Paul Colaianni is a brave, open and honest personal coach and podcaster who is committed to helping others lead better lives. He’s the creator of The Overwhelmed Brain (TOB) podcast and blog which receives thousands of downloads and views every day.
Paul had always been a dedicated 9-to-5’er until 2013, when as an IT sub-contractor he became fed up with his employer’s broken promises of hiring him on full-time. At the same time, his relationship with his wife was on the rocks. With a career not on track and a wife about to leave him, Paul came to the conclusion that, “The only way that I can have confidence in anything in life is if I do it myself.”
This realization put him on a crash course into entrepreneurship, something he knew nothing about at the time. Paul was unsure of what subject to tackle, until he gained some valuable insight from a professional podcaster who said that if you’re going to be a podcaster, talk about the things you could talk about for hours on end without getting bored. Great insight!
Paul had always enjoyed giving advice to his friends and colleagues, advice which was often very helpful and appreciated. He figured he could help more than one person at a time, and coupled with his love of radio and podcasting, he created TOB.
‘The Overwhelmed Brain’ is a term used for something we all deal with in this day and age. Paul is now helping thousands of people every day through his podcast and blog, where he gives away everything he knows, for free.
Paul’s coaching differs from many other life coaches out there in that he targets people like him who feel that affirmations and positive thinking don’t always work.
We use affirmations to change our inner dialogue and the goal is to consciously change our programming. But, one of the problems with affirmations is that sometimes we can feel like frauds when we’re saying them to ourselves. “I’m a super intelligent person” really doesn’t work for someone who feels stupid. A better affirmation would be, “I feel stupid, but I’m trying to get smarter and educate myself.”
When you’re looking to hire a coach of your own, Paul recommends two points of advice:
As a coach, Paul doesn’t really set out any guidelines or boundaries for his students. This allows the student to express themselves, and it gives him the freedom to catch points of interest as they speak, points that can lead to breakthroughs in the problems the student is facing.
To Paul, being bold is forging ahead without fear of the consequences. When you fear the consequences, you make decisions based on that fear. Eliminating the fear allows you to move forward.
I really enjoyed my time today with Paul and I know you’ll learn much from our insightful discussion.
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Matthew is a super authentic and inspiring entrepreneur and podcaster and we are very fortunate to have him on the show this week.
His podcast called ‘Having It A.L.L.’ (which stands for Abundant, Loving, Life) explores our beliefs, ideas, and mindsets on life and how those influence how we experience life as a whole. For Matthew, “having it all” is a mindset; it’s how he approaches life.
He didn’t always have this outlook, though. As a child he dealt with lots of anger, frustration and sadness. He kept quiet in his emotional moments and never expressed outwardly his emotions, even his mother couldn’t pry his true feelings out of him. He continued to suppress his emotions through high school and college, but once he graduated, these feelings negatively affected the relationships he had. There are three buckets of relationships in life; relationships to self, to life and to others. Matthew was suffering in all three.
In 2013 he was introduced to Day Adeogba, creator of the YourDay Balance Game (YDBG). This was a pivotal moment in Matthew’s journey to living a better life. This is where his healing started, where he learned to question the actions he was taking each day and to determine if they were leading him down the right path.
Matthew finally had to deal with unnoticed bad scripting and negative beliefs that plagued him his entire life. A key one was, “If my partner wasn’t happy, I couldn’t be happy.” He was tying his emotional happiness to that of his girlfriend at the time. He wore this badge proudly, like he was being true to his love of her. But he eventually realized that this made things tougher on her as now she was responsible for her happiness and his as well.
One thing that Matthew uses daily to help him be more authentic, happy and transparent is the Balance Chart he learned from YDBG. Balance is an acronym for 7 building blocks to living a healthy life: breath, aqua, lengthening, anaerobic, nutrition, cleansing and energize. Through daily habit building within each of these building blocks, you’re committing to develop transparency and integrity of doing what you say you’re going to do.
One of th benefits of YDBG is that it helps you to change your life for the better through a public accountability system. Each day you tell the group what you’re going to accomplish and the habits you’re going to work through and everyone encourages each other. They also see when you fail in your accepted tasks and this helps to spur you to action.
One habit that Matthew has taken up is nightly journaling. In his journal he writes about two very specific topics:
“What you put your mind on you create.”
With this idea in mind, Matthew has created his own Mission Statement in life. This mission statement is what he’s playing for in life, it acts as a north star for him as it helps him to live up to his top values in life which are:
Many people know their why in life, but Matthew believes that writing it down as a mission statement causes things to begin shift for you in life. The mission statement goes from a thought in your mind to being a concrete thing in written form. Then you memorize it and lastly begin internalizing it. As you progress through this process different things will happen and even more shifts in your life and mindset will occur as a result. This was a great moment in our chat for me, because I realized that while I’m clear on my beliefs, I hadn’t revisited my mission statement in awhile.
