Whole Man

#1: The Journey of Becoming Whole

• Brennan Hilleary • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Welcome to Whole Man!

This episode is about my WHY behind creating this podcast. I talk about who it's for, why it exists, and my own story that lead me to starting it.

Enjoy.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey guys, my name is Brendan Hillary, and I am the host of Whole Man. And I want to tell you guys why I created this podcast, who it's for, why it exists, my hopes for it, dreams and aspirations, all that stuff. So the reason why I created this podcast is because I feel like for the majority of my life, I have been living half a life. And what I mean by that is throughout my childhood, throughout my professional career, I feel like that there's always been a part of me that's been missing. And that part of me is something that I'm rediscovering now in my life for the first time. And this podcast is for the high-performing adult, the high performing achiever, where most of your life you kind of grew up in survival mode and you've grown up being taught that your self-worth is tied to how successful you are on the outside. So a lot of your life, maybe you have been externally focused, meaning that you have sought maybe validation from other people. Um, you have uh worked to move up the chain in your career. Uh, you've worked really hard to make a lot of money, you're a business owner, maybe an executive, or just somebody who considers themselves to be super ambitious. And all of that is great. There's nothing wrong with being externally driven and focused until it gets to a point where it's not sustainable anymore. Um, one of the things that I dealt with in my life was that even when I was accomplishing the goals that I had been working so hard to achieve, it didn't feel satisfying. It didn't feel whole. It didn't feel like it almost felt like there was still something missing. And the more that I would accomplish, the more that it would take for me to feel good about it. Uh so I I just got in this cycle in my own life of chasing success. And in the process of chasing success, I was unknowingly abandoning myself. And so I guess the problem that I'm trying to solve with this podcast is how do you not only pursue a life of ambition ambition and success and accomplish your goals, but also at the same time, how are you prioritizing fulfillment in the process? How do we find the balance of not only you know chasing success, but also inner alignment, making sure that the way that we're getting there, um, the decisions that we're making are is in alignment with who we actually are, with our value system. So that's why this podcast exists. So again, if you're a high-performing adult, if maybe you consider yourself a people pleaser, uh if you consider yourself burned out right now, if you're feeling disconnected from your emotions, disconnected from your life, if you feel like you're walking around as a zombie, maybe on the outside looking in, you have everything figured out, but internally you're suffering and you're miserable and you don't know why, this is the podcast for you. And with that being said, I want to get into my story. I want to get into why the hell I'm trying to solve this problem, and uh go from there. So my story starts from when I was when I was born, obviously. Um it started from what I would call a broken home. So I had two households growing up. One household was they were kind of like helicopter parents. I had a stepmom who was super A-type personality, I had a dad who was more soft-spoken, and in that household, I felt like I was always being watched. Uh, standards were pretty high, and perfection was kind of the expectation in a lot of different ways. So that was household over here, and then this household over here, the one with my biological mom and my stepdad, it was very much so lackadaisical. It was neglectful, it was very much so pretty much tried whatever I could to get attention from them because I felt like they just weren't really there that much. And so, as you can imagine, growing up in that environment, uh, you you don't really have a sense of self. You don't really have a soft place to land, you don't really have a self-esteem because what a kid learns whenever they have completely different parenting dynamics and they don't have a sense of stability is they learn that they have to change who they are to be loved. And I didn't know this at the time, obviously, but from the time we're zero to the time we're seven, we are just a sponge for um what's called belief systems. And essentially what we learn to believe to be true from an unconscious level is based off our environment that we're in. It's based off of our parents' beliefs, it's based off of our circumstances, typically. And yeah, one of the things I learned unknowingly that became a really big part of who I thought I was was um who I am is not enough. I have to change who I am based on who I'm around to be loved. And that's what created the people pleaser in me. So I learned that at a really young age. Um, didn't really have, I guess, great social skills, was I had a speech impediment from the time I was 13, I believe. I couldn't say my R's. Maybe you'll pick up on that at some point in this podcast. I still slip up sometimes. And also was, yeah, just kind of an outcast. I felt like a black sheep in my family and also a black sheep at school. Uh I wasn't a great student, as most entrepreneurs aren't. Uh so I was a straight C student. Didn't really have a clique I belonged to in school. I was bullied a lot because I would go to school sometimes in dirty clothes. Uh my parents did not prioritize teaching me a fashion sense. And for the record, I have a good relationship with my parents now. Don't want to spend this podcast bashing them, but just want to tell you what my reality was when I was in it. And yeah, so I grew up with, again, just a lot of feelings