What Fame, Money & Success Won't Get You w/Steven Bartlett EP 1259

And people hate that. The concept that the people that they've attracted into their life, the results they've attracted into their life are a mirror of who they are. And I said to him, I said.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome back everyone to School of Greatness. Very excited about our guests. My friend Steven Bartlett is in the house.

Good to finally be here.

My man. Very excited about this. I was just in London hanging out with you. I went on your show and we got to dive deep on a lot of different things, relationships, mindset, fears, insecurities, all these things. And you have blown up in your podcast, really in the last six months in a big way, your companies have blown up over the years and you're known for really being an entrepreneur, being on Dragon's Den in the UK, which is kind of like the UK's version of Shark Tank, and so many other things that you're known for, your social media content is great. But something we were talking about right before we got on here was the dark side. And I wanted to ask you a question not about your dark side, but on a scale that I've been asking people. A scale of self-love. So I'd like you to imagine from a scale of one to 10. 10 being you love and accept and appreciate yourself to the fullest with where you're at in your life right now. 10. Consistently on a daily basis, you love yourself fully, accept yourself fully, knowing you're a flawed person but you still love yourself internally. Or one being you hate yourself. On the scale of one to 10 of self-love, where do you feel like you're currently at with all the successes, all the now new fame, the podcast growth, the social media, the businesses, the money, relationships, everything you're at, where do.

You feel like internally you're at in this moment? I would say an eight, but I'd.

Say that there's so much pain in the two.

Why is there pain in the two? I think whenever there's a deficit of self-love and self-validation, it can be insidious to anybody. And even if you're at a nine, There's so much pain in the one. And I've seen this on my podcast where I'll sit with guests that are happy, that have a happy family, have their business together, have nothing to quote unquote worry about, but that one is agonizing them. And sometimes that one can cause you misery because you're at a nine, if that makes sense. Because everything else is great, the one becomes the focal point of your despair. And for me, the reason why I say eight, because In fact, in a.

Way, you're at an 8 consistently pretty much. You feel like you're at an 8 of self-love. Yeah. Yeah.

By time, do you feel like a 2 or? So when I said the 2, the so much pain in the 2, I.

Mean the remaining 2. Oh, okay, so you're saying the remaining.

2 is pain that you're not at a 10? Yeah, and that's what I said. So even people that have a 9, there can be so much pain in the 1, if that makes sense. So it can be the smallest thing, but it can cause you so much agony and despair. that one thing. So when you asked me the question at first, my brain shouted out 10. My brain shouted out 10 because I'm someone that is, I spend a lot of time feeling grateful and actually being unsure why I feel, why I was, I have the privilege of feeling good. I've had this conversation with my friends for the last 15 years. Why do I have the privilege of feeling good often? Not always, but often. When a lot of people who I meet on my podcast or I speak to my friends, They have more struggles than I do in terms of that mental battle with self-worth and all those things. The reason why I realized that it was actually an eight is I asked myself where the things that I get anxious about, what they're centered on, and they're centered on the opinion of others. So as you said, over the last three to six months, my life has drastically changed because I joined that show, Dragon's Den, which is the UK equivalent of Shark Tank that came first. And that thrust me into the public eye. And what it taught me about myself is I always thought I didn't care what people thought about. But when you have newspapers outside your house and you have thousands of people tweeting about you if you tweet something, you have hundreds of people tweeting you and making podcasts about why Steven Bartlett doesn't have more black people on his podcast, why he doesn't do this or why he doesn't do this or any small thing and you care. For me, the fact that I care about that means there's still a hole I'm filling with other people's validation. And that's why I know it's an eight. I would have said 10, but the fact that I care so much about that and it causes me anxiousness and anxiety, then I know there's still work to do in finding that validation in myself.

So before a year ago, which I would say in the last year, things have really taken off in a bigger way.

Yeah, right.

You had a you had a big social media following before, you were CEO of a big company, all these things, you're making money, but it wasn't really as public as it is now, let's say, right? Is that fair to say?

Three months.

Three months ago. And so where do you feel like you were a year ago on a scale of one to 10?

So a year ago would be in the middle of the pandemic. Life was just very comfortable, very easy, didn't have a public profile in my country. So I would have said, A 10. I would have said a 10. It wouldn't have been true. That's what I would have said. I thought, yeah, I thought self-love, you know, I appreciate myself. I live deeply submerged in gratitude to the point that I've always found it suspicious. But now I've come to learn over the last three months when I've been thrust into a new altitude.

You know what's interesting? I've asked this question to multiple people in the last couple months, and I asked them before they kind of got their bigger break, where they're at, and then after. And the people who've made 10 times more money than before, more fame, more followers, all these opportunities, New York Times best-selling books, all this stuff, they always were higher on self-love before the bigger amount of success came. I'm curious, why do you think that is?

They lied before.

You think they lied?

You didn't know. It's like you've got to put something to the test to understand its characteristics.

The pressure.

Yeah, and the pressure, they say it creates diamond, but it also reveals the character of ingredients. And they do that sometimes to understand the constitutes of a material. They'll put it under pressure, they'll heat it up and see what happens when it evaporates, when it's exposed to certain conditions. And I've been exposed to certain conditions. I've been exposed to pressure. It's the same thing that money does to you. Money will tell you the expression is money will, it won't make you evil, but it will show you who you are. Reveal who you are. Yeah, exactly. And the same with attention, success and fame. It will tell you very clearly who you really are. And, and I've learned more about who I really am. And I thought I'd done all the work. I thought I was this, secure personnel. In fact, I used to reflect on myself in hindsight and say, I used to be insecure. I've said that all around the world. But I think to some degree I must still be because I shouldn't be able to be swayed. I shouldn't be able to read something and have it impact me for days. I shouldn't be there. And because it's so recent, I mean, we might have this conversation in a year and I'll tell you all the tools, the tricks and the hacks to overcome it because that's the way I work, right? Right. And I've said this to my girlfriend. as well, it's an adjustment I'm going through. I've been through maybe five key adjustments in my life and this is the most recent one and it's a new dynamic, it's a new world that I'm living in personally and I'm learning the rules of engagement. I'm learning the good, the bad and the ugly of having a public profile in my country, in the UK, where newspapers will be outside your house and they'll write anything and they'll go through your thousand previous employees and ask them how was he? Did he pick up the dog poo in the office? Was he... And they'll interrogate them to try and find a story. This is a new thing for me, and I'm learning what it means.

In the last five... Because you're about to be 30 later this year, is that right? Still 29. In August, you'll be 30 in a handful of months. What would you say was the greatest lesson you learned from 25 until 30?

What matters in life? So at 25, I attained pretty serious wealth. and at 25, well, at 25 I got an offer for serious wealth. A big company came to me and said, we want to buy your business. And that day I literally went home. I did the math on how much money would go into my pocket if I sold my company. And at this time we had about 400 employees and we were a big marketing firm all around the world doing the marketing for Uber, Amazon, Logitech, Apple, you know, across different markets. This is how much money would go into my pocket. 18 year old Steve, who was super insecure and thought money and material possessions would fulfill any concern or void he had in his life, showed up on that day. 18 year old Steve was sat there. This is it. Yeah, this is it. This is the moment. So I went on Rightmove that night, which is the website in the UK where you can buy houses, and I went on Auto Trader, two tabs open. I looked at what I could now buy.

Oh, it's the worst thing to do.

Before you get the money in the bank. Yeah, and I was sat there and I remember exactly which room in my house I was in. I remember what what I was wearing, what I mean, it was pitch black outside. And as I sat there on the floor for some reason, looking into the screen, I was looking at a future life of emptiness. I could see it. And it was this weird paradox of, and this contradiction of knowing that if I bought these things, I would be poorer, but not financially. Because then what I'm saying about my life is that these things are important, which means that the next thing needs to be a slightly better improvement. And the stoic people talk about that hedonistic treadmill you you find yourself in when nothing satisfies you. And realizing that, that I would be trading something of meaning, my company. People think, you know, companies are these like ugly corporations that spit off cash. But for me, what I realized in that moment is my company was actually my friendships, it was actually purpose, it was actually meaning. So I was trading friendships, purpose, meaning and community and connection, however you want to dice it. A Lamborghini, which would be uncomfortable to drive, that I didn't need anyway, 'cause I lived two minutes from the office. Right. And a mansion, an arrow way, that would take me an hour away from my friends. Uh huh. I was trading connection for a lack of connection. And I spent, and I didn't know why I didn't want to press buy. And I spent the next six months of my life at 25 years old, honestly confused. Why am I doing this then? And that's ultimately where I realized that my business wasn't about marketing. It was giving me community purpose, meaning all of those things. And that's a hard trade to make.

Did you buy that mansion?

It's funny. I bought a nice mansion just before that day and I tried it. And that's part of the reason I knew it wasn't it. So I'd been in. I had this seven bedroom mansion in the countryside with a tennis court at the bottom garden. They had downstairs. It was about, I don't know, 100 square meters down on the bottom floor alone and it had a pool table, a full cinema, not like a cinema room, a full cinema in there. Full table tennis table. Had another house at the bottom of the garden that I never walked into. I never even opened the door and I was 23 at the time. Big 100 meter driveway that went wrapped down round in the countryside on the top of a hill. And I had a taste of the fact that that actually just removed me from my friends.

You were there for a couple of weeks and you're like, I wanna go back.

I wanna go back into the city. I begged that owner to release me and he eventually agreed and I moved into a one-bedroom studio two minutes from my office. And then but yeah on that day at 25 it was one of the real catalyst moments of my life and the other catalyst moment happened about six months later when I met a guy who was tremendously successful, who I'd followed in my city for the longest time, who had everything I'd ever wanted. He had the Lamborghini Aventador. I went to his house, I went upstairs in one of his rooms and he had a Louis Vuitton room, which is one of the spare rooms. He had one room where he had every single trainer in every color, color coordinated, wrapped around the wall that I'd ever wanted. And he was so clearly the most miserable person I'd ever met. So, so clearly. And it's like looking at the guy you're striving to be in the face and getting to walk through his house and seeing that he's the only one there, no one else there, not a girlfriend, not a friend, only the security guards who were paid to be there. And he ultimately that night asked me to sleep in bed with him.

