Ep. 38- How You Show Up Determines Who Shows Up For You

So everybody sitting in this room today can look back upon their life and probably point out things that were the most challenging to them. But my big question is, if you look back at those challenging experiences, can you also see where the guide, the path, and purpose might have opened up to you if you take the time to actually reflect on a much deeper level? So there's a very famous teacher teaching in the book of Ethics of Our Fathers, which is a biblical text, that says, "Appoint yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a friend." And as we go through our journeys, each in our lives, those are the things that we're trying to accomplish, trying to pick up, trying to figure out how we can do that for others. But a lot of times people get stuck in their own story and they create a narrative where they're more in a place of negativity, or a place of limitation, a place of lack, than they are in a place of expansive, wow, look what turned out for me. So my own story started off going through growing up in South Florida, but I remember in 10th grade I switched from public school to private school, and I was asked to join this medical magnet program that was in Liberty City, Florida, which wasn't known for people who look like me. In fact, it was one of the top football high school school programs in the country, and many professional NFL players came out of that school. So yeah, I thought that was gonna be pretty cool. So I ended up going, and within a month, hanging out after school and waiting for the bus, and all of a sudden this guy comes to me and goes, "Hey, you want to buy a gun?" And I thought it was one of my, one of my boys that I became friends with, and I'm like, "I'm good." And the next thing I know, I have this thing At the side of the head. Guy makes another comment and says, "Well, what happens if someone comes up to you and then puts a gun to your head, starts laughing, takes it away, walks off?" So I'm trying to process this. Nothing major hit me at that moment. Go home, a day or two later, I think it was either a Thursday or Friday, I'm then playing tennis with a friend over the weekend, and literally in the middle of the match, I just collapse on the court. I'm like, "Oh my God, I had a gun put to my head." 3 days later, I switched to a private school, Jewish private school in South Florida, and I had to recreate this whole identity, this whole community, this whole new circle, this whole new— I thought I was going this direction, now I'm over here. And as that time evolved over those first weeks, I'm like, "Wait, I don't think that was a gun. And was that one of the guys on my bus?" And it turns out that what I realized after a week or two was actually a broken-off umbrella handle that he did and he put up against me. So right there in that moment, I realized how our negativity, how our fight-or-flight response can start creating a story that keeps us stuck. So around that time, there was a lot of things going on in my life. My parents were going through a divorce. It was— the entire community was involved. Lots of fighting. Much later, as I'm sitting with I bring a client to my therapy office and they're retelling that story, I'm like, "That's my story. I didn't know that I grew up around domestic violence." Because, you know, that doesn't happen to people who come from a certain background in a certain community. And it hit me like, "Wow, there's been all these things that my journey has had that I could have been stuck in a specific story and have told that over and over again in Arabic to them." So at this school, I met a new group of friends. And in my 11th grade year, all of a sudden I get invited by these— the two cool kids in my class. One was my class, one was a year— like, we're going surfing tomorrow. Awesome. Stay home from school, we'll call you in the morning. One lived around the corner from me. We'll pick you up. Okay. Somehow found a way to skip school. I don't know how my parents let me do that, but at that time I was always kind of missing school. I think I missed school on average at least 5 or 6 times a month due to all the stress that I was going through. And I'm waiting for the call, and I'm waiting for the call, and I'm waiting for the call. Nothing. Call them, no answer, nothing. 2 o'clock or so comes by, and I get a call, but it's not one of the two guys that were cousins. It was another friend of ours who said, "Turn on the news." And at that moment, I turned on the news and said, "High school boy that Jason Wasser dies drowning while surfing in Hollywood Beach. No. So my mind goes a million miles a minute. One, the trauma of it, and I start calling all my other friends, and right, we end up meeting up at a friend's house, and we're all there, and the next couple weeks were just chaos. We were in 10th grade. Who has a friend die in 10th grade, much less like in a crazy traumatic accident like that? And then I'm thinking more and more, why didn't they call me? Why did that happen? What would have happened if I actually— if they did call me, they did pick me up, would that have been me? I never went surfing before. That's one of the reasons why I was so excited. They're going to teach me how to surf. And this