Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Turning Pain into Purpose: A Journey of Mental Resilience with Dr. John A. King

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Turning Pain into Purpose: A Journey of Mental Resilience with Dr. John A. King · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  I've had to not only build my financial and business life, but my mental life and my relational life, my relationships.
• 0:13
  Today we're joined by Dr.
• 0:15
  John A.
• 0:15
  King, best selling author, entrepreneur, and founder.
• 0:19
  Of multiple global nonprofits.
• 0:22
  John's story is extraordinary.
• 0:24
  After recalling and overcoming unimaginable childhood trauma, and he transformed his personal pain into a mission of helping others find resilience.
• 0:34
  John opens up about the pivotal moment he began, recalling 14 years of childhood abuse and trafficking, which led to a rapid decline in his personal and professional life.
• 0:45
  He describes the isolation of losing his career and marriage while battling complex ptsd, highlighting the historical lack of support for male survivors.
• 0:56
  Our conversation dives into John's process of rebuilding, underscoring the power of mental resilience and incremental progress.
• 1:05
  He shares his personal strategies like the 3x5 challenge, dedicating 15 minutes a day to mental health, and discusses the turning point of shifting from living for external expectations to living for authentic purpose.
• 1:20
  Now, through the Phoenix Collective, John helps others rewire their thinking and transform trauma into a tool for success.
• 1:27
  Success.
• 1:28
  We wrap up with the details on his mindfire Challenge, a five week resilience program and how you can also access his resources.
• 1:36
  This interview is a powerful testament to finding hope in the dark and embracing the small steps towards fulfillment.
• 1:43
  As always, if you found value from.
• 1:45
  This content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:48
  All right, Dr.
• 1:49
  John A.
• 1:50
  King, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:52
  G', day, mate.
• 1:52
  Great to be here.
• 1:53
  Thank you.
• 1:54
  And I love the name Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:56
  That's what actually attracted me.
• 1:58
  I think it's a statement.
• 1:59
  It's fantastic.
• 2:01
  Oh, we appreciate that.
• 2:02
  All right, well, thank you so much for being here, John.
• 2:05
  And so, John, you are a successful author, speaker, entrepreneur with multiple companies.
• 2:14
  You run a nonprofit, but your story is anything but ordinary.
• 2:20
  So if you want to just go ahead and talk about your backstory and how you got here.
• 2:26
  Sure, mate.
• 2:27
  Well, yeah, love Texas.
• 2:28
  Been an American citizen for about five, six years now.
• 2:32
  And so when I came to the States, my view of my childhood was very ordinary.
• 2:38
  There are a couple of flashes of things that I sometimes wonder about, but I.
• 2:42
  I didn't really think about things too much.
• 2:45
  And then back in 2008, I had recall of 14 years of sexual abuse and what you would call trafficking by the people who raised me, particularly the woman and her girlfriend.
• 2:57
  So it was a very different sort of situation.
• 3:01
  And so what that happened is I went from being very left brain, analytically driven, goal focused, to literally right brain.
• 3:08
  You know, I wanted to just write poetry and smoke a cigar.
• 3:11
  And as a result of this complex post traumatic stress, this recall of what happened to me, I, I had some major challenges.
• 3:20
  I went from being an international speaker to having a chronic stutter that was so bad people would walk away from me.
• 3:27
  I couldn't hold down a normal job.
• 3:31
  You know, I ended up losing my first marriage, estranged from my kids, and I really lost everything.
• 3:36
  I ended up in a one bedroom apartment with a mattress on the floor and cinder book block cases.
• 3:41
  You know, it was really just back to the beginning, man.
• 3:46
  And so, you know, the last 15 years, I've had to not only build my financial and business life, but my mental life and my relational life, my relationships.
• 3:58
  Let me tell you what actually happens with the knowledge that runs your business.
• 4:04
  Someone spends a week writing an sop.
• 4:06
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• 4:09
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• 4:16
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• 4:17
  And it walks out the door every time someone leaves.
• 4:21
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• 4:25
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• 4:27
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• 4:35
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• 4:39
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• 4:43
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• 4:46
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• 4:54
  And it's just been this journey and this whole process has taught me so much about mental resilience and toughness.
• 5:04
  Yeah, I mean, talk about mental resilience and toughness.
• 5:07
  I mean, you were a very successful high income speaker, had a, a wife and a family.
• 5:14
  And then one day when you had this, this post traumatic recall of your childhood and the trafficking and everything that happened.
• 5:21
  I mean, what was the process like when, when everything fell apart?
• 5:26
  I mean, was it like, like how long did that all take?
