In this episode, Nick speaks with Utkarsh Narang to explore the themes of self-mastery, personal development, and the importance of deeper conversations. Utkarsh shares his insights as an executive coach, emphasizing the need for awareness, acceptance, and action in the journey of self-discovery. They discuss societal pressures, the superficiality of modern interactions, and the significance of finding one’s values and purpose.

“The world is nothing but eight fucking billion perceptions, each one trying to prove that mine is better than yours. It is not.”

“Change is inevitable. Whether I do something about it or not, things are going to change outside of me and inside of me.”

“We need to spend 2% of our day—just 28 minutes—connecting with ourselves. Sit with your thoughts. It may be uncomfortable at first, but something will emerge.”

About Utkarsh Narang

Utkarsh is a Learning Consultant, Executive Coach, Facilitator, and Content Creator based in Melbourne, Australia. Over his 16-year career, he has transitioned from being a physiotherapist, and a good one at that, to filming and editing 400 hours of content for a Columbia Business School professor. He has also scaled a startup and led sales, and now, he focuses on helping individuals and teams outperform themselves. Throughout his journey, he has learned to make fear an ally in living a courageous life.

He has a passion for understanding human behavior and uses his diverse experiences to build programs for organizations across the globe. He lives by his 5 core values: Discipline, Excellence, Growth, Freedom, and Love. When he’s not helping others get better, he enjoys working on himself through reading, meditation, exercise, and raising his two boys with his wife in Melbourne.

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Your Friends at “The Mindset & Self-Mastery Show”

Nick McGowan (00:01.583)
Hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self -Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan, today on the show I have Utkarsh. How are you doing today?

Utkarsh Narang (00:12.779)
I’m doing very well, Nick. Thank you for not butchering my name. And the name has a very important significance because it means to progress. And I always say that hopefully the next 45 to 60 minutes that you and I spend together, both the first progress, but also our listeners.

Nick McGowan (00:26.99)
Absolutely. What a great transition with that. You’ve clearly done this before and you’ve had people butcher your name. Obviously we talked a little bit about that before we hit record. Our names mean a lot to us, but they can also mean whatever we want them to mean. It’s not just, this is what our parents named us and this is how we are. We get to actually put our own flavor to it and what it means for us. I know there are some people that have names that can tie to somebody in history that has been really a negative person.

but they get to be able to change that and shape that. And like you’re saying, it’s progress. There’s slow progress. The progress just takes the time it takes. So, hey, why don’t you start us off? Tell us what you do for a living and what’s one thing most people don’t know about you that’s maybe a little odd or bizarre.

Utkarsh Narang (01:12.467)
Absolutely. So I’m an executive coach and a learning consultant and I live in Melbourne, Australia. Nick, so I’m in the future. It’s six or five on a Wednesday morning. We’re on Wednesday already. And so looking forward to this conversation, I help organizations, help the managers become future leaders through coaching workshops and whatever it takes. And my whole idea is that that this human life is really beautiful. And yes, we have our fears. We have our limiting beliefs. We have our challenges.

but we need to walk through them and make sure that we make the best out of what’s been given to us. And one thing that people don’t know about me, I have two boys now who are about to be 14 and 10. I really was super afraid of becoming a parent about 15 years ago. I would have never taken the responsibility, but I think…

That’s one role in my life that’s given me the most joy that it could. that’s something that I sometimes share, but sometimes don’t fully. Yeah, that’s what you do when you ask that question. I don’t know why.

Nick McGowan (02:16.558)
I love those sort of things. The reason why I ask that question is to find out what somebody thinks is kind of an odd thing or a little weird or what have you. But I really love that you went with the intuitive approach of like what came to you first may not be an odd thing to others, but it might be something that we can really expand upon. I don’t have any children, but I could imagine that shifts and changes the way you look at things. Am I right?

Utkarsh Narang (02:35.359)
Yeah.

Utkarsh Narang (02:41.035)
Absolutely, it 100 % does because you’re almost wanting to take ownership of these two human beings but the point is that you don’t have any ownership over them. And I don’t know why as you were speaking about the word odd just kind of started to resonate in my head and another odd thing that I can share is which might irk a few people is that I don’t like watching Netflix.

Nick McGowan (03:06.156)
Why’s that?

Utkarsh Narang (03:08.681)
I feel like people are continuously creating so much content in the world. How much can one consume? And it just gets so exhausting for me to then remember the details of that and then have conversations with friends about that. So I better not like not even watch it.

