Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Friends, it's Tina Tower here, and welcome to her empire builder show. Today I have a very special interview for you with my favorite coach, Barrett Brooks. So I am a very big fan of coaching. I've been in business for over 20 years, and nearly all of that time I have had private coaches. I've been part of group coaching programs, part of masterminds, memberships, all of the different things. I love learning, and I love having a coach to be able to talk to. I think as business leaders ourselves, we are constantly pouring into other people and trying to give and give and give, and it can sometimes feel like you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders as a business owner and really trying to take on that or not take as much of that responsibility on. And I love to have a coach so that I've got someone there who's.

 

Main Episode

 

Tina Tower [00:00:58]:
Who's on my side, who's there to, you know, give me an atter go, but also to question everybody belief that I have and to reflect things back to me and help me to gain clarity and to distill my own thoughts and to help me make decisions and help me trust myself. And I first started working with Barrett at the beginning of 2023. My good friend Clint Salter, he had worked with Barrett for a while and recommended me to him mainly because what I got out of it and what I went there for were very, very different things. So I go Barrett because I was looking at. I was at this place in my business where it had taken off quite significantly. And my last business that I sold in 2016, I sold that because it got too big, it got too heavy, and I wasn't loving it anymore. You know, when you build something and then you wake up one day and you're like, what have I done? Like, this isn't fun. Wrong way.

Tina Tower [00:01:53]:
Go back. And so I was very trepidatious to not do that again. And I was kind of feeling a lot of inner conflict in going, I want to build this business, and I want to see what I'm capable of, and I want to see how far we can go. But also, I don't think I want that at the same time. And a part of me had been operating like in push energy for such a long time that I couldn't quite figure out which was my true intuition, which part was my actual salt. Did I actually want to go big and I was too scared to go big because of my previous experience, or did I really just not want it anymore? And if I didn't want it anymore. Who did that even make me? Because I've always defined myself by more and more success. And so I was really at this crossroads in trying to figure out what is it that I actually want and so that I could be really purposeful and intentional about creating a business and a life that was right for me and not one that I necessarily thought I should be living.

Tina Tower [00:02:53]:
And I could not have found a more perfect human being to guide me through that. The year of working together. So Barrett uses a lot of ifs internal family systems to. To navigate a lot of. A lot of the things and, you know, for people that have listened for a long time and read my books, you know that I had quite a. Quite a bit of childhood trauma that informed a lot of my reactions and a lot of the way that I dealt with business as well. And so we worked through a lot of that for the first few months, which was. It was not fun.

Tina Tower [00:03:26]:
First few months was not fun. It just brought up a lot of different things. But I tell you, at the end of the year of working with Barrett, I was like, this has been one of most transformative years of my life. Other than getting married and having babies, it was the most transformative year of my life. I aged backwards. I felt so happy, I felt so contented, so aligned and just more myself than I think I ever have. You know, I've. I've always had inner conflict in inside of me and for the first time ever, that was gone.

Tina Tower [00:04:00]:
And now here we are a year and a bit after we've stopped working together, and I've never been so healthy and happy in my life. And that contentment has stayed with me and changed my life forever. And so I was really, really excited to be able to get Barrett to come on the show. And he's just, you know, you'll. You'll see in a moment. He's so wise and so kind hearted and just everything you could ever hope for in a coach and in a friend to be able to have there. So I hope you enjoy this incredible conversation and the beautiful insights that you are going to get from. From Mr.

Tina Tower [00:04:37]:
Barrett Brooks. The fabulous Barrett Brooks. Welcome to her Empire Builder show.

Barrett Brooks [00:04:41]:
I was just saying I cannot imagine a better way to spend an hour. Thanks for having me.

Tina Tower [00:04:45]:
Too kind. Too kind. So in the intro, I obviously spoke about, you were my coach for a year and you made a bigger impact on me and my life than anyone I have ever worked with. And I've worked with a lot of different coaches throughout the last 20 years. So first I will say to your face, like, thank you for that. Something that will last a lifetime, that I'm eternally thankful for. It also made it really difficult to write questions for you because I got. I want to ask you everything, and I know you're here for that.

Barrett Brooks [00:05:16]:
I am so good.

Tina Tower [00:05:17]:
Okay, so first, like, you know, I've introduced you as the greatest coach that I've ever worked with, which is a big accolade, but it's also very true. And what I wanted to start with, though, was the interesting part, because, you know, only five years ago, four years ago, you were COO of ConvertKit, which, you know, obviously you worked really hard to get there. Such an impressive title that so many tech people aspire to get to that level. What changed?

Barrett Brooks [00:05:48]:
I think of it as a progressive surrender to who I really am and to letting go of how I wanted the world to think of me, to get my needs met. And so to bring that down to earth from this, like, very airy language, I hit a point at ConvertKit where it was just stealing more from my soul than it was giving to me. And that was coming out as burnout and frustration and taking away from my experience with my family, my young son at the time and my wife, and it just didn't work anymore. And what I realized was I just had not acknowledged that this doesn't work for me. There's nothing inherently bad or wrong about it. It just doesn't work for me. And it took a moment of conversation with my wife to just own that fact. And as soon as I realized that, then everything started to unfold from there.

Barrett Brooks [00:06:37]:
But getting from there to here was a long journey. I mean, I spent 18 months, made a book about climate change with a mentor of mine. I went and was the CEO of a local coffee company just for fun for a while. And then I went back into technology at a climate technology company here in Portland, building these really big, interesting technical devices to create energy from the ocean. And I started feeling the exact same way. And it was like, wow, I'm still chasing something that's not true to me, because otherwise I wouldn't be feeling this way. And my coach at the time just helped me begin to surrender that I am made to be an entrepreneur. And not just I'm made to be an entrepreneur, I'm made to be a coach.

Barrett Brooks [00:07:15]:
And I felt a lot of shame about that because coach has connotations to people. And what I've settled into over time is it does not threaten me when you say, you are the greatest coach. I have ever worked with. I'm not attached to it, but I'm also not threatened by it. And I think that is just through a lot, a lot of never ending, not in a negative way, just never ending inner work to just settle into. Like, yeah, I'm here for it. I'm here for relationships like this. And it's what I love.

Tina Tower [00:07:42]:
I think you also take your, in everything that you do, your level of excellence very seriously.

Barrett Brooks [00:07:50]:
Yes, I do. I have the value that I espouse in that is creative excellence. And I don't view creativity as just the things that I make. I think the relationships I foster are an act of creativity and an act of excellence as well. And I really do bring that to everything that matters to me. You know, there are some things I don't try and be excellent at, but everything that matters to me. I really try and hold myself to a standard. And coaching, if I was going to make coaching my profession, I was not just going to hang a shingle and say, come hang out with me.

Barrett Brooks [00:08:20]:
I was going to treat it like a professional athlete would treat being a professional athlete. And for better or worse, I think a lot of coaches treat it more like they're playing pickup basketball rather than trying to make it in the NBA, to use a lame sports metaphor. But I really wanted to honor my clients with training myself as if I'm here to do a really, really sacred and honored job, which is to be alongside people and help them with the psychology of entrepreneurship, which is not easy.

Tina Tower [00:08:50]:
No, it's not easy. So when you're in that moment with ConvertKit, because I know that for a lot of people that I know, I think it happens once, twice in a lifetime that you kind of get to these crossroads and go, everything I've worked for, everything I thought I wanted, I no longer want that. And it feels strange to no longer want that. And it feels like this conflict of who you thought you were and who you think you're becoming. I know you had had the conversation with your wife, but was there a particular moment that made you go, this is no longer for me, or was it a slow niggling burn? And because what I'm trying to get at is for a lot of people that are in that situation, it's really hard to make that change. What was there a catalyst of some sort that made you go, you know what the pain of this is worth more than clinging to the idea of the identity that I thought I always had?

