Brandon Held - Life is Crazy

Episode 76: From Rock Bottom To Purpose And Joy with Kellan Fluckiger

• Brandon Held • Season 3 • Episode 76

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We share a raw path from childhood abuse and lifelong depression to a hard stop with addiction, a surprising love story, and a steady rebuild through truth, service, and purpose. The core message is simple and fierce: you matter, it’s never too late, and your story is your gold.

• childhood discipline and its lasting scars 
• identity shaped by not being good enough 
• success followed by self-sabotage and MDD 
• the Intervention night and “it is enough” moment 
• quitting cocaine cold turkey and seeking help 
• learning to tell the truth and be a partner 
• reframing success as service, purpose and joy 
• preventing suicide by choosing tomorrow 
• writing as healing and owning your story 
• gratitude practice and mindset shifts 
• practical invitations to change today

Kellanfluckigermedia.com is where you find both a contact form and a list of all the crap that I'm up to. If you're interested in telling your own story, dreambuildwriteit.com is the page to sign up for the book challenge 

Go to my website, brandonheld.com, and subscribe to the podcast 


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SPEAKER_02:

Welcome back to Brandon Held Life is Crazy. And today I have a special guest who is exciting, and I believe you will really love his message and what he has to say. His name is Kellen Fluchiger. He's a coach, catalyst, speaker, award-winning author, and performer. How are you doing today, Kellen?

SPEAKER_00:

I'm doing really well. And the first thing I want to do, Brandon, is tell you how grateful I am to you. You're putting for podcasts as a labor of love, and you're putting the effort and energy and love into the world to bless people's lives. And I just want to honor you for that.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I really appreciate that. Thank you very much. That that is the goal and idea. So uh Kellen, we we have a show here where I really like to go through people's lives and and dig in, you know, both the the good, bad, and everything in between, and uh as much as possible in a short amount of time. So we're just gonna start with, you know, your childhood. Tell tell everyone what your childhood was like, where you grew up, how that shaped you into the young man that you became.

SPEAKER_00:

So I was born in the San Francisco in 1955. So I'll be 70 this year. And um I was raised in a two-parent home. Looked pretty normal from the outside. We were middle to lower middle class, never wanted for anything. The uh the interesting thing that left a scar on me for my whole life was that my mom got married really young and she was really fanatic about religion and behavior, and so she had very specific, absolute ideas about how things ought to happen. So I was raised with discipline that today would be felony child abuse. And uh just regularly, sometimes every single day, spanked or beaten to the point where, you know, black and blue, I mean like serious stuff, uh, in order to create obedience. Now, that left uh a permanent mark on me in terms of believing that I, number one, I wasn't good enough. Something's wrong with me, obviously. Right. Obvious to me as a kid. And two, that my whole life needed to be spent proving to my mother that I was okay, so I would eventually get the stamp of approved on my forehead. So the other stuff, I mean school, went to high school, graduated, went to college, left home at 17, and but but that whole arc learned a lot of stuff, did music, you know, but it was all in an effort to both protect myself and to um prove that I was okay. I was blessed with, you know, pretty good intellect. I got good grades, got a scholarship to college. You know what else? The best skill I learned is I learned to be a liar. I learned to be a pathological liar that that just ruined my life because I lost my connection to truth. I got so good that I could spin all kinds of stories and keep track of everybody and everything, and not get caught in that. And what a horrifying thing to learn as a m at a mastery level to protect yourself from situations and both emotional and physical abuse.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And so that was something, and I left home at 17, never really went back, very short periods of time, and I went out into the world to to prove myself, but with this underlying thing of two things. I'm not good enough, and I need somehow to prove I'm okay.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, so did that create like obviously you had like a self-protection mode on all the time. Uh, did that also create like this mode to want to be a people pleaser? Do you think you were a people pleaser?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, I have a one of the things I do is help people write their own stories. As you mentioned, I've written a bunch of books. And what and because of that, I love helping people discover and tell their own stories. And I mention that because I run these workshops periodically. This is dreambuildwright.com. And one of the ladies in the one I ran in February is writing a book, and hers is about people pleasing, how she spent her entire life doing that. She's a little bit older than I even am. And so listening to her to describe that, I wasn't. In other words, I didn't just turn into a doormat to do anything everybody wanted at all. Okay. Because I had this conflict. And the conflict manifested in me in severe depression. So until I was 52 in 2007, I lived a life of trying to prove, rebelling, and then burning it down. And so both careers and relationships, I created them and then ruined them. And the I looking at it afterwards, at the time, I didn't think about it this way. But afterwards, I believed I don't deserve this. I'm not good enough to have this. So I would create success. I had a good career, several of them. Three times. Build it, burn it down, build it. Three failed relationships. Because I realized now I didn't, I don't get to have this because I'm not, I'm not okay. And so I went through this cycle of believing I was not okay. I struggled with MDD major depressive disorder. And I didn't actually get any help for that till after I was 52. So all those decades later, as I told stories to different shrinks, I mean the diagnosis was different, bipolar, MDD, whatever, whatever. But all of them said, we're surprised you're alive. You know, that would be the sort of reaction. And so the central theme was, I'm not good enough, I don't get this. And, you know, if you put a handle on it, it's MDD major depressive disorder or it's it's funny.

