--:-- Ryan Hanley: We do not have enough suffering in our lives. That's according to today's guest, Christian Ray Flores, international pop sensation. And I mean that quite legitimately. Minister, entrepreneur, coach, author, incredible human being. Someone who spent a large portion of his life dealing with adversity and trauma. Growing up in Russia, living through the Chilean revolution, having his father in a concentration camp. Made it to America and absolutely has dominated. Just a tremendous human being. The range, the depth, the philosophy, coupled with tactical guidelines that he's going to share with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, I hit 15% of what I wanted to talk to Christian about. We're going to have him back on the show again because we simply ran out of time. This is one of my favorite episodes, one of my favorite conversations I've had in a long time, and you're just absolutely going to adore Christian. I highly recommend that you dig into his work, that you follow along, connect with him on social, subscribe to his newsletter. All those things, because this is someone who I'm going to be connecting deeper with. We just matched philosophies in a way that... it's why I do the podcast. Episodes like this are why I do this show, because I get to meet incredible people and share them with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: With that said, my friends, this audience is growing rapidly and I appreciate it. I love you for that. If you're listening, please like, subscribe, watch, leave a review, comment. I read every review. I read every comment on this show. If you agree, if you disagree, come over to the YouTube video. Watch us have this conversation. Leave a comment and Christian will come in and answer it. I'll come in and answer it. My friends, I love you for being part of this community. And if you want to go deeper, if you want to get insights beyond just what comes through the podcast or through the YouTube channel, head over to my website, ryanhanley.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. It comes out once a week, unique content. We're driving you to resources, ideas. It is my best work, my deepest work. We put it through the newsletter. Oftentimes it is diving into topics that we didn't get to fully address in the show. We'll dive deeper there. It's completely free. RyanHanley.com. Head over today. I love you for being here. I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Christian Ray Flores.
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--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... So dude, when I was researching you and getting ready for this, I gotta say, I had a moment where I felt very emasculated by what you've done. You had during your pop career the most epic hair I have ever seen in my entire life. I was looking at it going, "I could never pull that off." Look how freaking awesome that was.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: The hair that did it, huh?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, it was the hair. You know, you've done all these amazing things in business, but that hair really got me. Now, born in Russia, you immigrate to Latin America. You have this wild story, and you can go into that as much as you want. But maybe starting there, I'm really interested in diving into your backstory just a little bit. We don't have to do every detail, but maybe some of the highlights. I think what I was most intrigued by was you did not have in any regard a standard upbringing. You had tons of turmoil, stuff where your father's put in jail for a period of time. Yet you have found a way to not just persevere, but to excel in life in many different areas. I really want to dive into, especially early on in this podcast, what those early experiences did for you and how you have taken them and not used them in a victimhood way, but used them as a way to build strength and write books, become a pop star, international pop star. I mean, literally, I'm reading about how Boris Yeltsin's using your songs in his campaigns. Just this incredible life where so many people that would come up the way you did and have the early portion of your life the way it was, they would turtle in. They would compress. They would become depressed. And you have done the opposite. I'm sure every moment of your life hasn't been completely joyous and amazing, but you've persevered so well and driven through it. I'm interested in starting there.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Okay, so thank you for asking. And I think that is the question. To give your audience a little bit of a background in a very fast-forward way, what you're referring to is that I basically changed four countries by age seven. My dad was in a concentration camp in Chile. We were refugees in a refugee facility. Then we were traveling to Germany, then back to Russia, then to Africa. There was a civil war in Africa when we were there. There were bombings literally across the street from my house. They blew up a building. And then I ended up coming back as a teenager to the worst Soviet Union restrictive environment. And then after the fall of the wall, it almost took flight. There was like escape velocity that happened.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: And the question, I guess, is about that. How does that happen? I became one of the pop stars. Then we moved to the States, started several businesses, nonprofits, and did a bunch of other things. None of it is really over-the-top grandiose, but if you think about it, "Wow, that's a lot." The question that I get most is what you're saying: How do you not contract? How do you expand in the midst of massive disadvantages and life-threatening circumstances?