I’m more focused than ever on how our personal stories are what drives us. Part of my own story is care and concern for our planet. Not because I’m so altruistic, but I adore the outdoors. It’s my playground and I selfishly want it conserved and protected so I can keep enjoying it…and my grandkids can as well. So I’m driven to help conserve and protect it. But I also realize how frustrating it is. I have a full life and taking time to recycle or limit my own use of resources feels like a drop in the bucket and a hassle. Then comes along Bill Weir, CNN’s first and current Chief Climate Correspondent. He’s written a book titled, Life As We Know It (Can Be): Stories of People, Climate, and Hope in a Changing World. It came from some letters he initially wrote for his son. The book is actually crafted to follow Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Bill states, “Now more than ever human stories will be the difference between destruction and salvation. Climate change on a degraded planet is not a problem created or solved by physics or technology. It is a problem created and solved by stories.” That’s what piqued my interest. So I sat down with Bill. Honestly, I wanted to get some education and understanding about what is actually happening from someone on the front lines, not just someone else theorizing on what they’ve heard. Bill draws on his experience creating and hosting the primetime CNN Original Series “The Wonder List with Bill Weir,” now streaming on Discovery+. Weir and his team produced four seasons of the show across 28 countries, highlighting wondrous people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of seismic change. He actually won an Emmy Award. Bill is one of those news reporters like they depict in the movies. He was among the first reporters into the floodwaters of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Japan’s tsunami zone during the nuclear crisis of 2011. He dodged Taliban bullets in Afghanistan, led network coverage from Iraq and was the first American to broadcast live from Tibet. His live shots have come from atop the Golden Gate Bridge and below the waters of the Great Barrier Reef while his adventure reporting includes jumps from hot air balloons, hikes deep into the Amazon and one fun night spent lashed to the side of Yosemite’s El Capitan. We all want to claim we’ve done some epic things. Bill has. And from it all he has something to share with us. Find Bill at billweirclimate.com

In this episode I have a paradigm shift that will alter your drive. We are all raised in the mono-mind belief system, the idea that we have one mind, and from this one mind we have an infinite amount of differing thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges. That we often feel are competing against each other. We think of our good selves and our bad selves. Our healthy and unhealthy aspects. And we get frustrated and feel guilty that our one mind seems so schizophrenic. My guest today has a very different theory and perspective. From his research he believes we have a multiple personality, and all the parts are doing what they are supposed to. If we understand this, we can use them in harmony to help us be our best selves. Richard C. Schwartz, is an American systemic family therapist, academic, author, and creator of the Internal Family Systems branch of therapy. He developed his foundational work with IFS in the 1980s after noticing that his clients were made up of many different pieces or "parts" of their "Self.” Dick is currently on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and his latest of five books is called, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. The forward is by renowned music artist, Alanis Morissette who credits Dick’s work with IFS as revolutionizing her own therapy and life perspective and even bringing her to her core spirituality. Famed physician Gabor Maté and psychologist Bessel Van Der Kolk attest to IFS as one of the most innovative and transformational therapies to have emerged in the present century. I sat down with Dick to dig into Internal Family Systems and the message in his new book, No Bad Parts, to uncover how changing our paradigm on the different parts of our minds can significantly alter what drives us for the better.

The point of this podcast is to better fuel your drive so you achieve more fulfillment. I’ve met few people who want to talk about death. We avoid it like…death. It’s black and dark and to be feared. At least in our culture. But seven months ago my Dad got a surprise cancer diagnosis, and he died six weeks later. I was fortunate to walk with him daily until his last breath. I went from zero exposure to death, to full exposure. And it’s altered my life. My brother Jared Angaza was there as well, and he participated intimately as a death doula, walking with my Dad intimately in his personal care and spiritual ponderings. We’d never heard the term “death doula” before. Well, divinely, I was contacted by an agency about having Alua Arthur on this podcast. Alua is the most visible death doula working in America today. She trains and educates other death doulas to walk with people in the end days of their lives, from basic planning to nurturing their souls and the lives of their loved ones. Alua has spent literally thousands of hours with people as they contemplate their mortality when regrets, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally revealed aloud. It is for this insight I wanted to talk with her. Her TED Talk, “Why thinking about death helps you live a better life” has 1.5 million views. She has been featured on CBS’s The Doctors and I’ve now seen her in Disney’s “Limitless” docu-series with Chris Hemsworth. Alua’s journey to death work started when her family fled a murderous coup d'etat in Ghana. She went on to become a lawyer, but after walking with a close friend through his death, she devoted herself to walking with others and educating us on what we can gain in our lives today, from considering our death in the future, instead of avoiding it. I’ll be referencing Alua’s new book, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life By Getting Real About The End, which is her raw, no holds barred, honest, and frequently hilarious memoir that shares her powerful message with people all around the world. You can also find out more at Goingwithgrace.com. I sat down to talk with Alua about how her insights with death can help us lead more authentically driven and rewarding lives, right now.

