EPISODE 231 WITH KELLAN FLUCKIGER: DISCOVERING YOUR ULTIMATE LIFE AS AN ENTREPRENEUR

Ready Yet?! Podcast Episode 231 with Kellan Fluckiger: Discovering Your Ultimate Life as an Entrepreneur

Transcribed with Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. Hello. Hello. And welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast. And I’m excited about today’s guest because we’re kind of getting to turn the tables on him. I was on Kellan’s show yesterday where he asked me all sorts of difficult conversations. We had a lot of fun and he dropped a few hints about a sordid past.

Erin Marcus: So we’re going to dive right in. Be able to put him on the spot. No, really. But but to share his experience and his information with you. So welcome, welcome, welcome. Let’s see if I can do this right. Helen Flukiger.

Kellan Fluckiger: That’s perfect. And that’s unusual because even when I tell people how to say it, they always end up with Flukiger or Flukinger or some other thing.

Kellan Fluckiger: And Kellan Flueckiger is perfect. Amazing. Well,

Erin Marcus: I, like I said, I grew up in Chicago with people from 22 different countries, and I can still spell my brother’s best friend’s name, Armand Madlong Baya. So we learned how to I’m impressed. We learned how to pronounce things, if nothing. We might not have gotten a formal education, but we did learn how to pronounce names.

Kellan Fluckiger: You know, the first thing I want to do is just be grateful to you. I want to honor you because doing a podcast is a labor of love. And the effort and energy that Aaron puts into this to bless people’s hearts and lives touches my heart. And so I want to honor you and great, be grateful to you for this work.

Erin Marcus: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m excited. I am excited to have this conversation. And when we were chatting about what we wanted to talk about, I brought up the fact that, and it’s, I’ve noticed when I have conversations with people, they seem to go in themes. And the theme of a lot of conversations I’ve had lately is what I’ve started a title, your new comfort zone.

Erin Marcus: your new comfort zone. And so I’d love to get your approach and your take on this from your history and what you do for clients and what you’ve done in your life. I know a lot of business owners who get their ball rolling, right? They get their ball rolling. They’re doing well. They’re, they’re, they’re making revenue.

Erin Marcus: You know, there might be the multiple six figure situation, a little more depending on what type of business they’re in, but they’re stuck and overwhelmed and frustrated and almost ready to throw in the towel. Because you get to this point when you get there that’s like, oh my God, is it always going to be this hard?

Erin Marcus: Is it always going to be this hard? And then I call it their new comfort zone. They don’t know how to get past that. And I know, you know, talk a little bit about, if you could, I know we talk a lot about it’s what you’re thinking, not what you’re doing. How does someone in that spot, like they’ve, they’ve started the ball rolling.

Erin Marcus: They’re stuck in a new area.

Kellan Fluckiger: You’re stuck in an area because you don’t know what you want. Okay, flat and pure and simple. I don’t care if you’re making no money and you’re stuck, or you’re making five hundred thousand and you’re stuck, or you’re making five million and you’re stuck. You’re stuck because you don’t know what you want to do.

Kellan Fluckiger: Next, you don’t really know. Do I want more money? Do I need to grow here? Well, you know the first piece is inside of you without thinking about what I call the Wittock fungus. And I coined that term at the beginning of COVID when we first got locked down and everybody was following the Johns Hopkins map every day and all that stuff.

Kellan Fluckiger: Witot fungus stands for what I think others think, and it’s spelled W I T O T. When you’re stuck in that, and you have stories about what you’re supposed to do, and you’re supposed to make this kind of money, and you’re supposed to work this way or that way, and you’re living your life from an external measurement perspective, primarily, you’re never going to be happy.

Kellan Fluckiger: Here’s a saying, write it down, you can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you don’t need won’t satisfy you. Okay, so if you are stuck and you’re saying, I can’t work any harder, I, my first question is, what is it that you really want?

Erin Marcus: Isn’t that amazing that they can’t answer that question?

Kellan Fluckiger: Yeah, if you’re ideally situated, tell, describe your day. You get up and do what? Or you’re weak if it’s not a day. Like, tell me, really, you wake up when? You do what? Why does that matter to you? What is it that makes you supremely happy? That’s why I put your ultimate life up all the time. Your ultimate life, you define it.

Kellan Fluckiger: But I bet, and I know because I meet lots of new people every week, most people can’t give me that definition.

