When everything crumbled—his marriage, his business, and his sense of self—Ray Martin discovered the true path to purpose. In this raw and redemptive conversation, we explore how loss can be the start of something sacred.
Transcript:
Speaker 1:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt or worry and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, sylvia Worsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, sylvia Worsham.
Speaker 2:
Okay, Okay, no-transcript, that’s all right we have some leeway.
Speaker 3:
I don’t know how much leeway you’ve got for the interview, but yeah, I’m good isn’t till 1 pm my time. You’re in the uk or where are you yeah in the uk and it’s 5 30, okay, so if it’s 11 30 am here and I, my next one’s not till one, then we have a good amount of time and I’ve already eaten lunch in the middle of this because I got up at oh yeah, this morning to get.
Speaker 3:
Oh my goodness I have a 10 year old daughter and I’ve got. I had to sub for a good friend of mine who has a networking event here in the morning at 7.45 am. So I dropped off my daughter at school and I got everything done so that I could be subbing for my friend from 7.45 to 9.30. And I was like, oh, so much to do. But you know how it is, life is always moving, I do. Do you have any questions on anything? I’m going to describe the format.
Speaker 2:
No, I don’t think so. Just how long we want to talk for, that’s all.
Speaker 3:
Okay, so why don’t we allot for 45 minutes?
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 3:
Because you know, people’s attention span right now is not great yeah. And they want. What can I do now? To start living my best life. And so the whole purpose of this podcast was to really shine a bright light on people who have had amazing transformational stories, because there’s so many people right now that are anxious, that are stuck, that they don’t realize the light they hold inside of them and they think that everything they need to get is outside of themselves, and you and I both know that that’s not how life works.
Speaker 3:
We have, there’s no certainty in life, and we, you know, change comes at roaring at us and we have two choices we can either move through the change and grow and transform, or we can stay stuck there forever. It’s a balance, right. So what I’m going to do is the questions that you answered on the calendar. I’m going to kind of weave them in, depending on how the podcast is going.
Speaker 3:
If there’s any coaching that needs to occur, anything I feel within my intuition that needs to be shared in the podcast, I will share it at that moment. But it’s like we’re having a coffee chat and just chatting about our story Very comfortable, very light.
Speaker 3:
This is your stage to say what you need to say, to empower others, and I’m here to empower your light. That’s my mission. That’s what I do for a living. I’m a spiritual transformative coach and I bring people towards their divine purpose. This is what my role is in life, and so it sounds like you’re in your divine purpose now and we want to just kind of share how you got there, yeah, what changes you went through and dark chapters, and how you got out of there. Does that?
Speaker 2:
sound good to you. Oh, that sounds with you. Oh, Sylvia, I’m totally resonating with everything you’re saying. What part of America are you in?
Speaker 3:
I’m in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2:
Oh, okay, okay.
Speaker 3:
Right in the capital.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Brilliant, but I hail from. My parents are Mexican.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 3:
So I grew up with that cultural background, but I married a white guy, so we’re in Austin now. It’s my second marriage. My first marriage ended badly, but we’re friends now, which is interesting because we have a son together.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Speaker 3:
When my daughter was born, my 10-year-old was born. She kind of united our family. It’s really interesting, it’s beautiful and detailed it in my own book in faith I thrive and it just shows this transgression from a traumatic start to forgiveness yeah, a person that chapter one was with my dad and chapter 15 was with my dad, and it’s a full circle of what happened how lovely and so I think we we have a lot common. I saw all the turning points.
Speaker 3:
You went through the death of your dad, your marriage unraveling, losing your business, like this trek not working out for you. So we’ll just start. I’ll start with hey, describe your story of transformation. I’d rather you introduce yourself the way you want to be seen.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Speaker 3:
Because we don’t know each other that well. But we’ll get to know each other after this interview Sound good.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, sounds brilliant. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3:
Okay, so let me count us down so my editing team knows when to start, and we’re going to start in five, four, three, two, one. Hey, lightbringers, it’s Sylvia Worsham. Welcome to Released Out Revealed Purpose, out reveal purpose. And today is Ray Martin and I. When I read his story I was blown away. He is currently in the UK and we met up in Podmatch and it’s just. It’s so amazing how many connections I’ve made through podmatchcom that have really led to lifelong friendships and multiple collaborations afterwards, and I know Ray and I have a lot in common. So let’s dive deep into his very, very profound, transformational story. Ray, you’ve got the stage. Welcome to Released Out Revealed Purpose.
Speaker 2:
Oh, thank you. That must be one of the loveliest introductions I think I’ve ever had. Thanks for having me on your program.
