Dismantling the Traditional Career Path: Limiting Beliefs, Identity, and Breaking the Blueprint | Kai Brown

What if the exhaustion, the anxiety, the feeling that something is just off — isn't a personal failure? What if it's a pattern you inherited before you were old enough to question it?

In this episode, I'm sitting down with Kai Brown, entrepreneur and mindset coach, who helps young men ages 18–25 build unshakeable confidence and break free from the identities they built just to survive. But what Kai shares in this conversation goes way beyond his niche — because the patterns he's describing? They're running most of us, regardless of age, industry, or how "put together" we look on the outside.

We get into the limiting beliefs passed down through generations without anyone realizing it, the way trauma isn't what you think it is, and why so many high-achievers are building lives that look successful but feel hollow. Kai also breaks down the reticular activating system — the brain's filtering mechanism — and how it literally keeps you trapped in the reality you already believe.

We also dig into the blueprint itself: where it came from, who it was designed to serve, and why following the "responsible" path can quietly drain the life out of you.

In this episode:

• Why your burnout might not be about your job — it's about the identity underneath it
• How inherited beliefs about money, success, and worth get wired in early and run on autopilot
• The difference between building an identity to compensate vs. one that actually fits
• Why fixing tactics never works when the belief driving the behavior hasn't changed
• What it looks like to finally stop performing and start living from the inside out

If this episode hit something for you and you're ready to go deeper, Burn the Blueprint is where we do this work in a structured way. Link below.

Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who's starting to question the life they were handed.

📌 Connect with Kai Brown: 🌐 kaibrown.co

📌 Connect with Renae + Hustle Rebels: 🌐 waywardwellnesscoaching.org

Transcript

00:00 Questioning The Responsible Path

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's fascinating because if you look at the people that are telling us that the responsible path is college job investments, 401k retirement, those people are enjoying a life that they enjoy because they started the business. And they're telling everybody else the responsible route is to get a job, climb to the top of the business, and then retire. Meanwhile, they're owning the business and they're owning the company that offers the 401ks, and that's why their life is exciting.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

That's so true.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Isn't that crazy? And the whole thing starts to break down when you look at it.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

This is Hustle Rebels, a podcast for people who know how to grind, but are starting to question the cost. I'm Renee, and here we talk about success, burnout, and nervous system regulation without glorifying exhaustion or sacrificing your health, relationships, or your sense of self, and without pretending ambition is the problem. Let's get into it. Today's guest is Kai Brown, entrepreneur, coach, and founder of a company focused on helping people break free from old patterns so that they can actually build their lives that feel aligned with themselves instead of impressive on paper. What stood out to me about Kai isn't just that he's young and already successful, it's how he got there. Because I think a lot of people have been conditioned to believe that success only counts if you suffer through it. Like you have to burn yourself to the ground in order to prove yourself constantly and go to the right school and follow the approved blueprint and basically earn permission to succeed through the exhaustion. But Kai was raised differently in a lot of ways. His parents gave him room to think independently, question the traditional path, and pursue something that actually fell aligned instead of forcing him into a mold that he never fit into. And I think this creates a really important conversation. What happens when someone doesn't inherit the same scarcity-based conditioning that most of us did? So today we're going to talk about a lot of things, including identity, freedom, entrepreneurship, a lot of old systems, authenticity, and why so many people are chasing these lives that we don't truly even want.

Kai Brown Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 2:16

So, Kai, welcome to Hustle Rebels. And why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're coming from?

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Renee, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. So excited. I'm Kai. I help people transform themselves and their lives through my mindset coaching and different frameworks and events that I run. And I started doing this because I just was so unsatisfied with what life presented me. I was kind of experiencing a lot of addiction, a lot of anxiety, interacting with people, didn't feel like I was being me. It felt like I was kind of wearing some mask that was how I was supposed to act and who I was supposed to be. And I didn't know how to break out of that. And nobody told me how to break out of that. And when I tried the methods that people present, like therapy or whatever was available to me at that time, I had a lot of struggle with the available methods. And so I set off on a quest to figure out how to feel fully alive and fully like myself and enjoy interacting with people and build a business that I was passionate about because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was very young. And along that path, I found the methodology and frameworks that I use with guys in their 20s, 18 to 25 range, to help them build just exceptional confidence and live a fully expressed life.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

I love that. And it's such a formidable age, too. And a lot of people your age are still trying to figure themselves out. You already seem very intentional about identity and mindset. Where do you think that came from?

