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Canine Crew, it’s time to just sell the damn thing. Doberman Dan is revealing his contrarian formula for getting a rush of new customers, building your business faster and making the highest possible profits. Go to justsellthedamnthing.com to get your copy today.
Prepare yourself for the uncensored, nothing held back, no BS reality of how business and life really work. Doberman Dan is off the chain.
Jonathan: Canine crew, welcome back to another Off the Chain show. Last week we were talking to Bob gardener and we cut it off just as it was getting interesting. So, here we are back again with part two, Bob gardener.
Dan: But that's their thang. That's their stance. You’re never cured. You manage it in. And actually a friend of mine who did deal with drug addiction and went to a 12-step program, he hates it now. He got out of it because of that message. And the professionals, that's their stance, too. So, I mean, you're contrarian and maybe even despised a little bit.
Bob: Well, thank you for talking to D my direction—despised. No, it's true, though and I had to be contrarian to get out of it and that doesn't mean that those programs don't give people comfort and solace. It doesn't mean, I mean, the statistics on success, how can you even measure that? It's really difficult because their way of measuring it is just distance from the last episode, and that's like you're starting over every time you mess up.
The entire mentality in there, there are four main points that I took massive umbrage with. The first was declaring myself an addict. I had learned enough about affirmations and stuff like that to be like, How many times so I have to say this before becomes untrue? This is a little weird to show up and say, Hey, this is my identity, because all of your actions are going to come out of your identity and if I keep affirming I'm an addict, I'm going to start behaving like one. If people keep telling me I'm an addict, I'm going to start behaving like one, just despite them maybe. It depends on how it goes.
The second thing that they tell you right at the beginning is that you're powerless over your addiction and it may feel that way. It totally does. It sucks to feel like you have zero control, but it's not that you're powerless. You have all the power in the world. You just haven't learned to use it. You've been given the keys to a Hummer and you haven't learned to drive, so you keep driving over the neighbor’s mailbox. Not a problem, but once you look going to put it [03:00] in park, to try and remove the key from the ignition, you don't worry about the Hummer running away in the middle of the night.
You just have to learn how to use the vehicle. Your mind and your body are powerful enough to do all kinds of things. This has been proven throughout human history. So, to say that you're powerless over something like this is ridiculous.
And in those meetings they're claiming belief in a higher power. I mean, I went to those meetings for a number of years. I facilitated those meetings for a couple years and they gave me comfort. They gave me solace. They gave me a place to start and it was a powerful environment to drop my story. So, I can’t poo poo that, but in there we're talking about a being who can raise the dead, some higher power that has that capacity, but somehow in the beta version we're running, he can't seem to manage addiction. It didn't compute to me.
Dan: It doesn’t make any sense.
Bob: So, version 2.0 is what we're running now. You need to upgrade the system or something.
So, that was one that bugged me. The other one was they said it's a character flaw that's your problem, like there's something messed up about you and that's why you're an addict, and hundreds of people I've spoken with, never once has it been a flaw in who they are, never once. They have been suffering deeply and their “addiction”, quote-unquote, was not a disease. It was their solution to the suffering. It was the only way they could at least manage their life. It's just happened to be a taboo way, so we call them names and stuff. And so, it was deep suffering that's the problem. It wasn't a character flaw.
If you handle the suffering, they show up as beautiful human beings that automatically you don't have to teach them to be moral. You don't have to teach them to be good as citizens. You don't have to teach them to treat people kindly. They do it automatically when you handle their suffering. Any human being who's miserable shows up and spreads nastiness, and a human being who's just wonderful on the inside, they naturally just exude a kind of power.
And then, the last thing was that once you're an addict, you're always an addict, and that's one where I was like, Okay, well, that's all you've experienced. That's the limits of your knowledge. I don't like that knowledge, so I'm going to go looking somewhere else. Very contrarian in many ways, and the difficulty for me sometimes has been…I did a podcast a while ago that had to be taken down because it was a religious congregation that was running the podcast and that religious congregation runs a lot of 12-step programs for free—because I charge for my services, right?—so they run those for free and a lot of people get some comfort and some benefit out of them, but they complained because I was so contrarian that they felt like I was bashing the leaders of the church or something like that, and it just wasn't the case. So, it is a little bit contrarian, for sure.
