Podcast
Waking Up After A Year In Bed: Healing Yourself Using A Holistic Approach With Gary Wagner
Sometimes, when medical science fails, you have to find a way to start healing yourself. A holistic approach to treating chronic pain is better than just targeting the condition. In this episode, Janet Hogan hears the story straight from the CEO of Recalibrate Melbourne, Gary “Gaz” Wagner. Gary talks about suffering from a condition that caused him to become wracked by chronic pain at 22. He then shares his journey towards coming back from pain and co-found his own company that focuses on holistic training. Listen in and be inspired by Gary’s story.
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Waking Up After A Year In Bed: Healing Yourself Using A Holistic Approach With Gary Wagner
Imagine if you had to spend a year of your life on your back in bed, trying to heal your body but so immobilized that getting through each day was an unimaginable ordeal. How would you cope if, for a whole twelve months, it felt like your physical self had been taken away and all you had were your thoughts and feelings, mostly negative ones, to get you through? How do you think it might affect your future life? For my next guest, the impact was profound. At 22, he had to confront his dark night of the soul and reinvent himself from the inside out. As one of Australia’s top fitness coaches and CEO of Recalibrate Melbourne, he’s made creating healthy bodies and minds his business. With great pleasure, I introduce you to Gary “Gaz” Wagner.
It’s a pleasure to be here. I am honored, thank you.
At that tender age of 22, you had quite the wake the F-up moment. Can you talk to us about that?
First of all, this show spoke to me straight away because there have been many moments in my life where I’ve had to go through that journey but this particular moment when I was 22 is probably one of my most profound and defining because I was suddenly inexplicably struck with the most torturous level of back pain that immediately incapacitated me. It was almost an overnight thing and yet the journey back from that was over the course of a year. It is something I have never forgotten in the years that have gone past because it was such a moment of adversity and rising up from that moment of adversity showed up what I needed to do in order to get out of it. It’s a powerful experience.
One of the things I remember when you were telling me about this earlier that surprised me was that the people in the medical game didn’t seem to know how to fix this pain and you tried all modalities. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What were some of the paths that you went down?
I’d been getting around the gym for a few years before that. I started working out and finding my way around the gym in my late teens and when I was hit with this back pain, I was recommended to go to see a physiotherapist. There was a surgeon that flew in from the coast because I was in rural Queensland at that time. I went to see massage therapists and whoever I could that was available. Time and time again, I would come up against this roadblock. The MRIs would be done and the x-rays would be done and they are like, “We can’t find a reason for your pain.” We could try more painkillers to get you out of it or we could have surgery to try and fix it. Neither of those sound like good options.
The other therapist may give me some relief, but I didn’t walk out of those sessions with any understanding or empowerment about how I can tackle this myself and how I can take back control of my own body. Everyone seemed to be hitting this almost stereotype of, “If it’s not in my box, there’s no solution for it.” There was no exploration. There was no, “What else is going on in your life?” As a person, Gary, it was all like, “This is my set of conditions. You don’t meet that set of conditions. Therefore, I can’t help you.” Where else can I go? You’ll have to find out for yourself. It’s a very isolating, frustrating and horrible experience.
One of the moments of clarity that came to me on that journey was, I can’t be the only person that has been a hit with such a debilitating level of pain, not just in the back and other areas. Then be seeking out professional help and not be able to find professional help purely because I don’t fit into a predefined box. Looking back at it twenty years back, it’s one of the key moments that led me to the position, the job and the work that I’ve done ever since is why do we have to define people as components or pieces? Why do we only tackle the injury? Why do we need to talk about one aspect of the person when we’re trying to help them? Why can’t we work with the person as a whole?
That holistic approach is essential to any progress or growth in a person. You can’t grow one aspect of yourself. You can’t heal one aspect of yourself because if you try to do that, you’re robbing yourself of the rich tapestry that can happen as a result. Ever since then, I’ve always tried to deal with people and work with people as people first and the condition that doesn’t define them. It’s part of what’s happened to them.
