The Hidden Traumas Sabotaging Entrepreneurs’ Success! with Dr. Don Wood

What if your procrastination, anxiety, or burnout isn't a flaw, but it's a glitch in your brain's survival system? And what if your success is secretly fueled by fear, costing you your peace in mind, your happiness? So I invited Dr. Don Wood onto the show. He's the founder of Inspired Performance Institute. He's going to break down how unresolved trauma, either big or small, are quietly sabotaging your business, your relationship, your health. And he's going to reveal how high achievers probably like yourself often live in fight or flight mode, like all the time. And how rewiring your mind can help you unlock calm clarity and peak performance. Let's dive in and find out. Did you know that most businesses only use about 20% of their data? I mean, that's like reading a book with 80% of the pages just ripped on out. You're not getting the full picture. So the point is, you're going to miss a lot unless you're using HubSpot. So their customer platform gives you access to a bunch of data that you need to grow your business. There are things like insights trapped in your emails, your call logs, your just transcriptions of chats that you're having either with yourself or with others. It's a ton of unstructured data that's going to really make all the difference for you. So because you want to know more, you'll be able to grow more. And that's kind of like having that full book, the 80% of the pages shoved back in there. So you're seeing everything. So get that for yourself. Go visit HubSpot.com today.

All right, Dr. Don Wood, we're doing this. I'm so happy that you're here today. How you doing, my friend?

I am doing great. I appreciate it. I got a little bit of a raspy voice, so it's a little off, but apart from that, I feel great.

Yeah? Yeah. I'm like, we've been chatting. Your mind's clear. I know that much. So that's what matters most. Well, you. Yeah. We've been fortunate to connect through Delphi AI. And folks here in the podcast have definitely heard me talk about it. So it's cool to be able to build that out for you and inspire Performance Institute.

Basically your practice, everything you do, which we'll talk about here, which has been blowing my mind ever since I learned about it. And selfishly, I'm like, oh, man, this is. I can't wait until you release that to the world.

So we're excited about it. Like, when I came down, I was telling people, our team about it. They're like, how does that work? And then after they got off the call with you, they were just like, oh, my gosh, I can see so many things we can do.

So we're all excited about it. Cool. Well, yeah, we'll definitely share it around when it's live, too.

What you do is just. It's super fascinating. And we've had the pleasure to actually chat on another podcast of mine called the TPE Blueprint. Quick little shout out there. It was a lot more angled to anxiety trauma and how it relates to toxins. And it's kind of a different. Well, similar topic, but we're going to angle it differently here for this show.

Sounds good.

Yeah. Performance based. As a business owner, like, we were just talking about this. You know, we, as business owners, we have our own forms of trauma that we develop around what the relationships, the things that we do every day. Some of it we don't even. We're not even aware of. Right.

It's absolutely. And a lot of people aren't aware that, you know, a business trauma can have an effect on your current business, and it can make you afraid to make decisions. You know, you can get into freeze mode. I mean, the same way you can in any kind of a situation. We have fight, flight, or freeze in normal life. Right. So if something is, you know, you've had an experience with something, you could go into fight, flight, or freeze. You can in business, too.

Yeah.

And it will affect the way your mind will make decisions. And so we're creatures, you know, of our environment. And if our environment was dark and stormy at one point, it still remembers that dark and stormy. And. And when people say to me, well, I sabotaged myself, and I go, well, it's actually impossible. You can't sabotage yourself. The brain would never do that. It's trying to protect you. So if you had had a particular kind of situation in your business and something looks like it's going in that direction, your mind will move you in another direction, not to hurt you, but to protect you from running into that same thing.

Interesting. Yeah. And a lot of us might see that as, oh, I'm just procrastinating. I keep avoiding this thing or beat myself up about whatever it might be in the past.

And all of those things, even procrastination, are protection systems. So I wrote my second book and I called it Emotional Concussions. Right. Because not everything's a big T trauma. So, you know, we know the obvious big T traumas. But if somebody's had an emotional concussion, that can have an effect on the way people's minds will work as well. So, for example, I had a lady, very successful, owned her own business, was doing really well. And she says, well, I sabotage myself. And I said, well, what do you mean? She goes, well, I procrastinate all the time. And she says, and I, I write it off to that fact that I must be much better under pressure. So that's why I procrastinate. And I said, well, no, that's not true. Nobody's better that way. We're better when we take our time and do things right. But we looked at it and it came back to when she was a child and her mother was the principal at the school she went to. And she says, I remember my mother calling me into her office and asked me to bring her homework. She'd do this all the time. And she goes, and I remember that red pen coming out. And she'd underlined all my mistakes. And so what her mind had learned to do was to try to wait as long as she could. I don't have my homework ready. Right. So her mom couldn't criticize her.

Wow.

So the more she could put it off, the less chance there was of being criticized.

