Transcript:

Ben Smith:

Welcome, everybody, to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. My name is Ben Smith. Allow me choose to choose my co-host the Eastern white pine tree to my yellow birch tree, Curtis Worcester, how are you doing today, Curtis?

Curtis Worcester:

I'm doing well, Ben. I'm doing well. I'm trying to figure out if I know what an Eastern white pine tree looks like, but I am doing well. How are you?

Ben Smith:

I'm good. Well, I then need to inform you that that official state tree is the Eastern white pine here. So Mainers, right? You've got the pine tree state, which is technically the Eastern white pine.

Curtis Worcester:

Got it.

Ben Smith:

So those are the top two trees in the state of Maine, which is why I put that together.

Curtis Worcester:

All right.

Ben Smith:

So obviously, we do a little tree here, but we want to talk about a few things today and one thing that's been on our mind is, obviously for this episode, we want obviously all of you to think about the following and we see this situation a lot with the people we talk to, especially from our first sessions, is that many of us are nearing retirement and we've been working a job or career our entire lives, right? But maybe that doesn't allow us to be the expression of our true self, right? So there's things that we'd like to say or do or be, but we have to sacrifice a lot of it. And so maybe I'm either doing that myself in terms of my career today or I've previously done it or I maybe know someone that has.

And our team gets that, right? We see that a lot and there's a lot of frustration that builds into retirement and we have to do that, right? We all have family priorities and bills that need to be paid. And maybe we might live in an area without much economic opportunity and we have to settle for the best job we can get, cough, cough, maybe like much of rural Maine and maybe we can't afford the education to get the career we wanted. But regardless, there's many of us out there that might be in that situation.

So as a result of working a job that doesn't provide our purpose and align to our true selves, we've had to stuff our emotions deep inside of us to match who our job or career needs us to present ourselves as. So what can happen over a lifetime of making that choice is that we maybe lose track of the core version of us versus who we present ourselves as. So many of us do this because we don't really know of any other way. We kept on chasing that goal of retirement, hoping that when it was all said and done, we've been able to buy ourselves the freedom and the pleasure that we never able to get during our working lives. So the problem is that we get to that end goal and we have completely lost ourselves along the way. And as we said, our team sees us a bunch and we've lost ourselves, so we now don't know how to enjoy ourselves, right?

Curtis Worcester:

Mm-hmm.

Ben Smith:

How do we know what's fun when we haven't really spent a lot of time getting in tune with what fun really is? And then also then spending that money and a lot of it, we talked about this on this show in the past, spending money sometimes represents going backwards towards the career we don't love, right? Because if what we run out of money, which means, "I have to go back to work ..."

Curtis Worcester:

Right.

Ben Smith:

"... and I have to become that again." So if we're in that situation, what do we do next? So this is exactly what this show is about. How do we use emotional healing to address the pain caused by a lifetime of misaligned purpose, and as a result, how do we start moving forward as our true self?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, that's exactly right, Ben. And as our listeners probably know by now, we love to bring in experts in the topic. So our next guest today is an emotional wellness coach and author of Feelings First Shadow Work and 10 Mind Hacks for Quicker Emotional Healing. So our guest teaches self-love and shadow work to show people how to master their emotions as quickly, easily and painlessly as possible. His unique methods help people bypass their logical brains and connect directly to their emotions to release past trauma, limiting beliefs and self-harming patterns without needing to focus on all of the past traumas that caused these issues in the first place.

He's helped client after client overcome stress, anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, PTSD, depression, etcetera and find the real lasting self-love and joy they've struggled so many years to attain. So with that background, please join me in welcoming Benjy Sherer to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. Benjy, thank you so much for coming on our show today.

Benjy Sherer:

Thank you for having me. It's a genuine pleasure. Chatting with you guys so far has been awesome and I really look forward to sharing all of this with your audience.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, Benjy, we're excited to get into it because I know in terms of your work and the conversations that you have on a daily basis with your clients and the things that you help them work through, we want to get into, right? Because I think there's a whole population out there that we help and that are listening to the show. We want to show them that path, but obviously, before we get into the topic, we want to get to know you a little bit here, right? So we'd love to hear a little bit about your upbringing, where you're from and this professional career, love to hear a little bit about that, and how did you find yourself becoming an emotional wellness coach?

Benjy Sherer:

Okay, so that's a big few chunks of questions that you just asked. I'll try and breeze through a few, a bit of it. So as far as my upbringing, I grew up in Montreal, which is a great city other than the terrible winters and grew up in a smallish Jewish community in the sense that I went to private Jewish schools, which kept us in a little bit of a bubble. And even as soon as I got to high school, I recognized that. I recognized that everyone that was around me was living one very small sample of what life has to offer and I felt the need to rebel against that. So I got to experience a lot of different lifestyles and a lot of different cultures along the way. I didn't feel right just following the path that was laid out for me like some others did.

So after high school, I studied, in Montreal, we have this thing called CEGEP, which is a couple of years in between high school and university. So that's where I started studying philosophy and religion because I had an intense fear of death my entire life and that really drove a lot of my progress. It's why I studied philosophy and religion. It's why I lived my life a certain way. It's why I took risks and chances because I needed to figure out what I really believed about life in this world and because I was desperately trying to find some logical way to not be so afraid of death.

So I started studying all kinds of different religions because I realized when I was about 13 years old that I did have some religious faith, let's say, but I started realizing that I only believed in Judaism because I was born Jewish. And so I started examining a lot. I studied a lot about Christianity and Islam and a lot of the Eastern religions and started finding something of a path for myself. But even by the time I finished university and I did an honors degree in philosophy and religion, by the time I finished that, I still couldn't find any real deeper meaning or I couldn't find any way around this whole death problem. I still felt like this universe was a physical thing and that's all there is to it and was disappointed at what I found.

So I then spent a few years playing music in a band and just trying to get the most out of life in that sense, really believing that the only true meaning and purpose to be found in this life, presuming it's just a physical world, is in the way that we impact others. So I was always trying to be of service to people in some way. I was always just trying to discover more about myself. And then there were some ups and downs. After the band didn't work out the way that I hoped it would, I found myself, what does a good Jewish boy with a background in philosophy do when he's given up on life? Well, he goes to law school.

So I went to law school thinking, and that's exactly what you were talking about a moment ago, that in order to find your path in life, you have to stuff parts of yourself away. And so in law school, law school was actually fairly easy for me. I was the guy that basically never showed up to class. I would show up in the first day and I would show up to the exam and people would ask me, "Whoa, you're in this class?" and I'd be like, "Yup, I'm in this class," and I would get a B+ or an A- and I would walk out because I was only there because I was lost and I didn't know what else to do with myself.

And as that went on, I started finding myself more and more depressed, more and more anxious. By the end of my second year in law school, I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't do anything because I just started feeling, "Well, this is my life from now on." I'm like, "Yeah, I'm going to make good money, and yeah, maybe I'll find a wife and I'll do whatever, but I'm now going to spend the rest of my life doing something that doesn't feel right to me," because law is not about justice. Law is this game that we play between each other. We set up these rules and now you have to play within those rules to get the best outcome and it really didn't feel right to me. No knocking to any lawyers out there. It just wasn't right for me.

And so I dropped out of law school and built a recording studio and it was really hilarious. I don't know if I'm talking too long about this.

Ben Smith:

No, no, this is great.

Curtis Worcester:

Not all.

