Leadership is a process that you learn one step at a time. Understanding your feelings while managing people is essential for your well-being. We choose our path in life, even in the professional journey. Dr. Tracey Jones sits down for a conversation with Mike DiCioccio about being a leader despite loneliness, weariness and abandonment. Mike DiCioccio leads with service above self mentality, seeking ways to positively change the world. Mike is the founder of Social Chameleon. He loves helping entrepreneurs tell their stories and connect with their audience. In this episode, he shares personal and professional experiences in addressing negative emotions and overcoming depression. He elaborates on how social media has made us want things that we don’t need. We also have this best version of ourselves that we want to put out consistently. Learn and tune into this podcast and unlock techniques to achieve a fulfilling life.

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Mike DiCioccio - Leaders On Leadership

I am excited because my guest is Mike DiCioccio. Mike leads with a service-above-self mentality, seeking ways that he can make a positive change in his community and the world. Mike is the Founder and President of Social Chameleon, a podcast production agency. He is the host of MIKE’D UP!, a podcast with a mission to help inspire people to be brave and bold in pursuit of their dreams. Mike loves helping entrepreneurs, businesses and brands tell their stories and connect with their audience. Mike, it's an honor to have you here on the show.

Thanks, Tracey. What an awesome setup. I'm going to sit back and enjoy the show with everybody. It made me sound impressive. Thank you for that.

For the readers out there, they are always like, “Tracey, how do you connect with all these tremendous people?”

We were joking off-camera saying how so much has happened. Entrepreneurial years are like dog years, one week is six months of time.

It's always exciting. Mike, I love what you do. We have had a couple of conversations before this and I know our leaders are going to be incredibly inspired and blessed by learning about what you have been through and how you want to encourage them. Let's get right into it. My father wrote this speech called The Price of Leadership many years ago.

Leadership was his passion and he was incredibly enthusiastic and optimistic but he was also pragmatic. He always let everybody know, “If you are going to be in leadership and we all need to be in leadership, we all have a calling to be in leadership, it's a privilege but you are going to have to pay the price.” It's not the corner office, it's not hanging out and making more money. There are a lot behind it.

He lists four things that you are going to have to go through and it's entrepreneurial, too. The first one he talks about is loneliness. You and I have heard the saying, “It's lonely at the top.” A lot of people are good at their job and they are like, “I want to be a leader,” and they are like, “This is tough. This is lonely.” Can you unpack what loneliness means for you or maybe if you have been through a season? What words would you give to our audience if they are in a season of loneliness now?

First of all, thank you for having me on the show. Thank you, for anyone reading now. We know that there are millions of options you can go to read the content. Thank you for being here with us and checking us out. Interestingly, this is the topic that we are starting with because it's real for me feeling this. I have a small team for Social Chameleon that I put together. Being a leader of that, I can relate to the loneliness of being a decision-maker at the top of a small organization. If there's not too much of a board of directors to bounce ideas off, that can be lonely.

Being a single parent, entrepreneur and leader, there's a lack of a personal partner to, at the end of the day, try to share some of the crazy stuff I dealt with or have someone share their day and have those moments together where someone understands what you are going through. The other thing is I have been a leader in Corporate America as well with small sales teams and ran sales meetings. A lot of times, that could be lonely, too.

The way I felt, I will speak for myself, is that as a leader, the team that needs to buy into you like a head coach of a football team or whatever team you are talking about where you’ve got to have respect. The number one thing is people respecting you. They buy into you and not buy into you just to do what you tell them to do but to genuinely be like, “I will be moving in the same direction.”

A leader needs to lead from the front. I'm always someone who is a little bit of a people pleaser. It’s maybe too much where if I say or do something and there's something that needs to get done with the team and I give someone responsibility to do it, I want them to be into this where you have to be a little bit of a disciplinarian. It's like a parent who has to set the right expectations and have checks and balances with their family, you need to do that in business as well. Separate yourself from the people on your team that are also friends of yours is what I'm trying to say.

Maybe after work, you would love to sit down and have a drink or a cup of coffee with people on your team. You’ve got to relate to people and not only be likable but to understand and care about your team. On the flip, you need to be able to set direction and they follow it. That’s the challenge where I felt it was a little bit lonely at the top. I always respected and wanted to be respected by the team, “This guy is cool to sit and watch the game with and have a conversation. He's a real person.” At the same time, that real person needs to set the boundaries, set the direction of the team, they need to respect it and follow.

As far as to answer your question about the loneliness thing, I have been feeling it a little bit more because of the situation I'm in. I'm a single dad and I'm divorced. I started my company right out of divorce. It was something where everyone was like, “This is not a good time for you to walk away from Corporate America and start a company.” Most of them would have been right but the thing is only you know, in your heart, when you are going to do it.

There is no real right time. Happiness is not something that you put on the back burner. I was in a situation where I didn't like my own self. The reflection in the mirror didn't reflect the person I was proud of being and all stuff that was going on. I felt like a shell of my actual self so I decided to make that move.

We will talk a little bit more about my entrepreneurial story but I want to stay on this topic of how getting through loneliness with things I have at least experienced that I would like to share that I feel can help the audience now. The number one thing that I tuned into that helped is mastermind groups. I facilitated them in the past from a leadership role but I also am now facilitating and I'm a member of one as well.

Why is that important? That’s confidence. In the old screenplay, a person's title is confidant and the best friend of the protagonist. To have that person in your life that you can share and trust in, mutual trust, that's what other entrepreneurs or business people who are leaders in a mastermind group are going to be willing to offer you. They are going to give you real feedback and they are going to be real with you.

It’s super important. Why do I say that? If someone is married or they have a good connection with their family, that's a fantastic thing. It’s not always the best bounce-back resource because, whether it's your mother, father, husband, wife, whatever the situation is or if you have an older adult child that you talk business with, they are not always the best person to either share information with.

I will tell you why I feel that way. They may give you the family response, which everybody who typically loves and cares about you, your well-being is important. Jumping off and becoming an entrepreneur is not always the safe thing that mom and dad are going to want to see their 31-year-old son who is highly successful in ten years of Corporate America. They are like, “Why would you walk away from that? You are a pro baller. Why would you do that to go into something with an unknown?”

For them, it didn't make sense but for me, it was the only right decision. We are seeing it with different lenses and perspectives. The thing I said about going with family is as a leader of your own family, I have a daughter so at no point in time do I ever want to reveal to her that I'm struggling, whether it's an emotional state or a financial state. I'm her rock.

She looks up to me for guidance. She looks to me, “Daddy, what are we doing now?” If I'm breaking down at the seams, that's horrible. That's not someone that I would go to at this point. When she's older, she can know more and we could have more of that relationship. Even with a spouse, if you come home and you have had a rough day, you don't want to always unload that on your spouse. That gets messy, too. You also don't maybe want to even reveal to them that you are struggling because you are supposed to be the guy in a relationship who has this masculine thing, which is not a healthy thing, too.

