Gareth Pickering managed to overcome his thirst for purpose and meaning by setting aside societal pressures and letting his authentic self shine. By going on a journey of profound self-connection, he discovered what it takes to live a fulfilling life, which he interestingly calls a “fuck yes” life. Joining Daniel Weinberg, he explains how building a strong relationship with oneself and giving yourself permission to dream will allow you to be aligned with your heart’s true desires. Gareth also opens up about his personal battle with sex addiction and how being vulnerable within men’s circles sparked his desire for personal transformation.
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Living Your “Fuck Yes” Life With Gareth Pickering
In this episode, we’ve got Gareth Pickering, a Relational Growth Advocate who lives by the mantra of Live Your Fuck-Yes Life. Let’s go to my conversation with Gareth.
Gareth, welcome to the show.
Good to meet you, brother. Thanks for having me.
Where in the world are you right now? This is a first for me.
I’m a South African, but I found myself making a home on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I’ve been here for many years. For those who don’t know where Guatemala is, it’s Central America, South of the United States and to the East of Mexico.
Introducing Gareth Pickering
We’ll get into how you got to Guatemala later on in our conversation. Why don’t we start in South Africa? You grew up in South Africa. Tell us a little bit about your background.
I was born in Durban, in South Africa, and at a young age, we transferred first to Pretoria and then to Johannesburg. I have one brother who is two years younger than me. I have an amazing, stable family. I didn’t realize this at the time, but I subsequently realized how dysfunctional some families can be. We are a middle-class family. I went to a semi-private school in South Africa.
I hated school. I didn’t like the framework of school at a very young age. I felt like it restricted me, and I just want to get you of it. At the same time, I was being raised by my parents to be well-mannered. I developed the inner archetype of the polite boy. It’s the part of me that knew how to get my needs met and receive love by being well-mannered and polite.
What did you call that?
The polite boy. The people-pleasing tendency. To be able to show up, make sure everybody else is okay, and be in service. The opposite of that appeared at the same time, which is the rebel. That’s the part of me that would bunk school, smoke cannabis at an early age, and lose my virginity at an early age because these two parts of myself were in a dialogue.
After that, I spent some time traveling. I’ve always enjoyed traveling. My folks instilled the travel bug in us. We would go camping when we were kids. I first went to the States and had a bit of an adventure there. I spent some time in London, five years working as a restaurant manager in London. Loads of partying, lots of cocaine, exactly what you’re supposed to do in London. I loved it. I wouldn’t want to go back, but I also wouldn’t change it.
From there, I came back to South Africa. I spent ten years building an advertising agency in South Africa. That journey started off super exciting on the entrepreneurial path. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. Somewhere along the way, I started to feel uncomfortable with the work I was doing and how I was spending my time, versus what I now describe as my soul’s calling. I felt like what I was creating was the script that was handed to me by society, which was like, “Go out there, bro. The more money you make, the happier you’ll be.” That’s what I did. I went on that adventure.
My advertising agency was successful until I realized that I wasn’t enjoying it that much. I was in this difficult place of being stuck between the part of me that was Gareth, the advertising guy, a successful business person, had all the things, toys, jet skis, multiple properties, and a part of me that wanted to burn it all fucking down and do anything else.
Why? Where was that coming from?
I would say a lack of purpose, a lack of actual meaning. I don’t think that the work that I was doing felt meaningful to me. Our biggest client was Pepsi-Cola. My market was to sell more product of Pepsi products to the poor people in South Africa. I now don’t drink that product. I think it’s poison. I wouldn’t sell it to my kids, and I wouldn’t want to sell it to somebody else. Inside that, there was a lack of meaning. Is this it? Is this what I came here to do, to continually make more money, buy another car, a bigger house, or something?
It felt a bit meaningless. That tension of looking at life, noticing that in my early 30s, I could see a timeline of me continuing to do more of the same, which is getting another client and making more money. I was like, “This seems fucking pointless. This is not what I came here for.” I didn’t know what I came here for. This is what created this uncomfortable feeling inside myself, which also manifested in my world as sex addiction, and not very comfortable spending time on my own.
I was always busy, and I thought my life was “balanced.” Balanced meant I woke up at 5:00 in the morning, I would go straight to CrossFit because I wanted to exercise, and then I would have a meeting at 7:00. My day would be flat out until like 5:00 or 6:00. I would then go and have drinks with my mates in the evening, get pretty drunk most nights, and see if I could bed a lucky woman. If I didn’t, I would go home alone. Normally, I wake up feeling like shit, go to CrossFit and do it again.
I thought my life was balanced because I did all of the things that I needed to do. The way I was doing it, there was a hustle and a stress in my being that didn’t give my body much chance to rest. While I was ticking all the boxes of the things that were important, you have a social life, and you have a sex life, you have a good business, and you are moving your body. The way that I was doing it wasn’t healthy for me. It was starting to show. I felt disconnected. That was the start of my adventure that led to a journey that took me through 45 countries and ended up here in Guatemala. We can go into more of that. I don’t know how much more detail.
You dropped something in the conversation. I’ve had a few guests on with sex addiction-related issues. I’ve had a love addict. I’ve had a gentleman who’s a recovering or recovered sex addict. I’ve had a therapist who focused on sex addiction. That was what he focused on. You dropped in there that you had a sex addiction. How did that come about, and how did you realize that it was an addiction rather than something that was something you did frequently?
Maybe the best place for me to start is at the end, because at the time, you don’t realize you have patterns that run in your life. I’m hooking up with multiple women because that’s what makes me feel good. At the time, I didn’t label it as that. Now I define the differences. The difference between an addiction and a healthy sex life is two things.
One of them is, are you able to control your intimacy? Are you able to decide when you choose to make love or not? Are you leaking energy around it? Meaning, if you have an intimate connection, do you feel your power around it, or do you feel guilt and shame and secrecy around it? Those two elements define the difference to me between sex addiction.