Wow.

He said, you wouldn't mind, this is a man that's almost 40, you wouldn't mind sharing a bed with me tonight?

No way.

I didn't flinch. I said, yeah, of course. But I knew what it meant. And that was me. I was looking at my future if I didn't change course and assess my priorities. So when you asked the question between 25 and 30, those were the two sort of catalyst events that made me think, oh God, I've got it all wrong. And then the pandemic was a real affirmer if I needed it, but by then I didn't think I needed it.

Wow. What do you think will be the biggest lesson from 30 to 35 that you'll learn and realize you wish you would have learned or maybe this is a big transformational step for you moving forward?

I think 30 to 35 will be about authentic, true alignment and balance in my life. So I'm now in a relationship, which is a very surprising thing if you know my backstory.

Why is that surprising?

Well, because growing up, I'd see my parents screaming at each other every day for like seven hours, eight hours. My mum screaming at my dad sitting there passively and he just took it. So my dad would just be watching the TV and in the left side of his peripheral, my mum would be screaming from two meters away in his face. And I used to watch that as a kid and I used to say to dad, don't take it, dad, do something about it. Don't let her scream at you. And it wouldn't stop anything. And then And then I think at seven years old he called me in and said, by the way, just so you know, me and my mum don't love each other. I don't love your mother and we're gonna get a divorce. They didn't. At 10 they called me in and said, I'm gonna get a divorce, by the way, we don't love each other. I've watched her chase him around the house with a knife and smashing him trying to defend himself with the doors. So the model I learned about love was that love was prison. And I didn't know I'd learned that lesson. And the fascinating things happened to me throughout my life and this kind of speaks to really understanding what your self-story is. At 14 years old, I pursued a girl religiously called Jasmine. I was obsessed with her. And then one day I won. She turned to me, Steve, after school, I remember where we were after school and she said, Fine, I'll be in a relationship with you. Let's do it. And I went, no, no, no, this is about, no, don't, don't, Jasmine, don't, don't. And I would, do not, I did everything in my power to dissuade her from that.

Never understood why I always did that.

At 23-24.

So, wait, you wanted to be in a relationship with her, you chased her for weeks or months or years. Weeks or months or years. And then she said, okay, let's do it. Yeah.

And then you sabotaged it and you said, no. Why? Because in that moment, something inside me put myself in my dad's shoes, which was, you are in prison, you are a bird trapped in a cage, you have to run. And it was actually journaling, it was doing my podcast, it was that real, honest introspection at maybe 25 years old where I look at myself and go, why have you never had a girlfriend and always self-sabotaged? Where has that come from? And one good question is that feeling you had that day when you were 14 when Jasmine finally turned to you and said she loved you too and she wanted to give it a shot. That feeling in your stomach, where was the other time you felt that? Well, it was staring at your father, watching him being screamed at by your mother. And then I kind of managed to put together the dots. that my model of love, the one I learned first, was that as a man, love and a relationship is a prison sentence. It will inhibit your freedom. That's the story I believed. It was central to everything I did, thought, and how I formed my relationships. Equally, it didn't just impact romantic relationships, it was relationships.

So if someone said- Friends, business partners.

Someone said the word best friend to me. Oh, Steve's my best friend. Cringe. I would go, oh, that's so awkward. I'd feel something, my body almost like convulses, like, oh. And they'd never know it, but I think, oh, please don't. I had an intimacy problem.

Wow.

Because I thought intimacy was a jail sentence.

When did you learn that it wasn't a jail sentence?

Just like many months of work with my diary. What year?

How old?

24-25. I never had a relationship until 24-25.

Really?

Never, never.

Did you have one then at 25?

No.

My first relationship was when I was 26.

But it was just trying to understand why? Like what is it, what is it like, what is the belief that's at the core of my behavior? And there's always a belief at the core of a behavior. We are basically creatures living out the stories we told ourselves about ourselves and the world a long time ago. And having studied childhood psychology, fortunately, it's one of the things that I'm so happy I studied, I understand how formative that early 0 to 10 in your life is. I understand how I've seen the studies with the resource monkeys that they've done where one small thing, a lack of affection, one small defining incident or traumatic event on the playground can shape your self-story so much more than any preceding evidence does. So even though if at 15, 16, 17, 18, there's evidence in your life presented to show that that thing that happened wasn't true, that story you told yourself is invalid, It's not a stronger force than that 0 to 10 period. That's where we learn how to survive. And some of the survival lessons are great. Put water in your mouth, put food in your body. But some of them, unless you unlearn them, will end up being the bane of your adulthood and the bane of your life. So this is what people think of self-development as this process of learning stuff. But there's two necessary things. Unlearn and learn at the same time if you can. And central to being able to do either, is being able to read yourself.

Yes.

As I always say, there's no self-development without self-awareness and you can read as many books as you like, but if you can't read yourself, you'll never learn a thing.

And I learned that the hard way. So when you were 26 and in this first kind of, sounds like maybe relationship, kind of relationship, wasn't full relationship, I'm not sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The relationship.

How long was the relationship?

It lasted for one year before I sabotaged it. Pretty much.

Well, I just didn't, I was so mature because of my first one, so I destroyed it. Yeah, yeah. the thing you unlearned in that first year of that relationship, three years ago, by the way.

Yeah, do you know, sometimes it takes the right person, and I think you can relate to this.

Of course.

Sometimes it takes a certain person who goes maybe at a certain tempo, they give you a certain energy, which counteracts the trigger. So my trigger was any impingement or anything that felt like it was touching the walls of my freedom. Then I would have a adverse reaction, run.

I know that feeling, man.

I, you know, yeah, you know the feeling, right? One of the things that I really relate, I realized this was because when I dated someone previously, not a relationship, but just dated them, when they'd argued at me in a loud tone, I did what I always wished my dad would do. I get up, I got my stuff, I got in my car, and I drove away. They didn't even know I'd gone. And it was 3 a.m. and it was my house. It was that mansion I told you about. Wow. I got in my, she was, argued with me and I tried to talk to her. She actually shouted at me again saying the same thing. So repeating and that was one of my triggers because my mum would do seven hours round and round and round to my dad. I got in the car, she didn't even know I'd gone and I drove off at 3 a.m. And I was, because I will never argue with anyone because my dad didn't either. It's never been productive. I've never seen the model of it being really productive to scream at someone, right? We have disagreements but screaming Screaming is.

Not acceptable for me. Like it's something that I experienced in my life as well, we've talked about this, you know, childhood stuff, but also in relationships, I attracted types of personalities that liked to scream and yell. And then I would just kind of sit there and try to be like, okay, it's okay, you know, but then it's really hurting yourself at the end of the day when you allow that to happen and not create a boundary. You're abandoning yourself, you're abandoning the little child inside of you that experienced this pain. And so, so you just would leave at that point?

I would leave. And at 26, so the girl I met called Mel, she did not scream. She didn't have that commitment. She had really mature.

She was peaceful, loving.

She allowed me to have my independence. She wasn't threatened if I had to fly away and work. It was me meeting the person that could counteract that self-story I told myself about relationships. She was the opposite of my mother.

To show you it's possible.

Yeah.

It showed you, hey, you don't have.

To be trapped in a relationship. That's exactly, I've actually never thought about that before, but she is the opposite of my mother.

Wow. In every way. Because usually we kind of attract the parent that we need to kind of heal or fix the childhood wound. It's like we attract that person until we learn the lesson.

No, yeah, I've never actually thought about that. But yeah, my mother was loud, didn't listen, screamed, would Restrict your freedom. Mel is the opposite. She will talk. She will. I remember one day when I, she flew in to New York to see me where I was running the office out there. And the minute she landed, I get an email saying, you've got to fly to San Diego. We're a social chain. We're about to close a deal on this big company out here on this, on this coast. 50 million. Can you get on a plane now? Go, like, go to the airport now and fly. Mel had just, we've not seen each other for a month and a half. She's just landed. She gets to my house. I know I've got to go out the door. And I say to her, like, babe, you know, I'm stumbling over my words to her because she's going to explode.

You've got the trigger, you've got the fear of the past.

Yeah, we've talked about this. This was my test. Whether it's right to test someone or not, but it's the test of whether I can be honest and true and open with you and not get scolded and yelled at and go back to, like, lying or something or being dishonest or having to end our relationship. She lands, she walks in, I say, There's this deal. I'm like, stuttering over my words because I'm like, She's gonna just be angry, like my last thing was. And my last relationship was, and she looks at me and she gives me a kiss on the cheek and she goes, It's okay, babe. It's good. You go do it, babe. You go do it. She goes, Woo, woo. She's like, Woo, woo. Wow. Touching my shoulder, she goes, Woo, woo, woo. This is so amazing. And then I literally had the conversation with her. I was, I'm really surprised by your reaction. I was expecting, and she goes, Babe, you having to go sometimes keeps spice in our relationship.

There you go.

And then when I came back from San Diego, maybe three days later, the exact same.

Peace, calm. How was it?

Yeah, exactly. And I was expecting the quietness, the- Passive-aggressive, the energy. Then I knew. Then I knew, but I ended up dumping her anyway.

Why?

Because we had our first issue in our relationship, and I hadn't learned the lesson that I should be asking, Is this relationship worth it? instead of Is this relationship perfect? And I was asking myself because I've seen Instagram relationships so long, I've never had one and I've seen movies and everything else. I thought any sort of issue within a relationship was fatal and I'll be honest with you what the issue was we had a problem in bed and I've never encountered that before and I think it's emasculating for a guy when your partner might not have the same interest in sex as you, right? You do.

Interesting.

And I think I was emasculated by it. I think I didn't understand it And she probably because I wasn't creating a safe space, she did not want to talk about it.

Right.

And for me that felt at the time like a dead end. Like you've hit, like going through a maze and you hit a cul-de-sac as we call it, like a dead end.

What would a safe space have looked like for you to create?

Just honestly to ask some very thoughtful, unloaded questions and to listen.

You weren't willing to do that or you just didn't have the tools or the awareness? The tools.