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: I think, honestly, for me, the answer is that there's actually a tremendous potential opportunity for growth in the midst of suffering if you process it correctly. Actually, I don't think we have enough suffering in our lives that makes us weaker. I mean, it's biologically true. You don't go to the gym, you become weaker. You go to the gym, you create suffering, you become stronger. But it's extraordinarily true across all dimensions of life: learning, ambition, romance, friendship, money. It actually works universally. It's not that I wish—it's actually impossible to replicate my kind of suffering that is completely out of control. But you can actually replicate suffering on purpose, constructive suffering that makes you grow. I think that's the answer: that you interpret suffering as a win of some sort. And that's a mindset shift.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love the idea that we don't have enough suffering in our lives. I completely agree with you. How does someone who is coming up in a standard American middle-class family in a neighborhood that's safe, that's never had to worry about gun violence or poverty or drugs—it all feels outside of them. They may see it on the news or hear someone talk about it, but they've never experienced it. Their school is relatively safe. How does that person who's listening to this and going, "I hear what he's saying," how do they cultivate that in their own life? What are some of the constructive ways that someone could find suffering, bring suffering into their lives and start to grow again?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Exactly. Basically, what you need to do is seek out not too much suffering, because too much suffering will break you, but enough suffering to grow you. There's a term coined by Nassim Taleb called "anti-fragile." Anti-fragility is the ability to get better, stronger, smarter, more agile because of suffering, not in spite of it. I would say the formula is: keep 80% safe and predictable, and create 20% across all dimensions every single day in the unsafe, painful suffering. And you will be unstoppable, I believe.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love anti-fragile. It's one of my favorite books. It's on the wall behind me. It's one of my most recommended books.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Yeah, it's an incredible work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You know, so you've seen the outside world, outside of America. In my backstory, I grew up in a very small, very depressed town in the middle of the woods in upstate New York. We used to say that you could keep your doors open at night because the criminals lived in our town. They didn't steal in our town. I haven't lived in a war-torn area or another country with completely different challenges, but I didn't necessarily have it easy. We were certainly lower class. You'd have three shirts and one pair of jeans for school for the year, and you'd just wear them over and over again until they fell off you. That was just what it was like.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: That's pretty third world, man, even if it was in America.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Absolutely. So now I've risen up out of that. My sole goal in life, even at the age of 10—I was telling my kids this the other day—at 10, I had this idea of, "I need to get out of here and never come back. This is not where I want to be as I grow up." I've achieved that to a certain extent. My kids live in that bubble. They've grown up in that bubble community where it's safe, it's nice, the people are good people for the most part, there's sports leagues and community. I struggle every day with how do I show them? How do I introduce them to experiences where they start to feel that pain? Obviously, I don't want to put them in mortal danger, but I want them to experience some pain. Because at my age, 43 years old, I have so many friends who grew up in the community I live in now. I look at them and so many of them are either miserable, just straight miserable even though by the outside they have a good life, or they're dead inside. They just go through the motions. They bitch about their kids, their wife, their job, their taxes. And I'm like, "Dude, those are not real problems. Your wife is actually okay. Your kids are fine. Your taxes are going somewhere. Your garbage gets picked up. Your roads are clean. The fire department shows up." I don't want them to grow up to be those people. So how do we start to cultivate that now? You've seen the outside world. You're in America. You've written this love story to America, which I want to get to. If I'm coming up to you asking for advice, how does a parent do that? How do we start to indoctrinate them to this idea of suffering being a good thing?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Thank you for asking that question, because I am very passionate about parenting. I come from three generations of broken homes. I had to really recalibrate my life, my character, my everything to learn how to be a good husband and a good parent. This is quite literally the top of my priorities. It's not business, it's not money, it's not career, it's not even impact. It's my wife is radiant with joy, my kids are functional and winning. That's basically it. I really do care about this tremendously.