If you are feeling this and you are a guy or even a girl reading this and you feel you have some role to play and it's not your genuine self, number one is to identify it. Number two is to figure out what that is so you can fix it. You’ve got to realize it's happening and then you can fix it. A lot of times, guys don't want to admit, “We don't have it all figured out.”

Especially a leader in an organization doesn't want to show holes because they are going to show their vulnerability. The best place of growth is when we get real and vulnerable. Go to a mastermind setting where you can be vulnerable. It's confidential. Make sure people sign waivers that they are not going to spill your dirt. That, to me, is how I feel you can work through the loneliness thing.

The next thing I will say is before you can lead any group of people, you need to be a leader of yourself. It builds confidence if you say you are going to do something and you do it. Imagine that friend that always says, “I want to play tennis.” Saturday, you don't have the kids, 1:00. You call them at around 12:30 and they give you an excuse. They are not feeling good and they’ve got to go run here.

You are like, “We are going to play next week?” “Sure." "How about Friday afternoon?” “Okay. Cool.” They dropped the ball. That's yourself when you say, “Now, I'm going to wake up and meditate a half hour before I go in the shower or go to the gym,” and you don't do it. You are the friend dropping the ball all the time. What does that say to yourself? You are telling yourself you are not important.

I realize I'm sharing this and I'm also someone who has gone through this myself because there are things that I am not packing into my day that I know I'm letting myself down with still. You are always looking to grow and be proud of where you are at. Even if you feel you are struggling now, know that you have come a long way from the beginning. I don't like the word should. I say, “Don't should on yourself.” Think about how you can go in the right direction and it's these little things you can do every day and it's the small promises. When you keep them to yourself, you build this crazy confidence.

At least you know that you're going to do what you say you're going to do and people will feel that. When you come to the team and you bring something out, they're going to know, “This guy or gal means business because look at all the things they said they are going to do and they did them.” Now they expect me to do something, that's the level that is set. The bar is set there instead of, “He always talks about doing stuff but what has he done?”

You unpacked a lot there. I love that you said, “First of all if you are not at ease with yourself, you are at dis-ease or a disease, that’s your first indication of loneliness.” You look at yourself and when you first dial that in, that's the greatest source of peace and liberation you are going to have because you start attracting the right people. My dad would always tell me, “I'm going to come home. Nobody knows the troubles I have seen and nobody ever will. It's not for me to unload that on your mother. It's not for me to burden my kids with that.”

Fulfilling Life For Leaders: When loneliness, weariness and abandonment enter your life, acknowledge it because it’s a process of developing the best version of you.

My dad would say, “Don't tell people your problems. Half of them don't care and the other ones are secretly glad. Be careful.” I love the mastermind concept. That's all over Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. My dad went through a tremendous amount of stuff and he was incredibly strong. He was smart with his boundaries. He had a ton of incredible people to pour out into and that poured back into it. Books do confidants.

He set up the right people. I'm glad that you brought that back up because if I can share some of the things that I feel I made mistakes in the past, I’m too openly trustful. I will meet someone and if I like them, we have some common denominators. A half-hour later, they might know everything that's going on in my life because I'm a relator. I'm a connector so it's easy to get there with me. Sometimes people might not even be asking for it but it's easy for me to open up.

I have done some podcasts before I have opened up and said, “Maybe I revealed a bit too much.” At the same time, I don't know if it's cathartic for me to get it out. It feels good because I'm getting out to the universe and not holding it in anymore but I would tell the audience to be careful. You don't want to hold it in forever or always. Find the right people to share that with.

Maybe for your spouse, if you reveal that you feel upside down at work, they might not sleep now. If you are the breadwinner, what does that mean in their head? They might be overthinking. All you are saying is that there's some stuff that you are dealing with and they may overthink it. I know my mother. She loses sleep when she knows. As a young entrepreneur, it’s not that she’s not proud but she knows that every month is different.

I know that she worries more than I like to have her worry. It's a situation where she doesn't need to know. She needs to know that things are moving forward or whatever. You don't tell that person every little nuance. I'm not saying to be fake. If they ask, that's up to you to decide what you want to say. I'm not saying to lie to people. What I'm saying is to have a filter. Your dad had a filter and he chose when to loosen the filter in front of the right group of people. That's such great advice.

Dr. Henry Cloud, one of my all-time favorite authors, has a great book called Safe People and he talks about how you determine that. Edwin Louis Cole co-wrote a book called The Potential Principle. Being prior military, we never talked about government secrets unless it was on a classified line. His point is when you share intel about what's going on in your life, make sure it's on a classified line and that other person needs to know is on your team and has your back.

Otherwise, the stuff you are putting out there on social media, you don't know and you don't want to spew that into the universe. The Law of Attraction, that stuff starts coming back. From either an evolutionary standpoint or a theological standpoint, we are meant to be a collective. Don't go alone. Be careful. As with you, I like sharing. Not everyone who is there is going to have your back so be careful about it.

That's great. This is awesome. What was the next bullet after loneliness?

Loneliness, as if that's not enough. The next bullet after that is weariness. My dad always said, “You are responsible. Your name is tied to the EIN. If we go bankrupt, it's you.” People are like, “The guy is at the top.” I'm like, “It's fraught with risk and all that other stuff.” My dad always said, “Tracey, you’ve got to understand that there's going to be some people that do way more than their share and there are ones that do way less.”

Weariness, like anything else, is a fact of life. He always said that there's good weariness and bad weariness. You alluded to it, too, with loneliness. There's healthy loneliness where we need to be alone, meditate, be quiet and there's bad loneliness. How do you stay at the top of your game? How do you stay fully energized, physically and mentally present, and combat weariness?

With weariness, it's one of those things you need to identify and understand. It's okay to not be okay, number one, first and foremost. No guy is too strong, too hard, too tough to admit when things are not going smoothly and address it. If you are knocked down on the mat, maybe you are dealing with something major like a divorce, bankruptcy, a child going through a medical situation, there's no choice but to address it.

If a child has a terminal illness or if you have a terminal illness, or if you have a bad X, Y, Z, it's time to take care of it. There's no option to say, “I'm going to walk away in the other direction.” That's not an option. Weariness is going to be natural right there. My point is if everybody is going to be in that situation, it's how you react to it. It's okay to not be okay. You are knocked down on the mat but now everybody, at some point, gets up. Is it tomorrow? Is it next week?

Are you going to go on a six-month bender because you are out of it and you feel you have thrown in the towel? What does that look like for you? It's important to have a stronghold on that to understand, “I'm going to get through this and the best way for me to get to where I would like to be is to start making some small progress and then some bigger steps.”

