October 26, 2021 • 31 mins
There's so much out there to help you figure out what you want to do with your life. Coaches and self help books galore can help you figure out why you're on this earth, what you're here to do and who you're here to help.
But what's the most important part? Having the courage to walk away from life that is expected you live. So you cn truly live the life you're meant to experience.
On the 6th year anniversary of Dan burning his corporate career to the ground here's here with a question...
Are you living for desires or expectations?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mark Twain famously said the two most important days in
your life for the day that you were born and
the day you figure out why. And with all due
respect Mr Twain, the man's been dead for a hundred
and ten years. I think it's time that we update
that quote and put an asterisk that works for because
when Mark Twain was alive, there was no self help industry,
(00:21):
there was no Oprah, there was no Life Amplified podcast
or any podcast for that matter. And over the last
hundred years or so, there's been a lot of materials
for people to start to get clear on their purpose
and figure out what they are here to do, who
they're here to help in, what problems they're here to solve.
(00:43):
But the third most important day is what we have
to talk about. It's having the courage to walk away
from the life that is expected so you can truly
live the life that you're meant to experience. This is
a very import topic to me as I'm celebrating the
six year anniversary of burning my old corporate career to
(01:05):
the ground so that I could live my purpose. And
this week, that's what we're gonna talk about. Are you
living for your desires or for expectations. I'll tell you
what that means and give you my best tips that
fall in love with your life again. This week on
Life Amplified, Welcome back. What is an amplified life. It's
(01:27):
having amplified relationships with people who support and encourage you
to be your best. It's having amplified energy to conquer
the challenges of the day. And it's having an amplified career,
one that's meaningful to you, the world, and your bank accounts.
I'm Dan Mason, life reinvention coach, helping you discover your
(01:48):
calling and create an amplified life on your terms. This
is the Life Amplified Podcast. One of my private one
on one clients recently shared with me. She said, I
feel like I have robbed in myself of my own life.
Can you relate? Do you ever wake up in the
morning and you feel, perhaps that you just don't love
(02:11):
your life as deeply as you want that even though
you've attained some outer success, there's a void, something is missing,
And maybe up until now you went the route that
I did. For many years. You tried to fill that
void by chasing another job, a flashy new job title,
a promotion, a pay raise, when that didn't work, you
(02:32):
tried to fill the void by buying a nicer car
or getting a bigger house, and when the material world
let you down, many times we can look to fill
that void by abusing ourselves drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping,
and eventually every person has to learn the hard way
(02:53):
that there's no material possession, nor is there a chemical
that is going to fix a crisis a purpose. It
was October twenty that I woke up for the final
day with that feeling of fresh hell, just struggling to
get out of bed, showing up fifteen minutes late again
(03:15):
to the Monday morning sales meeting, completely unable to focus
or be productive on the tasks that were in front
of me, because quite honestly, I didn't care about the
work I was doing. I didn't believe in the company
that I was working for, and I knew that there
was something more out there for me. And it was
so bad at this point that just to get through
(03:37):
the day, I would have to shut my office door
for twenty minutes around my lunch break, and I would
tell myself I was going to meditate on the couch,
but I was so energetically exhausted. Within two minutes, I
would fall asleep sitting straight up on the couch and
then wake up twenty minutes later, you know, with that
snore snort thing going on, where I'd be like and
(03:58):
there'd be drool coming out of the side my mouth,
and it was a hot mess. But that was the
only way I couldn't make it through the day. As
luck would have it is I was teetering on the
edge on whether or not I should quit that soul
sucking job. They made the decision easy for me. I
was let go, and rather than going and chasing another job,
(04:21):
I burned the whole career to the ground, much to
the chagrin of everybody in my life. And I took
all the internal work that I had been doing on
myself to discover my purpose, and I built a new
vision and I committed to building a coaching practice. I
had no clients at the time, I had no website,
there was no podcast. My god, I did not even
(04:43):
have a computer because my two thousand and eight MacBook
had crept out a year and a half before, so
I was just using my work laptop for everything, which
is really funny because I think in hindsight, Like God,
when I turned that thing in, when I walked out
of the building, I can only imagine with the I
t people found on their not just that I might
(05:03):
have been going to some websites of ill repute every
now and then, but like my Google search history was
probably just filled with you know, how do I leave
this shitty awful job. I often wondered if maybe they
had just like tapped into my computer and found my
search history and that's why they sent me backing and
(05:23):
sent me on my way. But it's neither here nor there.
Everything worked out for the best and and the biggest
challenge for me, the biggest bridge cross, was to let
go of all of my expectations. Yes, I'm gonna talk
today about how so often we build life to meet
(05:46):
the expectations of other people. But I want to take
it back even further than that, because expectations come in
all shapes and sizes, right Like I would love to
tell you that my family, because my father worked in
radio and I followed in his footsteps, that I was somehow,
you know, I had my arm twisted and really urged
(06:08):
to go get into the family business. But that was
not the case. You know, my passion growing up in
high school was always doing theater. Uh. And I went
away to Emerson College. I studied musical theater. My family
was supportive of that. Believe it or not, your friendly
neighborhood Life Amplified podcast host and life reinvention coach. Also
(06:29):
a song and dance man. I can sing you as
show tune. Uh. Not going to do it on the
podcast today though, And what got in the way of
me pursuing that, Well, my family never told me you
don't to go get into radio, but my dad leaned
on me very heavy, you know, around my junior year
of college that hey, look, you need to graduate on
(06:51):
time and you're on your own, Like, we're not going
to help you out while you're auditioning. You're gonna have
to go wait tables or figure out whatever it is.
And you've got to find a way to make it work.
