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This was one of THE MOST ENJOYABLE yet costly lessons I ever learned in my drive to become an entrepreneur.

I wrote this back in 2011 and spent the next eight years honing my ability to use what I’d learned, so as to protect myself from myself.

Took a minute. But the lesson finally stuck.

To succeed at anything, but especially large things, you’re gonna need drive, determination, excitement, enthusiasm, and a stubborn refusal to quit.

You’re going to need help, guidance, advice, opinions, and direction from others who’ve gone where you wish to be next.

Trust will play a huge part in these events as you step out into new territory.

And here’s where you must be careful

Earlier in my entrepreneurial upbringing, I inadvertently found a mentor; someone whose excitement and drive piqued my own sense of adventure. This person sensed where I was headed and he wanted in. He wanted to help. And he needed help with his projects as well.

It seemed to be a natural fit, us working together. And to be honest, much of it was. And I learned a lot. I mean tons of information came my way in the form of varied, multiple, and ever morphing experiences. We were in the flow.

But I began to notice a change

We had a team. We worked hard. We slept little. We were partners in other people’s projects. We said “no” to nothing.

And it was all falling apart.

I felt forced to separate myself from this situation and it was hard. It was like a mini-divorce but I could not take what my life had become inside this partnership. I had to put my foot down but there had been such a loyalty built up that it was hard to take.

But part I did, and as soon as I did, and the initial adrenaline wore off, I felt FREE!

It felt just like every other job I ever quit before it. I have always told people that the only relief I felt that was stronger than finally getting a job and paying my bills, was the relief from quitting that same job a short time later and being free once again!

But this experience, of which I could never do justice to its scope and intensity, was rewarding in a direct manner and an indirect one.

I learned skills that were meant to be taught the way they were and I learned skills from surviving what the teacher put me through that was contradictory to our supposed reality.

I learned a lot of hard lessons but I am grateful

This one partnership probably brought me ten years of valuable lessons condensed down to two. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you – fail fast. The quicker you get through your mistakes, the quicker you reach your victories.

But as I said, I learned a lot of good too, and it came from a good place. And I learned to keep my eyes open and to be careful. This is what I learned:

• Explain yourself to no one
• Figure out if you’re selling a product or selling a brand
• Dig deep within yourself to discover what the world needs you to achieve
• Rein in your enthusiasm. Avoid “shiny object” syndrome
• Don’t build the other guy’s dream for him
• Conversely: don’t expect him to build your dream for you
• Don’t let others take advantage of you
• Never build a company without a written plan
• Don’t overextend yourself
• Don’t make promises you can’t keep
• Don’t lie in order to get what you need
• Be in a business for the right reason
• Pick your partners very carefully
• Don’t let someone else decide your fate
• Don’t depend on someone else to tell you your vision
• Don’t go into an arrangement with desperation as your main driver
• Don’t be conned
• FOCUS! Keep your projects down to a minimum, preferably one
• Fight hard for your dream
• Don’t be an opportunity seeker
• Family is more important than business
• Help the helpless but don’t become one while doing so. Avoid martyrdom
• Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight
• Be of service to your community
• Develop your own vocabulary for your business. This brands you
• Posture matters – how are you perceived by the other side?
• Don’t come to the table with nothing to offer the other guy
• Be specific
• There is no altruistic act
• Bartering can cover a lot of ground as you grow
• Don’t become the very thing you’re trying to beat, in order to best it at its own game
• Use the system to its maximum extent wherever and whenever possible

I know that was long and I thank you for reading this far but that one man really did teach me worlds of info.

This is another blog post from Outsiders Journey. I wrote this describing what I learned from the co owner of Truehope after we’d shared the stage at a mental health conference some years back.

Now here’s an odd problem to have. When you repair your life on every level through the rebuilding of your entire being, you are now a newcomer to wellness.

You are seeing the world in a way you never have before

And it is hard to take, believe it or not.

I had a chat once with the co-owner of the supplement company that turned my life around. He told me that many of the people they helped are so used to being medicated, thinking like victims, and having an authority figure tell them what to do, that once they become well, they can’t handle it.

They willingly return to using meds, even though they know that their health would suffer, their illness would return or get stronger, and they’d have to once again deal with all the side effects of that poisonous medication.

But it was easier than being in charge of their own lives and facing their true feelings!

• Most people would rather be led than lead themselves to their own achievements.
• They’d rather take the easy way out of every situation, rather than face the responsibility of taking charge of their lives.
• They live in fear of facing their own selves, not wanting to see what really lies just beneath the surface.
• They are scared to confront their deepest desires because they’ve already convinced themselves that they’ll never have what it takes to attain them. So they stay numb in some fashion, instead.
• And for many, their version of reality has been formed with a mind that’s been continually under the influence of mind-altering substances. They literally have no foundation for thinking in regards to living a healthy life! It’s an alien concept.

OK. I wanted to be meds-free and I wanted to be healthy, but I knew what this man was saying.

I experienced everything on that list above, at one time or another

When I became well, the journey had changed more in me than just the face of the illness. Every part of me had been responsible for the illness even being present. So, to beat it I’d had to change every part of me!

