In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about drugs and alcohol and a story of drugs and alcohol and all of a sudden that becoming the story of a seven figure online coach. Let’s get into it right now.

Now, this is a story all about how am I. Hey, guys, Dino Gomez here, and you are listening to the Secrets of Coaching podcast, where we break down the nuances of growing a seven figure online coaching business. And we are about to get started in 3 2 1. All right, guys, drugs and alcohol and seven figure coaching, how does all of that mix together? Well, today, guys, I want to get a little bit personal with you.

I want to sit down with you like we’re having a beer or like I like we’re catching up, having a cup of coffee or something like that.

But basically, I want to take you guys back in time and tell you guys a personal story, because this story is actually about me. And so it all started when I was 20 years old. Coming out of high school, I had eight different universities that I applied to that were kind of where I could get accepted to. And it’s funny what I was looking for in a college.

I’m a huge sports fan, so the seven universities I applied to were decent universities, but otherwise had exceptional sports teams. In particular, they had incredible basketball teams. And so that’s how I plan to spend my college days. I want to be at all the basketball games and everything like that.

So my criteria for university is that they are DC university. I didn’t care if they’re out of state. And in other words, they had to have great sports. Now, as the kicker, there was one more university I applied to. All right. And that was Boulder, Colorado. All right. And the reason I applied to Boulder, Colorado, is because they were ranked the number one party university in the nation. All right.

And so I went out and visited several different universities with my folks, checking out the campus and the weather and the whole thing. And then I also went over to Boulder and checked out what they had going on over there. And I learned a lot about Boulder, Colorado. Here’s something you may not know is that Boulder, Colorado, gets over 300 days of sunlight, which is insane. That’s more sunlight than San Diego, California gets, which is where I live and I’ve essentially grown up.

And so I chose Boulder because the weather was going to be like I thought it was a really cool experience in terms of like one actually having like seasonality and having snow and experience and all that. Since I grew up in California we don’t get snow. So I was like, OK, that’ll be cool. I’ll get to experience that. But on top of it I’m not going to get too depressed or not be able to handle it because even if there’s snow on the ground, it’s sunny out.

So I guess I’ll still enjoy the sunlight. And I really like the campus and stuff like that. And also, again, number one party school. I was like, let’s go for it. Let’s get out there and try all the things. And so that’s what I did.

I went to Boulder and I partied hard and had an absolute blast, freshman year. And it just so happened me and a couple of my buddies when we were freshmen, we were the only freshmen to secure an off-campus house in the summer going into our sophomore year. So basically you can imagine this. All the freshmen are in their dorms, right? All the parties happen normally in off campus house.

And we secured our house early, in the last two months of our freshman year.

So all of a sudden for the last two months of our freshman year, we’re the only freshmen who already have and are paying for an off campus house, a five bedroom house. And so it’s empty. It’s completely empty. The former students moved out. There’s not a piece of furniture in it. And so basically for two months,

We kind of became the big shots on campus, because.

Right.

We could literally would truck in basically we would take the bus off campus to, the residential area, we had this empty house.

And so, of course what we would do, we would go pick up a bunch of kegs. We had this empty house, so we could fill it with hundreds and hundreds of freshmen wall to wall and we would throw ravers. And it was a ton of fun.

So many great memories, so many great laughs. Real quickly, our house became known amongst everybody as the party house. Because we were hosting the parties first, everybody knew where our location was and it became like a weekend regular thing. And then that trickled into sometimes on the weekdays. And before long, guys like I am in non-stop party mode. It’s like every single night. And then, of course, drugs got involved as well.

And I was getting into all that and I’m not going to lie, dude. I went too far.

I got way too deep into it and developed some poor habits and stuff of taking care of myself normally had previously to that like in high school, I was like an athlete. That’s kind of what I was known for. Smoked a little bit of weed in high school, but not a lot. And so, yeah, it was completely switch of everything I was used to, everything my body was used to.

And, you know, some people can handle it and some people can’t. And as it turns out, I’m somebody who can’t, you know, a good two years of experimenting with a lot of different things, a lot of different substances and the culmination of two years of that without really giving my body a chance to reset or break or take a break, really took a toll on me. And in particular, it took a toll on me mentally.

And so what ended up happening? And the second semester of sophomore year is that like I literally started to hallucinate, like when I was not on drugs, I was hallucinating.