Erin Marcus: I’m curious, I’m, I’m one of those people who I understand things better when I know how they work. When I learned how to drive a stick shift, once I understood what the gears were doing, I’m like, oh, okay, now I get it. So, why is it so hard? And it’s hard. Like, I’ll ask people what they want, and we could be 20, 30 minutes later and they still haven’t been able to answer the question.

Erin Marcus: Why is that so hard for people to answer?

Kellan Fluckiger: Because they haven’t internally decided what’s important to them. They have made their measurements by what they were told, how they were raised, what society expects, what their church expects, or community, or their family. I have a client who told me for years, I can’t make any more money because then I’d be abandoning my blue collar roots.

Kellan Fluckiger: And that was after two hours of conversation that we finally got up to that sentence. Yeah. So, i i it’s you. Listening, you haven’t decided what the heck you want yet.

Erin Marcus: Well, to your point with that client, one of the reasons you might not have decided what you want yet is you’re not sure why you already think it’s a bad thing.

Erin Marcus: Do they not know what they want? Or is there a fear around claiming what they want because of some hidden story that they’re either Not even aware of

Kellan Fluckiger: all the time we were like we were born innocent and unimprinted and immediately we get, you know Buried with all of the judgments and thoughts and I call it a B deep beliefs definitions experiences Expectations and perceptions and it creates a context straightjacket through which you see the lens in the world There’s nothing wrong with them The revelation is when you realize it’s just a set of lenses.

Kellan Fluckiger: Everybody has one. I can take them off. I can allow other people to have theirs. And you know what? I get to actually decide what mine are. That ownership and that understanding sometimes takes people years to realize because it’s covered with guilt and shoulds and all the rest of it that actually have nothing to do with creating your ultimate life.

Erin Marcus: So how, what was your eye opening moment? Because I agree with you. I, most people, this is not a thing. People aren’t taught this. They’re, you’re not brought up with this. Some people are. I think there’s, we’re now raising new generations of people with more awareness. But you and I are of a different generation.

Erin Marcus: Hey, our generations were not taught this. So what was your When did you realize, wait a minute, this could be different?

Kellan Fluckiger: So this is a story. Is this a time for a story? This would

Erin Marcus: be a wonderful

Kellan Fluckiger: time for a story. Okay, cool. So I was raised in a typical two parent home. Middle class, lower middle class kind of stuff.

Kellan Fluckiger: Never really wanted for anything. Dad went to work. Mom stayed home. The problem was that my mom, particularly, was very, very religious to a fanatic degree. I grew up with discipline that today would be felony child abuse, like even in high school I remember getting dressed last in the locker room because I didn’t want people to see I was black and blue.

Kellan Fluckiger: You know, so it was physical discipline, some sexual abuse, a lot of emotional stuff, to the point that when I left home at 17, I believed with all my heart that not only was I not good enough, And never would be, but that my entire life needed to be proving to my mom that I was okay so I could get that stamp of approval in my forehead because after all she had God on her side.

Kellan Fluckiger: So I, I’m serious. And there’s nothing wrong with her or the, I mean with her, yes, the religion, no, religion in general, no, but the way that it was imprinted on me. So for the next 35 years, from 17 to. 52, I spent my life fighting between trying to figure out who I was and being what I thought I was supposed to do.

Kellan Fluckiger: I struggled with deep depression, self sabotage, and all the rest. And so for 35 years, I rode the roller coaster of creating big success. Because I thought maybe she’d like me if I made enough money, and then trashing it. I would sabotage it. And so I created success, and then I would trash it, literally lose positions.

Kellan Fluckiger: And then I would do it again. And each one was bigger than the last. I was married and divorced three times without ever being a decent marriage partner. I was in and out of rehab with addictions. I attempted suicide twice. And that was my life. Of self loathing and self sabotage, including all of the peripheral, the accompanying troubles in their gorious details, which we won’t need to talk about today, but if you’re curious.

Erin Marcus: Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: Tightrope of depression, my journey from darkness, despair, and death to light, love, and life. In August of 2007. I was back at the top. I was a single dad, single for the third time. I was, had four of my ten children living with me as a single dad. I was making so much money that my 3, 000 a week cocaine habit didn’t matter.

Kellan Fluckiger: And I came home on a Friday night that August, gonna go out and party for the weekend. I, all of a sudden, had this urge to turn on the television, which doesn’t sound like anything, except I picked up the remote and realized I didn’t know how. I’d bought the biggest cool of stuff you could buy and had people come and put it all in and everything, but I didn’t know how to turn it on.

