Self-Sabotage: How to Rewire Childhood Beliefs for Lasting Change (with Michael Wood)
Break Free From Negative Self-Talk (The Core Belief Rewrite)
What do hardened maximum security inmates and boardroom leaders have in common? According to Michael Wood, it’s the mind’s struggle for peace and the powerful tools anyone can use to break free. As COO of Jarrett Companies and creator of the “Learn to Love Being You” program, Michael brings both lived experience and a coach’s heart to real-world transformation.
In today’s episode, Michael opens up about the surprising spiritual depth he’s witnessed behind prison doors, why breathwork matters for both inmates and executives, and how to start untangling negative core beliefs that keep us stuck. He shares practical strategies to quiet the never-ending inner chatter, let go of limiting self-identities, and build a new internal script-no matter how intense the pressure. If you’re tired of fighting your own mind and ready for real relief, this conversation delivers actionable tools, hands-on exercises, and a challenge that just might shift your day.
Get ready to rethink self-mastery and discover what’s possible when you stop resisting the present moment and learn to love being you.
Enjoy the episode!
Key Themes
- Breathwork and mindfulness for personal transformation
- Overcoming negative self-talk and core beliefs
- Working with inmates in maximum security prisons
- Masculinity, vulnerability, and emotional expression
- Identity attachments and letting go
- Forgiveness as a daily practice
- Creating positive workplace and personal boundaries
Lessons Learned
1. Understanding Core Beliefs
Learn how childhood experiences create lasting beliefs that shape your emotional reactions and daily life.
2. The Power of Breathwork
Discover accessible breath techniques to shift mental state, reduce anxiety, and quiet internal negativity without external substances.
3. Separating Thought from Self
Practice observing your thoughts as an outside witness to gain control and reduce emotional overwhelm.
4. Letting Go of Attachments
Detach from rigid identities and roles to find freedom, reduce reactivity, and lead with more presence.
5. Rewriting Old Narratives
Use writing and forgiveness exercises to reframe painful memories and stop self-defeating thought loops.
6. Daily Forgiveness Ritual
Embrace small, intentional acts of forgiveness each day to build compassion toward both others and yourself.
7. Setting Healthy Boundaries
Learn simple conversation tools to handle negative people and protect your energy at work and home.
8. Cultivating Self-Love
Treat yourself with the same care and respect you would offer your closest loved ones.
9. Practicing Authentic Living
Align everyday choices with your truest self to reduce misery and increase overall fulfillment.
10. The Ripple Effect of Healing
Recognize how your growth and positive change inspires and uplifts friends, family, and your work environment.
Michael Wood
Mike is a Consciousness Awareness Professional and the creator of the Learn To Love Being You program, a 10-week journey designed to help people break free from anxiety, self-doubt, and the emotional spirals that keep them stuck. After rebuilding his own life from the inside out, Mike has dedicated himself to helping others rewrite the beliefs that shape their reality and reconnect with the part of themselves they forgot they had.
As COO of Jarrett Companies, Mike has led hundreds of high-stakes, emotionally charged conversations-experiences that shaped his direct, no-nonsense approach to personal transformation. He blends spiritual insight, grounded psychology, and a goofy sense of humor to help people open up, relax, and finally breathe.
Whether he’s teaching breathwork in a maximum-security prison, building businesses that actually uplift their people, or guiding someone through a major breakthrough, Mike’s mission is simple: help people remember who they are, unlock what they’re capable of, and actually enjoy being themselves again.
Weekly Challenge Trophy Weekly Challenge
Michael Wood challenges you to forgive at least one person a day for something small. It could be as simple as someone cutting you off in traffic or saying something rude just consciously forgive them. Practicing this simple act daily can spark your journey toward greater self-love and inner peace. If you’re struggling to find someone to forgive, consider starting with yourself for anything you feel you’ve done wrong. This daily forgiveness exercise can be a powerful step in rewiring your mindset and lifting some of the emotional weight you’ve been carrying.
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Get Early Access To The Anxiety Relief ProtocolJason Wilson is a best-selling author and the founder of The Yunion, a Detroit-based non-profit that has served over 17,000 youth since 2003. An expert in Emotional Stability Training®, he also established the Cave of Adullam Transformational Training Academy (CATTA) to build emotional resilience in young men through martial arts and introspection.His work gained international prominence after a viral video led to a presentation at the White House and the award-winning 2022 documentary, Cave of Adullam, produced by Laurence Fishburne. Wilson has over 25 years of martial arts experience and remains dedicated to youth development, his faith, and his family.
The Art of War by Steven Pressfield
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Episode Transcripts
Show notes and transcripts powered with the help of Castmagic. Episode Transcriptions Unedited, Auto-Generated.
Tyson Gaylord [00:00:02]:Welcome to the Social Chameleon show where it’s our goal to help you learn, grow, and transform on your path to becoming legendary. What happens when you combine the intense pressure of a corporate boardroom with the raw reality of a maximum security prison? You get a masterclass in human resilience. Today we’re joined by Michael Wood. He’s a conscious awareness professional, the COO of Jarrett companies, and the architect behind the Learn to love prison being you program. Michael rebuilt his own life from the foundation up. Now he helps leaders and everyday people dismantle anxiety, rewrite their internal scripts, and permanently break free from emotional spirals. We are diving deep into the exact mechanisms of self mastery and exploring how to navigate the heavy friction of personal transformation. If you’re ready, this episode delivers the exact tools you need to stop fighting yourself and step into your true capability and become legendary.
Tyson Gaylord [00:00:58]:Without further ado, let’s welcome Michael. Michael, welcome to the Social Chameleon Show.
Michael Wood [00:01:02]:Thank you for having me on. I greatly appreciate it. Looking forward.
Tyson Gaylord [00:01:05]:No problem. You got an interesting background, interesting story, and I have some questions for you. So as reading through your things, you work with inmates in maximum security prisons. I guess typically with breathwork is what I read about. Can you explain what is that like working with the maximum security prisoner? What is it like for them? Like, the first time guys, how do you facilitate this? Can you just kind of walk us through that whole scenario?
Michael Wood [00:01:30]:Yeah, it was super odd first time I went in there. And so I basically work through the doors. These guys that I’ve been working with are in their cells for 23 hours a day. And I don’t get them in a group, it’s not safe. So it’s basically working with them through the door. So I’m basically standing at a cell door for however long we’re working together. And basically at first, I just kind of go door to door, figure out who’s interested, who’s, you know, who wants to talk. And at first it’s kind of building some trust with some people.
Michael Wood [00:02:02]:And then, you know, when you kind of get a connection with somebody and they like what you’re saying, then I just start delivering tools and see what they want to use, see where they’re at in their life as far as mentally, spiritually. A lot of guys in there, you know, they’re already meditating at, at a very high level. Oh. So I’ve been really surprised with some of the responses that I’ve got from people while I’ve been in there. But some of these guys aren’t getting out. You know, some of them are in there. For one guy, he had been in there for 16 years, you know, so they’ve done some crazy things. But you know, my, my intent was just to try to help somebody.
Michael Wood [00:02:48]:And these guys, they just have more time than anybody else on the planet really to be focused on it. And they, you know, they’re yearning for something to quiet the demons in their head.
Tyson Gaylord [00:03:00]:So especially it sounds like it’s a solitary confinement kind of situation in most of these cases.
Michael Wood [00:03:06]:Yep.
Tyson Gaylord [00:03:07]:So you’re just stuck with your thoughts all day long, which I heard is a form of torture sometimes. So.
Michael Wood [00:03:11]:Yeah, yeah, out in the free world, it’s a, it’s a form of torture for a lot of us. It was for me for about 40 years.
Tyson Gaylord [00:03:20]:I guess it reminds me of that. Is it Pascal or something? Like all of our problems are because we can’t sit still in a room by ourselves? Something along those lines.
Michael Wood [00:03:26]:Yeah, yeah, that’s never been a truer statement, you know, that just fighting the demons in our heads, you know, we wanted to all quiet down to where we can have some peaceful moments. Right.
Tyson Gaylord [00:03:39]:So I guess what I’m thinking about a maximum security prisoner, I’m thinking about like you’re saying, probably a hardened criminal, maybe a guy that just made one bad mistake one night. I. What’s that initial kind of talk or thing? Like, you know, I think this, this woo stuff’s not for me, man. Like going to the next cell or what is that like one of those walls? What are those barriers like?
Michael Wood [00:04:00]:There’s a lot of that, there’s a lot of that. It, it’s really nice when you, when I get what I do, get to connect with somebody who’s open. A lot of folks in there, you know, they turn to the Bible, Christianity. There’s a lot of, there’s a fair share of Muslims in there and there’s a lot of folks that just looking for something, you know. And so what they normally get introduced in the door to door setting is Christianity. And so when I, when I show up, I’m I’m bringing something a little bit different. A lot of what I teach does align really well with Christianity, so there’s no conflict there. But yeah, when you start to explain things to them and you give them an action item and you walk through it with them and they start to feel a change in that moment, you give them a tool that actually works and say, all right man, I’ll be back in two weeks, a month work on this.
Michael Wood [00:04:57]:And I’ll be back and then when you go back. And that’s where it’s been really cool for me when you, when you go back and you’re able to talk to these guys and they just couldn’t wait for, to see me when I came back. And those simple things are changing their lives within the cell. And my major focus with them is really to just focus on the negativity in their minds, learning how to quiet the voices down. I give them some breath work techniques, I give them the breathwork techniques are really the, what I introduce them to because it’s actionable items where they could alter their state of consciousness right now, right? No drugs, no alcohol, no nothing. And you can alter your state of mind. And, and for them it’s, it’s liberating, you know, to be able to do that. And like, for me, I still use a lot of these tools on a daily basis.
Michael Wood [00:05:52]:And when I first learned how to do it, I can only do it for 30 minutes. After practicing, I’m able to maintain a place where I can’t even have a negative thought for up to three hours.
Tyson Gaylord [00:06:02]:Wow.
Michael Wood [00:06:03]:And it’s, it’s liberating. Like, I never thought that was possible. You know, in my 20s, I smoked a lot of weed and have any negative thoughts in that, but it’s, you know, it’s drug induced and you know, and then my 30s came and I couldn’t even be in the same room with somebody if I was smoking weed. And so it’s just at the end of the day, these guys, they feel a sense of liberation, that maybe there is control over what’s going on in their mind. And then you go back and then you, you take it to the next step and you start trying to move identities and you start to teach them about how to remove, you know, rewrite old negative core beliefs. And you just kind of put some steps on top of it and it’s, it’s just liberating for these guys. You see them with some hope, like, hey man, my life is changing. Even though I’m, I’m in these walls still every day they’re, they’re finding a way to find positivity in there.
Tyson Gaylord [00:06:58]:Are you doing like, just some kind of like calming awareness breaths or like a holotropic thing where you’re trying to get to the hallucinated type state? What are you kind of things are you working on?
Michael Wood [00:07:07]:So the, the main one that I’ve been been teaching them and I’ll teach it to, to, to you and your audience, it’s it’s very simple. It’s. It’s a Pramayama breathwork. And basically what you do is you flood yourself with oxygen. And it. The first 10 to 15 minutes, your whole system gets flooded with anxiety. Your body is just like, oh my gosh, make this stop. Your mind’s gonna tell you to quit when you first start doing it, but after about 15 minutes, it’s just poof, all the negativity is gone.
Michael Wood [00:07:41]:Your body starts to get flooded with energy. It starts buzzing, and at about third for the next 10 to 20 minutes, depending on whatever you break through to the other side, you’re just buzzing with energy. And it’s very simple to do it. All you got to do is just inhale through your mouth, fill up your belly, fill up your chest, and exhale through your mo. And if you do that repeatedly, you’re basically flooding yourself with oxygen. You’re hyperventilating, basically. It’s called primiama.
Tyson Gaylord [00:08:20]:Is it similar to what WIM HOF does?
Michael Wood [00:08:22]:Very similar to what does. Okay, he does it and uses it to hold breath and everything. So he doesn’t necessarily, you don’t necessarily hyperventilate with him. You, you get flooded with oxygen and then you hold your breath for extended period of times with the WIM HOF method. And I really enjoy that too. Being able to hold your breath for three minutes is pretty cool.
Tyson Gaylord [00:08:40]:Please don’t do it around water, folks.
Michael Wood [00:08:43]:No, don’t do that. Yeah, if you pass out. Yeah, it’s not a good thing because a lot of times you will pass out. Doing the WIM HOF method. You can.
Tyson Gaylord [00:08:49]:Yes.
Michael Wood [00:08:50]:Yeah. So you’ve done it?
Tyson Gaylord [00:08:51]:I have, yes.
Michael Wood [00:08:52]:Huh.
Tyson Gaylord [00:08:52]:I’m familiar.
Michael Wood [00:08:53]:Yeah. Very, it’s very cool for everyone. But yeah, that state, once. It, once you get yourself 10 to 15 minutes into this process, it, man, you just literally, you have zero fearful thoughts. You’re. You’re in a, in a state of mind that isn’t like a drug induced state where you’re like, oh my gosh, where am I? What am I doing? But you’re, you’re in a state where the negative voices that haunt us all day long, they’re just gone and you just have clean, clear thoughts and you could, you can just kind of exist for a little while without any of it. It kind of just lets you know what the true self is. Because the true self, in my opinion is, is, it’s, it’s completely patient.
Michael Wood [00:09:42]:Like you mentioned earlier, you’re able to just sit in a chair and not do Anything. Right. Self could sit in the chair and not worry about anything. And that breathing technique, it gives us all a short window and a glimpse of what it actually feels like without all the noise in our heads.
