If you prioritize it and you know what to do with where you're at in

that moment, fuck, is it worth it? And once you get

some wins around this, it will be generative. It will be momentum that you

can build. And so at any level in today's podcast, I

hope you do implement something that

you can do to shift from go mode to rest, family and

connection mode. Welcome to the King Within, a podcast for men

who seem to have it all, yet feel like they're losing what matters most.

I'm Mike Salemi and I've been there. Successful on paper, but

disconnected on the inside. This isn't about grinding harder, it's

about mastering your emotions, leading with calm strength

and rebuilding trust at home. Each week we dive into real stories and

tools for becoming the man your family runs towards, not away

from. Because you didn't build this life to lose yourself in it. This is the

King Within. Let's do the work. Welcome to today's episode.

I have been looking forward to today's topic for months

and the specific thing that we're talking about today is a

time of day. It's only a few minutes where a man

transitions from work mode or provider mode into

rest and family mode. And usually it's overlooked

or completely non existent in most men's life and

its consequences and repercussions can be massive.

Now let me just backtrack for a moment because two weeks ago I

recorded a podcast all around Patience. Now so many

guys that I work with say, man, Mike, I just need to be more patient.

And I come home, I want to sit down, I'm exhausted and all of a

sudden my kids grab the remote, they change the channel and boom. Next thing I

know I'm yelling at them and I end up hating myself and feeling

guilty for it afterwards. So in that episode we talked

about how patience is the end product and there's building blocks to it

as well as what to do to support yourself in a moment of

high reactivity or even high withdrawal. Today

we're looking at what happens before that in the time

of transition from go mode to family mode.

And also on today's podcast, I'm going to give you information on an upcoming

workshop that I'm going to be not only doing it live, but it'll be recorded

going even deeper on this topic with specific protocols and a four

part framework that you can do to support yourself during this

strategy. Super important time of day, but let's unpack this a bit

more because what first gave me the idea for today's topic

is this was, I want to say, like three months ago,

and for context as well. So this is my home office. This is

also where I practice. This is where I, you know, serve

about 90% of the clients that I work with, from the

online men's group to one on one. And. And it's

a very quick transition point between what I'm

doing in here to downstairs. My wife, Lauren,

and Luca. So on this particular day, I remember I got up, I did my

morning routine, my meditation, my embodiment practices. I

worked all day. There wasn't too many buffers, and I had, I

think it was one or two more cups of coffee than I normally do.

And what had happened was, is I went in the kitchen and

immediately I was writing on the whiteboard of the logistics for the

next day of, you know, what appointments that I have. We

write my main appointments for the week on a whiteboard so my wife can have

an understanding of scheduling and planning and meals

and, you know, who's picking up Luca, all that sort of stuff. So I went

to that, gave her a peck on the lips, gave Luca a peck. And she

immediately says, you're bouncing,

you're all over the place. And she was exactly right. I

was moving fast, I was talking fast. There really wasn't

a deep sense of presence that she was craving, especially after me being

gone all day with little to no breaks.

But in that moment, I was tired and wired.

And in that moment, I understand what she was communicating, was the

relationship felt more mechanical. Right. There was logistics, but no

warmth. And not only in that moment or that

evening, but. And most times that I don't do

some type of transition ritual, I got sleep issues. Like, it's

harder to wind down at night. And I'm not

just saying these issues are with me, because I think every

single man that I've coached or talked to has the same

or very similar issues. And I get it. Like, in the work

that I do, it's very easy to focus in moments of

peak stress. Like I talked about in the last two weeks, up two, two, the

episode from two weeks ago, what to do in moments of high reactivity.

Or we go way back into what was happening

early on in life and childhood that helped form our

perceptions of the world, how we experience ourself, how we experience the

world, the underlying tone of our nervous system.

But what we're talking today is actually really tactical.

And what I find is not that, of course,

the deep work and the inner work, that's invaluable stuff.

But this is something truly, brother, that is so

simple and so, relatively speaking, easy and

accessible, and if done consistently, can have a

massive, massive benefit to how you

experience your family, how your family experiences you.

