Philip McKernan - Believe In You

Full transcript: Philip McKernan on London Real

9:00 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Philip McKernan, who speaks around the world about the importance of overcoming personal obstacles, gaining clarity and cultivating the confidence to believe in yourself. You have worked with a Canadian Olympic team in London TV personalities and entrepreneurs, billionaires to people who’ve gone bankrupt and everything in between. You speak about people’s dysfunctional relationship with money and how their inability to get in touch with their own deep intuition inhibits them from gaining the clarity they need to live an authentic and meaningful life.

9:32 Philip, welcome to London Real. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You know, you come at a huge advantage to anyone who sat in that seat before, because I watched you at your best last night, you were here in the studios. We had 25 people here from London Real Academy and a few others.

9:49 We had the chairs. We had the microphones, and you came in not knowing anything about the audience. I know you didn’t have anything scripted and no plan, and for two hours you captivated everyone, and you took us all on this emotional journey, and everyone seemed to get a little bit something different from what you said. I know I’m still processing some of the things you said, and I want to just ask you, what’s that like to do? And how did that feel, being here last night and doing what you do?

10:23 Wow. Really, probably you can probably see it. I suppose I haven’t stopped to consider it. You know, people came up to me last night that were very complimentary in the context of what I offer them in terms of philosophy. What I offer them in the context of questioning their own existence, their own life.

10:44 And I think, you know, I try not to make it too much about myself. I try not to sit back and think too much and feel too much about what it means to me, because it is all about the audience. It has to be about the audience. But to me it’s just, you know, people say things like, you know, automatic responses, like it’s an honor and it’s a privilege, and I think sometimes it’s true, but sometimes it’s just a heavy response to me. There’s a part of me that cannot believe what I do, and I don’t mean can’t believe that I’m so good, or that’s not what I’m.

11:13 I just can’t believe that I’m doing what I do today, around the world. I just never, ever, ever would have imagined this. I mean, I never, ever would have imagined I’d be doing what I’m doing today, including sitting here today in this studio. So to me it’s not about me. It’s to me, it’s, if people refer to me as somebody who has a gift, if I do or not, that’s not really for me to decide, and if I do, it’s on loan.

11:37 It’s on loan. I’ve been given it for a small period of my life, and my job is to make sure that I use that gift in a really, really authentic, passionate way, and pass it on to other people as I do. So I think it’s, I was talking to your wife afterwards last night, Pauline, and we were talking about it. It’s just your intuition. You really seem to feel the vibrations of different people in the room.

12:02 And I think I first saw you do that. That was out in Napa at Jason Gard’s event, Mastermind Talks, and you know, you asked this whole room of entrepreneurs that question. And we’ll get to that later. It’s not as important what the question was, but you saw the reactions people had, and I, I could have sworn two people gave you almost the same answer, and one of them, you were like, okay, I believe you, and one of them, you’re like, no, no, there’s something else going on here.

12:26 And immediately, and I saw you do that last night, and you seem to kind of know right away if someone is giving. I think you said, sometimes an answer from the head or an answer from the heart. Tell me about your intuition and that difference between the head and the heart. Yeah. People, people often ask me, say, how do you do what you do?

12:43 Because my work is very intuitive, so if I’m in a coaching environment or in a retreat setting, it’s very much about intuition. It’s about feeling your way through the work as opposed to thinking and strategically planning it and using tactics to bring people on a journey. And there’s a little bit of that, but a lot of it is just sitting there and not just listening, but hearing the person, but most importantly feeling what they go through. Now the emotional cost on me personally as a result of that is quite significant.

13:11 So last night I was drained, not just tired, not just because it’s warm in London right now, we’re under lights, etc., but I was emotionally drained. But not in, I’m not complaining about that. I mean in a beautiful way. But I think we’ve got this incredible gift, all of us, to be able to feel what’s going on. Let me, I’ve never used this as an example, but let me give you an example that I think may relate to you or other people who are watching this.

13:38 Every year I go and I bring a group of people and we go to a developing world and we work with orphans. Okay, so typically it’s Spanish-speaking countries, and we were in Guatemala, Peru, and then recently we went to, or we’re going to India later this year, and you know, I remember people saying, oh, can you speak Spanish? And I went no, and they said, are you going to learn Spanish now, or are you going down, you’re going down to work with kids? And I said no, and I’m never going to learn Spanish or any other language that matter.

14:05 I can hardly, you know, hardly you know, work with English, never mind another language. But here’s my point. When we got down there to work with these young children, and it was basically three or four days working with these kids, and the idea behind it is we work with these kids. We give them time. We don’t give them gear.

14:22 We don’t give them stuff. We hold them. We play with them. We engage with them. We look with them.

14:27 We laugh with them. We cry with them, to show them that they matter, even for a day. Okay, to show them that they matter, even for a day. But when you don’t have language, okay, when you can’t converse from a vocal point, you know, you have to observe everything. You have to kind of feel the emotions.

14:45 So I remember one day, I’ll give you an example of this. I remember one day walking around a corner and there was a young boy, and he was like curled up in the corner, and he was just his head down, and I went up to him and I just put my hand on his leg, and I knelt down beside him, and he looked at me, and there was tears streaming down his face, and he was saying something over and over and over again, and I went to kind of put my arms around him, and he retracted, so I wanted to be respectful of that, so I kind of stayed away from him, and then it kind of the crying deepened to a point where it wasn’t even a mental thought, it was just like, this kid needs, he needs something, so I literally grabbed him and I pulled him up and then I realized as he unfolds, this is a… he’s a big guy, he’s like, he’s 15 years old or whatever he was, and I had to almost drag him over, and I sat down and he put one leg here, one leg here, wrapped himself around me and cried and was saying the same thing over and over, and I called the interpreter over and I said, what is he saying?

15:43 And he says, he said he’s saying, I, he says, I want my mommy, and he was saying it over and over again. But the point I’m trying to make is that I engage with him almost like he was my own son, and I didn’t have any idea what he was saying. So we get so caught up in words, and if we just shut our mouths just for a period of time and just observe somebody and allow ourselves to move from this mental space down into a more intuitive place, down to a place of feeling, we’ll understand ourselves so much more, and we’ll understand everybody around us in a way that we are almost incapable of doing when we’re up here, and it changes everything, because our conversation changes, and we’ll end up having more real conversations, for want of a better term, with the people around us, and therefore deepening everything in our lives.

16:33 You have a quote that I saw in your bag earlier, and it said something about, you know, success is in the head and happiness is in the heart. How does that go, and is that a pretty good way of describing the way you look at the world? Yeah, I think the quote is, success is manufactured in the mind while happiness is cultivated in the soul, and I think that success in the traditional sense, like the way we see success today, is very much around money, and it’s around materialism, and it’s around businesses and stuff for that.

17:02 And this is a very, very beautiful, incredible tool. I wouldn’t say beautiful. It’s a very tactical tool, meaning your mind, and it’s a great way to, it’s a great thing to use in order to attain and to strategize and and create a tactical plan and execute. So that’s what we call mindset, but I believe mindset has been put ahead of what I have dubbed to Soul set, and it’s almost replaced and overshadowed, intuition, gut, soul, whatever you want to call it.

17:32 Let’s not get cut up one word, because that might turn people off. But like, this is the voice, and it’s, and it’s about to me, it’s about, you know, the head leans forward. It’s about bringing the head back, but allowing the heart to lead, allowing the soul to lead, and then using this to back it up and a sec. It’s like a secondary device. But how many of us are living up here?

17:54 I mean, honestly, there are so many people living up here in the world today that there are so many human beings that don’t even need bodies. If we just put two little legs on their heads, they’d be able to run around, and we’d have heads running around, but it would save them a lot of time and energy. They wouldn’t have to look after the rest of their body. We wouldn’t have to wear jeans. We wouldn’t have to wear shoes, because they don’t use the rest of their body.

18:14 And I just think there’s so much more to the world. It’s the same principle. I don’t know what the stats are in terms of, you know, communication is 70%, you know, body language and 30%, you know, voice, or something like that. Same principle. I think most of it’s driven by emotion, but we’ve allowed the head to take over.

18:33 And, uh, it was Einstein who said something along the lines of the intuitive mind has been, um, is a beautiful gift, but it’s become the servant to the, you know, it’s become secondary to the to the to the, the, you know, the intuitiveness has become secondary to the mind. The only thing I would disagree with Einstein is that there’s no such thing as an intuitive mind. I just don’t agree. I think it doesn’t exist. The mind cannot be intuitive, and I know people will argue with me, and they can do that all day long if they want.

19:04 The mind is the mind. Intuition is, it’s now how they communicate. It is very, very important, but if you lead with this and this comes second I guarantee you, you’ll make better decisions. You’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll be more aligned.

19:18 You’ll surround yourselves with better things you’ll be more aligned as a human being in the work that you do, the relationship with yourself and the relationships with people around you. I feel like we’re all being taught to use the mind more these days, and with every new tech advancement, it seems to be it’s the mind, it’s the mind, it’s the mind, not to mention all the things that distract our mind. But I feel like I was grown up and taught, your mind is what’s going to get you ahead in this world.

19:42 Your mind is going to get you the job, and the this, and the recognition. And so I know I’m very mindor. But it feels like, as a population, as a species, we’re going the mind way and not down, which feels like we’re going up. Yes, absolutely. Okay, yeah, it’s increasing even more.

19:57 It is, and I think it’s been driven partly by this insatiable appetite for the expansion of the mind and the mindset, and all the, all the, I I pretty much, pretty much, my one of my predictions is in about 20 years from now we’ll be looking back and say, we had it all wrong. We had it ass ways. We should have been honoring the intuition and using the mind purely as a… the mind is a computer. It’s just a laptop. That’s all it is.

20:23 Um, and yet we give it so much credence. I mean, it’s extraordinary. It’s a brilliant piece of equipment, but that’s all it is. Um, the intuition, the soul, is just so unique to each of us. It’s our blueprint, but the problem is when you follow your soul, it often requires you to stand alone, but we don’t want to stand alone.

20:38 Yeah, we want to fit in, and I know a lot of people say no, I don’t want to fit in, but you really sit back and think about it. We want to fit into society. We don’t want to stand out too much, and when you follow your soul you’ve got to stand out, because if you honor it, it typically brings you in a way that leads you away from the societal push to follow success in the way that it’s been deemed that success should unfold. Um, and the other thing is that we’re absorbing masses of amounts of information.

21:05 So the more information that we absorb, we’re moving up into our brains. So we’re absorbing huge amounts of information, and as I said last night, and it’s just something I’ve been sitting with recently, is as we absorb information, we’re not allowing that information to move down to a place of knowledge, and move further down to a place of wisdom, and move even further down to a place of awareness, because we’re too busy reading the book and the next book and the next book. And the interesting thing is, I’ve realized that people who absorb information, they’re not absorbing information because they want to really, really be knowledgeable and be wise and be aware.