Tyson Gaylord [00:10:02]:It’s interesting when I. When I’ve done it and I do it, I guess my self talk isn’t negative, but my brain’s just going 5,000 miles an hour. There’s 45 different ideas at the same time. Can I connect things together? So when I do it, I just get that quietness period. Like chatter stops and the ideas kind of stop. The task list goes away, you know, so. But you keep talking about negativity. What.
Tyson Gaylord [00:10:27]:What are we. I guess, what is your experience with that? What is. What is kind of happening? Why. Maybe some people have that not. And is it kind of similar to what I’m experiencing where my brain just quiets down a little bit? Is that kind of. Are we talking about the same thing there?
Michael Wood [00:10:39]:We’re talking about the exact same thing. And what I’d say is, you’re. If I’m just referencing you for a second, what I would say. It’s a very common thing for us to do is our brain is going to constantly roll because it doesn’t want to sit in the present moment. It’s worried that fear from the past, negative emotions from the past are going to show up. So a lot of folks, especially men, will develop to do lists. Very, very, very proactive, Very doing things. I got to be doing everything.
Michael Wood [00:11:12]:My boss is that way. His garage is immaculately in place, and he just loves to go out there and reorganize it because it keeps his brain moving to where it doesn’t settle in because then the. You know, the demons stay at bay for most people who are struggling with anxiety and depression, which is why I created a program, why I’m on your show, to kind of talk about this. Right. Is they’re. They’re struggling with the negative voices. They’re haunting them. And in the.
Michael Wood [00:11:39]:In the regular life, they’re miserable. And that is the noise that I’m tempting to. To. To quiet on down, you know, and you’re doing similar things because, you know, it is nice to be able to relax and not think about all those things. You know, the. The endless noise in your head saying, I got to do this, I got to do that.
Tyson Gaylord [00:12:02]:Can.
Michael Wood [00:12:03]:Can be just as challenging as negative thoughts about your worth and being lovable, intelligent, ugly, all the things.
Tyson Gaylord [00:12:14]:Right? Yeah. Because I also can get stuck in a little bit of a loop of all the Things I also haven’t done yet and things I should have been doing. You know, those different things. And I know on the past episode we talked about the word should. I’m still working on kind of eliminating that from. From my vocabulary there. But that’s like you’re saying. It’s just like my son.
Tyson Gaylord [00:12:30]:He’s like, dad, you’re always looking to solve problems. Like, you’re constantly. You’re Everywhere you’re going, you’re looking to solve problems. I was like, I never thought about that. But apparently that’s just what I do. I’m looking to solve problems all day long. So it’s always. My brain is always churning.
Tyson Gaylord [00:12:43]:And I noticed, like back to my son, what you said kind of triggers something. I forget what we were doing, but we had done something. I had seen it happening. I had analyzed the situation and had already come up with a solution. And my son’s like, I haven’t even finished thinking about what just happened. And he’s like, you’ve already come up with a solution for it. He’s like, your brain just. He’s like, it’s a different level.
Tyson Gaylord [00:13:00]:You got to stop.
Michael Wood [00:13:01]:Yeah, yeah, it’s. It’s a beautiful brain. But the way that the mystics and the yogis talk about it is we should be able to use it as a tool and put it on the shelf.
Tyson Gaylord [00:13:14]:The shelf part is hard.
Michael Wood [00:13:16]:Yeah. And that’s the part of life that we all need. You know, everybody talks about all the things you need to survive. We got to have water, we got to have air, we got to have food. You know, we got to have all those things survive. But there’s one more that nobody talks about, and that’s sleep. We have to be able to turn our brain off and let it recharge. Because all of that energy that we’re using, if it just goes on and on and on seven days later, we will go crazy and eventually die because of what happens in our brain if we don’t allow it to relax.
Tyson Gaylord [00:13:51]:I’m good about going to sleep even though my brain goes wild. But the second I wake up, my brain’s like, let’s go. And we got 400 tasks to do. However, my wife and my son, they have the opposite problem. They have a hard time going to sleep because as soon as they lay down, it’s like, ah, let’s talk for a second here and have all these thoughts in head to just. Just go, go. And I try to coach my wife and my son through kind of like letting that go. But for me, I’m like, I don’t talk about easy for me because I don’t experience such a problem.
Tyson Gaylord [00:14:17]:But I do know what you’re saying, you know, there is, you know, so much sleep is such a huge problem. I think in this country, especially if not just most of the western world where we just go, go, go, we have so many things we want to do, our schedules are overpacked, so on and so forth.
Michael Wood [00:14:31]:Yes, challenging. You know, we. And it’s especially. Well, it’s the same for both but like predominantly like for men, our worth is judged based off of what we produce. Right. Like if we’re not getting after it, you know, we’re not being measured, you know, up to this, up to par. So yeah, it makes a lot of sense for men especially. And I’m not saying women don’t have the same deal with the same problem.
Michael Wood [00:15:01]:But yeah, we’re not. If we’re not bringing in the money, we’re not taking care of things, you know, we’re. Our self worth is going to be extremely low.
Tyson Gaylord [00:15:12]:Yeah, it reminds me of this book shoot. Something about men don’t crash, something like that. It’s this black author from Detroit. I’m his name slipping me at the moment. I will put it in the show notes for you guys. He’s got a great series. I think it’s like three books about men. Getting in touch with that.
Tyson Gaylord [00:15:27]:And he said when he was that hard charging kind of guy when he was younger and he would lay down on the couch, he’s like, I just need a quick nap. He said I’d be laying there trying to take a nap and my wife would come in and said I feel guilty. And I’d immediately jump up and I got more stuff to go do.
Michael Wood [00:15:40]:Yeah.
Tyson Gaylord [00:15:40]:But I started thinking about those. Like I, I feel the same way, you know, like, you know, I just want to sit down for a second, let me just kind of close my eyes. And then somebody will come in the house and oh crap, I feel like I’m caught not doing and I should be doing something else. At least, at least. Sometimes I think about it, I’m like, I should be showing my family, look, this is what you should be doing. Like I should be the example, I shouldn’t be laying here. But I also then I tell them at the same time, listen, go take a nap, take a second off. You know, 15 minutes is fine.
Tyson Gaylord [00:16:07]:But then when I do it, I feel guilty.
Michael Wood [00:16:09]:Yeah, it’s not, it’s not fair. We have to be able to Learn to love ourselves the same way I love our kids. Because you’ll tell your kid to go take a nap, right? That’s unconditional love. You’re not judging him that, that way. Other than that same standard that you’re judging yourself. It’s very common for men to just suppress all this stuff, just to push it down and never deal with it. You know, you just rub some dirt on it, get back in the game and you know the people with depression, men versus women. Women identify and talk about it 12% higher.
Michael Wood [00:16:42]:24% of all women associate and basically say they have anxiety or depression. Both men Is, it’s about 12 points lower, about half of that. But men are killing themselves, committing suicide. 80% of the all men, all of the suicides are men. So men aren’t suffering less by the numbers. They’re just suffering in silence. And it’s, it’s really sad that because we just, we have these programs that say we have to be a man, we have to live up to these standards. And the whole time we’re, we’re suffering and it’s, it’s tough.
Tyson Gaylord [00:17:19]:I heard a part of that is women have girlfriends to talk to that it’s okay to say those things to versus men typically don’t have a friend or person they can express. Like, I’m, I’m depressed. I’m having a hard time. I’m thinking about killing myself. Is that something you experience or how do you think about that or see that?
Michael Wood [00:17:34]:So I see it the same way because. But I think women are just much more in touch with their feelings and willing to speak about it to anyone. I think there’s situations where men are suffering and they have somebody close to them that they probably could say something to, but they’re scared to even do it. You know, it shows that we’re weak. And just like you, don’t you feel like you have to get up off that couch and be active? It’s the same thing where men are. Put themselves, holding themselves to an unwritten standard that says if I’m not performing, I’m not going to get loved. Nobody’s going to love me or nobody’s going to value me if I’m, if I show weakness, if I’m not performing. And it’s just not the way that it should be.
Michael Wood [00:18:24]:But you know, it’s, it’s the environment that we’re living in. We just, we have to, as men, we have to start opening up and use words like love and compassion and speak with compassion, forgiveness, you know, and, and I think we could, we could change it, but it’s just one person at a time opening up a little bit.
Tyson Gaylord [00:18:44]:Are you seeing this as mostly a American thing, a Western thing? How with that, is this worldwide with men? How do you see these? Have experience with that?
Michael Wood [00:18:53]:Do you see anything? Yeah, I do feel like it’s. It’s a little more United States than ever, but I, I think it’s. It’s just slightly less, you know, the rest of the world’s a little less macho, bravado type folks. But like, so, like with my program and you know, it’s called learn to love being you, but not a lot of men are logging in and say, I want to take a course. Learn to love being you.
Tyson Gaylord [00:19:23]:If they’re doing it, they’re probably in the closet and they don’t want nobody to know they’re on there.
Michael Wood [00:19:26]:Right, Exactly. Yeah.
Tyson Gaylord [00:19:27]:Incognito browser. My wife’s not going to see my history.
Michael Wood [00:19:30]:Yeah, it’s kind of sad to me, but it’s all the labels. It’s all the, you know, one of the things that’s in my program, we talk about it, is identities. So anything that we identify with the subconscious mind will hold onto that and protect it as if it’s the true self.
Tyson Gaylord [00:19:48]:The I am statements, is that what you’re referring to?
Michael Wood [00:19:50]:Yeah, those I am statements, like I am a COO or I am a dad, I am a, you know, a brother or a son. And then if I’m identifying as a. Just use it as an example. A CEO of the company that I work for. If somebody walks into my office and starts challenging the way the company is being ran and something that’s happening. If I have an attachment to being a CEO, my first response is going to come from my belly. It’s going to be an involuntary response and it’s going to be an attack on them, like I’m being attacked, so I better fight back. And I’m going to challenge them and feel like I’m being attacked.
Michael Wood [00:20:26]:But if I remove that attachment as a coo, which I have done now, somebody comes in my office, I simply say, all right, sit down, let’s talk about this. Where are you coming from? Help me understand so we can, we can get better not feeling attacked. The attack on me as a coo, it. It’s non existent. Just like if they walked in and they said, mike, you’re the shittiest attorney that I have ever met. I’m like, dude, I’m not an attorney. I don’t Care. And so when we get rid of some of these attachments.
Michael Wood [00:20:54]:But back to the men thing, like, if we can get rid of some of the attachments to being a man, to being strong, to being some of these things, it will free men up from some of this stuff. That’s involuntary because that’s what it is. You know, it’s. It’s involuntary. It’s coming. An involuntary reaction that’s coming from our gut.
Tyson Gaylord [00:21:19]:I just lost my train of thought there. Shoot. Oh, belief systems. These are belief systems. Probably talked about somebody else that loved us dearly and gave us this. How are we breaking that?
Michael Wood [00:21:28]:So it’s very simple. I actually started doing this with my son. So he’s. He’s 11 years old now, but. And he goes to a special school for kids with learning disabilities. So he has the same rare form of dyslexia that I do. I couldn’t. When I graduated high school, I was reading at about a second grade reading level, and I had a rare form of dyslexia.
Michael Wood [00:21:53]:And it went undiagnosed. When we were going to school, folks weren’t talking about dyslexia and there wasn’t folks. And so nowadays there is. So long story short, my son, he’s carrying the same badge there, and he’s going to a school and he starts coming home and he’s really upset about soccer, right? I realized that he’s playing soccer with all these older kids. So he’s in a very small school. So he’s playing with kids, 12th graders, all the way down to kindergartners. And he’s like in first grade and they’re all having fun at first, but then he comes home, he starts practicing. I’m going to be a good soccer player.
Michael Wood [00:22:30]:I’m this on that. And so now he attaches that statement to soccer. Coming home every day now crying. You know, these guys are being mean. They’re not doing this. And now it’s all this negative stuff. He stopped just playing soccer and started getting feeling attacked, like his system, because he’s attached to I am a good soccer player, to his Christmas tree. So he put an ornament on there, said, I’m a good soccer player.
Michael Wood [00:22:57]:And now his, his, his system was defending that as if that was part of the tree. And the whole time it was just an ornament on the tree. So we carried it. He ended up removing it. And all you have to do to remove it. It’s so simple. Identities can go on and off just like that. All you have to do is Say, I’m not a soccer player.
Michael Wood [00:23:17]:I don’t. I’m not a good soccer player or a bad soccer player. I just play soccer. And then, boom, it’s gone. Now you can just go play soccer and it’s gone, but you can put it on just as fast. And we have to be careful with our words because we’re casting spells to our system every time we speak and we say the I am statements. The beautiful part for me watching him and helping him was when he started coming home saying, I’m dumb because I can’t read. Oh.
Michael Wood [00:23:47]:And we walked through a whole system. I taught him some breathing techniques because he would get overwhelmed with emotion once he got triggered because it was involuntary. So he would. We worked up a system. He would raise his hand, hey, I need to go to the bathroom. So he’d go to the bathroom, spend five minutes in the bathroom, 10 minutes in the bathroom, and he would do box breathing. Once he was able to calm his system down and get it to where the system was safe, where he wasn’t hyperventilating, snot not coming out of his nose, because he’d have full on, you know, emotional breakouts. And then what he would just sit in the bathroom and say three or four times is, I’m not a good reader or a bad reader.
Michael Wood [00:24:26]:I just read. And he would say that over and over until his system just goes, okay. Nothing that just happened mattered because I’m not a good reader or a bad reader. And he would just go right back into class, sit down and be good. And the guys that were snickering and got in trouble for making fun of him or whatever, the teacher got onto him, and now he’s coming back in there, and now he just feels bad for them, that they were upset because they hurt his feelings, but all that other stuff was gone because he wasn’t having a physical reaction to it, you know, and that’s just the thing. But it’s so easy for him to put it back on there because he’s gonna have to read again. And, you know, so he has to constantly. He almost has to do maintenance on that a lot.
