Career Reset Guide
Welcome to Career Reset Guide, the podcast for self-directed individuals ready to embrace transformative career change and discover their full potential.
I’m Michael Davio Simmonds, your host and a career development coach with 20 years of technical and business experience in the corporate world. After my own life-changing journey to build a coaching business, I now empower managers and executives worldwide to redefine their careers to also achieve greater fulfillment.
You see, the world needs more people like you to lead with authenticity, vision, and purpose. And yet, changing careers can feel overwhelming. That’s why this podcast exists to challenge conventional thinking, provide clarity, and safely guide you toward a purpose-led life.
This is your space to reset, recalibrate and develop your confidence to move forward. So tune in, and let’s take this journey together.
Career Reset Guide
Reclaim Your Inherent Power by Going Within
What if your greatest challenge became the doorway to your authentic purpose? In this moving conversation with clairvoyant reader Dave Clark, we explore the liberating journey from limitation to freedom that awaits anyone brave enough to look within.
Dave shares his extraordinary path from a childhood marked by family addiction and polarized extremes to becoming a sought-after spiritual guide—a transformation catalyzed by caring for his severely disabled daughter and the profound spiritual awakening he experienced when she passed away at age eleven. With raw honesty, Dave reveals how witnessing his daughter's transition to the other side fundamentally altered his perception of reality and ultimately led him to discover his gift for clairvoyant healing.
At the heart of our discussion lies a powerful truth for career changers: the programming that limits us operates largely outside our awareness. Dave explains how these unconscious beliefs—often formed before we have conscious memories—create internal resistance that prevents authentic work and fulfillment. Whether you're contemplating a major career shift or simply seeking greater alignment, Dave's insights illuminate why the transition between external validation and internal purpose often feels chaotic yet leads to profound clarity.
The practical wisdom Dave offers transcends the spiritual realm. His approach to creating bridges between current reality and future vision, developing authentic "vision boards," and recognizing how our natural talents connect to purpose provides a roadmap for anyone navigating significant life changes. Perhaps most compelling is his perspective on how facing our fears—especially around survival and worthiness—ultimately frees us to create work that reflects our true nature.
This conversation will resonate with anyone who senses there's more to life and work than meeting external expectations. As Dave reminds us, "We have to start looking within," for it's only by reclaiming our inherent power that we discover what we're truly here to contribute.
Welcome to Career Reset Guide, the podcast for self-directed individuals ready to embrace transformative career change and discover their full potential. I'm Michael Daviau-Simmons, your host, and a career development coach with 20 years of technical and business experience in the corporate world. After my own life-changing journey of building a coaching business, I now empower managers and executives worldwide to redefine their careers to also achieve greater fulfillment. You see, the world needs more people like you to lead with authenticity, vision and purpose. And yet changing careers can feel overwhelming. That's why this podcast exists to challenge conventional thinking, provide clarity and safely guide you towards a purpose-led life. This is your space to reset, recalibrate and develop your confidence to move forward. So tune in and let's take this journey together. So to this podcast. Today. I would like to welcome Dave Clark. Dave, how are you? I'm doing?
Dave:Well, thank you, thank you for having me.
Dave:I appreciate it.
Michael:Yeah, it's really great to have you join us today, Dave.
Michael:I'm smiling because it's a different way for us to meet the normal, because in our previous meetings you've been supporting me with what it is that you do and we'll get into that in a moment and, at least from my perspective, you're a voice. You're a voice that's revealing information about me. There's no video when we're together online usually, so I'm looking forward to getting to know more, I think, the person behind that voice and, as I was saying in the brief discussion that we had before the podcast, there's a specific side of your profile which I'm very much interested in, and that is that you work in a rather esoteric space, and I think that that could be interesting to hear about for those listeners that either also have skills that lend themselves to the esoteric world, or those people that perhaps have a tendency to downplay the importance of their skills because they don't conform to societal norms. In other words, if we're not performing open heart surgery or defending a high profile legal case, they're less important. And yet I think the last time that I checked your schedule, you were booked more than three months out, so I doubt that your clients would agree with that perspective.
Michael:How about if we start there? Can you explain to us, Dave, a little bit about what it is that you do today?
Dave:Yeah, sure, absolutely. Thank you again for having me. And so I would describe myself as a clairvoyant reader, healer and teacher. So I give clairvoyant readings, meaning I help people look within themselves to see what's going on in a certain area of their life and then by doing that I help provide a healing of sorts to let go of any limits that may be affecting them in that area. And then, teaching wise, I teach classes in clairvoyant development the same way that I was taught.
