Amber Nelms 0:00

Well, hello, Josh. It's a pleasure to have you on Accelerate with Amber's podcast. Today's guest is Josh Roberts, the founder of Inspired Mind Mental Health, the creator of Neuro Diversity Gifts, a transformative program that helps thousands of people reframe their mental health experience through the lens of psychology, spirituality, and a lived experience drawing from his own journey. Wow. What a pleasure to have you on. I'm going to follow you and figure out all your content. I this is why I love doing this podcast because it brings so many cool people into my life. You seem amazing. Tell me more about how you got into this field and everything.

Josh Roberts 0:45

Well, thank you, Amber. You're the one putting out the signal beacon and it's attracting different minds and different hearts. I love that too. I think that's how it works. It's like a frequency. Well, I got into the field because I was kind of pushed into the field with my lived experience. I was doing my thing. I sound a little peculiar. That's because I was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. And I'd been traveling around the world, just figuring out the nature of reality, when I discovered one of the most interesting places in the world, my own mind. I got pushed into the depths and the enchanted kind of mystical space of bipolar. And so I was actually in seminary at the time, and no one really taught me how to navigate it. I went to professional psychologists. They didn't really seem to have access to the kinds of experiences that I've had. So I had to chart it myself a little bit. I went to seminary and wrote all my papers on this stuff. And I believe that our framing of mental health is it's had its day. I think we can expand it. I think it served for a purpose, but I think there's a multidimensional understanding of the mind, of the human soul, and of life at large that brings enchantment and wonder back to the world. So that's what pushed me into the field. I had to figure it out myself where I might as well, if I figured some stuff out, might as well share it with people. And now it's in the dream. I get to cruise around and meet the most interesting minds, including people like yours. And yeah, after the startly grouping to do groups, there'll be about probably 45 people today, where I believe are the visionaries, the creatives, the geniuses. And so we're busy harnessing that together to bring it to fruition for the benefit of the whole world. So that's kind of mission.

Amber Nelms 2:27

That's amazing. Tell me more about the groups and what you your larger like, I know this is not a part of the question, so let's see if you can roll with this. But your larger, like, five-year goal, where do you want to take your neurodiverse gifts program? Where do you want to take it? I want to understand how it works. Because I obviously work with a lot of neurodiverse. I am neurodiverse myself. So I'm fine, yeah, we're the best. So I'm very interested to understand further.

Josh Roberts 2:53

Beautiful. So yeah, for about five years, I was just running these groups in one facility in Carlsbad in North County, San Diego. And then through word of mouth, so I don't really market this. Then through word of mouth, it started spreading. And now we're in six facilities in San Diego County. And I've got to do that. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. And it's growing faster than like I was expecting it to. So I'm scrambling and trying to keep up here, but that's a beautiful thing. And I I've put up that signal beacon myself and have attracted vibrant minds, these beautiful souls who are coming alongside me and facilitating my groups with me and for me. And so we do, I don't know, maybe 40 groups a week in San Diego County. But back in the day, even when it was still just in one in-person location, the National Empowerment Center also caught hold of it. And they flew out from Massachusetts to come and film it and turn it into a digital training. So we've had that digital training on Teachable for, yeah, probably like four years now. And so I would love to see the digital training expand. I mean, that's so accessible to so many different people, get it into schools and into mental health IOPs and PhPs. And to see the physical in-person one expand. If we're only in North County, San Diego and we're already doing 40 groups, I envision it going to LA and to Orange County and the rest of San Diego. And so, I mean not to connect with you as well and to your audience, Hagar has I think something's happening here. It's a wave that's coming. And I'm a surfer, and so we're positioning ourselves perfectly to ride this coming energetical wave, which is going to be thrilling to ride, which is gonna transport us all as a society to new places, and which is gonna leave the sandbanks of underlying terrain forever changed for coming generations.

Amber Nelms 4:35

Let's surf I love it. Well, tell me more about how the program works. Who needs to come into your program and how does it work and then how does it help people? And who are your main people that should join your program?

