Your Thursday Three Things for June 11, 2026
On community, shared struggle, and what happened when two strangers opened up within five minutes of meeting us.
None of us would have finished the Spartan Race alone
At mile 2, David had a very clear thought. He looked at the guys around him and knew: without them, he wouldn’t finish. He was right. He also finished.
7 miles in the heat, the hills, the wind, and the mud of Colorado Springs. Will and David came in from sea level. I live at altitude and still underestimated it. Nobody quit. The race itself is almost beside the point. What it unlocked is what I want to write about, because doing something genuinely hard together is a different category of experience than just getting together. It changes something. A weekend watching sports leaves you roughly where you started.
What your body does when it’s near other bodies
There’s a concept called co-regulation. When 2 people are physically present with each other, their nervous systems start to influence each other. Heart rate variability. Cortisol. The stress response itself. That’s what co-regulation means. Dr. Stephen Porges spent decades mapping this (he’s the nervous system researcher whose polyvagal theory identified a specific pathway in the vagus nerve he calls the social engagement system). Being near people you trust is biologically distinct from being near a screen. Your body is wired for proximity. Shared space. Physical presence. What we’re doing now (distributed across time zones, running most of our deepest relationships through rectangles) is new territory for the nervous system.
I noticed it the moment Will and David showed up at my front porch. Something settled. My wife noticed it in me. I noticed it in myself. Something that had been unsettled for a while just... went quiet.
The honest thing about virtual work
I hate to admit this, but in the weeks before this trip, I was getting frustrated with Will. Business stuff: text threads, video calls, trying to build things while we’re 2,000 miles apart. That friction had been accumulating. Will was getting the worst of it. He showed up at my door and I gave him a hug. And by that evening, the stuff that had been building in those text threads just wasn’t there anymore.
There’s something about being in someone’s actual life (seeing where they live, watching them with your dogs and your kids, making a meal together) that gives you a read on a person that a one-hour meeting window can’t carry. I know what Will’s life looks like in New York because I’ve been there. He knows what mine looks like in Colorado Springs now because he’s been here. We both have information the other didn’t have before. That information makes us better to each other.
Our virtual connection is real. It’s also transactional in ways we don’t always name. We’re checking boxes. Getting through the agenda. Moving the business forward. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s a different bandwidth than being present in someone’s actual life. And over time, without the in-person version to recalibrate things, the transactional starts to feel like the whole relationship. It isn’t. But it starts to feel that way.
The couple with one arm
There was a man and a woman on the Spartan Race course. Each of them was missing an arm: him the right, her the left. They were running the course together, helping each other over obstacles, and occasionally helping other teams.
One of them was carrying a rubber arm. Giving people high fives with it. Then taking the arm off, throwing it over the obstacle, climbing over, picking it back up on the other side. Part of the race, fully committed.
I don’t know their names. But at one point I looked at them and any thought I had about how hard this was went somewhere else entirely. You don’t quit while those two are still moving. Nobody said that out loud. Nobody had to. That’s what community does when it’s operating well. It raises the standard you hold yourself to without anyone saying a word.
Experience Onward
After the race, we went to visit Dan Carcillo. 2-time Stanley Cup winner with the Blackhawks, multiple concussions from a career in professional hockey, now runs plant medicine retreats through an organization called Experience Onward. First in Oregon, now with a location in Golden, Colorado.
2 men were there who had just been through a retreat. I’d never met either of them. Big, solid guys, the kind you’d give a second look to on the street. We sat down in a room together and within 5 minutes they were talking about things that men don’t typically say out loud.
Complete strangers. A room, a shared space, people willing to be present. That’s what the environment created. The conversations men need to have usually start with proximity, time, and some evidence that the space is safe. Give men that, and most of them will do the rest.
What to do about it
Make the call. There’s someone you’ve been meaning to reach out to, maybe someone you haven’t talked to in years. He’s probably been meaning to reach out to you. You’d be surprised how glad that person is to hear from you. A call, not a text. You can pick right back up and go somewhere from there that a text thread never gets to.
Do something hard together. The specific activity matters less than the challenge level. Spartan Race, a real hike, helping someone with a physical project, anything that requires genuine effort from everyone in the group. What Will said in the episode is worth hearing directly: you can see each other struggle, and pull each other up, in ways that build something specific. The masculine wakes up differently under pressure.
Show up for the kids’ sake too. My son gave Will a hug that lasted close to 2 minutes and wasn’t letting go. Our kids get more than we can give them when there are other good adult men in their lives. Who are the men your kids are watching? Who are you bringing into that space?
Get out of the silo deliberately. Will made this point well: men tend to isolate into their daily responsibilities and lose track of the fact that other men are out there wanting exactly the same kind of connection they are. The first step doesn’t have to be a Spartan Race. A coffee. A call. One small reach across the gap.
Look up Experience Onward if you know someone who’s carrying something heavy. Dan Carcillo is doing serious work. I’ll let you make your own call on it. Those 2 men in that room had found something real. experienceonward.com.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Will and I sat down with David Valadez, who’s been on the show before, who flew out to Colorado Springs for the Spartan Race and stayed a few extra days, and who you will hear this time without the lisp our old recording equipment gave him (he does not have a lisp). We talked about what in-person community actually does to you, why shared struggle builds something that shared comfort can’t, and what happened when we walked into Dan Carcillo’s place and 2 strangers opened up within 5 minutes.
Watch on YouTube | Listen here
Before we get into the exclusive paid content, Will and I launched Awareness to Action a few weeks. It went really well. We built community into the course on purpose, because connection is part of what makes things actually stick. We’re looking to grow that community into retreats and in-person events, the kind of thing we’ve been talking about in this episode. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course to find out more.
Until next time,
Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness
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