Life-Changing Challengers
Dive into the heart of transformation with "Life-Changing Challengers," a podcast that inspires listeners to turn their challenges into opportunities for growth. Hosted by Brad Minus, a seasoned endurance coach with over 13 years of experience, this show brings you compelling stories of resilience, ambition, and personal triumph.
Brad and his guests share their journeys of overcoming obstacles through endurance sports, personal development, and pursuing passions. From completing Ironman triathlons to conquering personal and professional hurdles, "Life-Changing Challengers" is your guide to breaking barriers and achieving your dreams.
Whether you're looking to incinerate your limits, find inspiration to chase your big passion or enjoy motivational stories of people who've transformed their lives, this podcast is for you. Join us to explore how embracing challenges can lead to a happier, more fulfilled life.
Subscribe, review, and share to be part of a community dedicated to making every challenge a stepping stone to success. Follow "Life-Changing Challengers" to ignite your desire, push your boundaries, and embark on your journey to the extraordinary.
Life-Changing Challengers
Overcoming Odds: Jonathan McLernon's Journey Through Trauma, ADHD, and Personal Transformation
What if your premature birth was just the beginning of overcoming life’s toughest challenges? Meet Jonathan McLernon, a weight loss coach and podcaster, who shares his gripping journey from being born at just 26 weeks on a tiny island outside Vancouver to battling developmental issues and defying all odds. His story begins with his parents' quick thinking and extraordinary resilience, leading him through a turbulent childhood and shaping him into the person he is today. Jonathan offers us a window into his life, reflecting on how these early experiences have molded his perspective as a father and imbued him with a profound sense of resilience.
Ever wondered how trauma and ADHD intersect to impact family generations? Jonathan and I draw parallels between our childhoods, recounting the chaos of navigating traditional education systems with ADHD. We open up about our fathers' struggles, shaped by historical traumas like World War II PTSD, and how these experiences have influenced our parenting styles and relationships. We also highlight the impressive traits of our children, who surprise us daily with their incredible memories and unique learning abilities. This episode is a deep dive into the emotional and psychological hurdles of growing up and raising kids in the shadow of past traumas.
Traveling through life’s unexpected twists, we venture from schoolyard fights to the structured chaos of military life, and from hopeful new beginnings to harrowing experiences in South Africa. Jonathan recounts his nine and a half years in the military and the unexpected turns that led him to teaching in Mexico and surviving a violent attack in Africa. This episode captures his journey through trauma, binge eating, and self-discovery, emphasizing the importance of seeking help and forming authentic human connections. Jonathan’s story is a powerful testament to the enduring human spirit, offering inspiration and practical advice for anyone grappling with life’s challenges. Tune in to this riveting episode of Life Changing Challengers and be prepared to be moved and motivated.
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FreedomNutritionCoach.com
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All right, welcome back to Life Changing Challengers. My name is Brad Minas, I am your host again, and with me is coach Jonathan McLernan. He's a weight loss coach, he's a podcaster and he's an innovator in the weight loss environment. So how are you doing today, jonathan?
Jonathan:Fantastic. I think every day is a good day when you have kids. I have a three-year-old and eight-month-old.
Brad:Some parents might say it's one of the more challenging times in life, but there's nothing better than baby snuggles. And not too long before coming here to record, I get snuggles from an eight-month-old and I just go like man. I wish I could bottle your childhood, how you grew up. What was the environment like? Give us a good picture into what was Jonathan like as a kid.
Jonathan:Well, I had a very unique start to the world. I joke that I was a failure of 1980s birth control. Shout out to my parents. My brother was 14 months old at the time that I was born. I was born at 26 weeks, so I was not expected to survive. I was born at home, 5 am on a Sunday morning on a little island called Hatsik Island, which is just outside of the city of Vancouver, british Columbia, in Canada.
Jonathan:I actually I haven't published this book yet, but I've been writing a book kind of about my story, so one day it's in the shiny object store. So I I actually interviewed my parents about this because, like I actually now as an adult want to understand what it was like for you when you were actually younger than me, and you know, for my dad. When my mom says I think the baby's coming, my dad's like what? He's not due till april. It's january and apparently it was about two seconds worth of labor. And there it was.
Jonathan:So my dad said I was blue, ears folded over, eyes shut, and first thing my mom said was is it alive? Yeah, so my dad had the presence of mind to do cpr with his pinky finger and I guess that's when I started crying and that kind of got my lungs inflated and my heart going. It was probably 15, 20 minutes before the amulets could get there, because it was January, it's winter, it's slushy, snowy and it's kind of out of the city and they got me to one place before taking me to another place, and at the Royal Colombian Hospital they told my parents, like don't get too attached because you might not make it. So they said, you know, we got him Go home, be with your 14 months old and come back in a day or two. So that was my start in life. I don't remember a lot of it, but yeah.
Brad:Is that normal? I mean, as far as hospitals go in Canada, do they literally tell people to all right, listen, if we can't do anything, you need to go home and then come back in a couple of days. This was 1982.
Jonathan:So maybe things were just a little bit different back then. The other thing is so the hospital they brought me to which is the best hospital they get me to was probably an hour's drive away from at least from where my parents lived. It's middle of winter, it's slushy, cold, icy. My mom's got a 14-month-old, my dad's I think it was a pest control exterminator at the time, working crazy hours. It was just rough. So I think they're actually just trying to give my parents a break. So we got good nurses here, things like that. We're going to take care of them. Just don't get too attached until we know if this one's going to live.
Jonathan:So, as evidenced by my presence here, I did make it, but that was my start in life. Along with that actually apparently comes some complications, and sometimes they don't show up till later in life or things that you go like. I wonder why. This was always a little bit tougher for me, but when you skip a trimester which is basically what I did I skipped 14 weeks in the womb there's a lot of motor development that normally would take place. I got two boys, and both of them it was like they rode bicycles inside my wife's uterus, like when she was pregnant with them. They're like hey, if your kid has like less than 10 kicks an hour, I think it is like, but these guys have like a hundred kicks a minute. Like what is going on? My wife could hardly sleep.
Jonathan:So I'm on life support in an incubator gold plated if you will, because apparently that they're very that's the very good conductors, gold is and the nurses, I think, called me the little chipmunk because I had these puffy cheeks. That was maybe the one thing that was like big. Everything else was like toothpicks, but I had puffy cheeks. Like he looks like a little chipmunk. I was two pounds nine ounces. I went down to two pounds one ounce and then kind of started gaining weight. They said looks like this kid's a fighter, he just might make it, kind of thing. And so I think my mom, I was kind of on life support for about nine weeks and then they're like it, looks like he's going to make it, like he can probably take him home now, kind of thing.
Jonathan:But they had to work really hard to like teach me motor skills. I don't think I walked until I was maybe a year and a half, maybe 16 months somewhere around there. So it without that time in the womb, I don't. You don't sort of get that motor development. I'm also very, very poor eyesight. I had laser eye surgery, so it's good now. I've had issues with digestion most of my life. It's cool that you can survive that kind of thing. But there's a few other things that start to show up. They're like oh okay, when you don't get sort of the same level of development, it's not quite the same. So that was my start in life.
Brad:I imagine that the brain has a big development going on at that time of the trimesters and things. Did you find anything once you got to school?
Jonathan:Well, I joke that I got a really good brain, but I got it free of charge, so I can't really take the credit for it. What I kind of lacked in physical coordination, like I was kind of just awkward. I wasn't even like awkward in the clumsy sense, but like just learning how to kick a ball, swing a bat, like the normal things that kids do. It just took me longer to figure it out. I described as it just felt like there was this disconnect between my brain and my arms and my legs, and I couldn't I couldn't really figure out why. It was just like it just doesn't work so, but it wasn't like. I mean, I don't think I didn't go through any special special like physical therapy, it was just yeah, I guess you miss out on something. You have to work harder to create those brain connections.
Jonathan:What's really cool, though, is that your brain can do that. That shout out to neuroplasticity and your brain's ability to learn these things, because before I went to, like his kindergarten class, I'm trying to answer all the questions and like whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, kid, you're not going to school for another year yet. Like it's okay turns out. Later in life I learned that I have adhd. I'm like oh, that explains why my brain works the way it does, right, I'm sorry.
Brad:There's some parallels that are going on between you and me. I was six weeks preemie, but yeah, back then that's still full term, or at least closer than you were. Let's put it that close. Yeah, but I also, now that you say that and you know, back back. So I grew up in the seventies. So, and then in the eighties, seventies I look at more gray hair than you. You just can't see it Cause my hair's cut short. My dad I always had that. I had that. He started me in hockey, then tried baseball and I never was really good at any of it. I went to soccer and I better, but not great. You know, nothing ever came up like nothing came out of it. I was a mediocre student, but if you sat me down and made me do the work, I could do it, and I could do it rather quickly and understand it, and I didn't find out until I was 33 that I had adhd. So the parallels are amazing.
Jonathan:Well and and so back then they would have never known to look for it. So here's why I think I got overlooked. I have a really good memory as well, and my kid seems to have inherited my three-year-old recites entire books back to me and I was like, is this normal? Like I don't have a lot of experience with kids my wife has been a child, child entertainer and childhood educator and she's like no, it's not normal, he's, he's got, he's got your memory. I'm like, oh okay, so normally with ADHD people struggle as you have to focus more and start to learn more complex topics.
Jonathan:I have a real in sort of the traditional educational sense, where you learn information regurgitated for tests. I could ace tests without really having to study very much. I just kind of like show up and do it, and then I kind of have a bit of like an engineering brain as well. I can figure out pretty quickly how things work, and so I think I got pretty good at like faking it, like I scored really high grades. I was known as like a pretty smart kid, and I am, in a sense, but it was actually in a conversation with a fellow coach, oh, maybe a couple of months ago, and I was talking about my three-year-old and she said here's something you got to watch out for. They can sound like they really understand something and they have no idea because they know what the right answer is supposed to sound like, but it doesn't mean they actually grasp it. So just be careful, because he'll go through school like that, not actually learning as much as you think he is, but being able to give you the right answers. And I was like man. He kind of just hit on my education In high school. I made the honor roll year after year because I could recite all the answers, but most times I had very little interest in actually learning this stuff. I just would recite it and then, once I was done writing a test, I'd promptly forget it.
Jonathan:Um, in terms of childhood like growing up I had a pretty good childhood. I look back now through an adult lens and I go. My dad in particular had a really hard life. I now understand why he struggles and has struggled with the various things he did. I have so much compassion and love for him because of who he has worked to be and become. He grew up in a household that really had no love for him. It was basically a cuff upside the head kind of thing.
Jonathan:But then my grandfather was a prisoner of war from world war ii, captured by the germans in north africa, like came back with ptsd, but they didn't call it that back then. Mary doesn't need fuck yeah, which it's kind of funny because I think shock is actually a pretty good expression. I'm like that's a. It's a pretty accurate way of describing like what's happening to their brain kind of thing. You just relive the same thing over and over again and we'll get to my PTSD later on.
