Podcast Episode 126 Transcript

Episode 126: Habits Of Peak Performers w/ Jeff Wickersham

Folks on the prereal podcast. This week, we talked with Jeff Wickersham. We really dive into some difficult personal things that me and the family have gone through recently. Jeff is a bestselling author of Rise, Fight, Loved, Repeat, Ignite the Morning Fire. He's a Tony Robbins award winner, podcast speaker, and creator of the Four Step Morning Fire Methodology. He is on a current streak of like 800 straight days taking ice baths, 15 or 1600 straight days of meditating. He's completed the David Goggins four x four by 48 miles run twice. This is a real leader, a real coach. Don't miss this episode. It's emotional, it's powerful, it's impactful. And he offers a 20 minutes free session on there. So check it out. Prereal podcast. Jeff Wickersham, this week, are you ready to bring your real estate game to the next level? My name is James Prendamano. I'm the CEO and founder of Prereal. And over the past 25 years, I've closed over a billion dollars in transactional real estate. Each week, a meeting with outstanding investors, high performing individuals, and visionaries operating in the real estate space. These are the people that are actually out there in the real estate game right now getting it done. This podcast aims at bringing anyone's game to the next level. This is the prereal podcast. Welcome, everyone, to the Prereal podcast. I say this from time to time, but boy, oh boy, do we really have a treat to you today, folks. We're joined by Jeff Wickersham. He is the founder and a coach at the Morning Fire. He's a mental toughness and peak performance coach. Jeff is best selling author of a book Rise, Fight Love, repeat ignite Your Morning Fire. He's a Tony Robbins Award winner, a podcast host, a speaker, and the creator of the Four Step Morning Fire methodology, which we'll get into if there was someone to speak to about unlocking that next level of absolute peak performance. And we're going to get into some things where we have a lot of folks on the show and people talk about doing exceptional things. Jeff is in the process right now of doing two things that are quite remarkable, and we'll dive into that as we move along. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I'm so excited to have this conversation, man. James, thanks for having me. And I'm excited as well. So you don't wake up and just become a mental toughness and peak performance coach, right? Everybody has a story. Everybody has a journey. Your story hit home for me on a personal level, and I was wondering if we could start there. We all know the grind that we fall into. We all know what it's like to wake up every day and not be intentional and not quite understand why and to continue to kind of go through the paces and do the things that we did yesterday and yet have the audacity to be frustrated that today didn't bring a different result. Would you be okay sharing a few minutes on that personal moment for you and what was the tipping point for you? Yeah, absolutely. And it was nearly eight years ago where I watched my mom take her last breath, right? So she battled breast cancer on and off for 17 years. It came back a couple of times. And when you watch the woman that brought you into this world leave this world, it fundamentally changes you, right? The fragility of life smacks you upside the head with that two by four, processing that deep, searing pain, something that loss that I just never had experienced at that depth with such a ferociousness right of losing my mother, not being able to give her a kiss or give her a hug any longer. And that was the catalyst, looking back now for the change. And I was tested right after she passed. And I didn't know it then, but looking back now, I definitely was after she passed. She passed on a Sunday, and we got the second hand crew of the funeral home service. It was a couple of gentlemen in their late 70s, early 80s. I'm the oldest of three kids. I've got a younger brother, younger sister. And I was kind of thrust into that lead, right? Calling people, letting them know that my mom had passed. And then I saw concern on these two older gentlemen's faces, and I asked them what was going on, and they said, we don't know if we can carry your mother down the steps. Right? They were preparing her. I said, I got it. Just let me ask my brother. So that night after she passed, I was already tested. Would I stand up and would I lead? And that night, my brother and I carried my mom down the steps in the body bag and put her there. And that was the moment I pull power from now and pull that energy from. But it was a deep, dark period in my life, for sure. So you've referenced a few times now. First of all, thank you for sharing something that personal you've referenced a few times. Now you understand and now you see what those moments were in the moment. What was the mindset? Now, this on top of, was it that anger, frustration? Was it all of those emotions? You would think it was? It was anger, frustration. It was hopelessness. It was questioning everything about life, right? It was those dark days when you just miss that part of you that will never be there again. And it sent me down a path where those questions became very powerful, right. What do I truly want to do in life if we only get one trip around the sun, right? And life is short, life is fragile. Do I want to continue doing what I'm doing? I was in corporate America at that time. Or do I want to go out and make a bigger impact and help