On this episode of Zen Success, Charissa had the pleasure of speaking with Harrison Meagher. He is a CHEK certified Holistic Health Practitioner and Heart Centered Personal Coach from Australia. Charissa met Harisson on clubhouse months ago, and she was so impressed by the way he connects with others on such a deep level that she just had to interview him. His passion is holding loving space for those who feel there is more to emotionally let go of & heal but can’t find the energy, confidence or time to do anything about it; reclaim lasting holistic health & become a cosmic antenna of Self-Love.

Harrison do this through an approach that is made up of a Holistic/Wholesome, Functional and Ancestral view to get to the root problem (mindset/emotions, movement, nutrition, sleep, recovery, spiritual reconnection) on the road back to inner connection, acceptance, abundance and unconditional love.

Harrison grew up on the east coast of Australia, a small little beachy touristy town called Coffs Harbour.

He spent a half of his childhood and adolescence there. And as a child, he was very inquisitive. He had this beautiful upbringing and he’s very grateful for his parents. At the age of 18, he had the urge to explore more. He needed to go on the hero’s journey to find himself a bit more and he traveled around the world, studied around the world, backpacked around the world and do a lot of work. But there was definitely a stage of guilt and shame around it. “I could not be who I am right now, if I did not have that intensity. It escalated to a point where one day everything was taken all away from me.” Harrison shared.

“I was detained at an airport. I was put in confinement in the airport for a couple days and interrogated and went through this whole experience.”

Harrison spent a big part of his life in the US studying, working, traveling and it was routine for him. But then one day, when he handed his passport and the immigration officer looked at it for a bit longer. And they said, “Hey, come with me.” For almost two or three days, Harrison spent being questioned, being searched “strip searched” and that time he was really confused. He did not know what the hell was going on. “But, …because I’d spent so much time doing work exchanges, and I don’t know if you know about like doing a lot of woofing and working on farms and hostels and bars just exchanging my services. They saw that as illegal work. So that was the what they were interrogating me.”

Harrison was like the biggest of pedestals but now everyone is telling him that he was a criminal, and he was put on a plane and deported back to Australia.

Harrison was forced to finally go inwards. T look at the things that he had been suppressing. Look at those connections that he had with other people, look at his health, his spiritual connection, and that’s what started this journey.

At that time Harrison was dating a lot of people. But when that event happened, he felt very ashamed and guilty. He pushed away that sexual creative and sensual side of him. And very recently, that has been the last little piece and he started coming out of the shadows. He focused on the physical and the cognitive learning and therapeutic things and even the spiritual learnings. Now, he felt safe enough to own that he is a sexual sensual being as well. He now sees it as part of his wholesome holistic journey. Sexual pleasure in general, is money creation, business creation, health and that it’s all connected to that root chakra.

What is Lucia Lights Meditation?

In his audio rooms, Harrison speaks a lot about holistic and natural healing back to self-love. But another milestone in Harrison’s expansion into what he does is the Lucia lights Meditation. The Lucia light uses wide-spectrum solid and flickering white light to gently dance across your face and closed eyelids, inviting you into worlds of colors, patterns, deep meditations and transcendental experiences. It is a light frequency technology that you lie under. And it stimulates your pineal gland with different ranges and spectrums and vibrations and frequencies of light. “And we know from the work of Joe Dispenza, we know from the work of Dr. Norman Doidge in the book is called ‘The way the Brain Heals Itself. That when you stimulate the pineal gland and the brain in certain ways through light frequencies it induces in a very simple way to explain it deep meditative states. And so I use that with clients that don’t know how to meditate, or those who haven’t heard about a higher self or just anything to do with a spiritual connection, I help them ease into what that feels like. And at the very least what it gives people is a relaxing sensation of just letting go. I’ve had clients that come to me that go on spiritual journeys and they see ancestors and see different planets. It’s very psychedelic in a lot of ways.” Harrison explains.

What is Cosmic Love Antenna?

