Transcript
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All right, welcome back to Life Changing Challengers.
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My name is Brad Minas, I am your host again, and with me is coach Jonathan McLernan.
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He's a weight loss coach, he's a podcaster and he's an innovator in the weight loss environment.
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So how are you doing today, jonathan?
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Fantastic.
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I think every day is a good day when you have kids.
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I have a three-year-old and eight-month-old.
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Some parents might say it's one of the more challenging times in life, but there's nothing better than baby snuggles.
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And not too long before coming here to record, I get snuggles from an eight-month-old and I just go like man.
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I wish I could bottle your childhood, how you grew up.
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What was the environment like?
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Give us a good picture into what was Jonathan like as a kid.
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Well, I had a very unique start to the world.
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I joke that I was a failure of 1980s birth control.
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Shout out to my parents.
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My brother was 14 months old at the time that I was born.
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I was born at 26 weeks, so I was not expected to survive.
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I was born at home, 5 am on a Sunday morning on a little island called Hatsik Island, which is just outside of the city of Vancouver, british Columbia, in Canada.
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I actually I haven't published this book yet, but I've been writing a book kind of about my story, so one day it's in the shiny object store.
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So I I actually interviewed my parents about this because, like I actually now as an adult want to understand what it was like for you when you were actually younger than me, and you know, for my dad.
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When my mom says I think the baby's coming, my dad's like what?
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He's not due till april.
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It's january and apparently it was about two seconds worth of labor.
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And there it was.
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So my dad said I was blue, ears folded over, eyes shut, and first thing my mom said was is it alive?
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Yeah, so my dad had the presence of mind to do cpr with his pinky finger and I guess that's when I started crying and that kind of got my lungs inflated and my heart going.
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It was probably 15, 20 minutes before the amulets could get there, because it was January, it's winter, it's slushy, snowy and it's kind of out of the city and they got me to one place before taking me to another place, and at the Royal Colombian Hospital they told my parents, like don't get too attached because you might not make it.
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So they said, you know, we got him Go home, be with your 14 months old and come back in a day or two.
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So that was my start in life.
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I don't remember a lot of it, but yeah.
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Is that normal?
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I mean, as far as hospitals go in Canada, do they literally tell people to all right, listen, if we can't do anything, you need to go home and then come back in a couple of days.
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This was 1982.
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So maybe things were just a little bit different back then.
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The other thing is so the hospital they brought me to which is the best hospital they get me to was probably an hour's drive away from at least from where my parents lived.
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It's middle of winter, it's slushy, cold, icy.
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My mom's got a 14-month-old, my dad's I think it was a pest control exterminator at the time, working crazy hours.
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It was just rough.
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So I think they're actually just trying to give my parents a break.
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So we got good nurses here, things like that.
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We're going to take care of them.
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Just don't get too attached until we know if this one's going to live.
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So, as evidenced by my presence here, I did make it, but that was my start in life.
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Along with that actually apparently comes some complications, and sometimes they don't show up till later in life or things that you go like.
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I wonder why.
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This was always a little bit tougher for me, but when you skip a trimester which is basically what I did I skipped 14 weeks in the womb there's a lot of motor development that normally would take place.
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I got two boys, and both of them it was like they rode bicycles inside my wife's uterus, like when she was pregnant with them.
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They're like hey, if your kid has like less than 10 kicks an hour, I think it is like, but these guys have like a hundred kicks a minute.
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Like what is going on?
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My wife could hardly sleep.
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So I'm on life support in an incubator gold plated if you will, because apparently that they're very that's the very good conductors, gold is and the nurses, I think, called me the little chipmunk because I had these puffy cheeks.
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That was maybe the one thing that was like big.
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Everything else was like toothpicks, but I had puffy cheeks.
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Like he looks like a little chipmunk.
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I was two pounds nine ounces.
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I went down to two pounds one ounce and then kind of started gaining weight.
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They said looks like this kid's a fighter, he just might make it, kind of thing.
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And so I think my mom, I was kind of on life support for about nine weeks and then they're like it, looks like he's going to make it, like he can probably take him home now, kind of thing.
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But they had to work really hard to like teach me motor skills.
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I don't think I walked until I was maybe a year and a half, maybe 16 months somewhere around there.
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So it without that time in the womb, I don't.
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You don't sort of get that motor development.
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I'm also very, very poor eyesight.
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I had laser eye surgery, so it's good now.
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I've had issues with digestion most of my life.
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It's cool that you can survive that kind of thing.
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But there's a few other things that start to show up.
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They're like oh okay, when you don't get sort of the same level of development, it's not quite the same.
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So that was my start in life.
