The Breathwork Framework Every Overwhelmed Entrepreneur Needs | Sam Kabert

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Welcome everyone to Doing Business with a Servant's Heart Podcast. I'm your host, Steve Ramona, and I'm thrilled to have you join us today. The podcast is dedicated to exploring the idea of doing business and living life with a purpose, serving others and yes, achieving success. We believe that when you when we approach our work and our lives with a servant's heart, we can truly make a difference. We create this for show for you because we want everyone to be motivated, inspired, and educated to make an impact in your world. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a community leader, or simply someone looking to bring more purpose into your daily life, this podcast is here to support and uplift you. So let's dive in together. I want you to think about today. This guest is going to be incredible. I love this guy. I want you to think about how you serve today and what impact will you create today from that service. Very important today. Don't wait till tomorrow. Let's explore these questions and embark on this journey of serving others and achieving success. Thank you for being here and welcome once again to doing business with a servant's heart. But that being said, impact was a lot of my monologue. This gentleman is impacting in a way that the world needs. I know it sounds kind of audacious or pervacious, whatever that word is. But if we follow what Sam, my guest, is going to talk about, I think the world will be a better place. Sam, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 2:15

Steve, thanks so so much for having me. What an awesome intro. I'm so stoked to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

Yeah, this is and we're live close. He's about uh 20, 25, 30 minutes away. It's always cool when you have somebody local being being a guest and you know helping my uh audience to grow. I want to start with mental health's a big problem in the world and it's not getting better. How did you prioritize mental health become such a such a for focus in your life and career?

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Well, let's again chills already. Let's just go straight to the deep end. So back in um like 16 years ago, it was 2008. So yeah, about 16 years ago, Super Bowl Sunday. Um, I actually witnessed uh a friend hang himself, and we were in the living room, and that was, I mean, there's some we could just talk about that, the whole thing, right? So that was one thing now, and I was 19 years old within six months of that happening. Um, my mom's cousin was murdered by her husband, and he killed the twin boys on the sixth, uh their sixth birthday party, uh, their six-year-old birthday party. And I mean, between those two events, like that that really messed me up. And I went to Chico State in Northern California, which is a very notorious party school, and I ended up joining like the top frat and just living above the most popular bar in town. And I repped monster energy drinks, uh spring breaks trip, all the things, and really, in hindsight, a lot what I was doing was numbing myself, right? And then I got into entrepreneurship uh right before I graduated, and I've always been passionate about mental health since then. I would say like 2008 or so, but even growing up, like I very much have been uh dealing with depression and just like not feeling like this place, this planet is home and seasonal effectiveness disorder, things like that. That even though growing up in California, you know, it's still a thing. And then in 2019, all this culminated in building my business to a million-dollar company with no employees, just virtual assistants. And I had a top podcast and was known as the VA guy, wrote three books in a year, was named to Silicon Valley's 40 under 40 list that year. I was uh dating an NFL cheerleader for four years on and off. And uh, from the outside, like I had everything that I had wanted and I'd been chasing. And you know, anyone could look at my life and be like, wow, that's so like that's amazing. But I was just putting on a front and I was I was very depressed and I hit this numbing depression, and then a plant medicine known as ayahuasca found me. And after sitting with that medicine, I changed my entire life. It was people say this medicine is like 12, 14 years of therapy packed into a single night. For me, it felt like an entire lifetime or lifetimes of therapy. And since then, back in April of 2019, I've drastically made a 180 on my life.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Wow. And ayahuasca is their Aaron Rodgers plant that I call it. That's the one he's been taking, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:34

Yeah, he uh he kind of made it a little bit more popular recently, for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

So what an incredible story. I'm I'm glad you're here because I'm sure there were times you probably just I'll just leave it at that. What do you do to really use this breath work? It sounds like you help with mental health and PTSD and all these issues. How's the breath work?

