E308: Creating abundance, purpose and discovering who you are | Trauma Healing Podcast

------- INTRO -------

At the end of the day, your life is in your hands, you have control over this, you can write this beautiful, beautiful story about who you are, but if you're unwilling to face the fear, if you're unwilling to operate within your values, if you're unwilling to stand up for yourself, you will not have the life that you want to have.

And look, I wish it were different, I wish I could just hand you the life that you want, but I'm going to tell you right now is a person who's had to do a tremendous amount of fucking work and who still does, day in and day out, the truth amount this is, the road is not easy, the path is not easy, the journey is not easy, but the destination is worth it.

------- PROCESS OF RECOGNIZING YOUR PAST SELF THROUGH THE SCOPE OF WHERE YOU ARE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT -------

Michael: When you're going through the process of recognizing and looking at your past self through the scope of where you are in the present moment, how do you reconcile you are no longer that person while balancing, okay, I'm in this moment, the future is uncertain, but I feel like I'm starting to tap into myself and there's this thing you that I believe, people cling onto us past experiences where they go, that is who I am and I cannot let go. Is reconciliation for you letting go of that adjust they like, what does that actually look like for you?

Dave: Well, I mean number one, I have been through a harder a little window of time and that is not comparable to a lot of the trauma that other people have been through so I want to be careful in how I even couch, the way that I have processed this because I don't want it in any way to sound dismissive of or toxic positivity as rose-colored glasses in any way.

But for me, the way that I've thought about my experiences is through the lens of two broad categories. I have the central experiences that have in some ways to find who, I think I am, and these circumstantial experiences, things, that happened to have happened, they are a part of my story, they are the color commentary of my life, but they don't define who I am. And when I think about my central experiences, think of like Inside Out that animated Pixar movie, right? There are some things that are formative in our history that have been attributed, positive or negative feeling and those attributions inform in many ways who we believe ourselves to be and what we think ourselves to be capable of because of that positive or negative attribution. And I just know for myself, as much as I have, had some experiences that I wouldn't have liked to necessarily go through or that I wish hadn't necessarily happened, they happened and acceptance is part of understanding who I am, but also asking, if there is a way for me to frame those experiences in a Tony Robbins s kind of way as being for me, not having happened to me, that's some of the hard work that happens in therapy and conversation with God and Community with close friends on a rock in nature when I am meditating, trying to find a way to say hey, I know at the end of 2019, I made this really bold declaration that 2020 was going to be my best year ever and what I didn't appreciate and going through divorce and transitioning out of a company, I'd help build, I didn't appreciate that I didn't get a say in the conditions that would bring my best forward. And as much as I am, not interested, like most people are not interested in reliving 2020, I was able to in this kind of an exercise, find a way to create positive attribution for some of the hardest things that I've had to go through as the Catalyst for why I now believe myself to be stronger, emotionally, mentally, physically, relationally and spiritually, right? Being forced to your knees, made my strength, in my God, and my faith that much bigger, being challenged to understand why I think the way that I do or spending, as much time, I did with the therapist, made me stronger emotionally and mentally, spending time with people that I cared most about are being forced to walk alongside the trauma that my own kids were experiencing in the end of their parents’ marriage, brought us together and created a bond that stronger today than it was before, getting out and running or being in a gym and getting physically fit was training me to understand how strong I could be even in the midst of hard times, right?

All of these things were a byproduct of attempting to create positive attribution for something that was hard in my life. And the beauty that has been part of my story and hopefully it's a thing that someone who's listening today might be able to spend a little time on. There are times when things that were a formative part of my identity, a central experience became because of the deconstructing of the pieces that I'd afforded, wait to circumstantial experiences, because of time and perspective and it doesn't mean again that I'm looking to dismiss that, man, you didn't deserve it, is it wasn’t fair? That trauma is something you still need to honor and spend time in therapy and community and grieve. But also, if we're able to see these things, as may be, the reason why I wear the warrior now that can handle whatever comes next or stronger because of having survived them or if over time, we're able to release ourselves from some of the weight that we have assigned to them in a way that make them things that happened to have happened but don't get a say in who we are, we now are the authors of what of our experiences define us. And it's hard work, it's long work, it's complicated work. You know, for me has been three and a half plus year kind of journey that will likely never end as I continue to try and to find how putting myself into situations that sometimes introduce pain or trauma or grief, are things that are ultimately going to be part of why I've become who I am known as at the end of my life.