Trying to handle a big hole is something like taking on something that is going to stress you out even more. It's going to be easier for you to pull back and make excuses or whatever that might look like. Sometimes it's not even an excuse, it's reality. In an interview I had with a guest on my show, she turned her financial situation around in two years. She paid off $25,000 of debt. She was young and fresh out of college and now she's someone who teaches people about managing their money. She's brilliant but she experienced that.

If you take someone who has a money problem and says, “Get out of this $50,000 hole,” because they don't have the system in place to do that, you are setting them up for failure. If you say, “Let's figure out how you can save $5 to $10 a week. When I see you on Friday, you show me where your $5 to $10 is,” they have something to solve.

If you are weary or whatever that looks like, acknowledge it and set up some ways that you are going to get yourself out of it. If it's a $50,000 problem or something major, I'm using that number, it could be financial or emotional, if it's this huge gap, is it going to be taken care of in 24 hours? Absolutely not. Acknowledge that it's going to be more of a process.

I would say, “Get obsessed with the process of being someone who's going to get out of that,” whether you believe in God or the universe, people that are given taller tasks are put in positions because they are the right person to handle that to teach lessons to others. If you are learning things, don't bring that to the grave.

Get it out and teach people. The people I listened to have been there and done that. They have a T-shirt. They went through the clinic. They understand what it takes to get out of the situation. The last thing I will say on this one is there's no shortage of information so there’s no excuse to get yourself out of something.

If you don't know how to do it, there are people out there willing to help you and most of it is free. You can watch YouTube tutorials, whatever it is, on the thing that you need help with. Get professional help. If you don't have the means to do it, there are free resources. At the end of the day, there's always a person in the mirror and you know that if you focus on it, you can start to pick yourself up one step at a time.

I love that you brought that up. They are habits. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Lena Horne. She says, “It’s not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it.” You talk about the crises that hit us and some things will knock me down hard but like the little problems are big problems, you tease it out. You reverse engineer. As a project manager, we call it chunking. Do one little thing every day.

For the readers out there, I don't know if you can relate to this. When I feel sometimes the most bad weary is when my habits or when I've gotten off my structure, my schedule and feel like I'm spinning or lost my mojo. If you think that doing activities makes you weary, no. Doing productive activities fills you and gives you more energy. It's when you are stuck in a rut and you think, “I'm taking a rest.” Are you? You’ve got to look in the mirror and be honest. Are you taking a rest or are you making an excuse?

The lack of activity is when depression and negativity can fall into. Let's not make the mistake of saying I'm not acknowledging the importance of rest, whether it's meditation, getting quality sleep or even taking a moment to breathe. That is super important. What I'm saying is if you create these holes in your calendar, that's when uncertainty can seep in and depression.

It's hard to find someone that's on purpose, driven, their responsibilities are strong and they are tied to their purpose and they are busy for that person even have time to be depressed. At the same time, if they are underneath all of that, they need to address it. I'm going to tell a quick story here. After a couple of years of being an entrepreneur, the first time I have taken an official day off is when I'm with my daughter.

I have my daughter, set days, times and everything. I try to be present with her. I’m not going to lie. There are days and I still take calls and stuff like that but for the majority of the time, I'm with her and I want to be with her as long as I can schedule it correctly. Those are days off but it's family time. It’s the most important thing. I have not taken a set scheduled vacation. If I have gone out of town, usually, it's to work or I have done a workstation where I went to a nice touristy spot so that was the backdrop while I worked out of a hotel to change the scenery.

I had water damage and we had 2 feet of water in the basement and all this stuff. I left the situation because there were machines set up so we couldn't even be down there. I had all my equipment down there. I had to not work where I normally would be working. I went up for four days and stayed in a place where I had a beautiful beach view but I still worked.

The first time I didn't take my computer with me was when I went down to Florida and I visited my brother and my sister-in-law. My mother’s sister and daughter came with us. I’ve got everybody their plane tickets and my sister treated us to Disney for the day. I was 100% present and tuned out of my everyday needs. My team was presented with all the information they needed. They were creating content while I was gone. My clients all received a personal connection with me before I left.

Fulfilling Life For Leaders: When you focus on your goals, you pick yourself up when faced with trials and struggles and move on one step at a time.

I said, “I'm going to be out of town. This is when I returned. All your content is taken care of. It's all scheduled and ready to go.” I even have personal emails that I send them on the day that their podcast comes out. I sent that previously. It was queued up and they needed to press forward and they could send it on to their guests so they had all that already prepared. I had it automated while I was gone. It was the first time in the four-year window.

When I came back, I was struggling a little bit. It's not that I’ve got back to working hard. I was always consistently overworking. As most families will tell an entrepreneur, “You are doing too much.” That was my mentality, it’s go-mode, twelve-hour a day. When I took the time off, when I came back, it was a struggle because there were a lot of things. By removing myself from it, I was able to evaluate them better.

You are talking about consistently doing all the things you need to do to get it done. If I wasn't meditating enough, I was starting to read books more again. I used to read every day and I’ve got away from it. I was making an excuse of the time thing or starting my days a little bit later because I go to bed at ridiculous hours.

By taking this week off, it allowed me to come back and dive back into it. I was like, “I don’t want to dive back into that. I want to fix it.” I'm reading a book called Recalibrate and it's going to be a shout-out to Jen Traverse, who wrote it. She was on my show. She wrote this book, Recalibrate and I felt like I was in a time and place that I needed to recalibrate.

I started to read it on this vacation on the plane ride home. I picked it right back up when I’ve got back home. I'm halfway through the book in the last couple of days and I feel like this is the right time in place for me to hear all this. If you feel you are in a place where you need to recalibrate, you need to take that time to evaluate it and change things.

Otherwise, you will continue to go and wear down in a way that you are not even happy with what you are doing. You might be on purpose in doing something you are proud of in your business, your company and serving your clients but make sure that you are not in go-mode all the time without you even assessing what you are doing. That can be ugly, too. I did it for a few years until I finally stopped and said, “Maybe we need to get back to doing some of these things I'm not doing now.”

I love that you hit on, no one is indispensable. When you are an entrepreneur, you feel this tremendous burden. If I don't get this book uploaded to Amazon, if I don't get it, it's okay. We are not launching nuclear missiles. Take your time. I love when you came back and said, “What do I need to come back and do?” I am a big proponent of Sabbathing. I started a few years ago and I'm intentional. I love work.

Work to me is fun but do I take my down-day. I turn it all off and people are like, “I haven't seen you on Facebook for a while.” You are not going to. I’ve got other things I want to do with my time and it's good to be relieved of that. We don't have to do it and sometimes, as entrepreneurs, we think we have to. How great when you step away and go, “Do I need to be pulling this lever to drive the company forward? Is there some other way that we can do it?”

It's crazy even to say to double the work the week before so I could have it all automated because there wasn't even time to do double the work. We made it happen as a team to get everything queued up. To keep it moving is not healthy. You need to assess and understand why you are doing what you are doing. If there are things that you want to change, the best way to do it is you have to step back and evaluate it and figure out how you are going to implement the change but it is healthy to have those walk-away points. You call it the Sabbath where you are taking some intentional time off.

