Career Reset Guide

The Conscious Path to Career Transitions

• Michael Davio Simmonds

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What if the most reliable guide for career change isn’t a plan, but your ability to stay present, welcome fear, and act from love? With spiritual mentor and meditation teacher Eva Liao, we explore how grounded spirituality can turn uncertainty into clarity while still honoring real-life needs like money, timelines, and family.

We redefine spirituality as connection to something larger and a return to our natural state of love and presence. Then we get practical: noticing fear without wrestling it, how welcoming discomfort frees energy, and why “the noticing of a negative is the greatest positive.” Eva shares a simple self-inquiry - name the fear, ask what you need, soothe yourself, and then ask, “Could it be that I can trust life right now?” That question shifts you from spiraling to your next steady step.

We dig into authenticity, healing, trusting both yourself and something bigger, and taking safer leaps with part-time bridges and nervous-system-aware planning. We explore choosing love over fear, body intelligence, and letting answers arise in everyday moments so your identity isn’t tied to outcomes.

If you’re at the edge of change - seeking meaning but wary of risk - these tools offer clarity and grounding.


Connect with Eva Liao:

Website:  www.evaliao.com

Instagram: iamevaliao

Explore Eva's course "Awakening" on her website




Connect with Michael Davio Simmonds:

Personal website: https://simmondscoachingservices.biz

Email: simmondscoachingservices@gmail.com

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

Michael:

I'd like to welcome to the podcast today Eva Liao. Eva, how are you?

Eva:

I'm really excited and grateful to be here.

Michael:

Every guest on this podcast brings something a little bit different to the topic of career transitioning. And in your case, we're going to bring in the perspective of spirituality. So to give the listeners a little bit of context to this, I think an observation I've made over the different podcasts in this series, and probably some of the listeners would have made it as well, is that everyone I've interviewed has actually touched on the topic of spirituality in their own way without actually labelling it as such. So today I thought we would come out of the closet, so to say, and name it for what it is. And I think this will give us an opportunity to explore the topic more freely, how it relates to career transitions, and how it can support us, particularly during periods I think of doubt, challenge, which I think is an inevitable part of making important transitions. So I think with that, let's start with the first question. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Eva, particularly what it is that you do for a living at the moment?

Eva:

So I am a spiritual mentor and meditation teacher. I generally keep it intentionally quite broad because I think my work as a spiritual mentor really encapsulates anything that brings people closer to I think our true nature, which is truth, love, and peace. But I generally feel like that's actually what we are all looking for, whether we call it that or not. And some of us end up taking windier paths. But I think that the spiritual route is the direct route.

Michael:

How about we start with some clarifications here on definitions? So for you, what is spirituality? What does it actually mean? Because for some people, it's quite a loaded word still. Some people associate it with being religious, other people associate it with um people that have their head in the clouds perhaps and are not very grounded. And other people who are probably spiritual think it's a great thing. So how would you describe it?

Eva:

Yeah, it's so funny because I'm gonna give you my answer now, and this could change tomorrow because it's incredibly abstract. Trying to answer this is trying to answer something that doesn't really have an answer. But to me, in this moment, spirituality is connection to something greater than myself. I am very connected to myself to be connected with the self, to be aware, to be connected to the present moment, and also the mystery of what is running this whole show. And I think when we are deeply connected in that way, there is a part of us that, you know, we're seeking truth. And I think in that process, you don't go on the spiritual path without experiencing more love, more universal love, a sense of non-separation between you and the other and nature and non-living things. Love is my true nature, and I forget it all the time. Right? I go back into fear or my story of being an Eva, but then when I am suffering, the gift of suffering is that it pushes me to look for how to get out of suffering, and again, the answer always comes back to some version of love and presence and non-separation.

Michael:

You brought in the aspect of love here, but there's also the aspect of challenge as well. So, how do we reconcile these two sides of ourselves? The fact that there's an aspect of us that's is seeking love, and yet we tend to experience many challenges, and all of that within the same human being.

Eva:

One thing I want to clarify is this idea of seeking love. I mean, I do think that a lot of people who are on the spiritual path are seekers, you know, they're curious. And it's not even about finding the answer, it's the experience of seeking itself. But I don't actually think we're seeking love. I think what we're doing is remembering that we are love. It's not something like outside of us. Without our mind and without our fear, what's left is love. So we're rubbing up against the contrast of like that being our true nature, and then also the fact that most of us are steeped in fear every day. I used to be like an incredibly fearful person. I mean, so, so anxious, really high strung. I think that's how my friends described me. And that came from a lot of like my trauma of growing up in a house that was violent, and I had an alcoholic parent. And so it was just wired into my nervous system, like I was always on edge. But the gift of that fear was that I was experiencing so much suffering that it pushed me into being like, I need to find some relief. I need relief from this because this is like not a sustainable way to live. And so I share that because the point that I'm trying to make is as many mystics and teachers of our time have said, the gift of suffering is that it is the doorway actually to liberation, because oftentimes suffering is when we say enough and we're humbled enough to look for a different way. And so one of the quotes that I love from Vernon Howard, he says, the noticing of a negative is the greatest positive. So this relates back to your question. Noticing fear, acknowledging that it's there, that's not actually a bad thing. It can actually be a beautiful thing. Noticing of the negative is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful positive because that's the beginning of change, essentially. It's this unconditional welcoming of all the stuff that kind of feels terrible and letting it guide us to a better way.