----- CREATING THE LIFE THAT YOU WANT TO HAVE IN YOUR MIND -----

Michael: I think it's really important, whereas most people will skip over it, you can sit and you can visualize and you can create in your mind and manifest as all as much as you want all day long the life that you want to have, but I still believe it requires a tremendous amount of work and effort and energy, would you agree with that? Because I don't want people just to hear you go, he thought about it and suddenly he had this hundred, 10-million-dollar business and 500, but talk to me about the practical side of creating the life that you want to have? Well, also, navigating through the creating the life that you want to have in your mind?

Brandon: I love that question. And I talked about this in detail in my new book, The Golden Key which you know, I'd love to give to the audience the audio or eBook. The keyword in the law of attraction, ACTION and so learning it's not just about sitting Indian style in the corner and sending distance Reiki to create something, I'm someone I'm definitely a doer but so it comes very naturally to me and probably to you, it sounds like, but it's about finding that balance of, how do we manifest the stew of manifestation? There's a lot of ingredients that go into that and that's something that I talk about in my book and I think learning how to really follow your own inner excitement and knowing when it's time to act and when it's not and I mean up until recently I've had a big the biggest spell of, not sure how I wanted to direct my energy and I took that as an opportunity instead of in the past I would just throw myself into something and I said, no, I'm not going to do that this time, I'm going to wait, I'm going to follow the signs, what is my always tuning in to myself, Am I feeling inspired to follow this breadcrumb? And if I'm inspired, that is an indicator that there's something for me there.

Now, it might not take me all the way to the promised land even go down a path that comes to a dead-end at some point, but there's something I need to learn on that journey. And if I learn to tap into knowing that what's right for me, what I'm seeking a seeking me, and what keeps it at bay is me trying to ever for something. Here's the thing is when something when you're following a path that's for you, you're lit up about it, you're going to find excitement in yourself about it and then the work what does the saying, you know, do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life. I believe that path is there for all of us, it's finding it and it doesn't mean it's never going to be hard or challenging or any of those things but once again, smooth seas never made for skilled sailors and you came to be a skilled sailor. So knowing you didn't just come here for it to be all roses rainbows, and butterflies, your soul wants that hero's journey tale, that is why every great movie like Star Wars, for example, is in the hero's journey tail because that is our journey as a species, as a society, that is Mankind's core journey, I believe. And so learning to be aware and tapping into yourself and getting sensitive to – how am I feeling about this? Am I feeling inspired? Okay, I'm not feeling inspired to go in that direction. What am I feeling inspired to do? Oh, is this a time for rest? Okay, let me honor that.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is to sit back and rest and allow some time to pass. And so, it is a dance, it's really takes getting tuned into the subtle energies and that takes time for all of us to get better at more adept at and I think experience and awareness help with that.

----- BUILD AND CREATE THE GOALS -----

Michael: When you look at life from the scope of comparison or jealousy, it leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation because the reality is, you know, and it's so funny because I'm lucky enough to have really incredible mentors in my life, people, who'd go, how did you get in connection with that person? And when you're in connection with that person what you recognize is like they have mentors too? Everyone is in this journey they're looking at the person one step ahead of them so they can go and create the life that they want to have. And I think about that every single day and for me, it started with this idea of, okay, where do you begin? What is step one? What is actually take? You know, not I measure this idea of my life and what I want to build and what I create against the goals that I put in place and I just go, okay, what do I have to do to get there? How do you get there? I think, one of the hardest parts about this Vince is that people are terrified to write down their goals because it's often preceded by, I'm not good enough, I don't deserve it. Who am I to have this thing? Talk to me about how you navigate that?

Vince: Okay. One of the things I did, which was funny, because I've suffered, we call this imposter syndrome, obviously, this is a sense that you don't belong at that table, the sense that you don't deserve the success that other people here, are all the sense that you're going to get found out. Everyone's going to know, you have no idea what you're doing, by the way, I would argue that none of us know what we're doing, honestly, we're making this journey up as we go along, that's absolutely okay, that's not a problem.

