Podcast 535: Are Your Beliefs Truly Yours? Critical Thinking, Identity & Social Conditioning

(Intro)

MICHAEL: They're not actual beliefs that are based on logic and critical thinking. And so we create these whole belief structures. My side's the right side. My side is the good side. My worldview is the right side. And any sort of conversation that is applied to that belief system says, "You know what? Maybe you're wrong here," becomes an identity threat.

MARTIN: Hey, everyone. This is Martin Pytela for "Life Enthusiast Health Shots" podcast. And with me today is a man cut from a very similar cloth as mine, Michael Kohan. And I so appreciate Michael.

MICHAEL: Hi

MARTIN: Hello. I so appreciate you joining me here. Let's open with shalom, Michael.

MICHAEL: Shalom. Shabbat shalom on Friday, but today is a Tuesday, so we'll just say shalom.

MARTIN: Indeed. Yeah. As we're discovering, both of us come with the Eastern European Jewish heritage transplanted into America. And with it come all kinds of gifts. For example, here's a story. I feel that many of us were inbred towards the MTHFR genetics, which give us a lesser ability to detoxify, so we are more prone toward metabolic illness, but with it come gifts such as linguistic, mathematical, and musical talents, and also the higher achievement mentality. We tend to drive toward perfection and achievement. Tell me if that is true for you. It is for me.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Some of it is, some of it isn't for me. I think one of the things I like about growing up Jewish, well, Jewish-ish. My family never really super identified with being Jewish. We went to temple on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and then had a Christmas tree. So it wasn't something I really identified with as an individual until I moved into New York City and met my first wife, and I can talk about that whole journey if you would like also.

MARTIN: Sure.

MICHAEL: The thing I love about Judaism as a practice, as a faith, as a culture, is a couple components. And I think this is what makes a lot of people really smart and really ambitious in Judaism. The first one is we're taught at an early age to question everything. Part of being Jewish isn't blind faith in God. It is a conversation about what God is and what that means for you.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHAEL: The whole purpose of the Talmud is one big, giant argument about what Judaism means.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And so you're taught at an early age to question.

MARTIN: Yeah. I wanted to butt in here with this quick little quip, which is, Christians seem to have an answer for everything. Jews seem to have a question for everything, and that kind of summarizes, in my head, the difference.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I think that's a simplistic observation. I think that goes down to the idea of consciousness. Consciousness is sort of this, the act of being self-aware.

MICHAEL: Who am I as a person? And from a spiritual standpoint, consciousness is questioning one's purpose in life and one's connection to the divine spirit or the greater good. The difference in the tradition of Christianity versus Judaism comes from the hierarchical principle from the Catholic Church, right?

In Catholicism, which at one point was a monarchy, and then an unofficial monarchy throughout Europe, was to not question faith. It was that the pope or the bishop or the priest knew better.

MARTIN: Right

MICHAEL: And that your faith was this, to follow the wisdom of this individual who was chosen by God. That's where that tradition comes from of having the answer. Whereas Judaism comes from the Middle East, comes from a pre-Romanic era where it's rooted in Egyptian, it's rooted in Greek, it's rooted in the Phoenicians, the Philistines. It's rooted in this very ancient period of time where one was trained to question God, if there was even a God.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And it was less about blind faith in the hierarchy because the hierarchy never served the Jewish people. Think of Egypt, think of the Romans, think of Herod. I forget the Jewish king, I forget his name, that conspired with the Roman Empire. The individuals who we were supposed to have blind faith in never served us as individuals. They always ended up betraying us, imprisoning us. And so we've always had this mentality of questioning authority. But at the same time, you can then argue back that the teachings of Jesus are of rebellion against the Roman Empire.

MARTIN: Right.

MICHAEL: So I think it's just over a period of the last 3,000 years, the culture of Judaism has always been to question authority, question hierarchy, question one's faith, versus Christianity has been more about following the principles of a particular path to reach the same end result.

MARTIN: Yeah. Live by rules, obey authority, that sort of thing.

MICHAEL: We've never been told to do that well.

MARTIN: Oh, well. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So I think that's the first component of what I like about Judaism is the questioning of faith, the questioning of practice.

Why do we have certain rituals, what those rituals mean to us. And I think that is instilled in us at an early age, as youths in synagogue, in Hebrew school, which carries over into how we learn in school, right?