Michael:

Yeah, I like the use of your word welcoming, because I think instinctively we push away the discomfort, however we might describe that discomfort. And I think what you're actually saying is no, let's embrace it, let's bring it closer, something like that.

Eva:

100%. I think you're speaking on something very important and also very human, just how we're conditioned or taught is that we want to make the bad feelings go away and we tend to fight against them. And we actually believe that's how we get out of it. But it's actually what perpetuates it. But also we all forget, especially when it's a feeling that we don't want to feel, in a nanosecond, our habit is to either ignore it or change it or fix it or make it go away. But in reality, you'll notice that that doesn't work. And the only thing that does work, you had said embrace it. I think I would use the word allow or welcome or to notice. I mean, you guided me through a really lovely meditation earlier. And even the noticing is a really sweet, welcoming. My partner said to me, could it be that just noticing is enough? And at the time, I was like, no way, noticing is not enough. But what he was talking about was like to be in the observer seat and how loving that observer is. You know, it's really unconditional. And over time I start to see, like, whoa, this noticing of how I'm feeling and allowing it to be here is actually incredibly transformational. It's the beginning step to making real change because then you become more attuned to yourself, you can start supporting yourself, you give yourself what you really need rather than like running around in a hamster wheel going nowhere.

Michael:

Yeah. That noticing brings us into the present moment. And I think that's where we experience joy. And so much of the time, or at least in my mind anyway, I think my mind is either projecting me into the future or the past. So a lot of the time I'm not actually present in this moment. So yeah, noticing can be very powerful if it means coming into the present moment.

Eva:

I love this because I think you're bringing in all these different spiritual principles that are all connected and sometimes are the same thing. So you talked about how noticing is like presence. And honestly, you could spend a lifetime just mastering presence. That one theme could take a lifetime because you could go so deep with that, even just like a brief moment of noticing, like allowing yourself to experience no past and no future, and noticing what your presence is like in that experience. And I have often found that without a past and without a future, I'm reminded of oh wait, that's actually who I am. And it's like a really good feeling, and if we can get there, it's no small feat.

Michael:

You mentioned that it's a beautiful experience to be in that presence. And I would say, and being in that presence is when I start to observe stuff rising in me which I didn't see before and actually doesn't feel very pleasant. So I fully agree with you that the beautiful moments in my life are when I'm fully present, but also some of the ugly moments in my life as well are when I'm in presence. Does that make any sense?

Eva:

100%. And to connect this back to what we were saying earlier, I think there's a real gift in that. Because I really believe that things don't come up unless we're ready to experience them. Right. So when we have a lot of trauma or something going on, like a lot of stuff is suppressed and it doesn't come out because our body is actually quite intelligent and it's saying, like, I'm not ready yet. And then sometimes we do some self-care or personal development, and then all of a sudden all of this stuff comes up. You'd think it's gonna be blissful and floating on a cloud, but it's actually quite torrential. But I think it's actually a beautiful sign because if it does come up, it's like you've evolved to a place where you can actually begin to hold what's coming up for you. So that's one thing. And then the other thing I would say about that is yeah, it's true that the uncomfortable stuff comes up. We start to notice what's living inside of us, our negativity, our fear, our jealousy, pain in the body that maybe we previously were ignoring. But again, the noticing of a negative is the greatest positive because you're bringing it from the unconscious to the conscious level, and that's the only way that you can be free of it. And then it's about having the skillfulness for knowing how to respond to the difficult things that come up that change the whole game.

Michael:

So as part of the spiritual journey, healing is a part of that journey. And I think at this point, I'd like to start to make the connection to career transition. Maybe we could start by asking the question: what is the relationship between spirituality and making career transitions? And I think the two areas that come up for me are first of all, authenticity. So a lot of people I think that would like to make career transitions are looking to do something that's more authentic to who they are. This then gets into understanding who am I, and the more that I can understand about who I am, the more authentically I can manifest my career. And that gets into the topic then of connection to self. And I think the other element is related to going back to healing to make these transitions. As you I think are very aware, we go through a healing process because, by definition, if we're seeking more authenticity, it's implying that we've been going against our true nature. And so as soon as we stop going against our true nature or seeking more authenticity, then stuff is probably gonna rise up that's been suppressed. Anyway, this is just one or two thoughts coming to me. What do you think, Eva?

Eva:

I mean, honestly, I loved how you just weaved those things together. To me, spirituality is simply just the how of how we do anything. How do we move through our business living our spirituality? And so that can look like a lot of different things. It's almost like spirituality is just this really helpful framework for how we can respond to the challenges of like going into a new career. And I think, for example, that might look like really trusting yourself, like developing a sense of self-trust. And some people might just call that personal development, but I do think that in some ways there's a Venn diagram where personal development and spirituality are... there's a crossover, you know? It's just a different word for the same thing, oftentimes. But it's this idea of learning how to trust yourself while also trusting something bigger than yourself. For me, I think being an entrepreneur and going for this dream that you have is essentially going to show you everything that isn't working, and again, in a really good way. It's self-help boot camp and it's going to ask you to like up-level your game. And then again, I think spirituality is like the skillful means in which we learn how to respond to these limitations. And oftentimes it's limitations of the mind. It's really our mind. But oftentimes I have seen our mind is just so loud and it can be incredibly dangerous when we're believing our negative thoughts and our fearful and stressful and scarcity thoughts. And so much of spirituality is also about coming into again the present, coming into your body, coming into love, which is the absence of your mind. It's not that your mind isn't there, but it's not running the show. Or sometimes it's absence of a story, which to me is very synonymous with absence of the mind. To be able to move through not just your business but your life without a story, that's for me this ongoing practice that I'm still working on.

