Car Chronicles EP 6: Identity Before Direction: The Quiet Work That Builds A Fulfilled Life

Ever feel like your choices aren’t fully yours? We dig into a simple framework—three core beliefs that shape a fulfilled life—and focus on the first and most important: know who you are. From wedding week chaos and cookie wins to candid stories of trauma, avoidance, and change, we trace how identity quietly determines your partner, your job, your friends, and the way your days actually unfold.

We unpack how inherited beliefs from family, culture, and social media become default settings you never chose, and why the adult move is to test them against your lived reality. We talk openly about trauma—how unprocessed pain narrows your options, fuels fear of your own reactions, and turns every decision into a threat assessment. You’ll hear a raw example of confronting violent impulses, the anxiety it created, and the work it takes to separate healthy confrontation from dangerous escalation so you can act with courage and restraint.

Then we turn to vices and habits. Porn, gambling, endless scrolling, and even constant people-pleasing masquerade as relief while stealing your most valuable asset: time. We break down practical steps to add friction to the bad, remove friction for the good, and rebuild self-trust with tiny, consistent wins. Finally, we share a clean decision audit—check trauma, vices, old beliefs, and habits for influence—and a three-part priority stack: you first, your dream second, your partner third. When every invite, project, or habit runs through those filters, life gets lighter, direction gets clearer, and progress compounds.

If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your choices and start living from a grounded identity, this one will hit home. Listen, do the audit, set your top three priorities, and tell us what belief you’re retiring today. If the conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a five-star review so more people can find the show.

Follow us on IG:
@leos_ftiness_adventure
@Stephmoralessfit
@teamvalhallaathletics

Apply for 1:1 coaching and get the results you are looking for: https://www.valhalla-athletics.com

Join our free Facebook group:
https://m.facebook.com/groups/804195770472212/?ref=group_browse