And as a result, because we're taught at an early age to question, which allows our brains to develop differently, right?

That gives us the ability to thrive academically. The second thing I love about Judaism is the rituals or the traditions for one to understand the world around them. I love the idea of Shabbat, what Shabbat means. I love the idea of shiva. I recently had a friend's uncle pass away, and I love the idea of what it means to sit for shiva, why we sit for-,

MARTIN: Is it like a five-day sit down?

MICHAEL: Nine days. Yeah, nine days.

It's a nine-day sit down because it gives the ability for both the family to mourn, and the community to come and support you, and I love that. These are the beautiful things I love about my,

MARTIN: Yeah. Those are really cool traditions, right? They are hard to maintain in the modern society as we know it, but...

MICHAEL: I'm not really a good Jew. I'm not really in practice. I'm Jewish, but I'm not religiously Jewish- if that makes sense.

MARTIN: I have the same story. My mom came home from the concentration camp experience from the war, having lost all of her relatives. Everybody. 55 people from her immediate extended family went in. Two came back. One cousin.

Anyway, she wanted to have nothing to do with it. She had the prisoner concentration camp number that she had tattooed on her forearm removed. She had it taken out, and she wanted nobody to know anything.

MICHAEL: That happened to a lot of people. A lot of people, when they left after World War II, as a way to survive and as a way to start over, they changed their last names. They moved to different countries.

They got married and found different faiths. And what you're finding is people who are taking these genetic tests, I've never taken one, but they find that they have Jewish blood in them or Jewish heritage, and they're like, "Where did this come from?"

MARTIN: Yeah, I took one, and yes, I do. And so interestingly, I grew up in a police state. We were in Czechoslovakia, occupied by Russia, ruled by the communist totalitarian regime. And it was horrendously awful, as oppressive as you can imagine. And so despite the oppression, the household just devolved into, as you just highlighted, it couldn't be put down or held down. It just had to blow up somehow. I ended up leaving the country as a refugee because I just could not visualize myself living in a country under that oppressive system. Questioned everything. Was not allowed to question anything, right?

That was the most rigid system, probably more rigid than the Catholic Church. Anyway, that's my experience of growing up there.

MICHAEL: I can't imagine what it's like to grow up in another country that doesn't have the ability to express oneself. My experience has been the United States, except for brief periods of both leisure and a little work back before I became a life coach, of traveling to other countries. But mostly, I would travel to other pro-democracy countries. So I don't know what it's like to live under a society that controls us. But I do know today it's not that we live in a society that controls us, and that we have a government. We're in, at least in the United States, we live in a society that our consciousness and our political discord has slowly become regulated and controlled through the guise of free speech, in the algorithms of the 24-hour news cycle, the internet, and social media that has really pushed us into these camps, where we are no longer questioning our worldview, but rather being told what our worldview is, and then feeling that we are expressing ourselves through rage in this false sense. That's another form of oppression.

MARTIN: Oh, gosh, yeah. Having lived in a totalitarian system, I have it in my blood, in my body. I smell it, I taste it. And so I'm watching it rise all around us, or I was watching it rise all around us. The COVID experience was pretty close to nightmarish for me because of what it brought out. That was essentially the expression of that kind of mindset, is just control from top down and repress. And it was shocking to me just how quickly people were willing to shout at one another, "Put your mask on," and, "How dare you not vaccinate. Are you trying to kill me?"

MICHAEL: Well, it all depended on where you lived. This is one of the things that I think people struggle with is what makes an individual unique is their past experiences, their life story. You growing up in communist Czechoslovakia creates a certain component of personality that I would never be able to relate to. I don't know what that's like. Right?

Just like someone who grew up African American in the 1980s, I'm never going to know. I remember growing up as a kid, I grew up in a very very affluent area of this country, in a bubble.

I thought everybody lived like me growing up. Everybody had money and went on vacation and was able to go out to dinner and had nice clothes,

Until high school, when my really isolated bubble town matriculated to a regional high school where not every kid had money.

I thought everybody, I knew in theory that the world was diverse, but I thought everybody looked and thought and behaved the way I behaved, and that affects who I am as a person to a degree. Right?

MARTIN: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah.

