To have a firm persuasion, to set out boldly in our work, is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done but who we become while accomplishing the task. -David Whyte - Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity In today’s conversation Jerry is joined by Ben Rubin - Cofounder and CEO of Change Collective - an organization itself that is set on helping people make positive change in their lives. Ben comes to Jerry wondering how he can better deal with the negative inner dialogue. They quickly discover that inner voice, and more specifically the feelings that precede it, are a powerful indicator of an underlying fear. What opportunities exist in exploring that fear?

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Welcome to the Reboot podcast. I'm Dan Putt, one of the partners here at Reboot and I could not
be more excited about this conversation. We're here to showcase the heart and soul of authentic
leadership, to inspire more open conversations around what we consider the most important part
of entrepreneurship, the emotional struggle; and hopefully, we open up some hearts along the
way. We are extremely grateful that you have taken the time to be with us and look forward to
this journey ahead with you. Now, on with our conversation.
"To have a firm persuasion, to set out boldly in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors,
to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done but who we
become while accomplishing the task." That quote is from David Whyte in his book 'Crossing
the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.'
Most startups fail, I think we all know that and understand that on some level. We have even
come up with reasons why failure is so important in the world of startups. It's the age of pivots
and failing fast and iterate-iterate-iterate all things that intellectually describe the value of failure.
But what's not discussed as frequently and that so many of us carry around is a deep fear of
failure. How does that show up in our day-to-day? How does it impact our work? How does it
drive our regular decisions and what about the pain that comes with that fear? Or more
interesting, what about the power that lies in embracing it?
In today's conversation, Jerry is joined by Ben Rubin, co-founder and CEO of Change
Collective, an organization itself that is set on helping people make positive change in their lives.
Ben comes to Jerry wondering how he can better deal with the negative inner dialogue. He
quickly discovers that that inner voice and more specifically, the feelings that precede it are a
powerful indicator of an underlying fear. What opportunities exist in exploring that fear? Ben
and Jerry explore that in today's episode of the Reboot podcast. Enjoy.
Jerry Colonna: Hey Ben, how are you?
Ben Rubin: Doing well.
Jerry: Thanks for coming on the show and thanks for agreeing to do this. Before we get
started, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about who you are, the situations that
you are dealing with, the company and specifically what you wanted to talk through
today?
Ben: Sure. So, company is Change Collective; its' a company that my co-founder and I
started about a year and a half ago and it's really based on what I view as my life
mission, which is helping people make change in their lives. My last company was
helping people sleep, this company, sort of more broadly is building courses on
mobile devices that help people do everything from learn how to meditate, learn how
to become more productive, learn how to get fit. So we've been working on that for
about the last year and a half and the challenge that I have been sort of continuously
facing is that there's an inner mental dialogue that often has lots of negative
commentary and sometimes that mental commentary is really useful. I mean, it's

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telling us things about things that won't work, things we've learnt, new directions to
head in and sometimes that mental dialogue just feels like a beat down and stops me
from making a progress and it can be really hard to tell the difference between what
I'd call really useful information that is bubbling up versus insecurities and fears that
are stopping me from exploring the right direction to go.
Jerry: So, I'm gonna make sure I understand it; what you are looking to talk through is the
experience that you are having, of this sort of constant negative thoughts and really
looking to figure out a way to discern which of those thoughts are actually useful
and which of those thoughts are actually getting in the way.
Ben: That's right and when things are getting in the way, how to move forward in spite of
and do the right thing and to not ignore them when they are real information that we
should act upon.
Jerry: So, I'm gonna suggest – I'll give you a quick, short answer and then we'll explore in a
little bit more depth. The answer is gonna lie in the feelings and then we'll circle
back to that for a moment. Tell me a little bit more about the thoughts. Give me an
instance when they show up.
Ben: Yeah, so about a month or two ago, we just sort of put our first five courses in the
market and we were having trouble getting initial traction, not surprising and for the
first month or two of the product launch but the negative barrage started with
thoughts about, you know, 'Oh, no one will buy these.' 'They are not useful' and then
jump to 'We'll run out of money in X months,' what will you do next? How will you
deal with that? How much cash will be in the bank, in your personal bank account
when the company fails? So just sort of fast-forwarding all the way towards, you
know, a future that was pretty negative. When in reality, there were problems that
needed to be worked on and I needed to focus on those.
Jerry: So, and these thoughts were coming as you are walking down the street, the thoughts
were coming when you would like lie down at night –
Ben: Yeah, and I'd say –
Jerry: – all the time?
Ben: Yeah, I mean, it goes in waves but at times, maybe a month ago, it was a barrage and
I would have enough awareness to sort of notice the thoughts but they were – they
can be overwhelming and then at other times they are almost not present. It really
depends on, it seems, on the vagaries of how the day is going and whether good
information or bad information comes in and sometimes I am excited and moving
forward and sometimes these negative barrages have just bombarded me.
Jerry: Yeah. This reminds me a lot of a blog post I once wrote called, 'Shoot the crow.'

