Man That Can with Lachlan Stuart
Welcome to Man That Can with Lachlan Stuart—the podcast dedicated to empowering men to break through barriers and achieve their full potential.
Hosted by Lachlan Stuart, this show dives deep into the challenges men face, offering actionable insights, real-life stories, and expert advice. Whether you're focused on fitness, business, personal growth, or fatherhood, you'll find inspiration and tools here to help you rise above any challenge and become the man that can.
New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday. Tune in, get inspired, and start living the life you’ve always wanted.
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Man That Can with Lachlan Stuart
Understanding Emotional Intelligence and Peak Performance with Mike Zeller
Mentioned On Today's Show:
🤝 Healing PTSD with MDMA
🤝 Rewiring Your Belief Systems for Success
🤝 The Stigma of Male Vulnerability
https://mikezeller.com/
https://www.instagram.com/themikezeller/
In this episode, emotional intelligence takes center stage as we discuss the transformative effects of MDMA on emotional barriers, particularly within the dynamics of masculine and feminine energies. Hear personal stories of navigating trauma, the limitations of traditional therapies, and the groundbreaking role of psychedelics in therapy. We also delve into achieving peak energy and renewal, emphasizing the necessity of balancing exertion with rest to prevent burnout and maintain high productivity. Join us for an enlightening conversation that bridges the gap between mental health, trauma recovery, and achieving peak performance in all areas of life.
Succeed At Business.
Win At Life.
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Do Something Today To Be Better For Tomorrow
excited for this week's guest. Now, before we dive into the episode, as last week, I want you guys to take a moment to appreciate something you've done well over the last seven days. It is very common for blokes to go through life and not acknowledge things that you're doing well. So while you're taking a moment to do that, I'm going to sit down here and give you a quick recap and introduce today's guest. So over the last seven days we went to San Francisco. My wife played a show with her band Shepard, at Nico Moon opening for Nico Moon, who's an incredible artist in himself, which was cool. Fun to check out San Fran.
Speaker 1:We did do the red eye on the way back. For those of you who have caught a red eye, you know the feeling. For those of you who haven't never do it, we arrived at 6am and pretty much wiped out all of Monday. Nonetheless, I hit 80 kilometers this week and I tested something different with training. So on Friday I adopted the last man standing format, which is essentially you run a certain distance every hour on the top of the hour until you can run no longer, and what I chose to do was just run 45 minutes every hour for five hours and I managed to get out 38 kilometers, which is good, right, a marathon-ish distance, but I wanted to see how I pulled up and yesterday I pulled up incredibly well. So I'm stoked with how the body's feeling and how it's progressing for the 58 to 58, how the body's feeling and how it's progressing for the 58 to 58, which you guys will hear more about coming up soon.
Speaker 1:The other thing that is in massive progress is the focus success system. So, as I mentioned, there's going to be more stuff around helping you build a business. For those of you who are wanting to make, I guess, or take, more control over your finances in today's society, with AI and technology where it is and people being able to build personal brands, there's a lot of opportunity available to you and you're probably seeing people all over the internet doing it, and I'm not teaching that. I want to give you the business readiness, which is helping you identify your skill sets, what you have available to you and what it could actually look like, and then navigating potential opportunities for you. So that may be traditional business, it may be ghostwriting, it may be e-commerce, it may be coaching, but from that you can then choose the best, I guess vehicle for you to achieve your goals moving forward. Obviously, for me, that is online business. It works really well with my lifestyle, et cetera, so we'll dive into that in more detail. The waitlist is now open. If you head over to the website at themanatcamprojectcom and just a little reminder as well I'm probably going to be rebranding the man that Can Project, so stay tuned for more on that.
Speaker 1:Today's guest is Mike Zeller, and we met through our mutual friend, zach Tepperman, when we were out at his lake house a couple of weeks back and Mike and I had a lot in common. He's a business coach for a lot of C-suite people and is now working a lot in plant medicine and stuff, so what we talk about here. We'll have conversations around depression, anxiety. I want you guys to know that this is not medical advice. This is a conversation and personal experiences, and if you find those sorts of conversations challenging to listen to, just skip this episode and listen to another one. Let's dive into today's episode with Mike Zeller. Welcome to the show, mike.
Speaker 2:Great to have you Excited to be here, my man.
Speaker 1:It's almost like it just proves how small the world is. We connected through a mutual friend, zach Tepperman and Emma, because I was out I think I was pickleballing at the time and you were chatting with the girls and Emma's message you've got to come chat to.
Speaker 2:Mike.
Speaker 1:He's like you but better, and I was like, is that a compliment or an insult? I'll take the compliment out of it. And then we got chatting and we're sort of crossing paths in a way of you've come from the business coaching background and now moving into like these journeys and really helping people on a I wouldn't say deep level, because business is still a deep level. It's deep and I'm I've gone from like the mental health and I'm sort of moving more towards business, just because I think that's a focus in my life. Uh, and I wanted to get you on here and pick your brain, man. So it's so good to have you here, glad to be here, brother, but you have an incredible resume like it is mind-blowing, and there's so many things that I want to learn from you.
