When did you run Cohort One? It was

during COVID.

The backstory was I'd been working as a coach initially and working with kind of founders and execs.

And I then ran a series of workshops on emotional resilience.

This was to kind of tech leaders.

And in those workshops, the piece that really stood out was like the energy management and the nervous system work.

And I was like, oh, I feel like there's like something here.

But did these people come to you or did you do outreach to get on some of these shows?

Plus a desert island.

Desert island with 36 girls.

You couldn't get a better scenario.

So that is literal proof that all these things- Still didn't get laid.

Exactly.

That's not going to solve your problem because here's a guy that had all those things and he still didn't do it.

And I have another sample of a bunch of guys in my fraternity that were short, that didn't have money, that weren't that smart, all this stuff, and they got a ton of pussy.

This is your chasing versus choosing paradigm.

Hmm.

And that, you know, I, I think the, the fi- the stages of grief are actually ways that we resist feeling the grief.

Um, because it's too overwhelming.

And it, and it's, it makes complete sense because it's so, it's so much to feel that amount of loss.

And, and I imagine you've, you've been through your own journey with this, which I- I'm curious to hear about.

Um, but realizing that these, these waves could actually come through.

And I, I remember one particular experience where I was, I was approaching her memorial bench on a, on a beach in, in the UK.

One breakthrough away.

Yeah

... or s- or something majorly breaks so that you can no longer continue going about, you know, with the same, the same map, the same mental models.

I wish it wasn't like that.

I wish, I wish it was easier, but that's often what I see.

I, I think the other way that is maybe certainly more efficient i- is noticing that it's actually not working when you're just in your head, and that making disembodied decisions are often much worse decisions.

Relationships are more shallow.

Um, there is often less capacity to, to meet life, and, and, and often people are living in this place of, of reactivity instead of-

Wow.

Hmm.

And fairly out of the blue, she had an anxiety attack and ended up taking her own life, and that completely just turned my life upside down.

Um, going through the journey of grief kind of opened me up to...

I, I feel like I'd almost been numb from the neck down.

Like, I wasn't, I wasn't unhappy, but I was just relatively, like, dialed down, so to speak.

And I think going into grief initially kind of opened me up to this whole world of, I guess, inner exploration and the nervous system.

Um, so initially free diving, breathwork, um, some psychedelics in there as well, a lot of meditation.

Yeah.

When you say nervous system, what do you mean? And what's the framework of how you look at the nervous system so that our audience can start to build this up from a first principle standpoint?

Any practice, breathwork, meditation, nervous system protocols, can be used to self-regulate away emotion.

And I think of this as the, the self-regulation paradox, in that there are certain situations where that is healthy, adaptive, and useful.

Like, if you're in a boardroom meeting or you're, um, with your kids, you might not wanna go...

You might not wanna express the emotion that way.

So being able to meditate, downshift, relax is super useful.

But if you do that over and over again, over a period of time, it compounds this, what I think of as emotional debt, where that, that emotion, it doesn't just go away, but it gets, like, stored somewhere and then comes out later.

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... and don't even know what's going on beneath the neck?

Yeah, totally.

So I think about in the kind of journey of nervous system mastery, of kind of working with, with your nervous system, there's three kind of core skills that I think about, and the first is, is what you, exactly what you spoke to, which is kind of regaining sensitivity of our internal experience.

So it's called interoception, is, is the kind of fancy name.

I know you've written about it in your book.

And, um, it's really relearning to listen to the feedback from our body that's coming all of the time.

The second skill is self-regulation, and this is, you know, what a lot of people are probably familiar with when it comes to anxiety.

Mm-hmm.

How can people get better at managing discomfort? One

way to think about this is People often won't take action until the discomfort and pain that they experience through, you know, not looking into their own inner experience increases.

So, you know, what I mentioned earlier around like waiting for the crisis or the burnout or the breakup when the pain is sufficiently high.

The discomfort of not doing something outweighs the discomfort of actually looking within and exploring and doing some of this inner work.

I think there are other approaches as well.

I personally like the frame of the inner adventure.

If you think about you're going to climb a mountain or you're going to go on a big trip, there's going to be hard parts to it.

some specific stuff, if you were to come up with a plan that would help someone regulate their nervous system in like two weeks time, what would that look like?