21:44 They’re reading information mainly because they’re scared. We’re almost afraid not to read the next book. I’m not saying books are a waste of time, I’m not, but we’re almost afraid if we’re not reading the next coolest, sexiest book, we’re missing out. How many people are walking this Earth feeling that they’re missing out? I often, people say to me, I’m going to be 40 next month, and I said, okay, great, are you worried?

22:09 Oh, I hate being, I hate the idea of being 40. And what you’ll realize, it’s not about being 40. It’s about that they are worried that life has passed them by or is passing them by. It’s not about the age. It’s about how they feel about themselves in the context of the life they’ve lived.

22:25 I, uh, I did a TED Talk in January, and I said, research is procrastination in disguise to a certain extent, because I felt myself doing that in the past, and sometimes I do it just for a dopamine loop. I believe as well that new info, that new info buzz. And I was up in Scotland last year in November, and I was, uh, up there for a retreat, and my room didn’t have Wi-Fi, and so God forbid, or any 3G, and so I couldn’t get my dopamine fixed when I go to bed, and for a few hours I had to be with my thoughts.

22:56 Uh, God forbid, right? And, uh, I know, I know you are a big fan of unplugging and really just being with yourself. The decisions you made and pondering them, and you even said something fascinating last night, which I had to agree with you with, is that even meditation is a way of not engaging with the decisions you make and with yourself, and I agree with that. I meditate every morning, but when I’m in a meditative state, I’m actually doing something or trying to achieve something, so in a way I’m not actually just sitting there contemplating all of the decisions, and so I was just wondering if I could get your thoughts on taking a step back, and you know, taking a step back from the goals, from the busyness, and from all that information, but we can’t do that, Brian.

23:39 I mean, that goes against everything. I mean, f***ing busyness is a badge of honor, especially in America. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s, yeah, in America, but also a lot of other places, and it’s become this, you know, how are you? Oh, I’m super, super busy. It’s become this almost need.

23:56 It’s almost like business equals, you know, success. Business equals business, it doesn’t, right? And people say they’re busy. Whenever someone says they’re busy, it means they don’t have time for you. It’s one way of subconsciously communicating, so I’m so busy, I’m so busy that it’s not important for me to engage with you right now.

24:13 And that’s, that’s fair point, but I would go a step further and say that they don’t even have time for themselves. Okay, they’re so busy they don’t even have time for themselves. Think about that for a second. They don’t have time for themselves, that they want to stay so busy. I remember inviting a group of clients one day to create some space.

24:32 I’ll just give you a little snapshot of some of the reactions. Number one is, like, what the, you know, they just couldn’t believe that I was suggesting, God forbid, as you say, that they would actually go and have some time. And one of the guys said, yeah, I’ll give this a go, and he comes back a few months later, and we had another workshop, and he said, I couldn’t even get into the car without turning on the radio. He said, I didn’t realize how bad I was you see that?

24:55 But the problem is that we don’t realize how busy we’ve become. So, for example, my mother suffers from arthritis, and she does a great job of trying to protect me and everyone around her by not allowing us to see how much pain she’s in. So I’ll ask her, how are you today? She goes, no, today’s a good day. So let’s just say I could plug some sensor into her, plug it into my leg to experience exactly the pain that she’s having right now.

25:20 I’d probably fall on the ground like a sack of potatoes in agony, because I’m a disastrous patient, and I’m very, very high m, anyway, when I’ve got, when I’m sick, but she’s become so used to the pain over so many years of her life, and I think the same thing happens with busyness. I will literally have people, many entrepreneurs sit in front of me on big whiteboards map out their lives, and I’m looking at this and people are, they’ll sit in front of me, go, no, but this makes sense, and this feeds this, and this is my passion and this business feeds, and they’re trying to rationalize, and just, we don’t realize how busy we’ve become as a society, and when I encourage people to take space, they think it’s about going into the jungle and having a night in a cottage on their own or going into the mountains and having a moment of reflection or a night of reflection, and that’s physical space, but there’s also emotional space, and there’s also mental space, and it’s in the gaps.

26:17 I run an experience in Ireland once a year, and we do work, create space work. We create space, so we do this reflective work. We ask questions, and then we get hiking, and we go up into the mountains, and we walk 5,000-year-old green roads. I remember a lady saying to me one day, says, can we not just stay in the classroom and do more work? I really think I’m getting somewhere, and I said, really, appreciate the feedback and the comment, and get your hiking boots on, and I’ll see you outside.

26:44 Six hours later with a bit of mist on her hair and a bit of sweat pouring down her face. I look over, mud on her shoes, and I look over and she just looks at me, goes, the growth happens in the gaps. It doesn’t happen when we’re busy, but we’re not creating the space to allow the work that we do, the reflection that we do, the information that we absorb, to land within us. If that makes any sense? Yeah, it does.

27:11 Do you encourage people to do these regular unplugging sessions? I mean, do you encourage your clients to shut off certain pieces, or to be aware of how they’re consuming all the time, like you said, car stereo on, on the tube, you’re on your email, on the, this, that? You tell people to try to take a step back and be with their thoughts on a regular basis? Yes and no. I think if, if someone, you know, and I’m very reluctant to prescribe what people should do.

27:36 And I’ll tell you why, because if I say to somebody, one of the best strategies you can do is unplug for one day every month, for example, and then they literally say, okay, one day every month, they put it in for the next six months, they take the day off and they sit there and go, they’re not ready for it. So what I, what I encourage people to do is, where I start with somebody, is, why don’t you… It’s like a business person will come to me, say, I want you to help me grow my business, and I go, great starting point for me is, why you doing what you’re doing?

28:06 What do you mean? Well, I’ve always done this. I said, I appreciate that, but why are you doing it? Well, it pays the bills. So is that, that’s, that’s, that’s the legacy that you just want to basically pay your bills the rest of your life?

28:16 Is it possible that you’re misaligned to what you actually do? Can we change the business the way you do it, or you need to, you know, align yourself into a different business to really honor your soul? I’m all about the why. Okay, what you do becomes secondary, but if you understand the why, what you’ll bring people to, you’ll bring people to a place where they’ll want to go and have an unplugging session on their own, and when they do that, they own it.

28:41 They’re not being told by Philip McKernan to go and spend a day a month on their own. They shift their value proposition within. They’ll want to honor themselves and take some space. So as I started to take space for myself, not because it was a strategy and a tactic, but because I really wanted to have time on my own. I’d be, I was met, inundated by family and friends and other people go, well, what about your wife?

29:04 What about your wife, when she going to take some time? And I used to try to fix my wife. I used to try and push her up that mountain. Do you know, to make her see her own value? She has to come to that place in her own.

29:15 I said, what about her? I said, if she doesn’t want to take time for herself, that shouldn’t mean that I sacrifice that space either. And by honoring myself, some would call it being selfish. By honoring myself, she started to go, maybe it is okay to take time for yourself, and she has started to do the same without feeling guilty for being a bad mother and a bad parent and a bad wife. She’s now starting to take time for herself, and what happens is she feels better about herself.

29:44 She comes back energized around her parenting and missing the kids and missing me. Her children are brought up in an environment where they see that her, their mother and their father, take time from this. They value themselves. They value us deeply. We feel loved, but they also value themselves.

30:03 So it’s not being selfish, it’s the most selfless thing you can do. Busy people are selfish. They’re busy running around trying to help everybody, but they’re helping nobody, including themselves. Right? Get selfish a little bit, and it’s, but but when we use that word, it, people treat that word with disdain.

30:22 Or you want me to be selfish? and it goes against everything that we’ve been taught to believe and do in society for the most part. I would kind of reframe it and shift it, and I would say honor yourself. Forget about whether it’s selfish or not, because selfish is almost like a judgment potentially. It’s like, honor yourself, and therefore honor people around you.

30:46 If you really loved your kids, if you can’t motivate yourself to take time for yourself, do it for your children. Do it for people around you, because they need you. They don’t need a busy fool. All I can tell you is this, and I want my kids, and one of my wishes would be my kids would stand over my grave 20, 30, 50, 100 years from now, whenever it is, and say, okay, he may not have been the richest guy in the block. He may not have left us lots of cars and real estate and property and everything else, but he was present, and when he was with me, he was with me.

31:18 Because the problem in society today is that we think that quality time is actually being with people, but it’s not. You can be at home, but you can still be in your brain. You can be at home and still be on your BlackBerry. You can be at home and still worrying about the office, so you may as well be in the office. You can take time and go, the am of men I know, and it’s not just men, it’s women as well, men in the context of golf who say, yeah, I go and play golf, but, jeez, I feel so guilty because I’m working all week and then I go and play golf, and I should be with my family.

31:49 They may as well not play golf, because the guilt is negating any benefit of the time that they have on their own. I don’t want, I don’t want my kid standing above my grave saying, you know, he left me lots of money, lots of real estate, I don’t have to work for the rest of my life. It’s kind of great now, but he was never around, and when he was, he was always off somewhere, making me think more about myself. So it’s going to be a personal session. Let me ask you about money.

32:19 It’s something that we talked about last night. It’s one of the big things I noticed about you when I saw you speak in Napa, and we were in a room of 14 entrepreneurs, some of them very successful, and you asked this question, what is your relationship with money? And it was like a pin dropping in there. I just felt this energy, and I’m not even that intuitive, I don’t think, and everyone, you could just, the cog started moving, and you started talking to different people, and everyone had different relationships and dysfunctional relationships, and you know, someone was like, I’m making $10 million a year and I hate what I do, and someone said I was born wealthy and I felt guilty ever s, and some person was this, and that, and you ended up speaking with each one of those people, and I know it’s obviously resonated with me last night.

33:05 Everyone came, said a word about money. One was freedom, one was options. I said pain, and you know, and I didn’t know I was going to say that, and so, and you picked up on that and you talked about that. Tell me about that question and why you ask it, and what you found, and what it says about people? Yeah, I mean, first of all, if I may, you said I’m not very intuitive.

33:31 You are an incredibly intuitive man, but you may not always honor it. You may not listen to it, and I say that with tremendous respect. Incredibly intuitive. Incredibly intuitive. So that’s a massive compliment if you choose to see it like that.

33:45 Thank you. I will be more aware of it. And I was, I was very intuitive, but the thing is, I just didn’t listen to it. I didn’t trust it. I just wasn’t used to tapping into it.

33:55 So if, if we often say things like, oh, I’m not intuitive, or it’s almost like, well, I don’t have intuition, and I know you didn’t say that, but this is for the benefit of the listeners or the watchers, if you like. Trust me, you have it in abundance, and if you start to understand and even just feel that, say, I do have intuition, and then you start to really start to hone in on it, and it’s a small nuance, but it’s very important. But back to the question.