Speaker 1:But from time we'll uh, we'll dive into some cool stuff. But you're a peak performance coach who helps high performers and entrepreneurs shed trauma, rewire belief systems and find their deepest area of genius for enhanced performance, joy and fulfillment. I love all of that and I'm very excited to see how it all intertwines. Utilize NLP, something that I've studied as well IFS tools to rewire the subconscious Psychedelics, which we're definitely going to be diving into, to double the neuroplasticity and flow psychology and habits to activate flow state, to improve performance. Mike, your journey you've got nearly a million followers. You've impacted hundreds of thousands of people's lives. What sent you on this journey, first and foremost into business coaching and the world of business, and then we'll dive into where we are today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, probably like a lot of high achievers out there, it's like this insatiable quest to make the most of your life. And I remember as a high schooler I was like man, like what you know, if you look at peak performers in sports, I was a pro or I wanted to be a pro baseball player at the time and I was like it's the mental edge, like a lot of people have physical talent, but it's like that last, like 10%, that's the mental edge.
Speaker 2:And so I kind of started diving in in high school and then college. I went to a seminar, uh, at age 19, and it was just mind blowing and really lit me up of, like you know, how much you can really dictate your future by studying and by becoming a master student and a forever student. And so I made it a goal eventually by age 20, to read a book a week. And so I'm 45 and pretty much since age 20, I've read a book a week. So I've read thousands of books at this point. I love, I love learning, I love growth. I immerse myself in growth continually and now, with tools like psychedelics, I can enhance and accelerate growth and myself and lives of those I serve. So it's pretty fun.
Speaker 1:I love that and I love that you had that realization so early on. I would say I did as well. 23 was when I started I guess specifically intentionally reading to learn what was it about books that you loved and what were some of the key things that you've taken away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I always read a lot of books as a kid. My mom got me started. She used to pay me a dollar per book that I would read.
Speaker 2:And then, pretty quickly, I was reading too many and she's like, yeah, I don't need to pay you. But then Brian Tracy said something pretty profound. I went to his seminar middle of finals week, age 20. And it was like December 20, whatever, I don't remember the exact year and he said if you read a book a month in your chosen field, you'll become an expert, a top 1% expert, within three years. So I was like that's 36 books. I was like, why would I want to wait three years to be like, let me do it in a year? And so that's like I went down leadership and then sales and marketing, psychology, you know now neuroscience and other things, so I could really rapidly understand business. I mean, I've read, you know, probably over a hundred biographies at this point and other.
Speaker 2:You know sales and marketing books. You know some, some subjects. I'm more than a hundred books in Um so uh. But also you just feel like, okay, if I'm getting 1% better every day, then the growth is basically infinite and it feels really good. Your confidence actually goes up too as you continually learn and master your skills.
Speaker 1:I love that. I think it's such a powerful thing. I aim to read a book a month on minimum, but I'll then throw in some podcasts or audio books as well, and I think it's one of the most underrated tools to build a better life is reading, and I think it's one of the most underrated tools to build a better life is reading. Audiobooks are great, but reading there's something about the structure of sentences and maybe for me personally, because I love seeing things is it helps me piece together my own ideas and develop them even further, because then you can take notes and build upon that. But you've chosen, or you've read, hundreds of books in multiple different fields as well, which is I think it's such a powerful thing, because most people stop learning, yeah, after school right, exactly, that's incremental yeah, and the compound effect of what you've now experienced in the beginning.
Speaker 1:Reading a book is hard like you're flexing that muscle, you're learning to focus, you're um understanding the sacrifice of if I'm reading a book I could be out doing other shit, but I prefer the book and then the compound effect of you've written a book, you've read multiple ones, you can start piecing together things and go okay, well, this actually works. What I learned here in fitness applies to money, what I learned in money applies to my relationships.
Speaker 2:And you then get to start developing your own ideas, which makes you, I guess, a thought leader and a highly influential person in your own own field yeah, exactly, and you can start stacking knowledge and connecting the dots in ways, because you just have more accumulated knowledge and if you look at, like charlie munger, who passed away last year, warren buffett's partner it was like man.
Speaker 2:That guy and warren would read hours a day and they just had so much accumulated wisdom that it was their intuition was so much more spot on. Yeah, and then now some of the other work I do now where my heart is more connected, thanks to, you know, medicines like md may or sassafras, where I can connect with, like I had a great mind mind to body connection, but now I have a great mind to body connection but now I have a great heart to body connection too.
Speaker 2:So it's like the channels. I think of channels of communication or data that helps drive decision-making is like four main quadrants your heart, your body, your mind and your spirit, and now I feel so much more complete and integrated in. A lot of my clients are getting like boom locked in, where all four major channels of communication are flowing, which enables you to just navigate life and business. So much more adeptly.
Speaker 1:Could we dive into that a bit more, Because I still feel uncomfortable here in like the heart to body one. I'd love to understand a bit more about it, but as as someone who is still really focused, like my goal is the million buck yeah yeah, like that's, that's been a goal for 10 years and it's still the goal.
Speaker 1:And I think what you said then hit me. It's like I'm still very mind to body, like I've got great routines and habits that are helping my mind and helping my body. But the heart part is what I really struggle with and I often look at it as not woo-woo, but like I couldn't, even if I would put a word on it. I feel I can't even put a word on what. But there's something that I struggle with. But I also know, because I respect, what you've done in business. You know you've generated over 100 million dollars in sales. You've also lost a million dollars in any like. So you've had the big wins and you've had some tough losses. So it would be stupid of me to sit here and not go okay, well, how do we piece this together?
