The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Making a Radical Identity Shift with Ali Shanti

Ali Shanti was living a life that looked successful on the outside, with a million dollar business, and the accolades we all dream of. But making every decision based on money, and accumulating more of it became a prison of her own making. Through a radical identity shift, she escaped that prison. Here are the highlights:

Building a successful 6 Figure Business
The danger of making every decision on money
The myth that a certain amount of money will free you
Why Alexis gave up everything in her life
Finding the the truth of who you really are
Running 2 businesses with two names
The power of showing up with no answers
Becoming a victim of the trappings success
Signs that you’re not on the right path
Finding a way to get into real truth about money
The 4 levels of which you can use money to be happy
How living in your bare minimum completely changes people
Finding a powerful motivation for why you make money
How to dissociate yourself from your money number
A look at incredibly unusual business structure
Why entertainment is crucial to our culture
The power of having quirks in your brand
Changing the imprint of your life
Learning to find the gift in your difficult experiences
Stepping into alignment with your role in the ecosystem

Ali Shanti is a business priestess, truh telling lawyer, evolutionary strategist, and catalyst.

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Duration:: 1h 7m
Broadcast on:: 07 Apr 2014
Audio Format:: other

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. I'm Srini Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where I speak with creative entrepreneurs, artists, and other insanely interesting people to hear their stories, learn about their molding moments, tipping points, and spectacular takeoffs. Hey, true crime fans! Tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations? Good news! 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We're going to talk about the future of the pandemic. We're going to talk about the future of the pandemic. We're going to talk about the future of the pandemic. That was probably in our first 100 interviews, when we were called Blog Cast FM. Absolutely. Three years ago, it might have even been four years ago, I was doing some of the same things that I'm still doing now. I was training lawyers. I had built a successful law practice myself in Redondo Beach, California, and then using a new law business model that I had created, I started teaching that new law business model to other lawyers. And right around 2009, I hit a level of success that had built $2 million businesses at that point. I was full on immersed in the world of internet marketing, and I had written a book, and it had become a bestseller, and I had appeared on today's show, Good Morning America. And so, in many respects, I had all of the success that so many people, I think, are striving for, and I was not happy at all. I felt trapped. You know, I really came to understand the term trappings of success, because I had them all. This huge 5,300 square foot house, the Mercedes, just all of it. And I didn't feel like I was really on my path. Even though all of the things that I was doing seemed to be the right things, there was something inside that was deeply off. And I really didn't know what that was, other than that I kept hearing from the people on my team, Alexis, you can't say that. You can't write that. You can't wear that. You're going to hurt the business. And that is not why I went into business. I didn't go into business to feel compromised in who I was. And I recognized that I had started making every decision based on money. How much money is this going to bring in? How much money will this person bring to me? How much money will this person pay me? How much will I need to pay this person? And when I looked around at my life, I didn't have any friends. I had no community. I was starting to really disconnect from my children. I have two kids, they're 10 and 14 now, back then they were 7 and 10. And they would come home from school, they would go down into the basement and they would play video games until 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock at night. And I'd be in my office working 12 to 16 hours a day. And the companies at that point were bringing in about $2 million. And I had this idea in my mind that I would be free when I had $40 million in the bank. I know, that was my number. That was my, okay, well, if I have $40 million in the bank and I am making 5% interest and that throws off $2 million a year, then I'll be free. And I began to realize that if I wasn't free with $2 million of revenue coming in, I was never going to be free. It wouldn't even matter if I got to $40 million in the bank. I would be even more trapped at that point and that I needed to make a radical shift. And I didn't know what that shift was, but I sensed it. I moved from California to Colorado with the intention of making that shift, found myself just stuck in all my same patterns. And so I started to do some really radical, very uncomfortable things. I fired my whole team. I broke up with my boyfriend, who was also my partner. And I began the process of really discovering myself, I hired an interim CEO, who it turned out was really basically a coach, someone who every single day I would cry. And he would ask me, "Alexis, what do you want? What do you want?" And as he kept asking me that question, I started getting more and more clear. And what I wanted was liberation. I wanted to be free to be who I was and still be able to do my work in the world in a way that felt really good. And I had to go through a big dark night of the soul and a lot of very challenging experiences and including moving out of that big house, giving up my Mercedes, moving to a farm that I had bought, but never intended to live on. Giving up all of my support staff, everybody who was helping me in my home. And I filed bankruptcy because I had to get to a place where I wasn't making any decision whatsoever based on money. And when I did that, I found the truth of who I really am. And during that time, speaking of shows, we did create one season of a show called The Whole Truth Show, which was a super raw video filmed from my farmhouse with this one little spotlight, like a floodlight that I