Latest / The Inner Wealth Podcast / Ep124. Embracing Authenticity: A Journey from Corporate Rat Race to Authentic Leadership.
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: This is Mike Kitco and I'm a small business owner just like you.
- 0:06Speaker 1: I'll never be a hustle, horror, grind guru, but I do believe in having it all health, wealth and a life full of love.
- 0:12Speaker 1: Struggle is not the goal and sacrifice is not glamorous.
- 0:15Speaker 1: I like the path of least resistance.
- 0:18Speaker 1: It just takes a shift in mindset and the beliefs you hold.
- 0:21Speaker 1: You believe that you need to sacrifice now to have what you want later, or do you believe that you can have it all all the time?
- 0:27Speaker 1: Does your beliefs create your outcomes?
- 0:29Speaker 1: I choose to feel wealthy, successful and happy every day, and you get to choose for yourself.
- 0:35Speaker 1: Welcome to lead.
- 0:36Speaker 1: Love, profit, play, where small business owners learn and choose to have it all and choose to create success without distress.
- 0:48Speaker 1: One time when I was in corporate, I was with my business mentor and he was also my boss, but this guy taught me more than anybody else, any other single person, about business leadership when I was talking to him about the qualities of a high performing leader.
- 1:09Speaker 1: We were talking about the qualities of a high performing leader.
- 1:11Speaker 1: One thing that I remember that stuck out in that conversation is he said Mike, your greatest asset is your edge.
- 1:21Speaker 1: Now, edginess to me feels really, really good.
- 1:28Speaker 1: What it means is when we talk about being edgy.
- 1:31Speaker 1: What it means is being intense, being direct, speaking your truth and being willing to stand in your truth in the presence of resistance.
- 1:42Speaker 1: So I have no problem being in a discussion with somebody that I disagree with, showing up with love, acceptance and listening to another side, but literally standing in my truth and being able to speak from my gut and tell my truth, and with intensity and directness, without skirting the edges that served me so greatly in my leadership capacities.
- 2:15Speaker 1: When I was in the Marine Corps, this edge came out, and when I was in corporate, the edge came out as I started to lose myself right around 2014, 2015, 2016,.
- 2:28Speaker 1: One thing that happened was my edge started to go away.
- 2:31Speaker 1: My edge started to dissolve.
- 2:32Speaker 1: I stopped believing in my truth and I stopped believing in my value and I stopped believing in my talent and I stopped believing in standing up for myself.
- 2:45Speaker 1: Maybe that clicks with you, maybe that resonates with you, but when I was willing to stand up for myself, I succeeded, and when I wasn't willing to stand up for myself, everything started to fall apart.
- 2:58Speaker 1: Then I started this transition from corporate into coaching and building an executive coaching, business, consulting, business speaking business.
- 3:08Speaker 1: In 2016, 2017, and when it really started to take off in 2018, my first full year in business I hit double six figures from nothing.
- 3:20Speaker 1: In first full year of business, I did around $36,000, and the second year I did close to 200K right around 200K.
- 3:34Speaker 1: What started to happen is my edginess started to come back and being willing to speak my truth and being willing to just listen to you, understand your perspective, but not cower, not shrink, not bend myself.
- 3:52Speaker 1: That is what has really helped me show up powerfully and strongly and uniquely in the coaching space.
- 4:02Speaker 1: It's almost like do no harm but take no shit right.
- 4:06Speaker 1: That's the marine part of me that I love so dearly, and we have all these aspects of ourselves and until we let them all out to play in the world, we're going to feel like something's missing and we're going to feel unfulfilled.
- 4:20Speaker 1: Now, lately, I've been really really diving into and understanding in my life how approval, the need for approval, has really set the tone for some pain and struggle in my life, and I could trace it back to and you know, look, our personality is just based on our pain.
- 4:46Speaker 1: So I want you to think about that and write that down right now.
- 4:49Speaker 1: Your personality is based on your pain.
- 4:51Speaker 1: Your preferences are based on pain.
- 4:53Speaker 1: When you go back to you know your childhood and you go back to some of the traumas that happened some of the good times, some of the not so good times your personality and your preferences are based on what you're trying to feel more of and what you're trying to avoid.