Benjy Sherer:

So the hilarious part of it, so usually when you want to stop law school, you have to have a meeting with the guidance counselor. Because most people when they quit law school, it's because they're stressed, they're freaking out, they can't do it. And so I went into the meeting with the guidance counselor who said, "Are you sure you want to do this?" I had a giant smile on my face. She wasn't used to seeing that because I was finally like, "Yeah, I'm not doing this anymore and I found a path for myself." So I started getting back into music, but I was just so happy to be out of that and it was like my higher self took over and I was just so immensely driven.

I had never used a power tool before in my life. I had no official training as a sound engineer. I had a background in it from my work in music, but no official training in it and I just started doing it. Everything just came together. And so I was having a great time in my life. I felt like I had a purpose. I wasn't earning a lot of money because I was doing it more as a passion project. My recording studio was dedicated to helping emerging musicians get off the ground, so I was going out of my way to charge as little as possible, but I was loving it. I was doing something that was meaningful to me. Something of that was beyond a dream, was a fantasy, like the idea, "Oh, I'm going to run a recording studio? That wasn't even in the realm of possibilities." So I was loving it.

And then that led me to, I started working at one club, a venue, concert venue, and someone that was working there, the event planner, got me this other job working sound at a burlesque club. And that place, as soon as I walked in, was magical. I had never seen a place like this before. I didn't know that this lifestyle was possible and I felt like I had finally found my home, a place where I could finally be myself, finally express myself, finally let all of my artistic freak flag fly. And I even started performing there as a burlesque artist under the name Man Halen. So I was using that place as a way to bring the biggest version of myself out of me and I was loving every minute of it.

So I'm running this recording studio and now I'm performing burlesque and I've got this whole social group of friends that's surrounded in that burlesque scene. But here's what I didn't realize and here's what led to the work that I'm doing. I was there because I was finally learning to discover who I really was and learning how to bring that version of myself out of me. What I didn't realize was that a lot of people were there because they were running from themselves. They were covering up their pain and trauma with drugs, with alcohol, with sex, with that whole party lifestyle, with the glitz and glamor and makeup that came along with burlesque because they don't use their real names and they're always in costume and they're always performing and I didn't realize any of that.

And the more that I tried to authentically be this big caring light version of myself, the more that it irked some of those people. They didn't like it and I was being criticized for being too passionate or too excitable or too whatever. And that started a cycle of some emotional abuse that was going on there, which then led to this really downward spiral for me. Because the more that I was this light version of myself, the more that they didn't like it, and so the more that they didn't like it, the more that I tried to gain their approval, and the more that I tried to gain their approval, the more that they didn't like me. And it just led to this cycle and pattern. And like I said, in that lifestyle, there was drugs, there was alcohol, there was all sorts of things.

So when you combine a bit of emotional abuse with that party lifestyle and then with love, I fell in love with someone there who was, by her own definition, I would never call her this, she called herself this, she called herself a sociopath. I didn't see that in her and I didn't believe it, but she couldn't handle emotions and she was straight up with me about that, but I didn't understand it. I didn't believe it really because I saw the core version of her that was underneath and whole long story that I won't get into, but I fell crazy in love with her. And things were going well. We were hanging out for a few months together, things were going very well, but then once I fell in love and once the emotions became real between the two of us, she ghosted me. She pushed me away, which was really awkward because we were working together in that highly sexualized environment in that burlesque club.

So you combine those three things, the emotional abuse and being pushed away from this place that felt like my home for the first time ever, the first place where I could finally be me, so the emotional abuse involved with that and them pushing me away, the drugs and alcohol and the party lifestyle that was going on and then the immense heartbreak that I couldn't even begin to understand and all of that created a perfect storm where everything in my life fell apart. So I started acting out even more at the burlesque club because I was trying ... She didn't even tell anyone about us, so I had to pretend like I didn't care. So now I'm stuffing away all of those emotions and trying to pretend like I'm happy and everything's fine and they're pushing me away more until they eventually fired me and banned me and excommunicated me. I wasn't even allowed to ... I couldn't perform there anymore. I basically couldn't even step into the place.

So now everything was lost. I lost that love of my life and I lost this place and I couldn't focus on my recording studio anymore because I would be sitting here running a session and I would just be tapping my legs and unfocused and I couldn't do it anymore. So once again, same as it was in law school came to a point, I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't do anything and I became genuinely suicidal. As someone who spent most of his life terribly afraid of death, I was genuinely suicidal and I couldn't work anymore. I couldn't do anything. So I shut everything down for a year or two years, just going deeper and deeper into debt, trying to find my way out of this darkness.

I told my parents at some point, "If I can't get my spark back, my only option is I might just move to China and join a monastery because I felt like this world had nothing left to offer me." And all of the standard approaches, I didn't like the medication, I didn't like my time with therapists because I felt like, firstly, they were telling me things that I already knew and understood about myself and they were telling me things that didn't like, "Great. I understand logically why this is happening," that doesn't help and they were making a lot of things out to be my fault. It's like, over time, I've learned to accept responsibility for a lot of the things that I did, but they would take other people mistreating me and try and make it about, "Well, what did you do to deserve that or what did you do to bring that up?"

Ben Smith:

Right.

Benjy Sherer:

So all the standard approaches were just making me hate myself more and more and more. And then that all led to something of a spiritual awakening, which it just reminded me who I was. It led me through this brief period of being intensely spiritual, which I've now come down from, but it led me through this journey where I had to start discovering all sorts of things about myself and find my own pathway out of this. And it all found its foundation in three simple words, which is unconditional self-love. When you truly and fully understand what those words mean and everything else that we learn about emotional healing branches out from those words. The ways that you judge yourself, the ways that you talk negatively about yourself, the ways that you don't believe in yourself, the ways that you don't take action, the ways that you don't take risks in your life, the ways that you get angry at people, the ways that you judge people, all of those things go against self-love.

And when you start understanding what those words really mean, starting to practice it and start practicing, learning how to feel the uncomfortable emotions head on and getting the head out of the way because the logic isn't going to get you there. When you learn how to start doing all that, then you start pulling the real version of yourself out. So at that burlesque club, I thought that I was finally the real version of me, but this journey taught me that I had so much more to learn. And then as I started going through that, I just started sharing my journey online, just making posts about it. And the more that I did, the more that it started becoming clear that like, "I really do have something to offer."

I always felt deep down that I was here to do something, that I had something to share with this world, but I didn't know what that was. And part of me, especially because of people's judgment, made me feel like I was just being arrogant for even thinking that, like, "How dare you believe that you have something to offer this world? What kind of an arrogant thinks that about themselves?" But the more that I started sharing, the more that people were telling me like, "Wow, I've never heard it described this. You really have a way with words," and just people who were following me that even before I started really doing the work, I was having a massive impact on them.

So from there, bit by bit, it all just started snowballing. There was never a moment in which I sat down and decided to myself, "What do I want to do with my life? I think that I'm going to be a mental health coach." It never happened like that. I just started sharing and bit by ... And this is where the whole spiritual awakening thing comes in because it was almost like I didn't have a choice. The same way that I dropped out of law school and built this recording studio, even though that was a completely insane idea, I just started doing this even though it seems completely insane. Like, "Who do you think you are to start teaching people about emotional wellness?" "Well, I'm not trying to be anything. I'm not trying to pretend anything. I'm just sharing."

And the people that resonate with it find me. And bit by bit, I started taking all of the tools and skills that I had learned for myself and putting it together into a course and into a program, and then at a certain point, the inspiration just hit. I wrote both of those books that you mentioned in a month because they just poured out of me when it happened. So I never planned this. I just learned more about self-love, learned how to be myself, learned how to express myself. And for me, this was my calling. This is where ... There's a thing, how to discover your calling, and there's this Venn diagram of three different circles, something you're passionate about, something that you can serve the world by and something that you're good at. When you find what's in the middle of those three circles, that's where your calling is. And for me, it was this.

