The MythoSelf™ Experience

The water was cold.

I remember that first. Standing at the sink in Bob Brandau's kitchen in 1987, turning my right hand under the tap, watching the water run clean over two small holes at the base of my thumb. One on top, one underneath. If I held my hand up to the window at the right angle, I could see light through both of them at once.

I was twenty-eight. I had a divorce just behind me, a two-year-old son, Jason, at home, a career I'd walked away from, and no clear picture of what came next. That morning I'd driven up through the hills and valleys of northwest New Jersey, in Sussex County, to ask one of the finest protection dog trainers on the East Coast to take me on as a student.

He said no. No ceremony and no unkindness. He just didn't take students.

Then he watched me work his client's dog.

Flash was a year-old pit bull, all muscle and attention, and he was a good dog. That matters, because what happened next was entirely mine. He took a clean, full bite on the sleeve, exactly as he should. Then I did what I'd been taught to settle a dog after a bite, and brought the agitation stick back to him in a calming stroke. To Flash, that stick meant engage. So he let go of the sleeve, found my hand, and put both canines through it.

Bob walked over without hurrying, looked at my hand, looked at me, and said, "That was pretty stupid. What did you think you were doing."

It wasn't a question.

So there I was at the sink, twelve minutes later, gluing my own thumb shut in the kitchen of the man who'd just told me no and then watched me prove he was right.

And standing there, something happened that I couldn't explain for years.

I turned off the water, dried my hand, and said, "We should go back out and finish the session. We don't end on a bad bite. It's not fair to the dog."

Bob looked at me for a long moment. "Are you sure."

"Yes."

"Then let's go."

We went back out. I did it right. Flash did it right. The session ended clean, on a good bite. And before I left, Bob told me to come back the following week.

· · ·

I've told that story many times, and people usually hear it as a story about grit. It isn't.

I wasn't braver than anyone else would have been in that kitchen. I didn't weigh my options or talk myself into anything. I didn't reach for courage. The decision was simply there, whole and certain, before I'd thought about it at all. When Bob asked if I was sure, there was nothing in me that wasn't.

What I understood much later is that in that moment I was working the way I work at my best. Nothing was added and nothing was fixed. It was just me, without the noise.

And here's what took me years to see: that wasn't a lucky moment. It was a way of being I already had, one I'd had long before that morning. What I didn't have yet was a way back to it on purpose.

You've had a moment like that, when you knew, without deliberating, exactly what was yours to do, and you did it. Probably more than one, and they all felt the same: acting was the most natural thing in the world. What you may recall is what was missing. There was no weighing and no need to decide consciously. You just knew, and that was enough.

You may have spent years since then, and a good deal of money, trying to reach those moments deliberately, on demand. Workshops. Trainings. Therapy. People who promised to change you.

But you were never the problem, and those moments were never lost.

You don't need to be forgiven or fixed. There's simply something in you that needs to be remembered.

The Monday after

After thirty-five years of this work, I can tell you how it usually goes.

You go to the weekend. Something opens. You feel it in your chest, in the way you stand, in how clearly you can see what matters. For a few days you're lighter and more yourself. You make promises you fully intend to keep.

Then Monday comes. The inbox, the old conversations, the familiar weight. By Thursday, the weekend is a memory you describe to people. By the next month, you're already looking at the next workshop.

And somewhere underneath, there's a question you rarely say out loud:

I've done all this work. I know more than most people ever will about how change happens. Why am I still not living from it? What's wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you.

You were given the wrong starting point. And no amount of effort from the wrong starting point was ever going to get you home.

Why it never lasted: the Borrowed-State Trap

It isn't that the trainings and seminars didn't work. Most of them gave you something real. But almost all of them began from one of three places:

• Repair. They started from what was wrong with you, went looking for the wound or the pattern, and kept you looking there.
• Installation. They added something from outside: a peak state, a technique, a belief, someone else's model of success laid over your own. It held for as long as the energy of the room held.
• Understanding. They helped you learn a great deal about yourself. But knowing about a way of being isn't the same as living from it.

What those three share is a premise: that you are a problem to be solved. A whole industry is built on it. And from that premise, whatever you gain is borrowed, never your own.

I call this the Borrowed-State Trap. Borrowed states always have to be given back. That's why the clarity fades by Thursday. It isn't that you failed. It's that it was never yours to keep.

What works

The MythoSelf Process™ begins from the opposite premise: what works.

Instead of asking what's wrong with you, we start with the moments when you were most fully yourself, like mine in that kitchen, and like the one you touched a minute ago. We don't treat them as memories to admire. We treat them as evidence of how you actually operate when nothing is in the way.

Then we model that. We work with how that moment is held in your body, what you perceive from there, how you move and decide from there, until you can return to it deliberately. That position has a name in this work: the Ready State™. It isn't confidence, which depends on things going well. It's the place you act from before you've thought about it, the place the decision in that kitchen came from.