And it doesn't need to be complicated. It just needs to be

present. Right. So what are some of the consequences

of if you don't have some type of

intentional transition? And when I say intentional, I'm not

talking about, okay, the commute from work to home.

I'm not talking about taking a shower. I'm not talking about having

that beer. No, what I'm talking about is a

legit, legit change of state with

intention. And again, it doesn't have to be long now. If this goes

on long term, it

will erode the quality and the intimacy

of your relationship. In fact, intimacy basically dies

because there's no conditions for it. There's nothing that's setting

it up for your woman to feel safe,

to relax, to soften into what all of us

men want into their feminine. In order for that to

happen, we need to be grounded, we

need to be present. We need to have our breath low

and slow, not high, fast and tight, not in a

sympathetic, dominant mode. Because if she feels

that she is not going to feel safe with our nervous system, and

therefore her nervous system isn't going to be able to

relax and unwind into us, no, she's going to still stay

on guard and still stay tense and she's going to pull back.

And also she doesn't know what version of us we're getting. And if that

happens over and over and over, she's going to be

more again on guard and more in like a protective mode. And the same

thing with our kids. That's why when in the example I mentioned, I walked

downstairs and it's like, oh, where's Mike at? Or what version of Mike

am I getting tonight? And I've heard this in different ways in so

many guys that I've coached over the years that that's the very reason

why, again, we're doing this podcast and a

man needs a pattern interrupt in that moment. Right?

So the other thing, long term consequences is sleep

challenges. Sleep almost becomes impossible.

Right? Even if you're in bed at 9, 10,

11 at night, but your mind keeps going. You're

thinking about the meetings from the day or what needs to get

accomplished or what didn't get accomplished, or what are you going to do

tomorrow? Or, you know, something that maybe you felt shameful

for during the day and your mind is just racing over and

over replaying you're not going to be able to

downregulate into a more restful state. And usually what ends up

happening then, then you don't get quality sleep. You're

exhausted in the morning, you need more caffeine, and then it's even

harder to downshift. Now, you might be taking sleep

aids, you might be, you know, have an extra pot at night,

but that's not a real intentional downshift. And you're

not going to really get the quality sleep that you need. And remember this,

there is nothing more tissue rebuilding, more recovery

promoting, more regenerating than

sleep. And a lot of the sleep

challenges that men have can be remedied or resolved

by this exact thing. And so think about this.

When you wake up in the morning tired,

usually it started the night before or again just before that.

The other thing that happens is if this goes on for too long,

you'll likely end up losing yourself because you'll

continually be reacting. You'll be in reactive mode.

And over time, the stress that you're experiencing is going to be

your natural tone, and you won't even

realize it. And you're just going to be, again, reacting to

everything around you, reacting to what your wife's saying. You won't even

hear what's deeper underneath it because you're too in it. If

you've heard the saying, which I love is, you can't read the label from inside

the bottle, you're so in it, you're so stressed,

you're so tired but wired that you don't even

realize at a deeper level it's actually going on. And like I've

mentioned in multiple times already in just the last few minutes, but

I promise you, your wife can feel it, your kids can feel it, and

if you're really being honest, I would imagine you can feel

it too. You just might not know that

it's as big of an issue it is or what to do about it.

But if you do do this and have some semblance

of a protocol, a downshifting, an intentional time of

transition, it can do wonders for you.

And when I was thinking about this, like, like, I get it even in my

own life, as a performance coach, as a men's coach, so

much attention gets put in the morning routine. And when you look at

the highest performers, usually they have

a morning routine. And oftentimes high performers can get

done what most people get done in their entire day,

in the first two hours of their day. So this is not to say that

a rising ritual or whatever you Want to call it a morning routine isn't critical

because it is. However, most

people's challenge does not start in the morning.

It's a byproduct of what happens the day and the night before.