Michael:

Absolutely. I notice a huge difference in the way that I approach situations and I experience situations when I allow myself to be drawn into the thought processes of the mind versus when I can stand back and observe the mind, observe my thoughts. And I'm actually going through quite a big transition in my life at the moment for different reasons, and even after all the personal development work that I've done, there is something that is coming up in me where it feels so challenging sometimes to disidentify with the thoughts of the mind. There's still a tendency for me to attach to the beliefs of the mind and to create the story around that.

Eva:

Can I share something about that?

Michael:

Please do.

Eva:

So, welcome to being a human, right? I mean, I think that's just I want to normalize that. And I think oftentimes, especially for people who've been on this path for quite some time, of growth or spiritual awakening, it becomes a lot easier for us to have the story of I should know better. We use our growth to attack ourselves because we're like, I have been doing this for so long, blah blah blah, this shouldn't be happening anymore. And the truth is, and again, this comes back to the welcoming, is that we can never change if there's self-condemnation in the equation. Self-condemnation is just your ego, and it's really tricky, and it's coming in thinking that it's helping, maybe, because it can be this internal cataprod that we think is gonna help us be more productive. But the only answer to noticing that we're still struggling with the same thing or we're struggling with a new thing is compassion. There is no other way. You can only love yourself into change, at least in a sustainable way. You can condemn yourself in a self-attack for some time, but it's not gonna lead to lasting happiness.

Michael:

Right. How can we relate this to typical challenges of career transitioners?

Eva:

Well, for starters, noticing anywhere where you are being really hard on yourself, and I almost feel like it goes hand in hand. I don't know any business owner or entrepreneur who isn't kind of a jerk to themselves sometimes. It's a lot of pressure and it can be really stressful, and sometimes we need to pay the bills, and we think that the way to motivate ourselves is through a self-attack, the condemnation, the criticism. And it can be really loud. And again, we're just confused because we truly believe that it's effective. There's some part of us that still thinks it's effective, but we also know in reality, not only is it not effective, but it's doing the opposite of what you want it to do. It's draining you of energy and self-trust and life force energy, and it's exhausting, and then you get overwhelmed. So, again, just practicing to see if you can trust self-compassion, which is extending kindness to the parts of yourself that are suffering. So, again, you could spend a lifetime on that practice alone and you would be an incredibly evolved person.

Michael:

I think it's inevitable that going through big change, that critic comes up because we then find ourselves in a position of having to do things that we haven't done before. And obviously, there's a learning curve to go through to be able to make it to the other side. And so as we're going through that learning curve, that's exactly the moment when this self-critic is likely to come up. Why couldn't I have done this before? Why didn't I do it quicker? Why is it taking me so long? etc. etc. At least those will be some of mine anyway. If we broaden this topic a little bit, we could ask the question, why is spirituality relevant or how is it relevant to career transition? And as a general comment, I guess the way I think about career transition is it's going into the unknown. It's going through what can feel like radical change, letting go of what we've known perhaps for many years. And in my own particular case, it took a lot of suffering for me to let go of the old identity and to transition into something new. If you take the typical person that I coach from the corporate world, a lot of them would prefer to hold themselves in a job which probably isn't very healthy for them because it gives them the financial security. So then the idea of leaving that financial security raises a huge fear in a lot of people. Other fears could be, you know, I'm not good enough to do it, you know, I'll never be successful at that. I can't do that, that's for other people, I'm just not capable to do it. So I think what's coming up for me is the fears that get in the way of us taking that first step even towards an authentic career. A lot of people don't even make the step because of those fears.

Eva:

Yeah, it's really hard to take the leap. It's really scary. Especially if you have a family and you have to take care of little ones, like it can feel really, really high stakes. You could lose it all. And there is no denying that. And that's what it means to live a bold and daring life, like to take risks. And anybody who is an entrepreneur is taking a huge effing risk because you don't know if you're gonna fall on your face. But I think that's true of any creative, right? Any person who creates music or art or follows their passion. I think when we experience enough suffering, we can see actually that there's no other choice, oftentimes. It's because we're so unhappy and so miserable and so you know disconnected from ourselves, or not being true to ourselves, or being so inauthentic that we end up getting sick, or something happens where we're just like, I can't keep living this untruth. And so when I talk about people taking the leap, I want to be very clear, there are responsible ways to do that. Some people can just take the leap, and good for them, their nervous system has the capacity for a lot of change. But for some people, when I say take the leap, you can do that in a safer way. So maybe you transition from full-time to part-time. You can take like practical steps, but you don't have to do in a way where you totally blow out all of your systems. But you can move in that direction, and that's still taking the leap.

Michael:

Yeah, I really like what you said there. I'm curious, is there an example in your own life that demonstrates some of these principles?

Eva:

Well, I can tell you what I wish I did do what I didn't do.

Michael:

That works as well. It's the learning you're sharing.

