In this episode, Phil opens up about his personal struggles with darkness and how it affects high achievers. He shares his own story of dealing with childhood trauma, fighting addiction, and facing thoughts of giving up. Phil talks about the importance of confronting inner challenges and not hiding from them. He recalls a tragic story about a fellow Marine, highlighting the seriousness of battling your inner darkness. Phil emphasizes the need for self-healing, staying disciplined, and using personal struggles as a way to grow and help others. His main message is about resilience and the importance of not giving up, no matter how tough things get.
Welcome to The Phil Bohol Show, hosted by USMC veteran, mindset coach, sales expert, self-made entrepreneur, husband, and father, Phil Bohol. On this podcast, we don't just offer strategies — we offer a war cry, a call to arms, a challenge to rise, to break free from the shackles of mediocrity. You’ll learn the raw truth on how to break your limitations, scale your business to 7-figures, and level up every area of your life. Together, we won't just face challenges. We will crush them. Relentlessly.
Timestamps:
(00:55) - High Performers and Their Inner Darkness
(03:28) - The Void Within
(05:52) - The Burden of Being a Beacon
(10:38) - The Role of Hardship in Shaping Purpose
(12:12) - Conquering the Darkness Within
(14:16) - From Personal Loss to a Lifelong Mission
(21:00) - Transforming Pain into Purpose
(25:10) - The Hardest Work of All
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Transcription:
[00:00:00] The thing that people struggle with the most is understanding how to maneuver through the darkness.
But it's because everybody tries to avoid the darkness.
The reason why people come to me to coach them and to mentor them is because I face my darkness every day.
I talk about it.
It's real to me.
So I know it's real for you.
[00:00:30] What's going on you guys?
It's Phil Bohol and welcome to the Phil Bohol Show, where we have real talk about family, fitness, finance, and everything that would hold you back from leveling up in every area of your life, and more importantly, how I personally got through them.
Everybody else in this world wants to bullsh*t you.
I'm here to give you the truth.
[00:01:00] Most people don't realize that high performers always want to give up.
When you do the best that you can on a daily basis and you achieve new heights in your life, new heights in your business, the hardest part about that is carrying that weight, continuing to be that person, that high performer, when emotionally you don't feel that same drive, that energy.
[00:01:30] And there's so many different reasons why this level of confidence would be affected, but I want you to always remember that confidence.
You don't achieve it and you're confident forever.
There's constantly going to be things in your life that cause you to question yourself, to doubt yourself.
Sometimes that's the highest form of self sabotage.
You start fearing the unknown, you start fearing success, you start fearing failure.
You start fearing if you can actually hold up with all of that success, all of the momentum, all of the things.
[00:02:00] And now you create this unnecessary pressure on yourself, to always have the smile, to always be positive, to always have that hardcore mentality of just getting the job f*cking done.
The truth is, for people like me, we're all high performers.
I am one of the highest of performers.
But that means that the higher I go, the lower I get.
And people don't like to talk about this sh*t.
[00:02:30] People like to be all gung ho and happy all the time.
But the truth is, I probably struggle more than a lot of people with staying confident, with maintaining that sense of belief.
I want you to understand the darkness has never left me.
I may be preaching positivity all the time.
I may be talking about staying motivated, staying hungry, outperforming yourself.
That is all 100 percent true.
But that doesn't mean that the demons are gone.
I've just learned how to master the demons.
[00:03:00] Even now, I can feel the demons.
I can feel the darkness.
What I do with those feelings and emotions is what makes me different.
This is the thing that caused me to take quantum leaps in life and business.
But the truth is, if you're like me, you feel it at such a level that most days you wake up and you kind of just want to give up, and not in some pity party bullsh*t way, but it's just a lot.
[00:03:30] See when I was coming up when I was about 10 years old up until that point I was the happiest f*cking kid.
There's nothing that could really break me down for the most part.
I’d get in trouble, you know?
I was a very happy-go-lucky kid, so I’d get in trouble for having too much energy and sh*t, but for the most part, there's nothing that could really break me.
10 years old though, that's when everything shattered.
[00:04:00] The world that I knew shattered.
I could no longer be that happy-go-lucky kid anymore.
It was deleted from my memory.
Because when my mother decided to let us children know on Christmas Eve, that my family was separating, she said she followed my dad and somehow found him with another woman.
