46. Don't Ignore Your Wake-Up Call — Say Yes to the Scary Thing

This is your wake-up call, so wake up. Don't let the moment pass. Don't refuse your call, because if you do, you'll be asking what if for the rest of your life. My wife says this intro sounds like a conspiracy mystery, so I'll stop that voice and tell you this show is for you to get you on the track you want for your life. I'm gonna share encouraging educational content, hopefully entertaining What if you could feel alive, worthy, fulfilled, buzzing with energy, and living in peace and in love every single day? Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be awesome? I think it'd be beautiful. And the fact is, we have a choice and we can choose to feel alive and fulfilled and worthy. I'm Tony Suriano. It's simple, but it's not always easy. We'll get into that in a few moments, but I just wanted to say welcome into the episode. I'm Tony Suriano, and this is Direct Your Life. This is where I remind you of things you may already know, give you some new ideas to make sure that you're living your life better than any movie. That is the tagline. I want you to live your life better than any movie, full of adventure, romance, excitement, contribution, and yes, tough times that you don't give up in. Because that's what it's about. Because adversity happens. It's always gonna happen. But the key is to condition yourself, build the habits, build the muscle to not let it bring you into the pits of hell. Now today's episode is actually part 4 of 15. The last 3 episodes, uh, we started talking about the opening image, the theme, and the ordinary world of your life. And this is some of the ideas that I'm taking out of my book, Direct Your Life or Someone Else Will, coming out soon. And this is a way for you to navigate the next steps for yourself, to navigate what matters to you. If you haven't listened to those episodes, please go back and listen to them. They're nice little voice blurbs that can get you moving and do it in a fun, different way. But today we're going to talk About what we call in the film industry, when you're writing a script, we call it the call. We call it the call or the catalyst. This is the inciting incident that actually starts a film off. Now, if you don't know me, I'm a filmmaker. I direct. I love cameras. I love writing stories. And every great story has an inciting incident. The hero gets a call, and it could be a literal phone call saying something devastating happened, and the hero has to make a choice. And when that hero makes the choice, when he— the hero accepts the call, that's when the movie really takes off. And I believe that we all have calls in different periods of our lives, but a lot Of people don't accept the call. They refuse the call. And when they do that, they're doing injustice. And this is the funny thing that's not that funny. The very thing people avoid, the thing that you're scared of, the thing that you just couldn't even do in your head, you're like, no, I can't do that, I'm scared. That's the very thing that you need to feel worthy, to feel fulfilled, to help grow and, and contribute all the wonderful things that we just talked about in the beginning of this episode. That's what you are guaranteed when you accept the call, because that's the beginning of your hero's journey. And this could be starting a new family, accepting the call of a new child. And not running away because you're a guy and you're scared. That is the beginning of a new journey. And when you accept that call, there's going to be challenges. There's going to be new information, light, darkness, joy, sadness, all these different emotions. And they only get to happen when you take the journey on, when you accept the call. And I have an example, a part of my life where I accepted the call and the very thing scared me. I stepped forward anyway, and it was one of the best decisions I made because it just boosted everything I thought I couldn't achieve. So here's what happened. I was just starting to become a professional magician. I did maybe 30 or 40 live gigs, walk-around magic. That's another thing I do. I'm a magician and I love it. And when I started doing that, every— not a show really, a walk-around event, let's call it— I would go into the bathroom and I'd breathe. Okay. And I'd make sure I know how I'm gonna talk to people, what I want to share, and the magic that I'm gonna give to them. And I'd be in there for 10 minutes, and I'm like, okay, I can't stay in here the whole time. I gotta get back out. So I would go out, and then I'd perform. It would do great. I would be nervous sometimes. I'd get over it. Then I'd go back to the bathroom, and eventually I was able to spend less time in the bathroom and more time performing for people. But here's the thing: eventually the word got out that I am a magician, and When you know a magician and someone says, hey, does anyone know a magician? You usually just say, oh, I do. So this new friend texted me and said, hey, they want to do a stage event at my work. It's a pretty big stage. Should I give them your information, or do you want to contact them? And I've never done a stage show before, so immediately that scared me. I was just getting over some of those nerves and those bathroom moments. Now, up until this point, I have conditioned myself to accept crazy challenges without thinking too much about it. So within a matter of minutes, I just replied and I said yes. And then I started talking with the event planner. I went to audition. I eventually got the gig, and it was the biggest stage event I've ever done up until that point. And it was wonderful, but here's why I'm bringing this up. It tested me so many times in different ways. I not only had to perform 3 shows a day on stage to a pretty big audience— this was 4 days in a row, 3 times a day. Okay, so we're doing so much in a little time. I got sick on the end of day 1, and I felt worse than I ever had in my life. Back pains, leg pains. This was like major flu. Not that I needed to go to the hospital, like I just should have stayed in bed for 3 days, but instead I showed up every day. And I pushed through every day, and no one knew I was sick. The audience didn't know, the coworkers didn't really know. I was just telling myself, I'm gonna push through. When I got on— get on that stage, I'm gonna have this new energy, and I'm gonna share the magic to the lovely people out there. And it changed my threshold because I could have so easily called in and said, hey, I'm sorry, I can't do this. But really, I chose that I was willing to do it. And that, that's a hard thing to do when you're hurting physically, and every time you take a step, it actually hurt. Again, I didn't need to go to the hospital, but it was— I was the sickest I ever been. Maybe I should