I could see that. And something in business actually just. And maybe this relates where I've seen myself, but also I've chatted with others and I think someone even broke this down is even when you're selling or you know, you want to sell a new customer in your business prospect, and for whatever reason, you're not doing the. Maybe you have the call, but you're not doing the follow up. You're not doing all the things that you know will probably aid in that sale. I've heard, and maybe correct me if I'm wrong, or maybe any insights you have, you're almost. Your brain might be thinking about all the work that or the stuff that you need to do after they say, yes, let's go, that you might be actually preventing that happening the first place.

Very true. All of those kinds of things have. It's just the way our minds work. Our minds are trying to protect us from pain. And pain can come from different areas. Like that could become extra work. And so if your mind sort of sees this is going to be painful, it'll try to put it off as long as possible. So you may not be able to close that sale and you have no idea why. I'll give you another example. I Had a guy, very successful trader. He did options, derivative stocks.

Yeah.

And he says, and he comes to see me and he goes, in the third quarter, I sabotage myself. And I said, well, explain what that means. And he says, well, when the fourth quarter comes, he goes, my anxiety goes through the roof. He says, I avoid the office at all costs, he says, because I know if I go in there, my anxiety is going to go crazy. And he says, so I make excuses. I tell everybody I'm burnt out, I need a vacation. You know, it's a pretty stressful world making those kinds of trades.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and they're working on a quarter of a point a day. You know, stuff like that.

It's always moving.

Yeah, always moving. So they're having to watch everything so intently. So he goes, well, I don't know why, but it's the fourth quarter is always the time where I end up, like, trying to get out of it. And he says, and I feel bad because I leave all the work to my partners. And he says, but then when the new year comes around, I'm all fired up and I go back to work. So I asked him, I said, you know, any trauma? And he goes, no, I had a great childhood. He goes, my dad was my hero. He goes, he's my mentor, extremely successful guy. He says, I learned so much from my dad. And then he said something. He goes, and my dad was the most resilient person I ever met. I said, all right, tell me about why he's so resilient and what that means to you. He says, well, he went bankrupt four times. He says, so I remember as a kid, he says, we'd be flying in private jets. He says, and then in the middle of night, he would wake us up and have to pack up and move because we're getting evicted. Then we'd be back in private jets. So he was making about 2 million a year. What was his mind trying to do? Protect him from losing it.

Keep it.

Yeah, hold on to it. So the fourth quarter is the most volatile sometimes in the stock market. So his mind would try to get him, keep him out of the office.

Geez, that makes perfect sense.

And then after he goes through the program, he said, I've never felt so much peace in my life driving home. And then he sends me a message on December 15 that that was his last day. He was taking the rest of the year off.

Ah, but.

And he said it had his best year ever.

Oh, man.

But he had never identified where it came in from.

Well, that's what I'm curious here because you've. And. And I know we just jumped into it, but, like, your. Your background is fascinating, and I, I definitely want you to tell the story of how even, you know, why you chose to go this path, what, 15 odd years ago. But then, you know, maybe we do that. But then I want to get into, yeah, how does this trauma show up in. And of course, we're talking entrepreneurship mainly here, but we're all humans, and there's all traumas that we're probably just completely unaware of that are affecting our daily lives. And performance can skyrocket if we just clear something or identify that. Right.

Well, especially successful entrepreneurs. Right. People look and go, well, you know, my life's doing really good. I've got my dream home, I got my dream family. Everything's going along really well. But they're doing little things that could be affecting their enjoyment of it.

So I got into this mainly because of my daughter. So I'd always been an entrepreneur.

So I was in insurance, mortgages, real estate, doing things like that. And my daughter ended up being diagnosed with two autoimmune disorders, Crohn's, at 14. And they said, there's no cure for Crohn's. We don't know what causes it. And she ended up having 24 inches of her intestines taken out. And they said, there's nothing we can do. She'll end up with a colostomy bag eventually. And then she ended up with a second autoimmune disorder in her lungs. It was called idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis. And that's where the iron and the blood gets released. So again, they told us, no cure for it. We don't know what causes it. So that sent me back. My wife said, if we don't figure this out, we're going to lose our daughter. So I went back to school and started doing my research, and I went back, got my PhD, and I always say, if you want to solve a problem, send in an entrepreneur. Yes. I didn't come into it to become a doctor. I came in to figure out how to save my wife and my daughter.

Okay. Yeah.

And what I discovered is this unresolved trauma we didn't know she had was creating the inflammation. And then the inflammation compromised her immune system and neurotransmitters and neuroplasticity. So the genes that regulate inflammation upregulate, the genes that regulate the immune system downregulate. And that's the perfect recipe for disease. So once we Discovered that she had had trauma when she was 6 that she had never shared. I started making the connection between the trauma. People are experiencing a lot of these illnesses that they have. And so once I figured that out, I figured out a way to solve it.

That's crazy. That. And you're right. Yeah. The entrepreneurs are the ones that solve these problems and probably look at it from a completely different lens, too. And I'm curious, how was that experience? So you obviously had the motivation, you know, to. You had a goal. Yeah. And very clear goal and love that you did that. Like, how did you approach. I mean, going to school? I mean, you had all this business background, but now here you are, fresh, clean slate, new beginning.

