 So we've all heard about thinking positive, maybe creating a vision board or a dream board doing affirmations that kind of thing to try to change our life and make it more, you know, going towards our dreams and visions. But what if those things aren't working as well for you as you'd like, maybe you're just missing some part of the plot. And today I get to interview Russell Davis, who is a life coach and has wonderful content for us about how do we manage our mind effectively in this crazy adventure called life. Russell is a Marine veteran. And he is also a New Yorker by birth and Californian by heart. I love that. And I'm just excited to and he calls himself the VP of the George Cal fan club, which very grateful. Russell, thank you so much for being here and sharing with us today. Thanks a lot, George. I appreciate the opportunity just to be here. I love hanging out with you and I know your people are definitely going to be my people because if they love you, we're going to get a lot of great. So much, so much appreciation. So tell me about life coaching. Maybe we could start with a kind of a general question. Why do you think life coaching is helpful for people? You know what happens is I usually have a tool that I use to have my clients do this and all your people can do this now, you know, as they're watching now or they're watching later, as I have them take the tip of their finger. And I tell them look at the tip of their finger. And they're like, okay, yeah, where are we going with this. And then I tell them to take the tip of their finger and put on the tip of their nose and ask them if they can see the tip of their finger. And they usually say no. And I say yes because it's hidden in plain sight. You know it's there. You just look at it before you touch the tip of your nose, but you can't see it. And that's usually what happens is usually we are too involved in the drama of our life with too emotionally attached and someone else who is able to have be a little more objective from the outside can actually see something that might be right in front of your face like my perfect example is Now I do where I wear glasses now I have to also wear for reading and for looking and I remember one day I was tearing the house up I mean literally tearing the house up looking and someone told me that my glasses were on my head. And even better than that I had a situation where I had the glasses on like I have them on now and I couldn't find them. This happened recently. I was like I can't believe it, but it was right in front of my face I couldn't feel them I couldn't see them and I was tearing out. So that happens to all of us human experience. Yeah, for sure. Now that's a really helpful perspective that. We all have blind spots, you know, and blind spots are are sometimes quite a quite influential and in our life and having a life coach somebody who's willing to kind of bring bring those to view and help us to move forward and in a better way so one of the things you talk about is 5050 life what does that what does that mean. Well, what happens is, you know, I've been involved in personal development, probably since I was like 14 I actually asked my mother to find out because half the time you don't remember these things. And, you know, I've been studying health and body and the mind and all of this stuff and the impression that I got from the self help personal development world was, you know, you're supposed to be thinking positive everything will be rainbows and butterflies is corn all the time. And if it's not like that, you're not doing it right. And so there's a lot of times what I found, just in my life, what I've done to myself and what other people do is have a lot of self condemnation, they walk around feeling a lot of guilt and shame and imposter syndrome, things like that. And those things are I call them a really strong men, or women, whatever one be politically correct, right. But you know the whole idea is you, you know, life is a, you know, a full of contrast joy and pain light and dark. You know, and that's real life night and day. And so what happens is when you understand that 50% of your life is going to be filled with feeling great and 50% just to be honest, we're just going to suck. Some things just suck. But if you think about it, think about the things you've gotten the most out of as many times and you go through the research status in the Marine Corps, you know, embrace the suck, you go through the suck, you come out on the other side and you learn so much grown so much. And many times we learn more from the things that don't feel so good. That we're willing to go through. Then the victories even. Yeah, I discovered I mean I found that to be true as well it's like life isn't always going to go our way and for a lot and also for those who are struggling life isn't always going to be a struggle. So there's hopefully moments of relief. And but it's it's yeah if we're able, like I mean it's beautifully said you're able to embrace the struggle. And if you're able to have a life coach to help you along the way is so much more meaningful and you can grow more consciously by embracing it. Yeah, absolutely. I