EP140 - How To Overcome Adversity | Nathan Simmonds - WHOLE MAN ACADEMY

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And it all starts here at the Whole Man Academy. Okay, so this is the whole matter. Cabbie Podcast, Season 4, Episode 140. My guest today is Nathan Simmons. All the way down in sunny Kent, where I used to come from. I don't know what to call him because he's got multiple strings for his bow. So, firstly, what would you describe yourself as? And then give us a how are you?

Super simple, direct way is a hypnotherapist. That's what everybody gets. And you know what? I'm feeling really excited, really happy. Yeah. Curious to see what's going to come up in this conversation.

Yeah, I. And I often say to guys who ask me about the podcast because I always forget, you know, I've done 140 hours at least, of talking to men now, and some guys have always had that, oh, I'd love to have a podcast. And I'm like, start it. Because your network of men and people could be women as well, but apparently women have some value as well, I'm hearing. But, you know, for that, your network will improve and even us two connected and end up spending ages talking about stuff. But what I find interesting is when you chat before or after, and it will be an anecdotal story that will come up, that will be, I always think will be really valuable for guys. So I know we've got shitloads to get through today, but first off, tell the guys, because this is where I think it's important, like in the hypnotherapy and also the other stuff, the other work you do, like, why did you get into it? Because it's not like you've just taken a job up. You don't start hypnotherapy, I would guess, just because you're like, oh, I thought it'd be interesting.

No, no, no, no. So the shortest version of the long story is, and as a man is I'd spent 20 years ignoring my own trauma and my own problems, and I'd actually spent 20 years over, intellectualizing, reading the books, watching the videos, doing the training sessions, learning all the frameworks and the coaching models and trying to outsmart the devil kind of, that sort of thing. And actually it was just repeating the same patterns and having the same problems over and over again. It's like we end up walking backwards circle with our eyes closed and wonder why we keep ending up in the same place. So 20 years of learning, 20 years of accomplishments, 20 years of, yeah, massive fuckups, let's be frank. But I still wasn't learning the lessons. I was learning the tools, but not learning the lessons, not getting the experience. And I was getting more frustrated with leadership. I was working 9 to 5 in, in the corporate space in insurance at that point, get more and more frustrated with the leadership teams, the inability leaders, the inability of the learning and development department to give me what I needed. And I was constantly pushing, but I was getting more and more frustrated. So the way that I was communicating was actually causing me more problems. And eventually I was like, well, if you're not going to give it to me, I need to go and get qualified. And I went and qualified as a leadership coach so I could give people the tools and techniques and strategies to be better leaders, to get better results. Great, fantastic. But I still saw this portion of people that I could see what was going on. I could see that something else was going on behind the scenes. And I didn't have a safe place or safe way to take them to that place. And I've been learning NLP and psychotherapy frameworks since 18, 19 years old. I've been learning these tools and techniques so I could see there was something going on and I kind of knew what it was from my, my understanding of people, but I couldn't take them to that place. So then I'll continue with the leadership development coaching one to one in classrooms, teaching the tools. And then about eight, nine years ago, I watched a couple of podcasts. One of them was by a Peter Diamandis, the guy that SpaceX. And the other guy was David Eagleman, neuroscientist that we sometimes see on Netflix and stuff. And kind of these moonshot ideas from Peter Diamandis. And David Eagleman is like Tom Billy, who said, so what are you currently working on? He said, oh, we're working on a small project at the moment. We're just inventing the Next Human Sense. That was his small project. And he's just like, what's going? So I started kind of putting two and two together. It's like how could we. What, what's next? What's the evolution of leadership here? And then I saw an interview with Jamie Whitland and he was talking about psychedelics, and I was like, okay, this is interesting. How can we create something different with leadership and psychedelics? Innovation, productivity, novelty, something. So kind of got into this space and started exploring the psychedelics myself for my own personal work, my own mental well being, and then found all the trauma that I've been running away from.

Right, so what are the psychedelics?

Tell me about those. So initially it was working with magic mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms. So I was microdosing psilocybin mushrooms just to help me kind of to smooth out the edges, to take the overthinking out. I was having problems at work and was just kind of overly strategizing, causing myself overwhelming, just burning out slowly but surely. And actually the microdosing helped. Yeah, and the microdosing just helped to smooth out the edge. I'm not here to advocate this for anybody else and I'm not here to do that, you know, support anyone on that. It's, it's in. Do your research. So that really helped smooth things out. And then I did some larger journeys with the psilocybin mushrooms, but it was helping me to process. So with all the tools that I'd been learning for 20 plus years, I was able to drop into a very deep space on quite large quantities of psychedelics and process at extremely high speed all the things that were going on, Problem relationships in the current situations that happened to me 15, 20 years ago on high speed. So combination of the cerebral tools with access in the subconscious, like, okay, this is amazing, but completely naive that I could walk into a leadership space and create this kind of approach without actually clearing down my baggage and not carrying that, which actually is what we're all doing, we're carrying that baggage into our current situations without even realizing we're doing it. And then, so this kind of led me up. So I'd started to explore the psychedelics and kind of seeing what was going on, different relationship dynamics. And then I met Tom Fortis Mayer, my teacher in hypnotherapy, who taught me a modality of hypnotherapy called free mind. And it's 80, 90% inner child work. It's developmental trauma. It's the things that we didn't, didn't get as children. It's the, you know, on a scale of the innocuous comment from a teacher when you were six years old, all the way up to the stuff that you wouldn't want to even imagine happening. So I'm working with people across this whole spectrum, including on myself. And now I've got a safe container and a framework with which to take people to that place to unpack their stuff so they can stop carrying that bag and just show up even more wholeheartedly, more consciously in their relationships, in their work and in their everyday life.

I was just going to say, because it, you just said it kind of shows up in, in every area of your life.

Every area.

And I mentioned briefly before we press record this weekend, which is where what we now like mid July, I hosted an event for 10 men in the Cotswolds. And I, you know, mentioned for all guys. They've all got different, I call it silent struggles. And they still might have loads of money in their bank, but still it could be they haven't got a partner or they want to work on their fitness or they want to do different stuff. But I realized that I can see most of that. But you can't see the trauma. You can't just look at someone and be like, oh, unless you have got some special powers, it's the hidden trauma that you're like, listen, you can have a morning routine and you can do some press ups and you can have cold showers and you all that great stuff and journaling and meditation and vision boards. But if you haven't dealt with something that's the inner self, then all that stuff is helpful. But it's not necessarily, it's not as fruitful as it could be.

Yeah. 100. But then on the other side of it is you see the very successful people out there in the world and you can throw some names in that. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk of the world, Donald Trump's, all those sorts of individuals and they're super successful. And then you look at the damage they're actually causing to the world, the damage they're causing to their relationships, the broken relationships with family members, including their own children. And then you start to scratch beneath the surface and you start to see the relationship to their parents, their fathers or the lack of relationship. So you start to see that, well, yes, we can have this exterior, we can have this demeanor and we can be creating great results. Yet internally something's going wrong. And when we see these things, I say to people, anything that is causing damage or harm, any habit, any behavior that holds you back or causes damage and harm to yourself, to somebody else is actually an indication that there is something that you haven't dealt with from your past because all you're doing is that whole thing of hurt people, hurt people. Whether we realize it or not, we hold on to that baggage and then that becomes kind of the lens through which we see the world, which. Which with which we project onto the world. So when I was at school, I was horrendously bullied. I mean, I'm six foot six. I mean, you've got to be pretty stupid to kind of bully another kid that size. Yeah, there was a group of boys from another school and this is how it pretty much started. And there was four of them. Because I'm so much taller than them, they thought that I was the same age as them. I thought that's what I led to believe. Yeah, four guys. But I couldn't tell my brother because my brother was the toughest kid in school. All the girls wanted to be with him, all the guys wanted to hang out with him. So I couldn't tell my brother. At 13, I couldn't tell my brother because I thought I would be less of a man. And I couldn't tell my dad because he was a police officer and I thought I'd be less of a man in his eyes. So I didn't tell my dad. So then what happens? Well, I get really angry and then I start bullying other people because that's how you get up the pecking order. I start using drugs to kind of just to self anesthetize, to self medicate. And it's. We're now kind of in that we're on that treadmill going through that process of just reciprocating and kind of. And repeating those patterns. So it's like. So when we see those things, it's like whether it's nail biting, cuticle pulling over drinking, overworking, drinking too much coffee, anything that causes you damage or hold you back, that it then is a window. Whether it's procrastination, people pleasing, perfectionism, all of these habits and behaviors, anything that holds you back becomes a window with which to see yourself more clearly. And then with the hypnotherapy, we turn that into a doorway through which you can walk to find yourself.

