When the Goalpost Stops Moving with Maurice Philogene

Maurice Philogene built the kind of life many people spend years chasing: multiple careers, financial freedom, deep service, real estate, travel, and a wide field of experience. But the center of this conversation is not achievement. It is what it cost him to follow an inner voice that kept pointing him away from the track everyone else seemed to be on.

Maurice talks about turning down visible markers of success, leaving paths that no longer made sense, and the loneliness of being different before he had the right people around him.

What emerges is a conversation about discernment, status, fatigue, belonging, and the shift from building more to finally living inside the life already built.

Timestamps

00:01:00 The life Maurice built across corporate work, service, real estate, and travel

00:05:00 Why his attention has shifted from building a life to inhabiting it

00:08:00 The red line where more stopped feeling right

00:11:00 Leaving roles that no longer matched his inner direction

00:14:00 Mud scripts, intuition, and the pressure to keep pressing go

00:18:00 The cost of being different before he had people who understood

00:23:00 Finding the people who made his life easier to speak about

00:26:00 Fewer relationships, but much deeper ones

00:29:00 Why not every hard thing is a real problem

00:38:00 Letting life unfold without controlling the outcome

00:41:00 “There is no there” and the end of chasing the next marker

00:51:00 What Maurice wants people who are still running hard to know

Guest bio

Maurice Philogene is the founder of Try Life On. Across more than two decades, he worked as a corporate executive, military officer, federal agent, police officer, and real estate investor while building financial freedom and traveling to more than 100 countries. His current work points toward building and inhabiting a life you do not need a vacation from.

About Carla

Carla Royal works privately with a small number of founders and leaders whose decisions carry real consequence. Most of them already have excellent advisers. What they rarely have is someone who knows the person carrying the company and can stay with the questions that cannot be answered inside it. She works underneath performance, where judgment, timing, and steadiness are formed before they appear in the room. Carla Royal, M.Ed., is a Certified Integral Master Coach™ with more than three decades of experience spanning psychology, coaching, and long-term private work with founders and senior leaders.

Links

Maurice Philogene: https://trylifeon.com

Email: maurice@trylifeon.com

Carla Royal: https://carlaroyal.com

About the show

What Holds is a podcast about the work that holds what founders and leaders are building. Each conversation looks beneath performance, self-sufficiency, and success into what people carry, what it costs, and what becomes possible when they are no longer carrying it alone.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're bearing all of that weight. You don't have the ability to speak about it. Not easily. I felt awful, to be honest. I I was I can feel emotion coming because that kid and then starting to be young adult endured being alone because his inner voice was saying, Go this way, but the masses were going that way, and that is a very difficult thing.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

This is what holds conversations with founders and leaders about the weight people carry and what becomes possible when they are no longer alone in it. I'm Carla Royal, your host. My guest today is Maurice Philogene. For more than 20 years, Maurice ran several careers at once: an executive, an Air Force officer, a police officer, a real estate investor, and somewhere in there he built financial freedom and got to more than a hundred countries. He coaches people on what he calls try life on, building a life you don't need a vacation from. Lately, he's been pointing to something different. Not how to build that life, but how to live inside it once you have it. Maurice, I am absolutely delighted that you're here and I welcome you.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Yeah, it's my it's it's my pleasure. And I'm glad you said that because um I think sometimes when people hear folks' but bio or resume or whatever, it's nice, but it's all in the past. I like that you reference what I'm doing now, which is much more helping people inhabit the life that they've actually built rather than default, let's just keep building, which that's not my way of thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

I love that. And that was one of the things that uh absolutely stopped me in my tracks when we had our podcast episode with you when I was uh when you were uh interviewing me. And that was one of the things that that really stopped me that inhabit your life. And I want to say, Maurice, that I got off of that call, and at that time I did not have a podcast. And I got off of that call and I felt so good about our conversation. I just felt very alive and excited, and it was such an interesting conversation, and you're so interesting. And I thought to myself, I want to do this. I want to have a podcast, and I want to have people like Maurice on my podcast. And so you you really were uh an inspiration for me to start this. So thank you, sir. I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

I I I I receive that. And um same thing for my podcast. I get to meet wonderful people like you who either validate what how I think or I just recognize myself in you. Um so I'm glad you're doing it because you're gonna help a lot of people with the platform.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Tell me a little bit about what you've built, Maurice, and where your attention is these days.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Yeah. So um I have built a life that I think uh is uncommon. Um, it is extra nor extraordinary by societal standards, but not extraordinary by my own. And I and I w say it that way because it doesn't matter what I've built. My life doesn't really matter for everybody else. It's an example, but I just like to use it as an example of the art of the possible for what whatever other people would like to do. Um, I'm 50. I tr I tend to start from where I am today because I believe in the power of now. I'm 50. I'm the dad of two boys. I live between coastal Maryland and coastal Lebanon. I put the word coastal as an adjective on purpose for people to understand I love to be by the water. Um for roughly 25 years, I was a senior executive at a global consulting firm called Accenture, right out of college. Um, for a parallel 22 years, I was in the military. Actually, it was technically 26 because I was in the military in college too, but but I was parallel a military officer at the same time as a federal agent, retired as a lieutenant colonel. And then later in life at age 33, uh, just because it was my value system to give back to my local community, I became a police officer and did that in parallel as well as a midnight police officer. What you were alluding to was 23-year-old me had the wherewithal to understand to take all those beautiful paychecks and invest them in real estate along the way. And then you also alluded to my value system is not careers and titles and necessarily money as much as it is an extraordinary life. So I found ways to travel to 100 countries, whether it was work, personal, military, weekend trips to Turkey to read a book. Um I I genuine, genuinely believe that the best thing we can do for ourselves is design a life we don't need a vacation from. I haven't taken a vacation in over 10 years because I don't need to.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Thank you for that. I I've noticed in some of your podcast episodes and in our conversation that you are talking a bit less about building the life and more about how to live inside that life, how to inhabit that life. And again, that struck me so much. I'm curious what you mean by that. Um, and what what what what prompted you to turn your attention there?

