#23: Rewrite Your Story with Jonny Hulbert

Tania Cotton: Welcome to the LifeWise Show, where we explore the things in life that make you feel truly alive. Today I'm joined by Jonny Hulbert and this conversation rewrite your story with Johnny Hulbert is a genuine invitation because after 27 years working in a global corporate environment, Johnny's enormous energy tank was running on empty and what looked like success on the outside felt like a void on the inside. Johnny realised that to tap into the things that truly nourished him, he needed to explore entirely different ways of living, working, and being. In Johnny's case, it was his relationship with sound and music that opened a doorway into discovering valuable tools and practices that can enable us to let go of severe stress, extreme exhaustion, overwhelm and anxiety, and enjoy deeper sleep, clarity, and a sense of happiness that goes far beyond productivity and performance. I am joined also by Caroline, Johnny's wife, who has witnessed and been part of a remarkable transformation in the man she married that has brought them even closer.

Tania Cotton: Johnny, it's really good to be here with you and Caroline, thank you for coming.

Jonny Hulbert: Thanks, Tania. Lovely to be here.

Caroline Hulbert: Thank you. Very excited.

Tania Cotton: Jonny, to set some context to set the scene, can you describe the version of Johnny who spent 27 years in a global corporate environment? Not so much what you did, but how you lived and how you felt in your body as it progressed over that time.

Jonny Hulbert: Thanks, Tania. Yeah, I guess it was a long journey and one where we're impacted by the stories that we tell ourselves, our narratives, our expectations, the systems that we grow up within and particularly and that can come from parents, from mom, from dad, from school, from work environments. The short summary was that I think that I felt a huge amount of pressure externally imposed by my bosses to be a certain way. I felt a lot of pressure self-imposed to be a certain way and particularly to take a traditional role of providing for my family and the circumstances that I were living in were just such that that was a little bit more extreme than what most people go through. I think everyone's going through some version of that, particularly these days where the world and the way that we're living is speeding up more and more and it was really just the relationship with that and how things shifted for me, which was interesting to observe.

Tania Cotton: Can you just give us a brief insight into kind of what the daily routine was that really took your energy up?

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah. So I suppose at the end, the last 11 years of my corporate career, I was based in Asia working for a US firm and so I was just travelling a huge amount. So I would have meetings in Singapore on Monday, Tuesday would be Hong Kong, Wednesday sold, Thursday, Beijing, Friday Tokyo. So I was doing the equivalent of London, New York 24 times in a 10 week period. I had three small kids. I was getting up at 6:30 with the family and then the calls in the evening with New York would start at nine, 10, 11 o'clock at night. So on the one hand, my life looked amazing. It looked great on paper. I was making good money. I had an interesting job. I had an amazing wife, three lovely kids, but my lived experience and my nervous system was just shutting down because I was in a state of perpetual sympathetic engagement and a situation of total nervous system overwhelm.

Tania Cotton: Thank you. Yes. And Caroline, can you tell us about the man you married and the impact of those 27 years, the impact they had on him and your lived experience?

Caroline Hulbert: Looking back on the lived years we've already had, the wonderful years, we started the journey together in Switzerland, both coming from a British upbringing and I was fully supportive of the career that Jonny had chosen, which then took us to Asia and like you said, we really enjoyed the life we had although it came with so much stress that we were trying to balance that stress and doing what we could to support each other, but it got to a point where he was trying to explore other avenues to support that.

Tania Cotton: Yeah. So let's have a look at that exploration. We went on a walk Jonny together in the forest with your beautiful dog, Neo, and you started to tell me about how you began exploring because you felt the costume you were wearing no longer fit and you wanted to try on different costumes. Can you unpack this analogy and describe the process of exploration you went through and what did it mean for you to try on different costumes?

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah, it's a good one. And I think as Caroline knows, I've always enjoyed fancy dress and dressing up and actually in a way what made me a very effective salesman, and that was effectively the role I've always taken was I always figured out what other people wanted or needed from me and I would be that person for them. But the challenge with wearing costumes that are inauthentic for very long periods of time is you lose your sense of self within that and over time the system wears down. And so I was pretty motivated and I had a strong engine so I kept going for a long time, but it was just one holiday too many where I just arrived, collapsed, fell asleep, got sick and I thought I've got to do something different. And so poor Caroline in this situation, I didn't realise the process that I was going through and it was a little bit like in terms of costumes, I'd suddenly gone to a fancy-dress shop and I started trying on a whole range of other costumes and Caroline was looking at me going, "Wow, hang on a second.