Nothing is added. Nothing is installed. You're recalling something that was yours long before anyone tried to fix you.

The only way to live from your best, instead of visiting it, is to return to the Ready State your best moments were already made from.

You can't lose your way back to something that was never borrowed.

Why I'm bringing this back now

My grandparents came from Sicily, where olive trees cover nearly every hillside. My grandfather used to tell a story about a man he saw digging in the hot sun. His father asked the man what he was doing. "Planting an olive tree," the man said. My great-grandfather walked away laughing. "It takes sixty years to grow an olive tree," he told his son. "What does he think he's doing?" he asked, as he picked a perfectly ripe olive from a beautiful old tree himself.

For the last ten years I've been out on the branches. I've designed bespoke programs for private clients, for large multinational firms, and for the luxury retail world. I've gone deeper into research on how people actually experience one another, how they participate together, and the geometry of perception itself. New work grew out of that: Decision Architecture Correction, Participative Executive Function, Persuasive Architecture.

Every one of those branches grew from the same root stock: the MythoSelf work. Moving toward what excites us rather than away from what hurts. The body as the ground of how we perceive reality. Turning what we perceive into the ability to create outcomes with and through other people.

Now I'm bringing all of it back to the root. The branches have been fully explored, and the trunk is far more mature than it was ten years ago. The MythoSelf work is, again, at the leading edge of human experience and performance, leading to what I call a MythoSelf Life™.

This founding cohort is the first to receive it.

The four sessions

Each Tuesday in November we meet live for two hours. Between sessions you'll have a private space to practice, share what you notice, and connect with the others in your cohort.

Week One: Remember

We begin where the work always begins, with what works. You'll recall a moment when you were most fully yourself, slow it down, and notice how you were organized in it: what you perceived, how you held yourself, how the knowing arrived.

• Why the moment that holds your form is rarely the one you'd pick, and how to let the right one find you
• The detail in your own body that tells you you've found it

Week Two: Return

You'll learn to step back into that way of being deliberately: not by waiting for the right conditions or working yourself up to it, but by returning. This is the Ready State. By the end of the session you'll have done it more than once.

• How to arrive in the Ready State in the middle of an ordinary day, without a quiet room or a ritual
• What changes in a hard conversation when you walk into it from there

Week Three: Reveal

From the Ready State, a different question becomes possible, the one at the center of this work: What do you want? Not what you should want, or what you've been trained to want, but what has always been pulling at you from underneath.

• Why the answer you get from the Ready State is quieter, and far more certain, than anything you've reached by thinking
• How to tell a real want from an old obligation dressed up as one

Week Four: Rediscover

The last session brings it into your life: your choices, your relationships, your work, the way you meet the people you lead and love. You'll see the shape of the story you've actually been living, and the one that has been waiting for you. That's the myth you were always meant to live.

• How to recognize the moment you've slipped back into a borrowed state, and the one move that returns you
• A way back to your best that belongs to you, so it doesn't fade when the course ends

Behind the curtain

If you're trained in NLP, hypnosis, coaching, or any form of change work, you'll get something more. In every session I'll take a few minutes to show you what I did and why, so you experience the work and see how it's built at the same time.

How it works

The four sessions are live with me online, and you join each one directly from your member space, with nothing new to install. If you miss one, the recording will be waiting for you.

You'll also have a private space, just for your cohort, where you can share your experience as short videos or audio notes and connect with each other whenever sharing or connecting is what keeps the experience alive and present. Some of the most important shifts happen between sessions.

Who you'll be working with

I've been doing this work for more than thirty-five years. I learned NLP from Richard Bandler, then spent seven years apprenticed to Royé Fraser, the creator of the Generative Imprint™, until his way of working became part of mine. The MythoSelf Process grew out of that apprenticeship and Joseph Campbell's work on the Hero's Journey. I've taught it since 1995, to people from more than thirty countries, and carried it into boardrooms, sales organizations and leadership teams around the world.

"Joseph Riggio … is at the cutting edge … and pushing the envelope."John La Valle, MBA, President of the Society of NLP™

But the best measure of the work isn't what I've done. It's what the people who've done it say.

What people have said

"The workshop was for me about … 'coming home' … fulfilling a profound yearning, a longing in the space within me … the core, the center, the source from which all else manifests and flows … a place that had been familiar, that I had tasted many times … and until now, I hadn't learnt to have access to it … to function and operate from there."Tara Bali

"I choose experiencing MythoSelf because I did the NLP and the Tony Robbins seminars. The experiences were not lasting for me and I was unable to hold the space. The MythoSelf Process is very powerful and I now move through the world very easily. … The best way to get it … is to experience it."John J. Suhar

"When I first attended the MythoSelf program with Joseph Riggio, I was beyond skeptical. I'd been to dozens of workshops and practitioners of various types of personal change work. … What I found though was quite the opposite. … I was organizing myself in relation to possibilities instead of problems."Jeffrey Leiken, M.A.

