#154. Michael Anthony: Think Unbroken

Man, I just, this is not what I signed up for, but there's a moment in time in your life in which your face with the precipice of making a decision about who it is that you want to be. And sometimes a universe, God, spirit, whatever you want to call it says you need to make a fucking decision. Who are you going to be? What are you going to do?

What are you going to bring to the world? It's so good to be back. If you haven't caught up yet, I did release a little update of why the show stopped so abruptly, so you can go back and check that out as the episode before this one. But right now I'm excited to bring this conversation to you.

I challenge you to not be inspired by Michael. He has an energy about him that is just inspiring. Michael Anthony is an advocate for adult survivors of child abuse, an international speaker and author. He spends his time helping other survivors get out of the vortex to become the hero of their story and take their lives back.

Michael also hosts the Think Unbroken podcast. And we're talking about his book here, Think Unbroken. So you can find him over at his website, thinkunbroken.com or read the book, listen to the podcast. All of the things.

This is a really powerful conversation and he touches on so many super important things. He talks about why it's important to define who we are, the power that is inherent in making that decision to do whatever you can to become the hero of your own story, how mindset plus action is the key to self actualization, how a confused mind will always fail, and how important and teaching and clarity really are. And he also shares his personal motto with us and how he applies it. No excuses, just results.

I feel like this is a really great way to wrap up the end of the year and to take some motivation into 2022. I will note that I was trying to be super fancy and record on Instagram at the same time. So the audio isn't quite on point in some spots, but hey, you win some, you lose some. The power is all there.

So without further ado, I will leave you with Michael Anthony. Welcome to Head of Thrive. I'm your host Kate Snowwise. This is a podcast with people who are ready to step up and live a happier life.

It's for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life. It's a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought, always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don't believe we're here to merely survive. I truly believe we're here to thrive.

So let's get going. Michael, thank you so much for being on here to thrive with me. I am. I've really been looking forward to this conversation with you.

Yeah. Thank you so much. It's right up my alley. So I'm stoked to be here with you today.

When I came across unbroken and thinking unbroken, obviously we're going to jump into your story in a lot more detail. But at one point, did you consider yourself broken? You know, that's a good question. I don't know that those were really the words I was using for myself because I was just looking like something's wrong.

I'm stuck. Something doesn't feel right. And the concept of the unbroken came because one night I was laying in bed and I just heard it again and again. People are always like, you're broken, you're broken, you're broken.

And you see that all over mental health. And if you're not like within the box of the normative structure of the society, you have any type of mental health element or disorder or maybe you're an outside thinker, people go, oh, that person's broken. And I've been in this conversation with an ex partner and they were like, oh, you're just broken. You don't get it.

And that night I was laying in bed. It was like three o'clock in the morning. It's like five years, four years ago. And I was just like, this is nonsense.

Like this is not how I think. This is not how I act. This is not how I exist in the world. I'm not broken.

I don't think that way. And it was like this light bulb moment that shifted my life in a direction that I never entered. I never asked me 12 years ago what I'd be doing right now. I'd be like, I'm going to be drunk in some alley right now.

Like this is not where I anticipated my life being. I love that. So that light bulb moment of like how how no, I'm not broken. Well, it was very much I never felt that way.

Like if I rewind to being a child, like even though I come from this very traumatic and trauma-filled background, my thought was always like, man, if I can just figure out what everyone else seems to know, and that's all these people living this lifestyle of health and abundance and love and like looking at at times when I was homeless, I would live with all these different families. I probably lived with 30 different families between eight to 12 years old. And I would see good things. I would see bad things and see in between things.

And I just I would look at this as a point of measurement and data and go, this isn't right what's happening like in my home and in my life. And so I was just like, it's just not right. It never felt like even as I was going through it and in my early 20s and dealing with drugs and alcohol and sex and drugs and rock and roll, that whole lifestyle thing. Like I still I never felt broken.

Those weren't my words. I just felt like what the hell is going on? When I was researching for the podcast, I opened up your website and honestly, I mean, I feel emotional just even reading this back to you. But the first line on your about page and I quote, it says, I didn't sign up to be the spokesman for survivors of child abuse.

In fact, this job sucks. I mean, that the truth is that the universe chose me for this role. And I really feel emotional just reading that back because you wouldn't ever choose this. And yet it's obviously a calling.

