Unpacking the Power of Connections: A Conversation with Joe Burgess

Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Connections in the brain and connections in the world.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and how they intersect to bring us prosperity and happiness, not only to us individually, but also on a global basis. I'm your host, Jill Hart. Welcome to the mystic marketing podcast and Jay is

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: having some time with his family. So we have a very special guest joining us today. Joe Burgess, who's a trauma mentor and author of the book, A Coffee Table Guide to the Human Experience. Joe has some personal insight on connections, not only with your brain, but with other people in the world, and how they're changing, and how they allow us to prosper, not just individually, but as a community and

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: as a global community. So welcome to the show, Joe, it's really great to have you here with us today.

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Joe Burgess: Thank you very much, my dear. It's wonderful to be here. I appreciate you.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So tell us a little bit about your story.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and then we'll talk about how you met Jay, and how that connection happened.

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Joe Burgess: My whole story started out in Michigan, middle of Michigan. I was had just graduated from high school.

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Joe Burgess: My family was. The day was my family had been celebrating. We were all my parents lived on a lake.

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Joe Burgess: my neighbors, friends, family, loved ones, we all gathered, had a barbecue all this kind of stuff. Then the night was winding down. My friends and I were headed back into town, but we had to go load up the sailboat that my friend brought up that day.

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Joe Burgess: So we went over. We loaded that up. I had a new to me car, which was

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Joe Burgess: sounds kind of Corny. But it was a race car. It was a Volkswagen rabbit, but it was a race car. It was set up for Sports Car Club of America racing in, parking lots

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Joe Burgess: and so I thought I was like kind of a badass, my brother race cars. He went to Nationals and all that, so I thought it was really cool.

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Joe Burgess: so I thought it was really cool, and

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Joe Burgess: we pulled out of the boat launch, pulled out onto the highway right there, and somebody passed my friends and me, thinking I was a hot 90, almost 19 year old, kid. I didn't want my friends, or I didn't want the car to pass me, too. So he passed them, tried to pass me, and I started racing, and we race for a couple of miles down the highway

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Joe Burgess: and going around a bunch of curves.

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Joe Burgess: and we got to this one curve and was. We were finally way ahead of my friends, and it was dark, and what happened was he slam? He went low on the road. I slam our brakes on a 90 degree curve, and my car went over 2 or 3 times into a field.

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Joe Burgess: My front corner hit so it shattered my battery, so my headlights went out so my friends didn't even know that anything happened to me. People on the corner heard Tiger squealing and all that, so he jumped up, trying to trunk lights on my car. I was in the passenger seat.

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Joe Burgess: so he was looking around for a driver in the field didn't find anybody, because his fiance called the Paramedics. They were just down the road a few miles, so they came down.

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Joe Burgess: They took me into the hospital. They call my parents and said, well, actually, it was kind of crazy that my! I got taken into the emergency room.

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Joe Burgess: and the attending physician was walked in on the room, and they didn't. There all the nurses and all the staff were like, we don't know who he is. He doesn't have any Id or anything.

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Joe Burgess: And when he saw me he's like, Yeah, that's Joe Burgess. His mom works up in quality assurance.

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Joe Burgess: So the crazy thing is that I had. He wouldn't have known me, because if I hadn't dated his daughter a year before.

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Joe Burgess: so I only know because of that. So it all full circle. But then they called my mom and told them that said to her that I need that they needed to get to the hospital because I wasn't expected to make it through the night.

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Joe Burgess: and then

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Joe Burgess: it went. I wasn't supposed to make it until noon. Then I wasn't supposed to make it until that night, and I was literally hour to hour, to hour, to hour and for days. And then finally, they're kind of threw up their hands. And they're like, we don't know if or when or what's gonna happen. We just have to let it work itself out, basically. And we just have to keep them comfortable

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Joe Burgess: during that time. And I haven't told the story to many people.

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Joe Burgess: But during that time my heart stopped and I went flatline, and it was that time that I actually remember in my mind. I remember I was above my body. I looked down to the left. My mom jumped up. She resuscitated me. I looked down there to the left, on my feet, and nurses came into the room. I looked to the right out the window. It was a dark, cloudy day, and then went back into my body.

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Joe Burgess: So I've had that connection with

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Joe Burgess: not knowing how to explain it, not knowing how to justify it, and that kind of being my motivation. For, like.

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Joe Burgess: I experienced this. So now I need to understand it. And that's what. After I got out of my out of the hospital and all that kind of stuff. And I started figuring all this stuff out.

