Everything You’ve Been Suppressing Isn’t Staying Quiet. It Just Gets Louder with Randy Lyman

Speaker A: Everything that you've been suppressing is not staying quiet. It just gets louder and at some point it stops asking for your attention and it starts breaking things to get it. And my guest today, he had all the success. He had the companies, the results, the credential, the credentials of, uh, a physicist. And then he hit a wall. It wasn't a strategy wall, it wasn't a tactic wall. It was an emotional one. And he went to a four day retreat on business communications, sat across from a partner on day three and something that had been locked up for 12 years released his businesses. Listen to this. Scaled 30 times after that. Not because the strategy changed, but because he changed. And I'm excited about this episode because I sit down with Randy Lyman. He's the founder and author of the Third Element, and he's a guide to founders and executives who have had the success but still feel that big hole to talk about emotional healing, why suppression always has a ceiling, and what's actually available on the other side of feeling it. So my one ask is that you hit subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a conversation like this one or the summary implementation episode that follows. You're listening to another episode of the Mind of George show and let's dive into today's episode foreign. Welcome back to another episode of the Mind of George show. In case you're watching this, welcome to my living room. I decided to build a studio in my kitchen just because I got to change it up sometimes. I got to change it up. I am really, really excited and, and it's almost hard to introduce today's guest. I could call him my self titled label of a recovering physicist, uh, a very successful entrepreneur, uh, incredible looking cowboy, a bald brother, uh, you know, he's rocking a cowboy hat. But yet I'm in Montana. But I'm excited because today's guest, he built all of his early success through logic and discipline and performance. But he experienced some deeply personal turning points and it forced him to reconcile the emotional patterns that he had been basically spent years suppressing. He had everything on paper, but something was missed. And he found really what we've been talking about for 700 episodes. So this is probably going to be one of those episodes where I'm like, listen to what he says. He's got more wisdom, more success, more experience. And I'm going to be like, see, I told you. But a lot of the things that we miss when it comes to success, when it comes to leading our teams, when it comes to leading ourselves, are the things that actually shape the results we have in our life. And so he started doing his own work and started unpacking the emotional journey. And magically, it's almost like a formula. And his business has started scaling more than 30 times. And so over the last three decades, he's continued exploring, teaching, and guiding people at that intersection of emotional awareness, leadership, trust, performance, and most importantly, human behavior. But it's not one of those, like, do as I say. It's, look, I did this. Now do what I did so that you can have the same results. So he helps founders, executives, high performers who have that success. But what I would call that hole in the stomach, right? That pit of, like, I thought when I hit this, I made it. I thought this would make me feel better. I thought that number in the account, I thought that many sales, that many customers, that many teams. And so I'm really, really excited to be joined by today's guest. So, Randy, welcome to the show. Brother

Speaker B: George. Great to be here. I love the introduction. Recovering physicist. I haven't heard that before, but it's appropriate.

Speaker A: It is. I mean, like, the more I find out about you, I was like, we did this and you did this, and I was a marine. You're way more educated than I am. So, like, I'm. I'm excited to dive in. So I. I want to start with this. I love the premise of everything that you do, and I resonate so deeply with it. And I still every day bump up to people that fall into this toxic thinking pattern of, like, yeah, but I'll. I'll deal with that later. Like, I'll just suppress my feelings. I'll just hustle harder, right? Like, it doesn't matter. And what have you noticed, both for yourself personally and for all the people that you've helped is possible when they really start to dive into the check engine light of their own emotions?

Speaker B: Starts with being willing to feel the pain from the past.

Speaker A: M.

Speaker B: Which leads to clarity, which leads to more inner peace, which leads to success in the way we lead our teams, and which leads to business success. And I, uh, want to kind of touch on something that you implied, which is we're not sure how to do this. Why do we avoid emotional healing? For one, it's very messy. And second, as men, when we grew up as boys and young men, especially in junior high and high school, everybody's competing to be who's the strongest. I'm going to see who's the strongest, who's the toughest. And so if I, for example, was able to, uh, be in touch with my intuition or I was caring or compassionate, that I'm identified as weak. I'm a target, and anybody who's insecure is going to attack me to feel stronger. So we went through roughly six years of our life as young men trying to learn how to survive through masculine traits, through being aggressive, through being strong. Now, I'm not saying being strong is not good. We are inherently protectors and providers. That's primarily what we do as men and we don't want to give up on that. But we also, I found, are, uh, we have a better life and we're more effective when we can embrace the feminine traits of being human. Now, the feminine traits doesn't mean I'm going to be girly in any way. It means I'm going to be in touch with my gut, my intuition, I'm going to be caring, I'm going to be compassionate, I'm going to connect with the people who I'm leading. And those are feminine traits. Again, I'm a 64 year old man. I'm very competent. I fix my own machines and cut my own firewood. But at the same time, when I was leading my companies, who I was 36 years ago, I hit a wall and I couldn't accomplish anymore until I looked at myself and I found ways to grow and change how I approached myself and how I approached the teams that I led.

Speaker A: You know, I want to, I want to get basic for a minute because I, I know being in this industry, for me like almost 20 years, somebody hears the term like emotional healing and they're like, ugh, it's that woo woo stuff, right? It's that like we don't talk about it. How would you define emotional healing?