Jonathan:What fascinates me is patterns. So I look at my grandfather and what he experienced. He would have went to war as a relatively young man. He just experienced the horrors of war. There's nothing good about it, there's nothing glorious about it, it's just awful. It's just a meat grinder for most who fight in. That Comes back marries out of a sense of duty. My grandmother the reason why she married him is because her fiance was an English army officer and he was killed in the war.
Jonathan:My grandfather's from New Zealand. He had an accent somewhat similar to the British accent. My grandmother was educated at McGill in Montreal and then got her PhD in clinical science from Harvard. She was one of the first women to get a PhD from Harvard. My grandmother probably should have been royalty or something, I guess and my grandfather just married out of a sense of duty and fathered children, because that's just what you did.
Jonathan:That was the groundwork for my dad, and my dad had a twin brother who unfortunately passed away by suicide at the age of 23. He suffered from severe bipolar disorder. It was again not really understood back then. At least it was peaceful for him. But of course for my dad the one person in his life through his entire childhood was by his side, that understood him, that knew him like that gave him stability when his parents didn't was taken from him. So I just I didn't say that because I, you know, I think about a human being going through that.
Jonathan:The other things that my dad was shipped all over the world to boarding schools from the grandfather's oil field geologist. One year he's in Libya, next year he's in I don't know some other country. He actually came to Calgary, alberta, like not far from where I'm from, you know. But most of my dad's sort of growing up years were kind of either boarding school in England, in Victoria, british Columbia, or New Zealand and Australia. So you put that level of instability, with no love, into a developing brain. You know, like my dad just knew that he didn't want to be like his dad, he didn't know what to you know, and so that was so that, and why I share that is because that sort of shaped some of my response to experiences I went through and struggles that I had, but I didn't know what at the time. So the other thing I struggled with as a kid was temper tantrums.
Jonathan:Turns out I'm an empath For most of my life. I would have had no idea what an empath even was. I seem to have an ability to read people that I can't really describe, read sense, whatever. I joke that my coaching superpower is x-ray vision. I can't explain it.
Jonathan:Vision, I can't explain it, but as a kid, like what it means is like I take on all these emotions and I don't know how to. I don't know how to filter them or anything, and eventually they have to be expressed and so it just comes out as a flood of emotions. You know, wild temper, tension, kicking and screaming and pounding the floor and just, but it's my now look back and I go, my brain was overloaded, it didn't know what to do with all these big feelings running around in it. My parents would stick my head under the cold shower to basically shock me out of it because they didn't know what else to do back then and I go wow, yeah, because you didn't even, because the the feelings that you wanted to express weren't even yours and so I would have had words for it and, and from their perspective, the way that they were raised like I was, I was acting out and I was misbehaving and things like that.
Jonathan:And I'm not I'm not angry at my parents. I love them dearly, they live. They live 10 minutes drive away. I love them. I'm so glad they're in my life, I'm so glad I still have them in my life. And, uh, but I look back, I go, they didn't. They didn't really know what to do with this kid. I go, I probably wouldn't have either if I was raised in that era and raised. You know, my mom had a beautiful, wonderful upbringing. You know, my her, her upbringing was lovely all things considered. Um, there's still tragedy in her life too, but it was. It was much better. So, so that kind of shaped um.
Jonathan:So as a young, young boy, like going to school, I got into a lot of fights as well. Um, cause I was. I was like a temper, I was a hothead, whatever, but there's always a part of me and I was a pretty big kid. Um, until about 13, when I was six foot one at 13. And then I just stopped. I was like, oh great, I'm going to be like six foot seven and basketball player, cause that was the one sport I was reasonably good at. I just stopped at six foot one.
Jonathan:I was like at 13, I was like I peaked early, um so, but as a kid I would get into a lot of fights, um, and I, I in a sense won a lot of fights. But back then, say back in the day, schoolyard fights were like once one kid was on the ground, the fight was considered done, it was considered you won. There's none of this like filming it for social media, stomping the kid going back to the kids, pounding it was like it was a scrap. You might even have got up and shaking hands after the fight kind of thing. Maybe not, but like you kind of got over it. Um, but I, I would go home and I would cry afterwards and I didn't know why, cause I didn't know, I was an empath, I didn't know that, like the fight that we were having, whatever it was doing, and if I heard a kid, I'd go home and cry afterwards and I couldn't.
Brad:I didn't know why I was crying after I won a fight.
Jonathan:This, hey, because you were feeling the other person's, you were feeling the guy that you were fighting, yeah. So then I realized I don't, I don't want to get into fights anymore. Yeah, because it hurts me, even if I win the fight, like it hurts me on the inside, I don't know why. Again, as a kid I had no, no way to understand these feelings, right, like I had no, no frame of reference. You know, like most parents, my parents had no background in psychology or understanding of any of these things. I just knew that I was, I was troubled by these things and I couldn't, I couldn't put worse to it. So, um, yeah, so I kind of coast, coasted through school, um, ended up going to university studying music and chemistry of all things, music and chemistry, okay, yeah, I know. I thought, well, I love music, I've got an ear for it, so kind of have an ear for music, languages and mathematics, they all kind of seem to go together. So I thought, okay, I'm going to be practical, maybe I'll just be a teacher.
Jonathan:I grew up in a little town, 2 000 people, like no internet, right, like my ideas weren't very big about what I was going to do with my life back then. So I was like it seems to make sense, like maybe I'll just do something reliable, like become a teacher. I'll go study music and chemistry, then I can be a science teacher. And chemistry is kind of in demand, more than biologists, because biology is easy, so. And physics was maybe just more than I wanted to do more effort, right. And physics was maybe just more than I wanted to do more effort, right. So chemistry felt like the middle road.
Jonathan:Turns out, chemistry is pretty challenging too. When you get into the upper level you know calculations, quantum mechanics and things like that. So that's what I did. Then I realized, okay, I probably don't have much of a future in music. I actually don't want to teach music. I don't think I'm going to become a famous musician or even a producer to famous people. So then I kind of was like now, what do I do with my life? So I left university.
Brad:I was like, okay, I wrote some exams, I left and I went and joined the Navy. Wow, the Canadian Royal Navy. Yeah, royal Canadian Navy.
Jonathan:Royal Canadian Navy, the RCN, right, right, right, yeah. Yeah, the Royal turned back in there, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. Yeah, I became a Marine engineer, so working on anything with moving parts, and part of me enjoyed being in the military. I liked in some sense the structure, predictability of it, but the other part of me just got insanely bored. Again, I had no idea this was adhd but I was just like and I got into.
Jonathan:I would say I got into like a lot of trouble but I didn't fit in that well with like you're supposed to just shut up and do your job. And I didn't register me that like there's a reason why they're not actually picking the most efficient way to do this. They're trying to give you something to do, because you're in a floating steel box in the middle of the ocean with nothing to do and bored people get into trouble, so they're just keeping you busy. But I was kind of too smart for the game, too smart for real good, open mouth a little bit too often. And so I I was one step below chief engineer in my educational um path. So I I was, uh, basically chief, like I ran an engineering crew and then we'd have like three sort of of these engineering officers, and then you have your chief engineer on top of that. But my rank was like two hooks. So I had guys that were like two, two ranks above me in terms of their rank in the military, but they were under me in terms of my department.
Jonathan:I was in this weird place and there's a bunch of politics in there too, and, and you know, I I just joked that, I was I was the wrong demographics. You know, frankly, no offense to anybody, but I was a green Democrat. I didn't. I didn't speak French. You know, like they were looking for bilingual and they were looking to get more women into positions of responsibility. And hey, that's a great thing, nothing against that. And I just opened my mouth too many times and it's like I'm never going to get promoted. Clearly, it doesn't matter how good I am. In fact, I topped the merit list two years in a row. That's like in your trade. That's the rankings of like how you perform in your trade. You'd think that would have got me promoted, but it didn't, because I didn't toe the line.
Jonathan:So so I left the military. My wife and I packed up our lives. Oh, along the way, I met a woman, got married to her. She's from Australia. So when you mentioned Queensland, oh yeah, been over there a few times, right. Yeah, oh, it's Detroit. Um. So I came home and said let's just go teach English somewhere. So we kind of packed everything up into a storage unit, hopped on a plane to Mexico and flew down to Puerto Vallarta Not much of a plan. And we're like, oh, maybe we'll just kind of go for one of those like six week adventures or something like that. Sort of see, uh, three years before we ever found a way back to Sanidad and and really it was it was it was in the travels where I had some really hard experiences that we can get into. I'm sure it will be of value for your audience, and that's where the struggles really started. But now you have a bit of my backstory, right?
Brad:right. So you know what? I have never done an episode on myself. And I do that specifically because I want to be able to do comparables with my audience members. And again, we've already done that.
Brad:And I was in the military for nine and a half years and I was almost in the same position, but I was lucky enough to be put in positions where I was able to make my jobs. So my first, my first duty station was korea, okay, and they put me in what they called in and out processing and at the same, at that time, the, the, the, uh, the way, the. What we were supposed to do is they would do the forms that when people came into country, you would basically say okay, if you get hurt, these are the people that get your benefits, let's make sure that your records are updated and then we'll give you your orders and you'll be sent to your, sent to your unit here in korea. But that might be that's where I was. Well, when we got, when I was first, when I was first given there, it was typewriters with carbon paper in the sheet. You actually typed on the typing blah, blah, which was a lot of waste because they would make one mistake and you can't use whiteout because whiteout doesn't go through carbon paper, right, yeah, yeah, I'm really, I'm really like digging deep here. So I was. So what was interesting was is that when I first got in country, my, the person I was replacing, wasn't done yet, so I had to be put on, just like what you said I basically had to be.
Brad:I was put on busy work because they had to keep me busy before my trace opened up. Well, we were, we were. They were told that we had to do inventory on this quonset hut. And look at the quonset hut and there's a bunch of computers sitting there and I'm like well, what are those? Well, those are 486s. You probably won't even not recognize that name. Um, but they are 486s, which is like one of of the 286 came. And then the 486 came, which was IBM compatible PCs, and those are 486s, we don't use them anymore.
Brad:Blah, blah, blah and I go back and I get into my duty station and I'm all of a sudden I'm on typewriters and Urban paper and I'm like I went to the captain. I'm like but there's these things that are sitting there. Well, those are used for casualty operations when we go to the field. Well, when do we go to the field? Once every quarter. And I'm like, oh well, once every quarter, for what? 30 days? And they're like no three, we go for three days Because our operations here are too important. We would be down for that long.
Brad:So I was like, well, that's kind of a waste when you've got a whole freaking section, two sections actually, in and out processing using typewriters and carbon paper. So I went, I can take four hours off their time Now in and out processing. They would be gone from five in the morning and they'd be struggling. They gone from five in the morning and they'd be struggling. They'd be coming into the barracks about nine, nine, 30, 10 o'clock at night where everybody else had a regular eight hour day. Right, yeah.
