The Power of Mindfulness: Overcoming Fear and Cultivating Self-Discovery | Case Kenny

24:06Like, let's say in the field of dating. Oh, my gosh. I mean, everything from, you know, I talk to people all the time. a lot of my audience is women. And a lot of women have gotten in this headspace of waiting for men to show them interest, right? From a traditional gender roles perspective, as well as just, you know, this is just the expectation. And, you know, I talk to women all the time, and they're saying, yeah, you know, I don't want to show interest first, because that's not what you do. And also, what if they say no, rejection is terrible, blah, blah, blah. You know, I've talked to so many women and, I suppose, coached them through acting first, being the first to try, so on and so forth.

24:39And And I have many examples in my life of where that gender reversal, I suppose, worked out in their favor and they're married or they're together. And that's just a very, very simple opposite. But I mean, I suppose in any assumption-driven area of life, you can engage the opposite of, well, I mean, I quit my career to share my feelings for a living. And I was doing really well on a management level in advertising sales. And this literally could not be more of an opposite. And it's worked out really well for me. So I suppose you could apply it in any area of life. Yeah. I feel like this is a book title, The Power of Opposites.

25:15It should be if it's not. So you quit your job. Obviously, the podcast is doing well. You have half a million Instagram followers. You're selling books, journals, other merchandise. What convinced you finally? What took you over to the top to quit your job? Well, I mean, I would say for one, I did them both concurrently for a long time. I'm a big proponent of side hustling or at least creating leverage for yourself before you jump ship. I'm kind of, I don't even know if it's contrarian anymore, but like, you know, the whole, if you're not all in, you're all out. You know, you got to be, you got to eat, sleep and breathe your startup or whatever.

25:48I don't really agree with that model because I think about if I were to have quit my job in 2018, right when the podcast released. And I remember the first month I got 57 ,000 downloads, which obviously is not a lot now. But for a first time podcaster, that's an astronomical amount. It's very, very difficult to do. And I remember at that time, and then I got an agent and all these things started happening fast. I was like, I could, I was like, I gotta quit my job. Oh my gosh, I see the path to$10 ,000 a month or$20 ,000 a month. I could have easily quit, but I had no leverage, financial leverage that is.

26:16And I knew that if I had quit my job, I would have said yes to every single advertiser, every single company that wanted me to put quotes on their merch. I knew I would have been operating from this place of no leverage. And I knew that would have been a mistake. So I committed to working on the business until my net earnings were the same as my sales job and that I had consistency there to an extent. And I was just patient with it. And luckily, I launched my journal business in the middle of COVID, started releasing journals. And that went zero to 100 really, really, really fast. I think appetite for wellness products during COVID obviously peaked and e-commerce peaked.

26:54And this is before some of the Apple privacy changes with ads. So we were just running this thing really, really hard. And I just saw the pathway there. And eventually it was coming to the end of the year and the next year. And I was like, I'm not feeling the enthusiasm for the job anymore, for one. But two, I have this thing that I'm passionate about that makes me want to get up every single morning. It's helping other people. It's time to prove this to myself. Because I remember when I first started working in sales in 2013 or something, I was super, super timid, not a type A person. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm going to be an account executive.

27:30I don't know what I'm going to do. And I just saw my evolution from that guy to a guy who ended up being a vice president of this company and just the way that I just changed my mentality around asking for what I want, going from zero to 100, doing these things, managing a team. I was like, if I could do that, which I had so much doubt about at the time, I can do this because I've already proven it. I've been podcasting for years. I know how to talk. I know how to write. I know how to listen. I know how to build a product. I remember when I first launched my journal, I was like, how am I going to find a manufacturer?

28:00How am I going to ship this to people? How am I going to build a website? How am I going to do email marketing? No idea. Figured that all out. So I think it was just an accumulation of finding proof points of being proud of myself and having confidence that I can continue to do that. That's interesting. Finding proof points so you can be proud of yourself, that being a metric for when to jump ship, I think is very interesting. I haven't heard, usually it's a monetary goal. Like, you know, as you said, also like that, that's what I did when I jumped from a full-time job to my very first startup.