just thought up is that what usually I find in life is you have people. You know I call myself a truth seeker and a truth teller. And many times when people hear that especially when you're thinking about coaching with me. They use people's mind always goes to the negative you know I want someone to tell me what's wrong with me and what I'm doing wrong and what happens is I find that human beings tend to extreme. All of us. Okay, so what happens is when you look at the 5050 life you have some people who are skewed on the positive where they just kind of walk around with a little bit of a Pollyanna type of mentality like everything's wonderful and I'm always positive and you know everything's great. And what happens is, then something really tough happens. And they're blindsided and it just totally knocks them out and sometimes those people don't recover from it. And the other extreme is you have some people who is as a, I think a protective measure, they'll just say okay they become cynical and hard so much so that that way they're never going to be less than they're never going to be hurt. And what they're not doing is they're not enjoying and appreciating any of the small victories or the large victories. And so none of these people are dealing with the total truth. I think it's all positive all the time or all negative all the time. You're not looking at the truth. The truth is 50% of the time it's positive 50% of the time it's going to be feeling negative. And so if you want to be a full human and experience the full experience of life that we all are here for, you need to accept the truth, and that truth will make you free. And accepting the truth. Essentially it's about managing our mind. Right. Yes. So you work with. I mean, if you talk about something called the self coaching model. So what is what is that what is it what does that mean. How do we. I did make that up. That's for my coach, Brooke Castillo and she said that, and everyone will know to remind myself of where she got it from. She was studying a lot of cognitive psychology Byron Katie's work. She kind of noticed that there was a pattern of how things actually work. Pretty much in the universe. I know that sounds kind of woo woo, but it's, there are things like gravity works here on earth and wherever you are on earth, no matter what tribe would, you know, culture that gravity is going to affect you. And so basically what happens is when you look at the self coaching model. And by the way, let me just give a little precursor I am my coaching I've been coaching for a lot of years since probably, you know, exclusively coaching life coaching and executive coaching since probably 2011 2012. And before that was a personal trainer and that kind of thing and used to frustrate me when I was a personal trainer and primarily health coach I was like I knew there was something deeper. And it was usually the way people were thinking and I didn't really know a way to help them help themselves in between sessions and even if they were no longer coaching with me. And I came across the model from Brooke and I just embraced it because it's how I already, you know, approach things. And basically what it is is that circumstances can trigger thoughts, thoughts, cause feelings feelings, drive action and actions, give us our results and the results that we get usually will we confirm the original thought. Okay, so I'll kind of break that down a little bit circumstances which this right here was super powerful for me. Okay. Circumstances are things we have no control over. And in all my experience studying health and mindset and mental health wellness. And what it is we spend an inordinate amount of energy, trying to control things we would never meant to control. And I personally just a anecdotal but I personally believe that a lot of the mental, physical and emotional dis ease, if you will, come from us trying to control things. We have no control over it takes them with no amount of energy to do that. And understanding what you control and what you don't control that alone is powerful. Now, that brings me to what you actually do control. You don't control what happens in life, but you do control what you think about it. Now, some people are going to fight me on that they're going to be like, Well, yeah, I do have control because I set this goal and I make it happen. But yeah, think about this, there are people who do all the right things. They have everything that you know, it's supposed to happen that they're supposed to do to achieve a goal, and it doesn't work out. Maybe the market fluctuations, maybe something else happened that they just unexpected you know family member dies. They get hurt, they get they can't perform anymore. Something happened that they couldn't have anticipated, and they had no control over. That's your circumstances but then, and my analogy for this is you we've all seen these kinds of things where you'll see, maybe I'll think about Isaiah Thomas is a good example of basketball player from back in the day. He came from a very, very bad neighborhood, like really bad. Okay. Now, there were other people neighbors friends of his that came up in the