Kellan Fluckiger: So I asked my, one of my kids, my 16 year old daughter, punch some buttons. You know, threw the remote at me, dip weed and left the room, right? It landed on a program I’d never heard of, which was not a surprise since I didn’t watch TV. It’s a reality TV show that may probably isn’t on anymore, but it’s called Intervention.

Erin Marcus: I used to watch that a lot. Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: Okay. And the protagonist was a high ranking executive with a cocaine problem.

Erin Marcus: Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: And so I watched my life on TV for about 10 minutes and said, yeah, I’m not watching this crap. So I turned it off and did some other stuff. And when I got ready to go out, I felt absolutely compelled to turn the TV back on.

Kellan Fluckiger: So I did. This time I knew how. And that program started over. And no, I didn’t have a DVR, and no, it wasn’t on the schedule, and no, it can’t do that. But it did, and thought, holy crap! So I sat down and I watched the episode. It went badly, the guy yelled at his family, stomped out of the intervention, swore he didn’t have a problem, and you know the drill.

Kellan Fluckiger: But it freaked me out enough that I didn’t go out to party, I went to bed. When I went to bed, I went to hell. And what I mean by that is I went somewhere, it felt out of body. I was in a dark room, it was like a theater. And I could hear voices and see things, and the scenes that played out on the stage were scenes from my life, and they all were focused on suffering.

Kellan Fluckiger: The suffering that had been inflicted on me all the years growing up, up to and including the suffering I had inflicted on everybody else as an addict and a liar and everything else that I’d been. After an interminably long period of time, at a level of intensity that I do not have language to describe, a voice said, It is enough.

Kellan Fluckiger: I woke up and I was backwards and upside down in bed. The entire set of bedclothes were so wet, you could wring them out. I cannot understand, couldn’t to this day, what on earth could make something that, you know, where, where it all came from. But anyway, I, that wasn’t the amazing thing. That was just a crazy thing.

Kellan Fluckiger: I got up and realized it was five o’clock Saturday afternoon. So I’d been somewhere for nearly 18 hours. I realized I had been invited to change. I had no idea. Where to go, how to start, who to talk to. I’d never gotten any help. I didn’t have any idea what to do, but I knew one thing, I’m done, we’re done.

Kellan Fluckiger: So I threw away about a thousand dollars worth of cocaine and other stuff I had laying around because I always did, and I quit, cold turkey that day. That got me sober, but it didn’t do anything about how I got there, which was the mental illness and all the rest of the struggles. Yeah, it didn’t heal anything.

Kellan Fluckiger: But God wasn’t done. Okay. So Monday, I went back to work. I didn’t have a job. I was a contractor, but I had a bunch of people that worked for me and stuff like that. But anyway, in the position I had, I used to make important decisions that affected other companies, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars.

Kellan Fluckiger: So I used to get a lot of free stuff. Not bribes, but be nice to Kellan stuff, right? Free tickets to this, and free expensive bottles of booze, like I needed that. But, you know, that sort of thing. And one of the things I got was a free pair of tickets to see a Yo Yo Ma concert. If you know classical music, you know who that is.

Kellan Fluckiger: And if you don’t, you don’t. Yo Yo Ma in the classical world, that’s like, AHHHHH!

Erin Marcus: That’s a big deal.

Kellan Fluckiger: Good as it gets, right? And there were thousand dollar tickets, and so I thought, holy crap, be ashamed to waste this other ticket, and I sure as heck don’t have anybody to take, so I ask in the groups that I managed, who likes classical music?

Kellan Fluckiger: And a woman in one of the groups said, well, I do. And I said, have I ever given you anything before? Because I gave away stuff all the time. He said, no. I said, okay, fine. See you there. So I gave her the ticket. We met at the venue. The concert now was a couple of weeks later. And I’m, I’m now two and a half weeks, stone cold sober.

Kellan Fluckiger: The concert was amazing. Halfway through, I had this feeling come over me that I recognized from two weeks before, and the voice said to me, you need to marry this woman. I said, you are insane. I said, I have screwed You were fine with

Erin Marcus: the first experience, but this one was a no go? I have screwed that

Kellan Fluckiger: up three times officially with disastrous consequences, and there have been other atrocious messes in between.

Kellan Fluckiger: I said, I do not know how to do this. This is not happening. Later that night, we were backstage, because there were 1, 000 tickets, because there were backstage passes and the reception and the whole thing. So The voice came back and said, yeah, comma, and you need to tell her tonight. I thought, there’s a couple of problems here.

