Phil Bohol is a founder, entrepreneur, and mentor who speaks directly about the internal battles that shape success. In this episode of his mindset podcast, Phil addresses entrepreneurs and business owners who feel stuck, restless, or constantly distracted without fully understanding why.
This episode is for anyone who keeps themselves busy but avoids the one thing that actually needs to be faced. If you’re building a business, chasing growth, and still finding yourself numbing out, self-sabotaging, or feeling blocked, this entrepreneur-focused conversation goes straight to the root.
Phil breaks down avoidance in simple, uncomfortable terms. Avoidance is not laziness. It’s the habit of looking away from thoughts, emotions, or experiences that feel threatening. Instead of facing them, many men distract themselves through alcohol, substances, overwork, or constant noise. The problem isn’t the distraction itself. It’s what the distraction is protecting you from seeing.
Drawing from his own experience, Phil explains how unresolved childhood trauma quietly shaped his behaviors for years. He shares how emotional pain from early family events became a subconscious lens that influenced his decisions, habits, and self-destructive patterns long into adulthood. That pain didn’t disappear. It just hid behind busyness.
A core idea in the episode is this. Avoidance clouds judgment. When personal pain is left unexamined, it leaks into business as hesitation, inconsistency, fear of growth, and self-sabotage. That’s why many people think they have money problems or business problems when the real issue is internal.
Phil introduces a practical way to confront avoidance. Stillness. Silence. Writing without filtering. He explains why sitting alone with your thoughts feels unbearable for many people and how that discomfort is a signal, not a flaw. The moment you stop trying to curate your thoughts and instead write exactly what comes up, patterns begin to surface.
This is not therapy talk or motivation. It’s a discipline. Facing what you’ve been avoiding creates clarity. Clarity creates better decisions. Better decisions create momentum in business and life.
This episode reflects Phil Bohol’s broader work around mindset, self-mastery, and leadership. It’s part of an ongoing message about fixing the internal bottlenecks that no strategy can override.
Listen with the intention to slow down, turn inward, and face the thing you’ve been avoiding. That work is uncomfortable, but it’s also the doorway to real progress.
Right boys listen up. So let's talk about avoidance. What is avoidance? Avoidance is when you have some shit in the back of your mind that is just clawing at you every hour of every day, and you pretend it's not there. You pretend the whispers aren't, aren't there in your ear every second of every day.
You pretend when you are lying awake at night that like. There's no dark corners in your mind, so you try to distract yourself. You look the other direction, right? Like that's avoidance. And what happens for a lot of men is the avoidance turns to trying to numb it, trying to silence it, trying to do something.
So the direction of focus goes to the other thing versus the thing they're trying so hard to fucking avoid. Why are we talking about this? Well, avoidance leads to you fucking drinking for the sake of drinking. Like you want to be drunk so you don't have to think about the thing you're avoiding terrible.
You smoke pot so that way you can get lit and then feel good. Pretend to be happy because it's not that bad. You do other shit to distract yourself. Here's the thing though. Okay. And this is the, this is gonna be the hard part because it's just the brutality of the fucking situation. Either it is as, as bad as you're fearing it to be.
Like it's actually terrible and you fucked it off for so long that it's like compounded into some bullshit. Um, or two, which is more likely, it's not actually not as bad as you think. And that's the thing about fear. Fear equals false evidence appearing real. So if it's false evidence appearing real, how did we get to the point where the thing we're afraid of, right?
Peeking under the cover, hiding in the closet, turning on the lights in a dark space, whatever the case might be. How did it become so powerful that we started to fear this thought? Well, depending on where you're at in your life, in business. It is very normal for personal issues, traumas and experiences to cloud your judgment of today.
So let's put it into perspective. When I was 10, my parents started the process of divorce, right? I think it was like separation, then it turned into divorce or whatever, 10 years old Christmas Eve. Happy, Merry Christmas, you know? Um, that became how I viewed the world, right? My worldview changed because of that experience.
So throughout life, during the holidays, for some reason, even at a very young age, I would start drinking. I would start doing drugs. I would start doing crazy shit that like pumped up my adrenaline. It always happened during the holidays and I thought it was just what you do because it's like the holidays, you know, you, you, you have nothing else to do.
It's party time, blah, blah, blah. Over time, as I grew up in more mature, as far as my emotional state and my mental state, I started to realize. At a subconscious level, I was avoiding the pain and the heartache and the heartbreak that that 10-year-old boy experienced, and I avoided that motherfucker for a majority of my life.
So the biggest thing is when we understand that our pains, our traumas, or things in our personal lives start to become the lens of our lives today, it's important that we. Separate ourselves from this thing, right? This entity, this experience that's no longer us. If it is, then we have to heal it because that can lead into some bullshit, and that's why your business doesn't grow.
That's why you don't make more money. That's why you self-sabotage. When things start going good for you, you start doing stupid shit and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you go onto this hamster wheel of just embracing the suck. How do you move through avoidance? It's so stupid what I'm gonna say, but just hang with me.