Brad:So I was like, okay, so I was given those opportunities. And that wasn't the only opportunity. Um, because of that, I networked all these, all these computers together together. I got a printer thing and they finally now, and I got them, I got, I requisitioned the software and all of a sudden I took a their, their 10 hour day and brought it down to six hours. Um, so now they can do pt. Now they were able to go to the, they were able to go on ftxs and and the whole bit.
Brad:So the the captain was like all right, we need you to do that without processing too. And then after that they're like well, you seem to know a lot about this stuff, so why don't we put you in? We call it the J2, which is the information section, and then you'll work with the information section instead. So I was like perfect. Then it got to the Pentagon and the same thing happened. There was an opportunity and I took it just like you, literally. So those parallels are amazing. I wish I had the didactic memory that you did. Oh, yeah, but yeah, so all right. So now you spent three years in Mexico.
Jonathan:No, I only spent six months in Mexico, three years total traveling. So we moved down to, we flew down Puerto Vallarta and then we went to Guadalajara. Guadalajara is the second biggest city in Mexico six, seven million people and we went to a school down there to get a four-week English teaching certificate, um, a practicum in a school around the corner. It was a nice little setup and then he's jobs teaching English there and we got a little hacienda just down the road. So it was basically it would used to be like a large house where you'd like go through these big, tall, like probably 20 foot tall doors, like horse and buggy would come through and the bottom floor would have been like all horse stables back in the day, like 100 years ago or or long you know. Now it was just each horse stable was converted into there's a bed and a bedside table and a couple chairs, kind of thing. It's a room that you pay like 100 bucks a month for, kind of thing, and so we just walked to and from the school in this like downtown part of guadalajara but like there weren't a lot of white people there. For those who are watching you can see I'm not very. I don't look very Mexican, nor does my wife Now. I loved living down there. My students were amazing. You know, what was so cool is, um. You know, for them, like, learning English like meant something, cause it was, like, you know, a door to opportunity, and so they were so enthusiastic about learning.
Jonathan:My wife's a born performer, it's just what she does, and we would horse around with our students, tell jokes, sing songs, whatever. There was one point where we were in a building where it had like a I don't know say seven stories and had like a big sort of atrium in the middle and then all glass on the inside so you could see across to other classrooms, basically. And uh, there was like the, the director or the head of the school had a classroom right across from mine, and so he'd be, you know, all stern and whatever and like writing on his, his whiteboard and I'd like bust out, I'd pull off my, my um sharp here by a whiteboard marker and I'd start using like a microphone. I just started like blasting out, singing out a song, kind of thing, and his class would then start looking through the glass at whatever I was doing, because clearly we're introducing this guy like writing sentences on the whiteboard, and then he'd turn around see what's going on. Of course I would just whip around, pretend to be like writing on the whiteboard again like nothing was happening and it kind of became this, this game, um, but I, oh man, I like and I tell you what, uh, living down there, like the average Mexican, like when they're not looking for tourists, all those like they're just some of the warmest, most hospitable people, man, they'd love to eat and dance and whatever. Like it was just. And we just made like local friends who, again they, you know, because we actually weren't, we didn't have a bunch of money either. That's the funny thing. I was like hey, guess what? We're going to pay the equivalent of four bucks an hour, like it was, we're not, we're not rich either. And so they like showed us like some of the local spots that you go to and save money and whatnot.
Jonathan:There was one time we were supposed to meet someone at a coffee shop and we walked in. So my wife and I walk in this coffee shop. So already we stand out cause we're very white, like I'm, I used to get called casper as a kid, right. So we walk into this sort of somewhat dimly lit coffee shop, slash bar and a bunch of heads like turn to look at us and and this, this guy comes up, you know very nicely, but he's like I think you're in the wrong place. And we kind of just like took stock as your eyes kind of adjust to this like dimly lit room and it was very clearly a gay bar, which is very interesting.
Jonathan:In mexico is mexico still quite conservative, but guadalajara is a little bit more liberal of a city and I was like, yeah, it's a bunch of it's just a bunch of gay men, um, dressed very flamboyantly and they're like you can stay if you want, but you're in the wrong place, that's like. No, I think our friends wanted us in that coffee shop or us, or I just got the wrong side of the street apparently, um, and and you know we got a few whistles and things like that like, but it was all. It was all kind of in good natured fun. But you know, like it's just look, they have fun down there. They had, they kind of had fun with life in general.
Jonathan:You know, obviously there's another part of mexican life that's really really difficult. That's the cartels and all those kind of human trafficking, the whole dark side of it. Of course we didn't see a lot of that, thankfully. But we also knew the police were corrupt. So you have like the federalities who drive around like these big black armored pickup trucks, you know six guys in the back with automatic weapons and maybe a mounted .50 cal, and you're just like, just turn your head and just kind of look away, just don't draw attention to
Jonathan:yourself. We, we were shabby clothes and stuff Cause another teacher who was from the U S, he got pulled over when he was in a taxi and they're like hey, we found this bag of cocaine in your pocket. And he was like, no, you didn't. I attached her. I was like shut up, you idiot, give them the money. Like you do not want to go to a Mexican
Jonathan:jail. And so we kind of realized, you know, we loved it down there. We loved teaching. It was, it was fun. We had friends down there. We made friends like, but we're also pretty vulnerable, like we're just sitting ducks. You know, we we kind of got lucky we never got robbed. We were sure we'd get robbed down there at some point, but we didn't. We even got neighborhood called zapopan, um, and a lot of cartel heads have like mansions in this super rich neighborhood, um, and we were living in like this dingy like centro historica, this old sort of beat up old downtown kind of thing, um, and and just like eating street food off these local taco vendors, it was great, um, so I really loved it there. But two after we left, there was a drive-by shooting right outside our school and like two people were killed. I was like maybe we've got the sign to like leave at the right
Jonathan:time. So we we actually got job offers, uh, from Italy, because we were planning on heading down to South America, we're going to go down to Peru and you know, machu Picchu and that kind of thing. That was what we're going to do. But, uh, we were like, okay, well, let's see if we can find some other English teaching jobs down there. And my wife was like, hey, there's this job offer in Italy. Let's, let's try this, okay, um, I didn't think they would take me because it was actually, um, teaching the older, sorry, teaching English to children. And my wife, you know, tablet educator, she's a trained clown and theater performer and all this. I'm like, yeah, they're totally gonna take you. I'm like an ex-military guy with a chemistry degree like they're not gonna hire me, but let's try anyways. And then turns out they did, they didn't care. I could teach english. So the funny thing is, in Italy I was a huge
Jonathan:hit. Italy still has a very, I'll say, male centric culture and so for female teachers it can be a bit rough, because Italian children have to be among the worst behaved in the world. Just yeah, they're terribly behaved. They whine and kick and cry and scream and snivel and all the rest of it. They can be some of the most frustrating kids to work with. You know the Mexicans, they had just so much, it was like tons of fun, they had so much energy and enthusiasm. But they're like hey, man, learning English is important to me because I know it represents more opportunity. So they actually wanted to. So that's why we loved it so
Jonathan:much. Italy was just kind of like they're just chaotic, it so much. Italy was just kind of like they're just chaotic. But it's that whole pass down from generation to generation. Right, they just they. They kick and scream and cry and fight with each other and whatever else. But I walk in the room and I'm a six foot one, two, 40. Like. These little kids were like whoa, you're a pretty big guy. Um, okay, we'll listen to you. And so, um, there's a video somewhere on the internet and hopefully it's not easily found of me like leading the circle of 200 children in the song of appealing bananas and eating bananas and pounding my chest like a gorilla, and they're
Jonathan:just. But the funny thing is. So I would go in there and for the first like I don't know week I just wouldn't crack a smile with this group of kids, I'd just be mr, mr, hard ass kind of thing. But then after that, like okay, we can have fun with this guy as long as we sort of stay within the bounds. And by the end of camp, like every kid was like running up and wanting to like get a hug or a high five for me and things like that, whereas a lot, of, a lot of the young female teachers bless their hearts, they would go in there and oh, they're so cute and they're adorable, and blah, blah, blah. I was like, but these little children are monsters. Okay, you have to see them as that first, and by by, like the third week, they're all yanking their hair out. Like I can't control my classroom. I was like now, to be fair, like I said, hey, if I, if I was like a five foot two, you know, 98 pound, like 19 year old female. I probably would have a hard time too, I you know, but I wasn't. So that was kind of a fun
Jonathan:experience. But that company that we worked for, they were posing as like a nonprofit organization. Well, to avoid like higher taxation in Italy, and um, they got raided by the Guardia di Finanza, which is like their financial crimes police, their offices did. Thankfully we weren't around at the time, but we didn't really have an actual visa for working in Italy. Um, and they made us cash and envelopes. We were like, whatever turns out, the whole world of teaching english is pretty shady. Anybody who's like taught english overseas will like know exactly what I'm talking about. Like, yes, there's some reputable schools out there, that's probably about one in five. Like, the whole english teaching world is pretty shady. They just take advantage of the fact that a lot of us just want to go to some other country, have a different experience, pay us in cash. Who cares? Kind of writing you. It was no different in Mexico
Jonathan:too. I'll share with just one funny story from Mexico, because they couldn't use my name on any official documents about the classroom stuff because I wasn't on the books, I didn't know this, but it turns out it wasn't. So it would always say like pendiente for the name of the teacher, meaning like teacher pending. But Mexicans have a lot of, I'm going to say, phallic slang, so I thought one day it'd be funny to write on the board, señor Pendiente. And I think they said to me hey, teacher, I don't know if you want to write that, I'm like why? And they're like, you know, they're like trying to be polite to me, because they're like we don't want to be too hard on this guy. But apparently pendiente is slang for a swinging penis.
Jonathan:And I was like dang you guys, because at first they're just like laughing uproariously. And then when one student very kindly came up to me and was like hey, maybe I should clarify this for you, and yeah, and of course they'd always be like what'd you have for breakfast? Cuevas.
Brad:Ha ha ha. Like Cuevas are slang for balls, like Cuevas, eggs, balls, whatever, like everything is like innuendo with them. So once you, once you figure this out, it gets, it gets to be a lot of fun and it gets pretty funny. But I was a bit of a few jokes in Mexico just because of that. So all right, so you went to Italy, you went from Mexico. It sounds like you had fun in both.
Jonathan:What was it Did you have? Did you do another contract, or did you end up going, going to Poland to teach English and lived in Poland for a year? Well, like 10 months for like a school year, kind of thing. My brother was living in Turkey at the time he still does to this day and so we went to Poland and this guy from South Africa came to Poland and lived with us over there and taught English for a bit, but then, being South African, like his travels a little bit harder, especially in Europe. The owner of the school again tried to erase the stamp out of his passport to get him to stay longer, and he's like whoa, whoa, whoa, you like that'll get me arrested, man, like. So we had to go back home. So we ended up going down to South Africa and that that's where I went through like a life-changing experience. Um, we went, we moved down to South Africa and started teaching down there, and it was down there that, um, we were teaching on a nature reserve, um, so we thought this this is great. You know we're not naive, like, we know South Africa, but we went down there 2011.
