For Vince Dickson, breathwork isn’t just a tool… it’s a doorway. As a performance coach working with entrepreneurs, athletes, founders, and people navigating major life transitions, Vince uses breath to bypass the mind, clear emotional weight from the body, and help people remember who they are beneath their stories.
His work began long before he ever taught a class. A startup-driven life, hidden anxiety, and a heartbreak that “really shattered me” set him on a journey inward, one that ultimately transformed how he sees healing, success, and the inner world.
Today, Vince blends somatic breathwork with mindset coaching to help people become more present, more open, and more powerful than they realized possible.
Stuckness, Stories, and the Search for Safety
Vince describes his coaching simply: he works with clients who feel “in some sense stuck, which luckily is everyone.” Whether it’s high performers seeking expansion or individuals in crisis, the root is often the same. “Ultimately it comes back to the same place, we’re all stuck in some sort of narrative… some sort of limiting stories.”
For many, the stuckness is invisible. “For a lot of people, we don’t even know we are stuck in a story. It’s just, well, that’s reality.” And the default response? Pushing harder. “We just grind a little bit harder… which then obviously leads to burnout, which leads to relationships imploding, businesses imploding.”
When clients reach him, whether through heartbreak, burnout, or ambition, they’re often approaching the tipping point. “People are running around treating symptoms without becoming aware of the real problem.”
A Breakdown That Became a Doorway
Before becoming a coach, Vince lived what looked like a successful life, startups, ambition, forward motion. But beneath the surface, anxiety brewed. “I came across as fairly chill… but actually I was sort of, it was like the duck. On the surface you’re very calm, but underneath it’s just constant flapping.”
Everything collapsed when a long-term relationship ended. “I just wasn’t listening… It really shattered me and sent me on this sort of journey because I had no choice.”
The intensity of that heartbreak cracked something open. “This was almost like the crack that it was now able to come up, stuff I had been so good at keeping squashed.”
He sat in the pain for months. “I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. It was really just the classic kind of heartbreak.” But within the suffering was an invitation. “I realized immediately… there’s stuff here that now needs to get looked at.”
A Moment of Awakening
What followed was Vince’s profound breakthrough, a realization that reshaped everything. He saw clearly that “all of our suffering, all of our stuckness, it’s all in our heads.”
He describes the moment simply:
“I realized that what we are all looking for… is this experience of love. And the thing I’m looking for, I could have now. I don’t need the relationship. I don’t need the money. I don’t need the success.”
It was presence, not achievement, that held the feeling he spent years chasing. “That was available without all the stuff.”
And then came the deeper insight: “That was only available once my mind slowed down.”
That realization led him to breathwork.
Somatic Breathwork: A Path Back Into the Body
The first breathwork session Vince ever attended brought him back to that same quiet truth. “It brought me back to that sense of openness and beyond the mind… being in that state of love, of surrender, of everything is good.”
He began studying breathwork deeply, eventually teaching others. “I started working with people and I realized pretty quickly I would do this for free.”
Somatic breathwork, he explains, is powerful because it takes you beneath the mind. “It shuts down the critical thinking part of the brain… so you’re much more in this open state.”
The body stores everything we don’t process. “Humans are the one animal that doesn’t release stuff in the body in real time. We push it down and then we associate it with stories.” In breathwork, all of it can rise:
“I’ve had clients who remembered childhood abuse they never knew about… the body is incredibly intelligent and it holds this stuff.”
But breathwork also brings peace. “Rarely, for most people, it’s this state of just the mind has calmed down… this sense of expansiveness and compassion and love.”
Breath as Regulation, Energy, and Everyday Medicine
Vince believes everyone can benefit from learning to breathe well. “Our breath is so associated with our emotions… and how we breathe feeds back into our emotional state.”
Most people, he says, live in chronic fight-or-flight. “We’re holding tension, we’re always uptight, we’re very upregulated.” Conscious breathing can change everything: “Just breathing better — that alone is life changing.”
His favorite practice is beautifully simple:
“One of my favorite exercises is what I call a triangle breath… very soft, very slow breath in, let it go, pause at the bottom, and wait for your body to take the next breath.”
For mornings, he recommends “50 breaths… it’ll completely shift your state.”
In every case, breath is the bridge to safety. “At the heart of everything I do is getting people to feel safe. Feeling safe in your body can be quite low-hanging fruit — it shifts the needle a lot.”
Presence as the Ultimate Performance Tool
Though Vince’s work is deeply spiritual, he often enters through the doorway of performance. “It’s almost like a Trojan horse,” he laughed. “You shape it into something someone who wouldn’t touch anything woo-woo can do.”
But the truth beneath it is simple: “Your default state is one of absolute bliss and joy… the only thing standing in the way is a bunch of stories.”
Performance, happiness, and presence are the same muscle. “Being incredibly at peace and living a life you wanna live, and performing at your very best, they are the same thing.”
When people surrender the striving, everything changes. “When you operate from that state, the world opens up to you.”
Coming Back to Love, Safety, and Stillness
Vince teaches that what we’re all chasing, success, belonging, safety… is already here. “Everything you’re looking for… you already have. It’s right there.”
The work is simply dissolving what blocks it. “It’s a process of dissolution, not a process of becoming.”
And the doorway back to that truth is the breath. “One surrendered breath… for a fraction of a second, you don’t need anything. You’re there.”
Vince Dickson’s work reminds us that healthspan is not just about how long we live, but how deeply we feel alive, how present, grounded, and connected we are to our bodies and our truth. In breath, he shows, we find our way home.
Listen to the full podcast here.