Dave:I didn't grow up this way, I'm a trained clairvoyant. So I had a daughter who was severely disabled, who didn't walk or talk her whole life, and she passed away when she was 11. And that got me onto this path, and prior to that I would say I was very off path. But spirit has ways of guiding you on path, whether you like it or not. So here I am. So basically that's what I do is I help people in certain areas of their life, whatever it may be whether it's family, it could be relationships, career and I look at the energy and look at the programming that's limiting them in that area of their life and then, by doing that, they get their energy out of the programming and it's freed up for them to make a new decision in that area, to make that next step or that change in one's life. So I don't tell people what to do, or I don't offer advice or predict the future, because it wouldn't help them anyway if they don't let go of the limit that's driving them to make this current decision that they may not like or they may want to change. So that's the way that I approach clairvoyant reading. It's healing and helping people return to wholeness, which means becoming more aware of themselves as spirit and their abilities as the soul that they are that they may have temporarily forgotten about, but it's still all there. A society we end up getting majorly programmed from our childhood and we have to deprogram it. We have this programming through our families and schools and societies that's telling us yep, this is what you need to be. We end up losing sight of our real purpose and our real power that's within us that we have access to. All the time becomes layered over with limits. So the training that I've done is just a process of peeling away the layers of that programming that say I need to be this Like.
Dave:When I was growing up, what my mom and dad could have of me was sports. So I took my creative energy and I was very good at sports. But when I got to college I realized I was much more creative than that and I ended up becoming a professional dancer modern contemporary ballet style of dancing and I realized I was much more of an artist, much more into dance and movement and performance and music and things like that. That prior to that I never had any idea that I would have had any ability in it whatsoever, because all I had permission to do in my family was to play sports and I was good at it. That's how I got praised. Otherwise I was getting paddled or lots of different things. So all that programming early on led to me think, oh, I'm an athlete and yeah, I was an athlete, but I'm also way more than that.
Michael:So just to pause here for a moment, Dave, because there's a lot of information that you've already shared there and I do very much want to get to the situation with your daughter, because I think it's quite amazing what you've been through there but just to start to set the foundations of this. So you come from a background where it sounds like there were certain challenges for you at a very early age.
Dave:How did that affect your starting point in life? My mom had me when she was 18. So my mom and my dad were 18 and 19 when I was born. So they were very young and struggling in survival just to make ends meet. I remember having to have powdered milk and then one time my mom made us think it was milk by putting water in flour and it was, Oh, it was terrible.
Michael:hat was a good trick.
Dave:Yeah, it didn't work. I was like I can't drink it. It was so bad. So I didn't realize this at the time, but looking back, a lot of survival, and so I got programmed very early on - you got to work hard and to really sacrifice yourself. My mom was all about doing things for everyone else.
Dave:I grew up in a family that was very polarized. So on one side my dad's family is born again Christian, which is a very strict religious side. So they were "if you don't believe in God, you're going to go to hell. Strict religious side, so they were. If you don't believe in God, you're going to go to hell. So it was this kind of perfectionism and having to be this perfect kid and that lasted to around sixth grade, middle school, and then we moved completely out of that and it was more along the lines of my mom's family. She came from a family of 11. My uncle had killed himself heroin overdose. They were all alcoholics, drug addicts and partied.
Dave:If you weren't partying and having fun, you were ostracized. Because I remember I was always very smart in school and I got good grades, but they would just tortured me about it. It just wasn't part of their program and so I remember very early on thinking, okay, I knew that my dad's side of the family, that wasn't the path to God or to enlightenment or source or whatever. I made the incorrect decision that well, I'm just going to go to the other side and become more hedonistic. So I just partied right with them. You'd think the family's great. Oh, my aunts and uncles, they're partying, having fun. Ooh, that's fantastic. I didn't realize it until I was 27 that not every family did that, because you end up attracting friends that have families that are similar to that. All the friends in college that I had had families that drank, had families that would do that kind of thing, so I just thought it was normal. Luckily I had basketball and sports to keep me out of a lot of the much more serious drugs.
Dave:I definitely drank and did do some drugs throughout my life, but I never got caught up in heroin and cocaine like my brothers did. And my youngest brother was a heroin addict and he died about five years ago of a heroin overdose. And then my other brother has struggled with addiction his whole life and has just recently, within the past year and a half, become sober. So addiction has plagued our family and I'm actually the only one that's gotten out for the most part, which is very unusual, but I always in my mind knew it wasn't right. I don't know why, but I also couldn't change. It was very difficult until my daughter was born and then, when my daughter was born, I stopped drinking completely within a year and became a stay-at-home dad and pretty much raised her with my wife because she couldn't walk or talk her whole life, and I found I had much more time to like, play music, play the guitar, lots of much more creative things than putting it towards drinking and party have fun type of thing.
Michael:It sounds as if you, relative to some other members of the family, were born a little bit different. You were born a little bit against the grain.
Dave:Yeah, my uncle calls me the white sheep. I'm glad I'm the white sheep, because I wouldn't want to be part of the family black sheep. Their behavior, it just leads to a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, a lot of depression, a lot of mental health challenges. But yeah, the one thing that I, when I look back on it, that was different is I wanted to play professional basketball and I've always had this ability to practice and I enjoy practice as much as the games. Even when I became a professional dancer, down the line I enjoyed ballet class, I enjoyed modern contemporary class and rehearsal just as much as I enjoyed performing.
Dave:In my mind there was no difference. So I would spend five, six hours a day practicing basketball and that kind of devotion helped keep me out of the bigger trouble, because without it there's just no way I would have survived. I easily would have become a heroin addict, there's just no question. But because I had this in my mind, I've discovered that devotional ability put my energy towards something. So even once my daughter was born and we were trying to find a variety of therapies to help her to be able to walk and talk, I devoted myself to that. And so I would spend four to six hours a day doing manual therapies to try and get her to speak a little bit better, be able to eat even.