experience happened, and I started questioning a lot. What's this purpose? Where do I fit in? Why am I here? How did I get from this school to this school? And then evolved more as I was going through this. I was really involved in my high school. Still youth group. And again, same stuff going on at home around that time. And I couldn't afford to attend all these events. And out of the blue, the relationship that I had with the person who was running the program, the youth director, Joel, was like, "We got you. Just show up and we'll take care of you. Just participate in however you can participate and we got you." And that person became a lifelong mentor to me. And through that time, about a year later, when Morris died— it was November 15th, 1994. In November, a year later, the first weekend of November, I was at a retreat where us, the high school kids who were the leaders on the boards of each of the groups, were mentoring the middle school kids retreat. And we had our own staff meeting. And that was the weekend that Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, was assassinated. So they pulled us all together and shared this with us. How are we supposed to navigate this? This is a Jewish youth group. How are we going to tell the kids? This is a big thing in our culture and our history. And one of the youth directors from a different synagogue pulls me aside and goes, "Hey, I know what you're going through in school. I know what's going on in your life. I think you should maybe go and spend a year or two in Israel. Forget this college thing for a bit. You can defer. Go, go figure out what's going on in your world. What's your identity?" And one of the crazy things was like, I was an awful student. Barely graduated with a 1.8 GPA. When I was younger, I would not do a presentation. I'd rather get the F than actually standing in front of people and doing what I'm doing now. Literally sweating, shaking, get an F, happy to do that. All the way from middle school and high school. But once I got this identity of being aboard my birth, all of a sudden, all this stuff started to change. I started having influence. People started seeing my birth. They started seeing what was inside of me that I couldn't see because of all the trauma and drama. So I applied to this program, this year course program, and they were so excited because I was a leader in this community that they even gave me scholarship plus spending money to pay for this entire program in 1996. And then the news came. I was rejected. I wasn't good enough because my GPA was that 1.8 GPA. So now what do I do? I'm thinking, I'm thinking, God, waitlisted from University of Central Florida. And back then that was a really bad thing because, you know, back then everybody got into University of Central Florida. Now it's a much more difficult school to get into. And I had no clue. I couldn't see beyond the next 5 minutes. There was no future. There was no, "I can see myself in 10 years, what I want to do." I had no clue, no idea who I wanted to be, no purpose. So during that senior year, our class president and I and a few other people were planning our fundraiser. To pay for our end-of-year party. And we brought in these two musicians that were making waves in the music scene, that were through the Jewish community, that later became top 10 Billboard charts artists known as Evan and Jared from Atlanta, Georgia. We brought them in for our senior class presentation. No one knew them. They were just like this little small circle. We're out to dinner with them after the party, and they're like telling them what's going on. What are you doing? It's like, you know, if that didn't work out for you, you should go to the school the school that we went to in Israel. Write down this number. This is the guy who's going to get you in. I'm like, but I don't have money. The scholarship was, you know, for that program. They'll take care of it. The next day, picked up the phone call, not realizing that it was a 7-hour time difference. The person picked up not so happy because I think I called at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it. We're going to get into the whole process. Here's the flight dates. Here's what you have to do. Get on the plane. So I get on the plane 2 months later, and I'm there around a community of people I've never met before. There's one other person I know. And then you get assigned to different rabbis for what classes you're going to take. And I'm sitting down with the person, and we start talking. And over that time of us talking, he's like, "Oh, that's so interesting. Oh, that's so interesting. Oh, that's interesting." So I shared that my parents were divorced, that I grew up in this youth group connected to my synagogue, and that I was supposed to go to this leadership training program that ended up, right, I got rejected to. It's like, oh wow. Yeah, so my parents are divorced. I was in that leadership training program before it became this specific— the first generation of this. And I also mentioned that my family is a third-generation family furniture business that my grandfather started after the Holocaust. And so yeah, my family was in the furniture business too. So here I am, having gone through all these traumas and tribulations. This got