#169: Inner Transformations For Your Highest Calling With Richard Taubinger

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel. I am feeling very blessed today. I've just— my own little internal voice is going, you said that last time. I find that I say that a lot actually when I think about it. I don't know that every moment of the day I'm feeling blessed, but certainly when I think Interestingly enough, in this moment, how it is that I want to feel and what's the true expression, what's really going on inside of me, I do feel blessed. Any given moment, I may complain, I might get angry, like lose my shit, which happens from time to time, like in an airport or— less and less with that. But asking that question, if I ask that question of myself, which is what I've just done before I hit the record button here, I really do feel blessed. And it's because there's just no getting around the fact that it's good to be alive. Just don't think it's any more complicated than that. And, you know, jokingly, the alternative is not really an alternative that most of us want to consider. And there are— that's saying that there are a lot of people that are in pain that are considering those things and have considered them. And I'll say straight up, I've had my dark days, my dark nights, and times when I just thought, you know, this is just like too much work, or this is too hard, or whatever it is. And I think it's really important that I be reminded of and we all be reminded of just how blessed we are just to truly be alive. And regardless of any challenges or things that might be going on in a particular moment, I feel lucky today as well that I've got a guest on the show that I've already hit it off with, already think is going to be just tremendously valuable to all of you and listening to him and getting to know him better and even maybe being able to extract some wisdom. nuggets, some wisdom, and good things for us to think about. I'll read a little bit of his bio and then we'll dig right in as always and find out, maybe get to some juicy pivot stories in his career and his personal life. Richard Taubinger started Conscious Marketer to serve conscious businesses, entrepreneurs, publishers create and launch products and services on the internet. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago School of Business. and is a chartered financial analyst. Richard has worked in the fields of investment management, venture capital, and higher education. His passion is working in partnership with brands and movements to help people with inner transformation, as well as writing about conscious marketing and business. He lives in Maine, one of my favorite places on the planet, with his family. He travels to work with clients globally. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show today, Richard. Thanks for being with us. Really appreciate your time. Thanks, Adam.

Thanks for having me, Adam. It's a great honor to be with you here talking.

I read your bio. We actually, funny enough, had a little mishap with the bio as we found out just a few moments ago. I had the wrong bio, wrong introduction, but with the right name. So it was one of those, not so much off-camera, but one of those funny moments behind the scenes that maybe we'll share with you guys a little later. Right.

I was ready to trade my life for the other person, but I guess you don't have that option.

No, but what a great exercise actually to write a bio maybe Like some hypothetical bio for your life or some introduction with nothing that's actually something you've already done. Maybe the only rules of the process would be that you're writing your own intro, your own bio, but nothing you've done to this point gets to be included.

That's a huge pivot, right? That would be a conscious pivot to recreate your own personality. It reminds me of the show Imposters or even just the field of acting where you have to step in and be a completely different person than what you are.

Yeah. To riff on that just for a second, Richard, people have imposter syndrome. I mean, I've heard this term used a number of times where folks that are in a pivot of some kind, whether it's they're moving out of one career into another, like I went from being a lawyer, I was a lawyer for 18 years and then all of a sudden I'm a speaker, a trainer, I'm an author. What kind of BS is that, right? Right. It's like it was such a different thing and that whole imposter syndrome where you feel sort of like a fraud. Is a pretty real thing. I mean, I don't know where your career started. I think it might be one of those wonderful things if we can create a trajectory that takes us to today with you. And maybe the lead-in to that will also be the question of where along the way, if any place, did you have imposter syndrome? Did you feel like you're living or trying to live a life that's sort of maybe not exactly your own?

Right.

I don't know if that's ever been relevant for you. First of all, Has that ever been the case?

Yeah. I think different people live different lives, but I feel like I've had like 3 or 4 big pivots. But the last position before I started my own business was almost 16 years ago. So I've been basically self-employed for 16 years running a marketing agency.