Barrett Brooks [00:09:39]:
Yeah. So there are two really important moments. It had been niggling at me for a very long time. And I found every reason in the book to put it away to h in a back corner of my soul, which is what we all do, because it protects us, right? Keeps us safe, keeps us comfortable. The core difference in vision between me and my dear friend Nathan Barry, who was the CEO at the time, was he had a really deep seated desire to keep the team as small as possible. That was a core part of the vision for the company that he had. And for me. I love people.

Barrett Brooks [00:10:07]:
People are how I get everything done in the world. And I see managing people and creating wonderful jobs and fostering beautiful team culture as like gifts I can give to the world. And these things were in conflict. And so he wanted to keep the team small. And I felt all of the reasons I wasn't hitting my goals and my incentive plan was that we didn't have enough people. And that's what a lot of my executives that reported to me were also saying to me, they need more people, they need more people. So I was banging up against this wall that for my friend Nathan, was really important to him. And now I can honor it because it's his company, you know, it's his company.

Barrett Brooks [00:10:44]:
I owned a little piece of it. And there was a conversation we were having where I'd had this niggling and it wasn't working for me, and I hadn't acknowledged it yet. And he just said, you know, I think the greatest mistake I've made is compromise on the number of people we were going to have in the company. I think that was a big mistake on my part and I don't want to hire for 18 months. And I just knew in that moment, I said, you know what? If that's the case, this is not a threat. This is from a place of love and acknowledgement of where we are. I want to begin my process of leaving. And so I want you to sit with it for a couple weeks and just make sure that that's where you're at, that that's what you want.

Tina Tower [00:11:17]:
And.

Barrett Brooks [00:11:18]:
And then I think we should start the process. And that was. That was only enabled by feeling like I had permission from my wife. That was a really key ingredient, was feeling like she believed it was better for us if I left than if I stayed at that point. Because I actually feel, I think a part of me was carrying weight for the family.

Tina Tower [00:11:38]:
Yeah, of course.

Barrett Brooks [00:11:39]:
Like, I have to stay here because what will we do if I leave? And so those two ingredients, permission to leave. And it just crossed the Thing that really mattered to me, I didn't want to operate that way.

Tina Tower [00:11:53]:
Yeah. And yet now you run a company with no people.

Barrett Brooks [00:11:57]:
Yeah, for now, yeah.

Tina Tower [00:11:59]:
Oh, okay. I'm going to ask you more about that later then. So I don't digress too much, which is, which is my habit. So you left and you would have felt this big, you know, you would have felt this, well, what now? And you mentioned you went and worked on the book with Seth Godin, which is pretty amazing. And then the coffee company, of which, you know, sometimes I have fantasies. Right. So my husband and I want to do a sabbatical at some stage. And one of the things that Matt wants to do is work in a surf resort, teach foil boarding, surfing.

Tina Tower [00:12:28]:
And I'm like, well, what am I going to do? I'm like, maybe I could run their marketing. And there's like this really fun temptation in getting a job that I would just completely knock out of the park. I'm so competent at this. And there's like very little challenge. Did you chase some of that afterwards in going like maybe you're going to coast to figure out what to do next, or were you chasing a big thing or did you have a bit of an identity crisis or how was that process for you in discovering? Because I imagine even though you'd left ConvertKit and felt like you'd lost something because of all the experience that you had, you would have been bombarded with opportunities. Right. And been able to go into many different tech companies and many different roles.

Barrett Brooks [00:13:11]:
Yeah. So objectively that is true. Subjectively, in my inner experience, I had tons of fear that I would not be desirable, I would not be wanted, I would not have opportunity. And to some extent that was justified. I mean, convertkit's a funky ass company. We had no investors, we were bootstrapped, we were in the creator economy. Half the investor class didn't know what that was. There's not a lot of respect for bootstrapped companies from the venture backed companies.

Barrett Brooks [00:13:36]:
And there's not a lot of overlap between talent pools either. And so I realized that like I had all these connections in the creator world. Hundreds of people that everyone would love to know in that world, but not that many in the tech world. And that actually proved to be a real challenge. But I always like to acknowledge in this story there is a very important piece here that everyone should hear, which is that I sold 80% of my stock and I had enough money where for 18 months I didn't need to earn a dollar. So just like that has to be said, because that was true for me and that's not true for everyone. So what I intended to do was to take at least six and not do anything because of all the things I am good at, sitting still is not one of them.

Tina Tower [00:14:17]:
I don't relate at all. Barrett.

Barrett Brooks [00:14:19]:
Yeah, I know. I lasted one week until I got Seth Godin's email saying I want to make a book about climate change. And I said, perfect.

Tina Tower [00:14:29]:
Do you think if you hadn't got that email, do you think you would have lasted? Because I mean, that's one I wouldn't. Who would say no to an opportunity to work with Seth Godin? But would you have lasted or would have been something?

Barrett Brooks [00:14:41]:
No, I would have found something else. It was just a convenient excuse not to stay still. And I learned a lot and it did help me. I thought I wanted to go in this direction of combating climate change and using my career on that. I thought what was missing was mission and I was just a little bit lost, honestly. And I was probably grasping for certainty where there could be none at that moment and it gave me a convenient excuse. It's like it's a volunteer project, so it's not really work. So I kind of am taking space.

Barrett Brooks [00:15:07]:
But then I worked full time on it as the volunteer managing editor for six months. It's like it was a job. However, the competence thing, the thing that the book gave me was confidence that my leadership skills translated to a completely different environment. Not for profit, totally volunteer based. All my leadership skills came to bear in it and it worked beautifully and that restored some confidence that I needed. So it did play an important role. The coffee thing though was just joyful. It's fun.

Barrett Brooks [00:15:36]:
The mechanics are so simple. All of the operational things I put in place just seemed like basics to me, but were really big improvements for that business. I knew from the day I joined and the CEO and I had this conversation like I couldn't make enough money doing it long term. And so either we were going to have to figure that part out or it wasn't going to be long term. And so I just let it be a joyful six months. We agreed that the money part just wasn't going to work and I left and it was so whole. They're like my best friends still. I love them and there's a lesson in there.

Barrett Brooks [00:16:03]:
So that's kind of. To answer your question, yes, I did really want a job where I could just be like hit home runs every day.

Tina Tower [00:16:10]:
And then coaching came about. So how did you get from all of that, did you actually end up taking the break or you missed that opportunity? There was no break taken at all.

Barrett Brooks [00:16:21]:
No break taken. And the longer that time went on, the more the money came back into play. Like, I really did need to make money again. It wasn't a forever fund that I had generated for myself. So the way we structured it was we put enough money away in investments to where if we sat on it for 30 years, we would have very, very modest retirement. Like live in a tiny apartment kind of retirement. But at least we wouldn't be.

Tina Tower [00:16:43]:
Yeah. Which is good for security. I like. Like the security of that safe. Yeah, yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:16:48]:
And then. And then I created 18 months of Runway for myself to figure out what I was going to do with my life. So just for transparency sake, you know, people have these questions and it's better to just answer them. How did I get to coaching? So I started coaching when I started my first business back in 2011. It was called Living for Monday. I was working with upcoming college graduates and I was helping them through the career search process. So I began reading coaching books and building my coaching skillset. Way back then, before I joined ConvertKit and after I left my prior company, I had a period of three or six months where I went back into coaching coaching entrepreneurs because I didn't know what I was going to do next and I needed a bridge.

Barrett Brooks [00:17:27]:
So it had always been in me and it always came very naturally to me. It's just a very easy fit to slide into that role. But I have always placed value on hard work, on things that feel difficult, therefore being valuable. So you're getting messages, Tina, that you have heard come out in our coaching in a different format, right?

Tina Tower [00:17:48]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I translated your version of this. Can see me smirking right now and going, what? Don't understand you're talking about at all. But I mean, this is something to probably elaborate on. Well, because I think a lot of us feel like it needs to be hard and we're taught that when it's hard, it's more deserving and more worthy and that something's missing when it feels easy as well.