Speaker B: Okay, so, uh, I want to set the framework for this. Everything in the universe falls into one of three categories in no particular order. We have our thoughts and information, we have our physical body and the physical world we live in. And then we have emotions. And everything fits into one of those three categories. There is nothing else. Uh, those three categories are the three elements. So we have learned to be as smart as we can, educate ourselves and try and learn to be smarter. We work hard, that's an obvious one. But we avoid our emotions. And uh, another part of this makes it really more useful to get a person's mind around. And I explain all this in my book the Third Element. So if we start with our body, our physical body is only available to us in the present moment. It's like, I can't cook on Yesterday's hot stove. I can't. It's just gone. So my body is right now in the moment, moment by moment, moving forward in the present moment. And Eckhart Tolle talks about this a lot. I take it to another level. But when we're aware of our body, we can be in the present moment through how we feel it in our thinking mind. Our thinking mind is a stream of thought in the past to the future. Or it has to stream out over time, not in a moment. We can observe in a moment. That's different, but our thinking mind is never in the present moment. And then, for me, the most important component of the human experience is our emotions. We all want to feel good and enjoy our life. Those are emotions. Well, emotions are bigger than time and space. Emotions can only come through a feeling in our physical body in the present moment. Our mind can never connect at the present moment, so we can never connect with our emotions and heal. Feel. Release. That's the key word. Release those old emotional wounds through our thinking. It has to be done through a somatic, a bodily experience of some sort. So there's not many, uh, people who really explain how to do it. And it's messy, and without some guidance and a reason to go down that path, it's like, there's no light at the end of this tunnel. I'm not going down that tunnel. Uh, again, pitch, in my book, it's all about sharing with people. There is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a way to do this. It's not complex. It is possible. And the results are amazing. Because, as you said, I scaled my businesses to 30 times what they were once I started working on personal growth, and I showed up differently to lead my teams in a way that was more effective.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, because when you start doing that work, what the personal growth leads to is increased capacity. Right? You. You have presence, you have perspective. You have all of it. And I. I love the way that you described it. The three buckets were thoughts and information, the physical body and then the emotions.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, I. I love that. And I love that. I love that definition of it as well. And, you know, I. You know, I'm a dad. My son's nine. And I'll. I'll never forget because I was. I was the antithesis of what you teach. Like, when I got out of the Marine Corps, right. I was convinced for 13 years of my life that pain is weakness leaving the body, that I'm unkillable, that I don't feel pain, that tears don't happen. Right. And I became this numb version. But then what happened is I basically kept bumping up against all these ceilings, right? There was a limit to what was there because everything was just logic or suppression. And it was almost like when I would start to feel something, I became a victim of the feeling. I was so afraid of it that I would compensate or I would, you know, do something along those lines. And it reminds me of a kid's book I read my son. It was called Bear through the Woods. And, uh, I'll never forget this book. It was like, you can't go over it, you can't go under it, you can't go around it. You gotta go through it. And one of the fears that I had is feeling it. Like you said this at the very beginning is like feeling the pain is that felt so unknown to me, right? Like, what felt known to me was like, oh, I can suppress this. I can go scroll on my phone, I can go distract myself. I can go work out really hard. But I was so afraid of feeling it that I suppressed it. Right. So when you talk about feeling the pain, can you, like, define that? Can you give some context? Can you maybe soften the blow a little bit? Because I know people hearing that are like, I don't want to feel any pain. So I would just love your thoughts on that.

Speaker B: Well, first of all, opening our self to our emotions is like opening Pandora's box. We don't know what's going to come out. If we're going to access the good, happy emotions we've been suppressing or we're avoiding today, we're going to open that box and the old painful emotions come out also. Now for me, it felt like it was going to kill me. Oh my God, I don't want to feel this. I'll lose control and I'll never be able to regain control of my life. The opposite is true. But intuitively it just felt like, wrongfully, it felt like I was going to lose control. And the only way really to release old emotions that we first experience as a physical sensation. Let's talk about where emotions come from. I have an experience either through thought or a physical experience. And my mind builds a story around it might just be an instant, makes up a story. I get adrenaline, I get dopamine, I get whatever, uh, hormones come through my body to feel the emotional response that either guides me towards good or guides me away from bad. And that's, uh, a charge. Say it's 100 units of bad of a hit of A charge that I feel in my body, well, if I feel it all, it's gone. But If I feel 20% or 50% and I say, no, I'm not going to feel the rest of this and I push it down. I'm strong, I'm smart, I'm tough. I'm going to push this emotion down. It's like storing gasoline in a metal can. I can pour that gasoline out 10 or 20 years later and it'll still burn, it still has energy. But here's the thing that's the same also as gasoline. Once I feel it completely and burn it off, it's released. It's first law of thermodynamics. Energy is not created nor destroyed. It's only transformed. So we take this uh, thought our body, turns it into hormones, turns it into a physical feeling. And if we choose to push it down, we can. But it's bigger than time and space. It won't go away. So, uh, some of the ways to get through this. And I talk about 14 different methods in chapter seven of my book, the third element, breathwork. Wim Hof made breathwork really, uh, mainstream. And I don't care whose breath, work, session or excuse me, um, um, method somebody uses. Find a method that works. And another one that's really effective for me is eft tapping. I dedicated um, the appendix of my book to helping people write their own tapping exercises. You don't need to go buy it or go, you can write your own working out. Like you said, just a tough workout. If we can get to an emotional place and feel the frustration, feel the pain. And sometimes as a man, cry the tears of uh, whatever pain is ready to come through. Then I release that energy. And thermodynamics again, this is physics. Even if I just get a little watery tear in my eye, it transformed that physical energy that I was storing. That emotion I was storing it, transformed it into something that's thermalized, released and it's gone. And it's no longer something I need to carry. I need to fight, I need to push down. My mind becomes clearer, my actions are more effective and I'm a more effective human being. And I've got to the place where once I got through my own shame around my emotions. I've cried in front of my employees, I've cried online, I've cried in front of people in ways that not like a, uh, oh, I'm afraid and I don't know what to do. It's like, no, this is a pure emotion. I'm feeling Whether it's fear from the past, whether it's pain from the past, whether it's love I'm feeling for a brother or a sister, I'm helping. I just feel it now, and I let it come through. And because I have no shame around it and I'm comfortable with it, the world's a mirror of us. When I'm comfortable with it, doesn't bother anybody else. So I've learned that there's no reason to have shame around emotions. We're human. I was working with somebody today, and they said, well, I'm feeling emotional. Like, well, last time I checked, you're human.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, um, got. I have so many. Literally, my brain is, like, going through, like, the body keeps score and breath work and somatic releases and things I used to facilitate. But, you know, you said something that I want to call out. You're like, we feel an emotion, but then we tell ourselves a story about it. And I had a therapist, I don't know, maybe like, 20 years ago, and they broke this down for me because I realized that I was suppressing the emotions by telling myself bad stories about it instead of just letting it be an emotion, right? They're like, have you ever, you know, almost been in a car accident? You know, that feeling, like, the pit in your stomach, the tightness in your chest? I'm like, yeah, yeah. Like, it's bad. And they're like, have you ever been on a roller coaster? And I was like, yeah. They're like, what was the feeling? And I was like, the same. And they're like, notice how you told yourself two different stories? And it, like, kind of, like, broke my brain a little bit, right? And then it was years later. It was a couple years ago, I read this study that, uh, humans can only feel, like, actually experience the emotion for about, like, 90 seconds to two minutes. The rest of it is the residue from the stories and the spiraling and the rumination. And so, you know, I'm curious because the way that I look at this, for my own life, for everybody listening, I'm just gonna, you know, put myself on the. On the crucifixion cross of this one. Because, like, this, Randy, is, like, speaking everything I struggle with for 15 years until I had one of those, like, good cries and big releases, and it started this process. But most of my. Most of my life, Randy, the way that you described it was basically me suppressing that energy, right? Like pouring the gas down, pretending it wasn't there until some catalystic moment in my life happened that I couldn't suppress it anymore. And it came out unwillingly, uncontrollably, like unbridled and. And caused consequences. And then there was a shift where I started to proactively pursue that. Right. And so then it became this holy moly. There's, you know, something on the other side of this. And so just your thoughts on that.