Let's see, this is, this is where I find it interesting because I've seen hypnotherapy in an action in a big group, and I just thought it was amazing because if someone tells you you're like that, that can't happen. And to understand the sheer power of what that can do. But I was going to ask you then, so let's say primarily for the men that you would work with. My first question would be like, what are the most common things that those guys come in with? And my second question, which you don't have to answer at once, would be, how do you start with that, man? Let's say I come in and say I'm here for a reason. Where do you start? Is it with understanding some of their past? You just hypnotize them quickly and crack on? Or how does it work? So give us the what do men come in with first? And then we'll go on to the other stuff.

Yeah. So the interesting thing for me at the moment with. When I first started working with hypnotherapy, I was working predominantly with women. It was 80, 90% women that I was working with. And then through the course of the last 18 months, as I've been working in more men's retreat spaces and doing my own kind of personal menswear and actually sitting in circle with men as well, beginning of this year, it's now shifted kind of 70, 80 men. But we're actually starting to talk about more of the same things. Yeah. So we're starting to talk about the imposter syndrome. We're starting to realize that overworking isn't a badge of honor. We're starting to talk about the relationships we do and we don't have with our kids and starting to kind of unpack that that is imposter syndrome, when they originally started studying it in the 80s, was just what women. You know, it was a woman's thing. Men. Men didn't get imposter syndrome. Right. Which is completely farcical because everyone gets it. And they did a survey a couple of years ago during COVID I think they surveyed 2, 000 people, something like that. And something like 96 of people surveyed said that they experienced imposter syndrome. But it just comes up for us in different ways as men. Like I say, we want to overwork, we want to push ourselves. We become extremely independent, and we'll push people away to prove that we can do this on our own and. Yeah, well, you know, and leading the charge, but just running ourselves down. Yeah, it's like, so it's talking about those things, but the relationships we have with our partners, how do we want to show up as men? Now? The big thing that I've really kind of tuned into the last six months or so is this. Not just even sure it's a writer's placidity, it's this passiveness. Like duplicate things that, you know, we just want to have a peaceful life as men. This is what I'm really tuning into. And I'm kind of really tuning into it. My own traumas as well, and the stuff that I've carried. It's like, we want a peaceful life, and we don't want to prod the bear and we want to tend our vegetable patch, and then, you know, like, live a peaceful life. And if anything comes into us or anyone starts to aggravate us or someone says something, we'll just. We'll try and smooth it over and laugh it off a little bit just to keep it peaceful. And we become complacent. Yeah, but the problem with this is in which more men, I think, are tuning into, with everything that's going on, that complacency becomes complicit. So what you're actually saying by trying to smooth that over and say that that's okay and just laugh it off and. And push it to one side, what you're actually saying is that behavior is okay, especially how other men are treating women.

Yeah.

So we have to be tuning into this. But what is sitting underneath that is because not. Not all men are bad men. This is really important. Yet all men feel the weight of what every man has ever done. It's like it's in our DNA. It's in ourselves. When we were growing up as teenagers, who were our role models? Did we see friends of ours mistreating a girlfriend or mistreating women? Did we mistreat women ourselves? Although it may have been consensual, was it actually pleasant? No. Were we coercive or manipulative? And what we worry about, I think, as men, is that if we prod something or say something or say that that's not okay. Is someone going to say, hold on a minute. That thing you did when you were 21, let's have a conversation about that. So we would rather just smooth everything over so that we don't have to feel like we have to take accountability almost for those things.

Deal with it. You know, it's interesting you said that. I was thinking back to, as you said it, someone in my group of friends, probably when I was in my 20s, and I got told that he was kind of not. Not in a good way, but, like, throwing his girlfriend around the bedroom.

And.

But I remember at the time thinking, I'd want. I'd love to say something to him, but you wouldn't know where to start. So you end up just being quiet. And who knows how that escalates. But you think maybe if you'd have said something back then, not saying you would have, like, stopped and doing it, but you might have helped them realize that, helped them with the realization. Which is exactly where even with the whole man Academy, with all the tools that you kind of create, be it in person or podcasts, what you're trying to do is get a guy to hopefully kind of look at his life and think more about his behavior, his choices, you know, what he eats, what he drinks, what he watches, who he believes, all that kind of stuff as well. So I think it's a massive part man's life.

Huge. Huge. So looking at those habits and behaviors and then giving space for men to be able to unpack that, as in. With the whole man academy, it's like, here's a safe space. Let's talk about this. And also was meant to hold our hands up and say, hold on a minute. If there's something that I need to kind of reconcile, remediate, repair, whatever, and. And hold myself accounted and be able to do that and to step into that and have enough integrity to be able to stand there and hold whatever it is that you need to hold whatever you did or didn't do in your earlier life. Yeah.

Would you think especially it's even more. What's the word? Relevant? Or is it pertinent in the last four years when, you know, during lockdowns, I sensed kind of a weakness in men where they would just comply with whatever they were told. And. And also, if you. If you went against what you were being told, you were considered, you know, dangerous views, when, in fact, you know, it's shown since then that actually it wasn't what we were being told, and those people that spoke out and went to protests and stuff had a right to do it. But I think at the time, for a lot of men, it's. It's. Some men want an easy life, and I understand why, but that shouldn't come at the cost of your own complacency around freedom.

Exactly.

And.

But then the problem is it compounds. It's like, well, I didn't say anything there. Well, oh, maybe I'm a bad person because I didn't say anything. It's just like, well, no, it's not about whether it was good or bad or whether it was right or wrong. It's a case of, okay, what do you know now? No, no, better. Do better. Yeah. And as you see, that's like, well, based on that piece of information, what would I do now? If I see someone in a restaurant saying something inappropriate to a woman or a member of staff being, doing whatever. Okay, if someone was saying that to my daughter, would I stand for that?

Yeah.

And if my daughter's with me and I don't say anything, what am I then? Projecting? It's like, okay, that was then, this is now. Know better, do better, stand your ground.

Because that, and going back to the, let's say, linking that back to the childhood. You know, I'm, I've got three boys who are seven, nearly five and one. So you know, they're very early on in their journey and you don't want to your kids up, but we both know, you know, we all say things and do things. And I've said on podcasts before, I hear especially my 7 or 5 year old say things and I'm like, oh my God, that's, that's me. Like, yes, the good and bad stuff. And sometimes I'm like, I'm really proud of what they just said. Other times, like, I've got to stop saying that. But talk to me about the, the effect of the childhood trauma. I know it's hard to go over it all, but kind of the basics of the childhood trauma which then shows up maybe in attachment for, you know, later in life as a man.

Yeah. I'll share the analogy that I share with everyone because it gives everyone a framework to play with and kind of to, to see how it fits. So if you imagine there's the little version of Anthem and he's like maybe 3, 4, 5 years old and he's in the boardroom of his head and he's all, he's there all dressed up in adult clothes with all the sleeves hanging down, looking like one of those cute wedding car pictures, you know the ones I mean? Right, right. And there's mum and dad and they're the divine feminine. Divine masculine. And they're gods. And they have to be right because human babies are the most useless creature on the planet. If you look at a dog or a buffalo or a giraffe, within two hours they can walk, within two days they can run. Human baby can't even clean its own ass for the first four years of its life, if you're lucky, right? So there's mom and dad and they're gods. And we have this projection of perfection that we put onto them, which they can't sustain because they don't know how to. But there's only three things that we need as children and as adults, but primarily in our children, in the informative years. We need to feel safe, certain and loved. That's it. Safe with these people. Certain we're going to get our needs met and loved for who we are. But then something happens, right? And you get given this dossier. It's like this, this dossier is, is trauma. It's an, it's, it's a moment and remembering. Gabor Mate says trauma isn't what happens to you, it's what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you. And it's something that changes you psychologically and physiologically in order to survive. So you get given this dossier. And this dossier is basically how your mom and dad is. Yeah, Right. That's what, that's what it tells you, right? And no matter how good, and I say this to people, no matter how good your relationship is with your mom and dad, how much it does, in simple terms, at some point you will get given this dossier, right? And this dossier is trauma. And your whole world starts to collapse in on itself, right? And bear in mind, there is no big or small trauma, there is only the trauma. And the trauma is relative to your experience. So it could be surviving an 80 car pile up on the M25, or it could be the last words your first girlfriend or boyfriend said to you when you were 12 years old. That could be traumatic.