Kellan Fluckiger: I said, first of all, she could have me arrested or something. Right. Like, what? Right? For harassment. We’re jumping a few steps. We’re jumping. You know, yeah, no. And the other thing is, I actually don’t know her well enough to know whether or not she’s in a relationship. Like, I don’t know this thing. So, no.

Kellan Fluckiger: But you don’t win those arguments. So, I did, and it went about like you would have expected, are you insane? And she left, but she didn’t call the cops or HR or anybody, and she didn’t have a relationship, which I did not know. Over the next three weeks or so, she had her own set of experiences. And about three weeks after that concert, I walked away from millions of dollars of contract.

Kellan Fluckiger: She resigned her entire career and we walked off into the sunset together without any idea what we were going to do, but absolutely certain this was what needed to happen. And last December, we celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary. So that was what happened.

Erin Marcus: That’s awesome. I have questions.

Erin Marcus: There’s, you listened. I think that

Erin Marcus: what made you listen, because I think people have divine intuition, divine intervention, things we can’t explain. There’s so much that. You know, there’s breadcrumbs. And in your case, you probably missed the breadcrumbs, and so You got hit over the head because breadcrumbs were, were The only

Kellan Fluckiger: reason my breadcrumbs were so loud, the 2x4s, is because I had said no.

Kellan Fluckiger: Every time we get these intuitions, they are invitations. Let’s be really clear. Those two things didn’t do the work. It didn’t heal my depression. It didn’t fix my self sabotage, the self loathing. It didn’t do anything. I’ve asked, oh, the most fun part? My wife’s name is Joy. Like, you cannot make this stuff up.

Kellan Fluckiger: Can’t make this up.

Erin Marcus: No,

Kellan Fluckiger: I’ve asked her a hundred times, what on earth possessed you to nick, to quit your walk away from everything and off into the sunset with a drug addict? Because everybody knew. I mean, they didn’t know, but they knew, right? She said, I just knew to the core of my soul, it was the right thing to do.

Kellan Fluckiger: And so we said, yes, and not because it did any of the work we said, you know what else we said? We said, this is insane. We both know this, but if we’re going to do it and we’re this convinced that it’s true, then this is ride or die, baby. I’m not doing this again. This is ride or die.

Erin Marcus: And, and that’s the other piece.

Erin Marcus: I think we ignore our instincts. We ignore the invitations. We ignore the intuitions. We ignore the divine interventions. And then we don’t do the, and even if we do listen, how do you learn to do the work?

Kellan Fluckiger: I have a, I have a gift for people, www. UltimateLife. ca, and the thing is, it’s five master keys to your ultimate life.

Kellan Fluckiger: The, and the reason I say it is because key number one is the declaration. I’m doing this. I’m

Erin Marcus: doing this.

Kellan Fluckiger: I got up and I threw away a thousand dollars worth of drugs. I could just as easily have gotten high.

Erin Marcus: But here’s the thing. I’m doing

Kellan Fluckiger: this. But that,

Erin Marcus: and this is going to sound so weird, but my background is what it is.

Erin Marcus: I know people who’ve done that and then they did it again the next year and then they did it again the next year. Like, to me, an addiction situation, you knew that’s bad. Like even in the middle of an addiction, you know, addiction isn’t, you know, addiction only ends one way when you die, right? Like that’s when it stops.

Erin Marcus: If you don’t, if you don’t intervene, the

Kellan Fluckiger: 12 step program always says, you know, you ended up in one of two places, prison or dead,

Erin Marcus: right? That, that is how that works. And, and so as odd as this is going to be say, it is not illogical. to wake up from your first experience and justify to yourself that that tv show sparked something in you that made you want to try to get off the addiction train but to continue to follow Right?

Erin Marcus: To continually be open to receive the messages, continue to open to do the work. And I think once you learn how to do this or learn to be aware of it, you learn how to tap into it.

Kellan Fluckiger: It didn’t, it was very, very difficult. Like people that hear the story and think we wrote off into the sunset magically are full of crap.

Erin Marcus: That’s the point. Like it doesn’t mean, right. It doesn’t mean that the, the divine intervention. Doesn’t mean everything’s going to be easy. No,

Kellan Fluckiger: it didn’t fix anything. It didn’t fix a thing.

Erin Marcus: People give up.

Kellan Fluckiger: She, she joy didn’t know what she was doing either. She hadn’t even been married before. I mean, this is all brand new.

