Traveling is not just to go to a place, but also find out who you are. The concept of traveling is discovering what’s more of you to come out and evolve through all these experiences. A lot of people have been living their lives in other people’s shadows. Traveling from place to place without a goal and enjoying good food and great people is an incredible experience and an opportunity to find a different part of yourself. It is an exciting and scary endeavor, but the core of the experience of letting go of the status quo and the structure is to find out who you are and where you want to go.
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A new year, a new me. I’ve always hated that “New Year, new you,” but it’s true. You’ve got to pay attention to and respect it because it feels like life is becoming new and exciting. I’m grateful to be alive in this time. Morgan and I are going to Costa Rica. She’s doing a week long certification. I’m not exactly sure why I’m going. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me and this is filling me with this feeling of almost dread because I don’t know who I am without purpose, without my office, without my laptop, without my appointments, without my schedule. This is going to open up this new part of me, which I’m excited to see.
This show starts off with a rant about the concept of traveling. Traveling not just to go to a place, but also find out who you are. I’m excited to see what’s going to be like. I’ll be doing a show live from Costa Rica, sharing with you what I’ve discovered and who I am. We then talk to Rachel who also had a structured first 34 years of her life as a teacher and finds herself in that same place, a place where she’s not sure who she is without her own structure. We’ll give her some advice around coaching and we set up a game for her to start her own podcast, her own group coaching call. For more shows, please visit us at TuffLove.live. If you’d make a donation to the call, please send a little loving to PayPal.me/KandellConsulting.
Excited to be here talking about this concept of traveling. A few other words before we jump onto the show. For those of you who know me or listen to this show probably think, “Rob, you’re a pretty authentic guy,” and that is true. I’ve been discovering through all these experiences I had how much more there is for me to come out? How much more there is to me to show up? How much more of me that wants to come out and really excited to be that? There’s this book that’s evolving. I’m doing my first eBook, I’m redoing my websites. I’m in this place of fully being who I am and totally excited to find out who that person is because I don’t know who this person is that wants to evolve.
I’ve realized through some therapy, loss of business, a lot of money, and time that I had been living my entire life in other people’s shadows. I’d been living in a place where I haven’t felt fully comfortable being the front man. To be that one out front, which is crazy because I do this show every week for over a year but there’s still as part of me that’s hedging my bets always. The turn on, the excitement is for me to come out and fully own who I am. Look out world, here we are.
This show’s around the concept of traveling and here’s a little history about myself. I went to high school and I was heading to college. I spent a month in Israel right before I went to college in between high school and college with my best friend Ronin. He lived there when he was young. He moved to the States when he was twelve and he’s like, “Let’s go to a Hemingway thing.” I was into Hemingway at the time. If you haven’t read Hemingway, challenging books to read, but so good. Especially when he would travel, he would talk about sitting around and watching his hair grow, the patience and the beauty of his travel, drinking and chasing bulls and all those things. I did this Hemingway-like thing when I went to Israel with my buddy. We moved from town to town without a goal and enjoyed, ate good food, chased women who didn’t chase us back and had this experience of going out and finding ourselves in friendship for a month.
That was an incredible experience. I haven’t done it since then. My life has been a progression of work and school-related things. Since that day I got off the plane from Israel, I went to college and I did well in college. I went to school until August of my senior year then jumped right into grad school. From grad school, I was supposed to go to Europe for three months and backpack. That was my goal after college. Lo and behold, I met my future ex-wife and we journey together. We ended up in San Francisco together. My trip to backpack that eased out of discovery vanished because I made the choice to move to San Francisco with this woman and start my adult life. From that, I went from first job to second job to my own consulting business to starting OneTaste and being engrossed in that for many years.
Concept Of Traveling: The structure is important.
As soon as I was done with OneTaste, when I got off the boat at OneTaste, I had this choice again. I have this blank slate. I had this opportunity to do the Hemingway, to do that magical thing. I jumped right into building my next career. No break, no travels, little trips here and there. I went to Barcelona, had a great time for about seven, eight days. I’ve always had this rigid, this stubborn way of needing to be in structure, to have the next job, to have the next purpose, to create the next thing. I am definitely, totally uncomfortable with the skill of being free, loose, unstructured, not killing myself every day, not in purpose every day. Every step of my life since that day in Israel has been one thing after another, to build the thing, moving away from unstructured.
