Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the episode today, we have Stacy McAlpine. Stacy, welcome. Thank you. So happy to be here today. I am happy to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do? Sure. So I’ve been around on the planet for 46 years, I’m okay with saying that out loud. 20 of them was in consulting, working for some of the big four consulting firms like Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, helping really large organizations like Google, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, all those good things, State of California, and a consulting focus was all around project management, process improvement and change management.
And so through that I learned a lot about how to help people change because any organization requires each individual to change. You can’t change whether it’s a 10 person organization, 250,000 person organization that requires each individual to make a change. So I learned a ton about how that works and with really proven methodologies that you know, it’s a rinse and repeat. It doesn’t matter what the scope of the project is. It’s about the methods that you use to help people get clarity on what it is that they want and how to know when they’re there and then work with them on how to get there. So what I realized about a decade ago was that when I want to change in my own life and wasn’t getting it, that after reading all the books, going all the programs, trying to be my best self and wasn’t really applying any of it, I decided I would try to start using what I was using with my clients in my own life and it worked, it seemed to be the missing piece that I was on the hunt for out in the personal development space that, how to take what we’re learning and implement it into our own lives to tailor those things can sometimes just be overwhelming, right?
And so by coupling what I was doing with these organizations and these proven methods with what the things that I knew I wanted my own life and was learning from, the best practices of personal development gurus if you will, it just seemed to make things start to happen. So now, about a little over two years ago, I’ve left the big four firm life and Transitioned 100% to be focusing on individuals, so now people that wouldn’t normally have access to those tools and techniques, I can bring them to each individual and make it fun. So I took all the boring stuff out, you think about strategy and goals and blah blah blah, rewards measures and translate it all into more things that don’t feel like work. So my company name is Journey Fuel and it’s all about life’s journey and how to live a life, you love waking up to taking those methods and incorporating that into more of a journey language.
So it doesn’t feel like it’s a pain change and instead becomes exciting, and I’m loving it. It’s a great introduction. So there’s a lot to ask you about. In terms of, what your favorite topic is. What would you say your passion is there? Oh, my favorite topic. I could nerd on that one with just how to, how to help individuals, including myself. Just find what it is that’s special about our contribution to the planet and what I found is that, lot of people have been on the hunt for their purpose. What’s my purpose or I don’t know what they want and what I’ve determined is that in reality, life is just an experience of feelings. That’s all it is. It’s just an experience of feelings. So once I learned that from a program that I did a couple of years ago, it just changed the way I think. And so I’m really fascinated by the idea of how people can use their feelings to translate that into what they want because so many times we get stuck on, I don’t know what I want, I just know I don’t want this.
But if we know that ultimately it’s not about the stuff or the people or whatever it is that we’re doing, it’s about the feelings that we get from those things. So if we harness, how are we feeling right now and how do we want our life experience to feel and how can we get closer to feeling that? Then it just opens up everything right now. You, you have a direction without having to know all the answers. So if you know, you want to have a life of adventure or full of, you know, tight knit family or you want to have the feelings of love, then you know what direction to go into and you can start to piece together well what’s something I can do to get more of that in my life and it just is a different experience of of, you know, determining what we want our life to be about. So it might sound cliché that that’s something I’m passionate about, but that’s why I went into Journey fuel because it really is a topic that, you know, I found fascinating in my own life and know that it can help anyone really.
So I just love watching other people shift when they start to learn that and it just lights up, you can see the light turn on, you know, behind their eyes and so it’s hard not to be professional about something like well, thank you for the answer. I think it’s a great one, the experience of feelings quite profound, but I am interested to know when you did learn that or when you did decide to have that as a guide, what did you do next? Because I feel like in some instances people aren’t always kind of aware of their feelings. So how does someone go about doing that or how did you do it? Yeah, I mean, and I have to attribute to my coach Marni Batista, that really taught me that lesson, Tessa auburn, uh and just put that out there full of full disclosure. What happened was um they had to start with an exercise, they called a rut exercise.
So even if you start as simple as you draw a circle on a piece of paper and you identify something that seems to keep happening in our lives that we don’t the outcome that we don’t want. And so you can start with, okay, gosh, I make the same thing, the same thing keeps happening. I think we could all probably find something that seems to just keep reoccurring that we don’t really want those results. And what she had us do was to go around the circle and you put a dot on the circle every time, there’s a decision point that we have to make in that cycle. So for example, I use the gym just because most people can relate to that or health, you know, exercise, oh I want to lose weight or whatever and so you can say, okay, so when you start to want to lose weight, what is the next decision that you have? Okay, it’s I need to find a way to, what am I gonna do, right? And what decisions have you made in the past and how do you feel in that moment? It’s like, you know, I feel like it’s going to be a drag.
