Transcript

Brian
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Here we are for episode 120. Honey, how are you?

Ani
I’m great. How are you today?

Brian
I am feeling successful on the inside.

Ani
Okay. It sounds like that’s what we’re talking about today.

Brian
That’s what we are talking about today. We’re talking about this idea that success Being successful on the inside takes more than being successful on the outside.

Ani
It’s funny you say that because I used to think, especially when we first started getting into coaching and developing our business years ago, that the people who were really successful on the outside all were super successful on the inside. I had this funny idea around it. And then the farther along I went, the more people I met, I realized Because that’s not true.

Brian
Yeah, well, me too. I had the same, and I think that was probably a limiting belief that we shared. Oh, yeah.

Ani
A huge. I had to have it all just right inside thing, dialed.

Brian
But also, I think the limiting belief was that when we look at people outside of us that externally were more successful by Western world metrics, let’s say, which we’re going to talk about here in a moment, they had everything inside clicking. Everything was working internally.

Ani
Inner peace, abundance.

Brian
It was interesting to have that belief and to have that belief be hit over the head it a lot and realized, Oh, my God, that’s not actually true. Because I think we’ve both met and worked with many people that by all accounts were very successful or are very successful externally, but they are the most unhappy, miserable people internally than you could ever meet in your life. I always thought that that was some aberration. It was like, Oh, that’s just an aberration because everybody is successful on the outside is already successful on the inside. I realized that that was actually not the aberration. That’s more the norm for people. As we’re having this conversation, we just want to say out loud that we’re not saying in this conversation that external success is wrong, bad, not good. Of course. We’re not saying that internal success is the best thing ever, and it’s the pure and all that stuff. We’re just bringing to the awareness that we’ve worked with a lot of people who, by all metrics, are successful externally, but internally have are not successful. We’ve also met people that internally are pretty successful but don’t actually exhibit or display the outer success that you attribute with Western morals and values.

Ani
Because what does success really mean, Brian?

Brian
Well, that’s the point. What does it mean? It’s very personal to each of us.

Ani
Yeah, it’s very personal. We have these societal benchmarks around what, especially with all the social media stuff. Really baffles me when we look back at our lives over the past 20 years or whatever and look at when we didn’t have cell phones or before there was text messaging or whatever. Social media hasn’t been around forever. But with social media in our lives, I think that definitely highlights what we think is successful as society and what we think other people have Yeah.

Brian
Well, the whole law of relativity really comes into play, right? So you can even be suckered into a con where someone on social media looks like they’re super successful. And so we give them a bunch of money to help us become externally successful, and they’re actually not really that successful.

Ani
We think they’re internally successful because they wear pretty clothes.

Brian
Because they have all the external success, right? Because the pictures look like it. Yeah. So the first thing Something we just want to debunk here is that external by West… Let’s just maybe place this first. What are we talking about? We talk about external success from a Western sense, a Western world sense of… Maybe we can actually say global, too, because I think this all around the world, I think a lot of people attribute external success to things like having money. Having enough money. Having a lot, having enough, not only enough, but a lot. But a lot. But a lot. An excess, an abundance of money. Okay?

Ani
Yeah. And how much does depend on where in the world you are? Because that’s different.

Brian
But even if you’re in a village somewhere in a third world country, if you’re in a If you’re the person in the village with more resources than anyone else in the village, they would probably consider you to be the most externally successful. Sure. Let’s just say that.

Ani
You had the best-looking donkey.

Brian
Yeah, whatever it was. You have more resources externally. Money, possessions. Go back to the best-looking donkey or the most donkeys or the most cows or the most pigs or the most sheep or the most houses or whatever. We’re talking money, possessions, social status. I think everybody would agree that that’s a marker of a Western success. Power, which means that you have the ability to make decisions that affect more people than just yourself. I would consider that being powerful. If you can change policy that affects 100 people, a thousand people, 10,000 people, a million people, I think most people from the Western world would say that’s power and a tribute of external success. Fame.