"The workshop … helps you reach the most powerful 'core' state you can, a state powerful enough that it allows you to transcend the way you currently relate in the world and move yourself to the next stage of development."Stever Robbins, MBA, Harvard Business School

"I've worked and studied with other trainers over the previous ten years, who are internationally renowned 'names' as master change workers, and none compare to Joseph in terms of effectiveness, authenticity, knowledge, skill or caring."Charles Moore, MythoSelf Certified Trainer, London; former V.P., Salomon Smith Barney

"I took this seminar … and was awed by the astounding possibilities that were unleashed for myself and the rest of the group."Peta Heskell, author and international trainer

"No one has changed so much in my life in so little time. A rare jewel and invaluable life resource. Such a privilege to have such a friend."Kevin Smith, Founder, ICON Advanced Capital and Estate Planning Inc.

"Great professional help with amazing knowledge."Rosangela Persico, Private Client

And from readers of The State of Perfection, the book that grew out of one of my live MythoSelf workshops:

"Most personal improvement books begin with the assumption that the reader is somehow damaged and needs to be 'fixed.' Joseph Riggio starts out with the belief in great potential."Alan Weiss, Ph.D., author of Million Dollar Consulting

"Joseph begins from an entirely different, refreshingly innovative premise: you already work perfectly; you've just forgotten what that's like and how to retrieve the state in which it occurs."Randy W. Green, Ph.D., author of Decisions, Decisions

"A unique and powerful process for transformational change."John La Valle, President of the Society of NLP™

Who this is for, and who it isn't

This isn't for you if you're looking for a new technique, a quick fix, or someone to change you. It isn't for you if you want a peak experience to carry home for a week.

It is for you if you've tasted that place many times, you know it's real, and you're done visiting.

Your place in the founding cohort

The founding cohort of the MythoSelf Experience is capped at 60 people, so the room stays close enough for me to work with each person in it. It begins on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, and meets for four two-hour live sessions on Tuesdays, 3, 10, 17 and 24 November, from 1:00 to 3:00 PM Eastern (7:00 to 9:00 PM Central European). Enrollment closes on November 3, 2026, or sooner if all 60 places are taken.

Everything included

• Four live sessions with me: Remember, Return, Reveal, and Rediscover.
• Recordings of every session, yours to keep and return to whenever you need the way back.
• Your private cohort space, for sharing short video and audio notes and connecting between sessions, where much of the change settles in.
• Behind the curtain, a look in every session at what I'm doing and why, so practitioners take the craft home as well as the experience.
• Your full $997 as credit for a year, toward private work with me, or toward repeating the MythoSelf Experience in any later cohort.
• Founding bonus, for the first 24 people who enroll: a private 30-minute call with me, scheduled and held in October, before the cohort begins. And from the day you join until our last session on 24 November, a private one-to-one text line to me for any question you want to ask privately, answered within 48 hours.

My promise to you

You'll know in the first session.

Come to it. By the end, you will have felt where this work goes. If it isn't the work you've been looking for, tell me, and I'll refund every dollar. You keep what you found in that first hour.

I can make that promise because the work speaks for itself in the first hour. It always has.

Where this leads

For some people, four weeks is exactly enough. They leave with a way back to themselves, and that's all they came for.

Others find that remembering is only the beginning. They want to refine it, live from it more fully, or learn to guide others there. For them there are live trainings. And if, within a year, you choose to go deeper with me privately, or to return for another MythoSelf Experience cohort, your full $997 comes with you as credit.

You don't need to decide any of that now. Begin with the remembering.

Two paths from here

You can close this page. Nothing will be lost today. The next workshop will open something real, and by Thursday it will be fading. The call will come again, a little more quietly than last time. It always does.

Or you can take one of the 60 founding places, and in four weeks be able to find your way back on purpose. Picture an ordinary Tuesday a month from now. A hard decision arrives, and instead of weighing it for days, you simply know. You act, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Not because you tried harder. Because you finally started from the right place.

Which will you choose?

$997, or three monthly payments of $347. Full refund after the first session if it isn't for you.

You don't need to be forgiven or fixed. There's simply something in you that needs to be remembered.

P.S. If you've done the trainings, the seminars and the therapy, and you're still carrying the feeling that there's a place in you that you've tasted but can't quite live from, this was made for you. Come to the first session. If it isn't what you've been looking for, it costs you nothing.

P.P.S. The founder's price of $997, or three payments of $347, is for this cohort only. When it closes, the MythoSelf Experience becomes $1,297, and the founding cohort is capped at 60. The first 24 to enroll also receive a private call with me in October and a private text line to me through 24 November.