SPEAKER_02 5:58

Breath work is fantastic. Like I did my first breathwork journey, we'll call it, a week before ever sitting with ayahuasca, and I literally felt reborn. So let's rewind. Breath work is a very trendy term right now. In fact, uh, I believe from 2023 to 2024, in just one year, internet searches went up by 40% on the term breathwork. And it means so many different things to different people. And as a certified yoga instructor and a certified breathwork practitioner, uh, I'm very passionate about delineating and teaching what breath work is, because a lot of times when we say the word breath work, we're talking about just like simple exercises to shift from fight or flight to rest and digest. And for that reason, I like to call those breathwork exercises as opposed to a breath work journey. Now, a breath work journey is a deep dive into your psyche where we're doing a certain style of breathing. And your listeners uh might be familiar with holotropic breathing or Wim Hof breathing. It's kind of similar to that, or even transformational breath. There's a lot of different styles out there, but most of these styles are all activating the same thing, and it's just different ways to get there. And what we're doing is it's a specific style of breathing to stimulate or simulate a trauma response. So I like to think of it like this: if we were to imagine a lion chasing a gazelle in the Serengeti, if that gazelle is lucky enough to get out alive, what does it do? Well, that that gazelle starts to shake and convulse because it's now releasing that trauma it just experienced. Moments later, you'll see that gazelle just chilling and chomping on some of the foliage. Whereas with humans, we are trained from a very young age, from being a child and having a temper tantrum to not express ourselves. We're making a scene, we're being disruptive, we're being dramatic, all these things. When really what the child is doing is they're letting that energy that they're experiencing move through their body. So as a result, we start to constrict, we start to contract, and we start to disassociate from feeling from a very young age. And that stays with us as we grow up. So the idea of doing a breath work journey is to allow your body to get into that trauma response. So those stored energies and traumas that are in your body from like your whole life can start to move out of your field. Like, literally, when I did my first breath work journey, I literally felt reborn. Not everyone has as intense of an experience that I had, but a lot of people have like maybe uh memories from repressed, suppressed memories, or maybe loved ones that have passed that have lived uh visited them in their experience. It's a very profound experience, and that is very good for what you allude to PTSD and uh overcoming trauma, all that type of stuff. Last thing here, going back to breath work exercises, which are to get shift into rest and digest. I think of that as a daily maintenance or daily practice, and that's something we can do at any point in our day. Maybe it's the morning, maybe it's the evening, or maybe just starting to notice how you feel throughout the day and just taking a couple minutes for some deep breathing. We can talk about the different styles so that you can start to shift into rest and digest. So, again, just to wrap it all up in a bow, the two styles of breath work or the two things to know are breath work exercises for rest and digest on a daily maintenance, and breath work journeys to release it's a deep journey of releasing trauma, PTSD, all of those sorts of things, which might be like something you do monthly, quarterly, or annually. You don't do it all the time.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

So that's the long term, and the rest and digest is the short term. Oh my god, I've got this big meeting coming up. Do some breath act uh breath breathing to calm me down from that uh fight or flight. Oh my god, I'm gonna mess up this meeting or this podcast. Is that what you're saying? 100%. You got it. Phenomenal, phenomenal. Audience, I hope you're taking notes, man. This is because you've got the the the secret sauce, that's probably the wrong word, but a way to really handle trauma, which we deal with almost daily.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of people are starting to speak out about this type of stuff more and more. Um, what I feel my secret sauce is more than that is this six-step breath process that I developed. And the word breath is an acronym. And this is the process and framework that I'm teaching on stage when I uh do keynote speeches for companies and in my new book, Overcome the Overwhelm. And the very high level of that, if you will unpack it, I'm happy to. But the high level is to understand that emotions are energy in motion. So, kind of like everything that we just discussed, these emotions that we're feeling are designed to be in motion. But when we constrict and we tighten, that energy gets stuck and it gets stored in the body. Now, taking this a step further, science teaches us that we have a 90-second physiological response when we experience an emotion. So if we put this together, now we can understand, hey, if I can just give myself a few minutes, you know, I'm not going to like put on a stopwatch and count to 90 seconds, but just a couple minutes, take a time out, focus on my breath, and allow this energy to move through me. Now, where the pundits kind of come in is like, well, no, I still feel that way. And it's like, well, your body has processed it, but now your mind is reliving the past. So now you're reliving it and your body is re-experiencing it again. So, what do we do in those 90 seconds? That's the acronym breath. And the high-level version of that is just three simple themes. It's first breathe, then you feel, and then you leave the experience thinking intentionally, like positive affirmations. That's like, you know, six steps can be a lot to remember. So summarizing it in those 90 seconds, breathe, feel, and think intentionally.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Can we do an example? Would you be okay? So trauma just hits you. I guess do you need to know what kind of trauma? You probably so trauma hits you, and you got these 90 seconds. Let's go through the three steps.