Kellan Fluckiger: She was in her. She’s not like way younger than me. She’s like six years younger. So she was, I was 52. She was like 46 and it was just like, okay, this is new. This is scary as hell. But we’re doing this anyway, and we’re gonna figure it out as we go, and the key is, you can do that, but there’s a no matter what piece.

Kellan Fluckiger: There’s a no matter what piece, and every time I tell this story, I can’t say this loud enough. You can have anything you want, but you have to have no matter what. Like if this dude behind me wants to climb that mountain. It’s no matter what no matter what and people say that and they don’t even know I clients.

Kellan Fluckiger: I’ll say well What do you want and figure it all out? And what are you willing to do to get that? Oh, I’ll friggin do anything Yeah, okay, cool. Start with this this and this. Oh, I didn’t know I had to do that Like they don’t even know what they’re talking about. So I had to go start seeing counselors. I had to change my whole life I had to learn to be honest for the first time in my life I didn’t know how to tell the truth to save my soul.

Kellan Fluckiger: I didn’t even know who I was. I remember, see, two weeks before that intervention, I’d attempted suicide for the second time. And I remember distinctly being in this study, which is where I used a lot and hid from everybody, kids and people. I don’t even know who I am. Like, you put me in my three piece Armani downtown, I made an appearance downtown.

Kellan Fluckiger: I can do whatever it is. And I was paying a lot of money to be that guy.

Erin Marcus: Yeah.

Kellan Fluckiger: When I got home and the lights went out, I didn’t know who the frick I was. I don’t feel anything. I don’t know anything. And so it was simply the primal scream that said, I, it is enough. Like the boys, it is enough. So every time I got stuck or said, You know, it is enough.

Kellan Fluckiger: If not this year, then what? When I’m 62? When I’m 72? It is enough. And so it’s the work. Like, I can’t tell you how many thousands of hours I’ve spent with counselors and coaches. And why do you think I wrote 19 books? I didn’t write books for other people. I wrote them because I needed them.

Erin Marcus: Well, and it has to be.

Erin Marcus: And I think, you know, most people are very fortunate, and they might not have as a dramatic Obstacle to overcome. But when you combine that with what we’ve started talking about, what do you want? I, the thing that I say all the time, what do you want and how bad do you want it? That it’s that easy?

Kellan Fluckiger: It it, and people don’t want it to be that way because that requires the work they want.

Kellan Fluckiger: What do I want? And who’s gonna do it for me? . So what do you want? And who’s gonna do it? For me? When

Erin Marcus: I, when I learned the whole concept of personal responsibility, like mm-hmm. . Extreme personal responsibility. I was in the middle of a divorce. And the last thing that I wanted to hear about was that it was all my fault.

Erin Marcus: Because I will tell you, I was absolutely convinced it was not all my fault. That was not what I was interested in hearing at the time. And when I was first introduced to that concept, I thought of it as a burden. And now, dramatic personal responsibility is the most empowering thing you can have. It’s, it, it opens everything.

Erin Marcus: I mean, that’s what you went through.

Kellan Fluckiger: It’s, it’s simple choice. So I’ve changed my background to my phoenix. Thanks. And the reason I do that, I love them. I have like a hundred of them. And they’re all these AI generated pictures. That’s my story. It’s my logo. And here’s the way I think about it, and I’m going to slow down because I want your listeners to understand this.

Kellan Fluckiger: If there was ever a poster child for someone who should have been left at the bottom of the canyon, I was that. Even in that place, an invitation was still offered. There wasn’t a quick trip around, go pass, go collect 200, but the invitation is offered and you have felt it. You have heard those intuition voices.

Kellan Fluckiger: You have felt those nudges. And I don’t care how many times you’ve said no or brushed them off. Today is the day you can say, you know what, I’m going to move in a new direction. And we live in a world where people think everything should be solved in the length of a TV sitcom. It’s not. So just strap in, because you are the author, the owner, and the creator of your life.

Kellan Fluckiger: For better or worse, you are at cause.

Erin Marcus: Have you found You know, mentioning tapping into it again, like I have found for me, you asked me when we did your show we had this conversation that I don’t really do organized religion. I don’t have a, I have not rectified how I feel about source universe, God, any event.

Erin Marcus: And I said, if I had to have a version, it’s mother nature. Have you found a way to seek out the voice?

Kellan Fluckiger: Mm hmm. There’s two things. I’m sorry. Shall I talk or be quiet? Yeah,

Erin Marcus: absolutely.