Speaker B: Okay, but we can do this, um, we can do this on our own terms, because emotions are also like a child. And you said you have a son.

Speaker A: I do. Nine.

Speaker B: So, okay, your son wants your attention. He'll say, dad. And then you don't listen. Dad, he gets louder. And then he tugs on your pant or your shirt. And then if he doesn't get your attention, he'll go break something. And maybe your son doesn't do that, but a lot of kids, they'll go break something. They'll do something catastrophic to get our attention. That's what emotions do. So if we deliberately dive in on our own terms and our own conditions and our own time, then we can work through it. But if we don't, it's like that child or somebody who wants attention that's gonna go break something, and they amp the volume up and that message up until it gets our attention. And that happened to me, and I had a big release that helped me understand the connection between emotions and how they interact with the law of attraction through the universe to create our reality for us. And then once I made the connection, it helped me. But also, not only did they have that epiphany that helped me understand the interaction between our emotions and how the world is created for us, it released pain that I'd been carrying for 12 years. And that was really my start towards healing. And there's no way, as I already said, to think our way through this. We have to be strong enough. We're men, okay? And we're talking to women here, too. But if you're really brave, then be brave enough to feel the pain. If you're really bold, if you're really brave, if you really care about yourself, if you really care about your family, if you really care about connecting with the people around you. They feel our pain. They feel what we're going through. You have brothers who have been injured. You have brothers you've lost. You know that those emotions are real. You know that we are here as spirits, spiritual beings on a human journey to experience the material world and navigate the material world. And we're here to understand and feel ourselves at the deepest level possible. And we're Here to feel the people around us, who we love, who we support, who we just interact with on the street at the deepest level possible. So when we see the love in everybody, when we feel the pain that they're feeling, not to take it on, not to be sympathetic, but to understand, every one of us is an emotional being who's pretending to be smart and work hard so we can avoid our emotions. But when we find balance and all three, we can still be smart, we can still work hard, we can still accomplish a lot, and we're going to accomplish more and we're going to connect with our family and our friends and everybody. We need to connect with and have a happy, joyful, creative, emotional experience that's balanced.

Speaker A: I'm curious. I have so many questions. I'm going to start, I'm going to start here because I want some context. What was that? Because you had success, right? You were a physicist, you were running companies. What was that personal moment for you? Like, what shifted all of this for you to come to this side?

Speaker B: It was in 1991, I think, and I went to a four day retreat on business communications. And on the third day of the retreat, we went through an exercise called the seven Levels of Truth. And I talk about this in the book. And so we, we partnered up and my partner, he started asking me questions about what's your current problem? My current problem was people in my business and in my life who were just completely incompetent. And Maria, my romantic partner at that time, we were together for three years. She started me on my personal growth journey. She would tell me, it's a mirror of something inside you. You have to look at yourself. What's the mirror? Well, I was looking at my thoughts and I was looking at my actions and I was trying to be confident, but I wasn't aware of the emotional component. So we're going through this exercise and I remembered something that my uncle had said to me 12 years earlier, drunk on his 40th birthday. He said, I wish you were more like your friend John. Now what he meant was, I connect with John. I wish I love you. I want to connect with you and I can't. And I don't know how to express that. So his words came out were, I wish you were more like your friend John. All I heard was that he didn't approve of me and he wished I was different. Well, that helped me because that pain drove me for 12 years to overachieve. But eventually the pain within me just got in the way of everything. I was doing. So I broke down. I wear a group of, like, 16 people, and I just break down. I cry. The tears. I let it go. I'm sobbing. It doesn't always have to be that way, but it was. It was a deep. I'm 17 years old. Okay? You'd think, okay, Randy, you're 17. You're intelligent. Why? You have feelings. I gotta figure out how to get a job. I gotta find friends. I have to find a romantic partner. I gotta find a girlfriend. And so if my family doesn't approve of me, how is the world gonna approve of me? How am I gonna make it? So at 17, I had this pain. 12 years later, I have this release. I go back to work four days later. And all the people in my life who were incompetent either left my life. Uh, two of them just left. They were gone within a day or two, quit or just never talked to them again. And then four of the six people, they became competent overnight, immediately. So me, I'm a scientist. Cause and effect. The cause was I had the huge emotional release. The effect was the issues that I was having around competence were suddenly solved. They fixed themselves because I no longer had to have the reminder of my own feelings around incompetence, my own feelings around needing approval. So when I healed those emotional wounds, I became clear, my life became better. And I made the connection between our emotional pain we suppress and how the universe always wants to remind us of an opportunity to heal.