would hook up. It was edgy, it was four hours a week. And we would just be on the show and we would chat with people on the show, it was totally live. And I'll tell you, it was one of the most amazing, fun things that I did, but I didn't have a business model around it and there did come a point at which it was like, okay, I've gotten to this point where I'm not making any decisions based on money. And what I realized when I got there is that part of my purpose is to make money and bring money into the community and share that wealth. And so I started looking at, okay, if I'm going to make money again, what is it that I really want to do? And rather than building a business model around that show, I decided to start training lawyers again and start training entrepreneurs again in much the same way that I had before, but with a totally different perspective, a totally different model, a new name, although there has been a big piece of confusion for me in that I didn't give up my old name either. So I still have one business, the business that trains lawyers where I'm Alexis Neely. And I have a business where I am both Alexis Neely and Ali Shanti, which is confusing. And it's been a big question for me about how do I go forward in the world being two people and feeling very connected to both of them and still being fully myself. So there's still a way that I'm sitting with that question. And it's not fully resolved yet. Today, the businesses are back to exactly where they were in 2009, but completely differently as well because I'm not trapped by them anymore. I've been able to recreate them in a way where I get to be both Alexis Neely and Ali Shanti and we're making it work and people are being served. And I am doing the things that I love again, including what I see on the horizon as a show again with a higher production value than when I shot it at the farm and ideally a better business model around it so that it's sustainable and I can keep it going. So that's where things are today and still very much in the inquiry, but really grateful to be able to show up in the inquiry without having all of the questions answered because I think that's the thing that I missed the most during my journey was being able to hear from people who didn't have it all figured out while they were going through it so that I could gain the insights that they were in the inquiry about myself and feel like I was being supported with not having all the answers. So I think too often we just show up with all the answers and then the people who don't yet have all the answers feel lost and just not like, gosh, I have so far to go, I have to have all the answers before I can do what I'm really here to do in the world and it's just not the case. I think that we're always in the inquiry. Wow, there's a lot of stuff there. So let's do this. Let's take a few steps back. I want to start at the very beginning of this. You know, I think that the trappings of success, I mean, some people are going to hear that and think, oh, yeah, you've got it all figured out, you know, a million dollar house, you know, Mercedes, and it kind of makes them like, I don't think on some level, I think they can't relate to that too, because they're like, how can you possibly say that? I know if I had all those things, it would give me everything that I want. Yeah. And I think that we are very much under, I think that one of the hardest distinctions that I've found to make is the difference between what we actually want and what we think we want. And it's, you know, I think when those two things don't match up, which we often find, you get into sort of the crisis that you did. And I guess, you know, for me, the question that comes from that is, one, getting that kind of awareness before you're in the situation where you have the trappings of success, so that you don't end up there. And then two, you know, just developing that kind of an awareness that, hey, something's wrong here. Yeah. How do you do that? Yeah. So I asked myself this question quite a lot, especially back in 2009 when I was really in it. I was still in California. I had, you know, this massive overhead. I felt trapped by it. And the first thing that I did is I went to my CFO who was working with me on my financials. And I have to say that I was always really bad at looking at my numbers, the numbers of the business. It freaked me out. And the real reason why I built the million dollar businesses back then, ultimately, is because I was afraid, I was desperately afraid of running out of money. That was my driving motivator for much of my life was, oh, God, I'm going to run out of money. I'm going to run out of money. I better make as much money as I possibly can so that I don't run out. And I think that's sign number one, that you're not on the right path to what you really want is when your motivation is fear. And I think, unfortunately, fear as a motivator is very common. It's kind of what has been bred into us probably by our parents who, you know, try to control us or did control us with fear as opposed to motivating us with desire. And, you know, it's bred into our marketing, right? All of the marketing that we learn how to do teaches us to market based on the pain and, you know, motivating people to get out of pain. But there seems to be a shift that's starting to happen, which is being motivated by desire, pulled by desire. I see you very much embodying that. And it's really part of the reason that I wanted to be here, part of your community, is I believe that the people that are here and attracted to you don't want to be motivated by fear anymore. And so we just need more models of that. And I'm just really applaud you for doing a great job with that. If you actually are, you can tell me if that's not true. I mean, do you resonate with that at all? Do you feel motivated by fear or pulled by desire? No, definitely pulled by desire. I mean, I think that, you know, I mean, when I've created things out of fear, they've all kind of been big flops and everything, like, I look at everything that I've created in the last year or so, like the books that I've written, the stuff that I've been writing daily on Facebook. And I think it's because I'm called to do it like there's, I can't not do it, if you know what I mean. It's like, this is what I'm supposed to do. This is what I was put here to do. Exactly. And so