have, I don't know. And this went on the whole rest of the time. But after, after the shows were over, I had this feeling I could take on any magic gig anywhere, anytime, under the worst conditions, because I just went through all that. Like, it can't— you can't get worse than being completely sick. You don't want to talk, you don't want to stand, but you have to talk. And stand and do magic and perform and show your skills and speak and control the audience in a good way. So it was a test, but really my testimonial. And I tell you this because I accepted the call, and that was my call in that period of my life. What's your call? What call are you avoiding? Which one did you refuse recently or in the past that maybe you regret? Stop living like that because you're not meant to live like that. You're meant to actually take the call and go through the challenges. And think of it like the hero's journey. If you know filmmaking or the oldest stories in the world, they have this hero's journey and it's a circle often drawn where the hero starts and he goes through his world. You kind of see his theme and then he gets the call, he has to take the call, he goes through the bad guys, the challenges. His world gets flipped upside down. And that happened to me, right? I was sick and literally flipped upside down in my head. And then you break through and you have a finale and you bring back your gift to the world. And my gift was just seeing how far I could push in such conditions. And that means a lot for me because I personally love taking on hard challenges. I'm a unicyclist. That's hard. When I mastered that, it blew me away. I couldn't believe I actually was able to master that thing. And now with the magic on stage, being able to get through that, I really Was proud. And I take that pride, and this is good pride. I take this pride into the next challenge, and that's how you build up your confidence. So what's your call right now? There's one thing that's true. You have to accept it most of the time. But every now and then you get forced into the call. Have you ever been pushed and just then somehow you're doing the thing you didn't even know you were going to do it, but you had no other choice? And then you got on the other side and you realized it was worth it. You realized you grew. Yes, it was growing pains, but whenever you grow, it's going to be a little painful, but it's always worth it. Quick pause. If this resonated with you, I want to keep the conversation going so you can stay in alignment Get motivated and implement weekly with my free newsletter. Go to tony suriano dot com slash newsletter. Real stories, mindset shifts, psychology, creative breakthroughs—all on directing your life. Go to tony suriano dot com slash newsletter. And now back to the episode. So what's worth it to you? Let me rephrase that. What scares you? And what's calling your name? I want to know. Send me an email or find me online. Find me on Instagram @TonySuriano. Write it down in your journal, take a picture, and tag me. Or just message me, comment. Let me know what yours is. This is the important thing. Really pay attention here, because once you work on the thing that scares you, And you're doing that thing, you start getting all these rewards. Like we mentioned in the beginning, feeling alive, connected, you're growing, you're feeling worthy, and you're fulfilled. You have this peace because you have something important to you that you're going after. That's the meaningful pursuit. But again, so many people just avoid it. They think the things that scare them, oh, they need to avoid. I could never do that. Yes, you could. I know you could because I could, and we all should. So do that thing, make it happen. You have the rest of this year, don't waste it. Now, this is part of finding your true north because the more challenges you accept, the more calls you accept, you start Narrowing down in a good way to find your true north. And I want to give you a little snapshot of— on how to find it or what to look for. So this is how you recognize when something's truly calling you versus just noise and distraction. Okay. Exciting plus scary. It's an adventure. It's love. Creative risk. Contribution, truth-telling, growth, opportunity, a dream that won't leave you alone. That's your true north. Those things, it's a collection. Now, everything else, the noise that pulls you off course, that is this in no particular order: useless drama, toxic relationships, endless scrolling, negative news, binge-watching nothing. Chasing likes, impulse shopping, gossip, comfort food instead of action, soul-crushing routine, playing it safe forever. Did I mention negative news? So get yourself a gut check question list for identifying your call, and that's this: Does it light you up like a Christmas tree? Does it scare you just enough that you You'd regret not trying it. If you deny it, will you always wonder, dang, what if? You do not want to wonder what if. You want to look back and go, yeah, I found out. That's the truth. Now I go deeper into this and more in my new book, Direct Your Life or Someone Else Will. And if you want your life to be better than any movie, you need to get this book. This is many years in the making, and it is a physical activity within the book that you can do that helps you navigate your own hero's journey. It's going to be fun. It's going to be exciting. You're going to have ups and downs, but you'll know how to get out of those downs. So what you need to do is go to tonysuriano.com/directyourlife. and sign up for the notification or get the pre-order or just buy the book if you see that it's available. And if you're listening to this in real time, it's not yet published, but pre-orders will be on soon. If you're listening to the future, it might be there, but go there, check it out. I'm going to be having new free resources there as well, and I would love to share All of these navigation tools with you, the director's perspective, and many other things that I believe can really help you direct your life. That's it for this episode. I really, really enjoyed talking about this stuff with you, and I know you do too if you're here. And if you did enjoy this, please do me that lovely favor, rate and review the show. If you're on Spotify and listening, there's an ellipsis. You have to click it and just rate it. That would be awesome. Give me a comment. If you're on the Apple Podcast, scam all the way down and then you'll see it. I want to know what you think, and that helps others explore this show and help them direct their lives too. And that is a wrap for this episode. Tune in next time because we're going to talk. About the next 5th stage in this 15-part episodic hero's journey. That's it for today. You know what to do. Go out there and direct your life.