Making It – Episode 173
Why Inner Game Is the Real Secret to Making It (Christian Ray Flores)
Christian Ray Flores: Hi, my name is Christian Ray Flores, and you’re listening to Making It. I run a couple of companies. One is called Xponential. It’s a coaching program for high achievers to fly higher and go further. I also run Third Drive Media, a brand strategy, personal brand development company, and we focus on helping individuals and companies establish, promote and amplify their brands in the marketplace.
I grew up in an incredibly fast moving and disorienting sort of context. I’m half Chilean, half Russian. I was born in Moscow. We moved to Chile when I was a baby. There was a military coup there. My dad was in a concentration camp. We got asylum in Germany, then we went to Russia. Then we went to Mozambique, Africa. So I’ve moved four countries and three continents by age seven. I learned nine languages by age nine. By the time I was a teenager, 14 years old, we made another move after my parents divorced and we went back to Russia in the very sort of lowest point of the Soviet Union, beginning to sort of crumble. Before I was 21, I saw a military coup in Chile, civil war in Mozambique, the fall of the Soviet Union, and tanks in the streets in Russia. So that’s quite an unusual tapestry of experiences, let’s put it that way.
There were a few things that definitely shaped me in major ways. The change of culture, the change of languages, shaped me to be curious about people because I wanted to fit in all the time. So I wanted to learn. I became a fast learner, speaking different languages. I sort of developed this desire and passion and love for understanding different perspectives. The other was music. Early on, I had a voice. We did a lot of music in Africa, and then I was exposed to the African tunes, Latin American tunes. We went back to Russia. I sort of compiled all those things, almost digested them, right? And then that became the foundation of my first professional success when I became one of the top pop stars in Russia. And then producing other bands and sort of teaching, coaching other people, producing media and serving the poor. So being exposed to poverty, for example, definitely was the source of my love for philanthropy that I’ve, you know, I’ve stuck to for 27 years or something like that.
I have three things I focus on. Xponential Life is my coaching program. It is a high performance coaching program for people who want to be at the top of the game, fly higher and go further. The other one is personal brand development, media marketing, from my exposure to culture early on. Then music, show business, producing bands, creating multimedia, understanding that you can be incredibly impactful if you learn and develop content marketing, understanding brand strategy in general and personal brand strategy, how powerful that is. And the third piece is the philanthropic piece. I grew up in some of the poorest countries in the world, and you see a different reality. There’s the economic ladder, right? There’s a ladder. You can climb it. In many of those places, these children cannot reach even the bottom rung of the ladder.
It’s heartbreaking to see we’re not giving them a handout. What we’re doing is teaching them, giving them the capabilities to reach the bottom rung of the ladder, and they’re going to get themselves out of poverty. So that’s sort of the passion there. And that obviously stems from a lot of experience, seeing that firsthand since I was a child. I enjoy being a catalyst for transformation. When I was in my weakest moment, psychologically and emotionally, I was clinically depressed. Yet I had a number one hit at the time. What changed things for me and sort of redirected my trajectory was a human being who mentored me and coached me.
And I realized even the highest performing people need a guide. For me, the meaning is being that guide for exceptional, talented, gifted, driven, sacrificial, even bold human beings that I’ve ever met in my life that fills my life with meaning and purpose. Now, when it comes to a house full of love, it’s deep friendships that I cultivate over many, many years. A marriage that is happy. I’ve been married for 25 years, and we have bumps, but most of the time we’re so, so happy. And it takes effort, mastery, and also I have three daughters. And the fact that they are, they sort of grew up as confident, specifically talented, gifted women who are now pursuing their passion. They overcame obstacles early on in life and respect and love me. That’s the house full of love thing, right? We have these deep friendships. We have a great marriage, and our children just respect us.
One of my most important investments and devotions of time was to my daughters. I built my whole life and business, my time, my energy around me and Deb, my wife, Deb, being present in every aspect of their lives, not being sort of this person who just comes back in the evening. They barely see. They don’t have a connection, and they sort of rationalize it by saying, I’m doing this all for you. They don’t need our presents. They need our presence. We have this life integrated with them. So we travel together, we speak a lot, we’re at home a lot. I’ve never missed any of their events. We’ve always exposed them to life, the highs and the lows, the beautiful, the beautiful things like Paris, the inner city in the United States, working with underprivileged kids, or being in the slums of Mexico, for example, and other places like that.
