Download this episode

• Jay Gabrani is the founder of a company called Prepared Fathers, to help fathers be ready financially for major, unexpected situations life can throw at us. This was, of course, borne of Jay’s experience as a husband and father.
• Jay grew up in Canada, and took a trip to India to spend time with his grandfather, who instilled in him a desire to build his own business. He didn’t start that way, but built a path to be able to be an entrepreneur, working for himself since 1997.
• In the early 2000s, Jay got married, bought a house and started a family. All at ‘hyper speed’, as he puts it.
• His first business was a restaurant franchise, which he ran successfully for 13 years. He’s gone on to other ventures, including investing in real estate.
• The biggest benefit of being an entrepreneur is the freedom and choice to design your life. He decides what time is for business versus family versus exercise, etc.
• With three young children at home, Jay worked and his wife stayed home with the kids. In 2011, his wife slipped and fell, leading to getting prescribed Oxycontin to deal with the pain, which she soon became addicted to.
• Along with the addiction, his wife was battling depression and pain, while Jay’s style was to snap out of it and do what you have to do (similar to my approach when my wife went through her worst in 2011, too).
• His wife decided she didn’t want to live, and took her own life in 2014, leaving Jay and the kids behind.
• Overnight, Jay became a single father of a a 5, 7 and 9 year old kids. He used his real estate investments to fund taking a sabbatical from working so he could focus on his kids. He expected that to last a year, but ended up being a four year period.
• The devastation is not something he feels you can ever fathom until you’re going through it.
• Being a professional accountant, Jay expected he would handle being the executor of his wife’s estate to be easy. He quickly realized how mistaken he was. From not knowing her passwords, where the key was to her safe deposit box and more.
• And he realized how much worse it would be for his wife if he was the one who had died since she knew even less about the things an executor needs to know than he did.
• That woke him up to the need for a little bit of planning, a little bit of preparation. He says his company’s mission is to help fathers plan for life’s little curve balls.
• My reaction was that this is all right, but easier said than done. Having these conversations is hard. People don’t like to talk about, “What would happen if I/you died?”
• Through his tragedy, he realized he could help other fathers avoid that. There are a lot of fathers in trouble for various reasons, and he can help solve that.
• It’s not about money, it’s about skills. If you lack the skills you need for what you’re facing, go and acquire them. Look at how you’re spending the resources you have (time and money) and see if you can spend those resources in a way that moves you forward.
• There are some basics to be sure you have in place that don’t have to cost much, like wills and basic life insurance. A $250-500K life insurance policy would have made a tremendous difference for him and his three young kids when his wife died, and not having it put his family at risk.
• The most important step, and likely the hardest, is the conversations. Not just between the two parents, but key others like parents, siblings, step-siblings or step-parents, etc. Doing that work up front will make things smoother and better and give you a sense of release.
• We got into how you can have these conversations as it can be really hard. I shared my own struggle with my wife to have this talk, especially since there was a scare around her survival. Jay enlightened me with another approach.
• Rather than making it about doom and gloom and the fear of being stranded, appeal to the family or the children. For the sake of the children, let’s talk about this. And once it’s done, we don’t have to do it again.
• He suggests getting all the papers in order and together in one place, and then having the conversation focused on “here is where you find everything, in place.”
• Jay put together a checklist for the key things you want to have in place to be prepared that you can get for free at preparedfathers.com/day
• As fathers, we often feel a need to be a provider and protector, If we don’t have these things in place, we aren’t really providing or protecting our family.
• And this transcends gender-stereotypical-roles. For any parent, this is a truism. We are leaving our family unprotected and unprepared.
• Jay shared a brilliant thought that feels like it’s at the heart of this entire show – in order to impact the world, you have to take the worst moment of your life and convert it.
• For him, that message is even more important because his kids are watching, and he owes him this.

Links:

• Website: http://www.preparedfathers.com and get the checklist he mentioned at preparedfathers.com/day
• Podcast: A Minute with Jay
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jaygabrani & https://www.facebook.com/preparedfathers
• Instagram: @preparedfathers

Download this episode

• Bruce was a very stressed-out teen, with a lot of anxiety and anger. Oddly, he didn’t know why.
• As he got older, it got worse yet his voice didn’t change, so he wouldn’t speak up or out. This only made it worse as those feelings were brewing and bubbling with no outlet.
• He looked for his voice in music so he could express himself without exposing his high-pitched voice.
• While he wanted to go to school, he was afraid to try or try what he wanted because he was so afraid to speak.
• He found an ENT doctor who knew immediately what to do to help him, and it worked. It was all stress- and anxiety-based rather than physical.
• His anger and stress came from his home life as a child.
• Growing up, his father was angry and upset most of the time, and his mother was stressed and upset as a result.
• Bruce has pneumonia as an infant that nearly killed him, and lead to him being defined as fragile. That meant he couldn’t go outdoors in the tough Canadian winters. And, living on a farm, it meant he tended to help his mother in the house rather than the tough work outside on the farm.
• Adding his voice issues, that reinforced the corner he was being painted into in terms of the kind of person he was.
• He found himself looking to escape, so when he turned 18, he left, while his siblings stayed around.
• When he found his voice, it was like a huge rebirth for him where he could be any of the things he wanted to be.
• The metaphor of “finding your voice” was playing out literally for him, as well, and it was empowering and freeing.
• Despite that freedom, he also had waves of being stifled and held back.
• Today, he is an expert on mindfulness, so his back story is so interesting given how much pain and internal strife he faced.
• After becoming a music teacher in the school system, Bruce saw bullying at play too often. He thought about how mindfulness can help work against it.
• He took on a persona and a strategy to fight bullying and had a whole show he would share with students in assemblies and other performances to share the message. He became DJ Benny DL (taking on the name of his then 1-2 year old son).
• Bruce sees music and creativity as such a powerful way to express yourself, work through difficult issues, and feel freedom.
• Today, Bruce does not struggle with anxiety like he used to. This is because he is very proactive with applying the tools he’s learned before it becomes an issue.
• He has learned to recognize that things are the way they are supposed to be, and let go of the idea that he needs to change them or that he needs to be someone else.
• Bruce wrote a book with mindfulness expert Brian Tracy, Cracking The Success Code, which he made available to you for free at mindfulnessmode.com/cracking.
• He wants people to really embrace the idea that having some form of meditation in your life is really a necessity. Even sitting down for 15 minutes of quiet time with yourself is highly valuable.
• Book mentioned: John Marshall Roberts, The Voice Code.