while there is an element of that, especially in the beginning, when I started in my businesses, very quickly the fear took over and it became a, I have to do it because I'm going to run out of money if I don't. I have to keep earning all this money. So I started with the question with my CFO guy, I said, Keith, how much money do I actually need to make? And he couldn't answer that question. And that was a big wake up call for me. I had to get clear about how much money I actually needed to live the life that I wanted to live. And that was a little bit of a corrupted question because I had been highly influenced by the internet marketers that were living these big lives, you know, especially in LA and Southern California. And you know, I'd been swimming in these circles where it was really about status and image and brand. And so I had to find a way to get into real truth about, well, how much money do I actually need to have the life that I want? And I created a process for myself where I looked at that question on four levels. What was my minimum amount of money to be happy? Like, what's the smallest lifestyle, least expensive lifestyle that I could have and still be happy? What is my preferred if I could afford it? What is my no limits? Like, if I just had zero limits and I could have houses all over the world. And then what's the reality of my now situation? And it took me some time to actually feel into all of that because, again, I was deeply, deeply conditioned. But when I really felt into it over some time, what I discovered is that my minimum to be happy was actually pretty small that if I had friends and community around me, I could actually be happy living in a tent or probably a yurt, more than a tent, you know, a yurt on land and being with my kids and having a really, really, really simple lifestyle. And that was shocking to me because that was not what I had ever been taught, would be successful. You know, that would be the kind of antithesis of successful. But when I felt into it, that was actually true, that that was my minimum to be happy. And then I could start to feel into what would be my preferred if I could afford it. What was my now? And once I did that, I was able to start to write relationship, my experience with money. And I did, for a time, go live that minimum to be happy life. I lived on a farm. I did not live in a yurt. I did have a house, but my ex-husband lived in a yurt on the property. And it was the scariest by far the thing that I was most afraid of was having to live in a remote place with my kids with no support and feel isolated and alone. And so if something told me that, okay, well, if that's the thing you're most afraid of, you need to go down that road. You need to face that fear. If the thing you're most afraid of is running out of money, you need to go down that road and face that fear, or else you're constantly going to be driven by it. And so I did. I allowed myself to run out of money to the greatest extent that was possible for me. I'm a mom. I'm the breadwinner. So for me, running out of money looked like just bringing in $5,000 a month. And when it comes to kids' activities and schooling and clothing, I mean, that's really very, very small compared to what I had been bringing in before that. And to go live on this farm in the winter, in the snow with no support there other than just me and my kids. Now, I know that this is a common existence for most people. And hearing me, people might say, well, okay, yeah, no big deal. That's the life I live. And for me, it was a big deal. It was my biggest fear. And so what I would say for you to take from this is whatever is your biggest fear, face it, dive into it, confront it. And what I discovered when I was there is I really actually loved that life. I loved it. It was deeply connected. It was soft. It was slow, I had time to create. And also at the same time, what I discovered is that I have a huge vision that I want to bring out into the world that requires me to make a lot of money, not to feed my ego and not because I'm afraid of running out of money, but because it requires actually a lot of people to carry it out. And so from that place, I was able to come back into the world. I moved from there back into Boulder and three bedroom condo and still a very simple life. But back into the city again, back into the world again. But this time rebuild things with an entirely different perspective where I wasn't motivated by the fear. I was no longer had this idea of financial freedom and that one day when I had enough money in the bank, then I could do what I wanted to do. I realized that, oh, no, the time is now, there is no one day, there is only now. And no longer felt like I needed to have any savings because I discovered that no matter what, I have learned the formula for earning what I need when I need it on demand. And that was liberating. Oh, okay, what I wanted is liberation. I'm liberated. I don't need $40 million. I need to earn what I need when I need it on demand. I know how to do that. It's actually not that hard. And part of the reason that I had to go through bankruptcy and move to the farm and kind of live this existence of not having a lot of money was for exactly what you said at the beginning, how could anybody have related to me before that? How could anybody have related to me when I graduated first in my classroom law school? I built these million-dollar businesses, and I know, Shree, that the people I'm supposed to serve are the people that are at home right now watching TV. They're living in their farmhouse. They don't have any support. They're deeply in debt. They're stressed out to the max. They're beating themselves up for bad decisions that they feel like they've made and not moving forward in their lives because of it, and I'm supposed to serve there. And how could I serve there if I haven't been there? And so I had to be willing to go there and come back from it as well so that I could serve the people that I know that I'm here to serve. And as I tell this story, I still wonder, am I still not relatable? That scares me, am I still not relatable? Awesome. Well, there's just a lot of stuff here. There's so much. I mean, this is rich territory, and it's funny because I feel like I'm having- I'm going to group your interview with Jamie Tardes because I think our relationship and the conversations we have