[00:04:30] I just wrote this big ass letter of how my father was my hero.
That day.
And I was super excited to share this, cause that was my homework for the holidays, is to write it and to share it.
So everything that I knew was truth, in that one f*cking night, where I broke down, completely, when everything shattered.
There was a part of me that broke, and I'm still healing it to this day.
[00:05:00] There's a part of me that thought that life could be so beautiful, life can be so happy all the time.
And that night showed me how dark life can get.
And the thing is it didn't stop there.
All of the sadness, the young boy whose heart broke, that turned into wrath.
I despised everybody and everything.
I hated the world.
And more importantly, I hated myself.
To feel that way.
[00:05:30] To be such a boy.
And to think I had any control over how that felt.
I had nobody to console me.
I had nobody to guide me.
And I hated the world.
I hated the world that I started experiencing this void in my heart.
And nobody told me what this void was.
That was the darkness calling to me now.
It's like whispers in the night.
[00:06:00] When all the lights are off and you're just alone with your thoughts, there's a darkness that calls to you.
There's a darkness that tells you to just stop.
There's a darkness that is so silent and it's so faint, that it's literally somehow convincing you that you just need silence now in your life.
[00:06:30] And to make the thoughts, the feelings go away, that you know you shouldn't be thinking and you shouldn't be feeling, you turn to drugs.
You start drinking like I did.
Before I could even get a driver's license permit, I was drinking bottles on bottles on bottles.
I started f*cking with drugs.
I started wanting to silence all of the darkness because it was so much.
[00:07:00] Little did I know, trying to silence it with all these vices, is the thing that made it scream the loudest.
I would drink myself to blackout.
Literally, just to blackout.
Cause I couldn't handle it anymore.
There were so many times where I'd look at things.
While I'm driving on the freeway, I'd think about, just, what happens if I just crash?
[00:07:30] What happens if I just jerk the wheel a little bit, and the car flips?
Like, what if that's it?
It'll cause everything to be silent again.
I used to turn off my headlights on my BMW when I was driving before.
And I'd just go a hundred miles an hour on the freeway.
Just wondering, if I can't see, I won't see it coming.
[00:08:00] But every time my exit came, nothing ever bad happened, fortunately.
There's so many times where I've had thoughts.
Where it's like, what if I could just stop now?
If this is supposed to be the rest of my life, what if I could just stop now?
And the thing is, I went to the darkest of places.
[00:08:30] I went to the places where most people would be too scared to even talk about or to relive.
But the truth is, that's a part of us.
The darkness is a part of us.
And every single day, especially if you're like me, you have to fight the darkness.
You have to fight it.
‘Cause it's so comfortable being in that space.
It's so comfortable just to be on the edge of giving up.
[00:09:00] And that's why every morning, I have my disciplines.
I have the things that bring me back up from that darkness.
I wake up dark all the time.
There was a time in my life where I used to wake up angry.
But the truth is, I let go of that wrath, that anger a long time ago.
But this sadness, this darkness, this void, it's always present.
[00:09:30] And the hardest part about that is when you become successful, and you achieve all the things.
Everybody looks to you as that positive energy, that light.
But there's some days where you don't really want to be that for people.
There's some days where you're just like, f*ck, I'm going through a lot.
But I can't even, I can't even share it with anybody.
I can't even put it out there into the world because, what's gonna happen then?
[00:10:00] Who am I gonna let down by showing my weakness, by showing that I hurt too?
And that's the hardest part for high performers.
I don't say that for some victim sh*t.
I say that because it's true.
I say that because if you're watching this, you're also a high performer.
And there's like this expectation you have of yourself.
[00:10:30] There's this expectation that other people have of you, and there's some days where you feel wrong for wanting to give up.
You feel wrong for having the thoughts or the feelings of wanting to give up.
But why does it have to be a bad thing?
Why can't the wanting to give up, the emotion, the feeling that comes along with it, why can't that be an indicator that we want life so badly?
[00:11:00] Why can't the days where we want to give up the most, show us that there's something else that calls to us, that there's a purpose that our hearts are being yanked to fulfill.
But emotionally, we're not strong yet.
Mentally, we're struggling.
So what do we have to do?
[00:11:30] We have to understand that this time where we want to give up the most is wisdom.
It's the ability to understand self, to find how to heal self.
Because when we start to heal ourselves, you have to understand that's healing in others.