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: The thing is, it's fascinating. I would love to skip 40 years and that kid is a high-performer CEO, and how the same principle applies to that kid and to that CEO. But it's the same thing. My kids—two were born in Moscow, one was born in Ukraine—but they moved pretty early. My oldest one was 12, but the youngest ones were zero or like one and three. So they're 100% American, very Americanized. Here's how you still replicate the healthy patterns: No participation prizes, ever. Those are the basic things. Teach them disciplines, not grades. The school system is designed as a factory, a conveyor belt. It's designed to teach kids to perform and give them a certain mark. They're literally creating cogs.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's the way it's done.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: What we taught our kids—our oldest went to a charter school, then a private school, our youngest two were actually homeschooled throughout—we taught them disciplines. This is history. This is literature. How did literature relate to history? How does this thing relate to each other? This is economics. This is geography. The mindset of the normal education bubble is you're at the center of it, then it's your parents, then it's your state, then it's your country. What we taught them is there's the world, there's continents, countries, states, systems, then it's your family, then it's you. You are not at the center of the universe. There's a world and you fit into it a certain way.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: When it comes to relationship, you teach them relationship by not being a parent only in the morning when you drop them off and in the evening when you tuck them in and maybe play around in the backyard for a little bit. Integrate your life with them because they need it when they grow up. They need to understand what deep relationships are. We literally planned our business opportunities to where our lives with our kids were integrated, weaved together. If you do that early on, they won't resent you when they're teenagers. When they resent you in the teenagers, it's too late. Now they're all out of the house—20, 22, 29—but they come back. The relationship is intact. The dynamics change because they're grown-ups, we treat them differently, but we love each other so much. We have such a warm relationship. You can't buy this kind of influence. You can't succeed your way into this kind of influence. You have to just do the work with them.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: When it comes to comfort and what you referred to earlier, what we did is we invested a ton of time and money, literally from age zero, to travel. It would be Paris, it could be an all-inclusive resort, and it would be the slums of Rio de Janeiro, or the barrios of Mexico and Tijuana, or the under-$2-a-day slums in Maputo, Mozambique. They would be with us the whole time. They know the third world since they were born. Even though they grew up in America, they were exposed to the contrast. We spoke about the things and we told them the stories. I think that's the way: exposure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. I was reading an article the other day. I'm very interested in the turn of the 19th century up through World War Two. Not just the wars part, but the lifestyle. It was a very dynamic time because documentation and imagery started to expand. Not only could we read the stories about what was happening, but we could see it as well. I was reading this story about how one of the things we've lost, particularly in this country, is the apprenticeship of our children. That's exactly what I just heard you describe.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: That's exactly it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Where the shoe cobbler, his son would be in the store with him. If the mother had work, her daughter would be with her. We apprenticed our children into our trade. It doesn't mean they necessarily would do that trade, although many did at that time. It showed them from a very early age work ethic, grinding, failure, success, conversations. Even into the 50s, you see many leaders, executives would have their child with them standing behind them as they're doing deals or having meetings. The child would sit there. Now we're like, "My kid can't sit still for 10 seconds without a piece of technology." What the heck was happening back then? They didn't have that. What was the kid doing? The kid was listening to your conversations. They were learning how to communicate with people, how to handle themselves in society. I said to myself, we wonder why we launch these kids into the world and they lose their minds in college and go crazy. It's because they lived in a bubble, and then all of a sudden they were launched out into the world and they were like, "Wait a minute, the world is crazy and hard." What you just described, I'm absolutely fascinated with it. I'm starting to do with my own children, maybe a little late—mine are nine and 11—but I'm starting to bring them into my life, into my work life, because I want them to see this is effort. You don't just get to show up. You have to do this, and you have to do it well.