Moore Style - Igniting Your Most Intentional Life with John R. Miles

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Many of us want to live an intentional life aligned with our passions and purpose – yet we still find ourselves burnt out, bored, and going through the motions. Today’s guest, John R. Miles, was no different. But by intentionally choosing a different path, his life completely changed. Join us as John outlines the importance of understanding our mental limits and boundaries, how to spot the “invisible” influences that take us off track, and the biggest regret that most people have toward the end of their lives. Although it may not happen overnight, being consistently dedicated to your vision can help you ignite your most intentional life. We all have the ability to craft our lives in the exact way we want to. Make sure to tune in for some life-changing wisdom and tools to help you along the way!  In this week’s episode, we discuss: [01:33] About John R. Miles [04:23] It is never too late to live the life you want to live [06:10] Why are so many people burnt out and bored? [09:17] What led John to “break free from the matrix” [15:51] Changing societal and family patterns [17:30] The impact of seeking support from a life coach, therapist, or career coach [19:23] The importance of addressing our trauma – change does not happen overnight [24:47] About John’s book, “Passion Struck”  [27:48] Marc Benioff’s story –  being consumed and committed to our vision [30:30] Being intentional about the life you are trying to achieve  [32:11] The impact of changing how we look at things [35:20] The invisible influences then can detour us from our track - the “three different mosquitos” analogy  [41:29] Understanding our emotional & mental limits and boundaries [45:46] The most important person you will ever meet is yourself [49:08] John’s favorite date   Connect with John: Website Instagram Podcast

Welcome to the down and dirty podcast, the ultimate guide to modern midlife dating. I'm your host Celeste Moore and I'm here to help you navigate the challenges of today's dating world. Think of me as your female version of hitch but better with over 16 years of experience as a certified image consultant and dating coach. I've got the inside scoop on what women want. In this podcast, we're diving deep into the world of healthy masculinity and modern dating. It's a fast changing industry. And here you'll find personal stories, expert insights

and candid conversations that will empower you to take control of your dating life. There's never been a better time to achieve your desired outcome, whether it's marriage, finding a significant other, securing a life partner or simply regaining your dating confidence. We're here with you twice a week to explore the viewpoints and challenges in today's dating arena that resonate with every man seeking dating success and love. So let's dive into today's episode. We've got an exciting discussion lined up for you. Get ready for the double D's of dating where dating dilemmas turn into dating triumph. welcome everybody to another episode of the down and dirty podcast as always I'm your host Celeste

Moore and I am so excited and honored to have my guest on the show today and before we get into this episode I would love to introduce you to him his name is John R. Miles and he is a dynamic force behind Passion Struck, captivating millions with his globally renowned podcast National Radio Show, and cementing his status as a guiding voice in alternative health and leadership. A former U.S. Navy officer and Fortune 50 senior executive, he is celebrated as a transformative leader in intentional behavior change and personal mastery. As an author, entrepreneur, and podcast host, John's profound insights and inspirational guidance have earned him accolades as a visionary in modern leadership. John is the best-selling author of Passion Struck,

12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. Well, like I said, I'm so excited to have you and honored. Welcome to the show, John. Well, Celeste, it's such an honor to be here and thank you for that very kind introduction that you just did. Well, we all need to know a little bit about your life and your backstory, and I think it's important for people to understand kind of what path led you down to writing Passionstruck. And also that's the name of your podcast, correct? It is. It is the Passionstruck podcast. So was this part of your passion and purpose in life? Is this kind of why you started? Because

I believe the podcast is about three years old and the book has just recently come out. Is that correct? Yes. I started on this journey really seven years ago, but I guess by the time the book came out nine years ago of trying to figure out how do I craft for myself my ideal life the best that I could become and I had found myself kind of stuck in a different place where self discrepancy theory calls it your ought self O-U-G-H-T but it's basically you've ended up in this place where you should be based on burdens and societal expectations, whatever, but it's not ideally who you are aiming to become. So I've been pursuing this path of bridging that gap. And that led me to creating Passion Struck and doing everything that I'm doing now.