Nick McGowan (03:22.923)
Yeah, it’s interesting. We could probably just go down that rabbit hole a bit. There’s societal pressures with being able to shoot the breeze with somebody around the water cooler in a sense of like, hey, what did you do this weekend? Why binge watched whatever. It’s like, those are surfacey level conversations. Let’s be real here. What we’re doing right now is we’re creating content. We don’t actually use this on social media to push against the algorithms or try to get in front of people in that way. Cause

Utkarsh Narang (03:42.741)
to it.

Nick McGowan (03:49.793)
we don’t actually believe that that helps. There’s no real reason to fight against the algorithms, but having a solid list, an email list, and people that are followers that want to actually listen to this, that’s a huge piece of it. So if you think of things like streaming, Hulu, Netflix, whatever else, they are there for people to be able to binge. And for the most part, I think a lot of that can be an escape. Now granted, we all need downtime. We need rest. I am part of the anti -hustle culture.

because I’ve been through the horseshit of the hustle culture where it’s like, you just keep pushing and pushing. And then ultimately at some point you just want to stop living. Not cool. So being able to step back from that, but we do beautiful way of saying, I don’t want to be a part of that. What led you to that point to think, well, I don’t want to be a part of that. And what do you do on the opposite side of it?

Utkarsh Narang (04:18.677)
Hmm.

Utkarsh Narang (04:36.117)
Yeah, I think you’ve said a lot of very thoughtful things there. I’d start with first the water cooler conversations, Nick, because I think they really define what and I work a lot of with organizations. So that’s going to come up. But even in our conversations with our friends, with our colleagues, with our partners.

We’re having these very superficial conversations where I’ll ask you, how are you doing, Nick? Or how was your weekend? But I’m just waiting for you to finish your answer so that I can say something that’s very meaningful. Or even worse is that, like you and I were speaking just before the start of the show, the black coffee, the cold brew. I want to retain and remember those things because they mean something to you and to me. And that’s why we’re sharing those things. I think the deeper conversations have gone.

Nick McGowan (05:03.327)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (05:21.695)
drastically down over the last few decades, I would say. And yes, we can blame technology, can blame our focus being dispersed all the time, distracted all the time. But we have a choice. And I don’t know what’s stopping us from

from asking Nick, how is he doing and really listening because that’s so important and how it will make Nick feel is going to be amazing. So I think we got to get back to being deeper on our conversations. That’s one. Second, when I coach people, Nick, I see them that they would feel, we procrastinate or we are going through an anxiety phase or we’re going through a divorce or something that’s very challenging in the workplace or personally. And then they’ll use this as an

I’m using a bigger word, but use this as an addiction. Where they’ll say, I’ll start at like nine o ‘clock in the evening because I don’t want to sleep. I cannot sleep. And I’ve scrolled like for three hours. What did you gain out of it? Nothing at all. Nothing at all. But we still go back to it every single day and we choose to spend our lives that way. And I’m not saying it’s wrong. I know people go through that, but I think it’s it’s a choice that we need to shift that. And then third, final thing that was coming through through what you were saying was

The hustle culture, the 70 hours a week. I’ve done that too. I used to take pride in sending the 3 a email and like, what the fuck was wrong with me? Why was I doing that to myself? And then the societal pressure comes up, which is something that if so right now live in Melbourne, Australia, but I’ve been brought up in India and I’ve been people ask me often on conversations, Nick, how is your childhood? And and as soon as that question comes up,

Nick McGowan (06:38.889)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (07:01.781)
part of me feels like, I wish I had some dramas in my childhood.

because then I would have been able to to kind of sell those and to share those and this and that. But I did not have any traumas. I had parents who were doctors, but they never told me that with Kash, when you grow up, you have to become a doctor. Over the journey of my lifetime, it became clear that I wanted to become a doctor. So I studied and did a master’s in orthopedic physical therapy, got into into private practice. All that happened. But there was not that societal pressure.

But I would see my friends who were going through this that you learn because you have an exam to cross. You do this because your parents want you to do this. And that’s just unfair to, again, human life.

Nick McGowan (07:44.427)
Yeah, wow, there’s, I will have conversations with friends, people on the podcast, clients even, where we talk about where that stuff comes from because there are things that have become tradition in a sense, where it’s like, this is what we do in this family, this is how this is, but it’s really just based on trauma that has stemmed back from those people. It’s great that your parents didn’t do that to you. Hopefully that’s because they learned from watching from other people when they were younger going,

It doesn’t sit well with me. We’re not gonna do that when we have our own kids. And I’m sure you now are able to transfer that to your own children, or at least be loving and respecting. Like you said, right up front, you feel like it’s your job to help them. It is, but it also isn’t because they are their own human. They get to live their own life. They’re gonna make their own mistakes. They’re gonna have their own successes, all that sort of stuff. But for you to not…

compound upon what societal pressures and consistent traumas will lead to, you get to then be a refuge for them to be able to help. There’s a lot when we look back at where things stem from, like even the people that don’t have those conversations that are deeper. Somebody, and I think from the water cooler perspective, I don’t know how many water coolers are actually in offices these days, but let’s say the coffee bar in a sense where people are like, all right, I’m getting to the break room. I’m gonna grab some coffee.

