SPEAKER_01: 0:04

Are you ready to break free from hesitation, self-doubt, and isolation? Do you want to lead with confidence, build powerful connections, and live boldly? I'm Corey Baum, and I'm here to share the most impactful strategies and mindsets that I've learned through coaching, leadership, and real-world experience. Together we'll forge unshakable confidence, master social dynamics, and create a life rooted in purpose, brotherhood, and bold action. Inside, you'll get the tools and insights to become the strongest, most connected version of yourself. Let's dive in. All right, hey, brother. Hey, so Anthony, I'm really looking forward to having this conversation. Your story, right, as we were talking just before the show here, your story feels like a bridge beh between like the neurosciences and spirituality. So yeah, I'd I'd like to start at really just kind of a human level. What what season of life right now do you feel like you're in? And what does your day-to-day focus look like?

SPEAKER_00: 1:04

It's a great question. This season is one of grounding and anchoring myself. I've always been someone who's lived in a bunch of different places. And so I'm I'm still traveling a bit, but it's with the intention of figuring out a place where I want to settle down. So I'm I'm mixing a bit in, you know, going to see some friends, going on Airbnbs, doing some volunteering here and there, but it's really with the intention of finding that that fit for me. Like what place do I want to ground myself in? And day-to-day wise, I'm working on my my business, you know, helping people with flow, focus, performance, spirituality, yeah, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:51

That's huge, man. So where would you know, and I I know that you and I have already talked about this, but for the the listeners that are just joining in, if you had to describe where you were before this transformation, before you started on this journey, right? Before all of the the flow and the awareness work and things like that, what was what was that version of you like?

SPEAKER_00: 2:16

I'd love to share a snapshot of three different versions of me, actually. There was one version of me when I was about somewhere between 11 and 14, where I was on the verge of obesity. I mean, I was just over the obesity line. I wasn't morbidly obese, but I was technically obese from a BMI perspective. And I had huge issues with confidence, with relationships. I had so much desire for the girls in my class, and there was no ability to make a move. Or if I made a move, it would be so shaky and so masked as well. And fast forward, I became an engineer and then I had a first mental health crisis. That crisis got me diagnosed with bipolar. I was put on schizophrenia meds, antipsychotics. And following the exit from hospital, I was full-on depressed for a good one or two months. Then fast forward a bit, I actually spent about a almost two years being okay until the second crisis. And that was really the a wake-up call for me. Perhaps the first diagnosis crisis was a spiritual awakening that I didn't have the tools to integrate. The second one was just being irresponsible and not really having learned the lessons from that first diagnosis, thinking I can get away with keeping on partying, keeping on doing drugs in a very unconscious way, staying up all night. And basically, yeah, my uh my uh brain went into full-on manic. I couldn't take care of myself. I had to be hospitalized by the authority of other people, like the the police system or the medical system kind of, yeah, there's a law that states in the UK that if you can't take care of yourself, you're not in a position to make any decisions, then you are in the psychiatric hospital under what they call section. And so I had that experience. And following that, then that really kicked off a clean transformational journey. I I dove into spirituality and then so much, so many more things. But yeah, that was that's kind of the three big snapshots of my life that I would say have been the biggest low points that I would at the moment I feel very proud to have overcome and managed.

SPEAKER_01: 5:05

Man, it sounds like knowing a little bit more about where you're at today, that that's a huge identity shift, right? A completely different picture, perspective, identity of who you were then to who you are now. From, you know, I don't know if if maybe you're at a place to call it kind of mastery, but at least on your journey to mastery of really embodying these sort of experiences and whatnot. So I'd love to talk about that journey a little bit, if that's okay with you.

SPEAKER_00: 5:38

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

SPEAKER_01: 5:41

So, you know, you you mentioned, as we were talking earlier, about being like being misdiagnosed as bez, being bipolar and medicated and and whatnot. What was that like for you internally?

