In this episode, Nick speaks with Dennis Procopio about the evolution of a trauma victim into a business owner who works with men between their 20s and 60s who are having difficulty reframing negative self-talk, creating long-term goals, chunking these out into short-term goals, staying accountable, and managing relationships in a healthy way.

About Dennis Procopio

Dennis is the Founder and head coach at Man-UP! Life Coaching. Established nearly a decade ago, Man-UP! Life Coaching was Dennis’s answer to the question we all face as men: “What is my WHY?” Using his experiences both as an educator and a trauma survivor, Dennis began a coaching practice for men, using what he calls the “Bro Coach® Approach”. His coaching methodology incorporates elements of traditional therapy, instructive coaching, and an otherwise noticeably missing factor — Brotherly Love — to help men achieve optimal wellness and self-betterment goals in all facets of their lives.

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Your Friends at “The Mindset & Self-Mastery Show”

00:00:08:18 – 00:00:42:04
Nick McGowan
Hello and welcome to The Mindset and Self-mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. And on this show, my guests and I unpack the stories that shape us and the lives we lead on our path to self-mastery. Today on the show, we have Dennis Procopio Dennis Back Story involves the evolution of a trauma victim into a business owner who works with men between the ages of 20 years and sixties who are having difficulty reframing negative self-talk or creating long term goals, chunking these things out in the short term goals, and staying accountable.

00:00:42:13 – 00:00:55:07
Nick McGowan
And he helps them even manage relationships in a very healthy way. Now we cover a lot of ground in this episode, and this is one of the most informational packed episodes to date. So let’s not wait any longer. Let the games begin.

00:00:58:25 – 00:01:00:27
Nick McGowan
Hey, Dennis, welcome to the show. How you doing, man?

00:01:01:06 – 00:01:04:07
Dennis Procopio
Hey, Nick. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:01:04:23 – 00:01:21:27
Nick McGowan
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you being on. I’ve had some great conversations or communication, rather, back and forth with some of the members of your team and your team’s awesome. You’ve been awesome so far and you’ve been kind of shooting the breeze a little bit, so I’m excited to get into some of the stuff. But Dennis, why don’t you all kicks off in some context.

00:01:21:27 – 00:01:25:29
Nick McGowan
Tell us who you are, what you do for a living. And one thing that most people don’t know about you.

00:01:26:16 – 00:02:05:20
Dennis Procopio
Are who I am. Let’s see. So I am a 51 year old life coach for men with a little bit of a colorful backstory, which probably informs my decision to move into a male health and wellness space as a career and arguably my legacy. I make the joke that my story, if it were written, which is on my to do list, would or should I say will read as an Oprah Book Club Book of the Month story.

00:02:05:21 – 00:02:59:09
Dennis Procopio
It’s kind of a little bit of a tear jerker and an inspirational story all rolled into one. So some of the finer points include poverty, abuse, alcoholism, some drugs, some jail, but also on the lighter side. So a lot of experience with women in relationships, which again, lends itself to my my ability to coach relationships. I was an academic phenom and ended up getting really high grades and being accepted to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, where I studied art and went on to become an art educator, where I discovered, you’re not really an art teacher.

00:02:59:19 – 00:03:37:10
Dennis Procopio
You’re a coach who teaches art techniques and art with about a million stupid jobs and and weird stories in between. I landed in New Orleans, Louisiana, both before, during and after. That’s not really both. That’s three things. Both before and after Hurricane Katrina. So there’s a side quest there. And I ended up with my lovely partner, who is the mother of our almost 12 year old son, Bennett, who is autistic.

00:03:37:15 – 00:04:08:07
Dennis Procopio
We now live in San Diego, California. I operate as a men’s life coach as I’ve done for nearly a decade under the brand man up life coaching. And if there’s one thing that I could say that people don’t know about me, it is something that I didn’t know about myself until this year, which is that like my little son, Daddy apparently is autistic.

00:04:08:07 – 00:04:12:13
Nick McGowan
And what a thing to find out later in life.

00:04:13:00 – 00:04:40:00
Dennis Procopio
It was a wild thing to find out. I assumed that I was, quote, just crazy because I’m a Jewish Italian from, you know, Philadelphia, Philly. All right. Who has a history of abuse. So it was probably PTSD. It was probably oh, he’s four is Calabrese so he’s hardheaded, you know, that maybe it was the 24 different schools I’ve been to.

00:04:40:21 – 00:05:19:10
Dennis Procopio
These are all true things and they’re unfortunate. But I’ve learned that neuro types are a thing and I’ve learned that I am diagnosed possible as a very specific neuro type, which is neurodivergent rather than neurotypical. And that is a fancy way of saying, I am not a garden variety processor. I process differently and folks who are like me typically have a challenging time operating in a neurotypical world.