The thing that people struggle with the most is understanding how to maneuver through the darkness.
But it's because everybody tries to avoid the darkness.
[00:12:00] The reason why people come to me to coach them and to mentor them is because I face my darkness every day.
I talk about it.
It's real to me.
So I know it's real for you.
The question I want you to ask yourself is, what do you do when you're in that state?
[00:12:30] What do you do when you're experiencing all of this darkness, it's all around you, you can't see through it, it feels like it's blocking all the sound in, and it feels like you're trapped, it's hard to breathe, there's a weight on your chest, what do you do?
One thing that I've found helps me the most, on the days where I want to give up the most, is to go to the gym, work through my sh*t, every time I carry the heavy dumbbells, I imagine that as my problems, I imagine that as darkness.
[00:13:00] And every rep that I do, I'm pushing and showing that I'm strong enough to carry the weight of the darkness.
I prove to myself through every rep that I'm strong enough because there's those days where I want to give up.
Where I've just like, I've given so f*cking much to this point.
Everything that I have.
Everything that I am.
And all of those thoughts, all of the whispers start coming back, flooding back, pouring back into the body.
And every time I carry those weights, I just imagine that's all the darkness I'm carrying.
[00:13:30] And my mind tells me, “No, you can't do another set, you can't do another rep, you're tired, your muscles are sore, you're not gonna be able to lift the weights.”
Those are the times where I push the hardest, and I find myself again.
That the mind will just challenge me.
The mind will make me doubt me.
The mind is not me.
The mind is constructed of all the projections of the world.
How the world has defined what this feeling is.
[00:14:00] But in those moments where I push, I define what it all means.
And to me, all of my pain, all of my darkness, all of my weakness are lessons to leave as breadcrumbs to others.
On how to continue moving forward and every step I take forward is another step I can inspire somebody else to take.
When you shift the perspective of your darkness and allow it to be something that illuminates a path for you.
[00:14:30] You realize that this is a gift.
To master darkness is a gift.
To learn your own darkness is to learn others.
That there's somebody out there that's just like you.
Maybe it's a family, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a stranger that's just going to come across you or your page one day.
But they're not you.
And they don't know how to think like you.
They don't know how to decide like you.
[00:15:00] They don't know how to move through this darkness like you.
But if you give up now, you will fail them too.
One of the hardest parts for me in my entire journey as a human, as an entrepreneur, is knowing that I have this darkness in me.
And there's so many times where I've been at that edge.
[00:15:30] There's so many times I hung from the ledge.
And also knowing that there was somebody that was following me, emulating me, that was also on the edge but I was so caught up in my bullsh*t I didn't see that they were inching closer and closer and closer to it.
I didn't see the signs.
In the Marine Corps, you're taught to always look out for your Marines and their welfare.
[00:16:00] So one of the biggest things that has haunted me for years is knowing that I was this mentor, this guide, without even realizing it, to a Marine that looked up to me.
That wanted to emulate me, that wanted to live the life that I had, to be the person that I was, to be the gunner that I was.
[00:16:30] And this Marine was going through his own battles, and I couldn't see it.
I was so caught in my bubble, this shell of a life that I had, that I couldn't see it.
I was so fixated on me.
My hurt and my pain that there was pain and hurt happening around me that I was so unaware of because I was just so selfish.
I was just focused on me.
[00:17:00] And I didn't realize as I stayed in the shell versus sharing my message, like I do today, this Marine was inching toward closer and closer to that edge.
And then just like that, one day I get a call.
I get a call from a buddy of mine asking about funeral services for the military.
And I can still see that day like it was yesterday.
[00:17:30] The thoughts were rushing through my mind.
“Why are we having this conversation? Where is this question even? Like what?
What could have possibly caused this curious question?”
And then it hit me.
Something bad's happened.
[00:18:00] And I just remember, in that moment, the only words that I could think about asking was, “What happened?”
And just those seconds, they felt like years.
You could hear a pin drop.
[00:18:30] The world stopped around me.
And then I heard the words that I didn't even know was possible to hear.
“Tommy took his own life last night.”
And again, all I could ask was, “What happened?”
[00:19:00] When you hear those things, it makes you start questioning everything that you ever knew, and everything that you are.
[00:19:30] Because for a life to be taken, knowing that maybe, maybe that extra call, maybe the text, maybe hanging out, maybe asking, maybe caring, maybe wondering, maybe showing something to that person that they were not alone would have been enough.