And how do you want to feel instead? Is the sneaky question that like blew my mind when she taught us that because I don’t know about you, but I certainly have never been taught to pay attention to what I want when it comes to feelings. It’s like, no, you’re supposed to do this and you’re supposed to do that. You’re supposed to go to college and you’re supposed to get a good job and you know, it’s not so much about do I feel like getting a job, that’s what you do, right? And so Like you said to tap into feelings, it’s like, well how do I feel in that moment? And I feel, you know, discouraged or deflated or you know, even defeated because a lot of times we’ve done this 932 times and it never worked anyway. But now we have a decision to make. So you can say, Okay, well how do I want to feel instead? And you can say I want to feel excited. So okay, what’s something I can do that might actually get me excited instead of feeling deflated versus I just don’t want to feel like this because if you say, I don’t want to feel like this, you have zero direction, you say, I know I want to feel excited and you know that you’ve tried to pick the gym before and that just wasn’t the trick.
What are three other things that you could do then for each decision point? Um Tony Robbins says there is no choice until you have at least three things and there’s always at least three ways to do something because if you have one choice, you know, one option, that’s not a choice, two options, it’s a black and white, yes or no, that’s not really a choice. Once you have three now you have things to choose from and if you think long enough about anything, there’s always at least three ways to do something. So then at least, you know, if I want to feel excited, what are some other ways that I could get myself moving to get myself excited and maybe it’s, you know, walk around target until I have 5000 steps on my Fitbit, right? Whatever it is, you can always come up with another way, as long as you know the outcome that you’re searching for, So, and you do that all the way around. So, and then the next decision point, you know how, what’s the next point that I get to and I have to go, okay, so what are the choices I usually make? How do I feel in that moment?
How do I want to feel instead? And what are three different ways? I could go about getting that feeling in that moment to make a different choice until you start making new choices and then you can start to see the difference and then if it’s not working, just go back around and try it again and ultimately you’ll find the path that brings you the feelings that you want instead. So it’s really practice, you know, on how do I feel now, doing things that are simple and then also you can probably google this that the Gottman Institute, I think it’s called they have a feelings wheel and it’s um you can even just google feelings wheel. It probably doesn’t even need to be by Gottman, but it’ll give you, you know the basic human emotions like sad, mad happy and then it’s like a little pie chart where you can take it and start to get more granular with that feeling. And it kind of gives you five new options for how to describe sad and then it gets more and more granular, so it can help you touch your, you know, test your heartstrings if I say this, does that resonate yes or no.
And then you can start to get a broader vocabulary around feelings and then start to get more and more in touch with it and it just takes some practice. But even just trying it once or twice. I think you’ll find that it’s something that actually is a pretty powerful technique just to give us direction when we don’t necessarily know the answer. Thank you for sharing that. Another great answer. I’m intrigued about when you were doing this exercise or where you were thinking this through. What what are the emotions that you wanted to feel initially? Yeah so initially um So at that time that about a decade ago when I was really trying to discover myself back out of where I was I was working 50 60 hour weeks. I was a mom of one with one on the way and a stepdaughter who was in high school and my husband at the time was in law school full time. So I was the only breadwinner and racking up $200,000 in law school debt.
Living off of one income in the D. C. Area mortgage upside down you know all of those things all at once and it just didn’t feel like there was ever going to be a way out of that like it just felt just really felt kind of hopeless really. Um I knew I wanted to see my family you know my daughter was calling me grandma because she saw my mom more than she saw me at the time and that just wasn’t the life I wanted but I couldn’t think about like what’s a way out. I mean I have to keep making money. I kept not make money. My husband at the time. Couldn’t go out and you know make money and um so I just really had to get in touch with. Alright well it’s either this for another 40 years I might need to do something different and that’s when I just started trying different techniques and the time I was really just using things like Tony Robbins had a personal power and how to get in touch with what values you care about and then would use that to help me guide my decisions.
So every time that I had a choice to make I would use a litmus test of the values that I came up with and whether it matched or it didn’t and if it didn’t I just didn’t do it or if I couldn’t just not do it when you know, I thought okay well what can I do that could you know, get rid of that should and it’s just you just have to be so convinced and certain that you that you want something different that’s staying the same is more painful than changing another Tony Robbins attribute. You know, he says people don’t change for pleasure, they change to avoid pay so until it’s more painful to stay the same, which you know, we can all relate to pain as a feeling um until it’s more painful to stay the same. Oftentimes we don’t change so you know fast forward when I learned the rut exercise and learned how to use the feelings technique that just made it 10 times easier to give myself direction on what do I want now because, you know, life wasn’t super rosie the whole time over those last 10 years and I would say maybe about midway, about five years ago, I was in a similar boat again and where now I was divorced, taking care of my kids full time by myself, you know, the whole nine and I just had to go back to basics, you know, what do I care about what’s most important to me and how can I start lining up my choices with that?
