Episode: 030

Men in the Western world are often walking alone and do not receive the real support they need.

Introduction:
Stephen Mansfield is a bestselling author and a leadership coach. Stephen has written a number of books including The Faith of George W. Bush, Killing Jesus, and Mansfield’s Book Of Manly Men; which has inspired men’s events worldwide. He is currently working on a new book to help accompany Mansfield’s Book Of Manly Men titled Building Your Band of Brothers, and sheds some light on how men can build better relationships with other men.

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Key Takeaways:
[1:40] Thank you Vancity Buzz for being a sponsor!
[2:15] What was a defining moment for Stephen.
[5:10] What is manhood?
[7:15] What kind of values should a man look for?
[7:55] Take responsibility for your actions.
[9:25] Men in the Western world are mostly walking alone.
[12:20] How can men become more vulnerable amongst each other?
[14:55] Stephen shares a story on how his band of brothers has helped him.
[18:15] How can you build accountability and responsibility within a group?
[23:15] What kind of guys should you surround yourself with?
[26:40] Should you have boundaries with your band of brothers?
[29:10] What other virtues are important aside from responsibility?
[32:15] Stephen talks about his mentors and key influences in his life.
[34:45] Stephen tells us about his new book, Building Your Band of Brothers.
[35:45] Military men often do not have a support system due to their constant traveling.
[39:05] What kind of challenges or pitfalls do men face?
[42:45] What kind of legacy would Stephen like to leave behind?
 

 
Music Credit:
J Parlange & Latenite Automatic (jesusparlange.com – lateniteautomatic.com)
 

Tweetables:
“If you do not initiate the boys, they will burn the village down.”
“Statistics show that men in the Western world are walking alone.”
“To be a great man, you have to overcome.”

So You Figured Out That Life is Meaningless and Shallow? Here’s What to Do…

An uncomfortable truth: one hundred and fifty years from now there will not be a single living person who ever knew you. In fact, unless something weird happens, you wont even exist as a pixel in someone’s memory, let alone as a conscious influence in their life or their world.
Think about it for a moment: What were the full names of your great grand parents? What did they look like? How did they move around the room? What were their personalities like?
What about your great-great grand parents?
The reality that we all have to swallow is that it only takes the a few generations before we’re forgotten.
Of course, there’s an off chance that you’re one of the truly rare people who will be remembered. Maybe you’ll create a piece of transcendent art like Leondaro DaVinci, or you start a war like Osama Bin Laden, or become the first person to step foot on Mars.
But pause for a moment. Even if you are remembered, do you think people will remember you?
Probably not. We tend to remember influential people as concepts, not humans. Plato, Jesus, Hitler, Buddha – they are held in the collective memory as demi-Gods, not the mortals they really were. We don’t think of Buddha taking a deuce, or Hitler being charmed by a puppy, even though these things assuredly happened. We forget about the humanity of the people who shaped our world.
Even if you are one of the few who will be remembered as who you truly were that doesn’t excuse you from the reality that as humans, we spend our lives running in circles, distracting ourselves from our nature, struggling with the same problems year after year, only to finally replace them with new ones.
(By the way, I promise I’m going somewhere with all of this…).

The Trap: Replacing One Illusion With Another

Many of the men that I’ve worked with have succeeded at an extremely high level, only to find that success is a false God. This, for many men, is their first step towards waking up.
Searching for something meaningful, they start meditating, or spending time with their kids, or volunteering on the weekends, or getting in the habit of giving compliments and expressing gratitude.
And these practices have a magic quality to them: they create the sensation of meaning. They lull the individual back to sleep and create a more compelling illusion to suspend themselves in.
Many men become content with these practices. The practices allow them to sleep at night and to feel happy. They give the individual new, harder mountains to scale.
And the truth is, few men will ever go beyond this deeper, more sophisticated illusion.
And that’s fine. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve created a life worth living and are likely a force for good. Truly, we can’t ask for much more.
But what if you’re the exceptional man who transcends even this layer of illusion and sees the truth: even the practices that feel deep, don’t actually resolve the fundamental tension of being human? Though we feel like we are Gods, we are really nothing more than animals.
If you’ve gotten this far, it’s time for you to step onto your path. This one you need to blaze on your own. If you followed someone else’s, you’d just be setting yourself up for more distraction, more illusions, more traps, more bullshit. (And there is a quiet part of you that already knew this anyways).