Dan: We've had a friend of mine on this show a couple times, Dr. Glenn Livingston, who is when he was practicing psychology, he worked a lot with people with addictions, and now [06:00] in his current business it's all about binge eating. He's got a system for curing binge eaters and I think cure is the right term. It's not managing. It's for those who follow a system a cure.
But he said something that was really strange to hear from a psychologist when he was talking about addictions. He said, “The minute you label it a disease that it's outside of your control and, like you said, all those things you said, it's because of a flaw, a character flaw, all those things you were just talking about, he never ever in years—what, 15 years of practice, maybe more?—of specializing in addictions, never saw anybody get better. Never. It was like that just snatched whatever opportunity they had to get better, just snatched it from like, Nope, it's disease. It's beyond your control. You're always going to be that way. We’ve just got to manage it. Never saw anybody get better.
And what he's doing with his binge eating program is it's a very contrarian message because he's saying, yeah, it is within your control, and he said that those people who accept that are the ones who can finally take the steps to get better.
Bob: Yeah. So, let's look at the word “addiction.” You know where the word “addiction” where it comes from?
Dan: No.
Bob: No. To dictate something is to say something, right? So, addict is to say toward, so literally the word means like something inside of you that says yes to something. So, you imagine this, way back in the day, because way back in the day in the 1800s and be in prior, everybody just looked at this and pornography wasn't even really a huge thing. I mean, obviously it was around because you can look at paintings from the 1600–1500s and prior, and cave paintings and all kinds of stuff, right? But alcohol, drugs, they looked at them the same as like eating too many sugarplums and caffeine, and they all kind of looked at them the same and it was just a vice.
Then, somewhere along the way, the word “addiction” shows up. And you imagine it. You're looking at somebody like, Why does this person not do it, and this person does do it? Well, maybe he has something inside him that says yes to it, an addiction. And so, now I create this concept in my mind and now I have to go find evidence for it and then solve that thing. But addiction is just a word. It's not a real thing. You can't cut someone open and find addiction anywhere. You can’t. You can find the results of their behaviors. You can find the results of their thinking processes. But you cannot find addiction like you could find a virus or a bacteria or any other kind of actual disease. You can't find it. Even Down syndrome and things like that, you can find evidence for those, right?
So, addiction is not a real thing that you could find, but addiction syndrome showed up in the 1870s for the first time, the idea that it's actually a disease and it sort of eliminated the need…eliminated culpability, at first, like, Oh, it's a disease, and then from there to call [09:00] the substance addictive was another step to eliminate culpability, It was not me. It's substance. But there you are in the 1870s and they pick up addiction syndrome. 1879 or something Keeley kind of coined this that “Alcoholism is a disease and I can cure you.” That was like his slogan. He opened up 120 centers across the US and that became super widespread for a while.
And so, then early-1900s, to scientists get together and they're looking at opiate addicts and heroin addicts and stuff like this, and they're trying to figure out, Is this really a disease? If it is, let's isolate it, so we can solve it. So, they grab a bunch of addicts and they're looking for withdrawal symptoms, and they're trying to figure out if they can with their withdrawals and everything else start to isolate what's going on inside of them, and they had all these addicts and these addicts were exhibiting all the symptoms of withdrawal, but they couldn't find any concrete evidence, biologically, physiologically or pharmacological that there was any dependency whatsoever on the substance.
And over the years, many, many research projects have done this where people can just walk away from it, no problem. They stopped cold turkey. I've spoken with a lot of people that have just been like, Yeah, I stopped heroin. I stopped this. I stopped that. I just stopped. That was it. No withdrawals. Some people experience detox; others don't.
These two scientists figure this out and they think they're going to get made fun of because by then the idea of addiction, of disease, is something that's very common. It had been 30–40 years or 50 years almost. And so, they're looking at it and so at the end of their paper they're like just because somebody who wants a drug is begging and pleading and saying they're in pain doesn't mean that there's actually something physiologically wrong with them or going on inside of them. It's more of a psychological thing than anything else. It's just in their mind they need it or they're going to die. And they injected them with like sterile water instead of morphine and the person was fine. It wasn't like a chemical dependency. And sometimes they just told them just to stop and the person was just stop and be fine.