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Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: You remember that post?
Ben: I do, yeah.
Jerry: Yeah, and if you remember in that post, I was recalling something that a poet and
teacher of mine in college used to say. I love this image of her, she was five-feet-
nothing and a chain smoker. So her fingers were always nicotine stained and she
used to thrust her finger in the air and say, "Shoot the fucking crow!" because the
crow was her name for that constant barrage of thoughts, that constant thing and the
way it stops us from actually taking steps forward.
Ben: Yeah, and yet sometimes that voice is telling me what's wrong; it's pointing out the
very thing that I need to listen to. So –
Jerry: I'm suspicious of that. I want to take you back to something.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Go back and remember that incident that you were telling me about or that time
period that you were telling me that after you launched and you had the three courses
out and then all the doubts, all the doubtful thoughts came up.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Describe for me, the feelings that you had and when I say feelings, I don’t mean – I
mean very primal and primitive words; anger, sadness, happiness. Not the thoughts
that we attach to the feeling.
Ben: I'd say it starts with anxiety. It's just a feeling of 'Oh no, what's going to happen?' and
I can sort of feel it like right in my upper chest, like this sharp twisting and that
would happen sometimes in response to a stimulus like a customer email or a
marketing campaign but sometimes just out of the blue – ooh, that feeling and then a
train of thoughts would follow.
Jerry: Okay, notice that. Okay, notice what just happened; which came first?
Ben: The feeling.
Jerry: The feeling precedes the thought and this is a really important understanding. I was
once was sitting in meditation and I was about five minutes into my session when I
noticed that level of anxiety; the same gripping in the chest, the same – and we're on
Skype, we've got video so I noticed that you were pointing to – like right between –
like right in the middle of your chest; right? That's actually where the Vegus nerve
bundle goes. That's where the anxiety really gets activated and I noticed the same

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twisting, squeezing feeling but I did something really important in that moment.
Since I was sitting in meditation and had the intention of not falling my thoughts, I
heard one of my teachers, Ani Pema Chodron, her voice came into my head and she
said, "Sit, stay" like a dog. And then I started to explore the feeling of anxiety, not
the thoughts and I did this by saying to myself, 'What does it smell like?' Which is –
you can't figure that out; what does anxiety smell like?
Ben: No.
Jerry: And what it did was it distracted the mind long enough so that the feeling became
the object of meditation. So it was not my breath that became the object of
meditation, it was the feeling that became the object of meditation. Okay? And in
that moment, I began to separate the thought patterns because I could feel my mind
trying to explain the feeling to myself. It went sort of like this: "I'm anxious. Why
am I anxious?" And then the mind, which is so clever at doing this, supplied me a
million reasons why I should feel fearful. What is the threat? That little gap between
noticing the feeling and the train of thoughts became something that I began to work
with because it opened up the realization that what I was feeling was a general
anxiety. In this case, simply for being alive because there was literally no threat,
there was no cheetah pacing underneath the tree, trying to eat me. There was no
evolutionary threat, there was no threat on the horizon, there was just a feeling of
dread and then my mind, in trying to push it away, trying to push the anxiety away,
made the anxiety worse. Does this resonate with you?
Ben: Yeah and I have experienced the practice of trying to sit with the anxiety and I can –
if I focus on it, I can do it but like on a meditation cushion but on the vagaries of
everyday life, it feels much harder.
Jerry: Okay, the point of sitting on the cushion is for life or the cushion. We practice on the
cushion so that we can do off the cushion. Okay? This is the challenge in a
meditation environment, this is the challenge in that is that when the conditions are
right, we can work with things.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: We got the candle going, we got the incense going, we've got the nice bell, we've got
the nice quiet – that’s a falsehood. That's just practice and so the real skill and we are
focusing in on meditation right now but there's more to this than that but the real
skill is to learn to really work with the art of noticing and separating out. Now you
do a little bit of a Jedi mind-trick on yourself. I either call it a 'Jedi mind-trick' or a
'Jedi mind-fuck' and that goes like this: you have become convinced that some of
those negative thoughts are useful.
Ben: Yeah.

