale. And lots of stuff happened. I got married, that was crazy. Like all kinds of weird stuff happened and all of this pathway, I just didn't know who I was anymore. And that I think was the kind of biggest disconnect. Now the transition from that is interesting because I actually didn't give a shit about myself because why would I care about someone who I'm not, I actually had no sense of self worth. Because why would I? Because I wasn't being the person who I was, so it was useless, the me that I was in the world had no actual value to me because it wasn't actually me. And so I had no self worth. So I actually didn't care that I was killing myself. I knew it, I was like, like I would literally, and I'm not saying this to try and brag, but just to give context, I would literally towards the end of this kind of period of my life, when things were getting progressively worse and worse, I would wake up and I'd drink about half a bottle of straight vodka and do a gram of cocaine before I'd even have my morning coffee, that was how I was starting the day. That's how bad that it got, and I'm a reasonably intelligent guy. And I completely understood that's a pathway to an early grave, you're not going to, you don't live to grow old on that kind of a diet, but I didn't care, why would I, and it was only when I had something to lose that I cared about more than myself, that I had a strong enough impetus to change. And if you don't mind, I'll keep expanding on it, ‘cause I think it's useful and we'll go on a good path. I met my partner, Gabby. She, I was running a business at the time, which in and of itself, I thought it was a business, not really a business, but there's a whole another story. She came to work with the business at the time I was living on my office floor, I had nowhere to go, I had no money, all of this kind of stuff. Don't know what she saw in me at the time, but for whatever reason, we fell in love, and all of a sudden. I was like, ah, okay, here's something that is useful to me, like useful in the context of I've found someone to love something that actually gives me joy in my life. That didn't trigger an instant change, I didn't just fall in love, and all of a sudden I'm like a year, two years into the relationship and my abuse had gotten worse and eventually got to the point where she said, Hey, look, I can't sit around and watch you kill yourself anymore. So I'm going to go, and if you want, like you can like, you gotta, basically you got a choice to make. She didn't say that, she didn't give me an ultimatum, but she said, I just, I can't watch this anymore, and there's a whole story around that. We were working on a festival site, all this kind of stuff. But the root of it is that for the first time, I didn't care that I was gonna, that I was gonna die, what I cared about was that I was gonna lose Gabby, and that was enough. That was enough of a trigger, and there's a big lesson in that, right? The lesson isn't go find your soulmate. The lesson is that you need to be able to find something bigger than yourself. Because when you're in that modality where you are abusing yourself, you're not in a modality of self love and self care. You can say, come on, man, you should be better, you should take better care of yourself, you don't care, you're beyond that. So what you need to do is you actually need to find something that is bigger than you, and that bigger than you is also then going to be tied to a life worth living, right? Because when you're in the modality of abuse and suffering and pain, life is not worth living, you're making that choice. Everyone knows it. Like heroin addicts, they know that they're addicted to heroin, they know what heroin addicts are like. They know where it's going, and so how do you then throw an anchor and hook onto something to create a life worth living now? And the first instance, Gabby was that life jacket, right? She was the one that kind of like in that was like, okay, I've got something, I've got pulled in an anchor. I've got something to pull on there. And together we've now gone and crafted a life by design and life with designing a life. Lifestyle design is something I'm so passionate about because that is actually the outcome of living a path of self actualization, which we can dig into as well.

Michael: Yeah. That's powerful. And I love that you set us up for reality, it's don't go try to find your soulmate, that's not the solution. I think that they're obviously are very fortunate to have that experience, and there's many people who I know personally have had as well. And you look at that and it's what can you hold on to? But one of the One of the stark difficulties in that is, if you're like me and you grow up with no parents, if you grow up on the streets, you grew up doing drugs, you will hold on to anything. And this is where people get stuck so frequently because they'll hold on to the career that doesn't serve them, they'll hold on to the abusive partner, they'll hold on to all of the ideas and notions that don't lead them forward, right? And then you're, they're looking at their life and they're like, why is my life so bad? And they don't understand and look, I didn't understand this either, it sounds like you were in the same boat where the reality is it takes as much energy to create your life as it does to destroy your life, and when you're In that moment, sometimes, and you see this frequently and it's devastating, the people around you, there will show you the signs. They're like, dude, get your life together, like this is the thing that you're doing, this is what's happening, and for some of us, it's not enough, and sometimes the ultimatum still is not enough. When you're looking at your life in that moment, where did you like really begin the process? Because I think that a lot of people think success is I'm going to just change my life overnight. And I'm sitting here 13 years into this journey and it's like still working through it. Still therapy, still coaching, still meditate, like still all the things, I'm a couple days away from my next Tony Robbins event because it's dude, you have to keep doing the work. So when you started this process, like what was the beginning, like not what were the steps like necessarily, but what was going through your mind? What was happening when you were if you were still screwing up, what was the start of this?