I did not have the tools. I didn't know how to communicate. And communication is foundational to everything. It turns out most of the time, as I've seen in my life, whether it was when I dropped out of university, my mum didn't speak to me for three years, whether it's my business partner becoming an alcoholic and only finding out when he was downstairs lying on the floor as a drunk, or whether it's in that situation that we tend to all want the same thing, but we don't have the tools to communicate. So it sounds like we're pulling in different directions. And I think in that situation, again, it was one of the moments in my life where I learned the importance of mature communication and creating a safe space and understanding that what someone self prescribes as their issue is not necessarily their issue. And sometimes people don't know what their challenge is. So someone might say to you, I don't like sex. And for you that again, it feels really binary. It's like, well, you either like it or you don't. So and you're not willing to talk about it. So it's over. But things as I learned in this case, are often much more deep and complex, and sometimes people can't self-diagnose what's going on with them. But if you create a safe space together, you can go on the journey to understand what that actually means. I wasn't willing to, so broke up with her.

Wow. I'm back with her now. Well, it's the same relationship. Same relationship. It's her. Yeah.

I didn't know that. Yeah. Interesting. I thought it was a new relationship. I will be, I 100% marry her.

She'll 100% be my wife. Because it's, yeah, I mean, I've never.

Met a person like her, but. Wow.

So this is that relationship then, and you ended it. How long did you enter for?

A year.

Come on.

Yeah, I ended up for a year.

Were you in touch at all? Was a little conversation?

Not really. So she, the pandemic happened and she had some troubles in her life that she wanted to go and figure out. So she flew to Indonesia, she flew to Bali. And the longer time went on and the more time I had on my own, and I'll be honest with you, the more time I had to try all the wrong things and have them fail me.

Right. You were like, okay.

Yeah, I was like, oh, that was the one.

Oh, wow.

That was the one. And I became sure and sure as the days went on that I would never find a love like that. I would never. And I was sure of it. I was utterly convinced I had made a mistake and that I was the problem. And although I didn't know the issue we had in our relationship would be fixed, I went to the airport, got on a flight, and I flew 22 hours to Indonesia to more than anything apologize.

Wow.

Because I felt like I threw a good thing away for a bad reason and I know I hurt her and I knew that even though I didn't think she would be interested in me or take me back or anything like that, I knew that if I am to be the mature person I am, my apology, if it's not manipulation, should come without an expectation. Right. You see what I mean? Because when apologies come with an expectation, they are just manipulations.

Yes.

I thought you just actually have to go there and say, say what you mean and leave it there and then come back.

Not try to get in a relationship with her, but just do it for the sake of you being a good person.

Exactly.

And owning up to your part of the street.

And then-- 'Cause then I could have another relationship with someone else and start the record personally in myself that I am now the mature person who's willing to communicate and be humble and admit his own deficiencies so I could then be the person I wanted to be for the next person. And it just ended up being a very, probably one of the most interesting moments of my life, how that situation played out. Because I got there, she was being very distant with me.

Did she know you were coming? Did you tell her? Yeah, last minute.

Yeah, last minute. So when I was in the Doha airport, I said, oh, by the way, I'm gonna be in Bali, so it'd be nice to see you. She was very distant with me. She wouldn't come near me. She was sat quite far away from me when we met with some friends. And then as the days went on and on, she said, Look, I don't know what the future holds, I'm staying here. And I could see it, so I apologized to her anyway. Then on the second, the next day, by the way, that was an ego blow. That was a moment where my chimp brain showed up and said, Take revenge, play a game, try and get her back. But fortunately, by this time in my life, the other part of me that knew I had self-sabotaged myself with my ego for years, and that the games had always failed me, manipulating someone has always failed me, abandoning my character and.

Integrity has always failed me, the chase.

And then- All of that had always failed me. So in that moment, which is I'm gonna stay here in Bali, super graceful and nice, thankfully. I see all of these things like a balancing act and it's like which force will win? You don't have to be a hundred percent mature, but if you're 60-40 and that's the words that come out your mouth, that's a good place to start. And fortunately, in that moment, my maturity won. The next thing is she sits me down the next day, He goes, I've been sleeping with someone since we broke up.

Huh! Zing! And I'm like, that pressure, how are you gonna show up with that pressure?

And again, my chimp shows up, it says, Finish her. Oh, it says, Manipulate. Games, tell her off, make her feel like.

Oh, wow.

That's my ego. It goes, Go on, Steve. But, fortunately, I gave her a kiss on the cheek. I was like, I understand. I understand. We can't, we're in a co-working thing. we carried on doing our work. By the way, at this point, we're not romantic, so we're not... Right. I'm just, babe, it's okay. Give me a hug. Thank you for telling me. You didn't have to tell me. And I literally looked her in the eye, and I remember saying to her, she'll listen to this. I was like, I know that must have been hard to say to me. So thank you, because you've told me. You didn't have to tell me, but.

You'Ve told me because X, Y, and.

Z, we carried on working.

That was tough.

Next day, this is where... But you ended it with her. It's been a year. What's she gonna do? Yeah, exactly. But your ego doesn't care. Yeah, of course. Your ego doesn't care if you ended it, if it was your fault. Your ego gets triggered, especially, I think this is quite a masculine thing from what I've read as well. We get triggered in a different psychological way because of various prehistoric reasons, which I won't go into. And then the last thing was, I realized that she was gonna stay here. She wasn't interested in me, so I was gonna leave. And I sent her this really wonderful message and a voice note, which I've played before publicly on stage. And I said, I'm leaving Bali on Saturday, but listen, you're on your journey, it's been amazing to see you, et cetera, et cetera. She responds and she says, she's surprised, but she says, okay, okay, can I see you before you go?

My ego shows up.

Don't let her see you before you go. That's your last chance of getting a victory.

Oh no.

Do not let her see, make her.

Feel bad, play a game.

Oh man. You've got the power vest, she's given you- She wants something.

Yeah.

You take it away from her. Yeah, to take it away from her. That's one last ego restoring victory. and then reflection, asking myself who I am and who I want to be, what my values actually are and what has succeeded in film in the past. I said, sure, you can see me before I go. And in those three days, everything changed.

What happened?

She made plans for us over those three days. It was like, and I'm not sure if this is a karmic thing or a spiritual thing or whatever it is, but it was like she realized I'd finally learned how to love her. And it was like life had sent me these three tests to check if I still had that ego, if I was still immature, if I was willing to hold a safe space. And because I passed those three tests, those last three days, everything changed. And we have been wildly in love ever since, to the point where I'm sure she's my wife. I'm sure we're gonna be- I could have ruined that on three occasions. There was three challenges like she was testing you.

Whether she was thinking of a test.

Or she would never think of it. She's too pure.

She's too authentic. It's the human experience to say, well, I don't fully trust this. Okay, I'm gonna shoot, maybe not thinking, but it's just the body's response probably. It just comes out.

It taught me something about the nature.

Of the human body. She would know if you would have reacted differently in any of those three, she'd have been like, something's not safe here. She would have not trusted you to.

Be able to want to get back in a relationship. But is the world not doing that to all of us in all facets of our life? Of course. Is it not sending us tests, whether it's the barista who you might be rude to that day that turns out to be the daughter of the person that you end up going and trying to pitch business to in three years time, is life not testing us at all times to see what we're ready for and what we deserve? And that's kind of the broader picture lesson I learned was like, Mel never had to change. In fact, nothing externally needed to change for me to get the results I'd always been looking for in my life. I had to change. And then the world sent me things, and this sounds very woo-woo, and I'm the least woo-woo person you'll ever meet, the world sent me a different set of things. It said, because you've changed, we're gonna mirror a different set of results. It's that old Einstein quote about doing the same thing and expecting different results. Yes, you've taught me this as well because if you have a huge amount of self-responsibility when it comes to your relationships, you say, I did that. I said this to you last time we spoke. When you're talking about your past relationships that have failed, you said, But that's on me. And you say, Because I picked them. And I think about that so much because I had my hairdresser come to my place in LA the other day and he walks in, starts cutting my hair, says, My girlfriend, she's not really interested in me. She's been talking to a lot of other guys and she's been going for this guy just because he's got money. And he walked in and when he walked in he had this $2,000 sneakers on, a Louis Vuitton bag dripping in diamonds and gold. And I thought, you,'ve got what you deserve. And people hate that. The concept that the people that they've attracted into their life, the results they've attracted into their life, are a mirror of who they are. I said to him, I said, well, what did she do? Well, she's a hostess in a nightclub. Okay, and what, like, how did you meet her? Well, I was in, you know, I was at a, at one of the tables in the nightclub, and I was one of the big spenders, so they.

Put her on my table.

So you're attracting from that space. Yeah. That's, that's what you've attracted. So if you did some work on you to figure out why you need to wear diamonds all the time, where that comes from, that need for validation or whatever it is, you could drop the diamonds, you could stop buying the Don Perignon in the nightclub and you might end up in a different environment and attracting someone else for other reasons and values. And it was the same with me throughout my entire life. Until I did the work on me, I attracted all the wrong people.

Really?

Oh, God, of course. Attracted all the wrong people that wanted me for all the wrong things, that wanted me for the mansion in the.

Countryside or the Range Rover or the car.

The car you have now is pretty sweet. Yeah, I don't actually, funnily enough, I don't actually have a driving license. so I have a driver. Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So. But I can't drive. I lost my license. I thought, I don't need it anymore anyway.

So.

Yeah. And so, yeah, I think about that.

A lot now because I had to do the work to, to find the love I was looking for. You can't blame others. You gotta, you gotta take responsibility and ownership. And that's why I said with you, it's like, for me, maybe there was things that I didn't like about these other relationships I was in, but I was the one choosing those relationships. I was the one staying after, you know, six months, 12 months, two years, when it wasn't working and things weren't.

Shifting, and I continued to repeat.

Patterns that I was bringing into the relationship. So we all have choices, but when we blame others, it's really easy, but when we take responsibility, it's much harder.

What are you scared about in your relationship that you haven't fully healed from that might end up being fatal to your current relationship? What patterns do you see in yourself when you go, oh, I'm gonna address that before we go down the aisle?