Yeah. I'm so grateful for you bridging that gap because I find that with a lot of, I mean, myself, I think we've, especially if you're midlife, I feel that you get to a point in your life where you stop for whatever reason, something, maybe it's something that happens that you didn't expect, or maybe you're just veering far to the left and you thought you'd be more to the right. I don't know, as an example. And you end up and you look at yourself in the mirror and you don't know who you are. You don't recognize that person anymore. And I think that this is such an important part to teach people that it's never too late to actually say, you know what, I can live the life that I want to live. Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because I really open up the book discussing just this, that I use myself as kind of the me search, that I had found myself almost as if I was living in a daily masquerade. I didn't really feel significance when I got up for the day ahead. It just felt like I was going through the motions. And I had really gotten to a point where my career, even though from the outside, it looked like I was on a rocket ship. And inside, I didn't really feel fulfilled. I felt just burned out and stuck in this place that I had kind of built into, but now couldn't find my way out of. And I'm sure many people who are listening probably feel the same exact way. Yeah, I definitely can relate. I've been through, I want to say, if I look at myself about five different lives about, I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but I've gone through different, I almost feel like I've lived in different universes or different, what do they say, like quantum physics, like we're in the same path, but it's a different life. And I've grown so much. And I would hate that someone would would wake up like that and feel like, what kind of life is this? This is not me. This is not my passion. This is not my what I'm intended to be here to do. And I think that what you are speaking about, I'm sure resonates with so many people.

Well, I was just going to say a lot of it goes back to what Henry Day Thoreau was talking about on Walden when he wrote the mass of men, mass of people lead lives of quiet desperation. And I think that we're seeing this everywhere. I mean, you just look at what Gallup puts out and they show that over 900 million people in 142 countries. I'm not sure how they came up with the numbers, but regardless, that they feel unfulfilled. And there are plenty of other studies that are just like this. So it's one of the major reasons that I started doing everything that I'm doing, because I think so many people feel this sense of unmattering and that it's really leading to the mental health crises that we're seeing and to so many people who feel bored, burned out, broken, battered, whatever word you want to choose. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think you end up in the same spot I found myself in. You maybe get to this point in your career and it's a place that you never expected yourself to be. I know I never pictured myself when I was younger being behind a desk, being a corporate executive. I always kind of saw myself doing something more creative, more engaging with people than that. I also, when I was younger, wanted to do something that had a lot more adventure in it and diversity, which is really why I started my career out in the military. And for me, a pivotal moment happened when I got out of the military. I did it only because I had gotten an appointment to go to Quantico and become a special agent. But unfortunately, Congress had another one of their funding issues at that point in time. and my class got cycled. And unfortunately, three and a half years later, my life was completely different. I had a two-year-old son, was living on the West Coast, and that opportunity kind of passed its way. And I think what ends up happening is once we start having these

responsibilities, your dreams can sometimes fade away because you're now concerned about how do I put food on the table? How do I be a better parent, a better husband, whatever it may be? And that's exactly what happened to me. And then I fell in the trap of chasing after more money, better titles, better positions, more responsibilities. And all it did was add up to a lot of possessions, but it didn't make me spiritually or emotionally whole. And I think the reason people can't break free from it is

the burden of responsibilities. I mean, once you reach a certain stage of life, it's very difficult to, to change paths when you've got your mortgage or rent your car payment if you have one the upkeep that you have to have with your family and everything else and so your lifestyle unfortunately starts dictating how you're living in the pursuit of your passions and I found myself stuck exactly in that place so what were some of the steps that you that took you out of that place for you to to open your eyes and say you know what i want more out of my life even though i have responsibilities and i have an amazing family and so on and so forth how did you how

were you able to step out of i don't say the monotony but there's this you know system of of society that we live in you know we wake up we go to work like you said you put food on the table and it's just it never ends how how were you able to step outside of that so i guess you're asking me, like, how did I break free from the matrix? Exactly. You said it so much better than I did. It didn't happen overnight. I can tell you that. And what I like to tell people is that I think we have a couple of voices that drive our behaviors. I think there's that constant voice that we hear inside our head that's telling us to continue to do what we're doing because we feel like it's working for us and it feels safe and it becomes a routine and we're used to

the habits that we're performing. And I think there's this other voice, if we really listen deeply for it, that's really sharing with us what we should be pursuing. And that voice is often, let's face it, it's distanced out by the noise that's all around our lives because we're constantly consumed with information, with distractions, with obligations, with other things that I think the vast majority of us don't spend the quality time doing the self-care and introspection that we need to even have the openness in our mind to allow that other voice to come in. So for me, I first started hearing it probably in 2008, 2009. And the way it came to me was that I was supposed to help a group of people that the words were just foreign to me.

