Jared Bringhurst on Healing Failure
From multiple million dollar businesses to multiple bankruptcies and the choice of divorce after 13 years of marriage, entrepreneur, Jared Bringhurst helps us tackle one of the biggest obstacles to total healing, how to heal failure.
Referenced in the Show
Jared’s Bio
Jared Bringhurts is a Senior Marketing director in the Miliare Group and has a team of over 200 people across the United States including Hawaii. In his new business, Jared is now on a mission to coach entrepreneurs and cure financial illiteracy through education along with people like Ed Mylett, Christopher Paliska, Ali Zamany and Edwin Arroyave, among many others.
A born and bred entrepreneur, Jared began like a lot of kids, selling lemonade and cookies, then built a baseball card shop in his driveway. He has been a business owner, officially recognized by the IRS for 20 years :), in multiple industries from real estate, wholesale, to retail stores, and most recently he sold over $20 million in high efficiency windows.
Father of two daughters, age ten and six, he resides in Salt Lake City, UT.
Full Transcript
Sarah Marshall ND: Welcome to Heal. From multiple million dollar businesses to multiple bankruptcies and the choice of divorce after 13 years of marriage, entrepreneur, Jared Bringhurst helps us tackle one of the biggest obstacles to total healing, how to heal failure. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Marshall.
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Sarah Marshall ND: Jared Bringhurst. Welcome to HEAL the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this.
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah. It's my honor. I'm really, really, really, really excited to be doing this with you.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how to introduce you. I'm like, I mean, I was, I've been thinking about this for two days and I've been like, Well, he's an entrepreneur, but that does not even begin to sum it up. Like, and that's not really, we don't have to. I know you know who you are is going to come through strong through our conversation here, but father of two extraordinary girls, a kick ass family and you've run, sold, left, had to walk away from numerous businesses, your time and my recollection of the story.
So when did you actually start your first business, where you like 8?
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah, it was, yeah. I mean, pretty much. I mean, I've been hustling my parents since I was born, but the first time I actually exchanged money was I was about eight years old and you know, kids used to sell lemonade, we'd sell lemonade cookies and a couple other things and I learned very early on, you know, we used to stand out on this street called vine street. It was a two way street, but it was pretty busy. It wasn't like a normal residential street and I found out, you know, I was holding a sign and doing the whole thing. And I, I figured out, man, when I stepped in the middle of the street a little bit, cause I was just trying to make my friends laugh, the cars would stop. And you know, we had this guy stopped. He pulls over and yelled, “get out of the street! You guys have got to get out of the street! You can not do that!”. You know, we're a bunch of eight year old kids. Yeah. But then you bought something and I was like, Hmm.
So the next time the guy takes off, I stand back in the middle of the street with my sign, boom! After adult, after adult yells as but they bought something and that, that was the beginning of it. And I went from everything from that to, I used to get excused from school early because I had a card shop at the end of my driveway, I had to go to the Sam's or Costco.
And my dad, I used to love collecting sports cards and I'd buy boxes of sport cards. And then I flip them. Cause you could get, let's say a box of 20 costs, two bucks a pack. I could flip them for four or five bucks a pack. So I was making hundreds of dollars a month, five, six, 700 bucks.
Sarah Marshall ND: And you would leave school early to be able to go run your business?
Jared Bringhurst:I got my parents to give me a note to get out of school, like five, 10 minutes early so I could run home and set up my card shop until and I also got massively bullied growing up until the kids decided like, wait, he's a skinny little run with all these things and they took my cards. But I, I remember I begged my dad to build me this super fancy permanent card shop in our front yard.
He was like, no, I'm not doing that. So I'd roll a table out. All that I've done every kind of business you can think of, but really seriously, I haven't had a job in 20 years. I've done real estate wholesale, I've done retail, I've done flipping homes, I've done developments, I've done...my last company was a window company and we sold a little over 20 million in five years and then turned my company over to my franchises. Or like you said, I've also gone broke twice. I've lost everything. A few times, houses, cars, investments, money, you know, the whole nine yards.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah, all of the things that we have to go through in this world, like I, you know, at one level I feel like this is sort of a broken record statement, except that I think we can't really grapple with it enough to make it real, which is like every single person in my life I know who's really successful is because they've been willing to face and go through and deal with failure. More than most of the rest of us. And like, I just it's like, I think you and I talked about this before and I'm going to get the details wrong, but fortunately, Kendra, our producer will get it all straightened out and put it in the show notes perfectly.
But the gentleman who created the Marvel comics. Apparently my recollection is he had a lifetime of like, you know, being quite frankly yelled at, picked on and looked down upon for being in comic books. Especially I think it started in like the fifties and the sixties, and this was like not considered an adult thing to be doing at all. And comics were for kids and there was like this whole world around him, most of his career have a stigma about it and he just kept moving forward, kept me forward. And then in his seventies was the first time that a Marvel movie went blockbuster. And the headlines read an overnight success. And he was like, are you kidding me? Like, you know, whole lifetime, this whole world of everything that we do up until that point. And so, you know, and I, I grapple with it too, like you and I have talked about the difference between a business owner and self-employed and like, really I'm, self-employed like, I've never, I don't have employees.
Like I employed myself and I haven't had a job. The last job I had was.,I think working as a ski instructor at snowbird ski resort, when I was 20 years old, that was like to pay the bills. And I worked as a waitress alongside of that. And that was the most corporate job I ever had was working for snowbird corporation.
Like otherwise I was a raft guide and I've been a barista, but otherwise it was, there was just no way I was going to work for anyone else. Yeah. But with that comes this world of In the beginning, what felt like on a daily basis, it was 80% confront of I'm going to fail, I am failing. this is never going to work out, what the heck am I thinking? And then at some point I got more and more traction. NowI don't have those thoughts as often as often.
Jared Bringhurst: Yes, as common, Yep.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. So what I see is the opportunity for this conversation is how do you do it? How do you bounce back? Or is that the right word? Like, can you heal failure?