28:31I had to make sure the earnings were, were equal at least. So that was an important thing. But also maybe I should have thought more about moments when I could be proud of myself. I think I have a hard time celebrating small successes. Me too. Still learning, still working on that. Yeah, but I mean, like, because I kind of changed my barometer for success. Like previously in my job, I was like, I want to be a successful salesperson. I want to make a ton of money doing this, that, and the other. And I really, really reevaluated that for some of the reasons we just discussed, right? Adjectives and verbs.

29:06But also, I just found much more consistency in pushing myself to do new things through the lens of being proud of myself. and the more that I was like, yes, I'm proud of myself, the more I realized that all the other metrics were ticked off as well because that means that I did the things I was afraid to do. I pushed myself, I showed up, I was consistent with everything and I just found that as an incentive to do more, pushing myself to be proud of myself was one of those things and it's also a very personal thing for me. I am crazy about if I see dirty dishes, I have to do them. Not in an OCD capacity but more just because I know if I'm not, I'm disappointed in myself.

29:43Like, why did I allow laziness to win over in that scenario? Like, I respond really well to like, kind of like tough guy talk. I know not everyone does. But to me, like, that really pushes me to be proud of myself. And I've just found that when you're proud of yourself, you know, success, happiness, relationships, like these things follow suit because it means you're not biting your tongue, means you're not being subtle, means you're not, you know, backing down from a challenge. You're doing the things that you would need to do to be successful. But through the lens of self-pride, it's more self-motivated.

30:14And I just, you know, obviously in anything you do, you need to find a very emotionally charged personal source of motivation. And pride for me is that. Yeah, I like that metric. I'm going to, I think I'm going to start using it.

30:45When you talk about mindfulness, do you view it as meditation or a style of meditation? What do you mean specifically when you say mindfulness? And how, again, can someone listening say, oh, I've never done that before. It seems too woo-woo or whatever. How should I start? Yeah. Well, I mean, you just described me, I would say in my 20s. I was like, mindfulness, that's a big word. What does that mean? Anytime I thought about mindfulness, I thought about people who would go to Southeast Asia and do a silent retreat or talk about their chakras and vibrations and frequencies and aligning their energies and intentions.

31:18And again, don't get me wrong, I've come around to understanding what they really mean when they say those things and not just these words. But for me, literally, when I think about mindfulness, we're gonna use the definition in the word, I mean, it's to be mindful, which is to be aware. So when I start thinking about mindfulness, I think, okay, mindfulness is self-awareness. But that's not enough for me and it's not practical enough for me because you could be aware of something, but it doesn't mean you're doing anything about it, right? You could be aware that you shouldn't be out till 4 a.m., that you shouldn't be lazy, that you shouldn't be unhealthy, so on and so forth.

31:49So there has to be an element of engagement and action capacity. So I've evolved it from self-awareness to honesty because at least now you're getting somewhere. Now you're thinking, all right, honesty with honesty, that means I'm getting to why with why. We could break it down. We could do the opposite. We could do something about that. But still, honesty is very circumstantial. It's one thing on a Tuesday when it's dark out and you've had a bad week, to be honest with yourself, versus Saturday with the boys out having a beer. Different levels of honesty. I still think there needs to be more.

32:18I still come back to the word why. When I think about mindfulness, I think about asking yourself why and letting your actions follow suit. To me, that is the essence of mindfulness. Asking yourself why. Why do I feel a certain way? Why do I have certain goals? It's challenging yourself so you can uncover what you don't know. and then to be incentivized to align maybe something like pride with actions that would uncover that why or challenge that why. So that's all it is to me. Mindfulness is why, which is such a silly, simple answer. And it's much more nuanced than that, I suppose. And many people have different definitions and they're all correct.

32:53But for me, I needed a way as a regular guy to be honest with myself, to be vulnerable with other people, and to tap into what truly motivated me. not borrowing other people's, you know, not falling in line, not doing what was expected of me. And to me, why the form of why really got me to that point, because it was a way of challenging myself. So that that's how I think about mindfulness. And that can take different forms, of course, right? You could ask yourself why in the form of journaling, which is how it started for me, you could ask why in the form of counseling or therapy on a on a walk, yoga, meditation, whatever it may be.