I feel like, I mean, we are so, we talk about these things all the time. And I feel like because I have emotional accountability with my therapist every two weeks, she has it with her therapist every two weeks or whenever she does it as well to work on these things. Like even last night we were talking about, you know, what's the thing that you think you still need to work on that you haven't talked to? Because we had this incredible vacation in Costa Rica and I was like, and we both had therapy last night at different times and I go, I don't know what I'm gonna talk about. Like everything's great. What do you talk about when everything's great in a relationship? And for me, just like you were saying, there's different levels to my childhood, right? There is the zero to seven ages, which I feel like I've fully addressed and healed. And life has tested me, let's say, with different scenarios that could trigger me, or would have triggered me from those things in the past. And let's say I passed the test, right? Most of the time. Or, to a high level degree, I passed the test. I think everyone has a breaking point of something, you know, at some point it's like, okay, let's move on from this. But let's just say I passed the test and we're talking about it. And with my therapist, I was like, you know, I haven't really talked about this phase of my life from 10 to 12. My therapist said, well, that's the next phase. You go through the different seasons of your life to meet up to where you're at in this moment. And you heal those different scenarios, those different ages. that kind of shaped or split parts of your psychology to make you feel like you were masking something, you had to protect yourself, you were defending yourself, you were doing something that wasn't out of your most authentic self, your highest version of love, your joy, your light. And so that was a season of darkness, right? And I'm not stealing cars, there's levels to the darkness, but there was something in me that needed to steal something every time I went to a store. It was a rush, there was the challenge, the oh, I'm gonna get back at the system or whatever it was I was feeling. It was a pain inside that I needed to heal. And that gave me a feeling, it was a coping mechanism, to feel something better than what I was feeling. Just like we do with drugs or alcohol or sex or porn or whatever it might be. That was my thing and I haven't addressed or healed that yet. So I have on my phone, I showed you this, and she told me, I have on my phone, I've showed this before many times, on my phone, I've got a photo of myself from when I was that five to seven range, right? And it's funny because I talked about this on your podcast, which I want everyone to subscribe to, Diary of a CEO, which is amazing. Some man posted a photo on his Instagram of his self when he was like five or six. And he said, Thank you for talking about that. I'm now working on healing that part of me where I was sexually abused. when I was that age, where my parents were arguing all the time. That's made me kind of guarded in my life, right? From these different, from that period of time. And so now my therapist was like, okay, Louis, I want you to find a photo of you when you were 11. And we're gonna put that on your screensaver, 'cause this has been on here for almost a year.

Really?

A year. Every day, I look at this and I see this and I feel like that season of my life, I've healed now. And it's taken a year. of integrating the healing lessons and being tested by the universe, right? Relationships, conversations, uncomfortable conversations, challenges to be like, am I still triggered from that wound? Or have I opened the wounds, looked at it, it's painful, and then allow it to heal fully so there's a scar but it's going away every day.

Is it fully healed?

I feel like it again, if the universe tests me, the whole thing for me around that age was abuse. The sexual abuse made me feel like I was getting taken advantage of, right? So I would always feel taken advantage of in different scenarios. And I felt like I needed to defend myself. I don't feel the need to defend myself anymore. Like if people say nasty things about me, I'm like, okay, that's their opinion.

Can you think of a scenario that might trigger you?

If someone says a comment online or says something about me, that I feel like, oh, they didn't get that right. Like they were, they don't know the whole story. They didn't get it right or they're assuming something that's not true. That used to be the main thing. And I might see that today. You might have a moment of like, oh, I want to correct them and tell them the full story. But I don't do that anymore. So there's a moment of like, oh, I'm aware of it. Okay. But I don't need to. Yeah, yeah, okay. And so it's an awareness. It's like, okay, maybe there's a moment of the trigger where you're like, My body is so used to this nervous system response, but I'm in a safe place and I go back to looking at the photo and say, I got your back. So it's integrating the healing from the child psychology to the adult and bringing the adult in the room. And so now it's, okay, let's see if there's things to uncover from ages 10 to 12. So I'm going to put a photo, I got to look for a photo, put it on here of that age range where I'm like 6'3, goofy, skinny looking, being made fun of all the time and I'm sure there's going to.

Be stuff where I need to open.

A wound and be like, man, this is painful, and I don't want to have this wound here, but I can dress it, look at everything, and then allow the wound to heal, full recovery. And then there'll be a scar, but eventually the scar will go down and it's more and more healed and it's stronger.

What's the process of finding out? So when you get that photo of you at, what, 16 is it?

10 to 12.

10 to 12. How are you gonna know what the sort of limiting self-stories are that you're still carrying from that time?

I'm not gonna know until my therapist does multiple different exercises with me. She'll do a set of exercises in person and over Zoom where she'll have me think about those times and journal and have me bring up stuff from parents. I've no clue what she's gonna bring to me, but she's gonna walk me down a journey and the journey of rediscovery, of reliving Parts of my past that I don't wanna think about anymore, right? For 25 years, I didn't wanna think about the sexual abuse or the trauma. I didn't wanna think about being in that bathroom with that man. I didn't wanna think about it. But it was a movie that played in my mind every day for 25 years. And I never told anyone until I started to actually address it and open that box again. It was extremely painful and scary, but every day after that became easier and easier. the more I did the exercises and integrated the healing journey. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. And so now I feel like I have this courage, like I can take on the different stages of my life from 10 to 12 or 16 or, you know, the different relationships, all the different relationships I've been in. I'm going to go back to all those seasons as well at some point and see, okay, where did I, you know, mess up? Where can I take more responsibility? How could I heal that and rewrite the story of every chapter of my life so that it's more integration towards peace.

Towards peace.

That's the key. And so, I don't know how long it's gonna take. It might take a couple weeks. It might take a few months. It might take a year with me having that photo on my screen. What I'm committed to is the growth. And I'm willing to do whatever it takes to set myself up to be the best leader for my life I can be and the leader I can be for the people around me. and I know that takes me doing the self-awareness, healing, and being on that constant healing journey.

But you can't see yourself ever leaving therapy, can you?

At this point, but I remember before the call last night, I was like, do I need to take this call? Like everything's great. Everything's amazing. We just had this seven day trip. I've never, and I told my girlfriend this, I go, I've never been on a trip where there wasn't some type of blow up or some type of, in a relationship, where there wasn't some type of make wrong or you didn't do enough or you should have done this better, as opposed to the partners that I chose being grateful and appreciative of what we were creating. Look at all these good things we did over the last five days, but you're focusing on this one thing that I did or didn't do, and that always made me upset. And Martha's not like that. It was just like this beautiful experience. I was like, I don't know why I need to go to therapy right now. Maybe I'll wait a few more weeks. But I think the consistency of it and things came up for me last night. Like there was new stuff to work on. You know, there's always a different level. And my therapist says, you know, look for the pebbles in the shoe. There may not be a big rock, some big thing that you need to address. There might be like a little grain of sand that you like kind of notice it, but not really for the first like few hours. But then after a day, that sand, like, starts to create a little blister, and then you're bleeding after a week from a little grain of sand, like a little pebble. What's the little stones that like, they're really not that big of a deal, but then they build into like, you can't walk in a year.

If you just get a drop of water and you just drop it on like a piece of stone, nothing happens tomorrow. But over a million years, you can create Grand Canyon just by a flow of water. And that's kind of how I see it. If you're allowing something to flow in your life, although it won't be destructive today, it is corroding you gradually and it's building up and it's building a pathway. You can think about it from a neurological perspective, it's building a pathway of bitterness or resentment or grudges neurologically. And I was really fascinated when I wrote that book about water because it's something you, it seems so irrelevant. It's the thing that's carved up the world, it's carved, it's the reason we have a Grand Canyon and you know, and it can destroy anything if you allow it to persist long enough. Even a drop can destroy anything, which is pretty fascinating, right?

Yeah, and a drop of water turns into a river that cuts through a whole country.

Through a country.

From a drop of water over thousands of years.

Thousands of that, yeah. So you've got to turn the tap off.

So that's, I don't know if I would stop therapy. I might pause it for periods of time. I might say, you know what? I'll go a month or six weeks, like I don't think I need it every two weeks. There might be a season of life where that happens, but every time I do it, I feel better. And there's always something to be addressed from life. I was going through this challenge with like a teammate of mine in my company or this happened to me and it kind of made me feel like a little frustrated and I just wanted to talk about it. You know, I didn't react and I didn't blow up, but there was a little trigger there inside of me that made me, I didn't like that. Let's address it.

Do you write the things down as they happen during the week and then like in your notes or something and.

Then take it to the therapist? Yeah, it's kind of just like a mental note. Yeah, it's like, is there a pebble? She's like, where are the pebbles? And I'm like, I don't think there are, you know? And then it's like, I have to really dig. But it's because I'm doing it every two weeks, I'm addressing things consistently so there's no big rocks. It's like, oh, I keep talking about everything and letting things go and allowing things to flow. It's a thing of emotional accountability, I feel like, I never had until really in the last year. I did therapy at seasons of life for the last 10 years. Every relationship I've been in the last 10 years, I did therapy with them. And none of the people wanted to do therapy with me. I would suggest it because there was a rock in our relationship of like, I think we need therapy. They'd be like, no. But that was my responsibility for choosing these types of individuals that didn't want to grow in this way, that didn't want to look at themselves because I was like, I will address anything wrong with me. I know I'm not perfect. I've made lots of mistakes in this individual relationship and I want to talk about them.

Yeah.

And so, but I never did it consistently every two weeks and I've done it for the last year every two weeks. And I think I told you we did like a five hour session together a few weeks ago.

Yeah, you said.

Not because something was wrong, but because everything's great. We did a five hour with my therapist in person exercises like many kind of games, eye gazing and really sharing vulnerable stuff and practices and creating agreements and I felt like, man, it's so powerful to create agreements when things are good, not when there starts to be like some downfall.

Reactively.

So, I don't know if I would end it, but the ego would get, I could see the ego saying, you know what? You figured it all out, Louis.

Do you have them on retainer? This sounds like an interesting question, but there's actually a truth to it because I think that for a lot of people, probably not yourself, right? Because I know you're doing very, very well, but for a lot of people, I've seen in my friends, They factor in the fact that it's going to be expensive. So I was thinking with therapy that there might be some logic in block booking it.