SPEAKER_00: 6:02

So the misdiagnosis thing is a theory that I have. I cannot claim to have medical expertise, but just to put a little bit more context behind that, if there's a lot of chronic trauma or a complex trauma, plus maybe some really difficult life circumstances, a lot of stress in the background, and a certain life event trigger, it's possible that those things could lead to the symptoms that I had, and thus the diagnosis that I had. Now, I can't confirm whether it's it's true or not, but that's my theory at least, is that it's more the trauma and other factors that that was the root cause. But regardless of what the causes were and what my current story is about it, definitely back then I was feeling so broken. And I mean, not just emotionally in terms of wow, I I had all these plans and now my body has no energy. I'm just stuck in bed all day. I hardly uh there were a lot of days I didn't even feel like taking a shower. Like a sh getting a shower was an accomplishment in my depressed and medicated days. And then even when I was able to start being able to do things, I would come back to family while I was searching for a job and my next move in life, and I would just feel super low, my mood would be low, I would be irritable, and the response from the environment was this is not the Anthony that that we know, you know, and and it just compounds that feeling of broken, you know, that and they say that one of the things about mental illness is a chemical imbalance in the brain. I'm not here to advocate for that. But back then I believed that my brain had a chemical imbalance and that this was the root cause of my issues, and there was nothing that I could do about it. And so it was like, wow, it really reinforced this loop of helplessness and feeling unworthy and just not being able to do much. So yeah, that was that was pretty bad times.

SPEAKER_01: 8:29

Yeah, man, that's you know, you bring up a really good point, and I the so many of these different things, that these factors in our life, right? I and I claim to be a psychologist or know enough about it, but I I know that a lot of these diagnoses are they're based on like tendencies, right? Or are factors, right? There's kind of a list that they they look at, right? And and they look at that, and maybe if there's 10 things, they're like, all right, you got you know, 70 of seven of these things show up right now. You know, and then so they kind of put you over into that bucket sort of thing that that nobody really knows for sure. But at any point, they're just looking at the signs and the symptoms of things that they've evaluated in the past and kind of said, like, you know, so many of these show up. But to your point is that those signs and symptoms could be caused by other other, you know, external influences that are going on in your life, right? Different traumas, scenarios, situations, things in the past, right? Any of that sort of stuff. But it doesn't have to be this like your body is chemically shorting you, you know, one chemical and producing more of another. That and and even to that point, when I think about it, that I imagine your body can re produce chemicals in response to different stresses and things like that. So even if you are chemically imbalanced, like this is probably something to an extent that you can create for yourself. So I'm I'm curious in that, do you do you feel like there was a moment when you you realized that you know the the system or whatever it was like wasn't going that that diagnosis wasn't going to save you, that you started to really kind of like take responsibility for your own healing.

SPEAKER_00: 10:21

There's always been doubt until a certain point, and that point I was led to it because I was experiencing struggles with binge eating disorder. And so this was a point where I'd already done a lot of training, I'd already reduced my antipsychotic medication consumption, and just to give you an idea of the journey of that, six years ago was when I had my last episode, one year ago was when I quit medication, and in those first five years, I was gradually reducing in phases. So it was at some point in that journey, I was a high performer, I had already trained in flow states, I had a strong sense of purpose, I was a meditator for many years, I was spiritually connected, and yet there was something that was leading me to binge eating. And I mean, I would eat I could eat two tubs of Ben and Jerry's after eating pizza and whatever. Like really just they yeah. And I there there was just a cumulative effect of this is way too much, not only one time, but it's way too frequent, and there's actually a problem here, and it it doesn't matter how much I learn, I cannot solve it by learning more, and I cannot solve it using willpower. So what the heck should I do? And I I started investigating, and then I I discovered the whole world about the the nervous system and trauma and the unconscious, and I I actually opened up to my parents about look, this is the symptoms that I'm dealing with right now, and I don't know how to go about it. And it was on my 30th birthday, and to give you context, I'm about to turn 33 now in a week. On my 30th birthday, my mom told me that there's a really key piece of information that I don't know that might be really important for me on the journey of understanding myself. And it was the the Christmas after my birthday that she told me about a trauma, and I'm happy to go into it, but basically she was sexually assaulted right around the time of my fifth birthday. So having understood that, like once I once my mom told me that story, I had some tears that were released, and emotionally I connected that with the feeling that these tears had been stuck in my system for 25 years, and that for me was the most pivotal moment in my mental health journey because A, it spoke so much about trauma and the impact of trauma, and when we are unable to learn our way or willpower our way out of some symptom or some problem, then there is a psychological, spiritual, emotional root behind it. And if we dig deep enough, I'm pretty confident that we can release that emotional root and actually deal with the root cause. And that's what actually led me on the path to discussing with the psychiatrist. Okay, I have this different theory now about my mental health, and I actually feel that I could maybe eventually quit my medication. And so that's even accelerated my journey even more. And I started going to therapy and doing all these other more inner healing type of works.