I am an extremely structured person. I love structure. I love my calendar. I love knowing where I’m going to be. I love my office. I love my home. I like things clean. I like things organized. I like these things in depth and in tune and I’m not very good at traveling. When I would go to travel vacations, what would I look for? I would do the same things in other cities that I would in my hometown, movie theaters, coffee bars, bookstores when they existed. I’ve lived in this place where I don’t know how to live in the unknown. Some part of me is like, “I’m just not a traveler, that’s not who I am,” and this other part of me that’s always questioned this feeling.
Here we are. Morgan, my love, is trying to get into a certification program with her teacher, Teal Swan, TealSwan.com. She’s awesome. I highly recommend her and check her out. She does this certification process that Morgan has been doing for about a year and a half, two years and wants to get properly trained in it. She’s like, “Wouldn’t it be great if I come to the certification program. You have to apply, and if they pick you based on your energy then you could go.” I was like, “That’s cool. If you want to go, that’s great.” She’s like, “Maybe you can come with me.” I was like, “What? What would I do? You’ll be in your little training and I’ll be alone in Costa Rica.” That’s where the training is. What will I do during that time? Will they have internet cafes everywhere? What about my work? What about my clients? What about my commitments? What I was saying was I was definitely feeling uncomfortable with this concept of the unknown.
Lo and behold, Morgan got her place in the training. We bought the plane tickets. The goal was for me to stay at the retreat center where the training’s going on. Morgan would go off and do her training during the day. I would wander close by and then we’d hang out at night, make out at night, have experiences or go on day trips. It was this trip planned with the both of us to go to be together. The message came from the organizers saying, “No, Rob cannot stay at the retreat center. There’s not enough room but also we don’t want someone who’s not in the training to be involved in the energies.” I got that as someone who’s taught hundreds and hundreds of workshops and retreats and those fifteen people for those nine days or seven days, however long it is, they can be tidy and gross.
Me popping in and out could be a huge distraction. It could be detrimental on some level to Morgan’s training. I said to her, “No, you’re going to be focused on this. Maybe I shouldn’t go. Maybe I should not go to Costa Rica. We’d lose it, the plane ticket. It was $500 or $600, or maybe I could get some credit for it. You could go and I could have an adventure or just work. I like working. I’ll just stay home and work and then this little voice in the back of my head said, “This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity for you to find out what it’s like to live on unstructured.”
This podcast is one without answers. Usually, Tuff Love, the concept is we give you some ideas and we give you some defined tasks. How to make your life better, how to handle money, how to handle jealousy, how to communicate, the show has a purpose and a to-do-list at the end. This isn’t this show. This show is going to be who the fuck is Rob going to be at the end of this experience and the excitement of it. I’m preparing for the show and I’m, “What am I going to talk about? I never know what I’m going to talk about.” I remember this thought I had. I left OneTaste and built my consulting business. LA Mother started. That was my next prism I applied and lived in for a while, but that space between, I was in this place where I was like, “Maybe I should go live in Bali for a couple of months. Maybe I should go live somewhere and challenge myself to move out of my status quo, who I am.” I had that thought and I even posted on Facebook. “Where should I go? Bali, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Thailand?” to have this experience. I put it out there.
Morgan wasn’t too thrilled about that, but that’s a different story. The point was I had the thought of what it would be like to leave the status quo of Los Angeles, America, my structure, my consulting business and live out in the world and quickly nixed the idea. I quickly let go of the idea and here it is. We’re leaving on a red-eye to Costa Rica for this nine-day experience. I have the opportunity to find a different part of myself that I’m totally excited about and also a little nervous.
Here are some details about the trip. First off, God-willing with solid internet, I’m going to be reporting my experience of the first week. This is part one of two of travel, next is part two of two of travel. You’ll get from Costa Rica live from Costa Rica, Tuff Love, a report of what’s happened. Here’s what I know about my trip for the next nine days. We fly in, Morgan and I. We get in around in the morning. We have this lodge that we’re going to, this beautiful room that my parents treated us for Christmas called the Peace Lodge, which is right by the mountains. There’s some horseback riding. There might even be a zip line with me and my fear of heights might attempt. This is beautiful place called the Peace Lodge. You could check it out. It looks beautiful. We’re going to stay there. Then we drive to a retreat center where Morgan is staying.
She goes and goes deep into her training starting Saturday night till Thursday. I have Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday totally to myself. The opportunity for me is to find out who this person is. Now here’s the thing that’s in the back of my head, Robert, you’re going to fucking love this. This is going to be the next thing for you. There’s going to be some part of you that’s going to arise because you are a control freak. You are someone that likes everything lined up. You’re going to find this different part. The same thing happened when I went to Burning Man with my ex-wife, Carol. She dragged me. I was like, “I don’t want to go. That’s Burning Man, those are for those people, those hippies, doulas, massage therapists and there’s naked, nudity, and sex. That’s not for me because I’m a yuppie.” I went to Burning Man and fell in love with it. I fell in love with the experience, but I fell in love with who I am inside the experience. That’s been a trippy world. That’s been a trippy place. The rising of who I am, this grand adventure that’s going on excites me.