00:05:20:24 – 00:05:48:21
Nick McGowan
So to think of processing the way that people process through things just in general is probably super unique to how they go about it, at least to themselves. They think, Oh, I process things differently than other people. If you really think about it. So the fact that there are different versions of processing and that you now understand later in life that kind of flipped the script for you where you then thought kind of back through everything you’ve ever done.

00:05:49:05 – 00:05:55:13
Nick McGowan
I’m like, Oh my gosh, that’s why I’ve made these decisions, or that’s how that all worked. Or Have you not gone through that?

00:05:56:04 – 00:06:02:24
Dennis Procopio
I’ve absolutely gone through that. Hindsight is, of course, 2020.

00:06:03:04 – 00:06:03:11
Nick McGowan
Or.

00:06:04:19 – 00:06:54:09
Dennis Procopio
Or in this case, 2022. But Bob and I, you know, I at first was challenged by the label autistic, and I realized that there is a ballistic I should I should clarify in the autism community the term ableism and frankly, in the disabled community at large, the term able ism is obvious. It applies to the people who have the privilege of not dealing with the disabilities that some of us do, and making certain assumptions about how you should operate, which are unfair to the challenges that we face.

00:06:54:27 – 00:07:33:10
Dennis Procopio
So I recognize that there’s a little bit of evil ism in the way I thought of autism. I used language like high or low functioning. I now know better that’s not appropriate. But I was so familiar with the sort of Rainman autism air quotes, low functioning stereotype that it didn’t occur to me that people like Elon Musk, for instance, are also identifiable as autistic, which is a fact.

00:07:33:14 – 00:07:54:22
Dennis Procopio
Mm hmm. So when I look back at my life, I realize I was saying, oh, well, I can’t. I could never be autistic because I got great grades in school. I can never be autistic because I’m such a great communicator. I could you know, I, I think being social so well, that’s called masking and then it’s actually appropriate.

00:07:54:25 – 00:08:23:24
Dennis Procopio
Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So. So, yes, I did, in fact, do a full systematic look back at, you know, 51 years of my life and replaced old labels like crazy temperamental, you know, immature, or all of these negative labels that I was able to replace them with autistic and therefore appropriate for your diagnosis. So that was huge and a good thing.

00:08:24:16 – 00:08:42:29
Nick McGowan
Oh yeah. Well, that’s clarity to I could imagine if you were when you label something, you state this is what it is. And I want to dove into labels a little bit because your label changed, you know, when you thought, Now I don’t want to be Rainman or I could never be like that. I could never be in that sort of situation.

00:08:43:00 – 00:09:00:07
Nick McGowan
You put a judgment and a label specifically to it, and we all do it naturally. We all just do those things because it’s abnormal from what we are used to, atypical to what we’re used to. So for you to actually go back through and go, Oh, I like this label, wasn’t the actual label I need to replace that label.

00:09:00:24 – 00:09:16:27
Nick McGowan
When you first thought about, Well, I’m now autistic. You put a label on yourself. So how were you not subscribing to a specific label and continuing to thrive in life and not pull yourself back to be on this level of a label that makes sense?

00:09:17:21 – 00:09:43:07
Dennis Procopio
It makes perfect sense. And I’m going to demonstrate that I understood the question. Okay. And I’m going to go big. I mean, if we’re really going to talk about let’s do it. Talk about it. Right. Okay. So let’s begin with the umbrella of neurodiversity. I’m going to use that as our parent folder, our parent directory that contains everything else.

00:09:43:07 – 00:10:18:24
Dennis Procopio
Okay? A subset of that will be neurotypical personalities, and another subset of neurodiversity will be neurodivergent personalities. I’m not an expert on this subject matter. I literally just found out that I’m autistic and my son diagnosed at five. So we’ve only dealt with his his autistic identity for, you know, half of his life. Little bit more than half his life.

00:10:19:06 – 00:11:09:04
Dennis Procopio
That said, I’ve done some reading and I’ve done some hanging out in the community. And I’ve interrogated a couple. Interrogated, though, because I want to know what I’ve learned. Yeah. And what I’ve learned is that neurodiversity simply means that there is a spectrum. If you could imagine a spherical prismatic spectrum of metrics that can, you know, be used to determine if someone is introverted or extroverted or has, you know, since, you know, sensory response is just, you know, everybody is diverse under this umbrella.

00:11:09:04 – 00:11:39:11
Dennis Procopio
Now, neurotypical people are people who by definition are in a really, really tight lane, and they have in common that they are wired similarly and they do kind of the same stuff more often than not, which there’s a certain level of homogeneity there. And then everyone else trying to impress you. I said homogeneity, that’s a big word.

00:11:39:11 – 00:11:40:21
Nick McGowan
Drop those things that works.

00:11:41:14 – 00:12:20:19
Dennis Procopio
Right? Right. I think inflation I think we’re up to like a 25. But so so that’s another conversation. So we, you know, we have the neurotypicals and then we have everyone else, which is those people who are neurodivergent. That simply means that we diverge from neurotypicals. But it’s an ironic term, in my opinion, since I’m learning that there are so many people who technically qualify as Neurodivergent, I have to wonder how many people are masking as neurotypical or as a survival mechanism.