- 5:10Speaker 1: Okay, and the Buddhists call this like attachment and aversion, you can call it different things, but your personality and your preferences are based on what you're trying to feel more of and what you're trying to avoid feeling.
- 5:22Speaker 1: So, in what you're, what you want to connect with and experience more and what you want to connect less with, and it's typically based on.
- 5:30Speaker 1: You know the pain and even the pleasure of your past experiences, but the need for approval has shown up in my life over and over and over.
- 5:43Speaker 1: And I remember being when I got terminated that second time in 2016,.
- 5:46Speaker 1: I remember sitting in my boss's office at that time and that was my last day of working for him, but I sat in there and he said, mike, I hired you and listen, I was 300 pounds, I was suicidal, I was drinking at ridiculously crazy levels and my wife was in pharmaceutical addiction and our family was in absolute, utter chaos.
- 6:06Speaker 1: We were upside down.
- 6:07Speaker 1: There was nothing good happening in my life and this is why he was letting me go, because I was like an incompetent and incapable leader at that time.
- 6:15Speaker 1: And he looked at me and he said Mike, I hired you to run my business and you tried them Like you thought your job was to make me happy.
- 6:22Speaker 1: And what he was ultimately saying is you were seeking my approval instead of optimizing my business.
- 6:29Speaker 1: And he was absolutely right.
- 6:30Speaker 1: He was absolutely right.
- 6:32Speaker 1: And the times where I crushed it in corporate, I wasn't seeking approval.
- 6:35Speaker 1: I was literally running the business, or running the organization or running the team to my full capabilities, my full capacities and according to what I perceived to be the right thing to do, and I was in integrity.
- 6:49Speaker 1: And when things fell apart, it was because I was seeking approval and validation.
- 6:55Speaker 1: I was seeking acceptance instead of, like, standing up for myself and doing what I felt was best for me and in the interest of the organization and for the interest in my team.
- 7:07Speaker 1: Now, lately, I've been really, really unpacking approval on how this has shown up in my life and we are on the precipice.
- 7:18Speaker 1: So we got a couple more weeks until the new year and I've got a vision for my life.
- 7:24Speaker 1: Now in the Interwealth Mastermind and if you ever work with me one-on-one or if you're even at a workshop the thing that we connect most with right to the mission of Interwealth Global is to make the world a more loving place, and the way we do this is to help you design and create the life of your dreams.
- 7:46Speaker 1: Now, what I mean when I say life of your dreams is that I encourage you, when you design the life that would light you up, to wake up to every day.
- 7:58Speaker 1: I would like, I would recommend you hit pause on your life as you know it right now.
- 8:04Speaker 1: Pretend you're not married.
- 8:06Speaker 1: Pretend you don't have a spouse.
- 8:07Speaker 1: Pretend you don't have children.
- 8:09Speaker 1: Pretend you don't have a business.
- 8:11Speaker 1: Pretend you don't have a job.
- 8:12Speaker 1: Pretend you have no financial issues.
- 8:14Speaker 1: Pretend you have complete health.
- 8:16Speaker 1: Like what do you want in your health, in your wealth, in your success and in your relationships?
- 8:25Speaker 1: And why I asked you to suspend and students to suspend, like belief or disbelief or part of the disease and pretend like you're building from a blank slate is.
- 8:36Speaker 1: Sometimes I've had students try to build a new life around an expired relationship.
- 8:42Speaker 1: I've had students try to build a life around a career that they hated.
- 8:49Speaker 1: I had students build try to build a life around like shitty behaviors that were causing them to destroy themselves.
- 9:00Speaker 1: And what they were trying to do is they were trying to fit their old life into their new life because they were afraid that they couldn't like, outlive or outgrow or let go of that old life.
- 9:12Speaker 1: And if you don't feel capable of letting go of that old life, you're going to try to fit compromised choices and compromised decisions into your new life.
- 9:25Speaker 1: So this is why I encourage you, when you're creating a vision for your life, to completely part the seas of your life and say you know, I don't care what I have, what do I want?
- 9:38Speaker 1: When I first created a vision, angie and I were still in turmoil.