Rest and Recharge, R&R. We had it in the military. One of the gentlemen in the show who I was interviewing said, “Make sure that the activity you are doing is worthy of your energy. If not, delegate it. Don't do it. Save your greatest energy for the things that need to be you.”

I have been way better at delegating. We talked about hardships and things that can come to us. Who the heck expected a pandemic? Maybe we all should have if we listened to Fauci who said it was coming on Trump's watch and interesting things were said. We are not going to go into politics but most people reading probably know that. It was predicted extremely accurately. The majority of people didn't know it was coming the way that it was. You move on. You prepare. Some businesses had to go out of business.

It's crazy what's happened in salons and people that were pinched in difficult ways and some businesses were like, “Go back to operating regular procedure.” The small business owners are getting crushed and still in many ways are struggling to recover from all of it. Small foot traffic businesses got hit the worst. You don't know. The thing is, you handle it as it comes at you. The lens I use that I like to share with the audience is the lens of how this is happening for me and posted to me.

I was married for six years. I did not know or think that we would get divorced. We didn't have it in our vocabulary. We did not see that as something that would happen. We both got to a place where we felt we are better off going our two separate directions. Sometimes that happens, you become two different people. My interests have changed. I was becoming more entrepreneurial and different than I was when I was 21, 22, 23 when we were in our early dating years. I’ve got married when I was 25.

I was different at 25 and 31 with things I grew into. We had some other personal underlying things. You get to a dark point of no return. We had a divorce and it was devastating. In many ways, I was mostly concerned about my time with my daughter, even though it’s a mutual decision and agreement. A lot of things were cordial with how we set everything up. It's still not 50/50 when it comes to time with your child. The system is broken in many ways there.

I didn't lay down and suck my thumb like your dad would have said in the fetal position for weeks, months or years. I felt it. I understood it. I knew I wasn't happy with what was going on. I knew I wasn't happy with myself and who I became. I stopped doing the things that I had interests in, which were media production and all kinds of stuff as a child that was fun to do. I even have a college degree in Media Production but I wasn’t pursuing it. I was selling insurance and managing a Sleep Number store. Those are the things I was good at. As a ten-year-old looking at it, I was like, “Who is this guy?”

It was time to get back to who I was again without anybody telling me who I had to be except for myself. It felt freeing to be able to go into a position to do that. Some people are going to have a better grasp of entrepreneurship. Maybe they have parents that were entrepreneurial that they learned from. Some are going to have more resources. Maybe they have a little more leeway with a savings account or whatever it might be.

Everybody knows their tap-out moment. I don't know if there's a better term for it. Maybe it’s resilience. It’s a level that you know you can withstand. Everyone's levels are different. Tap-out is a wrestling term. It’s a hold that you give up. People who love us and care about us, their give-up moment is different from everybody else's.

I have had people in the past, they saw me make some strides and go back. One step forward and two steps back a lot of what I was doing in my first couple years. Sometimes it was even one step forward and five steps back, unintentionally and that happens too early entrepreneurs. A lot of people were tapping out, “Mike, I know you have a dream this and that,” and they were done. They didn't see it.

They didn't see the vision. They were tapped out. That would have been where they quit. I’m not picking on anybody but I knew in my heart that wasn't it. That wasn't even close to it. If I'm fighting Goliath, I'm not tapping out now. I'm still able to breathe and move so I'm not tapped out. I'm still swinging. Other people might say, “Whatever. Maybe go back to doing what you are good at. That's a good idea,” or whatever.

All these voices are in your head, which also is part of what leads this whole thing into that loneliness. A lot of times the only person that believes in your vision is you. Look at Walt Disney, he had to get into cash value in his life insurance policy because banks wouldn't fund Disney World. They said that it's not a worthy thing. He got fired from a newspaper. They said, “You are not creative enough.”

It was difficult, “We are not going to give you money for Disney World. This whole thing is not going to work.” It worked. That's Disney. We are not trying to be the next Elon. I hope you are not trying to be the next Oprah if that's your thing, Steve Jobs or whoever you can name. Be you. Everyone else is taken. Be the best version of yourself.

I always talk about, “Be great and be grateful.” The two things right there I'm referring to are not a pompous greatness thing like, “You’ve got to be this great person.” What I mean by that is you have a gift or many gifts that make you up to what your potential level is. If you are not living to the greatness that you can achieve, it's like a jigsaw puzzle that's sitting in the box. It can be this beautiful picture. Don't you want to make that beautiful picture that you can be?

To me, that’s unlocking your greatness. That's what you are supposed to do. I also feel like everybody is responsible if you are in an environment where you wake up and there's not a gun held to your head telling you what to do. We are in a free country. When you and I are recording this, we are in a situation where we can go and do these things. We can achieve our greatness if we focus on it and unlock it.

Also, it's to make everyone else better around us. That's a responsibility. We are born on this planet. Nobody knows our end date. God willing, you live a long prosperous life. Who has improved because of that? Other people around you. It's not only your family. It's not 1 of 1 that you took care of. That's a sad story right there.

If you were born, you only took care of yourself, scratched your own back and you passed away, maybe 1 or 2 people knew who you were as a human being and everyone else around you didn't get anything. How many people live that lifestyle? I’m not trying to be calling people out or whatever because everyone has the right to do what they feel is right but maybe if you are not thinking about that yet, I would like for you to think about it.

What's your actual purpose? Your purpose is bigger than you and that's when you start to serve. Instead of work, it's more service. Leaders are in service to everyone around them. They are serving their team, clients and when they have a product or service that's bigger than only the clients who pay for it or whatever like Apple is not only serving people who purchase Apple products, they change the game.

Everyone operates differently because of what Steve's vision was for that company. Apple became something that everyone else played catch up with in different ways and the way that we operate with smart devices and everything else changed the game. He wanted to make a dent in the universe, which was his quote and he absolutely did that. Instead of saying, “I'm selling insurance. I'm managing this team. I'm the father of my children.”

Fulfilling Life For Leaders: Choose to be an entrepreneur driven to do what you ought to do, but you also have to have some levels of fun so you could appreciate life as a whole.

Who are you on the planet? We are all together. It's not the neighborhood anymore. It's not. It's not Sally and Susie Jones next door that you might be able to have a nice cat backyard conversation in to improve their day. You have the opportunity. That's why you and I are doing this interview because we want to help more people. Only myself and only you.

In the past, you and I would have done it either on a phone call or if I lived in your town or up to my town it would have been a cup of coffee. You would have had this similar conversation, we would want our two separate directions, and you and I would have benefited from it or maybe a fly in the wall. We are doing this, recording it and getting out because if you and I can help one or more people, I will do it 1,000 out of 1,000 times.