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But it was actually for a hedge fund. So I was co-managing a $150 million hedge fund. So to go from a hedge fund into more of a marketing position, that's a pretty big pivot, I would imagine.

You would imagine. Well, you lived it. You would know. Yeah.

I think it's not always easy. I think my experience, and I don't know what yours was, but my experience was the next thing isn't always given to you before you make the decision. It's more, it's like the universe wants you to make the decision first to be all in, and then you have to almost have this gap period or a space has to be created. And then in that in-between space, you can do the work that's required for the next thing to come in. I think we want to have the next thing come in before the old thing ends. And normally that's not what happens, or it hasn't been my case at least. So I was in Asia for 10 years and I was a trader for most of those years. And at the time I loved it, but then I knew I needed to get into something where I wasn't just trading numbers all day and making money, which I became pretty good at. And so for me, I knew I needed to move into something else. So I came back to the US and took a job at Stanford University kind of as an interim position. I remember one of my jobs was placing all of the MBA students in international positions. The funny thing was that a lot of the students were trying to get the job I had just left. I remember going through almost thousands of job positions and thinking— feeling a little bit like a lost soul. I was like, well, what's my thing? I was happy to be of service to the students, but I also knew that probably wasn't an endgame for me. There was more that I could do for the world. And I remember getting real quiet one day and I heard kind of that inner voice say, you care about inner transformation. And I was seeing jobs like save the rainforest or go work at McKinsey. What I really cared about was helping individuals go inside, know who they were, find their true purpose, and then bring that into the world. Because I think when I was in my 20s and 30s, I was like, you have to create a big movement and you have to reach millions of people. But if you think about somebody like Gandhi or Martin Luther or any great person, it comes from a single individual. And so I realized at that time that one of the pathways to that was to help authors and transformational teachers, spiritual teachers to just reach more people. So that's when I knew I needed to kind of move forward with starting an agency, helping, doing some consulting work, bringing a lot of the experience I had into that world.

So creating something of a ripple effect, or as Bucky Fuller used to call it, the procession. That was more your inclination than to be the leader of a movement. Is that sort of what I—

And also kind of change from the inside out. So trying to push transformation onto people generally doesn't work for anything really, or trying to push sales. But if you can change how somebody experiences the world through meditation or through movement exercise or through whatever it is, then they become a different person. And then that changes everything around there, especially if it's somebody who's leading a company or running a family or teaching students. I mean, it's like versus like a technique or reading a book, but it has to be— it's like what actually creates the inner transformation. So that became the question.

Right. Great question. I mean, You and I, I think in many ways, very simpatico because I went from something like the practice of law and in particular litigation, a little subset of the overall space of legal work that's possible and that's very adversarial and very much about certain types of outcomes and then to move into the work I was doing is so different, maybe even antithetical to it. Right. You were involved in something in Asia. the finance space and the work that you ended up doing, very, very different. So what was it like for you to have those— make that decision? As you said, there are kind of— when you think about a pivot of that magnitude, A, it doesn't typically happen overnight. And there's sort of 2 ways I look at that. It's either sort of pivot by design or pivot by disruption. My book Pivot was all about, can you actually design a pivot? Right. And I had, and I had a theory about I knew what had worked for me and that was what I was sharing and theoretically, it could work for other people. And now it's not anecdotal. Now we know from lots of other people that have written to us and all that kind of stuff that we just know it does work. It has a place. But it's not the only pivot. The pivot you're describing is much more of a pivot by disruption, which can happen in a variety of ways. You can get fired from a job, your business can go bad, somebody can die. There's so many things that can disrupt your status quo, then you're in a position where, okay, so the floor has literally like been pulled out from under me. I'm going to do something about it. And as you said, in that moment or in that situation, there's not necessarily a plan in place to start executing on. You're literally creating the bridge as you're walking over it.

Right. I guess the consulting, they call it like building the plane on the runway kind of thing.

