How Sam Kabert Found Fulfillment Through the Practice of SOUL/Life Balance

Sam Kabert is a serial entrepreneur who was named to Silicon Valley’s “40-Under-40” list at just 31 years old. Yet, despite his impressive accomplishments, he felt unfulfilled and lacked purpose in his life. Through a path of self-discovery, he’s now living a life that brings satisfaction and fulfillment through a focus on mental health.

In this interview, Sam shares a few practical techniques anyone can use in just a few minutes each day to improve their mindfulness. He also explains why it’s essential to focus your time and energy on what excites you.

Please tell us about yourself and your business.

Hi, I’m Sam Kabert, a seasoned serial entrepreneur known for my unique ability to build high-performing teams that bring visionary ideas to life. My journey includes such accolades as being named one of Silicon Valley’s “40 Under 40” at the young age of 31 and earning recognition as a “Rising Star” in the promotional products industry.

However, despite these achievements, I found myself grappling with a profound sense of unhappiness. This realization sparked my deep quest to discover my true purpose in life.

Now, as the accomplished author of the #1 Bestselling book, “SOUL/Life Balance,” my mission is to inspire and empower individuals. I’m dedicated to providing accessible techniques that enhance mental well-being on a daily basis.

Through transformative practices like breathwork and reprogramming of subconscious limiting beliefs, I’m committed to helping people unlock their untapped potential and lead deeply satisfying lives.

I’m committed to bridging the gap between business conduct, mindful practices, and self-communication. My approach revolves around prioritizing psychological safety and mental health as the foundations of personal and professional excellence. 

Can you share your experience that led to going from serial entrepreneur to spiritual seeker?

I was doing all the things I thought I was supposed to be doing, which for me included chasing the 4-hour work week. While I never got to a 4-hour work week, I did get to a 2-hour work day. As my business grew, I turned to content creation and found joy in creating podcasts and writing blogs, which later fueled my passion to start writing books. In fact, in the year leading up to my awakening, I wrote my first 3 books in less than 12 months.

I was focused on work with blinders on and my ultimate success came when I was named to Silicon Valley’s 40 Under 40 List, finally hit a million dollars in revenue, and wrote those first 3 books. All of these achievements were something I was chasing for quite some time and they all came around the same time.

It’s easy to look at my story and say it sounds like this dude just overworked himself and while, yes, in a way that may be true, it was so much deeper than that. I’d also like to make the distinction of what I mean by work. When I say “work” I’m referring to business-related tasks. All of the podcasts, books, and general content creation never felt like work to me, so when I was done with tasks that had to do with working in and on the business, then it was time for me to unleash my creativity through content. 

At the time I was so disconnected from my feelings and was caught in dissociation. It wasn’t until a numbing depression came that I was finally ready to surrender. Ever since then I’ve made a complete 180 in all the ways and am so much more connected to my inner world and am now living an aligned life that brings me fulfillment.

How were you able to achieve such a high degree of success as an entrepreneur and content creator working less than 4 hours per day? Is that something others can do too?

Yeah, that’s a great question and I would get that question a lot back in 2017 or so, and that’s when I became known as the “VA Guy” – VA as in virtual assistants. I had built my team to be completely based on freelancers. I had employees previously and in my book, SOUL/Life Balance, I touch on the transition from an employee-based business model to a freelancer-based business model and how it skyrocketed my business.

The main thing to know is as a founder it’s important to double down on your strengths and get excited when you find weaknesses. A weakness just means it doesn’t require your expertise and that is something you must get off your plate.

These days with the rise of AI and working with freelancers being more prevalent, I feel like this advice is more common. Yet back then, despite living in Silicon Valley, I was always getting asked about VAs/freelancers, which to me was surprising that more people weren’t on board with that model. Bottom line, focus your time and energy on what excites you; period.

In your book, Soul/Life Balance, you talk about the need to surrender and accept things. Resistance, in fact, only creates pain. Can you tell us more about that?

In any given situation we have a choice and as we continue to move through life we’ll be confronted with options that don’t appeal to us. Usually, this is when we try to push through. When you push through so hard that everything for a long period of time is feeling like you’re swimming upstream – well, that’s you being in resistance and when it’s time to surrender and accept. It’s within the acceptance that a new path unfolds.

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You mention how our work lives and personal lives are not separate. Can you expand on that for us?