Michael Wood [00:25:06]:But it’s such a beautiful thing, me, to be able to teach my kid, because when I went through school, I just had to act like I could. And then when they forced me to read out loud, it was just embarrassing. And I would hide from class to class, try to hide behind the kid in front of me. And teachers.
Tyson Gaylord [00:25:21]:Yeah, I wasn’t a good reader either, so I know what you’re saying. I’ll be counting people like are we gonna get to me before I have to read this paragraph? And I would practice. I know what you’re saying.
Michael Wood [00:25:30]:Yeah, it’s terrible, but it leaves a lot of old negative core beliefs which is, which is actually the reason I, I created the program that I have is because I learned how to go back to that five year old that where I actually mine started in kindergarten when I couldn’t spell my name and go back and rewrite those at their core, reframe the whole situation with compassion, love and forgiveness. And then the subconscious mind doesn’t hold on to it anymore, which is a whole nother part of the healing process. Those are just much deeper pain. Like a lot of the folks when we were talking about the negative thoughts in our heads. Most of those negative thoughts come from old negative core beliefs that were created in our childhood. Right. Well we don’t even know they’re there, you know. So for me, even though I learned how to read when I was 25 years old, I had any time I would try to do anything new or get in an uncomfortable environment.
Michael Wood [00:26:25]:The noise in my head was telling me I was stupid, I’m dumb. You can’t do this. They’re going to figure you out. You’re a fraud. Why are you even trying to do this? You know you can’t do this. And it was all just coming from a five year old who was made to feel the way my son was feeling in those moments. And, and it, the subconscious mind’s number one job is, is to protect us. And so it’s constantly scanning for those threats.
Michael Wood [00:26:52]:So whenever I get into a stressful situation, high pressure situation, now it’s basically autopilot scanning. My brain’s getting just filled up with all the negative thoughts all day long about how hey, you’re gonna fail, they’re gonna figure you out, you’re stupid, you’re not smart enough to do this. You know, logically it’s a lie, but you think that it’s because it’s your thoughts that, that it’s you. And it’s like you believe them, you get bought into them. It’s lie, like it’s none of it’s the truth, it’s just, it’s just regurgitated programs written by five year old, right
Tyson Gaylord [00:27:32]:from like I said earlier, probably somebody that loved you very dearly that was just trying to help you.
Michael Wood [00:27:36]:Yes, yes, I tell people too.
Tyson Gaylord [00:27:38]:I was like imagine that self talk like say that out loud to somebody else and you see how ridiculous you Sound. You would never allow that. But to ourself, we believe it. Whole hook, line and sinker.
Michael Wood [00:27:49]:Yep.
Tyson Gaylord [00:27:51]:With those. Sorry. I want to go back to what you’re kind of saying about your son or at least just the framework there where you’re saying, I am a reader. What about making like a future kind of statement like, I’m getting good at reading, I’m getting better at reading. I’m getting. I’m working on becoming better at soccer. Is that something as well, some type of future statement?
Michael Wood [00:28:10]:Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You can get very creative, right? You can get very creative because, you know, if you’re working on it and you. And that’s a true statement, whatever feels right. The only thing that I would say is it just needs to be positive. It cannot be a negative statement. Anything negative is going to.
Michael Wood [00:28:27]:Is going to create a program because then the subconscious mind is going to grab on. As long as it’s a positive statement, you’re in. You’re in good territory.
Tyson Gaylord [00:28:35]:Okay. Yeah, I just was thinking about that and I like your analogy of a Christmas tree. I think that’s a nice visual. We can all start with. So with that as well, you know, let’s say you had a pretty full Christmas tree. We’re talking about earlier, you know, kind of letting some of these go. Is there a. Is there a danger in like letting go too much and becoming, for lack of a better word, too soft or too naked as a Christmas tree?
Michael Wood [00:28:58]:Man, I’ll tell you no. The answer is no. And I’ll give you a quick story. So the first time I started doing this, I read a book and I started removing things off on. And I removed being a Titans football fan and politics. And they were both causing me pain, the Titans. So you know how it goes. You’re mad every.
Michael Wood [00:29:17]:Every Sunday and then carries over into Monday, Tuesday and then false hope into the week. And then when they lose in the playoffs, of course you’re miserable for the rest of the year. But that one. So that one, I’m able to watch football. I still love football, but I just, I don’t have any physical reaction to whether they lose or not. That was great. So. And then getting politics off my, my Christmas tree, that was an amazing one because that was instant.
Michael Wood [00:29:44]:I was going home every night watching local news, watching the. All the pundits talking about this and that. And it was also negative. Like, my life got so positive and happy. Fast forward about a year and a half and I knew how powerful this was because it changed my life. Well, I have this program that I have now, and I’m like, I need to put this in there. This needs to be in there. And the first person that went through my program, she took everything off, right? She took me in a good daughter off being a good dog, mom, being a good friend.
Michael Wood [00:30:13]:I mean, she just went like a beast and started taking off everything. And I was like, holy moly, I gotta step my game up. Like, you just completely showed me up. I just got dunked on here. Like, this is not okay. So then I went back and that’s when I started taking off my job title. My being a good dad, being a good husband, being just a good grandfather. And it literally changed everything in my life.
Michael Wood [00:30:39]:Like my. The quality of an employee that I was because my title was gone, especially as the boss of 300 people. You know, my ability to be able to process a situation without those attachments to what was going on, be able to take responsibility. Right. So I’ll give you a quick example of how it really helps. So we had a fire. Fire suppression company and it was about three years in, and we flooded a high rise building, about a million dollar claim, really bad. Yeah, if we kept doing that, we would have been out of business in that.
Michael Wood [00:31:14]:That part of our business because we’d be uninsurable. And so we got to come up with solutions here. We got to fix this moving forward. And so I call all these sprinkler people in. I’ve never hung a sprinkler head in my life. And I know that I have to come up with a way to make this my fault. Right? And so I go into. I sit and I stretch out.
Michael Wood [00:31:34]:All right, I got it. I go into the meeting and I. The first thing I say, guys, there’s about nine sprinkler men in there, right? A lot of these guys are roughnecks and going there and I’m like, hey, guys, this is my fault. I want everybody to understand that this is 100% my fault that this happened. And they’re like, no, this ain’t your file, Mike. As a little. Listen, hear me out. We’ve been doing this for three years.
Michael Wood [00:31:55]:How much training has anyone received on anything formal training to do sprinkler work? They said none. I said, that is my fault as the leader here. And then we moved on. And I was like, all right, how many sure. Off tools are in all of our trucks? A tool that could have prevented this flood is like one or two. I said, we should have had one in every single truck. And that is my Fault. I should have had enough foresight to work through some of these.
Michael Wood [00:32:22]:And then they all, like, one after another because I didn’t have any problem saying it was all my fault because I didn’t have any attachments to that in my. On my Christmas tree. They all just started popping up and saying, hey, Mike, that wasn’t your fault. I could have done A, B, and C. And then the next guy would go, you know what? I could have done this, this, and this. And before you know it, we have a whole room full of guys saying, hey, what? They could have done better. We had solutions. We started a new training program.
Michael Wood [00:32:51]:We did. We did all that, all these things. And we would go another almost 10 years and not have a really large flood again, right? So it. Removing those attachments, that ornament from my tree made me a better boss. It allowed that room to come up with solutions instead of people pointing at each other. And you know what happens in a lot of other places, but it works in everything. It made me a better husband. You know, I didn’t tell my wife I took being a husband off my Christmas tree because it probably would have hurt her feelings.
Michael Wood [00:33:28]:She didn’t understand it. But when she would call me with anything now, any problem that we would have in our relationship, I wouldn’t feel like you felt when you had to get off that couch.
Tyson Gaylord [00:33:38]:Right?
Michael Wood [00:33:38]:Cool response. Like, oh, something’s wrong. I gotta defend it. I gotta do this. No, I’m just able to sit there and go, all right, baby, tell me what’s going on. Help me understand so I can make you feel better. I can understand the problem. What can I do to make it right? I don’t feel a need to defend anything, because there’s nothing to defend.
Tyson Gaylord [00:33:54]:Right.
Michael Wood [00:33:55]:You know, I am so much more than a husband. I’m so much more than a coo. I’m so much more than a dad, a grandfather. I’m infinitely more than all of those things, so why should I be identifying with him? It doesn’t mean I’m not a husband. It doesn’t mean that I’m not married. You know what I mean? It actually made me better at everything that I do when I started taking all these things off. It’s liberating.
Tyson Gaylord [00:34:20]:It is. I know that. I. I understand. I’ve experienced some similar things. I’m curious. Well, with when. When this lady strips her Christmas tree, and then you’re looking at that, saying, why couldn’t I do? Why didn’t I do that? Is that because of a safety thing? Like you feel like if I take too much ornaments off, if I take a little bit too many of these lights down, I’m not Mike anymore.
Tyson Gaylord [00:34:41]:Is that something that.
Michael Wood [00:34:42]:Yeah, the ego’s holding on. Yeah, it’s trying to survive it.
Tyson Gaylord [00:34:47]:Right.
Michael Wood [00:34:47]:The ego wants to live. Right. It thinks it’s. It thinks it’s the boss.
Tyson Gaylord [00:34:53]:Yeah, it does.
Michael Wood [00:34:54]:It doesn’t want. So what happens? Just like as a graduate level type of a thing, when we get rid of old core beliefs and forgive people, we learn to, to bring our attention into the present moment. We learn to quiet the noise in our head and we get to a place where we can’t just sit in a chair and not have any thoughts. What happens is something quiet inside of us starts to talk. You start to connect with things. Like Rick Rubin. He’s probably the most famous producer of all time. He’s worked with everybody, started in his dorm with Run DMC and has worked with everybody from Adele and every major artist over the last 40 years.
Michael Wood [00:35:37]:He has worked with him. And he is not somebody who writes music. He basically gets these, these musicians in a, in a space and helps clear the noise out of their head and let what’s underneath all of that noise come out. And that’s where it’s beautiful. And, and so I say all of that to say when we can get that noise to quiet down, something responds a whole lot more. So when you remove those identities, you’re making space for that thing that’s far more intelligent, far more beautiful, just far more creative. To me, it’s the essence of God that is in all of us. We’re all connected.
Michael Wood [00:36:23]:We’re all of source. Every religion on the planet tells us to look inside us to find God. Well, I believe God’s there speaking all the time. Whatever label you want to put to it, Universe, God, divine, whatever it is. And when we get quiet, we can actually hear it talking. But we can’t hear because everything’s so loud. Everything’s so loud in our head and it’s like God’s trying to talk, whisper to us at a concert, and it’s too loud.
Tyson Gaylord [00:36:51]:That’s a good analogy too. And not to mention not the noise that we all have. Then there’s the constant distraction that we partake in or not it’s there, right? The phones are constantly, the emails, whatever, like we talked about, to kind of start this conversation off. If you’re not having that moment to yourself, to sit in a quiet room alone, you’re not going to hear whatever it is, whether, whether it’s what your body’s telling you, whether it’s what the divine is telling you, whatever it be. Yeah, you need that moment of silence. You need that moment of boredom to just sit there quietly and let kind of the universe speak to you through you and so on.
Michael Wood [00:37:27]:Yeah. It’s beautiful when it happens, right? It’s beautiful when it happens. It started happening to me, and a lot of the coaching sessions that I do, because I would sit in there and I would try to just bring myself into the present moment and not let my ego get in the way. Because when I first started coaching somebody, it was really weird because this isn’t a lifelong thing that I’ve been doing. Kind of went on a spiritual journey here. When I was 45 years old, I was almost suicidal and I turned my focus inward, started meditating, listening to audible books, like five to ten a month. I was just obsessed with just knowledge and. And then at some point, the noise starts, quiet down, and I’m in coaching sessions all of a sudden, and it’s like, wait a minute, what am I doing? Do I even need to be in here? And I.
Michael Wood [00:38:16]:Sometimes I would speak, and I didn’t like what was coming out of my mouth. I was. Because I just wasn’t good at it. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I started just trying to just be present and not think, and all of a sudden, things are coming out of my mouth, and I was like, holy shit. Like, that just landed really well. And I started to realize it wasn’t me. The thinking mind is gonna get in the way.
Michael Wood [00:38:39]:And when you can stay present and something comes from somewhere else, it’s beautiful and it’s brilliant. It’s far more intelligent than. Than I could have ever imagined.
Tyson Gaylord [00:38:51]:Speaking of, I guess that. That moment when your life changed. I mean, everybody loves that, you know, rock bottom to come back. The. The rights to riches. What was. I mean, maybe in the briefings where you found that rock bottom and what was like the very first kind of few steps that got you moving, got you momentum. Not just talking, not just writing this down on a to do list for later on.
Michael Wood [00:39:13]:Yeah. So what happened was, you know, as I went through life, I was miserable from a very early on. Like, I was very riddled with anxiety. Depression was rising as I went through phases, but I always thought the next thing was going to make me happy, you know, So I kept working hard, working hard. I worked my ass off and everything that I did to overcome thoughts that I was dumb, but also to get that Next thing that I thought was going to make me happy. And so I got the wife, I got the house. I got her to stay home. I made enough money where she didn’t have to work.
Michael Wood [00:39:54]:And every time, it felt good for maybe a week or a month. And then it all came back, right? All the noise. And every time, it got a little bit louder. So I had to go get something else now. Now I got to go make more money. Now I got to go do this. And at 45 years old, I was working with a company I still am. And we went through this down period where we shot up and we got rocky, right? We were growing too fast, and, excuse me, I had to basically dive in and go backwards.