SPEAKER_01: 14:25

Man, that's crazy. Thanks for sharing all that. I it it really just kind of brings up how much you know the the point that you brought up is that hey, those maybe those tears had been in there for 20 or 25 years or whatever that and those are the sort of things that people have stowed away, right? And under years and years of boxes and baggage and all sorts of things that are just waiting to be uncovered. And so it's not necessarily always about you know, in coaching, is you know, like we I talk a lot about the story behind the story, right? That the that the story that you discover at the you know the first pass is never necessarily really what's down there, and so the story behind the story that that really have to continually digging at, and that's great that you noticed for yourself that hey, this tendency to binge eat or whatever it is, like it's not because I'm I'm salvitating over Ben and Jerry's, although it's really good, but like there's something here, right? And I it's interesting that those two how there's such a disconnection between the two, right? It's not that like you know it was that sort of sexual abuse for her, but it was showing up in your Ben G Deed.

SPEAKER_00: 15:46

Yeah, I mean, I knew from when she shared that she did tell me that I I sensed it, what happened to her. And not only is there the acute thing that happened on you know the big trauma day, you know, big T trauma day, but then there's well, how did that change her? And how did they change her relationship to me and her habits? And the deeper thing behind that is what happened in my psyche as a five-year-old observing that change and maybe believing that I'm the problem.

SPEAKER_01: 16:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:30

That's that's where that's the real light bulb moment because these things, the tricky thing about these things, particularly when uh we we often feel, and particularly as a man, I relate to this. If I I gotta willpower my way out of it, I gotta force myself, I gotta make new systems, or I gotta learn more things. And when none of that works, the the craziest thing is if it's something that's been so deeply repressed, it just is a blind spot. We have no recollection, no memory of it whatsoever. And so it's only with those difficult conversations or in powerful healing work, whatever avenue is chosen to do that healing work, that we can actually uncover those blind spots.

SPEAKER_01: 17:26

Yeah, man, that's a really good point that you make about how it wasn't necessarily the event in itself, how it was the reaction after that, right? And it sounds like everything that you had probably known up until that point that there was a shit, you know, it's like they say, like, there's a disturbance in the force, right? Like, I don't know what it is, but something's off, and it must be because of me. Right. And really shifting, you know, and that could perpetuate, you know, who knows how long you, you know, it was before your mom ever got support, if ever, right? And so that perpetuating from that moment forward and you living a life kind of based on that. So that's wild. So when you when you think about those experiences, right, and and the journey that you've you've been on with this, how do you how do you feel like it shapes how you see men's like emotional and spiritual health today, right? Doing that work and exploring those sort of things for yourself. Because that's I mean, this is pretty expansive, the the work that you've done.

SPEAKER_00: 18:42

Yeah, I I see different buckets of men. There's a lot that are in denial or just simply don't have the knowledge required in order to start digging into it. But I think once something clicks, or once there's an event or enough motivation or the right knowledge that comes into place to really know that, okay, this is gonna solve my big problems, then a lot of men actually are really motivated to do that deep work. But I think the general state of affairs is pretty terrible in the world right now. I mean, in the UK, I know that suicides in men outnumber suicides in women by a factor of three or so. So meaning that 75% of suicides are men. And the roots behind that are all psychospiritual, emotional, and the societal conditioning that men have to just be tough and stoic or whatever it may be, to not talk about mental health and the shame. Around looking weak or something like that. And yeah, luckily I was able to, I don't know, find people that have reframed that for me or dig deep enough to find the trainings in in trauma and the books that that actually gave me the insight that this is the key to my healing and this is the last thing that I didn't try yet. So I'm gonna go deep into this and see where I land. Because if it's the difference between going back into the psychiatric ward or not, or the difference between being able to break free from pills and be healthy, healthy and high on life rather than needing some kind of crutch for emotional issues, then I definitely want to do that deep work that's gonna lead me to a better place.

SPEAKER_01: 20:56

Yeah, definitely. So how do you, you know, in regards to doing this deep work, right? To identifying for men, identifying these struggles and considering turning those into a strength. What what does that actually look like in practice?

