Hey, this is Ken Jensen. I beat bipolar disorder in an all natural fashion back in the mid 2 thousands. Believe it or not, that’s not even the coolest part of my story.

What I learned through that process and what came next and how that applied to bipolar and why bipolar was ever even part of the process, was mind blowing to say the least.

Bipolar has hidden within its strengths. I’m gonna show you what I mean and how they’ve shown up in my life so you can do the same. Hello, fellow trauma survivors.

This is episode 64, The Sauce. Now I’ll just reiterate I made a shift away from purely high functioning bipolar people to anyone that survived trauma and has a story and wants to create a business around it.

Or they want to get their story out, and I’m saying a business is 1 of the best ways to do it. You turn turn your story into a machine and that will ensure to most people hear it. A lot of painful lessons learned there.

And I’m really happy that I got to this point. I’m finally free to talk about what I want specifically. In a way that ties together all the pieces of me that I feel matter to you. Man to me. Very selfish about that.

If you’re not happy doing your thing, it’s gonna be a slog. You’re not gonna keep up with it. I’m so used to reiterating myself that I get annoyed, but eventually I shift wherever I must and that’s what I just did and just keep going.

On that note, you’re you’re gonna have to learn to not only have thick skin, but you’re gonna have to learn how to push through.

I tonight, I had already done a fantastic episode that did not cord because the batteries in my voice recorder died even though it has AC power. This was a thing I knew that might happen.

I have no idea why the freaking thing has AC power because it’s appears to only run on batteries and like an idiot. I did not test this before doing a podcast episode. I meant to. I looked up the manual online.

I tried to find out what might matter. I tried to get my answers solved. And I was like, alright. Apparently, we’re good as long as that a season. And the batteries died, I watched the screen go dark, but I was in such a groove.

I told myself, well, it’s just sleeping. The screen sleeping. I knew full well but could not remain aware of it. That this particular device does not do that. It it will sleep but not you’re talking into it when it stays lit up.

I just kept going. And then finally, I realized that screen has been awful dark and realize I hadn’t recorded shit. I flew into a rage and to a degree, I I rage but it ain’t like A true nobody got hurt.

On top of that, There’s a very cool software I found, a service, a SaaS, software as a service that would help me asynchronously coach I didn’t even know that was a thing till I found out about it from another podcaster, Tim Stodz, Tim Stodder.

And He raved about this thing how you could coach people and not have to be on the same schedule. So I put that all together.

It took me weeks of a lot of intense effort, and I got it to how I wanted it. I had to integrate it with my site, which means a lot stuff on my site had to be rewritten to a certain degree so that this this new tool made sense.

And I was just getting ready to go live there’s only a few things I gotta do before I can do my monster push of this this marketing machine I’m about to turn on.

And it’s all I’ve been dreaming of doing because it involves me writing a lot. There’s nothing left to do.

I’ve built everything that needs to be built for this new version of what you offer. That company went under. They lost funding or couldn’t get more funding to keep to keep the company running, so no more SaaS for you, mister Jackson.

I got the news. I thought it was a joke and an email said something rather, you know, abrupt. We’re all done. We’re leaving. We’ve closed.

I thought it was like a marketing hook to get me to open email and read more. Nope. They closed. And I sat looking at that. I was like, I worked weeks on getting that thing right. And now it’s not a thing. That thing is not a thing.

Now what? This sort of thing, if I haven’t done it to myself, shot myself in my own foot, some other something like this happens, and it’s it’s frequent enough on the Internet that you kinda gotta just be ready for it, and then pivot.

So I pivoted found another service almost immediately. That was even better. Even better. The prices were right. And as I got into it, it turns out they’re evolving.

They’re not staying as that service. They’re turning into a new company, keeping that service, but it kinda offer all kinds of new shiny super duper things that that it it’s not currently doing.

And then I looked at the pricing and it’s it’s it’s through the roof for my current standards. The version that they were currently was perfect.

Then they, like, tripled all their rates. And as I I did I then looked around the the Internet. I found a few other different companies doing the same thing, and they’re being competitive with their prices.

I’m like, alright. Well, fuck me. That’s that’s I don’t know what I’m gonna do now. I’ll figure it out. I always figure it out. I got this far. I will keep going. I beat bipolar without meds. I beat addictions.

I should have been in prison, and I didn’t. I beat so many fucking things that this software situation is not gonna be the thing that takes me out. You would like a nice easy coasting ride, but you’re not gonna get it for the most part.

Just know that now, embrace yourself. Gird your loins. So a lot of stress. However, Let’s bring it back to the joy of why I built bipolar excellence dot com.

The sauce. If you go to my website, you’ll see a link in the footer that says the sauce. I wrote this article some time ago and I didn’t know what to do with it.

It felt very important to me, but it didn’t really didn’t fit into the marketing of the site in any way that made sense to him. At least not that I can figure. That happens to me a lot.