Which is totally cool, no resentment on that. But I
also had a trauma history and a lot of anxious
attachment around abandonment and not being able to take care
(07:15):
of myself. And without getting into too much detail, you know,
I grew up with a mom who threatened to have
me legally removed from the home just about every day
between ages eleven and sixteen. You know, she was always
threatening to take me to court to have me emancipated.
And there was a lot of languaging in my family
that said, well, you're twelve years old, you can't even
(07:37):
go get a job. How are you going to take
care of yourself? And that was a real traumatic thing
for me as a child, and a lot of that
trauma around this messaging that I couldn't support myself played
in as I thought about graduating and just becoming a
you know, a struggling artist in New York. So I
was the one that made the decision to follow in
(08:01):
my dad's footsteps. And that's why I want to talk
about this idea that the first level of expectations that
so many people struggle with when they're talking about making
a massive up level to go live their purpose are
subconscious expectations. Because you know, from my perspective and my
(08:22):
neural wiring and everything that I had witnessed growing up
in my life, I had no example of somebody who
went and followed their dream and the arts and made
an abundant living and was successful. I had just never
actually witnessed that ever in my life. And I want
you to consider where in your dreams you've held back
(08:46):
with a lot of stories. There's so many people that
tell me they want to write a novel or that
they want to publish a book. They're like, oh, but
nobody makes a living writing Dan. And other people will
tell me all the time, well, Dan, I have to
stay in this paying so soul sucking job because I
have kids to support. You know, I'm a single parent.
(09:07):
There's no way that I could ever take care of
my family if I went and launch my business. I
can't do that to my children. And yet, if that
were true, that nobody could be a single parent and
start a business that makes millions, if not billions of dollars,
(09:29):
the Lifetime network would never be able to make a
feel good movie again, Like, isn't that emory Lifetime movie
is the true story of somebody who was just gritty
and scrappy and defied the odds and live their dream
and change the trajectory of their family's life. Of course
that's happened. We see these inspirational stories all the time
(09:50):
on talk shows, on Lifetime movies. If it were true
that nobody could ever earn a living as a writer.
Stephen King would be a homeless man right now. Think
of any writer that you love. Tony Morrison never would
have made an impact in the world because nobody would
have ever bought those books and they'd all be starving
and on the street. Yet of course they've done it.
(10:14):
It's just that you have not personally witnessed that and
it is not part of your internal model of reality.
In fact, you probably watched your parents suffer every day
working in a soul sucking nine to five corporate job
where they were tired and grumpy when they came home.
Some people, they're your model of reality as you watched
(10:36):
your parents struggle working two to three jobs and not
being able to make ends meet. And where have you
taken on those patterns in your life? Because from pretty
much the time you come out of the womb, you're
subconscious is learning and making assumptions about what's possible and
not possible, both based on the messages that you got
(10:57):
from your family. Think about what you were told about money.
It doesn't grow on trees. Rich people are a holes
and you know we're noble because we're we're struggling. There's
a lot of that subtle messaging, and even in families
where there's no explicit messages, it was just demonstrated that
life is about sacrifice, that you put yourself on the
(11:20):
back burner and your creative pursuits on the back burner,
and you do the right thing in order to put
food on the table. So the first set of expectations
that we're looking at are just a replication of what
was demonstrated for us. These become subconscious expectations. Now can
(11:40):
you break out of that? Of course you can. There
are some people who were really driven. I think about
Michael Bloomberg, who you know as a multi billionaire and yes,
you know he might be really sketchy with women and
all sorts of other issues that came up during the
two seconds he was running for president. But that was
a man who grew up really poor. His family had
(12:02):
no money, and he was able to rise above it.
For him, he used that is fuel to go generate
a lot of wealth and success in the world. So
your subconscious expectations, you know, they might be the model
of reality that you're struggling with, but you can move
beyond them. And then the second thing that we want
to look at when you're not really owning your desires
(12:25):
for your life and you're living expectations, it becomes your
own expectations. Because once you invest the money and you
go to college, or you get a degree, or you
get locked into one career path, the career in many
instances for people becomes their identity. It becomes a nice, neat,
(12:47):
little one dimensional title that we can put on ourselves. Hey,
I'm Dan Mason. I'm a career in life reinvention coach. Yes,
I am that today, I am a podcast host. I
love what I do today. But one of the things
that's really come up for me over the course of
one now that I'm six years into my business, is
a really burning desire to serve at a higher level.
(13:10):
I know that there's only so many people that I
can impact with a private coaching practice. There's only so
many people. Even as I'm scaling and doing more group programs,
there's a cap on the number of people that I
can serve. So this is why I've invested so much
time this year building a television brand as a TV guest,
because you know, do I want to continue to coach
(13:32):
a small circle of private clients or what I like
to be able to impact millions of people every time
I do a national daytime TV talk show, and part
of the extension of that vision would be find a
way to leverage that into my own television brand, you know,
something sort of like a doctor phil but more personal
(13:53):
development instead of medical. So that's a big thing that
I'm going to be taking some steps toward. But when
your job that you have, particularly the one that you
took out of college and you worked your way up
the ladder at it years old, becomes your identity, there's
no space for evolution and there's no space for growth
(14:15):
because think about it, you wouldn't wear the same clothes
that you were that you wore twenty years ago, not
just because they might not fit, but they probably would
look pretty dopey. They probably would not be in style
if you wore them out. God knows, if I had
the same hair that I did twenty years ago, I'd
be rocking some frosted tips right now and people would
(14:37):
be like, oh, does he still think he's an in
sync from two thousand one? It would not be a
pretty sight, and we would never think about doing that.