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: This idea that you show up and participate, and somehow that's success, is a complete fabrication. If you do that, they will never be those classic cliche people who are entitled. When people say it's a generational thing, it's not a generational thing. It's a parenting thing. My kids are the exact same generation that they accuse of being entitled. No, my kids work hard. Why? It's not because they belong to a generation. It's because they were brought up in an environment. Apprenticeship is such a beautiful concept. It's actually a concept that is widely needed for grownups as well.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: You mentioned bringing them to the workspace. They've seen me on stage when I was doing music. I have pictures of them sitting on a set when I'm shooting a $160,000 music video at a production company when we did that in LA. They're hanging out with extras and camera people and grips, seeing the whole thing. They've seen me produce videos. They've seen me do this. My youngest one, her name is Bella Flores, you can look her up on Instagram, is just crushing it as an influencer. She edits, she shoots, she has this aesthetic about her. She understands how to frame something. Honestly, I don't think she's ever going to send a job application ever. She's not even out of college. She's getting brand deals right now in college and partnering and designing clothing lines. Ridiculous, right?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Why? Because she grew up watching us do stuff. All three of them are very different, but they all three have a work ethic. They all three have almost an internal freedom of, "I'm going to pursue this and I'm going to pursue that. I'm going to puzzle for a bit." And we're totally fine with that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's like we've forgotten everything that Joseph Campbell taught us about the hero's journey. We've completely forgotten that we start in the safe village, surrounded by our family, with a routine, and things are fine. Then if we never launch out into the world and we never face the dragon, if we never stand in front of the dragon and that's our strength and our ability, then there's no way of coming back in and actually becoming the hero. Yet what we all want to do is press a magic button and all of a sudden we're the hero. It simply does not work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I come back to this idea of apprenticeship. Before what I do now, I owned a commercial insurance agency, a national digital commercial insurance agency. We hired a lot of people from all different places. When we started to really dial in and figure out how to find the workers, they were rarely the most educated, rarely the most polished. They were oftentimes the ones who had some funky story in their background, but it was always an overcome story. This terrible thing happened, I got fired from this job, I made this decision that didn't work, I tried this business that didn't work, but now I'm here and I'm pushing forward. The ones that just took this straight path of come out of the good community, go to the good college, get that corporate job—it never clicked for them. They always wanted something from us. Instead of "What can I bring here? How do I succeed? How do I get forward?" it was a different conversation. It was all "How much time off do I get? What's my benefits?" And I'm like, we're thinking about this all wrong.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: They're entitled.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. And here's where I want to position this question. Faith is a huge part of your life. It's a huge part of my family's life. My kids go to Catholic school. I'm a devout Christian, I was raised that way. Faith is a big part of the conversations we have. I'm very interested in how you built that into your own life and how you've brought your kids along through faith, and what that was like for you, and where you see faith in ultimately getting to a place of meaning and purpose and contentment.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: That's a big question. That's a huge question. The peculiarity about me is that I literally grew up—and you'll probably find almost zero people in the United States who can say the same thing, unless they're an immigrant from a communist country—until I was probably 20, in my early 20s, I knew zero people who believed in God. You have to let that sink in to understand the ripple effects of a culture like that where everybody is godless. It doesn't even matter which faith, but just in general, it's an atheistic cultural baseline. Of course it's not zero people, but I knew zero people.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: What happened with me is that I became very successful as an artist. I was literally entertaining millions of people, selling millions of albums, playing sports arenas. There are these foundational dimensions of your humanity that were basically underdeveloped in me because there was no faith. There was no moral framework. There were not these meta structures of: Is there anything bigger than me? Does that anything care about me? How do I fit into the picture? Why am I here? What does that mean for my relationships? What does that mean about power and talent and money and love and sex? All of those things were almost devoid of faith that is thousands of years old and has perpetuated and breathed and lived within humanity. You go, "Oh, this is just abstract lofty ideas," but it has a very real consequence.