Jonathan:It was a year after the World Cup. We're like man, they invested in all this infrastructure, all this security to have like a safe World Cup, all this kind of stuff. We're going down with South African friends, we're going to a city that's known to be reasonably safe, all this kind of stuff and so we live in a town called Grahamstown in Eastern Cape so it's halfway between Port Elizabeth, east London for those of you who know South Africa and so we're out on this nature reserve and one night we'd only been there about two weeks. All our luggage got lost and we landed in South Africa the end of July, beginning of August, which is middle of winter down there, and although it's not winter like we have in Canada, it's blinking cold because they don't insulate their houses, and so we had like no clothes for like three days down there. So it's funny because people think traveling the world, this is amazing, this is this great life. You know, lifelong adventure, it kind of is. But then you have stuff like this happen all the time and you're like, oh, it's not so easy to just go to the store and getting some more clothes or something, um, but down there, um, one night pardon me, monday night, um August 15th 2011, I was going back to the instructor's cabin which was kind of nestled away in the trees. You know, there's there's, there's monkeys, there's all kinds of wildlife out there. This is South Africa.
Jonathan:And uh, the the door to the cabin was like slightly ajar and so when I thought so, maybe I forgot to lock it. I look back now I realized I forgot to notice or failed to notice, deadbolt sticking out. The door opens and I see three guys at the table. I recognized one of them, but he wasn't in uniform. He was one of the Rangers, but he was off duty. So then my first thought goes to oh, maybe they were going to, like I don't know, repair the tap or something you know, cause it was Monday. Maybe maybe someone who was, cause we would go back in town on the weekends. Maybe someone made a complaint about something. They were coming to repair something. No, they weren't.
Jonathan:I didn't see the fourth guy who then smashed me over the head while I'm standing at the door, but kind of like trying to figure out what's going on, he smashes me over the head with a rock and, yeah, then blood starts, kind of seeing stars. I'm a little bit dazed. These guys jump up off the table. They were, they were like they are drinking tea and rusks, right, roybus tea and rusks. So if you're South African again, you'll know Roybus tea and rusks. They were like literally helping themselves to our food. They weren't expecting me, I don't think, to come back at that time. They were robbing us really off, and then they would have come in to rob us, basically, and so these guys just, you know, I get smashed over the head again. Like I follow the ground, I'm like no, I'm not unconscious, thankfully, but I'm like I don't know what is going on.
Jonathan:Um, and these guys, you know, just started like stomping and kicking and beating on me. And there's one thing that kind of stuck in my mind, though, and that was I'm wearing like a collared golf shirt for those who are listening, those are watching a shirt like this. And, uh, this guy, it is dark out too. Here's, the thing is dark. I'm by myself. Like everyone else was in a building, like 200 feet away, and it's it's noisy, and so it's well lit up. Um, they can't see or hear me at all. I'm by myself. This guy grabbed me by the collar of the shirt as he's swinging the rock towards my face and smashed me to the bone, like this guy's smashing me across the face intending to kill me, and he's he's kind of smiling as he's doing this. It's, it's very unnerving to actually stare into the face of pure evil. Um yeah, so I don't know how I got the strength to get up. I've been smashed over the head multiple times with a rock, I've been beaten and stomped and kicked and they're they're laughing and having a time with this because they know that nobody can hear me and there's kind of a cultural part of it down there, like they could have just stabbed me and walked away, but they wanted me to suffer. So they were gonna. They were gonna make this last kind of thing and maybe that's the reason I'm still alive today.
Jonathan:I don't know if you have any religious beliefs. I'm a Christian and I say that I believe that God gave me the strength to get to my feet. Like these guys weren't huge and I'm a big guy. I have that to my advantage and I managed to get to my feet and kind of fight them off enough to start stumble, stagger, running as I'm stunned and I got blood in my eyes and I can't see straight or anything, but I'm towards the light, the building and for whatever reason, they didn't chase me. They could have, they didn't and I don't know why. So I got to the building, the door, I walk in the door. I'm like I've been attacked. I don't know how many guys are out there because, you know, in in South Africa they could travel in packs of 15, 20 guys. Like the violence down there is just it's on a level that we don't like. You'll see it in, like maybe some inner cities in the US, but this is like an everyday thing down there. Like this is just it's, you know anyways.
Jonathan:So all our students freak out too, right, and we were kind of barricading the buildings. We turned the lights off, we put you know, I would say we. I wasn't doing this, I was just slumped over holding a fork, thinking I was going to defend myself with a fork. Well, blood's pouring out of my head, like what's going on, I don't know. I don't know what day of the week it is, kind of thing. My wife was incredibly brave in all of this. She's like directing their boiling water whatever they can find, because we don't know how many guys are out there and we could be in for some kind of fight.
Jonathan:Thankfully one student, um, had their cell phone with them. Most of them didn't, because they weren't supposed to have their cell phone with them during like learning hours or in this case it was hospitality preparation, so it was like serving hours and some of them would like on the kitchen and be waiters and stuff like that, you know. But one had their phone and was able to call a police station and and by a stroke of luck again, it was like a senior police captain who walked by an office where this phone rang and picked it up, because most times the police don't even care, they're just there to collect a paycheck and not get hurt. But he picked it up and he dispatched some police. But the problem is we're 45 minutes from the nearest town and to get to where this nature reserve is you have to drive down through a valley. So at night these, these police cars, they drive in the front gate and they have like their lights flashing and you can see all the way across the valley where there's still 25 minutes driveway because it's not a straight road, it's this windy, bumpy down through the valley, back up the other side to get to where we are, kind of thing.
Jonathan:And so these guys I forgot to mention they were trying to smash the doors down, the windows down with shovels. But doors and windows in South Africa they have bars on them, and so they were trying to break the doors down to get in. Now they probably would have been in a fight for their lives if they did get in, because there were 20, 25 of us in there and we would have been fighting for our lives, but anyway, so they could see the police and they just kind of like melted into the bushes as the cops get there finally, and they come in and they go oh, nobody died or got raped. No, okay, cool, we're going to leave now. You're probably just fine.
Jonathan:What my wife was like? No, you're not. My husband needs to get to a hospital and they're still out there and some people saw their faces. You're going to take statements. Oh, these guys, they were thick as bricks. But, like you know, we we have our problems with police. I understand that. But by and large, they're competent, right, these guys don't even care, let alone are they competent.
Brad:Holy crap.
Jonathan:Yeah, so you know I got in the hospital. It was like you know, I was concussed, but it wasn't like you know but had they knocked me out. So it turns out, the night before these guys had beat to death, another guy smashed his head in and I don't know why the cops told it. Why would you tell these? Why would you tell someone this, like, oh, you're lucky, they smashed the other guy's head in last night. So I guess this is a crew of guys that went and smashed a guy's head to. They said he smashed his head in like a pumpkin.
Brad:Oh geez.
Jonathan:Yeah, and I was like why would you tell me that yeah?
Brad:So there was a lot I swallowed from that. Yeah, I can't even, I can't even imagine, I can't even, I can't even imagine, I can't even fathom what you went to. So how long did it take you to recuperate from that?
Jonathan:well, and I guess I'll say one other thing. So while I was like being attacked, it was dark out, I couldn't really see the guys. I'm concussed, I'm done days, I don't even know what day of the week it is or where I'm at. I'm just trying to stay alive and like I can't die tonight. I can't die tonight. You know that's running through my head, screaming for help and and for me, I just I'm like maybe I got a taste of hell that night, screaming for help, nobody hearing me. You know that kind of thing. So that left like a mental scar as well. So physically, you know, bruised ribs they didn't break any bones because you know I'm fairly thick and so they'd have to hit me pretty hard. They didn't manage to break break any bones. They didn't fracture my skull, like it was all at that point surface level, because they didn't finish the job they were having. They were, they were just having so much fun kicking and stomping and beating on me that they didn't finish the job, and that's, oddly enough, something I can be grateful for, because they were taking their time.
Jonathan:No-transcript we're doing, we're going to stay here. So we stayed on for another four or five months, um, in south africa. And, uh, in that time so we lived we were like we're not staying out overnight on the nature reserve anymore, we're going back into town every night and our students aren't staying out here either, you know, because we're not putting them at risk either. So we got housed in the town and just got kind of bust out every day, um, but in in the remaining about four, four and a half months that we were still down there, um, our, our, the house that we lived in was broken into 13 times. Um, we had the copper pipes cut out for copper, so then we lost our running water. Um, like it, just like it's like living in prison but the inmates are on the outside.
Jonathan:And and in all of this, like I got to the place where I was ready to start making traps so that when they broke in, like I could catch them and I could tie them up and I could beat them to death. And that was when I knew we had to get out of there, because there's a part of my brain that went this is insane, you can't do this. You're not this person. But it's hard to explain to someone who's never been like violently traumatized, like the kinds of intrusive thoughts that come into your head when you're not sleeping. When you sleep, maybe a couple hours a night in batches, you sleep with weapons by your bed and you're you know every single night. You're just ready. Is someone going to break in tonight? Is this the night that we have a gang of guys breaking in, like you know? Yes, we had, we had panic buttons that would call private security, that would show up in probably five minutes or less and shoot to kill. Basically, that was you know, but that that's the common industry in south africa and that's literally what they do like. It's just, it's a world that we kind of like.
Jonathan:I grew up in small town, canada, so when I got to the place that I was, I was wanting to kill people. Um, I realized that we had to get out of there. Um, we couldn't. We couldn't stay.
Brad:I have a question what after this massive beating that you took?
Jonathan:what kept you there for another four and a half months? Honestly, I think it was hearing our students' stories. Okay, so in all of this, I hope that I want people to understand that South Africa is a very beautiful country and there there are some wonderful people. In South Africa we love our students would hug us. We love you, like it was. I don't know if I'd ever said it to white people before, but because we're not white South African, maybe it was like we asked because you know, like and and, but we heard their stories. Like they went through crazy stuff, the stuff that we, you know, we went through. Yeah, in one sense it was pretty tame. Uh, probably at least half the women had been raped and one in four women had been gang raped. Oh, wow, it's called Jack rolling down there and it's a sport.
Jonathan:It's a sport, it's okay. So here's the thing that people might not fully grasp they have different ideas about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, and there's different rituals depending which tribe. South africa's has 11 major ethnic groups, eight major like black tribal groups in there. They call it the rainbow nation because there's so many different languages and groups of groups of people turns out they mostly don't like each other and fight with each other a lot. They fight with each other over like cultural things, among other things.