Ani
Which is really important to a lot of folks.

Brian
Yeah, a lot of people, recognizability, Fame. That’s a Marker also of external success. We’re talking about those kinds of things, money, possession, social status, power, fame. Again, we’ve worked with a lot of people who, by all margins, relatively speaking, have more of those things than other people, but aren’t necessarily exhibiting what we might call inner success. Sure.

Ani
What would that be?

Brian
Inner success, well, let’s talk about that. What does inner success look like? Well, it really looks like just having a really true inner peace.

Ani
I was thinking, this is not the right way to phrase it, but less internal conflict.

Brian
Yeah, less internal conflict. Yeah, more internal peace, less conflict. Light-heartedness, living with lightheartedness, living with really contentment, a sense of what I would call living gratitude. Gratitude is alive in someone, not just I’m making a list of things I’m grateful for.

Ani
Practice you do on Sundays for five minutes.

Brian
Yeah. I don’t really feel emotionally connected to it. Right.

Ani
Emotionally connected to life.

Brian
Yeah. You’re really grateful for all of life. You’re grateful for everything that you have in life. Right. Everything that happens in life. Really detached from what most other people would consider problems?

Ani
I’m thinking healthy. Like mentally, emotionally healthy. Yeah.

Brian
Yeah, mentally, emotionally healthy, for sure. And by the way, you could be physically not a specimen or physically actually ill. Physical specimen. You’re a specimen. Yeah, I’m a specimen. But you could also have things going on in your physical body, but still be exhibiting internal success. Right. So there’s actually… And that’s not a disconnect because we live in a physical world. We live in a physical world, even as non-physical beings, we live in a physical world. And in the material, physical world and having a body, sometimes things happen with your body that you need to meet from a spiritual place.

Ani
Right. I was just going to use the word spirit. So to have a connection, really strong, healthy connection with your spiritual nature.

Brian
Yeah. The way I frame it up is being in the world, but not of it. Being in the world, but not of it. I just love that phrase that when really you have inner success, it’s that you recognize that you live in a material world, but you realize you’re not actually of that world.

Ani
A material girl.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. That’s what it looks like when you have inner success. But let’s bounce back to this outer success idea again, because inner Other success, in my experience, is much more rare.

Ani
Oh, for sure.

Brian
Other success. We think about people who like to achieve things. People like to achieve things. People who like to set goals around bringing in more money, or like to set goals around their fitness, or like to set goals around their experiences or the possessions that they have. A lot of people, we set goals around all those markers of external success. We set goals around money. We set goals around acquiring possessions. We set goals around our social status. We set goals around having more power and influence and control. We set goals around our recognizability or our Fame. A lot of people we work with set goals in those areas.

Ani
Yeah. A lot of people don’t really set the inner goals so much. I think they probably have a hard time articulating what that is, too, or what that looks like, or even having enough, well, I was going to say experience with it, but also other people around us to be able to… Because one of the reasons we set goals is we see other people achieving them. Right.

Brian
Yeah. Externally. Exactly. We’re actually always living in that external feedback mechanism, which I get it, which is why I think it’s actually easier to achieve external goals than as internal goals. But we chasing these external goals thinking it’s going to change something internally, and it doesn’t. But let’s actually just talk about when we think about achieving external goals, external status, external Let’s just say success. Let’s just sum it up as success, all these things that we talked about. You can achieve external success, I think this is interesting, either through ethical or unethical means. You You can actually achieve external success. Well, let’s look at some of the potentially ethical ones first. Like birth privilege. I’m not saying that’s either ethical or unethical, but that’s the one way that people achieve external success. What do you mean They’re just born into it. Oh, yeah, I got it. They’re born into families. They have plenty of resources, plenty of opportunities. They go to the best schools. They meet the best, they meet the people that can actually help them create more success. But let’s just say out loud that many times external success is really just birth privilege.

Brian
Not just, but that’s a huge part of it.