When I show up with my clients, when I show up here, I just have to be myself. I don't have to work from any notes or any books that other people taught me. I just show up and be the most authentic version of me, and by doing so, I get to impact people's lives.

Ben Smith:

And, Benjy, quick point about that because I really love that story, is, in terms of that Venn diagram, one of those circles is not what I can get paid at, right? Because how many of us can look at our Venn diagram and say, "Well, what can I get paid the most from?" and how big these circles are in terms of how they align with it. So what I love there is, oh, see, you found your calling and your calling combined those three things in terms of really creating that passion, is I think when you find that center of it. So I love that. I know Curtis has a question for you.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, so I just wanted to first say thank you for sharing that kind of journey to becoming where you are today, Benjy. I want to focus on today and just talk to us what is it like being an emotional wellness coach, right? What type of challenges do you help your clients solve and what have been some of the transformative results that you've been able to see?

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah, so what it's like doing this work is, I mean, it's beautiful, because like I said, I just show up and be me. I get to ... Sometimes my Q&As with my clients are better than therapy for me because I just get to come out and share myself and see that not only am I accepted for being myself, but I'm appreciate and respected for it and I get to have a massive impact on people's lives. So there's that beautiful element of it. And watching the transformations in these people is absolutely beautiful. I work with people who sometimes they had spent 30 years in therapy going over this stuff, never really getting to where they wanted, people, who 30 years in therapy, they had never been given any tools, any skills of how to deal with their emotions, of how to deal with that turning feeling in the pit of their stomach. They spent all this time analyzing it, but never got anything.

Or I've had people who came to me genuinely suicidal. I've had at least five different clients tell me that they were going to kill themselves before they found me. Some of them had written the notes, some of them had planned how they were going to do it. One of them was just waiting for her cat to die, so that the cat wasn't left alone. So I've helped people with things, as you mentioned, PTSD, anxiety is a huge one. Anxiety, ironically, it's one of the most common ones and it's also one of the easiest ones to deal with with the methods that we're working on, compared to, like I said, the people who come to me suicidal or bipolar or borderline personality disorder. I just got off the phone earlier today with someone who in the last year and a half lost both her mom and her husband and was just like now is crying every day and can't do anything. She's afraid to take any action or do anything.

So I deal with people who are suffering with a range of problems. A lot of them have been in abusive relationships their whole life. A lot of them have been through the worst of the trauma that you can imagine. I couldn't even begin to tell you some of the stories that I heard, things that I wouldn't even believe still happened in this life. So people that come to me just unable to cope with day-to-day life at all and they're trying to do things like they're trying to cover up their negative thoughts with positive ones, like just practicing gratitude, journaling kind of thing, trying to cover up the negative thoughts with positive or they're trying to avoid the emotions with things like meditation and yoga, which by the way, I highly recommend, but they need to be done the right way.

So people are avoiding their emotions or they're trying to analyze them and a lot of them feel completely hopeless because they've tried all of these kinds of things. They've tried medications which often leaves them feeling worse. They feel very numb. Some people do need medications, but a lot of the people that find me just hate them and really don't want to resort to them for the rest of their lives. And over the course of working together, I see them learn how to stand up for themselves, learn how to express themselves, learn how to process things like anxiety and shame and grief without experiencing more fear around it, knowing that whatever negative emotion they're experiencing in the moment, that firstly it's going to pass, so that we don't allow a period of being depressed or a period of grieving to trick our minds into thinking that nothing is ever going to be good again.

And they learn how to form healthy relationships, how to set healthy boundaries. Some of them have saved marriages that were on the rocks and others have learned how to walk away from toxic relationships that they shouldn't have been in the first place. I've had people start healing practices of their own. I've had people leave big jobs to start something that they were truly passionate about and other people to claim their promotions, their raises that they didn't have the courage and the self-love to ask for before. So people had just really felt lost, or as you said, never learned how to be happy.

Just finally learning how to let go of that fear, let go of all the tension and do something that a lot of teachers talk about, but no one teaches directly how, which is how to stay in the now moment and trust your intuition. Because we all know that the moment is all that exists and so many of the spiritual teachers, the mental health teachers, they'll tell you, "Okay, well, you have to live in the moment," but no one teaches you the how, "Well, how do you actually do that?" And it's about just getting rid of the fear that's in between. So much of this healing is about learning that you are finally safe because we have spent our whole lives feeling unsafe in a bunch of ways, feeling unsafe expressing ourselves, feeling unsafe pursuing ourselves, feeling unsafe taking risks or being vulnerable.

And when you finally confront those defense mechanisms and recognize that, "Wait a minute, this discomfort that I'm feeling in my body isn't a threat. It's my body's way of trying to process something," then you can work through it and you can start building the emotional muscle necessary to live a more authentic life than you ever thought possible.

Ben Smith:

What you just said there is, again you and I chatted about this I think a couple weeks ago when we did our pre-chat, was about that concept of being safe and how a lot of times we never allow ourselves to feel safe. And especially when you go to the fear of death is that some of that fear of death is not feeling safe or that death isn't a safe process or [inaudible] having this finality towards it. And from a therapy perspective is, I appreciate what you're saying there too because I know sometimes it's reviewing what you did, is looking backwards and trying to examine and break apart backwards. And I think what you're trying to say in terms of the emotional wellness piece is addressing, "What am I feeling now? Where am I?" and then getting that safety towards having that trust in who you're and where you're going.

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah. Like I said, the head cannot solve this problem. You can't logic away emotional pain. You can't logic away any pain. If you went to the doctor and said, "Hey, I have a headache," the doctor's like, "Okay, sit down. I'm going to explain to you over the next two hours why you have a headache. And there's all these chemicals in your brain. There's this trauma that you once experienced. You hit your head once, so that's playing a part of it and you're not drinking," whatever. He's going to explain to you all of the reasons why you have this headache. Would you then go, "Okay, well, that's great. The headache is gone. Thank you so much," or would you go, "Well, that's great, doc, but what do we do about it?"

And like I said, I just got off the phone with someone today, this person, her mother and husband had died. And so she's been going to this therapist for the last few years and I asked her, "Okay, well, what tools did he give you? How did you learn how to handle these things?" She goes, "None." And she's not the first at all to tell me that. I spent 10 years in therapy and I don't know how to deal with any of this. I understand now that I'm not the problem or I understand that I am fueling my own pain, but what do we do about it? And this therapist never gave her anything of how to deal with these things. So you can't analyze away emotional pain, but the secret is that the emotional pain isn't actually a threat. It's not a danger. It's your body trying to process something.

There's a certain amount of energy that is behind that emotion and the turning feeling in the pit of your stomach or the tightness in your chest or even just a moment or a day of depression, that's your body trying to purge that energy. But because we don't feel safe, because we've been made to feel unsafe throughout our lives, like you were saying before that you have to stuff yourself away for the job, that's very true. But it's not just the job. It's your whole life. And it's true for both men and women, but I think, especially with men, you're taught big boys don't cry, right? You're not supposed to show emotion.

If you're a male in high school who's being emotionally open, well, you're going to be made fun of. You're going to be called gay, you're going to be called whatever. We learn over our years that, "If I express emotions, I'm going to be judged, I'm going to be rejected, I'm going to be taken advantage of, I'm going to be abused," so what lesson do we learn? "Okay, well, in order to keep myself safe, I need to stuff this emotion away, because last time it came out, I got judged for it. Maybe I got dumped for it. Maybe I lost a friend over it or my parents used to punish me for it. They used to make me feel bad about myself for it. So in order to stay safe, I need to make sure that I don't feel and process and express these emotions." And that leads to a really messed up view of what being emotionally strong is.