We will evolve our look, our fashion, our hair, but
we get so handcuffed to the same career choice. And
this is what we can look at is level two,
(14:58):
which is more of your or conscious identity, and this
is where your ego gets involved and you become very
attached to this notion of success and you know, giving
the appearance of having made it. There are other people
and you might be one of them who get very
attached to the story of lack and struggle. You know,
(15:21):
one of my one on one clients right now, we
just had this huge breakthrough where she's committing to struggle sobriety,
because there were so many patterns of struggle with her
family with finances and stuff growing up, and she realized
that she keeps reverting back to that to sort of
stay connected to fit the expectations of the tribe. So
(15:43):
her subconscious identity about struggle was actually become a conscious identity,
and she's realizing that she can choose again, particularly as
she steps into a higher level of service and starting
her business. But then once you do that work around
your conscious identity, which if you really want to break
through those first two levels that we talked about to
(16:04):
get crystal clear on how your subconscious was programmed in
the first zero to ten months of life and how
that's affecting where you're at today. If you want to
work through that quickly, just hire me. Like this is
exactly the process I take with my clients who have
gone on and reinvented their lives and careers and relationships
(16:26):
and totally transformed their life. But the thing is is,
once we get clear on your purpose and you figure
out a new vision that suits who you are today
and not the person you were ten years ago, or
the person you were in college, or the person that
you had to be growing up, then we're getting into
(16:46):
level three, which is the expectations of other people. This
was a big barrier for me. I had so much
shame and guilt about even explaining to my dad that
I wanted to walk away from the radio industry. And
you know, for perspective on this, my dad's career was
way more successful than mine. He's actually in the National
(17:09):
Radio Hall of Fame. But you know, my dad would
tell me all the time, well, Daniel, where else you
gonna go and make six figures? Those jobs don't just
fall from the trees. And you know what, by the way,
he was right when it comes to corporate America. It's
not like there's a lot of six figure jobs that
you know, you can just easily go grab in corporate America.
(17:31):
I had to actually leave corporate and start making multiple
six figures. So that was, you know, the up level
for me. But there were expectations from my dad, and
many of them were with the best of intentions. You know,
he didn't want to see his son lose everything to
go chase a dream. He wanted me to be comfortable.
(17:53):
He wanted me to be successful. And I know that
he wanted that for me. But tell me, if this
resonates within your family, and maybe you're a parent right now,
who's listening, don't we often want the kids to be
successful because it's a reflection on us, and there's a
little piece of you that likes to brag on the
(18:14):
porch with your neighbors about how well your kids doing,
or what college they got into, or how much your
son or daughter is making out there in the workforce.
And there was an element of that for my family,
particularly at that point, because you know, my brother was
more of a late bloomer. My brother's eight years younger
than me, but you know, he went through some rough times.
(18:36):
He failed out of college twice. There was some d
u I's some bad choices, and God love him, Like,
he's grown so much and he's doing amazing now and
he's got a great paying job doing something that he loves.
And I met an amazing woman and they got married
and they had kids. He's figured it out. But at
the time, Daniel was the successful one in the family.
(18:59):
That was the one they could brag about and sort
of sweep the other stuff under the rug. So there
were some expectations of that. And meanwhile, when I first
started creating this this idea that that there must be
a next vision for my life, I also had a
living girlfriend who then became my fiance and wife, who
(19:20):
would be in my ears all the time telling me, well,
you can't quit that job. We have a lifestyle to maintain.
And because she didn't really work, what she really meant
it was that I had a lifestyle to maintain for
everybody in the family, including her and her daughter. So
there were a lot of expectations and fears about letting
my dad down, about you know, letting my ex wife down,
(19:45):
about just my contemporaries and peers in this career where
I was so successful. Are they going to think that
I'm an idiot if I walked away? But here's the
big thing that I want to talk about today, as
we you know, really digging in to this idea of
living for your desires instead of the expectations. Right, Pleasing
(20:08):
other people is like chasing a moving target. Right, people
will have multiple hopes for you, and the expectations that
your spouse or your parents have might not even be
the same. The expectation that your children have from you
might not align with that. Not even to mention your
(20:30):
social groups and the peer pressure that we feel there.
And when do you start trying to please everyone, you
end up pleasing no one, including yourself. This whole idea
of living up to expectations, and it doesn't matter which
level you're at. Your subconscious expectations are based on a
(20:55):
life and a reality that no longer exists. It's based
on something disappeared twenty years ago that's no longer the
present moment, and your expectations that you have in this moment,
which are about the current you can never help you
become the future you that you want to be in
(21:15):
the future. I once had a therapist who told me
that expectations are premeditated resentments, because frustration is the gap
that exists between what people expect from you and who
you are. And if you want to bridge that gap,
the processes is that we have to re start to
(21:36):
reframe our relationship with people's expectations. Because the downside is this,
and maybe you're already experiencing it in your life when
you are basing your life decisions on getting the love
of other people, that love won't even feel good to
you because at some point you're going to look in
(21:56):
the mirror and be like, all these efforts in my life,
they don't love me for who I really am. They
love me for this avatar that I'm portraying. They're they're
loving me for the character that I portray every day.
So there's not gonna be any lasting joy, satisfaction abundance there.
(22:17):
It's actually going to turn into self loathing because you're
gonna wake up like I did every day for four
or five years, feeling like a paid liar, cash in
the checks, but knowing that you're not really honoring yourself
or making the impact that you're here to make in
this lifetime. And if you're that person, that's living in
(22:40):
the void that I talked about at the beginning of
the podcast. If you just feel like something is missing
and you know that you're ready to fall in love
with your life again, if that's something you want to
create in your life starting today and into two then
we have to have a bigger conversation here about desires
(23:02):
instead of expectations. And what I would love for you
to reflect on is if you could, if you could
have anything you wanted, you knew that you could press
the reset button in your life, which is still be
in the job that you're in today, Would you still
live in the same city that you live in today?
