Have you ever felt like you're merely existing, rather than truly living? Our remarkable guest, John, former naval officer and founder of Passion Struck, shares his transformation from leading an unfulfilled life to one of authenticity and zeal. He takes us through his philosophy of breaking free from 'quiet desperation' and courageously chasing significance. As a psychotherapist and entrepreneur, I've witnessed firsthand the stark impact authenticity has on our mental health and career satisfaction, and I'm excited to exchange insights with John that could very well be the catalyst for your own journey towards a life that resonates with who you truly are.
With intentionality and mindfulness at our core, we navigate the waters of pursuing passion with precision, much like a seasoned angler. We delve into the art of life crafting, the perils of comparison, and the importance of benchmarking against our former selves to measure progress. You'll hear personal stories that affirm the transformative power of heeding life's signals and staying true to one's course, despite the distractions and pressures that incessantly vie for our attention.
The episode culminates with actionable wisdom on crafting a purposeful life, managing boundaries, and maintaining passion. We explore the 'passion struck continuum', a dynamic, lifelong process that requires resilience and adaptation. Furthermore, we tackle the universal struggle of overcoming personal demons and sustaining our drive, with compelling examples from leading figures who exemplify discipline and the pursuit of constant self-improvement. Be prepared to look within and possibly redefine your identity, as we reveal the steps to align with your passion and impact the world in your unique way.
John R. Miles
https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-podcast/
Passion Struck Book
https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-book/
More about James Marrugo, LPC:
https://morningcoffeecounseling.com/
If there are questions you want answered or topics you want me to cover, send me an email at
James.Marrugo@MorningCoffeeCounseling.com
Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay
Have you ever felt like you're merely existing, rather than truly living? Our remarkable guest, John, former naval officer and founder of Passion Struck, shares his transformation from leading an unfulfilled life to one of authenticity and zeal. He takes us through his philosophy of breaking free from 'quiet desperation' and courageously chasing significance. As a psychotherapist and entrepreneur, I've witnessed firsthand the stark impact authenticity has on our mental health and career satisfaction, and I'm excited to exchange insights with John that could very well be the catalyst for your own journey towards a life that resonates with who you truly are.
With intentionality and mindfulness at our core, we navigate the waters of pursuing passion with precision, much like a seasoned angler. We delve into the art of life crafting, the perils of comparison, and the importance of benchmarking against our former selves to measure progress. You'll hear personal stories that affirm the transformative power of heeding life's signals and staying true to one's course, despite the distractions and pressures that incessantly vie for our attention.
The episode culminates with actionable wisdom on crafting a purposeful life, managing boundaries, and maintaining passion. We explore the 'passion struck continuum', a dynamic, lifelong process that requires resilience and adaptation. Furthermore, we tackle the universal struggle of overcoming personal demons and sustaining our drive, with compelling examples from leading figures who exemplify discipline and the pursuit of constant self-improvement. Be prepared to look within and possibly redefine your identity, as we reveal the steps to align with your passion and impact the world in your unique way.
John R. Miles
https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-podcast/
Passion Struck Book
https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-book/
More about James Marrugo, LPC:
https://morningcoffeecounseling.com/
If there are questions you want answered or topics you want me to cover, send me an email at
James.Marrugo@MorningCoffeeCounseling.com
Music by AlexGrohl from Pixabay
Hello and welcome to the another episode of mental health, without the bullshit. I'm your host, james Rugo. I have an extremely exciting episode for today regarding a book that's coming out soon. But before we get into the meat of this discussion, john, go ahead and let the listeners hear your voice and introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Hey, james, thank you so much for me being here and I have really enjoyed your show with someone who has suffered several traumatic brain injuries in combat and in sports. I really liked episode 15 on the hidden impact of traumatic brain injuries because I think it's something that so many people don't really understand the long term impacts that it can have on you and your life. But a little bit about me.
Speaker 2:I, as I mentioned, being combat meat, spent a number of years as a naval officer and from that I positioned into a big four consulting for a number of years and then spent most of my career as a senior executive. I like to say I'm a recovering senior executive because it takes its toll, and about four years ago I started on a completely different path, although I think a lot of the things that I talk about in the work I do now are things that I practiced while I was an executive and tried to be the best leader I could to the people I worked with. But I started a company called Passionstruck about four years ago and it's culminated into podcast, a number of online courses, speaking, and now I'm an up-to-date book. So thank you very much. I feel very honored to be here.
Speaker 1:Honors all mine and for the listeners of my podcast, john Passionstruck. I didn't know your podcast existed until people on your team had reached out to me. I started listening to your podcast, looking into you, and you allowed me to have an early copy of your book that's coming out soon. Love the book such an amazing read. A lot of what I talk about as a psychotherapist and help my clients with is being their authentic selves, moving forward and just being passionate and overcoming anxiety and depression and anger and all this emotional turmoil we go through as being humans. For those who don't know, what is it to be Passionstruck? How would you define that phrase?
Speaker 2:So I'm going to take a step back and maybe give the listener an understanding of what led me to even consider coming up with the name. So one of my favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau, and he says the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and I want people to really think about that. The mass of men and women lead lives of quiet desperation, and in today's fast-paced, success-driven society, the idea of leading a life of quiet desperation, as he puts it, I believe, is more prevalent than ever, and many of us find ourselves in a job where we lack fulfillment, spending days in a monotonous loop of meetings, emails, presentations that drain us rather than inspire us. But why do so many of us fall into this trap? And it's a sobering fact that only 5% of society will create and live the life that they truly want, and when I started hearing numbers like that, or the Cornell study that was done in 2018 that showed, on their deathbed or nearly their deathbed, the biggest regret people had 76% of people was that they didn't live the life they aspired to live, it just told me that something is amiss, and so I really went on a soul search for about seven years to get to the bottom of this inner calling that I had been getting, that I needed to start serving people who were bored, beaten, broken and battered around the world. And for a while I had no idea what this inner voice was telling me. But I've come to the conclusion that it's so.