Yeah.

I don't know. Like, was there a different approach that you took it than. Than I guess someone else would in that same seat?

I. I think so, because I came in saying, what have they missed? Because they all told us the same thing. Didn't matter who we talked to. They said, we don't know what causes Crohn's or the hemosiderosis. We do know there's no cure for it. So I said, that can't be possibly true. They just haven't figured it out.

Yeah.

So I'm gonna have to see. What did they miss? So I think I came in with that approach is what did they miss in that? And I think the. The. The reason I found that out was because if you look at the current way we train our doctors and train our medical profession is they go in to become a doctor, and very quickly they're siloed and taught a specialty. So the people that were dealing with my daughter's crohn's with gastroenterologists, well, they get zero psychological training.

Right.

So they would never have made that connection. And then the people dealing with their hemoclosis are dealing with autoimmune things like that and lung disorders. Again, they know a lot about the lungs, they know a lot about the gut, but they don't anything about the psychology. And that's where what I figured out is the root is in the psychology. The Crohn's and the hemosiderosis were symptoms of the problem. They weren't the problem. So then I had to figure out how was trauma making these changes to my daughter's health. And so. And I'm not equating myself to him, but Elon Musk, I heard him talk about one time, they said, you know, how did you do this? NASA can't do it like, you're Putting rocket ships up at so much less cost. He says, well, the way we looked at it is we engineered it backwards. He says, we took a look at what they built and then started taking stuff out. Like what did they not need? What was redundant.

Yeah.

And so he started to eliminate things to see if it would still work by taking stuff out. And it's sort of a little different, but it's that same mentality of they've over engineered it, which is what I realized. They've over engineered the Crohn's and hemosiderosis.

Right.

So let's break it down. What is it?

And look at it holistically as well. It's. It's, you know, it's connected to everything else. And like you said, it's this. The root is the psychology. And that's interesting. I want you to unpack that if you could. And just so now that you know, you know you've helped a lot of people, including your daughter, I guess, explain how the psychology is the root and how that affects other parts of our body and generally. And then of course, how that can lead to illness as well, if unresolved.

Yeah. I believe 80% of the diseases and everything we're treating today are psychological based. About 20% may be physical, but 80% are psychological.

Wow. Okay.

So it's just the way the brain works. So your brain and your mind. When I talk about the brain, I'm talking about the computer, the physical computer. When I talk about the mind, I'm talking about the software, which is a software that operates inside the computer. So the brain, the physical brain, is subject to physical damage if you get injured, the mind is subject to glitches and error messages the way software is. So trauma creates glitches and error messages. And your subconscious mind operates in the present. It sees everything as now. So 95% of your mind is operating on a subconscious level, fully present in the moment.

When we have a traumatic event that is stored. Only humans store explicit memory. We store tremendous amount of details about everything we've seen, heard, or experienced in our life. So that memory keeps activating the nervous system. There's nothing happening. But the mind keeps looking at memory in real time and turns on the nervous system. It's a glitch.

Yeah.

So when you ask somebody, oh, what happened five years ago, like when I worked with the Boston Marathon bombing survivors, they would start talking about it and start shaking and crying. And I would say, do you know why you're shaking and crying? They said, well, because I'm talking About what happened to me. And I said, right, but your mind thinks there's a bomb about to go off. It's looking at memory in real time. That bomb went off five and a half years ago. But when your mind goes into memory to start describing it, it's actually seeing.

The memory right now, thinking it's happening all over again.

That's what people have missed. So my daughter's trauma was looping over and over and over. They continued to activate her nervous system. And what that would do is then put it into a fight or flight state. So the genes regulate inflammation would upregulate.

Yeah.

And Crohn's is just inflammation. Same with the hemocytosis. So the inflammation stayed on and kept staying on because the memory kept running in the background. Right. So what I did is create a technique that I can reset that memory and stop that loop.

That's incredible. I mean, the fact that it seems like a couple things need to happen is, well, really under identifying. What is that unresolved trauma. Right. Like, I'm thinking about that, and there's. Even if we don't think that we've had big T trauma, you know, the ones that, like you said, the pretty obvious ones, Bombing is a big one, you know, but what are these smaller T traumas that are just happening, you know, in our childhood schooling, in our workplace?

When I take people through the process, a lot of times, people may not be thinking about it, but as I take them through the process, they start to pop up.

Okay.

And so all of a sudden, people would. Haven't thought about this in a long time. And then it'll come up. Here's the best way to understand if the trauma is affecting you. If you start to talk about it and you get emotional, it's active.

It's.

The purpose to. An emotion is a call for an action. What's the purpose of fear? Run.

Run.

What's the purpose of anger? Attack. Yeah. So if you talk about something where you got somebody hurt you five years ago, and as you start talking about it, you start to shake and cry is because your mind is trying to get you to run or fight five.

Years ago, It's a glitch.

Right? Yeah. It's silly when you think about it. You're like, from five years ago? It's like, how are you gonna. You can't go back.

And so you feel that emotion. So, like, we talk about professionals. I work with professional golfers.