Can you, what does that actually even mean? You know, this podcast is about how do we heal? And we've talked about all kinds of things in the physical realm, the emotional realm, the spiritual realm. We dabbled a little bit about people's relationship to money and how similar, what people deal with around money is a lot of what they deal with in health, actually, there's a big correlation there, but what we haven't looked at is this, this thing that looms in all of our lives in many different areas, not just finance or career, but is failure. What's what say you about that, Jared?
Jared Bringhurst: Well, I think there's a couple of things I don't relate to it as bouncing back, first of all, because that would dishonor everything I learned from the quote unquote failure.
So I just look at it as. Look, the only way I really relate to myself as like it's a real failure, it's actually like, Oh man, that's a crime is if I don't build from it. And I think about this in relationships, you know, I talk more about it in the middle of the divorce we got COVID I lost my dad two years ago suddenly. I lost my business in February. So in the last two years I lost my dad and went to dinner with them on a Tuesday or Thursday, lost them on my birthday. On Monday, I COVID hit, turned over my franchise, my franchise, or got divorced, moved out. You know, like created a whole new business built in the middle of COVID on zoom while raising my kids at home because they couldn't go to school.
That's a lot to deal with, but I just feel like, let's say my real estate. I had millions of dollars of real estate. I had a development with eight townhomes commercial project, I think three spec homes, which means that we're building them with the intention to sell them for more, a couple rentals. The house I lived in.
And one that we were doing like a fix and flip. So all of that at 27, 28 years old, and then the market crashed and I lost everything. I mean, my wife was pregnant with our first kid. I mean, I pulled up to my house one day and thought that my lawn narrated, cause there was a sign in the front, you know, the signs they put when they do it.
And I pulled up closer. Yeah. I was like, Oh shit. Yeah. That's a foreclosure notice. And I walked in my soon to be ex-wife was upstairs showering. She didn't even know his home. I walked in my basement and cried so hard that for the first time ever, I was like, afraid I might hurt myself. Yeah. And I called my dad, my dad's a, so like I said, my dad passed, but my dad was the guy, my G my dad's the guy, the guy you call, like no matter what's going on with my dad, you call him he's there. Period. End of story. So I called him and he came over, made me feel better and I'll never forget a couple of days later losing everything drove my titanium, silver 2006 m3 over from Germany, just for me, my dream car back to the bank, lost everything, moving into our friend's basement for free cause I couldn't afford anything. And I was driving my dad's Accura because I was borrowing it and I was pulling onto the freeway and I remember the sun coming up and I was like, Oh my God, I'm free. So all of that hardship could have been a failure, like, Oh my God, I'm never going to do this again. I can't ever get back in the game. I’m... what happens if I do it again? I filed bankruptcy on my 30th birthday. Birthdays are a little trip. So 30th birthday filed bankruptcy, my 39th birthday, my, my pops passed away, but I, I realized the lesson was, I was building all this for the wrong reason. I was trying to get stuff to fill some hole in my heart, trying to fill, get stuff.
Like I still love cars. Don't get me wrong. It's not like forget cars. I want a million cars now. I just don't want them because I think something's wrong with me. I want them because I love great machinery. I love driving fast. I love racing. I love the, the, all the different things. Me and my car people always talk like if somebody asks you what your favorite car is, you know, that's not a car person because that's like a foodie being like, what's your one favorite food? It's like, well, wait, are we talking Italian? Or are we talking to Mexican? Yeah, anxiety producing question. When you're a car person, like I don't, what do you mean one? That’s inappropriate question! And, so like it's okay to do that and now it just doesn't drive me.
I don't have to have it. And that day was the lesson. So going back to the failure, how do you get through it? Is I build on top of it. I think when people say, Oh man, like my... I've been married for 13 years. I've been together with her for 16. My conversation is not, Oh my God, I'm starting over. Do you know how horrible that would be if I was starting over as a 25 year old, I'm 41 that dishonors the 16 years I've learned, the 16 years I've built, what it is to be a dad of a 10 and six year old girl, the business I've built. So I'm now dating with all of that new information gentlemen, powering that is. I get to be the human that I missed and all the things I missed in our marriage.
And I love Jamie. I love her so much and we chose.. Hey, we're going different paths. It's been hard as hell, has been the hardest thing I've ever gone through. And as you know, I've talked to you a lot about it, but in the process we're honoring each other. And I know we're going to end up as friends and I know we're going to end up as great co-parents and I know, I mean, she lives in the same apartment complex as me.
She lives 200 yards from me, so we could raise our girls close together. And if I didn't take that into dating and learning the things that I did, that didn't work for me and her, my piece in all of how the divorce went, in what I did financially and the going broke and the impact that has on people.
And, you know, then I think that would be a failure. So how do I deal with it? I just make sure that I learned from it. And then the second piece that I think is probably how I get through this stuff the most is I always look at how is this chapter in my book going to make a difference for other people, like, okay.
I went broke. That sucks for me. Okay. Yes. I can make it through. Yes. I'm gonna learn the lesson, but then I'm like, okay, how can I share this with somebody else gets valued that I think really is the thing that heals me the most and brings the most healing is when I can share my story and have somebody else go, Oh man. Okay. I'm going to be okay. Oh, Jared went through that? I'm going to be okay. And that's the most healing time is when I get to share that.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah, it's so dead on to what the whole theme we've had in the conversations of Heal because when I originally set out to create this podcast, one of my intentions was to share the good, but really the bad and the ugly, the like, like actually vomiting your way through this as normal.
And you know, this is when you have flares of an auto-immune disease, what you actually have to manage for, and like, Because then people get their own humanity in a new way and they can actually like relax. And I think we have, you know, we, the looking good culture we have, and I don't know that we ever have it.
I wasn't alive a million years ago or a thousand years ago, so I have no idea. But my general understanding is human beings have been pretty driven towards making sure that to our outside fellow man, it looks like we have it all together all the time. And yet. What corrodes us on the inside emotionally and I've even seen physically into the diseases is thexd secrets and these withheld shame, ridden failures and experiences because well, I can't say because really my suspicion and what I've learned from like sociologists, like Bernay Brown, she does a ton of work around shame and vulnerability and you know what it is to live, what she says, wholehearted living. And what I think you've said is a really big deal about like, how can I share this in such a way it's going to make a difference for people. And that's like bringing something that could have been a buried experience of shame, which we now know fasters and causes all kinds of internal problems emotionally and physically, where shame is likeI'm bad and guilt is likeI did something bad.