and they’ll shoot the shit with somebody for a minute. For the most part, they will just ask, how was your weekend? It good, cool. Well, my weekend, I… And they just go into their own thing, or they don’t really care at all. I think some of that ties into what we see within social media, where people expect this big, big, big thing to be the thing to talk about, and you can’t really talk about the mundane or the smaller things. And especially, it can be difficult for people that don’t have these conversations often to then talk about the work that they’re doing internally.

Or the work that they’re they’re struggling with or the things that they’re struggling with and there’s also kind of a balance that like you see people on social media Talking shit about it. But at same time they’re trying to expand like how do how do I have the conversation and they’ll just complain But what are your thoughts?

Utkarsh Narang (09:55.913)
Yeah, you know, part of me feels like it’s a it’s a really strange scenario. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that is it’s you see posts on social media where someone’s being vulnerable and that goes viral. And then you feel like that’s the right path to take. Then you see certain things that that make you feel like, this is also superficial. And then you feel like that’s the path to take. You have these water cooler or coffee pit stop moments in the office or wherever.

but we’re forgetting the humanity that we have within ourselves. And I think that’s the big challenge because we’re not having these conversations for a deeper purpose or a deeper meaning. And just in that moment, I’m not saying that we should now start having conversations for like some larger purpose that will be achieved out there in the universe at some point, but we need to make sure that we connect with each other on a human level. And I think that’s not fully happening.

Because it’s really hard, Nick, to let out your own fears, to let out your own vulnerabilities out there in the world, because it seems that everyone else’s life is so damn perfect. But it’s not. It’s not. And what I often say, Nick, is that the world is nothing but eight fucking billion perceptions and each one trying to prove that mine is better than yours. It is not. It is not.

Nick McGowan (11:12.573)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (11:18.859)
And who knows? I’m sitting here in Melbourne. You’re right across the world. There are 100 ,000 people in some city in Europe and there are a billion people in India. Who the hell cares what do I do with my life? Really no one, right? And my sphere of influence is really small. But I’m still so worried about the societal pressure. I don’t know why. And on that, when I tell my children to study hard and to do this and like an Indian parent that comes up on certain days.

which wants them to excel in their studies in meaningful ways. I think about that, that Utkash, you spent six years studying medicine to become a doctor, and here you are 20 years later, you’re not even using that degree anymore. You’re not even using that skill anymore. So who are you to predict a future for them? 10 years down the line, maybe AI will do everything, and all they’ll have to do is go on a vacation to moon or to Mars, or Elon Musk will build something

that will take them to another planet. And so why worry about it too much, which is so far in the future. And so I think what is coming up for me in several conversations, Nick, is that if we can have these human conversations better, if we can build these skills of wanting to know a little bit about Nick, wanting to share a little bit about wanting to connect on a deeper level, then I think then that’s to me, me, victory.

Nick McGowan (12:41.936)
Absolutely. I think there are a lot of times where people get really hung up on their own shit, that it’s hard to ask somebody else about their own stuff, where they don’t care as much because they don’t know how to deal with it on their own. Let’s go back to Netflix. I watch Netflix. I watch different shows. I watch different things. And there are times where you rest and there are times where you just watch a movie because you like the cinema or whatever it is of it, you know?

But then there are also times where if you can become aware, knowing that you are actively trying to escape something, once you’re aware of that, you can then do something with it. You make the choice to go, fuck it. I’m not gonna go anywhere near it. I see you, but I don’t want you right now. Or, yeah, you’re right. And I’ve had that intuitive pull where it’s like, I am actively trying to escape right now. What am I trying to escape from? But I think it takes people being able to slow down.

and being able to have that moment with themselves instead of just being stuck in a spot where it seems like everybody in the global economy is just doing well enough or not hurting bad enough where you’re just doing a little bit of enough where I got other shit to deal with. Like I think of politics and I’ve said this before, like I can’t even with that because I have these other things to do. But we at ourselves, we have to be with ourselves to the rest of our lives. We came into this world.

and we’re gonna leave this world and we’re all gonna be by ourselves, but we can do it with other people. But it starts with us having that conversation. Now, how do you coach people to become aware of that and then have those internal conversations with themselves that are, let’s be real, they’re fucking difficult conversations.

