How To Become Your Authentic Self As A Man - Josh Tomeoni

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Josh, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for taking some time out of your day to hang out with me for a few minutes. I sure do appreciate it. Love telling people's story on this show. You probably could imagine that because the name of the show is beyond the story. So I always like to go back to the beginning of the story and the beginning is always different for everyone. So you decide whatever the beginning of the story is for you, but I'd like to give our listeners some context on your backstory and what really brought you to present day with the work that you currently do. Sure.

Sebastian Rusk

That is a vague, open-ended question and I hate it, but I'll do my best. I always need specific questions, but I'll just, I'll try to do my best. So let's see. Um, Ooh, what's the beginning. All right, here you go. One of my very first memories was when I was in preschool, In preschool, there's this other kid that just didn't get along with kids. He just was kind of an outcast. He was kind of a derelict, if you will. And for those that don't know what that means, which is my whole brand, it means that you're outcast, you're forsaken, you're thrown aside. It's used in nautical terms as like a broken down ship, a broken down vessel. A lot of the times it's used for people that are homeless, that don't have houses, that are just out there. I view it more as a man that is not living his true authentic self, which is a lot of the work that I do. So going back to preschool, I see this little boy and he clearly is not comfortable in his own skin. He's not connecting with other boys, et cetera. And one of my first memories is just bringing him under my wing and just making sure he was okay. Ever since then, I've had a heart for, well, boys originally, and then men when I grew up and I became an adult. You know, I worked with kids all the way through school. When I was in high school, college, I worked with junior high kids, high school kids, et cetera. And then it's just continued to expand. So that's, I guess that's the big part of the story. Uh, and then there were all of the failures and mess ups along the way that made me get to a point where it's like, okay, failure is okay. There's nothing wrong with failure. In fact, failure is just the next step to success. So if I'm going to find my most authentic, real self as a man, and I want other men to do the same, then I need to be able to embrace those failures and just move on and figure out what they taught me. So that's kind of a really short version. Everything that I skipped along the way were business failures, marriage failures, relationship failures, divorces, I guess the same thing as marriage failures, right? Every failure under the sun, health failures, gaining a bunch of weight, losing way too much weight. I mean, you name it, it's been there.

Josh Tomeoni

So were they failures or were they lessons? I always like to ask myself when that word shows up.

Yeah, you know, a lot of people have a problem with the word failure and you know why, or at least I think why? I think because most people think of failure as this shame, like I am not enough. Like I have failed in my life. It's this ultimate, like I am a failure, but that's not what the definition of failure is. Do you know what the definition of failure is? I do not. Please tell me. All right, I'm just gonna look it up here so I can give you the exact words. But when you look up the definition of failure, the very first piece that you get is just the lack of success, which is not super helpful, right? The second definition of failure, I'll read it exactly here. The omission of expected or required action. I'll read it again. The omission of expected or required action. So all it's saying is that you didn't do what was expected to be done. If that's the definition of failure, I fail every day, brother. Yeah, same. If I'm trying to walk across that, this is a stupid example, but if I'm trying to walk across my kitchen and I stubbed my toe, that's a failure by that definition, right? because I was trying to walk across the kitchen without stubbing my toe. So I think people get this idea of like, I need to shame myself and I'm an ultimate terrible person and everything is wrong in my life because I am a failure or I failed. No, no, no. A failure just means that I tried to do something and it didn't work out the way that I wanted it to work out. Well, that happens all the time. Yeah. So part of my mission, honestly, is to bring that word to the surface to say, no, no, yes, they were failures. They absolutely were. I did not get married to get divorced, brother. I got married to be with my wife forever and ever and ever and ever didn't happen. We ended up getting separated, divorced, super contentious, super terrible, completely terrible experience for any of your listeners, viewers, et cetera. They're going through it. Reach out to me. I'm more than happy to chat with you. I'm more than happy to be a listening ear. I'm more than happy to help you through that process. I actually wrote a book about it. It's on Amazon right now, and it's called the five traps men face when going through divorce and how to avoid them. Happy to give it to any of your listeners for free. If they want to just reach out to me on Instagram, be cool.

If I give them my, yeah, absolutely. We'll be sure to link that in the show notes too. So people can find you easily as well. I appreciate that.

So on Instagram, I'm just Josh, the derelict Josh, the derelict. Perfect. Look it up.