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Jerry: Right? Because what does the negative thought – give me a negative thought that has
been useful for you.
Ben: So, in the launching of this product, a barrage of negative thoughts, the one that was
useful was 'Huh, we can't seem to explain what we're doing to people and they don’t
quite get it.' And what that led to – and there was a lot of – there was a lot more
negativity I think than there needed to be but it lead to us rethinking how we talked
about the business and what the product features were and led to use adding product
features that now are making it a lot easier to explain what we do and are delivering
a lot more values. So there was – I feel like there was a nugget in there.
Jerry: See, I don’t believe it's the negative thought that gave you the impulse. I believe it's
the way you responded to the negative thought. See, what you are talking about is,
there is an observation and the observation is, something is not working.
Ben: Right.
Jerry: That in and of itself is neither negative nor positive; it's just an observation. It's how
you respond to it that creates the opportunity for change.
Ben: Yeah. It's almost as if I could skip that step; if there's observation, negative thoughts,
listen to negative thoughts as real and make change, I could just skip from
observation to what's the right action –
Jerry: Make the change, exactly. It's that interim place that is actually – see, it's the
observation. What is the observation? This is not working; right? That then creates a
feeling what's the feeling?
Ben: Anxiety.
Jerry: What's the threat? Fear. What's the fear?
Ben: I mean the threat is business could fail to succeed, fail to thrive.
Jerry: Pause. Business could fail, right? Then we're off to the races.
Ben: Right.
Jerry: Why is failure so scary?
Ben: I feel like it's a deep human desire to succeed in the things that we set out to
accomplish.
Jerry: Why does failure scare you, Ben?
Ben: Why does it scare me?

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Jerry: You; not just humans, you.
Ben: I'm worried that I've failed before and if I fail again, I won't be able to pick myself
up again to do it and try again and I desperately want to make a big difference in the
world and that's going to require trying again and again and again and I worry that if
I continue to fail and fail again, that I won't try again. I'll just give up.
Jerry: What do you think of that train of thought? Let me repeat it back to you. I've failed
before; in this case if I remember correctly it's Zeal, right?
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Jerry: Zeal was a big failure; is that right?
Ben: Yeah, a 32 million-dollar smoking hole in the ground.
Jerry: A 32-million dollar smoking hole in the ground. Let's just pause and acknowledge
that and the fear in that is that you're going to fail again. But you also said, 'I need to
try and try and try again' and so the fear is a very kind of specific fear. It's that I'll
stop trying.
Ben: Yeah because intellectually I know that startups fail; the right way to deal with that
is to move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and keep on
trying, keep on learning, keep on getting better, and better and better in whatever
role you are in and that's just the way the game works. So, intellectually I understand
that but emotionally, it took me some time to get myself back together after leaving
Zeal and then eventually having the company fail and yeah, at some deep level, I
worry that I can't do that again.
Jerry: Right. What would happen to you if you can't do it again?
Ben: I mean intellectually, I can – it wouldn’t be a terrible thing. I would –
Jerry: Don’t give me the intellectual thing. Give me the fear.
Ben: It would suck, it would be –
Jerry: It would suck.
Ben: I've got a lot wrapped up in being an entrepreneur and being a –
Jerry: What do you mean you've got a lot wrapped up in it?
Ben: I have been a co-founder since I was 20 years old in college, before I could legally
drink and yeah, this company especially it's like it's exactly what I want to be doing.