Goose: So the first thing I'll point out is that there's no, there's never a light switch. There isn't a moment where you are one way and then all of a sudden you're another way, in fact, when I was younger, I actually worked for, I worked in construction when I was younger and I worked for a builder and he was an Irish guy and he told me he was an alcoholic, but he hadn't had a drink in 20 years. But he told me he was an alcoholic. I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? You haven't had a drink in 20 years, you're not an alcoholic, I was like, come out and have a beer with me. You haven't had a beer. And he's no, what you don't understand is I'll always be an alcoholic and I didn't get it at the time. He was actually part of my recovery journey as well, which was pretty cool, which was pretty cool. But to your point that you said 13 years, I think it was, it's Life is a garden, like you need to continue to weed it, you don't just plant it and then go, Hey, I've planted the seeds of success in whatever format that might look like. Because, financially is only one very small component of what success truly is. But you need to continue to tend to it less to become overgrown, and unless you lose track of the thing that you really set out to do in the first place. So there is no moment where you switch from A to B. That being said, there's two very distinct phases, there's many phases in my life. There's definitely two distinct, parts the part of my life where I was drinking, taking drugs and all of that kind of stuff, and then the after part, which is sobriety. So there's two, definitely two distinct phases. Although that even on the sobriety side, it's not Hey, I've achieved sobriety, and then that creates some baseline of existence that just continues on. It's every single day compounds into a better existence, which necessarily means that it's a journey. It's a continuous process, but going back to the kind of the question you had around what would the initial stages like within the initial stages were painful, when you're trying to evolve from one version of yourself into another one, it is painful. No change, all change is friction, necessarily. There cannot be change without friction and friction, can be tough, friction creates fires, friction creates pain. And so the heart like this, there's several things that need to change in order for you to be able to change. One of them is physical, right? You literally need to buy on a physiological level, start to act differently. So whether that be changing the things that you're consuming, whether that be drugs and alcohol, whatever, changing your diet or changing the way you move now. For in my instance I, again, I was like smoking, drinking, the whole thing, not exercising, we're really overweight, I literally went cold turkey on everything on day one, quit carbs, went keto, started going to the gym every day. Like I like, I went to an extreme end to it. Now I can sit here and say, man, I remember the first month or whatever, and it was I'm certain that I struggled with withdrawals and all of that kind of stuff, I'm certain that I did. However, that's not what I remember. What I remember is this feeling, and I can still feel this right now as I'm telling you this. I remember feeling like I could see again for the first time in most of my life, I felt like I had a veil that got lifted from my eyes, and so whilst there was probably lots of pain and suffering and torment and all of this kind of stuff, and that's probably what I experienced in the moment. Looking back on it, that is not the thing that I remember, the thing that I remember is I felt like for the first time I could see the world anew, like I could see who I was coming back, my brain turning on, my self realization of my identity, which was huge, which actually is the other part of this. So I mentioned the physical part, but in order for change to, in order for change to actually happen, you need to change the identity of who you are, and it was only gaining the clarity of mind that I was able to actually start to ask myself the question. I was, I had to reintroduce myself to myself, I was like, okay, you can think clearly again. So who are you? What is this all about? What are you doing? Are you happy? Where are you going? But it was only through being able to give myself the clarity of mind that I was able to start asking those questions. Those questions led me to led me to start to shape my identity, my identity started to shape my actions. My actions took me on a path to where I am today. No one's life is perfect, so despite the fact that I'm like, yay, life is great. And I'm, I couldn't be happier with my life at the moment, but it's not perfect, right? It's a whirlwind journey. But it's these sequences of changes that have to happen and just to bookend that as well. Again, that even that wasn't some magical moment where I suddenly discovered myself and then hurrah, I went on to do wonderful things, man, I had. I had a couple of relapses, bad ones, like that entire year, the rest of that entire year, all kinds of things happened, my business went bankrupt I had, I organized a festival that failed, I lost like a million dollars my business failed, I completely ruined a massive other project that I was working on because of a variety of, circumstances out of my control, but it was a failure, I relapsed on alcohol twice, I realized, and I realized that it wasn't a smooth transition. But these things happen in steps and it's these things compound as well. So they happen slowly at first and then all at once you, these small actions that seemingly feel like my new little pieces of progress on the path over time. You wake up one day and you go, how the hell did I get here? But that only happens through the small.