Speaker 2:and I need to learn from you with that, yeah, and it's frankly, it's really hard for men in general. So the average uh, this comes from a book called how to improve your marriage without talking about it, and the authors are two very well noted researchers in therapy, couples therapy, et cetera and they found that the average seven-year-old daughter has a more emotionally rich vocabulary than her father. Okay, so like just from the fundamental basis. So my daughter is like three years old and so I got like four more years if I'm average, but I'm a little better than average on on the heart connection now that I've done some of the work.
Speaker 2:But then also boys. What they found in their research is little baby boys. They can hold an eye gaze for far less than a baby girl.
Speaker 1:So in a baby girl if you make eye contact and change her diaper or whatever she can hold that gaze and hold it and hold it and hold it the baby boy is like half or one third of how and it's too emotionally intense and they have to look away. Wow.
Speaker 2:Right, so we have a different proclivity or wiring in terms of our natural predisposition, and a lot of the women that I coach, the women entrepreneurs, I'll remind them.
Speaker 2:Hey, they because they want their husband to be the leader of the household. Yeah, I'll be like you got it kind of wrong. You are a leader, and the leader of certain aspects of the household, as is he, but you need to own, embrace the part that you are, by by nature, much more emotionally adept. The, the average woman, is much more emotionally adept. The average woman is much more emotionally adept than the average man in terms of emotional awareness, emotional acuity, emotional attunement, and so, like on my retreat, I just encouraged one of the women who, like she, was abdicating her responsibility to create the emotional home, almost like the emotional fireplace that lights up the whole home from the heart. And and now the husband will follow, because if she's emotionally connected, if they're emotionally connected to one another, and but the man needs to create this protective, safe container for her emotions to safely flow in and her to nourish the home emotionally.
Speaker 2:Um, and I'm and this isn't like gender roles or anything like that, it's just the biology of women more typically more heart connected and more emotionally available than men. Um, and the number one complaint that women have about their men you're emotionally disconnected, my wife had that for five years, right, um.
Speaker 2:But fortunately there's tools that I haven't seen anything come close, not even like in the same universe, in terms of opening up a man's heart as mdma. Mdma floods your body with feelings of empathy and heart connection, like in my metaphor, is like when I walked into my first MDMA experience. It was like um. I had a gravel road from my heart to my mind.
Speaker 2:Right now I have a four lane highway from my heart to my mind. My wife still has like a seven lane super highway, but I'm like I can flow with her and I have much more emotional awareness and even the way my daughter reacts to me. My daughter before I did the journeys like she. She would let me hold her and she liked me, but she didn't run to me. Now afterwards, like literally weeks after she started running to me and being emotional, she felt emotionally safe and connected and I was able to emotionally even recognize how I need to soothe her, how I need to be present, and I was able to emotionally even recognize how I need to soothe her, how I need to be present, and I had so much more feelings of love than I had before because I could just connect to that access to my heart. And there is also a lot of science behind the heart's power. If you look at HeartMath Institute, they've found that the heart is 65 times more electromagnetically powerful than in your mind.
Speaker 1:According, to ECGs.
Speaker 2:So it's like old technology that can measure your heart's electromagnetic field when you are in a state they call heart coherence when you're in heart alignment, not like jealousy and fear and doubt and all that. Your heart's energetic field radiates up to eight feet outside of your body.
Speaker 1:That's incredible, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's science back.
Speaker 1:It's interesting, I was listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about karma.
Speaker 1:And he asked the gentleman who he was sitting with do you believe in karma? And he's like not really. And he's like well, do you believe in genetics? And he's like, well, duh, that's proven right. And he's like, well, 4,000 years ago it wasn't but the law of karma. A lot of people do believe in it. He's like we just haven't found the right thing to study. Yeah, study it. And it made sense to me. So that's when I learned more about psychedelics, or even the heart stuff, as much as it's very, I don't know. I can't tell you why I find it uncomfortable well, it's not normal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, I mean it wasn't normal for me yeah, yeah, it's like my wife would bitch about me, like not being heart connected, and I'm like woman I love you, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I don't know what else I show you. I love you, I'm kind, and she's like you're still not emotionally available. I'm like I don't know what the hell you mean.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to get there. Maybe it's the fear of change, the losing the aspects of myself that I think I love, but maybe they wouldn't change anyway. They're just, they'd be enhanced, accessible. Yeah, enhance, enhancing what were some of the biggest challenges you found when you were looking to like. So the way I see it is like the mdma allowed you to drop the barriers that maybe you couldn't do consciously. What were some of those barriers that you were struggling with consciously before you went down that journey?
Speaker 2:Well, I think if you look at the predisposition and we'll call it the masculine-feminine energy more than male-female, because that's probably a little more accurate, because some men are more feminine and some women are more masculine by nature, men are more feminine and some women are more masculine by nature. Um, so if you put that aside, then you also got culturally, uh, adaptations right, and so, like in most of our culture, um, if men or little boys cry, we're called, we call each other sissies or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly A little wimpy boy or whatever. Why are you crying? Women, we kind of expect little girls to cry Um, and it's more okay. And then even in dating and Rome, romantic relationships, like even as I was on this journey through the medicine, sometimes my wife would say things like you're being wimpy and I'm like I'm doing what you asked me to do Like what do you want from me?