Mike, you hit up the mountain back down. For entrepreneurs out there, that is par for the course, too. You are going to go up the mountain into a valley and sometimes you need to back up to a couple of mountains before. That's okay. Either you have to relearn something that you didn't get right the first time or it's just the journey. People don't get that because they are all still back in what I call Mountain Majority. They are like, “Why did you leave in the first place?” You know you are calling. You can choose to give up or to go on. You choose.

I love that's what you are telling everybody about. You can't blame it on the government, religion or race. You choose. Once people dial that in, sometimes we are weary because intrinsically we all know that it's up to us. When you deny that unlocking what's inside of you, it starts to wither your soul, and you atrophy. Some people die that all they did was sponge resources from the planet the whole time. That's what we are here to do.

I want to add something I thought of, too. It’s the loneliness thing. It's heavy on my heart. I feel it. I do a lot of things within my community, my church and stuff. I’m ever easy to get along with. I am intentional about having fun and making people feel better. I want when someone is with me for five minutes and I leave the scene that they feel better energy because of that situation. It's not something that I'm always actively thinking about.

It's just personality but there are times where I still feel awkward socially in a situation where someone doesn't know or get what I'm doing or why I did this. They might not even fully understand it. A lot of times, it's the relatable thing where maybe there's intimidation if you are around a few friends that are struggling with or hate their job. They are like, “What are you doing here? You have a company and a podcast.” I'm not saying it's a jealousy thing or whatever but it could be.

People don't always understand you, us or it, the thing that we are doing and also, one thing that I noticed is when you start to reach up, change your habits and I can think of five of my closest friends and I don't believe any of them meditate or have at least said that they have that. I'm thinking of people that I grew up with. You start to maybe outgrow your friends. Do you know that whole old saying of, “The accumulation of your five closest friends?”

There's truth in that because the pack wants to keep everyone in the pack. If you started to pull yourself out and hang out, I'm hanging out with you. You hang out with Dr. Tracey. Who's that? What's she doing? She's got this great company and she's all the people that she's inspiring working with. I'm in a mastermind group with her. All of a sudden, the guys who want to talk about football all day long and drink beer, I'm not trying to say that I don't like these people but it's not someone who I'm getting my inspirational resonation from. It’s not resonating with me anymore.

I will hang out and chat with you but I want to sit there on a Saturday and that's my thing. I don't even watch TV anymore unless it's on in the background, typically. Maybe there's a live event here or there. I love sports. I love the Yankees. I will put the game on in the background typically on mute. I will read a book or work on projects, do emails and do all the important things I need to do with that in the background.

There's absolutely no way for 162 games a year plus the playoffs if they can make it in 2021. They are struggling. All those games, four hours times 162, that's a part-time job. You’ve got a PhD. There are a lot of people who after whatever they are doing, might be miserable and hate their job. They do that and zone out. This sounds super judgmental and there might be people that are like, “F you. I watch the game whenever.” I get it.

Maybe that's your outlet or whatever but if it's not bettering yourself so you can help others write to me at this point. I don't respect it anymore. I respect people who are bettering themselves to help others. That's it. That's what I expect for myself so I expect from others. I want to make sure people understand what the hell I'm saying.

It's lonely because when people know you are doing that, they might get intimidated by it. It's not that you are trying to be intimidating or trying to say, “I'm a cut above you guys.” No. It is really what you are doing. You are working to try to strive further. It's uncomfortable. All of a sudden, you are the loner, outsider. It will happen. It happened to me with family and friends, and it continues to happen. If I'm around a group of like-minded people in a mastermind group, I am fitting right in.

If I'm around a couple of friends that have been doing the same thing for twenty years, it's uncomfortable for us now because I'm not feeling that. It's not resonating with me anymore and they are looking at me like, “Who are you? You are not who you used to be. What happened to Mike? You are not a fun-loving drummer that used to be hanging out, this, that and the other thing.”

I'm still that same dude in my heart but I have a different purpose now because I tuned into it and I didn't realize it until after I’ve got divorced when I had that, come to the universe, come to God moment, “What am I supposed to do? Put me in position.” I don't want it to be 1 of 1 who I'm taking care of. How can I be of service and make this place better? Of course, it starts with myself and my daughter but what about after that?

That's where people get energy from when they are like, “How the hell do you do this for twelve hours a day and not get burned out? If you had the cure for cancer, you are going to go knocking on doors and help as many people as you can.” You are not going to sit with that on your kitchen table. You are going to want to get it out to the world. Eric Thomas has got a high energy level him. Not everybody can handle that for that long. He's a great public speaker.

I forget the exact quote or the story but there's a story about a guy who goes out into the ocean is basically drowning or struggling for air and he says, “When you want it, as much as you are in that moment and want air, it's non-negotiable.” That's how I feel. That's why I'm putting in the twelve hours. I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to lose some sleep now to pay the price now so I can pay any price tomorrow because I'm building something that is going to where Isabelle and I want to go to Disney.

I'm not going to double up everything for a week so we can do it. I can make it happen because the thing I built is operating with or without me at some point with my guidance because I put in that work and that nobody else was either willing to appreciate or even understand. Fine, they don't need to but you need to. I want to make sure I was clear about that.

A lot of what you are talking about is going to the next point, which my dad talked about. It’s abandonment. If you are a pet lover like me, abandonment has a negative connotation. Fear of abandonment is a bad word. His point was that we need to abandon what we want to think about in favor of what we all need to think about.

You have consistently dripped out, as you ratchet it up, as you go to ascend the next thing. You are going to have to purge off or prune off some of what was in your life before to breathe the rarefied air up there to include friends, habits, time slots, all that stuff. What I like to say is he's like, "It's the focus, Tracey. It's a singular focus. I used to do more in a day to contribute to my failure than my success."

I'm like, “How is that possible?” He's like, “It’s because I don't intentionally catch every thought, every moment.” He was diligent about it. Can you unpack for us that sense of abandonment and how you stay? You have done a lot of it already but is there anything else on abandonment and how you maintain that hyper-focus, and why it's so important?

It's important to have checkpoints with yourself. You’ve got to get back to being real again and evaluate. Don't wait as I did on going on vacation after a few years to finally go, “Holy smokes. What am I doing? I'm driving myself crazy.” A lot of times they are stuff that changing the plan a little bit makes a big difference. Are there things you are doing that you can delegate? What you don't want to abandon yourself from is having fun.

If you are only doing things because you are driven to do it but yet, you are not having some level of fun that, at the end of the day, I chose to be an entrepreneur so I can get away from a system that basically could run with or without me with no appreciation for who I was from my personality and a soul level. It makes me sound like a hippie but who I am as a person, my purpose and my cause so you go into entrepreneurship, you have that thing that you can go and fight for.

At the same time, if you go and start fighting for something and get a little bit lost in it, then you basically can become an employee of your own thing that you created. There are times when I felt like I have all these tasks to do for myself and my clients, and all of a sudden, it feels almost like a job again where you are basically working for yourself.