Michael: Yeah, that's so true, man. I love that you just said that. And there's no time I've ever been on this journey, and I've thought to myself, I'm good, I'm done, I'm not stepping in front of a potential boss every day of my life, and I think that's a really hard thing for people to wrap their heads around, especially at the beginning, because you're like, man, I went cold turkey and I got on keto and I started taking care of myself. And you don't understand that, that's at the beginning, that's not enough. And honestly, it's probably not enough now. You're like, okay, how do I take care of myself mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially? And all of the ways that one has to take care of themselves, and then balance, this is what's so crazy because the first time that you fall down, the first time that you mess up, and you do the thing you promised yourself you would never do again. Like for some people that destroys them and one of the things I'm always trying to explain to my clients is that it's about taking lessons from that experience and extending the period of time and hopefully to never, but expending the period of time to, into the space between occurrences, it's man, if you relapse after three months, next time, can it be sick? And then can it be six years? And then it can it be 60 years, right? And I think that's so much of the journey is being able to sit in that and it's oddly profound in some really weird way when you sit back and you look at it objectively and you recognize that this is just a game. And it seems so weird and it seems like something like a throw away or a nonchalant thing that people say, but this healing journey is a game because if you go look at the occurrence is right because we all have these things that you can track back. I can look at my childhood and I can say that's probably the reason I drink because I watched my parents drink, right? I watched my grandmother drink, I watched my uncle drink and eventually go to prison. I can look at smoking weed. At 12 years old, I got high for the first time and it became an escape mechanism, it made me feel good, right? And then I can look at dealing with sex and love addiction and track being abandoned as a child and having parents that chose everything except their kids and growing up in the system. And if you like pay attention to those things, you recognize like they're just patterns. And if you can interrupt those patterns, that's how you find success. But on the occasion, no matter the amount of work that you done and look, you're a successful guy, tons of people, I know tons of people. We all know this is true, everyone has the moment where they fall back. Everyone does, and if you're around people who say that they don't, they're a liar and they're hiding from reality or they've now found a new coping mechanism and they don't want to admit it a lot for, ultra, ultra marathons, workaholism, whatever that thing is. And we're all afraid of this. It's just human nature, what are the things in those moments? Because I want to really go into this, you've been able to transform your life in this really beautiful way, but I know there's people right now who are like, I'm never going to have what Michael and Goose have. That's not in my card, even though I've been listening to this podcast for five years, and I know all the things to do, I can't seem to get it. I don't, I understand what they're saying, but I can't seem to make it happen in my life. What does somebody really have to do here, Goose? If you really want to make your life, what do you have to do?