I have a place to stay at this little commune, close to where Morgan is doing training. I have no plans, no hotel plans. I have a map of Costa Rica. I have my friend Ben Rody, who lives four hours from San Jose. I have a rental car SUV with a GPS, my laptop, a knapsack, and money. I’ve got to have money. I have no idea what it’s going to be like and what it’s going to be like to wake up, get in the car and which way do you want to go? Do you want to go south? Do you want to go east? Do you want to go west? Do you want to go north? Do you want to go north to the mountains and the volcanoes? Do you want to go west to the Pacific Coast and visit places Montezuma? That’s a great surf beach. Do you want to go a place where they don’t speak English? I don’t speak Spanish. Do you want to go a place where you know you don’t know where you’re going to end up? Do you want to get lost?
The coaching business is hard. It is a hard business to be in. Click To TweetFor me to get lost in this world is something that’s antithetical to who I am. Who am I without work? Who am I without structure? Who am I without the innate sense of who I think I should be? This is going to be this grand adventure. Finding out you know what’s the next thing? For my faithful and hopefully some of this conversation is starting to spark up little ideas in your head. Are you wondering who you’d be in my shoes? Would you be totally excited? Would you be totally nervous? Would you be willing to go on this trip? Would you willing to break your own status quo? What would happen if you did go against your status quo? Who would you be not knowing where your next meal is going to come from? I’m on a pretty strict diet. It was called a lifestyle. I’m not doing the dairy. I’m not doing the glutens. I’m trying to limit the greens. Who am I going to be in a country where beans and rice is the natural thing? Who am I going to find out who I am, and who am I going to be without Morgan by my side? Who am I going to be by myself on the road? That is an exciting and scary endeavor. My feelings are this. My feelings are I’m not going to know what’s going to happen.
The last thing I want to talk about is this concept of letting go and living in a world where letting go is scary and it’s scary for me. It’s probably scary for you but it’s scary because I’m not sure what I want to be in this world and if I don’t have my structure, letting go and allowing, surrendering, not creating, not forcing. That is going to be the core of this experience to find out who I am and where I want to go.
Live Coaching
Jeffrey’s on the line and Rachel volunteered to be coached. Let’s do Rachel and then hopefully, Jeffrey will have a little time. Rachael?
Hello.
How are you?
I am good.
Good to hear from you. Thanks for volunteering.
You’re welcome. I’ve been coached before so I was leaving it open because I saw you several times and that it was like, “Maybe it’s meant to be,” so I went ahead and volunteered.
Thank you so much.
I definitely resonate with what you’re talking about because I left my teaching job. I’ve been in school from when I was three until last year because I was a teacher. The things that I’m finding out about myself are that the structure is important and I’m having troubles making a structure for myself. Being able to get up whenever I want or stay up as late as I want or do whatever I want. It’s freeing and what I’m finding is overwhelming because there are many options.
How old you?
35.
For 35 of your life since you were three, school has been your structure. They’ve been your rails. They’ve been your container and now, you left your teaching job. How long ago?
It’s been about a year.
For a year and you find yourself out in the world trying to discover who you are without this structure. Who do you want to be?
I would love to be a coach, a speaker and someone who travels, has adventures and that person that’s living an exciting, abundant life.
That is a common thing especially in our clan, in our demographic of people. It’s a challenging thing to do because one, I want to say this for the record. The coaching business is hard. It is a hard business to be in. For all the people who are being enticed by coaching programs, books or certification programs, there are many coaches out there all with the same concept that you do. I’ve been in this business for over twenty years and there are still times where I’d struggle. It’s gotten better in the last year for sure. My point is, if you want to be in this business, it’s not going to be piece of cake. I want to give you a reality that you’ve picked a difficult profession to be in, to differentiate yourself and to be successful. You’ve been now this for a year, you want to be a coach, you want to be a speaker, how it going?
I would say it’s okay. It’s not great. I have a few clients, not enough to bills. It’s different and similar to what you do as a teacher. Part of me is because I do have that skill set. It’s almost I fall back on it because what else could I do? As a teacher who has all of those qualifications, I’m sure there’s probably a thousand things I could do, but I guess it’s figuring out what that is that’s hard.
Your language was interesting there. Do you feel shame about having a fall back plan?
