Phil Bohol is a founder, coach, and entrepreneur known for his raw honesty around leadership, identity, and personal responsibility. In this episode of his mindset podcast, Phil speaks to entrepreneurs and business owners who feel stuck, distracted, or held back by unresolved family trauma and unhealthy relationships.
This episode is for anyone trying to build a business or a family of their own while still carrying the weight of a broken past. If you feel torn between loyalty to where you came from and the life you’re trying to create, this entrepreneur-focused conversation addresses the problem directly.
Phil shares deeply personal experiences from his childhood, including family betrayal, addiction, and repeated brushes with self-destruction. He explains how those early wounds shaped his identity, relationships, and ability to move forward in life. Rather than suppressing that pain, Phil breaks down why acknowledging it is the first step toward real change.
A central theme of the episode is identity. Many people unknowingly continue living as the broken version of themselves created by early trauma. That identity shows up in business through distraction, self-sabotage, and lack of focus. It shows up in relationships through toxic patterns and misplaced loyalty. Phil explains why growth often requires letting go of people you love, not out of hate, but out of responsibility.
Phil introduces the idea of loving from a distance. You don’t have to stop caring about family or friends, but you do have to protect the life you’re building. Boundaries are not punishment. They are leadership. For Phil, becoming a husband and father forced him to ask a hard question. Who do I need to unbecome, and who do I need to become, to protect my wife, my children, and the future I’m creating?
The episode also connects personal healing directly to business performance. Phil explains that unresolved personal chaos drains mental bandwidth, focus, and execution. When you create space in your personal life, clarity and momentum follow in business.
This is not about blame or resentment. It is about ownership. The moment you stop expecting others to heal you or understand your vision, you regain control of your life.
This episode reflects Phil Bohol’s broader body of work around mindset, leadership, and self-mastery. It is part of an ongoing conversation about becoming the man required to build a healthy family, a strong business, and a life you’re proud of.
Listen with the intention to reflect honestly, create space where it’s needed, and take responsibility for the future you’re building.
This is gonna be a tough one to hear, but you're gonna have to let go of that family of yours. And I'm not talking about your wife and kids, I'm talking about the broken family that you are raised in. And that's a hard pill to swallow. It, it, it's your siblings, it's your parents, it's your close cousins.
I don't know. All I've ever known is my immediate family, but. That pain that you experienced today that maybe you're bottling up or pretending is not really there is one of the biggest things that's holding you back in every area of your life. It's holding you back in your business. It's holding you back in, in your marriage.
It's holding you back in your relationship with your kids. It's holding you back from your relationship with yourself. Why? Because you still identify as the broken person that was raised through those harsh beginnings. Nice. So I'll give you a story. When I was a kid, around 10 years old is when my mother sat me and my three siblings, my three sisters down on Christmas Eve to let us know that my dad was cheating on my mom while he was away in the Philippines.
You can imagine this is probably the worst. A holiday to tell us this. It's just came out of the blue. I'm sure there was no great way to say it, but timing, you know, you probably don't wanna fuck up your kids' Christmas for the rest of their lives, which it did. And, um, everything just collapsed at that time.
Everything that I knew or I thought I knew collapsed. The thing I think hurt me the most was we. For school, and I remember this clearly 'cause this is what broke my heart. We, before we went on the Christmas break or the holiday break or whatever it was, we had to write a, a letter to our hero. We had to talk about our hero in life.
I chose to write that letter, that story about my father, and I was so excited as this little kid. Wait for Dad to get home from the Philippines. I'm gonna present him to this gift, my heartfelt letter, talking about how he's my hero, thankful for all the things he's done for us. Only to hear from my mother that this is what was happening behind the scenes.
And the thing that pained me the most was I kept thinking as, as a kid, you know, man, I just wrote this letter about this guy being my hero, but how could he hurt us like this? Now, again, as a young kid, you don't really know any context. You just kind of know what it is, and it's not like parents usually know how to bring up situations like that, but they also didn't take the time to realize the pain.
It would inflict on us because I, I can speak at least for myself, I grew up all types of fucked up because of that. I started, uh, drinking. I started doing drugs, smoking weed, especially. Smoking weed led to me popping pills. Popping pills, led me to shrooms, shrooms and pills led me to coke. The list goes on.
I wasn't ever that guy. I was actually a very playful kid. I, I was kind of like a nerd, a little geek dude, you know, and that started that path. The first time I wanted to take my life was at 16 years old. Then again, right before I turned 18. And then again, probably in my early twenties. All of that stemmed from this moment.
And the reason why I tell you this story is so you can understand how those moments shaped my ability to change my life every time I could do better for myself. Instead of doing that, I would just drink literally every night. I would just drink, even before I was of legal age, I would just drink it hammered.
I'd get a fake, ID head to Vegas, like with people 10 years older than me, and I'd freaking party it up. I was in a void and I didn't really care about what life told me was or what was not possible. I said, I'm so in the darkness. I need to fill this void with something. So I chose a drug and alcohol. And I got so resourceful to do that, to, to, to numb this pain.
I mean, think about the shit that I've been able to do. I mean, you're talking about 17 years old, fake Id spending a week in Vegas. You, you're talking about partying up with people 10 years older than me every weekend as if like, I'm like 25, 26, 27 years old at the time. I think I started partying around, um.