Dave:A couple of years before she passed away, . I found this clairvoyant training program and it was taught by a woman who was a medical doctor and I thought, man, if she went through med school and believes enough in this to it teach, I got to give it a try. Maybe it'll help me communicate with my daughter. And the minute I started that class I knew that it was less about my daughter, more about my own spiritual growth. And then I put the same devotion that I had put into all the other stuff. I just put it right into that and I've been studying clairvoyant development truly as a path of enlightenment or self-realization and healing and wholeness for 14 years now. Early on, I took between 30 and 50 classes a year in terms of training. So I was very devoted and then I started to discover more of who I really was. And that's the key that I've discovered for life is we have to start looking within.
Michael:I'm just going to pause you there because I want to make sure that we give some space and alot of respect to what you've had to live through with your daughter. And I think that situation for at least some of us is almost an unimaginable situation of having a child that not only passes away so early, but also requires a lot of special attention.
Dave:Yeah
Michael:And I think it takes a certain greatness in a person to be able to go through not just one of those two, but both of those. I'm wondering what has allowed you to come to terms with what happened and to still be a healthy, contributing member of society, because for some people, the risk is that it would crush them.
Dave:Well, life definitely wasn't easy. She had meconium aspirated, which is inhaling her stool, and the resuscitation wasn't done so she went without oxygen in her brain for a very long time. She spent about 120 days or more in a hospital throughout her 11 years. We had to feed her, toilet her and I was always the muscle, so to speak, so I was always the one to be able to get her involved in things and take her hiking and do a lot of different stuff. At the time, I remember after Ella was born, our neighbors thought it's a tragedy and that just never resonated with me. I just couldn't understand how the birth of any child could be a tragedy. But what they were looking at was how Ella wasn't going to be like everybody else. They were looking at the loss of the expectations of what Ella may have become had she not been born severely disabled from a birth injury.
Dave:When she died I was holding her in my arms and I had a pretty miraculous experience of being transported with her to the other side and it was is just unbelievable because I saw the veil go down and I saw Ella step out of her body and go to the other side and she was greeted by three light beings. They were just balls of light and it was so miraculous and timeless and celebratory. It was the closest that I could say I've ever been to or experienced what people might say God. It was just unbelievable. It was totally no separation.
Dave:For the next four and a half years I could barely engage socially with anybody. I still continued my spiritual practice, I still continued studying clairvoyant training. But to be social, to go out social, I just I couldn't do it. I was in so much pain. And part of that pain, I knew Ella was fine because I saw her go to the other side so I knew she is in a great place. But you know, those that are left here in the body, it's a different story. And I had to deprogram my identity. I had identified myself and my worth and my value as Ella's dad. And yeah, I was Ella's dad. I did a good job at it. But I'm also more than that that. So we end up limiting ourselves, either doing it to ourselves or through our programming when When we're kids and the society that we grew up in or the family that we grew up ., We we end up taking on these limits and not even aware that we're doing that. So it took me about four and a half years and a lot of tears, especially for the first year.
Dave:t's was very tough but luckily I had my spiritual practice that saved me. I didn't go back to drinking, I didn't go back to doing any drugs, I didn't do any of that stuff. I just kept going forward. And I had to look within to let go, be able to recognize I had limited myself and I wasn't aware of it. I was unconscious, and that's the part that's most challenging is that the things that limits us a lot of times we're just not aware of, and so we have to start looking within to become aware. And that's how I started to discover the bigger context or broader picture of Ella's life and death. And I didn't fall into the trap of, well I did for a while, but I was able to get myself out of "oh, she's gone, cause that's just not true. Physically her body is gone, but what I discovered afterwards is that in spirit she's there all the time and I can communicate to her anytime I want.
Dave:I had to be willing to do the inner work to discover that next level of relative reality.
Michael:And I think this is exactly why I wanted to spend a little bit of time on this topic with you. I wasn't sure exactly what you were going to answer on that question, but I think this has a lot of relevance again to career transition, because in going through important career transitions, we inevitably come up against certain limitations, certain ideas about ourselves, certain beliefs about ourselves and the world that we live in which, although they're not true, most of those beliefs we nevertheless tend to buy into them. And it's not even clear what we're buying into a lot of the time, because it's just part of an ingrained way of being, I think, in the world. And yet I think what you're communicating is that, once you start to go inside yourself and develop what you refer to as a spiritual practice, that we can start to become aware of these limitations that we're holding ourself to and to even work through those as well.
Dave:Absolutely. And every career transition, or even relationship transition, it's a death. It's a mini death because you're letting go of this old to look at stepping into this new. And that letting go of is kind of a mini death, the mini grief which can be major, right, for some people. It's not mini, it can be very big, a transition out of a relationship into a new one, or from this career setting to that career setting. And the part that makes it so difficult is exactly what you said.
Dave:It's the unconscious limits that say we can't let go, or say we're not going to be able to make it if we take this leap. Or how are you going to survive? Are you going to make enough money? Are you going to this? Are people going to like you? It goes on and on, and all that stuff, as we make a transition, has to come out of us to make space for the new step.