I've already paid for the whole year. That's what I'm saying. I paid in advance for the year.

And we schedule, it's already in my calendar like every two weeks for the next four months. Because I've seen my friends think about whether to go and then factor in the cost that they're gonna have to pay. And I go, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't want that force coming into your growth. So block book it ahead of time.

And then you won't have that guilt.

Associated with the expense?

Yeah, and I'm a huge fan of emotional accountability, whether that's a therapist, a coach, a mentor, a friend, having a place where you can go, especially as men, because in general, I will generalize, most men don't have these types of conversations with their guy friends on a weekly basis, where in general, women tend to do this on a daily basis with their girlfriends or their mothers. They have conversations about vulnerabilities and securities. When did you ever do this growing up with your guy friends? We didn't do it growing up.

Exactly. With my guy friends, absolutely not.

You're trying to survive. Exactly. Ask a woman to say, ask a woman, most women, if you say, imagine going a month without talking to a girlfriend about how you feel, your challenges, your insecurities, your relationship issues, your body insecurities, whatever it might be, your stuff at work, they say it'd be horrible to not be able to talk about it for a month. I go, imagine going a lifetime. That's so many men in the world go years with never sharing how they truly feel with one friend. And imagine they were like, I feel like I want to kill myself. Imagine how a lot of guys feel. And I'm not saying like, what is the weight of the world on all these men? But just imagine not being able to express your emotional feelings. And that's why I feel like emotional accountability is so powerful. to have that for each one of us. And so, and with therapy, I feel like it's a powerful tool to have emotional accountability. So I don't know if I would end it. Maybe I would not do it as frequently, but I really want to do the work on these different chapters of my life, and then maybe I would extend the times of going. But are you doing it consistently?

No.

Are you doing it at all?

No.

Do you feel like it'd be worth it?

I've started to think about it in the last two months and I've started to look at things. So I've started to make comments to my team about doing it. I spoke to a therapist and said how would it work? And I think part of that is the adjustment, the adjustment of my life that I talk about over the last three months is I now need to learn a new set of tools to adjust to the adjustment that my life has seen.

What is the ultimate goal you wish you could have internally? With imagine your life, you accomplish all of your dreams and the fame doesn't slow down. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So imagine what you've experienced in three months is a hundred times.

Yeah.

Because of the growth of your business, your brand, your podcast, the books you create, the impact you have in the world is so massive that this is not three months. This is a hundred times this is three months every day.

Yeah.

What is a tool you feel like you're gonna need or three tools that will support you to staying in peace or is peace the goal?

When I think about the tools, it's whatever tool is going to help me deal with a lot of sometimes factually incorrect, sometimes bias ridden, external feedback. And I'm actually really good with dealing with it, but even I struggle with it sometimes. When you were saying that a thousand times, 100 times, whatever, I was thinking about what it must have been to be Barack Obama. I was thinking who's the most, you know, criticized, the highest pedestal one can climb to, where you have literally 50%.

Of the country- Loves you and the other hates you.

And then you have wars to contend with. You have economic issues, you have all of these challenges, you have personal challenges, you have for kids, and you're still trying to stand up in front of the nation and be a man of integrity and character.

Man.

So the word sounded like the tool sounded like perspective. It sounded like a greater sense of perspective on what actually matters and what to tune in to and what to tune out of. I think that's probably what I'd need to survive at that level. And I guess a therapist could give me that.

Do you feel like you have perspective right now though?

Clearly not. Clearly not. Evidently not. Because if I had a greater sense of perspective, I don't think things would bother me at all. I think so when I say this, I want to be clear that I'm not the type of person that will ever reply to anything. I'm not the, if I see something and it's Steve Ballmer is a whatever, I won't reply to it. I won't get involved in that. But it'll affect you. But I think about it. And I'll think about it for a little bit longer than I'd like to. And it varies in the amount of, like, the length that I'll think about. If it's a big newspaper writing something about me, then it might, I might think about it for two days. It might just keep popping into my head, and I don't like that. I want to be able to control my, my calm. Even if there's chaos outside of me, I want to find that calm within my chaos. I want it to be a place that I can go back to as a choice. And if it's not, then I'm going to be dragged like a plastic bag in the wind for the rest of my life around by whatever someone else is saying or doing. There are practical steps like change the notifications on Twitter. Yeah, yeah. So you can't see most of the stuff, which I've done, done that on LinkedIn and my other channels. I don't search my name ever, but.

There'S always going to be a friend that sends me something.

Steve, have you seen this?

And the curious brains would be like, oh, what are they saying about me?

Yeah, and it's not true. And then if it's my mom or my dad or my sister, I have to then give them perspective. I go, listen, don't worry. And then I get back into it. So just getting systems in place to deal with that, because I want to be able to pursue my mission without consciousness or fear of consequence, because my mission is authentic. It's genuine to me. The things I want to do in my life, I believe them to be the truth. whether it's my truth or in terms of my content, I believe it to be the truth. So I don't want to try and have to caveat myself or speak or live or exist in fear, limiting myself because of what other people might think. So that requires a little bit more, I guess, perspective on what that noise is.

Yeah. I'm curious about your mom and dad. What was the greatest lesson your mom taught you growing up that has supported you and the greatest lesson she's taught you that you don't want to repeat?

Interesting. So I'll give it in the context of business and then maybe personal. So the best lesson she's taught me in terms of business was unbelievable hard work. My mum would wake up in the morning at her shop after sleeping on a bag of rice. She would go run her little corner shop and then she'd go back to the UK. She'd go back to her bag of rice where she'd sleep in the back room and she was doing that because She was being racially abused so much that she and the shop was being broken into. She realized that if she went home, then they would come in. So she just slept. Yeah. And I remember being there as a kid looking down at this bag of rice on the floor and I was like, why is it all chewed up? And she was like, There's lots of mice and rats back here. But she didn't care. She was doing and it was so bizarre that she would give so much for this one little corner shop, which was selling Mars bars and it wasn't.

Like a business that ever made any money. It was like a corner news stand with like...

It was like nothing. It was a tiny little selling Snickers and Mars bars and maybe a toilet roll, really random things. And then that business would fail and she'd start another one. And then that would fail and she did that for 25 years of my life. None of them ever made any money. They actually destroyed our finances as a family to the point where our house, for example, was smashed to peep. We were in a perfect white picket fence neighborhood, but our house was... The windows on it the front of my house was smashed for 15 years. Grass was six foot high, there was fridges in my garden. And we were the only black people in that area. So it made you look even weirder, like. Yeah, the context, everything is about context, right? And you would determine value of anything in your life by the context in which you see it. I've said this before, but if you see a Nokia next to five iPhones, the Nokia is a piece of, you know, bull. But if you remove the iPhones, if you go back, Two decades, you would be astounded by such a contraption. I was the Nokia in a village of iPhones. So I always felt that's why I wanted the mansion in the Lamborghini. So that's the one lesson of hard work.

What's the lesson that she taught you that you don't want to learn?

That you want to unlearn? Okay, so her relentless hard work and always starting another business taught me the importance of hard work. But at the same time, it taught me a bad lesson. Well, it taught me it's actually a good lesson now that I've learned it, which is the cost of lack of focus in life. My mum's businesses sequentially went bust and that put our family into hardship over the space of 25 years because she never focused. And her shop, she'd have her shop and because it didn't make her a millionaire straight away, she would start something else because someone walked in and said, you can make a lot of money from furniture businesses. She should go, okay, I'll go start a furniture business. That meant that the shop went under because she left alone and it lost her focus.

It lost the focus, yeah. So now I'm- maybe it could have.

Made a lot of money if she put 10 years into it. some of those businesses were smash hits. They weren't showing up in terms of the bottom line yet, but she started this one restaurant called Tropical Sensation, which was a, which I used to work in as a kid, smash hit. The only African jerk chicken place in our little village, and it was a smash hit, but she got unfocused, started something else, and then the restaurant went bust. We had that restaurant for about four years. If she had applied us, focused on that, we would, there'd be a chain around the UK, but. So she taught me that lesson. Yeah, I mean, a lot of them I talked about earlier with my dad, but just like how to communicate and.

Those kind of things, I guess. And your dad, biggest lesson he taught you?

Love unconditionally. Even if a woman is screaming in your face. Really? Yeah, even if my mom was screaming in his face for, honestly, when I say seven hours, if you met my mom, you'd understand there's no exaggeration there. And the decibel she could reach was, she's not from Nigeria, is unbelievable. The decibel to the point where your eardrum would ring. It's unbelievable the volume she could get to and maintain it. My dad said to me when I was a kid, he said, you know, I would leave the house for hours and go and do errands, go and do shopping. I'd come back in, she'd still be screaming, saying the same thing. And she didn't even know I left because she'd just be screaming from another room. But he, regardless of that, and although he's at times said, by the way, me and your mum are getting a divorce, He in the same second she was screaming at him if she went Could you change channel for me? He just can't do it and then if she was had been screaming at him all day for weeks and weeks and weeks and then she goes I need a lift home from she immediately get up put her shoes on and go and do it and he kept he loved us all he he stuck around regardless of conflict and yeah, and I think this is why I don't I can't see myself ever getting a divorce because the other model I learned is is, and whether this is a good one is you weather the storm.

Wow.

In that regard, once you're married, you're married.

Are they still married? Yeah.

Once you're married, you are married. And you. And you met. And you care about those kids above everything else. Because my dad did. He cared about us above everything else. Never really. I've never felt like I was close to him. I'm still not close to him now, but I know that he loved us just unconditionally.

Yeah.

And he left that with me this. you care about people, your loved ones. You really, you have to be generous with them and care about them.

So what's the lesson you wish he didn't teach you? Or the lesson he wanted to unlearn?

I mean, he had no affection at all. So I had to learn affection.

So when I hug you and squeeze you for 20 seconds, it's awkward.

It's not now. Honestly, it would have been. I wouldn't have known what to do, but I literally did the work. So I learned about why men pat the awkwardness of the pat. When you hug, you squeeze because you're not insecure. Men, it's almost like tapping out. It's to try and keep that kind of masculinity. And I saw a body language expert talking about this. It's almost like, you know, because they don't want to be vulnerable. But yeah, no affection. So I had to learn all those things. Even like saying best friend or girlfriend, even, you know, saying I love you. It took me until I was maybe 26 or 27 to learn how to say words. I call my parents by their first name. Still. I don't call them Mum and Dad. I've never in my life called them Mum and Dad.