And then when I learned that that technique about feelings, it’s just, it made such a difference because it creates emotion because once we have an emotional tie to something, we’re more likely to get in motion. You know, we’re more likely to do something about it versus just be a concept. Let’s go to the gym, but we have no feeling. So I just, I know it’s a long answer, but I’m gonna add one more thing, which is um, the other thing. So you don’t have to wait until life is painful. What I do in my programs have a program, walk the talk weekend, which is actually coming up in a couple of weeks and walk the talk weekend is a 2.5 day program where we go through these steps of, you know, how are you feeling now? What do you want life to feel like instead? And then the second day we go through a certainty test where it’s like a should litmus test, I came up with this thing and just sort of fell out of my mouth the other day and I’m loving it. Like how to take the shirt off your shoulders and when you think about it sounds so cheesy but it kind of almost like you can feel the weight come off just saying it and it’s so true, right?
Like should we are really heavy to carry? And so we do a litmus test on what we came up with on the first day and well is that it should because sometimes we’re like, oh we should be part of the community. What do you really want to be part of the community? You’re not going to get that excited to go do it. Right. So we do it should test and then once we have the certainty then you get into, well how do we activate that on the last day where now we’re looking at tools and techniques for that, you know I’m bringing in from my consulting background. Well how do we take now that we know where we want to go and um why it matters to us then we can get there. But the big piece of not having to deal with the pain first is you start to think about, well what if I don’t have it in my life, right? So if you come up with the seven most important things to you, that if you have those seven things in your life from a value perspective, you have no regrets and if you’re missing any of them, there’d be some sort of a gap and you say, okay, well what if I didn’t have that, what would life be like, and you create the feeling of, what would that be like in such a powerful way that you can now see what the pain would be without having to actually get there.
You can start to articulate that it would be more painful to not have it than to have it. And so now the change becomes your path instead of waiting for the inevitable pain. So there’s some ways you can get in front, thank you for that, you mentioned the values in your answer and I did want to say in relation to the, the feelings, there’s, there’s like, the detrimental side of that is like, I just want to be happy all the time and not do anything responsible. But of course, if you have your values in check, then that’s something that can stop that from happening. So would you mind sharing what your values are and how you came to your values? Yeah. So, um in terms of values, one of the things that I’m doing with what the talk weekend made it a little, made a lot easier than the techniques that I had learned previously, which is you know, starting with what you want and why do you want it? And then starting to pull out the themes life started with, well how do you feel now and how do you want to feel instead?
And then we do some techniques in the program where you start to do some visualizations around. Well what does that feeling look like? What’s in my life when I’m feeling that way and then start to see what pops up and that way it doesn’t feel like you’re on some you know, excavation of yourself and feeling like you’re trying to find these answers that you don’t feel like you have anyway, but you’re doing it in a way where you’re letting the feeling drive what pops up and then trying to see, okay, what seems to matter to me the most and then start to put those together and then you already know what it’s gonna feel like to have those things. So it’s a different experience of values and so now you can get a feeling for, okay, so this really does matter to me. It’s not a should, it is a walk. So living in alignment with them isn’t a work anymore, it’s something that I’m looking forward to doing. And then the technique that I’ve used in my life that was a game changer and I teach this in my programs which is you know, once you have your core seven values, then every choice you ever make after that point you let miss test against those seven.
So now you’re only testing against seven things instead of how you never know. Like there could be 93 different options, right? But if you know, these are the seven things that I care about most that I want to make sure I have in my life. So for example, you know, let’s say you’re at work and um happy hour comes up, but your kids are at home and you know, you value your families. One of my values is tight knit family. Um and another value is being able to, you know, have achievement, you know, so being able to kind of have those Olympic moments and see what I’m capable of and our professional life can sometimes be that for us, Right? So I need, I really wanted to excel in my career, which in consulting happy hours just kind of part of the deal because it’s a lot about relationships. So if I didn’t go then I was thinking, okay, well I value achievement and I value like, you know, my tight knit family, what choice do I make? And then you start to think about, okay, so what if I go, what am I gonna, you know, what’s the value of going, what’s gonna happen, what if I don’t go, you know, is it really gonna affect my career this time or let’s say I am going to go home?
But I’m so tired that I’m not even gonna hang out with my kid anyway. Just the fact that I’m home doesn’t mean that I’m creating value with my family. So okay, what’s what’s the distinction? How do I make that choice? Well if I’m gonna go home and just be too tired then it’s really just a waste of time and I’m missing out on an opportunity to build my career. So it helps and you know, and then you can tell yourself, okay, so how do I make time for my family next time? You know, when it’s not a choice between going to this thing or not going to this thing, how can I spend time with them this weekend or something? So there’s a way to accommodate what matters to us. But it doesn’t mean that we only have the one choice. It goes back to what are my options and what’s the impact if I don’t do it? Like is it really as bad as we think if we don’t do the should, you know, even just um you know, I learned over time that just because you have a deadline doesn’t mean that that person is actually gonna do anything with whatever you turn in on the depth.