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Joe Burgess: That was a big part of my motivation was, how can I explain this to somebody who doesn't even believe in any of that kind of stuff. I didn't believe in it, so how can I explain it to somebody?

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Joe Burgess: So then I was bad. For a couple of years. My brain had to relearn, to walk, talk, breathe, brush my teeth.

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Joe Burgess: temper problems. I was angry, I was resentful. I was bitter.

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Joe Burgess: I fight with everybody. I would punch things and break things, and we'll punch holes in walls. And I was very angry.

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Joe Burgess: and I learned meditation then, and that's what saved my life, because

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Joe Burgess: I finally found a place where I could be comfortable, and

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Joe Burgess: the great thing about it was I didn't have to be anywhere with anyone or with anything, because my mind is always with me. And so I took that as

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Joe Burgess: I don't need medicine, I don't need the, because my mind is always with me. So mental health is very important to me, and ever since I learned that I've done everything to make myself better. Mentally.

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Joe Burgess: I've done everything I I can do to make those around me better mentally. And I just.

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Joe Burgess: I understand, because this is gonna sound kind of crazy. But I learned dog psychology and dog behavior. And

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Joe Burgess: that's

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Joe Burgess: a big part of how I piece together what I comprehend, because a dog is either comfortable or it's uncomfortable.

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Joe Burgess: and if it's uncomfortable. Then it's gonna have a be in a survival state of consciousness and fighting, or it's going to be running.

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Joe Burgess: So then we're the same way. But we have feelings and emotions, and that's 1 thing that dogs don't have. They don't have this near the complexity of the processing or the manipulation that we do so we can manipulate our past, manipulate comprehension of the future whatever, so that we can have things. How we want dogs can't.

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Joe Burgess: So, looking at dogs as a brain, a brain, a brain as a brain is a brain is a brain. Then humans are so much more complex. And these we can we make everything complicated.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Should.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The connections. Part of it is interesting because they

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: they all work the same. I mean, brains have like specific functions that they're in charge of

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: of overseeing. And I you know I've had dogs my whole life, and I I can see what you're talking about in terms of you know they're either

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: they're either happy or there's something wrong. And and you can tell just by looking at them what's going on with them. And

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and they're they're usually they like patterns, and they like

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: routine, and if you can keep your dog in a pattern or a routine, then they're going to be much better behaved than if you just like, are constantly throwing new things at them because they don't know what to expect. I think people are kind of like that, too, when you're connecting with them, if you if you can keep it simple.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: E, even connecting with yourself. Because really I think that's where connections begin and

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and meditation again. It's it's just connecting your mind and your body together and allowing yourself to be whole

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: before you start having connections with outside influences.

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Joe Burgess: I saw my cousin the other day, for, like I see him once a year and on Christmas and

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Joe Burgess: I was talking about just what I do and how I do what I do. And I was telling I was explaining to him like my form of meditation, because I've

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Joe Burgess: I I've also incorporated, like self hypnosis and hypnosis into my meditation. So it's

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Joe Burgess: that's how I fix myself like they told me I wouldn't have anger on control, or I'd have never have impulse control. That's totally gone, because I

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Joe Burgess: trained my brain to have impulse control through like self hypnosis and all that. I didn't know it at the time, but I was studying it, and I was picking up all these techniques and tricks and all this kind of stuff, because I saw the power in meditation. So I knew that the pot there was power in hypnosis. And then I started doing the self hypnosis and all that kind of stuff. So I incorporated a lot of that into my meditation.

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Joe Burgess: But I said one thing to my cousin about. I'm like, well, one of the 1st things you do is you notice the bottom of your foot what it feels like? And he just kind of looks at me, and he's like it's kind of out there, man. He wasn't expecting to hear something like that out of me, but it's my meditation is literally the you feel the bottom of your foot. You know you feel your ankle. You know what it feels. I mean. You're aware of what it feels like to have your sock on your foot.

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Joe Burgess: and when you put your focus of your attention into that moment or into that area of your body, then it gives you more control of your body, and your mind begins to gain more control of your body. And so then it's just it kind of snowballs. And you get more control of this you get. I'm I

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Joe Burgess: I feel mental like if I pop a zip, or if I have a zip pop up on my head, or whatever I feel it, and I know it just I'm aware of it, and it's just that's I'm very in tune with my body, and then I'm very.

