The One You Feed - Kristoffer Carter

Episode Date: October 14, 2014

This week we talk to Kristoffer Carter about building an Epic LifeKristoffer Carter ("kc") is a meditation expert for rapid growth start-ups, facilitator, & experience designer for Good Life Project, created by Jonathan Fields. By day, KC helps lead education & development for Centro's 90-person sales force, having built the company from $65MM & 50 employees to over $300MM & 550 in the last 7 years. Centro has been named the #1 Best Place to Work in Chicago by Crains Business for the last 4 consecutive years. KC is also a Kriyaban yogi (Self Realization Fellowship), husband & Father of 3, marathoner, and multi-instrumentalist since childhood.His manifesto on his framework for "Full Life Integration" can be found at http://www.thisepiclife.com/manifesto KC's free program to create a powerful meditation habit can be found here: http://www.thisepiclife.com/meditation In This Interview Kris and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.The power of discernment.Right action- not all action is created equal.His journey to becoming a yogi.Kriya Yoga and The Autobiography of a Yogi.Where personal development ends spiritual development begins.His first experiences with meditation.How hard meditation can be for some people.Moving from the lizard brain to the human mind.This Epic Life Manifesto.What Non Negotiable's are and how to integrate them into your life.How full life integration works.How unused creative energy is not benign.Being whoever you are wherever you are.When it comes to your inner alignment there are no shortcuts.Radical Self Inquiry and the value of a variety of personality surveys.Bringing your whole self to your work.Radical Authenticity.Doing things that you are afraid of.Discerning signals from static. Kristoffer Carter LinksKristoffer Carter- This Epic Life HomepageKristoffer Carter TwitterKristoffer Carter- This Epic Life- FacebookKristoffer Carter- You Tube Personality Tests discussed on the show:The EnneagramStrengths FinderMyers Briggs   Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I always tell people that meditation helps you discern signals from static, and the static is the ego and the voices and the scripts that we're given as kids telling us you have to fit in this box and do this and like all that stuff that doesn't quite jive with us. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers

to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, Is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like. Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our guest this week is Christopher Carter. And the reason that you're hearing my voice instead of our trusty Chris Forbes voice is that I met Christopher Carter at Camp Good Life Project, which I have tweeted about and some other things have been online. And Chris was the ringleader of ceremonies there. And we got to see a lot of different sides of him. He led us in meditation at first thing in the morning. He walked around with a megaphone, kept everybody motivated. He led a garage band where we played

a lot of music. And he is a truly inspiring and dynamic guy. And he is from Ohio, where we are from. So I was able to travel up to Akron to meet him again. I had dinner with his family, his three kids, which was quite an adventure. And then we were able to go out to his studio and record this interview. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show. Awesome to be here. We are sitting in your office slash studio here in Akron, Ohio. So I'm always happy to do interviews in person. It's a much better experience, Ohio. So I'm always happy to do interviews in person.

It's a much better experience than Skype. So it's great to be here. And we just had dinner with your family. I'm sorry, Andrew. Welcome. No, it was good. So our podcast is called The One You Feed. And it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. And he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Sure, sure. First of all,

I love the fact that you have a whole series of amazing interviews based on that parable. It's very, very cool to me. So many ways to interpret that. And for me, in thinking about the last few years of my life, becoming a Kriyaban yogi, studying yoga at a deep level, a lot of meditation, it really brings up the idea of discernment, of being able to consciously choose which wolf you're going to feed day to day, which of these terrible habits that were handed to me as a child or that I nurtured as a child are going to serve me and which ones need to be cut out like a cancer, basically. So I try to head into each of my days with just more of a kind of a polished lens of awareness and being able to be open to what's serving me and what's not.

And that's kind of what the parable brings up to me. I think that all of us have a front row seat for the best aspects of ourselves, but also the very terrifying aspects of ourselves. And through meditation and some other things, I've had to come face-to-face with all of it. And so I guess it just reminds me where to direct my energy. The parable is one of those things. And in some ways, the show is all around that parable,

and it comes up every time. But the answers to it tend to be, I always find the follow-ons to be so illuminating because the answer largely is about, like you said, I think discernment is a great word. It's about, you know, what are the choices we're making? But I do like what you're bringing to it about, because we talk about action a lot, but what you're talking about is the step before that, the clarity to even know. Yeah, and you went to summer camp with us for GLP, and I talk a lot about right action. The yogis don't consider all action to be created equal.

We're taught in our culture that take action, work hard, make it happen now, now, now, now, now. But yogis are more of the opinion of maybe I'll go meditate for about six hours. Maybe I'll take a shower, go for a walk, spend time with a guru or a disciple or whatever, and take right action. And that one right action might preclude or eliminate countless other actions by just taking that right action. So again, the meditation is about discernment. So whenever I'm faced, it seems increasingly more lately that whenever I'm faced with giant workloads, I have to be really concerned about taking right action. So that's where, you know, the meditation, I think, comes into it.