Barrett Brooks [00:18:12]:
And so look, let me go back in history for why that's the case. The fact of the matter is, for a very long time in human history and the way our brains are wired, the harder you work, the more likely you were to survive. That is default. True. And when you're trying to get your basic needs met, that is often the answer. Work harder until your basic needs get met. And then we Go through these layers of development and layers of needs that we're meeting, and that's just no longer true. And I'm very privileged and grateful that I've gotten to that point.

Barrett Brooks [00:18:41]:
But the fact of the matter is that hard work was holding me back. It wasn't serving me anymore. And what I needed to do was to learn to surrender and just let it flow, Let myself use my gifts in service of other people and let everything flow from there. And so that was the lesson in all of that, was if I let go of my attachments, or I should say, aversions to the word coach, and I let go of the stories I'm telling myself about what it will mean if I arrive in the world and say, I am a coach, and that's it, I don't justify it. I don't qualify it. If I just settle into that, what becomes possible. And that was the work of the first 18 months of my business, was to settle into that and own it and then get to the place where I could earn a living from it. And then that opened up this next chapter that I'm in now, which is from a place of abundance and just, like, radical acceptance of the role that I play.

Barrett Brooks [00:19:34]:
This really. I use this word sacred, because I really believe it. There is no more important role in an entrepreneur's life than their spouse, first of all, but then their coach.

Tina Tower [00:19:45]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:19:46]:
And as I have accepted that, things have just flowed to me and I've just had to accept them and surrender to them. And it has allowed me to move much more rapidly than I could have if I were trying to control everything and, like, make it all happen.

Tina Tower [00:19:58]:
Well, I mean, you do. You are in the position where, you know, I know when I was coaching people, I knew all their secrets, all their deepest, darkest, sometimes more than what their spouses would. They would tell me things. But how do you. How do you carry that without holding all of it after? Do you have some sort of ritual or habit in being able to get that, like, out of your nervous system after? Because I can imagine some of them are light, and some sessions are going to be really, really heavy.

Barrett Brooks [00:20:26]:
Yeah, I mean, I had a session today where we just did our check in red, yellow, green. You're familiar with it. It's just an inner emotional check. It's my first session back after being away for a week with coach training, or second session back, and I'm, you know, my heart's really full. I'm feeling really open, and I just asked, how are you doing? And my client Just started bawling. And I just felt like I had infinite spaciousness for it. It was the perfect time for that to happen. I just said, I'm here.

Barrett Brooks [00:20:50]:
Let it. Just let it be. And we just sat there for a minute and they just cried. And they said, you know, it's not even coaching stuff. It's just life stuff. I said, yeah, life stuff is coaching stuff. And I said, would it be helpful to just name what's going on before we get into anything else? I mean, it would be silly for us to just jump into something business oriented.

Tina Tower [00:21:10]:
Yeah, let's not talk strategy right now.

Barrett Brooks [00:21:12]:
I mean, what a. What a silly, silly thing to try and do. And sometimes that's the tendency is just to shut it down or put it away, to get scared of it. And we just left space. And they shared what's going on with one of their children. And it's hard in being hard. It's beautiful because it also allowed us to settle into what a gift their business is to be able to have the financial and time spaciousness they need to support their child through what they're going through. And without all of the hard work that's gotten them to this point, they couldn't be there.

Barrett Brooks [00:21:43]:
And that led to them acknowledging like, yeah, last month actually was my best month ever. And so there was this ability to hold these two competing truths. Nothing has ever been better than it is right now. Nothing has ever been harder than it is right now. And both are true right now for this person. And what I have learned about holding these things is, between you and I, there is a space. And that space has infinite capacity for whatever needs to be held. And my job is actually not to take on what you are carrying.

Barrett Brooks [00:22:14]:
That would be a disservice to you, and it would certainly be a disservice to me and the people in my life. But the space between us. I have this book of blessings by a poet named John o' Donoghue, and it's called To Bless the Space Between Us. And I think about it as my job is to enter into every coaching session blessing the space between us, such that it can hold everything that's gonna come. And I have no idea what's gonna come on any given day. So that's one piece is that space. The second piece is I have so many practices for moving through my own stuff because everything is in relationship. Everything that moves a client moves me.

Barrett Brooks [00:22:49]:
And so here are all my practices that I engage in. I go to therapy every week. I do internal family systems therapy. With a wonderful man that I love dearly here in town. Uh, once every four to six weeks, I go to a craniosacral therapist, which you can look up, up if you've never heard of. It's a form of massage that works with the nervous system, and it's an important companion to the cognitive therapy because it gets into the body a lot more and helps release tension through there. I have a massage every month. I try and go to the sauna twice a week.

Barrett Brooks [00:23:20]:
And then on my coaching days, I have very specific structure where I have four sessions per day on Tuesday and Thursday. That's all the coaching I have every week. In between, there are 30 minutes. So I have a morning session, 30 minutes, a second morning session, two hours for lunch and a break, an afternoon session, 30 minutes, an afternoon session, and it's great. And I really try not to book outside of that on coaching days. And in between, I walk and I eat, and I really try and nourish myself so that when I show up, I'm not holding all of the other commitments I had. Like, all the other shit has to go on the to do list and be handled tomorrow. Because if I am living in that, I can't live in my client's world.

Barrett Brooks [00:24:01]:
I can't create the space. So I really try and be disciplined on the days of coaching. That. That is my only job that day.

Tina Tower [00:24:08]:
I love that so much. I need to take it. Like, one of the things that we got from. From working together, which you're gonna go, oh, my goodness, Tina. Was. Was to actually put breaks into my schedule, because I would do our call days and do like 8am till 4pm is my. My normal call day. But I'd put.

Tina Tower [00:24:25]:
I'd go three hours back to back, and then a half an hour hours. And then after you were like, that's not enough time. Like, that's. It's not. And the different. I still maintain that now I have one, and then I have a break, and then I have one. And it's just made such a difference to the level of. Of clarity, to the calm, to the way I show up.

Tina Tower [00:24:44]:
And it's one of those things that I just cannot believe I didn't do it beforehand. It does take sometimes someone reflecting back to you and going, are you serious with. With that? Like, is that the best thing that you could do? But. So I want to ask you about burnout, because, you know, you. You went through a bit of burnout, a little bit of depression after leaving Invert Kit, and I do, like, I'm very aware. Also that was covered times, which was.

Barrett Brooks [00:25:07]:
Yes, a whole other factory.

Tina Tower [00:25:09]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a whole other thing that comes in there. But now what do you do to resist that temptation to go, all right, you've nailed the coaching thing. Can you make it a big coaching practice? Are you going to put groups in there, like all the opportunities of growth? What are you doing to make sure that you don't end up in that space of burnout again? And second part of that question, do you think it's possible to still be burnout doing something that you love?

Barrett Brooks [00:25:35]:
Okay, these are two wonderful questions. So on the first one, I built structure from the get go to try and create boundaries for myself. And you just heard me speak about it. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my coaching days. That means because I work with clients twice a month, I have room for 16 clients. They pay me a lot of money. I notice you have a business audience, so I'll just name what. What my current rates are.

Barrett Brooks [00:25:59]:
So my rates just went to $4,000 every month per client. You can do the math on that. That doesn't bother me at all. And that is a spacious, wonderful life at that rate. You know, if I have and really full is 14 because I need a couple spots just for flex and when people need to reschedule and all of that. So it's not 16, but you know, 14 times $4,000 a month, that's pretty good living. And people are always like, well, how are you going to get out of the one to one work? And it's like, don't want to. That's the point.

Barrett Brooks [00:26:30]:
Yeah, that's what I love. I love it. It's. I adore my people, you know, and I just don't work with anyone I don't adore. And that's the gift in it. So, okay, so I created structure first of all, but my gifts want to be expressed in other ways too. And I know that's not all there is for me. And so I also have my podcast that I make every week.

