September 10, 2025 • 51 mins
On this episode, Seano welcomes Miles Adcox, founder of Onsite, to discuss the power of vulnerability, emotional healing, and the importance of creating safe spaces for personal growth. Miles shares his journey from seeking external validation to building a world-renowned retreat center focused on compassion, resilience, and connection. The conversation explores the impact of community, the value of mentorship, and the transformative work being done through projects like The OK Project.
Keep in Touch With:
Instagram: @Seanovenice
Website: https://www.shellvenice.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We also want to invite you to an idea that
you might be more than that part of your story.
You might be more than covering alcoholic. You might be
more than a recovery trauma saviral. You might be more
than a felt marriage. You might be more than the
stretch you carried last year when you questioning I've been.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Loving what you're doing with jelly roll and the Okay Project.
Could you walk the audience through that and how that
came into your consciousness.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Like, I'm over five hundred pounds and I'm trying to
sell sixty toward eights and I'd like to make some changes.
And I had told him I couldn't do it to
the level we wanted me to do it. But then
when I got into the hood a little bit and
stopped just looking at the car, I realized, oh man,
this guy might be a generational voice for mental health
and addiction.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Welcome back to the SINO Show. I'm your host, Cina McFarlane,
And before we get started on this amazing episode, can
you help a brother out? Please subscribe, please follow. Thank
you so much. I appreciate that. Oh boy, my guess
today has built one of the most powerful spaces for
emotional healing in the world. Miles ad Cocks is the
(01:07):
creative on site where people from every walk of life,
from rock stars to single parents come to hit pause,
peel back the layers, or remember who they really are.
He's a truth teller, a safe place, a living proof
that vulnerability changes everything. Let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Welcome brother, I've been excited to meet you. We talk
about you a lot at the facility. I know my
colleagues think the world of you, and I know you're
doing great work, so I'm honored to get a chance
to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
You have incredible gift for compassion, patience. You meet people
where they're at. You've mastered the art of active listening.
You did not learn that skill set at Yale. Was
there a moment where you had that tap out moment?
What led? I want to get into what let What
(01:57):
was your tap out moment? Let's just start there because
I know we just have an hour.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Well, tap out or tap in? I guess it's both
happened at the same time. I was pretty early on
due to a lot of circumstances in my developmental years,
I learned a skill which ended up being a survival skill.
Which was to get my needs met through a lot
(02:22):
of external validation. So I remember at an some of
my earlier ages, I used to look outside to try
to get my knees met and to get validation, and
that sticks with you. It's really tough to shake. But
somewhere in my early twenties I had a breakdown we'll
call it, and that would be my tap out, but
then it was really my tap in. It turned out
(02:42):
to be the most amazing opportunity in the world to
realize that if all I had for fuel was what
other people thought about me, then the road the runway
was going to be pretty short. It just got too tiring,
which is why ended up medicating it in a lot
of creative ways. But once I unplugged from that strategy
(03:06):
and plugged in to who I truly was and who
I was becoming, I'd say, my whole soul got quiet,
and maybe for the first time in my life. Little
did I know that it would end up propelling me
into this profession and I would fall in love with
helping people quiet the unnecessary noise in their psyche so
(03:26):
that they could begin to hear their own voice and
also hear the voices of people that count. But when
I began to be able to hear myself, I suddenly
just got a spark and knew I wanted to be
a voice in an ear for other people. So since
then I have been trying to actively listen everywhere that
I can and just provide presents for people who feel
a little disregulated and ideally support them to get their
(03:49):
feet on the ground, just like I had the opportunity
to do well.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Thank you brother. And so you had that tap in moment,
and what was the vision for on site? What was
going through through your head? How did that drop into
your consciousness?
Speaker 1 (04:02):
When I first got into the mental health space, I
started in crisis interventions. I started out and got certified
and several of the modalities and learned how to intervene
on people when they were kind of at their worst.
And although I fell in love with that work, I
started to realize pretty quickly that usually ideally what comes
(04:24):
on the back of an intervention is a resource, a strategy,
and a plan where people go get opportunities to grow
change in the heel. You hope they go to some
type of program or something to get some help. And
I had a lot of success in trying to get
people support and help. But when I started to experiencing
these programs and how clients go through these programs, I
(04:46):
realized it was unfortunate that people had to have one
of those crisis oriented moments to tap in to who
they are and to become more grounded and connected and
get a better angle on who they're becoming. And I
often o what a short sighted opportunity for the world
that you have to have a big face plant moment
in life to be able to go get to know
(05:07):
who you are. I guess, go quote unquote to human
school and become a better human being. And ideally, when
I had that experience, and when a lot of God
and a lot of the other people did experience, I
thought I started to flip the way I looked at
it wasn't this punitive thing that you go fix the
broken parts of your story and you should feel really
bad that you got there. I started to realize this
is one of the greatest opportunities on the planet. I mean,
(05:27):
who gets an opportunity to go somewhere for thirty days
and become a better human being for it, improve their relationships,
optimize their life, optimize their health, and why is that
only reserved for people who have breakdowns? So I became
kind of obsessed at that time with how do we
make the door wider? Because honestly, I came out of
my own experience and other people's experiences, and I thought,
how do you usher the whole world through residential treatment?
(05:50):
Good residential treat but I know it's not all created equal,
But how do you rush rush the world through thirty
days of checking out of their life during to digital
detox getting their feet on the ground. And I would
have always thought, maybe can you imagine the collective consciousness
that could rise if we all had better opportunities to
work with That just put a spark in me to
want to go try to and it turned into a
little bit of a wildfire. I was just Okay, I've
(06:10):
been fortunate to be mentored by some of the great
pioneers in the self development, psychology accounting space, and how
do we give more people access to this information? So
I started looking at the landscape and I saw that
in personal growth at the time, there were people doing
(06:31):
seminars for everyday people like the Tony Robbins and some
of those guys that started doing that in the eighties
and nineties, but there weren't a lot of people teaching
the principles of psychology counseling therapy unless you were on
the other end or motivated by some type of problem
or crisis. And I wanted to try to see if
we could create a space in a place because I
(06:52):
was pretty invested in creating a space because I'd seen
what happens when you can get people out of their
environment and into a really psychologically safe environment, and I
wanted to create a space that allowed everyday people, whether
they had a crisis in their life or not, to
come get a deeper look at who they are and
be able to offload some of the things that don't
belong to them so they could just become the best
(07:13):
version of they are optimize their relationships. And I didn't
know what that would look like for years. I thought
it might be more like a seminar business because I
just couldn't imagine how you could make that work in
a retreat setting. And I thought, well, maybe you bring
people to you, and they say in a hotel, But
I thought, man, we're really missing it if we can't
completely get people insulated and connected in that way. So
(07:36):
and I also am a hospitality nerd. I love great
hospitality and good hospitality heels and I wanted to be
able to offer that. And it's difficult to offer in
a work a semi a traditional seminar format unless you
can take care of people's other needs like lodging and
food and things like that. So that's what ultimately sparked
the idea of bringing people together in shorter amounts of time,
(07:58):
offering services that would be available for anybody, including people
in need. And that was the early vision for it.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Oh that's beautiful man. Before we get into actually breaking
down the program. How long you've been, tell me about
some of your great teachers, if there's one you want
to highlight or two you want to highlight. I'm so
curious that level of tutelage that you had, because you
strike me as a very curious human being.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment because I am.
I would say one of the top And if I
were to tell you the rest of the on site story,
I'd have to tell you the history of the origins
of what is now on site, and it predates me.
The lady by the name of Sharon White shot her
(08:44):
Cruise had a vision and she's got a wonderful story too.
But it's interesting a lot of great people that came
out of the therapy and psychology space. They came out
and sold a lot of books, but it was before
our world got pop cultureized, so most people but don't
know them, and mainstream people people in our field probably
know them. Because she was one of the early pioneers
(09:06):
of the codependency movement. She was a founding chairwoman of ACA.
She wrote a whole bunch of books back in the
day around children a Children of Alcoholics and codependency, and
she had an initial vision because she worked with Bernond
Johnson of the Johnson Institute, one of the early pioneers,
really pioneer of intervention of what do we do with
(09:26):
the rest of the system. We've got a primary patient
here that's getting intervened on, and we typically rushed them
off to a room to try to support them, and
then you've got the entire family that's hurting and they're
not getting any attention. So she mentored under a woman
by the name of Virginia Satyr who a lot of
people probably studied her. If you know anything about family
(09:48):
systems and Virginia kind of slated her to succeed a
lot of Virginia's work. As a matter of fact, I've
been able to read some of Virginia's old journals that
Sharon has, which is really powerful. And Sharon I met
her in Tucson, Arizona years ago, and then I followed
her and went on the back end of her career,
and she was still speaking some and she had the
(10:10):
original vision for a training and education center that would
take fail ultimately in the beginning was to take family
of alcoholics through some type of education and recovery process themselves.
And that really wasn't out there at the time. It
was pre family programs and treatment and all that stuff.
And so she was one of my primary mentors and
who I considered to be the founder of a lot
(10:30):
of what I still carried forward with on site. I've
you know, it's just much different company today. We shortened
the name down and had a longer name. We did
a lot more stuff back then, but her her roots
are all over our process and she was a great
mentor of mine, So she still got some great works
out there. I would recommend anybody that's looking for a
good read to look up, Sharon White shatter Crews.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
That's great. Can you give me one of your biggest
takeaways from her?
Speaker 1 (10:55):
I'll give you a vulnerable takeaway from her, because what
I did say was where I met her. I told you,
I told you I met her in two s on Arizona.
I tell you where I was. And I was in
residential treatment from early twenties, and there was a she
was a guest speaker that came through that facility, but
(11:18):
before the evening in which she and her husband spoke
that night, she tore the dorms, the facilities where the
patients and clients were, and I was in one of those,
and I was about a week and a half into
a residential stay. And like a lot of people who
end up going into residential care for mental health or substance,
(11:38):
she was here anything. You don't know what you know
until you get there. And thankfully the stigma has come
down significantly in the last twenty years, but we still
got a lot of it. But at that time, the
stigma was significant. I mean, it was a it was
a mountain, especially in the part of the world I
came from. It was just so out of context. I
knew nothing about it. I just knew how bad did
it have to get for me to end up in
(12:00):
a place like this. I was just really down on myself,
and I had not yet turned the corner to see
the value and get excited and go forward and do
what I've done with my life. I was still in
the muck and feeling pretty shameful about having to go
somewhere to fix some of the challenges I had. Coming
out of my dorm room. About a week and a
(12:22):
half in, I see people coming through on a tour.
It's the owner of the facility and Sharon and Joe,
and I at that time had my head on the floor.
I wouldn't make an eye contact with anybody and didn't
really want to talk to anybody. But she had this
engaging and infectious spirit, and she saw me about the
(12:43):
same time that I walked out of my door, and
she said hello, young man. And it was the way
she invited me into that greeting that brought my eyes
off the floor and straight into hers, and it made
me feel for some reason like I deserve to be
there instead of I had to be there. And I've
never forgotten. I've never forgoten. So there's a type of
(13:06):
management that I employed, which is walking around. I've never
had an office. I really like desk. When I'm at
on site or any of the facilities, I like to
walk around. And primarily it's because the influence of sharing.
