Manders Mindset
Are you feeling stuck or stagnant in your life? Do you envision yourself living differently but have no idea how to start? The answer might lie in a shift in your mindset.
Hosted by Amanda Russo, The Breathing Goddess, who is a Breathwork Detox Facilitator, Transformative Mindset Coach, and Divorce Paralegal.
Amanda's journey into mindset and empowerment began by working with children in group homes and daycares. She later transitioned to family law, helping people navigate the challenging emotions of divorce. During this time, Amanda also overcame her own weight and health challenges through strength training, meditation, yoga, reiki, and plant medicine.
Amanda interviews guests from diverse backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and wellness experts, who share their incredible journeys of conquering fears and limiting beliefs to achieve remarkable success. Hear real people tell how shifting their mindsets—and often their words—has dramatically changed their lives.
Amanda also shares her personal journey, detailing how she transformed obstacles into opportunities by adopting a healthier, holistic lifestyle.
Discover practical strategies and inspiring stories that will empower you to break free from limitations and cultivate a mindset geared towards growth and positivity.
Tune in for a fun, friendly, and empowering experience that will help you become the best version of yourself.
Manders Mindset
From Special Forces to Sovereignty: Tim Thomas on Turning Pain into Purpose | 144
Feedback on the show? Send us a message!
What if your darkest moment held the key to your greatest purpose?
In this powerful and soul-stirring episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo sits down with Tim Thomas, Special Forces veteran, breathwork facilitator, and founder of Breathwork & Bed to explore how pain, isolation, and trauma became the foundation for his mission to help others reclaim their sovereignty.
Tim shares raw stories from growing up in one of Australia’s most prejudiced towns, struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia, navigating divorce, and surviving PTSD. But it was one breath, taken at rock bottom, that became the circuit breaker and changed the course of his life.
From the battlefield to breathwork, Tim speaks with brutal honesty, fierce compassion, and a heart for service. His journey reminds us that healing isn’t about avoiding the shit it’s about turning it into fertilizer.
This episode is a must-listen for cycle-breakers, seekers, and anyone ready to transform pain into purpose.
🎙️ In this episode, listeners will learn:
🔥 Why trauma and fatigue often mask themselves as isolation
🌬️ The physical power of breathwork and how it saved Tim’s life
🧠 How dyslexia helped him develop elite-level pattern recognition
🛏️ The story behind the Breathwork in Bed app and its global impact
👨👧👦 How breathwork has shaped his parenting and personal relationships
🧭 What it means to reclaim your sovereignty starting from within
💥 How one breath can be the first step toward transformation
🕒 Timeline Summary:
[1:02] – Meet Tim Thomas: Special Forces veteran, breathwork coach, father
[3:08] – The "shit to fertilizer" mindset and the million-in-one mission
[4:30] – Growing up in a racially divided town and learning from Aboriginal elders
[7:47] – Struggling through school with undiagnosed dyslexia
[14:28] – Applying for the military at 30 and discovering the power of breath
[18:07] – Balancing fatherhood with a career in Special Forces
[21:19] – The story of Tim’s son running a spontaneous marathon
[27:30] – Parenting through community and breathwork
[31:40] – Hitting rock bottom post-divorce and finding healing through breath
[36:40] – Why quality sleep, sovereignty, and self-connection go hand in hand
[39:39] – Closing reflections and the ripple effect of one breath
To Connect with Amanda:
Schedule a 1:1 Virtual Breathwork Session HERE
📸 Instagram: @thebreathinggoddess
Follow & Support the Podcast:
📱 Instagram: @MandersMindset
👥 Join the Manders Mindset Facebook Community HERE
To Connect with Tim:
🌐 Website : Breathwork in Bed – Access guided Breathwork audios and sleep support.
📸 Follow Tim Thomas on Instagram: @breathworkinbed
📺 TikTok: @breathworkinbed
📱Facebook: @breathworkinbed
Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers and a variety of other people when your host, amanda Russo, will discuss her own mindset and perspective and her guest's mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Mandu's Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life.
Speaker 3:I'm your host, amanda Russo, and I am so excited for today's episode. I am honored to be here with Tim Thomas. Tim has served as a special forces operator in the Australian military and he has a passion for helping people improve their sleep and he founded the program called Breathwork and Vet and I am so excited to chat with him today. Thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 4:Amanda, it's so good to be here, Warm energy being sent from down under.
Speaker 3:I'm so glad to have you. So who would you say? Tim is at the core.