So, what should you do once you’ve uncovered the new illusion of meaninglessness and shallowness?

1) Return to Nature. Observe Her. Let Her Guide You.

Go into the woods. Or the mountains. Or the sea. And go alone.
Observe how Mother Nature and her creatures spend their time. They rest. They find food. They play. They fuck. From time to time they are violent (but not without need, and rarely for very long).
You’ll notice that everything in nature spends much more time at rest than you do.
You’ll notice that nothing in nature wakes up to an alarm clock, spends their day working for a dick headed boss, comes home and fights with their partner, and then uses a glowing rectangle to lull them into a trance and avoid their primal pain. Only humans have created such compelling traps.
You’ll notice that everything in nature behaves intuitively. If you ask the fox, “Why did you just leave your den?” The fox wouldn’t even understand the question. The fox simply felt compelled by some force it didn’t need to understand, and started moving.
You’ll notice that occasionally some creatures, like the crow will use rudimentary reason to steal a shiny object from your bag. But don’t let that obscure the reality that the crow, like all other creatures, lives from the heart.
When the crow flies through the air, riding on invisible currents, she’s not using her rational, thinking mind. She’s suspending herself in what is.
You begin your new path by observing the nature that you exist within, so that you may find the nature that exists within you.

2) Shift From Your Head to Your Heart

Life’s intrinsic meaningless and shallow nature is an illusion created by the mind. You’ve used human logic to reduce everything down to that which is observable.
Your heart doesn’t do this. Your heart feels. Your heart trusts itself. The lion does not think to himself, “Now is the moment I must pounce.” The lion feels the shift in the air and pounces without hesitation.
Shifting from your head to your heart is difficult. Unless you were unschooled, many of the most formative years of your life were dedicated to training you to ignore your heart and pay attention to your head.
Unless you are an artist or a mystic of some sort, you were rewarded for suppressing your emotion and letting your rational mind flourish.
And there’s nothing wrong with rational thinking. It’s given us amazing gifts (personally, I love airplanes, penicillin, flush toilets, and air conditioning). Just realize that it’s rational thinking that got you into this mess in the first place. It won’t get you out.
Your job is to begin tearing down the walls that protect your heart. Doing this will likely require a coach or a mentor or a teacher.
And the walls around your heart: they aren’t your fault. They are a natural response to a world that doesn’t value a heart as much as it values a head.

3) Use the Twin Tools Silence & Honesty to Access Your Deep Gift

There is no escaping the suffering that is intrinsic to the human experience. Even if you are born to perfect parents, meet your soul mate, live during a peace times in a wealthy culture, your parents will still die one day. And your soul mate. And your friends. And your dog. And it will fucking hurt. In fact, if you live long enough, everything you’ve ever loved will die.
There is no escaping suffering and pain. Most people end up surrounding themselves with little white lies to protect themselves from reality.
The lies appear harmless. You claim you make six-figures, when in reality, you make $82,000. You claim you’re deeply in love with your partner when really, you’re just very, very fond of her. You tell yourself you’re happy, when actually, you’ve been consumed by apathy and ennui for longer than you care to admit.
While the lies may briefly distract your rational mind from itself, and they may seem to make any individual moment easier than it would be otherwise, what the lies are really doing is distracting you from yourself. From your nature.
Your work: sit in silence. You can do this as a daily thing, or go on a retreat, or both. Shine a bright white light on yourself and cast away all the little lies you’ve been using to protect yourself from the crippling pain of human existence.
This won’t be easy and it wont be quick, but it will be worth it. As you cast away the white lies and feel the intrinsic pain of the human experience, you’ll notice that resting beneath is a steady sense of calm and a quiet sense of joy. This is what Camus was talking about when he said, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
And that invincible summer? It’s accessible to everyone. It just requires dwelling in reality, something that humans struggle with.
As you step more fully into reality, you’ll begin to uncover traces of deep gifts that are unique to you. Perhaps you feel drawn towards working with the less fortunate. Don’t ignore that. Perhaps you come fully alive when you are playing the piano. Don’t ignore that. Perhaps you feel meaning when you are mentoring your neighbor’s child. Don’t ignore that. These are clues leading you down your path.
The gifts are the tools you must harness on your path forward. They were given to you for a reason. I don’t know what that reason is, and there is a chance that even you will never know why you were given them. But the quiet truth remains: you have them, they are important, and you are meant to use them.