You give yourself all the stuff to do and if you get away from having the fun, being the kid that's playing in the sandbox with whatever it is that you are doing, business service, leadership, it could be in sports. If you are losing your love for the game, I would ask yourself why, try and figure that out because you don't want to abandon yourself. Also, the abandonment of others and that thing. Something else I wanted to add to what we talked about before as well, it's also tough about that loneliness thing when you start to reach up.

As an entrepreneur, not everything is going to work out. There are going to be a lot of people who are like, “I proved that I was right. There's a game that gets played off, “I told him, he should have not pursued that. If it didn't work out, initially you feel, “They have proven themselves that they are right and I’m wrong or whatever.” Remember that the only person you have to prove right is yourself. Stop trying to make everyone else happy or show off, whether it's social media or whatever. It's not going to matter anyway.

If you have one million followers or not and you are lonely inside, it's not going to fulfill it. It might feel good for a moment. It's like when a lot of money is dropped on your lap. You can feel good for a moment but at the same time, if you don't have real connections with your family, the last thing I would want is to live the rest of my life and never have a strong connection with my daughter. You can give me the private jet, all the stuff and the island but if she’s like, “F you. I don’t want you in my life,” at some point, it’s not going to be worth it to me.

I want to have a great connection with her and with other family. I want to bring people up around me like the people we care about, friends and the people in my mastermind group. I want to see them do well knowing that somehow I was a little bit of a speck in that process. I helped them out in some way. That's what's going to feel good because that's fulfilling to me. We haven't even said that word somehow yet in this conversation but the number one reason I left what I was doing was that I wasn't fulfilled. I'm doing what it is now.

Fulfilling Life For Leaders: The only person you have to prove is yourself. Stop trying to make everyone else happy or show off on social media because it’s not going to matter anyway.

When I started to notice myself, getting into that employee feel again where you are working for yourself, I noticed that it's the fulfillment that starts to come into question. That's asking yourself, "What more can you do that is fulfilling? Is it something in addition?" The reason I do my podcast, I didn't start to monetize it or anything like that. It was a passion project that was fulfilling to me to have these conversations because my show is a similar concept to yours.

It’s to learn from people and collectively educate the audience in some way of inspiration. To me, it was worth an hour to sit on the mic and to have a great conversation. I do a lot of off-air work behind the scenes that people don't know about in preparing for an interview and in post-production. It's a fulfilling thing. I remind myself often why I do what I do at the moment. I had a fantastic interview and it reminded me this is why I'm doing it. There's not always an ROI.

If everything you are looking for is for ROI, imagine if you did that as a parent or friend? It’s like, “I'm hanging out with you, Tracey. Let's go to a movie Friday night.” You go and you are like, “Is every moment ROI positive? Did she make me laugh? Did I make her laugh? Did you enjoy the popcorn? Are we having fun? Is every second perfect?” That's how business is when someone says to me, “It's not ROI positive.” How do you know? What you are doing now might make you a better person so next month, you can land that deal because you learned something. This is an experience.

Life experiences aren’t an ROI and certainly, you want to have some checks and balances that if you are doing a business activity, you want it to have a return on investment, no doubt but if you are overly tight about it, it ruins the experience. It’s like being on vacation. This one is like, “Are you having fun right now? Is this fun? Are you enjoying this? How’s that roller coaster? Is it going well? That's too much.” It’s super important to have fulfillment and remind yourself of why you are doing it but don't be overkill about it because that will kill your vibes and your purpose will feel almost too plastic and not natural.

It almost gets into trading. “I'm going to do this for you.” The universe is not about trading. You give. My dad would be like, “You don't give the get. It's all God's anyway. You should give because the more you give, you get a capacity to give.” If reciprocity happens, then it happens but if not, in the art of blessing others, I am blessed regardless of what I get out of it or not.

That's why people feel uncomfortable when someone does give you something because then it's like, “What's he going to ask me to do?” The neighbor cut your grass and you didn't ask them to, “Does he want me to shovel in the winter and now I'm shoveling his driveway. What happened? What did you sign me up for?” It doesn't have to be that way.

I'm much better now that I'm older. I allow people. I’m like, “Thank you for that blessing.” and I love it when I come in to help people and they allow me to bless them. I'm like, “Thank you.” Say yes. When I was younger, I'm like, “No, because then I'm going to be indebted to you.” I was so stupid. There are all these Earth angels willing to help me and I'm like, “How can I pay you back?” Let them do it. Let them bless you because that's their thing.

That's a whole other episode. Accepting blessings is hard for a lot of people. Take them and also think about how you can bless people with no expectation of being returned. The best thing is Christmas. Hopefully, if you are reading this and we get real with each other, it certainly feels better when you give someone a gift and you watch their face when they open it than it does by getting a gift. Let's be real, it sets the adult mentality.

When you are six years old, you don't care about anybody else. You want the Barbie, the GI Joe or whatever. When you are an adult, whether you have kids or not, it could be a spouse or girlfriend, grandchild, grandfather or whoever it is, it's that magical moment. That's giving a physical gift but it doesn't have to be that. It could surprise someone with flowers, not on Valentine's Day. That's huge.

If they let you borrow their car for something because you needed a lift in town and you fill it up with gas without them telling you to do it or something where you are like if I can make this person smile without me saying, “I made you smile,” that's giving a gift and going “Do you like it?” “Are you happy? I filled your tank up with gas. That was something I didn't have to do. Did you notice that I did it because you don't want me to do it but I did it?” All of a sudden, the magic of it is gone. It's all about you. It's not about you.

You blocked the blessing pipeline again.

It's so important to remember when you are giving it's not about, “What did I do here?” It's not a pat on the back. It's not a gold star. It's about making the world better. I love the saying that Gandhi put out there, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Go and do it but don't turn around and say, “Did you see what I did here?” Your actions speak for you.

The last one and this dovetails into a lot of what you are talking about, vision. You named Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and all these people that were like, “I'm not a visionary.” My dad was like, “Vision is simply seeing what needs to be done and doing it because if you don't have that action, in the Law of Attraction, nothing happens.” Can you share with me what vision means to you and how you continually hone it for what you have with your organization and MIKE’D UP!?

I come from a media production and a director. I always loved studying film and storytelling. To me, vision is huge. When I watch a movie, I'm watching it through a different lens than what's being said. It's the whole setting of the scene. I feel like one of my superpowers is to be a visionary. When I was thinking of Social Chameleon on the couch writing names and coming up with what my media company's name was going to be, I was already picturing it as a 50-year successful company.

I was picturing what Apple would be when the guys are coming up with the idea in a garage and they are putting together different circuit boards and stuff. It's super important to take time to make sure you are putting time and energy into your vision. We are all the CEO of our own lives. If you are a parent, you are the CEO of your family. That position’s number one role is to be a visionary, to see things through like a head coach of the football team. It's a visionary thing of how you are going to win the Super Bowl, then you have to put the processes in place.