The world got weird as I got well. I had to teach myself how to be this new person. And I was scared and despondent at times, too. It can be a nightmare restarting your life, even when that’s what you wanted. Change is the hardest thing for a person to accept.

But accept it I did. And even though the road’s been awfully hard at times, I would never think to go back to where I was.

I want more and I had to become more to get it

I want to help you do the same if you’re willing to take on such a challenge. Because believe me, for you to pull off whatever got you looking my way in the first place, is going to require you to become something different to some degree, than what you are now.

It’s going to require an increase in your level of responsibility and a stretching of your comfort level.

What are you about to become a newcomer to? What about that scares or confuses you? Stymies your efforts to move forward? Tell us below and let’s work it out as a crew.

The following is a blog post from my old site, Outsiders Journey, from 2015. It shows when I made the leap to just helping people (ineffectively) beat bipolar to what I am now, someone who focuses on those who’ve reached a solid stability, whether the illness is still present or not and realize there may be more to this illness than meets the eye. Good things.

As I begin the process of discovering my process, it might help us both if I share a recent conversation I had with a new friend via email.

This person found me through my book, “It Takes Guts To Be Me”.

And he had questions regarding how I handled the transition off meds, while adding what was really missing.

Truehope and my experiences: Hmmm…I have so much to share about that and for so many reasons. And with the passage of time, I have a different understanding of what all of this has meant.

Let me first inject something that came later. I had the co-owner and his son share a stage with me at a mental health expo some years back. The owner admitted to me that I’d done something that even they could not help people with, and that was to manage my newfound sanity.

Truehope has had loads of success with de-medicating people. But as it turns out, many of those people cannot handle wellness. They can’t understand it. They feel too much and become overwhelmed by too many new things. To them, this is scarier than the original illness and the meds side effects, so they go back to that way. I am one of the few who’ve built a successful Step Two. Which, now, I am trying to expand into something separate from just fighting mental illness. But keep reading.

I still stand behind all I said about them, regarding the science and the Why of it all. (Here’s a research link from their site. Before I ever started taking their stuff, I read every single word of any research from them or about them that I could find. I put weeks of study into it before ever calling.)

And I am still good friends with the CEO. But that came after my success with their program. They are truly good people on a good mission and they lead from their hearts. I can’t stress that enough.

And I feel that all the punishment my physical self endured from toxins and stress really did need their chemical answer to help heal me.

But what I feel they might have that’s even more important than their products is their support team. I mentioned this in the book. I LIVED on the phone with them, as I endured the rough transition off meds. Their helping hands played a huge part in enabling me to overcome and survive the really fucked up transition. And it was every bit of fucked up.

I have the same to say about Centerpointe. Their CDs were massively helpful but I also LIVED on the phone with their support staff as I tried to understand why anything in my head and life was as it was as I transitioned. And more. CP has more to say about all of life and their input is invaluable.

*Ken’s note: This next bit is the pivot point to all I’d been doing and what I’m doing next. This is where I failed many.

Now, as far as how I dealt with the transition when I wasn’t on the phone with support people: I gutted it out, mostly. And that’s where my system fails people. I learned, in retrospect, that I had what it took to NOT go back to drugs, regardless of how scared I was or how bad I felt. I kept telling myself that my 3-inch thick psych file proved, scientifically, and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that meds could NEVER help me and would ONLY hurt me.

I chanted that to myself like a mantra as I endured hours-long panic attacks, refusing to touch the huge bottle of Klonopin in my desk drawer. (In the end, Klonopin was the only thing that could even dent my panic.) I just hung in there, reminding myself that there was no Plan B. I had no choice. I gutted it out or died. And Marines don’t quit.

And there’s another thing I could not pass on to other sufferers. My Marine attitude. That will to win, or at least to not give up, even in the face of dooming odds.

Those two lessons about myself eventually made clear to me that I’d done something unique, and even with all my steps, many just could not do it.

And dealing with the unwell became painful for me. I partly empathized too much, which added unnecessary pain to my day. But I also grew very frustrated when they just couldn’t stick to the plan. And many thought I was a scumbag for charging anything for my help.

Since I was also trying to build a business out of this, you can see my predicament. I subsequently stopped all bipolar assistance about 4 years ago. Yet, I knew it still mattered to my own growth, as well as the fact I had something powerful in me to help others.

So, that is why I am reformatting all of these experiences into something else that’s more useful and for a wider batch of people.

And I want to do work that makes me happier than when I was 100% about bipolar. That was a stepping stone to what I’ve become. And I’m excited to fully understand what it makes me now.

I want to stress that I still feel mightily for those fighting mental illnesses and addictions but that I’ve beat those demons and wish to explore new lands; see where my old knowledge can take me next.

And I’m looking to see who’d like help from someone who’s survived what I have but do not, themselves, need direct help with those same areas either. If this is you, please let me know below.

Bill Harris is the founder of Centerpointe and the maker of Holosync, a technological meditation system that has had a profound effect on my life.

He, above anyone else in my life, showed me how my mind worked, how groups of people interact, and what our world really is.

He also showed me what I really am (any of us for that matter) and what the evolutionary stages are that we all inhabit at various points in our lives.