Those of you listening to the link will be right there in the description here of this podcast episode on there. So you can,

If you shoot me a message and just say ebook, I'll give you the ebook if you're going through that process. But yes, I absolutely do consider them failures. Now, societally, again, a lot of people have an issue with that word because then they think that I'm shaming myself and I'm saying that, oh, I'm now a terrible person. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying there's an intended result. I didn't hit that intended result, so therefore it's a failure. But then to your point, well, what comes out of failure? Well, there's two things that can come out of failure. One is this path of, well, now I'm going to be bitter. I'm going to be angry. I'm going to be a victim. It works to make you worse. I love it. It's drinking, dude, you're drinking your own poison, bro. Like you think you're giving somebody else the poison. You're not, you're giving yourself the poison. So there's that path. What's the other path of failure? The other path to failure is, Oh, I omitted an expected or required action.

Hmm.

Interesting. What could I do next time to make sure that I do that action? And then that becomes success. There is no success without failure. There just isn't. No one just sits down one day and they decide, I want to become a billionaire. And then all of a sudden they're just a billionaire without failure. Are you kidding me?

I heard Tony Robbins say one time, and I think we confused the word failure with mistakes, but I'll never forget him saying this. He said, In life, there are no mistakes. Life is just a guided journey of lessons. And I was like, whoa, talk about reframing something. And when you really start to wrap your head around that, you were able to extend some grace to yourself. And I think that, That is a grossly underrated strategy in this human experience that we're all going through here of being able to extend ourselves some grace and not beat ourselves up so much and realize, was it a mistake? Does that even exist? Or was it just a lesson that I absolutely needed to be taught?

Yeah. You know, I, so I, I think I want to write a book about my most hated phrases near the top of the list is they're doing the best they can. I ate that phrase. Why the passion? Because I think that it gives everyone an out for anything that they do ever. And I think it should be rid from the English language. However, What I do agree with in that concept is what you're talking about right now. If there's no mistakes, if I, out of pureness of heart, do an action based on all the information that I have right now, I don't think that that can be a mistake no matter what, even if I make the wrong action. So it's about intent, it's about the why, it's about the philosophy. So the reason I don't like the phrase is because, well, not everyone's doing the best they can because not everyone has the best intent. There are some people just trying to fuck other people over. There just are. There are some people that are just working out of pure malice and bitterness and resentment and anger and everything. Absolutely. And we all do that, by the way. I'm not saying I never do that. That absolutely happens. So the whole they're just doing the best they can. No. But if we reframe that and we say, well, Given the context and given the fact that I know that this person is a good, respectable individual, and with all this information, they made this decision. Could it have been the wrong decision? Sure. But was it a mistake? Yeah, I would agree. There's no mistake there. We're doing the best we can with the information that we have, as long as there is good intent. And I think that's what that's missing. Because you could go really extreme with that and you could talk about any genocidal maniac. And are we going to say, oh, they're just doing the best they can. Right. Also, I mean, that's insane.

So as an extension of that phrase, and I'm, I'm, I love that. I, my, one of the, my, my, one of my mentors, Gary, John Bishop, um, put a series out on his podcast, um, of the war on words and, uh, very similar context. He, he kicked things off with is it is what it is. That immediately went on the top of my list. It is what it is. And he's like, no, it's not. It is what you say that it is because of your thought process and experience.

So, um, so, so, so based on that, I'm going to go back to the goat that you just mentioned a moment ago, because Tony Robbins is one of my favorite people on the planet, even though I never met him. And I wish to one day my goal is to have him on my hundredth podcast episode. We'll see if it works. Let's go. But one of my favorite quotes that he says is that you don't experience life.

You experience the life you focus on.

Yeah. Let that sink in. If you haven't heard it before, because somebody can go through the exact same experience and it'd be a blessing for them and for it to move them to version 2.0 of themselves. And somebody could go through the exact same experience and it could bring them down to the pit of despair. Yeah.

So when we talk about people doing the best they can, I, I've been on the healing path for the past decade now. That's crazy to say. And I'm still fucking nuts. But when it came to healing my past and being fully accountable for my life and past, present and future, we had to go back to the childhood and we had to go back to mom and dad. We had to go back to the dad conversation and the blaming, the finger pointing and all of that. And when I first started to work through that and forgiving someone, you know, I learned, quickly that true forgiveness is waiving the right to ever bring it up again. And that's an extremely, extremely difficult task for, for, for most people to take on or even believe. But I decided to do that. And I went through a transformational program back in 2016 when the healing journey really started to crack me wide open. And, um, I got through it and that's when I said, you know what, I'm, I'm going to love myself and I'm going to become accountable for myself and all these things. play a part together, but I'm also going to call my dad and I'm going to say, Hey dad, I got my power back and I forgive you and I love you. And you're the only dad that I have. And you're the only dad that I'll ever have. And I love you and I'm done blaming you. And I'm grateful that you did the best you could do with the resources that you had at the time. the end, close the book, do not pass, go to not collect $200. That is it. And I'm having a lot of these conversations with my daughter now because I raised her on my own. She's 23 now and doing great and self-sufficient and a psych major. And I put her in all the work when she was younger and she could start to experience these things. we were talking about, you were just kind of reminiscing the other day via, via text. And she's like, remember the California days. And I love Newport beach. And I love that elementary school. And I was like, yeah, California was a great run. I was a fucking lunatic. She goes, you were doing the best you could do with what you knew at the time. And I thought, gosh, that is such a beautiful reminder. Number one for ourselves. And then number two, like when I, when I circle back to my dad kind of flares up again, I'm like, It's the only dad you got, did the best he could do. And then another thing that helped out with that process.