MICHAEL: Our past makes us individuals, and our past forms our belief network, and our belief network, along with our present choices, where we live, who we surround ourselves with, create our values. And I would watch individuals, specifically during the pandemic, I would see it, where when they were in one part of the country for about three months, they had one view of the world.

Masks, vaccines, social distancing, how dare you think anything different. But then when they had to leave this one area for whatever reason, whether it was work or they moved to another region of the country, their entire worldview shifted within three months without them realizing it, because their values shifted based on their present environment. When we came and went inside during COVID, our values changed once again because our environment was no longer in the physical world. It was all online, and social media, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, 

They're all the same. Instagram, they're all the same.

They're there to distract you and to hyper-isolate you so that you go on there so that they can then take you and sell you to a company to sell a product that you do not need.

MARTIN: I think of it as echo chambers. All of a sudden, you live in a silo in a group that social media has created for you without you even knowing it, and much like you described growing up in an affluent town, not knowing as a small kid that there were other options out there, not all of them wonderful. And likewise here, you show up on social media, and it will create a little village for you that does not necessarily represent the world at all.

MICHAEL: But what happens is when we're isolated, when we're lonely, when we're struggling to pay our bills, or to eat healthy. There is no reason why in America that healthy food is so expensive, but it is. I have a busy day today, and I have a little bit of a window to eat dinner. Okay? I can go to the pizza place and buy dinner for $8, or I can go to the grocery store and buy healthy food real quick for $20.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm lucky. I make a decent living, so I can choose the healthy option. But if you're struggling financially, all you have is the garbage food. So you're stressed out because you're barely surviving in a country that is so wealthy. We have so many billionaires and mega-millionaires. We have so much wealth in this country, but yet people are struggling, and so they're struggling financially. They're stressed out. Now they're eating toxic food. They're stressed out. They go on social media to escape. They're emotional. And then what happens is, because they're on social media and they're emotional, they create what's called a perceived belief system. Perceived beliefs are emotionally based assumptions about reality. They're not actual beliefs that are based on logic and critical thinking, and so we create these whole belief structures. My side's the right side, my side is the good side, my worldview is the right side, and any sort of conversation that is applied to that belief system says, "You know what? Maybe you're wrong here," becomes an identity threat because it's perceived, so it's emotional, so I'm unable to change my worldview. When I was a kid and as an adult, and I try to have my beliefs examined and I try to base them on more logic so that when someone comes up to me and says, "Hey, this view you have is wrong or not in alignment," I don't become emotional and I'm able to look at the person from a critical standpoint and go, "Huh, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong," but it's not going to affect my identity, my self-worth.

And therefore I can change and adapt and evaluate the situations, so therefore I don't become addicted to these negative information overloads that seem to be driving our narrative right now.

MARTIN: Yeah. You started with it earlier, they wish to belong, to wish to be a part of something, a tribe or a village or a,

MICHAEL: It's part of our human nature.

MARTIN: Yeah. Absolutely. We are team creatures, team builders, and,

MICHAEL: Well, it's part of our human evolution. We are a group or, so, we'll go back to World War II. Post-World War II, there was this concept where we were trying to, as a global society, to understand the horrificness of what occurred during World War II on both sides.

Both the Allies and the Axis. We just did horrible things to each other. We burnt cities, we dropped the atom bomb, we murdered, we genocided entire populations, we put people in internment camps, we captured people and then forced them into conscriptions to die. We did horrible things during World War II. And after World War II, everybody was shocked by all the atrocities, both sides, right?

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And so we came up with this philosophical idea that by human nature, we're animals, we're savages by nature, and the only thing that prevents savagery is society, government. And so we had this belief that government is what makes us civilized. Society. And without government, we will become savages. And then an author wrote a book, and it's a famous book that we all read in America called "Lord of the Flies," and it's all about the breakdown of society and how we start off as civilized individuals and through time become savages. That's been disproven. The theory has evolved to understand this, that we are group-oriented individuals, that we want to belong to a group because that is part of the human evolution condition. 5,000 years ago, if you were exiled from your tribe, it was certain death, and the only way to survive and thrive was to belong to your group. Originally we identified, 5,000 years ago, I would be, "I'm Michael, son of John, member of this tribe."