Most of Harrison’s services is one on one coaching. His niche would be a connection back to self love. That’s the transformation that he offers people through holistic and natural healing. He called it Cosmic Love Antenna.  Where you lean back into your deep sense of Self-Love by reconnecting, releasing, and transforming. Using tools and modalities such as deep chakra clearing, dream work, inner child remembrance, shadow work, ancestral healing, entity removal, higher self-guidance and more! For 1 month 1 on 1 with Harrison go on an emotional release roller-coaster and then ground back into the physical body by supporting it with natural and holistic lifestyle practices. The main objectives of the Cosmic Love Antenna are to firstly get your beautiful and healing love energy flowing back through you from your heart space and then secondly support that emotional/spiritual reconnection with a soothing physical and holistic plan to make sure your human vehicle runs optimally during this process.

What is Self Love through the Chakras?

The emotional release one of a modality, and Harrison use to connect back to that self love is through the chakras. And the reason he used it is because it can be really systematic, it can help people start feeling into their body. He do it on one on one or in Self Love Activation Tribe. It is a 6-months course program for those feeling like they do not want to take the journey back to self-love alone. They join and be held, seen and empowered back to a place of deep acceptance and love. Be given not only the tools but the community to remember all that they are.

“So if people are interested, my Facebook business account, or my Instagram, I have a big series of testimonials and reviews. As a coach, in my opinion, we attract what we are the clients that we become into our lives.”

Harrison on expanding his horizon

On a personal level, Harrison want to get back out into nature. Connect back to Mother Earth or nature at large, He would love to own a property, own a farm and plant and grow some foods. And that’s what’s growing and pulling towards him.

Harrison is really pushing to build a community, a tribe so that the program that he is running at the moment will impact more people. Harrison loves working one on one and still want to expand to do that too. There’s something in him that’s wanting to just reach to more people, connect more people, and expand his own voice. Expand his own reach, expand his connection to people and sharing with people.

Tap into Power of Positive Intelligence to Live Your Life with Less Stress and More Freedom to Do What You Want

On this episode, Charissa Sim, host of Zen Success had the pleasure of speaking with Barbara Fonti. Barbara is a successful entrepreneur and the Chief Business Coach at Big Dream Executive Coaching where she works with entrepreneurs and business leaders to help them achieve astonishing results. Barbara is an expert in the field of Positive Intelligence, The X Factor for peak performance, which you will learn in this episode.

She is certified in leadership coaching from Harvard University and is a certified professional life coach. Barbara is based in New York, but has a global client base. In the past, Barbara has held management positions at several Fortune 100 companies, where she won awards for management excellence, customer service and training, including the prestigious President’s Club and Chairman’s Council quality awards.

As a child, Barbara was a recovering introvert. She was shy. “I think a lot had to do with what was happening in my house. There was a lot of drama. I’d be the typical middle child, I became the peacemaker, and saw myself in my role as the person who was there to cajole everybody else. And to help them become stronger. I didn’t feel that there was room there for me, for my needs, for my desires for my fears or anything. So I learned to keep that to myself.” For her, it was better to be invisible. But she made a 180-degree progress in it. But it took work. And it took identifying the things that she was really most fearful and whether or not they were based, in fact, or just a narrative she created for herself.

Growing up, Barbara was certain that she wanted to create a safe loving home. She always knew that she wanted to be a mother, and that the only thing she knew. Barbara went into corporate America as the Director of Training and Education for a large financial services company. She had two little girls who are in elementary school and this great career. And they were at odds with each other. Barbara knew that she did not want other people raising them. She didn’t want nannies raising them. But she had to because she had no choice. Barbara had a strong why she made the leap from corporate America into sales, because she saw that as something that would give her flexibility. So she could be at the soccer game. So she could be a class mom once in a while and really participate more with them. They were young, and she didn’t know what the future held.

“Everybody told me I would starve. They said you’re not a salesperson. And, and I believed them too. But I also believe that I could learn things. And I saw it as an opportunity for growth, even though it scared me a little bit. I don’t know if I would have done it if I didn’t have those two girls as my, why.”

People come to Barbara for all types of reasons. But it always boils down to wanting to live their life, with less stress, and more freedom. And whether that freedom is financial freedom, or freedom from beating themselves up or just the freedom to do the things that they want to do to be able to find the time to live a full life and not feel trapped. She works with people on tactics and strategies.

