Why Men Today Are Repressed & Depressed — And How To Fix It | Ani Manian | Better Man Podcast Ep. 089

Dean Pohlman: Gentlemen, it’s Dean. Welcome back to the Better Man podcast. Today’s episode is an interview featuring Arnie Manion, a.k.a. The Mind Whisperer, and Arnie was a speaker at our last be The Better You Retreat in the end of 2023. He is an incredible individual, an incredible coach who has a unique ability to help people understand their deeper intentions and desires.

Dean Pohlman: And I think this fits so well into the conversations that we’re having on the Better Man podcast, which really go deep into what are your deep seated desires? What do you not know about yourself? What are the subconscious beliefs that are driving you? And Arnie helps you get to the bottom of those. So, Arnie, thanks for being here.

Dean Pohlman: Joining me. Yeah. So, so Arnie and I are are I would go so far as to say friends in real life. We we got sushi a month ago and then we went on a hike last week. And the friendship that we have is one of the friendships that I encourage you guys to have and that I encourage all men to have because we actually have meaningful conversations.

Dean Pohlman: We’re presence. We’re not watching, you know, we’re not watching something else. We’re not watching a show. We’re fully present and we have similar interest. We have passion around self-development. So the conversations that we have are just very engaging and very I feel very connected to to you, Arnie, as I’m having these conversations and they’re incredibly fulfilling. So every time he says goodbye, he gives me a hug, says, Love you, bro.

Dean Pohlman: And it’s just been really cool having a friendship with you, and I’m excited to have a conversation on here.

Ani Manian: Likewise. Likewise. Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: So how do I start? So you guys know how I know Arnie now, Arnie, maybe you can give us some background on what you do and how it might fit into in, into the goals of the Better Match.

Ani Manian: I would definitely attempt that, you know, these big existential questions, which is, you know, innocuously posed is what you do always stumps me because who we are at our core is, I believe, limitless potential. And what we do is what our current best attempt is at actualizing and instantiating that potential in form. And this is a lifelong journey.

Ani Manian: And my journey has taken me through the darkest levels of my own pain and the darkest levels of my own self-discovery process and who I am and what I do has been very deeply shaped by that. I say this often. My my dharma comes from my karma. Dharma is our sense of purpose. What we’re here to do in the world.

Ani Manian: And karma is the the experiences that we collide with. And that’s not just in terms of the experiences we have in this life. And those can be positive experiences, those could be negative experiences, things that shaped us, interactions that molded us, circumstances that we responded to to the best of our abilities, that give birth to our sense of self.

Ani Manian: But it’s also the collective that we’re born into the world we’re born into. And we see this today because the kids being born in the 2020s are going to be fundamentally different than, you know, those who were born a few decades ago.

Dean Pohlman: And yeah, we talked about that for decades.

Ani Manian: A lot has changed. So I orient myself to a singular purpose, which is to help as many human beings as possible unlock their potential in this life. And I believe that we come in with an imprint of that purpose. And I believe that we come in choosing the purpose that we want to actualize and embody. And we also come in choosing the exact conditions that will give us something to overcome, which then leads to that purpose.

Ani Manian: And so in this life, I was born to two parents who were having a very hard time of life, you know, both economically and in all these other ways. And I grew up in a household where there was a lot of conflict. There was a very intense level of economic scarcity, financial scarcity, total lack of boundaries, total lack of emotional and psychological safety.

Ani Manian: And I witnessed some of the darker aspects of human nature at a very early age and at a very early age, I had to contend with the impact of that on me. And I spent most of my life not really feeling in harmony with myself. You know, all the way from almost killing myself when I was six years old to just carrying around a general sense of loathing for myself and having a really hard time accepting myself.

Ani Manian: And it was it was a couple of decades of basically living inside the matrix of my own conditioning and.

Dean Pohlman: What does that mean for people who are like, Bro, I’m not on that level yet. Or like, you know, like that’s a that’s a really powerful statement. But I don’t think many people understand that.

Ani Manian: So let me let me think about how to unpack this. We so we’re born, right? When we’re born, we come in and you can corroborate this because you just had a baby and you’re watching this baby exist and experience and grow. And this baby has come in to this life almost, almost a blank slate. We do come in with some conditioning.

Ani Manian: We come in with some imprinting of generational trauma. We come in with the imprinting of our mothers nervous systems, mothers, attachment systems. But for the most part, as we are born, we do not have an ego structure, we don’t have a sense of self. So to baby, there is no difference between baby and mommy, so there is no sense of the other.

Ani Manian: And because there’s no sense of the other, there’s no sense of the self. Now, the other thing about babies is that they don’t actually have a cognitive structure for the first few years of their life, so they don’t have this narrative structure that we do as adults that’s constantly chattering, that’s making all this noise about ourselves and about other people, about the world, about the economy, about money, about, you know, responsibilities and cars and insurance and debt and all this stuff.

Ani Manian: And so babies don’t really have opinions, perspectives. They don’t have ideological beliefs. So there is no real sense of definition in their experience of life. And when we are at that age, we’re basically completely open. We live in direct contact with reality. We live in direct contact with life. We live in direct contact with our visceral physical experience.

Ani Manian: And we live in direct contact with our emotions. So you may have seen this in your baby. It’s quite incredible how babies can fluidly move through different emotional states. So one moment, babies are crying because baby wants to be fed or baby needs to be changed. You change, baby. And then within a matter of minutes or seconds, baby, smiling babies laughing baby is curious.

Ani Manian: Baby is captivated by toy and babies move through their own visceral, emotional experience very fluidly. They’re incredibly.

Dean Pohlman: Hesitant.

Ani Manian: Right. That’s the other really, really, really beautiful thing about babies that are so they’re always present. So there is and when we see that they’re present, this is another thing that’s worth defining. We can also invert that and say that they’re not absent. And what creates absence, is the cognitive structure that usually operates as a little barrier between us and our visceral physical, emotional experience.

Ani Manian: So when we lose presence as adults, it’s usually because we retreat into our heads and we’re thinking about, I got to do my taxes, I got to, you know, talk to the the cleaning people, see if they can come, you know, day after tomorrow instead of today. Because I have all these calls and by the way, I got to take the laundry out of the dryer.

Ani Manian: shit. I am off track with my diet again. I really should get back to my yoga practice. There’s all of these thoughts and all of these worries, all of this projecting into the future or ruminating about the past that takes us away from being fully here. And that state of being here is the place of full receptivity.

Ani Manian: That’s the place where we’re completely open and available to life. We’re fully open and available to ourselves. So babies are fundamentally, fully open. Now what happens is that as we’re kids, as we are growing up, we grow into, you know, let’s say age three, four, and that’s when we start developing the sense of the other. Now, baby starting to differentiate between, that’s mommy and this is baby, that’s Daddy and this is baby.

Ani Manian: And baby starts developing a sense of himself for herself based on how mommy and daddy treat baby. So there is a whole host of internalization that starts happening again. This is not cognitive and this is completely based on the nervous system and the attachment system. But if baby doesn’t get picked up immediately, baby internalizes that, hey, maybe, you know, mommy doesn’t care about me.

Ani Manian: And so we develop this sense of self starting at that age and we form almost social identity. We become the person that we think we need to be to get the love that we want to get, the acceptance that we want to get our needs met. That is actually the matrix that forms that. We then spend the rest of our life living out of living inside of.