Yeah.

And I had one guy tell me about this one particular course that had a par three and he goes, every time I play that par three, he says, I can't stop thinking about the water. And he says, and almost every time I put the ball in the water, because his mind was looking at the number of times he put the ball in the water. Now people would say, well, you know, you just have to put that out of your mind.

Right.

That's not how the mind works. So that's not a golf hole. That's a threat to your survival. If I keep putting the ball in the water, I miss the cut, I don't get paid.

And so now you got guys who are still trying to grow on the PGA Tour, they're on the Corn Ferry Tour, and they remember times where they made those mistakes and missed a cut. Now they go back to that same spot. And that's why these guys, you see them, you know, they get down to the back nine and all of a sudden start falling apart.

Yep.

Because they probably lost it on the back nine at another tournament. Yeah. And the mind's going, what do I know about this place? And starts to pull in the old memory. And then all of a sudden, everything starts to tense up.

I wrote this down for myself, but the purpose of emotion is action. And that's. That is.

Nobody's ever thought about it that way.

No, that's. It's incredible because if you're having an emotion pop up, you know, from something in the past, I'm imagining it's maybe separating from anything possibly happening in the moment. But even that could be tied to the past. You know, it seems like man, because.

Your mind looks for similar and same.

Right to protect you.

So all of a sudden, say you got into an accident with a white van. And you're just driving along and a white van starts. You see a white van pulling up to the corner. Well, it's not going to hit you, but all of a sudden, your heart starts beating in your chest. Why you're not in danger. But your mind looks at the white van and then starts to say, what do I know about white vans? And starts to pull in the accident. And your mind thinks it's happening now.

Right. And. And we're so dang smart as humans that it just feels like it's happening all over again in real time.

So the conscious mind cannot override that.

Right.

It's subconscious survival based. And that's why I said it's impossible to sabotage yourself. Your mind's always trying to protect you. It's dealing with faulty intelligence.

So you have this subconscious layer that's really Running the show. But totally. Yeah, let's talk about that. Because now at a, you know, at a logical or conscious level, we realize, okay, purpose, or the purpose of emotions that we feel that pop up is to act on something. And like you said, it could be fear, you know, so then that's more of a. Yeah. Runaway or anger attack.

Yeah.

Procrastination, I'm sure, is a whole nother thing. Or, you know, anxiety. A lot of us are dealing with that. I know that's something you treat.

So, yeah, I guess explain this whole layer of this, the. The subconscious now and how that is really the boss, it seems.

Yeah. The subconscious is your survival brain and it runs about 95%. So everything that's happening to you on a subconscious level, you don't have to think about. Are you thinking about that there's a hundred gallons of blood pumping through your system every hour. Do you have to think about that at all?

No, no.

How many times your heart beats a day? Right. How much oxygen is being taken in? Like, none of that is conscious to us. So 95% of those. All those actions that are going on, you don't have any conscious awareness and don't need to attend to, is being run by the system. And it's programmed to keep you alive. So 95% of your mind's operating below your conscious awareness to keep you alive. And so if it sees that there's a threat, then. So no animal, Joe, can do this. Only humans can. Because we store explicit memory about events and experiences. Animals don't. Animals are fully present in the moment. They respond to their environment. If there's a threat, they will respond. If there's no threat, they're not thinking about threats. They don't remember threats.

Right.

We've stored all that information. So a zebra cannot feel fear of a lion unless there's a lion present. The zebra is not sitting around thinking about lions. It doesn't remember the lion chasing them yesterday. But if a lion shows up, it's built into their DNA that that's a threat.

Right.

We have that same system, but we added explicit memory. So every lion you've ever dealt with has been recorded and stored in memory and keeps turning on the system and is not supposed to. So what we do is when you have a traumatic event, all your senses are heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So how's it recording that? High definition, Tremendous amounts of detail stored in that memory. So you can see if I. If you started to talk about something that happened to you 10 years ago, there was a traumatic event and started to try to talk about it. You have to go into memory.

Yeah.

And all this high definition information starts coming into the system and your subconscious operates in the present, goes, oh, that's happening now. We need to protect you from the threat.

I'm gonna pause this really fast and shout out a podcast that you should go follow. It's called the Science of Scaling. It's hosted by Mark Roberge and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Now, the reason why I like this show is that each week Mark Roberge, the host, sits down with leaders in business and talks about scaling properly. So I like Mark because he is in the trenches. He is the founding CRO of HubSpot, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. He's a co founder of Stage 2 Capital, and he's diving into the secrets, the strategies, all these tactics of how to properly grow with people that are doing it right now. What I've found is most companies, when they're growing, they either do the wrong things to grow or they do the right things in the wrong order. And that's what I gathered from these episodes. So it's a great way to straighten all that up. So go listen to Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcast. Too many business owners hit a ceiling because they can't clone themselves. That's exactly what we do at AI Build Team. We build AI digital twins, which are basically smart clones of you that know your expertise, they sound like you, and they help scale your reach to a bigger audience. So instead of repeating yourself or even missing opportunities, your AI twin becomes your always on educator, salesperson, even content creator, and a ton more. If you want to see this in action, go to AI Build Team AI Slash Joe. You can chat with my AI twin right now. Again, that is AI Build Team AI Slash Joe. Like, would it be safe to say that you almost have to detach this high fidelity, this high definition out of your brain? So, yeah, it doles maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Is it a doling, Is it a disassociation? Like, I guess, what's up?