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I imagine that the brain has a big development going on at that time of the trimesters and things.
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Did you find anything once you got to school?
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Well, I joke that I got a really good brain, but I got it free of charge, so I can't really take the credit for it.
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What I kind of lacked in physical coordination, like I was kind of just awkward.
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I wasn't even like awkward in the clumsy sense, but like just learning how to kick a ball, swing a bat, like the normal things that kids do.
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It just took me longer to figure it out.
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I described as it just felt like there was this disconnect between my brain and my arms and my legs, and I couldn't I couldn't really figure out why.
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It was just like it just doesn't work so, but it wasn't like.
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I mean, I don't think I didn't go through any special special like physical therapy, it was just yeah, I guess you miss out on something.
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You have to work harder to create those brain connections.
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What's really cool, though, is that your brain can do that.
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That shout out to neuroplasticity and your brain's ability to learn these things, because before I went to, like his kindergarten class, I'm trying to answer all the questions and like whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, kid, you're not going to school for another year yet.
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Like it's okay turns out.
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Later in life I learned that I have adhd.
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I'm like oh, that explains why my brain works the way it does, right, I'm sorry.
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There's some parallels that are going on between you and me.
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I was six weeks preemie, but yeah, back then that's still full term, or at least closer than you were.
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Let's put it that close.
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Yeah, but I also, now that you say that and you know, back back.
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So I grew up in the seventies.
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So, and then in the eighties, seventies I look at more gray hair than you.
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You just can't see it Cause my hair's cut short.
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My dad I always had that.
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I had that.
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He started me in hockey, then tried baseball and I never was really good at any of it.
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I went to soccer and I better, but not great.
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You know, nothing ever came up like nothing came out of it.
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I was a mediocre student, but if you sat me down and made me do the work, I could do it, and I could do it rather quickly and understand it, and I didn't find out until I was 33 that I had adhd.
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So the parallels are amazing.
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Well and and so back then they would have never known to look for it.
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So here's why I think I got overlooked.
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I have a really good memory as well, and my kid seems to have inherited my three-year-old recites entire books back to me and I was like, is this normal?
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Like I don't have a lot of experience with kids my wife has been a child, child entertainer and childhood educator and she's like no, it's not normal, he's, he's got, he's got your memory.
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I'm like, oh okay, so normally with ADHD people struggle as you have to focus more and start to learn more complex topics.
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I have a real in sort of the traditional educational sense, where you learn information regurgitated for tests.
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I could ace tests without really having to study very much.
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I just kind of like show up and do it, and then I kind of have a bit of like an engineering brain as well.
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I can figure out pretty quickly how things work, and so I think I got pretty good at like faking it, like I scored really high grades.
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I was known as like a pretty smart kid, and I am, in a sense, but it was actually in a conversation with a fellow coach, oh, maybe a couple of months ago, and I was talking about my three-year-old and she said here's something you got to watch out for.
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They can sound like they really understand something and they have no idea because they know what the right answer is supposed to sound like, but it doesn't mean they actually grasp it.
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So just be careful, because he'll go through school like that, not actually learning as much as you think he is, but being able to give you the right answers.
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And I was like man.
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He kind of just hit on my education In high school.
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I made the honor roll year after year because I could recite all the answers, but most times I had very little interest in actually learning this stuff.
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I just would recite it and then, once I was done writing a test, I'd promptly forget it.
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Um, in terms of childhood like growing up I had a pretty good childhood.
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I look back now through an adult lens and I go.
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My dad in particular had a really hard life.
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I now understand why he struggles and has struggled with the various things he did.
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I have so much compassion and love for him because of who he has worked to be and become.
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He grew up in a household that really had no love for him.
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It was basically a cuff upside the head kind of thing.
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But then my grandfather was a prisoner of war from world war ii, captured by the germans in north africa, like came back with ptsd, but they didn't call it that back then.
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Mary doesn't need fuck yeah, which it's kind of funny because I think shock is actually a pretty good expression.
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I'm like that's a.
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It's a pretty accurate way of describing like what's happening to their brain kind of thing.
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You just relive the same thing over and over again and we'll get to my PTSD later on.
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What fascinates me is patterns.
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So I look at my grandfather and what he experienced.
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He would have went to war as a relatively young man.
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He just experienced the horrors of war.
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There's nothing good about it, there's nothing glorious about it, it's just awful.
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It's just a meat grinder for most who fight in.
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That Comes back marries out of a sense of duty.
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My grandmother the reason why she married him is because her fiance was an English army officer and he was killed in the war.
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My grandfather's from New Zealand.
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He had an accent somewhat similar to the British accent.
