Intuition-Led Creative Transformation: A Moron's Insights

What happens when a top Wall Street trader walks away to follow his intuition? In this powerful conversation, Steve shares his mid-career awakening after 20+ years of success left him physically broken and spiritually disconnected.

A stark warning "you're going to die on this desk" led him to leave his job, despite having two kids and a pregnant wife. Rather than chasing another high-paying role, Steve embraced creativity, drafting his book How to Succeed on Wall Street and Why You Should Absolutely Not Do It: A Moron's Memoir in one week. This sparked a new path: founding Creative Postures, producing music, podcasting, and writing poetry.

Steve discusses trusting intuition, the roles of creativity and healing, and redefining success. His daily practice of writing 1,000 words shows how discipline fuels transformation.

If you're feeling stuck or questioning your path, Steve's story is a bold reminder: the best things in life often weren’t planned. Explore how trusting your gut might also provide purposeful direction for your path of transformation.

Connect with Michael Davio Simmonds:

Personal website: https://simmondscoachingservices.biz

Email: simmondscoachingservices@gmail.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldaviosimmonds/

Transcript

Welcome to Career Reset Guide

Michael 0:07

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 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.

Michael 1:18

Good morning, Steve. How are you doing?

Steve 1:20

I'm doing well, Michael. Thank you for having me.

Michael 1:25

Thanks for reaching out. I'm excited for our discussion today because you're an example of somebody that's right in the middle of your career transition and I think this could be a great opportunity to talk to you about some of the challenges that are coming up for you real time, some of the thought process that you're going through to navigate those challenges and, yeah, some of the learnings that you're going through. So turning up the resolution a little bit on what it actually means to go through a career transition. Maybe we can start with what it is that you currently do. How do you make a living today?

Steve 2:02

Well, as you mentioned, I am currently pivoting. So when you're pivoting, that means you're kind of in two places at once. I think about myself and I laugh. If you've ever seen the show Friends, there was a famous episode where they were moving a couch and they had to turn it around all the way and they kept yelling pivot. Currently, to provide for my family, I trade institutionally at a brokerage house. I do a similar job and function to what I did in my former life, but this one has more autonomy and more space to kind of be yourself, whereas the traditional institutional white shoe kind of banks - it's a little less open, if you will.

Steve 2:53

So that's what I do to make the dough.

Michael 2:58

You work on wall street, and you've worked on wall street for a number of years now. That's got to have its own unique flavor to what you do. How does that make a difference to your work?

Steve 3:09

Yeah, I've worked on Wall Street for 20 plus years and there's going to be good parts and bad parts about it. I always like to say nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so. There's a lot of famous parables about that. But on Wall Street very particularly, some people, they talk about how bad it is and it's terrible and it's this. And then some people think it's the best thing ever, and the truth is usually somewhere in between. So working on Wall Street has been, I think, an amazing teacher to me. The market is volatile, which when we talk about volatility, all we're talking about is emotionality. And when the market is volatile, you see that in culture, you see that with people all over the place, and the more volatile the market is, the more volatile reality seems to be. So there are parables and metaphors in between the two. And so I like to think of Wall Street as sort of like a teacher, and it's taught me many lessons. Some you learn through pain and some through wisdom.

Wallstreet Lessons Captured in a Book

Michael 4:14

And talking about the lessons, maybe this is the opportunity to mention that you've recently written a book which captures some of those lessons 'How to Succeed on Wall Street'. Maybe you just want to give us a little bit of an overview of that.

Steve 4:28

Absolutely. The full title of the book, and it's a mouthful, is 'How to Succeed on Wall Street and Why you Should Absolutely Not Do it: A Moron's Memoir'. I took the opportunity in between a career transition for reasons that are above me that came down and kind of gave me a message to tell this story. And again, I wasn't trying to tell a squeaky clean story and I certainly wasn't trying to overhype anything either. I was trying to shoot it down the middle and talk about both sides. So in the book I have pro tips throughout and I have indexes as well where these are tips that if you follow the pro tips it's going to help, because either it's going to stop you from banging your head on a tree or it's going to help you move forward faster. And there's a lot of that in there. There's a lot of 'time kills all trades', 'Hustle beats talent when talent doesn't hustle' which is like one of my favorite ones. You could take that from Wall Street to Main Street. If you're not hustling, you're not going to make it. And you could have all the talent in the world, but if you're just sitting there. And then there's the other side, right, and why you shouldn't do it. So I have a lot of anecdotes and stories and different situations where life is going to give you lemons. You got to make the lemonade. Some people read the book and they're like well, you didn't really tell me how to succeed on Wall Street, and that's true. But if you can succeed in life, you can succeed on Wall Street. It's the same thing. So some of the tips and some of these stories are very not unique to Wall Street. I tell stories about being in high school, in college, in different phases of my life, in different situations where lemons were given to me and what was I going to do? And I believe that the successful people are going to turn those lemons into lemonade. They're going to sweeten it up and they're going to make it happen. So that in itself, that's the whole book. It has a story, it's got an arc, it's got character development. And the funny thing about the character development is it was real.

