023 - The Act of Becoming Rather Than Achieving: Part 1

Being in community with others is an important piece of the human experience, but how do we differentiate between belonging and simply being accepted?

In this episode of On This Walk, I’m chatting with Robert Cumming, 6th degree taekwondo black belt, leadership coach, and martial arts teacher. He pours into the lives of his students by teaching them to balance compassion, self-discipline, connection, and determination. He knows the struggle to find a healthy community well, and he uses that life experience to help others become who they are meant to be and ultimately find belonging.

In Part 1, we discuss becoming rather than achieving, the importance of conscious leadership, and how his unique journey has led him through the full spectrum of emotions.

In This Episode

(0:26) How Luke’s life changed when he considered what he wanted to be rather than achieve
(11:26) How Luke’s life story impacted Robert
(14:18) How Rob’s desire for acceptance fueled his passion for connection
(25:19) How Rob’s first leadership role helped him develop his identity
(27:38) The power of conscious leadership
(31:31) How leadership uncovered Rob’s personal need for mentorship
(36:44) The realization and event that changed Rob’s career
(40:48) The emotion that Rob had to work through to process his trauma
(46:00) Rob’s intense pivot and and how he shared the lessons he learned
(55:28) How the pandemic forced Rob to adjust his relationship with work, his family, and himself
(1:00:58) Why we have to confront our fear to grow
(1:06:43) The importance of asking, “What does my behavior say?”
(1:10:22) How our egos can hold us back from connection
(1:15:21) Rob’s hope for who he will continue to become

Notable Quotes

“Respect essentially is re-spect. ‘Re’ – like a rerun, redo, replay. It’s just again. And ‘spect’ or like spectacles on your face. So to look. So, it’s to look again. Respect means to look again. So what I found myself doing is looking at him as a father, as a husband, as those things, as a person who has some growth. There’s a lot of growth that needs to come in that regard. But I had to look at him as a person first, and that actually helped me to move forward. But at the same time, respect myself. Look at myself again. Because I think we often don’t do that. We don’t pause and look at ourselves: ‘OK. Where am I at? And where are we going?’”
“One of the things that gets pointed out to people at times is, ‘OK what’s being expressed is that you want to be right.’ And some people will go, ‘Yeah, actually I do. I want to be right. I want my perspective to be seen.’ And then there’s others that will say, ‘No, that’s not it. That’s not it. I don’t need to be right. They, however, need to know that they’re wrong.’ Either way, it's our ego beginning to present itself in such a way as our right and wrong definitions are the way in which we want others to be, the way we want the world to be, and no understanding gets created in that space… There’s no connection that’s there… I can promise you, you will never have any form of agreement with an individual or any type of alignment, you’re certainly not going to change their mind, if you don’t first begin to understand them.”

Our Guest

Robert Cumming is a leadership expert and martial artist that teaches others the art of connection, compassion, and discipline. After being bullied as a child/young adult and struggling to find healthy friendships, he found solace in the sport of taekwondo. Today, he teaches kids martial arts and coaches others on leadership and empathy in every environment.