So they’ve been exposed to this very wide range of human experience. And throughout it all, we have told them story after story after story after story. And maybe at the time when they’re younger, sometimes you feel like, are they even paying attention? They’re rolling their eyes, they’re focused on something else. But when they grow up a little bit more, you start seeing that they actually did pay attention. And it sort of layers on their character, their worldview, and then it bears fruit when they’re sort of in college and straight out of college. You can see how that character shows up. And it’s a beautiful thing to behold.
I have a constellation of people who are my guides and mentors. I’ve invested a lot in those relationships, nurturing them and being generous, because I really believe in coaching and mentoring. I think coaching and mentoring accelerates your growth. You can get to where you want to go in months rather than years. You can avoid very painful mistakes. You know, it’s part of the reason why I coach. It’s an extremely valuable and rare resource that not enough people tap into. One of my first coaches as an adult was a pastor, a missionary in Eurasia. I was at the height of my career, at the lowest point emotionally, and he helped me fix some things that were there that actually allowed me to heal, get happier, get more holistically healthy. And then it actually pushed my professional career in a much faster pace and different direction.
Another example is two friends who are incredibly, I would say very, very successful in startups, tech startups, and they also family people. So I can see how a founder who has started and launched and sold several companies can at the same time be able to have a great marriage and have kids who respect him. I have a friend who is incredible with finances and he deals with high net worth individuals. Through him I understand the mind, heart and even the blind spots of the ultra successful. And that helps me tremendously to help others as well. I have another friend who is an investor, tech entrepreneur and he sort of brought me into the startup world and I was curious about it, but I didn’t know enough of what’s under the hood.
By spending time, we became business partners actually and being in rooms with him, being in meetings with him, I got this accelerated course in the tech startup world and now I can speak with confidence and authority, when I speak to someone who’s a founder, who is an investor, a venture capitalist, et cetera, et cetera. But all those things happened because I was sort of attaching my wagon to somebody else’s car and also investing time in nurturing that relationship, being present, asking questions. It’s a massive investment of time, energy and attention.
Some of the most common blind spots for high achievers, entrepreneurs, high performers, the number one is they over invest in their outer game, which is basically the things that everybody see. Their capabilities, what the world rewards with money, status, advancements, investment, connections, respect. They underinvest in their inner game, which is emotional health, spiritual health, the ability to read people, build relationships, family, friendships. The world doesn’t see it as much, so it doesn’t get rewarded as much. And also those skills take longer to develop, it’s a longer arch, so they don’t produce this immediate result. So because of that sort of duality of this inner game, outer game, the classic high achiever, they usually are extremely good in the top 0.1% of outer game.
They’re usually underdeveloped in their inner game. And the problem with that is that’s fine in the short run because you can get to places faster. You can hustle, ignore your health, your friendships, your family, you’ll get a divorce with every startup you have, et cetera, et cetera. All the costs that you pay. In the long run, it catches up with you. Even the thing you invested so much to develop and become the best in class or the best in your industry at starts suffering because your inner game is so underdeveloped. If you want to reach a certain level above the sort of the good enough or the majority of high achievers, the only way to get there is because of the inner game actually. If you really truly want to be the best of the best of the best, that can only be achieved through inner game change.
You are already obsessing over all the outer game stuff, right? Over speed, investment management, sales, technology. You’re burning the candle in that direction, which is great. That’s what makes you move fast. Eventually that’s going to catch up with you. Become curious about emotional, spiritual, physical, relational health, the secrets of the human experience. So you can actually attract and retain the best talent and the best people to guide you. Invest in guiding and coaching, right? The most successful people spent 10 to 20% of their income on learning and being guided. Those are the people at the very top.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, the one thing that’s been plaguing me for forever. I naturally lean towards causes over commerce and I always have both because I’m a very idealistic, sort of cause driven guy and also I’m a very entrepreneurial guy guy, right? I always loved both. But I would literally drop the commercial side any minute to start doing something in the cause side. So plant a church, help thousands of refugees during the war in Ukraine. Start an Ascend academy in Maputa, Mozambique, to help children in extreme poverty. I will sacrifice the commerce for the cause. That’s the bane of my existence because it’s not healthy, right? Both cause and commerce need to be in balance because the commerce can then fund the cause. But if you over invest in the cause and underinvest in the commerce, then you start having trouble funding the cause in the first place. And that’s basically the thing that plagues me now for decades. And I’m working hard to fix it.