Yeah.

But what we do is we tend to, we play those things down so that we don't have to process them. And that's part of the clever games our ego plays. So you get given this dossier and all of a sudden you no longer feel safe, you no longer feel certain, and you no longer feel loved and your whole world starts to collapse, right? And the truth is, up until the age of seven, if you don't feel safe, when you don't feel certain, you can actually die. Because if you don't get your needs, but if you're not fed, clothed, kept warm, you can actually physically die from this. Now, the human brain only wants you to do two things. Stay alive, make babies. That's it. It's really simple, right? So at that moment, you no longer feel safe, you no longer feel certain. You're going, you're a small child, you think you're gonna die. Psychologically and physiologically, you're going to start, you're starting to shut down. No matter what the event is, it's just happening. This is when your ego steps in and your ego goes, I'll take that away from you. And the little version of you is like, seriously, bro, I'm good. Take it. Like, yeah. And the ego goes, great. And it reaches in and it grabs the dossier and it takes the emotions with it. And it often takes the. The. Some of the memories with it, which is why we often have bits missing in our memory. The human brain and mind is amazing. Like this. Takes it away and says, right, I'm going to lock it in this room and I'm going to mark this room a 99 out of 100 for storm. Yeah. If you go in here, it's going to be apocalyptic. It's going to be four horsemen, rivers of blood, cats, liking dogs. It's going to be a mess, right? And the little version of you is like, I'm good, Cool. And the ego's like, amazing. But in order for you to stay away from this room, you're going to have to change the way you behave. And the little version, he says, well, I don't want to feel like that. What do I have to do? And bear in mind, this is all happening in less than 0.2 of a second. Yeah, yeah. And this part can be tough for some people to hear, right? But then the ego says, in order for you to stay away from this room, you're going to have to say, it's all your fault. Because if it's not your fault, it's their fault. And if it's their fault, you won't feel safe and certain. And you only need safe and certainty in order to stay alive and make babies. You don't need love for those things.

It's a good point.

So what happens? You go, well, I can do that. It's all my fault. But what you're actually saying is you're not lovable because if you were lovable, they wouldn't have treated you that way. And then what happens? We're going, well, you can't live like this. You have this huge hole inside of you, this empty space. This is void, this lack of love. You have to go and look for it everywhere else now. So we end up, as the song says, we go looking for love in all the wrong places, right? So then we go and overwork to prove ourselves. Then we do people pleasing to kind of make sure we build and maintain that connection. We do perfectionism to make sure everything's just right so no one shouts at us.

And we want to make my parents proud.

I heard yeah, yeah. Want to make my parents proud. Look at me, Daddy. I'm 46 years old. Please look at me, Daddy, and love me.

Yeah.

And that's not the 46 year old talking, that's the 5 year old talking or even younger. So we go out and we do all of these things and that's when it becomes the imposter syndrome. It's the fear of not good enough, the fear of losing love. So we will go out there and do those things. Now that's kind of the emotional side of it is we're going to feel trying to backfill this chasm, this bottomless chasm inside of us of not being good enough because of what we didn't, didn't get as children. But then the other side of it, which gets a little bit interesting is you cannot process physical and emotional pain at the same time.

Right.

So then you have self harming, self medication, self anesthetization. Yeah. And self harming comes up. It's not just the control cutting that we often see, especially in teenagers. It's. Yeah, really painful to see. Yeah. But it's everything from how we eat, how we don't eat, you know, what we put into our system, how we drink, the drugs that we take. Physicality over exercising, just coping mechanisms. It's keeping us physically in pain because our brain can only deal with that. So it's keeping us distracted. It all becomes distraction, all of it. The people pleasing, codependency, overworking, drinking, drugs, sex, gambling, you know, cheap instant gratification and dopamine hits which end up in some sort of resulting pain or after effect that keeps us physically amused, that stops us from processing the emotion. And the only reason or the part of the reason it does this is because your ego doesn't know you've grown up. It still thinks you're the same age as you were when you experienced the original trauma. So it still does what worked then. So it still uses that same coping strategy, that same mechanism. Because what holds us together as children is what pulls us apart as adults. So when we do this work, it's just about reassuring the ego that you're not going to get rid of it. Reassuring it.

So where do you start with that then? So again, let's say, you know, Jeff comes in and he's like, I've got, you know, do you, do you talk and assess where he's first or is it like just tell me the one major problem, like where do you. Because it's, it's a, it's a can of worms, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a beautiful can of worms. It's like a really beautiful can of worms. So there's two roots to it. One is there might be that single point. It's just like actually I'm, I've had this argument with my boss or I've got this situation, my wife or I'm, I'm having sleeping issues. You know, there are four, four primary ones. Sleeping, eating, sex. And I can't remember the other one going for a. Actually are the four basic mammalian functions that we need complete security for. Like if you ever look at now, how do animals have sex from behind so they can see what's going on because there's that, that need for safety. So these are the four cool core shout outs. How we eat, how it comes out, how we sleep and how we make like how we have physical intimacy. These are really good indications that something is going on, that you don't feel safe about something. So it might be that you have an issue with that. And Jeff, Bob, whoever want to come in, Like I've got this issue with this. I've got an autoimmune dysregulation. I'm not going to toilet properly actually, or erectile dysfunction or whatever it is. It's all going to have a foundation in there or. Yeah, so it's kind of that point. But then as you open that up, you'll then find out, okay, well what are the layers that sit behind that? What are the key events? And we'll spend time talking about what the key events. What's your relationship like with your dad? What's your relationship like with your mum? What's your relationship like with your siblings? Because that also has an impact. What, what the key ages where, what do you remember happening? You know what happened? You know, they'll say, well, this happened. How old were you? Seven years old. Okay, cool. So that's another route in.

I was going to ask you, that's a really interesting point because I had example of someone who shows, I would say the sh remembers a traumatic in their head experience with their father years ago that they say in their head their father like threw them across the room when they'd done something bad. And knowing the father said that's not what happened at all. But they've kind of made that up in that, you know, their, their five or six year old has felt that much blown out of proportion. But they've carried that trauma through for 30 years. When you speak to the father and the mother, like that's not what happened. But if that's what they think happened, then that's, that's, it's good enough. For their inner in a mind, if that makes sense.

100. And they did, they did a science experiment with, I don't know how in 10, 15, 20 people. And they got all these photos of their lives and put them up. And then what they did is they then interspersed it with a fake photo, it'd been photoshopped. A really high quality of them going on a balloon ride. And something like 75, 80 of those people actually get. Oh yeah, I remember going on that balloon. And they'd never been on it. Right. So that like this is why this sort of information isn't admissible in court. Because the, the memory is so malleable and flexible. Yeah, yeah. And it warps, you know, the emotions and elevate and de, escalate certain things in order to create that sense of certainty and that sense of getting the needs met and safety. So it makes these stories up. So when we do that in hypnotherapy, you can go in and actually just shift the perspective. Looking at it as the adult rather than still looking at it as the five year old frozen in that moment and then go oh, it didn't actually happen that way. And then the game changes. I work with a client who was a high achiever in a low achieving score family, moved, ended up in a high achieving school. And that individual, they got their first C grade, they'd never, never seen a cigarette, always been A grades. And they believed that the teacher had told them they were average. Like so they remembered going up to the front of the class, they put the, the C grade and said what's this? And the teacher said you're average. And they'd lived their whole life on that simple premise, that simple one sentence, right. One word, just one word. And this is where it gets interesting because actually when that person went back and saw the memory, they saw themselves walk into the front of the class with the paper as if they were standing in the classroom watching it all happening around them. And they presented the, the exam paper to the teacher and they said, what's this? And the teacher didn't say you're average. The teacher said that's average. And the whole game changed. Two weeks later. It's like, well I've had this idea and I'm going to do this with my business. I'm going to sort this. And they spent the last 14 years worrying about what people thought of them.

It's like a light bulb goes on.

It's just like literally that is the revelation.

Yeah.

So if you imagine how many people are playing These games. How many people are beating themselves up because actually a teacher said something to them that they believed as gospel because they were six years old, seven years old, and that's how they've lived the whole life. So hold on a minute. I'm sitting here banging my head against this brick wall, wondering why it's not coming down and just getting bruises. Actually, I can just take all that pressure off. I can show up in a completely different way, which is more wholeheartedly and holistically me.