Are you still amazed sometimes when you look back and just see what you've been able to do with where you started and the start in life that you had? Yeah, I mean, like every day, I mean, like realistically, I sign up for this. I don't want to do it particularly to be fair. I tell this to the clients I coach to the stages that I speak on to the people who read my book or go and join a coaching program or these conversations like, man, I just this is not what I signed up for.

But there's a moment in time in your life in which you're faced with the precipice of making a decision about who it is that you want to be. And sometimes a universe, God, spirit, whatever you want to call it, says, you need to make a fucking decision. Who are you going to be? What are you going to do?

What are you going to bring to the world? Because you know, I found myself in this position where, you know, I've had really incredible things happen in my life. You know, I come from an environment. People don't make it out of the neighborhood.

My three childhood best friends have been murdered. My uncle's in prison for life. Almost all of my family has been to jail. Some of us haven't, but most of us have, right?

You know, I come from a place I didn't graduate high school on time. I barely graduated high school at that. I can't read. I have a learning disability.

I find myself in this position where we're constantly facing the reality of the truth of our decisions in front of us every single day and the choices that we make. And here's the truth about it. I've traveled the world. I've lived in 12 different countries.

I've written a number one best-selling book. I've coached thousands of people. Go look at the testimonials on my website. Like, I don't, that's not made up.

This is real shit. And every single day I look at my life and go, I'm just trying to do my best. I don't know what I'm doing. There's no roadmap for this.

There's no, like even the reason I wrote Think Unbroken is because I felt like it was the book that I needed because there was no actual real practical guide to trauma healing. It was all either science or it was fluffy bullshit. It wasn't, here's something you can write down. Here's an action you can take.

Here's a step that you can move towards right now in this moment. And so when I look at my life, like, I think about it like this. What else am I going to do? What else am I supposed to do?

I mean, as an entrepreneur, I'm amazing entrepreneur. I run another business. I'm deep into that, right? I've been successful in the business world.

But like when I die, when I'm on my death bed, which assuredly I will be because I know as much as the sun will rise tomorrow, we're all going to die. So you better accept it and change your relationship with time and death because it's coming. It's coming and you're sitting here not doing shit with your life and blaming the world. And that's where I was.

I was 25 years old, looking at my life at rock bottom and thinking to myself, man, what the fuck is going on? Like, what are you doing? And then fast forward a decade plus here I am talking to you. And so the in between of that is from this place of stuckness and just being like, what is going on to this life of abundance that I created?

They're doing incredibly difficult and uncomfortable things. I mean, even when you look at the fact that the world is in chaos right now, I've had the best last two years of my life ever, ever, because like, there's always going to be chaos. There's always going to be something in your way. There's always going to be limiting self beliefs and self downs and naysayers and people.

I get canceled like every day. Every day, somebody sends me a message like, who do you think you are talking about trauma? You don't have a college degree. I'm like, no, but I got my 10,000 hours motherfucker.

Like, here's the truth about it. Like the reality of this entire thing is every single day, I'm doing my best to live into being the person that I want to be the Michael in front of you right now is a caricature of the idea of the person that I thought I could be when I sat down and I wrote out my identity and I said, I'm going to move into that relentlessly until it comes to pass. And if it does great and if it doesn't, well, at least I tried. You don't have a PhD in trauma from a university, but how do you have the life experience?

10 out of 10 adverse childhood experiences or on the ACE scores. Could you give us a little overview of what that ACE major looks like? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, here's the thing.

So I finding that survey, so it's called the ACE Adverse Childhood Experience Survey. I don't believe it's as complete as it could be. I think it's great. I think it's a beautiful baseline, but it's fucking 30 years old.

Well, not 30. It's almost 30 years old, right? 20 years old, excuse me. And so like you look at this as Adverse Childhood Experience Survey, Dr.

Felitti California Center for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, their research study to find a correlation if there was one between childhood adverse experiences, trauma and long-term detrimental health ramifications, mental and mental, mental, emotional, physical. And so I came across this survey in 2016. It was December. It was a cold rainy Portland day.

I'll never forget it because I'm on YouTube. I just got done doing yoga in like a YouTube yoga. My shout out to my friend Cole Chance, who's an amazing yoga instructor. And I was doing her course and I was in YouTube.

I was just trying to find stuff about trauma. I was trying to learn more about it because I'd been into the books. I'd been into doing a lot of going to therapy. I'd been in a men's group.

I'd been in, you know, doing Gestalt and EMDR and CBT and ABC. I did them all. And so it's in this place where I'm like, there's more. There's something missing here, right?

