We recently connected with James Greene and have shared our conversation below.

Hi James, thanks for joining us today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I absolutely love being a business owner. There’s no other job like it. I tried the 9-5 lifestyle a few different times in my life, and it’s just not for me. My mind is built for strategy, and coming up as an athlete and Veteran, I have high expectations for one’s ability to execute whether it be a task for myself or others on the team. I am no worker bee.

Don’t get me wrong, the world needs worker bees. If done to the best of your ability, the job of the worker bee is an honorable pursuit. When that was my role early on in my working career, I fettered myself to higher expectations than any boss would dream to impart upon an employee. My senior year of high school I would work half the day, and attend clasees the other half of the day. I found work in a metal fabrication factory in Grand Rapids, MI. I would constantly be working myself out of a job, accomplishing tasks weeks before schedule. Within the year I had worked in every capacity that factory offered, save management, demolishing back-logged work and getting departments ahead of schedule. It got to the point where I was pleading with my managers to allow me access to managerial tasking. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell they were going to let some seventeen year old become a manager, so they had to let me go. I realized then and there, I wasn’t made for the average work environment.

This experience led to the first time I had seriously considered enlisting in the armed forces. I knew I needed something more… more excitement, more challenges, more opportunities… and eventually I took that leap of faith and finally enlisted into the United States Navy at nineteen. Although those four years, and he succeeding three years of work in various capacities as a private military contractor, were some of the most difficult years of my life, they never lacked excitement, challenges, and opportunities. I was proud to be a 24/7/365 sailor.

I suppose from time to time, on rough months when sales just won’t close or in the midst of a large undertaking, my mind does wonder and dream of what it would be like to just be another name on a muster again; what it would be like to do nothing more than take orders and complete tasks. Then I remember being in that factory… and very quickly recalibrate to my natural flow state – leader.

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

Growing up, I was warned that I would inevitably be called upon to step up as a leader in life. This prompted the young teenage James to read every piece of leadership material he could get his hands on. By the time I laid down my weapons for the last time, I had received multiple military commendations and was honored with a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for leadership and dedication to duty.

After serving as an Anti-terrorism Specialist for the Global War on Terror, I earned my certification as a Personal Trainer and launched my first company. Within the process of building the framework of that first organization, I found that I was really struggling to socialize – I didn’t just lack the ability to walk up to strangers and strike up a conversation, but I couldn’t even be vulnerable with my family and closest friends. The one-on-one atmosphere of a personal training session created a familiar and safe place for me to show my heart for others.

My training sessions were different from other personal trainers. Not only was I consuming copious amounts of continuing education material to perfect my craft, but I had 7 years of military leadership under my belt, and another 12 years of leading championship caliber sports teams on my resume. This experience allowed me to sort of mash different aspects of what we now know as personal development into my programming. To this day, I take the time to personally interview every new training member. We build intimate and detailed profiles, including mental health surveys, behavioural change surveys, lifestyle surveys, and detailed goal setting, and other metrics to ensure your plan is specific to your needs. Mind you, that doesn’t mean it will meet the needs of the “world’s expectation” of you… but rather our passion comes from helping you discover your self-love, and facilitate that love’s capacity to heal from within. I repeatedly tell our members, “it’s better to fight and fail than live without hope, and if you fail, SwoleConnect will get you back on track.”

Last year the company reached a huge milestone when we partnered with TruthMap, Inc. out of Florida. TruthMap CEO Holly J. Nelson is one of the most loving and ambitious women I had ever had the pelasure of dining with. She and I share similar aspirations – to become more than just a platform for mental health awareness, but to be the tip of the spear in providing the mental health solutions our society who so desperately needs.

I don’t want to bash on advocates of the #mentalhealthawareness movement, but I will say that awareness without education is nothing more than a platform for villification. I believe firmly that if we can provide our culture with a better understanding of finance, emotions, and physical health, we will see a supereme downtrend in behavioral health issues. SwoleConnect strives to provide our communities with the relationships and resources necessary to achieve their health and wellness goals – and that all begins with Miss Holly J. (CEO) and TruthMap Inc.

Another piece of exciting news is our recent acquisition of TWC MMA (Total Warrior Combat) a premiere regional professional mixed martial arts promotion. Through our partnership with TruthMap, SwoleConnect was the first personal training company in history to provide emotional wellness and behavioral health solutions to our members at no extra cost, and the world responpnded in a big way with over 450 regional, national, and international online news outlets carrying the story. Now, we are incredibly proud to announce to the world that we are, through our subsidiary TWC, we are the first professional sports organization to provide cost free emotional wellness and behavioral health solutions to our athletes.