Barrett Brooks [00:26:50]:
I think I'm gon this opportunity to say the new name for the first time.

Tina Tower [00:26:53]:
I was wondering, I was like, and it's cold.

Barrett Brooks [00:26:56]:
Yeah. So for the first year, it's been called good work and we are taking a brief hiatus to change a bunch of stuff up and rebrand and reposition, but same essential show. And so it's going to come back called World Class with Barrett Brooks. The Inner journey of outward success. And that just feels very true to who I Am you know, that standard of excellence, what I help people with, what the show's about. And really that's my Mondays and Wednesdays is my research day on Monday and Wednesday is my podcast day. And so I really don't have much room outside of that. So now the challenges I'm facing are that I know there are other ways that I can use my gifts to serve people and I don't want to burn out in the process.

Barrett Brooks [00:27:37]:
And the solution for that to me is to begin inviting people into this work together to really create room for other people to come and use their gifts under this umbrella that we will create together. To kind of be arms wide open and offering an invitation to people who want to join me. And I would say that's the phase that has begun this year is kind of finding what that's going to look like. I do do a couple of groups, but those groups occupy a single coaching spot. So of the 16, a group might be one of those now. So I have three groups and then I think I have currently 12 one on one things. And I won't get into all the crisscross of all that, but basically three groups and everyone else occupies a one on one spot. So I'm maintaining the structure.

Barrett Brooks [00:28:19]:
But now I have continued demand again. Just as I let things flow, it comes to me. I don't have to chase it. I just am being myself and trying to maintain my standard of excellence. And so now I have extra opportunity that I can begin to offer other people. And I'm letting that guide me rather than saying here's the perfect structure I'm going to end up with. I'm looking for who are the people around me that I have met, other coaches, other practitioners that I connect with at the soul level and how can I invite them into this work together that we can co create and see what comes out of it. So that's the stage I'm at right now to avoid burnout is not do more and more and more and more and more myself, but let's do it together and see what comes of it.

Tina Tower [00:28:59]:
Love that. And that's where your people are coming back into it.

Barrett Brooks [00:29:01]:
Yeah, yeah. You asked me a second part of that question and I'm not remembering what it was.

Tina Tower [00:29:06]:
The second part of the question was, do you think people can get burnt out still doing something that they love?

Barrett Brooks [00:29:12]:
Yes, easily. I could easily overextend myself doing this. And what I have to, what I have learned to balance the place that burnout comes from is I think, a distorted attempt to meet our own needs. So the needs I have always been trying to meet are the same as everyone. I mean the basics of like food, shelter, water, clothing, but then also love and belonging and safety in the relational sense. I have had to do a lot of work around not feeling, not feeling loved my whole life, even though I have in fact been loved my whole life. And feeling alone, even though in fact I have not been alone my whole life. And these are big pieces of work for me.

Barrett Brooks [00:29:56]:
And so it is really easy for me to try and use work to show that I am loved or I am not alone. And work can't fully do that for me. It can be a part of it. And so what I just have to constantly come back to is what is the need I'm trying to meet here? And there's a true version of the need in my work, which is I don't want to be alone in my work. I do want to have peers, I want to have people joining me. That feels really wholesome and joyful to me. Also my family is here to love me and I just have to let that in. And if I over index on work, then I actually can't let the love in from my family.

Barrett Brooks [00:30:32]:
And so this is in coaching work, we would call this a polarity. Work and family is a polarity. And what we think is when one thing gets out of whack, well, we gotta rebalance the other one. It's like if work is out of whack, let me go focus on family. But actually the way to balance things back out, and this is a tool for burnout, whatever the juxtaposition is and the polarity this versus that, they're not in opposition to one another. But you gotta work with the one that's out of balance first and bring that back into balance and then everything evens out again. It's not, I'm over indexed on work, let me go spend more time with family. Because it doesn't fix the work part, you actually have to fix the work part.

Barrett Brooks [00:31:10]:
So if I, if I took on 20 clients and I'm like, oh God, I'm not spending enough time with family, it's not spend more time with family, it's spend right amount of time on work that creates the spaciousness for family. So this concept of understanding these polarities in my life and understanding the ways that I'm trying to get my needs met has allowed me to properly meet them in the places they can be met.

Tina Tower [00:31:31]:
Okay, so on that, I'm happy for you to disclose Anything to make me a guinea pig here. But one of the biggest things that we worked on was this exact thing was going for me. I always want to do more. Over committed is like my M.O. constantly. Matt, my husband, will constantly say to me, are you going to be saying I don't have enough time until the day you die? Like, seriously. And that's something that I feel like I am constantly fighting with is this need to to the edge of my potential. If I dial it back to a manageable level, I feel like I'm not reaching my potential.

Tina Tower [00:32:08]:
I'm capable of being able to do more and then I will go as hard and fast as I can to fit as much as I possibly can in to the point of exhaustion. Yeah, I am not alone in that though. Why? Why do we do it?

Barrett Brooks [00:32:21]:
This will annoy you because I never answer your questions directly.

Tina Tower [00:32:26]:
I'm like, so. So for like in coaching. And I'd ask Barrett like, why he would would do this, but I'm like, it's a podcast inter. He'll have to answer me. And no, you're still not.

Barrett Brooks [00:32:36]:
So I have my own work on these things. Right. And I have my own coaching commitment that I work in. You know, we worked with a coaching commitment and that's kind of the organizing force for our work. I don't know. I won't share the whole thing, but the end of my commitment right now are these three. Some people will call them affirmations. And you know, if I say it and you think I'm woo woo, that's fine, like skip this part or just come back to the more.

Barrett Brooks [00:32:57]:
Whatever. I'm letting it go. So the three affirmations are, I am ancient, I am not alone, and there is so much time. And these are important addendums to the core commitment, which is I am a commitment to using my infinite loving power to build the organization I have always longed for. And there's so much in this. There's layers and layers and layers to this in terms of how I've arrived here. But the infinite loving power pieces. I have arrived at a place where I know trust and believe that love is infinite.

Barrett Brooks [00:33:28]:
It can only expand. It is dangerous to nothing and no one. And all I have to do is to access that. And if I use that as the motivating force to build an organization, that will be a beautiful organization. But my habits and way of being will get in the way. And so these three statements, I am ancient is about. I have always been called an old soul. I have always been quote Unquote, wise beyond my years.

Barrett Brooks [00:33:50]:
And that has made me uncomfortable in the past and now I am embracing it, as that is a gift. And maybe it comes from pain and suffering, and maybe it comes from some unknown place that the universe gifted me with. I have no idea where it comes from, but I do know I have wisdom in me, that it comes from beyond me. The second thing is that I am not alone. I have never been alone, but I did not know that for most of my life. And I am on this journey with people who love me, and you are one of them. I know that I am not alone. I could call on you for anything.

Barrett Brooks [00:34:17]:
And I have so many people like that in my life. And I have to remind myself that, because that gives me the trust that there is so much time. What am I hurrying for? For whom? For what? What am I scared of? And I believe for me, for me, this is a trauma response. It's a very common trauma response of feeling like we are going to die. And what I'm learning as I process all of the things that I've been through in my life is to trust that I'm actually not. It felt that way for a long time because I could have. Then a little version of me going through what I was experiencing could have died back. But now that's not the case.

Barrett Brooks [00:34:51]:
There's so much time. I mean, we have, if we're lucky, you know, I'm not saying that there's always so much time. And I know that there's. There's a counterpart to this that's important, but if we're normal, average, we got 50 years, Tina, 40 years. Just let it fucking be, man. So that is my message to myself, and I will leave it at that as an answer to your question.

Tina Tower [00:35:14]:
Yeah, I do know that, you know, from our work together, a large part of it is I don't like letting people down. So the. Let it be and going, I've done enough. And even listening to your schedules on coaching days and going at the end of coaching days, you will have emails, you will have admin that's built up, but you can say, I can leave it till tomorrow.