Steve 6:42

I wrote this from a real place of not knowing what tomorrow held, not knowing how I was going to feed my family. And I really didn't want to tell a story from 'I got out of it and here's what I thought of it then', because it's different. I wanted to tell the story of 'I'm in it. I don't know what I'm going to do and I'm still going to be truthful and I'm still going to be honest'. And let me tell you, if you want to know who you are, go into the abyss, because all those things are going to start to come up. Your fears, your anxieties, everything is going to tell you, 'Okay, say this to this one, say that to that one'. And then ethics, how you act when nobody's watching is who you really are. And when you're in the hole, when you're in the dark, pay attention to that. Don't judge it, don't 'Oh, I did this to sell'. Well, you know, people make bad decisions when they're on their ass. I tell my kids all the time 'you got to be your best when things are at their worst'.

Michael 7:38

So what did your career look like before you started to transition and what triggered the decision to think about yourself differently?

Steve 7:49

So I did not graduate college with a great GPA. I basically had the GPA of a man who could barely tie his shoes. That'd be like two, two, two, three, three. After attending a prestigious high school, I sort of uh, went a different direction. In college I had fun, I partied I hold no grudges on that. I made the choices. So getting out of college and trying to find a good job was difficult because you're judged on your grades. And, yeah, I did some internships and I had jobs and I had stuff, but I wasn't competing on the grade side. So my first job was at this company and I went on an interview and the guy told me this is just a practice interview. They're looking at higher end people for this job and it was just an operations job. But we want you to get to practice.

Steve 8:46

So in the interview with a guy named Steve, he asked me 'what will you do that others won't? ' And I said to him man, 'if the janitor doesn't show up, I'll mop the floors. I'm just looking for a shot. Get my foot in the door, I will literally, give me the mop, I'll mop'. And he started laughing. He was like, 'that is funny'. And, lo and behold, the headhunter, Richie Franco calls me up and says Steve, you got the job. He has this like really raspy voice. I was like you think you know why you got the job. I'm like I don't know why. Rich, tell me, you told him you would mop the floors. So he's like he loved it. He loved it. He ate it up, I loved it. This is the best story I ever heard. He still tells this story to this day to people that he works with.

Steve 9:36

So I got this job in the back office in the P&S department of an investment bank where you weren't sniffing any type of real career trajectory, you just weren't. I was just sitting with reams of paper every day. From there I had to outwork everyone else. My whole theory is do the job, don't ask to get paid for it first. Nowadays everybody's like 'oh, what do you get paid? What do you start with? '. Who cares what you get paid? What do you start with? Who cares what you start with? What can I end with? Like, where can this go? Where's the growth potential? And if people start thinking like that, they'll act differently. So I didn't really worry about the money at first and it was nothing. It was real nothing. I just worried about doing the job.

Steve 10:23

And after I did my job I said to the guy to the right, can I help you? I said to this one, can I help you? I went to my managers I could take on more, and so I just kept accumulating work until this one day we had a day where everybody from the back office gets to go up to the front office and all the commissions are generated to its charity. And so they bring the back office up and then it gets late and he's got so many trades that day and you got to book them. And this is kind of like my job at the time and the middle office folk it was 4. 00, 4.30, they started leaving. I saw thousands of trades that needed to get booked.

Steve 10:56

So I went to the middle office manager, who I didn't really know at the time, and I was like 'what do you need? '. He's like 'what do you mean? It's time for you to go'. I'm like 'there's work to do, I'll stay'. He's like, 'really? ', I said 'yeah'. So I worked for him, I did some extra stuff and a year later I get a call, 'Steve, you want to work in the middle office? '. And I was like, 'yeah, I do'. It was that manager who I had stayed late for. Somebody in his group left. They called, they said 'do you want us to go recruit someone? '. He's like 'no, I know who I want to hire'. And he called me and I took that job and I started working in the middle office. And then rinse and repeat. I went from middle office, I started working on an options desk, I worked on a trading supervision team and I kept telling managers and senior MDs that I want more.