When I was a child, making it was not a concept in front of me. It was more survival. Because the world changed quickly, rapidly. Some of it intense and dangerous. I think the first time I remember feeling, oh, there’s something there that I can aspire to. I was a teenager and I started being super, super interested in music, the music industry, show business. And I was in college. I was like, okay, so I guess I can go into banking and academia or trade like some of my friends. But it didn’t light me up. The music part, the communicating and changing culture, those were the things that really got me going.
My concept of making it has definitely evolved from my late teens, early 20s. It was basically about, I want people to hear my music. I want my music to have an influence. I want my people to think of me when they’re thinking of falling in love, growing up, making changes or aspiring, daring greatly. Culture impact was the main thing for me. Fame definitely was attractive to me at the time. And then it sort of lost its luster later. I think right now when I think of making it, I think of an impact in the world. I’m proud of a life full of purpose and meaning and significance and a home full of love. Those three things are the composite of making it. When you are very, very driven, you have sort of this draft, almost like, almost like a sketch of what making it is. It revolves around respect, achievement, impact, money, status, choices, right, possibility.
Once you start experiencing some success, that sketch becomes much more defined, filled in with color, shadow, nuance. And you realize what you had was just a sketch. It’s fine to pursue something in broad strokes, but the key Is to create that a work of art. And the only way to do that is to be creative, to maneuver, to be humble, to maybe even reconsider some of the early sketch things. Right. Okay. I think I didn’t sketch it right on this part. I need to change it. According to my definition, I have made it because my values have evolved. The priorities I had in the beginning reshuffled according to a more mature definition of making it.
My final picture obviously is not finished. Right. It’s still evolving. There’s decades ahead of me, God willing, in this present moment, There are some missing pieces that I feel like I would like to perfect and change. And maybe that’s going to take years. But I would say overall, I am very, very happy where I am and where I’m going.
What I wish I’d known when I was younger is that the biggest return on investment you’ll ever get is to pursue wisdom and get guidance from people ahead of you. It can’t be overstated how valuable that is, because the time that we all have equally allotted to us is 24 hours a day. Time is the only unstretchable resource we have as human beings. So if you gather wisdom, if you avoid mistakes, if you learn something at an accelerated pace, you are using the most valuable resource you have better than most people. If I knew when I was younger, seek wisdom, find people to guide you, ask questions, ask for advice, learn stuff, I would have probably advanced at much accelerated pace. I would have saved myself all kinds of pain and mistakes.
A lot of it is ignorance of what you don’t know. And that’s why you get guidance, because you know what you know, but you do not know what you don’t know. So if you have somebody by your side who goes, hey, have you thought of this? And you go, no, I didn’t. Thank you. The best investment you can make is in guidance and wisdom.
One thing that I think it’s valuable to mention, it’s very primal for us to fear rejection by our tribe. It’s very primal of us all, regardless of how creative you are, how accomplished you are, to try to aim for a little bit on the safe side, a little more for the middle, because then you have a little bit more of a guarantee of success. And what’s the counterintuitive truth that I think could accelerate your path to success and significance is finding ways, mechanisms, mindsets, guidance, people around you, community to override that and actually aim high rather than the middle. Because most people will absolutely aim for the middle. The middle is very crowded. It’s much harder to make it in the middle. If you aim high consistently, it’s easier to make it on a high level than in the middle. It’s just less crowded.
My name is Christian Ray Flores and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can go and subscribe to my free newsletter. It’s at christianrayflores.com. And if you’re particularly interested about my coaching or personal brand development services, go to Xponential.Life and exponential is spelled without the e. There is a free assessment called the Xponential Scorecard. It gives you a very crisp idea of the things that you need to work on, the things that you’re actually working really good at. Gives you a report in your inbox in about five minutes. It’s about 40 questions. It’s an incredibly crisp assessment of where you are because you need to know where you are before you know where you want to go.
Melinda Cohan: Making it as part of the Mirasee FM Podcast Network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and Once Upon a Business. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making it, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It is the best way to help us get the these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.