905 - Final Episodes 6 of 6

Speaker A: This is the Momentum Podcast. Welcome to the final episode of the Momentum Podcast. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, then you know I'm late. This podcast should have come out last Friday as the final episode. But to be honest and transparent, I've had some trouble recording it. I've had trouble recording the last episode because it felt so important. I've had trouble recording the last episode because it's the last time I will do this. And I've done this every week since 2016. It's the last time I'll record a podcast in over 900 episodes. So it felt very heavy, it felt difficult to get into. But after talking to a member of our team yesterday and this morning, having the final huddle we will ever have with our team, today is the official last day of the company. It came through what this podcast needs to be about and what I need to share. And so right after the manifesto, I will do that. But today, rather than playing the pre recorded manifesto, I'm going to read it live for the last time that I will ever record this podcast. Here it is. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast. Made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them and rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the most consistent source of positive human evolution. And we always will be. I wrote that almost a decade ago. And I wrote it and rewrote it until it gave me chills and gave me goosebumps. And it still does every time I read it. If you've been a podcast or if you've been a listener of this podcast for a while, I just want to thank you. I want to thank you for your validation. I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for the energy and attention you've given me and thank you for this incredible journey that has been the entrepreneurial personality type and the companies that I've ran in the past 10 years. And if you were a member or a follower or any of those things, thank you so much for being here and for getting me to this place where I'm making this massive transition in my life. This is, this is one of the most exciting things I've ever done. This is a release of the identity of consultant and coach and entrepreneur. This is a release of the identity of being in operations and systems and process and structure, structure and routine. This is a release of who I've been so that I can understand who I have become and who I really need to be in order to make my greatest impact in the world. And it may seem dramatic and crazy to just shut everything down and take some time off, but I can tell you that in my body what I feel is massive momentum and massive validation of the decisions that I'm making. And that actually takes me into the subject of this final podcast. I wrote the Entrepreneurial Personality Type book almost a decade ago and in the third chapter it says we are momentum based beings. And in this chapter I make the argument that as entrepreneurial personality types we don't feel emotions like the rest of the world. And I make the argument that we just feel momentum whether it's there or whether it's not. And that's the only way we interpret the world and have to share with you. I'm sorry that chapter didn't age well. I wrote it like I said, almost a decade ago and I really did believe that people like us didn't feel emotions because I didn't understand and feel them. I didn't understand how to interpret my own. And for years I told people that we didn't feel emotions. We didn't need to. We just needed to feel momentum. But here's what I can tell you now after almost a decade more of processing and understanding and working with incredible coaches and consultants and people who have changed my life. Kylie Ryan in Australia, Dane Thomas, who coached me and has helped me so much to understand myself better. Anthony Klova, my good friend who's listened and understood and listened to what I've said. Govind Jeremyan, who has been this reflection back of myself on a weekly basis when we talk. My friend Gabe Arnold who has shown me so much of who I am Colin Hogan, who lives here in my neighborhood. Garrett Salpeter Cole. Witty Ta. Gosh, I could just keep going. Emily Hirsch. So many people in my life who have reflected back to me who I am. Not the least of which, and probably not probably the absolute most important, is my wife, Katie, who is an incredibly emotional human being and felt judged by that chapter that I wrote and felt like she didn't understand that chapter and didn't believe in that chapter. And I can tell you now that I know I wrote that from a place of lack of understanding. I wrote it from a place of lack of tools and lack of embodiment of what I really needed to understand who I am in this world. And that is to understand that our feelings are our superpowers. Entrepreneurial personality types feel feelings just like the rest of the world only might be a little bit more difficult for us to interpret them. And since I wrote this chapter, in this, the time in between then and now, like I said, I've worked with some incredible people. I've. I've gotten some incredible knowledge. I've understood more about who I am. And what I know now is that as entrepreneurial personality types, the more in touch with our feelings we can become, the more we understand our feelings, the more we understand what's going on in our body and how it translates into a feeling that we need to interpret and understand to know how to move forward. That is how we create the life we really want. Part of the reason that Katie and I made the decision to shut down our company is that I felt it in my body. I felt the weight and the stress and the lack of excitement for doing what we were doing. But I could also feel this anticipation and this encouragement and this future focus on what we could be doing, what we might be doing. And it's obscured, and I don't see it all yet, but I know that it's there. And I believe with every cell in my body that it's there. And that's why we've shut down this company. And really, as entrepreneurs, jumped into the abyss. We have no business and nothing to do on a daily basis that feels like it's productive financially. And I couldn't be more excited if I hadn't done the processing that I've done and I hadn't spent the time that I have with myself and haven't learned so much about myself and feelings and how we feel. I don't think I would be able to do this. I know I wouldn't be able to do this because the identity of entrepreneur, the identity of coach and consultant was just too strong. It's too strong to walk away from. But now understanding what I understand, whether it's logical or not, the feelings in my body, the feelings that I'm having of constraint and feeling like I'm not doing