Please tell me more about your business and your consulting and coaching business, please.
Yeah.
So business-wise, there's two different things.
So I do resilience in the individual couple and group space, as I mentioned, but I also
do resilience work in the institutional and systemic place, and I'll speak to that in
a moment.
I'm 30 years, almost 30 years as a psychotherapist, licensed in the state of California, transpersonal
specialization to postgraduate training in somatic or body psychology.
For the last 20, almost, actually this is 2025, 25 years, I stopped doing therapy and
I started doing coaching.
Okay.
And I can explain that if you're interested at some point why I did the transfer.
And part of the last 25 years, I spent about a decade as a master coach at SealFit, helping
them run a wide variety of their programs.
It's a company founded by retired Navy SEAL commander Mark Devine.
I spent almost five years at Spartan 7, which is also a Navy SEAL run company, Dan Cirilla,
who unfortunately passed away a couple years ago.
So I've been fortunate to spend a lot of time in the special operations space, working with
those kind of folks.
And a lot of that informs my work with resilience.
But part of resilience is not just physical capacity, like mental toughness, emotional
resilience, physical capacity.
But JC Glick and I, who I mentioned, we run a men's group, we talk about resilience 2.0,
which I can talk, explain to you if you're interested in learning more about.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, so, so, okay, cool.
So it's really important that human beings, especially men, since we work with men, are
physically capable of doing whatever they need to do to provide and protect in their
families and their communities, etc, etc.
But that's not enough.
We also think that resiliency 2.0 is the ability, in this case of men, but all humans, because
what we work with men, so I just speak to men, to be able to be resilient in their own
system, meaning they're able to sit in their own discomfort.
A lot of men, but also human beings, seek distractions from their own feelings, their
own thoughts, their own sensations, drugs, porn, alcohol, Netflix, you know, YouTube,
Instagram, whatever they do, like to just work, work out harder, work more hours.
So we teach our men how to sit in their own experience because inside the physical body,
thoughts, feelings, sensations, energetics of the body, is very valuable information
that we actually should allow to emerge and to process to deal with more effectively.
Because if you don't deal with it, it comes out sideways, either as health conditions
or passive aggressive behavior or aggressive behavior, whatever happens to be.
So one of three pillars for us is literally learning to sit in your own experience.
And I'll see if you have any questions before I hit the second pillar of that.
No, no, I'm listening.
Definitely.
Okay, cool.
And then, you know, we work with a lot of married men and we'll just use heterosexual
as a heterosexual couple as an example.
It's not limited to that, but we just say a heterosexual couple.
And what we teach our men is how to sit in the relationship with their female partner
in such a way that serves their wife.
A lot of men have a tendency and a lot of humans have a tendency, a lot of men have
a tendency to feel uncomfortable if their partner feels uncomfortable and want to solve
their problem as quickly as possible because it makes the man feel uncomfortable.
We teach our men it's not about you being uncomfortable.
Be aware of that.
That's important.
But the more important question is what does your wife need from you at that time?
Maybe she just needs you to listen.
Maybe she does need you to help her solve a particular problem.
Maybe there's a third or fourth or fifth option, but you need to be comfortable enough
in your own human system, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, that you can hold the space for
your wife to show up as she shows up and be there for her.
The resilience is like interpersonal resilience, being strong enough in that system that you
show up for your wife as she needs you to be.
That's the second pillar.
I do have a question.
It might be obvious, but what was the reason for focusing strictly with men?
So personally, I work with men and women in my individual and obviously with my couples
too.
But the men's group, that's a great question because J.C. Glick and I, we've noticed that
a lot of men seemingly have the inability, not the capacity, not the skills to really
show up fully in their lives.
We have to be guys, we spend a lot of time with the guys.
We just kind of notice in these things like, wow, our men need a lot of help.
Not to say that women don't need help too, but we just happen to notice that a lot of
men seem to need a lot more help than we thought they needed.
So we're like, we need to create an effort.
In this case, this is a men's group that would just focus on a man to help the men.
So if you help the men, then you help their children and you help their wives or depending
on their husbands, I mean, depending on what the relationship is.
But like, you help them, you help the community around them.
Yes, yes, yes.
So we just decided to focus on the men because that's the signals we're getting from the
environment.
Across the board, though, it seems like you're focusing on resilience rather with couples,
rather with men, and it seems like other businesses that you have.
Matt asks, what's the reason for that word specifically?
Resilience.
Yeah, it's a word that's kind of driven.
Like, if you know, my history is kind of driven my life.