And so most guys, maybe you're one of them, this transition

is just non existent. They may. You might be doing a location

change, like the commute from work to home, or maybe you go pick up the

kids, but you actually don't have something that completely shifts

your nervous system. So your nervous system continually

stays on, continually stays alert, as if

you're, you're assessing for threat. What could go wrong, what happens? You

need to be on, but you're not dropped in to your body. That's

truly. That's what embodiment is like. We hear embodiment tossed

around all over the place today. But at any level,

embodiment is you dropping

into the sensations. It's more sensation

oriented than mind oriented.

It's you dropping into your feeling body. It's you

being connected with your feet on the floor, you being

connected to the expansion and the stretch of your

belly as you breathe in. It's you being able to

actually exhale, like truly deeply

exhale. That is when you're more in your body, when

you're embodied and not just a talking

head or what. A lot of times, guys, when you're tired and wired,

it's a rising energy, it's a fast energy.

Embodiment is slower. The tone, even your

voice will drop an octave or two is

because you're being more felt. Your breath is low and slow. And you've

heard me say on many podcasts about

it's almost going to be impossible to even rewrite

any story that you have about yourself, about the world, whether you're not

enough or your wife's bitching at you or always complaining or

the world, whatever the story is, it's going to

be impossible if your breath is not low and slow,

meaning if your nervous system is not communicating

safety. So again, most people do not have this transition

at all. And their nervous system is continually in

goal mode, meaning their levels, their hormone, their hormones of

cortisol and adrenaline is too high for too long.

And they haven't allowed themselves to adequately enter into rest

mode, recovery mode, connection mode. I mean, just think

about this. I mean, I love coffee, don't get me wrong.

But know that remember the half life of caffeine is

approximately five to six hours. So what that means is

if, let's say you have two cups of coffee, maybe you have

one at 8am and then one at 3pm towards the end of the

day. That coffee at

3pm, let's say it had 200 milligrams of caffeine,

which isn't super crazy. I think even just

a normal long coffee has somewhere around 3 to

3:50, something like that. But let's just say moderate.

You have a 200 milligram shot of coffee or an

Americano, you have that at 3pm if the half

life is five to six hours, it's going to be

8 or 9pm before it drops down to

100. So not only your

sleep, but your quality of sleep will never. You'll

never really get there. And then you'll wonder why your oura ring score or your

whoop score is continually showing as not quality sleep.

All right, quick pause. So you just heard me breaking down. What's happening

in your nervous system, why you're tired but wired, why your mind

won't shut off, why your wife can feel when you're not really there.

And look, if that's you, you're not broken. And trust me, you're not

failing. You're just missing a transition. That's it.

And that's the problem I'm solving. Tuesday, February 10th. I'm teaching

you the exact protocols and framework to shift from work mode into

family mode in less than five minutes. We're doing it live

together. And you will feel the shift immediately. And it's also going to

be recorded, so if you can't attend live, you can get the replay. However,

the price will go up after the workshop. Right now the price

is $47 and I will include a link in the show notes. So if you

need this, or a man you know in your life need this as well, send

them the link. All right, let's get back to it. Or again, you just wake

up wanting to hit the snooze button and you never feel fully online or it

takes you a long time to actually turn the lights on.

Right, because that go mode, that sympathetic

dominant mode, truly was not designed to be

an all day thing. It's more designed for short bursts,

intentional bursts. But when we stay in it for too long, especially

out of the workday, like, I get it, we have a role. If

you're like me who feels the call, and it's a true

fucking honor to be the provider of my family.

