Natalie Bulger

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Motivation N'at. I'm Natalie, your host, and this is where we take hot mess to high potential. And as you may have seen with some of recent guests, I'm getting folks that are listening and saying, I've got someone you should talk to.

 

And it happened just about a month or two ago where an old coworker of mine from the VA reached out and said, Hey, Natalie, I'm sitting down with this guy, Joseph Schmitt. We used to work together at the VA. We're grabbing a meal and his story and his experience are perfect for the podcast. And I always love when it's someone who recommends a guest to join us. And I have to tell you over the last few weeks getting to know Joseph and getting to read the book that we're going to talk about today, arc of HUMANITY, which you can see I have marked up as I love to do with books. We'll get into this. We'll talk about what drove this, but I think this is an incredible reflection back on experiences that Joseph, our guest, has had. And I'm hoping to learn right along with everyone else and take part in this journey together.

 

Without further ado, things you'll hear about today are the uncomfortable spaces that make or break us or redefine us or drive us to truly challenge ourselves to understand who we are and what we're capable of. And hopefully I've done that justice in that kind of quick thinking of it. But Joseph Schmitt is the guest today. He has been in a little bit of everywhere, military background, financial background in healthcare within the federal system.

 

Natalie Bulger

You work with bees now, you have a nonprofit, there are so much there to unpack and I'm not going to try to. So Joseph, I'm going turn it to you. Tell us a little bit about you, who you are, what your journey's been like in getting to where you are today. And then we'll dive into what really built this whole idea of arc of HUMANITY and what it means.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Thank you, Natalie, and it's great to be here and just honored to be on your show. I've listened to a lot of your podcasts on Spotify, and so I'm just really excited to have the opportunity to sit down and talk a little bit about myself and about arc of HUMANITY. I'm a Midwestern boy. I grew up in Southern Illinois for the most part of my life and joined the Navy at a young age at 17. And up until that point in my life, I'd never really been outside of the Midwest and so at a young age, I got to travel the world. I got to travel all over the Atlantic seaboard. And I also became a father at a young age too, at the age of 19. And so at a critical point in my youth, I really just started to take on a lot of responsibilities, which was very developmental for me. And then I started to have a lot of challenges as far as raising a family. And so that started shaping a lot of my trajectory. And so once I got out of the Navy, I spent several years in college and trying to get my education. I got my education in aviation management and maintenance. And I've lived a lot of lives. I've lived a lot of lives. The Navy was a big part of my life. Being a father was a big part of my life. And so I have done a lot of different things in my life to try to support my family. So it was a lot of different jobs. A big part of that was in the federal service with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

 

It's just been a mix match of experience that I've gotten and it has taken me on this journey through a lot of different perspectives in life. It has been hard to—the compounding forces of the tragedies and a lot of the issues that I had with having a young family have been hard to work through.

 

Natalie Bulger

We're gonna pull it back. It's funny as you're talking, I'm thinking of, we always talk about pulling away the layers of a thing or a person. And it's almost like as we go through our life, we build those layers. And we really may not understand what are those core components. What's at the heart of the onion, right? When you cut it open and what are those pieces? And when I was reading through some of the vignettes in the book, and we're gonna hit on some of the quotes, because the way you write is a way that for me,

 

Joseph Schmitt

Yeah.

 

Natalie Bulger

helps to digest very quickly impactful moments that often people take a lot of time before they get to the punchline, right? So they get to the point and you didn't. I mean, and just kind of scrolling through seeing the threads of empowering what really is historical trauma. So those early years and then trying to learn as you're growing yourself in a way, kids raising kids, I mean, you're 19, you're still a kid in a lot of ways.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Yeah.

 

Natalie Bulger

You speak very openly about your relationship or your estrangement with your son. You talk about this motorcycle wreck you had that brought a lot of perspective and awareness and those kind of weaving in and out of the story. I can understand how it's hard to summarize that in a quick, who are you? There are so many pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

 

Natalie Bulger

that kind of start to parse together and why it really makes sense that and I'd love to hear this premise of what arc of HUMANITY is for you because it's 52 weeks and in those 52 weeks there's times where you encourage hey if you didn't get the whole week done go back it's a reset so it's probably going to be more than 52 weeks for some of the things that are a little trickier but what makes it different in looking at it is it's not the things like the 75 hard that people sign up to do

 

Natalie Bulger

And you're pretty truthful on the back cover, it says, hey, this isn't for passive reading, it's for participation. And it's not a quick fix. It's a field guide. And anyone that's been in the federal government, anyone that's been in the military knows this premise of a field guide, which is we can tell you what to do, but how well you embrace it, how much you interpret it and make it yours, you've got to do yourself. So talk to us a little bit about

 

Natalie Bulger

How the heck did we get to the point of this kind of field guide, this arc of humanity? And were you writing it as you were doing it yourself? Was this a reflection back on what the journey had been like for you? How did this come to be?

 

Joseph Schmitt

Well, it all started back in May of 2020. It was a point in my life where it's really the most challenging, darkest experience I've really ever had. And so I've always been an optimist. I've always been someone who shows up, have a good attitude. I work hard. I mean, that was the way that I was raised, to get done whatever I needed to do. And so I just reached a point in my life where a lot of the life experiences that I've had, especially surrounding being in a young family, being a young father and dealing with those challenges. I mean, it just really started to accumulate and I didn't realize it until the point where I just felt so broken and so lost and just at this point where I just didn't know who I was. It was an identity crisis, or crisis of identity.