Links:

• Website: http://www.mindfulnessmode.com
• Podcast: Mindfulness Mode (hear me on episode 251)
• Twitter: @brucelangford
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mindfulnessmode
• Instagram: @brucelangford

Download this episode

Key Points from the Episode with Terah Harrison:

• Terah is a relationship therapist working with individuals and couples, and also hosts a podcast called “Make More Love, Not War” that includes a recurring segment with her friends where they talk shamelessly about sex. That shamelessness part is the key, and takes work to get to.
• She started the podcast with her husband as a way for them to work through relationship issues together in a way that therapy seemed too daunting for her husband. Through that process, which includes bringing other therapists on the show, listeners benefit, as well.
• A common issue with couples therapy is that one of the partners thinks the therapist will just side with the other person, so the show helps remove the chance for that dynamic.
• Terah’s work as a couples therapist started with her own parents, where she was often thrown into the mix of their relationship issues, as many kids end up doing.
• Her goal is to bust through shame, whether it’s about sex (often for women), our emotions (often for men), and how disconnecting it is to feel shame.
• I asked if she prefers working with men or women, and she shared why she generally prefers working with men. A key reason is that she is benefiting the woman at home who needs her partner to be a better partner to her.
• It’s also been very healing for her to work with men and see their good hearts and ability to improve. That comes from her own story.
• Terah’s story started with sexual abuse at age 4. It happened so long ago that some people might say you should just be over it by now. She shared why that doesn’t “just” happen. When we are that young, our neural network is being built, so the wiring is being set to tell us that we aren’t safe and aren’t worth the protection.
• The man who abused her was the father of a neighborhood friend, who would abuse Terah and her friend together. It was more than just physical, but also what she referred to as “grooming” them to be abusable. He made her feel special, and that this was something she was lucky to have going on.
• She felt that she couldn’t tell her parents, so she told them it was just her friend. She was afraid of being labelled a ‘dirty little girl’ who wasn’t worthy of protection. Once her parents found out it was her, they decided not to prosecute him because of what they thought it would do to her to go through that process.
• Her parents would justify why he did this given his own back story, and they seemed to have sympathy and acceptance for him. They even allowed him to send Christmas cards and presents to Terah.
• This made her feel like other people are more important than she is, and she doesn’t deserve protecting.
• Others seemed to sense this, and would target her, whether with bullying, sexual abuse (she was raped at age 13), and mental abuse.
• She asked her parents if she could talk to a therapist in her teens, and they refused, preferring to “keep it in the family”.
• Her parents were just doing the best they could. They were young parents who made a lot of mistakes.
• It left her with feelings that her dad not protecting her meant she couldn’t trust any man since the one who should have been there to protect her and be trustworthy above anyone else didn’t and wasn’t.
• She ended up in another abuse and controlling relationship. She understood why he was the way he was, but that does not make what he did ok. It’s important to separate the two.
• He was almost like a cult leader, trying to control her mind and life.
• Finally leaving that relationship is what allowed her to start healing from all the abuse she had suffered.
• Her relationships with women were also not good, and that was part of her healing process. Girls had bullied her from a young age, and that was a recurring theme, so that was a piece of the work she had to do which might not have seemed obvious relative to the work around trusting men.
• The first step she found through her therapy journey is to tell your story. The second step is to build relationships you trust and tell your story to them.
• Her sense of safe was initially just around sex, but she learned it’s bigger than that, and needs to include emotional safety. Whether that means not being emotionally and mentally abusive, or also behaviorally. That means acting truthfully and not cheating, for example.
• Through getting her masters in therapy, she worked with men who had done some pretty bad things, whose families had to call the police on given their behavior. Seeing that extreme level perpetrator actually want to do the work to get better opened her eyes to being able to trust.
• She does warn people to just cut and run if it isn’t safe. Her abusive ex-boyfriend, Scott, broke into her apartment after she left him, and assaulted her physically, injuring her in the process.
• She talked about finding Amago Therapy, and finding the book Receiving Love, written by the developers of Amago. It went into seeing what you think about love, what your primary caregivers teach you about it, and more. That became the basis for a lot of growth personally and showing her a focal area for her therapy practice to help people.
• She then found EMDR, a type of therapy focused on reprogramming your neural networks around traumatic events to take away the messaging in your brain around traumatic events and their emotional impact.
• The third step in her therapy is Somato Emotional Release using Cranio-Sacral Therapy. This process involved visualizing and talking to her four-year-old self, and telling her she is safe, loved and worthy. She tells her own daughter that every day, and she did it for herself, which finally let her feel protected.
• Doing that for herself allowed her to feel strength and stability in her own protection because it comes from the one constant we all have – ourselves.

Links:

• Website: http://terahharrison.com & http://www.makemorelovenotwar.com
• Podcast: Make More Love Not War (hear me on this episode)
• Twitter: @terrahharrison
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/terahharrisonlpc
• Instagram: @makemorelovenotwarpodcast