To be clear, I literally started to hallucinate and I started hearing things like I was literally hearing voices in my head that didn’t exist. And it became really scary, because I thought when that when that’s happening to you, you don’t realize that it’s not real.

It’s kind of like that movie The Perfect Mind, you don’t realize that’s happening. But I’ll never forget this day for the rest of my life. But at one point I’m sitting in the library trying to get some studying done and the way the library is set up and I’m going to take all this back into coaching and some other things. But the way the library is set up. It’s kind of almost like little cubicles, but you can rent out these little cubicle rooms where there’s a door that you close.

So, it’s completely enclosed room so that you can’t hear sound, you know, from inside or outside the room so you can study in privacy. So I’m in one of those rooms I’m studying.

And all of a sudden I hear my roommate and he grabs the cubicle, the room next to me.

All right. And so I start chatting with him and his name is Scotty. And I was like chatting with Scotty.

And I was like, dude, what are we doing this weekend? Right.

Are we throwing a party like, you know, X, Y, Z, if we start making weekend plans and I’m talking through the wall to him and I’m talking to the wall through him from my private room and for which you normally wouldn’t be able to really hear anybody through the wall. But for whatever reason, in this scenario, I was able to and I have like a good 20-30 minute conversation with Scotty about weekend plans and different things.

Right. And it was so real to me, like I mean, like that was happening. I was having a conversation with Scotty, you know, through the cubicles, through the walls of these private study rooms. And then all of a sudden, I get a knock on the glass door and it’s this middle aged gentleman. And I just I stand up and I open the sliding glass door and I say, hey, how can I help you?

And he goes, Who are you talking to?

And I kind of baffled and confused. And I was like, well, I’m talking to my roommate, Scotty.

He’s in the next room, we were just talking a little bit. Are we too loud? And he takes a step back. And then he looks around and he goes, Dude, there’s nobody in any of the rooms around you, you know that, right? And I was like, what are you talking about?

I was like, No, no. Scotty is literally in the room next over. We’ve been chatting and he’s like, no, there’s nobody in any of these rooms I’ve been here for two hours sitting at the main desk. And you’re the only one in any of those actual rooms. And I haven’t seen anybody come or go. And it was weird, my heart sunk.

Like I was like, wow, it’s like my stomach dropped, right? I was like, what?

So I looked at him strangely and then I step past him to turn the corner because I wanted to see and confirm. Right. That I like Scotty was in the room next to me like I was talking to him. And so I go over there and look and Scotty is not there. And at that moment, a million thoughts swirled through my head.

I was like, what the heck is going on? Right. Like, obviously things aren’t right. Like, I forget my exact emotions, but I just remember thinking a million things. So I said thank you to the guy or whatever and grabbed my stuff and went back to our house, into my room and just laid on my bed. And I was like, what is going on? I just had a conversation with, like, essentially an imaginary friend, so to speak.

But it was so real. And so that conversation I have with Scottie was that happened was so real to me at the time. And that’s when I realized I had problems. It’s when I realized I was starting to hallucinate without being on drugs, the combination of just, Boulder’s notorious for, being a big weed smoking university and the combination of smoking a lot of weed and drinking a lot, probably not getting enough sleep, not getting enough exercise, mixing that in with, you know, the occasional recreational drugs that we probably did a little too often.

And my brain had gotten messed up, you know, it gotten rewired. And so, you know, I call my parents and let them know and they come out and they said, we need to get you to a specialist or a doctor, a psychiatrist just to see what’s going on. So I go into the psychiatrist and stuff like that and make a long story short, like, yeah, they diagnosed me with a mild case of schizophrenia, that’s what schizophrenics do, right?

They hear voices and have different personalities and all these types of things. And my roommates have been telling me, dude, you’ve been acting really weird for the last couple of months. And I didn’t think twice about it. I was like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, we were all drunk last night. Like, you were weird too, whatever.

I kind of just brushed it under the rug like it didn’t mean anything. Yeah, so the psychiatrist and the doctor goes, yeah, you have mild cases of schizophrenia and what we need to do legally is we need to get you into a psych ward and you have to spend two weeks there where we can closely monitor and watch you to figure out how severe of a case of schizophrenia you have so that we understand what we need to do next, kind of what medicines you need to go on and also how this is going to change your life.