Dave:So, in order to take any new step, when you make that commitment, I'm going to change jobs, I'm going to step into this career, what automatically happens - it doesn't happen before the decision, it happens after the decision - you make the decision, then all of the naysayer voices in your mind and emotions and feelings that say you can't do it, start to bubble out, start to release. And that's good. That helps you become aware of what was limiting you from taking that leap before. And if you can be aware, "oh, that's just what I'm letting go of so that I can take this next giant step, great, I'm just going to let it go. But most of the time we feel it doesn't feel good, we become it and then we believe it again, we make it real in our mind again and then we go two steps forward, one and a half steps back, two steps forward, one and a half steps back, because we're resisting what we're actually letting go of to make space for that new step that heretofore we weren't able to make because of those limits and that naysayer voice. And basically we got programmed out of believing in ourselves and trusting that we have the answers within ourselves and trusting that we have the answers within.
Michael:Now you mentioned, Dave, the release, being able to release. My experience of partly myself, but also a number of people that I work with, is that there's a risk that we never get to that side of the equation. In other words, we're already experiencing fear inside ourselves at just the thought, just the idea of making an important change for ourself and because it feels so uncomfortable, the feelings of fear or whatever other emotions are present, we never actually change. And I'm wondering any advice that you might have on how to overcome that internal resistance so that we get to that release step.
Dave:Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. Fear is at the core of all limits. It's embedded in any type of limit. So one first step is to recognize that all fear is an illusion. Fear is not real, although we experience it. When our energy is in it, we will experience it and create from fear. We will fully believe it's real. So the key to when we experience this fear is to look within to discover where did it come from and what time? When did we believe in something that now is leading to our present day example of having fear, of taking this next step in my career, stepping into, let's say, a big leadership role, or stepping out of being a Robin to Batman? And now you're going to step into being the Batman type of role, because if you were great at Robin, you got a lot of validation for being Robin, being that support staff, and you get a lot of praise for that. But there's a time when now it's your turn to be the Batman. I'll just give an example from my own life. My first chakra, which has to do with our survival, got programmed in relationship to work to one, work hard and two work for people. There was no permission to have my own career, to have my own job. My mom still to this day can't really understand what I do. She doesn't get it because I'm not working a nine to five and I came from a very blue collar family, meaning restaurants, painters, construction workers, and my grandfather had a trucking dispatch company. So in their mind, to make more means you work harder, you work more. They suffered a lot, their body suffers and their mental health suffers from it. That's why they self-medicate through drinking and drugs, because they can't change that programming of "I got to work hard, you got to work hard and got to work for somebody. You can't work for yourself.
Dave:xample in order for me to step into doing what I'm doing now, which is my own business and giving clairvoyant readings and healings and teaching classes, I had to really look within to recognize how did I take that up? I had to let go of that programming so that I can manifest, let's say, smarter, not harder. I got programmed to believe I had no worth outside of what I did for somebody else. I was so used to determining my value based off of the boss, the coach's rubric of it, not of my own. It wasn't an internal validation loop, it was external, and so I had to go through and I spent years deprogramming all of that stuff because you pick it up so early.
Dave:I still struggle with the money piece and is there going to be enough? A lot of that just stems from the fear that I picked up from mom and dad when they were struggling and I was a baby. Those types of fear pictures don't have any thoughts in them. You just feel it because Because I was an infant. When I took it on I wasn't reasoning, I wasn't thinking, but it just just slid in because dad's stressed about work, mom's worried, and then all of a sudden I'm just absorbing it like a sponge. Then I grow up and I wonder why I can't seem to find a really good job, or why do I always end up back working in a kitchen?
Michael:ecause just to summarize, then there's the idea that we take on these programs. You use the word programs, I think. I use the word beliefs, but we're talking about the same thing. So we take on these programs early on in life and sometimes we have no memory of any particular events or period in our life where we might have taken on such programs, because the programs are taken on pre memory...
Dave:Yep,
Michael:... right Before the verbal years, so years one, two, three, something like this.
Dave:And even if we were to take it on later, if it's so painful, we tend to hide it from ourselves, we tend to push it back and we forget. So that's another thing that could happen too.
Michael:It's interesting you say that. When I started on my own journey of inner transformation, it was an observation that I made that I have very few memories of my childhood, very few memories of mom and dad, very few memories of the family, and I think I've come to recognize now that probably the reason for that is that there's a side of me that just doesn't want to see it, that doesn't want to remember what went on because of certain painful experiences.
Dave:Yeah, that happened to me too, especially getting paddled. So what happens is is we, as the soul, go out of our body. So when we learn to come back into the body, we'll have no memory of our childhood, because when we were a kid we weren't in the body enough to remember anything. We were out, in a safe zone above our heads because it was too painful to be in the body. And when we're young kids, the world itself is challenging, right. Our family life could be great, but the world is full of hate, it's full of anger, it's full of competition and invalidation. So we're born and we're just smashed right into that energy and we go, "Ah, because it hurts and it's so challenging, we just go right out of the body because it's easier to be up above. And this is one of the reasons why I drank, because I would just get out of the body, out of the pain, or I'd push my body to the nth degree playing basketball, and that would also help ground out all the energy that I was picking up but I wasn't aware of. So I was either trying to get out of the body or push myself to the nth degree, because that energy doesn't want to be around someone who's, you know, pushing their body as hard as I used to push my body. But early on in my life, I didn't think of it at the time, because you just get programmed to believe it's normal.
