Mindset training for entrepreneurs starts with the system you keep ignoring
Most high performers spend years optimizing their calendars, their teams, and their tech stack. Joey Klein's argument is simple and uncomfortable: the one system that runs all of it, the self, gets almost no deliberate training. "If we don't understand how to train and nurture our inner reality," Joey says, "we basically have a really beautiful prison."
Joey is the founder of Inner Matrix Systems and has trained over 84,000 people, including Fortune 500 executives at Google and VMware, professional athletes, and leaders at every level. He didn't start there. He started at 17, broke, in a destructive environment, sitting on the foot of his bed at 3 a.m. deciding he either changed everything or didn't survive the year.
How elite leaders train their minds: the ownership formula
The core of Joey's method is not meditation in the popular sense. It's a structured sequence: awareness, ownership, regulation, and cultivation. Most people skip straight to trying to fix the circumstance. Joey says that's the wrong lever.
"The mistake that the majority of people make is they look at the circumstances that are going on that they believe are creating the pain." The circumstance, the divorce, the lost deal, the argument, is a reminder of a pain that was already conditioned into the nervous system, often before age seven. The event doesn't create the anger. It triggers a reflex that was trained long before.
Step one is ownership. Not blame, not fault, ownership. "In this moment I'm feeling angry. That's okay. That's my anger. It's my responsibility." That single reframe, Joey argues, is what makes everything else possible. Without it, the mind keeps outsourcing the problem to the circumstance, and nothing changes.
The science of inner mastery: nervous system regulation and the fourfold breath
Once ownership is established, the next move is physiological. Anger, anxiety, and overwhelm are all sympathetic nervous system states, fight or flight. You cannot think your way out of a sympathetic state. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for critical thinking, creative reasoning, and what Joey calls "joy and peace and those feel-good emotions," goes offline when the brain stem is running the show.
"We've got to go from sympathetic to parasympathetic. We've got to get the brain stem calmed down. We've got to get our prefrontal cortex active and functioning." The tool Joey teaches is what he calls the fourfold breath, a structured breathing technique designed to shift the nervous system state before any higher-order thinking or emotional work can land.
This is what separates Joey's approach from most mindset content: it's not about reframing your thoughts while you're flooded. It's about changing the physiological state first so that reframing becomes possible.
The three chronic pain states most people are stuck in
After 22 years of working with people from every background, from someone couch-surfing in Boulder to a woman standing next to a U.S. president in a Bel Air estate, Joey has identified three lanes of chronic emotional suffering: anger (including resentment and rage), anxiety and overwhelm (the fear-based stress most people just call "stress"), and sadness (including grief). The formula to address all three is the same. The circumstance changes. The method doesn't.
"About 90% of people are chronically suffering today at an emotional level," Joey says. Most don't know it because they've built coping mechanisms, scrolling, overworking, Netflix, food, that take the edge off without resolving anything. "It doesn't make the pain go away. It just has us forget about it."
Joey Klein's Inner Matrix Systems: from rock bottom to 84,000 people trained
Joey's path to founding Inner Matrix Systems wasn't strategic. It started with a mentor who gave him an ultimatum: start teaching people or I stop training you. He started coaching for free, by donation, sharing what was working for him. Twenty-two years later, a marketing partner helped him add up the numbers. It came to 84,000 people.
What drives it, Joey says, is the same thing that started it: a personal knowledge of pain and a conviction that it doesn't have to stay that way. "I crawled out of the ditch," he says. "And I think that's part of what drives my passion to give as many people access as I can to world-class training, regardless of their circumstances."
The through-line of this conversation is that inner mastery is not a personality trait reserved for monks or elite athletes. It's a trainable skill, built through consistent practice, the right system, and the decision, Joey is specific that it is a decision, to believe something different is possible. "Belief is more of a decision than it is something that's inherently there or not there. And I think if people understand that distinction, it changes the game."
