Kute Blackson grew up in a minister's family across Ghana, Japan, and London, ordained at 14 but eventually rejected that path. He argues most people ignore their inner knowing through distraction and rationalization, pointing to signs like missing joy or staying in situations you know are wrong.
You've got an incredible background story.
Yes.
Can you share that with us?
Yeah. I was born in Ghana, West Africa. My father's from Ghana, my mother's Japanese. I grew up in London. My first memories as a young boy was literally seeing a crippled woman crawl. This was in Ghana, West Africa, and seeing a crippled woman crawling on the floor. And I remember being a chubby kid lost in the crowd. And as I saw her crawl on the floor, she picked up the sand that a man walked on, wiped on her face, and. And stood up. So week after week, I grew up seeing the same man who Sanshi picked up, literally look at someone in a wheelchair, and he would simply say, stand up. He would look at a woman with crutches and say, put the crutches down. He would look at a blind person and put his hands on their eyes, and literally they would see. So this wasn't on television. This was live in person, week after week. So I grew up with this sense of possibility. So I always felt a deep sense that anything was possible. And who was this? This guy was my father. This guy was my father. My father had 300 churches in Ghana, West Africa, hundreds of thousands of followers. He had a huge church in London. Age 8, I started speaking in my father's churches, gave my first talk in my father's church. At age 14, I was ordained as a minister, given a mandate to take over. My entire life, you could say, was planned out for me. And I felt this calling to make a difference. But I knew I had this sense that that wasn't my path. I had an inkling that wasn't my path. But I didn't have the courage. It took me five, four years to really muster up the courage to have the conversation, to acknowledge my truth and have the conversation with my father that I wouldn't be taking over his churches. And it was agonizing because I was afraid. And I think that many of us, we feel a deeper wrinkling. We feel a deeper truth. We feel a deeper knowing in our hearts. A sense of this relationship isn't right. A sense of the this job isn't in alignment with my highest purpose. I'm compromising who I am. But we're often afraid. We're often afraid. If I'm really honest, if I'm really honest with what I feel, then what will happen to my life? If I really tell the truth to myself about this relationship, then maybe I have to admit that it's not working. But I've invested so much. I've invested 10 years five years, two years, whatever is into making this relationship work. So what I see often keeps people stuck is we're constantly lying to ourselves. We're constantly BSing ourselves, lying to ourselves, pretending, rationalizing. We often play a game that I call the I don't know game. You know, I've worked with thousands of people. Billionaires, celebrities, athletes, household names, mothers, children, you name it. I've worked with them one on one and in large groups. And the thing that keeps people stuck is we pretend there's a game we play called the I don't know game. And we say to ourselves, oh, I don't really know what my life purpose is. I don't really know if this person in relationship is the right person for me. I don't really know what I should do. And the truth is, it's bs. There's a deeper part of us that always knows. I believe there's a deeper part of us that knows everything, because at the deepest level, we are everything. But we're often not willing to acknowledge the truth.
So how. How do we know if we are living a lie? How do we know if we're in a fake relationship that isn't really right for us, but we are stuck in it because we invested time? How do we know if we're in a job that we shouldn't be in, but we're there because it's safe.
Because often there's a sense of dissatisfaction. Often there's an inkling of something that doesn't quite feel in alignment. Often there's a lack of joy. Often there's a lack of fulfillment that feels truly aligned. But what we often do is we distract ourselves. What we often do is we pretend. So I think what we have to do is have the courage to feel deeper, to remove the distractions from our lives and feel deeper. And I think many times when I work with clients, you know, they'll come to me as a relationship example. They'll often say, you know, cootie, you know, I. I'll give you a specific example. I had this woman come to me and she was crying, oh, my God, I've been betrayed by my, you know, by my husband. I've been married seven years. I love them so much. Oh, my God. And I looked at. I said, okay, tell me more. And I felt so much compassion for her. And he said, well. And she was really playing the victim. He said, well, he left me and he told me that he's gay. I'm like, well, I can't really argue with that. So now he wants a divorce. And I said to her, but you knew, didn't you? And she just stopped cold. And she's like, yeah, I absolutely knew. And I said, what happens is, when I first met this guy and he showed up at my work, I looked at him and I asked him, are you gay? And he said, no. And I guess they got married. So she had a knowing. There is an inkling. So I think first we have to be willing to feel deeply, and I think based on so much of our culture, because as children, we're conditioned to not feel as children, out of survival, we learn all sorts of defense and survival mechanisms. To not feel the pain of trauma, to not feel the pain of our parents not being there, to not feel the pain of rejection, to not feel the pain of many things growing up to survive. We have disconnected from our feeling capacity. We've disconnected from that sensitivity, that feeling capacity, which we all have access to. But I think we often don't create the space. So to me, the first step is to create the space to listen. And many times we listen, but we don't actually honor the knowing, and we don't actually act on the knowing. So we have to be willing to really act on that.
Okay, but here's the counterpoint to that. How do we know that we're not making a rash decision? Because there's a book called Mastery, and the book Mastery said, life doesn't go. Life doesn't flow upwards like this. So imagine this is a chart. Right, Sorry. This is the chart. Life doesn't go like that. It goes up, then it stagnates, then it goes up again, then it stagnates. It goes up and it stagnates. So you could be at a point in your career where, you know, it's just stagnating. It's like a step, but it doesn't mean that it's not gonna go up again. Life is a mastery in anything in life, whether it's being with a loved one or being in a career is a step. It goes like this. But what if someone bails too soon because they don't realize that they are simply in a few weeks of stagnation and the next big uptick is about to happen?
I think usually it's, you know, a few weeks is fine, but I think many times we're in relationships for years, and I think that's where. If it's not in alignment, here's what I can say. There is a deeper part of us that knows that we have to learn. If we're going to truly live in alignment, we have to learn to start trusting. I think we live so much in our minds, in our modern day, which has a place that we've disconnected from our hearts. And I think what we have to return to is the intelligence of the heart, to connect to the heart and, and to feel deeply. And to me, that feeling is not an emotion that goes up and down. Okay, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling bad. It's a deeper sense of peacefulness. The peacefulness of this feels aligned. The sense of peacefulness of like, yeah, this feels right, this feels. There's a rightness to it.