What was that like for you? Because you're, if I'm going to be bold enough to say this in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way, but you kind of, you were cut from a bit of more of the anal-retentive cloth, right? You're more of a left-brain guy by your training, by what you had done in school, what you'd studied, and what you ended up being in career. And yet the kind of change you made and the place you went to find the guidance to make that change, because you weren't fired or anything. You consciously elected to transition out of your position, which is a different— so was there an internal conflict there for you between the training and the way you'd been approaching life and career to that point and this other work that you felt inspired to do?

The fund I worked for was a global macro fund, the last fund. And then before that, I was actually a floor trader. So I started in Chicago and was one of the guys in the pits before Everything went electronic and then I became a pretty good electronic trader. You know,

the guys screaming with the cards and all that kind of stuff?

Yeah. And in futures markets, so it was pretty high risk and high stress. But if you know anything about trading, it's a real internal game and you have to actually be very mindful or have the awareness of what's going on and train yourself to find edge and to not get emotional and actually to go against— human nature would be to cut your winners and hold losses, and you have to actually go against that. Trading for me, I would trade during the day and read meditation and all kinds of books, especially being in the East. What I wanted to say is sometimes you don't know why you're put into positions, but then when you look back at the things you've done in your life, you can see that there's a thread between everything, and I call that a soul thread. You just know you're there and you're meant to do it at the time. So at the time, I was enjoying trading. I didn't know why I was Oh, I chose to be in Asia trading, but when I came back, I was looking for the next— pick up the thread somewhere. And I just knew that that was the next step. Now, that was like 15 years ago. Now, what's interesting is one of my clients now runs an algorithmic hedge fund, which is a big fund. And one of the unique features of his fund is he requires every investor to give 10% of all the winnings to a good cause or charity. And it's the only hedge fund that I know that has A

tithing requirement

baked into it.

Yeah.

It's built into the fund, but this is like— I mean, and his premise is, if I can double your money, and we're talking tens of millions of dollars here, and you're not willing to give away 10% of your capital to make the world a better place, then I don't want you in the fund. So I'm one of the few marketing agencies that actually understand his business, but also understand how to market in a different kind of way. So I wouldn't have thought that that would kind of come back around, but it has in my business 15 years later. So it's kind of interesting. It's just part of the soul thread. So

I guess what you're saying is that there wasn't so much attention inside. I'm thinking of some of the people that are listening to this, watching this, that are having— that have had those urges to leave what they're doing, or that they've had those moments where they— clarity, or looking in the mirror where they go, you know, what I'm doing sucks, or my heart's not in it. I mean, I'm just being dramatic because That was my conversation. I was like, I'm doing this. At a certain point, I was able to be so transparent with myself that I said, I'm basically doing this for the money. I mean, it's basically it. I've got 4 kids and Randy and I, my wife and I, we have a life and I'm just not going to put all that at risk and I'm not going to jump ship. I mean, that's just crazy for me. Yeah. But I also realized this is probably killing me. On some level, it's certainly depleting me of something really valuable. That I wouldn't have called it my soul at the time, but now that's sort of what it was. It was a soul-sucking siege, as I think Tom Cruise said in Jerry Maguire. And