Ani Manian: And that becomes the fundamental sense of limitation and fundamental level of separation from us and everything else in the universe from us and our true potential from us and our full, authentic city. And so by the age of seven, what happens is that 95 to even like 99% of this programing, this conditioning, this matrix is formed and crystallized.

Ani Manian: And most people, the average person spends that literally the rest of their life operating out of this. So on a daily basis, if we have, you know, 60 to 70000 thoughts a day, 95 to 99% of those are just repeat of yesterday and so on. So we end up basically looping around this structure, this matrix, this ego structure of the sense of self, whatever you want to call it, this mosaic of perspectives, opinions, judgments, fears, inadequacies, and also sometimes self-sabotage.

Ani Manian: And we end up playing out this program until something interrupts this. Usually for most human beings, it takes a certain amount of pain. That was my experience. It took losing my dad to deliver a wake up call as literally cremating his dead body. And then I saw in a way, this matrix from outside. It’s almost like the astronaut effect.

Ani Manian: When astronauts come back to Earth, they come back completely changed, fundamentally altered irrevocably. And what they’ve realized after a lot of research is that when they see the earth from the outside, when they see it from far away, it changes how they perceive themselves. That changes how they perceive humanity. It changes how they perceive religion and borders and race and all of the stuff.

Ani Manian: And it they real. There’s almost a sense of oneness that they that they experience and they come back completely changed. And so when we are able to glimpse the matrix that we’ve been operating inside of typically our entire life, from the outside, it fundamentally alters us if we are willing to let it. And then we have an opportunity, we can either go right back into it and keep operating in the same program, or we can do the painful and sometimes very uncomfortable work of actually confronting who we’ve become and can and confronting how we’ve separated from our deepest, most authentic self, our most powerful self, our most limitless self, and really start reconciling and asking

Ani Manian: these deeper questions of, well, who am I? What is my purpose here? Why am I here? What’s what am I here to do? Who am I here to be? What really makes me happy? How do I get the best out of myself? How do I thrive? How do I unlock my true potential? How do I actualize into the greatest version of myself?

Ani Manian: And I think that’s really what every human being is craving. They want to know who this version of themselves is. That is the absolute greatest version of all they can be in this life.

Dean Pohlman: So I want to try and summarize this to try and make sure I’m understanding this correctly. And maybe if you’re listening along, you can get this as well. So we start out as babies, basically a blank slate. We realize we attach ourselves to our mother, our caregivers, and slowly we realize that we’re not part of them. And then as we’re aging up to age seven, we are learning the behaviors that will help us feel secure, help us feel loved, help us feel worthy.

Dean Pohlman: And then for the vast majority of us, that’s how we behave on autopilot for the rest of our lives. Unless something major happens that causes us to have the awareness, to have the motivation, to have the awareness, to look at the way that we’re living our lives, to look at the beliefs that we have about ourselves, the the core programing, or that autopilot behavior.

Dean Pohlman: And to start doing the work, which is, like you said, it’s really uncomfortable. You know, if you’re not doing if you’re not crying during your self-development, you’re not doing it correctly, you’re not you’re not going all the way there. And that you in doing this process, you peel back the the person that you created to fit in and you’re trying to get to this most authentic, which is the most powerful version of yourself.

Ani Manian: You nailed it. Well.

Dean Pohlman: Give me my A-plus. Yeah. If they only mattered if grades only mattered. So, you know, short of you know, and actually, we had a this is a really big theme that I’ve heard in interviews that I’ve done in this podcast, which is when people have a significant event happen, it could be, you know, we had one guy on here who who lost his father when he was 21, I think 20 or 21, and he realized, I’ve just been trying to make the meaning of life out of working out and getting as jacked as possible and, you know, we’ve had other guys who have had you know, we’ve had military veterans who have had significant PTSD

Dean Pohlman: and they realized how much of their own hurt they were covering up. And so that’s one way to and you might be at that point, maybe you have had this significant event happening recently. You know, maybe you’ve lost a parent recently, maybe you’ve seen friends die, maybe, I don’t know, maybe something significant happened to you. You’re going through a significant life change.

Dean Pohlman: Could even be maybe you’re retiring, right? Maybe something big is happening right now. So what are some of the things maybe from your personal experience? What were some of the strategies? What were some of the the processes or what resources did you start utilizing to start addressing? Okay, here’s the awareness of where I am and this is how I can move toward being a more powerful version of myself.

Ani Manian: Yeah. So we I think it’s important to state how challenging it can feel for most people to break free from the autopilot because the autopilot is very comfortable. It’s also simultaneously very uncomfortable because it typically creates a set of undesirable experiences and results in our life. And this could be in terms of money, it could be in terms of relationships, it could be in terms of health, could be in terms of any number of different aspects of our life.

Ani Manian: But there is a certain amount of suffering that we’re experiencing, and that’s part of the design of the system, because that is how we find our way back home to our true self. Because without the suffering, without it’s like without the check engine light on the dashboard, we won’t know. We need to take the car to the shop and get it checked out because something’s not something needs to be aligned or harmonized for it to be working as it’s designed to.

Ani Manian: So the process of contacting and breaking through this autopilot inherently is destabilizing and it’s disruptive. So it requires a tremendous amount of energy and it requires a big enough pattern interrupt that causes us to pause. And that really commands our attention and says, hey, actually, you know, the way that you’ve been operating hasn’t really worked. And here’s a little glimpse of how it hasn’t really worked and what the consequences have been.

Ani Manian: And typically, most humans need a certain amount of pain to grow and evolve because it’s very tempting to stay in our comfort zone because deep down, we don’t want to take responsibility. We, you know, as kids, we grow up as beings that are caretaking beings, that are hopefully provided a certain amount of safety. Our basic needs are met and the parent, the caretaker, is taking a level of radical responsibility to insulate the child from reality.

Ani Manian: And we don’t want to grow up.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, that’s that’s something that I thought about a lot is at what point does the child become responsible? You know, if, like I have, I have a vivid memory of my dad coming to my dad didn’t talk to me about serious things a lot. But I remember one one day he came up to my room and he wanted to talk to me about something important, something that he knew that I was struggling with, that I was embarrassed about, and my immediate response was to shut down and to tell him to go away.

Dean Pohlman: And I think back to that moment and think what had happened, What would have happened if I had opened myself up to that moment? What if I had like said, you know, Dad, I really am embarrassed about this. And it is really hard and I’m glad you’re talking about it with me. Like, I wonder if I had been responsible at that moment, how would that have shaped my relationship with him?

Dean Pohlman: How would that have maybe opened me up to being able to discuss uncomfortable topics? So I’m curious, what are your I don’t know. What are you what are your thoughts around, you know, when does the child become responsible and and Yeah, so how do we do that?

Ani Manian: That is very subjective. First of all, because we have a we have a linear temporal age and we have a psychological and emotional age. And so someone can physically be a 40 year old, but emotionally they can be stuck at age six. And this happened and most of us.

Dean Pohlman: Are and most of us are.