Utkarsh Narang (14:26.251)
They are now we’re talking now this is this is my sweet spot. I love talking about this this fluffy stuff that that you could imagine but this is what is really meaningful because see what I often say is I have a rule that I often share with my coaches and when I speak to people it’s a 2 % rule and what that stands for Nick is if I had to ask you what is 2 % of 24 hours and I did not tell you the answer beforehand so I’ll do the drum roll myself and I’ll answer it 28 minutes.

So 2 % of 24 hours is 28 minutes. What I ask people is to start spending that time on hopefully a daily basis, but at least a weekly basis with their own selves. Just sit down in a corner in your house, looking at the blue sky, the green grass, and just sit there. It’ll be very uncomfortable for the first few minutes. You’ll feel like, what the hell am I doing? What’s wrong with me? You will want…

certain stimulus, you will want your phone back, will want your Netflix back, you’ll want someone to have a conversation with, but just sit there with yourself, with your own thoughts and give it a few minutes. It’s like, it’s like if I were to take water, Nick, and then stir a lot of sand into it. The sand takes a while to settle down. And that’s what we’re doing. And that to me helps us craft that self mastery, that mindset that you and I will hopefully speak about once we once we get through everything else. That’s that’s important.

So that’s one idea that I want to share that spend that time with yourself because it seems very difficult at the start, but by the end of it, you’ll feel that something is emerging. The second is, which I do often my coaches is to find really who you are. think that’s a question that’s really complex. It’s very difficult to answer that question, but it’s really important for us to understand who we really are. And this word again, authenticity, misused, abused and overused.

There’s no end to it, but you have to find your own authentic self to be able to then express that out in the world. And I think it’s the inner work that all of us need to do, Nick, to have a deeper impact on ourselves first and then people around us.

Nick McGowan (16:40.167)
Yeah. And it’s not enough to just say for us to do it. We should do it. We should do that. Somebody should spend that 2%. They should do those things. It’s taking those first steps and having grace with ourselves to be able to go, all right, I’m going to start this. I meditate for 30 seconds. I’ll sit here. I’ll put my fucking phone across the room for two minutes or whatever it is. And being able to see that you can have those little successes that help us, but then also understanding

how the energetics of ourselves work within that. Like even being able to set ourselves apart from everything else that’s going on, there are different ways that we can find time to be able to integrate with the things that we’re learning. But when you work with clients that are having a really hard time just settling down or understanding that they need to shake that stuff off and kind of let the sand settle to then do that work, what are some of the steps you walk them through to be able to do that?

Utkarsh Narang (17:35.819)
Absolutely. So I feel it’s always a five step process that we go through Nick. The first one is awareness. And sometimes it takes time to build that awareness, but it comes through a conversation. I walk into these coaching conversations as a coach who’s not an expert because for me to then come say and Nick you do one, two, three, and your life is going to be bliss is not going to work. If you’re going through a toxic work culture.

If you feel hustle is the right path to take, if you feel that entrepreneurship is for you, if you feel that’s that’s how you feel about it. And who am I to come and say that, Nick, no, that’s not the right way to think about it.

So instead of doing that, I just walk into the conversation with a lot of questions, with a lot of deeper introspection for them to think about what are they really doing with their life. And one thing that I’ve always seen work for individuals is, this conversation Nicky and I are having, this could be the last conversation we have. I could die after this. I could have an accident or you could have something. I could have a heart attack. And I know it sounds grave to be talking about this, but that’s actually the truth.

And so if something were to happen to me, will I be happy? Will I be fulfilled? Will I be satisfied? Use whatever word that works for you. Living the kind of life that I’m living right now. And sometimes I tell my coaches because I don’t want them to think that they’ll die today. I tell them, imagine 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the line. There has to come a day when you’ll pass on from this planet. If that day is happening right now, how would you want to live your life from now?

to then. And so start to consider this your day one to the rest of your life. And now you tell me what makes sense. And so that allows them to start to settle things up. And that’s like the first step, the awareness.

Nick McGowan (19:25.469)
awareness is the biggest thing that I think a lot of people, full pun intended, they’re unaware of, you know, they just don’t know to know. But once you become aware of something, again, you then have the opportunity to do something with or not do something with it. It, we, I want to go back to the societal pressure, because there are a lot of times where people will think, well, I’ve been doing this thing for so long, and I should be at some stage now, like,

I should at 30 years old, I should be doing these things at 40 or 50. I should have had all these things done. And it’s really difficult to understand that should is just a bunch of bullshit because we are taught that we see that through everybody else. And people say, this is what it should look like. And it’s really just passed along trauma. But when somebody becomes aware of that, I oftentimes will get asked, well, what if everything has to change? That’s one of my favorite questions. Cause I’m like, fuck yeah. What?