Maybe when you were like four or five or something. No, never. Never.

Really? Did they say, Call me Mum or.

Is that just a joke? My mum made it, I think it.

Was a joke at the start where she was like, I don't want to feel like I'm your mum, I want to feel young. So you can, I've always called them by their first names. It would be deeply awkward to call my mum and dad mum and dad. It would make me feel... it would make me cringe.

Or to make them feel...

I think they'd find it weird now, like 30 years on, you know what I mean? I start going mum... It's a weird word to me. Do you have siblings?

Yeah, I'm the youngest of four. Yes, I'm the youngest of four, too. Oh, really? Yeah.

There we go.

That's interesting. He's a podcaster. Where does screaming come from? Do you think when someone feels like they need to scream, they do a few things.

So the first is they don't feel like they're being seen and heard. So if you, and there's a circuit going on in their brain where they don't have the tools to communicate in another way. They've learned, it's generational cycles. They've learned my mum and Nigerians have a bit of a reputation sometimes for communicating in a certain decibel in tone.

Yeah.

And that's what she had learned. That's what she had learned communication was and how it worked. And my dad had learned the opposite about communication. He was a passive white man that's 55 years old at the time. He's like 65 now from the countryside. He had learned that you talk. They, they didn't know how to communicate. And my mom clearly wasn't feeling heard because she was repeating herself. My dad didn't know how to acknowledge.

What she was feeling.

He didn't know how to pacify her. Wow. So it's just tools, right?

And you could, that's the great thing, is you can learn these.

Tools. Tools.

And that's why I feel like therapy is such, or something like therapy is such a powerful, if you can find the right experience, way to learn tools to improve the quality of your life.

Exactly.

So like, you know, like my parents and your parents, they screamed a lot and my parents are no longer together. My dad just passed. But your parents are together. If they had tools, they could improve the quality of their relationship.

Right.

And it takes both people being willing to face the wound. that's creating the pain, I feel like. And learn new tools.

And what's the foundation of making that decision to go to a therapist? That you have something you can improve.

For me, I'll speak for myself, I was feeling pain in certain relationships and pain in my life. And I didn't want to feel pain anymore. And after trying things for so long to make money and build my business and build a following and realizing that didn't relieve the pain, I was like, okay, my life's still messed up internally, even though it looks good on the outside. And so I was like, there's got to be a better way. So for me, it was feeling enough pain where I said, okay, I need.

To go do something to get rid of this. So it goes back to that expression of change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change. And it's that balancing that scales for you. At some point you go, in fact, the pain of going to therapy and doing the work is actually less than the pain of staying the same.

What I've been experiencing for years.

Yeah, exactly.

And repeating the same loops in relationships and attracting similar personality types and making decisions based on what I thought was the right decision. But it was based on a wound that I was trying to fix, as opposed to consciously deciding, is this a person who's got the right values, vision and lifestyle for me, and maybe it works out, maybe it doesn't, but choosing from a conscious place, not from a chemical connection, which is what I did my entire childhood. I chose relationships mostly based on, Ooh, there's an attraction. Ooh, let me try to see if I can flirt with them. Ooh, there's some sexual chemistry. And then there's sexual action. And then, ooh, now there's a bonding of chemistry through these sexual interactions. Now we're connected and now let's have fun and experience life. And then six months, a year, two years goes by and I'm like, oh, but I never chose consciously. I chose from chemical feeling. And I think that's probably most of us.

It's pretty much all of us. And it's really intriguing though because when you were faced with that pathway of like, do I carry on as the same or do I go to therapy? Do I start doing that tough work to, as you say, like peel back those wounds and address them? Both paths are painful.

Painful, painful, man.

Both paths are painful. One of them though, this is why people don't change. One of them, the pain is front loaded to the present. The other one, the pain is like it will be the pebble in your shoe. Yes.

Right?

And it will lead you, what you don't realize is it's actually circular, that path. It goes right back down to the same place. The other one has a big wall at the start of it. It goes, do you really want to peel this back?

It's not fun. But it is progress. You know what I mean? It's incredible. It's painful, front loaded, like you said. But the peace and the gratitude afterwards is priceless. It's unbelievable.

People can't get over that initial front load of pain though.

It's hard, man.

Or ego dissolution.

It took me 38 years. It took me 30 years to address the first stuff of sexual abuse. 30 years, well, call it 25 years. I was 30 when I addressed it. So it took 25 years of numbing pain, but knowing what the pain felt like. and trying to mask it and trying to build myself bigger and stronger to overcome the pain and realizing it didn't work to eventually be like, I need a breakthrough and being willing to face that season of my life. Then it took another eight years of still attracting relationships from other wounds that I hadn't healed from parent stuff. So I was healed one wound from sexual abuse, but the parent dynamic, I hadn't learned to heal. So I was attracting trying to fix my parents. for eight years, man. And that was exhausting. But I can't blame any of these people. These are all wonderful people in their own existence who are living their lives and I wish them all the best. It was me creating and choosing based on a wound, not based on a conscious vision for my life.

Question, man. The worst relationship you've been in, right? Think about the worst relationship you've been in. Do you believe that person, as they currently are, can find and find themselves in a healthy relationship?

Yeah, because the worst person I was in a relationship with was myself.

Okay, the second worst, I think. Good answer.

The worst person I was in a relationship with was myself for so long. And if I can create a healthy relationship after all the messed up things I said to myself and did to myself for decades, then I believe anyone else can do it if they're willing to really face themselves fully. All the darkness, all the shame, all the insecurities, and the pain, and really face it, open the wounds back up and allow them to heal. The second question, which I know you were trying to say is, do I feel like any of those relationships I was in, do I feel like they can be in healthy relationships?

Without doing the work. The one the way you think it was most toxic on both sides, 'Cause I reflect on some of my exes and I go, I understand that I had to do a lot of work and that's for me, I'm doing the work, etc. But do I think it's a case of fit or do I think they also need to do work? Or is there someone out there that that person, your ex, who is a bit toxic, is gonna fit together like a jigsaw piece with and they're gonna be really happy?

I don't think anyone's gonna fit perfectly if they've I think they might be better matches for them that allow their wounds to not come out as much. Allow their wounds to not come out as much because maybe they're, let's say if you're, you know, I'm not gonna name anyone, but let's just say you're with someone who screams at you a lot. And if they're with a really passive person, maybe repeating the pattern of your dad, maybe it works for them, but it doesn't mean it's healthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can suffer and stay together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It works. but it's not healthy. It's not conscious. And everything that I've been working on is what is conscious relationship? What are the distinctions of conscious relationship, which is part of conscious communication and values and all these different things. And so I'm not looking to make a relationship work and just like we're together for 50 years and it we lasted. For me, that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the juice of life. I'm looking for something special knowing that life is gonna happen. And I think the one criticism I got from your, well, I'm sure I got lots of criticism, but the one thing I saw from the interview I did with you was I said, like, listen, if I have to give up who I am to please someone else, to make them happy in a relationship, and we aren't able to figure out a way to make it work by adjusting the relationship, by flexing it, by, you know, building something by working together through therapy, and we're not able to, after a period of time, to make it work, then I'm willing to walk away. and I said that and a lot of people were like, Amen. And then other people were like, well, yeah, but you don't have kids. So you don't know what it feels like when there's kids and there's a longer dynamic. And I'm like, you,'re right. I don't know what it feels like. But what I can say is, I don't want to just suffer for years and years and years and last.

Yeah.

And life is going to happen. But hopefully by creating a different foundation than what I've done in my past, I'll be able to expand that flexibility within the relationship. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time. Oh, if you miss out on one agreement and I have to fall back for a few days, then I'm out. That's not what I mean or say. What I mean is because we've got a foundation that's different, my goal is we have agreements that are in alignment and we can be more flexible and get back on track. and not just stay in a numbing, suffering space for 10, 20, 40 years. That's the key.

Man, I want my girlfriend to be.

Willing to walk away.

If you're an a**hole every day for a year to her. And she sticks around? Can you imagine? What is that teaching your kids? And there's no possibility that we're gonna have a fulfilling relationship if only one of us has boundaries. Exactly. I want my girlfriend, if I got to the point where I didn't think my girlfriend would walk away, our relationship would descend into absolute chaos. You can't respect her either. She needs her boundaries, I need mine. And, you know, and so what you said is completely true, but it does, it's somewhat triggering to some people, I guess, because it sounds like a Belazé. But you said you clarified that, but it's what people feel.

Exactly.

It's not what they hear, it's how you feel.

Exactly.

So, yeah. And I'll be honest, I'm gonna say it. If I had kids and I was in a toxic relationship, then it's in the best interest of my kids, in my view, to walk away.

Because you experienced that.

I begged my dad at one point. To divorce. To divorce. I begged him. I remember being 14 and sitting at the table with him, like, I think you guys should split up. I'd rather there would be two homes where there wasn't shouting than one where there's chaos. And I wish they had, because maybe.

I wouldn't have had so much to unlearn. Which relationship do you feel like you need to heal the most with?

Mom or dad? Definitely with my mom. Really? Yeah, I'm not even talking to my mum right now.

Really?

When's the last time you talked to her?

Maybe two months ago. Mm-.

How does that make you feel? Like I'm heading towards regret.

Because if that turns into four months, turns into a year, two years.

Was it you that said to me about how many times you get to see your parents a year? And that really stayed with me. Can you repeat what you said to me?

Yeah, Jesse Itzler, who's a buddy of mine, who unfortunately just lost his father. He told me this a couple of years ago. He said, Jesse's in his 50s. So he said, you know, my parents are in their 70s or 80s at the time, right? And he said, you know, once you're older and you move away from home and you've got kids and you've got family, he's like, you see your, you go back to your home to see your parents two, three, four times a year, maybe, maybe most people twice. And I was like, yeah, that sounds about right. And he goes, Well, if your parents are in their 70s or their 80s, you don't have 10 or 20 more years with them, hopefully. You have two times a year. You may have 10, 20, 30 more times you're gonna see them if that's been your cadence for the last five years because life happens. Maybe you talk to them, but you don't see them in person every day, every month. You see them a few times a year. He said, you only get 20 moments with your parents. Maybe if they live a super long healthy life, maybe get 30 moments left. Have you said everything you want to say? Have you connected with them the way you want to connect? Have you addressed things? Have you shown up fully and loved them? Or are things on set?