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Self-introspection. My lived experience, I think one of the reasons why I resonate so well with many other people because they can see themselves in me one way or the other. Black kid from New York and Boston, my family's Haitian, typical American guy, but I speak languages as well. I have worked in white-collar, blue-collar, no-collar, military, corporate street level stuff. So it's it's it's just it's a it's a beautiful thing. Um, but the reason I talk so much now, and people are starting to sense it in me about inhabiting the life that you built is because we have, I was just talking about this in my son's uh classroom. They invited me for career day, and I explained to them we have been taught over time, no fault of our own, that everything is about building a life, building a career, building a family, building an entrepreneurial endeavor. Um, I built a private equity firm. We uh acquired well over 2,000 apartments over a period of time. That wasn't for money for me, that was a way for me to help other people reach their own version of financial freedom. But what happens after you achieve all the building? You do it. In most cases, what I have observed from peers and from my, and I say peers from corporate government and entrepreneurial, they don't know how to shut it off. I think people have lost no fault of their own because that is the noise and the static around us. Hey, you you're worth a million, you should be worth five. You're worth five, you should be worth 10. You're worth 10, you should be worth 20. And maybe you get to the 20 or the 40 or the 80, but then you're 82 and you forgot to live along the way, other aspects of your life. So what I've um come to understand, and this is what I was getting at before, my own lived curriculum. I call it my sacred curriculum, my own lived experience. I think people can see themselves in me, and what I'm expressing to them is I don't need to do more. There's this notion we we have to go do more and more and more. And I started feeling or listening to my internal compass, my internal voice, my intuition, and it was telling me something was off. Every time I went to go do the next real estate deal or just go to the next country just because there was resistance to it internal, and I listened to it. And where I got to with a lot of self-work was understanding that I it was time for me to inhabit the life I built, not built more external architecture just for the sake of it.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Was there a point in that where you started to see the cost of that more, more, more? Or did you sort of catch yourself before that point of the cost?

SPEAKER_01 8:17

I don't think you can totally catch yourself before the cost because you have to feel the redlining uh to make a change. If it still feels good, I have nothing against money. I want to make money, but if it feels good, do it. Like if you're in a business, like Elon is not making money because he just wants to make money. It feels good to him. He's fundament Elon Musk, he's fundamentally changing how society operates, whether it's Tesla or SpaceX or PayPal, whatever the guy's done. That feels good to him. Other people, let's say, um, I'll use two examples. I'll use corporate example and I'll use my a military example. In corporate, I turned down the partner track four times because it didn't, it didn't make sense to me. In the military, when I got to lieutenant colonel, I had a track to get to full colonel, but it didn't make sense to me. Because the things that I was doing at my senior manager level and at my lieutenant colonel level, which was field level work with people that I really liked and my clients and embassies and all that type of stuff, that felt good. The moment I went the next or had an inkling to go the next level, I could feel that it didn't make sense for me at all. And what I'm good at, even though I built all these businesses and had all these experiences, what people don't um are sensing in me is not that I'm this entrepreneur exec type who does everything. No. It's that I have the ability to kind of intrinsically listen to my inner voice, pivot on a dime, and I don't question my thought process. It's like, it's time, I'm leaving. It's time to shift to something else. But um, I don't think a lot of people do that, and I don't blame people because that's not how the static around us tells us that success or tells us what success is.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

That's right. You talked about it in our uh in our podcast episode with you that that it was like moving the the goalposts, just constantly moving the goalposts. And and that it does seem to be the kind of culture that we find ourselves in, the grind mentality at all costs, uh, not just when you need to or when you want to, but but just no matter what's happening, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. And of course, you have been a grinder and and and you know how to grind. So you said that there that that you didn't know that you could catch yourself, that people can catch themselves at that red line. They kind of have to get to it at some point. What was your red line? I hear you saying you're listening to the intuition and to the voice, but was there something else happening that got you in every single case.