people and guide them and inspire and motivate them. And those deep questions bore out that I wanted to leave corporate America and I wanted to do something different and I wanted to make a change personally. And I think you mentioned it intentionally step into the best version of myself, for one, myself, but then my kids, my wife, and all those around me. So it was all those feels right when it happens and you're just trying to process the finality of it and how you get through it minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. So, so many of us have these moments, not necessarily as impactful or personal profound as that specific experience you described, but we all have our baggage, our emotions, the things that we're dealing with every day. And there are a lot of systems and platforms and programs and apps and you name it, right, that talk about taking that step to turn things around and to get on the right path and unlock that beast inside, if you will. But I feel like you can take all the systems in the world and if you don't put them on a proper foundation, if you're not right here, none of it matters. I mean, literally, almost none of it matters. So how do you address that piece? And does your program work at getting this piece right to take the next steps? Or is your program starting at once? You've gotten right between the ears. Now here's how you become an elite performer. Where does your program start and stop? I guess, yeah, it starts with the foundation. And I feel that the foundation is bookending your days, right? What's that last 30 minutes of the day look like? How do you prepare for success? And then what's that 1st 30 minutes of the day look like? If you can control your book ends, you have some semblance of control in an otherwise chaotic world, right? And let's not kid ourselves that six inches in between our ears. The battle in our mind, it's never ending. It's always going to be there. And we can stack good days after good days, but we're going to have days where we have dips. And if you can control those bookends that last 30 minutes, 1st 30 minutes, you have some semblance of control and you feel less depressed, less anxious, less stress because, you know, hey, everything in the middle I can take care of because I've got this foundation of what I do to prepare for a great night's sleep. And then how do I stack wins, gain momentum and progress in the morning. So how do you do that? What's the first set of steps? So depending on who, you know, you're citing and what study you're reading, they say that creating a habit takes anywhere from a few weeks to 60, 70 days, right. Somewhere in between, there and breaking a habit and then replacing it with a new habit. Those are two separate instances, from what I understand. There's not breaking a habit and replacing the habit. You can't meld them together. These are two separate and distinct things. And I feel like we're in a world where COVID did a lot of things that not many folks are talking about. Right. They broke the old habits. Some of them were good habits, jeff right. A lot of us were in a routine, and we were getting up in the morning, and we were doing the things we needed to do to get ready to go hit the day. And there's a benefit, there's an immense benefit to that, in my opinion. And it went on so long that they then created new habits for us that were kind of thrust upon us that I don't think we recognized in the moment what was happening. And now that this stuff is rolling back, there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of fear. People feel lost, and they don't quite understand why they can't get up and just return to work and get back in that pattern and go, this is a process. Right. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I would agree with you 100%. I mean, I remember when COVID hit, and people kept asking me, are you still getting up at 05:00 A.m. And doing your morning fire routine? I said, absolutely. They said, Why, you could sleep in. I said, It's a slippery slope when you start down that path. And to your point, James, a lot of people started getting away from those things that lit them up physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And then two years went by, and now they're trying to dig out of it. And it takes so much willpower, it takes so much energy, it takes so much focus to get moving once you've fallen off that proverbial cliff, and now you got to climb back up that mountain, it's very difficult. So that's why I have a saying that I say, never miss twice. Right? You can miss one day, but never miss twice. Because if you miss once, that train is still rolling down the tracks, right? There's still momentum. You can hop back on and get going, but you miss two days, two becomes four, becomes a week, becomes a month, a year, two years with COVID and then you don't even know where to start and begin because there's such a tall mountain for you to climb. Yeah, there sure is. So booking your day, never missed twice. I had referenced in the beginning of the show that Jeff was in the midst of two remarkable things. Can you speak a little bit about your meditation streak and your ice bath or cold plunge streak? Yeah. So I have meditation. It's now 1807 straight days, so almost five years with ten minutes a day. And I do it every morning. And that's one of the staples. That three things I do every day, regardless if I'm traveling on vacation or camping with the family. It's drinking water, exercise, and meditation. Those three things. I get those