Eva:

So I'm really sharing from personal experience. After I got my life coaching certification, I ended up working with a coach that really emphasized you can have your six figures in a couple of months. You know, you could have the six-figure business. And then I worked with another coach after who was much more practical, and she was like, I actually recommend that all of my clients keep their day jobs for a while so that they can continue to make money, so that they're not super stressed out, so that they're not in scarcity mode, and so that they're not running their business from scarcity mode. And I was like, wow, that sounds a lot safer to me. And I think I would have liked doing it that way instead. But I don't actually think there's like a right or a wrong way. I mean, I'm really happy with the way that my path has gone. But I just think we want to be really careful getting sucked into the stories that sometimes we might see on social media about the overnight success.

Michael:

Yeah, exactly. Well, what I liked about what you said there is that sometimes taking small steps might be necessary in order to minimize the fear. Because when we go into fear, it's usually not from fear that we make the best decisions about ourselves and our future.

Eva:

100%, yeah.

Michael:

And I think the risk as well of being in that fear is well, we could say that we create our own reality. So if the fear is very strong, there's a risk that we create a reality that we're not looking for.

Eva:

I could not agree more. I really think that this is where the mindset piece, which is to me a spiritual piece, is really important. But I also want to take a moment to talk about trust and coming back to this connection between spirituality and career transition. Because I talked about taking the leap, right? And how it is a risk. Following your heart, I think, in our world can be a risk. But I'm really interested in this idea of trusting life. This idea of having trust in something greater than ourselves, trust in life, trust in God, if you're comfortable using that word, which for me, I didn't grow up religious, so it doesn't really bother me. But when I say like trusting God and life, I don't necessarily mean I'm just trusting life to help me have a successful business. Like it's much greater than that. It's that I'm trusting life to be like, oh, actually, if I fall completely on my ass and this is a complete disaster, and this turns out not to be the path for me, that I can trust that as well because there's a greater plan. And I think it's really important to extend what we think trust looks like because if we're like, oh, we have to trust life to make sure that it's gonna make me successful, we're still coming in with our own agenda. And that's not actually trusting life at all. Does that make sense?

Michael:

Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And actually, there's a lot of questions coming up for me now around this area of trust. I think it's a great topic. I think the first one is what are we actually trusting in? And is there a risk that we end up trusting in something outside of ourself rather than trusting ourselves?

Eva:

There's so much that I want to say about what it is that I trust in, but I actually think it's really important that every individual and every listener find that out for themselves. What is it that you trust in? What is it that you feel like you can trust in? And I think that takes a lot of investigation and curiosity and excavation, which has been my process. But what I mean by trusting life and trusting God is first just acknowledging the truth, which is that you do not know how you got here, you do not know how you breathe, you do not know how food is grown, you do not know how music is made and then it hits your ears. There's this humility of understanding that you just don't know, right? And when we come into this I don't know space of Byron Katie, she's someone whose work I greatly admire. We're in this space of I don't know mind, and then we can open up to seeing actually the support that's actually here in every second of our lives. It's almost like everything is a miracle. Every tiny little thing is a miracle. And so something is running the show. I don't know what it is, and it's ineffable, and I might not be able to name it, and that's also where the mind gets in the way because we really want to know. I really want to know, and I intellectually really want to understand it. But that just really gets in my way because I don't think it's knowable. It's not knowable from a head space, but it's knowable from a heart space or from awareness or consciousness. It's like there's no denying that there is something here that is making all of this work, and it's incredible, and that is the thing that I'm trusting in, which is this thing that I don't know. Do you know what I mean? I experience it as very loving. The fact that I exist, something must love me because my body and the miracle that it is is giving me life. So if there's something here that is love, it's like love is the thing that's running this whole show, and so can I trust that? So even if I fall completely on my face with my business, what if I could trust that too?

Michael:

That's very beautiful what you're saying now. When we think about it, we control so little of our daily reality. I mean, how much do I control the fact that my heart beats? How much do I control my digestion system? How much do I control even the breathing that happens every moment? I have no control over that. Well, okay, I could say that I can breathe faster or slower, but the fact that I breathe.

Eva:

But even if you're breathing or at faster slow, you still don't know how you do that.

Michael:

Exactly. And then we zoom out even further, and we look at the fact that we're living on a planet which was created long before I was born, and then we zoom out even further, and that planet is part of a larger cosmos, which I had nothing to do with.

Eva:

Which is completely unlimited. There's no limit. Like we are just part of a galaxy that's part of another galaxy, that's part of another galaxy. And then if you want to get really trippy with it, which is like so fun to contemplate, is like you can say that's true of the cosmos, and then that's like the macro, and then you can take that all the way into like the micro and notice that that's true of every atom as well, which is that within an atom, there's no end to that. We think there's something solid, and then you go into the solid piece, and then you see actually no, that's also just more space. And in more space, you think you find something solid, it's just more space. It's unlimited in both directions.

Michael:

I like your phrase trippy. That's a good one. So coming back to trust, then, there's the trap that we end up trusting in something which is beyond us or which we perceive outside of us, rather than realizing that we have to trust ourselves.

Eva:

When I say that I'm trusting God, I'm also saying that I'm trusting myself. It gets really tricky. We are all God, like every single one of us. We're all one thing. And so it's a living paradox, a beautiful paradox. And so this thing that you're trusting that's outside of yourself, it isn't this white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud, it's your higher self, essentially, which is also in connection with source and consciousness.

