Transcript of Marriage Expert: "After 20,000 Hours Of Counseling, I Know What Kills A Marriage" | Ep. 450 with Tim Arrigo Co-Founder of Beyond Driven Enterprises

Work addiction is the one addiction you can have where everybody calls you a success. And I've worked with Olympic athletes in the past who have a very hard time with, with, with that line.

Tim Arrigo is a certified master's-level counselor with over 20,000 clinical hours in mental health, marriage, and substance abuse. He's rebuilt Olympic athletes, founders whose businesses are quietly wrecking their marriages. But his own story is the wildest part.

I grew up in a dysfunctional home. I had childhood trauma. I became an IV drug user in my teens.

What really kills a marriage?

A lot of guys, they'll wait until the house is on fire to call the fire department.

What's one thing a struggling couple could do tonight that would change everything?

Learning to understand that—

I would say the number one question that I have for you right now is what really kills a marriage?

Yeah, good question. Honestly, selfishness and self-centeredness. And that selfishness and self-centeredness can come from a host of different issues. A lot of people aren't— they're not aware of how our most— the formation of our intimate relationships begins with our parents. Right. And when there is not a secure base that's established early on, those patterns, they follow us into our adult life. And the marriage is a living, breathing organism. It's always changing. It's always growing and it's always different, right? When people say like, well, I want to go back to what we had. The reality is you're not, you're always going to be in a different season inside of your marriage because You know, the version of me, the young man, that version of me that my wife met, it, he's, he's not around anymore, right? And I'm a different person now in a lot of ways. And so you have to constantly be able to fall in love with that person and prioritize your marriage. And so much of this world, it glorifies narcissism, right? Your boundaries, your, what you want, how you feel, what's right for you. And it's like, if somebody doesn't accommodate that, well then just throw away the relationship and label them or label the relationship versus looking at yourself and seeing, okay, how can I be better?

Where can I improve?

Right.

And I'd say that's one of the number one reasons, right, is, is people make it all about them when a relationship isn't about what you're going to get from it. It's about, right, what, what are you going to give? And it's a give and take. The reciprocity occurs based on the giving. Right? And receiving. So I think a lot of people are just in a position where they're selfish and self-centered, and that will— they get dug into their position. If it's resentment, if it's contempt, unforgiveness, self-destructive behaviors, even victimhood, people will get stuck and entrenched in that and expect their partner to change. Right? And that somehow that's going to fix it. So I need my partner to do X, Y, and Z in order for us to have a good relationship. Well, some of that might be true, but your partner's change of behavior doesn't heal you.

Right?

And so we have to be willing to look at ourselves and not be selfish and self-centered and think about, hey, what am I bringing to this relationship? And what is actually holding us back as a couple from, from growing?

As a society, we're becoming more selfish. Which is why a lot of people that I keep hearing, they don't want to get married. In fact, many of them are not even in serious long-term relationships.

Well, that's the hard part is this, the world, right, is constantly pressing upon us individuality, autonomy, right? These things are, they're good and they're valuable. But if you ask anybody at the end of their life on their deathbed, right, if you ask them, what's the most important thing inside your life? They're always going to talk about their relationships. The happiness and the health of our life is completely congruent, right? With the quality of the relationships we have. So I think a lot of people are in the mode of dopamine, right? Seeking, chasing, pursuing, attaining. And then they get to a point in life where they realize they're alone, right? Who can I share this with? The happiest moments in our life are shared with somebody else, right? You know, you, you, you're in the ocean and you're swimming, right? And you, you, you body surf that wave with a friend and then you come up from the water and that second you come up from the water, you turn to look at that person you're with to share that moment with them, right? And there's a big difference between feeling good and being happy. Feeling good is dopamine.

Right? It's visceral. It happens below the neck, right? It's eating, shopping, drinking, binging, right? It's attaining, acquiring. It's goal-oriented, right? Where, and that experience of feeling good is usually done alone. Usually experienced alone. It makes your brain say, this feels good and I want more. Whereas being happy, happiness, a lot of people think it's a feeling, right? Happiness is a state of mind. It's inner peace, right? It's having a sound mind and being happy. When you're happy, you're experiencing life in the context of experience with other people, right? It's ethereal. It happens above the neck.

Right.