Michael Wood [00:40:30]:We had to contract one of our divisions, and we had to just basically do an autopsy on everything. And so for about six months, I was working 90 to 100 hours a week. Yeah, it was. It was very intense because I thought we were going to go bankrupt if our line of credit wasn’t high enough or we lost just a little bit more money through that phase. Like, this company was going bankrupt, and we’re doing. We got it up to almost $100 million and sold one of our divisions. So now we’re about $70 million. And all of that could have been gone.
Michael Wood [00:40:57]:It was. It was right on the edge of collat. And so I’m busting my butt, and we’re having success. Like, the things that we’re fixing. These are solid things. Like, we’re fixing the whole thing. And we get to. I get to the end of this, and I’m looking around one day, and I realize, holy, there’s nothing left for me to fix.
Michael Wood [00:41:14]:Like, I went from working 90, 100 hours a week to nothing. Like, and I’m staring around, and I’m. I’m left with my thoughts, and they just got loud. I mean, dude, Tyson, they were as loud as they’d ever been in my life. And I had been living with anxiety and depression my whole life, and it was. It was deafening. Like, everything was my fault. Everything that we just went through, even though I just fixed it, it was all my fault.
Michael Wood [00:41:40]:And the noise was just screaming and. And I realized, okay, I fixed all this stuff, and I got all this time on my hands now. Well, I need to be better. I need to be better. I need to do something, one, to quiet this noise because I can’t deal with it. But two, I don’t need to make any of the same mistakes again. So I took all my focus, and I turned it inwards. The first thing that I found was Tony Robbins and everything he was saying was, go inward.
Michael Wood [00:42:03]:And so my brief stint with Tony, as far as some of the videos that we have access to, and then meditation. And once I was able to meditate for about 15 minutes and feel just a euphoric quiet for about five to 10 minutes after a meditation, I was like, holy moly. This. This is. This is what I need. This is. This is telling me this is my direction. It was affirmation that I was pointed in the right direction.
Michael Wood [00:42:31]:And then it just took me on a spiritual journey to where I just kept. I started meditating an hour to two hours a day. I was exploring Reiki healing. Anything that. Any course that I could take, anything that I could do to just learn something new. And it was a vicious two years of going crazy inward, and I experienced a lot of amazing things. I don’t recommend this to everybody, but I took an extremely large amount of psilocybin under controlled environment where you. Yeah, well, yeah.
Michael Wood [00:43:08]:And the way I did it, as I studied the John Hopkins and UCLA studies that they’ve been doing.
Tyson Gaylord [00:43:14]:Yeah.
Michael Wood [00:43:15]:Where you put something over your eyes, you put. Basically what I did is put classical music in my ears. And you just go inward the whole time. You don’t go out into the world with it. You go inward. And it was. It was an okay experience. And it did.
Michael Wood [00:43:29]:It did. It did alter me a little bit, but it just made me calm, more calm, more loving. I don’t know how much it healed, but it did change a perspective for me. But I honestly feel like just the meditation and all the knowledge I was getting because I was consuming five to ten books a month for a very long time, and. And then I found a guy. Because one of the things I started doing was I realized if I took a crystal and I put it in my hand, just hold. Held a crystal in the palm of my hand. I could feel the energy in my hand.
Michael Wood [00:44:03]:I thought it was the crystal at first, but I realized it’s the energy in my hand. I was able to feel the energy in my hand. And when it’s not anything crazy, it’s kind of weird, but I realized when I put that crystal in my hand that. And I focused on that, the noise in my head would stop. It’s like when I’m focused on my hand, I can’t have be focused here and have any thoughts. So it was like this tool that I used all day, every day. I started carrying rocks around. Everybody I was thought it was A weirdo carrying rocks around.
Michael Wood [00:44:34]:And so that really helped me. And. But then I started to get super sensitive. The energies in my hand, it was like when I’m saying that right now my, my hands are lighting up with energy. I could feel them at the energy in my hand. And there was a guy that was advertising energy healing. I didn’t have a clue what the heck it was. I was going to see him.
Michael Wood [00:44:53]:And so I went to go see Chris Hancock and I’ve been going for almost five years now, every week or every other week, depending on our face through there. And he taught me how to go back and find the old things that were haunting me and rewrite it and release them. And so in that process, I got really good at understanding the basic nature of the subconscious mind. How it works, why it works, that there is no different. It doesn’t know the difference between a perceived threat and a real one. It doesn’t know the difference between time. Everything is now. Everything that has ever happened to us has happened in the present moment.
Michael Wood [00:45:33]:And so you start understanding some of these guidelines and how the subconscious mind works, and then you start manipulating things, understanding that subconscious mind’s number one job is to protect us. Okay, so now I don’t need to fight it because when I fight it, when I get mad at it, it would just flare up, you know, so that was really where my journey really took a leaps and bounds. Where my life truly changed is with Chris Hancock sitting on his couch. And he guided me through it and he healed me from a lot of things that was going on in my past. He helped me understand it. He helped me understand just the dynamics of it. And you know, what he is doing is a variation of what the Buddhists have been doing for 2500 years. They understand this very well.
Michael Wood [00:46:21]:And in the process, I actually created a writing exercise that I could do what I do with Chris and what EDMR is, but I created a writing exercise so I could sit down with you and we could go through this and in an hour to an hour and a half, you can go back and re reframe an old core belief from your childhood. And then after the first time you did it, you can take that worksheet that I gave you, that writing exercise, and you can do it like I’ve been doing it once every week or every other week at whatever pace you wanted to for the rest of your life for free. You wouldn’t have to go sit down with Chris and do it. You know, I Bet I’ve spent $20,000 going to Chris. $25,000 going to Chris. I don’t know the exact dollar amount, but it’s. It’s pretty expensive to go. And, you know, it’s a repeated thing now.
Michael Wood [00:47:13]:I go because I enjoy it. I love Chris. He’s a dear friend.
Tyson Gaylord [00:47:16]:Yeah.
Michael Wood [00:47:17]:But I just feel like the world needs to understand all of these simple things. These are all the things we should have been taught in elementary school. Right. And we just. We never were.
Tyson Gaylord [00:47:30]:Is this something that’s in your 10 week program or is this something on the outside somewhere else?
Michael Wood [00:47:35]:Nope, this is in the 10 week program. The reason I created is okay. Is the rewriting of the core beliefs because I basically created a way to rewrite your OR beliefs. It’s. It’s original to okay. And it’s just a simple writing exercise. It’s pretty simple. There are a lot of other methods out there, and they’re very similar.
Michael Wood [00:47:57]:They’re all doing the same thing. Going to the root cause of a. Of a negative core belief that’s haunting us today and just reframing it in a way that the subconscious mind doesn’t need to hold on to it anymore because. Moves it out. What I could say is moving out of the fear bucket, put it in the love bucket. Anything in the fear bucket the subconscious mind is holding on to and then scanning the future for that same potential threat to happen again. And while it’s scanning, it’s causing the same pain in the present moment. But once you take it out of that fear bucket, you reframe a situation with compassion, love, and forgiveness.
Michael Wood [00:48:32]:Instead of fear. The subconscious mind, it doesn’t have anything to protect you from anymore because it’s. The beautiful thing is the subconscious mind has no concept of time. So you could use your imagination right now and go relive any, any memory that you’ve ever had in your entire life and just reframe it with your newfound knowledge and compassion. Love and forgiveness. Forgiveness is the key. And. And it just releases in it.
Michael Wood [00:48:58]:It doesn’t haunt you anymore. It’s. It’s so liberating.
Tyson Gaylord [00:49:01]:I’ve heard about that concept with some PTSD research that they’ve been doing. Going back and reliving that, that traumatic event and coming up, I guess, coming up with a different ending or resolution or whatever. I don’t know the exact details of that ending part, but I have heard about that. Can you. Can we get a question or two? I’ll answer them, I guess, the best of my ability.
Michael Wood [00:49:24]:Whatever you want, brother. I am yours.
Tyson Gaylord [00:49:27]:I Just want, I want the listeners out there to. I get the muscles in the brain moving, letting the fluids going, like. Yeah, can you, you know, question or two, Whatever you feel like. And that’s. I guess I kind of want to see what this is like and what you’re talking about.
Michael Wood [00:49:39]:Sure, sure. So are you wanting me to ask you or.
Tyson Gaylord [00:49:45]:Yeah, yeah, I’ll be the guinea pig.
Michael Wood [00:49:47]:All right, beautiful.
Tyson Gaylord [00:49:48]:Let’s go that way everybody can hear the question and then I’ll answer it in my way. And then at home you guys answered in your way. Whatever the answer to the question is and whatever I get right or wrong, we can all learn from this.
Michael Wood [00:49:59]:All right, so let’s just, you know, I’m just basically take you through a core belief. That’s okay.
Tyson Gaylord [00:50:05]:Yeah, let’s go.
Michael Wood [00:50:06]:All right, so I want you to just think, Tyson, go back in your own life. Think about anything that was traumatic from your childhood. Think about anything that. Because the way a subconscious core belief was created was you had to get into an elevated emotional state with a clear intention. So in the clear intention is going to be however you felt in that emotion. So for me, before I answer your question, because it probably will. One will come up for you. Yeah.
Michael Wood [00:50:41]:So when I was in kindergarten, my teacher got excited. She was frustrated. She didn’t know why I couldn’t spell Michael and all the other kids at that point. I started to notice when she was frustrated that all the other kids had already spelt their name. And I got into an elevated emotional state. And I was looking around and I started to get excited because my teacher’s getting frustrated because I can’t spell her name. And she said, Mike or she said, just spell Mike. And I was like, okay.
Michael Wood [00:51:13]:And I was able to spell Mike. And in that moment I realized that I wasn’t as smart as the rest of the kids. The emotional attachment that I had to that moment was I wasn’t as smart as everybody. And so now I had a program. From that day on, I had a program. And so the way we fix that is we go back in time. I used my imagination and I went back into that moment and I closed my eyes and I went back in with that imagination. I’m sitting there with my younger self, my five year old self, and I see the teacher and I forgive her because she didn’t understand dyslexia.
Michael Wood [00:51:47]:She had no idea what I was going through. And I forgive her because she didn’t understand. She was troubled and didn’t understand what was going on. And then I Forgive all the other kids because they didn’t understand. And I forgave myself for not processing that information. And now all of a sudden, I was able to release that information, and it didn’t haunt me anymore. So as you take that understanding of what a core belief is, are there any negative memories that you have from your childhood that kind of stand out? Anywhere from 2 to 12 years old, I guess.
Tyson Gaylord [00:52:20]:Like, you’re saying what did trigger is I did have a problem, like, with reading and spelling. I think from what I’ve. What I’ve figured out was I never learned how to read, like, phonetically. I had to memorize everything. So if I come across, even to this day, I’m getting pretty. I’m getting a lot better. I’m getting pretty good at. At it.
Tyson Gaylord [00:52:40]:If. If I. If I’ve come across a word I’ve never seen before and I don’t know how to say it, it makes me super nervous or I have to spell something makes me super nervous. Like, I’ll try. Like. Like, I remember trying to, like, fill out a job application and like, oh, what did you do for thing? I like, how do you spell these words? And now I’m like, well, I got to change a whole sentence around because I don’t know how to spell a word.
Michael Wood [00:53:00]:You and I walk the same path, brother.
Tyson Gaylord [00:53:03]:Yeah, but I. I know how to read. Like, not to diminish anything.
Michael Wood [00:53:07]:You.
Tyson Gaylord [00:53:07]:I don’t have dyslexia or anything like that or whatever. Just. I didn’t know how to read, so. But I was. I was good at memorizing words, so I got by because I could memorize a lot. But when it came to things, I didn’t know if I ever saw it before, man, it just. It just. Even this day, it makes me kind of sweaty and clammy.
Tyson Gaylord [00:53:22]:Like, oh, I’m so trying to work past it.
Michael Wood [00:53:27]:When was the first time you remember that happening?
Tyson Gaylord [00:53:32]:I want to say I might have been in, like, second or third grade. So I had. I had lived in. I don’t know if it was Virginia or Georgia something. I was really little. My dad was in the military. And then I moved back to Hawaii. I was born there.
Tyson Gaylord [00:53:43]:We moved for a little bit. So where I went to, I think it was kindergarten and first grade and a little bit of second grade, we were taught to memorize. When I went back to Hawaii, they taught phonetics. So I remember being in class and the teachers like, hey, you don’t know how to read is. They know I know how to reach. They Know, but you can’t stand up the word. You know how to read. And then I had to go to like a remedial class and mind you, this felt crappy because I was in advanced classes.
Michael Wood [00:54:04]:Yeah.
Tyson Gaylord [00:54:05]:So I was like, okay, now I’m going down with these guys, but I’m on the top of these other guys. I remember that kind of moment where I kind of got called out. We’re not knowing how to read.
Michael Wood [00:54:14]:That’s your moment. Yeah, that’s your moment. So in that moment, can you remember the exact moment when they told you you had to go back down to that class?
Tyson Gaylord [00:54:23]:I want to say yes. I kind of, I kind of vaguely remember and kind of feeling being there and being kind of like, I feel like everybody’s looking at me like, how can you not know how to read? Like, but you’re in advanced math class. And then like, what? But what do you.
Michael Wood [00:54:37]:Like what? Yep.
Tyson Gaylord [00:54:39]:So the teacher, I don’t, I.
Michael Wood [00:54:41]:She was, I don’t want to say
Tyson Gaylord [00:54:42]:she teased me, but she definitely made me feel a certain kind of way. I can’t quite remember what it was, but it, I definitely still kind of have a little tiny bit of that feeling.
Michael Wood [00:54:49]:Yeah. So in that moment, you got into an elevated state saying, what’s going on?
Tyson Gaylord [00:54:54]:So embarrassing too, with all the kids around and your peers.