00:12:21:27 – 00:12:29:04
Dennis Procopio
Which brings me to my next interesting logical leap, which is probably bullshit, but it sounds good. So let’s.

00:12:29:04 – 00:12:31:24
Nick McGowan
Let’s go all the theories, right? Let’s. I mean.

00:12:31:24 – 00:12:57:14
Dennis Procopio
Let’s double down. So. So I have this idea. I went to a school called Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Okay? There’s an implied dichotomy there that science is on one side. You know, that’s the way side of the corpus callosum. And and and art is on the other side. Right. You can even make an argument for the male brain and the female brain couldn’t.

00:12:57:15 – 00:13:24:23
Dennis Procopio
Or it’s that’s that’s a conversation we’ve had culturally over the past, however long we’ve been around. And this dichotomy of science and art is artificial. I am of the opinion that it’s artificial technology. Techniques from the Greek literally means art. And so the term technology itself means the study of biology.

00:13:25:02 – 00:13:25:21
Nick McGowan
Yeah.

00:13:25:21 – 00:14:10:06
Dennis Procopio
And right. And so when you see a renaissance thinker like Leonardo da Vinci, who both makes beautiful illustrations from cadavers and they’re so medically precise that they’re still relevant in 2022, you see the best of both romantic and classical thinking simultaneously. Stay with me. Whole brain thinkers or renaissance thinkers are often known as polymaths or polymath thinkers. I am of the suspicion that we are design bound to be polymath and to be whole brain thinkers.

00:14:10:20 – 00:14:40:06
Dennis Procopio
But that whole brain thinking doesn’t necessarily lend itself to social productivity. And so there’s an argument that we are socially conditioned to be neurotypical so that we can like the movie divergence, so that we can do our little jobs and serve the hive. So back to your original question, which I remember, believe it or not, how do you accept the new label, autistic?

00:14:41:06 – 00:15:11:05
Dennis Procopio
If this label means that you’re different and you’re part of a bunch of people who are different? I think the truth of the matter is that autism and autistic will in the future prove to have been sort of stepping stones to the recollection that we are whole brain thinkers and the people who are presently thought of as Neurodivergent will eventually be.

00:15:11:05 – 00:15:25:07
Dennis Procopio
Theodor thought of as normal, and the people who are neuro typical will be thought of as a sort of social construct that existed for a while until we learned better.

00:15:26:09 – 00:15:45:09
Nick McGowan
That’s interesting with the the all the thoughts that happen from both sides of the brain and being whole brained. One of the things that you pointed out was not being able to communicate that and get that out to somebody else. And I think that right there is of itself an example that science and art of being able to actually get out what you’re trying to say.

00:15:45:09 – 00:16:25:28
Nick McGowan
And it’s the art of communication. The labels when somebody labels something like if you look at a cup that’s blue and you go, It’s blue with a blue cup easy. And we will also have to think about that anymore. But then that’s all that thing is with all of the stuff that you’ve been through and understanding that you are evolving, the question of do you look at that label and say All that is now what I am just with a little extra spice to it, and then you kind of take it to a completely different level to be able to talk about how it’s maybe actually an evolution.

00:16:26:08 – 00:16:38:20
Dennis Procopio
So that’s is it an evolution or is it a a a a return to sanity?

00:16:39:05 – 00:17:04:25
Nick McGowan
I think that might be semantics because realistically, if if things happen, let’s just run with the idea of evolution for 1/2. If we say things happen and as we as a human race evolved, we also adapted and we changed. Like, even now, we don’t run around and hunt for our food constantly. People do for enjoyment, or they do to go out and just do hunting.

00:17:05:04 – 00:17:24:10
Nick McGowan
But it’s not like when I want I’m done with this. Not going back, man. I’m going to run out. Go grab a rabbit or something like that. So things have changed. We’ve adapted, we’ve figured that out. But if what you’re talking about, of that adaptation, of being able to say, Well, I need to actually focus on one side or the other to be able to work within this sort of situation.

00:17:24:21 – 00:17:37:12
Nick McGowan
As we grow, as technology advances and we tie in to technology, maybe that’ll help us understand that we don’t actually have to work in one specific environment. We’re kind of experiencing that throughout everything that’s happened with the pandemic.

00:17:38:15 – 00:17:58:23
Dennis Procopio
I was going to say exactly that. So all right. I have there’s a there’s a little voice in the back of my head saying, do you tell him what he wants to hear you say what you’re really thinking, right? Say so, let’s do this. I was going to say let’s do the second thing. So, you know, I mentioned having gone to college for fine art there.

00:18:00:06 – 00:18:31:13
Dennis Procopio
I had the opportunity in New York to visit the museums a lot. And one of the artists that I was very I responded very both viscerally to and intellectually. And there’s a whole argument there if those are different things with the Belgian artist René Magritte, and he has an image that become iconic. It’s called The Treachery of Images, and it’s a painting of a pipe.