• 5:30
  Man, it was horribly messy.
• 5:33
  You know, it happened on a Thursday, 10:45 in the morning.
• 5:37
  I saw some daffodils, believe it or not.
• 5:39
  And when I was growing up as a kid, there was a lady down the road who grew these daffodils.
• 5:43
  And I would count the years by daffodils.
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  So every springtime, I realized I survived another year.
• 5:49
  And this one particular day, I saw these.
• 5:53
  And this whole thing just vomited all over my pristine life.
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  So literally in a day, I went from getting ready to speak in a church, meet some clients, to not being able to speak in public.
• 6:06
  Very hard to go into public.
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  And that continued for about seven years.
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  The recall kept happening over and over again as I dredged up more memories and went into therapy and a range of different things to try and get my handle on this.
• 6:19
  Because remember, mate, this is like nearly 20 years ago.
• 6:22
  No one was speaking about men being sexually abused, let alone by a woman.
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  PTSD had just come onto the forefront with dealing with military trauma and police trauma.
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  And so there was no resources.
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  So I had to try and cobble together a recovery process for myself.
• 6:40
  And that process of doing that has been incredible in terms of being able to transition into businesses and opportunities and building back.
• 6:52
  It's been very beneficial.
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  Often our greatest lessons happen in our darkest times and that's when I reflect and look back on what happened to me.
• 7:02
  That's the sort of thing I see.
• 7:05
  So up until that, that recall event happened, I mean, what, what was your recollection of your childhood and those past experiences?
• 7:13
  I, the, the thing with abuse and people will tell you this is that you've got nothing to compare it to.
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  I, I just thought everybody had to watch their female caregivers bathe.
• 7:27
  I just thought it was ordinary to watch pornography and have oral sex with female dinner guests.
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  I know that sounds aberrant now, sitting here talking to you as a 62 year old man, but back then I was just a kid who was doing whatever he was told and whatever I needed to, to survive.
• 7:45
  So before it was like I had these little old 8 millimeter frames in my head and on this day when I had this recall, they all strung together and it played for me and it continued to play for
• 7:56
  about seven years.
• 7:57
  And I realized that as an adult that that is not something that anybody could call normal.
• 8:07
  Okay, all right, so you have this recall event.
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  You go from a successful speaker to where you stutter intensely.
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  You can't, you're scared to go in an elevator.
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  You, you can't hold down a job.
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  You lose your, your family.
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  I mean, how, what.
• 8:29
  And then you're back in that.
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  Like you said, that one bedroom flat with a mattress on the floor and cinder block shelves in there.
• 8:36
  I mean, what, what was the process of rebuilding and how did you go about that?
• 8:45
  You know, if I've got any particular gift, it's stubbornness, I suppose, resilience.
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  I just wasn't going to give up.
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  I didn't know what the future was, but I did my best to try and imagine one that I wanted to inhabit and that was going to be, you know, one where I Was loved one where I was being
• 9:05
  fulfilled, one where I was not stuttering.
• 9:08
  And so during my darkest times, I wouldn't try to focus on what I was dealing with today.
• 9:13
  I was always trying to look at, well, what does tomorrow look like for me?
• 9:18
  Because I knew that I was going to get up tomorrow and the sun was going to be shining and I'd have another opportunity.
• 9:23
  So there was no point thinking that the day was miserable tomorrow just because today, that tomorrow was miserable just because today was.
• 9:29
  I just knew that if I kept on going forward, just one step at a time.
• 9:33
  And this is what I teach people in our mental resilience courses.
• 9:38
  We often want to focus at these 5 year plans or 10 years plans instead of where we are now and where we're going to be tomorrow.
• 9:45
  And the greatest thing that we can ever do as leaders and business owners is just take care of tomorrow and do it really, really well and then the doors are going to open up for us.
• 9:58
  Okay, so you focused on one step at a time.
• 10:03
  What, you know, what can you do today, tomorrow?
• 10:05
  And so was there a turning point where you really started to, you know, get better, take off and really get some upward trajectory?
• 10:16
  Probably two years ago.
• 10:19
  So for 12 years it was just hard slog.
• 10:24
  And probably two years ago I felt like I had my feet under me for the very first time during that period.
• 10:32
  And so what, what was that?
• 10:33
  What were you doing up until then and what was that like two years ago?
• 10:40
  Literally every day I was just getting up, I developed a very strict regime of things that I had to do in terms of diet, exercise, supplements, even dress and music, what I'd allow myself to participate in in order
• 10:56
  to keep a positive focus.
