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Dominick Quartuccio: Helping High Performers with Burnout
97 Plays5 years ago
On today’s podcast, we welcome international speaker, author and executive coach, Dominick Quartuccio. He exchanged his 15-year corporate career in financial services for his passion, which is helping people to design futures that they can be excited about! In this episode, Dominick gets candid about his past struggles with sexual addiction, describing how repressed emotions as a young boy eventually created a fracture in his identity, causing conflict between his public and private life. He talks about the terrifying experience of vulnerability when someone sees beyond that which is protected to the outside world and the role that genuine acceptance has played in helping him to remain authentic. We pivot to a discussion about the dangers of drifting, how to recognize when you are stuck in this state and what to do to get yourself back in alignment with your authentic self and living the life of your conscious choosing. For more on all these facets of self-development, check out his podcast Man Amongst Men and be sure to join us for this conversation!
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Transcript
Dominique's Career Shift
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey, welcome to this week's episode of the Art of Authenticity. Thank you guys. I'm Laura Coe, the host for joining us. I've got Dominique Cortuccio joining us. He is an international speaker, author, and executive coach to high performing people who are kind of burned out. He left a lucrative 15 year corporate career in financial services for Fortune 100 firms.
00:00:41
Speaker
For him to live his passion and then help people design futures that they can't wait to live, to be part of, to wake up every day to. He has been featured in the New York Times. He's been on NPR. He's done a bunch of TEDx's, amongst other things. And he has a new podcast, the Man Amongst Men podcast. You can check that out.
00:01:01
Speaker
iTunes and i think for women out there don't feel like that's not a good podcast for you because of the title he's not talking about men and emotions and if you're in a relationship with a guy or you have people in your life that you want to understand who may.
00:01:17
Speaker
not be as clear to
From Corporate Leader to Personal Crisis
00:01:19
Speaker
you. This is a deep dive into the male psyche. Very interesting. All about how men can express their emotions more. He's got a new book, Design Your Future. You can check that out. All the links will be on our website. You can find Dominique at dominique.com. Thank you guys for joining in. Hey Dominique, how are you today? What's going on? I brought extra authenticity for you today.
00:01:45
Speaker
I love it. I feel it and I hear it in your voice. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming on and sharing your story, your journey. I've read about it. I've thought about it and I'm excited for the audience to hear how you've moved from someone who is a leader in a Fortune 500 to
00:02:06
Speaker
struggling with sex addiction and making a huge turn. Our stories are very similar, I think. We were talking before the show and you mentioned it, I
Living Authentically
00:02:15
Speaker
felt the same way. But if you could maybe take the listeners through where you were working, what were you doing, and kind of what that journey looked like, and then we'll talk about the turning point. Cool. Yeah, let's start with the boring stuff that you've probably heard a million times before about someone living a life that
00:02:34
Speaker
was not necessarily of their own design. That was me. I grew up, went to Catholic school because I was told to do that. I went to college because that's what I was supposed to do. I got good grades because I was supposed to.
00:02:47
Speaker
picked a profession in financial services that would allow for me to make the most amount of money and fast-track my career for stability and options in my future. So I did all those things. Can I just insert for one second? Because you're like the first person who's taken that prescriptive truth that we're all told everybody is like, yep, that's the way to do it. You say it in like 30 seconds, right? And it's like, I want to dispel this in less than 30 seconds.
00:03:15
Speaker
There's all these 20 year olds who are being told that right now. Right. It's it's amazing. And how many of us on the back end trying to say it's not the answer and yet, you know, it's really the same message coming through. But I don't know. I just somehow had to pause on the fact that you're like, and I did those things. Check, check, check. It's like everybody listening. Right. It doesn't work. Right. You need to find the rest of it, which is what we're here to talk about.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, Laura, it doesn't work if you just defaulted into it like I did. I mean, there may be other people who have consciously said, yeah, I love financial services, or I love this field, and I want to build a career, and I want to make it my life. If you know that about yourself, have at it. Of course. But for me, it was just like this, OK, I'm going to go from this thing to that thing, that thing to that thing. And it built a very successful life. I had a lot of great memories, great experiences, brought some level of financial freedom and option in my life.