But remember, our role and responsibility

as husbands, as fathers goes far beyond

the role of being a financial provider. That's one piece. And, and it is

a big piece. Don't get Me wrong. But if your family's not

feeling you, if your family's not feeling connected or

safe around you, everything that you're doing to work so

hard for, I'm not saying it doesn't mean anything, but would go so

much further in the ways that you want it to if you

had the awareness, the

sometimes even the willingness to prioritize

shifting out of this mode. And so we need to

be able to walk ourselves into a more

calm, receptive,

heart centered state. Because

if we're in work mode for, who knows, eight to 12 hours,

we weren't with our family during that time. I mean, this, even

historically, this is one of the major

reasons why young boys have challenges and

grow up as immature, uninitiated men

is because right around the Industrial Revolution, fathers were

pulled from wherever they were on the farm

or whatever they were doing and into the factories. And during

that time, kids, sons specifically, were

no longer spending as much time in proximity to their fathers, where

they could learn and feel the transmission of

what it is to be a father, that role, that

nourishment through osmosis. And so it's similar, but

it's different. Today we have guys, myself included, who

we work in an office, whether it's, you know, now there's a lot of guys

working from home, like me or you work in a corporate setting, you work

outside. But when you get home, your kids or your son specifically

was not there with you, your wife was not there with you. So there's something

in the psyche that's like, Robert Bly talks

about this. Like there's an inherent distrust in the boy's

psyche of, because he doesn't know what his father was doing. He gets a father

who's just sitting on the couch, exhausted, not present, and he wasn't there

for so many hours and he can't even conceptually understand that. He's

providing, he's supporting. And so I'm telling you,

this is how important it is because it can completely reshape

your whole family dynamic. And it doesn't require a ton of deep work.

It just literally requires awareness and prioritization. And

so many guys, myself included, at the end of the day, like, yeah, I'm exhausted,

I am tired. And so what we end up doing is we try to

draw on willpower, okay, gotta dig deep, Gotta,

gotta turn it on. But it is so much harder to

override the physiological state with your head,

your heart rate's elevated. For me specifically, the way that I

express is my jaw can get tense. I like, I've got clients who will say,

like, their shoulders elevate. They feel the tension in their shoulders. That's

all rising energy. The breath is high, tight, shallow,

sympathetic. Right. Your nervous system

is not well, again, it's going to be sent further into sympathetic

mode. You need a cue, you need a signal that go mode,

threat mode is over. Right. And so the

example that I mentioned earlier about me going downstairs and bouncing around and

Lauren being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're bouncing. Where are you?

I mean, that's happened in different ways, shapes or form, and more times than I'm

even proud to admit. But it's so easy for us guys

to get locked into one but not have the transition

right. And the transition is so much where the gold

is. I was talking even with, with a client recently. This

guy's a. Yeah, like a high performance CEO. I train him

multiple times a week. And I see

it so clearly with him and we've talked about this many times, but

he has. His wife gets irritated because of this very thing.

He's providing, doing everything for the family. But then when he comes home,

she just wants him there. She just wants to make dinner with him. But even

though he's going through the motions of helping, supporting, making dinner,

she doesn't feel him. And it's, I understand

for us guys, it's hard to conceptualize this. Like, what

does it mean to feel? Well, everything that I'm saying

plays into this. But if you're not in your breath, you're not going to be

feeling yourself, right? You're not going to be feeling your

own heart. And how are you going to expect your wife or your kids

to feel so to feel you as well. So

she was getting irritated. She was getting irritated over and over that even though

again, he was present and you know, doing logistical things like to

help, she's like, where are you? Where are you? And then when we

started giving him some simple stuff, it was actually one to two minutes. It wasn't

even very much. It completely shifted his whole dynamic. How

his kids experience him, how his wife and they finally started

feeling him. And so in this workshop that I'm going to

be teaching just here in a few weeks, and I'll be sure to link it,

you know, in show notes or below. But the first step

of the framework that I'm going to teach, and I want to share it with

you because just even having the awareness of the necessity

and the importance of a, of a protocol or taking a few intentional

mints to downshift could be all you need and you can run with it. But

I'm going to go much deeper than what I'm sharing here. I'm going to break

down a four part framework and then I'm going to give multiple different protocols

that you can do in under five minutes, usually 2ish minutes, to

create that intentional state change that can elicit all the changes that

we're talking about today. But the first thing is about noticing where

you're at. Actually, the first thing is prioritizing a

time for the downshift protocol, a time for you to take

a moment, for you to get resourced.

