On this episode:

• What vulnerability truly means and my own experience of being vulnerable.
• How I have been practicing learning from what I have been teaching since I was a kid.
• What revelation looks like and how it helps me preach to myself.
• Why we shouldn’t just practice what we’re learning but instead, live what we’re learning.

Key Takeaways:

• True vulnerability is when you’re not comfortable talking about something to someone.
• Learning how to live what you learn means you’re going to mess up.

We teach what we need to learn.

• Preach to yourself.
• Learn how to live what you learn instead of just practicing it.

Connect with Joseph James:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meetjoejames

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meetjosephjames/?hl=en

Hello everyone, welcome to another great episode of Purpose Through Pain Podcast, I am your host, Joseph James. Today I wanna talk to you about something extremely vulnerable that I'm going through personally at this current moment or have been over the last couple weeks, or brought to my attention within the last couple weeks. One thing about vulnerability, it's easy to say that we're open about something that we feel comfortable talking about, but true vulnerability is really when we're not comfortable about talking about something, and so this is me being extremely vulnerable at this moment, I have struggled over, quite some time now, probably over the last, since my wife passed away over two years ago to really get engaged back into my own business, I have a very successful dog training business, working towards, you know, continual growth, it's successful, okay. But I have struggled getting back into it, I have struggled getting the en me being engaged with my staff, I love growing the business, I love the aspect of the growth, but in terms of the hands on inside the business, I have struggled with because, for various reasons, just the struggle itself, when my wife passed away, I wanted to kind of disconnect from a lot of things, I felt like I lost something of course something deep inside of me. And so fast forward throughout the last two years, I've kind of come and gone, come and gone, come and gone, and I've really never been able to get plugged in, okay, mentally. And so, but I would still be here, then I would go, and then I would come and I would go. And of course my, one of my business mentors would always talk to me about this, about getting plugged in, and I'd get plugged in for a few weeks and then I'd kind of de detach a little bit. However, that wasn't necessarily a root cause, but that was an effect of things, right? And so recently I had two different people bring this to my attention. They're like, Joseph, you're doing great,your podcast is doing great, you're really doing great. Sharing and motivating and encouraging people, but the very people that need it the most, you're not doing it for, you're not doing it too. And he is making reference to my staff or making reference to the people that are around me, and this come from a very respectful individual, I consider him not only a friend, but a very close friend, a mentor, somebody that I allow to speak into my life. And then somebody else that I am very close to, this happens to be a female and she's very close to my life, I allow her to speak into my life as well, we have a really good connection with each other, and she's closer to me because of the relationship that we have with each other, and she told me the same thing. She's like, Joseph, how can you sit there and talk about you know, being encouraging to people and helping people live a different life when I am not living it, okay. She's like, I'm not seeing the fruits, I'm paraphrasing, but she's like, I'm not seeing the fruits of what you're preaching, and both people said these things in two different aspects of my life, the business aspect, and then also the personal relationship aspect, and it really hit me hard, it hit me hard because I understood what they were saying. However, nobody asked me or I didn't feel like I was able to share where I was coming from, and what I mean by that is this right here is a lot of these podcasts that I get, things come to me right before I actually get on the show. And so I'm sharing from a place of revelation, not necessarily a place where I've been practicing this my whole entire, okay. But in the revelation, it may be something that I've also already experienced, and I'm like, yeah, man, I didn't even realize I was doing that myself, this is what I'm doing, so let me share with you and something that I learned, I went to some therapy retreat this past week in the end of the middle of July, and it's called RIM, Regenerating Images through Memory, and it really helped me kind of break through a lot of things of my past, the confidence, the self-doubt, the lack of motivation, lack of drive, things that stem back to my childhood, things that I thought people said but really didn't see, me looking at through my eyes at certain situations and not necessarily through the eyes of the person maybe delivering the message or how they were treating me or not treating, and I was talking to one