Resources & Links

On This Walk

Robert Cumming

Luke (00:00:01):
Welcome to On This Walk, a show about the winding journey of life in all its realness. I'm Luke Iorio. Please join me and my brilliant heart-centered guests each week as we look to navigate this journey more consciously and authentically. Uncovering how to tap back into that sense of connection with self, with soul, and with something bigger than ourselves. Now, let's go on this walk.
Welcome once again to On This Walk. And today, this is a conversation about becoming, not achieving. So let me start our walk through a story that I originally shared online, although I'm gonna expand it a bit. I'm gonna go into some further added detail and some maybe fun commentary as we go, because that actually is what's gonna bring us into today's conversation and how it even began. So, very early in my career, I went through a series of shifts, although I can't truly tell you that I knew at all what I was doing.
I was really just responding to what seemed like it was, was unfolding for me at any given moment. And I was really following the yearnings that were in my heart. It initially, this wasn't the case though, when I came out of college, I was ready to achieve. Like, that was my orientation, was how am I gonna achieve? What does success look like for me? How am I gonna go out and get that? And it wasn't necessarily about climbing the ladder in maybe the more typical, like working for an organization standpoint, but the energy, the ambition of climbing the ladder was absolutely in my energy. It was absolutely part of who I was and the way in which I was working in the world. And so, originally I worked for a small boutique ad agency. I did really well. I got a couple of promotions all within the first year, taking on more responsibility, things I couldn't believe I was doing as a 23-year old, all sorts of great stuff.
And that ultimately led me to another position in a marketing communications job at a medium sized IT company. And it was at that job that a couple of years later placed me on a train heading into midtown Manhattan, New York City on September 11th. And as many of you have heard me mention on past episodes, I did not make it into New York. I did not make it into midtown that day. Our train was cut off, and I witnessed all of the events unfolding and the first tower collapsing from under a mile away, just across the Hudson River in Hoboken, just staring out at the horror that was taking place in southern Manhattan. The experiences of that day started me on a very, very different quest, you could say, and with very different questions than I had really ever asked myself in my life at that point.
However, to be honest, a lot of the questions that were coming up around, you know, who am I? Where am I going? What do I want for my life? I don't even think I understood most of the questions that were coming to me and that I was posing to myself at that time. But nonetheless, that's part of what started my quest and part of me taking a look at how am I gonna do things differently in my life? So it was, what are you gonna do with your life? Is this direction that you want to be in? Is this the work that you want to be doing? All sorts of different questions that started funneling through. And what I quickly surmised was that change was needed, even though I had absolutely no idea what that change should be, where it was I should be going or, or what this was all about.
I didn't know any of those things. I just knew change was needed. And so a couple of months later, I'm sitting outside my now fiancee's apartment that I had actually was just in, in the process of moving into. And it was in the evening, it was dark out. I had driven home from work, and I'm starting to feel like the nervousness sitting outside the apartment building, because we needed to have, I needed to raise a conversation with her that was going to be a little stressful. And so I'm carrying myself up this the long stairs up to our second floor apartment, and then we sit down on the couch and I share that I know that we're engaged. We've got a wedding to pay for. We've got all of this aspect of our life that we are about to get started, uh, on together, but I can't keep working where I'm at and that this is not my path.
I needed to make a change. And so at that point, I had, I had figured out, and this, this was an ongoing conversation at this point with, with Dawn, that I was gonna go work with my father in his business brokerage. And what that meant was that for a give or take about the next nine to 12 months, I'd be working for very little pay with a hope of commission checks somewhere out in the future. And I mean like way out, nine, 12 months out in the future, really, really, really great way to pay for a wedding. Let me tell you. And as I did, I kind of explained all of this that, okay, this is where we're gonna go. And I kind of turn and look at her a little bit playfully, a little chuckling, a lot of nervous laughter of, so what do you think?
She, she somehow agrees. And we found our way to making sure that we could pay the rent for our well under 700 square foot apartment, uh, on her teacher's salary. And that's how we started out. And while I was working to build something new, she was supporting us and we were finding a way of whatever we needed to do to make ends meet. So I started off working with my father, and then I actually also enrolled in an MBA program. Well, about a year later now, we're married, things are beginning to move, things are beginning to grow, starting to get some money back in. So naturally, that's a really, really great time to come home and say, the MBA isn't for me, and I'm not headed in that direction anymore. I don't think I actually want to stay in the business I'm in with my father.
I wanna start a new consulting business because I think that's gonna be something better that I can spin out into. And so now not only are we not gonna be making money again, I'm gonna borrow money and we're gonna take even more and we're gonna go after this new endeavor. And so what, coming back to the, so what do you think? And at this point, Dawn laughs I'll say she probably laughed a little bit more nervously listen this time with me. But she agrees. And we both kind of agreed that I need to see where this was gonna continue to get me to go, like, what, what's unfolding here? And we needed to continue to honor that. So I effectively quit working for my own father, and I began the consulting work. Well, now it's more than another year later. The consulting work is growing steadily.
Things are beginning to look solid. And I make a, a unique arrangement with a new client that I had this new client I essentially was working for, for free with the promise of potential rewards and payout based on the project that we were running. It was kind of a, it was very entrepreneurial, very entrepreneurial, the way that we were doing this. And so the project comes to an end. We did not hit our immediate goals. So the payoff that I was looking for was not there, but it was, and it was because I started to show what was possible at this new company. And with that, I ended up coming home for the third time in about three years, and, and there I am. But now we're not getting engaged. We're not holding a wedding. We're married and my wife is eight months pregnant with our first kid.
And so that's when I come home and say, you know how the consulting business is finally, it's like coming together. I'm gonna close that. I'm not gonna continue with it and I'm gonna go back to work for somebody else. But she knew a lot about the company I was entering into, which was iPEC, the coach training company I was with for, for a very long time. But I get through the whole conversation with her, and yet again, I turn to her go, what do you think? She laughs one more time. But she very quickly actually this time said, that's what you should be doing, that's where you're supposed to be. And she also then quickly added, but would you mind sticking with this one a little longer? And so it did, it stuck out. I was actually with iPEC, as you guys know, for 17 years that only concluded two years ago.
And this journey with iPEC would be one that continued my path of becoming. And to be perfectly honest, it was one that I had to continue facing this conditioning that I had around wanting to achieve because that was something that I was still wrestling with, even through my evolution and through my growth, really my maturing process while I was with iPEC. And I needed to follow, even in this process of quitting three times, I needed to follow those soul nudges that I felt were going on for me to be able to get to where I needed to be. I needed to listen to them as they kept guiding my growth and development, even if I didn't understand how they were doing so. And I also needed to understand what it meant to not listen to them, to not follow them, because that's what led me to ultimately being burnt out many years later.
And even that too, even that moment of burnout was a sacred experience for me. One that was fundamentally important to becoming and recognizing what it was that I needed to leave behind in terms of the way that I was going about things. And so our journeys are forever unfolding. We don't typically get to know where they're leading us. We can't control them. And yet all, all too often, we try to, and that ends with us being stressed out because we can't possibly control everything. It leads to us being unfulfilled because we were following, we're following more of our conditioning, rather than enter into that discomfort of uncertainty and do the really hard work of getting to know our true selves. And frankly, it also led to a lot of feeling trapped and feeling stuck because I ended up with all of these priorities, all of these responsibilities, and usually for very good intention, for very good reason.
But it now felt like I've got no way out because I'd built this wall of responsibility, these things that I needed to manage these expectations I needed to continue to live, live up to. At some point though, we need to follow the new directions that our lives, our souls are nudging us towards. We need to be able to pay attention to those things. There's many ways to do this. We can do this by choice. We can do this gradually by creating space for ourselves and for our development, for the unfolding of what's occurring. We can more rapidly just jump into it as I did a couple of times. We can be forced into it when life says not this way anymore. And it washes out the path that we thought we were on. So, and that washing out, it could be the loss of a loved one, it could be the loss of a job, it could be a health scare, it could be some other big event that may even kick us in the head.
And with that, let me get to our walking partner for today, for the rest of this conversation. I'm gonna be joined in just a second by Robert Cumming. Let me tell you a little bit about Robert, because he has been knocked down more times than he can count, that he was incessantly bullied as a child and that he failed out of school twice. However, Robert made many moves since that time. Robert enrolled in martial arts at a young age, due to the social cruelty he had experienced. This led him to his first career as he helped others see the best of themselves as he provided a way for his students to realize their potential in honor that earned him a position on Team Canada as a trainer for the Junior World Taekwondo Championships. Robert's a husband, a father educator, entrepreneur, leadership coach, sixth degree black belt, and an internationally certified sports coach.
He's also an active member of his community. He's a huge fan of the underdog because he sees himself in every dark horse he meets. Robert's experiences have gifted him with compassion and empathy as he is someone who listens when others speak and feels when emotions are shared without judgment. Robert does his best to practice what he teaches, the importance of making the choice to experience discomfort for the sake of growth, committing to a routine, finding peace every day, admitting mistakes, apologizing when wrong, finding ways to elevate his energy. And recognizing, acknowledging and appreciating the good in life. For those of you who are new to the show, do me a favor. Please, please, please hit that subscribe button so you do not miss one of these conversations going forward. And with that, let's go on this walk with Robert Cumming and our journey with becoming and not achieving. Robert, welcome to On This Walk.