SPEAKER_00: 21:19

It's a great question. I have my own unique way of coaching and helping people, which is based on engineering kind of principles. I I take the engineering process that engineers use to design things, whether it's cars or software, and I apply that to personal development. And so more or less, the framework is there's a conscious component and there's an unconscious component. And the conscious component is everything that you can learn, everything that you can implement as far as systems and just repetition of habits. If the conscious component doesn't solve it, then the roots of the problem have got to be unconscious. And there's always a balance between the two. So like sometimes, let's say my binge eating is 90% unconscious and 10% conscious. So I do all the learning that I can about intentional eating, about nutrition, I put all the healthy habits in place, you know, make make junk food harder to get to, make healthy food easier, all of those systems, and I find that it only reduces my problem by 10%, and then I stay stuck, then I have to go deeper into unconscious work. And I don't actually there's a certain amount of help that what I do can can bridge unconscious rewiring, but for that really, really deep, deep stuff that's buried in the nervous system, repressed memories, traumas, and all this, I don't actually help with that. I send people to therapists, shamans, or whatever it may be. Even some life experiences can be super transformative emotionally, and yeah, basically it's an exploration of all the tools that are possible. I'm I'm personally on a mission to map out all of the different healing modalities that exist for unconscious inner emotional work, and it's everything from classical talk therapy to the spiritual stuff like Reiki or Quantum Healing, things that people have never heard about. My first therapy was actually a Tibetan Buddhist process called feeding your demons, and it's actually freely available on YouTube. It was so powerful for me. It helped me cry and make some additional links in my head about the binge eating. And just every one of these modalities has given me something super valuable. So yeah, it's I think what what I would recommend is doing the research about what's out there, what's possible, and trying. Because you can only yeah, you can only know if it'll work for you when you try it.

SPEAKER_01: 24:30

It's a really good point that you bring up about, and I I don't know that I've ever really heard it that way about the 10% and the 90% and the, you know, doing doing the educational work, right? Doing the the book sort of stuff, but at a certain point, you know, having the hard conversations with yourself, they're like, hey, I'm I I've spent a lot of time learning about this, and I'm not necessarily making the kind of progress that I want to, that maybe it's time to go a little bit deeper, that it is more about the unconscious. And to your point, to to branching out into these other things to just be explorative, right? To seek to be to be curious around what it might might help or provide.

SPEAKER_00: 25:16

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:20

One of the things that I that you've talked about before was this sense of like flow state, right? Or flow states. So was it was it through kind of this journey or you know, sport or work or whatever it is, moment of grace that you kind of came to be with that?

SPEAKER_00: 25:41

So after my second episode in the psychiatric ward, I came back to my parents to recover. And just as I was starting to recover, it was COVID. COVID kind of forced me to go inwards. So after like the the order in which I discovered the major pillars of what I teach were first spirituality, including meditation and like making sense of consciousness and who am I in this mind-body beyond the mind and body. The second thing was flow states, and the reason that I got into that was because I was looking for a specialization in coaching. At that point, I was I was maybe one year or two inside the journey of building my business as a life coach, and I wanted to be a bit more unique and be a bit more specialized, and I found this training around the neuroscience of flow states. I was a bit skeptical at first, but it made a lot of sense to me. Like it just felt like a resonance because once I understood what flow was, and to give that context, flow is a state of consciousness, and it's that state in which we are totally absorbed in the activity that we're doing. And the most easy to recognize way to know when we're in flow is when hours fly by without noticing it. And at the end of that flow state, you go, wow, was that three hours? That felt like half an hour. So that particular thing, that state of consciousness we're in, when we lose that sense of time, that's flow. And I knew that there was an appeal for me, because I'd I'd always been a big procrastinator in high school. I would do my homework at the very last minute. A lot of the time because I was in a flow state from doing what was actually interesting to me, whether that was playing poker or video games or something else. But this pattern of wanting to get into flow states has been pretty consistent in my life, including after I was in university, I would be taking drugs and I would be going to festivals. And so now that I had experienced the psychiatric world twice and I was looking for a coaching specialization, to know that there was a way to get into flow states more consistently, more easily, and for longer and deeper, naturally, that was just so appealing. And after I went through the training program, I mean, even while I was going through it, I would observe all aspects of my life just going up and up. I mean, I had more time because I was more efficient. With that time, I was meditating more, I was going to the gym more, I had more energy, I had more motivation. Everything was just boosting. And it was just like such a magical thing for me. And yeah, I've been a big advocate of flow ever since because it's it's one of the most cutting-edge and novel training modalities that there is. Like this this is something from the last 50 years only that we have just been unpacking and kind of researching in universities and training people in.

SPEAKER_01: 29:40

Yeah, you know, it it kind of reminds me of it. It sounds like something that the, you know, we're talking about something that men crave, right? That feeling of being like fully alive and fully focused, right? And but but instead, right, most of us numb us or put blocks in the way or things like that of achieving that. What do you feel like gets in the way for most people of getting into that state?