And shame is I want to hide it and I don't want anyone to know. And we leave it in these dark crevices, in like our spaces of our psyche and if we can bring light and shed light on it, most of the shame actually dissipates. And you start to worry. I mean, it's like at one level you just sound so empowered. You just skirted right over the top of like, yeah, and then I went broke twice. Those are such significant things for so many people that they can never admit, they don't even always tell their spouses about, they don't tell their family members about. And I think that piece of, you know, and I'll also say sharing it with wisdom, this doesn't mean that you went out and posted your dirty laundry on Facebook, like instantly, you know, I do know you actually are really active on social media and you crafted shares and you actually thought about how you could. And another thing I know about you as you move fast around it, Like you don't give it time to fester. You don't let it sit for very long. I mean, I don't know the timeline you could tell me, but like you and Jamie shared about your divorce publicly on social media, within, you know, six weeks or so, I want to say of like, when you guys were really clear, that's what was happening.
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah. When we...from the time we told our kids to sharing, it was a month from the time her and I were crystal clear with six weeks. And from the time we were kind of dealing with stuff was a couple months, but the, the intention there was a couple... and you set a couple of really great things that I, I just think about is I learned… So when I first went broke in real estate, I was having panic attacks before I went broke. I mean, I remember when Jamie and I first got together, I’d woke up in the middle of the night, once at like two or three in the morning and walked to the park and had an absolute anxiety attack. Panic attack. I didn't know that's what it was at the time. Crying hysterically, bent over, like the whole thing. She had no idea what was going on and why that happened was because I was hiding it from people. I was hiding the true nature of what was going on. I was hiding what was actually happening, you know, so that, that is incredibly impactful. And I learned over time. If I'm the first person that's willing to say it and tell the truth, it's going to free me up. And nobody will be able to, like, I have all the power over me literally now, in life, and this has been 20 years of practice. There's nothing anybody can say to get me,because I've already said it and I'm willing to say it.
Sarah Marshall ND: So, what I got from all that is like the, the lessons you've learned or the things you've created as part of how you heal from failure is really more about like the context you put it in, like what it, what it means to you. And what I'm hearing is like, you see, okay, this horrible, which we could decide whether, or not really as horrible thing happened to me or happened. What am I going to do about it? And that one of your access points is, is like how it now can be a contribution to others, which I can see how that takes something that would seem invaluable and immediately turns it in by shifting the context to something that's now valuable, it's valuable to you, it's valuable to other people. It's this like difference making opportunity, opportunity, is probably some of the root of you being an entrepreneurs since you were in the womb. And you know, it is cause you, you, that's your outlook on the world is like, what's the next opportunity? What's the next opportunity. And that's some of how that's gets shaped, you know, and we talked about how shedding light on things that we typically think of as shameful is actually where the liberation and I would say the healing comes from. Now how do you determine who to share with? Cause like that's a whole thing.
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah. It's not necessarily who, but more what, and at what time, so the first thing I look at and the first thing I look at is I don't want to damage anybody else in the process. So right now, when I'm going through a divorce and there's certain things that are hard and there's, you know, moving on and going through it, no matter what happened in the marriage, no matter who wanted the divorce or how it went, it's hard.
It's been hard for me. It's been hard for her. So what I share about my divorce publicly, number one is, am I, am I at a place where I can honor all the people involved, my kids and my soon to be ex-wife. And if I can't do that, I won't share it yet because I'm also not going to torch somebody else because I feel like sharing. I feel like I've got the right. I don't want to do that. The second thing is, is I share things as soon as possible. So I'm different too, though. You know, Jamie likes to be a little bit slower about those things. Like you said, I handled things very quickly. I go through things very fast. My last business, I lost it.
I literally similar thing cried in the corner of my empty office. It was my dream office. It was the coolest office ever, ever, ever, you know, like I said to 20, over 20 million in sales and five years and lost it all. And I cried one night and then two days later started a solar company because I think I'm really, really good at getting the reality of things and then dealing with the impact.
And I think this is the other part that really helps me is I know, every single thing that happens in my life, as long as I keep moving forward and I don't clam up and get more resigned and cynical about life, like in a divorce, it's easy to be like, well, women are there this way and I'm never going to date another one of those.
I'm never going to blah, blah, blah. But then I'm just calling it in my life, all that crap. And I'm listening for it and looking for it. And if you're listening for it and you're looking for it, guess what you're going to find. You're going to find it. So versus doing that, I just go, Oh man, really appreciate everything we've been through.
I love that woman, so much. I respect her. I think she's one of the best human beings on the planet. I think whoever ends up with her is going to be one of the luckiest people ever, and we're not creating our life together anymore. So we're moving on and I know looking back, this is going to be the best thing that ever happened.
I already feel that way about it. I already feel that how my life is going up until now businesses, relationships, my father passing, Winnie passed, the stuff we dealt with, my mom, my mom had breast cancer. I tell my mom and we say in my family, the best thing that ever happened in my family is my mom having breast cancer, who the hell says that?
Well, here's why I say it. We were all a little bit checked out as a family. We did the normal stuff, the Christmas, the blah, blah, blah, but kind of going through the motions. Well guess what snapped us out of that? And my dad and everybody ended up, boom, my mom gets breast cancer. We all come together. We didn't miss a chemo appointment. My dad, all of a sudden is super attentive to my mom. Cooks everything, cleans, everything. Doesn't complain. He's not being edgy. He's being happy. He's making sure nobody puts anything in her space. My brother and I are coming together. We're closer. Everybody comes closer in my family because my mom had breast cancer. All right. Well, where's the blessing and the hard things. I think there's blessings in every single hard thing. We did the same thing when my dad died. I love that about my family. A lot of people fight over objects and things like that. My family got closer. My sisters got closer. My brother got closer, my mom got closer and that's, I think really important to live is, you know, what's the blessing? What's the thing? And I think that helps people heal is when you get stuck in this victim, do you have like, Oh, woe is me. I'm getting divorced. Ooh was me, I lost my business. Ooh was me,I went broke. Oh, I'm never going to do that again. Oh, it's so hard versus, Oh, there's probably some lessons to learn here, if I, if I get back up and start moving forward, it's like falling off a bike and I really do treat all of life like a game. Hey, it was a game and business is a game. All right. I'm creating a business school, I'm going for it, I'm going to, I'm gonna try and hit this one over the fence. Oh, damn. I missed.