“At the heart of this and what is really the foundation is what’s going on in our brains. And what are the things that are sabotaging our success and our thinking and our well-being. So we do spend a lot of time in those areas in the beginning and throughout the process.” Barbara emphasizes.

Barbara stumbled on this methodology called Positive Intelligence a few years ago, and she love it and it changed her life. “And it’s changed the lives of my clients for the better” she said. Positive Intelligence is a methodology that we can all incorporate in our lives, to not only achieve our goals but to live happier. Because we all know that there are these people that, we may see on a magazine cover, or they’re an icon for what would be considered success but they might be tormented inside.

The backstory on Positive Intelligence, it is the synthesis of decades of research of over a half a million people from around the world, all shapes and sizes. And so what the researchers did was they looked at how come there are some people who reach their potential and some don’t? And how come there are some people that live with more ease and flow and from a happier place and they show up in their lives? And others, which, unfortunately, is the majority, that we show up motivated by negative emotion? And what can we learn from those people that reach their potential and do so from a happy place.

And a lot of the research is synthesized by Shirzad Chamine, and he is the bestselling author of the book named, Positive Intelligence. “I read his book and I said, Aha! I had so many AHA. And I brought it into my coaching practice.” What Shirzad found is that we actually have three core muscles in our brains, that we can strengthen, so that we can show up in our lives better, and we can be motivated in our day to day by positive factors, rather than the negative ones like fear and stress and shame and anxiety, etc. Because most people tend to be motivated by those negative factors. And unfortunately, it takes a lot more energy to live that type of a life. And it does hold us back. So we help people identify those three core muscles and strengthen them. And I’m part of a global group of coaches who are the pioneers in this field. And so we teach people what we call mental fitness, which is exercising those three core muscles to live better and ultimately improve the quality of their lives.

According to Barbara, being mentally fit means that you can weather any challenge that comes, it means that you can find a gift or an opportunity in any seemingly bad challenge that comes. But we need to identify those challenges, those surprises, those stumbling blocks because if we’re not mentally fit, we are going to feel the stress of it. It makes sense if we look at what those core muscles are. Barbara thinks it is really impactful to identify our saboteurs because the one muscle that we want to use in our brain is what we call our saboteur interceptor. And that’s our ability to recognize those internal voices. And those patterns of thinking that may have served us in the past, but they’re not serving us now. And they’re actually sabotaging our success and our wellbeing. The strongest is our internal judge – The master saboteurs. Even the happiest people on Earth have an internal judge. It’s just part of our physiology as human beings. The internal judge that we have, we can use it to judge ourselves, we can use it to judge other people. And we use it to judge our circumstances. We judge people very quickly, sometimes too quickly, or just based on our experiences. So we have clouded judgment, and we judge or circumstances and automatically, we want to assign a label to it, oh, this is good, or this is bad.

The first thing we do to strengthen that interceptor muscle is to look for the judge or for any of our saboteurs. Start listening and looking for that judge and become aware of it. And when you notice it, label it. Because the power of recognizing it and labeling it is that it starts to lose its power.

And when we talk about saboteurs, we talk about a certain part of your brain that you’re residing in. The alternative to that is our clear headed space or the Sage brain. Imagine your brain to have two distinct parts. On one side of your brain, that’s where all those saboteurs reside. And the other part of your brain. Well, that’s where all the good stuff happens? That’s your Sage brain, and we call it your Sage brain. Because it’s clear, it’s lighter, it’s more focused, it’s the part of your brain where your learning centers reside. And it can handle your challenges that that come in your life with a clearer and calm mind. Ultimately improve the quality of our life.

That’s the place where we can practice self empathy, we can give ourselves a break. And we can empathize with other people, we can try to see things from their point of view, instead of just going head to head where are saboteurs like to be in our sage brain, that’s the part that gets curious. That’s our Learning Center, we can explore things for our lives, we can explore opportunities and alternatives and, and, and new ways of looking at problems. You have the power to take action is the opposite of having the fear.