 

I was just at this place where I did not know that I was willing to continue. And I was just so exhausted with the life that I was living. And not that I've had a bad life, because I've had a good life. I've had a lot of good experiences. The Navy took me around the world. I have a great family. I have my own shared trauma as a kid growing up, but I still come from a good solid family structure with people around me that wanted me to be successful and develop me and to give me the love and the attention and the structure that I needed to grow up and be a productive, good person. It wasn't that those things were bad in my life, but it was just a lot of the trauma that I brought into my own family and that I watched my kids suffer through, a lot of that just accumulated and this broke me. And so I started experiencing a lot of challenging circumstances in my career. And I just—COVID was happening during that time. And I'd just gone through a traumatic breakup in a relationship that I was in. And so all of these things just compounded. And it just hit me.

 

Joseph Schmitt

It had been accumulating over several years, four or five years. And I was at the point where I was just tired, just exhausted. And I was just pretty much finished with carrying everything that I'd carried. And I just started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life and if I just wanted to continue. And so that's really where the arc started, because I decided that if I was going to continue that I was going to live my life in a completely different way. And I was in a lot of therapy at the time. And so I'd spent several years really unpacking a lot of things in my life. Very fortunate to work with a local therapist who would come visit me at my house and we would just sit on the front porch and we would just talk about things. And so it was very helpful to have that person who had the capacity to just help me work through a lot of these things. And then right around that same time, AI and Chat GPT started becoming more mainstream. And I just spent a lot of time just unpacking everything, just unpacking myself, the world, just all of these questions and these challenges that I'd been through, just trying to make sense of things.

 

And trying to understand myself more and work through all of the things that were burdening me. And then that's really where it all started. And so from that point, I created a 52-week email series to every aspect of life. And I sent that out to 15 of my closest friends and family to see what they thought.

 

And they spent a year getting every email. They went on every Sunday, like 7 a.m. And I started getting a lot of good feedback on the content and on the insight that people were getting by reading through it each week because it was just a short, motivational style email, kind of like what's in the arc now. And then once I realized the impact that it was having, I thought that it would be

 

Joseph Schmitt

It was beneficial for me to put that into a book and package it in a way where, if it was able to help me, it would be able to help other people that was dealing with depression, which is what I've dealt with for a long time. And so I think a lot of the insight that I got from experiencing depression and from learning about myself and doing the work that it takes to really unpack these things that you're challenged with and burdened with.

 

I felt that it would be beneficial to put it into a book and see if it could help other people. So that's what I did.

 

Natalie Bulger

I love it. And it makes sense when you explain the 52 week, every week, an email kind of test to run of, hey, is this helping? Is it something good? And we're going to get into the components of it, this idea of there's a reset, you have a vignette, and then there's challenges that kind of come with it. One seems not too bad, the next one's a little bit of a push. And then there's one that makes you really uncomfortable, which is, I think one of the themes we have on this pod is sitting in that uncomfortable space. And that's really a theme that you have. But in your very opening section, there's a statement where you say your life changes the moment you stop negotiating with your own potential. And I thought that that one hit me like a ton of bricks, because I'm in this space too as so are so many people we know where society changed around us and we were faced with are we just going to kind of conform and fall in line and do what's expected? Or is this the sign that you stop and you go, what am I capable of? What the heck do I really want to do? How do you make this possible? And I know some of that comes with some privilege, but the potential that we all have within us is so much more than we ever tap by far. And

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Natalie Bulger

What did it mean when you were kind of thinking that through of how would you negotiate it with your potential in the past and this idea of I'm not going to do that anymore because of whatever boundary it's setting on me.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is, I think it's common and it's easy to kind of outsource a lot of your decision making to other people and to circumstances, to beliefs and customs that we inherit. And so I think when it comes to negotiating with your potential, you have to choose what you want out of your life and you have to decide for yourself the commitment that you're willing to give, whatever that is. And so if you're someone who wants to lose weight, but you go out and you drink soda, you eat fast food, that's a negotiation. You're negotiating with something that you're supposedly committed to giving yourself. And so if you are in toxic relationships, you're in a job that isn't rewarding.

 

If you have a belief structure that doesn't align really with your true values and the true essence of who you are, who you want to be. That's a negotiation. You're negotiating circumstances that put limits on what you are capable of becoming. And so I think that it takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of willpower to figure out what those things are and to strip them away so that what remains is the purest form of who you are and what you want to be. And so you don't allow these negotiations to even take place. You don't allow them to be a part of your thought process. I mean, it's a complete mental shift to say,

 

I don't care what anyone else thinks about me. I don't care what the society or what religion or what any kind of inherited beliefs people in my family—this is who I am and this is who I want to be and this is what it will take to do that. And so it may require going to the gym, working out, eating clean, changing the way that you think, changing the people that you surround yourself with.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Changing how you spend your time, changing how you live your life. I mean, there's a whole array of decisions that you have to make to get to that purest form of the person that you want to be. Those are the decisions you have to make. And so that's the negotiations. Are you willing to let other people dictate? Are you willing to entertain the fact that, I want to lose weight or, yes, I want to be healthy, but I still like pizza?

 

You have to make those decisions and you have to commit to it. And it all goes back for me to just the mindset. If you don't lock that mindset in, everything else becomes a negotiation. But once you make the decision to say, this is what I'm doing and this is who I will be and this is the effort it's going to take and I will do it and there is no other option. I mean, I think that's the key to eliminating that negotiation.

