Introducing Out In My Mind – An Experimental Psychology Series

Out In My Mind started with a simple question: what if we had access to the best psychologists, coaches, and therapists from around the world and they were willing to provide us with their best advice? 

What would we do with that information?

I’ve been obsessed with the world of psychology and personal development ever since my first psychology class senior year of high school (hellooooo 2007). Over the past 13 years, so much of my time has been spent exploring my internal landscape and trying to understand, test, and improve it. There’s been journaling, therapy, personal development programs, meditations, travel and more. It’s been a long, painful, uncomfortable journey, but one that bears invaluable fruit.

Through this work, I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit about myself and developed a decent amount of self-awareness.

I’ve also learned that there are many people who lack the proper tools to dive into and understand their internal landscape. And so they stand at the gates wondering what’s inside. Or they’re too afraid to even look. When I thought about why, I realized in our culture there’s no education or even encouragement to introspect on a societal scale. It’s a skill we’re never taught in any structured way.

So we have millions, if not billions, of people walking around this planet without the faintest idea of who they are or why they do the things they do. And when you don’t know who you are, it becomes very hard to improve yourself. 

When Brian and I looked at what we’ve built together with Nowhere Men, we realized we have a platform with global reach, and we asked ourselves how we could use this platform to make this world a better place. And given our passion for psychology and personal development, we came up with our initial question.

How Can We Serve

Would it be possible to use our platform to attract the “celebrities” of the psychology world to share their best insights on human development with us?

This was followed by another question: if they shared their advice with us, how would we make it useful to people?

This question was important because we also realized there is a ton of advice out there about how to live a better life. There are thousands of books, articles, and videos published on the subject every year. But what’s missing is anyone showing you what it looks like to actually put that advice into action. There’s no one modeling the advice, so it falls flat. It sounds nice when people tell us to “live in the moment,” but what does that actually mean? For most people, it means “turn the page and forget about it.” 

I’m a victim of this, too. When I read a personal development book, I’m often inspired and fascinated by all the things I can do to improve myself, then I finish the book and move on to the next without attempting to implement anything. Part of this is laziness, but part of it is that it’s hard to implement things you only read about.

When we thought about this challenge of how we could make psychological advice useful,  our immediate answer as filmmakers was to film ourselves doing the things our guests recommend.

And that’s exactly what we did! 

Introducing Out In My Mind

We sent emails out to some of the top psychologists we could think of and, shockingly, almost everyone of them agreed to speak with us.

This is how Out In My Mind was born.

It’s currently in a testing phase, but the idea is to get the top psychologists and coaches from around the world to challenge us to try one thing that they think will make our lives better. The definition of better is completely up to their interpretation.

We’ve already launched two of our videos with Dan Doty of Evryman and Dr. Mark Goulston.

We’re going to do 6 of these videos as an experiment and see how it’s working. Are our viewers enjoying the vidoes? Are they getting value from them? Are we enjoying the videos and getting value from them? Is this a sustainable series with all the other work we have going on?

We’re not so sure right now, but we’ll find out soon enough.

You can watch the series on YouTube here and on Facebook here.

Alex