Speaker 3:
Well, thank you for joining us, and I know that when I read the major turning points you were encountering in your life the loss of your marriage, loss of your father, losing your business and really having to start all over again. Share with us a little bit about that chapter in your life and how you landed in this space that you’re currently in.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it’s not something, as a younger person, I ever imagined I would be doing. You know, I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of people. I was in my 40s when these events occurred. But when I was growing up, the main message I had from everyone in my community my parents, my teachers, everyone’s saying happiness means getting a good job, a, a good wife, a house, a home, kids, a mortgage, all those things, and so I never questioned that. Being told that, I just assumed that was the way to happiness, just kind of got on with doing those things and trying to tick all the boxes. So by the time I was in my mid-30ies or late thirties, I’d started my own business as part of that pathway, and I was doing it with my business partner, who was the woman I was married to, and so we were a husband and wife management team and we had our own home in London and all the boxes were ticked and it, on paper, looked great, but it wasn’t sometimes feeling like I imagined it would feel.
Speaker 2:
When I’d got to that place I there was something always gnawing right deep in my sort of seat of consciousness. That this, as bronnie ware describes in her book the five regrets of the dying. She says the biggest regret people have when they die is I wished I’d lived my life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me. And so I kind of felt to some degree I was living the life that others expected of me and I was doing it extremely competently, because in 2002, when we had the business for about six or seven years, I was awarded the business leader of the year by the Daily Telegraph, which is like the New York Times in England, and so I had a lot of recognition publicly for the good work I’d done to become CEO of the company.
Speaker 2:
But it all kind of shockingly fell apart one day when my partner my wife and partner came home from a business meeting and said I’m leaving you and I’m leaving the company and it was sudden, I didn’t see it coming.
Speaker 2:
It ripped a sort of hole in my heart immediately, and on top of that happening, my father suddenly became ill and he passed away shortly afterwards, and so within three or four months I was out of my home, I was out of my marriage, my dad had gone, the company was going to be seriously affected by our split because we owned the company half each and suddenly my normal life didn’t look normal anymore. It looked like I was standing in a bomb crater 360 degrees, surveying all this rubble around me, thinking what do I do now? What do I do now? I was lost, broken, lost, felt a lot of guilt and shame about her walking out like that because I’d failed somehow and hadn’t realized it. And it was really really hard to be doing difficult time that time and I think I spent about a year in grief and paralysis, really not doing very much.
Speaker 3:
I think it’s very common for people that have that grief and that sense of loss because a divorce is. It’s like you’re grieving a life that you were supposed to live forever yeah and when it comes screeching, halt it.
Speaker 3:
You don’t know where to go and it’s tough because some people they don’t want to deal with their pain and so, like you, you stayed one year and I was kind of the same way. After my divorce, I stood on stage, I was a top performer at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. I, like you, checked all the boxes, super high achiever. But I was not happy and I was not happy in that marriage either. So when he asked for a divorce, it was stressful in that we had a four-year-old son and I had just accepted a promotion at Pfizer and I had been denied. Four years in a row I’ve been told no, no, no.
Speaker 3:
And the position I’d taken required a lot of me. And that’s when he took the time to say, well, I think we should get a divorce. And I was just like the time to say, well, I think we should get a divorce. And I was just like whoa. And it does wake you up and it makes you sit back, reflect and try to put the pieces back together. And as we both know, because we both journey through it, it doesn’t always look linear, sometimes it looks very chaotic. But I don’t know what you did. I know what I did? I turned inward.
Speaker 3:
I started to feel I’m a faith-based coach and I started to feel a pull in my soul that said you can do this. You’ll be okay, I don’t know what happened with you after the year. How did you start picking?
Speaker 2:
Well, I eventually did turn inward, but it took a couple of events for that to really take place. One was that about a year into the paralysis of all of that, I really couldn’t see a way out. And a friend of mine said to me if you can’t see a way out sometimes, or it all looks very dark or bleak, one of the things you might consider doing is just going into service 100% to someone else who really needs your help. And I thought, wow.
Speaker 2:
I thought about that I thought, yeah, that would make sense because I could just take all my own troubles and put them to one side and go and help someone 100%. And I found out as I was contemplating that someone I knew very well, who lived in Australia, now from England, had breast cancer and she had a young son and a husband who worked full time. So I contacted their family and said how do you feel about me coming to Australia for a month to sort of take care of Elizabeth while she’s having breast cancer and going for a treatment, so I could just be at the house and do stuff to help you all out? And they said, oh, that’d be great, come over. So I went to Australia to do that and of course, as you might imagine, after I finished my service there, nothing.
Speaker 2:
I just pulled back on the dark, thinking that I was in. Nothing had really shifted, as my friend who gave the advice said, but I, they didn’t say how long it would be, they didn’t say it would happen instantaneously or anything like that. So I I thought about that and I had a few more days left. And I went to see another friend in Australia who invited me to go to the theatre with her mum, and this might sound like a small detail but it’s very relevant. So when we’re in the theatre, I was looking at the programme in the interval about the actors and the play.