So it doesn’t hurt to say, hey, you know, what are you going to read this tonight or what if I get it to you before you wake up tomorrow or when are you actually gonna read what I turn into you and then you might be able to buy yourself some time. So even if we feel like we don’t have choices, we often do have a lot more flexibility than we think we do. You prioritize your values or are they kind of all equal um equal importance? You know, it changes. So I answered your question personally, a tight knit family achievements really more around life immersion and fulfillment is my second one. And freedom and abundance is the third and I call it glitter and shine, which is health, which used to be health with those words just weren’t doing it for me and then I tried vitality and still wasn’t working out. So like glitter and shine that can get me out of bed in the morning, right? And then um have unwavering faith and self expression. So just being authentic and um this environment is another one and making a difference.
So of those seven. So it’s not really like I’m not going to prioritize certain things over my family necessarily. Like if there was a train coming, would I jump in front of the train and when I go to happy hour, but you know, there are times when in the moment there’s not something that I’m going to do about that, right? Then there’s another value that makes sense for me to participate in because it’s an opportunity that I’m not gonna have again? Right? So there’s really prioritizing is one of those things where I think in the moments we can do that as long as we think about it holistically and that’s what I do and the programs after what the talk weekend, I have other programs that I do where we take what we do and walk the talk weekend and once you’re clear on what those values are, how do you, it’s called Love and Life Accelerator. How do you now take it and live your life fully without, you know, um, being too dialed in on one thing because to start, what I do have people do is say, okay, so if you look at your seven things when people are just starting, if you try to do all seven values at the same time, you’re gonna fail.
We haven’t been doing them for a long time and certainly not all of them. And so for us to set ourselves up for failure by saying we’re going to do all of this now, even though we haven’t been doing it for 40 years is not going to help us build a muscle of trust and feel like, you know, we’re going to trust ourselves to follow through. So to start would be okay if I had to look at one thing and I have people kind of draw a circle and and put, you know, all the seven kind of like a pie slice together and pick, you know, where are you in relation to Nirvana being the outside and not so much in the middle and where are you in terms of living that value and then looking at the answers and saying, okay, so which of these? If I were to make any kind of adjustment would make the biggest impact in my life right now, And then what’s one thing that I can do differently that would help me have more of that in my life and then just practice that, you know, give yourself 30 days, give yourself some time of doing that thing differently for that amount of time.
So then you can start to build trust in yourself that you’re going to follow through because when you take two biggest steps, you know, and I talk about this and walk the talk weekend on day three and sometimes people get so excited because now there are jazz right now, I’ve got my course seven, I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna live the life, I love waking up to which you can do knowing what that experience is while you’re building up the pieces of it that are going to get you to, you know, your Nirvana, right? And so it’s a matter of sometimes people say, I’m gonna do these three things, I’m like, I encourage you to not pick three, maybe pick pick put the other two somewhere, you’re going to remember to look at later, you know, put them in the parking lot if you will. So you know that you’re not going to forget that you’re passionate about that. But let’s get one thing going because it’s so easy to get overwhelmed the second we go back to our real life, maybe we’ve all experienced that. Probably whether you’ve read something that got you excited or gondo program or you know, heard something on, on a program in a podcast or something like this, right?
And then life takes over the second it’s over. But you haven’t learned how to incorporate that new thing into your life yet. So unless we’re really purposeful about it and then look for ways while our life is already full, how are we going to find the capacity to do that? So it’s you know, got to give yourself some time to find where can I fit these things in without being so overwhelming and unrealistic that you’re going to change everything tomorrow. But if we even just change one little thing, it changes everything. You know, people kind of question, am I really gonna live a life? I love waking up to after 2.5 days of my life feels like, you know, purgatory. When the answer becomes well, when you have clarity and certainty on the things that matter most to you, you now have a completely different experience of the next day because you have something to guide your choices that you didn’t have before. So it creates confidence and faith and belief and the fact that oh I can have this in my life and I’m doing it and I’m taking steps and it changes the entire energy and vibe around how you’re waking up the next day because you have a new way of looking at what you want your life to be as an experience, you have to wait for all the stuff, you know how to tap into those feelings so that you can bring those feelings into your life without having to wait for it all to be together because you now have kind of a trusted path if you will.
So it’s you know it really comes down to, I was just watching some napoleon hill which a lot of people in personal development and say you know foundation of everything goes back to napoleon hill, there’s a, you guys want to see it on Netflix, it’s actually for real napoleon hill, like we’re recording of him a zillion years ago, black and white and of him sharing all of his principles and one of the core core principles that he called the key to mastering success is belief. And if you don’t believe it and you know, you don’t believe it, you won’t achieve it right, but he says it in five different ways, but it all comes back down. If you don’t believe it, then it’s just not happening. So if we don’t believe what we come up with, if we don’t believe in the experience that we can have that experience or that the values that we have are clear enough to know what that would even look like. How can we possibly expect ourselves to have the motivation to do anything about it, you know?