And so, there were all these different things that they did and they couldn't find any evidence for addiction at all, but the idea was such a cultural concept that their research was kind of just shuffled under the door. Later on in the 1940s and stuff when Alcoholics Anonymous took off, that's what kind of cemented this in. So, since then, we've created this concept of addiction and that concept has actually created more addicts, because now I believe I'm an addict and now I start to behave like one.
Dan: Like you said, it takes away your culpability. Well, it's not that I made a decision to indulge in whatever activity is my addiction. It's a disease. I'm not in control of it.
Bob: Yeah.
Dan: And I know that's like… The funny thing is the first doctor to propose, Hey, guys, there's these things that we can't see and we can't see them, but they're causing people to die, and they're called germs, that guy [12:00] was tarred and feathered, man, and stripped of his medical license like, Oh, my God, this guy's insane. I don't know how many years it took till they finally figured out like, Oh, yeah, that dude was right. All the breakthroughs are like that, right?
Bob: Totally.
Dan: And so, everybody's still stuck in this addiction is a disease model. And who knows how long it's going to take before they…? Well, the evidence is just there. The evidence to the contrary is there. It's just it hasn't broken through the current dogma, I guess.
Bob: When enough people get fed up with it. It's just that the difficulty, I think, is the 12-step programs are part-church and part-therapy and so they end up becoming like it's a spiritual thing, and if you somehow break…it operates on more levels. It'll be harder to break than just if it were just science has discovered something new. It's not science. Now it's like this is a spiritual tradition and, if you're saying something different, then now you're countering the word of God kind of thing.
Dan: Yeah, interesting observation. So, can we talk about what you said earlier? I won't quote you correctly, but you'll know where I'm going. Where you said the root cause of it is some… What is the root cause? People just don't decide to become an addiction and it's not a personality flaw or character flaw. What is the cause then?
Bob: That is such a good question and that question alone is what starts to lead you to the answer. There's a lot of theories around root cause out there that counselors use like attachment theory. There's disease theory, obviously, right? Attachment theory is a big one. They're like, You're missing human connection and so because you're not getting real human connection, you're looking for a fake substitute to it in whatever way it is. And as far as theories go, that's helping people find better human connection, but as somebody who was inside of it, whenever I went to somebody and they diagnosed me, Here's what your problem is, my innards went like, You want to know what your problem is?
Whenever somebody diagnosis you with something, there's always either a total surrender and brokenness like, Oh, my God, I can't fix it, or there's resistance to it just naturally. And so, I had to find it out on my own and I can talk about it. It was quite an interesting and maybe some people would say miraculous series of events, but ultimately at the bottom of it is some form of misery. We've looked at human emotions enough to know that basically emotions are a kind of chemistry and experience of the chemistry in your system, and that the emotions we call negative emotions, anger, misery, sadness, depression, even boredom, right, some people argue and they're like, No, boredom is not a bad emotion, and I'm like, Well, do you want to stay bored the rest of your life? Well, no. Okay. So, obviously, you don't want to be.
So, [15:00] there's some level of toxicity to them, meaning they actually break down your body. They stop organ function, they do. If steeped in it and marinated in it for a long period of time, they'll break down your body. Well, your body's not dumb. It wants to feel good and it wants to survive. So, when it hits red level alert, body overrides your conscious mind and goes and does something to feel better to change its chemistry. So, whether that's introducing a substance that will literally change the chemistry or fantasizing about naked women that causes you to go through an experience and then you change your chemistry in that way, in one way or another you're changing your chemistry. Even getting out of the car and going off on road rage will change your chemistry. All kinds of things that people do to change their chemistry because they're uncomfortable, they feel negative. They may not even be conscious of it and then the body takes over.
So, my question was, What's causing that? What is causing this suffering? And I knew that I couldn't generalize. I knew that I couldn't just say, Okay, Doberman Dan here, the problem with you is the same thing as the problem with everybody else on the planet, right? You're just missing human connection, because how many humans have lived on the planet and had had a ton of human connection and admiration and love, a.k.a. Hollywood stars, and still taking their lives?