Kellan Fluckiger: There’s two things that have happened since August of 2007 that are, have changed my life completely and that now still do and will do for the next 17 years.

Kellan Fluckiger: And these are the two things. I created a fluid, not static, but a mostly static after 17 years, but a description, a constitution, a declaration, thinking of the Declaration of Independence is 200 and something. That’s that powerful and that dramatic of a description of who I choose to be. To be so I call it a PTAC personal truth and commitment document.

Kellan Fluckiger: I have it memorized I have read it to myself and then recorded it and Splice it together and put it on repeat. So it plays for an hour. I wake up to it. I go to sleep to it I make adjustments to it and record it again and again and again not because anybody has to agree I Not because I need anyone’s permission, which I don’t, and neither do you, but because I have finally made some decisions about who I am.

Kellan Fluckiger: And so the creation of that thing is the number one. Now, lots of people have been to conferences and seminars where you create some powerful statement, I’m a wonderful, powerful, compassionate, blah, blah, blah. There’s nothing wrong with those. Except if you can’t quote it, and you can’t look in the mirror, and it doesn’t make you weep and tremble to the core of your soul every time you say it, it doesn’t mean anything.

Kellan Fluckiger: Because you’re talking about infinite and eternal declarations. And if you don’t know what those are, okay, neither did I. But you need to do that. Because it guides every business decision. It guides every conversation, including this one. It drives how I treat the precious angel that came in that thing.

Kellan Fluckiger: It drives everything. Every single thing I do, and if it doesn’t, then I fix me because that declaration is mine and I said so. And the most powerful words in the language are not I love you or any of that crap. It is because I said so. That’s it. So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is now that you have that and you, and it’s that powerful.

Kellan Fluckiger: You need a way that it guides your life every minute. For me, that’s the creation of, I call it a morning ritual, daily ritual, whatever. It’s three hours for me. But when I teach clients, it starts at 40 minutes. That you fashion according to your needs and desires and your things. But it’s like an athlete.

Kellan Fluckiger: An athlete doesn’t warm up after the game. I’m a classically trained jazz pianist. You don’t go to a performance without warming up first. I sing. You don’t go to a vocal performance without warming up. Why in the world would you meet your day, day after day, with half assed prep? What do you expect?

Erin Marcus: Right, I tell people Don’t do the work before they go to work.

Erin Marcus: I call my morning routine setting the stage. I do a similar thing. I, it’s setting the stage because having that in front of me at the beginning of the day reminds me what I’m trying to create, who I’m being, and guides my decisions. And it’s what I, one of the things that you’re saying without saying is that even after you’ve quote unquote solved the problem, made your changes.

Erin Marcus: You have to maintain the effort to maintain the changes. To me, this is a sneaky little slippery slope. I don’t, I don’t talk about my mindset too much. needing to be fixed because there’s no end date that one day this is all going to be okay. There’s no end. I don’t want

Kellan Fluckiger: there to be an end date. I want to keep getting better.

Kellan Fluckiger: I don’t want to have a plateau where I’ve arrived. Like, what in the world is that? Either with my music, I mean, I sing, I got 88 songs on Spotify, I got 19 books, I got six more on the drawing board. I don’t want to be done, I don’t consider myself done with anything. Like, let’s assume for a minute there’s a God, or nature, or whatever.

Kellan Fluckiger: The goal of that thing is perfection. If you look at nature and the way things are put together, that is perfection. Why would the crowning creation with the most Intelligence, and the most stupidity, by the way, but the most intelligence be, well, we’ll just leave that part half assed. Hello? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Kellan Fluckiger: And so, I do it all the time. Anytime I’m coming to a place, during the day, the first, it is such a habit that I wake up with the words of my PTAC on my lips before my eyes are even open. They’re coming out of my mouth before I wake up, and sometimes I’ll do parts of it and a certain line will stick out for me, and so that will be my thing today.

Kellan Fluckiger: And I will just marinate on that thing. And it’s not like some silly thing, it’s what you choose. So think about something like piano. So I practice. Okay, I don’t do it four hours a day anymore, but I used to, and I’m, you know, at that level. But if I don’t, if I go do some warm ups on the keys and there’s a particular thing, I might spend 20 minutes just doing a thing because I’m working on that little thing, fingering or some piece that I want to, okay, Why?