I believe myself to be an analytical thinker. And so because of that, I'm always looking for rhyming reason. And the one thing I could not understand was correlation, right? I could not quite understand a decipher.

Why at 25, 27, 30 years old, like these behavior patterns were autonomic. These self-limiting beliefs just kind of seem to exist all the time. All this pain and chaos and suffering on all those things that happened in my life just seemed to just happen. I couldn't understand it.

And then I got really sick, really sick. I got a bacterial infection that almost killed me. It took me five years to heal it. I had back pain.

I had sciatica. I had, you know, I was in this position where I had asthma as a child. Actually, one time when I was like five years old, I was in Kentucky with my mother and I had asthma attacks so bad, I flatlined, right? And so I was just trying to like, I'm looking at my life and I'm finding this research about a survey and I'm just thinking to myself, Oh my God, this is the missing piece of the puzzle.

It's the same reason that I put it into the book so people can understand it. And so long story short, the a survey, 10 questions. I won't get in them because we don't have enough time. But what I will say is when you look at this research and you understand that there's a direct correlation between smoking, drinking, suicidal ideations, and attempts, depression and anxiety, pulmonary embolism, heart attack, asthma, diabetes, because we're growing up in a cortisol state and a toxic state as a child and fight or flight always in the sympathetic nervous system.

No wonder your body's freaking out when you're 18, 12, 25, 35, 40, 50. And we're constantly in this place where I'm like, I can't seem to get healthy. I have anxiety and depression. I am overweight.

I am drinking myself to sleep. I'm smoking two packs a day. I'm suicidal. Like all those things, because we grow up in this toxic state where everything that we understand is toxicity, everything that we understand is pain and suffering.

And so your body, think about this. Your body in the sympathetic nervous system is in fight or flight. That is one purpose. Your body has one purpose and that is to help you survive.

And so if you are always in survival, how can you thrive? And coming across that research and looking at that and discovering that for the first time, that's what changed my life. The rest of it was great. Like I will never say, don't go to therapy.

I'll never say, don't go to men's group. I'll never say, don't go to coach. I did all those things. But having finally a rhyme and reason that I could look at and connect and be pointed to, I was like, Oh my God, this makes sense.

Can you tell us a little bit more about your own history and some of the trauma you did experience? Obviously, as much as you feel comfortable sharing today and what feels like it's kind of mine for you right now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let me give the elevator pitch because I think it'll also help create context here.

So my mother was a drug addict and alcoholic. When I was four years old, she actually cut off my right index finger. My stepfather at six hyper abusive, the kind of dude you pray is never your stepfather, never met my real dad. I used to lay in bed at night and just cry myself to sleep.

Like God, why don't I get to have a dad? You know, by the time we're eight, we're poverty, like super incredibly poor. We were homeless in various times living in shelters. Sometimes when we did have a home, sometimes we didn't have electricity.

We didn't have power. We didn't have running water at eight years old. One time the water company actually came to our house and turned our water off. That's how poor we were.

They turned our water off and I would have to take this little blue bucket that I use in the backyard and I'd go to the neighbor's house and I'd still water from the spigot on the side of their house. That's how poor we were. And partially, that's because my mother was using all the money for drugs and my stepfather was who the hell knows what he was doing. And by the time that I was 12, my grandmother adopted me and you'd be like, Oh, that's a godson.

That's amazing. However, I'm biracial, black and white. My grandmother was a super racist old white lady from a town in Tennessee you've never heard of. And so now I'm facing this identity crisis.

And at 12 years old, I get high for the first time. 12 years old, I get high for the first time. By 13, I'm drinking. By 15, I'm getting expelled from school and put in a last chance program, drinking, smoking, running with drugs, selling drugs, running with guns, breaking into people's houses, stealing cars.

And again, as I mentioned, my three childhood best friends have been murdered. And at 18, when I finally graduated high school, not on time because I had straight steps, I had to graduate with like a 1.4 GPA or something crazy like that. And I was looking at the world trying to understand why. And I thought the solution for poverty was money.

And so I was like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go and make money legally, which was super important to me because I'd already had these experiences of knowing that I was going to end up dead or in jail if I stayed on the path. And so I got a job by time I was 21. I reached that goal.

I wrote it down literally every day. I was like, I'm going to make $100,000 a year by the time I'm 21 and I landed a job with a Fortune 50 company. And on my 20 right around my 21st birthday, I cash my first check for $10,000. And I was like, oh, solution.