Ani
It’s a huge leg up.

Brian
I think the other thing that people will really attribute external success to are things like hard work and hustle. Hard work. Because then we feel like we’re earning it, we deserve it. I’m not saying those things are wrong or bad, but that is one way that you earn external success is through hard work and hustle. That can be a good thing. It also can be a challenging thing depending on how you use it.

Ani
I also see the flip side of that with folks who say that they get external success through, let’s just say, alignment or connection or the more feminine way. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that’s how people talk about it. And in that way, it’s like, Oh, I’m super connected. I’m super aligned, so things just really come to me. And there’s so much stuff that comes up internally when people are trying to do that in terms of how to get their external success. I mean, I’ve gotten jammed up around that so many times in my own life. Interesting. Because I thought that in order to make the external success work in a feminine way, I had to be so pure, clean, aligned internally, but that wasn’t necessarily how it was working for other folks.

Brian
Yeah, that would make sense.

Ani
It gets all mucky.

Brian
The other way that people can achieve external success is actually through conformity. Yeah, for sure. If I just like, Okay, so I’m going to go to school. I’m going to get Really good grades. And by the way, hardware could be a part of that, or it could be birth privilege, right? It could just be born and be really a smart cookie right from the start. And so you get really good grades, you get into a really good college, and then from there, you get a really good internship, and then from there, you get into a really good job, and you go up through the ranks to what people would lay out for you as the pathways to success.

Ani
Yeah, sure.

Brian
Right? So people can be really successful that way. All those things aren’t necessarily bad things, but those are pathways. You can also, though, create external success through things like bullying.

Ani
Or manipulation.

Brian
Bullying, manipulation, narcissism, Like conning. All those kinds are also ways to achieve external success, let’s just say. That’s what we’re saying. External success isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Is it a bad thing when you achieve it through those ways? Well, it’s certainly going to be some type of law of cause and effect associated with that. You can’t get away with that forever.

Ani
We’re not judging it as bad. Good bad is all mixed up. But is it going to come back and It will cause some issues?

Brian
Oh, it always will for you or the people around you. In some way. Yeah, in some way, shape, or form. But I just think it’s interesting, again, this external success, it can be created or achieved either through ethical means or non-ethical means or really unethical means. But when you look at inner success, inner success can only be achieved through ethical means.

Ani
I’m just laughing to myself thinking about ways that people try to achieve inner success, and not to say it’s ethical or unethical, but people try all kinds of crazy stuff. And damn it, when it doesn’t work sustainably. But yeah, it eludes people. It eludes people so much.

Brian
Yeah, the inner success.

Ani
The inner success.

Brian
For sure. Yeah. For sure. Again, we’ve both met a lot of people with outward success. People who have what you might think is plenty of money. But what’s interesting is oftentimes when people are solely outer success-oriented, no matter how much that plenty of money is, it’s never enough money. There’s always some type of lack. But also, you know But it’s not only that there’s never enough money, there’s also never enough respect. There’s never enough love. There’s never enough health. There’s never enough… There’s something that’s still driving the person from a sense of lack, which is actually causing them to achieve more external success to try to overcome the internal sense of lack that they have. So That’s what I was always dismayed about, because I thought that people with plenty of external success, they already felt a hole inside. Oh, my gosh, yeah. That’s why they had that external success. But that’s the rarer person. Definitely. It’s more rare to cultivate external success from a place of feeling whole inside. It’s much more common to generate external success from a place of emptyness inside.

Ani
Yeah, that drives people.

Brian
We’ve seen that. Then you might think, Well, who cares, Brian? I want the outer success. I don’t care about the emptyness inside. I want to have the outer.

Ani
Well, you care when it’s eating you up inside.

Brian
You care when it starts eating you up inside. You care when you wake up and you feel like you’re You have no purpose when your relationships are hollow, when you’re lonely, when your health is suffering. Because you will always start to see it there. That’s where we see it start to crack in people first.