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Here I am, a pop star. I'm doing all this stuff. My ego is super inflated. There's nothing bigger than me in my mind. I don't know what to do with marriage because I come from three generations of broken homes. No one taught me anything about this. I don't understand submission to authority. My dad wasn't there since I was 14. The whole faith—obedience out of faith, out of adoration, out of love—non-existent. The effect is I don't know my way around X, Y, and Z. I am in the top 0.1% of performers and attainers, just crushing it, and I'm completely inadequate in the most basic things like marriage.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: I'm dating all these girls. I have no idea what I'm doing. I basically sabotage every relationship I'm in. I'm fearful of commitment. And also, like any human being, I want love, I want family, I want that warmth, that belonging that comes with it. I don't know how to get there. So I want it, I date, it gets too close to intimacy, I'm afraid that it's going to end up in divorce, I sabotage it. Rinse and repeat. I meet a girl, she gets pregnant. I treat her like crap. She leaves me, cuts me off from my oldest daughter, Deanna. I'm now a pop star, entertaining millions, clinically depressed. Don't know how to breathe. Forget creativity. Forget high performance. Forget genius. Forget thriving. You see how even a high performer can go into a deep hole if they don't fix some other areas of life.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: I meet this Canadian missionary. His name is Andy. I look at his family and I'm like, "Just teach me how to do this." He says, "Well, are you open to listening to the Bible?" I said, "It's sort of an old book. I don't really believe in it. But if I get what you have, sure." Basically, that's how I came into the faith. Now I've been a Christian for almost 30 years. I've preached the gospel all over the world in four different languages. I've started churches. I've been a bivocational pastor all over the place. It is really the most important part of my life.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Even when I coach in my coaching program, if you're not a Christian, I can coach you as long as you don't mind me quoting the Bible, because these are eternal truths. I will be doing you a disservice if I don't quote you at least a scripture where I say, "Look, this has been true 2,000 years ago. It's still true about you right now. You need to pay attention." I'm not going to push you to become a Christian at all. If you want to know how, obviously I will share my faith with you. But it is that important. I do think that the Bible contains the secrets to life and success and health and wealth and joy and love and all of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was very taken, by the way. I spent some time reading about and thinking about how we've lost in our culture the idea of generational thinking. So much of what you read about everyday life, particularly about Americans at the time, was you worked to put your children in a better place than you were. Then they worked to put their children in a better place. That's how we took the bloodline and the family and moved them forward in life. My role here is not to be a celebrity. If that happens, that's amazing. But my role is to take my family, my name, my bloodline, and move it from this place and progress us forward. Today, when you bring up the concept of generational thinking to most people, I watch them crank in their head. It's like they've never even considered the idea. They're like, "What do you mean? I'm going for the vice president of sales position. That's what matters: me making more money or getting this position." It's like, but what does that opportunity mean to move you forward? It doesn't mean you shouldn't have that opportunity. I think that's where people get lost. When I talk about this concept, I see a lot of people go, "Well, what about me?" A big lesson that I've taken from the Bible and I try to share with people is that you can fulfill your own meaning and purpose while also guiding the next generation through some of the obstacles that you face. Ego has been a problem in my life in different scenarios before, and I work very hard to talk to my kids about how to be driven but humble at the same time. That's me trying to fix a lesson that wasn't taught to me, a blind spot that I had in my life and a hole I had to fall into and pull myself out of, and now you try to move them forward. To your point, Jordan Peterson says it best: you don't have to believe in God, but there is no better roadmap for success than the Bible. Act as if. That's how he came to faith. I thought that was a wonderful way of looking at it. He came to faith, which now he says he's a believer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: He came to faith by simply just acting as if. He's like, "I don't believe, but I do think this book is really important. So I'm going to act as if." Then through the activity of researching, practicing, talking, communicating, and trying to live out the lessons, he came to believe. I feel like atheism has surfaced again in our country. So much of the lack of birth rate, people not getting married, relationships being very Tinder-based—so much of that is a loss of responsibility to the generation we're trying to move forward. Does that make sense? Does that land for you?