The Paradox of Wealth and Fulfillment: A Conversation with Craig Beirdneau

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Emotional man Weekly podcast. Today I am thrilled and really lucky to have Craig Baird-Know with us. He is a performance coach at Seeker Leadership. He helps powerful people see how powerful they really are. He loves working with any leaders and entrepreneurs who are feet and family focused, and today he's joining me for a mini series. This is a little different than what we've done in the past, and so what we're doing we're discussing several key topics and we'll break it up as each topic is discussed, and those three topics which I'll introduce now are how the pursuit of financial freedom can sometimes lead to personal purgatory. So, craig, you work with a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs. When have you seen this and what does it look like when you come across it?

Speaker 2: 1:07

Yeah, I think one of those common ones is I'm going to sacrifice family time right now so that I can work really hard, grow our business, ascend the ranks of whatever company we're wanting to work at, make as much money as we can in the next 10, 15 years so that we don't have to work ever again. But what happens is we sacrifice the most important things in our life in order to get that, which begs the question is it worth the honesty? It's a great goal to seek for financial freedom and prosperity and all that, but at what cost? Right?

Speaker 1: 1:48

Yeah, and it begs the question freedom from what or freedom to do what? And you think about a lot of people. Think about financial freedom. They're thinking about freedom to spend time with their family, freedom as opportunities for their family. So, in the pursuit for defining freedom to spend time with their family, they're going to ignore them for about 10, 15 years in the hopes that they still have family at the end of it.

Speaker 2: 2:20

Yeah, I think one of the things is I always ask almost everyone's like when I'm asking them what they want. What are they wanting to create?

Speaker 2: 2:27

I want more money, and it's always do you really want more money? Let's say you had all the money that you could ever want, so you had a billion dollars. What would you then do? And so I would travel with my family and I could spend time working on the projects and working with the people that I wanted to, and so it's like, okay, so you don't.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Almost all of it doesn't come down to that. I want financial freedom as much as I want fine relationship and attention freedom. Obviously, I know my wife would say Craig, we want financial freedom, so just keep your mouth shut right now. And we want it too. Financial freedom is a great thing as well, but is it really you want all the financial freedom in the world, or is it what it is? You would do after you get that? And it's so weird that we see that it comes after, but it doesn't need to come after, and that's the crazy amazing. Yeah, and it's honestly one of the reasons like coaching has been as exhilarating as it's been, because it's helping people shift with mindset of prioritizing the most important things first, right.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Yeah, and it's interesting prioritizing things first, because I think if we were to prioritize what's truly most important to us and understand, like, what our values are and that's what I mean by truly important to us and what we truly value it often comes down to who we are, to our character, to our relationships, but we want these relationships to exist in this zone of this area that's free from hardship, free from anxiety, free from worry, free from having to choose which of our resources go where.

Speaker 1: 4:17

We just want this abundance in our lives so we don't have to deal with scarcity. It's this idea that if I have more money than what I need, then I'll have true abundance and never experience scarcity of options, scarcity of whatever it is. And the truth is, though, the emotions, the anxiety, the worry that a lot of people think I are running away from when they're looking for financial freedom, that worry and that anxiety and all those negative emotions, they don't go away. They want it too, because they wanna change their circumstance so they don't have to feel fear, feel scared, feel whatever it is. But the truth is, those emotions are caused by our thoughts and not by the circumstance of how much money we have.

Speaker 2: 5:05

How have you seen that?

Speaker 1: 5:06

play out with, because you start, you get the position, you get the title, you get the money. Yet the worries are still there, the same worries that you've had this whole time that something catastrophic will happen if you don't make that pay raise, if you don't get that promotion or if you don't get that money. Your brain is trained to think that way. It's just not magically gonna go away.

Speaker 2: 5:26

Yeah, a couple things come to mind. First thing that came to mind was and it just left my mind too, which is really fun. The second thing that came to mind is so a lot of there's a lot of things that I know, there's a lot of things that I've written about it, I've spoken about it. They thought, man, I'm gonna work really hard and grow my business, then I'm gonna sell it for a million to millions of dollars and then I've made it right. But so many of them, when they sell their business, they get that money hits their account. They're happy for an hour or two and then what happens often is they go into a deep, dark place and what is it I really want? Like, what, like? It then starts to really come back to I didn't really want, I didn't wanna stop working, I didn't wanna stop the business, I didn't wanna stop growing.