Disassociation. So what we're going to do, and this is the best way I explain it, if I asked you what you ate for dinner last night, can you tell me what you ate for dinner?

Blanking on it right now. Oh, hamburgers. That's what we have. Yeah.

So when I asked you that and everybody's watching this, you looked up.

Yeah, Right.

And you saw information probably saw where you ate it, what you ate.

That's right.

That's how you stored the information about dinner last night. No animal does that. That's why you can feed your dog the same thing every day. He doesn't remember eating that yesterday. This is just a new meal. He's actually responding to his environment in real time. But because last night wasn't threatening, disturbing, it's stored as a fairly low resolution file. Not a lot of detail, but enough to store it. But if that was a threatening event, a traumatic event, and all your senses are heightened now, that memory is extremely intense and that's what turns on the nervous system. It's a glitch. Wow. So what I do in the process is I take that high definition memory, get your mind to reprocess it into the same format as to what you ate for dinner last night.

Now you can talk about it. And it doesn't activate the nervous system. People are blown away when I take them through the process. The most dramatic one was a US army sniper who was ordered to shoot and kill a 12 year old. And for eight years he, he couldn't stop thinking about it and was drinking a lot, getting into fights, getting medicated constantly. And so when I sat down with him, he said, I can't talk about this again. He says, I got arrested last week at the VA because I started picking up tables and chairs and throwing them. And I said, well, here's the good news, I don't need you to talk about it. He said, well, what are we going to do? I said, we're going to fix it. How are we going to fix it if I don't talk about it? And I said, I only need you to just pull up the memory. And I said, you can talk about it if you want to, but I don't need you to. And I said, if you prefer not to, I've got a technique that I can just take you to the visual memory and reset it within two minutes.

And he said to me, he goes, how the bleep did you do this? Why am I able to think and talk about it now and I'm not shaking and crying? And I said, because for eight years your mind's been trying to get you not to pull the trigger. It's been calling for an action. What would solve that problem? Don't shoot. So his mind kept calling for an action that wasn't possible. He can't not shoot, right. It doesn't exist. It's just information about an event that's life changing. Oh, yeah, you equate that into business. You know, people who have a business trauma and they don't understand why they keep on making these changes that weren't beneficial is because there was an old memory about, you know, I get hurt when I expand my business, I get to a certain level and I fail. So they try. They don't know that that's what they're doing, but their mind is diverting them into another direction to protect them.

It's almost talk therapy. Like you mentioned, he was able to visualize it. Sounds like just you prompted him or cued him in a way to recall it in his mind. Right.

Like I said, give me a minute, two minute highlight reel. I said, if we made that whole thing into a movie, I'm looking for the trailer.

Got it.

And so he'll be visualizing it, but I'm taking him through a. Processes, different techniques that I use. That is basically interrupting the process of recalling it, which then the mind. And the real key, Joe, is the reason I use four hours is I've got to get the mind and the brain into optimal condition to heal.

That's why traditional therapy is not very good for trauma.

Right.

Because the mind's still stressed when it used. So if I sat down with you and I said, joe, tell me about what happened to you. You're stressed talking to me about it. Your mind's not going to make a change when it's feeling stressed. So we don't even talk about trauma for the first two hours. I'm giving you all science and education on how the brain works, why it does what it does, and what I hear constantly is people saying, well, that makes so much sense. Yeah, of course that would happen. How could it not happen?

So you're getting them into this mode. I know from before when we chatted in this alpha brain state, this brainwave state. So it's literally the calmest your. Your mind and body can be. Right. So you feel safe with all this new information.

And it takes a little bit of time to get the mind to feel safe. Right. And the reason it starts to feel safe is as I'm taking you through it, your mind is absorbing this information. And I'm saying, and one of the things that I've had, literally, Joe, people will cry when I say this. There's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing wrong with your mind. The reason you're experiencing these symptoms of fear or anger or depression or anxiety is because that's the way our minds work.

Yeah.

There's nothing Wrong with you, your mind is responding. All of the things that they keep telling people that there's wrong with them. You have anxiety, we're going to put you on anxiety medication. Anxiety is the symptom, it's not the problem. Depression is the symptom, not the problem. But they treat the symptom, which means they never solve the problem.

When it comes to business owners, are there some trends or commonalities that you've seen from the folks that you've worked with that maybe show up more often with entrepreneurs, people who are self starters, leaders, you know, problem solvers than others that we should kind of maybe be aware of, be like, oh yeah, that's me.