But by that time you never really know what could have been, you just know what it is at that point.
[00:20:00] And in those moments, in those weeks, in those months leading up to that day, I was so fixated on the pain, on playing the victim in my life.
That I realized, or I didn't realize, that if I learned to stop, to accept that I did want to give up in those moments, to accept where I was in my life, in my emotional and mental state, I could have started healing.
[00:20:30] And as the healer, I would have been able to feel the energy shifts, the signs, and maybe could have done something about it.
So when we think about giving up nowadays, as much as I feel it, and as much of a weight it is to carry, I also made a decision after we put him to rest that I can't stop now.
[00:21:00] I'm never gonna fail anybody like that again.
But it starts with me, just like it starts with you.
Every day you show up for yourself and you don't give up, especially on the days where the whispers, they turn into screams, and they just keep calling to you, the darkness just keeps calling to you.
You have to remember, it's not for you.
[00:21:30] You're meant for something greater in life.
There's somebody that's watching you now, that's emulating you now, and you don't even realize it.
That they're on the verge.
That they want to give up.
That they are just wearing that smile on their face just like you were.
And until you start healing yourself, you're never going to sense that in them.
And I want you to understand, this person is somebody you can save right now.
[00:22:00] You could be that healer to them, the person that has walked the path that has obliterated their darkness to no longer have power over them.
But it requires you to accept that there are going to be days where you want to give up.
Not to reject that version of you, but to accept it and to learn how to master it just like I mastered mine.
[00:22:30] That this world, this life that we have to live is so much bigger than what everybody believes it is.
It's not just for experiencing.
It's about leaving an imprint on the world, with each life that we meet, that we come into contact with, to try to heal.
That is the true impact we can have.
But I want you to know that it's okay to want to give up.
[00:23:00] The whole point is not.
The whole point is having all of those days where you want to give up and proving to yourself daily that you win that battle within.
That every day that you want to give up, you win the day.
And all you have to do is just win today.
Don't worry about tomorrow.
Don't worry about next week.
Don't worry about next month.
Don't worry about next year.
[00:23:30] Don't worry about the what ifs.
Don't worry about if everything can go to sh*t or go wrong.
Win today.
Win this moment.
Just right now, focus on the now.
Be present again.
And focus on healing.
And then as you heal yourself, you're going to create space for all of these people all over the world.
Because you're going to be able to feel it, you're going to sense it.
The world is energy.
[00:24:00] You're going to feel all of these people from all over the world energetically, who are resonating with you, who are seeing your growth, who are seeing how you're healing.
And you're going to be the light for them.
And you might not feel like that's you now, trust me.
I didn't start this journey thinking that I would ever be a leader in the world.
Or to want to create and evoke this level of change in the world.
But I think that I've spent a lot of my life hurting.
[00:24:30] I spent a lot of my life in darkness, in pain.
And to get to that point where I was done with life, I just know how bad it can get.
And I also know that the world has more in common than we think.
There's a lot of hurt that we all experienced that most of us never talk about or speak about, but it's there.
It's present.
[00:25:00] So it requires you to heal.
To show people that it's okay to feel that.
That that's what makes us strong.
So I'll leave you with this.
On the days where you want to give up the most, I don't want you to try to be gung ho motivated.
[00:25:30] I don't want you to try to just push through the pain.
I want you to accept self. I want you to sit with yourself and feel through, think through, process through all of that darkness.
Because in that darkness is where you find yourself again.
Darkness is not something you need to shy away from.
Darkness is where you find yourself.
Just remember that.
And it's very intentional.
And it's the hardest work you're ever going to do in this life.
[00:26:00] Harder than business, harder than making money, harder than anything.
It's to have the courage to go through that darkness and to find yourself each and every time.
Because at every level, for the rest of your life, you're going to have to.
But you're worth it.
Who you can become for the world and for people, is worth it.
But in order to help them change their lives, you gotta start with changing your life first.
[00:26:30] Because in order to speak truth into people, you have to have the level of conviction that everything you say is truth because you healed yourself.
It's okay to want to give up.
Just choose to never give up.
And you'll always win.
That's the show.
Don't just listen to everything I just f*cking said and do nothing with it.
Take everything you learned, go out and execute.
Send it.
[00:27:00]