It's, it's being of service. It's helping other people. It's providing value. Right. And I think it's important. We can have a balance of both in our lives, but if my life is just oriented around, you know, feeling good all the time, and I'm confusing feeling good with being happy, I mean, there was times in my life where I felt good all the time, but I was the most unhappy that I've ever been. You know, and I would wake up depressed and unhappy because my relationships weren't, they weren't healthy. They were toxic. And the first toxic relationship that I really had was the one I had with myself. And that then turned into being attracted, quote unquote attracted, right, to other people who mirrored and mimicked and held the same kind of core beliefs. and even the same behavioral patterns that I did. So to answer your question, I think to some degree, yeah.

Do you find that people will come to you or they'll seek help by trying to fix the relationship or fix the marriage, but they're not trying to fix themselves?

Absolutely. It's extrinsic, right? Most people, especially men, especially business owners, If it's, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Right. So a lot of guys, they'll wait until the house is on fire to call the fire department. Right. And wait till it's burning to the ground and it's almost completely eviscerated to actually do something about it. And their wife's contempt or anger towards them will motivate them in the beginning. Right. They'll feel like their arm is twisted. Okay. I'll work on our marriage. I'll work on it. But because they're, they have these blind spots and they've externalized a majority of what they've dealt with, right? They don't, they don't see clearly. They don't have clarity. So what they'll do is they'll externalize, they'll blame their partner. Okay, I'll work on the marriage. It's something I'm not doing, right? I'm not doing something. So what do I need to do? A communication hack. Do I take her on more date nights, vacations? Do I need to take her shopping? What do I got to do to, to change this dynamic? And the reality is, To change your marriage, you change the man that shows up to the marriage, right?

And guys will say, well, why should I go first? Why should I have to go first? Because that's the natural order and design, right? You can't expect your wife to be accountable like a man. Stop expecting your wife to act like a man. Men take accountability. We're leaders. Your wife blames you for the problem because, well, you're the guy who's ingenuitive. You're creative. You're intuitive. You solve problems. You find a pathway when no one can. Right. And there's a reason she blames you. Ultimately, a lot of times wives blame husbands because she doesn't have a way to get you to take action, or she doesn't have a plan to fix it. She feels helpless, right? So in a way, she's subconsciously believing through blaming you that your change can actually initiate and be the catalyst to lead both of you out of the situation you're in, right? But guys hear, oh, my wife's blaming me. Why is everything always the guy's fault? Well, it's not, you're not as much the problem as you are the solution and your change of behavior. It's like, if you can bring out the worst in each other, you can bring out the best in each other, right?

You can change your marriage through influence, the power of influencing people, right? And how to do this. And as entrepreneurs and business owners, we've done this. We've done this for a majority of our career. So for a lot of guys, yeah, they're extrinsically motivated and they think that the problem is out there.

Right?

So it's something out there that I need to fix. And then through the process, they start to explore and understand that, oh, okay, there's a lot that's going on with me that I'm not even aware of or wasn't aware of that I'm gaining clarity on. And now I'm starting to go from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic. Right now I'm starting to see, okay, this is really for, it's for our marriage. The marriage is the beneficiary. But it begins with me and I should really want to do this for me because it's important because as men, we neglect our inner world a lot, right? We neglect our inner world. We, uh, that's self-martyrdom, right? Falling on the sword, putting everybody's needs before our own, because a lot of us were, we were raised in environments where we were told to not look inside, to not be self-aware, don't identify feelings, especially in business, right? There's no room for emotions in business. So we push all of our feelings aside, right? And we use the same power-through mentality that we use inside of our business in our home, which it backfires.

I've read that over 50% of marriages will end in divorce. Do you think there's something there that we look back to our parents and maybe it's 50/50 that they've been divorced? We say, well, I don't want to get divorced, so I don't want to get married. Do you think that has something to do with the impact of how we look at relationships?

Absolutely. I think there's an element of fear. It's like why people don't want to have kids. Well, I don't want to repeat the same patterns, right? I don't want to repeat these same patterns that I've observed or experienced or seen. So I think, I think for a lot of people, right, you don't have to settle for the marriage that your parents had, right? You can create the one that you always dreamed of. And you can create that marriage by becoming aware of, okay, what do I want to change? Right? How do I want to show up differently? And is conditioning powerful? Of course. Are you going to struggle to fight against those patterns? Absolutely. Right? But we're all a work in progress. And I think we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and just negate the necessity or the importance, right, of healthy relationships, especially intimate ones. Um, just because we've been through something in our past, or we've seen something our parents have done. And then we assume that we're just, right, we're bound to recreate it just because.