I was asked to help the lonely, the helpless, the hopeless, the battered of the world. And when you're sitting here and you're at the top of your chariot and you're a senior executive in a Fortune 50 company, and all of a sudden you get this message sent to you, I did what many people would do. I ignored it. I didn't know how to deal with it. It was so different from the life I was on. I didn't even understand what it meant. I'm supposed to help who to do what. And at that point, I was in the middle of the constant chase of success.

And it was the last thing I wanted to hear was that I needed to take this huge detour. And it makes me think of if people are religious at all, what people must have felt like in the old Testament, when all of a sudden God gives them some message that they're supposed to do something that's like way out of the realm of what they think is possible or even part of their understanding. And that's certainly what happened to me. And unfortunately, I think what ends up happening is once you finally start letting this voice in, if you don't pay attention to it and heed its calling,

I think it starts affecting you in different ways. And for me, and I think most people, it starts manifesting negativity into your life. And I almost went through like a biblical journey. I remember moving to Austin and this was about the same time that I got this calling and a whole bunch of me felt like I should have stayed in Charlotte where I was at the time, but decided to take this job opportunity because it really was my dream job. And I remember within a week and a half of arriving, I go home for my first visit. I come back.

My corporate apartment is completely flooded. Lose everything. They put me in a new corporate apartment. And about three weeks later, I'm in the middle of taking a shower while all of a sudden I feel this immense stinging pain all over my chest and shoulders. And I look up and there are actually scorpions falling from the ceiling. I'm in bed like three weeks later after reporting this to the management company of the corporate department and them saying this has never happened before they send people in to inspect and to exterminate they can't find anything a couple weeks later I'm lying in bed in the middle of

the night I'm woken up stings again and they're like four or five scorpions over me again then my kids come to visit we have bed bugs infestation we buy a house we have half the house torn apart because we had unknowingly bought a house that had a whole bunch of unreported termite damage. I mean, the list just kept going on and on and on. And pretty soon my relationships were suffering. My career was suffering. I was facing burnout and it just piled up into a moment that I guess I had just had enough and realized that I had been working so much to make other people's dreams come true, that it was time for me to start leaning in on what this task that I'd been given really meant and what I was supposed to do. And that started the journey

to where I'm at now. Thank you for sharing that story. I mean, wow, that if there's not one sign, there's 10 signs like this is not where you're supposed to be, John. That's wow. That was That's pretty powerful there. You said if you're not a religious person, you definitely have to take these signs into something as maybe this is not your path. I love that you said that you're living your life for so long for other people. I think so many of us do that. I don't know if it's probably a bunch of things, society, our parents, our family. This is what we're supposed to do if we did this people might look at us weird and that might rock the boat too much so what are maybe some of the tools that you can talk about that where people can if they have this

realization i mean to just follow that gut follow that what do you recommend to someone that comes to you and says you know what i'm right where you were at john but i don't know what to do with my life. I just know it's not that. Yeah. So first I'm going to just touch on like, why do I feel like I wound up in this place? And I think it's easy to be an imitator. I mean, we fall into these group norms that are all around us. And for me, I definitely fell into the group norm of being a corporate executive. And then that becomes your identity. And then you start just following the path that so many people have taken before and for me it was the path that my father and my grandfather had taken before me so I had a lot of examples that this is the path that you're supposed

to take in life and that we're supposed to be earning and building and focused on achieving and I was always brought up to be a high achiever so this is just what I knew and I think when this is how you were raised, it's difficult to then switch directions. I know for me, it was difficult to switch parenting styles. I remember when my child was younger, I found myself in the trap of parenting like my father had, which was yielding more of a heavy hand and a loud voice and et cetera. And I remember my son was about two years old and I kind of looked in the mirror and decided, do I want to bring him up the same way that I was raised? And the question became an obvious no well then it starts taking effort to break free from that you can't just go from

being seeing something your entire life starting to emulate it and then change overnight and i think the same thing amounts to our life when it reaches this point and for me i took a step that i would highly encourage other people to take when you're feeling numb when you're feeling a bit lost when you're feeling stuck. It's often one of the best times in life to go out and seek help, whether that's a career coach or a life coach or a therapist. In my case, it happened to be a combination of a person who was a therapist and also a life coach. So I remember working with this gentleman and I had done about four sessions with him. And this fifth one I came into and he said, today I want to do things a little bit differently. I've gotten a good foundation

for where things are in your life. And I want to do a visualization exercise with you. And he goes, I want you to imagine that you're going into your kitchen. Just picture your kitchen. Do you have stools there? Yes. Okay, so you're approaching the stool and you sit down upon it. Now, I want you to reimagine the stool.

