081. Smash Your Anxiety by Embracing Change with Jesse Harless

Key Points from the Episode with Jesse Harless:

• Jesse has a training company called Entrepreneurs in Recovery to train leader facilitators help people in treatment centers, structured living or other forms of recovery to bring rapid change through conversational choreography.
• What is “conversational choreography”?
• It’s a way to bring people through content via an experience, as that helps drive the learning much deeper and help it stick.
• Because recovery is Jesse’s personal focus, that’s been the space he’s built it for, but it works in corporate or non-profit team settings, as well.
• It’s about self-care strategies to employ as a community to make the whole group stronger.
• Jesse said how he believes everyone is recovering from something.
• Help people see what they’re doing great today, and that can be a basis to start to build more resilience, self-care and personal strength to tap into to move forward.
• We talked about the loss of human interaction while increasing our ways of connecting virtually.
• When we don’t want to connect with someone, or are worried it might be uncomfortable, we just look down at our phone.
• Jesse saw the similarity with looking down earlier in life being about self-esteem issues.
• When you look straight ahead, you’re focusing on the future, while looking down is about focusing on the past.
• Looking at Jesse’s past, it’s one of trauma and addiction.
• Seeing his early years as traumatic is a new way to look at it. His father left when he was four, which was traumatic.
• His father was in a car accident and pronounced dead, spent over three weeks in a coma, and then woke up with brain damage. They spoke only a handful of times over the years that followed, with his father struggling with his physical recovery and drug addiction added to his existing alcoholism.
• And it was the beginning of a sad, difficult set of years where Jesse was consumed by hurt and social anxiety.
• He stopped going to the cafeteria at school because he would have a panic attack around everyone.
• He never asked for help, and withdrew into himself further.
• Once he got to college, the addiction set in as he suddenly had access to alcohol and drugs, which made him feel better.
• He was caught for plagiarism, failed out of school, was arrested all in his first semester of school.
• He had all the ready made excuses – college was too tough, he took too many credits, etc.
• A month after leaving school, Jesse’s father passed away. That was the first time Jesse tried cocaine.
• Jesse described himself with the term he doesn’t like of being a ‘functioning addict’.
• He’s learned how many people fall into this category, as 75% of people who are addicted are employed full-time.
• That means many people working around you may be struggling silently.
• At 22, he was arrested with a federal felony, facing seven years in federal prison. His choices followed him, and had caught up.
• He talked about that whole time as unconscious addiction. He would see people happy and smiling, and not being able to comprehend how they could even do that.
• He was able to avoid prison through the way he gave himself into changing.
• He met his first mentor, Pastor Bob, and a recovery specialist.
• He started to use all kinds of techniques and tools to reshape his life – journaling, keeping a calendar to structure his days, etc.
• He learned about his intuition, which today is the thing he cares about most.
• He kept doing the next right thing every day, which built and built, keeping him from prison, getting him his job back, and putting him on a clean path.
• While all the original pain that drove him to addiction came back, he was clear and equipped to face it.
• He went back to school and got his undergrad degree and bought his first home after six years being sober.
• He went on to get his masters at 11 years sober, and got a job with a Fortune 15 company as a felon. These are all things he was told were impossible, but he did them.
• The key was the sum of all the daily habits he was employing.
• To Jesse, you don’t have to have the level of wake up call he did to wake up. Spend 20 minutes in silence with yourself, and let things come to the surface.
• Start building a group of people around you to recognize when you’re not serving yourself and support you. Start with one person, and build a team of three to five Jesse calls your recovery team.
• He shared a book called The Five Regrets of Dying
• He shared the number one regret, “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
• We shifted and talked about Jesse’s cold shower idea.
• A friend told him he had to take a cold shower despite it being super cold out.
• After that first shower, he went to a meeting two hours later, and he noticed her had none of his social anxiety.
• He thought the shower might be part of it, so he decided to try it for 30 days.
• What he noticed was that his anxiety was down, his confidence is up, and he kept doing more and more.
• It fueled the idea for his book, Smash Your Anxiety with Cold Showers.
• Jesse went back to all of the habits and tools, and advised we even start with one small thing.
• Start with journaling, or doing the last 10 seconds of your shower cold.
• These little shifts can start to add up and catalyze the change we seek.
• When you’re doing the cold time in the shower, here’s an approach:
  • Before going cold, envision what you want for your life,
  • Say an affirmation of “I’m abundant, I’m safe, I’m secure.”
  • Then turn the water cold for 20 seconds, and don’t let it hit your face, but just hit your body.
• That’s it. Over time, you can add more time, and work your way up to a minute or two minutes.

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