It sounds like it delivered you a massive injection of wisdom at a very young age when most people are still trying to figure themselves out. Perhaps that was an amazing gift of time that you were given to self-reflect, but it certainly speaks to what’s wrong with the world. Doesn’t it? We compartmentalize ourselves off into areas of specialization, particularly in health. No one seems to take charge of the overall issue, the interconnectivity that’s within us.
We’re complex organisms and that one thing’s got to affect another will be a symptom of something else. I can imagine your frustrations. It’s interesting how that plays out in your life and one of the things you mentioned when we were chatting before the show, you invite people to play a bigger game. Talk to me about your bigger game. What’s your bigger game?
My biggest game in terms of how I work with clients or in terms of business?
We could touch on both, but particularly with clients. What is it based on what you experienced firsthand that you bring to others?
The first thing is that there are a lot of great specialists out there. I’m not discounting the need for specialists. What I’m saying is that the missing component is often the hub. The professional that has regular contact with the client gets to know the client and they get to work with them as a person. They have enough base knowledge of everything that if that client needs to go to a specialist, there’s a communication pathway there because I’m sure people in your listenership have experienced this. You go off and you get a doctor’s appointment, an osteopathic appointment or any modality. You come out of it, not knowing what’s been done and what’s wrong with you. You may have a diagnosis, but you’re not sure what that means for your everyday life.
You may have exercises, but you don’t know what relevance they have in order to get you better or progression from there. How big a game is the trusted advisor in the hub for people to help them come back from a place of pain. Come back from a place of obstacles and stagnancy and help them move towards where they need to go, their potential, their performance.
ringing in other team members as needed and making sure that the person who matters the most in this equation, which is the client, has an understanding and is empowered to take back control themselves. To understand that they can control more than they give themselves credit for and they can influence more than they often give themselves credit for. I ended up basically rehabbing myself from that back pain. It came from a moment of like, “If no one else is here to help me and I can’t find someone. I’m going to have to do this myself.”
You spend enough time on the floor trying to find some level of comfort and eventually, you get sick of it. You need to go, “I’m in pain, lying here. I’m in pain, trying to move on. I might as well be uncomfortable moving forward. I might as well be uncomfortable trying to make progress.” One of the things that my clients and my community love/hate are when I say, “You need to be productively uncomfortable. You need to be stepping outside of your own box in order to get results that you’ve never had before.” It’s been something that I’ve done continuously and consistently my whole entire adult life. It’s led me to opportunities that I would never have gotten if I didn’t do it. Now, the catch is that you’re being uncomfortable for a reason. You’re not being uncomfortable for the sake of being hard or tough.
You’re doing it for a reason and you’re doing it to get to a bit of a place in the medium and longer-term rather than being always being comfortable now, which leads to a place of stagnancy and decline. The thing is that there’s no such thing as maintenance. Maintenance is a myth. We’re either progressively going up or progressively declining. There is nothing in this world that is stagnant and the only way you’re going to get progressive progress or inclination up is if you’re driving that, if you’re being productively uncomfortable and driving that growth. The way that you decline, you aim to be comfortable in the end up being stagnant. Then you ended up declining and progressively deteriorating, that sneaks up on you.
I remember getting a chill when I heard one of our former Prime Ministers, John Howard saying his vision for Australia was that every Australian be comfortable.
Complacency is the worst thing. You look at the challenges that we’re facing. In my business, we’ve faced challenges as same as everyone else. Different boats, but we’re all in the same storm. People want to return to that place of comfort and it’s never going to happen. The whole population is going to be uncomfortable for the next 5, 10, 15 years. This whole generation is defined by it. If you keep trying to go back to why things were, you’re going to be a very unhappy camper, but if you go, “This is where we’re at, what can I choose to do in order to bring myself forward?” You might not be in your perfect place, but you’ll be in a hell of a lot better place.