Barrett Brooks [00:35:33]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:35:33]:
And doing that, that was a big. That was a major thing for me to be able to work through is going, you know, so someone's got to wait a week sometimes for me to get back to them. And they might get mad at me, but that's okay. That, I think, was a really difficult part and is a very difficult part for a lot of women that are. Yes, you Know thought to be people pleasers and be of service to everybody all the time.

Barrett Brooks [00:35:55]:
Yes. And, and I have. So I was raised by a mother who was the breadwinner in the family. And I learned most of my leadership from the female perspective. And so I have a very soft and gentle way of leading that has a lot of overlap with my female counterparts who are leaders. I notice that I have a lot more in common, often with that perspective than with the common male perspective. Also, I am a male, so I, you know, I get to flex back and forth. There aren't the same expectations put on me as there are on female leaders and entrepreneurs.

Barrett Brooks [00:36:24]:
And so I just want to acknowledge that that's true. It is different. The expectations are different. The societal weight of that is different. And it is easier for me to say it can wait than it is for you in this case. And the practice under underlying that becomes the same over time as we learn to trust ourselves and we learn to just to let it be. People have to cope with their own expectations. You know, we can't take them all on.

Barrett Brooks [00:36:50]:
It's just too heavy.

Tina Tower [00:36:52]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:36:53]:
And our inboxes are other people's expectations.

Tina Tower [00:36:56]:
Like a little story to solidify that. I was talking to a mate of mine who runs a very similar company to what I do, and I was speaking at his conference and he had said, like, at the end of the conference, you know, I'm here for you always. You've got my personal cell. If there's anything you ever need, just give me a call. He has 350 members. I was going, what are you doing? Anyway, I talked to him after, afterwards. He's going, no one ever calls. I'm like, I get messages all day long.

Tina Tower [00:37:28]:
No one ever bothers him. And so I was talking to a couple of people that are part of his program and going, you know, do you, do you feel the need, like, do you ever contact, like when you're going through things like, do you want. Oh, I would never want to bother him with that going. That is what I think is an interesting difference between how men and women are treated.

Barrett Brooks [00:37:45]:
Yeah. And so I have been leaning into these topics more from a place of learning. And so I will invite comments and conversation about this. It's not, this is not the correct perspective, but there are layers to this. Right. From my perspective, from my seat only. And I think there's something really sacred about the difference between men and women, that the masculine and the feminine, to take it away from men and women, the masculine and the feminine both exist. For a reason.

Barrett Brooks [00:38:10]:
And if you read about kind of the background of yin and yang, like that is some of the basis of it is this masculine energy, this feminine energy, and that they must both exist in the world. They must. It can't. The world cannot exist as a structure without both. And I believe that is true in business and organizations as well. That actually we really need both. And when we find balanced, wholesome, thoughtful organizations and cultures, I believe it is because they are in balance and that they both exist. They co.

Barrett Brooks [00:38:38]:
They find a way to coexist healthily in that. And I think that there is that energy in the dynamic when there is only a female leader of a business or there is only a male leader of a business. The way their people, their customers, their whoever treat that is because, not because, but it is attached to the expectation, the underlying expectation of that role. Like we, we, we all biologically had somewhere out in the universe a mother who produced an egg and a father who produced a sperm. And we attach meaning to that right. Of like, what is the role that they play in our life? And we attach caretaker to women most of the time. And I believe that plays out in the way people make these requests of women who are leading is to ask more because there is an inherent sense like, you are my caretaker. And I don't know what to do with that other than just to name it so that we can all stare at it outside of ourselves and just know that that's there.

Tina Tower [00:39:37]:
Yeah, agree. So 99% of people listening to this podcast right now would be women. In south by Southwest last month, where I went, Professor Scott Galloway, who I am a big fan of a lot of what he says on masculine feminine, he does a lot in terms of. So people that don't know a lot in terms of, of like raising boys to be good men. And a lot of what he says I agree with. But he was talking about one thing and he said like, men need these three things to feel masculine. And one of them was he needs to be the provider. And he didn't say, he clarified in saying, I don't mean the provider is in taking care of the family.

Tina Tower [00:40:17]:
I mean he must earn more money than his wife.

Barrett Brooks [00:40:21]:
And I was money.

Tina Tower [00:40:23]:
He attached it to money. Financial provider. Luckily at the time, I was filming it at the time and I was going because otherwise I would have questioned. Did he really say that? He really said that. And so I've watched it back many times. And one of the things that I have I when people ask me what has helped me become successful. I 100% of the time say I got really lucky in finding a very, very supportive man to do life with.

Barrett Brooks [00:40:48]:
Yeah, Matt.

Tina Tower [00:40:48]:
And. Yeah. And I think that has made probably a bigger difference than anything else. He's my biggest champion and supporter and confident and all of the things. But I know from working with a lot of women that it does have the same thing that Scott was talking about in going. What if she dares to want for more? What if she wants to have the conversation in going, you know what? I want to become the breadwinner. I maybe want you to take on more of the family role, and I want to step into more leadership, and I want to go for it. What's your.

Tina Tower [00:41:20]:
Your advice to women in that situation?

Barrett Brooks [00:41:22]:
I think, okay, so I'm working this out. I don't have fully formed perspective, so I am in conversation and dialogue with you right now. I don't have answers. The part I agree with Scott on is I do believe men have a need to be provider. I do believe that. I have since that in myself, I have since that in other men. I have seen men get emasculated by their wives being the primary breadwinner. I do not think that that is necessary.

Barrett Brooks [00:41:48]:
So this is the edge where I will disagree with him. I don't attach provider to breadwinner. I think those are different roles from my side.

Tina Tower [00:41:58]:
My husband's the provider. Yes.

Barrett Brooks [00:41:59]:
So that was. I was gonna say that I never met Matt. I feel like I know Matt in a deeply respecting, wonderful way. And my perception of him, if you're listening, hi, Matt. Is that he is the most wonderful kind of provider for your family. He creates the structure and space for your boys to grow up in, for them to feel nourished in, for them to be built up as men in. He is teaching them to be good men. And he creates the structure, support, and space for you to go out and do the beautiful work that you do that uses your gifts.

Barrett Brooks [00:42:36]:
And that is not to say you couldn't do it without him. You could. You could build businesses without him. You are capable. However, the blend again of these two roles has created more abundance because they both exist. He has found a way to use his masculine energy. And we have both these inside of all of us, by the way. It's not one and the other, but he has found his way to use his masculine energy to provide for your family, things that you cannot because of the role you're playing.

Barrett Brooks [00:43:09]:
And that would be my advice, is every couple has to make their arrangements and their negotiations on how are we each going to use our gifts and our energy and our sacred level role in this relationship to provide. And I just think you all have managed to dance around that beautifully. You figured it out in a way that works for both of you and takes nothing away from either.

Tina Tower [00:43:32]:
Yeah. It's a lot of conversation and a lot of working it out and a lot of breaking expectations as well.

Barrett Brooks [00:43:39]:
Yeah. And just saying when it doesn't work for you.

Tina Tower [00:43:42]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:43:42]:
Like, hey, it's not working for me. Can we adjust?

Tina Tower [00:43:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's constant. That's constant. So what would you define as the difference between coach, mentor and when someone needs a therapist?

Barrett Brooks [00:43:56]:
That's good. There's actually a whole spectrum here that goes all the way to kind of consultant, contractor, all the way to. I don't know what the other end would be. Spiritual leader or something like that.

Tina Tower [00:44:07]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:44:08]:
So coach, mentor and therapist. If I could have my way, every one of my clients would be working with the therapist and with me. And I think about this in terms of there's a timeline of your life. You know, I'm holding my arms out right now, and that represents a timeline. And we all have a past and a history and we all have a future and things that have yet to unfold. And in the middle is the present moment. And what therapy is designed to do is to help us understand how the events of the past have shaped our psychology and behavior and sometimes personality into what it is today. The ways that all of the unconscious patterning and the ways we think about ourselves, the stories we carry, just all of these things, belief systems have become shaped.