• 10:59
  And about two years ago it's like the series of little decisions started to pay off and the curve started to sweep upwards.
• 11:07
  And so I think that's what people don't understand about incremental growth is at some point, you know, we always look back and you know, say he was an overnight 20 year success.
• 11:17
  It's exactly the same with mental health and mental growth and positioning yourself in a new field.
• 11:23
  If you will do the incremental daily work, at some point it will just pay off because you do reap what you do.
• 11:30
  So.
• 11:32
  Okay, and so what, what happened two years ago and really put you on that upward trajectory?
• 11:38
  Look, I don't know, Dave, that's a, that's a great question, mate, because in, in here I've got this benchmark of about two years ago.
• 11:46
  And understand, two years ago we, we I just come through a bankruptcy.
• 11:51
  I, I developed some technology, had an investor, product was valued at about $150 million.
• 11:57
  Then a whole Covid shenanigans hit and lost it all mate.
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  I ended up in hospital, had a mate commit suicide.
• 12:04
  I mean it was a close cluster.
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  Had another mate murdered.
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  And so, so it's like literally it was the darkest part of the night was before the breakthrough.
• 12:15
  I mean it got horrible.
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  There was about three years where, where it just, you know, we were down to $400 four days from homeless.
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  I mean it was just a total cluster.
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  But during that whole period of it being the worst, it just started to get better.
• 12:34
  And I don't know how to explain it to people, but I just tenaciously held on believing that something would turn.
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  Now in any business there is a point of no return where you've got to cut your losses.
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  The ROI is no good.
• 12:48
  So I'm not talking so much about that.
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  But, but I'm talking attitudinally is that even in your darkest moment, even if you lose everything, you gotta close the doors, you're bankrupt.
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  There is still tomorrow, there is still hope, there is still possibility.
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  I'm not talking about running down a bad deal like I did with when my investors went.
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  There's nothing I could do about that.
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  So you know, it's gone.
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  Million and a half dollars burnt.
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  I'm talking attitudinally and mentally like you just can make it through.
• 13:17
  Okay, so you're already starting to rebuild.
• 13:19
  You had this new company, you had investors, Covid happened, everything fell apart.
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  So you're back bankrupt again.
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  But like you said, you're whole.
• 13:29
  You're holding on to this intense belief that things are going to get better and somehow you're going to find a way.
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  And then what happened next?
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  Well done, mate.
• 13:37
  You should do it from this side.
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  You're doing a really good job of doing this, buddy.
• 13:42
  I don't know man.
• 13:42
  I just turned up every day and I think that's the key with resilience and relentlessness is just turn up every day, turn up with my determination to put the best thing in.
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  I do that I could just live today and do it well.
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  Excellence is doing the best we can with what we have.
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  And it doesn't matter if it's a beat up pickup truck or a Mercedes Benz, it's whatever you've got.
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  You do the best you can with what you've got.
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  And I've just come to believe that people and the people in the world.
• 14:15
  Just reward that okay, all right, so then currently you're a speaker, an author, you've written 27 books, you've got a non profit that helps other survivors.
• 14:28
  Like how did all this originate?
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  When did you get all that started?
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  When I was living in the flat, I wanted to do something.
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  I thought if I could just help one person, that would be worthwhile.
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  So I wanted to give myself a focus.
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  So I started giving them a voice foundation.
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  And then in that process, I was invited to appear in a documentary.
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  I'm a bit of a unicorn, a male, I'm a survivor and I'm prepared to talk about it.
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  So that documentary went on to win 80 awards.
• 15:00
  Then another group wanted to make another documentary.
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  And that award, a documentary, went on to win another series of awards.
• 15:07
  Then in 2017, the State Department recognized the trafficking of boys and men for the first time ever in its history.
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  And that's based on the work that we had done.
• 15:18
  So during this dark time, there wasn't like there weren't glimmers of hope, but I just would keep on going, okay, this is the direction I've got to go into.
• 15:25
  This is the direction I've got to go into.
• 15:27
  And then we ended up being involved in the tail end of the Epstein case.
• 15:31
  And then the guy who took over from him, a guy called Peter Nyga, I was involved with the team that they did all the tactical work and we were on the front end of that and we started to
• 15:40
  deal with survivors in that space.
• 15:43
  So it takes a bit of an arc.
• 15:45
  So we're building up.
• 15:46
  It's all very dark and very miserable on a personal level.
• 15:48
  But these, these highlight opportunities start to turn up.
• 15:52
  And so then we came out of that and it probably, as I said, it took me 15 years and probably about $300,000.