Ani Manian: We’re living in a world where most adults who are walking around, most adults who are out there running countries and corporations and making decisions are actually stuck in a regressed earlier point in their life. And this happens because at various points as we’re growing up, we experience trauma. And trauma is basically any experience that we didn’t have the capacity to digest fully.

Ani Manian: And so when we encounter something like that, our normal response is to shut down. And so in that example that you shared, you didn’t have that option available where you could be vulnerable and you could open, you could allow him to see you. And there was probably a part of you that was beating yourself up, that was making yourself wrong, making your self bad, because the child will never make the parent wrong.

Ani Manian: They’ll make themselves bad because the human child is the most dependent in all mammals for survival on the on the caretaker or a parent. So what happens is that we develop this web of compensatory strategies is that and this is, of course, the true cause of suffering that are designed to protect us and keep us safe. But they’re also the barrier between us and everything we came here to be and who we truly are.

Ani Manian: So in this could be around, you know, in the past decade, we’ve seen this whole wave of this trend of vaping, right? That’s a really great example of a compensatory strategy that someone’s using to cope with reality because they they are not able to hold reality fully. And so they need a barrier, they need a way to dissociate from it to a certain extent to make it palatable and digestible.

Ani Manian: And the number one coping mechanism in the world is food. Now there’s social media, now there’s all of this stuff. There’s of course alcohol and even working out can be a coping mechanism, right? That was certainly one of mine for many years. So we develop all of these ways to buffer against that visceral reality, that contact, because if we make contact with that and we have to reconcile all of these things, so it’s much easier for us to keep those things at bay with all of these devices.

Ani Manian: And so we as we leverage these coping mechanisms and as kids, these coping mechanisms are our heroes. So when I was a kid, one of my coping mechanisms was to dissociate from reality and go into imagination, and that became a superpower and it really took me, you know, very far in life. Another one was dissociating from reality by reading.

Ani Manian: So that shaped my brain in ways that I can’t even begin to fathom. But my linguistic skills, I completely do that. In fact, even my work today. So most of my work is working with high level entrepreneurs who are looking to unlock the next level of themselves and the next level of their business. And they understand that, you know, they have all the strategies and the tactics and the team and all that stuff, but on some level, they’re still holding themselves back and they can’t figure out exactly how and why and how to unlock that.

Ani Manian: And so my ability to see people, my ability to deconstruct their psychological systems and help them reconfigure it to be their most authentic, powerful, high performing self directly comes down to the coping mechanism I developed when I was really young because my primary emotion at home was fear. And so when a child experiences a lot of fear, they naturally become more hypervigilant.

Ani Manian: They naturally become way more attuned to the nervous systems in the space. And they have to anticipate threat by becoming really good at reading the nervous systems of anyone near them. And so they basically have to know people better than those people know themselves. And I got really good at that. And as an adult, again, this has become one of my superpowers.

Ani Manian: So every and this is of course, true for negative stuff too. So if someone has been using alcohol, someone’s been using social media and someone’s been using, you know, all of these ways to dissociate, it’s because of a mechanism that was created during childhood. And that that mechanism, which is, you know, considered a bad habit or problematic or self-sabotage in adulthood, was actually a childhood hero.

Ani Manian: So when that mechanism was created, it actually was their hero because it kept them safe, because it helped them survive. So all of our adult self-sabotage was actually a childhood hero. And so when we think about how do we unlock this next level of ourselves, when we think about, okay, there are all these ways in which I’m holding myself back, all of these ways I’m trapped inside my own programing, conditioning, trauma, wounding, we first have to fully honor and acknowledge how those mechanisms served us.

Ani Manian: We can’t just try to get rid of them. And that’s the fundamental mistake. And that’s why most people, if they’re trying to quit cigarets, if they’re trying to quit alcohol, if they’re trying to quit social, whatever it might be, the act of trying to get rid of it only makes it stronger. And it really leads us more powerless against this thing because that thing actually is a younger part of us.

Ani Manian: That’s our six year old trying to stay safe. So when we try to get rid of this undesirable behavior or pattern or thought or belief or whatever it might be, we’re actually attacking a four year old, a three year old, a five year old, a six year old, and trying to get rid of it. And if we try to get rid of a part of ourselves, that’s never going to end well.

Ani Manian: We only end up being more fragmented. And the more we try to get rid of something, the stronger it gets and the more intensely it has power over us. And so that keeps us locked in this cycle of fighting ourselves and that leads to what I call a series of self conflicts. And when we’re in opposition with ourselves, when we’re in a state of conflict.

Ani Manian: So one part of us wants to move forward, another part of us wants to move back. So the victors are directly opposing each other. We waste a lot of energy in that loop. So the easier thing to do is and this is what we were talking about, we need typically a pattern interrupt that gets our attention first. For most people, it’s pain.

Ani Manian: For me, it literally took my dad dying, watching him die because he didn’t love himself enough. Cremating his dead body, seeing all the ways I had become just like him, ways that I liked in ways that I didn’t. And in that moment, man, I was like, Fuck, this is I have to do something. Because if I don’t, I see the trajectory.

Ani Manian: I see where my life is going, where the autopilot is set. I can see the destination that it’s like being in a Tesla and the autopilot is set to a destination and we’re sitting in the seat without any sense of agency or control and or influence. I mean, control is dubious at best. At best, we can have, you know, a level of influence.

Ani Manian: But not having the agency or influence to direct the course of this car is very scary. If that’s not where we want to go. So when we think about how do we how do we architect this change, first, we have to actually understand what the GPS is set to in terms of the destination. Two, we have to see what it’s costing us, how it’s impacting us to operate in that way.

Ani Manian: And that’s true in every area of our life. In terms of health. It could be if I continue to operate like this in terms of my eating habits, like where am I going? Where am I going to end up if I continue to wake up, drink coffee and immediately sit in a chair for 8 hours a day? How is my body going to feel ten years from now?

Ani Manian: Because the difference between the child and the adult is that the child has no sense of consequence. So fundamentally, and this is really interesting, a lot of my work centers around this, the fundamental difference between a child and adult is that the adult understands consequences. So that’s actually how I define that transition from childhood to adulthood. It’s not really about physical age.

Ani Manian: There’s a lot of kids who act very adult like because they understand the consequences of their actions. And this is the fundamental skill of adulthood that I think because if we can link our behavior to consequence, typically for most things, the consequences in the future. So if I let’s say I start using a vape, right? Let’s say work is very stressful and to cope and because my, you know, colleagues and friends are doing it and I want to feel like I belong, I start using a vape and now, you know, to fit in and to have that sense of connection.

Ani Manian: This is, by the way, something worth exploring where a lot of self betrayal actually comes from prioritizing attachment. And so we prioritize attachment with someone else versus attachment with ourselves. So we self betrayed, maintain connection with other people. So a lot of self betrayal actually comes down to that. But in this example, let’s say I’m using the vape to serve all these needs to get all these needs met.

Ani Manian: Now what’s happening is that in that moment when I take a hit, I’m not connected to the consequence of that behavior, the consequences in the future. The behavior is in the present. The reward, perceived reward is in the present. This is also why people struggle to save, because the reward of saving money is way into the future. The benefit of, let’s say, not saving and spending that money to get a dopamine hit in the present is immediate.