Transcript

On The Road And Weddings

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, back on the road again. I did a C4 serial C4 serial killer review. So I already cracked that mother freaker open. Go check out their review. I ain't posted it yet. But by the time you probably hear address, I'll probably posted it. So check that out. On the way to another wedding. Last night's wedding was a lot better than the night before. But at the very end, the bride spilt her drink, and uh she stepped back to try to like dodge the cup falling. And she stepped on her dress, fell, and busted her head on the table. And uh I go up to her, I asked her if she was alright. Uh everybody else was saying that she was alright. She got up, walked it off. So she's doing she's doing okay. I don't know how she's doing today, but she was doing okay last night. So that was good. And we got another wedding, like I said, I'm going to right now. So hopefully, enough bad things have happened in the previous two weddings, and now I just get all the good. I'm trying to chill. Gave one of my one of my cookies to the bride. She said it was one of the best cookies she's ever had. And the her she let her friend try it, and her friend was like, this cookie is like crumble but 10,000 times better. So, you know, I'm trying to tell you, your boy be like that with the cookies. Listen, if you want to try one of the best cookies you ever had in your life, DM me and ask me for a white chocolate macadamia cookie with coconut. And I'll make the best cookie you ever had in your life. Put some caramel on top too. You ain't homemade caramel. Don't get it twisted. You ain't ready for it. I'm telling you that right now. I ruined a lot of people because now they're like, man, dude, this cookies don't taste the same unless it's yours. Be like that sometimes. Anyways, anyways, anyways, enough about me. Uh, we're leaving for PMR. Gonna go bring in the new year out there in Puerto Rico, hopping in the beach, and relaxing. So, yeah, let's get to the episode today. Let's get to the episode today. And this episode is gonna be about three, but it's gonna be about one of my strongest core beliefs. These are three beliefs that I believe if you have these, then your life will be fulfilled and you will be happy. I'm gonna list all three, but I'm only gonna talk about one because I could talk. I talked the whole ride home last night to myself. So I can y'all know. If you've been listening to my podcast, you know I could talk. I got a lot to say, but I don't want to make this one too long. So I'm gonna go ahead and list all three. So the first one is know who you are, by far the most important one. Know who you are. The second one, know where you're going in life. And the third one, know how you want to be perceived by others. Okay, those are the three core beliefs that I believe. If you have all three, then your life will be fulfilled and you will be happy. And that's how I live my life on a day-to-day. And I could die today and have lived a very fulfilled life. And there's not a time where I'm looking at my life and like, oh my god, I'm just, I wish things were better. I wish, I just wish I was just better. The only thing I do wish is that I believe that I should be further ahead in life than where I am right now. But I feel like I've been holding myself back because of the one thing that I've been working on this year drastically is procrastination. And if I had to say it has gotten definitely gotten a lot better because I've done I've been doing things the old me could never. Oh, you want me to get all this done in a specific time? I'll do it. I'll do it whenever. I'll do it the day before. Like now, you know, I knock it out. So that's what I've been working on. But we're gonna go ahead and hop into um the most important one. Because without this one, the other two are not even possible to figure out. So we're gonna start off with know who you are. Firstly, you're probably asking, what does that even mean? Like I'm me. How do I not know who I am? Well, I'm glad you asked. And I've talked a little bit about this in probably all my episodes. So you're probably gonna hear some regurgitated information, but it's very important information, so uh go ahead and slop it back up and uh swallow it and apply it to your life. So, who you are as a person, when you are born into this world, you are pure and innocent, you know absolutely nothing. Then, as you grow, you are exposed to different things in life, depending on how you were raised, your values, your morals, and your ethics, principles are all instilled into you by your parents. And so, depending on how you are raised, it's gonna shape a majority of how you see the world. Then outside of them, you're gonna have influences from your friends, from where you work, people you work with. Then you're gonna have influence from social media, and everything is shaping who you are as a person, right? And then if you have some type of religion you believe in, all of that is shaping who you are as a person, okay? But one big caveat to all of that is those aren't your beliefs, those are beliefs that you were just raised upon that you agreed with, but never actually had taken the time to analyze and apply it to yourself. Is this something that actually benefits me? Is this what I actually believe, or is it just because my parents said so, or just because so-and-so said so, or just because social media said so, just because society said so, that's why I'm actually doing it, or that's why I actually believe it. And a lot of people don't take the time to analyze that and see if that belief or what they or what their parents raise them on serves them anymore. Because some people, for example, uh are raised to think that the police are bad. And you know, you gotta stay, watch out for the police or stay away from the police. And unfortunately, some people are raised to say, you know, you gotta stay away from white people, you