How easy is it? Then there's. I want to ask you about kids and let's say abandonment of kids. Either by making them sleep on their own in a room when they're little.

Yeah.

And leaving them at nursery primary. Whatever. But. But prior to that. So I'll tell you that. So I don't forget it because there's about a million questions in my head because it's such a interesting topic.

So.

So where do you start with? Will you sit and have a conversation and then put them under hypnosis? And if so, I know there's multiple ways to hypnotize someone. What's your. Do you have, like, a preferential way or.

I love working with people online. Yes. I can work with people face to.

Face, but that's a common question. He's like, I said to some the other day and they said, well, obviously it has to be face to face. No, no, no, it doesn't.

Well, the truth is, we're all walking around hypnotized anyway. Yeah, we're all walking around, like, absorbing massive amounts of media and advertising and we're picking up subliminal messages everywhere. So everyone's just taking advantage of you. And the truth is, the more confused you are, the easier it is to take advantage of you. So people don't want you in your full mind, full body, thinking consciously and creatively. So we're all doing it. So actually, you just sit down, we take a few breaths. You've got your earphones on. You haven't got to worry about where your parking is or whether your parking's running out or how to get there, or now if we had an emotional experience in. Your mascara has gone south. You haven't got to worry about, like, getting on the bus and going home. Right. So it's all of that. It's just like, actually, you can just sit down, relax, put your headphones on and listen to my voice so that when I do that, I then just start to slow the voice down and then start to talk about your breathing and Just slow your breathing down and just take a nice deep breath. Long, slow exhale, slow it all the way. And people just chill the out. It's just like, oh, can I actually take a moment here just to listen to Nathan's voice? So it's not like I've got to sit here and try and think of nothing else. I just listen to Nathan's voice. We just gently go into a deep space of relaxation. 12 to 15 minutes to get into really deep, profound state of relaxation. It's not just like, close your eyes and here you go. And now you're tiptoeing through the tulips and here's your power penguin and all that. Right. It's like properly, like, getting into that space. When we do the full. And I'll do a full session and then just walk people through that journey, just giving them the guidance. Like, okay, go here. See this, invite this. Okay, let's explore that and unpack that. And we have different. So I have, like, a bit of a shopping list to work through to make sure people tickle those boxes as they're working through it and getting the emotional content and the realization and revelation they need so they can come out the other side of it and go get it. Right. Cool. Okay. And if they need to cry, if there's emotional emotive, like, to let that stuff rip as well, not to really pull it up. But I also say that because some. I was speaking to a person just now and they just said, I don't feel brave enough yet. Is the truth is that's your ego talking. And the truth is, if you know something, there is holding you back, causing you damage or causing somebody else harm, you can already see it. So the moment you see it, you cannot unsee it. If you know you need to do that piece of work, you need to do the work. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to go anywhere until you do that work. It's like the whole Morpheus in Matrix. If you take the blue pill, you wake up tomorrow and all of this becomes a dream. But if you take the red pill, you get to see how deep the rabbit hole is. Yeah. But the truth is, the moment you know there is a red pill, you've already taken it. There is no backing out at that point. It's just like, okay, I've got to go and do the work. Let's crack on. So that's kind of the key bit. But even. Even going. Doing some of the body work stuff, the semantic release, even taking A few deep breaths with your eyes closed. And starting to use your active imagination to. Okay, there's a memory. There's also. There's a moment I've had recently. Okay, cool. Had this argument with my partner. Great. Where do you feel that? In your body?

Yeah.

What? How does it feel in your body? Tight, heavy, limp, empty, whatever. Okay, numb. Okay. What emotions do you find in there? And just doing this with the eyes closed, just with a few deep breaths, I'm doing this kind of in the space of 15 to 30 minutes. What emotions do you find? Okay, cool. Now visualize what that looks like. That tight, angry feeling. Visualize what it's like. Oh, it looks like a. A knotted ball of rope. It looks like a black cloud. It's like a heavy weight. It's a brick wall. All these different metaphors. All everyone's mind is different. Okay, cool. Because that what you're visualizing is actually your protective ego. So however it appears that is your protective ego or even just as a feeling, sometimes it doesn't appear at all. It's just the feeling that is your protective ego. Using every technique and tactic it to keep you away from the memory that it's protecting. Because it thinks if you go there, if you feel that again, it thinks you will die. But many of us go, well, it wasn't that bad. I don't think I'll die. No, no, no. Your ego thinks if you go there, you will die and it will do everything it can to keep you away from it. Yeah, but we don't want to get rid of the ego because your ego is amazing. Right. Like your ego is actually there to keep you alive. It's just been given a standard operating procedure that's been written by a three year old. Right. That's not good business sense.

How do you improve your ego? You know, how do you protect it? I guess. Or grow it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is the bit is. Well, the first part of what we tend to do with our ego is. Oh, well, we stop drinking or we go and do this and then the moment we, we fall off the wagon or we slip. Yeah. And we're like, oh, you, you up again. Like you end up in some. You're useless. Why can't you get your together?

Yeah, same spiral.

Same spiral. But what it's actually doing is affirming to your ego. Your ego goes, well, you're obviously not ready to deal with this, Anthony. Like, you know, I'll carry on driving the car. You carry on being a passenger in your own life. Right. And I'll look after you, sweetheart. It's all right. Here, have some vodka because the lager is not working now. Have some, Charlie, instead of a pill. Right. And this is a game of play. So it just keeps you more distracted because you've beaten yourself up. Then you start to realize that actually your ego is doing all of this because it loves you. It loves you so much it doesn't want you to feel like you did when it first showed up in your life. But like I say, it's been given a standard operating procedure that was written by a three year old. And you're wondering why things aren't working properly. Yeah. So at this point it's just like Mike. Right. Revelation. Ego's doing it because it loves me. The drinking, the sex, the gambling, the procrastination, whatever. It's doing all of that to keep me safe. That's clever. Okay, how do I, how do I build my relationship with my ego? It's like, it's like if you've got a company and you've got someone in your company that wasn't trained properly and they're running around like, like lunatics, but they weren't onboarded properly, they've never been shown what to do. Like, right, they're trying to make the tea, sweep the floor with the broom up their ass. They're trying to do this. Yeah. But they're actually starting more fires than they're putting out.

Yeah.

Just through their enthusiasm. Right. So if you had someone that was that energetic and that enthusiastic in your business, would you fire them? Or would you give them the training and redirect them to do something better for the business?

Yeah.

Because this is what we then do is we rebuild the relationship with the ego so that you can actually have a conversation with it. So you can stop giving yourself a hard time, because you can stop judging it and alienating it. Because if you took even 5% of the energy that your ego has used to hold you back and things up. Floating speech marks. Yeah. If. Even if you took 5% of that energy, how different would your life be? So do I want to get rid of that? No. Do I want to get that part working on my team or, you know, supporting me? 100. Yeah. And actually we can create this level of kindness, a little bit of self compassion where you stop beating yourself up and go, I'm a bad person for doing that. Because you're not. Because the thing that you're doing in truth isn't actually your fault. Those things that we up when we cause Problems or whatever, it's not actually your fault. Yes, you might have been the, the, the actor of that. You might have been the perpetrator or whatever, the enabler. And at the same time, it wasn't your fault. You were given a faulty map of the world by people that don't even know how to navigate and you're wondering why you're still lost. Right.

And this, this, as you say, that it counts for. I don't mean loads of men. I know, but I, I think a lot of men I've either worked with, I'm working with three different men at the moment who all got different things going on. But when I think of the 100 plus men I've interviewed on the podcast who are experts in certain fields, but still, at some point we might have private conversations. Conversations will be like, in one area of their life, they just feel lost and you realize that that one area of their life is probably their weak link. And maybe, you know, saying you're only as strong as your weakest, you know, like, group member, but maybe as a man becoming a whole man, you're only as strong as your weakest link, if that makes or segment of your life.

Yeah, 100. And I think Jim Rohn said it about, you know, you're the average of the top 10 people you hang with or whatever, and actually your psyche is made up of many different parts and different elements of history and story and younger versions of, you know, if there's a part of you that doesn't feel, you know, fully actualized and activated and able, that part is actually going to be pulling your internal average down. I mean, I'm kind of thinking this as I'm, you know, as I'm talking to you about this, it's like, it's putting that down. It's like, okay, I might be super successful over here, but what's my relationship with my wife? What's my relationship like with my son?