Ani Manian: So typically rewards are immediate and the consequence is way into the future. And it’s so far into the future that it’s like, I don’t need to worry about that right now. But if someone keeps using the vape for five years, I don’t think it even takes that long. But they start feeling out of breath. They can go up a few flights of stairs without getting winded.

Ani Manian: They start experiencing more anxiety, more, you know, a lot of downstream negative effects physically. And until they can actually make the connection between the consequence, the true consequence and the behavior, they’re not going to be able to actually break that loop. And that’s what adulthood is. So when we look at people and this, this person’s really acting, you know, as an adult, really what we’re saying is that this person in the moment when they’re making choices and when they’re making decisions, our life is basically the product of all the decisions we make.

Ani Manian: So if I can make a decision to stop eating by 5 p.m. so I can get great sleep, limit my caffeine intake, move my body, go to yoga every day, do breathwork, do all these things that allow me to feel good. And if I do that today, tomorrow I’ll wake up feeling amazing. Tomorrow I’ll wake up full of energy rested.

Ani Manian: My body will feel good. So tomorrow the outcome that I experienced tomorrow is a result of today’s treatment. And of course this keeps getting wider and wider and wider. So when it comes to saving, when it comes to prioritizing our health, when it comes to, you know, even things like building a business or building a career, a lot of the benefits, a lot of the positive rewards are typically into the future.

Ani Manian: But the dopamine and the immediate gratification is in the present. So if we can link the two, if we can shape our present behavior based on the future we’re trying to create, then I would say that we’re operating as functional adults. But if we keep sacrificing the future for some immediate gratification in the present, then regardless of our biological age, emotionally we’re stuck in an in a more child version of ourselves.

Ani Manian: And developmentally we’re regressed. And unless we first make contact with that, become aware of it. Hold space for all the pain that led to the creation of that and actually work through it and choose something different that’s more in alignment with who we want to be and how we want to live. We’re going to keep looping in that pattern.

Ani Manian:

Dean Pohlman: So I want to call to attention a couple of things. So first off is that if you’re explaining this really well, but all of the coping behaviors that we have, which are typically associated with unhealthy lifestyle things that guys feel a lot of shame for, they feel embarrassed for, they think that there there’s something wrong with their character, there’s something wrong with them on fundamental level because they do these things.

Dean Pohlman: I think this is I’m sorry I said day because we do these things. It’s something that everybody goes through and it is human nature to do these things. So first off, I would say don’t feel bad because this is happening to you. This is this is your biology at work. This is literally how you are predisposed to behave.

Dean Pohlman: It is your automatic behavior. And you and I were talking about this on our hike last week. But I think for most of us, with the amount of buzzing this that is going on in our lives, I mean, most guys that I talk with have 30 minutes of free time a day, at least if you’re if you’re still working, you’re retired.

Dean Pohlman: It’s a different class, different situation. But for guys who are still working, they are up in the morning immediately getting ready for work, maybe some time with their family. If they have a family, they’re at work. They come home, they’re with family again. They’re with their partners. They’re with their spouse. And then maybe they have 30 minutes of time for a workout.

Dean Pohlman: Maybe they have an hour after the kids go to bed at nine. But the amount of free time that they have and the amount of energy that they have to recognize that this is what’s going on. And to make that change, most people just don’t have the willpower. They don’t have any reserves to be able to recognize that these things are going on and the way that they go about addressing is all wrong, right?

Dean Pohlman: We go about it thinking, if I just had more willpower or if I was just more disciplined or if I could just, you know, remember how much better I feel when I do yoga, then then I could fix this. But that’s not working, right? That’s not working for most people. I think there is something to be said about recognizing, being able to recognize the consequences of actions and remembering, you know, at night if you’re about to eat some some junk food before bed, you know, it’s sitting there and it’s really tempting.

Dean Pohlman: But future, you looks at that and says, no, no, no, If we eat that, we’re not going to sleep very well. So like, let’s not eat that. It’s going to be really easy to eat that. But you will feel better if you don’t do that. Or you could be sitting on the you could be sitting on the couch watching TV and you can remember, you know what, TV’s TV’s.

Dean Pohlman: I know I’m not supposed to watching TV before bed, but if I put on these blue eye blocking glasses, which by the way, if you don’t have blue eye blocking glasses when you watch TV, it’s really good idea to fix them up. Helps you sleep better if you’re watching screens at night or if your partner likes watching screens and you can’t get away from that.

Dean Pohlman: But if you can put those on and then get a foam roller and do some foam rolling or do some yoga while you’re doing it, you’re going to sleep better, your body’s going to feel better. But it’s hard to do that in the moment. It’s hard to have that initial energy. And so when we are so busy, it’s really difficult to have this energy to be able to make these decisions.

Dean Pohlman: And what you’re saying is that these behaviors are part of coping mechanisms, that unless we get to unless we have the awareness to recognize what they’re coming from, and then we do the work to address them, we’re going to continue to struggle with this. So my question now is, what is after the awareness?

Ani Manian: Yeah, so on the awareness, I think it’s important to highlight that most people, you know, all of us included, avoid coming into awareness at all costs. And there is an.

Dean Pohlman: And it’s so easy to avoid coming in where we talked about this because let’s go back let’s go back two centuries. Right. There’s not there’s not phones. There’s not there’s not readily accessible food for if you’re living somewhere rural or if you’re going have to walk, what you going for a walk three miles to go get some bread?

Dean Pohlman: You’re not going to just go out three miles to get some potato chips, Right. So it’s so easy to fall into a coping mechanism. So it’s so easy to avoid a wound.

Ani Manian: Society is making it easier and easier as we go. And the core issue is that we fundamentally all have this same core that is the barrier between us and full awareness of ourselves. And it’s worth highlighting the the experiences that create this. So one most of us were conditioned by parents using shame, guilt and punishment. So shame is the primary conditioning mechanism that parents use to influence a child’s behavior.

Ani Manian: And this typically happens because the parent is afraid. The parent loves this child so much. Most of the cases that they really want the best for this child and that fear that they have for the child’s future. What’s going to happen if they keep doing this or if they do it this one time, whether it’s, you know, crossing the road when there’s cars coming or whatever it might be that gets projected out on the child.

Ani Manian: And the tools that are typically used are some level of shame, some level of guilt, some level of punishment. So most of us are shaped into who we are today using those energies. So we all have some level of shame about ourselves. And one of the deeper things about this is that actually birth itself is traumatic. So when we’re born into this world, first of all, we’re nice and cozy in our mother’s wombs.

Ani Manian: It feels very safe. That’s our home, and all our needs are met perfectly because of how a woman’s biology is designed. And it feels amazing. We’re totally at peace now. When we are basically born, we experience separation for the first time, so we are basically kicked out of our home. So we experience rejection for the first time. We now feel very vulnerable, very dependent, very helpless, very powerless for the first time.

Ani Manian: And we internalize all this in our nervous system and attachment system and. It’s almost like the first imprint that we come into this world with is there’s something wrong with me. Because if there wasn’t something wrong with me, I wouldn’t get kicked out of my home, I wouldn’t get crossed out, I wouldn’t be evicted, you wouldn’t be evicted.

Ani Manian: So the eviction becomes proof. And again, this is not cognitive. This is not a thought. And this is a very deeply embedded, subconscious belief that’s pre-verbal. It’s important to note that. But we that’s sort of the creation of the shame core. And then this gets exacerbated because it’s the easiest thing for a parent to do to shape a child’s behavior is using shame to make the child feel bad about themselves and do something different.