If, but what if everything doesn’t change? And here you are 10, 20, 30 years down the road, but still showing yourself grace as you move through it because it doesn’t all have to happen today. But at least you do something a little different today than you did yesterday.

Utkarsh Narang (20:39.347)
powerful. I think a few things come up as you were speaking about that. One is these are just distortions of the brain. This shitting, this shitting that we do, not shitting, this shitting that we do all over ourselves. I think who the hell cares about the shits and the words and the money and the goods. It’s just immaterial. So that’s one thing. So we need to kind of overcome these distortions. And then the question that you beautifully asked is

Nick McGowan (20:46.884)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (21:07.019)
our brain and I’ll give you an example from my life. this was back in the times of the COVID seems like I know how many years ago it was, but it was very recent. I was in a full time job doing really well, hustling it through very purposeful, very well being, loved the team, grew the team from two to about 50, 55 globally. So it was, it was home. It was home that that place was home for me, but I decided to quit that job in the middle of the pandemic.

Now brain started to tell me, Utkash, what if you fail? Utkash, what if you go bankrupt? Utkash, what if nothing works out? And those are the questions that the brain asked me. But what if we reverse the question ask? But brain, what if everything goes right? What will open up for me by making this change? And that’s the shift that we need to bring in our thinking. So that’s one. Third, you spoke about change. Change is inevitable. I mean, whether I do something about it or not.

things are gonna change outside of me and things are gonna change inside of me. If I can be a little bit more intentional and deliberate and accepting of that change, it’s gonna actually change our fucking lives. And that’s the only way to go about it. We can resist it. that, I I see people telling me, Utkash, Aya is gonna take over this and Aya is gonna, so what?

What are you going to do about it? Because that’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. Technology is going to grow. It’s getting faster and faster with each day and time. The phone is always going to be there. Netflix is always going to be there. What are you going to choose to do? French fries are always going to be there. What are you going to choose to eat? So it’s a choice. And when we give up that choice, that’s where it hurts me the most to see.

Nick McGowan (22:28.152)
Yeah.

Nick McGowan (22:52.16)
Yeah. And if we take that a little deeper, because yes, we have that choice and we look at why people make those choices that they do or why they choose to not make the choices, we can then figure out where the root problem is because something happened when they were younger or some situation happened and told them that they couldn’t, they shouldn’t, they wouldn’t do it anymore. And they stopped looking at that. I think everybody knows that change is inevitable. Everything’s changing. Even

Now, you know, the seasons change, life changes, policies, like all these different things change. And still people will push away and go, well, that’s fine, but that’s over there. But we do get to control whatever we have inside of us. And the reason why I’m saying it like that is because I want people to understand that no matter what you think, you still have control of that. There are times where I’ll think about the book, Man’s Search for Meaning from Victor Frankel, game changer.

Utkarsh Narang (23:48.841)
Love that.

Nick McGowan (23:50.732)
total game changer. That man literally was in a concentration camp that was like, I’m here, this is the spot that I’m in right now. And I can only do what I can do, but I can manage myself appropriately. And throughout the book, or at least that first half before he gets out and does all his talks and all, he talks about there are other people who just couldn’t, they couldn’t handle it. And we as people will go through that throughout different situations. I thoroughly believe that we’re equipped with

what we can handle and you can’t handle any more than what you’re given. But there are certain times where things will happen. Like there are people that are like, I never thought I could do that until it fucking happened and they did it. It’s like, well, now that you’ve done that, what else is possible without being like, cool, I can take over the entire world or I’m the next Steve Jobs. We even look at purpose of that. Like your purpose may be specifically working with the people within your community. It might just be you being the best fucking parent you can be, but being okay with that.

How do you work with your clients to be able to grasp that and then really dive into it?

Utkarsh Narang (24:56.211)
Yeah, yeah, I think this idea around choice

I think again, it’s over the last hundred years that it’s been made us like that has made us believe that we don’t have the choice or we don’t have the ability to choose certain things. I think it’s again a lot of unlearning that needs to happen, Nick, for us to get there. And as I was telling you, like the first step is awareness. The second is acceptance that yes, something screwed up here. Something’s not right. I don’t know what that is. I feel it in my bones. It shows up as burnout. shows up as…

anxiety it shows up as just like feeling that life’s not worth it.

So I gotta accept that something needs to shift here. And that’s where I tell my coaches is to find what’s that desired sweet spot looking like. At least you can visualize it as you can dream about it. Who’s gonna say, come and tell you like, and I see that very often Nick, where this childhood trauma that you’re talking about or something someone said in the past to us, you had a bad marriage and a few years.