Goose: I think there's a few things in there. I can't tell anyone what to do, right? Let me share some thoughts that I think might be useful. So there's a couple of considerations we need to have in here. What is, what actually even is success? And I think a better proxy would be happens. Because like success, people think it's like, Oh, have you made a heap of money or can you do whatever, but it's realistically, it's happiness, a couple of topics I want to touch on in this context is the death is the secret to life. I'm going to come back to that, but asking yourself first, what is, what would actually make you happy? Because we have these ideas that, okay I will only be successful if I X or my favorite, the when then fallacy, when I do X, then I will feel Y. So when I've made a million dollars, then I'll finally be happy. And so you have these kind of ideas of what is success and you put them on a pedestal. And they can number one, be extremely misleading and number two, feel unattainable to people. And because we have these incorrect reference points for what success is, it can actually make it feel like it's out of reach for everyone because a million dollars, that doesn't make you successful or unsuccessful to Elon Musk. A million dollars is like a rounding error to someone who like to, to me five years ago, a million dollars was more money than I could conceive. And so how do you join those two things together? So the question you've got to ask yourself is how will I know if I've lived a good life and what is happiness? And so what I mean by death is the secret to life, understanding, appreciating, celebrating the fact that we are living an extremely finite existence where we are at the blink of an eye. We're put parentheses in eternity. We are absolutely nothing in the context of an infinite amount of time and space. We have this tremendously valuable opportunity to experience the fact that we can experience anything is just so profoundly insane. Now we get to choose how we perceive this experience, what is pain? Pain is only signal. We then decide whether or not that is good or bad, there is no good or bad, there's only what we perceive it to be. And so we then get to decide how do we want to perceive our life? Because there are many rich people who are suffering, who are unhappy, who are depressed, because even though the fact they might be rich and they've got a nice house and a nice car, they're comparing themselves to somebody else, and they're saying, but I'm not as good as them, therefore I suck. And that's just, that's the wrong point of reference, and so what they're choosing, despite their material success or otherwise, they're choosing pain, they're choosing suffering. There's a phrase or a frame of reference from Zen Buddhism, and I'll butcher it a little bit, but I'll get the context correct. Happiness is only found in the fleeting moment, between the changing of desires, because all desire is suffering. All striving is suffering, and in those, in that brief moment between either when you've achieved or let go of a desire and before you spontaneously grab another desire and then sit on a new path of struggling and striving and suffering, you experience happiness because happiness is being devoid of suffering. And so if you can get yourself to a place of being devoid of suffering, then you're going to find happiness, which is actually purely based around your perception of your reality, and which then goes back to the point that I was making about the guy who's uber successful, but comparing himself to somebody else and thus sitting in a place of suffering. The only suitable point of reference you can have is yourself. There is no other reference point that you can have that is in any way useful to you. Other than you, there's no point comparing yourself to me because we've got different stories. We've come from different backgrounds, we've had different experiences, different inputs, we've it's all different. So that'd be like, it's the old saying, it's like comparing apples to oranges, or it's more like comparing an apple to, I don't know, a lizard, something completely different. There is no point of reference. So the only suitable point of reference that you have is yourself. So then the only real question you can ask yourself is, am I becoming the best version of myself? That's the only thing you can ask, and it's for, just, just to finish on that, that that's the reason that I think that self actualization is the only worthy goal, that's where the answer is.

Michael: Yeah, I agree entirely, and it's so difficult because again, going back to the reference of life being a game, there's one player in the game, there are not more than one players, there are not a team, like even though we need teams to succeed, right? It's just you versus you. And it's incredibly difficult because for many people, and look, I was in this seat too. I would just look at the outside world. I'm like, why can't I have what they have? And you realize so much of it is a facade. So much of what they have is not true. I saw this amazing video the other day or this guy who's a very successful entrepreneur was talking about how he had bought a Lamborghini and he had spent like three quarters of a million dollars on it. And after having it for about a year, he went and sold it and bought a Toyota Camry. If you think about that, you're talking about a car and a Toyota Camry that is worth 20th of a Lamborghini, right? And he said that he realized that he was trying to keep up appearances because he thought that's what made him happy. And he realized that what made him happy was doing the thing that made him happy, and it's funny because happiness is just, for what you said, it's a beautiful reference, happiness is fleeting, it's a moment like other moments of life. And when you recognize that this too shall pass, most of life is just in the middle, right? You're going to have moments where you're happy, you're going to have moments where you're not, and in the middle is just the day to day. Like, how are you living? How are you showing up? How are you connecting? You keep using This phrase, self actualization, I love it. It's actually one of, it is actually one of my values. Self actualization is a value for me, and self actualization to me means living truly into the fullest realization of who I believe that I can be. And what's interesting about that goose is like self actualization, I want to go into this conversation with you because I think this is going to be really interesting. I think self actualization is beyond just oh, I created this life, right? I think self actualization is also in the things you say in the things that you do in your boundaries, in your values, in your mission, it's so much about leaving everything on the table so that when you look back at your life, because I agree, if you change your relationship with time and death, you will change the way you operate in the world and self actualization, however. Is the most terrifying journey that anyone can go on because the one for many and you said this, you're like, I didn't have an identity, right? That was my experience as well, a lot of identity is stripped from us. If you go through childhood trauma, if you had abuse, generally speaking, you lose your identity in that process. Self actualization is the discovery of identity. And so now you're facing the biggest fear that you've ever faced because you have no idea what it's like to be you. When you think about self actualization, if you parse that down a little bit more, if you created a narrative around what it means to you, how would you explain self actualization?