Because what I do is I'll take meetings on the go,
I'll take meetings on the walks. But primarily I just
don't want to miss opportunity to look people in the
eyes at their works and be able to be a
(13:28):
mirror for them, just like she was a mirror for me,
and show them that their best is just ahead. She
just with the tone of her voice in that moment
she saw somebody, she saw me. She didn't see me
for the way I would see me. You shouldn't see
me for the problems I was dealing with at the time.
She saw me. She saw deep into my soul. Now
we would go forward and create a great professional mentee
(13:51):
mentor relationship. And she taught me all kinds of clinical
acument and all kinds of cool stuff. But such a
beautiful question you ask him. It's why I wanted to
go back to the origin of our story, because the
very biggest lesson was it never miss an opportunity to
look somebody, yeah and show them what they're made out.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Well, that's beautiful, and I'm going to make an assumption
here while it's that every guest that comes to your
amazing facility, where they get off a plane or they're
coming here, is greeted in that spirit.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, thank you. We worked really hard we train the
transport drivers that pick up at the airport are not
just drivers, They're an important part of our hospitality to you.
And that's where it starts. The minute you engage with
our team. We want you to feel warmly received and
loved on from the minute we bring you into our
(14:36):
process until the minute you depart.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
It's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Man.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
I like women like her, and the angels that cross
our paths are powerful. Let's talk about on site the program.
When did it actually get started? Where it's located. Would
you be so kind of break that down please.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
It's in Our primary campus is about forty five minutes
west of Nashville, and that's where the majority of our
work happened until we started to spread out a little bit.
But primarily that's where the majority of our work continues
to app but most of our volume comes to our
Tennessee campus started out on sixty eight acres. It's right
around three hundred acres now. We've just added a little
acreage over the years as we've gone. Got a beautiful
(15:18):
campus that sleeps comfortably about eighty five and it's in
the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee, just outside Nashville. It's
a really beautiful place. It's built around an old eighteen
sixty eight home. It's five thousand square feet. It's absolutely
gorgeous as kind of the centerpiece of the property, and
then we've got cabins that kind of surround it and
(15:39):
a nice restaurant and some other beautiful space. Is my
favorite thing about it though, is all that's on about
fifteen acres. But then once you go out of that
into the green space, we've got just a beautiful walking
trails and it's an active quarter horse ranch too. I'm
an equestrian, so we've got horses on property. Do equine therapy,
of course, but we do a variety of different programs.
(16:00):
I mean, we became kind of known for doing workshops
and intensives before a lot of people were doing workshops
and intents were for years were some of the only
people doing those. And what I mean by those for
people that may not know. Our insider lingo is that's
just a shorter term therapeutic experience anywhere from three to
five and sometimes seven days. And our flagship program is
(16:21):
called the Living Center Program, and it's kind of what
it sounds like. It's an incredible program for people who've
never looked at their origin story, a great way of
inviting you experientially back into your family of origin story
so that you can take a deeper look at what
serves you well, understand your imprint, also understand what maybe
didn't serve you well, and rewrite any old messages and
(16:43):
so that you can kind of clean your narrative a
little bit and then move forward and identify what ways
you might be medicating certain parts of your nervous system
that might be impacting you from fully living into your story.
That's another way to say trauma or emotional trauma work.
I don't know. I haven't got a chance to look
at all your demographics. I don't know if we're talking
(17:03):
to people in our field, Insiders, clinicians, therapists are all
the above. Okay, cool, That's why I'm trying. I think
sometimes I was guilty for years of just us an
insider language and hoping people can hang on. But I
try to neutralize it now for everybody. But yeah, so
the family of Origin, Code of Tendency work, evocial trauma work,
grief work. I think that's a great catch all program.
If I could get everybody to start with that one,
(17:25):
I would love it. Not everybody has that luxury because
it's time, resources and other things. So sometimes we specifically
might want to put somebody in a healing Trauma program,
which is a week long experience with some of our
trauma practitioners. It's powerful too. But yeah, we've got a
menu of therapeutic workshops that we offer throughout the year.
We're running about forty eight weeks out of the year
at Tennessee. We set a year annual calendar, and then
(17:48):
what we pepper in alongside it are custom curated individual, family,
couples intensives, and those are ones where we work specifically
with someone their story, pair them with people our team,
and then curate a great experience for them hopefully to
be able to heal and change. Those run throughout the year,
and we share the campus with one other offering. It's
called Milestones, and it's a long term residential trauma program
(18:12):
and it's twenty four twenty six bad somewhere around in there,
and it shares space, but it's a separate program altogether.
So it's primarily what happens in Tennessee. And we offer
some versions of our workshops at our California campus, and
then we have a digital offering. We're doing online intensives
and workshops and creating. As of right now, we're starting
to film some more emotional wellness masterclasses that we'll be
(18:34):
living in a format. So that's some of what we're
up to and onsite. I kind of I don't know
if I'm the worst of giving people elevator pitches.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
I'm not a great I don't know about that, buddy.
I don't know, but I'm going to just say it
once again, the work you guys do there is just extraordinary.
I've only had nothing but outstanding discoveries and transformation from clients,
and I want to thank you for curating that amazing
experience for folks. I know how specific you are and
I love that.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Thank you. Yeah, And probably the secret sauce of being
able to offer a product I really stand behind them
seek proud of is of course our team. I should
have started there. I started about telling you some of
the offerings, but I curate clinical talent obsessively. I just
I love finding really talented change it. So I was
(19:22):
going to say clinicians, but I think the letters are
just a bonus, honestly. I mean, we've got to have
those where all of our people are credential. We try to.
I'm really proud of the clinical excellence and integrity that
we offer, but it comes second to the people to
show up in the room with these people. I give
people permission up front. It's like, these tools are essential,
but make sure you're not leaving with them with your humanity.
And so we look for great people. We have an
(19:44):
incredible collection of wonderful clinicians around the country and some
in Nashville that will fly in and help be a
guide for people's stories. And that's been my favorite part,
just building wonderful relationships and taking care of them like
we would a client on their own campus.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Myles, how long has that program been in existence?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Now? I've had the program since two thousand and seven,
but it predates me. There are elements of it that
predate me and go on back. I forget the actual
data somewhere in like the late seventies when when Sharon
started doing her original work. So it's got a quite
a tale of great history and legacy, but a lot
(20:19):
of the elements you see today started somewhere around two
thousand and seven and eight, and then we added some
stuff in two thousand and ten, we added some stuff
again in two thousand and twelve, and we're adding some
stuff now. So we just kind of we're we're slow
and intentional. You know, have a great brand in our space.
The way it's been rolled up and consolidated in the
(20:42):
last fifteen years, there would have been faster pass the growth.
I had a lot of interesting people wanted to try
to accelerate us, and I'm not saying that that wouldn't
have been a good idea, because I love the idea
of scaling impact. But at the end of the day,
we were so obsessed with quality that we decided to
keep it at a certain size and make our growth
really small and intentional, continue to offer the quality that
we all aspire to do.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
As a person in the film and a person who
runs a facility and being insanely curious, what has been
the most difficult part for you challenging running on site.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Where are we starting to do with thesis on this one?
It's been full of challenges hand nd full of incredible
growth opportunities. I would probably say I got started, you know,
fairly young in your twenties and thirties. The way I
define success, I was still dragging some of my pathology
(21:35):
along with me, because, as you know, we're wounded healers,
and we get in this space and you just continue
to heal and evolve. If you're doing it right, ideally
you get to be a recipient benefit of the work
we spend time with. But I made some classic mistakes
early on of caring a little bit too much about
the image of what we were doing. And that was
(21:56):
always a distraction because you just you know, spend up
chasing the wrong things. And I would think now as
you mature and season into you get a different definition
of success where it's care more about doing what I
want to do, when I want to do it, with
the people I want to do it, and making sure
(22:16):
we do that with a lot of pride and a
lot of integrity and a lot of grace. And so
I'm really into I think if I've learned anything and
running a program in the behavioral space. It's that if
you take a playbook out of history and humanity, study
things besides psychologe like sociology, you realize that good communities
(22:36):
are actually what heal people. And if you want to
have a really good therapeutic product, you should really obsess
about curating community and creating a healthy community. And that
alone will buy you so much margin for era because
we're going to get it wrong. It's not a black
(22:57):
and white process of artistic and creative process of your
doing it right. It so you're gonna people are gonna
make mistakes. We're gonna make mistakes in a variety of ways,
clinically culinary on down. But if you have the tenants
and the foundation, I mean a really organically healthy community,
not a perfect community, but just a good community. I
(23:17):
guess if the backstage mashes out front, then that's that's
success to me. If the culture is really good, that success. Obviously,
if you want numbers, you want you want good business,
and if that follows bingo, that's icing. But the cake
to me is do I feel really good about the
people and the place and the offering, And that's kind
of the success. I would say that has helped us
(23:39):
today season well. But the mistakes I made early on
was often I would I'm add and I get a
little bit addicted to entrepreneurships. Often I'd have too many
things doing at one time. I'd have nine hundred workshops
and couldn't maintain the quality and couldn't staff on. And
then you start raining it back in and you get
focused on the ones that really matter. I feel myself
too far into it early on and found myself pretty
(24:03):
burned out, kind of chasing chasing my career at the
cost of me. I made that mistake, and I think
that's a really common mistake in our space, because all
of us should pass some junkies, and you know, there's
easier ways to make a living than doing our work.
But we got to love it. You're going to do it.
And I fell in love with a to the point
where I lost myself in at times, and I retooled,
(24:25):
and all those were great steps to who I've become today.
But those were some of the classic mistakes I made
early on. I couldn't delegate early on. I was terrible
at that, very codependent leader. Early on. I didn't know
how to be weird boundaries. Like I said, I can
go on and on on this one. There were quite
a few.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
I appreciate that, man, I really do. You and I
share a lot of things together that are important to us.
One is, let's get into the resilience, let's shift the narrative,
let's get past a sad story. Can you talk to
me about your philosophy and your treatment of that and
your facility out there?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
I really leave that. We have two distinct responsibilities with
human beings, one of which is to create a safe
enough container and invite people alongside you, to shine a
light in front of them, not trying to push them
(25:20):
and pull them where we think they need to go,
but just shine a light on opportunities for them to
evolve and grow and heal and grieve and all the
things that we do. And often that requires us to
go back into their story, and not always a lot
of times people that are thinking about stepping into trauma
work or emotional work, they're terrified of turning over all
the rocks. And that's a misnomer. I don't think we
(25:41):
don't turn It's not from not uncalled for to turnover
all the rocks, but sometimes it is important to look back,
and I think some of us and I made this
mistake early on. You get so obsessed with looking back
into people's stories and using all the creative tools that
we have at disposal to help them certain parts of that,
and then we bring them to current day and then
(26:03):
we say, okay, good luck. And I have in the
last few years, especially coming out of the pandemic, where
I really start starting to see this narrative accelerate like
a wildfire. And I'll tell you what I'm talking about
in a minute. Was I think, if you're not careful
and you only help people look in their past and
(26:23):
you stop them at current tie without opening up doors
of what possibilities could be the payoff or the benefit
of doing this heavy lift, then you kind of doubled
down on a bit of a victim narrative. And I
saw our whole field kind of go through that to
where we were so obsessed as a people for years
with the concept of vulnerability, and then when it got
pop culturalized, thinks that wonderful colleagues and dear friends like
(26:46):
Brene Brown that kind of became superstars over not with
vulnerability talks and wrote great books and did great research
and couldn't respect it anymore. I think they were pivotal
in lowering some of the stigma about what we all do.