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Let's go and explore that. So what's your relationship like with your father? Okay, cool, let's unpick that. Because then actually that brings your internal psyche all up. It's like, well, let's use the best parts of, of your psyche here. Unpick what's coming up here where you can see that pain point, unpick it and bring it forward. And then everything kind of up levels because now this part isn't dragging everything down or base. It's like everything shifts up. How you show up with your wife, how you show up at work, how you show up for yourself, your physical health, your mental health, how you show up in your communities. It's like great. You know, it's. Again, I'm kind of just drawing back to kind of some of those great male role models that we were often told to kind of believe in. And you're gonna. Hold on a minute. They got some going on.

Yeah.

Like Martin Luther King. Right. Was a massive womanizer. Right. Is that cool? How. What sort of role model is that for black American men trying to move forward in the civil rights. You know, Mahatma Gandhi, massive wife abuser, used to lock his wife in a room and starve her and beat his kids and stuff.

Yeah.

Like, hold on a minute. These are supposed to be advocates and role models for peace and power and movement and stuff. It's like, yeah, actually, no, I've got some questions here.

Not sure. Yeah, it's really important you say that. I, on a podcast ages ago posed the question of, let's say for the. My nephews as boys are 17 and 14, I should, I should know this, but I look at them and I'm like, who are the role models for them? Yeah, because. And it, but even if you go to the, the 35 year old man that I was when I was about to leave the city, you know, I went down the personal development route and found lots of different men. And some of them that. And I don't mean you like worship them, but part of you was like, oh, you wanted to, you wanted to instill some of their traits. And, and then I look back and I realize a lot of them have got trauma that they're still trying to deal with. Maybe they're trying to help other people before they've helped themselves, if that makes sense. It's like, I'm gonna save people. And you're like, well, you're. So how does that work? Which not to say you can't. It's like having a fat personal trainer. I said it once to someone like, personal trainer shouldn't be overweight. And the guy said, why does it matter as long as he can help you with your problem. I was like, that's a good point. You know, that's. I get it. But it's, it's been interesting to me, especially again the last few years. I see how the media push certain. Let's. Again, talking about men here, male stars. And then when you understand more about them, you realize they're. They're not. Then you're never going to hear honest opinions from very high profile people because they're completely controlled either by their brands or their sponsors or whoever. So I think it's really hard for men now to look around and be. And honestly be like, hey, that's the guy that I really, you know, I really can model what he's doing.

Yeah. And I think partly that is because again, it comes back to that complacency piece is there's been such a movement of me too abuse being called out. What are we complicit in as young men and you know, as predominantly white men in our. In our culture, what's been projected? So it's a case of how do we hold our hands up and how do we hold ourselves to account to it? How do we talk about it openly and honestly and. And in a way that doesn't create more shame? Because I don't think the shame is useful.

Yeah.

Inspires more engagement and more men to go. Yeah, I'll get it. Yeah, I totally see that. I can see where I can see my part of the problem. I can see how my behavior might be adding to that. How would I like to make that better? And I could say if there's stuff that you need to do because perhaps you have done something that requires police intervention or something like that, then you have to take those steps. You can't play those things down or kind of brush them under the carpet or, you know, if you've got enough money, just pay people off so you don't have to go at court. Because that's also not okay. That's basically saying that you. Yeah, you're validating what did happen. And also you're paying it off to keep it quiet so you don't serve the time. And that's. So again, how do we find that right balance and also as men also, how do we find that center point so we can actually go hit me like bring it.

Yeah.

Like, especially for the divine feminine, in whatever format is our partners, society, collectives. Like, how can I hold this container for what I may and may not have done or what I have been part of or no exploring that and then just holding that in the integrity and being the lighthouse, not the little boat on the ocean. Right. But when we become the lighthouse, it doesn't matter what your partner, what your kids throw at you. It's just like the lighthouse doesn't go anywhere. If you're out there paddling in the rubber dinghy in a tsunami, mate, you've got a problem.

It's so funny you said. And I mentioned to you when he had our. Our first Kind of chat the other day that the, the, the, the second most watched podcast I've ever done, but, but easily the most interacted with, with hundreds of comments and stuff like that was a guy called Neil Kramer. And he said two things which funny links to what you've just said. Number one, he said, what is being a whole man? And he said it's centeredness, you know, especially in, with all the, that's going on around you in the world, you know, being able to sit there, take it in, react how you want, not get flustered, etc. Etc. But the other thing he did a thing age ago where he said you need to be a lighthouse in a storm. And it's like you said, I remember hearing that, would you call it analogy and thinking that was, that was so true. Especially in the last three or four years and even today, I mean, we're, you know, it's a, a few days since the, the pantomime in the States with Donald Trump's been, you know, shot in the ear and you've got, everybody's got their opinion on it. And some people think it's, it's real, some people think it's fake, some people think it's staged. And I sit back and I'm like, well, that's what the media want you to do. They're all arguing about it and you're wrong and you're wrong and people are pro this and, and, and shouting and the experts are being in. I'm like, all that noise is now just taking energy away from you. And, and that's exactly what they want. They want you to comment online, they want you to argue with people, they want you to have, and I would say if you know, an inbuilt, ongoing feeling of dread in your mind, what might come. What's happening.

Yeah. And this is what keeps you in the distraction. So often when I draw this, if you imagine kind of there's this little circle in the middle and it's you and you're born perfect and then you experience the trauma, like the traumatic event. So you get this kind of ring of trauma around you as an individual, and that's when your ego kicks in. And I say this from kind of a personal point of view as well as from a collective point of view. But then you have this fear. So the ego puts fear in place to keep you away from the trauma because fear is really useful to keep you away from things. Fear of not good enough. Fear of losing love. Right. Keeps you away from the original moment, the origin, the Originating moment because it thinks if you go there, you will die. But you can't live your life in a state of fear. Like, literally, you would just. You would fall apart. Stress, you were, you know, all of those things much quicker than what we do actually, when we get into the ring of distraction. So the ring of distraction is where we put all our habits, the behaviors, the news, the media, then binge, binge watching, Netflix, the soap operas, the alcohol, the drugs, the food, the autoimmune dysregulation, all of that stuff. Physical illness, Trump getting shot in the air. What a load of. Right? All of that stuff. Right. Is right there out there in the ring of distraction. So what they're doing in the media, in marketing and the world is they're like, look over here, look over here, look over here. So you're not looking over here, which is where you need to be. But actually it's like, well, what is this reminding me of? That time that I was lied to by my dad when he put on some sort of pantomime and was shouting at me from the sidelines of the football or whatever, or when I missed that goal and he was like, come on, keep fighting and do whatever. It's like, what's it actually reminding me of internally about me? So you can come back to that center. It's like everything outside of you, anything that triggers you externally is what needs to be worked on internally. And then as you do this piece of work and you come back to center, it's just like, as you were saying that I was thinking, this is why we've got so many back problems, so many spine problems, because we lacking that internal structure, we're lacking that internal support. We need an internal reference point. Like a totem pole almost.

Yeah.

To keep Australian. It's like, I know what I'm coming back to.

Do you know what I think is one of the.

The.

How can I put it? One of the biggest challenges for men is. Is the mobile phones now. And again, I've a. I know because I've spoke to lots being myself. I've said on many podcasts, you think, let's say you and I are communicating on LinkedIn. I've got a message you. And then something will pop up and I'm like, oh, I'll comment on that. And then you know, oh, look, there's a cat dressed as a Nazi. And then something else and something else. And five minutes later you're like, oh, I just checked Instagram. Oh, there. Jeff's might message me on there. And then you're like 20 minutes later, like, what the was I doing? And then you don't even remember. Yeah. Start all over. And they were like, Nathan, that's it. I was gonna message him. I'll go back onto LinkedIn. Oh look, look, someone's on a poll. I'll fill that in. And it's just, it's because I see now one of the guys who's in the whole Mad Academy network, long story short, has got someone that's important in his life who is Palestinian. And obviously with what's been going out there, I, I see where he's been trying to kind of support it. But then you're basically just looking at traumatic stuff all day.

Yeah.