You then have to do the little meetings, practices, preseason games and the games. Check your season every four games, and then you just build into it. It all starts with a vision for how you are going to get there. It’s so important when you first see it and you start to feel it when you are seeing it in your head. It's an experience.

When you set the process out and you go and do the things that you need to do, it feels different. You are coming from it like you are the protagonist in your own story if you want to stay with that whole theory. We can be the protagonist in our own stories. God willing, we get to have a long prosperous life but think about reflecting back and ask yourself, “If I get to write the story and it is empty pages, what story do I want to tell?”

Imagine yourself now. My story can start from somewhere as far as my entrepreneurial story. It can tell a little bit about my childhood, my upbringing, what makes me who I am, the decision to change, and then when my purpose was created, then where it goes with that? Maybe if it's 12 or 15 chapters as the whole big picture, I feel like I'm in chapter 2 or 3 of my story. I acknowledge it and I'm operating as if I'm there. I'm not trying to fit, be fake and be Chapter 12. I'm not trying to beat myself up and say, “I'm still frigging Chapter 1 because I have some setbacks.”

We are all where we are at. The vision is so important because if you are just working, trying to move forward, solving and doing all kinds of projects without the vision first, you don't know where you are at and the whole thing. That can be scary because you can be years into it, and then all of a sudden, you are like, “Which direction am I even moving in?”

I would keep it simple. A football coach and football team know what their one goal is. It's to win the Super Bowl. That's it. At the end of the day, everything they do is to work towards that. It's identified. They know exactly what it is. There's a game standard played. There's a schedule of when those games are played. They know the field size and they know how to score touchdowns. It's all mapped out.

If I pick a quarterback and tell him, “You are going to have to throw passes,” sometimes guys will catch them. Sometimes you get points. You are going to have to figure out what the scoring looks like. Sometimes you play games. Sometimes they count but sometimes they don't. Winning happens at some point. Come back and check with me and maybe I will let you know how that happens. At some point, you might win a championship.

You’ve got one group that everything is mapped out and they know what is calculated and another group of people that's trying to figure out and put it all together like a jigsaw puzzle without the picture in the box. The vision is getting the jigsaw puzzle with the picture as opposed to an empty box. Picture a brown box with jigsaw pieces in it with no picture. You don't know what you are building. Both people can build the picture because if you spend enough time even without it, you are going to be able to look at that beautiful picture.

If you had all those pieces, someone could put that together because they are going to do the blue borders. They are going to see on the top there's some white so all the white pieces stay together. The jet is silver-gray so they will be able to find the jet pieces but it's going to take him a whole lot longer than for someone that knows, “That plane is a little bit lower than dead center.”

When you are building the map, you have a vision for it. To me, the vision comes first, and then the processes come second. I do not have this all figured out and I'm a student of the game myself but I certainly know that anytime I need to recalibrate as I talked about in the book I'm reading, it all starts with a vision first. That's where I get my energy from because I'm a visionary kind of person. If that gets murky, working twelve hours a day starts to feel like you are working for somebody else again because you forget what your vision is.

It's important to go back to that source and take a sip of the water and say, “This is what I'm doing.” Sometimes, of course, vision changes. I started as a media production marketing company and I was building websites and doing all the boring stuff in marketing like SEO and SEM. I was helping people on the first page of Google, optimizing their ads on Facebook and stuff that was fun for me, but then eventually, I lost the love for it because it was things people needed so I thought, “I can help you with things that you need for your business,” but it wasn't necessarily what I’ve got the most personal fulfillment for.

Eventually, instead of trying to water the forest, I started to water the garden. I’ve got laser-focused on the area that I wanted to focus on, which was podcasting. I’m trying to monitor and water the forests. Imagine how difficult that is. When things grow, you may not even notice them right away. When there are weeds, how do you even navigate and find them? How do you remove those? When you do remove them, if they grow back somewhere else in the forest, good luck finding them.

If you have a 10x10 plot of land and you can hone in on that. You can see where things are growing and aren't growing straight. You can go to your little tomato plant and talk to it a little bit. You have a personal relationship with being great at something. I'm not saying you only have to do one product or one service but have it more laser-focused. When I did that, things started to grow.

Fulfilling Life For Leaders: Whether you have a million followers or not, it's not going to fulfill your life if you are lonely on the inside.

Somebody once told me, “Tracey, you can't be everything to all people.” They are like, “Who makes more money, a specialist or a general practitioner?” A specialist because they are nuanced and they go deep in something that people need. Entrepreneurs can get generic and we try to be too relatable. Without that dialing it in and getting the clearest focus, it's like a kaleidoscope versus a laser beam. A laser beam is so powerful because it's intensely focused. That's what you want your business vision to be.

You have the vision and it's focused but that doesn't mean that you are only limiting yourself to one thing. I know most entrepreneurs have different arms and things. When they go back to that assignment, whether it's a business or if they have some financial play with an organization, they are going to go in there and have it aligned with what they are doing, what the focus is, with the story that they are telling and what the vision looks like. It's not going to be wishy-washy all over the place.

That was my vision and thank you for your insights on that. We have covered loneliness, weariness, abandonment and vision. Anything else, Mike, that you would like to share with our leaders? Any other lessons or things that you found through your experiences?

Social media is huge. We all have this best version of ourselves that we want to put out consistently. I'm not arguing with what your dad said, where he said, “You don't have to show your cards to everyone.” I do agree with that but I also feel that if you are fake, if you are holding too much of a facade or if you are not being vulnerable at all, then you are not being your actual true self and your personal brand.

That's what podcasting is. It’s personal branding. If you are reading and you are like, “I'm not a podcaster,” fine. If you are a salesperson, your story is who you are. People are going to like, know and trust what you are all about. Have some vulnerability with that, relatability to it and it has to be genuine. One person who has a nephew that plays baseball is like, “I used to play baseball,” and then the next one is like, “I'm a bowling champion. Let me tell you about the time I was a bowling champion.”

It has to be real. If it's a real story, it's a real story and be genuine. It's important to be vulnerable because people can then connect and relate to you. Certainly, if you think about the shows that you may tune into and feel the most at home with conversations and the content, it's not people that are trying to be an elitist attitude where they are not showing their true self. Typically, the shows that resonate and get the most views are when people are being real about it. It doesn't mean you have to lay out all your dirty laundry.

It just means that you are being a more vulnerable version of yourself, which I feel I have done when I’m sharing some of my stories that I didn't absolutely have to share so people reading will know a little more about me and understand what's going on. That's super important out of a list of bullet points. It's important for people in business, too, whether you are a leader, you are on the team or whatever your position is, there's no alternative to being real. It never helps you out to be fake. Fake it until you make it was misunderstood of what that even was.