Jonny Hulbert: This wasn't the guy that I married and look at this costume, I hope to God that he doesn't stick with that one because I'm not sure I want to live with that one." And so I was just going through the process of exploration and trying on different costumes and that looked like completely changing my diet, my exercise, my sleep, got into meditation, discovered sound meditation and was discovering all of these different things, but it meant that the person that Caroline had married had kind of left the building and she was in this transition period where she didn't really recognise who I was and was wondering what life like together would look like in the future when we got to the end of that process.

Tania Cotton: Caroline, what was that like for you watching Jonny try all these different ways of being and living and it must have been quite disconcerting?

Caroline Hulbert: Looking back on it now, it was an interesting period of time. You have both used the analogy of the costumes. I would like to say it was more like a train where Jonny was at the front of the train and I was trying to walk through the carriages as quickly as I could to get to his carriage, but then he would go onto another carriage at the front of the train and so every time he was trying a new costume or going into another carriage, I couldn't catch him because I was just finally getting to a point where I would be willing to try or understand and then he would be in another carriage. Yeah, it was an interesting time. Looking back on it, there were challenges, but we wouldn't be where we are now if Jonny hadn't gone through that very long train of many, many carriages.

Tania Cotton: Was there a time when you thought, "Oh, this is just a phase." I mean, were you searching for a transition transformation too or did you feel Jonny was searching for something that perhaps wasn't what you were looking for or you didn't know in fact what he was looking for? I mean, was it quite frightening?

Caroline Hulbert: I would say there were definitely moments that could have been frightening and there was a lot of uncertainty, but there were also clear understandings within our relationship that with that uncertainty came trust and I think our relationship is built on something very strong and trust and respect got us to a point where I really understood that all those moments of him trying different costumes or running through the train carriages was leading to something that we both trusted.

Tania Cotton: That's really beautiful and I really have that sense when I'm with you both that you are right behind each other and very, very strong together and it's very inspiring. Jonny, your life and music have had a wonderful marriage as well. I would love you to share what that relationship with music has been even since childhood.

Jonny Hulbert: And just to come back on that last point, I remember one afternoon when I came back from work and had to sit down with Caroline and say, "Look, this must be really scary because the man that you met and married is not the person I am today and as I try on all these different costumes, got to understand the reason that I'm doing this is to become a better husband, a better father, and that without you, without the kids, none of this works." And so to understand that rooted within that is a desire to kind of be of greater benefit, not just to myself on some selfish voyage of exploration, but to be of benefit to all of us and to the family. And that was definitely a helpful conversation in some wobbly periods. But yeah, sound has always been an area of fascination for me.

Jonny Hulbert: I mean, ever since I was a kid, I love music. I love dancing. I was in the choir. I was always singing, making silly noises, silly voices and interestingly, and also when I've been a DJ as a hobby for 25 years, I used to do disco shows in London in the '90s under my alias, Randy Groover, with the Fabulous Flirtations under the tutelage of my mentor, Dr. Glitz. And so it wasn't that surprising. I mean, I started with changing diets. I found out I was intolerant to dairy. I stopped drinking alcohol, caffeine, I was sleeping better, exercising more and went to a festival in Thailand called Wonderfruit where there was this amazing woman called Martha Collard who runs Red Door Studio in Hong Kong and she was playing gongs and as I was running around exploring, trying on all these different costumes, going to the chakra meditations and to the breathwork and someone said to me, "Do you want to come to the gong bath?" And I said, "What is that?

Jonny Hulbert: Do I need to bring a swimming costume?" And I came along and there was Martha playing her two gongs and I had this experience where I kind of shot out of my head into the cosmos and most importantly, I had this deep sense of peace and relaxation and connection, which was exactly what I was looking for. And then I had a bit of a light bulb moment in terms of realising that yes, of course as a DJ you use sound and vibration as a tool to change people's states, to speed people up, to help with some sort of fun celebration and catharsis and that you can also use sound and vibration to train brainwave states to slow people down, to calm people down as well.