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It's taking what I have learnt in my own life in terms of making a personal change
and helping people do that at scale, that's amazing.
Jerry: And what happens if you fail? What happens to Ben?
Ben: Um, I'm crushed.
Jerry: You're crushed. Slow down, stay with that feeling. You said before, you practiced to
becoming familiar with anxiety.
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Jerry: You know the softness that's just come into your body right now? Now what we are
doing is we are feeling the fear. We're feeling the consequence of that fear. 'I would
be crushed.' I would be unloved, I would be bereft, I would be humiliated, I would
be ashamed; I want to honor these feelings because it's so easy to quickly
intellectualize and jump up into our mind and hear the other crow. The crow that
says, 'Oh no, it'll be fine.' And of course, it's true that it'll be fine but the cognitive
awareness of that truth does not alleviate the feeling; does it? I wish I could be in the
same room with you right now because you are really holding the feeling. What
alleviates the suffering is to lean into the fear. What would happen is I would be
crushed. Crushed.
Ben: Yeah, and I feel like I have been intellectualizing around it.
Jerry: Yes.
Ben: I tell you know, the negative barrage of thoughts and feelings come or feelings and
then thoughts and then I try to replace them with positive thoughts. Well, here are
the things that would happen then; I would be fine.
Jerry: Right.
Ben: Instead of sort of backing up to what's the feeling that preceded those negative
thoughts.
Jerry: Right. The thing that you have to remember, that cognitive awareness does not
create transformation. The person who over indulges in drink, in alcohol or smoking,
knows at some level that it's wrong. The person who over indulges in anxious,
fearful thoughts knows that the thoughts aren’t true but they are still plagued by the
thoughts.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Right. So it's a myth that we think that the mind, remember my experience of sitting
in the cushion; my experience of sitting in the cushion, I could feel my mind trying

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to push away the anxiety with intellectualized thoughts. 'Oh, I will not feel anxious if
I could correctly discern what a true threat is.'
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Right, and what I did was, my Amygdala took over, hijacked my brain and started
scanning the horizon for threats and everything became a threat. This thing, this
thing, this thing, everything became a threat, only making me more anxious. Cutting
me off from the very thing that I need to find the answers to the observed challenges;
right because if we go back in time, we talk about, it was the observation that there
was a challenge that provoked the anxiety in the first place. The take-up wasn’t – the
courses wasn’t occurring as quickly as you thought it should and rather than taking
that in as simply data that is useful, you took it in as a threat and what we need in
those moments, is to get back to our intellectual ability. Not to figure out our
feelings, not to push away our feelings but to really discern to go right to what the
challenge is. And so the way we tend to manage the triggered reaction gets in the
way of our ability to create the solutions that we need.
Ben: Yeah. So, let me play with sort of a different strategy maybe which I'm playing over
in my mind. My current strategy is, feeling leads to negative thoughts, leads to
intellectualization about how those [Crosstalk]
Jerry: It's actually one step, there was a step right in the middle. It's feeling, the desire to
push away the feeling, leads to negative thoughts.
Ben: Right.
Jerry: Go ahead.
Ben: Leads to intellectualization of essentially arguing why the negative thoughts are not
true.
Jerry: Correct.
Ben: And so, and then eventually works into a solution. So instead of –
Jerry: Sometimes it works into a solution.
Ben: Sometimes yeah, sometimes it just spins.
Jerry: Sometimes it just spins.
Ben: Yeah, for a long time, I've noticed that.
Jerry: Right.