It is one of those things where I'm like, I'm really interested in.
There's a saying, you fall down seven times, get up eight.
And I'm always interested in like, why do some people when there's adversity that they
face, they seem to grow and evolve, adapt and learn from it.
And others seem to collapse.
And that's always been an interest to me.
And no judgment if someone collapses and retreats and doesn't do so well in facing adversity.
It's like, oh, but why?
And is it possible to help people train up their skills and inner capacities and their
character traits and their mindset and their nervous system in such a way that when life
throws things at them, whatever it happens to be, the adversities that come through life,
that they're able to not only take them on successfully, but use them as kind of a fuel
for their own growth.
And I've been exploring that for forever.
And that's kind of drives a lot.
If you know me, it drives a lot of my work that I do for personally things that I'll
do.
But it's also kind of driven me like memetically for the last 30, 40 years in terms of like
what I want to help other people be able to accomplish in their lives, you know, recognize
that they're pretty limitless.
They can have unbeatable minds that they can take on these adversities and really grow
and be the kind of person they really want to be and not limited by culture or their
mindset or the family of origin out of fear and insecurities.
Yes.
So it's definitely a part of your story.
And since that's what drove you and has driven you to get to a space and place where you're
at, then I see that you're paying it forward.
I love that.
Yes.
I love that.
Yeah, yeah.
Paying it forward.
I really like that.
Absolutely.
But I tell you, when you do learn those lessons, I've always said this life isn't about me.
You know, why go through what I go through if I don't share and give it to someone else?
And so you're doing exactly what is necessary.
And then I think that most people, you know, you're you're an expert, right?
And you've done your I'm sure your research and everything else in degrees, but then the
experience.
Oh, man.
X on top of X.
Oh, exciting.
I love it.
So right now, currently, where are you at in what you're doing?
Mostly are you focusing mostly with your with your couples and resilience or the group or
is everybody getting the same amount of time?
Well, there's actually four things and there's actually a fifth coming down the pike.
I'm I'm very driven by like novelty and excitement with new things and like trying new things
and things like that.
So I'll say like my individual work, I have a six month program that's kind of holistic
in orientation, four pillars, physiological, psychological, social, environmental, do a
deep dive to really create the conditions for someone to grow themselves.
I love that because I love working individuals and seeing them grow over time.
Our couples I love because it's so real, you can you can see the both the tension in the
room as they try to work through these things.
But what's possible for them as they open their heart and deepen their connections and
be more intimate.
It's a beautiful thing.
The men's group.
I'm like saying I love all these things.
So they're getting all my equal time.
The men's group is awesome because I watched these men grow and we get to see the men bond
with each other and support one another, which is so needed in our society.
There's not a lot of opportunities for men to bond, except for maybe in sports, which
is OK, or watching sports, which is OK, or going to the bar.
I questions about that.
But like there's not a lot of opportunities for men.
They really bond deeply and kind of emotional, mental and spiritual levels.
So we need more of those, whether it's men's groups or church or synagogue or whatever
it is.
But like opportunities for people to come together to do good stuff together.
And then so those are things get a lot of my attention.
And colleagues and I just launched what's called Team Foodishen as a list last year.
And this is a place for people who want to do really hard things to come together to
train for them, to get community, to get support.
And when I say training for hard things, the example would be last year we did a 50 mile
go rock and we had people all across the country that we helped train up and support and we
held each other accountable and support one another.
And we're doing this coming year, we're going to do other things like that.
And then we're going to be launching our own in collaboration with other groups and organizations
and companies.
So like I like to do really hard physical things.
So it's nice to have a place to go play with some really cool people doing really hard
physical things.
So that's a fourth thing that's grabbing my attention.
And I'll just stop there.
You said there's five.
I'm here.
OK, so I mentioned resilience in the individual couple and group space, but also in the individual
group, institutional and systems space.
So I spent 20 years doing public policy, mostly at the national security level, but also the
policy, foreign affairs, defense reform, cybersecurity, things along those lines.
And I retired from it almost four or five years ago.
And there's a strong chance I've been asked to come back and do some work in our space
in 2025, which are it's nice to have a break from it.
But I'm excited to kind of go back because there's so many things happening in the world
that I think if we had more resilient institutions and systems in place that we could be more
adaptive and deal with them much more effectively and efficiently.
I get that.
And when you five things across the board from your experience and your expertise, resilience,
as you work in these five things, tell me about your vision.
Yeah, so I think my vision came from when I was a little kid where I would look at situations
I found myself in and I'd say they don't make any sense to me in the sense like I understand
why people do what they do, including myself, driven by insecurities and fears.
