Latest / The Inner Wealth Podcast / Ep137. Navigating the Shift from Conformity to Authenticity.

Transcript

Ep137. Navigating the Shift from Conformity to Authenticity. · The Inner Wealth Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Do you ever wake up feeling like there's something missing in your life?
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Do you ever feel the need to escape your business?
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: Are you running your life or is your life running you?
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm Mike Kitko and I'll help you design and create a life so authentic and aligned with who you really are that you'll get excited just to wake up.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: I'll help you create real wealth, success and freedom from the inside out.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Inner Wealth Podcast, where we learn and choose to live inspired each and every day.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: I'm going to lead off today's episode with a single question.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Now, this is a very simple question, but there's so many layers to it that we're going to dive into, and this simple question is are you living the life that you're supposed to live?
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Now, if you're watching this on video, you just saw me air quote supposed to live.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: So I want to really unpack this today and I want to talk about the absolute insanity of living the life that you're supposed to live.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: When I was being raised by a 40 year union steelworker father that he was very certain that financial security came from having a job, from working for someone else, from being part of a union, from making sure that you're stashing enough money away for a rainy day and not taking a whole lot of risk, not exposing yourself too much to uncertainty, of creating a life where every year you get two weeks or a couple of weeks of vacation and you go someplace that you don't want to go to do something that you don't want to do for somebody that you don't want to work for, and you do this all in the hopes of one day becoming financially secure enough to retire from this 40 year trajectory, this 40 year path of doing what you don't want to do, so that in your later years, when you're 60, 70, probably 80, now that you can eventually like, like, call a halt to it and say now I'm going to start living.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: You know, and when you're in those accelerated ages, you know your knees don't work as functionally powerfully and you know your strength isn't always where it was meant to be or where it was, and your health maybe isn't as powerful, your energy levels aren't fully there, but you're going to save like, you're going to spend your whole life getting to a place so that you can finally stop doing what you want to do in the waning years of your life.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: And that is what is as insane to me now as that sounds.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: That's what I grew up, believing that you're supposed to do with your life.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: And I started doing that because I knew I knew nothing different.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: I was supposed to do that, I was supposed to go to work.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: So I I out of high school and I was, you know, you're supposed to go to college.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Out of high school I started taking a couple of college classes and I went and got a job.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: I was making five bucks an hour as a, as a draftsman and an engineering company, because I went to an engineering high school and in Baltimore city, baltimore Polytechnic.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: Anyway, that was very proud of being a poly.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: I am very proud of being a poly alum, but anyway I I got a job making five bucks an hour.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: I started taking college classes and when that, when that didn't take me anywhere, I started looking for a different job and I got another job making 750 an hour and I continued to take college classes.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: But when I saw that that was taking me nowhere, I joined the United States Marine Corps and that is what really started the, the ladder that the Marine Corps was my, my mechanism to really step into, I don't know higher levels of leadership and higher levels of of living intentionally, in terms of I got to see what, what was in me trying to get out okay and leadership and and commitment to a mission, so that that really kind of served as the catalyst in the spark plug.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't until I joined the Marine Corps that I felt like I had a purpose in in this world and that started the wheel rolling.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: But anyway, after I joined the Marine Corps, when I spent five years of serving the United States Marine Corps, I exited as an E5, as a Sergeant of Marines, and so I had a unit, a little unit, a little platoon of Marines you could say about 13 to 15 Marines that were in my charge and I led them and I led a mission.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: So not a combat mission, not a combat infantry type mission.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Just we had a purpose and a mission for the functional purpose that we served the United States Marine Corps and we did that on a daily basis to drive combat readiness of the aircraft that we served.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Anyway, take that to the next level.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: In five years I had exited in Marine Corps and I joined Corporate America, fortune 500, america, and that's where I really started climbing the ladder of success and I started.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: I went from an individual contributor on a little electronics technician team to being a manager, a production manager, and from there I became, like you know, an operations manager and then I took over a plant the manufacturing plant and then I took over another manufacturing plant, and then I took over another manufacturing plant and I started climbing the ladder of success and there were more commas and more zeros and bigger bonuses and things like that, and so I realized that I was so far out of alignment with where I wanted to be in my life and what felt good for me in my life and what was natural to me and like I mean I just got.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: I was.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: I was just so upside down in my mind and in my body and in our marriage and just in life in general.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: It all just fell apart.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: And thank God it did At the time if it was completely unnerving and completely frightening, but it fell.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: It fell apart and I got fired twice in a matter of about 20 months, like 2014, and then again in 2016.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: And then I rebuilt from there and when I rebuilt, I I, I don't know I started questioning everything in my life.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: It's like why do I feel like going someplace that I don't want to go and doing something that I don't.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: I don't want to do.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: Why is it?