Dave:The programming only happens when we resist an experience. If we're neutral to those experiences, that energy goes right through. And that's one of the only ways that I know how to discover what we're unconscious to in ourselves that's resisting something, is to clairvoyantly or in meditation, look within. Now I'm sure there's other methodologies that can help people look within to discover and let go of what they're unconsciously using to resist an experience. But for me the best way has always been to look within and bring it to my awareness. Because once we become aware, like I became aware of some of that programming I took on as a young kid, I have to work hard, can't ever relax, once I started to discover where that came from, the light of awareness will help you let it go. And then you'll get your power back to make a new decision so that you don't have to work hard in order to succeed or have value or worth. You start to recognize how your worth is internal and everybody inherently has worth.
Michael:If, for the moment, we were to accept, okay, so it's about looking within. T he next challenge which can come up is, okay, let's say that I have a program where I have a tendency to please other people. o this shows up in the work environment as I like to please the . And and the more that I please the boss, the more promotions that I get and the more that I evolve my career. Now, all of a sudden, I start to become aware of that program and I'm less pleasing of the boss in the way that I was . The risk now is that reality reflects back to me why it made sense to hold on to that program in the first place, because when I don't please the boss so much, my boss now doesn't give me as many promotions or the same salary .. If I think about this in terms of making a career transition, as in, for example, wanting to leave my current company to do something that's more authentic, authentic the reality that's reflected back is that, yes, I had a belief that I'm not going to make as much money and now leaving my corporate job, I don't have as much money and I don't have enough to support my family. How do we then move to the next step, which is to face the new reality, which reinforces the beliefs that we were holding on to.
Dave:That's the way this whole world is built on right. It's all built on competition and performance. But that's the illusionary world. That's not the real world, the inner world. And so I would say the biggest, most difficult, transition space for any soul here incarnated in this free will game is to go from without to going within. Because the more we go within, the more it starts to align with asking and you shall receive. So you just postulate something, spirit aligns it, and then you step into it and you take your steps.
Dave:But that transition part between going outwards and then going inwards, you're not fully going inwards yet, you're not going out. It's like a gray zone. And that can be very, very challenging. Almost every soul, including myself that's gone through that, it seems like our life is flipped upside down and nothing is working. But we're actually spiritually making a great leap because we're going from the outward way of manifesting to an inward path of self-realization and enlightenment, and manifesting according to our purpose, not according to society's norming or society's limits or programming or whatever we may have grown up with.
Dave:So usually that shift, that transition, requires someone to build a bridge from their current corporate job to their more fulfilling job. Some people can let , go and jump right into it. But typically that leap is pretty big and for me the way that I did it was I worked in early childhood special education. I worked 30 hours a week doing that and I did 20 hours a week of my own thing and I kept building it from that point on. Because there's so much resistance in the world for everyone to be living the life of their dreams and fulfilling their purpose and being able to manifest whatever they need. Nobody believes that's possible. So there's so much anti against that type of mentality that it tends to take a while for that transition to happen. It took for me about four years doing this part-time bridging to get to the full-time thing that I've been doing now for about three or four years and I won't go back at all.
Dave:So that process of movement from the outward to the inner, it's almost like a dark night of the soul type of experience. It just seems like nothing is working. But that's because you're letting go of all of the fear and the programming that drove you to stay looking outwards. Now you have to look within and trust yourself and that you're capable and you can manifest anything. And that takes time. That's not something that, from my personal experience, you do just in one fell swoop. You build that certainty and clarity moving in that direction. Then, over time, you have to continue to take the steps, get the training that's needed to be able to step into that new role and not fall into the trap or the fear that you can't make it happen and then fall backwards. Because going backwards, you'll just find yourself being very unfulfilled again. Most people that this happens to is, they end up feeling very unfulfilled in their life and they start asking this question, "there's got to be something more right, there's got to be something more to this. And that question then starts the inner process of looking within to discover everything is within you, all the answers you already have, but it's becoming aware of them, being able to listen, being able to hear, being able to see that guidance, see the next step. And it's very challenging that whole process for me. I had to have a daughter who was severely disabled and she passed away when she was 11 for me to be able to make it to the other side of that and to recognize and start to manifest from that space.
Dave:You know, all the corporate stuff, they want people to stay in that dynamic. They don't want people to be free. Whether they're conscious of that or not, the structure of it is hierarchical. Similar to in Europe, with monarchies and church hierarchies and family hierarchies and all these hierarchies. They want you to adhere to them so that they can control you. Basically, they can use you for their benefit. When you start to discover you have all the power within you, you can create whatever you want, you're a major threat to them because now they cannot control you, no matter what they do. If you can let go of your fear of survival, which is always at the root of it, which at the root of that is the identification with yourself as a physical body instead of identifying with yourself as eternal spirit, they can't control you, manipulate you and put you back in the system. And then you're working nine to five, all based on survival.