What I defined as sex addiction was a part of me that couldn’t be by myself at the end of the night or on a Sunday afternoon. Whenever I felt lonely and I didn’t know how to be with myself, I would send a message out to somebody and see if I could make love to a woman, but then I would not feel good about it, and I wouldn’t tell anybody else about it. That’s the second part. It’s like I couldn’t control it. It was pulling me, and there was guilt and shame around the connection, which created an energy leak that, to me, defines sex addiction.
I now live in a world having gone through this process of defining what it is and recognizing my underlying core wound, that drove that pattern in the past to recognize I can have multiple connections if I choose to connect erotically with my partner or with multiple partners, as long as it’s in the light and I’m honest with all of them and I’m being honest with myself, and I don’t have to hide it from anybody.
That’s more where I’m more in my power as opposed to leaking energy from the same actions. You’re still connecting with somebody. One of my coaches says, “It’s never about the thing. It’s the relationship with the thing.” Meaning the relationship with sex is just sex. If you’re using it consciously with awareness in the light and feeling your power around it versus it’s driving you, you can’t prevent yourself from hitting the Tinder swipe right continually, it’s the same thing. It’s just that the relationship you have with it is different. That’s how I define the difference between the two. I can’t remember your question there.
Living The “Fuck Yes” Life
I wanted to understand how you got there, and how you knew you had it. You’ve explained it. Your focus from everything I’ve seen and read about you goes to trying to coach influence, and educate men, in particular, to learn how to form a strong, healthy, loving relationship with themselves as the core of their life operating model.
You are telling me about your being on the hamster wheel of life, and then something has happened. You’ve got these two voices that are pulling in your head. Talk us through what’s happened that put you on the journey to the work that you’re doing now. You’ve coined the term, “You should Live Your Fuck-Yes life.” What happened? How did you make the jump?
One of the biggest challenges that a lot of men have, and I’m speaking from my own personal experience in having conversations with those that are in their life that you describe, not maybe as extreme, but they’re getting up at 5:00, working out, going to work, coming home, kids, dinner, sleep, repeat. Maybe there’s drinking in there, maybe there’s nothing in there, but it’s like this routine, slightly lifeless soul. I hate to say it. It’s dull.
However, it’s a very difficult decision or move to make to break the mold for lots of reasons. You’ve got a partner, different stakeholders, your social circle, and it’s like you’re going to be causing ripples to a tsunami. That’s the spectrum. It’s not going to be without consequences. What happened to you, and what gave you the courage? Were you forced to make the call? What happened? Take us through the journey in the 45 countries and the coaching. What happened? What’s the event where you woke up and went, “I cannot do this anymore?”
It was a Sunday night, getting into bed. I was dreading the week ahead for the reasons that you explained. This lack of connection, lack of meaningful work, I felt like the hamster wheel, the dullness of it all, combined with the part of me that was feeling guilt and shame for how I had been behaving. I didn’t want to be out drinking every single night. I know that’s not good for me.
A part of my physical body, and anybody who drinks alcohol, your body knows it’s poison. That’s not up for debate. That’s clear. I’m realizing that I’m having these decisions that I’m using in my life as coping strategies. I’m looking ahead to another week. As I lay there, I’m like, “I’ve done this every single night for the last week, and it was last Sunday that I was doing the same thing. This is fucking nuts.”
I see a timeline ahead of me that looks like another 30 years of the same, of potentially having the exact same thing. Some part of me, I don’t know what it was. It was like, “I’m fucking not doing this anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” My first step was to get out of my business. My business had started to go under pressure with the clients that I had. We had quite big overheads. I needed to get out of that and create some space from that. It wasn’t clear what I needed to do next, but this part felt like something that I needed to let go of.
Were you married at the time?
No, I’m solo. It was still a difficult decision. For somebody who’s got commitments like a wife and kid, I can only imagine how challenging this choice is because it was tough for me as a solo human. It was fucking tough. Anyway, I made the call, and I was like, “I need to shift out of this particular frequency, this repeating loop that felt like Groundhog Day.” I sat down with my business partner and I said to her, “I had been thinking about this for a while,” but the idea of sitting down with her and sharing this news felt like it was going to be a bomb drop. That Monday morning, I said, “Can we meet for a breakfast meeting?”
I sat down with her in the restaurant and I said to her, “I’ve got something I need to share with you. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what’s next for me, but I can’t do this anymore, the business.” I’m like flinching, waiting for the fucking bomb drop because I’ve been thinking about this conversation for probably eighteen months or maybe two years. I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t want to let her down. She said something to the tune of, “What has taken you so long to tell me this?” I was like, “Wow.”
It was one of those important moments where I realized we create these monsters in our minds of what we think other people may think of the choices we’re going to make. She could see how unhappy I’d been. She was like, “Okay, what are we going to do?” That unfolded the unraveling of our business. She took it over, and that was the start of the journey for me. Even then, it wasn’t like, “I’m going to do 45 countries.” I was like, “I’m going to give myself six months. I’m going to go to a friend’s wedding in the UK,” which was my plan. I was going to travel a bit after that. One of the perhaps underlying nuances of this uncomfortability that I felt had been the sense that I’ve always had a bucket list of things I want to do in my life.
We create these monsters in our minds of what we think other people may think of the choices we are making. Share on XIf I see a documentary about an amazing island in Greece, I’ll be like, “That’s cool.” I put it on my bucket list. Go skydiving, put it in my bucket list, all these things. I realized pretty soon that I’m like, “When I look back on a year, I’m putting more stuff on that list than I’m ticking off in my life. This balance equation doesn’t feel good. All these things I want to do are like 10% of my time. All the shit I have to do feels like 90%. This is backwards. This doesn’t feel right.”
I often think about this because I feel like I am in a position now where I am ticking off. I get to do all the stuff that I want to do. It’s a bit of a luxury position to be in. It happens for various reasons.
Why do you think it’s a luxury? Why did you decide that?