So tell me about your becoming a yogi and that spiritual path. How did you, you know, maybe how did you get on that path? And tell us a little bit more about that because that is a particular path you're on is one that I just am not, I don't know as much about. Yeah, you know, it's, it's a rigorous path. It's, it's really the science of meditation and self-realization through meditation, as taught by Paramahansa Yogananda. Most people would probably know the name from the book, Autobiography of a Yogi. Came out in the 40s. He was one of the first swamis from India to come over in the 1920s and bring over this ancient science of yoga to the West. And so most people think of yoga now as downward facing dog, happy baby yoga, stretches and stuff. But this was really kind of the step

beyond. It was the half of yoga and the stretch of yoga was to prepare the body for meditation. So the type of yoga I study is more so a series of techniques that kind of just keep on deepening your perception over time, if you're practicing right. I mean, and some days are great, some days are not. I mean, it's meditation. But how I found the path was really, I grew up suburban Cleveland latchkey kid. And talk about having access to every possible bad habit and bad influence, including all the crazy ass 80s hair metal, headbangers, ball bands. you know, drinking beers in the creek behind my parents' house at the age of 12 and playing in rock bands and all these things that, you know, I have respect for now, but just had the potential to really lead me astray and really like, really kind of engage that seeker in me that maybe there's a better way to do things than to, you know, be drunk every weekend or whatever it may be.

And years and years later, in my 20s, I had an experience that, you know, I nearly passed away from it was stress related illnesses and symptoms. And after that whole kind of big upheaval, I started getting hardcore like you into personal development, and professional development. And where I started to realize, as it sounds like you have as well from the interviews I've heard, is that where the personal and professional development work ends, usually the spiritual path begins. And sometimes they overlap. So like a guy like Stephen Covey, who I have tremendous respect for, Seven Habits of Highly Effective. One of the best books ever. Absolutely. Because he understood universal, profound, timeless truths.

And I would argue that Wayne Dyer has that same thing. You know, Wayne Dyer and Stephen Covey also happen to be like the U2 of that whole arena. Right. So of course they're looked at as like, oh, I could, you know, take or leave that. You know, it's like two on the shelf of every Walmart or something.

But the fact is, it's so based on, you know, Wayne Dyer is talking about the Tao. He's talking about the Bhagavad Gita, all these things. So as I started to go more and more down that road, Autobiography of a Yogi kept coming up more and more. People would say, Chris, you should really read this book because they knew I was a seeker, but they also knew that I was pretty hardcore.

Like I was a scientific seeker. Like I have two speeds, off and 11. So if I wanted to go down a spiritual path, I wanted it scientific seeker. I have two speeds, off and 11. So if I wanted to go down a spiritual path, I wanted it to be rigorous. I wanted to measure my own results. I wanted to experience, hopefully, the expansion of my consciousness on some level. And that work absolutely did that for me. So I started in the very beginning of 2012. I sent away for the at-home lessons.

I started rigorously meditating. I'd been meditating for about 10 years prior, but just kind of tripping over decent meditations once in a while. And this just kind of gave me the structure and the outcomes I needed to really pursue it. What sort of meditation were you doing in those years before that?

Yeah, so the first time I- Because I'm kind of fascinated by the topic because there's so, when we say meditation, there's so many. Yeah. So the first time I'm kind of fascinated by the topic, because there's so many say meditation. So many. Yeah. Yeah. I met this woman on an airplane when I was 19. And I was getting ready to fly down to Texas to tell my dad I was going to drop out of school to tour with this band. So I was really in a low depressed state. I was terrified about this conversation with my dad. So this woman wakes me up on the airplane and essentially tells me that I'm her reincarnated brother and all these things that hairdressers from California might tell a young traveler from Ohio. And so I was skeptical to say

the least, you know, but by the time I got off this flight in O'Hare airport, I was beaming. I was felt connected to something and my eyes were glowing and I just felt really felt that blissful kind of love sensation. And I ended up running into her again in this like crowded airport. And she asked me to come outside and she just really dropped some knowledge on me. She said, it's your path to meditate. I'm going to give you a basic technique to start with and promise me you'll practice. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll practice. And it's a technique that I still teach to people when I teach companies to meditate these days. However, it took me another few years of floundering before I really tried it. And I tried meditation like most people do. I was like,

don't you meditate at the end of yoga, the savasana, the corpse pose? And of course, what happens when you do that? You fall asleep right yeah yes so i did that countless nights of oh it's it's just a new way to fall asleep that's meditation and but one night on the third night i remember in chicago um when i was years later i was living in chicago i was laying on the basement floor of my studio and i i did the savasana meditation and i somehow transcended i felt my body is something distinctly different from my soul. And I felt like a body buzz kind of feeling. And I thought, this is it.

This is the dragon I will chase to the end of my days. And that was enough to do it. And it just kind of, since then, it's been about 10 years, it's been just really polishing the technique and trying different methods to get me back to that place. Yeah, I've been on again, off again. I was writing something today about my earliest meditation experience. This is a long time ago at this point. I think it was like 17.

And so on again, off again, and it really isn't until the last year that I feel like, all right, I got it like every day consistently. And the thing for me was I kind of had to give up wanting any experience from meditation. Because I think that I thought I was supposed to feel good while I meditated. And I think some people do. And I think some people don't.