And then I went to the mall and I spent it all because I'm an idiot, 21 year old who doesn't understand anything about the world in a real practical way. The only thing that I knew growing up was like, money was this thing you could use to get things. I didn't understand that money was a thing you could actually use to influence create and change and make the world a better place. And so I found myself making all this money and just it exacerbated all the problems and all the things I hadn't dealt with.

I was 350 pounds smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, drinking myself to sleep, cheating on my partner, not going to work, not taking care of myself. And at 25, I put a gun in my mouth because I was like, what the fuck is out and done? Like, I'm so done with all of this. And shortly after that, I was laying in bed and it was 11 o'clock in the morning.

I was smoking a joint. Can you keep in mind 350 pounds eating chocolate cake and watching the crossfit games? Like, if that's not rock bottom, like, I don't know what is. And I just had this moment where it wasn't even this day.

It was the next day, the next day I woke up and I'm in the bathroom and getting ready to go and do this, this wedding thing that I had to do. And I was looking at the face and I did not recognize the face in the mirror. And I was rewound. It was crazy.

It was like, I was sucked into this tunnel back to being eight years old. That day, this blistering hot August Indianapolis summer day where we had no electricity and we had no water. And I was walking across the street with that little blue bucket, stealing water from our neighbor. And I remember it like it was yesterday that when I was getting that water, I would promise myself that's not going to be my life one day.

I didn't know what that meant. I just knew that whatever was happening was not going to be my life. This was not going to be my reality. And at 25, 26, it was.

You said, I'd broken the promise I made to myself, right? We're all guilty if we all break promises to ourselves. But this was huge. because at eight years old, it was a promise that I made that that would have put me on a different trajectory.

And in that moment, I said myself, Michael, what are you willing to do to get unstuck, Michael, what are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have? What are you willing to do to be unbroken, right? And I have those words in that moment. But that's how I felt.

And the words, no excuses just results came to mind. And it has become the moniker and the motto and the baseline for my entire life. Everything that has led me to where I am right now, 11, 12 years from that moment started with no excuses just results. And today I'm sitting here talking to you.

You perfectly lead into something that I wanted to ask you about, which was coming from a background of childhood trauma, being an adult survivor of childhood trauma. You've got a lot that you could blame. You could blame the world. And so how do you turn that around into no excuses?

How did that shift happen? And is it still a challenge at times? Yeah, look, I don't think it's ever not a challenge, right? And I tell my clients this all the time.

I'm like, look, just because it's good today doesn't mean it's not going to be great tomorrow and doesn't mean it will suck tomorrow and you're going to have to do the work and you're going to have to show up every single day. Now, in that moment, and look, I would love to be able to say that you can start to mitigate the risk of hitting rock bottom sooner. But I don't know how to do that because I think natively as human beings, we kind of have to go to that darkness to pull ourselves up. I wish that weren't the case.

I'm trying to solve that problem. I don't have an answer for it yet. And so the only thing that I know is that the real change in our lives only begins to happen when we choose to make the change happen. And often, this is the part that I'm stuck on most often is that change doesn't occur until we are faced with our back against the wall saying, Oh, fuck, I can't go any lower, right?

And that's where I was. And in that moment in adopting this understanding of no excuses, just results, it really became this like no matter what, I'm just going to go forward. That doesn't mean I'm not going to make mistakes. Doesn't mean I'm not going to fuck up.

It doesn't mean that I'm not going to do things that I don't want to do. But it does mean that I'm going to go forward every day. I'm going to be relentless. I'm going to be default aggressive.

Choco Willing's term, which I love. I'm going to be default aggressive in my life. I'm going to go forward for the things that I want. I'm going to change my life, my body, my mind, my sense, my situation, my status, my money, my finances, my love for myself.

I'm going to do whatever it takes again to be the hero of my own story. And that started with first and foremost, writing it all down. We're walking around in limbo. People are like, I'm stuck.

We'll write some shit down, get some goals, have some ambition, like create a pathway. If I told you to come from New York City to San Francisco, when you had no GPS, no compass, no street signs, no navigation, you would never make it. But if I said, here's a light, come towards this light because it's the light that you need in your life right now, eventually on a long enough timeline, you will get there. You have to think about this.

