152: I Brag

What do you do when life is so good that you don’t know what to do with it? How does one confront when things are going your way? How do you stay sane when all you’ve known is stress and pain to motivate you? It’s no easy feat. Listen to your own internal voice. Say yes to what you desire. Start to work towards it and start to receive it because that’s the way that we can all up-level ourselves, our family, and our relationships. Rob digs into the richness of his life and how he stays sane when life is so good. 

This show is about what you do when things are going well. You’re excited, you’re feeling good but the people around you aren’t feeling as good and they’re not excited about life. Do you invite them up to your amazing life or do you shrink down and make yourself smaller? What do we do when life is good but getting out of control? For more shows, please visit RobertKandell.com. Check out my upcoming communication course. The book is now on pre-sale and many other things. If you’re so inclined, please write a review on your favorite podcast app, iTunes, Stitcher, whatever you listen to. I’d be most grateful.

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This show is about how to live inside the mayhem when things are going well. I had been trained my entire life to deal with problems, challenges and things going wrong. I’m like an expert when it comes to ‘the sky is falling’ and there are all this pain, angst and people worrying. When people need me and things are on fire, they say, “Call Rob.” My entire life, I’ve been great at handling that but not so great at handling when things are going well.

For our audience, there’s a communication course in Los Angeles on September 22nd. It’s going to be super fun, super exciting in Downtown Los Angeles. I’m shooting for 100 people. We’ll see how many people will come, how much I can have, which will be part of the show. If you’re interested please contact me. Also, it’s creating a game inside of a game. I also wanted to celebrate this. This is version two of the book. I’ve thought about writing a book my entire life since I was a kid. There were always these reasons that I couldn’t or shouldn’t or wasn’t ready for it or didn’t have it. How many of us think about going forth and putting our thoughts in the written form? Here I am, less than three months shy, going from this beautiful binder of version two into a book that’s going to be in my hands. You can buy it online. You can read all my secrets and the book is called unHIDDEN.

The reasons that these two things are happening is because I’m in a position to truly embrace and receive my surplus. My entire life, I’ve been working towards this point of figuring out what I needed to do, who I needed to be, and what I needed to drop off in order to know that I deserved everything that I deserved. I’ve worked my entire ass off my entire life. There’s nothing left. I’ve worked nonstop since I was fifteen years old like going to a good high school, good college, graduate school, first job, second job, OneTaste. Since leaving OneTaste, I’ve worked nonstop. How much have I received? How much do we allow ourselves to receive? How much do we allow the good to come in? This debate that I have with Morgan constantly is watching her give it away. We talked about how if there was a plate full of food and they were surrounded by a bunch of hungry people, she would give it away. I would give it away. We have so much challenge in simply receiving what we have. This concept of, “I brag, I love myself, I’m awesome,” is all about the concept of how to be in the face when you don’t think you deserve it.

First off, a shout-out of respect to our Mama Gena and the sister Goddesses, Regena. This is where I learned this term from, “I Brag.” This is all hearsay, I haven’t been in a sister goddess class, being a cisgender male. I do know that they have forums, text messages, and Facebook groups where you can say, “I Brag.” They have this permission for each of them to overtly say things that are going well, vacation brags, job brags and relationship brags. It’s a way to bring what’s inside out because that is antithetical to who we are and what our society is. We live in a society where it’s improper to say how good life is. We can relate over our pain until the cows come home, but to sit and say, “My life is so amazing.” That’s not acceptable.

You have the happiest person and you have a miserable person. The happy person goes to work, had a great day, got some compliments, finished a project and got a bonus. They come home and they’re happy and then their partner or loved one had a rough day. Maybe something happened with their job or their mom and they’re miserable. What’s the dynamic when you have a happy person and a not so happy person? The happy person has to shrink down their happiness and turn down the volume of their joy in order to match the not so happy person.

We have it in a society that it’s improper for a happy person to remain a happy person in the face of some darkness. To keep it inside and put on the face of like, “That sounds horrible. I’m so sad you had a rough day.” In your mind, you’re like, “I got a bonus. I did a great job. I’m happy,” and instead we’re like, “I’m so sorry. Let me get you a cup of tea.” What is it that we can’t say no? It’s like, “Unhappy person, I’m going to stay happy. I’m going to be up here on my happy level of abstraction, beaming, glowing, flowing. Get into my sunlight and energy, get into it instead of your miserable darkness. Why don’t you just climb up on my ride so we can both be happy?” The question then is, “Would you rather be happy or would you rather be miserable?” Most people are much more comfortable in the miserable. We’re trained to live in the miserable and so to sit in the happiness is challenging.

When Life Is So Good: Most people are really much more comfortable in being miserable.

What happens when you’re in that happy place? What are we looking for? We’re looking for the other shoe to drop. We’re looking for the disaster where we’re saying, “This is going to be happy, but this is going to end real soon. I might as well start preparing for the unhappiness because I’d rather be prepared and somewhat clenched for the darkness that may or may not come rather than simply living in my true full happiness.” What happens when you start to clench for the other proverbial shoe to drop? You come out of that happiness and you start to create and magnetize the dark. You are magnetizing the dark side because you’re refusing to build the skill and the muscle to stay in the happy. That is ridiculous, but that is the world we live in. That is what we do. This happens in relationships with our parents, siblings and friends where we don’t feel capable of maintaining our happiness. We feel almost guilty for being happy when they’re miserable. A lot in the family dynamics, this happens between mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, and partners where we feel wrong. We create circumstances to keep allegiance to the parents, to keep the loyalty by not getting too happy and not bragging too much about what’s inside.