What do you see in the first 10 minutes that couples can't see when they come to you for counseling?

That they're so hyperfocused on what their spouse is doing wrong, that they're completely oblivious to the role that they play. and how they actually feed into the very cycle that they complain about.

Right.

And to be in a dysfunctional marriage, you have to be dysfunctional. So the system only, the system is only continuing to reoccur and move forward and progress because of your involvement. Right. And in a lot of ways, people are not conscious of how they contribute to that pattern. So it's, you get in the habit of externalizing and blaming your partner, right? And then you get in this mode of basically you're disempowering yourself because you're expecting that their change of behavior, right, is going to elicit a change inside the marital dynamic more than your own sovereign agency that you were given, right, as a human being. So I think people don't realize how they reinforce patterns that Are the very patterns that hurt them.

Wow. I think it's hard. It's hard to look within yourself. I would imagine it's also hard to admit that you have a problem or that you need help. It seems like we talk so much about traumas nowadays, and it's almost we recognize that there are issues and things have come from the past, but it's really hard, I think, to take the step to change. So do you think that people that are single right now that are considering wanting to be in a relationship, can they start changing themselves today? So when they do get into that relationship, or it enables them to find that right partner, they're going to be in a better place?

Absolutely. Because the, a lot of the guys that come through our program, they'll be actively going through a divorce. Right. And the relationship is over. And, you know, as you get into alignment, sometimes a relationship that served a lesser version of you doesn't serve a future version of you. And so as guys are exiting these relationships, they're like, I never want to be in this situation again. What do I need to do? And as they do this work, what they come to discover is that when they do meet somebody else, the quality of the conversation goes up dramatically. The questions they ask, the things they're interested in knowing about their spouse or their, the person they're dating, right? So they're in the conversation and now they're more acutely aware of the red flags, what to be aware of, what's important, right? That, and really at the, at the root of it is values and needs, right? Is every relationship thrives off of aligned values. And when your values are aligned at the end of the day, right, with that values alignment, that really becomes the foundation of— there's alignment on both sides. And we can agree right at the foundation that these things are important to us.

The other part is needs, right? At the root of every single marital conflict is a needs violation, is that there was a need that was not met. And the person is upset, but they're They're looking at the behavior without identifying the actual need, right? So, you know, it's, you're dishonest and you lie to me without identifying, hey, trust is important to me here, right? Or you neglect me. You don't spend time with me. Okay. What's the need here at the found— at the foundation at the end of the day, if you really drill down, is quality time, right? Is that you don't, you need quality time out of this relationship. So we have to know what our needs are. And we have to stop blaming our partner for what they're doing rather than explaining, right, what we actually need. Hey, what do you need? Communicate that. And a lot of us, again, we, we haven't spent the time, right? And, and we don't have to spend a lot of time doing this. We haven't spent the time to really write out, like, what do I need from a relationship? And I have guys do an exercise where I ask them, Okay.

What kind of relationship do you want? What kind of partner do you want? Let's identify that person. Let's really cast the vision and specificity here because specificity is where the breakthrough lives. And then the second part is, and who do you need to be to attract this person into your life? And guys will really realize a lot of times that version that they'll write is sometimes juxtaposed to the person that they are right now. And, um, and, and, and again, it's just spending the time to find these answers.

What's one thing a struggling couple could do tonight that would change everything?

Learning to understand that your partner's behavior is not a reflection of how they necessarily feel about you. Um, their behavior is a reflection of how they think and feel about themselves. And even if you're the collateral damage to their behavior, To understand that there's, you know, a reason that people do what they do. And a lot of times partners won't forgive because they see their spouse's behavior as a reflection of how they think and feel about them, right? If he loved me, well, he wouldn't act this way. When in reality, his behavior is a reflection of how he thinks and feels about himself, right? And that breeds that unforgiveness. And when there's unforgiveness and there's resentment in the marriage, Right? That's going to, it's going to break trust. It's going to affect respect and it's going to create judgment. And once you get stuck in that cycle of judging your partner and contempt takes root, and they've done studies on this to prove that contempt is a leading indicator of divorce, right? When you can't find a pathway back to respecting your partner and you're just refusing to respect them and you're, you know, okay, when they do this, then I'll respect them.