Giving Yourself The Permission To Dream
It’s because you can afford to do all the things I want to do. However, wanting to do things also requires financial resources, time, and being uniquely not responsible for others. How do you overcome the “This is what I want to do and this is what’s best for me,” with the reality of “We’ve got to pay for this. I’ve got my partner. I’m going to do this.” Aren’t you being selfish by wanting to do everything that you want to do? Do you know what I mean? It’s a fine balance.
Yeah, I do that. What I understand from you is the predicament between desire and actual constraints, whether those constraints are commitments to family, the cashflow, or whatever those things are. What I see more with the men that I work with is that they don’t give themselves permission to dream of what they want. They’re like, “Fuck, my life sucks.” “All right, cool. What do you want it to look like?” “I don’t know.” Fucking start there, bro. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan, but most people move through life, letting the world flow wherever it goes, and then complain when it doesn’t work out. I’m like, “How do you expect it to work out?”
The difference between those two is that you’ve got some constraints. You might have a family with fucking six children and it’s heavy, but you could also build a dream that they go with you and start working towards that. If you sit and complain about it and don’t have the desire, that’s the part that I work with men. I’m like, “This is the piece you need to work on.” I agree, there is a constraint between what we want to do, but I’ve found a lot of men are not clear about what they want. No plan for their lives, no plan for themselves. I want to get back to their part of you, which is like, “I’ll show up in service for everybody else. I’ll be their father, the breadwinner, the boss, and the leader in my society.”
Relationship with self is at the back of the queue. When we get stressed and eventually collapse from a heart attack or a stroke or manifest some disease, and I’m looking at a future timeline of my own life when I say this, because I fucking carried on without listening to that inner voice that was like, “Bro, slow down. Do something more meaningful.”
If you’ve heard that voice, you can ignore it for as long as you want. You can numb it with alcohol, you can numb it with sex, you can numb it with social media, you can numb it with whatever you want, but if you don’t listen to it, at some point, your body’s going to manifest a disease. The very people that you love the most in your life are going to have to look after you.
That’s what pisses me off about this because people don’t fucking give themselves permission to dream. We don’t give ourselves permission to understand what my Fuck-Yes life looks like. What does that even look like for you? Have you taken the time to think about that or have you found yourself at 46 years old going, “Jesus, what the fuck is happening here?”
We don’t know. If you don’t know, you get pulled along and you build somebody else’s dream. That’s the piece that was alive inside me that eventually was like, “I’m going to take six months and see if I can find myself.” It was wrapped up as tick-off shit on my bucket list along the way. I’m like, “This is actually how I want to live.”
At the same time, I was the healthiest I’ve ever been. I found more romantic connections. I was more relaxed. I manifested $1 million. I learned about the Law of Attraction, and everything shifted because I made one choice. I learned other tools, and it was a hard choice. It’s not an easy choice to make. Even in the place that I was in, as a solo dude with access to cash and a business that was already doing okay. For someone who’s at the bottom, it’s a very different choice to make, and have a plan.
Start working towards something. Know what it is that you want because what I’ve understood about reality creation, which is what we’re all in, where apes that tell stories and the stories that we tell create the belief systems that shape our world. Meaning, you and I can be born in the same family and we can have the same parents and you believe that life is fucking beautiful and abundant, and you continually manifest the reality that proves that to be true. The more you see it, the more it shows.
I’ve got some core wound, some trauma, or some story that everybody is out to get me. There’s not enough money in the world, and I’m sitting as a victim. We have two different realities with equal opportunities. The tools that I teach to my clients are, first of all, to know what you want, and to know where you are leaking energy. What are the things in your life that are not aligned with your Fuck-Yes Life? What are those things?
This relationship, this job, it doesn’t mean you quit your job on day one. It’s like, “What would a Fuck-Yes job look like for me?” Most people don’t know that they’re stuck in going for a partner at the law firm because that’s what I’ve been pulled to do and I’m fucking hating it, but I’ve got a Porsche and I’m golden. What would that even look like? Have you given yourself permission to even think about that?
Just that first piece allows you to open up that potential timeline that I agree may need to come through with understanding what the constraints are with my current reality, family, money, etc., to get there. At least I’m making decisions in the future now towards a new path that feels like a life that I genuinely want to manifest, as opposed to a life by design instead of a life by default.
Are you designing your life, or is it handed to you by someone on social media? This was me. I met a dude in London. He said to me he made £3 million as a stockbroker. I was like, “Cool, that’s what I’m going to study.” I went and studied investment banking because I thought that was going to bring me happiness. It was completely by default. It wasn’t aligned with a life plan that I wanted to create for myself. It’s a beautiful question. It’s important to do, and do the work of giving yourself the permission to dream. That’s the underlying piece for me.
How Men Can Find Their Higher Joy
How did you get to teaching this? What was your journey to go, “This is actually what I want to give back to other men?” That’s what’s what you do now. This is your gig.
All of these things I want to share are not a straight line. It’s not like I woke up that one morning and I’m like, “I’m going to live in Guatemala. I’m going to have this amazing woman by my side who’s a fucking legend. I’m going to have this passive income. I’m going to coach men.” It started with like, “I’m going to take one step in the right direction.”
What I teach men now is to follow their highest joy. That’s life pulling you towards what’s most exciting. It doesn’t mean that you can go and become an artist if you’ve got bills to pay, but allow yourself to follow those threads of excitement that life is showing you in the direction. For me, it was travel. It was the opportunity to leave my life in South Africa and to go out on the road and to tick off some of these bucket list items.
It’s a hero’s journey story. It was connecting with people who taught me lessons that reflected parts of myself to integrate. I was on a beach in Thailand. I had been out to a nightclub, and I was still drinking alcohol at the time, but I came out of the nightclub. I had a big night, and I was on my way back to the bungalow that I was renting on the beach.