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: It does. You brought up something very interesting—the Tinder generation. The concept is you experiment until you get it right. The problem is that the wear and tear of failed experiments really wrecks you. You're just one atom floating in the universe, and then you find another atom to see if there's a match. The apps claim to be very scientific and data-driven. You're looking for a mate—you like walking on the beach, she likes walking on the beach. You like reading books, she likes reading books. "Oh, we're a match." That's not how marriage works at all. If you really want to be scientific, you want somebody who complements you, and you complement them. It's very hard to do that through filling out an application. The mismatches are probably increased by the claim that "we belong together because we're the same." We actually belong together because we're different.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: The other layer is that experimentation is everything. You Tinder your way through life. Look at the outcome seven or ten years later. People are literally more lonely, getting married later, not really understanding what that means. I did that. I did the whole "experiment until you get it right" thing. Then I realized I was so destroyed internally—the damage was so vast. I asked, "Can you please give me another model?" The model was so impossible for me to even wrap my mind around, but I was so desperate. I said, "Okay, how do I do this? My main pain point is how to find a mate, get married, stay married, and be happy." They said, "First of all, what's your system of values? If you're a Christian, who do you marry? A Christian." That narrows it down quite a bit. I said, "Really? Yeah, really." That's an algorithm you can add. It narrows your focus. Why? Because you have the same values and you're both submitted to the same authority. That helps. People fight, people change. If you don't have any authority above you that is objective, you will get divorced more likely than not. When we fight and you have authority, I can open the Bible with my wife and somebody can say, "You guys are a mess. Here's what the Bible says about that. You repent." We're like, "Yes, sir." That helps.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: When you talk about generational wisdom about dating, I'm applying what you said to one scenario because I want to be practical. I basically adopted a completely new approach to sex. I never ever in my life considered that sex is for marriage only. That wasn't even a concept. I was sexually active from age 15. By the time I became a Christian I was 26. I had been sexually active for a decade. On top of that, I was a pop star. A big portion of the population of 15 countries thought I was hot and had posters on their walls of me. That presents a whole different layer of availability of women. It's not healthy or normal. Imagine me in that state at 26—testosterone is pretty high. The guy says, "Yeah, sex is just for marriage." I said, "I don't understand what the words coming out of your mouth mean." He said, "You asked me to teach you how to do this. This is what it says." I said, "Okay, I don't even know how that's physically possible." I made the case that it's unhealthy physically—didn't fly. I made the case that there's got to be a get-out-of-jail card because of my occupation—didn't fly. I finally had the choice of whether I believe in this and will follow this approach or not. I was in so much pain, I figured I'd just do it. Act as if. So I did. I was sexually active for ten years, then completely abstinent for four until I met my wife, courted her, proposed, and married her. The first time I made love to my wife was on the wedding night. No one I knew understood the concept. But I was trying to break a generational curse. I was determined to figure this out.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Twenty-five years later, I'm happily married. So happily married. Never any infidelity of any kind—not even a hint, not even a thought. Our kids love us. They're so jealous of us. They say, "You guys ruined it for us. We're never going to find a marriage this good." But that gives them a higher bar to aspire to. I'll add another layer to this. Generational wisdom—you meet a girl. She's cute. There's chemistry. In the West, in an atomized, individualized society, it's just you and her. You get serious, you inform your friends. You get engaged, you inform your parents. You don't get their input about anything. That's the culture. When it comes to ancient wisdom—thousands of years, not even just Christianity—you get the community involved. When I was courting and dating girls as a Christian, it was like, "Okay, there's chemistry. I like her. There's alignment. I want to get to know her friends. What do they think about her? She will get to know my friends. What do they think about me and her?" It's this incredibly free-flowing, beautiful, holistic wisdom beyond just chemistry and attraction. Then, "Do you have a mentor? Does she have a mentor? Let's talk to her mentor and she'll talk to my mentor." She would literally grill the guy who mentored me about all my worst qualities. I think that's a beautiful thing. Then we're fully informed, wisdom is flowing. We go, "Yes, I want you. I want you forever for the rest of my life." That's what happened.