Michael Wood [00:54:59]:So what I’ve learned through all this, because I’ve done over 200 of these on myself and I’m, I’m well past that with other people now. And they all funnel into four major categories. Stupid, ugly, unworthy, and unlovable.
Tyson Gaylord [00:55:18]:Okay.
Michael Wood [00:55:19]:So it doesn’t matter what you’re feeling, that’s going to funnel into one of those. Right. Feeling ashamed, not smart enough. And so if I was sitting down and we were going to rewrite a core belief right now, I would basically, what we would have to do is you’d have to basically identify that exact moment. Who was in the room, Were your parents in the room, teachers in the room, who was in there? Because you have to forgive everybody in the room. All right, so what we would do is I would ask you to close your eyes, go back to that moment and basically relive it for a second. Because you need to be able to tap in to how you felt. Because now we’ve identified where it got created.
Michael Wood [00:56:03]:Right now we’re down within a 24 hour period of when that thing got created. And that’s how you rewrite it. You got to go back to that moment. It happened in the present moment. You have to Go back to that present moment to rewrite it, which is a beautiful thing once you understand it. So now that we understand that we’re going back to that moment, the next really important part of this is you have to understand all the emotions. How old were you when that happened?
Tyson Gaylord [00:56:29]:I don’t. I don’t know. I guess 8 to 10. Somewhere in that range. Whatever, whatever, like second or third grade is. I don’t know.
Michael Wood [00:56:37]:All right, so we’ll just say eight. But your subconscious mind will know exactly where you’re at.
Tyson Gaylord [00:56:41]:Right.
Michael Wood [00:56:41]:Right now you’re at 8. You’re in that room with. With your parents and that teacher telling you or making you feel like you’re not as smart as everybody else. In general. General terms, how did it make you feel? And what we would do is we would write down every single one of the ways that it made you feel. It made you feel dumb, made you feel embarrassed, made you feel ashamed, made you feel maybe unworthy, made you feel a handful of things. And then what we would do is we’d say, all right, when I was eight years old, I had an old negative core belief that was created, and it made me feel unworthy, dumb, ashamed. Name all of those negative core beliefs, and you say, I’ve lived BY that for 35 years, and it no longer serves me.
Michael Wood [00:57:35]:Then you come down and you’re going to write a new core belief, and we’re going to say, all right, now my new core belief is, and you’re going to take every one of those negatives and you’re going to write the opposite of it. My old. My new core belief is that I am intelligent, that I am worthy of love intelligence. I am. I am worthy. And basically you’re going to take and write positives to each one of those opposites, and then you’re going to. Basically, the next phase of it is go. And I want to forgive my teacher for not understanding how I was learning.
Michael Wood [00:58:11]:I was memorizing words. And now she wanted to teach me a different way. And she didn’t understand because that’s how she was taught to teach. And she didn’t understand that that was causing me pain in that moment. And she didn’t know how to relate to me. And I forgive her for that. And then you can forgive your parents for them not articulating it, making you feel comforted, making you feel a certain way. Not that you had bad parents, but there’s a negative connotation there when they’re your protector, right? So you forgive them, and then you forgive Yourself, you’re like, you know what? I went through all that.
Michael Wood [00:58:43]:That was really silly. I’m clearly intelligent, you know, and I just didn’t know how to process that information. And so now, all of a sudden, that memory just went into the love bucket. Subconscious mind doesn’t have to hold on to it. And now when you’re doing things in your days, today, that’s not coming back and haunting you. Now, here’s a very important thing that I want everybody to know, is if you have an incident that happened one time, you can go back one time and make it go away, right? But for me, my first time in kindergarten wasn’t the first time I created a core belief surrounding my not being able to read in my intelligence. So I had to go back 20, 30 times and find a bunch of them and rewrite all of them to be able to get all of that one issue gone. So we can only go back and rewrite what we can remember and bring back to that day.
Michael Wood [00:59:46]:And the beautiful thing about the subconscious mind is that you’re probably not gonna remember most of anything, right? You’re gonna remember a little bit here, a little bit there. But when you go back and you do one and then you do another, boom, here comes all these memories. Your subconscious mind is gonna go, man, I’ve been tired of holding on to all this, and I’m really glad you’re doing this. Here’s another one. Because it doesn’t a lot of it. I see this a lot with men, but it happens with women, too. When. When we have something really bad that happened to us.
Michael Wood [01:00:15]:The subconscious mind’s number one job is to protect us. So let’s remember that. It’ll cut off our memory. You won’t even be able to access it. Some people can’t remember anything that happened to them in their entire childhood. There’s a complete wall up, and they can’t remember anything negative that has happened. And so you start at 18 years old, and then they’ll. It’ll open up a little, and it’ll open up a little more.
Michael Wood [01:00:39]:And then you start. Things start to pop in and you start to remember them. And it’s kind of scary because, you know, you don’t know what’s on the other side of that curtain. You’re 35 years old, and you got a whole wall of your childhood that’s hidden from you. And a lot of people are scared to open that door. It takes a lot of courage to pull back that curtain and face each one of them, but it is Liberating when you do face it and make it go away. So now at least you know you have a tool. If you do face it, you know what to do with it.
Michael Wood [01:01:08]:But it’s, it’s, it’s very scary.
Tyson Gaylord [01:01:12]:Yeah, I know what you’re saying, but, but I think if you can get past the scary part, for me personally, it’s like you’re saying it’s very liberating when you’re like, okay, like, huh? I don’t have to be the guy that can’t spell. I don’t have to be the guy that doesn’t read good. I don’t have to be the guy that can’t read out loud. Like, and then you get stuck in that, like we talked about so much earlier. And that’s the thing kind of about when I started doing the podcast, I was like, oh, I gotta read out loud. I gotta read intros and stuff. And, and, and I, at first I was like, oh, I’m not good at this. Okay, I practice.
Tyson Gaylord [01:01:43]:And, and then I was like, wait, what am I doing to myself? No, I gotta be like, you know what I was doing was like, I’m getting better at reading out loud. I’m working on being a great person, a great out loud reader. You know, I’m working on my presentation skills and, and you know, and that’s what I. So I had to frame it. And then, and then when you do that, it’s so weird because like, you’re like, oh, like I’m so calm now. Like, this is not scary anymore even. I’m just talking to myself reading a Google Doc.
Michael Wood [01:02:10]:Yeah, it’s good because you can. So there’s multiple ways to program the subconscious mind. And what you’re talking about doing right now is auto suggestion. It’s repeated things over and over and over. That’s how we learn how to drive, that’s how we learn how to walk. That’s how we learn how to talk. So we can program the subconscious mind in multiple ways, but the subconscious mind, it’s extremely strong. You’re not going to rationally talk with it to make it feel better.
Michael Wood [01:02:35]:Now, you could coach yourself into being a good speaker and you still have all that negative stuff over there about your intelligence, but you can overcome it through auto suggestion by training yourself. All right, I’m going to go in this direction. I’m going to fix this and I’m going to overcome this hurdle, which is amazing that you could do that. It’s like the, the rate of people achieving their new Year’s resolutions is like it’s. The success rate is 12%. It’s ridiculous. And it’s because they’re fighting a program. Right, Right.
Michael Wood [01:03:13]:And if the mind tells you to stop, we stop. You know, it’s looking for a reason to tell you you can’t succeed. And it’s when that program is running the same program that’s keeping your heart beating, that’s beating, that’s breathing your, your lungs, that’s that you drive. I don’t know how many times you do it, but I drive home all the time. I don’t even remember driving home.
Tyson Gaylord [01:03:33]:I have no idea where I am sometimes. Like how did I get here?
Michael Wood [01:03:36]:Exactly. But we weren’t unsafe, right? Exactly. On my phone, I was just somewhere else. Mentally.
Tyson Gaylord [01:03:41]:Yes. That, that unconscious confidence. Right. Where you just can flow through.
Michael Wood [01:03:46]:Yeah.
Tyson Gaylord [01:03:46]:These, these tasks and I, I do feel a little bit better now. My car is self drive so I’m like, oh, at least my car was being safe.
Michael Wood [01:03:52]:Like crap.
Tyson Gaylord [01:03:53]:What was it? What was I thinking about? I got. Okay, I gotta, I gotta focus back here. I gotta. It’s just so interesting. I think if you folks out there listening, this is my suggestion to you. You think this is crazy or not for you or I can’t, I can’t get this done. Just give it a shot and watch how freeing this becomes. And like this like weight lifts off of you and like it’s like you stand taller and like your lungs expand more and that sometimes like you know that that gut, the diaphragm might open up a little bit.
Tyson Gaylord [01:04:24]:You can get a little bit more of a belly breath going. I’d say if you’re, if you think it’s not for you, give it a shot. You’re going to feel. I. In my experience, not just myself but others that I’ve heard these stories, it’s just those weightlessness that comes off of you.
Michael Wood [01:04:37]:You want me give you a little trick. You know, you’re trying to work on speaking and, and I’m doing the same thing. Right. We’re fighting the same battle. If you go back to my tiktoks from my dude, it would take me 30 clips to get one TikTok. Oh yeah. So do this. Connect your fingers.
Michael Wood [01:04:54]:Okay. And notice that you’re breathing into your belly.
Tyson Gaylord [01:04:59]:Okay.
Michael Wood [01:05:01]:This automatically makes you breathe into your belly. A rare few people it’ll actually switch up. But you, when you’re breathing into your belly, it’s not stress breathing. And if you’ll notice and once you start to pay attention, the great Speakers, they’re doing this when they’re speaking. Barack Obama used to do it. Like when speakers, great speakers, really good speakers are doing it, they do this. And it does something. It kind of disconnects something in here in the subconscious mind, and it allows things to flow.
Michael Wood [01:05:33]:Part of it, I believe, is because when you breathe into your belly, you’re signaling to your system that you’re safe. And so what I understand about the default mode network, which is basically the reptilian brain, when we get stressed out, you know, all you have to do is have some negative thoughts in there. Says, hey, I’m not a good speaker. I’m not this. I’m not that. Well, as soon as you have any of those thoughts, you go into cortisol, all right? And you can come out of cortisol in two minutes of compassionate, loving thoughts or a breath work that’ll calm your system down. So when you do this.
Tyson Gaylord [01:06:10]:Sorry, one second, folks at home, that’s just listening. We’re talking about putting an index finger to a thumb, like, okay, symbol or something along those lines.
Michael Wood [01:06:17]:Yeah. And if you do two hands, it actually improves it, but at least one finger. And what it does is it if right now I’m having. If I’m super stressed out, somebody just triggered me, and my whole system goes nuts. The elite military units do this, right? The baddest of the bad on the planet are taught to use breath work to calm their system down. Because if in a firefight, if they lose capacity to think because they’re stressed out, they will die. Their team might die. So they teach them because it’s.
Michael Wood [01:06:49]:It’s science back. Two minutes of controlled breath work will calm the system down and bring it back down to zero. Because when we get excited, the default mode network kicks in. We go into our reptilian brain, fight or flight at whatever level that we’re in. But either way, once it’s on, our ability to think drops between 40 and 60%. So we’re only. When we get excited and we think, when our brain starts messing with us about some negative bs, that is not the truth. But we can’t make that noise stop.
Michael Wood [01:07:23]:We’re literally becoming dumber because we are having those thoughts, the cortisol kicks in. The beautiful thing is two minutes of compassionate, loving thoughts. What I like to get people to do is a gratitude journal. So two minutes of gratitude journal will literally manually shift you over into oxytocin, which most people have no idea what oxytocin is. It’s the love drug. And if you’ll do it for two minutes, it’ll flip the switch, eight more minutes. So do it for 10 minutes. And now all of a sudden you’re drug induced happy.
Michael Wood [01:07:58]:And you, you could literally sit in a chair and be happy. You can start your podcast and you’ll be drug induced happy. You can’t even have any of those thoughts. It’ll wear off after five or 10 minutes. But once you’re going, it’s not going to override you. So if you literally just before you did a podcast, you wrote what you were grateful for, for, for 10 minutes, it brings 100% of your attention into the present moment. So now you’re not time traveling and, and then you’re getting drug induced happy by shifting out of the fear bucket into the love bucket. Because the.
Michael Wood [01:08:29]:I truly believe that whoever created us, God the divine, the universe, wherever we came from, designed us in a way that we, the opposite of love within us is fear. Any fearful thoughts produce cortisol and any compassionate loving thoughts produce oxytocin. And there’s that polarity there and that the way you switch out of those drugs is the content of your thoughts. And it’s. We just need to take control of. So those random ones that come in that are somewhat negative are throwing us into the, into the fear bucket or producing cortisol. And cortisol will put those thoughts on a real. Because it thinks it’s trying to protect us.
Michael Wood [01:09:11]:It thinks that fearful thing is here. I got to be on high alert for it.
Tyson Gaylord [01:09:16]:I like what you just said. They’re like
Michael Wood [01:09:21]:that.
Tyson Gaylord [01:09:22]:If we can just realize we can control these things, we are 100% in control. We tell our minds what to do. Like we have that ability to stop, relax. You don’t have to fight, you don’t have to yell, you don’t have to scream on the Internet. You know, whatever it is, you have the ability to be anger. You know, these things are all we’re doing to ourselves. Nobody’s doing these to us. We’re doing to them to ourselves.
Tyson Gaylord [01:09:44]:And we also have the ability to stop. We can get that done. That’s powerful.
Michael Wood [01:09:48]:It’s extremely powerful. So the first three weeks of my program, we. The first week we do gratitude journals, we do box breathing. And I give folks other tools as well, like stop and smell the rose. If you go outside and you just close your eyes for a minute and take a deep breath, take in as many smells as you can, your brain turns off. You’re not traveling anymore. You’re bringing 100% of your attention into the present moment. And all those thoughts, you just took control over them.