Robert (00:11:15):
Thank you so much Luke, and it is an absolute pleasure to be here and I love listening to you. So that was awesome to be here and alive with you as you, as you do your intro. So thank you.
Luke (00:11:25):
Thank you, thank you. Let me, I wanna dive in a little bit to your story, but let me just ask, is there anything from kind of hearing the story? The part I guess I actually didn't add to anybody was, I shared a little part of this story online at one point and that prompted Robert to reach out to me to tell me a little bit about what he had experienced and, and some of the resonance that we had with, with each other's background and stories. And it led us to have some conversations and it led frankly to, to Rob being here today. Just before we kind of dive into everything, I'm just curious if there's anything, you know, kind of coming into today's conversation, coming into this moment, sitting where you are now that feels alive for you, that feels like it needs to be expressed before we dive in further?
Robert (00:12:04):
Well, thank you for this opportunity to share. That is, when you're speaking, I'm writing down things, you know, I guess it's part of, part of the coach life, but I'm writing things down, but I'm also writing things down, going, there's so many little similarities in your path and mine, which I'm, I'm just sort of going, wow, that's really amazing. And I think often we, we don't recognize how similar we are with others. Commenting, common cross, uh, past the cross. But, you know, one thing that jumped out at me and I wrote it down, I'm reading, uh, a book by Ryan Holiday right now. Courage is Calling. And in that it says, once you are not changing, you are choosing.
Luke (00:12:38):
Yes.
Robert (00:12:39):
And I was like, wow, that, that hit me pretty, pretty hard when I read that. I was like, holy smokes. And, and as I listened to your story and what, what you talked about and how your path, you had different paths. You were sort of going on, alright, we have new path, new path, new path was like, what I heard was you were making choices because change was something that you felt needed to happen.
Luke (00:13:01):
It is, and I, I'm glad you say it that way because I also want to, you know, highlight for everybody. While in those days there was something fueling that energy to keep changing. I also felt the experience many, many years later of suppressing that feeling and, and saying, no, no, no, no, I've got these responsibilities to my team and to the company and to my family and to what I thought was like, this is my career for eons and eons from now. This is what it is. Right? And so I felt these whispers and I felt this call towards change and yet I was stuck and I was almost like paralyzed with the experience that I was having until finally it was, you know, brought me to my knees kind of a moment which people had heard on, on here. We go through different iterations of it. And at that time I was making a choice. It was more of an unconscious choice of trying to stay, to stick things out, to try to keep on the course, even though I was being shown signs that it's time to start looking at different turns. That's, let's look at the forks in the road and start to take one of.
Robert (00:14:07):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And when, when you talked about being stuck in that role, because that was my experience, I think when I reached out to you initially, I was saying, you know, yeah, I've had three times two where I've fallen down, but it was kind of a fourth.
Luke (00:14:17):
Because I wanted you to dive into that because it's, it's, you know, it's great if we can say that we did this intentionally, but more often than not it's not intentional. Well, I finally just kind of gives us the push, the shove or the kick. So I was wondering if you could, you could start to share some of that for us.
Robert (00:14:32):
So essentially as a kid, you mentioned, uh, in the introduction that I was bullied in, especially as a child. And this is when I was younger, we lived in Cornwall, I lived in Canada, so Cornwall, Ontario. And then we moved, uh, actually Kingston to Cornwall, then back to Kingston. And when I came back to Kingston, I was the new kid. And as the new kid within a school, you know, you have to kind of feel out and see who your friends are and maybe who's not really a friend. And unfortunately I had experiences where there were more non-friends than friends. So walking home, you know, I remember just getting, getting picked on consistently by kids who were one, two years older than I was. And the nice thing about being bullied back when I was, if there is that such a thing, is that when I went home, they were closed.
I was cut off from it. You know, I, I was in a loving, supporting family, so it was great, but it was tough. It was tough. So my older sister, she was also incessantly bullied as well, which caused her to switch schools. I followed a few years later and just what it was, my mother finally said, you know, I think your sister had such a great transition, we're gonna transition you and your sister as well. I have two older sisters. So I made that transition and for the first time in my, in my life back in Kingston, I was experiencing some social clout, if you will. I was all of a sudden people were, hey, be my friend. You know, I, I had a girl who, who, who seemed to like me and that and, and she was popular. So it brought me into that social circle, which I wasn't really accustomed to. So here, I'd been starved of that for so many years and now was like, this is what I want. I want the connection. I felt disconnected for so long, I'm connecting now. I want more of this. And that became the driving force in my life. So school, forget it. Right. It was all about the social and that followed me up and through into high school.
Luke (00:16:18):
I was gonna ask you, how how did that continue? Because, you know, I I, I've explored a lot of that in my own journey, right. Of some of the things that I experienced when I was younger and the imprint that they made on me. And a lot of the unconscious choices and habits and behaviors that I created for myself to be able to cope with whatever it was to be able to move on from whatever it was ended up manifesting in different iterations later in life. And some of it, it was an adolescence, some of it was later in adolescence and beyond. And so I'm kind of curious that, you know, you describe it as that kind of, that yearning for connection that was there. And so I'm curious how that continued to play out both in high school and even kind of beyond there. How that was still an underlying, even unconscious motivator for some of what you were getting into.
Robert (00:17:01):
And just before I get into that, I think there, there's elements of that experience that, that are still with me today. You know, I'm 40 years old and they're still, I'm aware of them. I'm aware of them though. I think that's maybe a, there's difference, is the awareness piece as opposed to going into high school in grade nine, I also switched schools again. So it was like another, okay, I'm switching schools again because my family moved to a different part of the town. So it was a new high school, new social group. And I remember, you know, first day of high school and one friend from my old public school was there. And I remember it was a half day. So in this half day, what do you do? Let's hang out. And I'm like, I want to hang out because I want to be with, so I don't wanna go home alone.
You know, too many, too many days walking home and having people follow me. Right. So I, I'm going with the group and I'm gonna go and I remember sitting in a circle around the, near these homes with this group who I didn't know any of them but one. And then guess what happens the first day I see drugs, how they come and I'm like in my mind going, oh my gosh, that's marijuana. Oh my gosh, they're rolling a joint. Oh my gosh. And then they're lighting the joint and there's this, this joint goes around, it's coming to me and in, I'm having this, this whole thing about what I value versus the social element and do I value the social connection more than, than what I leave to be right or wrong? I remember that as it comes around.
And what happened was when that joint came to me, I took it and I inhaled it. And that I think was almost like, okay, that's where we're at. It's the social over the other elements. Right. The other values that you hold. So that sort of set me, I think into, into a path through high school of I'm gonna do what I need to do in order to be accepted by the group. Because that was so important to me. So as we continued on for another few years, it was drinking on the weekend, hanging out, you know, girls in grade nine. I was highlighted as one of the most challenging kids in the school, me and my buddies. Because we didn't care about school. It was about being with each other. And it was all about, all about the parties in the weekend.
So I failed out of science and math, had to go to summer school. Right. And I remember going summer school, great, it's a party because we're going together. Right. It was that kind of a thing. But ultimately that led me to a place where as a, even, it was funny because I was still doing martial arts and it was almost like I wear the different masks at martial arts. I have one mask and in my social group I have another. So I was almost like I was wearing a different person. So the question was who was I? Was I the martial artist or was I the, the the party guy? And that all kind of came together a bit. I think when that one night when I was at a party and I'd been drinking, actually inebriated at one point was Thanksgiving actually when I was 16 years old.
First time that we'd had 911 put into our city. The first time we had a service of 911. So a friend of mine was there as well. Two guys, two or three guys came to beat him up because he was dating one of their girls. It was the whole social drama thing. And I was there, I was there and I decided, you know, hey guys, back off. You know, leave 'them alone. I wasn't trying to fight them or not. And next thing I know I get pushed and I'm getting kicked and punched and curved and then I, I get pulled out of the situation and I'm just completely disoriented. Of course I'm intoxicated at the same time I've been hit in the head. And uh, I say, why are those guys being such assholes? And this guy says, I don't know, sometimes you're just like that.
Then I go inside and I look in the mirror, you know? And, and I know that in this, in your episode as you talk about looking in the mirror, why I look in the mirror and what I see, I see blood. So I see blood, I see red, I get angry. So I go outside and I'm like, who did this to me? Effing this and that, and this guy standing there. And what I, what I realized later was, was the guy that pulled me out, the guy that saved me from the beating initially was staying there and said I did, I pushed him and then he beat me down. I remember waking up on my back, blood all around the, the grass and fading again. Coming back and seeing my parents.
Luke (00:21:00):
Oh wow.
Robert (00:21:03):
Yeah.
Luke (00:21:04):
Wow. Let me approach it from this, this angle is, it's amazing to me the way in which the different aspects of who we are, the different roles, the masks that you've alluded to, that we've talked about, that we can play in our lives. We can show up in these different ways, in these different perspectives. And yet at some point they're going to intersect. Right. They're going to clash. And this issue of social connection, social acceptance is one that is so prevalent. I would say it's obviously occurs most in our adolescence, but I'm not sure that many of us ever really fully developed beyond that initial protection mechanisms and coping mechanisms and ways of relating for the sake of getting social acceptance in some way. And that could be social acceptance from the group that we're trying to ingratiate ourselves with. It could be social acceptance by rejecting them before they can reject me so that I get, you know, accepted somewhere else.
It can show up in many, many different ways. I would love for people to take a look at how formative their relationship to social acceptance and social connection early in, in their earlier days has really been on them. Because I think it informs so much of the way in which we then end up showing up. And what's interesting because, of this becoming journey that we're speaking to today is that it some point we do need to reconcile how we have become accepted or tried to gain acceptance socially with then recognizing we don't accept ourselves.