Michael:Just to maybe clarify a point here. You mentioned the control within the corporate structure. So whilst we can debate whether there's an intentional component to that, I would say there's a very unintentional, unconscious component because of the programs that the hierarchy has in those organizations.
Dave:Absolutely.
Michael:So I'm not necessarily believing that they're trying to intentionally control me. But because they have their own set of programs, which in some cases is around control, it has the effect of feeling as if we're being controlled.
Michael:.
Dave:Yeah, we just fall like right into that system, you know. And then we believe that that's just the way it is. And then lots of us believe, oh, there's nothing I can do about it, I can't make this change. It's our own power in that belief that limits us. It's not actually the outside thing, it's what we've decided to believe in. When we get our energy out of that and discover where that originated from, then we have enough power to make a change, to make this great leap, to take this next step. Now we have free choice, but prior to that we could only choose from the limit.
Michael:And I think your comments are very resonant with my own personal journey. If I look at myself today, which is far from being a finished product, some of my perspective is completely, I mean almost radically, different than it was when I was in the traditional corporate world, which is where I spent, what, 22 years or so.
Michael:It's difficult to imagine, I think, what life is like on the other side of the coin, and it makes me wonder what was that impulse in the first place which provoked me to even entertain that there could be something different, that there could be another kind of a life. And I think sometimes it's about what we're trying to move away from. So I think in my case there was an element there of just recognizing that what I was doing at that point in my life just wasn't fulfilling anymore, but I didn't actually know what I was moving towards. So I guess the idea is coming up of this balance between moving away from something versus having something to move towards. I think a lot of the people that I work with, certainly not all of them, but a good percentage of people, know what they don't want anymore, but they're much less clear about what they do want.
Dave:What they do want. Yeah, that's tricky. And from my perspective, that's the next step. Just like you said, you have to let go of the old, but then you also have to create the new. But without let going of the old, you don't have enough power to create the new. So it's a really a tough one. It feels like you can't even move sometimes when you're in that space. But as you eat your power out, it starts to dawn on you, "this isn't working for me anymore. I'm not fulfilled. Well, that means you got enough of your power out of the programming to start to recognize that something else is available, that I don't have to live this way anymore.
Dave:What ends up happening is we usually have to have some challenging experiences to start to rattle us a little bit, to recognize there is another option. So all of the challenges in our life are actually guiding us towards our freedom, if we can see it from that context and that perspective. But most of the time we go "ah, it's difficult. Why is this happening to me?" And then blame, blame and blame, and we fight those challenges instead of recognizing. Those challenges are set up for us to learn how to free ourselves from something we're not aware has been limiting us. This is the question I asked for about four years after my daughter died. And I started to discover, "whoa, Ella's in spirit. I can communicate anytime I want with her". Whoa I'm not supposed to heal everybody. I'm supposed to find that balance and let people learn how to heal themselves. So it's a balance of things.
Dave:I started learning how a lot of the things that happened when I was young, especially on a very dramatic level like shotguns pointed at me and different things, was because I took on my family's karma. So all of these things I ended up learning because of the process of the 11 years of Ella's life and then her death. And without that there's just no way I would have been able to change. And it's not because you don't have enough power. It's typically because you have so much power, you've been so good at the world, you've been so good at things in your life, that in order to make this fundamental paradigm shift in reality, you have to mock up something that's really intense. Because otherwise you'll be able to coast through it, you'll be able to find a strategy around it. So that's what I learned about myself, is that I had to mock up something really intense for myself, in order for me to learn this lesson, that I have to go within for my answers.
Michael:So challenges, then, are actually an opportunity if we choose to see them that way.
Dave:All opportunities, every single one, is a lesson. And in the work that I do is I help people see the context of the learning. What are they learning through some of the experiences that they have and then sharing that information. And then that validates them typically and they feel more alive because they're getting more of their energy back because life really is our ultimate spiritual lesson. Every single day, life is showing us something, giving us an opportunity to make a new choice, to free ourselves.
Michael:Absolutely. So, Dave, I'd like to come back to a point that you mentioned a little bit earlier on because I think it was a very pertinent and important point to career transition. And that is, you mentioned the idea of creating a bridge. Creating the bridge between where people are currently in their jobs versus where they'd like to end up. How might people identify what that bridge looks like for themselves?
Dave:Well, the first step, from my perspective, is to have the clear vision of where are you going, what is the end game or the goal in this segment? When I started my clairvoyant training, I knew right then and there, I was going to be a professional reader. And so I had a clear vision right from the get-go, I'm going to be a clairvoyant reader. Now, I had to do all that training to communicate with wisdom and grace and love and kindness and compassion and neutrality. I had to develop all those abilities in order to be able to give clairvoyant readings safely and effectively, both for myself, and the person I'm reading. But I had that vision, had that clear vision of where I was going.