Barrett Brooks [00:44:51]:
And in good therapy, there's bad therapy for sure. But in good therapy, what that does is it raises our awareness of all the forces that have shaped us so that we can bring it into the present and make choices based on that. What coaching does is if you are in both, it does not go back there and dig it all up. Because there are real ways that our mind reacts to some of this stuff that can be dangerous, self harm and crisis. And a lot of these things can come from old trauma getting truly triggered in a way that it comes all the way back up and we experience all the same emotions all over again. But right now, because our body can only be right now, it can't be in the future, in the past, but it experiences stuff it remembers about the past as if it's right now. So this is why there's a line between coaching and therapy is coaches, most coaches anyways do not have the training for what happens when a client goes into crisis, because you're dealing with something that is really, really deep in there. So that's what therapy's for.

Barrett Brooks [00:45:54]:
So bring all that stuff into the present to help you understand how it shaped you. And the ways that it's showing up today. And the way it serves coaching is to say, okay, so how's that showing up at work? You know, sometimes in life, too, and that's the beautiful interplay between them is I imagine a client coming to a session and saying, I had this realization in therapy last week. Here's this pattern I now know exists. Look at all the ways it shows up in my business. This is crazy. And then we say, all right, what do we want to do about that? And that's what coaching is for, is to say, how do we make conscious choice going forward to shape your life and your work in a way that really serves you, that honors the person you have become and you're growing into? Mentor is outside of this whole spectrum. Mentor actually exists on a different axis, where they're over there, and maybe they've been through a similar journey in their life.

Barrett Brooks [00:46:39]:
And of the three roles, they're the only one with full license to say, here's what I would do, or, here's what I did. The other two have to remain more objective than that. We can't get attached in that way to say, here's what I would do. And so very, very frustrating and very important, right? Yes, and very important. So that's kind of how I think about those three roles.

Tina Tower [00:46:59]:
Yeah, I love that. And what do you do when someone comes in and they are maybe a little bit disconnected? So again, when we started working together, I was all strategy. Like, I. I got you as a coach because I was like, I don't know whether to go big or whether to stay where I am. I don't know whether I am frightened of going big because of my previous business experience and I don't want a big team, or whether the whole thing was looking at it in a very strategic way. And one of the things that we started working on together was why and where's this coming from? And what do you think about this? And thinking about your thinking, which was so frustrating and so difficult. The first few months of working together were really difficult in terms of. You would ask me things like, where do you feel that in your body? And I would honestly go nowhere.

Tina Tower [00:47:51]:
Like, I don't. I don't. I'm thinking it. I don't feel it anywhere. And then on your Advice. I went to a kinesiologist and they were like, you have a severed head. There is no connection between your head and your body. And I ask this because I am big on strategy.

Tina Tower [00:48:07]:
But we know that you get to a certain level at hustle and hard work will get you to a certain level of your business. And then a lot of it is that mindset is being able to have that self awareness unlocked. How do you know when you've kind of got to your edge and you need to get that unlocked? And if you have been ignoring that your whole life.

Barrett Brooks [00:48:27]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:48:28]:
How do you start to really get that self awareness in, in your body so you can feel it again?

Barrett Brooks [00:48:33]:
Yeah, yeah. This has been a really important piece of work for, for you from my seat and, and for me as well. And it's been really beautiful to see it play out for you. So I'll just say that first.

Tina Tower [00:48:46]:
All the feelings.

Barrett Brooks [00:48:47]:
Yeah. So, okay, so there's some really good science here actually. And you can think of this just like broadly as a framework in kind of three levels of, of your experience of your life. So we've got cognition up here in the mind. We've got emotion, we might say from the heart. And then we've got somatic awareness or what's called interoception of what is our body experiencing. And at any moment in time we can connect to all of these. But most of us are only taught to tap into our thoughts.

Barrett Brooks [00:49:15]:
And this is because that's what's respected, is to be a detached head with a mind and a body that just serves this head that is so smart and intelligent. Well, we know factually that if the gut gets severed from the mind, it still works. It has all of its own intelligence and similar wiring to what the brain has. And that's fascinating to me because it says that there are intelligence is at different levels of the body. And I'm not even speaking at the spiritual level right now. I'm just speaking purely at like the, the neurobiology level of all of this. And so what is actually true here is just like there's masculine and feminine in all of us and finding the right balance there, both within ourselves and within our relationships. It is not that we cannot be in our mind and be strategic.

Barrett Brooks [00:50:00]:
It's not that we should only be heart centered. We should only be aware of our body. It's that we want to have alignment between them. And what's happening most of the time is that, that everything our body is taking in is background. It's being processed in the non cognition parts of our brain that were the early, early parts that developed. And it just happens on autopilot and so we, we aren't aware of it. It's like I'm not aware that my heart is beating right now, but it is. And I can control it once I think about it.

Barrett Brooks [00:50:28]:
I can take, take breaths into it and slow it down. I can get really excited and pump it up and. And so the practice is actually becoming aware that all of these things exist and knowing that like 90 plus percent of the data your brain is taking in at all times is from your body. As you're listening, take a moment. Where are your feet? Are you sitting down? What does your butt feel like in your chair? Are you carrying any tension right now? I just noticed a little bit in my chest. I was not holding my chest up properly. Got a little bit of shoulder tension. Okay, move it around a little bit.

Barrett Brooks [00:50:57]:
Notice it. Are you squinting? You know, like look at how much data there is. Yeah, we're never aware of it. And most of the time that's good, except for when basically emotions get trapped in the body as patterns of movement. And so this is where books like the Body Keeps the Score or In An Unspoken Voice. The researcher and PhD Peter Levine wrote In An Unspoken Voice and has a training called Somatic Experiencing Practitioner Training. And this is about getting and helping people get in touch with their bodies. He's kind of like the gold standard for this stuff.

Barrett Brooks [00:51:32]:
If you want to go read more about it. What it allows us to do is to learn about these untrap patterns. Just like we have behavioral ones, we have body patterns that are all related to the emotional stuckness we might feel about decisions we need to make that then tie into behavioral patterns that are coming from our mind. And so if we want to unlock our minds, our beautiful, big, brilliant minds, sometimes you got to go through the body first. And the way I work is I'm not going to lead with that because when you came to me, it was unequivocally true that you knew where you were going. And I could have fought you on it and said, well, actually what you need right now is you need to get in touch with your body.

Tina Tower [00:52:13]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:52:14]:
Or I could say, wonderful, let's do it.

Tina Tower [00:52:17]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [00:52:17]:
And meet you where you are. And as we build trust, this is not subversive. I really mean that. It is just saying it is my job to meet you where you are. And if we end up going exactly where you say you want to go, that's beautiful. What I Find is that over time, we build trust. I get a little more license, and I just say, you know what? Would you be willing to try something with me? Can you just take a really deep breath and notice, do you feel anything in your body right now? And it's as simple as that the first time, like you said. But over time, there's this trust built where it's like, well, Barrett, he's built a $30 million company, and when I really push him, he will weigh in, and I trust his judgment, and he's been good for me so far.

Barrett Brooks [00:52:54]:
So, like, yeah, I'll do another weird experiment. And so next time, maybe I'll say, hey, would you stand up with me? We'll raise our desks up, and I'll say, when you're working nine hours back to back and not even taking a break to pee, like, could you take a shape of your body for what that feels like? And maybe you'll do it. And then I'll say, all right, now imagine the times when you feel most free. You're on a beach, you're reading a book. You're, like, with your family, you're not thinking about work. Well, what does that feel like in your body? Can you take that shit? And now across the screen, I'll say, all right, I'm going to take both shapes, and I just want you to look at me, and I'll take the first shape of being all crazy hunched over, and I'll turn all the way around. You'll look at me through the screen. I'll take the shape of the other body.