SPEAKER_01 3:56

A big part of me feels like it's just it's who I am. I was doing it when I was probably 12, just unofficially, one before I knew that there was a whole world of people doing stuff like this, freeing themselves from their old patterns and their old identities. I was trying to figure out how to do it at a very young age. It's so funny when I look, I find my old journals, my old books, and they've all got like an early form of the mindset work. But really, like at a deeper level, I think that it was my exposure to people who were focused on creating more for themselves and for their lives that allowed me to be inspired enough to chase this. And then I get to stand on the shoulders of all the giants that taught me. And that's the only reason I'm here in this place, knowing so much about what I want to bring to the world and knowing so much about who I am and still discovering more every day.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

That's awesome. I kind of want to highlight one thing about your upbringing because it sounds like it's a different experience than probably a lot of people did experience. And your parents didn't really seem to force a traditional path on you, like college or just the traditional things that many of us have. What impact did that seem to have on you?

SPEAKER_01 5:10

This whole business is mom's fault. It's all credit to mom. You guys are heroes, and my mom especially was such a hero. She was always a champion for me since day one. And when I was starting to struggle in school because I thought about things differently than a lot of the other people in school, and I just experienced the whole system differently. She was open and willing to explore other options for me. And I'm not saying there's a right way or a wrong way whether you should take your kids out of school or whether homeschool is better, but she offered me the chance to do partial homeschool and partial high school, which for me was really important because it gave me more space to start exploring things that actually really mattered to me. It gave me space to form an education on things that you don't learn in school. And super frankly, the education that I got outside of school is what I use to run the business that I'm running right now and live the lifestyle that I'm living right now, not the education that I got in school. And so that, you know, at a high level, there was that difference in the way I got to grow up, which was I got to spend more time chasing my passions. Deeper than that, the really significant reason that I feel my mom set me up so well to find the success that I found, she didn't pass on to me the ideas that a lot of parents unintentionally pass on to their children. Ideas like money is hard to make, ideas like you have to work hard and earn anything good in your life, ideas like hustle and grind is the only way to create a good life for yourself. And any sort of belief that's out of alignment with just freedom and exploration and making an impact. She was really intentional about avoiding those beliefs in her own life, in herself. So she was doing her own work to avoid being in that pattern. And then she intentionally avoided passing that pattern on to me. And so that gave me the most significant head start in my mind was how liberated I got to grow up from concepts that are constructs. So they're made by people. And those constructs are things like money's hard to make, things like there's not enough time to pursue a passion, things like just put your head down and work.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

I loved how you had talked about the way she had not passed down her own limiting beliefs. And I think that's a big portion of it. We don't always realize how much we are affecting those around us without doing our own work, right? I worked through something that I hadn't realized I was holding on to until working with someone that we have in common with. And she had brought up something that I didn't even realize I had a memory of back from my younger age from my mom, who was a pivotal matriarch in our family. She has done everything for us. And this is not of her own doing, right? But she had a very good job as a respiratory specialist at a nuclear power plant when I was growing up. And she had received a promotion. With that promotion, she received a trailer that she thought, you know, you'd think that, oh, I receive a trailer with this promotion. This is incredible, right? But we didn't know at the time that apparently that trailer was filled with formaldehyde, which was slowly burning and fusing her alveoli together. Long story short, she ended up being forced to leave that position, her job entirely. And I remember for the rest of my life that my mom was no longer able to work. And she was told she was no longer able to work. So that is what I grew up thinking. Now, fast forward having to leave my job after being injured, I had this underlying limiting belief that I didn't realize was there because I witnessed my mom being forced from her job being injured, that I also will not be able to have a work-life balance, even though I'm trying to start my own job after this whole thing had happened with my career. But I seem to self-sabotage myself in many small ways