Speaker A: M. So I'm curious. I'm curious too. Like, you know, maybe to paint the picture right, because cause and effect. I love the. The sciency thing that your brain. Not my brain. Right. I'm the vision guy. But I. I love. This is like, prior to this catalystic moment, there was a way that Randy was showing up in business, in. In life. Right. And then after, there was a way that Randy was showing up. Right. Can you paint the difference between, like, what it actually looked like in the day to day, because you were running companies. Right. And there was a drastic shift that had results. But I think for people listening, it would be helpful to know, like, what it looked like before and what it looked like after.

Speaker B: Okay, so it's not far off. It's going to sound extreme, but it's pretty much the way I operated. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. So when I grew up, if we had a job, it was, shut up and do your job or you can go find another job. Shut up and do your job or you're out of here. I told you what to do. That's enough. Just do it. And that's how I was 40 years ago. That's how I was. And some people were okay with it. Very few were okay with it. Most weren't. And I just accomplished what I accomplished because it was hard to get a job back then. And then once I went through my own personal growth and you fast forward to, say, the 1990s and especially 1999, when I had a huge epiphany again, it was like, okay, this is what we need to do. Do you understand? How do you feel about it? How do we communicate? What timelines do we have? What expectations do we have for each other? Now, taking that was in the 90s, taking it to today, I need to clearly articulate what the mission for the company is. I need to share that, make sure people hear it the best they can. Then I need to ask people, do, uh, you understand? Not only do you understand this, how do you feel about it? Does this make sense to you? What part would you like to play in accomplishing our mission? And then, more importantly, really, the final step is I need to make sure each of the team members I lead understands that I'm here to help them succeed. Now, I'm not going to make them make dumb decisions. I'm not going to let them do things that can damage the company. I'm still going to hold people accountable. It's going to be boundaries and discipline when necessary and all that. But we're going to do it from a place of coordination, cooperation, understanding. And I teach teams how to make decisions. I can't have a team of three people or 40 people and say we're going to make decisions and expect them to know how to do it. I teach decision making. I teach people how to disagree with each other and still get along. I teach mediation. But then we show up when the team, we say we're going to make, we're going to make the plans together. You guys are going to come up with the solutions as much as you can, and we're going to work to hold each other accountable, including me accountable to accomplish the goal. And I'm here as your leader to support you, as you, the team, support the mission. That's exactly backwards, completely backwards to the way I did it 40 years ago. And that's the way I built the successful businesses I did. And that's how we changed the industry that we changed was we did it as teams of people who cared about each other and people who truly knew I cared about them.

Speaker A: M. Yeah. I love that. I feel like every question I ask is going to be selfish. If you're listening to this, uh, hopefully these land and resonate for you. But I want to take 30 seconds to paint this picture because I was very much like you because I grew up, you know, basically homeless, fending for my own from 13 on. So then I joined the Marine Corps. Well, they celebrate that behavior, right? They're like, survival, push, go, right? Like, if you can't be done, force, right? Like, that was the solution to everything. And I had similar moments to you. Mine was in a personal development experience that kind of like, cracked me open. But then, because I had never expressed those emotions, I almost swung the pendulum all the way to the other side. And I got stuck in Wounded Feminine, for lack of better terms, right? Just

Speaker B: for a while. That's fine. It's part of the journey.

Speaker A: For a long while. Like, a long, long while. Like, talking three years, uh, because it was so different and so new that I was so afraid to go back to the other side. I didn't understand harmony. Like, I didn't understand the masculine feminine. I didn't even know how to handle the emotions or the feelings. And so there was this whole season where I was just a basket case. But it was this interesting dynamic for me because then I was getting a different dopamine from being a basket case, right, of people like, oh, you feel and you do X. And. And I became, like, trapped in that world. So, like, how does somebody navigate the. The day to day of emotional healing, but also performing your job and then, like, showing up but also being sad? Like, I'm just curious from your perspective how somebody navigates that.

Speaker B: First, uh, of all, we have to give ourselves permission to make mistakes. We're going to make mistakes. It's going to be messy. Find a mentor. Find a partner if you can. Most therapists want to talk. If somebody's going to help you feel the pain, that's a great therapist, that's a great mentor, that's a great coach or teacher to be able to feel that pain and support you through feeling it. Because if we feel it on the surface, we get stuck there. If we can dive deep enough into the original wound and, and feel it completely at the deepest level of pain possible, if we're bold enough and strong enough to do that, then we'll release it. But a lot of therapy, a lot of people get stuck, uh, like halfway through or three quarters of the way through. Now, you're not gonna heal every issue completely right away. It's an onion with layers to peel. But if you just kind of scrape the surface and you don't peel off at least one layer and get to some underlying emotion to feel it, emote it, let it go, then you're not gonna get there. So, um, find a mentor. So here's what I did. I asked the universe, I prayed and I said, show me somebody who can help me. I need guidance. I need help. I surrender. I don't know how to do this on my own. What happened? People started showing up who were able to help me on my path. And when I grew past those people, I found new people. So, uh, I'm a big believer that every thought's a prayer, every action's a prayer. And prayer to whatever supreme being, source bigger than us, who's not judgmental and doesn't have any expectations, is here to help us when we ask for that help, and that's part of the human journey, is to realize that we're both, we're human beings, we're human and limited. And yet at the same time we're a spiritual being. When we ask for help from a place of humility and say, I'm helpless, I don't have the answer. Then we're connected with a part of ourselves that's infinitely strong. It's the balance of humility and asking for the guidance. And when we find that we're going to find the solution and again find somebody, find a brother or sister or a uh, friend or whoever is already on the path. When we ask for something and we go looking for it, we find it. If we look for problems, we're going to find problems too. But if we look for solutions, the solutions will show up. These aren't miracles. And I explain this in the book, these aren't miracles at all. All these possibilities exist and we walk into the future that we choose through the vibration of our thoughts and where we direct our thoughts, the vibration of our actions, where we place our body and how we act and how we treat ourselves and our emotions. So when we're aware of our thoughts, our actions, and we becoming aware of our emotions and we set our intention, we're going to be guided.