(23:25):
Would you be in the same relationship that you are today?
And those are simple questions in theory, but they're not easy.
And there is part of you. If you feel yourself
activated and anxious even by listening to me ask you
those questions, well good, because now is a good time
to get curious. Where are you not in unlignment? And
(23:50):
that brings me to the second step for you to
fall in love with your life, which is you've got
to connect to your own inner wisdom. You've got to
create some space for you to even intuitively figure out
what it is that you want meditation a great tool
for that. Some people UH find that internal guidance when
(24:14):
they're on a yoga mat. Some people find it when
they're on the treadmill. Some people find it when they're
out on a hike in nature. I don't know what
it is that activates that for you. One of the
biggest ways, particularly when I lived in New York and
I had access to so many museums, a great meditative
place for me to go to sort of connect to
(24:34):
my own wisdom and creativity was to walk through an
art museum. You have to know yourself enough to figure
out what that is, but you have to begin to connect.
It is hard to fall in love with a life
when you're not even connected to your higher self. So
know those ways that you can tune into your guidance,
your intuition. Listen to those whispers within your soul because
(24:58):
guess what, it's always talking to you. And pro tip
on this, it doesn't speak loudly. It's not like the
heavens open up and the angels come down on a
cloud and blow a horn and tell you you know
your next path in life. Intuition whispers, it's those whispers
of the heart. It's that random thing that pops into
(25:18):
your mind when you're folding laundry and says, Hey, wouldn't
it be great if I could move here? Or what
if I could start this business idea, what if I
could invent this product? And it just comes and goes quickly.
Those are the things I'd like you to tune into
this week and start to pay attention because it moves
us to the next step to fall in love with
(25:40):
your life again, which is to take charge of your life,
which means you're not a victim, you're not powerless, you
are not at the mercy of other people's expectations. You
are the decider of your life. And once you take
owner ship, this is really it the fastest way to
(26:03):
fall in love with your life again. Take ownership of
your decisions. Step number three to fall in love with
your life again. This is really big as we talk
about those subconscious expectations that we all have. Start to
question your stories. Every time you find yourself in a
story of well, nobody is going to make a living
(26:24):
doing blank, or I couldn't possibly I couldn't possibly pursue
my dream until my kids are all grown up and
out of the house. Let's start to get clear. Is
that really true? It's almost like the Byron Katie for
questions when she talks about the work. Can you be
sure that that's not true? Where are there examples that
(26:48):
disprove that belief that you have? And another one and
again totally lifting this from Byron Katie. Right now, who
would you be without the belief of lack and limitation?
And the fourth step to fall in love with your
life let other people off the hook. When you remove
(27:11):
your own biases and expectations, you can do the same
for others. So often we want to get people to
bend to our will. You know it slowed me down
so much when I walked away from corporate and I
started this business as I wanted my girlfriend at the
time to be on board. I wanted my dad to
(27:32):
believe in my business so much that it would compensate
for my own lack of belief. But other people can't
believe in your dream or your business idea more than
you do, So stop adding useless pressure onto them and yourself. Right,
Just get back into the joy of living. Chase your joy.
(27:55):
Of course, people are going to have expectations and other
people are gonna have opinions about what doing and what
I've found is that mostly it's just a mirror of
what they believe is possible in their own life, or
in some cases, what they believe isn't possible. We've covered
a lot of ground today. We talked about the three
(28:15):
expectations that will get in your way subconscious expectations, your
conscious expectations which become your identity, and expectations of others,
which is actually the last part of that many of
us believe falsely that it's actually the start at the beginning.
And we also talked about the steps to fall in
(28:37):
love with your life again. Number one, ask yourself if
you could press the reset button today, which is still
be in the same job, the same city, the same home,
the same relationship that you aren't now. Number two, you
have to begin to cultivate that inner guidance, find a
way to connect to your own intuition, and also listen
(29:00):
to the whispers of that intuition. Start to really pay
attention to those little fleeting thoughts in the back of
your head. Number three, Take charge of your life, which
means taking responsibility for your decisions. Number four, we want
to start to question your assumptions, especially any of those
(29:21):
subconscious expectations that tell you nobody can make a living
doing blank or this idea could never work because Blank
start to question those and finally let other people off
the hook. It's not their responsibility to believe in your dream. Really,
(29:44):
at the end of the day, friend, it's about following
your joy. And I would be an idiot and a
liar and a snake oil salesman if I would tell
you that it's some easy thing that you make one
decision and everything comes together magical like a Disney movie. Yeah,
there's gonna be some bumps and some bruises along the way.
(30:06):
But the thing that I've learned on this path is
that you get to have what you want. That you
live in a friendly universe that created you for the
express reason of living your purpose. So why would you
not be supported as you took courageous steps to that endeavor.
(30:27):
And it might not happen overnight, but that's the point
at the end of the day. Falling in love with
your life, reclaiming your passion, reclaiming your soul's purpose. It's
about growing into the kind of person who can have
that kind of freedom. And if you need some help
(30:48):
along the way, it would be an honor to serve you.
That's what all my coaching programs are about. Fastest way
to make the quickest progress is to work with me
one on one. But we've got a brand new group
coaching program coming up. It's going to be a year
long group mentorship program with some amazing, like minded badasses
like you, and it's really gonna be an interesting mix
(31:09):
of people. Some of you know my past clients who
are already doing it, who are out there making it
happen and they're just growing into their next level of abundance,
and maybe somebody like you who has just taken that
first scary step. But who you hang out with is
who you become. I'd love to invite you to join
(31:29):
my community. You can get all the info on my
coaching programs and fill out an application at Creative Soul
Coaching dot net. If the podcast serves you this week,
please screenshot it, upload it to your Instagram stories, tag
me at c SC Dan Mason, and don't forget to
give us a follow here on whatever podcast platform you're
(31:50):
listening to. In the meantime, turn down the volume on
your negativity, Turn up the volume on your purpose, so
you can live life amplified.