You'll see a few different things. One, you can see anger show up a lot where things just frustrate them really quickly. And that may come from earlier when people just didn't listen to them or they had, they failed because they couldn't communicate their message and then they ended up not making it, you know, or even back into childhood where nobody, they were really smart, but nobody listened to them and they were told that they weren't smart. Any of those kinds of things will show up in an emotion, in a situation. So my wife, for example, dealt with fear. And I didn't understand it because I know I understood she had a very violent father, so I understood where the fear was coming from. But she's now living with me and we're 10 years into our marriage, we're living in our dream home, we got three beautiful children, everything's going really well, a good business and she's not enjoying it. And I couldn't understand why she wasn't enjoying it. And she'd say to me, well, what happens if that insurance company doesn't renew the contract in two years? And I went, why are you worried about a contract in two years? She goes, well, what happens if they don't? Have you got a plan for it or are you like she was waiting for the, the shoe to drop and she couldn't relax. So you see that a lot of times in successful entrepreneurs they can't relax because there's that constant, when's it going to fall apart? If I let my guard down, I'm going to get hurt.

Sounds familiar. I've been there.

For me, I had no trauma so I could enjoy the success we were having. And I couldn't understand why she wasn't, because she wasn't in that house anymore. You're living with me, I don't yell at my wife. I've Never hit my wife. And yet she's operating in fear. And until I understood where it was from, it was from her traumatic childhood that kept on. So if I would say something as simple as, no, I don't like that, she would tear up and start to cry, and she'd say, why are you mad at me, Joe? I go, what are you talking about, mad? She go, yeah, I can tell you're getting mad. I wasn't getting mad, but if I had a little tension, change in my voice, my vocal cords were a little tighter because maybe I'm tired. That sounded like I was yelling at her. She was super sensitive to sound.

Super sensitive to her environment. You know, we could come out of a store, and she'd go, can you believe how rude that clerk was to me? And I go, where? How is she rude? Well, didn't you see the way she answered that question? Or the way she stuck the clothes in the bag? I can't see any of that.

You're not seeing the same picture.

Yeah.

Same story.

I'm not living in that world.

Wow.

There was nothing wrong with her and nothing wrong with me. Right. She was filtering through what I call your own set of personal atmospheric conditions. Right. So her atmospheric conditions growing up were dark and stormy. Mine were bright and sunny. So I see the world through bright and sunny. Right. Doesn't mean that I'd ignore danger. Right. But I'm not looking for it. That's all she can look for because that's how she stayed safe as a child. You get hurt if you put your guard down.

Yeah. It's not safe. You got to move. You gotta. Yeah. Fight or whatever it might be. But there's a reaction constantly.

Look for the danger. And she can see it everywhere and.

See it shows up. It seems like it's a spectrum. It'll show up in everyone. You know, some a lot more debilitating than maybe this underlying anxiety feeling that, for whatever reason, you know, and that might be preventing you from totally feeling happy or focused or whatever it is. Fatigue.

Yep.

I don't know. Are there symptoms that you would. That you kind of see as well? And of course, that's not where the root is, but maybe, like, the signs, business owners or people, they're like, hey, maybe that's. That's. That's worth going in. Emotions. I know it leads to action, but, you know, kind of.

Well, you'll see them become workaholics. Right. That they can't stop working because if they let their guard down, they get hurt. So they work and Work and work and work, and can't enjoy the success they're having because what they realize is if I let my guard down, I'm going to get hurt. And so they don't get a chance to enjoy. They burn out. And so those are the kinds of things that you'll see.

And. And they can show up all kinds of different ways. You can have somebody who's like a super successful person, really nice guy, you know, generous, you know, doing all those kinds of things. And then you find out he's an alcoholic, always got a gambling problem. Right. But he puts on a great image. And a lot of times you don't realize that it's all coming from fear or coming from being hurt, anger. But you'll see it in some of those emotions.

I'm curious, like, so as we kind of wrap it up here, I want to. I want to know more about your. Your process and, and just like the way that you would, I guess, start people along or maybe even some now stuff to kind of prime people if they're starting to nod their heads and be like, yes, okay, that sounds familiar. And there's been a few things I can relate with, I guess. What would you say to that? Because I want to definitely give some actionable things, if possible here, and then lead them your way, you know, if. If it's a good bath.

Yeah. I think the idea is to identify what are your strengths, what are the things that you're struggling with? And it's sometimes hard to sort of analyze ourself, you know, so if you got a good partner, good spouse or somebody like that, just say, what are the things that you think I should work on? And you be. They'll probably tell you.

Yeah. So the key is being open and not saying anything during that time. Right.

But it's really good to. Because a lot of times you don't identify with it. You don't think that that's my issue, but it definitely can be. And so even somebody growing up with a lot of success, and then something goes wrong. Right. Then they could just get so upset when something doesn't go right. And so this is my complaint with my wife and I. Not complaint, but she says about me, I hate to lose. I'm competitive in a card game. We play these games with our friends. And I hate. She goes, why do you get so upset when you lose? I don't get like mad throwing things or anything, but I hate to lose. Yeah.

Yeah.