 

Natalie Bulger

And doing that, I think sometimes we often focus on what we will cut out in order to get to a certain point that we're looking for. And oftentimes, and I know I've talked about this on some other episodes, when you say no, you make room for yes, or you make room for things that actually benefit you on that journey in a different way. So if it's a no, I'm not going to engage in, or I'm not going to go get ice cream three days a week.

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Natalie Bulger

now I can go to my favorite workout class with my best friend who has been trying to get me to go. And so we're going to shift to that place. So there are always these trade-offs that happen in between. And I think our comfort often has us sit with one place versus saying, all right, well, let me just give it a try. And I love in the 52 weeks, the idea is we're doing this in the week and the focus is on that week. And the discomfort is going to be felt in that week. And then you do the reflection and you get this feel of, how did that

 

Natalie Bulger

work for me? Was it actually good when I can look back on it? Or was it just something that I'm going to have to do this a few more times to see if it truly resonates? So as you were doing this first round of the email practices with these people that were close to you, what was some of the feedback that you got from them? Were there things that they were like, I can't—I could never do this, or that was the best thing that I challenged myself to do? What was some of that that you heard from them along the way?

 

Joseph Schmitt

Well, the original email series didn't have any of the challenges in it. It was more of just a reflection. And none of the email series had my personal story embedded into it as well. And so it was really just unpacking different aspects of humanity. And it's just like nihilism, the idea that the theory that there really is nothing that matters in life. If you look at the world, if you look at your life, you strip everything away. There's really no meaning.

 

Right. Meaning is assigned. Meaning is something that you attach to it yourself. It's something that you determine. If you look at the aspect of time, you look at the aspect of love is a force and fear, just unpacking all of these different elements of what does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to unpack the world around me and everything that's going on in the world around me on a physical level, on a meta level, on a spiritual level. We live in a grand universe and so there are people who believe that God exists and there are different religions. Every religion has a different belief but there are people who don't believe in God, there are people who believe in the collective universe.

 

If you look at just energy as a whole, if you look at the sun, the sun is a form of energy, calories are a form of energy. Everything that is surrounding us has energy, it has life. And so it's just—it was more of just trying to observe all of these different things that when you combine them together, that is the existence of life. It's the consciousness of being alive. And so it's...

 

It was really very—it's a deep dive into humanity. And so it didn't have any structure, really. It was more of just this journey through the universe where we just touch along these different topics and just try to take a moment to think about them, the power of now, right now, right? Nothing else matters, right? In the future, it doesn't matter. The past doesn't matter.

 

Joseph Schmitt

All that matters is right now I'm on a podcast with Natalie Bulger and we're talking about arc of HUMANITY and focusing on the now, embracing it for what it is and not giving anything else room in your mind. And so it was just unpacking a lot of those different concepts. And so one of them was death, the very first week was actually the concept of death and the— at some point in your life you're going to die. And so you have the moment between now and the moment that you're dead to live out your life. And so just to get people to think and to really take a moment to pause and reflect and doing the same thing that is formally structured in arc of HUMANITY now. But just in a very loose way, very fluid way. It was just a journey and you're along—we're all taking this journey together to explore these different areas. And so it wasn't until I really sat down to write the book that I started thinking through the importance of adding that structure because from a behavioral perspective, we need to be challenged. We need to have that structure to walk us through and guide us through these things that we need to start digging through in our life. And so layering from a start to down to a deep dive helps people to determine which level they're willing to engage with because a deep dive, I mean, you're really doing the work. I mean, that's where a lot of the work is to figure out these different parts of your life and the things around you. Whereas the start challenge is something that is easy to do. It starts building momentum and it gets you in the flow and the habit of working through each week and working through all the challenges.

 

Natalie Bulger

So I love that you touched on the idea of presence and I hope it's okay with you. I wanted to read just two liners from different parts of the book that hit on a few. One was regret pulls you backward, anxiety drags you forward. The present—the real present—is razor thin and easily sacrificed. And it was in that second and it wasn't that I was falling into that anxiety and regret but I was like, wow, how much of my day do I think thinking about what I need to do?

 

Natalie Bulger

or what is coming up and that being one of the challenges is you take away this idea of future forward thinking. And I'm like, I feel like my brain's going to have so much space when I do that. So almost looking forward to that. But you had another one where

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Natalie Bulger

Time isn't something that happens to you. It's something that you either inhabit or abandon. And I've had a fixation with time lately where I'm like, wow, it feels like it's racing away from me. I can't get ahead of it. And this whole wanting to control it versus seeing it as this construct someone has created. And if I just enjoy my moment or I think about this moment, my time becomes so much more valuable in some way.

 

Natalie Bulger

You had another one, my body isn't responding to the present, it was reenacting the past. And I hope everyone just sits with that one for a minute because in that first few weeks, there's a lot in there about what do you feel like? And my therapist asked me that a lot. She goes, where do you feel it? And I'm like, I feel like I lose my ability to talk. Everything just constricts in that chest and that throat area. And so,

 

Natalie Bulger

these things that have been really hard, I think, over time for me or people I know to put into, like I said, those bite-sized little nuggets. And I just want to throw these on post-its and put them on my wall and remind myself sometimes that it takes two seconds to kind of put this into a tangible moment to start to make sense of it. And we'll definitely hit on some more as we go. But you also mention in the beginning this idea that every human carries fire.