I’m on board with what you’re saying. One of the things that you said that left an impression on me before was that people need to understand their ability to leverage their personal capacity. They have usually had little idea what that is. Can you share with us may be how stories bring to lifelines like that? Is there a client that you can think of that might’ve started off in a certain place and they’ve achieved a capacity that would have beyond their imagination apart from your own story? Is there someone that you’ve worked with that you could share with us to give an idea of the transformation that is possible for people who might be feeling uncomfortably comfortable in their lives?
My key market is business owners and professionals because taking that lesson and translating it to your professional sense is often easier for people to understand. Businesses drive our community. They employ, they affect the community. The example I’m going to give you as a business owner. She was in her late 50s, very successful and an expert in their industry. I came across her in quite a strange way for me. I was on social media and I was in an industry group. Someone asked, who is the best trainer in Melbourne? I’ve got a client coming in from Brisbane. Who’s the best personal trainer in Melbourne. Everyone’s putting up their hands and saying, this guy, this girl, they’re the best trainers, I am or he is. The first thing I asked is, “Who is this person and what did I need?”
I didn’t know this person from a bar of soap anyway. I laid touch with her and I was taking my family away for the Easter holidays and I made contact with her. We had a good text conversation because she was traveling and I was traveling. She gave me a lot of details, straight up. That is an indication to me straight away that no one has ever listened to it before. No one has ever taken the time to actually listen. Maybe no one’s ever asked the question in terms of who are you? Where are you coming from? What obstacles have you faced and where do you want to go? We had this massive conversation.
She’s a director of a company and she goes, “I’ll try you out. I only train at this time of the morning. I want to try multiple times a week and these are the reasons why.” I said, “Okay.” She came in two years prior she’d lost a lot of weight. It was the first time she’d been purposely active her whole adult life. She’d been a busy professional. The trouble was she’d lost a lot of weight, but you’d also acquired a lot of injuries. Her whole capacity increased as she lost weight but rapidly diminished because everyone was going on that go hard or go home philosophy. Everyone was trying to carve the white author and treat her as the segment. Weight loss is the problem and nothing else. She came in for a first session and this is the all-or-nothing behavior type.
High achiever people look at them and go, “They’ve got amazing energy and they’re always on the go. They’re so productive.” She came in at 5:30 in the morning, all guns blazing. I was like, “What are we going to do is we’re going to lie down and we’re going to breathe.” She said, “Why?” I said, “You want to run better?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “In order to run better, you need to be able to breathe.” She accepted that.
If I told her my real motive was, I needed her to calm down a little bit, she would’ve walked straight back out that door. She’s like, “I’m not coming here to breathe.” Here’s the thing, within two weeks, she was standing straight up because what she didn’t know or didn’t realize was that she was riddled with joint pain, back pain and limited that she actually couldn’t stand up straight anymore. Within a couple of weeks, she also noticed an improvement in her work performance.
The gentle methodical stop that we gave her started to teach her how to switch gears and work from a place of increased capacity but less stress because here’s the thing about an all-or-nothing behavior type. When you’re cooking, you think nothing can stop you. The world is flying by at 100 miles an hour, but all it takes is a little obstacle, a little deviation from your plan and you’ll fall back position is zero. If you look at the progress over time, it’s stop, start, stop, start and stop. You’re never continually moving forward. You’re always going flat out or lying down on the couch. What I was teaching her was how to switch gears and get through her life with more capacity, less stress and more clarity. One of the things that she reported after her first year, this is a data-driven professional.
She reported to me that her work capacity actually went up. Her charge-out ability went up. Her ability to de-stress and de-load when she wasn’t at work increased. Her joint pain movement went down. She achieved all of her physical goals and more. Her first physical goal was basically to be able to run 5K. She now has completed half marathons. She’s gone up and down mountains for obstacle courses and she’s been learning how to sail again.