I write articles over the years that are are very important, make very important points but but there’s no way you gotta streamline how you run your sites so that people easily understand what it is you want them to do so you can get some more done with them.

You can’t you know, and everything’s gonna feel important to you, but I I really do come out with stuff every now and then that says something so perfectly and is so powerful But it’s 1 of many.

Now what do I do with it? So anyway, I linked it at in the footer, the sauce, and it’s all about my love of conversations which plays a big part of why bipolar excellence exists. I I love stories.

I love reading. I love I love I love a a good script in a movie. I love the telling of a story and what has to be put together? The machines have to be put together to get a story out to the world like making a movie in particular.

I’m I’m really fond of movie making. I don’t do anything with it. I’m just fond of it. And I I like the thought of a bunch of people getting together to bring something to life.

I’m just doing it now with you guys 1 on 1. I need as much as possible to have complex stories being told to me and and me telling mine back, but it needs to be people that can that can meet me on on my level.

Or selfishly, I’d be happy if they had more to say than I did or were better at it just for my own entertainment.

That’s acceptable as well because I love hearing a really good story. And then with my website, I love interacting with the person that has that story and the story itself and seeing what we can turn it into.

Could be where helping people could be something else entirely but I talked a lot in that episode that doesn’t exist about the journey I took with learning about storytelling.

Let me let me recap a few things. Sometime ago, I learned It’s better, you know, you got 2 ears and 1 mouth. Listen more than you talk.

Well, with bipolar and mania and just me, even without any bipolar essence, not talking so much when I people for a lot of my life was very hard. I only got a I only got the hang of it recently last handful of years.

And as a coach, you need people to talk to you more than you talk to them, or you’re just talking to people, you’re not coaching them. So I learned that a long time ago.

But the first thing I found out was when I told my stories, I’ve lived a wildlife When I was younger, I lived a very wild life between the marines alone that was hundreds and hundreds of insane stories.

And then Certain things happened in my twenties that were just over the top, then bipolar, which was completely over the top.

Everything about it was over the top, and it was horrific. These make for great stories. I beat the damn thing and I did so without medication.

That’s a great story. I’ve overcome so many things that and and I keep finding more. And now, like with my forties, and now I’m into my fifties. The intensity the out of control intensity is is no longer a part of anything.

I still have intensity, but it’s it’s more subtle now. It’s more nuance. It runs more under the radar. A lot of it is only what’s going on in my head as I deal with certain things.

And 1 of the things I found when I was younger was when I shared my stories, some people, particularly men, would get depressed if they didn’t take the kind of risks risks I took or made, you know, the same kind of stupid decisions I did that led to misadventures that were just the stuff of legend.

They had chances of doing the same, but they played it safe, they played it smart, or they just didn’t get off their ass and try to do anything.

Whichever way it was, I found out in in certain cases. I was depressing the people I was talking to. They wished it had done something like what I did.

Even when it was, you know, clear, nobody should be doing some shit I was talking about. So once I got a little older, I started realizing that was happening happening, and I started feeling bad for people.

And I love telling my stories. And I was like, well, I can’t do it this way anymore because I don’t wanna I don’t wanna hurt people like that.

And I I can see it’s happening. The other thing so I stopped doing that so much. And then it’s very just egotistical. And once you realize that and I mean, really realize it, you just get grossed out with yourself.

I still love telling my stories. I love telling the phenomenal shit. But another tricky thing I learned is there’s a time and a place. A lot of what and and this is a problem for for me, just what do I do with myself?

A lot of what I’ve been about, a lot of what I’ve done and experienced and how I reacted to it, and the people I was with at the time, I there’s no place to really talk about it.

There’s not a group of people who can tolerate the intensity, the aggression, and and the the the ugliness, and the brutality that formed a backbone of a lot of my tails.

There’s just no place for it. I have to be in a similar group of people to share these tales. And luckily, at my day jobs over the last handful of years, I have I have been with these people.

And it’s a pure delight because we go back and forth on just fuckery and disasters and and just these really wild rides that we took that destroyed everything.

Because they’re fun. We it doesn’t matter that they ended poorly or disastrously. The stories are fun and we’re glad we did them. Even knowing full well, it led to our complete and total annihilation of heart, soul, in in real life.

So there’s a place for it, but it’s very specific and I’m frequently not in it anymore. Don’t wanna bum people out with my stories, and then the other thing was, What was the other thing?

Oh, I learned some time ago through business training, coach training, Personal development training. It was coming at me from a lot of ways.

Let the other guy talk. You got 2 ears, 1 mouth. There’s a reason. So For a while, what ended up happening was I I would attempt to let the other person lead. I still do, but I’m I’m better at what happens next.