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Now the way you're saying it, yes. There was there was a red line, and I could feel it. Let me just because I want people to see themselves in me, so I'll give real world examples. For the police department in 21, um George Floyd had just happened a year earlier. Policing changed, nobody wanted to see us anymore. I joined the police department for a check of a hundred or one thousand four hundred and five hundred dollars a month to risk my life to be part of the community. I loved it. I loved every moment of it. In 2021, I found myself uh two, three in the morning, always in the back lot of the station because we weren't out there doing anything anymore. Nobody wanted to get in trouble. Citizens didn't really want to see you. And I understood. And I felt it. And I was like, this is not, this is not why I came. And I walked to my to my sergeant and he said, Oh man, you're done. And I said, Yes. I felt it. I listened to my own voice. I'll go quicker on the other ones. For lieutenant colonel, I was a federal agent, um, acting as special agent in charge of field offices. Well, to get the colonel track, I had to leave the field, leave running offices of federal agents, and go to headquarters and write policy. I could feel it. I was like, I don't want to make lieutenant. You know what? If I make full bird colonel because I do policy for three years, then I got to stay another three years to retire at Fullbird Colonel. It didn't, I'm not saying it doesn't make sense for everybody. It didn't make sense for me. And then the last one, I was gonna do four, but I'll just do this last one. Real estate. I did a lot of real estate on my own and then and I earned my financial freedom that way. And then in 2019, I started a private equity firm with four other partners. We did really well, especially in 21, 22, up into 23 because the market allowed it. 24 and 25 were very, very difficult years. When people started asking, and now I didn't leave because it was difficult years, I left because there was alternative thoughts within my company, and this is fine, on let's go earn money this way. It was a totally different way. That didn't resonate with me at all. What resonated with me was buying apartment complexes, uh, renovating them, giving tenants a better quality of life, and trying to do our best to give investors a return. So now we're, it was kind of it's not a chasing money thing. It's just that we we were starting to make money in ways that did not resonate with me at all. Now, everybody could say, Mo, go make lieuten or colonel, go be a partner at your firm. Why wouldn't you make another $2 million with your private equity firm? It made zero sense to me. Zero sense. I could feel it. And it was um very difficult to leave all of them, but it was the right thing to do. And over time, I've just gotten very good at detaching from things.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

A lot of the clients I have worked with in the past, they want that legacy. They want that, you know, the the top, the top, whatever that is, even if it costs them um their intuition or what they think feels good to them, they want the label. They want they want the status. It sounds like you haven't done that as much.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

I was able to put words to that thought process because of you. They will they are many of them want to do it. There's nothing wrong with that if that is their version of success. But many people are just pressing go because for 35 years they've been pressing go. They don't know what else to do. They are running a mud script. They are. What I got right over my time, for some reason, this happened starting at age 15 for me. For some reason, I have always listened to my intuition. For some reason, I cannot tell. And even when all of society or all of my peers or all the fellas that I grew up with were telling me to go right, if my inner voice, if my superconscious, if my God, my divine, that inner voice, that inner kid in me was telling me to go left, I went left. Now that has a cost to it. I used to talk about it when I was on social media. I coined the phrase entrepreneurial depression because I didn't know what else to call it. I would leave the DC area on a Thursday, fly to Turkey, like the country Turkey, read a book for two days, and then fly back and be at work on Monday. My intuition was telling me there was just more to life. I didn't want to work, I didn't want to stay in the area on the weekend. So there is a cost to that. Um, but I don't blame people for not, let's say, stopping something. Because when you've been doing something for so long, it becomes part of your subconscious routines. But what I've learned is that we are neuroplastic. We can rewire. So the person that's talking to you now, the 2026 Maurice, is very aware of his thoughts. I have thoughts about my thoughts. I want to know if it's coming from a subconscious routine, from a mud script, or from hearing my neighbor say something, or is it really, really something I want and need to do? When you can get to that level of discernment, life changes.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

You've mentioned mud script twice, so I want to give our listeners reference for that because in our podcast episode together, it was great. I was telling this. It was, it was fun. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

It it I talked about the Golden Buddha story, which is a true story that back, I don't know, maybe in the 1400s, I d I can't remember exactly. There was a village and they were Buddhist, I think, and they had a golden Buddha, a pure gold Buddha. And they heard that war had broken out in the country, and they knew it was just a matter of time before the soldiers came through their village. And so they plastered the Golden Buddha with mud. And and then sure enough, the the soldiers came in, wiped out the entire village, didn't touch the Golden Buddha because it looked like a big blob of mud, and it stayed there for centuries. And in 17, I think in the in the 1950s, I think it was, it might have been the 1970s, somebody was walking through that field and saw this blob of clay, and there was a crack in it, and the sun hit it just in such a particular way that they saw a gleam. And then they they took all that mud off of it and they found a golden Buddha that was worth millions of dollars. And so in my work with people, my thinking is that we come into the world as a golden Buddha, and then our beliefs, other people's beliefs, the culture's beliefs, and so forth is mud that gets put on us, usually uh with good intention. Uh it's usually they think to keep us protected, uh, but we forget that we are the golden Buddha and who we are. And so that's what you're talking about, the mud scripts. It's like we believe our we believe our mud. We believe the mud is us. So we spend time on social media media or wherever um decorating our mud, trying to make it look nicer, not realizing that there's the golden Buddha underneath. So thank you for bringing that up. Yeah. You said that there was a cost to you, for example, the example was flying to Turkey for two days. I'm curious what the cost was to you because it was what it sounds like you you learned from an early age to trust your intuition and that it has served you well. What was the cost for you to that kind of thing to follow your intuition?