Speaker 2:
And I saw that my attention was being pulled to a box in the corner saying we’re auditioning for the next play and it’s about an English member of parliament and it’s called Out of Order and it’s on. It was on after I was going so I wasn’t going to be in it. But I said to my two friends I should be in that play because I’ve got the perfect English accent. I would be able to play that character and be really genuine. And they looked at me and said do you know? We know the director of the play is doing the casting. Why don’t you go to the audition on Sunday? You’ll be here. And I said don’t be ridiculous, I’m not an actor. I’ve got to go home on Tuesday. I can’t be in the play. That’s crazy. They said well, why don’t you just do it for fun? No, you know you won’t be in it, but do it for fun. I thought, yeah, that’s not a bad suggestion, I’ll do that. So I threw myself into the audition, read the scripts, did every part I played and at the end of it the director came over to me and said can I ask you a couple of questions? He said do you actually live here and I said yes, I do. I didn’t want to say I’m going back to england. Okay, so it was a chance I might get asked. He he said when are you going to decide who’s going to be in it? He said we’re going to decide in about a week and I knew I’d be at home. So I told my friends, if they call which I think they will tell them that I’ve just gone back to England for a family emergency and I’m coming straight back, you know if I need to. So I did get a call when I landed in england from my friend who said they want you to be in the play, not a small tiny walk on park. They want you to be the main character, the central character of the whole story. They want you to play this character. I said I can’t believe that.
Speaker 2:
So I thought two things. One is I better check that the director has really not gone crazy, because I’m a high risk choice with paying, fair paying passengers coming in every night for their seats. And the second thing is I’d committed to book to do lots of work for clients in my coaching business and they were expecting me to do that work. Now I was back in England, and so I thought that’s a dilemma, because I don’t want to let them down, because I’ve given my word I’m going to help to help them. So first of all, I made a call to the play director and said are you crazy? Do you really believe I can do this? And they said yeah, we think you’ll be great. We know you’ve got no experience. We’re going to help you prepare. You’re the perfect person. We want you to come, please come. So that was number one tick.
Speaker 2:
And the second thing was I called four clients and said you, you’re not going to believe this, but here’s the story. I told them about the play and I said I feel like God wants me to do this. That’s a really weird thing to say to people in business, but I felt like I’m being called to do it and I said the only way I’m going to say yes is if you look at me and say I give you my blessing to go and do that and skip the commitment you’ve made with me. And all four of them said I give you my blessing I would go and do it. And so I took that to what I call a confirmation signal that I was making exactly the choice that my inner wisdom was telling me to make and I went back and did the play.
Speaker 2:
It was a sensation. It completely changed my mindset, completely. As I was flying back to England on the airplane after three months of being in Australia. I remember thinking, god, I feel awful, I’m going back to play Ray the businessman again. Hang on a minute. Ray the businessman, he’s a character that I’ve created. It’s not really me and I never thought of it like that ever before, until that moment, after I did the play. So that was the gift of the service was I saw my life as a businessman, as a character, and I decided to kill that character off.
Speaker 3:
You know, as you’re speaking, like we said, it’s not linear and the way our souls get led, I know the Holy spirit is always talking to me and that right after the divorce I turned to him and I said what am I going to do? They’re expecting the world to be at Pfizer and I have a little boy and I have people I vowed to help. And he said he put a desire in my heart You’ll be number one in the country and in the region and you’re going to earn enough money. Cause I was scared that I wasn’t going to be able to financially support and I thought for a fact. I was like I sat there and just thought are you crazy? What do you mean?
Speaker 3:
number one, because the territory I’d taken over was dead last in the region and the vice president even knew my name and said you have six months to turn this thing around and the guy who had the territory before the sales territory hadn’t really done anything with these problems and I had to run like mad. So I find that our stories there’s lots of parallels because the way you glanced up and just got the prompting to just go and audition is the holy spirit guiding us it’s.
Speaker 2:
You know it doesn’t make any sense. While it’s happening, you just know you’re being pulled to it. You’re going. Why is this?
Speaker 3:
yeah, there’s an instinct that you feel. I call him the god instincts in my book in faith I drive and he’s nudging us like okay you want my want, my help. I will help. I will help you because I see everything and I see where your. You know your thoughts and your actions and your heart and how I’ve designed you. Yeah, and you still don’t know who you are. So I’m going to help you.
Speaker 3:
And that’s kind of the relationship I’ve always had with him, but it actually started right after the divorce. It began taking form and shape and initially it’s numbing because you don’t know, you can’t see in front of you, you don’t know if that step you’re about to make is the right step or not. And you and I both came from a background that feels very similar, that we had boxes we were checking off. We were this high achiever. This was what success looked like. It was probably came from our modeling. I came from modeling. My father was an immigrant in this country and he was always striving for more and that was his idea of success. If I wasn’t striving for more, I wasn’t successful. But then, when all these things and shifts occur, it starts to put things into perspective doesn’t it yeah?