At one point, she was even looking at the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race as competing as a crew member. A massive journey in two years, and a compacity is exponentially increasing. Where did it start? It started bothering me getting to know her, teaching her out of breath and then progressively layering it down to get her stronger and fitter.
That’s great because it gives me the philosophy of how you work, too, because I relate to that, go hard or go home thing. That wasn’t a mantra and it was all about self-sacrifice. Sacrificing yourself on the altar of hard work, that was the key to success. It’s self-punishing when you think about it and what you seem to offer is very nurturing. This is what’s going to make you feel good. What’s going to be good for you.
Someone used the expression who I was speaking with. They said divine selfishness. That resonated for me because everything we do needs to be an act of divine selfishness. Even when we’re being of service to others, it must serve us first. I say that as someone who’s been in the space of self-sacrifice for most of my life. I know the pain of self-betrayal and what that feels like and it’s a hard thing to know. There’s no joy in that.
I loved the fact that you encourage people to get more into themselves, not more away from themselves, because that’s what we do. Isn’t it in the entrepreneurial space we’re running away from something? There are a lot of people that are a little bit ADHD in this space and we equate any movement is good movement, but maybe sometimes the best movement is to go within.
Thank you for sharing that story. I think that’s illuminating. The other thing I’d like you to speak to is honoring the context, which is COVID and locked down, and I’d like you to put your business owner hat on and speak to the business owners out there. How have you dealt with one of these industries that have closed down entirely? How did you not collapse in a heap and go, “I give up it’s too hard?” What did you do to deal with this?
The first thing I did was I made a decision. I looked at what was happening. I’m not particularly across world events. I don’t spend every day sifting through the news and disseminating everything that happens in the world because I’m focused on my world and what I can do to make it better. When I looked at this situation, I literally came from running a conference for fitness businesses. On that very weekend that we ran that conference, the whole city shut down. Melbourne was shutting down. I looked at the situation and decided that this was a defining moment in history. I don’t know the extent of it. I don’t know how long it will last. I know for anything that extreme to happen, it’s not going to go away tomorrow.
When I looked at the situation, I decided that there are two ways you can go. You can either be crushed by it or take that severe adversity and use it as an opportunity to move forward and to leapfrog into a space that you’ve never done before. I was like, “I don’t want to be crushed by it. There’s no good outcome out of that.” I don’t want my livelihood to be taken away. I don’t want my business to be taken away. I don’t want my clients to stop being served. I don’t want any of it. There’s nothing good that comes from lying down and letting pandemic habits lie with you.
My only choice and the choice that I chose was to stand up, innovate my business, strive to make it better, strive to make it resilient and turn this adversity into an opportunity like I did when I was 22 and like I have countless other times in my life. Faced with severe adversity, I chose to turn it into an opportunity and that’s what I worked to do. I invested more in my business. I got additional staffing on the backend.
I had conversations with people to get more mentoring and more support around me. I got better as a coach about asking for help myself, which is something that does a huge personal development point for me in terms of having that conversation. That has been my focus, building the online component so we can service, support and coach clients anywhere in the world, even in lockdown areas and give them the benefit of what we do in the best way possible. That is the option for me.
Does that mean that a client doesn’t have to be based in Melbourne to benefit from what you do?
No, they can be based anywhere in the world and the beauty of it is that this mentality of, “I’m going to exercise when I’m in town and then the holidays I’m going to take a break from looking after myself, my self-care and myself optimization.” That helps eradicate that excuse. It becomes about investing in yourself every day, even if it’s 10, 15 minutes, no matter where you are and reaping the rewards of that on a regular basis. They could be anywhere on the planet. I had a lovely chat with someone on to the US. We’ve got clients all across Australia and we’re looking to work with the people who share the same values as us regardless of where they are.
I think the gift of COVID for Australians, in particular, is a breaking down of the barriers. Australia is not an island anymore because it’s okay to work online. Previously, working online was always seen as the poor cousin to working life with someone and COVID smashed that myth and this is significant for us and who’ve always been living on the asset of the earth. The other side that suddenly all these other countries are accessible and maybe you don’t realize how profound that shift is, but I’ve certainly found that as well. It’s a matter now of seeking out people, not based on their geography, but their values.