When I was a little younger, I wasn’t, I can’t stand there doing me me me. And in a lot of cases, I definitely can’t stand I can’t stand there and tell the stories from my my teens and my twenties.

It’s it’s too much. It’s not the right time and place. So I would let the other person lead and try to get them to tell me about them.

Now this isn’t everybody, but this happened enough that it flummoxed me. I I give so many opportunity to tell me all about them, and they’d come back with the the standards.

The things people say when they don’t know what to just so they can keep the moment from becoming more than they care for it to be. Did you, you know, just keep the day moving.

The shit you say to the clerk at the register when nobody means anything they’re saying. It’s just pleasantries because it’s pleasant, but you don’t really care what the other person’s saying.

I would get that. And that frustrated the fuck out of me because they would just they would wrap up awful quick with nothing to share and then it’s back on me. And me has decided not to be a dick and talk about nothing but me.

But what do I talk about if they share nothing? Well, I never solved that per se. I just know that in my search to live the way I want. My world changed in such a way that people like that don’t really come my way anymore.

The people I meet in large part, have something interesting to talk about. Also, I took steps to learn how to find what people say interesting when I don’t think it is or that’s not exactly right.

I I would I would I could tease more of a story out of them. Some people have interesting stories and don’t even know it.

Or I have a way of finding the silver lining. I have a way of finding the gem hiding, you know, under the dirt. And I can make something out of almost nothing when people talk to me and it’s a skill I picked up over the years.

I did it at first to entertain myself. And then with coach training and the jobs I’ve had over the last 5 years, working with people, it’s a way of getting people to open up and you definitely gotta figure out how to do it.

It’s it doesn’t just come overnight. But I got really good at it. I’m awesome at it now.

I know I am. People tell me all the time. It just it just is how it is. But I always try to watch myself because I can just I can just get carried away to whatever degree with my energy and I I don’t wanna do that.

And I’m always telling myself to dial it down and and bring it back to that person. Make your point and then shut shut up and then listen to them.

Now I thrive at pulling more and more out of people. I I that became my entertainment. Just to see how much I could dig out of their heads and then put my spin on it that might be opposite of what they think happened.

Or just the freakish way I look at shit for my own entertainment. I’ll put some I’ll put some hilarious spin on it.

That turns the mundane into the awesome And then when that happens enough times when that happens enough times, more stories do come out of them. You gotta, like, break the ice, and that’s what I’ll be doing with you.

So I didn’t realize that I wrote down article and figured out all the things that I just shared with you how important stories are to me. And they’re they’re and to find someone who’s a competent storyteller. So, you know, that matters.

I I like talking with someone who’s a justice skilled. Because then everything goes up a notch or 2 or 3. The vocabulary rises, the twistedness gets more intense. The bizarre the bizarre angles become more prevalent.

It’s it’s it’s like fencing. It it it just gets it just gets more enriching, and and there’s a higher skill level involved when you’re parrying with somebody on the same level. Now I don’t do to how would everybody wanna that?

I’m thought I’m talking about. That’s with only a handful of people at different times that I know. However, as I build out my business, I know I’m gonna find more of them, particularly among trauma survivors.

Particularly among trauma survivors who want to share their story because there’s something about surviving trauma it does something to us that just gives us a different perspective on everything, and I feel even with the pain involved, whatever kind of pain, We’re more interesting.

We banked through something. We survived. If you come my way, you probably survived something most people don’t. And it does it can be anything.

A health scare a health scare, a mental health scare, a spiritual breakdown something in real life, like your company closed, and what you had to do just to keep your house and to eat. You know, all these things hurt war.

These these are the best stories to me. I like drama more than anything. Not sappy drama, just good, well written drama. And a lot of people have lived it. You can watch it in movies or you can you can go out and find these people.

And those of you that come my way, I’m telling you, you’re gonna be able to tell your stories in such a way that you’re gonna do such such a wealth of good to so many people, particularly whoever’s fighting whatever it is you got out of.

And I I am just Champing at the bit to have the opportunity to to help you pull that off. And then have the conversations you and I are gonna have as teammates and peers as we build your thing together.

I crave it. I can’t wait for you to share yours with mine. With mine, share yours and mine together, share yours with me, Alright. I had to get the what you call it correct before I hang up. Alright, guys. It’s been a long day.

It’s been a long weekend. I’ve achieved quite a bit even with the problems I ran into, technical, and software. There’s a lot going on right now. I’m being pushed to the extreme. And I’m handling all of it. And it has a feeling to it.

I I can’t quite describe. Something’s growing inside of me, energy wise, And even though my life lately has become the most complicated it’s been in quite some time, I’m not exactly happy about that, but somehow it’s feeding me.

It’s feeding me. So I’ll leave with that, and I hope to I hope to develop these kinds of feelings and and and results working with you as well. I know I will. I know we will. Can’t wait to meet you and do it. Alright, guys. Be well.