Speaker 3:
it does, and then, after this whole Ray Martin business getting killed off, what were your next steps?
Speaker 2:
Well, someone had said to me while I was in Australia you know, why don’t you take a six-month sabbatical and review and reflect on what’s happened and sort of start to reinvent yourself and dream a new life from here? And my initial response to that had been before I went and did the play was oh, that’s a ridiculous idea, I’m not going to be wasting my life backpacking around the world or something, but after I did the play and I realized that I was a character.
Speaker 2:
As a businessman. I had the power to rewrite my character and play any episode in a new series that I wanted. I didn’t have children, by the way, so it made a big difference to my decision making at the time and so I thought, yeah, I could do something radically different. So when I started to think about taking the six month sabbatical now, it felt like like a really good idea. I’d never been to asia, I’d never been a backpacker, I’d I was in my 40s and I’d only ever flown sort of business class and done businessman type things, so I’d never lived modestly like that or rudely, and I felt like I missed out on that. So I thought, yeah, that would be good for six months. I’ll use that time to reflect wisely on what’s happened and I’ll hopefully get some inputs in Asia from people with sort of Buddhist teachings or something which I knew nothing about. And so that’s what I did. And by the time I got to month five of my six months, I was still feeling quite agitated and scared about the future and hadn’t worked anything out, and quite anxious about everything that had happened, even though I was in a lovely physical place underneath the still surface. There was a lot of turmoil going on and one guy I spoke to said why don’t you do a buddhist vipassana retreat in a monastery? It’s 10 days of silent meditation that’ll give you a really deep insight into what’s happened to you and give you a chance to really take a look deeply and calm down, and everything will look different after that. I thought, gosh, I’ve never been silent for more than 10 minutes. How can I handle that? I wasn’t doing yoga or anything, so the idea of sitting in meditation for a few hours every day was a real challenge for me. But I decided I’d commit to it because I just got energetically the same feeling that it had about play. When he was describing it, I just my wisdom, knew you need to do this, ray, I have to do this, you just have to do it. So I committed to doing it and when I left the monastery after 10 days, it was like if he had a dial on my head which had been turned up to 10 out of 10 for noise. In my mind, someone had turned it down to a one out of 10. You know it was.
Speaker 2:
I was left in such peace and tranquility and with such a deep insight into the nature of my own mind and my own ego and everything you know. That stuff I never really knew about but they taught us during the retreat. Ego and everything you know that stuff I never really knew about but they taught us during the retreat. But I a lot of life made sense and a lot of the reasons why I’d made all the choices that others expected of me made sense in a way I’d never made sense of them before.
Speaker 2:
And I saw that I had a different path to follow from this point on and I decided I’d stay in asia to develop my mindfulness practice and find a group I could meditate with and I wasn’t ready to go back and I stayed on longer to evolve that. And then I got an idea to do fundraising. I started a fundraising project and I ran in my 50s around five marathons, raised $50,000 for an elephant sanctuary and a school and an orphanage in Nepal and various things like this, and that was a whole episode in itself. But my six-month sabbatical turned into 14 years that I lived out of my backpack and then I returned to the UK afterwards.
Speaker 3:
But all the lessons you learned.
Speaker 2:
Millions. There were so many that I can’t get them all in a conversation. That’s why people kept asking me. When I met them traveling, we talked for a couple of hours like we’re chatting now, and at the end of that chat people would say can I give you my email address? I say why is that? They say because if you ever write a book about the stories you’ve told us, we’d really want to read it. So would you tell us if you do?
Speaker 2:
I laughed and said I’m not doing this to write a book. I’m doing this to heal myself and to kind of find out what my life’s work is. I never did this to write a book, but when I got to about five years into this journey, I had about 100 email addresses from people. I thought, oh my god, I’m being called to write a book and it never really dawned on me until one day it did. I kind of got hit between the eyes like Isaac Newton and the apple falling off the tree. It just dawned on me right, I better write a book. And just to show that the universe does know all this stuff already. As I was having that thinking, the next day on Facebook someone advertised I’m coming to Chiang Mai, which is where I was living, thinking. The next day on Facebook, someone advertised I’m coming to Chiang Mai, which is where I was living. I’m a very established literary agent and author from New York and I’m going to run a five-day course on how to write a book for beginners.
Speaker 3:
How amazing.
Speaker 2:
So I wrote to her and I said I want to do your course, but A I can only afford half of what you’re asking and B I’m a novice and I’ve got no experience. And she said fine, you’d be fine, you can do it for half and it’s okay, you’re a novice, come and join the course. I knew that was a confirmation signal, but that was the right thing and that’s when, I decided to write the book.