around money are such complicated things. And there's such individual stories for each and every one of us. One of the things that you said, there are two things. One is that you had a number, $40 million, which when you hear that, you're like, really? That sounds completely insane. You need $40 million to feel free, and there are people in this country who are barely scraping by, and it's funny because it's to think that. And so there's two things that come from that. One is just dissociating with that whole notion of, "Hey, this is my number." But then you mentioned, you ditched it all, but then you somehow found yourself stuck in some of the old patterns. And so I guess there are two things that come from me. One is just, how do you dissociate with this notion that, "Hey, this is a number." And once I have it, life is golden because I think I had that sort of mindset too. I thought, "Hey, when I have a best-selling book, I'm going to be- it's going to be smooth sailing." And I can tell you, it hasn't. Right. And then, of course, I think that this idea of getting unstuck from old behaviors, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about that. Yeah. Let me start with the number. I met a guy who, I'm not going to say his name because he's fairly well-known for someone who is very early in the business of selling trainings and various things online. So people would know who he was. But I met him and he has something like, "He kept telling me how much money he had in the bank." He's like $100 million or $80 million, some insane number. And he has it like in Switzerland and all these various places and silver and gold and cash and he's not free. He isn't even close to free. He's so trapped by his fear about losing that. And he doesn't have any community and love in his life. And I could look down the road and see the reality of that in my life. That here's a man who's probably in his late 60s and he's not happy. He's working constantly. His whole driving force still is in accumulating more and more and more and not having the love. And when I looked out out at my life, until the end of my life, that just wasn't what I wanted. What I wanted is to feel a lot of love around me. When I did Daniela Port's desire map process, my core desired feeling is generosity. And he's not a generous guy at all. He's not looking at ways that he can help more people in the world at all. He's just looking at ways that he can amass more and more. And I saw that's the trajectory that I was on. And that's not what I want to template into the world. Where I see that we're going, especially my children and their children, is into a place where we have to learn to live in community. We have to learn to work in community. We have to learn to come together and create new paradigms where we're not accumulating for ourselves, but we're accumulating for the benefit of the community. So now, yes, my businesses today are doing, they did about 1.7 million last year. But it's all for the benefit of the people that are supporting what we're creating. I don't even think of them as my businesses. In fact, the way that they're structured is they are not my businesses. They are owned among several people. I'm just a player on the team and it's a totally different paradigm. The people that work in my home are the people that I'm supporting. But just it's not even I'm supporting them. The work that we're doing is supporting them and we're in it together. It has a whole different feeling to it. So I wanted to create that and not this life where I'm constantly trying to accumulate more and more and more and hoard it. One of the movies that I watched during this time is the movie I Am by Tom Shadyak. Have you seen that movie? I don't think I have actually. So such a great movie. He was the producer of many of the Jim Carrey movies. So he was the super wealthy producer and then he basically, like me, gave it all up, moved into a trailer in Malibu. He has a beautiful view, but it's a trailer. And now he's making movies that are really contributing in a very transformational way to the planet by helping us to wake up and see new paradigms through entertainment. And what I got through that is that in many ways, that's actually my purpose. I mean, you're living it. You're living it right now, which is to use entertainment to up level the consciousness of humanity. Because as you recognize, as you made the transition from blog cast FM to your new brand, unmistakable creative is that one, what it's called, yeah, unmistakable creative, which is so just awesome and juicy and rich and like the colors and the cartoons and the drawings, all of that is entertainment. And what I heard you say is that people don't want how to, they don't want you to tell them what to do, but they do want to be entertained. 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Terms and conditions apply. Linked in. The place to be. To be. Wow. You know, I never heard it put like that. The whole idea of creating entertainment for up leveling the consciousness of humanity. That makes it sound like what I do is way more impressive. It's interesting. I can see why you would say that. Some of you probably saw it on Facebook a few days ago. One of our listeners, Joe Tito sent me an email about sharing some of the work that we're doing here on the unmistakable creative. While he can't take it into prison cells, he actually does some ministry work in a prison. He said, you should know that the work you're doing is actually having an impact in places you might not have thought. In a million years, inside the walls of a prison, that I would have never guessed. Yeah. Yeah. What more important places to be impacting than the people of our society that have been most disregarded, disenfranchised might feel like they have no hope until they hear you and they see a possibility and then it sparks something and all of a sudden they are shifted inside and they have an up leveling of consciousness and they realize a new possibility and then they can step into that possibility and entertainment really feels like the best form for that to happen. So you are doing it and I'm highly impressed by it. Thank you. Thank you. Well, let me ask you this. You know, it's really funny. I'm listening to the way you're speaking to me now and I, you know, I mean, it was such a long time ago. But I mean, I feel like I'm speaking