So I’ve attempted to stick to the most relevant points in relation to why you’re here now:

• What you think of as “you” is really just a construct, not real, and easily changeable
• Reality is subjective, an opinion we all have that is unique to each of us
• Our adult actions are driven by experiences we had as children, but we are no longer aware of this fact
• To become “aware” is the secret to life
• Life is a game and we all have our part to play, just like an actor, but we are not that part
• Heal your mind and your body will follow
• Attachment to things being the way they are is the root of all pain – focus on letting go

Depending on where you’re at in your evolutionary understanding of yourself, some or all of this might seem bizarre.

If any of this is hard to swallow, just know that my comprehension of these things has had a measurable effect on my life, which translated into big changes in how I shared my message and went about building business.

And I’m still learning from Bill.

You are not you

You are a map, an idea of yourself based upon what you’ve been taught, what you’ve survived, and what you desire to gain from this life.

To put it into more technical terms, you are an interface that your conscious mind has developed in order to stay safe in the world as you believe it to be.

This is fantastic news!

It’s fantastic because if you are not satisfied with the version of you that you are now, you can change it out for a better version that takes you where your subconscious mind knows you truly belong.

I share this in order to help you begin to look closer at why you’re on my site and why you’ve chosen to look deeper into sharing your message.

Your ability to truly understand your motives for wanting my help, directly correlates to your ability to be authentic.

In order to know those motives, you must understand why you are as you are, and for most of us we don’t even know.

Or we make assumptions that have been formed by the same person who doesn’t truly know why. We kid ourselves. It’s how we stay safe.

This is also why witnesses at an accident will each have a slightly or majorly different version of what they think happened.

Cops know this and it’s why they interview as many witnesses as possible. Then they decipher what they feel is the truth from there.

Of course, their interface is screwing with this result too, but let’s keep this simple.

We see the world around us based upon this map of ourselves, which we’ve created

Change how you are and who you think yourself to be and the world magically changes around you.

When I first actively pursued this work, I was stunned how life started to be unfamiliar but in a good way. I started to see how I was routinely shooting myself in the foot.

I began to change how I did things. As a result, my life began to improve. Over time, my mission got bigger as did my self confidence. I want this for you, too.

All of our actions are rooted in a need to survive traumas we endured as children

And we do this on autopilot. Our formative years have had more of an impact on our actions than we know. As you build your business, share your story, and help your people just be aware of why you may be doing this.

Staying aware will enable you to access the deep parts of your mind that have your best answers to your most pressing questions just waiting for you.

Becoming aware is a deep topic – too deep for this post. It involves becoming a witness to yourself. You need to develop the ability to watch yourself go through your day, as if viewing a movie. Don’t judge. Just watch.

Did your decisions for the day help you achieve your deepest desires and needs? If not, don’t kick yourself. Just change how you make your decisions and take another whack at it.

One area that you’ll find this witnessing to be useful is in how you care for your mind. By caring for your mind better, you’ll find that many bodily pains and illnesses will vanish. This makes your mission easier to accomplish.

The brain and body are one, not two separate pieces as psychiatrists often seem to think. They’re literally inseparable. Take care of your head and watch what other pain dissolves. Then see how much work you get done and in a much more positive mood!

Life is a like a game or play – we’re performers

In a play, you have a part. You pretend to be someone. When the play is over, you are no longer that person. Well, that is the reality behind your entire life.

It goes back to that interface. Based on the interface you’ve designed (your part) you interact with the world. You’re being the “you” you think yourself to be.

But remember what I said above. This can be changed.

Just know that if the part you’re playing in this game is not speaking to the deepest parts of you, then change your part.

Life being a game does not mean it’s fun.

It just means it’s subjective and alterable.

Think of the biker who one day becomes a priest. Think of the office worker who one day becomes a mixed martial arts fighter.

Think of anyone who was something totally different some time ago compared to what they are now. Those people have changed the part they play in the game.

It can also be little subtle changes.

You stop being rude. You pay more attention when others speak. You quit telling the same jokes. You change your favorite brand of anything for a brand that serves you better.

You stop living your life based on conclusions whose formation you no longer remember

If you ever stopped for a moment to really inspect why you do anything the way you do it, you might be surprised to learn that you no longer agree with yourself on that topic.

It’s amusing and freeing. It’s often a major relief that leads to a big part of your life improving.

Staying aware of this fact will help you adapt as you develop your dream, your plan, your mission, your business. Staying aware of this fact will help you discover what you should truly be doing with your time, in order to get the most return on its investment.

Lastly, know that all pain is derived from your attachment to something being the way it used to be and your resistance to the fact that it’s no longer the same. All pain. This is a fact that is very hard to comprehend at first.

Yes, even cancer fits into this description. You’ve probably heard of cancer patients who were in massive pain until the day came when they accepted their fate, then they were filled with a bliss that was palpable to everyone in the room.

My rather heavy metaphor directly correlates to your being able to know when to say “when” on a plan or idea that is not going where you’d like it to. You simply need to know when to let go. And in doing so, you move forward.

I won’t go deeper here but Bill is waiting over on Centerpointe to explain this much better than I can.