Tania Cotton: Well, I look forward at the end of this podcast to you sharing some musical moments with us with your gongs. I find it fascinating and having had my second session with you today with you playing your gongs and the music as a follow on from the breath work and your coaching where you really seek to understand and the support I have received has been incredible, and the musical experience has opened me up in a way I never imagined possible and that's something I'm deeply fascinated by. So I look forward to sharing that more at the end of this podcast when we can go down to your music room, to the bunker room. So that gong experience really was an opening up and I'd just like to wind back a little bit because you flitted past the fact that you were in the choir and why did you stop singing in the choir is my question

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah, I think the reason I stopped and again, we're entrained by so many systems and so many mechanisms around us and so what we think is cool, not cool. I love singing when I got to secondary school when I was 13 years old, it was just not cool to be in the choir. It was cool to be in the rugby team and other pursuits and as I kind of thought about that and also combined with the fact that my voice was breaking, I thought actually you know what the need to fit in, the need to wear the same costume, the same suit as everyone else was stronger than it was to kind of express my own individuality.

Tania Cotton: And how much of trying to fit in that conformity and trying to be what other people want you to be rather than being yourself do you think is the way most of us live? Is that your experience? Is that what you observe and do you find that the same in men and women?

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah, I think it's huge. Everyone is trying to fit in to present the best version of themselves, feeling concerned that they're not good enough, that they don't fit in, that they're on their own, or maybe they feel that it's all on them and I think this is part of, and again, we can talk more about this later, but in my coaching work which uses both mental methodologies, breath work and sound, the realisation independent of who you're talking to, independence of creed, colour, religion, gender, nationality, access to resources, everybody is going through the same human journey and our perspective and circumstances are all different and unique. Some more challenging, some little bit easier than others, but at the end of the day, that's really what we're wrestling with and coming to terms with.

Tania Cotton: Thank you. Yes, and your coaching and how you use your voice, how has that changed? Because during your 27 years of corporate life, the way you used your voice there must be very different to perhaps how you're using your voice now and connecting with people that way. Just talk to us a little about your coaching journey.

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah, interestingly, professionally, as someone said to me once, I'm just an overpaid tour guide and so I would be taking people around to visit with different investors and actually I was the voice that was least heard within the room, which was probably a reflection of the fact that I undervalued my own contribution, I undervalued my voice and as I transitioned then I speak more Caroline would probably say I'm speaking a little bit too much and so using that voice is important and to articulate what it is that I'm experiencing to help my clients steer them towards the level of mind at least, what is it that they're experiencing and in other ways as well. I've been involved for the last nine years in an amazing not- for-profit called Bridges for Music. We have a creative school in one of the townships in South Africa set up to serve creatives from underserved communities, which has also given another really interesting window and lens into a society which has got a very big pain body, which is very traumatized, and using sound, vibration, community, music as a tool for societal change.

Jonny Hulbert: I suppose in terms of my coaching journey, if you will, I worked out that actually in my corporate roles, the aspect that I enjoyed the most actually was recognising, identifying, recruiting and training talent within different teams and helping people to become authentically themselves within the goals and targets and aspirations of the corporation that they were working for and I figured out that actually what I really love and I'm quite good at is human jigsaw puzzles and there's different facets to that and all the work that I do is really just to help people to see things from a different perspective and to understand and to use different modalities to understand that yes, we are all different and for some people certain methods work better than others, but some combination of using mental techniques just because all of us tend to spend too much time in our heads, in our logical rational selves, but our somatic embodied wisdom and intelligence is far, far greater than the mind, that we have to bring that in as well, otherwise the coaching at the mental level is necessary but not sufficient and the embodied aspect and sound is just another amazing way to downregulate a nervous system, which for most people is way too active and way too stuck in the sympathetic and so the combination of these different modalities helps people to both see things differently, to experience things differently in their body and hopefully to have some insights and a guardrail as to how to move forward.

Tania Cotton: Does that bring up any reflections for you, Caroline?

Caroline Hulbert: Yes, just hearing Johnny explain what he does now reminds me how the combination of the two methods is so powerful and how he was almost stunted within his career. The ability that he now has to help others, which is something that I don't think we noticed was really something that he would be so good at until he had that opportunity. He was looking back on his corporate career, he was helping others, but the way he now helps individuals is so incredible and to do it in these two, this combination is really showing some great results. So

Tania Cotton: Yes, I'd like to know you to talk about the combination, because in my experience, there's a combination of three things. One is this listening and coaching and guiding me through to find my own answers to some of my greatest challenges, followed by the use of breathwork, which I would love us to explore and then this ability to use music to unlock things inside of us and have an experience and an opening that otherwise we don't have access to.