- 9:42Speaker 1: My wife, angie and I were still in turmoil and Angie's name wasn't in my vision because I didn't know if Angie was going to be part of my future.
- 9:50Speaker 1: But as time went on and we rebuilt our relationship and we rebuilt our connection and we rebuilt our alignment and we've rebuilt our lives and our health and we got clear on what we really wanted in our life.
- 10:06Speaker 1: Then Angie started getting added back to my vision because at that point I knew with a level of certainty that Angie was going to be part of my future.
- 10:14Speaker 1: But until I knew that I part of the seas and left the name out and said I will have a powerful, harmonious, awesome, loving, bonded, connected, physical relationship with the woman of my fricking dreams.
- 10:30Speaker 1: And then you know, years later, angie is the woman of my dreams and Angie is fulfilling all those roles and all those ideas and concepts and we're aligned.
- 10:45Speaker 1: And it's important to understand that you can make a pivot from wherever you are to wherever you wanna be.
- 10:51Speaker 1: And my level of pity and sympathy for people right now is at an all-time low.
- 10:56Speaker 1: And I'll tell you why and this is some of the edginess my level of pity and sympathy is at an all-time low because I don't believe anymore in there being haves and have-nots.
- 11:06Speaker 1: I believe in there being people who will do and people who won't.
- 11:11Speaker 1: And there's a person, there's a prospect that's been on the fringes of working with me one-on-one or working with me in any capacity for a long time.
- 11:25Speaker 1: And when somebody else and it was typically about money and when somebody else offered the pay, they said well, I'm not gonna do that cause I'm not gonna give them my weekend for the workshop.
- 11:40Speaker 1: So there aren't like haves and have-nots.
- 11:43Speaker 1: There will do's and won't do's.
- 11:44Speaker 1: Anybody can do this.
- 11:47Speaker 1: Anybody can create more in their life.
- 11:49Speaker 1: Anybody can make a pivot.
- 11:51Speaker 1: Anybody can make a change.
- 11:52Speaker 1: Anybody can create a completely new reality anytime they want.
- 11:58Speaker 1: But some will and some won't, and that's why there are haves and have-nots.
- 12:04Speaker 1: People that have are just willing to do things that people who don't have won't do.
- 12:09Speaker 1: And then the people who won't do blame the people who do for what they don't have.
- 12:16Speaker 1: And this is why the richer evil and the richer greedy and the rich steal from everybody else is because there's this whole pool of have-nots that won't do and they blame the people who do and have.
- 12:29Speaker 1: It's like delusional right.
- 12:36Speaker 1: But whenever we're working together in the workshop or in my mastermind or in a one-on-one capacity, I'm going to ask you to get really, really clear about what it is you want in your life, in your health, in your wealth, in how you want to impact the world and in your most intimate relationships.
- 12:53Speaker 1: And I don't want to know what other people want for you.
- 12:58Speaker 1: I don't care what other people want from you.
- 13:01Speaker 1: I don't care who you have in your life, I don't care what you're doing in your life.
- 13:06Speaker 1: What I want to know is where are you going and what does the next 10 years look like?
- 13:11Speaker 1: And let's set a target based on what you want, not what you have.
- 13:20Speaker 1: Now.
- 13:21Speaker 1: One of the struggles that I've had and, to bring this back to the beginning, one of the struggles that I've had in my life is seeking approval and seeking validation, and I didn't think I could just be me and succeed, because I was too worried about what other people thought of me and I was too worried about if people were going to approve.
- 13:45Speaker 1: I wanted to be accepted more than I wanted to be happy.
- 13:48Speaker 1: And when.
- 13:50Speaker 1: What I've learned is whenever you're seeking approval, whenever you're seeking out acceptance, whenever you're trying to get somebody to love you, you're going to leave a lot on the table, because approval, acceptance and love are outcomes when used in a healthy way, when viewed healthy in a healthy way, when connected to in a healthy way.
- 14:16Speaker 1: Approval, acceptance and love are outcomes of an integrated person who is living life completely on their terms, without compromise.
- 14:27Speaker 1: The right people enter your life and the right people exit your life.
- 14:34Speaker 1: Now, I made a post on Facebook today, and today is December 11th 2023.
- 14:42Speaker 1: And this episode will be published tomorrow.