• 15:59
  And I was just blessed to be able to have the money, to be able to take that time and spend that money on, on learning how to get well.
• 16:07
  And I came out of that and I wanted to do something positive.
• 16:11
  I wanted to try and find a way to compress 15 years of recovery knowledge into about an 18 month period so people could get it for their own lives.
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  If it's business or childhood abuse or PTSD from military or the police, there's some way for them to be able to get this in a transformative experience.
• 16:33
  And that's really what everything has been leading up to now.
• 16:37
  Now when I say leading up to it wasn't in my plan 15 years ago.
• 16:41
  My plan 15 years ago was to try and find matching socks.
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  And if I did that, I accomplished something today.
• 16:47
  It's morphed into something totally different.
• 16:51
  Okay, and what, what's the mission today?
• 16:54
  The mission today is the Phoenix Collective is the group we started.
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  Part of our non profit is to help rewire the way people are thinking about themselves.
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  Americans, about 60 to 70% of Americans are fundamentally unhappy.
• 17:08
  And a lot of those people who experience extreme trauma in their lifetime, but trauma doesn't have to be a death sentence.
• 17:15
  You can turn your, your scars into medal of honors.
• 17:19
  You see, our past will either refine us or define us.
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  And we want, we want to help people use their past to refine them to go forward.
• 17:27
  If it's a business failure, a marriage failure, a personal issue, whatever it is, is what sort of mental resilience do you need to build to guarantee success in the future?
• 17:37
  So that's really what we're focused on now.
• 17:41
  Okay, so you help people, whether it's an abuse trauma, whether it's some sort of pts, whether it's a business failure, a marriage failure, whatever it may be, where people have had some sort of trauma, you help them rewire
• 17:57
  the way they think about themselves so they can use that experience to be more successful in the future.
• 18:03
  That's, that's well put, mate.
• 18:05
  And if you think a lot about a lot of people in your audience, small business people, people working for large organizations, they're carrying this baggage around which is really hindering them.
• 18:15
  Just imagine what they'd be like if they could get rid of this trauma, thinking of these trauma impact and be able to live free of the shadow of that.
• 18:23
  And that sort of feedback from the people we work with is some of the greatest feedback we get on a weekly basis.
• 18:31
  Okay, great thing, brother.
• 18:33
  And you've got a special giveaway for our audience and we're going to get into that.
• 18:37
  But just talk about like for someone like you said, right, that maybe has had some setbacks, had some traumatic events, but they're moving forward, but yet it's still impacting them.
• 18:46
  I mean, talk about some strategies that you would just, you know, that people.
• 18:51
  Could take away from this interview that.
• 18:52
  They could implement right away.
• 18:54
  Sure.
• 18:54
  Let me give you a thought.
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  And then very simple strategy.
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  The thought is a little bit metaphysical, but it's all based upon neurology.
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  Emotions are a chemical reaction.
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  And when.
• 19:06
  So you go through something, you experience a series of things and that releases a series of chemicals and your brain lodges those chemicals and they tie that chemicals to an event.
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  Your past doesn't really exist.
• 19:20
  What exists is A series of emotions that are chemical responses.
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  So there's one thought.
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  The second thought is there is no tomorrow.
• 19:27
  There really isn't, because we don't know what that is.
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  So in reality, the only thing construct that you can control is your now.
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  Your past isn't real.
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  It's a set of emotions that you've just got to learn how to control.
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  And your tomorrow is uncertain.
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  Which means, you know, success comes when opportunity meets preparedness.
• 19:46
  What am I doing to be successful now?
• 19:49
  And one of the ways that we've found that just very simple key that anybody can do to implement it is called the three by five challenge.
• 19:57
  Now it's simple, but the premise is this, that you are worth 15 minutes a day.
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  That your mental health is worth 15 minutes a day.
• 20:06
  That you as a person are valuable enough for 15 minutes a day.
• 20:10
  So what we encourage people to do is identify three things that are important for them and to practice those three things for five minutes a day.
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  For example, my three things are breath, work or meditation.
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  I like to take five minutes, put my feet on the ground, take my shoes off before I leave the house and just breathe.
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  And second thing is contemplation.
• 20:33
  I like to read my Bible.
• 20:34
  I'm a Christian man, I read my Bible.
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  So I sit for five minutes and I think or pray.
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  I read my Bible.
• 20:41
  And then thirdly, I have what's called an authenticity check.
• 20:45
  Authenticity is very, very important to me.
• 20:47
  And my authenticity check just looks at me, thinks about my day, my calendar, if I do this at the beginning or the end.