Through blurry eyes, I looked down at my phone, and I had a Facebook Messenger message from a friend back in South Africa. She said, “Gareth, please, can you help me? I need some support with a big decision in my life.” I’m like, “Cool.” I jumped on the phone with her the next day. We have a conversation. She’s like, “I can see you’re so happy in your life. You’ve got everything together. I need some help.” I was like, “No. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I’m surfing, smoking weed, having it.”
However, something had shifted in my field, and people on social media could see that I was a happier version of who I was. The palm trees, wherever I was in Thailand, helped. I had a call with this person and she was like, “I’m fucking lost in my life. It doesn’t feel like I’m enjoying this.” Another version of the same story that I know you’ve had that I know a lot of your other men on this show have had, and my story, which is, “I’m fucking bored. I don’t know what to do, and I want to do something more meaningful.”
In this conversation, I say to her, “This is what I did. Go for it. Make this first decision to say you’re going to do something new. Give yourself the easiest possible way to make a decision. You can always come back to your job, but make the decision to go.” She also had a desire to go traveling. Over the next few weeks, she paid me to coach her while I was living on a beach in Thailand.
You can always go back to your job. Make that big decision and go traveling. Share on XI was like, “I could make some money and keep doing this,” because up until that point, I hadn’t been earning anything. I’d been living off my savings, and I had a story that I was either going to run out of money or I needed to find a way to make money on the road to keep doing this. I realized that the path I’d walked, the journey I’d integrated into my own life, had value for people who were prepared to pay me to help them through this process.
That was where the coaching adventure started. I’m a strong student. I love to teach. I love to learn so that I can teach. I unpack specific concepts in important ways. I got into all sorts of things that I had never been interested in before. Meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, and understanding the Law of Attraction. Later on, men’s work came into my field, and I see these as tools to be able to support me to be the best version of myself.
The only work that any of us has to do is to bring the best version of ourselves to the world. That requires, first of all, recognizing, and it’s not a problem. All of us have some inherent core wounds as a function of the world that we’re born into, being raised by imperfect parents, and living in a capitalist world that tells you continually through media that you’re not enough.
You’re not enough until you have this car or this body, or this partner or this perfume. You’re bombarded with that all the time. Our work to do is to let go of all of that programming and come back to this deep place of being completely loving and connected with yourself, because from that place, I give myself permission to dream. I don’t say yes to things that aren’t a Fuck-Yes in my life. My time is too precious. I love myself too much to stay in a toxic relationship.
You can stay in the job for a while if you need it as a short-term fix to get cash to move towards your Fuck-Yes life. You love yourself enough not to stay there because you feel too polite to leave, or you’re addicted to the paycheck or whatever that is. Underneath that was basically the journey. I can share the men’s work story, which I feel is quite an important piece for me on my particular journey, if you want to hear that. Despite all of this personal development work, I decided to do a week-long tantra retreat, which was called The Sacred Sexual Shamanic Experience.
Is this ISTA?
Yeah.
I read about this in Lenerd’s book Jump! I was going to go do that first course. I was referred by another guy I met along my travels, who said it’s a life-changing story, and then I ended up in a relationship. You don’t need to go to that story.
I would suggest that it’s something that you can even do even if you’re in a relationship. It does look at themes of sexuality and the wounds that we all have, the guilt, shame, and fear that we have around intimacy. It also gives you important reference points for understanding authentic communication, speaking about boundaries, understanding masculine and feminine energies, your core wounding, all of it. It’s a powerful container, whether you are single. It’s next-level. I’ve done so many of them. My beloved is an ISTA facilitator. My partner, Araminta.
They’re one-week courses, right?
It’s a week-long residential. You live on-site with between 20 and 30 other people, men and women, facilitated by three facilitators. They take you on this powerful journey. It’s called Life Force Mastery, recognizing some of the stuff we’ve been talking about here, which is coming back into alignment and out of control. Life force is a way to be able to live an authentic life. It’s powerful stuff.
The Power Of Embracing Vulnerability
Is this also connected to the Law of Attraction?
Not directly.
You would keep referencing the understanding of the Law of Attraction. Why is that so important in the whole story?
Let me tell you the men’s work story, and then I’ll tell you the Law of Attraction. They’re not directly linked. I see the poster that says Sexual Shamanic. I’m like, “A retreat that does sexuality. I’ll attend that. That feels like it’ll be something good for me, and I may even meet somebody there.” There’s some part of me that’s thinking that could be it. When we are there, on one of the days, they say, “There’s going to be a men’s circle this afternoon where all the men are going to come together.” I was rolling my eyes. I’m like, “Fuck, I don’t want to do this with other men. I don’t see the point of this shit.” I wasn’t excited about it.
“I’m happy in the group space and I’m enjoying what we’re doing here, but the fact that we’re breaking away and I have to go with men, it felt a bit unexciting for me. I wasn’t at the time 100% sure what was underneath that emotion, but that was what I felt. They held a circle that afternoon, and there were probably about fifteen of us. The facilitator said, “You are going to step into the circle and you’re going to bring something that feels like it’s been a challenge that you’ve worked with for most of your life, and share it with the other men in the circle.” He then instructed us to say, “Whatever comes first into your mind, trust that.” The first thing that came up for me was this sex addiction.
I hadn’t spoken to anybody about this. This was still something that I was working through. My connections had started to come more into the light. I was honest with the women that I was connecting with, but I wouldn’t say it was completely integrated. Anyway, when it’s my turn to step into the circle, my palms are sweating, my heart is racing. I can’t even hear the guy next to me over the internal dialogue. It’s that nervousness of mine stepping into this to share this thing.
It’s my turn, and I step into the circle and say, “For most of my life, since I was a teenager, from the first time I connected with a woman, I’ve tried to sleep with as many women as possible. That’s been my modus operandi. I feel like I’ve had sex addiction for most of my life.” I look around the circle expecting maybe ridicule or laughter, and there’s nothing except compassion, love, and radical acceptance of what I shared.
How was that expressed?