You were just blamed every day for everything that you did. You tend to then get into a state where you feel like that’s how I am. That’s how it is. But my question to you then is what’s stopping you from letting go of that weight? Because it’s not your husband, it’s not your partner, it’s not your wife. They’ve gone. You’ve separated from them. But there’s something else that’s stopping you. And more than often, that something stopping you is within you. And if you accept that,

Utkarsh Narang (26:32.895)
that’s when you’ll be able to move forward from it. So that’s the second piece. The third piece that I think is really important and it’s where, as you were saying, I think we need that internal compass and internal metric, something on the inside that anchors us on this journey of life because, and the word that I often use is for number list. You, me, all of us who are listening.

We’re all phenomenalists. Now, a tongue twister word, the first time I heard it, I had no idea what that means, even though hopefully my English is okay. But when I Googled it, it means to be a tightrope walker. And all of us are treading this tightrope of life. There’s no going back. We cannot step back. There’s only one way that’s forward. And we have to choose the small steps that we take on this tightrope.

The tightrope is going to be wobbly. It’s going to be trying to throwing us off the cliff and into the unknown. But we got to take that one step at a time, one step at a time. And that’s where having an anchor within you helps you go through that journey. So I tell my coaches is to do an experiment where think about your closest friends or think about, again, your life in the next few years. What do you think are certain values that you want to live your life by?

that will guide your journey to wherever that desired future is. And they start to kind of think about it at the start. It’s mostly… I don’t want to kind of demean that word, but it’s mostly superficial that I want happiness. I want a good family. I want good health. But what do need to do to have that?

Nick McGowan (28:05.418)
Yeah, of course.

Utkarsh Narang (28:14.579)
And then what emerges is I need to have discipline. And these are my values. So discipline, excellence, growth, freedom, and love. These are five values that I operate with. And they’ve been quite useful, I would say, in the path of this life.

Nick McGowan (28:30.56)
Yeah, that anchor is a big component to what we do. And if we don’t have that anchor, it can be easy to just feel lost and completely undervalue yourself because you don’t know where that is. That’s part of the reason why we as a company really love to be able to help people with subconscious processing, to be able to uncover those things, work through those things.

get that out of your cells and to be able to reframe it and shape it in a way that is a better story to be able to actually work with and understand that you can have that core. If somebody has that core and that anchor and they feel this is what I’m here to do, things start to open up. But even with you’re talking about like, yeah, we’re honest with this. A lot of it is surfacey where it’s like, well, I want happiness. Cool. At least that’s a start. What does happiness look like for you?

I find when we ask that at times, people will go, well, happiness looks like this, because my parents told me that’s what it looks like. Or my manager, my job tells me that that’s what it looks like. But if you really start to get deeper and deeper, they might go, well, happiness looks like me sitting outside being in nature all day long and talking to people specifically about nature. We start to then get closer to what is part of our core and our purpose. And what a beautiful thing when we get there.

It sounds like you probably get into a lot of that with people, but it’s not right off the bat. It’s not first session. It’s probably not even first 15 sessions. Like by the time you really start to unpack those things, because there are so many doors that we get to and then we go, shit, there are 40 other fucking doors. All right. And I start to move through those other things, right?

Utkarsh Narang (30:13.831)
Yeah, absolutely. And again, the choice is ours. What do you want to knock on first and whatever comes out of it, how do you want to tackle it? And I think sometimes I even tell people like, let’s just start with the groundwork and you don’t have to trust me at all. You don’t have to trust the process at all. You don’t have to just, just go through it for the sake of it because you’ve already paid. So let’s just do one session today and just speak about your values and then be like, are these going to work? And I’ll say, don’t worry about it.

Nick McGowan (30:20.243)
Yeah.

Utkarsh Narang (30:39.913)
You don’t have to trust the values yet, trust Utkarsh yet. What I tell them to do is get the values out in, the first few sessions, Nick. I ask them to put them onto a Post -it note and stick them onto the mirror where they brush their teeth, assuming they brush their teeth every day. They put it onto the mirror. And then I ask them, before you sleep at night, just go through a quick reflection. Which of the values did you compromise on today?

And sometimes one week later, two weeks later, they come back and say, it’s changing. Something’s changing. What is changing? And that’s when the bloody dam opens up and it’s all they all let go of whatever was holding them back. And then it’s a journey. And again, coming back to we cannot predict that damn future. I can tell you the lottery numbers right now. And hopefully someone is listening and they can go and buy that ticket.

Nick McGowan (31:28.072)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (31:36.521)
But when the future really comes, it’s going to be changing. It’s going to be ever evolving. And so don’t worry about that future too much. Yes, plan for it. Yes, it’s important. Yes, you have to earn the money. Your purpose is not going to pay the bills. Not at all.