SPEAKER_02:

There's something about the 50s, right? I just turned 52. I just started this podcast at 51 because I dealt with a lot of the things you're discussing. I've been divorced three times, I'm on my fourth marriage, I've been, you know, successful in my careers, but I've also been laid off twice and you know, homeless, the whole thing. And I was a victim, and I finally got it all together, meaning, you know, understanding it was my perspective and outlook on life that was causing a lot of my problems when I felt like it was just happening to me. And I felt like I learned that too late. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to create this podcast was to not let people wait until it was too late to realize they really truly had power in their hands from their own perspective and how they looked at life and how they viewed the world. And my intention was to go through your life story, but it this is a transition, it transitions well uh into your message. So just tell everyone what you were uh going to say about that as well.

SPEAKER_00:

I I will, and let me give you a little bit more transition. So in 52 in in 2007, can I tell can I tell you a story? What happened?

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. Go for it.

SPEAKER_00:

Because it was a it was a staggering divine intervention. So after I had been married and divorced three times, built and destroyed through action, got myself fired from executive positions, like high-ranking positions. I made a lot of money. From the outside, I had this big successful thing. People looked at and said, wow. And it was like kind of like a movie where behind the scenes, it's like, holy crap, the disaster. So completely separate kind of life, right? In August of 2007, this is Callan. I was single again for the third time. I was making, I was a$3,000 a week cocaine addict. And I was making so much money that none of that mattered. I was a single dad, four of my ten children were living with me. I was a terrible dad. We were the party house, all their friends came over, and who the hell knows what went on. You know, that that was me in August of 2007, the year I turned 52. And so I love you said too late because it's never too late. And that's why I wanted to tell the story. Because when I came home on the Friday night in August of 7007, I was going to go out party for the weekend, and I had this urge to turn on the television. And that doesn't sound like anything, except I didn't watch TV. I had the biggest cool of stuff you could buy because I made all that money, but it was for the kids and the friends and whatever. And so I had to ask my daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, she punched some buttons on the remote and threw it at me, you know, dip weed. It landed on a program I'd never heard of called Intervention. Now, intervention is, I don't know if it's on anymore, it's 20 years ago. It's a reality TV show.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