 

And I think sometimes we think of fire as this very visible, very loud moment. People see it, they're either trying to put it out or they're trying to come to it. But I think for me, and I wonder your thoughts on this, is that sometimes fire is the embers that are burning nonstop. They're the hardest thing to put out. They're there, they're constant, they're a little quieter, and they're also sometimes the most damaging.

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Natalie Bulger

because you walk away and they ignite again and they come to be. So when you mentioned that every human carries fire and it's kind of what we do with that fire, what are some of the ways that you've seen that in your life or some of the instances that brought that kind of visualization to be for you or that you see in others?

 

Joseph Schmitt

I've always believed that the fire is a form of purification, fire consumes. And so I think the fire in this aspect is that driving force, that energy, that desire to get whatever it is out of life that you're moving towards.

 

And so for me, the fire—I've always had a fire in my belly to accomplish a lot of things in my life. And from a professional perspective to personal, to family. And I think that is the driving force behind a lot of what everyone does. I mean, that's the reason you get out of bed every morning. It's the reason why you do your podcast and your show. And so I think that fire for me, it kind of got smothered for a long time. It went through a period where it was just struggling to get the oxygen it needed to burn cleanly and to grow. And so I think that is a challenge that a lot of people have. And so

 

It's a method of stoking that fire within you to energize you, to consume you to the point where it's a raging inferno that can't be stopped. It's like a wildfire, it's out of control. It cannot be stopped and it consumes everything in its path and it purifies it. And so I think that that is the essence of having that fire within you. And I think a lot of people have the fire. I think for a lot of people, they don't recognize it or they misdirect it. Or they just—for me for a long time, it was just kind of smothering and it wasn't able to breathe. It wasn't able to burn cleanly and grow. And I think that when you get to that point where you strip away all of the things that are impurities out of your life. Then it gives you that room to

 

Joseph Schmitt

have a raging fire within you where it energizes you and it pushes you forward to everything that you're trying to accomplish in your life.

 

Natalie Bulger

It's funny because sometimes we think of fire as destruction, when you say wildfire and it's destroying everything. But how often do we realize then that in some of those areas, it's created space for new life to grow. And what's left behind is nurturing and this idea of oxygenating the fire and you can't do it if to your point, you're smothered or you're constricted in a way that there's no flow of that there to keep that kind of resounding.

 

Natalie Bulger

So I have to ask, what have been some of the hardest parts for you on the recalibration journey? Which components did you struggle the most with? Because I know which ones I will when I'm looking at this, based on my own kind of starting of understanding the onion of my life. But what did you run into? And this is going to take us into some of what I feel is very validating and how you've recounted things. But let's touch on that quickly before we get into the validation piece.

 

Joseph Schmitt

I mean, I think the hardest part for me was just seeing relationships in my life that I thought were whole and very nurturing fade away, the people that I thought would be there in the darkest moments of my life that weren't there and that distanced themselves from me. And so that was really hard. And so trying to recalibrate myself and trying to reshape myself and put myself in a trajectory where I was growing and also healing at the same time, having to remove some of those relationships from my life. And that's—it was disheartening. It's one of those things where relationships are what bind us, right?

 

Life by itself—I'm a bit of a loner. I've always been a bit of a loner, but I've got a big family and I've got a good circle of friends around me. And so having to see and experience

 

The fact that a lot of those connections weren't as real and as deep as I thought that they were in the moments when I needed them most was probably the hardest thing to deal with and to make the decision afterward to part ways with a lot of people who just weren't healthy, they didn't bring value to my life in the way that I needed it and they didn't give me the capacity to be who I am and be the person that I wanted to become. That's probably the hardest part.

 

Natalie Bulger

And that relates directly to the one line in here, the facts didn't change, the lens did. So as we shift our perspective or our goals or what we're looking for, it's like the progressive lenses, right? They change kind of shades and we see different things as a part of that or night vision goggles let us see different things. And I think that that's where that piece of playing into the looking backward or looking forward. And there's been so many times in life where I feel like my lens changed, the facts didn't, I saw things differently. And in that moment, I was more focused on, well, how did it take me so long to realize this? And so you're then dragged down by this wanting to understand, well, how did it take so long to get here versus the celebration of, okay, I'm here now, okay, next step, moving on to the next thing. And it's that piece of the universe that you touched on too, where we're just such a small

 

Natalie Bulger

thing and blip, an atom in the universe. And though we may feel as if our ripple, and we see this in everyday life, how one person can have such a massive impact on the world, but in reality, our day to day moments, that 60 seconds that we're in, our ripple may end up really big, but in the grand scheme of things, it's big for us because we're sitting in it, we're living in it. And those relationships are either going to survive that or they're not. And we're

 

Natalie Bulger

the engine behind our own doing. And so really grasping that. But one of the ones that you had, and I just—this is probably going to get a really big printout on my wall, was where you said, fear has become directional. Fear's door is never pleasant, but on the other side is the person you were created to be. And I have to say and I'm hoping people are like moment, light bulb, because how often are we told just don't be afraid of it, just take the leap, just do the thing. And this is saying the same thing, but it validates that idea of it's not pleasant. It's not enjoyable to be in that space to be totally afraid of where does the next paycheck come from? Do I have somewhere to stay tonight? Will I have someone to be there if I'm hurt or injured? And it goes back to your experience with your motorcycle wreck and talking about what it felt like for your daughters to come in. Let's take a second and just talk about fear because all of this to me is fear is that thing that very much could halt you. That directional piece is that it stops you. But if it doesn't, and we push through it, we end up in a directional place that we never may have gotten to before.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Yeah, and I think that goes back to the negotiation with your potential, because fear—I think no one is immune to fear. I think it's something that we all—I think it's genetically programmed into you as a human being because it's a survival mechanism. It's a way of making judgment about the things that are around you and determining whether or not it's something that you can survive.