There is a little bit of shame or guilt there.
It was loud for me. It might not be loud for you. That might be something you look for. It’s awesome that you have a backup plan. It’s important. You should not look at that as a detriment but as a plus because you might discover after a year or two coaching, I’m not predicting this or prescribing this, that you might not want to be a coach. You might want to be something else and there’s no shame in my book for that. It’s to have that backup plan, to have those skills is good because then your system can relax a little bit.
I was talking to this guy who wanted to be a coach and he basically worked for a tech company. He made a lot of money with stock dividend or something and then quit and then has been living on savings trying to build a coaching career. He’s had trouble make getting clients. I said to him, “Keep your day job. If you want to be a coach, if you want to increase your career, keep that foundation. That way, the worst thing you could do as a coach is trying to sell from desperation. When you’re selling from desperation to pay your rent that is a challenging place to be with your clients.
Concept Of Traveling: When you’re selling from desperation to pay your rent that is a challenging place to be with your clients.
Is there something you want to talk about specifically or how I can help you?
It’s more just looking at how do you get past the overwhelm of all of the decisions to make a decision?
The overwhelm has to do with the vast amount of choices you have in your life. The getting up whenever you want, go into bed whenever you want. It’s the lack of structure. What’s your relationship to structure now? Do you want more of it or do you fear it?
There’s this place where I want more of it and then it’s hard for me to stick with it. Then I wonder, do I want that or I just feel like I should want that?
I have something similar with exercise. I’ve been a jock my entire life and I go through periods where I am sick of working out. I’m sick of yoga and I did Tabata. It’s twenty seconds of high intensity and ten seconds of resting. I actually enjoy it. I have the same thing with in terms of exercise and finding that spot. I would recommend more inquiry. Allow yourself to ask more questions about it and maybe there’s some sweet spot around structure you haven’t found yet. Do you have an accountability partner, coach, friends, support system?
I do and I haven’t leaned on in this area.
If I could recommend anything, that’s your first step. To use my analogy, I work out much better when I have a coach or personal trainer. Unfortunately, Equinox are $10,000 a month. It’s like $1,000 a month. I’m like, “Fuck that. I’m not spending $1,000 on a trainer, even though she’s cute and looks great.” My point is, I’m looking to extend the work out. I’m looking for some kind of team thing or some group exercise. That’s my deal, to find some kind of group exercise or training I could do with a bunch of people. Having an accountability partner is a powerful thing that most people, for some reason, don’t do. They want to be proud or hide from it. They want to think they can have on your own, but someone to say, “I want you to hold me accountable that I get up every morning at 8:00 AM, I’m out the door by 9:00 AM.” Let them help you keep your own commitments. The second thing I want to ask is, do you have specific goals?
That’s been part of I feel like the structure is sitting down and figuring things out, which I’ve been avoiding.
My advice is set up some goals for yourself. I do this all the time. I set up goals. I did a forecast of how much money I wanted to make based on all the debt I owe from LA Mother, how much people owe me, how much I spend. I built a little template, if anyone wants it, it’s a cool little money template I built to help you forecast. The number is I want to make $200,000 a year in my consulting business, which is a lot of money. I did well this year, been working on other businesses, but knowing that number $200,000 and then you divide by twelve months and that’s around $16,250, something number like that. I know what I need to make per month and then from that, I need to know what I need to sell to make that number.
There’s a way where I set goals for myself as a way to do a reverse engineering to set myself up for what I need to do. Every month I can see how far I’m behind. I don’t today have the structure or the clients to make $16,000 a month. I know that. Now I’m getting craftier. There’s this thing called Patreon.com that helps people with podcasts where I can get patrons and I can ask for $1 per month. People donating, just like, “Give me a dollar a month if you like the show to support to show,” or maybe $40 per month. $40 per month is some specialty act and then I’m going to do $99 coaching for anyone who wants45 minutes, one-on-one with me, which is much cheaper than my rates. Maybe I’ll do a $2,500 per month as a specialty act to you once a month with me. It’s getting creative and learning to leverage. It’s learning to how to get to the next level.
As you were talking about that, that definitely sparked some desire and interest like, “That’s exciting.” I definitely do not lack any ideas. It’s getting them into motion.
Mitch has volunteered to support you. Mitch is an awesome guy. We are brilliant creatures and we’re also un-potentiated and I say this with the kindness and with much approval as possible. We’re un-potentiated, which means we’re not living in our fullest potential. Very few human beings I’ve met in my entire life live at their full potential. Tony Robbins lives at his full potential. That man is ridiculous. He’s just one person that popped in my head who lives at his full potential. Tim Ferriss is another man, and I’m doing a lot of research on Tim Ferriss and liking the work he’s doing. Tools of Titans is a great book if you’re interested. We’re un-potentiated and we’re not un-potentiated for any bad reason. We’re un-potentiated because we don’t know how to live in our full potential. We’re learning this new skill.