And yours has a couple pillars, but one is much larger than the others. And for you, what this has become is the constant grind, and it's taking over your life. and what do you think is happening is this pillar keeps getting larger and larger and the other pillars supporting you keep getting smaller i'm like what's leading to burnout it's leading to emotional numbness it's leading to relationships falling apart etc and he said you're absolutely correct and he goes you have an opportunity to lifecraft your life any way that you want it And you can take that same analogy of a stool, but imagine there being pillars of support underneath

it. And these can be whatever a listener wants them to be. I chose them to be relationship health, emotional health, spiritual health, physical health, mental health, et cetera. And then the step I took and what I encourage people to do is once you start evaluating what this new destination is that you want for yourself to not make the mistake of trying to get there overnight because wherever you have found yourself

to be in your current state it didn't happen overnight I mean I didn't reach this point by flipping a light switch to begin with to me it's like dystemia when you have depression and it gradually grows

underneath the surface to the point that you're not even noticing that it's there. And I think the same thing happens to our lives. And whatever it is, whether it's burnout or the numbness or relationship failure, what have you in your life, it comes almost imperceptibly at first and then builds up. And then typically there's some hockey stick moment that takes it from being moderate to more of a severe state.

But I decided that out of those new underpinnings for my life, the one that i had the biggest issues in at this point was solving stuck points that had come before me through big trauma that i experienced earlier in my life that i hadn't properly dealt with to begin with and at about the same time i had recently had stumbled in upon a person who was robbing my house i was supposed to be at the gym at the time they were canvassing the house so they picked a time when they thought I would be gone. And it just so happened that the gym had an electrical fire. And so I came home early, but I was confronted by a gunman pointing a gun at about five feet range for me. And then about five days later, my best friend committing suicide. And I

think those things just immersed combat trauma and physical assault trauma and some sexual trauma that I had experienced earlier in my life. And they were just engulfing me. I mean, I just remember it was like my emotional cup was so full I could barely breathe. I didn't know what to do and I was losing weight. I wasn't sleeping and so I just made the decision that I needed to seek treatment. I needed to start focusing on these stuck points and to get to the core issues that were keeping me from becoming who I wanted to become and I mean this stuff doesn't happen overnight. It starts by taking small actions. And this is an important message, I think, for your audience. I think we feel like we need to have courage or confidence before we act. And I think we get the equation

wrong. In my opinion, and what I write about in the book, in my own research and the research I've done on hundreds of other people, it's taking intentional action without having the clarity of what it's going to amount to that ends up building confidence and courage to take more boundary-expanding actions that lead you to start building a new pathway to yourself to move away from the one that you have sculpted before. It's the same thing I had to do when I started to learn how to reparent my son, is I had to make the intentional choice to do things differently and to catch myself when I was falling back into habits or patterns of the past so that I could use that as an opportunity to realize what I was doing and to make the conscious choice to do something different and to be intentional about it. Yeah, I love that. I love the end part that you were actually intentional about it. And that's that is your book, right? To have intent to live with passion and purpose. Well, intentionally. And thank you for sharing all that I can relate in so many ways. I am a sole parent, my daughter 17 now, but I went through trying to live a very what typical traditional life like society has built for me. I would go and try and it didn't work and it would just kind of maneuver. But I finally figured it

out that I didn't have to be like my parents. Like you said, I didn't have to parent the same way because that wasn't working for me. I tried it and it wasn't probably working for my daughter. So there is a point and hopefully it's not living through multiple traumas at once. I mean, that had to have been just, I can imagine a breaking point for you where enough's enough. I want to be healthy. I want to live happy. You know, life is so short. I know that's so cliche, but when you live through a different lens and you get out, it's almost like we live in this fog. You know, it's this day to day to day. And what lifts that fog is usually a trauma. It's usually something that rocks our boat so much that we're like, oh man, I don't want to