Just in the love that I see in these other men’s eyes as I’m sharing what feels like probably the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever shared, thinking that I’m going to be judged. This is also the thing that I’ve kept secret for most of my life. I step into that circle and share it. As I look around the circle, there’s nothing except men looking at me. Some of them have maybe a bit of tears in their eyes, but they’re super present. I honestly feel like I took a big rock that I’ve been carrying in my backpack, I put it down in the middle of that circle, I stepped out, and it stayed there. I’m sitting in the circle not processing, “What the fuck happened?” I’m like, “That was strong medicine. How did I feel so much lighter by what happened inside that circle?”
In the days that went after that, I was starting to recognize that the medicine for me was talking about it, sharing. It was the medicine for me to be able to express it, because as soon as I’d spoken about it, it was out. That was fucking mind blowing for me but it doesn’t stop there. In the rest of the retreat, 3 or 4 men came up to me and said, “Thank you so much for what you shared. It resonated so much with me as well.” I went, “Jesus, it’s got an exponential healing effect.” I get goosebumps now when I talk about it.
I’m like, “This is it. This is the moment that I knew my medicine to share with this world is to create spaces for men to be able to have these conversations.” There’s a saying in the men’s work, you’ve probably heard it, that my work is your work, and your work is my work. I step into the circle and share something about sex addiction, and it resonates with almost everybody there, if not directly, at least through the collective field.
When you step in there and talk about a relationship that you’ve had a difficult relationship with your dad, that is so fucking healing for the rest of the circle. The conundrum that we sit with in men like you and me doing this work is the very thing that I needed to do. To step into a circle with other men was the very thing I was fucking never going to do.
From my perspective, the big shift for me was when I had my own crisis, and I never shared the things that were very difficult for me. I used to repress, not express. I was so broken, I could no longer hide. I took the leap and opened up with, “I’m fucked.” To keep it very high level, I was broken. When I did that, what I received in return was, and this is what I always tell people, when you make yourself vulnerable to others, what tends to happen, not always, is that your people, and you’ll know who your people are, will reciprocate. They’ll open up to you and show you who they truly are.
It’s only when you make yourself vulnerable, authentic, and open to others that you’re going to form deeper bonds, not just with yourself, but in relationships. You can say radical honesty, but I’m talking about truly making yourself vulnerable, exposing your shadows, which is what you are talking about, which is what you realize is you’re not alone. There are other people out there who wanted to say the same thing but didn’t have the courage to do so. You almost did that for them.
That’s the opening. Now, they can tell you about some of their darkness without feeling ashamed, which helps them work through their own things. It’s being seen, it’s being accepted, it’s being understood. It’s having compassion shown towards you. You feel lighter. You don’t have to feel like you’re carrying that around with you anymore. It also makes you feel like, “I’m becoming more honest with myself by sharing it.” You’re no longer Superman, Mr. Perfect. I’ve got this. It’s all good. You don’t have to be there anymore.
What you’re hitting is something that I touch at the beginning of a men’s circle for people who have never been in a circle before.
Bringing Men Together Through Retreats
You run these retreats. You’ve just come back from one in South Africa. I want you to talk to us about the program and what you do. I want to ask, do most people who attend it for the first time have gone to something like this? Are they usually like virgins or like first-timers? They’re going, “I’m looking at this to kick off my journey,” because I would say most of the men I know in my lab, very few of them, have gone to a men’s retreat. They’ll read about it. They’re not saying, “I want to take a week’s holiday and go to a men’s retreat.” The people who are doing it are taking a big step for themselves out there.
I do multiple different things. My core focus is something we talked about before we started, which is recognizing that the relationship with the self is the most important. One of my teachers, Jamie, in one of his leadership programs, spoke about this thing, which articulated it so well. It’s a triangle where the bottom layer of the triangle is called Me. That’s the relationship that I choose to have with myself.
The healthiness and the solidity of that relationship determine how well you’re able to show up for the next layer on this little pyramid, which is called We. We is your partner and your family, maybe your extended family. Only once you’ve got a healthy relationship there, or have you got any chance of being able to show up fully for The, which is the greater world and your mission, your ability to be able to serve your mission.
What I see with a lot of men is that we’re so busy trying to look after the second and third layers of the pyramid, but the bottom foundational level, Me, is not being taken care of. It becomes an unsteady foundation upon which to be able to build. The recognition of this is that there are many different ways to be able to make this bottom foundation more solid. The underlying place is, I believe, self-love. For a lot of men, it’s like, “I’ll get to that when I’ve done my other stuff.”
I’d like to reframe it as, what’s the best way? What are the most effective technologies that you can use to make that bottom layer as solid as possible? A lot of men leak a lot of energy by being inauthentic. It’s what you spoke about, which is I’ve got all these masks on, the Gareth who is successful, and I wear all of these masks all the time. What you touched on is like, “That’s not me. That’s me showing you who I think you think I need to be in order to keep this persona.”
At the beginning of a men’s circle, I say to the people who are joining us, “Until you can speak authentically about what’s happening in your inner worlds, you don’t trust yourself.” Meaning, there’s a part of me that’s inside that’s feeling uncomfortable here to date, perhaps. I’m like, “Everything is good.” Some part of me inside is like, “That’s not true.” I don’t even trust myself. If you’re a brother of mine, and I’ll share a practical example of how this looks, in my time before I got out of my business in South Africa, when it was going shit, if you and I went for a beer in South Africa and you said, “Gareth, how is work going?” I was never going to tell you if it was going badly.
I’d be like, “Yeah, a couple of tough times, but we’ll get through it. How are things with you?” I would deflect the conversation. That’s a mask where I’m pretending to be somebody that I’m not. I’m lying to myself, and I’m lying to you. It’s dishonest because my words don’t match my energy. What that means is, you’re sitting there as my brother, Daniel, you’re genuinely asking how I am. I say things are fine. In that moment, your nervous system and your emotional body can feel that something is not good, but my words said that they were fine.