34:16 So just to create some context, last night I asked everybody in this room. I said, if you were to sit back and consider money, I’d like you to sum up how you feel about money. It’s a very different question than think about money. How do you feel about money in one word, and that’s what you’re relating to? One guy said bastard.

34:36 One guy said freedom. Somebody said options. Somebody said, you know, you use the word pain. Somebody said, you know, trade, etc., etc., but think about the vast, the vastness of the different answers and the depth, and you think about the emotion potentially behind them, but more importantly the stories behind them. What’s the story behind the pain?

34:59 What’s the story behind bastard? What’s the story behind freedom? And on a very simple human level, it’s like, you know, a lot of people argue that money buys you freedom. I, I can fundamentally disagree with that, because I know very, very, very wealthy people who never have to work another day in their life, and I’m telling you they do not feel free. Can they walk out the door and buy a Lamborghini, where they’re thinking about it?

35:21 Yes, if that is your definition of freedom, good luck, because to me, freedom is about being able to, in your bed at night, close your eyes with a little stinky smirk on your face, not every night, say f*** I’m living, I’m living, and be able to close your eyes and fall asleep with peace of mind. There is no money in this world that can buy that. None. So to me it’s about your relationship to money. How do you feel about money?

35:58 Because what you think about money is irrelevant, because you may have an affirmation that goes, I’m a, I live a life of abundance, and I have endless amounts of money, and you read it every single day, yet it doesn’t necessarily transform into your life, but I’m reading the affirmation I was told to do. This affirmation, I’ve got a vision board, I’ve got a $1 thousand bill, and that represents the thousand I want to make every single day. You know, I’ve set my goals, I want to be a billionaire by the time I’m 45 or whatever it is, but yet you don’t feel you’re successful in societal terms, but you don’t feel satisfied.

36:32 So what do you do stay busy and keep chasing it, or do you have the courage to stop? The courage to stop and say, what is that niggly feeling telling me? Maybe it’s a signpost, maybe it’s my intuition saying, hey, I used to be a roar in your life many years ago. I’m like a mouse right now because you’re not listening to me, you’re allowing society in your brain dictate the entirety of your life. If you just listen to me for a second, what I’m trying to tell you is that you’re not as happy as you tell yourself you are.

37:04 You’re not as happy as you pretend to be on Facebook every day, and if you stopped, maybe there’s a different way of living, maybe there’s a transformation, maybe there’s a transition in your life. I’m not going to use the word change, because we all freak out about change. Maybe there’s a slight transition, maybe there’s a little degree turn that you need to make, where you can become more aligned, more engaged, and happier in your own skin. So it’s about our relationship, and when I work with couples, one of the things I say is, what is your relationship to relationships?

37:31 What are you talking about, said when you grew up as a kid in the home that you grew up in. What was it like? What do you remember? What did you see every day? And it is extraordinary.

37:46 So picture this: you have a man and a woman, typically, and one side of the other, and it comes from this place of, you know, they come to this experience kind of with a laundry list of the s*** they want to change in their partner, and then before they know it they start witnessing their partner get in touch with their story, their relationship to relationships, say, well, my mom used to do this, and my dad was always this, and God didn’t know that. Wow. And that competitive edge is replaced by compassion, and then they start to understand the person because we are we can only be what we’ve seen.

38:16 We can only be what we’ve witnessed to a large extent. So our relationship to relationships in the context of couples impacts and influences at a very deep level, and our relationship to money impacts us at a very deep level, and it could be such a such a minor comment from your dad or your mom. We’ve heard the usual one, you know, money doesn’t grow on trees, and all that kind of stuff, but you know, don’t get too big for your boots, and that’s only for the rich people, and that’s all, and this s*** stays with us, and when we don’t deal with it we bring it into every single conversation, and we don’t don’t honor it, and what ends up happening is, it’s almost, it almost, we put it this way, and I said this recently.

38:59 Hopefully this makes sense. Is when we get up in the morning and we hold something deep, like say money and pain, we hold that true. We go out every day into the streets of London, the streets of New York, and the streets of Vancouver, the streets of Dublin, seeking to validate how we feel about ourselves in the world. We might be thinking and saying something different, so you might walk into a meeting saying, yeah, I want to sign this million dollar contract absolutely.

39:28 This makes sense, but you behave and you do things to honor and validate how you feel about money. It’s a form of sabotage, and we don’t often know we’re even doing it. Is that most of the people you do work with is, is it something related to that issue, or they might say it’s the money, but is it about life choices they’ve made, and the money represents, you know, how they will look to their peer group, and is it often times interrelated to that one question?

40:01 Most people come to me because they want to make a transition in their life. Most people come to me when they’re in transition of their life. Most people come to me because they don’t feel fully satisfied within their own skin, within their own lives, or within their own business, and they know at some level that something needs to change but typically somebody would come to me for this. They come to me for, say, why, but really, X is the issue and what I often say is, what’s happening off the ice or in the stadium impacts how we are on the ice or on the field.

40:32 We haven’t, I mean, people used to kind of like roll their eyes to me in the context of the work that I do. They’re not doing it anymore. So you’ve got some, you know, very, very influential individuals that I choose not to speak about. You’ve got very smart companies. You’ve got corporations starting to realize that they talk a great game about valuing their people, but actual fact, you know, if you really want to look after your people, help them off the ice, help them in their marriages, help them with a relationship to money, help them with a relationship to themselves, help them with their self-esteem issues, and I say self-esteem issues because everybody has them, help them with their confidence, not conditionally and looking for the bottom line, and looking, because there’s an almost an intangibility to that but if you really care about your people, which is the world that we’re moving into right now, we’re moving into a place where if you’re not caring about your people, you are dead.

41:23 You know, sourcing ethically is one thing, and you know social consent and corporate responsibility and all that kind of stuff. It’s shifting into, you know, there’s an, it’s the opportunity is there, but there’s the possibilities, as I love, the possibility to really care about your people, and if you help them in those areas, do you not think they’re going to be more engaged, more loyal, you know, more productive? Absolutely. So what happens off the ice has a massive impact on our ability to perform on the ice.

41:55 We had a young man last night, and he was telling you about the job he does for money and the job he does because he loves, and he was telling you about this while you were gazing deep into his soul in a McKernan type way and I’d seen this happen before, and so I knew we were in for an interesting ride, and you know, you start asking him questions and asking about relationships in his life, and you know, he’s like, no, no, it’s nothing to do with my parent or this, that, and you know, you weren’t buying it right away, and at one point he gave you a quick answer when he was like, oh yeah, I’m over that, and you were like, that came from your head and not from your heart, and again, a lot of the stuff was off the ice stuff that seemed to really be carrying into a lot of his decisions, and, uh, I guess I was wondering, is that, is that something, is that a pattern you see a lot of?

42:45 This, I do this for this, and I do this for love and passion, I do this to make the bills, and it’s all wrapped up in an old relationship-based piece, a parental base, and people just need to work a lot of that out. Is that yeah? Okay, I think that can be an awful lot of the blocks, and then when you move through that, there is the tactical and the strategic play. I mean, strategy and tactics are great, but they’re only, it’s like, it’s like, it’s, I’d almost, I’d use the analogy of a young a young soul, like a young man or woman, like you know a young student, and people obsess about, oh, I need my kids to be have financial literacy, and you know, be, you know, understand numbers, and that’s a great, but if you’re laying more education on top of low self-esteem.

43:24 So when I work with young people, which I have historically done, talking in schools, etc., and it’s very much a contribution thing for me. It’s something I love to do, and I work with young people, 14, 15, 16 years old. Their biggest challenge is self-esteem, is value, is identity. They don’t really know who they are, and they don’t really feel tremendously good about themselves. There’s no education in the world that will fix that.

43:45 It will basically layer on top, like Band-Aids or plasters, but it won’t actually get to the core. And the same principle applies so if you think about that gentleman last night, what a soul. Oh my God, I mean, what a beautiful man, and it’s sad to see this man, you know, going out into the world doing stuff every day that he really doesn’t want to do because he feels he needs to pay the bills, and be successful, because his parents, particularly his father, understands what he does here, but doesn’t get what he does here.

44:15 And yet this is where his heart lies. This is where his passion lies, and when we track it all back, the reality is he’s seeking validation from his father. He wants his father to see him as a success. And when we, if you think about it, and I believe that we are obsessed by what people think about us in this world. You can take that and multiply it by a 100 or a thousand when it comes to our parents, so we will literally live our entire lives to try and impress our parents, whether we know it or not.

44:44 We know it or not. Okay, so I have a question for not just you, but a question for the audience listening here is who are you seeking validation from today? I don’t want you to necessarily answer that, but think about that. Who are you seeking validation from? I’m not asking, are you?

45:01 I’m asking who, because I don’t know a single soul in this world, including myself, that’s not seeking validation from somebody. I asked that question in a workshop one day, and this lady was there. Now she didn’t tell me for about a year afterwards. She was so angry, because what came up for her was the first name was her father. Wouldn’t be unusual, except for her father left when she was two.

45:27 He walked out. He left the home when she was two, and yet she is desperately trying to seek his approval today. She wants to get herself in a financial situation that if he walks back in the door into her life right now, and she doesn’t know why he left, really. So it’s not that he’s a bad guy or whatever. You know, we just don’t know the circumstances, but if he walks back in, she wants to be able to look him in the eye and go, I didn’t need you to succeed, and I don’t need you right now.

45:58 And her whole life is based on that event. It might never happen. It probably won’t ever happen. It may never happen, but the point is she’s living her life on the basis that someday he may walk back in. So this is how she’s playing out now.

46:12 She was unaware of this reality, completely unaware, and I said now that you’re aware of that, where does it show up? She goes, I make decisions, I live in places, I chase career opportunities primarily based on this old story, and if I look at my life, therefore there’s parts of it that are not authentically aligned to who I am as a person. I’m doing things that I don’t really want to do because this story is playing out. This movie is playing out within me that I was unaware of.

46:45 That’s just one example of how this plays out. And when we got to the core, we didn’t get to the core, because again we didn’t have a lot of time, but we got right back down to even further depth than that, and he admitted last night that young man admitted last night that actually he didn’t feel he deserved it. Okay, which is the next level, then, right? Often we want great relationships. We want to be aligned in business.

47:11 We want to make a difference in the world. You know, we want to be confident in our own skin. We want to be happy, but do you deserve to be happy? Let’s bring it back to couples again. It’s like, you know, people often say, well, I want this, and I want them, I want them to clear up the kitchen, and I want them to put their slippers away, and I want them to stop smoking in the apartment, and whatever, right?