Goose: To me, self actualization is the continuous and never ending process of becoming the next best version or becoming the best version of yourself. Now, the interesting part about that is that it's never ending. You don't become self actualized, right? It, as you progress on the path, every step that you take on the path of self actualization leads you to another step that you need to put in front of yourself in order to become the next best version of yourself. So it's a continuous unending process, which is fascinating. Because just, I want to anchor this back and I want to potentially say something contrary to, to, to the point you made on identity, right? So in the early, in the first stages, discovering your identity and developing an identity and, going on that identity transformation journey is critically important. But in order to be able to continuously traverse an endless process of change, one of the worst things you can do is have an anchor to your identity, because your identity actually shapes who you are. It actually can become a dead weight on you. So when you can get to a point where you can know yourself, but also live in a transcendent state of any identity so that you're not saying my name is Goose and I'm an entrepreneur because I'm putting a label on myself and I'm deciding that this is the box that I'm going to put myself into versus saying, I'm living, I'm here. My name is Goose and I'm living, I'm on a path, and so once you can actually start to break down the boundaries of identity in a pursuit of continuously new evolutions of yourself, that's when you start to uncover, all kinds of weird and wonderful and frankly, exceptional things. But the way that I think about this in a more practical context, because I've got a little bit atmospheric there, is imagine it's your last day on earth, the final day, you're about to exit all of your final chance to ever experience anything, and you're looking back on your life. How would you know, if you like how are you going to feel like, how would you know, if you've lived a good life, are you going to feel gratitude and be like, oh my God, this was, I've just, oh my God, I can't believe I lived such an amazing life or are you going to feel dismay thinking, man, I can't believe I never did all those things. I can't believe I left all that on the table, I can't, but just think about that. Most people are going to get, if they get to that point and look back on their life, they're going to be like, I can't believe the five regrets of the dying. A lot of people sit there at the end of their life with regrets. And why didn't I do this? Why didn't I live fully? Why didn't I tell people that I loved them? Why didn't I, follow my heart, all of this kind of stuff. So you've got a choice to make in this very finite piece of existence that we get to traverse in our fleeting moment. When you get to the end of it, what kind of experience do you want to be having? Do you want to be looking back going? I became the best version of myself, I'm proud of who I became, I'm proud that I actually did all of the things that I said that I was going to do all of stuff. I lived life in alignment with my highest alignment of my values, because I think that's really what it's all about, it's like, how do you create a life where you can live in perfect alignment with your highest personal values? And if you can do that, that then dictates what success looks like, because I know for some people their values dictate that a good life to them is, has got nothing to do with money, maybe they're living off the land, maybe they're like, farming and living off the land and then living a subsistence living with basically no income, but that, that could be absolutely fully enriched. That could be, that could be the pinnacle of success, they could be like Elon Musk levels of success in their spectrum of the world. So it really comes down to what are your values? Because that is going to, that is going to define what success looks like to you.

Michael: Yeah. I love that you said in your values. And that's so true. It can't be somebody else's and, I feel kind of cliche in saying this, but I'm going to preface it because you hear this all the fucking time right now, but if you go look at social media. If you go look at dating apps, if you go look at entrepreneurship, if you go look at people right now, more time, probably more than in the history of ever, people are posturing, they're pretending that their life is better, they're pretending they're lying, they are putting up a facade because they are living in other people's value systems. Because they believe that if they look this way, I saw this video the other day of this fitness entrepreneur. All of her photos are fake, all of her photos have been edited. And that's we're living in an edited world. Problem is, in the edited world that we're living in, many people are reading other people's books and trying to become the hero of their story. And it's goose, dude, you can't be the hero of somebody else's story. There, there is something about this journey, if you're willing to face just like the tremendous amount of suffering necessary to become yourself, the stripping down of your ego, the letting go of false beliefs. The removing, and this one gets really difficult, the removing of people if you're willing to go down that path, it can be beautiful. And it's beautiful for how you deem it to be, and this shift, we're really just talking about at the crux of this, a shift. You look at your journey, you had to go into recovery, you had to sleep on the office floor. You had to lose money, you had to almost lose a relationship, right? On top of others that you probably had leading up, and it's cool. At the end of the day are you willing to walk through fire? Because I don't, I just don't know how else you'd do it, you know what I mean? I really think about this a lot and I've had the benefit of working with some of the greatest minds in the world, interviewing them on this show. We all agree with one thing you have to go through hell, because you're stepping into this place that you've never been before and that's the scariest, most inferno type situation that you could be in. But there, there's a trap in this, right? And I want your opinion on this because I know that you're a very studious guy, you have a podcast, you probably, like me, consume a ton of information. I think that we are in an unfortunate place where, again, because there is so much content, too many people are just consuming content, and to me, I think, I love when people on the rare occasion will email me and they'll be like, dude, thank you for the podcast. I get it, but I'm not going to listen anymore, and I'm just going to go and do the work. And that to me is one of my absolute favorite moments because it's like that's where this actually starts to work, it doesn't work in theory, it doesn't work in concept. It only works when you do the work, it's like being in the set. You do the program, if you don't do the work doesn't get done. What are the things that you did? If you trace this back a little bit, and just it can be any period of time leading up now, how important is actually doing the work and what does that mean?