Jonathan:Um, but most women have been. In fact, I think every woman, in fact every, every person, every student that we had had been, had been a victim of either witnessing or a victim of violent crime, seeing their family members murdered, seeing their mom get raped, this kind of stuff. And so somehow in our reasoning we just went like we can't abandon these kids. They're young adults, they're between 18 and 28. We're like we can't abandon these kids because this happened to us, like we're we're trying to help them, maybe like better their lives and and so that they don't live in a world with this, like this, and so that kept us there. But obviously I was traumatized ptsd, but now, to be fair, my wife was traumatized too, and a lot of people people overlooked her trauma because she wasn't physically attacked. But she watched her husband stagger through the door, blood covering his face, beaten, muddied and bloodied, and was like is my husband going to die? That leaves an imprint too.
Brad:It's extremely noble and I love the fact that you were able to look past that for the students. Like that is in my book, so praiseworthy. I can't even imagine, because I don't know, when you go through that type of trauma. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. If I could have done it, I think I would have been out of there.
Jonathan:Yeah, well, and so normally this city was seen as like it's a university town, it's pretty safe, all this kind of stuff, but with like the like national police force, they'd been trying to like clean up crime to some degree and so they've been making a bigger push in the major cities, and so I guess there was like a like roving gangs that came to this town, basically because there's less police presence. Um, okay, but but the other thing, like, like one of the other facilitators, um, who, who was a black guy, they took his brother brother, put him in a building, locked him in a building and set it on fire. Oh, like that's just terrible it is. And they do this because they're trying to send a message. So see, here's the thing Education, their education system is broken.
Jonathan:Their public education system is broken. If you can afford private school, you can get a decent education in South Africa. Their public education is broken. Students sleep with teachers, teachers show up drunk. It's broken Like in ways that we can't imagine. Maybe again, some inner city schools in the US might understand this, and so education is like the way out of some of this. But education means that, like, we get smarter and we might not like join the gangs or be a part of the gangs or things like that. And so, well then, when that sort of stuff is happening, like we got it, we got to try to send a message because you're, you're interfering in our community, the place that we control. So, just like, stuff like that kept happening and we were just like we can't take this anymore. Now that was when I was like on the verge of wanting to kill somebody and and I'm not that person, I can reassure you but in that traumatized like state where I hadn't slept for like weeks on end, like or maybe slept a couple hours a night, kind of thing, just like living on survival mode, feeling constantly under attack, like.
Jonathan:And so we, we flew back to Australia, where my wife is from, and I got a job on a cotton farm in rural Queensland. Um, what's the town's name? Is like one word, not. They have a town up there called banana, but it wasn't banana and the town, banana, is named after a yellow cow, of all things. Okay, yeah, um, maura, there's this town called maura, you know 100 people, and I was on some farm like 30 miles out of town, kind of thing.
Jonathan:So I was like in bumfart, nowhere rural queensland and and I was given like this trailer to basically live in my my my wife lived with her parents who lived in the city of Rockhampton in Queensland, and I went out to work on this farm and it was probably like, in one sense, the best thing, but like I would go to sleep in this trailer. I was the only farmhand at the time because it was slower season, it wasn't busy season where they would have like five or 10 laborers. I was the only one other than the family. So here I am, sleeping in this trailer in the middle of nowhere and I'm like, and there wasn't even locks in the doors. I was just like I had to keep reminding myself like I don't have to sleep with a baseball bat beside my bed because there's nobody coming to get me.
Brad:But it probably took a month before I was even comfortable, like relinquishing the baseball bat beside my bed, like yeah, I, I've got a little bit of experience like that, I go into it, but I, I, I get it, I totally get that. So, so real quick I'd. So your, your wife was living with her parents, you were out 30 miles working.
Jonathan:I, I was like probably four or five hours from where they are, but like 30 miles out of town, kind of thing. Yeah, so how did you maintain a relationship? Oh, she'd come out, or I'd go home on the weekends, or they'd actually come out and like stay in the trailer for for the weekend, kind of thing. And the farm they were like so, so that was not. My wife was used to me being in the navy and going away and stuff like yeah, you, we're, we're coming up on 18 years together. Um, we've been through a lot together. Um, yeah, getting close to that, two decades, which is kind of cool. Actually, it feels like a real accomplishment. Um so, but here's the other part.
Jonathan:So I I'd, I'd really become a binge eating food addict at that point. Of course, I had no language to. I didn't know what was going on. I, you know, know, there's something about like dissociating with your body, like not even people, like didn't you notice you were gaining a whole bunch of weight? And I was like, well, no, because of my traumatized state, it's like my, the self image I had was frozen of this guy that was reasonably athletic, the guy that lifted weights and played sports like I wasn't.
Jonathan:It wasn't I can't hardly explain it to someone, but I was like it wasn't registering my brain that this was happening. But I was just like smashing food and, of course, living out on this farm with you know, I would just go to the local grocery store you know I don't buy pizzas and hash browns and whatever and just like mow through food like nobody's business and I blew up to like 330 pounds, wow, yeah, um, and and thankfully I had this physical job because that probably stopped me from hitting 400 pounds. It was hard work on this cotton farm.
Brad:I mean you're killing 2,500, 3,000 calories a day just in work, yeah, and that means you had to be eating like 4,000 to 4,500 calories over what you burned over your BRM, yeah.
Jonathan:Oh my God. Yeah, the one thing I remember about it is so the way they would do irrigation. There is you have like irrigation trenches that run alongside their paddocks, which is what they call their fields no-transcript. You just lose way too much moisture. So you do like irrigation like this, and they had a property right on the river so they could pull water off of there and the river is flooded, but anyways, so that's the part.
Jonathan:I remember the physical job. But so now I've got a. I've like lost myself. Who am I? Who is this guy, you know? Just for the sake of time, we'll fast forward a little bit.
Jonathan:We got, we eventually got back to canada. We went back to south africa, would you believe? Uh, but only for about three weeks. And we went to the western cape. I went to cape town uh, we wanted to. We went, you know, table mountain. Like we wanted to have a positive experience in South Africa. We didn't want to leave with our last memories being like cowering in some guy's like guest house at midnight, hiding behind the bed, we tipped up on its side because we thought someone was trying to break into the house. It turns out he just went out to his garage to get something he'd forgotten. Like that's how, like traumatized, we were whispering to each other, like texting him under, like the blankets to the light of the phone Wouldn't show that we were there, like hey, we think there's someone in your property, that kind of thing, you know. So so we, we finally got back to Canada and we were very different people in these young kids who'd like flown to Mexico, just kind of like well, hey, let's just like go and travel the world and all of this.
Jonathan:And now I'm just like obese and puffy and like how did I get here, you know? So I thought I was going to go back to the Navy. So we went, went to live with my parents in this little town called Okanagan Falls 1500 people, you know. Um, I tried getting a job locally. Couldn't even get a job at the local corner store. Nobody would hire me. This is super, super depressing. Now I did, I did start doing like some training. They're on the shores of a lake, so I went and I started training there and I got my weight down to about 265 because I was trying to get ready for the physical, to try to get back into the military. So what else am I going to do. I guess I'll just go back to the military that had left three, three years earlier, kind of thing.
Jonathan:But my paperwork got hung up in in Ottawa and, uh, they were dragging their feet.
Brad:Right, well, I mean, I gotta tell you. So I'm curious, because you said you, you just kind of went down to the lake and started training. I I'm interested just because of, obviously, of who I am, am, um, what you did, because it's still 70 pounds, oh yeah um.
Jonathan:Well, at first, because I was like I have to be able to pass the beep test. You know, for those who don't know, it's like you you run from one side to the other maybe it's like 40 meters or something like that and then the beep gets gradually faster. So you pick up your pace until you know a certain point. You're basically sprinting back and forth between the two and if you miss crossing two lines then you're done. That's what level you got to. At my fittest. I ran 11 and a half on the beep test. That was at bootcamp, um, but you had to run, I think like a six, to pass um, so I got a. I got like a.
Jonathan:It's funny to have an app. Didn't have a smartphone, so I got an app, or not an app, sorry. A recording of the beep test. Put it on my little mp3 player there was some knockoff mp3 player of the beep test and and at first I couldn't even get to a three on the beep test, like oh, yeah. So I was like okay, and and I basically figured out a distance between two park benches was approximately that and then I just made and two park benches and a paved path on the edge of the sand where the little sort of beach was on the lake shore, and and figured out roughly what the test would be, and so I said, okay, I gotta you know. And so I managed to get myself up to a six and a half on the beep test over a span of about three months so is that what you were doing?
Brad:I mean, you went down to the lake every dingle day and you just kept doing the beep test until I had no job.
Jonathan:You had some progress we were living in my parents little like small house. I had to get out of the house. Like it was awkward, being 30 years old, having to go back to your parents as like a morbidly obese, traumatized whatever, like you know. And my parents were very loving and patient and kind and gracious in all of this. But it's hard. And I was just trying to get a local job and I couldn't get a job at a corner store or liquor store or anything like that. Nobody would hire me. We had no money because I wouldn't qualify anymore for employment insurance, even though I'd paid into it for a number of years in the military because I'd been out of the country for too long, so that sort of expires. So I was on the brink. I'd already applied for welfare and I'd got my first call. No, it was two days before I got the call about my first welfare payment getting deposited in my bank account this is where I'm at now Living in my parents' house about my first welfare payment getting deposited in my bank account. Like this is where I'm at now living in my parents house about to collect welfare.
Jonathan:I get a call from an old buddy of mine. He said hey, we're, I'm dean of trades at this school and we're starting a new program, a power line program. Would you be interested? I know your background, I know you have a background in like marine engineering and stuff. Like you have the technical knowledge for this. Would you be interested in in being your background? I know you have a background in marine engineering and stuff. You have the technical knowledge for this. Would you be interested in being a part of it? And I was like yeah, heck, yeah. Years ago I thought the power line trade would be a very cool one to get into because I knew they paid well and it was a good physical job that had a high pay. It's a hard industry to break into because it's a lot of like your brother, your dad kind of thing.
Brad:Right Now. Can you explain what Powerline is?
Jonathan:Oh, so building like utilities and towers, so your power pole that has like wires running that kind of thing, so everything residential to which is your wires running to your house, or underground substations and that kind of thing, to building 200 foot towers. I didn't get to do Highline work when I was in the trade. Um, that's the stuff that really pays good money. But again, you, you gotta work, you gotta be a grunt for a long time before they're anywhere near that, cause that's paying like 250 bucks an hour kind of thing. Nice, yeah, yeah, I would.
Brad:I would have been okay with that yeah, but I mean, but you were able to break in yeah, so that was like my ticket into the trade.
Jonathan:And then so I'd got that call and it accepted. And then, like two days later, I got this call about like my first welfare payment and I was like, oh well, it turns out I qualified for this trade here, this trade school, and I now have a job. And so then we had to move to Vancouver so I could could leave my parents you know place, give them them a break uh, move to vancouver and started working in the power line trade. Um, so I was a grunt and then I did that for a couple of years. That's how I ended up in alberta. I came up to alberta because bc is like heavily, heavily union, like you're, you're grounded for like the first four years before they even start, like it's just, they make you earn your stripes hard. And I was like man, I'm 30, 31 years old, like I want to start a family at some point in my life, like I can't just wait eight years to like get qualified. So I came out to Alberta and it was like boom, oh, you've already done your first year of school and you have X number of hours working the trade. Cool, you're already a second year. So I went from being what's called a trades trainee and a grunted nobody to first day on the job out in Alberta. They're like, hey, up that pole, oh nice, yeah, that was a good move, yeah. And so I was like man, I've been like practicing for this day.
