The Shortcut to Transformation

A couple weeks ago I started sending out a series of emails all about progress. It’s a vehicle I used because I felt like I had a ton of stuff to share with you…so I broke it up into smaller chunks.

Through that series I’ve talked about the summit, some changes to my coaching, breathwork updates and even an unexpected podcast update.

But there’s one last thing I haven’t gotten to and that’s the magic shortcut I mentioned in the first email.

See, there are actual shortcuts sometimes. The original point in my first email was that are no real shortcuts - that most of the time people are just trying to sell you something.

Even within this shortcut I’m going to share with you - you still have to put your own work in. But it can drastically cut down the amount of time you spend learning a skill or a life lesson.

The secret is to ask for help. And to get help from someone that already knows what you're trying to learn.

I first learned this secret from Tim Ferris in a book called The 4 Hour Chef.

The premise of the secret is (to paraphrase) that we all know that to master a skill you need to put in the “10,000 hours”. But that studying someone who had optimized the skill could drastically speed up your own learning curve.

The fact that your teacher had optimized the skill was key - it’s not as effective to learn from someone who’s naturally gifted (like learning swimming from Michael Phelps, whose unique genetics make him a naturally gifted swimmer even before the countless hours of training and conditioning that he put in to win all his gold medals).

No, you want someone who isn’t naturally gifted - an average person who has learned through optimization, and through making mistakes.

In other words you want to take advantage of your teachers experience, from the mistakes they’ve made so that you don’t have to. From the things they’ve found the hard way.

This is the heart of the shortcut and why it is a shortcut - because they’ve done some of the hard work for you already through their own 10,000 hours.

It took me a long time to apply this shortcut in my own life, (which is a long story, but comes down to one main reason that I could describe as a strength or a weakness:

as a weakness: that people have failed me repeatedly in the past and I’ve learned to only rely on myself as a trauma response to prevent me from feeling let down,

or

as a strength: that part of my leadership style comes from understanding how things work (dominant C on the DISC scale for those that know).

The fact is that when I discovered the root of the trauma response I began to change it. In the last year I’ve hired trainers to help me with my physical fitness, accountants to help with my finances, a web designer to build a website and maybe most importantly a business coach to help me grow my business.

Instead of trying to do everything myself I’m asking for help.

Now I didn’t do that when I first started to work intentionally with plant medicine and heal my trauma. In fact I kind of did the opposite (because I still hadn't processed the trauma lol). I tried a lot of systems. I subscribed to a lot of newsletters and got a lot of free gifts thinking that this one would have the answers. And they didn't. Over time, I found books that helped, practices that helped, and systems that worked. And I actually followed them.

I carried this experience into my work as a coach. I asked myself “what would have helped me back then when I was getting started?” And I included all of my experience into the container, including the knowledge that I gained from making my mistakes - so that you don’t have to make the same ones.

Here are four examples of this that I help my clients with that I learned by experience:

If you’ve never meditated before, don’t try to meditate for 30 minutes a day when you start. So many people that I talk to about meditation tell me they have trouble meditating for 30 minutes. Who said you had to do that? I did this myself when I started (trying to make myself sit still crosslegged for an hour), but I also have learned by slow and gradual steps even if it’s just counting my breaths. I also learned to use habit building that’s backed by science to help people learn to develop so that they have a practice that helps them remove stress and have more clarity with their thoughts and feelings.

You don’t have to dissociate if you want to take an ice bath. Lots of people do this, I used to (and also did breathwork in the ice which is very dangerous…which I didn’t know). There are ways to bring presence and grounded clarity into cold exposure. Using these methods not only has all the health benefits of being in the ice but also builds resilience not avoidance in the nervous system which helps you be more present and get more out of working with plant medicine.

Doing transformational breathwork without any other breathing practice can seem appealing but isn’t the best idea. While it’s a lot sexier to do breathwork for “fat DMT releases” like you see on youtube, building a full breathwork practice that includes awareness and functional breathing will help your nervous system, lower your anxiety and make it easier to get more out of the transformational experiences like psychedelics and breathwork.

Integration isn’t optional. I spent a lot of time taking psychedelics recreationally and even trying to get something out it without knowing anything about how to integrate. And I got very little lasting benefit out of that. It wasn’t until I really started to take my integration seriously and put intentional time, including daily and weekly practices that supported bringing that “love & light” into my regular life and embodying it, that things really started to change. Which is why creating a daily practice is something that I help my clients with now so that they can embody their insights and higher self too.

So there's the magic shortcut. Find someone that you can work with that has been where you want to go and ask them for help. It doesn’t have to be me, but if you’ve been following me and wondering how I do things, now is a great time to reach out and schedule a free discovery call.

I hope you enjoyed this series. One of my “resolutions” is to be more consistent in my email/newsletters and these blog communications in 2023. I wish you a Happy New Year and I’ll see you soon!

With Blessings,
Jonathan