Barrett Brooks [00:53:30]:
I'll turn all the way around, you'll look at me, and I'll say, what do you notice? And it's just an experiment. I'm not, like, trying to tell you all of this background research, they're just these little tools that we start to work in. And what happens is my license to operate grows and grows and grows and grows to where we've got my full tool set available. And it's not. It doesn't feel in opposition to one another. It feels like it's in service to what you're trying to do. And there's just a beautiful kind of, like, moving trust. And that's what I have to hold on my.

Barrett Brooks [00:53:59]:
This is the stuff going on in the background for me. You know, if you want to know what it's like to try and build excellence in coaching, I'm not saying I've built excellence in coaching. I'm saying as I try to build excellence in coaching, these are the things I'm holding in a coaching session.

Tina Tower [00:54:14]:
Yeah. And it works like I would say from the end of our year of working together. It sounds very simplistic when I wrap it up like this, but it was so pivotal in that I had never felt more me, like, never felt more like myself. Like my life before and after is so aligned and so much calmer, which are two things I have never felt before, which has a big deal. And so that leads me into coach camp. You mentioned at the start of our call, which I am going to call it coach camp because it just sounds so much fun that you went to coach camp and you said my life was forever changed from that.

Barrett Brooks [00:54:53]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:54:54]:
How?

Barrett Brooks [00:54:56]:
Yeah. So I'm going to tread lightly here because I think it's important to, to protect the space that is still unfolding. Here's, here's what the experience was like. So I made a commitment to myself and my business that I will train intensely every year and usually that's probably going to look like one training per year. So in 2023, into the, into the new year of 2024, I took a training called presence based coaching. And it was kind of like the fundamentals of coaching. And most of what I got from that was a lot of the somatic stuff we were just talking about. It's a good coaching model.

Barrett Brooks [00:55:29]:
But it was like I had gotten some of the basics of that already. So I added a new slice of my toolkit which was the somatics piece. So fast forward to this year, which is 18 months later. Basically this training is the advanced practitioner training from the same company, presence based coaching called Living in Presence coaching course. And it takes everything a step further. And the practical tactical part of it is like, here's how to structure a six month engagement and like how you design an entry point for the client, how you check in in the middle, how you wrap up at the end. I've pretty much got that stuff already. Not to say there's nothing I can't learn.

Barrett Brooks [00:56:03]:
I learned a lot. Still, there's new tools that I'm incorporating. But again, in this training we are serving as both coach and client. So we're all coaching each other in the middle of it where we get to switch seats and we're all working with our own coaching commitments in the middle of this, being coached by expert level coaches because they're there for a reason too. Right. And it just creates space. And I believe I contribute to that space where openness can exist. And mostly we don't know a damn thing about each other's lives other than that we're all there for a reason.

Barrett Brooks [00:56:36]:
But the consciousness and the care that everyone there is learning to hold that space between us that I was talking about. Now imagine there's 16 people who all understand and are learning how to hold that space together and the power of that to just let yourself surrender to your own development. That's what the experience has been like for me is really in that circle of people. I can. Without attachment to everything else that exists in my life. I can say right now, just in this moment, I'm not alone. I am in a circle of people. Factually.

Barrett Brooks [00:57:14]:
Everyone here is holding space for me to experience what I need to experience right now. This is the only place I can be. There's no work to do. It's just be right here. There's so much time right now. I don't have to do a damn thing. And it's like this perfect reinforcement of the messages that I needed to hear of. Life exists in these tiny little moments.

Barrett Brooks [00:57:39]:
And I was in a tiny little week of a moment so supported, so loved by a group, so open to whatever needed to come up for me. And in that little moment, I think it taught me something about what I needed to bring back to my life and my relationships. Like, I think this conversation has been different because of that. There's just a different essence to it. There's a depth to it that would have been really great two weeks ago, but now it's just a little different.

Tina Tower [00:58:07]:
Yeah. Magical experience. Yeah. And so how do you say, with your background in tech, with your. With your. Everything that you're going through now and your level of. Could say human consciousness, but that sounds a little wanky, doesn't it? But you know, it's kind of how the world is heavy right now. There's a lot of people dealing with a lot with politics, the economy, climate, everything that's happening the world over.

Tina Tower [00:58:34]:
What is your advice to people? To remember to breathe through that and that we're all going to be okay and to focus on what we can maybe control or how do you deal with that in your life? Because I know you deeply care about politics and climate as well.

Barrett Brooks [00:58:49]:
Yes, I do. So I really. Let me preface with. I really want to invite people to hear this with the assumption that of what you just said, that I care so deeply about every one of these issues and that I have arrived at this place because I believe it is the way I can be of most service. So. And not from a giving up or detached Place which it could come across like. And that's why I'm saying it up front. So I do not read the news.

Barrett Brooks [00:59:14]:
I cannot access social media, the news, or anything else on my phone. I have like five apps I can access for 80% of my day. I have one day a week where I have full access to every app on my phone, and that is on Saturdays. And the app that controls that is called Opal. And I have set it such that I can't even change it except for on Saturdays.

Tina Tower [00:59:33]:
And that's when you do your Instagram stories. Right.

Barrett Brooks [00:59:35]:
So I have a separate device that I bought, and that Device only has LinkedIn and Instagram because Instagram is such a pain in the ass to use on a computer. I wish they would not do that to us as creators because they depend on us. But that is a separate tirade. So I have a separate device. It's my old phone. It only has Instagram and LinkedIn. And I can only access it it 9am to 4pm it turns off. I can't do anything about it after that.

Barrett Brooks [01:00:00]:
What I have learned is I can only maintain the boundaries with forced discipline. It's the only way I can do it. I don't have enough willpower to do it on my own. And once I surrendered to this, I really don't have a desire for it anymore. I don't seek it out on my computer. When I do, maybe it's once a week, once every three weeks, and I kind of get the download on where things are at. And I get it. Look, people are talking about it all the time.

Barrett Brooks [01:00:22]:
It's not like I don't know what's going on. I'm just not consuming it in that way. Way. Okay, so why? Why? Why? Because that is the more important thing. It is not that you should follow what I do. It is that what I noticed was when I was trying to be constantly informed, I was only being reactive in every area of my life. I had lost all capacity for choice. And I knew for a fact that my clients would suffer, that my family would suffer, and most importantly of all, that I would suffer if I kept operating that way, because all of those groups and myself were already suffering from it.

Barrett Brooks [01:00:57]:
And the other piece of work here for me was I had a realization and then an integration of that realization that for most of my life, I acted as if my ego needed me to act as if I could solve the world's problems. I cannot. You cannot, none of us can. We can solve all of them. And the integration of that landed at the place of, oh, well, if I surrender that I can't do all of it, then what can I do? Well, I can do a really important piece of it. And that's the work that I'm doing. And so it's not that I don't care about climate or politics or whatever other thing that's out there. It's that I have decided of all the gifts I have, this gift right now is the one that will most contribute.

Barrett Brooks [01:01:43]:
And the way it most contributes is what you said earlier, which is that through a year of working together, you felt more connected to yourself than maybe ever before in your life. And I will also just note, you look, appear to feel and talk about feeling healthier than you have ever felt, a hundred percent. And I believe most of the brokenness and pain in this world comes from people being disconnected from themselves. And so while I was just you, you know how many people you lead? A lot. A lot. And I have a massive point of leverage in the way that my business works, in the types of people that I work with, where my people have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. And if I can help, every one of my people really confidently say, I both know who I am and am comfortable with it and aligned with it in a way I have never been in my life, that is going to affect how everyone they influence feels. And from that place of healing, that place of wholeness, much less stuff will be broken over time.

