[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Walls of Sparta, a podcast dedicated to authentic stories of men overcoming adversity by demonstrating strength, leadership, and healthy masculinity. I'm your host, Greg Papanikolas, and you can find me on social media at gregpcoach on Instagram and the Spartacode on TikTok, as well as Greg Papanicholas on Facebook. Sparta is famously known as the ancient city of elite warriors. These legendary men defended their homeland with such vigor that they themselves became walls. This show honors the Spartan legacy by showing men how we can remove our barriers and build true inner strength while promoting healthy masculinity in family and in business. The Walls of Sparta is sponsored by the Sparta Code. If you are a former athlete, elite business executive, or entrepreneur and you know what you're capable of, but it feels like you've sort of lost that edge lately, you're not alone. Our society is rapidly evolving, and those of us who hold on to traditional values can have a hard time keeping our tools sharp on our own. That's why we created the spartacode. It's a brotherhood of men who value strength, family, and leadership. But above all else, we are committed to stepping into our true purpose. And we're on a mission to help a thousand men in the next five years. So if you have a burning desire to return to the greatness that you once felt, it's time to start living by the Sparta Code. Get the code
[email protected] My guest today is Dallas Colis, who is a life extension coach.
And I love that type of description for a coach. And we're going to talk a little bit about what I saw on your profile, which was a. A life collapse, which is what you described it in your life, but. Welcome to the Sparta Code. Welcome to the walls of Sparta.
Appreciate having you.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Greg. Appreciate being here.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Absolutely, man. Thank you. So can you share with us, like with the listeners, what a life collapse is?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, you have to get to the point of collapse. So a big part of the story is the story. You're a story, I'm a story. Everything we went through in our lives created parts of our story. New chapters, new events, each page being written, and we become identified as the story of who we believe we are.
So a childhood that has trauma and difficulty, we've all gone through.
I came out of my childhood believing I was no good. Not good enough, not smart enough, not capable, a failure. And I lived up to that image I had of myself over and over again. Self sabotage, bring myself down, cut Myself down, punch myself in the face when I thought I was doing something. Well, all the things we do to make sure we're living as the person we think we are, based on our story.
So you take 50, 60 years of that, building up that pain and suffering, it turned into alcoholism, drug abuse, and what is addiction? Well, it's hiding from the pain, it's medicating so I don't feel me, the real me that's hurting inside. I want to keep that away.
I became an addict of blame. Blame is an addiction because if we blame everybody else, every circumstance outside of myself, I don't have to face me again. It's a kind of addiction.
This culminated to a point of a 25 year marriage with my wife, who was also an addict, who was also in that pain. And from the outside, we have a house, we have two kids, we have cars, a business, together, vacations. We look normal, we look together, we look like you're supposed to look underneath. The roof of that house was a war zone. It was hell.
So in 2000, on July 1st, I got lucky. My life collapse began. I woke up that morning with cancer.
Turns out that's the best day of my life because it began a series of events that made me have to wake up to myself over the preceding 12 months. That year I called life collapse, cancer. Lost my wife, lost my business, lost my house, lost my family. Ended up a year to the day alone, broke, broken and alcoholic. I was suicidal.
And that was the moment I began getting back to my feet.
A couple of things happened that shook my world and started me to wake up. The first one was a friend who said, you think you're weak and broken, but in the middle of a pandemic, you just went through cancer, lost your wife, lost your house, lost your family, lost your business, and you're still alive.
If that didn't kill you, what's going to kill you?
And that was like, wow, you mean I might not be weak?
I might actually be stronger than I think I am.
And I think that was one of the primary lessons is we are all so much stronger than we think.
And we're living in a culture, especially towards young men, who's teaching them that they're weak, they're fragile, they can be easily hurt by words alone.
And we're losing an inner strength that is always there. It doesn't leave us.
We mask it and cover it up and push it aside out of fears and worries and society and culture and fitting in. And we forget that warrior. We forget the real masculinity that is always there to back you up, to protect yourself and your loved ones. It's there, but we let it get covered up by all the noise of the world.
