Greg Kruger Podcast Transcript
Greg Kruger joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Greg Kruger. Greg Kruger, the founder of Forgotten Truth Coaching, emphasizes the power of embarking on a journey of self-discovery to break free from the internal barriers to expansion and fulfillment. Through various proven modalities and methods, Forgotten Truth Coaching illuminates the path to recognizing and transforming unconscious self-limiting belief patterns into conscious patterns to live an empowered life.
Greg Kruger’s transformational Forget Truth Coaching, a component of Kevala Breathwork, guides people to embrace their authentic selves to overcome unconscious patterns that hold them back from living a more fulfilling life. In today’s world, many people find themselves trapped within repetitive cycles, repetitive emotional states, and a prison of continuous stress without realizing that they are confined by their own neurology, blind spots, and limiting beliefs.
The uniqueness of Kruger’s coaching practice is in the outcome of his clients becoming their own best coach. The training principles focus on enhancing awareness, unlocking the truth of vulnerability, and instilling accountability measures through practicing daily success habits and exercises, ultimately assisting people to rediscover their power in creating their lives.
Well, good afternoon, Greg. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:23] Greg Kruger: Hey, thanks. Glad to be here, Brian. I appreciate it.
[00:01:25] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you. And I appreciate you making the time hailing out of the great State of California. I should say the Southern part of California, SoCal. I spent some time in there, as you know, and thank you again for your service. We both served in the Marines. So, thank you.
[00:01:39] Greg Kruger: Yeah. Cheers, brother. Semper Fi.
[00:01:41] Brian Thomas: Semper Fi. All right. Well, Greg, we’re going to jump into your questions here. We want to get your story out to our global audience. You’ve got quite a career in sales, health and wellness. You are a senior executive, entrepreneur, now the founder of Forgotten Truth Coaching. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:02:03] Greg Kruger: Yeah, what’s interesting to my career growth is that My career growth hasn’t been towards finances up until this point. It was driven by income in the early part but has been driven towards expansion and following my passions.
So let me tell you what I mean by that. For 18 years, I was in the pharmaceutical industry and doing sales there. And I was doing what I needed to do to powerfully serve my family, to raise my family. And I knew that that industry wasn’t for me. I think there’s a lot of valid applications for pharmaceuticals, but the truth is, is that the evolution of who I am was beyond that industry.
And I needed a way out, and I ended up becoming an entrepreneur and partnering with a guy to build what’s called Dream Nutrition, D R E E M, Dream Nutrition, and it’s a veteran owned Hemp supplement company. What I realized in that transition was that what I really wanted to do was follow my passions and purpose, and my purpose is in helping others expand, and helping others just improve.
And so along that path, I was also on my own personal journey of doing a lot of work in the mind body space, Neuro Linguistic Programming, and meditation, and breath work, and all these different modalities. And that was really my passion, but it was always on the side and Dreem Nutrition offered me an out from an industry, it offered me the ability to stand in the mirror and say, I’m willing to walk away from all of the benefits and all of the money that I’m making in order to follow my passion and purpose. But the truth is that even dream nutrition wasn’t my full passion and purpose coaching.
And empowerment coaching and teaching people that they are the answer to their lives. That’s my purpose. And along the way that had been for the last decade that had been small and, on the side, not small in the sense that I wasn’t making large impacts on people. And I was still coaching executives, but small in the sense that it was just a couple of clients a year that I would serve.
And then COVID really put A strong, oh, I didn’t want to say it really hurt our company a lot based on a number of factors. And in that space, I was evaluating and what do I do now? Do I get another job? Do I go back to sales? And what I really realized was I caught myself in my thinking and got in the mirror and I said, man, do what you coach everybody else to do.
Follow your passion. And so, in that, on the last couple of years, I’ve really started going all in into coaching, not only Forgotten Truth, Coaching, Forgotten Truth, Coaching is my own singular brand. But with my partner, we have what’s called Kavala Breathwork and Kavala means fullness. So we have mind, body, spirit.
Everything covered in Kavala. And now that personal coaching is just as a part of Kavala as well. So, what lights me up is helping people understand the power that they have in their lives to command their lives, to command their emotional state and to really live their passions. And that’s what I’m doing now. And that’s what I absolutely love.
[00:05:05] Brian Thomas: That’s so awesome, Greg, we talk about it, especially with entrepreneurs on this podcast. I’ve had many people across the globe, but a lot of entrepreneurs and at the end of the day, it’s that passion. And once people find that passion, they dive into it. It’s a game changer.
And I think what you’re sharing this evening is really the same sentiment that many others have shared. And I really, really appreciate that.
[00:05:28] Greg Kruger: Yeah. Thank you.