I generally didn't. I would sit there and think, I don't feel peaceful. I don't feel calm. My mind is racing. I'm looking at the clock. I want to stand up think, I don't feel peaceful. I don't feel calm. My mind is racing. I'm looking at the clock. I want to stand up. And I finally went, I just went to a, you know what?

I'm going to treat this sort of like brushing my teeth. Like, you know, brushing my teeth, maybe I enjoy it, maybe I don't. It doesn't matter. But I get clean teeth. I get clean teeth. That's the benefit. The other 23 hours and 40, you know, whatever it is, I've got clean, healthy teeth. And I'm just going to treat this like mental hygiene. And once I relaxed about that and didn't expect to have any experience,

I was able to settle in enough that I started to get to the place where I was like, oh, this is, this is, you know, a lot of times it's enjoyable. Sometimes it's still not, I still sit there and I want to get up, I want to go, I want to, you know, and, but I think just that, and all, you know, all meditator teach, all meditation teachers generally will tell you just relax and don't be hard on yourself. Yes. Your mind is going to race. It's going to run, you know, just that's fine. It's an exercise in compassion. And then, uh, as John Kabat-Zinn says, it's a, it's an act of sanity. You know, like I love, I love your term mental hygiene. That's so great. I've got to totally steal that.

I'm sure I stole it from somewhere. But when I talk to people about meditation, specifically companies or executives, they think that meditation is sitting in a beautiful white room with candles lit, a nice pillow, the absence of thought, totally zen, all white-robed or whatever. No. The act of meditation is some of the hardest work zen, all white robed or whatever. No. The act of meditation is some of the hardest work you can do.

It's showing up for yourself, sitting there at all costs while the thought monkey's crawling through the windows and just trying to clear the screen to white, trying to clear the screen. So it's that intentional act of bringing your meta attention back over and over, no matter what the weather. attention back over and over, no matter what the weather. And I realize now after doing it for so many years that if people think that I've made any progress, it's from that. It's from training my meta attention. And the only way you do that is by sitting your butt down and doing it. It's like working out a muscle group. And I got to tell this really quick funny story is that a few months ago, I was so busy. I was traveling all the time. And I forgot that I got to tell this really quick, funny story is that a few months ago, I was so busy. I was traveling all the time and I forgot that we had scheduled our roof to get

redone. And at the time before the studio was done, I was meditating up above our bedroom in our finished attic. So like every day I go up there, my habit loop kicks in. I opened my eyes and I think I have to meditate now before the kid's feet hit the floor. That's my habit loop. So I get up, I go, and before I light my candle, once I light my candle at my meditation altar, that's me committing for an hour. So I think long and hard before I light the candle. You know what I mean? Because an hour is an hour. Yeah, that's a substantial commitment. It's rigorous. And that's what the path that I'm on kind of requires. It's a lot of techniques. it's a lot of time on the cushion so before i before i

light the candle i think are you ready for this and sure enough let it i sit down as soon as i sit down this truck pulls up and these amish men storm the roof like spiders they crawl to the top they're banging they're whacking they're ripping they're shredding the kids come my little children come into the room trembling like, Daddy, what's happening? Crawling into my lap. Candles falling over. The shades are, I mean, it was chaos. But the interesting thing was I sat with it,

and I told them to calmly go downstairs for breakfast. Daddy will be down in 55 minutes. And all I could do was kind of sit in that chaos and try to find the one Amish guy on the corner of the roof that had a rhythm to his hammer. Right. Then find the guy that was taking care of how he tore things off, to become really mindful in a total chaotic situation.

And it turned something that was totally unnerving into a really interesting exercise. But I couldn't have sat there for 30 seconds a few years ago. Yeah. Well, I've been meditating lately outdoors whenever i can because i'm like can i get you know can i get the sound of crickets or birds or and and sound seems to be the thing that has worked for me i mean locking in and just sort of paying attention to sound but the place i do it most often is in an industrial park so there's there's birds yeah there's crickets, because there's a little pond,

and then there's the sound of semi-doors slamming and forklifts going back, beep, beep, and cars going by, and I'm like, I'm just going to treat it all as, you know, how can I just make it all sound and not be like, I like that one and I hate that sound, and this sound disturbs me, and just like, and that's been a good experience for me to sort of try and non-judgmentally or non-preferentially just relate to what's there.

Well, it brings you into the scene. Sometimes when you're in a museum and you see those people that aren't truly appreciating what's there or just missing most of it, just going quickly, painting to painting, judging, judging, judging. But then when you catch the right thing, you kind of become, you come into it a little bit and meditation brings you fully into your life experience, like good and bad. I mean, you know, I lost three people close to me over the, uh, over the summer and I haven't experienced like that many, um, grief experiences that close together and it still comes and goes. But because I'm a meditator, because it's like my refuge and my strength and all those things,

it allowed me to process the grief, I think, more quickly, but also on a very, what I feel like is a deeper level of understanding. Because I would have thought before if I would have lost one of those people, I would be derailed and out of the game for months or years. I don't know if I would recover. But something about the lens you cultivate in meditation brings you into a state of understanding, being able to stand above the maze of your life and to see adjacent possibilities and reasons versus being down in the maze and right fearful of that next corner yeah yeah i think that's met whether it's meditation which i think is a great way to do it

or but whatever way we can get perspective i always think perspective isn't really whether that perspective as you said is you sort of rise up and look down on the situation another type of perspective i always find interesting is to play with time. How will I feel about this in five hours or five weeks? You know, because we just get so mired in this, but anything we can do to sort of change the frame of reference so that we think about those things from a different angle. And I agree. I think meditation is, I mean, going back to, you know, the Stephen Covey, I mean, that book, the very first thing in it, or very early, is right between stimulus and response, there's a space.