I cannot tell my internet provider that, I’m having very purposeful conversations with Nick. Please don’t charge me for the internet. That’s not going to happen. So you have to go through life with all of that shit. You have to pay the bills. You have to make a life for yourself and your people around you. And that is super critical. Start with yourself. Start with that inner work, because then it might become a little easier.

Nick McGowan (32:14.268)
Yeah, and I’m really glad that you got on to that. There are people we’re a purpose driven company at choose your calling. It’s what we do is we help people figure out what their calling is and their purpose. And so many people think, well, it has to be the next Steve Jobs, or it’s not worthwhile. And your purpose can look vastly different, but your purpose is uniquely yours. And it’s how you want to be able to show up and be able to do it. It can be really difficult for for people in general to be able to slow down to understand what are they like? What are they not like?

Just like there are times where people are stuck. Like, I’ve been doing this thing for 20 years. How do I get out of it? Or I’ve been in this relationship for so long. What do I do? But it starts with us to be able to do that. It’s interesting how even the stuff that you were talking about ties back into awareness and acceptance. No matter what. you’re aware of it, you can then do something with it. If you’re not fucking aware of it, you can’t do a fucking thing about any of it. But you then can accept and go, cool, well, here I am. What do I do from here?

Utkarsh Narang (32:59.903)
Yeah, no matter what.

Utkarsh Narang (33:08.863)
the executive.

Nick McGowan (33:13.851)
And how do we do this? I have different conversations with people, different ways about specifically the stuff that they’ve gone through because some people are more open to going, you know what, I fucked up. Here I am now. I’ve learned from that. I don’t blame you for looking at me that way and expecting a pattern, but I can do something different. And there are other people that need to have deeper work to go through because…

Utkarsh Narang (33:19.306)
Mm.

Nick McGowan (33:38.587)
I had a conversation with somebody recently who went through a subconscious processing session for hours and were like, this is what I thought I was going to get into. And what I really got into was something else because your subconscious needs to work through those things and you need to be able to work with it because in all reality, subconscious is just trying, just trying to keep you alive. Like it’s not there to support you in that sense outside of like, don’t fucking kill yourself. Let me keep you alive. But being able to unpack those things, do you get into that sort of stuff with your clients?

Utkarsh Narang (33:57.331)
Exactly.

Utkarsh Narang (34:07.977)
Absolutely. And I think it’s really important for us to go through that stuff. But the question that always comes up is there are things that you cannot change. Why are you trying to change the uncontrollables? Change what you can control, like Victor Frankl did. And this idea about Steve Jobs, I adore and love Steve Jobs. He’s on my wallpaper on the screen, iPhone, iWatch, everything. But do I want to be another Steve Jobs?

Nick McGowan (34:22.535)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (34:33.855)
I mean, first question the brain asks, can you become one? Maybe yes, but do I want to? No. And there is enough evidence that Steve also has shared through his biography and other sources that he did not die a fully happy man. And I think it’s always there are these balls where almost like tossing in the air. We cannot do everything. And so you’ve got to choose your calling. You’ve got to choose as you were saying, Nick, you’ve got to choose your calling.

And that calling could be just being a great parent, just being a good friend, just being a good business owner who can have like 10 people, 15 people on the team and help them have good families and good work ethics. And that’s about it. It could be trying to touch lives like you and I are trying to do. And so we all have different means and paths. We’re all in our very unique journeys. And so there’s, there’s inspiration that we can take from each other, but there’s no need to try and replicate what the other person is doing because that’s not how I work.

And then as we’ve spoken about awareness and acceptance, the third step is take action. Without action, nothing’s going to change. mean, and the whole challenge, Nick, is if I want to raise my hand, only I can raise my hand. You cannot force me to raise my hand. And so that’s where personal growth, that’s where self mastery, that’s where the mindset comes. If you don’t act upon it, if you don’t want to change it, we can do whatever we can.

But nothing will happen because ultimately you got to choose to act upon it. And I think that happens only when that clarity starts to emerge.

Nick McGowan (36:08.412)
Yeah. Yeah, what I think that in and of itself when somebody goes, well, I don’t want to make this change. It should be somewhere where pause and say, okay, I need to do work here then. Why don’t I want to do that? What am I actually afraid of? Because again, the subconscious is like, hold up, hold up. There’s some shit you’re about to get into. So let’s deal with that later. Like the amount of times I’ve even said in the past, like I’ll let future Nick deal with that. And future Nick is like, motherfucker.

Like if past Nick had dealt with this, we’d all be okay at this point. But being able to take those little steps bit by bit by bit, I think it gets back to the awareness. And I really appreciate that that’s what we stem from, the awareness and the acceptance. And of course, action needs to go with it. Why don’t you finish that off? are the last two steps?