same neighborhood. He became super successful as an athlete and business person, where some of those other people, same circumstances became, you know, self destructive or destructive toward others. The only difference is the mindset. Okay. Now, Isaiah Thomas had a coach his mom, his mother was not going to tolerate him and get out in the streets and not, you know, applying himself and being his best self in each moment. Okay. Now the thing is, most people think, Oh, my feelings, I just feel this way, you know, George, you know hurt my feelings. And we are programmed to that from childhood. Oh, did Russell hurt your feelings that Susie hurt your feelings. And if you think about it, no one can actually hurt your feeling. No one can actually make you happy or sad, no one can make you anything. That level of power. Now we have an influence to the level that other people allow us to have, but we don't have that power. So someone does what they do, and we choose how to think about it. And based on how we're thinking about it. That generates a feeling and a feeling is simply a vibration in your body and it's usually described by one word, happy, sad, angry, shame. But what happens is, is when we understand like, for instance, I know sometimes people might have a member hearing an example where a woman had lost her husband. And she was telling a friend and the friend was like, Oh, how are you feeling. And the friend didn't check in the woman was like, Oh, I feel great. I was, I couldn't wait to get rid of that bomb. You know what I mean. You just don't, you can't assume you don't know her perspective was, Wow, I'm free now. He's gone. I don't know that sounds a little cryptic, but you know, he's gone. I can now live my life the way I want it. Now she could have done that anyway. But in her thinking, she felt like she couldn't. So when he was gone, she felt because of thinking change. She felt like, you know, she could do what she wanted. So those feelings that energy is going to have an outlet that's going to drive actions usually for angry will do something either toward ourself or toward others. Then what happens is we get a result from that because we live in a cause and effect universe. That's just the way it is. But most people live at, at the effect of life versus recognizing what part of the cause they have control over. And what people normally do, this is where a coach comes in. Most people are trying to change their results by changing their actions. And they keep going in a loop. And what had the problem with that is, they never get down to the root cause like the type of coaching I do is a cosmic causal coaching. That's the root cause of why is this even happening. And once you get down and understand your thinking around certain circumstances in your life, that can just have a domino effect and change everything. That's pretty powerful. Yeah, that's so cool. I imagine that there's some kind of diagram somewhere but you know this this idea of, yeah, you can you can change you can, you're responsible for the thoughts. And there, everything tends to flow. I can send you a diagram. I didn't even think about it. I can send you a visual representation of you, you know, make it available to you people if you like. Yeah, you know what I'll do is I'll, I'll put it in the notes of the video. Okay, beautiful. Yeah. Awesome. So one another thing you talk about is, you know, this is related like story versus fact. So tell us what you mean by that. Yeah, everybody didn't know this, but everybody is in the storytelling business, you know, we look at authors and movie makers and book writers and realize, wow, that's so amazing. We all do that we all tell stories. I'll give you a perfect example. This is way back in the day like mid 90s. I used to work at Columbia University graduate school of business. And, you know, they, you know, we were I worked in administration. So there were certain people that we were kind of close a little group. And so they one time we were going to a social event within the same building. And they had food and everything and across the room. I saw a friend of mine who was looking my way and, you know, and so I said hi and she completely ignored me. And immediately, I was like, what's up with that? What did I do to her? Was she upset with me? What did I do? You know, and I'm started, I started weaving this, this tale of how, you know, and I so because I thought she snubbed me, I started to defend and react like well later for you, you know, and I get all up in my feelings as they say today. And later on when I talk to her about it, come to find out she was thinking about something else that had happened right before that was kind of, you know, intense problem. And she didn't even see me. So I created this whole narrative, based on very little context. And that's what we all do. We, we develop stories like we do it so quickly. Usually, unfortunately, it's geared toward the negative. Either like what we'll do is I, most people don't know on science, I study, I geek out on some of the science stuff when it comes to the body in the mind. But we have what's called mirror neuron. And that's part of our nervous