In that moment, you don’t trust me either. You don’t say you don’t trust me, but something feels out. You can’t put your finger on it. Until you can practice speaking authentically what’s true for yourself, you can’t trust yourself. If you care about your wife and your partner and your friends, you owe it to them to be authentic about what’s genuinely alive with you, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Until we can do that, we’re all sitting around with masks on pretending, and then we say, “Please, can you help me with my relationship?” I’m like, “Are you honest with the people in your life? Are you honest with yourself?” The men’s work technology is the opportunity to fast-track building this bottom layer of foundation, where you can build trust with yourself by starting to be authentic, and to stand in a circle and say, “Brothers, I sit here every single week with you. I’m having a hard time in my relationship right now.”
What’s the theme? It’s not that everybody is going to solve that for you. It’s that you’ve been authentic in expressing it. Just like the men’s circle that you’ve spoken about, you fucking received it. If you’re having challenges in your relationship, whether it’s a resonance or not, some part of you is like, “Thank God, it’s not just me that has this.”
That’s the magic of this men’s work technology that’s at play. There are multiple different ways to be able to do this, but this is at the basis of my work, which is recognizing that the relationship with yourself is the most important relationship. If you go and get super busy, and as I said earlier, continually hustle and burn hotter and faster, you’re going to burn out. You’ve become an inconvenience and a cost to the people that you’re trying to serve. That’s not going to be the way that you want to show up for the work that you came here to do.
If you get super busy and continually hustle, you will burn out hotter and faster. Ultimately, you will become an inconvenience to the people you are trying to serve. Share on XThat’s what we do in a nutshell. The men who show up, we’ve got online programs, we’ve got a WhatsApp group. There are different ways that men join our programs. The online circle, you can try it for free. It’s part of our tribe membership where men can sit in a circle a couple of times a month. We are growing a community of men who sit together on a continuous basis.
Is that a consistent group that sits with each other regularly? They don’t know each other from before?
They come from different parts of the world. This is an online circle. We tackle different themes, but it’s an opportunity to sit. I call it a space holder where I hold the space for people. What I noticed is there’s not that much for us to do as space holders. It’s to bring men together with an agreement frame that says, “All you need to do is be who the fuck you are and we’ll hold you in that, including if there’s tears and you want to scream and cry, and we are going to celebrate our wins. Bring it all.”
That’s the only thing we want you to do. Just be fucking real, please. It’s remarkably hard to do in this world. We’re so busy trying to be the brave Gareth or the successful Gareth. To say, “I’m having a shit day,” is so fucking liberating for my own nervous system, but also for the circle. What I’ve noticed is that the circle starts to gather some intelligence of its own. The more we sit together, we start to build trust with one another. There’s so much magic that starts to come from doing this repeatedly.
It’s the same as sitting on a meditation cushion. The first day, it’s going to be uncomfortable. The second day, you get a bit better, but all of these are tools and practices that I believe are going to support and develop that solid foundation, which is me. The added benefit of doing this with a group of men is that you’re also supporting the mission-serving part.
Meaning, I’m sitting with men in my circle whom I co-create retreats with. We do business together, and we support one another. Not only am I building my relationship with myself, but because I’m doing it with other men, I have the opportunity to network. If there’s an opportunity for me to connect you with somebody else, much like we got connected here, I’m going to connect you to Lenerd after this. This is the point of it. To come all the way back to stepping into that first men’s circle, I had to get honest with the fact that I didn’t trust other men.
I didn’t trust other men. I thought we were all fucking competing with each other. That was an underlying story that if you got the business or if you got the girl, then it would be less for me. That’s a belief that I now understand to be based on scarcity. That’s one of the challenges that we have with it. There’s not enough. We all have to fight and compete against one another.
Do you think men, in general, are like that? Is that the default?
That they don’t trust each other? Let me ask you, did you trust other men before you got into this work? Did you feel super open to bring what was authentically alive to all the men in your life?
I would say, because what I heard you saying was that the reason why you didn’t was based on competition for girls, for business, etc. I felt like things like competition in business is necessarily like those things with friends. What you are saying is that it doesn’t matter. You didn’t trust your mates enough to be completely honest with them about yourself, for whatever reason. When you frame it like that, it’s interesting because that’s right. If they’re not, they clearly don’t trust other men. It’s interesting the way you framed it like that.
I don’t think I trusted other men. I think what was underneath that was what I was pointing to you earlier, which is that I didn’t trust myself. Meaning, I couldn’t sit across in the bar from you and trust myself to be authentically Gareth and say, “Daniel, I’m having a hard time at work.” Why couldn’t I? It’s because I was in competition. I thought I had a story. I think there’s something in the collective agreement, perhaps, that men always need to have their shit together. You put on with it. Nobody gives a shit about your stuff. We’ve all got problems. Just do it, dude. Keep on putting bread on the table. That’s the jam.
Something in that is like if I’m not telling you that story, then I’m probably not going with a consensus narrative of how we are around one another in the pub. It’s not true. It’s impossible. That’s what I’m saying. If I sit there and say, “Yeah, business is good,” I can’t trust myself. I told a fucking lie. It’s a white lie wrapped up in the story that you don’t want to hear my problems. That’s the reason I don’t think I trusted other men is because I didn’t trust myself. It would be impossible for you to trust me for the explanation that I had earlier, which is that you can’t trust me.
Are you also not doing it because you don’t want others to think you’re a loser?
That’s a very big part of it. The idea that I’m not enough unless my business is okay, for sure. There’s a part of that in there.
Men are often caged in the idea that they are not enough unless their business is okay. Share on XIt’s all those things. You feel like all those things that you associate yourself with are a representation of you, and that’s what people get caught up in.
I’m worthy because I’ve got a successful business. If I don’t have a successful business, I’m not worthy. It’s that loop. You can replace a successful business with a bank account or whatever.
How Many Can Start A Healing Journey
Can you give me, whatever comes to mind, a great anecdotal story of where you’ve seen someone, the impact of them coming to your retreat, and they walk away with a light bulb? They’ve awoken, let’s say, metaphorically speaking?