Because then that becomes the next, that's the journey. I mean that's the journey of becoming is getting into that place. And so I'm curious, you quite literally, you know, you'd use the phrase with me when we were, we were offline, it's why I kind of, you know, teased it as we teed things up, that sometimes that life redirection can come in the form of getting kicked in the head. Not to make light of, of obviously where, where you've been. But I'm curious at that moment, you're now moving on. You've had the experience where you were on the lawn, you were bleeding, your parents are there, you've got to reconcile the situation that you've been on. Where do things go from there?
Robert (00:23:13):
I remember being in the hospital. A friend came to visit, my father was there and I was, I wasn't quite part of the conversation because I was still a little foggy. But I recall this, my dad was talking with my friend and, and my friend was almost saying that party kind of having a debate about partying and being social. And my dad was saying, look at this guy. He goes and he runs every night. He does martial arts, he does all these things. Why does he need that? And it was almost like they were arguing my life.
So it was really interesting to see that. So from that situation, I was away from school for a while. They broke my jaw, a metal plate, two screws in my jaw. I think when we had initially scheduled to talk, I had to actually get a tooth removed. That was based on the trauma that happened back then. Some 32 years ago. So that, the whole idea of that trauma, that took me a while to come back to school even. And I remember even as a 16 year old kid, I had almost a beard because I hadn't, couldn't shave and that sort of thing. But that was a moment where I, I had to make that choice again. What? You're not changing, you're choosing. So what happened was I started to move away from that social group because one thing that I realized was I wanted friends.
I wanted to be, to fit in. Right. I, I wasn't looking for a group to belong to because the whole fitting in thing is I gotta change me to be with you. But the belonging thing is you accept me for me. And what, what the defining thing for me was no one stood up for me. The girls, some girls were there and they stood up for me. But no, no one, none of my friends stood up for me. Saving Rob wasn't worth a punch in the face. Right. Or, or whatever. So it was, it was, I will stand up for my friends regardless because they're my friends. Right. But we belong. But I realized that, so I switched my peer group completely and I actually went to Fuller Way and I went to church. And I spent, spent a number of years in the church. Again part of that agreeing as a youth group accepting. And I stayed there all the way through high school. What ended up happening was I went to school and I realized it wasn't for me, but I had an opportunity to take over a martial arts academy because my instructor was moving back to Hong Kong. I'd done martial arts for 10 years at that point. So it was was a good time to, to make that transition. And I learned so much about me, who I am, what I want, and just engaging with people.
Luke (00:25:19):
Take me through a little bit of that, right. You at some point have this recognition whether it was conscious or not at the time, that you wanted to begin to gravitate towards belonging as opposed to joining. Right. And that belonging was really that you sensed there was a longing within you to be who you really are and that that's how you wanted to be accepted. Take me through a little bit of, of kind of that portion of the journey of how did you, at that point, and this may be a many year thing, obviously begin to get a better sense of who you really were. So you even knew what you were accepting about yourself, that you were also then asking others to accept you for.
Robert (00:25:57):
What jumps up to me right now is the idea of I became less of a follower and more of a leader. And what I did when I took over the martial arts academy, I went from assisting my instructor to becoming the instructor at 22 years of age. So what I started to do things that, you know, being a part of the community, doing fundraiser for different organizations, teaching children and adult classes, and really starting to help people in a way that I don't feel that I was helped as much as a kid.
I was a little more, maybe more explicit at helping kids becoming the better versions of themselves. And we had a competitive program and part of that competitive program meant that we would train students to compete. And it was the Olympic sport of Taekwondo that I taught at that time. So it, you had a, you had a path to the Olympics potentially. So we had a or very good organization, you could compete recreationally, you could potentially nationally, internationally. And as I got more devoted to that type of coaching, we had started to have students who started to perform. And one student, he was, he started training with me when he was 10, at the age of 14, he went to the world and that was Istanbul. So we went to, went to Turkey for, uh, in 1998 for, for the World Games. And I was brought on as, as the team trainer and what an amazing experience. But that was the beginning of creating a team because I'd never, as I grew as I, as I was training, I never had a team to train with per se. And my instructor wasn't super into the sports element of coaching more the martial arts. But I had a real keen interest in, in competition. Right, And, uh, I think we learn a lot about ourselves through competition. Right. When we get ups and downs.
Luke (00:27:39):
Okay. Here's the thing. I wanna lean into what it means to be a leader and a follower for a moment. Let's start with being a leader. To be clear, being a leader has nothing. And I mean nothing to do with your title or position or status in life. Leadership is simply interaction where influence occurs, the influence can be positive or negative, focused consciously or unintentionally. And the impact can be minimal or maximal. A leader is the individual in that interaction who knowingly or unknowingly creates the greater influence on the other person. What Rob started stepping into was consciously leading, meaning consciously thinking about the positive influence and impact he could have on those he supported in choosing actions and communicating in a way that was congruent. As kids, we don't typically have that level of self-awareness or even overall mindful awareness to consciously lead others, which to try to get by to fit in to figure out who the heck we are all while dealing with the pressures of family.
And what are you going to be when you grow up? The more strong willed or outspoken kids become your defacto leaders again because they influence unconsciously and impact those around them. For better or worse, as we grow up, there's a lot of followership, again, whether conscious or unconscious. We aren't yet fully aware of the amount of influence our upbringing, heritage, local socioeconomic factors, race and so on have on how we relate to the world, let alone how specific human beings or people we look up to are directly influencing us. For a lot of people, this level of unconsciously following can go on for much of their lives. We even need to become conscious followers. Meaning to be conscious of the influence that others are having on us. Jim Rohn famously was quoted saying, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Not the five people you love the most, not the five people you respect the most, but the five you spend the most time with. And that's a good place to start looking, although I'm gonna add one more element and that's what are your top three sources of information? Because if it's media or any hyper-focused media or social media where you're only getting fed the information, the viewpoint of information that you wish to have, then it's having a massive effect on how you process information for yourself to be a conscious follower. And to be clear, we all follow and we all lead throughout our lives even within the same day. To be a conscious follower requires discernment and mindfulness on your part. It requires you to be engaged and active in what it is that's influencing you. It requires considering when things are in alignment for you and in alignment with what matters most to you.
It means thinking critically at times and questioning the source of information. It means being very intentional about who you let influence you and being critical about whether that influence is helping you bring out your higher self. That unique essence that each of you are and that offers unique gifts to enrich your world. Okay. I think you've caught the key word in what I wanted to raise here. And that's conscious. We're consciousness. We need to be conscious of how we lead and conscious of how we follow. Both should be in alignment with the core of who we are. And actually I just created a new workbook that captures an alignment process that I've been using with clients for years. Go to onthiswalk.com/alignment. It's yours free. Thanks for being here. Now let's get back to Rob in the pursuits we went on thinking that was the way, well until it wasn't.
Let me ask it from, from ask from this perspective, because this is something, knowing a little bit of the, the next couple of kind of iterations that you go through, a couple of of new turns around the life wheel, as it were, that, that are are forthcoming. One of the things that I recognized is that there was, if I talk about this in stages, there was a stage in my life where I was pursuing, and originally it was pursuing of achievement because I thought that was, right. That's what I was told. This is your path to success and happiness and all the things. And it was a very outer orientation that what's outside of me, if I can, if I can create what I want outside of me, then inside of me will feel better, right? Then that stage ultimately gave way to this sense of purpose, but I was still pursuing purpose.
And what I mean by that is like, even when I was with iPEC, which was just this wonderful, you know, experience for, for as long as it was, there was still a part of me that was pursuing purpose as if I got the one thing, like this is what I'm here for, then all of a sudden everything else would fall into place. So it was still this idea of pursuing something that felt like it was outside of me, but it was more noble. Right. It was not just about about the material or otherwise, it was more noble. It was more aligned. It felt good until I finally recognized that I needed a completely different orientation and I, I completely redefining what purpose meant to me. We can cover that in a bit. So I'm just kind of curious for you, as you started to go on this evolution that originally part of that pursuit was in the social acceptance, social connection that was there, and then you turn that into something that is more purpose-filled in the way that you are serving others in the way that you had not been served. You're creating a team around you, you're creating a new environment, you're able to show up more authentically in that space, or at least as far as you had known yourself at that time. And so I'm curious, when you hear me describe kind of these different phases, I'm curious where this fits for you because you, you still had a couple of changes yet to come.
Robert (00:33:26):
You know, I think when I was leading others and helping others succeed, part of me was like, what about me? You know, I was watching students compete, provincially, nationally and, and some going to world championhips and, and here I was still a young man in my twenties. I'm like, what about me? What about my potential? And that, and I had, I didn't have someone who I felt to really help lead me in that direction. So as a mentor, I had no one to mentor me like I was mentoring others. That's why I helped create that team around me and, uh, not just in my, in my academy, but also outside of it a bit. And started to travel and, and build relationships. And then I felt that I was starting to really find that mentorship, albeit through a different, a few different people to help me step into time where I could actually see what, what I could do. Not just what my, my students could do.