Ani Manian: So the result of all of this is that most adults have the same core and the core of their ego structure and psychology. And when they try to look at themselves objectively, truthfully, honestly, and create that awareness, they encounter this. And this feels very uncomfortable, it feels very intense, and it feels almost really challenging to approach directly. And so what we do is we just bounce away from it.

Ani Manian: We just avoid it. And that keeps us locked in those coping mechanisms or destructive patterns. You know, it could be anything. It could be. I used to have this pattern of, you know, I had this need to feel needed in relationships because I thought that if I wasn’t needed, I wouldn’t be wanted again, Not a conscious thought, right?

Ani Manian: This was how my attachment system was wired because I felt very unwanted growing up. And so that basically created my attachment system structure. And so as adults, as an adult, when I tried to have, you know, adult, romantic, my attachment system would filter out the women who didn’t need me because then I would have to contend with the risk of not being wanted and then being abandoned.

Ani Manian: That would bring up, you know, all those feelings of inadequacy, unworthiness, shame, all that stuff, rejection, going back to childhood, which I didn’t want to feel. So of course, and this is all part of the matrix that I was operating in. None of this was conscious, and so I would filter unconsciously for women who needed me, and if they needed me, that was my template for attraction and love right being needed, which is not really what love is.

Ani Manian: And these relationships would all for, you know, follow a very similar trajectory. And it it took the pattern repeating half a dozen times for me to say I’m interesting. This is this is really interesting because all of my relationships seem to start the same way and the same way. It’s like the same sort of key. This is a pattern, and the common piece of this pattern is me.

Ani Manian: So what is it about me and that so it’s something like that. There’s enough when there’s enough heartbreak that stacked up, when there’s enough heartache and pain that stacked up, then it’s like, okay, I could I could see myself starting to repeat this pattern with someone else. But wait, let me just pause for a second and inquire, What is it about me that’s creating this?

Ani Manian: Where am I complicit in creating the exact circumstances that I’m trying to avoid? That I’m complaining about that. I’m saying doesn’t feel good for me yet there’s a part of me that compulsively recreates it, what’s actually happening. And so for us to really create awareness, we have to work through the shame. And I’ll say one more thing on this.

Ani Manian: The typically the shame developed in a relational space. Actually, most trauma that we experience happens because of an absence of relationship, and some trauma happens in relationship typically for us to work through these things. And this goes back to the point you were making that it’s really helpful for men to have frank deep friendships with other men where they feel safe, where they can talk about anything, where they can be seen, where they can really express and be vulnerable, not feel judged and not feel shamed.

Ani Manian: And they don’t have, you know, pose or front or, you know, put on a show. They can just be themselves. That’s very healing reason is that the relationship was actually the most crucial part about all of this because the most powerful way to create that awareness and break through these patterns and see these patterns and break through that shame is when we’re witnessed in the experience by someone in a non-judgmental way.

Ani Manian: This could be a friend, could be a therapist, could be a coach, could be a partner, Right? Of course, most people aren’t trained to do this, you know, in a in a very precisely calibrated therapeutic way. But relationship in general is very healing. And so when we can be with the shame in a relational context, when there’s someone continuing to love us through that shame, something changes inside us because the shame was created because of an absence of love, because of an absence of understanding, because of an absence of empathy.

Ani Manian: So when the bomb of that love, of that empathy in a non-judgmental space is applied something magically shifts within us and possibilities become available that weren’t before.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, so I’m I’m immediately thinking of back to when I first saw you work at a retreat I attended. And you did this with I can’t remember when I think I was the third guy to go or something like that. But you did this with six people and I had to stand up and take a break at some point.

Dean Pohlman: I think once we got four and a half hours in without a break, I was like, Arnie, Arnie, we need a break. This is like this is like four and a half hours of just like, heart wrenching, just very intense, deep work. But I remember going through that and watching people and that’s exactly what you did. You created that non-judgmental empathy for people, going through that experience, going through those struggles.

Dean Pohlman: And it’s extremely powerful. I mean, that setting is something that I mean, you did it to me and I was like, I was sobbing. I was I got there and it was it was incredibly powerful. And that that was for me. That was when I realized that was when I realized that I was trying to outwork my feelings of I was trying to work my way into a feeling of love and acceptance.

Dean Pohlman: I was saying, like, if I just reached this certain level, then I will be loved. And remember these guys where we did this thing, where we had people celebrate whatever goal they were reaching towards, and I felt totally inauthentic doing it. I couldn’t do it. I was just looking around people celebrating, thinking like, I can’t even do this.

Dean Pohlman: And ultimately, for me, success looked like being able to be fully loved and appreciated. It wasn’t, you know, reaching X amount of subscribers or whatever metric it was. Being able to walk home and feel totally loved and accepted. And that was and that was only possible for me having that clarity going through this process that you’re talking about right now.

Dean Pohlman: And I also want to I also want to mention I also want to talk about the what you’re mentioning with relationships. And if you just go from a relationship, from one relationship right into the next relationship without addressing anything, you recreate that relationship. And I think it’s so interesting that we subconsciously attract people that fit those criteria. Like, cool, you have all the baggage, you fit all my baggage perfect, which we feel comfortable with that.

Dean Pohlman: But it also comes with the burdens of that baggage. It comes with the drawbacks, it comes with the weaknesses, the flaws that will eventually lead to the the same result that you had before. So if you’ve been divorced twice and you don’t do any work and you go into another relationship with the same person that you’re attracted to, guess it’s going to happen.

Dean Pohlman: So for me, I’m it intrigues me to think what relationships would be like if you went from two or three serious relationships and then said, Hold on, I’m going to press pause, I’m going to do the self-awareness work and and, you know, kind of work on myself and then going into back into the dating world. And how different would that be?

Dean Pohlman: It’d be so interesting to see, you know, the different the different people you’d be attracted to if you went through fundamental change.

Ani Manian: That’s literally what I had to do. And I took two years of a hiatus from dating relationships, two years of celibacy, because I realized that I was not operating fully in integrity with myself in terms of relationships. And unless I actually really fundamentally made peace with myself and didn’t and I worked through the pattern of using others and using relationships to avoid being alone with myself, then relationships would always be a crutch for me.

Ani Manian: So my process and this has been my process with a lot of these shifts and transformations has been to understand what the crutch is, what the coping mechanism is, and then create a space for myself, create a container and set certain rules which and boundaries, which is again an adult thing. The one of the crucial and other crucial difference between adults and children is that children don’t have boundaries.

Ani Manian: Boundaries are an adult concept. And so for most of us who are operating regressed, we’re operating from our six year old or seven year old. There’s typically also a of boundaries. So when we create a container, create boundaries, create a space where I take the coping mechanism away and I observe what comes up when I do that. And for me, that look like two years of really being alone with myself.

Ani Manian: And it’s really interesting because being alone is also being with myself. So there’s two ways we can see that. One is heads, one is tilted, it’s the same experience. And with myself, I felt like alone. It wasn’t it didn’t feel like a relationship. It felt like the absence of a relationship. So I had to learn to create a relationship with myself and come into a level of secure attachment with myself.