Speaker 4:Tim's a kid that never stopped his wanting to adventure, like there's always a new horizon. I had a bucket list of things I wanted to do and and the problem was I ticked them off. I was one of those people that actually tried to live without regrets, but then when you get to the end of that bucket list, you're like what the heck? And I fell into a bit of a funk and then I realized that my old way of moving wasn't serving me and it was potentially a little bit selfish, because it was all about what Tim wanted to do and where Tim wanted to go. And so now it's funny, the things that you struggle with or struggle through or get a breakthrough in end up being the very thing that helps you serve others, Like the one thing experience that you didn't like or didn't want to deal with. When you do move through it, it gives you so much more value to others. And so if I'm talking to veterans, I use quite plain speak. I said, listen, you might not feel like you're special, but I bet you've been through some shit. And they start nodding and I said, well, it's that shit we're going to turn into fertilizer and the stinkiest shit, the shit you do not want to deal with becomes the best fertilizer to help you grow and to help everyone else grows. And ask yourself the question how many other people do you think are going through the same shit? Okay, because even if it takes you a week to go through a month, a year, a decade to turn that shit into fertilizer, that's the amount of time you're going to be able to save all those other people going through the same shit. And in that moment, if you ask yourself that question because that's a real question, how many other people are going through the same shit? And then they become people left and right of you. Give it a number, whatever it is.
Speaker 4:My pathway into this was the veteran space, but you could have, you know, a relationship problem, breast cancer, whatever it is. Picture those people left and right of you, however many that is, you know. In my idea I thought maybe at least a million, you know. And so I had 500,000 on my left, 500,000 on my right, all looking in saying, tim, you've got to find a way forward for you so you can find a way forward for us and all the people listening right now. There are going to be people in your future that you possibly haven't even met yet, that are going to say you know what? We are so glad that back in 2025, you saw us you broke your own isolation and made a choice to move forward.
Speaker 4:Because here's the thing, if you can make, it's sometimes hard when you're coming out of a problem, coming out of the shit. It might be a struggle to make an inch of progress, but you're no longer making one inch, you're making a million inches because you've got all those people with you. It's no small thing what you're doing. It's multiplied by a million, so you're no longer like one in a million, you are a million in one. And once you get your head around that, that's when you become super powerful.
Speaker 3:I love the shit to photolyzer analogy. I loved that. Okay, I know that makes a lot of sense. Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing? Take us back, yeah, sure.
Speaker 4:So think of I mean, I haven't spent that much time in the States but think of the deep South where there's, you know, back in the sixties, where there was a lot of racial prejudice. I grew up in a very small country town statistically Australia's most prejudiced town. I grew up in a very small country town statistically Australia's most prejudiced town. My father worked for the Aboriginals and a lot of white folks didn't like us and the Aboriginals didn't hate us but they didn't trust us. But at about the four to five year mark they realized dad was a good guy and then I got accepted into their culture and I figured out pretty quick that in their culture you can't say no to a kid that's under five. And and so I would always when, when dad would visit the camps and all that, I would always find the oldest guy and that always make a particular thing and I'd say, okay, hello, my name's Tim, what's your name, what do you make? And he says I make boomerangs. I said, great, make me a boomerang. And he'd just get up and would walk out in the bush, would walk around, would find the right tree branch, cut that, and I'd sit with him as he made the thing and he'd engrave and then he'd just give it to you, you know. So. You know, to this day I've still got these artifacts from. You know that upbringing and and I still go back there from time to time and spend time doing some. You know, hunting and gathering. You know with the locals. So, growing up in a space where, you know, obviously there was no technology, it was very sort of free range. You know eating what they call bush taco, which is basically anything that crawled, walked or flew we would eat. My favorite food growing up was a particular grub called a witchetty grub, which is like a big fat white grub, kind of tasted like an almond cheese, and a lizard called a sleepy lizard. In the local tongue they call it gala. Or if you ever seen one of those shingle back lizards with a blue tongue, yeah, we used to eat those and that was just a normal day upbringing. And I was terrified of sharks because where we were there was great white sharks in the area and I'd have nightmares, wake up screaming from these sharks and it wasn't like the boogeyman. It's not real. These sharks were real, right. So one thing I do as an adult now, amanda, is I go back to this place and I'll swim in the ocean and I do a lot of spearfishing these days so I'll swim in these oceans that I was once absolutely terrified to be in, and so it's so great to have a place that challenges you on such a deep level because you're not the top of the food chain. So, yeah, my upbringing also, my parents were missionaries. They worked in the church, so very, very conservative Christian in that space.