But I don't think there were enough of us talking
about resilience, which is the question you teed up here,
which is, okay, what's the only thing we do to
connect with one another? Is all circle and talk about
(27:08):
our problems, And we're probably going to become more of
our problems, and there's got to be more conversation about, well,
where do we go from here? So we've really tried
to shift it to where Often you know this, people
that bounce around therapeutic circles for a long time or
recovery circles for a long time, often they know more
about all their diagnoses and problems than anybody could, and
(27:29):
so much so they can't tell you who they are
without telling you about all their diagnoses and problems. And
we try to stop it right up front and say
it's important. We want to know about your alcoholism or
your whatever it is, we want to know about it.
We're proud you have a shameful way to express that,
but we also want to invite you to an idea
that you might be more than that part of your story.
(27:50):
You might be more than covering alcoholic. You might be
more than a recovery trauma survivor. You might be more
than a felt marriage. You might be more than the
stress you carried last year crash and burn. And I
believe that is where resilience becomes. I think more than
the second step. I think it becomes the key ingredient.
(28:11):
Do we teach it the way I want to teach it?
Not shit? I think we're We're really putting a lot
of effort into that now. We're really trying to find
innovative ways because I think I'd love to get better
at that, if I'm completely honest, as a facility, but
I do think we put a lot of attention on
it in the last two or three years to where
we're trying to make sure that aftercare is not just
an afterthought. It's still so tough. I've never seen an
(28:32):
africallic plan I just loved, and we do a bunch
of them, and I like to be honest, I hope
it doesn't scare off people that like what we do.
But I think I get nervous with the people that
tell you they're great at everything that they do. When
they do the best after plan in the world, because
if everybody did the best aftercare planning, we'd all have
more than thirty percent of the people that do the
Africa Plan and none of us do.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, right on, that's a straight up truth.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So I'd love to get more innovative and what's next,
you know, how do we spend a little bit more
time in where we go from here? Because that's where
the greatest gift I've ever gotten from looking at deconstructing
my own story and the building back who I am
today is that some of the things I used early
on in my story where it was like, well, I've
(29:15):
got to create safety or safe people, safe circle, safe,
family of choice, all the things. It's like safety. I
used to think safety was an internal concept. I used
to I am an external concept. I used to teach
it that way, so I didn't get anything to do
with safety. Safety is right here. It's wrapped up in
this ball of resilience and you can just take it
wherever you want to go. You get just taken in
distressful places, unsafe places, people that typically are going to
(29:36):
activate your nervous system, and you still need to be
who you are that's resilience, and I hope that's what
we're teaching people.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Beautiful. I think you said, dear brother, the you know,
opposite of diction isn't sobriety, it's connection. You talk about Yah, yeah,
let's talk about that. That's a good one.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
That hats man. So I did a little or homework
on your end.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
I appreciate youahy do that. I value man's time.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I've really tried over the years to simplify complicated change
techniques and tools so that it's a more approachable process.
I remember my struggle to get back to my faith
in my spirituality, and I often wondered why. And I
see a lot of people that go through psychological challenges
(30:18):
or behavioral challenges also struggle with spiritual challenge, which is
why we often deploy a tool early in people's process
and give them opportunities to re engage with some type
of spiritual life. We most of us feel like it's important,
you know, an important part of the recipe. And I
remember trying to re engage with spiritual life, but I
(30:38):
had so much baggage from spirituality kind of gone wrong
that it was tough to It was tough to re engage.
I just wanted to avoid it, didn't want to prioritize
it or create my own version of it, which ended
up being more about me than now. I believe it
is my God, and I realized it was because it
had so much activating language around it, so much insider speak,
(31:01):
that I couldn't ever get to the purity of the
message without wading through everything I thought I should know
about it, and learned about it all the way up,
and I realized our lane can be the same way
if we're not careful. I think there's there's quite a
bit of dogma in therapy circles, and people can get
really attached to the model that we think works, the
one we've been trained in, and if we're not careful,
(31:23):
we're over prescribing that language to people who have no
context for it. And many people have been hurt by
counseling and therapy too, and often it's difficult to build
that bridge unless we get creative and neutralize the language.
And that's what led me to exactly what you said earlier.
(31:46):
I started thinking, Okay, what is this really about? What
do we really try? This is back when I was
working in a residential treatment center, and prior to on site,
what is this really about addiction? What do we do?
You could say, well, and I said this before too,
that I've never met somebody with addiction that didn't have
chronic stress or trauma on board as well. That used
to be super controversial. It's not as much anymore, but
(32:06):
it used to be really controversial because you had the
addiction faithful, the old school addiction folks that said you
can't treat trauma alongside addiction. Then you have the new
growing field of the trauma folks that said you can't
treat addiction without treating trauma. And then there was the
out of the mouse, which one do you do first?
And when do you do it? And nowadays people are
realizing there's more of a holistic approach, and then everybody's
a little different and the timing needs to be curated individually,
(32:29):
ideally and out of factory line. But that was a
long way for me to say. That was how I
arrived at the concept. If you strip it all back,
people are feeling disconnected from who they are. They're just
feeling disconnected from who they are, isolated from other people
in the world, even the most social people, the most
plugged in, people can be lonely, disconnected and now know
(32:50):
who they are. And when that happens, one of the
first things we do is experience anxiety, the experienced depression,
and one of the most common things we do with
anxiety and depression is we need to regulate, non or
medicate that and we do that with substances, alcohol being
one of addiction being one of them, off food being
one of them. That's often where we go, and so
(33:15):
you had to kind of follow a trail. There was like, Okay,
if addiction's up here, what's underneath it? Well, what's underneath that? Well,
what's underneath that? When I got all the way down
on the basis, was like, man, people just feel disconnected.
And if we could help people get re anchored and
reconnected to who they are, they're twice as likely to
be able to connect with other people. And if they
can connect with other people, they're gonna be able connect
with the world in a little different way and maybe
(33:35):
won't need the lubri can to feel okay in their
own skin.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, right on, man, beautiful, let's talk about I've been
I've been loving what you're doing with jelly roll and
the okay project, could you walk the audience through that
and how that came into your consciousness. It's incredible, man.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, Jelly Is he's just a unique guy. I got
to meet him. I worn't in the entertainment space as
well and bring a lot of our tools Indian Camic World.
In addition to helping people when they're going through challenges,
also do performance coaching and some other stuff in the space,
and so we run in similar circles and I've gotten
to know him a little bit socially. But he had
(34:15):
reached out to me. He had some big goals, you know,
he was starting to have a couple of songs just
go crazy, and he was kind the rocket ship. The
few started to get lit, and he was just not
in a place that he felt I could sustain the
journey he was getting ready to go on, and he
called me. He's talked about this a lot publicly, which
is why I can talk about it. But he's like,
I'm over five hundred pounds and I'm trying to sell
(34:38):
sixty tour dates and I'd like to make some changes.
And so I often will come alongside people not as
their therapists, but as a coach or a consultant to
help them reformat their team, their life, their environment they're surrounding,
and so I initially engaged with him to help him
do that. I didn't have time, honestly, you know, I
didn't have time to lock in with one clas because
(35:00):
I advise a whole bunch of camps and lots of artists,
and I had told him I couldn't do it to
the level we wanted me to do it. But then
when I got into the hood a little bit and
stopped just looking at the car, I realized, oh, man,
this guy might be a generational voice for mental health
and addiction. I really think, well, what was that moment?
Was it a song?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Was it a look? Was it a conversation? Was it
What was that moment for you, man, where you said,
this cat's onto something?
Speaker 1 (35:27):
It was the Houston Rodeo in March of twenty three,
which was his biggest ever show. They do like ten
or twelve dates with massive artists every year in every genre,
and you're planning to I forget the number eighty something
thousand people, so it's bigger than most stadiums. And that
(35:48):
was the first time, outside of award shows, I'd ever
seen him do an entire set, and I saw him
get up there and start to tell parts of his story,
tell parts of his interesting story, tell parts of his
struggle story. It wasn't that he was saying something that
I hadn't heard other artists say before. That wasn't what
got my attention. What got my attention was I started
(36:09):
watching the people. I started watching how they responded to him,
and I started watching. Now he turned an entire stadium
into a safe like recovery circles that we sent there.
I was going to say, church, whatever you plug in
what he turned it into a spiritual experience. And I thought,
not only is he a brilliant artist and a great creative,
(36:30):
it's a brilliant orator. And what my favorite thing about
his oratoribility or him as a speaker, is that he
is uneducated but wicked smart. That was as much as
but it's all it's all come through street knowledge and reading.
Spent a lot of time in carse ratings, who got
to read a whole lot of stuff. But he picked
stuff up really quickly. But he was using complex concepts
(36:52):
in a vulnerable way with street language, and it just
connected right to the heart of the people. It felt congruent,
it felt offen because it was authentic and cangrue. And
when I saw that, and I saw him moving in
hire arena full of people and not a few people.
Usually if you get up there and you tell the
part of your story and you do a testimony, a
few people are going to connect to it, and others
are waiting on the song then one to hear he
(37:13):
stopped everybody in their tracks. And I said, if he
can do that with eighty thousand people, what could he
do with millions? And I just got invested and we
got to be good friends outside of the work that
we do together. And I'm so proud of him. He's
down two hundred and twenty pounds. He's really revolutionized himself emotionally, physically.
He's done it the hard way. You know, he hasn't
(37:33):
any of the shortcuts. He's really put the work in.
But more than that, it's what he's doing with his
influence is a number one mention realized is more than
the music. I want to go make a change. I
want to make the unseen feel seen. I want to
give hope to the hopeless. And I love what I
do it on site. I always will, and I've got
a foundation. I get to work with people other more
diverse population that doesn't necessarily have the means. But who
(37:56):
we're reaching now is people I never thought i'd be
over reach doing our because a lot of the people
that are part of the demographic that will come up
to come to concerts and other events that we do,
they're coming in for the same reason people come to
me or maybe you. They're searching for hope. They're going
through a very difficult part of their story and here's
(38:18):
this artist that has redeemed his story and now has
found international success, and they are looking for him as
for ministry in a way, and he's stepping into that
moment and doing the best he can to provide hope.