Speaker 2:I'm like showing you my feelings for the first time and I'm flubbing it up. I'm not doing it perfectly, but you asked me to share my feelings and that's what I felt, like that that hurt me or whatever, and and we both had to unlearn certain cultural patterns that we had adapted. And then you know, growing up in my home I had loving parents, good parents, all that, but like most parents, they were not emotionally connected to one another like the only safe emotion was kind of anger or, you know, sadness was not a common emotion.
Speaker 2:You did not talk about your feelings, you did not talk about what was going on, um, and there was just not that emotional safety. Neither parent felt that from each other and also neither parent felt that from their parents. So it's kind of passed on um and so. But if you look at I mean daniel goldman's work with emotional intelligence that came out in the 80s and 90s like this, the rise of eq, you know, is arguably more important. Cultivating high emotional intelligence and emotional awareness is arguably more important than iq. And and if you think of people that cultivate massive charisma and are dynamic leaders and, um, and get a team or organization really behind them to go, you know, summit a mountain, they've probably got a high level of emotional intelligence and emotional connection with the people that are getting behind them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. I've met. I just I remember when I went to study at university sport science and there were some guys who are so academically brilliant but when you put them in a gym and they had to implement what they knew, they were useless. And that was the first time that I realized it doesn't matter how intellectual you are if you don't have the emotional intelligence or self-awareness to be able to make people feel something and build the confidence within them and I guess the ideas to click.
Speaker 1:And so that's when I started reading, obviously, Emotional Intelligence and diving down that rabbit hole, and it's been game-changing.
Speaker 1:Because I don't consider myself highly intellectual I would not at all but I feel like I can build rapport with people quickly and help people get more out of themselves than most people, and I think that's why we're probably both coaches right, exactly, yeah, that ability to do so what, aside from obviously recognizing those roadblocks within yourself and wanting to go a little bit deeper, was there anything that really triggered you to get into or even shift from the business side of coaching and I know you still do that and what you do now helps with that into the the journey work yeah, yeah, it was just like it was pretty obvious to me as I experienced the journeys and saw in myself and saw in other clients and friends.
Speaker 2:Like you know, um, we got into this initially because my wife was in a deep depression spiral and she's a three-time suicide survivor and in october 2020, when she got pregnant, it created an avalanche of emotional upheaval and depression spirals and suicidal ideation and panic attacks three to five times a week and plus complex ptsd which I didn't recognize at first. So she was really stuck, nothing else working. And then, as I dove into the neuroscience, I was like I don't have an ordinary problem like a top 20% problem, meaning, if you think, mindset work, mindset work. I say mindset rests on the foundation of your neuro wiring, in other words, your nervous system wiring Neuro means nervous system, so your mindset like I would try and get my wife to do mindset stuff when she was battling depression zero effect, you know it.
Speaker 2:Just counter, counteracted and she would get even more angry and more depressed. Because I don't want to do your blah blah, blah like.
Speaker 2:Stop trying to fix me, yeah yeah and um, and I was like, okay, there's something much deeper here.
Speaker 2:And then, as we did the medicine journeys, the first couple, and I was like, okay, there's something much deeper here.
Speaker 2:And then, as we did the medicine journeys the first couple times, I was like whoa, I felt this massive opening. I saw her open and shift in a beautiful way and I saw that, oh, we didn't do full journeys for her. We did about a half of a dose, typically half of a full and but she started opening up and I started seeing her nervous system recalibrating and I started understanding, you know, as I read on trauma and studied trauma, because it's like how the hell do I help my wife get out of trauma, because I don't want my wife or my daughter to grow up without her mom. And then my wife's an amazing human, but she was really suffering and was really suffering. Right, we were suffering collectively. Getting back to the woman being the emotional center of the home. She was the emotional center home and her emotions were shame and guilt and just the bottom of the emotional pool and and so I was like I got to figure out how to reset help her reset.
Speaker 2:And but then, as I looked at the neuroscience side, I saw, yes, the psychedelics coupled with the therapy. So it's like the psychedelics create this beautiful opening and and and the science side.
Speaker 2:We call them the acute subjective effects, which is you got two major windows when you do a journey. The first journey is the acute subjective window and it's about three to six hours and it's basically your nervous system is more wide open than at any known point in your lifetime, meaning we can do more deep work in that three to six hour window, like I just did a session in vancouver. One of my clients she had been in six years of therapy. We covered five major traumas actually four major and then one sub trauma. All all of the traumas actually four major and then one sub trauma all all of the traumas that we covered and healed and released and shifted her nervous system she hadn't even brought up in five years of therapy or six years of therapy, hadn't even touched and so it was like incremental progress and you know we talked about it Like our journey was about five hours. She's like. You know I get into therapy and the first 30 minutes it's like building rapport.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And you get to a little something and then you're like, oh, time to go, and and then also your nervous system doesn't feel safe to bring up the big things because your nervous system can't handle it. What is trauma? Trauma is an overwhelming feeling or emotion that gets frozen in your nervous system. And so then so I saw very quickly from the neuroscience side, from huberman labs and tim ferris and all these other guys that were big in the space, that it's arguably the biggest breakthrough in mental health in our lifetimes.
