Human School Hunter Hayes: Chasing My Version of The Dream
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What if the music you've been making your whole life was actually the therapy you never knew you needed?
What if chasing someone else's version of success is the very thing keeping you from discovering who you actually are?
Hunter Hayes has been on stages since he was a toddler. He earned Grammy nominations before most people have figured out what they want to do with their lives. He toured with Taylor Swift, scored radio hits, and built the kind of career that looks flawless from the outside. But behind all of it was a kid whofelt deeply lonely, who learned early that love and acceptance were things you earned by performing, and who spent years chasing a version of success that someone else had defined for him.
In this episode, Hunter goes into the emotional terrain behind his music: the relationship between performance and belonging, the cost of tying your identity to external validation from the time you're five years old, and what it feels like when early success levels off and you must decide who you are. Hereveals how years of therapy, intensive work, and learning to understand his brain finally gave him permission to stop performing his life and start participating in it. He shares the moment that songwriting stopped being about writing hits and became therapy set to a melody.
What makes this conversation unique is that Hunter and Miles don't just talk about the destination, they walk through the actual work. This is a conversation about what it looks like to come back to yourself after years of giving yourself away and how creativity, when it's rooted in honesty rather than performance, can become the most powerful tool for healing you've ever had.
In this conversation, you'll learn:
- How to Use Songwriting, Journaling, or Any Creative Outlet as a Form of Emotional Processing
- How to Rebuild Your Identity When Your Career Has Always Been Your Entire Senseof Self
- How to Redefine Success So the Numbers Stop Running Your Life
- How to Invite Your Inner Child Back Into Your Creative Process Instead of Locking Him Out
- How to Protect Your Energy on Social Media Without Disappearing
- How to Find the People in Your Life Who See You for Who You Are, Not Just What You Produce
- How to Use Structure, Checklists, and Consistency as Mental Health Tools
- How to Write About Where You Want to Be Before You've Arrived There
- How to Be Proud of Yourself Out Loud Even When the Road Looked Messy From the Outside
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What We Discuss:
00:00:00 Welcome to Human School00:02:30 Why Hunter Spent 10 Years Chasing Someone Else's Version of the Dream00:05:00 What's Different About Hunter Today00:06:35 How an Onsite Intensive Became a Turning Point00:08:28 The Music That Taught Hunter He Had Permission to Write With Hope00:12:55 Music at Two Years Old and a Career No One Planned00:34:07 The Move to Music City from Louisiana00:43:15 Songwriting Became His Version of Journaling00:46:58 The Loneliness That Hid Inside an Idealistic Childhood00:56:25 The Sentence That Shattered Him at 1501:02:40 Letting the Inner Child Back Into the Creative Work01:05:30 Transactional and Purely Relational Friendships01:16:12 Storm Warning, Dan Huff, and the Radio Tour That Changed Everything01:26:48 Navigating Life After the Biggest Season of Early Success01:32:50 Why He Started Talking Openly About Mental Health01:39:46 Learning to Fly and the Life Metaphors Hidden Inside Every Pre-Flight Checklist01:48:04 The New Project: Evergreen Season One01:53:40 How Hunter Manages Social Media Without Letting It Manage Him