Michael 11:49

There's a lot of learning experiences that I'm hearing that you went through. If we fast forward a little bit to the period just before your transition, where did you end up? Where did you land just before the transition?

The Intuitive Message to Change

Steve 12:10

So the big fast forward is that I became the top producing salesperson on the desk from not being given a shot. So that's my little Rocky preamble. But when you come from the bottom to the top, there can be a lot of broken glasses in the way, and on Wall Street it's not always clinking glasses. Sometimes they're breaking them over your head.

Steve 12:32

So I found myself in a toxic situation. I found myself not happy coming to work. I found myself having two neck surgeries, the second one pushing me over the edge. And I found myself on the butt side of some deals that I didn't think needed to be handled the way they were handled. But they were. And we have to, as salespeople and client representatives, really we have to try to live with that. And internalizing some of that stuff was very difficult for me and I then decided, or it was decided for me (I think there's other powers that be in the world, I don't need to define those, but I do think they exist) and I was sent a message that said 'you're going to die on this desk if you don't do something'. So I went on disability. I informed them I wasn't coming back.

Michael 13:39

Sounds like you were going through a pretty tough period. You had some private challenges with your neck, you had some challenges specific to the work environment. And I'm curious about what you said just a moment ago, that something informed you that you needed to do something different. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

Steve 13:58

Yeah, I call it intuition. Intuition is when you have those thoughts, when odd things happen, when you notice things that you don't normally notice. I think you're supposed to pay attention to those things. I did when I met my wife, I did when I found a dog on the street. And usually the best things that have happened to me in my life don't always make sense. It wasn't part of the plan. I am big on planning, but the best things generally aren't part of the plan.

Steve 14:32

I believe that true answers whisper because true confidence doesn't need to be loud. So I think it's very important for people to be quiet so they can hear themselves. But in this instance, man, it was pretty loud. I believe that it was some other power Could be the Higher Self, it could be God, it could be Universe. People have a lot of dog-lun terminology around that. It is and has passed along some very crucial information to me across my life, and the better I've listened, the better it's turned out. And it has you questioning sometimes whether there's more signals that you're just missing every day. I do believe you, me, all day we're missing signals and they're there. And part of the pivot, and part of where I'm going, is being able to clean the mirror a little bit so that these signals can come in. And I believe we're all receiving them like radios, but unless you're on that channel you don't hear it.

Receiving Messages through Creativity

Michael 15:43

I love what you're saying right now. For me, it's all about tuning into ourself and what's giving us the positive energy in our life at the moment. And if we're not finding it with what we do, then it needs to be something different. But in order to be able to do that, we need to listen to ourself, which is exactly what you just said a moment ago. I'm just wondering how do you do that listening? Is there some kind of a practice that you have what allows you to listen in to yourself?

Steve 16:12

I think that's going to be unique to each person. For me, a couple of ways that works for me. One is meditation. There's various types you could do, transcendental, you could do this, you could do that. I find that those are good ways to clear space so that you can listen. Exercise for a lot of people, they talk about the runner's high and stuff like that. You're really accessing a flow state.

Steve 16:39

In order for that to happen, and I think for me personally, and something that I'm a big advocate for, it's written word and it's creativity in written word. I think that the more we write and the more we get thoughts out of our overwhelmed heads and onto paper, we can start to make sense of it. And when I say right, I mean like right with your hand. The speed of the hand slows down the mind just enough so that the ball of yarn can unwind. And in that unwinding, the silence. In that unwinding, the space. In that poetry, the seed. In those prose, the word. The sacred practice for me is writing. I write a 1,000 words every day. I don't know what I'm going to write and sometimes it's really hard. I write 1,000 words a day and sometimes it's 'I don't want to write these words'. But I write them because the messages for me come through that way. So I would just say anyone should think about how you get your messages and start to put more concentration there.

Michael 18:01

I think that's a really interesting point, because you mentioned the connection to creativity, writing being one form of creativity. I suppose other people are going to have other forms of creativity that they're more connected to. So I guess it's for everyone to figure out what is their form of creativity and maybe tap into that. What do you think?

Steve 18:22

I think I couldn't agree with you more. I do think there are some forms of creativity, like poetry, like writing, like songs, like music, that have been around for antiquity. So I know that in this modern day we always want to have this new and improved. If it's worked for 5,000 years, do that writing, singing, moving. The answers have been around and it's just taking them in, giving them a try, trying that new hat on and seeing what works for you.