of the instructors, and he mentioned this to me and it really just hit home to me about things because as I was sharing it with him, like, man, I'm really struggling about these two people which I love and adore and care for, they spoken to my life and what they said was a hundred percent correct. I can't argue that, but what I wasn't able to say back, because then it, it would almost come across like, I'm just defending myself by the way I'm acting or I'm not practicing what I preach is a lot of the things that I get, I would get right before the podcast or I'd get it the day before and I'm like, I this is for me, this is for me, I'm going through this, I am having to, it's coming to my hea, the knowledge of it's coming to my head. Now I'm having to practice it, I'm having to do it right then and there, so there was no fruit, so to say, because the moment that I would share it is that is when I am starting to put it into practice, okay? Or I learned it ahead of time, or I grabbed it from studying or whatever the case is, I'm like, man, this is really good, let me share this with every, and it really wasn't enough time for me to practice what I was preaching. And ultimately is this right here, three things, we teach what we need to learn, we teach what we need to learn. What I mean to that is when I get on here, and I've been teaching for teen years, I started when I was a young kid in aspects of church and teaching younger boys things, it could have been from tying knots to building camp buyers to survival, I was always teaching, then in the Marine Corps, I was an instructor I was constantly always teaching, when I have my firearms business, I was constantly teaching, when I have my dog training business, constantly teaching, I've been teaching for 30 something years, okay. I wouldn't say that I'm an expert, but ultimately, the things that I would be teaching is I was learning at the same time. Once I grasped a concept of how to do something, teaching was a way for me to hands on learning it, if I was teaching somebody how to build a campfire and all of a sudden something just came to me, I'm like, okay, this is what we need to do, and as I am doing it, I'm also teaching myself what I really needed to do, oh, if you blow on, if you get down really, really low and blow on the fire when it's not yet ready, the oxygen itself does what to a fire, it builds the fire up, okay. So I'm like, okay guys, everybody get down and let's blow on this fire and it's gonna help. I am teaching what I was also learning in that, okay, so ultimately I was teaching what we need or what I needed to learn, I just verbalized it. The second thing is preach to yourself. There is no reason whatsoever that I need to preach to anyone because at the end of the day, this podcast, it is for everyone listening, but it's for me, it's for me, because these things are coming to me through revelation, these things are coming to me through knowledge of learning something from somebody else, whether it's through a course, a book, a post on social media, I'm like, oh man, a motivational video or a conference like, man, this stuff is good, but when we sit there and we verbalize how do motivational speakers get good at speaking. I guarantee you, I can almost guarantee you that anybody that you know that speaks on a platform stage with an audience started off speaking to themself, they stood in front of a mirror, some people put stuffed animals up on their bed and they would preach to them or they would teach to them, or they would instruct to them, they did it all by the, some people would memorize scripts, I remember in the Marine Corps we had a certain script that we had to follow as a format, not necessarily a script, but a format, and so I would do, again, attention, it could be me walking in the room and me yelling to the top of my lungs to a whole bunch of Marines, okay? And I gain everybody's attention, and then it went into a transition of, now that I gained your attention, this is what we're going to talk about once I talked about it, then we're gonna transition to, I'm gonna remind you what we talked about, but now transition into the next thing we're gonna talk about. Everything was a format, but I had to learn that format and then I had to teach that format. So ultimately, as I'm doing that, I'm speaking to myself constantly, when I'm up here and I'm sharing these things with you guys, I'm sharing my heart, I'm sharing, the experiences that I've gone through, I'm sharing and being vulnerable about the hard times, the rough times, the bad times, the hell, the struggles, the journey of the loss of my wife, my father the relationships that I had, but ultimately I'm preaching to myself on how I need to act, how I need to be, how I need to make through things, how I need to pick my head up, how I need to get off the ground, how I need to pick myself up, how I need to continue to move forward in life, I'm preaching to me, I'm sharing with myself what I need to do. Don't thank for one minute that people like Steve Harvey or Jim Roone or Tony Robbins, you know, Simon, Sinek, you know, that they didn't preach to themself before they ever started living it, because that is what we call