Masterpiece in The Making - Who You're Becoming

Most people spend their entire life stressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want or what's important to them. See, I'm here to cut through all that noise, connecting you to yourself and the life that you were meant to live. I used to slave away at a corporate job that I hated, but I broke through the social norms and pursued my passion. As a result, I own my own coffee company. I'm Espresso Sommelier, and I get to travel the world. You, too, can live a life that you love, but it starts with getting clear about what you want. It starts with a new decision. I'm your host, Donnie Rouse. You are listening to the podcast One Life. Masterpiece in the making. We are all masterpieces in the making. We are all blocks of perfect marble being sculpted into something spectacular. So many people, including myself, truly, we go through life and we have all these pain moments, and we get caught up in that present moment. Pain that we fail to realize that what's really happening there is we're being sculpted. Sometimes the sculpting happens by choice. Other times it is not by choice. And the times where it's not by choice, those could seem like they are the most painful times. Those can seem like they're the times where we are just kind of fluttering in the wind, a leaf just floating, unsure where we are going to land or what's going to happen, if we're going to be taken away somewhere else. But I want you to know that regardless of if it's chosen or unchosen, that you are being guided and you are being sculpted. So if you adopt the mindset that, well, you know what, this is happening for a reason. This is making me into something better. It makes the journey much more enjoyable, at least eases the journey a little bit. But it's hard sometimes to get that perspective. There's a quote by Rumi that says something along the lines of, he who cannot take a good rub. How will you ever to expect to become a polished mirror or a polished gem or something like that? And it focused. I think it was the. In this quote, he was using the term as a mirror. So if you think of a mirror that's been dusty and tarnished, in order to get that mirror clean, you got to take a rag and literally, you have to buff it out. And that buffing is abrasive in a way. Right. If you think of anything in life, like, think of a gemstone before. Actually, I'll give you a different example. Headlight. Think of a headlight. So I am on my car, I'm doing some. Some work on my car. And one of my headlights has gotten oxidized because the layer over the headlamp has lost its. This protective layer on it. So it looks cloudy. So I was looking online at videos. I'm like, well, how do I fix this? Do I have to replace the headlamp? That's probably gonna cost me 500 bucks. And when I was looking online for ad instructional videos, people would give, you know, they would show you how to literally fix the lamp. They say, listen, you start with a grit of 600 sandpaper, you buff it out, and then you literally keep going to finer and finer sandpaper until you're at something like 2000. And when you're at 2000 grit sandpaper, all of a sudden when you're buffing it out, it's clear. But isn't that true of life? Isn't that true of being polished? Right, you're rough, rough, rough, rough, rough. But it takes that constant rubbing, that abrasion to sculpt us into this something crystal clear, like the headlamp. So that was not the example I want to give, but I want you to think of areas in your life right now. Think of maybe you're in a moment right now where you're struggling with something and you can't see. You can't see. I can't remember the forest beyond the trees or whatever the heck, whatever that quote is, but you can't see a way out of it. I want you to sit here and ask yourself, let's ask ourselves a few questions right now. Where are you struggling in life and what emotions have you been feeling? How have you been looking at this situation? What things have you been telling yourself about it? Ultimately, what I'm getting here is that what is the story you've been telling yourself? Like, oh, I'm never going to get out of it. Oh, life sucks. It's a struggle. But then we're going to. Let's flip the script. If you had a look at it from a different viewpoint, how is this shaping you for the better? Different question. And who will you become as a result of overcoming this? As I mentioned before, a lot of time we cannot see who we're becoming, right? The sculptor, the master sculptor, the universe, God, source, whatever you want to call it, we have, I do believe that every single one of us has a calling. We have a purpose, something that we were all brought here to be, do, experience. Sometimes that calling isn't really apparent to us. It's a Little unknown. We might have, like, the gist, but it's not crystal clear. And it requires another layer, just like the headlamp to be buffed out. So looking at it from a different viewpoint, like, who are you becoming as a result of this? The example, the reason I brought this up, because I was thinking about. I mean, my weightlifting competition was one thing, and that was one where I had choice, right? Every day I would go to the gym, and it was painful. It was really painful because I literally had to push my body past exhaustion to try to break apart the muscle. And there were times when I didn't feel like doing anything. I didn't want to go to the gym. I didn't want to eat the six meals because I felt like I was literally the food was going to come out my esophagus, or it's like, I'd rather sleep, but I have to do meal prep. All these things. But I had a reason. I was so focused on the reason that it pulled me through. And I think I mentioned on other podcasts that I didn't miss a single meal. I think there was one meal where I cheated out of six months. But I had that purpose. I knew exactly what I was going for, and that's what pulled me through. But how about the times where I didn't know or I felt confused and lost? Most recently, I've been in my coffee company. I've been trying to figure out, well, how do I scale this? How do I get past me just doing all the work? Because I can't grow a business if it's just me. Plus, I want to be out in the world. I want to experience it. I want to bring you inspiration and focus my energies on those things that. Because that's what really brings me joy. But how do I get there? So I was talking to all these different co packers, process authorities, and literally, I felt like sometimes I was literally running in a circle. Like, I could speak to seven different process authorities. Every freaking one of them would give me some different answer. I'm like, well, how could this be? How could it be? And then calling different co packers, trying to find someone who could keep my process, the integrity of my process, and realizing that it was challenging