Here's the key though. What did that do for you? Set me free. A hundred percent. And did your bitterness and anger and resentment and everything that you were harboring against him do anything to him?

Nope, at all, and everything to me, right? Right. Everything got me all jarred. Now, there was still some residue there. Again, I think there always is with forgiveness. I forgive him, but I forgive you, but there should never be a but after.

It doesn't mean it's not gonna flare back up, brother. You're gonna have a morning where you wake up and you're like, fuck you! It happens, right? It doesn't just disappear.

Well, here's what helped. Somebody said, I was working with a coach a few years ago, and she said, I said, I've forgiven these people, my dad and my stepmom. but I still want to punch him in the throat sometime. She goes, I'm going to give you the trick, giving you the hack right now. Are you ready? I said, yeah. She goes, you're going to think I'm fucking crazy. Here's the hack. Compassion. And I'm like, what?

She goes, yeah. Could you imagine being like that? Wow. Crazy, huh?

Thank God. And man, compassion combined with forgiveness, true forgiveness, I mean, what can't you do? Sky's the limit, baby, you know?

Can I give you two more things? Please. A mentor told me a long time ago, and this is, so I want everyone to just remove whatever shackles you have about God and higher power and religion and spirituality just for a moment. Because a mentor told me a long time ago, it's impossible to have those negative feelings and beliefs towards somebody if you pray for them. And I've found that to be very true. So again, whatever your spiritual tradition, et cetera, try it. You don't even have to pray to anything. You just be like, I just pray that they're doing well. And I pray that they have a joyful life. And I pray that they are, you know, they find the people that they want and that they have the tribe they have. And you can't, you literally physically cannot be upset with them while you're praying for them. It's impossible. It's like being negative and positive at the same time, right? You can't do it. Can't do it. I found this from personal experience. Number two is a concept called effective blaming. And effective blaming is that if you're going to blame someone in your life for all of the terrible things that they did to you, you could take your dad as an example. He wasn't this, he wasn't this, he didn't do this, he didn't show up for this, et cetera. You also have to blame them for how they positively impacted your life. So as an example, the most difficult person I've ever dealt with in my life by far is my ex-wife. And she is also by far the person that I've learned and grown the most from.

Hands down, period, end of sentence. I believe the TR had a famous viral clip of saying that exact thing. You're gonna blame people for all the bad shit that happened in your life. You better fucking blame them for all the good shit too. And I was like, whoa. And it is, it is so true.

And here's the thing, what, like, I want to make sure people, cause sometimes people hear this the wrong way, right? It does not mean that something bad didn't happen. Correct. Like if you got physically abused or sexually abused or spiritually abused or whatever, it doesn't mean that that didn't happen. And it doesn't mean you're writing it off saying, oh, it wasn't a big deal. That's not what we're saying here. It was a big deal and you can blame them for all that terrible shit they did to you. However, if you then, you know, failed through it, went to the next level of yourself, and now all of a sudden you find yourself like, wow, I'm this, this, this, and this because of what happened to me. You're not giving them power by saying, oh, it's a good thing that they physically abused me. That's not what we're saying. You're not giving them power by doing that. You're giving yourself power. And what you're doing is you're allowing yourself to get out of that victim mentality of, oh, all of these things are always happening to me and poor me and woe me and everything else. Cause honestly, that doesn't hurt anybody but yourself. And I, man, I am like, I'm raising my hand with all this shit, dude. Cause I've done all this stuff. Like I'm not the expert that never did this. The only reason I know about all this is because I spent so many years doing this myself. Sure.

Sure. Love this. Love this. We're definitely aligned in the same thought process and mindset on here. Well, no mistake. So what a coincidence, which I don't believe in, by the way, that we ended up on a podcast episode together, Josh. Absolutely.

It's not a coincidence. There are no coincidences. Again, call it God universe. powers, whatever, I don't care what you call it, but there is something that orchestrates things around this planet. Like you, after you've been around for a long time, unless you're just completely, and you could be blind, but unless you're spiritually, emotionally, mentally, everything blind, you just can't not see it. Right.