Speaker 4:And yeah, in the 90s, when I graduated from high school, everyone was like you have to get higher education. You are useless if you don't get higher education. But what nobody knew was I was and I didn't know that I was dyslexic. So I really struggled with schoolwork. Like if I worked 300%, bleeding from the eyeballs, I might get 55% on a test. You know maths, english, because I just didn't understand what people were saying. It's like a different language. So when everyone was getting higher education, I'm like I'm done with books. I'm so done with books. This is not me.
Speaker 4:And I worked as what you would call a cowboy In Australia we call them jackaroos or ringers just herding cattle on horseback in the outback and that was good. But eventually I just got tired of looking at cow bums and I want to do something completely opposite. So I started working in town, working in a bank, and I had no idea what I wanted to do, I just had a lot of energy. So someone once described me as a guided missile without a guidance system. So lots of energy, no direction. And it was only when I had like an experience that kind of completely destroyed me that I really started getting some ballast, so to speak. Knowing my up from my down, you know, knowing who I was, my up from my down, you know, knowing who I was, and I realized that the biggest gifts we can have kind of wrapped in shit.
Speaker 4:How so? Well, think about this. You know, turning shit in a fertilizer, like you know, the ability to have empathy for another human being. To have empathy for another human being, that is a painful experience. The shit is wrapped around the inside where, once you work through that, you actually have empathy for another human being going through that and you have the ability to break that person's isolation. So the shittiest experience I had was coming out of special forces PTSD, lots of alcohol, lots of pills, suicidal idolation and being dyslexic, failing high school. But I was in the top percentile pattern recognition and I saw that it doesn't matter if the pain's emotional or physical. It gets to a certain duration or intensity where it transforms, without the person knowing, into loneliness, isolation. I'm the only person going through that, and that's super dangerous.
Speaker 4:Because we're social mammals, we're supposed to feel connected to one another. It's the best thing in the world to have a group of humans around you that have your back, but when you're feeling all alone and isolated, you don't know who to trust and you can't drop your guard for a second because something bad is going to happen, and so you're often in a state of fatigue as well. So, coming through that, trauma often occurs. Trauma and isolation often occur as these words you can't speak and we're all waiting for someone else to speak. Those words and those unspoken words are like rocks around your heart. And when someone else speaks those words, those words that you can't speak, it's like those rocks just dissolve and you can feel again. And in the veteran space, my experience of it was when you know, when someone's sharing their truth, their jaw would kind of pop open like that, which is interesting that they do this, they go, and then they'd say words like fuck, I thought I was the only one and I knew that was the beginning of their healing journey, knowing that they're not alone in this. And then that's the start point.
Speaker 4:But then you move into getting them out of fatigue and I noticed that people had 98% of everything they needed inside of them. But if and all you needed to do was break their isolation and then get them out of fatigue and they had everything they needed to sort of generate and move forward, it's like this sort of golden compass turns on inside of them and until you understand that, people think, well, I've got to help somebody. So there's millions of dollars spent on veteran health, there's millions of dollars spent on mental health, but I tell you now, that's all water off a duck's back If you're not breaking the isolation and you're not getting them out of fatigue two things that aren't often on the spreadsheet, but it's, it's. It's such a done right, it's such a simple thing to do.
Speaker 4:So you know, I had this lifetime goal of saving 40 veteran lives from suicide and that was actually achieved within one year because of those two things simply breaking isolation, getting out of fatigue. And then people just went click, click, click. I know what I need to do and I wouldn't have gotten to those tools. Those tools were wrapped in a pile of shit, you know, and and and. That then got me to the gold. Otherwise I'd be like I don't want to deal with this and I'll just keep on drinking.
Speaker 3:I, I gotcha. So you graduated high school. And now, when you graduated high school, you didn't know you were dyslexic. So how did you uncover that? When did you uncover that high school? And now, when you graduated high school, you didn't know you were dyslexic. So how did you uncover that? When did you uncover that?
Speaker 4:Well, I'd just done all of year 12. And one of the one of the teachers just said look, can you just write this down for me, tim? And and I, it was his lunch order, so it was on the days where it wasn't online, it was just on a piece of paper. And I wrote Danny's lunch order and she brought it to the tuck shop lady and you know the tuck shop ladies are somewhat straightforward in their way of doing things and and she looks at it and she goes I tell you I'll do that, cause my, my handwriting was that terrible. And and she sort of, she sort of made fun of it, it and and the teacher saw this, and he saw this and he thought, look, I, tim's not stupid, but why is this like that?