This moment, this conversation is over a decade in the process, over a decade to have this moment with you today, Kate. Like, and people, what you have to understand is when you are relentless about what you want in life, eventually you will get it, but you're going to have to suffer through the uncomfortable and the discomfort of creating the new person that you want to be because it's not just going to get handed to you. There's no fucking Disney moment in this, right? There's no magic where suddenly life's different.

It doesn't work that way. It takes years and decades and a lifetime to become the person that you know you're capable of being and the only way that you get to the place where you're the person that you know you're capable of being is by making an effort, is by showing up for yourself, is by living within the idea of being the person that you think that you can be. And it's the most difficult thing that you'll ever do. And so to answer your question, is it still hard?

Yes, every fucking day, every single day, every day, I have to do the same thing. I wake up, have my water, get into my journal, meditate, move my body and create this life. And every day it's hard. And every day there's obstacles.

And every day there's haters. And every day there's self-doubt. And every day there's a roadblock. And every day there's something in my way that wants to derail me.

And every day I have to say no excuses, just results. Get it done. Because if I didn't want this life, if I didn't want this life that I didn't sign up for to begin with, I would just go back to what I was doing. I'd be drunk right now playing video games.

You touched on something there about believing in your future identity. And you said you wrote out your identity and you had that vision of who you could become. How did you even start to believe that for yourself? When you have the background, you have, you're sitting there overweight, playing video games.

How could you envision where you are now, 10 years down the track? Or did you not see this far down the track? Yeah, no, I definitely didn't see this far. If you would have even asked me this four years ago, I'd be like, I don't think this is what I'm doing, right?

What it was, it was little things. It was incremental change. Can I not smoke a cigarette today? Can I not cheat on my girlfriend today?

Can I not get drunk today? And then it turned into I will not. And it became very binary for me, right? Was it yes or no?

I will do this. I will not do that. I will do this. And slowly that incremental shift started to adapt and then it started to adopt.

And then I assimilated it. And then eventually it became who I am because it was you're effectively reframing everything that you understand about yourself. You see people again, and this was my my experience too. I thought if I did it one time, then my life will be different.

Again, the no Disney moment concept, right? And so I put myself in this position where every single day I had to force myself into the discomfort. And I would be like, all right, go do hot yoga today 10 years ago in a room with nothing but beautiful fit, scantily clad women. I'm 350 pounds.

Go do hot yoga because men weren't doing hot yoga back then, right? And I was in Indiana. I'm doing hot yoga in the Midwest in America. Go be uncomfortable.

And then I did it 64 straight days in a row. Go be uncomfortable. Go challenge yourself. Go force yourself into something that you know you need to do for you.

Stop asking permission from other people to live your life. Stop looking for validation for other people to create objections and what it is that you need to do for you. And that's what it was. I had to just go for it every single day and slowly and look the yoga thing and the weight thing.

I think when you fix your body and your mind simultaneously, they both get stronger and better shape, right? They become fit because you're using them. And what I looked at in my life at that time was, can I eat better? Can I eat a salad today?

I will eat a salad. I would literally write that I would write this like nonsense. And people go, that's crazy. You have to write down that eat a salad.

Yeah, because I never fucking ate a salad before. You don't get to 350 pounds by magic. In this position where it's like, I will not smoke a cigarette today. I will read a self-help book today.

I will be present in therapy today. I will get a coach today, right? I will put all these things on my plate and force myself in a position where the only way that I could fail is my taking full ownership and responsibility of the person that I am and the person that I wanted to be. And then eventually it became a forward thinking within that momentum because I started to solidify the baseline.

And I kind of had this like structure that felt solid, like I could stand on. I got at least have kind of an understanding of who I was because I didn't know who I was. At 27 years old, I had no self-esteem. I couldn't name my values.

My wants, my needs, my interests, my goals, my boundaries. I had none of those. I none of it's incredible. I challenge you right now.

Name your name, name your values. If you're listening to this and name your values. You probably can't because most people haven't defined who they are. My value start with me, honesty, kindness, self-actualization and leadership.

And that becomes the precipice in the baseline for how I exist in the world. And if you can create and understand those values, they will put you into forward momentum. And then what happens is you start to think about the visualization of can I create the framework of the life that I want to have and write that down every single day until it comes to fruition. And I'll tell you this, for five years now, four years, excuse me, I've been writing down two goals every single day.

One, I'll be a New York Times bestselling author. I push my book to number one without making it on New York Times. Two, I will share the stage with Tony Robbins. I won't be in his audience.