And I watched people leave these experiences and we kind
of his first big tour, did fifty eight city tour
last year. I'm losing track of toms last year, and
(38:40):
it was so kind of he invited. I mean, he
had some of the most successful managers and producers and
choreographers across all the industry in the room to design
and create this tour, and he put me in the
middle of that. He said, I want a mental health
guide here. I want you to create what you create
on site in this arena, and he let you, let
(39:03):
me kind of build into that. And we did some
really unique cool things throughout the entire set. I mean lights,
We turn the lights up at one time and the
whole place finds a stranger to hug. And we just
did this stuff. You don't you know, you don't really
see it concerts we start. We started off the show
with I wrote a kind of an invitation into the
(39:23):
experience of people we hoped that they would experience. It
was a language that we'd use every day in a
therapy room. I tried to neutralize a little bit. And
then we had this crazy dream. We were like, what
if we could give Morgan Freeman to be the voice
of God to say this over the loudspeaker right before
you come out. And the head of CIA was in
the in the room when we were saying that, Hey,
(39:44):
it was like, I represent Morgan, so what do you know?
The next thing, you know, Morgan Freeman is the voice
of God speaking, uh, speaking my words into an arena
full of people. And then Jelly would go up there
to knock their socks off and love them and pour
into them, and so it was just a It's been
a beautiful experience. And the reason I've anchored in with
him so much and we're creating this Okay Project is
I saw he wrote kind of a song with a
(40:05):
couple other buddies that ended up being a little bit
of a mental health anthems. It's called I'm Not Okay.
And I watched it grow. I watched it start when
people didn't know it, and then I watched it end
where nobody didn't know it and when number one and
it's been a beautiful thing, and we got together and start.
We also stopped at fifty something jails on that tour.
(40:27):
We tried to match the number of arenas we were
going to with the number of jails and jubis we
were stopping by to pour into people, and we realized
the benefit of him coming into spaces like that was
just checking on people and making sure they were okay.
And that's what we wanted to do with the Okay
Project is create a vehicle in a format offer really
good resources to the people who don't don't typically get resource,
(40:49):
check on people, make sure they're okay, encourage them and
give them a little hopes. That's what the Okay Project's
all about.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Oh, that's It's an incredible project. And I encourage everyone.
We'll put all the stuff down, the songs at the
projects you're doing, support that, you know. Listen, I've been
sober thirty eight years. I've been blessed to be in
this field.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I've worked with you, with a lot of great people.
I've been in partnership with Tony Robbins. The guys that
are really free and are having a blast in life.
They just know that there's one thing they must do.
They must always give it back times a thousand and
when I'm watching the videos of you guys out there,
I'm like, what I'm feeling. We are so blessed we are.
(41:31):
Let's just just poor people with love and kindness and grace.
Let's do some crazy stuff. Let's turn the lights on,
let's pray a different way, and let's just shake these
motherfuckers up. And I just applaud you for that, man,
because it's a real fucking get down for me. I
you know, I use bad words sometimes, but I don't know.
That's just the way I am, you know, But I
(41:51):
love I love that. But would you talk about that
if I'm speaking correctly, If that makes sense for you,
the impact when you have that gift and keep that
gift besides the gift of sobriety, that you must be
on the firing the firing line and giving it back
that way, please.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
I thought when I got into my space that I
get back every day. We work in a business that
helps people resolve challenges in their story and become better
versions of who they are, and pretty I felt like
that's a pretty noble run. But if you're not careful
after a while, if that's all you do with your time,
(42:31):
then it'll turn into a job. And it's it's not
that the job is still not doing good things, it's
just if I'm not, if I don't, if I'm not
tapped into any other service opportunities for humanity outside of
the thing that I run or the thing that I do,
if it's in the helping profession, I think we're missing
this great opportunity for this other part of our soul
to not just come alive, but to stay alive. So
(42:54):
I've always wanted to get creative in I think some
of the best service work in the world. Because after
the jails we went into, we never had a camera,
nobody who ever know we were in there, and I
think some of the best is done without anybody knowing.
But I think sometimes if you can accelerate it, then
you can ripple it, if you can try and take
some swings and do some things outside. Because I've gotten
(43:15):
criticism too, you know, from publicly being involved with people
that the old guard would be like, wait a minute,
if you have any type of engagement with them on
a professional level, you should never be friends with them
or have any social setting. And I'm like, I get it,
That's why I'm noticed there. I could justify it, but
I don't even adjust for it anymore. It's like I
hear you and I think I'm impacting one more people
(43:36):
in one night that I might my whole career and
on site, and I'm just sorry, but that outweighs. I
want to keep pouring fuel on that because it's doing
a lot for me, and I think it's doing a
lot for other people. And I think if we can
find a rhythm where it's a reciprocal opportunity for me
to stay grounded spiritually, knock some doors down, try to
change a few lives, and it's benefiting some other people.
I think it's a worth for well pursuit.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
I've over shopped that man right on. If one comes
to mind, give me your biggest transformation story, that one
that you'd like to talk about. They're one that you
think about the most. If there is one, I know
there's been hundreds.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
This will be outside of the well, not really, I
mean on site. I've got a foundation called the on
Site Foundation, and we try to use some of our
expertise an experience to go pour into other NGOs and
nonprofits at times, and before I had kids, before I
got married, I went on a wild few year run
(44:31):
where I went to have the hottest spots in the
country in terms of danger around the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, DRC,
mogud Isshue, Somalia. And these were NGOs or nonprofits that
we're working with word torn regions to help either educate, feed,
or support kids or women who've been exposed at gender
(44:53):
base violence. And then what happened was a lot of
these efforts were following short because the kids were so
well they didn't know they were wondering. You know, if
the scores, we got good teachers, we got good resources,
the kids don't seem to be able to learn. I
was like, well, they're living in active trauma. So unless
(45:14):
the teachers can be trauma informed and help them find
ways to stay grounded, to be difficult for them to learn.
So I got to go and do some of that work.
And one of the places was supporting One of my
really good friends has a great place that doesn't neat
work around Uganda, Northern Uganda, different places in Africa, but
he has kind of carved out a little niche to
work with witch doctors in Northern Uganda. It's a really creepy,
(45:39):
interesting group of people. And I got a chance to
go speak to a room full of witch doctors that
were graduating from a year long program to try to
rebuild their life and to give up some of the ways.
We weren't trying to change their mind about everything but
child sacrifice some of the stuff they get into. We
(46:01):
were trying to change that narrative. But I never forget.
We were in this old building that had no eating
air and it was just no windows, but we were
able to secure and we were trying to emulate a
graduation and I was kind of giving a graduation talk,
a commencement talk nobody in the audience with the people
(46:23):
who were commencing, and I was like, what do you say?
What's a white dude from Tennessee say to these Ugandan
witch doctors. I just did share my story, the story
you and I probably shared in anonymous circles before, and
be real, would they connect to that? I didn't think
the details. No, it's completely different life. Did they connect
(46:46):
with struggle and vulnerability and pain and grief and loss. Absolutely?
And it was really at the end, it wasn't what
I said or seeing any kind of miraculous moment when
I had the mic. It was when I set down
my buddy had things to say. But when they got
ready to get their diploma, we didn't have They had
captain gowns alone, and they were so excited because most
(47:08):
of them I had never read or wight. They'd never
been able to read a writer or anything, and they
had learned how to read as part of this experience
we had. We found some kazoos and we were playing
pomp and circumstance on canoe and in that moment, I
saw sheer joy on these grown men's on their face.
(47:31):
I saw their eyes line up, and I saw hope
come alive in ways that I didn't even think was possible.
And I was sitting there playing at kazoo in the
middle of north of Uganda. It was just an experience
I never forget. I don't know why that's the one
that popped up. I've had a lot of amazing experiences
watching people transform, but that one was one I think
that transformed me.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
Oh, that's beautiful and ironically, and perhaps some day, over
a good meal, we'll talk. I've worked extensively in northern
Uganda with children's soldiers, so I know exactly the folks
you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
That's beautiful. So we got to connect on that.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Yeah, man, So we got a couple of minutes. I'm
gonna do just a couple of rapid fires and I'll
let you get back to all the great healing you've
probably got planned today. One belief you've completely changed your.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Mind about vulnerabilities.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
We one habit or ritual you won't compromise on.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Family comes first.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
What love feels like when it's healthy, messy, The hardest
truth you've had to tell yourself. Enough, Yeah, go on
that a little bit, buddy. Let's let's tell me more
about that.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
Tell me about miles is enough when you carry the
backpack I carried for so many years, and then you
start to see some of your labor take root, you
start to see it start to make an impact. It's
almost impossible, it was for me for that old impost
(48:50):
not to creep back in. And every time it raises
another level, it's like, okay, wait, oh, you're the level
you're operating here, which means what I mean by another
level is I'm influence seeing more people. Where I'm around
interesting people, we're doing something even more interesting or more cooler.
I get that that voice continues to go, you're a
little bit outside and you're a little bit over your steets, buddy,
and you're gonna be found out to find out you
(49:12):
don't know what you're doing, what you're talking about, and
you probably ought to stay back in your lane. You
were doing a great job running outside and sitting and
coming the frint of six days a week. Why don't
you go back there? So that truth I have to
face that hard truth every day is like I'm I'm
I'm I'm standing, I'm stepping into my divinity. It's where
I'm supposed to be, and I'm supposed to be in
this room. I'm supposed to be in this face, and
(49:32):
I'm enough and I'm gonna be okay. That's that's the
trith I have to face every day.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yeah, that's beautiful. Final thoughts, buddy, to the person that
you and I both know who's struggling, who's scared depression
set again? Maybe you know thinking about does it make
sense to be on this plan anymore? What's the message
for them right now? What's the first step?
Speaker 1 (49:53):
What? What? What? What? What?
Speaker 2 (49:54):
What do you recommend? What kind of love do you
want to send out to them?
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Right now? You're actually feeling a bit, a little bit
alone and in your pain, and there's going to be
well intended people who are going to come along and
tell you're not alone. And those people just drive me
crazy because I felt alone, So why are you telling
me I'm not alone? So I want to say I
know what it's like to be alone in your pain.
(50:17):
I also know what it's like to start to get
okay with that pain enough that I could start to
look at it enough that I then could start to
share it on a piece of paper, and then I
was able to share it with one other person, and
that one other person turned into a group of people
that turned into a community of people that now turned
into the world. And I have no shame about my
(50:38):
pain story anymore because I share my pain story and
I've been able to grow and heal from it, and
I don't want to change it because I'm a better person.
And I don't expect that you follow my playbook because
you got your own playbook. You can't see it yet,
but I promise you it's in there. Anybody that comes
in and tries to advise you without loving you, I'll
(50:59):
be weird if somebody comes in and loves you and
looks in the eye and said, I know what it's
like up in there. It is. It does feel like
it's alone, But there is hope to rebuild your story,
and you are one hundred percent worthit and just the treat.
But I have to tell myself every day. I'm going
to tell you right now, you're enough in the world
needs you, and I can't wait to see what you
do with the rest of your story.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Heymen, buddy, God speed, buddy, Thank you so much. This
has been a real blessing.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Man.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
The Sino Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod People in twenty eighth.