Kellan Fluckiger: Because I said so. Like nobody’s keeping score and I don’t need anybody’s permission, this is who I want to be. And when you’re that, any, I can promise you right here, right now, any business problem you have, any overwhelm problem you have, any revenue growth problem, any product creation problem, anything you have will be solvable.

Kellan Fluckiger: If you first put yourself in the place that is the highest expression of you, that you have declared. You’ll know what to do. Even if it’s a step at a time. You just know.

Erin Marcus: You just know. And I think the, the word that I use and what I work to, it’s kind of a definition of itself, is that it should all be intentional.

Erin Marcus: I think too many people are, the reason they’re not happy, the reason they’re not succeeding to what they want, the reason of all the challenges is they live in reaction mode and they’re not intentional about what they want to create, how they behave, how they move through the day, how they make decisions.

Erin Marcus: And it’s not about judging what you spend your time doing being right or wrong, is it intentional and does it, I get real black and white when I’m trying to accomplish something. Does this moving me towards it or away from it?

Kellan Fluckiger: It’s fine. And that, that question is perfect. And it applies not only to your bottom line profits, but it applies to how you approach your business, how you treat your employees, how you treat your customers, how you treat your spouse, how you treat your kids, everything.

Kellan Fluckiger: And so my, my declarations are all encompassing, some statements are simple facts, and some are aspirational. Some people shy away from aspirational statements because they’re scared of them. One of mine is, I am my word, I speak only truth, I do what I say, I am who I seem, with no camouflage, duplicity, or guile.

Kellan Fluckiger: Now, I put all that language in there, not to impress anybody else, but I needed that because I lived most of my life as a liar and a deceptive, very, very good at being two faced, duplicitous, deceptive, keeping track of things, living a double life, etc., etc. So that declaration is aspirational. I’m not pretending to be perfect, but when I repeat that to myself, I’m I am my word.

Kellan Fluckiger: I speak only truth. I do what I say. I am who I seem with no camouflage, duplicity, or guile. It’s really easy to make decisions about what I say. Does this thing, what I’m saying or doing or seeming or anything, does it fit with that? It’s not complicated.

Erin Marcus: It’s not complicated, but I, it’s also, it’s not easy to do because I, it goes against everything we’ve learned to our point where we started everything.

Erin Marcus: We’ve learned everything. we have as a habit. And, and tapping into that voice, I think it’s important to find your, whether it’s your physical state, whether it’s an emotional state. This is so weird because you’d never think this, the way it works for me is I volunteer almost every week at a wildlife rescue.

Erin Marcus: I’m literally out in the forest cages as they were, cleaning poop, trying to not get bit by baby raccoons. And, you know, this is not a glamorous situation by any sense of the word. It is enough activity to burn off my extra energy without needing me to pay attention to it.

Kellan Fluckiger: And it’s in the middle of a forest.

Kellan Fluckiger: From knowing you, that it is soothing and a blessing to your soul. And that you breathe deeper. And that you connect. Even though you have a bag of poop, or whatever you’re carrying, it doesn’t matter. It’s a place to decompress, to connect, to put your fingers in the dirt, and to just be. And I also know that about you too.

Erin Marcus: And people, like whatever that is for you. To have that space. And I want my best business ideas are often, you know, that’s when they come. My best ideas for what I want to do come to me when I’m just going through the work of being. So you

Kellan Fluckiger: ask about how do you find that connection? Figure out what connects you to source and go stand there.

Kellan Fluckiger: Be there. Swim there. Walk there. Breathe there. Lay on the floor and count stars there. But do that on purpose and learn to quiet your mind and set aside all the other nonsense so you can hear the voice.

Erin Marcus: That was very hard for me. It’s still that’s still a challenge for me. That’s why I have to be so imbursed in the sit in a environment that allows it for absolutely

Kellan Fluckiger: the first five books.

Kellan Fluckiger: I wrote were a five volume series on meditation because that was the tool that I used for decades. Even when I started young with martial arts, and now a much more refined application. And so I wrote a five volume series on that, so that I could work with it for me, and I could also teach it, and help people see it.

Kellan Fluckiger: And then define it in a way that’s very expansive, walking, or cleaning the forest, or just being those places. So, 100%, it’s not a trivial thing. We live in a noisy, Yeah. Grumpy ass. Yes. Grab your attention sort of world, and you get to decide how much you let that control you. And if you think you don’t have control, it’s okay that you think that.

Kellan Fluckiger: You have to be open to the possibility that that’s not true, and then be willing to do the work to make it not true.