For Matthew, I learned that being bold starts when you’re willing to define what is living your greatest life and being the greatest version of yourself. Once you have this, you go into action to bring these things to life.
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
“At the end of life, the person who wins is the one with the most stories.”
This one sentence perfectly encapsulates Sean Ogle’s attitude to life and business. He’s an adventurous and relatable entrepreneur, who has created a strong community and a portfolio full of travel and epic narratives.
Sean started his entrepreneurial journey after an eye-opening trip to Carnival in Rio de Janero. Upon his return to the States he decided to leave his 9-5 job as an analyst and hasn’t looked back.
His genuinity and curiosity led him to befriend Chris Guillebeau of the Art of Non-Conformity Blog, early on. Chris recommended that Sean start his own blog, not for the writing necessarily, but as a means to make his goals public and to add some accountability, kicking him into action.
Sean credits his willingness to connect with those he respects as a great precursor to his success. He gives lots of great advice on how to do this:
Sean developed a three-step process for creating a location independent life after unintentionally going through it himself in the first two years of building his successful blog, Location Rebel. He credits this process as the key to his success:
He decided to put this strategy to use by creating Location Rebel, a course and community for growing a location independent business. His goal is to get all of his members making $100/day. When you’re making this much you have something to work with and build upon.
One of the funnest things about Sean is his ability to accomplish so much and still find time to do many of his favorite hobbies and activities. He would say that in actuality, he doesn’t find the time--he makes the time--as this is what energizes him. He credits doing fun things on a regular basis as helping him overcome resistance to doing work. He’s also consistently putting in at least two hours a day of solid work. It might not sound like much, but when you’re consistent about it, you can accomplish a heck of a lot.
Putting in consistent work like this is a big part of his success, but Sean also credits his relationship to uncertainty and how he’s learned to overcome it. According to Sean, there are three phases of uncertainty:
To Sean, being bold means embracing uncertainty. “If you can embrace the challenge and embrace the unknown then that’s about as bold as you can be.”
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Jodi Ettenberg
It was wonderful having Jodi Ettenberg on the show. She’s an articulate, strong and fun woman who for 8 years has been successfully doing what many dream of: traveling the world, leaving a demanding job behind and making a living as a travel and food blog writer.
It all started with a planned year-long sabbatical to Siberia from her job as a lawyer. Her intention had been to return to work, but after a year came and went, she realized that she had outgrown that path in life, and would prefer to remain on the road.
Her travel blog, Legal Nomads, was also starting to gain some traction. She had initially started the blog so her mom back home could keep up to date with her adventures, but lo and behold, it caught on with people who loved her genuine and sincere personality.
8 years ago when Jodi started her journey, the travel blog space wasn’t as saturated as it is now; growing a following was easier than it is today. But she does have some advice for those who wish to live this lifestyle: Build skills. Figure out your goals, and build skillsets that will benefit you and put you on the path to those goals. Ask yourself:
“How can I get better at what I do so I can use it for my life’s work?”
Her passion and commitment led Jodi to revenue streams that she never even had to pursue or seek out. Freelance writing, books and public speaking gigs stemmed from people being attracted to her personality and authentic writing. Equally important, Jodi cares about her brand so much that she never puts anything out there that she isn’t willing to stand behind, as she knows that the internet is forever.
We talk about the fact that even though Jodi has been all over the world, she prefers the city life most. She feels at home in places like New York, Bangkok and Saigon. The energy in these places is just fun and there’s always so much going on. “You can fall out of your front door and into an interesting situation immediately.”
One word of caution that Jodi wants to pass on to anyone interested in nomadic living, is that travel doesn’t fix any of your problems. People often think that their problems will melt away as they travel and see the world. Nothing could be further from the truth! Wherever you go, there you are, so if you don’t work on fixing what’s inside you, you’ll just take your problems around the world.
“If you travel to escape darkness, it’ll find you.”
Jodi has many exciting projects on the horizon. She’s currently developing detailed translation cards for many more countries to help people with celiac disease eat healthy as they travel. She also has some exciting public speaking gigs coming up, including a speech on storytelling at a Denver conference. And more food maps are on the way!
We chat about living a bold life and she tells me, being bold is unapologetically believing in something and educating people about how you’ve done it, but not being aggressive in how you do so. Not shoving it down their throats. Believe in yourself and do what you care about. That’s Jodi in a nutshell.
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…