Yeah, the Viktor Frankl quote. I love that quote. And what I found with meditation is that space increases. Yeah. That space between, all right, I have got a stimulus, and my response, I just have a little bit more chance to go, okay, what is happening here? What do I want to do versus just immediately? And I've always been pretty good at not like, I'm not a like you say something to me and I immediately hit you kind of guy.

Or I immediately start screaming. But what I do do is I immediately go to an emotional reaction that I attach to pretty strongly and believe is the truth. Yeah. And I think most of that I attach to pretty strongly. Sure. And believe is the truth. Yeah. And I think most of us are wired to do that. I mean, we have a lizard brain for a reason. It served us very well for millions of years. But the more often you could consciously try to put your focus up into the front of the cerebral cortex or the Christ consciousness or any of those higher faculties, chances are things tend to work out a little better for us.

Yeah, I just did one of the recent mini-episodes on exactly that sort of thing about why is it that we're inclined to focus negatively. And it tends to be because that's what our brain is wired to pick up. But exactly what you just said, if you can move that attention to call it whatever you want, Christ consciousness, the front of your brain, your higher self, whatever it is. But if you can move out of lizard brain mode, out of survival mode, and perspective is one of the ways to do that. Yeah. For a lot of my work, I do a lot of curriculum design stuff. And part and parcel with curriculum design is to receive immediate feedback. You know, it's kind of like coding software, you know, you have to have

immediate feedback for it to improve. Otherwise, you'll just never solve the true problem. And when you move into that space, you feel really raw, because you're like, I'm always under attack, everyone just wants to like, rip apart my beautiful work all the time. But what I realized is that the feedback, it's such a gift now because that's, you know, one of the main components of flow states, certainly like you have to have a good feedback channel open to, you know, work at the highest level of your creative capacity. But that meditation and mindfulness, it just keeps you from jumping into that defensive mode of like, how dare you attack my beautiful curriculum module? And you get to a state of, wow, we're all here to make this better. And isn't this great?

And we're like truly collaborating. And the end user is all who matters because that's who keeps our lights on. All these higher ways of perceiving a situation where a lot of people cross their arms get defensive and take it personally and you know i was absolutely one of those people for a long time but yeah you know i can't afford to be I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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Follow The Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. A minute ago, you used the term lens. And so I want to take this moment to maybe change a little direction a little bit and talk about your, you've got a website called This Epic Life. And in it, you've got a manifesto. So maybe could you talk through what This Epic Life is? And then one of the parts of that manifesto is about upgrading your lens. Yeah. And so let's maybe move into that now.

Sure, sure. So the manifesto was created, I released it at the end of 2012 when I was doing a lot of training with both with the Good Life Project led by Jonathan Fields, as well as doing all this Kriya Yoga meditation. So that whole year was really kind of the scorching of the earth. It was like really shattering who I thought I was. It was dismantling the ego. It was everything was up for grabs. And I had a sabbatical in that year in April.

And our company is great. They give you a three-week paid sabbatical in your fifth year. You have three weeks to do whatever you want with. And I didn't know what I was going to do because I have these three small kids. So I decided to keep my normal business hours and pretty much meditate all day long. I went running and I meditated. That was pretty much all I did from 8 to 6 p.m. every day for three weeks. Really ideal circumstances to come up with something creative. You know what I mean? And I think that I was just insane enough at the time to actually do it and stay with

it. I called it the radical sabbatical. And during that sabbatical, I just had a kind of an answer came to me. And my big question over that period of 12 years leading up to that was always, why do I always feel like a jack-of-all-trades, master of none? Why do I tend to look at all these different talents and skills I've amassed and accumulated as more of a curse than a blessing? Why can't I just pick one thing and focus on it and be excellent or outstanding at that thing versus wearing all these hats? I was a professional musician since I was a kid. I was an entertainer. I had this, youer. I was starting to get really into meditation. I was starting to get

really into running. And it wasn't trying to prove that I could do all these things. It was like, I felt like these things made me me. And so somewhere in the sabbatical, I got this idea for the framework. And the framework is this, is that you can control your entire perception of life by having what I call a lens statement. Companies have typically very cheesy, crappy mission statements like, we will serve the people by selling more widgets every quarter and blah, blah, blah. But if you think about a guy like Stephen Covey, who is highly guided by virtues, and it's like kind of that deep values work that people do, a lot of coaches do, except I kind of skipped the step of values and I went straight for the capital Vs, which is virtues. And I thought, you know, I was really into the