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Does it feel to what I feel pulled towards, like serving myself up with a whole lot of punishment?
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: And I could point back to these beliefs that I had accumulated and accrued that life was about?
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Like doing shit that you hated.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: That's just what life was.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: You did stuff that you hated for the hopes and the illusion of security, and I had just gotten fired twice.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: So I realized that there was no security in that.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: That.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: That was a false illusion, that was a false belief that I had accumulated or adopted, and I got to question everything Like why am I showing up in my marriage?
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Why is my marriage full of conflict?
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Why am I parent?
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Why am I punishing my kids for making choices that that suit their own needs instead of the what I expect them to be in this world?
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Why am I trying to force my values onto my children?
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: Why am I, why do I feel the need to force my child to take a certain path and a certain trajectory in life?
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: Why am I forcing my spiritual beliefs on anyone?
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Why do I feel that I need to guide and direct another human being to be who I want to be or who I want them to be.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: I got to question all of this and and I saw that I was just living out this fantasy that was created in me as a child by people that I loved, and people that you know loved me, obviously, but they were only teaching me what they believed about life, and I was carrying it out, and I was carrying it.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: I would.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: I would punish my children the exact way I was punished, and that was physically, mentally and emotionally Like I would what my kids asses, because that's what what happened to me.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: So it was just natural, that's just the way it's supposed to be.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: When my kid, like, challenges what I want for them, I punish them.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: That's what was, that's what happened to me.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: So I just like I just brought that into the next generation.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: I got to go where I don't want to go, do what I want to do what I don't want to do, to work for somebody I don't want to work for.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: That's just what you do, that's just how things are supposed to be.
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: And and luckily I got this time, after that second termination and the seas parted, I got this time to reflect on what the fuck just happened for 43 years in my life and I got to kind of dismantle the belief system that I had adopted and accumulated about career and wealth and religion and marriage and health.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: I got to dismantle everything that I had to like piece together and I got to rebuild it in a very, very powerful way.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: And Angie and I attended this weekend workshop and the purpose of the workshop was to get really clear about the life that you want to live, not the life that you're supposed to air quotes supposed to live.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: And what I realized in this workshop and by doing this reflection is it's really easy for a human being to fall into the life that you're supposed to live.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: And after I started getting clear about the life that I wanted to live, I even fell back into the trap a couple of times of what I was supposed to do.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: And it's something that if you're not intentional and if you're not clear about what you really want in your life, it's really easy to fall back into the patterns of what you're supposed to do and who you're supposed to be.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: But let me share this with you you are one of 8 billion people on the planet and you are not here to live a life that looks anything exactly like someone else and I've seen it with my own eyes.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Like now, it's easy to spot when a child is just living the life that their parents told them that they were supposed to live, or when you're surrounded by people that are going in one direction, it's really easy to fall in line with that direction.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And in my first book, the Imposter in Charge, there's a story of a guy named Corey, and Corey was.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: He fell into the hustle culture and he questioned why he felt so broken by trying to force himself into the hustle culture.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: It's because Corey was never meant to be in the hustle culture.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: For Corey, the hustle culture was toxic.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying that the hustle culture is toxic.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: I'm saying for Corey to try to fit himself into the hustle culture was toxic.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: He tried to force himself into a lifestyle, into a mindset, into mental and emotional processes that didn't fit who he was.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: He was putting himself in a box that he was supposed like.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: According to the gurus, he was supposed to fit into that.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: If you didn't fit into this, you were lazy, you were broken, you were like there was something wrong with you.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: You were flawed, you were defective, because you didn't fit into this box that somebody else had designed for you.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: And Corey felt broken because he couldn't fit himself into that box Naturally and easily.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: And it's only after we dismantled that box and we rebuilt a life that he wanted to live, doing what he loved, at his own tempo, at his own lever level of effort, at his own level of momentum, at his own level of Just joy.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: It's only after we rebuilt what that box, destroyed the box but rebuilt what that lifestyle, what what his unique brand to bring to this world, would that look like?