SPEAKER_00: 30:11

Oh, it's so many things. I mean, one of the big pillars of flow is to connect with a strong sense of purpose when when what we are doing is in alignment with our passions and purpose, when we're highly motivated, and when we have a sense of agency and autonomy around how we do what we do and when, that drives a lot of flow by itself. There's some productivity techniques as well. And I'm happy to share some few tips, but in this training, it's really about optimizing the way that not only the tools and the environments that we create for ourselves, but our behaviors based on having a bodily understanding of what state of consciousness we're in right now, and how do we balance growth with recovery and flow? So there's something called the flow cycle, and you can look it up, and there's four stages of flow. It's about understanding how to use that cycle in our day-to-day so as to minimize self-sabotage and be more in alignment with how our biology is meant to operate. And now I'll just conclude this answer with if someone has all of the knowledge from flow states and has the strong sense of self-belief and has a strong mindset, but is still being a victim of self-sabotage, that's when 90 to 95% confidence it's not systems, it's not knowledge, it's actually emotional inner work or trauma-related kind of fears and all these things that are actually what's holding back. And but until we do that investigation, we can't really know.

SPEAKER_01: 32:22

Yeah, well, it goes back to what it was that you were saying earlier about the kind of the 10 and the 90% about learning what it is that you can learn, right? But at a certain point, you have to draw the line, right? That exactly that if you find yourself either not taking the action or repeating the same behaviors, that that there's something else, this the there's another story behind the story there that needs to be investigated.

SPEAKER_00: 32:49

Yeah, exactly. And that, you know, for different kinds of problems, there's different ratios of how much is conscious mind stuff versus unconscious stuff. Maybe if someone is dealing with procrastination, maybe all you need is a better goal setting system or a better accountability system with peer pressure. Maybe all you need is the right whatever calendar system or something. But if you try all those things and then you're still procrastinating, then it's really about cultivating that self-awareness of okay, now that I'm stuck, let me observe my stuckness and start collecting the data about what are the patterns behind every single time I'm stuck. So it could be, oh, I this work is too big, too overwhelming. Or it could be the opposite. It's too small, it's underwhelming, I'm bored. Or it could be if I put this out into the world, then I will feel that I'm not good enough. All sorts of things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:07

Yeah, definitely. You know, one of the things I'd like to just kind of touch on before we move on is one of the points that you brought up is that one of the precursors or the things, the requirements ahead of time to flow is having this sense of purpose. I've said for a long time, like I keep going back to even for myself, of like having this real set of like core values and sense of purpose and meaning and direction in your life. And that without that, it's almost like a failure to launch or failure to start that continues to like really come back to that foundational aspect of it, right? That you can't it's kind of like building the foundation, right? You can't pile all of these other things on top of it until you go back and really establish like who it is that you are, what you believe in, and kind of what your purpose is in life.

SPEAKER_00: 34:59

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. If we don't have a solid foundation, whatever we build on top is grounds for crumbling. And yeah, for for that, if if anyone is listening and struggling with purpose or with building that foundation, my my number one recommendation is just to explore. Like do different things, learn different things, and eventually you'll find patterns in what you like more and what you dislike more, and you can gravitate more towards what you like, and eventually you'll find a way to tie things together, and that'll feel like a sense of purpose. And I think another important component to that as well is making sense of the big questions, the spiritual questions. I'm not here to tell anybody what to believe, or you know, even whether or not there is a God. Like, regardless of beliefs, we have this complex system that we're in, the universe, nature. And we don't know where it came from or why it exists. Making sense of that, I think, is a big part of the foundations of understanding how you as a human being fit within the grand scheme of all that is. And that that helps build that foundation, I would say.

SPEAKER_01: 36:34

Yeah, I think to that point of like purpose and meaning and direction and just knowing that you're included in that, that there's there's something for you to really ground yourself in. So how how do you usually suggest, like, how can men right as they're along the this journey that they're they've got these questions, maybe these things that they're struggling with, right? Which not to like to discount how how hard it can be just to break into that journey, to start doing the work, to start doing the research, to asking the questions, right? But how can men start developing that sort of introspective awareness, right? Really starting to like notice what's happening inside their body without without feeling like lost or overwhelmed or shameful about it.