Michael Wood [01:10:18]:It’s a manual trick. Just like the crystal in my hand, that’s a manual trick. So the first three weeks of my program, it’s all about manually taking control of those thoughts that you were just talking about. And one of the most important, important parts about all of it is sitting in the witness seat, right? You’re having all these thoughts, and you can pay attention to them. So if you’re paying attention to them, you’re witnessing them. The true you is witnessing our thoughts. We are not our thoughts. We are the witness of our thoughts.
Michael Wood [01:10:50]:And the more we sit in that witness seat, we start to get separation between us and our thoughts. And the more separation you get, the more control over those thoughts you’re going to get, because now you’re actually starting to pay attention to them. You’re like, okay, I see what you’re doing here. Instead of just letting them drag us around the house and drag us out the house and in the backyard and wherever it’s taking us. When you go, all right, wait a minute, I see what you’re doing. I see the negative thoughts. I see that I’m. My to do list is growing, and it’s not.
Michael Wood [01:11:20]:I need to get to it. I see what you’re doing right now. I hear what you’re saying. And from that seat, I can make a conscious decision to pay attention to it or just let it pass on by and go. And once you start getting good at doing that with thoughts, emotions are just elevated thoughts, right? They react and they swell up. And now all of a sudden, when you’re doing that and you. You get excited and you go, wait a minute. Yeah, I feel all that in my body.
Michael Wood [01:11:50]:My body’s going nuts right now. I really just want to. I just want to, like, yell at that person right now. But you’re going, well, I’m watching all that happen. I’m the witness of this emotion. Now you’re sitting in the driver’s seat of everything. You can allow all that emotion to go. And when you disconnect from it and you just watch it, it just goes.
Michael Wood [01:12:10]:The air just goes out of the tire. Like, it just. The intensity of it just. It loses its. Its gravity because it. It realizes. Wait a minute. Your system, it realizes, hey, wait a minute.
Michael Wood [01:12:24]:He’s in control. He doesn’t need me right now. Look how calm he is. Like, he’s able to see it. It disconnects from it. And now that all that emotion is for the Waste, because you are consciously in control. But once it takes you over, you are one with all that emotion and it’s just going, and you’re reacting and you’re doing, but when you separate from it, you just watch it, right? It’s extremely powerful. And the, it gives you freedom from your thoughts, but it also brings awareness to them because that’s where all the information is for you to be able to go back and heal from your past.
Michael Wood [01:13:02]:It’s, it’s, that’s where the liberating material comes from. No, now I’m noticing all day long I got all these thoughts about my intelligence. Well, I must have a bunch of old negative core beliefs about my intelligence. Or you got, you know, you’re constantly feeling attacked about whether or not you’re a good podcast host. I wonder if that’s an identity that I should just get rid of. I’m not a good podcast host or a bad podcast host, you know, or
Tyson Gaylord [01:13:26]:a husband, a father, a brother, a co worker, whatever your thing is.
Michael Wood [01:13:30]:Yeah, exactly. Yes. And so, yeah, now all of a sudden your thoughts, the negative ones especially, they become information. And it’s, it’s so powerful. Once you get the separation between you and your thoughts and emotions, then you start to see patterns and then you look in your life and go, all right, man, you know what? Me and my wife, and I’m speaking from my own thing, like we didn’t get in any fights for the longest time, but then we would have in 22 years we’ve been married, we had four, five. But those four or five were big, right? They were big blow ups. And I was able to look back at those and I’d seen a pattern. Well, what’s triggering them? I had a negative core belief from when I was 18 months old and I was able to go back to that memory when I was sitting in my crib like a little like, not necessarily like, well, just like a plate crib.
Michael Wood [01:14:28]:Something to combine me from running around doing bad things there. And I’m watching my mom yell at my dad, why don’t you love me anymore? Why won’t you stay? Why don’t you love me anymore? Why don’t you stay? And the way that at the 18 year old process that information was when you love somebody, you leave. And so whenever I would get into these, that happened when I was 18 months old and it never reared itself until I was well into my late 20s and in a very heated situation where we were upset, really mad at each other, a lot of alcohol involved in most of those. And so the elevation motors. And then it would come out, we would get in a fight. And my first response was, I’m leaving. And I didn’t know where it was coming from. But once I was able to go back and start paying attention to the pattern, then I was able to go, all right, I have something going on here where I’ve got abandonment issues or something.
Michael Wood [01:15:34]:And then once I was able to track it, then my. My subconscious mind says, oh, you’re ready to deal with that? Here it is. And I go into a deep meditative state with Chris, and he tracked me right back down to 18 months old. And I just closed my eyes, and I watched it all happen again. I didn’t remember any of that stuff my entire life. And then, boom, there it all is. And that’s how all of this stuff works. We don’t know what programs we’re running on, and they can be latent in there for a very long time, and then, boom, pop out and smack us in the face and control our lives, essentially.
Tyson Gaylord [01:16:08]:I never thought about evaluating something, not to diminish anything here about it. Something so simple and maybe even naive, or it’s just like, as.
Michael Wood [01:16:17]:As.
Tyson Gaylord [01:16:18]:As. As. Walking away like that could be a problem. Walking away is a problem. I’m thinking about myself when I get upset or mad. I. I want to do either, too. I want you to punch you in the throat, or I want to.
Tyson Gaylord [01:16:28]:I want to get as far away as I can. I just don’t want to deal with you. I just want to get in my car. I always want to walk down a bike. I’m not listening to this nonsense. I can’t have. So I never. I.
Tyson Gaylord [01:16:38]:But until that. You just said that, I never thought that was some type of program that I’m running in my head where.
Michael Wood [01:16:44]:Where.
Tyson Gaylord [01:16:44]:When something upsets me and I get upset, I want to do one of those two things. Okay, I got something I got to work on. I. I like that.
Michael Wood [01:16:51]:Yeah. Well, so, yeah, you just. You have to track it down to its source. Like when. When you. And what I realized for me, when I started paying attention to the patterns, once I started that separation and you start paying attention to the patterns, those patterns are telling you something. It’s gold. It’s literal gold.
Michael Wood [01:17:10]:And it’s. It’s. It’s constantly trying to tell you where it’s at. And in the patterns that you’re looking for are the ones like, man, why did I do that? That I do not like it when I do that. That is an Involuntary thing. And right now, under my normal month thinking mind, I would never do that. And yet every time I get excited I do that thing that is 100% a negative core belief that can be rewritten and changed. But you have to have the courage to go inward, look at what’s going on with you, track it to its source and then just simply go through the exercise and forgive everyone involved, reframe it, move it out of the fear bucket into the love bucket.
Michael Wood [01:17:53]:And you won’t respond that way. And me and my wife have been tested in that way ever since I rewrote that one. We get into, I don’t ever say I’m leaving anymore. And I caught a lot of pain to my wife. You know, like we’re always happy, always good, but when we get into this, that place, I’m leaving. I caused her a lot of pain in our, in our marriage because of that. And, and it was causing me pain because I would wake up the next morning sober and I’m like, I don’t want to leave. That’s dumb.
Michael Wood [01:18:25]:You know, and. But she would always remember the fact that I wanted to. It caused her pain, you know, and pain that I couldn’t just wipe away was. Sorry, I want to stay.
Tyson Gaylord [01:18:36]:Very interesting. I like that. I’m going to, I’m going to pick up on these smaller pattern things that I’m doing and find out what’s happening there. I like that. Thank you for that. Your program is 10 weeks. That’s just off the top of my head. That feels on the long side.
Tyson Gaylord [01:18:53]:I’m not judging, but you hear about a lot of these 48 hour weekend retreats and what’s maybe the bad about that and maybe is there harm to something so quick and short?
Michael Wood [01:19:04]:Oh well, you know, if I had somebody for a three day deal, I could get all of it in, you know. But what I realized in my journey and once I got to the other side and I’m living just a different life, I went from not knowing if I even wanted to be here to I want to live till I’m 200 years old. Like this is great. I’m enjoying life. And one of the things that I realized is there’s so many different things that makes up the ability to be peaceful. Right. You’ve got to get control over the thoughts. Right.
Michael Wood [01:19:41]:Be able to control that because that’s literally just pulling us around blindly. We have to learn a couple different perspective shifts. We have to learn what it actually means to love ourselves, how we’re living our lives. How we’re treating, how outside forces impact what’s going on in our head. You know, most people don’t know this, but I give you a few little tidbits. If you’re within 12ft of somebody and they’re having negative emotions, those negative emotions are transferred into your system. You were going to feel their negative emotions, and your latent stuff that is similar will get triggered. So now all of a sudden, you’re feeling a negative emotion for no reason.
Michael Wood [01:20:18]:And then your. Your shit that’s in there, that’s negative will get popped up. So we have to be very careful about who we hang out with, who we’re around, the people that we’re with. If you’re hanging out with a bunch of people are unhealthy and negative, you’re going to get pulled into a vortex. Just the opposite, though, if you’re hanging around a bunch of people who are positive, mentally healthy, they’re going to lift you up, you know, so that’s a. It’s a very challenging thing for people to learn because after you learn all the manual tools, you become hypersensitive to everything going on around you. And so you have to navigate, you have to learn how to have boundary conversations, set new boundaries with family, friends, co workers. And then as you move into the.
Michael Wood [01:21:03]:The forgiveness and attachments. Attachments is pretty cut and dry, right? We all can kind of understand and relate with that. But then there’s another part of this that is forgiveness. You know, when you’re driving down the road, somebody cuts you off. What. What’s the response? Right. We. Most folks get upset, like, what the hell, dude? Right? What’s happening, though? That anger.
Michael Wood [01:21:26]:Anger is, to use what’s his name’s quote, famous quote, but it’s basically anger is like drinking poison, expecting the other person. And so when that person cuts us off and we get excited, we just dumped ourselves in the fear bucket. We got cortisol running. We’re excited for no reason, and we’re kind of out of our peaceful state because somebody was driving. But that happens every day. Like, we can expect that to happen every day on the way home. And when we learn when that person cuts us off to forgive them, immediately come up with a reason in our mind that says, that person is in a hurry. They got to get home to their kid.
Michael Wood [01:22:06]:Their kid is sick. I hope they make it home safe and everybody’s okay. Now all of a sudden, we stay in the love bucket and our system is happy and calm and good, and we can do that in the Grocery line. We could do it at the restaurant. When we don’t get our order the way that it’s supposed to come out, we, we could do that with our family. When they say these things that trick or us, like, we just forgive them. And when we start to do that over and over and over and over again, and this takes a long time to do, but when you do that all day long, every day, the hardest thing about forgiveness is forgiving ourselves.
Tyson Gaylord [01:22:42]:Yes.
Michael Wood [01:22:43]:I’ve been around people that have forgiven caregivers that have done atrocities to them, and they forgive them. It’s easy. But forgiving ourselves is the most difficult thing ever. If you start a daily practice of forgiveness to everyone for everything, what’s going to happen about three to six months in is you’re going to. You’re going to do something, you’re going to mess up, you know, trigger your wife. You’re going to do something, you know, like, hey, I. I screwed up. There’s going to be a part of your brain that’s going to speak that you then heard before.
Michael Wood [01:23:18]:It’s going to go, wait a minute, Tyson, you have literally been forgiving everyone for the last six months. What about you? You need to forgive you right now. And now all of a sudden, that forgiveness starts to come in. Because just like we talked about earlier, we’re all connected and we’re all one. And when we forgive everyone else, you are literally practicing forgiving yourself. Right? Giving that forgiveness to everyone else is. Is literally giving yourself forgiveness. And so it’s the same thing with negativity.
Michael Wood [01:23:48]:But we all need to be careful of that. If I’m talking negative about somebody when they leave the room, I’m talking negative about myself. You know, so we want. We’ve got to guard our words. Our words are casting spells. And so if you’re talking negative about somebody, you’re really talking about yourself, your shadow self. That’s how you truly feel about yourself. And you’re.
Michael Wood [01:24:08]:We just don’t understand the logic of what’s actually happening. And so you kind of work yourself through all these. These things and then you get to the core beliefs, and then one of the most, like, so let’s just say we’ve manually worked ourselves into a good place. We are, we. We know what it. We’ve set boundaries. We’re. We know what it means to actually love ourselves.
Michael Wood [01:24:30]:We’ve forgiven ourselves. We’ve removed attachments, we’ve gone back. We’ve done a bunch of core beliefs, and we’re still miserable because we’re not living an authentic life. Right. We. If you, if you’re living a life for everybody else, if you’re in a marriage that you’re miserable in just, just for your kids, like, at the end of the day, there’s two parts of us. One of us driven by our subconscious mind that just wants to be safe once, doesn’t want us to leave the house. It doesn’t want us to try to do something new.
Michael Wood [01:24:59]:Like when you were doing a new podcast, they want you to stay safe over here. We’ll have an expansive side in you. And that expansive side in you is like, be big and bold, Tyson. Let’s go. The world needs to hear it. Let’s go. Come on, baby. That’s the expansive.
Michael Wood [01:25:15]:That’s the true self. That’s the authentic self. And so there’s a war going on. And if, if the subconscious mind suppresses the true self, you’re going to be miserable. I don’t care what you, what you got going on in your life, if you’re not living an authentic life, you’re going to be miserable. And most people have no idea what that is.
Tyson Gaylord [01:25:38]:Yeah.