gotta stay from black people, whatever the case may be. And so you live your whole life thinking that this entire race is somebody that you gotta stay away from, but as you grow in age, it gets to the point to where you start to question things. And so then that's when you go in and you analyze that, you analyze that belief and see if it's still something that serves you or it doesn't, and if it does when you when you start to make the corrections and form a new belief, like, oh, white people aren't bad, oh black people aren't bad, oh the police aren't bad, and now you have a new belief. And that's how it's that's how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to consistently analyze yourself. Because if you don't always do self-reflection, then you get complacent with your own closed-mindedness, and then you begin to live in an echo chamber where you're just echoing your own beliefs. And if you're living on outdated beliefs, or if there's information out there that has proven your belief to be false, and you're still echoing the same one over and over and over again, all you're doing is wearing yourself out mentally because it's just it's it's just true. Like you believed it in the past and now it's been disproven. So now it's time for you to do the grown-up thing and change your mind. But what happens is when people are raised and they become an adult, all of those things start to form and it forms their identity. So everything that they stand for in life is based off of you know your values, your beliefs, and everything like that. So, in order for them to change, it's going to shatter their entire identity. And that's why a lot of people are afraid of changing, because the fear of the unknown, they don't know who the new them is gonna be, or if people are even gonna accept the new them. So instead of changing and letting go of those beliefs, they stay the course because the comfort outweighs the fear and the pain of the unknown. And so they don't change, and then they stay like that for some people say like that for the rest of their lives and are just miserable and never actually experience what life has to offer. Another big aspect of knowing who you are, and I talk about this all the time, is you got to do the healing, okay? Because I want you to understand something. Think about a very big traumatic experience for you, something that really traumatized you. We all have them. We all have been through something traumatizing and that really messed us up mentally. Uh, I told mine, mine is about when I was uh when I was anesthetic, and I had to shoot kids with a non-lethal shotgun because they were stealing the metal from the Hesco barriers. And when I pulled the trigger, that was one of the greatest feelings in my life. And I felt like so much stress just came off my shoulders when I shot that kid in the face with a with a shotgun. And it really messed me up because one, I have the capability and capacity to do that. And two, it had me wondering, okay, what if it was a real gun and I killed him? Would it have made me feel better? And it was like a high, and I just wanted to know what that felt like if I actually killed him. And that really messed me up mentally for a while. And that's something that I really have been wrestling with. And, you know, it still it still haunts me, it's still in the back of my mind, and it really has bled over into me think confrontation. And sometimes the confrontation that I avoid has gotten me in trouble because I should have stepped in when I didn't, but out of fear of losing control and crossing that line and not knowing if I will be able to come back from it. And so it scared me. And so I'm now I'm working on trying to differentiate between confrontation that's gonna lead to something greater and just confrontation that I just need to step in, say something, and de-escalate. So that's what I've been working on, and that's one of my traumas. And so I say all of that to say this because trauma can influence your choices in life. And for the example I just used, if you know, I was in a situation where there was a hostage taken and you had the hostage taker, uh, would I be able to do it, or would I be afraid that taking that life will be the catalyst that puts me over the edge that I can never come back from? I don't know. But what I do know is I'm I'm capable of doing it, but that that fear would seep in because I don't know if this is gonna be the last of who I am, and am I gonna constantly want to kill more and more and more, and it just becomes overwhelming? Or would I just be able to do it and feel nothing? Like I just don't know. But that would influence my decisions in life. And so if you have trauma traumatic experiences that you aren't actively working on, then that can influence your decisions in life. So, say for example, in your last job, you got sexually harassed or assaulted because uh because there's like all more males than female or more female than males, whatever the case may be, and you got sexually assaulted or harassed, that's gonna influence the job selection that you're gonna be looking for. Because now you're gonna try to you know find jobs that's not more men or more women, or you might try to find jobs where you're like in your own office, or you might try to search for remote jobs, and that can make your job search longer. You might have to do more things to qualify for those certain jobs. So, in the meanwhile, while you're not working, you're gonna be uh not bringing in the income, so it can cause more stress financially, and it can just influence a lot of things. So that's why it's one of the biggest things I say all the time is you need to actively be working on your trauma because you can't make rational decisions. The trauma is running rampant in you because it will influence your decisions. But when you start working on it and you are aware of it, and you know, you know your own weakness, then you can start to, when