Speaker 2: 6:18

We think that the financial success will give us I would say, the financial success and freedom also goes with personal success at Plain and Steward. We think, man, once we take that milestone, we will have made it. When it's not about that milestone at all and it's about the journey of getting there, it's about the journey of where we're going and who we are becoming, versus who we become at certain milestones. The other thing I've hit on was just the meaning that we assign our emotions Is just one of the best things that I talk, one of the coolest things to see when you're asking people. There's, I think her name's Katie Byron. She wrote a book.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Oh, the work. I think it's called the Work right.

Speaker 2: 7:07

Yeah, it's called Loving what Is and it talks about the work, right? Yeah, byron Katie. Yeah, bern Cady. And, like her first question and like the line of questioning is like four questions.

Speaker 2: 7:18

The first question is it true, when you ask somebody that and they dive into the meaning that they've assigned something, the worry, anxiety and the fear and you ask them is it true? Most of the time it's not true. It can be true, right, it absolutely can, but most of the time it's not. It's the meaning we've assigned it, and this is going down a deeper hole. But if we look at our past, ben Hardy Benjamin Hardy's a PhD has written some really awesome books and has some really great thoughts up there. He talks about, like, rewriting our past. Our past is made up of the meaning that we have associated with that meaning that we've given it, and so if that's true, then we can essentially rewrite a lot of the meaning and what's happened in our past to be what we want it to be to serve us, which is a really interesting thing. Sorry, I know that's going into financial freedom questions.

Speaker 1: 8:15

No, but it's actually super relevant because you think about why, when people start defining success, it's often in relation to the past I want to have what my parents had, or I want to give my children opportunities I never had it's when we start defining success in relationship to another circumstance. That's, I think, when we start really setting the trap for emptiness. Because, like you said and this is this I was recently at a conference and this is one of the speakers I forget what her name was is it's still her name talking about how milestones and circumstances don't give us feelings. It's our thoughts about the circumstances, our thoughts about the milestone that drives emotions. Often.

Speaker 1: 9:18

The reason why she was sharing this she had been preparing for this marathon I think it was in Chicago and she prepared and suffered and everyone who's prepared for a long range run knows how grueling it can be and then it was canceled because of COVID and she was so frustrated because the finish line was taken away from her. She was imagining what she would feel when she crossed the finish line and that was ripped away. And she was talking about how we don't have to wait for the milestone, for the finish line, for the circumstance to fill a certain way, because our thoughts are what drive our emotions, not the circumstance. And so if we start waiting for the circumstance to fill a certain way, it's not the circumstances, it's our thoughts. And so if we understand the connection between our thoughts and emotion, as an entrepreneur, we don't have to wait to feel successful once we've surpassed some kind of milestone, and we don't have to tie our worth to success. What are your thoughts about that?

Speaker 2: 10:33

I think tying your worth to success is one of the worst possible things that we can do. We think we have to hit these certain things to be worthy, which is a big thing. For me, it's been a big thing in my journey of doing the work on my end and doing my own personal work. I thought, oh, I'm going to go get a PhD because then I'll made it. I was there for a year and was like, nope, not here, and so by those standards, I am nothing. I dropped out of the bottom of the ballot.

Speaker 2: 11:04

But it's so silly that we get caught up with these things because our worth is not defined by these milestones. Like you said, I came over to say that some famous coach always talks about this it's one of my favorite things to say, which is like our goals are a place to come from and not a place to go to or not a place to get to. So if we think about who do we need to be, who would we be if we crossed that finish line? I'd be a marathon runner, or I'd be successful, or I'd be all these, whatever meeting you associated with. We can start from that place.

Speaker 2: 11:39

We can start from that powerful place of who we are now and be that person, and literally every day, from this conversation on, we could live, be that person. That's powerful, successful. All we say is because we get to create. We get to create the beauty, we get to create the world around us. We get to create who we are every day and it's one of the most amazing things as a creator, everybody on this planet is a creator of their world and, in other ways, creators in a lot of other ways too, but you get to create your world every day and it's a really awesome, powerful thing.