00:04:08
Speaker
All of those things were great. And running in the background was this growing and gnawing sense of restlessness that I couldn't quite put my finger on. And there was this one year, it was 2009, which was basically the height of the Great Recession, right? Like unemployment rates were, I think, approaching 20%. The world was collapsing. The market was dropping 1,000 points in a day. It was just like bedlam. And quietly, I was having the most
00:04:37
Speaker
successful year of my career. To this day, financially the most successful year of my career, I just happened to have a massive sales year. I was working for Prudential Financial, which is a Fortune 100 company, had a corner office in Times Square in New York City. And it just happened that that was my greatest year. I tripled my sales goal, made more money than I ever thought I could make, at least at the age of 30, which was what I was then. And when I hit this mountain peak, I was like, oh,
00:05:07
Speaker
Is this as good as it gets? And I started to look out over my next 30 years, 35 years of my career and I'm like, if this is as good as it gets and it doesn't feel all that great, then I'm kind of scared about what the rest of my working life will look like. And I didn't know who to talk to about that, who would empathize with me. I didn't even know how to approach that conversation. So there was that that was happening. And also there was this other insidious thing
00:05:33
Speaker
that was operating in the background of my life for decades that I honestly did not know was really even a thing. At a very early age when I was growing up in my household, I'm sure a lot of your listeners can relate to this, some of the unconscious messaging I got around sex and sexuality was that it was bad, that it was to be avoided. And I remember being an eight-year-old kid sitting on the couch with my family. My parents are amazing people, they're lovely, but sex made them uncomfortable. If we were watching a movie on Friday night,
00:06:03
Speaker
And like there would be a sexually suggestive scene. Let's say a woman was taking her shirt off. They would lunge across the couch cover my eyes and be like no stop watching. And they would be so angry at the movie that you could cut the tension in the room with a knife.
00:06:21
Speaker
So what I learned in those moments was, whoa, like, that's not okay. But physiologically, I'm really drawn to that. Like when my parents go to bed, I'm going to put that movie back in the VCR, I'm going to watch that again, right? Like the secret was born and I went to Catholic school, like I was told that that was sinful. So like, this natural thing in my life became very bad very early. And when I became a teenager and I started to, you know, stumble across what most
00:06:51
Speaker
teenage boys do, which is masturbation. I ended up feeling the sensation that was extraordinary. It was like sitting on a pile of heroin that I could use to at any point in time, it was free. And it actually numbed out like any stress or anxiety, especially as a very sensitive teenage kid who just switched schools. It just made all my problems go away. I could deal with stuff. So what happened very early on
00:07:18
Speaker
My only forms of dealing with stress or anxiety or confusion or overwhelm was this like sexual thing that I labeled as bad and shameful and guilty. And that stayed in my background. I created a separate Dominic. So I have the Dominic that the world wants. And then I have this private Dominic that ran concurrently side by side for decades.
00:07:40
Speaker
And that even showed up like, you know, when I bring it back to 2009, when I had my most amazing year that year, I was this like leader. I was this young gun with a lot of potential for the future and presented myself to the world that needed acceptance, basically the inauthentic life. And then this other part of me that I kept hidden, that was where I navigated all of my stresses, but also a lot of my excitement was over here. Like the stuff that I thought was really exciting that was,
00:08:11
Speaker
dangerous that society said is not okay. That's where I got my life, my energy.
Public vs. Private Persona
00:08:20
Speaker
Maybe the place I'll take you next, Laura, before I take a breath is five years later, when I was 35 years old, where it all came crashing down, was for the first time in my life I fell in love with somebody.
00:08:34
Speaker
She was the only person who was able to penetrate both my private and my public life and and was able to get beyond that wall of those two worlds that I created. And simultaneously, as my love grew for her, I also became more and more trapped by her ability to see me at a deeper level. I didn't have language for this. I didn't know what was happening at the time. I just felt more and more trapped by it. And even though my love grew for her, I found myself going back to all of my
00:09:03
Speaker
25 years of conditioning, which was sexting other women, which was pornography, which was escaping into the only place I knew how to navigate my emotions until the day that she caught me, December 28th, 2012 in Colorado on our very first vacation together. And she found my phone and that's when I decided to enter Sex Addicts Anonymous, which is where I stayed for a period of four years.
00:09:29
Speaker
Wow. So there's so many things I want to kind of backtrack to, but particularly
00:09:35
Speaker
When I've heard certain people talk about authenticity, particularly Dr. Shafali, I don't know if you've followed her at all. She's a clinical therapist out of New York City and she works with kids and she's been on our show. She's been on Oprah a whole bunch of times. But what I love about her explanation of authenticity is that if we're not seen, if we're not valued for who we are, by the age of 10 or so, we start to split.
00:09:59
Speaker
and the authentic self hides and the inauthentic self steps forward and we don't know how to then embody our authentic self. So there's this whole process for kids where they learn how to embody that authentic self into the world and they play with it until they
00:10:17
Speaker
To your point, right, you were going out into the world unconsciously. Other people may consciously pick to go into the finances, but you unconsciously did it because right when you split off, then this front forward facing this persona we create starts to lead and the true self is behind, right? And this is where life starts to take on this. I didn't design it. I don't know what it is. This isn't me. It feels inauthentic. You're living side by side with your truth.