Mark Twain famously said the two most important days in
your life for the day that you were born and
the day you figure out why. And with all due
respect Mr Twain, the man's been dead for a hundred
and ten years. I think it's time that we update
that quote and put an asterisk that works for because
when Mark Twain was alive, there was no self help industry,
(00:21):
there was no Oprah, there was no Life Amplified podcast
or any podcast for that matter. And over the last
hundred years or so, there's been a lot of materials
for people to start to get clear on their purpose
and figure out what they are here to do, who
they're here to help in, what problems they're here to solve.
(00:43):
But the third most important day is what we have
to talk about. It's having the courage to walk away
from the life that is expected so you can truly
live the life that you're meant to experience. This is
a very import topic to me as I'm celebrating the
six year anniversary of burning my old corporate career to
(01:05):
the ground so that I could live my purpose. And
this week, that's what we're gonna talk about. Are you
living for your desires or for expectations. I'll tell you
what that means and give you my best tips that
fall in love with your life again. This week on
Life Amplified, Welcome back. What is an amplified life. It's
(01:27):
having amplified relationships with people who support and encourage you
to be your best. It's having amplified energy to conquer
the challenges of the day. And it's having an amplified career,
one that's meaningful to you, the world, and your bank accounts.
I'm Dan Mason, life reinvention coach, helping you discover your
(01:48):
calling and create an amplified life on your terms. This
is the Life Amplified Podcast. One of my private one
on one clients recently shared with me. She said, I
feel like I have robbed in myself of my own life.
Can you relate? Do you ever wake up in the
morning and you feel, perhaps that you just don't love
(02:11):
your life as deeply as you want that even though
you've attained some outer success, there's a void, something is missing,
And maybe up until now you went the route that
I did. For many years. You tried to fill that
void by chasing another job, a flashy new job title,
a promotion, a pay raise, when that didn't work, you
(02:32):
tried to fill the void by buying a nicer car
or getting a bigger house, and when the material world
let you down, many times we can look to fill
that void by abusing ourselves drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping,
and eventually every person has to learn the hard way
(02:53):
that there's no material possession, nor is there a chemical
that is going to fix a crisis a purpose. It
was October twenty that I woke up for the final
day with that feeling of fresh hell, just struggling to
get out of bed, showing up fifteen minutes late again
(03:15):
to the Monday morning sales meeting, completely unable to focus
or be productive on the tasks that were in front
of me, because quite honestly, I didn't care about the
work I was doing. I didn't believe in the company
that I was working for, and I knew that there
was something more out there for me. And it was
so bad at this point that just to get through
(03:37):
the day, I would have to shut my office door
for twenty minutes around my lunch break, and I would
tell myself I was going to meditate on the couch,
but I was so energetically exhausted. Within two minutes, I
would fall asleep sitting straight up on the couch and
then wake up twenty minutes later, you know, with that
snore snort thing going on, where I'd be like and
(03:58):
there'd be drool coming out of the side my mouth,
and it was a hot mess. But that was the
only way I couldn't make it through the day. As
luck would have it is I was teetering on the
edge on whether or not I should quit that soul
sucking job. They made the decision easy for me. I
was let go, and rather than going and chasing another job,
(04:21):
I burned the whole career to the ground, much to
the chagrin of everybody in my life. And I took
all the internal work that I had been doing on
myself to discover my purpose, and I built a new
vision and I committed to building a coaching practice. I
had no clients at the time, I had no website,
there was no podcast. My god, I did not even
(04:43):
have a computer because my two thousand and eight MacBook
had crept out a year and a half before, so
I was just using my work laptop for everything, which
is really funny because I think in hindsight, Like God,
when I turned that thing in, when I walked out
of the building, I can only imagine with the I
t people found on their not just that I might
(05:03):
have been going to some websites of ill repute every
now and then, but like my Google search history was
probably just filled with you know, how do I leave
this shitty awful job. I often wondered if maybe they
had just like tapped into my computer and found my
search history and that's why they sent me backing and
(05:23):
sent me on my way. But it's neither here nor there.
Everything worked out for the best and and the biggest
challenge for me, the biggest bridge cross, was to let
go of all of my expectations. Yes, I'm gonna talk
today about how so often we build life to meet
(05:46):
the expectations of other people. But I want to take
it back even further than that, because expectations come in
all shapes and sizes, right Like I would love to
tell you that my family, because my father worked in
radio and I followed in his footsteps, that I was somehow,
you know, I had my arm twisted and really urged
(06:08):
to go get into the family business. But that was
not the case. You know, my passion growing up in
high school was always doing theater. Uh. And I went
away to Emerson College. I studied musical theater. My family
was supportive of that. Believe it or not, your friendly
neighborhood Life Amplified podcast host and life reinvention coach. Also
(06:29):
a song and dance man. I can sing you as
show tune. Uh. Not going to do it on the
podcast today though, And what got in the way of
me pursuing that, Well, my family never told me you
don't to go get into radio, but my dad leaned
on me very heavy, you know, around my junior year
of college that hey, look, you need to graduate on
(06:51):
time and you're on your own, Like, we're not going
to help you out while you're auditioning. You're gonna have
to go wait tables or figure out whatever it is.
And you've got to find a way to make it work.
Which is totally cool, no resentment on that. But I
also had a trauma history and a lot of anxious
attachment around abandonment and not being able to take care
(07:15):
of myself. And without getting into too much detail, you know,
I grew up with a mom who threatened to have
me legally removed from the home just about every day
between ages eleven and sixteen. You know, she was always
threatening to take me to court to have me emancipated.