Jonathan:Where I lived in Vancouver, they had some power poles right outside their property and I would take my climbing gear because I had the gear and I would climb the poles just to practice and I would put like tape around the pole and that would be like my markings climb up and down. And it's probably illegal to do that, but I had the climbing gear and so I did, yeah, so, so, um, I worked for a company that built um rural utilities and utilities to like energy projects, ie oil and gas, you know, getting power out to these drilling sites and things like that. So it was, it was hard going. You're, you're climbing poles all day long, like you frame a pole on the ground. You get all your poles framed up, then you get all the poles in the ground, then you're gonna climb up and and and get the wires on and stuff like that.
Jonathan:So it was a very, very physical job and so that helped me to lose some weight, but then I got injured. I slipped on an icy road and I landed awkwardly on my arm and I injured my elbow. And so this is about 2014 now and I couldn't climb without pain and I did rehab and all this kind of stuff. But once you make an employment insurance or a worker's compensation claim, you're blackballed from the industry. This is a very insular industry and it's like that's it, so they couldn't fire me while I was under rehab. But as soon as my rehab was done, they were like oh sorry, we ran out of work. I was like you liar, what?
Brad:You liars, are you? So you slipped on an icy road while you were at work, yes, and claim workers comp and then they say, oh well, sorry, what You're running away, that's, that's so. You know, down here in the States we don't hear about employment and things going on in Canada. You know, we, yeah, as much as I love my country and I'm very patriotic and I fought for it and the whole bit we're kind of me centric, you know we're, we're very, you know, self-centered, and so we don't, we don't really get into. You know the politics, um, and so we don't, we don't really get into. You know the politics, uh, well, the politics, yes, because, um, I, I I'm a, I'm a huge, um, uh, pure polymer fan.
Brad:I love that guy, um, you might not, but anyway what I like the guy yeah good, I like him too, um and and, just because of the internet, you know, and and what trudeau is doing to you guys is like ridiculous. But beyond that, we don't get into the nitty gritty Just to hear that there's stuff like this going on, because I mean, you don't hear as bad as some things can happen here in America. That is very rare that that would happen, and if it did, there'd be lawsuits going on like crazy. So here's the thing.
Jonathan:I could have fought that because I knew exactly what they were doing. But now I'm in a company where nobody likes me, nobody wants me around, and they're just going to make my life a living hell. I knew what they were going to do. They'll get you out on the rural lease road and they're just going to give you the most miserable jobs and miserable tasks. You're just going to be working way harder than everybody else. They're gonna. They're gonna make your life so like a living hell until you quit.
Brad:So I was like, okay, fine, um, yeah, it's like. Uh, it's like, it's like a cop like testifying against another cop. Once that happens, you're done yeah.
Jonathan:So I I did temporarily get another job with another company, but the pain in my elbows and shoulders just kept coming back and I couldn't climb. And if you can't climb, I tried to get on the city utilities, where you ride the bucket trucks, you know. But again, that's union, that's like your brother, your dad, that kind of thing. You know. Killer interview Great candidate. Yeah, it went to like the son of some guy. Personally, you know. Killer interview great candidate. Yeah, it went to like the son of some guy.
Jonathan:Now, at this point in time, my wife had to go back to Australia to get her permanent residency with Canada. So when you go through the permanent resident process, you either apply in the country, in Canada, and you're not allowed to leave the country for two years while it's being processed, or you go back to your home country and you can't come back into Canada. She opted to go back to her home country, which I I supported, because, like, if something happens to her family, she's not going to like not go home and see them, and so we were apart for basically a year, and so I'm now living alone in a basement suite in alberta with like no, I had a few, like hardly any friends, no job, I'm injured unemployment insurance at least and just badly depressed. Keep in mind I've never really dealt with my trauma and the eating and everything just came back. It all just came back and I remember one night, like spite eating, like this entire, like chocolate bundt cake that I bought from the grocery store and just like binge watching Netflix or whatever it was at the time, you know, you know just angry at myself, hating myself, hating the world, um, just all this self-loathing that came back. You know one thing we didn't really get into, but I actually forgave the men who tried to kill me. I never saw them again, so I didn't do it in person.
Jonathan:But when we were living in Turkey with my brother after the South Africa incident and I was kind of psychologically decompressing there I know some people are listening what, how do we connect all the dots? Sorry, how do we connect all the dots? Sorry? But after we left South Africa the second time, before we got back to Canada, we stopped in Turkey to live with my brother for a little bit while. I was just trying to psychologically decompress and I was just tired of being angry. I was tired of the rage just filling my body and just violent thoughts and all this kind of stuff.
Jonathan:And I made the decision I had to forgive these guys. And for anybody listening, forgiveness is a process. It wasn't like I made a decision like I forgive you and, ta-da, I'm free. I, you know, I had to make a choice. I was like, okay, how, how, how, how am I going to forgive them? Like, so, when the rage would like come in, I would, I would go, okay, I could. You know, part of our brain can kind of think outside that super, super intense emotion. It's really strange but it can. And I would try to think what happened to those guys, what happened to them, what happened to them? That this is their life and it's not to excuse what they did.
Jonathan:Forgiveness is not about them being absolved of the crimes they committed, but it was about me trying to cultivate a sense of compassion enough that I could think about what they did to me, what happened to me, and not hate myself and hate them and want to kill the next person. I see, I just I didn't want to live with this rage inside of me because I was. That's probably why I was like binge eating so much is because I was so ashamed of the rage that I felt, that I was. I was trying to smother it and bury it deep inside me so that my wife wouldn't see it. Like it wasn't that I acted out and punched walls and hit people. Like no, no, it was all like being deeply buried inside of me and just eating me up inside because I I was like this is not who I am. I don't want these thoughts in my head. I don't want to feel like this. Why do I feel like this? Why I don't want these thoughts in my head. I don't want to feel like this. Why do I feel like this? Why is this happening to me, you know? And so, um, that all came back.
Jonathan:When, you know, back in 2014, when my wife was gone, I was living by myself in a basement suite without a lot of friends and injured and depressed and couldn't work. And like, what am I going to do now, you know? And so I, I got a couple other jobs, got working in um, the oil patches, we call it. Um, did some trucking, did some fracking, some nitrogen pumping, equipment operation, that kind of stuff. I'm kind of glossing over the details for the sake of time. Um, and then, and then came an opportunity to work in a in a supplement store with a friend of mine and, uh, so I was like, okay, I wanted to go to the oil patch Cause I don't want to be gone all the time, cause they work rotational work like 15 days on, six days off, and I'm like it's not a way to have a marriage, right? You know my wife. When she got back I was like, okay, and we were actually going to move in 2015. We're all set to move to Australia. Um, we of our life in Canada, we're going to move to Australia. Like, her sister lives in Switzerland, my brother lives in Turkey, her family's over there, my parents are still here, but we're like let's just move to Australia.
Jonathan:But then I started helping my buddy out at his store because it was like struggling and he was having a falling out with his business partner, all this kind of stuff. Turns out this buddy of mine is a narcissistic sociopath and a pathological liar. Yeah, of course I didn't know this. You don't go into a friendship or relationship whatever, thinking this is the kind of person you're dealing with. You have no, so you're not even looking for the signs three years into. I guess you know again. For the sake of like yeah time. But three years into the relationship, but the business was failing badly, it turns out he was like a crooked accounting. It was being used to like lose money and all kinds of stuff and I just lost a mountain of money like over a hundred thousand dollars that I invested in this business. Yeah, like it was bad.
Jonathan:But along the way, in 2017, I was back to about 295 pounds and I was trying to get some life insurance and then they'd send like a nurse to like take your vitals Yep. So she comes to the supplement store. Imagine coming to a supplement store protein powder, pre-workouts, greens, vitamins, all this kind of stuff and there's this 295 pound guy that greets you like behind the counter for starters. So I already hated myself for looking like this. I hated myself for what I'd become. I hated like and I hated the fact that, no matter how smart I was, I couldn't seem to find my way out of this. I didn't know the kind of help that I needed. So we go to the back room where we had like a body comp scale and stuff like that for like assessing people. I had to lie on the floor to try to get my blood pressure down and it was still couldn't get under like 145, over 90, 295 pounds high blood pressure. So now I have to get a rider, as it's called, put on my life insurance policy. I have to pay extra money because I'm more likely to die sooner. Oh, that was a wake-up call. So I was like, okay, I have to try again. I have to try to lose this weight again.
Jonathan:So I hired a coach and uh, I hired him because I thought I wanted to look like him, like maybe I'll stop hating myself if I look like him. Yeah, he was in his 40s, jacked, whatever and uh, he never, he never treated me the way that I treated myself. You know, on the outside to other people I was like friendly, jovial, jolly, fat, giles kind of thing. On the inside I was just tearing myself up, hating myself, berating myself, beating myself brutally, awful, like self-hatred and loathing, like it was just, you know, just awful. So then, of course, of course, I expected this is how, this is how you get me results, so you're gonna have to treat me like this.
Jonathan:Basically, I didn't verbalize it, but he did the exact opposite. He modeled for me compassion, and you know, I never understood compassion before that here's a guy that hates himself, who actually even despite kind of being a Christian sort of had no idea what compassion actually was. I didn't know, and I don't know if this guy was or I have no idea, we never talked religion but he modeled for me compassion. He showed compassion to me. He didn't hate me, he didn't tell me what a loser I was, what a hopeless sack of you know what, that I was, this kind of all this kind of stuff that I was telling myself.
Jonathan:And and when I screwed up, like you know, I remember eating an entire pizza at my car in a parking lot, just hating myself through every bite, but, like, spite eating, hating myself so much that you bought this, you lose. You're going to eat this entire thing, trying to make myself sick, just trying to somehow. I don't know if I can eat enough of this and get so sick. Maybe I'll never do this again. I didn't again.
Jonathan:I didn't know how to get out of this. And so, instead of, instead of berating me or talking down to me or belittling me for my self-destructive behavior, he was curious, just like hey, okay, so that happened, tell me about it. And and at first I was very resistant to all of this. I was like whatever man, like don't try and come up with this soft stuff, like I know what you're trying to do, and for four months like nothing happened. But he wouldn't give up on me either. And then I paid for a year. So I was like I tried to prove to him that he was going to fail working with me like there's no way.
Jonathan:I am a hopeless case. You cannot fix me. I literally only signed up so I could tell everybody I tried so hard and couldn't do it. And he just kept being patient and compassionate with me, just refusing to give up on me. And you know, little by little, like changes started to happen in a way that never happened. You know, little by little, like changes started to happen in a way that had never happened before.