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Ben: So, instead of – and that's probably better than believing the negative thoughts
outright but still not –
Jerry: Well believing – right, believing the negative thoughts leads to a paralysis. Spinning
around the negative thoughts leads to a different kind of paralysis and sometimes the
negative thoughts lead to an aggression. Think about all the conflicts that can occur
in a start u – 'Fuck you!' 'No, fuck you!' 'Now get out of here!' All that is is fear. No
one is properly dealing with the fear and so they turn to aggression. My friend Parker
Palmer says, "Violence is what we do when don’t know what to do with our feelings
or suffering." That's it. So you are going down the path of figuring this out.
Ben: So new strategy: feeling, negative thoughts; if I could simply accept the feeling I
could never have negative thoughts and after maybe 20 more years of meditation, I'll
get there but today the feeling will often general negative thoughts. Instead of
intellectualizing and fighting against those negative thoughts using logic, back up to
feeling the feeling and then instead of engaging with the negative thoughts, engage
with what the solution might be.
Jerry: Or, change the pattern of reaction to the negative thought from push away, dismiss
the negative thought just as we try to push away the negative feeling. Invite it in.
Remember before I said to you, so you would fail, which led you very emotionally,
with tears in your eyes, say, "I would be crushed" and within two minutes your
whole body softened and you returned into yourself. Simply by allowing you to feel
the effects of your worst imagined thought, 'I would be crushed' and then we didn’t
push that away; we just said that's the feeling and now you are intellectualized
creativity has kicked in. It's actually the welcoming in of the state in which you are
in that creates space for what your mind is really good at which is coming up with
creative solutions. It's acknowledging that and then seeing that the things that you
are looking at as potential threats are really not threats at all. If you had a hundred
million dollars cash in the bank, okay, and the –
Ben: I'm imagining it, it's wonderful.
Jerry: It's wonderful and the first take-up on your first three courses wasn’t what it
expected; is it a threat?
Ben: No problem, no.
Jerry: That's not the issue.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Right?
Ben: Yeah.

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Jerry: The issue really is a combination of where we are and what resources are available.
It's actually more complex than the fearful mind thinks. If you had a dollar in the
bank, everything is a threat. Right?
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: So in that fearful moment, you are losing sight of what resources are available to
you. Do you have enough time to figure it out?
Ben: We should, yeah. It's always tight but yeah, we have time to figure it out.
Jerry: That's – now, notice that. So what are you thinking in terms of the pattern of
responding to things right now? Because I noticed that your mind wants to go to –
what is the path? What is the – what should I do.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Yeah, so notice that. Notice that that could be helpful but its ability to be helpful is
going to be limited. It's not an engineering calculus. If this then that. Doesn’t kind of
work here.
Ben: It would be easier if it was.
Jerry: Oh shit, yeah. [Laughs] It would be so much easier. [Laughs] It just doesn’t work
that way. You know, even managing in this environment doesn’t work that way.
Leading in this environment doesn’t work that way. It is a function of working with
what is true about what is happening inside of you. I know, in my bootcamps, one of
the first things we worked is a bastardization of a Zen [Unclear 0:29:49] "This being
so, so what?" And what I mean by that is facing the reality as it truly is. So, the take-
up on the first three courses wasn’t what you anticipated it to be and you have X
amount of dollars in the bank and you have Y amount of time and there's critical
pieces of information that you still lack and there's critical information that you’ve
gotten. Now what do you do?
Ben: Yeah and with that, how do we – so when the barrage of negative thoughts are so
consistent, it feels hard to get into that space.
Jerry: Right so let's talk about that. What fuels the barrage of negative thoughts? What
fuels the anxiety and the answer lies in something that you just said, around being
crushed.
Ben: Yeah, it's what I perceive will happen if we don’t move through the challenge to
myself.
Jerry: What will happen to you?