00:10:44
Speaker
But what's so interesting is then here comes this woman who loves you and sees you. And you'd think, right, like you'd think that this would be the moment where it all comes together and we just feel seen and we write because it's what we want. We want to be seen. We want to be valued. We want everybody, I think, at our core desires more than anything to be fully seen. But it's so scary. Right. What if we're seen and we're not enough? What if we can't, you know, the person seeing us, but
00:11:11
Speaker
They don't really get it right like they're not really gonna love us like all these other strange anxieties come up and we run do you feel that when she really saw you not only did those habits come but it was also. It's very scary to have somebody finally you know see behind the curtain. Oh it was terrifying i need to the paradox of this was.
00:11:32
Speaker
Before she was able to penetrate that wall, I resented her for loving only the part of me that I presented to her. I'm like, well, you don't really know the real me, but of course I never gave her the opportunity to. We're amazing. We're just a mess of a mess of contradictions and paradoxes. Well, because the truth is so scary, right? So we do all these other weird things. Yeah.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah. Well, one of the things I learned when I went into sex addicts anonymous was that one of the reasons why we ended up where we did, why I ended up where I did was there was this belief that I was unlovable the way that I am. Right? Because like, you know, again, go back to that like early conditioning of, Oh, I'm an eight year old, I'm watching a movie and a woman's shirt comes off and I'm excited. But then there's this whole like, that's bad in the room. And my parents didn't mean to do like to create that,
00:12:22
Speaker
lesson, but it was like, oh, if I like that, then I'm bad. Like, I'm bad. And so it's like, how many of those kinds of messages did I get along the way? How many of the messages did we all get like that along the way where, and here's the other thing that you said about the true self, the idea, if you would have said that to me, let's say 10 years ago before I discovered any of this stuff, and I would have heard, yeah, but my true self is this part of me that I hide from the world. I would have been scared to hear that because this true self that I was hiding
00:12:51
Speaker
had some parts that like were pretty ugly. And the reason why they got ugly is because they weren't allowed room to breathe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when we're supposed to experiment in the world, bringing ourself forward and it's not safe because whatever it is, is being judged. Right. Is not enough or wrong or the artist should be the doctor. Right. Or the
00:13:16
Speaker
you know, whatever it is that your passion is or your interest is if you're into sports, but your family thinks that's a waste of time, right? Whatever it is, if that gets judged to the point that you feel you have to hide that,
00:13:32
Speaker
then that doesn't get to be embodied and you don't even know it's there yourself and you start to have trouble expressing and even knowing who you are and even knowing how to ask the question. Most people call me for coaching and say, I know I need to do something. I know I need to make a change. The question, what do I want makes me crazy, right? And these are high functioning people. You don't even know how to ask the questions anymore because we've lost the opportunity to do that in a safe space. Right on. And
00:14:02
Speaker
I too work with a lot of high performing people who are on paper, have everything. And then they're also feeling that thing that we hit on earlier, which is just like that discontent or that restlessness or there's knowing that there's something more, don't know how to get at it. And I feel that a lot of them come to me, I'm curious that they come to you like this Laura too, which is
00:14:21
Speaker
I feel like I need to know what my purpose is, right? Like I need to know what I'm meant to do here. And then people put so much pressure on themselves to find that thing. It's like, oh my God, I'm not living my most authentic self, right? And then you can see people getting grippy around that. And one of the things that I know that worked for me when I was trying to figure it out, because once I woke up a little bit to this, the gap between where I was and living a purpose driven, authentic life was Grand Canyon esque.
00:14:48
Speaker
And I got overwhelmed by trying to close that gap. I was like, what's the next foot forward I can put? And I just became expert. I became a master of understanding what gave me energy.
00:15:00
Speaker
Yes. Yes. I love both of those things. I just want to pause so the audience heard it because one, one step forward, people want to go from I haven't exercised the muscle of thinking about purpose and authenticity and intuition in 25 years, but I want the answer. And by the way, there's no singular answer. Life keeps changing and you just keep navigating it. But secondly, like it takes time to find that it's not something that happens overnight.
00:15:29
Speaker
Especially if you've been following a default script, right? Your whole life. Yeah. Other people have been telling you like you were using those examples before. Oh, you're supposed to become a doctor. We'll go do that thing. Or you're supposed to be a business person and you haven't made a lot of those decisions on your ear. Like, oh, I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to. I'm supposed to. And now it's what would you like to do? Yeah. And this is one crazy question that I get all the time from men in their fifties who are at the tops of organizations. They're like, I want to figure out what it is that I like.