Trauma Beliefs And Brain Filters

SPEAKER_00 9:27

that prevents progress, you know? So it's interesting how we absorb things from our parents without fully realizing it.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah. And I want to be really clear anything we experience in our life, other than ultimate peace and joy and freedom and ease, actually comes from some sort of original trauma in our lives. And I could hear people like, well, I wasn't traumatized, or what's this big deal with trauma, or buck up, or whatever. And the truth about trauma is that it's not what happens to you. You don't have to be molested or go through something horrible. There's always people that have gone through much more horrible things. Trauma is actually a mechanism of learning. It's us learning how the world works. And when we learn anything that's out of alignment with peace and joy and freedom and ease, we call that trauma. And so it happens to everybody. It happens to me, despite my parents' amazing efforts. In really significant quantities, it happened to me, just as it happens to everybody in really significant quantities. And this trauma is stored in our brains as associations. So our brains are these networks of neurons that connect to each other. And somebody who is bitten by a dog connects dog to pain. And then 20 years down the line, they're seeing a dog that reminds them of that original dog, and they're in a stressed state while their friend next to them is so excited to go pet this furry creature and is really happy. And so that's the exact story that played out in your life. You experience something, you learned, okay, so this is how the world works. I'm going to store that. And then you experience it for the rest of your life until that association is made conscious. So until you realize it's there, and do some form of release, some form of work to move past this association. When you're living in that world where dogs are scary, where you can't have a work-life balance, where money is hard to make, it feels completely real. You have a long list of evidence for all the reasons why dogs are scary and you can't have a work-life balance. You can name five different experiences in the past two weeks where you didn't have work-life balance and you seem to get bitten by more dogs than your friends. Because when we're living in the world of money is hard to make, or we're living in the world of dogs are scary, our brains are so powerfully capable at only seeing things that are in line with what we believe that we filter out everything that isn't. It's a part of the brain called the reticular activating system. This part of the brain filters out 85% of what's around us. Like if I told you right now to notice what's red in the room, immediately a few things might stand out to you that you didn't see before. And that's because before I said notice red, those red things were part of the 85% that we filter out. And so nice dogs just end up in that 85% when you believe dogs are scary. And easy money also ends up in that 85% when you believe money is hard to make. And so you spend a whole lifetime in this world and you're so stuck in it that nothing else seems to exist. The vast majority of these beliefs that we learn, we actually learn in our early years. So that's why it's so significant the connection between your parents and you. That's why people tend to marry their mom. I married my dad, I married my mom. It's because these early associations are formed in our brains that tell us the way the entire world works, and then we live in that reality. And so the work we're describing is the work of breaking out of that reality into an entirely new one where things you didn't even know were possible start to occur.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

An important thing to note too that we don't fully realize that we can change those and we can actually reframe that filtering of our reticular activating system because we can actually take that 85% of filtering out the good dogs and actually re-filter the good experiences with the good dogs. And we put it ourselves

Breaking The System Burnout Cycle

SPEAKER_00 13:48

in the box, right? Speaking of these limiting beliefs or these inherited beliefs, I think a lot of people inherit the belief that if they don't follow the safe route, they're irresponsible and failing, right? So they think that they need to follow this traditional route or they're not going to be successful. And it's hard for them to break out of that box. Did you ever feel pressure to justify to your peers or to society that you needed to follow the path that you wanted to follow?

SPEAKER_01 14:21

That's such a wonderful question. And I want to talk about that concept because it's a crazy one. It seems normal to most of us because we grew up in this concept. So let's look at this for a second. It's the concept that it's irresponsible to not follow the path that society's laid out for you, to not do the things that you're told. The first example of the way that this is just a construct of the time and place and people that we live with is how this path didn't exist for the majority of human history. So the path of go to college, get a job, work that job to the top of the ladder, 401k, retirement, et cetera, that path, it's only been around for a really small portion of history. And there's been people living outside of that path more than there's been people living in that path. We're a small minority, actually, that believe that that is the way to achieve happiness. When we give ourselves a little bit of permission to step outside of the box and notice that it's a very small thing, it's a very small portion of human history, it's a very small portion of human awareness and human capacity to expand and explore. We can start to have a little more space for things that we might feel and notice. And one of the most significant things that you notice is that a lot of people on that path aren't very happy. Like if it's the really responsible route, why are the people that are following it having the experience of wasting their life? I've talked to a lot of people that feel like they're having that experience on that path. And there's a lot of people that love it. And to those people, they're in the right place. It's beautiful. But to the people that feel like this path is just a waste of their potential, it starts to seem a little crazy when you step outside the box to say that it's irresponsible to follow a path that feels like a waste of your life. And it's fascinating because if you look at the people that are telling us that the responsible path is college job investments, 401k, retirement, those people are enjoying a life that they enjoy because they started the business. And they're telling everybody else the responsible route is to get a job, climb to the top of the business, and then retire. Meanwhile, they're owning the business and they're owning the company that offers the 401ks, and that's why their life is exciting. That's so true. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And the whole thing starts to break down when you look at it. You also look at the way the system originally formed. You know, I talked a little bit about how this is such a small slice of human history, this box that we live inside of this is the only path and it's responsible and all their paths are irresponsible. That path was created in the Industrial Revolution when a group of people came together with the specific intention of creating people that were effective factory workers and useful for the expansion of the Industrial Revolution. There were literal meetings when they were first creating the path that we're describing as responsible on how this path can crush the human spirit and keep people in line.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