of anxiety and depression and just uh not feeling great internally. And so we'll speed up to when I was 15 years old. When I was 15, um, I was having some really weird symptoms. I had start to run track at that point and then do wrestling. So I actually felt better than the majority of my life up to that point. I felt like I had a sense of belonging. I felt like I had a sense of tribe in a way. So I really enjoyed sports because I, for the first time, I was learning discipline. I was learning structure. I was proving to myself in some capacity that I could follow through with the things I said I was going to do. And that was really good for my mind. And during this time period, the symptoms I was experiencing were one, I couldn't breathe through my nose for a good six months. And then two, I was always exhausted. Didn't matter how much sleep I got, didn't matter how much food I ate. I was just always really tired. And I had a deep feeling in my gut that there was something wrong. So I asked my stepmom and my dad, that's who I was living with at the time. There was a custody battle that happens. Uh, moved with my stepdad, stepmom and my dad when I was 13 years old, um, away from my mom and my stepdad, because that environment was a little bit more toxic. So anyway, yeah, I was having these weird symptoms. I went to go and get a CT scan, and I will never forget the look on the doctor's face when he came in and told us the results. He looked me straight in the eye and he says, I'm so sorry, but you have a mass the size of a grapefruit in your face. And you have to be admitted to St. Jude right now. So, while I didn't have the best childhood, at that point in time, my biggest concern was if the girl in class liked me back. And now, here I am 15 years old, me and my parents not knowing if I was gonna live or die. And so that catapulted me into a complete state of survival. Uh, from the time I was 15 to the time I was 17, I probably had I think 10 surgeries. I had 30 plus hospital visits. And yeah, it was just a constant state of uncertainty. Uh, literally, like one day I would be fine. The next day I would be emptying the dishwasher and sneezing, and I would start bleeding from my face. And, you know, I guess I should have given you a disclaimer. It was pretty graphic. So if you don't do good with blood, my bad. Um, it was a really hard time. And throughout that time period, I was being prescribed pain medication. You know, my tumor was wrapped around a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been wrapped around my right trigeminal nerve, uh, my right optic nerve, my carotid artery, um, almost lost complete vision in my right eye. It was not in great spaces, and it was really painful. So I was being prescribed pain medication, and I didn't know what it did. I never involved myself in substances as a kid, thankfully. That was never something I was exposed to. So all I knew was I took this stuff and my physical pain went away, and I didn't know what was going on emotionally, which was it was also suppressing my emotional pain. And so let's fast forward when I was 17 years old. I had my last open-face surgery, and it was successful. Um, the doctors were able to completely remove the tumor. I think it was like 95%, and it wasn't cancerous. It was aggressive, it was rare, uh, but it was not cancerous. So they were able to remove the tumor. And while this was all going on, I had gotten more attention from my parents and my community than I'd ever gotten in my entire life. So I was the highlight of my whole town. I lived in a small town called Washington, Illinois. Um, I was getting gift certificates from different local businesses. People I'd never talked to for years were checking up on me. You know, it just felt like in a way the world revolved around me. And my ego really liked that because again, I was a kid who constantly felt the need to be validated. And that definitely did that for me in this time period. And going from that to, hey, aren't you so happy that you're alive? Now you can just go back to being a normal kid. Um, a lot of people in my life, after I went through those surgeries and survived, expected me to just go back to being a normal kid as if that was something I could, a switch I could turn on. And I remember feeling the exact opposite of grateful. I felt ashamed that I was still alive. I didn't understand why I went through what I experienced, and I was left with just this emotional residue of trauma. Like there was so much stuff I had I had experienced in such a short amount of time. Being on a feeding tube for a month, having a catheter in my face, my nose being broken while I was awake, uh, being in a drug-induced coma for eight days, like so much stuff that happened that I just didn't have the ability to process. And here I am through all of that, but my nervous system and my mind did not think I was safe. I was still in a state of survival from that point on. And being the people pleaser that I was at that time, I wanted to give relief to my friends and my family because one thing that I don't think people talk about enough when you're going through chronic illness like that is how much it affects the parents and the people that are actually in a right state of mind that are watching their loved one go through it. And I knew my parents went through a ton of shit. You know, my stepmom already had drinking problems functionally before I started having surgeries, and it got worse as the surgeries went on. And, you know, my dad had to deal with the aftermath of that. And I had a stepbrother who was around my age who watched me go through this, and a half brother that was 10 years younger, wondering why his brother wasn't never home and always in the hospital. Like, so so many people put their time and attention worrying about me, and I didn't want them to have to suffer anymore. And so one of one day happened. Um, I'll never forget the first time I used pain