00:18:31:13 – 00:19:06:09
Dennis Procopio
And it says in French, in a present pipe, which means this is not a pipe. So it’s an image of a pipe that says this is a pipe. And that’s true. It’s not a pipe. It’s not it’s a painting. It’s a facsimile. So when we get back to labels, you know, I think we need to be careful to be sure that we understand what we actually are.

00:19:06:13 – 00:19:15:22
Dennis Procopio
Before accepting even the most seemingly contextually obvious labels. Yeah, such as human.

00:19:16:22 – 00:19:18:23
Nick McGowan
Yeah, I get that.

00:19:19:22 – 00:19:21:12
Dennis Procopio
I went back on. Yeah, right there.

00:19:21:12 – 00:19:46:27
Nick McGowan
Well, so the box that I’m thinking about that people have to sit in and the reason for the labels is to be able to go, I can get this, I can understand this thing. Yeah. And even with the Blue Cup, I was told as a child, that’s blue. This is a cup. You drink this. Those are labels. So you you then form judgments as you got as you go older, like you would talked about seeing Rainman and other things.

00:19:46:27 – 00:20:12:29
Nick McGowan
Your judgment changed when you had a child that was autistic. So you were a little further ahead, I guess, in somebody that may find out similarly to you where it might be a bit more of a shock, but you kind of thought about that a little deeper and took that to a different level. I appreciate the idea that there’s potentially an evolution that’s happening or it’s a claiming back to the things that are have always been.

00:20:13:21 – 00:20:33:15
Nick McGowan
And I think it’s interesting because I’ve always been told, I don’t know, since I was a little kid, we basically use about 10% of our brain. So using 90% more would have to be the entire brain. So in that basic like.

00:20:33:15 – 00:20:34:16
Dennis Procopio
Agree with that. Yeah.

00:20:34:16 – 00:20:54:19
Nick McGowan
Yeah. Even at that basic dumb level of like I do math, like that sort of stuff makes sense to use the entire brain. But you also touched on masking. There are people that are potentially kind of masking some of this and that’s just in general. So there’s the labels, there’s the mask, and then what people label a mask to be.

00:20:54:23 – 00:20:59:04
Nick McGowan
So which part of this would you like to dove in further with?

00:20:59:04 – 00:21:34:18
Dennis Procopio
You know, I’m feeling like I want to just quadruple down on my original intention, which was unforgiving honesty. And I think the reason that I’m going to do that is because it’s not only a story about being autistic slash a hole brained thinker, slash a polymath like thinker. It’s a clinic. This is what that looks like and sounds like.

00:21:35:05 – 00:22:13:02
Dennis Procopio
And it’s not familiar because it’s not typical. We have a tendency to follow verticals and to drop the ball on the lateral drift where ideas come from. Mm hmm. Autistics have this tendency to infodemic. We gather a lot of information, and I mean a lot because we’re constantly on a lateral drift collecting data. We don’t say, hey, the most efficient way to get from point A to point B is a straight line.

00:22:13:02 – 00:22:41:16
Dennis Procopio
We say the most interesting way to get from point A to point B is this outrageous, serpentine path. And look at all the cool stuff that I collected along the way. And so we tend to it tends to be one way traffic any time we talk because we just ha it hit you with all of this crap that we’re super geeked about.

00:22:41:16 – 00:23:12:09
Dennis Procopio
And so when I share with you these ideas about labels, about autistic identity, about being the father of an autistic child and about being an artist and about being a coach for men. If I had to like a jazz musician who finally says, All right, fine, I’ll give you the four, four time signature resolution. Note that I know your list.

00:23:12:17 – 00:23:13:15
Dennis Procopio
You’re home, you’re waiting.

00:23:13:15 – 00:23:14:21
Nick McGowan
You’re hanging on for. Yeah.

00:23:15:01 – 00:24:17:04
Dennis Procopio
You’re I’m going to I’m going to just tighten up. So if I had to find in the Venn diagram of all those things, I just enumerated the commonality that makes this digestible for the average neurotypical listener. My experience as a guy coming through chaos, learning to adapt in the world, becoming a coach for men and discovering along the way that I am an autistic who has been masking is also an experience in learning that a lot of guys with or without a label are also masking and are trying to be what they think they should be by looking at examples that they’re learning from, examples that they’re learning from example, and they’re not confident enough

00:24:17:04 – 00:24:26:29
Dennis Procopio
to come from a place of authenticity because there’s a lot of risk involved there. And the risk is social rejection, if you feel that one.

00:24:27:14 – 00:24:46:03
Nick McGowan
Yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that totally. You know, we are we as people can blame parents and say, you know, if my parents had raised me differently or if their parents had raised them differently or something like that, there’s a certain point where you as a human need to do your own damn thing and figure it out from there.