Okay. Well, Get back up and swing again. Oh, I went to hit one over the fence called’ be married for the rest of your life’, miss that one. I'm 41. I could be depressed and never take a swing again, or I can get back out and go. All right. I learned all these things about honoring myself and not betraying what I really believe in you know, honoring women and my daughters and what it is to be in a relationship and what worked and what didn't work. And now I get to take all of that on to the next time, I'm at the plate again. In business, I learned about cashflow management and building a business too fast. And there is such thing as selling your way out of business. And there is such thing as making sure that you don't grow too fast and making sure you're prepared for it if you do, and not over leveraging yourself and all these things I learned. The crime would be if I didn't take all the stuff I wanted in relationship, all the stuff I learned in business. And then I packed it in a closet, dark away, and then went and got a job and never dated again.
That's not what these tools taught me, like what, no, I gotta go put these tools back into play. And I think that's the most healing thing for me.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. It's like, What are we calling the failure? Right? Like the event that happened, the incident when you lost your business, or when you, you know, said let's get a divorce or is that the failure or is the failure the, what we do after that potentially, right. Like that's where it can come from. And like, yeah. Looking at my own life, I can see where, you know, I have much more of a tendency to regret than resentment. It's just however my brain formed or the family I grew up in. Like, I tend not to get all over blaming other people for the stuff that happens in my life. No, I blame me… like to usually the nth degree and where a lot of my healing and my personal growth over the years has been, has been in that area of self forgiveness and being easier on myself, not being so hard on myself. Like I've had people who I consider like incredibly high performers, people who live like extremely, incredibly awesome powerful lives, look at me and they're like, Sarah, you're really hard on yourself. And I'm like, if that person is telling me I'm okay, cool it right. And that's, that's been one of the biggest challenges and I... Last year, maybe two years ago now I did a silent meditation retreat and I'm still forever blown away at the amount of transformation I can get from sitting on a cushion and doing nothing for eight days. But like literally that's what we did. And you know, there are teachings, there are things that the, my, at that time on Autumn Tuptin was my teacher, you know, he is a Buddhist Lama and he would, he would kind of read the room, which is also amazing to read the room of this group of silent people, sitting on cushions all day long. And he would come up with these teachings for us. And, and we were working through these different what, what are called the poisons. And it's like anger, hatred, pride. There's like a handful of them in the Buddhist tradition. And he literally was like, I want you to pick one and then I want you to spend the next 40 minute meditation diving into it, like deeper, not avoiding it, like going all the way in and cranking up your emotion about it. But then in the meditation, bring peace, bring awareness, bring wisdom, bring emptiness, which is like that space of like letting things be as they are. So he went through the whole there's five of them and one of them was envy.
And what was interesting is I actually was looking at them all and I was like, envy. I'm not a jealous person. Like I don't have envy, like so interesting because you were actually a part of this meditation, which totally cracks me up now that we're having this conversation. It's probably why I thought of it.
So I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm going to, I'm going to look it envy. And for 40 minutes I dove in and I let myself like crank up the volume on where there's jealousy and what I uncovered, where there were a handful of my friends who had been married in their twenties and had children and had successful businesses.
And I had this, I mean, it kind of brings emotion to me now, like I had this world of they have what I want and I'll never have it. You know, my shit sailed. I already, I got a divorce three years after I got married, you know, and like that, that I'll never get to be the person who married in their twenties and stayed together forever and built this life.
And, you know, you and your marriage and your family were one of those people that I was looking at and in the process, and this is the magic of meditation. And I don't even know I'm not, I wouldn't even consider myself good at meditation, but this is what happened, is I did that and I looked at all of it and like out of nowhere this really wise voice was like, so what if you never divorced your husband?
Are you willing to give up all the experiences of life that you've had since your divorce that you would have never had? Now, like I know I would have had different ones, but then I had to like, and I made myself actually look in reality, like John and I got a divorce in April of 2011, and then that summer I went and spent a month working as a pathology professor in Samra, Costa Rica. And I got paid to live in Costa Rica and like, Teach massage therapy students about pathology. And then I went and I started to build what I thought was going to be an alternative hospital in Cancun. And I spent two years working on that project where we were, it ended up going bust, speaking of failures.
And I'm pretty sure there was no hospital. And there's a small chance that the person was actually siphoning investors' money off because none of us had ever seen it. But for two years, I had lived in this possibility of running a nutrition center in a destination hospital in Cancun, Mexico. And I got to go down there and live for free and like build all these relationships.
And then I looked at my relationship with my former Manu and his two girls. And, you know, I had this insane, amazing romantic relationship. And of course this is the moment that the garbage truck is right out the front of my house. And so there's going to be some noise in the background on that note, but, you know, I got to have this incredible romantic relationship withManu where we were creating a relationship across 6,000 miles. He lived in the Netherlands. I lived in the United States. We were going back and forth. My whole life grew to be global. And I had these two incredible girls and his whole family. I'm like I had to face sitting on that cushion. Would I give all that up? Just so that I could say I didn't fail at being married. Like that was the hook that was there for me and facing that.