SPEAKER_01 18:22

You know. So to be clear for your listeners, we gave the turkey example, but I'll give them another example that kind of makes it more real. So when I was a corporate executive, okay, I had a nine to five day. Well, a little bit more than that, because I was a consultant. But then I would in general come home, be with the kids for one, two hours, homework dinner, go to sleep for an hour or two, wake up, put on a police uniform, and go out on patrol. And I would do that four days a week. There's a cost I didn't sleep a lot, or if I did, it was in the patrol car, or sometimes I nobody not very few people knew this, but um if I was at the office, I would go out to my friend's car and sleep in the car at lunch to get sleep. But I wanted to be a police officer, but I also wanted to keep the corporate paychecks. Like I so the so the car and then okay, me flying a turkey, and that was about wanting constant learning, and now what I can better understand is constant expansion of of yourself as a human. I wanted to continue to expand. I don't like this press repeat thing every day that that we do in our society. There's nothing wrong with having a rhythm in life, but when you are pressing repeat every day doing the same exact thing, you become a bit of a drone and you stop expanding. We were expanding as kids running around, going to school, your first job, your second job, but then somewhere we just start pressing repeat for like years, and then the gift of it is a two-week vacation during the summer. No. So the cost was I felt different. The cost was the voices around me did not have the same vibration as as my own. The cost was yo mo, black dudes don't do that. You know, what what's up? Like what's what's wrong? And that's why I stopped talking. I stopped telling people what I was doing. No one knew that I, I don't know, bought a mobile home park in West Virginia and started running running it. Nobody knew for the most part that I was a police officer at my corporate firm. Smartest thing that ever happened, by the way, not telling anyone anything. Um, but you know, you're you're bearing all of that weight. You don't have the ability to speak about it. Not easily. With my significant other, yes. Sometimes with my parents, but my parents are traditional Caribbean Haitian parents whose value system is one job, one one school, you know, one degree kind of thing. I felt awful, to be honest. I I was I can feel emotion coming because that kid and then that starting to be um young adult like endured being alone because his inner voice was saying, go this way, but the masses were going that way, and that is a very difficult thing until you find your tribe. And what I would have changed years ago is the amount of effort I put into my entrepreneurial endeavors, owning restaurants, owning nightclubs, failing a coffee shop, starting uh a private equity firm, being a street off being a police officer, going to federal agent school. If I would have put that amount of effort into trying to find Carla, things would have been different. But back then we didn't have LinkedIn and social media and all I had was the library. So I was always in the library reading books and everything. So it was a heavy cost to pay.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

However, 50-year-old me is benefiting from the sacrifice that 23 to 38-year-old me made. And I'm grateful.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Well, and I I absolutely saw the pain when you were talking about that young man, that young boy and that young man, and the loneliness that you felt. And I do think that when you're in a culture such as ours, with all of the pressures and all of the mud scripts that um that to go your own way, the road less traveled, you know, beat the the beat the the drum of your own beat, you know, your own beat uh is is incredibly courageous and to your point lonely.

SPEAKER_02 22:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

And I think that that's often the case also for many entrepreneurs, is it's a lonely journey. It's it's lonely because they are in some ways bucking the system and it can feel insec it can feel frightening and it can feel insecure, though they may not admit that or say that out loud to your point. You don't want to necessarily say that out loud. It sounds like um you you've that you did find your tribe and your significant other. And how has that helped you with that maybe the loneliness or the pain or in building what you've been able to build? Has that been crucial for you?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Yeah, I mean uh for a preponderance of that journey, so I'm not with her now, but my youngest son's mom, uh, we were together, I don't know, 14 years or something. But I we she and I have had this conversation. She never questioned anything that I did. So it's not that I the reason I give her so much credit is because she just accepted everything. And even though we're not together to this day, I support her like nobody's business, whether it's spiritually, mentally, financially, even if we're fighting, I will always have her back because of what she did, what who she is as well. What's different nowadays is I can honestly say that there are Maurices all over the place. They're everywhere. But for the same reasons I was quiet back in the day, I think they are quiet too until we find each other. So your job is to go find your own reflection in people. Conferences, asking around, listening to podcasts where a podcast host, let's say a Maurice or Carla, tends to talk a certain way and they tend to attract a certain kind of guest, then you reach out to that guest via DM, you invest in that potential relationship. They live in Indiana, you live in New Jersey, you get on a damn plane and you go see that person. We think because of so well, I'm I've been off of social media almost five years now. We we think a post is enough that we know someone, or that that will drive a relationship. No. In fact, some like some of the people I've interviewed on my own podcast, when I could feel resonance with them, one pictic person sticks out. I was in Beirut, uh, lady by the name of Lisa Chastain, she and I are very close now. I could feel that she was one of us. So I got on a plane, she asked me to be on her podcast, and I said, Well, where are you? She says, Vegas, because I knew she did them in person, some in person. I said, No problem, I'll get on a plane in two days and I'll come see you. Like people don't invest in that. And that's what I've gotten really good at is when I find people of this cloth. And I it has nothing to do with money. Nothing. It has everything to do with understanding your own human divinity and having dignity in your ability to create your life. Those people, when you find them, man, we stick together like nobody's business because you just don't want to go back to folks who are so superficial or maybe just so much mud on them they can't see it. It's, you know, it's very difficult. But um, there's a cost to all of it. But once you can find your tribe, you cannot unsee what you've seen, you cannot unfeel what you felt, and the status quo loses you forever.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

And when you have that tribe and that community, are you then able to speak? Because you said, I I wouldn't speak about it. I wouldn't tell people this, that, or the other thing when you were in so much pain as a young man. Is that now is is with the right people, are you able to share some of your struggles, some of your insecurities?