4) Begin Shaping Your Life Around Your Deep Gifts

As you discover your deep gifts your next step is to bring them into your life and share them. Better yet, harness them in the service of everyone else in the world.
When you find the courage to do this, you will notice that the world gives you priority access to everything that your heart truly desires.
I don’t know how this works, nor do I need to. I just know it does. And the quiet truth is that you know this too (even if your head is still dead set on resisting).

5) Relax Into the True Nature of the Human Experience

As you relax into giving your deep gift, you’ll notice something strange about the reality that once seemed shallow and meaningless. You’ll notice that this too, was yet another illusion, another false path meant to distract you from who you truly are.
You’ll notice that only just now, has life begun.

Jason Connell is a speaker and writer who teaches confidence, self-love, and self-compassion. He’s worked with everyone from Senior members of the Obama administration and professional athletes to middle school students and emerging entrepreneurs. He shares his thoughts on life, authenticity, and power at: JasonConnell.co.

 
 
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Episode: 029

What does it really mean to be productive? Chris Bailey explains.

 
Introduction:
Chris Bailey has conducted countless productivity experiments on himself and has interviewed
several successful CEOs and business professionals on the subject of productivity. He has condensed everything he has learned into a 300 page book titled The Productivity Project. Listen to this interview to find out what productivity is -really- about and how you can use it to your full potential.

Listen to it on iTunes

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Key Takeaways:
[1:50] Thank you Vancity Buzz for sponsoring the podcast!
[3:50] What was Chris’s defining moment?
[5:25] Who is Chris?
[6:45] Why is Chris interested in productivity?
[8:05] How did Chris find the courage to start The Productivity Project?
[9:10] Follow your passion now. The time is now.
[10:45] Measuring and defining productivity was difficult for Chris.
[12:10] Productivity isn’t about how much we produce; it’s about how much we accomplish.
[13:05] Productivity is a combination of balancing time, attention, and energy.
[13:50] Has Chris met the most productive person in the world yet?
[14:45] The most productive people, ironically, teach meditation and mindfulness.
[18:45] Being in a flow state of mind is a combination of productivity and energy.
[19:20] Work on one thing at one time.
[22:45] How can people start being productive?
[28:20] What does Chris mean by ‘striving for imperfection’?
[31:00] What does success look like to Chris?
[34:50] How can you get yourself back on track when you stop becoming productive?
[39:45] What’s the difference between men vs. woman on productivity?
[43:00] What is Chris most excited about these days?
[44:00] What kind of legacy would Chris like to leave behind?
 

 
Music Credit:
J Parlange & Latenite Automatic (jesusparlange.com – lateniteautomatic.com)
 

Tweetables:
“We only have so much time.”
“If there’s a time when I should follow my curiosity, it’s now.”
“Productivity is the life blood of how much we get done every day.”

Episode: 028

Are you confused as to ‘why you are here? ‘ Dan Millman sheds light on finding your purpose.

Introduction:
Dan Millman is a former world champion athlete and the author of several books including: Way of the Peaceful Warrior, The Life You Were Born to Live, and many more. Dan talks about his latest book, The Four Purposes of Life, and what it really means to ‘live a life of purpose’.