That was the topic. They like to get their whiteboard out and they're like, how do we crush these people's souls? They got together, and then here we have the educational and monetary system in America. And so this concept that it's responsible to follow it, a lot of people could argue that it's not an accident that we're told it's responsible to follow this path and irresponsible to not follow this path. It's a great mechanism to keep people engaged with something that they normally wouldn't engage with because they would see it as something they don't want to do. They would have like free will, free choice, free spirit if it weren't irresponsible to leave it. And free spirit's really hard to control. It's not very useful to a big system. It kind of requires a new evolution of the system to allow everybody to explore that. And so the system's very uncomfortable with anybody stepping outside of responsible.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Right. A crushed and controlled employee is a compliant employee.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Yeah, and that's the goal originally of the system. It's important to realize that this isn't somebody looking at the system and saying, wow, this system is designed to crush our spirits. It's they sat down to design a system to crush our spirits. And this is not uncommon knowledge. You can find it. You just have to look it up. It's not a conspiracy theory or a niche subject. It's the history of the American educational system.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Right. Well, I've referenced it before too, the alienation theory. So the whole concept of high-achieving capitalism is the alienation theory of you removing the employee from the product itself, from the creation of the product, from the community of the product, and then ultimately the identity of the person themselves. And once you do that, you have a compliant employee. So you can control them in whatever you want. And that's the concept of capitalism. So it's just crazy how much we are trained in this thinking that we need to sacrifice ourselves for these systems that will never pay back what we have sacrificed for them, but it's all in the benefit of them. And it's never in the benefit of ourselves. Do you think a lot of burnout with people starts from them building their lives around approval rather than the alignment of themselves?

SPEAKER_01 19:35

I do. And I think that that question is a lot more important for the viewer to ask themselves than for you to ask me. Because there's people that are burnt out for different reasons. But I think that for a lot of us, if you take the time to touch into yourself and really start to observe your everyday actions, and if you sit with it for just long enough to get past the initial default thoughts and start to really notice what you do every day and the why behind the majority of your actions, I think for a large majority of us, when we sit with that question for a little while, we'll see that we were doing it for other people and not for ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

I definitely think that it's a question that many people I don't even necessarily avoid, but I think it's difficult for many people to sit down and actually answer that question with honest intent, or even may have never even thought about it. But there's this weird cultural belief that you have to suffer for 10, 20, 30 years before you're allowed to succeed. Have you felt that? And do you think that many people your age also believe that?

SPEAKER_01 20:45

I absolutely notice it. I think that there's a lot of chances to see why it's true, to prove that it's true, because our brains are these amazing search engines. And if we look for reasons why you have to suffer until you're 20 or 30 to make money, the brain will present you with a whole Google search list of options. Have you noticed how when you go on Google, there's so many things on the internet that no matter what you search, there's about 10,000 results that pop up in those two seconds? Our brains work the same way. There's so much data in these incredible machines that no matter what we search, in about two seconds, we're gonna have 10,000 results. And so if you're searching

Suffering Beliefs and Introspection

SPEAKER_01 21:26

for the reasons why you have to eat shit until you're 30, and then you start to feel okay, and then you retire, and that's the only way that works. You're gonna find a lot of reasons. But you can also Google top 10 reasons to join a cult, and it's gonna give you great options, like the best cults near you, it's gonna give you all the reasons that this is gonna benefit your life, and it's gonna seem really compelling. Because no matter what you search, you're gonna get good results for. And so we have an opportunity as humans with this amazing power called introspection to notice what we're searching. And if you're searching every day why you need to stay in a system until you're 30. And not make a lot of money in the meantime, and then start making money in the system and then retire, then you're going to get great results. It's going to give you all those results. We have the opportunity to query something else. So we can say, hey, brain, why might it be possible to not have to struggle until I'm 30 years old, 35 years old? Why might it be possible to love working every day? Why might it be possible to make more money than I need? Why might it be possible that life could be easy and fulfilling and fun? And when we do that, just as we receive results for the negative side, we receive a lot of really compelling results for the positive side. And the truth of the matter is that there's always equal amounts of evidence on both sides. We're just used to looking for the negative evidence. So it feels like there's a lot more. When you open up this whole world of asking, like, why can't I start off young and have a really positive experience and make a lot of money? You step out of this old world of suffering and into this new world of expansion and exploration. And you find that there's tons of other people doing it. You find that there's tons of pathways to start doing it. The people that you're talking to don't even really see it as a barrier that they're young, that they haven't put in their 10, 20 years of head down, grind and suffer. Because their brains are programmed to search for why it'll work. And so they're certain that it'll work. And so it works. An extreme example of this, I heard while I was at an event. The guy running the event was talking about his time starting off as a 21-year-old entrepreneur. One of the first significant offers he made to somebody was for a single sell of six figures. So over $100,000. I wish I remembered more of the details, but at 21 years old, this guy decided he was going to sell a $100,000 program to somebody. I believe he was a coach and he was going to help them build their business in some way. Because of the stupid amount of belief that he had in the value of what he was selling and the fact that somebody would want to pay $100,000 for it. Somebody paid this 21-year-old $100,000 for program that he then fulfilled to them. They were very happy, very satisfied, and went on with their life and he went on with his. I share that, not as a suggestion for everybody listening to go craft a $100,000 offer and start selling it willy-nilly, but I share that to illustrate that this man believed that he had something worth $100,000. He didn't believe his age was an issue. He didn't believe he had to put his head down and hustle and grind for 10, 20 years before he could do things like sell things for $100,000. And he had product he believed could back it up. And in that situation, there was no reason for him to not be able to sell this program. And so miracles happen when we're not living in limitation. Like the word limitless, when we think of what it would feel like to feel limitless, we'd be able to do just about whatever we want. And so the key to becoming limitless is to just look at where you're limiting yourself and stop. And there's methods that we'll talk about that are more practical, but look at this concept that you have that you need to put in 10, 20 years of work and look at whether or not it's true. When you look at it long enough, you realize it might not be. Then when you realize it might not be, that limitation starts to dissolve. And then you're no longer limited in this area and you approach life, you go to make some money and you're limitless now because that limitation is gone. And that feeling of limitless is what I really want you guys to imagine like how that feels to be that limitless. That comes from removing these old concepts and ideas that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

