Just checking in fellow gentlemen. I trust that you are having a safe and happy holiday season 🎄✨️🎄✨️🎄✨️🎄✨️🎄✨️🎄✨️🎄

Ending Self-Sabotage is about becoming a man who is respected, admired, and desired. Becoming the kind of man who gets respect starts with becoming the kind of man YOU respect. Because only you know the whole truth. Are you hiding things that you don’t want people to know? Because if they found out, you’d lose the respect you think you have. Things like addictions, how you treat people when you’re angry, and the truth about your finances. So you end up in shame cycles as you try to manage the stress of hiding the truth. Causing you to do more of the things that you hate about yourself. And the closer people get to the truth, the more defensive they become, using things like anger, lies, and isolation to keep from being exposed. Then, secretly doubling down on the addictions and self-loathing to cope with the shame only to cause more unnecessary damage to your relationships - the people you actually love. Either way, you’re walking around with this cloud over your head, living a life of appearance while feeling void of direction, purpose, love - and respect. What if there’s another way? Some hope. As a man who was addicted to drugs and would lie to keep people from the truth and would steal in moments that I didn’t have enough to get my fix. Then get angry, really angry, and disrespectful to those who were just trying to love me. A man who lived a double life as an escort. Trading my dignity for financial gain. Then was exposed to the world, yes, to the whole world, by a third party. Completely blowing up the lies I had been living. The ones I had been telling others to keep them from finding out my truth. But the most devastating lies that were exposed were the ones I was telling myself. See, I know what it’s like to be completely broke while looking successful. Being the life of the party and everyone’s favorite friend while treating my partner like shit behind closed doors. I used my real traumas to gain empathy when I acted out instead of taking responsibility for my actions.

With the holidays and a new year coming fast I know these next couple of weeks can feel like a massive weight on our shoulders. Like most men you're trying to juggle it all right now: the gifts, finances, expectations, travel or hosting all while you're trying to make sure your stress doesn't impact other people's joy. It's a lot. So let me check in with you... What is one thing you'd feel proud to accomplish this week? The one thing that if you get this done it'll create some relief in your life. The one thing that I'm focusing on is building out the "How to End Self-Sabotage" workshop. The name will be improved on haha But this workshop is the one thing that will impact all of my other goals moving into the new year.

On a scale of 1-10, how important is Respect to you as a man? And comment why did you chose that number? I'm curious about what you really feel, not what you think you should say.

Insecurity → Coping (sabotage behavior) → Shame → Coping (sabotage behavior) Self-sabotage doesn’t happen at random. It shows up when we’re growing—or being called to grow—beyond our current abilities. Maybe the pressure comes from an outside source, like a new job, a relationship, or the life-altering responsibility of becoming a father. Or maybe the pressure is internal—driven by your own goals, dreams, and the vision of a bigger life. Either way, growth is uncomfortable. When you’re challenged to become more capable, you’re also met with intense resistance. This resistance has a name: Cognitive Dissonance. Formal definition: Cognitive Dissonance is the discomfort typically experienced as psychological stress, which can manifest as feelings of guilt, anxiety, shame, or regret. Put simply, your brain thrives on predictable outcomes, better known as habits, and habits protect you in two ways: 1. They conserve energy. Learning something new takes a massive amount of mental and physical energy. Historically, this energy was reserved for survival—hunting, building shelter, and fighting off predators. 2. They create predictability. Predictability makes survival more likely. When outcomes are familiar, your brain feels safer. Stepping into unknown territory (even just psychologically) sets off your internal alarms because it could be filled with threats. So, What Does This Have to Do with Self-Sabotage? The problem is that modern life has evolved faster than our biology. We don’t need to fight off tigers or hunt for every meal anymore. But our biological responses haven’t caught up in our modern world, where we’re being hijacked by trivial stressors like the latest marketing tactics to get you to buy shit you don’t actually need or comparing our vacations to strangers on social media. As a result, many of us have become masters of coping instead of being. That energy in your body—the same energy designed to help you build, hunt, and thrive—is lying dormant, trapped like a bull in a cage.