Utkarsh Narang (36:38.335)
Yeah.

Utkarsh Narang (36:56.587)
So the last two are, once you start to act, you have your system there, you know what actions need to be taken, then you stack them up. And that’s your acceleration, where you accelerate your journey, where you achieve whatever you have to. And then the final step is achievement, where there’s this, it’s almost like a beautiful Zen space, where you feel that, yes, there are parts of your life that are screwed up. Yes, there are parents you cannot talk to. Yes, there are siblings. Yes, there are jobs. Yes, you’re in a toxic culture.

but you’re so aware of it that you’re taking small steps to changing that. And it’s almost like the state of bliss where you appreciate the green grass for what it is, you appreciate the water that you’re able to drink, you appreciate the conversations you’re able to have, you appreciate the impact that you’re having in your lifetime, but you also know that things need to keep changing. And so you keep going through that five stages. And I think the big shift that I feel…

I made for myself and I want others to also and I have my own challenges right now. Like it’s not it’s not a blissful journey where everything’s figured out. I know what’s going to happen over the next 10 years. None at all. I think what’s really important is that there’s this Maslow’s hierarchy that was given to us a few decades ago Nick, which said that you need to meet your physiological needs to then go up the pyramid to reach a stage of self actualization. What I say is self realization, self actualization. Can we start with that?

And that’s where the awareness lies. I technically won’t need a million dollars to be self -actualized. I could have no money or all the money in the world and still be actualized or not.

And that’s where the awareness piece comes back in. That’s where that 2 % rule. Let’s sit with yourself for about 28 minutes a week, 28 minutes a day, and see who you are because you’re very unique. You’re very beautiful. There are challenges, but those challenges make you who you are. So what the fuck, man? Let’s bring it on. Let’s just bring it on.

Nick McGowan (38:48.279)
Yeah, fucking have at it. Yeah, that’s good stuff. So on that note, what’s your advice for somebody that’s on their path towards self mastery?

Utkarsh Narang (38:59.721)
It’s going to be hard path, but you got to choose your heart. It’s going to be a lot of choices that you don’t want to make, but you got to choose and don’t choose because someone said that you should take a cold shower. Don’t do someone that you should go to the gym. If you feel that that’s the right path to take, do it. If you feel meditation is the path to take, do it. If you feel that it’s not, then find something else. Just, just don’t sit on that bum watching Netflix the whole day. Just, just move your bum out and achieve whatever your life’s.

Nick McGowan (39:10.01)
Mm

Utkarsh Narang (39:29.129)
like Skoll’s art.

Nick McGowan (39:29.902)
That’s awesome. And that kind of goes back to the self -awareness and the acceptance of it and taking those little steps. Like I’ve had different conversations with people at times where it’s like, this thing really works for this person, but it may not work for this other energy type, or it may not work for this type of person, but trying it out, like give it that try. And if it doesn’t work, great. There are some times where you can try something and realize that didn’t work because I really want to do this thing. And you possibly wouldn’t have gotten there hadn’t you gone through that other bit.

So it takes that action like you were talking about. And I really appreciate the conversation. I think this has been great. I think there’s a lot that we’ve gotten into, but for the most part, the big takeaway is really being self -aware, having that acceptance and then taking action with that, but allowing the cycle to keep going and keep working through it. Is there anything else you wanna add to that?

Utkarsh Narang (40:01.226)
Absolutely.

Utkarsh Narang (40:19.379)
It’s an endless journey. There’s no there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel is dark. That’s great. Tunnel has light. That’s great. You want to change the bulb. Go do that. You want to carry your torch, your iPhone. Do whatever the fuck you want to do in life. Just stay stay aware of where you’re going, what you’re trying to achieve. If it happens immediately. Great. If not, it will soon happen. But be on that journey. It’s worth taking that that beautiful journey.

Nick McGowan (40:45.984)
Well look, it’s been great having you on. Before I let you go, where can people find you and where can they connect with

Utkarsh Narang (40:51.753)
I think the best place right now is LinkedIn, which is where we’re trying to conquer the algorithm. As you were saying, Nick, we post a lot of valuable content on LinkedIn. So search me up on LinkedIn. Nick’s going to be putting all the links in the show notes. I give a TEDx talk, Nick, that I think we’ll put the show notes in the show notes that people would enjoy going through that TEDx because there I speak about my fears and how I’ve been able to embrace the fears and allow me to move forward on this tightrope.

Nick McGowan (41:18.871)
Yeah, that was a great talk and we’ll definitely have that in the show notes. Again, it’s been great having you on. I appreciate you today.

Utkarsh Narang (41:25.265)
Absolutely. Thanks so much, Nick. Take care of yourself.