Speaker 3:
It’s funny how God uses people as messengers to share his message with us. I had so many messengers along my journey, and it wasn’t. I had a major event in 2012. And it was there that I started to really contemplate leaving corporate America and really stepping into the person that God created me to be. And I’m still going through the journey, because you never stop learning. You always get the next assignment, as obedient as you stay to the calling.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
And I found that with your story you just the obedience, you felt the prompting and immediately you acted, and most people don’t understand that that’s truly a key to success when it comes to intuitive guidance, knowing what is the next step, and despite not being able to see the path, when you take that step in, I don’t know about you, but I would feel peace wash over me, and so I knew I was in the path that I was meant to be in. Before I would feel terrified, like I was very anxious, I didn’t know should I stay here. But then I fell in love with my second husband and intuitively I knew I need to move. And Pfizer wouldn’t give me a lateral move, even though I had been their top saleswoman in the country and all of these doors started to kind of fail, kind of like at the beginning of your journey and it’s.
Speaker 3:
God just saying nope, that’s not for you, nope, that’s not for you, next, next, next, and finally you land where you’re meant to be yeah and then your true gift starts to shine through and it sounds like writing and coaching others is where you’ve landed. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:
yeah, I mean, I was even in my business world life of coaching sometimes, because I, the company I founded, was a leadership development and coaching business. But when you’re running a company like that, inevitably you get pulled away from what gets done for clients and you get involved in contracting legal, financial, all sorts of things when you’re the CEO. So I’d stopped interacting with clients for quite a long time and I wasn’t actually doing the work, the real work with clients. And so when I decided to take the journey, it occurred to me three or four years into that journey Now I never wanted to own and operate a business again, I just wanted to be a freelance individual and actually do coaching work myself with clients, not find contracts for other people to do the coaching. And this is what really became very, very crystal clear to me.
Speaker 2:
After the Buddhisthist yeah, exactly and a lot of reflection time, and so I actually went out into the universe again and said I’m looking for part-time, individual work. I can do as a freelance coach with agencies that need more coaches but perhaps have the clients already so I don’t have to do the marketing or sales or anything like that which is what I’ve done for 25 years and a couple of companies were connected with me and said we would love to have you as an associate of ours.
Speaker 2:
You know we can find you lots of clients, and so I started that journey and I’ve been doing that journey ever since and I do a lot of my own coaching work privately now and I got the book published as well, you know, a while ago. So that’s created a whole journey in itself, because I get a lot of correspondence with people who read in the book or are have read it or want to talk to me about what decisions they want to make and stuff when you have so much wisdom to share because of all the experiences you’ve been through and the lessons you’ve learned I hope so coach one-on-one, those come out.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I hope so I was blessed to have a couple of really great editors who helped me finish the book and get it to. You know the standard I was hoping for, and they advised me to make the last chapter about what I’d learned from the 14-year journey, and so I did. I wrote that chapter as what I call my six rules for happiness, and I’ve set those six rules out and how you live them and bring them to life in a practical way.
Speaker 3:
Do you want to share some of those with us here on the podcast?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, if I’ve got time. I mean, the first rule to be happy, I think and this is applying to everybody is you’ve got to be willing to commit to a path of self-awareness. You is. You’ve got to be willing to commit to a path of self-awareness If you’re not interested in self-awareness, if you’re not willing to do wise reflection, review what’s going on in terms of the events of your life, both the ones that work well and the ones that don’t work well. You want to know why did that work well or why did that work well? What could I do differently? What can I learn from it?
Speaker 2:
If you’re not understanding that you have a vision of sorts that you’re following, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, that you have a set of values, things that are important to you, that you must experience being touched every day, otherwise you’re going to run out of energy, some kind of sense of purpose or mission, things that bring you in. What Ken Robinson pulled into your element where you’ve got things you’re really naturally good at talents. You’re good at these things and things in the world you care about and where these two things overlap, you’re in your element because you’re doing stuff you’re really good at around things you really care about. You could do it all day long and you’ve got boundless energy for that. So all of those things are in the first rule having like a self-awareness picture of yourself and that you keep refreshing and updating all the time, and it’s informed by life’s events, because you’re regularly reflecting to say how can I keep improving and growing and learning? That’s the number one rule. Number two would be taking ownership, 100% ownership, for all the events that happen in life, whether you like them. Or the events that happen in life Whether you like them or not, it doesn’t matter. You own it. Something in your life and journey has caused that event for you. It’s not being done to you. You’re not a victim. There’s some learning there about taking ownership, and this is a big topic in the corporate world as well.
Speaker 2:
Number three would be what I call become your own observer and this is something I started to learn in the monastery which is you’re not your mind or your thoughts. You’re the consciousness, the awareness that is observing those thoughts. So you can’t be, you can’t be the thoughts themselves, otherwise you couldn’t notice. You are thinking because we notice, we are thinking, we’re noticing. We’re not the thinking. The thinking’s a god-given gift and so creating that separation is extremely necessary. For you to be happy, because there are times when things aren’t going to go very well, you’ve got to be able to stand aside from your thinking and judgments about those times and look at it from a completely neutral perspective and say, well, this is obviously happening for some reason that is to benefit my evolution. I just need to deeply sit with what that is and explore that.