Here’s the thing is that in a traditional model, the coach would have to match their schedule to the client and there’s that whole scheduling issue. Now it becomes about how do we build the optimal schedule for that client in an environment that works for them. It doesn’t matter if I’m available at that particular point in time or not because we’ve structured the custom programming. We put it all together and we’re still available for that client to support them. Not just one session a week or five sessions a week, even every day of the week, they’re getting some input, some stimulus. That’s where those positive adjustments and recalibrations are coming in.
It’s interesting because I think there are many intersections with who we are as beings. We tend to measure the world in its physical terms. It’s like the iceberg. We see the tip of the iceberg and we think that’s it. Then there are these realms beneath that, our thoughts, the mental realm, then the emotional. We’re even talking about the spiritual realm, which seemed to be out of bounds talking about that in a mainstream sense. What I realized is that each of us doing the bit that we love can affect the whole organism, the whole self. It’s interesting to hear how you’re doing that. We all had an idea of what we think fitness centers and gyms are and you’re turning that on its head. I think that’s inspirational.
The way you speak so much from the heart and much confidence. I can see all the work that you’ve put into yourself, it shows. One of the things I like to demonstrate in these interviews is that we’re all on a journey. Some of us may be a couple of steps ahead of anyone else. I know one of the things that probably stops a lot of people in their tracks is they want to be able to see their path ahead before they’ve walked it. I feel you have to walk it in order to see it. Possibly we only ever see about 50 meters ahead and then there’ll be a bend that we couldn’t have preempted. There are lots of twists and turns in that path, no matter how straight we want it to be.
I also know the frustration of not knowing what our path is or people say, “Stay true to your authentic self.” What does that even mean? Align with your values, what does that mean? For anyone who hasn’t read before, I created this tool called the Magic Triangle to help you understand what is important to you and what your true path does look like? Not according to what society has told you or what you think might be what you need, but what your intuitive self, the self that we probably don’t tap into enough, what that self wants. What’s a yearning there?
I got Gary to fill this out the other day and we ended up with three needs. The idea is that you choose something that you want more of in your life. You might already have it to a degree, but if anything, you’d like even more of it. Came up with were three needs, accomplishment, abundance, and harmony. Now on the face of it, they sound like random words, but actually, there’s a lot of meaning behind them and that’s what we’re going to explore now. I’m going to ask you if you could share with us what each of those would start. Let’s begin with accomplishment and what does accomplishment mean to you?
Accomplishment basically equates to earning something from me. I feel like we are the biggest drivers. We are the common factor in every aspect of our lives and in order for us to reap anything genuinely and being able to receive it, we have to earn it. Accomplishment goes hand in hand with that. Recognizing that you’ve done it as well, like saying, “I did that. I earned that. I deserve that.” Then you’re more likely to handle that in a more diligent, responsible or enjoyable why even.
It’s required getting out of that comfort zone presumably. Accomplishment involves some growth and stretching of yourself.
Recognizing the journey is never complete. It’s just hitting markers along the way and giving yourself credit for, with myself personally. I used to have that double-edged sword of, if I hit a marker, I would instantly look for the next goal. I would instantly look for the moment of giving myself platitude for or recognition of it was not there. It was something that always frustrated me because I would never get to a certain plate because I’d always be looking in the future. Accomplishment is actually recognizing, “I’ve done this.” I may not be in my perfect state, my perfect body or my perfect business or whatever, but I’ve taken steps forward. Every time I get out of my comfort zone, I’d take more steps forward, even if I have to repeat lessons.