Goose: If you don't do the work, you'll get nowhere, I've actually met. I actually know people that have attended basically every single personal development event, seminar, that you can think of, everyone from Tony Robbins to Joe Dispenza to the whole thing. They've read every book and they're significantly older than me and they've been on this diet of self help and whatever for like at least 20 years, maybe 30 years and they're still stuck. They're still stuck in fear, doubt, lack, and it's sad, and they're very negative, they have a negative worldview. And every time I meet them, I see them, I try and help, and I'm like, come on you've got it all, you've read it all, you've read every book, like it's not an information problem. It's an action problem. And that's the thing, you don't actually need all of the information in the world. What you need to do is you need to take imperfect action in the direction of your goals, and that's the most important thing. Most people get stuck on this idea that they need to get it right, when in fact all they need to do is start doing something. Because movement actually creates the thing that you're looking for. It actually, momentum creates information. And the information allows you to reorient. Because, for example, let's say you decide you're going to go to the gym and start to try and get fit, you can hypothesize about all of the things that are going to happen when you do that and never go to the gym and never do anything, but by taking action and going to the gym and then realizing it's hard and then you get sore, you start to then learn, okay, how am I actually going to do this? So it's the action that actually creates it. I think there's another piece in here as well, where it is the process of choosing to do hard things that creates pretty much everything else that you want, and if you can choose to do hard things without a specific point in time, desired dopamine style outcome, all the better for you. And so what I mean by that is it's one thing to say, all right, I'm going to go to health kick for the next 90 days. That, that actually won't lead to lasting change. And that is I'm going to do this for this long. And then I'm going to go and eat a bunch of chocolate bars, ‘cause I'm going to be really happy with myself, ‘cause I lost two kilos or whatever the case may be, whereas if you can say, no, actually, you know what, I'm just going to commit to lifting weights four times a week for the rest of my life. That's just choosing to do something really hard without a really specific end day, and that requires a bit of a mindset shift. Now back to some practical things though, because you're asking like what. What do you do? The biggest and hardest thing for me was the identity change. Because I didn't, I was trying to work out who the hell I was again, and then trying to orient myself into what I was hoping was going to be a better life. And all you need to do is look around at all of the people who are unsatisfied with their life to realize that most people aren't orienting themselves towards the life they really want, they're generally unsatisfied. I had to go through a process, which I still do to this day of brainwashing myself, I had to prototype the things that I thought that I might like, and I had to try and brainwash myself into getting on that path. And so what that looked like in practice was I don't do it as voraciously as this anymore for a variety of reasons, which I'm happy to dig into, but every single day I would wake up. And I would write down with pen and paper, I would write down my vision for my life now in this at the start, because I didn't know what the hell I wanted, I was all like private jets and Lamborghinis and, big houses, millions of dollars. This is all the stuff that I was writing down that I wanted to have in my life. And we can go through a bit more detail around what that process looked like, because it was a pretty well developed process. But and that was useful because even that actually gave me some fuel to continue to give me the emphasis there, the impetus for change to, for action. I'd be like, okay, cool. If I want all these edit, fill me full of dopamine, jets, cars, money. Let's go that have filled me full of dopamine enough to give me the energy to take another step in that direction. Now, the thing about that is I realized over time slowly, that I was just these things I didn't really want. But the process allowed me to then continue to find the things that I did want. And so over time, I started going, you know what, am I actually motivated by a super yacht? It sounds cool, but I'm actually motivated by a super yacht. No, not really. Okay. So then you evolve the things that you dangle in front of yourself, and so putting in systems to do that. And I have honestly, I've tried to help a lot of people as well on this pathways as well. I can attribute. I would say a significant majority, 80 percent of everything that I've created in my life today over the last five years, down to that practice. And I've watched people who don't do that and I've watched them progress at a significantly slower rate or not at all. And I think the reason that is useful is because if you can carve out time each day, every day for yourself to ask yourself, what do I want? Am I happy? What will make me happy? Now, you won't have the correct answers, but the continuous process of doing that day in day out every day for years on end will actually be the work that you need to do to get you to the place. And the practice of writing it down allows you to craft the identity that you need to be in order to achieve those things. In a very real sense, we create our reality. We could talk about that at a quantum level if we wanted to go there, but even on a practical level, just the fact that we get to shoot by the actions that we take define the reality that we live in. And so that process, that practice will actually set your compass in the right direction.