Because a lot of us have been disappointing scenarios will think that we’re going to get something and then we don’t, and that builds up over time. So we have that is something that we carry with us, even though every circumstance we’re in is always different. Nothing’s ever exactly the same. That’s going to create the exact same outcome because there’s never the exact same scenario in terms of, you know, what color is it that you’re wearing that day, What’s the weather like? What, who are you talking to? You know, but none of those are ever going to be exactly the same. So sometimes we think, oh well, exact things and the same thing’s gonna happen. Well, you’re not the exact same person in future moments. So as you start to shift your focus as you start to find new ways of tapping into what do you really want? And is that authentic? Because that legit or is it should, and you start to believe that gives you a completely different way of operating on the planet. It’s really powerful. Yeah, you made quite a profound point that I wanted to highlight, which was about clarity and your future decisions and how they would be easier once your, should we say clear on them.
But I would also add that not only that, but I think people stress a lot about the decisions and don’t really have a way of going about how to answer them and it would remove a lot of stress at the same time. So I just wanted to highlight that you also mentioned in the habits part of it that kind of starting with one thing would be, should we say better than parking the other two. Is there anything else that you wanted to add around if someone wants to change their habits, how they go about doing that? Yeah. So something I focused a lot on and I kind of alluded to it in my introduction is changing the language that we use around those things. So in one of my programs, I always learn something from everyone that ever comes. I call them my love and lifers and one of them is named Shawn and values was a trigger word for him because he, you know, a trigger word being like kind of like kind of makes you tense or it just doesn’t and it turns you off right away.
And that was the one. Yeah. Right. And um, and so it was like, I’m just getting stuck at that word and it’s central to everything that we do in any of my programs. And I was like, well, okay. So what’s something else? He’s like, I believe in the concept, but that word just gets me, you know, stuck. So I said, well, what about treasures, treasures? I can do that. What are my treasures in life? You know, and you can map that back to journey. Is that you know your treasure hunt or whatever it is. And that changed him completely, completely changed. So now he was like back in it again. So treasures. What are the treasures in my life? So when you’re building a habit, even the word habit sounds kind of boring, right? Could be a ritual. It could be, you know, a soul promise. It could be anything that’s going to take the should out of it. And you know some bad words that journey feel or have to need to and um, you know, should anytime those words come out of your mouth, your try to see if you can recognize that, get awareness around that and should you, why should you, why do you think you should?
You know, a lot of times? Oh, I should have a habit. I should brush my teeth every night. Well do you, is it like, what do you get out of brushing your teeth? Well then my breath doesn’t smell so you want to have fresh breath? Yes. Okay. So you want to have fresh breath and brushing your teeth is gonna give you what you want? Yes. Okay then. Do you want to brush your teeth so that you can have fresh breath right so it’s it’s turning it out of the should until I should go do this. And if you just can’t get it out of there where it’s just no I just don’t want to then what are three other ways? Pick something else? What’s another habit? What’s something else that you have the capacity right now to do a lot of times It’s like oh I’m never gonna binge watch ever again on netflix but then there’s the couch and then you have three hours of nothing planned and it’s like um and so what if you just watch 2.5 hours instead of three you know or why do you not want to watch it?
Is it just because you’re not supposed to watch so much tv what am I giving up when I watch that amount of tv or whatever it is? You know? So because whenever we say yes to something we say no to something else. So if I say yes to that, what am I saying no to and it could be you know I’m saying no to having energy to play with my grandkids when I go sit on the couch and don’t take care of myself which is a little different from I’m never going to lose weight anyway. It doesn’t matter. So a lot of it really comes down back to feelings. How are you feeling? How do you want to feel instead? And what’s something you can do to shift so that what you are doing is bringing you those feelings. And if it’s not the gym, it’s not the gym right? Or one time there was someone in one of my programs where she said no, it really is the gym. Like I don’t want to go, but I really want to go like the gym, but I just don’t want to go like well why don’t you want to go? And I don’t know, I just don’t, I don’t feel like it was like, well why do you think you want to go?
Because I feel so strong and there are people there and I really get jazzed about it. So maybe it’s, I want to go hang out with those people that get me jazz and it’s less about the gym than it is about going to see the people at the gym. So you’re still doing the same thing, you’re just not relating it to something that makes you want to throw up and die, you know, or poke a needle, you know, poke your eye out with a needle. If you’re getting that feeling, it comes back to awareness. You know, having the awareness which I won’t go into go into that. I want to talk weekend, but there’s a change management methodology that’s called add car and it’s the horrible acronym, but it stands for awareness. Desire knowledge ability and reinforcement. And that’s something that underlies all my programs and techniques and it all starts with awareness. So if you don’t have awareness, you’re not going to build the desire to the level that you would really, it’s going to get you there in times of not wanting to do something.