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Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: What will happen? Tell me.
Ben: If we failed, I would take a little time off and –
Jerry: That's an intellectual answer, bullshit.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Tell me what it is that you are afraid of will happen?
Ben: I'm afraid that – I'm afraid I'll never recover from that.
Jerry: Yeah.
Ben: I try to stop my intellectual mind from not saying that because my intellectual mind
–
Jerry: Immediately jumps in and wants to –
Ben: Oh you'll be fine but –
Jerry: You'll be fine.
Ben: – that's what I am actually afraid of.
Jerry: Right, you're actually afraid that you'll never be able to recover and then what will
happen?
Ben: I'll backslide in terms of the rest of my life and all the [Unclear 0:32:00], games and
physical fitness and relationships will all dematerialize.
Jerry: And what will happen? What will Ben be?
Ben: I'll be a bitter, unhappy, angry person.
Jerry: Is there anybody in your life who is bitter, unhappy and angry because they
backslid? [Silent pause] Who are you afraid of becoming?
Ben: I don’t know, I'm trying to sit with that and um, the obvious answer is – I'm trying to
wrestle with like – the obvious answer would be there's a parent or an uncle and –
Jerry: No, not necessarily. It could be the person that you fear you truly are.
Ben: Yeah. I think what I fear is backsliding to what I – who I used to be.

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Jerry: There we go.
Ben: And then you know, my most – the worst times in my life, when I look back are my
teenage years of not really knowing who I was, not being happy with what I was
doing or who I was becoming. All the social angst that comes with friends and girls
and that – I don’t want to be that person ever again. That was very uncomfortable.
Jerry: Yeah, I really relate to that. I don’t think I have publically talked about this before so
I'm about to reveal something; I have talked a lot about my depression but I tried to
kill myself when I was 18, shortly after my 18th birthday. It was between my first
and second semesters of college and it was a very difficult time as it is for many
people and the roots of that depression go back very, very deep. So I really, really
relate to your fear of backsliding and becoming that person that you once were. I
have struggled with that same fear myself. It took me a long time to learn to
integrate that boy into the man that I am today and to no longer deny that boy or be
afraid of that boy but to acknowledge and integrate and recognize that that boy lives
on in the man that I am today and enables me to empathetically connect with your
fear in this moment. So, I want to say something to you: you are not alone in that
fear. Doesn’t make it go way but for me, knowing I'm not alone in my fears makes
my fears easier to bear.
Ben: Thank you for sharing that, that's really powerful. Yeah.
Jerry: You know, it's the fear of backsliding, the fear of – anybody who has struggled, I
think struggles with the fear of the struggle coming back.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Right.
Ben: One of my even deeper fears is that – so the person that I was, I didn’t – I was
unhappy, I was struggling and I didn’t even know what to do to move forward and I
now have built up this intellectual and emotional capacity to deal with some stuff.
And I worry about losing that because I think it was just luck that I got on the right
path and started understanding more about myself and the world and yeah, like
putting myself back there and imagining that like maybe that lightning wouldn’t
strike twice and I wouldn’t ever get out of that loop. Really scary.
Jerry: And so when Zeal failed, that must have been a particularly hard time because it may
have brought you back.
Ben: Yeah, it was a really interesting situation where I had left about a year before the
company failed and I had started embarking on my own personal development
journey from learning from this and starting with meditation and at the same time,
the company that I had built was falling apart outside of my control. So, I was