 

And so I think that it's inherent in us as humans. I think that probably all living animals have the same genetic responses to fear. But I think it's also one of the most crippling things because we just get so trained to compromise based on the fear. And I think that that's where the growth is. Coming on this show—I've never done a podcast before. This is my first podcast ever.

 

Joseph Schmitt

And so it's like you have a certain element of fear and apprehension about how am I going to show up on camera? How's my voice going to sound? Are people going to like me? Am I going to say the things that I need to say and want to say that really help to resonate and connect with people and to help them in their journey? And so I think that that fear is just one of those things that you're constantly faced with. And I think it's a discipline. It's like going to the gym. You have fear and it shows up in your life, you don't negotiate with it. You acknowledge it for what it is. And then you move through it because you can't get to the other side of you until you move through the door of fear. You have to acknowledge it. You have to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate to you.

 

But ultimately, you have to take that step and you have to move through. And I think that's where the growth is. That's where a lot of the exponential growth is, because you are constantly putting yourself in a position where you are growing as an individual and you're doing things that you wouldn't ordinarily do because you are limiting yourself and negotiating with yourself on whether or not you are capable or willing to do them. And so I think fear is one of the biggest challenges anyone ever deals with. And I think that if there's one thing that you can do for yourself, that gives you the capacity to discover that person in you that is there. I mean, that goes back to your potential. What are you capable of? And what is the things that are standing in the way of that? And what do you need to do to move through all of those challenges and those fears that stand between you and that person?

 

Natalie Bulger

And I like the highlight of fear has a place in survivorship. It makes me think of the animated movie The Croods, where the dad was always afraid of everything. But as they took little baby steps, they learned more, they explored more, didn't mean they didn't get hurt along the way or things happened. There are times where fear will tell us to stop and it probably may save our lives. But over time, we've turned all of our fear into this thing that makes us feel like we might die tomorrow.

 

Natalie Bulger

That's my world of I'm so afraid someone's gonna say something and make me question myself and the world will end. It's like, no, it's not. You'll go to bed tomorrow and you'll wake up. And so placing fear and where it belongs in a sense of is it telling me something about myself? And that again, back to those reflections of what is this indicating to me? What is the thing that it's bringing up? What is the ingrained moment in my head that I've just always accepted and never challenged as the reality of life. And there's—you talk about belonging isn't about perfection and in a world where perfection is asked of us on a regular basis, when we're in healthcare, perfection is supposed to be that we're not going to err anymore, even though it's human. You have to deliver care, you have to make sure everyone survives, you have to do all of this stuff.

 

Natalie Bulger

And the reality is, it's still an imperfect science. Everything in life is this imperfect science. Striving for—back to that fire and that potential doesn't mean that you're going to be perfect. And who defines what the heck is perfect, right? How have you? Yeah, yourself, you define what it is for you. But I have to—there's a couple of those exercises I did glance through and I was like, this might be the hardest 48 hours of my life. And it wasn't that there was a component of it's not doable. It is that the comfort—that coping mechanism that I created in some way, doom scrolling being my favorite one. Yeah, let me just go through threads or Instagram or look at all these things and maybe I'll giggle and maybe I'll laugh and maybe it's what I needed. But I haven't challenged myself to not do it. I've even told my therapist I should disconnect on this trip.

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Natalie Bulger

And then I end up fully connected the entire trip because it's possible. So placing those limits to test yourself. Were there times that you tested things and you're like, well, I'm glad I tried that, but that's not going to—we're not going to institute that for the rest of life. It's like, great, 30 seconds of a cold shower. Cool. Five minutes, maybe beyond a limit. And that's okay. Do you have moments when you're going through this where it's like, okay, I find out where for me is to that compromise point of I tried it. I was uncomfortable. I sat in it. I think I understood it. And I am going to make that conscious decision to pull back a little bit, maybe not go the whole way because, hey, I want that energy for the next challenge.

 

Joseph Schmitt

I really—I mean, I think I've had moments in my past that were really unrelated to the book that I experienced fear. I mean, one of those is I was on a rock climbing trip down in Joshua Tree. And I just happened to be camping and met up with these rock climbers that were from Holland. And they just come and hang out and climb rocks for the month or however long they do it. And they're in flip flops, I mean, and shorts and

 

Joseph Schmitt

They have their night where they climb up to the top of the dome and they sit up there and they drink beer or whatever. And I'm not a rock climber. And so they were trying to help me scale these rocks. And it was really intimidating. And they were just like, no, no, you can do it. And so they just walked me through, step by step. Here's where you put your hands. Here's where you put your feet. And so I was able to do it, but I was super uncomfortable.

 

And especially sitting up there having a beer with them. I'm like, well, now I got to get down. And there's just—one guy's six foot two, blonde hair from Holland, and he's in flip flops. And he's just scaling back down to the ground like it's nothing. I'm just like, how do you do it? And at that moment, I'm like, this is fun, but I don't know that I want to ever do a lot of rock climbing again. It really is something that's just not really cut out for me.