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Aaron Powell I'm a private person in general, but I am around my circles. And I express to you, you know, the the breadth of my professional and entrepreneurial uh life. So I know thousands of people, uh, but I knew them an inch deep. My circles nowadays, and this is intentional, let's say it's maybe a hundred people, and I know them a mile deep and very, very intimately. So I have no shortage of people that I can lean on when I need to lean on them. But I would say right now it's my, you know, it's my best friend, uh, two of my best friends, and my kids, to be honest, um, because I want them to feel what I feel and see what I see. What I still do, however, I don't talk much about what is in pro in progress or in process. I talk about things that are done already. Because I'm a big fan of the mental diet, as I think you know. I don't know traditional media, no social media. I curate the books I read, I curate movies, I don't watch kill them movies, I don't watch horror movies. Um, but I also don't I also make sure that I don't hear any voices louder than my own. So let's say I have certain life things that are going on right now, okay? Not necessarily business things, because I've kind of gotten away from the business thing, except for one pretty big thing that I'm doing. I won't talk about it. I won't even mention it outside of one person, one or two people, because I don't want the noise of everybody. I have learned that when you act as the guard of your own gates for information coming at you, you can hear yourself better. You're better connected to source energy, you make better decisions. You wake up in the middle of the night with a hunch and you write something down on a piece of paper next to your bed. I I always have them near me, these little pads. Because I like something comes to my mind and I write it down. Uh, but but I do have certain circles of people in my what I say, my Lebanon node, my Maryland node. I have mixed them together. They are my family, some by blood, most by spirit. And I feel like I'm home. And I just didn't have that in my, I'd say my twenties, thirties, and early forties.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

And you've built that now. And Intentionally.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Intentionally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

Yeah. And and and we we are in a culture of a loneliness epidemic. We've seen that and we know how danger it it is. And so I love the fact that you've been so intentional about that. And I also love how you have reduced the noise or the mud. You know, you're taking off so much mud, you've reduced the noise. There's so much noise. We know this with social media, with the news and everything. Um, I love that you trust your voice, that you you learned early to listen to your voice and to trust it and to follow it, even when it was painful, and that you do that now, and that you don't talk about necessarily what's uh what you're planning or what's going on. You listen to your voice. I think that's all very wise, Maurice. I really do. When you do hit something you can't handle on your own, what do you do with it? Do you go to your tribe with that?

SPEAKER_01 29:50

It just depends on what it is. Um there are I go well, I go within. I I don't like to sound all like uh woo-woo and stuff like that. If I run into an issue with my kids, my like I'm having a tough issue with some business partners right now. I tend to, and this has a lot to do with the my own internal work that I've done for the past oh, internal work. I've just done a lot of work on myself in the past four or five years. I've learned a lot about um when humans are in certain states. I have to be in the right state to deal with things. Usually when we have a problem, we really actually don't have a problem. We're just in a state, like your body and your mind is in a state that is not processing that well. And we are all, we tend, school, you know, get to Harvard, get to Stanford. We tend to be these A personalities that think we need to solve everything no matter the situation. What's happening, in fact, that is people are being reactive. I have a problem, let me solve it right away. I gotta get it done, let me call this person right now, I gotta da da da da da da da da da. Okay. It's nothing wrong with that. The problem is you're executing on, you're you're trying to solve the problem from a state that doesn't make sense, meaning you're low energy, you're upset at something, you're aggravated. So whenever something comes up for me, I ask myself, why is this bothering me? And is this really a problem? So the example I'll give is with certain business partners right now, we're not communicating well, but we're not communicating well because they are wrong and I'm right. We're not communicating well because they have a certain value system and I have a certain value system and we've grown apart. Okay? It's not a problem. We're just different people. So how do you get to the resolution? You put distance between the stimulus and the response. The stimulus is all of a sudden we're not communicating well. Great. Let's take it offline for three weeks. Get back to a position where we are much more neutral, it's not heightened and all those kinds of things. I've learned how to self-regulate in a way where I really don't have a lot of issues that I can't deal with. If I do need a sounding board, bar none, meaning a human one, that's not me. Bar none is my best friend Melissa, because we've been best friends since we were age 15, so 36 years now. Uh, and we're on this kind of spiritual journey together, our own growth with each other. But we think we have problems. You know what's a real problem? A real problem was when I was a police officer and went into someone's house and there was a burglar in a house with a mom with her kid, and she was by herself. That's a problem. Um I have a disagreement with business partners. That's not a problem. It's it's just a slight puzzle. And if here, and I'll give one more tip for people. I gave the thing about this stimulus and response. Take a pad of paper, write that problem that you think is a problem on that pad of paper in a one line or two, put it in the middle of your dining room table, walk around that dining room table ten times while looking at that problem. It'll shrink it down to what it is. Nothing. It's not a problem. It's just something you have to solve very quickly. It's not a problem.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Nice. Two things that you said that struck me was um one was, you know, the is this a real problem? And you go in and you see a burger, that's a problem. Your life experiences, because you've had so many different kinds of life experiences, has given you um has really widened your perspective. You've seen more than than at least most of the people that I work with, and and and probably more than I've seen for sure. And I remember standing on my porch um a couple of years ago and getting shot at. Well, that's not something that this nice old white woman experienced much in our life. You know, but other people experience that often. And it and and when you can can be in a situation like that and and understand what a problem really is, well, it does widen your perspective. So you have widened your expect your perspective with all of the different the different experiences that you've had. The second thing you said that struck me was uh about getting some distance between the stimulus and response. And that is a key practice uh in my work with my clients and and personally, and for you too, is that I I call it the pause. Pause, pause, pause, whether that's for a few seconds or whether that's for, what did you say, three weeks or whatever. Um that can right there. I was I was low this weekend, have no idea why, nothing happened. It's the nature of being human.