Thank you for that. That’s excellent. What I’m hearing is that something that you have to actually earn that involves some degree of effort and growth? You were speaking before there’s no such thing as stays that we’re either expanding or contracting. Imagine it’s on a year on an expansion path through this, but importantly, honoring what you’ve accomplished to, recognizing that and celebrating that. How about abundance? Abundance is a word that can be interpreted in many ways. Tell us why that came up as one of your top three?
Abundance to me is having richness in everything. It can be quite of monetary value, but it’s not all about that. It’s sacrificing yourself on the altar of corporate success and sacrificing everything else, it doesn’t give you abundance. Abundance to me is the whole life, the whole person. You enjoy your life. You have great professional success. You have good social relationships.
You have the financial freedom to be able to do more of what you want. All of it is in growth, in the growth stage of rich and getting richer. Abundance signifies that for me and that’s what I work towards. If I can achieve it for myself, that’s the people around me as well because everything flows over from my cup into the people that I connect with. That’s what abundance means to me.
It’s not just an accumulation of things for its own sake and that richness can apply to every area of life like health, connections and experience of life.
Everything is interconnected as well. It flows on.
Talk to me about harmony. That came up as your number one. Tell us about that.
Harmony came up as my number one because in order for me to earn an accomplish and in order for me to get to the abundance stage, harmony is what I’m focusing on right now. Harmony is different to me than the word balance because I may be focusing more on my physical self and other things may take a step down the scale in terms of how much time? How much energy? How much focus I’m giving it? It’s working well for me in this current moment for me to get where I need to get. When I reach the next stage, another focus may lift up and that may dropdown. My physical focus may drop down and my mental and emotional growth may step up but it’s in a place of harmony.
If you’re looking at balance, you’re trying to get an equal contribution in all aspects of your life in one particular moment. It’s not possible. When we don’t achieve that, the trap is that we like, “My professional life is awesome, but my personal life sucks. I can’t get that balance.” It’s not about balance. It’s about harmony. It’s about getting it flowing and fluid like a musical piece, all these different components working together to give you the result that you want and it changes.
That speaks to your philosophy of how you show up in the world. It’s interesting how balance has been the mantra, but balance it’s like a seesaw. It suggests to non-integrated things vying with each other for greater attention. We’ve got enough competition. We don’t want to introduce it into the self. Then we become a divided self. Harmony, as you express it, while I hear it’s a form of integration where the elements are working with each other and at one point, a family might be playing out loud.
That’s fine. Someone says not discord. It’s finding a flow and maybe this is the time in our evolution as a species where there’s an invitation for a harmonious life, even being given permission to work from home. That’s being able to spend more time with their partners and their kids and that being okay. Maybe that’s the invitation for us into a state of harmony.
Thank you for sharing that. The way the triangle works is interesting. We answer it from the point of view of our inner self. In terms of your inner world, as it describes the thing that’s most important for you, which is your highest value. I have to say, you’re putting it out there already, your highest value being harmony. That’s what you stand for.
I think you’re very clear on that. If you would like, is harmony the vision for you? The mission is how you achieve that vision and that’s basically through accomplishment and abundance. Through accomplishment and abundance, you achieve harmony. By bringing those two aspects into your, life makes you feel good about yourself. You’re integrity with what’s important to you. Does that sound right?
It sounds spot on, Janet.
What’s interesting about this is it always talks to the aspect of us that hasn’t experienced it. These needs are formed by a lack of them at some point in your life. In other words, the pain that we’ve experienced, whether it was physical pain, as in your case, can lead to mental and emotional pain. The pain is actually what makes us who we are. They’ve come from that context of what’s interesting as you heal that pain in your life, then you essentially get out of your way.
Those same three core needs become values. They’re part of your DNA. They’re part of who you are. In fact, you couldn’t live without adhering to them. There’s no effort in it because it’s important to you because you know the pain of not having them and accordingly, they become an expression of your outward self as well. These are what you have to give to others.