We’d all like to know the one assignment, the mission, the purpose that was just for us. That we were made for. We’d like a stone tablet to fall out of the sky that said, “This is what you are here to do. Go do it.” What confidence we’d have! We love to watch movies where life and death is on the line and it’s clear what everyone needs to do. But life is not like that. You wake up today to way too many possibilities, all the while thinking you’re supposed to find that one thing that is just for you. One thing out of the seemingly limitless opportunities. I have Mike Zeller on the show today because I’m incredibly interested in his concept of us having a “zone of genius.” As you’ll hear at the top of the show, he makes a great case for our genius and purpose not being one thing and one role, but a zone we understand and work within. It’s not limitless and it’s not one thing. That is hopeful and just rings true to my own life experience. Mike is a renowned business architect and mentor to entrepreneurs, but I find his personal genius lies within his innate ability to help people pinpoint their deepest purposes, greatest gifts, and highest potential to serve and influence the world, which is what we all long to do. His book is The Genius Within: Your Natural Pathway To Impact, Fulfillment & Wealth. We walk and talk through understanding your unique talents, key relationships, unique life experiences, and values and passions and how they compilate into your zone of genius. This is a deep conversation that I believe will uncover some profound insights for you. You can get Mike’s 14 Free tools to Rapidly Rewire Your Nervous System: https://neurorewiring.com/. And a free copy of his book at www.geniuswithinbook.com

You are in a variety of relationships. How liberated do you feel? How free to be yourself and think and speak freely do you feel? Especially in your closest relationships. My experience in my own life and in walking closely with so many others is we come together and morph to fit and please each other, and continue a cycle of morphing for the length of the relationship. If we can handle it. And often we can’t, which is why we see so many relationships end, or die and linger together for decades. Mark Groves is a Human Connection Specialist and founder of Create the Love. He’s host of the Mark Groves Podcast and co-author of a new book, Liberated Love: Release Codependent Patterns and Create the Love You Desire. Mark's work bridges the academic and the human, inviting people to explore the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and the beautiful sides of connection. He has an Instagram of over one million followers that he just discontinued because he felt the platform itself is not conducive to health. It depicts Mark’s devotion to the heart. To love. I start our talk off, asking him what, at a high level, he is guiding us to be liberated from. He started off with being liberated from patterns of relationships we inherited. We go from here to talk through six steps he lays out to help us, liberate our love.

In this episode I'm giving you the recipe for being known. Notice the word recipe. It's actually a term we need to use more in this personal growth space. Everyone is promoting to you that they have the answer for you. The secret. The perfectly baked cake to give you all you want. It doesn't exist. The best you can get is a recipe so you can bake your own cake. So here we have a profound recipe for being known. You have something great to offer. If you are unclear on what it is, or even if you think you know, you want to hear this show and gain some core clarity. But even if you do know what your key offering to the world is, you can die alone with it, without anyone, or many people, ever knowing or experiencing you. It happens all the time. My guest is Rory Vaden and he's literally a master at helping people hone in on their core offering, and effectively get the word out to the world. He's done so well at this that even incredibly established people hire him, like Ed Mylett, Lewis Howes, and Tom & Lisa Bilyeu. Rory is the world’s leading expert on the psychology of influence – which he defines as moving ourselves and others to take action. Rory is a New York Times bestselling author, Hall of Fame Speaker, and 8-Figure Entrepreneur, Rory has become a trusted voice by both the media and consumers alike. Rory works with what he calls, mission driven messengers. People not just trying to be massively influential, but who are literally striving to help and serve humanity. Just some of what we covered in this conversation, "Don't start with why, start with who. Who you want to help." "Our purpose is not what we do, but who we serve." "You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were." He describes how we look to model people who are successful in our given field, and how we emulate what they are doing now and miss doing what they did to get them to where they are now. Which is doing one, specific thing, over and over and over. Rory teaches us to "Get consumed with the person you're supposed to help, not with your peers who are more successful." And a revelation he offered in regards to this is, "There is no fear when you’re thinking about helping someone, only when you are thinking about yourself." Friends, this episode is literally a master class in finding your core offering and effectively bringing it to the marketplace. If you want to influence others, this is the show for you. And if you want to go further, you can talk with Rory's team for free. Go to freebandcall.com/drive. Of course they want your business, but to get it they will do what they teach, and provide great value for free. You can take it and run if you want. They're fine with that, cause they know you'll tell other people. This is the type of strategy they teach. If nothing else, go get a free call with them just to see how they do it, and use what you learn for yourself. freebrandcall.com/drive