to two very different people from the first time I talked to you. I mean, the first time we spoke, I was like, this is a woman who is very much a type A go getter. You know, like I just knew it. I was like, wow. And still very impressed. So you know, there's, there's sort of this in between time, right? Like the time that molds you into who you are and I can't imagine it didn't come without its struggles and its hurdles. I mean, I remember seeing things on Facebook. If I remember correctly, there was a burning man wedding involved in some of this, right? That distinctly stood out to me and I remember I saw the flack that you got for it too from a lot of people. Yeah. Not so I don't want you to just talk about that specifically, even though I'd love you to share that story. But in general, I mean, I don't imagine it was, hey, I'm ready to make this radical identity shift snap my fingers and now I'm who I am and, you know, growing through the world because I think that if people don't hear that, they're going to say, well, you two are a bunch of new age hippies. Yeah. Well, I probably am a new age hippie. I'll probably own that. And that wedding at Burning Man was actually my stake in the ground that said, here's who I am. I am weird. I do impulsive things and I'm not hiding that anymore. I'm coming out publicly with it. I posted it on my blog. I got a lot of flack and unfortunately I handled the flack wrong. I got the flack and then I thought that the lawyer community hated me. I thought that they were not going to trust me anymore and that they weren't going to want me to serve them anymore because pretty much, you know, I'd been serving lawyers at that point and the flack that I got on that blog post was mostly from lawyers saying you're a flake. I am never going to trust you, you know, who are you? And I took that in and I internalized it in a negative way and I began to shrink. And that was painful. It was really, really painful and good. It was definitely alchemizing but I shrunk and I shrunk that business back to almost nothing, which also in a way was good because it got to the core of the business where the lawyers that stayed with me, I began to realize, oh, they're never going to leave me. I'm providing so much value to them that it really doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter how weird I am. It doesn't matter if I wear feathers and my hair and jewels on my face and, you know, dance at Burning Man, they are still going to want me because I'm providing value to them. Okay. So if that's the case, then I can rebuild this business on that foundation, being who I am. And later on, I found out, and it's funny that I didn't find this out until about three months ago, we had hired a woman to call all the lawyers that were in our program. Sometimes and interview them. And somehow I never found out about those interviews until three months ago. It turns out that what the people said in those interviews is they wanted more. They were curious. They're like, I heard that Alexis got married at Burning Man. What do you know about that? They weren't saying that they didn't like me. They were intrigued. They wanted more. They wanted to be entertained. Now, the people who posted on my blog were mean, but had I seen that for what it was, impact, had I seen that it meant that I was reaching people, I wouldn't have shrunk. I would have grown instead. I would have given people what they wanted, which was more entertainment. And I would have never decimated basically the businesses. But I guess I had to go through that and I totally trust in the process of all of it. But what I've come back around to now is this realization that, okay, I can be who I am. I can do really weird things and still serve lawyers because the value that I'm providing to them and who I am are two totally different things. I'm an entertaining, creative soul. That's part of the value that I provide to them. So now the journey is in, okay, being more of that and continuing to stay focused enough on the business so that I can continue to provide that value, can continue to serve and not shrink in the face of the naysayers. In fact, at one point, Shree, I went on the internet and I searched all of the big people like Madonna and Susie Orman and Britney Spears. And I read about all of the things that people said about them that were mean. All the hater comments that people said about them. And then do you happen to know a woman named Julia Allison? I know the name, I think. She'd be a great interview for you. She is a woman who has done a lot of various things online. She had a column and then she had a reality TV show for a short while and now she's writing a book. Well, she has this hater blog that is so intense. It's basically an entire blog devoted to hating her. They post mean pictures about her, they have horrible commentary about her. And at one point, she was in my RV at Burning Man. And so at one point, all of a sudden, I got all these hits to my blog and when I traced them back, I found that they were from her hater blog. That these people who just spend their days hating on her had linked to me and said all these mean things about me. And I felt this feeling of excitement when that happened. It's like, I actually kind of like this. This means that I'm impacting. And what if I shifted my perspective on people writing mean and nasty things about me and instead of trying to avoid it, I cultivated it a little more. And once that shift happened inside of me, and I saw the way that Julia deals with it, which is pretty much just to ignore it. And I think in a way, like I haven't talked to her about it, but I get the sense that she might even actually like it. Once I got that imprinted into me, I felt a measure of liberation, like, oh, okay, that is actually what I want to cultivate because when there are, I'm a polarizing personality. And when people are hating me, an equal number of people are actually loving me too. And that's been a journey for me. That has not come easily at all. There's still parts of me that just wants everybody to love me and everybody to like me and to always look good. But I mean, I went to law school because I'm a competitive person who wants to have a lot of power, and that's why most people go to law school, by the way, and so it's true. So I've had to come to terms with that. And now a small part of sadness for