Success can look perfect on paper and still feel hollow in your body. That tension is where our conversation with life coach and author Larry Kesslin begins, with a moment that reshaped everything: traveling to Uganda and Kenya to bring computers to rural villages, then returning home confused by one undeniable truth he couldn’t explain away. He expected poverty to equal misery. Instead, he saw joy, community, and a kind of inner wealth that challenged his whole identity.
We talk about redefining success as significance, and why the chase for achievement can quietly turn into performance, comparison, and disconnection. Larry breaks down his “Joy Molecule” framework, conscious connection plus purpose, and the difference between connecting at the what level versus the who and why levels. We also dig into ego, authenticity, and what it means to see thoughts as information rather than demands, with honest reflections on spiritual awakening and the practices that helped him shift.
Along the way, I share my own turning points, including surviving pulmonary embolisms and the wake-up call that followed, plus what I’ve learned about presence, faith, and letting go of the need to earn love. We explore Maslow’s self-transcendence, the inner child and trigger patterns that keep us reactive, and the cultural habit of turning wants into needs, especially in parenting and resilience.
If you’ve been craving purpose, joy, and a calmer mind, press play and come sit with us for a conversation that goes deeper than goals. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s tired of performing, and leave a review so more people can find the path back to who they really are.
To connect or purchase his books head to Larry’s website at https://5-dots.com/assessment-1
To download a free chapter of host Sylvia Worsham’s bestselling book, In Faith, I Thrive: Finding Joy Through God’s Masterplan, purchase any of her products, or book a call with her, visit her website at www.sylviaworsham.com
Transcript:
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 Warsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, Sylvia Warsham.
Hey Lightbringers, it’s Sylvia Warsham. Welcome to Released Out Review Purpose. And today is the Larry Keslin. He has a story of transformation quite powerful, very, very relatable. 2012, he was on a trip and he found his calling. Let’s just put it that way. There’s there’s pivotal moments in our life that define us and define our journey. And I suspect highly that this is what Larry is going to be sharing with us today. And he’s a coach like me. We’re both certified life coaches, and we are able to guide people into their calling, whatever that may be. Those that have heard my podcast before know that 2012 was a pivotal moment in my life, especially around the time of Easter. This is when God showed himself in the ICU. Um I was given a 20% chance of surviving the night. Medical science in Houston, Texas, and St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital basically said, we don’t think you’re going to survive the night. In fact, they prepared my parents for that possible, very probable outcome. And I defied our lots. And I’m here to say that there’s reasons, very powerful reasons, and very ways that we fit into life that fit into God’s master plan. And we can’t see that plan, but our life has a significant impact on humanity. So without further ado, Larry, thank you so much for joining us on release that reveal purpose.
Thank you very much, Sylvia. Pleasure to be here and looking forward to the conversation, learning a little bit more about you and sharing whatever parts of my story you think are relevant to your audience.
I think they’re all relevant to a degree, in all honesty. And I really want you to dive deeply into that pivotal moment in 2012. I think you said Uganda was where you were.