I will be on his fucking stage. Now, look, I started writing that years ago. And in a week, I'm going to be in a room with the guy who chooses the people who are on the stage with Tony Robbins. Right.

And so here's the reality. Will that happen? Maybe it's not my time. Maybe it's another seven years before that happens, but I'm going to be relentless and I'm going to keep going forward.

And so once you have a baseline, once you can create and understand having the capacity to framework who it is that you are in this moment and who you want to be in the near future, then I think you can start to go really big because the difference between people who make it and people who don't and everything that you've ever done in your entire life is mindset and action. And I say this all the time, mindset plus action equals self-actualization. That word relentless. Like if now is not the time to be on the stage with Tony Robbins, it doesn't mean that you throw the dream out.

It's about continuing to pursue the things that you know you want for yourself and stop quitting on yourself people. Stop quitting on yourself. That's the other thing when you were talking about like those daily commitments, right? Like small commitments, either salad today, Michael.

Don't smoke that cigarette today. It's these small actions, positive actions that move your way from that self betrayal. It's about doing what you know is good for you and honoring yourself enough to do that. That's what I'm kind of hearing you say.

Yeah, but that's super hard, right? Especially when you're dissociated as a child and your your your central nervous system is totally out of control and your amygdala and your hippocampus and your prefrontal cortex are like exploding all the time because you come from a traumatic chaos and cortisol state. And so this idea of like living within your authenticity, you know, I won't get into it because it fires me up. People always like living your authenticity.

Well, how do you understand authenticity when the only thing you've ever known is that when you follow your gut instinct, there is a ramification. Every time you move into being the person that you think you're capable of being and challenging the narrative presented in front of you by those around you, you are faced with a ramification. So how the fuck can you be you? Right.

And so the first thing that you have to do is you have to recreate that alignment and understanding of who it is that you are capable of being so that you can start to listen up. People are always like the number one thing that I have conversations with my clients when we first started, they don't go. They say, I don't know how to follow my instincts. Yeah, no shit.

You know why? Cause every time you did, you got smacked in the face or starved or locked in a closet or beat to the point you passed out. That was my experience, right? I would get beat for saying a word incorrectly, right?

I would get locked in a closet for not putting the dishes away, like it was insane to me. And so of course, as an adult, I didn't know how to follow my gut instinct. How do you follow your gut instinct? When you have no idea how to do that without feeling the fear of consequence.

And that involves learning and understanding, reframing that and creating a reflection of safe environmental supports. Can I look at the environment I'm in and feel safe? Can I be in connection with people I feel okay with? Can I step into the discomfort of leveraging help?

There's so much to it. Like we don't have enough time to go into it. Take literally all day to explain this. But people are so caught up in this idea of authenticity and they can't even follow their gut because of trauma.

I do values work in my coaching practice as well. And I think it is essential as an element to understanding ourselves. But I'm kind of hearing you say that one of the things that has helped you is this deep self-knowing, this self-awareness and because you've had to be frigging intentional here to make these daily choices to do the right thing for yourself and go against, like you're saying, the programming, the intentionality here is huge, Michael. Yeah, look, you have to.

One of my mentors, Brendan Dawson, says, a confused mind will always fail. And that just, man, that sticks with me so hard. Like it has just become this thing where, and you have to think about this. I've had a coach for years.

I've been in therapy for years. I've read all the books. I read 60 plus books a year and nothing has ever sat with me more than a confused mind will always fail. If you don't have intention and clarity and direction and you're pointed and poignant about understanding who you are, creating and identifying the person that you are, you're going to fail.

You're going to fail. And that's what works for me. My victory came in years ago, understanding that I needed to create and understand my value system because I didn't know who I was. And I looked at this.

I created, it's actually the first exercise I ever put my clients through is I make them create and define their values because that becomes the baseline for everything that's next. Because if you can't identify that, how will you ever do anything else? Right? And so again, my value is honesty, leadership, kindness, self-actualization.

Right? That only happens. That only happens through diving into it and literally taking the dictionary one day and just being like, that word's interesting. That word's interesting.

I'm going to take 100 of these words and I'm going to create this spreadsheet. And then I'm going to self-define what every one of those words mean in my life. And then I'm going to pick five. It used to be five, but I felt like four felt stronger to me.

Maybe you need 12. I don't know. Do whatever the hell you want. But like reality is like I needed to define those for me so that I understood who I was.

