{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi","title":"Episode 045: Built an Empire and the Empty Never Left with Matthew Stafford","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3368,"description":"Episode Summary\nMatthew Stafford built the kind of resume that makes other entrepreneurs stop scrolling. Three decades of building companies. Thousands of store owners mentored. Hundreds of brands scaled past seven and eight figures. Stages around the world. The biggest e-commerce optimization event in North America. By every external metric, he had won.\nAnd in a room doing emotional intelligence work, he came face to face with a truth he had spent forty years avoiding. Every single thing he had built, he had built as a man who did not believe he deserved any of it. The abusive father. The mother who was there physically but checked out emotionally. The shame he had absorbed in the womb from a seventeen-year-old mother being shamed by her family for being unmarried and pregnant. The Jekyll and Hyde temper that erupted when the pressure cooker got too full. The relationships that kept ending the same way for reasons he could not explain. The success that kept arriving and never once made him feel like enough.\nThe moment of clarity did not come from a book or a mentor or a breakthrough strategy session. It came from acting out his mother in a three-weekend emotional intelligence exercise, turning around, looking at a wall, and realizing for the first time in his life that his mother had never played with him. Never taken him to school. Never been emotionally present. For forty years he had been focused on how to be less like his abusive father. He had never once examined the absence of his mother. That one shift cracked everything open.\nWhat followed was a four and a half day dark retreat in complete silence and darkness, then a second, then a third. Ninety days of old patterns quietly dying after the first retreat. Sleep metrics that doubled overnight. A body finally letting go of what the mind had been storing for decades. And a man who now shows up one hundred percent himself, builds from his zone of genius, and coaches other entrepreneurs through the same...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/bvg3em96AOxVPLqwVao5_m5h-Qdbm8H6_VrYU8WT40M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yZGQ2/MDBlNjNiYWJmZTM5/NjczNjA3OTA5OGJk/YjFhZi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}