And there was a lot of languaging in my family
that said, well, you're twelve years old, you can't even
(07:37):
go get a job. How are you going to take
care of yourself? And that was a real traumatic thing
for me as a child, and a lot of that
trauma around this messaging that I couldn't support myself played
in as I thought about graduating and just becoming a
you know, a struggling artist in New York. So I
was the one that made the decision to follow in
(08:01):
my dad's footsteps. And that's why I want to talk
about this idea that the first level of expectations that
so many people struggle with when they're talking about making
a massive up level to go live their purpose are
subconscious expectations. Because you know, from my perspective and my
(08:22):
neural wiring and everything that I had witnessed growing up
in my life, I had no example of somebody who
went and followed their dream and the arts and made
an abundant living and was successful. I had just never
actually witnessed that ever in my life. And I want
you to consider where in your dreams you've held back
(08:46):
with a lot of stories. There's so many people that
tell me they want to write a novel or that
they want to publish a book. They're like, oh, but
nobody makes a living writing Dan. And other people will
tell me all the time, well, Dan, I have to
stay in this paying so soul sucking job because I
have kids to support. You know, I'm a single parent.
(09:07):
There's no way that I could ever take care of
my family if I went and launch my business. I
can't do that to my children. And yet, if that
were true, that nobody could be a single parent and
start a business that makes millions, if not billions of dollars,
(09:29):
the Lifetime network would never be able to make a
feel good movie again, Like, isn't that emory Lifetime movie
is the true story of somebody who was just gritty
and scrappy and defied the odds and live their dream
and change the trajectory of their family's life. Of course
that's happened. We see these inspirational stories all the time
(09:50):
on talk shows, on Lifetime movies. If it were true
that nobody could ever earn a living as a writer.
Stephen King would be a homeless man right now. Think
of any writer that you love. Tony Morrison never would
have made an impact in the world because nobody would
have ever bought those books and they'd all be starving
and on the street. Yet of course they've done it.
(10:14):
It's just that you have not personally witnessed that and
it is not part of your internal model of reality.
In fact, you probably watched your parents suffer every day
working in a soul sucking nine to five corporate job
where they were tired and grumpy when they came home.
Some people, they're your model of reality as you watched
(10:36):
your parents struggle working two to three jobs and not
being able to make ends meet. And where have you
taken on those patterns in your life? Because from pretty
much the time you come out of the womb, you're
subconscious is learning and making assumptions about what's possible and
not possible, both based on the messages that you got
(10:57):
from your family. Think about what you were told about money.
It doesn't grow on trees. Rich people are a holes
and you know we're noble because we're we're struggling. There's
a lot of that subtle messaging, and even in families
where there's no explicit messages, it was just demonstrated that
life is about sacrifice, that you put yourself on the
(11:20):
back burner and your creative pursuits on the back burner,
and you do the right thing in order to put
food on the table. So the first set of expectations
that we're looking at are just a replication of what
was demonstrated for us. These become subconscious expectations. Now can
(11:40):
you break out of that? Of course you can. There
are some people who were really driven. I think about
Michael Bloomberg, who you know as a multi billionaire and yes,
you know he might be really sketchy with women and
all sorts of other issues that came up during the
two seconds he was running for president. But that was
a man who grew up really poor. His family had
(12:02):
no money, and he was able to rise above it.
For him, he used that is fuel to go generate
a lot of wealth and success in the world. So
your subconscious expectations, you know, they might be the model
of reality that you're struggling with, but you can move
beyond them. And then the second thing that we want
to look at when you're not really owning your desires
(12:25):
for your life and you're living expectations, it becomes your
own expectations. Because once you invest the money and you
go to college, or you get a degree, or you
get locked into one career path, the career in many
instances for people becomes their identity. It becomes a nice, neat,
(12:47):
little one dimensional title that we can put on ourselves. Hey,
I'm Dan Mason. I'm a career in life reinvention coach. Yes,
I am that today, I am a podcast host. I
love what I do today. But one of the things
that's really come up for me over the course of
one now that I'm six years into my business, is
a really burning desire to serve at a higher level.
(13:10):
I know that there's only so many people that I
can impact with a private coaching practice. There's only so
many people. Even as I'm scaling and doing more group programs,
there's a cap on the number of people that I
can serve. So this is why I've invested so much
time this year building a television brand as a TV guest,
because you know, do I want to continue to coach
(13:32):
a small circle of private clients or what I like
to be able to impact millions of people every time
I do a national daytime TV talk show, and part
of the extension of that vision would be find a
way to leverage that into my own television brand, you know,
something sort of like a doctor phil but more personal
(13:53):
development instead of medical. So that's a big thing that
I'm going to be taking some steps toward. But when
your job that you have, particularly the one that you
took out of college and you worked your way up
the ladder at it years old, becomes your identity, there's
no space for evolution and there's no space for growth
(14:15):
because think about it, you wouldn't wear the same clothes
that you were that you wore twenty years ago, not
just because they might not fit, but they probably would
look pretty dopey. They probably would not be in style
if you wore them out. God knows, if I had
the same hair that I did twenty years ago, I'd
be rocking some frosted tips right now and people would
(14:37):
be like, oh, does he still think he's an in
sync from two thousand one? It would not be a
pretty sight, and we would never think about doing that.
