Help Jordan Launch Team Builder Dojo

 

tl;dr -- I need your help to launch my new business: Team Builder Dojo. I thought I could get it off the ground by October but I couldn’t get it done. I got hit with some unexpected bills and need a bit more runway to finish the website. I’m asking for financial support to cover living costs for a few weeks and pay start-up expenses to launch my first new training in November.

 

I'm asking for help to bring my new business, Team Builder Dojo, into reality. 

 

The Backstory

 

When I closed Fighting Chance Seattle in November 2018 I was completely burned out. I pushed it too far. There was a clear call from within to slow down and pull back. I continued to teach workshops and offer private lessons to pay the bills and buy myself some time to plan what came next.

 

And then the pandemic hit and the workshops I had lined up were cancelled. Thankfully I qualified for unemployment assistance.

 

At first I scrambled to try to come up with something new. I came to accept (after an embarrassingly long period of resistance) that I couldn't force it, what was coming next was going to come through me, and that it was my job to listen for it and create space to receive it. I was being asked to surrender, to let go, and to trust (ugh).

 

Alone on an island in the warped-time of the pandemic, I had the space to open fully to feel my long-suppressed trauma, shame, and grief. It was clear that there was no path forward that did not go directly through this personal reckoning.

 

My Pandemic Experience

 

I completed a six-month anti-racism facilitator training with Holistic Resistance. I ran a pilot men's circle online for eighteen months. And I facilitated as a volunteer for Wake Up Seattle. These commitments to community work both revealed the obstacles that blocked me from connection and anchored me in social context through my personal healing process. 

Before I started therapy in 2015, I never imagined myself having open, healthy connection in relationship, let alone facilitating complex group discussions. I remember a time where I couldn't even tell my girlfriend how I felt unless I had two whiskeys first (what we called a "two-whiskey conversation").

 

As a man on a journey towards wholeness, I realized two things: first, it was my socialization as a man that blocked me from access to my sensitivity and vulnerability, and second it, it was my trauma that made it feel impossible to track and regulate my emotions.

 

My struggles to learn soft skills and practice vulnerability in relationship and community were the catalyst for what would eventually become Team Builder Dojo. It wasn't just natural for me to create a teaching system for myself, it was the only way I could grasp and integrate concepts that were so challenging for me. I relied on my background as a designer and karate instructor to organize and translate what I was learning into a framework that made it accessible for me.

 

Each insight brought me closer to what I would eventually create: a dojo: but for breaking down and practicing soft skills and relationship building in a supportive, low stakes setting.

 

The first offering of Team Builder Dojo is an eight-week, cohort-based program for men to learn to give and receive support, and to slowly work through the ways we were conditioned to see each other as threats. With your support I can get that launched in November.

 

By early 2022 I plan to launch a reimagined self-defense for women workshop with a badass collaborator and then a completely new soft-skills focused approach to kickboxing and karate.

 

Creating New Possibilities

 

In retrospect, it seems silly to think I could create a business called Team Builder Dojo without asking for help. At each stage this business has guided me to the next step. And this step is to breathe into and be with what arises in my body when I imagine asking for help.

 

Last week I tried to write this post and the words came out defensive and ashamed. I sat with the fear and shame. Then there was anger. Intense anger, and a feeling of disgust rising up my belly into my throat. And then the tears came. It was hard to allow myself to cry, and yet this is what I spent the last three years trying to reclaim: the ability to express my feelings in real time.

 

Asking for help goes against all of the stories I was conditioned to believe about the world. That everyone is out to get you. Men can never show weakness. We are all on our own. Decades of swallowed fear, shame, and anger came out in my tears. Instead of lashing out or shutting down, I asked for and let myself receive support. I allowed myself to be seen. I held myself even as I was held.

 

This is the kind of reality I wish for other men and this is what I'm working to create. I want to organize my life and relationships around cooperation and mutual support. I have the space to choose softness. I choose to own that I feel afraid, that navigating capitalism is exhausting, and I'm taking risks to try bring something new and generative into a time of despair and collapse.

 

I believe in Team Builder Dojo. It took four years to discover it within myself and it scares the crap out of me every day to take another step towards it. This is the most honest, vulnerable way I can show up and contribute to the world I want to live in.

 

Your financial support will buy me valuable time to finish and launch the website, promote the course, and cover start-up costs. If it is within your means and if you want to see more of what I bring to the world, please help me launch Team Builder Dojo.

 

I can't do it without you.

 

Paying it Forward

 

I recognize that it is a massive privilege to even be able to make this choice to focus on developing a business during a pandemic. There are millions of people who have to break themselves daily in work that strips them of their dignity and who have endured and continue to endure hardship through this.

 

What little I can do is to acknowledge and hold that honestly and to pay your support forward by making scholarships available and continuing to donate free offerings when the opportunities arise, just as I did while running Fighting Chance Seattle.

 

Thank you for reading. Thank you for holding me with care in this request.