Barbara’s business is called Big Dream executive coaching. Because she loves big dream. She is anything about big dream, because she changed everything. They host rooms that have everything from journaling, to get those aha and move forward. They also have mental fitness gym. And one of the things we can do really quickly for people is give them a quick assessment, it takes five minutes or less. And it will show people how well they’re currently performing relative to their potential. And we have our saboteurs’ assessment, it’s a two-minute thing that will show you immediately what saboteurs are showing up in your life. Just knowing that can make a huge impact in their lives.

If you want to learn more about Positive Intelligence, you can visit her website: Big Dream Executive Coaching. Barbara is also in LinkedIn and on clubhouse.

Mustafa Ammar is an author and the founder of the Passion MBA, where he is a speaker and consultant for individuals and corporations around the world. He is truly a global citizen who’s lived in five continents and speaks seven languages on different fluency levels. In addition, he has enjoyed success in several fascinating fields, including pharmacy, diplomacy, and multinational infrastructure, banking. He is the author of the passion project, build the career that you were born to have and find your life purpose.

 Mustafa was born in Cairo, Egypt. But he grew up with his family in different countries. His dad used to travel all the time, since he was one year old, so he was traveling with him everywhere. He grew up as a shy kid but always dreaming. When he was six years old, he was asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Then he would say “I want to be an astronaut. I want to be a diplomat. And I will be a soccer player.” He always had that feeling inside that he could do different things. And he could follow always his passions.

Mustafa have to conform at that age, because each time he answer that question with the same answer, people would say that he only has to pick one. Mustafa tried to pick one. But it was never fulfilling for him because he don’t want to do only one thing in life. “It’s only one life and I have to do several things.” He said. But what he decided to do when he was 12 is just follow his passion. So when he was 12, his passion would become a diplomat who would travel the world.

The idea was to just pursue his passion. Mustafa started imagining himself traveling the world and even preparing himself for the exams. It takes a very long process of examinations to become a diplomat. So he started preparing himself until he was 16. Then he decided to be a pharmacist out of his passion for chemistry. He started five years of chemistry and enjoyed it until he had enough of it. So Mustafa decided to be a diplomat, so he prepared himself to be a diplomat, while working as a pharmacist. He then became a diplomat. And in diplomacy, Mustafa worked in the UN in New York, Africa in Malawi and China. At some point, after 11 years of his career, Mustafa thought he needs to change and do something else. His third opportunity came to be working in a Multinational Development Bank. And currently, he is in his fourth career life, he is now preaching all the concepts and values that helped him to transform his life and help people transform their life.

It was three years ago, when Mustafa was in the banking career doing his MBA at the same time in Manchester in the UK. He was very interested in writing, he have at least 20 ideas what to write about and 20 concepts that he could write about. And this is how the idea of the book came. Mustafa thought that he has done this career change a few times, and each time was so successful, despite all the hardships, the doubter around him and the difficulties in doing a very major career shift. From a pharmacist to a diplomat, he had to learn all those skills to be good at it. And then had to move to investment banking and learn new skills and integrate this because he thought that there is a methodology here, the steps that he followed and it worked every time, and the careers he had were somewhat identical. He put everything on a mind mapping chart, he started his fourth career, The Passion MBA based on that and he tried it on other people, and it worked each time.

Mustafa believe in life that if you have your passions, your values, your vision for your dream lifestyle aligned, you can do whatever you want. Mustafa had always aligned his passions with his values and with his future vision. “Our passions change over time.” he said. 10 years ago, we were completely different persons having different interests, different passions, but overtime we evolve our personality, we change, our priority change. So we tend to have different lifestyles to adapt to our new passions. Our values are mostly similar, or sometimes they change over time. But when you have them all together, you can do whatever you want.