Jonathan:I'd never, I'd never like actually compliment myself. You know I can say this day I'm a world-class coach and not even be ashamed of it. I would, you know, go back five, six, seven years, I would be hiding under my desk before I'd say those words to you because I felt I was so worthless. I have an incredible brain. I have a great brain for coaching. It's literally what I'm born to do. I love it so much. Like I said, I can't explain it. It just works, it clicks, it makes sense.
Jonathan:But back then I couldn't even utter those words, I couldn't even think about it and he just kept being patient and compassionate with me and, uh, I thought I was going to lose 80 pounds in the year with him. I lost maybe like 50, 60 ish pounds, which is pretty significant, by the way. But, but I'd lost and gained weight. I joke that I've lost 600 pounds, right, cause I I've. I've ridden the diet so much like trying this thing and that thing, and my wife, my bless her heart, my long-suffering wife watching her husband, just, you know, heading straight to another brick wall but not really being powerless to kind of stop me, for I was going to do this thing and, ah, you know, all over the place. Yeah, he just patiently and compassionately worked with me and just just wouldn give up on me. And it was just little wins, little bit of this, little bit of this. Okay, hey, let's try this. Is this possible?
Jonathan:You could have never convinced me. This kind of approach could have worked. There's no way I was trying to destroy myself in the gym, snorting pre-workout, live, screaming, lifting heavy metal listen, heavy metal and lifting heavy metal. I was like, ah, you know, like I'm a pretty strong guy, I could lift a lot of weight not that anybody cares, turns out but uh, none of it was getting me anywhere. I was still massively overweight, no matter how hard I lifted and how much I screamed and and all this kind of stuff, and he was just took the totally opposite approach and uh, just bit by bit, and so I kind of kept going on that journey and just I learned how to not hate myself. I had to first learn how to not hate myself before I could learn to love myself and appreciate myself. Um and uh, but it turns out like you can't beat yourself into a vibrant, healthy body, you cannot punish your way into vibrant health.
Brad:I have a couple of drill instructors that I can introduce you to that. I would say differently, but I agree.
Jonathan:Of course, look, you can starve somebody and make them lean, you can put them through physical hell and get them in shape, but I wouldn't call that being vibrantly healthy. No, I, I agree, yeah. So so if people ask, well, how'd you lose 100 pounds, or how long did you lose 100 pounds, I'm like, oh, like a decade, and that's not the answer they want to hear. Of course you want to hear them took me six months. This crazy, cool, instagram worthy transformation story and it no, this was like slugging through hell, my own internal hell, fighting myself every step of the way, hating myself, like, just you know, getting somewhere, losing 50 pounds and then gaining 60 pounds. You know, just you know, working hard for four months and destroying it all in a month and just not understanding why. What the heck's going on in my brain.
Brad:We didn't even mention the anxiety and depression part, like because I'm like, oh my gosh, I, I gotta want to be respected. It's almost inferred, right, I mean ptsd, you're, you're by yourself, I mean it. Part of this has to, has to be causing you some anxiety and some depression. Oh man, first I had her wife for a long time. I mean, that's just that's, it's just gotta be.
Jonathan:Hell on you, yeah I had no idea what's happening either. Like I again, I didn't have the language or the understanding. This is a panic attack, like what? And? And I would have denied it anyways. Ah, no, ah, get all angry and whatever. This isn't happening to me, whatever, um yeah, no, I get it.
Brad:after after 9, 11 I, I went through a set of panic attacks that kept me on the couch where I literally could not move. It would hurt to go to the bathroom until I was able to get through it. So I get it, yeah.
Jonathan:So this coach, along with a I'll call him a neurologic chiropractor, I don't know what else to call him. He's a chiropractor, so you can build on a chiropractor. But he does other stuff studies, brains and concussions and stuff like that. I'm not a huge fan of the chiropractic trade. No offense to chiropractors, I don't mind you as people, but like I don't, like you know, 18 treatments in six weeks not getting me anywhere, sorry, but this guy worked on my brain instead and, um, he helped.
Jonathan:He did some like funky things that helped to calm my brainstem when I would have a panic episode. It would feel like I was floating out of my body, like I was just dissociating entirely. It's the weirdest, most disconcerting feeling. What's actually happening in the brain is this parietal lobe, that's the part of our brain that deals with sensing our position in space. You hold your arm up. Your parietal lobe kind of knows where you are. You can shut your eyes, right.
Jonathan:Well, that wasn't functioning in my brain, so I couldn't feel myself in my body, and so my first age treatment was to punch myself in my left leg, because it was the right side of my brain that was more under functioning, a big, strong signal that says I'm physically present in my body, and then we did some other things to help my brain calm down and I went four years without a panic episode. Nice, yeah, it was. It was pretty cool. I had one last year, but it was. It lasted maybe five minutes Like I knew it was happening. I just put on my pulse oximeter, tracked my pulse, did my breathing and just went back to sleep. So it's pretty empowering knowing now that, like if it happens to me, I manage my sleep and my calf. I joke, I don't manage my sleep. I have two kids. I used to manage my sleep.
Brad:They manage your sleep like you got it yeah, yeah, um, so that's that's like.
Jonathan:I mean, obviously there's a lot more that could be sure, but that's kind of how I got here. I got a lot of help and maybe, if there's like one thing that people take away, it's like get help, ask for help, become vulnerable. You just like to try, and it's just a fool's errand to try and do this on your own, to be like I did this thing. Honestly, nobody cares. Get help, and if the person that you're with isn't helping you, then look for someone else. But when we connect to another human being in a compassionate way, you know and compassion doesn't mean enabling, it doesn't mean glossing over and ignoring unhelpful behaviors, it just means we remove the lens of judgment. So now we're going to get curious about your behavior. We're going to help you understand why this is happening to you. But there's no character judgment. You're not a bad person for what you're struggling with. Let's help you understand why this is happening. Um, behavioral psychology and neuroscience is kind of my thing, among others.
Brad:Now, um, I love this stuff. I love the fact that you, that you, you put that with the weight loss, because I think you know you got to start with the brain first, um, but what you know, you got to start with the brain first, um, but what you mentioned, people don't understand that sometimes, you know, like they think that asking for help is a sign of weakness, when it's not, it's actually a sign of strength. You know that there are skills and there is knowledge that you don't know, right, therefore, ask for help and get, uh, and gain the knowledge that you need, and sometimes that is as a coach, to feed you this knowledge. A little by little, I've got, I've got triathletes that I've been coaching for six years, yeah, and I've actually told a lot of them.
Brad:I'm like, hey, why don't you try a different, a different coach to get a different methodology? And they're like why, I'm still, I learned something from you every time we talk. So, until you run out of things to teach me, I'm going to stick with you. And I'm like, can't argue with that, right? So and that's, and I imagine that's the thing. So, so, now that you've so, you've conquered. I wouldn't say you conquered, but you, you, you got down to this. A hundred, a hundred pounds when? Where did you then? How'd you turn that into? You know coaching.
Jonathan:Yeah, and I want to share something here. If you've been morbidly obese, you have to manage your weight for the rest of your life. I want to dispel a myth here. There's no happily ever after in the sense that I don't have to do anything again. I still have to work at it every day. It doesn't mean I hate my life and it's miserable, but I have to work at it because I'll get fat again real quick if I don't.
Jonathan:It's a habit, and, and, and it's a, but it's a, it's a habit that you're going to keep for the rest of your life. Yeah, we have to learn how to do this stuff and, like I said to a client of mine, I like there's going to be birthdays, there's going to be holidays, there's going to be grocery stores, there's going to be coffee and donut shops like this. This is not going away. So you got to learn to live in this world instead of wishing it wasn't there to somehow make it easier for you. I hate, you know, I'm like this isn't going to sell me a lot of programs in one sense, but just telling people like it is like we got to figure out how to do this in the real world because this stuff isn't going away. So we got to figure out how to live with it in a way that we can. That we're okay with.
Brad:Okay, okay, that's you know what. That's a great segue. Um, well, it's not a segue, it's just a question. So I'm gonna ask for an example. So okay, we know that we've got to live in this, let's call, let's use the coffee and donuts. Example yeah we know we got to live in this world of coffee and donuts. Why don't you explain to me what you mean by that and what you would do in that situation, or what kind of coaching you would give in that situation?
Jonathan:I look for the simplest things. So let's just say you have a habit of driving past and getting a coffee and donut or whatever coffee and muffin every morning. Can you drive a different way to get to the same place? So I call it don't run on a sprained ankle. If something's a weak spot, don't unnecessarily aggravate it Now. Ultimately, the longer term, what we want to do so that's like a triage solution. Right, that's an immediate solution to help. It's a pattern interrupt. Let's help you interrupt this pattern here. But it doesn't address why you're going there all the time. So while we put this triage solution in place to help you, it's like let's also figure out why, why this is happening, what, what need is this behavior meeting? So that's, that's the kind of thing. So the triage solution buys us the time to do some of the deeper work that helps us to get past this stuff.
Brad:Got. It Makes a lot of sense, yeah.
Jonathan:So here's kind of how I like to think about coaching. I got I got lots of analogies, but I'll give you. I'll give you two. Okay, in the navy, when you get a bomb threat, two people have to search a space, airspace on the ship. You send in one person who works in that space every day and one person who never goes into that space. Why is that?
Brad:One person knows it like the back of their hand the other one will find places that they never thought of.
Jonathan:When you live in something 24 hours a day, you're going to automatically overlook stuff. You just are. Michael Jordan had a shooting coach. Steph Curry has a shooting coach. Can they shoot as good as Steph Curry? No, but they don't have to to a shooting coach. Steph Curry has a shooting coach. Can they shoot as good as Steph Curry? No, but they don't have to to be their coach.
Jonathan:There's this like funny little myth about coaching that like, in fact, michael Jordan wasn't even a great coach. He was a terrible coach. Great basketball player, terrible coach. Phil Jackson, not a great basketball player, incredible coach, right, like, let's think about coaching differently. It's a different set of eyes that can see things that you don't see because you're in your own head 24 hours a day. Exactly the other person goes is this normal? Does that belong there? What about this thing here? Now you can say, because this is your world 24 hours a day, yes, that's normal and no, that's not. It works incredibly well.
Jonathan:The other thing thing about coaching is I like the idea of how did somebody put it? A guide by your side, not a sage on the stage. You are the expert of your life. So maybe you've seen a driving instructor car, two sets of controls. You're in the driver's seat Now I'm in the passenger seat. There's a steering wheel, brakes and gas. But most of the time you're Now I'm in the passenger seat, there's a steering wheel, brakes and gas, but most of the time you're driving I'm just saying, hey, make a left here, watch out for this thing up here, turn right here, stop here, please, that kind of thing. But you're in control Because ultimately, like at some point in time, we probably won't work together forever. My job, then, is to equip you with the tools to navigate this world. Now, how long that might take six months for some people, three years for other people because here's the great thing about coaching having that person with the controls beside you. You get to try to learn these new skills because, make no mistake, you're learning a new set of skills here, a new way to live, a new way to live in this world that is hostile towards weight loss. Basically, it is engineered to make you obese and a brain that wants to be obese. We didn't get into our family biology and why we want to be obese, but it's essentially so we can survive famines. In the nutshell. There's a lot more to it, but that's just remember that. So now you've got someone who has your back, you get to try out these skills. You get to try out these skills. You get to try to learn them. You get to screw up and make mistakes and come back and go hey, what went wrong here? Let's work through this.