Stoic philosophers, Greek philosophers. This Aristotle quote I read today that totally reminds me of the work you do on the show, that to be excellent, we just can't think excellent. We must act excellently. You know, that your action has to be congruent with your virtues. So the Lenz statement was really just a frame around the whole thing of tightly tied to my virtues. I say it to myself every day after meditation when all my channels are open. And it kind of reminds me who the hell I'm trying to be and who the hell I'm becoming on a daily basis. So that's the lens statement. And at some point in our development, we realize, and you and I were talking about this before the interview, is that sometimes you just outgrow

what served you well up to a certain point in your life just doesn't serve you anymore. And you have to change a little bit. So, you know, sometimes like yesteryear's bad wolf might serve you in some way, or the, the things that you thought were great that you conquered 10 years ago might not be anywhere near, near as deep as you need to go. Right. You know, so it's the lens really gets at that is how can I upgrade it for, to, to perceive the world around me, you know, and I say about the lens that it could either enhance or diminish all you experience. I mean, it's pretty heavy duty. So, you know, a lot of people's lens, they kind of acute, they acquire them or they adopt them by default, you know, like, if your parent was a worrier, maybe you're a worrier. If so and so is a doubting Thomas, maybe you are too.

I was lucky to have very amazing role models as a kid with my lens. But the lens was core for perception. And then the framework moves into defining non-negotiables, which are, to me, like the things I rattled off before, my art, my family, my vitality, and my work, my spirituality. So it's five non-negotiables. And the thinking is that the lens has the capacity to magnify and deepen those non-negotiables. So by making them non-negotiable in my life, I'm not only saying that I'm not giving these things up because I don't know any better. These are the things that make me, me.

I'm saying that over the course of my lifetime, I will absolutely pursue mastery in any and all of those areas. I'm not saying I'm going to get there. I'm not saying I have gotten there, but I will trip over moments of what I call full life integration is when all of the non-negotiables are working together and they're kind of spinning together. The lens is working with it. And the fact that I'm a musician makes me a better parent. The fact that I'm a decent parent makes me a better meditator. The fact that I'm a meditator makes me a better businessman. All those things that make us stop working in separate silos and start really working

together to make something profoundly unique and powerful. I'm fascinated by that. I was doing a keynote address today at a solar energy conference, and I had the moment when I walked away from that and I went, what the hell am I? Like, I've got so many different hats. And I had that moment of exactly like you said, maybe I should focus on, what if I focused on one thing?

But what I've realized is that, I don't know if I've realized it as consciously as you have, but any time I've gotten to that point, I've went, but that's just not me. If I did that, I just am never going to be interested enough in solar energy to spend all my time thinking about it. I'm interested enough in it to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it, but not all of it and and so i think that's really and when i read that about your i was really fascinated by that idea of how do you bring up how do you bring all those pieces together so what you talked about the lens so is when you talk about non-negotiables or what we saying is these are the key parts that make up me and I'm going to say that these are going to be part of my life.

Yeah. And so, you know, I know one of the things, one of our very first guests on the show, and it's kind of stuck with me when I asked him, what does feeding the good, you know, we read the parable and he said, it means making time to do the art. It means making time to do the art. And so for him, it was, his battle was, it's really easy for everything in life to pull me away from doing that. Family obligations, work obligations, all that. But when he doesn't do that, he just becomes an asshole. Yeah. And so I was sort of struck by that.

So is that what you mean by non-negotiable? Yeah. So I define non-negotiables as sacred life ingredients. Like sacred is a key word. They are sacred life ingredients that cannot be removed or substituted. And what I say in the manifesto is that you've already disproven all the haters and non-believers by just showing up year after year and saying, you know, I am an artist. I might not be excellent at my craft today, but I'm going to get there and I'm getting there and I'm working on it. And that was

always music was always that for me. That was the thing that I couldn't not do. It brought me joy. It was my, the first language I spoke with any level of confidence. And now I would argue when you're up there speaking at, you know, about solar energy, the fact that you're a great guitarist or musician or a podcaster, dad, any of these other hats you wear absolutely benefits you being at the podium talking about solar energy. You might not be able to make the direct correlation to it, but it's kind of the unique thumbprint on who we are as people. And to dishonor all of those other things by saying like, I'm just a guy in a suit today. And then I take the suit off and like,

okay, I have my dad time now. And then I have my music time. You know, Jonathan, my friend Jonathan Fields, when he interviews a lot of people, he's really obsessed with work-life blend. I mean, you've spent the last hour and a half, two hours with my family. You kind of see how my workday goes.

You know, it's a little bit of rock and roll, a little bit of business, a little bit of kids and diapers and food and all these things. That's my life. You know, I can't, um, I could, we could do our best to separate all those things in a nice little clean buckets of here's where my money comes from. Here's when I get to do my craft and my hobbies or whatever. But I was never into hobbies.