system. And if you notice that you see to use, I'll just use as an example, you see two ladies who add, I'll just say a bar or whatever, and they're hanging out in their besties. You'll notice, if you just look from the outside that their body language will be very matched. And it's because the mirror neurons are causing them because they're in sync with each other or causing them to model each other. And we normally do that. So if somebody comes to you, like somebody will, they come to you in an angry manner. So what you do is you will mirror them really realize we do this. We'll get upset. They made us upset because they're angry at us will descend and we'll get angry back at them. So we'll accuse them of what we're doing to them. It's really kind of ridiculous, but we do it automatically. And so the whole idea is when you can look at the facts and the facts are something that if everybody was looking at it would agree. Like, say you have a brand new red car, that would be provable in a court of law, you could prove that now you feel about the red car. That's, that's where you start getting to story. That's your thoughts. And that that right there that one thing for me at least, I found it to be life changing. Because when I can question myself on okay what's okay what are the real facts about this. And that changes, and helps me to stay keep myself in check about where I'm going with my story. And you can tell whatever story you want. Yeah, that's that's where your power is. You can't change that other person which is a circumstance or circumstance that happened in life like the economy, who's president who's not president, you know your neighborhood, whatever happens. But you can change the way you think you know what you're telling yourself what you're making it mean. Super powerful just that one thing if that's all you get from me today that right there will change your life. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, and it reminds me of, you know, like, I think my wife says this like when when something when someone like you know cuts us off in traffic or whatever right. It's like, All right, they're a jerk, you know, where typically that's the that's the instant story, they're just a jerk, they don't care about other people, or, you know, we could say my God, they're rushing to the hospital to see their, you know, they're dying, you know, parents or or or they're whether whatever may be like they're they really need to get there. You know, and it's like, we don't we can't know, of course, what which which story is true. But one story brings compassion. And the other story brings resentment and either one could be true or not true. And we can so we might as well as this is like it's our live we might as well generate compassion, rather than anger. Can I can I tell you just one little tiny story. I got the I got it from the book, the seven habits of highly effective. Yes, even cubby. And if you've read the book you're familiar with this story but what happened was he was on a New York City train subway train and he was sitting. Oh, maybe 10 or 10 feet away from this gentleman who had two kids and the kids are running around like, you know, just crazy to make an all kind of noise and. And so Stephen said he was really getting a little missed and then the more he saw and seemed like the man wasn't paying attention and watching over his kids. He got more and more upset. So eventually he just got so angry about it. He went over and said to the gentleman, you know, do you see where your kids are doing. And the man was really kind of in a fog and he said, Oh, I'm so sorry. Their mother just died. And I don't know what to do about it either. And immediately he shifted from anger into compassion, because now you had a fuller context of what was really happening in that moment. And it changed everything and when I listened to that story that changed things for me. And I try to, you know, think about this. I've done that I've gotten cut off in traffic and been really like, Are you kidding? You know, whatever I get all upset and then I cut people off, not meaning to and couldn't say I was sorry. You know, we had the windows up or whatever. And I realized, wow, maybe that's what the person did to me. They weren't trying to cut me off. It was just, you know, some of those things that happened. My God. Yeah. And I think, I think eventually, you know, if and when we can see everything and and like really understand everyone's stories, if we were able to, we would have so much compassion. I mean, even if somebody were cutting us off maliciously, because, you know, they, they, they say up, you slow driver or whatever, or they judge us in some way, they cut us off. Like if we understood the story of their life and what they've gone through and their upbringing and what kind of suffering they're going through, my God, there will be waves of compassion that came to, you know, and it's just, we can generate that is, that's beautiful. So one other one more concept and then we'll start wrap it up. You talk about buffering. What does that, what does that mean? Briefly. Oh boy, this is a real good one because I've done this. You