But my childhood, I had a lot of success in stuff I did. And so it's not a bad trade. Like, I'm not yelling at anybody or making a problem. But she can tell I hated losing. And she never really. That didn't make any sense to her. She didn't have. So even in successful, I mean, I'm using that as an example of success can sometimes create problems too, that when we do get hit with something and something goes wrong, how resilient are we?

Yeah.

You know, you see this a lot of times in really super talented athletes growing up, they're the biggest, strongest kid. And then by the time they get into college, they're no longer that dominant athlete. And then all of a sudden things go wrong. Right. They can't handle. Because they're used to dominating. Well, when you get to a certain level, it's pretty tough to dominate.

Yeah. It's interesting to think trauma can show up as a success as well. So it's not always looking at maybe the dark side or the. The shadow, which is what I think people would probably normally associate a trauma with or something that's bringing up that emotion from the past. And I don't know if trauma is always the right word. Is there a better word to use it when it's a success? Success Trauma?

Yeah. I mean, actually it could be an actual fact because you. Your mind, how it responds to things. Just the smallest thing going wrong. And that's why somebody could turn around and say, like, why did he get so upset over something so small? Yeah. Was because he's never had that. And then all of a sudden when it hits him, he doesn't know how to handle it. Right. Or her. Right. And then you're just like, wow, they're just really super sensitive. But they are when things don't go their way. And so then they end up overcompensating. There's all kinds of ways it'll show up. But the key to it, the best advice I can give to somebody, is try to identify what your personality traits are with potentially something throughout your life. And a lot of it comes back to childhood. Believe it or not, because the age is between 0 and 7, our brains are actually literal. We're not actually analyzing anything. We're taking everything in.

Real time and not dissecting it, we're just accepting it. So between the ages of 0 and 7, you're being told every day you're stupid, you're an idiot, you don't know what you're doing. Then that becomes the system that your system's developing. Or you could end up with the opposite. Where oh, you're the smartest. You're the best. Right. And then the child ends up. Something goes wrong when they get older and the frustration level builds and they don't know how to handle it. I'll give you an example. A young man, he was a teenager, and his dad said, I don't know what happened. He says, all of a sudden he's playing these video games, right? And he's smashing the wall, putting his fist through the wall. And it came back to. I said, what happened? And he says, well, he had. I forget which game it was. He had the basketball game with Jordan and then it reset. Well, you have to build Jordan back up again. You know, he's only a 60% shooter when you start and becomes a 98% shooter. Yeah, he couldn't handle that. He'd been so successful in the game, and he had very successful parents, and everything was going well in his life. And all of a sudden, now he's playing a video game where he's set back and he can't rebuild.

Yeah, that's tough, knowing what's possible. But now I got to do it all over again and, you know, whatever. I don't know.

Totally out of character for the. For the. For the young man. His dad said, he's taking his tennis rackets and smashing them on the ground when something goes wrong. And it came back to this, Right. Once we identified it, we were able to start working on it and reset it. But before that, they just didn't understand it. It's all of a sudden, well, I guess he's just, you know, this is teenage years. He's losing it. That was the big factor.

I'm thinking as a. As a parent of two little ones, and I don't know if this is something you would. You're. You would want to speak on, but I'm like, how do we prep our kids in this 0 to 7 age range where, yeah, it's almost like volatile. It seems like if you go one way or the other, there's a spectrum here. I don't know any. Any tips or.

Yeah, it's very. It's very easy. You have to be very careful the words you choose because children are literal with language. And I'll give you a good example. When my wife was growing up, when she was 6, so she's in an already traumatic childhood, and some of the women in the neighborhood, the mothers, put together a tea party for all the little girls. So she was all excited because she got to go to the tea party, get dressed up, she gets there and one of the mothers greeting her says, oh my gosh, Bridget, you're going to be such a heartbreaker when you grow up. And all the other mothers are like, oh, yeah, Bridget's definitely going to be a heartbreaker. She said, I got sick to my stomach and went home. What Bridget heard was, you're going to hurt people. You're going to break people's hearts. A six year old doesn't understand what that means. So we're thinking, I'm complimenting her. They don't know that she's literally taking in, you're going to break a heart. Be very careful that your children are understanding. Right? What you mean. Because they look for you for safety. And so the best way, the best advice I give to parents, especially when you've got these young kids, is make your home safe. It's got to be the place they can come back to. Doesn't mean that they get away with things.

Right.

My dad.

Never yelled, never raised his voice, never hit us ever, once. And raised three very disciplined children.

Nice.

I was never afraid of him, but I respected him. And the biggest thing for me is disappointing him. Like I didn't want to disappoint him. So that's how he raised us. But you hear all these people saying, you know, spare the rod, spoil the child. Tell me where that makes sense. I want my child to be afraid that I'm going to hit him.

Right.

I'm afraid that I'm gonna hurt them. How is that productive? It's not. I don't care what anybody says. I, I'd argue that all day.

Sure. No, I'm with you.

Can they be disciplined? Absolutely. So we would, if something went wrong, we would be disciplined, but it was always done in love. So here's, you explained, here's what you did wrong, here's the consequences, right? So that the next time you'll think about it.