And to be honest, it doesn't matter. You know, from my view, even if you're watching like a scary movie, I'm, you know, my understanding is that your kind of subconscious doesn't know it's a film. So you're just scaring the out yourself. Probably just before bed and, and therefore the next day or even with. I know we could talk about all this. For me, like when I used to play Grand Theft Auto when I was younger and now you look back and you're like, hey, that's what I needed was come home from work and shoot and kill people and you have police chase me for three hours and then just switch it off and hope for a deep night's sleep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And no, your subconscious mind and mind doesn't know the difference. So this is for me with the hypnotherapy. This is why it's really interesting when you can go into hypnotherapeutic state and you can speak to your younger self. You can go in as the 46 year old man as I am and I can speak to my 12 year old self as if I'm having a conversation. And then I can call in my mum or my dad or the teachers or whatever, the people that cause the problems at that time and I can have a conversation with them and my subconscious mind will be completely there in that moment. Yeah, there's absolutely fascinating. So when we then look at those moments where. Hold on a minute. From this moment, I can think about that first fight I had in the playground when I was 13 years old. Your body starts producing adrenaline and you start thinking about, well, what could I said and what should I have done and how should I have punched him? And it's like, did all of this. So your body starts producing this cocktail of chemicals which is now starting to corrode you from the inside out. So it's really important that you're kind of like, well, what am I actually feeling? What is my diet? Because the diet isn't just what I eat. It's the media, it's the clothing, it's the, the choices I make to put in my house, etc, the, the chemicals I clean my sink with. This is. This is what you're putting in.

Yeah.

What, what is that bringing out for me? And when I'm looking at things again, it's like when I'm looking at things on the news, when I'm looking at what's going on in the world, there's a couple of different camps and you can. One is, you can go, I can pretend everything that's light and love and I can sit here and arm and the universe will be a great place. No, no, no. There's children dying in Palestine. Let's talk about that. Okay. And then there's the other part where we can get so embroiled in it and we're like, it's angry and we're watching consuming, all consuming. But either way, we're like, we're. It is too much. It's too much of one or the other. But it's like. Hold on a minute. Is what's happening there. Okay. No, 100% it's not. You know, there's tens of thousands of children being good at a categorically. That's not. Okay. Okay. What's it bringing up for me? What part of the puzzle am I holding from over here? And I can sit here and meditate on that as much as you'd like and kind of send everyone well wishes. Is that going to stop Israel shooting missiles? No. No, Right?

Yeah.

What is it bringing up for me? What part of me is this showing? Like when the collective or on the individual level, so we can use hypnotherapeutic processes like that thing that Trump did, that argument you had with your, with your partner, that car crash. You saw the emotion that came up. Okay, what's that emotion showing you? What part of you still feels that? How I know. What's the, what's the earliest memory you have of that? And when I'm sometimes talking to the ego, I'll ask this question. I'll get people to ask their ego this question. How old was I when you first showed up in my life? And it'll be like. And then trust the first number that comes up. Five years old. Okay, cool. Can you see the five year old? And even from like is that a common answer?

Like a, you know, an age range like 5 to 7 or something like that.

It's normally with kind of, with brain waves, it's 0 to 7 is your prime kind of encoding of principles and morals because your brain's in theta. That whole thing with the Jesuit said, you know, give me the boy until the age of seven and I'll show you the man they knew 2000 years ago when they were saying that, however many years ago. But it's true, what with the brain frequencies and brainwave. So it's often something that we get between the ages of 0 and 7, but when we also have to look at then a little bit of epigenetics, a little bit of ancestral trauma and habits and behaviors. So it can be stuff where you're actually inside the womb in vitro might be something that happened to your mum and you're carrying that. So but it's all building essentially. But asking how old was I when you first showed up in my life? Trust the number that comes up and when, even with say the high level of taking a few breaths and just deepening the awareness and coming into the, the, the inner awareness, the, the, the body and being conscious of yourself. And I'll say, can you see the five year old? And they'll be like, yeah. And it's like, you know, in a good percentage of cases at that point, that's when the emotions start to shift because it's like me. There's the five year old that never got what they needed to.

It hits.

Yeah, yeah. And it starts to kind of just sink in a little bit. Then.

This is why it's. I know we said, you know, you could talk for hours just about this because each part of what we said you could break down into, you know, how, why, what can you do? Yeah, the big thing for me, and I'm mindful of your time because it's meant to be, that's our problem is we've got too much to talk about. So last, last question on this and, and what I'll say is, I know you and I'd said I, I want to try and find a way that we can do a bit more stuff where we contribute to the whole man academy's like email list of hundreds of guys because, you know, you're trying to do good in the world by helping men move away from trauma, whether you, you know, get rid of it, move away from it, whatever. And I find this stuff so interesting because it's not really talked about and most people haven't got a clue about it. I know they also don't realize how important it is. But one of the big things to me is about the, the trauma that you again, might cause your children, let's just say, so people don't get triggered. If you've either been fooled into thinking that leaving your child to cry all night is, is good, which, which I remember, you know, my partner Emma has fully understands a lot more about it. But of course, you know, in when you stand back and go, I know what we do. All your baby or little child wants is to is mummy and daddy to be hugged and to feel safe and to be loved, etc. I know what I'll do. I'll leave them in a room on their own. I'll let them cry all night. And my view on that now is years ago I would have been like, it would be character building. It'll be really good for them. Now I realize that's terrible advice. And actually if it was your partner and they were crying in their room, you wouldn't be like them, leave them. It'll do them good. It's like, let me go in there and see if it can give them a hug and talk to them and if they kept crying, just say hug, cuddle them. But the flip side of that is once they've gone from the baby that you're leaving basically in their head, they're abandoning them. But then there's the leaving the child with a stranger at preschool slash nursery, what have you. So, yeah, I know it's an expansive topic, but just kind of dip your pecker into that one a little bit, mate.

Yeah. Okay, cool. And so this is, this is the root cause of it and this is where it does get a little bit prickly for some people. People. So the first thing I'm going to kind of give it like a little bit of a caveat is not a judgment. This is what we were told to do.

Yeah.

If you look at the experiments of Milgram, I think it is when they got people to electrocute people in the 60s and basically everyone was an actor in the room except the person doing the electrocution. And all because someone was in a white coat and a clipboard said, no, you have to carry on for the, the sake of the experiment. Something like 78 of the people that did that experiment found out they could kill someone because someone in a white coat with a clipboard told them to. Right. So this is human. It's mental. It's a lot. Please, like, share the link for that because it's bonkers. So when we look at the things that we have and haven't done as parents when we're raising our children, sleep training, first day of school. Jabs. Sorry for bringing it up, okay, but it's like it's, it's not the, the and I'm not anti vax, it's the mechanisms, the psychology that sits behind it. It's like, okay, when you're actually sleep training and that small child there that the human brain doesn't fully actualize and come online until you're about 28 years old, so you've got a child there that's 6 months, 12 months, 18 months old. And we've been told since the industrial revolution this first actually come up. So basically white middle class and elite men and telling people, telling women how to raise children, right? Said leave your child there to cry out. As that small child's brain is the part of their brain that's still active at the moment, still thinks there's saber tooth tigers in the world, is still scared of the dark. Should not be left on the line because that's not how we raise animals. That's why all animals in predominantly baby wear in the majority, especially the primates. So what happens is that is that child is now freaking out. They don't know why they're freaking out because that part of their brain doesn't understand why they can't articulate it. They have nowhere to put it. So they scream. And the person they need to come and actually be with them is you, because you love them. But in that moment, what you're actually telling them is they're not lovable. And no matter how much they scream, you're not coming.

Yeah, for hours and hours and hours.

And the only reason they go to sleep is because they're absolutely exhausted and they have nothing left. They just give up. And again, this is not a judgment on any parent that's done. This is not a judgment on parents that have done this to us. This is just. And it's a discourse that has been shared with people. So this is how you need to raise your kids. Same with first day of school, same with the vaccinations. Like a small child, 12 to 18 months old, you take them to a strange place that smells really strange with lots of noise, lots of bright lights, etc, the small and basic. And then a mummy like that woman, like the divine feminine now gives me to a complete stranger and that stranger stabs me. Yeah, that's how it encodes in the system. So it's just like looking at these things, like, okay, how can we actually make those things better? How can we come up with alternative ways? And this is the important part when we're looking at these things is because there is only one trauma. And the one trauma is abandonment. So it doesn't matter what you call it, how you dress it up, sexual, physical, verbal, abuse, whatever. The trauma doesn't matter. It's just abandonment is. We lose connection. Because however many years, hundred, a hundred thousand years ago, we lived in communities of 150 people. And if we got sent outside of the community, if we got exiled from the tribe, it meant certain death. So the thing that we actually need to maintain all the time is connection. Like, safety isn't the absence of danger. Safety is the presence of connection. So we have to maintain that. So when things happen to us, even with some of the abuse cases that I work with, with women, it's like things have. Horrendous things have happened to them at the hands of men. And the thing they were saying is, where's my mum? Where's my dad? And that's what it boiled down, makes me emotional when I think about it. It's just like. So it's the abandonment, but we can't exist like that. So what we do is for that fear of being abandoned again. We then filter our world through faith. Four wounds, like four lenses to keep ourselves away from that, to stop us from repeating that pattern, that pain. And those four lenses is rejection, humiliation, betrayal and injustice. So what we end up doing is rejecting people before they reject us. We end up humiliating them before they humiliate us. We end up betraying them before they betray us. And then we sit there pointing our finger at the world, going how unfair the universe is and complaining about everything else, right? So when we start to see this, it's just like. Like, hold on a minute. Where am I pointing my finger? Where am I blaming? Where am I shaming? What part of me is still feeling that? What part of me am I trying to protect from feeling like that? And then getting really brutally honest with that and then being the one you've been waiting for is that whole thing. You know, we spend our whole lives waiting to be rescued, not realizing it was going to be us rescuing ourselves.