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learning, and I was growing and I was moving in these wonderful, new directions
and at the same time, all the things that I had built and worked for were falling apart.
And it was causing me to question who I really was and why I even deserved to be
able to take another chance.
Jerry: You know, Ben, I think the mistake that I have often made in a similar situation is to
presume that the intellectual accomplishments I have made, and the decisions I have
made and the systems that I have created in my life, are the things that I have created
the distance between who I was and who I am. What I forget and what I suspect you
forget is actually the resiliency in your own self that you created in that process. It is
not the systems that you have created. The systems can change but the resiliency is
as much a part of you as the struggle and nothing takes the resiliency away.
Ben: You're right, the – I mean, yeah, the things that I have done to change my life have
changed me in a way that even if I stopped doing all those things, it wouldn’t
disappear.
Jerry: That's it. And you can always access the resiliency, you can always access the grit,
you can always access the capacity. The way you access that is to stand still, feel the
feeling, not push the feeling away with an intellectual solution. The true strength of
Change Collective lies in the resiliency and not in the intellectual realizations. It's the
desire to change that will bring people to Change Collective. It is not the changes
themselves. Does that resonate with you?
Ben: Yeah, and when we talked about our company mission, we talk about developing
people's ability and confidence to change and we actually, when we built that
mission, we recognize that the skills were actually less important than the
confidence. The skills are less important than that resiliency, that grit and the way
that one starts that, the way it works for me is you lay one layer on top of another,
small win, small win, small win, you build skills along the way sure. But at some
point you have an unshakable confidence that you can meet the challenges that are
going to come up in your life and that's what we want to help people get to. That's
the ultimate –
Jerry: I think that's beautiful and you know, in taking you back to your mission and your
purpose, I'm reminded of something that is very important that I as a coach and my
partners at Reboot do, is what we try to do is bring people back to purpose when they
are feeling lost because purpose is the center. And listening to you describe the
mission of the company, made me smile because like all great companies that are
built out of love, who is it that you are trying to save with Change Collective?
Ben: It's myself.
Jerry: Amen, brother.
Ben: Yeah.

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Jerry: That's it; because there are thousands of people who struggle the way you struggled.
That is the connecting point.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: And when you can hold fast to that purpose, that is a greater source of resiliency in
the face of the barrage of the negative thoughts. That's where the creativity is going
to come from. 'Oh, I'm gonna save the lost Ben.' When I sit and I coach you, I am
going back in time and saving me and the thing that I have been taught is that my
saving me is saving you and my saving you is saving me because we are not separate
as individuals. We are part of a shared collective called humanity.
Ben: Yeah, I think for the first time, I'm realizing like I always sort of knew what the
mission was but now it's connecting back to the very thing that I fear most.
Jerry: Yes.
Ben: I fear backsliding, I fear becoming the person that I used to be that didn’t have these
tools and this resiliency and this grit. And the very thing I am building is what would
help that earlier version of me make the progress that I have made.
Jerry: Exactly and understanding that that is the source. The source of the purpose and the
mission is the suffering creates power, creates potency, creates magic, that's when a
company is built on love. This is about something more important than another
dollar in the bank. This is about saving lives. How are you doing?
Ben: I'm great. I'm now – my mind is fast-forwarding to how do I utilize this new
realization.
Jerry: [Laughs] You should see – I wish everybody could see the smile on your face right
now. Your face is lit up because you are connected to purpose. Okay, so my
suggestion – and we are going to start to wrap but my suggestion is, take the energy
right now, resist the impulse to concretize it by writing stuff down but you can
journal. Journal around the feelings. Remember, one of the first things I said is, the
answer here is in the feelings. Sit, meditate, go for a walk, let it land in your body,
let the truth of it become resonant in your body. You will not lose it if it's in your
body.
Ben: Yeah.
Jerry: Ben, that was beautiful. I really want to honor your vulnerability and your courage
for a guy who is dealing with a lot of fear to be able to get in public like this and talk
about this. It's really an honor and just that act, I know, is helping somebody else
right now. So thank you.

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Ben: Thank you too Jerry; I feel like I found a realization that's going to really help and I
also want to honor your vulnerability in talking about your struggles as a teenager
and that powerful story that you shared it helped me is a wonderful gift. So, thank
you.
Jerry: Oh well, thank you for receiving it as well as you did. It was really an honor.
So that’s it for our conversation today. You know, a lot was covered in this episode from links,
to books, to quotes, to images. So, we went ahead and compiled all that and put it on our site at
Reboot.io/Podcast. If you would like to be a guest on the show, you can find out about that on
our site as well.
I’m really grateful that you took the time to listen. If you enjoyed the show and you want to get
all the latest episodes as we release them, head over to iTunes and subscribe and while you’re
there, it would be great if you could leave us a review letting us know how the show affected
you. So, thank you again for listening and I really look forward to future conversations together.
[Singing] "How long till my soul gets it right?
Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?
I call on the resting soul of Galileo,
King of night-vision, King of insight."
[End of audio 0:46:38]
[End of transcript]