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Kellan Fluckiger

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, life,

money, create, depression, forgiving, podcast, perseverance, excusing, truth,

coach, Kellan, world, question, started, kinds, years, blame, optimism, joy

SPEAKERS

Kellan

Fluckiger, Ed Watters, Gareth Davies

Ed Watters 

00:00

If you

like Tony Robbins, you're gonna love our guest today. He's a powerhouse when it

comes to motivating you He is the catalyst for getting things done. Today we

are talking with Kellan Fluckiger. He is that person that you want in your

corner to get things changing to get things motivated and to help you push

forward. I highly recommend you looking Kellan up and getting involved with

him. Everybody needs a coach. And I'm sure with Kellan's story, he can help you

achieve your ultimate life. Let's not waste any more time and get into today's

episode.

Gareth Davies 

00:45

Hello,

good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon, wherever you may be around this

wild, wacky, and sometimes disturbing world of ours. Yes, that's the intro to

the mindset podcast, a weekly attempt to open eyes and shedding light on what's

really going on in the world. All done by ripping apart the media madness that

masquerades as news. Join me, Gareth Davies. Every Sunday on the mindset

podcast. You can find the show on all major podcasting services such as iTunes,

Stitcher, and so on or you can go directly to the main mindset website. That's

www.mindsetcentral.com. Check out the mindset podcast bring your curiosity, your

opinions, and a sense of humor. And remember that some worldviews are stranger

than others.

Ed Watters 

01:51

To

overcome, you must educate. Educate not only yourself but educate anyone

seeking to learn. We are all Dead America. We can all learn something to learn.

We must challenge what we already understand. The way we do that is through

conversation. Sometimes we have conversations with others. However, some of the

best conversations happen with ourself. Reach Out and challenge yourself. Let's

dive in and learn something right now. Today we have Kellan Fluckiger with us

Kellan, could you please introduce yourself, let people know a little bit about

you, and how you got to where you are today, please?

Kellan Fluckiger  02:55

 Well, that's a long story. I'm 65. And I have

lots of history. So I spent, I've had an interesting life and career as a

executive, as a musician, as a recording artist, as a career consultant in

energy markets. And in the last 10 years, I've spent all my time transitioning

to being a full-time business and life coach. I just say coach for clients

around the world.

Ed Watters 

03:24

You have

spent your life going through a lot of things. You say that you come out of a

depression, addiction, life-threatening illness, and a near-death experience.

The cage breaker, you tout that you are a cage breaker and the catalyst to get

it done. Makes sense once you dig into the story of who Kellan really is, let's

get into the details of the depression first because a lot of people deal with

depression.

Kellan Fluckiger  04:00

Well,

I'm happy to talk about it. And even though it's very stigma a lot you know

once in a while, like a few years ago, Robin Williams committed suicide and and

then you know, those kinds of things happen. And then it raises its head and we

talk about it for a little while and then it goes back down underneath the

radar is yesterday's news. My stuff started early, I was brought up in a very

strict religious household where if you didn't do good, it wasn't just be a good

boy, Johnny, it was you're you're going to hell and it was enforced with a lot

of physical punishment stuff that today would be felony child abuse. And so

there was a lot of that and the consequence of that for me, really, and it was

over everything. It didn't matter grades at school, how I behaved, whether or

not I told the truth every time, and then I learned to lie to protect myself and

everything else. But the consequence for me was I internalized a truth isn't

true, but I internalized it and that was I'm not good enough, and I never will

be. And so I spent a couple of really sad, but pervasive things came out of

that I became a liar, a pathological liar practically to protect myself. And

that spawned this. I have a really, really good memory. So I never got caught.