• 20:54
  And I want to make sure that John King, who turns up is the person that John King is representing to the rest of the world.
• 21:02
  Because it is very, very tiring to be living from the outside in.
• 21:07
  When you turn it around and you start to live from the inside out, things just start to open up for you.
• 21:13
  Relationships open up for you.
• 21:15
  You become easy in life when you're doing what you're meant to do.
• 21:19
  So that three things, a three by five challenge is a very simple thing.
• 21:24
  And I would suggest people do it two or three times a day.
• 21:27
  Morning, lunch, nighttime, before they go to bed.
• 21:31
  Very simple way to actually start to rewrite why your brain neurologically.
• 21:37
  Okay, and let's go back to something you just said.
• 21:40
  You said it's a lot easier to live from the inside out versus the outside.
• 21:44
  I mean, talk about the difference between those two things.
• 21:47
  Well, if you think about it, most of our lives and most of the people you know live from the outside in.
• 21:52
  We come, we're growing up and we're told how to behave, what to dress and where we go.
• 21:57
  So then we say, well, we graduate, we're going to college.
• 21:59
  Well, we go to college and then we really do dress like everybody else, believe what everybody else says, go to courses and just trust that whatever the lecturers are telling us is true.
• 22:09
  Then we've got to leave that and we get it.
• 22:11
  We've got to, we've got to pay off a loan or we've got to get a job.
• 22:14
  Now we're in a job and we're being told that we're supposed to do that.
• 22:17
  Maybe we went to university to be a lawyer, but really what we wanted to do was be a veterinarian or a vet tech.
• 22:24
  So we're in this space and that's why people get midlife burnout or what we would call crisis.
• 22:32
  I think it's realignment.
• 22:33
  They get to a point in their life and they say, listen, I've been living all this time from the outside in the world and everybody has been teaching me how to behave and who I am.
• 22:42
  I want to turn that around.
• 22:44
  I need to identify my purpose, my mission, my visions and my values.
• 22:48
  And I need to work out what it is to live from the inside out.
• 22:54
  And when you start to do that authentically, you start to line up, things start to fall into place.
• 23:02
  Often when people have affairs.
• 23:03
  Midlife, the so called midlife crisis, it actually is a midline alignment.
• 23:08
  They've grown up in a relationship and they haven't grown together.
• 23:12
  And you've got men or women that are just totally dissatisfied and they've, they've got to make a decision to work on it together.
• 23:19
  Authentic conversations or be authentic about that.
• 23:22
  It's not working.
• 23:23
  Same in careers.
• 23:24
  Here you are CEO of a big company and you don't like it.
• 23:27
  You just want to be a painter.
• 23:28
  You can stay there and be miserable for the next 20 years and get a paycheck and die on average three years after you retire or in your 50s, you can go, look, I'm dumb man.
• 23:38
  I just want to paint.
• 23:40
  I just want to go and learn what it is to be a painter and probably live to for the next 40 years because you're just bloody happy.
• 23:48
  Okay, all right.
• 23:49
  And so John, talk about the giveaway that you have our audience and then also if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about the work you do, how they can do that.
• 23:58
  Sure, people can connect with me on social media.
• 24:01
  RJohn A.
• 24:02
  King you know, D R J O H N A K I N G R John A.
• 24:07
  King my website is drjohnaking.com and if they go there, they'll see something called the Mindfire Challenge.
• 24:14
  And if they click on that, they can register for it.
• 24:17
  So the Mindfire Challenge is a five week program that includes foundations for recovery, redefining normal.
• 24:27
  What is it?
• 24:28
  What is mental toughness?
• 24:29
  A course on iridology and alternative medicines are in there as well, frequency medicine, which we find very, very helpful.
• 24:35
  And then another course on derailment is purpose, mission, vision and value.
• 24:40
  So we've given people an idea of the sorts of things we do in such a way is that it will be incredibly beneficial for them.
• 24:50
  So if they go to drjohnaking.com click on mindfire challenge, it'll enroll them and we look forward to seeing them September 30th.
• 24:58
  If they're listening to this after September 30th, 2025, then they just go there and, you know, probably cost them a dollar if it's going to cost them anything.
• 25:08
  Okay.
• 25:09
  And we'll link all that in the show.
• 25:10
  Notes for everyone.
• 25:11
  Well, thanks.
• 25:11
  M.
• 25:12
  All right, well, Dr.
• 25:13
  John, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing, you know, this, this valuable wisdom from your journey with our audience.
• 25:20
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 25:21
  Appreciate you, brother.
• 25:22
  Thank you.