that

was the daily experience of doing work that's just not—

Yeah, I mean, I think there's all kinds of wake-up calls, and it could be trauma or an illness, could be a death, could be a birth, a divorce, or it could be your own choice. And so however, as it comes about for me, I'll share just 2 thoughts that helped me along the path so that they might help the reader. When we came back, we ended up in Hawaii and we lived in Hawaii for 5 years because as a digital marketer, I can kind of work from anywhere. So I was like, let's birth our children in Hawaii and let's go live in Maui. That sounds like a good thing. So we did that for 5 years. And one of the teachers that I helped out there wrote a book called Spirit Walker. But one of the concepts that the Hawaiians have is a concept called kuleana. Kuleana. And aina means land, but kuleana, the derivation of that word is what's yours to do. And so you don't know why, but you know that it's part of your path. It's part of what you're meant to do. It's called kuleana. Sometimes when I'm at a major point, I'll go, is this my kuleana? And it can be as simple as giving some money or serving on a board somewhere or adopting a child. And you don't know why you're meant to do it, but you just know inwardly, that you're meant to do it. Now, to have that insight, you have to quiet the mind and listen to your higher guidance. And you have to do that however you want to do that, whether you do it through sports or running, meditation. There's all different kinds of ways, but it doesn't normally come from the mind. It comes from something that drops in the mind. It's a whisper. If you study enough great creators, great authors, you'll find that they say things like, you know, I heard this inner calling, or I heard this voice, or I just had this sudden insight or I had this vision. It comes from outside their thinking mind. And so the search for your own personal kuleana in life moment to moment, I think is really important. So that's one thing. The second thing I'd say is, and I learned this from an author named Stuart Wilde, you may know him. His prayer used to be like, show me how I can be of highest service. And I try to ask that as many times as I can because before you go on stage, I know you've helped people do that, or before you interact with a client or before I got onto this podcast, my question was, how can I be of service to the people that listen to this podcast? And I think if you run your life from a place of service, from servant leadership or whatever you want to call it, then it's kind of hard to go wrong because it takes out, again, that mental chatter of— you talked about imposter syndrome. For me, the number one thing to do to get out of imposter syndrome and just go, how can I be of service? Because then it's not about you anymore. And if there's somebody out there that needs your help or it's your moral obligation, it's a choice, but you can help them. And if you want to withhold that, then that's not the right thing to do. So for me, it's like find the kuliana and then keep listening to that to be of highest service in whatever shows up.

I so respect the idea that you're looking— a question like, what's mine to do? What's my work to do? Or what's my service? It changes your perspective immediately. I mean, we started this show by asking— Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free real Resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. My internal question was, how do I feel? How do I feel in this moment?

Right.

And that led me to also want to explore and even express how I want to feel. How do I want to feel in this moment? I want to feel grateful in this moment. It's the same thing with service. How do I want to show up in the world? I want to show up in service. I want to show up in a way that helps other people. And you're right. That makes it very much about others and not about yourself. We share sometimes with public speaking training a phrase that loosely translates into, it's not about me. Om Namaha. It's not about me. If it's about me, it puts us in that default mode network of the brain where we're just looking at where can we remain safe, how do we stay safe, and even how the layers, the textures of that are Many times about how do I look good? What will people think of me and all that? And that takes us way out of our hearts and puts us very much in our heads. So I appreciate the way you led us down that road. So you're not one of those people that had a sort of fetal, get in the fetal position moment? You know, I can't believe this is happening.

Well, my pivot away from Asia was I did go through a divorce. So I was definitely leaving something, but it wasn't because of financial ruin or anything like that. I had some events happen, but I also knew that I wanted to be of greater service in the world. And I knew that walking into— even turning on a computer to look at a trading screen almost made me physically ill.

Yeah.

And so I knew I just couldn't do it anymore. I remember one of the last times I walked in to trade, I literally walked in and I almost threw up. Like my body was like, my body wasn't able to do it and I knew it. And like you said it earlier, I almost knew that if I tried to override that, I would lose a part of myself and potentially die because it was just so not what I was meant to do. I was off my soul thread. I was off track, you know, and I needed to get back on with what my kuleana was in life, which is more about service, more about changing consciousness and helping people. And it's hard to do that in front of just a trading screen. It's like, I mean, you can make some money and then you can employ that money elsewhere. But at that point, that wasn't my path. So for some people, that is their path, which is okay.