Speaker 2:Many people have a feeling of un-mattering, they feel like they don't have significance in their life, and it leads you to exactly what Henry David Thoreau was describing. So if you're leading this life of quiet desperation, how do you break free from it? What is the opposite of this? And that is how I started to explore what does it mean to have mattering your life, to wake up, feeling significance, to feel like that you are living your authentic you. You are not living behind this mass that so many of us live behind, but you are out there living the life of your dreams. You're willing to do what it takes to risk financial potential embarrassment, relationship potential embarrassment, because you're not willing to sacrifice who you are in going after what it is you want in life, and that's, in its core, what it means to be passion struck. It's living that authentic life, that self-realized self that you have always aspired to create.
Speaker 1:I love that. Often in my sessions with my clients, I use the word authentic authenticity and clients often ask me what does that even mean to be authentic? And my response to them is to be your true self, to be who you really are, and let that be how you operate in your environment, in the public. One of the messages I got from your book was that discovering your passion, being passion struck requires you, as the individual, to find out who you really are. How did you come to this? To be passion struck as you? Because I would argue that with that phrase, that term passion struck, you're among the first. You're, you're the one using this, this dialogue and language. You're promoting it, you're talking about it.
Speaker 1:You've spoken to a lot of people in your podcast and in your personal life regarding research around motivation, psychology, mental health, but this term passion struck it struck a chord with me, no pun intended, because as I was reading your book, I saw parts of myself, my personal struggle wanting to be a psychotherapist, going through school having hurdles. I'm having hurdles now, being a business owner and entrepreneur. In this book also reinvigorated for me that I need to take action and focus on the things that really matter, but to also remind me to be my authentic self. How did you even come up with this term? Passion struck.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a fun conversation. I have a long term mentor and friend named Keith Kroj and, for the people who don't know Keith, he's a serial entrepreneur, super inspirational servant leader. He originally started a company called Ariba, which was in the e-procurement space, which is where I met him 25 years ago when I was in Big Four Consulting, and he ended up selling that company and then ended up becoming the chairman and chief executive officer of DocuSign, a company that many of us know, and, after a long tenure with them, ended up accepting a position as the assistant secretary of state, really with an agenda to try to foster entrepreneurship. Because the fact that many people don't understand is we were in a four-decade-long decline for entrepreneurship and it's drastic once you start looking at the reports at how far we have come, and I think it's a signal that we're moving farther and farther away of are those of us who live in America. They have a look at dream.
Speaker 2:Something that so many people around the world aspired in Americans because they saw us as being these innovators, these people who were building these self-profilling businesses. But I feel so fewer of us feel that we have it within us to pursue that life. And if you start looking at the figures, it's pretty eye-opening, because the statistics show that those who are college-educated were highly skilled, take the route of comfort, working for big companies, rather than pursuing a more audacious goal of creating a life for yourself. And so, as I started to think about this, I started to examine 700-plus people who took a different path, whether it was a professional athlete or an artist or an actor or a CEO or an astronaut. Why do these people not gravitate towards the crowd? And why do they gravitate towards this unique life that's filled with this enduring passion that just fills every ounce of you and propels you forward, not in service of yourself, but, more importantly, the impact that you can make on society?
Speaker 2:And as I was discussing this with Keith, I was talking about how so many of us are stuck in this self-fulfilling prophecy because we continue to perpetuate the same day every single day. And then I talked about these people like himself and he's like John. It sounds like you're talking about people who've gone from stuck to. They become passion-stroke in their life. And he said it and a light bulb just went off and I got off our phone call, never in a million years expecting that this thing would be available, and the first thing that came up was a perfume for Victoria's Secrets, and that made me even more convinced that there's no way that I have any hope of ever owning this. And I went to GoDaddy and passionstrikecom was right there in 1999. And I just doubled down from that point on it and really explored its meaning, which ultimately, is the combination of knowing how to utilize passion, perseverance and intentionality in your life.
Speaker 1:Yes, 100%. I completely agreed. I'm so thankful you had that discussion with him and came up with the term passion-struck. That's something that resonates with me personally because I'm trying my best as a private practitioner in mental health, as a clinician, to have impact, to engage my passion, to have forward movement. And one of the things that your book often talks about is the word intentionality and, interestingly enough, I've started using that word in my clinical space with my clients and just in the past couple of weeks I've seen mental health improvement.
Speaker 1:I have a couple of clients who are kind of stuck in their careers, going through the daily grind, you know, just going through the motions, day by day, and I brought up the word you know how are you being intentional? Where's your intentionality? And they started questioning themselves and realizing they've become apathetic. They just show up to show up to grab a paycheck. They don't really care about anything else and in the past couple of weeks they're having more conversations with their bosses and colleagues. They're showing up earlier, they're staying in later, they're moving towards things that they actually care about. What is intentionality? Come into play with people who are passion struck from your perspective.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just want to get to the slowly that I tell in the first chapter of the book and I have longed.