Could be 15 years old or so. So think about that. That's how bad the pain was that I started to not even see myself as a kid anymore. It took away my childhood and all of that pain I brought into adulthood. So it affected my relationships, right? I'd enter very toxic relationships where broken people attract broken people, and because I always wanted to do right by my family.
The family that I could create, what I would do is I would attract the wrong people who would take from me all that kindness and take advantage of me, just like my family was doing for a long time. And as I continued to try to hold onto this identity of family, like our Filipinos, you know, we're, we're the only ones here.
We have to stick together. The more I try to force this thing, it feels like the more aggression, toxicity started to evolve because it's like we all kind of trauma bonded with each other. You know? Like we kind of stayed in that space trying to heal that versus looking towards the future to actual growth.
And I think the thing that changed it for me was. Probably things leading up to me having my own family. You know, I was blessed to have met my wife because I kind of gave up on love. She gave up on love when we met too. Uh, she got screwed over, uh, by the wrong types of dudes before and I got screwed over by the wrong types of women before, you know?
Um, and the blessing was the children. Because my wife started to pull down, you know, break down my armor. But having children, it changed me because I asked myself, what type of life do I want them to have? What type of father do I want them to have? Who do I have to unbe become and who do I have to become to, to be that man that that I would know they're proud of to call dad?
On my journey to success, having built multiple seven figure businesses at this point in about five year span, right? That doesn't include the five years before that where I was failing a lot. Um, I had to let go of a lot of people. I've had to let go of a lot of family, a lot of people I've knew, known as friends.
Everybody that I ever used to associate myself with, I just decided they are holding me back from who I could become. And a lot of people probably took that the wrong way. I know that there's a lot of people that thought, you know, oh, that guy just thinks he's better than anybody. He probably does this.
He probably thinks that blah, blah. And they had all their opinions. And again, that's that mentality that I just didn't want around me. And this came from family and friends, you know, when it came to family. I have three sisters, you know, being the only boy. Um, you kind of wanna be there all the time. But what I found, especially with my sisters going through their healing process too, is every time there was a family function, a time to build a new memory, I kept hoping and hoping, man, I hope like that this turns out good.
And then that toxicity came back and then the night turned to shit. And then that became a new negative memory and it just added to, to this, this pain in my heart. And it wasn't until I decided I'm gonna, I'm gonna love from a distance, I'm gonna start cutting off all of these people, all of my family, man, all of my family, parents, sisters, you name it.
There's nobody, my blood that's in my circle right now. That was a choice. Why? Because I knew at the end of my life. The only regret I would have is not being a good man to my wife and not being a good father to my children, and a allowing toxicity and negative energy to be in their life. I'm their protector, so I have to make these hard choices and these hard choices in your personal life are what manifests into your business.
So if you have, if, if you're struggling with business, just understand there's an underlying thing that's happening to you personally that's so distracting to you that you can't focus on becoming who you need to become because you haven't created the space yet. So what you need to do is you gotta start to ask yourself, man, if I was really brutally honest with myself, what family or friends do I need to cut off or let go of and just love from a distance?
You know, I don't need to stop loving them, I just gotta love them from a distance because I know that they don't add value to my life right now. They take, they want to keep me at the level. You know, they might have good intentions, but they just say negative shit all the time. I just don't wanna be around that shit, you know?
If you have a brutal, honest conversation with yourself, the next step after that, once you kind of admit that they're not for you anymore, and that you have to love them from a distance, create the boundary. You don't need to have a formal conversation about it. It's just you start moving different, start changing your priorities and how you move and they'll pick it up.
And if they don't and they, they don't realize like, man, this guy's just focusing on himself. He's just trying to do good for himself and it's for his family. And they don't get that. That's the point. The fact that you have to explain that to somebody is the point. That's the issue. But it's not your responsibility to get people to understand what you do and why you do what you do.
You see what I'm saying? And this is why you gotta let 'em go. And that's a hard thing because all you've known is all you've known up until this point. And when you go through the process where you shed everything, you know, everything that you once were, the scariest part is, well, who do I fill this space up with?
Like, like, who am I without all of that trauma? Who am I without all that pain? Who am I without all that survival? Who am I? And that's a space that if you stay in. And you practice personal development, self-mastery, self-actualization. In this space, you will find yourself, you will build the business, you will have a beautiful, loving family, and you are the creator of that home.
But that means you must protect it as well. And that starts with you. The game of life and success is not an easy path. It's simple to talk about. It's very difficult to implement, execute on, and just give yourself some grace as you go through some highs and lows throughout this process. But if you're truly committed to change, you gotta change.
Alright? If this stuff is valuable to you, as always, like, share, subscribe to the channels. This is on Instagram, on YouTube, on Facebook. Share the message with somebody that maybe needs to hear this too. And just understand you're gonna have to sacrifice and you're gonna have to suffer in ways you never have before.
But it's kind of like tearing a muscle at the gym. It doesn't feel good in the beginning, but the more you go to the gym, the more you start to forge yourself, the more you start to fall in love with the process. You stop worrying and trying to avoid the pain, and you fall in love with who you're in the process of becoming.
I'll see you on the next one.