And it was so scary. It was so weird having the conversation then with my roommates that hey, this is what’s happening with me and that I’m no longer going to be living here. And I have to go live in a psych ward like so embarrassing and difficult and all the things. And so that’s what I did. I checked into a local psych ward and it was so weird. It’s like readout of one of those creepy movies.

Right. And, you know, I have my own room and stuff like that. And then every day they have you hang out and it’s like a common area where doctors, physicians, specialists watch you through a glass window to see how you interact with others in the room and what you do and who you talk to and things of that nature. And they study your behavioral patterns and all those types of things.

And after being there for three or four days, my mom still in town, too, because she’s coming to visit me and checking in on me and get updates and stuff. And doctors are like, yeah, you have schizophrenia.

We can tell, some of the things you said. You said some things to people that weren’t there. Like sometimes I can tell that you’re hearing voices because you’ll have a certain face and then all of a sudden your eye, your expression changes like you just heard something. So it was weird, guys.

it was weird. It was a crazy experience.

And it got scary because statistically, once you have or are diagnosed with schizophrenia, your chances of overcoming it and getting rid of it completely is one percent. People don’t recover from it. Once your brain has developed the neurons that fire to create schizophrenia, you basically have no come back. You can take meds that kind of minimize it, but it is not supposed to go away. And and so from that moment on.

Right. So what we did is I moved back home when I left university, didn’t finish my second semester, moved back in at home with my parents. You know, my parents said, We’ll give you two months to relax at home and kind of get yourself together and get essentially sober and clean. And my parents are very adamant, right, that like, hey, we can beat this.

But you need to remain sober. And on top of that you need to relax for a couple of months. And, you know, my parents are thinking, as soon as he gets sober, like things will his brain will start working normally again and he’ll be fine. Right. And that’s what we were hoping for and so forth. But at that point, I was like, I’m going to take this into my own hands and I’m going to make myself better.

And so what I did was with the two months my parents gave me, I didn’t just sit around, play video games or anything like that. I started reading relentlessly every single book I could get my hands on.

That was about how the brain functions and works. And so I learned so much about neuroscience and again, the cognitive, all the cognitive stuff around how the brain functions and whatnot.

And I read this book, it’s called Brain Lock. It’s my favorite book ever. It’s a great read for anybody who wants to understand how the brain works and how habits are formed and created and then also how you break a habit. And this really cool doctor wrote this book and he explained and it’s filled with case studies of how he’s been able to heal and help people that have brain damage or memory loss or whatever it is, get rid of it like recover from it all naturally.

And it has to come down with the way you think, because what happens and this is how habits are formed, really interesting. Habits are formed based on your thoughts. And so what happens is the very first time you have a thought, a neuron fires in your brain. All right. And the more and more you have a particular thought or do a particular thing, the more neurons that fire down that groove of in your brain. So what ends up happening is that habits are formed because we think repetitive thoughts over and over again.

So the neurons are firing in this particular pattern, those particular wave, so to speak, in this particular groove through your brain. And every time a neuron fires down that brain because you have that thought again, the groove gets deeper and deeper. So it’s like it’s harder and harder for neurons to break out of that neuron pathway, because over time the grooves get deeper..

Now, luckily, I had kind of mild case of schizophrenia. We diagnosed it very quickly. And so I read this book and I was baffled to learn all this. Right. This doctor was literally helping people who lost movement in their arm be able to recover our movement in their arm because he was able to help them rewire their brain. And so I was like, OK, this is what I’m going to do.

I’m going to rewire my brain to be healthy again.

And so every single time I would have a thought or a episode, as they call it, when you’re schizophrenic, every time you have an episode where I think I would hear something real quickly.

Right. You have to snap your fingers, snap your arm. You have to do something to break that train of thought, like you cannot continue in your brain having that fake conversation because that neuron is firing down that groove and it’s getting deeper. And you’re getting in. Once it’s too deep, it’s really hard to break it. And the same thing happens with habits, guys.

And it’s why when you’re young and you get your driver’s license, driving, it seems like there’s a million cars in the road and you can’t figure it out. And then, you know, 10 years later, you can drive with your eyes closed, like on the street. You can be on your cell phone or whatever. Not that you should, but you can be multitasking. And driving is so easy is because your brains done that so many times, like your muscles know how to fire and your brain knows how to work and it knows how to observe and take in all the different things.