three things when I'm getting up in the morning. I'm going to have a fantastic day, right? I have some semblance of control, and I have three winds. So that's one is the meditation. And I always thought meditation was very woo wooish, right? A bald bunk sitting on the side of a mountain with snow coming down. He's there for three days. Now it's just sitting there, and it's breathing. It's focusing on your breath. I mean, you can count in six counts. I love to count in six counts. Two second hold and 7 seconds out. That's 15 seconds. You do that four times, you got a minute of meditation. You're counting. So you're actually focused on the breath and you're not focused on something else external. So that's been a game changer. It's given me some control of my mind. And you pair that then with the other thing. You had alluded to ice baths, cold showers. It's wintertime now in the Northeast, where I'm going to be getting out and doing some cold walks, where I go hat, gloves, shorts, and just shoes, nothing else. And it it's my system, you know, invigorated getting into the cold, getting out of that comfort that we're in so many times each day, that 67 to 73 degrees. You talk about a mental rep. We hit the physical gym many times. We never hit that mindset gym. Stepping into that cold when your mind is telling you, you are a freaking nut, what are you doing? No way. And you can say, Mind, we're going. You're either with us or you're not. When you start to wield and consistently tell your mind, hey, this is what's happening. Help me. Don't stop me. Then there's some amazing power to get in those mindset reps in each day now, is there grace afforded for what if you're sick? What if you have the flu? Right? The excuses start to stack up as I think about something like this. How do you account for those anomalies? I don't listen to them, and I don't just give them any space in my mind. Right. The family, my two sons were sick a couple of weeks ago, and she asked me, and not so many words. I'll keep it PG. She's like, how are you feeling? I said, I don't freaking get sick. And she kind of laughed. And I haven't gotten sick in quite some time. That mindset, right? That mind body connection. Hey, okay, I'm not feeling that great. I go into the cold. That boosts your immunity, right? There's these little things that we can do that we can sprinkle into our daily routines that create this energy physically, mentally, our health. There are small little things that we can do that so many times. People aren't tapping into getting into the cold. It boosts your immune system. Right. Your veins constrict, and then they expand. You're almost giving your veins a workout. It helps with your skin, it helps with your circulation. All these things that people hear. You take cold showers? Yeah, why not? I want to live the best version of Jest that I possibly can. Then I got to push myself out of that comfort zone. That cold is one way to do that. And I will say when you put that natural stress on yourself, you actually step into it. You're then more equipped to handle the stress that comes your way from life. Right. And you pair that meditation with the cold things that come up. I'm calm. I can deal with it. Right. I've triggered my body into fight or flight, and I've breathed through it. Right. I've remained calm in the cold. I've remained calm through meditation. So those are just two powerful practices that I love to stay consistent and have given me a lot of mental power and clarity to operate from. There it is that embracing the suck, if you will, right. And as you're encountering the challenges, because you're going to encounter the folks throughout the day and throughout your weeks and months and life. When you start your day and you've already taken the time to focus and connect your mind to embracing that difficult point, and things start to go a bit off the rails as the day winds on, I would think that this becomes habitual. I would think that it's a learned behavior and it's conscious initially, but then I would think it becomes part of the subconscious that your brain is this ain't shit. I ran for 30 minutes today in twelve degree leather with the hat and gloves on like a nut. I could certainly handle this. Right. Is that part of how this evolves? Yes. Then you're pulling from your past experiences, right. Your past strength. And that's a habit to get into, pulling from your past strengths. Right. How many times do we beat ourselves up with a hammer, right? Over and over again for what we didn't do or didn't do yesterday, where imagine if you flip that and say, wait a second, I watched my mom pass. I carried her body down the steps and above. Like, I can get through that shit today. Are you kidding me? That's a joke. Let's go. Step into it. Bring it on and have that mentality. It's changing that mindset of strength, courage, confidence, versus, Holy crap, this is another thing I got to do today. I'm a victim. I can't do it. You feed that positive dog. You do things to get out of your comfort zone. All of a sudden, you have this incredible energy, and you can push through those bad times or those difficult times. And you said it, James, we're all going to have them. The key is how quickly can you bounce back and so many times people stay in that rut for days, weeks, months, months where if you had something, all of a sudden you pulled from some strength, maybe you changed your state, moved the body, got into the cold, and you are back within ten minutes. Imagine how much better life would be for you.