medication recreationally. It was, we were um essentially a tornado had just hit our town, and everybody was out of power. Thankfully, our house didn't get hit. And then my parents and um my siblings and stuff, we went over to the neighbor's house because they had a generator, they had power. And my parents asked me to go back to our house and grab some of the food that was out of the fridge and put it in a in a freezer or uh, what do you call it, like an ice pack thing. I don't know, a cooler, that's what it is. And um, yeah, I remember going to our house to go get it, and then I had just like this feeling of felt like a devil almost on my shoulder that was like, hey, your pain medication is upstairs in your parents' room. And I knew that they didn't uh take the time to lock the door or anything because uh we were all in a very uh traumatic situation with a tornado hitting our town. So I went up there, I took a pill for the first time without being in pain, and then from that moment on I was hooked. So I spiraled into addiction, did a lot of terrible things. I'll get more into it in other episodes uh because I'm big on being vulnerable and transparent. It's important people see the person I used to be. But yeah, um, long story short, it all blew up in my face all at once. Had a bunch of friends and family that called me out on doing a lot of terrible things, and I decided to admit myself into rehab for 89 days. And this is when I was 17 years old. So you guys can track me on the timetable here. I was 17 years old. I ended up going to rehab for 89 days inpatient, and that's a lot of time to reflect, it's a lot of time to be with yourself. And I remember making a conscious decision when I was in rehab, and the conscious decision was I wanted to take control of my life. So much so that it was actually to the extreme. Uh, because before that, as you guys know, I just talked about it. Like I was bullied. I was a victim of my parents' custody battle, I was a victim of my medical issues, I was a victim of addiction. I just felt so powerless. I was like, I have to be something. I need to chase success. I need to do something that that makes all the shit that I'd gone through worth it. That was my mindset. And so I literally made a conscious decision like I'm gonna do whatever it takes to be successful. And so I went out of rehab, and um doctors told me I could never really work out extensively again. They were very adamant on just like living a chill life and not striving for a lot physically and being the rebel soul I've always been. I didn't like that. So I asked myself the question: what is the most extreme thing that I can do to kick off this new archetype I'm creating as the high achiever? I didn't exactly think about it that way at the time, but that's reflecting back on it now, that's what it was. What's the most extreme thing I can do? And that thing was joining the Marine Corps. So when I was 19 years old, I ended up joining the Marine Corps, definitely lied about getting in, by the way. They did not know about my pre-existing conditions, they didn't know about any of that stuff. All they cared about was, hey, can you physically meet the qualifications necessary to go to boot camp? Right. So I started to work out, started to get in shape, started to prepare for it. And yeah, I went through the Marine Corps, I was in the reserves, so I went through all the training, and then you do something one week in a month. And yeah, so that was for me super important because I, you know, going from the world that I lived in, which was I didn't really have like people to teach me discipline or teach me how to work hard or teach me how to commit to something. That was all values that I kind of had to learn on my own. I will say my dad specifically really instilled in me a lot of amazing masculine traits, which is don't give up, which is um, yeah, make sure, like he taught me a lot of um, what do you call it? Um chivalry when it comes to women. So it taught me how to treat women. So my dad taught me a lot of incredible things. The thing I didn't really learn from anybody in my life though was like discipline, was pursuing success. You know, both of my family members were kind of like, I wouldn't say in the poverty line, but pretty close. Like we were not super well off financially. So yeah, that drive was kind of created from within in a way. And uh yeah, so I started to chase success. When I got home from boot camp, I uh went into this nutrition and supplement company store to um buy some supplements one day to try to beef up because I lost 30 pounds when I was in boot camp. And um I felt this desire to want to work there. And so I started my career for a nutrition supplement company when I was 19 years old. And that was when I was kind of introduced to the medium-sized business corporate world. Uh, they had about 200 team members, and yeah, I learned a ton about sales, about marketing, about customer service, about um the ins and outs of business. And I just started to excel. Like it was finally something I felt like I was good at. I was good at coaching people, I was good at listing, I was good at, you know, like closing deals, right? So I started to really excel. And five months into it, they were like, hey, do you want to go build your own store? And I was like, heck yeah. So I was definitely a yes man. So five months into it, I went to go build my own store, did some record-breaking stuff, and then a year later, they're like, hey, you want to oversee five locations? And this is when I was 21, mind you, putting a 21-year-old in charge of five stores. And I was like, sure, why not? Did that, and yeah, so it just kept going, kept going, kept going. And for a while, like I loved it. Like I loved working all the time. I loved not having any sense of balance or whatever. Like I just loved fully going all in on this thing, and it was a huge part of my identity. Um, if anything, I thought I was