Av Our lead producer is Keith carnlac Our executive producer
is Lindsey Hoffman. Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver. Thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
We also want to invite you to an idea that
you might be more than that part of your story.
You might be more than covering alcoholic. You might be
more than a recovery trauma saviral. You might be more
than a felt marriage. You might be more than the
stretch you carried last year when you questioning I've been.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Loving what you're doing with jelly roll and the Okay Project.
Could you walk the audience through that and how that
came into your consciousness.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Like, I'm over five hundred pounds and I'm trying to
sell sixty toward eights and I'd like to make some changes.
And I had told him I couldn't do it to
the level we wanted me to do it. But then
when I got into the hood a little bit and
stopped just looking at the car, I realized, oh man,
this guy might be a generational voice for mental health
and addiction.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Welcome back to the SINO Show. I'm your host, Cina McFarlane,
And before we get started on this amazing episode, can
you help a brother out? Please subscribe, please follow. Thank
you so much. I appreciate that. Oh boy, my guess
today has built one of the most powerful spaces for
emotional healing in the world. Miles ad Cocks is the
(01:07):
creative on site where people from every walk of life,
from rock stars to single parents come to hit pause,
peel back the layers, or remember who they really are.
He's a truth teller, a safe place, a living proof
that vulnerability changes everything. Let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Welcome brother, I've been excited to meet you. We talk
about you a lot at the facility. I know my
colleagues think the world of you, and I know you're
doing great work, so I'm honored to get a chance
to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
You have incredible gift for compassion, patience. You meet people
where they're at. You've mastered the art of active listening.
You did not learn that skill set at Yale. Was
there a moment where you had that tap out moment?
What led? I want to get into what let What
(01:57):
was your tap out moment? Let's just start there because
I know we just have an hour.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Well, tap out or tap in? I guess it's both
happened at the same time. I was pretty early on
due to a lot of circumstances in my developmental years,
I learned a skill which ended up being a survival skill.
Which was to get my needs met through a lot
(02:22):
of external validation. So I remember at an some of
my earlier ages, I used to look outside to try
to get my knees met and to get validation, and
that sticks with you. It's really tough to shake. But
somewhere in my early twenties I had a breakdown we'll
call it, and that would be my tap out, but
then it was really my tap in. It turned out
(02:42):
to be the most amazing opportunity in the world to
realize that if all I had for fuel was what
other people thought about me, then the road the runway
was going to be pretty short. It just got too tiring,
which is why ended up medicating it in a lot
of creative ways. But once I unplugged from that strategy
(03:06):
and plugged in to who I truly was and who
I was becoming, I'd say, my whole soul got quiet,
and maybe for the first time in my life. Little
did I know that it would end up propelling me
into this profession and I would fall in love with
helping people quiet the unnecessary noise in their psyche so
(03:26):
that they could begin to hear their own voice and
also hear the voices of people that count. But when
I began to be able to hear myself, I suddenly
just got a spark and knew I wanted to be
a voice in an ear for other people. So since
then I have been trying to actively listen everywhere that
I can and just provide presents for people who feel
a little disregulated and ideally support them to get their
(03:49):
feet on the ground, just like I had the opportunity
to do well.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Thank you brother. And so you had that tap in moment,
and what was the vision for on site? What was
going through through your head? How did that drop into
your consciousness?
Speaker 1 (04:02):
When I first got into the mental health space, I
started in crisis interventions. I started out and got certified
and several of the modalities and learned how to intervene
on people when they were kind of at their worst.
And although I fell in love with that work, I
started to realize pretty quickly that usually ideally what comes
(04:24):
on the back of an intervention is a resource, a strategy,
and a plan where people go get opportunities to grow
change in the heel. You hope they go to some
type of program or something to get some help. And
I had a lot of success in trying to get
people support and help. But when I started to experiencing
these programs and how clients go through these programs, I
(04:46):
realized it was unfortunate that people had to have one
of those crisis oriented moments to tap in to who
they are and to become more grounded and connected and
get a better angle on who they're becoming. And I
often o what a short sighted opportunity for the world
that you have to have a big face plant moment
in life to be able to go get to know
(05:07):
who you are. I guess, go quote unquote to human
school and become a better human being. And ideally, when
I had that experience, and when a lot of God
and a lot of the other people did experience, I
thought I started to flip the way I looked at
it wasn't this punitive thing that you go fix the
broken parts of your story and you should feel really
bad that you got there. I started to realize this
is one of the greatest opportunities on the planet. I mean,
(05:27):
who gets an opportunity to go somewhere for thirty days
and become a better human being for it, improve their relationships,
optimize their life, optimize their health, and why is that
only reserved for people who have breakdowns? So I became
kind of obsessed at that time with how do we
make the door wider? Because honestly, I came out of
my own experience and other people's experiences, and I thought,
how do you usher the whole world through residential treatment?
(05:50):
Good residential treat but I know it's not all created equal,
But how do you rush rush the world through thirty
days of checking out of their life during to digital
detox getting their feet on the ground. And I would
have always thought, maybe can you imagine the collective consciousness
that could rise if we all had better opportunities to
work with That just put a spark in me to
want to go try to and it turned into a
little bit of a wildfire. I was just Okay, I've
(06:10):
been fortunate to be mentored by some of the great
pioneers in the self development, psychology accounting space, and how
do we give more people access to this information? So
I started looking at the landscape and I saw that
in personal growth at the time, there were people doing
(06:31):
seminars for everyday people like the Tony Robbins and some
of those guys that started doing that in the eighties
and nineties, but there weren't a lot of people teaching
the principles of psychology counseling therapy unless you were on
the other end or motivated by some type of problem
or crisis. And I wanted to try to see if
we could create a space in a place because I
(06:52):
was pretty invested in creating a space because I'd seen
what happens when you can get people out of their
environment and into a really psychologically safe environment, and I
wanted to create a space that allowed everyday people, whether
they had a crisis in their life or not, to
come get a deeper look at who they are and
be able to offload some of the things that don't
belong to them so they could just become the best
(07:13):
version of they are optimize their relationships. And I didn't
know what that would look like for years. I thought
it might be more like a seminar business because I
just couldn't imagine how you could make that work in
a retreat setting. And I thought, well, maybe you bring
people to you, and they say in a hotel, But
I thought, man, we're really missing it if we can't
completely get people insulated and connected in that way. So
(07:36):
and I also am a hospitality nerd. I love great
hospitality and good hospitality heels and I wanted to be
able to offer that. And it's difficult to offer in
a work a semi a traditional seminar format unless you
can take care of people's other needs like lodging and
food and things like that. So that's what ultimately sparked
the idea of bringing people together in shorter amounts of time,
(07:58):
offering services that would be available for anybody, including people
in need. And that was the early vision for it.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Oh that's beautiful man. Before we get into actually breaking
down the program. How long you've been, tell me about
some of your great teachers, if there's one you want
to highlight or two you want to highlight. I'm so
curious that level of tutelage that you had, because you
strike me as a very curious human being.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Thank you. I'll take that as a compliment because I am.
I would say one of the top And if I
were to tell you the rest of the on site story,
I'd have to tell you the history of the origins
of what is now on site, and it predates me.
The lady by the name of Sharon White shot her
(08:44):
Cruise had a vision and she's got a wonderful story too.
But it's interesting a lot of great people that came
out of the therapy and psychology space. They came out
and sold a lot of books, but it was before
our world got pop cultureized, so most people but don't
know them, and mainstream people people in our field probably
know them. Because she was one of the early pioneers
(09:06):
of the codependency movement. She was a founding chairwoman of ACA.
She wrote a whole bunch of books back in the
day around children a Children of Alcoholics and codependency, and
she had an initial vision because she worked with Bernond
Johnson of the Johnson Institute, one of the early pioneers,
really pioneer of intervention of what do we do with
(09:26):
the rest of the system. We've got a primary patient
here that's getting intervened on, and we typically rushed them
off to a room to try to support them, and
then you've got the entire family that's hurting and they're
not getting any attention. So she mentored under a woman
by the name of Virginia Satyr who a lot of
people probably studied her. If you know anything about family
(09:48):
systems and Virginia kind of slated her to succeed a
lot of Virginia's work. As a matter of fact, I've
been able to read some of Virginia's old journals that
Sharon has, which is really powerful. And Sharon I met
her in Tucson, Arizona years ago, and then I followed
her and went on the back end of her career,
and she was still speaking some and she had the
(10:10):
original vision for a training and education center that would
take fail ultimately in the beginning was to take family
of alcoholics through some type of education and recovery process themselves.
And that really wasn't out there at the time. It
was pre family programs and treatment and all that stuff.
And so she was one of my primary mentors and
who I considered to be the founder of a lot
(10:30):
of what I still carried forward with on site. I've
you know, it's just much different company today. We shortened
the name down and had a longer name. We did
a lot more stuff back then, but her her roots
are all over our process and she was a great
mentor of mine, So she still got some great works
out there. I would recommend anybody that's looking for a
good read to look up, Sharon White shatter Crews.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
That's great. Can you give me one of your biggest
takeaways from her?
Speaker 1 (10:55):
I'll give you a vulnerable takeaway from her, because what
I did say was where I met her. I told you,
I told you I met her in two s on Arizona.
I tell you where I was. And I was in
residential treatment from early twenties, and there was a she
was a guest speaker that came through that facility, but
(11:18):
before the evening in which she and her husband spoke
that night, she tore the dorms, the facilities where the
patients and clients were, and I was in one of those,
and I was about a week and a half into
a residential stay. And like a lot of people who
end up going into residential care for mental health or substance,
(11:38):
she was here anything. You don't know what you know
until you get there. And thankfully the stigma has come
down significantly in the last twenty years, but we still
got a lot of it. But at that time, the
stigma was significant. I mean, it was a it was
a mountain, especially in the part of the world I
came from. It was just so out of context. I
knew nothing about it. I just knew how bad did
it have to get for me to end up in
(12:00):
a place like this. I was just really down on myself,
and I had not yet turned the corner to see
the value and get excited and go forward and do
what I've done with my life. I was still in
the muck and feeling pretty shameful about having to go
somewhere to fix some of the challenges I had. Coming
out of my dorm room. About a week and a
(12:22):
half in, I see people coming through on a tour.
It's the owner of the facility and Sharon and Joe,
and I at that time had my head on the floor.
I wouldn't make an eye contact with anybody and didn't
really want to talk to anybody. But she had this
engaging and infectious spirit, and she saw me about the
(12:43):
same time that I walked out of my door, and
she said hello, young man. And it was the way
she invited me into that greeting that brought my eyes
off the floor and straight into hers, and it made
me feel for some reason like I deserve to be
there instead of I had to be there. And I've
never forgotten. I've never forgoten. So there's a type of
(13:06):
management that I employed, which is walking around. I've never
had an office. I really like desk. When I'm at
on site or any of the facilities, I like to
walk around. And primarily it's because the influence of sharing.