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. There are a couple ideas you brought up. One was breaking a generational curse. I was reading some research—I can't remember where it's from—that said trauma we experience resonates three generations down. We are experiencing the accumulated trauma of three generations in front of us. The argument was that it is not only important but our responsibility and obligation to do whatever we can to fix the traumas inside of us. I'm not talking about physical trauma like an injury. I'm talking about the emotional trauma we carry inside. That is passed to our children. It is paramount, an obligation for us to work through those traumas to reduce the impact, because it's not just us. Like you said, we're so atomized in Western cultures—it's "me and my lived experience," a term I hate. The Bible talks about this too. You are passing that thing on. If you hold it, if you don't fix it, if you stew on it, if you let it fester and create tension and cancer, you are passing that down to the next generation and the generations that follow. Breaking generational curses is in large part why we're here. It is to solve these problems.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Through your teachings and coaching, both in business and the work you do with faith, when I bring these topics up to people in casual conversations, it's an idea that is incredibly foreign to people. Often they're not even aware they feel tension, anxiety, stress, frustration. They have no way of naming it, touching it, realizing that it is real—that they're walking around every day with something inside. How do you guide them to awareness? If awareness is step one, if starting to understand that maybe the reason you struggle to keep a job more than a few years or struggle with relationships is because of this thing you're carrying inside—how do we start to become aware of that? Is it conversations? Counseling? Mentorship? What is your recommendation for someone to start to understand what they're carrying? Because we can't address it until we understand it's even there.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: That's a fantastic question. I do think all of us carry trauma. It's the nature of the human experience. Just beneath the skin, there are stories of pain—every single person walking on this earth. On a macro level, the approach varies. I can narrow it down to something specific and give you what I think works really well. On a macro level, there's healing your past or building a future. That's one way of looking at it. Healing the past is therapy. Building a future is coaching. They overlap, definitely. But the big buckets are: if your past is crushing you, you just can't escape it—get therapy. If you're pretty much figured it out and you want to build a completely different future—get coaching or a mentor.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: The state you're in is another way to think about it. If you had an accident biking, you're bruised, you have a broken arm, maybe some internal bleeding—it's really bad. You don't go to the gym, you go to the hospital. Then from the hospital, you go to physical therapy. Then from therapy, you go to the gym. That's the continuum. You can apply where you are to where you need to be. To your question about awareness, the word I love to use because it's so deep and empowering is metacognition. Metacognition is your ability to think outside of yourself. It's almost like you're outside of yourself thinking about what you're thinking. That's a skill that can be developed. I teach it hands-on in my coaching. I don't keep secrets—everything I teach I post and share on podcasts. When I coach people, what they're paying me for is implementation.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Here's what works really well. First, you need a practice every single day that allows you to think beyond the autopilot. We're just existing, on cruise control. It's a horrible state of being. You weren't designed for that. You were designed to build, evolve, face obstacles, and overcome obstacles. That's what makes life worth living. Ninety percent of the population on any given decade lives on autopilot because it's painful to think beyond the uncertainty. A metacognitive skill set is the ability to have the space every single day to get to a place where you know exactly how you feel, why you feel it, where you want to go, what's in the way, what feelings are constructive, and what feelings are destructive. Every single day—and you're totally capable of doing it.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: The way I teach it: when you wake up in the morning, your mental and emotional tank is the fullest. You can do it another time, but that's where you have the most potential. The autopilot hasn't kicked in yet. So we spend an hour—twenty minutes, twenty minutes, twenty minutes. One is contemplation. That could be journaling, meditation, prayer, all of the above. There are various combinations. That allows you to think outside of yourself. You start becoming way more self-aware, positive, happy, and objective. The second is physical activity. Why? Because your brain spies on your body and your body spies on your brain. If your body is not engaged, you're only half aware. When you exercise, you're contracting muscles, overcoming obstacles, doing hard things. Your mind is beautifully designed to give you antidepressants and cognition spikes. You're smarter when you work out.