Jonathan:I have clients who have been lying to me for four months not out of malice, not even out of shame so much and I create a very compassionate, open space where there's no judgment. But they have to get to the place where they accept being in that place. So I don't fault them for lying to me for four months. I don't think they're a bad person. I think they just had to get to the place where they're comfortable telling me what they're really doing, where they can let go just the same way. It took me so long to get over my own self-judgment and self-loving and self-hatred before my coach could help me, because I mean, make no mistake, if you're not getting results, I know you're not doing everything perfectly the way that you're telling me Exactly.
Jonathan:Exactly. But there's no judgment there. That's not me saying you're a bad person. It's saying let's figure this out. So I have a program called Lifestyle 180. And it's my flagship program. It's kind of my favorite one. It's 180 days and, of course, capturing the name is like a 180 means a different direction in your life. The reason it's 180 days or six months basically is because three months isn't enough. I used to have a three-month program, 12-week program. You know the usual 90 days, three months, 12 weeks, whatever. There's also 30 days and 21 days and so on, and I have 14 days as well.
Jonathan:But really, to really do this, we have to commit to a longer period of time, because there's going to be the initial excitement phase. This is great, I'm doing everything right, ticking all the boxes. Coach is smiling. I'm only smiling anyways, but I know that they're going to crash. They just don't know and I don't want to spoil it for them. They're going to crash, they're going to hit the grind. They're going to hit the spot where I can't keep doing everything right, because the dopamine from the initial excitement of starting something new has worn off.
Jonathan:But the goal that I'm trying to get to is still in the distance. It's a ways off. I'm stuck in the messy middle. I don't feel motivated, the goal's far away and I just want to go back to whatever I was doing before, because it would be easier. Everybody gets there and I know they're going to. I just don't tell them because I don't want to spoil it for them. That's where the magic happens, where you stop performing and you start being real, and sometimes it takes a couple months before someone will do that. I can engineer a crazy good meal plan, a great training plan, I can help you optimize your sleep, and things like that. The best plan in the world means nothing if you can't stick to it. And if you can't stick to it it's not because you're a bad person.
Brad:So, oh, okay, I'm starting to see where we're going here. It's like it's. You know, obviously I'd be one of those people that would take me three months just to get started. But but yeah, so it's and you're absolutely a hundred percent correct. And I listened to my.
Brad:My clients think that's up to them all the time and I'm constantly trying to redirect, whereas people think that, hey, because I'm obese or because I've tried and failed, I'm a bad person and they need to separate that. That's not that. That's not true. And they need to separate that. That's not that, that's not true. I mean, even me.
Brad:I know that if I'm on the bike and I'm supposed to be hitting a certain metric for that, for that workout, and I miss my metrics, I'm like, oh you loser.
Brad:You know what I mean and that's, that's negative self-talk Now for me. I know that for me personally, the next workout will be like over and above, much better because I said that. But that's just because I know my own self-care talk and my own self-talk is sarcastic, um, yeah, but for a lot of people and I have, I have a client's self is that if they don't hit their metric, they don't get the, the result it came from, for an event that they're, that they're running in or something they really do. They feel like they're a loser and that's not just not the case, it's just another experience and another learning point. Now you take that and now we make it better, and I'm constantly saying that. But it's really hard, it's, it's I. I can say it every single moment. I can tell them, I can be compassionate, I can show them, but for them to believe it is a hard thing.
Jonathan:So, with you get to that point where you actually get your clients to believe those things yeah, that's tricky and I can't force a client to do that, but what I can do is help them. Because here's maybe here's a better question is how do we change a belief? Right, I think that's. That's a question because and let's just call it belief a thought that we hold to be true, whether or not it's factually correct, and it's maybe it's really deeply ingrained because you've held to be true for a very long period of time. I'm never going to lose the weight because I've struggled and tried. Now, part of that is your brain making a prognosis. Your brain is looking at your past behavior to try to predict your future behavior and decide if it should spend energy on this endeavor or not. That's a very simplified version. That's what's happening. So you're encumbered by that, but I'm not. So that's where I get to look at you and see your potential and I go actually, yours was possible for you. Now you might not believe me yet when I say this because of that belief in your brain, but maybe you've heard about the circus elephant. You know the analogy where the elephant was a baby and they chained it to a steel post in concrete and the elephant wasn't strong enough to pull it out, and so on. And then it's just learned helplessness, essentially. Then you see the elephant as like a big, you know, five ton, 10,000 pound majestic beast that can knock over trees and pick them up with his trunk and be used for logging. Tied to a fence post, I think. Why doesn't? The elephant doesn't even try, because there's this belief. So the human equivalent is kind of like you're tied to a surveying stake, you know a little one by two in the ground, with an orange ribbon on top or something like that, and you're walking in a circle around this just a pattern of behavior playing out, a repeat. Surface circumstances look different, but the pattern of behavior remains the same and your brain's telling you this is your safe place too. Let's not forget that. This is your safe place. Keep doing the same thing. I can keep you safe if you do the same thing. When you try to change it, it gets unsafe. That's your brain selling you right, that primal part of your brain. When you take an action that is contrary to a belief that you hold to be true, you start to challenge that belief. But if you try to make it too big a leap, your brain will reject it and you'll go right back. You'll even jam the stake back into the ground. This is where I belong, right? So you got to be sneaky, you got to be subtle.
Jonathan:How did I go from hating myself to being able to say I'm a world-class coach and I love myself? How did I get there? I had to, like, slowly chip away at that belief. It didn't change overnight. Brushing my teeth why did I brush my teeth if I hated myself? Because it's a part of me, so there's some value in me still. And so we turned brushing my teeth a daily habit into chipping away at this belief. I have value. I have. I have value. I have value. It's okay Putting a bottle of water beside my bed, so in the morning when I wake up, I hydrate.
Jonathan:I have value, I have value. Just chipping away at it. That first step pulling that stake out of the ground oh, it's kind of scary. And the first few steps away from that. You're dragging that stake behind you. It's getting snagged on weeds and roots and things like that. You're going to get tripped up by it. It doesn't like. I love this expression that says relapse is as natural to change as exhaling is to breathing I like that the way that we're neurologically wired means that we're going to relapse.
Jonathan:but if you know that it's going to happen, then you don't get stuck in a pity party thinking you're a terrible loser when you relapse into an old pattern of behavior. You can't take something that's been wired into your brain for 40 years and think in four weeks it's going to be different. Our brains don't work like that. You have to create new neural pathways in your brain. But to change a belief, an action that's contrary to the belief, a small one repeated over time, until one day the stake just falls off and you're free from it. I'd love to tell you it's a lightning bolt from heaven, but it's not. You chip away at it, little by little, actions contrary to that belief, until one day a new belief is fully blossoming in your brain.
Brad:That's amazing. That's so pretty beautiful. Relapsing is to change as exhaling is to breathing.
Jonathan:Relapsing is as natural to change as exhaling is to breathing.
Brad:Relapsing is as natural to change as exhaling. That's awesome, I love it and we got to think about that. To change is actually in this to breathing. Relapsing is naturally changes excellent, that's awesome, I love it and we got to think about that. But that chipping away that that's the key right there, that I, if you take anything away from this, it's that fact that if you want to make those changes, it's a small chipping away every day at the belief until you finally are able to let it float away. That's fantastic.
Brad:And yeah, and I think that is probably the best place for us to wrap, to start to wrap this up, and I think we've gotten such amazing information and your story is incredible and I'm very honored and privileged for you to share it with us. Um, do uh. So coach John um is at freedom nutrition coachcom and then he's got an. He's got a book, um, a free ebook that'll show you how exactly how to crush your cravings and that you start. Yeah, freedom nutritioncom slash book, um, and then I know you've got some. Where would you find is it's like the. Where's the best place to communicate with you? I know you've got all your, your socials here, but, yeah, that we can put in that. We're putting the show notes along with that website, but where's the best place for people just to connect with you?
Jonathan:Probably by the website, actually, because you can email me from there. I'm not as active on social media currently as I used to be. I love social media, it's been great, and I'm not disappearing off of it, but it's also nice to not always have to be on there. Here's the other thing If someone wants to talk to me, like just the way you and I are talking, you can book a call for free. I will talk to them for 30 minutes, no charge, nothing like that, no agenda, not even a pitch.
Jonathan:Funny thing is I don't even pitch anymore. I'm just like let me just talk to you and get to know you, and if it makes sense for us to talk about working together, that's cool. If it doesn't make sense, I'm not for everybody and I'm so okay with that, that's it's. It's so like awesome to be at that place, like in what I do, where people will figure out like there's a connection here. I want to work with you, you can help me. Or some people like hey, clearly I don't mind talking, so yeah, no, I, you know what it's.
Brad:It's so funny because I do the same thing. I do a consultant call and then exactly, and I like, if you don't feel like it's for you, it's fine. You don't even have to make a decision today, yet 75% of the people that go off and say, let me think about it, come back and they book. So I think it's definitely the greatest model. And I don't pitch either, I just say exactly what you said. It's more smart nowadays.
Jonathan:They know when they're being gamed. Consumers are way more savvy.
Brad:I'm like I'm not going to treat you like you're a dummy and I'm not going to emotionally manipulate you, I'm just going to talk to you like a real human being, tell you how valuable it is that I can help you and let you decide Exactly, and on the website, he has got tons of testimonials on there that you'll have to take a look at, and some of them are absolutely amazing. So please take a look there. I will. Obviously, I'm going to put the website and his contact information in the show notes. He also has a podcast called Between the Before and After the Stories that Shape Us. You said that you took a hiatus for a while, but there's 193 episodes in there for you to go back there's a few to look at, and it's amazing stories of people overcoming adversity in life.
Jonathan:I realized we are so inspired by stories. I love a podcast like this. We are so inspired by stories. I love a podcast like this. We're inspired by stories. We look for ourselves and other people's stories to find hope for what's possible for us, and so I wanted to share more of those stories to give more people hope.
Brad:Exactly so. It's literally that you can go back between the two. You can go back between life-changing challenges and between the before and after Great stories Exactly challenging challenges and between the four and after and you're great stories. And exactly, and, like I said before, I'm here to give you stories. We're here to give you stories of people that you'll get. If you just get that one little nugget, just that one little piece of information that says, ah, then you're, you're gonna be able to take that, and it causes you to take action. That's what we're here for. I consider it a win. So, jonathan, thank you, thank you so much for honoring us with your presence and with your story. That was a roller coaster of emotions and a ton of great information. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate that. All right, folks, until next time. Don't forget to spark desire your limits.