[00:05:29] Brian Thomas: You bet. Greg, next question for you is if you could just talk to us about how you teach others, how to powerfully connect with their truth, passions, purpose, power, and potential using NLP, right?
And because we’re a tech platform, it doesn’t mean Natural Language Processing. You do a little bit different when you say NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming. Maybe you could talk about that.
[00:05:52] Greg Kruger: Yeah. Neurolinguistic programming, which is started by Dr. Richard Bandler and John Grinder some maybe 50 years ago, I was fortunate enough to be trained with Dr. Richard Bandler. And it’s really the connection, the mind body connection, understanding how the brain and body work together, understanding the programs that we run by, because at the end of the day, we really are this awareness or this innate intelligence. Living in a biological robot. So, my process is this.
Everything starts with awareness. And so, one of the things we teach our clients is that when you have awareness of and take accountability for your breath, you command your physiology. When you have awareness of and take accountability for the quality of your thoughts, you command your emotional energetic state.
You are the answer. So, one way that we differ a little bit, I think, is that our goal is to work ourselves out of the job. Our goal is to coach people to be their own best coach, and it all starts with awareness. And one of the core awareness to me is that we’re not our body and we’re not our brain.
Our body is 37. 2 trillion living cells. They’re all individual cells, individual units of consciousness that. are born, they fight, they reproduce, they have just a fascinating cellular membrane that responds to the external environment, just like the larger body does, but 37. 2 trillion living cells. So, you’re really not your body.
And that’s not even counting tens of trillions of bacteria. And you’re not your body, but your body is a record of the past. And in our DNA, we have all this data that’s stored from our lineage, from everyone that’s ever lived before us. And that’s where we get a lot of the trauma that we’ve dealt with.
Sometimes we look in the mirror, we don’t understand why we feel the way we feel. And we can realize that it’s not ours. It’s also where we get our gifts though. So not only not our body, but we’re not our brain. Our brain is this computer in a dark room that just. Interprets data, and it’s really learning especially from the ages from zero to seven years.
It’s almost all unconscious brain activity, meaning the brain. Everything is our brains relationship to it. So, our brain is forming relationships about everything that we see, and we experience. So, the brain is also just a record of the past. It’s keeping track of experiences and creating kind of the stimulus response program that happens so that we learn when we touch that hot stove.
That’s hot. Don’t touch that. We learn What relationships are when we grow up with parents, whether there are biological parents or not, it doesn’t matter, but we grow up with people raising us. And if we see that there’s a couple raising us and they have relationships that’s characterized by love, affection and tenderness and communication, our brain associates relationships to those attributes.
Likewise, if we grow up in an abusive household, our brain will create a relationship between abuse and relationships. So, we are just being patterned. We’re being patterned by our first seven years of life, and we’re being patterned by our DNA. And then as we grow up and we learn discernment and negotiation and how to evaluate situations, we’re doing this based on programmed patterns that we never consciously chose.
So, I think that knowing that the awareness of that is freeing to a lot of people because it allows us to take the guilt and shame of decisions we’ve made and ways we’ve behaved, we can take some of that off of our back. It doesn’t condone things that we’ve done if, and when we’ve made our mistakes, but we can start to realize that we were within this body where this brain and body were driving us towards specific stimulus response unbeknownst to us.
That was never our choice. And so, then once we become aware of this, not only do we get to take off the shame and blame, but then we get to accept. the responsibility. So, awareness and then accountability. So, once we become aware of all this, we can say, okay, now let me start to become aware of the patterned responses, patterned behaviors, robotic aspects of my brain and body that no longer serve me.
And since I know we’re just good at what we practice. And I’ve practiced these responses for so long. I also have the power to change them and become who I want to become. So, I think that’s really the biggest thing is, and we start to understand that we can practice and start new behaviors.
There’s a lot of different daily success habits that I prescribed from breath work to meditation, to journaling, to giving self-love in the mirror. And this is just how we start to reprogram ourselves. Language and NLP, Neurolinguistic Programming, understanding language is also a big part of that. And I’ll give you, if it’s all right here, I’ll just give you a couple of language hacks that I really, really love.
So, the first is the brain doesn’t understand a negative command. So, if I say, don’t think of an elephant, you really, you’re going to think of an elephant, you don’t have a choice. Even if you’re not a visual person, once your brain learns what the word elephant means, if you hear the word elephant, your brain is going to process what that vibration of sound.
That word elephant means. So, a good example for anybody out there raising children, you look at them in the morning and you say, Hey, don’t spill your milk, and then they spill the milk. And then we tend to get angry at them for doing exactly what we told them not to do. But the truth is, is once those children learned what spill the milk means, it doesn’t matter that the word don’t is there.