SPEAKER_02 34:38

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

And and and the difference in in this weekend and maybe years ago is that I didn't make it a problem. I'm like, oh, okay, I'm low. And then I woke up uh a couple days later and I felt perfectly fine. Nothing had changed, nothing had happened. But just allowing for that space without making it a problem, as you say, is hugely powerful.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Yeah, it is. And uh I give credit to Dr. Nona Javid, D-J-A-V-I-D. I interviewed her one time. Um she's an amazing neuroscientist, and she taught me uh by observation the power of energetics and what they what they were. And again, I keep telling you, like, my instincts are really good. I I know that our human form, I knew this inherently, that our human form cannot possibly respond to our subconscious ability. The human body is so limited, we just don't know that, we don't know it. So when you start to learn about it and under Dispenza talks about this all the time, when you start to learn about it and understand it, you realize that, oh, okay, but if I'm low today and I make a decision that's gonna affect my family for decades, it's probably not gonna be the best decision. You'd be you'd be better off paying a late fee on whatever it is that you're dealing with and getting yourself back to a high vibratory or at least happy earth state. And then making a decision on it. But we're, you know, in grade school and in formal school, we're not taught these things about physiology and decision-making process as far as it comes with um uh the energy of who we are and all that type of stuff. I encourage people to get a better understanding of who they actually are, and then all these problems that exist in your life, they are real, but they are only real to the extent that your mind says they are. So if you can control your thoughts or if you can understand it's a practice skill to have thoughts about your thoughts. Why do I have an impulse right now that something is off? And I know why. Because I'm in my farmhouse. I just cleaned my house because I'm I'm a bit of an OCD, I like my place clean, and I'm looking outside and I know what's bothering me already energetically. The grass isn't cut. Flowers look a bit mangy. I don't like that feeling. So if I'm in a business meeting right now and I'm just like edgy because my lawn guy hasn't come and it's really pissing me off, it's not the time for me to be doing, or at least it isn't if I have to make a decision, that's fine. But I know that my anxiousness is not from the people on the call. My anxiousness is from what I have had observed outside. That's why I'm so good at this stuff now, because I have thoughts about my thoughts before I go about making such decision such decisions that could dramatically impact our lives.

SPEAKER_00 37:43

Yes, you have been practicing this for quite some years and have gotten quite good at it. Is there a part of your story story, Maurice, that you used to treat as a sort of detour or you didn't think it counted that you see now really shaped you?

SPEAKER_02 38:01

Part of my story.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

Um I maybe and maybe it's not a physical part of my story, it's a thought process. It's the way I process life over time. And that is I just gave someone this example. I tend to I tended to make decisions about life without care of the outcome. I didn't try to dictate the outcome. So I'll give you an example. In 2000, this goes to a bit to manifestation, but I I watched a movie in 2001, Jason Bourne, and he was kind of this spy guy on the Mediterranean. I was like, oh my god, I want to be a spy or a special agent on the Mediterranean. In 2015, I got an opportunity to be a special agent working on the Mediterranean because I ran Federal Law Enforcement Field Office in Izmir, Turkey. It's on the Aegean, but we did a lot of stuff down in the south of the country on the Med on the Mediterranean. My mother, when I talked with her about the opportunity that that my then colonel was giving me, she was like, don't go because A, B, and C, it's dangerous, it's on the Syrian border. I said, Mom, I'm going because something's going to change in my life. I don't know what it is. I'm I'm rolling. But I had the most mind-blowing eight months of my life, which then led me to being in the Mediterranean region, which then led me to the country of Cyprus, which then led me to meeting a friend who is a real estate developer on the island of Cyprus, and then I became a real estate developer on the island of Cyprus, which then led me to Lebanon, because Lebanon is a 30 hour one-hour flight away, which then led me to meeting all these other people, which then led me to led me to my now current dual country lifestyle. We we're so trained to want to do something and to define the outcome of what success means. If people can just do it anyway, without care of the outcome, and have joy in the process of it and the decision making of it. Because the end of it, the end state of it, okay, I did turkey. But the end is not what I enjoyed. It was the process of it. So okay, so is there a part of your journey? Yes. Again, my that 23-year-old kid just started doing stuff. He's like, I don't know where this is going, but I'm gonna do it. I don't know where this is going. Uh, 21-year-old Maurice who tried out for the NFL and didn't make it, who heard in his inner voice when he was 24, 25, I want to play football again. So he researched football eligibility and found out he could play in graduate school at age 26. So I went to graduate school at age 26, not to get a degree, but to get back on the football field to see if I could have another chance at the NFL. I don't know where this is going, but I'm gonna do it. I always treated life like that because if somebody would have said the success is getting a second tryout, Maurice, and getting to the NFL, I didn't get to the NFL. But I got so much more by just taking the decision and rolling with it. So that's the part of my journey that I think has been the linchpin, maybe soft skill of everything that I've experienced and earned.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

