Unleashing Your Confidence: Overcoming Challenges and Finding Your True Self with Allana Pratt, David Maxwell, and Ashley

Unlocking Your Heart's Potential: A Conversation with Allana Pratt on Overcoming Heartbreak and Attracting Your Ideal Relationship

 Michael: What is intimacy? Because so many people, and this is because we live in this pornified society, people go, Oh, intimacy is sex and fucking. And I'm like, no, it's not. But what does it look like? Paint is a picture, top to bottom. Explain intimacy. 

Allana: To me, there's very many definitions and I think fucking is one of them. My definition is a way of being where we honest, as you said, authentic, transparent, vulnerable, raw, heart open, at walls, down with ourself. It's not possible to give that gift to another if you haven't first given it to yourself. And so, it's the ability that when you're sad you be with yourself. When you're ashamed, you be with yourself. When you're really orgasmically alive, you be with yourself. like the whole kitten kaboodle, the wobbly parts and the triumph and parts you're just gonna be deeply connected moment to moment with yourself without the need to fix or change and just connect. When we can be that we can simultaneously, it's almost like this that happens when you finally come home to all yourself and you resist nothing and you allow all it's a oneness moment with the universe, cuz in my opinion, the universe doesn't have opinions. If it says I suck, it says, oh, and so it is, it's a figure eight loop. It's gonna give you back what you put out. It probably would love if it could support you in believing you're better than you think you are but it's a free will universe. So, if you put out, I suck and so it is, or I'm worthy and so, it is. So, you have this oneness with the universe that occurs as a direct reflection of your internal relationship and the experiences. Wow, the accomplishment, the outside world hasn't changed much, there's still little debt over there. My ass is still that size or you know, whatever it is. And you wake up and you're like, but I'm enough, I’m enough as I am, yes, I still choose to go to the gym. Yes, I still choose to learn how to be a better manager of my money, but not in order to be good enough, I'm already enough. It's an inspiration from love, not a motivation from fear, and that is a different paradigm.

So, life starts to become joyful just because you're alive, there's a peace in your skin. And then you start to get a little sassy, a little sexy, then you're like, okay, universe, what you got for me today? Because you're no longer terrified of what you can't control because you've got your back. You start to be able to be a little more sexy and sassy and joyful, and risk. But you simultaneously have this sense of, because your heart is open, cuz you're intimate with yourself. You can hear your intuition, you can hear uhhuh, uhuh, the gut, as you mentioned a moment before. So, you start making better decision. And you also stay in the best part of your brain, which is more creative and abstract thinking, as opposed to kill them before they kill me, fight, flight, freeze, right? So, you start to make better decisions and life starts to be more joyful and you have more success, not that you need it anymore to be good enough, but just ‘cuz it's fucking fun to be successful and generous and make an impact on the planet. And then that's a vibration too so you're gonna start to attract a community that's like-minded and you're gonna start to run into people, whether it's on heartmate, partnering up or at the freaking grocery store. Who are your people? You don't have to try. I would say you need to intend, right? Put it out there but not be attached, ‘cuz that's gonna push it away faster than anything. And then all of a sudden, by this willingness to have an intimate relationship with yourself, you and your body lost that extra 10, you didn't try, but you weren't at war with your body. You listened, hey, let's have a salad rather than another. So, everything, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, vocational, financial, social, parental, romantic, sexual, all of a sudden, every part of your life. Because how you do anything is how you do everything starts to up level. Yes, you need to show up every day, but not with attachment. And then, you know, within a reasonable amount of time, life is looking pretty good. And while I don't hope anybody dies tonight, if you did, you could look back and you don't have the regrets, you know, you lived a full life, you made a difference being you.

Unleashing the Power of Masculinity: A Candid Conversation with David Maxwell

Michael: You can have success and you can have a great relationship, you can have a great career, you can have a great family, you can have everything and impact the world but I think the hunger like this idea of like having an appetite for something, right? Is so much about and I want to know your thoughts on it is about can you satiate your needs as a human being, as a man, as a person to create an impact on the change that you want to see in the world, but I find that you have to be super self-aware for lack of a better way to phrase this so that that appetite doesn't actually become the driver. One of the things I know that you talked about and in coaching is appetites. What does that really mean when you're trying to understand who you are?