We can tease it apart this way. We talk about what’s my why? Your why is actually harmony. That’s what it is. You get out of bed to create a harmonious life for yourself in the spirit of divine selfishness, but it’s also your gift to others. As you give it to yourself, you give to others and they say every business needs a why, but I think when it’s something business owners struggle with is what is the why? We go clutching at values that are external to us, like, “Integrity sounds good. I’ll do it. There’ll be integrity.” “Hang on a sec. It’s got to come from you.”
Harmony comes from you and that is what you give to others. That’s your why, that’s the purpose so others, your clients, can be in harmony with themselves and have a beautiful sense of wellbeing that’s ongoing regardless of what’s going on in the outside world, but what you bring, what the promise is abundance. In your context, it’s an abundance of capacity. By unblocking, whatever it was that was stopping their physical health and maybe also their mental and emotional health, you’re giving them an abundance of capacity that they didn’t have before. Think of that woman from Brisbane comparing what she can do now compared to before.
Abundance of capacity is your what. That’s what you bring to the table and then your how. How you get people to do this is to give them a series of little accomplishments. They’re being rewarded on the journey constantly, whatever that is. There’s something that they do that can be measured that signifies their progress and there’s some acknowledgment from your coaches during that process. A pat on the back and then they’re motivated to take the next step and the next step and be okay with that ongoing growth. Essentially what you give for yourself is ultimately what you have to give to your clients. Does that make sense, Gaz?
It makes perfect sense. Beautifully put.
The other thing that we have to be wary of and in the same way you speak to pain. You say to people, to enter your growth zone, you have to be ready to take action, even while you’re in pain and it’s uncomfortable. My message is very similar in a different context, which is if you want these things, these core needs, then you must be prepared to face the thing that could stop you from having them. Let’s do a dive into that. It’s simple. You know that harmony is your North Star and that’s what hangs out there as the thing that pulls you forward because it’s what you desire most.
In the same way that whatever it is that we desire comes from having suffered the lack of it. Our desire or the lack of what we’ve had actually starts to form who we are. It defines who we become passively to grow. Harmony is important for you because somewhere in your past, you’ve known the pain of lack of harmony. I mentioned that harmony sits out on your right-hand side and we swing 180 degrees to look to your left and there is the opposite of harmony. If you were to sum that up in a word, what would that be the opposite to harmony for you?
Disharmony.
I want you to imagine disharmony and you might want to go back to a moment in your life where you experienced this harmony. Is there anything that comes up for you there?
Straight away where my greatest wounds are with that. It was when I was five years old, my first memory is the fight that my dad, my mom had. I was under the coffee table at that moment when my family broke up. My mom left and I ran after her. Everything was harmonious in my entire world from that. That is my first memory and that is the reference point of pain that set a lot of my life on the path that I did and that was a very disharmonious moment.
When you go back to that moment, what emotions do you feel? What emotions did you feel back then to how old did you say you were?
I was five.
Do you remember the feeling of that being under the table and hearing that arguing and the conflict?
Fear, sadness, confusion. Basically, that fear emotion was the biggest thing. Underlying the anxiety that our first thought was social anxiety in a good portion of my life and what I realized was actually connected to my entire life, underlying that was the fear.
Thank you for sharing that and we could go further than this, but we won’t be within the constraints of the show. If you’re reading this, understand that trauma that Gaz described, we tend to think, is partaking. Some of us say, “I haven’t been traumatized. I had the perfect childhood.” They might not remember that significant moment that’s clear for you guys, but we all experienced this. Every one of us, it’s impossible to be human and not have experienced trauma if you like or I call it a crime because to the child that is a crime.
If the feeling that something wrong has happened suddenly, not only is it the breakup of your parents, but as children, we see ourselves as all-powerful. In other words, and that’s a double-edged sword because as all-powerful creatures, things don’t happen around us. They happen because of us. Part of you, Gary, as a five-year-old would have gone, “Mommy and daddy are breaking up because of me,” and that’s where the real pain lies, more than the breakup. It’s directing it to yourself. This is where shame is born.