Speaker 4:And so, after all my exams are done, they did these tests and they said, yeah, you're, you're on the, you're on the dyslexia side of things. And then it was just sort of left at that. There was no sort of actions on what to do next. It was just yeah, guess what, tim, that's that's no sort of actions on what to do next. It was just yeah, guess what, tim, that's that after.
Speaker 4:And I'm like you know, it might've been helpful to learn this, you know, a few years earlier. But and I was kind of a little pissed at the time thinking, well, I'd just done all of high school, wondering why I didn't fit in. And then there was this thing in my head that I didn't know about, maybe and possibly becoming a bit of a victim there. But then my brother said, tim, you know, you still completed the race, but you completed the race with this heavy backpack on your back that no one else had. So you know, know, that you're creating a work rate underneath all that. So that's when I first heard of it, when I filled out a lunch wrapper for a teacher and the tuck shop lady or the canteen lady said, yeah, did a two-year-old do it?
Speaker 3:That's a beautiful comment, though, that your brother made, that you still completed the race with a backpack on. I love that analogy, wow, okay, so post-schooling when did you go into the military?
Speaker 4:In 2004, they started this scheme called DRSF, direct recruiting into special forces. Australia had never done this before, so to get into special forces in Australia you had to get into the infantry for two years before you could even apply. But essentially the government, new war was coming and they had a budget but no bums on seats. So they started this scheme and the maximum age was 30. So I thought, well, I'm not sure if I want to do this, but I might regret it if I don't do it. So I applied under the direct recruiting scheme to get into the special forces and part of it was I was wanting to start a family and I was at the time, as professional as it got in the nineties, a fighter, professional fighter. But back then it was sort of called no rules fighting. It wasn't mixed martial arts, it was sort of held in these underground biker bars. Yes, we got paid for it, but not much. And I thought, well, if I want to get paid above minimum wage, I've got to do something that plays to my strengths, and this job seems to do that. And so I applied.
Speaker 4:Everyone said, tim, at 30, you're too old for this. But being dyslexic, pattern recognition, I'm like you know what? I have never actually aged before, I've never been this age before. And, amanda, you've never been this age before. Everyone listening the age you're at right now, you have never been that before. So shouldn't it be us that decides what we can and can't do at this particular age? Doesn't that make sense? Because so many people say, oh, at this age you can do this or can't do that, or blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, I'm going to fuck you very much, I'm going to decide what I can and can't do underneath my own skin. And they said, okay, no worries. And there was plenty of guys younger, fitter, faster, stronger, probably smarter than me.
Speaker 4:There was two things that worked in my favor. One was growing up in the seventies and eighties, getting beaten up at school. I was just a Tuesday. You didn't even tell your parents, so there was a certain tactile resilience there. The other thing was I was a freediver.
Speaker 4:I knew about breath and the power of your lungs, and your body has a very interesting automatic system for how it allocates blood and there's parts of you that are more important than other parts, so they outrank other parts. So if your brain doesn't get enough blood, it'll send a signal to your whole body hey, I'm getting the blood. I rank, outrank everybody, it'll knock you out. So you become horizontal to the floor, so it gets the blood. And another important part we have is breathing. And another important part we have is breathing. So when, and your, your diaphragm unlike your brain, that's a, that's a massive muscle group, amanda. So when you're, when this is getting fatigue, it'll send a signal out to your whole body. I'm more important than the rest of you guys. I'm going to get the blood and you could see it in these guys that were younger, fitter, faster, stronger than me. When their breath would go, a third of their blood would go away from their arms and legs that were, you know, clearly stronger than mine and they'd be going. Meanwhile, old man, tomo, they used to call me not a fan of the name, but that's what they called me was just didn't stop because, because my blood was in my, my arms and legs, albeit my weaker arms and legs, but it was. But my, my lungs were strong. So so breath work gets a little confused in that sort of the woo, woo space of oh, it just feels amazing. Yes, it feels amazing, but there is a, there is a palpable performance, edge to breath work as well. So that's what got me by.