Because what I do is I'll take meetings on the go,
I'll take meetings on the walks. But primarily I just
don't want to miss opportunity to look people in the
eyes at their works and be able to be a
(13:28):
mirror for them, just like she was a mirror for me,
and show them that their best is just ahead. She
just with the tone of her voice in that moment
she saw somebody, she saw me. She didn't see me
for the way I would see me. You shouldn't see
me for the problems I was dealing with at the time.
She saw me. She saw deep into my soul. Now
we would go forward and create a great professional mentee
(13:51):
mentor relationship. And she taught me all kinds of clinical
acument and all kinds of cool stuff. But such a
beautiful question you ask him. It's why I wanted to
go back to the origin of our story, because the
very biggest lesson was it never miss an opportunity to
look somebody, yeah and show them what they're made out.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Well, that's beautiful, and I'm going to make an assumption
here while it's that every guest that comes to your
amazing facility, where they get off a plane or they're
coming here, is greeted in that spirit.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, thank you. We worked really hard we train the
transport drivers that pick up at the airport are not
just drivers, They're an important part of our hospitality to you.
And that's where it starts. The minute you engage with
our team. We want you to feel warmly received and
loved on from the minute we bring you into our
(14:36):
process until the minute you depart.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
It's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Man.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
I like women like her, and the angels that cross
our paths are powerful. Let's talk about on site the program.
When did it actually get started? Where it's located. Would
you be so kind of break that down please.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
It's in Our primary campus is about forty five minutes
west of Nashville, and that's where the majority of our
work happened until we started to spread out a little bit.
But primarily that's where the majority of our work continues
to app but most of our volume comes to our
Tennessee campus started out on sixty eight acres. It's right
around three hundred acres now. We've just added a little
acreage over the years as we've gone. Got a beautiful
(15:18):
campus that sleeps comfortably about eighty five and it's in
the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee, just outside Nashville. It's
a really beautiful place. It's built around an old eighteen
sixty eight home. It's five thousand square feet. It's absolutely
gorgeous as kind of the centerpiece of the property, and
then we've got cabins that kind of surround it and
(15:39):
a nice restaurant and some other beautiful space. Is my
favorite thing about it though, is all that's on about
fifteen acres. But then once you go out of that
into the green space, we've got just a beautiful walking
trails and it's an active quarter horse ranch too. I'm
an equestrian, so we've got horses on property. Do equine therapy,
of course, but we do a variety of different programs.
(16:00):
I mean, we became kind of known for doing workshops
and intensives before a lot of people were doing workshops
and intents were for years were some of the only
people doing those. And what I mean by those for
people that may not know. Our insider lingo is that's
just a shorter term therapeutic experience anywhere from three to
five and sometimes seven days. And our flagship program is
(16:21):
called the Living Center Program, and it's kind of what
it sounds like. It's an incredible program for people who've
never looked at their origin story, a great way of
inviting you experientially back into your family of origin story
so that you can take a deeper look at what
serves you well, understand your imprint, also understand what maybe
didn't serve you well, and rewrite any old messages and
(16:43):
so that you can kind of clean your narrative a
little bit and then move forward and identify what ways
you might be medicating certain parts of your nervous system
that might be impacting you from fully living into your story.
That's another way to say trauma or emotional trauma work.
I don't know. I haven't got a chance to look
at all your demographics. I don't know if we're talking
(17:03):
to people in our field, Insiders, clinicians, therapists are all
the above. Okay, cool, That's why I'm trying. I think
sometimes I was guilty for years of just us an
insider language and hoping people can hang on. But I
try to neutralize it now for everybody. But yeah, so
the family of Origin, Code of Tendency work, evocial trauma work,
grief work. I think that's a great catch all program.
If I could get everybody to start with that one,
(17:25):
I would love it. Not everybody has that luxury because
it's time, resources and other things. So sometimes we specifically
might want to put somebody in a healing Trauma program,
which is a week long experience with some of our
trauma practitioners. It's powerful too. But yeah, we've got a
menu of therapeutic workshops that we offer throughout the year.
We're running about forty eight weeks out of the year
at Tennessee. We set a year annual calendar, and then
(17:48):
what we pepper in alongside it are custom curated individual, family,
couples intensives, and those are ones where we work specifically
with someone their story, pair them with people our team,
and then curate a great experience for them hopefully to
be able to heal and change. Those run throughout the year,
and we share the campus with one other offering. It's
called Milestones, and it's a long term residential trauma program
(18:12):
and it's twenty four twenty six bad somewhere around in there,
and it shares space, but it's a separate program altogether.
So it's primarily what happens in Tennessee. And we offer
some versions of our workshops at our California campus, and
then we have a digital offering. We're doing online intensives
and workshops and creating. As of right now, we're starting
to film some more emotional wellness masterclasses that we'll be
(18:34):
living in a format. So that's some of what we're
up to and onsite. I kind of I don't know
if I'm the worst of giving people elevator pitches.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
I'm not a great I don't know about that, buddy.
I don't know, but I'm going to just say it
once again, the work you guys do there is just extraordinary.
I've only had nothing but outstanding discoveries and transformation from clients,
and I want to thank you for curating that amazing
experience for folks. I know how specific you are and
I love that.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Thank you. Yeah, And probably the secret sauce of being
able to offer a product I really stand behind them
seek proud of is of course our team. I should
have started there. I started about telling you some of
the offerings, but I curate clinical talent obsessively. I just
I love finding really talented change it. So I was
(19:22):
going to say clinicians, but I think the letters are
just a bonus, honestly. I mean, we've got to have
those where all of our people are credential. We try to.
I'm really proud of the clinical excellence and integrity that
we offer, but it comes second to the people to
show up in the room with these people. I give
people permission up front. It's like, these tools are essential,
but make sure you're not leaving with them with your humanity.
And so we look for great people. We have an
(19:44):
incredible collection of wonderful clinicians around the country and some
in Nashville that will fly in and help be a
guide for people's stories. And that's been my favorite part,
just building wonderful relationships and taking care of them like
we would a client on their own campus.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Myles, how long has that program been in existence?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Now? I've had the program since two thousand and seven,
but it predates me. There are elements of it that
predate me and go on back. I forget the actual
data somewhere in like the late seventies when when Sharon
started doing her original work. So it's got a quite
a tale of great history and legacy, but a lot
(20:19):
of the elements you see today started somewhere around two
thousand and seven and eight, and then we added some
stuff in two thousand and ten, we added some stuff
again in two thousand and twelve, and we're adding some
stuff now. So we just kind of we're we're slow
and intentional. You know, have a great brand in our space.
The way it's been rolled up and consolidated in the
(20:42):
last fifteen years, there would have been faster pass the growth.
I had a lot of interesting people wanted to try
to accelerate us, and I'm not saying that that wouldn't
have been a good idea, because I love the idea
of scaling impact. But at the end of the day,
we were so obsessed with quality that we decided to
keep it at a certain size and make our growth
really small and intentional, continue to offer the quality that
we all aspire to do.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
As a person in the film and a person who
runs a facility and being insanely curious, what has been
the most difficult part for you challenging running on site.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Where are we starting to do with thesis on this one?
It's been full of challenges hand nd full of incredible
growth opportunities. I would probably say I got started, you know,
fairly young in your twenties and thirties. The way I
define success, I was still dragging some of my pathology
(21:35):
along with me, because, as you know, we're wounded healers,
and we get in this space and you just continue
to heal and evolve. If you're doing it right, ideally
you get to be a recipient benefit of the work
we spend time with. But I made some classic mistakes
early on of caring a little bit too much about
the image of what we were doing. And that was
(21:56):
always a distraction because you just you know, spend up
chasing the wrong things. And I would think now as
you mature and season into you get a different definition
of success where it's care more about doing what I
want to do, when I want to do it, with
the people I want to do it, and making sure
(22:16):
we do that with a lot of pride and a
lot of integrity and a lot of grace. And so
I'm really into I think if I've learned anything and
running a program in the behavioral space. It's that if
you take a playbook out of history and humanity, study
things besides psychologe like sociology, you realize that good communities
(22:36):
are actually what heal people. And if you want to
have a really good therapeutic product, you should really obsess
about curating community and creating a healthy community. And that
alone will buy you so much margin for era because
we're going to get it wrong. It's not a black
(22:57):
and white process of artistic and creative process of your
doing it right. It so you're gonna people are gonna
make mistakes. We're gonna make mistakes in a variety of ways,
clinically culinary on down. But if you have the tenants
and the foundation, I mean a really organically healthy community,
not a perfect community, but just a good community. I
(23:17):
guess if the backstage mashes out front, then that's that's
success to me. If the culture is really good, that success. Obviously,
if you want numbers, you want you want good business,
and if that follows bingo, that's icing. But the cake
to me is do I feel really good about the
people and the place and the offering, And that's kind
of the success. I would say that has helped us
(23:39):
today season well. But the mistakes I made early on
was often I would I'm add and I get a
little bit addicted to entrepreneurships. Often I'd have too many
things doing at one time. I'd have nine hundred workshops
and couldn't maintain the quality and couldn't staff on. And
then you start raining it back in and you get
focused on the ones that really matter. I feel myself
too far into it early on and found myself pretty
(24:03):
burned out, kind of chasing chasing my career at the
cost of me. I made that mistake, and I think
that's a really common mistake in our space, because all
of us should pass some junkies, and you know, there's
easier ways to make a living than doing our work.
But we got to love it. You're going to do it.
And I fell in love with a to the point
where I lost myself in at times, and I retooled,
(24:25):
and all those were great steps to who I've become today.
But those were some of the classic mistakes I made
early on. I couldn't delegate early on. I was terrible
at that, very codependent leader. Early on. I didn't know
how to be weird boundaries. Like I said, I can
go on and on on this one. There were quite
a few.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
I appreciate that, man, I really do. You and I
share a lot of things together that are important to us.
One is, let's get into the resilience, let's shift the narrative,
let's get past a sad story. Can you talk to
me about your philosophy and your treatment of that and
your facility out there?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
I really leave that. We have two distinct responsibilities with
human beings, one of which is to create a safe
enough container and invite people alongside you, to shine a
light in front of them, not trying to push them
(25:20):
and pull them where we think they need to go,
but just shine a light on opportunities for them to
evolve and grow and heal and grieve and all the
things that we do. And often that requires us to
go back into their story, and not always a lot
of times people that are thinking about stepping into trauma
work or emotional work, they're terrified of turning over all
the rocks. And that's a misnomer. I don't think we
(25:41):
don't turn It's not from not uncalled for to turnover
all the rocks, but sometimes it is important to look back,
and I think some of us and I made this
mistake early on. You get so obsessed with looking back
into people's stories and using all the creative tools that
we have at disposal to help them certain parts of that,
and then we bring them to current day and then
(26:03):
we say, okay, good luck. And I have in the
last few years, especially coming out of the pandemic, where
I really start starting to see this narrative accelerate like
a wildfire. And I'll tell you what I'm talking about
in a minute. Was I think, if you're not careful
and you only help people look in their past and
(26:23):
you stop them at current tie without opening up doors
of what possibilities could be the payoff or the benefit
of doing this heavy lift, then you kind of doubled
down on a bit of a victim narrative. And I
saw our whole field kind of go through that to
where we were so obsessed as a people for years
with the concept of vulnerability, and then when it got
pop culturalized, thinks that wonderful colleagues and dear friends like
(26:46):
Brene Brown that kind of became superstars over not with
vulnerability talks and wrote great books and did great research
and couldn't respect it anymore. I think they were pivotal
in lowering some of the stigma about what we all do.