Luke (00:34:17):
Two notes on that for everybody. Number one is I love the fact that you just reframed that recognition of at some point the question of, well, what about me? What about my potential? The very often we end up creating the very things that we need, right? So it, we are giving out to others what we actually want for ourselves. And so I invite everybody to just kind of take a look at what is it that you are creating? What is it that you are trying to move forward or bring together within your life? This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just to take something that might have been unconscious and make it conscious so that you can understand what you're doing can be greatly aligned. It can be wonderfully noble and it may also highlight for you something that you still need more of in your life.
And that connected me to the second thing that I just wanted to mention to everybody, when we hear this idea of mentors, whether that be through a traditional mentor, a coach, a guide, a whatever, right? Whatever your mentor is, is it can be multiple people. Like it doesn't need to be one person who is like the guru that you are, are following, as it were. It can be multiple people who help you to advance in their special way, in a way that is aligned for you. And so at times, you know, I've, I've had many mentors in my life. They've changed throughout the course of my life as I have changed. There are times where I've worked with many people simultaneously. There are time that I've worked with only one. There's time that I've worked with none because I needed to be my own mentor and I had to tap into that.
So I just, I wanted to highlight that. Cause it's actually, again, it's a, another important thing in this journey is that we're not looking for like the one person, the one thing, the one situation that fulfills this need. It can come from multiple different perspectives, multiple different angles. And a lot of what Rob is, is displaying and, and talking about here, what I'm talking about here is bringing so much of this back into our awareness. Something that Rob, you said before, bringing these patterns, bringing the, the recognition of what might be working in the background of who we are, bringing that to our awareness so that we can decide is that operating in a manner that is healthy, that is balanced, that is moving me forward in the way that I wish it to? In which case, great, that's fantastic. And now that I'm aware of it, I can repeat more of it.
Or is it something that is not getting us where we wanna be? That it's unhealthy, it was unchosen, it was something we were conditioned for or something that was born out of fear or coping? Great. I now have awareness and I can change that. And so it's, all of it births through that awareness process. What I wanted to come back then too is that you're able to build this team, you're able to do all these things and at the same time you now are starting to ask these different questions that lead you to different forms of mentorship along the way. What does that begin to lead you to?
Robert (00:36:58):
I've always, so it's always these little moments where it's just like, it's an aha. It's, you talk about the awareness. Aha. And I remember at Christmas time playing video games, you know, having, having a strong bow cider and, and just kind of going, I don't like how I feel. I'm not enjoying the state that I'm in, physically, emotionally, psychological, I'm not enjoying this. You know, I, I'm putting hours into this system on my off time, you know, taking in the extra sugar of the alcohol and stuff and just, I'm not producing what I want. So it was at that moment I said, I'm gonna compete. And that was that culminating event in that, in that stage of my life, I'm gonna compete. So I went from like 199 pounds to like 155 pounds in probably about five months. And healthy. So like when to do it, do it, right.
Because I had to compete and I said, I'm gonna compete at lightweight, which is what I competed at a couple times when I, when I was younger, but not seriously. So I was gonna do that. And then I was not just leading the team, I was a part of the team. And that one thing that I always talk, think about is the idea of leadership and leadership can be lonely because we are, we're always having to lead everyone, but where is it that we can find that we can actually fit in and be led as well. Right. And be influenced as well. And I found that in my, in my team that I had and we started to really bond. It was great to, to have me experiencing as my students were experiencing. Not just sitting from the coaching line saying, yeah, do this, do that.
You know, looking in, but actually to be in the battle if you will as well. So that was, that was great. And we started to really achieve, I know I won the provincials the one year we went to, uh, U.S. Open. I think I won my first match 29 to four, which was, which was a really difference in Taekwondo as more the game has changed. But that was a big difference. But I performed really well at U.S. Open and they came back to nationals and I performed well again. And then the next year people were starting to buzz about my name, which is always nice to hear and it's people's opinion. But it's nice to hear, you know, nationals were gonna be in Kingston where I, where I live, where I had my academy, which was great. And they said, we think Rob may win lightweight nationals.
So hearing that was like, was amazing. I was like, wow, you know, here I am coaching and then I jump in the ring and with my team, it's a strong team and look at it, look at how we're performing. And now people are starting to buzz about me. It was like, you know, what about me? Well this is for me. I've put the work in. So this is for me, I'm, it's start, things are starting to come together. So it was, it was actually pretty awesome to hear that. And then I remember the new season starting and we had a, a good connection with the military team. They had cism and they would often, so my students from military and they go to the worlds as well. And we would train with the military team, the military national team frequently because my friend ran the RMC team, he was our coach.
So one of the heavyweights called me up, it was just on the long weekend in September. And he said, Rob, I'm down here visiting my wife's family. Can I come and train with you? I said, yeah, come on down. So he was the national heavyweight military, 255 pounds. And I remember warming up and warming up. We do something, it's just like light sparring. So you really touch light, you know, just moving, moving the body, moving the body. It's to warmth. So you can do more heavy training later in the session. And I remember sparring with, with him, and as I'm kicking, I'm a hundred pounds lighter, so I'm obviously faster and I'm tagging, tagging, tagging. And next thing I know I've been hit with a full spin hook kick in the forehead, which has crushed my skull, my eye sockets, and my nose.
Luke (00:40:24):
Wow.
Robert (00:40:24):
Never felt anything as painful in my life from, from that. So it was horrendous. And I remember I had to get operated on to get facial reconstruction and you know, it took me again, like the previous kick in the head, it took me months to get back to normal. Yeah. It was, it was, it was a time of, of afterwards to reflect, is this what I want? Is this where I'm supposed to be? Yeah.
Luke (00:40:48):
That's sort of what I, I'd like you to go and elaborate further into. But just to kind of paint this again for everybody, you pull a team together, you start to receive the mentorship that, that you're looking to perceive in various ways. You are both leading as well as having this group around you that you feel like they can lead you at different times in different ways. You have a really successful showing at the U.S. Open. You then, the next year are like, hey, Robert Cumming, he's, he's the lightweight guy, we got him. This is like, and then it's gonna be held in your city. Like all the stars are aligning. And then it's gone. As you go into reflection, I'm curious if you can explain sort of what it was like to grapple with the loss of what was almost as well as then what the reflection opened up for you.
Robert (00:41:46):
I remember anger, a lot of anger, tears. But anger because we always, and I always say no to my students cause I still teach youth martial arts. I say when we have a partner, we take care of them and then they take care of us. Like that's part of it. And it's, if it's in competition, full content competition, then that's part of the game you accept. But I was never hit like that in competition because we was ready for it. But the fact that I, I felt it was his anger that caused it, I was angry because of that. It wasn't just an accident, it was a reaction to something that, that he did not like. So, you know, often we think maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was this, maybe it was that. And I don't want to, I've forgiven him. I let that go because it doesn't serve me.
You know, a guy's 255 pounds, that's a lot of weight to carry. Right? So I don't want that. But I know there was an event that was replicated with this person. But actually I think that was the last time they had, they put a uniform on and competed because of that quick switch. So there was anger there because you know, why? Why would you do that? Why did that happen? All of these questions kind of came out, you know, like you said, everything was aligning and then it was taken from me.
Luke (00:42:55):
Yeah. What did you need to connect to or go through in order to create the forgiveness as well as acceptance for what was now a new path?
Robert (00:43:07):
Yeah, that's, I'm a talker and I think talking about that, what was a very important piece of that I don't, and I look at the person like respect essentially is, right, re-spect, re – like a rerun, redo, replay. It's just again. And "spect" to like spectacles on your face. So to look, so it's to look again, respect means to look again. So what I found myself doing is looking at him as a father, as a husband, as those things, as a person who has some growth, there's a lot of growth that needs to come in that regard. But I had to look at him as a person first. And that actually helped me to move forward but at the same time respect myself, look at myself again. Right. Because I think we often don't do that. We don't pause and look at ourselves, okay, where am I at? And where are we going?
Luke (00:44:02):
I love the redefining or the, the clarity there of respect to be able to look again. And I think as we look again something that you bring up through this part as well, and people may have have heard me mention this on the show. Uh, it's this relief kind of wonderful quote from Father Richard Rohr, uh, who's a great writer and everything else, talks about how hurt people hurt people. And when we look again at those that we feel have wronged us, who've taken something away from us, but we can see their humanity, we can see they're a father, we can see maybe something about their background. There's the part of our mind that wants to do that so that we can understand. But there's also a part of it that I think is from our heart that wants to see the humanity in the others that are around us, even if they have hurt us.
And there is something that allows us to, I guess, connect with them in a different way. Not necessarily to condone anything that's unfolded, but it allows us to open up and say, I don't need to carry this with me anymore, that I can, I can release this in whatever way. And it's, that's one of that aspect of a process that begins in supporting that. And I, the reason why I also bring it up though, is that part of your journey. Cause I know again, part of what's coming next in terms of where you go is that when we also have that perspective, it puts further focus on ourselves for our self-healing and taking responsibility for that which hurts inside of us and not projecting that hurt out onto others. So just like it may have been done to us, we don't wanna be the person who perpetrates that to others.