00:24:46:15 – 00:25:04:13
Nick McGowan
But there are things that happen as we grow up because those are the people that we see that are doing things around us where we are naturally emulators. But what are they doing? Oh well, that’s how I do this. It’s like how babies learn to speak, not like we teach them. Here’s the word that starts with the te baby.

00:25:04:16 – 00:25:26:03
Nick McGowan
Just look at us and shit, you know, so it wouldn’t help. So the emulation makes sense, but where do we. I wonder where we actually start to draw that line? It may be right around middle middle school where you start to actually look at yourself a bit differently. But things are also confusing as hell. So let’s kind of jump a little bit.

00:25:26:16 – 00:25:45:25
Nick McGowan
Now, people have been men have been confused. They’ve gone through their teens in their twenties. I know you work with men that are between 20 and let’s say 60 or so. What sort of issues are you seeing that those people are now having to go back through and process through? Like, what are the common, common things that you need to help them kind of work through?

00:25:47:13 – 00:26:19:27
Dennis Procopio
I’m going to reverse engineer my answer to your question, because if I answered it the way you asked it, I would list out a whole bunch of typical problems. But if I went to the solution to all of those problems, interestingly, it’s always two things meditation and validation. The real talk f So meditation is something that I learned by accident.

00:26:20:27 – 00:26:42:03
Dennis Procopio
I told you that I come from bullshit. And so there was always paper and pencil available or paper and pen or whatever. Even in jail, you go to commissary, you get a legal pad, and I felt tip pen too, you know, and you can sit in your cell or out in the common area and draw or doodle or do whatever you want.

00:26:42:03 – 00:27:28:14
Dennis Procopio
So that was me. I was that kid. I was constantly self-regulating and I didn’t understand that I was self-regulating. That’s that’s in know, clinical language. But I was self-regulated through drawing. What I was doing was a kinesthetic meditation practice on, wax on. And what would happen is along the way I would as I would assume, a yogic posture, I would assume yogic breathing, I would fall into sort of a, you know, and a rhythmic flow state where my energy was doing what energy does so that it can start to send messages out into the universe and use the old law of Attraction to get good stuff to come to you.

00:27:28:14 – 00:27:54:18
Dennis Procopio
And we can call that good fortune, miracles, blessings, whatever you want to call it. But there is absolutely a mechanism there. So meditation is something that I learned through drawing and as a byproduct there were these pictures that people were like, Hey, these are really interesting. You should go to art school. But it was really the process, not the product that that was my jam.

00:27:55:03 – 00:28:33:02
Dennis Procopio
So as an art teacher, I recognized man is people really need to just stop trying to do art and they need to learn to just be still and see and then document. They’re seeing the way they see it and technique will follow. And so the second piece, which is how art teaching evolved into coaching, the second piece is every I don’t care if it was like a ten year old kid or a, you know, 70 something, a hobbyist coming to take an art class.

00:28:33:26 – 00:29:19:17
Dennis Procopio
The most debilitating factor in a creative environment is self judgment. Somewhere along the way, as you suggested earlier, the baby didn’t learn that by having been told the baby just had his his his eyes open and his ears, his or her eyes and ears open and somebody said, you stuck, you you suck, you stink. Don’t quit your day job artist for quieres or whatever negative messaging and they heard that and they got shut down and they put their they took their ball and went home and they never played that game again.

00:29:20:10 – 00:29:57:12
Dennis Procopio
So what I learned about art education is before you teach teach technique, you have to teach someone to stop the shit scripting and stop judging themselves and learn how to father their inner child and learn how to validate. Now, at the risk of, like I said, boiling you over with information, when someone practices meditation diligently and practices self validation diligently, validating the self and validating others because we’re all connected.

00:29:57:12 – 00:30:23:22
Dennis Procopio
So it’s technically the same thing and learns to redirect the judgment of the self and the judgment of others. Problems start to resolve themselves. The problems that are typical are that are the reason that guys come to life coaching are not making enough money. I don’t feel that I have job security. I’m concerned about my health or fitness level.

00:30:24:13 – 00:30:47:01
Dennis Procopio
I’m having body dysmorphia and I think I’m too skinny or too fat or whatever. I’m not in a relationship and I want to be in one or I’m in a relationship and I’m struggling with it. I’m not as good of a dad as I want to be. I am dropping the ball on things that I feel like I should be doing, that I’m not doing.

00:30:47:01 – 00:31:09:20
Dennis Procopio
I’m not living optimally. I’m not hitting the goals I want to hit. So these are all manifestations of a of problems that occur which are corrected. Basically, I’m the devil’s in the details. There’s a whole program, but basically meditation and validation.

00:31:10:13 – 00:31:15:06
Nick McGowan
Makes sense and you’re fixing the root problem, not the symptom.

00:31:15:06 – 00:31:15:29
Dennis Procopio
It’s holistic.