 

Natalie Bulger

Right.

 

Joseph Schmitt

But I think that even in that moment, it was a fear that was just kind of crippling. And it's like you get up there and you're like, well, how am I going to get down now? How am I going to get down without breaking my neck or, worst case dying? And there's all these fears running through your mind, potential opportunities of how you're going to mess it up. And I think that in itself is the point. You need to accept those moments and I think you need to embrace them because that's where—that's where it's showing you where you're limited. That's the negotiation with your potential right? You're negotiating with something that you know that you could do. You're watching everyone else do it. They're all doing it easily. No one's falling, no one's dying, it's just a technique and it's a rhythm of how you move up and down rocks and so I think those are the moments that you really learn a lot about yourself and you're really able to grow in those moments. And so I felt good just about the fact that I could climb with those guys. But at the same time, I was super uncomfortable. And so I think that that fear and that limitation was something that really helped me to reflect on those moments that I can get the most out of myself by just accepting it, embracing it and trying to move past it. Do I ever want to be a rock climber? I don't think so.

 

I mean, it's fun. But I think that if I really want to challenge my fear level and I want to challenge myself to overcome fear, rock climbing is definitely one way of doing it.

 

Natalie Bulger

And I think we think sometimes we have these drastic examples and they make sense in some way because they're easy to picture, right? You're like, yeah, if I was in that state. But the component and a little bit of this beauty of this 52 weeks or this year long or more than a year long journey is that it starts with little bites. It starts with combating that first fear of

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Natalie Bulger

Well, if I put my phone down, if I miss an email that I need, what happens? And guess what? The answer is nothing blows up unless you are literally the only life-saving human on the earth that can answer or do that thing that's needed. But I think that goes to the combating this world where we've become very accepting, and this even goes for me, of, that's too hard, or I can't afford to do that, or that could contraindicate something from my health perspective.

 

And the point is, okay, well, if you can't do that one thing in this moment today, I bet you there's something else that you can challenge or there's another component that you can take on or another ingrained belief that you can question for a little bit or battle. And I think sometimes it's really—we've sabotaged ourselves in taking some of the first steps because what if it doesn'thave negative consequences? What if that moment makes us thirsty for more? And now it's like, okay, well, great, I learned something, but I've got kids at home and I can't do X, Y, and Z. What are some of the ways that people who have a little bit of those societal restrictions on them, whether it be socioeconomic, whether it be any of those pieces can still embrace this idea of working on an arc of getting from here to there. Maybe they don't have the same support systems or things like that. Because ironically, sometimes it's easier to do it when you're solo, alone. I couldn't imagine doing some of these things thinking, I'm responsible for these little kids in my life. I don't have any of those. So that wasn't something I had to worry about. But what are a few of those maybe first steps for folks that feel like this idea is so overwhelming, but you got to start somewhere.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Yeah, I mean, I think you just meet yourself where you are. I mean, we all have different circumstances. And so I think just meeting yourself where you are in your life circumstance and looking around and saying, well, what are the things in my life that I want to change? And so just start working towards those things that you can change. And so I think that a big part of it, too, is the whole structure of the challenges was to identify different layers of people's willingness to challenge themselves. And also, some people aren't willing to do a deep dive. Some people just want to do more of a surface level just to start that process. And that's what it's for. And so it could be just part of the challenge in the first section of embodiment of the book. It's like going through your refrigerator and your cupboards and identifying all of the things in there that are not healthy, that are not good for you. right? They're not good for your body. And so how can you get the most out of your body if you're putting stuff into it that is toxic and that is not healthy. And so for some people, food is a challenge—a lot of people, food is a challenge and a lot of people live in food deserts. And so that's all that they have is the stuff that exists at the Walmart and they have the dollar general stores. And so that's a challenge. I mean, that's definitely a challenge. For people, but I still believe that there are things that you can do to reduce those types of foods that you're putting into your body. I mean, drinking water, being able just to drink more water every day is healthy for you. Looking at all of the relationships that are in your life and figuring out which ones are healthy and which ones are not healthy and making a decision on which of those unhealthy relationships that you can cut out of your life.

 

Your habits. I mean we all are bound by our habits. So looking—taking some time to think through all the habits that you have and whether or not they're healthy habits or they're not healthy habits. I mean anyone could do that. It doesn't cost any money. It doesn't really take a lot of time. It just takes the effort to identify what those habits are and then make the decision to change them and that goes back to the whole negotiating with your potential. If you have a habit that's bad and you decide that you aren't willing to let go of it, then that's a negotiation. You're negotiating with your ability to get the most out of yourself because you have something that brings you comfort that you're not willing to let go of.

 

Natalie Bulger

And you had a line, it was indifference turned out to not be a failing. It was the boundary that kept me whole. And I think that people in life like to say, if you're just indifferent, you just don't care. And it's like, no, I'm protecting my own boundary. And I think that in a lot of ways, there are some of those small things that if you take time to do and you're indifferent maybe to the noise around you, it goes to those relationships. It's like, well, why don't you care? Why didn't you text me today? Why didn't you do this? And it's like, well, because I got other stuff. And those can be really painful. But also, I have found there are folks that I never thought would stick around.