Michael:

I'm a little bit hesitant to say that I am God, but I see myself as an aspect of God. At least the way I phrase it is we are each an aspect of God. And the image that comes to me is um I don't know if you listen to any Pink Floyd. Maybe you remember the album cover Dark Side of the Moon. And on Dark Side of the Moon, you've got this prism, and on one side of the prism, you've got the white light that's shining into the prism, and then the white light diffracts, and then you've got the different colours of the rainbow coming out of the other side. So for me, this is kind of a metaphor for our relationship with God. So God is the white light which is diffracted through time and space, and each of us is a representation of that white light of God.

Eva:

So beautiful. First of all, I I love that you can bring that because that's such a iconic image. And so I can really bring that to my mind. And I think that's a beautiful way to describe it.

Michael:

Well, I can't take all the credit for this. I think I'm inspired in that comment by Rupert Spira.

Eva:

Well, I think I just want to emphasize also that I can say all of this and like blah blah blah, all these words are coming out of my mouth, but I'm fully conscientious of the fact that, again, this is the indescribable. You have your descriptions, and Rupert Spira has the descriptions, and scientists and priests, they're all trying to describe the same thing. The scientists are trying to understand it and measure it, and the spiritualists are trying to feel it. But it's all unknowable, actually, in like a really beautiful way. It's all ineffable, indescribable, because we don't really know. We can only guess. And I'm okay with that.

Michael:

Hmm. Yeah. I'm gonna try to connect a couple of points together here. So we've touched on the topic of fear, we've touched on the topic of trust. How can somebody move through fear with more trust? What's the pathway there?

Eva:

I think a few avenues. I'd love to just walk through a really basic practice of self-inquiry if you're open to that.

Michael:

Yeah, please do.

Eva:

Yeah. And again, this is so practical. This might be something that people already do. At first, I think it's about becoming aware of what your fear is. Sometimes we're living in fear and we're anxious and we're restless and we don't even know what it is that we're scared about. So the first step is just to really identify what it is. Sometimes it can be really, really loud, like I'm just afraid I'm not gonna have enough money. And sometimes we need to get still and get really quiet, like you said, and maybe come into a meditation or just breathe, and just give ourselves space to feel and actually to be shown what it is that we're afraid of. And sometimes it's not what we think that it is. Sometimes maybe the fear is I think I'm not gonna make enough money, but the fear underneath that is the shame. I'm actually terrified of feeling shame because it feels like it's gonna kill me. So again, just the noticing is a really important and skillful practice. And then it's like once you can pinpoint what it is that you're afraid of, it's really attuning to yourself, connecting with yourself, coming into your higher self voice and asking, what is it that you need? What is it that would be really, really supportive for you in this moment? It's self-nurturing in a way. And sometimes the answer is we take an action, maybe. But oftentimes I found the answer is some sort of comforting, soothing, nurturing self-talk. And oftentimes I just need to honestly just say something to myself that'll make me feel better. That's very soothing. And so we just get to a point of like a little bit of relief, a little bit of calm. And once we've shifted into that state, I think we're more receptive to this question. So this is a question that I have found to be a practice that I have actually found to be really revolutionary in my life, and it's so simple, which is to get really present and still and ask myself: could it be that in this moment, this moment, not one nanosecond before and not one nanosecond after, but in this moment, could it be that I can trust life right now? And I want people who are listening to really take a moment to sit down and ask yourself that question in this moment, can you trust life? And so far, I've not found a moment where I couldn't trust life in the present moment. And it's been so sweet to see that. I've been quite humbled because I'm constantly living in fear, but in reality, I've seen that I've been taken care of in every moment. I'm sitting in a chair that's supporting me, and I have air, and I'm actually safe, and I have all of my needs met, and reality is way more kind than my fear is.

Michael:

I think that's a great point that you're making. So I could imagine some people's reactions to what you've just said. How can I trust life when something bad has happened in their life, they've lost a relationship, for example.

Eva:

Yes. And here's the thing, most people are gonna argue, well, that's impractical. Like you can't live that way. That's at least what I imagine people saying, well, yeah, sure, that sounds nice in the moment, but I can't live that moment by moment. But I'm actually like, it's actually more insane to not live like this. What is it that causes suffering? It's past and future. Like my mind, I often go directly to homeless for some reason. Or I see images of the past of where I had difficult times with money, or my family had difficult times with money, and then I create this whole reality for myself that's just in my mind. We live in an insane world and we're believing past and future. Like those aren't real. There's only ever one thing that's real, and that is the present moment, and that it is more sane to live that way. When I say be in the present moment, it's not with like a finger pointed at you where you're like, if you're not being in the present moment, then you're doing it wrong. If you come out of the present moment, don't condemn yourself. Ask yourself again, but could it be in this moment I could trust life? You just keep doing it over and over. I talked about identifying the fear, but it's also about identifying the feelings. What we're really afraid of oftentimes isn't the situation, it's how it makes us feel. The thing that we're most afraid of is the feeling that it creates inside of ourselves. We talked about before, you're not rejecting the feeling, you're welcoming it in, and you're letting yourself feel the feeling. Let it have its life, not so that it overtakes you, but so that it doesn't overtake you. And I think you can start to see that all of these things are connected. It's all a very loving practice of like unconditional love.

Michael:

So the trick is to try to disidentify with the mind by coming into the present moment. Because if we're not doing that, the mind is projecting us into the future or the past. And with anxiety, we're usually projecting ourselves into the future, imagining some worst-case scenario, which by one statistic 90% of the time doesn't actually come true.