You said so many great things in there that I'm trying to even process all of it. The biggest aspect, too, is that introspection into yourself and asking yourself, why do I even believe these things? And it's interesting because when you think of a younger individual that does have a lot of money, I feel like the majority of people, oh, well, it's because they're a trust fund baby or their parents paid for everything. And it's interesting because it's like, why do we believe that? Why do we think that that's the only way that that individual has money when in reality money is just like currency, right? There is an endless flow of money out there if we truly believe that, like currency, like electricity. If you plug into the right outlet, you're going to get the endless amount that comes to you. And if someone is an entrepreneur and believes in themselves the right way, just like that 21-year-old that you mentioned, you just have to find that one person out of however many billions of people in the world to give you that hundred thousand dollars. Why do you think so many people keep trying to change the results without changing that identity that's underneath the behavior? Because we're so stuck on trying to hustle and grind into like, well, if I just do this different, then this will happen. If I just do this different, this will happen. But it's just like the product of insanity, right? You're doing the same thing over and over, even if you think that it's different. And in reality, what's deep down inside is you need to do that introspection and you need to find the identity that's driving that behavior. What do you think is stopping people from doing that?

SPEAKER_01 27:03

A great question, Renee. And the answer is simple to me. It's two parts. It's one, let's say we go make a hundred thousand dollar offer and nobody buys it. It's very default human to say, well, the offer wasn't good enough. Well, the right people weren't here to buy it. The way I presented it was bad. I did a bad job. And it makes sense. You see something in front of you, there's something, quote, wrong with it. And so you try to fix it using what you can see visually. And we can't see what's underneath the surface. It's like if I were a robot and you like open up the back hatch. Like, what's going on under there that's making this whole experience the way this experience is? And it just isn't a learned pathway when we notice something wrong to say, what's going on inside of me to create this wrongness? Our learned pathway is how can I fight this wrongness with tactics and strategies to make it better? And it makes a lot of sense because you can see it in front of you, you can think of how to fight it immediately. And nobody has told us that it's actually what's inside that's creating what's outside. We can go into the mechanisms of how what's inside becomes what's outside later, but the level of effectiveness with which our internal set of beliefs becomes our reality is literally mind-blowing. It's like that guy who sold that $100,000 program, it was all because of his set of beliefs and they played out exactly as they would expect. And to somebody who believes money is hard to make, there is no other option at all other than for money to be hard to make. And so this brings us to number two reason why people don't look inside instead of looking at what's in front of them. It's that often it's more uncomfortable to look at what's inside than what's in front of them. It's really easy to just say they did this, the situation did this to me. I wasn't responsible for this. But the most freeing truth of realizing that our insides create our outsides is realizing that you created every situation you've ever experienced. I noticed I said that that truth was freeing and liberating, not horrible. A lot of people's tendency when they hear that is to look at horrible things that have happened to them and say, but this guy literally robbed me. But this situation literally happened to me. And it's a lot more uncomfortable to say, what was I believing in that moment that created that situation than to just say, but I got robbed. That was clearly just happenstance. That was clearly just me being a victim to this person. It's a lot more comfortable to look outside than it is to look inside. So that's that number two reason why people don't look inside. It's a lot more comfortable to say it was his fault. But we have to look at that situation of you getting robbed, and we have to ask ourselves a lot of questions. We have to say, why were we there at that point? What about my vibration attracted this person's vibration? What about who I am led me to be in a situation to be vulnerable to this? And why have I had so many similar experiences where I have found that I can't trust people that felt similar to getting robbed, but we're in relationship. And we really have to do a lot of introspection and like look at our lives objectively as a passive observer and lose our attachment to those stories. And we start to realize that we're weaving every corner of our story. Even the things that seem like they were other people's fault or other people's doing, it can be a big pill to swallow for a lot of people. But the other side of swallowing this incredible pill is the freedom to realize, wow, I created everything. What am I going to create now? So that's a really significant second reason that people might not look inside is because that pill is just too big to swallow because it really feels like life is happening to us. It really feels like we are a victim. It really feels like things are hurting us.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