Revelation, I get so much revelation in these podcasts that I'm like, oh my goodness, I need to go back and listen to that because it, something just came to my mind. Somebody triggered something in my mind for me to say it, and when I said it, I'm like, man, not only was that good, I need to take my own advice, not because I knew it, not because I've studied it, because it was pure revelation, the third and final thing is learn how to live it. We learn things so we can live it. So when I'm hearing and I'm sharing things about how to, I remember one of the first podcasts I did was, the steps of grieving, the steps of making it through, and everybody kept on asking me, he's like, man, you just lost your dad 22 days, years later, you lost your wife, you know, they both died in the same month and you're, how are you staying so positive? I'm like, man, I don't know, I'm just, you know, and after 30, 40, 50 people ask me that question, I finally like, well, what am I doing that is making me so positive that I can carry throughout my day, and I came up with four or five things that I was doing, I didn't even realize I was doing it. But in that moment when I started to share it, I'm like, man, I am preaching to myself, I am teaching what I am learning, and I am learning in this moment how to live it, we are not perfect, none of us are. Our relationships aren't perfect, our spouses aren't perfect, our children aren't perfect, our businesses aren't perfect, our college professors aren't perfect, our bosses aren't perfect, our best friends aren't perfect, we all mess up. Teach yourself what you need to learn, practice or preach to yourself. Forget about practicing what you preach, learn what you preach. Take that as a lesson, and this is me, this is me learning. This is me learning how to live it, when I say something on this podcast, especially with the young lady that I'm in a relationship with, when she's like, Joseph, you're not preaching, you're not practicing what you preach. And I'm like, I just wanted to just like, oh my God, if you only knew when I, when this stuff became revelation to me, because a lot of it was like in the moment, I'm trying to figure this out in the moment, I'm learning this in the moment, and guess what? It worked for me. That doesn't mean in a month from now I'm not gonna say go do something else, because I'm constantly growing and evolving. But I know that you though all those, the listeners that are out there that you tune in show after show or episode after episode, week after week of us launching these. I want you to know I'm coming from the bottom of my heart that, yeah, there's been times I haven't practiced what I preached because I'm just learning it, I'm discovering it right then and there. You know what? That's a great place to be, because now that I am learning it, I do have a chance to practice it, I do have a chance to preach to myself, I do have a chance to teach what I am learning and then learning how to live it, because isn't that what it's all about? I am learning how to live what I speak to you guys on, I'm no expert at it. I'm taking my experience of the trauma that I went through as a young kid for rejection, the abuse, the abandonment, the seeking, the approval, the emotional physical stress, moving into a marriage, losing my wife to cancer, losing my my father to health issues. I'm learning everything right now on how to live, I'm exposing my own self, I just went through some serious therapy. A lot of people don't wanna talk about that. That allowed me to see things that I've never seen before, allowed me to feel a way that I've never felt before. So when you see a friend that's practicing or not practicing what they preach, ask yourself, are they learning how to live it right now? ‘Cause learning how to live it means you're going to mess up, it means you're going to fail, it means you're going to fall down. But just know this, you're learning. And with learning, there's, what do we call, curves, right? There's learning curves and in the curves, some curves you can take super fast and some curves you're like, oh, that was too fast. I gotta slam on brakes in the midst of the curve, it's okay to be in a position that you're learning how to live it if people around you judging you, and these people weren't judging me, they weren't, they were sharing with me where I needed to be at and what I was doing in that current moment. And I greatly, I wholeheartedly, appreciate these two people because it, it allowed me to be like, okay, what am I doing? What is it that's going on? So going back from the top, teach what you need to learn. Number two is preach to yourself. And number three is learn how to live it, learn how to walk in what you're preaching, don't just practice it, learn how to live it.

I love you guys. Thanks so much for tuning in. Please, reach out to us, let us know what you want us to talk about, who you would like to hear on the show, reach out to us at Meet Joseph James on Instagram. You can message us, share things with us, share what you're going through, share how we've been able to help you, and please don't forget to subscribe, rate and review our podcast. Love you guys, we'll talk soon.