pulled away from me. This friend got lost. This youth director who said, "You should go and do this." Now I'm all of a sudden in Israel with someone who knows my journey already. So December comes, and my friend who was the senior class president comes back from America from this convention, 'cause he flew back as a senior to this convention, and comes back, was, "I have some bad news to tell you. David," who was his youth director, the person who was the person who said, "You should go to Israel," passed away in a car crash, killed in a car accident. But I'm tracing back steps, right? This person in 10th grade that led me to this, and then this person that said, "Go here," led me to this. And then I meet people that are connected to me, and then all of a sudden that person gets taken away. A lot of these struggles is like, where are you ending up, but what do you have to go through to get there? So later on, I flash forward, I'm living in Atlanta, I'm working in a community program, and I'm going through some personal stuff. Something I never dealt with. Stuff that's been going on. Even though I went to therapy when I was a little kid, but there's no real therapy process when you're in high school. You wanna, you know, you're too cool for that. And I end up going to this therapist, and he asks me questions. That no therapist has ever asked. I'm like, where is he coming up with this stuff? So I'm starting to do research. I'm like, what's his training? Because I've been to therapy. It was like, sit there, clean this, do that, how's your brother, how's your mom, how's your dad, how does that make you feel? Crappy style of therapy. This guy was really asking hard-hitting questions. And as I started doing research in what his training was, I found out that he was a marriage and family therapist. And during that time, I was already working with kids, being half programming director, half mentor. And then I went off to work the next year at Princeton University on student programming, doing the same thing: half programming, half mentoring, doing counseling unofficially. And I'm going back online, like, "I think my next step is graduate school in marriage and family therapy." So I started looking around, and Zimoa kept coming up in my face. You don't have a GRE. Oh, and your high school, right, GPA probably wasn't so great. And if I took the GRE, I was an awful test taker going back to my 1.8 GPA, I would probably fail. How am I going to get into graduate school? And then I found through one of my students who were doing research, she was going off to a conflict resolution program, and she found the graduate school that I eventually went to, Fort Lauderdale, because they didn't require the GRE. Why? They did not believe that this type of test will guarantee the type of professional clinician you will be. And that was it. That was my entry. I'm gonna get into a program, hopefully, because I'm gonna be crappy at testing. There's no way I'd ever do this. And they believe that that's not going to determine my worth. So I go to the program. Third semester or so, this professor walks in, he's the best professor. And she scared the crap out of me. She was larger than life, very in-your-face, and I'm like, "Oh my God, I don't know who she is, I'm scared crapless, but I'm gonna take every single class that she's taking." And I did. For the next year and a half, every class she took, I took. The best experience. But that first initial judgment of, "Holy crap, you scare me," back then would have been like, "Oh, I'll stay away from that." That person became— After I graduated, became my supervisor for my licensure. And when I became a supervisor of other therapists who were becoming licensed, she did my supervision on my supervision. And still today is a mentor that we meet every few months for lunch. So all of these things started showing up. Challenging situation, someone shows up. Challenging situation, someone shows up. And then 2010 happens. Married for about 6 years. I'm getting separated, panic attacks nonstop. Get divorced, still not going anywhere. And a colleague friend of mine says, "You should try this modality called neuro-emotional technique." All right, I'm already down with some of this alternative medicine stuff. And I went, and within 3 sessions, my anxiety and panic attacks went away. A month later, They happened to be at a training in Orlando, and I was there. Now, multiple years later, this has become the main treatment modality. Now, as a therapist using integrative and alternative medicine modalities to help other people going through their negative self-sabotaging journeys and stories. But again, going through anxiety, a challenging time, and then all of a sudden someone showed up and said, you should try this. So there's this like growing theme of when challenges show up, who are you willing to let get in and willing to hear. So now I'm practicing and doing this NET thing at a conference about 2017, and this chiropractor friend of mine there goes, you know, you should come with me to this conference in Dallas. Like, that sounds great, what is it? It's for entrepreneurs. Oh, I'm not an entrepreneur. I ran away from my family's third-generation business. I'm a therapist. I'm a healer. That business stuff ain't for me. Why? I