And that requires self-healing. It requires us doing that work. And it sounds like with kind of each evolution, each revolution even, that you've gone around the wheel through this process, there's more and more healing that is beginning to occur. There's more opening that's beginning to occur. And I want to ask a little bit about the work you're doing today, but we'll do that in a bit, because I think that's also what you're encouraging in the students that you now serve. But I'm curious if you would, if you would pick up kind of the story right? Of you've now quite literally been knocked down severely again, you are going through the aftermath of not only that physically, but also the emotion of saying goodbye to what had been. Because you, you can't compete anymore. Forgiving those that you feel like have kind of robbed you from, from what was to come. And you're working through that and then somewhere in there you begin to start to put new threads together again. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that.
Robert (00:46:29):
Yeah, yeah. You know, one quote that I love is fall down seven times, get up eight. Or rise eight. I love that. I know, um, Angela Eck, she's said the grit guru. I know that she really likes that quote. I think she even said that she, that would be the tattoo that she would get. But when you, when we look at grit, it's what a passion, perseverance, and purpose. But within that definition is also hope. And I think for me it was in that moment being able to see a better future. Being able to, to see that I had the ability to be able to see that future come to fruition and able to look at the different paths ahead of me or find new paths to find that future, which really helped me to move forward. So be, and one thing that I know that I would always wake up in the morning and go, what about your education?
It was always, because I, school was never important to me. It was never important to me. As I said, it was a social connection. But then as I got older and I learned more about me, learned more about others, I was like, maybe there's something to this education piece about helping me grow, me grow. Because I never saw it at school, as helping me grow. Right. I, I saw it as something else. It was off homework. I gotta, it's, it's work. It wasn't about investing in myself. So I was now at a point where I'm like, I'm gonna invest in me. And I remember going to my local college where I'd dropped out before and previously before I dropped out at university. So I went back to my college, I said, I have some credits. How long would it take me to get a, get my diploma here?
And they worked it out and I had one heck of a year, I have one heck of like, I had eight classes per semester. And I was still running the business like full time. So I was in school early, eight o'clock in the morning, school all day, go and teach until like eight, nine o'clock at night and then go and do my homework. And it was, I could start that as one of the best times in my life, one of. Because it was, everything was together. Right. They say, if you want something done, give it to someone who's busy. Right. Because I had it all balanced out and I, and I, my grades were phenomenal. What ended up happening was I had a, a path I wanted, speaking of different paths. Right. I had a path, I'm gonna go to Potsdam, which was United States, which could get me a teacher's degree.
College diploma, go and do school there and then get my teacher's degree and then start teaching. But then I'm gonna sell my school and I'm gonna sell my school. And I had someone show up and buy my school and they liked watching me teach so much. They said, well you come to Korea and teach Taekwondo in Korea. And I was like, what? Me go to Korea? You're gonna pay me to go to Korea and teach? I love the whole Korean culture. I was like, yes, yes. I love Korean food, love the whole culture, everything, the respect. I was like, so I sat to my parents and I was like, even as a 28 year old, actually I was a 30 year old man, I was like, can I go dad? I almost had that because it was, so I almost wanted permission to go.
And he looked at me, he says, I don't know how you can't. Okay. So, so I went and it was a wonderful experience for me to go there and, and, and be there. I taught 80, a hundred kids a day. 80% of them didn't speak English, but I had the Taekwondo Korean, I could, I could teach them. And it, it was, it was really neat. And I think, uh, I may have shared this with you before, but years later, the people who I taught for recorded every, every class that I taught. And I didn't know that. So I'm like, okay, I didn't know that, but I guess I was in a different country. And then they came back to, to Canada and they started their academy and they, they said, the one guy, I met him at a competition years later, he says, you're the spirit of our school because how you teach is how we now teach.
And I was like, I felt, you know, again, humbled and, and and honored to hear that my way of teaching was, was inspiring other instructors to influence other, other children. So that was really cool. But then I returned to Canada and I decided to go to a university in Quebec. And I finished my, my teacher's undergrad there. I came back to Kingston to go to Queens University to do my bachelor's of education. And that was a whole other experience for me as well. Being a kid had been bullied and then dealt with social cruelty his whole life, I once again was come, come face-to-face with bullying in the schools. And we expect that on the playground. You do, you know, you hear about it all the time, but often what we don't expect is to see the people in authority doing the bullying. And I was like, this is not cool.
Like, I know what it's like to be a leader. I've led people. Right. And helped them succeed. This to me is not leadership. So I, I stayed on and did a master's of education and the whole focus was really on how to create healthy relationships in the classroom. So it was, it was awesome to look at that. And often we, again, it's the respect, look again. I looked at the teachers and first I was like, how dare they? And I was like, wait a second, these teachers are burning out. Then they're lashing out. There's stress, there's conflict, there's all kinds of things with teachers. So they're dealing with and they don't want the tools to deal with it as effectively as they would like. Because I would ask students and I'd go and talk to like 700 pre-service teachers at lunch. And I'd need to ask them, why are you here?
I wanna make a difference. I wanna make a difference. I wanna make a difference. And everybody wanna make a difference. Those teachers who were lashing out at one point in time, they were saying, I wanna make a difference. They just lost their path. So I was like, how can we help teachers do this? So I, I got involved in it in some teacher training and doing those, bringing something in called verbal judo. And then I ended up, which was really cool. And then because I didn't have the tools to say, this is what you do, teachers would come to me and say, what are the tools? What do we do? I said, I'm just saying this is the problem. You know, I don't have the solution. So I said, okay, I'm gonna go and find it. And I, and I found, I found verbal judo and trained in that, traveled around Canada doing some different things with the head of verbal judo Canada.
And then I found myself at St. Lawrence College back where I started a few years earlier teaching. Teaching what? Stress management conflict education. And what happened was, so many of my students, they would come to me and say, I wish I had these skills when I was younger. And I heard this for years. And I thought, said to my wife, I said, I've doing martial arts for so long, what if we used martial arts as a vehicle to teach life skills to kids? And, uh, she was fully on board and reopened up what's what we call Jung Do and jung do in Korean means the right way. So the Jung Do Martial Arts Academy. So we ended up evolving that as time went on. And again, why did I do that? I wanna make a difference. Right. The teacher, me, I wanna make a difference. And we, we started off small. We gradually built up, we started doing summer camps after school programs. We had a hundred kids in our summer camps per week. And we'd have community events. One of the last ones we did, 1200 people showed up. It was amazing. And, um, then COVID, another knockdown.
Luke (00:53:17):
There was many things there, but I'm gonna reserve kind of comments for the next piece. But there was one piece I wanted to call out, which was your ability to pivot. And so when you were faced with get another change, you couldn't compete anymore, it's now time to figure out a new direction. Again, whether you intentionally did it or not, you recognized your ability to create a pivot. You had already done it a couple of times before in your life. Most notably what you shared in, in kind of the changes you went through in high school and, and then moving towards church and building a kind of a different unit around you and all that. And again, what I wanna call out for everybody is very often when we get into these very challenging environments where we're, we're faced with a lot of different choices that maybe we hadn't intended that have been forced upon us, but nonetheless, we are, it's time.
We've gotta make some choices about where we're gonna head next. We can feel the stress of it and get shut off from being able to see the strengths that we have had and we have relied on in our past. And so for us to be able to take a look at, you know, in our, in our lives when we have been faced with a challenging decision before, what have we relied on? What were the strengths that showed up for me at that time? What worked, what didn't work? What did I learn at those times? And so to, to use those moments with a little bit of that self-exploration so that we can remember we have faced tough times before. We have found our way through it. Sometimes very well, sometimes not so well. Either way, there are things that can be lessons that can be drawn from what we've been through that we can now apply to where we are right now.
But when we're in the stress of things, we very often forget that part of the process. Right? Again, I, I was bringing up that topic of self-healing before, and I can hear kind of in your story, the things that were very, very healing following the nudge to go overseas, to be able to train overseas, to soak up that experience for all that it was not even knowing the ramifications, the impact that you were having on others who would then go on to start their own studios. Right? And then what that also does in terms of you developing your own kind of coaching, your teaching style and a recognition and really starting to lean into the way that you do that. And then being able to see that juxtaposed with what you were experiencing when you came back here inside of, of education and, and furthering your own degree and furthering your own education. And so I'm curious, take us into the pandemic and how much needed to pivot and also how relationship became yet another key focus for you.
Robert (00:55:38):
It was essentially we got the message and we were closing down because all, all the places in Kingston like this where we're shutting down, martial arts or after school programs or what have you. So I went essentially from a full-time entrepreneur where I worked a lot to get my business. And people, I, I spoke with friends of mine who are actually were there and they had their children in our programs, and loved our programs. And they made a comment about yeah, every time we saw you, there was always, you're always thinking we could tell it. There was always some, some program running in your head because I was preoccupied with what was going on, uh, for as far as running the business. So, and what had happened was when that stopped, the whole world paused. We all know that. The whole world paused and I couldn't run my business.
Right. A business that at one time my, I believe five year old son at the time had said to me, Papa, you like work more than us. Never forget it. And I'm like, my heart ripped out of my chest. I'm like, no, but what did my behavior say? Absolutely it said yes. Right. Because I was choosing, I was choosing work over him as, as as he would see it. Right. Because we had babysitters throughout the week and every night of the week I was gone. Babysitters were him. My wife worked long hours too. So in the first few years they saw a lot more babysitters and they saw us. And we didn't, we didn't want that. But we were choosing that. We were choosing that. So now here I am, my wife's a frontline worker, so she's working and I'm here with the kids full-time.