- 14:44Speaker 1: So what I would encourage you to do, if you're listening to this around the world, hey, connect with me on Facebook and I'm going to help you do the work that I'm talking about right now.
- 14:57Speaker 1: If you're listening to this and you don't see my Facebook feed and you don't see this post, connect with me on Facebook, connect with me on Instagram, connect with me my YouTube channel, connect with me on TikTok.
- 15:10Speaker 1: But for the purpose of this exercise and what I'm about to do is, I want you to connect with my Facebook page, because that's where you're going to find it.
- 15:20Speaker 1: I'm talking about my personal Facebook page.
- 15:22Speaker 1: At my KITCO.
- 15:24Speaker 1: Now I made a post and I'm going to read it and it says to be and feel successful and fulfilled in this lifetime, you must be willing to step out from under the mediocrity and sacrificial nature of what society deems as normal.
- 15:40Speaker 1: So, if you watch where everybody else is going, that's what's called normal, and most people just want to fit in and not be exceptional.
- 15:50Speaker 1: Now, I just threw that in there, but I continue.
- 15:53Speaker 1: Here are some highlights of a mediocre life.
- 15:56Speaker 1: Make security your ambition.
- 15:59Speaker 1: Work a job you hate.
- 16:00Speaker 1: Make future goals your entire life.
- 16:03Speaker 1: Hide who you are to keep from being judged.
- 16:06Speaker 1: Look perfect on social media.
- 16:08Speaker 1: Don't question it all and publicly celebrate whatever race, gender, sex, religion, nationality or other protected class.
- 16:15Speaker 1: Society is lifting up above others at that given moment.
- 16:19Speaker 1: Show public support for the current cause or tragedy.
- 16:23Speaker 1: Compromise yourself to make others feel okay.
- 16:26Speaker 1: Do whatever it takes to make your spouse feel loved and expect them to do the same for you.
- 16:31Speaker 1: Stay in expired relationships.
- 16:33Speaker 1: Give up your dreams for others, who will give up their dreams for others.
- 16:37Speaker 1: Watch lots of television as recreation Over.
- 16:41Speaker 1: Eat, eat shitty foods or drink except hangovers is normal when you're with someone.
- 16:47Speaker 1: Eat and drink when they eat and drink.
- 16:49Speaker 1: Build a social life or build an entire social life around food and drink.
- 16:53Speaker 1: Treat your body like it doesn't matter.
- 16:55Speaker 1: Hate Mondays, love Fridays.
- 16:57Speaker 1: Look forward to vacation.
- 16:59Speaker 1: Escape life through chemicals, vacation and mindless entertainment.
- 17:03Speaker 1: Numb your emotions.
- 17:04Speaker 1: Make the people around you feel safe.
- 17:07Speaker 1: Wear the same clothes as everyone else.
- 17:09Speaker 1: Get credentialed to prove you're intelligent.
- 17:11Speaker 1: Smile for the camera.
- 17:13Speaker 1: Look tough for the camera.
- 17:14Speaker 1: Keep your struggles to yourself.
- 17:16Speaker 1: Keep your wins to yourself.
- 17:18Speaker 1: Pretend that money is not important.
- 17:19Speaker 1: Pretend to not have wants and needs.
- 17:21Speaker 1: Pretend that you only care if other people are happy.
- 17:24Speaker 1: Binge, watch the latest show.
- 17:25Speaker 1: Deprive yourself of sleep.
- 17:27Speaker 1: Don't question your religion.
- 17:28Speaker 1: Believe that rest is laziness.
- 17:31Speaker 1: Express how hard life is.
- 17:33Speaker 1: Teach your kids that making money is hard.
- 17:35Speaker 1: Teach your kids they need to work hard.
- 17:37Speaker 1: Teach your kids that marriage is hard.
- 17:40Speaker 1: Look like you're working all the time.
- 17:42Speaker 1: Work is 40 plus hours a week.
- 17:44Speaker 1: Believe someone else needs to pay for your benefits Plan for retirement.
- 17:48Speaker 1: Complain about the rich being greedy and how they need to pay their fair share.
- 17:52Speaker 1: Dog on big business.