As a shameless plug, I would encourage the readers to check out our website www.twcmma.com! If you’re a business owner and feel you align with our mission to be a part of the solution, we are currently accepting applications for sponsors. You can email info@swoleconnect.com and a member of our team will ensure I get your inquiry.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I am about to publish my first book entitled, “A Fuck Up Writes a Book”. It’s a play on words, because there aren’t many people that would look at me and think, “that dude is a total f-up”. The irony is, I have survived my entire life believing I was the ultimate screw up. The book is a journey through some of the childhood trauma I experienced, and a call to arms for all the masculine energy in the world to be better.

I was diagnosed with C-PTSD in 2018. I didn’t realize at the time the severity of the experinces early on in life, but since being a young child I have been exposed to near daily emotional abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual abuse by those who claimed to love me. I was exposed to combat at a young age and lost many dear friends to extremely violent situations, all before I was 19. By the time I was 27, and after spending the better part of 45 months (in total) “on mission” and away from civilization, my brain couldn’t handle reality any more. I broke down on the side of a mountain off the coast of Alaska and was ready to end my life. I was arrested by the local native authorities and accused of being a monster. Little did they know, all I wanted to do was put the monster within me to bed for good. A few weeks later after posting bail, I did just that. I consumed an entire bottle of opiates and was officially dead by the time I arrived at the emergency room.

February of 2018, I died and was brought back to what was nothing more than a miserable existence plagued with fear, shame, regret, and anger. By the time I moved back to Michigan in 2019, I was seeing specialists at the VA 4 days a week and had begun the arduous and exhaustive process of managing mental health medication. I was forced to completely isolate myself from the rest of the world. My family was just as worried as I was that something would set me off and I would inevitably hurt someone, or myself because of it.

I couldn’t hold a job, I couldn’t hold a relationship, I couldn’t afford my mortgage, my car was broken down, and all I wanted to do was swim at the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Some months the Veteran’s Affairs would neglect to send my medications at all, and I would be thrown into a hurricane of violent memories, unbalanced hormones, and withdrawal. I didn’t have any social life whatsoever beyond my service dog, Sig. My family was scared to death to keep me company. I was at total rock bottom.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, I decided to use the opportunity to start a company. SwoleConnect, Inc. was born March 2020 in the basement of my barren farm house, and properly consummated in June 2020. Now, I have the privelege of being apart of the mental health solution. None of my entreprenurial endeavours are for money – money is just a byproduct of the mission. In fact I forwent any salary from the company so we could afford to provide TruthMap sessions for our members without charging them any more money. This… SwoleConnect and the SwoleMafia… it’s about so much more than the income statement. We work as hard as we do, and take the chances we take, so we can positively affect our social ecosystem with what I have coined, Potent Masculinity – the antidote to toxic masculinity.

It is my deepest hope that my story, and continuous struggle with mental health and trauma leads some lost soul to the light one day. Healing isn’t easy work – in fact its downright HARD! But as I get older, I’m beginning to think that when the first person who said “nothing worth doing is easy”, he was talking about the journey through introspection and healing.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

You know what, I maintain I am terrible at social media marketing. It’s actually one of the next immediate hires we are looking to make – that of a social media marketing team. Personally, I use my social media in a few different ways.

First, we record aspects of our personal training sessions with brief explanations for general education and to ground the prospective clients out there who are too anxious to reach out. It’s important to me that we showcase our work within the environment in which it is facilitated so members and fans know we aren’t just about fluff marketing campaigns and paid ads. We put in the work,

Second, I share content that really resonates with me. Whether that be a stoic quote, a piece of business advice, some educational piece, or just a simple positive affirmation, I know that if that piece of content invoked a memory or made the hair on the back of neck stand up, it’s worth sharing with my follower.

Lastly, I use my social media as a timeline. I consider my personal IG page (@Don_Swolio) to be a virtual scrapbook of sorts. I believe one day my grandkids are going to wish they could find my content and when they find my page, I want it to be my essence. No filter, no regard for what is cool or the recent fads, no negativity. I wake up every morning aspiring to achieve and improve, and that’s the message I convey to my followers. Granted, I could be doing much more to build a larger following, and I admit to not implementing basic tactics to that end. However, my page is me. Through and through. Go check it out and toss me a follow – we will connect! Hopefully you can teach me something new, and maybe I can return the favor.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.swoleconnect.com
• Instagram: don_swolio
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/james.g.greene
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-greene-31b675b8/
• Twitter: don_swolio
• Other: www.swoleconnectswag.com www.twcmma.com