About families who stage interventions for busted loved ones, right? Yeah. The protagonist was a high-ranking executive with a cocaine problem. So I watched my life for about 10 minutes and I said, I'm not watching this crap. So I turned it off and I went and did some stuff and got ready to leave, and then I just had this urge that I couldn't resist to turn it on again. So this time I knew how. And that program started over. And I didn't have a DVR and it wasn't on the schedule. No, it can't do that. I got it, but it did. So I'm like, okay. So I watched the program. It went badly. The guy yelled at his family, swore he didn't have a problem, stomped out of the intervention, and that's it. And the whole experience like freaked me out. So instead of going out to party, I went to bed. When I went to bed, I went to hell. And what I mean by that is I went somewhere, it felt out of body. I was in a dark theater type room, and there was a stage. And on the stage were all scenes playing out from my life. Uh, scenes from my childhood, all every scene was focused on suffering. The suffering that I had experienced as a kid, you know, abuse and stuff, up to the suffering that I had inflicted on everybody else. I was a drug addict, a lousy father, a pathological liar, a self-destructing time bomb. And it went on forever. And the intensity of watching those experiences was so profound I couldn't bear it. After a long time, I heard a voice over my shoulder say simply, it is enough. I woke up and I was disoriented for three reasons. I was all twisted around in bed. That was number one. Number two, the bed sheets were so soaked that you could ring them out. And I didn't know a body could lose that much liquid, like sweat or whatever, but the intensity of the experience was that much. But the thing that really freaked me out was the sun was shining in the window, and the windows face west. I got up and realized it was five o'clock Saturday afternoon. So I'd been somewhere for 18 hours. And I got up and realized, okay, I've been invited to change. I have no freaking clue what to do, where to start, who to talk to, where to go, or any of this crap. And I know one thing, I'm done. So I got up and I threw away about a thousand dollars worth of drugs that I had laying around, because I always did, and I quit. Cold turkey that day. So that got me sober, but it didn't uh change anything about how I got there. So Monday I went back to work because and I knew I had to get out of the everything, but one thing at a time. So I went back to work, and because of the position that I had and the decisions I made, I used to get lots of free stuff. Not bribes, but be nice to Kellen stuff. Because I made decisions that affected other companies, sometimes to the tune of billions. So, you know, free tickets to this, box seats to that, you know, that kind of stuff. Not bribes, but pretty nice stuff. So anyway, one of the things I got was a pair of tickets to see a yo-yo ma concert. And if you know classical music, you know who that is, and if you don't, you don't. But in the classical world, yo-yo ma is like, oh. So I'm like, I'm going, I'm going, but I don't want to waste this other ticket. So I asked in the groups that I managed who likes classical music. And a woman in one of the groups said, Well, I do. And I said, Well, have I ever given you anything before? Because I gave away crap all the time. She said, No. Said, okay, fine, see you there. So I gave her the ticket, and it was about three weeks out. Three weeks later, met at the concert. It's a fabulous show, and I'm now three weeks, stone, cold, sober. Halfway through the concert, I I had this feeling come over me that I recognized from earlier. This otherworldly sort of feeling. And his voice said to me, You need to marry this woman. I said, You out of your flipping mind. I said, I've ruined that three times. I'm three weeks sober. Yeah, you're nuts. And so last later that night we were backstage, because they were like thousand dollar tickets, backstage passes, reception, all that stuff. And the voice came back and said, Yeah, comma, and you need to tell her tonight. And so I said, Well, there's a few problems with that in my head of having this dialogue, right? A few problems with that. Number one, I actually don't know her well enough to know whether she's in a relationship. I mean, they knew her, she worked in one of my groups. I don't know her that well. And number two, like she can call a cops or have me arrested or something. No, can't do that. And you don't win those arguments. So awkwardly and strangely I did, and it went about like you would have expected. Are you insane? And sh she left. And over the next three weeks, she had her own set of experiences. And about three weeks after that, so now we're first part of October, uh, she walked away from her entire career. I walked away from millions of dollars of contracts, and we walked off into the sunset together. And December will be 18 years in of marriage. And so the the point of that is the incredible story, but here was the point. Every one of us gets invitations because neither one of those things, even that unbelievable, otherworldly, divine set of circumstances, was an invitation. Getting over drugs was not trivial, quitting cold turkey was not trivial, telling some woman like that, trusting whatever that she was gonna do whatever she did in her own time and space and feeling those were all not a given. We didn't know each other very well. We made a decision based on that intuition to do this thing, and so all the work that you would imagine ought to go into that went into that. Like you know, the invitations are there, and those were mine, and they were flippin' loud because I'd been ignoring them all my life. And the reason I tell that story with all of its incredible pieces is because it is never too late. I was 52 when that happened, and a complete disaster. If there was ever anyone that should have been left at the bottom of the canyon, you know, my face was on that poster. Yeah. And even then the divine said, you know, I'm gonna issue this uh invitation, pretty stark, pretty noisy, and you're gonna have to crawl over broken glass and do the work and crawl up out of the canyon and all the rest of crap, but uh the invitations are there. So that was the the the the fire, as it were, that said invited me in. And you know, following that, counselors and rehab and you know, all kinds of stuff to to turn that invitation into truth. So that's the the reason the story matters, and where that's gone is the last 18 years have been spent without deviation in an effort to do just what you're doing, which is to bless the lives of others. It's not too late. You matter, you get to control your life. You whatever you did before, or wherever you've been today is your invitation. Take a hold of it and make a choice. My mission today, oh, and I told you October 14th is New Year's. The reason October 14th is New Year's is because that's Joy's birthday. Oh, and her name is Joy. Like you cannot make this crap up, right? Yeah. So that's her birthday, and so by October 14th, which is now just under two months, we will reach this year 300 million people, your show, 700 other shows. I've got a thousand-episode podcast. And the reach means with this message: purpose, prosperity, joy. We were built to do that if we have the courage to say yes.