33:30For me, journaling is like my sweet spot, but you know, it takes different forms. But for me, it comes back to that one word. What if you lie to yourself in the why? So like, oh, why did they fire me? Well, because they're jerks. You know, that could be the answer. There has, it seems like you have to combine the why with some sort of ownership. Like some, every situation I'm in has me in it. So I, I'm the common denominator of all my situations, whether they're good or bad. So I've got to take some ownership of them. So it seems like I can't just say, if I say, oh, why are they firing? It can't be just because they're jerks or because of the economy or whatever.

34:07And I'm not saying everybody should also portray themselves as the victim, but like, I don't know, how do you intermatch all those different things? Yeah, yeah, such a good point. Yeah, I mean, I think it does go hand in hand with honesty. Like if we're going to be honest with ourselves, hopefully we're asking ourselves a question like, what is the role that I'm playing in this problem? frustration, anxiety, so on and so forth. I think beyond pushing yourself there, yeah, I think some people are very averse to being honest and taking accountability in that sense. But I think it's essential to breaking the pattern.

34:39So I mean, I would say it's that simple for me, like, you're not going to get anything out of mindfulness unless you're being radically honest with yourself. And I think accountability is obviously the truest form of being honest. Yeah, I mean, I would say it's that simple for me. I would say, you know, a lot of the times, like when we're stuck in cycles, obviously we do a lot of blaming. We do a lot of assuming roles. I mean, there's a whole science and theory around the drama triangle and like what role, what role do we take in life when it comes to frustrations? Are we, it's like a persecutor.

35:10Do we blame other people? Victim, are we the victim? A rescuer? Are we, are we deflecting our own need for vulnerability by saving other people, right? And again, great topic for a therapist to help people impact, not me, a therapist. But I think really challenging the robot mode role that you go into can really help you find that accountability, even when it's been buried and buried and buried underneath years of habit, conditioning and adolescence, whatever it may be. But a lot of statements with I, I think are helpful rather than they or them or they to me using yourself as the object, I think, you know, coming home to that can potentially give you an aha moment of realizing, you know, the role that you're playing in your own demise or, you know, continued behavior.

35:54Yeah, it's really interesting kind of making sure when you're asking why we're asking the right person, you're not asking them some external thing. You're not asking, you know, the economy, you're asking, like, why am I kind of involved in some negative, what I view as some negative situation and not thinking about anybody external. Yeah, I'd add to that as well. Like one of the like most practical journal exercises I have people do is like there's a weird dichotomy in our lives where like we tend to give like decent advice to our friends because we can observe without feeling intently, right?

36:30We don't have that closeness, that like intimately closeness to the thing that we're addressing. And we certainly aren't rooted in maybe years and years and years of repeated behavior or assumptions. Like we tend to give good advice. So I try to encourage people to like flip that sometimes and be like, if your friend were to come to you with the same issue that you're facing, like you're facing an issue, you're stuck in a cycle of something. If your friend were to come to you with that same exact issue, like what would you say to them? Like try to come outside of your body and observe the issue as if your friend were coming to you.

37:02What advice would you give them? Like what would your knee jerk advice be? And I find just sometimes like a little bit of like super simple mental role play can help do exactly what you just said is, you know, try to see it from a different lens, that could be helpful as well. We just have to find a way to get out of our heads sometimes. Those are heads that are just beating likely the same assumptions that we've had beaten into us for years and years and years. And something as simple as, you know, trying to do a little role play of if your friend asked you that, if your friend came to you with the same issue, what would you say to them?

37:33Sometimes that could be really helpful. Yeah, a lot of this is about, I don't want to say like kind of self-hypnosis, but it's sort of like tricking the brain to go down a different path and then it usually goes down. So like if you ask yourself that question, what would a friend say to this as opposed to what I say about my own situation? Now the brain's got a different task than just repeating the narrative it always tells you. And journaling probably is a great way, or I also find it's a great way to unlock that because then I don't really call it journaling as much as storytelling because it's not necessarily, there's just a little bit of arm's length.