My viewpoint is, “Screw them,” to the unhappy people, not screw them, push them away. Don’t buy into the habit of shrinking your happiness in order to match to the unhappy person. My viewpoint, my lifestyle and the thing I’m doing now is when my partner is unhappy, I sit and respect and validate their feelings. I say, “You’re right to be unhappy, but I refuse to leave from my happiness.” I sit up there patiently waiting with a wry, somewhat frustrating smile on my face saying, “I’m going to support your unhappiness, but I’m not going to go down there into the basement with you.” How rude is that? How rude of a man am I to not placate this part of them of not joining them in their misery? You could look at your life, at the people, what you’re doing and how higher people pull you from the lens of your happiness down into the darkness. How often do we do that? How often do we feel a joyous moment then we pick up our telecommunicator, our leash to the world and unhappiness and check in, “How’s it going? I’m feeling happier here. I’m feeling uncomfortable with my happiness, will you tell me something dark and dismal, so I don’t have to feel happy anymore and I’ll feel more comfortable?” How often do we do that? How often do we invite those people into our lives? It’s the habit that keeps us shrink and keeps us in these little boxes where we can feel comfortable.

One of my friends and colleagues, Eva Clay, taught me something amazing. Every time she makes money or has the success or signs a new client or has a new project, she does a little dance. She’s a total dancing queen. She does a little dance because she understands the biology underneath it. She taught me about this. It’s the conjunction between the dopamine reward system and the reticular system, the RAS of the brain. If you biologically start to train your body for your successes, every time you make $1, $5, $10, the brain doesn’t know the difference between a $10 client and $1,000 client. Your bank account does and your accountant does, but not your brain. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a $10 and $1,000, a $10,000 gig. When you get the client and you dance, you’re training your body, you’re training your dopamine release system to enhance, to pull it in and get excited. We like the dopamine, the drip and sensation. We start to see places out there that we can do something right, to get the reward, to dance, to get the dopamine, and to have those pleasurable chemicals in our body.

Every single success, I’m saying to myself, “That’s amazing. I deserve it.” It builds success after success because we start to enhance ourselves. We start to look when we can’t see. When we live in this dark, dismal system where we don’t think we deserve success, that’s all we see. We see the trash on the ground. We don’t see the flowers, the bright light and the sun. We have to take our vision and what’s down and look up. As my teacher would say, “The stuff is up to here. We can look down and put our nose in the stuff or we can raise our eyes up and see.” Most of us are so lazy with it. We’ll let our heads drop, and put our nose in the stuff. It smells bad and it doesn’t taste very good. Our ability to stand up, look, feel bright and excited, that’s where your mastery is. That’s where you can live to expand your life and be more. This is the next step of our evolution because we live in a society of disapproval. We live in a society that’s constantly telling us the things that are wrong, bad and not happening.

When Life Is So Good: Your ability to stand up and look and feel bright and excited is where your mastery is. That’s where you can live to expand your life and be more.

I have such a love-hate relationship with Facebook and I have a challenge with my social media presence. I’m working because I’m writing a freaking book and you need to have a freaking social media. I wrote this poem. It just came out of me and just flowed. Then I put a nice picture on it and I’ve got some positive feedback. It says, “I brag that my life has gotten out of control. That there’s too much good, that I see that there is so much more, that my creations are birthing. My dreams are coming true and that is happening. I brag that I am afraid of success and the impact it will have on me, my love, my relationship, that I don’t know how not to struggle, that I have discovered that stress is not my only motivation. I brag I can have everything that I want. The only limitations I have are my own self-imposed limitations. I set my own limits, my glass ceilings or safety glass that is an escape hatch. If I can focus my eyes to see it, everything inside of us, we’re setting our own parameters of our own self-imposed limitations and your willingness.”

The Tuff Love lesson is for you to say, “I deserve this. I am awesome. I am special. I am unique. I’m going to have this life and it’s going to be amazing.” I deserve this because without giving yourself permission to have everything you want, there’s no way the rest of the world is going to follow. You have to start with your own intestinal fortitude to fall in love with what’s inside for you to invite and have more. I signed up for this Money Map Course about NLP Marin. It’s about the concept of money map, historical and ancestral.

The one thing Morgan enticed me and she said, “As soon as you sign up for the course, things will start to flow.” I want things to flow. I’m tired of living in stress. I’m tired of living in the small version of myself. I’m tired of living myself out of some loyalty to some picture about who I should be and how I shouldn’t be big. My plea on this podcast to you out there is a hope that you listen to your own internal voice. Say yes to what you desire. Start to work towards it and start to receive it because that’s the way that we can all up level ourselves, up level our relationships and up level the world. That, my friends, is this week’s rant.

I am so grateful to all people listening, supporting and inviting me on their shows. I’m so grateful to all the people who are saying yes to happiness, joy and excitement because that’s the way we create the world we all want to live in. Thank you so much for joining us. I enjoyed having the show, being of service to you and your life. There are a lot of fun things going on and it’s all about the book I put in the version three. I’m excited to get some feedback. November 5th is the date. Please mark your calendars.

Resources mentioned:

• Tuff Love on iTunes
• Tuff Love on Stitcher
• Robert’s communication course
• unHIDDEN
• OneTaste
• Eva Clay
• NLP Marin

• Here’s How »

• robertkandell.com
• Tuff Love Facebook
• Tuff Love Instagram
• Tuff Love YouTube
• Tuff Love LinkedIn