ABOUT
JOSH PERRY
Passionate About Empowering People & Creating Purpose-driven Leaders That Change The World
I dropped out of high school to chase a dream most people told me wasn't realistic.
By my mid-twenties, I was competing at the X Games, traveling the world, living the life I'd built from nothing. From the outside, it looked like everything had worked out.
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On the inside, I was already starting to disappear.
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At 21, I was diagnosed with my first brain tumor. Then a second. Then a third. Then a fourth. Each one arrived during a different chapter of my career. Each one I pushed through — because pushing through was the only identity I had.
I didn't know how to stop. I didn't know who I was without the bike.
So I kept going.
In January 2020, at 31 years old, I walked away from BMX.
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Not because I wanted to. Because something deeper was pulling me toward a life I couldn't yet name — and I finally had enough awareness to listen to it, even though it terrified me. What I wasn't prepared for was the grief.
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My wife, Jackie, was the one who named it first. She said, "Josh, I think you're breaking up with your first love." She was right. BMX wasn't just a career. It was the first thing I had ever truly loved. The first place I had felt safe, capable, worthy.
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Walking away didn't feel brave. It felt like dying.
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For months, I functioned on the outside while going numb on the inside. The nervous system that had kept me alive through years of professional risk-taking was now protecting me from the grief I needed to feel. Shutdown disguised as discipline. Numbness disguised as strength. It took time, and real work, to understand that what I was experiencing wasn't weakness. It was the cost of spending a lifetime overriding what was happening inside.
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Then, in 2021, I had a seizure in my sleep.
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A fifth tumor. The size of a golf ball. In my frontal lobe. Three months later, I was awake on an operating table at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville while Dr. Q removed it from my brain. Awake, so the surgical team could monitor my speech and cognition in real time as they worked. I remember thinking, with unusual clarity: if I make it through this, I'm done running from what matters.
I made it through.
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There's something else I carried through all of this that took me a long time to say out loud.
Survivor's guilt.
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My brother Danny died. Dave Mirra died. And I kept surviving, five tumors, multiple surgeries, and still here. For years, I told myself I owed it to them to keep riding. That walking away meant letting them down. What I couldn't see at the time was that I was using that story to avoid my own fear. It gave grief a moral justification. It kept me locked inside an identity that had already run its course.
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That's what mental prisons actually look like. Not dramatic. Not obvious. Just a quiet, convincing story that keeps you from becoming who you already are.
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Everything I do as a coach is built from what I've lived.
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The MITO philosophy, rooted in conscious evolution, nervous-system regulation, and identity-based performance, wasn't designed in a course or a certification program. It was forged across 13 years of professional competition, five brain tumors, awake surgery, grief, and the slow, hard work of learning to lead from the inside out.
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I work with founders, executives, and athletes who are succeeding by every external measure and quietly eroding inside. People who are driven, capable, and stuck in patterns they can't quite see. People who don't need more strategy. They need to see what's running the show.
That's the work.
My purpose is simple: to liberate myself from my own constraints — and help others do the same.
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Ready to see what's actually in the way? Explore How We Work Together → My Services