In order to actually achieve a breakthrough, we have to stop avoiding the pain. We have to acknowledge that we may not even be conscious of the avoidance pattern. Well, how Phil, how do I know I'm avoiding something. Can you sit still in the silence? Without feeling like anxiety in your chest. If you can, you might be good.
You might not be avoiding shit, but if you've stayed this far into this, then you probably have some shit that's resonating with you and there is probably some shit you are avoiding. So how do we uncover this? I always recommend going back to pen and paper. People in this digital world always forget that a pen and a piece of paper is like the most powerful thing you can ever do and utilize as a tool.
If you were to sit there and you were to, on your little piece of paper, right? You can go on Amazon, you can take whatever, like literally anything you can write on, like this is a. I don't even know what the small rig thing I could write on this. You know, like there's no excuses. I have a pen right here.
Right? Or you can go get a notepad on Amazon for like five bucks. You get like 20 fucking notepads. Um, and then you start writing. The whole point is to not filter. The whole point is not to try to curate or control what's being written. That's the most important part because that is your lens. That is the avoidance pattern.
That is the thing that you're trying to neutralize, right? Like think about it like this. I'm telling you to write on a piece of paper, okay? Your mind goes, what should we write about? Should we write about like what we ate today? What are we avoiding? I don't really wanna write about that. Maybe this is the right thing over here to write about instead, that's avoidance.
You see how stupid it is? Like we don't even know you do it. What you do is when you are doing this exercise, the very first, it doesn't fucking matter if like you thought of a bird, that's purple. That's what I just thought of right now. A bird that's purple. Why did that come up? If I, if I do this exercise, it's because my daughter is, is outside the office and she's cleaning.
She loves unicorns and unicorns are like pink, purple and white or whatever. And that's why I thought of a purple and then I thought of a bird. I don't know why my screensavers, um, a forest, so probably why, but you can see how by writing a purple. We got deeper into why there was a purple bird in when I closed my eyes, and we found that it was because it was inspired by my daughter.
Well, why was it inspired by my daughter? Well, because she loves unicorns. And unicorns have purple and pink shit. At least her unicorns do. You know? That's how we start to dig deeper into ourselves, not no longer avoiding. So let's say you're sitting there with your piece of paper and you're like, man, I don't even know what to write.
Guess what? That's what you write. See that's, that's your genuine thought. So you write that. I don't even know what to write. Then another thought's gonna come up is as soon as you let that out, something else comes up, then, then your next thought pattern may be, so what the fuck are we doing? Right? So some people start to get frustrated emotionally at that, like they're doing something wrong, but no, no, no.
You're doing the exercise correctly. Then you write, so what the fuck are we doing? Question mark, you ask yourself, right? So this is internal dialogue. And then you wait, and then you wait until the next thing comes up. And part of this exercise is to trust the exercise. And eventually you like go deeper and deeper into yourself, and then you start to have epiphanies.
You start to understand like, oh shit. There's things that I'm, I'm, I'm like writing down, thinking about, talking about, that I would've never thought I was even thinking about until I took the time to think about my thoughts. You see it, the avoidance thing is so crazy. So my thing for you as you, as you go into your world, into your life.
Is do this exercise. Uh, I would say set a timer for 30 minutes and do nothing else. Turn all the social media off, all of the fucking, even music. Like turn that shit off. Like be in stillness, in quietness with your own thoughts. Don't listen to fucking podcasts. Don't allow any other inputs to sway you, blah, blah.
Like, just be in silence. Like, if I was gonna do this exercise, I would turn off all the fucking studio lights and just be in the darkness enough where I can write something and uh, sit here. You know, that's what I would do. And if you're not even comfortable sitting with yourself there, there's more to unpack than you even realize.
If you haven't ever sat with yourself in silence, there's a lot more you gotta unpack that you don't even realize. I'm telling you right now, if you can't fucking just be by yourself, with yourself and enjoy your own company. There's a lot. Of self-worth issues that you gotta unpack. I'm telling you. And people think they got business problems and people think they got money problems.
You don't have business or money problems. You got you problems that are getting in the way of your money and getting in the way of your business. I'm telling you right now. Okay? So I hope that you do this exercise today and I would love to hear how would, how it went. Don't think that you have to go to a certain level or to a certain place or have this certain unlock, you know, like go as deep as you can and then fucking take a break.
And then when you feel called again, the moment that you think about the notepad again, you're like, oh fuck, something's calling me to it. Trust that, that's your intuition saying, I'm ready now. Let's do it. Because the avoidance will say, notepad. I'm kind of hungry though. Oh, we gotta, we gotta fill up the, the tank of gas.
Oh, my new Netflix episode's out. Fucking notepad. No, no, no, no, no. Notepad. Um, what else can we do instead? What else? Avoidance. Okay, like, subscribe, share this with somebody. I hope this helps. Do the exercise. Drop a comment with whatever you unpack. Would love to hear from you. See you on the next one.