And it's a season. I mean, we see the season come and go in our lives all the time. I mean, physically around us, nature is constantly reflecting back the greater truth of our existence anyway, or at least the nature of the universe literally. So you can't hang on to summer. You can't hang on to spring or winter if you're a winter person. You can't hang on to any of those things. They're all Impermanent. So it really is not necessarily even a mourning. I mourned a bit when I closed my law practice. That was my— was one of those moments for me. I remember my office had been cleared out, the Jersey office. I'd already moved out of Manhattan, and we had a shred-it truck sit outside my office for like 3 days. Right. It was so much that I, you know, over 18 years, and I only was required to hold on to like 7 years of documents by law or whatever. So Everything else was getting shredded. It took days and days to do it. And I remember being in that office with no furniture and just everything cleared out and something came over me. I got down on the ground. I literally was just writhing in pain and also tears flowing and all the rest of it. But it was a pretty good messy moment because it was a passing. It was a passing of a season. I still feel this. I was like this when I was a kid, man. When the summer was over, I would be depressed for a while. When I was an adult and we would go to this beautiful island that we love to take the kids to and we'd be there for a couple of weeks and then later on for the better part of a month and we'd come back and I would mourn the passing of that. Sort of, this was one of those, I guess, tendencies I had to look at a time. But the fact is, it's perfectly— it's just part of the whole process, right? As you said, it's tough to know while we're going through something what it means. It's almost impossible. Right. Martin Luther King, used to use that analogy of walking up a dark staircase.

Yeah.

And there's just no way to know that the stairs are all going to be sequenced in the right order and everything's going to lead you to the top of that staircase so that when at some point you look back down, as you do at any moment in your life, you look back, it's like everything seems to be just so perfectly aligned to get you right where you are, right? I mean, so here you are, you're no longer trading, and you followed this guidance When you're lucky enough to have a physical reaction the way you did that doesn't turn into a diagnosis, because sometimes we wait too long, we don't hear the whispers, as I've often heard, then some greater method of getting your attention sometimes shows up. But you followed that guidance and it leads you into something very new and different. I would say that you throughout that process were quite resilient. What's your thoughts on resilience? How would you define resilience and where has that been valuable to you?

Yeah. It's interesting because I started digital marketing probably 2005. And so those were pretty early days. There aren't many dinosaurs like me left. And we have 8 values of my company. And recently I added adaptability, which kind of goes back into what you were saying before. And so I think adaptability would be the word I would choose. And you can look at those 2 words together, but how do you be resilient? Well, you can be resilient by being adaptable to whatever's happening around you and being almost immune to it. And so that if something happens, you can change. And that's the essence of a pivot is adaptability, right?

We call it pivotability. It's so funny you say that.

Right. So adaptability, what you have to realize is that your amygdala and your brain, everything's wired to keep you safe. And your whole nervous system is wired to keep you out of danger and to avoid failure. So that's one side. And then if you look at the other side of that, which is the accelerated way to grow is to have massive failures or to have learning experiences and to have a lot of change. And so your physical system and your energetic system is completely wired to grow the most in life. And so for me, and I think it's still a process that's involved today, but it's embracing adaptability and reframing everything that happens as the most fantastic opportunity to grow and to learn quickly. Not that I want to strive for failure per se, although in something like maybe working out with my body, I have a trainer every day, like maybe that's what I need to do.

Yes.

But in business, it's taking some big swings and trying new things, but then very quickly learning and going to the next level because most people will either never take the risk or they'll take the risk and get hammered clobbered and then give up and say, oh, this doesn't work. Or they'll take the risk, but then shrink inwardly, collapse. And I think it's the true warriors, whether it's a spiritual warrior, business, whatever kind of warrior or warress, it's they view everything and they train themselves to embrace the resilience, adaptability. And I shared just a few stories. '07, '08, I remember my wife turn to me and go— and we were having a hard time because I was helping poor spiritual teachers at the time, which is not a good market segment to help.

Not if you want them to be paying clients.

