I love to kick off a new year—all the promise lies ahead and I see opportunity everywhere.
One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is training those who want to pay it forward—my Trainers and Apprentices.
I certify brand new Trainers every January and July, and this shot captured the very moment a promising new Trainer officially got certified.
The gratitude I feel for these people who want to develop themselves and train others cannot be understated.
And their commitment and desire to serve couldn’t come at a more critical time…
We’re currently living in what I call a Connection Crisis.
And I don’t mean that as a headline or a trend — I mean it literally.
We feel lonely, lost, disconnected, and broken… and we don’t know where to anchor.
We don’t feel connected to our partners.
We don’t feel connected to our families.
And more than anything, we don’t feel connected to ourselves.
And the reason this feels so overwhelming right now is because two forces are colliding at the same time. Like two high-performance vehicles moving toward a head-on collision.
The first is what I call the Defect Dilemma.
Somewhere along the way, we were told that if our life isn’t working — if our relationships are hard, if we feel anxious or depressed or stuck — it must be because something is wrong with us.
It’s your trauma.
It’s your diagnosis.
It’s your personality flaw.
It’s some psychological defect you haven’t uncovered yet.
So we go searching. We analyze ourselves. We’re taught to label ourselves. We start relating to ourselves like a problem that needs to be fixed. We start asking ourselves - what’s wrong with me?
And over time, that erodes and ultimately destroys our relationship with ourselves.
We stop trusting ourselves.
We stop listening to ourselves.
We start living inside our head, trying to think our way out of pain.
That’s the Defect Dilemma.
The second force is the Disconnect Dilemma.
We’re in a real loneliness epidemic. Divorce is high. Estrangement is high. Most of us don’t know how to stay connected when things get hard. We don’t know how to repair our relationships. We don’t know how to stay present with each other.
But what’s even more dangerous than losing connection with others is this:
We’ve lost connection with ourselves.
So when the Defect Dilemma and the Disconnect Dilemma collide, so many people are left feeling alone and broken.
And when that happens, people reach for something.
That reaching often takes one of two paths:
The first is what I call state management through the screen.
This is where we immerse ourselves in technology. We find ourselves doomscrolling through social media. We engage with AI, having conversations trying to find out what’s wrong with us.
We think technology is the solution.
It’s not because we’re weak or lazy — it’s because we’re desperate.
People want companionship.
People want answers.
We want to be told what’s wrong with us and what to do about it.
So the screen becomes a substitute — for intuition, for guidance, for inner authority.
The second path is what I call state management through substance.
This is where we turn to pharmaceuticals, and more recently to plant medicine.
In fact there’s a phenomenon that exists today which I describe as the Plant Medicine Panacea.
There’s a growing understanding that traditional pharmaceutical drugs are not inherently good for us, but we have a sense that somehow plant medicine is different. Better.
But in truth it’s just a different substance that we’re using to manage ourselves.
And I want to be clear — in some cases, pharmaceuticals and plant medicine may have a place. But what’s happening right now is that for some people, they’re being mistaken for a permanent answer.
“This will fix me.”
“This will heal me.”
This becomes another way of managing your inner state through something outside of yourself—a substance, instead of learning how to manage yourself.
And the problem with both — state management through screen or substance — is that they can leave us more disempowered than when we started.
They’re both just coping mechanisms to solve for the experience of being disconnected from ourselves and others.
They don’t teach you how to be with yourself.
They don’t teach you how to regulate yourself.
They don’t teach you how to relate to your emotions in real time.
They manage your state for you.
And this is the situation so many of us find ourselves in—but it doesn’t have to be.
The reality is there’s a third path.
The third path is state management through self.
You see, I found myself in this very situation—disconnected, lost, in profound pain—and somehow I knew my life was meant for more. There had to be more.
Which led me to seek answers. And in seeking answers I found myself in temples and ashrams around the world, in places I never expected I’d be. I found myself studying ancient wisdom traditions, modern psychology, and cutting edge neuroscience.
And what I learned is that there’s ancient wisdom that’s just as applicable today as it was thousands of years ago – maybe even more so.
And yet somehow it’s nearly been forgotten.
And so much of my work centers around these truths from ancient wisdom combined with the best of what we know today. These elements together have transformed my life.
What I learned took me from near-death to living the life of my dreams, and having the opportunity to support tens of thousands of people to do the same.