live like this. This is not me. You know, we start questioning and everything. And I love that you have so many stories, not just from your, you know, your career, but your personal life that people can really relate to. And I imagine you've gotten some amazing feedback on your book. And you talk about the 12 powerful principles into creating this passion and purpose in life. And can you touch on some of those? Yeah, let me give you a backdrop into how the book is organized because I think that would be very, uh, helpful for someone who's listening to this and doesn't understand the book. So the book has three parts to it, three sections, but it's really four parts. The first part is six mindset shifts. And you can think of your mindset is driven by

the virtue of wisdom and fueled by passion. And so these mindset shifts really are the why, and they influence how you approach challenges and opportunities. The second portion of the book goes into behavior shifts, and there's six of them. And once our mindset has been recalibrated, the next logical progression is a shift in behavior. And this is where perseverance becomes absolutely crucial. And our behavior is the what. It's a direct reflection of our mindset dictating how we act in pursuit of our goals. And then lastly, the third section of the book goes into deliberate action and intrinsic motivation. And deliberate action is, I call it really the psychology of progress because action plays a nonlinear role in the intertwined processes of reshaping our mindset and behaviors, acting both as a driver, but also as the outcome of these transformations.

And then your intrinsic motivation is what fuels it all. So with that as a backdrop, the way I stumbled upon this is I had come upon this analogy of the stool. It might have been a little bit even before this. And I was starting to try to do research on how do I bridge this gap between where I found myself and becoming my ideal self? Like, how do I lifecraft the life that I want? And so I started to really examine some of the most influential people that I had worked with, served with in the military, or had impacted me in my upbringing. And as I started to do this, I started to see some patterns emerge into how they led their lives and how they were really driven by their values, their beliefs, and their alignment of the actions that they were taking with their long-term ambitions and aspirations. And over the course of seven and a half years, I ended up examining about 800 people, everything from astronauts to military leaders, to actors and actresses, to professional athletes, to CEOs.

And these 12 principles became something that I found that were repeated time and time again by those who I perceived as living their best life. and I mean I'll just talk about one who I feature in the book his name is Mark Benioff I've known Mark for 25 years if the listener has no idea who he is I'll tell you his story he ended up going to Cal Berkeley he was interning at Apple came across Steve Jobs who started mentoring him and in some ways and after graduation he found himself not at Apple but at Oracle he quickly rises through the ranks and before he's even 30 he's a vice president he's touted by many that he could become the next Larry Ellison and while he's in his early 30s he makes the decision that he himself is stuck he's feeling this quiet desperation that he's

not living the life he's supposed to and he asks Larry if he can take a sabbatical Well, on the sabbatical, he ends up going to Hawaii. And while he's in Hawaii, he starts really getting into mindfulness and meditation. And he happens to be swimming one day. And as he tells it, some dolphins approach him. And as he's in this serene moment, this tranquil moment of mindfulness, this vision comes to him that the way that we as a society were delivering software via data centers that had to house it for each company was a flawed way to do it. And there was a better way to do it. And that was cloud computing. And so I had known Mark before this. I then got reacquainted with him when he was at Salesforce, which he now had founded. And he had made a deal with Michael Dell, his close friend, that he needed someone to help him be his chief evangelist who could give the perspective of what cloud computing could do. And so Michael agreed that we would start trying his technologies out at Dell. And so I traveled around the world with Mark, everywhere from Asia to Paris to the United States. And it was just remarkable for me to see someone who was so consumed by a vision that they saw, a problem that they had come across that only they had the power to solve, that it drove everything. And it really created this situation where whether we were talking to 4,000 people in the audience or whether we were in Japan talking to a handful of CEOs who told him he didn't know what he was talking about, he never deterred from his mission.

And as I examined him and others, these principles became apparent. And the first one that I'll talk about is mission angler. So I live here in Tampa Bay. I moved here from Austin, where you're at, back in 2011. And we are very lucky because it's a very great fishing area. But if you're like an angler, like many of my friends who go out, it's not as if they get in their boat, point the boat in any direction, hope that when they put the anchor down, they're going to catch fish. No, they are so deliberate about how they plan for their days that they're looking at the tides and the moon and where other people have had luck fishing and they have fish finders and everything else. So they put themselves in the best position to catch as many fish as they can.