47:33 But my question to you is, can you allow that person to love you? Do you deserve to be loved? I mean, they’re heavy-hitting questions, but often people, of course I do, really, because most of us walk this Earth and we’re not really that fond of who we are. We’re not really that proud of who we become in our own skin, and therefore we don’t believe that people deserve us. I had a father and a business bus man recently saying, my biggest challenge is I’m not home with the kids.

48:00 I’m away for x amount of time. I’m making loads of money, but I’m not home and present with my children, and I wanted you to help me make that transition. I said, well, that’s assuming you want to make that transition. Goes, have you not been listening to me? Like, like, what, what, like, he was so mad, because he thought, like, I just ignored everything.

48:22 I was listening, but I was really hearing, and I was really feeling, and we got through the annoyance and the anger, and we got to the conversation that really he’s not really proud of who he’s become as a man, and therefore a father, and therefore a husband. So if he doesn’t think he’s a good person, how does that play out? What does the Incredible Hulk, green friend, do? What does he do? He gets angry, but he doesn’t want to get angry, because when he gets angry and he turns green and grows up and he’s massive and he starts smashing s***, he basically damages people and hurts people.

48:56 So what he does, he removes himself from the situation. The possibilities, he removes himself from human connection because he doesn’t want to get angry. It’s really complicated, but this man is removing himself from the home, right? And he looked at me, goes, oh my God, he said, you know what, he said, he said, I don’t fully own that, because I, I’m struggling to get my head around that right now, but he said there’s some truth in what you’re saying. I’m saying intellectually I want to be at home, but honestly, the truth is there’s a part of me that wonders, are my kids better off without me at some level?

49:31 So why I’m sharing that, it’s a very deep, and it’s a very maybe complicated example, but I’m just sharing the depth of our story and what we hold to be true, and how it plays out in our lives, because I believe there’s four types of beliefs, and I say that now, and this is where you may, I may remember them. But there’s limiting beliefs, which we’re all familiar with, like money doesn’t grow on trees, and we’ve all heard that one. There’s debilitating beliefs, and these are the stealth bombers that don’t show up on any radar, the stealth bombers that I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve to be loved, I, I, I don’t deserve success, I’m not a good person, I don’t believe in who I am, I don’t believe in what I’ve done, etc.

50:13 These are like deep, and we’re completely blinded by them, but yet they continue to play out. And then there is adopted beliefs, things that we’ve adopted from our parents and adoptive from society that I think we often need to detach from to really know whether we own them or not. And then there’s finally, what do I actually believe, what do I actually believe in this world? I love that conversation. I love to find out what people actually believe, removed, almost unplugged from society, unplugged from parental expectation, unplugged from the person they think they should be.

50:47 What do you actually believe? And from that place, the clarity in terms of what we should do and who we should become and who we should be every day starts to come. Right, right. There was a young man last night that said, one of the things that he thought about when you asked was that his parents only seemed to love him when he achieved something, and that resonated with everyone in the room. I got emotional.

51:13 You got emotional. You get very emotional at these pieces. You get really invested in the people and you talked, you addressed it, and then you said, you know, this is a conversation you need to happen, you know, that needs to happen for you and even for the parents, but you said maybe that doesn’t mean a text tonight, maybe that means you need to go and be with this for a while, but it’s something that needs to happen, you know, for your own health and etc., and I, I was just wondering, what is like the next action step sometimes when you have people try to align themselves and have these realizations, and do you get people that make the phone call that night and divorce and all that, and when is the amount of time where you want to be with it, and then kind of take an action?

51:57 Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. I mean, I remember client one, we had four sessions in the year, and the first weekend he got back, despite my recommendations, got back home, burst open the door, honey, let’s sit down, I’ve got a chat to you. Downloads everything. They came up for him, starts kind of saying now, you need to work on your s***, you need to do this, and of course she freaks out, hates my guts, doesn’t even know who I am, and you know, kind of writes me off straight away, and he comes back, and it was just like a nuclear explosion.

52:23 He comes back and said, I just did it all wrong, didn’t I? And I said, well, yeah, you did. You kind of really messed that one up. So then he did something even worse the next time. So then he went the other extreme.

52:32 The next time he comes home, walks in his wife says anything to tell? No. Not, I don’t want to discuss anything, and she’s like, excuse me. He said, no, not going to talk about it, let’s just leave it for a week or two. She’s like, she’s freaking out, you know, it’s even worse.

52:47 She’s worried. She’s speculating everything else, and then finally he found his way, where he’d come back and said I’d love to talk to you. And it’s not just some seminar thing, that I got all these strategies and how to this is what’s come up for me, and then they started having real conversations and real dialogue. So there’s a place to sit with things and absorb, because what it does, it changes the conversation. So the story I often use to attempt to explain this is that years ago I lived in a city where we didn’t really want to live, and we didn’t know where to go, and I kept coming at the conversation, and Pauline kept defending it.

53:21 Then she’d come to the conversation and I defend it. It’s like, you know, your wife comes home and says, I want to see the new movie, you know, you know, maybe I’m being sexist, but let’s just, you know, just for the fun of it, it’s kind of like, you know, Notting Hill, too, or whatever, and I want to go to see Rocky 15, the new Rocky 15 movie that’s out, and I go, I want to see Rocky. She goes, no, I want to see, I want to see Notting Hill. I, I want to see Rocky.

53:42 I said, no, no, and then I said, listen, I’m just being an ass let’s go to see Notting Hill. That’s the very moment she goes, no, no, no, no, no, let’s go to see Rocky but we come at it, and we’re, we’re kind of, it’s like this juggling thing. So yeah, I think we need to sit with things to a point. I remember, you know, the conversation was, I was in the gym one day, and this woman was on the running machine beside me, and I said, you know, are you, you keep pretty fit?

54:05 And she goes, yeah, and she says, I do a lot of walking, and I look behind me, and there’s like four foot of snow outside, and it was a Canadian city that we really love. The people, we just didn’t like the city. And, um, in that moment I said, I have to leave the city. It was just one of those moments I came back in the door, and this has been months of back and forth dialogue on certainty. I walked in the door.

54:25 I said, Pauline, I have to get out. She looked at me and she says, okay, so when you sit with something and then you make a decision, here it becomes absolute, and everyone feels that from you. But if you’re trying to manufacture it, you’re in negotiations mode. Does that, I don’t know if that attempts to speak to what you’re talking about? Yeah.

54:47 And then when you communicate that decision, if it’s, if it’s all heady, then it just sounds like a rationalization, and when it’s here, people, you could say the same sentence like you said, but people know, that feel it, then it can move mountains. Yeah, I, I, I believe that we would eradicate 95% of the world’s communication issues if we stopped trying to communicate and just spoke our truth. Right? And that’s the difference between this and this. Just speak your truth.

55:09 Your vulnerable truth, your your authenticity. Just say what’s on, not your mind, tell me what’s on your, I don’t give a s*** what’s on your mind. I don’t care less what’s on your mind. I want to know what you feel. If we just tell people how we felt, if we let people know how, like, if that man finds the courage to go home and say you know, the line he said was, I said, what’s the conversation you need to have?

55:34 And he floored me. He said, you know, you know, his parents, like, why do you only love me when I achieve something? If he went back and rather than saying, got angry and accused them, if he went back and said, this is how I feel, there’s a 99% chance that his parents don’t mean to do that, but that’s how they grew up, and that’s how they parent based on what they’ve seen historically. They’d probably be floored if they were in the audience last night. They’re probably sitting there going, oh my God, yeah, oh my God, no, don’t you just don’t understand?

56:06 We want you to achieve because we think that’s what makes you happy, but we want you to know we love you, but if he doesn’t have the courage to have the conversation, it’s unlikely that they ever will. Yeah, and you said that conversation will help them too. Totally. So it’s a lot of times we frame it as, I’m not being treated right, they are the bad parents, but it’s because what happens is it’ll create a much deeper bond, because right now, guaranteed, he has a surface relationship with his parents, not just the amount of time he spends with them, but the conversations.

56:38 Why would he want to go over for Sunday lunch? Why would he want to go and spend Easter with them? Why would he put his summer plans aside and spend time with parents that he feels only love him when he achieves something? So he’ll remove himself from that situation, now rationalize that he’s busy and justify that he’s got so many complications that he doesn’t, so he’s removing himself from that situation. Yet all there’s blocking it is the fact that they’re not sharing how they feel about each other.

57:06 You said something last night that disturbed me, and that is that when you go and speak to military people at bases, you’ve gone on stage and said, I don’t think you’re heroes, or you’re not heroes to me, and that’s the way you open the conversation, and the things that you’ve learned, you said about some of these people in the military about why they’re there, because we often times have a version of in our mind why they’re there, isn’t necessarily the reason that they actually are there, and when you went down and dug deeper, there’s all sorts of issues with, say, a profession like that, and I know it’s in other professions too. Could you just take me through how you had that reaction and how that kind of that hero frame can be just as debilitating as it can be?

57:53 I, I don’t think we’re doing anybody a service. Movies about this, Clint would, did a movie about eima and T and took these guys that had been in iima, followed them back through America when they went on these hero tours, and how they were just, was ruining them inside, being called this name. Yeah, because a lot of them don’t own it. A lot of them don’t feel they deserve it, but when I stood on that first stage, I I, I was in Fort Benning, and, uh, I basically stood there and I said, I just want to be clear one thing, that you’re not my heroes.

58:20 Um, and initially I think people probably reacted to that, um, and not just because I’m an Irish guy living in Canada speaking in the United States, but I said, nor do I believe in societal terms it serves you. So, and I was speaking to the military, I said, and this is not a military issue, by the way, we could replace this, and I’ll get to that in a minute. I said, when you walk into a Starbucks and you order a coffee, sometimes you don’t even pay for the coffee, because someone behind you or in front of you has paid for your coffee.

58:45 Thank you for your service. If you’ve got your uniform on, or are you walking to stores in America primarily, and you get a discount because you’re part of the military? Now that’s a little bit different, but in essence what we’re doing is we’re putting them on to pedestals. We do it with celebrities. We do it with people who are successful.

58:59 We did it with people like Steve Jobs. Now people like, idolized him, idolized him, like, put him on a pedestal, and people were literally lying in the streets of Tokyo and lying in the streets of Paris, and lying in the streets of all over the world, mourning him, lighting candles in front of these visuals, and yet they’d never met him, and what did he do? I mean, no disrespect to him, he was a genius in a, in a, in a, in what he did, but who was he? Like, who was he as a man, as a person?

59:32 Like, we we emulate people. I mean, we, I tell you how obsessed we are putting people on pedestals. We are literally looking for people to put on pedestals. There was a time, and probably not that far back, in the late, maybe the early, mid 70s, where a priest walked down the road in Ireland, you would step off the path to allow them to walk past you. No disrespect to the priest, I’m not knocking it, but if they walk down the street today, I mean, someone might hit them because of all the scandals that have been going on, but when you put someone on a pedestal, they have to fall.