Shapeshifter is a nonfictional being or a creature that is able to change his or her physical form all the time. If we apply this to career shapeshifting, it means that, a job shapeshifter is somebody who’s able to change his career and adapting to the environment around him or her. Mustafa said that the benefit of being a shapeshifter, especially after combat when millions of people lost their jobs, some lost their investments and savings. Non shapeshifter claim to one thing all their life, they claim to one measure, one area of expertise, one domain, and that’s it. And even if they want to have something else or try something else they cannot do it, out of fear, or out of conformity, because they will lose their job or because they will lose their savings because they will start something that is risky. But then on the other side, shapeshifters are able always to adapt themselves. So they can live and want different lives in one single life. This is very powerful.

“Even if I’m in my fourth life, I’m planning for my fifth life, maybe five years from now. And it’s much more enjoyable, and entertaining, fulfilling feeling that we only have one life. So I’m not here in this life to pay my bills and just die. I’m here to pursue a life purpose, think of my life purpose, and try to reach it, enjoy myself, fulfill my potential, reach to my full potential and then help people around.” Mustafa said.

Mustafa thinks that we are not able to fulfill our dreams right away. We need some time. So the main idea is not to ignore those callings about those dreams. Spend time on reflection. In order to build that imagination, you really need to reflect every day about life, whether you’re enjoying your day or not, you’re doing your job or not, whether your personal relationships are fulfilled or not, whether you’re happy even if today is the last day of your life or you have lot of regrets that you wish you could have done this or do that. It’s very crucial to live every day with this reflection session, having 30 minutes session every day at certain time and is uninterrupted. But even if you haven’t reached to your goals yet, at least you’re on the way, and at least you’re pursuing them. People don’t regret the mistakes. Often, we would just think about it for a while learn from it and move on. But the long lasting regrets are lifetime regrets, regrets about the things that we wanted to do or we never did the dreams we wanted to pursue or the skills we wanted to learn. Nobody wants to be in that position.

Mustafa had a fatal accident back in 2008. He was in Malawi in Africa, his car flip and it flew not three meters and it broke nine trees. He though that his life is done, he was still 25. And he couldn’t think of too many regrets. He was in a coma and he was suffering for 15 months of some fractures but then later on what he thought is, if he got another chance in life, he have to really live it to the extreme, to his best and fullest potential. “If you have a passion inside yourself, my own definition of passion is; passions are the seeds that God implanted in your heart, in order to pursue your life purpose.” That’s Mustafa’s own definition of passion. So when God plant something in your heart, it means, you should open a door and explore it, if you have a calling about something, don’t close the door, because you will always regret it. And for me, I really didn’t want to regret. Even if it’s difficult, even if it would take some time to build what was coming.

“I humbly advise myself and everybody who’s listening to us. That every day when you wake up. Live your day to full expectations, do your best, think of as if it’s your last day in this life, whatever initiative, and you will really enjoy your day you will be enjoying your life. Even with all the hardships and challenges, at least you will be fulfilled” – Mustafa

2022 is a perfect year for your success. For an effortless success, a type of success that you’ve always wanted but you didn’t know you wanted it. And now you’re going to get clarity on that. Get intentional about what your vision is for success. This is your year to manifest. And if it doesn’t manifest, at least get clear and begin to act towards what it is you’d like to manifest.

Affirmation

When you want to manifest in your relationships, Affirmations can help. May it be a tap in the back or looking at yourself in the mirror and affirming yourself. And, with relationships, affirmation is when you dive deep into loving yourself. When you finally embrace that love for yourself, that love vibrates out beyond your soul, beyond your space, beyond our wildest dreams and whoever needs to feel that love can pick up that sensation and come into your life somehow. So that is a really important step if you are looking to manifest a love relationship.

Feng Shui

Feng Shui can also help in moving from force to flow. Applying Feng Shui in cleaning or decorating your house would allow that excess success to come in. That is a beautiful thing. You can look up that episode. Feng Shui way can help about 20% of the time and the other percent is your intention.

First, in order for you to allow more abundance in your life or health, you may need to heal something that’s a dis ease in your body, to allow more abundance to come in and they can tie in together. So it’s just wonderful to set that intention for all of those areas in your life. And then hold that space for that to manifest in the divine perfect timing.