But there was a couple of kind of pivotal moments for me, I remember one of them I was looking at other people's successes and I started looking at these; it is that I looked up to us looking at these people that we're making major coin of what they're doing, and I started to realize it was actually no pattern in amongst these people. You have Harvard graduates there who had grown up in wealth and growing up and surrounded by people that could, you know, help them and Mentor them and people that gave them good role models for all this and they were star pupils going through and I said, okay, well, they were obviously always going to succeed. And then you have the high school, dropout, your people at Russell Brunson, we failed at doing marketing school, you know failed at doing all these different things and yet it was crushing it and I'm like, the only consistent thing here is they believe in themselves. They've actually realized that they've got as much right to this success as all of us because if you look at it, there one thing that holds us back isn't other people, it's ourselves, it's our own thinking.

There's a conversation and share this about with a peer of mine, a friend of mine and she was somebody who consistently turn up online and what I mean, is that Facebook lives, multiple times a week, constantly putting content out there engaging with different people and just very vibrant kind of hyper-personal type person and I was like, this is cool and it's a good friend of mine. I thought I knew she was going through a launch, so I thought I'd reach out to her and see how things are going and I had looking realize, she's actually tune-up on social for a couple of weeks, she must be on holiday, so I thought yeah. And then I was like – I know, she's in the middle of a launch that can be Holly, just seeing her a message and said, hey just checking in, how are you doing? How are you getting on? And she came back with two words, I'm okay. Now, I'm okay from a person like that means a whole pile of other things. It means I am definitely not okay, Vince, I'm really struggling right now, I'm spiraling, there's a whole pile going on, I just don't know how I'm going to cope. So, I thought, right, that's it, I need to reach out to it properly. So, let's jump on his own coach because no, no, no, I had a catch-up on assume called now haven't done my hair and makeup and it well, neither have I, so you're okay and we laughed and finally got around to zoom call in, she just burst into tears and was like this, I'm really struggling, I'm spiraling right now and the reason it happened, funny enough was from success. So, she was going through a launch phase forms to reach and said, hey we want to do this profile on you as an entrepreneur, that's a pretty big deal. So, they said what we want you to do is we want you to fill out all this content, so they seem to these things that she had to write, at the same time she had a large corporate comes here and go, hey, I know you're doing your coaching work and things like that, but I really need you to do some consultation work for us, we're going to pay you back loads of money essentially. So, can you put a proposal together for us?

So, as you add these two things that she had to do a proposal and a writing up, the thing for Forbes and immediately didn't feel worthy of that, just sort of feel whelmed at this potential success right in front of her, so procrastinated. And in a week went by and she hadn't started either of those two weeks went by, same again, three weeks went by, same again to the point where it actually got really embarrassing and then shame kicked it. And then she didn't feel like she was, like – comparing ourselves to other people would do this easily, why can't I do this easily? I'm such a failure. I'm such a loser and while she was describing, this to me, this was very wrong, and very open for her and she was talking about this pain that she had. I just turned around with, oh my goodness, same here, she meant what I said, oh, yeah was made last Tuesday and I said to him at the fact that I do this as well as he died, funny enough, it was a large corporate and reached out to me and said, look, we need your expertise and the weirdest thing is it was about lead generation for an insurance brokerage. I'm going, I could do this in my sleep like this is easy and they said, yeah, we just need you for a weekend, we just basically need you to put some effort into putting a strategy together for us and I'm like, yep, sure, not a problem, that's a great put a proposal together, huh? Okay, and then I got in my own head and I thought if I put the proposal together, then it's not to be as good as the agencies they normally deal with because I'm not an agency, and what if it's not what they expected to, what if they reject me? what if they think? Oh man, we want to have actually skies an idiot. What if you do all these thoughts and it just caused me to procrastinate and to the point where I didn't take any action.