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My grandmother was educated at McGill in Montreal and then got her PhD in clinical science from Harvard.
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She was one of the first women to get a PhD from Harvard.
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My grandmother probably should have been royalty or something, I guess and my grandfather just married out of a sense of duty and fathered children, because that's just what you did.
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That was the groundwork for my dad, and my dad had a twin brother who unfortunately passed away by suicide at the age of 23.
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He suffered from severe bipolar disorder.
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It was again not really understood back then.
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At least it was peaceful for him.
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But of course for my dad the one person in his life through his entire childhood was by his side, that understood him, that knew him like that gave him stability when his parents didn't was taken from him.
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So I just I didn't say that because I, you know, I think about a human being going through that.
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The other things that my dad was shipped all over the world to boarding schools from the grandfather's oil field geologist.
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One year he's in Libya, next year he's in I don't know some other country.
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He actually came to Calgary, alberta, like not far from where I'm from, you know.
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But most of my dad's sort of growing up years were kind of either boarding school in England, in Victoria, british Columbia, or New Zealand and Australia.
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So you put that level of instability, with no love, into a developing brain.
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You know, like my dad just knew that he didn't want to be like his dad, he didn't know what to you know, and so that was so that, and why I share that is because that sort of shaped some of my response to experiences I went through and struggles that I had, but I didn't know what at the time.
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So the other thing I struggled with as a kid was temper tantrums.
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Turns out I'm an empath For most of my life.
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I would have had no idea what an empath even was.
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I seem to have an ability to read people that I can't really describe, read sense, whatever.
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I joke that my coaching superpower is x-ray vision.
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I can't explain it.
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Vision, I can't explain it, but as a kid, like what it means is like I take on all these emotions and I don't know how to.
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I don't know how to filter them or anything, and eventually they have to be expressed and so it just comes out as a flood of emotions.
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You know, wild temper, tension, kicking and screaming and pounding the floor and just, but it's my now look back and I go, my brain was overloaded, it didn't know what to do with all these big feelings running around in it.
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My parents would stick my head under the cold shower to basically shock me out of it because they didn't know what else to do back then and I go wow, yeah, because you didn't even, because the the feelings that you wanted to express weren't even yours and so I would have had words for it and, and from their perspective, the way that they were raised like I was, I was acting out and I was misbehaving and things like that.
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And I'm not I'm not angry at my parents.
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I love them dearly, they live.
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They live 10 minutes drive away.
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I love them.
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I'm so glad they're in my life, I'm so glad I still have them in my life.
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And, uh, but I look back, I go, they didn't.
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They didn't really know what to do with this kid.
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I go, I probably wouldn't have either if I was raised in that era and raised.
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You know, my mom had a beautiful, wonderful upbringing.
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You know, my her, her upbringing was lovely all things considered.
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Um, there's still tragedy in her life too, but it was.
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It was much better.
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So, so that kind of shaped um.
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So as a young, young boy, like going to school, I got into a lot of fights as well.
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Um, cause I was.
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I was like a temper, I was a hothead, whatever, but there's always a part of me and I was a pretty big kid.
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Um, until about 13, when I was six foot one at 13.
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And then I just stopped.
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I was like, oh great, I'm going to be like six foot seven and basketball player, cause that was the one sport I was reasonably good at.
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I just stopped at six foot one.
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I was like at 13, I was like I peaked early, um so, but as a kid I would get into a lot of fights, um, and I, I in a sense won a lot of fights.
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But back then, say back in the day, schoolyard fights were like once one kid was on the ground, the fight was considered done, it was considered you won.
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There's none of this like filming it for social media, stomping the kid going back to the kids, pounding it was like it was a scrap.
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You might even have got up and shaking hands after the fight kind of thing.
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Maybe not, but like you kind of got over it.
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Um, but I, I would go home and I would cry afterwards and I didn't know why, cause I didn't know, I was an empath, I didn't know that, like the fight that we were having, whatever it was doing, and if I heard a kid, I'd go home and cry afterwards and I couldn't.
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I didn't know why I was crying after I won a fight.
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This, hey, because you were feeling the other person's, you were feeling the guy that you were fighting, yeah.
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So then I realized I don't, I don't want to get into fights anymore.
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Yeah, because it hurts me, even if I win the fight, like it hurts me on the inside, I don't know why.
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Again, as a kid I had no, no way to understand these feelings, right, like I had no, no frame of reference.
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You know, like most parents, my parents had no background in psychology or understanding of any of these things.
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I just knew that I was, I was troubled by these things and I couldn't, I couldn't put worse to it.