Michael 18:59

Going back to the plot. You received this message. How did you respond to that?

Steve 19:06

The message to jump into the abyss?

Michael 19:08

Right

Steve 19:10

I was reading a book on Irving Berlin, his biography, because I had been spending some time after leaving getting in forests, going to libraries. I was just kind of like being, I wasn't trying to do anything. I wanted to learn more about Irving Berlin and I got a chapter in and I remember putting down the book and I'm like 'this is an interesting book'. And then it just came 'you have an interesting story' and I sat down at the computer and I didn't get up for a week. I'm talking 15-hour days, 18-hour days.

Steve 19:48

I would just sleep, eat and write, and the body of what became this piece of work was done in a week. Now it takes a year to edit the thing. They don't tell you that. Anyone who's looking to write a book, it takes a year to edit the thing. But the body and the hook spa of it was done in a week, in a flash. My note to people is, when it rains, get your bucket out. When you're in that state, when there's something that you need to be doing and you're on fire, be on fire. It's okay, everything in moderation, including moderation. So during that period, I just felt this was what I was supposed to be doing, and so I just did it.

Michael 20:32

That's an interesting first step to take, because I can imagine that that could have been a period of a lot of fear, a lot of doubt.

Steve 20:42

Tons

Michael 20:43

And a lot of people, I think, would have had the inclination to 'how the hell do I ensure I'm going to get a good salary? What do I need to do to cover that? '.

Steve 20:53

I'll add to that plate that I had two kids at the time and my wife was pregnant with our third and I am the breadwinner of the family. So the pressure was on. There was some legal fees I was involved with. The pressure was on and it was very weird.

Steve 21:14

One of the most important things I learned was during this period, you're not making any money, your net worth is just going down. But at the same time, I'm in the forest, I'm walking every day, I'm writing every day, I'm doing things and my self worth's going up? Everybody would come to me thinking I'm down here. They're like 'are you okay? '. 'What are you going to do? '. 'You don't have any money'. 'You're not going to do that'. And I was just like 'it's okay, I feel great'. 'Well, why do you feel great? '. 'I don't know, but I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. It's going to work out'. 'What do you mean, it's going to work out? '. 'I don't know'. And my answer a lot of the time is 'I don't know'. We're not supposed to know. That's what faith is in not knowing. So this was happening and, yeah, I felt those things. I felt the fear. You're supposed to feel it in the abyss. You don't get out of the abyss by pulling out of it. You get out of the abyss by going through it. So I just said, 'it's going to work out, something's going to happen'.

Steve 22:15

So I kept working on the book. I kept putting my intention there and then, magically, my customers knew I was out of work. They took it upon themselves to make calls for me. They called other brokerage houses and said 'this guy, Steve, he's a good guy. He works hard. We like him. Should think about calling him'. And I started getting phone calls. 'Hey, we heard about you. We heard you're good at what you do'. I didn't even put a resume together, but it started to work. And now I'm like 'oh, look at this, when you trust, when you have faith, it starts to work'. So I got this reprieve, which I believe was to write this book and to start this company and to begin this moron movement. And I got a new slate and I got a new opportunity. But if I was only focused on that new slate and that new opportunity, I couldn't have done this. I couldn't have created this. So when we talk about pivoting, you have to be able to really focus where you want your real attention to go and trust that something's going to work out.

Steve 23:25

A lot of people in this age of AI and data and information (and trust me, on Wall Street, it's all data, it's all information), we forget about faith. We forget about trust in something that we don't control. We all want to control. There's like a worldwide OCD thing going on. But what I preach is let it go, literally. Make sure your big bricks are in the right spot, your foundation is strong, and then trust. Just keep doing what you're doing and let bigger problems and bigger things figure themselves out. And they do. And I know people are like 'this is just you'. I don't know man. I was out of work, two kids, a pregnant wife, no money. I did it. This isn't a fairy tale. I actually did it and here I am doing it.

Michael 24:15

I think that's a fantastic strength to have, to be able to have that level of trust. Because I can tell you, when I went through my own equivalent transition, I didn't have it at that point. And I think the risk of not having that trust is to take a thinking approach to try to solve the problem. And I think the thinking approach, it comes up with some rational, logical next steps and how we might get there. But the risk is that it's completely disconnected from who we are and what we actually feel about ourselves. So, a man after my own heart, steve.