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Joe Burgess: I'm kinda egotistical when it comes to this. But I've done a lot of work on trying to figure all this stuff out. So that's why

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Joe Burgess: I don't know. Yeah.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's it's kind of a a pretty recent phenomenon that people are discovering that your brain can be rewired

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: and retrained, and you don't even have to go through traumatic brain injury like you did to to retrain your brain. And it's there's some very simple processes, you know, the meditation, hypnosis, hypnotherapy eft the tapping that people do. They're they're all things that help bring your body back into resonance.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And if you have somebody to come alongside you who's already walked that path. It just makes the process so much faster.

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Joe Burgess: The neuroplasticity of the mind is incredible. And that's 1 thing that

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Joe Burgess: I was doing. All this. I was paying attention to all this stuff like in 2,003, 2,004 like 20 years ago, before this stuff is what it is now. I hear it everywhere. But when it was putting all this stuff together, and when I was learning about it all

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Joe Burgess: it it wasn't commonplace. It wasn't. Everybody didn't know, and all that kind of stuff. So I was very

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Joe Burgess: I don't know. I was very protective of it, because I felt like I don't know. It was something about me. It was my selfish behavior, and there was like, I didn't need to be that way, and I wish I wouldn't have been, because then it would have been able to evolve easier and

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Joe Burgess: more seamlessly into who I want to be than who I was.

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Joe Burgess: But it's and it's

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Joe Burgess: I don't know. It's just neuroplasticity is. Oh, I I know I was. Gonna say, there was. I was talking with a woman who was actually like

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Joe Burgess: one of the main people of a Facebook group, with like like dozens and dozens of tens of thousands of people whatever.

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Joe Burgess: And I was talking to her about neuroplasticity and about how we what you can rewire the brain, and that was crazy.

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Joe Burgess: And I'm like, why are you? Why do you think I'm crazy? And all this kind of stuff? You can rewire your brain. You can teach it to do new things. And she didn't believe me. And it's just I

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Joe Burgess: I I used to care what everybody thought about me so much, so like I

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Joe Burgess: I was obsessed with like, if you think I'm wrong, I guess I must be, you know that's kind of what it was like, and so I didn't have any confidence in who I was, which goes back to my conditioning from when I was a child, which actually, after my accident, I had to redevelop my conditioning, which I was like 14. My brain development was like 14 years old at a 14 year old, when I was like 25.

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Joe Burgess: So it's I've witnessed the developmental stages of a child in my brain and in my life, like when I was able to do this or that. And so the connections. That's what I've you develop the connections. And so, like we were talking about.

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Joe Burgess: a brain is like, so I have a universal brain understanding. It's a ubu. It's a nonprofit that I was trying to get going a bunch of years ago, with Jay's help

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Joe Burgess: a while ago, and we were talking about it. And it's the whole process is a deer brain, a dog brain, a bird brain, a human brain is all just electrical impulse.

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Joe Burgess: And it's just just these connections. And it's just a roadmap of how to get from here to here and how to express your experience. And all this kind of stuff. So the conditioning is like related to our experience, and so

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Joe Burgess: that you I don't know. I'm just sort of babbling so. But it's just the connections in our brain are just an electrical impulse.

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Joe Burgess: and I don't. I.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And the connections that we make with people are also electrical impulses.

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Joe Burgess: Yes.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Everything is. It's frequency.

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Joe Burgess: Yes.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Is another way of saying electrical impulse.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yup! Yup!

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Most people are just not aware that that's what's happening

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: in the world and in their head.

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Joe Burgess: It.

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Joe Burgess: Tesla said that if you want to understand the universe, you have to think about it in terms of

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Joe Burgess: frequency and vibration, and all that kind of stuff, and in an energy.

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Joe Burgess: And that's

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Joe Burgess: I. Tesla knows a heck of a lot more than I knew a heck of a lot more than I did, so I might as well trust him, so I kind of just assumed his knowledge. Like I.

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Joe Burgess: I stand on the like shoulders of many great people like I wouldn't know what nearly what I know if it weren't for all these brilliant minds who were obsessed with what they were obsessed with and spent their entire lifetime, sometimes

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Joe Burgess: trying to find their truth. And it's all this stuff that it just. It feeds into what I know and what? Because gaining knowledge is like to me. It's a drug. It's the smarter I can be. Feed me more, feed me more. I want to be as smart as I can possibly be. I want to know what I can possibly know, because I was always viewed as dumb. I had one graduated with a 1.9 Gpa.

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Joe Burgess: In high school, and everybody thought I was dumb. Everybody thought I was stupid. Nobody thought I could go to college, which I didn't go to college, and every time I did it I did fail out of it.