I was always like, if I'm going to do it, I want to try to be good at it. I want to be proficient. And eventually, as you move down the path, you realize that I will be that crazy coot on my porch at the age of 70 rocking my bass. Because it's just who I've always been. It's who I always will be. So why not make them non-negotiable? And why not have all of your work benefit from the other non-negotiables in your life? What, but what you just said that, you know, you've sort of proven

they're non-negotiable because they're still there. But I know certainly at times in my life, things that I think are non-negotiable now I've let slide under, under pressure. How did, what, what, how do people go about sort of finding out what those things are? And is it really sacred if you've let it go? Can you bring it back? Yeah. And this isn't to really pitch my stuff, but as part of the manifesto, I did create a workbook that helps people do that. It's all the same process as I did when I put together my own framework. Because a big part of my work is trying to live my own case study and trying to break the model and seeing if it's truly legit. So how I usually help people do that is

non-negotiables are usually things that people either thank you for, thank you for bringing to a certain gathering. I get calls all the time like, dude, can you please bring your acoustic to the bonfire and rock out like 80s hair metal songs or whatever. And, um, it's, it's the things that just adds so such an intangible quality that nobody else might be able to bring, you know, he's that guy you call when we need him to do that, you know? Right. And, um, and what I started realizing about my own is that mine could be segmented in a way that could apply to a large part of the population. Like I really highly recommend a soul practice of some level, you know, it could be mindfulness, it could be meditation. For some people that could be like needle pointing

or anything that helps you transcend thought and just kind of get into the moment, you know, vitality. We all know that we need to maintain these human apparatuses or they're going to fail us eventually. Um, the family is, you know, it's a mixed bag of nuts for everybody, you know, um, and a lot of ways our families of origin are more pain than pleasure. So I always thought, how can I try to improve the situation I'm in and art? I feel like everybody has an art and some capacity, you know,. Even the most hard-ass businessman who's never picked up an instrument or a paintbrush, maybe it's the art of persuasion, or maybe it's the art of conveying ideas or packaging thoughts. And then finally,

work should be non-negotiable for people because it's pretty much inevitable in life. We need to work in some capacity, so why not make work benefit from those others? So I just ask people to really think about what people thank them for and think about the things that truly bring them joy. And it's kind of like Stephen Covey's Quadrant 2, which is like what's not urgent but important.

Brene Brown, who I'm a big fan of, she had this great quote, you know, unused creative energy is not benign. And I've seen so many musicians. Yes. Just let that one sink in because how many musicians did you grow up with? I mean, you've been in bands, I'm sure, since you were a kid.

The guys that don't hang their guitars in view, that they can't reach for their guitars when they want to, it manifests itself first as bitterness and envy and jealousy. and then they become the critic of all other music and then down the road maybe they end up with cancer or they end up with some sort of manifestation that's so much deeper or so much more uh painful than just being yourself and picking up your guitar because that's who you are you know yeah think the, there are a lot of things that I really struck me from what you're saying. I think that quote is really amazing, but I think this idea, and there seems to be more of it. You hear this more lately, and I know some of our interviews have reflected this, which is,

I think we all have a tendency to be, to bring the person to the situation we're in that we think should be there. Yeah. Right. Like you said, I'm now at this thing. So I'm the business guy. Right. And so I need to fit there. And so I mold who I am a little bit to that. Or I, even if it's not so much as I mold that I bring out the parts of me that work there and the parts that don't just sort of sit quietly until I go over to the other area. And I have been, I mean, I wrestle with this one a lot. I mean, I have done that. And what I started to realize was that, and I think it's kind of what you're saying, and it's not easy easy but the thing that actually is counterproductive i think to your to your to my business career because i'm not really there all the way right

i am i am part of who i am there i am a fragment of myself you're a facade in some way and so i don't connect or resonate with people in the same way that I do when I go, I'm here and you know what? Yeah, I'm, you know, I do these things that are at least in this circle would be considered oddball, but they're who I am. And then I'm there and, and things change. Yeah. At least for me, when I bring all of myself to a situation. I mean, we are, we are, you know, if we're icebergs, you know, there's the limited facade that's above the surface that the rest of the world sees. And then there's this, the waterline is kind of this thin

layer of static between, you know, us and the bigger us and the bigger us is enormous. And in so many ways it frightens the crap out of us and we're afraid to show it. But the tagline for my site, my, my coach, Cynthia Morris helped me figure this out is be who you are wherever you are and that we feel fully integrated and we feel fully alive when there is no toggle between who we are and what we do that I could show up rocking my mala beads to a board meeting or to a meeting with Jonathan for Good Life Project or to you know in my family situation and I don't care about judgment I don't care about judgment. I don't care about it because I'm just, I'm who the hell I am, you know. So how do you, I mean, that is a bold way to live, right? Yeah.