Right. And we were living in Mill Valley in California, pretty high expensive place back then. Actually, it seems affordable now, but back then it seemed it was high. And we had our first child who was like 1, and she's like, will you go back to trading? And literally out of my mouth came, if I go back to trading, I'll die. I literally said that. I don't say that kind of— like, I'm really careful with my language. I normally don't say that, but it just came out and like, that's what it felt like in my body. So I had the resilience to go through. And then if you've followed the digital space in '07, '08, there was no social media. We were recording on tape and then converting to digital. There was no like one-click membership site. Facebook had just come out. In fact, Gmail only came out in '07, '08. So it's only like— 12 years. It's only until 2012 that you could put ads on Facebook. And if you look at how fast the online world has developed, if you haven't been adaptable and quick, you've either missed the opportunities or you've given up because it's not the easiest game to play. That being said, there's more opportunity than ever before. You

can't, you can't win a race you don't finish. And so being able to go the distance, when we talk about resilience, Very similar philosophy and sort of elements of it that you just described, this idea of how do you reframe? Because every situation, there's a possibility of a more mindful way of looking at it, or at least responding from a place of mindfulness. That reframe is so key. And then you're going to recalibrate. I mean, there's an opportunity there to not only revision or recalculate like you would with a GPS.

Right.

But some of those adjustments, they're a little micro. They're just micro changes in your trajectory, but you have to be in the game long enough and learn from a humble place to be able to make those adjustments, to be able to at some point figure out what does work.

Right.

You're not around long enough, you can't figure out what does work unless you're just lucky enough to snag the beast on the first go, you know, and that's just not usually going to be the case. The odds are way out of favor for something like that. So that's why we talk about resilience, because in this community— I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses that there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com. In lots of entrepreneurial communities, the tendency of people to just become despondent or to just not have any gunpowder left, you know, to lose, just not have any money, no resources, be under-resourced financially and emotionally in so many ways, it just leads them to just go to quit or break or become really depressed. You know, sad from it. That doesn't have to be the case, and yet it's pretty prevalent too. So let me ask you just to plus or add another layer to resilience. So you got a resilience recipe, you recognize how important it's been in your own development. What's one ritual? And this may be sort of the last question we'll have time for, but what's one ritual that is part of your daily routine that helps you to be— to maintain resilience or create resilience?

Oh, to create resilience? That's a great question. For me, a lot of resiliency is just really being focused on what I'm best at in the world, coming into each day with my 3 things that I know I need to do to go to the next level. I think it's easy to get outside your lane. It's not so much a ritual, but I think there's useful pain and then there's unnecessary pain. And so unnecessary pain is me trying to do the tech side of my business, trying to do it all or trying to save money there. So for me, it's being resilient in the areas that I want to be best in the world at. And so that's my focus areas. So I'm really a great strategist. I'm incredible with copy, spending time with clients. Those are really good uses of my time. Project management, I prefer to outsource that. Tech, outsource. There's a lot of areas And so it's surrounding myself with people that support my strengths and making sure that the things I'm working on every day are making me better at the things I'm best at. And then a side note to that is I pay a lot of money every year for mentors and for people to help me out. And if somebody else has solved the problem before me or somebody else can give me the advice to take the right path, so I know you do a lot of mentoring and masterminds and things like that. And so 10x strategies to get in groups of people that can see the things that you can't see, those kinds of meetings, environments, they prevent the unuseful pain of— because you don't have to do it wrong the first time, you can do it right. The useful pain is you launch and maybe the market turns and you have to try again, or the useful pain is learning something that'll help you in the next launch. But unuseful pain is taking a strategy that maybe wasn't the best strategy to start with, and you could have hired somebody to mentor with that could have helped you create a better strategy so you have better success.

Couldn't agree. Richard, you said so many things there that I wish we had the time to dig into more of them. I'll just say that this— the contrast between unnecessary pain and what is actually necessary for our growth and development, what a great principle for people to think about. Because I do believe that suffering, in many ways, suffering is optional. And it's something people are addicted to, struggle. People are—

Right.

