Disconnection is an epidemic.
Breathwork as a practice in business, why people not replying to your emails is nothing personal, and a community happy hour in Santa Monica this evening.
‘Disconnection is an epidemic’. Words from Pete Vlastelica this week that I couldn’t agree with more. We’re disconnected from ourselves, from each other, mindlessly scrolling on screens, often lost in an existence where we’re disconnected from the very fabric of life. How cheery this all is.
Well folks, the good news is that whilst it might often feel like we’re living in a Matrix style simulation, there IS another way to hack it.
Pete is the first person I spoke to who was proof to me that you could straddle both worlds: a life of meaning and purpose and connection, whilst still having one foot in the ‘real’ world of business and financial stability. I have since got to experience the breathwork sessions that he offers, and holy smokes, this is the good shit right here. For me, it’s a high better than any drug I’ve ever taken, and a somatic release more effective than years of therapy. Hit him up. I swear it will be one of the best decisions you make.
In this edition, we dive a little deeper into Pete’s take on ‘trojan horsing the corporate world with profound hippie shit’, and I share the experience of learning not to take things personally when people don’t reply to my emails. Sad face.
**BONUS BIG NEWS**
TONIGHT: I have been co-hosting a semi-professional, community happy hour for the last 7 years. Community and connection - this is the real deal. Come join us at Solidarity (1414 Lincoln Blvd., Santa Monica) at 5.30pm. All welcome. We’re a friendly bunch. The kielbasas are excellent.
—Holly Gottlieb (Founder, Whole Collective)
Counter Culture Corporate: Pete Vlastelica
Pete is an investor, entrepreneur, and executive with 20+ years experience building teams and businesses in digital media, sports, lifestyle, and entertainment. You can find him: IG, LinkedIn, or pvlastelica@gmail.com.
Holly: Do you want to give a little background about the kind of you work you do professionally?
Pete: I’m an entrepreneur, executive, and investor, as well as a therapeutic breathwork facilitator and coach. I grew up in Mesa, Arizona, went to college at Stanford, and then moved to London and worked for Disney. From there I went to New York to work at a digital agency, then to Berkeley for an MBA. While I was at Berkeley I started a company that was acquired by FOX Sports, then I transitioned into senior executive roles, first at FOX Sports, and then at Activision Blizzard as a divisional president and CEO. I’m currently a managing partner of a venture capital firm, where I focus on investments in the areas of culture, wellness, and media. I’m also an angel investor in a number of startups, and an advisor and coach to founders. As a breathwork facilitator, I lead 1:1 sessions in an oak forest in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Holly: What got you interested in breathwork / other healing modalities?
Pete: Eight or so years ago I went to a group breathwork class with my sister, and it blew my mind. I’d been exploring a pretty wide range of healing modalities, prayer and meditation styles, and wisdom traditions by that point, but I couldn’t believe I’d never heard about breathwork before that. The next week I went to another group class but I was the only student who showed up, so I ended up getting a 1:1 session with a really great facilitator. The session was extremely powerful, and at the end I said to the teacher, “Wow, I feel like I just did 10 years of therapy in the last 45 minutes.” She said, “I hear that a lot.” Again, I couldn’t believe this practice wasn’t better known, especially because it’s so fundamentally simple — it’s just you and your breath — and I began to feel called to do my part to share it with more people.
Holly: We’re running with this line of ‘Trojan horsing the corporate world with profound hippie shit’… what do you think the need is to bring hippie shit into the corporate world?
Pete: It’s funny, I’ve been listening to Kyle Thiermann’s podcast since like 2016 and I know how hard he’s worked to grow as a writer, and I feel like he achieved the apotheosis of his craft with this tagline for you. “Hippie shit” can be derogatory even if it’s a little funny and self deprecating, but “PROFOUND hippie shit” commands respect and intrigue. Makes you want to know more. Who do these hippies think they are, hogging all the profound shit? Let’s bust open that horse and see what’s inside!
Everyone wants to feel connected, alive, and inspired, maybe now more than ever. I’m having more real conversations about life outside of work with colleagues and business associates than I ever have, and they seem to be craving them as much as I am. When one person opens up and gets a little vulnerable, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. Is that hippie shit? Compared to the dominant corporate culture of the last century, maybe so. But I think it’s also the kind of quality that people are going to be looking for more and more from their leaders.
Holly: Is everyone losing their minds right now? Why? Have you lost your mind?!
Pete: I’ll play with your words a little bit. What I see a lot of right now is that people are getting lost IN their minds. We’re stuck in our heads, lost in a noisy soup of chattering, worrying, planning, judging, and analysing. We’re hyper-vigilant. We don’t feel safe enough to just be still, and so our restless minds dominate our experience of being alive. It feels like we’re going crazy because we’re not experiencing the wholeness of what it means to be humans on Earth.
Disconnection is an epidemic. We’re disconnected from our bodies because the volume of our chattering minds is turned up so high that we can’t hear what the rest of us is saying. We’re disconnected from each other by a cultural expectation that we conclusively take sides on every issue, no matter how complex the issue is or how little we actually know about it. And we’re disconnected from nature by a runaway cult of techno-optimism that says that whenever technology creates a problem, all that’s needed to solve it is more technology.
Re-forming these connections happens when we find ways to turn down the noise and get still. In Los Angeles, we’re lucky to have access to some truly wild places. The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is the largest urban national park in the country, with more than 150,000 acres of wild mountain range. If I haven’t completely lost my mind it’s because I spend a lot of time there. And the message of practices like breathwork is that we are already whole, even though it doesn’t always feel that way, and that the parts of ourselves that we don’t normally pay attention to contain a lot of wisdom about how we should live.
