#382: The Best Advice You’ll Ever Get

I hope I am not spoiling the ending for anyone, but I don't think it's a big secret that we are all going to leave this body, that we are no longer going to be on this planet, in this human form at some point we are gonna die. Now, personally, I don't believe in death. I believe that we are much larger than these containers that we live in, that we are these ineffable beings, the these limitless beings, and that our bodies are like a rental car while we're visiting here on earth. That's my personal belief. But we all will be leaving these physical bodies. We will be saying goodbye to them. And one of the things that is most feared to discuss in this world is talking about the limits of our body that we will in fact die. And it's something that I talk to estate planners about because so often this is the reason people don't come in to sign their estate plan or they don't come into create an estate plan in the first place, is because people are afraid to address their physical mortality.

In this episode, I want to talk to you about it head on, because really dying is a gift. And of course, when we are experiencing grief of a loved one's death, it doesn't feel like that in the moment. But when you think about how precious everything becomes, when you realize that there is a finite amount of time that you will be in this body with your loved ones, with the life that you have as you have defined it for yourself, then you begin to see everything as more precious and you begin to think about things differently and how you show up in the world differently. That's why in this episode I wanna share with you a couple concepts and one of them is using death as your advisor.

Hi, I'm Dina Cataldo, a master coach and ex criminal prosecutor. I created Be a Better Lawyer Podcast for driven lawyers like you who want more from life than sitting behind a desk. You've been playing by other people's rules. Those rules have left you overwhelmed, unfulfilled and feeling like a hamster on a wheel. I've been there, I was doing everything people told me to do to be successful, working late nights, weekends, and trying to make everyone happy. So why wasn't I happy and I wanted more in life? When was I going to find time to find and pursue that? Well, I did. And I'm sharing with you my secrets to living a happier and more fulfilling life. This podcast gives you a lifetime of wisdom, mindset, principles, and bedrock strategies to give you unshakeable confidence, more time to pursue your goals, a powerful sense of purpose to uplevel your life and law practice and so much more. These are things we were never taught in law school. This podcast bridges the gap between law, school and life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started.

So let's talk. I'm gonna dig into a few books that I really enjoy and I wanna share them with you. I've talked about them before on this podcast when I was talking about personal power, and I will link to that episode on Personal Power inside the show notes. But these books have been in my life forever. When I was a little girl, my dad had these books on one of his shelves and I didn't really get into them because they were a little deep for me at the age when I first noticed them. But as I have gotten older, I've dug into them and I've gained so much insight and it's all consistent with the mentorship that I've received over the years. And I wanted to share them with you. And if they resonate with you, I will link to them in the show notes.

So the first book is, uh, the teachings of Don Juan, A Yaki Way of Knowledge. And the Yaki Indians are a native tribe in, um, the Sonora area, I believe. So these concepts that I'm talking to you about have deep roots in native cultures. But this isn't about dogma. This isn't about trying to give you beliefs to believe. It's about giving you concepts and you can choose to take them on or not. But I find them very helpful for me and I will bring them up with clients and I'll see the impact that these concepts have on their decision making processes. And it really shifts things for them. Another book in this series that I enjoy is called A Separate Reality. And the final one, which I really, I really go to it for a study book, there's so much into in these, they're so deep, is the journey Toon.

These books are fabulous, and these are the ones that my dad had on his bookshelf, but there was one more that I added onto mine, which is called Tales of Power. I will link to that one in the show notes as well. If what we talk about here today and learning these native concepts and really ancient wisdom is something that speaks to you. So the concept of using death as your advisor is something that really puts things in perspective. Not only do we take things less for granted, we start to really appreciate the people, the things, the gifts, the blessings that we have in this life, much deeper. We're much more respectful of them, whether it's respectful of the planet, of the foods we eat, of the way we treat ourselves, of the way we treat other people. But it also allows us to think much more clearly and do it pretty darn quickly when we use death as our advisor.

So I'm gonna ask you some questions here. If you are thinking about this as your last day on earth, the last day, you get to enjoy your life as you know it and you are thinking about your decisions, your decisions are going to change. So what choices would you make knowing that you had a finite amount of time in this world? And because we don't think about this very often, we think as if there's this continuity in this body is if we're gonna live forever. And so we put things off we, we don't say the things that we want to say to people. We live in fear of what other people think instead of honoring ourselves and doing what we most want for ourselves. But when you recognize that you and I have a finite amount of time on this planet, things change, our viewpoints can shift.

