Defying Norms and Redrawing Your Own Path

Are you truly following your chosen path, or have the opinions of others become your compass? In our latest episode, we unravel the significance of wonder and self-evaluation in determining the course of our lives. We embrace the exciting concept of the 'Crazy Ivan,' a tactic that urges you to take unexpected turns in your journey to gain fresh perspectives. It's a potent reminder that the path we should walk is the one we carve out ourselves, uninfluenced by societal expectations or norms.

Shifting gears, we then take a bold stride into the treacherous realm of fear and how it impacts our identity and mission. Change is intimidating, especially when it involves altering the core elements of who we are. However, we underscore the importance of questioning whether the decisions we make are fear-induced or genuinely driven by choice. As we tread into the unknown, we also highlight the potential of 30-day cycles. Embracing these cycles allows us to put calculated risks into action and inch closer to our dreams. This episode is an enticing exploration into decision-making, identity shifts, and the power of embracing change. Get ready to challenge your outlook and redefine your path, right here with us.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Power of Wonder and Self-Evaluation
• 5:32 Navigating Fear and Shifting Paths
• 12:36 The Power of 30-Day Cycles

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to the Certain Success Podcast. I'm your host, matt Fagioli, and today I want to talk about wonder. I had a pretty amazing conversation a few days ago with a mentor, with a person who have the utmost respect for, who's had a huge impact in my life, and he was talking about the word wonder and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind as a way to think about the world and look at the world. I asked him you know, what do you think about now? And he's an older man, he's accomplished a ton and I said well, you know, how do you look at the world now and how do you see it differently than you did 10 or 20 years ago? And what he said was I wonder, I look at the world with wonder. He was talking about seeing it wasn't an insect, but let's use that word seeing an insect and wondering what that life was like and how he views the world, which is, you know, it's a little kind of out there thinking, but it frames the conversation about wonder and if you bring that kind of back to reality or back to your own life, we all lose that sense of wonder that we had when we were a child, when we might look at the world around us with these big eyes of wonder and go, you know what's possible and see things with you know, incredible freedom, instead of the box that we kind of draw around everything. And I feel like, unless it's intentionally pulled back, I feel like it just gets more and more and more narrow and we end up building these prisons around ourselves where we're, you know, working, working, working in one specific direction and we don't stop to go. I wonder if it was different, I wonder if I made a complete about face, I wonder if I went in a completely different direction, or I wonder if this is the right path, like maybe the path that I am on is in fact exactly the right direction. But I think we have to give ourselves the freedom to stop and wonder over and over and over again. Now, you know we can go too far with that and get into this like analysis, paralysis, but I think every so often we need this sort of stopping and evaluating, and I think there's more stopping and evaluating than most of us give us time for, especially us. You know, crazy entrepreneurs and business owners would just like go, go, go, run, run, run, move, move, move and there's not a lot of stopping and evaluating at a really high level of you know. Is this the path?

Speaker 1: 3:28

One of my favorite movies is the Hunt for Red October and they have a phrase in, apparently in the submarine world called the crazy Ivan, and I don't know if it's really true, but in the movie the Russian submarine captains would stop an abruptly turn to be able to hear what was behind them and they called it the crazy Ivan and it always stuck in my mind. I love that movie, I've seen it a hundred million times, but it always stuck in my mind that that's such an interesting concept to go like everywhere along the line like there's no reason to stop, there's nothing forcing you to stop, but they would just stop and abruptly turn so they could hear what's behind them and in our case, sort of have to have that stop that crazy Ivan and go. Well, let me make sure that there's nothing happening here that I'm missing, because I'm just running down the road chasing business and life and all of that stuff. And then what happens? If you hit that point and you go, you stop and you evaluate and go. You know what. I don't actually think that this is the path that I want to be on at all. And then all these thoughts rush in of whoa man, who am I gonna disappoint, who am I going to let down? And what's it gonna do to my reputation? What are people gonna think if I completely change directions? And you know what will people say? And ha, all of that falls into that bucket of what everybody else thinks. And who freaking cares, at the end of the day, what everybody else thinks?