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah. And just reflecting on what Caroline said as well, I think the journey as well has enabled me to find my purpose and it's been a surprise probably not just for her but for me as to kind of really what is it that I enjoy doing, what lights me up and I think also it speaks to how we think about purpose in life and that actually people think, okay, that our purpose will come to us as an intellectual exercise, but actually what it is, is a deep listening and an intuition and then to try something and then through the act of doing, not thinking that actually our purpose reveals itself to us over the course of time and the other challenge of remaining perpetually in our heads is like we're in the realm of thinking, not doing or being and then actually it's that combination or it's the disintermediation of being and doing, which is so important.

Jonny Hulbert: And then actually the different modalities, and I'm really just trying different things and I started obviously with sound and doing sound meditations, gong baths, whatever it is that you want to call them and it was just because for me sound and vibration really resonated and it worked for me and I started doing this in Singapore with friends who noticed the shift and I just said, look, hey, come and try this. I'm happy to do sessions. People would give donations to Bridges for music, but I was just sharing what I knew and I said, "Look, I'm not a teacher. I'm not a guru, but this works for me. " And again, I would say I'm not trying to sell you on sound meditation or breathwork or coaching, whatever it is. It's more just, "Hey, try this. This really works for me. Does it work for you?

Jonny Hulbert: " And that curiosity and to understand that for different people, it's going to be different things, different modalities, but to open the doorway to curiosity that our lived experience isn't fixed, that there are things that we can proactively do to change our relationship with the circumstances that we're already living. And so what I loved about it is it actually brings agency and power back into people's lives, particularly if they feel depressed, if they feel overwhelmed, if they feel that life is too much or that they don't have direction to realise that there's so much that they can do that our conscious experiences of life, first of all, arises from the health of the organism and you obviously understand this extremely well with the work that you do with movement. Again, if our body isn't, if we're not moving properly, if we're not breathing properly, if we're not resting properly, if we're not putting the right fuel into our body, it's going to be very difficult and impossible to have a positive conscious experience because there are going to be so many structural hurdles to that.

Jonny Hulbert: But if we can bring everything into alignment, then it can be super powerful. So just to talk about coaching breath and sound, the three of those coaching first of all, I think really is just the aspect of meeting people in the head where they are and every time someone comes to me, I'll invite them to bring a topic which is front of mind, which is somewhere where they feel stuck, where they feel it's in a repetitive pattern that they somehow can't get through. But to me, it's never about the thing. That's just a clue as to where we're going. And if you think about that as a symptom, actually what we're trying to get to is to their core operating system of how they see themselves, other people and the world. And for all of us, that is all shaped in our childhood. So from the earliest days of our life, from mom, from dad, some of this is multi-generational.

Jonny Hulbert: It's the systems that we interact with which teach us and which form us, which may be our nationality, our gender, our schools, our places of work and to understand that how we perceive a situation says more about who we are and the situation itself and the ability to understand that, understand our lens, to have some form of gentle osteopathic movement on that lens, to see things from a different perspective and to understand and recreate narratives and beliefs that are closer to reality than the ones that we've grown up with. So that's the first shift is seeing a different story. But again, if the mind says, "Yes, I see that and that's one thing," and the body's going, "No, no, no, no, no," then the body's going to win. I see overall intelligence as a triangle or an iceberg where the intellectual intelligence, which we massively over prioritise within our society is the smallest part of that.

Jonny Hulbert: You have to get into that somatic wisdom to get alignment of both what the body is saying and the mind because without that, again, you come back to the necessary but insufficient. And so in my sessions, which as you know, quite long, they're kind of three hours, but for me, you need time to do deep transformative work is that we start in the mind, we discuss for an hour, hour and a half exactly what's going on where we feel stuck and then we breathe the new pattern into the body and the breath is amazing because it will reveal to us that which is stored within the body and it's a longer conversation, but you can see the breathing deviations, how the breathing patterns deviate from our natural breath, whether people are breathing more into the belly, more into the chest, which again will have all sorts of knock on effects on their own physiology and all of those different aspects and as they breathe in a certain way over a long period of time, ultimately more energy is shifting from the head into the body and hopefully at some point at either some point in the session or some point after two or three sessions, you'll see a shift where like the breath starts to shift and behave in a different way than it did beforehand and at that point it's really interesting and that's generally when people have the breakthrough moments and what they understand intellectually is suddenly, "Okay, now I really get it.