Yeah, I spent a month, 25 days, whatever, in Uganda and Kenya. And the intention was to bring computers to rural villages. I met somebody, I moved to San Diego in 2010. And before I moved here, I was very involved with some nonprofits in New York City. And when we moved to San Diego, I lost that piece of my life. And this one woman was, I met her at a at the beach, uh, I would say this time of year in 2011, um, at Passover. And she was talking about the work she was doing in Africa. And she was bringing computers to rural villages. I was a technologist. I had uh a company that was coaching IT resellers at the time and running peer groups for them. And I’m like, I’ve always wanted to go to Africa, I’ve always wanted to go on safari. I’m like, this is the perfect project for me and my family. So it turned out it was a great project for me. I’m not sure it was a great project for my family. My kids came with me to Africa with my now ex-wife, and we had an amazing journey, but I think I was transformed more than my kids were, and much more than my my wife at the time was. And I just saw people that were super happy, that had nothing, and they were filled with joy, and it did not compute. And I went to a conference seven weeks after I got back. So August 17th of 2012, I’m sitting at JFK Airport, and I’m just really confused. I just spent a month in a country that was quote unquote poor, and I saw things that I don’t see in the United States, and they weren’t all bad. It’s not like I saw abject poverty, which I did see, but to me, poverty equated with misery, and I didn’t see the misery part, and it just didn’t make any sense. So I define success for myself at 28 as the ability to do what I want whenever I wanted to do it. And I’m sitting in the airport, I’m 48 years old, and I’m struggling with, I am successful, yet I just saw people that are so much less successful than me, happier than anybody I know. I guess I’m done with success. I need to be significant. And I went on this journey, and I read before I went to Africa, I read Bob Buford’s book called Half Time. I was introduced to Second Mountain after I got back and David Brooks’ work, and I started realizing that I was struggling with my definition of success. And I realized a year plus later, after digesting everything I saw, and I went to a conference in Mexico in early October of 2012, like seven weeks after I got back. And I was asked three questions in the first workshop the first morning on a Monday morning, and those three questions changed my life. And what I was asked was, what is poverty? Who gets to define it? And why are we trying to fix it? And I’m sitting there like dumbfounded in this workshop with 15 other people, and I was so confused because what did I see? Did I see poverty or do I just see impoverishment? And I came to the conclusion in that week that we’re poor and that they’re just impoverished, and there’s some things that I would like to get from them to live my life by. So that’s been the last 14 years of my life is what is it that I experienced. And I’ve been chasing it, chasing it, chasing it until January of last year, 2025, when I had an experience, ego-death, life changing, that allowed me to see myself as a spirit, having a human experience. And not thinking that I’m a spirit, but knowing that I’m a spirit. Once you see something, you can’t unsee it. And there’s just a shift that happens in life. And most of my coaching work right now is focused on helping people see the fact that their thoughts are just that. They are thoughts, they are not anything other than information that I get to decide what to do with versus demands of how I need to be in the world. And that shift in my life, I mean, I thought I was spiritual, but that’s you can’t think it. You only can be it. And I’ve come to the conclusion, I’ve been working with a gentleman, his name is Michael, and when I I did a little bit more than a half a dozen psilocybin journeys, and one of them totally took me out of my being. And I’m laying on the couch in my apartment with this gentleman, Michael, and like Michael, it can’t be this easy. He says, sorry, it’s this easy. Like Michael, there’s no way. And I saw all the people in my life, I saw all the envy I had, I said all the judgment I had, all the jealousy I had. And it was like, stop, let it all go. It’s all about curiosity. And my life shifted. And I got to a point where uh this happened in January of 2025. I went to see my parents in March. Best experience I ever had with my parents because I released them from all the things that I thought they did wrong. One of my best friends said to me that week, he’s like, How does it feel not to perform? And somebody else who I’ve known for years who struggled with me because my performance made everything about me. And she looked at me after three minutes in her house. Her husband had died the year before, and we were crying, and she looked at me, she says, You’re different. And I said, What are you talking about? She says, No longer about you. And we both started crying. Because when you live six decades on the planet trying to prove something to someone, and you deal with depression, and you deal with I don’t know, the the best way that I work today, and the the way that I get clients, is not by telling anybody anything. It’s by being my authentic self and people seeing me versus who I was trying to be. And when they see that, they’re attracted to it because they want that. And when I speak to audiences and I clearly share my story, so the book, The Joy Molly, so success redefined. I define success at 28, ability to do what I want whenever I want to do it, realize that I needed to be successful. 