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: The third piece is learning. There's always something we lack. Especially if you're trying to build a new future, you're leaning into a future where you're missing pieces. If you had those pieces, you'd have that future today. To get those pieces, you're probably not fully equipped yet. But if every day you pick anything—marriage, business, whatever—and say, "I have no idea how to pick a mate. What do I look for in a woman? I'm divorced, I don't know how to start over. I want to switch careers. I want to scale a business that's hit a plateau." Obviously, you're missing pieces. What is the most painful? That's the lowest hanging fruit—something you can solve quicker, or something that scares you the most. Fill those twenty minutes with that and obsess about it until you get a functional understanding of what you're missing. That gives you a sense of accomplishment: "I can do this. This doesn't scare me anymore." I obsess over stuff I don't know every single day. I learn something I don't know every day. I can pick and choose when to start, upgrade, switch lanes, or pick another topic. But every single day I contemplate, I move, I exercise, and I learn. Those things bundled together—you're operating on rocket fuel. It will change your life forever.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I absolutely love it. I think you're one hundred percent right. I wake up at five a.m. I've done all three of those things at different times. When you only do one, you lack in the others. If you only read, you're shoving information into a brain that's already full. If you only exercise, your brain doesn't necessarily catch up. I don't do them all in the morning. I like to journal or sit and meditate—or ruminate, maybe in a positive way—over a cup of coffee. But what you just described is the battle plan. That really is.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: It's one hundred percent the battle plan. People say, "I don't like to journal." Just do morning pages. Just barf on the page. "Today sucks" a thousand times if that's what it takes. Whatever, get it out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Have you ever read *The Untethered Soul* by Michael Singer?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: No, but I know the title.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Highly recommend it. It's one of my most recommended books. What he describes is something I had always felt but had no ability to put words to: the idea that you are not your mind and you are not your body. You are your soul. Where we get confused is when we forget that we are not our mind. Your brain's job—the voice in your head that is not you and is not God—is strictly meant to keep the physical being alive on a second-to-second basis. It will give you every bad piece of advice because all it cares about is "alive for another second." Same with your body. You feel suffering when you're going for a long run and your body says, "This sucks." Cortisol is running through your body. But what you're doing is making you stronger. Your body is screaming at you to stop because your muscles are tearing, stress chemicals are flooding your muscles. But your soul knows what it's doing—making you stronger, more fit, giving you more ability to outrun a tiger.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you can internalize this idea that that voice in your head is not your friend—it doesn't mean it's not a data point you shouldn't consider, but it's not you—that voice is going to tell you, "Don't take on this big project. Don't fall in love with her. Don't send a random note to this person because he might think you're weak." All these crazy messages keep you from doing the things that move you forward. So much of it is because we think that voice is us, or some people confuse it to be God. But it's not. We are this separate thing, this soul that's been fit into a shell. The shell talks to us, but we cannot take it as truth because it's not truth. So much of what you just said is clearing that mechanism—getting the garbage out, getting the blood flowing, getting the body moving and engaged in the day, then refilling it with positive things. It's like taking out the trash every day. You dump the trash, clean up the dishes, fill it up with good stuff. It's a wonderful way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I could talk to you for three more hours. I want to have you back on the show as soon as I possibly can because I have a million more things to talk about. This has been absolutely phenomenal. Let people know about your book, your work with your academy, and the coaching you do. Where should people go if they want to go deeper into your world? Any resources you mention will be linked in the show notes. But where should they connect with you?
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: If going deeper into the world is the desire, the best place is my newsletter. It's at ChristianRayFlores.com. You get one free Sunday newsletter and one only for subscribers—eleven bucks a month—of the best stuff I can share, find, collect, and curate. That's probably the best place to benefit from what I share here. If you're one of the one or two percent who say, "I need to work with this guy," we have a waitlist. You can join it at exponential.life—spelled with an X instead of an E. That's my high performance coaching stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, enormous fan. I appreciate the hell out of you. I want to have you back on the show when you have time because I want to get into the book and some of your coaching philosophies. There's so much I want to talk about. I appreciate your time. This has been wonderful. Thanks for speaking with us today.
--:-- Christian Ray Flores: Ryan, thank you. I find you to be extraordinarily curious and definitely full of wisdom yourself. You can tell you're overflowing with these ideas because you don't just ask questions—you go on your own little sidebars. That tells me you know what you're talking about, you're passionate about it, and it resonates with you. Thank you for that.
--:-- [In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home, it is 3 a.m.]