And the first thing with that is to check in. Because what

I've really identified is there's four different states

that men often fall into in this point or this time

of transition. Either you're depleted and that

goes into fatigue. So depletion fatigue, exhaustion, your

eyes are burning, you're tired, you just feel heavy, you feel

foggy, and you even have short patience. Again. A lot

of the patience issues that even I talked about two episodes ago,

you wouldn't even need any of those tools or many of those tools if you

did what we're talking about here. Okay, so are you

depleted? Are you fatigued? Like your eyes are tired,

you want to go to sleep? That's one state. It's

different than feeling the next state, which is overloaded. So

when I'm talking about overloaded, I'm talking more about emotionally

full. You're at capacity or even exceeded

capacity. You might notice your chest and your heart is very

tense. So you're overloaded and overwhelmed emotionally.

And now that might be related to something that happened

at work. You know, some. Maybe you made a mistake, again, a story that you're

telling yourself, but emotionally you're at capacity, that's a totally

different state. The third state is being wired. Right.

Your mind will not turn off, you keep racing, you can't

slow down, you're still on. That was me in that

example I gave earlier. When I walked downstairs, I was tired and

I was depleted and wired. So some of these can overlap.

But just to explain it simply, wired is the third state. And the

fourth state is being disconnected. Now, a lot of guys fall into this.

You're numb, you're checked out and you're not in your feeling body.

So any one of these states can cause immediate

and long term problems. And the type of approach

that you use the protocol or what you choose to do will be

slightly different. Because if you were, for example, if you

were completely depleted, but I gave you to do Something that

would actually be more suited if you were wired. Like

it could actually be driving the depletion deeper. Right?

So not all of these require or not require, but

work well with the same remedy. And that's what I'm going to be teaching in

the workshop. But at any level you need to have

nervous system state, responsive protocols, things that you can do in a

short amount of time, things that you can do anywhere, both in your car, in

the shower, hour, you know, before you walk in the door

while you're driving to help you intentionally shift

out of this so again you can enjoy everything

that you're working so damn hard for. Like I get it, you work your

ass off to provide, to support, to be

the leader of your family. But that leadership

extends far beyond being a financial provider. Your

family needs you there, all of you, in your roots,

in your heart, not just in your head.

Yes, your head is one part of it, but it's not the whole thing.

And if your family can't feel you, if your family can't,

whether it's conscious or not, trust you in that moment, then you're not

really going to feel the connection, the intimacy that you feel not only

you deserve, but you're craving so deeply.

And if you do, however have a type of

protocol or something that you do to help you downshift, well,

one, you're going to walk into the house feeling more calm, more grounded, more

there, your wife is or your partner is going to feel more

relaxed. The hug that you get is going to actually feel

warmer. You're going to be more engaged, the evening is going to flow

much better. You're going to be more present for dinner time. The

intimacy is going to be, the texture of it is just going to

be completely different. You're going to notice a whole

shift in how you sleep. You're going to fall to sleep, fall asleep

easier, you're going to wake up more rested, you're going to be feeling more

like yourself and not like you're constantly under resourced.

And all of that is possible just by bringing again more

intentionality to this very short but really critical time of

day. And what I find it's non

existent in most men's life. And I think

it's also because at the end of the day, and I get it, I get

it, I've been there so many times, we're so exhausted that we don't want

another thing to do, right? But I'm telling you, if you

prioritize it and you know what to do with where you're at in that moment,

fuck is it worth it. And once you get some wins around this, it

will be generative. It will be momentum that you can build.

And so at any level in today's podcast, I hope you do

implement something that you can do to shift from

go mode to rest, family and connection mode. And

if you do want to learn this more, dive deeper.

Learn a four part framework. Get multiple protocols that you can

do anytime, anywhere in a very short amount of time that are not

super complex and not super require a bunch of technique or

skill. You just got to do them and and the benefits are

infinite or magnitudes more than what it costs to do

on you. Come to the workshop or share this with a man who can

benefit. I'm so fired up about this because it's just

it's helped me truly so much and helps

so many of my clients that I'm excited to offer it to you here.

And I'll be sure to put a link where you can learn more and sign

up. It's happening just in a few weeks. It's going to be live and it'll

also be recorded if you can't attend live. So learn more and I hope to

see you there. Have a beautiful day. Peace.