I have not. And my dad has outlived his younger siblings. My dad has outlived his younger siblings and I see my dad once a year.

And he lives in London.

And he lives in the UK. He lives about four hours from London in the countryside where I grew up.

Where's your mom live?

Same place. Same place. So I'm in my overdraft, as we call it.

So I'm in the red. You're in the negative. Yeah. It could be any year.

Hopefully he's got decades left. You never know. I'm pretending it's not gonna happen. And I know I am, and I ignore the thought. If the thought comes into my mind, I'll make myself busy doing something.

Of course, yeah. I know I'm gonna regret that. I've never lost anyone. So... Tell you what, man, it's the first time My dad passed three months ago now, or two months ago now. And a friend of mine, Jason Wilson, who's an older gentleman, really inspiring guy, he told me two years ago in 2019, he said, How's your relationship with your father? 'Cause he knew that for 15 years at that time, he had an accident, a brain trauma, where we really didn't have the same relationship because he wasn't mentally and emotionally available in that way. So it was a different personality type. He was physically here, but it was almost like he was, mentally and emotionally not here. And so when I'd see him, it was the same conversation every time. He didn't have the memory, all that stuff. It was just challenging to see him for me. Right. And he said, you know, even if you're not having the best experience with them, and even if he doesn't say he likes having you around, because after two hours he'd be like, I'm tired. I want you to leave. He said, even if that's happening, he still really cares that you showed up. He may not show it. He may not communicate it. You may not think it's true, but it's true. He's always gonna care. And if you don't know how many years he has left, you owe it to yourself to do the best you can. And so when he told me that in 2019, I said, okay, you know what? Because I usually want back once a year for years. I'd see my dad once a year. Because I'm in LA, he's in Ohio, I'd go back. I started hosting an event in Ohio, an annual conference called Summon of Greatness, for the reason to be back for one week in Columbus, Ohio, to be able to go see him multiple times and give me more than an excuse. He was like, you, need to go more. I was like, ah, but I've only got so much work here in LA and it's a big, you know, it's a flight over there and it's a whole issue, like seeing him, it's a big deal or whatever. He said, you, trust me, you don't know when, maybe he'll last 20 more years, but you have no idea. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna do this four times next year. I made the commitment. I'm gonna go for multiple days so I can see him multiple times each day. and then boom, the pandemic happened. And I went three times. I'd said I wanted to go four, I went three. And I felt really good about it though 'cause I extended my trips and I stayed longer and I saw him lots of days and I videotaped it all and I asked him every question I wanted to ask him. I interviewed him. I have all these videos of me interviewing him on a podcast. So I was like, I want to ask him everything. I want to tell him how I feel and I did that. And then in 2021, I went to see him twice. I did the same thing. I kept asking all the questions I needed to ask, said everything I needed to say, how much I appreciated him. And then in February 2022, this year, he passed away.

And I didn't know.

I didn't think it was going to happen. And I'm so glad for the last two years, I went to go see him, said what I needed to say, asked him questions, videotaped it, took photos, like, just had those moments, because now it can at least say, you know what? I did the best I could. Maybe I could have gone and seen him more in these last two years, but I went more than I've ever been. I felt spiritually more connected to him than ever in the last two years. I felt like our relationship shifted after 15 years of struggle.

And is there anything left? Any.

I think I told him everything. I told him how much I loved him, how much I appreciate him. I told him I forgive him for stuff that I dealt with, but also. He was a great dad, but had his challenges. So it's like I loved him for the things I loved. I forgave him for the things that felt like he struggled with. But again, certain things I said, it's like he couldn't fully understand it because mentally he had the brain trauma. But I was like I said it for me at least, you know? And hopefully his spirit captured it and he understood it. But I didn't hold anything back. I don't think I held anything back. I can't think of anything at least. Maybe there was something, but it's not.

Like, oh, I really wish I would have told him this. I told him everything. I've got marginally better, but not fast enough. Time is not on my side.

It would be, you know, it's something you should schedule in the next few months to go see both of them, in my opinion.

I said, and people wonder, people wonder.

What would you say to your dad? If you only had two hours left for them, one time to see him.

Yeah, I would, it would be appreciation that I don't feel like I've ever given him. But I've sent, so on Father's Days every year, When I send something, I always say exactly what I want to say to him in the just because I started doing this maybe two years ago, I say the things and I say it in our little family group chat on Father's Day that I'm gonna wish I said to him, which is just appreciation, like giving him the credit for the man that I became and more broadly for that unconditional love piece that I told you about, like being watching someone just love a family, regardless of the chaos they were surrounded by, is something that will have it create a generational cycle where I will be that person in my home because of you. And it's difficult with my mum because we struggle to have conversations. If I told you the things that my mum has said to me, you wouldn't believe it.

Just nasty stuff.

You wouldn't believe it. You wouldn't believe that someone could say that to their child. And so, and so I. People say to me, go. Go meet them. Go. But I go, but what if someone was saying this to you? And my mom is, she loves me deeply. She loves me so, so deeply. But she doesn't have the tools to communicate. She will say things you wouldn't believe a mother could say to a child. And so, so if you only had.

An hour with her and she couldn't say anything, but you could say everything, what were the things you'd want to say? And this was the last hour you would have with her.

It would be all about appreciation. It would be about the lessons you taught me, the facts you taught me that, you know, for all the failings in entrepreneurship, she taught me it was a thing. and even though it never succeeded for her and it still to this day hasn't, she taught me it was a root and that opened my eyes. And in fact, all the like deficiencies, the things people would consider in the parenting Bible to be deficiencies or flaws are all of my blessings. Not coming home to your kids. Well then what happens then? Well your kid's gonna have to figure out how to eat today. So he's gonna go into the house, pick something off the shelf in the house, at home and he's gonna go sell it. And that's what I was doing. And also, if he's incredibly insecure because he hasn't, you don't have Christmases and birthday celebrations, you don't have presents or lunch money or any of those things, you're gonna make him want and you're gonna give him a drive for things. And that absence you created as my parents showed me that anything I am to have in my life is a direct consequence of something I do. It doesn't appear. So that's why I was an entrepreneur at 16, starting businesses at 18, I was running all the school trips in my school. I'd done the vending machine deals for my school so that they had all the vending machines. I was super entrepreneurial because I had learned that everything in my life is going to be direct consequence of Stephen. And that stayed with me. And it was a huge advantage. And this, I mean, everyone can relate to this in their own way. The people, the guests that I sit with, whether it's you or it's a Olympic gold medalist or a billion CEO, it's all some kind of, it tends to be some kind of anomalous trauma. that has made them an anomaly in their lives. Driven. Yeah, it's like getting a piece of Play-Doh and poking it this side and you go, oh my God, it's been poked this side. But then you turn it and you look at the protrusion on the other side and you go, oh, that's their greatness. And it's the same thing. It's the protrusion on the right that's created the greatness on the left. And that's the case for me. But with that protrusion, you have to address the dark side. Yes. You have to know what it is. and address it because the thing that will make you obsessed in business will make you never see your family.

Do you think if you healed the major wounds of your life that you would be as driven and successful as well? Do you think that's possible for you to continue to be driven, successful and impactful? Or would you be less impactful? Or if you were healed or on a healing journey, would you be even greater?

It's a great question. When I've pondered much, I used to think that healing from the things that had made me driven would inhibit my ambition. I used to think that if I got to the point where I believed deep within my being and my inner child that I was enough, that I was as good as the white friends and the houses and all the things I didn't have when I was that kid in that neighborhood looking around, if I got to the point where I realized I was enough, I thought it would inhibit my sense of ambition and drive. What I actually learned was that was never actually ambition. The Lamborghini wasn't ambition, it was insecurity. I didn't want a Lamborghini. Society told me I would be enough if I got a Lamborghini. So when I realized I wasn't enough for myself, your ambitions become real ambitions. Then you go, what does Steve actually want to do if he doesn't care about the external validation or the approval of others? what are the things he would be doing if he wasn't striving for a Lamborghini or for followers or for some kind of applause? Annie had the void of financial resources filled in his life. Well, he would be making content about life and psychology every day. He would be spending time in Bali creating a home there with a family. He would be doing all these other things. So healing actually creates the foundation for real ambition. Before then, you think it's ambition, but it's actually a pursuit of validation. It's trying to quench an insecurity, or to make or to win your parents approval. So that was a really liberating thing for me. And now that I'm getting closer and closer to realizing that I am enough, which I think I'm pretty close now, I'm as ambitious as ever before, but I'm really asking myself whenever I pursue something, why? And I end up pursuing things and getting things that are actually intrinsically meaningful and rewarding, as opposed to things that I attained. And upon getting them, they would seem to dissipate in my hands. and it was a mirage, it was an illusion. Someone had told me a lie, and I think I know who it was, that four, six, eight year old me that told me these things would make you fulfilled and happy and content. But it was a lie I told myself because I didn't know better. And now I know better. So the things I attain and reach for and strive are things that are actually Steve's, that those are my things.

What would you say would be the three wounds that you could, if you started to heal them more, or fully healed them would create a abundance and richness of your life in relationships and service and impact far greater than your dreams could be. What were those three wounds that you would need to face? The dark side that you talked about.

The dark side.

Those three things.