We will evolve our look, our fashion, our hair, but
we get so handcuffed to the same career choice. And
this is what we can look at is level two,
(14:58):
which is more of your or conscious identity, and this
is where your ego gets involved and you become very
attached to this notion of success and you know, giving
the appearance of having made it. There are other people
and you might be one of them who get very
attached to the story of lack and struggle. You know,
(15:21):
one of my one on one clients right now, we
just had this huge breakthrough where she's committing to struggle sobriety,
because there were so many patterns of struggle with her
family with finances and stuff growing up, and she realized
that she keeps reverting back to that to sort of
stay connected to fit the expectations of the tribe. So
(15:43):
her subconscious identity about struggle was actually become a conscious identity,
and she's realizing that she can choose again, particularly as
she steps into a higher level of service and starting
her business. But then once you do that work around
your conscious identity, which if you really want to break
through those first two levels that we talked about to
(16:04):
get crystal clear on how your subconscious was programmed in
the first zero to ten months of life and how
that's affecting where you're at today. If you want to
work through that quickly, just hire me. Like this is
exactly the process I take with my clients who have
gone on and reinvented their lives and careers and relationships
(16:26):
and totally transformed their life. But the thing is is,
once we get clear on your purpose and you figure
out a new vision that suits who you are today
and not the person you were ten years ago, or
the person you were in college, or the person that
you had to be growing up, then we're getting into
(16:46):
level three, which is the expectations of other people. This
was a big barrier for me. I had so much
shame and guilt about even explaining to my dad that
I wanted to walk away from the radio industry. And
you know, for perspective on this, my dad's career was
way more successful than mine. He's actually in the National
(17:09):
Radio Hall of Fame. But you know, my dad would
tell me all the time, well, Daniel, where else you
gonna go and make six figures? Those jobs don't just
fall from the trees. And you know what, by the way,
he was right when it comes to corporate America. It's
not like there's a lot of six figure jobs that
you know, you can just easily go grab in corporate America.
(17:31):
I had to actually leave corporate and start making multiple
six figures. So that was, you know, the up level
for me. But there were expectations from my dad, and
many of them were with the best of intentions. You know,
he didn't want to see his son lose everything to
go chase a dream. He wanted me to be comfortable.
(17:53):
He wanted me to be successful. And I know that
he wanted that for me. But tell me, if this
resonates within your family, and maybe you're a parent right now,
who's listening, don't we often want the kids to be
successful because it's a reflection on us, and there's a
little piece of you that likes to brag on the
(18:14):
porch with your neighbors about how well your kids doing,
or what college they got into, or how much your
son or daughter is making out there in the workforce.
And there was an element of that for my family,
particularly at that point, because you know, my brother was
more of a late bloomer. My brother's eight years younger
than me, but you know, he went through some rough times.
(18:36):
He failed out of college twice. There was some d
u I's some bad choices, and God love him, Like,
he's grown so much and he's doing amazing now and
he's got a great paying job doing something that he loves.
And I met an amazing woman and they got married
and they had kids. He's figured it out. But at
the time, Daniel was the successful one in the family.
(18:59):
That was the one they could brag about and sort
of sweep the other stuff under the rug. So there
were some expectations of that. And meanwhile, when I first
started creating this this idea that that there must be
a next vision for my life, I also had a
living girlfriend who then became my fiance and wife, who
(19:20):
would be in my ears all the time telling me, well,
you can't quit that job. We have a lifestyle to maintain.
And because she didn't really work, what she really meant
it was that I had a lifestyle to maintain for
everybody in the family, including her and her daughter. So
there were a lot of expectations and fears about letting
my dad down, about you know, letting my ex wife down,
(19:45):
about just my contemporaries and peers in this career where
I was so successful. Are they going to think that
I'm an idiot if I walked away? But here's the
big thing that I want to talk about today, as
we you know, really digging in to this idea of
living for your desires instead of the expectations. Right, Pleasing
(20:08):
other people is like chasing a moving target. Right, people
will have multiple hopes for you, and the expectations that
your spouse or your parents have might not even be
the same. The expectation that your children have from you
might not align with that. Not even to mention your
(20:30):
social groups and the peer pressure that we feel there.
And when do you start trying to please everyone, you
end up pleasing no one, including yourself. This whole idea
of living up to expectations, and it doesn't matter which
level you're at. Your subconscious expectations are based on a
(20:55):
life and a reality that no longer exists. It's based
on something disappeared twenty years ago that's no longer the
present moment, and your expectations that you have in this moment,
which are about the current you can never help you
become the future you that you want to be in
(21:15):
the future. I once had a therapist who told me
that expectations are premeditated resentments, because frustration is the gap
that exists between what people expect from you and who
you are. And if you want to bridge that gap,
the processes is that we have to re start to
(21:36):
reframe our relationship with people's expectations. Because the downside is this,
and maybe you're already experiencing it in your life when
you are basing your life decisions on getting the love
of other people, that love won't even feel good to
you because at some point you're going to look in
(21:56):
the mirror and be like, all these efforts in my life,
they don't love me for who I really am. They
love me for this avatar that I'm portraying. They're they're
loving me for the character that I portray every day.
So there's not gonna be any lasting joy, satisfaction abundance there.
(22:17):
It's actually going to turn into self loathing because you're
gonna wake up like I did every day for four
or five years, feeling like a paid liar, cash in
the checks, but knowing that you're not really honoring yourself
or making the impact that you're here to make in
this lifetime. And if you're that person, that's living in
(22:40):
the void that I talked about at the beginning of
the podcast. If you just feel like something is missing
and you know that you're ready to fall in love
with your life again, if that's something you want to
create in your life starting today and into two then
we have to have a bigger conversation here about desires
(23:02):
instead of expectations. And what I would love for you
to reflect on is if you could, if you could
have anything you wanted, you knew that you could press
the reset button in your life, which is still be
in the job that you're in today, Would you still
live in the same city that you live in today?
(23:25):
Would you be in the same relationship that you are today?
And those are simple questions in theory, but they're not easy.
