7 life lessons for mood and anger issues: How to build a meaningful life in spite of trauma and life obstacles. An interview with Josh Orion

Today is an exciting day for me. I have my dear friend Josh Orion from Josh Orion Media as my guest. And in this interview we discussed mental illnesses, psychological treatment versus coaching, entrepreneurship and mental health, the industry of wrestling, near death experiences and even cats.

But before anything, I would just like to take a few seconds to properly introduce you to this great guy.

Josh, or better known as “The multiverse marketer” is a copywriter and a charisma coach.

A former wrestling athlete, he spent years training and performing in front of thousands of people, proving that he could be a front man even though he couldn’t speak for years after almost getting killed.

He is a certified nutritional and personal trainer.

The owner of the most narcissistic cat I’ve ever seen; he is on a mission to help entrepreneurs create sales supernovas. Today he is here to tell us everything. From being legally blind, having two knees surgeries, escaping death at the hands of a teen criminal and reinventing himself when life doesn’t go as you expected.

So, without further adieu, off we go. I give you, “Josh Orion 7 Life lessons to build a meaningful life in spite o trauma and life obstacles.

Lesson 1: How life chooses you and not the other way around:

Where to begin with you man, you are a walking book. I guess we will try from the nearest thing we can call the origin.

Business and marketing were not necessarily Josh ’s first option, he was always in love with the idea of being a pro athlete in the wrestling world. It’s safe to say that his road to entrepreneurship wasn’t a straight line.

“I technically started my first business when I was in college (studying sound engineering)…As we were learning we were also creating our portfolio and building our marketing presence and all that kind of stuff, so everything started back then, following to my wrestling career which led me to where I am here today.”

He got to live his lifelong dream of becoming a pro wrestling athlete and finding his life career because of it. He didn’t know that was going to happen though.  Sometimes life takes you through different paths and you would be advised to just “roll whit it” because maybe, it takes you to the very same place you wanted to go in the first place.

Lesson 2: Sometimes teachers are right: “I ignored my teacher’s advice” (and went out to do that very same thing he told him to do, years later).

“My music teacher told me that a mind like mine belongs to the business side…I ended up not following his advice and went into sound engineering and battle for 5 years.”…

Having a natural talent for it, he pursued a career in the music industry but stumbled into a few contract violation problems that led him to sue.

“Court cases, people not wanting to pay, the whole thing, I never lost a case.”

“One thing led to another and pro wrestling it’s nothing but marketing, so throughout that time, the decade I was wrestling, I picked up more marketing skills. E-commerce, for example. The pro wrestling world is pretty much e-commerce and branding.”

Sometimes life is grooming you for something in the future you are unable to see from the position you are currently in, and that’s perfectly ok, you can’t focus on too much, your brain isn’t able to do so, anyways.

Lesson 3: “I can’t really run anymore.” (Saying goodbye to your lifelong dream and keeping a sane mind in the process)

In spite of people telling him he didn’t belong to the wrestling industry, in spite of his physical limitations and life trauma, he got in the industry and went on to have a career in it, for a decade. But then, tragedy happened.

“I ended up discovering that I had lost all the cartilages in both of my knees.”

“I had knees surgeries… everything was good for like 7 months, but then I was in a lot of pain. Eventually I went to different doctors and I found that I had pretty bad arthritis in both of my knees. I can’t really run anymore, can’t squad …it was really hard…But marketing gives me the same feeling as wrestling. Running an ad that could potentially reach millions of people, gives me the same rush as being in front of an audience of hundreds of people, booing or cheering me, there is really no difference.”

Attachment to a life ideal, goal or dream in a life full of unpredictable events can really hit hard on our mental health. Not getting what we want, or having to walk away from it can lead to great frustration, bitterness and poorly bad decisions that take us further down in our mental condition. Josh was able to transition into a different path, one that life has been preparing him for and that his teacher once told him about. How was he able to transition?

“It’s still not easy till this day. There is really no reason for me to sit around wondering about the what ifs. There is no reason why I can’t get back to wrestling in the future as a manager or even take the role as directive manager. There is always something I can do in the world of wrestling. I can still get pretty close to the action being a manager, helping my clients win.”

“There is so much stuff that I can do if I get back to the business, and I know enough people that I can easily just walk in the backroom and be like “what’s up”.

“You can take the wrestler out of the wrestling, but you can’t take the wrestling out of the wrestler”.

Well, said sir, well said.

Lesson 4: That time I was almost murdered and went mute (trauma and skills)

Having been performing for a decade as a pro wrestling athlete, you would think Josh was a natural showman who was born with a microphone in his hand. Little did we know, he went mute in high school.

“I used to be a mute when I was almost murdered in high school. I didn’t want to talk to anyone…I just wanted to get through my day. It changes you forever, it changes your outlook in a lot of ways. But you can’t let it control you. All that kinda stuff led  me to public speaking.”