18 months later, I realized success without significance isn’t success at all. So I had to redefine success as the ability to do what I want, whenever I want to do it, while being part of something greater than myself. If I am not part of something greater than myself, then success is empty. So that’s success redefined. In the book, which I was interviewed by a friend who’s a writer. Her name is Susan Saba. So Susan wrote the book, interviewed me. She’s the words behind it. The joy molecule I wrote myself. That’s my fourth book. And my second book I wrote myself, and the fourth book I wrote myself. The first one my partner wrote, and the third one Susan wrote. And in the book, I said these words. So the cover of the book is connection plus purpose equals joy. And in the book, I wrote conscious connection plus purpose equals joy. And she said, Oh, that’s C2P. And I’m like, okay, it’s C2P. And she says, Well, if H2O is the water molecule, then C2P must be the joy molecule, hence the title of the book. And when I started really writing the book, C2P is at the core of it. But I started thinking of the people that I know that live with joy, what do they have that everybody else doesn’t? And I came to the conclusion that they knew what they were, they know who they were, and they knew why they were. And when you know those three things, nobody can tell you anything other than your truth. So if somebody comes up to me on the street and says, You’re an asshole, in a previous version of myself, I would say, What did I do to you to make you think that? And now I would just say, Thank you for your feedback. I get to assess whether what he’s saying is valid or not. And it doesn’t change my life. Where before it would have redirected my attention. And when I meet people that know what they are, who they are, why they are, they have joy. And if you look at the, I’ll give you, here’s the book. On the back of the book is the joy molecule itself, the what, the who, and the why surrounding the joy. And if you notice they’re all different sizes. And the reason they’re different sizes is because the whole reason for finding success, the whole reason for finding joy, the whole reason for finding purpose to me is about deep connection. It’s not about purpose. It’s not about joy. It’s about connecting. Joy is connecting to self. Connecting to others that have joy is the deepest connection I’ve found in my life. It’s so much easier to connect to someone who has shared purpose, who knows what they are, who they are, and why they are. But most of our culture, United States, who grew up in the US, I live in San Diego, you live in Austin, and most of the people in our culture, I went to Africa in 2012 for a month. My kids were different for two months. Then they went back to being the same little ships they were before we left. And I told my now ex-wife that if we really want to change their life, we should get them out of here for a year. And she said, okay, long story short, we pulled our kids out of school in 2015 for a semester and we traveled around the world. You know the one question I was never asked when I was outside the United States that is asked all the time in the night in the United States?
What?
What do you do? Nobody asked me what I do. So if you notice the what, the who and the why, when we connect at a what level, what do you do? What’s your favorite sports team? What what what? That’s a very surface level connection. It’s a resume level connection. The who connection, your values, who you are, how you show up, is a much deeper connection. But the why connection is the deepest. And when you connect all three together, that’s why the joy atom in the molecule is the biggest. Because when you know all those three, and you connect to a why level, that’s magic.
That is truly magical. And I can follow you completely because we’re talking about the same things, except in my molecule, its purpose is at the center. But the purpose, because that’s what was given to me in my 2012 download, if you will. And I could relate, and I think most people that hear this interview will be able to relate to a lot of aspects of what you’re talking about. I find that the work I’ve done in Pivotal Moments and Turning Points, it’s those are the moments that truly define us, define the essence of who we are. The change that we undergo, it’s so transformative. It’s a spiritual transformative journey that we get to be on to truly embody joy. One of my masterminds that I guide uh high achievers, former high achievers on that are seeking their higher calling is called joy in the journey. It’s not joy to journey, you know, joy to journey and the journey to joy. Because a lot of people want it to be a destination, and life is it’s everything. Like in other words, you will have trials and tribulations. You went through a divorce. I don’t think you stopped having joy just because you went through a divorce. There were joy, there’s joy in the journey as we navigate these trials and tribulations, and the more in tune we are to who we are, like the essence of us, that is what gives us that inner joy that we’re seeking. The joy is already within us, it’s not outside of us, and that’s what we’re taught here in the United States. That’s why we seek it so much in our first act. That we I know that I was raised by a super high achiever. So that’s why I fell into that trap. I fell into the trap of corporate America. I was there for a long time. And in that, I was the highest achiever you would have ever met. Probably that’s why I can relate to you on so many levels. In that success for me was you needed to achieve, achieve. And that was the definition of success. And if you’re these are golden handcuffs, these are the golden handcuffs that we described because I tied my worth and my significance to the and my identity to the size of my paycheck. And when I lost that after 2012 was really transformative for me in that on the outside, I looked like I had it all. I had a six-figure salary, I lived in a really nice neighborhood, I um was top saleswoman in the country for Pfizer, pharmaceuticals. Um career-wise, I looked, it was ideal.
But you’re right.