Josh Roberts 4:53

Yeah, so the in-person ones are in like intensive outpatient treatments, IOPs, and then PHP partial hospitalization programs. They're actually like established facilities that are out there. So those are the in-person ones.

Amber Nelms 5:05

Sorry to interrupt you. Is it covered through insurance ever or is it always out of pocket?

Josh Roberts 5:10

It is for them. So like I contract with these facilities and they're billing medical insurance because I'm a peer support specialist. And so I'm allowed to, on behalf of them, we're able to build medical insurance for my groups. And so they're making money, I'm making money, my facilitators are making money. And the people in this group have never experienced anything like it because I think CBT's great and DBT is great. And I literally got like Marsha Lennon's book right here. But I also think they've had a lot of this over and over. It's a lot of the same kind of stuff. And personally, when I was going through my stuff, I needed meaning and purpose and connection. And I wasn't really finding what was that to fill that God-shaped hole. And so, what neurodiversity gifts is it's a conceptual framework. It provides seven different modules that are like these academical conceptual frameworks, but are brought to life using just fun, interactive material. And it's made into like a pop audience so that it can be digested. So through seven modules that mirror the pattern of the hero's journey, we metamorphosize our understanding of what the mind is. It's starting in the world that we think that we know the West, we start with neurodiversity in the West. Then we explore frequencies and the science of mind in module number two, which explores quantum physics, the light spectrum, the consciousness spectrum. And then in module number three, we get into depth psychology and Karl Jung's neurodiversity. In module four, we move beyond space, we explore other cultures, the shamanic perspectives on what the world of the mind be. And could this be a calling to become a healer? Are our ancestors somehow involved in our lives? We look at the South African Sangormas, the Filipino Baba Lan, and the Native American perspective. And then in module number five, we've just moved beyond space. Now we move beyond time. We turn back the clock and we learn from the ancient Greeks. What were Plato and Aristotle saying about divine madness? And then we learn from the spiritual masters, high-dimensional Christianity and higher-dimensional Hinduism. And then coming back to the world that we left once before, in module six, we explore dreams and your compass of metaphor. And then in module seven, we land back in the postmodern world, but with fresh perspective. And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. So just like the hero's journey starts and ends right on these same chairs, you don't actually go anywhere. Your world is transformed because your perspective on who you are, what the nature of reality, what the human mind is transformed. So people who need this are people who are struggling with meaning and purpose, people who find themselves to be in the abyss of the hero's journey where all hope seems to be gone. This is that glimmer of light that when you follow it turns into this cascading series of, you could call them breadcrumbs, or it's like this light that just keeps on increasing. And so it's a joy. Every session has its own vitality, this liminal space that's created between all of us and it has a mind of its own. So it's a beautiful thing.

Amber Nelms 8:04

Amazing. Well, obviously, you love your work and you love what you get to do, and that is fantastic. Why do you think people having a meaning to life is most important in mental health? Is that the thing that you've unlocked the most?

Josh Roberts 8:18

Yeah, I think so. I think as humans we're meaning beings.

Amber Nelms 8:23

Yeah. And that really unlocks the willingness to stay in treatment.

Josh Roberts 8:28

Yeah, so like reframing the whole idea of what these mental health conditions are as a game changer, too, because we're story-making beings. And the stories we told about what's happening to us frame whether we want to be treated for a brain malfunction. Oh, oh man, I just want to get back to normal. But normal's not that great. And like this admission, right? And they're constantly dangling the carrot and staying on this hamster wheel. Some of us, I mean, in my clinical depression, I just didn't want to get back to that. I was over that. And so I think meaning is really important. And when we reframe these mental health conditions as not being mental illness, we're sick in the head, but rather a call to something larger, a call to a metamorphosis. And yeah, that involves mess, metamorphosis involves mess. It's also exciting because the butterfly has a whole different world than the caterpillar. I mean, it's the same world, but seen from a different perspective. And so when people find meaning in their transformation, it's not just like, oh, I'm broken. It's any other disease. It's actually an existential call to adventure that's going to leave life with post-traumatic growth better than it ever was before.