SPEAKER_00: 37:34

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. And the first thing I wanna in order to answer this question, the first thing I want to break is the shame. Because one of the foundational principles that I operate by and that I teach by, I even have a tattoo that relates to it, is there there's no blame for anything and there's no shame for every anything, because our mind and body is such a high form of intelligence. Whenever there's a disconnect between our actions, our reality, and what we think our reality should be, it's a conception of the mind that comes from programming. The real true data that reflects how reality is are the actions. And you can assume that whether it's because of knowledge, whether it's because of systems, or whether it's because of something that you don't know, whether it's unconscious or just a blind spot, there is some combination of that that resulted in the action being taken, and the action being taken is a proof that your mind and body believes that that was the best course of action. So a lot of the time, for example, and I I can make this really relatable, I could eat a full pack of biscuits in one sitting, and this is I'm not talking about years ago, I'm talking about last week, yesterday. That can happen. And when that happens, there's a version of me that could go, that sucks, I'm beating myself up, I have shame, blah blah blah. But the part of me that actually is kicking in, because I have some of that trauma informed perspective, and there's plenty of books that had have helped me get that perspective, is actually eating that whole pack of biscuits is what my mind and body considered to be the best possible action. In order to feel better right now, in this life circumstance, and or dealing with these emotions that are popping up. Now I can start collecting the data. Now I can start building the triggers. And over the years, I've identified boredom, loneliness, tiredness, those are triggers that still to this day lead me to symptoms that I don't want to have. So the point is there's never any shame because your body is operating intelligently and it's doing the best thing that it can. It's telling you that there is something deeper to look at. That's the key. So then you can start researching. Okay, is it something that I don't know that I need to learn in order to make this better or not? And if you then take the next action, maybe it's reading a book, maybe it's listening to a podcast, maybe it's working with a coach, maybe it's just having a conversation with a friend. But take that next action and learn from it and use that to take the next step. But always be unconditionally forgiving because the the further that you go, guaranteed you will make progress. It might take weeks, it might take months, it might take years, but guaranteed that if you keep going, you will make progress. Where you don't make progress is when you stay stuck in the loop of beating yourself up, judging yourself, feeling shame, not talking about it, and not taking action. So any action beats inaction and self-hatred.

SPEAKER_01: 41:51

Yeah. I love all of that. One of the things it reminds me of is I've I have for myself kind of called it always universal validation. And it's the sense, like exactly like what you said, that at that at the time that that happened, whatever you know it might was, that those are the skills that I had, that that is what had led to, you know, everything had culminated in my life, like in order for me to make that decision in the moment, right? So of course that happened. That makes complete sense that you sat down, you know, and ate that pack of biscuits or whatever it is. Because at that time in your life, with everything else coming together, that was what you had decided, you know, your mind, body, spirit, everything else, the decisions you made in the past, the culmination of everything, that was what led it to be, right? And and we can't change that. So moving forward, but this sense of like validation and acceptance and approval that, like, hey, no matter what happened, there was a reason that it happened, right? And things had led up to that. And now, to your point, right, using that as information, okay, it happened, right? And let's unpack that a little bit, right? And and if we see that it's happening again and again, what are the triggers that moved us into that and start to really dissect what it is? But it doesn't do us any good to sit there and ruminate on that event happening, right? It's it's information, it's happened, right? Let's unpack it and then learn from it and and move on. So and and to that point, right? I I feel like there's there's so much pressure for men to fix themselves, right? To yeah, it just like what is it, what does healing look like when it's when it's not about fixing, right? Because I I think those are two, they're they're like nuances in there. There's a difference between fixing this because it's broken, right? And healing is maybe more like a growth journey forward.

SPEAKER_00: 44:02

Yeah, that's a really, really good question. Answer that comes up, and maybe it's not a perfect answer, but but it's it's a relationship answer. Like there's a part of us that is beyond the mind and body. Whether we call that a soul or whether we call that consciousness, there's there's an observer. Uh the observer can witness the desire to go and eat that pack of biscuits. I'm gonna just speak in my case. The more the the the healing that's not about fixing something broken is about changing the relationship between the observer and that mind and body. And it's it's really about having a dialogue within the different parts of ourselves. Because, well, there's a a therapeutic modality that I really resonate with. It's called internal family systems, and it basically breaks down the the psyche into different parts. When a trigger happens, there might be a part of me that wants to reach for the biscuits as an emergency thing. There's another part of me that is valuing my health and knows that in the long term I want to change that habits. But neither part is doing the wrong thing, and neither part should be judged. What what the healing is, well, I would say the judgment of the parts is the idea of wanting to fix something broken. But if those parts can talk together and bring greater cohesion in your overall system, that's the healing. That's where you change your relationship with parts of yourself and your mind and body in order to create lasting change. And it can take some time, but yeah, I think I think it's uh it's a great question and a and a subtle nuance that has a lot to do with just being unconditionally loving towards yourself, even if you do something that you don't like, even if you're stuck in a pattern that you want to break free from. It's about having that love for yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 46:56

Yeah, I love that. I I say often on here, you know, it's it can be really hard for men to, you know, we grow up, and the I I was just talking on another episode about the the the conversations that we have ourselves and like what that sounds like. And it's just man, it can be horrible. You know, and it's it's it makes complete sense why people can struggle to move forward, right? On healing, of being on this journey, of overcoming their struggles when the conversation around it is so negative. But yeah, I I love the idea of really starting to you know like develop that relationship and nurture that relationship with the different parts of ourselves that are where these sort of things show up, right? With a more loving, caring, curious sort of relationship instead of judgmental and hatred.