The first one's got to be a detachment from external criticism and feedback because I think that would liberate me to do things from a place of greater truth. Like everything we create, if it's I think the things that we create that are most true and when truth is things that are in alignment with you, the world and what the world needs, if I created something that was more true and that wasn't sprinkled with I want people to be impressed, I think it would be with more value and in order to do that I have to detach myself more from caring about impressing people. The second thing would be a personal thing which is the relationship thing. So really healing more from the imprisoning belief that a relationship is a jail sentence. That would allow me to have a different, more vulnerable type of relationship with my partner, with my friends, with my girlfriend. It would allow me to let people in more, because I didn't think that them coming into my personal space or my life would be, would hurt my freedom. And then number three that I need to heal from, starting a business at 18. and building it to being a big, big old business by the age of 27, being a black 18 year old kid that still probably had a bit of a chip on his shoulder from his childhood. I think I had to build a tough exterior or a certain type of way in business to try and get the credit I deserved in the boardroom. So at 18 years old, I'm walking in with an afro to a boardroom of eight older white men. that are all very, very successful. And I learned a certain way of speaking and conducting myself, which I think can be harmful if I don't unlearn it now.

What was that way of speaking?

Being very, very direct to where the boundaries are blurred and it can sometimes be rude.

Is that a you thing or is that more of a British thing?

I think it's a British guy who's tried to build a business where he had like almost a thousand employees in the end and he had to deal with awful stuff every single day and people trying to exploit him. So he had to get, you know, and then also someone who had no time. So he got even more. He sacrificed the courtesies of things like politeness at times. Right. I have to get to the point.

Yeah. Yeah.

Don't want to be like that with your friends. Right. You know?

Yeah.

You gotta. You gotta learn a bit more empathy and softness and compassion. And compassion doesn't have a huge. Well, in the. The way that I saw business when I was younger, compassion was. secondary to the objective.

Yeah. Okay, I've got a few final questions for you. This is a question that I asked Matthew McConaughey and a couple other people. Matthew McConaughey had a speech when he won the Oscars, where he said something about who's your hero? And he said, My hero's myself 10 years away from now. I don't know if you remember the speech or you've seen it on YouTube or something. He's like, My hero's 10 years away. And then when I get to that person, have you met your hero? And he's like, no, my hero's 10 years after that, right? I'm always chasing that greater version of myself. So imagine you're 10 years away, you're about to turn 40. What does that best version of yourself look like? Who is Stephen at that phase? After another decade of life, whatever is going to come to your life in this next decade, what do you hope you are? How you show up when you look in the mirror, what do you see?

I think the word that came to my mind when I heard all of that was presence. I just want to be at that 40 at 40. I don't want to be the type of person that cares what I'm like at 50. I want to be so intently focused on looking in my children's eyes today and being really present with them so that I can get the real richness and depth of, like, life. But when we think about the minute you start saying about 10 years, 10 years ahead, I thought, well, that's what I do now. I'm asking myself how big my company, my bank balance, my following, my podcast is going to be 10 years from now. And when we do that, as I'm sure you know, because it's central to psychology and philosophy. We abandon this moment just a little bit. I do that too much. I would love to get to a point when when my kid is with me and they look up at me and ask me a question or my wife is with me at the dinner table, I'm completely, completely, utterly present or when I'm on stage or when I'm speaking to you, I'm completely, utterly present. Because I believe then I'll get a deeper richness and fullness of life. So I hope I don't care. I hope I'm not thinking about 50-year-old Steven when I'm 40. I hope I'm intently focused on today.

It's beautiful, man. Love it, man. You got an amazing podcast, the Diary of a CEO. You've also got a great book, Happy Sexy Millionaire. And people can get that on your website, stephenbartlett.com, you're all over social media @stephen on Instagram, great name by the way, I gotta get out Louis. Your content's on fire, it's inspiring, it's amazing, so well. So I want everyone to make sure they go subscribe to the podcast, the website, social media. What's the thing you're most excited about that we can be of support to you right now? You're on Dragon's Den, and so if you're in the UK or I'm sure they put it on YouTube also after the series, you're there on Dragon's Den.

What else can we support you with? I think my podcast is the main thing, but there are so many amazing causes. There's a really wonderful cause called the Magpie Foundation in the UK where they're helping Parents of children under the age of five that are homeless. So parents that become homeless with children under the age of five. Go check that out. Magpie. Yeah, it's called the Magpie Foundation, I think it is in the UK. And I've just donated the proceeds of my tour to them. But they're deserving of support.

Okay, Magpie Foundation, we'll set that up. Dude, I'm so glad we've been able to connect over the last, what's it.

Been, a month and a half ago when I met you? Yeah, I've watched you from afar for years. you've been such a source of inspiration for me, for many reasons, for the content you produce, but also the way that you've been this incredible early adopter in this medium, way before anybody else that I know. And that's been an inspiration for so many. People probably don't give you the roses as much, but you were, you were one of the, the real pioneers of what so many of us are doing now. So appreciate it. So thank you for the blueprint. Thank you for the wisdom. And thank you for showing me that there's still a Delta in myself because of your brilliance. That inspires me in such an important way.

I see the masterpiece in everyone. And I want people to see it within themselves. Just like, I know there's one in me and I want to create more of my masterpiece. So I'm willing to show up and I'm willing to reveal myself and I'm willing to say the things that are uncomfortable. It gets easier after you do it for nine years, you know? And I hope we are able to allow everyone listening or watching to see that they each person has a masterpiece within them. And ask themselves on a scale of 1 to 10, on the scale of self-love, where are you right now? And I think if we can do this and everyone else can do this in the home and say, okay, what are some things I need to address? Maybe you don't need to go all in on like all your wounds and your darkness right now, but there might be one thing you can address with someone or yourself to help you. And that's my mission. I think greatness is about, you know, when I first started, I used to think it was all about the success. the accomplishments. And now I'm like, oh man, how peaceful can you be in the pursuit of your dreams? And how much can you impact the people around you in that pursuit? Whether it's two people, how deeply can you impact them in a positive way or 20 million people? So that's what it's about for me. And I'm just grateful to be able to have people like yourself open up the way you do. So I'm so glad you're here. And I'm excited to continue to pierce your soul as a great friend, not a best friend. A great friend moving. But as a great friend that gives you very long, awkward hugs for many years to come. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called Three Truths. So imagine it is your last day on Earth, even though you said you don't want to imagine in the future anymore. But imagine you've created the life of your dreams and it's your last day. You get to live as long as you want. as long as you want to live, for whatever reason, you got to turn the lights off at some point. And you've accomplished everything externally, internally, relationship, family, all the things you want to create happen. But for whatever reason, this hypothetical world, you've got to take everything with you to another place. You've got all your written word, your content, books, anything you put out into the world, your message, no one has access to anymore. but you get to leave behind only three things. These are three truths you would leave with the world. Three lessons that you've known. Nothing else they would have access to. What would you say of those three truths for you?

I don't really matter. Which for me is a really liberating foundation for me. Like, I don't really matter. If this interview goes out and I get smashed, it doesn't really matter. Whenever I'm in a plane, it's the perfect reminder. I go to a far away land, I go, oh my God, these people have been living their lives this whole time, like while I've been living mine and dwelling over problems that I thought were consequential, or whenever I watch a documentary like Cosmos and it zooms out on the earth, it's nothing. And it just keeps going and going and going. I go, oh, of course I don't matter, of course I don't. And then the other point is that I really do matter. In the subjective reality in which I live, I can have an impact that matters on peace, and I felt peace, and I felt the lack of so if I can sway that, then my presence and my existence does matter. And I know that sounds like a contradiction in life is often, so I don't really care. And the third one is probably that life has taught me from earning all of these wonderful things, the cars, the houses, the tens of millions, building companies worth hundreds of millions and tasting a lot of amazing things that I once dreamed of, that the foundation, that home, that base is connection. And it only really needs to be with like one or two people. really. I've learned more recently when I've gone through that period of adjustment where things have got tough, I've had moments where I go, well, if I lost it all, at least I have Melanie. And then I realized that that was home. And I found in the hardest moments, even though she could be on the other side of the world, and the hardest moments, all I wanted to do was connect with her when it got really tough, when there was newspapers writing bad things about me or take, you know, taking words I've said out of context. My instinct as a human being was to pick up my phone and say, hey babe, how's your day going? That was home. I didn't go sit in my Lamborghini, I didn't go refresh my bank account. My home was that connection with that one person, that deep meaningful relationship. That's the foundation. So value those. You don't need a lot. You don't need loads of them. You can't have loads of them anyway, because your time's finite. But just a few of them really.

Make all the difference. And what's the thing you love the most about Melanie?

So many things. I would say that there is a pureness to her which I don't have which is helping me become a purer person.

Wow. Yeah.

She is my role model in terms of authenticity, in terms of character, in terms of kindness, in terms of how you treat people, and she set a bar for me, which I'm trying to meet, and that's making me a better person. Wow.

That's beautiful, man.

Yeah, it's true, though. Yeah.

I want to acknowledge, Steven, for how you've continued to show up in your life, especially these last three months with everything coming your way. But to go from building a big company and selling it and saying, you could say, like, I'm done. I just want to, like, chill for a while and say, you know what? No, I'm gonna go all in on a service. on creation of teaching and sharing the things I've learned from the mistakes, the lessons, the growth, everything over the last decade plus. And for you to dive all in on service, investing in the people on your team who I've met, they're all lovely and creating an environment for growth for yourself and for your community, I think is really beautiful, man. So I want to acknowledge you for diving in deeper, creating. Obviously there's lots of benefits personally that come from it from doing that, but you don't have to do it. So I really acknowledge you for showing.

Up in that way.

It's really inspiring. Thank you, brother. I appreciate that.

And I'm excited to hang more and.

Create more good stuff with you in the future. I know this is not our last conversation on this.

Exactly. Final question, what's your definition of greatness? I'm gonna steal a little bit from what you just said, 'cause you said something earlier which I hadn't added to my previous answer about being present. And I realized as you said it that I needed to add it, which was you said, be peaceful in the pursuit of your dreams. what I actually want to be and what I think real greatness is for me is being peaceful slash all present in the pursuit of my dreams.

Yeah.

In the pursuit of my dreams. Yeah. So you can't put a quant. You can't quantify dreams. Greatness can be being the best elementary school teacher, but if you are present or peaceful in the pursuit of that dream, for me, that is the closest definition I've heard to your personal greatness. And greatness has to be a personal thing. If it becomes relative, then it becomes, it's not your greatness anymore. It's externally measured greatness. So being present in the pursuit of my personal dreams is my definition of greatness. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett. Thank you, brother.

Thank you, man.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I wanna remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.