Because a lot of people think that emotionally strong is the ability to put your emotions aside in order to keep living your life. But if we were talking about physical strength, is physical strength your ability to not lift weights so that you can go and live your life or is strong about the ability to lift heavier and heavier weights?

Ben Smith:

Sure.

Benjy Sherer:

So people think that emotional strength is about stuffing the emotions away, but we need to learn how to finally feel them, how to finally deal with it and how to do so in such a way where you're not going to analyze it or think about it because that keeps you stuck in a cycle. Firstly, it makes you ... When you're rehashing all of the trauma, you're also reminding yourself, "Oh, well, there's a good reason why I'm in pain." You're justifying to yourself the victim mentality and why you're in pain. And then when you spend all of this time analyzing, it makes you think that analysis is the solution. So next time that you end up in a period of emotional pain, you try and rationally solve it, which is the exact opposite direction of how the real healing goes because that's avoidance.

When you're feeling pain and now you're trying to analyze how to deal with it, well, you're avoiding feeling the pain. You're trying to find a logical solution to it. And that creates this cycle, which is one of the cores of my teachings is there's these three elements of your experience of reality. There's your thoughts, your emotions and your sensations. Every moment of every day, you are experiencing those three things and those are the only things that you can experience. There is nothing else that you can experience in this world that doesn't fit into one of those categories.

So you're listening to me right now. The sounds that you're hearing, that's a sensation. The light that's coming from the screen. Every bit of your experience of the external world is a sensation. Your conscious inner life, those are your thoughts. And then there's your emotions, which is this intangible thing that you can't really put your finger on, but I like to describe it as the flavor of reality at any given moment. It's the mood that you're in, but you can't point to happiness or sadness or whatever. It's just the general overarching frequency that you're in. And the real secret is that those three elements are constantly manipulating each other, largely because you're constantly running from the emotions and the sensations. That turning feeling in the pit of your stomach doesn't feel good and you don't know how to feel it, so that creates more fear.

And that fear, your mind desperately wants to make sense of it, so it starts putting all these thoughts and all this logic to it and you start rehashing all of the pain. And then those thoughts tell your mind that you're unsafe. So it creates that stress response in your body. Again, the turning feeling in the pit of your stomach, the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, the tension that you hold in your shoulders, the clenching of your jaw, which then again reminds you that you're unsafe, so creates more fear, creates more sensations, creates more thoughts and around and around and around and around we go.

And when you focus too much on trying to solve this with your thoughts, what you're doing is you're avoiding connecting with those other two parts of your experience. So those other parts are there in the background yelling at you, "Please look at me. Please look at me. Please look at me. Please look at me," and the mind is going, "Oh, no. The last time I looked at you, the last time I expressed you, you got me rejected. You got me judged. So I'm just going to try and logic out this scenario and I'm going to push those things away because this is how I kept myself safe." And we just need to learn how to rebalance between those things.

And the thoughts, that there's a saying, I don't remember who it's by, maybe Plato, let's say, but that, "Your mind is a great servant, but a terrible master." So when you're trying to move through everything with your life, just through logic and rationality, then your mind is trying to take control. And the thing is, sorry, again, if I'm giving long answers, but the thing is, the mind can be trained to do whatever you want. If you want to be a lawyer, you can train your mind to go and be a lawyer. If you want to be a garbage man, you can train it to get in alignment with that, but you cannot train your heart. Your heart knows what it knows and wants what it wants and that's all there is to it.

So when you spend your life trying to get your heart into alignment with what your head has decided, then there will always be this inner conflict. That's what creates anxiety, that's what creates depression. But when you learn how to follow your heart first and get your mind in alignment with that, then you can get all of those three parts of your experience moving in the same direction and that's when you can finally feel safe.

Ben Smith:

So Benjy, I think that you perfectly described, I think, this emotional healing versus therapy, right? I think we have a really great flavor now of you and what the work you do and how you help people. And I know we want to focus on our topic today, which is focus on emotional wellness to fully enjoy our lives. Again, what we're describing in our introduction, there's a version of ourselves trapped beneath decades of a form of survival mode that we don't want to go to our graves having never experienced, right? So we want to tap that inner side here. And most of us don't want to pursue maybe this kind of rebirthing, right? "Geez, I'm 65," "I'm 62," Geez, can I really go through it? That feels like a daunting process. I don't want to go through years of therapy and self-reflection and meditation, right? So who wants to start this at this age?" So I guess my question to you is how do you approach this situation that we're describing to you?

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah, great question. So here's the thing, and especially the way that I do things, we're talking about emotional healing, I like to use the term emotional fitness training. That's really what we're doing here. Like I said, we're learning how to lift the heavier and heavier emotions and learning how to go in that direction. Now as far as this potentially daunting process, here's the thing, every day you're either moving up or down on this emotional ladder. Because every day, the world is going to present you with some challenges. And either, you are responding to these challenges with these defense mechanisms, with all these ways of avoiding these things or you start learning the appropriate way of dealing with them. So every day ... And when you do that, then every moment becomes an opportunity to heal.

So the real thing is that the challenges that you're experiencing emotionally, they're happening anyway. By not doing this work, you're not saving yourself anything. With therapy, yeah, it feels that way because, "Okay, well, I'm going to go down. I'm going to sit and we're going to start this process," which is one of the reasons why I didn't feel good with therapy either because I kept thinking like, "Okay, maybe if I talk to this therapist for the next five to 10 years, maybe we'll get somewhere, but firstly, it's going to take him a year or two to even get to know me well enough before we can break through and I know enough about myself that it's going to take him a long time to even catch up to where I'm at with what I've realized about myself."

And it can feel like this really daunting process because you're going to go through this whole thing. It might be years before you finally reach a breakthrough. And oh my God, why would I want to do that? But think about it with physical training. You're not expecting a breakthrough a year down the line. Every time that you go to the gym, you're getting a little better, a little stronger, not in the sense of when you walk out of the gym, "Oh, I can see the growth in my muscle," and sometimes you walk out of the gym feeling a little bit sore, but every session at the gym has its benefits. You sweat out some toxins, you build some muscles, you get a little bit stronger.

So this emotional healing process that we're doing is just about learning how to handle whatever's already happening in a better way. So the fear that you have right now, you're talking about your audience, the fear of spending money or the fear of stepping up for yourself in your job, the fear of claiming your promotion or the fear of retiring because you've spent a lifetime avoiding your thoughts and your emotions and, "Oh my God, if I retire now, I'm going to have all of this time on my hands and how am I going to confront those?" all of those things are happening already. You're not doing yourself any favors by not confronting them. You're just succumbing to the defense mechanisms and pushing these things away.

So every moment of every day, you're being given an opportunity to heal. Your body is yelling at you saying, "Please look at me. Please look at me. Please look at me. Please look at me. Please look at me." So every moment of that turning feeling in the pit of your stomach or the tightness in your chest, your body is trying to help you heal, saying, "Go left, go left, go left, go left, go left. Here is the pain. Here is the solution. Please look at me. Please look at me. Please look at me." And your mind goes, "No, because I've learned all of these defense mechanisms."

So the healing comes by simply learning a better way of when that turning feeling is happening in your stomach, what do you do? As opposed to stuffing it away, which is only going to make things worse, what is a better way to handle this, so that in the moment you suffer less and you build the emotional muscle and you start opening up this pipeline that has been turned off for years? The way I like to express is imagine that, from a very young age, you were trained to think that sweating is impolite or it's going to get you judged or it's going to get you rejected. So you train yourself not to sweat. You manage to shut off the connection between your sweat glands and your pores. Well, the thing is your sweat glands are still producing sweat. You're just not sweating and that's what's been happening with your emotions this whole time.