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Only after we designed that for him Did he start to feel the joy of being Corey instead of being all the other hustlers, grind gurus, people that tell you that you need to be different to be okay.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Only after we broke, he broke out of that Did he feel okay about life and and Corey's thriving now.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't look the way it looks for everybody else.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: The way I can spot this is because that's exactly what I've done with my life and when you look at my life it doesn't look like anyone else's.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: I Don't work a lot, I don't effort a lot, I Don't.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: I Don't do things.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: I don't sign myself up for punishment.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: I don't sign myself up for pain.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: I don't sign myself up for another level of physical, mental or emotional abuse of myself.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: I Don't Not in constant activity, I'm not in constant motion.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: I'm I'm not constantly engaged with my business.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: I'm not constantly engaged with other people in.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: In fact, if you, if you get the, if we had the opportunity to meet, you're gonna see that I'm not.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: I don't love the social side of life.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: I Don't.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: I don't love being in social environments for long periods of time.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: I don't love being in crowds for long period of time.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: I don't love More for the sake of more.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: I Love, I love music and I love sports.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: But when I go to a, a show, a concert, a performance, it probably takes me about 15 minutes of Of the performance to realize that I've had enough and I've seen what I wanted to see and I've heard what I wanted to hear and I start to tap out.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: I Go to a sporting event.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: I don't want extra innings nine innings like is a lot but I just want to go and experience the ballpark and I want to experience the crowd and I want to Experience the vibrancy and the energy and then, after a short period of time.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: I've had enough.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: When I'm in a social environment, I want to experience the crowd, I want to experience the environment, I want to experience it, but I don't.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: I don't want a lot of it.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: I don't want a lot of anything in my life except I crave long periods of solitude and silence and stillness, almost like a monk.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: And then, in or after long stretches of solitude and silence and stillness, where I feel peace in my heart and I feel love in my heart and I feel joy in my heart, especially after long stretches of these, am I ready to re-engage with the world, in my business, in some aspect of social life, in some form of entertainment, in some form of impact in the world.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: And then, after a short interaction with that thing, I'm ready for another long period of solitude and silence and stillness.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: And I never tire of the down time and the alone time and the healing time and the rest time and the restoration time and the self-reflection time and the self-awareness and the raising of my own level of awareness and consciousness in who I'm here to be, what I'm here to do, what I'm here to accomplish, what I'm here to accumulate, how I'm here to impact.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't look anything like anyone else.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: But there's a lot of people in the hustle and grind culture that would tell me that there's something wrong with me, and really what they're telling me is they've forced themselves to be like somebody else.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: So I should, too, like people who crave and desire alone time, like there's something wrong with them.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: And deep inside of your heart, deep inside of your mind, deep inside of your body, you know who you are here to be and it doesn't look like anyone else.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: And that is awesome.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: Because when you stop being everyone else and you start choosing who you are, who you've been designed to be, what you've been designed to experience, who you've been placed in this material world to be and for what you're here to experience and how you're here to serve, how you're here to impact, when you experience that, you'll see what true fulfillment is in life, and there's no fulfillment in just being who everybody else is, because you're not everybody else.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: You're one of one in a world of eight billion.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: But we're in a world where we sign up for to be taught by people who to be, or we're we sign up to be taught by people what to be and how to become them, instead of how to become ourselves In the interwealth mastermind.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: I don't teach anyone how to become me.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: I teach them how to find who they are and how to live a life, a powerful life, unique by being them and fulfilled by being them.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: But oftentimes I have to encourage them that it's okay to be themselves.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: It's okay to not want what everybody else wants or to not crave what everybody else has, or to not be anything that they're not, because that's just forcing yourself in a box that you don't belong in.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: People guilt and shame themselves into a feeling of desperation inside by feeling that they don't fit in with everybody else.