SPEAKER_02 12:38

Yeah, let's let's uh think of it as like a trigger, yeah, versus like a traumatic event. But this is something I I speak about uh all the time because it's super relatable. And typically when I experience a trigger, subconsciously, meaning I'm not aware that I'm doing this because our subconscious makes up 95% of our awareness, which we don't have access to. I'll just kind of be like, I'm not really hungry, but I'll walk over to the cupboard and I'll but grab a big bag of pistachios, not like a small bag, like a big bag of pistachios, and walk over to the trash can or the counter, which has like a trash can that pulls out, and I'm liver literally just hovering over this, cracking shells. And I'm telling myself, like, oh, it's okay. I'm I'm mindfully eating, but like I'm cracking cracking these shells, thinking, like, oh, like I'm I'm earning the pistachio, right? But after like five minutes of doing this or eating a half bag of pistachios and just like scavenging on this, I'll think to myself, what am I doing? What am I avoiding from feeling? And it's in that moment that I get an opportunity to shift from reacting, which is reacting for me is emotional and binge eating. For a lot of us, it can be scrolling on social media or any of these things. And once you get to that point on whatever it is for you that you find yourself in a reactive type uh mindset, and you think to yourself, what am I doing? Now you have the opportunity to respond. So the six steps applied would look like this. I I typically would have a few pistachios still on my palm. Go, I'm gonna finish those naturally, right? I'm gonna enjoy those. Then I'll seal up the bag and I'll put the bag away. I'll walk over to uh take a seat, typically on my couch or find a chair, sit down. And the first step of the breath process is breathe to slow down. So I'm gonna close my eyes and nothing fancy here. I'm just gonna inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth. And by letting the exhales be longer than the inhales, that helps to get us to shift into rest and digest. Next thing is the second step, which is the R in the breath process, relax to feel. Now I'm going to allow myself to feel these energies moving through my body, and this is where we might start to experience a little bit of resistance. So, what we're going to do is get curious, which brings us into the third step, which is energy to reveal. And now, as I'm continuing to breathe, just slow deep breaths, I'm going to start to ask myself, what is this energy here to teach me? What can it reveal something to me? What is the lesson? What am I avoiding from feeling? And this is truly the part where like a lot of us get stuck because especially in a work day, right? If you have a meeting coming up or you're in the office or whatever the situation might be, you're like, no, no, no, I don't have time for that. I I can't look at this right now. But the truth is we need to accept it, which is why the fourth step is accept to surrender. So whatever's coming through, we need to find ways to accept it. I talk in the book and other places about different ways to do that. One modality is through parts work, internal family systems, a psychotherapy practice, getting to know the different thought forms and building relationships with them and giving them names that can help to accept. And then finally, after those first four steps, and we've accepted and we've learned what this lesson is. Now we can alchemize it and we can transform it. This is the tea in the breath process, transform into empowering beliefs. And we're going to use I am statements because to say I will be or anything other than like I am is to tell your subconscious, I am not that. And your subconscious takes it as factual evidence, being like, oh, I'm not that, which is why I like to joke and say Stuart Smalley from SNL in the 90s, he was right, with you know, I'm this, I'm that, and all these things. It's like, yes, you are that. This is the time to invoke the power of positive thinking. And finally, the H in the breath process is habits to integrate. So as a result of what was shown to me through step three, energy revealed and what I've accepted and what I'm transforming, what different habits and behaviors am I going to actually take action on? Because I'm very much someone who's about taking action and integrating what we learn so that we're not continuously just coming back to the six-step breath process. Cause I tell people all the time, like, if you find yourself like always needing to come back to like go through this process and you're processing the same thing, then there's a few things going on here. Either one, you haven't fully got to the lesson and accepted it, or two, you haven't integrated and taken action on what it is you need to change in your life. So you don't have to keep coming back to this. But this six-step breath process is the number one tool that you can use at any point in your day to overcome anxiety, stress, or any triggers. Now, trauma is that that's a little bit deeper. We can expand this breath process, and it wouldn't be necessarily in two minutes, but we can use this same framework for sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Just know it takes longer. Awareness is what I'm hearing. Sam, the the you being aware of all this anxiety trauma, and that's what you're doing with these steps, right? 100%. Yeah. That's so freaking powerful. I rarely say frickin' my podcast, but that is just amazing because that's I think the problem with people that I'm not an expert, but what do I do? I have this, but what do I do? You go, here's what you do to it. I'm gonna be very blunt, but you know what I mean. 100%. That's it. Yep. And and this is what you do with your clients. You bring them in, give them a game plan of breath work and breathe and the acronym and all that. So when they're on their own, because we have to take action, you can't be on my shoulder 24 hours a day. You so you educate to allow people to learn this.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Well, I do have a breath club, which is a monthly membership, and it's less than $50 a month, and we meet weekly to uh do breath work in real time meditation shares in real time. But the real benefit of it is there's a WhatsApp community where like anytime someone's experiencing something, I'm teaching people how to communicate like nonviolent communication and hold space for other people and offer reflections as well as I'm coaching in there as well. So, like a lot of times when something's coming up and we schedule some uh a session with say therapists, by the time we get to that session, we're like, well, I was feeling this way, but now it's I'm feeling that way. So to your point of like, I can't always be there doing it for or with uh all the clients. We do have the WhatsApp community where it's like, you know, the more people that are learning how to hold space, we can jump in and support each other in real time.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

That's huge. And again, you just give them more opportunities, and that's available to anybody. I know WhatsApp is just like social media or Facebook or anything you just jump on. That's that's a servant's heart right there. What do you think is the biggest challenge of people working and breathing? Uh can you ask that another way? So what do you think? What's a piece of advice you tell somebody says, hey, I do breath work and it's not working for me.