Dan: Still absolutely miserable with more money than God.
Bob: Yeah.
Dan: Which everybody thinks that's going to make them happy.
Bob: Yeah. And how many people have lived lives in total isolation and been perfectly fine throughout history? So, the idea that human connection is needed in order for you to be happy is really whacked up, but it at least helps. We're using other people as a tool to help me feel better. It at least helps. So, I knew I had to find what's unique to me. And it took some digging, and once I figured it out and I started looking at other people and just having real conversations with them, and starting to dig into what's in their head, What are the thoughts they're having that are creating these emotions? What is the identity that there was? What's their worldview that's making it so negative? It's different for every single person.
So, I can give you an analogy, right? Are you a dad? Do you have kids?
Dan: No. Well, unless you want to consider the Shih Tzu I just showed you as a… o, no humans. No human children that I know of.
Bob: Okay, there you go. But, J.R., you have kids, right?
Jonathan: Yes, sir.
Bob: All right. So, he leaves Legos on the ground. Does he ever do this? Does your kid have Legos?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Bob: Does he ever leave other toys on the ground? Have you ever stepped on one?
Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, the monster truck last night.
Bob: Oh, good. We have a frack incident. Okay, you're stepping on a monster truck—what went through your head?
Jonathan: Why the **** did he leave that thing? I told him to pick it up a thousand times.
Bob: No, did you ever…did you blow up on him?
Jonathan: No, I didn't.
Bob: Do you know dads who do?
Jonathan: Oh, yeah. My dad used to.
Bob: Yeah, my dad did until he hated himself for it and then stopped. I was eight years old. He spanked me for the last time when I was eight years old and I love that man to death for [18:00] the way I saw him change. He went on a long walk, came back and never did it again. He just was fed up with how he was behaving. It was beautiful, man. So many deep lessons from watching my dad.
But so if you imagine a toddler sitting there—they’ve got their toys on the ground. Maybe they're 2 or 3 years old, whatever. Twins. One of them is on one side of the room. One of them is on the other. This is a totally fabricated scenario—but there's Legos on the ground. Does a toddler see a problem with Legos on the ground? No. It's an improvement on the decor. Now, it's more colorful. You can build things out of it, stick it in your mouth. Nobody's dying. There aren’t ants crawling over it because it's not food. It’s beautiful.
Dad walks in. Maybe he's had a long day at work. Maybe it's been a stressful six months and they're strapped for cash. Maybe he's under a deep deadline. He’s preoccupied about something, takes the shoes, goes into the room and says hi to the kids, steps on a Lego and has that thought in his head, but it's the last straw and he just unloads at the first kid that he sees. And just [yelling].
So, he just goes for it and the kid has to make sense of this. Why? Because you’ve got to survive life and something that intense coming at you from a person who's literally a giant, three, four times your size, walking in the room and just unloading, the kid’s got to make sense of it. Why? So he can avoid having that happen again.
So, to make sense of it, he's looking around the room. Obviously, it's not the Legos. That's not the problem. So, maybe he's like, Oh, maybe I make that angry, and that's what he comes up with. And if it happens enough or if it happens intensely like it does with some traumas or combat veterans and things like intensely enough, then it becomes cemented in with enough emotion really quickly.
This worldview, I, this identity, I make that angry. So, every father figure in his life he's worried about now. And so from there on, he starts to tiptoe around Dad a little bit or maybe he's the kid that does a whole bunch of extra stuff for his dad when he doesn't need to just to make sure his dad's okay, or maybe he avoids his dad when dad comes home. And then, when he goes to school, and there's male teachers or the principal, he's behaving in a similar fashion, I make father figures and authority figures angry. And then, as he gets into marriage and his wife becomes an authority figure sometimes, he worries about that and his relationship is affected in some way. Church issues. Maybe he has belief issues because of authority figures and sometimes he rebels and other times he kowtows.
And his entire behavior and thought process becomes reactive to this idea that he picked up somewhere along the way, not because his dad intended it and not because his dad did anything but yell, but simply because that's how he made sense of the chaos.