Ani
Is the health. But the thing is, it’s not like the relationship stuff wasn’t in their life, the relationship problems, but there, but they really start to do something about it when it starts to erode health.

Brian
Exactly. These things are not mutually exclusive, by the way, either. I want to be very clear about that. It’s not like if you have internal success, you won’t have external success, although you relate to it differently because it’s not as important to you anymore. When you truly have internal success, the external success is no longer as important. It It doesn’t mean that you don’t create it, but you create it for different reasons. You’re not creating it because you’re trying to fill up a void inside. You’re creating it because it serves more people and it serves more internal success for more people other than yourself. It just comes from a different… It comes from a whole, whole different place. And so how do you achieve internal success? And we already noted, internal… You cannot lie about internal success to yourself. To yourself. You can’t lie to yourself about it. You can’t trick yourself. You can’t manipulate yourself. You can’t cheat yourself. You can’t bully yourself, which are all means that people might use to create external success for themselves is bullying, manipulation, lying, narcissism, all that stuff. But you can’t do that and get internal success.

Brian
Internal success can only be created through ethical means. Things like clearing out, patterns of attachment and fear.

Ani
Yeah. I just remember we were watching a movie last night, and one of the main characters at the end, and I’m not going to give it away, even what the story was, was being tormented by a lack of inner success, right? Because there was so much that they had to let go of to be able to be at peace. And all their lives had been carrying around, like lack of forgiveness and understanding, and acceptance. That stuff just torments people in their lives.

Brian
Yeah, exactly.

Ani
You can’t manipulate your way out of it.

Brian
You cannot manipulate. You can’t bully your way out of it. You can’t buy your way out of it.

Ani
You can’t buy your way out of it.

Brian
You can’t buy your way out of it. And that’s essentially, again, as you get closer and closer to the moment where we transition to whatever is next. And I think a lot of this understanding, too, or experience, maybe, for me, comes out of my work with people people in hospice. 100%, yeah. I’ve been with people when they’ve transitioned, actually. It’s always interesting to me. A lot of the people I’ve worked with with a lot of means in their physical world, they have very difficult transitions, and there’s so much they’re still attached to that they’ve created, built, possessed during their life. When I was working with folks and going through that experience, I was like, I do not want that to be my last experience here on the planet. I want to be able to leave and just be at peace. I’ve worked with people in hospice who have just been a complete peace, and that’s what I want. If I have to spend my whole life working to that experience at the end, I think that’s a worthwhile life.

Ani
I’ve learned so much about inner success from my work with hospice, and I feel really fortunate to have had that experience when I was in college. My mentor was pretty big into hospice, and so I found my way there. And I did my grad work around hospice and all kinds of stuff. I wouldn’t have found that… I feel like it was a little divine intervention because I don’t think I would have sought that work out, but it tremendously informed who I wanted to be in my life based on working with those folks.

Brian
Yeah. It’s such a amazing teacher. It really does. It is formative, isn’t it? It’s great to be formative. So other ways about of achieving this internal inner success. It’s like really living in a line with the natural laws, I think is one of the best ways to be successful in your whole life, but internally to be aligned with the way that everything happens.

Ani
I agree with you because otherwise, we’re orienting how we think about ourselves in life from manmade principles. But when we orient how we think about ourselves and life from the natural laws, we’re aligned with creation. You got it, can’t go wrong.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
You know?

Brian
Yeah. Again, this pathway is much more rare than the external success pathway. Really, the invitation here is that if you are really someone who wants to and is driven to, let’s just use the word achieve. Achieve the highest level of success in your life, it must include internal success. External success will never fill up the internal needs, changes.

Ani
Void.

Brian
Void? Things like letting go of the need to control. Could you imagine if you just let go of the need to control things, and then people are like, Oh, my God, but then I won’t have that external success.

Ani
Are you talking to me? Right. Are you talking to me?

Brian
Well, I guess I’m looking at you.

Ani
I’m just kidding.