And for me, I realized I was living in my story, which was completely unsupportive to any of that.
And one day on a podcast, I heard a guy talking about consciousness. Just say this one line.
Show me yesterday.
Just that. Now, that line in my head said, hang on, I can't go to the cupboard and grab yesterday and show it to you.
Where is it? I live by yesterday. That's what I'm guided by. Who I have been is my story, and that's who I believe I am today. And this shook me because it said, if yesterday isn't a tangible thing, where is it? It's only a belief.
And we change our beliefs all the time.
We don't have to live in anything. We are constantly changing our beliefs, learning new things, going on new journeys.
But we're often anchored to this emotional baggage of the past that we think is us. Well, as soon as I made that disconnection, everything started to fall away.
The reason for the pains and everything were from the past.
If I didn't have to live that way, what did I have to worry about to be afraid of anything? It started to disappear in a matter of months, and my life totally changed. It was like, there is nothing to be afraid of in this world.
I invent it in my mind, and we all do. Nobody can really show you their problem. They can show you a situation in your life that they're upset about, but it's not a problem. It's just something to deal with.
We create everything in the negative. And as a big bag that drags us down for no reason, there is no reason to do it. But we've all fallen into this trap. We have a whole culture that does it. It's screaming at us, the government screaming this crisis and that crisis and global warming and wars and famine and poverty. And we're constantly bombarded with all this negative pressure. So of course we get lost in it. It's the easiest thing in the world. And this is this comfort and this convenience of life that says you can be protected somehow, insured against anything going wrong. And this is this fragility that then leaves us not realizing, guess what? Life isn't fair.
It's hard. You're going to get a bloody nose.
And now you've grown up and you can't stand a bloody nose.
You don't think you should have to see blood, because this is somehow violence against your sensitivity. And so we've got this crumbling world around us, I think, and men have been beaten up the worst because they've become a target of what's wrong.
We went to the height of toxic masculinity. What's toxic about masculinity? It's outrageous. You know, Greg, just yesterday I clicked on YouTube and it's like things align when you're about to do something like this podcast. And what comes on is a short documentary about the Boy Scouts of America and what they went through and how now they're not called boy Scouts, they're youth scouts. Because you can't say boy girls are allowed in because you must be equal and include.
It's the total removal of anything that was the down and dirty boy getting a bloody nose. That this suddenly is this disease in society instead of an obvious pillar of strength in society. You don't have to agree with everything that we might see as masculine, but you don't have to disagree with it completely.
There's got to be this balance to bring it in. Boys being girls and girls being boys. Come on, people. There's a reason there's two different. You know, we can't be this blind. And we've allowed this just to run everything down to the lowest common denominator until there is no strength there.
There is only weakness.
You know, when I first went to the gym, it's hard.
It's hard to get up and go to the gym. And after a while, through the discipline, it becomes easy.
It was hard to lift the weight. Now I love lifting the weight. The hard is easy because I love the hard because I know what it pays.
The easy becomes hard in a way because it destroys us.
That seat on that couch and flipping through videos is eating you up and destroying you. But you don't feel it because it feels comfortable. It is easy, but in that easy is the real hard life because you end up paying a much tougher price in the end.
And we're not seeing far enough down the road.
We're looking at the moment of convenience. I had to do little things like, I've still got a sticky note on my TV right there, and it says, get off your ass.
It knows I'm sitting there watching it, doesn't it?
So I have to have it remind me, hey, hey, don't sit here too long. You know, I'm a big. Not a fan of sitting. Let's just say one of the things in the beginning of getting my life back Together was I had to take my chair out of the room and put it in a garden shed. So when I woke up in the morning and saw the hole in the floor, it said, oh yeah, don't go, sit down, get to it.
Because it was easy. Just first thing in the morning. My routine was get my coffee, sit in the chair, hit the button for a few minutes, which always turned into too many minutes.
So I had to make really strong visual cues to change.
I realized it was these little baby steps would get me there, back onto my feet. You know, I've still got a sticky note in my fridge. What's going into your mouth?