Ani Manian: Because without that, there is 0% chance that I can have a functional, healthy, thriving relationship with another human being. I can’t have secure attachment with someone else if I don’t have secure attachment with myself first. So that internal insecure attachment I have to deliberately, intentionally create. And it was excruciating. Every part of me wanted to just bounce off of that and jump into a coping mechanism and for I wouldn’t recommend this for most people because this is a very, very intense and, you know, just a on a on a related tangent, I also have a psychedelic therapy practice where I work with entrepreneurs and these are, you know, typically very, very, very successful men, typically

Ani Manian: in their thirties, forties, fifties. These are men who run ten, 20, 30, $50 million businesses. They have, you know, 5000, 200 employees. They’re holding a lot of influence and power and responsibility in the world. And in these psychedelics therapy sessions, which is always in person, a lot of times it ends up in them crying in my arms because that’s the first time in their life that they actually felt safe, that they actually felt unconditionally held, that they didn’t feel judged, that they didn’t feel shame, they didn’t feel like someone was expecting something of them, that they could just actually just be themselves.

Ani Manian: And when a human being experiences that there’s a huge release of all of this pent up stuff that they’ve been holding onto. And for most people there is no underlying architecture for secure attachment itself. So they have it’s like trying to build a building and a skyscraper in their there’s nothing actually there. So on a relational level, it really helps if we have someone who can give us help us have an experience of secure attachment that we can then imprint in that relationship with ourselves.

Ani Manian: Because without that reference point, it’s like if I don’t know where Tahiti is and I have to go to Tahiti, it’s going to be very challenging. I don’t know where to begin right? If I don’t know what continent it’s on, I don’t know if it’s somewhere accessible by land or sea or air or where I’m going to need to change planes or I’m going to need to rent a car.

Ani Manian: It’s going to be very, very, very difficult. And that’s what most people are trying to do when it comes to relationships. They’re trying to go somewhere that they’ve never been. They don’t know where that place is. They don’t know how to get there. They have no reference point for it, but they’re attempting to go there. And it’s a really challenging process and the easier way.

Ani Manian: And I mean, I wish someone had explained this to me, but but I you know, it seems like my purpose in this life is due to trial and error. So all the other people don’t have to go through the same long winded journey. But I wish someone had broken this down for me back then because that would have been much easier.

Ani Manian: It’s much easier. And this could be a therapist, this could be a friend. This could be, again, someone who is holding that level of security, each one with themselves, because we can only offer someone else what we have inside us. And so if someone can offer us that space, we can connect to that space. And by the way, psychedelics, one of the reason why psychedelics work so well some psychedelics is because inherently they allow us to experience that level of self-love without the shame in that relationship with ourselves.

Ani Manian: So we get a reference point, not just psychological, not just emotional, but also somatic. Like I physically get what it’s like to love myself. I physically get what it’s like to accept myself. I physically get what it’s like to forgive myself. So, wow, this is what it feels like. This is what this is what it can feel like.

Ani Manian: This is great. I want this now. I have some foundation, some structure to build it on my now my my jacket is hanging on a coat hanger versus me trying to hang a jacket in the air. And that dramatically improves my ability to actually make sustainable, serious progress in that area of my life. And that’s true for health.

Ani Manian: It’s true for business, it’s true for relationships. It’s true for literally every aspect of our life.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think I’ll just say about psychedelics. I think that I think that a lot of people listening will be like, drugs bad and. And there’s I think ten years ago I would have agreed with that. And after everything that I’ve seen in this space and the people that I’ve heard about who I thought would never do it, I’m like, wow, this is this is legit.

Dean Pohlman: And this is something that has a lot of power when done responsibly and done in the right conditions. But it has the ability to help us get through our subconscious the things that hold us back. So the things that we the mechanisms that we built, the matrix or the programing that we’ve built for ourselves and allow us to get to this.

Dean Pohlman: So yeah, ten years ago I would have said no. Every week that goes by I’m thinking, you know, I’m interested in this stuff like this. This seems like something that I’ll do. I don’t know when, but eventually. But anyways, I wanted to touch on that. So two things I want to get through before we get to the end of this.

Dean Pohlman: So I would love to understand what practicing self-love looks like.

Ani Manian: So a big question, and I’m going to really try to simplify this because I think this is one of those things that is very, very, very misunderstood and social media doesn’t really help with that. There’s a lot of these esoteric, vague, spiritual ways that people talk about self-love. It’s all really helpful. It’s all really practical. So I’m going to attempt to give you the most usable, practical, tactical understanding of what this actually is and what it can look like to practice this.

Ani Manian: So my definition of self-love is my ability to give myself what I want and how much self-love I have that I’m exhibiting, that I’m practicing is the extent to which I allow myself to have what I want. And it’s important to clarify that want here is not the child’s need for immediate gratification. You want Here is the desire of my soul.

Ani Manian: It’s what I truly, truly, truly want. And typically those things are opposed to each other. So from let’s take a health perspective, what I may want from the child part of myself is only pizza. Today. I want to eat some chips. I get some ice cream that would give me the dopamine, that would give me the immediate gratification.

Ani Manian: But what I really, really, really want, what my soul wants is to find what the most healthy peak fitness level that I can achieve in this life, where my body moves very fluidly, where I’m not holding a lot of tension, I my digestion works really well. My mind is clear. I feel alive, my body feels alive. I can move athletically.

Ani Manian: I can use my body to do things that, you know, like play, play soccer, surf, you know, climb trees, whatever it is that I want to do, if that’s the true desire of my soul. And this is the first distinction, self-love is not about chasing pleasure. It’s about really uncovering first, what are what the true desire of our soul is, and then aligning to that.

Ani Manian: So in that same vein of, okay, I can choose instant gratification today, or I can defer instant gratification for the sake of the thing that I’m really here to experience. And so I orient myself from a lens of growth. So I want to grow in every way. I want to grow spiritually on a girl physically. I want to grow mentally, emotionally, relationally.

Ani Manian: And so if that’s what I know, I really want the degree to which I can align and optimize my thoughts, my beliefs, my behaviors on a daily basis to that is, I think, a very practical way to conceptualize and implement self-love. So am I making decisions today for who I’m trying to become, for where I’m trying to go?

Ani Manian: And I think this process is inherently joyful and pleasurable. I think it’s not a I’m not talking about a totally sacrificing fun and joy and pleasure. I think there’s a balance that we strike, but if we if we hit that balance, not optimally, let’s say we’re two in next on pleasure, then I’m going to ruin my life because I’m going to make very short term choices and I’m deferring pain into the future.

Ani Manian: And, you know, tomorrow or next month or next year or next decade is not going to be fun. If I’m overindex on the future not indexed enough in the present that I’m going to not be having a good time. And then I’m going to make it less likely that I want to, you know, operate in alignment with my future self.

Ani Manian: So what is that sweet spot? And I think it’s different for all of us because we’re all here with slightly different desires. You know, some people, their their sense of self-love is I want to build $1,000,000,000 business. And, you know, assuming that they’re not doing that to cover up a deficit in their sense of self and to prove someone wrong or finally get dad to approve of them, assuming their motives are correct.