me is that I in some ways feel like I missed the opportunity, which I know I didn't. I know I still have the opportunity, but I missed the opportunity to really dive into that in a bigger way. And now it's the question of, okay, how do I start to impact again in the way that I was before and allow all sides of myself to be seen and allow myself to be hated by some and loved by others and feel really good about that. And so again, still in the inquiry of that. Well, it's interesting you bring up the polarizing thing. I mean, inevitably, I don't know what it is. Anytime I get an email or a note saying something about my work being shitty or terrible or whatever, once our review shows my book, like within hours of it, somebody sends me something saying, thank you for everything you do. It's really weird. I've always wondered, it's just kind of like the yin and the yang thing, but I want to ask you about one other thing you said, that when you experience this kind of thing, you wanted to change the imprint. And I think that that to me is really where things start to change. And I think this is something we've spent a lot of time talking about here on the show is understanding the difference between circumstances and identity, because when the two get intertwined, that's when your life just becomes a giant mess. But changing the imprint. I mean, people are going to hear that, because I think that there are a lot of people who would find themselves in the situation where you fall from grace, but in my mind, sometimes you have to fall from grace in order to learn how to really stand. But changing that imprint and changing the story that you're telling around it, I mean, how do you go about doing that? Because I mean, I think for a lot of people, that could become the end of them, it could become who they are, they could let that become their identity. And I wonder how you avoid that. Yeah. Well, and that's who I'm talking to, by the way, is all of those of you who are imprinted by your circumstances to let you know that it's just a story. It's just a story that you can change at any moment. And you know, while I was in the place of giving up my identity and taking on circumstances that were not circumstances that I wanted to be known for, I reached out to people who could really support me in that, James Altuscher, for example, you know, I spoke to him during that time and he gave me so much courage to just keep going down. He said, just, you know, keep letting it go, keep going down. I shared with him a vision that I had of writing a book. It's the book I'm working on now. It's called You Are Not Your Credit Score and a book in which I would give people the permission to tap into the credit system, to finance their dreams, to go through bankruptcy if they're stressed out about debt and that's the right path for them and to not feel guilty or shameful about it, but instead to look at what is the most responsible decision that I can make, not from the cultural conditioning, but from the place of, how can I be of most service in the world? And he really encouraged me there. He said, yeah, go for it. That is the right path. And receiving support from people that I admired during that time was extremely helpful. I also, I read a lot of books. I read Napoleon Hill's Outwitting the Devil. I read Mike Dooley's Infinite Possibilities. Sometimes in kind of the darkest days, that's really all I could do was listen to things that would uplift me and give me hope that I wasn't going to be stuck in this place forever, that this was just a place that I was now and that the alchemy of it, the way that I could transmute it and turn tarnished silver or even aluminum into gold was to mine the experience to take the experience and help other people, knowing that the more people I could help, the more everything would be OK. And so if you're in those circumstances right now where life is just shitty and every single circumstance seems like it's lining up against you, I encourage you to look at it as a gift. Where can you find the gift in your experience? Where can you find the gift in your experience? What is the opportunity here for you to learn so that you can help others? What is the opportunity for you to perhaps to learn how to share more of yourself, how to open your heart more, how to ask for more help, to be more vulnerable, to be more soft, to love people more, and sometimes we have to be torn down all the way to the ground in order for that to happen so we can just surrender completely to our faith, the eternal trust in something bigger than ourselves. And then come through it on the other side with an internal strength that didn't exist before. And one of the things that I want to help to eradicate more than anything because it's the thing that shifted everything for me is blame being a victim and feeling as if you have no power because those stories are the stories that are keeping us separate. And it's a time for us to come together and recognize that there is no blame. There are no victims and we are in this together. And as soon as we all shift our consciousness to that awareness and look at how can I serve more? How can I help more? How can I love more? Even if I don't feel like I have anything to give, I do. I have something I can give to someone. Everything starts to shift and open up and the world can actually become a place that we all love to live in. I love that. It's awesome. You've really talked a lot about service and community throughout our conversation. And it's funny because I think that sometimes we see that as very separate from the money story that we tell ourselves. And I sat down with my business partner Greg Hartle. He was here for a month as we were building and doing all the work around launching the unmistakable creative into what it is now. And he said to me, he said, think about it this way. He said, we've made more money and as a result of making more money, he said, we're able to hire people. He said, that means those people get to put food on the table. They get to live a better life because you're making more money. And he said, so that story, I think the fact that we don't, I think that that's a very complicated story for people because they, I think we look at it for a lot of people, they feel like they are taking from the system without giving anything back into it. And yet it's, you know, when you