Brian
But we have clients who are like, You have to let go of the need to control. They’re like, What do you mean let go of the need to control? What’s going to get done? We’re not going to make the sales. We’re not going to drive the revenue. We’re not going to do all these kinds of things.

Ani
Nothing is going to get done at home.

Brian
How confrontational is it even the idea to let go of the need of control? We ask, Well, what would that imagine what that would feel like? They’re like, I don’t even imagine because that’s never something I’ve ever thought that I’ve wanted, even though the people are bundled up, their nervous system is all wound up in knots and all those kinds of things because they’re trying to control every little thing in their life. In their experience.

Ani
Right.

Brian
But that’s a part of internal success is letting go of that need to control. This work happens really deep in your own belief wiring. It really happens deep in your own soma in your body.

Ani
That’s why the sensation-based approach is so important to it. There are so many books on internal success, ancient books and New books. And anytime I’m reading any of them, I just got a new one recently that’s cool and more related specifically to athletics. Anytime I’m reading them, when they talk about anything related to emotions, I’m like, The sensation-based approach, man, is the secret portal. Yeah, it is. It’s a secret portal. I’ve been taking psychedelics, not psychedelics, in my opinion. It’s like the secret portal that people are looking for, the magic pill, which is why I said psychedelics. All of these different hanging on your head and whatever kinds of things. It’s like the secret portal is a sensation-based approach.

Brian
Yeah. Well, I think that from what I’ve heard about psychedelics, that many people have talked to about it. I’ve never done psychedelics, but the person that people have talked to about it, I certainly have had psychedelic experiences. If you listen back to a couple of podcasts we did ago. But the psychedelics, what they do is they, in a lot of ways, my understanding, strip away a lot of the barriers to directly confronting the limiting patterns that you have in your nervous system. That’s why they could be that psychedale can be very, well, not only confronting, potentially dangerous if you don’t have support in doing it. Because you come into- It’s so much sustainable. Yeah, because you come into direct relationship with parts of yourself that Other parts of yourself do not want you to come into contact with. You need help integrating that. It’s so important that that is integrated. That’s why to do psychedelic work, you need to do it with people who’ve done a lot, not just taking themselves on a few trips, but they do this professionally. This is what they do. They’re able to support. Integration is huge. We’ve worked with people that use sensation-based motivation coaching as an integrated tool, and it’s been incredibly powerful because I think That’s really what the work that we do is use these things to help people integrate those experiences so that they can really let go of those habituated patterns and step into something greater.

Ani
Because even if you’re using things that you think can help you to get to that internal success experience, the sensation-based approach still is like the magic portal, even if you have other external stuff that you’re trying to do to get there. Yeah.

Brian
This This is really the ultimate achievement. The ultimate achievement in your life is to transcend the identities that you’ve unconsciously adopted in your life. Because we unconsciously adopt these identities early in our lives, and then those identities drive you to make the decisions, to create external success for whatever reason that you’re doing it. But here’s really the punchline. The reason why Most people really focus on outer achievement, it’s really about avoiding pain. They want to avoid pain.

Ani
Which goes back to the sensation-based approach.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Then you might think, Well, I’m not really avoiding pain. I’m by working my ass off, Brian, and working 80-hour weeks. But here’s the thing. The pain of working the 80-hour week is still less than the pain of what you would experience if you didn’t work those 80-hour weeks. The pain that’s so confronting to your identity if you didn’t have that, and that all comes from that deep unconscious conditioning that we get. Most people are overachieving in the external world because they are avoiding a pain. Inner success is about transcending that pain.

Ani
I was going to ask you, and I still will, but I’m going to answer my own question first. What is one of the biggest inner successes that you’ve had?

Brian
In terms of my experience?