Even if you don't feel like it, feelings come afterthoughts. I don't think it was, “Be a facade.” You are right, it was taken out of context.

The fake it until you make it a thing to me that I appreciate is like, “Get started even if you don't have it all figured out.” That's how I took it. I'm not taking that as like, “Put armor on and a mask on, and try to tell people you are who you are not because that's not going to help you and that's going to hurt them.” Don't start until you feel, “It's a sunny day and I have it all figured out,” and whatever. “I don't have six-pack abs so I'm not going to post a picture of my family at the beach because I don't feel good about how I look.”

People will love the fact that you are happy and on the beach with your family, and you shouldn't care how many likes you get on that. You are going to get more if you are real and happy about it anyways. Stop with the vanity metrics and start being more real. That can serve everybody well. It doesn't matter who you are. You could be a doctor, nurse, salesperson or entrepreneur. Especially with your family, you have to be real.

It’s encouraging for the entrepreneurs out there because a lot of us are like, “I’ve got to be doing all this stuff and look at what everybody else is doing.” You can't conversate with people until there's identification so just use it and put the greater side of yourself out there. I love the vanity metrics because you get, “I'm supposed to be doing this or that.” Just be real.

There's a story in Recalibrate that Jen shares. It was someone that she used to follow or followed on social media and it was this woman who came out there. Her hair could be in a bun, living a messy activity in the next room audibly heard. She was giving these great videos and it was real and engaging. Her following has blown up like crazy. She was real. It wasn't over-calculated and it wasn't highly produced.

She started to get a following, a budget and she started to highly-produced her videos. It was soundproof and no kid in the room. She was wearing her best outfit, had more makeup on and her hair was done well. She had everything looking beautiful. She had studio quality but the content suffered because all of a sudden, she was trying too hard. You’ve got to be somewhere in between. I don't think it's cool at this point to throw anything together. That's no good because people aren't going to give you a second chance.

Respect your audience to put time and effort into it but don't wait to overcalculate before you put any content on either. Be somewhere in between. You want to have a good-looking header, subtitles and stuff. The most important thing is the content and what's talked about. I’m having this conversation and that's what people are going to care most about. I'm not trying to over-impress anyone. I'm here to deliver whatever information I can give and if it helps one person out, I spent my time well.

Mike, how can people get ahold of you?

Many ways. Talking about social, I spend the most time on Instagram and also LinkedIn. If you go to LinkedIn and search for Mike DiCioccio. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. It's also, @MikeDiCioccio on Instagram and Twitter. I don't spend too much time on Twitter. I'm on Facebook so if you want to connect with me there, do that. My website is SocialChameleon.us. If people are wondering, it's like the animal, the little lizard guy. That's my company. My podcast is called MIKE'D UP! I kept that super easy, too. It's MikedUpPodcast.com.

For the entrepreneurs that may be like, “I want to do a podcast,” they can approach you. You have your own podcast but you work to produce other people's podcasts, correct?

Yeah. Social Chameleon is a podcast production, distribution and promo company. We help you with creating your long episodes, audio and video but also the social media content that we are talking about. We do produce that. Tune into my show first so they get a feel for it, and then if you have a guest suggestion, whether it's yourself or someone you know, I am cool with people saying, “You should interview this person.”

Know that I spend time making sure I have people on the show that are going to tell stories and are going to drive the audience to the right place. It's not like everyone who wants to be on the show, just come on in and we will have a big party, as much as I love to do that. I make sure when I'm pressing the record that it's going to be of high value. Dr. Tracey Jones is going to be on my show.

You are saying that and I'm like, “I'm honored.” Thank you. You gave us so much. I learned more about you and your journey. I thank you for sharing with people out there. You give our readers at different stages, words of encouragement, words of the Sherpa and the sage that comes along and lets us know, “This is par for the course but you can do this. You can keep going.”

For readers out there, please be sure and connect with Mike. Check out his podcast and connect with him in all those different ways. That's why he and I do what we do because you cannot get it right without the right people. The more great people you have, you heard him talking about Jim Rohn and you are the five people. Make Mike one of those people.

I'm going to throw this out. One more thing I want to say is if you ever feel lost, remember to ask yourself, “What is my total purpose here? How can this world be better for me?” It’s because you do. Everyone can add to that equation. It’s something you can do, as small as it is, as large as it is. How are you able to make the world a better place? It will be a better place because of you. If you are reading this and you get lost, you are not sure what you are fighting for anymore, get back to figuring that out so then you can go and do that.

My grandparents on both sides came over from Italy and they had to learn a new language. I had grandmothers that were on a boat by themselves coming over and writing letters. Months later, getting a response and didn't know what the heck they were doing. They are figuring it out as they want. They barely had any money coming in. They had entrepreneurial journeys and stuff to make a buck. They did all that for me. I wasn't even born yet. They did it for the generational change. If I just sit on my you-know-what and take it for granted, that is a sin.

To me, both sets of grandparents took this huge chance to put their life on the line to come to America so their families can have an opportunity to live in a free world. If I'm just sitting here like, “I'm miserable. I'm just going to work at this job so I can get a 401(k), retire and maybe set my family up.” I'm not saying that it's not worthy that you are taking care of your family but if that's all I did, I will feel like I let myself down, my grandparents that are no longer with me down and future generations down.

It's like planting a tree but planting in the darkness when all you had to do is move the seed in here, water it, put light on it and now can become this beautiful, fruitful thing. If you feel like you are a little lost now, know that you can move into the light, water yourself in different ways and you can grow into that, your potential.

Mike DiCioccio, thank you for spending time with us. I look forward to being on your show.

I'm looking forward, too. No pressure. It's going to be the best one yet. You bring so much value to the table through everything that you have done and it's incredible what you are doing for your audience. What you have learned from your dad and hearing you talk about your dad brings me a lot of happiness because I feel that that's a similar relationship I'm looking to build with my daughter so it's a beautiful thing.

I'm sure all that pouring in, she's going to be a little mini-T, mini Tremendous DiCioccio.

She was incredible. I learned a lot from her every day.

To our readers out there, thank you for being a part of our tremendous tribe. Never forget to keep on paying the price of leadership. We are right there beside you. As Mike said, “You reach out.” Please hit the subscribe button. If you like us, do us the honor of leaving us a five-star review and leave us a comment or share this with somebody that you know is also trying to dial in their purpose and wanting to step into being their truest and authentic self. Have a tremendous rest of the day.

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About Mike DiCioccio

Mike DiCioccio leads with a service above self mentality, seeking ways he can make a positive change within his community and in the world. He is the Founder & President of Social Chameleon, a Podcast Production Agency, as well as host of MIKE’D UP!, a podcast with a mission to help inspire people to be brave and bold in pursuit of their dreams! Mike loves helping entrepreneurs, businesses & brands tell their story and connect with their audience.