Your emotions have been happening anyway. You just haven't been feeling them, haven't been processing them, haven't been expressing them and now you've developed a fear of processing and expressing them. But basically right off the bat, right as soon as we start this healing, one of the first things that we're going to do is break open that barrier and you're going to see very quickly that it doesn't hurt. It actually feels so good to finally let go of this. So the other way that I express it too, I expressed to my clients this way a bit ago, is like you've been holding in a burp your entire life because you, for some reason, believe that, if you burp, you're going to explode. So you're going to die if you do it.

So this pressure is building up and building up and building up and you're afraid to do it and now you're thinking, "Oh my God, if I want to learn how to let go of that pressure, it's going to be this long daunting process, but instead, we learn how to do it right from the beginning. Instead of letting it all out as once, we let out a little burp right at the beginning and then you go, "Oh, not only did I not explode, that actually felt really good because now there's less pressure inside me. Oh my God, this can actually be really easy." It's uncomfortable at times. You're going to need to confront certain things that you haven't wanted to confront, but you learn very quickly that, "Wait a minute, confronting these emotions and processing them feels so much better than stuffing them away," and then you start getting stronger and stronger. You start feeling more and more safe. You start learning that like, "Oh, right, holding this in isn't doing me any good."

So it's not a long daunting process where it's going to be a few years before you see any results. It's every moment that you allow yourself to let go of that fear and to express something and let it out like, "Oh, wow, I feel good. I feel safer. I feel stronger," and bit by bit, you just keep getting better and better and better because every day is going to present you opportunities. When you're in line at the grocery store and someone's taking a long time in front of you to pay and you start getting really frustrated and there's some tension in there and you're judging that person like, "Would you just hurry up?" people don't realize is that's a defense mechanism and that doesn't feel good.

The frustration that you're experiencing in that moment doesn't feel good. You don't want that. And if you learn how to let go of it in that moment, then right then in that moment, you're suffering less and you're letting go of the resistance, so that your body can start processing these things.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, I love that, Benjy, and I want to rotate a little bit, but obviously keep going here. So as Ben and I sit here as financial advisors, we have to ask you a money question, right?

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah.

Curtis Worcester:

So it seems like to us, as a society, we've made this decision that we'll exchange money for being a different version of ourselves, right? We'll sit here, we'll sacrifice pieces of ourselves, but on the other end, we're getting compensated financially to do so, right? So I think the opposite of that would be, if I'm going to truly be myself or we're going to be ourselves truly, that we maybe won't make any money or maybe make less money. So my question for you, Benjy, is, in your practice, do you find that these two concepts are mutually exclusive?

Benjy Sherer:

Not at all. And in fact, I have found both for myself and for my clients, the more authentic and free and safe that you become, the more money that you'll make and in a lot of different ways. For myself personally, I mean, I've now made my career out of this and I've done it by just being my authentic self, and the more that I go, the more that I'll move into a speaking career as well and do my Ted Talk and expand this beyond. So me personally, me bringing out my authentic self, and actually even going back for a second to when I was talking about with my recording studio, I was dedicated to helping emerging musicians get off the ground. And while that was a genuine purpose, the reason really why I was charging very little was because of a lack of self-worth. I didn't know my own value. I didn't love myself. I didn't feel strong enough to ask for something and I felt guilt and shame around asking for money in exchange for something that I was doing.

So guilt and shame was preventing me from making real money. And in fact, I learned the same about my mom recently. So both my parents are accountants and I was speaking to my mom. She works for a family friend that she had known since she was growing up and he is the richest guy that I know, flew us to The Bahamas on his private jet once kind of thing. My mom goes, "Oh, what are you doing this weekend?" "I don't know. What do you ..." "Oh, do you want to go to the Bahamas?" "What does that even mean?" Anyways, so I recently found out, I can't remember what the number was, but I asked her what she was making and it was sad for someone and she's so integral to his business. She's been trying to retire for the last five years and she couldn't because they couldn't find anyone to replace her.

So she's this integral core for this multimillionaire rich person, but she had been earning so little because she didn't stand up for herself. She didn't know her value, she didn't know her worth, she didn't ask for her value. And especially in this day and age, people are valuing authenticity and self-expression. I mean, that was always the case. The people that we look up to, the Martin Luther Kings, the Mahatma Gandhis, the people that have the biggest impact in this world are the ones that stray from the path and bring their fullest self out into the world, and especially now, that is being valued more and more and more.

So the way that it goes is, if you stuff yourself away, then there is a relative amount of certainty that you can earn a certain amount of money. If you sacrifice yourself for the rat race and stuff yourself into that, then you can get to a certain point. But if you learn how to really open up, it opens up worlds of income that you did not have access to before because you didn't feel good enough, you didn't feel strong enough, you weren't willing to take the risks. You weren't willing to put yourself out there into the world. You weren't willing to say something that was against the green.

So yes, when you stuff yourself away, you find some relative, maybe stability is the word, but there's no ... You have to trade who you are for it and you're always working for someone else. You never get to build something for yourself or maybe you did, but you're still ... Because there might be people listening who built a business for themselves, but had to stuff themselves a way to do it. There's a bit of certainty to it, but there's a lot of strings attached to it and a lot of tradeoff. And then on top of it, it's like, even if you make all the money in the world doing that, what's the point?

Curtis Worcester:

Right.

Benjy Sherer:

No one gets to their deathbed thinking, "I'm so glad that I stuffed myself away to live my life." The most common regrets as people get to the end of their lives is, "I didn't live an authentic life. I didn't take a risk on the things that were meaningful to me and I didn't spend enough time with my family," but people trade all of those things for their security. So I could have gone and been a lawyer and there would've been some certainty to that. I would've known for certain that I will make 100 to 200 grand a year plus because I'm working as a lawyer. The path that I went on instead involved some more risks. It involved a longer gestation period. It took me longer to find myself, but in the long run, I will make exponentially more than I would have as a lawyer partly because what I'm doing now is more valuable, because I'm doing something that is authentically me. I'm doing something that no one else can replace. I'm not the only person who can help people with their emotions, but what I'm doing is me. No one can do exactly what I do.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Benjy Sherer:

Which means that I can charge a premium fee for me because you're paying for something that no one else is going to be able to do for you.

Ben Smith:

That's right.

Benjy Sherer:

And on top of it, I can do it for longer. I'm not for the day that-

Ben Smith:

It's sustainable.

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah, I'm not waiting for the day that I retire because my job is just me being me. I get to love on people. I get to care for people. I get to share my unique wisdom and authentic experience and be valued and appreciated for it. So I'm not going to retire until my body, my mind literally can't take it anymore. And I get to build something that is meaningful to me and that has a positive impact on this world in a way that really drives me to keep on going and I will appreciate every moment of it more, which gives me the drive. As I said, with law school, I never showed up because I hated it. I got the job done, but I hated it. Whereas this, what I'm doing now, I show up every day ...

Ben Smith:

That's right and you can't wait to be there.

Benjy Sherer:

... and which means that I will put more into it. Yeah, I'll put more into it. I will make more videos. I'll make more courses. I'll write more books. I'll do all of this because it's just authentic self-expression or for other people listening, if you're just at the job, then it might just be because you learn to stand up for yourself. And when you do, you can have a bigger impact in the company that you're working for. You can produce innovation. You can produce changes. You can add something that is uniquely your own to the company that you're working at, which makes you more invaluable, which allows you to ask for a more premium rate.