Eva:

Which is why I say that is an insane way to live, which is how most of us live. People think living in the present is like insane because that's not practical. And I'm like, well, I don't think the other way is working for you either, but right, exactly.

Michael:

I'd like to try to touch on just one or two other topics related to career transition, bringing it back to the main theme. Why bother taking a spiritual path? If I'm going through a career transition, what is the payback? Or what is the benefit of taking a spiritual path versus well, a non-spiritual path, let's say a more traditional approach?

Eva:

Well, there's something that I love about your question because I think it points to the answer, which is that if we are going to the spiritual path because of the benefit that we get out of it, it's not gonna work. The people who have chosen to take a spiritual path oftentimes are forced into it. And what I mean by that is they came up against a really challenging life situation that humbled them, where they realized, I don't know shit. Like you're humbled. And it isn't until you are humbled where you know, you have a life-threatening thing, something wrong with your child, you're ill, you've gone bankrupt with my circumstances because I grew up in a violent home and I was like confused. I was humbled to the point where I looked for something bigger. And so it is those people who have had really challenging life circumstances that have completely opened up their hearts, that then the spiritual path finds them. And then what happens is you're this humbled, open place where you're not trying to be like, what do I get out of it? I almost feel like if you're gonna take the spiritual path, you'll get there because life will have taken you there. Rather than why would I choose it over like the more logical traditional path? And I think the truth is you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. I don't actually think it's fruitful to convince anybody that they need to choose the spiritual path unless they see that for themselves, because that's the only time it will be beneficial or meaningful. And on the flip side of that, I actually know a lot of people who I think are choosing the spiritual path, but they would not say that. They don't call it that because of maybe some associations that they have with spirituality. It's just not something that they resonate with. But if you are a person who is trying to live your life in love and kindness and self-awareness, being really grounded in yourself, to me, that is the spiritual path. And I think there are some people who live that way and run their business that way and would never call themselves spiritual. There are a lot of scientists out there who they don't call themselves spiritual, but they're very spiritual in the fact that their science has shown them that they don't know anything. They can continue to try and measure, but it's all just one big mystery. And to me that feels very spiritual.

Michael:

Yeah, that's an important point that the word spirituality can seem very lofty. And people, I think, use it with a certain arrogance behind it as well. I'm spiritual, you're not, I'm above you, something like that. But just living a life connected to love, exactly as you said, is being spiritual. Another topic, I'm switching between topics here just to get through some material.

Eva:

I love it, it's like lightning around.

Michael:

How can spirituality help us to move closer to a meaningful life, a meaningful career? The background to that comment is some reasonable percentage of the people I'm typically working with, if they were given free choice, they wouldn't do the job that they were doing. If they had all the resources in the world, they wouldn't be doing the work that they're doing at the moment. So the work for a lot of people, whether they're conscious of it or not, whether they choose to admit it or not, it's a paycheck. So we can have some enjoyable experiences still with that mindset.

Eva:

100%.

Michael:

The paycheck is important and it brings other benefits such as I go into work and I interact with people, I develop skills, I grow myself as a person.

Eva:

I have stability.

Michael:

There you go. But those people are often not living a meaningful life. So spirituality in some way for me should bring us closer to something that's meaningful. And as I'm talking to you now, I'm just relating this back in my own mind to authenticity. I guess the more connected we are to ourselves, the more likely we are to engage in life in a way that is meaningful to us.

Eva:

Yes, I have a lot I want to say about that. But before I jump in, I would actually love to ask you to talk a little bit more about what you mean when you say being connected to ourselves, like living authentically and what that looks like. Because that feels like that's been a really important part of your own journey and your process. And I get the sense that it's actually something that you are committed to living authentically. And I'm curious to know what you think that means for people to be connected to ourselves and live authentically.

Michael:

You can't do that. Back engineering, my questions.

Eva:

I know, kind of blindsides people sometimes, but I think it makes for more interesting conversations.

Michael:

Absolutely. Well, what I observed about myself is that I worked for a number of years in roles which were not authentic to myself, which were asking something from me which I could give, but it took a lot of energy for me to give that because I was having to learn to do that rather than me flowing with what comes naturally to me. And I ended up burning out. It took me to go through that before life, I think, forced me to see my first coach. I think those discussions started to make me reflect more and I think feel more. What do I really want for myself? What do I truly enjoy? And realizing that it's quite different than what I was doing in my day job. And so the more that I started to explore that and to take action on it, for example, to do a coach training myself, the more I experienced a kind of a positive feeling in myself, which was so different than what I was experiencing in daily life. It was clear to me that I was connecting with something different just based on the feeling that I was experiencing.

Eva:

Yes, I think it's so relatable. I appreciate you sharing that with me. And I feel like that brings us back to your question then of do you remember what it was?

Michael:

How can spirituality help us to live a more meaningful life?

Eva:

Right. Well, I think it's so interesting in the context of what you're sharing. I think if you realize that you're stuck at a job that isn't actually serving your soul and you're ready to make a transition, you're hungry for that. I think spirituality can help us to take the action that we want to take to live a more authentic life. And then I think there's spirituality for the person who's in a different stage where they're maybe afraid and they're not yet ready to leave their job, or maybe they decide to never leave their job because they're making a conscious choice to choose stability over their passion. And I don't actually think there's anything wrong with that as long as it's a sovereign choice. And spirituality can help us to find meaning outside of our job, to find meaning outside of what we produce every day. And that gets into having practices that help us again feel more connected to all of life, not just to the basic things like our family and our job, but the micro details of our everyday, which could be as simple as really savoring your coffee in the morning, really loving the music that you listen to, enjoying the texture of your bed sheets and the sun on your skin. People talk about how these are the little things, but the little things are actually the big things. It's like where you are actually more available for all of life to come in, where you can create meaning, essentially, outside of your job, which I think everybody needs to do.