38:06So it's not 100 % about me, even if I'm telling a story about myself. It allows me to more impassively look at a situation. No, I love that. Yeah, I think there's a degree of separation that's required to be really honest with yourself, which is ironic because to be honest with yourself, you have to be close to yourself. But if you're too close to yourself, you're not being truly honest because you're just repeating what you want to hear. So it's like you need to put some sliver of separation or just like a temporary ability to observe and not feel. And I think that's where the real magic happens.

38:39I do think journaling is perfect for that. I think there's a lot of good kinds of journaling. And I think there's some journaling that will empower you just to repeat things like there's a lot of journaling that's, you know, you have your five by five and your, you know, your grid journaling that you just kind of stream of consciousness or like, what's one thing you're grateful for today? Or what's one thing on your mind where you're just kind of repeating the same things over and over again. My whole thing with journaling is the power of a combination of prompted and unprompted. And with prompted, it's very challenging, very different questions that you can't really avoid by saying the same truths and assumptions.

39:14So, you know, I think as far as journaling goes, storytelling, I love that as a description because that's really what you're doing. You're either repeating the same story, you're creating a new story, you're writing a new chapter, you're closing an old chapter, whatever it may be. Yeah, I like to think a lot about journaling on like a line, on a linear your line of, you know, past, present and future. It's like, how can we look back at our past and maybe instead of reinforcing some truth that we've been living by and in through years, how can we maybe come up with a new thought around it, a new lesson, a new boundary, a new standard?

39:44How can we live that in the present? How can we project that into the future through promises to ourselves, through a commitment to being proud of ourselves, things like that. But yeah, I mean, again, the idea of mindfulness for me has always been like, it's almost like you're a lawyer and you're You're saying, oh, here is the evidence. Here is exhibit A, and therefore here is what the jury should vote for, right? Here's how they should rule. Like I have, in my life, I have been through A, therefore I believe B. Here's why B is true. Not theory, not fairy dust, not borrowing it from other people, but here is why.

40:15And then, you know, challenging that if that's something we've been living by for a long time or cementing it because it's a compassionate truth. I think a lot of mindfulness is simply making sense of your memories, looking back, because we can really only do that looking back, but doing that in a really honest, accountable way. Yeah, like I think when my writing career really changed is when I started doing that, looking back at past experiences, like for instance, when I went broke or maybe I wasn't the best possible friend or whatever, and really dissecting it in this journaling or storytelling way.

40:52So that, again, it helped me to understand it better. I wasn't in the middle of it right when I was writing it. So I was able to have some perspective. And it was important to be honest and not to be afraid of being honest. And for myself, I held myself accountable by essentially publishing everything I was writing. So that's why I view it slightly different than journaling, although I think that journaling is valuable, just as valuable. So for me, it was accountable by letting other people see it so that I really had to be totally honest. And it had to be really uncomfortable for me. Yeah. Well, I love that.

41:28I mean, I just think that is such a powerful mentality. Like mindfulness isn't always this like sexy, spiritual, altruistic thing. It's like, sometimes you got a brute force, force yourself to do these things, force yourself to put out your writing, force yourself to put out your music, force yourself to be honest with your partner. You know, I think fear of vulnerability is the quickest path to regret. And I think particularly for men, there's a big fear of vulnerability because it's a quick rebrand to being too sensitive or too feminine or whatever it may be. I wrote a book in January called That's Bold of You, which is basically how I broke down encouraging people to be bold, to be vulnerable, to be sensitive.

42:09And one of the real cruxes of that was this experiment called the Beautiful Mess Effect that these researchers did, which is basically studying the way in which were very hypocritical when it comes to the topic of vulnerability. Namely, we love vulnerability in other people. We love people who are honest and open and true and weird. Like we, for the most part, we celebrate those kinds of people. We want them in our lives, right? We want those people. We don't want fake people. We don't want people who are watered down. We want the real thing. But then when it comes to the same exact vulnerability in ourselves, we come up with these crazy hypotheses and assumptions and scenarios that talk ourselves out of being vulnerable.