Or Well, respect has to be earned and these justifications and using their behavior as a scapegoat for that, to stay entrenched and rooted in your own bitterness. You're only hurting yourself, right? It's resentment's like drinking poison, hoping that the other person dies. Right. And we need to really be able to, to be willing to really excavate our own inner world to say, hey, where am I letting bitterness take root? And what is a pathway back to forgiveness? And If there is no pathway back to that, then that's a different conversation.

So. What's the biggest lie that people believe about love?

I think, I think a big problem that people have with the idea of love is love is very different. It's subjective for, for different people. Right? And if you grew up in an environment where love is fused with dysfunction, well, that's your version of love. Right? If you grew up in an environment where everybody did everything for you and you're raised with a silver spoon and every single time you encountered adversity, people threw money at the problem and solved it for you. Well, then, you know, and you have somewhat of an entitled attitude in relationships, like they owe you something all the time. Well, that's your version of love. If you love me, then you treat me this way. So it's important for us to look at also how powerful love can be. If you're, and I've always kind of explained it this way, is Especially looking at intimate partners, right? If you're mad at your partner for something that they've done and you're holding resentment towards them and you start to actually look at, okay, why did they do what they do? Okay. If I can see why they, they've done what they have, I can begin to see that, okay, there's some real things that are very relevant to them in terms of their wounding or their issues that have caused them to act and behave this way.

A lot of times they've sabotaged something healthy.

Right?

A lot of times it's hard for them to let their walls down and trust. But as you begin to see some of those reasons, you can see that, okay, maybe it's because they didn't feel like they were good enough. They didn't feel adequate. Okay. Or they didn't deserve healthy love. Okay. And if I stay angry and bitter towards them right now, I'm sending them an unconscious message. And the unconscious message that I'm sending them is that You're not good enough, that you don't deserve love. And so in essence, I'm only reinforcing the same cycle, right? My behavior towards them is only feeding the very cycle that is hurting both of us. And you can love someone and not be with them, right? You can love someone and choose to say no to them. Saying no is an act of love, right? A lot of times you have a son who's an alcoholic and you say no to giving him money or buying him a sleeping bag. 'Cause he's sleeping on the street and you're, you're saying, hey, I'm not allowing you to use my love and resources to kill yourself. That's an act of love.

So, right. Love isn't always self-sacrificial. Sometimes it is, but love is also the most powerful thing we could ever do. 'Cause if you can forgive anything and you can love anyone, you're— nobody can beat you. Nobody can stop you. That's the epitome of power.

There's a lot of discussion that men have changed. And I hear from a lot of women that they can't find a specific type of man anymore and that men are becoming less ambitious, or maybe they go and live with their parents before they would look to getting their own place, getting their own job.

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's men have changed and so have women, right? We, I mean, we can look back decade after decade and men and women have changed. Right. And I think that's a very real thing to say that men have changed. I think men have also changed in a lot of positive ways, right? Men have also begun to see the value of emotional intelligence, right? Began to see the value of looking within and not just dissociating from everything and everyone when they're dealing with something, suppressing everything, right? Men have changed, sure, in a lot of maybe quote unquote negative ways, but also in a lot of very positive ways. You know, I think that we're in an age where information is very prevalent. I mean, a 17-year-old young man has more information about psychology than most of our parents who are in their 70s and 80s did. So I think the ability for us to, as men, right, support each other, iron sharpening iron, Accountability with men, men's groups, right? Men who are actually willing to step into the fire and to look inside, which is difficult for us, right? Especially a lot of us, the generation that we come from, right?

And the people we were raised by, which, you know, I knew, I know for me and my father, you know, conversations about feelings never happened. We swept everything under the rug, but you didn't talk about feelings. You didn't talk about how you felt. You didn't talk about being sad. Suck it up. Right. Get over it. And I think that's important, right? I think it's important that we are perseverant. I think that's critical as a man, right? Resilience, perseverance, of course. But that doesn't negate, right? It's not black and white. It doesn't negate the importance of process, right? Being open. And sometimes there's 2 reasons that guys will talk, you know, one, I want feedback or the other, I just need to get this off my chest. And I just need to get this out and having another person just hear me out and to know, hey, I'm not alone. And a lot of guys deal with shame and shame thrives in secrecy. So I think when men feel betrayed or they've been hurt in relationships, I've seen a lot of men get very jaded. And as a result of that, they kind of give up on the idea of They think that they were sold out on a lie, right?