Ani
Your own inner success. Yeah. What’s one of the biggest inner successes you’ve had? But I’m going to answer the question first based on what we’re talking about right now because it goes with it. One of the biggest inner successes that I have had in my life is recognizing that because I’m a human, I’m going to experience pain. Emotional pain, specifically, was where I was at when I had this realization that I was going to embrace pain as a part of the human experience. That was one of the biggest moments of inner success. I remember the realization that I had that I was trying to avoid pain, and I was going to instead embrace it as a part of the human experience. And my life has been so much better since then, especially because of the sensation-based tools that we use, knowing that pain is a construct. I’m just curious for you.

Brian
I would say that there’s two things. One of them is very similar what you just said. For me, a really embodied sense that pain is a part of life, but suffering is optional. Pain is a part of being human, but suffering is optional. Suffering is a choice. I can suffer with that pain, or I can just accept it as being an unpleasant experience that I’m having. But the other part of that is that every experience I’m having is information for me. It’s all information. It’s all information for what? It’s all information for me. Not to get too morose about this, but for me to have a peaceful exit from the physical world. That’s a lot of my life. We’ve talked about this over dinner. We talk with the kids. The kids are like, Would you stop talking about dying? I’m like, But part of my goal, part of my goal of living, and I’ve had this goal for a really long time, probably ever since I was 14 years old, when my grandmother passed away and I saw her just suffering so horribly, I thought, I never want that experience in my life. That’s when I really started getting in the study of Buddhism and Daoism and those sorts of things because I wanted to be able to leave this world on my own terms.

Brian
And by my own terms, not the way it might happen. I could get hit by a bus. I don’t know. But I want I want to leave the world in peace. I want to leave the world being content and peaceful and not feel like there’s any attachment or a longing to things. And so as far as inner success, I felt myself having that experience or felt like I’m having closer to that experience every year. For me, it’s a continued evolution as well. But the information that I get from any experience that I have, I always funnel into How can it help this with me transitioning on my terms at the end of my time here?

Ani
I know you do because we’ve talked about it a lot. I don’t think about it quite as much as that. I think more about the life I’m going to live and how I probably have. I’m 47 now, and I figured I got a damn long time ahead of me, probably, with the length of people’s lives at this point. I might not have even made it to 50%. I’d really like as many many days and years and moments to be great days and years and moments because I got a long time ahead of me, probably. Yeah.

Brian
There’s so many things. I mean, I could also say just to be able to be present with things, just be able to be present with the cold or present with the rain or present with whatever it is. I mean, there’s all kinds of markers of internal success that just makes life so rich. Rich, yeah. Just so rich. Anyway, I’m not sure how we want to wrap up this episode, this podcast, other than saying that there’s a whole opportunity to experience inner success and to be one of the less common individuals on the planet that really live from that place on a day to day basis.

Ani
It’s important to be around other people who are like that when you want to be like that because there’s plenty of people who aren’t. And your life changes based on the vibrational frequency that you place yourself in. The communities and the people that you’re around are really important to making choices about who you’re putting yourself around. That’s a thing that people with external success often say, and it’s the principle that actually is true. And I find that actually a lot of people who are looking for external success get themselves in communities where they think there’s going to be internal success there, and then they’re unhappy with finding that they’re not. Look for communities and people that you can be around. And very oftentimes in this day, it’s in the virtual world, and that’s okay. One of the things that I read in a book, gosh, I’ve probably read this multiple places, but that actually it’s important that those of us who are seeking and working towards and sincere about embodying inner success is that we’re actually spread out around the planet for a reason. We’re supposed to be spread out around the planet so that we can really create the most change.

Ani
In order to be with our people and find your tribe and find like-minded individuals, very oftentimes that will happen in virtual spaces. And then when you’re going to be in person with each other, you travel to be able to be together. But that’s important, too.

Brian
It’s really about, again, just raising the vibrational frequency of consciousness on this planet. And you do that through through internal success, not external success. Yeah.

Ani
Look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts and insights, light bulb moments about today’s podcast. Leave comments below. You know where to find us. And until next time. We’ll see you then.

Brian
See you next week. Bye.