SPEAKER_02:

I want to thank you for repeating what I said, because sometimes you you say things you don't realize how it was received versus how you meant it to uh come out in your head. And so when I say too late, I don't mean too late. I mean much later than I would have liked for it to happen in life. Because in case anyone's listening for the first time, I too have a story that is very similar to yours, believe it or not. I didn't have voices telling me that I should do these things, it was just my own strong urges and thoughts, and I too had three failed marriages, and when I met my now wife, I knew her six days. Six days when I asked her to marry me. And I thought, you know what the hell? I did the whole long-term engagements three times, and all three of those marriages failed. So, you know, I met her, it felt right, it seemed right, I took a risk, I took a chance. Obviously, she did the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah. So it was it actually took a she said yes to the marriage proposal, but the getting married we actually got married three months later. So the getting married in three months part took a little bit of convincing, but yeah, I definitely agree that it's not too late. I am living my best life. I have been living my best life for a few years now. Uh, and that is the message I want to get out to people as well that no matter whatever it was you were going through, you still can live your best life, and it's not too late.

SPEAKER_00:

You matter. Each of you listening right now, I don't care what's going on in your life, you matter. And you may be in the middle of the shitstorm, you may be before the time where I had my out-of-body experience and went to hell. You know, that was I think it was just to soften my heart enough so that when the words came, it is enough. Right. You know, it landed. It is enough. Okay. I don't know what the hell I gotta do, but it's enough. All right, all right, let's go. And so it yet, I don't care what you're listening to. You you gotta get help. I couldn't do that alone. I mean, I had to go, you know, do stuff, see counselors do things to take control. You know, nobody snaps their fingers, and and that's why I said crawl over broken glass. I mean, I spent the first two or three years just trying to. I had to learn how to unlie. I had to learn how to tell the truth. I had to learn how to have a friend. I had to learn how to be a friend. Like I didn't know how to do any of that stuff. I'd been married three times and I was always patronizing and taking care of things. And, you know, I made a lot of money all the time, or anywhere between enough and a lot at different times during that arc. And so I j I did not know how to have a partnership, or I did not know how to do any of the things that are normal because of how I grew up. Not enough, not good enough, protection, hiding, etc., etc. So, and I'm not saying mine's the worst possible thing in the universe. You listening may have had something far worse. I don't care. Whatever it is, your choice today is to change directions, even a little. Because if you don't, you're gonna do Groundhog Day. You're gonna keep doing a year from now, we're gonna be having the same conversation. So this is your invitation. You matter, you got stuff inside of you, it's time.