Then over time, I became Michael, son of John, of this religion. Then over time, I became Michael, son of John, of this religion, and I am a carpenter. And then over time, it became, I, Michael, son of John, of this religion, of this occupation, of this country, and anybody that's not part of that group is my enemy. 

And so if the leader of my group says to you that that individual over there is the reason why you're suffering or says to me, "Go kill that person," as a member of the group, for me to fit in, I will blindly follow that individual. Which is why good people end up doing horrible things to people. 

People don't inherently become racist. It's because of the family or community of the group they belong to, that they have racist tendencies. But our default nature, and this is what's been proven, is that we are kind and compassionate and thoughtful individuals. When tragedy strikes, what do we do? We donate blood, we give money to food banks, we donate to charity. That's our default nature, and our savagery and a horrible nature is based on the groups that we belong to.

And you can also bring that to how we live our lives. Individuals that overeat, overspend, they are all because of the individuals, the groups they're a part of, that dictate the behavioral trends that they are doing that are causing harm, which is why change is so hard. Because in order to change, to develop good habits, to do better in this world, you have to examine the group orientation that you have, and that's really hard for most people.

MARTIN: Yeah. So when you work with your coaching clients, do you drag this stuff in?

MICHAEL: Always. Oh, yeah. So when I'm coaching, I do what's called dialectical coaching, and/or cognitive coaching. So I basically bring all these concepts into coaching. One of the first things I coach on is consciousness.

And then from consciousness, I get into emotional intelligence.

And everyone's like, "Why are we," I will have, individuals that are obese, looking for weight loss.

CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, unemployed individuals trying to start over in life.

People coming out of addiction. You name it.

I will work with you if I have the availability.

And I always start there, and I have people be like, "Why are we starting with this concept of consciousness?"

MARTIN: I think there's some old saying something about ‘Man, know thyself.’

MICHAEL: Yeah. Right. Yeah. “I think, therefore I am.”

MARTIN: In the very beginning is, you need to actually understand who you are before you can actually express yourself onto the world. 

MICHAEL: It's learning to change the conversation from a why to a what. Instead of asking yourself, "Why is this happening to me? Why am I struggling? Why do I not have any money? Why am I overweight? Why is my marriage not working? Why do my kids hate me?" To, "What is the cause of the circumstance?"

MARTIN: Right.

MICHAEL: And when you change that question from a why to a what, then we're able to begin to shift our mindset and then take responsibility, and responsibility is a powerful, powerful thing.

Because when we take responsibility, then we take back our control. It's this idea that I struggle with, with younger clients. So I'll coach anybody. I have clients in their 20s, and I have clients in their 80s, and I know there's a shift as the clients move up the timeline,

In life generationally, where the older clients ignore trauma, and I have to work with them on understanding trauma, and then how that trauma affects behavior.

Meaning, like fear of failure, worry. I'm not a psychologist, so if the trauma's not surface emotional, I refer them to a therapist, always. But if I have a client who is overthinking or has excessive worry or has anger, right? That's the trauma. And clients in my late 30s, 40s, 50s, and above ignore that. My clients in my mid-30s and 20s identify it. Right? Which is the other side of the coin. It's like they use that identity of the trauma as the blanket to make the excuses for the circumstances that's causing the suffering.

MARTIN: Have you thought about whether it's generational or whether it's evolutionary? Will everyone, after a sufficient amount of suffering, end up becoming just a little immune to it? Or is it that the entire generation born, I don't know, since 1980 or '90, is it different?

MICHAEL: I don't think it's genetic. I think it's society. I fundamentally believe 90% of the human condition is learned.

Our behavior is learned. We form behavioral patterns and emotional patterns through life experiences. We're born, 10% of our lives are genetic, right? Everybody can learn to throw a fastball, but a very small portion will become Major League Baseball players.

That 10% is the genetic. 90% of it is talent, it's learned, it's effort, right?

We live in a world where we have one absolute truth. We only have one absolute truth, and that absolute truth in this world is one. It's not taxes, it's the fact that you're going to die.

One day you will cease to exist in this body.

Death is a part of life.

Because death is a part of life, that means pain is a part of it, because death is the root of change, and we live in a world that is constantly changing, and it's changing faster now. It's really changing fast now, right? Look at AI, and I don't even really think it's AI. I like to think of them as large learning models. It's not AI, but we use the term AI to explain it. And so technology and information has caused change to be accelerated.