SPEAKER_02 20:15

Um, I I think it's honestly super simple to just focus on your inhales and exhales. Like I'll try to speak for about two minutes because I can be long-winded sometimes. But uh for you, Steven, anyone listening, right now, just focus on slow inhales through the nose and even longer and slower exhales through the nose and notice your breath because so often when we're in conversation with someone else, we are thinking about what we're going to say next. So if you notice your thoughts are coming up when you're trying to be present with that other person, come back to your breath, focus on that. And not only will you find that you're starting to be more present and not have those ping-ponging thoughts back and forth in your mind, but also this is training your nervous system to breathe. Because most of us, uh, yes, we the breath is the only function in our body that we can consciously control, and also we can not consciously control it, just happens, right? So, because of that, a lot of times our breath becomes choppy and shallow. So as we're communicating with someone else, or maybe even just listening, listening to a podcast, or even watching a movie, a show, whatever, focus on your inhales and exhales, not only to clear your mind, be more present, but also you're training your nervous system to breathe in that way.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

This is what audience, this is what a successful person does to be more successful, to give value to you. He just gave you a great tip. I'm I'm I'm writing it down, I'm gonna use it. And for free. He's like, try this, and you know, there's other reasons we won't get into it. So I really appreciate you doing that because you're out there to help people. Yeah, you would need to make money, we gotta live and all that. You've been very successful, but you're still out there with a servant's heart. Talk about your podcast real quick so people can access that.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

Yeah. Thanks, Steve. My podcast is called Soul Seeker. I've been doing it since 2019. And I've talked about it. Luckily for me, I have a title that is very vague that Soul Seeker. It can go in a lot of different directions. So it's morphed and evolved over time from talking about the human origin story and psychedelic therapy to just basic mindful practices for business professionals. So there's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, anything that has to do with mindfulness, spirituality, like it. We go deep. We also keep it kind of uh practical and accessible for beginners. But yeah, it's called Soulseeker S-E-E-K-R. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Soul Seeker, I love it. So reach out there, I'll have the link in the in the show notes. Um, also to the book. Name of the book again. Where can we find it?

SPEAKER_02 22:55

Overcome the overwhelm. And that is on Amazon. And my website, samkbert.com. And just super simple, Sam Kbert with the B uh.com. And there you can find links to everything. Really active on um uh YouTube and Instagram and try and be more active on LinkedIn too.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, thank you. I was just gonna ask you. See, we've we're our minds are thinking alike. I just how can the people reach out? So go to samkbert.com. I like to end with something personal. So you're in Santa Cruz and people don't know Santa Cruz, it's the beach area, it's beautiful, it's quiet. We were just talking about why you moved out there. So, what does it look like on a Friday night in Santa Cruz for Sam? What does he do?

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Oh, Friday night in Santa Cruz uh for Sam is hanging out by myself, being in my own energy and trying to resist working, maybe just uh catching the sunset on the beach or maybe watching a movie or something. But I mean, I am single at this point right now, and one of the things that uh was such a gift for me personally during the lockdowns with respect to the devastation it caused was I realized how much anxiety I had when Friday nights came and Saturday. It was like I felt like I needed to, I needed to be out there doing things with people or with friends. And it's like I actually prefer just being in my own energy a lot of the time. So releasing any of the guilt and shame and just be like, yeah, I'm gonna own this. I'm just chilling by myself and just doing my thing. I actually enjoy it a lot, you know.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah, own your own energy. That's what I do. I'm gonna remember that. That's really good. Um, thank you, Sam. This has been incredible. I I just I'm gonna get the book because I'm fired up because I'm sure a lot of this is in the book that I can use. Um, and I'm gonna share this with a lot of people because I deal with entrepreneurs, talk about stress and anxiety. Well, you know that I know you work with a lot of them. Um, you know, go to YouTube. This will be on YouTube in a couple days, comment on it, reach out to Sam if you reach out to me if you need to connect with them, because this is powerful. Guys, this is not a CRM or an AI product. This is a life changer. And I hope you, if you don't agree with me, send me a message. I don't mind, because let's talk about. But what he just showed you today in like 26 minutes, it's changed my life already. I can't wait to dive into it. So, also don't forget my TV show, Together We Serve. It's Fridays at 2 p.m. uh Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. And as always, me and Sam, thank you so much for watching and listening to this episode. We'll see you on the next episode of Doing Business with a Servant Sire. See y'all.