One word, quite a different story. And God had other plans for me because he used one of my choices, my free will, to take birth control pills when I was dating my second husband, because, like a good Mexican girl, I didn’t want to get pregnant. Well, that was the least of my problems. I took a flight from South Texas, which is where I was living at the time, to Houston to meet up with my boyfriend, who was going to take me over Easter weekend to Louisiana for a crawfish boil so that my son could meet his family. And as a single mom, I kind of uh understood, and all my guy friends told me he’s planning on marrying you. He wouldn’t take you and your son unless he’s, you know, really wanting to make this serious commitment. Well, the day before I was scheduled to fly, I I turned very pale and I started having trouble breathing. And luckily, I come from an entire family of doctors, and so I had my pick of a litter of who I could call. So I called my brother, and he was making rounds. Um, so it was all over the phone, and I just described my symptoms, and he was like, Oh, you’re fine. You’re 37 years old, you should be okay. You know, typical sibling, you know, doctor uh relationship. And so he put me on some medication, and I don’t think he heard me when I said I was gonna take a flight. Well, this is the miraculous thing that happened to me in that weekend was I took a flight while having pulmonary embolisms. I did not die mid-flight. I should have. Um, and luckily when they my boyfriend saw me at the airport, he said, once they’re driving overnight, as was the original plan, we’re gonna stay the night in Houston, Texas. Now, for those that don’t know, Houston, Texas is a big medical center. Huge, in fact. All right, it’s well known around the world. And one of the best hospitals for what I had was there, and that was at St. Lucas Episcopal Hospital. And I landed there, and when they took a scan on my lungs, the doctors were baffled, really baffled, because science told them otherwise. Science told them that I should have died multiple times mid air, and I didn’t. And there was a higher reason, a higher calling why I stayed here. And in that weekend, God made himself known in the ICEO. Very, very known to all the people in the room because we all felt them. After he left, you could sense it. The love, the warmth. When I say this, I’m gonna say this very intentionally. We don’t know how loved we are, we really don’t. We don’t have a sense until you come face to face with the divine and the knowledge of the divine. There is nothing like it in this world. We are rich. The reason why you saw the people in Uganda be so rich in is because it’s not the things that we acquire that make us rich in the world, it’s what we carry inside of us. That’s so rich. It’s the only thing we can take with us when we die. When we physically die and our soul transitions into heaven, we cannot take all these things we have acquired on the earth. That’s why we see guys like Steve Jobs, like when he was on his deathbed, what he said at the end, questioning his life because he spent his entire physical life achieving. And for what? He listed out on all the relationships in his life, all of them. There was something I read. Um, see, where were we? I think we were in Hawaii. It was last summer, and I put I saw this testimony of a girl who had died. That God had spoken to her in the near-death experience and said, I want you to go back and I want you to tell people what electronics are doing to young people, taking them away from the relationship, the most important relationships of your life. He showed her how her grandmother was trying to connect with her, and she was too busy scrolling to even care. And the grandmother passed away. When I read those things, it’s it profoundly impacts me in that I have young children. I have an 11-year-old and I have a 20-year-old, and they love their tablets. But I’m very strict when it comes to electronics, and I’m very strict for that reason, is that I have learned through my journey and through your journey, and it it just says it all in this journey, there is more to us than the things that we acquire and the success and the definition of success from and I do call it the fallen world because we have fallen so deep into the into a darkness of like not only understanding the like we’re probably gonna build statues, but if if you think about where you’re coming from and the and the position that you’re you’re explaining, for me, the work that I’m trying to help people understand is there’s a shift.