Speaker 2:
Number four is about building powerful and purposeful, sustainable relationships. Most of the lucky breaks I’ve had in my life are because I’ve got good relationships with people that just called me out of the blue and said I’ve got an opportunity for you to join in with something here, would you like it? Or my friend in australia, you know, yeah, come and stay with us. You know we would love you to come and look after us or whatever it would be, but I’ve spent most of my life building purposeful, powerful, sustainable relationships with a degree of intentionality. So what I mean by that is, if you and I ended up working together at Pfizer let’s say we’re not just coming to the office to do the work tasks we’ve got to do I could sit down with you on day one and say, look, we’re going to be on the same team for the next two or three years with you on day one and say, look, we’re going to be on the same team for the next two or three years. I’m sure you’ve got some visions and dreams and hopes and wishes for yourself in terms of where you want to get to as a person. I’ve got some visions and hopes and dreams and wishes for me. Why don’t we swap what those are with each other? Let’s tell each other what they are and then let’s make a pact to bring radical support, radical challenge, give each other feedback and help each other grow into those visions and dreams becoming real. Let’s really have some intention to do this with each other as well as getting the work done, and while we’re doing that we’ll help each other. So those kinds of conversations I really encourage for the people I coach, because there’s so much more power available in a relationship that’s intentional. So that’s rule number four.
Speaker 2:
Number five would be taking proactive care of your well-being, something that’s gone up the agenda quite a lot in recent years. No one’s going to do that for you anymore these days. You’ve got to take care of your own spiritual health, mental health, physical health and really proactively keep a note on what your body’s telling you, what your mind. You know what all these signals are that tell you something’s out of kilter. You know resting, eating, sleeping, exercising all those things, being mindful, meditating, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:
There’s a whole bunch of things there. And the last rule for happiness and you have to be doing all the first five, otherwise you’re all six can’t work. So once you’re doing all of these, you’re. The thing that really makes the biggest difference is then you find other people to empower to do those five things and you share the learning with those five things with others. Because when you empower other people to live that way, it’s how you deeply integrate it yourself. You can’t integrate it if you’re not empowering others, because you have to share the learning. And that’s my six rules for happiness, just gone through in about five minutes.
Speaker 3:
I’ve got chills literally, and I know the Holy Spirit is in the meeting, because the last one is about serving.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, service.
Speaker 3:
And when we serve others the way he served his disciples we are really at the top of our game. That’s where we start to really invite more abundance, because we’re working from the overflow of his yeah and his abundance in our lives and exactly these gifts are not ours to keep, it’s ours to give away and to help others and you know, that’s something that at my stage, in the stage I’m in, I can totally relate to, and both you and I had that prompting.
Speaker 3:
You’ve got to write this book, in part to heal our lives, because if we’re not a healed person, we can’t help heal others. If that’s our role and that’s our gift. We have to be able to understand how the mind works so we can guide them through that, the intricacies of the subconscious mind, that can really keep a lot of people stuck, yeah, in these cycles of what I call ego identity, where the ego is comprised of fear-based belief systems that they’re not aware of.
Speaker 3:
That’s why the rule of awareness, self-awareness, is so important, which is your number one rule in the book, and it’s a really important thing to understand and to be able to observe those thoughts, because the thoughts are going to lead to those feelings and when we have big feelings, we are not people that keep those feelings under wraps. We love no, they, they cut things or act on them, depending on what kind of feeling we’re yeah, they the thoughts and feelings then drive your behavior.
Speaker 2:
They actually influence how you decide to act in any given moment.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, and so that that separation of that consciousness of looking at your thoughts and observing them, very key to success in general? Yeah, because then you can make a different choice, since thinking and choices and attitude are all part of the conscious ability of our minds. We have choices and people choose good, and sometimes you don’t choose very well for yourself, and but there’s always something inside of you that’s also attracting those choices into your life.
Speaker 3:
And so when you reflect, then you can see. Ah, I see why that went south. That situation went not the way I envisioned because there’s something inside of me that needs to be sifted out.
Speaker 1:
I’m in that process right now where I told God of me that needs to be sifted out.
Speaker 3:
I’m in that process right now where I told God okay, I want to be blameless and really have my identity in you, remove the elements and make me more like you. So I’m asking him to reveal things to me. And some of these revelations are not easy to hear.
Speaker 3:
And what’s emerged in the revelation and has what’s emerged in the revelation. In the revelation, it has emerged that I am ready to submit to my second marriage the way I’ve submitted to the lord, which to me was a very foreign concept years ago because I grew up in the mexican culture. I saw my mom submitting to my what I thought was my demanding father what I didn’t see was the conflict resolution that they had behind the scenes, which was never taught to us as kids.
