About

I spent most of my youth feeling disconnected from everything:

From the world. From other people. From reality. From my own body and feelings.

Now, we’re 2 phrases deep into this “about me” page. I imagine that by now, your mind might be mapping this to your previous experiences of such pages.

So it may seem like the disconnection I just told you about is something I see as a bad thing.

Au contraire, mon frère, I think it was exactly what I needed.

This disconnection, besides being protective, inspired something beautiful:

Year after year, I went out on the streets to interact with people. To run many little exploriments: poking the fabric of reality (including the one within myself), seeing how it responded, and reflecting on what that taught me.

These exploriments ranged from going on nonverbal dates, to brainwashing myself into different belief systems so I could feel the impact of believing them, to spending a year doing door-to-door sales to be put in challenging social situations with people from all over society.

People started noticing how this shaped me, and nudging me to write about my experiences.

I hesitated, thinking writing wasn’t one of my interests. But they kept bugging me, and when I finally did it, I discovered that not only did I love writing, I could actually help people by sharing my learnings!

That’s how “Pep Talks” was born. Back then, it was just a blog, on which I wrote at length about my experiences and insights. At the end of each post, I offered people a chance to send me a tip to thank me.

The tips didn’t just encourage me. They also showed me exactly what I could share that was most beneficial for others. When I received a 4-figure tip from a reader, besides the obvious excitement and joy, I felt a sense of arrival or meaning. Because it showed me how anything I lived through or played around with could serve other people deeply. And that it didn’t even have to involve selling anything.

Eventually, my exploriments brought me to a place I didn’t see coming: After about a decade of developing expertise in social skills, I realized that none of it increases connection. Just the appearance of it.

And that any response you get to your “perfect social skills” might not be a response to you, but to the behavior. (Or, as is surprisingly often the case: A response to you despite the behavior.)

Which inspired me to devote my life to figuring out what connection actually is. With yourself, with others, with the world or the moment you’re in. What does it mean to connect?

I dove deep into many existing practices and modalities designed to promote connection, mapped them to what I had already gathered from direct experience, and trained with mentors who had done similar things for many more years than me.

A particular pivot point was discovering Authentic Relating, which matched perfectly with my love for learning through games and experiments, rather than lectures. Working as a facilitator in this modality taught me a format within which I could deliver the many things I learned from other practices, or gathered from my own exploriments.

Besides that, since 2018, Ari and I have been hosting informal events at home which share a similar purpose, but in a much looser setting:

To create a space where strangers & friends can meet, feel free to fully be themselves and experience being love(d) for it.

On one hand, connection is always here, even when you can’t see it. On the other, it is a skill, a practice and an attitude.

So I’ve been running “The Connection Dojo“, an online training space for connection, self-expression and relating.

Just like a martial artist falls to the level of their training the moment they step into the ring, connection often gets harder in our most intimate relationships because the emotional stakes are so high.

The dojo is a place where you can practice relating with other people devoted to doing so, helping you show up more fully connected in the heat of the moment too.

I occasionally also host in-person workshops and offer custom experiences for events, festivals, retreats or groups. (Something I haven’t done, but would absolutely love to, is to offer daily sessions in a co-living space for the people staying there. Putting this out there). If you want to hire me, you can reach out here.

Oh, I almost forgot. I wrote a book about approaching personal growth from a place of connection. (This may surprise you, but many of the most popular approaches to self-improvement actually disconnect us from ourselves!).

People often describe reading it as a breath of fresh air or being in the presence of a friend. It’s called “Effortless: Transcending the Illusions of Self-Development” and you can read it here.

Speaking of reading! If you’re still here and enjoying it, in the spirit of how this all started, I continue to share insights on connection via email regularly.

Old blog posts are frequently deleted, so subscribing gives you a way to save them and a channel to start a conversation (by replying).

It would be a pleasure to meet you.

Much love,

Pep