And there is part of you. If you feel yourself
activated and anxious even by listening to me ask you
those questions, well good, because now is a good time
to get curious. Where are you not in unlignment? And
(23:50):
that brings me to the second step for you to
fall in love with your life, which is you've got
to connect to your own inner wisdom. You've got to
create some space for you to even intuitively figure out
what it is that you want meditation a great tool
for that. Some people UH find that internal guidance when
(24:14):
they're on a yoga mat. Some people find it when
they're on the treadmill. Some people find it when they're
out on a hike in nature. I don't know what
it is that activates that for you. One of the
biggest ways, particularly when I lived in New York and
I had access to so many museums, a great meditative
place for me to go to sort of connect to
(24:34):
my own wisdom and creativity was to walk through an
art museum. You have to know yourself enough to figure
out what that is, but you have to begin to connect.
It is hard to fall in love with a life
when you're not even connected to your higher self. So
know those ways that you can tune into your guidance,
your intuition. Listen to those whispers within your soul because
(24:58):
guess what, it's always talking to you. And pro tip
on this, it doesn't speak loudly. It's not like the
heavens open up and the angels come down on a
cloud and blow a horn and tell you you know
your next path in life. Intuition whispers, it's those whispers
of the heart. It's that random thing that pops into
(25:18):
your mind when you're folding laundry and says, Hey, wouldn't
it be great if I could move here? Or what
if I could start this business idea, what if I
could invent this product? And it just comes and goes quickly.
Those are the things I'd like you to tune into
this week and start to pay attention because it moves
us to the next step to fall in love with
(25:40):
your life again, which is to take charge of your life,
which means you're not a victim, you're not powerless, you
are not at the mercy of other people's expectations. You
are the decider of your life. And once you take
owner ship, this is really it the fastest way to
(26:03):
fall in love with your life again. Take ownership of
your decisions. Step number three to fall in love with
your life again. This is really big as we talk
about those subconscious expectations that we all have. Start to
question your stories. Every time you find yourself in a
story of well, nobody is going to make a living
(26:24):
doing blank, or I couldn't possibly I couldn't possibly pursue
my dream until my kids are all grown up and
out of the house. Let's start to get clear. Is
that really true? It's almost like the Byron Katie for
questions when she talks about the work. Can you be
sure that that's not true? Where are there examples that
(26:48):
disprove that belief that you have? And another one and
again totally lifting this from Byron Katie. Right now, who
would you be without the belief of lack and limitation?
And the fourth step to fall in love with your
life let other people off the hook. When you remove
(27:11):
your own biases and expectations, you can do the same
for others. So often we want to get people to
bend to our will. You know it slowed me down
so much when I walked away from corporate and I
started this business as I wanted my girlfriend at the
time to be on board. I wanted my dad to
(27:32):
believe in my business so much that it would compensate
for my own lack of belief. But other people can't
believe in your dream or your business idea more than
you do, So stop adding useless pressure onto them and yourself. Right,
Just get back into the joy of living. Chase your joy.
(27:55):
Of course, people are going to have expectations and other
people are gonna have opinions about what doing and what
I've found is that mostly it's just a mirror of
what they believe is possible in their own life, or
in some cases, what they believe isn't possible. We've covered
a lot of ground today. We talked about the three
(28:15):
expectations that will get in your way subconscious expectations, your
conscious expectations which become your identity, and expectations of others,
which is actually the last part of that many of
us believe falsely that it's actually the start at the beginning.
And we also talked about the steps to fall in
(28:37):
love with your life again. Number one, ask yourself if
you could press the reset button today, which is still
be in the same job, the same city, the same home,
the same relationship that you aren't now. Number two, you
have to begin to cultivate that inner guidance, find a
way to connect to your own intuition, and also listen
(29:00):
to the whispers of that intuition. Start to really pay
attention to those little fleeting thoughts in the back of
your head. Number three, Take charge of your life, which
means taking responsibility for your decisions. Number four, we want
to start to question your assumptions, especially any of those
(29:21):
subconscious expectations that tell you nobody can make a living
doing blank or this idea could never work because Blank
start to question those and finally let other people off
the hook. It's not their responsibility to believe in your dream. Really,
(29:44):
at the end of the day, friend, it's about following
your joy. And I would be an idiot and a
liar and a snake oil salesman if I would tell
you that it's some easy thing that you make one
decision and everything comes together magical like a Disney movie. Yeah,
there's gonna be some bumps and some bruises along the way.
(30:06):
But the thing that I've learned on this path is
that you get to have what you want. That you
live in a friendly universe that created you for the
express reason of living your purpose. So why would you
not be supported as you took courageous steps to that endeavor.
(30:27):
And it might not happen overnight, but that's the point
at the end of the day. Falling in love with
your life, reclaiming your passion, reclaiming your soul's purpose. It's
about growing into the kind of person who can have
that kind of freedom. And if you need some help
(30:48):
along the way, it would be an honor to serve you.
That's what all my coaching programs are about. Fastest way
to make the quickest progress is to work with me
one on one. But we've got a brand new group
coaching program coming up. It's going to be a year
long group mentorship program with some amazing, like minded badasses
like you, and it's really gonna be an interesting mix
(31:09):
of people. Some of you know my past clients who
are already doing it, who are out there making it
happen and they're just growing into their next level of abundance,
and maybe somebody like you who has just taken that
first scary step. But who you hang out with is
who you become. I'd love to invite you to join
(31:29):
my community. You can get all the info on my
coaching programs and fill out an application at Creative Soul
Coaching dot net. If the podcast serves you this week,
please screenshot it, upload it to your Instagram stories, tag
me at c SC Dan Mason, and don't forget to
give us a follow here on whatever podcast platform you're
(31:50):
listening to. In the meantime, turn down the volume on
your negativity, Turn up the volume on your purpose, so
you can live life amplified.
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