Speaker 1: 5:32

The biggest risk in all of this always is fear. I've become completely convinced that all of us are partly driven by fear, and which is why the Bible tells us not to worry, to not to fear, more than it tells us any other things, because we're all driven by this sense of fear To some extent. I think part of maturity is recognizing that, learning to interact with our fear properly and to honestly evaluate, and my making this particular choice, whatever choice it is that I'm on right now. Am I making this particular decision or this particular choice based on fear, or is this really the right choice for me to make? And then there's the God factor, the Jesus factor of is this something that God invited me into or did I just make this decision on my own, and so if we're at a point of stopping, a point of crazy Ivan, a point of wondering about the current direction, that's a really good question to ask. Is this something that God invited me into? Is this something that God put on my heart to do? Is this my actual mission, the path that I'm on right now, or did I just kind of make this up on my own? What were the elements that led me to the path and the mission that I'm currently on? How godly were those objectives and what was God doing at that time? And is he doing that now? And man, things change. It's.

Speaker 1: 7:39

Another huge part of this conversation is that we all build a prescription for our life that's working and we get things working and money's flowing and businesses is happening and everything's great, and we just want that to go on and on and on forever. But God's constantly doing something different. So if we're really tuning into that perspective of what is God doing now versus what was he doing last year or five years ago, it makes perfect sense to shift. But it's scary. All of a sudden we're building something new. All of a sudden we're starting over. All of a sudden we're back out on the edge. All of a sudden there's all of this uncertainty that wasn't there before, but that freedom of thinking is so powerful and it never, ever ends.

Speaker 1: 8:48

That's the interesting part about a faith journey in life versus just a life journey in life. That's the difference between really trusting God for what's next versus just trying to make our own best decision based on what we think. And all of that is that it's just never. It never ends. There's always another leap of faith, there's always another shift, and you can't even begin to have that leap or that shift unless you stop, unless you reevaluate, unless you come back to that place of wonder and allow yourself to think about am I really on the right course?

Speaker 1: 9:46

I think that's a scary conversation in and of itself. I think a lot of times we find it much easier to just keep running down the road, like it's much more easy to just get up and get on the hamster wheel for another day. And hamster wheel is what we got to do day after day, but I think it's every quarter, maybe it's every month, it's not every day, but it's a lot. Is this the path that I said I wanted to be on? Even if I'm on the path that I said I wanted to be on. Is this, in fact, the path? Maybe it was at that time and maybe it's already shifted. Maybe it's been only a short, little time that you've been on this journey and maybe that was the right choice. Maybe that's what God had for you at that moment, but maybe it's time to shift. Maybe part of what God's trying to show you in this particular moment is trying to teach you this nimble ability to shift and shift again, and shift again and shift again and not push back and go. Well, god, I just got here, and what's everybody going to say? And it feels comfortable to be here. I just got here and I haven't even gotten settled yet and you want me to shift again. I think that's probably more common to be true than not, than we want it to be, and I love the fact that all of this stuff is just stuff that I'm thinking about and noodling on and dealing with in my own life, one shift after another. Had another dear friend last week.

Speaker 1: 11:37

Use the phrase identity shift to talk about this, when you just become, effectively become, something different, whether you might completely change businesses or life directions or whatever, but whatever that looks like, it's an identity shift. I'm going to do this differently. I'm going to stop, reevaluate, pick a different path. Now that could look subtly different or it could look unbelievably different. But you have to be first. You have to be brave enough to even have the conversation with yourself about what you want your life to look like and if you're on the right path. If you only do that every decade, you're not going to have that many opportunities to pivot and move even closer toward the life of your dreams.

Speaker 1: 12:36

I think it's got to be something that you have to wonder about all a lot, and I'm coming to the conclusion in this podcast for me that I think it's every 30 days. I've been hung up on 30 day cycles for a long time. I think that there's an incredible power in looking at things in 30 day cycles, and I've talked a lot about that on the podcast and written a lot about that idea. So I think it's probably 30 days for me, every 30 days. Am I really right? Is this really the right path? Okay, yes or no?

Speaker 1: 13:19

And maybe there's just tiny, subtle changes. Maybe those course corrections won't look so dramatic if they're really evaluated on a 30 day cycle, instead of waiting five years and going. Oh man, I'm actually way off course from where I thought I was going and now all of a sudden, that course correction is more expensive, more painful and looks more dramatic to everybody else around me. So that's today. It's just wonder, stop and wonder, what if life was completely different? What are the things that you would do if you could do anything? And you can do anything? What would you do if you could do anything?