Just to wake myself up in the every little moment. Move to be aware, to be conscious.
Because we're sleepwalking through our lives and the convenience of that sleepwalking is killing us.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah. I really think that spiritual diet because that, that like we always think about food first. We're thinking about our, our lives physically, but then what we're consuming on a day to day basis is really affecting us, our psyche, our way of living. And, and I loved how you mentioned that when you were going back to looking at yourself and how people are running away from that. It's, it's so typical that we're, we're living so much in fear that we're running away from our own individual psyche, our own individual way of thinking.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Yeah. That's supposed to obviously be teaching us things and all of that stuff that was happening during the pandemic was a fear bombardment. But here we are.
The men are the ones that are embattled. We're the ones that were supposed to expect uncertainty. Right. So in essence, we're the ones that lead the charge and have to teach young men how to, how to lead themselves. And it's so interesting that you bring that up because it's like for the longest time I thought, you know, that I was just kind of living in the shadows, you know, because that's what TV was sort of, sort of telling you. But.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: And afraid. Afraid to stand up.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Right.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Because the example was if I stand up, somebody's gonna take my head off.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm gonna get in trouble, so I.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Better just shut up and just sit down and be quiet. Right. And that's just, that's just increased the momentum against this individual power and nature of who we are. Because it's made us more docile and quiet because we're now afraid that they'll come for me, cancel me, do whatever.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: My other big push now is you know, we've been 100 years of self development, you know, self improvement. We've been 100 years of talk therapy and figure out your emotional baggage. These things haven't worked very well. And I think there's a basic problem.
We say things like, believe in yourself.
Be strong, be tough. You can do it. I think that's a massive mistake. For this reason, the self you're believing in is the problem.
You see, myself was unconfident, insecure, fearful, afraid. Didn't think I'm good enough. So why would I believe in myself?
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: I have to believe in a new imagined self that is a reality I'm not living in.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: I can't agree more because you're stripping away the thing that keeps you from that. It's like, right, you're attaching self to belief, self confidence. You're ignoring the confident part and putting self in front of it. So it's almost like we. We should pull it apart and only consider the concept of confidence as the thing you're working toward rather than self confidence. Right. That makes total sense.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: Otherwise you've got people saying, I gotta believe in myself and it's not working for me.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: So what happens? I'm to blame. I'm not trying hard enough. I'm not pushing hard enough. The reality is that's not the problem. You're beating yourself up because yourself isn't supporting you.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: You're fighting against yourself.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: And this is where we are. This is why goals don't work for most people.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Because we're imagining this great future we can build. And when we don't reach it, what do we do? We beat ourselves up. I didn't work hard enough. I wasn't tough enough. I wasn't strong enough. This isn't the problem. The problem is our imagined self can never do it. That's the problem.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I don't want to cut this short, Dallas. So I feel like we need to do a part two. So what I want to do right now is just have you tell us kind of how people can reach out to you. We're definitely going to do a number two to this. Feel like we have to continue this if you're up to it, but tell us how people can reach you.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Well, you know, today, Greg, you can't hide anymore. If you've got my name, you can reach me on Facebook, on TikTok, on Instagram. If you've got someone's name, you got them. I got four books I put out. So far, they're all on Amazon. You got my name, you got me. Perfect.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'll make sure we talk a little bit about those books next time. And again, I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for sharing that story of strength and resilience to us. And of course, you can learn more from Dallas. He's got a Instagram @Dallas fit5life on Instagram. He's on Facebook, so reach out to him if you're struggling. Now, if you're a man who's battled those demons and lived to tell about it, we want to hear from you. Come share your story. On the walls of Sparta, we interview men who overcame adversity by demonstrating strength, leadership, and healthy masculinity. Apply for a future episode at the wallsofsparta.com. and once again, if you feel you need to get back that greatness and you have a burning desire to bring that greatness back into your life, get the Sparta code now at coachgregp. Com. Thanks again for joining us, guys. Thank you, Dallas. And remember, guys, victory is near.