“People telling me, you can’t be a pro wrestler. Have you been in a fight before? I sure have. Been fighting my whole life.”

“Going to therapy and doing wrestling. It all started getting together, I started being me. Louder, bolder, riskier.”

Sometimes our biggest and most traumatic events are the birth channel for our signature abilities.

Lesson 5: Fuck pills

After that traumatic experience, he went into therapy and wasn’t happy with the pharmaceutical treatment, but things got better thanks to psychological therapy, EMDR and later on, coaching.

“It took me 15 years to come into myself and get over all that stuff. It would have taken less time if it wasn’t for the pills… It didn’t do shit, except make it worse. I could have done it in half time.”

“I took pills for those years. I started at 15 and by around 21 I said fuck em, and got off and been off ever since.”

“I did CBT and DBT and then EMDR. I took one session of EMDR and literally the past 15 years went away… I’m still baffled by that. Sometimes things just work…thank God for all the scientists and psychologists that figured things out. I still don’t get how it works…. But it works, so who cares about the details.”

Years later, when he got into the marketing business, he got himself a coach to help him. Turns out, his coach helped him resolve some of the past trauma.

“A coach takes a very direct approach, whereas a therapist takes a traditional approach.”

“With most coaches, you will have a discovery session or two and then dive into specific issues that you are having, and you solve those, one at a time. It will typically involve exercises, repetition, affirmations or things.”

“A therapist will give you some work and stuff, but is mostly talking… Sometimes it takes a long time to get to the right treatment modality and I find coaching to be much more efficient. Now for some things you have to (go to therapy), I wouldn’t be able to think the way I think now if I hadn’t gone to therapy, CBT and DBT. I would say that coaching is overall more powerful and more effective than going to a therapist.”

And so you see, there are different options for how to approach your mental pain and those would depend on different variables, for example, the kind of problem that you have, your personality and your context. Do your research and choose accordingly.

Hire the blue hair kid!

Lesson 6:  Nevermind your limitations, those will be your fuel

Sure, you want to leave your mark in the world, but to do so you are probably going to have to find a way to impact other people’s lives, it’s not just about you.

Being legally blind, Josh finds his motivation in creating a better working environment for people who was ever look down for being weird or different.

“The fact that I have been looked down all my life. I’m legally blind, I can’t drive… Employers are pretty discriminatory towards people that have perceived disabilities or they don’t understand the problem enough…”

“That’s what keeps me going. Being a better employer, being a better business person. I don’t call myself an entrepreneur. … I’m a fucking CEO. I have to pay my people before I pay myself…most businesses, I don’t think they really think that way.”

“Give them gifts, do fun stuff, hire people who are weird, who have blue hair, who have tattoos and don’t make them hide them.”

Lesson for you if you want to cope with your mood and anger issues, find your purpose. Create a life that gives you meaning. Strive for meaning rather than happiness.

Lesson 7: Don’t copy and paste everybody else’s dreams. Create your own supernova.

The problem is that people copy and paste everybody else’s dream instead of having ones that are actually meaningful to them. Avoid that trap.

“Yeah, because they get attached to -I have to be this all the time…I have to hahah, be all fucking happy and forget that I have a fucking real life, too busy to be portraying all these fake stuff  just because I want people to know and like me…”

“If you want people to know and like you, you have to be real instead of -I’m so grateful all the time- … because the truth is we might be grateful all the time but we are not happy all the time. When you are happy all the time, you are fucking burying all this shit, that’s just the truth. Most gurus don’t talk about it, they ignore it, they pretend it doesn’t exist, but toxicity is everywhere, it surrounds everyone, it permeates every fucking thing and is not realistic to be that happy all the fucking time unless your name is Mark Cuban.”

So there you have it, you should learn from the people you admire and hold as ideals, but at the end of the day, it’s your life and the things you choose for yourself should be important to you, not an imitation from what you see others doing. You can learn from their habits, mindset and resilient spirit, but you can’t be them and they can’t be you.

Addendum

It’s been a blast having Josh here and his lovely cat. Yeah, his cat paid us a visit at the end of the interview. She jumped onto the computer and stole Josh show. A diva. Me, a lover of dogs, basically kept my cool, because rule #12 Pet a cat (Jordan Peterson’s book). Anyways, sometimes we learn more from the stories of others. I sincerely hope you found Josh’s stories to be of great meaning and that you could learn from it, so one day people could learn from yours.

If you want to get in touch with Josh and learn more from him or just talk to him, he is a really cool guy, you can find him here. And if you want to get more information on his services go visit his website. Also, do yourself a favor and become a member of his free community and start getting advantage of all his advertising tips.

Alright then! Have a nice day. Let me know in the comments which lesson resonated with you the most.


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