I think it was recently completed one of the Goggins four x four x 48 runs, is that correct? Yes, I did that earlier this year. Can you talk a little bit about what exactly the four x four x 48 is and what that experience was like? Yeah, so this was actually the second time I did it because I have a buddy who's a former Navy Seal FBI agent and he's a Wim HOF certified instructor. So he gets into the ice and he said, when you do something once, that's fine, you know the pain that it takes. But once you know that pain, the real grit is doing it again. Right. So I said, son of a gun, cause me, I got to do the Goggins run again. So the Goggins run is you run 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hours. So you start at 11:00 P.m. Eastern. Goggins is on the west coast, 08:00 P.m. Pacific run at eleven, 4 miles, rest, recover run at 03:00 a.m. Run at 711 all the way to Sunday at 07:00 P.m.. So you're basically almost doing the equivalent of two marathons over that 48 hours stretch. Wow, that's quite remarkable. This is exceedingly high level performance stuff here. How did you even begin to contemplate undertaking a challenge like this, never mind a second time around? What does that journey look like? And I would assume you've met people along the way. As you have raised the game and raised your bar, you're meeting more and more and connecting with higher and higher performers, which is such an important part of this that we could touch on in a bit. But how did you end up getting to that place where you went, yeah, I'm going to run two marathons in two days. I mean, it's borderline nuts, right? That's a real special feat here, that when you really think about it, it seems impossible. Can't it? I would agree. I mean, my brother in law said I was fucking crazy, but I told him I was going to do it, and I said, Joe Rogan's got a great line. Crazy and greatness. Our next door neighbors, and they borrow each other sugar. I love that line. But I was tagged in a post by a guy I had in one of my coaching groups and another one of my buddies just commented right after it. And I said, son of a gun, here's a challenge. And yes, there's the physical side. And that was huge because I'm not much of a runner, but more it's the mental side. Right. That's what got me excited. Like the mental challenge of doing twelve legs of 4 miles every 4 hours. So as I talked about bookending your days, preparing for success at night, I used that same kind of methodology for this I prepared. Right. I knew that physically it was going to be a challenge, so I needed to conserve as much mental energy as possible when I first did this. So I had the same route every single time. I didn't want to go a different route and have to see where I'm at or think is, am I getting a 4 miles? I did the same thing recovery wise, every time I came home, right? Stretching, getting into an ice cold bath, getting into leg compression sleeves, eating the same thing. After my 11:00 Friday, that I did 11:00 on Saturday, that I did 11:00 on Friday, I didn't want to have to think about anything because it's a mental challenge enough to run that much. And that really equipped me as well. The first time I did it, I tied a charity to it, right? So my youngest son has Crohn's disease. I raised nearly $5,000 for a Mother's Wish Foundation, which my wife is on the board of. So I tied those in. Second time I said, okay, I just wanted to finish the last time. And the first time I did it, I think my average mile pace throughout those 48 miles was anywhere from ten and a half to twelve minutes. I said, all right, I'm not going to have any charity, I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. I'm just going to hammer out this time and I'm going to get an average mile pace time under ten minutes, which was a big step from where I was. My average pace time that second time was nine minutes and 31 seconds. So just stayed focused, hammered through it. I did hang up the shoes after this past one, I told my wife a whole weekend of just running and recovering. Yeah, that was fun, but I did it twice. I'm going to be looking for new challenges. But really the mental side of waking up that second night at 03:00 a.m. Going for a run when nobody else is around, when your mind is telling you, stay the hell home. Your feet hurt, your ankles hurt, your calf's hurt, and you just don't want to do it, to say, no, I'm going. You again pull tremendous strength from telling your mind what to do, not the other way around, which so many times happens as we're growing up. And to people in life, it's hard to accept the things that happen around you when you're trying to attain greatness. There are folks that are good at what they do. And then this really landed for me. I recently saw one of the clips. It was goggins. I don't know if he was on Rogan or one of the shows he was on, but he had said that because it really clicked for me. He had said something to the effect of when you want to be the absolute best and people are saying that you're miserable and that you don't get it and there's got to be more to life and you have to find balance and you have to understand. He said, Look, I get all of that stuff. He said, but when you want to attain greatness and you really want to be the best at whatever it is that you're doing, and