Jared Bringhurst: Well, I think the other thing about failure is the way I see it. And I've gotten this from the work that I've done with landmark, but the actual definition of failure fail is that you didn't reach a goal you wanted. To look, did I get married to get divorced? Of course not. But so what? I mean, any drama attitude I'm adding. Is there stuff to be responsible for with my kids for sure. Is they're upset and going to take a little while to heal? For sure. Do different people heal and grieve differently? Absolutely. I'm somebody who, when I go through something, I don't know. I don't know if this is healthy or not. This is what I do. The second I knew we were getting divorced, I started envisioning my soon to be ex-wife with other people. Married another person around my kids, my kids coming home and being happy that this other person is more fun than me because likely they will be at first because people are more fun when they're trying to impress you.
My girls being like, well, I want to be with so-and-so all of those that world that at the time was like, I wanted to throw up. But I dealt with it. I looked out in the future, like, what are the things that are going to trigger me so that I don't get triggered because I want authentically be happy for Jamie when she brings somebody home. I created this whole thing. Well, we did about us being one family, not two families. So when she gets in a relationship, cool, then I'm in a relationship with that person. I don't care as long as they're good with my kids and good with her. Great. I'll support it. I I'll do whatever I have to do with my own personal development to be good with that. And part of my process is, and it was the same thing when I grieved my dad, when my dad died, it was hell for six months, but I went through that. He's never going to be there for that. He's not going to be there for my kid's wedding. He's not going to be there. And then it kind of brought all the stuff up so I could deal with it.
I can grieve it appropriately. I could let it up and out. And now. All I do is have appreciation for my dad when I'm, when I'm sad about my dad, I'm happy I'm sad because I don't want him to go away. When I have dreams about my dad. I'm happy. I had a dream, even though I wake up sad I miss him. When I think about them, I'm happy because I don't want my dad to go out away from me out of my existence, so it keeps it present for me. And the same thing with my divorce, the same thing with my businesses. Okay. I'm never going to do this again. I'm going to have to start over again. All of these people, blah, blah, blah. The money, the debt, the people I owe money to I just play it all out. And, you know, what's crazy is every single time the worst case, it was not that bad. It's just not like, all right, I'll start a new business or I'll get a job. The worst case scenario is like, I'll get a job. I'm highly marketable. Fine. Okay. That's not that rough, but worst case scenario is it takes us a little while to get over this, I probably will date again, but the absolute worst case scenario is I don't get married again. Okay. Okay. I've got my two daughters.
Sarah Marshall ND: I having spent many of the last eight years single, I can attest to that. Like, there's a lot of amazing things about that, you know, and I, I even, I went through like phases over the years of regret and upset and make wrong. And then I lived in this funny paradoxical universe of like, I knew John and I should have gotten a divorce. I knew that made sense. I just didn't think I should be a divorced person. There was like this like, you know, and it was really what I was holding that about myself. You know, like, like that I, I, all my levels of like, I should have been able to figure it out. I should have been able to do something different. And then that whole thing, and God there's like nine things I want to say about what you were just sharing. One of which though is a tool for people is what you're speaking to and I keep bringing up Buddhism in this episode, but here we are, is a practice that Pema Chodron who's phenomenal author. And I think she's a Buddhist monk. I think that's her actual designation wrote a book called the places that scare you. And it's a illumination of a practice called Tong Lin practice. And in Tong Lin, you intentionally shine light. You, you go, you know, the proverbial thing is you go sleep in a cemetery. Is you literally intentionally go have the thoughts, the concerns… Now I want to put the caveat, you know, this is inside of like a framework of a healthy mental outlook in life. You know, if you know that who you are as a person that deals with depression and it's not managed yet, and it's not, this wouldn't necessarily be the go-to tool to use, you know, Because you could have some imbalances that spin out, but generally speaking for most of us, it's actually a really powerful thing is to lean into the worst case scenario to actually let ourselves play it out. And in some of the other work that I've done around emotional intelligence, there's a woman who says that anxiety is just undefined fear.
Jared Bringhurst: Hm. And credibly high level of anxiety
Sarah Marshall ND: It's like, you know, they way now with the way that social media operates, we can actually track the words people are using. And we've seen an increase in the word anxiety over the last 10 years, like exponentially. In addition to what therapists are actually diagnosing in their patient populations, which are also going up. You know, anxiety is just been this huge thing. And I think as a culture, we have a practice to turn away from the things that we're afraid of to not look them in the face, to not actually play out the worst case scenario to not actually deal with it.
And so we live in an illusion of, if this thing happened, my whole life would end, everything would be terrible. And it keeps us in this stricken state of anxiety. Whereas in Tong Lin practice, or what you basically were doing is this turning inward and looking okay. Like, let me play it out. My ex-wife soon to be ex-wife now with a new partner and what is that going to be like in the first Thanksgiving we have, and the first time we get together and having to have the conversations with my daughters and like letting yourself move through those spaces and then say, and now what, and now what, and now what, and now what. And there's actually a lot of wisdom in health, fully allowing yourself to go through those spaces. Cause I think so much of what... I know what stops me is an illogical connection that if I fail, there's going to be a loss of love. It took me a while to figure that out. I wasn't actually afraid of losing money. I wasn't afraid of losing clients really. I wasn't afraid, it's like even launching the podcast, which was a huge thing I've had some of my own stuff around going public, just the willingness to be seen on a public level and what comes with it. The potential criticism judgments me saying the wrong things, me quoting stuff that's not scientifically accurate, you know, any of that kind of stuff. And then having the pushback from the community, what really gets me is when I think it's like, I'm going to find out I'm right that people don't really like me. I'm going to find out I'm right. That, you know, they don't really, you know, they might respect me, but they don't actually love who I am as a person. And those like threads, I don't know. That's like something I made up at four years old, probably on the playground as an upset, you know, toddler trying to figure out life.
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah, I think the other thing that hit me in what you just said was the, the avoidance of failure, like if you just get related to it is like a kid, can you imagine a kid riding a bike and they fall a couple of times and you're like, quit. Quit that you're going to get made fun of. It's going to be too hard for you.
You're never going to do this. What, what if someone sees you? What if you get really hurt? What if you break your arm? What did you break your leg? What if you crack your head open and die, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what it was, yeah, quit riding that bike. Don't do that. You're not...