It really is hard to get out of that victim mentality for sure, especially when it's right in front of your face, right? So, what did freedom really start looking like for you once you stopped chasing that external victim mentality or external validation?

SPEAKER_01 30:48

This is one thing that's really important to me. And it's really important about what I want to bring to the world. I was struggling with addiction, anxiety, separation from the people around me, feeling very alone, feeling like nobody liked me, very self-conscious. Something that I think a lot of people can relate to when they're really honest. I think we've all felt that tinge of like, what should I say? What should I do? How can I do this right in some sort of a situation? And that was just every day for me. It felt like I was always on a stage with people watching when I'm like pumping my gas in my car. Did I put it in right? Did I do it right? It was so extreme. And I didn't like insecure people because I thought nobody liked insecure people because they were awkward and weird at that point. So I really didn't want to be insecure. So then I'm beating myself up for the fact that I'm sitting there being so insecure when there's no reason to be insecure, which makes me more insecure.

Freedom Identity And Parenting Wisdom

SPEAKER_01 31:39

And then it's this vicious cycle of just this instant state of mental fog and buzz and what's going on, and what do I do? And panic as soon as I'm in public, because it just got progressively worse and worse and worse. And then that led to loneliness because I feel broken being able to connect to people, like my connector is broken, and then I'm inside and I'm alone and I don't have very many friends, and I'm starting to turn to video games and pornography and whatever I can do to feel alive and okay while I'm in a house. And none of that was me. I am an extrovert. I think most of us are extroverts. I would even argue a lot of the people that identify as introverts are extroverts with all this shit piled on top of us, similar to the shit I was experiencing. The technical term is shit. It's very, very scientific and carefully placed there. So this is where I was. I'm at home, defeated again, because I tried to go out to a party and enjoy myself, and it was just stressful, and I didn't meet any friends, and I felt different than anybody, I'm alienated, and I'm back home trying to figure out how to sleep, laying awake in bed with my mind racing, defeated again. It's a terrible place to be. And so I started to brute force it. I was like, okay, what do funny people say when they're at a party? What do charismatic people look like? Started going to the gym, started wearing different clothes. I started getting good at lots of different things to compensate for this part in myself that was not okay. I got good at tons of really cool stuff. Could jump my dirt bike 80 feet and I could like do wheelies on my motorcycle and I like wore the leather jackets and I played guitar on the stage. I built this whole identity. And the whole identity was built to compensate for the thing I was originally scared about. I had no idea. I thought I was just learning how to ride my dirt bike, learning how to play guitar, feeling this hit of adrenaline and excitement when I made a good joke and like everything's okay because I'm the guy now, and then I collapsed right back to that state of not feeling like the guy. Whole time, no idea. I'm building an entire identity for myself to compensate for a scared little kid that was living inside of me. And it was just this brute force journey. It was like beat yourself up when you're not that guy, get a hit of adrenaline when you are that guy, but be scared that you're gonna collapse to not being that guy. You know that feeling when you feel really good about yourself and you're like, this is the shit, this is the shit, but you're like, when's it gonna end?

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

When's it gonna end? When am I gonna fall back? It's a horrible feeling because it then you start to not even enjoy the times where you feel like yourself because you're just waiting to not feel like yourself.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:06