Speaker 1:There's almost no question about that.
Speaker 2:But then I saw on the peak performance side. I was like, oh, if this opens up your nervous system, then what can it also do for like limiting beliefs? Yeah, rewiring yourself for success, alter ego work other stuff that I've done like oh, it could actually it creates that opening for that.
Speaker 1:Let's do that too, far out. What I've loved most is that when you have problems in your life, you go seek, seek answers and understanding. Not like I think. Most one don't believe they can solve a problem or two, they just try and buy a quick fix, they don't ever have that level of understanding which then enables you to, I guess, approach things from a different angle, and wanting to have your wife around as a mother and as a life partner and being able to help her grow through that is truly incredible.
Speaker 1:You mentioned it was tough on you during that experience. Can you share a little bit more about how that was? Because obviously you were trying to do your best as a role as a husband and as a father, but you still had a business and things happening on the outside as well.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in our nervous system, unconsciously, what is the most contagious emotion? It's fear and anxiety. So, literally, someone who's afraid walks in the room. And especially if you're feminine and your energy someone who's afraid walks in the room, then you're automatically going to be more attuned to fear and anxiety. You're going to be paying attention because it's like, almost like biologically, maybe we're wired like oh, someone feels a little fear, maybe they saw a saber-toothed tiger right, but yeah exactly at the zoo nashville zoo has saber-toothed tigers, guys come see them, um, but uh.
Speaker 2:So you, your nervous system, thinks oh there, I got to be on guard, there might be something there. And it's designed because the number one job, the first job of your brain and your nervous system is to keep you alive. So fear kicks in. What happens? Then your amygdala takes over. Your amygdala is a little almond-shaped part of your brain and it controls your fight, flight or freeze response and it also encodes memories according to feelings flight or freeze response and it also encodes memories according to feelings. So fear comes in and then it bypasses, meaning it shuts down, the other parts, it overrules. Your amygdala will overrule all your prefrontal cortex and all your other decision-making facilities when it is locked into the driver's seat of your nervous system. But then if it stays in the driver's seat too long, it gets comfortable and you get, and that's why my wife was in hypervigilance mode.
Speaker 2:A lot of people battling significant anxiety their amygdala has been locked in, and locked in, and locked in, and literally what happens to? The?
Speaker 2:recent research has shown that your amygdala can double in size because if it stays yeah, so it can actually change your brain structure and it can change back, but it's so much blood flow can just go into your amygdala because it's overactive and a lot of my clients that are unconsciously stuck in PTSD or um experienced too many overwhelming feelings and emotions or life changes like a life change that you guys move into here. You stack that on with a couple other significant life changes and your amygdala might get locked in, especially for the feminine. I just did a session yesterday with a very successful man who he had a couple big life changes in 2022, not COVID related, but job related and business related and then his amygdala had been kicked in for two years and he was driven by fear, even though he's a man of faith right and he didn't recognize.
Speaker 2:And now he's working until 11 pm, works from 7 to 11, five days a week, plus on saturday, and he's, if he didn't make changes, not only is he going to burn himself out, in which we actually discussed in the middle of the session the medicine kicked in and guess what he felt so tired.
Speaker 2:Why? Because his body. The medicine helped, basically helps your body speak and your heart speak. His body was like you're freaking tired, you're burning me to the ground. And then his marriage and his family life was going to, it was going to eventually implode because he was physically going to implode.
Speaker 2:And his family was already not seeing him hardly ever, but he worked himself to the bone. He didn't need to. It wasn't like his job was demeaning that he's just so afraid of losing a client, so afraid of this, so afraidaning, that he's just so afraid of losing a client, so afraid of this, so afraid of that.
Speaker 1:Something I can definitely relate to, and the best thing I ever did was move over here because I could reshape some or re-change some habits that I knew I needed to but, it was too fearful to do back there.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in how does the journey work? So you mentioned it's anywhere from sort of three to five, six hours, which to me seems like a very long time. Yeah, but I'm sure it flies by and what does that look like? So is the the person so they'll take whatever the mdma or whatever it is, and are they conscious? Yeah, I assume they're conscious, so then you're talking, and guiding them is their journaling. How does how does it actually all work?
Speaker 2:yeah, and I should put a couple disclaimers. The medicines are still illegal in most states of the us. I also don't supply the medicine, so I'm. That protects me legally. I there's no law that says I can't sit with someone yeah, going through a journey.
Speaker 2:But what happens, how the journey works is it takes about an hour for the medicine kick in in. And MDMA is a very heart and body. It's not a psychedelic, technically, it's an empathogen. So it actually floods your body with empathy, feelings of empathy, and that's why it's amazing for couples, for business partners, for people in relationship to one another to let go of resentment let go of any frustrations or to talk openly about what you really care about and feel and desire, so you get flooded with feelings of love empathy and connection, which also means your nervous system says, ooh, oh, maybe it's safe for me to bring up this thing.
Speaker 2:It was really overwhelming. That happened 12 years ago, where your nervous system got frozen and emotion got frozen in your nervous system. And then literally most of my journeys that I guide people uh, every single one of them, over 50% of the memories that come up will be memories they've totally forgotten about, but they're affecting them today, like the client yesterday had three memories that we worked through that were very significant, only one of which he was fully aware of and he'd forgotten about the others. And then they came up and he's like that makes sense why I'm acting this way.