grew up in South Florida. And I saw money equating to not being a good person. And to buying fancy things and showing off, but not using it to leverage. At least amongst my peers and the community that— not realizing that much later on, the people who helped support me and give me all these scholarships were some of those people. But the judgment I had was business and entrepreneurship is about selfishness, ego, and all that. So for 2 years, yes. Jason Wasser. And I finally went. It was a big investment. I didn't have the money. My practice was kind of stagnant. I was not leaving my office till 10 o'clock at night, washing the doorknobs, sweeping the floor, taking out my own trash. Oh, and seeing 20 to 30 to 40 clients a week and scheduling and billing, doing everything. Superman syndrome. And I go. And day one, Rick Zappia, the person who runs this program, who created this program called Business finishing school, says you are an entrepreneur if you decide that you have specific certain values and that every day when you have a decision to make, you look at that lens of those values and you say yes or no to that. And if you do that over and over again through your list of core values, you are an entrepreneur. So if you're a mom and you decide that you want to raise your children a certain way and you have values that you make decisions based on, you're an entrepreneur. And if you're a person who has decided that emotions and mental health wellness for a specific community and how to do that and take that into people's lives is something that you want to wake up every day and do, that makes you an entrepreneur. If you want to connect to people, if you want to bring vulnerability and you want to bring community and healing, you're an entrepreneur. If you get out of your own way and show up and stand in front of a crowd and present yourself to the world, You're being logical. Woo! But I didn't know any of this stuff. And all of a sudden, things started changing for me. My business started dropping clients I didn't want to see anymore. I never knew I had permission to say no. This program says, if you don't want to do it, say no to it. Stop doing this. And all of a sudden, my profits went up 30% in the first 6 months because I was turning down clients. But that came out of me living in a struggle, and all of a sudden this mentor showed up. And the person I sat next to at this conference, khaki pants, polo shirt, his name was Matt. Start talking. What do you do? I do financing for big rigs and trucking. That's pretty cool. How long you been in that? About 20 years. Talking, connecting. Turns out when we signed up for the program, they put us into an accountability group, so we got to be in the same accountability group. He's like, listen, here's my, my card before you go. And out of his bag, he doesn't pull out a card, he pulls out a book. His book. Okay, I don't think I've ever seen that before in my life. So as I find out, as I'm getting to know Matt, Matt's company isn't this small little rinky-dink company. It's somebody who's doing about $100 million a year at that point. And his network was connected to this much larger network of people who are doing all these wonderful things for the community, breaking my mindset of what I thought an entrepreneur was. They're not just doing it to make money, but they're also doing it to take care of their family. They're doing it to take care of their community. They're taking care of when people are downtrodden, how can I lift them up? Values-based decision-making, this massive shift. And I started getting introduced to all these other people. Because of that, I decided like, wait, this guy has a podcast, he's doing some really cool stuff. How do I get out of my little small a small office, like 800-square-foot office, and bring what I want to share to the world? How do I now become the person that has showed up for me along the ways to do that for other people? Because people, I'm a therapist, so they're willingly coming to me, but they're paying me for that. But how do I get that influence that if that person is looking for something that they need, that they don't know where to go, maybe it'll pop up on their feed, maybe it'll be a recommendation from someone. And it wasn't, I'm gonna make a lot of money on this, I want 50,000 downloads. It was, how do I bring value? How do I bring what I went through to other people? And the pillars of this podcast, which I decided to call You and Your Wife, is based on all the things I've learned over the years that I feel are the most successful attributes that someone has to have in order to grow. And that's psychology, that's integrative and natural medicine, as I did that work through in our emotional technique. That is spirituality and entrepreneurship. So going back to that first quote, "Appoint yourself a teacher and acquire yourself a friend," how many of us can now go back through each of our journeys and realize that this person taught me something that I never thought, that person became a friend to me in a way that I really needed when I least expected it. And the beautiful thing about all this is that people will show up in your life, and these people will allow you to find your voice, to find your purpose, and to find your passion. Woo!