There’s a show called “Severance” on Apple TV, and if I’m getting it right, in that people are offered a choice to have a procedure where they don’t know/remember anything about their personal life when they go to work and when they go home they don’t know/remember anything about their work life.

In this show, people are given a choice to have a separate personal and work life, yet in our reality, this is not the case. We are living just one life! 

This terminology of work and personal life creates a void in someone’s mental and emotional state and it’s this compartmentalization that creates more of a challenge in the psyche. Sure, we need to be able to put work outside of our thoughts and feelings when we’re spending quality time with loved ones. Although I’d challenge the status quo to say that the compartmentalization that just gets put in a box never to be re-opened creates more layers to unpack down the road. More on this in episode #202 on the SOUL SEEKR podcast.

One of your main focuses is stress management. How can entrepreneurs manage their stress better?

In my new book, Overcome the Overwhelm, I’m giving “busy” professionals the process that has helped me, which in turn I’ve been sharing on stages and with my clients to overcome overwhelm and access inner peace. The process is through the B.R.E.A.T.H. framework and it is as follows …

B: Breathe to Slow Down

R: Relax to Feel

E: Energies to Reveal

A: Accept to Surrender

T: Transform into Empowering Beliefs

H: Habits to Integrate

The basic process is this, you feel an emotion, and instead of numbing you decide to breathe and in so doing begin to slow down your nervous system. Next, you’ll feel what’s arising to the surface because science teaches us that our body has a 90-second physiological response when we experience an emotion and emotions are energy in motion so let this energy be felt so it can move through you.

This is where it starts to get difficult and where the shadow work comes in, now you ask yourself what is this energy revealing to me? Is there a lesson? This is also when it’s crucial to come back to the aforementioned “resistance creates pain” lesson.

Surrender. It’s in the surrender that you are guided next to transmute the energy into something positive because we must process the emotions we don’t want to feel first as opposed to going straight to positive affirmations. Finally, all of this will be in vain, if you don’t find new habits to integrate into everyday life. 

I’m just finishing an entire book about this, so that’s the condensed executive summary version of how to move through stress. One more thing to note is that this process is designed to take about 2-5 minutes, anyone can do it. No more excuses that you don’t have time for mindfulness because you do!

What are breathwork techniques and how do we use them in our success journey?

We could do an entire article just on this! Breathwork is a big term that’s getting tossed around without a clear definition of what one is talking about when they use the term. This is a struggle within the breathwork community and something that I’m extremely passionate about teaching and encouraging people to understand if they desire to learn more about breathwork.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to break down breathwork into two buckets. The first is, breathwork for rest and digest and the second is breathwork for release.

#1 The aim of a Breathwork Journey is to mimic a trauma response by activating the sympathetic nervous system, which puts us into a fight or flight mode to allow the body to release these stored and unprocessed energies within the body.

Imagine you’re in the Serengeti and you see a lion. This lion is stalking a herd of gazelle, and as it slowly approaches them, the lion finds one to attack. The lion thrusts its body on this gazelle and does its best to take it down to bring it back to the pride so that they can nourish themselves. But, the gazelle gets away … as the gazelle gets away it starts to shake and convulse … 

Well, in a breathwork journey, we are mimicking this “trauma response” to release stored energies (including trauma) within the body. 

#2 – While I like to think of the aforementioned “breathwork journeys” as maintenance and not a daily practice, breathwork exercises to activate the parasympathetic nervous system are something that I would recommend building into your daily routine.

I’ve tried a lot of various breathwork exercises and I’ll share one of them with you, however, there are many resources whether it be on YouTube or an in-person class/workshop to experience these breathwork exercises to help you learn which styles will resonate most with you.

A Daily Breathwork Exercise to Overcome Stress:

Scientifically speaking, the practice of the Cyclic Sigh has been shown to be more powerful than any other breathwork or meditation practice it was compared to, to alleviate stress and anxiety per a study by Stanford Medicine and Dr. Andrew Huberman’s team of researchers

1. Through your nose, inhale as deeply as you can.
2. At the top of the inhale, sip in as much more breath as you can.
3. Slowly, through the mouth exhale the breath.

NOTE: When you inhale, let your belly expand like a balloon and when you exhale let your shoulders drop and bring your belly to your spine.

I’d recommend setting a timer for 5 minutes and continuing to breathe this way and slowly just notice how you feel before going on to the next thing. 

For more on breathwork, check out the playlist on my YouTube channel Spirituality Simplified called “Breathwork”