But I don't think there were enough of us talking
about resilience, which is the question you teed up here,
which is, okay, what's the only thing we do to
connect with one another? Is all circle and talk about
(27:08):
our problems, And we're probably going to become more of
our problems, and there's got to be more conversation about, well,
where do we go from here? So we've really tried
to shift it to where Often you know this, people
that bounce around therapeutic circles for a long time or
recovery circles for a long time, often they know more
about all their diagnoses and problems than anybody could, and
(27:29):
so much so they can't tell you who they are
without telling you about all their diagnoses and problems. And
we try to stop it right up front and say
it's important. We want to know about your alcoholism or
your whatever it is, we want to know about it.
We're proud you have a shameful way to express that,
but we also want to invite you to an idea
that you might be more than that part of your story.
(27:50):
You might be more than covering alcoholic. You might be
more than a recovery trauma survivor. You might be more
than a felt marriage. You might be more than the
stress you carried last year crash and burn. And I
believe that is where resilience becomes. I think more than
the second step. I think it becomes the key ingredient.
(28:11):
Do we teach it the way I want to teach it?
Not shit? I think we're We're really putting a lot
of effort into that now. We're really trying to find
innovative ways because I think I'd love to get better
at that, if I'm completely honest, as a facility, but
I do think we put a lot of attention on
it in the last two or three years to where
we're trying to make sure that aftercare is not just
an afterthought. It's still so tough. I've never seen an
(28:32):
africallic plan I just loved, and we do a bunch
of them, and I like to be honest, I hope
it doesn't scare off people that like what we do.
But I think I get nervous with the people that
tell you they're great at everything that they do. When
they do the best after plan in the world, because
if everybody did the best aftercare planning, we'd all have
more than thirty percent of the people that do the
Africa Plan and none of us do.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, right on, that's a straight up truth.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
So I'd love to get more innovative and what's next,
you know, how do we spend a little bit more
time in where we go from here? Because that's where
the greatest gift I've ever gotten from looking at deconstructing
my own story and the building back who I am
today is that some of the things I used early
on in my story where it was like, well, I've
(29:15):
got to create safety or safe people, safe circle, safe,
family of choice, all the things. It's like safety. I
used to think safety was an internal concept. I used
to I am an external concept. I used to teach
it that way, so I didn't get anything to do
with safety. Safety is right here. It's wrapped up in
this ball of resilience and you can just take it
wherever you want to go. You get just taken in
distressful places, unsafe places, people that typically are going to
(29:36):
activate your nervous system, and you still need to be
who you are that's resilience, and I hope that's what
we're teaching people.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Beautiful. I think you said, dear brother, the you know,
opposite of diction isn't sobriety, it's connection. You talk about Yah, yeah,
let's talk about that. That's a good one.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
That hats man. So I did a little or homework
on your end.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
I appreciate youahy do that. I value man's time.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I've really tried over the years to simplify complicated change
techniques and tools so that it's a more approachable process.
I remember my struggle to get back to my faith
in my spirituality, and I often wondered why. And I
see a lot of people that go through psychological challenges
(30:18):
or behavioral challenges also struggle with spiritual challenge, which is
why we often deploy a tool early in people's process
and give them opportunities to re engage with some type
of spiritual life. We most of us feel like it's important,
you know, an important part of the recipe. And I
remember trying to re engage with spiritual life, but I
(30:38):
had so much baggage from spirituality kind of gone wrong
that it was tough to It was tough to re engage.
I just wanted to avoid it, didn't want to prioritize
it or create my own version of it, which ended
up being more about me than now. I believe it
is my God, and I realized it was because it
had so much activating language around it, so much insider speak,
(31:01):
that I couldn't ever get to the purity of the
message without wading through everything I thought I should know
about it, and learned about it all the way up,
and I realized our lane can be the same way
if we're not careful. I think there's there's quite a
bit of dogma in therapy circles, and people can get
really attached to the model that we think works, the
one we've been trained in, and if we're not careful,
(31:23):
we're over prescribing that language to people who have no
context for it. And many people have been hurt by
counseling and therapy too, and often it's difficult to build
that bridge unless we get creative and neutralize the language.
And that's what led me to exactly what you said earlier.
(31:46):
I started thinking, Okay, what is this really about? What
do we really try? This is back when I was
working in a residential treatment center, and prior to on site,
what is this really about addiction? What do we do?
You could say, well, and I said this before too,
that I've never met somebody with addiction that didn't have
chronic stress or trauma on board as well. That used
to be super controversial. It's not as much anymore, but
(32:06):
it used to be really controversial because you had the
addiction faithful, the old school addiction folks that said you
can't treat trauma alongside addiction. Then you have the new
growing field of the trauma folks that said you can't
treat addiction without treating trauma. And then there was the
out of the mouse, which one do you do first?
And when do you do it? And nowadays people are
realizing there's more of a holistic approach, and then everybody's
a little different and the timing needs to be curated individually,
(32:29):
ideally and out of factory line. But that was a
long way for me to say. That was how I
arrived at the concept. If you strip it all back,
people are feeling disconnected from who they are. They're just
feeling disconnected from who they are, isolated from other people
in the world, even the most social people, the most
plugged in, people can be lonely, disconnected and now know
(32:50):
who they are. And when that happens, one of the
first things we do is experience anxiety, the experienced depression,
and one of the most common things we do with
anxiety and depression is we need to regulate, non or
medicate that and we do that with substances, alcohol being
one of addiction being one of them, off food being
one of them. That's often where we go, and so
(33:15):
you had to kind of follow a trail. There was like, Okay,
if addiction's up here, what's underneath it? Well, what's underneath that? Well,
what's underneath that? When I got all the way down
on the basis, was like, man, people just feel disconnected.
And if we could help people get re anchored and
reconnected to who they are, they're twice as likely to
be able to connect with other people. And if they
can connect with other people, they're gonna be able connect
with the world in a little different way and maybe
(33:35):
won't need the lubri can to feel okay in their
own skin.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Yeah, right on, man, beautiful, let's talk about I've been
I've been loving what you're doing with jelly roll and
the okay project, could you walk the audience through that
and how that came into your consciousness. It's incredible, man.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yeah, Jelly Is he's just a unique guy. I got
to meet him. I worn't in the entertainment space as
well and bring a lot of our tools Indian Camic World.
In addition to helping people when they're going through challenges,
also do performance coaching and some other stuff in the space,
and so we run in similar circles and I've gotten
to know him a little bit socially. But he had
(34:15):
reached out to me. He had some big goals, you know,
he was starting to have a couple of songs just
go crazy, and he was kind the rocket ship. The
few started to get lit, and he was just not
in a place that he felt I could sustain the
journey he was getting ready to go on, and he
called me. He's talked about this a lot publicly, which
is why I can talk about it. But he's like,
I'm over five hundred pounds and I'm trying to sell
(34:38):
sixty tour dates and I'd like to make some changes.
And so I often will come alongside people not as
their therapists, but as a coach or a consultant to
help them reformat their team, their life, their environment they're surrounding,
and so I initially engaged with him to help him
do that. I didn't have time, honestly, you know, I
didn't have time to lock in with one clas because
(35:00):
I advise a whole bunch of camps and lots of artists,
and I had told him I couldn't do it to
the level we wanted me to do it. But then
when I got into the hood a little bit and
stopped just looking at the car, I realized, oh, man,
this guy might be a generational voice for mental health
and addiction. I really think, well, what was that moment?
Was it a song?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Was it a look? Was it a conversation? Was it
What was that moment for you, man, where you said,
this cat's onto something?
Speaker 1 (35:27):
It was the Houston Rodeo in March of twenty three,
which was his biggest ever show. They do like ten
or twelve dates with massive artists every year in every genre,
and you're planning to I forget the number eighty something
thousand people, so it's bigger than most stadiums. And that
(35:48):
was the first time, outside of award shows, I'd ever
seen him do an entire set, and I saw him
get up there and start to tell parts of his story,
tell parts of his interesting story, tell parts of his
struggle story. It wasn't that he was saying something that
I hadn't heard other artists say before. That wasn't what
got my attention. What got my attention was I started
(36:09):
watching the people. I started watching how they responded to him,
and I started watching. Now he turned an entire stadium
into a safe like recovery circles that we sent there.
I was going to say, church, whatever you plug in
what he turned it into a spiritual experience. And I thought,
not only is he a brilliant artist and a great creative,
(36:30):
it's a brilliant orator. And what my favorite thing about
his oratoribility or him as a speaker, is that he
is uneducated but wicked smart. That was as much as
but it's all it's all come through street knowledge and reading.
Spent a lot of time in carse ratings, who got
to read a whole lot of stuff. But he picked
stuff up really quickly. But he was using complex concepts
(36:52):
in a vulnerable way with street language, and it just
connected right to the heart of the people. It felt congruent,
it felt offen because it was authentic and cangrue. And
when I saw that, and I saw him moving in
hire arena full of people and not a few people.
Usually if you get up there and you tell the
part of your story and you do a testimony, a
few people are going to connect to it, and others
are waiting on the song then one to hear he
(37:13):
stopped everybody in their tracks. And I said, if he
can do that with eighty thousand people, what could he
do with millions? And I just got invested and we
got to be good friends outside of the work that
we do together. And I'm so proud of him. He's
down two hundred and twenty pounds. He's really revolutionized himself emotionally, physically.
He's done it the hard way. You know, he hasn't
(37:33):
any of the shortcuts. He's really put the work in.
But more than that, it's what he's doing with his
influence is a number one mention realized is more than
the music. I want to go make a change. I
want to make the unseen feel seen. I want to
give hope to the hopeless. And I love what I
do it on site. I always will, and I've got
a foundation. I get to work with people other more
diverse population that doesn't necessarily have the means. But who
(37:56):
we're reaching now is people I never thought i'd be
over reach doing our because a lot of the people
that are part of the demographic that will come up
to come to concerts and other events that we do,
they're coming in for the same reason people come to
me or maybe you. They're searching for hope. They're going
through a very difficult part of their story and here's
(38:18):
this artist that has redeemed his story and now has
found international success, and they are looking for him as
for ministry in a way, and he's stepping into that
moment and doing the best he can to provide hope.