Speaker 4:And the special forces. It's a kind of a funny world to live in because when you go into it you disappear. So if you haven't got your bills organized, if you haven't got your personal admin organized, if you've got a family I was just starting my family and I did the math because there was about a nine month preparation to go from civilian to special forces selection to find out, actually, if you've got the metal to be in the special forces. And it's the most grueling 28 days of your life. And it so happened that my firstborn was going to get born on my special forces selection and they said look, tim, you got a choice. This is special forces selection. You can do this or you can see your sunboard. You can't do both and that was really hard because I'd worked super hard to get there. It would probably be another year and a half before I had that opportunity.
Speaker 4:I wanted to provide for my family, but I wanted to be there for the birth of my son and for my then wife, and I call her my then wife, not my ex-wife, because I stand for a positive future as soon as you say the word ex-wife, there's a bunch of negative attachments to it. So I always say, then wife, because of my positive stand for the future and it's easy to sort of draw a conclusion right now oh, she's your then wife. Now because of this, no, this actually brought us closer. So I had to see this situation of me choosing to do selection over being there for my firstborn from the perspective of my son. And I said, well, from his perspective, what does he need? What are his needs? Does he need me there at the birth or does he need a dad with a job? And I'm like that kid needs a dad with a job. And and so I got my then wife all the support she needed. And I told the guy, I told the selectors, I said, okay, I'm doing special forces selection, let's do this.
Speaker 4:And that was the answer they were looking for. You know, know they, they let me have a phone so I could keep track of everything. And yeah, so. So these, the, the physical aspect to you know, the, the process of getting accepted, had to be balanced with your own sort of personal admin as well. So a lot of guys were fit enough and had a powerful mind, but they couldn't organize their own life as well, so all these things sort of come up.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that was how I got in wow, that that's a difficult decision, but I I get what you mean by you. You had to look at it from your son's perspective and not not yours, not your then wife's, but your son's yeah, I'll just, I want to share something.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so my son, his name's corbin, he's 20, he calls me up two weeks ago and he goes dad, I want to know how to deal with blisters when he goes running. And I'm like, yeah, well, I'm ex-infantry, I'm all about how to care for your feet. You've called the right guy because, yeah, I want to, I want to, I want to run a marathon. I'm like, okay, great, you know, six months of training, at least we'll get you there. He goes no, I want to run a marathon this afternoon. Right like this is his.
Speaker 4:And I'm like there's a bunch of stuff going off in my head. And I'm like why do you want to do that, corbin? He says I just want to say in the morning I wanted to do it. In the afternoon, I did it. I want to say I can get off the couch and do it Again. A bunch of stuff going through my head.
Speaker 4:But I'm like I'm not going to stand in the way of this young man. He's going to get in action. And he asked me oh, should I post it on social media? He says I'm not sure. I'm like well, corbin, here's the thing. The credit here doesn't go to the critic. The credit doesn't go to the person who points out how the great person failed. The credit goes to the person actually out in the arena falling over, getting up, getting into action. There's no credit to being in the stands just pointing out what went wrong, so to say it doesn't matter if you fail right now, just get in action, whatever that looks like. And the previous day he'd worked 12 and a half hours at his job. His dietary intake was two Big Macs and a bowl of spaghetti. So do you think he actually out of out of interest? Do you think he actually did it, amanda?
Speaker 3:I don't know if he completed it, but I feel like he ran it.
Speaker 4:And I asked him. I was quite relieved. I said, oh, do you want me to run it with you? He goes no, no, it's something I want to do on my own. So I was quite relieved that I didn't have to run it with him. But then he goes. Oh, you can run the last 20 Ks with me, I'm like. And so so I I prepped him as best I could, you know. I showed him how to bulletproof his feet with blisters. I got his tissue salts ready, ready to go. I was his support crew, making sure he had the right nutrition, because the body only holds 2000 calories and that's why most people sort of stop after two hours of work. So I was. I was able to prep him as best he could, but still in the in the mid thirties he was cramping terribly. He was having these full body spasms that kind of blacked him out for a bit and I ran the last 15 Ks with him. But he did it. He fricking did it in five hours 20 minutes.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. Why are you shaking your head?
Speaker 4:I still can't believe it myself, like I mean, who the heck goes? You know, I want to just just just to have that, you know. And I'm like it kind of makes sense, cause when he was born that was a time of real turmoil, you know, because because when he was born there was this it they allowed me to duck out for a few hours and I got to the, I got to his birth, and then there was complications. My then wife thought she was going to die. We're worried about the baby, and so all this drama was going on.