42:48Vulnerability in many different senses. They did a bunch of experiments around vulnerability around admitting a mistake, vulnerability around asking someone out. They did one of vulnerability around singing a song in front of a bunch of strangers that they've never sung before. And basically what they found was that they separated these people into two groups, people who were doing the vulnerable thing and people who were judging the vulnerable thing. And right before the people were told that they were going to do it, they asked them, hey, how do you feel about singing a song in front of strangers, for instance?

43:17And everyone said, this is going to be horrible. We're going to get laughed at. They're going to hate me. They're going to think I'm stupid and so on and so forth. But then they also asked the other group, they said, hey, real quick, like before they sing, like, what are you thinking? And they're like, it doesn't matter. The fact that they're willing to sing just shows courage and vulnerability. So basically, and then they kept flip-flopping the scenarios. And every single time that people observing said that it was amazing, that it was great, that they admired vulnerability. but every single person who was about to or did express vulnerability in some form, they were so harsh on themselves.

43:48And then they flip-flopped it and had the same people join the other groups and it was still the same. So it was just an interesting anecdote on how hypocritical we are when it comes to the topic of vulnerability and how quick we are to talk ourselves out of the same thing that we say openly that we admire and want in other people, but in ourselves, we're very averse to it. So again, finding a way to forcing yourself just to get beyond that barrier and see what's there, I think could be really rewarding. So like when you're journaling, how do you get beyond that barrier? How do you kind of like keep yourself accountable that you're being honest?

44:18Like what's a good prompt for someone to start with? I'm not so sure. I mean, I think one, there's a certain level of intuition there. Like are you getting value from journaling? Like emptying yourself of self-judgment or whatever it is that's on your mind, it should feel rather cathartic. If you're not getting anything from it, there's likely something in place there. I do think a lot of the power of journaling also has to do with context. Like I need music to feel vulnerable, something just about the way that I'm wired, which is also how I've gotten into, you know, music and production and working in that industry.

44:48There's obviously a very close emotional tie between music and journaling. But I think we need to find the setting that makes us feel the most vulnerable. Like without that, you're just answering a question. You're maybe saying what you want to hear. You're just doing it because you saw, I don't know, James Clear talk about habit formation and journaling and how it's an alpha thing to do. Like we have to have, one, a desire to get something from it. But two, be in a headspace where we're willing to be vulnerable. I've never written anything, come up with a podcast title without listening to music.

45:19That's my thing. Maybe other people have different... And you make music too. Let's discuss this. How did you get into making music? Yeah, well, that was always more of just a passion of mine. I love dance music, house music, techno tech, any genre of EDM for the most part. I always found it to be, you know, you could be having a bad day and you put on the music and just the structure of dance music with the BPMs and the break and the build and the drop. Like you just can't help but feel something. You feel something. And I always just found that really encouraging. And then, you know, through my early 20s and 20s, always just, you know, a voracious consumer of music and enjoyed music and enjoyed, you know, DJing and producing as a hobby.

46:01and then you know as experimentation would have it when I started the podcast in 2018 there was one day when I was trying to find a clip of the podcast in my program and I also had Spotify open because I was listening to music and I was tabbing too fast and they both started playing at the same time a clip from my podcast and this dance track that I was listening to and the timing on it was just amazing in that it was in the interlude and the build of a track and I was talking and then the track dropped and I stopped talking and it was like perfect. I was like, well, that was really cool to have an interlude in this dance track that was building, building, building.

46:36I was talking, talking, talking and then it dropped and it was perfect. I was like, I love this. Why not combine what I do professionally and what I am passionate about? So then from there, I started doing these dance music guided meditations basically where I work with DJs and producers and my own stuff to basically put together these sets that are like 40 minutes long, like a DJ set where DJs will play their set and in interludes, they'll come in and talk about their new track or their tour that's coming up, buy my merch, whatever. I'm basically replacing that with mindfulness along the way.

47:07So it's very, very upbeat, 126 beats per minute plus case Kenny mindfulness. And you can listen to it while you're working out, for instance. That was a big motivation for me talking about the right headspace. I'm a little ADD. If you put me down on the couch and tell me to be mindful, it's not really going to work. And a lot of people are the same way. So I was like, why not give people a dose of mindfulness when they're on a run or walking or driving or let's input mindfulness into culture. And it's been really cool. Like I'm Friday. I'm releasing a mix with Andy Grammer. I've done some stuff with Martin Garrix, like a bunch of these like bigger names in dance music and pop music.