Speaker 1:That makes sense why I'm so afraid of this it's crazy what your body does and what it can do and the body keeps the score.
Speaker 2:That's why the fbi does lie detectors on your body, not on your words, because your body knows, you know and you think of this. Your average red blood cell lives an average of 115 days. Your skeletal muscle cells live an average of 15 years, right, yeah, so 15 years ago, 2009,. Your body remembers what happened and it's the very fiber of your muscles. And then, whatever happened before that, your muscles sent a signal this is epigenetics sent a signal that, oh, this happened when you were three years old, so don't forget about this.
Speaker 2:Dogs are you know? You got bit by a dog or whatever. Dogs are bad. Stay away from big, hairy, big, you know white dogs, or whatever Right, are bad. Stay away from big white dogs or whatever right. And then, even generationally, duke University is doing generational trauma on Holocaust survivors and they found the next two generations after Holocaust survivors meaning the children and the grandchildren who were both not alive during the Holocaust on their biometric data point, their biometric data. They very consistently show that they suffered severe trauma, even though they hadn't in their lifetime, but it was imprinted upon their genes that you have been through hell, right, so like this is. And then that's generational trauma and generational curses are real things. We can stop and heal them.
Speaker 2:Like a lot of work I do basically my clients. We end that trauma, we stop it from manifesting further into the next generation and we stop it from manifesting further into their, into their lifetime. So, um, so it's a really profound and deep work, but it's also much needed and so, like I got into it because I have never seen anything more powerful and more rapidly shifting. We will. I I've dealt with clients that hadn't raped and they were raped, you know, 20 years ago, and they hadn't ever been able, and one of my clients had tried 90 different modalities.
Speaker 2:It's what her wow she had, uh, hadn't even touched her rape, couldn't get to it. Her nervous system never felt safe enough to deal with it. Last week we dealt with it first session.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find it so powerful because I remember, maybe even five years ago, when I thought it was all woo-woo, and then as I read and spoke to more people and learned more for me, the way that I've, I guess, accepted it and become curious in it is through the fact of a lot of other things are just band-aid solutions To me a lot of medications, I don't personally and, once again, people can have their own opinions and do what they want, but I don't use medications or anything like that.
Speaker 1:I always just understand it's an issue within and I need to go figure that out. And if my life wasn't moving in an upward trajectory, I would probably be open to most things to try and find a solution, as as weird as it may sound, because a lot of, I guess, um, medicines are impacting people.
Speaker 1:I've got clients who are on significant amounts of antidepressants and they keep getting upped and I'm like we need to be having a collective conversation with all the people who are helping you, because you feel good for a small period of time until your body gets comfortable with that amount of SSRI or whatever you're on, and then you're back to well, I'm not happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I mean I have a lot of clients that are either tapering off or coming off of SSRIs or just don't want to touch them because I know they will just numb you and you might be able to live longer and live a little more stable life, but you're actually not going to live a full life. Is it? You know, one of my clients? She actually has a ketamine clinic and entrepreneur very successful, her and her husband, both like you know they got tens of millions of dollars in real estate.
Speaker 2:And, uh, we did a session and she was on SSRI um Lexapro I think it was 150 milligrams, and guess what?
Speaker 1:Even like the husband was not on anything. Medicine kicks in.
Speaker 2:He can feel, he can connect as someone and she took her a little bit more medicine to feel anything and she felt a fraction of what he felt and one of the challenges for their marriage is she can't feel as much.
Speaker 2:And so we're working her towards tapering that down. But she had a lot of PTSD from a very abusive ex-husband and um. But we can't even heal the PTSD while she's on the medicine because her nervous system won't let us access it, because she can't feel. And the MDMA allows us to safely work towards healing that PTSD because we can unfreeze the frozen, overwhelming emotion that is too much for your body. So your body freezes the motion because emotion that is too much for your body. So your body freezes the motion because it's literally too much. Yeah, your body can't handle it and that's why in regular therapy you're also your body with a massive trauma. Your body is like that's gonna be way too much for me. I'm gonna lock up and I'm gonna re-traumatize myself if I go through that painful memory. But the medicine mdma- again.
Speaker 2:Your body is like coated with this feeling of safety, feeling of love, feeling of empathy, then you can safely bring up those overwhelming memories like rape or molestation or suicide or whatever, and then you can just navigate right through it. You can go right through the eye of the storm calmly, with proper guidance. Right, so the guidance is a massive piece. The medicine alone creates opening. But if you don't have anyone to guide you safely through the opening that knows what they're doing with trauma and all that.
Speaker 1:You're just going to have a beautiful journey and then come right back down.
Speaker 2:It's a gamble to try and get that outcome. Yeah, you won't.
Speaker 1:And full disclaimer. I'm not a medical professional in that either. That's just from my personal experience. Um look, band-aid solutions are a tool. Yeah, again I. Sometimes they're right for a short time, correct? I then look at it. Okay, what else am I putting in place to create change? Because if I'm unwell it's because something yeah, is is something is not working and just slapping a Band-Aid on. Eventually you're going to need to buy new shoes or get dry socks to get out of there, which is a very interesting thing.