We had a lot of debt because we had things that we had done and we had summer camps, we had to refund everything. I remember getting phone calls, we're stopping, we're stopping refund, refund. And I'm just like, like literally a hundred thousand dollars, see you later. Like it was just going out the door. And I, the stress of this. So it was really a tough time for me worrying about the future of what, what's gonna happen financially. But also now here I am with two children. I think at the time they were, um, seven and five, my children, what's going on? Right. And, and like we were stuck in this, in our house. We couldn't go anywhere and I couldn't fight for my business. So I fought with my kids. It was almost like this, I can't, I feel helpless, but then, and I want you to do this and I have all these expectations.
So I'm fighting with my children. And what I've realized just in reflecting on this, is the fact that I was fighting with myself. Right. It was that, it's that internal fight that I had versus that, that flow. Kinda going with, versus resisting. Cause I was resisting something and I remember being unhappy. I remember we did, we switched, everything went from in-person to online. So it was all digital. And even we went from 150 students to 40. I remember getting ready, I had to teach that night and I was just like, I'm not doing it. I can't do it. I said, I'm sick. And I remember it was, it was more depression, feelings of depression than it was what sickness. I just, I didn't have it in me to do it. I can't, sorry everybody, not feeling well, you know, we'll do it the next time.
And I remember that. And this was leading me up to similar moment to when I was on that PlayStation years ago, 199 pounds again. Right. And I was like, and I remember it was a very tough day with the kids. Been fighting with the kids all, all, all day. I remember standing beside our, our bed and I was just like, head down, I'm changing this. Making this change. I'm, I'm gonna take my time. So I started getting up at five o'clock in the morning and I started doing stretching and routines and meditation focusing on me. Right. And, and workouts so that I could take care of me so that I could then take care of others. Right. And maybe when I took care of my team before and then I took care of me, maybe now it's taking care of me first so then I can take care of my team.
And that was such a nice switch and it really changed a lot of things. Nothing was perfect. I tell my parents, my, my children, I say, don't expect perfection from me. When I make a mistake, I apologize. Right. And then we, we're, we're gonna mend things and we're gonna, we're gonna talk about it. We're gonna get to the root of it, you know, no ego, let's talk. And we had a really good growth experience this our, for our relationship because I'm, I'm all they had. Right. They'd see my, my wife on the weekends and, and in the evenings. And at one point my son said, can you go to work and can Mama come home?
Right. But it's that now I'm here. He this, you, you asked, have me here. I'm here. And we were really kind of in that together. So it was, it was awesome. And then one of the parents from the academy who liked the way I teach and loved how I connect with people wanted to do work with me. And they're the one that suggested iPEC. They said, I know similar did iPEC. And uh, they suggested that I do this. And it was amazing experience because it really compounded the experiences I was having because it allowed me to re-look into that mirror and see. And I remember having some pretty powerful experiences. I was told once Leanne Wild, awesome coach. She said, listen, you're like a duck on water. I was so calm on the top. And my legs were just like, she said, it was a group coaching thing and people were trying to coach me and I just wasn't letting them. I was all talk, all talk. And she's like, whoa, I can't handle this anymore. You know? And the reality was, I couldn't handle it either. I couldn't handle it either. But I didn't, I didn't know that, you know, and that, that boom, that realization of, my God, you see me? Now I can see me. That, that helped again to make another shift.
Luke (01:00:58):
What was all of the paddling under the water? What did you need to let go of so you could finally start to coast more?
Robert (01:01:04):
I think it's how I'm seen. When I was a kid, it was all, you're accepted based on how people see you. You're bullied a lot of times based on how people see you. And that social element was really important. Fitting in is based on how people see you. So those elements were still there. How are you seeing me? I can't have you see me break down and cry. I can't have you, you see the true me. Because what happens if you don't like me? if I don't feel I belong? And now I don't even fit in. So guess what? You're marginalized. You're on the outside buddy. And that fear of how I'm seen is, is something I deal with all the time still. But that was like a, it was, it was a, a punch in the face. But it was a good, it was really good because it was like, it was like, kind of, kind of shocked me. And I was like, wow. And there actually was, actually that comment that I actually reached out to Leanne and I said, can you coach me? And, and maybe we started and she helped me, helped me with those elements. So it was really great. Yeah.
Luke (01:02:11):
Let's take this analogy for yourself for a moment and maybe even make it a quick exercise. See yourself gliding along a quiet pond as a duck. And then feel your feet under the water paddling like crazy just to keep moving along. Well what's that paddling about for you? What's under the water that only you know about that influences how you show up? How you make decisions, who you let into your world and how you see yourself. For what Rob shared, I'll raise my hands to this one too. I was a shy kid, a wallflower level shy. And I was constantly thinking about how am I being seen? It felt crippling at times. This fear of what others think of me is true for a lot of us. It's wired into our evolution. We needed to fit in because we're a relational tribal species. We needed to belong or we didn't survive.
And so we start only showing the parts of ourselves that we think will accomplish that sense of, or result of belonging, dominant traits develop that support this or try to support this. And then we start disowning parts of ourselves that feel vulnerable and that need to be protected by tucking them away. Have even posted about this recently on LinkedIn that, you know, I used to use things like people pleasing as an unconscious attempt at controlling other people's opinion of me. If only I can make them happy, they'll like me or they'll respect me or they'll value me as opposed to simply knowing my value in the first place. In other instances, since our safety doesn't fully rely on the tribe anymore, although being away from the tribe does greatly affect our mental health. We may choose to withdraw from belonging. Either rejecting what's out there before it can reject us, or simply cocooning in a manner that we feel is keeping us safer than putting ourselves out there.
Unless these patterns and cycles are examined, we won't reclaim the fullness and wholeness of who we truly are welcoming back those disowned and vulnerable parts that often show us so much more of who we are. So the first step is awareness. The first step to changing this is awareness. Our childhood and adolescent years can be a great place to look for patterns of trying to belong or worrying about what other people think of you. Just look for patterns of how I need to be seen in those years or in your first couple of jobs or relationships. Now next, build some awareness around what were some of the unconscious behaviors. What behaviors do you see meaning in those moments where you were worried about how you needed to be seen? Were you people pleasing? Were you unconsciously following and just agreeing with whatever direction people wanted to go in?
Were you always trying to help or volunteer regardless of if you truly had the capacity or even desire to do so right now? What else? Do you modify your behaviors to fit in? Even the clothes you wear so that you can be seen in a certain way? These are all unconscious behaviors that follow this idea of how do I need to be seen? Because I care so much about how people see me as Amelia Antonetti, our past guest on Episode 21, describes in her book, Designing Genius. These start to form your should nots. Meaning when you are balanced and conscious in your higher self, you or others should not see these behaviors of people pleasing and unconsciously following and whatnot. And next, you can now start specifically naming, what are the behaviors you want to display and why? What's the deeper reason for these behaviors?
What do they connect you to? What do they allow you to express that otherwise might be suppressed? What about this new approach would deeply satisfy your heart and soul? If you brought your awareness and energy to following through on this for the next six months, where could this lead you? What impact might it have on your life and how you feel about yourself? Picture who it is that you would become if you truly lived into these new behaviors. All right. That's enough for now. It gives you plenty to consider and hopefully you will do this as an exercise. Cause I promise you it will dramatically impact your life if you do so. Now let's get back to the conclusion of our walk with Rob, because we both have a few more personal admissions and reflections to offer.
There are many things I wanted to comment on, but let me start with this one. What does your behavior say, right? Because that's something that you were, you were noting before, right? Is that with, with your son who would come to you, you like, you know, daddy love you, love your business, you love work more than us. And for, again, for all of us to be able to take a look at, it's not what we say. Maybe even not what we mean. Maybe not what we intend, but what is our behavior saying? Because our behavior's saying, what our behavior is saying is actually the choice that we're making. And therefore do our choices actually align with our intentions, our values, what we find important, truly important within our lives? Or have we fallen into different unconscious behaviors that have said we're doing it this way. No, no, no. I mean this. No, no, no. I love this. No, no, no. I love you. And yet something is showing up in a completely different way. And so looking at our behaviors, looking at the way that you spend your day, looking at the number of hours you invest in all the different things that you do, those are the choices you're making. And are they aligned with your values? Are they aligned with what you intend in the life that you wish to create? It's a very powerful perspective that you have there.
Robert (01:07:52):
Yeah. And I love that you brought that up because I think when I messaged you originally it was, I said the quote which I, which I love. It's know the words, live the meaning. Right. And that's something I write down every day in my journal. Other words, love live the meaning because it's the living of the meaning, which is, which is powerful. That's, that's the teacher. And from when I think of my kids, I know they're listening, I know they're half listening, quarter listening, but they're watching every absolutely everything I do.
Luke (01:08:19):
Absolutely.
Robert (01:08:20):
They're, they're my mirror. My kids, they, they, if I'm on my phone too much, they'll come and look and I'm like, yeah, I don't want them on it. I don't want myself on it. And I put it away. It's just that realization.
Luke (01:08:30):
Let me ask you this because you, there's so many different ways that I can go off this metaphor, but I already love the term verbal judo and you haven't even explained it really. But I already love it cause I have an idea of what it, it connotates. But I also think that there's like this verbal judo, there's emotional judo. And I bring this up because you described that you were, you couldn't fight for your business. So you're then fighting with your kids. We are really just fighting yourself as opposed to you said, going with it. And I think that's something I'd, I'd like for you to expand a little bit more on because so often what we're fighting, what we're resisting, or the resistance that we're feeling, the only way we can feel resistance is if we're pushing back on it. Right. And I'm not saying to let everything run over you, but there's a way of working with that energy for you to be able to understand, wait, there's something I can go with here. And so I was hoping you could say a little bit more about that because you, you understand that physically, verbally, emotionally, I mean that's your world in taekwondo and MMA.