Nice. Start my programs with values as well. Michael, I truly believe that then they become the guiding lights as you were talking about how we need those guiding lights. They become the guiding lights.

Yeah. They're everything. They're everything because, you know, it's like that old adage. People who stand for nothing will fall for everything.

Oh, I will never forget. A confused mind will always fail. That's going to land. I'm not going to forget that either.

Yeah, it's powerful. And that was my reality because I look at and I call it very much, you know, being dissociated, having huge anxiety at one point I was having like five panic attacks a day. My life was in chaos. I was in what I call the vortex, right?

Just this unbelievable amount of limiting self-belief, self-doubt, not showing up for myself, hitting snooze 12 times, drinking myself to sleep, being in that rock bottom, right? The vortex, just that rock bottom. And then recognizing the power of defining those values and getting intention and clarity in my life. And when I got intention and clarity in my life, I'm telling you right now, everything changed.

I would not be talking to you had I not started. And look, the value system for me, it has changed. It has evolved. It has shifted.

It has been redefined time and again. I think about it. You know, we're living, breathing creatures. My value system is living and breathing, right?

I allow myself the space to navigate within that freely, understanding that today it may be different than it is tomorrow. But as long as I have those pillars, everything else can kind of just flow through them. And if they do, great, right? But, but I think if you have the baseline and you understand at least that minimum who you are, that's a huge win for you.

Michael, Intimission questions. What is your favorite self-care activity? Do you have one? It's actually going into sensory deprivation of float tanks.

I have yet to do a float tank, but some other people have told me they're really amazing. So the sensory deprivation, like you're in a dark float tank? Yeah. So here's the easiest way I can paint you a picture.

So you're in this room and you're in this, it's warm. It's the same temperature as your body, 98.6 degrees if it's done correctly. The water is filled with thousands of pounds of Epsom salt. So you're buoyant, right?

You can just lay on it. And then you can just float just like the Dead Sea. And the easiest way to explain it. And it's hyperbole, obviously, but it's like being in the womb.

It's warm and it's wet and it's comforting and it's completely pitch black and you can't hear a thing. And then you learn who you are. It's where I go. If I'm having difficulty and I'm like, I need a question answered that I'm having in my head right now, I will go there because there's no distractions and you're just with yourself.

And I've done it for 90 minutes and I've done it for six hours. So, you know, there's a lot you can discover about yourself in that time. Wow, that's amazing. Is there a book that's touched you at an important point in your life, Michael?

Yeah, all of them. I mean, I love reading. When I was a kid, I would get in trouble at school. The number one reason I got in trouble at school was for reading books at school because I hated the bullshit they were feeding us and I'd be reading biographies.

I hate nonfiction. I just does not compete or I hate fiction. Excuse me, does not compute. And so I spent all my time in nonfiction biographies, autobiography, real life stories.

And I think the one of the most powerful books actually behind me was David Goggins can't hurt me. And the reason why is because his life and my life are in such parallel that I read that book and I go, all right, cool, I'm not alone. Because I'm up here, I'm not the 10 A score, I'm the craziest. My mom cut my finger off, my shit's crazy, right?

And I look at his life, I go, okay, cool, there's somebody else up there on the fucked up shit scale. The reality is that just knowing you're not alone and Michael, that was one of the reasons I so wanted to have this conversation with you is that for anyone else who comes from the fucked up shit scale, just to know that they're not the only one, Michael is huge. Mm hmm. Communities, everything.

It really is. What was the name of the book again? Can't hurt me. Can't.

By David Goggins. By David Goggins. Yeah. What is a life lesson that you feel has taken you a good long while to learn?

It's a really fascinating question. No one's ever asked me that before. Trust myself. Trust myself.

Like that's what comes to mind because, you know, I think often it's you're in this position where you let too many people get in your head, too many conversations, too many opinions, too many cooks in the kitchen. And the only way, if this comes back to what we're talking about a moment ago, to reframe that understanding of your gut reaction, trust yourself, create a new hypothesis. If I do this thing, then X will happen in my favor and then repeat that so you have supporting evidence that proves out that theory and eventually on a long enough timeline, like the idea of trusting yourself will become native. That's beautiful.

How would you describe this all? Michael, do you believe in it? So here's, I'll say this. I actually grew up in the Mormon church.

I don't typically talk about that, but I think immediately my brain went to a ghost. I think, you know, I struggle with it. I really truly do. I, you know, growing up in religion, I'm conflicted, but also being a very spiritual person.