Speaker 2:I've been a long term fan of the word the angelic and quirk has, and I believe everything that she writes about and studies that she's done with researchers at West Point and throughout the world. In her book for those who have read it, you might remember, and for those who haven't she starts out by talking about cadets at West Point, and her book was written decade plus ago, but in 2019 they even took it further and studied not just cadets going through their sleep summer, but what made cadets succeed over the four years at West Point, and they found that, from their opinion, it was three things. It was physical ability, passion and perseverance. I have a unique firsthand experience of this, of what these cadets go through, because I graduated from the Naval Academy not 100% exact thing, but I'd say 98% and yes, as I looked at it, physical abilities were very important, because so much of what you do Revolves around physical activities of one form or another. So I mean, that's basically a baseline that you have to have. And, yes, you had to be passionate about wanting to get through the day and wake up and have that confidence that you wanted to put yourself through the misery of what we did and you needed to have that perseverance to carry you forward. But I really felt that she was lacking a very fundamental arm of the triangle. You know, passion and perseverance on one side, but while I was there, I was one of the members of the honor staff that we have at the service academies and when I was there, I think there were five of us on it.
Speaker 2:But unfortunately for me my senior year the class underneath us was involved with the largest cheating scandal that had ever looked the Naval Academy. I'm involved cheating on an electrical engineering exam that involved, I would guess, about half the class. So we're talking about 500, 600 people cheated on this exam and through that experience it really got me thinking. You can have all passion and perseverance that you want, but if you're not making the correct choices in your life, it's going to take you in one of two places. It's either going to take you to where those midshipmen who cheated did, which is to a valley of despair and not seeing their goals become achieved because they're not living to their core values, or you can look at the other 500 who made the different choice, who probably had access to the exam and chose that they were going to follow their core value, their aspirations, and they were going to cheat.
Speaker 2:And so to me, that's intentionality, and every single day we are confronted with what I call hard choices and easy choices. So I'll just put as an example maybe you're in college right now, or in graduate school, and you've got a really important project that's coming up that you know you need to do and you keep procrastinating on it. So the easy choice is your friends call you up and say, hey, let's meet at the pub and grab a beer, etc. Or, you know, I just don't feel like doing it tonight. I'm going to watch Netflix. That's the easy choice.
Speaker 2:Your choice is feeling those things hitting you, but making that choice in that moment that, no, I'm not going to do those things. No, I'm going to make that choice to instead spend time, even if it's 20 minutes, working on this, because in doing so it's getting me closer to it. Yet I think most of us live our lives through easy choices, and that's really a difference. Intentional is making choices, day in, day out, that align with your long term aspirations, your immediate goals and, most importantly, your core values 100%.
Speaker 1:This is something clients often ask me in therapy sessions. When I talk about authenticity and moving towards things that you personally care about or passionate about, they often ask what's the correct choice, and it's different for every person because it depends on what you mentioned earlier. Is core value? In order to make the quote unquote correct choice is a choice that has to align with who you are as a person, things that you care about, things that are important, things that have impact on you, and people get lost along the way, which is what I've seen. I've been a victim of this as well, trying to move through my life, or I get distracted by someone else's desires or what they think I should or should not do. It requires such intense focus to stay aligned with your core values and to stay within your passion and this is something you also briefly mentioned in your book. Is this ability, this need to focus, john? How does someone stay focused on their passion when it seemingly everything in the world is trying to push you away from it?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't want to sound like I'm just regurgitating what is common for people to hear now, but it starts and ends with mindfulness. It starts and ends with giving yourself a gift and you really need to look at it that way of self-care, of allotting time every single day to the most important person in your life yourself, to when you stand. What is going on inside your head, and what I mean by that is, you asked me earlier on, why am I so compelled to want to come up with passions? Because you know your podcast is about mental health without the BS. I mean, let's go real with people.
Speaker 2:Even though I achieved some amazing things, I myself was caught in the strap that so many people find themselves in. I had worked my ass off chasing these things that I thought were so important in my life, while I was basically arsoning the most important things in my life in the process and not even realizing along the route that I was doing it. And that's exactly what happened to me is I woke up one day and here I'm at what people would have thought was the apex of my career. I'm a C level and Fortune 50 company making seven figures plus a billion dollar, plus budget all this stuff and inside I feel completely apathetic. I don't even want to get out of bed. I'm like why in the world am I doing what I'm doing, working 100 hour weeks? For what purpose? I am spending so much time making other people's dreams come true, but I am not making my own dreams come true. And it just left me feeling so empty inside and I started to reflect upon what has gone so wrong. And it was I was not giving myself time to deal with the inner voice that was hitting me and the inner voice was telling me to continue this route and I was not giving myself time to deal with the inner voice that was hitting me.
Speaker 2:And there are various ways. You can do it and we can talk about that in your death. But once I started giving myself even 15 to 20 minutes of just me time alone with my own thoughts, you start realizing that this voice is telling you things and you have the choice. You can either continue to allow it to tell you. You can't do that. Your fears are going to stop you, your self-doubt is going to stop you, your imposter syndrome is going to stop you, your comfort patterns are going to stop you, or you can allow this voice to hit you and say I'm not going to listen to you, I'm going to do something different.
Speaker 2:And when you start doing that, that inner voice changes over time. It might not immediately, because it's gotten so accustomed to telling you the same things for so long, but once you just start changing one thing in your life, it's amazing how that one small change ends up changing everything in your life over time. And that is one of the most important messages and I think I have for people is we over-contemplate what it takes to change. We make it seem like we've got to do this tsunami worth of change all at once, and that's never going to work. What I've learned through all my self-work and in helping people is that you have to start with a micro change and then grow from there. But if you start with something too big, you're not going to accomplish it. I hope that answers what you were asking me 100%, 100%.