Speaker A: Mhm. God, I, I literally could talk to you all day. I'm like, that's just reminding me of my friend Sharon Lechter's book, Outwitting the Devil. Thoughts become words become actions. If you look at look for problems, you're going to find problems. I don't remember who said it was some famous, I think car, whatever you, whether you think you're right or you think you're wrong? You're. You're right. And, you know, I'm. I'm. I'm innately curious. I love your perspective and asking these questions. I'm just going to keep putting myself on blast. One of the traps that I fell into was I, um, thought that emotional healing had a finish line, right? So I was like, hmm. I processed that. Now it's gone.

Speaker B: Well, it does. It has the finish line. Once this life is over, that's pretty much all we can do. So here's the story that I tell m. I've been on this personal journey for 36 years, and I hope I'm halfway through. It's like having. It's like, okay, see, every issue is like an onion, and you peel through the layers, and you have to go back to it again and again. We're not going to get through one issue completely in one layer. It just too much. And the universe only gives us as much as we're ready to handle. It's not gonna kill us. It's not gonna overload us. Our brain says it's gonna kill us. Our brain thinks it's gonna overload us, but it doesn't. So I have to say for me, Randy, I had 30 onions out there, 30 different issues. And I'll peel through a layer on this one, and maybe I'll get some tears, maybe I won't. Doesn't matter. I peel through the layer, I get some emotional response. I put that aside, and I go find another onion, and I start peeling a layer, and. And I come back to him, um, again and again and again. And even after doing this for all these years and completely understanding it mentally, emotionally, I still get to a place of blame sometimes. I get to a place of frustration. I get to a place of wishing things are different rather than saying, okay, Randy, you know what you're doing. You've done this. You know it's real. Where's the gift? Let's look for the gift. Stop being pissed off, stop blaming, stop hoping the world around me is going to change, because the world around me is never going to change. I only have control over myself, and that's it. And you've been in situations where the enemy shooting over you, shooting after you, at you, um, trying to shoot through you, and all you can control is yourself.

Speaker A: How

Speaker B: am I going to calm? How am I going to be centered? How am I going to think clearly? How am I going to respond rather than react?

Speaker A: And

Speaker B: how am I going to control me? M. And have a positive impact on the people around me. And I can't control everything, only myself. And after 64 years on this planet, almost 65, I've never been able to change anybody. I wanted to change. People have wanted to change. They've asked for help. I've been there when they've asked for help. And that's different. But otherwise, if I'm trying to change anybody outside of myself, no matter how logical it is, no matter how well I fix that problem in the moment, it's going to pop up again later because I need that gift.

Speaker A: Mhm. Oh, okay. I got. I got three questions, but I'm gonna go through these each by each. But you just alluded to one of them where you were talking about, there's still days that I feel shame or that overwhelm. I remember early on when I started, you know, what I'll call my personal growth journey or emotional healing journey, it almost felt like dread. And then I don't rem. I don't remember the moment, but something shifted in me at some point where then it turned into excitement, like, almost like curiosity. Right. And I can imagine people listening to this of like, I don't want to do that work. I don't want to feel that, I don't want to have that conversation. I don't want them to know that about me. Like, if somebody's sitting there like, what is the next best step? And then how does somebody change their perspective from like, this is bad or this is happening to me. I don't want to do this to like, there's excitement in this, there's growth in this. Like, how do you guide people through that?

Speaker B: Well, I actually talk about, uh, the tipping point in my book. And um, it's a book called the Tipping Point, I think from a long time ago where we get to a certain point where suddenly, oh, it makes sense and we're finding success. And that's the way it was for me. My partner, Maria, she continued to push me to go deeper in my emotions. And even when I didn't want to do it, she kindly but sometimes not forcefully, but pretty strongly held me to, okay, this is the way. This is what you're going to do. And then through the experiences of, oh yeah, this kind of hurt in the moment, but my life got better. When we do that enough times, I don't know if it's five times or if it's 20 times, it's not 100. Sooner or later we say, oh, yeah, this works. And I'm going To feel better. And then our mind associates. It's like training a dog. I had to be trained like a dog, but okay, I had to be trained that if I address this openly, then I'm in charge, I'm in control, I do it on my terms and I'm going to feel better. And then when I reach that tipping point, uh, of, oh, great, this might hurt for a moment, but I know it's going to be better soon, then I embrace it. And I don't remember when that happened, but it's going to happen in, I guess, 20 different times. We have to dive into something we don't want to dive into. But how many things in life have we learned by doing what we didn't want to do?

Speaker A: Mhm, mhm. The scientist in you, I think it's the. I always mispronounce, but it's like the mid angular, singular cortex of the brain where it only grows if you actually do something you don't want to do. And then it gets stronger and willpower is associated. You know, you said something a couple of minutes ago, you know, where you were talking about finding a mentor, finding a coach. I had a nervous system expert on the podcast and she was talking about regulation, right? And earlier we were like, hey, you go work out, you go for a drive, you go journal, you go do something. You're regulating your nervous system. But I want to call out, the fact that you've said this over and over and over and over again is like, we desire to be in connection, we desire to be in community. But also when doing this, you want to be with somebody who's done it before because you learn the behavior from them. Um, right. You alluded to this earlier. We were taught younger, don't cry, don't feel, toughen up. And so you can try to logically think yourself or act yourself into doing it differently, but it's better to be witnessed in it and witness somebody in it to help you learn that behavior.

Speaker B: And we don't have to give up our very, very useful, absolutely necessary mind, our human mind, our logic and our reason and our planning, that stays. Our physical strength and our hard work, that stays. That doesn't go away. Those get better. And everybody's path is different. Everybody's mentor is going to be different. Everybody's, uh, epiphanies are going to be different. But when we ask for guidance and we set our intention, then it's just like the book from 100 years ago. Think and grow Rich, Napoleon Hill. Set your mind on what you want Surrender to whatever comes through and know that, yeah, it's going to hurt for a while, but God, you want to build muscles. How are you going to get through that without some pain in the gym?