I just think like, there's a very high likelihood because we have no idea of anything. Anyone who has any idea of what they think death is and what happens after it's full of shit because nobody knows, but something tells me like, we are reincarnated. I don't know why. Maybe not in this universe, maybe in another universe, maybe somewhere on the timeline of infinity.

I have no idea, but I'm just like, I feel like we come back. It's like Groundhog's Day. You just, that movie with Bill Murray from the 90s, you just do it over. You're just doing this life over and over and over and over until you get it right.

Yeah, I'm with you. It's, I love that. Anyone who tells you they know they're full of it. Yeah.

Anyone who's certain question them. Yeah. I don't even, I'm not even certain about my own life. I'm not going to listen to you.

Love it. What does fulfillment mean to you now from the vantage point that you have? Being okay with the reflection in the mirror. You're making me all emotional, Michael.

That's just, yeah, coming back to your mirror moment, right? That moment of looking in and being like, this isn't it. This is what I want for myself. It's everything.

My mentor, Tom Bill, you, he and I were on a conversation six months ago and he says this all the time, but it really sat with me this one particular day because I needed to hear it. And we're talking about some business stuff, right? And he goes, dude, I save us all the time. The most important thing is like how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself.

And I was like, shit, you're so right. Always, always, always, right? I love him. I love him.

And so that's it. Like can I be good with the reflection on the mirror? Because if not, that means I'm not living into who it is that I'm capable of being. Okay.

So pulling out of my like, intermission, let's just be nosy about you. Coming back to more of like the topic around abuse. As an adult survivor of child abuse, what would you like to say to those adults who have an experience, that kind of trauma? What do you want them to know?

I mean, like, like, I think to some capacity, most people have had something bad happen in their life. I think the most important people, I think the most important thing people need to understand about this is it's not comparative. People are always like the first thing I always, I get off of a stage cake. I get off of a podcast.

I get off my Instagram. People go, oh my God, my life wasn't nearly as bad as yours. What does that have to do with me? There's nothing to do with me.

Stop comparing. Because guess what? Like I don't live for you. I don't breathe for you.

I don't love for you. Like I understand where you're coming from with it, right? I don't need you to be in connection with me about how bad my past was. What I need you to understand is that we need your voice to make sure that someone else's past isn't that bad as well.

Yeah. So stop comparing. Just go out there and be a warrior, be a champion of this. Stop saying my life wasn't so bad.

Well if your life isn't so bad, good. Then that means that you can teach other people how to have that as well. What would you say to other adult survivors of child abuse who are listening today? Yeah.

The number, I'm telling you this right now, if you listen to these words and you let them sit with you, things can be different. And that is though trauma may be our foundation, it is not our future. You have to fucking decide that. Oh, you have to decide.

Practically, if people would have taken nothing else from our entire conversation, what is one thing that people can actually do that might help them just a little bit today? Going right down a goal, right down this morning, right down right now, right down tonight, right down in the morning when you wake up, right down your goals every single day, have a direction, move towards something, right down the pin is my ear, then the sword. I know it's ad hoc people say it all the time, but this pin right here, this thing that you hold that takes all the crap in your brain and puts it out into the world in a palatable way where you can look at it and digest it is power that you do not understand until you understand the power of wielding it. I feel like I'm going to have to re-listen to this episode a few times when I need that pep talk and reminder that I create my future through the actions and small daily commitments I make every day.

As I mentioned, you can find Michael at ThinkUnbroken.com. He also has the ThinkUnbroken podcast and his book is ThinkUnbroken. If you're here to here to thrive.com, head over to the podcast and you can find all of those links to heretothrive.com. And as we close out to the end of the year, I have a free reflection and planning guide that I use with my clients that is available to you over here to thrive.com.

If you go and sign up for the mailing list, I will send you an email back or some magic process. It will have that link to download your reflection workbook. It feels like a really good time to do that kind of stuff. I'm all about taking pause at this time of year and considering what I want for the coming year.

A little tool to help you do that over here to thrive.com. To launch season 5, there's a little bit of a blast and I have back-to-back episodes coming at you weekly until we hit the new year. So come back again next Monday and you'll find another guest episode. It's with Bess Matassa from TheNuminous and we're actually talking about the astrological year of 2022.

What we can consider and think about, astrologically speaking in 2022. So stay tuned with that next Monday. And until then, beautiful people, I hope this has inspired your heart and we will be back next week. And thriving beautiful people, keep thriving.