Speaker 4:And then I'm thinking well, you know, maybe people with like a, a big heart and high stimuli, they have to this world is so easy. You know it's, it's so our forefathers did too good a job. Like we don't have to run anymore if we don't need to. You know, the the new adventure sport is getting Uber Eats more. If we don't need to, the new adventure sport is getting Uber Eats. So maybe people with a higher level of stimuli have to sort of do these crazy things for the world to make sense.
Speaker 4:So I'm still trying to figure it out myself. Only now am I putting together the fact that my son called me up the other week to do this, and he was born in a real time of conflict. I'm like maybe, maybe his, his energy level was set at a certain marker at birth and now life is so easy for him in a physical sense he has to go and push himself, you know, in that, in that realm, to to, to get to feel normal. I don't know I'm shaking my head because I'm still trying to figure it out, but now that I've had this conversation with you, I'm like maybe there's some sort of energetic signature that was there, you know, from the get-go.
Speaker 3:That could be, you know, like the environment that he grew up in, like people, like if they grew up with a lot of noise, they can easily sleep with a lot of noise. You know, I've heard examples of that. It's very different, but like that aspect, you know, wow, that's amazing though.
Speaker 4:Well, you're holding a good space, amanda. I didn't know I was going to share that, but I thought, well, I've it, just came out well, I love that.
Speaker 3:That's wonderful and that that's really great, though, that you you were the person he called to and he didn't tell about the marathon.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he says blisters. How do I, how do I deal with blisters? I actually thought he broke up with his girlfriend. I'm like, okay, this is, this is something that he's trying to. You know, just do his, you know. You know, get, get it out of his system, like forrest gump or something you know. But but and and I wasn't gonna. I'm running with him, I didn't want to ask him about it. And and in the last year, in the last 15k, is he? You know the old explosive diarrhea? And so he had to do laps near a toilet so he could do that, but he still kept going. It was just surreal.
Speaker 4:And the thing was I had a whole weekend planned. I was supposed to co-lead a group of veterans up a mountaintop to do breath work with them, but this thing happened out of the blue and my son said this. I had to call him and go look, here's what's happening. This is happening now and I have to be there for it. And they're like cool, no worries, send us updates. I was taking little videos of the whole thing. In fact, I'll send you a little, a little video. Feel free to share it with you, with your crowd, in the last you know, a couple of hundred meters of him actually doing that.
Speaker 3:That's amazing and you did it with him. You reorganized your schedule to be able to. I love that. That's so beautiful. No, that really is. Has he done breathwork?
Speaker 4:He does like like all kids or like anybody, they do it when they see the self-benefit. So so my son is likes doing mixed martial arts and if I want my son to do something, I have to organize. And this is a tip for your kids your kids won't do what they tell you, but if you get a group of their friends doing what you tell them, they'll do it with them, okay, so so I will organize the martial arts class to do a particular form of breath work. So my son does it as well. And all through his primary school and high school years I would organize these young boys like to do boxing and I'd organize these boxing holiday clinics just for free, a chicken wing eating competition afterwards for these young boys.
Speaker 4:So I would have my son training, because I realized if I said, hey, son, let's go, let's do training, he's like he'd go. No, he would make his mind up on the day. You wouldn't be sure. But I knew that if I had 12 of his mates training there's no way he wouldn't. So I pulled the picture back get their friends involved and then they have to. It's sort of yeah, so that's what we did. A lot of school holidays did these you know boxing clinics, and then like a chicken wing thing afterwards and yeah, so that's how I get my kids to do. Anything is get their friends to do it.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, how many kids do you have besides the son?
Speaker 4:I've got a 20-year-old boy and an 18-year-old daughter. She just graduated from beauty school. She calls it a career now, a career in health and beauty.
Speaker 3:Why did you quote that? Why did you put that in air quotes.
Speaker 4:A career or health and beauty? Well, she doesn't call it a job. She calls it a career, so it's it's something that she really wants to do. She it's not just a job that she uses to pay the bill. She sees herself doing it for a long period of time. Okay, I quoted career, not health and beauty okay, okay look at you getting up. That's a real job. Beauty is a real thing.
Speaker 3:Tim I would get all defensive for your daughter. I'm gonna explain to you why it was, but that's amazing. Has she done breathwork with you?
Speaker 4:I think I was probably a little bit too forceful with her. So when we would hang out, we'd always walk the dogs together, and at sunset it would often be, and I'd say let's do some breathwork. You know, and I probably didn't give her the option to say no. So she's probably a little resistant now to it. But she thinks like me, she looks like her mom, my son looks like me but thinks like his mom. So it's funny One. They look and then have. It's like our brains got switched to a certain degree. Obviously they have their own personality.