people are saying that you're nuts and that you don't have balance, that's when you know that you're starting to arrive, right? Because it's a tough road, man, as you start to take these steps and it's something candidly that I'm experiencing now, and we are surrounded and pounded and influenced constantly about balance and finding that place where everything is just perfectly, then and I'm sure there's a lot of folks who that is for. I haven't found a place where it's quite for me. My family is number one in my life. It always has been, it always will be, but then there's one A, and that's what I do and deals. I've got a passion for it. I absolutely love it. And I'm working hard to take those next steps. And when you're in that place and the folks around you that are closest to you start to say, like, what the fuck are you doing, man? Come on. Did you really have to be there at 02:00 in the morning on a Saturday? Do you really have to be there at 06:00 in the morning on a Sunday? It's hard for those things not to creep in and for those things to not start knocking you off your game. And I have found that then I've kind of gotten in this. I feel like I'm in a washing machine where things are kind of spinning around, and I see it all and I understand the things I need to do. But there's so much happening around me that I'm having a hard time getting it all together, edified, organized, in its right place so that I can reason mentally that this is okay and that I'm taking the right steps. So what can someone expect at the Morning Fire? What is it that I could expect, for example, if I wanted to take this step, what would my experience look like? Three main things that I bring to every coaching, arrangement, relationship that I have energy, accountability, consistency. You add those three things into each and every day, there is going to be such a rise in your performance, personally and professionally. You're going to step into that greatest version of you. You're going to close that gap between your potential and where you're at right now, and that's the game is just closing that gap. We'll never get there to our true potential, right? And that's so hard for people to actually realize. And it was a struggle for me for years after I left corporate America, just thinking I'll get there. And to your point, it'll be a white sandy beach and my toes will be in this crystal blue ocean and I won't have to do anything. That's not the case. You'll never be exonerated from the work. You're going to have pain in life. There's going to be uncertainty. But when you have someone or you have a guide, a coach, a mentor, a cheerleader that's saying, hey James, get up, attack the day. Every single day you have somebody in your corner, it's amazingly powerful. I always say as adults, we're always guided. We're mentored as we're younger with parents, teachers, coaches, and then we leave college and it's like you're released to the wild and you don't have anything. And people, no wonder why people drift getting the stupid shit. Listen, I have my life. It's been painful financially. It's been painful in relationships personally. But energy, consistency and accountability bring in your best energy to every single day. People always struggle with time, the amount of time they have. Well, if you're given shitty energy, if your energy levels at a five between ten being the best and one, yeah, you're going to struggle with time because you're not putting enough energy into what you're looking to accomplish. So that's number one. Dialing that in two. Consistency, doing it day in and day out, right? Consistency is that gross multiplier. You can have focus, you can have time, you can have energy. Underneath in between those parentheses and outside is consistency. Doing it over and over again. The issue is. And I love Simon Cynic. Right. Consistency is more important than intensity. But we don't stay consistent because we don't know when we'll be successful. But if you continue to be consistent, you'd eventually get there. We're just wired with this I got to have six pack ABS and six minutes mentality, right? So consistency and then accountability. How many times if you're listening to this podcast, if you said you're going to do something and you didn't freaking do it, I still struggle with it personally from time to time. But how many times if that's a habit that you just say you're going to do something and then you don't. Maybe it's self doubt, maybe it's fear, maybe it's uncertainty. That accountability of having somebody else say, hey James, get this shit done today. Let's go check in when you got it. That's very powerful to get that momentum, get that progress, and get that truly stepping into who you want to be. So how personal of an experience is this? Yesterday, for example. Well, let me take a step back. We recently had a real health care with my wife.

She has always been my rock. She's just I'm the manic one, right? Like insane. Going constantly. And I joke around with her all the time. I could walk in and say, babe, we hit the lotto for 2 billion. Or babe, I just filed for bankruptcy. And she'd be like, okay, we'll figure it out. We'll get through it together. She's just fucking yeah. And I had never even contemplated that this was possible, that she could ever be sick.