Yeah, it's an inside job.

It is an inside. Literally, it's an inside job. The way out is in, and we have to go to that place and we have to reconcile that part and we have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. And there's another cliche, one Which I love using is like, because if we don't heal our wounds, we end up bleeding on people that didn't cut us. And that's what 95 of the world is still doing. Yeah, Your Benjamin Netanyahu's of the world are just little boys still trying to be seen by dad. Boris Johnson. Look at me, Dad. I did exactly what you wrote in your book 30 years ago. All of them, they're all doing it. And you're seeing that they just got larger amounts of money, bigger networks, better education.

Yeah. More toys.

More toys and equal measures of trauma.

This is why it's. It's so interesting to talk about again, because I think for a lot of us, you know, so much of what we do as men, decisions we make, things we say aren't necessarily what's necessarily happening in our head now, but obviously go back to something that happened in the past. And, and even for me, I was, I. I wrote the whole man journal last week and kind of listed certain kind of types of trauma. So it could be, as you say, it could be sexual, it could be when you were a child, it could be abandonment.

Yes.

And for me, I had. Years ago, I went away on holiday with one of my mates and a young couple. It was out in Greece and a young couple got hit on their moped and her leg had been severed. And I was, I held her hand for. I can't even remember now, for as long as it took until the ambulance arrived. And she was really beautiful. Gone. She was looking up at me saying, I'm gonna. And I was trying to just make a look at me instead of looking down at what happened. But I remember at the time, you know, you deal with it and then it was like, just dealt with someone having a leg cut off. And then they got taken away and she did have a leg amputated. It was that bad. And then literally was back on the. On the sun lounger. And your mate's like, jonna, you know, do you want a beer? And you're like, yeah. And it wasn't until a few nights after I got home that it's like I had this like, download of emotional whatever. And I dreamt about it for quite a while. And it's funny, even then I don't remember anything really about the holiday. Two weeks of it, apart from me looking at her and dealing with it. And it's like, you know, your body's decided though, that, that probably 30 minutes in a thousands of hours I was out there, if that makes sense, is what my body has decided to hold on to and nothing else. I can't remember anything else about what I did out there.

Yeah. And it's kind of when you get that PTSD moment, you get frozen in that moment. We get fight, flight, flock and freeze. And we get frozen in that moment and that becomes all consuming and we can't move out of it. And then something happens, a noise, a smell or whatever activates that emotional content as we're talking about, and it elevates and escalates right away.

Yeah.

But what you actually needed and what many of us need in those moments is a time, is a moment to decompress. Like your mate, God love him, has no idea how to deal with what you've just dealt with. Do you want a beer? And you're like, yeah, that's a great idea, I'll have 70. Right. And then you crack on. It's like, actually, what did you need? You needed, like, you needed to physically decompress, you needed to shake, you needed to scream, you needed someone to hold you, you needed someone to talk to, to start to let all that stuff, like, process through you. But we're not taught how to do that. It's too scary to hold that for someone else. Because if you do that with me, then I might have to deal with my emotions. And it's just like, well, I can't deal with that. And it's like, well, it. Let's have a beer and. But it. But we're all playing that game.

Yeah. There's avoidance.

Yeah. Playing the avoidance game, it's like, okay, is it safe to feel like that? No, it is, because. No, it isn't. Because no one's ever shown us.

Yeah.

How to safely feel like that. So we.

That's why when having several friends who are in the emergency services and also guys who are now friends. But I've interviewed on the podcast that are either in the special forces or firemen, and one of the guys, David Vo, who's also lives down in Kent as well, but I remember him saying it was literally his first shout as a young fireman in London where a lorry had run over a female cyclist and he was told to get under the lorry with, you know, someone else while she basically held her hand and died. And he said, and as an 18 year old, I got out, they took me back to the station, had a cup of tea and it was like, right, the next shout's coming, let's go. And he's just like, you, you. To try and compartmentalize that and deal with it isn't a two minute thing, but. Well, let's. I know this is why it's so interesting because we end up again going off on tangents. But this isn't the, this isn't the last. The guys in the whole mannequin. I'm going to hear of you because I know we want to try do some stuff together.

Yeah.

But I've got a few, I'm going to say quick fire questions that, that I wanted to ask you about yourself personally. So one would be, can you describe like a setback that you faced and how you overcame it in life?

The biggest one was probably when I overdosed when I was about 23. I'd say that was going to. Already been learning psychotherapy frameworks at that point in time. Drama triangle and coaching questions and a bit of spirituality. But I'd gone away, gone traveling, came back completely derailed, came back to hometown as well, you know, and then just got in with the same crowd but went in even deeper. And I was using my same values and drive to literally destroy myself, but didn't realize how toxic my relationships and friendships actually were and how everything was just falling around and how bad my mental health was at that time. And the only reason I, I pulled out and survived that is because I've basically been building up a tolerance over eight to nine months to get to that point. And on that night, I think it was 16 E's that I remember counting and over 5 grams of Coke in one sitting. And it was in a week's physical recovery. But then it was realizing in that week that actually my whole life was falling apart. And because I'd learned about the drama triangle and the coaching techniques, when I then saw it in retrospect, it was like, that's, that's, that's a mess. If I carry on doing this, I'm either going to be dead or in prison.

Yeah.

And having those available tools, even on the intellectual level at that moment to just switch everything off and move away from it, stop doing drugs, severed all the relationships with my friends or friends floating speech rights at that point in time, change the complete direction I was going. Yeah. Was absolutely paramount to where I am now because yeah, it's a huge foundation for a big piece of my work.

I love, I love those stories. It just reminds you that, you know, I would say sometimes you can be in the eye of a storm and when you are, you never think it's going to be a sunny day again. But if you look back on things and I'VE got the same. And lots of guys I have. You look back and you're like, there's sometimes there was just one decision or one moment that you can be happy that in a way it happened because you had to have something like that. I had a collapsed lung years ago, and not that I was in destructive behavior, but what it made me do was appreciate football. When I went back to it, because I'd played it and was really good at it, but just took it for granted. And then when said, we don't think you'll play football competitively again, I was like, you're joking. And when I went back to it, I won player of the year. Every time I ran out, I was like. Like a happy little kid again because I thought I was going to have it taken away from me. So I. I love hearing stuff like that. Okay, next one is like daily habits or routines that have helped you be success in your head of success. What. What kind of things? Or sometimes it's like, I don't have anything particular.

But yeah, you know, the biggest ones that I have done and we've had to change kind of dynamics with family is actually just sitting down and journaling and just creative writing. Freaking love creative writing. And sometimes it's journaling to get the content out of my head, or sometimes it's just writing a post for social media to think about what I do. My posts tend to be a little bit longer and a little bit more verby and wordy, but it's just like, actually I use that as part of my process to empty my head and clarify my thoughts, read an article, write something on that, write a comment on someone else's post, and then use that to kind of keep. Keep the thinking flowing. I think that's really important to start the day.

Bit of journaling. I like it.

And.