You have allowed yourself to enjoy the journey. And I I see so many clients uh and entrepreneurs who uh they start it for the enjoyment and then uh they get into the grind of it and they stop enjoying it anymore because they're looking for that goalpost that keeps moving, keeps moving, keeps moving.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

I I the to the executive, woman or man who's listening, to the parent with five kids, woman or man who's listening, I've done three traditional careers police officer, military officer, senior executive at very high levels. Okay. I've also very high-level entrepreneur who started his own private equity firm, and we acquired 200, in my day I've acquired $250 million worth of real estate. So I've been there. There is no there. It never ends. There is no destination, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there is no Shangri-La. Because no matter what you do, there's always something else you could do. And because of the way that we have been trained, formal education, now social and traditional media. Judy next door has the four-door Mercedes, so I want to get the Mercedes truck so I feel better about myself. We just we just keep consuming and we keep going. There's no there. And maybe that's the overall red line that I was trying to get across to you, Carla. I really started to feel that in 2021, 22. I was like, I'm not getting any happier doing all this stuff. So why not pivot and take all the external life architecture that I've built, which was very intentional. Where I live in my farmhouse in Maryland, we have a little cottage on the water, not overly expensive. Small apartment in Beirut, um, friends around the world. I can travel hack anywhere. I have a certain amount of passive income coming in monthly. My oldest son is out in the world. I designed his life between Atlanta and Maryland where I am. He floats back and forth. This amazing life architecture that I've built, to include business concerns. Let me simplify it all. Learn to be versus doing. So that's been my effort over the last two years is learning how to just be. So the person you're looking at on the screen is not the heavy entrepreneur, the hustler. No. What you're looking at is the fifty year old, ten year old kid who's just being I'm riding my bike again, I'm jumping fences again, I'm at the convenience store at the gas station buying a five cent Jolly Rancher again. There's no destination. And I I hope people feel that for me. Like I've done like I've all the careers, I'm living proof. I'm like, every time I got to a title, there was another thing to go do. So I don't know, it's a it's a tough thing.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

Yeah, it is. And and I think, you know, we know that. And and I'm 65, you're 50, we know. But but but we had to find out. And I think that's the case for so many people is no matter how many times we say there's not that destination, I I think people, for whatever reason, have to find out that out for themselves.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

They have to. And they have to have so you cannot take what Carla and I are saying and then make a decision today based off of that. What what we're saying, what I'm suggesting by talking through you or to you and through you, Carla, is for them to build up a level of awareness. So when I got the first offer to enter the partner track, my awareness was too high already. I knew that would not serve me, nor serve them, because then I wouldn't operate well in it. I still worked. I worked in corporate for 25 years, but my awareness level not to take uh the next golden handcuff was so high. And here's the kicker. My peers kept saying, Well, you've been here 20 years, why are you not partner yet? Well, you've been here 22 years, why are you not partner yet? You've been here 24 years. What is wrong with Maurice? Oh, and then I retired, and then it came out that I had bought 2,000 pieces of real estate over the years and traveled to 100 countries and all. They were like, How did you do that? Ah, I was following my version of success, not just a status quo way of doing things. Some of them are still stuck and they want to get out, but they are stuck. The gift was not my awareness to build financial freedom. The gift was my awareness that there was no, that there's no, the the goalpost is gonna keep moving. You you want life to be about experiences and relationships. That stuff never dies, ever. So I was always concerned with experiences, being a police officer, being a federal agent, starting a coffee shop, relationships, visiting my friends and the finish Arctic five times, et cetera. When you go, when our time is up in this human form, it's the experiences and relationships that are going to be the gift when you go over the next level. It's not necessarily all the money, the titles, and all that type of stuff. So, I don't know, just some awareness for folks. I want folks to have awareness. That's my drive for why I still come on podcasts and do what I do. It's just awareness. I want folks to be making conscious decisions, not running unconscious scripts.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

One of the things I love about that story about people saying, Why aren't you, you know, partner yet or or whatever it was, why aren't you this? Why aren't you that? And you were meanwhile behind the scenes doing all kinds of things that they couldn't see. And and they were sort of stuck in this in this track of how it's supposed to be, and you were out there actually living and doing life. And I think that that that's one of the things that concerns me, and I know concerns you, Maurice, about social media is we only see just whatever anybody wants us to see.