So I’ve done a lot of research on Abraham Maslow, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was never created by Maslow. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was created by some consultants. That wanted to use this construct in the corporate world, and he didn’t end its self-actualization, he ended its self-transcendence. So if you look at his continuum, the first level is survival. And when you’re in survival mode, you have a clear purpose. And that purpose is to survive. And when you’re surrounded by everybody else that’s in survival mode, then you’re connected to them at a deep level. The next stage of his continuum, which I’m calling the Ascension Ladder, which will be another book probably next year, is what I’m calling me, which is love and belonging and self-esteem, which is where our culture is stuck right now. And most people never get past this stage. This is what Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle talk about. I need the outside world to show up in a way that makes me feel okay. That’s what self-esteem and love and belonging are about. I need others to love me to feel good about myself. I need the world to unfold in a way that makes me feel better. And the shift that happens when you go into self-actualization and self-transcendence is a self-identified purpose. So if you think about it, purpose at the bottom, instinctive, no purpose in the middle because it’s all about me, trying to figure out who I am. And then self-actualization and self-transcendence, which is oneness with God, is your conscious development of purpose, your own individual purpose. And that allows you to connect with others that have shared purpose. So if you look at this, when you’re in the me mode, when you’re in love and belonging and self-esteem, you’re looking for everybody outside you to make you feel better. When you get into self-actualization and self-transcendence, you’re realizing that all the cause of your pain is inside of you, that nobody can make you feel anything. You feel based on triggers that happen in your life. You feel because you were wounded as a child, and I believe the most purest we ever were was the moment we came out of our mother’s womb. And we were one with everything. There was no definition of anything. And I’ve been using this analogy lately, and I’ve been playing with it, and it’ll be in the next book of this idea of the different positions in a car. So when you’re born, you’re born perfect, like absolutely beautiful, and you’re the driver of your own car until your parents get a hold of you. And your parents and your immediate family try and get you to understand how you need to be in order for their world to be okay. And your true self gets pushed into the passenger seat. And then they get to school, and society starts to get their hands on you, and your teachers and your friends. And now your true self goes into the backseat. And by the time you get out of high school and the time you get out of college, your identity is firmly gripped the wheel. Your identity is driving the car, so your identity of Sylvia is driving the car, but your true being is in the trunk in a box and has no idea that there’s even a being inside of you. And the project from 20-ish on is to wake up and realize that that being that’s in the trunk is me. And when I say I don’t like myself, who is I and who is myself? I intellectually understood that for the last 30 years. I didn’t know it until last January. Like truly know who I am. So I think the project is to take that being that’s in the trunk and put that being back in the driver’s seat. Take the identity, break it into its pieces, which is you have a conscious self, which is your adult aware, decision-making self, put them in the passenger seat, let them observe everything that’s going on and take in the world’s information and take your inner child. And that inner child needs to be thanked for everything that it did to protect you as a child. But as an adult, you no longer need the protection. So I’m happy to have the happy inner child and the playful inner child in the car with me. But the angry inner child and the one that ruined, I wouldn’t say ruined my life, the one that dominated my behavior, the reactive, the moment anything happens, I would snap and I would be unconsciously behaving. That part of me needs to be thanked, loved, appreciated, and put in a little box in the trunk. Yes. So, and the most beautiful place in the car is not the driver. I mean, I live in San Diego, and driving from San Diego to San Francisco is a gorgeous drive. But it’s so much more beautiful for the passenger than it is for the driver. And when you’re firmly gripping as your identity and you’re trying to control the ride, we have to trust that the ride will take care of itself. Michael Singer says it all the time: the world’s unfolding perfectly. It’s just not meeting our expectations. A lot of our journey is about expectation management.
We’re in control. Everybody wants control, and there is no control. It’s an illusion.
Total illusion of mind. So if you’re to this is what I’ve been working on for a while now, is this idea that my being has five major characteristics. My being is a hundred percent love, it’s a hundred percent abundance, it’s a hundred percent grade of gratitude. You don’t need gratitude lists once you realize that gratitude is just part of your being. It is a hundred percent present and it’s a hundred percent neutral, and that our mind creates everything else. Not that the mind is bad, it’s not a bad thing. No, it just needs to be the ego is the enemy. It’s in the enemy, it’s just it needs you need to know that it is how you show up, it’s not you.