MARTIN: Yeah, I think it's the size of the dataset that you're able to access all at once. Because,

Back when, my grandfather could only absorb what the radio brought or what the,

Generation before him, what the newsletter, news flyer brought. And before then, it was only what the guy who came to the village told him about,

MICHAEL: The town crier. Right.

So pain is a part of life because pain is a component of change.

And change is the result of death, right? The ending of industry, the ending of jobs, relationships, family members, loved ones, your home, your community. Change is a part of life.

And so as a result of the understanding that pain is a part of a human condition, and the onset from the 1940s, Freud, into accelerated in the '90s, we understand that pain is part of the human condition, and therefore we began to over-index on it, where we try to avoid pain and only seek pleasure, right?

So anything that is painful is bad. And anything that's pleasurable is good.

So anything that we experience is painful, we want to run away from it. Not because of genetics, not because we're born with different brains, because of technology, it's because we've been conditioned as we've gone through ages to avoid anything that's painful. Right?

And you look at the internet, it's all about creating no friction, right?

Frictionless payment, frictionless purchasing, everything becomes frictionless. But friction's what makes you alive. You can't walk down the street without friction, right? The friction between your shoes and the sidewalk, that's how you stay on the ground and keep moving forward.

MARTIN: Yeah. I'm thinking more like the rocks that are in the riverbed in a creek, they, over time, go from jagged to rounded,

From rough to smooth, and it's the tumbling of the current and throwing the rocks, and I'm usually throwing that metaphor in when I'm talking about teenagers who are just trying to grow up, and they're just having to do a whole bunch of tumbling. They have to just get their rough edges smoothed off through conflict. 

MICHAEL: They have to learn to embrace pain and not identify it.

MARTIN: Yeah. Embrace pain.

MICHAEL: They have to understand that if you want to achieve anything in life, you have to experience a level of pain. We went from a culture, I only can talk about America, but we went from a culture where if you were failing in school as a kid, it was your fault, to if you're failing in school, it was the teacher's fault. So we shifted the blame. We shifted the idea that you shouldn't have pain, everything should be easy and given to you instantly. Right?

And so when I'm working with younger people, it's to teach them to shift that mindset, that the pain is part of being alive, going out in the world. Now, one shouldn't dismiss trauma. One of the great psychologists that I love, and I always forget his name, is the author of the book, "Man's Search for Meaning," man's search for purpose. It's logotherapy. It's the idea that when we have purpose in life, a lot of the things that were causing us pain, that begin to create emotional distress, no longer seem important. 

But the other part of it was where he recognized that trauma is trauma, that we shouldn't dismiss our trauma, whether it's big trauma or little trauma, but we shouldn't identify with that trauma also. And that's the challenge, to move away from the identity of trauma to understanding what trauma is, and then how, yeah, love the-- It's one of my favorite books. I always forget the author. But how to identify that trauma, and then ask what is causing it versus why do I have it?

MARTIN: Indeed. Well, maybe rephrasing it or reframing it, instead of calling it pain, call it friction or resistance. Overcoming resistance and overcoming friction is necessary and beneficial because after all, muscle is developed only by applying it against resistance.

MICHAEL: There was a movie I watched over winter break. It was with Will Farrell and Reese Witherspoon. I think it was called, "You're Cordially Invited." And it was like a rom-com. It was okay. I found the kids' characters to be nauseating.

MARTIN: Oh.

MICHAEL: Because the whole part of Will Farrell's daughter's friends, their whole character base was all about identifying with their insecurities and their phobias as humor. And I was like, "That's the challenge." Right?

It becomes the identity. I have social anxiety, therefore I can't go out in public. I have fear; therefore, I can't try. I have this, and this is what's wrong; therefore, that's my excuse. Versus this is what I have to deal with, and I might need to see a therapist or a life coach,

But I have to take responsibility for it and not allow it to hold back. Because I had the same challenges in life.

I just wasn't allowed to use it as an excuse.

I had depression. I had anxiety as a kid. I had attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and I'm dyslexic. My parents were like, "Yeah, so what? Study.”

And I was like, “It's really hard for me."

My parents were like, "Study longer."

And I was like, "But then I can't hang out with my friends."