- 17:54Speaker 1: Keep moving so you don't look or feel lazy.
- 17:57Speaker 1: Play it safe.
- 17:59Speaker 1: Look forward to the future for happiness.
- 18:01Speaker 1: Survive until you die and last, always say why your family.
- 18:06Speaker 1: Always say that your family is your.
- 18:09Speaker 1: Why?
- 18:09Speaker 1: Now think about it.
- 18:12Speaker 1: Not all of those apply to every single person on the planet.
- 18:16Speaker 1: Like no one person can look at that list and say all of them are true for them.
- 18:22Speaker 1: But if you look at the grand, like the overarching theme of society, those are true for 90% of the lemmings in this world.
- 18:32Speaker 1: Those are true for other people all moving in the same direction.
- 18:38Speaker 1: And when you start to do something different than that list, society goes into an uproar.
- 18:44Speaker 1: Haters come out, naysayers come out, people like use guilt and shame and threats and anger and blame and they laugh and they condescend and they'll cash shade.
- 18:57Speaker 1: They'll do anything it takes to get you back into alignment with the norms of society to be fucking miserable like everybody else.
- 19:09Speaker 1: Meanwhile, we do all of this because we're just conditioned to believe that all of these are just normal.
- 19:15Speaker 1: We're conditioned to live the same life over and over and we're conditioned to live like everybody else, thinking that we're going to live an exceptional life.
- 19:27Speaker 1: And the only way to truly live an exceptional life is to be exceptional.
- 19:31Speaker 1: And an exceptional life requires an exceptional human being.
- 19:34Speaker 1: And exceptional human being sticks out and does things differently.
- 19:39Speaker 1: Because when somebody fits in, how are they exceptional?
- 19:45Speaker 1: And in order to be exceptional, it's like you're going against the entire flow of life.
- 19:50Speaker 1: It's like you're completely rebelling against a whole of society.
- 19:54Speaker 1: And how can you live a truly authentic, unique, individualistic, interdependent life when you just compromise who you are and you just go according to the flow just to fit in, be approved, be accepted, be loved?
- 20:15Speaker 1: Meanwhile, you're sacrificing your fulfillment, you're sacrificing your well-being and you're just doing what everybody else does because you just don't want to stick out.
- 20:24Speaker 1: And when I ask you in a workshop or in my mastermind or in my one-on-one relationship with you, when I ask you what you want in your life, make sure you're leaving all of that behind.
- 20:43Speaker 1: Make sure you're not building your life around how you're supposed to live.
- 20:50Speaker 1: Make sure you're not building your life around societal norms.
- 20:54Speaker 1: Make sure you're not just trying to fit yourself into the rigidity that life and society have created to make everybody cookie-cutter and just like everybody else.
- 21:08Speaker 1: We've got an education system Seth Godin, if you've never read Lingepin.
- 21:14Speaker 1: We've got an education system that is creating factory workers that we needed a hundred years ago.
- 21:21Speaker 1: There's a buzzer in, a buzzer out do as you're told.
- 21:25Speaker 1: There's rules.
- 21:26Speaker 1: There's sit down, shut up, stand up, just do what I'm told.
- 21:31Speaker 1: There's a grading system.
- 21:33Speaker 1: We're just making factory workers that we needed a hundred years ago.
- 21:37Speaker 1: We're educating people to be employees and very few people are educating people to be themselves.
- 21:45Speaker 1: In fact, we're conditioning and programming the uniqueness and the individuality out of people.
- 21:54Speaker 1: It's hurting a lot of people in the process because it's making people think that they're less than adequate, they're less than significant, because we're just trying to make people just like everybody else.
- 22:09Speaker 1: You're not like everybody else.
- 22:10Speaker 1: When you seek approval as your target, when you seek acceptance as your target, when you seek love as your target, it's because you don't feel like you can be yourself and be those things.
- 22:24Speaker 1: Listen, we got a couple more weeks before we hit the new year.
- 22:29Speaker 1: I hope my hope for you and my hope for everybody that really cares about you and really loves you, not cares what you do for them and cares how you make them feel not those people, because those people are not in it for you.
- 22:48Speaker 1: Those people are in it for themselves.