The white picket fence, right? The wife with, you know, 2 beautiful kids who, you know, your wife does the laundry and makes dinner and I'm going to come home. And a lot of guys assume that that's just, you know, it's a mirage. It's an illusion. It's not really real. And so I think they've given up on that idea and unfortunately succumbed to just kind of accepting a suboptimal version of a relationship. when they're capable of actually far more.

So your approach, the Inside Out Method, which I know you have the new book. Congratulations on the book. Got it right here. Love that. Love the COVID Why is this so important to you?

It's important to me because number one, I grew up in a dysfunctional home. Um, I had childhood trauma. Um, I became an IV drug user in my teens. I went through a lot of adversity in my life and went through a divorce, toxic relationships. And at some point in time, I had to stop looking outside of myself and I had to start looking inside and really start looking at, okay, what kind of life do I want? What kind of relationships do I want? And what's the role that I play in all of this? And I went and obviously began counseling and worked in the counseling space and attained over 20,000 clinical hours. And it really opened my eyes to a lot of what was wrong with counseling and the system, so to speak. And, you know, the counseling space, the therapy space is a space that's dominated by women. And, you know, it's cathartic for us as men to talk about our problems. Yes. But at the end of the day, men really need a blueprint. They need a system, they need a strategy, and they want to know, right? What are the next— what's the next indicated step?

What's the thing I can do today to change my life? And I think that in a lot of ways, there's this gatekeeping effect that occurs with psychologists and psychiatrists and professionals where you're going to somebody else in this model of dependency.

Right.

But you wouldn't go to the gym once a week and expect to get ripped. Right. And the reality is, is that we are all very capable when we're empowered with the right information and the right blueprint to change our lives. And so for me, it just came down to my personal belief that nearly every external problem is a manifestation of an internal one. Even if it's just based on how we perceive that problem, Because of how we think about that problem is going to affect how we feel about it. And the way that we feel about it's going to affect how we interact with the external, how we face that problem, how we behave and how we act. There's only 3 things in your life that you really have control over, which is how you think, how you feel, and how you act. And trying to control anything other than those 3 things is just a form of insanity. I think so many people are so, especially as entrepreneurs and business owners, we can be so used to controlling the external. Micromanaging things and always being involved in when the real change, when it comes to personal development, it begins within.

Right. And I love that quote of, right, our level of our level, our success will never exceed our level of personal development. Right. And it's important that as men, we prioritize our inner world just as much as our outer one.

Right?

Because so many guys that the empty nest, you're looking to sell the business or retire, and then you look around and your identity has been so enmeshed with all these things. Like, who am I? I don't even know what I like. I don't even know what I love. I don't even know what to do. And it's not to say do nothing and just go play golf all day.

Right.

But it's important that, you know, as men, we'll buy a car, we'll buy a boat, we'll buy a new home.

We'll, right.

We'll go on a vacation. But yet we don't see the ROI in looking inside of ourselves and investing in one of the most important things, the most important, right? Aside from my personal belief, your relationship with, you know, your creator, God, which is our relationship with ourselves, right? Really looking at myself and taking inventory and just stopping and hitting the pause button. You don't have to do that every day for the rest of your life unless you want to. But it's important. Hey, what is 90 days or 6 months or a year, right? Is it really, is it going to hurt you or is it going to help you?

Recently, business has been taking a toll. It's like every time my business goes up, it takes a toll on my personal life and how I feel. My energy goes low because I'm not sleeping. I'm not going to the gym. I'm not eating right. It's like every time one thing goes up, I notice the other thing goes down and it was really impacting my marriage. Because like you said, it's hard for me to show up at times. So I went and I got my testosterone checked. Turns out it's quite low. I told my wife about it and, and I even joked, can we not bring up the number of my testosterone? Because for some reason I equate it to me as a man. And it took a while for me to figure out what are the reasons that's really causing this.