It wasn't always that way, I'll tell you. Right. I mean, so I think that is a, there's a lot of fear to overcome getting to that place. So what are some of the things that, you know, people can do, you know, short, short thing or two. And one of the things you say, I love, which is basically, you know, keep in mind that when it comes to your inner alignment, there are no shortcuts. So yeah, yeah, I'm, you know, right, you're not going to give me the two easy tips that I never, right. But But what are some of the mindsets that people can start to bring when they go,

you know what, tomorrow at work? Yeah, I want to be more they go, you know what, tomorrow at work, I want to be more me. Or you know what, when I go home to my family tonight, I want to be more who I am instead of who I've been or who they expect me to be. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, my wife, you met my wife briefly. I mean, she gives me a lot of inspiration in this department because she's always been unapologetically who the hell Gail is. Like that's Gail, you know, and it was something to aspire to. She's way more assertive than me. She just, you know, she rocks her tattoos. She's who she is. But me, what I would recommend for people to do is there's so many great surveys you could take now, a lot of them

for free to attain what I call ruthless self-knowledge. Ruthless self-knowledge is taking the VIA strength survey, which is like a positive psychology survey that's so dead on in terms of nailing what your core strengths are. Remind me to get that in the show notes. Yeah. I'll give you a whole list of them. There's that one. There's a 360 reach survey, which is kind of a branding survey for anybody doing like personal branding. I just did that for my website. StrengthsFinder, Tom Rath is the book StrengthsFinder. The Lens Statement is absolutely one. That's one of my exercises I do and use religiously. But all of this ruthless self-knowledge is great because what you'll start to see, oh, MBTI is one of the most famous ones. It's been used in work situations forever. It helps with teams work together.

Myers-Briggs, it's called. But Ruthless Self-Knowledge, you take all these different things. Oh, and the other one that blows my mind is the Enneagram. Have you ever heard of the Enneagram? I have. Yeah. That thing is wild. It's kind of like astrology on steroids.

It's a way of looking at the world through a series of numbers. And I know for a fact, I'm an Enneagram number seven. So what does Ruthless Self-Knowledge give you? Well, it gives you the ability to lay out the results of these different things and maybe just take two or three of them. Because I only have one speed, 11, I probably took 11 of them. And I look for pattern recognition. I look for humor shows up in every single one of these. So I know that humor isn't a crutch for me. Humor is a strength. So how can I use humor at work to get executives to the table that wouldn't otherwise work together? Then I become the guy that people tap to bring people together for things. So you start small and working from an area of your

strengths. I started injecting, spirituality came up in all my stuff. I started taking meditation into the workplace and people thanked me for doing this. This is stuff I would have done for free anyway. But, you know, Was that, was that hard? Was it hard to, I mean, To put myself out there? To go into a corporate setting and say, I want to bring meditation in here. You know, I'm kind of spoiled. In my company, I'm spoiled because we have such a remarkable culture. We've, it's a company called Centro. We've won the best place to work for four years in Chicago. They are so open to anything and everything. Our founder chief, Sean, another Ohio boy, he grew up Mennonite, so high principles. He's basically an Amish that can party and use technology. He always had this culture that said, you know, I want to make it as spiritual and open and loving as possible. So, Chris, you got an idea. Do it.

And so at first, when I started with the company, I was really afraid to hit send on some of my crazy emails about meditation. And, you know, I'd wrap a lot of humor into them. But I knew that a certain percentage would think I was very weird and out there. And some of them still do, frankly. But I have their utter respect on some level, too, because I've never deviated from that. They know, like a lot of these executives that I've come up with at the company the last seven years, you know, one of them's asked me to officiate his wedding next weekend in Ojai.

So it's, it's when you, when you find the courage and you get the footing to just rock a little bit of your truth and live from your strengths, it leads kind of the next one. And each one's a little bit of a risk, and you push a little bit farther. But I swear there's times, and this is crazy, Eric, but remember those jobs we have all had where you had to hide the fact that you were a musician? You try not to talk about it. You don't want to be that guy like, yeah, I used to be in a band.

Now I show up at work events, and people seriously ask me where my guitar is. They're like, did you bring your guitar? And if I don't have it, they're kind of concerned. Why didn't you bring your guitar? I could have never imagined having a day job that paid me well where I could even think about bringing up music, let alone being that. But it came from that, again, long road, long commitment of saying, I'm going to push it. I'm going to be myself in these situations. But the more you do that, the more people come to push it. I'm going to be myself in these situations. But the more you do that,

the more people come to trust you. The more people come to rely on you and value your perspective on things because you're not packaging it. Because it's real. Yeah. You're not packaging it in the politically correct thing to do. I have to tell executives all the time, like, I appreciate your idea, but it's a terrible one. I have to, you know, give, because I love the company, I have to be direct. However, they know that I'm also the first one on their side when it's a great idea. Like, hell yes, let's do it, you know? Because authenticity, it's really, at the end of the day, it's our true currency for how our lives and our career unfold is authenticity. And everything works better for me when I put radical in front of it. So I would argue radical

authenticity, very painful for some people. Yeah. For me, it's been painful to a point, but I realized now that there's no going back. I just have to keep moving towards more authenticity. Yeah. Well, whatever challenges you may have had with that, you seem to at least, anywhere I've seen you, be past. You seem to be pretty much you. Yeah. I mean, in a pretty remarkable way. Thanks, man. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

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on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You had a great seat for the best job of my life in the last few years, which was being the camp director for Good Life Project, summer camp.