Jonny Hulbert: Now the message is landed, now the message is within the body." And then after the breathwork, I like to land it with sound if possible, if it's face to face, it's harder to do that on Zoom just because of the audio quality, but we can try a little bit is really using sound to land the nervous system to engage that sympathetic nervous system engagement where we're going to be most receptive to encode and try out these new beliefs, these new ways of being and then at the end of it have time for reflection insights and how we're going to move forward from now, which is a critical final stage because if you have the intellectual insight and then you go back to repeating what you've always done, you're going to have the same result. So people need to come with a mindset that something needs to be done differently and I need to stick with that to get a different outcome and so what is it that am I going to do differently?

Jonny Hulbert: And then when we do that, when we've had a message land intellectually, somatically, then we do things differently, then there's a potential to have a totally different experience of life than the one you And before you walk through the door, and this is the important thing, without having to change your circumstance so you don't have to quit your job, leave your partner, get rid of your business partner. You don't need the radical shift of your life, particularly to begin with. If it becomes clear over time that actually you're living in a way which is not aligned with your purpose or your values, then you can look at it. But to me, that's real freedom is changing the relationship that you have with the life that you're already leading.

Tania Cotton: Everything you've said completely resonates with me having had two sessions with you and today being the second session, of course, because now I've met you already, I was able to relax into it and sort of trust the process and I think that's part of it. So as much as I really enjoyed and got a lot from the first session, today I felt we were able to go a lot deeper actually because of the trust and relationship we had built in moving forward together in an exploratory journey that perhaps you have naturally some resistance I think at the beginning.

Tania Cotton: And even during the process today going through the breathwork session, I can feel that I start with resistance and I said to you, "Wow, I find this quite hard work." And it wasn't until you started to use sound. I say sound rather than music because you really feel I'm lying on the floor and you feel that vibration in your body and like it opens up different parts of you and you kind of need to be in your body and out of your head to be open to that expansion and the breathwork really helps that. We went on a walk and talk in the forest, which is my preferred way of conversing and that kind of set the intention and allowed me to realise where I was on a deeper level and to move away from what I thought were the superficial problems that I was trying to solve to actually what were the fundamental core challenges that I was actually having to face due to patterns probably I continued throughout my whole life.

Tania Cotton: And what interests me is because we were introduced by a mutual friend who understands what each of us do, has done what we both do and so we did a swap and so as I've tried, I've been on your sort of three hour journey if you like of trying to understand myself, my body and who I am and how I can best be in the world. I also took you and Caroline on a small movement wise journey because we're the embodiment of our thoughts, feelings and emotions and therefore for me it's really interesting when I look at people, I like to know first and foremost, what is the story in their body and how is that expressed through the way that they hold themselves and move? So their postural profile and their movement signature and how we can get stuck in either of those and they're very related in ways that put a kink in the chain in the slinky dink as we describe it that don't allow for that beautiful energy storage and energy release that allows movement through life to be smooth and effortless in spite of challenges and circumstances.

Jonny Hulbert: . Yeah, a couple of things that came up there. I mean the first thing is talking about how deep we can go in developing that relationship of trust and I would say for anybody that has the courage and the interest to do this sort of work is the most important thing is the relationship with the person that you're working with. So get away from kind of modalities this, that, and the other is just find someone that you really vibe with and that you trust and you're able to open up to because as I often say like a barrier to protect and we all have all of us many protection barriers, that's also a barrier to connect and so actually the barriers have got to come down. So whatever enables us to really surrender and to be ourselves. And then also the other aspect was just like how I love the mixture between the scientific and the more esoteric.

Jonny Hulbert: And I thought initially that I was going to be doing a lot of corporate clients and be a bridge between the corporate world and the slightly more esoteric or out there and I do have some fun gigs like that. I work with a professor at IMD at the business school in Lausanne and it's really interesting doing sessions for young, stressed out, burnt out executives on their leadership programmes, but using sound and different tools to help manage that nervous state and to see how through wearable technologies the scientific data is actually reflecting what people are feeling in their bodies. And so that's really important as you look about finding, I always say you've got to meet people where they are to take them where they want to go and so for different people, different situations, different cohorts, that's going to be very different. And my client base kind of ranges from kids in the townships in South Africa through Bridges for Music to former US Marines with PTSD to very successful business people.