00:15:58
Speaker
their fire has dimmed out. And I'm talking about leaders of billion dollar businesses who are just like, okay, I've done everything that I'm supposed to and I will continue to, but I honestly don't know what lights me up. I don't have a hobby. I don't have a thing that I look forward to. And the analogy I give, if you were to be an eight year old again and you remember like your birthday coming up
00:16:22
Speaker
and that present that you wanted so desperately, whatever that thing was, for me it was a Nintendo back in the day. If you don't have something on your horizon that gives you that level of excitement, like you and your birthday coming up in that present, you know you want it, you're gonna get it. If you don't have that level of excitement at all points of time in your life where there's something on the calendar that that's bringing that level of joy to you,
00:16:46
Speaker
you need to start curating and cultivating those experiences. And if you don't have that right now, then it becomes just a little game of how do I figure that out? Yeah, that's right. And again, I think you you know that it's step by step and it's learning how to find that fire finding
00:17:01
Speaker
Finding that passion within yourself, people become so good at getting things done and finding success, but that doesn't mean anything in terms of having fun and the excitement and the passion. And so blending those two, right, is the
00:17:18
Speaker
key, right? But we aren't told that back to your very beginning when you went through that in 30 seconds, right? Do all these things grind through, but we're never told and also have a great time, right? Also feel passion and excitement, right? Nobody says that to us. They I don't know why. So yeah, I couldn't agree more and I love it. So you're in business you 2009 that starts to fall apart for you, you check yourself in. What do those next years start to look like for you?
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. So 2009 began my personal development journey.
Personal Development Journey
00:17:51
Speaker
It was the first time I started doing any inner work. And I was nudged there by one of my brilliant friends, her name is Grace Gold. And she pointed me to a couple of books, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I know you were talking about Tim before, The Way of the Superior Man by David Dada, which is a book around mastering your purpose, passion, sex, relationships with women, two of the most important books of my life. And then she also pointed me to my very first workshop,
00:18:16
Speaker
which was the Landmark Forum, which I know for those of you who aren't familiar with the Landmark Forum, it's a three day personal development course where you really start to look at your life and the patterns and habits and belief systems that have been driving your life. Some of their work is controversial because they have very hardcore selling tactics when you're there and those rubbed me the wrong way as well. But I would say that that was probably one of the most important and still foundationally important personal development programs I ever did.
00:18:46
Speaker
And that all kicked off really at the beginning of 2010, like January, I got shot out of a cannon. And for the last 10 years, I've just been, you know, maybe the world's second greatest student behind Tim Ferriss. I've just been constantly doing as much introspection as I can. When I turned 35, which was basically in 2013, was when I entered Sex Addicts Anonymous for a period of four years, really looked at that area of my life
00:19:15
Speaker
left corporate financial services in 2016. I left a 15-year career behind. Great job, lots of financial security to start what I'm doing now, which is now I'm an executive coach. I run retreats, men's retreats, women's retreats. I'm an author. I speak on stages across the world around how to avoid burnout, how to design a future that you can't wait to live into, and that's where I am today.
00:19:40
Speaker
I love it. I love it. And so for people who are in this space and they're struggling with the questions that we, you know, we're just chatting about, I'm in the burnout space. I've recognized that I don't have that fire. I don't have that passion. I can't even, I mean, I'm sure you hear it all the time, right? As I do, I don't even have a hobby anymore. I don't know everything as I should. Everything feels like laborious, heavy. What do you suggest they do to take next steps?
00:20:09
Speaker
a few things you could give the listeners for if they find themselves in that place. I think coaching is very important. That was for me. And I'm sure you feel the same way. But we're just the listeners today. Like, do you have a couple of things that you would recommend they start with? I do. And maybe I'll start with a story and then go into the recommendations. I
00:20:27
Speaker
I have a client who's 43 years old. She's a senior vice president, financial advisor at one of the top advisory firms in the country, Ironman competitor, mother of two young boys under the age of five years of age. She's a top 10 producer for her company as a financial advisor. So she's just like across the board, killing it in all regards. Looks like the model of health. She reached out to me about five months ago because she had just recovered from
00:20:54
Speaker
an ambulance ride where she believed that she was having a heart attack. And what it turned out to be, even though she was in a model of health, but what it turned out to be was like a massive panic and anxiety attack that led her to feel like she almost was going to lose her life like a heart attack. And she was like, what is going on with me, right? Like I can't live like this anymore. And what was funny was, even though that's not funny, what was funny was the
00:21:20
Speaker
I dug through my emails and I'd seen an email that she'd sent to me two years earlier. It was just like a one line email that said something to me about I can relate to having it all in air quotes and still feeling discontent. And then two years later, boom, she ended up in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital. And and so what we did when we looked at her life, what I found was there wasn't an ounce of space for her for reflection, introspection or self care.