So I've gone from sad, scared, in bed, the weird kid, whatever, to seeming like the guy externally, and then getting in bed and still feeling like the weird kid and like having it collapse when it really mattered because it was built up so thoroughly, but it was on this very thin foundation where as soon as the situation was new or uncomfortable, there goes all the confidence. There goes who I feel like I am, there goes feeling okay, there goes feeling connected to people. As soon as the situation isn't perfect, I've lost it all. As soon as I'm alone in bed, trying to sleep, I've lost it all. As soon as I'm trying to form a deep, intimate relationship with somebody, I am just stressed. Who am I? Who is this guy? What's going on? Why can't I connect with this person? And that was when the journey of creating the business that I've created now started. Not with creating the business, but with creating what I bring to people for myself. And that journey, it took a lot of different people, places, experiences, gatherings, traveling, money to try to put together a way to get rid of this underlying feeling that something was just off. Where I could just get myself to feeling good, to looking good. But even when I was feeling good, I could feel this deep unease in my core. And I knew that as soon as I let go and relax for a second, that unease would just spread and fill me up and I'd be back in that anxious place, right where I was when I was 12 years old, all these years later. Through that journey, there were a lot of insights. Mind you, I didn't realize I had built my whole identity to compensate for a version of myself that was scared. I didn't know that there were limiting beliefs fronting every aspect of my life. I didn't know that my childhood was just playing out on repeat and that when I was talking to people and feeling shaky and scared, it was actually just me remembering a time when I tried to tell my dad about something and he didn't like it. And I learned something incorrect about reality in that moment. I didn't know all this. So I'm just blundering through trying to feel okay, trying to get off the anxiety meds that I was on, trying to get off the sleeping meds that I was on, trying to get to a place where I felt alive in the morning instead of dreading it. It's about a year and a half, over that year and a half, all of this stuff that I'm telling you now started to become conscious to me, started to realize what was actually going on inside of myself. Started to go to those corners that were too scared to ever get their expression. Started to learn why I was stressed around people. I started to learn why I felt like I couldn't actually build a business when it was what I knew I needed to do. I started to learn why every time I sat down to work, it felt like I was pulling from a million different voices and didn't actually know what to do and was just wandering and wondering instead of knowing exactly what to say and do in my work and being really clear and productive. When I showed up here as this perfect little baby, none of this stuff existed. And so through that journey, I started to pick those things out one at a time. And as I was picking them out, I started to learn how to work through them in real time as they come up. So then it starts to get faster. And then I don't spend a week feeling like shit and feeling like this not me version of me. I spend an hour and I get back to it. And then when something comes up again, it's only 30 minutes. And then you're starting to be able to pick through this stuff faster, and then something big comes in and it really starts to knock you out. But you have tools. You're like, oh wow, this big thing isn't actually the problem. The problem is not the problem. The meaning I'm giving the problem is the problem. And there's an association to an early memory that's created that original meaning. So I'm saying that I'm gonna be alone forever when this girlfriend broke up with me. And that's because of this time when I was really young, when my mom didn't show up when I was crying, could be so mundane. And because of that, I'm experiencing this is the worst thing in the world, and I feel like I'm gonna die. It's not actually that the girlfriend left. I think it was time for us to be over too. We start to see ourselves for what we really are, which are these machines that play out these crazy patterns. And so over that journey, as I plucked those things out one after the other, I started to be able to give somebody a smile. I actually feel like that smile was coming from me instead of me just doing what people do in a situation where you're supposed to smile, which is smile. I started to feel like work was something I actually wanted to wake up and do, and not just something that you're supposed to do because it's the rules. And I started to be able to feel like I was actually experiencing life in the way it was designed to be experienced. So there's still negative emotion, there's still hardship, but there isn't this underwhelming sense of things just being off all the time that I was living in. Things started to feel more consistently okay. I started to be able to achieve the things I wanted to achieve. So I could move through business so much faster and actually feel like I was somebody who was capable of starting a business. And then because I felt like somebody who was capable of starting a business, I started a business. I've been trying to do that for a long, long time. And then it just with ease, just complete ease. No grinding, no stressing, no pushing. It's just falling into my lap. It feels like I'm not even the one building it. I'm just shocked. And then I go into one of those stressed out states from an early association, and things aren't easy, and I'm pushing and I'm scared, but I know what to do. I look at it for what's really happening. I notice that it's an early association. I notice that there's a limiting belief around this that people don't want to listen to me. And that's why I'm scared on these sales calls, and it feels like such a grind to schedule a sales call. Because why would I want to schedule a sales call if it makes me feel like nobody's ever going to listen to me and brings up an early wound? So then I give that early wound its expression and I work through that belief and realize what's actually true is that people really love listening to me, that I'm great at speaking, and that I have a charismatic presence and that I'm great at sales. And then I'm like, when can I get the next one? Let's hop on the next one. Come on, this is too easy. And I actually make the sale because I show up as confident and excited and happy instead of hello, welcome to this sales call. I think you should buy my stuff because I feel like people aren't going to listen to me. And so that's how it feels. And so that's how I express. And so when you weed out this garden that's just overgrown with the shit that we learn that is not true, that is how we get back to an experience of life that's expansive, that's joyful, that's easeful, and that's authentic. And that's the key because people talk a lot about this great fast track to make tons of money and to create a cool life. But when it's really authentic is when you can really enjoy it. When you're actually building from the heart, instead of just fulfilling a role that you didn't even know you were fulfilling, but this role is not you. That's when you can really enjoy things like making money, like travel, like all of those things. I just found I didn't enjoy them in this state. Why am I even trying? If when I get there, I don't get to enjoy it. So weeding out that garden is so important because you get to experience peace and presence, an authentic expression of self alongside the progress through your life, instead of being a robot that's doing something and you don't know really why you're doing it.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