Jonny Hulbert: Coming back to the fact that we're actually all the same, we're navigating the human journey and it's understanding the context of really what's sticking in terms of the lived experience. And as you and I were talking about this morning, there's the surface level symptom that we start discussing, but then actually we get to the core of it. We look to the core of the operating system about what is it, how we are and how that story is reflected in our mind and in our body. And then to your question, I think our approaches are hugely compatible and again, to see like my own story, which is, I mean I'm nearly two metres tall, six foot four, had huge amounts of back pain and issues of seeing countless chiropractors, osteopaths, all sorts of people even was put on a physical rack and my spine stretched for about a year and to realise that a lot of those physical issues are actually mirrored in terms of what's happening in the mind and again, the fact that maybe you're stooped or you're not standing up or you don't want to be seen as much.

Jonny Hulbert: So how our physical work and again, this is well proven, like sort of how we stand, our posture can impact on our mental wellbeing and vice versa. And so I think having a good understanding of our anatomy, of our body, of our minds and the reality is like most of us, we've got these incredible bodies that none of us have spent nearly enough time going through the operating manual and to understand that things like, I mean, I often use the expression that the breath is the remote control for our bodies. It's the fastest way to reset your nervous system to either downregulate it if you're feeling stressed or exhausted or if you're feeling a little lethargic or tired to give yourself a little bit of a boost. So, some of these things, like how we stand and you understand this very, very well, the biomechanics of how we're standing, how we're moving and also understand how this can impact on the lives that we're living.

Tania Cotton: Caroline, you are a very fit mother of how many

Caroline Hulbert: Children? Three. Yes, we have three children and listening to both of you talk and having experienced sessions by both of you, thank you very much. It makes me realise that our bodies are amazing, and the importance is that we must remember that what we do to our bodies and what we give our bodies needs to be good for us.

Caroline Hulbert: And I think that a lot of people live in their bodies and take it for granted and then when there's a problem, they try and fix it. There shouldn't be problems because we should be looking after our bodies better and both of you, Jonny, talking about the breath, Tania with your amazing movement, it makes me realise that that is all extremely important as well as what we eat. And so if we are focused on those three areas, our bodies can keep going and doing amazing things and daily, hopefully pain free unless we're really pushing some limits or have some bad luck. But a few daily practices can really go a long way.

Jonny Hulbert: I've seen so many physios, massage, therapists, osteos, chiropractors throughout the years, but no one has been able as you do to identify what is happening so quickly and to recommend remedial actions and processes that we can do because you're looking at the whole system and I think the trouble is that we've got so many specialists in the world and actually we need to step back and it needs a broader system wide thinking approach to health, wellbeing, movement, all of these different aspects. And as I said to you after I first met, how do you describe the work that you do because there should be hundreds of thousands of people doing the work that you do and I think there's a lot of people and there's a lot of amazing body workers out there, but I still think that there is a huge amount of people that are there to correct a symptom rather than getting to the core issue and actually change the way that you're moving, training or doing things so that the symptom actually disappears over time.

Jonny Hulbert: And again, I see that as analogous to the coaching method. I'm not interested in solving today's problem because tomorrow there's going to be another problem and the day after and the day after. No, no, what I'm interested in is getting to the core operating system so that someone basically becomes fully self-sufficient and to know that our natural state is one of ease, our natural state is one of health and so whether it's movement to move without pain or whether it's from a psychological perspective to live without suffering is to know that actually there's a way of doing things. There's a way of being where as, the expression goes, that ‘pain in life is inevitable, but suffering actually is a choice’ because it's how we are in relation to the circumstance. And again, just to tie it back where I started this conversation, I kind of laugh at myself now moaning about the fact it's like, oh, it was hard and I was travelling lots and I had to stay up late and get on calls.

Jonny Hulbert: And I look at someone like Tony Robbins who's running 114 different businesses, nine billion of revenues is on a mission to provide 10 billion meals to people around the world. So terminal velocity in terms of what we think is possible and what's actually possible and I realised in my circumstance it wasn't about the circumstances, it was my massive resistance to it. And as soon as I dropped the resistance and moved into a state of flow, I realised actually I wasn't anywhere near terminal velocity and there's way, way more that is possible as a result of that. So again, it's about seeing our circumstances in a more objective way to get closer to that reality to totally shift and therefore to have a better, more free, happier, and optimistic way of living our lives.