And I watched people leave these experiences and we kind
of his first big tour, did fifty eight city tour
last year. I'm losing track of toms last year, and
(38:40):
it was so kind of he invited. I mean, he
had some of the most successful managers and producers and
choreographers across all the industry in the room to design
and create this tour, and he put me in the
middle of that. He said, I want a mental health
guide here. I want you to create what you create
on site in this arena, and he let you, let
(39:03):
me kind of build into that. And we did some
really unique cool things throughout the entire set. I mean lights,
We turn the lights up at one time and the
whole place finds a stranger to hug. And we just
did this stuff. You don't you know, you don't really
see it concerts we start. We started off the show
with I wrote a kind of an invitation into the
(39:23):
experience of people we hoped that they would experience. It
was a language that we'd use every day in a
therapy room. I tried to neutralize a little bit. And
then we had this crazy dream. We were like, what
if we could give Morgan Freeman to be the voice
of God to say this over the loudspeaker right before
you come out. And the head of CIA was in
the in the room when we were saying that, Hey,
(39:44):
it was like, I represent Morgan, so what do you know?
The next thing, you know, Morgan Freeman is the voice
of God speaking, uh, speaking my words into an arena
full of people. And then Jelly would go up there
to knock their socks off and love them and pour
into them, and so it was just a It's been
a beautiful experience. And the reason I've anchored in with
him so much and we're creating this Okay Project is
I saw he wrote kind of a song with a
(40:05):
couple other buddies that ended up being a little bit
of a mental health anthems. It's called I'm Not Okay.
And I watched it grow. I watched it start when
people didn't know it, and then I watched it end
where nobody didn't know it and when number one and
it's been a beautiful thing, and we got together and start.
We also stopped at fifty something jails on that tour.
(40:27):
We tried to match the number of arenas we were
going to with the number of jails and jubis we
were stopping by to pour into people, and we realized
the benefit of him coming into spaces like that was
just checking on people and making sure they were okay.
And that's what we wanted to do with the Okay
Project is create a vehicle in a format offer really
good resources to the people who don't don't typically get resource,
(40:49):
check on people, make sure they're okay, encourage them and
give them a little hopes. That's what the Okay Project's
all about.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Oh, that's It's an incredible project. And I encourage everyone.
We'll put all the stuff down, the songs at the
projects you're doing, support that, you know. Listen, I've been
sober thirty eight years. I've been blessed to be in
this field.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
You know.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
I've worked with you, with a lot of great people.
I've been in partnership with Tony Robbins. The guys that
are really free and are having a blast in life.
They just know that there's one thing they must do.
They must always give it back times a thousand and
when I'm watching the videos of you guys out there,
I'm like, what I'm feeling. We are so blessed we are.
(41:31):
Let's just just poor people with love and kindness and grace.
Let's do some crazy stuff. Let's turn the lights on,
let's pray a different way, and let's just shake these
motherfuckers up. And I just applaud you for that, man,
because it's a real fucking get down for me. I
you know, I use bad words sometimes, but I don't know.
That's just the way I am, you know, But I
(41:51):
love I love that. But would you talk about that
if I'm speaking correctly, If that makes sense for you,
the impact when you have that gift and keep that
gift besides the gift of sobriety, that you must be
on the firing the firing line and giving it back
that way, please.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
I thought when I got into my space that I
get back every day. We work in a business that
helps people resolve challenges in their story and become better
versions of who they are, and pretty I felt like
that's a pretty noble run. But if you're not careful
after a while, if that's all you do with your time,
(42:31):
then it'll turn into a job. And it's it's not
that the job is still not doing good things, it's
just if I'm not, if I don't, if I'm not
tapped into any other service opportunities for humanity outside of
the thing that I run or the thing that I do,
if it's in the helping profession, I think we're missing
this great opportunity for this other part of our soul
to not just come alive, but to stay alive. So
(42:54):
I've always wanted to get creative in I think some
of the best service work in the world. Because after
the jails we went into, we never had a camera,
nobody who ever know we were in there, and I
think some of the best is done without anybody knowing.
But I think sometimes if you can accelerate it, then
you can ripple it, if you can try and take
some swings and do some things outside. Because I've gotten
(43:15):
criticism too, you know, from publicly being involved with people
that the old guard would be like, wait a minute,
if you have any type of engagement with them on
a professional level, you should never be friends with them
or have any social setting. And I'm like, I get it,
That's why I'm noticed there. I could justify it, but
I don't even adjust for it anymore. It's like I
hear you and I think I'm impacting one more people
(43:36):
in one night that I might my whole career and
on site, and I'm just sorry, but that outweighs. I
want to keep pouring fuel on that because it's doing
a lot for me, and I think it's doing a
lot for other people. And I think if we can
find a rhythm where it's a reciprocal opportunity for me
to stay grounded spiritually, knock some doors down, try to
change a few lives, and it's benefiting some other people.
I think it's a worth for well pursuit.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
I've over shopped that man right on. If one comes
to mind, give me your biggest transformation story, that one
that you'd like to talk about. They're one that you
think about the most. If there is one, I know
there's been hundreds.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
This will be outside of the well, not really, I
mean on site. I've got a foundation called the on
Site Foundation, and we try to use some of our
expertise an experience to go pour into other NGOs and
nonprofits at times, and before I had kids, before I
got married, I went on a wild few year run
(44:31):
where I went to have the hottest spots in the
country in terms of danger around the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, DRC,
mogud Isshue, Somalia. And these were NGOs or nonprofits that
we're working with word torn regions to help either educate, feed,
or support kids or women who've been exposed at gender
(44:53):
base violence. And then what happened was a lot of
these efforts were following short because the kids were so
well they didn't know they were wondering. You know, if
the scores, we got good teachers, we got good resources,
the kids don't seem to be able to learn. I
was like, well, they're living in active trauma. So unless
(45:14):
the teachers can be trauma informed and help them find
ways to stay grounded, to be difficult for them to learn.
So I got to go and do some of that work.
And one of the places was supporting One of my
really good friends has a great place that doesn't neat
work around Uganda, Northern Uganda, different places in Africa, but
he has kind of carved out a little niche to
work with witch doctors in Northern Uganda. It's a really creepy,
(45:39):
interesting group of people. And I got a chance to
go speak to a room full of witch doctors that
were graduating from a year long program to try to
rebuild their life and to give up some of the ways.
We weren't trying to change their mind about everything but
child sacrifice some of the stuff they get into. We
(46:01):
were trying to change that narrative. But I never forget.
We were in this old building that had no eating
air and it was just no windows, but we were
able to secure and we were trying to emulate a
graduation and I was kind of giving a graduation talk,
a commencement talk nobody in the audience with the people
(46:23):
who were commencing, and I was like, what do you say?
What's a white dude from Tennessee say to these Ugandan
witch doctors. I just did share my story, the story
you and I probably shared in anonymous circles before, and
be real, would they connect to that? I didn't think
the details. No, it's completely different life. Did they connect
(46:46):
with struggle and vulnerability and pain and grief and loss. Absolutely?
And it was really at the end, it wasn't what
I said or seeing any kind of miraculous moment when
I had the mic. It was when I set down
my buddy had things to say. But when they got
ready to get their diploma, we didn't have They had
captain gowns alone, and they were so excited because most
(47:08):
of them I had never read or wight. They'd never
been able to read a writer or anything, and they
had learned how to read as part of this experience
we had. We found some kazoos and we were playing
pomp and circumstance on canoe and in that moment, I
saw sheer joy on these grown men's on their face.
(47:31):
I saw their eyes line up, and I saw hope
come alive in ways that I didn't even think was possible.
And I was sitting there playing at kazoo in the
middle of north of Uganda. It was just an experience
I never forget. I don't know why that's the one
that popped up. I've had a lot of amazing experiences
watching people transform, but that one was one I think
that transformed me.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
Oh, that's beautiful and ironically, and perhaps some day, over
a good meal, we'll talk. I've worked extensively in northern
Uganda with children's soldiers, so I know exactly the folks
you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
That's beautiful. So we got to connect on that.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Yeah, man, So we got a couple of minutes. I'm
gonna do just a couple of rapid fires and I'll
let you get back to all the great healing you've
probably got planned today. One belief you've completely changed your.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Mind about vulnerabilities.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
We one habit or ritual you won't compromise on.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
Family comes first.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
What love feels like when it's healthy, messy, The hardest
truth you've had to tell yourself. Enough, Yeah, go on
that a little bit, buddy. Let's let's tell me more
about that.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
Tell me about miles is enough when you carry the
backpack I carried for so many years, and then you
start to see some of your labor take root, you
start to see it start to make an impact. It's
almost impossible, it was for me for that old impost
(48:50):
not to creep back in. And every time it raises
another level, it's like, okay, wait, oh, you're the level
you're operating here, which means what I mean by another
level is I'm influence seeing more people. Where I'm around
interesting people, we're doing something even more interesting or more cooler.
I get that that voice continues to go, you're a
little bit outside and you're a little bit over your steets, buddy,
and you're gonna be found out to find out you
(49:12):
don't know what you're doing, what you're talking about, and
you probably ought to stay back in your lane. You
were doing a great job running outside and sitting and
coming the frint of six days a week. Why don't
you go back there? So that truth I have to
face that hard truth every day is like I'm I'm
I'm I'm standing, I'm stepping into my divinity. It's where
I'm supposed to be, and I'm supposed to be in
this room. I'm supposed to be in this face, and
(49:32):
I'm enough and I'm gonna be okay. That's that's the
trith I have to face every day.
Speaker 2 (49:37):
Yeah, that's beautiful. Final thoughts, buddy, to the person that
you and I both know who's struggling, who's scared depression
set again? Maybe you know thinking about does it make
sense to be on this plan anymore? What's the message
for them right now? What's the first step?
Speaker 1 (49:53):
What? What? What? What? What?
Speaker 2 (49:54):
What do you recommend? What kind of love do you
want to send out to them?
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Right now? You're actually feeling a bit, a little bit
alone and in your pain, and there's going to be
well intended people who are going to come along and
tell you're not alone. And those people just drive me
crazy because I felt alone, So why are you telling
me I'm not alone? So I want to say I
know what it's like to be alone in your pain.
(50:17):
I also know what it's like to start to get
okay with that pain enough that I could start to
look at it enough that I then could start to
share it on a piece of paper, and then I
was able to share it with one other person, and
that one other person turned into a group of people
that turned into a community of people that now turned
into the world. And I have no shame about my
(50:38):
pain story anymore because I share my pain story and
I've been able to grow and heal from it, and
I don't want to change it because I'm a better person.
And I don't expect that you follow my playbook because
you got your own playbook. You can't see it yet,
but I promise you it's in there. Anybody that comes
in and tries to advise you without loving you, I'll
(50:59):
be weird if somebody comes in and loves you and
looks in the eye and said, I know what it's
like up in there. It is. It does feel like
it's alone, But there is hope to rebuild your story,
and you are one hundred percent worthit and just the treat.
But I have to tell myself every day. I'm going
to tell you right now, you're enough in the world
needs you, and I can't wait to see what you
do with the rest of your story.
Speaker 2 (51:18):
Heymen, buddy, God speed, buddy, Thank you so much. This
has been a real blessing.
Speaker 1 (51:22):
Man.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
The Sino Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts. Hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod People in twenty eighth.
Av Our lead producer is Keith carnlac Our executive producer
is Lindsey Hoffman. Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver. Thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.