Listen to it on iTunes

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Key Takeaways:
[0:30] Thanks to our sponsor Vancity Buzz.
[0:45] What’s cool in Vancouver that people should check out?
[2:15] What was a defining moment for Dan Millman.
[5:55] Dan talks about his book, The Four Purposes of Life.
[7:30] Dan briefly explains the four purposes in life.
[8:40] How can we accomplish these four purposes?
[9:10] Why does Dan write books?
[10:00] It’s impossible to fail at anything as long as we learn a lesson from it.
[10:35] What is personal growth? Dan explains the 12 concepts.
[13:15] ‘What am I here to do?’
[15:05] Our career’s primary focus is to provide an income for us.
[16:20] You don’t have to love your work all the time.
[17:10] How can you discover your calling?
[20:15] Choosing a career people should do vs. want to do.
[22:25] How can we find our life’s path?
[25:30] What does Dan mean when he says there’s no such thing as a future decision?
[30:05] We make a decision when we act, not when we think.
[31:40] What does success look like to Dan?
[34:35] What legacy would Dan like to leave behind?
 

 
Music Credit:
J Parlange & Latenite Automatic (jesusparlange.com – lateniteautomatic.com)
 

Episode: 027

Discovering Your Story with Zander Robertson

Introduction:
Zander is a writing coach and a ghost writer. He helps his clients bring out their best stories to better serve and help their audience. Zander speaks on how someone can discover their own story, refine it, and write it in a way that benefits others. Zander is also a father of two and talks about the kind of legacy he wants to leave behind.

Listen to it on iTunes

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Key Takeaways:
[1:30] Please help us out by reviewing us on iTunes.
[2:20] What does Zander do?
[4:00] What is a ghost writer?
[8:10] How can someone refine their own story?
[15:35] Ask yourself: What were your defining moments last year?
[17:30] What happened in your life that really shifted/changed you?
[20:30] Take small steps. Start a journal.
[24:25] The way you tell your story needs to help the reader.
[29:00] How does Zander define success?
[34:25] Don’t visualize it, do it!
[40:00] Zander recommends The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
[47:30] What kind of challenges do men face today?
[50:05] Zander loves being a dad, but it’s also the hardest thing to do.
[53:40] If Zander could leave one legacy in the world, what would it be?

 
Music Credit:
J Parlange & Latenite Automatic (jesusparlange.com – lateniteautomatic.com)
 

Episode: 026

John Lee Dumas interview

Introduction:
John Lee Dumas is the host and founder of Entrepreneur on Fire. He produces a podcast 7 days a week and his business podcast has been awarded Best of iTunes. John talks about his new product launch, The Freedom Journal, which focuses on achieving your goals in the next 100 days.

Listen to it on iTunes

Listen to it on Stitcher
 
Key Takeaways:
[2:10] What is John’s favorite part about being a man?
[2:40] Who is John?
[4:30] What is The Freedom Journal about?
[6:30] Check out The Freedom Journal’s KickStarter campaign.
[7:15] At the time of the recording, John’s campaign had 1,932 backers.
[8:00] John is a big believer in F.O.C.U.S.
[8:50] John breaks down how the program is planned out.
[10:45] Focus on one goal at a time.
[11:40] What was John’s #1 challenge?
[13:00] John’s business has grown to 7 figures.
[13:50] Goal setting isn’t a solo task. You need a strong support system.
[13:55] Who are John’s mentors?
[15:30] How did John come up with the idea to host a podcast 7 days a week?
[18:10] What does success look like to John?
[20:45] How do you know you’re on the right track?
[21:45] Be authentic with yourself.
[22:50] John recommends The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson.
[24:45] Why did John choose 100 days to achieve a goal?
[26:45] Every time John hits a funding goal in KickStarter, he will donate $25k to build a school in a developing country.

 
Music Credit:
J Parlange & Latenite Automatic (jesusparlange.com – lateniteautomatic.com)