But how many of us are that deliberate about how we craft our own lives? Very few of us. And yet that's exactly what these people who, whether you look at Robin Sharma and says they're the top 5% or the top 10%, I don't care what have you, they're very intentional about that life that they're trying to achieve and the actions that they're taking on the path to achieving it. And so in this chapter, like I do in all of them, I blend personal storytelling with stories of other people who have used the principle. In this one, I talk about Jim McKelvey, my friend who founded Square, and Gary Vee, because I thought they were two great examples of life crafting the life that you want. And then at the end of the chapter, I give some takeaways. Another mindset shift that I like to talk about is the perspective harnesser. And in this story, I use the example of a close friend of mine who I talk about both his experiences when he was a Navy SEAL and when he was an astronaut. His name is Chris Cassidy. And oftentimes we end up living our lives in a way that's very linear. We look at things as either or, or, and how we approach life. And I think it's because of the way that we're taught in Western society.

But if you look at Eastern philosophy, it really looks at things more in a paradoxical way or both through both and thinking. And so I give a great example in this chapter of Chris. He's in BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition School, going through initial SEAL training. and he tells me that the days just seemed insurmountable and it's not surprising that 70 of the people quit but he told me what he started to do is to think about it that it was like an elastic band and yet and there was going to be both times of suffering and times of immense self-confidence and victory on the other side of it and using this analogy of a rubber band he ended up breaking down the moments into micro moments and for him it became a journey not of getting through a day but through getting through an activity or getting to the next meal or getting to the point where he could help another person finish a task and by reframing the whole situation

in that light, it not only allowed him to get through BUDS, he became the honor man of BUDS. And I think it's something that we can all utilize in our own life is changing how we look things so we can have self-criticism and be self-compassionate. We can do things to help our mind and body. So those are just two examples of different chapters. Yeah, I'm so excited to get it. my book's coming today. So I ordered it last night. I prefer the actual book versus Kindle versions, but yeah, I can't wait. I hear you right there. You go. Yeah. It's chock full of stories and experiences and where people can really relate to those stories and say, you know what, this adversity, I can move through this. And it is training ourselves for new habits and

new beliefs and moving away from the ones that weren't serving us, not bringing us closer to our purpose. And I love that you talk about that. And I really, truly believe the first step is realizing this is not for me. Now, how can I move forward and move toward living a passionate life? So there's so many moments, so many things I want to pull out of that but yeah I heard this that you talk about three mosquitoes and I always I was like what what is this this is so interesting to me because it's one thing to where we get to a life that we realize that we don't want this anymore but then you have those people that are close to you in your inner circle who make it very difficult for us to move forward to so I heard this um can you

describe what the three mosquitoes are and what that means? Yes, I'd be happy to. So as I was writing the book, I'm the type who, you know, when I'm staring at a blank page, sometimes the thoughts aren't coming to me. And so I like to take walks and put myself into meditation or mindfulness to just think about an approach for the chapter because I wanted these principles to be memorable. So as I was starting this walk, I had recently been reading a book by Jenna Berger, who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business called Invisible Influences. And if you think about the way I start the book, I mentioned the mission angler. You go from kind of crafting this life you want to the next principles about

the need for constant reinvention. And so you're now in the process of reinventing yourself And typically, when that happens and when you're on this new path, you start showing up completely different for people. And for many people, that can be off-putting. Let's face it. People like to see consistency in who they're seeing. And you're showing up now as this new person who's on a new mission. And so it got me thinking about the different invisible influences that then can detour us from our track. And this is both our environment and people in it.

And I happened to go from meditating to turning on a radio show. And the announcer just happened to be talking about what is the most dangerous animal on the planet? And callers were calling in and remember someone was mentioning a shark and another person was mentioning some type of snake and another spider. And I was thinking the same exact things. And the radio host goes, that's absolutely what most people would think, but it's, it's completely wrong. The mosquito is actually the most dangerous animal on the planet by far. It kills between a million and a half and two million people each year. More than all sharks put together will kill in 100 years.