Speaker 3:
Right, and we it was behind closed doors, and so I had a very distorted view of what submission, according to the lord, is yeah, yeah and so right now, I’m I. One of the revelations that was very key just a week ago was in order to walk blameless, like me, you must rid yourself of the sin in your tent. And when I read that in Scripture, what I interpreted that as? What’s in your heart, what are you carrying around that you need to release to me and with others?
Speaker 3:
So if there’s, any accountability you need to take with certain individuals in your life. You need to do that now. And one person that obviously came up was my husband, and there’s roles here that I’ve played that are not the roles that are meant in a Christian-based marriage. Our role as wives are to love, to pray and to support and respect our husbands, not to fix them. That’s not our role, that’s God’s role and I’m stepping on his toes.
Speaker 3:
So that’s a revelation that was brought to my attention, and so now it’s like stepping back and saying, okay, I want to be more like you, reveal the lies to me and then help me take these steps, these next steps that I need to take in order to start taking accountability for my role. I find it very freeing because when you can admit to yourself the lies you’ve believed and the roles you’ve played, it’s very freeing. It just doesn’t have power over you anymore. You know, if you can admit like yes, I’m someone that has lied before and I’ve been someone who’s let her pride take over, I admit it and.
Speaker 3:
I’m coming clean. It’s so, my goodness, that’s so light, because otherwise it’s inside your heart and it’s informing, it’s still informing your thoughts and it’s informing your reactions.
Speaker 2:
Well, I love what you’re saying because what you’re doing is you’re laying out for everyone listening what it means to live. The first rule being aware and reflecting on these things completely. You have of awareness.
Speaker 3:
In my case, I did a lot of meditation. Like you, I really struggled with this piece. Because I struggle? I have focus issues and genetically I have focus issues. I have focus issues and genetically I have focus issues, Drew my blood just recently and said okay, you don’t have dopamine or serotonin because your parents passed down this gene and so I need to supplement it for you. But you’ve probably had mental and focus issues. Your whole life Right.
Speaker 3:
And I said, yes, I’ve had ADD and OCD and anxiety and all these things, and they’re like, okay, it’s understandable, cause biologically you’re like okay, it’s understandable, because biologically you’re like messed up. So then I thought, wow, okay, so that explains a lot of that. And so what I did? Like you, I felt the prompting to step into a role of meditation which, for me, was like what You’re telling me to do what? And I couldn’t sit still. But I went from five minutes to almost an hour in 2020 to really get those new neural pathways built in my mind. And then my anxiety doesn’t kick in as much anymore. And I was doing it for my kids, because it started to spill into my parenting and I didn’t want that. I love my kids enough to change.
Speaker 1:
And so.
Speaker 3:
I changed that about me and it’s just been one step at a time. Like you, you’ve done it one step at a time and it’s been revealed to you in various ways, and I love the obedience you and I both have had to land in this. So now tell us you’ve shared a lot of wisdom in your story. Tell us is this your divine purpose that you’re currently in, and how did you discover it?
Speaker 2:
I think, my way of describing my divine purposes. I had to articulate this for the inside cover of the book. I describe myself as a torchbearer for greater human consciousness. That’s about as precise as I can be, because I realized that through my whole life I’ve always had an interest in truth and seeking truth and being conscious and aware of who we really are. And I’ve had conversations with hundreds of people, not just professionally, but in every walk of life, all ages. So this is consistent. So yeah, so my work as a coach is to ensure that people are living life true to themselves, they’re fully actualizing all of the God-given talents they’ve been given and actually putting their ladder up against the right wall when they’re building their vision of life. Because that’s such a big mistake I find many people report to me is that they were built. They put the ladder up against the wall, got to the top and realized that this isn’t the life that I thought I really wanted.
Speaker 3:
So much to unpack and I just I’m so happy you came onto this podcast because you’ve shown such wisdom and I know there’s people out there that are right now in the darkest of chapters, maybe undergoing the loss of a loved one or a major divorce or just something kind of, some level of change that came at them.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
And.
Speaker 2:
I feel for those people because those are hard things to deal with. I don’t want to trivialize that. Those are tough moments.
Speaker 3:
You realize, though, that you’ve gone in stages, and the first stage was just to face it, to face the reality of what was happening and face the fear that drove a lot of the decisions early on in your life, which you didn’t want to continue dictating right. Because, you landed in a very bad spot.