And so, yeah, that’s what I started doing, was anytime I started hearing a voice. Right. I’d have to snap my fingers or move my arm or do push ups or do something to sort of stop the neuron from firing down the groove that was creating that. Those imaginary voices in my head and I get super wild personal story. Right. But this is all true.

And what happened is over the course, it took me about six months, but six months of every single day, putting conscious time and effort. Into meditation, visualization, giving myself self affirmations that I was healthy and then also making sure that I was breaking the pattern of how my brain was firing when I was having these episodes, I was able to completely get rid of my case of schizophrenia. One hundred percent like it doesn’t exist.

And it’s really interesting thing because again, ninety nine percent of people don’t beat it. But also, I don’t think 99 percent of people go do the research on how to beat it. Lot of people just accept what is said to them by a doctor or doesn’t even have to be a doctor, can be somebody else. Somebody else can tell you, hey, you know, you can’t start a coaching business.

You’re not good enough. You don’t have enough expertise or whatever it is.

Right. And you can either decide to believe it or you can decide, nope, I’m not going to believe it. I’m going to rewire my brain to feel confident and to know that I can do this and it’s going to happen. I’m telling you this story is for a lot of different reasons. All happened to me? It’s now been, let me guess, my age.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s been thirteen years now since that happened and six months for me to recover from it. And then, you know, I transferred universities.

I finished up at Sonoma University in Northern California my last two years, and I bunked with a couple of buddies from high school that I knew well. And we kept sober and I was in the right environment and recovered. Right. And from there, right out of that university, got hired at a marketing agency and then boom, started my entrepreneurial career. But again, the reason I bring this up, guys, is because I don’t accept a couple of things.

One, don’t accept everything that people tell you to be like to be the absolute end all be all truth. All right.

You decide especially when it comes down to what you are capable of as an individual, as an entrepreneur, as an online coach. All right.

You get to decide your success. Anything is absolutely possible. And the other message I want to give here, right, is that things can change fast, freaking fast. Right. Like I was in a psych ward and then six months later, I was completely normal. All right. But it comes down to choice. Like, I had to do a lot of work. It was super mentally challenging to break the habit that my brain had created for hearing voices and hallucinating a lot.

A lot of work, a lot of focus. Again, I had to do meditation and visualization every single day as well and as well as affirmations. I put in the work. I did the research like I looked online and I was like, OK, how do I like who do I need to study? Who are the experts in brain chemistry and understanding how neurons work and all this stuff? And I went and I sort them out and then I studied them and then I implemented everything that they taught.

And so whether it’s somebody you have been diagnosed with, a health disease or whatever it is, you ultimately decide whether that’s a real disease or not. I just saw something cool on online today. I am not going to mention his name, but a very young entrepreneur recently was diagnosed with cancer at age I think he’s like twenty seven years old. And and he decided, nope, I’m not going to have cancer and I’m not doing chemo.

He did alternative medicine the last four months and now the cancer is getting smaller and smaller. It’s almost non-existent. And he did the exact same thing, it seems like that I did when I was 20 years old. Right. He did all of his research. He lowered his stress levels and then he studied what he needed to do to heal himself. And he did. And so I bring all this up because, again, not whether it’s health related, whether it’s business related or whatever it is, just don’t let anybody tell you that things are a certain way.

Like you decide what is going to happen. That experience, I wouldn’t change I would not change that experience. Ever since I have been so grateful for absolutely the smallest things in life because I almost lost my life, so to speak, there in terms of the quality of life that I was about to have. And you can lose it fast. You can overindulge. And but you can also make a comeback.

And so you can make a comeback. Does not matter if you’re struggling right now in business or if you have you tried and failed before or whatever it is, things can change at the drop of a hat. You can lose everything that you have. You can be crushing it. And business and life and relationships and everything are good. And you can lose it all real fast, vice versa. You can have everything going wrong for you.

And real fast everything can turn around. All right.

And in another example, I’ll drop of this is that one of our clients and our mastermind, seven figure visionary, she started with us five months ago when she started with us, she was at seven thousand dollars a month as an online coach.

Just today, she reached eighty three thousand dollars a month. She’s made eighty three thousand dollars this month. And we still have a third of the month left. So she’s going to break over a hundred thousand dollars this month, five months just after working together inside of our master mind, growing from seven thousand to eighty three thousand dollars a month in five months. All right. So, again, things can happen really fast for the good or for the bad.