Steve 24:50

We have to remember that we're magical creatures capable of anything. And if you're only thinking about what's already existed, you're not thinking about what doesn't exist. And that's everything you don't know. And I smile at it because it's like you don't know what you don't know. And now you got to learn, through your own journey, a skill set that you now teach others how to trust themselves, how to find themselves, how to direct themselves. You're taking that lesson and paying it forward. You were supposed to have that moment. That's a beautiful moment and you had it. I'm grateful for you.

Michael 25:30

Well, there's a general point here that you're touching on which is really important, and that is that we tend to see these challenging periods as something to get out of the way and then my life can start. But it actually is thanks to these challenges that we become the best version of ourself. And I do personally believe that some of these challenges are predestined because they're the greatest teachers that we have in order for us to become that bigger version of ourself. So, rather than turning away from them, I think it's to see that this is a part of my journey. It's not something to get out the way, but this is my path forward is to work through this challenge and then to see what opens up after that. And it sounds as if you were very much in that being space, going back to what you were saying, living life in the moment and just going with... I don't know, going with something, but not the thinking approach.

Steve 26:27

Intuition, and I've researched and studied a lot of Carl Jung and some of his writings. And the predestined, all that stuff, it's in a place that is very hard to access when we're overwhelmed with information. And, for the first time in my life, put it all down. I mean, I've been working since I'm 16 years old Through. I only know one thing and that's work. And for the first time in my life I wasn't working and I felt amazing. And how many people don't have jobs and feel amazing because you trick yourself into believing you need the work. The work needs you. It's a different way of thinking about it.

Creativity as a Source of Healing

Michael 27:10

Absolutely.

Michael 27:25

Going back to your story then. You wrote the book. What happened as a result of you writing the book?

Steve 27:32

What happened? I happened. I would say, writing the book, which I call my creative catharsis, was one of those things that was supposed to happen. And I opened the door to my own creativity. I've since made music videos. I have a song that I wrote. I have a rap song. I started a show called Sitting With Steve, which is on YouTube and Spotify, which basically is, I've told my story, I'd like to hear other people's stories. I'm very interested in people's stories. I'm very interested in the storytelling ability of humanity and how that keeps us tight and together, moving forward. I started my company, which is called Creative Postures, and that company, as well as supporting my book and my efforts here, is also a platform for others who want to look for creativity as a potential source of healing, because I believe that and I've done it. So I've never sold anything that I didn't fully understand, and this I fully understand because I went through it. We talked about it earlier. It might look different for everybody, but there's no doubt that acting creatively, intentionally and with discipline can heal you. So that's the message, the purpose, what I'm trying to put out there. And if you ask me where it's going, I'll tell you what I told you when I started. I don't know.

Michael 28:56

Fascinating. So, on the surface of it, hearing you talk about healing and some of the other activities that you're engaging in sounds completely different than what you have been doing. What is the connection there? Or is there a connection?

Steve 29:14

Yeah, the guy who took me out of the back office, he told me, and I'll never forget it, he goes, 'do what you got to do so that you can do what you want to do'. So I do what I got to do and that gives me the ability to do what I want to do. A nd that is create for myself. That is storytell with others. And that is help others learn how to get inside a little bit. You have the Tony Robbinses out there. You got all these guys that 'look at me'. What about somebody that looks like me? What about somebody that looks like just a regular Mo? What about that regular guy?

Steve 29:56

I feel like this world seems so shut off to them because I was a creative that shut it off at a young age and never touched anything and just went right to work and became a stormtrooper. And I wonder how many of those stormtroopers need to take their hat off, sit down and do this. So I don't consider that other stuff work. It's just what I want to do. It's the message I want to share. And, ultimately, the reason I do this is because I have three little kids and I want to leave this planet in a really good place for them and I can only control what I can control and that's my interactions on a daily basis, while they still exist, face to face for the most part.

Michael 30:42

You've done all this different stuff. Who is the real Steve?

Steve 30:47

I think the real Steve is all of it. You mentioned it earlier. I call it the rubber band effect. When you pull a rubber band down, the further it goes down is the energy it can go up. So if you don't have much volatility in your life, you're going to stay in a little band. But the ones that can reach the heights, they needed to be pulled back first. So all of that is part of me. All of that is me. So I am that guy.