00:21:50
Speaker
She was the person who, if she stopped at a stoplight and she was like, okay, I have 60 seconds to bang out two emails because if I'm not productive in these 60 seconds, then I will feel like I wasted this minute, like that level. And by the way, maybe that sounds extreme, but I know the people that I work with are in that same class picture. Let's put it that way. So one of the things that I talk about in the book that I wrote called design your future.
00:22:14
Speaker
is the first thing you need to do is to awaken. You have to wake up to your patterns and your habits, and the way to do that is to create space. And then most people who are moving at a million miles a minute, this is very uncomfortable for them. But to curate space at first, to just stop doing, to stop being productive, and actually just take a metal look, kind of like a third-party perspective, at your life, at your habits, and just create that space.
00:22:43
Speaker
And I'm a big believer in disrupting habits for short periods of time temporarily so you can start to get information around like why you're doing what you're doing. So for example, for her, it could have been something along the lines of when you stop at a stoplight, like you can't bring out your phone. Just try that for a week and just watch the anxiety come up. And all I need you to do is an inventory, a mental inventory of what's happening inside of you.
00:23:12
Speaker
We started creating 10 minute blocks of her time in the morning where she would wake up before her kids and just do like a little bit of breath work, a little bit of meditation to just sit in with what do I need in order for me to function and to be cared for over the course of the day.
00:23:28
Speaker
And these 10 minute things, which at first were tormenting her, have now turned into this like essential 30 minute practice in the morning that she can't do without. And it slows down the day for her. And she's like, oh, life is so much all these things that I would be in panic mode about before I don't even need to be doing now because I actually slowed the game down for myself in the morning.
00:23:53
Speaker
Right. And there's an irony because when you're on the move and you're going at that clip, which so many people are, slowing down feels counterintuitive because they don't have enough time. But when you slow down, you realize, like you said, you don't have to look at your phone at every single stoplight. There's all these things that we're doing that just create anxiety and create a sense of busyness, but you're not really productive. And you kind of get a little control back over your life.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah. The one word I can summarize that in is drift. And drift is a term that I borrowed from one of the greatest authors and thinkers of all time, Napoleon Hill.
The Dangers of 'Drift'
00:24:33
Speaker
And Napoleon Hill is most famous for writing the book Think and Grow Rich. There's only
00:24:38
Speaker
15 books that I've ever sold over 50 million copies. I'm talking like non-religious texts. And most of those books are like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings fiction books. Think and Grow Rich was the very first personal development book. It was the very first and it came out at the end of the Great Depression. So it was like not the most ideal time to talk about personal performance and achievement, which was at the end of what, a decade long period where the world was suffering. And the reason why Napoleon Hill wrote that book
00:25:07
Speaker
was because he had a mentor by the name of Andrew Carnegie from Carnegie Steel who said, Napoleon, if you want to learn how the rich attract the most riches into their lives, go out and interview 500 of the world's most successful. So that's what he did. He interviewed Henry Ford, the Roosevelts, the Rockefellers, distilled their secrets, wrote the Bible for attracting riches, which is thick and grow rich. But the more important book, the most interesting book was Outwitting the Devil.
00:25:34
Speaker
which is another book that he wrote based on Carnegie's secondary piece of advice to him, which was, if you really want to understand the full human experience, not just the richest, but the full human experience, then go out and interview 10 times as many people who at the end of their lives felt like they'd failed. Like they'd left chips on the table, they didn't live a life of purpose. Talk to them, because they're the ones with the real secrets.
00:25:58
Speaker
Napoleon Hill went bananas. Like he went out and interviewed 25,000 of these people over a 20, 30 year period of time. He mined all of their secrets, all of their pitfalls, and he wrote the book Outwitting the Devil, which he wrote the manuscript and he didn't release it until decades after he died. His family was worried about some of the shots that he takes at education systems and religious institutions. So it came out in 2010 or 11 at the end of the Great Recession. So both of his books came out like
00:26:27
Speaker
at really interesting times. And in the book, there's this passage that he writes from the perspective of the devil. And the devil is basically the distillation of these 25,000 dreams that were lost from people at the end of their lives who left chips on the table. And the devil says, the way that I enter the minds of people is through habit. And by establishing myself in habit, I established this principle of drifting.
00:26:57
Speaker
And if I can get a person to drift, I can lead them straight towards the gates of hell. And what the devil is saying about drift is that it's the state where we think that we're in conscious command of our actions, our patterns and our habits, when in actuality, we're not even behind the wheel of our own car, we're in the backseat. And it's our patterns and habits. It's societal expectations. It's what your parents taught you. It's what you were told to do. That's what's driving the car. And we don't really ever see it.
00:27:27
Speaker
until an outside force thrusts itself upon us and we wake up from that state of drift like my girlfriend catching me and waking me up. And here's the thing, Laura, like those moments can be extraordinary moments for change. They could be trajectory shifters. I'm willing to bet that you and every one of your listeners has had a moment in their lives that when they were going through it, it was absolute torture. They wanted it to be over and they would never wish it upon anyone else.