Speaker A: I, I use that example all the time when I'm speaking. I was like, working out for some reason is the only bucket that we have in our life. When it gets hard, we're like, hard means good, but then when it comes to our emotions, we're like, hard means bad, right? There's a big dissonance that happens between that. I want to ask like a, A, uh, a tactical question a little bit to kind of paint the picture. Right. So you have um, your book the Third Element and then you have your emotional healing workbook. And I think the, the term is in workbook, right? What is like a day to day look like for you? For somebody who is maybe we'll call it harmonious, right? Who has gone the old version of Randy, which was like logic driven boom to now paired with the emotional, right, Masculine, feminine. Together you coach so many leaders and so many teams and run your own businesses. Like, what is your like day to day look like? Like, do you have intention with process and discipline in the morning? Do you intentionally set time for yourself to process emotions? What do you do during the workday? Like, if somebody's listening to this of like, what would my day look like if I was actually pursuing this? What would, what would that be?

Speaker B: I start out by looking at a picture next to my bed of the people I love, the people who mean the most to me. And I have gratitude for them and, and for um, their acceptance of me and how we support each other. The first thing I have on my phone, when I look at my phone is a picture of the woman I love and know that I am blessed by God to have this person in my life. And then I can get to look into my email and Facebook for birthdays and things like that part of my routine. And then I also look at tapping, eft tapping. If anything's bothering me, I stopped and I take the time usually while I'm still in bed and I just walk myself through A tapping exercise takes maybe three minutes longer, shorter, sometimes longer if necessary. And I set my intention for it's going to be a great day. That's just habit because I know that when I set my intention, it's going to follow. And then I do what I need to do to get my body going. I have some nutrition things I do. And then I jump into my day. Gratitude is the One thing that is like a cheat code. If we can stop and whether we think about it or we write it down, these are things I'm grateful for. Maybe it's just that I'm, uh, living on the street, but somebody gave me some shoes last week. Maybe I'm sleeping on a buddy's couch, but at least I got a couch to sleep on. Or maybe I'm sleeping in my car, but at least I got a car. Or things are better today than they were yesterday. I've traveled around the world, I've seen third world countries. Most of the world lives in ways that Americans just couldn't deal with because we expect so much and we think that it's our God given right to have all these luxuries. It's not, uh, it is absolutely by the grace of God that we live in this country and we have so many wonderful things. Another thing I do that's big is when I have problems, I write them down. Not because I want to focus on the problems. There's several levels to this. So this is what I do with especially left brain coaches or um, leaders when I'm doing coaching. Take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and then both of those sides draw two more lines and you got four columns. What is the problem? What is the operational problem? What's the behavior problem? What's somebody else who's a problem? Write it down. Second column. What's the logical solution? I may have it, I may not, but if I have it, write it down. Third column. This is where it really becomes useful. Third column is, where's my judgment? Am I feeling blame? Blame on myself, disappointment with myself, disappointment with somebody else, shame. What judgment do I have? That's the third column. So first the problem, second the logical solution, Third column, the judgment. And then beneath the judgment on the fourth column is what emotion is this related to? Is this related to emotions around abandonment, betrayal, jealousy, um, inadequacy? What emotions are there? So I've logically stepped through it in a way that my mind's not going to shut it off. My mind's in charge. And now I have something to work with. I have my logical solution I can work with, I have my judgment, where I can be, where be aware of my changing my mindset. And now I've uncovered the emotion where I can dive in for some emotional healing. And it's so simple and it's so powerful and I do it myself. Now, uh, in my emotional healing workbook, I take a little bit different path. It's a longer path. But this is, I don't know, 72 pages. I wrote it for myself four years ago and we, my marketing manager, I shared it with her and she says, oh, you gotta publish this. So we go through, what am I. What problem am I sensing in my world? What am I judging again? What I talked about, what am I feeling? Where did those feelings and thoughts and ideas come from? From my childhood, typically, Do I want to change those? How do I think I can change those? How can I work through the emotion? And then now that I'm through the emotion, through the first five or six steps, what do I want to focus on? Where am I going to set my mind? Where am I going to set my compass on where I'm headed and how I'm going to create a better life? So we uncover the emotions. We work through the emotions in a way that's safe. You're writing this for yourself. When you're done with it, you can burn it, you can do whatever you want. This isn't for other people. This is for each person who goes through it for themselves. And in the end, I find some clarity emotionally. I find mental clarity as to where I want to go. And I focus my mind on the goal and it works. So I've been through this process about 13 times with my own workbook.

Speaker A: I love it. Where, where can. I was just going to ask now because I, I want it. Where can everybody get the workbook?

Speaker B: Major online booksellers. If I say the name, some platforms will, will have you cut it out. But, uh, on major online electronic booksellers, you can find it. Or through my website, randyliman.com you'll find a link to it and you'll find. I'll plug my, my website right now as well. It's, it's my name, randyliman.com I have links to free tapping exercises and links to follow me on Instagram, uh, or LinkedIn or wherever else you'd like to. But the, the book, the Third Element and the Emotional Healing workbook are both available through, um, an online bookseller.

Speaker A: Yeah. And, you know, you just, you just said something about the free resources that I think is so awesome. And I just want to dive deeper into your perspective on it. You've alluded to a few times that, you know, everybody's journey is unique, right. For some of us, like I was a breathwork teacher, right. I used to be a facilitator. For some of us, it's breath work. For some of us, it's journaling. For Some of us it's tapping. For some of us it's working out. I think one of the things that I struggled with early on and I still see is I would be like, well, Randy taps, so I have to tap. Or Randy does breath work, so I have to do breath work, right? And it became a very sneaky hiding place for me because I was like, randy, I'm doing the work, right? I'm doing the work that you do. So how does somebody go about finding a modality or a tool that's useful for them?