Speaker 1:Everything coming out of your mouth as far as what you've been through your perspective and where you are now is everything I'm trying to help my clients achieve. Where my clients are is where you were just apathetic, waking up just the daily grind of helping everyone else achieve their goals but really getting nothing personal out of it and realizing that something needs to change, but not always knowing what or how or why or even when. And this is where I find my clients eyes in that apathetic stage of just trying to figure things out. But where you are now in your perspective is what I'm trying to help them understand and learn. It starts with the individual. We get so caught up in everything around us, this rat race of money, control, authority status it's all bullshit In the end of the day, if it doesn't personally serve you as an individual, it's not something that you have a motion towards, it doesn't really matter then, because it's someone else's service that you're fulfilling, it's not your own and it creates a horrible mental health ecosystem inside one's own personal mind. And use the word mindfulness, which I love and I get that everyone's talking about mindfulness, but I think a lot of us don't fully understand what mindfulness really is and this is something you go into very great depth within this book is just self exploration.
Speaker 1:And, when I tell my clients, in order for you to enjoy your life and have meaningful relationships and to do things you're passionate about, you have to know who you are as a person. You literally have to go sit with yourself in an isolated environment a park, a room somewhere, your car and just like who are you. And one thing I love about your book and your overall message is that people who are passion struck, they know themselves. They're not afraid or avoidant of their own company. They engage in it. They thrive off of it. How did you get there? Because a lot of my clients and a lot of people around the world are struggling with sitting with themselves and getting to know themselves. What was that for you?
Speaker 2:I have a friend because I don't want to take credit for this quote because it's Lisa Edmonds' quote. I remember she told it to me a couple of years ago. She's maybe 10 years older than me and Lisa always has these wide sayings. But if you said to me one time, what people don't understand is that you, being yourself, are the greatest person that you will ever know. You are the most incredible person on earth that you will ever meet.
Speaker 2:Yet most of us don't live our lives like that. We live our lives disliking aspects of ourself or not believing that we're the most incredible person on this earth, and I think that's one of the fundamental things that we get wrong. And to start out the book, the first principle I talk about is the mission angler, and it's all about this very fact is, if you go out and you go fishing, you're not going to want to drive your boat 30 miles and waste all that gas not knowing where the fish are. I mean it would be stupid to go out where I live in Tampa Bay, and to keep going into the Gulf searching for fish, not having any plan ahead of where they're going to be and where you need to stop to drop anchor and go fish for them. Yet that's how so many of us live our lives and, on top of that, we live it by comparing ourselves to others something that Benjamin already calls the gap and instead of comparing ourselves to the person we once were, which are the gains that you're going to experience. So this whole concept of life crafting is rooted in behavior science, but it's one of the most fundamental aspects that you need to start with. I mean, people talk about you need to find your purpose, and that's easier said than done. I mean, that takes a long time of self exploration, but there are hints that will put you on the right steps to understanding it, and it's those things that, deep inside of you, excite you.
Speaker 2:It's when you get up out of bed on a weekend. What are you drilling towards? Like, what is it you want to do? Do you want to garden? Do you want to play an instrument? Do you want to write? Do you want to read? Do you want to go exercise?
Speaker 2:I mean, the signals are all there. We just don't listen to them oftentimes. But it's really about thinking about the life that you want, just as if you were going on a fishing expedition and starting to angle your life in search of this unique problem that only you, inherently, were put on earth to solve. Because I firmly believe each one of us was created in a unique way to solve something that we were put here to do. And when you start living your life in concert with that, I think things in your life start going better and better and better. When you continue to live your life and you're going against what your destiny is, I think the universe continues to send you signals and you have mental health issues, you've got self-esteem issues. You have other issues relationship issues that come in their way that tell you you're not on the right path. But it's about listening to those things when they're hitting you and taking that input in and doing something about it.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that that components of listening to the universe. What I teach to my clients from a clinical perspective is our environment, which I defined as anything outside of yourself. Your environment is constantly sending you messages, thousands of not tens of thousands every single day. When you get a message coming from different sources of your environment that are the same, it's what point in time is at your own fault for not listening Me.
Speaker 1:Starting a podcast was a result of me listening to my environment. My wife, who knows me very well there's always been a huge supporter of me told me that the way I talk and how I think it would be good for a podcast and honestly, I originally brushed her off. I appreciated her support and I was like you're crazy. No one wants to hear me talk for hours on end. I already do that as a therapist. And then a client, randomly on his own, told me I should start a podcast and that's when it hit me. I had two different sources out of my environment delivering the exact same message. So I started pitching this idea to various people in my environment and not one person disagreed with that pitch and I was honestly scared.
Speaker 1:This whole podcasting thing for me was very vulnerable and real. But I wanted to do something with my podcast that a lot of therapists don't do and can't do, which is just be our normal selves, not be so clinical, so guarded, be authentic. And right now I could be more thankful for the journey I've been on, because it led me to you to talk about passion struck, and for to hear everything I teach my clients and help my clients would come out of someone else's mouth. To me, this is phenomenal. Everything you say is literally everything. I'm trying to get my clients to focus on themselves, their passion, their authenticity, to just go forth, even with the fear of the unknown, and give yourself a chance, because if I didn't give myself a chance to start a podcast, I never would have met you or read your book or learned about your podcast. And through you I'm also learning a lot more about myself, which is amazing. You mentioned this term, which has also come up in the book, which is a mission angler. What is the definition of that?
Speaker 2:Well, to me it's, it's that whole concept I was just referring to where is? I was trying to come up with a way for people to remember these different chapters that they each started having different names and then, as I reviewed them, I'm like people are going to remember this and I didn't write this People to just read it and put it down. I wanted it to be something that people lived, and so I came up with catchy names like the mission angler. The fear confront her, where the mosquito auditors, the anxiety optimizer, have quick, catchy terms that people could resonate with. And so the mission angler concept. Because I like to fish. I live here in Tampa Bay and I just know when I'm out there trying to look for the best spots, I spend a lot of time researching what kind of fish do I want to hunt for and where are they gonna be? And I got me thinking that that's how we should approach our lives is.