SPEAKER_02 47:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

And and we don't know what's happening behind the scenes and whether that's good or bad. And so what might look like failure to someone else might be incredible success for the per person who's wherever they are. But we don't know what's going on behind the scenes. So I love that story that you just gave.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

And I was I was I admittedly, I was on social media for a very long time. Um, but over time something happened where I started to understand that social media, especially Instagram and Facebook, a little bit less LinkedIn, but LinkedIn's getting even worse nowadays. It was all clips of it's all it's all things that you haven't done where you haven't been, the status you haven't gained, the car you haven't driven. And it's pulling people's states down, making them feel less than. And then people will make decisions from that pull down. Well, I'm not good. Maurice has 2,000 units of real estate. I only have one. I I'm awful. And if they would actually get to know me, I would have said, there's no reason to have 2,000 units of real estate. If you can have three and pay them off over a 20-year career and now have $7,000 of passive income coming in, you're golden. But if they just saw a clip of me talking about that, that's what they would think that I would think is that's what drove me off of social media. I was like, it's where you haven't been, what you haven't done, who you are not, who you haven't met. Woof. And then once you get away from it, you can hear yourself again, you feel comfortable again and stuff. And uh, but yes, you know, all these definitions are tough. And but I again I give people grace because it's it's man, school taught us this stuff, our families taught us this stuff. As I was in my son's class yesterday at Career Day, I said, You guys have peer pressure. Adults just call it don't do that or don't be different. Adults have peer pressure too, right? It's a tough one. But that's why folks like you are very important to help people along and gain awareness.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

It is, it is very tough. Uh we're running out of time, Maurice, but I want to get a couple of more uh questions in. Uh one is is there anything despite all the internal work that you've done, all the self um reflection that you've done that you still can't quite shake?

SPEAKER_02 50:05

I think we're always gonna have some self-doubt.

SPEAKER_01 50:12

I could have could I have done more for my my oldest is autistic. He's he's out in the world, he's doing well. Could I have done more? Was I selfish with all the things that I did when my cause, you know, sometimes I was gone and my kids were alone. Could I have done better for my business partners? But then I go back to self, meaning higher consciousness, and I say, Did you do any of those things with the intent to hurt people, be malicious, or be deceitful? No. Then you let it go. You let it go. Because if you live with perceived guilt of some sort, you're just creating a prison for yourself. So I guess my answer to your question is probably, but I have kind of forgiven any of those deficiencies over time.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Yeah, I think of guilt as something that's super important for a moment, but not something to inhabit. It's momentary to help us shift a behavior or a way of being that's that's damaging or hurtful, but it's not a place to live. And I think that's super important. And it's kind of what you said is like, yeah, I can reflect and maybe see some things, and now I let it go, and I, you know, I choose to do differently. So yeah. Some of the people who are listening are running as hard as you used to run. What do you want them to know? It just to sum it up here, what is it that you want them to know?

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Okay. This is coming from 30, 30 years of professional lived experience, but since I was age 15, I was always a dreamer. And all this stuff started because I started traveling and I could feel life in a in a different way. Yes, we have to hustle, and I respect the hustle. I would tell you that I don't believe that humans were ever intended to struggle. I'm doing sometimes I do 80, 90% less than I've ever done in life, and I seem to reap the benefit of abundance coming from different places. Because instead of hustling to find the 10 opportunities, my nervous system is so calm nowadays that I can discern the one that was the best in the first place. So I would suggest to them, and they have a right to point at me as well and be like, dude, you were a corporate exec and doing police officer at night and being a lieutenant colonel at the same time and doing real estate at the same time. That's different because that was my passion. I wanted to serve, I wanted to do things for people, I wanted to have life experience. I'm talking about the hustle for hustle's sake. You don't have to. Get good at understanding your physiology, get good at listening to your inner voice. We were never sent here, from my perspective, from source, from universe, from God, to struggle. If you can pay attention to who you are and recognize your own divinity, you will find the one thing that for some reason is taking you 100 to find at the moment. I just know it's coming, and I keep getting all these opportunities, not because I'm the best real estate investor. I'm not. It's just because I can discern really, really well. So struggle is not necessary. Now, it takes all that struggle in the beginning to learn these kinds of things. So I get where they're coming from. But the way I teach my kids now is like, no, just listen. Listen, just let things go and you things will come to you naturally. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

Yeah, there's a time to grind and a time not to grind. And you and I both have a love of nature, and we see this all the time happening in nature with the seasons. There's a time to grow, there's a time to bloom, there's a time to harvest, and there's a time to go dormant.

SPEAKER_02 54:03

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 54:03

Yeah, so I I love that. Maurice, how can people find you? Or do you want to even be found?

SPEAKER_01 54:11

Oh, yes, yes, for sure, for sure. I am no longer on social media at all, although my evergreen material still persists on LinkedIn. So they can go to LinkedIn. Um, but the best way to find me is trilifefon.com. I still publish newsletters, I still do the TriLife On podcast. Uh I coach from time to time, but what I care for more now is just building awareness of how to break the status quo. Building awareness on how to make your extraordinary ordinary. And um, it's a joy to do it. I don't know how long I will do it because it's not a financial thing for me anymore. It's just helping people, but they can reach me there, and then the email is Maurice at trilifon.com.

SPEAKER_00 54:52

Thank you. I'll have all that in the show notes. Maurice, it has been just delightful to be with you again. I enjoyed the first conversation with you, and I have enjoyed this conversation with you, and I thank you so much for for being here.

SPEAKER_01 55:05

Of course, my pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 55:06

If this conversation brought someone to mind, send it to them. That's how a new show like this reaches the people it's for. I'm Carla Royal. I work privately with founders and leaders on the things underneath what they are carrying. You can find me at Carlaroyal.com. This is what holds. I'll see you back here next time.