1:00:07 So we’re all equal. Okay, like, even people last night were treating me initially like as if I was some all-seeing eye or something, like I wasn’t human. I was something special. There’s something special about me, nothing more than anyone else, nothing, absolutely nothing. And when you, when we’re all equal, it’s brilliant, but then suddenly we, we, and they allow us to put them onto a pedestal and push them up and push them up and push them up and push them up, and when they’re standing at the top of that pyramid, when they’re down here, and they look left and right they feel they’re connected.

1:00:47 They feel that they’re not above everybody else. They feel that they can turn for help, but when they’re pushed up to a pedestal and they look left and right, when they’re at the top, there is no one left and right of them. Nobody. And there they feel they need to have all the answers. So we’ve seen it with doctors and dentists and things of that.

1:01:05 We see it with politicians. We see it with celebrities. And back to the military, I said, here’s the problem, ladies and gentlemen, when you leave the military. So these were transitioning soldiers, moving from the military world into the civilian world. When you leave the military and you take off that uniform and you drop it on the ground or hang it up in your closet, who are you?

1:01:29 When you take off your military uniform, and we could replace military uniform with business, with parenting, so as the kids leave the nest, who is the mother, who is the father? More so the mother, because more mothers stay at home to look after their kids than men do. They invest not just so much in their children, but they invest so much of themselves. Their kids walk away. It’s like, well, that was an interesting 20 years.

1:01:59 Maybe it was very rewarding, maybe it was spectacular, maybe it was some of the most meaningful years of their lives. I get it, but who am I? And then they turn around to the stranger living with them, call their husband, and they go, and who are you, by the way? So what I’m saying is that we don’t serve these men and women. We say that they serve the nation of America, anywhere else for that matter, and and the military, US military, by the way, I’m not anti-US military.

1:02:28 I’m not anti-us. They’ve done some incredible things in the context of the world. I don’t agree with everything, but that’s not the point, and I’m not there supporting the military. I’m, they’re supporting these people, and when, when they’re, when they take off their uniforms, bad enough, but then they lose the hero status, and one of them had the courage to tell me. He said, have you ever heard the song The Traveling Soldier, sung by The Dixie Chicks?

1:02:50 And I said no, and his wife refers to him as the Traveling Soldier, and it’s this beautiful story in this song, and he said to her, he said to me, I just asked her recently because he’s about to transition, he said, when I take off my uniform and I leave the military, will I be your traveling soldier? And she said no, and he was tearing up in front of me, and he said the following statement, floored me, crushed me, because it’s unnecessary, and he said, I won’t be the hero to my wife, and I won’t be the hero to my children. He has taken his whole identity as a man and as a parent and wrapped it up in a uniform.

1:03:31 I get the commitment, I get it, but I’m saying that is unhealthy. When a recession hits a country, there’s carnage, but there’s also a lot, followed by a lot of suicides, when somebody loses their business. They don’t just lose their business and their means of an income. They lose their identity to a point where they will stand on a bridge and jump, standing on the edge of a building and jump. That’s about identity.

1:03:58 So how much of, like, how much of who we are is tied up in what we do in societal terms today? It’s extraordinary. You walk to a dinner party, it’s like, hey, what do you do? I’m an accountant. I don’t care what’s on your mind.

1:04:15 I don’t care what you do. Tell me and show me who you are as an individual, first and foremost, and that’s the starting point of the relationship that I want to engage in. What question do you ask people to get them to engage in that? First, I don’t have a standard question. Okay, just, you’re probably into it, and go where you need to go.

1:04:34 I just, probably someone like, how much money have you got in the bank, or something? And I I just, you know, maybe just even tell me a bit about yourself, right? You know, see where they go, see where they go. I don’t have a standard question. I mean, I just, I just go where the conversation goes.

1:04:49 Or I mean, nor do you want to walk into a dinner party and go, how you doing? Yeah, yeah, what’s your biggest fear? Yeah, I mean, you know, you’ll be a lonely guy sitting in the corner on your own having a glass of wine, which is not always about, if they know anything about you, they’re probably trying to avoid you. Yeah, exactly. Not sure what you’re going to say about on that, though.

1:05:03 Yeah, that’s an interesting point, because people often say, God, you intimidate me, you scare me. Right? And I used to think, myself, oh my God, this is a disaster from a marketing standpoint. I, you know, I’m destined to never have any clients, because everyone’s scared of me. They’re not scared of me, they’re scared of their own truth, and what they do know, or they sense, is that I will get to it.

1:05:26 Yes, I am relentless, and I will go after your truth, not so I can go home and chalk it up as another win. I’m relentless and after your truth, because the truth is the only thing that somebody said many years before I even existed. The truth will set you free, and I never understood that. Oh, how true that is. I’m after their truth because I know what’s available when I work with somebody.

1:05:48 I literally, someone like a photographic click, and it just goes into my brain, and I sit with it and I hold it, and it’s like what’s possible for them, because most of us have no idea what we’re capable of, and I can see that in yourself when you’re going in, and the guy in the front row last night, it’s almost like it’s unfinished business for you. It’s almost like a cluttered room that needs to be organized. It’s almost like for you, you’re like, no, no, no, that’s not it, that’s not it, but we need to get there.

1:06:17 We need to get, that’s not it. Okay, we’re getting close, and you seem like you need to make it happen. Yeah, well, actually, on that, and that’s true to a point, I think what I’ve done in recent times, let, I’ve let go of the need for it to happen, because the minute you go out, you need to make it happen. You get attached to the outcome, and it becomes very mental. It becomes very tactical.

1:06:38 It becomes very strategic, and you have to wrap it in a bow. What I’ve learned, um, it becomes a puzzle for the brain as opposed to a solution in the heart. Absolutely, bang on, and what I do now is I, I go after it gently, sometimes a little bit aggressive, but I go after it, and I just, I let go of the need to have an outcome, and then what ends up happening in that space is, it draws out, it allows it to come. So it’s, it’s, I think, and the feedback from people that worked with me and have worked with me, who’ve experienced me more recently, is that they almost feel that the work is more powerful, because it’s more, it’s more this than this, you know, kind of come on.

1:07:18 Yeah, I’m just, if it happens, great, and it doesn’t, I, like, over, and I care deeply, but you can care and not have to be connected to the outcome. Right, right. I told the story last night, when I introduced myself to you at Jason’s event in Napa, and I’d seen you speak and really captivate the audience, and, uh, I really wanted to talk to you. I think I just wanted to introduce myself, and, but at the same time, uh, I was, uh, I was maybe scared of my truth.

1:07:42 We are a little bit, and I was like, Phil’s going to read me in about three seconds, so here we go, let’s go talk to Philip. And, uh, I, I was part of me, in the left brain, was like, okay, Philip’s going to be like, Brian, you’re obviously not happy with London Real, you need to find your real direction in life. And, uh, so I went up and introduced myself, and, and obviously, uh, you know, I started talking about the show, and you almost cut me off and said, uh, you know, Brian, I, I don’t care if it’s just you and your grandmother, I think is what you said.

1:08:10 I’d love to be on your show. And you was like, I, I feel this energy, and, and, uh, I was like, thank you, and then I think I excused myself pretty quickly. I was like, all right, let’s, let’s not, let’s not mess that up. Um, but I was wondering if you get that reaction more from people now, if they know a little bit about you, aware, or if you give a talk like that on, on a Sunday, and then people afterwards, are they, are they seeking a little validation from you, or do they look into you sometimes for what’s coming back at them?

1:08:35 And does that feel strange? Yeah, sometimes people, you know, people just want to avoid you. You, you’ve touched something on stage. Where I mean, to be fair, I think the one thing, and I don’t compliment, compliment myself a lot publicly, uh, or privately for that matter, but, uh, I think the one thing that I, I’m very proud of is the fact that, when I, like last night was an example of that. I came here last night and I was pretty unscripted, but I went after the audience truth.

1:09:00 I didn’t go after them, but I went after their truth. I created a conversation that I believe is very real and authentic and true, as opposed to coming here and trying to look good, because I could have come here last night with a kind of a different energy, fire people up, make them feel good about themselves, than hopefully me. So one thing I’m proud of myself is that I, I do have I do create conversations that are real, but sometimes in that realness people identify or see their own truth or start to feel their own truth, and they retract.

1:09:30 Um, and some people say maybe they’re just not ready. Um, maybe they’ll never be ready. Um, so what happens is sometimes people literally don’t want to see me. They just don’t want to be around me. I mean, this is a pretty lonely gig.

1:09:43 Um, you know, and I don’t say that likely. I mean, what I do is very lonely, despite the fact that it’s surrounded by people. Um, the one fallout, and I’ve never spoken about this, um, is in friendships. I mean, I don’t have a lot of friends in Canada. I’m not, you know, you know, crying about it, and maybe I would if I considered it.

1:10:05 Um, but there’s a big cost to what I do. So I was out one night, for example, we with two couples. One couple was a client, uh, one guy was a client, and there was another guy, and the three of us were in a corner. Now my client was going after him like I probably would have 10 years ago, and he was going after him and challenging him and everything else, and I remember very distinctly, and I purposely kind of stayed back a little bit, but literally, you know, a month later I texted the couple, and so, let’s get together, and they weren’t busy and they weren’t around, and you know, whatever, and I finally just called his wife, and I said, uh, this was the non-client individual, and I said is there something I’m missing here?

1:10:42 And she goes, my husband doesn’t want to meet you again, and pretty much, and I just said okay, and I said, can I ask why? And she said, well, you know, he’s got a lot of s*** that he hasn’t dealt with, and he, you know, he felt you were attacking him. In reality, it was interesting that it wasn’t really a lot of what, you know, what I was doing that night. Um, cuz I don’t bring my work like I don’t sit down at dinner tables and try to analyze people. I mean, Jesus, it’s way too exhausting, and you know, I want to have a bit of fun and unwind and unrelaxed.

1:11:07 My wife at home, I mean, she’d probably have divorced me 10 years ago if I, if she had, basically, you know, if I’d analyze her all the time. And I can be a very annoying person, because I do call it. I call my truth sometimes. So the point I’m trying to make is that a lot of people don’t want to be around you because they’re afraid of their truth, and that’s what you do professionally, and so they just want to stay away from it because they might have to deal with it.

1:11:29 Yeah, and then people think you’re doing your work on them when I’m not doing my work. I might just, so for example, a friend of mine might be bitching about his job, and I might just turn and say, well, listen, you’re always bitching about your job. Why don’t you just leave it, or don’t you be doing your work? And I’m not doing your work. This is like, I don’t put work and, and person life.

1:11:43 I’m just one individual, and that’s one of the problems of society, is that we think our work needs to stand outside of who we are. I think our work needs to be an extension of who we are, because if it’s not, you’re kind of screwed, because you’re spending most of your living awake time doing this thing. If it’s not a reflection or an extension or some sort of connected aspect of who you are, you’re going to live a very disconnected life for a very long time, and you’re going to be very confused, and you’re always going to be disconnected.