And if they don't want to give it to you, then you will love yourself enough to move on to something better. Because every few years that you're working at a particular job, you're gaining experience and skills that now make you more valuable to someone else. But sometimes we stay at a place for so long because we're afraid of taking that risk for ourselves, taking that leap of faith. But if you walk away from a place where you're not being valued at your level and you have the strength and the skills and the confidence to go and seek out somewhere where you will be appreciated, you will find somewhere. Just like leaving a relationship to find someone who's actually going to care about you, works the same with your job.

Ben Smith:

So Benjy, I want to keep going, right? Obviously, we talk about in this career, but also if we've ... Our whole lives, we've not been taking risks to be more true to ourselves, then we're probably not likely to then just all of a sudden wake up the day one of retirement and go, "Today's the day. We're going to take the risks. We're going to live our ..." To your point about training ourselves and showing up to that gym and that every day you put the penny in the penny jar is we're adding things and we create muscle memory with how we behave over our lives, which then becomes who we are in a way, right?

So when we retire, if we've been training ourselves to be safe as we can and to not take risks and to stuff away ourselves, we're probably not going to just all of a sudden wake up to that day in retirement. So my question is, why is retirement the perfect time to explore the change and is it more difficult to change ourselves due to the decades of these hardwired thoughts?

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah, so I don't think that it's at all more difficult to make the changes at this age. What's more difficult is wanting to. So people often get this far in their life that they don't believe it's possible for themselves, or like you said, they think it's going to be a daunting process or they've got that motto in their head of, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," kind of thing or even worse are the people who, I don't mean that worse in a judgmental way, but the tougher situation, is the people who don't even recognize for themselves that they're unhappy. They've spent so long in this pattern that they believe that this is the max of what happiness can look like.

So what's tough is deciding for yourself that you deserve more, that you want more, that you're willing to do it, but once you make that decision, especially with the way that we do this, the whole emotional fitness training process, it's not actually more difficult to do it now than any other time because the problem always exists in the moment. It's right here, right now. It doesn't matter how much you've stuffed away, it's about how are you dealing with things right here in the moment. It's not about unpacking that's now 60 years' worth of pain. It's just about unpacking, "Wait a minute, what are you doing in this moment? Are you running from the emotion or are you feeling it? Are you stuffing things away? Are you allowing that tension to build up and build up and build up or are you afraid to do it?"

So the tough part is about making that initial decision. My oldest client now was I think about 80 years old and she was also one of my most grateful and one of my most successful clients. So she had been through a lifetime's worth of this stuff and came to me. I think she was 78 when she found me. I'll be honest with you, even at my head, she was the oldest client that I had had, so part of me was wondering, "I don't know, can a 78-year-old do this?" And she had one of the biggest transformations that I've seen from everyone and she did it in ... I mean, the path never ends. You never stop getting better and getting healthier, but in the first few months, she may just massive progress. I know she sleeps with my bed by her nightstand now all the time, just goes through it over and over.

So the toughest part is about making that decision, deciding that you're worth it, deciding that ... Admitting to yourself that you haven't been happy and there's a challenge there because you're going to have to admit to yourself that you've lived so much of your life not actually living. And there's going to be some guilt and some shame and some fear involved with that, but those are the very things that we're learning how to deal with. So you need to make that initial decision. Then as far as why is retirement the best time to do this, I'd say there are two main reasons.

Number one is because you might finally realize all of the things that you have been holding onto. You've spent a lifetime distracting yourself with work. That's one of the big things that a lot of my clients come to me with is like, "I've held onto this pain and all this trauma for so long and I've used work as a way to distract myself. I've used work as a way to get my value and to feel good about myself, but now that I don't have that here, well there's no running from these things. They're just there." And if you can't run from it by covering it up with work and productivity, then now it's starting to present itself and there's nowhere to go. It's going to become more and more powerful and it's going to leave you more and more bitter.

You're going to spend more of your time trying to find other ways to avoid it, which especially now you don't have a job and now maybe your body's breaking down, so you can't do some of the things that you wanted to do. And you've spent all this time planning on it like, "Okay, well, I'm going to work until 65 and then I'm going to retire and then I'm going to be able to have some fun," but now you're out of shape and you're tired and you're emotionally exhausted, you don't want to do these things. So that's going to start presenting itself to you and you're going to be unable to avoid it.

You can trick yourself into thinking that, "No, this is just what life is and I'm happy and that's fine," but most people are going to start recognizing, "Something is missing here. I finally have this money. I finally have the freedom. I finally have the time and I'm still not living. So what's going on?" So it's a serious time to do that because ... And if you don't do it now, you spend all of these years working so that you can enjoy your retirement, if you then don't enjoy the retirement because of these things, well, I don't need-

Ben Smith:

What was the point?

Benjy Sherer:

Exactly. I'm glad you said it, not me. And then the other reason why I think it's the perfect time is I sometimes look at doing this emotional healing a little bit like trying to quit smoking, that you put it off for so long because there's never a good time to quit smoking, especially when you're working. You're using smoking to deal with the stress, "Oh, well, tomorrow, I have that meeting. Next week, I have this presentation and then I've got three phone calls today and I've got ..." So there's never a good time to stop because you're like, "Okay, well, there's always more stress and more pressure coming in," so you always need this thing to cover it up. Always with the emotions, you needed the defense mechanisms to cover it up.

But now there's no excuses anymore. There's no more stress. I mean, not to say that life is ever completely without stress, but you don't have that excuse anymore. There's nothing else to run from. So yes, quitting smoking is going to be uncomfortable for a little bit, but it can't actually harm you and it feels so much better once you quit. So the same goes with this emotional healing. Now you don't have those stressors anymore, you don't have that excuse, and yes, learning to break through those barriers is going to be a little uncomfortable at the beginning, but you're safe to do it now, right? You can take a week, two weeks, you can do whatever as much as you want where there is nothing else on your plate other than doing this.

So if you dedicate yourself as much, even half as much to this emotional healing as you did to your job, then you will start making that transformation. You now have the freedom without all those other stressors on your plate to really start doing that work.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. And it feels like I'm changing directions a little bit, but it's really just me going back to another money question because this is just what we do. So it seems like conversations that Ben and I have more times than not, right? It's people that just say they will never have enough money, right? They have this number in mind even and they achieve that number, right? They get to retirement. They've got that number they had on the bulletin board their whole career, but it still needs to be more now. So my, I guess, deep question for you, Benjy, is why do we, and I say we as a society here, use money as an emotional safety blanket?

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah, well, I think that we confuse fear with pragmatism a lot of the times. So what we tell ourselves is a pragmatic decision is actually fear manifesting itself. And we don't realize this. This goes back to the cycle that I was talking about before, thoughts, emotion, sensations, thoughts, emotion, sensations. So what's going on is that you actually feel unsafe. There's fear going on. The fear creates this turning feeling in the pit of your stomach or it creates that stress response in your body and you don't understand why that is and your mind desperately wants a logical reason. And what is the most practical thing that we can point to that has an impact on our lives? Money.

Ben Smith:

Right.

Benjy Sherer:

So when our body is feeling this emotional stress intention, we point to money as, "That must be the reason why." That's just your brain creating thoughts to help justify this fear. So it's not actually about the money. It has nothing to do with the money. It has to do with the fact that you are carrying fear and the fear isn't about anything. It's just a lifetime's worth of unresolved pain that you never dealt with. And we convince ourselves that this pragmatic choice of, "I need more money," is actually the real problem here. And as you said, look, there is never enough money. There is no such thing as having enough money. I've really come to believe that money is an addiction. The people ... If you're someone who's, especially if you're retired, if you're checking your bank account every day, every few days, you're addicted to that money or the people who like the billionaires who just love watching that number grow kind of thing.