Speaker 3:
And then it was. Then you looked at, oh my goodness, but now I don’t want to stay in this space. I actually want to be authentic to myself and I want to do things that bring me such joy and that’s why you went and and had, you know, the acting, you know chapter. That’s a lot of joy, that’s a lot of oh yeah that’s releasing all those fears and just stepping into something pretty darn cool. And then it’s doing the surrender work.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, into, like god’s sovereignty I’m glad you mentioned that, because my favorite book of all time is the untethered soul by michael singer and it talks only about living in surrender in that book. This is a beautiful book. I recommend it to anyone yeah, the with surrender.
Speaker 3:
There’s so much value to it. I had to fully surrender when I faced an 80% chance of dying.
Speaker 1:
And.
Speaker 3:
I was kind of cornered into it because God was like all right, child, you’re not listening to me, I haven’t gotten your attention. Do I have your attention now? And you know the doctors weren’t confident I was going to survive and so I just visualized surrendering to him. But it was surrendering in a big moment. What transpired and what he was trying to teach me was okay. Now you saw the value of surrender. You saw that I came through for you very beautifully. You could trust me and I came. Now I want you to surrender daily. Now that’s a tough one because most people they’re too go, go, go, go go and they don’t reflect and they don’t have awareness and they don’t speak to him and they don’t include him in just minor things. They include him in the big things.
Speaker 2:
You and.
Speaker 3:
I both know what we’re talking about here.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we do.
Speaker 3:
But in the little things we tend to forget to include him, and that’s truly having a relationship with him, and that’s where I’m at now. So I have masterminds that I facilitate in my job, and the first one is freedom from fear six weeks. And then you build into the one that now is called joy in the journey, because first you have to remove those fear-based beliefs. They don’t help you and they inform too much, but then nobody knows how to be in joy no one. Everybody knows how to live out of fear.
Speaker 3:
We’ve learned that we know how to do that, because society just worldwide is more and more and more and more. Never enough, never enough, keep going. You know, it’s that constant grind and here in the states it’s on. It is the most horrible way to like begin our journeys right. And so I kind of teach women to kind of sit back and take themselves out on a date and really get to know themselves again, especially after a major life event, because they don’t know who they are.
Speaker 3:
And the last one is surrender to God’s sovereignty and that one’s an interesting one because that’s at that highest level of awareness and consciousness.
Speaker 3:
And most of us when we reach the age of 50 and higher. That is where we really want that in our life and I found that programs that I had participated in didn’t have all these levels and I wondered why? Why can’t you build one program on top of the other? And that’s the gist of the book. In Faith I Thrive because I’m kind of showing someone like get out of there and move through your fear into your joy and into total peace and wholeness.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 3:
That’s where you want to land, because then you graduate into heaven and then you have eternal life.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Ta-da.
Speaker 2:
You’re done, it makes sense, it really makes sense.
Speaker 3:
So that’s where I find the alignment in your stories. Both you and I have those alignments running yeah and currently in the background and I, when I read your story, I thought yes, for sure, he needs to be on, released. I’ll reveal purpose, because we start off in fear and then we reveal our purpose and we yeah and we, and that brings so much fulfillment than it yeah, it does, it does yeah any last minute, ray, that you want to share with the audience?
Speaker 2:
Look, I think everyone deserves a life that feels true for them, and sometimes people say what’s the best place to start? And I always think the best place to start, if you can, would be to just start to think about what a picture of a great life would look like for you. The picture of a great life would look like for you, you know. Just ruminate on that and try and get some sense of it. You know what’s in the picture of the kind of life you’re trying to author, that feels authentic, that’s really yours and it’s not what anyone else wants, but it’s your unique print. Because once you’ve got a sense of that, or at least some of the detail of that, you can start to see what actions are going to be needed to move towards it. But without that, it’s very hard to create momentum. So I think that’s a really good place to start. As a tip, that’s yeah, I think that probably would do for tonight that is.
Speaker 3:
That sounds wonderful and people wanted to get in touch with you, ray. How?
Speaker 2:
would they?
Speaker 3:
go about doing that that’s really easy.
Speaker 2:
My book’s called life without a tie and I had a website built called life without a tiecom, and the reason for that was because a lot of people who read the book when it got published said we really want to see pictures of all these places that you’re describing, and so there’s lots and lots of photographs of different parts of the journey and people can read about the journey there. They can find links to Amazon and other booksellers there. Yeah, I think in America most book sales are coming via Amazon.
Speaker 3:
That’s where I can find it. It’s the way that we can internationally support each other, right?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, mine was an Amazon bestseller that released the second edition released last September, just as my father had passed away. So, it was like oh, all this joy and surrender and grief all in one package. It was just surreal really, but I do thank you for coming on to release.
Speaker 2:
Well, it’s my pleasure, my pleasure.
Speaker 3:
It was a beautiful conversation and I want to remind our listeners remember Matthew 514, be the light. Have a wonderful week, Stay safe. Love you all. Bye now.
Speaker 1:
So that’s it for today’s episode of Release Doubt Reveal Purpose. Head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private VIP day with Sylvia Worsham herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.