00:31:15:29 – 00:31:17:16
Nick McGowan
Literally. Yeah, exactly.

00:31:18:17 – 00:31:20:24
Dennis Procopio
That’s what a whole brain thinker would do, right?

00:31:20:28 – 00:31:23:02
Nick McGowan
It’s pretty holistic thinking you got there.

00:31:24:00 – 00:32:06:04
Dennis Procopio
I mean, I think so. So, again, to land the spaceship for a second, the average guy who comes through here, here being my my little world is, as you mentioned, between 20 something and 60 something is usually a guy who is you know, these aren’t crisis cases typically. I mean, they come along once in a while, but they’re usually guys who can afford a coach, you know, whose charges at a you know, at a fair but competitive price point to their guys making, you know, $100,000 a year up to like, I think one of my highest earners is somewhere near 10 million.

00:32:06:22 – 00:32:34:16
Dennis Procopio
And they’re guys who are doing okay but want to be doing better. And by doing better, that means that they’re doing all the things they’ve been told to do to qualify as a great citizen, but they’re actually not happy. That must resonate with you a little bit, right?

00:32:34:18 – 00:32:54:09
Nick McGowan
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I hear to have those conversations as well. And that’s it’s the fucking problem is the root. So many people try to deal with the symptom of it, letting my emotions get into it. But I’m right there with you and I’m feeling what you’re saying, man. I appreciate it. So keep going.

00:32:54:09 – 00:33:03:26
Dennis Procopio
Well, I can, though. I as much as I like to share, I also like to learn. So, I mean, if you don’t mind me asking. So you coach, right?

00:33:04:03 – 00:33:04:11
Nick McGowan
Yeah.

00:33:05:22 – 00:33:12:24
Dennis Procopio
Yeah. And you deal with people who have some of the same problems that I’m talking about, right?

00:33:12:24 – 00:33:36:19
Nick McGowan
Absolutely. Oh, yeah. I mean, we all deal with basically the same problems. It’s all at the core, similar types of problems. It stems from somewhere different. But I think a lot of it what I what I really work with is a lot of going back to the childhood trauma and figuring out what happened when you were a kid that you’ve just been dragging with you for years and years and years.

00:33:36:29 – 00:34:03:05
Nick McGowan
It’s part of the reason why I ask the question. That’s one of the biggest things that not only did I work deeper on throughout the whole pandemic and everything that was happening, but having conversations with other men that were going through the deep stuff that was just spitting out, it’s almost like pimples when you eat like really, really greasy food for a couple of days, you get a pimple, just that shit trying to get out of your self, your system.

00:34:03:20 – 00:34:24:24
Nick McGowan
So seeing stuff, try to get out of people’s system and then not knowing what to do with it or how to go about it and how to process it. It’s like, is poison kind of coming out and they have no idea what to do. It just spilling out of them. So that’s a rough thing to be able to watch people go through, but it’s a beautiful thing to actually help them through it and be able to help them kind of process through.

00:34:25:05 – 00:34:42:16
Nick McGowan
I think for a lot of people, even just doubling helps where they get to listen and talk and throw things back and forth and be able to have a bit of conversation. Do you experience that to where sometimes some of your sessions you’re talking to somebody, you just ask a couple of questions and by the end of it they’re like, Oh, it’s this thing, man.

00:34:42:16 – 00:34:46:10
Nick McGowan
That’s great, thanks. You’re absolutely good talk.

00:34:47:18 – 00:35:11:20
Dennis Procopio
Yeah, that’s classic Socratic method, right? Yeah. You’re you have the answer, but you’re not addressing the answer. There’s a difference between obliviousness and ignorance, right? If you don’t know there’s a monster standing behind you, then you’re going to act differently than if you turn around and go, Oh, crap, there’s a monster behind me. I’m just going to ignore him till he goes away.

00:35:12:04 – 00:35:46:11
Dennis Procopio
There’s two different ways of yeah. Of of acting I think a lot of people are ignoring, which is the true definition of ignorance. They’re ignoring this monster, which is a construct that is created by a negative narrative. That negative narrative can come from, Hey, my past was X, Y, Z, or I’m concerned that my future will be x, y, z.

00:35:47:03 – 00:36:06:27
Dennis Procopio
Neither the past nor the future exists now only exists now, which is why meditation can be interesting because it asks us to be present, which requires letting go of narratives about the past or the future.

00:36:06:27 – 00:36:40:07
Nick McGowan
Yeah. And tying in the validation, like you said at that moment, is really doubling down on what your what your intent is within the meditation to be present and feel every bit of that presence and feel every bit of that positive side of that and being able to move forward. There are certain conversations I have and there’s certain conversations I have to have with myself at times, and you can feel things just kind of swelling up the frustration or the aggravation and being able to just pull your energy back, just breathe for a three, four in, three, four out, whatever it needs to be.