I do like that you use the weeding out the overgrown garden because I love gardens, but I don't like weeding out overgrown gardens. It is the most daunting thing to look at your garden, especially in the beginning of the season. I have a gross fence in the front of my yard where the sidewalk is. And in the early spring, like right now, it gets really grown over fast. And if I don't catch it early, it's really difficult to start. And the longer I wait to pull those weeds out, the longer it's gonna take. But once you start, like what you were saying, you just started and then it became like a domino effect. You just get all the shit first that's underlying, you really just have to maintain it after that. So, like a few weeds do pop up. All right, now I have the tools and it's a lot less overcrowded. Now you just pull those weeds out once in a while. It's not overwhelming. So before it was a little overwhelming, it was like a fight, fight or freeze at some point. But once you do the work and then it's becoming that domino effect, it's just maintenance at that point. And it might take a little bit, but you have to maintain that consistency and that mindset to get to the point where now it's just like, all right, this popped up.

Advice for Parents and Wrap-Up

SPEAKER_00 42:31

Yeah, it's causing some anxiety, but I know how to work with it now. I just have one more question because this has been so much great information. And just coming from how you've grown up, what is something that you wish more parents understood in raising their kids today?

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Do your own work. Don't look at the problem of raising a child as how can I set this guy up? Because this guy already has everything he needs to be able to blossom into who he's here to be. And the only thing we can do to hamper that is interfere. And so often, in the name of helping our child expand into who they're meant to be, we actually are hampering their ability to expand to who they're meant to be. So, an example of this is we're worried our child isn't going to be able to make enough money. And so we do things to try to help them be able to make more money. But really, what we're doing is passing on to them the idea that it's hard to make money. In trying to do that fixing, we're not letting their natural ability to make money flourish. Whenever we identify a problem in somebody, whether this is one of my coaching clients or a friend or a partner or a parent looking at a child, whenever we identify a problem in somebody, we're actually identifying a problem in ourselves. So if I see somebody as weird, I'm identifying that I believe I'm weird. I believe I couldn't. The things that person is doing and still receive acceptance and love. So it makes us uncomfortable that they're doing it. When I see somebody that I think is going to be broke, I think they're going to be broke because I don't have enough of a belief in the fact that money can flow easily and freely into my life, into anybody's life. And so I believe that they're going to be broke. It's not true. We're so convinced it's true. But the only reason we believe that they're not going to make enough money is because we ourselves are insecure about money. And so the one thing I would lead with parents wanting to enable their child to live a purpose-driven, expansive, free, wonderful life is when you see a problem in your child, it's not a problem in your child. It's a problem in you and your belief system. 100% of the time. And so the answer is do your own work. Find a coach or somebody to help guide you and some sort of content and container to do the work inside of and start looking at how you can weed your own garden so that you stop hampering the unfolding of your child's brilliance into who they're here to be because you don't trust in them enough, because you're scared about the fact that nobody's going to listen to them because your mom didn't listen to you when you were seven years old.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

And just like we are saying before we even started the recording, it it's never too late to do the own work in yourself and then to pass it down to the ones that you influence. I think a lot of people that are listening are realizing how much of their own life is built around proving and performing and trying to become acceptable instead of really trying to become their true selves. So I appreciate this raw and honest and grounded conversation, just how you are in general, especially at your age, because you're challenging the idea of how success has become really self-destructive in many different ways. So, with that said, how can people find you, connect with you, and learn more about your work?

SPEAKER_01 46:11

Thank you so much, Renee. My website is kaibrown.co. So K-A-I-B-R-O-W N dot C O. And I work with young guys ages 18 to 25 to help them live as passionate, purpose-driven, and free as they're meant to be. And so if you have a sense that somebody in your life is meant to live like that, you probably already know that they would benefit from a conversation with me. And you can go to my website to make that happen.

SPEAKER_00 46:45

And for everyone that's listening, if this episode resonated with you, make sure you subscribe to Hustle Rebels, leave a review and share this episode with someone who's questioning the conditionings and blueprint that they were handed. And if you want to support the show or learn more about the Hustle Rebels toolbox and partnerships, you can head over to waywardwellnesscoaching.org and send a message through the contact form. Also, all of Kai's information is going to be linked in the show notes description as well so that you can connect with him. So we will see you guys next week.