There is an addiction to it and we don't realize that that addiction is actually just our way of dealing with uncomfortable emotions. We're trying to cover these things up. So we tell ourself that it's a pragmatic choice and we don't realize that it's actually just fear and fear is just an emotion. So you're trying to cover up your emotional distress with this practical solution. And it's the same thing as trying to cover it up with analysis or cover it up with positive gratitude thoughts. You're trying to cover up the fear with a pile of money big enough that, look, what we were talking about before is feeling safe.

The whole problem is that we don't feel safe and you convince yourself that, "If I have X amount of money that I will be safe," but then you get X amount of money and you still don't feel safe.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure.

Benjy Sherer:

"So I guess I need X plus Y amount of money," and then you get that amount of money and it's never going to be enough. There is no such thing as enough money, and the more money that you have, sometimes it feels like you have less money because the numbers change. When you are broke, $5,000 is a life-changing amount of money, "Oh my God, it's so fantastic." When you have $2 million in retirement, in the bank and whatever, then even earning $20,000, "Yeah, that's barely a drop in the puddle. So I need to make ... If I don't feel safe with $2 million in the bank, then I guess I need to have $4 million in the bank because 2,050,000 isn't going to do it."

Curtis Worcester:

Right, yeah.

Benjy Sherer:

So it's all just about feeling safe. You think that the money will keep you safe, but it won't.

Ben Smith:

And Benjy, I think as advisors that we are right and I think some of this is thinking about the process and what we look at is, "Hey, our job is to help land you through retirement to optimize your life and use money to do it, right? So if things are changing in your life, we need to change money to make it match. And vice versa, if something's happened with money, then we need to trust the process that we're going to work through it together and we're going to find a way to make it work." So I think sometimes there's that fear of the, "I distrust the process that it actually will be okay," and I know that's actually where I'm going to go next here, but that feeling of being, "Okay, I maybe have never felt," or, "I don't trust enough," to then just trust the process, so I go back to the thing that I can see and I can see that that number and I'm going to question the number.

And I know actually I have a client that we've been talking through the number thing today and, "I think I should have earned X and I earned Y and I need it," and so it becomes the number game instead of, "Well, what's underneath this?" And I want to raise another point, Benjy, is we had one of our previous guests on was Chris Gathers and he got diagnosed with a four-centimeter brain tumor. And all of a sudden, so all the work we're talking about and the emotional healing is all of a sudden he was forced to deal with these emotions all at once, right? Because, "I have two girls, little girls. I'm married. I need to focus on living my best days. I need to focus on being a better version of myself or however long I have."

And it turns out his story, he actually got the tumor removed. He has had clean checkups, but what he's learned from that forced emotional healing that he had to do was that that cancer was a blessing because of who he is now as a true reflection of himself, right? And he's thankful and grateful every day that he went through this, because if he hadn't, he would have still lived a life where he still didn't deal with that trauma. He really couldn't ... He was maybe not the husband he wanted to be. He wasn't the dad he wanted to be to his girls. So this whole trusting of, "Everything's going to be okay," that's a powerful place to be.

And just hearing that, the listeners, if you want to go back to that episode, because Chris does a great job expressing what Benjy, I think, helps people do and Chris has had to figure out on his own, but if we know with certainty that everything's going to be fine, we are going to be less anxious, we're going to be more calm, we're going to be at peace more with whatever happens. And he had to do that in order to accept if things aren't okay, he is okay in the end and his girls are okay and his wife's okay if that cancer can't be treated. So my question to you, Benjy, is Chris had to do this because of a traumatic diagnosis that could have been terminal. So my question, Benjy, is for the rest of us, is that a possible outcome?

Benjy Sherer:

Absolutely. I feel cheesy just saying that absolutely [inaudible], but yeah, no, the actual answer is absolutely and that's exactly what I help people do. And there's two big points that you brought up with that story, is number one, it is so unfortunate that we as humans often wait until things go completely off the rails to start doing this. And it was the same for me. I could say that period where I hit that deep dark depression, I am grateful for it every day. Every time I show up for my clients and I'm having those Q and as, I'm reminding them like, "Look, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that. I wouldn't be doing this work. I wouldn't never have found myself." And like I said, there was some part of me that always knew that this is what I was here to do and I never would've ... I look at that period. That's why to an extent I've come off of the whole spiritual element of it ...

Ben Smith:

Sure.

Benjy Sherer:

... but I look at it and that's the one element that still makes me think that the spiritual element of it was real because I always felt I had this in me, but I wasn't going down that path. So it's like the universe came down. It's like, "All right, Benjy, we're going to force you. We're going to force you to do this work. You don't have any choice anymore." And I came out of it more healed, more whole, more healthy, more happy, more fulfilled, more successful than I ever had been or ever would've imagined myself to be. But like I said, we build up all these defense mechanisms, we live our lives in this kind of restricted way, and for many of us, it takes until something absolutely terrible happens for us to decide to do this work.

And I would encourage anyone, don't wait until that happens. You're missing out on your life right here, right now. And if you don't do it, one of two things is going to happen. If you don't take charge of it right away, one of two things is going to happen. Something terrible is going to happen, which is going to force you to do it, just like the brain tumor. That's going to make that period more challenging because you haven't built the tools and the skills before then. And if you're dealing with those things, we all know that stress and emotional distress makes physical ailments worse, so it might lead to extra problems if you don't do this work first.

So number one is something terrible might happen that will force you to do it, or number two, probably even worse, is you'll never do it and you'll end up in those last days of your life recognizing and realizing, "You know what? I never lived my life having that same regret that everyone else has. I never expressed myself. I never took risks on myself. I didn't spend enough time with my family and my loved ones and here I am at the end of my days." So we shouldn't wait until things get that bad in order to start doing this. And then the other point that you mentioned is learning to trust that everything is going to be okay. And while there is an element of that and we do need to trust our journeys, we need to trust the process as you said, I think trusting that everything is going to be okay is really about trusting that you can handle whatever is going to happen.

Ben Smith:

I like that.

Benjy Sherer:

Things will happen, things will go up and down, but do you trust yourself to be able to make it through any challenging period? If your spouse dies, if God forbid a child dies, if you do end up losing all of your money, that's when you're going to need these emotional tools and skills more than ever. So trusting that everything is going to be okay, if you just want to believe that nothing terrible is ever going to happen, that's nice and that's one thing that can maybe help you feel safe, but especially if something terrible happens, that's when you're going to going to need these tools more than ever. And if you can trust that you will handle whatever comes at you without getting into fear, without getting into paranoia, without getting into this pity party, then whatever does happen will be okay.

Because right now, let's say something terrible were to happen, not you but your listeners or whatever, if you were to lose half of your fortune right now, tell you, everything is still okay. There are lots of people who live with so much less than what you guys have, but are you going to be okay?

Ben Smith:

That's right.

Benjy Sherer:

That's the real question. Can you handle what this road is going to throw at you? Because the world is going to throw things at you from time to time, and if you can handle it, then you can come out the other side of it usually even better off than you were before or at least feeling okay. So the question isn't necessarily, is everything always going to be okay? The real question is, if something bad happened now, are you capable of handling it?

Curtis Worcester:

That's right. I like that.

Benjy Sherer:

And if the answer is no, if you are so scared that, "Well, if I lose part of my money tomorrow, I'm going to collapse and I'm not going to be able to get out of bed and I'm going to want to kill myself," then which is more important, whether or not the money is there or whether or not you know how to handle whatever's going to come up?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, I love that. I love that angle you put on it and I think it's a really important message for ... It was important for me to hear and I think for everyone else to hear too. Benjy, we've reached the end of our conversation today and I do have one final question for you before we let you go. So obviously, we're here on The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. We'd like to ask all of our guests this question. So I want to ask you, how are you going to find your retirement success when you get there?