David: Well for men, it's we want to give men permission today to be passionate to have desires because that's how we're designed men are passionate creatures. You get two men together, who were into two different sports teams and they're going to be passionate, they're going to be arguing about who's the best. Men today, argue about things, like, you know, Jordan versus LeBron, just because that's who we are as men. We were getting very passionate about things when I want men to see is that passion is not a bad thing. Sometimes guys, feel like what the term, toxic masculinity, in these things they want to; ‘Oh! something's wrong with me.’ No! No, it's not wrong with you. You just need to channel it in the right direction. Men who are passionate, who channel their passion, they're the men who make a difference in the world.  It's kind of like a train, trains are huge, they have huge engines, they have rail cars going back from miles, as long as they're on the track. They take care of a lot of business, they do a lot of stuff but get them off track, and literally, it's a train wreck.

And a lot of guys in their life their passion gets them into train wrecks because they don't have it disciplined, they don't have it focused. So you take a guy who sleeps with woman after woman after woman, take all that passion and let him channel it into one woman, let him channel it into one relationship and I guarantee you that relationship will be much deeper and stronger than any he's had before because he's focusing all his passion into that one relationship.

And so what he's doing is he's keeping his life from going off the track, he's actually channeling it. In fact, a lot of times with men, I use the example of a bullet. If you take just a handful of lead and throw it at someone, you know, it can hurt them, it might give them a little nick, but if you form that lead into a bullet and shoot it out of a high-pressure chamber, they can do a lot more damage. A lot of men are wasting their passion doing lots of things when they have gifts and abilities that are designed to do something specific but a lot of times, they never figure out what that is because they're just throwing their passion everywhere. They're chasing all the women, they're chasing all the money, they're gaming, five hours a night, and they're doing all of these things but they're losing that passion that they have, and they don't even know what to do with it. They say; ‘Hey! I love all this passion. So I guess I'll game all night,’ but then they're not growing and getting better and really using their gifts for other people.

Michael: I often think about the idea of mindset in this, right? And the attitude that we have in creating the life that we want to have and fear often being this precursor for why we don't create the life that we want. What do you think is the correlation between the attitude you have? And then how much of this is like really having to face your fear?

David: Yeah, I think for a lot of guys, it's facing your fear and also getting to that point of realizing that there are things you're good at and there may be things you're not good at and that's okay. And a lot of guys don't like that, they want to feel like they're good at everything but that's, you know, Olympic athletes. Don't try to do all the sports, they focus on the one sport and they become graded it, and that's what takes them to the Olympics. And I think a lot of men today or scared of admitting, I'm not good at this or I'm not good at that and I think that's something they have to realize that you need to do because then you can start prioritizing what's more important, what's the most important thing in my life? And also for some guys, it's just getting to that realization of gosh! I need help. You know, for me it was that when my son was born I realized my life was out of control, I was doing all these things, I didn't want to do and I just needed help and that was scary because I had to admit, I needed help. It was expensive because I had to pay for that help. So, you have to invest in that even though you've been investing in wasting your life.

Now, I had to invest in getting help, but those are the things that I think for a lot of guy they think that admits defeat when it doesn't, it gives them actually more tools to win the war in their life. And that's where a lot of guys, they don't see it that way, they see it as well, I'm a failure. No, you may have lost the battle but the war is long, the war is your life and if you start fighting the right way with the right tools, then you're going to start winning that war instead of having it beat you. And some guys they have just gotten so beat up, maybe they've been hurt, maybe they don't know how to do that inward journey, and they don't know how to get help, so they asked a friend and the friend doesn't really help them because they don't know any better. What I tell men is they need to find a good coach and when I say coach, a lot of times, I'm talking an emotional and mental coach, and that could be someone who coaches, like what you do with income broken or what I do coaching men or it could be a professional counselor. Some guys need to go too deep counseling and deal with stuff. And when I tell them is think of a counselor, someone who's a mental and emotional coach, all they're doing is helping you figure out, why you are the way you are. It's not to blame, it's not to not take responsibility. Men should take responsibility for themselves, but they should also recognize hey! I need some help.