my work for a really long time. And so I kept achieving success, achieving success, and achieving success. The problem was at the the more that I achieved, I started to notice some burnout symptoms. Although back then, that version of Brennan would have not have called it burnout. Uh, he would have called it laziness, he would have called it a lack of discipline. Uh, I really adopted the Marine Corps mentality of like, hey, hustle and grind, push through no matter what. That was definitely a part of my identity at this point. And yeah, so I was starting to feel burned out because burnout happens when you don't create fulfillment enough in your life, right? It happens when the ratio of things that drain you outweigh the ratio of stuff in your life that fulfills you. I didn't know this at the time, but I was banking my entire uh satisfaction and happiness on two areas of my life. One area was my work, and the other area was my relationship with a partner, a significant other. And so, because of that, I didn't pour into any other areas of my life. I wasn't getting any energy back from any areas of my life. So over time, it just started to drain me more and more. And instead of seeing burnout for what it was, um, I saw it as a personal character defect. And so, what did I do? I shoved it down and I pushed harder. That was my way of dealing with everything at this point because it had worked up to this point. You know, what helped me survive my surgeries and what helped me survive boot camp and what helped me survive rehab, all this stuff was shove it down, push harder. And I feel like that's a narrative, and we can talk about this in depth in another episode. That is a huge part of the way that our society. Conditions us. It's it's you know, you overglorify masculine qualities, which is drive, ambition, external focus, accomplishments, titles, accolades, the physical world, but then it significantly devalues the stuff that you can't see, which is emotions, fulfillment, introspection, mental health, right? And so for me, I fell into that and I was a huge victim to it. And so I kept shoving it down. I went from being addicted to opiates to being addicted to overworking myself. I became a workaholic in the fullest definition, and then also started to take stimulants, which when I started to take stimulants, it almost like it gave me another life. So I was able to really ignore my burnout for a long time. And then, like all things that are not sustainable, eventually it came to an end. When I was 25 years old, my fuel that I was using to drive this success ran out. And this is a really important point and a huge theme that's going to be around this podcast is what is the fuel that you're using in your life? Because for me, I didn't know this, but the fuel that I was using to pursue success was toxic and super potent. It was fear. It was the fear of not being good enough. It was shame because I was ashamed of the stuff that I had done in my past. It was anger because I was sick of being treated and not respected. It was anger at my parents for not taking care of me the way I felt like I deserved. So I was using all of this stuff to like ignite me into and propel me into success, which, hey, use what you've got. The problem isn't using that fuel, it's continuing to use that fuel when it's ran out. Right. And for me, it ran out at 25. Thank God it did. Um, but when it happened, I really, really, I mean, I lost everything. Um, I'll be really vulnerable with you guys because that's the whole point of this podcast. Um, it got so bad for me that when I was 25 years old, I had to put in the month notice at my job because I couldn't sustain the workload anymore. Um, even the stimulants weren't working. I couldn't, I didn't have any spark or passion left. Uh, I lost the relationship that I was in, and I lost my house. All that stuff happened within three months of hitting kind of the the edge of burnout, and it got so bad. I mean, my entire sense of self was wrapped around my job. I literally believed that my worth came from how well I did there, how how I led others, how I served other people. And when that happens, I think this is also similar to what happens when people transition out of the military. I had an identity crisis, you know, at 25 years old, so much so that I wanted to end my life. And I won't go into too much drastic details here. However, there was a time where I had a gun loaded loaded and I had it pointed at my head, and I wanted to pull the trigger. This was November of 2022. And the timeline here is important because I'm speaking to you right now, January of 2026. November of 2022, I had a loaded gun to my head, and I was this close to pulling the trigger. And here's why I didn't. I literally heard a voice in my head. And what that voice said was do not end your life before you know what it's like to really live it. Every time I talk about this, I get chills. That was God's voice from my perspective. Whatever you believe in. The universe, God, Allah, like I don't, I don't know. It was something. And what I realized in that moment was I did not want to die. I just never learned how to actually live. My entire life was built from an identity that wasn't me. I'd spent my whole life chasing something that was within me all along. And while in that moment I didn't know how to fix it, I knew that my life was not meant to end there. And so what happened was I became obsessed with self-discovery. I was like, okay, well, if I'm not being me, who the fuck am I? Who am I outside of my job? Who am I outside of my accomplishments? Who am I outside of this stuff that I thought defined my value? And yeah, it took me on this path of self-discovery. And and what I learned as I was going on this path, I just started becoming obsessed. Like I was like, let me let me study the unconscious mind. Let me figure out how belief systems work, let me look figure out how behavior change works, like let me