Sarah Marshall ND: You don’t really need to ride a bike anyways. I mean, you could, you know, ultimately you're going to drive a car as it is.
Jared Bringhurst: Well look, we've got Uber. You don't have to get driving cause that's also very dangerous, but that's how people live their life inside of love, inside of career, inside of money, inside of these things that are not, it sounds so ridiculous when you say that about riding a bike, but don't, I can, I can tell you thousands and thousands and thousands of people, you know what they tell me don't ever get into business with family. What cause you have one business relationship in your family go bad that means about my brother, my dad, my mother, like the projection is insane or women, yep, I can't even tell you how many people, ‘oh bro, just wait, women are so emotional’, Like, wow, that's quite the statement. No shit. First of all, what? You're not? You're , you're a robot? Like what kind of comment is that? That we put on people, but then we do it to ourselves og, ‘Oh, wow. If I go broke, then what are people going to think? I can't do that. And I'm never gonna do it again. And I can't get back in the game and Oh, what if I fail twice? And then no, man, I'm really going to look stupid’... And I can't tell you how many times I put ridiculous goals out there and I tell everybody I'm going to do it and then I missed. I told everybody I was going to sell $10 million with a windows this one year we did six. All right, well guess what? I sold 6 million windows. Nobody else did.
Sarah Marshall ND: And the year before it was what, like two something, so you like…?
Jared Bringhurst: We went from 3.4, 3.5,
Sarah Marshall ND: something like that. Absolutely.
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah. But the, the view of, so what, is missing, like, okay. Yeah, my wife and I said we were going to be together. I can't tell you how many people, like they justify their own bullshit relationships with my wife and I now. And here's what they say. I thought you guys had the perfect relationship. It's so relieving, no, you didn't. No, we did. And now we're completing it. Yeah, was there stuff that didn't work and stuff I can see for myself, for sure but that's only looking backward. I'm only looking backward and saying, Oh yeah, I can see all these things missing, but who's to say that's the truth.
Maybe I'm just, I'm just making up stuff that empowers me to move on in life. And yeah, we had a hard time. We also had a beautiful marriage. We have beautiful kids. We were kick-ass parents. We got along really well. We converse through things and it's so funny to watch people go, ‘Oh, Oh look’, and kind of validate their own experience of life where I'm like, why don't you go validate anybody that's not… My wife and I promised when we in our wedding vows that we will always honor our highest and best expression, even if we're not together. We said in our vows, even if that means not being together, well, guess what? Now we're not together because it honors our highest and best expression and that's what we're going to do from her side and mine.
And given that's happening. I'm happier than I've ever been. I'm more free than I've ever been. I'm more confident than I've ever been. And I don't...I don't need to villainize her, to make her wrong. She she's the biggest contributor to that over my 16 year marriage and my kids and everything we've been through and how much she stood by me and going broke twice and loving me and you know, the death of family members and friends and hard things and celebrations. I don't need to villainize it. That's the other thing. Oh, you got me on a rant now, but that's the other thing people think people think to end a relationship, they have to villainize the other person or to end a business partnership. You have to villainize the other person. They must be horrible for me to justify leaving.
No, she's a, she's a beautiful human being. She's going to make somebody super happy. She's an incredible mom. She's like very strong. One of the strongest women I've ever met. She's a therapist. She's going to make a difference. And guess what? That's not what we're creating for the future. I don't have to say anything else. I don't have to justify getting divorced.
Sarah Marshall ND: And that's something like how you've even been talking about it in this last, you know, 30 minutes is really striking because I think even still, I would hear people they would honor their partner, but they would still come up with some justification, like, well, we're just not compatible or blah, blah.
Right. And you actually, I mean, I'm pointing this out because it's easy to miss what's not being said. And you've, you don't say that. That's not how you talk about. You just say, and we're creating something new and we're creating something different. And we created that. Then we completed it and now we're creating something new. And sometimes that approach to me, I sometimes think like, Oh my God, these people are being so robotic, but as lived in my own life and when I apply that to my own life, it is the most clean, most empowering thing ever is to be able to just say, I chose this until I didn't. And now I'm choosing something else because actually that's the closest thing to the truth.
I mean, we try and come up with reasons and stories and justifications around all kinds of different things that we did. That neuroscience will tell us mostly we're full of crap because that's not even how our brains work or what is happening. And it's, it's just, you know, I mean, human beings are storytellers and it's a lot of the fabric of our culture. It's a lot of the fabric of our survival. I love it. This whole podcast is people sharing and telling their stories, but there's something so empowering about being able to speak so cleanly without the events that happened in our lives and not add that means I'm a, this kind of person, or that means they're this kind of person cause then we're trapped and stuck and all that. And then that's the life we've got to live.
Jared Bringhurst: It's like, it gets you handcuffed to the bed of that decision and then you're stuck with it. You're the one dragging it through life, not on me or them. You're the one that has to drag that interpretation. And look, I also don't want to be Airy fairy about this.
Jamie and I have been through health. We've fought, we've argued we've, you know, been through where I've said nasty things about, well, this is why we got divorced and you did this and this and this. Here's the thing I'm proud of though. I’ll apologize. Hey, I'm sorry. That didn't honor what I said, which is we make divorce look good. I'm committed to honoring you, but then I've also, there's also things that have been hurtful. Moving on, iIt's hurtful. I'm moving on. That's hurtful. And I'm not doing it on purpose, but there's also a level of. I'm going to honor myself, but also honor her. I'm not going to put things in her space on purpose, but I'm also going to honor myself. And how do you hold the space for somebody being upset and then not rearranging your life to make them okay. That's another thing that I've learned and really healed for myself because my whole life has been given by if you're upset, I'm going to do whatever I can have you not be upset. I'm an obsess about it. I'm going to think about it. I can't sleep over it. If you're upset. Oh my gosh, what's going on? I can feel it. And it's mine and I get worried. And one of the things that's actually healed is I could be with somebody upset. I can be sad, they're upset and I don't have to take it on for my own. And I don't have to make it mean I have to change my life to fix it. And then I can just authentically look, what's right for me. What am I creating? What do I want? And then I can still be great with them. The other thing is another another time I don't have to make her wrong to justify what I'm doing. Because if you do, you probably aren't being clean. Like if you think you have to justify your own actions, well then why, what, what is, what is inconsistent?