The brain processes all of the words. So, when we say don’t spill the milk, the brain processes and creates a picture for that child and their brain unconsciously. Of what spilling the milk looks like. So instead of saying, don’t spill the milk, we can say, could you please be careful with that milk and make sure to drink it all either one that we say both has the desired outcome of consuming the milk, but the trick here is, and this is getting into the law of attraction is that we don’t get what we want.
We get what we focus on. And so, when we look at that, just with linguistics language, when we create a picture of spilling the milk, we’re likely to get that. When we create a picture of being careful with the milk and drinking the milk, we’re more likely to get that. It’s not to say the kids won’t spill the milk because they’re still learning coordination of their limbs.
But the point here is speak powerfully into what you want versus what you don’t want. The other one is the removal of need and should in our language. Need and should both imply lack. So, even though words have a definitive definition, an actual meaning, they also have an energy.
And need implies it should imply lack. So, if a client says to me, yeah, I really need to work out. I would say you don’t need to, because what you’re telling me when I’m picking up from your language is that you’re either lacking in physical health, lacking in feeling good about how you look or some other aspect.
So, what you’re really in is an energy of lack. So, the fact that people use need and should shows that they’re energetically feeling the space of lack. And just like speaking into the things we don’t want, we get what we focus on, not what we want. Well, when we’re in a space of lack, we get more of what we focus on.
So, we really work with clients to create more empowered language. And in the case of need and should, if they say I need to work out, I’ll say you don’t need to work out. You can or you cannot. It is a choice. When we start to use language to understand that, and we put choice back into the frame, another example with should, would be when somebody’s doing you wrong, and you ask yourself, well, how should I feel about this?
When we say how should I feel about this, what we’re saying is that we’re looking at what’s happening outside of ourselves as the dictator of how we’re going to feel. This person was being a jerk, and so I should feel upset. I should be down. I should be angry. But if we replace should with shall, instead of how should I feel, how shall I feel, then we’re taking our power back.
So, both with need and should, I can or I cannot. How shall I feel? Both things are reminding us that we have the power of choice in how we respond to the external world. The outside world will always keep moving, but when we have awareness of what our internal world is doing, we can command it. We command it through the breath, we command it through our thoughts, we command it through our language.
I think that’s one of the biggest things, is really getting people to the awareness of the power that they have. And then adjusting all of their behaviors that no longer serve them to swap them out with empowering ones so that they can become and be the truth of who they want to be the truth of their passions and the purpose in their life.
[00:14:45] Brian Thomas: Thank you, Greg. I appreciate you sharing that. Again, for my audience, typically NLP is Natural Language Processing in the machine learning space, so we appreciate your version of NLP, which is the Neuro-linguistic programming. I think that’s so important that we learn these human behaviors and how we can better ourselves using this type of behavioral approach that you teach.
And Greg, the last question here, if you could just briefly share, are you leveraging any of that new and emerging technology in your business and coaching? And if not, maybe there’s a cool tool or app you found useful you could share with our audience.
[00:15:18] Greg Kruger: You know what a funny thing is, and we’ve talked about this recently, is that I was so averse to technology, I was averse to social media, and I think what I found in my own coaching of myself was that that was just limiting beliefs. That I had and ways that I could push back to keep myself in the same space I was. And so when it comes to technologies, I’ve always been adverse to them and I’m just really starting to promote and push through social media.
That said though, I am now leaning into everything that I felt resistance to and technology is one of those. So, I’m just getting into AI and learning more about that. I’ve got a friend who is about to launch a new AI platform. It’s called VSL. AI. And he’s just a boss and runs the VSL programs for Mindvalley and other pretty significant companies.
So, check that out. I think if there is a cool tool, he’s getting ready to launch that and getting ready to do some free courses on it. So probably that would be the cool app or tool would be VSL. AI.
[00:16:23] Brian Thomas: Awesome. Thank you, Greg. And we appreciate that. I know a lot of these apps and platforms and companies get free plugs on this podcast because whether they’re a technologist or not, we get to hear what people are actually utilizing. And believe it or not, we’ve gotten some great feedback on some of these platforms that we’ve shared on this podcast. Because people are actually getting a new idea about using a particular app that they’ve heard here first.
[00:16:45] Greg Kruger: I would say just lean into that. If you’re resisting it, like me, lean into it, because if you’re resisting, it’s probably showing you an area of opportunity that would greatly enhance your life.
[00:16:55] Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s awesome. And Greg, it’s been a pleasure having you on this evening, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:17:02] Greg Kruger: All right. Thanks. It’s been great. I appreciate it. Thank you for the time.
[00:17:05] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Greg Kruger Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