Dave:So this is why vision boards can be very effective for people. The more they look at those vision boards, the more they're imagining the power of the Christ within them to begin to say to spirit"he hey, this is what I'm creating, help me out, send back what I need in order to manifest this vision. Then from there you can retro-engineer it backward to okay, what are the steps to get there, and again it's vision seeing. Do I need this training? Do I need to start putting feelers out to apply for a new job? Do I need to make a video of myself and my skill sets, or whatever it might be? Do I need to work two jobs, have a part-time job and then build something on the side? That's what I did, and then just take it one step at a time. Because each step of the way helps build that certainty, builds the confidence that, yeah, I am capable of doing this vision that I have.
Dave:But typically, when we first start, we don't have that certainty yet. We don't have that confidence. So we have to build the bridge to get to it. You got to go A to B, B to C, C to D. But the steps are just as important as getting to Z, because all of the learning that you're going to have happen from A to Z is the gold. But that process of getting there is the juicy part, because that helps you let go of all those limits and discover more of who you are.
Dave:.
Michael:I don't think it's always a linear path. I think sometimes in going from A to Z, we go through intermediate steps which then inform us about actually what the true vision is. But we couldn't get there without going through the intermediate learning step first. And that's certainly what happened to me.
Dave:Yeah, me too. And that vision board kind of changes and becomes more clear through the process. I would agree, I would say it's completely nonlinear. That vision doesn't have to be perfectly solidified. You just have to have an idea of where you're going, and then you can build it, add this piece, add that piece, then over here you got to put in this piece, piece and then eventually that puzzle,. whoa., I became a clairvoyant reader, and then,"oh oh, I gotta got start teaching classes" classes. So then I started adding that to the vision board. You just build upon the next. .
Michael:people need to be prepared, I think, to explore themselves is what you're saying. So this isn't a fixed destination and a one-time deal. This is an ongoing journey and we have to be prepared to carve out some time to do something different, to explore ourselves in a way that feels right at that moment in time.
Dave:Exactly. We have to look within, and that's usually the biggest challenge that I've come across in the classes that I teach is people carving out the time to practice the meditations. One of the biggest things we got to go, go, go. This needs to be done, that needs to be done, and we forget to take care of ourselves. I was really bad at this. I'm still learning to take care of myself, but we have to start looking within and carve out at least a little bit of time each day to take care of yourself.
Michael:How might somebody go about creating one of those vision boards that you mentioned?
Dave:Well, I imagine a sphere and in that sphere I put in the things that I'm looking to manifest for myself. But if we come from desire, I want this, we actually will unconsciously push it away because wanting something is fear-based. So what ends up in that mock-up bubble is fear. I need a million dollars. Or, oh, I got to get this job because I can't stand this other job. You're going to get more of the other job because you're coming from fear. So when we're creating, the best way that I've learned is what do I have within myself that I'm looking to share in the world?
Dave:For me it was clairvoyant readings. Okay, so I'm going to put in there clairvoyant readings. I'm going to give 30 readings a month, so I'll put that in that mock-up. But in order to be able to do that, have a family and a home, I need to charge a certain amount of money, right? So it started out as $75 (I'm at $175 now - I've really undervalued myself early on). So I put in at that time $75. I thought, okay, readings is equal to a massage. Then I started looking at okay, well, what else can help me share this thing I have within me giving readings? Okay, I need a website. I need a scheduling app. I need the money to hire a web designer, and I started to build it that way. I also need money for my son's school. I need to make enough to support my family. My wife had a job too, so I was working with that.
Dave:So you build this vision based off of what you have to offer and the things that will support you offering that more in the world. And if you need a million dollars to offer what you need to offer, you put that in that vision board. You want a million dollars, you're going to get fear back instead of the million dollars. Also, if you put in a million dollars, that might come back in variety of ways, not just as one lump sum.
Dave:Jesus said ask and ye shall receive. He also said something along the lines of whatever it is that you desire, see yourself receiving it. That is what we're talking about here. You're seeing the mock-up, you're seeing the vision. You're seeing yourself receiving it over and over and over again. And as you do that, all of the naysayer voices and all of the doubts and all of the you can't this, you can't that who do you think you are? All that stuff starts to pour out, and that's where we have to be willing to let that go. Don't believe that naysayer voice.
Dave:I had a spiritual teacher. His name was Hans Christian King. He's passed away now but he was a very famous medium here in the United States. But he would always don't believe the mind chatter, don't believe the monkey mind. Just let all that go and keep focusing on that mock-up bubble so that you can receive that mock-up back.
Dave:So when we create consciously, like this, as spirit, in the power that is invested within us, that we have naturally, which is different than when we're on the outer path of creating, you literally can't create that old way. It won't work. Everything will fall apart because you're learning to create a new way, making it much easier for yourself. You just postulate and it all lines up. You just put out, okay, this is the type of career that I'm looking to find. Next thing, you know, five opportunities show up for you, but you, the person creating that mock-up, has to have the clarity and certainty that, ah, this is what I'm mocking up, to fulfill what I have within me to share in this world, this purpose, whatever that is.
Dave:Sometimes defining the purpose can be challenging too, but typically it's what you're good at. It's what you're naturally gravitate towards. Like, for you, you're a natural leader. You're a natural coach. You know you did that type of leadership in your corporate job, but you found that you needed to have more freedom to express more of who you are instead of it being squeezed into that corporate model. But you were always a leader. You were always making decisions, so now you're just doing it more in this form.