My parents went, "Then that's too bad." They weren't horrible. It was this, I wasn't allowed to use any of these things as excuses.

MARTIN: Yeah. You know what's interesting? What's interesting in my work is, as I work with people and their health, the main factor determining success is whether the client is going to take ownership of what they have. Meaning this, I tell them, "Look, it's not your fault that you got what you got, but it's entirely your responsibility to manage it or deal with it." 

MICHAEL: It's a real problem. Health issues, obesity, diabetes, these are real issues that people struggle with.

Food is addictive. When I'm working with clients that are working really hard, and on the road, and traveling, and they're tired, and they're hungry, and they've got to go from work to this. I have clients that have full-time jobs, and then they have a second job in order to put food on their table. And they're tired and they're hungry and they go into a convenience store or Dunkin' Donuts or whatever, and they just want a cup of coffee, and then they see the shiny, sugary crap in front of them, and you think they're going to have the willpower to say no on a Thursday after working two jobs and running around with their kids? No, they're going to eat the garbage, and then that's going to create a whole system of health problems. And then over a 10, 15 year period when life is beating them down, and they're tired, and they're broke, and you got some… can I curse on mine, on this?

You got some a**hole on social media or on a YouTube channel that says that it's your fault that you're this way, and this person's like, "I didn't want to be this way."

MARTIN: Well, the society does conspire against you because every addictive thing is made, more attractive and-

MICHAEL: And cheap.

MARTIN: And if it's advertised on television, I promise it's not good for you.

MICHAEL: It makes no sense that a pound of apples is more expensive than a box of fruit roll-ups.

MARTIN: Isn't that something? Yeah.

MICHAEL: Right.

MARTIN: And at scale that's what we have.

MICHAEL: Right. It makes no sense. It makes no sense for me to be, It's cheap. I can buy a loaf of Wonder Bread or whatever the equivalent is, because I don't know what it is anymore, for 99 cents from the LDL that's right down the road from me.

Or I could buy a loaf of healthy bread for $8.

What is the average person going to choose?

MARTIN: Well, so this is the system that we have evolved where we have money being able to affect policy, so the lobbyist representing the money will affect the legislator who will then write legislative pieces that will tilt the playing field. We now have subsidized corn and subsidized wheat and subsidized whatever, grains, growing on fields. So we're taking tax money, giving it to farmers to grow more stuff that will make us sick, that we will then later spend trillions trying to overcome through the healthcare system. So it's,

MICHAEL: Right. I don't think that's a conspiracy. I think it's a system that 's been a slow moving cycle that's been going on since the '80s.

MARTIN: Well, it's no more- It's no more a conspiracy than a pack of wolves will hunt down an elk. 

MICHAEL: This happened over time, and we went, I think there was the panel in the 1970s, because it was the first time in America that we had an obesity epidemic in America in the 1970s, and they had the first nutritional council on American health and fitness, and basically that began the slow moving queue because we identified at the time, the science said that fat was the reason why everybody was fat, right? "Oh, Americans are fat because we have too much fat." So we began to remove fat from food. That's where it started, and when you remove fat from food, it tastes like s**t. 

So then what do you do? Then you put sugar to make it taste good, but it's low fat, so therefore it must be healthy, and that's where it started. And this began to spiral to this point now, where the average American is what? 50, 60, 70 pounds overweight? And I'm not against these GLP-1s. I think they're a miracle solution. I think these weight loss drugs are great to help people get off of, because you're more likely to lose an arm if you have type 2 diabetes than if you get shot, right? So it's a real health concern, and if you're overweight, you're more likely to have heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes. So it's great that these medicines can help you lose weight so that you're not going to die easily, but we also have to address nutrition along with it

MARTIN: You know, Go back. You're naming technological solutions for a problem that can be solved with mental health.

MARTIN: When you started your health coaching and talking about emotional health and talking about spiritual awareness and all of that, that's where the solution lies. The solution lies in becoming aware and acting in your best interest rather than in the best interest of the people who are trying to seduce you into their trap.