Struggle in so many ways. And I look at where am I struggling unnecessarily? Where am I experiencing unnecessary pain? That's a great inquiry. And of course, knowing that you can't say that all pain is a bad thing because we, as we said at the very beginning, part of our growth, this is one of those little fine lines that make life such a wonderful paradox is that there is an element of pain that's very much in our favor that does help us to grow. And so that's an independent exploration and something I highly recommend everybody's listening or watching this to kind of consider that. Where is that line in the sand for you between those 2 things? And lastly, with regard to mentorship and masterminds and things like that, I'm a part of some of those groups as well as the fact that I do mentor people. I'm also mentored and to be mentorable is a big deal.

Yeah.

I think one of the greatest values of it is just that you see things, to be in the seat, so to speak, and literally as well, to be a student, to be able to see things with apprentice eyes or beginner's eyes, super powerful. I mean, so highly, highly, highly recommend that if you've not yet or recently anyway gotten yourself committed to a book Or looked at hiring a coach or a mentor or get into a program that you've always wanted to. Maybe it's a mindfulness program. I've just finished reading a book that was out several years ago. I'm not always sort of following trends that way, but when it crossed my path, I was like, yeah, I'm going to dig my teeth into this book, 10% Happier. Dan Harris wrote this great book about mindfulness and really interesting stuff. I have so enjoyed our conversation. Very happy that we got to.

We have so much to talk about. I'm sorry it's so short. And we probably could have taken any one of the things we talked about and done an entire episode on it, Adam, right?

So true, which is teeing up maybe the next opportunity we get to continue, I'm sure.

Okay.

Folks would love that. Our comments are always really helpful. So this is me talking directly to our community. Please leave the comments that you've got questions that you might have for Richard or myself. And let's look forward to a part 2 of this conversation because we can, as you just said, Richard, go down so many beautiful paths. I will remind everybody, as reminding myself in this moment, that gratitude is— it's like a miracle drug. It's better than a miracle drug. It is truly the most instantaneous self-help I've encountered yet.

Right.

Doing this work for a long time, work with a lot of people, and it is, you know, there's a lot of shiny pennies and promises that industry-wide are made to folks to change their lives for the better. And this is as simplistic, I suppose, as it gets, but it also just never fails to work. So I'm grateful in this moment for you, Richard. I'm grateful to be here with all of our community. And we'll think about tomorrow morning because if you're here right now, as you are listening, watching, you know for sure when you went to bed last night that it was not a guarantee you'd wake up, that you'd have this particular day And I am optimistic and also prayerful that we will, all of us, get to wake up again tomorrow. And for sure, when you're doing that, when you're taking that first conscious breath of the day, you can be aware that there are people all over this globe that will be taking their very last breath in that moment. And so that makes that moment not just an ordinary moment if you're framing it, if you're looking at it through that lens. And for no other reason, you can be grateful right then and there. And if you're inclined to also put some words to it, it's like the beginning of the day, the ritual to start your day is fundamentally, I think, the most important thing you can do. How you begin the day is in all likelihood the trajectory you're going to be on until something happens where you pivot and change that trajectory. So why not start out? This is my question to all of us. Why not start out with the best possible outcome right out of the gate? And so for me, that's 4 words. It could be something else that you say to yourself, some other statement, some other mantra. I know a wonderful woman, Judy Whitcraft, she loves to start her day by asking this question: I wonder what miracles are coming today? That's her question. I wonder what miracles are coming today? I'll ask you, Richard, do you have a question or a statement that you start the day with?

I say sometimes, how can I be of highest service today? And I just listen right after that to know what's the most important thing I can do That day, and sometimes it's an unexpected answer. Yeah, so it's just a variation of that question that I said before.

Kuleana. Yeah, beautiful. So that's your question. I know with Dr. Michael Beckwith, he likes to ask, what's my assignment? That's his question, or at least it was when I interviewed him a while ago. My question is, or it's not even a question, it's a statement. I love my life.

Nice.

No comma, no matter what. No matter what, I love my life. So with that, we will say ciao for now, everybody. This has been Just a wonderful time, a blessing. So have a fan-flippin'-tastic rest of your day, evening, wherever we're finding you now. Ciao.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot, If you want to consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.