Now, his brother was in the room on the side and he saw the whole thing go down and thought it was funny, and he picks up, Dad’s an idiot. So, now for the rest of his life, he's going through like, Well, I don't need to listen to what Dad says. He's an idiot.
So, he's the kid that rebels in classes and he goofs off at the back of the room, and he does pranks on other people and it's constantly pushing [21:00] boundaries, and just regards everything and he’s really recalcitrant, but then he becomes a dad or a boss and now the fear starts, Maybe I'm an idiot. And so, now he starts doing things to prove that he's not an idiot. Maybe he's that kind of dad that just does everything perfect. Well, maybe he's the kind of dad that I kind of was where I just talked down to my kids and made them feel like they're stupid. And, later years, I'm seriously 30 plus years old trying to prove to a 5-year-old that I'm smarter than him like, Why am I doing this? But for some reason I was and all these behaviors, because that's how it feels like. That's how the world is made.
It's some idea you’ve got in your head that feels so true, it feels like a fact that you would never even challenge it. And that inside of every person I've ever worked with, they have something like that, one or two of them, just a handful of them, sometimes just one that they've picked up somewhere along the way that has radically altered how they feel about themselves. It’s created all these thought processes, emotions and everything else.
And when you free them of that, then what's left is who they really are. You strip away all the lies and all the stories they made up to survive, which aren't bad—they help them survive—you strip it away and they get to explore something bigger, a bigger truth about themselves, and now that's where freedom starts. Now they can set their own course.
Dan: That’s fascinating. And isn't it weird that those things that are causing all those issues nobody consciously made that happen? It's just the father yelled about the Legos and the kid had a certain thought or certain reaction, and all of a sudden something gets imprinted that affects that person the rest of their life.
Bob: Yeah, I saw it in my kids. I mean, I have six kids, five of them are boys, and I was stuck inside of my pen. Who's laughing? Are you laughing that I have six kids, J.R.?
Jonathan: And they're better behaved than my one.
Bob: That's my wife's doing. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. I don't think your son’s [unclear 23:06]. He's just energetic.
So, but the first three were direct victims of how my thought processes and how I was coping with life. I saw this for the first six years of my oldest son's life and then the first four and a half or five years and my second one, and the first three years or so, two to three years of my third son's life. They were dealing with me in a certain way where I would blow up at them or I couldn't control myself, and I couldn't control my environment, and so I'd start to get mad and if they'd be screaming and yelling I remember I would squeeze them sometimes. I'm so grateful they don't have physical problems or brain damage, but I didn't know what else to do, and so I would just break down and do stuff like that. And so, as a result, each of them develop different patterns of coping with things.
My oldest son, he goes into victim mode really easily, has for years, where if something starts to go wrong or is a little off [24:00] or if he feels like someone's unhappy with him, he immediately goes to “Nobody likes me”. He doesn't do this much anymore, but used to like, Nobody likes me and I'd be better off dead, and nobody wants to be around and nobody loves me kind of.
My second son, his response was very angry and he would hold it in his body, and just hit and yell, and scream and bite, and do all kinds of things. His reaction, he became very angry as a kid and I had to figure out really cool, fun ways to help him let go of all that stuff, because it had better be fun to heal from stuff like this. If it's not fun, there's no... It's already serious enough. You might as well have a good time while you're getting better. Right?
Dan: No kidding.
Bob: That's what I tried to do with [unclear 24:44]. And then, my third son, his throat closes up and he can't talk. If he starts to feel threatened in any way or things start to go south, his throat closes up and he can't talk, and even when he gets sick, he was just sick to his stomach the first thing and place he feels it is in his throat. It's like that became a safety mechanism like he didn't feel like he had a voice in the world. And these are things that I saw.
Dan: What is that chakra? What is that responsible for that area? Do you remember?
Bob: The vishuddhi, here, this chakra is responsible for the sound, right, in your body, and so the space that it's held that is inside your body and the space that governs it and holds it together, but also they'll talk about speaking your truth and being able to voice who you really are. So, that place when people clam up and they can't talk, it’s because some part of them feels like they can’t be themselves.
Dan: Interesting, and that's where he feels that even when it's a physical ailment, another part of the body, he feels it right there.
