Infinitely Scalable Podcast: When Tough Guys Trade Fear for Love — With Mike Giardina

Mike Giardina has spent decades grinding.

Being tough. Gritty — in the U.S. Navy, as an Operations Specialist 2nd Class. As a high-level CrossFit athlete and Seminar Staff Flowmaster. And as a survivor of trauma.

He’d grown up dodging the shrapnel of his father’s explosive outbursts, using drugs to cope. He watched friends overdose around him. And after he left the Navy in 2009 — while dealing with the shock of reentry into civilian life — his father killed himself. Mike found the body. Fourteen years later, his sister followed suit.

At a retreat organized by the Heroic Hearts Project, Mike and other veterans stepped back into their traumas through a supervised psilocybin mushroom ceremony.

“I was faced with an extremely concentrated experience of fear,” he says.

The experience led him to a profound realization: “The tiny bits of fear that I feel daily, that force me to keep my walls up and protect myself and keep tension within the body — it fucking hit me in the face. Hard,” he says. “And the only way I could get through that fear to the other side was by learning how to let go.”

In this episode of the Infinitely Scalable podcast, a host of self-proclaimed recovering “alphas” — win-at-all-costs tough guys obsessed with dominance in the gym and in life — talk about finding a more real kind of strength.

The kind of strength that comes with vulnerability.

“The shames and the traumas and the embarrassments … we’ll bring them with us in so many different ways,” says co-host Tony Ronchi. “At some point, you’ve got to actually go back to the root to figure out why those things are the way that they are.”

Co-host and CrossFit Seminar Staff member Andrew Charlesworth agrees.

“The most alpha thing you can do is talk like this to other dudes,” he says.

Listen in as the guys share glimpses of their own journeys and how their definition of success has shifted over time. “My metrics of success now are the relationships that I continue to strengthen with my loved ones and my friends,” Mike says. “That’s the kind of stuff that really is important to me now.”