And then the child will go, okay, they may not like it. Right. But you do it without that, that anger in your voice. And that creates that world of safety. And that's how I grew up with that. So it kept me calm, kept my nervous system calm, kept me healthy.

And that's the key thing, is keeping that nervous system calm in those early years. And you're right.

Yeah.

Bring in the safety. So then we're, we're literally living in a safe world the rest of our lives, ideally. And of course, the outside world will do other things, but if we can.

Keep, the world's gonna bump them. The world's Gonna hit them. Yeah. They need to know when they come home, there's a safe place. And that's why I said to Bridget, you know, she said, I said, you had no place to land. She was in flight all her childhood. I had none of that. And so my nervous system stayed regulated. Now she's high functioning. She didn't get into drugs or alcohol or anything like that. She was just living in fear. And that was stopping her from engaging and enjoying the success we were having. It wasn't that she wasn't appreciative. Right. She was, she was appreciative. Appreciative and grateful, but always looking for what's going to go wrong.

Yep.

And I'm the opposite. I'm just like, I don't understand why you're thinking that way. She couldn't not think that way. That was the program that was running.

Thank God that you've figured out a way to kind of reboot things, the system. No matter what your beginning was. Right. Like, and it's. Yeah, well, like I said on the website, you know, it's rebooting your mind and you're literally. Yeah, you're doing that. So no matter if it came from that very, you know, you can't land anywhere at home because you're being whatever the abuse or trauma could be or all the way to success, you know, like, I was the best at everything. Yep. Yeah. So how, I guess what are the next steps here for a listener who might want to go a little deeper into what you are doing? Any of the tip program tipping, I guess explain some of the next steps and tell them where they can go find you.

Yeah. If they want to find out more. There's a lot of great testimonials on our site that may relate to what you're dealing with from people who've dealt with anxiety, depression, anxiety, addiction, even high performers. We work with a lot of professional athletes. Prince Fielder, his testimonials on our site. There's a pretty high performer, six time all star.

Oh, yeah.

He says if I had gone through your program, I would extend in my career by three to five years. He says I sat on benches with guys that were dealing with depression, anxiety, panic attacks. So a lot of we think about these guys and we think, oh, they've got it made. But they're dealing with the same things and, but they just perform at a very high level.

Man. That's all the way down to, you know, every one of us, we're all, we're all dealing. Walking around with this so however you apply yourself in the world.

Definitely, when I talk about.

We all have another gear. Yeah, we have another gear. We just need to figure out how to reach that gear.

Oh, man.

Because it actually affects the mitochondria in the cells, the energy, the ATP in the cells. And so if you have trauma, it's pulling that energy. So I have a lot of people go through the program and on that, on the athletic side who increase their.

Personal best because they're literally getting. Creating more energy. Right. Or maybe it was energy. Yeah, it's probably creating and directing it in better places. Right?

Yep. That's why I love working with athletes, because they're measuring it all the time.

Yeah.

So you can see it. So we're seeing it in this study that they did with DNA and the gene regulation. Inflammation coming down in immune system coming up. That's, you know, you can't. How do you do anything but prove it? By just saying, here's the evidence. Neuroplasticity changing, you know, mitochondria changing. That tells you how much trauma is affecting us.

On the other podcast that I host, it's all about, yeah, like, how toxins can really clog up the mitochondria. And those are the. That's creating energy. So, like, what you're saying is exactly what a lot of these doctors are saying as well. And if you have inflammation or it's just clogged up, it's like your. Your body literally just goes haywire. And.

Well, the best way to explain it, too, is, and this is sort of a simple analogy, trauma is a lion chasing us. If a lion is chasing you right now, it makes sense to run, Right. So you could run on jagged rocks and bare feet. You will not feel the pain.

Right.

Because your mind's not going to prioritize. Maintenance is going to prioritize survival. So as long as you've got the trauma in the background, right, the mind is focusing on survival, not maintenance. There's where the toxins start to build up. There's when all the system starts to go out of balance because the maintenance isn't being done. It's minimal maintenance when we're in survival mode.

Right.

And people will say, but I eat right, I exercise, I take all my vitamins. Why is this happening? It's flushing it.

Yeah. There's some. Some underlying things happening that. That are really controlling all the levers. It seems like.

Yeah, can't methylate them, can't absorb them. Because the system is saying, our. Our survival right now is more important than using any of that stuff.

I'm happy that we got to chat a second time, first time here for a second time. We'll link to the other episode, too, on the other podcast if you want to jump back and forth, get another flavor of you. But I appreciate the work you've put into this and I know you have a lot more coming, the studies as well. Of course, when the when your Delphi is live, we'll be sharing that because.

Oh, I can't wait for that. That's going to be really exciting. It's all I'm going to be on our website. Inspired performanceinstitute.com There you go.

Perfect. Well, we'll link that as well. And appreciate your time again. And yeah, thank you.

I appreciate it. Thanks for the audience, Joe.

It.