SPEAKER_00: 47:57

So yeah, curiosity is a big one, and so is safety. You know, a lot of the things that hold us back are related to fear, and in order to change the shape of fear, we actually have to relearn safety. So, for example, if I'm if I'm looking for safety in biscuits, it's because there's a fear that something bad would happen because of loneliness or tiredness or whatever it is that the triggers are. So the journey of healing would be relearning that I'm safe in the environment and the cause of the trigger that led me to the behavior that I want to change. And when we keep just compounding that, compounding self-awareness and compounding safety, then we can see some lasting changes.

SPEAKER_01: 49:04

Yeah, definitely. Well, hey, I want to bring this back a little bit to embodying flow or like living in flow. What what sort of daily or and we've talked about a couple of different things here, but what sort of daily or weekly practices uh do help you stay balanced and and connected to flow?

SPEAKER_00: 49:31

Great question. So I generally go through a process when I'm when I'm teaching people to first understand whether you're strongly biased either as a morning person or an evening person. And depending on the bias, your optimal times in order to do focused versus creative work would be different. So I'm a morning person. The best time for me to do the hardest work, deepest work, most analytical work is first thing in the morning. If I start my morning by checking emails or doing some other like really low, super easy, kind of quick reward high dopamine tasks, I'm gonna self-sabotage my ability to do the deep work. So that's where kind of planning your day based on dopamine and states of consciousness falls into play. And I've been doing that on a daily basis for years. Another thing is biorhythms. We, as human beings, work best between 90 and 120 minutes of focused work. Within that, we our body naturally craves a 15-20 minute rest. And that rest should be something that doesn't engage the mind. Or, you know, if if you're doing a computer-based task where you're really focused and using your brain, then the recovery behind that should not be checking your phone or trying to squeeze in another task. I really the the teaching of active recovery should be more mind-body-based and yeah, just a different sensory experience from that cognitive work. You can't you can't recover from computer work by watching Netflix because you're gonna be using the same kind of brain circuits and states of consciousness. So, with all that knowledge from flow, you can kind of understand okay, this is gonna keep me in that struggle state of consciousness where I'm paying attention and learning and growing. Now I need something to release that, whether it's breath work, meditation, going for a walk, gym, shower, all of those are great recovery protocols. And so the balance is key between that cognitive focused work versus recovery. And that's that's a good chunk. There's then of course there's more there there's more and more tools, more and more precise ways of applying them. But yeah, I yeah, that's that's a good base to start with. Another one I would say that's really high on the list as well, is the separation between doing a task and planning it in other and including goal setting. So if one of my tasks is to create a presentation, often people will have on their to-do list create presentation, but they won't have the substeps of what does it entail in order to create that presentation. Like, do I need to first start with researching? Do I first start with making an outline? Do I first start with any questions that I have and planning how do I answer those questions? And when we don't have that, we bounce back and forth between doing a little bit of the task and then doing a bit of defining, then doing a bit more of the task, then doing a bit more defining, then doing a bit more, and then doing a bit more defining. And that constant back and forth is something that drains energy. More efficient is if you can make it one full task to define as much as you can what the strategy for completing that task is, and then shift into doing the task where you can just look at the the list, the goal, and each sub-goal and just cross one off one after the other, that's gonna get you into a flow state a lot more than bouncing back and forth. So it's really about optimizing those states that we can be in and how do we how do we manage not only our day, not only our energy, but also how do we actually complete tasks.