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So, um, yeah, so I kind of coast, coasted through school, um, ended up going to university studying music and chemistry of all things, music and chemistry, okay, yeah, I know.
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I thought, well, I love music, I've got an ear for it, so kind of have an ear for music, languages and mathematics, they all kind of seem to go together.
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So I thought, okay, I'm going to be practical, maybe I'll just be a teacher.
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I grew up in a little town, 2 000 people, like no internet, right, like my ideas weren't very big about what I was going to do with my life back then.
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So I was like it seems to make sense, like maybe I'll just do something reliable, like become a teacher.
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I'll go study music and chemistry, then I can be a science teacher.
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And chemistry is kind of in demand, more than biologists, because biology is easy, so.
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And physics was maybe just more than I wanted to do more effort, right.
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And physics was maybe just more than I wanted to do more effort, right.
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So chemistry felt like the middle road.
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Turns out, chemistry is pretty challenging too.
00:15:53.326 --> 00:15:55.236
When you get into the upper level you know calculations, quantum mechanics and things like that.
00:15:55.236 --> 00:15:55.679
So that's what I did.
00:15:55.679 --> 00:15:58.969
Then I realized, okay, I probably don't have much of a future in music.
00:15:58.969 --> 00:16:00.285
I actually don't want to teach music.
00:16:00.285 --> 00:16:04.024
I don't think I'm going to become a famous musician or even a producer to famous people.
00:16:04.024 --> 00:16:07.850
So then I kind of was like now, what do I do with my life?
00:16:07.850 --> 00:16:10.293
So I left university.
00:16:10.653 --> 00:16:19.171
I was like, okay, I wrote some exams, I left and I went and joined the Navy.
00:16:19.171 --> 00:16:19.972
Wow, the Canadian Royal Navy.
00:16:19.972 --> 00:16:21.215
Yeah, royal Canadian Navy.
00:16:22.360 --> 00:16:23.403
Royal Canadian Navy, the RCN, right, right, right, yeah.
00:16:23.403 --> 00:16:26.350
Yeah, the Royal turned back in there, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 years ago.
00:16:26.350 --> 00:16:35.808
Yeah, I became a Marine engineer, so working on anything with moving parts, and part of me enjoyed being in the military.
00:16:35.808 --> 00:16:43.869
I liked in some sense the structure, predictability of it, but the other part of me just got insanely bored.
00:16:43.869 --> 00:16:49.647
Again, I had no idea this was adhd but I was just like and I got into.
00:16:49.668 --> 00:16:55.390
I would say I got into like a lot of trouble but I didn't fit in that well with like you're supposed to just shut up and do your job.
00:16:55.390 --> 00:17:01.302
And I didn't register me that like there's a reason why they're not actually picking the most efficient way to do this.
00:17:01.302 --> 00:17:08.044
They're trying to give you something to do, because you're in a floating steel box in the middle of the ocean with nothing to do and bored people get into trouble, so they're just keeping you busy.
00:17:08.044 --> 00:17:13.923
But I was kind of too smart for the game, too smart for real good, open mouth a little bit too often.
00:17:13.923 --> 00:17:21.003
And so I I was one step below chief engineer in my educational um path.
00:17:21.003 --> 00:17:32.372
So I I was, uh, basically chief, like I ran an engineering crew and then we'd have like three sort of of these engineering officers, and then you have your chief engineer on top of that.
00:17:32.372 --> 00:17:35.124
But my rank was like two hooks.
00:17:35.124 --> 00:17:45.626
So I had guys that were like two, two ranks above me in terms of their rank in the military, but they were under me in terms of my department.
00:17:46.769 --> 00:17:54.148
I was in this weird place and there's a bunch of politics in there too, and, and you know, I I just joked that, I was I was the wrong demographics.
00:17:54.148 --> 00:17:58.185
You know, frankly, no offense to anybody, but I was a green Democrat.
00:17:58.185 --> 00:17:58.406
I didn't.
00:17:58.406 --> 00:17:59.450
I didn't speak French.
00:17:59.450 --> 00:18:06.599
You know, like they were looking for bilingual and they were looking to get more women into positions of responsibility.
00:18:06.599 --> 00:18:08.446
And hey, that's a great thing, nothing against that.
00:18:08.446 --> 00:18:12.426
And I just opened my mouth too many times and it's like I'm never going to get promoted.
00:18:12.426 --> 00:18:14.405
Clearly, it doesn't matter how good I am.
00:18:14.405 --> 00:18:16.347
In fact, I topped the merit list two years in a row.
00:18:16.347 --> 00:18:18.407
That's like in your trade.
00:18:18.407 --> 00:18:20.627
That's the rankings of like how you perform in your trade.