Robert (01:09:25):
Yeah. Yeah. I love the question and I think of the, this video, I saw this clip and it was, I believe it was a monk. And he had these beads and he, he said he took these beads and he, he started swinging me. He says, what we want, don't pull it to you. Because then it swings away what you want. Don't push it away from you because then it swings towards you. And that's kind of the idea of, of when we, when we have that resistance, we say ego creates tension, empathy absorbs it. Right. And that's one of the quotes of verbal judo, which is huge. And when we put our ego in, then, then that's what happens. Things escalate. It's the ability to allow your ego to set aside, be, step into professional type of, of state and try to understand the other person first. And that takes a lot of, a lot of courage. Right. A lot, a lot of discipline to do that because it's always about me, me, me. Right. But when I, what's the quote of first seek to understand and then to be understood. You know, is a really, really neat way to kind of look at that.
Luke (01:10:21):
Yeah. It's, it's funny cause I, when I've, I've watched the, the verbal jousting and emotional jousting and everything else and, and having coached on this and trained on this in multiple ways, one of the things that gets pointed out to people at times is, okay, what's being expressed is that you wanna be right. And some people go, yeah, actually I do. I wanna be right. I want my perspective to be seen. Right. And then there's others who are gonna say, no, that's not it. That's not it. I don't need to be. Right. They, however, need to know that they're wrong. Just a different expression of what's there. Right? And either way, it's our ego beginning to present itself in such a way as the, our right and wrong definitions are the way in which we want others to be the way that we want the world to be.
And no understanding gets created in that space. Instead it's just a talking act. There's no connection that's there. But I, I love that quote around empathy being that which can absorb and absorb in the sense of you're not taking it on, but you're allowing it to dissipate. You're allowing it to dissolve because you're not pushing back on it, you're not pulling it, you're not doing any of those things. And instead your energy is one of holding space of being able to say, well, tell me a little bit more. How did you arrive there? Tell me about what that felt like. Tell me about what's, where's that coming from? That seems like there's some background there. What's going on there? And it puts you in a space where you can actually get to understand where somebody is coming from. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them, it doesn't mean you have to accept what they're, they're saying to you. It doesn't mean any of those things. But I can promise you, you will never have any form of agreement with an individual or any type of alignment. You're certainly not gonna change their mind if you don't first begin to understand them and to see where you're coming from.
Robert (01:11:55):
Yeah. I love it. You know, there's a, there's a quote Renzo Gracie, my opponent is my teacher. My ego is my enemy.
Luke (01:12:02):
Absolutely. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.
Robert (01:12:06):
And when we think of Jiujitsu, you know, I, I trained in Jiujitsu and I remember going in as a white belt and just like tension. Tension. And I got shot, injured badly with my knee for, because I was such a tense person on, on and then going and trying to win and trying to control. But it's the flow. You need to go, you need to let go and, and flow with emotions that helps you move within jujitsu. And if your ego is, in fact, if I, if I roll now, if there's an, if I'm going against a huge ego, I'm, I'm tapping out, you win. Like I don't care because I'm not putting my body into that. You know, it's, I want to, I want to experience the flow with you. Which is what I'm looking for.
Luke (01:12:41):
You've also made that comment of when you were in coach training with iPEC, as we mentioned, that there was that moment with Leanne and you were kind of not allowing yourself to be coached. And another way of saying is you're not allowing yourself to be led either that particular moment. And you know, it's interesting because that's also part of our resistance, right? Part of it you described is the social acceptance and connection, wanting to put on the, the presentation. So it all still looked good and it was being received the way that you wanted it to. But there's a time to let that all down and to allow yourself to be coached, to allow yourself to be led. And I don't just mean that in a, like a dynamic with a professional. I mean that life is trying to do that for you. Your soul is trying to do that for you.
The, the inner voice, the inner whispers, whatever we want to call it, right? Or intuition. And when we don't allow that in and we just keep, that's another form of resistance that we're putting up. We're blocking some energy that's trying to be seen and experienced within our life. Whereas if we turn towards it, if we open up in that empathetic standpoint of, let me understand, let me feel this, let me know this. Let me witness what I need to witness. Let me witness within myself what I need to witness within myself. Let me hear what's being mirrored or shown to me or expressed to me from all of these different perspectives, whether they be people or things or situations or whatever. Even by the seasons, there's so much that's being mirrored back to us that we can pull in. But if we're not, not allowing ourself to be led, to be coached, to be witnessed, to be the witness, we miss all of it.
Robert (01:14:18):
Yeah. I, I love that. And, and what, what I, I remember having a very powerful experience in, in motu and it was after Leanne talked about the whole legs under the water thing. And it had, uh, had to do with the gremlin and, uh, what my gremlin was. For me, when Leanne shocked me with that, I just, she just couldn't handle it anymore. And I, I was like, what? What? Right. But then I got it and I reflected on it and I think it's almost that unlocking of the door. Okay, I'm unlocking, right. There you go. Okay. I'm open. And when, when she came in and we went through the whole gremlin exercise, I was, hey, I'm ready to, I can volunteer and, and suggest, and she exact me, exact me again and said, no, I nicked that surface. So here I am again on the surface, calm and then not doing the work. And I reflected on it and I had a super powerful experience, very, very emotional talking about my grandma. And it was, yeah, it was very powerful. And it led to a huge release of energy, or I say should say allowing the energy to flow because it was blocked and it was, it was my childhood bully that I had. And that's probably a story, maybe a story for another time, but it was, it was a huge release for me.
Luke (01:15:21):
Robert, I appreciate that. I think to, to just kind of bring us around full circle, you know, we've been talking about this journey of becoming and I guess at, at this point, let me frame it this way, just to give context. It was funny, I was just having this conversation with a friend of mine before we hopped on that there was a, a book a long time ago by Buckminster Fuller called I Seem to Be a Verb. And it was this recognition that we can't really simply identify ourselves by a noun or an adjective because that's too static. We're too dynamic. We're always evolving, we're always emerging. There's a, it's we're being in motion. Right? And so the way I also say that is I am more Luke-ing than Luke, right. It's more of, I am a verb. It's a, it's an unfolding. And that to me is, is you know, symbolic of, or you know, tied to this notion of becoming, we're always becoming. And so I guess my last question for you is who are you becoming now?
Robert (01:16:16):
Yeah. I love that. And I think as you, as you said that, and we've said a few times, is the context of that whole becoming, was Lanny Bassham, Lanny Bassham, Last Parents. Yes, then the question, are you more concerned about what your child achieves or who they become? And most parents answer what your kid becomes, and, and, but we forget that we, it's that whole thing of what you're doing versus what you're saying. For me, I'm still in transition and I think I'm always gonna be in some form of transition throughout my whole life, but who I'm becoming is the person I, I love.
Luke (01:16:46):
That is a wonderful becoming. And it is one that, that the more and more in which we can sit in that space of accepting of self, of loving of self, the way in which that fills us up. Just as you began retaking time for yourself in the early morning to fill yourself back up for your children and for life and then ultimately how that pours into your business. These are all different ways that when we come from that place of love, we come to others with such peace and with such openness we can meet them where they are because we're not threatened. We don't need to gain something from them, including, we don't even need to gain their acceptance or love. Cause it's already filling up with inside of us. It's a very different way of being able to interact with life.
Robert (01:17:29):
A hundred percent. And as I said that I got emotional and it was like, we don't often say that. I think we often don't, that mirror exercise you talked about, right? I was looking in the mirror. But, but we often don't reflect again and see ourselves. And I think that's what I'm allowed allowing myself to do, is to spend time with myself, to see myself, to build a relationship with myself. I think that's, that's what I, what I'm really working on, taking care of me, which allows me to then have what I need to take care of the others in my life. And that includes my coaching. I love to be able to show up and, and be there fully empathetic, understanding, listening and open for the people that I serve. Because I think that's what's sort of led me to this place is I'm feel that I'm really making a difference in the lives of others. And it fuels me. Like it fuels me. And to feel that that's what I'm doing to help other people. And it's, it's, I don't know that I, I would be satisfied doing anything else.
Luke (01:18:22):
Rob, I wanna thank you for being here on the show, on this walk for the work that you're doing right now, presently in the world for sharing your experiences, your journey so openly with us and for all of, of just kinda the lessons and wisdoms that that imparts for everybody that got to, got to listen in to our time together today. I wanna thank you for being on this walk.
Robert (01:18:41):
Absolutely, Luke. 100%. And I wanna thank you, I think, and what you're doing, creating this space for everyone and the, the way in which you're doing it and how open-hearted you are about that, it's amazing. I think we have been disconnected for so long. This for me, as I listen to, to your podcast and listen to you and learn from you and grow from, from your influence that there's a coming together and I love it. So thank you.
Luke (01:19:06):
I deeply appreciate that. Absolutely, Rob, thank you. And for everybody that has tuned in, I thank you once again for going on this walk with us.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of On This Walk. Before signing off, please subscribe to the show and don't miss a single episode. Also, please rate and review us. This helps me greatly in getting the word out about this show. And remember, this is just the start of our conversation to keep it going, ask questions, add your own thoughts, join the ongoing conversation by just heading over to onthiswalk.com and click on Community in the upper right hand corner. It's free to join. Until we go on this walk again, I'm Luke Iorio. Be well.

Feliz BorjaJanuary 10, 2023

023 - The Act of Becoming Rather Than Achieving: Part 1

Being in community with others is an important piece of the human experience, but how do we differentiate between belonging and simply being accepted?

In This Episode

Notable Quotes

Robert @ 43min 17sec

Luke @ 1hr 10min 30sec

Our Guest

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Full Episode Transcript