MICHAEL: Yeah, if I have a client that wants to lose weight and they're like, "What do you think of me getting on a weight loss drug?" I'm like, "Great, but let's focus on your mind and your habits and your nutrition as well." Because if you're going to be on a weight loss drug and lose weight, but you're still going to eat terrible food, you're just going to develop a whole different set of problems, right? Because you're going to become nutritionally deficient, and that's going to create a whole set of problems, and that's going to lead to a whole other set of emotional issues. So you got to focus on, you got to approach wellness from all angles. 

You can't just say like, "All medicine is bad," just like you can't say that all herbs and nutrition solve all problems, right? Depends on the individual, and you have to approach it from nutrition, mindset, habits, psychological, mental, emotional, spiritual, lifestyle. But you have to kind of keep going at it from different angles. 

And what I tell clients also, I say, whatever client I'm working with, I said, "Here's the one takeaway, whatever I can instill in you, the day you stop coaching, the thing that I want you to take away is this: “There's always going to be something that you have to deal with. It might be today, your health, your finances, your emotional well-being, or your career. Tomorrow, it's going to be another thing. It's going to be your family, your parents, or your home. There's always going to be something to deal with." And what happens is, that issue doesn't come in usually like a grenade. It comes in as a whisper, and it starts here.

And you don't really know what's going on, and it starts this little bump that then begins to create this perception of awareness.

That it then begins to manifest into physical reality. And if we don't practice self-awareness and understand that it's a never-ending project, that we're always going to have to have an area of our life that we need to work on, that there's never a place where like, "Oh, if I just solve this one problem, then everything will be good and my life will work out and everything will be like heaven, potpourri, sunshine and rainbows." 

When you fix this one problem, there'll be another problem, and then there'll be another problem. The quality of life, the quality of an individual is not the absence of the problem that they're dealing with. It's how they handle the challenge and face that opportunity for them to grow. Because that's what it means to be human. That's why we're here, to grow, to evolve. And so the challenge that you have is the problem that will help you grow. And when your back is against the wall and you're struggling in life, the last thing you want to do is have some guy like me tell you that. And that's okay also.

MARTIN: And yet, there it is, the health coach offering help, which I think is really reasonable. I'm looking at your website, by the way. This is elevatelifeproject.com with Michael Cohen.

And I see that you offer people that they can contact you for a short visit, for a 15-minute evaluation or a half-an-hour evaluation or a one-hour evaluation.

MICHAEL: Oh yeah, of course.

MARTIN: And that's great. So, anyone who's listening to it here who feels inspired to contact Michael, there you have it. And if you're,

MICHAEL: I'll always carve out time for anybody under the sun, whether you're an existing client, someone who just needs a quick phone call. I'll always carve out some free time for everybody. My mentor did it for me, and that was the promise I had for him, that I would always pay it forward by offering that as an option for people.

MARTIN: Nice and generous, and that's what makes the whole society tick.

MICHAEL: Well, thank you.

MARTIN: The fabric of the world. Indeed. Well, there you have it. There is help out there with your intractable problems that you may be struggling with. There's a man with some level of wisdom. It takes a few years. You definitely need to have had a few tragedies in your life before you're ready to see life, work from a different perspective.

MICHAEL: Yeah. They call it the dark night of the soul, right?

It's that point in your life where you're down on your knees, you're praying to whatever higher power you believe in. And you can either choose to stay down, or you can choose to step up.

I remember when I was 31 years old. I was living in New York City, and I looked in the mirror, and I saw this person looking back at me and was like, "Who is this person? How did I get here?" I hated this person. I hated everything about me. I hated my life, I hated my career, I hated my circumstances, and I hated how I looked. I hated how I felt. And I just had a choice.

I was like, "I can either give up," and I thought about it, "or I can choose to change." And I started this journey, and it took me 10 really hard years to get to a place where I was like, "Yeah, I'm good." It was about a 10-year journey. And on the journey, I reconnected to my purpose, which was to help individuals. Became a yoga teacher. I lost weight. I got off of drugs. I started making money again, saving money. Then I became a life coach. And then, yeah, found my wife and here I am.

MARTIN: Awesome. Well, all right, world. You can meet Michael Kohan. The website, one more time, is elevatelifeproject.com. And you're learning about it all at the "Life Enthusiast Health Shots" podcast with Martin Pytela at life-enthusiast.com. Michael, thank you so very much for spending time today and explaining yourself to the world.

MICHAEL: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I hope I did a good job.

MARTIN: Absolutely. Thank you.