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Joe Burgess: but I digress.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Well, people like Tesla and Einstein didn't really thrive. All that well, in educational institutions, either. So you're kind of in good company.

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Joe Burgess: Yeah, yeah, yeah, very true. Very true.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So tell us about

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: in our, in our thread of connections, how you actually met Jay, and how he became part of your

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: your environment.

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Joe Burgess: I can. Crazy thing. So when I lived in Michigan, my ex-wife and I got a divorce, and we're both moving down to Florida

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Joe Burgess: because I didn't have anywhere in Michigan to go, and I didn't want to be homeless in Michigan, so I figured I'd just come sleep on the beaches.

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Joe Burgess: be homeless in Florida. Not really. But I had family better place to be homeless.

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Joe Burgess: Yeah, yeah, that's the basis of it. No, I had family in Florida. So I came to Florida, too.

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Joe Burgess: And just before I came down I somehow, on Facebook or somewhere on mine, I connected like especially raw TV.

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Joe Burgess: I I linked up with them. Somehow.

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Joe Burgess: I came to Florida, and I was walking around a bird sanctuary, actually. And I got the 1st phone call from him.

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Joe Burgess: and we're we just started talking. We just kind of hit it off. I mean, he got me. I got him like whatever

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Joe Burgess: so then I've had.

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Joe Burgess: I'm not a very I

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Joe Burgess: I didn't think I was worth of it worth anything before. I didn't because of my accident. I didn't think I was value because

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Joe Burgess: I felt guilty because I survived. I felt guilty that I lived because I survived a 99.9% mortality rate, so that I

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Joe Burgess: then then that actually kind of turned with the ubu with me, working with Jay. He was trying to help me find sponsors and all this kind of stuff for it.

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Joe Burgess: week totally forgot where what I was gonna say.

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Joe Burgess: But Jay was helping me with the ubu

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Joe Burgess: couple of year. A few years after that, after I met him. We've never oh, I I don't, really. I'm not very.

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Joe Burgess: I'm not money oriented because I thought money was the root of all evil, basically. So I was very.

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Joe Burgess: I didn't think I deserved it. I thought I was supposed to be poor because of my accent. I didn't think I because I couldn't work. I was. I'm on disability, and I didn't think I was worthy to have any money or so I thought I had to live destitute essentially. And then I started spending my money and all these things to help prove myself and better myself, and then kind of dug me in deeper, and I'm just.

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Joe Burgess: I've never grasped how to make money. I've I've never I mean.

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Joe Burgess: I used to be an artist, and I used to sell my artwork all over the country all over the world. But I,

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Joe Burgess: since I've like.

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Joe Burgess: been away from that, I haven't, and that was actually my ex-wife who was helping me do that. I haven't been able to figure out how to get that going in my mind and get that working, and I don't know. I I wish I could. I mean I honestly I wish I could. I have tons of ideas. I've tons of books, I've

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Joe Burgess: courses, I have. I have all kinds of stuff that can make me money. I just don't know how to implement it, and I don't know what I need to do, because my brain is holding me up, and I can't figure out what it is that's holding my brain up.

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Joe Burgess: But regardless, I

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Joe Burgess: met Jay. We talked. After that we worked with on the ubu. We worked on a couple of other things. He introduced me to a bunch of stuff.

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Joe Burgess: He's always been a soundboard kind of thing like that basically, that's

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Joe Burgess: kind of a mentor. Honestly, he's always been there. He's never not been there. If I've needed him, he's

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Joe Burgess: sometimes I would go away for a year or 2 years, and then I'd always find my way back about something that I'd be doing that I I know he knows the answer. I know, Joan. I know Jay knows how to do that. I know Jay knows people for that, and so he's a very good connection, for.

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Joe Burgess: to be honest, he's he's a wonderful connection, just to have

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Joe Burgess: his energy, his wife's energy, just the

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Joe Burgess: he's gonna tell you how it is

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Joe Burgess: that, and that's 1 thing that I respect about him, even when you don't want to hear it like me constantly, I don't

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Joe Burgess: necessarily in my mind know anything is wrong, but then he sees it from his perspective, and he calls me out on it. And so it just. He's a very truthful. He's an honest guy he they'll tell you he's a straight shooter. Tells you how it is.

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Joe Burgess: He does stuff that I don't even know how he does it. It's I wish I could. He's just has a way of

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Joe Burgess: talking to people and connecting with people and have having them understand what he's trying to get convey, and all that kind of stuff. So

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Joe Burgess: hope that answers your question a little bit.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It does, it does.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So you've known him for like 10 years, and he's helped you with some things. Yeah.