You know, every professional athlete has a coach and they're the best of the best.

You know, you watch the series on Jordan, I was just reading something about it today and he had, Phil Jackson, you know, he had coaches, he had people, he had trainers, he had all these people helping him so he could be as best, and I think his men sometimes we think I have to do it all on my own. I have to be the lone wolf and that's just not the case, when a man surrounds himself with other people when he surrounds himself with those situations and starch to better himself that's when he'll make more of a difference because he can actually grow stronger from it.

Mastering Boundaries: A Conversation with Ashley Gordon on Taking Control of Your Life and Achieving Success

Michael: I think there's healing in facing your fear and I think coaching is a big part of that, that's obviously why I do it and why I have coaches myself, but what are your thoughts? How can coaching help you heal in this journey?

Ashley: Well, yes. And I definitely faced my fear, which was, you know, I was always overcompensating, or under compensating in my relationships and so, I had to do the one thing that I was terrified to do is just be like, hey, I don't feel good enough like be vulnerable, right? Be vulnerable and show me in a way I never have before. And so I think the way that coaching can help others heal is like some of the elements that I already talked about is really being able to process through what's going on behind the scenes? What's going on behind the patterns and the behaviors? Because I was operating from the place of little Ashley, right? I always talk about my inner child and how little Ashley did everything that she could do to keep herself safe and protected and stay in those patterns and those jobs that we don't like and those relationships that are hard. You know, they're keeping us safe to some degree there is a secondary gain.

So the power of coaching is to have a coach help mirror back to you, what you are gaining help, you understand a deeper level of what you're gaining by staying in these patterns and these relationships that are ultimately keeping you small and what I mean, by helping you gain something like, I think initially a coach could ask you, you know, how is it serving you to stay in this job that you hate? Or how is it serving you to believe these beliefs that you keep believing? And when we say, oh, how is that serving me, we might initially think that's not serving me, right? It's not serving me to stay in a job I hate or stay in this uncomfortable situation. And coaching can help you dig deeper to see really, there is something powerful for you here, there's something here that's protecting you, and what is it? And if you can understand through the power of coaching, what that is, and so much so many other things, but this is what's coming through right now.

You can really help your clients reprogram that protection in a completely new way because the way that you're protecting yourself by staying in those scenarios that aren't actually serving you, but are giving you something, you can change that energy's, just energy, it's just energy, our beliefs, our energy, our thoughts are energy but if you can give that energy a brand-new job, that's the power of coaching; coaches can help you do that. Does that make sense?

Michael: Yeah 100% I've seen that happen not only in my own life but in the people that I've worked with and you know, I think what's really interesting about this idea is like the more that you hold onto this narrative that you've already created the life that you're capable of having that you're effectively for lack of term because I think what happens is like keeping yourself small and is a feeling of safety, it's really at the crux of it when you break it down, is an autonomic response built within a defensive mechanism, right? We learn to keep ourselves small, it's safe when you're in a traumatic household when you're in school when your community, and eventually what you come to find out like your question, which I think is really brilliant is how does that serve you? And I think finding your voice is part of the thing I've identified of what happens in coaching? And I know that, like – even in this experience of yourself going through yoga, being in this position, facing your fear on the backside of it like, is that not finding your voice as a part of it, like, learning how to speak up for yourself to stand up for yourself, to be who it is that you are?

Ashley: 100% absolutely. Finding your authentic voice, your authentic expression ultimately for me has been a gateway to freedom to living this life that I literally couldn't have imagined just like you said, I love that you said that, because it's so true, never saw this coming and yet, it's a perfect fit, right? It's like my freedom, my expression, my gift to the world, right? And finding your voice is so powerful.