00:27:57
Speaker
And when you look back on that moment or that period of time in your life, you're like, that kind of made me the man or the woman that I am today and I would never trade it for anything. Those are amazing moments, but the real question that I pose is if the only moments that can cause true change in our lives are when an outside force thrusts itself upon us, then how in command of your life are you really? So the drift is that state of
00:28:26
Speaker
just constantly obsessed with higher performance, doing, doing, doing, never taking a step back, and you have to wait for the ambulance ride, you have to wait for your girlfriend to catch you cheating, you have to wait for, you can't take it anymore, and then that's when you make a change, that's when you know you've been drifting. So Outwitting the Devil is a book that I highly recommend, and then the book I wrote, which is called Design Your Future, is all about how do you break free from drift. Right, and is the goal eventually then to not have external forces
00:28:55
Speaker
push for change in your life, but to have that consciousness, the awakening, and then start to do the introspection on a regular basis so that you're making changes because you desire different outcomes. I would say it's twofold. It's number one, life is going to continue to have outside forces. It will always, right? So it's a matter of, can you navigate those with more fluidity and with more welcomeness with less resistance? So that's number one. And then number two is yes, like where you were going is
00:29:25
Speaker
you absolutely want to more intentionally design a future that you're excited to live into. And what I find is that most people are living in a state of reactivity. And even in a state of reactivity, you can accomplish a lot of great things. You can have wonderful memories, but like some signals, internal signals that you know, that are telling you that you're drifting are, you feel the sense of restlessness, you feel the sense of there's something more,
00:29:53
Speaker
You feel like you're on a hamster wheel of some kind. You keep telling yourself you should be more grateful for the life that you have. And yet there's still something nagging at you. You can't put your finger on it. Like those are. I hear that last one so many times, like, yeah. And this podcast, people were like, nagging sensation, I'm nagging. Right. And then one thing I would say to the listeners, too, though, is that nagging gets louder and louder until you, you know, I believe it ends in crisis.
00:30:18
Speaker
So it's better to listen to the nagging because I think the universe just turns the volume up until you start to listen. One quick thing, Dominic, on this before we switch topics, I also think about this concept of self-care and finding space for it, but that there's people out there who are like, no, no, no, no, I'm good. I do practice self-care. I am in a practice of it, but there
00:30:42
Speaker
to put it in your language, right? The drift is still there. They're unconsciously moving through it, and they are getting the pedicure and the manicure, and they're going on vacations, but it's all done from that absolute frenzied, overwhelmed, right? Busy, busy state. I would not think that's what you mean by self-care. Oh, well, those could be elements of self-care. I know people who don't take any time for themselves because they think it's selfish, or they have kids to tend to, or work to tend to, or partners to tend to, right? All that stuff.
00:31:11
Speaker
So self-care is an extremely personal conversation. And what I think I mean by it is like, have you consciously defined what self-care actually looks and feels like for you? Do you have a conscious strategy for that? So I do know people who are, let's say, like my client that I mentioned before, who is in extraordinary shape, right? Like she was Iron Woman, you know, competed in multiple ones, Iron Man.
00:31:38
Speaker
So like if you would have asked her two years ago, do you practice self care? Yeah, I work out all the time. I made sure that I took my time away from my business so I could do that. And to a certain degree, she absolutely was taking care of herself because she allowed herself to do more than just work. And actually, she was unstoppable at work when she was doing that.
00:31:58
Speaker
where her blind spot was was that she was sleeping four or five hours a night because she just had an overwhelming to do list. There was never a moment where she would give herself permission to not be productive, to just wander to just play lost connection with like the deepest relationships in her life and these kinds of things. So self care is I believe, an ever evolving, very personal and
00:32:24
Speaker
desperately needed, intentionally designed protocol for each person. Yeah, but I do think it requires that little bit of what you were talking about, that space, right? To slow down, to take it in because ripping through it like any other errand, while it has benefits, of course, you can miss a lot of the value. Self care is not another errand. There you go. Yeah. All right. And then I got to ask this person that you fell in love with, are you guys still together?