And we're all searching and we're all looking. Some of us have found it, some of us haven't. And that's okay. It's meeting people exactly where they're at and not, leading our experience into theirs.

You mentioned a really good thing as well. And that's empathy and that's compassion for someone to realize. And it's not, again, they're doing the best they can, because I think, again, the fallacy of that. is that if they're actively not doing the best they can, I don't want to give them credit for doing the best they can. I really don't. However, having compassion and empathy for their situation and whatever happened in their life that makes it difficult for them to act in the way that I think would be appropriate, hands down, that helps. But that's not them doing the best they can. You see the difference? I'm not saying they're doing the best they can. What I'm saying is I have empathy and compassion and concern for their situation and I can understand why they're doing what they're doing. There's a difference between understanding and just giving them full blanche and saying, yeah, do whatever the hell you want because you're doing the best you can. Those are two different things.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. So, let's talk about some of the work you do here with men now, these days. I know you're doing some great work and you and I connected through the same mastermind group with the great Dan Martell that we're all really excited about. But let's talk about the work you do.

Absolutely. So, yeah, I work with men. I work with men trying to find the most authentic, masculine version of themselves in a world that seemed to have forgotten what that means. I don't think that there's a lot of really great masculine influences right now. I think we live in a society where, in general, if somebody is being masculine, the answer is that's toxic, that's chauvinistic, and that's evil. Therefore, be more feminine. And then when masculine men become more feminine, that hurts the world, does not help the world. Now to specify something, every single man and woman on the planet has masculine and feminine traits. I'm not just speaking about men here. We all have both traits. You have feminine traits and masculine traits. So do I. What I'm trying to help men though is to rediscover their authentic masculine selves because without That what ends up happening is that guys dig into addiction primarily, whether it's drugs, alcohol, women, or work being a big one. They dig into that to try to realize what their identity is and to try to realize how to be an authentic man. And then it doesn't work. And that either leads them down a path of just workaholism or depression, or unfortunately for the number one group of people that commit suicide, 35 to 50 year old men, because they get to a point where they just can't do it anymore. They don't know how to do it. They don't feel like they have the freedom to actually talk about the struggles to talk about failures, which is why I would bring up the word failure so much because everyone cringes when I bring it up, but it's not a cringy word because if you learn from it and you grow from it and then you get to the next level of your development, it's the most beautiful thing on the planet. I've learned the most out of my life from the failures that I've experienced. So I helped men walk through that. Love that. How long have you been doing that? like I said, my whole life sample from the preschool or something. Yeah. Years and years and years and years. I do financial coaching as well. There's a few other things I do, but that's my primary, primary purpose. So depending on when this episode airs in a couple months, I have another, my main book coming out as well. Cool. And, uh, I'm really looking forward to that as well. So pick up a copy. Well, absolutely.

Well, if you're listening to this right now, make sure you're connected. I'd love that. If you're listening to this right now, make sure that you hit the Instagram link in today's description of this episode on here so you can connect with Josh. Josh, love what you're up to. Love the authentic way that you show up. And we've just connected over the past couple of weeks on here. like my good friend Gary Vee says, you know, authenticity trumps likability. And I, I gotta, I gotta believe it. Cause people's, you know, your, what is it? What's the quote? Your energy introduces it. Your energy introduces you before you even say a word. Right.

A hundred percent. Yeah. Well, yeah. You know, I, I learned that actually I took some improv classes. And one of the things that they teach you in improv, which I thought was very fascinating is they said, try to be interesting more than being funny. Yeah. In other words, be your interesting, authentic self, and laughs will happen. If you try to be funny, you're being inauthentic to yourself. So just be your authentic, interesting self. And you are, dude, man. I mean, obviously, that's why I'm on this podcast. I don't say yes to everybody that, you know, want to go on a podcast with. I love being here with you. We could talk for another half hour.

Yeah, you are not kidding. I'm going to have to have you back on the show. We're doing a Josh part two for sure. I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I love what you're up to. And I love the work that you're doing. Uh, it's work that matters and work it's work that, um, infuses the world with change and empowers men to, to, to show up who they, who they were designed to be. So keep doing what you're doing. Any final thoughts for our listeners? No, just a lot of those times for guys, it's hard to reach out.

This doesn't mean, you don't need to feel like you need help to reach out. Like just reach out. Reach out on my Instagram, send me a message. I will respond personally. I don't have some virtual assistant responding to my messages. I respond to all of them personally. So reach out to me. Let's have a call. Let's have a conversation. I'm here for you. That's it. Love that.

Thanks again, my friend. I appreciate you. All right, brother. Appreciate you too. Have a wonderful day. You too. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.