actually are abundant, I realize you're able to give back into the system in a way you couldn't when you're, when you're, you know, poverty stricken even mentally. Yeah. It's, it's really, I never saw it that way before. Yeah. I really didn't. But wow, we're actually creating, we are creating work for people that to me, you know, that was a very, very different conversation around money. Yeah. It's like we, we are all supporting each other. And what I found is really important is that it's important for each of us to step into right alignment with our role in the ecosystem. So I used to resist the idea that I was the attractor. I used to resist the idea that I was the leader, like it felt like a burden like, I got to be the leader. But actually that's, that's my role. I have the internal structure, the fortitude, the life experiences, the, the, any agram, the Myers-Briggs, the astrology, the human design to attract. And if I stay there and live there and I'm willing to be there, then I can attract in what's needed to support the supporters, what's needed to support the connectors. And these are some archetypes that I've, uh, begin to work with to help people identify where in the ecosystem do you belong? And what I find is that there's not enough support out there for the supporters. The, the supporters are the people that we rely upon to support what we're creating. And I get the sense that there's this idea out there that somehow you should evolve beyond being a supporter, that it's better to be the, the creator, it's better to be the attractor. And that's just not the case. It's not a matter of better. It's a matter of what is right for your personality type, your structure of who you are as a person. And how can you be part of an ecosystem that allows you to relax into whatever your right role is? Maybe you're a guide. You love to work with people one on one, take them through transformational experiences or they're accounting or they're bookkeeping or they're legal work. Maybe you are creator and you are just not fulfilled unless you're creating new methodologies, entertainment, art, books, maybe you are a connector. You don't want to create anything. You just want to be out there introducing people to each other and getting paid for it. Or maybe you are a supporter and you love to hold the container. You love to lead from the bottom and the more everybody can settle into their space in the ecosystem, the more we can all be entrepreneurial. Live lives that are liberated, I like that word better than free because freedom, there's really a prison that gets created when we chase freedom, but liberation pops all that open so we can all be liberated and feel amazing in our place and that we're all contributing to creating something that supports the whole. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Honestly, when I started this, I thought only I'd have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch, whatever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month, new customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra speeds, lower above 40 gigabytes of C details, hate your crime fans, tired of ads interrupting your gripping investigations. Good news with Amazon music. You have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. After all, ads shouldn't be the scariest thing about true crime. To start listening, download the Amazon music app for free or go to Amazon.com/adfree true crime to catch up with the product of Amazon.com. Touch up on the latest episodes without the ads. You know what? I love that. You know, it's so funny because nobody has ever talked about it that way before. I think that, you know, we, we sort of live in the internet perpetuates individualism almost to a fault. I think, you know, we, we, it's the, it's the conversation that nobody wants to talk about. It's like, hey, the whole world is saying quit your job, you know, be a misfit, all this stuff, help, you know, to some degree, I'm one of those people who perpetuates it. But, you know, as, as we've done things in the last six, probably 60 to 90 days, what I've realized is how, how much more the entire system thrives when we're working together as opposed to I'm out to build my empire. Yeah. Yeah, that. So, so the empire analogy is really interesting because if the truth is, is if you look at an empire, an empire right was supported by the king and the queen. And if we look at the reality of a benevolent king and queen, what we can see is that it was actually an ecosystem where the king and the queen are actually supporting the people that are supporting them. But that's not what we've gotten in our minds because we all watch like Game of Thrones, which I have to say that I read the books and they were fascinating. But as I was reading them, do you know about these books, Game of Thrones? Well, everybody talks to me about them. I haven't read them or seen the TV show. Okay. Well, it's probably better because as I was reading them, what I, what was being imprinted into me was fear this idea of every man out for himself. It's, it's, it's frightening. And that is why I'm so committed to using entertainment to change the cultural conditioning that we have because if you watch those shows, you get the idea that an empire is every man out for himself. But the reality is that an empire, when supported in everybody in their right role in the ecosystem and nobody being competitive and everybody being co-creative can actually be a beautiful, supportive thing where everybody is getting their needs met. I'll, I'll share another book with you, which I do think you should read. It's called the fifth sacred thing. And it's kind of a dystopian, it's a, it's a novel about a dystopian time. So it's a time in the future when the world has run out of water, run out of not completely run out of water, but almost completely run out of water, which, you know, here in California, which is where I am today, you see that it could actually happen at some point given the drought that we're having. And so the world is run out of water and the ability to get clean food becomes very difficult. And so the world divides basically into the population of people who are basically living under the control of a very, you know, rationing government. And then a small group of people who have learned to come together to create clean food, to create clean