Lewis Howes is a New York Times best-selling author, 2x All-American athlete, keynote speaker, and entrepreneur. The School of Greatness shares inspiring interviews from the most successful people on the planet—world-renowned leaders in business, entertainment, sports, science, health, and literature—to inspire YOU to unlock your inner greatness and live your best life.
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Of continuing to tell yourself a story that your right person is is they they're still out there. They just don't wanna be with you anymore. Oh, man. Then there's what you're talking about. And they might be with someone else. And they're with someone else. And and so we we experience that grief a thousand times. You experience it the moment you realize they're with someone else. You experience it the moment they propose to that person. You realize that the you experience it again the moment they have a child. You're you're, like, you're experiencing the grief over and over and over again. The the kind you're talking about where you know while you're in it that it's the wrong relationship, I think that the heartbreak there is that the so much of it relates to the fear and the disappointment of, oh my god. I'm I'm back on my own again. Yeah. And that fear of uprooting our life again, of changing our well, firstly, if someone has gone as far as marrying a person or you've just been enmeshed with someone for many years, you don't even have to be married. You could your lives could be so intertwined at this point that leaving is like throwing a grenade in your own life. Yeah. Friends, family, maybe you live together. Maybe there's, you know, all these other things that you've been intertwining. And the and the identity. Oh. You know? That was my identity, that relationship. My community. The people around me knew it. So I now have to sort of recreate my life and build from the ground up again. It can feel like for so many people, of course, that we add marriage into it, and often there's financial implications, and there's, you know, sometimes there's children, and it it the the com there are so many layers of complication, and we may have we may have had this fear gnawing away at us that someone was wrong a long time ago, but it's hard to be the one that lights the few.
Self be proud that I didn't take the shot or more proud that I actually did take this shot. I failed. I learned something from it, and it led to something even better. After that failure or that loss. And I don't think our future selves will ever think I'm proud of you for not taking a chance. No. I'm proud of you for Have it a dream and not going for it. I'm proud of you for for playing small and for shying away because you're afraid of what a few people might think or say about you. I'm proud of you. Way to go. I don't think what our future self would ever say that. I don't think our you know, a mentor is whatever. Say, you know what? It's a good thing that you didn't go for it. You didn't give it a try. Does it? It doesn't matter if we succeed or win in everything we do, but it's the effort of doing it, I think, is where we gain pride in ourselves. So I think that's really cool. I think that's also where confidence comes from. Like, a lot of people will ask, like, how do I a lot of people ask, how do I get confident, right? How do I build confidence in myself? And they think I have to go do something I have to succeed. That's not necessarily the truth. Sometimes I think a lot of our confidence comes from feeling fear, doing it anyways, maybe not having the results that we actually wanted to. But in turn, looked at it and said, I'm really proud that I showed up for myself. Yes. And not built confidence in you. Huge time. Yeah. You show up for you. That's big. But a lot of people don't know what their purpose is, or they feel like they have too many ideas too many passions and they don't know which direction to go. So what have you discovered about how to discover or find your purpose at this stage of life And is there a formula you teach people? Yeah. So there's there's a couple different things. The, the thing that I hear more than anything else is that most people don't know what their passions are. And they don't know what their purpose is. More than I hear that I have too many of them, I I heard a couple of that last night when I was when I was live, and some people said that they they did have too many things that they could do. But majority of people are like, I don't know what my passion is. I don't know what my purpose is. And then I ask them, I'm like, well, how often do you do something new? And then