Some people relate to trauma. Some to grief. But everyone will admit to disappointment, even if you’re a chronic minimizer like me. We’re not here to exaggerate and inflate anything, and nobody wants to give attention to disappointment so it limits them. That however is my concern. Are we healthfully dealing with disappointments or are we repressing unresolved feelings that are in fact, limiting us? You may be CEO of your company and clearing a million per year, and have unresolved disappointments, from your childhood or last year, limiting you. Maybe they are limiting your performance. Your income. Your relationships. Your fulfillment despite your achievements. This was my focus as I entered into the following discussion with acclaimed grief educator and multiple best selling author, Christina Rasmussen. Christina studied to become a therapist and crisis intervention counselor - even doing her master's thesis on the stages of bereavement, and thought she understood grief. Then, with daughters nine months and two-and-a-half years old, her 31 year old husband was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer and passed away. It was then she truly grasped the depths of sorrow and pain that accompany loss. Four years after Christina’s husband died she created the Life Reentry process, which launched her on a mission to bring compassion, grace, and validation to thousands, while simultaneously establishing an exit from what she termed the Waiting Room. She wrote the book, Second Firsts that became a bestseller. Then, Where Did You Go? Her new book and our muse here is Invisible Loss: Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief. She’s taken her experience and research from severe and tragic loss and brought the same, profound process of healing into our everyday grief and disappointments. She found that it’s not the size of the big trauma or little disappointment that matters, but the resolution, and she has a process to help us work through it.

In this episode I'm unveiling a very common motivator for your drive that I'd not adequately conceptualized before. We all realize that negative feelings can often be a powerful motivator for us. The desire to prove ourselves to the world. But my guest took it a step further and it was an "Ah ha!" Moment for me. Self-development leader Joel Brown cited that even among the top performers he's hired to coach, he finds that many not only have negative motivators driving them, but they are actually afraid to lose them, as they feel, even subconsciously, that it's their superpower. Boom. I think this is huge. We may be holding on to negative motivators because we've attached out identity to them. Joel Brown is a renowned self-development leader who has inspired 372 million people worldwide with his #1 personal development website, Addicted2Success. Over the last 14 years he's directly impacted over 12,500 lives through hands on training, conferences and retreats. Joel hosts the highly successful Addicted2Success podcast, with over 6.2 Million Plays & Downloads over the past 4 years + over 9 Million plays on his Youtube channel featuring thought leaders such as Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Simon Sinek, Les Brown and more. Joel stands apart to me because of his holistic blend of cutting-edge psychological strategies and deep spiritual insights, delving beyond the surface to target the subconscious patterns that often derail us from our path. Joel is also a Jedi of understanding procrastination. He actually has a quick quiz you can take to understand your procrastination type. There are six procrastination types and it really helpful to discover mine and how to better mitigate my propensities. Go to doquiz.com. doquiz.com. But you'll hear us talk about it in this coming conversation.

In this episode we’re delivering steps for you to stand out and be remarkable. So you don’t get lost in the shuffle of noise out there. To get much of anywhere today, we must be remarkable. But what does that mean? My guest defines it not as being famous or rich, having tons of followers or being a genius, but as making a difference. Making the world a better place. His podcast is actually called Remarkable People, and after having 200 amazing guests he’s curated tremendous wisdom in his new book, Think Remarkable: 9 Paths To Transform Your LIfe and Make a Difference. And he, is Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a Silicon Valley legend. If you look him up in Wikipedia it says: Guy Kawasaki is an American marketing specialist, author, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He was one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line in 1984. He popularized the word evangelist in marketing the Macintosh as an "Apple evangelist" and the concepts of evangelism marketing and technology evangelism/platform evangelism in general. The Wikipedia source is interesting as Guy actually sat on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees for a time, which is the non-profit operating entity of Wikipedia. Guy has written 15 books and this is the third time I’ve had him on my show. Guy is a truly inspirational and wise guy. I dubbed this book, “Life’s Little Instruction Book For Aspiring People,” which you’ll hear Guy say he is going to steal and use. I’m honored. This conversation goes by quickly, it includes a lot of laughter, and an immense amount of wisdom from a truly, wise Guy. Next up…Guy Kawasaki and a guide to being remarkable.