Yet when we think about them, they're really benign on the surface. Oftentimes we don't even know they're there until they strike us or we might hear they're buzzing, but we just swat them away. And I think the same thing about human mosquitoes in our life, these invisible influences that many times have been part of our life, maybe since we were born, if they're our parents, or for a very long time, if they're friends or peers or nieces or nephews or what have you. And so I started to think about the life of Oprah Winfrey. I mean, we all see Oprah and who she is today, but a lot of people don't know the backstory of sexual assault and other things that happened to her and her path to becoming who she is today really was by getting a lot of these negative influences and the environment she were in out of the way.

And so I started to think about, you know, what's a memorable way that I could teach this? So I came up with three different types of mosquitoes. There are more than this, but I think this gives a very good initial footing. There's the bloodsucker, the invisible suffocator, and the PETA. So the bloodsucker is what my dear friend Terry Cole would reference as a boundary destroyer. these are people who all they want to do is draw blood from you it's often by ignoring personal and professional boundaries they're the ones who are intrusive of your time they question your decisions and their unsolicited advice leaves you feeling undermined and disrespected i think we all

have experienced those the invisible suffocator are those pessimists in our life they are the internal complainer. They dampen the mood when we're around them. They affect the morale if we're in a professional setting. And if you remember back to our holidays, they're oftentimes a member of our family who, when we bring up a fantastic opportunity that we have to pursue, they bring all the negative aspects that come with it and try to discourage you from taking that path. And then there's lastly the PETA. Some people call these the piece of work. I call them the pains in the ass but these are those people in your life who thrive on drama and conflict they instigate disputes they gossip behind your back they create tension and discomfort

etc and so the beauty of knowing these three different types which i'm sure now that people hear them people can identify these people in their lives i mean we sometimes can be these mosquitoes and other people's lives. But once you do, it gives you an incredible power to do something about it. And something that I encourage people to do is just imagine that you're shooting an archery, a bow and arrow against target, and maybe just line up 15 of the people who are closest to you, who's in your initial center, your next center and your next center. And any of them fall into one of these three mosquitoes.

If so, you now have given yourself an incredible gift of recognizing it. And now you can go down the path of deciding what you're going to do with it, do with them and how to handle the situation. That's a tough one. I love that you broke that down because, yes, I think everybody can relate to having one or more in their lifetime or around them. And that's tough because maybe as just, for example, me, I decide that I don't want to be around my best friend who's a PETA. How do I maintain relationships? Maybe it's not my best friend. Maybe it's my sister. Is it limiting our time together? Is it making sure my boundaries are much more clear? And how do we move past those people if they're really internally never leaving our lives? so i think the first step that i would do is even before i take action i would start by understanding what are my own limits as you are now on this new path let's say you're that you're

taking you know what are your values what are your ambitions and what behaviors or interactions do you find end up draining your energy? Is it the constant interruptions? Is it the negative gossip that you hear? And I think you really have to consider your emotional and mental limits and how much stress you're willing to take before it starts affecting your life and your mental health. And I think having that recognition is the first step

to understanding how large a limit you want to set. And I think then it becomes, once you've understood that, you now have to figure out how do you want to communicate it? And you have the choice to completely push them to the side, but that, to your point, can be extremely difficult. So it's more likely going to be that you're going to have to establish a boundary. And this is going to be uncomfortable, likely, because you're going to have to state your limits in some way or another and explain the rationale behind them. And it's important because this helps others understand your perspective and makes it more likely that they're going to respect your boundaries. And then I think the third thing we need to do, and this is where a lot of us screw it up, is you have to be consistent. I mean, you can't start putting out new limits, new boundaries, and then back off of them when the other person doesn't react the way that you hope they will.

you've got to be consistent because if you're not it's not only going to give them permission they'll probably double down on the behavior that you don't like in the first place and then lastly i would say you got to practice self-care um throughout all of this and show yourself some self-compassion that you're on a growth journey and that it's not always going to be all roses and that you're going to have to deal with situations that come your way and that it's a path to growing. Yeah, that's so important. And I think the more that we live through those healthy boundaries for ourselves, our new life, our new path, and realizing that we are valuable, that we matter, that our lives matter, right? If it's not going to be us who actually take