And I was able to just sort of remember everything. But it made me live in a

world that was not true. I said, whatever I wanted to say, to protect myself

and that was not good. And it's not good enough means that I went on a rampage

for decades, trying to get the approval of was principally my mom who was the

disciplinarian, the violent disciplinarian, I guess, and I needed to prove I

need to get her approval. And so that led me to when I was a kid in grade

school apathy, and I got crappy grades. But when I went to high school and

university, I got good grades, and I got straight A's, and I mean, honor roll

and, and then I got in business and I got high positions and got elevated and

got up into companies and you know, got senior-level executive positions and

made a lot of money. But at the time, I was never feeling good enough,

everything was not enough. So I always had this fear of being found out the

imposter syndrome, we call it all kinds of stuff. And at the same time, because

my true love was music, and music was not okay as a career in the context of my

upbringing, because musicians are bad people, they do drugs, and they are, you

know, immoral, then I couldn't be a musician. And then I ended up being all the

things that my mother was afraid I would be, even though I was in business, I

ran a recording studio on the side for a while. And then I buried the whole

thing. By burying it, I sold it off and just got out of it and pursued the

executive and consulting career with a vengeance. So that career took off. I

made a lot of money. And I testified before Congress and I had big contracts in

the United States and Canada, did a bunch of stuff. But behind the scenes, I

was a drug addict. I was destroyed relationships, the typical thing you see in

movies, where you have a double life, very, very high profile, facing the

world, and everyone would have looked at me and said raging success. But in

behind the scenes, I was an addict, I was destroying relationships, I ended up

getting married and then divorced three times, and the battleground behind me

and had other relationships, besides the official marriages that were all also

disastrous. And it was all because two things one I believed that I couldn't be

good enough, and two every single time I got somewhere that looked good,

meaning I got a big promotion, got a bunch of money, got a big position, or

whatever. My internal clock or thermostat said you shouldn't be here, this is

not okay. And so then I would begin the slow or rapid process of self-sabotage.

So then I would start to do things that would undermine it. And eventually, I

would either leave or the position would fall apart, or I'd get fired, or the

relationship would end and I'd get divorced. And that happened over and over.

And over, I listed the number of times I started with drugs when I was 12, on

and off at different periods, and I listed the periods of, you know, drugs, or

relationships, or addiction or divorce, and to the life from 12 to 55, is when

I finally realized what was going on, and finally got some help. I never talked

to anyone, I never who's you know, taboo to talk about your personal problems,

because you shouldn't have them anyway and you suck if you do that kind of

doctrine. And so I never talked to anybody. And I just kept trying to do this

on my own. We're probably 20 different episodes varying in length from two

years, to five years, during that 40 years. So there's almost no time, zero

years where I wasn't in trouble. Somehow, seriously in trouble. Whether or not

one area affected the other and it just depended, I was quite successful at

hiding, stuff, functioning addict, functioning alcoholic, etc., etc. but I

personally as a person was miserable. And at the same time, I learned to be

completely disconnected from my feelings. I remember saying once to someone in

2000, which was 20 years ago, and about seven years before this all came to a

head in 2007, which I'll get to in a minute, that divine intervention that

changed everything. I said to somebody, I can be anybody you like, tell me what

I need to do and I can be that. And I could do it so convincingly kind of like

character actors. And it didn't matter if it was a social situation a business

situation, I could be that. And inside, I had no feeling I was just playing a

part. And I could do it really well. So I was just sort of sick individual

afraid of being found out, having tons of secrets to find out, knowing that I

wasn't good enough, desperate to win the approval of those who would never give

it for decades. So that's how depression manifested itself for me through all

of those years, until the end of 2007. So that would have been when I was 52.

And, finally, at that time, I had a 17 hour out-of-body experience, divine

experience and you know that voice said, that is enough, or it is enough, not

that it isn't enough. And I realized that you know, this is time to change my

life. So I'm 50 something years old. I've never talked to anyone I've been, I

was at the time a practicing addict, like 1000s of dollars a week is this level

of severity. And I was making so much money that it didn't matter. It was lunch

money. And, and that experience made me go from $3,000 a week as a coke addict

to zero in one day, throw it away. And I said, Okay, I got to do something

different. I walked away from the contracts I had, which were, you know, very

lucrative contracts millions of dollars worth of stuff, and said, I gotta start

over in my life, in my mid-50s. So I did that. And that that divine

intervention was the thing that started me on the path to healing. It wasn't

sudden healing, but it was, we've got to do something different. So part of

that divine intervention was, this is a funny story. For those that are

interested, all of the details are written in a book that I wrote called

Tightrope of depression, my journey from darkness, despair, and death to light

love and life, which is on Amazon if anyone's interested. So part of the

divine intervention was after that 17-hour out-of-body experience Two weeks

later, I hadn't quit yet. That whole process of resigning and leaving took

about a month. About two weeks later, I got tickets to a very high profile,

performance, musical performance in a very expensive venue in a city I was

working in. And I got that kind of stuff all the time. Because the positions I

held I got the things that would have been, almost bribes, you know, all kinds

of gifts, right? And so I had these two tickets to see this concert. For those

of you that do classical music, the performer was Yo-Yo Ma cellist, who is a

spectacular and electrifying performer anyway, I was single again for the third

time. And so I had an extra ticket. And I gave it away to somebody in the

office. I said, Who wants classical music? Who wants to go see this? And then

this lady came and said, I want it. I said, Have I ever given you anything

before? No. Okay, good. We'll see you there. So we met at the venue. And

partway through the night at the performance which was like this, like I said,

electrifying, I had this overwhelming feeling which I had very recently come to

recognize that voice said to me to marry this woman. And I said, Yeah, not

gonna happen. I haven't done so well in that department. Let's just drop that.