So then, because the interview went so well, Mark forwarded Charissa’s name to 20 or 30 of his closest friends and they became Charissa’s circle too. Now, there’s an incredible synchronicity of people, journey, and manifestation and that is what Charissa wanted to share. That can be your life too, she said. If that’s what you desire, if that’s what you visualize, if that’s what you want to create. So, this is really your journey, your own Zen success journey.

Charissa is not a practicing Buddhist, but she really does love the philosophy of it. She would say she’s a spiritual person, and she believe in God and the universe. And she believes in whatever it is that you believe is true for you and can help support you on this journey. So, this podcast is not religious, it’s meant to be inspiring. So, it’s meant to be neutral.

And Charissa’s birth date is an eight, which means learning about abundance. And she think that maybe that is why she wanted to do this podcast on Zen success, because she love helping people, have more joy, have a great relationship, live their dreams, and also make more money in their lives so that they’ll be comfortable and not stressed about life and how they’re going to get food on the table. She just really loves igniting people’s success. And that’s that is her life path as an eight.

Meditation

Meditation gets you to drop into the zero point field, the unified consciousness of all that is, and you can get divine inspiration. That’s where a lot of my ideas come in. And sometimes maybe your ideas come in during the shower or when you’re on a walk in nature. Think about where inspiration happens for you and give yourself that self-care. Prioritize yourself because then you can be in alignment and take divine right action when the time is right. Timing of things is also important because maybe at the same time that you’re thinking about them, they’re thinking about you. That is a part of the collective consciousness, that’s part of our own psychic abilities that are being activated in us. Meditation is a powerful tool, to get you to just drop in to that unified field, where you can manifest anything you’d like, and visualizing what you want to achieve.

So taking this goal that you have and putting it into your meditation, that’s what Charissa do with her clients. So after she removes the blocks, she then fills that space in with their dream. She put them right there in the dream, because how to move from force to flow with your goals is you want to align with it, you want to vibrate at the same energy. And so meditation is a great tool for bringing in abundance. Charissa know sometimes when she work with her clients on abundance, She like to first start off with healing the blocks, sometimes you’ll see patterns from their parents on never having enough. And Charissa actually had that pattern, too, with her dad, but not with her mom. So she had kind of conflicting money stories with her parents, which just all wonderful, everybody has their own unique story and pattern.

So there are so many things to take into consideration. Charissa is encouraging you every day to take that time, meditate, breathe, be with yourself and allow the magnificence of who you are to flow through your being. Let your heart expand with what’s possible. And may you move from force to flow and have your own Zen success.

Charissa Sims interviews Ram Castillo, an award-winning Design Director, Author, top-ranking Podcaster, International Speaker, CreativeLive Instructor and Approved Advisor based in Sydney. Specializing in digital spaces, customer experience design, branding and creative strategy. 

His parents originally came from the Philippines. And that’s his cultural background. His father grow up tough in the Philippines, lost his parents early at a very young age and the way out was really education. He was hardworking that he ended up finishing two degrees, Marine Transportation and Mechanical Engineering. But when they got to Australia, those two degrees were not recognized. And so their father did all the work, he worked at a factory just to support his three kids. Ram’s mother was one of five. And she had a mother who really raised them all through a little corner store to get by and a little sewing machine because her father was an alcoholic and wasn’t really around. They tried to ensure that they had opportunities for the future even if they only had a tablespoon of peanut butter and a piece of bread.

It is where the perspective quickly came to Ram, the self awareness of a different baseline. “You look at a world with decrease of getting anything, the patience, the decrease of resilience, because everything’s given to us. I’ve often said that the bar of convenience is so low, it’s so easy to be inconvenienced, that it can be quite dangerous nowadays.” Ram said.

When he was about four years old, he remember sitting in their apartment where they rented. His mother asked him what he want to be when he grow up? And Ram said, “I don’t know, Mom, I just want to make stuff and I was kind of distracted. I would collect empty tissue boxes, toilet paper rolls, I would make robots and cities.” And then she paused and said, “Well, remember whatever you want to do, make sure you dream really big. Dream much, much bigger.” “So she gave me at four years old, that gift, I didn’t know it at the time. But just go after whatever you want. There’s no set rule. There’s no permission that you need from anyone else. Whatever makes your heart sing kind of thing.”