action for our own lives, nobody else is responsible for the outcome. And yeah, Yeah. I think the hardest part I know that I find within just people in my life or with clients is finding those healthy boundaries and sticking to them. It's the sticking to it. And maybe you get to a point where you don't care what other people think because truly when you're on your true path, then nothing is going to deter you. So hopefully that's the case. But yeah, like you said it's not all roses you've got ups and downs and if you just keep on the end result for your life because ultimately that's going to you're going to live that purposeful passionate life but thank you so much for breaking that down because you know everyone listening today can

understand what the book brings them a little bit more purpose and value and I love that you have actionable steps plus stories. So that's really amazing. Thank you. But is there anything that I didn't touch on today that maybe you would want to talk about? Just want to make sure I ask all the right things for the audience here. Yeah, I think a very important thing for everyone to understand, and I try to make this really a call out, is that the most incredible person that any of you who are listening to this show will ever meet is the person who stares back at you in the mirror. And the sooner we start understanding that and living that authentically, the more fulfillment, happiness, whatever you want to call it, you're going to experience in your life.

But the double-edged sword to that is the biggest competitor you're ever going to face is that same person looking at you in the mirror. And that's where imposter syndrome and self-doubt and fear take hold so to me this is really a journey of you defining who you want to be and i want to leave you with this thought on my path to writing this book i came upon some research from cornell university that psychologist tom gillovich has been doing and he's been studying thousands of individuals who are in their third chapter of life and along this path He has collected some incredible data and he's asked them, what is the biggest regret that you had in life? And the results were kind of surprising to me.

I figured that it was going to come back, that it was the mistakes that we made. And 76% of them actually responded that it was the what ifs and the should haves. It was not pursuing becoming their ideal self, which ended up becoming the biggest regret that they faced in life. And so sometimes I just gave a talk where the audience, the majority of them were probably 65 and above, and they told me the book wasn't applicable to them. And I said, the book is just as applicable to you as you're sitting here as it is to a 20-year-old. There's no time in life that we don't have the opportunity to better ourselves, to constantly reinvent, and to make whatever finite time we have left the most intentional that we can make it in the service of trying to be a beacon of hope to others and showing kindness and generosity and giving back to others. And so that would be the message I would want to leave, is it's never too late to start. It's never as daunting as you think it is if you put your mind in the right space to just start making simple changes. and don't overcomplicate it let the process handle itself and i guarantee you if you start making micro choices that go towards where you want to be in life and they're aligned with your underlying values you will start seeing changes in your life it might not happen immediately but after a while

they'll come fast and furious and all of a sudden you'll be in a completely different place than you once were. I love that so much. Taking action. This is my purpose this year is to take action on as many things as possible. So thank you for leaving that. Okay, I have one last question for you that I ask all my guests. And it is, what was one of your favorite dates? And what was it? Well, I think we oftentimes complicate dates like we do everything else. And to me, Sometimes the most simplest dates become the most profound. And for my birthday last year, my fiance and I happened to go to San Juan, Puerto Rico. I'd never been before. And we decided to try out a restaurant. It had some good reviews, but we didn't really know too much about it. but this happened to be my birthday too. So they ended up putting us outside and at first we're a little bit worried because we were right in the middle of kind of a courtyard, but it turned out

just be this magical evening where the service was impeccable. The food was fantastic, but then around us, the street performance started happening. So it was almost as if we were eating and had our own catered live performance around us. And to me, that is just an example of a simple life moment that truly exceeded all expectations that I had. Thank you for sharing that. That sounded like an amazing birthday. I absolutely love that.

Well, thank you. As we wrap up this in-depth conversation with John R. Miles, I want to express my heartfelt thanks for sharing his insights and journey. and to you our listeners your support and engagement make this journey truly rewarding and don't forget to subscribe to the down and ready podcast for more engaging conversations and until next time keep exploring stay curious and thank you for tuning in today if you enjoyed today's episode and want to support podcasts like ours then please hit that subscribe button leave a five-star rating and or invite others to listen

Your support is what helps us grow and continue to bring you valuable content. Thanks for hanging out with us on today's episode. Let's stay connected. You can find me on Instagram at Celeste Moore Image, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's discussion. For all the links, resources, and additional information mentioned in this episode, check out the show notes on my website, CelesteMoore.com. That's all for now, but stay tuned for our next episode where we'll dive into more exciting

topics. Until then, see you next time, friends.