Speaker 1:But I guess, even diving into that, one thing that I've read or heard you say is being in a place, physically and mentally, to grab opportunities as they arise themselves. You said you're 42? 45 man, you look about 25, you're jacked um, but keeping yourself physically and then doing this kind of work to to mentally allow yourself to, I guess, take make the most of any opportunities that arise. A lot of men chase success and that's, you know, stereotypically that means financially killing it and you've got some great status behind you.
Speaker 1:As a result, they sacrifice their relationship with their family, they let their health go. You know they might be 20, 30 kilos or pounds overweight and life's not really that enjoyable. So the idea that you have around, being physically and mentally in place to grab those opportunities why do you believe that's so important and what does that look like for you?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I read a book um called the powerful engagement about 14 years ago. I read it three times since and it talks about, uh, the importance of sustainable energy and and keeping your energy high, and how energy maintenance and energy optimization is more important than time optimization, time management. And he breaks it down to four and their sports psychologists that work with, like Venus Williams and Serena Williams and Andre Agassi and all these other top athletes and top CEOs, and they break it down into four energy quarters emotional, mental physical and spiritual, but the foundation of them is physical and then the rest are kind of built on.
Speaker 2:But if you are depleted on any one of those areas, you're just not going to be able to give your best. And you also think all right, if I want to get in a flow state where I'm just locked in, I'm in this unconscious zone.
Speaker 1:You know athletes have this zone.
Speaker 2:When I'm in flow state, I am 500% more productive, I'm releasing all six positive neurochemical cocktails, you know the neuropathenine, oxytocin, endorphins, serotonin, et cetera and I'm just feeling amazing. Well, for me to get there I've got to have peak energy. But I can't have peak energy if I'm just all exertion, like my client yesterday. It's on the edge of burnout. I was like, uh, we'll call him, call him. Uh, sam, sam, sam's on this exertion. Exertion, exertion in the Western American model is like how can I get more done? Yep, it's all obsessed about getting more done. Well, it's actually contrary to common thought.
Speaker 2:How you get more done in less time, is you actually got to have more energy for the time that you are working, which means you need to focus on renewal. So you exert, renew, exert, renew, and it's this cadence and dance and if you look at natural life cycles, we have summer, fall, winter, spring.
Speaker 2:The earth rotates, day, night. Day night is not just day forever, and then a bunch of nights, and and so we actually need that. Biologically, we forget that we are not robots, we're not human doings, we're human, which means we need this renewal. So most, actually the majority of the women that I work with, one of the first things we got to repattern is in their nervous system. That's okay for them to take care of themselves, meaning replenish massage, downtime. The kids will be okay without you, you know with dad or whatever, right, but then taking real days off, like my client yesterday I was like dude, we got to cut down your work hours, replenish your energy, take real days off.
Speaker 2:Um, clients on Sunday, take real days off and um, and as they do that, their energy starts going up and they feel happier, they feel more fulfilled and they actually get. They feel happier, they feel more fulfilled and they actually get more work done. Because they're more locked in, they have more energy to give when they're in the zone, when they're in the work zone. So that was a massive piece for me because I was, you know 14 years ago I was moving towards burnout 70 hours a week.
Speaker 2:It was always available. I was in real estate at the time and. I could very seriously. I was getting edgy and irritated and angry easier and um and I just had no rhythms in my life for renewal.
Speaker 1:It's interesting Even from that, like the seasons of life.
Speaker 1:you said you were in real estate and you were doing 70 hours a week and then, you sort of moved into a different career and path and took a lot of lessons from that and, once again, like you, continue to evolve. A lot of people don't allow themselves to evolve. I think coming out of school it's like once you're 18 or you go to university, it's like that's your career for life. If you change, you're a failure. But we we need to take the feedback of our life experiences and even trust our gut more and evolve into those next phases and I think that probably like what we were, talking about when we first met.
Speaker 1:For years. I've resisted that next chapter because I started in the mental health space based off my own experiences and building community and I didn't want to. I've always wanted to help people who were where I was then, but I've really struggled to be around that energy now for for whatever reason, and I felt like maybe I'm a bad person because of the change. But I also have come to realize it's just time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your, your, your soul is craving your next evolution, whatever that is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, your soul is craving your next evolution, whatever that is yeah, exactly, and I think a lot of people don't allow themselves to do that. And there's so many tools, modalities, people to learn from, experiences to be had that can allow us to live a better life, and I feel for whoever's listening to this, some of you may disagree with what we've spoken about, others will be all around it, and I think what's most important is to think about what you want your life to look like and reflect on where you're at currently.
Speaker 1:If there's things that are a bottleneck whether it's you or trauma, or your environment, or maybe money there are ways for you to bridge that gap. But you have to take full responsibility for that, and your journey to get getting there is going to be different to mine, which is going to be different to Mike's, but ultimately, the journey is the the most beautiful part about that. Sometimes you have to shed some skin. Other times you, you know you have to knuckle down and really dive into that and that's, I guess, the the experience that we've both had. I just want to quickly touch on before we we wrap up. You've written a book, a genius within, and there's four key areas that you touched on with that. Would you be able to share those with the gang?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, like a lot of my clients, what I found with high achievers is like they often go through transition seasons of life Right, and we're looking for the next right thing. And as we get older of life, right, and we're looking for the next right thing. And as we get older, we get more mature in our career, we want to get even more precise, like precisely in the best area that we can, like where we're going to be most fulfilled, we're going to make the biggest impact, we're going to receive the biggest compensation, and I found that I couldn't give a cookie cutter formula for people, and so this was about eight years ago. I started like putting together pieces. What does it look like for? Like? What are the clues or the evidence of? Like? This is the right role, this is the right business opportunity. This is where I am most likely to succeed, cause, like, I played out of position before when I play out of position.