Speaker 2:I was recently talking to my son and you know he doesn't like what he's doing right now and he's on, he's twenty five and he's on this path of self discovery, and I just started asking what gets you out of bed in the morning, like what Is that thing that makes you want to live your life and for him it's music and music production. Then I started to ask him what research you doing on it. Have you reached out to any people in the industry who Are you do music production? Have you looked at courses that you can take to expand it? I mean a lot of it you can do on your own Time and with your own talents. But he wasn't taking those additional steps and I hope he is now. I don't know if he is, but I think so many of us do that like.
Speaker 2:We have this aspiration that we want to achieve, yet we don't put the work behind it to understand what are the next steps. Like chasing fish. Like, if I want to become a music Producer, then what are the steps I need to do to get there? How much money am I gonna make if I get here? What's the most person's gonna make? And if they are that person at the top of their field just like being a podcaster, anything else what does it take to get there?
Speaker 2:I? What specific talents that did they have? What schooling did they have? You not need any of it all.
Speaker 2:What's the career path you gotta go through and that's all what life crafting is is about. It's if you Even figure out that I want to be an astronaut, okay, so you're gonna have sixteen thousand people apply and eight people get selected. So if you want to be one of those eight, what's the first thing you're gonna do? I'm gonna smoke examining the last two or three classes of a astronauts and understanding what are the basic components that you find that they all have, because you're gonna find a foundation and from there I'm gonna look for things that NASA is probably gonna need in the future that make me unique over the crowd, that I can cultivate, that are gonna give me a chance to catch my dream or, being a mission angler, catch the most fish. So that's what that whole chapters is really about, and I talk about two people in it, as I try to do in each chapter. One is jim calvi, who's the founder of square, and the other is gary v, who probably a lot of your audience knows.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all of your chapters in the titles are very interesting to me and they are catchy. One thing I remember was the. I think one of the most impactful for me was the mosquito auditor. This is something that I see a lot of my clients struggle with. What is mosquito auditor and why is this so important to being passion struck?
Speaker 2:So let's just go through the first three steps. So we talked about being a mission angler, so crafting this life that you want, this problem that only you can solve. After that, the next chapter I go into is is becoming a brand reinventer. And I did this on purpose, because oftentimes, unless you're coming out of school, and even then you might not have an identity established. But a lot of us, like myself, I, I was known, my identity was a fortune 50s chief of information officer that's how people knew me, and I was a father and everything else. But professionally that's how I was known I didn't really have a brand as being a self improvement person or someone focused on personal master of behavior science. So I'll just use my example.
Speaker 2:Once I figured that what I was really meant to do was to teach people how to create an intentional life. I needed to reinvent various aspects of my life in order and that goes beyond just my social persona, my brand that I'm putting out the world. It meant that I need to turn, reinvent aspects of myself. So I was showing up differently In life, because if, if you don't, people are going to believe anything, you have to say Exactly. You know what I mean, and so, once you start going down that step, the first thing that's going to hit you as you're trying to change your identity Are these in the visible influences that are around you, and these are the people that are in your inner circle, and there are the activities that you've gotten accustomed to doing. So, being a mosquito auditors, really auditing out these invisible influences so that you can recognize what they and then do something about it. And I tried to make this a fun topic because you know, I think everyone is heard. You know you are the five, the sum of the five people who are closest to you, and you're in a circle, but people don't do anything about it. So I thought let's just make this into a metaphor and I I got.
Speaker 2:This is when I write my chapters, I like to kind of think about what I want to talk about, and then I put myself in a place of mindfulness. So I happen to be walking with my dog and I happen to start thinking about how to approach this and start thinking about the invisible influence aspect of it. And then, after about 20 minutes, I turned on A podcaster radio show in the and the announcer was talking about what is the most dangerous planet or most dangerous animal on planet. And the responses were coming in and they're exactly what I would have thought of the great white shark or the jellyfish in australia or this poisonous snake or this poisonous spider. And that wasn't it at all.
Speaker 2:It was this tiny little mosquito which kills A million to two million people per year, and it just got me thinking. Just like mosquitoes of these pesky things that we just Are in our periphery, we don't really notice them until they bite us. The same thing Comes with the human mosquitoes in our lives. There are family members, friends, peers, subordinates I mean whatever you you want to say in your life, but they are existing around you all the time, and so many of them you've already let into your inner circle that you don't even realize the invisible influence of the having on you. And so I ended up coming up with three catchy ways that you can identify and there's more mosquitoes than this, but three identified the blood suckers, who are the people who absolutely just want to destroy every single boundary that you have and they want to suck every bit of blood that they can out of you.
Speaker 2:There's the invisible suffocators, which are the pessimists in your life. Is glass half full people who, like james in your case, I want to become a therapist. Well, do you know all the repercussions that come with becoming a therapist and how much work you're going to do and how it is the beginning Of your tenure there and finding clients and getting enough hours so that you can get license? I mean, there are those type of people who come up with all these barriers why you shouldn't pursue your dreams. And then the last one is the pain in the asses, or the abbreviation is the pitas. And they are the people who, in a great example, is I have a friend who I mean I love her, but she never stops talking long enough for you to give her any advice or for her to hear anything about you that really matters. And that's just an example.
Speaker 2:But we all can identify those three things in our lives. But the importance is, once you get there their metaphorical pictures in your mind, then the exercise you need to start doing is start putting out your friend group, your family group, on target like you would be shooting a bow and a low at and start putting them in each one of those concentric circles and then figure out are any of these mosquitoes? And if so, then what's your plan to deal with them? And because I guarantee you they're gonna be more than you think in your way. And then the other side of this is then you need to become which is another chapter in my book Boundary magnifier and to start really enforcing the boundaries that you have that are gonna establish the behaviors that you want to set for yourself. And if these people are not adhering to those boundaries, then you either need to reinforce your boundaries or you need to get them off your boat, so to speak.