And a lot of times people will start at knowledge, you know, I need to learn this, but if you don’t have full awareness of why you want to change or what the impact is of not changing, then you’re not gonna be able to pick up all the knowledge that are going to help you get to that answer. And so because our brain can only absorb so much stuff, so if we start going and learning stuff, but you don’t have full awareness of what it is that we’re even listening for, it’s like, you know when you buy a blue car and all of a sudden there are 100 and 17 blue cars on the street when there was no blue cars there before, you know, it’s an awareness, they were always there. So, but now we know what to look for. So if we know what to listen for knowledge, like when they listen to your podcast, if they have an awareness of what it is that they’re changing for and have a desire to change now, they know what to listen for, right? And so the same thing with the ability to build an ability, you need to know what it is that you need to learn, you know to need need, that you get to learn to be able to get to that the phase that you want and then reinforcement is what just keeps you from sliding backwards.
So but the beginning is all about awareness, so anybody that’s listening, the easiest thing to do is just start to pay attention to how you’re feeling and instead of saying, I don’t want to, you know when you say how do I want to feel instead? Well I just don’t want to feel this way instead think about, well how would I want to feel without it being like, well that’s impossible, you know, what would you really want to feel? Where are you, what are your choices and what’s one thing you could do at least start to turn the ship closer to that feeling and it gives you a whole new direction, but it’s really awareness of noticing is the first step talking to you, It’s obvious to me that you’ve immersed yourself in self development because it’s just like the language and just your approach to everything is I like I like speaking to those people as refreshing as well to speak to someone. My my question is around what you think of the self development location because in some instances it’s time consuming and also costly.
Now from my perspective anyway, you’re at a point where you’ve learned a ton and previously you weren’t. So now you can look back on it. What do you make of the fact that you’ve invested so much time and maybe money in that and where you are now. What your thoughts? Well plenty of money. I’ve probably spent at least $100,000 over the course of even just the last five years probably, which I didn’t exactly have, you know, credit cards can be savior sometimes. Yeah. You know sometimes and it’s a trade off right? Like if I value abundance yet I hate my life, do I spend money on my credit card to if I’m going to know that I’m going to get the results that I want, that’s going to change the way I think and act and believe and and function. You know, we go to college and why don’t we go into the university of learning how to live a life we love, right? We’re not taught that that’s not an easy thing to know. A lot of people don’t even know how to live a life. They love waking up to that were being under the influence of.
So so you know where I really started to get value was knowing why I didn’t want to be where I was anymore, which would guide what is the next, you know what’s the desire, building, that desire and then knowing that you know it’s worth it to me to invest in the knowledge. Now I know what knowledge to invest in and so we can read a whole bunch of stuff and I’m not saying reading is a bad starting point. You know sometimes you know learning, we’re gonna we’ll we’ll get us to think about, oh you know what that resonates with me, I wonder, you know why and you can use that to build awareness and maybe you don’t finish the book because by the time you learn that you’re like it’s not worth the next hour for me to read this because I’ve just gotten what I need from it. It’s like watching a movie that you are hating when you stay to the end, it’s like we don’t have to stay till then guys, if we know it’s not working right? But also if you trust that it’s gonna get good at the end, then maybe you’ll stay, but but in the end it comes down to knowing why you want change and and getting certainty around why staying the same is going to be more painful then um then you can start to seek out the knowledge that is really valuable.
I mean the way I’ve been thinking about how do I articulate my background to people to understand what I’m doing is different. You know what, how do I articulate that people are like, oh well why house journey feel any different, you know why walk, talk week and nobody has their 2.5 day programs or whatever it is. So you know being able for me to articulate what that is, I have to really think about it myself and it really comes back to, I have done a lot of learning, I have done a lot of personal development stuff and there’s always that thing and I think anybody could relate to this, like if you listen to Stephen Covey’s seven habits, you’re like yeah those are good and then you listen to Tony Robbins and you know about this like yeah that’s good. Or you go listen to Chris Howard and you but there are all these little things now, how do you put them together? And that’s a lot harder than you know, than just going to someone that has a method that says, Okay, here’s what change looks like once you have and I can help people get from awareness to desire to where you need to be in knowledge, you know, where you want to be in knowledge and I can pull from those and incorporate that into what I’m doing.
So you don’t have to go out and spend $100,000 because I already did that for you, you know, and I’m pulling things in based on proven methodologies and consulting, that’s what we do consulting. They’re like what’s a consultant anyway, even my kids are like, I don’t get it, but um basically it comes down to an organization or a person has a challenge that they need to overcome, you know, there’s an outcome that they’re being told they need to achieve and so it’s about coming in and helping people articulate well what is the actual outcome that you want? What is the outcome? So like for us it would be, what is the experience of life that you would want and how do you know when you get there? What does that look like? And then okay, now that you know how you you know what it looks like to get there, What are the things that if you do this will get you there? They’re answering it. I’m not answering it, I’m using the techniques that I can tell from. Okay, so this is the problem. If it’s a cyber security project, I’m not going to bring in my customer experience people that do brand management.