figure out internal world stuff. What is like the fundamental principles of emotions? I just became, yeah, driven, like this madman of like trying to figure out this problem and why I felt the way I did. Because I knew deep down that other people were not, I was not alone in what I was experiencing. Other people were experiencing the exact same thing that I'd experienced. I was not special in that sense. So I became obsessed with how do I help myself and then how do I help others? And that's what encouraged me in March of 2023 to build my business. Um, and I won't, you know, this podcast, I'll talk about my business sometimes, not all the time. Uh I think it's relevant to the story. So my business is called Build Your Power, Coaching and Consulting. And how I built it initially was I want to help the high achiever who feels like work is consuming their life. Um, so I called myself a burnout prevention coach, specialist, whatever you want to call it. And essentially my whole mission was how do I help people create fulfillment outside of work so they can show up better inside of work and uh in a way that's practical? Like, how do you measure that? And yeah, I figured out through a lot of trial and error and through a lot of I have so many like sub-stories I want to talk to you guys about. But again, this is the big picture podcast episode, so I'll stay in my lane here for this episode. Um, yeah, I figured out how to create a program essentially that was designed to help high achievers systematically create fulfillment in their life and measure it. And it was, it was successful initially, and that's how I initially was able to go full-time for my business. However, I still saw a huge gap, you know, and the reason why I say that is because a lot of the people I ended up helping were business owners, smaller business owners. And we can talk about fulfillment and how important balance is and you know, like how much it's important to enjoy your life, all we want. But the reality of the situation is in order to be able to fully prioritize that stuff, you have to meet your hierarchy of needs. And the hierarchy of needs for a business owner, one is I mean, are you making money, right? But then above that, what starts happening when you get a team and when you start getting other people involved is you need leadership and you need structure. And when I look back on my experiences in my corporate career, the two things that caused me to overextend myself besides my own internal shit I was navigating from an external perspective was that I was not taught leadership skills and I was not taught how to build structure within my the way I operated. And because of that, I went through a ton of things that I probably wouldn't have had to go through if somebody taught me how do you go from doing everything yourself to being an actual leader? How do you go from thinking that your success is defined by what you do to bringing out the best out of others? Right. So I saw that for business owners, until I help solve that problem, which is leadership, development, and structure, until I help them make that transition from doer to leader, they're not gonna be able to create fulfillment in their life. And I honestly think the whole concept of balance, the way that it's normally talked about, is bullshit. I don't think balance is about let me put an equal amount of energy to every area of my life, because if we did that, then one, that's perfection and that doesn't exist. And then two, um, we're not prioritizing stuff. You know, like there was a time for my business, my entire life was my business because if not, I couldn't pay bills, right? So I really hate this like spiritual bypassing type of culture that people are creating now because our values have started to shift to caring about the shit that fulfills us and enjoys us. That's great. But I hate this narrative of like bypassing the reality of life, which is if you don't have basic your basic needs met, food, water, shelter, none of that shit matters. You know, like get there first. And um, yeah, so anyway, I help for my business. What I do is I help business owners, service-based business owners, anywhere from like five to 20 plus team members who have not learned how to be a leader, have not learned structure in their organization, and they're paying for it. Like the same mindset and behaviors that help them build their business are not the ones that are helping them grow it. They're having culture issues. Um, people aren't doing what they're told. They keep hiring people that keep leaving. So that's what I do for my business. All that to say, that's what brings me here. So again, this podcast is for the person who you have your basic needs met food, water, shelter, right? And you're you've probably been pretty successful in your life. You've probably achieved a lot of things. People probably look up to you as being the decision maker. A lot of people probably depend on you. And yet objectively, you feel like you should be happy. You feel like you should be fulfilled, but for some reason you're not. And you know deep down there's this thing in your heart that's telling you you're not living the way that you're meant to be living. And so my goal is to demystify that and to hopefully put words and practical insights into how you can go from unfulfilled, disconnected, and burned out to living a value-driven life, living a life that's meant to be yours, having satisfaction, having enjoyment. And by the way, that's not gonna get rid of the pain. We're still human beings, like we're still gonna suffer, we're still gonna like go through shit. But hopefully, this will help make the path of life a little bit easier. So life is hard. This podcast will help, and I'm excited to take you guys on this journey. So thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe, please follow, please share it with your friends and family, and I'm excited to see where this goes.