Speaker 1:I talk about boundaries with my clients almost every single day. I go into the office and have sessions. Boundaries are so important for so many different assets of life and what I tell my clients is boundaries is how you protect your mental health, is what gives you the space to get your needs and wants fulfilled. You know, within yourself or within your environment, and I love that you bring that up, and I myself have been caught up with mosquitoes. When I first started my private practice, I was trying to come up with a lot of marketing ideas to promote myself and Bring in clients and get myself out there. One idea I had Was to market specifically to women so that way they could send their husbands to me for therapy. And a lot of people told me no and gave me a lot of barriers and boundaries and a lot of toxic behavior, and so I never went with it, and this was almost three years ago.
Speaker 1:Is since that idea, every male client I have in my private practice has either come from their spouse or come from a family therapist. Very few of the men find me themselves. They don't look, but people in their environment look, and in reading your book I realize I've become apathetic with my marketing. So my business has begun to stagnate. I'm going through the motions of just whatever marketing I am doing and I don't really care for it. And I realize the whole reason why I never really went with that idea was because someone in my environment just shot me down Repeatedly.
Speaker 1:And now I'm wondering that is the one marketing idea I actually never went with. I never actually fully followed through with it, and yet I don't have a single male client who found me himself. Someone in his environment has found me on their behalf and they've benefited from my Experience with them and I've benefited from it not only as a professional, but as I built a relationship with my clients. I also grow as a human. How does someone, from your perspective, someone who's passion struck? Is it really linear, or is it possible to reach a certain point and then get derailed and start back at square one?
Speaker 2:So it's absolutely the lack, and in one of the chapters of the book I introduced something called passion struck continuum, and it was one of the last chapters actually added to the book. And as I was thinking about this and people on this journey, I wanted to give them a way to understand their starting point, and so I created something called the passion struck quiz, and it allows you to answer 20 questions, and it was a very interesting question Allows you to answer 20 questions and it will tell you which one of the phases becoming passion struck are you at, and there are five of them.
Speaker 2:It starts with something I call a subsistler and then it goes to an imitator, a vanquisher and orchestrator, and then a creative amplifying, and in this chapter I outline kind of the characteristics of each one. But in the quiz it will tell you which one you're at, what that means and then what you need to do to get to the next stage. But what I have found is that oftentimes we are making strides and our lives and let's say You've hit the stage where you're A vanquisher and you're in control of, you've got this career, that's, that's going extremely well, you're in control of of that, you're in control of your emotions.
Speaker 2:But then you know, little trauma comes into your life, or it could be big trauma. Maybe you have a death of a loved one, or you have a major setback and you recoil from it and your confidence is blown and it takes you Back a couple steps. That is common in life, and so the thing about Hope idea of becoming passion struck is not, it's just becoming. It's how do you continually strive to be passion struck? And so I look at it that there are going to be times in your life when, even if at one point you were living this life, that you might have to pivot, re-invent yourself again, go through the steps again, do them again and then get yourself back and track. So they're absolutely Are our times in your life when you might be backtracking.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I've seen this many times personally and professionally. What I like about that message is that passion is a process. It's not really an end goal, it's just, it's a lifestyle decision that you engage in daily and you talk about. That in the book is daily engagement, the process of being passion struck, saying focus you, mosquito, auditor, mission angler, all of these really fun terms that you have. At what point in time, with someone passionate, can they become apathetic? Is that part of the process as well is to just find a passion, go for it and then you fulfill it, and then can you then become apathetic and then have to start over in a different direction.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think what I ended up doing in life was similar to that. I mean, for a long time I felt extremely passionate about the work that I was doing and felt that the mentors that I was doing, the people who worked with me and the jobs I were doing were culminating in something that was meaningful. And then I reached a stage where I'd lost them and I lost that vibrance in my life and I went from myself, at one point, being passionate about what I was doing to apathetic. And I guess what I realized is I went on my own journey is being apathetic is a choice, being passion struck is a choice, and it all comes down to the fifty thousand to sixty thousand thoughts that emerge in our minds every single day. And it's how do you approach those? Are you going to do it by looking out the windshield or are you going to look? Do it by looking in the rear view mirror? And I found that those times when I felt apathetic, I was taking the latter approach and I was allowing that inner voice that I was talking about earlier Talk me into repeating the same patterns over and over again, because I subconsciously was faring the changes at that point in my life that I needed To make, and I think this met metaphor of looking through life's windshield rather than through the rear view mirror is an important one because it symbolizes Forward focus.
Speaker 2:Living and that's really what passion struck is all about is having this life craft and Forward vision of what we want to achieve.
Speaker 2:And there are times that you can achieve that very Hill that you've wanted to climb and once you get there, you find out it's not yet Not exactly what you expected, and at that point you again have a choice.
Speaker 2:You can allow yourself to be stuck there or you can go back through the self discovery process and figure out where's that next, tell that you're supposed to climb, because I I think, especially in this world, that Millennial generation, especially Gen Z now, are coming up. And If you don't think you're going to have to reinvent yourself, if you don't think that You're going to find yourself feeling apathetic as more and more jobs get displaced, you're for a root awakening, because I believe right now, if you want to get ahead of this curve and stop being the mass that's getting in these portfolio jobs that I talked about, where you are going to be replaceable, and start figuring out how to constantly reinvent yourself through constant learning so that you understand the patterns that are coming up and you pre position yourself. Safety by Figuring out where the market is going and positioning yourself ahead of it.