Steve 31:14

I used to say, 'ah, I'm not this guy, I'm a that'. No, I'm all of it and I'm trying to appreciate who I am. And I think a lot of men have this issue because we don't have archetypes. I think I have a good idea of who I am, and that's very multifaceted, that could be paradoxical, some may say oxymoronic. What I'm trying to do more of is just appreciate who I am and love myself, which not a lot of men are talking about that. But I can tell you, it's something that we men need to work on. Instead of toxic male, it's a guy who's not happy. It's a person who doesn't understand themselves, who's confused and is acting as they've been taught. We don't have those male archetypes in this world. We have Rocky, we have Indiana Jones, we have John Wayne. We don't have emotionally intelligent men, and those are the places that I find myself. I think it's a frontier and I'm honored to have been put on this path, to learn these lessons. And if I get something with my talent of writing and communication, it's my responsibility more than anything to pass that along. As I self-discover, I self-share. And I want to hear and I want to share. And I think that's how we heal together. So my journey is a healing journey more than anything.

Healing to Grow & Overcome the Challenges

Michael 32:54

t's, this topic of men in the modern world is a whole other conversation. But I fully agree with you that there's a big question at the moment. With the roles of women having changed, I think we know what we're moving away from. I'm just not sure we know what we're moving towards. I think that's a huge question. So, coming back to your story, you've mentioned this word 'healing' several times. What are you referring to when you're talking about healing? Because I can imagine that different people have different interpretations of what you're talking about.

Steve 33:33

What I refer to in healing is going to be interpersonal. It requires a little bit of self-awareness. I mean, I've had to heal physically, emotionally and spiritually. And, by the way, I don't think they're different. I think we think they're different and modern Western science doesn't always connect the dots. But my neck, since I've written this book and had two neck surgeries, doesn't hurt nearly how it used to. That's a fact. You're releasing something. I think they're all entangled. So my healing focus has taken me to some wondrous places.

Steve 34:20

I am not sure that this podcast is the place to go into all those different healing modalities that I've experienced, but I continue to look for them. I've lately been really concentrated on breathwork. Breathwork as a lever to control the nervous system and put us in different states. And it's wonderful. I have a saying in the book 'when you're green, you grow, when you're ripe you rot'. And so healing to me is also growing, and you mentioned this earlier. I lean into the pain. I lean into the toughness. I was told the story of the buffalo recently. For anybody out there listening, the wild buffalo is the only animal that, when a storm is coming, they go into the storm. They don't fly away from the storm, they march directly into it. And the reason they do it is ingenious. It's because it's the shortest way through. The shortest way through into an oncoming storm is to go through it. And in my healing journey I look for those points where it's like 'ooh, that made me upset. Let me really think about that'. So I think the lessons of how we're supposed to heal are literally everywhere and it's just a matter of do you want to pick up that weight? Do you want to try that one out?

Steve 35:40

I'm like a kid at a jungle gym at this point, because I believe that you work through your trauma, you come out of it stronger. I'm a big believer of that. I'm literally looking for body traumas, to work on those mental traumas and spiritual traumas. I look for them and I'm like 'all right, what next? '. And not in a way where 'you got to be fixed', because I think that can get people in a bad space. You're not broken and you don't need to be fixed. But when you look at that trauma with a smile, you're like 'all right, you got something going on here, let's think about that'. And collaborating with your own self, your future self. Being nice to your past self, collaborating with your future self, coming to the present and working on that stuff. And some days it doesn't feel like you're doing it, and you're still doing it.

Michael 36:30

So you're healing from physical traumas, spiritual traumas, psychological traumas. For people that aren't so familiar with this, how relevant is what you're talking about to, let's say, the average person? Is this something specific to you, that you're more screwed up than the rest of the population, or is this relevant to everyone else? It's to give a broader perspective to those people that aren't familiar with trauma.

Steve 37:01

We all have to look at ourselves in the mirror. I am doing that, and I am sort of doing that publicly as well, to give others the opportunity to look in that same mirror. And whatever you see, you see. Nobody can tell you what your traumas are. If anyone ever says 'you should feel this' or 'you should be happy', out of here. here ou should be what you are. And I just think the most important thing is to get present with it. And if you're present, then you can take your own stock. And we need people, like I mentioned before, archetypes and other people, to say 'hey, I went through some shit, I lived, here's a story'. Like my story of being in the abyss and coming out of it. It happened. You could check my bank account. It happened. It was real. On my own podcast I always say 'I don't know who needs to hear this, but' and 'I don't know who needs to hear this but, you can do it and there are examples for you to see'. But ultimately it's up to you. That's it.

Michael 38:09

What you're talking about here is relevant to everyone. For those listeners that aren't so familiar with the topic of trauma, a lot of them are coming from childhood. We know now from the new science of epigenetics that we also inherit some of this stuff from our ancestors, particularly in cases where our ancestors have been through a very challenging experience in their lifetime and they haven't been able to fully integrate that into themselves. So nature has a very intelligent way to self-heal by passing that trauma on to the next generation.