Michael: Yeah. That's everything, man. Here's what I'll say to that. Doing exactly what you just said is why I'm here today, there's no question. The most arguably the most important thing that I've done in my healing journey was sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and write my life out and I can trace it back from Grant Cardone investing into Think Unbroken, to Think Unbroken becoming one of the number one podcasts in the world, to becoming a best selling author, to losing 150 pounds, to all, I can go on and on and so much of it started with that, because if you don't have a direction, then you have nowhere to go. And even if your dreams are crazy, like even if you write down things that seem asinine or impossible, it's like perfect. That's what it should be. And then you get, you parse it down because as you go through the journey, you really start to recognize what is true. Do I actually want this? Is this the way that I want to get there? Is this the person that I want to be? And it keeps evolving and keeps changing. And so I would certainly encourage anyone who is not writing down their goals and their dream and crafting their life. If you can't take five minutes out of your day to write down your dreams, you don't deserve them. And I know that's a hard thing, and that's a harsh thing for people to hear, and it seems unfair, and they're like, why do I have to write it down? And it's because you need to witness yourself, right? And if you write it down, that's one step closer to having that reality. Here's my friend, this has been an amazing conversation, I loved it. Dude we're going to have to do this more because I think we're just getting started.

Goose: Yeah, totally.

Michael: Before I ask you my last question, please tell everyone where they can find you?

Goose: Best place is Instagram. I actually use Instagram periodically. So that's @goosemcgrath or If you want to check out my blog and newsletter, it is blog.goosemcgrath.com. We have a weekly newsletter. There's no sales pitch or anything. It's just like valuable stuff to help you try and live a better life, which is really my goal. I've, I'm got all my economics working for me from my business, so all of the content that I create, including coming on this podcast is. Genuinely from a place of wanting to help people to live a better life, that's really what it's all about for me.

Michael: I love that dude. And guys, please go to thinkunbrokenpodcast.com. Look up Goose McGrath and we'll have that information and more in the show notes. My last question for you, my friend, what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Goose: It's a great question. I'm going to take a little bit of a tangential way to answer this. I think it is love what I mean by that is we are all, it is the broken pieces of us that make us who we are. So the fact that you may have been broken is actually part of the thing that makes you perfectly you. And it should be celebrated, not hidden from, but to become unbroken is to put yourself back together. You can only do that if you can learn to love yourself, to love who you really are, and to love all of those fractures and dents. That you might have, that you might've picked up along the way. And so to be unbroken in my point of view is to realize that you're worthy and you're worth it and you can experience love. And if you can love yourself, you can love the world and the world will love you back.

Michael: Beautifully said my friend, could not agree more. And my hope is you continue to have and find love that those listening do, that they get the support that they need, whether it be through you or if you think unbroken or through whoever it has to be in the world. That they find and cherish the time that they have and they use it to go and create the life, that they write it down, that they build it, and that ultimately they become unbroken as well, my friend, thank you again for being here. Unbroken Nation, thank you for listening. Please share this episode with someone. If it's brought value because remember every time that you do, you're helping others. He'll transform their trauma to triumph and ultimately become the hero of their own story.

And Until Next Time,

My Friend,

Be Unbroken.

Off the yacht!