the right thing, just can no longer be denied. And Katie and I made the decision to close this company down just a few weeks ago. And in that decision was a partner decision that we were going to close this company down and go all in on us. Uh, Katie is the most extraordinary thing that's ever happened to me in my life. She is, she's my everything. We've been together for 20 years. The night that I met her, like literally the night that I met her, I knew I would marry her. And I've been head over heels, ridiculously, hopelessly in love with her since that first day. And to have the opportunity to unplug and to be able to explore each other and explore together and get curious and go figure, uh, things out about ourselves and understand more about our relationship and go even deeper into time together and ritual together and connection together and how far, how much can the two of us do and create more pleasure and more ecstasy, more joy, more connection together is my focus right now. And when I look at my life and I think about the fact that I've been working since I was 8 years old, that rarely have I put in under a 60 hour week in my career. I've been helping people since I was really young. And I've made a massive impact with a lot of human beings. And I feel like right now this space and time in my life has to be some type of reward because financially, Katie and I have everything that we need. Our, uh, kids are in a great place. Reagan is 17, Kennedy's 14. And they are just in a great place in life and our connection with them, in our capacity with them, we have an incredible network of friends and people that we love that connect with us and that we can support and they support us. We have integrity in the marketplace and a tremendous amount of respect. And we're in a place, I'm in a place where I get to unplug and put all of my focus on myself and my physiology and feeling better and understanding myself better and on my wife, on understanding Katie better, on spending more time with her, on exploring with her, on adventuring with her, on seeing what we can accomplish and achieve together when there's nothing else to focus on. And this feels like the most exciting and extraordinary period of my life. And when I say that it feels like some type of reward. It's. I've won. I've won. I feel like I'm in exactly the place that I need to be. And over the course of the past few weeks, I've gotten a lot of questions from people like, are you retiring? Are you going away? When are you going to come back? Is there going to be anything else? We're going to miss you. And thank you if you've sent me one of those messages or in any way. I just want you to know how much every single one of them has meant to me. And I also want you to know that I'm not going away forever. This. This transition of identity, this transition of the responsibility that I feel in the world, this transition of the outcome that I want to drive towards in the world is so important to me that I'm willing to shut everything down so that I can allow for the space and the spaciousness and the time for the intuition and instinct to flow through about what we should be doing next. I know that for so much of my career, I pushed so hard to be in momentum. I pushed so hard to be in forward progress. I pushed so hard to do the next thing that sometimes I made decisions, maybe a lot of the time I made decisions out of a place of scarcity, out of a place of urgency, out of a place of feeling a need to do something next. And today I'm in the opposite place. I'm making a decision from a place of abundance. I'm m making a decision from a place of excitement. I'm making a decision from a place of validation and connection. So strong. I may have never felt anything as strong before. I'm, um, so excited to have this space and time with Katie and with myself and for us to take what is already an extraordinarily strong marriage. And I want to make just say something about this. I think a lot of times when people talk about having a strong marriage or a strong relationship, they make it sound like it is ideal. They make it sound like everything's perfect. And our relationship is fundamentally imperfect. And we've had some really hard, challenging times in our lives and challenging eras in our relationship. And so I'm so thankful that those have cleared up. And there really isn't a lot of static or frustration or weight or challenge in our relationship anymore. But it's because we've been together for 20 years and the issues that have come up, we have imperfectly and sometimes not very skillfully navigated them to understand that the relationship that we're in, and perhaps the relationship that you're in, is a reflection of all the opportunities that you have to evolve in this lifetime. What I now know about my time with Katie, what I now know about this extraordinary privilege, uh, that I have of being her husband, is that every conflict, every challenge, every frustration that we've experienced has been an opportunity for leverage and evolution of the highest order. And this time, to go further and deeper and, and create even more connection and go to understand my favorite subject, which is Katie, even better. Feels like such an extraordinary, exciting, and overwhelmingly validating gift. And if you've been one of our members, if you've followed me, if you've listened to this podcast, if you've ever done anything with us, you're a part of helping make this time in our lives possible. And I can't thank you enough. And with that, I'm going to close this podcast for the final time. And thank you for being a listener. Thank you for your time, for your energy, for your validation, for your support. And since this is the final episode, maybe you can go and leave a review and let me know what this podcast has meant to you, because I will be reading every single one of them. I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you for being here with me today. Thank you for everything over the past 10 years of running this company. And, uh, if you're excited or interested in what Katie and I are going to do next, you can go to charfen.com, our website, sign up for any of the free downloads, and you will be on our email list. And from time to time, we're going to be sharing what this period of our lives is like, what this period of extraordinary expansion and opportunity is. And if you're curious to see what two career entrepreneurs do when they're not running a business, and the excitement and the adventures and the challenges and the transformations that we get into, I'd love to have you on our email list and you'll hear from us from time to time. So thank you. I love you. I appreciate you have an extraordinary day, and here's to your momentum.