I was at this last men’s retreat. There was an older gentleman.
Where were you guys? Where did you go?
We were outside Cape Town in a place called the Cedarburg. We had this spot called Waterfall Farm, and there were fifteen of us.
Only South Africans or from around the world?
There were only South Africans in this retreat. Where I live in Guatemala tends to attract a little bit more of a traveling crowd because of its location. This brother had been doing quite a bit of work. He’d done multiple retreats. He’d also done in ISTA, he had been working with other relationship coaches, and he was working on his own stuff. At the end of the weekend that we shared together, he said, “I’ve achieved more here.” It was only two days. It wasn’t even a long retreat. He said, “I feel safer in my body here than I have from,” I think he’s been doing like 20 or 30 years of therapy in different modalities. What was underneath that was that he had never been to a men’s retreat before.
What was underlying in his story was a relationship with an abusive father. He felt uncomfortable around men, and to be in this space that was held with complete love and presence, where you could be whoever you were, we were naked around the waterfall, being in our space and being present and being aware and holding a real strong presence.
This vulnerability piece of talking about themes, we were talking about the theme of relationship and sexuality at this particular retreat, and he said in two days, he feels like he’s done more healing than all of his other years of modalities combined. I keep hearing stories like that because there’s wounding in the collective masculine that starts inside all of us because of whatever that is. There could be sexual abuse, there could be physical abuse, there could be any number of things.
It could be something as light as being shamed or doing something small, and that’s it. That small event that looked like a completely irrelevant event wired your association with that experience, and then that’s it. That’s what happened. I want the audience to understand that you don’t need to have been sexually abused as a kid to need to go do this men’s work. This is for everyone.
There’s a misconception about what these men’s groups are. To men out there, it can look a bit woo-hoo as opposed to this isn’t so progressive or out there do to go to a men’s retreat or go to a men’s group and listen. You can only win from the experience. When you talked about those online virtual forums, that stuff works, particularly as you commit to doing it, number one. Doing it with people you know from before, which should bring a level of comfort.
There’s an agreement between all of you that you’re going to share. In effect, what happens in time is you start getting to know these men, most probably more than most of your mates, because these are men who are revealing themselves. They feel more comfortable in their group. Effectively, they become very strong relationships, not just with individuals, but as a group, because of all of you committing to it. If the energy is right, these people can become life brothers effectively.
You’ve nailed it, bro. One of the testimonials I had from a brother who came to his first men’s retreat in Cape Town, that one we were talking about earlier, he said, “I’ve got to know some of the men here more deeply in the two days than would take me two years to get to know people over drinks and beers and coffees.”
Even with those beers and drinks, you’re not even going to get there in two years.
You continually have this mask.
They haven’t committed to being authentic with themselves.
Here’s what I’m saying. I believe that this is how we are going to have to be outside of the circle. It’s not like I’m this person in the circle, and then I go and fucking be Gareth with a mask on outside of this. I’ll take this work. I’m also stepping out into the world. There’s potentially some churn here. You need to be gentle with how you come back to existing relationships. If you suddenly want to go super deep and vulnerable with the dude who’s never done this before, there’s a level of integration required to skillfully navigate this piece.
What you’ll see is the ones that know you’ve done this, like I said earlier in the conversation, when you make yourself open and vulnerable to the other, which is what you’ve been doing, but if you don’t get it back, from my experience, what I also think happens is you start more consciously choosing the relationships you want to have in your life, and you cut out the ones that are not leading to energy leak. Rather, they’re feeding your soul like you are feeding their soul.
In all this work, what ends up happening is you’re becoming more conscious. You’re choosing. You’re deciding. You’re making decisions about who you want to have those conversations with, who you want to be spending your time with. Do I want to give up two hours of my time twice a month to sit down with a group of guys? You’ve got to be consciously deciding. That’s why when you are doing that, you’re having a richer life experience.
I agree with that 100%.
Answering Rapid-Fire Questions
We’re going to finish up here, but I’m going to ask you my five final questions, which I do with all my guests. You’re pretty used to this. What comes to mind first? I’ll go one by one. The first one would be, who would you like to say sorry to, given the chance?
This is something that I’m pretty current with. I recognize the importance of this particular practice. If I haven’t said sorry to them directly, I’ve been through the process of tracking my own energy leaks of where I’m still connected or feeling resentful about a past relationship, so I say sorry to people. I don’t think I have anything that’s not current in this particular questionnaire.
What are you proud of being or doing in your life?
Falling more in love with myself. It has to be that. The only thing the world needs is the best version of me. Every single day that I wake up and feel more in love with myself, that’s how I would describe it. I make better choices. I chose properly. I don’t say yes to things that are not a Fuck-Yes. I’m proud of the journey that I’ve come on, and the physical world has reflected that back to me. My podcast, my work, the testimonials, the people I’m serving, the relationship that I’m in, and the physical manifestation of where I live are all a representation of that. I’m super proud of that journey that I’ve been on.
When did you receive kindness while needing it most and expecting at least?
There was a time around the time I was leaving Johannesburg when I had this older man in my life. He was a bit of a mentor, a friend, and a brother. I was sharing with him at the time that I was feeling like I needed to get out of this. I was stuck. This is probably the first time I’ve spoken to someone about it, and I’m having a barbecue at my house.
It wasn’t necessarily kindness. He said, “Bro, go and do it. Go and do it.” It was the gentleness in how he gave me permission to go and do something else. That was the catalyst that was like, “That’s all I need.” Some part of me was waiting for a grown-up to give me permission. He said, “Go and do it.” I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do it.” It felt super gentle, and it was a pivotal point on my timeline.
What did your mother or father teach you that you frequently remind yourself of?
What’s coming up is this overwhelming sense of gratitude for the parents that I have. I lived with the most amazing parents. I can’t believe I chose them. They’re so amazing. They’ve been a beautiful example of stability. Where it leaves me is that as I’ve worked with more and more people, gotten to know more and more people, quite a few people don’t have very stable families. I feel like I’ve been gifted so much stability. I look back on my timeline, and I’ve got no real trauma or real abuse.