 

Natalie Bulger

relationally, they have loved this component of the journey. They're like, you canceled, I can cancel on you too. That's an acceptable thing to do. And we're both empowered by it versus pushing through and not being happy and you're just because you think the other person will be better for it. And it's like, no, they would have been better if we both would have agreed just to stay home today because we both needed to do something for ourselves. So

 

I have to touch on bees at the end of the conversation because under all of this, one of the things that Joe told me when we connected was like, oh, Joseph does—he's a beekeeper, he does bees. And there was a component in one of the vignettes that said calm—what bees had taught you was calm isn't something you can think your way into. It's something you embody or you're rejected by the system entirely. And because thousands of bees will tell.

 

Natalie Bulger

If you walk in, you can't trick them, you can't smoke them into calmness necessarily. So what has that journey with these tiny little insects that can pack a punch taught you or reinforced with you along the way?

 

Joseph Schmitt

Bees are amazing and I didn't discover them until several years ago when I was going through depression and I just happened to come across an organization here in Reno called Bees for Vets. And it's an organization that works with veterans and first responders with PTSD, traumatic brain injury. In my case, I was going through major depression. And so it's a program where you go out to an apiary. There's 35 hives out at the apiary, every hive has on average 30 to 40,000, 50,000 bees in it and so you're literally surrounded by millions of bees and so you immediately get the sense that you're in their territory right? They don't care about you. You're a threat to them and if you're too much of a threat they will sting you to defend their hive but once you start to acknowledge them and their system, they have a lot of healing power. And so not only from an ASMR, vibrational perspective, because I think it's a 460 hertz is what their humming sound resonates. And so that in itself is a healing property. But I think it's just their system and the fact that they force you to slow down and be mindful because you're basically ripping off the roof of their house.

 

As you open their hive to start to inspect them and see what's going on. But to become a beekeeper, you're learning about the way of managing these bees and understanding the roles in the hive, because every bee has a role. The whole system is a super organism. So every bee has a role. They all execute that role. It's genetic. It's part of their genetic makeup.

 

And so I think that being introduced to bees, it's always something that I've been interested in and fascinated by. But the moment that I stepped into that apiary and was surrounded by these bees and started to learn more about them, it was just very humbling. It was very empowering because it gave me the capacity to not only block out everything else that was happening in my life.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Be present, be right here in the now with these bees and just watch them and observe them and how they operate. It's just—they're just relentless workers. It's pretty much all they do is work 24 seven. I mean, they do sleep, which I didn't learn until later on that they do take breaks and sleep on the job. Actually funny. But I think the biggest benefit for me was just the mindfulness, being around the bees.

 

The honey is delicious and so if you've never had raw honey from a beehive, do yourself a favor and go get some because it's not only got healing power as well, but it's delicious. And so just being in front of a hive, just observing 50,000 bees working in unison as one system to accomplish one goal. And that goal is reproduction, right? So you have one queen and that queen's gonna lay an egg every 10 seconds, over the course of her life, she'll lay almost a million eggs and recreate a million different bees. And the whole system is set up to make sure that she has all of the nutrition, everything she needs, and that the hive is structured in a way where she can lay eggs constantly. And so that's the goal. And so just watching them execute that constantly, no, no ulterior motives.

 

No other ambitions. It's just solely focused on procreation. We need to produce. We need to go out. We need to forage. We need resources. We need nectar for energy. We need pollen. And so they're out there pollinating everything around you. They're out there gathering all the nectar. They're bringing that back into the hive and they're feeding that to all the eggs that the Queen's laying. They're feeding the Queen.

 

They're creating royal jelly that the queen eats. That's how you actually make a queen. You can take an egg and just feed it royal jelly continually and it turns into a queen. It's like a superpower or super food. And just learning that they're ruthless as well because if you're not doing your job as a part of the colony, they will evict you. And so there's this thing in the bee world where everyone makes fun of the drone bees because most people don't think—most of the bees are females.

 

Joseph Schmitt

The females do all the work. And so they're the ones who have the nurse bees, forager bees, house bees. The queen herself is obviously a female. You have scout bees that go out and they find new locations to expand their hive and their colony. But the drones are the male bees and the drone's sole purpose is to mate with another queen from another colony. And so one time a year, they have a mating season. So all the drones will take off and they'll try to find the queen and mate with her. And she mates with 25, 30, 40 different drones. 'Cause she's self selecting for all the genetic properties that she's trying to pass on in her own colony. And if you're not successful in mating, you go back to the hive and you're basically like, well, it didn't work out. And so you start just hanging out. All you do is eat, right? You're a male bee. You have no other role. You can't forage. You can't defend yourself because you don't have a stinger. You have no role in the hive other than eating. And so once the season starts to dry up and once the foraging starts to dry up around you, all of the females are like, well, it's time for you to go. And so they kick out all the drones. They die instantly because they can't take care of themselves.

 

Joseph Schmitt

And so you walk up to your hive and you see all these bees that are dead on the ground. Most of them are drone bees because it was just time for them to go. And so they have this ruthless mindset of we have to continue this hive at all costs. And so sometimes that's the queen herself. And so at a certain point, a queen will get to a point where she's infertile and she's no longer able to produce fertilized eggs.

 

Natalie Bulger

Wow.

 

Joseph Schmitt

And at that point, they're like, well, she's got to go too. So they all pile on top of her. They will overheat her until she dies. And then they'll just drop her out the front door and they'll go make another queen.

 

Natalie Bulger

Wow. That's incredible. And it's interesting, because at some point we may be like, well, we can't all be bees like that. However, if they didn't have that operation, and we weren't able to see the pollination and everything else that they are a part of in the ecosystem, it's not just that we wouldn't have honey, there would be a whole lot of things impacted. And so how important it is that those ingrained genetic pieces of them do continue in that way.