Ani Manian: Correct As in in harmony, not right and wrong, then for them, self-love is going to look like, hey, I’m going to push friends aside and partying aside and you know, all of this stuff aside because I’m going to focus single mindedly because that’s what my definition of self-love is for you. It might be, okay, I want to impact millions of people and I want to help them come into this beautiful relationship with their bodies.

Ani Manian: And I’m going to optimize my life for that. And you know, I’m going to try and be as present of a father and husband, and I’m going to really be there for my my child. That’s, you know, how you self-love for someone else. You know, it could be that they want to travel around the world tasting wine from different regions, and that’s their definition of self-love.

Ani Manian: So I think the first thing is there’s no universal definition. There is a universal principle, but again, it requires us to really uncover who do I want to be? Who do I want to become? What do I want to experience? And that’s the adult part of me. That’s how do I want to actualize in this life? And then how can I each and every day align my thoughts, my feelings, my behaviors, my habits to who I want to become, to what I want to create.

Ani Manian: And if I can do that, then what happens is that we operate in a state of harmony with ourselves and self-love is the effect of that. Self-love is not something we directly do, but it’s self-love. Self-love is the the outcome of a certain level of harmony with ourselves. And in a way and this is, you know, a little controversial, I think the ultimate level of self-love is not thinking about ourselves.

Ani Manian: So self-love is not thinking necessarily well of ourselves, because any time we attach to thinking well of ourselves, we’re also resisting, not thinking well of ourselves. We’re pushing against we’re opposing any opinion or perspective that might diminish us in some way. Right. And that keeps us locked in that duality, self-love to me, ultimate self-love is the absence of a sense of self where I’m so one with how I live and what I’m creating, the art that I’m making, the music I’m producing, and not really actually music, but just my purpose.

Ani Manian: And I’m primarily Orient it in service to others. I’m not thinking about myself and it’s a paradox.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, that that totally makes sense. I mean, the absence of pain is.

Ani Manian: Not thinking, and most pain comes from thinking. What’s so interesting about ourselves?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I’m thinking about just, like, physical pain, right? People who are trying to get rid of physical pain in the body. If they didn’t, that the the ultimate cure for that is getting to a point where you don’t even think about pain because your body feels so good. And you were talking about this a lot before, but you were talking about how focusing on something to try and get it to go away only makes it harder to push away.

Dean Pohlman: So there’s there’s this recurring theme of of focusing on something in order to make it more If you’re trying to solve a problem by focusing on it more, you’re making it more problematic.

Ani Manian: And for most people, you know, there is a level of life that’s unlocked only when we get over ourselves and we really dedicate ourselves to the world, to humanity. And I think that’s actually when we really begin to thrive. And that’s why we see in our world all these people who have all money in the world, right? $10 billion, $50 billion, $100 billion.

Ani Manian: What they do next typically is oriented around philanthropy or, you know, charity or doing something to contribute to the world, because we can have everything. We can have all the resources. But ultimately, the thing that makes us really happy is being of service. And I think that’s part of the design. And when we align to that design and when we orient our life to be of service, we are operating in a state of love and self-love and love are almost indistinguishable.

Ani Manian: It’s just the act of love when the act, when we’re loving, when we’re in a loving place, we’re in a place where we’re feeling gratitude or feeling benevolent, where we want the best for the person across from us, from all the people around us. Then we are a part of that fabric of love, and that’s the most sustainable place to be.

Ani Manian: That’s the most harmonious place to be and that’s the easiest place to be. Doesn’t take work and the benefit is out. Now, we’re not so self-obsessed and almost narcissistic and like unpacking and, you know, beating ourselves up and improving ourselves and trying to get us to be, you know, a different way, then change and transformation happens a lot more fluidly and easily and effortlessly.

Dean Pohlman: So two things I want to go back to in what you just said. The first is when you talked about doing the habits, the thoughts, the actions on a regular basis to work toward, to in alignment, to work toward our ultimate goals. Goals for ourselves are, are the true desire of the soul. You said it’s important to I think about this in terms of living a healthy lifestyle a lot, but you want to find those things that give you some level of joy, but don’t cause you to have this huge euphoric spike followed by the low.

Dean Pohlman: So if you can find, the things that give you kind of like a mellow, mild level of joy and think about your life fulfillment or your happiness as this kind of just slowly rising level and then you’ll have lower you’ll have higher lows, you’ll have lower highs, but you’ll also have higher lows and it’s much more sustainable, enjoyable than the short term pleasure followed at the expense of long term fulfillment in the other the other really quick thing I wanted to say is when you were talking about having the awareness to think of who do I want to be, what do I want to experience understanding yourself.

Dean Pohlman: It’s so important to choose to be alone for X amount of minutes, hours per day in order to have this awareness. That was something that really struck me. And, you know, we talked about this, but I mean, you we, we I work from home sometimes. And ultimately for me, I realized I need to get out of the house and I need to come be alone in my office because if I’m at home, I can’t focus on there’s distractions.

Dean Pohlman: But also I can’t separate the family version of myself from the mission focused version of my solo self. And I know for you, you mentioned that you actually rented an apartment so you could have an office, so you could be so you could be on your own more as opposed to being at home.

Ani Manian: Yeah. With your partner being alone, we can’t really be together. So we actually have competing needs for togetherness and separation and usually what happens in long term relationships is that they’re meeting the need for togetherness, but they’re not really meeting their own needs for separation and aloneness. And so they become very undifferentiated that confused. And any time this fusion, it destroys the relationship.

Ani Manian: So this is sort of an easy hack to make a long term relationship work and stay fulfilling and exciting and fun and alive because we we end up taking each other for granted less. We end up having and maintaining a sense of self. And by virtue of that, we’re able to keep the attraction and the spark alive for much longer.

Ani Manian: And I think that’s a that’s a very underrated, underrated hack. And I think to go back to the first point you made something that’s very useful is to really meditate and understand the difference between joy and pleasure. I think we’re in our current world very oriented towards pleasure and we’re in next on Joy. And we can find joy in the mundane.

Ani Manian: We can find joy in the stuff that we wouldn’t expect to be joyful. Like if I know that oral hygiene is important to me and I can serve that by brushing my teeth every morning and night, then I can find joy in that. I can become oriented in a tantric way to the act of brushing my teeth and really focus and really be so aware and present as the the bristles make contact with my gums and really feel that and really experience joy in that sensation.

Ani Manian: I can experience joy in the mundane in cleaning my space. I can make that a joyful experience because that’s an act of self-love. I can experience joy in doing the laundry because that’s an act of self-love. I think the more we orient towards joy in every moment of our life and every moment, every activity can offer that, even if it doesn’t appear to be on the surface, the less we need the pleasure to spike our state and the more stabilize we become in this new way of being and the more aligned and the more harmonious we become.

Ani Manian: And then we can self properly, because we can’t be in relationship without being without suffering. And most people in relationship, what they do is they self to be in relationship and therefore the relationship is not sustainable. So when we can self fully, when we can know ourselves, when we can really understand what our deeper purpose mission values desires are, when we can operate in harmony and in alignment with that, when we can honor ourselves in a nonjudgmental way, when we can be with ourselves alone, when can take care of ourselves on a fundamental level in a state of joy, then everything that we desire in the world unlocks for us.