Tania Cotton: Yes. And I think that highlights what you've highlighted is how we cannot separate movement of the body and movement of the mind and therefore none of us can afford to work in a silo and that you and I and others like us should be working together and with you, Caroline, because you totally understand what nourishment is, not just in providing the most amazing food, but the care that goes into preparing that food and the obvious desire actually to nourish people in a much broader sense is you just experienced that when you're with Jonny and Caroline and that's why it really excites me that you are going to be working together to run, I don't know what you call them, to run experiences and do you call them retreats? Yeah. What is it that you now are looking to do together?

Caroline Hulbert: We are excited to be able to work together to run retreats both in our home here in Switzerland and also elsewhere and just being able to share what we both believe in for others and from my side I would just love nothing more than to care for them from my kitchen and produce healthy nourishing meals, both the body and mind. And I am not a trained chef, I'm not a trained nutritionist, but I take huge pride in providing for my family and my friends and anyone who comes to the house and I try to grow the odd bit myself and buy locally and just do what I can. I love just good healthy food. I follow a lot of very good chefs, but I also try and make things myself as Tania has experienced my lunches, my colourful salads and try and make it easy for other people to realise that it doesn't need to have hundreds of ingredients to be delicious and healthy and easy anything is possible.

Jonny Hulbert: And I think this is a really exciting chapter of our lives and Caroline has been the most incredible mother to our three children and it's something that she'd always wanted to do and as they get older, then obviously start to have more space open up for her and obviously been having the discussion as to what is it that you want to do and as she's kind of been sitting ringside on this evolution that we've both been going over over the last 12 years or so and say, look, not only is getting to a place of acceptance but actually excitement that actually this is something that we can do together.

Jonny Hulbert: And so really it's just the evolution of living our values, living our purpose and sharing that with more people that are curious and that want to come and explore different ways of being, whether that's how they move their body, whether that's how they eat and being inspired to eat more healthily, whether it be to again do the deep transformative work that I'm trying to facilitate and so in addition to all the one-on-one sessions we're doing more retreats where people come and stay with us for a deep dive for a few days in Switzerland or also in Ibiza as well where we're doing bigger groups of people up to 10 or so people and so to really facilitate a container where you're going deep because what you can do within three hours, you imagine what you can achieve over the course of a week and also to know that each of us is navigating the human journey and all of our stories, all of our challenges, all of our triumphs are all echoed in the people around us.

Jonny Hulbert: And so actually when we drop the guards, opening up with vulnerability and having that be a source of inspiration to other people and there's just another way to do the work and to ripple that out and to find different access points for different people.

Tania Cotton: If people want to come and meet you and work with you and try and remove some of the barriers to them really living a happy and fulfilling life and to meeting some of their challenges and to getting to know themselves better and having the courage to be themselves, how do they find you? How do they learn about what you're going to do?

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah, good question. And at the moment we need to build websites and have more ways that people can connect with us. We're in the fortunate situation that actually we're super busy just with connections and referrals. I'm on Instagram under Jonny Hulbert, J-O-N-N-Y without the H. Hulbert, H-U-L-B-E-R-T, connect, send me a message on that.

Tania Cotton: So we have a tradition on this podcast and thank you for that. I will include that information in the show notes. Moving to the tradition of what is your favourite quote and what is your favourite film? Can you share that with us, Johnny?

Jonny Hulbert: Yeah, happy to. The quote, hopefully I remember this is one that I picked up when I was selling study guides door to door in the Midwest of America as a student and it was really a testament to the power of action and it's from Theodore Roosevelt and it's written in the masculine, but I'll read the quote as it's written, but hopefully it resonates for everybody: ‘So the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is mad by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause and at the end of triumph or high achievement or if he fails, at least fails whilst daring greatly so that his place will never be amongst those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.’

Jonny Hulbert: And yeah, to me that really just speaks to the power of action, talk is cheap, get out there and do it, get muddy, get dirty. And then the film, it's got to be The Matrix we even named our Black Labrador Neo because he's the one and yeah, I think it's just the aspect of what we feel is reality and what it really is that there's quite a gap between the two and to let people know that what they're experiencing, particularly if it's painful, that there is another reality out there which is waiting for them should they choose to get in contact and take the red pill.

Tania Cotton: Yes, I have to say that quote I found very, very powerful and so perhaps we should move downstairs, Jonny, it would be wonderful to record a little music that we will share with you at the end of this podcast and of course everything, the transcript and all those notes that we've talked about will be on the show notes. Thank you very much for joining us now. We will record some music for us and attach it at the end of this show.

Caroline Hulbert: Thank you.

Jonny Hulbert: Thank you.