And so that was really what I wanted to share with you guys is to tell you guys a little bit more of my story. And again, that experience is really what propelled me, I think, ultimately into entrepreneurship, because I learned so much about the brains, about how much potential we all have as humans to decide what happens in life, what we can do with our life. And that really inspired me to just be like, well, yeah, if I can beat, you know, schizophrenia and ninety nine percent of people can’t beat it, like, what else can I do on the positive side.

Right. And so I’m grateful for that experience. And so there’s a couple of things take away from this guy is like if you look back in your life, if you’ve ever had a tough time, just remember, you make it through it, tough times pass. So if that’s you right now in this difficult year for many 2020 covid just know you can make it through if you want it. You got to put in the work though.

You’ve got to put in the reps and then otherwise just know things can change really fast. All right. And so keep your eye on the prize, whatever it is that you want to do, whatever it is you want to make happen, because you can absolutely make it happen. The brain is infinitely powerful as the most powerful computing system machine in the world. Humans on average only use two to three percent of your entire brain capacity. All right.

And that’s why there’s a lot of people that are into meditating as soon as they wake up, because technically your brain is still in that dream state. And if you meditate right away, when you wake up, your brain is kind of like accessing different levels that it normally doesn’t. When you are 100 percent conscious and awake, there’s just so many cool things hack’s out there around the brain that I’ve learned that we’ll get into another episode because this one’s already pretty long.

But again, I just want to share that message with you guys so you get to know me a little bit more. Got to know my story again. You know, some people look at me and may think I have a perfect life or whatever. Everything’s always been easy for me or whatever it is like.

We all have our stories. We all have had our ups and downs. The main takeaways, guys, are just that know that your brain is infinitely powerful. You can achieve and do anything you absolutely want to do. It’s up to you. All right.

And so the ball is in your court and just know that real quickly, no matter where you’re at, you can make amazing things happen and things can happen very very fast and life can change for the better really fast.

And so that’s my example for you there, as well as with our client. Right. Who you know, her life and her business just changed so fast over the course of five months because she decided that she wanted it to. She hired a mentor, which was us, and she put in the work and boom like she’s doing all types of amazing things now. And so things can happen really quickly, guys.

So that is it for this episode. I wanted to show that amazing story for you.

Hopefully that, you know, you guys get to know me a little bit more from that, a little bit more my background. I want to be very authentic and real with you guys, as well as giving you guys tangible tips and strategies around growing an online business and in particular, our coaching business. I also want to talk about and share with you guys personal stories and stuff like that where I think it will relate to and I can relate it back to, helping you in other aspects of life and otherwise give you inspiration to go after and do all the things that you want to do.

Because the worst thing you can do is not do anything and live in regret. Regret and wonder, what if at the end of your life, that is one of the seven things that people regret on their deathbed, is wondering what if and another big one is caring what other people think of you. So if what’s holding you back from starting an online business is that you’re wondering what other people are going to think of you. Right.

That is, again, just so you know, that’s one of the top regrets of people on their deathbed, is they wish they would have just done what they wanted to do and were who they wanted to be without worrying what other people thought. And so those are the takeaways. Guys, I hope this is inspirational or help some of you, no matter where you’re at right now in life and in business in this crazy 2020 year.

But yeah, that’s it for this episode, guys, as always, keep doing. You keep having an absolute blast with your online business. And we’ve got a bunch of cool episodes of cool stuff coming up. A lot more tangible and technical and tactical strategies that you guys can use to grow your online business, online coaching business. So make sure that you hit the subscribe button if you haven’t already. All right. So that you download all the episodes to your phone and so you get notified when new episodes come out because they come out every single week.

Normally times multiple times a week. And we’re going to have some amazing guests on our show coming up here in the near future. So you don’t want to miss that. But a lot of cool stuff in the works and excited to share all this stuff with you guys. So that is it for this episode. Guys, we will see you in the next one.

Hey Dino Gomez here, and if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to head on over to the secretsofcoaching.com for more resources, downloads, videos and cheat sheets to help you grow your online coaching business.

All right. And if you picked up a cool tip or strategy from this particular episode, we would love a five star review where every single month we choose one lucky winner to win access to one of our coaching programs. All right. So that is it for this episode, guys. We will see you in the next one bye-bye.