know, what happens is, is usually we're taught in our society and I can't really speak about other countries, but I, there's the human experience, you know, we're taught to avoid discomfort in our society as much as possible. And what happens is, so what happens is we all love when things feel great, you know, joy, love, happiness, that kind of thing, but then we don't like shame, we don't like fear, we don't like anger, those things don't feel good. And so what we'll do is because we think it's not supposed to be like that, or we don't like that feeling, we want to avoid it. So what we'll buffer with is we'll buffer with, you know, drugs or porn or internet or work or anything that distracts us. And I have found that we humans are brilliant at deceiving and distracting ourselves, you know, and I'm mainly speaking about myself. You know, so what happens is, is we will tend to like, I don't know if anyone's ever experienced this, but I have where there'll be something that I really don't want to do because I think it's going to be unpleasant and I'll procrastinate and I'll procrastinate and I'll procrastinate like one night it was like, I let my kitchen, you know, I live alone until I let my kitchen just get, you know, nobody's here but me, somebody's going to see it. So if the kitchen gets just a total mess and I came in every day from, you know, whatever I was doing outside and it just looked horrible, but I didn't do anything about it, because I didn't really want to do it. And then one night, it was like 10 o'clock at night, and I just got, I was done, I was done looking at a horrible dirty kitchen. And so I just cleaned it up, took me about 30 concentrated minutes of just effort. And when I got done, I was like, why was I making that a big deal? It wasn't even that it was like, boom, I just did it. Many times it's easier to just do this thing and to think about doing the thing. You know, and so a lot of times we buffer and so, for instance, because I do live alone, you know, there are times that I feel lonely. And in the past, what I would do is, Oh, I'm feeling lonely. And if you, you know, I don't have a TV, but I'll turn something on, listen to audio book, I'll go call up a friend or go hang out with somebody. Whereas what I learned to do is I just feel lonely. And I said, Oh, this is loneliness. I just feel it. And I said, Oh, okay, this is what loneliness feels like as an experience. And I let it, I feel it. And because I'm feeling it, it will eventually pass. And it'll do what it was here to do, teach me what it's here to teach me. One is that it enables me to have a compassion for someone else that might be feeling lonely at that moment. That first thing you said, I think it's key is compassion for self and for others. And what happens is we spend so much time resisting and avoiding and reacting to our emotions and our feelings. So what happens is they get blown, they become drama. So instead of feeling the, you know, anger, you can just feel anger. Think about, what am I thinking about this? They can be so anger versus blaming on a circumstance. And it might even be justified, like if there's an injustice that you saw happening, you can feel the anger and then take, you can choose not to react but to respond and do something constructive with that same energy. But if I'm reacting, I mean, how many people are probably in jail because they did a quick reaction in a moment of anger and did something that changes everybody's life. So, yeah, that's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. So, as we wrap up, if somebody is watching this, listening to this and they say, well, gosh, Russell, I'd love to work with you as my life coach. How do they move forward? What's the, what's the, yeah, how do you work with people? Yeah, the best way is, is to go right to my website, which is coachrofffool.com. And you can contact me through my website or through Facebook Messenger. Pretty responsive. And the really coaching, coaching is an experiential thing. And I offer a, what I call discovery session. And that discovery session is usually about 50 minutes to an hour. Well, we actually find out one, if we are good fit to work together, and if coaching is a good fit for you right now. But we also, many times I've had people have a total change of perspective just from looking at what they think the problem is with someone who doesn't have an agenda. I don't have an agenda because I don't even know what's right for you, but I know how to help you discover what you should be doing next, if anything. Awesome. I will be sure to put the link in the notes of the video, but it's a coach Russell. So it's C O A C H R A S as in Sam, you L C O A C H R A S U L dot com. And yeah, I'll put the link and yeah, like people, you know, people can just contact you through Facebook as well. It's easy to reach you Russell Davis. So awesome man. I really thank you for being here doing this interview and help people find this helpful. Thanks Russell for the work that you do. Well, thanks for having me and letting me have this opportunity to any excuse to get to hang out with you is awesome. Thanks so much. All right, have a great day.