Ram added, “there wasn’t this sort of, you need to pursue this path to be successful. I just never had those pressures. Yeah, granted that we weren’t wealthy, but I always felt that so financially wealthy, but I didn’t feel poor.” “And I guess it only came to high school where I realize that we didn’t have that much. You know, when my friends were getting brand new everything every year …But when I got home, I was so well fed. So well love, I felt safe.”

Ram said that he wasn’t the most intelligent in class. His grades were average or below. But he was great at art and that’s why he pursued design because I knew at a very young age that was for him. He would just constantly draw and make stuff and feeling and gaining a lot of confidence in art. And the thing that he loved most about art specifically and the same thing in design is you can impact someone without ever saying a single word.

Ram ended up wanting to go to a design school that his parents couldn’t afford and it was one of the top design schools in Australia. So what he did, he ended up applying to a no name college that wasn’t even known for having design as part of their curriculum. He took it because it was still the course that he could build his profession. He started in the mailroom career at Ogilvy in Sydney, one of the biggest advertising agencies in the world.

Ram may be over qualified for the job but he had met 350 professionals in his first week. He got to know them by name. He has to, he need to deliver their mail. And that has been the springboard to launching his entire career. Ram shared that when you’re around people, you get exposed to tools, systems, and processes. You get to observe the department stuffs. So you get to know pieces of one of the biggest companies in the world and you get to understand. “That was never taught to me in the course” Ram explained. “Or never taught to me in a book“. “The second thing is people started talking to me, I started building rapport.” Ram said, he basically has 350 coaches and mentors.

Four years after, Ram was already moving into midway designer role going up to a senior and because he was so much more equipped to do that. And then I just the trajectory just increased faster. I started then having to do pre round interviews for the company that I was in at the time, and I was interviewing people that I graduated with for more junior roles because they just didn’t end up getting a job. Ram navigated through and worked for other large agencies. The key part to all this is a multidisciplinary designer. He was able to even design probably one of the most fulfilling briefs that he ever worked on.

He specializes in human centered design, which is basically an application of design thinking methods, specifically there.

Ram’s definition of success is how well does he sleep at night. The reason is because, he had very little and he had a lot and he had everything in between. And if he is not sleeping well at night, then is that really wealthy? Is that really fulfilling? Is that really successful? I’ve had some nights where I’m like, could you have done better? Would you have been more honest? Could you have ever betrayed anyone? Have you ever been someone that maybe negotiated or compromise even their values? Did you disrespect anyone? Did you not?”

“You look at the lives of some very influential very publicly recognized people such as Celebrity Chef Anthony Bourdain. He died by suicide in the 18th of June 2018. Kate Spade, Three days before Anthony Bourdain, she committed suicide on the fifth of June 2018.” Ram said.

“Somebody, you would think that they have it all? Charissa emphasizes. “I mean both of them.” “And it’s just you just never know what’s going on the inside.”

Ram continued, “The most shocking for me was probably Robin Williams, you know, American actor, comedian, he died from suicide at the on the 11th of August 2014.”

According to Ram, success is only relative to the perspective or the operating system that we are viewing as successful. But he often asks people, “Do you know how much future you have left?” ‘And then they’re like, “No”.’ Ram emphasizes that we don’t have to do anything, everything is voluntary. Whatever version success means to you, we don’t have to do any of it. It’s all voluntary. Life is short not to be live. Even in life, there can’t be light without darkness. There can’t be courage without fear. There can’t be calm without chaos. And so when we talk about Zen success now, it’s what matters to you? And how well are you going to sleep at night?

Ram shares that among his interviewed there’s so many who standouts, One is his mentor named, Debbie Millman. She’s very well known in the world of design. She owns the world’s longest running design podcast. “And this will always sit with me,” Ram shared. “She said, RAM, the longer it takes, the longer it’ll last. The more you’ll be prepared for the success when it comes.”

Don’t feel like you have to go it alone. Seek for help. And that’s actually one of the fastest ways to get to where you want. Speak to people who have done what you ultimately want to do. Cut the guesswork.