in the sense that there were a lot of these puzzle pieces that literally needed to be fixed together. And no one person really had that configuration for me to make that complete puzzle. But what happened as a result of doing all this, all this research? I've been doing a lot of product development, and I have one friend, my Friend Lynn, who always picks up the phone when I call her. And she always lets me, like, you know, vent some of the stuff. She works in food as well. She makes the jams that she makes my espresso jam. She takes my espresso, she reduces it down, and she makes a spreadable espresso. So if you love espresso and you like it on your toast or cream cheese, try that Coyote Kitchen. And I was talking, just sharing some of my frustrations with her. And she's one. She would reflect it back to me, say, well, that's great. She's like, you're learning. You're figuring out what the next steps are, and you're gathering information. And when she said that, I was like, well, yeah, it makes so much sense. I really do know many of the aspects of coffee, right? The roasting, the barista, the sensory side, all these things. The one area that really does elude me is the rtd. Making beverages for more of a commercial scale. I never thought about that. And now I'm having this experience of building this and the contacts I made. I have a Rolodex now of people all around the country, even in some cases in the world, to be able to curate and create products. I wouldn't have had that before, and I couldn't see it before anti. It's now. Having literally been going through this for like the last probably like three months at least, and it has not been an easy three months. I've literally felt every swing of that hammer chipping away those pieces of marble because I've been resisting in my mind, I'm like, no, no, this is how it has to be. This is how it must be. And all of a sudden something else will shatter. Like a piece of marble will shatter off me and realize that, you know what? I have to take a new approach. But all these things, like, feeling like I've been going in a circle has really given me more detail, more specificity as to how I need to move forward with my espresso. Had I not taken that journey, had I not literally made all these different contacts, and I wouldn't have the understanding that I do now, I wouldn't have the experience I do now. Like, I understand more about the process, the brewing process, the being shelf state. I mean, there's so much stuff that I can't even go into it. I can't pretend to go into it here, and I can't even pretend to really pull it out. It's all, like, in my head because there was so much Stuff coming in. But in hindsight, I'm very grateful now because now I see what the journey was for. Now I see a way, like a way out. Because my intention from the beginning of the year is I want to create this business. I want to be able to. But I also want my business to feed my lifestyle, to give me the freedom. Now, there's a way to do that. And I've been resisting it the entire time, right? I know what I want, but I've been resisting it. But in all these steps moving forward and all these small steps I'm taking, they're all adding up, they're all compounding to give me that result that I want, give me the freedom to travel, to give me the abundance that I want, to give me the time to be. I'm here with you to share inspiration, to give my opinion, my view on life. So if it resonates with you, you can choose to follow your heart. Who doesn't that resonate with? But it's so all these things looking back, I referenced the quote a million times, like the Steve Jobs quote. You could only connect the dots. You can't connect the dots looking forward. You could only connect them looking back. Everything has been lining up. And that's really the point of this podcast here, right? Because I might have said it a thousand times, but you can never hear it enough. Because knowing that you're guided and trusting the journey is the first step to really living that journey. Because all of a sudden now when you're resisting, you can't see anything. When you're resisting the path, when you surrender, all of a sudden, now things just flow through. It's almost like having a shell, right? You can't cook an egg. You can't enjoy the egg if you keep it in the shell, right? You put it in the frying pan, it's not going to work. You can boil it, but when you crack that shell open, that's when you get that delicious runny yolk. If you like eggs, if you don't, then I don't know what else to give you. Let go of the resistance, see who you're becoming as a result of it, and embrace the journey. So I'm gonna go back to those questions again. So where have you been struggling in life and what are the motion that you've been feeling? Give you an example from where I was, I was feeling with, you know, figuring out my brewing process and how to scale, I was feeling extremely stressed, confused, like I wasn't making any progress. Next question. If you had to look at it from a different viewpoint. How is this shaping you for the better? When I looked at that, I realized that I was actually, it was making me understand my beverage even more. Like where I thought I knew how to make cold Roman. All this stuff I thought I knew. I mean, I created it, so I do know. But I got even more granular and I understand more now than I ever have in terms of the entire scaling process and how to bring my product to millions of people. Next question. Who will you become as a result? I will become the worldwide Coffee authority. I am a coffee authority, but I'm going to be even more of a coffee authority now. I am going to be a source of inspiration. It's going to give me by mastering this, it'll allow me to scale my business to bring on more people, which will in turn give me the freedom to do more of the things that I want to do. Mainly come on here. Inspire you. Closing thought. You have to see where you're being pulled, what you're getting because of this, because of what you're experiencing. You got to see how you're being shaped. And if you can't see how you're being shaped, just trust. Trust that it is happening for you. That is all I've got for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please subscribe. If you have any questions or comments, you can send them to me via email @ww. I'm not via email, sorry. You check the website at www.donnyrouse.com again. Www.dot O n n y r a u s dot com. Thank you so, so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope that it gave you a little bit of just peace on your own journey and maybe a little bit of surrender and gave you a greater vision to see who you're becoming. Trust the process you are being guided. Trust that and then everything else is going to take care of itself. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. God bless you. You get one life. Live it. Thank you so much.