00:32:55
Speaker
No, we are not okay. What was amazing? I mean we stayed together for about eight months and During my recovery as I had a chance to really go deep and do the inner work What I found was I was not in the right relationship as much as I loved her and she loved me I just I realized that for my future it just it wasn't She wasn't the one and it was actually one of the scariest things I ever had to do Laura was to walk away from someone who was willing to stay with me after
00:33:25
Speaker
all of that and to have this, what I thought at the time was this branding of who would want to be with a sex addict, who would want to be with someone who was broken, who would want to be, right? And the very first date that I went out on was someone after I left that relationship where we went out a couple of times and on that second date, I ended up sharing with this woman that I was in a 12 step recovery and how my last relationship ended. And it was kind of like that moment of
00:33:51
Speaker
will I be rejected? And she, after I shared with her, she smiled at me and said, thank you for sharing that with me. I really appreciate your honesty. And there were more questions after that. There were, you know, more tender moments that followed in the days and weeks that followed that. But like what that told me in that moment was like for the first time in my life, I really, I felt like I could be imperfect, that I could have something that I would deem as substantially
00:34:19
Speaker
problematic and still have someone sit there and say, cool, I'm willing to stay in here with you and see what that's about. And that opened up a whole new world of freedom for me to be authentic. Yeah. Yeah. And so the woman who came into your life was there helping you as a guide in this lesson and this big changing turning point moment in your life. Right. And so while every love doesn't last indefinitely, it's a very meaningful person.
00:34:45
Speaker
in that regard. Yeah, yeah, beautiful. And so you've now got a new podcast, the man amongst men podcast, I gotta be honest at first, I was like, man, again, amongst men, I'm not sure that as a woman, I can really but I want to say to the listeners, I mean, it really is thoughtful conversations that go into deep content. I don't take it to be really immense podcast. How do you define it?
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. So we call it the man amongst men and we define a man amongst men as someone who creates an environment where he and others can thrive. Like a man living the highest version of himself creates environments where he himself but others around him can thrive. He lifts everyone else up. He curates and refines his consciousness. He honors women. He does introspection around the patterns and habits that are creating his life. What are his belief systems?
00:35:35
Speaker
He consciously expands his perspective of what it's like to to live life as a woman, to live life as someone with a different nationality or race than you do or sexual orientation than you do. So we specifically speak to a high performing man.
00:35:51
Speaker
who is just beginning his inner journey, right? So someone like me of 10 years ago who built his entire life around external achievements and success and all that's great. I'm not telling you to stop doing that. But like when you start to recognize that there's more and you don't know where that more is, we provide a very nice bridge to the next level, which is going and taking a look on the inside. And what's been fascinating, Laura, as we've been talking openly about our
00:36:16
Speaker
sexual histories, my sex addiction, or what my morning routine habits are, or how to break free from drift. These are all podcast topics that you can go and take a look at, the Man Amongst Men podcast. We found that half of our listeners end up being women.
00:36:31
Speaker
Because women are like, this is the one thing that we've continued. We run live events, we run retreats and stuff like that. And in our live events that we open up to both men and women, most times we end up having like 50 to 60% women because what they've told us is that like a man who's doing this kind of inner work is irresistible.
00:36:49
Speaker
Because these are the guys who actually know how to listen. These are the guys who actually know how to hold space emotionally. These are the guys who are working at overcoming their anger and aggression or learning how to channel the anger and aggression in like a really powerful, protective, creative way versus a destructive, isolating, or attractive way. And men who are doing this work become more magnetizing to women. They become more trustworthy leaders as men.
00:37:14
Speaker
So yeah, like head on over there, take a listen to some of our topics, just calling to you. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know, this blend of masculine to feminine and finding that balance point while I think the genders are different and I think within genders,
00:37:29
Speaker
people are different and unique in different ways. But I think that middle ground space, there's more commonality than there is difference in the end. And while a lot of women's groups are about empowerment and all these different things and like bringing in more of the masculine edge. And I think, you know, that makes it more appealing to more guys. And I think what you guys are doing, right, at having those deeper conversations, it's finding that nice blend. Yeah. It's a great blend. It's allowing guys to feel like, hey, we want you to be a masculine guy. We don't want you to give up on
00:37:58
Speaker
what makes you a man and what you feel feels right for you at your essence and at your core and all this other stuff about what you've been told a man is. If you just buy that as a default, that's drift. And one of the specific areas that we get into is how to build your emotional fluency. Most men, we've been told that one emotion is welcome, which is anger or aggression. And then everything else, it's like you're less than a man. You're fill in the blank.