1:12:15 I’m not saying you have to nail it in day one, but move towards it, right, and be aligned. Every hour you’re doing something that’s not congruent with who you are is detracting from that, off the time, correct? And people say, well, that’s great, fell that sounds brilliant, but I don’t know what this is. Now, I used to use that as an excuse for years, and what I often say to people is, act upon what you do know. Act upon what you do know as a p, as opposed to not act using what you don’t know as a reason.

1:12:47 So if you know you’re in a job that doesn’t serve you, if it’s driving you nuts, if it’s degrading you, dragging you down, holding you back, some, some would say this is crazy, but sometimes you’ve just got to make a bold move and give it up and do what the Vikings did when they landed sometimes on a shore. They’d burn the ships because there was no going back. Yeah, we all would love to transition into our dream jobs before we give up the job that we have or the business that we have, but sometimes that’s not available to us, because the shittiness of the job that we’re in or the business that we’re in is actually closing us down, our creativity down.

1:13:23 Okay, it’s closing us down emotionally, so therefore it’s blinding us from what’s available to us. So sometimes you just give it up, and then people say, yeah, but how am I going to pay the bills, on what, on the apartment? I said, well, which is more important, paying the bills, and aesthetically looking as if you’re still successful and still good, and paying for your Audi, you know, paying your installments, so that’s more important than your happiness to me.

1:13:48 We’ve have it as ways. You asked a question last night. You said, well, who is, who is here is not doing what, what they love or doing what they want to do? And, uh, people raised their hand, and you said, well, what, what should you be doing? And people were looking around, and you said, uh, well, if you don’t know, what would you do if you did know?

1:14:08 And I didn’t even understand what you were talking about at first, and, and people were like, what? And then he’s like, well, but if you know, and then I think you, you broke eye contact, to you, you’re like, what if you did know, then what would it be? And a few people raised their hand, and they told you the answer. Um, we all know. We all know every one of us knows exactly what it is.

1:14:28 We’re just scared of this, or scared of the success or the failure, a lot of things, but we know down here. We know. Yeah, I think it’s, it’s more down to, it’s not the scared. I think we use fear as an example or a reason. I think it’s less about the fear, actually.

1:14:41 It’s more about, do I deserve it? Can I do it? And that is a fear as well, of course, but can I do it? Do I deserve the success? Do I deserve to be happy?

1:14:49 So again, if there was one thing that I love to work with people, it’s shifting that internal value piece, that internal value proposition, because when you lift your internal value within yourself, everything changes. As I as I discussed it last night, you will lean into conversations. You will do things that are ordinarily you wouldn’t have seen yourself do. You shift your value proposition within, and it will change everything in your life. Honestly, it will change everything in your life.

1:15:14 And what ends up happening is, a lot of people, you know, there might be a lot of people watching this right now, and they’ve just checked out. They go, oh s*** this guy’s all about value and changing value within. I mean, I’m, I don’t have a value problem. I’m super good at what I do. And there they’ve just made a fundamental mistake.

1:15:29 They’ve mixed up confidence with self-value. You can be incredibly confident and do something exceptionally well. You could have one of the biggest actors in Hollywood, who has paid the highest money, who is one of the most stunning actors in the world, can play incredible characters, very super dynamic, but when the lights are off and he’s at home, or she’s at home on their own, their confidence is shot. Sorry, their, their, their self-esteem is shot. M, and I see business owners, very successful financial business people, CEOs that I work with personally, they’re very confident.

1:16:03 They can stand in front of their team. They can talk strategy tactics, but their self-worth at home is a little bit different. Now, if you can start merging the two, extraordinary things happen, right? And you saw that with the Olympic athletes you worked with as well in 2012, that they could be extraordinary at this one thing, but a lot of times they were not necessarily enjoying that one thing they were doing. I mean, one of the first things I said to, when I walked into I mean, one of the groups I worked with was the rowing team, and two things I said, pretty much straight up F, and I wasn’t trying to shock them, but I was trying to create some real strong context, and I said number one is, I think your sport is boring.

1:16:38 Okay, and I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious either, but I was just trying to say, just to be really clear, I’m not here about your sport. I’m not here to help you tactically. I’m not here to help you physically, but if you think for one second that your emotions are not affecting your ability to perform on the water, how mistaken you are. They gave me one shot, and they said it’s optional, if we come back on the second day, because we’re busy people. London’s coming up.

1:17:01 Every one of them showed up on the second day and then they end up inviting me to London to experience it, which was an extraordinary experience. And the second thing I said is, you’re too attached to the outcome. Said, what do you mean? I said, you’re too attached to this medal. it’s a gold medal.

1:17:17 It’s probably not even gold. One of them says, no, it’s not real gold, or it’s partial gold so I said, you got to let go. See, there’s a beautiful place to get to in this world, is to have a desire. Okay, to have a desire to have something that you want to achieve, to be attached to some extent to an outcome or be clear on what that outcome is, but then let it go, to let it go so you don’t need this to validate who you are. And then what happens is you meet somewhere in the middle, and it becomes like this, and it’s more peaceful and it’s more congruent and it’s more fluent, and flow, unfortunately, we think has only been achieved and accessible to athletes.

1:18:06 And yet I believe flow, as we’ve heard about it or talked about it or experienced it, is available to everybody. And nor should we expect it to be constant, but there’s periods of time in our life when the flow can come in if we work on it. What’s a kid from Ireland doing on the stage in Vegas talking to thousands of people about identity, now traveling around the world? I know you’ve got a retreat in Ireland. You know, I saw you in Napa.

1:18:35 You know, how did you get here? Was this something you dreamed about when you were a kid? Never. You were you were in the real estate business. Yep, I was in the coffee.

1:18:46 I was in the wine business for 5 years, I was in the coffee business for 5 years. Uh, my brother set up a coffee company called Java Republic in Ireland, and it has turned out to be an extraordinary brand, and I was very passionate about that, and, uh, I think, you know, I think you know, it was, it was David’s journey, not mine. Um, and, uh, I think to honor the relationship and, and everything else, I, you know, I kind of decided that that wasn’t for me.

1:19:09 Um, and I think that was a good thing, and I didn’t know what it was, and, uh, I meandered for a few years, felt really lost. Um, but I just knew there was something else out there, and I think at some level I had some inkling into the conversation, like we all know. I knew that I wanted to work with people in some capacity, but I didn’t believe I deserved it which I was completely unaware of. That was my stealth bomber. That was my debilitating belief.

1:19:35 Um, but I really thought it lay in my inadequacy about education, our lack of education. Like, I’m completely uneducated in a formal sense. Um, and I kind of worked on some of those things, and then I got to the belief piece. I got to, do I deserve this? Do I believe I can do this?

1:19:51 And when I started to really work on that, it just finally came down to pulling the trigger. And I’ll never forget announcing that I’m having, I’m opening up my first kind of coaching, you know, opening up for clients, if you like, and my first client rang and signed up to work with me for a year, and then the second guy phoned, and then I just started to go from there, but I had no, absolutely no idea what I was going to be doing in the context of this. And I think that if I had continued to chase my goals, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.

1:20:19 I might be financially in a better place. I might be sitting there justifying and rationalizing that this is the place I need to be in, but I have found what I’ll do for the rest of my life. I will literally, as the grave, as the coffin is dropped, I’ll still be yapping about what I believe and what I stand for, and hopefully allowing people, encouraging people, and challenging people to really see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that if you get reincarnated and come back as a slug, or you get reincarnated and come back as a bird, brilliant, it’s a bonus, but really grasp what you have and have the courage to step out and run the risk of being happy, and that’s my job, that’s what I’m here to do.

1:21:05 And if I have to pay a price for that emotionally, or maybe I’m a little bit isolated from certain people, um, that’s what I’m here to do. I know that my heart and soul hasn’t really answered your question. How did I get here? I think it’s been accidents. Um, it’s been a, it’s been belief.

1:21:23 It’s about taking action in the, in the absence of clarity, which is a huge mantra of mine: take action in the absence of clarity. Um, or in the absence of clarity, take action, whichever way you want to say it, and meeting great people, meeting people like yourself, who within the first two minutes I said, I’m in. I think I said to you, you start talking about your reach and how successful and other guests, and I just looked at you, and I just bought into you, and I said, I don’t care if it’s you and your grandmother are the only listeners to this or watchers or viewers.

1:21:52 I’m in, and Jason, like, we met. Jason bought into me. There’s something about me that Jason saw, and he invited me. So without Jason, I wouldn’t be here with you, and without this interview, I won’t meet the person who’s watching this who may want to offer me a possibility to go and do a podcast, or a conversation, or maybe someone will come on a retreat with me. I don’t know, but people have been extraordinarily good to me, and you’re following that intuition, and it’s working out perfectly.

1:22:20 Yeah, yeah. So what I did was, I shared very briefly last night, is I’ve let go of chasing opportunities, and what’s happening is possibilities are opening up for me, and people will say, well, aren’t they the same thing? No, they’re not. We spend so much time looking for opportunities, and we’re so fixed on it that we miss the possibilities of life. It’s like blinkers, right?

1:22:43 You know, I want to be a millionaire before I’m this age, or I want 50 properties, or I want, you know, this business, and I want a beautiful woman in my life. I want a beautiful man in my life. And, you know, I, me, I give you an example of this. I remember a client telling me one day, says, I’ve created a dream manifesto for the perfect woman. I said, fair enough, what does it look like?

1:23:00 And he said, well, this is her leg length, and this is her bum size, and this is her breast size. This is what she’s going to be doing, and she’s going to be a yoga instructor, she’s going to be a vegetarian, she’s got to be outgoing, into meditation, etc., etc., etc. And he goes, what do you think? And I said, you really want to know what I think? And he said, yeah.

1:23:18 I said, I can order you one of those, because I’ve got a friend who works in Toshiba, and I think we can build one. In fact, we maybe build two. I’ll get one as well. Well, and what I was basically saying, in my own sarcastic, unfunny way, I think I’m funny sometimes, but my wife doesn’t agree, is basically that you’re manufacturing somebody, and you can’t manufacture soul. And I said, if I’m wrong, tell me.

1:23:41 And three months later he rings me, and he says, you’re wrong. She showed up. This is the boob size, this is whatever, it’s almost identical. And I said, well, she, you know, what you learn, stuff every day, good luck. A month later he rings back, says, didn’t work out, and I said, why?