You know, it’s like, okay, so what what resources does this person need and I can pull from what I already know or have access to and share those things with people. So so it it’s a way of something I was trained to do over 20 years of listening, being able to help people get to what is the desired outcome, help them can facilitate the conversation for them around what does that mean? What does that look like? And what would we have to do in order to get there? What are the things that we, if we do these things we get there. They’re answering those questions but they couldn’t answer until they knew the outcome, right, that they wanted and why? So it’s about a process that people use around the globe. This ad card methodology is used around the globe and it’s different projects, but it’s the same technique of walking you through it. But then to your point about personal development, if I didn’t know what to pull in, like I don’t have all the answers, I’m not like making up all these best practices, I’ve read them and start to I can now piece together, okay, what is it that I want from my people?
I want them to be able to have this experience. Okay, so now I know what to go read for now. I know what to pull from now. I need, you know, in terms of continuously improving myself, I have my own coach because you don’t know, you don’t know. And then I can pull from that and start to incorporate that in a way that other people don’t have to do all that, but can trust the system, you know? It comes back down to David Allen, have you ever heard of David Allen getting things done method and it’s a Yeah. David Allen changed my life and I’m a time management as a project manager, right? Was like, we’re going to have structure into how we deliver until we know we’re going to get there and so I’m always reading stuff about that and he was probably, I might even say the biggest influencer of how I manage my life now and his whole thing is to get it out of your head and into what he called a trusted system, something, you know that if you put it there, you can find it again because our brain is like a computer has like RAM, you know in it and I’m not even a technology person, but at least I know what happens when a computer is slow and annoying because because when it goes faster and it’s when you have too much stuff on it, right?
So so if you get it out of your head and you’re not constantly trying to remember when you have power point open and you have zoom open, zoom is gonna crash. So you it’s still running in the background even though we’re not using power point, right? So it’s it’s still using up our brain power. So if we get it out, so like you know what, you need to give the grocery store, you know what movie you wanna watch them day, what you have on your list of things to do today, right? If you get it out and put it into a trusted system then your brain can relax, you know where to go get it, you know that it’s there when you need it and then there’s a whole infrastructure of how to organize it so that you can find it then he teaches you how to build that trusted system of getting things out of your head and into somewhere else. And so once you trust it then you can relieve your brain and it reduces your anxiety significantly. You know it’s kind of like when people lay in bed and can’t sleep because they’re thinking about 917 different things that they didn’t do or want to do and don’t want to forget, so if we write it down and then somehow our brain can go back to sleep, you know, so it’s getting all of that stuff out and I have different programs that do that but it’s a matter of getting that out of your head and related to a snow globe.
You know if you shake a snow globe you have all that snow in there, like you can’t see anything. I don’t have you ever been in a white out, have you ever been in like a snowstorm? Like a white out? It’s so scary. You literally can’t see, you can’t see even though you’re on the road you have to trust that you know where the road is. But if you could like breathe, let the snow settle and then you have the capacity to see again. So when you get that out and know that you’re gonna be able to find it again then you can think more clearly and then you can start to follow that path. So I know it’s like the longest answer. Pretty good at long answers. But but it’s knowing when I learned that that was a game changer because now I can learn all these things and save them in places where I know I can go get them and I don’t have to remember them all. And then like when you ask me a question I have you know where I can access that somewhere in my brain beforehand or you know something that I’ve learned so much that it comes back to me but I don’t keep stuff in my head.
So it’s a matter of you know also baking it into you like the values when you practice your seven values all the time and every time you have a choice to make it’s there. You know in the beginning look at it right? And I mean I haven’t written down every time I put something on my trusted method, trusted system of where I keep all the things that I do every day, it doesn’t go on there unless I can tag it with a value, if I can’t tag it with the value doesn’t go on and I delete it from my brain it’s gone. And so once it’s in there and I know that it’s an alignment but but that takes practice. So even the most simple thing would be when you get clear on what those seven values are practicing that it helps eliminate a lot of the letter in our own lines and because now we don’t have to remember everything. We just need to remember seven things we get to remember seven things. So the simpler we can make it, even though, you know, the personal development space, I think the biggest gap for me was always well how do I implement it and how do I tailor it to my own life?
And that was always the sticking point and you get to the written exercise if you’re already overwhelmed, you just close the book and hopefully get back to it one day. But it’s the idea of stopping and thinking about how to do it is like it’s enough to read the book, but I don’t have enough to like do something about it, but when someone can guide you through that and you know that that next step is already gonna be there for you and it’s gonna work, then it becomes more magnetize ng than it is like pushing yourself up to help you know, I certainly feel like you’re talking directly to me in relation to how I am with trying to keep stuff in my mind and you know, not being able to go back to sleep because you’re thinking about a particular thing, all that very relevant. So I certainly appreciate the value there. I do ask one question on every time I speak to someone on the episode and it’s what does success mean to you? I’m sure you’ve got a great answer, but I would love to hear it nonetheless.
