We recently connected with Bryan Reeves and have shared our conversation below.

Bryan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

The best things in my life have come to me because I made the unconventional choice, took the path less traveled: my career as a professional relationship coach, the perfect tribe of friends i could have dreamed up for myself, my wife. It all began when, at 26, I was a Captain in the world’s most powerful military, the US Air Force, yet I was miserable. I was dead inside. I could not really laugh. I surely could not cry. I could not feel my life. In late winter 2001, just 9 months before 9/11, I left the Air Force.

When all my military buddies were leaving for high-paying jobs with government contractors, I gave my things away and went walkabout into the world.

Just 3 weeks into my journey, late one evening while hitchhiking through northern Wales, en route to wherever, I experienced an intense emotional meltdown in an old phone booth. My whole body shook with deep tearful sobs as the pain I had buried so long beneath a mask of perfected stone ruptured like an earthquake from my core.

I couldn’t go back to my old life, but I had no idea where else to go. I felt utterly lost. I had no idea who I was.

Over the next few years, I would desperately seek to connect with my life as I backpacked across Europe, the Middle East, India and Australia.

I spent months living with Egyptians in Cairo who adopted me into their lives as their own brother and son. They stuffed me so full of breads and meat and water from the Nile that I got dysentery and prayed for a quick death. A short time later, I lived with an oddly self-absorbed “holy man” in India who forcibly attempted to commit me to an Ayurveda Hospital. I also roamed aimlessly across Australia, desperately seeking meaning amidst the dry, crusted Outback under stars like glitter sprinkled on black silk.

Through countless more adventures to come, I made countless small decisions to trust more in my intuitive knowing over what others would insist was the “sensible thing” to do. Per conventional wisdom I should have stayed in the military – or at least taken one of those high-paying defense contractor jobs. I should never have married that French woman in France after only knowing her for 5 weeks. I should have kept my 6-figure-salary luxury watch spokesperson job – it put me on the Oprah Winfrey show after all! – but instead I left that cushy world to manage a spiritual music band I’d fallen in love with, despite the fact they could only pay me $200 a month to start.

Then in 2015, after that music band had taken me on a whirlwind tour of North America and brought me to work with some of the world’s most renowned luminaries – Marianne Williamsion, Neale Donald Walsch, Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and many others – I met my wife after making yet another risky decision to NOT take a commercial shoot in Los Angeles for Amazon-Amex, that would have paid me $2500 and potentially given my career a boost at a time when I really needed money.

Instead, I answered a deep calling to leave Los Angeles for a cabin in the Idaho wilderness, to finish my first book. On that trip, while surrounded by mountain quiet and an eternity of stars, I met my wife – and had my first $20,000 month as a professional coach. Had I said yes to the obvious money in Los Angeles, none of this would have happened.

Taking risks, making the unconventional decision, has not always been easy and sometimes been downright terrifying, but it has given me a life I love, doing work I love, alongside the exquisite woman I love.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a former US Air Force Officer who – despite being raised by women, 2 mothers and 3 sisters, and being highly educated, including a Masters Degree in Human Relations – I totally sucked at intimate relationships with women. I was soooo disconnected from my body, from my emotions. After the military I intended to get a second Masters Degree from American University to study International Peace & Conflict Resolution. I was a month away from starting that program when i met a woman in France, and married her. That relationship changed my trajectory in life. Because although it failed just 8 months later, it took me away from international diplomacy – if I couldn’t navigate having a French wife how could I navigate negotiations between countries!! – and towards a lifelong journey of self-discovery, personal growth, and profound spiritual and relational awakening.

In 2012, I started blogging about what I was learning as a man in regards to relationships, and all the relational mistakes I had unknowingly been making with women for years. As I wrote, my audience grew, until by 2015 my blogs were being read by millions of people all over the world (since 2015, over 100 million people have read my blogs).

My current book, Choose Her Every Day (Or Leave Her), has sold over 13,000 copies as an independent author.

One thing that sets me apart is I stand for 100/100 model of relationships – not 50/50, as most therapists and even coaches tend to operate from. In my model, both partners have 100% responsibility for the success – or failure – of the relationship.

Another thing that sets my work apart, especially in the domain of men’s coaching, is that I am a strong stand for men taking full responsibility for our own ignorance and unskillful behavior in relationships. While I do not excuse women’s lack of skill or awareness or poor behavior – and certainly women have their parts to play – I do not stand for men making our frustrations in relationship the fault of women.

At first, men are sometimes confronted by my approach. But within a short time, if they just keep reading, they find I offer a pathway to the greatest freedom they could possibly know. Because all men want, in their deepest heart, to be relational. We just don’t know how to be. I offer a pathway to learning how.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

My biggest lesson that I’ve had to continuously learn at deeper and deeper levels has to do with money – in particular, the mindset battle between abundance vs. scarcity. I inherited scarcity from my family system. My mom has always been financially bereft, at least in her words and actions, even if not in reality. My mom wouldn’t let us turn on the air conditioning even in the sweltering Maryland summer. Every childhood picture of me shows me with a messed up haircut because, in my mom’s words, “the barber costs a fortune,” so she’d cut it herself. This was the mindset I unconsciously took into adulthood, such that I held onto any money I ever made so tight like it was a life preserver. Thing is, money isn’t a life preserver. More you hold on to it, the more you sink. And that’s what started happening to me in my 30s, about 5 years into my entrepreneurial journey. I started to sink.

When I finally hit financial bottom – meaning I’d lost everything and was living in a friend’s guest bedroom – I hired my first coach (she let me pay her fee off in long installments). We went to work on my mindset, and I was able to shift my beliefs profoundly in that domain. I’ve never looked back.

Today, whenever I send money off, whether for my mortgage, at the grocery store checkout, or at dinner with my wife, I always say a prayer of gratitude, grateful that I have the resources to send off into the world, knowing life always has my back in countless imaginative ways.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I started blogging in 2010, before the true advent of social media, and before people were accustomed to vulnerability as a marketing tool. I was really vulnerable in my early blogs, though not for marketing, but because it was my catharsis. I grew up in a family that didn’t really talk about difficult stuff, so I unconsciously used my blog to do that. I think the world also wasn’t accustomed to men speaking so vulnerabily, so publicly, so I filled a unique niche and quickly grew a sizable audience. I wasn’t selling anything. I was being honest, transparent, infusing my difficult experiences with life wisdom and lessons. Today, everybody’s doing that, and the market place has grown noisy. I keep just doing what I’ve always done, trusting that the people who need to hear my words will find me, and they do. Selling is easy when people can trust they’re seeing the real you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bryanreeves.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanreevesinsight/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bryanreevesofficial
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/c/BryanReevesOfficial
• Other: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@bryanreevesinsight

Image Credits

David Tosti
Sheldon Botler