Steve 38:45

And Michael, one thing that people aren't talking about, because I agree 100% with you that the trauma's passed down. But guess what? You get to heal it backwards. And that blows people's minds because it challenges the concept of time. But you get to heal for people that you've never met physically. You get to heal for them too. And I believe when you heal those deeper epigenetic traumas, something else is being healed too outside of you. And it's a blessing, it's a true blessing.

Michael 39:26

Yeah, that is a bit of a weird one. And I've heard stories about people healing their own personal trauma and then, all of a sudden, they find out that their kids start to behave better in school or are more happy with themselves. So it seems to have a knock-on implication, both in the present, but also the past, as you're saying. Fascinating.

Michael 39:48

Why even bother with this? How is your career transition benefiting from healing your trauma?

Steve 40:01

Anybody who's going to undertake an act of faith and purpose is going to question themselves. Why bother? I ask it often to myself. I have a damn good career. I could just stick with that, save some time, spend more time with my family, absolutely. I just feel like we're supposed to be additive to each other's lives. And not to sound like a boomer, but a lot of what's out there on the Internet, and everywhere on social, it pulls us apart. And I felt alone. No one should feel alone. We're in this together. And I'll keep going because people keep feeling lonely.

Steve 40:53

Look at the child suicide rates and depression rates. They're through the roof. People are not getting mentally stable. People are getting more mentally unstable. There's a sickness here. Why is that not being promoted? Follow the money. That's where the Wall Street stuff comes in. Follow the money, you'll know why. You don't know about these things, but they're there and I see them and I felt them myself as a mentally unfit person that had to go through some stuff. So I believe that the purpose outweighs the burden. I don't think of it as a burden. Like I said, I kind of laugh at it. But the purpose to me for what I'm doing matters. And where it goes, how it flows, nobody knows. And then I write poetry like that in the middle of a sentence.

How Steve is Navigating His Transition

Michael 41:40

One of the ways I think about this is that all those traumas that we've accumulated over the years, it's like these split-off parts in our psychology. And as we learn to heal ourselves, it's like reintegrating those split-off parts so that we can become more whole. And the more whole that we become, the more that we can become the best version of ourself. So it sounds as if that's the journey that you're on, is becoming that best version of who Steve is. Not the story I was originally expecting from a guy who has done a lot of hustling on Wall Street. B ut I really think that's a beautiful journey.

Michael 42:20

How are you navigating through this transition period, because it sounds like you're very much in the midst of it. You've been through one important phase of it, but you're not yet at the other side of it. How are you navigating it?

Steve 42:38

Yeah, I mentioned Indiana Jones earlier. There's a bunch of scenes where he doesn't know where to go. He has to throw the dirt down and he sees a couple of bricks and then he goes across. I'm handling it by controlling what's under my control and generally that'll bring me back to the present and that'll be a daily situation. So I look at what I want to do for the next week, for the next day, break down my hours. So for me, I simplify everything to its lowest common denominator. And I'm saying 'where does the next foot go? '. And where I don't see the long term and what the bigger picture is, sometimes I can see where the next foot goes. So my process is have faith, have trust and look where the next foot goes.

Steve 43:31

A friend of mine once told me, and I think of this all the time, he goes 'when you make mistakes, do the next best thing'. You messed up, something happened. What's the next best thing you can do? And in that situation, make the best choice or the right choice or whatever feels right for you. So, in order not to get too big and collapse, I just say 'what's the next thing I can do? '.

Steve 43:56

And that's where my thousand words comes in, that's where my daily practices come in. And I will continue to record my own podcast TV show, whatever label people put on it, Sitting with Steve. I will continue to write my thoughts, potentially a book of poetry to follow, potentially a book of fiction to follow. And I will continue to leave the door open to mentor and help others that can heal through the creative process, very specifically because I think there's some amazing people out there looking to help each other. And I have a protocol and a practice and I can connect people to people that they wouldn't have naturally able to connect with and really help foster that change that I was able to find in myself. So I hope that was a good answer.

Michael 44:56

It's a perfectly good answer. It's whatever comes up for you.

Michael 45:00

For those listeners that are thinking about making a similar move, what advice would you have, based on the experience you've gathered so far?