Bob: Yeah.
Dan: Wow.
Bob: Not as much anymore because we've been working with him, but especially a few years ago that would show up all the time, and so, yeah.
Dan: I’ve got to pay more attention to that. I think I’ve got something like that going on, but I’ve got to pay more attention to where I feel it. It's probably going to be lower and mid back, but when you said that that really resonated with me like, Wait a minute, I got the same thing going on, just in a different part of the body.
Bob: See, but that's power right there, Dan. When you can locate where it is, now you don't have to use your brain, your mind, the thing that's causing all the mayhem, you don't have to use that to fix it. So, part of what I do is very physical with people and I have them do very physical things so that we can bypass the psychology that's causing the mayhem and get them back on track faster.
So, being able to locate where in your body you're feeling these things is a wonderful opportunity to start to work your body to help you loosen it without having to sit there and be like, Okay, well, what does that mean and why do I have to talk through it? because your body when it heals, it only has one question—Is this killing me?—that's it. If it is, we vomit either at the top or the bottom or the skin. Ahem. And that’s it. That's the only response.
It doesn't have to understand it. It doesn't have to find meaning in the [27:00] poison. It doesn't have to digest it or get as much nourishment as it can out of it or process it or sit with it or heal it. Then only we have to heal the poison. It just eject. And when you can learn to do that with your psychology, now healing can happen so much faster, because you're no longer sit…
I'm 39 years old. For me to handle everything that's happened to me in my life, I'm going to be sitting in therapy for another 39 years, and what during those 39 years I'm going to live another 39 years. I'll never be out and I didn't want that. I don't want that for anybody else. I was like, What's the shortcut? What's the fastest way to healing? And one of the biggest gifts you have, it's not the only way, and there are a lot of different approaches that kind of work together really well, but one of the biggest gifts you have is your body. If you can locate it consciously and say, Man, this is really being affected by this, and start to work your body, you'll find that it affects you psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, in all kinds of different ways on profound levels.
This is why yoga talks about certain poses being so profound. This is why stretching programs will talk about like when you open your hips, you'll notice different qualities and characteristics showing up. And all that, yoga has identified certain poses and positions the body could be in that open one up to spiritual processes and not just physical stuff. And so, it's been around for millennia, this kind of understanding that the body is a gift, but for too many people it’s a stumbling block instead of a stepping stone.
Dan: True. Doctor—I don't remember his first name—Sarno studied back pain for most of his career. 50 years he was a specialist in back pain. So, after so many thousands of clinical studies and all that stuff, I mean, he wrote several books. What he came up with is in almost every case, it's not a structural problem. It's not a physical problem of any kind. It's an emotional problem.
And the same thing with the guy who suggested there's these invisible things called germs that if you [sound dropped] surgery with those things on your hands, you really run a high risk of killing people. That guy that they tarred and feathered and ran him out of town, same thing with Sarno. All his peers wouldn't even associate with him, in spite of having the best track record in curing issues of chronic back pain. It all came down to emotional issues, but nobody could accept that, nobody is still accepting it. Probably in decades they'll recognize him as the pioneer who founded the breakthrough, but that's interesting where you were talking about the body there.
Bob: Yeah. If you look at it, I mean, what a human being experience is like, you have the level of behavior. Then you've got emotions that drive behavior. Then you have thoughts that drive emotion. They're kind of half two halves of a whole. The emotion is the juicy side; the thought is the dry side. And then you have identity, which [30:00] is just basically a really entrenched thought that feels like a fact, and then below that is actually yourself who you really are. And this identity that we've picked up, that’s why I don't like personality test because they're never… People get stuck in a personality test, Oh, I'm an INTJ. Oh, I’m a red. Oh, my love language is this.
Dan: And it now becomes an identity.
Bob: Now becomes another label. And I'm like, Yeah, you're very outgoing except when you're not. You're an introvert except when in these situations, when you're not. How? Why is this? This is one personality that you have and whether it's the one that you wear all the time or not is different, but instead of being identified with that, to get past it and be able to use it consciously, now that's power, instead of, Well, this is just the way I am. That's not true. You could be any way you want to be.