What’s fascinating about it is because shame is a misunderstood emotion, but shame is a powerful tool for children because the shame is strong that at that point, and you might not remember this, but subconsciously children when they feel this they go, “Hang on a second. I might not love. I’m not wanted. I’m a bad person because look what I’ve done to mommy and daddy. I better rewrite my life, so it has a happy ending.” We take it upon ourselves to rewrite our life from that point, from the age of five and do that. We have to tell ourselves as a story and a story that’s probably quite dark.
This is the journey. The hero’s journey of the soul is to go to this place and find out what that story is. That’s what I call the core destructive belief. When we can bring that to the surface of ourselves and go, “This has been driving my behavior all my life and I didn’t realize that.” That’s when we step into our power, but otherwise, what we do and this part of the human journey is to reinvent ourselves so that we will have a happy ending. We see this in the entrepreneur space, that core destructive belief, whatever it is, we’ll create a core fear, whatever that is and that core fear is what drives us to be the other, to be someone else. To wear the mask that will provide us and ultimately the love that we’re looking for. It doesn’t do that. It doesn’t work.
At some point in our lives again, not consciously we go, “Plan B didn’t work.” That’s when we enter the state of amnesia. In that state of amnesia, we numb ourselves and that’s when we become addicted to whatever it is. Are you talking about the blind in Brisbane to being an all-or-nothing person, hyperactive or whatever it is? We get into this state of addiction, which only ends up one way, which is it’s unsustainable? We burn out. We become exhausted. Thank you for sharing that to say that this path is common to all of us.
The next step, it’s not for everyone, but it’s to actually discover what that is. It sounds to me as you’re on your growth journey but if anyone listening to this is feeling stuck, or you feel that there’s something wrong with you or everything’s going wrong. Understand there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s this story is still playing out and you’re probably not aware of it, that’s all. Thank you for sharing that to show that it doesn’t take long, does it? To get to the bottom of who you are, doesn’t have to take long.
The use of the right tools administered by people in a position that want to help you is incredibly powerful. I’ve always been a person of reflection, but one of the things I could have used to fast-track that is finding people who resonate with me and making them allies in that journey. I have found allies, but when you find an ally and you think they’re an ally, you got to approach them. You got to be open and say, “This is where I’m at. I need some help.” Often, you’ll be surprised by how much assistance can be gathered from that.
Thank you for that. I think that’s an important message. Imagine you’re speaking to someone out there. Maybe it’s a business owner, someone who’s maybe they’re feeling overweight, demotivated, maybe a bit unloved. What would you say to that person that’s reading this?
What all inside of this is that the pain and the discomfort that you feel? No one knows what it is exactly. No one knows what it’s like to walk in your shoes, but what they can do is they can have come from a place of empathy. If you understand that your journey is your own, but you can have people along the way to guide you to support you, to help you be accountable.
That is a crucial step in moving forward but you have to understand that no relationship nothing exists in this universe, right down to the cellular level, without a relationship to others. In order for you to have a relationship with others, whether it be a coach, a mentor, a spouse, a child, you have to be open in your communication. You have to open yourself up a little bit in order to be changed.
Rather than trying to protect yourself and cocoon yourself, you have to open up to that pain. You have to open up to others in order for you to move forward and breakthrough that limitation. That’s the why you get uncomfortable. That’s your first thing to get uncomfortable and that will help you grow. The white, the unhealthiness, all the aspects that you’re not a fan of in your life can change and you got to be getting used to getting uncomfortable first.
Gary “Gaz” Wagner, thank you so much for your words of wisdom. I love the work that you’re doing. I hope that someone out there has been reading this conversation and will come forward and be that vulnerable to ask for help and being rewarded accordingly. Thank you.
Thank you, Janet. The beautiful thing about things like this is that they stay out there for a long time. I don’t know who will read this and he’ll be affected, but think about how you can recalibrate and how you can live great. I hope this interview has helped you.
Thank you.