Steve 45:11

Trust your gut, trust your gut, trust your gut. I wrote it three times in the book. I'm saying it three times here. You know, you know. And don't let logic choke you out. Don't let logic move you to a place that you can't move any longer because you can't solve the illogical parts of life with logic. So listen to yourself, trust your gut and, even if it doesn't make sense, if your gut's telling you to do it, do it anyway. Do it anyway. And do it anyway.

Michael 45:55

It takes, I think, a lot of trust, but also courage as well, to do that.

Steve 45:59

Even as I say it, it's scary. I'm a logical person. I work with numbers. My whole career I had a plan and, like I said, the greatest things in my life meeting my wife just randomly. They happen because you're listening to your gut, because you're trusting your intuition. And most people are trusting what their logic is telling them, and that's great. There needs to be a combination. We need to get back in touch with our intuitions. We need to get back in touch with our own innate wisdom. And that, for whatever reason that you or I cannot explain, and that will be another 18-hour podcast, it's we don't know what we don't know. We could claim that all this is going to teach us. There's plenty we don't know, and that's why churches exist. So we got to just trust. Trust that we're here for a reason. Trust that you have a purpose. And, when you find it, trust that you can make the next step.

Michael 47:05

So there are important skills, then, that are needed for this transition, trust being one of them, courage another one. Anything else that you would add on top of that?

Steve 47:19

Discipline for sure. Things aren't going to happen if you're not consistent. Patience, the world does not move at your speed. So definitely add discipline, patience. And then responsibility. You've got to take the responsibility, especially for people that are going to go through a transition. It's very easy to be like 'oh, he did this, he did that'. Anytime you're pointing that finger, like the old tale, you point one finger out, four fingers come back at you. You really got to take that responsibility for yourself. And life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you.

Redefining Success

Michael 48:01

Beautiful, absolutely. I think we're going to start to wrap up, but there is one last question that I'd like to take the opportunity to ask you, and that is about success and your definition of success. I'm wondering if you've seen a difference in how you define success now, having started this transition, versus earlier on.

Steve 48:28

Absolutely. For a lot of people, they think success is money. I thought success is money. Money is nothing to do with success. For me, the big point in the book was that the success came from finding my own way. It came from loving myself. And that's coming from a guy who's been in the pits. So when I talk about success, it's more about are you passionate, are you purposeful, are you moving in a direction of the future you that will be proud? And I am. And that's where the success comes from. And everyone has to define this word for themselves. I'm a success because I'm a father and a husband and I'm supporting a family. Like, there's so many different ways to succeed and you just got to figure out the ones that make you smile and keep doing those.

Where to Find More on Steve's Work

Michael 49:37

Steve, really thank you so much for sharing your experience and your backgrounds with us today. I feel I could keep talking to you for probably a few more hours on different topics. But I think for today we'll wrap it up here.

Michael 49:58

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

Steve 50:01

For moron Steve. Get it? For moron Steve, you can go to morons memoir, spelled m o r o n s m e m o i r. Morons memoir dot com is sort of the website where you can find the book. You can find the links to all my socials. I do meditations. I put out free meditations up there as well. I call them real-life situational meditations, rlsms, because that's where meditation is needed in real life. And I put a bunch of free access stuff on the website. And for those who are looking to heal through their own creativity, I have creativepostures dot com, creativepostures dot com. And that's our landing spot for those who are looking for mentorship or maybe helping with their own brand development or, most importantly, looking to heal through creativity and through our protocol there. So we have two legs here that support the table and we got all the socials. So I'm out there, I'm doing it, I'm trying to make sure it's public and ultimately a real person. So if somebody ever wants to connect, it will not be hard to get a real person on the other side.

Michael 51:14

Yeah, and eventually I'll be getting a webpage together with some of these details on it, so people can find you more easily.

Steve 51:20

Awesome

Michael 51:22

Any last thoughts you'd like to leave for the listeners?

Steve 51:27

Absolutely. The world, seemingly, is being torn apart. If you watch the news, you just see the division. And my personal mantra, and the reason I'm doing what I'm doing, it's because I think we need to be the glue. Any situation you find yourself in, especially when you disagree with someone, find the spot where you can be the glue. You can disagree, but you agree here. And if we concentrate on being the glue in society and with each other and in our relationships, we will start to heal. So that's all I would say is be the glue.

Michael 52:10

And with that, I think we're going to draw this to a close. It's a great message to leave on. Again, thank you very much Steve for your time and your generosity and I look forward to keeping in touch for another discussion at some point in the future.

Steve 52:23

Thank you for having me Mike. It's been a pleasure.

Michael 52:26

The pleasure is mine. Thanks Steve. Bye.