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: And you're not here to fit in with anybody else.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: You're here to be the best version of yourself, but don't be surprised when it doesn't look or feel like what anybody else is experiencing in this world.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: When my wife, angie and I attended that workshop and we designed the life that we wanted to live, angie has a social aspect to her that I don't possess and I have a meditative, self-reflective, highly internally driven aspect to me that far exceeds those aspects in her.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that she's right and I'm wrong or I'm right and she's wrong.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: It means that she's designed differently and she gets to be different and I'm designed differently and I get to be different and I don't force my solitude onto her and she doesn't force her socialized, her need for socialization on me, and that's what's made our marriage powerfully powerful, when we stopped forcing our desires onto the other.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: If you look at life, if you look at people in this world, there's most people 8 billion people on this planet are living the life that they're supposed to live, not the life that they want.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: My business, interwealth Global, is a tool for raising the awareness and consciousness of the planet of helping people get into their zone of genius and helping design and create the life that they get to live.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Interwealth Global moves the needle in the world on people's wealth, their health, their success, their impact, their love, their joy, their peace.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: It moves the needle in every aspect of their lives.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: But it's also designed.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: My business is designed around my lifestyle and I engage in my business at the level that supports my lifestyle.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: I don't build my lifestyle around my business.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: I build my business around my lifestyle.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: I've built a business that provides fuel to fund my lifestyle and to fit my lifestyle.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: My business is not my form of self-worth or identity or my personality.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: It's just my mechanism for moving the needle in the world and for moving the needle in my finances and moving the needle in my personal fulfillment in the world.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: But my business funds my authenticity.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: My business fuels my authenticity.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: My business is not me.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: My business is a mechanism for helping me experience higher qualities of life.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: But those higher qualities of life is not just wealth and success.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: It's about serving in the way that I was designed and created to serve and that happens to move the needle in the world and it moves the needle inside of my heart as well.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: When you think about the life that you're living, how many things on a daily basis are you doing because you have to instead of you want to?
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: How many things are you doing strictly out of obligation, or from a place of brokenness, or from a place of incompletion, or from a place of fear, or from a place of desperation, or from a place of obligation, or from a place of insecurity, of inadequacy or insignificance?
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: How much of your life is built around trying to solve an internal conflict that can't be solved through external mechanisms?
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: And when you see that, if you see that you'll experience and you'll understand why you're not living a super fulfilled life if your life is built off of desperation instead of inspiration.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Peel back the layers on the life that you're living.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Peel back the layers on why you're making the choices that you're making.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: Peel back the layers on why you've chosen certain business attributes on certain aspects of life, why you've chosen certain friendships and certain partnerships and certain allyships.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: Look at it and see if they're out of obligation, if they're out of fear, if they're out of desperation, if they're out of insecurity, inadequacy or insignificance or if they're out of like inspiration that you get to, not that you have to.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: I don't have to sit in silence and solitude and stillness for most of my day.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: I get to, and for other people that doesn't fit.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: But I'm not other people.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: I'm my Kiko and there's only one of me in the world and I'm one of one in a world of eight billion.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: There's somebody out there right now who wants more solitude, that wants more silence, that wants more stillness, that wants more rest in their life, but they're hustling and grinding because they think they're supposed to.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: And there's someone out there with a job that thinks they're supposed to have a job, but they actually want a business.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: And there's someone in a marriage that doesn't fit, that's expired and they're only staying there because they're supposed to stay in that marriage.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: And there's somebody out there who's living a life perfectly designed for someone else and they're miserable, but they haven't developed the courage to live a life by their own design and create a life that will fulfill them, instead of doing what they're supposed to do.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: If I'm talking to you, if you're listening to that and you're in those circumstances, I would love the opportunity to help Help you realize that you are perfectly designed to live the perfect life that you are here to live, not the life you're supposed to live.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: I would love the opportunity to connect, just inspire you to higher levels of authenticity and living life by your own design, your own choosing, instead of instead of obligation of what the masses are doing.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: I heard something one time.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: It says look to see where everybody else is going and go the opposite way, because that's where you're going to find joy, because the masses aren't heading towards joy.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: The masses are only headed towards the illusion of security.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: See where everybody else is going and go the opposite way.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: Guys, love you.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: Hope this has moved the needle in your life.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: If I can be of service.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: If I can help you in any way, shape or form, connect with me and let's jam.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed what you heard and you want to learn more, go to wwwinnerwealthglobalcom for more tools and resources.