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Joe Burgess: I

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Joe Burgess: I have. I I can't recall right off. What like exactly what we've done. It's my fault that more than likely I didn't succeed at whatever he we were doing. It's

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Joe Burgess: I don't have a bad thing to say about Jay honestly, cause I he knows what he knows, and he's an expert at what he knows.

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Joe Burgess: and I can't take that away from him. Anything that

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Joe Burgess: anytime I've ever failed at anything in my life is 100%. My fault.

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Joe Burgess: I'm the one who.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Would you? Would you say it's really failure or just not success yet.

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Joe Burgess: Just. You're as you were saying, that I was hearing my sister the other day the other night yelling at me because I was saying to her, I'm like, you're too hard on yourself. You're too hard on yourself.

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Joe Burgess: Excuse me. And then, as you were saying them like hearing, I'm like hearing myself talk. I'm like you're too hard on yourself. And she's basically saying the same thing that you said. It's not, and it's not.

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Joe Burgess: I kind of look at failure is that you don't fail if you don't give up.

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Joe Burgess: And so it it's just that I wasn't successful at the when I let's rephrase that again.

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Joe Burgess: the expectation that I had placed on the desired result was not met because because of something that I was unable to accomplish

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Joe Burgess: by no fault of his?

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Joe Burgess: Does that make sense.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It makes total sense. And I think when it comes to talking about the connections with people that we make and the connections that go on in our head that sometimes we have expectations of things

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: turning out one way, and when we get too tightly attached to those expectations, we don't allow room for

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the even better to evolve, and sometimes the evolving piece takes a little more time than the expectation that we had about the way something was going to work at that time, and I can tell you it's taken all of this time of your relationship with Jay to get to the point where you were going to meet me, and I think that I have some things that are going to help you move what you're doing into a much

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: bigger and richer

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: potential than what you would have experienced had the thing that you thought you were putting together 10 years ago or 8 years ago, however, long ago that was, would have produced

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: so everything is always in the perfect timing.

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Joe Burgess: Yes, I 100% agree. You could very much. So it's I. It's crazy because I don't.

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Joe Burgess: Everything happens at exactly the right time for exactly the right reason. Even our failures, or in even our mistakes. Our fuss stumbles, are even the time every time we fall down. It's happened for a reason.

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Joe Burgess: and I learned that with my car accident, because had I been going 5 miles an hour faster or 5 miles an hour slower, I might be dead, because I hit my head right behind my left ear, and I hit it in a position like on the door jam. The window was rolled down. I hit it on the door jam.

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Joe Burgess: Had it been higher or lower, or anything I might have like, had a totally different result, and that could have been dead.

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Joe Burgess: But it

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Joe Burgess: everything happened exactly the way they needed it to be for me to actually, now I interpret those on the survivors guilt of 99.9% mortality rate. Now I look at it as I am the voice for the 999 people who weren't able to survive the injury that I was then on top of that, with the nonprofit, the ubu.

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Joe Burgess: I represent 9,990 people who are no longer with us, but I represent all their families as well, who are no longer able to witness those 9,990 people, because there were 10 of us that survived.

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Joe Burgess: Because the if I'm 1 of 1,000, that means that there's 10 of us out of the 10,000, and I'm the one out of the 10 that had the mental faculties, the abilities, the capabilities to live my life, the way that I did.

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Joe Burgess: and then I did nothing but improve myself, and better myself with the connections that I was building through meditation

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Joe Burgess: onto everything that I'm becoming.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We have so much to offer the world

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: from your experiences. I think we we appreciate that. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: your story with us, but also your connections, and how they're continuing to evolve.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And I would really like to encourage people to check out Joe's website, mindsetblueprintllc.wordpress.com to connect with him and learn more about what he's doing and how you can help him make connections as well.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I know he'd love to connect with you.

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Joe Burgess: Yes.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And be sure to join us in our community on Facebook. The mist. Oh.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: facebook.com forward slash groups, mystic marketing as well as

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: joining us on Mondays for the monetize your message workshops that we do at 2 Pm. Mountain standard time, and you can register for those by going to heart or the mystic marketing podcast.com forward slash, mmm.

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Joe Burgess: Really quick. On Facebook. I have 2 groups, Joe's Jungle Gym, and then mindset mastery. Llc.

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Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Awesome, and we'll put links to those in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for joining me today, Joe.

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Joe Burgess: Thank you very much. I appreciate you and your time.