Amber Nelms 9:37

Wow. Well, how do people find out how to find you and to get involved? What does that look like? This is not the normal questions, but I have never had someone like you on my show before. And I um I definitely, you know, this is my world. I work with neurodiverse people all the time. I think it's important to have other lots of different resources out there. So tell me more. How does somebody find you? How do people get help? How's what does the process look like? And also tell me more about how they would get a hold of your online course.

Josh Roberts 10:12

Beautiful. They would find me on your podcast, Accelerate with Ambrose, where it's all happening. I highly recommend everyone pull in here. And then if you wanted to come to me directly, you can go to southaficanjosh.com. Southafricanjosh.com, and that'll redirect you to Inspired Mind Mental Health. And then that's my offerings. I mean, neurodiversity gifts is one of them. I know you're into technology. We've got some pretty cool other technological things that are offered called Inspired Canvas. Please feel free to check that out. And if you wanted the digital course, that's on there as well. You can also check out the National Empowerment Center's website to go directly through them. And that would be powertou.org. And the Neurodiversity Gifts is there.

Amber Nelms 10:56

Perfect. Is there anything else that you would like to share with everybody today that you think is really important? That given this audience that is typically working with neurodivergent children, is there something important you would like to share with everybody for them to consider?

Josh Roberts 11:15

Yeah, definitely. I mean, thank you for the work that you guys do. I think it's so powerful. You want to change the world, change the next generation. And if you want to change the world, empower the neurodiverse to unleash their gifts into the world because the world has always been changed by those who are neurodiverse. Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, Carl Jung, all sorts of beautiful souls and Virginia Wolfe and Joan of Arc and so many different talents that can come to the world if we're able to fan that spark into a flame and then contain that fire because fire can burn down a house. But fire in control can warm us. Oh, you know it. And so I actually worked in the field for a while on the outskirts of LA. I was an AVA therapist cruising around and empowering people. There's a program called Autism Response Team. And so I know the work, I love the work, I think it's super profound. And again, just coming back to meaning, I think we're story-making beings. So what are the stories we're telling the kids or the people that we work with about what's happening? And I find that the story has an intelligence of its own. When we start telling these stories, the stories start to tell us and it starts to shape our perspective, it starts to shape our lenses. It's the same with technology. We create the technology, but then the technology creates us and we form this synergy. So I want to invite the people working in this field to step into that. I know it can be exhausting, and I know the helping professions have one of the highest burnout rates. And if we see this as our own call to adventure on the hero's journey, you come back to the known world to empower others and look for those little glimmers where actually the story is pulling you along. I think that can give us a fuel that that outlives the paycheck, a fuel that is existential in nature. And then it's contagious to those that we're working with. So again, yeah, thanks guys for the work that we do. Fine and it's beautiful. I'm so to be connected to you, Amber.

Amber Nelms 13:14

Absolutely. Do you know what my core purpose of my business is? I think you're gonna love this. The core purpose of Triangle ABA is to catalyze everyone to become the hero of their own lives. That is our core. I know, isn't that crazy? So it's so in line with some of the stuff you're talking about. And I just had our town hall meeting with our whole company, and that is what I always talk about. It's like we have a very strong why, and I always try to guide everybody back to is like that's what we are doing. We're not just like helping people, we're creating heroes and saying, like, you become the hero of your own life, you make it what you want to be, and that's what we get to have happen. And our staff, our clients, our families, that's the goal because that's how people should see themselves. I'm my own hero and I get to live that out, right? So I definitely think we I understand your thinking and I love it. It's so beautiful. It is a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for being on the podcast today.

Josh Roberts 14:08

You rock. I'm so glad that our past connected and I can't wait to see what unfolds because of it. So appreciate you. Thank you for everything you're doing. It'll be great to connect again.

Amber Nelms 14:16

I would love that. Thanks.