Speaker 2:Guess what? That's? When shit hits the fan and I lose a million dollars yeah uncomfortable yeah, yeah, exactly, and because I'm good at certain things, I'm really good at certain things and I'm not so good at other things. Um, and yes, I can quote, be anything, but I may not be wired to be anything and everything um I might. My ceiling of potential might be a five out of 10 for certain things and it might be a 10 out of 10 for other things.
Speaker 2:So the four main areas that I found is your unique talents is the first one, and so I have people do five different personality tests so I can get your strengths and your weaknesses side by side from all these different measurement devices or tools like Wealth Dynamics is my favorite personality test for entrepreneur strengths finder, disc profile, myers-briggs, enneagram, etc. Colby index.
Speaker 2:And then the second one is your defining life experiences so chancellor, I'm in the mental health space now because I started seeing how many leaders were actually suffering and they didn't, and also like male entrepreneur leaders did not want to go see a therapist. They don't want to just unravel and talk about their shit for like hours and they my entrepreneur clients. They want to get like. Most of them have a lot of mouths depend on them, meaning they might have a staff of 16 or 50 people or a hundred employees and their family depends on them.
Speaker 2:They can't unravel. They can't afford to unravel for weeks or months and just disintegrate. But they, that's so. That's. One of their first fears is like all right, am I going to just implode for a while while I work on my shit? I can't do that, I have to control it. I was like, nope, we're going to get through it. It most of it within five hours and you'll need about 24 hours to recalibrate. But we're gonna get through a lot of deep stuff in about five hours. Um, and then you know it was part of what healed, saved our marriage and and kept my wife here on earth because she didn't want to be a wife, she didn't want to be a mom, she didn't want to be on earth. Um, for basically two years that was almost a daily mantra. It was like the negative affirmation I don't want to be a wife, I don't want to be a mom, I don't want to be on earth.
Speaker 1:All right, that would be tough to deal with she didn't want to.
Speaker 2:She was in a very depressed state. Now she's happiest she's ever been. And she, she would say February last year when she did a session very similar to the sessions I um guide people through. I had orchestrated that with her therapist, um, and talk to her therapist into doing it, and then, uh, I got her to do it as well. Talk took me months to get her ready and night and day difference afterwards, um, so, like, defining life experiences you are here because certain things have shaped you and now you're driven towards the next thing, right, so you define life experience.
Speaker 2:And the third thing is your key relationships, the people that also bring you life versus death. But then also, who are the people that you already naturally have a cluster of relationships with? So, like, entrepreneurs are my people, high achievers are my people. I already have like plethora of connections around the world on that.
Speaker 2:And and then, um, the fourth thing is your values and your passions. So, your values what are you standing for? What are you standing against? It's kind of like a filter who I let in, what I let in, what I you know what are non-negotiables for me and what violates my principles of, of how I operate? Um, and then the passions I like to say you know, a curiosity can often become a passion, a passion can often become a purpose and a purpose can often become a life path. Doesn't mean, like, not every curiosity becomes a passion, not every passion becomes a purpose, like right now. Um, I've always been driven for 20 something years, been driven to to help unleash people's god-given potential. Now I just have a different expression of it. So my life path is that now purpose. A part of my purpose hasn't fully become a life path, but part of my purpose is help high achievers get radically free of trauma and PTSD so they can access their highest and deepest potential and radically impact their family, their businesses, the world the way they want to.
Speaker 2:And the book was just another. It was basically the most complete process I had seen ever created for finding your deepest area of gifting and kind of that sweet spot of life. So that's why I created it. Um, it's fairly short. You can read it in three hours but you'll get a blueprint on how to gather the data on who on earth you are, what on earth you're meant to do and where you have the biggest chance to succeed. Because people who, um, people who accomplish extraordinary results are usually in extraordinarily right positions.
Speaker 1:Very well said. So where can people grab the book and follow along with your journey and the work that you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's called the genius within and it's on Amazon most of the world, I guess and then also genius within bookcom. You can grab a free copy and just cover a shipping handling type deal.
Speaker 1:Awesome. And socials. Where's the best place for social?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm on all. I grabbed the Mike Zeller on all the social handles right now. So a tick tock YouTube. I'm focused a lot on YouTube content right now where I go a little more in depth on peak performance type stuff and mental health and psychedelics and all that jazz. And then, um, also, I have a free um lead magnet, uh, for it's 14 tools to rewire your nervous system. So psychedelics are just one of the tools, but, um, neurofeedback, other things that are really powerful modalities, um, depending on what your proclivity is.
Speaker 1:that's on neurorewiringcom and then mikezellercom as well so all those will be in the show notes. You can grab them. If you've got value from this episode, make sure you take time to share it with someone you know would appreciate it. Leave a rating review. Mike, thank you so much for coming on dude, thanks for having me in lachlan absolute pleasure yeah, me too.