Speaker 4:But yeah, jodie has told me that she has used the nighttime breathwork in bed tracks when she does want to sleep, although I mean, it's like everything. It's a bit funny hearing your own parents' voice telling you to breathe in and out. So my breathwork in bed app guides people to sleep and out of bed, as you know. And the difficulty I have is with people that know me really well. They're like I love you, tim, but it's sort of that familiarity breeds contempt. So I do have other voices on there now for people that want to change, and my boy was highly resistant to the. I don't want to hear my dad's voice in my in my bedroom because his, his girlfriend, downloaded the breath working bed app and he's like you're not playing that oh my god I love that would, would you say, breathworks helped you with parenting at all.
Speaker 4:Well, here's the thing. I really discovered it and created something with it post-divorce. So COVID divorce 2019, 2020, and it was a big financial loss. I lost house, home, money, regular access to kids and I'm sleeping on the couch of my parents' place and you can bet at 2 am I wasn't sleeping. And here was the breakthrough, and this is what put me here in front of you today.
Speaker 4:In that moment, I understood that the mind's like a garden Whatever you water will grow. And I was watering the weeds of stress, and those weeds grew, grew, grew, grew, grew, until eyeballs pop out of them and they become sentient. They become aware of the things that you do that feed them and they want to be fed. And they become aware of the things that you do that starve them and they'll push back against the things that you do that starve them. And so an example of this is, if you want to exercise or go to the gym, before you go, there's always that part of you oh, let's not do it now, I don't want to do it. Rah, rah, rah. They're the disempowered parts of you that know once you become truly powerful, they're gone and they scream the loudest before they die. So understand that.
Speaker 4:So the resistance you feel is there, telling you something powerful is about to happen. And once you can reinterpret that, you don't see it as resistance. You say like this there is something powerful that's about to take place. So, so just outside my door, right here, I've got an ice bath and you can bet there's resistance before I get in. And it's still there. But I interpret that as wow, if I'm getting this much resistance, I'm going to get this much assistance afterwards. So resistance equals assistance. And once you see that equation, you can use it as a reverse compass. You know like oh, I don't want to deal with that shit in my life. Well, that means, if you deal with it, there's so much powerful power there available for you. I kind of lost my track there, amanda. Where were we?
Speaker 3:No worries, but I had mentioned about if breathwork helped you with parenting.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, here it was, 2 am, post-divorce, sleeping on the couch in my parents' house and the stress weeds were loving it. Okay, because everything I was doing was feeding them and even though I technically knew that breathwork would help, it's like I couldn't. It's like I was locked into place, and a lot of people in the wellness space experience this, and now I'm speaking to it, where you can get so locked down into a particular state and those stress weeds go great, keep them here and you know what you should do. But it's like you are locked in. And I got up 2am. I was about to drink a lot of alcohol, take a lot of pills, potentially do self-harm, potentially all three. And I just looked at my left thumb. I said, tim, you can take one breath, take one effing breath. And I drove into my chest as hard as I could and it was like the first breath coming up from drowning and I'm like, oh, this works, take two. And I got two fingers. I drove it into my chest. I took a second deep breath. Okay, take three, take three, four, get to five, get to 10, a finger at a time, a breath at a time. I'm just reclaiming the power of my breath Right.
Speaker 4:And then somewhere between 15 and 25, those stress weeds got kicked the fuck out. And the rest of my mind was like Tim, thank goodness you kicked those guys out, this is working, keep doing it, we love you. And it was in that moment I started thinking how many other people are in a situation where it's like there's no way out of their own head and they may know what the right thing to do is, but it's like they can't do it. And so to have that circuit breaker there, that that little thing that you can, you know external focus point mine was my thumb, but you know I made breath work in bed, so people can just press, play and you say breathe in or make sense, hold it, breathe out. You know those simple things, that little external focus, when you're in the mix of it, to then get you out of it and and and I've never found anything that acts so rapidly as breathwork does Between 60 and 90 minutes done right that stuff in your head gets kicked out. And this peace, it transcends words, it transcends. You can't explain it. So I really encourage people to have a lifestyle of breath work, because then that gives you a whole new, better level of normal Because breath has a nature.