I don't have to justify anything. This is just what I'm creating and I can hold space for the upset and I can, I can be great with her. Or try to, you know, the times that I'm not, I try not to be, you know, and I try to clean it up. So I just don't want to paint a picture like her and I are going through some happy Valley of rainbows and unicorns parts, you know, like that's not, that's not it. And we keep returning ourselves to being, you know, conscious and creating. And we do create, like once we're healed, we really do want to create a best friendship. Once the grief on both sides is healed. Once all of the stuff that's happened is healed. I do think Jamie and I will be best friends. And I do think we'll raise an incredible family together. And I do think, you know, when we're both in other relationships, I think we'll both come together and be happier. I just do.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. And it, you know, the, the not polyan -ing it, and it's. It may seem like we're saying the same thing, but there's, there's something. And I can only say for the listeners is like, you just got to try this out and discover it for yourself is the difference between like positive affirmations and mantras on top of pain and incompletion and resentments and regrets and unresolved, you know, unhealed wounds. For me, I've got a bunch of those still looming in my business. Like I, I am creating being able to impact and share my knowledge and the knowledge of people that I love around me with more and more people and the podcast was a big step in that direction. And five, well now six years ago, you know, but five years before I created it was the first time I said I was going to make a podcast.
And for five years I was like …. (gasps).... because my own unresolved and I could put every positive affirmation of it's my duty to put my good out into the world. And all of my goodness that's inside of me is an injustice that I'm not allowing it out. Like I could see what I didn't freaking matter at all. So there's something distinct about choosing to honor our failures and choosing to honor our challenges. It's it's on both sides. It's not only on the positive. It's also, I've been very honoring of my process and I've been very honoring of, you know, part of my stuff came from, you know, and it's interesting because Tanda Cook and I were in business together when we first started our practice in Bozeman, Montana and Tanda is the first episode of the season of season three. Like she kicked us off and she's a dear, dear friend of mine. And we went through some shit as business owners together. We, we essentially divorced, but we didn't have the structure language of a divorce. So it actually, for me at least was a little messier and we went through years of barely talking to each other and, and then working, I mean, we've worked it out, but there's some spots inside of that, that I noticed is still unresolved for me. Like I'm right on this precipice of what I want to do next is going to require a team. I am not doing it by myself. And I see like my own limitations of when I really do the play the worst case scenario that down, which is like an exercise you can actually do when you're looking at anything in your life. Like you're worried about it. Okay. Will play out. So for me, I look at like, okay, I have a really dear friend.
Now we've talked about going into business together. And I'm like, My brain, the unconscious part goes. Yeah. Are you willing to sacrifice that friendship just to make some more money? Cause there's this evidence from my history that the likelihood of us staying in business long-term and us not ending up in some sort of disagreement or upset about it, I'm like so afraid to sacrifice that friendship. I haven't even been willing to ask this person. To actually legit on the court be like, when are we doing this? Why don't we start it? Cause I have this concern about it. And it like totally blocks me from all kinds of possibilities if what I could be accomplishing in this podcast, in creating courses to go online in creating all kinds of other things other than my private practice.
So like. I'm not just saying like, Oh yeah, it's easy to snap your fingers and just say something new, you're going to have this whole new life. Like, there are things I know, you know, for you, you even said it. You're like, no, you actually did take the time and you're willing to feel the emotions, you know, in the initial moment when your dad died, you know, it was six hard, long months.
And when your business ended, you cried your eyes out for a couple of days. And you, I remember you telling me, you were like, I'm going to be upset and pissed about this for two days. That's what I'm giving myself. And then I'm over it. That's it, that's all I'm giving myself, but also moments where like patients would come back up and then you look at them again. You know, you're not ignoring that. We're not saying that, but it's, it's like, What do you want to say about this event in your life and how do you want it to live for you?
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah, I remember this is a good one, as far as that goes. So I did, so I went to dinner with my dad on a Thursday. He was really sick. We thought he had the flu. He had surgery a little while ago on a hernia, but my dad was the guy. I was like, I'll go to the hospital when I’m dead, that's what my dad would say full life. So my dad had a a torn hamstring and he didn't go to the hospital for two months. So I might have walked around with a torn hamstring for two months, super bruised, destroyed, and actually found a voice memo on his phone after he passed, of the recording of when he went to the doctor and the doctor was like, wait, You've been walking around on this for two months. And he was like, I can't perform surgery on that. I'll find somebody else, but I might know. And they found somebody else who they did the surgery. So we go to dinner, sushi, downtown, or not downtown. So it was The Vegas roll. I'll never forget this. He couldn't eat, he didn't need any of it. Just super sick. And so he went back to the hotel that he and my mom were staying at. And. Then I left the next day for Scottsdale. Cause it was my birthday and I was spending it with my friends. On Friday they're like, Hey, your dad's really sick. We're going to take him to the hospital on Saturday, on Saturday, he goes in and he had this black thing on his face. They didn't know what it was. And so they took him to do a biopsy. They put them under, he had complications and he was in critical condition from Saturday.
I flew back Saturday. He was it, it just got worse and worse and worse every once in a while we'd have this thing. But I was like, I think I'm going to lose my dad. And then Monday morning. So it's crazy. Sunday night, the last thing my dad said to me was happy birthday. I have this thing that I'm making up about it. And my dad thought that was my birthday and he waited to die until he thought it wasn't my birthday. So the next day it's like 7:30 in the morning. They're like, he's on dialysis and it's not going well. So the doctors having the conversation with me and my brother and my mom and my sisters, and Hey, it's time, like, what would he want?
I was like, unplugging from that effing thing. That's something that, is not, my dad would kill us. He would be so upset. So we don't, it's crazy. We walked out of that room and within five minutes of that, they hadn't done anything, my dad passed. I always tell everybody, that's my dad's last F you, like, you're not going to tell me what to do and you're not going to make me.