So some patterns of dreaming from thousands of dreams can be explained by some patterns of the dreaming brain. And that was, the idea in my head. And, my publisher, in London, Penguin, when you came, but we were talking about doing a different book. That's gonna be the the next one, hopefully, but, You know, she said, we we we need. We and I think she meant, like, the publishing world and readers and people in general, like, they're they're real they're they're real you know, they put out books that are like French fries. I love French fries, but they also wanna put out some stuff like, like, this is an important book. We need a book about dreams explained about the science of it, the story of it, a love letter to dreams, because There is no dream scientist. You can it's not a field. I'm a neuroscientist with live experiences trying to put together brain scans, dream reports, neurons in a petri dish to to put together a story of what I think is happening in dreams and dreams. Wow. So that's how this started. Wow. And it's just what's that happened has been an ignition in my mind for about 18 months? So there's been a There have been reports on lots of different dreams, right? There's been like people documenting their dreams. Yeah. And there's and there's studies around that. Great question. First of all, Again, not my dream or your dream, but they're a great dream bank. Uh-huh. People for, decades have woken people up in sleep labs. They put an electrode on to make sure they're sleeping. They say, hey, wake up. What are you dreaming about? And they're writing down. Yeah. Yeah. So that that world's been happening. Okay. That's where I'm getting like the, you know, the certain percentage report dreams of falling. Certain percentage dreams of, you know, being chased a certain percentage, math. Really? That's
It's more as alignment. I think people try to balance and navigate everything, or it's more aligning your values, your vision, and your lifestyle in harmony with the people in your life, your health, your businesses. Mhmm. And sometimes you'll be out of balance of what the rest of the world looks like is balanced, but you'll be in harmony because you're communicating and you're working on those things For sure. In seasonal times. Yeah. And so, man, that's so cool. Now did you did Courtney, your wife, did she inspire you to open up more about your feelings and kinda tap into the feminine side when you met her, or was that before you met her? I think I've always been a little bit of a softer male. Yeah. You know, I've always been a little bit more emotional. I've never been, like, the intense, like, gritty, like, everyone up kind of thing. You know? I'm, like, I'm at the Olympia. I'm making friends with people. I'm chill. I'm, like, here to win, but, like, I'm not gonna, like, step on your throat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think what was also cool with her, and she definitely inspired me way more, and a lot of men don't think women even want that. They think they want, like, that tough man on a horse who doesn't cry kinda thing. But what actually attracted Courtney to me, which was really cool, talk about law of attraction and people trying to find the right woman, trying to find some someone who loves them for who they are, all this. You have to actually show yourself to be loved for who you are. And I put out a video in 2018 just being like, I was expected to win the Olympia that year. You know, I was a young guy coming up, all this stuff going on, and that's when I got sick. Didn't win. Came second. Still did really good. But I went through I was in the hospital at 4 weeks, so I was really scared. I didn't think I'd be able to compete again. And I just had a lot of emotions going through me, and I put out a video talking about all that. And I cried in the video, and I was super vulnerable. And I just shared how I was feeling and what I went through in that journey. And that was the video that she saw. She kind of heard of me, didn't know what, but then she saw this video. And she's like, okay. This is that guy who's, like, like you said, the big, strong bodybuilding guy, and now he's on YouTube crying. Like, there's a mismatch. There's something different about him. And then she watched it, and she's like, this guy's this guy's gotta be
You and see how the body reacts or responds. Right. What would be the next step after that? We notice a tightness in our stomach, a clenching in our throat, a pain in our chest. What would be the next step to starting that healing process? Step 2 is relaxation. Step 2 is actually going into any kind of practice you choose, right, but it can be breath work, it can be meditation, it can be tai chi, it can be yoga, it can be so many. That can actually help your body to release some of that tension. Interesting. And so what we're doing in that very moment is that we're, of course, recognizing that there's a pain that has been there that has been emotional, that has now a physical manifestation, and that we're also integrating a relaxation, a body relaxation practice to help release that tension, help absolve that tension from the body. If we never release it, what happens? It becomes disease. Wow. So emotional memories turn into physical pain and eventually disease in some way. Many of the metabolic conditions that we know about, diabetes for example, cardiac conditions, a lot of those can be mapped back to stressors in life. And there's a lot of studies that have been done around even autoimmune conditions being very deeply connected to stressors and to trauma. And more recently, there's some studies that also have some correlates to certain cancers. So when we start thinking about what the body is telling us, the body, when it's in that state of disease, is telling us, I don't feel well because I'm not being taken care of emotionally, and that, you know, it is usually, like, the clue for us to say, oh, I need to slow down, when we needed to slow down probably 15, 20 years ago. Right. Right. Right. So once we, you know, recall the memories and I guess