It’s the current self-image that you’re carrying around. And that’s what I always tell people on the podcast: it’s not your enemy. What you need to do with the ego is empower it. In other words, identify, at least from the life coaching perspective, identify the belief system that’s truly the in the driver’s seat that is driving all these thoughts, all these feelings, all these triggers. And when you stay curious, like you said earlier, and you understand like where’s this coming from? And you think that inner child, because I have an inner anxious child that shows up after trauma when I was seven, and she shows up to people please and to follow my husband around when we’ve been in conflict, because that’s what happened to her. She needed to to kind of calm her dad down, who was blaming her for the near death of her little sister. And that stayed with me for a long time. I didn’t understand it. The psychologists all later explained it to me through various therapies, right? EMDR was one of them primarily. There’s another self that shows up for me, my bullied 17, 18-year-old self, and she goes into total attack mode when she feels like she’s being bullied. And I didn’t recognize these identities. I had learned about them way back in 2018. But you know, when you get into just doing life and you tend to forget some of this wisdom. Well, when I started to interview people on the podcast, one of them talked about these identities, and all of a sudden, something in my mind went. And I remembered that patterns of behavior, much some of these are patterns of control that you have, formed habits around when you react to certain triggers, just need to be thanked, but said, I love how you have taught me. You have taught me so much. Thank you so much. But right now, you’re standing in my way of my light. I cannot embody who I truly am with you hovering over that light. And I need you, I’m gonna release you. Thank you. I’m gonna thank you, and I’m gonna release you, but thank you so much. And just I actually sat with my identities, my inner child, just very recently ago, and just said, I love you. You taught me so many lessons that I’m using now. I’ve gained so much wisdom, and I just want to thank you, but you don’t need to stand up for me anymore. I got this, and I just very gently put them down. They’re always there. It’s kind of like uh the beautiful mind, the movie, where he sees the personalities walking alongside of them. They’re always there because patterns will always be there. Just make sure that the change that you’re about to make is what you want to do. It’s there to protect you. So realize that the patterns of behavior are not the enemy, they’re just there to make sure that this is the right thing for you to do. Because when you were little, you didn’t have that capacity, that consciousness that you have now. This is the difference between the conscious awareness and the subconscious awareness. The subconscious is on automatic, no filter. This is the one that reacts, the inner child. The conscious is the present self, right? This is the one that can help calm you down and say, hey, stay curious. There’s more information here to learn.
I think your conscious self can be subconscious as I said in the in the joy molecule there’s a possibility. I’m not saying I’m right. Is it possible that the subconscious knows everything? And that our conscious mind only keeps us from being present, and that the subconscious will come up with the answer all the time. Oh, really? Your body, your mind.
The subconscious keeps the score, right? So the subconscious knows everything about you, it has seen everything that’s happened in your life and how your mind has translated that via the belief system.
So the problem becomes why do we need to inspect it? Is really the question. Why do we need to actively think? If your body pumps blood, if your body digests food, if your body triggers muscles without thinking about it, why do we believe that our mind doesn’t do what it needs to do in order to keep us to be the ideal person we’re supposed to be? Why wouldn’t the mind itself take care of it? Just because we have the ability to inspect our mind doesn’t mean we should. And I’m not saying I’m right. I’m just throwing out the possibility that if our conscious mind Go ahead. Finish your thought first before I I speak. Go ahead. If your conscious mind is keeping you from being present, then is it really serving us? If the only moment that exists is the present, and that if we’re truly present, not thinking about what we want to say or responding to the other person, but being present, then the active mind, I have a friend who said his mind has gone quiet. He had some trauma, he’s in his 50s, and we’ve been meditating together for five and a half years, and he said, you know, something happened back in June of last year, and his mind went silent. So he has no self-talk, and maybe some of it’s come back, but he went for a period of time with no self-talk, and he was wondering how he was going to get words out of his mouth. But you know what? They came out perfectly without ever thinking about what he was thinking of saying or saying or whatever. So is it possible that the conscious thought we have is a distraction from the present moment?
That’s all it is, and that the so- It can be, it can be, and I’m gonna push back a little because again, I’m just throwing out the possibility of the thing.
Oh, no, no, no.