But I also for some reason had the ability to see what was possible outside of the frameworks
we operated in, even as a little kid.
And I was like, we do this, but this is possible.
How do we get here?
And that's literally been driving my whole life.
Like I learned meditation when I was nine.
I learned guided imagery.
I learned biofeedback when I was nine.
I got into martial arts.
So I was fortunate to kind of get into this space of like, oh, we can manage our nervous
systems.
We can evolve our consciousness.
We can do things differently.
And like, wow, okay, that's awesome.
But we don't we do this over here.
How do we transition from these limited models and ways of being in the world to like this
more expansive models and ways of being in the world?
And literally that's the question I've been asking.
And that's been driving all my life and my work for a long time.
And it's interesting.
So before I got on with you, I was speaking to an individual who's a physician and she
talks about trauma and and our childhood and things like that.
And so I love when I hear people go back all the way to their childhood to realize now
at whatever age we are, young age we are to realize how it set us up for something completely
different.
You know?
And so who knew that you would be focusing completely on resilience in five different
areas, but they all have relation.
I think that that's just really good to be able to reflect and.
Yeah, thank you.
Yes.
Yeah.
Can I speak to the trauma for a moment?
Absolutely.
So in my graduate work, I did study pre preimperonatal psychology.
So like, you know, how from the moment of conception to the post birth, like, you know,
how the fetus evolves over time, both mentally, emotionally, as well as physically, and the
conditions necessary for optimizing health psychologically and physically.
And so just going back, it's really interesting because if you look at how we do things that
we do them counter to how nature or God intended them to be for the most part, medical intervention
society, because sometimes you actually do need a medical intervention.
But like birth is, you know, natural childbirth to the vagina, breastfeeding, as an example,
was what God or nature intended us to do because it you the bonding of the baby with the mother,
the proper feed, like the proper food, not artificial stuff created in the factory, the
vaginal birth gives the microbiome for the skin and comes into the body of the baby.
So they actually have natural immunity over time.
You know, those things, if we start paying attention to and, and supporting how nature
intended things to be would be a great first start to get us healthier and happier from
moment one moving forward.
So people need less of people like me, like, you don't need therapists, you don't necessarily
need coaches, we can be helpful.
But like, if we can, we can prevent the traumas in the first place, or reduce the consequences
of traumas, I think that's a much better way to go.
And then looking at institutions and systems, we can question like our food.
Is it really food?
Not really.
It's like, what is this stuff?
And we can do a deep dive into that if you wanted to.
Our education system does actually educate people.
Well, maybe not.
It's more of an indoctrination system.
So like, there's, there's ways of looking at our institutions, ask the questions, like,
do they actually serve a pro-sociality effect?
Yeah, yeah, I would say a lot of them necessarily don't.
But that's a different conversation.
You know, interesting you say that, because my mind just goes, and I know that it all
definitely starts from there.
And then, you know, moving forward, and we get to where we are.
Do you think that we would have the experience to be able to educate those that did not have
that opportunity, you know, at the beginning?
And I just love how life works, right?
And I know it's hard, right?
Life gets hard at times.
And I'm sure you and I and anyone else watching this can attest to that.
But I tell you, it's in the storms that develops someone like yourself to give away and pay
it forward of what you are learning.
So I definitely agree with that.
But I think that would definitely be in a perfect world.
But I know that the work that you're doing is so needed, especially, I hate to say it,
not not being sexist, but with the men, right, because those are the providers, those are
the protectors, those are the and and, and stating, not for everyone, but in my mindset
and the lifestyle that I live.
That's what I've been taught.
So having, yeah, having them to sit in a group and have that discussion.
So I really, really, even speaking about trauma and things like that.
It's, it's a lot.
It's a lot, but it's it's awesome because like you, Michael, we all get through it.
And then we find a group that's amazing.
And I really do want to know what was one of your significant learning experiences?
Yeah, so I would say quite a few, but I'll just name one.
So I mentioned I work, I work for CELFIT, Founded by retired Navy SEAL Commander Mark
Devine before I before I work for them.
My wife at the time when I was 39 said, what do you want to do for your birthday?
She's expecting me to say, go to the islands and have a good time in the Caribbean somewhere.
And I'm like, I want to go train the Navy SEALs.
So I found a program called CELFIT at the time where they train pre buds candidates,
young men who want to go Navy Special Warfare.
I was 39.
I wasn't going to go Navy Special Warfare or even the Navy.
But I was like, I'm going to do that and see what I'm capable of.