Erin Marcus: So I could talk to you for days and days, but if people eventually we have to hit the stop record button. If people want to continue and learn more about you and how you do this and how you can help them do this, I cannot, I say this very freely all the time.

Erin Marcus: The biggest shock to me coming out of corporate and being in charge of my own business was my success had nothing to do with what I was doing and everything to do with what I was thinking. And this is the piece that has to get dialed in first, not just for your business, but the, the potential. It’s heartbreaking when I meet people with massive potential that haven’t found their access to it yet.

Erin Marcus: Like this is where it starts. So what is the best way for them to get ahold of you? I know your URLs are up on the screen, we’ll assume that, but for those listening who can’t see.

Kellan Fluckiger: So one of the fun things about having a weird name like Kellen Flukiger is that I can’t hide. So pay attention and spell the name right.

Kellan Fluckiger: I’ve got a whole pile of books on Amazon. If you go on Spotify, I’ve got a Boatload of music. I wrote albums of music telling stories from tightrope and then I, I was only going to write one book about my journey and then I ended up writing another one.

Erin Marcus: I think your journey needs more than one book. Yeah, well the sequel, the sequel

Kellan Fluckiger: is down from the gallows.

Erin Marcus: I have a question.

Kellan Fluckiger: And I wrote an album of music with each one telling stories. I want one

Erin Marcus: from Joy’s point of view.

Kellan Fluckiger: I can’t write that book.

Erin Marcus: No, but you have influence over the person who can.

Kellan Fluckiger: I could. And she, I, I, one of the things I do is I run 90 day classes for people who know they should do that and dunno how to start or whatever.

Kellan Fluckiger: In fact, I wrote that book, I wrote a book Publish. Maybe we can get

Erin Marcus: Joy in a one of your workshops.

Kellan Fluckiger: Story arc, which is a book about how to write books. Yeah. And if people stay with the homework at the end of 90 days, I got the first draft enhance. So

Erin Marcus: Nice.

Kellan Fluckiger: That’s what the guy we were talking about earlier.

Erin Marcus: Yeah. We’re gonna have him on a podcast.

Kellan Fluckiger: Yeah. So

Erin Marcus: that’s a great story. I can’t wait to talk to him. If that’s who you’re working with. I can’t wait to hear the rest of his story.

Kellan Fluckiger: Okay. It’s fabulous. So his, he told the story in there anyway. So how to find me? Kellen Flukiger. I’m on social all over the place.

Kellan Fluckiger: LinkedIn, Facebook. Joy has made an explosion of our presence on Pinterest, which is an underutilized platform. I have a friend who does nothing but market books on Pinterest and he just sent me an email today and he had a testament on there from Jack Canfield who said, I bought this guy’s thousand and one ways to market your book.

Kellan Fluckiger: I had my staff take them all and put them on sticky notes. We used about 900 of them. And when we got those done, we were number one on the New York times bestseller list for three years. Wow. And, you know, so he was bragging about that. But so that telling stories, if you want to find me, I can’t hide. If you can’t find me, it’s because you’re not looking.

Erin Marcus: Because you’re not trying. And we’ll make sure that there is links in there. So thank you for your time, your energy, your just open, open story. I don’t. I don’t think, I mean, people share their stories, but not with the generosity and intention that you share yours. So thank you for doing that. You’re

Kellan Fluckiger: welcome.

Kellan Fluckiger: I only do one thing, and I had told you, Aaron, and I’ll tell your audience, I have a commitment this year. My year starts October 14th, and the reason is because that’s Joy’s birthday. So my year starts October 14th. Last year, I made a commitment to help 50 million people to discover who they really are and to create from that.

Kellan Fluckiger: It turns out that we reached 75 million by last October 14th, so we’ve set a new goal this year, 250 million.

Erin Marcus: Okay.

Kellan Fluckiger: I would love to be able to serve you in some way. Whoever you are, however that is, which is why I write so much and put so much free content videos and all that kind of stuff. It’s only to do that.

Kellan Fluckiger: So I only do one thing. Morning to night, first breath to last, is figure out how to reach my 250 million. And it’s not work. It is my labor of love.

Erin Marcus: I love it. Well, hopefully people reach out, and I am very, very excited to be part of helping you reach those people. So, thank you for joining me.

Kellan Fluckiger: Thank you, and I want to end with honoring you again for the work that you put in.

Kellan Fluckiger: Your heart, your love, and your willingness to share, lift, and bless those people. Who hear you

Erin Marcus: thank you