47:43So it's just really cool to see those worlds colliding. But it came from happenstance as well as just the desire to be creative. When I grew up, I went to Waldorf school for a couple of years. It's like a Montessori type, you know, learning through playing concept. So I've always been inclined if I'm interested in something to like, if I like music, for instance, I can't just listen to it. I have to make it myself, even if I'm not good at it. So I think that kind of inclination has always served me well. If I'm interested in something, I want to stick my hands in it. And it's kind of cool to see that take flight here in a pretty unique way.

48:17And that's really important, too. And it's part of the experimentation. Like don't let anyone say, oh, you can't do music. You're not a musician or you didn't go to music school or you didn't, you haven't been like a prodigy in music since you were four years old. Like, like all the other musicians are like, I don't want to say everybody can do anything, but most people can do lots of things and, and, and being able to do your passions is really important. Like we only live once. So, you know, I, I tell people all the time, if you like comedy, go up at least once on stage, do standup comedy. If you like tennis, play in your club's tennis championship.

48:52If you want to take violin lessons, just try it to see what happens. And people are afraid, I think, to experiment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah. I mean, for me, I don't produce great music. My sweet spot is DJing, recording, and mixing. But yeah, I mean, for a long time, I talked myself out of the idea because who am I? Like, I'm not the coolest guy in the world. And DJs are cool, man. man, look at them. They're cool with all their, you know, music and women and festivals and clubs. Like I'm not that guy. So I talked myself out of it for a long time. And I'm so glad I didn't because for one, you'd be shocked.

49:27Martin Garrix, number one DJ in the world, Andy Grammer, you know, platinum award-winning guy. They all say, yes, they want to work with you. I work with a bunch of the record labels now. Did you reach out to them directly or how did you reach out to like Andy Grammer? He actually came to me, but it's the other ones that just reached out. I reached out to their publicists, their PR teams, because that's where the real eagerness lies, or the record labels. Record labels are always looking for ways to promote streaming. And podcasting, of course, is streaming adjacent, I suppose. So they're very eager.

50:01And then you show them what you have to offer, who you've worked with in the past. You show them that you're serious. You show them that you're good at what you do. And plus, you email them 30, 40 times. Eventually, they'll say, okay, fine. They'll do it. And that's always, for the most part, worked pretty well for me. That's great. Well, look, Case Kenny, you have a great podcast. You're on almost near episode 500, right? You're at around 475 episodes, something like that. I mean, that's an incredible run. That's podcast pro right there. So New Mindset, Who Dis, is the name of the podcast. And name some of the titles, some of the books.

50:39The bold one you just came out with. Yeah, I have a book that's bold of you. I wrote a book called Singlers Your Superpower. It's about embracing singlehood. I wrote a journal book concept called But First Inner Peace. I have a couple other journals called Unbothered and the New Mindset Journal. But just different ways to crack life in all its forms, from anxious thoughts to pressure to be in a relationship to how to manifest to how to be real and honest and bold. Just different ways to apply a lens of mindfulness and honesty to your life. Yeah, and I love the fact that you've dealt with all these issues, so many of these issues on your podcast, like 480 of these issues on your podcast, basically.

51:19And then in your books and on your blog. What's your URL of the website? Because your blog touches on a lot of these issues. Yes, it's just newmindsetwhodis.com. It's all one word, bit of a mouthful. And, of course, on your Instagram, half a million followers where you have quotes and lots of people engaged in those quotes and so on. And so, Case, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I know you're a busy guy, but I love the topics you address. I love your stances on them. And everybody should just go out and listen to your podcast and read your books and enjoy your material.

51:52Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. And I meant it when I was saying that before. I remember in 2014, before I started this, and I was kind of just learning about online and blogging, I very distinctly remember reading your blog voraciously. so I'd be remiss to not say that you were definitely an inspiration early on for me so I appreciate you and it's cool to see us come full circle here. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And thanks again for coming on. Thank you.