And it was one of those things I knew months leading up to it that I was made to do this role. I'm going to be a ringmaster, I'm going to be an emcee. I'm going to be a DJ, a motivator, a musician, all these things. And who else would be crazy enough to try and try all that stuff, but to show up there and to just be fully enmeshed in the moment and to be rewarded for being who I am showing up in pajamas on the second day and doing like the intros for the keynotes and pajamas and those things. It's, it's not a look at me, look how much fun I'm having kind of thing. It's a, wow, what took me so long to get here? You know, this, you know, I see guys like Bob Marley. I see guys like, you know, John Lennon, people that were unapologetically who the hell they were from a young age, like almost fell onto the earth like that.

And it takes some of us a lot more years to take that baby step journey. But once you trip over it, it's hard to go back. Well, I certainly think it's encouraging to see. Because I think if you didn't, watching from the outside, not knowing you, it would seem like this guy hadn't been born that way, right? Because you were so clearly just there, out there, having fun, completely unselfconscious. But I think it's really important that people hear that wasn't the way you were, that you can get there, that you can, you know, those, those, um, that weight that we carry to be somebody different than we are, you can. So one of my things, one of my exercises every once

in a while is I try to post something on Facebook that literally makes my skin crawl because James Altucher is the same way. If you ever listened to his podcast, he's, he said, you know, he'll, he knows it's a successful post by the degree to which he's scared S-less to post it. And when my dad passed this summer, I was with him as he passed. It was a very emotional time for our family. But somehow being at my parents' house over the weekend, I found this hidden on a shelf. I found this little book of my senior photos, yearbook photos. like little book of my senior photos, yearbook photos. And they were the most horrific photos,

like floral vests, brooches, band letters, band whistle, Doogie Howser haircut. I mean, just yabba dabba damn painful to look at. So I thought I got to practice what I preach. I got to, I'm going to post these one by one and just kind of see the response I get, you know? And, and so I still absolutely take those risks and endure that pain to say, you know, and in some way it's honoring that kid, that geeky, super concerned with what everybody thought of him kid that we all were at some point, honoring that and saying, you know, these days I try not to have any apologies for who the hell I am, but all of us kind of start from that place. And, you know, but waking up the next day and seeing kind of like that mixed bag of support and like total all my friends like jumping in

and reminding me what a complete dork I was and stuff, you know, it's somewhere in there is what I'm trying to leave behind, you know. Well, I like that we talk often on the show, it's about small steps. I mean, for some people, sometimes just taking a huge jump is the right thing to do. But in a lot of cases, for people, it's just one small step. What one way tomorrow in one conversation with one person can I be more me? And then, oh, that went okay well all right

let me try that again the next day with a different person or let me take one more step with that person or it's you know those things those microscopic steps add up if they're consistent absolutely and again it's for me meditation is where that's cultivated i i always tell people that meditation helps you discern signals from static. And the static is the ego and the voices and the scripts that we're given as kids telling us you have to fit in this box and do this and all that stuff that doesn't quite jive with us. People meant well when they gave it to us, but it doesn't serve us. And then the signal, which is sometimes absurd, sometimes inspired, sometimes scary, but your unique signal, if you could use meditation or a mindfulness practice to tune into that and be guided by that, those risks become less about the risk and more about your duty to fulfill. Because to me, that's your mission. That becomes

providence. That becomes, and all the audacious people in history, I mean, Steve Jobs summed it up beautifully in the Think Differently campaign, that it's those people that changed the world and it was no easier for them to step into that responsibility because it is a responsibility than it is for any of us,

but at some point we realized that we have to do it. Yeah, and I is for any of us but at some point we realize that we have to do it yeah and i think for a lot of people the the uncomfortableness or the pain of not doing that starts to become a pretty big motivator i used to joke about it like when i was younger and would be scared to ask a girl out i would eventually i eventually got to the point where i was like the pain of being a chicken is worse than the pain of rejection at this point yeah i can't stand my chickenness on this right you know and and then you try you get past that and you're like oh yeah this is not being true to ourselves is far worse although it not it doesn't seem like

it for a while but eventually at least for me that hits a hits an inflection point where i'm like i can't yeah do this yeah you die well you had you had a great quote on one of your podcasts i listened to the other day which uh was one of the short ones where you were talking about pushing through procrastination to take good action and you said something about uh you can't think your way into action but you can act your way into you can't think your way into action, but you can act your way into it. You can't think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking. Yes, yes. You have to lead with action, and most people aren't wired to take that action. They have to really go through so many crazy cycles of getting the hell beat out of them before they say,

okay, I've had enough. I'm going to try, you know, to, to pursue this. So, yeah. Well, I think we are, uh, at the end of our time, actually, this has been a long one, which seems to be happening more and more as I get great people on the show. Um, but thanks so much for taking the time. It's been been fun and I will make sure that on our show notes, links to your site and all that stuff, we'll make sure we get some of those personality studies out there also or tests. I appreciate that

always great to make another good friend in Ohio yes, Ohio power thanks for having me on thanks Thanks for having me on. Thanks. You can learn more about this podcast and Chris Carter at one, you feed.net slash Carter. And don't forget to go online and sign up for our email list, and you can get Eric's free four-part series about the seven habits of highly effective people.

Thanks. Bye.