No. That seems kind of naive and silly, but it's hard to explain the dynamic unless you're in it. And you're wired the way I am and wired the way she is. She never misses a beat, never misses a day. She's almost never sick. And it was for me, I think, that moment where from the outside, you would look and say, here's a kid from Staten Island that has built a great portfolio and he's had a lot of success. But internally, I look at it and I go, you fucking mud. You can do so much more. You know you can do so much more. And you have not taken that next step. Why? And when we got this news, the initial thoughts and emotions are what you would expect, right? I should have spent more time. I should have okay, thank God. It turns out that we just found out the day before yesterday that everything is going to be okay. And the other shoe kind of dropped for me and it was, okay, here's your wake up call. Nothing is guaranteed. We don't know what tomorrow is going to look like. You can do so much more. You can impact so many more people. You can teach so many more people. You can influence so many more lives. Let's go. And you have these emotions. And then just yesterday, I was up at work. I was out the door by a quarter to seven. I put a couple of hours in and then I had some stuff I was going to do with the kids. And in the afternoon I was going to start working on goals for next year. And I didn't. I decided to sit on my ass and say all those excuses you deserved half a day you deserve, right? And those things crept in and almost immediately I started to regret it. By this morning, I was like, because now it's just got to be done this week. And then a ready, challenging week. We have a conference, we have a lot of things going on. You had talked about accountability. How intimate of an experience is this? How often are you checking in with your coach? How involved are they in your process? I know that was a very long set up, but I was going somewhere with it. How intimate of an experience is or is this not? Yeah, well, I mean, James, first and foremost, glad the news was so much better with your wife. I could feel the emotion and coming through. So thoughts and prayers there. That continues first and foremost, because I know how important that is. So that's number one. Number two is it's very intimate from a one on one perspective when I bring on a client accountability, check in daily, right? I also offer a concierge service. When you're going through shit, you have my cell phone. You're on my favorites list. You can text, call me. Because when you're going through that moment, that's when you need somebody to say or give you a perspective or be there just to dump everything out, right? And then say, okay, James, now it's time to get back. Now it's time to be there, right? Have heroes, have strength for two, right? Now, you're going to have strength for your wife in this process, right? And you're bouncing back. So that's the other piece I love, because those are the times, right, when we stay stuck. Like your example yesterday. Imagine if you would have called me when you sat on the couch after five minutes and said, you know what, Jeff? I'm I'm struggling right now. I would have said, James, get your ass up. Remember what happened with your wife tomorrow's. Not given it's a it's a gift, right? Get moving. So that those are those are two of the things that I love to do and I think is a big differentiator for me in the marketplace. And we typically connect weekly on a zoom, 30 minutes zoom call. We're just diving into things that are going on and how we can step into the best version of ourselves. But that daily accountability and having me on speed dial if you need it, all of a sudden, that progress, that momentum. Getting up off that couch, attacking those goals, doing those things, that's where I'd love to see that progress in my clients. So I had asked you about the Goggins four X four X 48, how that came about, because as you're going through this process and folks, this is so important if you're not surrounded by and at a bare minimum, if you don't have several people in your life that are living the life, walking the walk of where you want to be, you're in the wrong circle. And you need to raise that bar, because without it, you fall victim to what I fell victim to yesterday. I started to think, Jeff, about who could I call to subtly try and get a kick in the can right as I'm going through the list. And they're all wonderful people, but I could hear the conversations like, bro, you put it in 100 hours this week. It's Sunday at fucking two. It's okay. And I didn't need that. I didn't want that. And for you to be called out right, on that challenge, because that's what it is. Like, hey, Jeff, we're doing a four x four X four. You know what that is. I know what that is. They know what that is. Now you're doing a four x four X 48. So you need that in your life, folks. You need that next level performer for performers. You need people that are going to want to feel compelled, the need to push you because you can't do it alone. You need to have the right people around you. And that's why I asked again about the four X, four X 48 and how intimate of a process is it? Because that's also a process, getting into that next level of people and making those connections and building out your COI and making sure that you've got the right people around you. And these are the programs and the steps, folks, that