Michael:

Yeah. What you're saying, which I think is a good point, is that where we derive meaning from doesn't have to be about our job. For a lot of people, it's not the only area of our life where we can derive it from. A lot of people derive meaning from the relationships outside of the work or some hobby that they have.

Eva:

Yeah. What I'm realizing is spirituality can help us find meaning in something that is immovable. Because I think the truth is like all of these things, our jobs, our health, our relationships, they're all changing. And to put our happiness on these things that we don't have any control over, I think is oftentimes what puts us on this emotional roller coaster while we're happy one day and then sad the next. I think spirituality is a lot about how can we put our meaning in something that is not changeable? And what is that? I think is the ultimate question.

Michael:

Actually, what it provokes in me is this is about a way of being in the world. So we are all here to be something, but not in the doing sense, but in the essence sense, that there is an essence behind each of us, and the more that we be that essence, the more that we then automatically manifest something in the world which is a reflection of our essence, and that then brings perhaps meaning, but it all goes back to us being the essence of who we are, something like that.

Eva:

Oh my, I mean, I think that's a mic drop moment right there. You know, we're done. I think that is on the money, and I'm really happy you brought that up. It is about being is a spiritual practice. What is spirituality? It's like this being, which is also another word I think for presence. But I do think that's how we can find meaning in our lives through spirituality, which is nothing to do with what we're doing and everything to do with how we are being and experiencing our presence in the moment. And I do agree with you actually that the more that we can live from this being place, the richer our lives become organically, actually, without us needing to effort to make things come to us. And I think that's what true quote-unquote manifestation is. I think there's a lot of dysfunctional dialogue out there about what manifestation is, but I actually think it's just manifestation of our own inner being, our human beingness, that is naturally projected when we are in our beingness.

Michael:

So we're talking about meaning, which is related to us going back to our essence. How do we recognize when we are out of alignment with our essence?

Eva:

I mean, that's easy, just anytime we're suffering. Anytime you notice tension. Like anytime you notice tension or suffering, it means we're not in the truth, which just shows actually how often all of us, myself included, are straying from our true nature, which is love. But I think it's so important that I emphasize that that doesn't mean it's bad. There's zero self-condemnation there. If anything, I find it a very good thing to notice when I am suffering because it's just showing me I've forgotten again, silly me. It's like not so serious. And I can't say that it's not always serious. I obviously also very much get into my own swirls. And I fall asleep, and then I wake up again, and I fall asleep, and I wake up again. But it's just so gratifying to me. Every time I notice that I'm suffering, it just means that I've forgotten my true nature. You know, you can be progressing on the path and still have that experience, not because you're messing it up, but because the depth of which you can experience peace and love is so profound. It's so deep. So you can keep going a long, long way. And I have found that the deeper you go on this path, your capacity for love just gets even bigger. And so you notice the suffering more in some ways because you catch on to it faster. And also it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It's just noticing that your capacity for love is just growing.

Michael:

Do you think we're destined to suffer in this world?

Eva:

Oh, absolutely not. I think we're destined to awaken. Like the Buddha says, pain is a part of life, but suffering is optional. And I actually think that we're here for one purpose, all of us, and that is to awaken.

Michael:

Well, this ties back to uh a point that you were making earlier on. The reason that we suffer is because of resistance to the present moment. Resistance to the situation in front of us. So if we're more open to what's actually happening, then again, the fact that I lose part of my wealth, it's an observation, but it doesn't need to lead to suffering. Losing the money itself isn't actually changing the present moment. But we're so programmed around the value of money, and I think it's difficult for most people, including myself, to feel that I could lose money and just be ambivalent to it. I think one of the last questions I'd like to raise here is making career decisions. How can the spiritual path help us to make better informed career decisions?

Eva:

Well, I actually think you touched on this earlier about how we don't really make great decisions from fear. And one of my guiding spiritual principles is to choose love over fear and to make decisions from a place of love rather than fear. So it's actually really helpful. It becomes like a North Star. Let's say you're in a business and you have to decide if you want to spend $5,000 hiring someone to help you in your business, or you've been working in your business for two years and you're not making enough money, and you have to decide if you want to take a side job, or you have to have a difficult conversation with your partner about something with your job. And it's really just about coming into yourself and noticing, are you making a decision motivated by fear, or is it that you're motivated by love? And to be able to trust love, it is about following your heart. And I've actually been surprised because sometimes I think that choosing love means that I'll choose the more quote unquote seemingly idealistic choice. But sometimes choosing love means I make a very practical choice. You know, I'm gonna decide to not go on vacation and spend the week working on this project that I'm really invested in. And that may not seem like that's a loving choice, but actually it feels like love to me. Does that make sense?

Michael:

Well, so I think what you're saying is that there are different types of feeling inside us, which we could call positive feelings, but the motivation is different. So love, for example, the way that you're using the word love is different than desires that I may have.

Eva:

Hmm. Yeah.