Speaker B: Uh,

Speaker A: what does that look like? You're cracking me up

Speaker B: here, George. You're cracking me up because in chapter seven in my book, I share 14 different modalities, 14 different methods that are possible, and there's more. And in chapter eight, I say specifically, everybody's different. Find what works for you. Don't expect somebody else's method to work. And if I prescribed a step by step method, our, uh, brain would latch onto that. A person's brain would latch on. I'm doing these steps. How come I'm not healing? It's not about thinking. It's not about process. It's not about the perfect discipline. It's about allowing ourselves to feel what we've been avoiding. And everybody's path to that, that place where we're safe enough and able to feel those emotions is different. For me, one path I used a lot is I would say, surprise, uh, me, I'd just say a prayer. Surprise me when I'm in a safe place to feel what I need to feel. Bring it on. Show me something that's gonna take me to that place of release. And then the universe, God, spirit would always, always respond with the perfect time and place. And it would come through and I would feel better. And I can't do it with my mind now. I can do it today. I can do tapping eft. I can do breath work and I can kind of force my way through it and journaling and all that. But as soon as I'm forcing, it's not the same as allowing. And the only way to truly grow is to be willing to allow.

Speaker A: Can you just say that last line again? That was so good.

Speaker B: Healing can never be forced. Personal growth can never be forced. Leading a team effectively to the highest level of effectiveness can never be forced. It has to be allowed. And that's a feminine trait. Okay, but it's more powerful. Einstein said imagination and creativity is more powerful than knowledge. Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg channeled the uncertainty principle in 1927. When he is on a hiatus on an island to get away from some kind of grasses because he had allergies and he's out meditating. And that's how he figured out the uncertainty principle, which is the last piece of real science we've had since 1927. Nothing new has come through aspects of that, but allowing is what we were never taught. And, uh, in the Marines, you're not going to allow. You have to take charge. Okay? That's reality. When I ride my dirt bike, I have to take charge. If I'm in an emergency situation, I take charge. But if I'm in a place where I'm leading, I'm looking for growth, I'm looking for healing. I have to allow and I have

Speaker A: to

Speaker B: trust in something bigger than me.

Speaker A: I want to close one loop because I had a question. Uh, and I love that you cover this in the book with, like, the 14 modalities. When somebody is pursuing a modality or something for them, what is a sign for them or what should they look for to know that it's working? Right. Like, what are those things? Right? Because people listening to this might have, like, never tried anything, right? They've never tried tapping or they've never tried breath work. Like, what are those signals that they should look for to know? Like, I should pursue this.

Speaker B: It's not neutral. It's either irritating as hell and that's a good sign, or it's bringing relief, and that's a good sign because sometimes we have to. Many times we have to go through the irritations before we get to the relief. And the irritation is our ego saying, I don't want to feel this. I'm going to fight you. So if it's just neutral, it's the wrong one. If it gives you an irritation or relief, that's you're on the right path.

Speaker A: I. I love it. I love it. I. I think that's great. It's. It's funny earlier when you were talking about prayers, I've learned to get really specific with my prayers to Jesus because I've prayed for many things. And I was like, I'm gonna be more specific next time on, like, what I would like this to work look like. And I thank you for. For giving this to me. Um, because that's such a big point and because we've talked about it a few times and I've talked about on the show, but I'm. I'm just curious. I haven't talked about it in years. Like, masculine, feminine. Feminine dynamics. Right? I know the difference. But in your words, for everybody listening, can you just explain the difference when you're speaking about masculine versus feminine? Like what are the masculine traits? What are the feminine traits? Like, how would you define those?

Speaker B: Masculine traits are taking something that already exists and directing it through persuasion, through force, through containment, through boundaries, through rules, whatever that might be. Those are all masculine traits. Those are all necessary. Feminine traits are creativity are bringing forth the things that haven't been discovered yet. Science is based on feminine traits of discovery. It's out there, we don't know about it. And we need something to show us that. We need to allow it to come into our reality. We can force constraints on a scientific experiment, but we have to allow ourselves to observe what's coming through. And in leading people, I have to give people the space to fail if they're going to have the space to succeed. And if I have the constraints too tight, then I may feel like I'm in control, but I'm also limiting the outcome. And also this is the thing for, for me as a man and I just worked through this a year ago, the, uh, feminine aspects. I was very comfortable with most of the feminine aspects. There was part though of, of divine feminine that scared the hell out of me. And that is the divine feminine is undefined, it's unpredictable, it's undetermined. Now from that create comes a lot of great things. The creation of human life, but also all the discoveries, all the things that we're figuring out, all the wonderful creations that are yet to come, those all come from this scary place of, uh, where things are not defined. From the abyss, from the void. That's really where God exists. That's where the power exists, is in that void. And we could talk in a future episode if you ever want to do it. About zero point energy. If we go to the very center of our heart, smaller and smaller and smaller, far beyond the nuclear and the sub nuclear, we get to, um, infinitely small and infinitely powerful that reaches everything all at once. And that is the void. And that is the feminine aspect of God. That is so scary to those of us who want to have control over our life.