 

Natalie Bulger

But to the same point, if they're scouting for new locations, they still have this piece of innovation and knowing they need to change. Okay, we need to go somewhere new now. Hey, everything's not available for us. We've got a new spot that we need to go. So it's not just that they operate off of a manual and they never change. There's still variability in there. It's just how it works within their components of things. So I love that kind of coming to, and I always love—I've never been stung by a bee.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Right.

 

Natalie Bulger

And it's the one moment in life I always feel calm when a bee comes around and I'm just like, yeah, I literally can't—I'm not going to move. I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to let it do what it wants to do. Does it want to relax on me for a minute? Cool. I'm going to take a look at how pretty it is. All these things, there's no reaction. And I laugh because everyone else around me was like, oh my God, get this thing away. Right. But it forces me back to our time piece of just pause. It's just okay.

 

Joseph Schmitt

That's the last thing you want to do, swat at them.

 

Natalie Bulger

Need to just be fully kind of in the moment and it'll move on and do what's next. So love that background on it. Joseph, this has been an amazing conversation. And as we're wrapping up, I want to hear where people can find information about arc of HUMANITY, the book, but also Expedition, your nonprofit. We'll get that linked in the show notes for everyone if they want to take a look at it. Where can we find this right now? If people are interested in being able to go through it, mark it up like I have, check off what they've been able to complete, things like that.

 

Joseph Schmitt

It's on Amazon right now. You can get it as an ebook. You can get the paperback version. There's also a hardback for people that prefer hardbacks. It's going to be in the local library soon. I'm working with a distribution company to get it into all the local libraries, especially in the ebook form. But they can also go to the website, the foundation website at xpdshn.org, xpdshn.org.

 

And there'll be a free version of the book on that website. So you just sign up, enter your email address, and you'll have access to the free ebook on the website.

 

Natalie Bulger

Awesome. And anyway, if people are interested in talking to you more or learning more about you, do they do that through expedition? What are the best ways that people can connect with you in order to share this story more? If there's other podcasters listening or anyone that would hopefully want to engage and be a part of this right along with you.

 

Joseph Schmitt

They can contact me at joseph at xpdshn.org. That's the foundation email address. And just reach out to me. I'd love to have a conversation with anyone.

 

Natalie Bulger

Awesome. So we'll get all of that in show notes for folks. If there's anything you'd like to share with folks as we wrap up today, what are kind of final parting messages, final maybe challenge that folks walk away with after they've listened to the episode today and that fire is starting to burn a little bit or they're wondering what they can stop compromising or negotiating with themselves. What's the ending thought for everyone?

 

Joseph Schmitt

I think the ending thought is that pain is good for you. And I think that depression—I look at depression as a superpower. I look at it as a way—it helped me to gain the perspective I needed to really uncover the things in my life that I needed to address. And without depression, I don't think that I would have ever done that. And so I mean, I think having dealt with depression, I'm a stronger person. It's something that I feel like I have a more definite way and more intentional way of looking at my life. And so I think that if you're a person who is dealing with your own set of challenges and you have some dark moments in your life, I would just recommend that you just sit with them and just embrace it and just try to listen to the signals and try to figure out what it is it's trying to communicate with you because I think that there's a person on the other side that you can't get to until you go through that work, until you go through that process. And so having gone through it, I mean, I feel like it's a valuable experience. It's not for the faint of heart. It wasn't easy in the beginning. It was definitely not easy in the beginning. But I think you just show up every day, breathe, drink water, just try to be the best version of yourself that you can be and just work through these moments and just try to find the insight that it's trying to communicate to you. I think that the person that you get on the other side is a completely different person that's transformed, that's more capable, that's more empowered. And it's something that you will thank yourself for once you get to that point. But that's the work that you got to do is to get through it. And you can only do that one step at a time, one breath at a time.

 

And just be kind to yourself and love yourself. You don't need anyone else to love you. Just love yourself and figure out who that person is that you want to be. And then just go chase that and be that person and get to it.

 

Natalie Bulger

I love that and it really does—also having depression, it taught me that I still—I could feel. and that feeling was telling me something. And it was funny when I got treated with medication that I felt like I couldn't feel anymore. I didn't want to be on it. I was like, take me off. I would rather feel really sad and try to figure out how do I work within this than anything. And I think those resources are out there for you. But to your point, you still have to do the work. Nothing can just magically alleviate or be fixed with medication or anything like that. There's still a component of you that has to push through it and understand this discomfort is here for a reason. What does that look like? So if you're looking for a tool to maybe start with that, arc of HUMANITY, expedition.org, reach out to your own local resources that you have available or those around you that are on similar journeys. But Joseph, thank you so much for bringing this different kind of perspective to how we can challenge ourselves on an ongoing basis. It's been really enlightening and I am thrilled to start my own initial journey and see how this goes.

 

Joseph Schmitt

You're welcome. Thank you, Natalie.

 

Joseph Schmitt

I'm glad you finally got it.

 

Natalie Bulger

Yes. Well, thank you, everyone. Appreciate you listening in to another episode of Motivation N'at. We hope you will join again soon and have a wonderful day ahead and week ahead. There's so much more to come in this hot mess to high potential world.

 

Joseph Schmitt

Thank you. Have a good day.