I would say that's a lot of guys' experience and I personally had low T as well. And I think those things are important to treat. I mean, you can't, so many guys are trying to work through an issue psychologically when it's physiological or biochemical, right? And if you're having these deficiencies inside your blood work, that's why I recommend every man get blood work and get labs done. You have to know some guys I talked to, they haven't got labs done in 10 years and they've gotten generic labs, right? Go get your lab work done. Right? Optimize your physiology. Look at your hormones, exercise, right? It's the 4 domains. It's the psychological, it's the physical, right? It's the social and the spiritual. And all those, all those facets of life, they all work together synergistically, right? To create that harmonious life. And there's always, usually if you look at a guy's life, you know, he can overcomplicate why his life is the way it is or why he feels the way he does. But if you really strip it back, sometimes it's that he's just not doing the most simple of things.

That was, that was me. It's crazy. I wanted to look to what's the most complicated, but I have to say the most successful people that we talked to, they've gotten there, but at the expense of their relationships. I would say 95% of the people that we talked to, their business and how they treated their business caused them to get divorced, or their kids don't want to talk to them. And now post-divorce and post maybe business sale, they're trying to go backwards. Do you think it's possible to have a harmonious life while you're building all these things simultaneously?

Well, it's difficult. I'll tell you that because we know that, right? All those clichés, work harder than everybody, right? You have to be willing to make all those sacrifices. And that is very real, right? That is very real. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs, I think, can agree to the fact that, you know, a lot of us, the place that we started in, right? I think a lot of us, the place that we started in, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs operate with a chip on their shoulder. They have something to prove, right? And I think That we're not the greatest followers, we're great leaders. And so as a result of that, I think that unconsciously our business success can get directly enmeshed with our identity. And now I can't delegate my anything in my business because I'm not delegating things in my business. I'm delegating my identity. And so those things have to be separate, right? The business, it's like, why did I start the business? Well, I started the business so I could actually enjoy the fruits from it.

Right?

I didn't start the business to be a slave to the business, not be able to delegate anything, have my emotional state dictated by the ups and downs, which are obviously all businesses, right? Are volatile depending on the market you're in. They're all the ups and downs of business is very real. And there becomes a certain level in business too, where there are so many problems, because that's all business is, is solving problems all day long. Right? And there's so many problems that are occurring. You get to this point where you start realizing real mastery is learning how to not react to those Real mastery is learning how to remain stoic. And that's why a lot of guys, they think that emotional intelligence is going to make them more emotional when in reality it's the guys with the least emotional intelligence that are the most emotional. When we have emotional intelligence, we're able to be stoic, not react to what we feel. Just because you feel like something bad's going to happen and you're catastrophizing doesn't mean something bad could happen or even is happening. Just because you feel guilty Doesn't mean you did something wrong, right?

So feelings aren't facts. And so if we learn to separate those worlds and learn to separate our identity from the business itself, we can begin to see, well, who am I without this business? It's like professional athletes have a really hard time separating their identity from sports. And I've worked with Olympic athletes in the past. I've worked with, you know, very successful athletes who have a very hard time with, with who am I outside of what I've done? I don't even know who I am. And that's really where the work begins, right? To discover us. And men, as men, we need to have a sense of purpose. And that business gives us a lot of purpose, right? It gives us a lot of drive. Our entire reward system is completely wired around the business, right? I look at a problem, I analyze it, I identify it, I formulate a plan, I begin solving it, and there's KPI around the whole thing, right? Whereas my marriage, okay, I'm attracted to my wife. I court her. I date her. You know, we get married, we're intimate, right? We have kids, we buy a home. And then all of a sudden I fall off this proverbial cliff because I'm not wired.

There's no KPI in my marriage. There's nothing to achieve. It's just, hey, I'm here. And now I fall into, right, the monotony and the mundane. every single day where it's Groundhog's Day in my marriage, but yet there's all these changes occurring in my business. And that's why I think as entrepreneurs too, it's so important to be in a space with other entrepreneurs who can relate to what you're dealing with because it's very hard. I mean, let's face it, right? The average person who doesn't own a business is not dealing with the things that we're dealing with, right? They're not facing the things that we're facing. And it's very real. Your circle gets smaller. And it can be a really lonely road. They say it's lonely at the top. And so I think it's critical for guys if, when they're building a business, especially in the height of that business blooming and exploding, it's so important that they separate their identity from the business itself. And they recognize that a lot of it is just fear-based, right? It's, I'm afraid the bottom's going to fall out, right? I have to deal with competitors or whatever it is, or AI taking over.

And Man, technology, the market's changing. And a lot of it is just, it's, it's fear, right? Fear rearing its ugly head into the marriage, into my personal life. That's causing me to burn myself out and, and not be able to prioritize the relationships with my wife and kids, even my friends and family the way I want to.