Dave:The outer path is all about effort. It's all about pushing oneself. It's all about more. It's competition and all that. And that'll work for souls who are still learning about the outward path.
Michael:I'm starting to become mindful of the time. But there is one other question that I would like to ask you, and that is the linkage between what you've just told us about finding purpose, finding the path, and the talents that people are born with. We're all born with talents. Whether we take the opportunity to develop those talents is another question, but they're innately a part of us. And in some way, those talents seem as if they should be and are related to our purpose. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that.
Dave:Absolutely, I would say they 100% are. At the cosmic, we're not an individualized soul. We have access to the infinite abundance of source of everything. But down here, at the soul level, I'm this soul, Dave, and these are the types of things that I like to do, and you're this soul, Michael, and these are the things that you like. So you take that creativity and you individualize it, so to speak, to how you like to express it when you're incarnated here in this world. This is why looking within is so important, because we won't recognize and be able to validate what we're good at, because to us it's just normal. Oh, doesn't everybody have this? Nope, they don't, and the gist of it is that they don't. But we might just think everyone does, because that's our frame of reference and we're just used to it and it's normal to us.
Dave:Once you start looking within, you can start to see, not to make yourself better than anyone else, but you start to discover, wow, I'm really good at this thing healing. Like, for me, I have a natural orientation towards music and art and I kind of like eccentric stuff. And you start to discover, oh well, I'm this leader in this way, but I'm not a leader in that way. I like to empower people to take their next steps. I'm not a leader that's going to tell somebody what to do. No, I'm going to hopefully give you strategies so you can discover what to do and make that step on your own. So you start to discover it. And even down to very simple things, like I'm very good at cooking dinner. I'm not good at finding the recipe to cook dinner. I don't know why that is. So these abilities, like for you when you're coaching, and me when I'm giving a reading, when we start to highlight them in people and they start to recognize that, whoa, this is unique to me, this is what I'm really good at, we're basically validating their spirit. And once you can frame it in the correct context for them, their purpose, they start to get inspired.
Dave:And what is the root of inspiration, In Spirit. To bring in spirit. So when people start to discover, whether it's you or me pointing it out in them, or sometimes people just discover it on their own, they will be inspired because they brought more of themselves as spirit in, more of those abilities that they may not have thought of had any value, but in fact has a lot of value. But each person's going to be individualized because they've developed their soul identity differently than you and I. A healer might be a healer, but every healer is going to express themselves a little bit differently. A leader is a leader, but they could express themselves in these unique ways. Some leaders like one-on-one, some leaders like group just lots of different ways to express that ability.
Dave:So that's all can get eked out and communicated to people and then they start to realize whoa, what had been invalidated in me as a kid is actually my greatest strength, and that's why it was so invalidated in me as a kid because I was unconsciously a threat to people. I didn't know I was a threat I didn't know I had so much love to give that every time I was around somebody they would get upset because all their pain started coming out. Or I didn't think I could communicate very well. But it turns out I'm a pretty good communicator, but as a kid I got invalidated for that because it was such a threat. I would point out the truth too much. So sometimes our greatest strengths get the most invalidation and if we believe it, then we think we are not good at certain things when we're actually very, very good.
Michael:It seems to me, as if in some of the coaching work that I do, that there's a relationship between people connecting to those talents that they have, so becoming inspired, as you call it, and letting go of the fear.
Dave:Yes.
Michael:So working on the fear directly is important. But there's something that also happens when people connect to their talents that seems to move them forward as well.
Dave:Absolutely, and that's what I would describe as the letting go, is you have to recognize the fear and where it comes from. You let that go. But then you look at the light coming back for them, the abilities, the energy that was stuck in there, and help them then discover what they're really good at. Then they have that power to build their next step from, that they couldn't because it was in the fear. It's like a two-step process, identify the fear of the limit, let that go. But then you have to look at the power you're getting back, meaning your abilities, what is now freed up for you to use, moving forward, to help you in your next step. And when you start to highlight that, people start to glow. They end up getting really excited lots of times.
Michael:That's one of the joys of this work. So, Dave, this has been a wonderfully rich conversation. You've really done a wonderful job at sharing some key information with us today.
Dave:Thank you.
Michael:Where can people find out more about the work that you do?
Dave:Yeah, the easiest way would be to visit my website, which is www. divineroots. love. So that's D-I-V-I-N-E-R-O-O-T-S dot Love. Divine roots dot love. And I have a little bit about my story, a little bit about what I do. I have classes that I offer.
Michael:And we'll be providing your contact information on the website. Any last thoughts that you'd like to leave to the listeners?
Dave:I think we covered it all except persistence and devotion to oneself is the key. Looking within and taking care of oneself. It doesn't mean you're selfish, it just means you're fulfilling your purpose and just not giving up on yourself. That's the key.
Michael:A big thanks for making yourself available today and also for the work that you're doing to support the lives of so many other people.
Dave:You're welcome.
Michael:Have a great rest of the day.
Dave:You, too.