Speaker 1: 12:19

Which ties in about helping powerful people see how powerful they really are, and a lot of people always type power to influence. Right, really powerful people have lots of influence, but I think the most powerful influence we have is the influence we hold inside ourselves, and I think that's where power really truly originates is. And what is the power? What is the influence? It's the capability to intentionally choose how we think about it given circumstance, and I think this one of my favorite books is Man's Search for Happiness or Man's Search for Meaning, frank Frankle.

Speaker 2: 13:00

Frankle Man's Search for Meaning Man's Search for Meaning. I think I'm wondering that. No, there's another one too, and I was going to confuse this. You're in great company.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Yeah, and it's the fact that in between stimulus and response there's a choice, and that choice starts with how we choose to think about it. And then, in very practical, as a daily father, the way I experience this most often is when my toddler doesn't like the way I've presented his food and he throws it across the kitchen, and I can choose the thing about it this two different ways. I can think this is a toddler who doesn't know how to experience big, and this is perfectly natural. I can approach it with patience and understanding and I can be there to coach him. Or I can think you shouldn't throw your food. Dang it, stop throwing food.

Speaker 2: 14:02

Or I can show him how to act without understanding patience right. And how to react with big emotions and not be like Jamesy, not be like, yeah, still working on that one.

Speaker 1: 14:19

So let's tie it all back around Now. We started off this conversation talking about how personal freedom can lead to personal purgatory, and I think the pain we put ourselves in is that what we're doing is we say we can experience happiness, success and really what that kind of translate to is like worthiness and value, until we've reached some kind of milestone, outward marker that we, that's external to us, that says that we are worthy, that we are successful, that we have worth and that we have abundance. But in the meantime, what does that mean? That means we are putting ourselves that we are not worthy, that we don't have worth, that we are not successful yet, that we can't love ourselves yet, and so we are putting ourselves in this like prison of belief. That's just elicits a lot of suffering. It leads to disconnecting with ourselves. It leads to telling our family that we can enjoy being a family when we have X amount of dollars, but until then we can't have this yet. What are your thoughts about that?

Speaker 2: 15:36

Yeah, it's like boiling it down. I'll be blank. When blank, right, I'll be happy, I'll be successful, I'll be free, I'll be able to do and be with I will. Who was I wanting all that? I'll be happy when something happens, and so we're pushing it off into the distant future, like the moment we say that, the moment we think that we're pushing our happiness away from now, even if it's just tomorrow, that's a one day of unnecessary suffering that we don't have to go through. And we talked about. There's hard days. There's hard days all the time and on those days matter.

Speaker 2: 16:18

It's why it's so important on the good days, that you are doing and speaking and developing these awesome mental habits and frameworks that give you power and meaning. And that's why I love to operate in like that belief, like operating in our beliefs. What are the beliefs that we hold? Because they are either serving us or help happiness to suffer. Right, and it's. I love that you brought up settling, because it's there's so much of that all over, all around.

Speaker 2: 16:45

You brought up Victor Frankel. He came out Nazi concentration camp, a more powerful, happy, loving person, that he went into it and like, how in the world does that happen? Right, how can that happen? Because that shouldn't happen, we would assign meaning to it that that should not happen. And we assign meaning oh, it's cloudy outside and I don't like cloudy days. Therefore, I will not be happy today because it's cloudy out. Something so small and insignificant, right, the complete opposite. The cool thing is the complete opposite is true. And if you haven't, if you're looking for the influence thing, influence is the really interesting thing that we talk about a lot, because a lot of people want influence, but it's like do you really? So I'm gonna tando for another day, yeah, yeah. The truth is, we can be who we want now, we and we should. There's, no, there's nothing holding us back from doing that, from being powerful now, because the truth is we are powerful, we are worthy, we are powerful human beings that can create literally the world around us every single day of our life.

Speaker 1: 18:00

I love that. I love that and that actually can segue really well into our next discussion, in the next episode of our mini series, which is looking outward for success leaves us empty inside, and so we're gonna, we're gonna, really, in our next episode, we're gonna really dive into this idea of if we're not assigning success and meaning and value to some kind of external circumstance and we have this power to choose we, we can become these powerful people who are worthy. Now, what do we tie that worthiness to? If it's not something external, that's something we'll just we'll explore in our next episode. Thank you so much for coming on and we're looking for next week when we come back together. This can be great.