And so, at those levels, emotions are always driving physical ailments. Not always driving. Obviously, if you get hit by a car, right, that's definitely a physical ailment, right?
Dan: Absolutely. Definitely physical, but when it lasts 33 years, most likely it’s not.
Bob: Yeah. So, here's the thing—your body is designed to take messages from your mind and turn them into reality. Right? So,
Dan has a thought, I love my dog, and his body goes like, Sweet, I'm going to go into the Superman booth and I'm going to come out with the “I love my dog” suit, and so he comes out with the “I love my dog” suit on and, Ta-da, I feel like I love my dog. And then, if you have your dog poops on your foot, Now I hate my dog. Right?
Dan: Yeah.
Bob: And so, then your body instantaneously goes into the Superman booth, comes out with the “I hate my dog” shirt on, and you're like, [yelling]. But let's say he poops on your foot while you're talking to a neighbor you're trying to impress. Now your brain is like, I hate my dog, but I'm supposed to love it and think this is cute. So, he comes out in the “I hate my dog shirt” with a smile on his face and like, Oh, yeah, I hate my dog, and that's how your body goes.
So, if you have a physical ailment, someone breaks your arm, your body is trying to repair it, but if in your mind, you're like, Oh, it's never going to get better, then your body is also trying to match what your mind is doing. So, it takes forever to heal because you have all this crap in your head that your body is also trying to do at the same time.
You get diagnosed with cancer, Oh, you only have so much time to live—that for a lot of people becomes, See, that's it. That's the end. For some people, they become…they turn it into a big F-you and be like, Oh, yeah, well, watch me beat this sucker. But for some people the diagnosis, because it comes from an authority figure, they accepted as truth, and so their mind automatically just starts to create that as natural, I'll never get over this. And then their bodies are trying to heal it at the same time, and so what's in your mind is going to affect dramatically how your body heals. I mean, I went through a number of years of training and body work in different kinds of healing methods in my own health journey, and explored all kinds of stuff like this, and it's fascinating how much if you can get the mind out of the way the body can heal so much faster. We call it miraculous, but it's actually, no, that's how your body is designed if you would just stop [33:00] messing with it.
Dan: That's exactly right. Hey, J.R., I know we’ve got to wrap it up real soon. So, do you mind if I take a stab at a different track for a minute?
Bob: Yeah, let's rock.
Dan: I'm just an outside observer, but it looks like you're using…your business model is what I affectionately call the JSTDT model, which stands for “Just Sell the Damn Thing”.
Bob: Yeah.
Dan: Because your website, your call to action is “schedule a call”, and I imagine on that call, you determine if it's a good fit for them and you close the sale. Am I correct?
Bob: Yeah, I mean, I didn't…it was just me at the beginning and trying to create big processes. I mean, I’d tried to create programs for people and stuff for years, and it was just so much technology and so many other things in the backend that I couldn't help people very, very effectively, because they were slogging through other stuff and reading blog posts and stuff. And my wife who's just like, Dude, your gift is when you're actually working with people and the more that there's a barrier between you and them it's just they don't see what you can help them with; they don't see what you can offer.
And so, we just really said, Okay, fine, let's just get on the phone with them and see what happens, and we started just getting on the phone with people, and so if it's a good fit, if I feel like I can help, we talk about it; if it's not a good fit—the goal is at least to help them see this is where you're at; this is where you're trying to go and the big things that you need to accomplish are these things—and so, at least they walk away understanding at least from my perspective, at least from the experience I've had with myself and 150 plus other guys is that every addict on the planet, no, never will be. And so, obviously, don't believe anything I say. If it resonates with you, great. If it doesn't and you think I'm a dork, move on.
Dan: Right.
Bob: But, yeah, so that's kind of how the business is set up. It’s like, Look, how fast can I get in touch with them? So, there's just me and one other coach—we're working together with him now—and he went through the process with me a while ago with tremendous results for him, and so the two of us together, it's very, very high touch, very one-on-one. We're in their life pretty much every day until they're done as fast as we can make that happen.
Dan: And for so many reasons and for so many businesses, that is the model that just makes so much sense. You want to go from point A to point B, just go there the most direct method you can rather than shuttling people down 1,001 survey questions and having a 47-step autoresponder sequence, and all that other shit.