00:38:25
Speaker
Right. And so the same thing with women. Right. Like if you're going to be empowered, can you still stay feminine? Right. If you're like going to get out there and speak and hold your ground, can you still feel fully as a woman? And I think these are the things that we are socialized and conditioned into thinking they can't go together, but of course they can. Right. And yeah, what's interesting is in October, I'm going to be running a retreat for women
Balancing Energies in the Workplace
00:38:50
Speaker
here in New York City. We have 13 women from
00:38:53
Speaker
top financial services companies like the Fortune 500s, we have VPs, senior VPs. And these are like, it's kind of like a hall of fame level crew who are coming together and 40s, 50s years of age. And one of the things that they will tell you is that they've been very successful running masculine energy to succeed in a male dominated environment. And some of the themes that we found is like over a lifetime of wearing that masculine energy, which
00:39:19
Speaker
in many cases may not necessarily be natural to them, but they've been able to put on that outfit and wear that armor. It's like over a period of time, you know, decades of living that way, there's like this chronic exhaustion or fatigue that starts to set in. You know, like when you're in the elevator about to go home, like the door shut and you're by yourself, you can finally let your shoulders down. We see like just this armoring and hardening happen, right? Like hardening on the inside and armoring on the outside where it's like it's hard
00:39:49
Speaker
to stay connected in the romantic relationships. Yeah, so guys, right, hardening to not show emotions and only allowing anger is like a primary emotion and women trying to be super masculine and not allowing themselves to like let their shoulders down, like you said, and show their family. I mean, I worked in business for a long, long time and I remember we would walk into a business meeting, right? And my brother and I worked together. They'd immediately look at my brother, shake his hand, look in his eyes, how you doing? And then they would look at me and go, hi.
00:40:18
Speaker
Wow really and like you have to keep proving yourself over and over and over and over and you know he was smart until he improved otherwise i was not there until i proved i had a seat at the table and it's just it's tiring right so finding that way to rebalance right on both sides is a beautiful thing so don't make everybody comes on the show i ask them.
00:40:43
Speaker
to speak about, you know, what an authentic life means to them. What does an authentic life mean to you?
Defining an Authentic Life
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, to me, an authentic life is living a life of my own conscious design. And what I mean by that is I envision the future. And I typically look out over a 10 year horizon and I say, what would have to happen over these next 10 years for me to feel like I'm living the most fulfilling, exciting, meaningful decade of my life where I'm making a dent in this world?
00:41:13
Speaker
And if I can be really honest with myself about what that is, even if it scares me to actually step forward into that life, and then I align my daily actions around that, right? Like, are my actions in alignment with that even when it's not easy? That is living an authentic life. Sometimes that means speaking up and saying things that other people won't agree with. That means, here's a perfect example for you, Laura.
00:41:39
Speaker
I speak openly about my sexual history and just the podcast that we talked about here. I lost a six-figure speaking contract as a result of that recently. And for one of the largest financial services firms, because one of my emails that went out had something about the past and the firm decided to cut ties as a result of it. And I knew that would be a risk as part of the work that I do. And of course it hurt.
00:42:07
Speaker
Of course it stung because that was a great work and I loved what I was doing there. And there was a part of me that screamed, this is an injustice, right? Like, I'm one of the guys who's helping. I'm one of the people who's addressing the things that we need to talk about. But I also recognized that, you know, being a pioneer in the space and talking openly about it requires some of this. And ultimately, I've gotten to a place where it's like, that's right on. Like, I feel authentically aligned with how I'm doing things and knowing that no matter what the setback is,
00:42:36
Speaker
I'm going to be all good. I love it. I love it. And what do you do to keep a practice? Many people speak about, you know, you spoke about making sure you don't drift and living a more conscious life. And so living authentically requires a lot of consciousness. What do you have habits, routines, things you can share with the audience? Yeah, I'm a huge believer in having a daily practice. There's a lot to it. But I would say the two places that I really have refined are my morning routine, my evening routine, we've done
00:43:06
Speaker
two podcasts on these. One is called 11 ideas for your morning routine. And the other one is 10 ways your evening routine is sabotaging you. So check those out on the man amongst men podcast. And the morning routine for me is all about what is the state that I need to be in for the next 16 hours of my waking hours of the day. And so if it's on a day where I'm speaking, like I get to get on a stage and I need to be my best self and hold
00:43:33
Speaker
hold the space for an audience of like say 100 to 500 people, I need to make sure that I'm feeling alive. So first thing in the morning I get up and I do breath work. I have a five minute breath work practice that activates my oxygen. I have a meditation practice. I read something either spiritual or personal development oriented. I journal and I finish with a shower with at least a minute of cold. So the cold shower
00:44:00
Speaker
Activates and has a lot of like mood enhancing benefits get your brain going so that leads me to feeling a sense of aliveness and My mornings when I cycle through that and that can take me anywhere between a half an hour to 90 minutes Depending on how much time I have that day. I just know that I've got it for the rest of the day
00:44:18
Speaker
I love it. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing your story and your honesty. If people are looking to find out more about you, the podcast, where can they find you? Yeah, great. DoInnerWork.com is our website. DoInnerWork.com. And I have a couple of book lists on there for download, like 12 books every man must read and 15 books that every man must read written by women. Those are really popular on there.
00:44:44
Speaker
You could find the podcast on there as well, which is called the Man Amongst Men podcast. It's on iTunes and Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Awesome. Thank you so much, Dominic.