1:23:55 He says, I forgot to put on the list that she shouldn’t be psychotic. The point is that, you know, we’re so consumed by trying to dream up and attract what we want, and a lot of it’s up here, and we’re so busy doing that that he’s in the bar doing his dream manifesto, and the girl serving him a drink just puts it down, says, there’s your drink, sir, thank you, thank you. He doesn’t even look at her. And if he lifted his head and not just looked at her beauty or possible beauty, but opened himself up, that could be literally the love of his life, that put the drink down, and he didn’t even see her because he was too busy chasing what he thought he wanted.

1:24:34 Right? And does vulnerability open play into that a bit? Is if you can even be vulnerable yourself, then it’ll open you up to even more possibilities. Vulnerability is the doorway. That’s a concept most people don’t know.

1:24:48 Yeah, oh my God, what they’re missing in this life. I could talk about vulnerability for 4 hours, and then take a break, and speak about it for another 4 hours. Just use the dating analogy. I have a beautiful woman who’s done some work with me called Donna, and now every time I refer to her she gets really uncomfortable, and she doesn’t like it. Maybe I’m disrespectful in the way I talk about it.

1:25:13 It’s not my intent. I, this woman is the epitome of courage to me. Um, she shared the most incredible story one day, and it was so simple. She said, she, I, I think she went online, or somebody set up a blind date. I think it was maybe a blind date, and she found herself at home putting on makeup, and she doesn’t wear makeup.

1:25:34 She’s giving up wearing makeup and putting on some sort of perfume that she’s not really, you know, and going on this date with this man, um, and I think between them they discovered pretty quickly that it wasn’t a fit, and I think he or she said that, and then suddenly the minute they said that, said, well, listen, you know, this is, I’m not feeling it, so it’s not going to work. They said, well, let’s have a drink, and then they start talking about life, and he opens up and says, you know, honestly, one of the things I always look for in women is, I’m not mad about women who wear makeup. You know, I’d like just women who just don’t, you know, not that they don’t care but they just, they want to be seen for who they are, as opposed to trying to be something that’s not.

1:26:14 My argument or debate, by the way, just so we’re clear. I’m just using this, and she just goes, I don’t wear makeup. I put it on tonight because I was trying to impress you. And isn’t that just such a cool analogy or example or you know, doorway for us just to look at what we do? So we’ll meet people in a bar.

1:26:36 We’ll meet people in a restaurant. We’ll meet people in life, and we, to some extent, unconsciously play a game, this cat-and-mouse game, and we’re not vulnerable in that space because we’re too busy trying to be something we’re not. So vulnerability is this most incredible. It’s not a tool. It’s not a strategy.

1:26:55 It’s a doorway. It’s an incredible possibility, and it changes. It has the capacity to change every relationship in your life, including the one with yourself. Vulnerable to yourself, vulnerable to yourself. I mean, that’s the ultimate relationship, the one we have right here.

1:27:14 And people go, what do you mean, relationship to yourself? I said, absolutely. The biggest bully you’ll ever meet is not the guy or the girl in the schoolyard that bullied you for years, or the bully that you are to them for years. The greatest bully you’ll ever meet is the bully that you meet in the mirror every single day, and we don’t honor the relationship we have with ourselves. And vulnerability is just, I, me, I, I could talk about vulnerability, as I said, all day, but in parenting, you know, I ran an event recently, and this young boy was there.

1:27:46 This young man was there, and he was 14 or 15, and the biggest feedback he gave us was, so what do you think of the event? The biggest feedback that came back was he said, it’s great to see that adults have problems too, because at home his dad is strong, his mother has the answers. We can’t allow our kids to see us argue. We can’t allow ourselves to be seen as, you know, crying. We have to close the door and cry, and then open the door, hey honey.

1:28:18 We’re not protecting them. We’re isolating them from life. We’re isolating them to the point where they feel that they cannot be real and vulnerable in front of others. And we take our history and our story and our inadequacy. We wrap it.

1:28:30 We put it in a box. We wrap in a bow. We give it to our children. We say good luck. And yet if they saw us cry and said, Mommy, why are you crying?

1:28:39 Daddy, why are you crying? Daddy’s upset. Daddy’s really sad about this, and we give them the permission to be human. We allow them to see that we don’t have all the answers, and then, for it doesn’t become parent-child, it becomes human-human. Maybe there’s boundaries, and there’s, there’s discipline, or whatever needs to happen.

1:28:59 That’s not what I’m talking about. Allow them to see your vulnerability. My own wife grew up in a house where there was never an argument, and people go, oh my God, that must have been so wonderful. The minute I raise my voice, she shrinks and then gets defensive for years. Doesn’t, not anymore.

1:29:17 That’s changing, or changed, quite a lot, but if she saw arguments, confrontation, if people spoke their truth more, and I’m not just blaming. This is not my wife and her family, if they’re watching this. This is about every family. My family is the same. We think we’re all close, but we don’t necessarily speak our truth.

1:29:36 We don’t share how we are emotionally. We joke a lot. We’re brilliant. A sense of humor, which is a beautiful tool to deflect, and I’m all about having a bit of fun, right, but not all the time. There’s the hockey and the weather story in Canada.

1:29:50 There’s the NFL and the politics. Maybe, maybe in America, in London, we talk about what people talk about. London all the time, the pin politics, yeah, and how warm it is now, two football, and that’s great, and then there’s the humor piece, but where is the real conversation? I have to work on the vulnerability with the children. One, do you have kids?

1:30:14 Yeah, I have a stepdaughter with Mariana, and so, being, you know, my dad and my grandpa, they were always the tough guy and control guy, and so I feel like I’m, that’s my service is to always be that guy. But I, I can see now anything not genuine and congruent with her is not right. Right, and kids will pick that up quicker than anybody will pick that up. So what you say resonates with but also, and I appreciate that, but also we think about vulnerability in the context of personal relationships.

1:30:43 Yeah, oh, I get it. Yeah, I’m just using your example, and it’s great. You know, I’m going to, I’m going to, I’m going to bring that into my parenting style, or into my, you know, working with my stepchild, etc., and that’s great, but what we also miss is that people say, well, where does vulnerability show up in business? So what do you mean, business? I’m a managing director.

1:30:59 I’m a CEO. I’m an owner. I’m a founder. I’m a whatever. I’m a manager.

1:31:02 I don’t realize I’m not saying you walk in every day and go, guys, I’m, guys, guys, I’m down and I’m sad, and I cried last night because our sales are down. I’m just saying that, you know, maybe there’s a point every so often that you can turn around to somebody in a meeting and say, guys, you know what, you know, I’m stressed. Okay, I didn’t sleep last night. I don’t have the answers. I need your help.

1:31:29 You watch your team roll up their sleeves and go, we have your back. It is actually a great leadership style, but the big caveat always is it can only be used in an authentic way. If you try to use vulnerability to achieve something, it will explode and blow up and kick back into your face. So the silly and obnoxious and rude example I often use, to some extent, is people go, oh yeah, vulnerability, I like the idea, this vulnerability thing, yeah, I must try that.

1:32:01 So Monday morning they go to their biggest client and say, I want you to sign this big order, and by the way, before we get into the whole business thing, you know, I used to wet the bed till I was 15 years old. You know, now do you want to do business with me? Well, of course not. You’re trying to be vulnerable. Allow it to come.

1:32:18 So if your stepdaughter, don’t know what age she is, she comes to, in D, you know, Daddy, or whatever she calls Brian, you know, you know, I have an issue in school, and rather go, well, you should do this, maybe, it’s like, you know, what I really struggled in school. What I really did, I, I’ve never talked to you about this before, but I did, and I struggled, and I was really unhappy, and I had no confidence or whatever it is. Right? You know, I fail that exam or I fail that thing, and I remember feeling really stupid.

1:32:45 I promise you, that person can only just walk away, go, they would lean into your relationship like you would not believe because of your vulnerability. I don’t know what it says in the dictionary, but to me vulnerability is one thing and one thing only, it’s only your truth. So if you’re not vulnerable, what you’re basically doing is hiding from people every day. If you do feel stressed and you didn’t sleep the night before at that management meeting, are you going to pretend you’re strong, or can you allow people to see your humanity and allow them to feel human in the process and then be cohesive?

1:33:18 A company rang me recently, and they said, we want you to do a day with us, a team-building day, and I said, I won’t do a team-building day with you, but I will do a team-deepening day. They said, okay, what’s that about? And I explained the concept, and he trusted me. He heard me speak, and I went in and I brought them on this journey of getting to know each other at a real fundamental level. You can’t force vulnerability, but you can provide an environment in which, like, for example, last night, where it can come up, and they walked away knowing more about each other, and therefore why we act and behave and lead in a particular way, and that competition, and that, you know, grittiness, is replaced by understanding and compassion.

1:34:03 So the team deepens. Right, right, powerful. I always ask the people in this chair a bit about themselves, and I was wondering if you could humor me with a few answers. Is there anything that, if you look back over the years, that you changed about your game, maybe, a personal habit or something, something that just had a huge increase on, you know, the quality of your life or the quote unquote success that you have? If you look back, is there any one thing that made a big difference for the show.

1:34:58 Do you miss Ireland? Do you miss Europe? London. Yeah, you’re on the west coast of Canada. It’s a very different place.

1:35:17 Deeply miss Ireland. Can you communicate that to someone who’s not Irish what it’s like to miss Ireland? There’s no words that could describe how much I miss Ireland. Absolutely none. That’s like a child to me.

1:35:37 There is no more beautiful, more grounded, more spiritually connected place on this Earth for me than Ireland. Desperately miss it, but I’m not meant to be there right now on a full-time basis, and I’m like a child when I bring a group over. As I’m doing it, a couple of weeks, they get to see who I really am. They get to really experience Philip McKernan in his home turf and his home soil, you know, doing stuff with relationships that I know for 20 years, and I’m like a, I’m like a, I don’t know, I’m like a Cheshire Cat going around the biggest grin internally and externally, showing them off to this country and showing them off to themselves, and discover Ireland, discover you.

1:36:22 That’s the tagline. It’s basically, I, that country is immense. It doesn’t know how beautiful and how incredible and how magical it is, and could be, often, and that’s the reality. We don’t often recognize that in ourselves and the people around us. We see it often, uh, more so in other people, uh, that we want to emulate, but Ireland.

1:36:43 If I ran the country, I’d do, I’d change a few things, but, um, I’d never want to be in politics because I don’t believe in politics, but at one point I did want to be the president of Ireland, which is a political role. It’s almost like the queen, if you like, but I do believe that if I had the influence in that regard I would use it in a way to really promote, uh, the country at an international level, but also inspire the people of Ireland to believe that they really do have an incredible, incredible place, but you have work to do other places for. I’ve got a lot of work to do, right?