Speaker 4:Okay, if you try to hold air, you can't hold air. It can't be held, that's obvious. So when we breathe it, we take on the nature of air. We can't hold air. It can't be held, that's obvious. So when we breathe it, we take on the nature of air. We can't hang on to physical tension, we can't hold on to mental tension, and you know the amount of drugs and alcohol and all those sorts of things that you can take for us to be in that state. Well, we can attain that state without any of it. We can be what I call regain our sovereignty. We can have our boundaries in place and be in control of what's underneath our own skin.
Speaker 4:Because I had to get divorced, lose my money, house home, regular access to kids, to realize that this thing right here, this level of skin, is about where my control stops. But the good thing is underneath this skin. I get a say in it, and breath was the thing that brought me into that state of sovereign power. And you know what Powerful connections inside of you increase the likelihood. It doesn't mean that you're not about to go through a storm, but powerful connections inside of you increase the likelihood of powerful connections outside of you. And that's what I started doing. I started making these little recordings to help me go to sleep. And then I had a business. I had to get up at 2.30 am and I'd feel like crap in the morning, so I'd start making recordings to help me get out of bed and I'd share them with friends, you know, but it was a bit clunky, it didn't quite work. So, you know, I made the breath work in bed app. So you just, you know, tell it when you want to sleep, when you want to wake up, and then it just falls out of your phone because people are busy enough, it's, it's. You're not serving them If you just do this, all right, but if they can just have so, look, here's what I want, and then you just press play on that little notification, then, with ease and grace, you start reclaiming your sovereignty and quality.
Speaker 4:Sleep has an accumulative effect. You start, you know more energy when you wake up means more energy for your day, means often you can get a better return on your day. And it's not so much the sleep that gets me excited about this. Yes, sleep and breathwork needs to be the first step into your growth. What gets me excited is everyone has these seeds of greatness inside of them and those seeds of greatness are just waiting for the right energetic level for them to flourish. This is the beautiful thing Bringing up your energy levels through quality sleep creates this natural flourishing of the person. All those gifts that are inside of a person start flourishing. Gifts that are inside of a person start flourishing, and that's the most beautiful thing I get to do and observe in people is see how it's like colors that never existed. I'm just waiting for the right energetic level to come out of you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, it's so true. Sleep affects our brain and our ability to do any and everything it really does. Well, thank you so much. I really really appreciated this.
Speaker 4:Thank you for being a wonderful host, Amanda.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, of course. Thanks for joining me. Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty?
Speaker 4:Name sounds familiar Jay Shetty.
Speaker 3:He's got a podcast called On Purpose. He's an author, former monk he probably heard of it.
Speaker 4:Oh okay, yes, I think I do.
Speaker 3:So he ends his podcast with two segments and I've incorporated them into mine. I just give him a little bit of credit because I did not come up with these questions. Beau's segment is called the Many Sides to Us. There's five questions and they need to be answered in one word each.
Speaker 4:One word, okay, I love this.
Speaker 3:What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as?
Speaker 4:Probably overwhelming, oh, probably overwhelming.
Speaker 3:What is one word?
Speaker 4:someone who knows you extremely well would use to describe you as Fun.
Speaker 3:Quirky. What is one word you'd use?
Speaker 4:to describe yourself.
Speaker 3:A seeker Pushy Appreciation. Second segment is the final five and these can be answered in a sentence.
Speaker 4:What is the best advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 3:Trade your expectations for appreciations. What?
Speaker 4:is the worst advice you've heard or received.
Speaker 3:Be like me and everything's going to be fine. What is something that you used?
Speaker 4:to value that you no longer value.
Speaker 3:What other people thought of me.
Speaker 4:If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it. What would you want it to say? Oh, this one's easy.
Speaker 3:Quality sleep worldwide. If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to know, what would it be? And I want to know why.
Speaker 4:Breathwork before bed, because quality sleep leads to quality people.
Speaker 3:I love that. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Speaker 4:I know we've got to shut this down now because we've got a busy day ahead of us, but yeah, I'd love to do this another time. I feel like we just skimmed a rock across a very deep lake in this conversation, Amanda.
Speaker 3:That's so true, and we will. We'll pick this up another time, for sure. I really appreciate it, though. Thank you so much.
Speaker 4:Thank you, Amanda.
Speaker 3:And thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Amanda's Mindset, for tuning in to another episode of Mander's Mindset.
Speaker 2:In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you, I'm rooting for you and you got this, as always. If you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five star rating, leave a review, review and share it with anyone you think would benefit from this. And don't forget you are only one mindset. Shift away from shifting your life. Thanks, guys, until next time.