I then get to this place of like, “Okay, bro. You’ve got a fucking head start. You’d better get to work. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be in service and sharing your mission because there are other people who have got quite a lot of stuff to move through to be able to get there.” I’m continually reminded of the beautiful, safe place that I was brought up in. It’s luck and circumstance, and so much to be grateful for that I’m continually reminded every single day of how lucky I am to be where I am in my path. That’s a function of the world that I was born into through them.
I call it lucky sperm. What is your superpower, Gareth Pickering?
I’m a very present listener. I have a real ability to be able to listen to people and to reflect back to them what I heard them say. It builds trust quite quickly. That’s the part that supports me in my mission to be able to take somebody who’s feeling anxious about something, whether it’s going down this path, joining a retreat, or something, to listen and mirror. That’s something I’m continually working on as well. It’s not something I’ve always done, but I recognize that communication is what builds trust in relationships.
Communication builds trust in relationships. Share on XAs I said, relationships are everything. I’m in a relationship with everything in my life, my relationship with myself, my partner, my relationship to money, my relationship to my phone, and the communication that we have with the relationships that we have with people is super important. If I want to have good relationships, it’s important to be able to communicate well.
Your ability to be able to speak well is part of it, but also to be able to listen, that’s the other feedback loop. To be aware of what’s moving in the field energetically. How do I read your body language? How do I feel and trust my gut about what’s coming through behind the words? I would say listening, if I were to say it in a way.
Get In Touch With Gareth
I want you to tell the audience, if I’m a man and I want to join one of your virtual circles, how do I do it? If I want to come to one of your retreats around the world, where do I find them? How do they look you up?
First of all, I want to echo what you said. I think a lot of what my personal path has been has not necessarily been learning more. It’s been unlearning the conditioning and beliefs that I’ve had about certain things. I’m talking to Gareth of ten years ago, who wouldn’t step into a men’s circle, even if it was presented to me. Give yourself permission to unlearn that story that this is not going to be valuable, that it’s going to be weird, that I don’t need this.”
Whatever that is, if you feel a resonance inside, give yourself permission to go. Give yourself permission to access this because the priority is manifesting and focusing on this bottom layer, this relationship that you have with yourself. There are multiple tools. From what I can tell, this is one of the fast tracks for the reasons we’ve spent the last hour and a half talking about.
Step into it. It’s a safe, confidentially held container. It’s called the King Circle. Give yourself permission to dive in. Come and see what happens inside this. If you don’t dig it, you don’t have to come back. I know you will, because if you’re reading this, you’ve made it to the end of an episode where something has kept you here for a reason. Trust that. That’s life pulling you in a direction that’s potentially giving you the opportunity to do something new. If you don’t change, nothing changes. It’s as simple as that.
If you read this and then go back to whatever you did today again tomorrow, you’re probably going to see similar results in your life. If you want to shift something, whether it’s a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, reconnected to a deeper alignment with the world, more money, whatever those things are, potentially improve that relationship itself. Check out the King Circle. I also have a podcast called Fathers Sons Brothers. We have conversations supporting men to become purpose-driven leaders and legendary lovers.
We share conversations through relationship, through the lens of leadership, and how to show up authentically in a relationship. Those conversations are also based on my own journey, which is the tools that I’ve learned around lifestyle design, around manifestation, around overcoming addiction, finding purpose through working together as men, through men’s circles. That’s some of the topics. FathersSonsBrothers.com has got all of our upcoming events. At the moment, we’re in a phase of doing a series called Kings and Queens, which is men and women together in a five-week series of trainings, supporting them to show up more fully in relationships.
Is this for couples or individuals, or both?
It could be both. It’s five trainings that help people become a little bit more connected to some of the nuances and relationships that emerge from studying thousands of people at the end of their lives. They asked them what things were that made their lives meaningful. It’s not money, it’s not the accolades that they created, it’s not the trips that they went on, it’s the quality of the relationships that they had.
That points to the fact that your relationships are probably the things that make your life the most meaningful, and none of us has any tools on how to do relationships well. If you’re out there trying to make your marriage work and you have no idea how to do conscious communication, you don’t know what your own triggers are, you don’t know what they are in your partner, it’s a battlefield that you’re completely unprepared for.
That’s part of what my work is. It’s recognizing that we don’t have tools for this stuff. This series of training is for men and women to give them some of the tools to identify how to support themselves, whether they want to call in partnership, whether they’re in a relationship at the moment and need some support with authentic communication, increasing polarity, relighting the fire in the sex life, or got out of a relationship and want to integrate the lessons from that relationship.
This series of training is for men and women. It’s free. At the end of it, the women journey into training with a relationship coach called Kate Mansfield. She’s the UK’s number one relationship coach, and the men journey with me and Lenerd into something called the Legendary Lover Method, which is our twelve-week men’s relationship and sexual mastery program. That’s what’s moving in our world at the moment, mostly around relationships.
Doing big stuff. Garrett, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I enjoyed our chat, and we’ll talk again soon.
Much love, brother.
Important Links
About Gareth Pickering
Relationships have always been a powerful teacher for me. When reflecting on my past connections, I realize they always mirror my inner state at that time. When I felt turbulent inside, I had tricky, difficult relationships.
When I started focusing on inner work and became the leader in my own life, I attracted more inspiring business partners and more secure, intimate connections.
For more than a decade, I’ve been testing and sharing tools and frameworks that support me in my relationships.
Using practices like meditation, emotional awareness, radical honesty, men’s work and bio-hacking, I coach others to invest in the relationship with themselves and become leaders in their own lives.
I live an idyllic and simple life in a tropical paradise in Guatemala with my partner Araminta, two cats and a rescue dog.
My mission is to share the tools that have supported me with others and inspire 1 billion people to love and accept themselves just as they are.