Speaker 1:That is amazing, by absolutely love that it's. It's just so accurate. So what's going on in people's mental health from my perspective is someone in the community is there's this lack of reinventing oneself, lack of self discovery and this kind of expectation that, once they've landed that job or that thing, that they'll just kind of coast and hang out there. I have fallen trapped to this as well. I thought when I started my private practice It'd be six months of Marketing grind and then I'd have a caseload and I would just hang out. And it's been three years and I've I've realized it doesn't stop.
Speaker 1:The way I market myself when I started no longer works the. The culture has changed, the markets changed. I need to change and I myself have become apathetic towards my own marketing and I've also become fearful, which is something we haven't talked too much about. Oftentimes, when I see clients in there in that apathetic phase, they are wanting to find their passion, have a willingness to do it, and I help them find it. They discover their passion and then all of a sudden they just slam on the e-brake. Everything starts moving and it's just sheer terror. John, why is engaging in our passions so terrifying at times?
Speaker 2:Well, because Oftentimes it's leading us to have to take a journey that we've never Taken before. We're having to take a leap into the unknown, we're having to follow a path that is not the linear path that we see in society, that's going to be Different for us, and so that sets up a whole bunch of Internal mental road blocks For what we think we can accomplish. And I'll tell you an extreme Version of this side just interviewed Harry Buddha mat, and he is Originally from Nepal. I mean, this guy story is incredible. He was born in a remote village in Nepal. You think about the weather conditions there and how much it snows and everything. He had to walk 45 minutes each way, barefoot, over rocks and mountain terrain to get to and from school. And then he was faced with a choice when he was 11 years old, of Either having to go to work in the fields for the rest of his life or he could go into an arranged marriage which would allow him to continue with school. So again gets married at 11, is the first person in his family ever to graduate from high school and then ends up putting his name in the hat to become a Gherka, which is the Nepal, the famous Nepal army that has been fighting alongside the British for 200 years. It's just hard to become one of them, as it is an astronaut. Like 20,000 people apply, 20 of them, 200 of them get picked a year.
Speaker 2:Well, he had been in this profession for 15 years. He's in Afghanistan on a routine patrol and he steps in an IED and in the matter of a blink of his eye he's lost both his legs, severe injuries to the rest of his body and he had the bleakest of outlook she could possibly have. He wakes up from all of this and, as a you can imagine yourself, he describes it to me as he wakes up and there's this sheet draped over his legs and he remembered when the incident happened that he knew one of his legs was gone, but he still saw his other leg, even though it was bent and turned around, that he still thought he was going to have one leg to live the rest of his life. And he looks down and he can tell, by the way that the sheet is, that he likely doesn't have a leg there, but he doesn't want to peek underneath the cover.
Speaker 2:I tell this as an extreme example because so many of us as we're going on this new path to life are faced in that same situation. We see this life ahead of us but, like Harry, we're afraid to look at the ramifications that we might have to cross in order to get to where we want to be, because fear confronts us and for him, as life stopped for four or five years he allowed himself to be contained by alcoholism and that is how he spent every waking moment, because of all the self-doubt and fear and shame and everything else that was facing him, and it took him looking into his son's eye one day just saying is this the legacy I want to leave? Live and long story short is he now is free from his substance abuse and earlier this year he climbed Everest and now is on the path to being the first person who has amputees above their knees to climb the seven summits, the tall seven summits of the world. I put this all in front of you is each of us has our own Harry moment.
Speaker 2:His is a much more extreme example of this, but if someone like him can overcome these demons, my message is any of us can overcome these demons, but it takes with being intentional about what steps you want to take to overcome your own addictions, whatever they may be. It could be porn, it could be career, it could be alcohol, it could be drugs, it could be something else, it could be your serial data. You can't. You have the addiction of not being able to get out of your own way. I don't know what it is, but until you face whatever these things are that are keeping you from becoming who you want to be, you're going to continue to stay where you want to.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful story, so inspiring, and I love that you have these such deep and tactful conversations with people, not only personally but also on your podcast, and that you've taken all these experiences and put it down pen and paper and in a book that I think is going to help so many people on such a deep level regarding mental health and self care and passion, and to just understand that this is a process that continues and you always have an option to engage in being passionate or not. And one of the things I want to know from your perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges of someone who currently is passion struck?
Speaker 2:A person who has reached the state of being passion struck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because once you're there, everyone assumes that you know. Once I'm passionate, life is easy. I could just engage my passion every day and it'll be great, but that's just not always the reality. Passion will make things better, but that doesn't mean that being passionate comes without hurdles and challenges. What does it take to stay passionate? What are the things getting away from your own personal experience and the experiences of people you've met? What is the actual challenge of being passion struck?
Speaker 2:I mean, let's take a couple of good examples. Let's look at Michael Jordan. He's someone who I think anyone would say at the height of his career he was passion struck. And yet, at height of his career, he's a great symbol of someone who, after he had won the first three championships back to back to back, was not satisfied. You know, had this calling that he was done with basketball and so he had always wanted to pursue his love of being a baseball player. And so he, when most of us would have thought never in a million years would you pivot, at this point he ends up pivoting. I mean, some people may say it was a stupidest mistake he ever made, but from all the research I've done, had they not had the baseball strike at that time, he had the skill set even to cross one discipline to another and would have been a professional baseball player. And what allowed him to do it was that self discipline.