But then also I'm like, you know what? My dad didn't want my mom to have to do that. And he knew, so my dad died and I remember crying in the corner. It's crazy. I was on the West side of this building. Eight 20 in the morning. And I could see these rays of sun, like the sun was coming up over the West mountains, which the sun doesn't rise in the West end not the East coast… sort of a trip. I'm not like a super woo guy either, but I, I remember physically being like, Oh, the sun's coming up and I didn't think about it. And I'm looking at my phone. And it's like eight 45, whatever it is now. And it's being happy birthday, Dean, I hope this is the best day of your life being like 35 text messages and I'm crying and the tears are streaming down my face and all of these happy birthday, we love you. I hope everything's great because nobody knew. And I looked out the window again and I thought, okay, this is going to go one of two ways. Every year from now on, I'm going to hate my birthday cause it’s the day my dad died. And I'm going to be like, this is the day my dad died. This is the worst day of my life.
And every day on my birthday, I'm going to be suffering or I can make something else up about it. And then a moment looking at my phone, crying, sun coming up on the West side, I said ‘uh-huh’, I'm not doing that. That would dishonor my father. So every year from here on out, I'm going to honor my dad on my birthday.
I get to honor the man who gave me, gave me birth as well as my birth myself. And that's the last two years of what I've done. The next year was my 40th birthday, I took my friends and my entire family to Hawaii. We woke up on my birthday. We did shop at tequila at eight 35 in the morning. We read poems about my dad. We celebrated my birthday that night. We laughed. We played, we had a good time and now I get to celebrate my father every year on my birthday and just remember his great life and the great life he gave me and who he raised me as a man and all the gifts he gave me through my life and all of it. That's that's the decision I made, but look, it was a choice.
I didn't, I didn't have to be empowered about it. I could have been just as disempowered. I just chose to chose this other way because it empowered me. And I, I love that story about it. And when people are like, Oh, well, my gosh, that's horrible your dad died on your birthday. I'm like you had to die on a certain day.
I'm glad he did it on my birthday cause now I get to celebrate him, you know? And that's healing for me. That's, that's another level of honoring people and my dad, I know my dad would be proud of that's what I made up. I know my dad would look down and go thata boy. Thata boy. That's what, that's what he'd want for me.
So I want to honor my dad and what he'd want for me. And it's that way in business. And look, my last business, I didn't know what I was going to do. I was like, Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever. And now I'm in business with one of the 50 richest people under 50. He's the best mentor I've ever met. I went from being in business with somebody I was in, you know, constant strife with legal battles to a man that's semi famous has coached the best people in the world and he's my business partner. And then literally when I got divorced, he checked on me every single day, said I'm praying for you, I love you, I hope you're doing well. I mean, I would trade that last business, making millions of dollars a year in one second right now to be where I'm at and starting over again with the people that I'm in business with one, 100%.
If you're like, Hey Jared, you can go back. You can be running that $20 million business you can make millions of dollars a year. You can even fix all your mistakes you made that, have the business go that way and have all of it right now. Do you want to trade? You want to trade the millions for what you're doing now?
And I'd be like, no, I'm good. Thank you. Thank you. Hey Jared, you could fix your marriage and have it all be perfect and go back. Do you want to, no, thank you. I'll take the lessons I've learned. I'll take the human being that I get to be. Now. I'll take who I am now. I'll take all of that. It's just how I view my life. Cause guess what? You can't go back anyways. So you may as well be empowered about how it went. So, yeah. Thanks for saying all that.
Sarah Marshall ND: I, I mean, we could keep saying the same thing now from here on out, but I think that pretty much nails i t...
Jared Bringhurst: pretty much it. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall ND: Yeah. That's awesome.
Jared Bringhurst: Yeah. Insert my comments into every situation I deal with pretty much how I personally deal with it.
Sarah Marshall ND: Oh my gosh, this, I knew it was going to be awesome. And it was, this was incredible conversation, Jared, I appreciate you so much and sharing your, just heart so vulnerably and your life and all the things you've been through. Like it's a super big deal for us to, you know, all of us going through all different versions of whatever, you know, there's... it's been a hell of a last 12 months, the 2020 that is now behind us.
But like, yeah. You know, for lots of people, massive life changes have happened. And I know a lot of people have, you know, inside this incredibly sad at one level reality we've been in. I mean, I, I personally just got really struck when we hit the 400,000 deaths from COVID that just does something about that just really rocked my world.
Like, I, I don't know. It's not like, I didn't know we were at 399, but like, it just, it did something to me about that, the reality of it. And also the reality that like, we're, it's not like that's the number we're going to land at. We're not done, you know, and I'm, I'm really aware. Yeah. And I have had many, many, many people in my life say what a transformationally empowering year this last year has been and reconnecting to family and spending time with their partners and their spouses.
And re-evaluating what really matters, you know, like, I dealt with chronic fatigue syndrome and I stand by that's the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life. I don't know that I would have ever really, really given up being a workaholic until my body demanded it. There was no way, like, I don't know that I would have, yeah, I think it kind of required this.
And I have so much enjoyment and appreciation of my day-to-day life now. And I used to be able to blow through weeks at a time, a 16 hour work days and not even think twice about it. And I just. My body is like, I'm sorry. You will stop and smell the roses. Dammit. Okay. Here we are. So killer. Yeah. Awesome. Well,
Jared Bringhurst: thank you. Thank you for having me.
Sarah Marshall ND: Absolutely. Until we get to do it again. Awesome. All right. Thank you.
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Sarah Marshall ND: Thank you to today's guest, Jared Bringhurst for his no bullshit stand for personal responsibility. Are you ready to take on your own health? I'm now accepting new clients for 2021. Contact me at SarahMarshallND.com or Instagram at @SarahMarshallND. For a full transcript and all the resources for today's show visit SarahMarshallND.com /podcast.
Thank you for listening. Support and spread the word by leaving us a review on your favorite platform, so we can heal our world special. Thanks to our music composer, Roddy Nikpour and our editor, Kendra Vicken. We'll see you next time.