And then after the performance, it was there were backstage passes, of course.

And they came back and said, and you need to tell her tonight. And so I argued

quite a bit and lost the argument. So I did and it went about like you would

have expected she freaked out left, and we hadn't come together, so that was

fine. Anyway, later, it's her own experience. Within two weeks, we were

together. We got married three months later after I had quit the position, she

resigned from her positions. And we just struck out on this new adventure. And

that was 13 and a half years ago. So she knew me and she knew me during the

time I was, you know, managing supervising the senior executive director of

that position. She knew I was in trouble. She knew me. But I didn't know her

very well. But everybody knew me because I was the boss, Big Boss. So she knew

that and she took a chance. Anyway, she had her own set of experiences that

said, this was right. And that was a, you know, there were several things that

out of body experience, then meeting her in that spectacular way. That made it

clear to me that there was something else besides what I've been doing for the

last 40 years. And so that's where it started. And that put us into 2008. At

that time, after I walked away from all that I said, Okay, what do I know how

to do we're going to do something completely different because I'm done with

that other stuff. And I had a couple offers to be CEO's of small companies in

the energy industry, which is what I've been in and I turned them down. Because

I knew it would take me right back to where I was. So I said, I'm not doing

that. And I didn't know what I was going to do. And I said, Well, what I know I

know how to do is I know how to help people do impossible things because

that's what I'd been. That was my career was built on that guy you call when

stuff has to get done that can't get done. Okay. So that's what I knew. And I

thought, well, what is that? I think that's a coach. So I decided I would study

and become a coach because what what I knew skill was that I had was to help

people do hard things. So I did that. And gradually, over the first few years,

which would have been eight to 12, 2008 to 2012. You know, I came to grips with

the decades of depression. And finally, in 2012, I began talking to a shrink and

experimenting with way admitting I have depression and I was diagnosed with

severe MBD that probably started in my teens, which is why I say that. And so

then I just began working on that. And, and my work today isn't really at all

focused on depression, per se. But what it's focused on is people who live with

a story that makes them addicted to mediocrity, settling for what's easy and

obvious instead of what's possible. And I took the words cage breaker because

cage is how we often live, we're trapped in a cage, we can see through the bars

what we want, and we reach for it, we can't get there. And cage is an acronym

that stands for in the negative sense. Compare, abandon, grumble and excuse,

or, in a positive sense, create, achieve, grow, enjoy. And so breaking a cage

is a metaphor for doing what I did, which is I'm done, I'm going to do

something different. And in the process, since that time, I've written 13 books

and done a bunch of other stuff. I speak in a lot of places, etc, etc. So this

is a long monologue. But that's kind of some detail about what happened.

Ed Watters 

17:17

Yeah,

that's great. We love long monologues because it gets inside. And people

really need to understand each other, this how we change ourself. And that's

what Dead America is about. service to others, you tout this in everything you

do in your social media. I love that, you know, helping others no matter where

you are in life, money is nice. But doing what you can, with what you have is

action, and not excuse. You do that very well. How to get organized enough, out

of all of the chaos in your mind to become a great coach like this.

Kellan Fluckiger  18:07

It's not

an accident. So the divine intervention I talked about just got me to stop

being an addict. But it didn't create a coach and it didn't create the keywords

that I use, and you used the beautiful one that is one of my most powerful. I

have three words that drive my life, love, create, search. And those are the

three words that I judge every action by but those didn't come magically or

automatically during those first few years. Eight to 12 or 13,14. As it goes

along. You evolve. And I said, Okay, I want to be a coach, what does that mean?

How do I help people? How do I talk to them? What does it mean to be a coach?

So I went through some coaching stuff, and they didn't teach me how to help

people do hard things because I knew how to do that. But they taught me

frameworks...