1:37:15 Um, and a lot of people to connect with. Um, and only people who want to be connected with me. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to experience me or my work, or I fr Fen them, or piss them off, or whatever, and that’s fine. And all I’d say to those people who, who, who often take the time to judge me is, you know, maybe send that email to somebody else, or maybe you know, make that Facebook comment to somebody else. If I know you, unlike me, if I, if you’re not aligned to who I am, just with respect, move out of my way and let me get to the person behind you who really does want to actually make a difference in their life, and does see that maybe they can’t do it on their own.

1:37:47 Um, I think we spend a tremendous amount of time judging and letting people know how, you know, we feel about them, where use that energy to look at our anger issues, and sometimes it’s a legitimate feedback, but sometimes it’s not or a lot of the time it’s not. Um, so yeah, I have a lot of people to connect with. Do you listen to that criticism? Facebook comments, YouTube comments. Do you, how do you deal with it?

1:38:11 Do you engage with it? Sometimes it hurts. Okay, every time, every single time, I could sit here and say no, it doesn’t hurt. I just, I don’t listen to it. I off of ducks back, and all hurts every single time.

1:38:24 Like, for example, just recently I started doing videos with my wife. Um, and people are being critical and saying, you know, so disrespectful. She just sits there and reads the questions, and what they have no idea is why that’s happening. That there’s so much thought and so much feeling behind what we’re trying to do, and that is bringing my wife from behind a camera, who would never, ever, in her wildest dreams sit in front of a camera to read questions.

1:38:46 Literally, when I’m on camera, it was a bit awkward. I didn’t like it, but we had the courage to continue with it, so now she’s sitting beside me, and maybe there’s going to be the day where she does the videos and I don’t. Not because I want to leverage my time, not because I want to be able to be the guy that, you know, you know, kind of, um, what’s the word that everyone’s the big buzz word about, elevating your business, but it’s about, what is it, H, scaling your business?

1:39:06 Next person ask me of scaling, that’s probably your next question. Are you scaling your business? I, I just can’t stand why there’s this insatiable need to scale everything. God, I love what I do. Scaling it could destroy it, and yes, people could argue could also elevate it and help more people.

1:39:23 I get that, but I don’t believe that scaling is always the right answer. Big is not always beautiful. But what people don’t understand, the context of just that video, is I’m trying to support my wife and draw her into an environment that makes her uncomfortable, but do it in a respectful way. And if people stop judging how I’m doing it and ask, what are you trying to do? Seek to understand, as opposed to step back and automatically judge what they see.

1:39:46 Is I’m trying to help this beautiful soul who wants to step out and to create an environment she can do so, because I think she’s got a wonderful gift, and I think she’s got a capacity to help and support people in a better way than maybe Philip McKernan, in a different way than Philip McKernan. And my ego is not big enough that I don’t like, if, if, if, if the greatest magic comes from her, like last night, people are going to chalk it down to Philip McKernan. Oh my God, he was amazing last night.

1:40:12 I poured my heart and soul in last night, and I wasn’t feeling 100% as I shared with you, but I honestly believe that some of the greatest magic came from the man in the front row and the guy in the back row and the question that you asked, and Peter sitting over, etc., etc. That’s where it happens. So people judge, and it hurts every time, and that’s because of my old patterns. Do you learn from it? Can you use some of it to change your game or change anything up?

1:40:39 I don’t really learn from criticism. Um, I think really good feedback, like really caring feedback from some of my clients who care enough to reach out and say, Philip, I really want to share this with you. Sometimes they’re projecting their own inadequacies, their own stuff on me, but some, sometimes they’ll give me something that’s gold. Um, but if I was to listen to all the criticism, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today, and if I was to listen to all the feedback, I’d be doing what I’m doing in a different way, so I’d be creating experiences and retreats and mentoring programs and executive experiences and work with leaders in a way to give them what they want, as opposed to create environments that gives them and presents the possibilities of what they need.

1:41:19 So you, you have to, you don’t have to listen to anything, but you have to be open at the same time, really believe and be in tune with what, what, what, what fits for you, if that makes any sense? Yeah. Go with your intuitive feel of what you know is right. You are on the right path, and yeah, yeah, yeah. I always ask everyone that comes here and sits in that chair a few questions, and I’m going to hit you with these now.

1:41:47 If, if you can make the phone call to the 20-year-old Philip McKernan, give that young man a bit of advice. What would you tell him? I tell him I love him. I tell him I love him, and don’t be so hard on yourself, and that it’s going to be okay, and probably stop setting goals. Was that guy setting a lot of goals back then?

1:42:16 Yeah, he was, he was, he wasn’t Philip McKernan. I can tell you he was trying to be anything to everybody but himself. He was so desperate to fit in that he was trying to do everything to fit in, as opposed to allowing himself to stand out. Never heard that answer, powerful. Second part of that is, uh, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received in your life?

1:42:46 You know, could be business, could be personal, just something someone said to you that just resonated. This might come across as being very arrogant and self-serving, but, um, the advice that I gave to an audience a few months ago, and the advice I gave last night, which is very young, that it’s not about you. So the advice came from myself, which was possibly influenced by other people, but it’s, um, stop making this journey about you. We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re spending way too much time on ourselves in the context of these lives.

1:43:20 I want to be happy. I want to do this, and I want to find my passion, and I want to find meaning, and I want to do this, and everything else. If you just go out and say, how can I help other people? Where? The neighbor next door, the orphanage in Africa, or the billion people in some part of the world that need support.

1:43:35 If we stop making this journey about us and we start serving people, everything changes, and that’s what I’ve done. Um, and when I get the criticism from people, which happens when I’m standing there last night, quite frankly. But, you know, honestly, I’m not trying to hide it. I was in a lot of pain and discomfort, um, with dental issues that are still haunting me, and even now. But this is not about me.

1:43:56 This interview is not about me looking good and speaking a bit funny. This interview is about what this message might be able to do with somebody who’s watching this camera right now, who’s watching this on YouTube, or watching this on the internet, or watching this on their device. Stop making it about you. Mariana got up this morning. You know, the first thing she said to me, she said, Brian, I get it.

1:44:19 It’s not about me. Then she walked off to the bathroom. Uh, oh, so, know your message is getting received. It definitely is. Um, final part of that question, or that series, is, you know, to the 20-year-old, that’s, you know, that’s listening to us around the world.

1:44:37 You know, could be in China or Brazil or North America, could be a lot like the 20-year-old. You know, Philip, what do you tell them? You know, when they are looking for answers, they’re looking for direction. They don’t know what to do what not to do. Is there anything you can, you can tell them?

1:44:53 It’s just a message. I try not to tell them anything, because I think they’ve been told what to do and who to be and how they should succeed in life and what the path is and everything else, and I think that’s part of the problem. They, they’re, they, you know, it’s, it’s, I always ask them to not necessarily turn this interview off, um, but maybe I am, maybe I’m asking to hit pause right now for a second and just to reflect and sit with what are the pieces that speak to them, what are the pieces that touch their soul, and what are the pieces that don’t fit, and honor that, as opposed to just taking it and absorbing it as information.

1:45:29 Is that just to turn off the noise and the busyness and say, what is my truth? Who the hell am I? But if there was, if I, to distill that down even further into something that’s a little bit more tangible, I would say, don’t get caught up in the obsession with education and information, and if you’re going to embark on a journey over the next 5, 10, 20, 30 years, and it’s a journey, is figure out who the f*** you are in this world. When you figure out who you are, not like to the nth degree, but the more discovery you have of who you are, what you believe, what you stand for, what parts of you have been unauthentic, how many masks you’ve been wearing, and you start removing those masks and start wearing the clothes that you want and start speaking like you truly want to be, and you need to be the clarity of who you want to become and what you want to do, and what your passion is, and what your, you know, what, what, what what is meaning in your life, and what is alignment, and living with fulfillment and never having regrets.

1:46:27 All of those things will unfold. People go around, say, well, if I could just figure out my passion, if I could just figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life, then I’d be happy. Think about that. If you could just figure out who you are, then what you do and what you’re meant to do shows up. Think about it in the context of an animal.

1:46:46 Like, you know, a gorilla doesn’t wake up and says, who, who am I, what am I meant to do for the rest of my life? They just crawl over, eat some bamboo, make love, fall asleep, scratch themselves, climb a tree, whatever the hell they do. It becomes natural. We’re these natural human beings that are designed to do things that are natural. We’ve lost that ability because we’re not in tune with our intuition, and part of the reason is because we don’t know who we are, and we don’t see that as a valid journey.

1:47:16 We see a degree or a masters as something that’s critical, that’s so important, but if we took that time, that energy, that expense, that money, whatever you want to do, and invest into understanding who we are at the core, everything else will come from that space, and then maybe you might want to do a masters. It’s probably unlikely, because you wouldn’t feel that you needed a masters to go and do what you want to do. You wouldn’t feel that you needed a masters to validate who you are, to give yourself permission to chase your passion.

1:47:47 What is your truth? We might call the episode that we’re going to have to see. I like that. I’ll trade in the mark. That later on, you know, the last 24 hours has been really special.

1:48:01 So thanks so much for, I guess, feeling my energy, and I’m just, I’m so glad we manifested this ourselves, and you know, it’s just been an incredible experience, incredible for everyone else, and you know, I always, I’m getting more in touch with my intuition, and I’m going to try to listen to it more in the future, but some things I can’t ignore when I’ve got 25 souls around me shaking their heads like, yes, this is good, this is good. Then, even I start to understand that we did something good here, the last, last day or so. So thank you.

1:48:33 When you said to me earlier on here, before we kicked off filming, that you know, thank you for coming over to London, that you made this possible, and I don’t, I don’t like to finish our interview with me, you know, challenging you and disagreeing with you, but I’m going to, because I’m sitting here because of you, and the only reason I’m sitting here is because of you, or one of the only reasons, partly because of Jason, partly because of what I do. Absolutely, get that, but because of who you are. Like, I get a lot of invitations, a lot of requests, a lot of different things, and when I saw you and I Bal you in Napa, there was something about you.

1:49:07 So what I would love you to do is not just to think about that, and to own that up here, was to feel that, because you are a special human being, and you are doing very special work, and you were impacting a lot of people’s lives, and I just happen to be, and very honored, to play a small part in that. And I love, I love that about you, and I love the fact that you’re vulnerable. I love the fact that you won’t sit here and pretend you have all the answers like a lot of people in your position would.

1:49:29 So I deeply admire that and don’t ever lose that, please. So the people who are listening, they probably already know this, but, um, you know, they’re in a good place, and you know, the person who’s on watch, which is you, and overlooking all of this thing, is you’re a good guy. Thank, thank you, thank you. You said that last night, and thank you, and I want to make sure everyone always makes sure that we stay that way, you know, on London Real and stay vulnerable and always listening to new ideas, and we say it’s about the journey here on London Real, that was the line that came into our heads when we started, and so I always like to think about that, and I wish you well on your journey, and stay in touch with us.

1:50:10 I will thank you. All right, Philip, thank you very much. Want to