Speaker 2:That I don't know if for people who don't remember the story, he he starts playing AAA ball and his first like 20 games he's almost in like percent. I mean he is just rocking it, but then they figure out he's got a weak weakness. I can't remember if it was the curve ball or the knuckleball, but once that's discovered, that's all they're throwing at him. He's striking out left and right. He can't buy a hit, but what does he do? Does he sit there and doubt his capabilities? Does he sit there and have self pitting on himself? No, if you talk to the people who were around him, he did the same thing he did to become the basketball player that he was. He starts intentionally spending more time than anyone else at the baseball facility. He gets there before everyone, he's there longer than anyone and he spends hours per day constantly getting this pitch thrown at him and he swings and misses dozens of times until he starts hitting it. And then, once he learns to hit it, his baseball career starts exploding again. And then, when he doesn't have the opportunity to play professionally, he goes back in and ends up winning three more championships. And then, even after that, he's now carved out, through constant reinvention, different aspects of his life where he doubled down on buying sports teams and doing other aspects, whether it was charity work or other components. But the point is he's never stopping. He's always striving to continue to get better, to be better.
Speaker 2:You can look at Bill Gates as another example of. Look at what he did during his time at Microsoft and he could be sitting on an island right now doing nothing, but he created this whole philanthropic arm where he's now doing things that he thinks give back to humanity. I mean, richard Branson is another great example where, I mean he's been a billionaire for many years but a lot of people don't understand that, in addition to the Virgin companies, he's got all these philanthropic endeavors. So, in case people have never heard of these things, he created and co-created an organization called the B Team, where they have these CEOs from these major corporations my friend, mark Benioff is one of them but what they were trying to do is to get corporations to change their metrics from being completely focused on online top line to being focused on how do we make an impact, how do we create solutions that make the world better? He created the elders, which are a group of individuals. He did this with Peter Gabriel and they created this group of elders who consisted of never Nelson Mandela, jimmy Carter, the former female president of Ireland and a bunch of others where they were looking at how do we, as elders, give back to humanity by trying to solve some of the biggest issues we have, and these are a lot of things that most people don't know about Richard Branson.
Speaker 2:But my point here is they don't stop. They just look for other things in their life that extend their passion, their journey. I mean, david Rubenstein is another great example. He created probably the most successful private equity group on earth, but now he is spending his life dedicating it so that people understand the importance of history. So he's preserving critical documents like the Declaration of Independence and famous things from the African American community, because he wants to preserve why this country was created and what made it so important. So my point is they don't stop. They're constantly pushing themselves forward to where they find the next interests or passions in their life and they continue to implement the same things to get them to that next phase, where they want to go.
Speaker 1:I love your book. I love your podcast. I love every message you've given all of our listeners here. I know we're running out of time. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me, and I mean, my biggest hope is that I serve your audience, because I don't do this for my own sake. I do this because I'm trying to help the people on the other end of this podcast live a better life, because I honestly and so hopefully don't want you to be the 95% who doesn't live the dream that you aspire to live. I want you to be part of the 5% who 10X is their life, because the world is such a better place if we're all living it in 10X than if we're 3Xing or 4Xing ourselves. The best places to reach me are passionstruckcom. If you're interested in pre-ordering the book, you can do that. Anywhere you would purchase a book, but if you come to passionstruckcom forward, slash passionstruck book right now, during the pre-order phase.
Speaker 2:I have curated about $300 worth of things for my community that I think would be of importance to them. One is the masterclass that I did on finding your purpose. Another is an e-book on how you use a critical thing that I bring up in my book, which is the deliberate action process. I introduced it in the book. This is a 60 page document that I've been using for 20, 25 years of my life that has allowed me to 10X everything I've been part of. I'm giving this to you for free. I'm also giving you a guide to how do you 10X your intrinsic motivation. I tried to come up with things that I thought people could use in their own life to top end their life. Plus, you'll get an early access to chapter one of the book.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. When does that book come out?
Speaker 2:It launches February 6th.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. I'm so excited for the entire planet to just pick up this book and become more passionate and just improve themselves. Be happy 10X everything, and to find their passion and continue to find it, one after another after another. This is something that I strive for with all of my clients is just be happy, do the things you need. Do the things you want. Focus on the things that are important and valuable and that have impact on the people you care about and the things that you personally give a shit about. This is what life is. It's either you engage in things that are meaningful or you don't. We're all going to clock out one day.
Speaker 1:What did you do with the time that you had here Passion truck? I think is a great way to understand this entire process. It's definitely something I'm going to read over and over. I personally gained from it. I'm currently in my passion, and there's pieces of my passion that I've become apathetic towards. This book reminded me of how I got here in the first place. I currently need to reinvent parts of my business and parts of who we are as a therapist. This book was so helpful. John, do you have any final messages for any of the listeners?
Speaker 2:My biggest message would be give yourself permission to dream your dream, once you do create the impactions every day that get you closer to it. I just had coffee earlier this morning with a friend of mine who is now on the city council in Tampa Bay, but he was running against an incumbent and a person who was being paid by the previous mayor to run against him. He said I just kept manifesting that I kept seeing myself when I was accepting that, this recognition that I had become the city council member. He said I had no idea whether I could do it or not, but I put the actions in place to realize my dream. He overcame all the odds and is now a city council member. He's just a regular person, just like any other rest of us. Allow yourself to dream your dream.
Speaker 1:That is a beautiful, beautiful statement. I will definitely speak well of you to all my clients. I'm going to make sure each one of them gets a personal link to your book. I'm going to have this podcast up very quickly because this needs to come out. People need to hear this, find out that you exist. I'm so excited and I plan to follow your podcast and listen to more impactful conversations. I'll find them to be so inspiring. John, thank you so much for being here. This has been an absolute honor. I look forward to the success of Passionstruck the book and as well as Passionstruck the podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the honor was definitely mine. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Of course, through all you listeners out here. Thank you, We'll now catch you next time.