I think you described me in many ways, not in the good ways. How can I increase my emotional intelligence?

First thing, increasing your emotional intelligence is being able to name exactly what it is that you're feeling when it's happening. So let's say you're triggered. It's being able to say, hey, I'm triggered. Having the awareness to not say this is making me feel this way, right? Because I could be standing on a street corner with 2 friends. A car could drive by with people in a convertible. They could point in our direction and laugh. Well, I might've thought they were laughing at me and I feel ashamed, embarrassed, and angry, and I want to chase after the car, right? To yell at them.

Right.

The guy next to me might've thought they were laughing at something behind us and he just feels indifferent towards the whole situation and keeps walking down the street. The guy next to him might've thought they thought he was handsome and he's all excited and he wants to go meet the people in the car and get their number. Right. So it's important that we recognize how our perception affects how we feel.

Right.

How, and a lot of this is just habitual. So The first step as a man, get yourself a feeling wheel and begin simply. When something comes up for you, identify it with a name, right? Hey, I'm feeling guilt. This is guilt, right? For a lot of guys, it's hungry, angry, lonely, tired, right? Or the 4th one, horny, right? It's very hard for guys to identify what it is that they're experiencing. And so you, if you can't name it, you can't tame it, right? And if we don't have awareness about what's coming up for us, Just the simple ability to say, hey, I'm activated, or hey, I'm overwhelmed, or hey, I'm emotionally flooded, or hey, I'm taking this personal right now, or hey, I'm allowing this person's behavior to say something about me that it doesn't. As men, you know, we, I worked with so many men who in the first week I'll ask them a question and almost instantly they'll by default just say, oh, I don't know. It's like, hold on a second. You expected the answer to be right there. Okay. You do know, because if you don't know, then who knows? Let's stop right here.

Close your eyes. Let me ask you the question again. I don't want you to think about it. I want you to just feel and experience it, right? What comes up for you? What's the very first thing that comes up for you without you intellectualizing it?

Right?

Because a lot of guys will intellectualize our feelings, right? We'll minimize what's going on with us. And when they do that, right, what they'll find is when they can remove all the mental barriers, The answers are right there. It's all right there. And as we begin to do that, we build more self-awareness and self-awareness is synonymous with empathy, right? In order to— sympathy is feeling bad for somebody. Empathy is understanding what they're feeling. So to understand what you're feeling and to attune to you emotionally, I have to understand what I'm feeling and be able to attune to myself. Like what's coming up for me right now? And that's the question I'll ask guys when guys are moved to tears. I'll just sit in that space and just ask him, hey man, what's coming up for you right now? And a lot of times it's, hey, this is coming up for me. And this is something I've been, I've been holding onto and I didn't know what to do with it or where to take it. Right now, I'm— it's a lot of times it's sublimation, right? Guys will take a feeling and they'll put it into something where the world is okay with them showing that feeling in that, in that scenario.

For example, like if a guy has Anger issues as a kid, and he takes it into football and he becomes the greatest linebacker and expresses it through anger in football. It's like he gets validated for that, right? And I think that there's a lot of places that men take feelings where it's good and cathartic for them to express it, but it might not be the best vehicle for them to do that, right? Why so many guys fall into addictive patterns, guys fall into addictions, self-destructive tendencies, Because they're looking for an outlet to cope with what it is that they're feeling. And they feel like there is no outlet for them other than these behaviors, right? But those are just coping, right? Those are just coping behaviors, right? If you're using pornography, right, or you're using even work itself, right? Work addiction is the one addiction you can have where everybody calls you a success, right? And if you're using these things as a vehicle Well, all these are is coping behaviors, and you can replace those behaviors in time with different habits that you can install, but you change through experience, right? So let's have a different experience this time.

Let's try something different. Let's implement that and see how you feel with it. So I think the first step is really for guys to be able to name what it is that's occurring internally. And sometimes even just the simple The simple ability to just acknowledge it and say that it's happening.

Wow. The inside-out method. Tim Arrigo. I think we'll have a better place if people were more healed. I feel like the world would be in a better place, or maybe not even just healed, but just understanding, having better emotional intelligence. But Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm enlightened. I feel like I went to like a Tony Robbins event just now. That's awesome.

It's an honor. Thanks for having me.