water, to create clean energy. And as you read this book, what got imprinted in me is a vision of how this could actually be possible, not through force, which is what happened in this book, because it became no choice. But by choice, how if we can step into that now and start to create that now, we don't have to end up in a dystopian society, where we can actually live in a space where there is enough food, there is enough water, there is enough energy. And it's going to take us making a cultural shift right now that fortunately I can see coming to fruition already in at least in my children. But it's a big reconditioning, because again, the media is so just imprinting in them the old ways. And so I think that's just, you know, it's our job to come together and reframe things like empires and business, and find a way to do it that feels good for all. I love it. So, you know, I'm going to close with my final question. It's really, you know, this has been, this has been amazing. I really, it's such a, the contrast in our two conversations. And for those of you guys listening, if you're up for a really painful experience, you can listen to some of my earlier work, which I'll link in the show notes. So, you know, it's interesting. I'd been thinking for hundreds of interviews, how do I end, you know, with something different? Because I'd been asking the same question over and over again. But now I realize, I mean, this show is called the unmistakable creative. So I think I finally figured out, you know, in a world of this much noise, regardless of where you fall in the ecosystem, how do you become unmistakable? You become unmistakable by discovering the truth of who you are and living that so on, on the spot so true to yourself without striving to accumulate more and more and more, but identifying where do you actually belong in the ecosystem, not from ego, but from what actually feels good to you? And how do you learn to live on just what you need, focusing on building a life that is going to take you into your elder years, not having to save for retirement and hoard for retirement and pay off all your debt and focus on how you can get ahead. But actually focus on how can you love and live right now and learn to provide value in the world in a way that allows you to earn what you need, when you need it on demand so you can stop hoarding and living in that scarcity, tight, scared place. And instead be aware of the abundance that is here for us right now when you know that you can always provide value by giving more and that it will come back to you. And it's somewhat of a challenging thing to learn, but if you spend more time with people who are doing that, you will open up to it. It will naturally arise in you and go to Burning Man. Well, I think that that that makes a perfect way to sum up our conversation. This has been amazing. I really I can't thank you enough for coming back to the show for a second time. I wasn't to be honest, I wasn't even sure what to expect. I was like, are we going to have a bunch of spiritual new age psycho babble conversation? But this has been really, really cool. I have to say, I think people are going to get a lot from this. Thank you, Stree. Thanks for taking a chance on me both then and now and allowing me to be part of your community. I really appreciate how you're showing up in the world. Awesome. And for those of you guys listening, we'll wrap the show with that. You've been listening to the Unmistakable Creative podcast. Visit our website at UnmistakableCreative.com and get access to over 400 interviews in our archives. How weird does it feel to be called someone's fiance? The first time you hear it, you do a double take. From there, let's enjoy this moment. Turns into we're planning a fall wedding. That's where Zola comes in from a venue and vendor discovery tool that matches you with your dream team to save the dates, websites and an easy to use registry. Zola has everything you need to plan your wedding in one place. Start planning at Zola.com. That's Z-O-L-A dot com. Have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity? Well, what if you could turn that fear into create a fuel? We've just published an amazing new ebook called the four keys to success in an AI world. And this is more than just a guide. It's a deep exploration into the human skills that AI can't touch. The skills that are essential for standing out and thriving, no matter how much technology evolved. We're talking about real differentiators here like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and much more. Inside, you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills, whether you're a creative person, a business person or just simply someone who loves personal development. This isn't a story about tech taking over. It's a story of human creativity thriving alongside AI. Picture this AI as your creative co-pilot, not just as a tool, but a collaborator that enhances your unique human skills. The four keys ebook will show you exactly how to do that and view AI in a new way that empowers you instead of overshadows you. Transform your creative potential today. Head over to unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys. Use the number four K-E-Y-S that's unmistakablecreative.com/fourkeys and download your free copy. [BLANK_AUDIO]

Building a successful 6 Figure Business
The danger of making every decision on money
The myth that a certain amount of money will free you
Why Alexis gave up everything in her life
Finding the the truth of who you really are
Running 2 businesses with two names
The power of showing up with no answers
Becoming a victim of the trappings success
Signs that you’re not on the right path
Finding a way to get into real truth about money
The 4 levels of which you can use money to be happy
How living in your bare minimum completely changes people
Finding a powerful motivation for why you make money
How to dissociate yourself from your money number
A look at incredibly unusual business structure
Why entertainment is crucial to our culture
The power of having quirks in your brand
Changing the imprint of your life
Learning to find the gift in your difficult experiences
Stepping into alignment with your role in the ecosystem

Ali Shanti is a business priestess, truh telling lawyer, evolutionary strategist, and catalyst.

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