No, no, and this is a discussion, right? So it’s not like to say you’re wrong or whatever. No, here’s another concept that has come up as of late. God, the divine, comes through our thoughts as well. There will be thoughts of goodness, of joy, of love, versus thoughts of what we want to do. Like the stuff that goes against us, the envy, the you mentioned it earlier. Envy and how you once were, the identity that you carried, all of that has like there’s a a conflict in the mind that is constantly at battle, right? And it’s these are biblical things, these are not things that I’m coming up with. This is Galatians 5:17. I’ve quoted it just recently over and over and over again. I think it’s because this is the big struggle that we have in the world right now, where your desires, that which you’re thinking about constantly of doing and wanting to be, are in direct conflict. This is the ego side, the ego identity, as I refer to it in my book, In Faith I Thrive, ego identity versus the soul identity, uh, where spirit resides and that is trying to help you embody these things, like embody the fruit of the spirit, which is peace, joy, love, um, goodness, gentleness, kindness, all those things that advance humanity forward and not keep us in the dark ages, right? Of envy and discord and all these things that are trying to pull us into these traps. Um, so the thoughts I have found in my journey are critical when they are thoughts of joy, thoughts of peace, thoughts of love. Because then I know I’m on the right path. Now, do I embody it? Yes, I do embody it. I think there’s always a balance to what we are finding in our journeys, and I think we’re always leveling up in our knowledge, especially when we connect, using your terminology, to God, to source. Because when we connect at various levels of our mind, of our heart, of our spirit, heart, mind, and spirit, and you hear it in a lot of the literature out there, when it becomes one is when the embodiment occurs. The and that’s what I came to the conclusion in my journey, and the words that God kind of had me say in my book of like, when ego, soul, and spirit become one, life becomes very easy because you’re in full alignment to who you were created to be. Like you said, when you’re born and you first come out of your mother’s womb, you’re perfect, you’re perfect. You don’t move fear, you don’t know, you don’t have the modeling, you don’t have the trauma, you don’t have anything. You are fearless. And when you’re fearless, you move through life embodying these things. Now, very recently, you mentioned you had a pivotal moment just recent. In my pivotal moment came in November of 2025, and there was a silence that came back. I I’m usually someone that has coffee chats with God every morning at 5 a.m. without fail. And I mean like Monday through Sunday, there is not one day I miss because it is so important for me to be in presence, to pause for presence, because from that moment, that pivotal moment in November, where he said, I need you to understand what I want from you. I need you to stop achieving my love. You have my love. You don’t need to achieve it. I gave it to you already. Why are you doing this? Your father’s been gone almost two years, that this is what happened. I was achieving my father’s love. And so I every person that I encountered, I was achieving love because I did not believe who he said I was. I didn’t believe it. I went through the motions and he stopped me and he said, I need you to pause for presence, and I’m going to be silent for a couple of weeks so that you understand what I mean. And it was the most deafening, let me join you, that is the most deafening silence. I have been it was painful. I need to feel him. I need him like I need air. I need to me that’s being rich in life, is to have that relationship with myself, with him. Nothing else.
Yeah.
I I think there’s the the book Success Redefine had a working title. And the working title was When Wants Become Needs. And I think culturally, at least in the United States where I grew up, we have turned wants into needs. So what is it that we truly need in order to survive on this planet and to thrive on this planet? And I think it’s I I I I think we use the word need a lot where it’s not appropriate, where it’s not a need, it’s really a want. And we are peace, we are love, we are all these things. So even when you’re saying I need God to feel it, you don’t need God to feel it. You are it. Yet there’s a part of you that still questions it, because that’s why you my observation. So when we go through this journey we call life, the opportunity is that we’re gonna get lessons. And we keep getting lessons, and when we learn the lesson, we get a new lesson, and if we forget the old one, we get it back. So that’s the journey. I had a prospect sit in front of me one day, and he said, I want to go raise a bunch of money to grow my business. I said, Why? I said, You have a traditional business, there’s no time constraint, nobody’s gonna take your business away from you, and nobody’s gonna you raise money when you have a time constraint and you need outside funding to beat your competition to the to the finish line on something that’s gonna be gone if you don’t do it now. Everything else is more of a pipe dream. And he said, because I look at businesses as either lifestyle businesses, growth businesses, or hyper-growth businesses. And he was a lifestyle business trying to be a hyper-growth business, and they just don’t mix. And I said, Why are you doing this? He says, I don’t want my daughter to suffer as much as I did. And I looked at him and I said, So when did you learn the most? When you were suffering or when you weren’t suffering? And he didn’t have a reply. I said, Why are you trying to steal your daughter’s learning by making it easier for her? Easier does not mean better. We have raised an entire generation of non-resilient young people because we tried to make their world perfect for them, and the world is not perfect, the world just is, and there are challenges and there’s opportunities for learning at every corner. And the woman I’m dating now that I actually live with, I mean, we talk about this, she calls them law mower parents, and they’re people that are cutting the grass in front of their kids so if they fall down, everything’s nice and soft. And the truth is, life is meant to be lived. You need to eat dirt, you need to have germs, all these people that are cleanling this all the time. I believe a lot of that has to do with all of our allergies because we never got that stuff into our system, so if we eat it, we’re allergic to it. And this all this bacteria concern. I am a healthy 62 and a half year old who does not get sick. And the reason I don’t get sick is because I think I ate a lot of dirt as a kid.