00:36:40:23 – 00:37:05:17
Nick McGowan
And being able to pull yourself back to that that little bit of meditation throughout the day, it’s one of the things that I try to leave with people like just all your energy back, all your energy back and breathe, just the beauty within that. Because there’s moments where if you don’t do that, you’re going to snap off. But if somebody can catch that, become aware, do the breathing, understand that they’re in the moment, they’re totally good and they’re actually okay.

00:37:05:23 – 00:37:08:04
Nick McGowan
And that can shift everything moving forward.

00:37:08:23 – 00:37:49:28
Dennis Procopio
I agree. It’s funny, you know, you’re you’re making me think about the first of all, my son, who is autistic, is very inflexible necessarily in his reactions to things that don’t go his way. And so teaching mental flexibility is a full time job as a dad, especially when you’re just like him. You’re just an older version. So so one of the things that he’s picked up from his teachers is, Hey, Bennett, stop, breathe and think.

00:37:51:23 – 00:38:13:19
Dennis Procopio
And sometimes if I’m driving and I don’t realize that my yo South Philly is coming out a little bit trying to drive through the San Diego traffic, I’ll hear my kid in the background, her dad stop, breathe and think, you know. So even though I’ll tell guys all day long meditate and validate, I might catch myself in a moment where I’m going.

00:38:13:19 – 00:38:31:21
Dennis Procopio
If this motherfucker cuts me off, I swear to God I’m going to hit him. And I’m like, I’m not saying that, but I’m just I’m breathing. My heart rate’s up and he’s back there like a pizza dog or something. Good, dad, because he can hear my breathing. Go, Daddy, stop, breathe and think. And it’s so. Yeah, we should we should.

00:38:32:02 – 00:38:53:02
Dennis Procopio
We should audit ourselves constantly, make sure that we’re physically relaxed. Make sure I learned this in the B JJ classes three times a week. I go in there and they’re like, Dude, listen, listen, listen up. You’re going to gas out. If you keep going like this, we should loosen up. We should breathe. We should do the best we can to be present.

00:38:53:17 – 00:39:07:29
Dennis Procopio
And the validation is valuable because when our brain automatically goes back to that fear based thinking, validation is a way of sort of waterboarding the self conscious with positive messaging. So it knocks it off work.

00:39:08:17 – 00:39:11:13
Nick McGowan
Waterboarding with positive messaging that the.

00:39:11:29 – 00:39:21:26
Dennis Procopio
Talk about, oh yeah, you are loved. How many times do I tell you I love you.

00:39:23:10 – 00:39:53:23
Nick McGowan
Man, too good. Well, and we’ve gotten into a lot here and I know there’s a lot more that we can get get into. We’ve touched on a couple of major episodes in your life that have happened that have kind of shifted things for you. But are there any others that make sense to talk about that really stand out that you’re like, look, there is this one moment in time that shifted everything outside of the things that we’ve already talked about.

00:39:53:23 – 00:40:32:24
Dennis Procopio
That’s a good question, man. I have to I have to say that and I kind of I’m sorry that this sounds like like something you’d expect a guy, you know, that’s promoting a business or whatever to say. But real talk when I there’s a Japanese concept called ikigai, right? And if your guy is the center of a diagram which represents the overlap between what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for.

00:40:33:14 – 00:41:06:03
Dennis Procopio
At a certain point in my life, I sat down and I said, is the thing that I’m doing now, my why? And it wasn’t. And I said, What would describe my why and some of the answers when I solicited the universe and audited myself, some of the answers I came up with are I want to help people. I’d specifically like to help men.

00:41:06:03 – 00:41:35:21
Dennis Procopio
I believe in brotherly love and I’d like to promote it as a way of globally helping the world. And I believe that doing this on a daily basis could also help me heal. And so I sat at my table. You and I are looking at each other, so I’m pointing to my little by little man up symbol. I actually painted that on a piece of paper and I said, I think this is my symbol, man up.

00:41:35:29 – 00:42:00:06
Dennis Procopio
And in that moment something happened and I literally drew my destiny into existence. And almost ten years later, I am now a product of the principles of my own coaching, kind of the old commercial. And yeah, just the, you know, the president of the Hair Club for MIT.

00:42:00:06 – 00:42:04:24
Nick McGowan
And also a client. Client, you’ve got to be your first client. You’ve got to be your man.

00:42:04:25 – 00:42:30:00
Dennis Procopio
Yeah, because you are. And and so and so more than anything else, I mean, rivaling that would be the birth of my son, but probably more than anything else was the moment where I accepted my began the journey with man up life coaching and began developing genuine relationships based on brotherly love with other brothers and helping guys here while healing in the process.

00:42:31:14 – 00:42:55:06
Nick McGowan
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And I love the fact that you’ve gone through all of the auditing. You’ve brought that up a couple of times, and I think that’s a big thing for us all to be mindful of. There are times where I know that people feel like they’re off and look, I’m not in your skin or in your head, but listeners know when they’re off, when they’re a bit off, you got to audit yourself.