Michael:

See what I'm trying to say? So I may have a desire to procrastinate and go to the beach instead of doing the work. But that decision isn't being made from a place of love. So there's love and there's something else that might motivate us, which may appear to be love, because it may give us a positive feeling, but it's something different.

Eva:

Yes. And I think that in itself is practice of like, what is even love? And as someone who's been in this work for a long time, that's an unanswerable question. I'm just kind of feeling into it. I don't know if I could completely describe it spot on. So that in itself is a worthwhile exploration, but it's not the same thing as fun or desire, like you're saying. It's more like, how would I think about my nephew who I love and adore unconditionally? And I think how would I treat him in that situation? And it could be that in that situation, I think that he should go do his homework instead of go to the beach. But and sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes what's loving is that he goes to the beach instead of doing his homework. You figure that out on a moment-by-moment basis.

Michael:

Yeah.

Eva:

And then if I could add one more thing to this piece about how do we make decisions, we've talked about getting out of the head. We're not in the mind as much, we live more in the body. And with someone who is quite cerebral, it's been this practice of actually not making choices from up here, but listening to my body. And I think my body has a natural intelligence. And I literally check in with my body and ask my body what it wants to do or what it thinks it should do. And it doesn't always give me the most logical answer, but usually I can just sense and feel that it's more right for me.

Michael:

Yeah, I love that. Exactly. It's almost like the answer is being channeled through us.

Eva:

And it goes back to what our conversation earlier about, something that is greater than us, and it is us, and it's this paradox of this connection to something that's outside of us, but is also us simultaneously.

Michael:

Well, I find myself these days when I'm making decisions, I mean, sure, often there's some kind of an intellectual thought process which is associated with me making those decisions. But I find myself allowing the answers more to come to me rather than my mind trying to reach out to grab onto an answer. It almost feels exhausting to me now to have all of these thoughts running through my mind and having my mind try to grab onto an answer versus sure thinking things over, raising my awareness on the important points, and then kind of going into a period of stillness and allowing an answer to come to me. This is a little bit of an idealistic description I'm giving, but I see myself orienting more in that direction than when I was in the corporate world. I think when I was in the corporate world, I was doing a very analytical type of a job anyway. And I think I've been so heavily trained and conditioned to think my way through life.

Eva:

Yes.

Michael:

And I think what I'm experiencing now is exactly the opposite.

Eva:

I think this is such a logical, practical way of making decisions in our business and in our life. And I just want to add that I have the same practice. We're so conditioned to be analytical, and I don't actually think that that's wrong. I think there's a time and place for that, but the scales are just too tipped in that direction, and we just want to tip it back into actually more like listening. So my practice is very, very similar to yours, and I give it space, but I really will sometimes just speak to life and I'll just say reveal to me what it is that I need to know or some information that I need or what I don't yet know. And then I just set it in the backdrop and I just kind of like leave it in my subconscious mind. And I oftentimes find that the answers will reveal themselves to me or will come to me. It's not so different from people when they talk about sleep on it and give it some time. And I think it's because when we're not grasping and we don't have a chokehold around trying to make a decision, it can actually come to us really organically and it makes life a lot easier.

Michael:

I'm trying to think this through for myself. In the cases where maybe I felt that the answer didn't come to me, it was either because I was too much in the fear and I wasn't allowing the answer therefore to come to me, or I needed more time. I find I need a certain time to make these decisions. I need the time to feel into the decision, and that feeling doesn't always come immediately, at least in my case. Okay, Eva, where can people find out more about you and what you do?

Eva:

Uh so we come to the end. I feel like the tip of the iceberg, you know, when it comes to talking about spirituality. Where can people find me? Well, I am the most present, even though I wouldn't even say I'm that present, on Instagram. So you can find me at 'I am Eva Liao'. And there are a couple ways to work with me. Oh, I'm really excited about this. I have this course called 'Awakening', and it actually covers a lot of what we talk about here and some really fun foundational spiritual practices. It was a paid course that I had available for people that I've just turned into a free course, and you can find that on my website at 'evaliao.com'. So if there are things in this conversation that you found supportive and you want to learn more about, you can go there. And then also, we didn't even get into talking about it, but I spend half of my time in the jungle of Brazil, and it's this beautiful, mystical life that I've ended up in. And we run retreats there. They're really, really, really beautiful and profound and fun. We also run retreats around the world. You can also learn more about that on my website, or you can just DM me, send me a message on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you.

Michael:

Any last comments, advice that you might offer people going through an important career transition?

Eva:

I guess the last thing that coming up for me is that I know it may be hard to remember when we're in our fear state, but it it's really not that serious. If we can make it less high stakes and just remember that it's not all so serious, and we're actually here to have fun, I just wish I could impart that on people, and that's so much also what I hope to share with people in my work because we get really caught up in some silly shit, and I think we're here to have a good time, and I really want that for people.

Michael:

Okay, great. By the way, you did a very good job at keeping this clean except right at the end, but I'm not gonna edit that out, I'm gonna leave it in. Woohoo. Living life on the edge. Alright, so Eva, it's been a real pleasure talking to you.

Eva:

Yes, thank you so, so, so much for having me. It's been an honor.

Michael:

I think this has really taken me into some new territory.

Eva:

Oh good, that's really what I hoped to share with people. To get them just to crack open consciousness a little bit. It's really fun for me.

Michael:

Thanks for your generous comments and wish you all the best with your continuation.

Eva:

Thank you. Bye.