I drank from the house. So who knows what was in there in South Texas.
Exactly. So our body builds up immune systems, and our body as an adult and even as a child, we can do hard things. What does not kill us will make us stronger. And that’s where we are today. I think that we are so struggling right now.
Yeah. I agree. I agree. Any last words of encouragement, Larry? And if I wanted to work with you or purchase any of your books, how do I find you?
I don’t know. Last word, everything starts with awareness. Being aware of what you are, being aware of who you are, why you exist. That’s where the work starts. If you think anything other than you are a beautiful being having a human experience, then there’s a lot to learn. And I love helping people on this journey. I love talking to them, I love making them feel safe and providing a container for them to share what’s truly going on in their life. You can find my books on Amazon. The Joy Molecules in Paperback, Audible, and Kindle, the Success Redefined, is in Paperback and Kindle. I might record it even though I wrote the book 12 years ago. 11 years ago.com, the number five, hyphen, dots. And you said earlier about Steve Jobs. My company’s called Five Dots because of Steve Jobs. You watch his commencement speech at Stanford. In 2005, he talks about you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. And you have to trust in something your gut, karma, whatever, that the dots will somehow connect. And I was at an event in Denver where my daughter lives back in the holidays, and this woman said, What can I get you for the holidays that would help you in life and in your business? And I said, You can get me a really good breadcrumb detector. She’s like, What are you talking about? I said, Life’s a collection of breadcrumbs. They just keep leading us down a path. And I would love to know which ones are worth following, which ones are worth throwing to the side. Because that’s what life is. That’s where purpose lives. You said before that you help people find their purpose, and the purpose is at the middle of your. I think purpose is a doorway. And the metaphor that I use in all my talks is the door. And the door handle that we go to turn as Americans, we live in this beautiful, comfortable space. We call it rugged individualism. And rugged individualism provides us the opportunity to be uniquely ourselves and an individual and isolated, but we’re deeply connected. And how do we find that? And we find that by turning the doorway to look inward versus turning the doorway to look out. So the invitation is to start asking the questions why do I feel the way I do inside? Not how can I change the outside to make me feel better.
Very cool. Thank you so much for joining us today. Lily, very, very profound conversation. Lots to digest in this one. And uh before Easter weekend, why not? And um I definitely keep in touch. I’m very interested in your book and just being connected uh via, I know, social media, but I’ve got to do it just because of the message we have to share with the world. And it’s not ours to keep, you know, our own. It’s ours to share because it’s a gift from him to his children. And um, I just want to thank you for being on my show today and for the listeners who were at least out reveal purpose. Remember Matthew 5.14 to be the light, embody the light within you every day, do it on purpose, right? Find out who you are, go on the journey. Just like Larry went on this journey, and I’ve been on my journey, and we’ve discovered things, and we and we didn’t keep that wisdom to ourselves, we actually share it with others, and if we can do that, so can you.
And we’re just on the beginning of our journey, we don’t know. We don’t know. It’s like trying to figure out what the meaning of life as a caterpillar is as a human, and the caterpillar is supposed to spin upside down, create a chrysalis, and become a butterfly. We don’t even know what the butterfly looks like because we think the meaning of life is being human. I’m not sure. I think we’re preparing for what’s next, and I don’t know what’s next, and I can only fantasize because I won’t know until I get there.
Yeah, I um I’ve been shown different things than you on what’s next, and I can’t wait, honestly. Um I know that uh this is a very fleeting moment in our human experience, and what is waiting for us is eternal, and it is a love like no love we’ve ever felt on this earth, like it and you income close. Um it’s beautiful, it’s all it’s all income passing. I mean, like you just you want more of it, you don’t want to ever leave that presence. And um, I want to share that with the world and and know and just know that this weekend, especially this weekend, know that you are so beloved, you are so loved by God.
He loves so much on the same days, yeah.
So and it is a beautiful time to just sit and reflect and be in silence and allow and just embody the love. Have a wonderful week. Stay safe. Love y’all.
Bye now. 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. We’ll win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a twenty-five thousand dollar private VIP day with Sylvia Portion 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.