Benjy Sherer:

Can you clarify that question a little bit? What you mean by that?

Curtis Worcester:

I guess, what do you think sitting here today will be? I guess, if you get to the end and look back, how will you evaluate a successful retirement for you? And I know you said earlier you're not going to retire until your body or mind makes you, but we'll put that caveat in there, but I guess, how do you see your retirement years being deemed successful in your eyes?

Benjy Sherer:

So I think the first thing to having my retirement years be successful is making sure that my working years were successful. And not just successful in the financial sense, but making sure that I've done something that I can be pleased with, so that by the time I retire, I don't feel like I've left anything on the table. Because if I'm in that last stage of my life feeling like I had more to offer, feeling like I didn't give everything that I could, feeling like there's something trapped inside of me that I never got the chance to share with the world, then my retirement years will only ever be so comfortable and so safe. There'll be all that guilt, all that shame on me.

So firstly, it's about making sure that I live my life in the best way possible. And then I don't know, I just hope that by the time that happens, I found a partner and I have someone to share it with. I mean, obviously, financial success is something that we all strive for, but I keep that as secondary to making sure that I've had an impact, that I've lived my purpose and making sure that I am as emotionally strong as possible by the time I get there. So it was, I think, Plato or Socrates, who said that, "Philosophy is really the art of learning how to die, learning how to be okay with that, learning how to live your life in that state of solidity." So I am just constantly working on my own emotional strength and my version of retirement success will be, if I can, not finally because I'm doing it all the way, but if I can be the most authentic version of myself and just let go and know that I don't owe anything left to the world, if I know that all of my interactions have been good, that I've left the world a better place than where I started, and yeah, I can express myself until my dying day having shared something ...

Curtis Worcester:

That's great.

Benjy Sherer:

... I think that's what retirement success is for me.

Curtis Worcester:

That's great.

Ben Smith:

Benjy, yeah, I love that, Benjy. And as practitioners, obviously, I think our focus and our industry's focus on the money part is having a treatment for the people we're trying to help is the most important thing that we can try to do and having connections to folks like yourself that when there's expression of these feelings or these regrets or, "Here's where I'm in my life," unfortunately, unfortunately, I think we are in a trusted position with the people that we're trying to help because a very private and personal thing, that having the ability to have these conversations, and again, we are not emotional wellness coaches, but we want to make sure that when we spot people that need help, that we can get them to the right places.

So thank you so much for coming on our show and offering your insight and also for what you do every day as a service provider and making a change with people one by one by one, right? These are all bricks in our world that, if we're building, I think we're going to build a better world step by step. So thank you for what you do. We appreciate coming on.

Benjy Sherer:

You are very welcome. It really is a pleasure. Do you have a couple of more minutes, just a couple?

Ben Smith:

Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah.

Benjy Sherer:

So because I know there was something that you brought up earlier in our first conversation that I just wanted to touch on because I think it's just important thing to remind people on. You and I were talking about this idea of camp, Maine camp. It's something that you guys do. And you were telling me that a lot of your people feel because they're afraid to let go of that money, that spending any money ends up being putting them back. And I just want to take a moment to remind everyone of what this life is really all about. I just went two days ago. I've seen them three times this summer. I went to see the Foo Fighters three times this summer. My favorite band in the world since Queen is gone. Their drummer died last year. And when their drummer died last year, it really firstly broke my heart more than any other celebrity ever dying.

And in that moment reminded me that I don't want to miss opportunities anymore. And so I decided this year I'm going to see them as much as possible. And then when I was there at the concert a couple of nights ago and it's one of those moments where you're experiencing, like you're in a sea of 40,000 people sharing this love, sharing this music, sharing this passion. You remember in that moment, "What are we even doing here? What is the point of this life? Why am I living?" These are the moments that we're looking for and especially for something like camp for your family. That's what this has all been for. I just want to remind everyone, look, this is what life is about. If you are holding on to the money and afraid to spend it on spending time with your family, living and experiencing, then it would have all been a waste.

You did this so that you could provide not just financials for your family, but provide these experiences, provide that time. And what if your grandchildren never get to experience camp? Then they won't have that tradition. Maybe they won't learn those values of life and they'll learn from their grandparents, "Okay, well, I didn't get the time with them or the love or the affection or the support that I got from them. I got money. So I guess money is what's important in this life."

Ben Smith:

Right.

Benjy Sherer:

You're going to pass that lesson off to your children, to your grandchildren. So if you want to really pass off something to your family, then do this work for yourself and find the strength and the courage to spend the money on the things that are going to bring them happiness, so that you can train them to see what life is really about. Show them how to be happy. And if they can learn how to be happy and express themselves authentically, then they'll find their own path. But if you show them that holding onto the money is important more so than actual experiences, then that's how they're going to live and that's not the lesson that you want to leave for them. I just want to share that.

Ben Smith:

I love that for sharing it because I think from our end too is, again, we look at highest and best use of money, is the highest and best use of money for ... I just speak personally, is exactly what you're saying is, "Hey, there's experiences." To your point, there feels like there's never a great time to spend money, and hey, it's a balancing of tomorrow and today, but it's that trust of, "I know we will figure things out as we go and we have to continue to invest in today." But also if we are not happy today, if we continue to show a pattern of not being happy today, then we're showing that to everybody else behind us too, our kids, our grandkids, everybody else, our friends, our family. It's like, "Well, I guess financial advisors are really not happy people because everyone I know is always miserable and they're all stressed out about looking at green arrows and red arrows all day long, right?"

It's like it's on us to own this, to be in the moment, to be grateful and I think all of us, even in retirement, is we need to show people that retirement is just another phase of life and it's a really happy place to be and let's be happy when we get there, right? Let's focus on that. So, Benjy, I applaud you for bringing that up because I think it's a really important point.

Benjy Sherer:

Yeah. I genuinely believe and have seen for myself, even if you want to make more money, whatever it is that you want, the most important thing to invest in is yourself. People spend millions of dollars on houses and cars and art, but are afraid to invest in themselves, afraid to invest in improving and healing and growing and strengthening, focus so much on the external world. But when you build this, when you build you, you become more powerful. You become more able to earn, to enjoy, to share. The most important thing to invest in is yourself.

Ben Smith:

Love that. Benjy, thanks so much for coming on our show. We really appreciate it. We'll hope to catch you another time.

Benjy Sherer:

It's my absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Ben Smith:

Thanks. So really good to have Benjy on, our neighbors to the north in Canada, right? Looking at emotional wellness and I know we try to have a treatment of all parts of retirement, is emotions are part of that and how we ... Gratitude's a thing that we talk about a lot in our show and being in the moment and being grateful and open to experience and living the most we can. And I think this angle of emotional wellness is a way to tap into that a bit. So again, just maybe a 30-degree angle on it and I know we had some of that with Chris Gathers from his personal journey, but good from a practitioner side too to go into it.

We will have a lot of Benjy's links on our website, so his YouTube channel, his books that he's produced if you want to check him out. He's got a public Facebook group too if you want to join that. So we will have all those links there. If you go to blog.guidancepointllc.com/88 for 88.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Ben Smith:

Episode 88.

Curtis Worcester:

Right.

Ben Smith:

And you can find all of that there. So again, love to have you check him out. I know he's on different social media too and he'll use some of our content that we did today on his platform. So please give him a follow and check it out, but appreciate you staying with us through episode 88 and we'll catch you next time.