can help you do that. Jeff, where can someone go to learn more about the experience, the program? Is there a particular website? Is it your YouTube channel? Where can they get the most information? Yeah, they can go out to my website. It's www.vthemorningfire.com. If you feel compelled, grab 20 minutes complimentary 20 minutes sessions. Just love connecting with people, right? Too many times we don't connect with other individuals. And James, I love how you put that. Right? You got to have people around you that are pushing the limits. And I will tell you, five years ago, I still hang hung out with the same circles, a lot of guys from high schools, not neighborhood guys. I barely hang out with any of those anymore because they're not on a mission to be the best version of themselves. They're, you know, hanging out, drinking beer till two in the morning. I need to be around others that are on this mission to what can I do next, how can I up level, how can I impact? Listen, there's a lot of people out there that are suffering quiet desperation, anxiety, depression, stress. It does not need to be that way. But you got to get out of your circle and you got to find out and search out others that are putting in the effort and our practitioners, right? I don't speak from a fucking book. I put in the work myself daily. And that's how I can speak so passionately about what I do. Because I tell people, I'm never going to recommend anything to you that I haven't tested out on myself. And that gives me authenticity, it gives me confidence to speak to it. So my website is the best. I'm out on all socials. You want to check out any of my free content, podcasts, YouTube channel, all the socials. But yeah, I mean, if you're stuck and you got that itch on the back of your neck and it's an itch that I could never scratch. And I tried to for 20 plus years until I got into this world, until I found out these strategies, daily habits to implement, I just I always knew that there was something more for me out there. And if you feel that same way, we definitely should connect. So, folks, you know who you are. You're feeling it right now. If you don't have it, you can't explain it. If you do have it, you know exactly what we're talking about. If you have that itch. I didn't know Jeff was going to offer a free 20 minutes. I think that's amazing. And thank you for that. Get up and take the step. Unlock that potential. Time is fleeting, my friends. And I could tell you, for me, this has been an emotional, difficult, challenging couple of weeks, but I think I have my moment here. It's easy. And part of what's come out of the COVID thing is everybody is a fucking coach. Everybody is. And I'm working hard with my team to find the people who are doing what they're saying, not just saying it right, because that is equally, if not more dangerous. When you're advising people and you haven't been there yourself and you haven't done it yourself, you can really do damage to someone who's vulnerable and looking for leadership. And the fact that you've done these 800 days of the ice baths and 15 or 16 or whatever the number was now of meditation and you've done the four by four by 48 and you're you're actually living it. Timing is everything. I was looking forward to this episode and recent events had just put a giant spotlight on it. Jeff, I can't thank you enough. This was a great chat and you're going to find me on that portal logging in for my free 20. There you go. Love it. James, man, I appreciate your vulnerability and it was amazing discussion. My man. I really appreciate it. Jeff Wickersham, everybody. As always, please stay safe. This was great, man. I really appreciate it. This was good stuff. Yeah, man. You gave me I got goosebumps. Listen, at the end of the day and I meant every single word I know. I'm so happy that it was good news for your wife. And kudos to you for having all the feels and talking about it. Right. Because especially as two men shooting the shit that needs to happen more in our society, because the largest part of the population that suffers from suicide is that men from 25 to 50. Right. Because we don't talk about shit and we don't get down to a level that is actually meaningful and impactful, not just, hey, did you check out the score of the game? No. What fucking matters and is your wife okay? Right. And that sort of stuff. So kudos to you. Yeah. This was incredibly uncomfortable for me. Podcasts. I've always been a head down guy. I hated the spotlight because I just was not comfortable with myself and I had made a decision if I was going to do it, I was going to let it all hang out. I'm not going to fucking pretend anymore. I spent a lifetime pretending. I'm exhausted on it. I'm that prototypical a personality that nobody sees the other side and it's fucking perpetuating. That is dangerous and unhealthy. I decided I wasn't going to do it. I was going to either be in and be real or move on. Love it. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and sign up for that session. Yeah, let's talk. Yeah, I'd love to do that, man. I appreciate you. Absolutely. I appreciate you as well. So what's your wife's name? Can I keep her in my prayers and thoughts? Absolutely. Thank you. Lauren Prendamano. Lauren. Got you. All right. I'll put her in my family's thoughts and prayers. For sure. I appreciate your man. Thank you very much, Jeff. You got it. We'll talk soon. Stay blessed. All right. See you. Goodbye.