SPEAKER_02:

I totally agree. And you know, as someone who attempted suicide but obviously uh failed. I saw an article today in the news, and it was about this young woman, attractive young woman, who was a skydiver. She's I guess she skydived thousands of times. Wow. And one day she was skydiving and she decided not to open her parachute, and she plummeted to her death because she had just broken up with her boyfriend the day before. And I really wish I could get to someone like that. I could get to that person and let them understand this is just a tiny moment in time. No matter what you're feeling in this moment, it will pass, you'll get better, life can be better, life goes on, and she just didn't see that in that moment. And, you know, stuff like that makes me sad, and that's really what I want to prevent here.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that, and you're exactly right. Because when you're in the middle of, you know, the crucible or in the misery or face down in the gutter, or the guy I interviewed earlier on my podcast today said, you know, there was a time when he woke up with a needle in his arm in the gutter, you know, and today he's built some major software that's gonna do all kinds of stuff and it turned his life around. So the stories are legion, and the point of the stories is each individual matters. The lady who you know jumped out of the plane. And in the moment of pain, I had a I had a friend, a guy who worked for me once in one of those shops. He was a recovering alcoholic. And he told me uh I used to travel around the world in this capacity as a sales rep for big machinery and things. He drank so much one time that he one of millions, not millions, thousands of times probably he woke up on a train going somewhere, and the shame and the hangover and the pain and everything was so bad, he just, you know, almost jumped off the train. Or, you know, it was more than he could handle. And so that feeling of worthlessness is common. You're not alone. And and then the question is, what will we do with it? And so all of the opportunities are there for you. And maybe the most important thing that you can hear right now is that you are loved, and I can say that, and you can think, yeah, bullshit by who? And I'll tell you who. Me. I love you, and you can't do a darn thing about it. And I care a lot about the light inside of you, even if it's been buried, even if it's been turned off. And that's the reason I do what I do, and that Brandon's doing what he's doing.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I really love your passion about this too. I can feel it, I can hear it. Uh, a lot of times I feel like I need to bring it. You're bringing it so well that you're making me feel like, oh, I can step back a little bit because he's really bringing it. So, no, I really love it. I appreciate it. So I uh thank you for doing that.

SPEAKER_00:

You're welcome. And I I say, my, you know, I I everybody picks their own way of expressing it. And one of the ways I have is the phrase, your ultimate life. And I ask people all the time, you know, what does that mean for you? What would be your ultimate life? And the typical answers are, you know, if I had lots of money or all the free time in the world or whatever. And and the truth is we each are built to love and serve each other. And we are happiest when we are doing that. I agree. When we are expressing love and service and lifting and blessing. And I think that's why you and me, and that dude I talked to earlier today, and everybody else who goes through these things, when we begin to heal, however, we got the invitation, there rises up within us the same thing, this yearning, this irrepressible yearning to help somebody else avoid, to mitigate, to reassure, to lift and bless. And that doesn't mean make excuses for or buy into their bullshit, but it means express the invincible truth that you matter, there is a day forward, the sun's gonna come up tomorrow, and there is a different road.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's well put. And one of the things I have found in people like us is we were just we always had this desire and energy to strive and be successful in life, but we were just striving for the wrong things, and so that's what we figured out, right? We were working really hard to make money, be rich, get girls, you know, whatever the case may be. But feeling hollow and empty inside. And this is where we come to the realization that this is true meaning, this is true happiness, your ability to reach out to others and lift others up and help others through difficult times. That is what it's all about.

SPEAKER_00:

I mentioned earlier, I love that. You're 100% right. I mentioned earlier that um one of the things I do is love help people find and write their stories. And I didn't plan to be an author. I didn't write. I, you know, my executive career, I wrote a few technical papers, but I didn't plan to be an author, and I didn't start writing until a couple of years after the 2007 story. And then I realized I I needed to, if I was going to be the most help, I needed to write some stuff. And so I started writing. And now I've written 20, and I'm just finishing number 21 and be out next month. But every one of those books is written from the battleground of learning. And it's written for exactly the reason that you've just described. And so one of the reasons I love that so much is because when I help people do it, I run a five-day challenge and then take people on a six-month Odyssey to write their book and get it published and get it up on Amazon and create some kind of a product or service. I love that so much because part of that lets me edit. I get to edit their books, and so I get to be part of all these incredible stories of struggle, of choice, of resilience, of growth, and hear this over and over again from just all kinds of different people in all kinds of different ways, you know, different examples, different things. And it is so affirming because I get to help them have the confidence to put themselves in the world that way. And I get to be part of these amazing stories and products and stuff that they're creating to do just what you said, which is to lift and to bless and to love. So it's such fun.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's why a lot I have a lot of my guests that fall into that realm that you were just talking about and getting to go through their stories and their you know, their struggle and survival, and not only survival now thriving in the world. Uh, it's it's so great to hear those stories and be a part of those stories. All right, Kellen. I think we really did a great job here today showing people, you know, how they can choose the life they want to live. And like you said, it starts with one step at a time, and I believe it's a mindset as well. You just you have to start practicing gratitude and understanding to be grateful for the things in your life and really focus on that. I know those are words, I know people hear those things, and and just don't let it fall on deaf ears, though, because it's so true, it actually makes a huge difference in your life. So uh go ahead.

SPEAKER_00:

I have one more thought that I I want people to take away. When you hear a story like the guy I talked about earlier woke up with a needle in his arm, or the skydiver who could have changed but didn't nobody got to her in time, or Brandon's story or mine, or one of a hundred others that you may have listened to. You I used to think, and then this is in the beginning, after 2007, when I was doing this work on myself, I don't have anything worth sharing. Yeah. I don't have anything valuable. Nobody would listen to me. It won't matter that much. My story's not that exciting. So what? I didn't jump off a cliff or wasn't a drug addict or whatever. I'm gonna tell you something, and I'm gonna look you right in the eye, and I'm gonna tell you this. The most valuable asset you have is the story of your own becoming. Yeah. I don't care where you started, I don't care what the challenges were, the story. Of your choice to change from whatever to whatever. It doesn't matter the start and end points. The story of your becoming is your gold mine, both for impact in the world and for income. And it's not hard to understand why. Because everything else you or I or any of you listeners know how to do, it's about that thing over there. That's something I know how to do, and people might pay me for it. The journey of who you are is the thing that you own the deepest and most powerfully. And a vulnerable willingness to share that, what you have learned, and then create a way to help those who need it with that. It's worth more, it'll have more impact, and you can get paid more. And that's what the key is. You own the story of your becoming, and that's your gold mine.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's well put. And that's obviously why my show is titled Life is Crazy, and that's why we go through people's stories, because the story is the gold mine. It is the reason that uh we show the way that we show people exactly how to get to where you are today. So I want to thank you for coming on the podcast today, Kellen. Uh, how do people get to you?

SPEAKER_00:

So there's lots of ways. When you have a name like Kellen Flukiger, you can't hide. So I'm I'm most on most socials, LinkedIn, Facebook. Got a thousand YouTube videos. I got podcasts, Your Ultimate Life. If you're interested in telling your own story, dreambuildwrite it dot com is the page to sign up for the book challenge. Uh challenge doesn't cost anything. Uh-huh. Uh Kellenflukigourmedia.com is where you find both a contact form if you want to get a hold of me and a list of all the crap that I'm up to in the world to try to do the things that Brandon and I have talked about today.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, and you've done so much more than we've even talked about today, and that's a good way for people to just find out everything. I'll just throw in there really quick. You've recorded 82 songs and performed with uh number one Billboard Chart Inquirer in Phoenix, which is close to me because I live in Tucson. So you've done so much, and you can't squeeze that all into a podcast, but the message is clear and the message is phenomenal, and I really love it. And for me, I want to thank you for listening to the show today because I never take for granted that you have given us your time. Your most valuable and precious resource is your time, and I thank you so much for giving to that to us here today. And uh go to my website, brandonheld.com, and subscribe to the podcast. And please just uh let me know that you enjoy the show and you want to support it. And uh, this has been Brandon Held Life is crazy, and I'll talk to you next time.

Head Shot

Brandon Held

Host
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Kellan Fluckiger

Guest