Dean Pohlman: I think this is a really good I think it’s really good that you brought this up, because I know from the conversations that I have with demand for yoga community and people in in our members area that guys really struggle with creating space for themselves, creating time to be alone. And I think there’s a perception that by being alone, by being away from your family, you’re worse of a dad, you’re worse of a partner.

Dean Pohlman: And in reality, taking that time for yourself is is going to help you be a better partner. It’s going to be help you be a better a family member. And so I think it’s I think it’s really important to start reframing that. Understanding. My perception, I guess, is I think maybe decades ago or maybe, I don’t know, very few guys in your fifties or sixties who are listening to this, you’re going to have to email me and tell me this.

Dean Pohlman: But my perception is that guy time used to be more common or easier or more prevalent and. There are still certain guys, maybe certain groups of guys who find having gay time easier or finding time for yourself easier. But it’s definitely it’s definitely harder for the majority. There are fewer people doing it. And so this is just a really good reminder for guys to create time for their selves to create time for being more authentically themselves outside of their roles as fathers, as as partners.

Dean Pohlman: I’m glad you brought that up. So we’re getting close to I want to get into part two, which is kind of my my rapid fire questions. And I think we did an amazing job through the importance of examining shame and understanding how significant that is. Talking about self-love, talking about attachment to our parents, talking about the difference between child and an adult joy versus pleasure.

Dean Pohlman: I think these are all really great actionable tips. So thank you. Thank you for all of that. Arnie. All right. So rapid fire questions, what do you think is one habit, belief or mindset that has helped you the most in terms of your overall happiness?

Ani Manian: I think my meta belief that I’ve been practicing since I was eight years old is that I can teach myself anything I want. And so that allows me to approach pretty much anything from a place of due ability that, yeah, if you know there’s something I need to figure out, I can figure that out. And I feel more capable to do that and just that belief allows me to rapidly acquire skills and, you know, learn things across a variety of domains.

Ani Manian: And it allows me to integrate these learnings into this model. So I think it’s I can teach myself anything that I want.

Dean Pohlman: What’s one thing you do for your health that you think is overlooked or undervalued?

Ani Manian: I know my body every day. If I don’t move, my body every day doesn’t feel good. So it’s almost my body feels best with daily movement. And it that practice has saved my life through some very, very dark times. And I think once someone changes their relationship to movement as this something I have to do I should do to while this feels amazing, that’s the first thing that I put on my calendar my whole life and business operates around my movement time Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: That’s awesome. I know you have a pretty dedicated yoga practice, too. We’re going to do some yoga together at some point, so that’s kind of relevant to what I do what’s what’s the most important activity you regularly do for your overall stress management?

Ani Manian: So I’ve been breath work on the trampoline, which has been really nice. Yeah.

Dean Pohlman: Like a rebounder.

Ani Manian: And just use it. Exhaling on the downswing and then inhaling on on the jump up. And it’s really amazing how in a pretty short amount of time. So I’ve been playing with doing more micro movement throughout and see if my body feels less stiff through, long periods of sitting. And that one practice has been really fun and it just perks me up without needing stimulants and my body feels a lot more loose and mobile.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Awesome. What’s the most stressful part of your day to day life?

Ani Manian: Facing the truth about my potential, seeing the gap between where I am and where I would like to be. And that’s almost a daily practice of looking myself in the eye and saying, okay, where you are is perfect and we’ve got some work to do.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, that’s tough. That’s a tough one. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing men in their wellbeing right now?

Ani Manian: Growing up, I think most men, most people are trapped in a more child state and they have a hard time making choices aligned with their best interests in terms of health particularly, and they sacrifice too much of their bodies to get and create a sense, you know, a certain level of safety and security and stability in life. And that decision making catches up real quick.

Ani Manian: And so I think the the core thing in society right now for men is we don’t have all the ways, all the rites of passage and all the ways that we come into adulthood that were maybe true 50 years ago. And now we have to sort of take personal responsibility for our own adulting and our own progression, you know, from child or adolescent to adult.

Ani Manian: And I think that’s and the World Is Me has made it much easier to have coping mechanisms and unhealthy habits. So we have to really get stronger and we have to get wiser and more aware and take more responsibility to continue to thrive in a world that, you know, where it’s a little it’s becoming more and more challenging, too, like for particularly for men were under attack from all directions.

Ani Manian: If you touch a receipt, you’re basically absorbing a boatload of estrogenic BPA compounds, polyester clothing, you know, really impacts testosterone levels. Drinking water out plastic, you know, in this country are foods contaminated with a lot of substances. So we can’t take it as easy as we once could. We can’t take things for granted. And we have wake up and we have to take a much greater degree of personal responsibility that our dads and grandfathers needed to.

Ani Manian: And it’s it’s only going to get more like that. So I think the more we wake up and the more we grow up and we all have some level of the Peter Pan syndrome, we don’t want to grow up. We want to we want to have it easy and, you know, the government or someone to make good decisions for us and take care of us.

Ani Manian: But I don’t think that’s an option anymore.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I think it’s good that you mentioned it’s harder. It’s harder than it used to be, but we are all going through this harder together. We’re all experiencing it so we can lean on each other for that. All right, Arnie. Well, I’m looking forward to hanging out with you again. I’m super excited for you to come back to be the better you next month and for 12 new guys to have their minds whispered to and yeah, so how can people because I know a lot of these ideas are probably pretty intriguing to people.

Dean Pohlman: I know that if you’re interested in self-improvement, these are things that you’re going to want to look into. How can, how can people keep up with what what you are doing? And I know you’re still building a lot of this out, but how can people keep up to date with you?

Ani Manian: And yeah, first of all, thanks, but this is a really beautiful conversation. It’s always lovely for us to connect. And I feel like you bring out the best in me in so many ways, and that’s partly down to who you are and, who you’ve cultivated yourself to be, and also, you know, the space you create. So super grateful for that and for the be the better You Retreat.

Ani Manian: Coming up, if last one was anything to go by, this is going to be a firecracker. And if any of this resonated, I have a podcast called Scale with psychology. My website is on the money Incom and I am and an icon. You can find me on Instagram YouTube all the places. Most of my work is with entrepreneurs who want to scale their businesses and themselves to the next level.

Ani Manian: So if that is fields of interest, drop me a line, you can shoot me an email on it on money.com and yeah, this is my life’s work and I feel really, really, really grateful to have spent my life and to continue to spend my life, you know, unlocking and unpacking these these ideas, these philosophies and these frameworks to help as many people as possible unlock the best version of themselves.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, I mean, if I could summarize, I’d want to summarize, but if I can maybe put across one of the most important things that I’ve learned from Annie, it’s that applies to business, but it’s something that applies to us in life as well. The things, the strategies that got you to where you are today are not going to be the things that got you to the next level.

Dean Pohlman: And you have to unlearn those things and do things differently in order to reach the next level. And that applies to businesses. That applies to your self-development. And that’s something that I I’ve been very fortunate to be able to work with Annie on. So thank you again. All right, guys. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Go check out Annie.

Dean Pohlman: He’s amazing. The Mind Whisperer you get just by mine Whisperer recon and just get all of those animals.

Ani Manian: I to.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And guys, I really hope this episode inspired you to be a better man and I’m looking forward to seeing you on the next one.

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