- 22:50Speaker 1: The people that care about what you do for them and how you make them feel they are not in it for you.
- 22:56Speaker 1: They are in it for themselves.
- 22:59Speaker 1: But what I want for you and what I want for the people that really matter in your life the people that matter in your life, or the people that want for you what you want for you and they know that they don't get a vote in, that, that it's none of their business what you want for yourself.
- 23:15Speaker 1: They just help you get to that point what I want for you and them is for you to truly find the life that you would get excited to wake up to every single day without condition.
- 23:31Speaker 1: And I'm gonna help you find that life and I wanna help you live that life.
- 23:36Speaker 1: And I know, if you go to my website right now at innerwealthglobalcom, on the front page right now as it stands, there's a course called the mini course, the Choose your Destiny mini course.
- 23:47Speaker 1: But I wanna go a step above that.
- 23:49Speaker 1: I wanna give you, for free, my entire Choose your Destiny video course.
- 23:56Speaker 1: There's 12 modules.
- 24:00Speaker 1: There's a workbook, powerful workbook that I also use in my workshop.
- 24:04Speaker 1: There are six exercises to help you get really, really clear about how to create, design and create the life of your dreams.
- 24:14Speaker 1: And if you want this, I've got this listed right now on my website for 997.
- 24:20Speaker 1: If you want access to that full video course, go on, email me, email my business.
- 24:26Speaker 1: One of us will send it to you at hello H-E-L-L-O at innerwealthglobalcom.
- 24:33Speaker 1: If you email hello at innerwealthglobalcom and you put in this subject line video course, one of us will send you the video course.
- 24:44Speaker 1: And when you do this video course, like there's listen, just like I said a little bit ago, there aren't haves and have nots.
- 24:54Speaker 1: There are people who will do and people who won't do the people that do take action on the thing that's going to move them to the next level.
- 25:03Speaker 1: So please don't send me an email if you plan on just accessing this video course and doing nothing with it.
- 25:10Speaker 1: Email us at hello at interwealth.
- 25:13Speaker 1: Let me say that again Email us at hello at interwealth global dot com and I'll put the.
- 25:20Speaker 1: I'll put the link in the show notes.
- 25:21Speaker 1: Email us at hello at interwealth global dot com.
- 25:25Speaker 1: If you are an action taker, if you are hungry, if you're humble, if you're smart, if you're ready to go, email us and we'll send you a link to the full video course.
- 25:36Speaker 1: Then, when you take this video course, if you ever feel interested in doing that same work with me in a workshop, then go, look at the choose your destiny intensive vision workshop and come do the work with us and I guarantee you your life will begin to change in miraculous ways that you couldn't have even perceived.
- 26:00Speaker 1: But you've got to be willing to let go of the need for approval, acceptance and love.
- 26:05Speaker 1: You've got to be willing to be unloved by the people that you would rather love you and loved by everyone and anyone unconditionally.
- 26:16Speaker 1: But you can't force their approval, acceptance and love on you.
- 26:22Speaker 1: You can only be the very, very best version of you.
- 26:25Speaker 1: And watch who approves, watch who accepts you and watch who loves you.
- 26:30Speaker 1: That's where you're going to find your tribe.
- 26:31Speaker 1: That's where you're going to find your real people.
- 26:33Speaker 1: And remember you're the average of the top five people you spend the most time with.
- 26:37Speaker 1: If you're surrounded by people who are keeping you small, you're going to stay small.
- 26:42Speaker 1: You join the inner wealth community.
- 26:46Speaker 1: You're going to find yourself surrounded by people who want for you what you want for you, and they'll accept nothing else less for you.
- 26:53Speaker 1: Email us and get started.
- 26:56Speaker 1: Let's jam.
- 26:57Speaker 1: We got a year.
- 26:58Speaker 1: 2024 is going to be an awesome year, just like 2023 was.
- 27:02Speaker 1: If 2023 wasn't a great year for you, it's not because it happened to you.
- 27:07Speaker 1: It happened because of you, and the only thing, the only way that 2024 is going to get better than 2023, is for you to become better than you were in 2023.
- 27:20Speaker 1: Let's go.
- 27:21Speaker 1: If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to wwwinnerwealthglobalcom for more tools and resources.