Holly: You have started offering breathwork sessions, what’s your WHY behind this? What kind of folks do you want to be working with?
Pete: The 1:1 breathwork sessions I lead are 90 min long and set in a grove of giant, ancient oak trees in the mountains west of LA. I deliberately select the location, music, and my own guiding words in order to cultivate a felt sense of reconciliation with the natural world. I do this work for entrepreneurs, business leaders, artists, and healers. And I am a student of this work myself, more than I am a teacher. Fundamentally, I use this work to go deeper, learn more, and connect with other people who also suspect they are being called to cultivate the seeds of a more whole and soulful world.
Business Building in a Flailing Economy
It’s nothing personal, by Holly Gottlieb
I mean. Sometimes it is. The boy doesn’t like you back. You didn’t get the job. They don’t want to be your friend anymore…those are pretty personal things to take. What did I do wrong? There must be something wrong with me? Rejection always feels personal.
But as we venture down the path of profound hippie shit, among the many one-liners, we hear ‘rejection is protection’. Ok. Fine. It is. Maybe there’s some solace in that, in it I have certainly found some truth. But it still hurts. Rejection hurts. Period.
As the year is coming to a close, I’m in major business development mode - building a recruitment business focussing on mission driven companies, working with purpose led founders - the clarity that has poured in around what direction to take with this business is now crystal clear. I have a business plan. I have clarity over my value, what I can bring to the table and where there’s a need in the market. I know what I want, it’s now time to go after it like my hair is on fire. There’s a lot of outreach happening, to people I’ve known for years, and many I don’t. And the response is sometimes achingly slow - I’m witnessing the same tinge of rejection in my body, and I have to hammer home the point to myself, that it’s nothing personal.
I’m finding that across the board, emails, text, LinkedIn messages, phone calls… all the things… are just generally not being replied to as much, and if so, much delayed. And I am as guilty as the next person. Typing this now I realise there are things in my inbox from a month ago that need a response. I still have every intention of replying, I still think very highly of those people. But this overwhelm of L I F E is happening, and these things naturally slip. And then there’s the guilt for not replying, another add to overwhelm, one more thing to do. And HELL I know I’m not alone here.
It’s an overwhelming time. Are you kidding me?
I don’t need to list off the insanity of what we’re all dealing with today, because you get it already. There is just so much happening, in 25 different inboxes, all the time, everywhere, all at once (WATCH THAT FILM ALREADY). Our bodies and nervous systems weren’t built for times like this. Our human capacity was not designed to hold and respond to all the information onslaught that this world continually throws at us.
Sometimes the text or the email or the whatever arrives at a time when someone has capacity and the ability to respond, but in a society of increasing overwhelm, where our capacity is already being stretched past it’s natural limit… a lot of times we don't.
It’s nothing personal.
So as I’m looking at this business plan, and strategising about what kind of work I want to be doing, I have to remember this whole thing is a game. Really and truly it is. Whether or not folks are going to reply to me, most of the time, has nothing to do with me. There are a couple of instances where it probably is personal, I’ll take those on the chin, but by and large, it’s not. I know the human on the other side of that message has probably got some stuff going on. And guess what, I’m not a priority. I tend to have an allergic reaction to other people thinking they should be my priority. Why should I expect it the other way round? Your urgency is not my emergency folks.
There’s a story which I was umming and ahhing about telling, but it feels relevant here. Maybe it’s helpful to someone. So I’ll take the risk.
A few months ago, I had an email reply to one of these mass emails I send out, from a guy who is part of the business community I have been a part of for a few years. I didn’t know him intimately well, but we were friends in a professional capacity and I saw him at the monthly happy hour I co-host.
The email from him was a congrats about the launch event for Whole Collective. In addition was a business request for his company. I have 4 email inboxes, and that reply drifted to the back of the one that isn’t my regular. A couple of weeks later, a follow up from him ‘Just checking in. Are we all good?’ A timely response from me this time, let’s catch up next week! And then, ‘Thanks for getting back to me. I thought you were upset with me for some reason.’
A week later we find out the news that he had passed away. We still don’t know the details surrounding his death, but the news shocked the community deeply.
Here I am, a few months later, still thinking about the email I didn’t reply to.
Did he take my non-reply personally? By his response. Yes.
Do I wish I had over-emphasised the point that it was nothing personal? Yes.
But on the other side of a screen, it is virtually impossible to know what another human is going through. Even in-person, that awareness can be very limited at times.
In how many circumstances can we obsess about what someone else did or didn’t do, and was it because of us, were they ‘upset with us for some reason?’ That’s an impossible world to live in. If our mental capacity wasn’t stretched before, that’s a great way to go about it.
So how do we live instead? In this impossible world, what are we striving for?
A utopian ideal where everyone has awareness and takes responsibility for their mental, physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing would be pretty darn cool, but that feels like a distant dream for now.
How can I keep my own sanity as I move through this all? It’s an ALL IN commitment on that very process. To find some sanity, and serenity. So I remember as often as I can, that it’s nothing personal. I keep showing up and sending emails and doing outreach, and trust that the next opportunity will arrive, because it always does.
This is a game after all. We’re just playing in it one day at a time. So if I could stop taking it all so seriously, maybe it wouldn’t be so heavy.
Holly has 10+ years working with high-growth companies (primarily in tech, media & CPG) to scale their teams (at the CEO level through to entry level hires). Her primary focus is now working with mission-driven / purpose-led companies and founders who are building for the betterment of people & planet. Ideally in a fractional recruiting capacity. LinkedIn HERE.