And I've always encouraged the guys in the whole Man Academy network to if. Especially if they want to change something in their life, like get a new job or become a key person. So you start publishing content, getting your ideas. I know there's, that there's a book Getting Things Done by Dave Allen where he says, your head is for having ideas, not for holding them. Yeah, like, listen, get it out of your head and publish it on LinkedIn if it needs to be. But it's always a. It's a useful subject to talk about is publishing your thoughts. And as we know, these days, I'm big on getting around men that resonate with me and I resonate with them. So the more you can tell me what you're like, the more I can quickly decide whether I hate you or I love you. And therefore if I want to hang around with you or I'd rather just unfollow you, basically. So that's where I sit. Okay, next one. How do you, and I'll say stay motivated and maintain like your drive. I'm not sure if anybody can ever stay motivated 100 of the time I have times I'm like, ah, it can't be bothered word. But generally motivation for you and maintaining your drive.

Yeah. Okay, so let me flip those words over a little bit. So I think for me personally, motivation is, is finite and inspiration is infinite. So when we look at motivation, it's the packet of Haribo, the double time overtime on a Sunday, the bottle of wine for doing a good job. But it's something that is finite and will run out, whereas inspiration is internal and infinite. So my daughter, as much as we don't want to think about, she is finite, she's motivational. How I want to show up for my daughter though, is inspiration. That's. You can't take that away. So it wouldn't matter if I was flipping burgers in McDonald's if I had to, or was doing hypnotherapy, I would still bring the same driver, still bring the same amount of meat of that. So when I look at that is even looking at some of my addictive habits and some of those things that still crop up for me every now and again when my stress levels elevate, it's like, how is this actually in alignment with who I am? Is this like, is this helping me? How is this helping me get this next project over the line? Because this next project over the line is going to cause huge amounts of impact for an individual or a collective group of individuals. Like, and how do I want my daughter, do I want my daughter to kind of grow up observing those addictive habits in me when I get stressed, that I pull back rather than come forward or, you know, not even come forward. How I hold myself with more compassion so that I can come off, come forward more clearly? So yeah, it's like, who do I want to be when I show and how do I want to show up?

I love it. This is why these questions always open up interesting avenues of thought. Next one. Can you recommend a book or resource to, like, aspiring men?

I'm looking up here on my interesting board of things, the one that I have been listening to over and over and over again for the last three Months is from the call by John Wineland.

Right.

Me dead. Like, just. There was some useful, actionable stuff in there, but there's just some, like, super simple perceptions of how men and how women are and how men need to show up in. To create more integrity and all those little kind of just little nuances that we don't realize. It just makes sense.

Yeah.

That women just want more awareness from the men. And when women call us forward. Forward. This is again, one in the language. They're not calling us out, they're calling us forward. That many people don't know how to call someone forward. They end up calling them out, which is just built on shame. So when we can see that, it's like. So when my partner asks me to do something, she's not doing it from a place of shame or pointing. She's asking me because she wants me to be a better man. She wants me to be more aware of her needs and show up with more integrity. And then, you know, it's not just my trainers in the hallway. It was not just the toilet seat being left up. Not that I, I stand up and pee these days. Right. But it's just like. It's not. It's not just the toilet seat. What she's actually asking you to do is to be more aware. Because when you put the toilet seat down, it will become the trainers in the hallway. When you put the trainers away, it will become up. Hoovering the. Hoovering the stairway. It will become. It's not going to affect. Because one domino leads to another and you'll think, well, it's never ending. Well, actually, you're in a relationship kind of. You're in it for the long haul. Yeah. And all she's doing is asking you to be a better man, to be more aware of her needs so that she can be even more loving, which then actually creates more space for you and spaciousness and freedom. Because actually she can trust you to go off and do whatever you want to do. If you want to go away and have your retreat with the boys, fantastic. Because she can trust that. Because you put the toilet seat down.

You've just said something that. It goes off on a tangent, but I saw an Instagram post earlier where it was a. It's a guy in the States who was posting about how basically men should not have female friends. And you could even flip it and say, you know, women should not have male friends. And I, I understand the, the point of it, but for me, that just shows a lack of trust. Because if you said to me, you've got to drop a few of your female friends because, because you're like, well, if you don't trust me, then that's a, that's a problem in itself. Forgetting that, you know, there should be trust there. So I was just in an observation I saw earlier, whereas I saw people in the comments being like, yeah, you should never have female friends. I was like, I don't agree with that. But anyway, I. Not. You don't have. Always have to share your opinions online. But. Okay, next question. This is an interesting one. How do you want to be remembered?

Oh, Jesus, mate, that just makes me want to cry when, when I think about that. But it's the guy that cares in, in different ways. Yeah. I'm doing such diverse creative projects. I'm working in leadership space. I'm working hypnotherapy with men. I'm working on men's retreat spaces, doing group hypnotherapy there. And at the same time, I'm doing New Moon and Full moon journeys and based on the astrological signs with more spiritual groups and in super deep powerful meditations with silent disco headsets and a house DJ and stuff. And these are all the different things I'm doing. I'm just about to release an oracle deck with a group of meditations that are recorded to go with it. So you like this real diverse, eclectic mix, which is partly my ADHD creative brain, which I love. Right. But it's like, how do I want to be remembered? It's just like, yeah, the guy that cared.

Yeah, I like it. And it's. Again, it's. It's a question that you could sit for half an hour with and go through. But I, I love. Because for most of us, we don't necessarily think about that and that drives a lot of. With the whole Man Academy. For me. Here's an important part of where I see it. With the whole man Academy, I see, I follow people that release courses and people buy the course, which can be highly valuable. And I've spent thousands like myself, and then they just go off. But my point is, then you have no idea. You don't see any progress. You don't see anything where for me, I see the men in the whole man academy, I see the progress that men are making. So we've got guys in there now who, let's say, came to events as a 1 out of 10 and looked white and pale and weak and depressed and pissed off and rageful and all these things. And then we've worked with them in various ways. There's no. As you know, there's no one way necessarily. But now I like, literally we say they're an 8 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10, and their shoulders are back and they've got color in their face and they're. Now we've reignited their drive. And that's why I think. I think for guys, they need a combination of the work, let's say that you do, which is more of the inner work, and the work that I try and do, which is more of the get on with things. What are you doing today? You've said you're going to do this. Why the. Haven't you, you know, how are you making your bed? Are you eating properly? Drink? You know, have you stopped drinking? All these different things, which I think is. It's the equation or it's the. It's something that becomes the whole man. Because if you're deeply traumatized from something you're past inside, you can have everything outside. But if you've done everything inside, maybe you want the better body, the better, you know, the relationship, the better sex life, the better bank balance. So I love the way there's. There's a deep synergy there. So my last question to you is, what's the best advice you would give men who are seeking to improve their lives?

Embrace it. Because the male drive is to go intellectual, is to compartmentalize it. We saw this in Victorian England and the Victorian Empire. It's a compartmentalize everything. Take the magic out of it, catalog it, break it down into its core components and dissect it. And actually, like, you're missing the magic. Like, as a man, it's just like, okay, there's this moment, there's this feeling, there's this obstacle, there's this pain point. On the other side of that pain point is a deeper level of intimacy to yourself, to other people. And when you release that baggage, which you've probably been carrying for 10, 15, 20, 50 years, it's like, how much energy is it taking to carry that baggage? And actually just taking an hour, 90 minutes to embrace that and move into it and find yourself, it literally is recreating the whole man.

I love it. And that's why, for me, I would say it's taking a guy from wherever he is at the moment to where he wants to be. And that's different for every guy. So these conversations I have and have had for, you know, three years, you'll often have a guy which I love. You know, someone could listen to this and something you said in the first minute is the, the light bulb, the trigger for them that makes them think more or do more or stop doing something. And it could be the last thing in it or it could be all of it. So that's why it's important to have these conversations and as I say, because we have a, a good synergy together in our thought process. I, I, this isn't the, the last of what we're going to do, so. Good last question of you much as I'll share your details, but what's the best way if a guy listens to your stuff, he's like, hey, I might get in touch with Nathan and be nice, interesting work with him. What's the, the quickest, fastest way for him to do that?

Probably, you know, either on LinkedIn, just come drop me a message on LinkedIn, Nathan Simmons, the leadership coach, or even just finding, trying to find me on nathansimmons coaching.com the website needs an overhaul for sure, but the email addresses are all saying, look, if you want a conversation about this, something's coming up, something's pushed a button, something I've said's niggled you aggravated, you got a vexation, got a realization, just message me and let's have a conversation about it and get truth from useful.

Yeah, perfect. Well, as always, I, I'll end by saying the world needs strong men. And at least for you and I, we're trying to help people, help men get to that stage. So I appreciate your time, brother.

Thank you. Appreciate you.

Cheers.