Barrett Brooks [01:02:40]:
And I have just had to surrender to complete faith that that is my piece of work to do and it will contribute to these things, even though there's a long line between them.

Tina Tower [01:02:51]:
Yeah, yeah, it's a good way to look at it. What is your view on the future of work with AI? Well, do you think it will take away some of our humanness?

Barrett Brooks [01:03:02]:
We are at choice in all things, even in the things that we feel we are not at choice at. We are at choice and how we react to them. And so AI is happening and you and I can't stop that.

Tina Tower [01:03:14]:
No, I mean, there was at south by. There was, you know, someone talking on neuralink about the chips that go into your brain to help you make decisions and read your thoughts and analyze your emotions and all of those different. And it's just, I think there's going to be a massive divide between people that will adopt all of that and people that want to go even more analog and, you know, something like opal and switch off and get out of it. Like, you're not going to be swallowing.

Barrett Brooks [01:03:36]:
Neurons no, I'm, I'm not. Or at least from my current level of awareness right now. But I think that's because we already have so much data available to us. It's like you can't hack your way to awareness.

Tina Tower [01:03:47]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [01:03:49]:
So it's not even that, it's just like you can't.

Tina Tower [01:03:52]:
I like that. That's a, that's a line right there. Like, I think people need to hear that a little bit.

Barrett Brooks [01:03:57]:
You can't hack your way to awareness. There's just no way around it. And more data is not going to make that easier. And what things like neuralink are going to do is it's going to be more data. And I believe we will lose something if we try and outsource our human experience to the computers. But the beautiful version of all of this is if we fully own the human experience and everything that we do and fully surrender all the stuff that doesn't aid that to the computers, that will be a more beautiful world. And if we leverage it to help us connect more deeply, more fully, more consistently with one another, it will be a tool that enables human connection rather than pulling us apart. But that is where we have to be at.

Barrett Brooks [01:04:40]:
Choice. I use Chat GPT all the time. I love ChatGPT. It's great. It knows so much about me and my business. It is, it helped me come up with the name of positioning of the podcast that I'm switching to. It's rewritten the copy on my website. It's like my greatest co worker in terms of productivity that I've got.

Barrett Brooks [01:04:56]:
But that doesn't change the fact that I want someone to partner with and grow in this business over time because that's about emotion, that's about connection, that's about, I gotta live more years of my life and I want to be in community with people. So I don't think it's either or. I think it's a choice. And I think the choice I want to make and am making and hope to continue to make is I want to use AI to make me, me more connected to all of the people that I care about and to create more healing in the world. And if it can give me 100x the leverage, which I think is probably roughly about right, right now, to create more healing. Let's go.

Tina Tower [01:05:34]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [01:05:34]:
Like, what a beautiful gift. And I've refused to be afraid of it. You know, I, I, I acknowledge my fear. I'm not saying I repress my fear. I will acknowledge my fear. I can get into fear mode on this And I could talk all about the fearful parts, but I will not, not act from that place. I choose not to act from that place because there is only despair there.

Tina Tower [01:05:54]:
Yeah. And I also think a lot of people that are in the tech world think that the normal people will adopt it far more willingly than they actually will. Yeah. I don't think it will have the uptake that I'm like. I don't think it'll fall down like the Metaverse did. But I also don't think that 90% of people want chips inside their bodies.

Barrett Brooks [01:06:14]:
Yes, currently.

Tina Tower [01:06:16]:
But we'll see. We'll see what unfolds. Okay, I have two questions left. What is the one piece of advice that you find yourself giving over and over again to entrepreneurs that you wish more people would take seriously?

Barrett Brooks [01:06:27]:
Okay, I'll give you the kind of answer that you're looking for, but first I'm going to tell you a story that I think is a better answer than that. So, on the back end of my coach training last week, I scheduled an extra day to stay in Atlanta, which is where I'm from, where I grew up, Atlanta, Georgia. And in the United States, Southeast United States. And my grandfather is dying. He's dying of emphysema. He's lived a long and beautiful life, very joy filled life. And I decided to stay an extra day and be away from my family another day to go spend a day with him and just sit with him. His wife still works, she's quite a bit younger than him.

Barrett Brooks [01:07:03]:
Not my grandmother, second. Second wife. And I just went and sat with him for a day, half day, really, just was there with him because all he can do is sit in his chair, really have the TV on. You know, he's got an oxygen tank and he's nearing the end and he knows it and we know it, and he knows, he knows what I'm there for, you know, there to make sure I see him before he dies. And we had a really beautiful conversation. But I asked him, I said, opav, if you could go back and you could give yourself at 37, my age, any advice about how to live life, well, what advice would you have? And he said, well, I think you've asked me a question I don't know how to answer. That was beautiful, first of all. And he sat there quietly and then he said, I guess just be yourself.

Barrett Brooks [01:07:46]:
That's all there really is. And that was it. And I knew there was no follow up question needed. There was no, there was nothing more that was going to come from him. And that was because I did not need to hear anything else. That was exactly the message I needed on the back end of that experience last week. And that can sound lame, I acknowledge that, can sound even almost like trite. But I honestly believe that the core of my work is helping people really come home to themselves and surrendering to their gifts.

Barrett Brooks [01:08:14]:
And so I guess my piece of advice would be just listening, listening for that voice that's already there, that voice of inner knowing, that voice that says, this is right, this is wrong. Not universally, but for me, go this direction, don't go that one. And maybe just let it flourish a little bit, let it inform where you're going. Develop some relationships where you can speak from that place instead of all the places that you felt like you had to your whole life. Yeah, that would be my advice. Be yourself.

Tina Tower [01:08:42]:
As Oppa said, absolutely perfect. And you're the. What you said, like, the right. For me, not universally, I think is. Leads me into my final question that I ask everyone so well is, like, my definition of what a successful life changed through our course of working together. I shouldn't say the definition changed. I allowed myself to agree with the one that I always thought was in there, but was never available for me because I thought I could do more, I could do better. So I was going for the one I thought I should have rather than the one that I actually wanted, because that didn't seem like enough for you.

Tina Tower [01:09:23]:
What is your version of a successful life and what are you building?

Barrett Brooks [01:09:28]:
You know, I've already achieved more than the average person will achieve, quote unquote, you know, lifetime earnings or podcast downloads or anything superficial. And I'm just, you know, kind of acknowledging that in this moment, it feels almost silly to think that some number more of those things will change me in the ways that I want to be changed and grow. And so that I'm going.

Tina Tower [01:09:50]:
Like your grandfather, if he had a podcast, would he care how many downloads he had?

Barrett Brooks [01:09:54]:
He wouldn't, you know?

Tina Tower [01:09:56]:
Yeah.

Barrett Brooks [01:09:56]:
So I think what I'm orienting towards more and more is how much love can I receive and how much of that can I give away? As if. As if it is truly infinite, you know, as if I cannot. It cannot be lost when it is given away. And I really want to live my life, and I want to surround myself with people who reflect back to me the times when I'm shying away from this one way or the other. I want to live my life fully, receiving the love from all the angles that it's coming from. So that I can turn back around and give it all away. And whatever format I can find to break through that cruft that gets built up on all of us through all the years of pain and challenge and hardship and suffering and even success at times. And just the ways we build armor and protection to hide from what we really seek, which I think at the end of the day, if our basic needs are met, it is love and belonging and connection.

Barrett Brooks [01:10:54]:
If I can be a tool for that, that's all there is.

Tina Tower [01:10:57]:
Barrett, thank you so, so much. You're an incredibly special soul. I am so grateful that Clint, my beautiful friend, brought you into my life. He'd be listening right now. Hi, Clint. We love you. It's changed my life, and you've changed so many people's lives. And like you said, the ripple effect of that with everyone that you work for, everyone that you work with is just incredible.

Tina Tower [01:11:21]:
And so thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for everything that you do.

Barrett Brooks [01:11:24]:
Yeah. Thank you. You've changed my life, too, T.