Bob: Yeah, and we're building out. Not everybody's in a spot where they're ready to invest in that kind of help, right? I mean, that's one-on-one. It's a lot to invest in and it's worth it 100 percent, but not everybody's in a spot where they're ready for that. Either they don't really trust it yet or it seems too good to be true, which I totally believe it, because [36:00] I’d lived the other way for a long time, or they're just not ready yet or finances are what they are and they're just struggling.
And so, that’s why we're starting a podcast with Podcast Factory and that's why we're starting to try and build up some other things that we can do for people to meet them where they're at, so that they can at least get some help, because, really, there's not…I don't know anyone else on the planet that does what we do. There are some people that talk about root issues. Most of them work with high-end business owners. They're not really dealing with addiction. By “most of them”, I mean, all two of them that I know—and one of them I know is super effective at what she does. The other guy, he's pretty good at what he does, too. He’s a good friend of mine—but there's not that many people to do what we do.
And so, for me to be like, Well, we can't help you right now because you're not ready, I want to be able to provide something for them so that they don't have to go back into the world of “Just cope with it. Just manage it. You have an addiction for it. You're always going to be fighting this. Satan's on your tail and he's always trying to take you down,” and I'm not trying to say that that idea is right or wrong. I'm still discovering more about what the truth is in my life, so I'm not going to say that there is no such thing as Satan. I've had enough experiences in my life to know that there are bigger things out there, dark things and influences that are beyond my comprehension that I've had to deal with. So, I'm not saying that that's wrong at all, but to go into the world believing that you're always being attacked is to go into the world already disarmed for a battle that doesn't even have to exist.
Dan: Wow, that’s powerful. So, for people who want to get more info about you and what you do, where are the best places to do? And tell us the name of your podcast and where to find that also.
Bob: Oh, I would love to tell you the name of the podcast, but, but…
Jonathan: Ouch.
Bob: Ouch [crosstalk 37:48].
Jonathan: We're working on that.
Dan: J.R., what's up? You’ve got to come up with a name, right?
Jonathan: You know how it works. It's a process.
Bob: Yeah, it’s a process. So, when we have that, maybe you can update the show notes to this one when we have the actual name itself.
Dan: Yeah.
Bob: So, that'll be coming in the next month or so. And other than that, you can go to my website liberateaman.com [liberate a man dot com]. There's not a lot there like Dan mentioned, just a little bit more of my story.
Dan: Nor does there need to be a lot there. What’s there is effective.
Jonathan: And the testimonials I was looking at, so what's just there, it’s not a lot there [unclear 38:23]. There’s not a bunch of people I fixed. You won’t just stumble into that by mistake.
Dan: I think the last thing you need—so I read your whole website and I read your story—the last thing you need is some slick, super expensive copywriter like me translating your story into their words. What you have on the website is perfect. I wouldn't change a single comma.
Bob: This from a super slick copywriter, folks, you have the endorsement of the Dangerous Doberman Dan.
Jonathan: Ds. Triple D.
Bob: And, yeah, so there's that [39:00] liberateaman.com and that'll give you a chance to schedule a call if you want us to schedule a call. If not, there is a contact link if you just have a question. If not, you can find my Facebook page. It's facebook.com/thebobgardner [Facebook dot com slash the bob gardner].
Jonathan: “The”.
Bob: Yes. And you can find the page there and I post things fairly frequently, and connect that way and send a message that way as well.
Dan: Awesome.
Jonathan: Cool, liberateaman.com. I’ll add it to the show notes.
Dan: Man, I have really enjoyed getting to know you. I actually feel like the time flew by too fast.
Bob: Yeah.
Dan: There's a lot more I'd like to talk about, so hopefully you'll come back. We're brothers on the Podcast Factory, so…
Bob: Yeah, I would I would love to come. Anytime. You want to talk about whatever you want to talk about, I'm happy to help.
Dan: Awesome. And thanks for setting it up there, J.R.
Jonathan: All right. That is a wrap for another Off the Chain show. We’ll be back in your earbuds next time. Thank you for tuning in.
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