Michael Wood [01:25:39]:And so a 10 week program is a lot, but I wanted it to be a comprehensive thing. And there’s things that I’ve left out, to be honest, as I’m learning and as I’m evolving. But what I didn’t want it to be was something where I’m going to give you some tricks and give you some tools and you’re still going to be miserable wondering why you were unhappy. And if somebody takes the program and this happens, a lot of times, people will go through it and they’ll really connect and resonate with six weeks, they’ll get the knowledge from all 10, but they’re only really committed and going to do some of these. A lot of people can’t remove attachments. It’s like if I remove this attachment to being a Tennessee Vols fan, I’m not going to be able to connect with my dad anymore because that’s where me and my dad connect and that’s where I get the love from my dad. Like, so there’s things that people are terrified about, uncertain weeks, some more than others. And now all of a sudden it’s okay, like, we’re not going to be able to just take all 10 weeks and just slam dunk every single one of them.
Michael Wood [01:26:50]:But you’re going to excel in some weeks, and some weeks you’re not. But when you, if you just get all of the information, what I like to do at the very end is create a one year healing plan. And we revisit every week and we say, all right, what works well for you? You like the gratitude? All right, let’s continue to do it. How much you want to continue to do it. And you continue to. You do it at that rate. The box breathing, how do you use it? All right, so you set some daily reminders to remind yourself to, to do box breathing. So you keep that practice that worked well for you and then, then you revisit.
Michael Wood [01:27:24]:All right, so I had all these attachments on my. And all these ornaments on my Christmas tree and you remove three or four of them, but there’s a bunch more that you can come back. Like, when do you feel comfortable revisiting this? Six months or a year, two months, three months, whatever it is. And then you put that on your long term calendar and boom, you would like to use the Any do app. It’s, it’s relatively cheap and you can put it in there whenever you want to revisit something. As long as you just check this out. You’re going to be reminded to do these things throughout the next year because we didn’t get anxiety and depression overnight. It took us years to get all this.
Michael Wood [01:28:04]:And it’s not going to be done in 10 weeks. Not going to be done. If you went to a three week or a three day retreat, it’s not going to get done in 10 weeks. It gets done through repetition and learning this stuff and really put implementing it into your life, having all these tools. And the cool thing is that virtually everybody who does the program takes it serious, puts in the work. When they get to the end of it, they all run into stuff again. But every single one of them knows what to do it do with it.
Tyson Gaylord [01:28:37]:You have a toolbox now of things?
Michael Wood [01:28:40]:Yep. Yeah. I’m writing a, I’m writing a book. It’s coming out in October, October 21st. It’s called One Brave Breath, the owner’s manual for being Human. And that’s basically what we’re giving people in this, in this program. It’s, it’s an owner’s manual. This is how the system works and this is what you do to make it go.
Michael Wood [01:29:02]:It’s like, you know, how do you, how do you program your radio in your car? Most people know how to do it. You pull out a manual. Where is the jack? I just got a flat tire. Where is the jack? They’re all tucked away and it’s hard to find nowadays. Yeah. How, how do I manage these Thoughts in my head, where are they coming from? You know, why is it, you know, why can I not logically fix this with, with the words that are coming out of my. I know this is wrong, but I logically, I keep reacting this same way. Why? Like.
Michael Wood [01:29:35]:And it’s, it’s all very logical. Once you have a manual and you understand how the system works. But we’ve never been taught how to, how to operate ourselves.
Tyson Gaylord [01:29:44]:Right. Something that popped in my head when you were speaking was Stephen Presswood’s the Art of War. That’s a great book about which kind of a little bit what you’re talking about the resistance. And it’s always going to be there. And I recommend, if you guys haven’t read that, read that. That kind of get in lines of. Mike was just talking about. That’s great.
Michael Wood [01:30:04]:So
Tyson Gaylord [01:30:06]:I’m sure you have Fortune 500 guys, executives, you know, C suite guys and all these people. But a lot of these guys, the reason these, these hard driving, kind of get it done guys is because there’s something to prove. But they also, they’re probably looking at you and looking at your program saying, I gotta change something. Like how you had that moment when you had to change. But how do you know? Work with the guy or let him know or reassure him that, listen, just because you can work on yourself and do this doesn’t mean you can’t still achieve in the outside. How do you, how do you tackle that?
Michael Wood [01:30:41]:You know, I would. Because, because you’re right. The drive that pushes you to go, I would argue from experience, it makes achieving easier. It’s not as miserable like waking up to do something you’re passionate about. It’s easy now because you’re not being told all the negative things. Life becomes easier. Relationships grow, they prosper, they’re enhanced. Because, you know, I’ve been around a lot of different types of owners, and these ones that are driven, they drive with a whip.
Michael Wood [01:31:19]:They can get a team to move, right? As long as you have the guts to be honest with people, you could still get them to move. And you don’t have to get excited if you’re honest with somebody and say, look, man, I love you. You’ve been here for 10 years, but your work is slacked. You don’t show up on time, you leave early, you, you’re treating people poorly. I don’t know what happened to all the hard work and getting along, but it’s all gone and we got to fix it. Is there something going on? But at the end of the day. If we don’t fix this, we’re gonna have to make a change. Right? This is somebody that you ran through the, through wars with because they were honest and person.
Michael Wood [01:31:59]:If you have the ability to have honest conversations with people, you’re not going to lose the edge. Because at the end of the day, every business is about the people. Right. It’s not about you. It’s your ability to manage people and rally people and troops to run in the same direction, to bust their butts, to build a program, to give a service to somebody who’s willing to pay for it. And obviously as the head, you know, you’re probably the best salesman, you’re the best technical thing. You, you carry a certain level of skill set that’s, that’s invaluable. But if you don’t know how to rally troops, your business isn’t going to be successful.
Michael Wood [01:32:36]:And I would, I would argue a million times over that going through all this allows you to connect with people better and it’ll allow you to motivate the people working for you in a, in a much more positive, healthy and effective manner.
Tyson Gaylord [01:32:59]:Yeah, I hear what you’re saying there. When you’re not. And I’m imagining turnover is lower, morale is higher, culture’s better, which, it’s hard to put those numbers on a spreadsheet, you know, and look at a bottom line number. I mean, there are ways. I’ve heard of things, you know, 100,000 plus dollars, you know, for these different types of things per employee. So yeah, there’s, there’s a lot there.
Michael Wood [01:33:23]:Yeah. So one of the things, So I teach, I actually teach a leadership course. I started teaching it here at Jarrett and then when we, we merged with another company, I started teaching it for all these new companies that they, that they acquired. And one of the. So as I’m building this course, part of it is an emotional intelligence and there’s, there’s wonderful stats to exactly what you just said. Retention of an emotionally intelligent leader, somebody who doesn’t lose their shit, somebody that checks in with people, make sure you’re right and is very honest with them.
Tyson Gaylord [01:33:55]:Responsibility and ownership, like you were saying earlier.
Michael Wood [01:33:57]:Yep. The retention rate, people will stay with that. 26 per, 26% higher retention rate for people with high levels of emotional intelligence. It’s a huge thing. Like people are going to stick with you, they want to work with you because you’re not bringing all your crap to work. You know, you and your wife are fighting. You come to work and you’re mad at Everybody, and they don’t even know why. Nobody wants to deal with that volatility anymore.
Michael Wood [01:34:23]:That’s.
Tyson Gaylord [01:34:24]:That reminds the thing you were talking about earlier when, when you’re in a room where you’re kind of, you’re kind of stuck, you’re at co workers and that you got that negative person there, how do you stay in that higher state of, of happiness or how do you bring the room up?
Michael Wood [01:34:39]:You know, so if, if there is somebody like that, what I’ll say, like, what’s happened here? Those people don’t exist anymore. Okay? Like, like minds. Like, like minds, right? They attract. And, and so for a long time we had a bunch of negativity. I’ve been here for now 14 years in the middle. I had my spiritual break and then we moved and it’s. Everything changed. Two years afterwards, everything started to change as far as the culture.
Michael Wood [01:35:06]:And if there was somebody in one of our meetings to your point that was super negative and whatever, when the meeting got over, I would pull them directly into my office and be like, hey, what’s going on, Jimmy? Why. That’s, that’s out of the character. I don’t know what’s going on? Is everything okay? And a lot of times when that does happen, it’s, it’s a. He just found out his, his wife was cheating on. You know what I mean? His mom is, is in urgent care and he’s hadn’t slept in the last couple of days. Like, typically there’s something going on because it’s out of character for them, you know, but if you, if you do have a building full of negativity, it starts with you, the owner, the leader. And as I’ve, I’ve done a boatload of research on this, read countless amount of books on leadership, and the culture is set from the top. If you’re going to snap and be volatile with everybody, it gives them all permission to have a bad day and take it out on their co workers.
Michael Wood [01:36:13]:And they might not kick it up the food chain, but the guys down below them are going to feel it because they just watch you do it. It’s just like our kids, right? They’re going to mimic what we do. They’re not going to listen to a word we say, but they’re going to watch exactly how we act and then do the exact same thing. Business is no different. And as a leader, the healthier we are, you know, taking a course like mine and getting through can literally change the course of your business. You know, I actually had a young guy Come to me. He’s got a. He’s got a plumbing business, and he’s 29 years old, and he’s had his business for three or four years.
Michael Wood [01:36:48]:Came to me about six months ago, and his business was just stuck, right? He was. He was making enough to pay his bills, but it was like right here. And his bank account would go up to here and go right back down to danger zone. He would be up there and then a week or two of not flooded with calls, and it was right back down. And he was just constantly in stretch smoke come in. And we skipped everything in the program because he wasn’t able to have the focus, mental focus. We just went straight to core beliefs. We were doing one a week on clockwork for about six weeks.
Michael Wood [01:37:24]:It immediately just completely changed him. Like, he started feeling those sacks of brick, his insecurities, all that stuff started leaving the way that he spoke. I was very clear with him about casting spells, about all the negativity that was coming out of his mouth. He started becoming aware of it because it was all just a program just coming out of his mouth. So he started becoming aware, changing those words. And about three months ago, because he’d been struggling with finding good employees, these three people showed up. One father and son duo. The dad was on his last legs, had his.
Michael Wood [01:37:59]:Had his own company, didn’t really want to work anywhere, and he didn’t want to work for himself anymore. It’s too stressful. His son had been in the plumbing business forever. And then he brought one of his best friends. So all three of these people, super positive, super intelligent plumbers, like, top of the line plumbers. He said they’re as good or better than he is. It happened three months after he fixed his mental capacity to be able to not fly off the handle, Started not going off, started realizing, calming himself down. And then not only did those three really good plumbers helped the work, that he was getting shot through the roof.
Michael Wood [01:38:37]:Wow. Now all of these things are happening and all changing. None of it is a coincidence to me. Like, it all happened when he fixed what was going on inside of him. All those limiting the beliefs, all the. The spells that he was casting that he wasn’t good enough to perform, he wasn’t smart enough to grow his business that much. It was gonna fail. It was always doomed to fail.
Michael Wood [01:38:59]:And he just lived with that every day. And when he released some of those thoughts that weren’t. That were involuntary, all of a sudden the universe started working in his favor and, you know, get good employees that he doesn’t have to worry about. And then the work starts blowing in the same time there. So those guys are all super busy all the time now. His business is good. His bank account that was here has quadrupled. You know, and it’s.
Michael Wood [01:39:23]:He’s just. When I talk to him now, he couldn’t be more excited about where his. His business is headed. And more importantly, he’s healthy and he’s. He’s found a new girlfriend. And it’s. It feels stable. Right? It’s.
Michael Wood [01:39:41]:Everything that has been going on in his life, it all changed once he started. And it’s so common for me now. Like, it’s not a surprise. When people do this type of work, things in their lives changes because those subconscious core beliefs that are driving the program, which is our life. Because here’s another thing about the subconscious mind. People don’t understand, but we live 95% of our days on autopilot. This is proven by science. Right? This isn’t me just throwing a number out there.
Michael Wood [01:40:10]:That means we’re only living 5% of our days consciously. So when something bad happens on the job and we freak out, it’s all involuntary. It’s all a reaction. It. So Carl Jung said this best. If we don’t make the subconscious conscious, we will live our entire life thinking it’s fake. It’s not fake. Like you have the ability to change whatever you think you’re stuck in, but you have to make it conscious.
Michael Wood [01:40:42]:You have to make the subconscious conscious, bring it into your awareness. And now you can make changes. It’s. It’s beautiful when it happens, man, to watch somebody’s life get altered that fast, that quick. And I see it happen so many times that it’s not an accident anymore. They just. The common trait is somebody willing to have the courage to do the work because it’s scary.
Tyson Gaylord [01:41:07]:Yeah, I know what you’re saying that is. Is interesting when it starts as a line and the skies open up for you, because that’s literally what you’re asking for it really. But what about the guys that are aspiring leaders or down the totem pole more? How are they maybe aside maybe looking for a different job? If you got a lot of negativity at your company, how are you trying to come into work and. And, you know, stay positive, not feed into Janet. Oh, here she goes again. She’s talking about all this crap. And I’m tired of that. I don’t want to let that bring me down.
Tyson Gaylord [01:41:40]:How do you put up some armor or something like that? Against that.
Michael Wood [01:41:44]:So there is actually things that you can do to protect your energy, because, like I said, if somebody’s within 12ft, they don’t even have to say, say anything. They’re already affecting you. So if you’re sitting in cubicles with people that are negative, you got to do some serious work. But there are things that you could do that you could sit there and you can go into a meditative state, and you can actually create an energy block from people. But it’s hard because you have to keep it up. And it’s. It’s a very experienced thing to do. Like it.
Michael Wood [01:42:13]:I’m not gonna be able to teach you guys how to do that on this call, but it is possible to do it. So what I would say, though, is if they bring their energy up and if they bring positivity to the table, their energy shifts, right? So they can shift. And so what I would say is if somebody comes in and they’re just constantly bitching about the job or bitching about the company, and they’re just constantly just negative. This is what I tell people in that after they go through the manual stuff, is you have to re. Establish boundaries. You have to have tough conversations with everybody around you. So if you’re in that environment, if Jill next to you is talking negative every day, like, hey, Jill, I love you. Yeah, you do great work.