you get into those situations, you can rationalize and be like, okay, it's okay. Not everybody is gonna try to sexually harass me or assault me. Uh, not not every guy or every woman is the same. And I shouldn't judge this workplace based off of one bad experience. So you can start to rationalize the situation, and then you know you'll get you a job where if you haven't worked on it and that's still running rampant in you, you're not able to rationalize the decision, and it's gonna prevent you from picking jobs that could re uh allow you to relive that experience. And this is why I also say, you know, talk about your trauma because the more you talk about it, the less power and influence it has over you. So that's why I say that. Next up, we got vices, you know, almost everybody who hasn't done any type of healing has a vice, and this vice is controlling parts of your life. For example, back when I had a porn addiction, pornography stole so much time from me because I would just I gotta do it, and it didn't matter where. I was like, I gotta do it. And it would just, man, sometimes it would just be hours, two, three hours, just wasted. And and I think back on all that time I spent doing it, I was like man, I could have been doing so much more with that time. I was like, man, I just gotta do it. So those vices can influence your decisions. And once again, it's another situation to where you're not thinking rationally because you're being controlled by your body and you're not in control of your body. So like people have gambling addictions, uh, alcohol addictions, just gaming addictions. Things that you just gotta do. And you just if you don't do it, then you then it really like it, like I don't know, you get irritated. Like it's almost like you want to fight people if you don't you don't get to do it. And when you think about how much time you invest into these things, because you aren't able to control them, and then it's still so much time from you. So if you don't know who you are and you aren't doing the work, and you're being controlled by your body instead of controlling your body, and and you're not able to make rational decisions, how how do you think your current life would be going if you were in control, if you were making those decisions? Because you can't possibly be in the best spot in your life right now because you're not making rational decisions, because you're not in control of your life. These traumas and these vices are controlling your life. So you're allotting more time to them than your actual priorities in life, because you don't have any priorities. So you're letting these things fill the void. And it's an illusion of happiness because these things give you a nice little dopamine hit. So you think that you're happy, but in reality, you're not. You still are living in a constant daze in confusion because you have no direction in life. You have no guidance. You don't know where you want to go. You don't know who you want to be. You don't know what you want to do. You're in a settled, you're probably in a settled relationship. You probably work in a dead end nine to five. You probably want to be so much further ahead of life, but you feel like it's such a you feel like it's a heavy burden and that you can't get anywhere because, like I just talked about, your traumas and your vices are ruling your life. And then on top of that, you know, people with bad habits. You know, you got bad habits, procrastination, bad habit. Uh not keeping your word, bad habit, not being reliable, bad habit, no discipline, bad habit. These things alter your vices and your traumas, and then you can see how all your time starts to get sucked away because it's going towards all of this bull crap instead of what you should actually be investing in, which is yourself. And in order to do that, you have to start working on these things. I've talked ag nauseum about my my bad habits that I used to have. And I I mean, if you listen to my videos, but I'll just say it again here, when I used to talk to all these women, I will waste so much time seeking what I was missing in my marriage outside of my marriage, my my uh ex-marriage, instead of just finding it in her and talking to her about it, because I was just so tired of not getting anywhere with her when I brought it up to her. And it got to the point where it just seemed like she didn't care enough to try to figure out a way to, I guess, fulfill my needs for a better lack of words there. And so I sought it outside the marriage. And then vice versa, when I would always go to her, you know, ask her, what can I do better for you? Because I just felt like I wasn't enough or I wasn't doing enough for her, and that's why she didn't want to return the favor. So I would always ask, you know, what can I do better for you? Because I just I don't I don't know, I don't know what to do in order for you to reciprocate the same energy that I'm I'm giving to you. Not saying that I was perfect in the marriage or better in the marriage by any means. Obviously, I was talking, I was talking to all these other chicks, but I'm what I'm saying is that because I was missing something and I wasn't getting it from her, I sought it outside the marriage, which was just affection. And I gotta keep I gotta keep saying this, but I never slept with any of these women. I I gotta, I gotta I gotta keep making sure I say that because I don't want y'all to think that I'm sleeping around. That ain't me. So yeah, so and think about how much time was wasted investing it into these other women when I could have been investing that time and energy into my own marriage and actually trying to build it better instead of just giving up on her, which is one of my greatest regrets, I guess, if you want to say, I don't really regret anything because I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I don't know what word to use outside of regret, so I'll just say regret for a better lack of words