Sean is a sought-after keynote speaker—he’s stood on some of the biggest stages in the world, and he’s exceptional at what he does. Yet, as he approached the threshold of midlife, a quiet ache began to rise within him. Beneath the applause and success, a profound silence marked his greatness. His longing for a new voice—a truer, more soulful expression—began to bubble up, pressing against the edges of his identity. The call to elevate his work to another dimension was no longer a whisper; it had become a pulse.

The challenge Sean faced wasn’t the “problems” in his external world; it was how he translated those problems. Like most men, he tried to think his way through—reacting to discomfort with force, control, and strategy. But, as with a knot in a rope, the harder he pulled, the tighter the resistance became.

When Sean entered the Mythical Model, we began with one of its most essential teachings: to dissolve the very idea of a problem. We explored how the masculine obsession with fixing often reinforces the illusion of control—and in doing so, keeps the soul confined. Through this dissolution, Sean began to see that what he thought of as obstacles were actually initiations into a deeper voice and vision.

As his old identity loosened its grip, a new story began to emerge—the one his soul had been waiting to tell. A story not about performance, but about presence. Not about success, but about service. Today, Sean is deep in his mythic journey—creating the kind of work his soul has longed to create, speaking from truth rather than technique, and living from his mythical script rather than his industry’s. He no longer chases the next stage; he is the stage—alive, awake, and utterly his own.

Mark was the president of one of the world's largest private equity firms, overseeing the management of billions of dollars. The first time we met was pure synchronicity. It was late evening in a bar in Denver, Colorado. I saw him from across the room; he didn’t know I existed, and I didn’t know he did, but I could feel his soul suffocating beneath the weight of success. Without hesitation, I walked up to him and said, “Hi, I’m Ryan—and I can help your suffocating soul, if you want.” It’s not something I normally say to strangers, but in that moment, I knew it needed to be said.

Over the next two years, we walked side by side, unearthing the dormant memory of who he truly was, not the man he had been told to be. Beneath his title and responsibilities lay a deeper longing, one that no amount of money, mastery, or market success could touch. Mark was facing what many powerful men secretly face: the silent crisis between external achievement and inner emptiness. His marriage was strained, his role as president had become a golden cage, and his desire for meaning had turned from a whisper into a roar.

When Mark stepped into the Mythical Model, everything began to shift. Together, we worked to dissolve the false structures of identity that had been built around duty and dominance. We invited his soul back to the table of myth-making. Slowly, he stopped leading from performance and began leading from presence.

Not long after, Mark left his presidency and founded a new capital venture firm aligned with his soul’s truth, one centered on conscious and ethical investment. He wrote a book about living from the soul, moved his family across the country, rekindled love in his marriage, and began speaking on international stages—even in front of Saudi Arabian kings—on the future of ethical capitalism.

Today, Mark no longer measures his worth by the numbers he manages, but by the life he lives. He has become what I call a mythical king: a man who leads not from control, but from connection; not from power, but from presence.

John is from the Midwest, a father, and the founder of a successful development company. Accomplished in his own right, yet like many men, he found himself standing at the edge of the great unknown: divorce after thirty years of marriage.

I honestly don’t know how men traverse the wild terrain of divorce without a mythical lens, because divorce is one of the ultimate little deaths in a man’s life. Without myth, that death can lead him into territories of the soul that feel unreturnable.

For John, the challenge wasn’t the divorce itself—it was surprisingly peaceful—but the identity collapse that followed. His sense of self had been woven so tightly with his wife of three decades that he didn’t yet know who he was without her. Beneath the surface, what he truly faced was his longing to be loved again, not by another woman, but by life itself.

Throughout our work together, John entered what I call the mythic initiation of love. In the realm of mythmaking, a woman holds a sacred and catalytic energy. If a man is willing, the women in his life, the one he loves, the one he loses, and the ones who cross his path, reveal exactly where his soul stands in its evolution. Thankfully, John was willing.

Through the Mythical Model, he began the deeper work of bringing his relationship to the feminine into balance and harmony. He stopped seeking love as a means of validation and began embodying love as a vibration. Slowly, his heart became free, not from women, but from the burden of neediness itself.

Today, John lives untethered from his old scripts about what it means to be in a relationship with the feminine. He is initiating his own sons into their owl soul work, and his business, rooted now in wonder rather than worry, is thriving in new and magical ways.

John’s story reminds us that every ending is a beginning disguised in grief, and that the man who learns to love through myth learns to love for real.