And so it's a program that lasted almost four weeks is called the three week soft academies
close to four weeks.
And on the tail end of it, we did what's called Kokoro camp, which means Kokoro means indomitable
spirit.
It's a Japanese term, but it's modeled after Navy SEAL Hell Week.
It's 50 hours instead of five days, no sleep.
You just train for 50 hours in different environments from the beach, the mountains to the grinder
in the ocean.
All it was fun.
But so I did, I did the three weeks soft Academy, I trained up with some amazing young men all
became SEALs, like is a great group of people.
And then I did the 50 hour Kokoro camp.
And the lessons I learned were invaluable.
The lessons and then Mark eventually brought me back on to help run various programs for
him.
But the lessons I learned just going through that was we have amazing young men in our
country.
There are moments where I'm like, oh my God, like what are we doing?
And that with our people and our culture, I just have a lot of questions around that.
Like, oh my God, are we going to be able to survive some of the challenges we face?
But being around some of these men, I'm like, okay, there's going to be men and women who
are going to be able to stand up and do the right thing and lead us through the darkness.
So that made me feel much better about the world we live in.
Secondarily, training with these guys, I got to see what I'm capable of.
Like we, you know, we train, you know, we literally started training at 520 in the morning.
We finished about 730 at night.
And then sometimes they wake us up around 1 a.m. the morning to go do fun things in
the ocean.
So I was able to see like I'm capable of doing what Mark would say 20 times more than I thought
it was.
Like physically capable, mentally capable, emotionally capable, spiritually capable.
That is awesome.
And then I remember one experience where one of the CO cadre, Brad, Brad was spraying with
water.
And that's part of the whole thing, sprayed with water.
Like why are you doing some kind of push ups or squats or whatever you're doing?
And I have asthma and I started panicking because I couldn't breathe.
I'm used to not being able to breathe and it brings panic in me.
And there was a moment there that I'm like, wait, I can manage this.
Like I calmed my system down and instead of like panicking because I couldn't breathe
because of sucking the water, I'm like, I'm thirsty.
I just started drinking the water and started smiling.
And Brad stopped because he saw that I got it.
I learned the lesson that I'm able to manage or master my own nervous system.
So like that's another lesson I learned from this whole process, more like self mastery
and self management too.
And that was really cool.
And you say cool and fun.
And as my facial expression say it all, I'm like, fun?
Okay.
That was perception.
But I'm like, what way to put yourself in something that lets you know that you can
handle whatever you put your mind to?
Resilience at its finest, right?
You just said it is to put yourself in situations and that's pretty, it seems like that's what
people are most fear.
It's putting themselves in situations like that.
And I really like that you do all these five things and although they may seem like five
separate things, it's the same Michael across the board.
I appreciate that.
That's great.
And let me speak to like the hard physical challenges, like people being afraid to do
those kinds of things.
When I work with clients, like some of them want to do really hard, cool stuff.
That's awesome, physically, but for some, that's not even the hardest thing.
Like having an honest, open, vulnerable conversation with your wife.
Some people would rather go climb a physical mountain than literally have that conversation
or that same conversation with their parents who are getting older or a boss or their underlings
or their children.
So being resilient is not just doing really cool, hard physical stuff.
It's like, hey, can I be strong enough to sit and talk to my wife or these other people?
I can be even harder than other physical things.
Well, I guess you said it.
It's different hearts for everyone.
And like I said, there's sometimes you just don't want to put yourself in those situations
and fear keeps you back from everything.
And I was just reading something that I wrote not too long ago.
I want to jump so that I know I can fly.
I like that.
Okay.
Yeah.
And I think that's the fear, you know, is jumping because the assumption is to fall.
But if you say I'm going to fly, then you'll fly, you know, manifest all these things.
I love that.
That's good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes.
Well, I have one last question because I see you smile and I see the passion in you.
What are the greatest joys of what you do?
Wow.
So I'll limit it to my work with couples, although I can say the same thing about my
other programs and projects I work on.
I love it when I can see a couple like their heart is armored and they're having a really
difficult time engaging with another their their traumas are emerging, they're being
triggered, their old patterns are coming up and they do what they do.
It's just not working.
And then when they had that breakthrough, and they can have compassion for themselves
in a deeper way, they can have empathy for their partner, they can have a deeper understanding
of why their partner does what they do.
And kind of the heart armor drops for both of them and they connect in a much more loving,
caring, intimate way.
That that brings a huge smile on my face like, wow, okay, that is that is like, awesome.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
It's going to get more and more fun, we'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.