So, I told her that and I said, I had two fronts up to that and I told her what it did, I actually reached out to them I thought I woke up one morning and thought I need to change this pattern. I need to disrupt this pattern immediately, so I reached out to them and say, look, I just want to be open and honest with you. I'm really struggling to put this proposal together, it's not because I don't stand this, I could do this literally in my sleep. You guys know, I'm the expert in this, I said, but the problem I've got is I started getting into my own head, I was really open with them. So, I shall get in my own head about, you know what, you're expecting for the proposal, and that started to make me a bit overwhelmed, and I just, I procrastinated to the point where it's just embarrassing. So, totally understand, if you don't want to deal with me, but if you do, let's crush this and they said, actually we really need your help get into the office now, we got in there, we just wrote it up on a whiteboard. Done. No proposal necessary, that's what we need to deliver did that and got paid heaps of money for it. But I told her the story and in sharing that story with her and being open with her about that and her being open with me, we realize we all go through the same kind of stuff, I'd seriously we're the best at getting in our own way. And a lot of that comes from that insecurity in that fear or that's like the Imposter syndrome aspect of it. So having somebody else to talk to is incredibly important, but being emotionally honest about that is going to help you to deal with it.

So, we started saying, hey we need to talk about this a lot more than other people, so we did. We even did a Facebook live and for this group and the two of us, just joking around talking about what we've been through and put ourselves out there very vulnerable, young man, like – very vulnerably that people could easily judge you for that kind of thing and say, well, you can't you procrastinate on putting together a proposal, what the hell is wrong with you? You call yourselves amazing entrepreneurs, like – people do this all the time, but actually, the response from people was, oh, so good to know I'm not alone. So good to know I go through that as well and like you guys, you know.

So, I think that's one of the keys is actually being emotionally honest without it actually getting out of our own way essentially and having someone you mentioned it before having someone to hold you to account as one of the most important parts of all of it, it's one of the things that you said every successful entrepreneur and I mean, every, I'll be very surprised if there was a single successful entrepreneur that didn't have some form of mental or coach or someone speaking into their life and the reason for that is because they've realized the truth that we need to realize and that is you can't do this alone. You can't do entrepreneurship alone, you can't do life alone, we are not designed to be alone, you need people that can prop you up when you need to people that can lift you up when you fall down, people that can stand by your size, celebrate, your successes with you. So, you need to make sure you got people speaking to you.

----- MOMENTUM -----

Michael: How do you continue the momentum? If I were to pinpoint the number one way that people let themselves down, it's by giving up on their dreams because it got too difficult. How have you been able to either cultivate momentum or build momentum or even in those moments like, what is the process for that? Because I see the transition in the trajectory of your life, it obviously didn't happen overnight, I'm sure you're probably nowhere close to where you're trying to go and what's next? But how do you continue to have that carry through to push you towards what you want to accomplish?

Agi: Yes. So first of all, when you have a very big goal, as you mentioned, you have said that. If you just leave it like that and then try to take the next little step in order to reach their that's probably not going to work for me it wouldn't work like that, I would need to kind of reverse engineer that goal and see if that is really what I want, we’re do I need to be in a year's time from now? For example, to reach that or six months or in three months or next week, should tanking it down into smaller, things really help with the momentum because you have more clear direction and it’s broken down.

You know, that if I have completed, this chunk of the goal over this month, then I know that my next one is this and so on. If I can give you an example, I run the London Marathon few months ago and that was the first time I ran a marathon, if I started just by thinking, how will I run those 26 miles? The motivation would be very difficult to maintain but I had broken it down reversely into, I need to do this a month before need to be able to do this a month before these two months before. So, I was working towards smaller goals or interim goals, which are much more achievable. So doing like 10 kilometers as is a much more approachable and goal than saying, I'm going to do the marathon; yes, you will do the marathon eventually, but you have to build yourself up to this. So, I think that is the key to momentum to one of the kids, there are many but that is one of the keys to have smaller sub goals that will lead to that big goal and rather than looking at the very end of what you are wanting to achieve. Look a little bit closer, what is my next step? Especially when on those days, when you really don't feel like you want to practice or for work or run or get out of bed or that's really the time that it has helped me to keep up the momentum.

And one other thing that comes to mind us in action if you want because momentum is very easy to lose, it's pretty much a daily process but if for any reason because things will happen in life will happen. You get out of the momentum and you don't do what you wanted to do for one day. Make sure 100% that there won't be a second day that you will not do the actions that you have set yourself to do, because if it's easier, get back on the horse as soon as you can at the moment that two, three, four days pass and you might as well start over because your momentum will have dropped to zero. I don't know if you agree with that, but for me, these are things that I personally do it, they have helped me to maintain the momentum. You know after a point, it's a school zone when you pick enough, it goes faster and faster, you don't really need to do that much effort.