Yeah. So what I’ve determined is success is just showing up and experiencing my life as who I’m here to be and so many people are on a hunt for their purpose and reality it is what is who am I authentically? And that took me a long time to dig into. And now I have a way of accelerating that because I learned how to do it and now systematize it. But um you know, if I just show up as who I am and authentically, I’ll actually get to experience life as that, which so much of our lives is when we aren’t authentic in our answers or we don’t speak up or we don’t reflect on, I don’t want to feel like this. You know, I want to feel like this instead and why, you know, that’s coming from somewhere, you know, we have a soul or we have a gift, whatever your beliefs are, whether it’s higher power, I mean in the end, it’s a fact that each individual has their own capabilities that are different.
So if we focus on what is it that I have within me that I’m naturally good at or drawn to are excited about and pursue that my whole energy in life is gonna change my ripple effect to other people. You know, my mission is I want to create the biggest ripple effect of all time by being who I’m here to be and helping others do the same and as a result, that’s gonna bring souls and humanity alive. If you think about it, if each soul, if each individual were to be who they’re here to be, so their energy, your energy, everybody is listening to your energy. If you were here, you know, who experiencing that looks like to follow through on something that you decided matters what would life feel like, how cool would that experience be versus not doing that and never lighting that part of your soul up? Right? So for me, success is following and trusting that feeling and having the resources behind me that I trust to to know that when I take the next step, it’s my next step and whatever that is, is the experience of life that’s gonna create my ripple effect and my own joy in life and experience that I want.
And if we each did that, you know, you think about all the challenges we have right now of people feeling you know strongly about different topics and you know, a lot of um divisiveness in a lot of things. If we could just authentically show up and each contribute our own version of what we’re here to be that wide would just change because we have a different experience of humanity. You have a different lens of what you’re looking at other people and knowing that that’s their experience or or how can you learn from their experience or, you know, napoleon Hill is classic and going back in and so on is on Netflix, I can’t remember. It’s Netflix or Amazon, I think it might be Amazon prime, but it’s so worth whatever, you know, $15 or whatever it was to download it. I can’t remember. But she talks about all of them very rapidly, but they’re all very simple, basic things, which is, you know, to be successful in life, you know, having belief and being able to learn from others and, you know, showing up as a personality that people want to be around.
But it all comes back to, you know, for each of us, you know, success being, I get to experience my life in a way that is authentic. Like how amazing would that be? Everything’s a new adventure. The curiosity about, well, what ice cream would I pick might be different. I don’t know if I’m following my my own choices, Maybe I’ll be more adventurous, I don’t know, but a lot of people are saying, oh, I want to make a difference. Well, rather than focusing on making a difference. Your differences in showing up as who you’re here to be. And ultimately, like we think about doctors make a difference, right, if your passion is helping people and somehow that attracts you to med school and so from med school then you become a doctor and you make a difference? So it’s not by starting with making a difference. How do you want to feel? And then as you build that the difference that you’re going to make is going to unfold, which makes it even cooler in my opinion because it’s like this discovery as a result, people are going to see that you’re being authentic and to inspire them to do the same is probably one of the most amazing things you could do in life.
So that’s my version of success. Well, congratulations on doing that for starters and also the no, the, the education and the what you’ve expressed here today. I can tell it’s like part of your personality but it’s great to listen to. So thank you for for that for people who want to connect with you or maybe do one of your would you say that courses or would you say that walk The Talk weekend is my Hallmark Foundation? Yeah. So to find me the um for your audience, I want to gift you walk the Talk weekend. Anybody who’s listening just put the name of your podcast and how you found out about program, just go to walk the talk weekend dot com and you can sign It’s an $897 program. But anybody who’s listening on a gift that to you because I don’t like to talk about the next step and then not enable people to do that and take it. So no barriers. The next one I actually have coming up is in a couple of weeks.
So if you’re listening to this after that I do have them pretty regularly. This will be my last one for 2022 so sign up now, it’s October 21st, the 23rd. And if it’s past that when people are listening, um you know, you can go on the site c when the next one is or or get on the list and be notified when the next one is, but that’s the absolute best way because no matter what, if anyone ever does anything with me, we always start with the foundation of values, which is what I do in 2.5 days and walk the talk weekend and you can learn more about it at walkthetalkweekend.com. There’s a video and some description there and I just encourage you to sign up and in the event that you can’t make that right away or want to know what else I’m doing, just go to @yourjourneyfuel on Facebook and you can always see what I’m up to on there. But I really encourage you guys to take advantage of the gift of walk the talk weekend. If you could do some of the things I was talking about today in 2.5 days and know that that would be your life.
It’s in my opinion, worth the investment of time at no cost to you financially. So that’s my challenge, my cold action is to do that for yourself. Well, thank you for that. Very generous. And again, I reiterate you’ve been a great guest today. So Stacy, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.