That’s a scary place of who would I have to become to live at my full potential every day, of sliding through life and being semi successful or that fear of success thing is real.
It’s humongous. Your ability to stand in the face of fear of your success and move towards it is what’s going to get you potentialized. We’re taught that we’re failures. We’re taught that we’re not fully potentialized. It makes the world go round that we don’t have everything buttoned down, but that’s a choice like every others.
Let’s play with one. Give us one goal and let’s see if we can diagnose it to see how to help you and help others see how to potentialize their goal. What’s one goal? It could be my goal, it could be the clients’.
One goal I have is to set up an online weekly, either women’s group or some coaching call or a weekly something online that I do consistently. Weekly online events.
You’re talking to the right person because we’ve been doing this the whole for a year plus. Let me share some of my experience. I don’t know if you’d know this, but now we’ll do it for the record. Tuff Love got created because I was sick of enrolling people for courses. It was basically a fuck you to the whole workshop world. I was sick of enrolling. I made a commitment. I said out loud on Facebook, “I’m going to do six Tuff Loves every Thursday for six shows.” I wasn’t even sure how to do it. I knew what Zoom was like but I was like, “I’m going to do it.”I did those six shows. I had anywhere from eight to fifteen people show up. People were starting to download the recordings. I had some skills there. Maybe five downloads a day.
Your ability to stand in the face of fear of your success and move towards it is what’s going to get you potentialized. Click To TweetI basically said, “I’m going to do this.” This is show 57. I have close to 6,000 downloads. That’s 6,000 times people have listened to my voice. All it is because I was willing to say I’m committing to this process. My ego wants 500,000 downloads. My soul on some level is doing it for people like Elvis and people like Larry and people like you and people like Mitch and Henrick who show up every week. I know it sounds corny, but I do this for myself. I got a note from someone who says, “I love your show. I love your lightness and you’re approving nature.” This is a woman I’d never met before. I was like, “That’s why I do the show.” If I could turn someone on some corner of the world, that’s inspiring for me. Just do it. Pick a date. When are you going to start?
Next Wednesday.
Do you want international or do you want domestic or both?
Both.
8:00 AM, 9:00 AM, 10:00 AM is your ideal time. You’ll lose out on the Australia, but they’re a crazy time anyway. The 10:00 AM can get you people like Henrick. You can get Ireland, you can get England, and you can get a lot of the Europe. 8:00 AM, 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM. Which one do you want to do?
10:00 AM. I’m not a morning person.
Good, 10:00 AM. Next Wednesday. Do you have a Zoom account?
I do not.
Zoom account is $10 a month or $15 a month for up to 50 people. As you can tell every week, but you come here, it’s a great platform. When you do use Zoom account. Make sure you set the record to auto record. I lost a show because I forgot to set record, really pissed me off. You can set a reoccurring Zoom link, then you can publicize Zoom link and that’s all you need to do.
I think I can do all of that.
What are you going to call it?
I already have a Facebook page called Life Abundantly. Life stands for love, integrity, fulfillment and enjoyment. I’m going to continue that theme.
I like that. You know what Fiverr is? It’s a website where you can get a logo for $5.Some of them are really $5 logos, but they’re cool. There are many graphic designers. Allow them to start off with one and then they build others, but you could build a logo. The Facebook event, invite all your friends, be vulnerable. Come up with a plan. Be willing to be a total fool of yourself. I did it my first few shows, looking back, but throw yourself into it and you can’t go wrong.
I’ve written it all down. I’m super pumped. I’m going to get it as soon as we get off the phone, I’m going to do it. Otherwise I’ll chicken out.
Elvis says he’ll tune in from Ireland. They are my number one fans. They’re here early and they’re always enthusiastic.
I will need some fans.
All you need is one. That one starts off with you. Do it for your own sanity. That’s why I do it. I’ll be on there if I can. I’ll be somewhere in Costa Rica. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much always for being on the show. I appreciate it. Spread the word. Thanks so much always for listening and download. Patreon is coming away to support the show painlessly and I’m excited for what comes next. Go forth, be free and find out who you are without your structure. Go against your status quo and good luck. We only have this one life to live that we remember, why not enjoy it, fully be who you are. That’s my goal and I’m grateful. Take care. I’m out of here. Bye.
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