Michael Wood [01:42:58]:We’ve always gotten along, but I’ve been working really hard on myself, and I realize when I speak negativity out into the world or I’m around negativity, it shifts the chemicals in my brain, and it. It really causes me pain. And I’m. And I’m really trying hard to heal and heal from my past and be positive, and I’m becoming hypersensitive to negativity. And sometimes when we talk, it turns negative. If there’s any way you could help me out, try to just keep things light, keep it positive, you know, I would greatly appreciate it. I truly appreciate you. And keep it positive.
Michael Wood [01:43:36]:Don’t go at him and say, jill, you’re the most negative person ever, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? That and casting judgment is negative. So we have to draw a very. A very safe line when we’re. When we’re doing that. We don’t want to cast judgment on Jill. We just want to try to set a new boundary and help her shift and bring awareness to her negativity. A lot of these conversations, I’ll be honest, they go.
Michael Wood [01:44:02]:They go bad, especially with our friends, especially young people, right? Young people Have a million friends. You’re just getting out of high school, you got 50 friends, 50 people you would call friends. Five years later, you got 12. Ten years later, you got three if you’re lucky. Right. But when you’re young and you’re going through this, you got to cut a lot of people out really quick. And it’s really kind of scary and traumatizing. But one thing that’s beautiful, the way that all this happens and way people change is awareness.
Michael Wood [01:44:35]:When you bring awareness to what’s happening, you get separation and you start to see what’s going on. That’s a gift, Right. Because now you get to use all that information so you can make a change in your life. Well, when you have a bunch of friends and you’re hanging out with a bunch of folks, let’s say you’re young and you got 20 friends that you hang out with, you go to bars, you go dancing, you hang out on the weekends. And now all of a sudden, you realizing that about half of them you can’t hang out with anymore. There’s not really even a conversation. You just start talking to them, and then you got about 10 that you really like, you have a connection with. But about half of them are negative, too.
Michael Wood [01:45:12]:You got to have a conversation, Right. You can’t continue on without having a conversation. And so you have a conversation, and at least one or two of those, that five, they’re gonna go bad. Oh, you think you’re better than me, don’t you? All you Miss High and Mighty or mister. It’s not gonna go well. But about half of those go away and come back.
Tyson Gaylord [01:45:36]:Mmm.
Michael Wood [01:45:37]:When they come back a month later, whenever, however long that takes, they come back and they go, you know what? You’re right. I couldn’t stop thinking about how negative I was and how negative I’ve been. And I’ve really been working on that. And I just want you to know that, you know, I’ve been working on it and whatever. Now you have just changed somebody’s life.
Tyson Gaylord [01:46:02]:Yeah.
Michael Wood [01:46:03]:Brought awareness to somebody else’s life and changed their life for the better. Because now you brought awareness to what was happening in their life. Now they have the ability to process information and go. And that’s what I call the ripple effect. And it’s beautiful because virtually everybody that goes to this program impacts other people who impact other people. And it starts a ripple effect, Right. And it starts to move fast because everybody’s. You’re forced to deal with it like I had to deal with it in my in my personal family, my very close personal family.
Michael Wood [01:46:38]:But then it rippled out through my entire family. They know if they come around, we’re having a family dinner or family outing, there’s no negativity because everybody has gotten aware of it. Not because I went and pointed at everybody, but because everybody became aware of it at some point by proximity. And now all of a sudden, it’s trickled out. Same thing happened at my job. You know, we have contagious it. It has to be. Yeah, because you have to protect.
Michael Wood [01:47:11]:Once you. We get so familiar with. They call it habituation. Science habituation. We get so comfortable living in misery. It’s just normal. We just call it normal. Life sucks and deal with it.
Michael Wood [01:47:24]:Right. But once you get used to living with oxytocin running in your brain 50% of your days now, all of a sudden, it’s not normal anymore. It’s a problem when you. When somebody triggers you automatically and puts you in that because you don’t want to feel it. I’ve been living all day long. I’ve spent most of my day in oxytocin. And I feel great. And now I feel all those ugly feelings and all that stuff in my body is physically reacting.
Michael Wood [01:47:48]:I cannot stick around this person. Yeah, it’s a. It’s a rejection, a physical rejection. And you just have to deal with it. And it’s scary and it’s. It’s hard, but it’s also liberating. You’re also telling yourself that you are valuable, you deserve love, you are worthy. You don’t have to just sacrifice your peace for somebody else’s.
Michael Wood [01:48:09]:And it starts to feel a cup up inside of you. That’s pretty amazing. You know, it’s part of the reason why I called this program what I did. I know it’s corny and it probably runs a bunch of men off, but at the end of the day, we are truly learning to love being ourselves. And that’s. That’s a. When that starts to truly settle in with the forgiveness, when it comes back full circle, when we’re freeing ourselves from these old core beliefs, when the attachments leave and we’re not physically responding, we start to really enjoy just being ourselves. And it’s amazing and it’s powerful, and it’s like, holy moly, how can I help somebody else feel the same way? Because that’s the natural response once you start to feel this way.
Tyson Gaylord [01:48:54]:I think the name is perfect and fitting. It’s that old adage, you’ve got to put your oxygen mask on first. If you’re not loving yourself, you’re not loving nobody else.
Michael Wood [01:49:03]:Yeah. You’re not.
Tyson Gaylord [01:49:04]:Like you’re saying, right, you’re gonna be this nasty person we talked about that’s in the break room, and everybody’s like, oh, here comes Tyson every time. We got to hear about this now. You don’t want to be that guy. To be loved and to love, to give. Love it. It’s. It’s probably the pinnacle of the human experience, and I think we all should strive for that and. And be able to experience that.
Michael Wood [01:49:23]:Yeah, absolutely. It’s. It’s powerful. You know, there’s a week, one of the weeks when you’re going through all this stuff where you’re having to deal with boundaries and family and friends and all this. I put a week in there called Learn to love being you. Right. And in that week, what I do is I ask everybody to do a couple different things. But one of them that’s really powerful is I have everybody identify who their closest person is.
Michael Wood [01:49:48]:Right. Some people it’s their dad. Some people it’s their best friend. Some people might be their kid. But whoever it is, maybe it’s your husband, your spouse. Yeah. And you imagine that they’re leaving their body, all right? They’re gonna pick up and they’re. They’re going somewhere else, and you’re going to live their life for them for the next six months.
Michael Wood [01:50:09]:If. If they were overweight and they’ve been talking about working out, would you work out for them while they were gone? Of course. Would you. If they had a dream and they. And they. And they. About starting a new business, would you make any action item? Would you take any steps towards making that dream come true?
Tyson Gaylord [01:50:29]:I think that a good person is going to help out as much as
Michael Wood [01:50:32]:possible, as much as they can. Right. When you look in the mirror, right, what are you going to see when you see that person? Are you going to see. You’re going to have a thought that, oh, my gosh, look how ugly you are. Look at your eyebrows. Like, to pick it apart. Or you’re going to look in the mirror and go, oh, my gosh, you’re beautiful. Right? So we go through this exercise where everybody imagines being that person, and we get to the end of it, and we simply just say, now, what about you?
Tyson Gaylord [01:50:57]:Yeah, just yourself.
Michael Wood [01:50:58]:Yeah. Why are you not doing all these things for yourself? You have dreams, you have aspirations. You need to treat yourself well. And it’s just a perspective shift. That whole week is literally about having a perspective shift. And it really helps people just kind of go, now wait a minute. I don’t have to treat everybody bad, but I should at least hold myself on a level playing field. Right? Because if we’re all connected, we’re all one.
Michael Wood [01:51:24]:I shouldn’t be putting anybody above me or below me, but, my God, I should be doing it at an equal. Right? And when we start doing that, everything starts to shift. Everything starts to shift. We see where we’re being taken advantage of. We see where we’re taking advantage of other people. We. We. We just start to make shifts in our lives and try to balance things out.
Michael Wood [01:51:46]:And honestly, I think it goes back to the week nine, when you start to be more authentic. It starts to align things in a. In a. In a healthy way. Because a lot of people, they will do anything for everyone, and they have a hard time saying no. Right. I’m gonna do whatever you need. Whatever you need.
Michael Wood [01:52:02]:Whatever you need. I’m gonna show up for you. I’m gonna show up for you. But that leaves no time to show up for yourself, you know?
Tyson Gaylord [01:52:08]:Yeah. A lot of those people burn themselves out.
Michael Wood [01:52:10]:Yeah. You deserve the right to take a nap.
Tyson Gaylord [01:52:16]:I do, I do.
Michael Wood [01:52:18]:I’m getting better.
Tyson Gaylord [01:52:18]:I’m working on it. I’m working on it.
Michael Wood [01:52:20]:Gosh, I’m sorry. But, you know, I want to be
Tyson Gaylord [01:52:23]:raw with you guys, let you know, like, I think no matter where you’re on your journey, there’s still going to be something we’re working on. We’re still. I still have a hard time, you know, I’m like, listen, kids, leave me alone. I’m gonna sit down. I’m gonna take a nap. Give me 20 minutes.
Michael Wood [01:52:39]:Take an hour. You need it.
Tyson Gaylord [01:52:40]:I don’t know. This is five. Just give me a second. So if you guys want to learn more about what Mike’s got going on, learntolove being you.com, i’ll link it in the show notes. As well as on Instagram and tick tock, YouTube, we got Michael Wood mindset. Everything will be linked in the show notes for you guys. Anything else? I think you were saying you had something for the guests, for the listeners out there.
Michael Wood [01:52:59]:Absolutely. So what I did is I want to thank everybody for listening to the podcast. You know, your time is very precious, and I wanted to give everybody the first week of my program for free. I want to give you guys the meditation that I talked about, the breathwork meditation. I created a guided breathwork meditation to flood yourself with oxygen that we talked about earlier. And I wanted to give you guys, a guided grounding exercise. I use it whenever I get headaches. I just feel off.
Michael Wood [01:53:29]:I can get rid of a headache with a 10 minute grounding exercise. And I wanted to give you all three of those things for free. And where you find it at is mwoodmindset.com backslash chameleon
Tyson Gaylord [01:53:46]:and I’ll link that. Guys, if you’re walking and you’re on the car, don’t worry about it. It’s in the show notes. So you guys, your podcast player or on the show notes site, you guys can get all that?
Michael Wood [01:53:54]:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want everybody to be able to have that stuff and that way you guys can introduce this stuff. You don’t have to, you don’t have to spend 500 bucks on my program and dedicate 10 weeks. You can start with baby steps for free and see how it, see how the shoe fits.
Tyson Gaylord [01:54:12]:Well, that is so generous, Michael. Thank you so much for that gift to everybody. And then on a social media show, what I like to do is I like to do a weekly challenge where we challenge our listeners to implement an idea or concept or something we talked about, maybe something we didn’t talk about. And what I’d like you to do is I’d like you to issue this week’s challenge.
Michael Wood [01:54:30]:This week’s challenge. I would, I would like to issue a challenge that you, you try to forgive at least one person a day for something small. It doesn’t matter what it is. They cut you off, they said something rude, consciously forgive them. It’ll change your life. A simple act of forgiveness will start you on your journey to being able to love yourself.
Tyson Gaylord [01:55:00]:That’s perfect. And maybe if you’re struggling for a place to start, start with yourself.
Michael Wood [01:55:04]:Yes, for anything. Anything. Doesn’t matter what it is. I made a mistake. I forgive myself for that. I am perfectly imperfect is what I like to say. We are all perfectly imperfect.
Tyson Gaylord [01:55:16]:And then the final question I have for everybody, it doesn’t have to be a grandiose thing or a big, huge thing, but what is your definition of becoming legendary, living that legendary life, leaving
Michael Wood [01:55:32]:an impact on others, you know, living a life in service of others and having that ripple effect, being able to affect the people around you in a positive way because you’re living and impacting them in a positive way. You’re lifting them up. You’re not being that neighbor that’s tearing people down with the negativity. You’re the light that’s lifting them up. Because in every scenario, one person is either lifting them up or getting pulled down in every scenario you come into that is happening and you be the one that’s pulling somebody up in every scenario and that makes you legendary.
Tyson Gaylord [01:56:07]:That’ll be a legend. Mike, thank you so much. I had a wonderful conversation. I got a whole page of notes here. I’ll leave everything in the show notes for you guys. Your generosity with not just your knowledge but with your gift to everybody is truly appreciated. Thank you so much for everything.
Michael Wood [01:56:23]:Thank you, thank you, thank you for being open and letting me mess with you a little bit. It’s. It was a pleasure. You’re. You’re a great human and I appreciate everything you’re doing for everyone. Your show is, is constantly uplifting everybody and I highly recommend everybody goes out and gives you a five star review because you deserve it.
Tyson Gaylord [01:56:41]:Thank you so much.
Michael Wood [01:56:41]:I appreciate it.
Tyson Gaylord [01:56:42]:I hope you guys got some insights and tips on switching up these beliefs, switching up all these different stuff. Michael had such a bunch of techniques and stuff like that. Everything’s gonna be in the show notes, guys. Check it out. Social media show and there’s no paywall there. There’s no premium content subscribe to. There’s no Michael woods interview plus or premium or platinum. There’s no other things.
Tyson Gaylord [01:57:11]:Everything. We give it to you up front and we ask if you found any value from this episode, please share with these two other people. As always, in between episodes, you guys can connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or your favorite podcast player, apps or past episodes and links to everything we’ve discussed here today. Head over to thesocial chameleon show. Don’t forget to subscribe on substack for show notes, legendary life posts and a monthly rewind directly delivered to your inbox. Until next time, keep learning, growing and transforming on your path to becoming legendary.
Michael Wood [01:57:49]:Sam.