The center of what I learned is this—while the modern message has been: use your mind to override your emotions. The profound truth is that emotion was our first language.
Emotion is at the root of it all.
Before we could think.
Before we could reason.
Before we could explain anything.
We were experiencing emotions.
What I learned in my journey is that emotion is the operating system underneath thought — not the other way around.
And this is antithetical to so much of what is taught today.
We’re taught that everything stems from the way we think. We’ve been trained to believe that if we just think differently, we’ll feel differently.
One of the most popular best selling non-fiction books of all time—over 100 million copies sold—is Think And Grow Rich.
Not Feel and Grow Rich.
The message has been clear for a long time: use your mind to override your emotions.
And when we try to solve emotional pain purely through mindset or logic, we get frustrated. We know what we should think, but we can’t access it when it actually matters.
No wonder we can't achieve the change we want to see. We’ve been looking in the wrong direction the whole time.
That’s why I put emotion first.
Not in a dramatic way.
Not in a “vent it all out” way.
In a practical way.
I teach people how to work with what’s happening emotionally, in real time — because if you don’t know how to manage your emotional state, your mind doesn’t get a vote.
So what’s the answer?
If the answer isn’t state management through screens, and if the answer isn’t state management through substance. What’s the alternative?
The alternative is state management through self.
What that means is change through you.
This is all about coming back into relationship with yourself — in real time, in real life — so you don’t have to outsource your stability, your clarity, or your sense of direction.
And this work is future-focused.
I’m not interested in endlessly digging through the past to prove why you’re broken.
The question isn’t, “What happened to you?”
The question is, “Who do you want to be, who do you want to become — and can you stay regulated enough to move in that direction?”
Now, I started this work in a very modest way. First and foremost, it was my personal journey to get out of pain and find a sense of peace and fulfillment within myself.
Then I started working with just a few clients in a small practice that started as a seed.
I saw the impact this work was having on these clients and I quickly realized that if I wanted to create the type of impact I believe this work could have in the world, I needed to expand this little business from the few dozen private clients I was meeting with in person in Los Angeles to something that could become a movement.
That’s what led me to build the business that I have today, that has served over 84,000 people over the last twenty-two years.
And this work became personal for me long before it became professional.
I grew up around extreme realities — domestic violence, murder, suicide. My sister’s estranged husband broke into her house and shot himself in front of her. This is just one example of many.
And like a lot of people, I tried all the things. Drugs. Microdosing. Plant medicine. Alcohol. Searching for the thing that would finally fix me.
I had a mentor anchored in ancient wisdom techniques. They had me disconnect from the world in order to reconnect to myself. I was guided to watch no television (the internet didn’t even exist at that time), take no substances, and clean up my diet.
From there, they taught me how to train, align, and rewire my emotions, my thought strategies, and my nervous system in order to anchor within.
I felt better than I had ever felt before or known possible. I felt peace in and as myself.
Ultimately, I learned to leverage all the things the world had to offer—media, social media, material things—but was no longer dependent on them to influence my inner state and wellbeing.
I realized the power of my training when I would get stuck in an emotional pattern, and was able to literally, through myself, get unstuck.
For me, it all came to a head in martial arts.
I trained hard. I worked hard. I did everything I knew how to do — and I still hit a ceiling. I was un-beatable at the dojang in practice, but I couldn’t perform under pressure during competition. I’d choke.
And it wasn’t until I learned how to work with what was happening inside me — the fear, the pressure, the emotional reactivity — that everything changed.
That shift took me from struggling, to becoming a three-time world champion.
And it showed me something that most people never get taught:
You don’t need another thing.
What you need is a relationship with yourself that actually works.
So when people ask me what I do, this is the simplest way I can say it:
I help people navigate The Connection Crisis by teaching them how to manage their inner state through themselves — so they can stop feeling broken, stop outsourcing their answers, and start creating real relationships again.
And that’s why I created The Connection Fix.
In the coming weeks, here’s what you can expect…
But first, I’m curious—what resonates most from today’s issue? What hits you in the heart, based on what I’ve shared here today?
If you’re willing, hit Reply and share with me.
Even just a few words—whatever’s on your mind, whatever shows up for you.
The reason I invite you to do this is, I personally read each and every response, each and every word, and more than anything else, I’d love to hear from you.
Okay, with that being said, we’re going to wrap today’s issue.
Have a great rest of your day, and I’ll look forward to connecting next week.
Joey