00:42:55:08 – 00:43:13:27
Nick McGowan
You got to be able to figure out what that is. And I coach people to understand what their triggers are like. What’s the actual thing? How do you know you’re off? I know when I’m off, when I’m not naturally just up and positive and excited because that’s my natural state is that state of joy. And if I’m not, I’m like, Wow, fuck this and fuck that.

00:43:13:27 – 00:43:29:16
Nick McGowan
I’m like, Wait a minute, dude, what’s your problem? What’s wrong? Yeah, man. Well, I feel about this knob about, like he said. Yeah, you got to parent yourself and you got to be the father with that little kid that’s still in there. Sometimes, even if you go back through and you process through all that, there’s still shit that’s in there.

00:43:29:16 – 00:43:39:27
Nick McGowan
It’s going to come back. But they are. The fact that you’ve gone through and you’ve worked through all of that and you’re doing what you’re doing, man, you’re doing the great work and thank you for doing it. And I appreciate you being on the show.

00:43:40:12 – 00:43:54:28
Dennis Procopio
And back at you. Thank you, too, man. I mean, I the first time you and I spoke, it was a great connection. Second time, even more so. So I appreciate you for having me. Hopefully I didn’t, you know, talk your ear off or get to soapbox, you know?

00:43:54:28 – 00:44:01:14
Nick McGowan
No. I think this has been great. Talking my ear off isn’t a thing. This is a podcast. So you should talk my ear off.

00:44:02:21 – 00:44:04:09
Dennis Procopio
You’re supposed to talk and you are.

00:44:04:12 – 00:44:22:24
Nick McGowan
Really up on a pedestal or soapbox or anything. That’s what I think. What we got into was pretty deep and that’s what I aim to do. So, man, I appreciate you being on the show. Let’s let’s kind of wrap this thing up with what’s that one piece of advice you give somebody on their path towards self-mastery?

00:44:22:24 – 00:45:05:24
Dennis Procopio
You know, I think mindset before technique is the key to mastery. And I think mindset begins with stillness. So practicing stillness, which we might call meditation, is clutch and positive mindset, which means rather than saying, I’m not going to be negative, which is kind of ironic because all you’re saying is negative, negative, negative. But instead of brainwashing yourself with positive messaging until you’ve believe it, stillness and validation if you practice them.

00:45:05:24 – 00:45:10:05
Dennis Procopio
I am a living testament. Testament to the fact that everything else will fall in line.

00:45:11:00 – 00:45:19:10
Nick McGowan
It’s awesome, man. You are. Appreciate that. So tell us where people connect with you. Where can they find you?

00:45:19:26 – 00:45:36:00
Dennis Procopio
Yeah, if you’re interested in the stuff I’ve been saying and you want to hear more, you can go to man up life coaching dot com. Or if that’s too much to remember you can go to mail life coach dot com.

00:45:37:14 – 00:45:40:15
Nick McGowan
Perfect again Dennis thank you for being on the show. Appreciate your time.

00:45:40:20 – 00:45:49:29
Dennis Procopio
Thank you, brother.

00:45:49:29 – 00:46:19:14
Nick McGowan
Another great conversation on today’s episode of The Mindset and Self-mastery show. Wow. Dennis truly has an incredible story. And can you imagine being diagnosed with autism later in life? Sure. Even if it’s not autism, there may be something else that you or someone you love has been diagnosed with later in life. And, you know, it’s interesting to think about the process of thinking in the variations of how we all process.

00:46:20:02 – 00:46:46:04
Nick McGowan
So since we all process diagnosis and everything else differently than anybody else would, and the way you or I process may be labeled as a certain way of processing, we shouldn’t let that stop us, should we? Oh, we shouldn’t let any label hold us back. So what did you think about today’s conversation? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the episode, and if you enjoyed the episode, please jump over to iTunes.

00:46:46:04 – 00:47:04:11
Nick McGowan
Subscribe right and leave five star review. It helps us to be found and helps others to be healed. And if you really enjoyed the show today, go ahead and share it with a friend. That person that literally just came to mind for whatever reason they came to mind. Just share with them. Just go for it. Why not blame it on me if they’re like, What is this?

00:47:05:02 – 00:47:27:08
Nick McGowan
So if you really enjoyed the show today to share it with whoever comes to mind, that’s the moral that story. And check out the show notes for more information and get contact info for Dennis and check out the other episodes on the mindset and self-mastery show Dcoms as well as our YouTube channel. Just go to YouTube and look up the mindset and self-mastery show and that are key.

00:47:27:09 – 00:47:46:10
Nick McGowan
Thanks again, Dennis, for being real, for being honest and forgetting into some really deep, interesting stuff, and for sharing that with your clients and the rest of the world for being vulnerable with us about it all. And thank you to you for being a part of this show.

00:48:09:05 – 00:48:14:25
Nick McGowan
So with that, remember your mindset matters and so do you.