SPEAKER_01: 54:27

You know, and I love in saying that that there's a sense of kindness in there, right? Of like, hey, let's actually set ourselves up for success here, right? Let's plan for the hours that we are most receptive to doing this sort of work. And let's not overextend ourselves because I think a lot of times people want to like just sit down and bang out this thing for eight hours, right? I'm gonna take Saturday, I'm gonna catch up on everything. When in reality, that it sounds like from what you're saying that you've only got 90 to 120 minutes before you need a break, right? And so knowing that, being like, okay, hey, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna be productive, and I'm gonna get up and take the dog for a walk, and then I'm gonna come down and put in some more time or whatever that is, but being okay with that, because I think at times people would be like, uh, you know, I I just have to keep grinding until it's done. So I I I love those small, yeah, right, subtle, but yet very impactful ways of really how to stay in that state.

SPEAKER_00: 55:29

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and to to really drive the point home, I think there's two big reasons not to grind for eight hours straight. Number one, while you're in the grind and when your body energy is depleting, you're actually losing efficiency. It's better to work seven hours at a hundred percent capacity than to work eight hours at 50 to 70% capacity. So that's one thing. Just purely efficiency perspective, purely from a you're gonna get less distracted and just be more energized and accomplish your goal faster when you do take those breaks. But the second thing is really health related. If you are trying to keep pushing on overdrive, you're overrunning your natural your body's natural cycles, and that disrupts not only your rhythms, but your hormones, and you have imbalances in your system. And when you do that chronically, it can lead to weakened immune systems and and diseases in the long term. So it's really a no-brainer to just align your ways of working with how your body was meant to operate, and that's where flow comes in.

SPEAKER_01: 57:01

Yeah, I love that. It sounds so easy yet so difficult to stay in, right? Especially for us with all of the distractions and you know the programming that we've got leading up to it and and whatnot, but it sounds beneficial nonetheless.

SPEAKER_00: 57:20

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of societal conditioning that needs to be undone. There's a lot of mindset shifts as well that that lead to more flow. There's technological interventions as well. Like I I don't have notifications on my phone for years now. The only time I have them is when I install a new app. And the first notification that it sends me, I go, oh my God, no way. I go right into the settings, off, off. And I yeah, and when I when I see people in society who have phones with 50 notifications on their home screen, Snapchat, Instagram, email, text message, it's just like blowing my mind how much energy is spent from just being aware of all that digital clutter. And I think, you know, flow is one of those knowledge that's necessary for the 21st century, given how much the technological growth is happening with AI and notifications and the speed of everything, but just also preserving our sanity, preserving our mental and emotional well-being by reducing that overwhelm. It's priceless.

SPEAKER_01: 58:40

Yeah. Yeah. I'm really hoping with all of these advancements that and I think we're on a good path with it, that people start to recognize the impact of the technology, right? That I don't know that we're really meant to get things at the speed in which that we do, that we just don't we don't process that fast, or at least I don't.

SPEAKER_00: 59:03

So absolutely. No, nobody is, nobody is our our brains. We we have cavemen brains in in a world of way too fast new information. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 59:16

Yeah. Well, hey, if you could, yeah, I'm curious at the end of this, as we start to wrap up, if you could leave like one sort of embodied principle for the men that are listening, something to to live, not just to think, right? Because there's a certain aspect of this that we have to move from learning to actually doing. What do you what would that be?

SPEAKER_00: 59:39

I'd say move your body. I think you're absolutely right that we're so much in our heads and we are so much conditioned to be in the analytical and in the doing. Move your body, do something different, be. It's not easy to just sit and do nothing. But if you can get a little bit of movement in, that's gonna be productive, it's gonna be rejuvenating, and it's gonna start the cycle of building awareness of when you're self-sabotaging because you're pushing too much and actually not listening to your body or not being in alignment with your biorhythms. And so, yeah, whether it's going for a walk or going for a glass of water, going to the bathroom, a quick exercise, even if you have five minutes between two calls or whatever, some jumping jacks or just stretching, that will compound into making every aspect of your life better, more efficient, and yeah, just expand that positively self-reinforcing cycle of goodness.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:03

Yeah, I love it. Action. Hey Anthony, I I really appreciate this conversation. You know, it's it's really powerful to see how you've turned your own healing into a model for others, right? And and so with that, where where can people go to learn more about your work?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:26

The best place to start is on my website, which is my last name, www.palisonpalacin.co.uk. It's a UK website.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:41

Awesome. Okay. And so I imagine there you've got probably a bunch of different resources and and things for people to explore a little bit more of that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:51

So yeah, yeah, I'm a big believer in free education. And if anyone I I don't care if people invest in me or not, if so long as people have access to the right information that they need to keep going on their personal growth journey, that's what makes me happy.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:12

Definitely. All right, Anthony. Well, hey, thanks again, man, for having this conversation, and we'll chat soon.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:19

Thank you so much. Likewise.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:22

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