Speaker A: The control, that's the one, right? I call it the illusion of control, right? Because at the end of the day, I'm reminded in my prayer every single day, I'm like, I have none. It's just an illusion. The only thing I can control is in that moment, how I respond to it, how I show up about it, what my perspective is about it. And I want to close this Loop very. From very early on, because when we started talking, you know, we were talking a lot about men. And I coach both men and women, right? And I love your definition of the masculine and feminine because it's not a male, female thing, right? There are men that I know that are very, very masculine, but then there are men that I know that are very, very feminine. And inverse, there are women that I coach that would run circles around my masculine, like. Like, get it done on the job, drive through the wall, and are. Are missing that feminine. And so when it comes to the emotional journey, right, the emotional healing, I'm just submitting this, that I think the goal is that we have, uh, we're in touch with both sides because some of us default more to one side than the other, right? Is there a difference on the emotional healing journey from a man versus a woman? Or is it more so leaning into the other side? Because when I'm hearing you speak, there needs to be structure, right? There needs to be some discipline. There needs to be some routine, which is the masculine. But what that structure does is that allows space. I call it bumpers on the bowling alley, for the feminine to be able to express, to be able to have creativity. So, like, how do you guide or advise or what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker B: First of all, I want to say that my experience as a man is I had a lot harder time getting in touch with what I needed to than the women that I coach.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: the women are easy because they just need a safe space and acknowledgement and know that they're going to be heard and they're easy to work with. Me, as a man, I fought it. I did not want to. I did not want to give up my control. And. And I find that the women that I coach, women executives and leaders I coach, they have the masculine down in the way of planning and order and discipline and structure and calendars and budgets and all that. And then they try and act masculine as a leader, and they miss their greatest strength, which is their femininity, their ability to communicate and connect. And so what I help, mostly I help a lot of women through their childhood issues, where some man typically did not acknowledge them, did not see them for who they were, and they spent the rest of their life trying to get that man's attention. Even if their father, their grandfather, their brother has passed on, they're still trying to win that person's attention, and they're fighting the world with masculine instead of embracing the beauty of their feminine strengths. And all they can accomplish by simply allowing themselves to be more feminine. So men and women both in my opinion in our society today are going to find more effectiveness through feminine traits in balance with the masculine control.

Speaker A: Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. I love the way, I love the way that you answered that. That actually made more sense than my question. So thanks for translating that. That was super, super helpful. So you know, I wanna, you know, as we start landing this plane, you know, I know that there's a lot of people listening to this that are, are probably at very different places in their emotional healing journey. Right. But I always, I'm a big proponent of not letting something become shelf help. Right. So if somebody is listening to this today and like anything resonated, like what would your advice be? Like, what should somebody go do? What's a, what's a first step? What's a thing to learn into? Even if they're in practice, even if they've been doing this, like what would be your advice for somebody listening?

Speaker B: Do what they're afraid to do.

Speaker A: Look

Speaker B: at the biggest fear and sometimes the people who can help us the most, we're living under the same roof with them, but we're afraid to be completely frank and honest with them and tell them the truth because we're afraid they can't hear it. So I've found that with my domestic partner, I tell them this is what I want to work on. Are you open to this? If they say no, I'm with the wrong partner. If they say yes, then I say it's going to be messy. If you stick with me, I'll stick with you and we'll work through this together and it's going to be the most scary, but it's also going to be safe because if we make a mistake with our partner, they're going to hopefully, if we have the right partner, forgive us if we make a mistake. In a corporate setting, it's not as easy to recover. And then whether you work with me or find somebody else, find somebody who can coach you. And if you're interested in working with me, I'll do free consultations with people to see if I can help them or not. And they can contact me through my website through, um, uh, hello at the Third Element, through my email, they can contact me. And I'm not here to make money doing this. I have an amazing life. I want the world to be a better place. I want to know that the kids I'm influencing today are going to have a great world to grow up in. I want to know that the men out There. And the women who are hurting, who have pain can find a way to release it and live a better life. That's why I'm doing this. Because you know this. You're a coach. When you help somebody, you might work with 10 people or 20 people, and only one really gets it. And that one person who gets it and has that breakthrough that's worth whatever it takes along the way to get to that place where somebody really has an improvement in their life and they're living more fulfilled and more in touch with their heart.

Speaker A: Yeah, brother, you said that. You said that so well. So this is my favorite question because, you know, for everybody listening, I'm gonna, I'm gonna land the plane with a, a question, but I, I want you a minimum to connect with Randy. Like, go to randyliman.com, check out his book, the Third Element. Check out the emotional healing workbook. Like, connect with him wherever it is. And Rennie, I love this question. I'm really excited to hear your answer to this question. Right. Did you ever see that movie Met in Black with Will Smith where they, uh, erase people's memory? Okay.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I want you to imagine we just zapped everybody and they forgot absolutely everything that we talked about. But whatever you say in this moment is going to get tattooed on their soul. Like, they're going to carry it with them forever. I call it the tattoo soul wisdom. For everybody listening, what would be your tattoo wisdom that you want them to remember to take with them and to carry forever in the rest of their life?

Speaker B: There's no reason to judge ourselves or judge anybody else around us. Yes. Be discernible and make decisions, but we don't have to live life perfectly. We can make mistakes.

Speaker A: That's a fortune cookie right there, man. That's my retirement business. I'm going to take each one of these answers and I'm going to launch a good fortune cookie company. One that's real, one that's loaded with life advice, like life giving fortune cookies. Um, I might even make them gluten free. Just so you know, we, we heal the, the physical aspect as well. Uh, brother, it was an absolute honor. I, I thoroughly enjoy this conversation listening to you. Like, thank you for sharing your gift. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, and most importantly, thank you for being an embodied example. Like, not only teaching the work, but doing the work and being the work. Like, I, I really enjoyed this conversation, so thank you.

Speaker B: You're welcome. George, thank you for having me on. This was, uh, this was wonderful.

Speaker A: Of course. And for everybody listening. I'll say it like I say it all the time, right? If anything tickled. Actually, I'll even use Randy's words. If anything he said provided relief or irritation, that means go. So if it's him, lean in. If he irritates you, call

Speaker B: me about it.

Speaker A: Tell him about it. If I irritate you, you know I say this all the time, tell me about it, right? But whatever it is, answer that call. Because either of those options are great paths for you to follow, but nothing changes after this episode unless you do. Nothing changes unless you choose to. And my biggest fear, just similar to Randy's, is that this just becomes shelf help. It's another reason to file it away. It's another reason to logically explain it. But you have to do the work, and the work is sitting right in front of you. Nobody can do it for you. Nobody can make the step for you. But there are a whole lot of people that can stand right next to you and encourage you and support you in the process as long as you pick up the phone. And so that's my parting wisdom for today. So this has been another episode of the Mind of Georgiou. You will either see me in the next episode or you will hear me in your earballs, but either way, we are done for today.