is giving up, and I hate it. Every time I look back on it, I think to myself, man, I could I should what more could I have done? But yeah, so you can see how all of the time that you're wasting on letting your trauma control your life, letting these vices control your life, letting these bad habits steal your time, and then then you then you sit up you sit around wondering why your life feels so complex and complicated and stressful, it's because all your time is being put towards things that that aren't of value to you, that aren't moving you forward in life, and they're just setting you back. So when you have no time, when you when you when you're doing all that stuff, it feels like you don't have any time. But like I said, we all live basically similar, and obviously there's more nuance here, but we wake up in the morning, we go to work, we get off work, we come home, we sleep. We all basically live that life. But when you add on kids, when you add on um watching pornography for hours, when you add on having to go gamble, when you add on the trauma that you've experienced in previous relationships, now your life starts to feel hard. Everything is amplified to the max because you're always in survival mode, walking on eggshells, because you just don't know what's gonna happen next. But even in all of that chaos, you found comfort in that pain because you're used to it. And because you're used to that pain, that pain outweighs the pain of changing in the fear of the unknown. So people don't want to experience new pain because they're so used to their old pain, they never change. This is why it's hard to get people to change because not all pain is the same. The pain that people are living with their day-to-day lives, they've been so used to it for so long, it just feels normal to them. So any new pain that they would experience is no longer normal. So now they're like, oh yeah, I don't want to do that, I don't want to deal with that. But then when you look at your life for the last 10, 15, 20 years, it has been absolute hell compared to what it could be if you just went through short-term pain for long-term success. Long-term gain. I was gonna say gain, but no, I said success. So just think about that. You know, okay, I want you to look at your current life, the life that you're living right now. If you're in a relationship, I want you to think about your significant other. Is this really the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with? Think about everything that has happened between you two. Is this really the person that you want to spend your life with? Or did you settle for this person because you weren't in control of your choices at the time? And if you had a rational thinking mind at the time, you would have never picked this person. Okay, let's go back through it. Your trauma. Did your trauma influence your choice? Did your bad habits influence your choice? Did your vices influence your choice? Did your old beliefs influence the choice? You see what happens when you don't know who you are? You can be influenced by so many different things, and the choice you actually made was never yours. That's the issue when people don't take the time to heal. You can do the same thing for your job, you can do the same thing for your family, or not your family, your friend group. Just run it through the list. Traumas, vices, bad habits, beliefs. What influenced these decisions? And then you'll then you'll have your answer. And then you'll come to the realization that hopefully that you do, that these choices that you make it ain't the ain't the ain't the brightest. And that you're being influenced by things that are out of your control because you don't know who you are. Which is why I believe the most important thing in life, okay, in life, is knowing who you are. So when you write your priorities out, you need to be prioritizing things that serve you. What are my top three priorities? Number one priority is me. Because if I'm not good, then I can't make sure anybody else is good. So I gotta make sure I'm good first. Number two priority is my dream. Okay, my dream is my number two priority, making sure that I am working towards my dream, which is to own a gym in either Florida or Puerto Rico and make it the best gym that people can come to. That's my dream. And my number three priority is obviously my wife making sure that I'm doing everything in my power to take care of her, and so we can grow and build our empire together, and so I can so she can be in her feminine more than her masculine. So she has a chance and opportunity to relax and no longer have to be in her masculine energy. Because unfortunately, we live the life of entrepreneurs, and our revenue is heavily dependent on other people, and so I want to get to a place to where she doesn't have to worry about money anymore, and so that's what I'm working on. Those are my three priorities, and if things don't align with those, bro, guess what? I kick them things to the curb, bro, and keep moving. Everything I do, I think about those okay, priorities. So when I'm like, when somebody says something, like, hey man, uh I'm having this event. You guys want to come? I'm like, oh yeah, bet, and I'll bring some cookies that way I can get some free marketing, and maybe I'll get somebody who wants to buy them, and maybe I'll be able to cater, and then maybe I'll make some more money. That's more money, and then I'll make the more money, and then I can apply that money to my dream. That's how I think, that's how I run through it, that's how I do things. And that's just little examples of what you could do when you know yourself, but you can't do any of this until you know yourself. But yeah, I can keep talking, but I made it to the venue, so I'm gonna go ahead and end the episode here. Uh, and if you guys enjoyed this episode, like always, don't forget to like, comment, share, and leave that five star review. And until next time, see you.