So if you knew that even not even today, but six months from now, you knew that six months from now you definitely were gonna leave this body, well, let's ask a few questions. What choices would you make if you knew that to be the fact? How would you live in this moment? Would you look up at the sky? Would you look at the clouds and recognize that this was the last time you would ever see clouds And that pattern again? How would you spend your time between now and the end of these six months? How would you talk to people on a day-to-day basis? Would you be kinder? Would you be less kind? I hope not. Which people would you no longer want to spend time with? Which people would you want to spend more time with? What might you regret not doing? And these are all questions that we don't usually take the time to ask ourselves.

And there's so many lawyers that I talk to that want something more. They want to leave their practice or they want to design a new practice or they want to step into the next version of themselves, whatever that might look like. But they're so afraid. They're so afraid of what other people might think. They're so afraid of what could happen that they don't take action. And when you start using death as your best advisor, death as the clearest cut advisor as to what you can do and what you might want to do, it becomes very simple. And this is what happened to me when I was making the decision to leave the law. Even before that, when I was making the decision to do things that looked different than the other lawyers around me, where I felt uncomfortable with what other people might think of me, I had to ask myself, well, am I gonna regret it?

If I don't do this, am I going to be leaving any chips on the table when I die? I don't want to. It's very natural for us to have fears. It's very natural for us to hesitate to make big changes in our life. And when we start to look at death as our advisor, it makes it a bit easier to understand where we want to say yes and where we want to say no, where we want to do things differently in our lives and it requires us to change. And change, yes, can be scary, but what is scarier? Feeling that fear in the moment? Or is it scarier to think of yourself on your deathbed regretting that you never went for it? And for me, the fear was always bigger that I would die and regret not having done what was pulling at me. That's why using death as your advisor is such a powerful tool.

It really brings into focus what's important. One of the things that, one of the concepts that these books talks about also is the mood of a warrior. And if you think of a warrior, think about someone who is powerful, someone who is fully in knowledge of themselves and their abilities, someone who is connected with themselves, who doesn't care what other people think, and also moves forward in their lives with the full knowing that they can take care of themselves, that they don't need anything from anyone, that they are not under obligation to anyone. They have a freedom in their actions. That's not brought about by chance. It's brought about by intention, it's brought about by their continued work on themselves to become the best, most impeccable version of themselves. Impeccable doesn't mean perfection. It doesn't mean having a perfect schedule or having a a perfect routine. In fact, warriors are those who may not even have a routine because they have made decisions moment to moment because they are in the present moment fully to do the next thing that is in the best interest of them and their future. And then they make the next decision and the next decision because they are fully immersed in the present moment. They're not worrying, they're not fearful, they're fully in their seat of power.

And that's a concept that may be a little difficult for us. As you know, a lot, a lot of people who listen are Americans or Canadians, but we don't grow up in a culture like that one in which you can grow out into the desert and fend for yourself and you know, have dinner to, to really be at peace with yourself, know yourself on a deep, intimate level. Most of us do not have that experience. So to step into the shoes of someone who is a warrior, someone who creates their mood on demand, that that's really what I interpret this, the mood of a warrior as not someone who's a victim to circumstance, not someone who is offended easily or who gets upset easily. They're very neutral. They're not in these high ups and high downs. They're very neutral. They're at peace with themselves. I talk about peace a lot in this podcast and how to connect and reconnect with that over and over because I truly believe that peace inside of ourselves is the most amazing goal.

It's the most amazing thing that we can create for ourselves and that does take practice. This is not something that happens overnight. A warrior isn't a warrior because they simply are deemed a warrior. No, they go through hardships, they go through trials. You've gone through hardships, you've gone through trials. And every single time you come out of those trials, those hardships, what are you learning about yourself, about other people? What are you learning? What are you gonna take away from that? What's your gaining? Because really a warrior is someone who's always looking for the gaining out of the experience. What is it that you hope to gain? And I always look at the failures in my life as the places where I've had the most incredible gains. We used to talk about that when we were doing trials, is you learn so little from the trials that you win.

What you, where you really learn are from those trials that you lose. You learn what questions to ask, what questions not to ask, how to present things in a way that makes sense to a jury. How to look for those little details that might have slipped past the jury or the judge. How, how to really look differently at the experience in the future because you, you'll have this experience over and over again. And stepping into the mood of a warrior is somebody who practices creating the mood to do something on demand. So for example, you create a calendar, and on your calendar you say, alright, at four o'clock I'm going to the gym. And at four o'clock plan on your body not feeling like doing it, that your brain is gonna say, you know what? Maybe we should just lay down, or maybe we should just have dinner early and skip the gym tonight.

Plan on that happening. But this concept of the mood of a warrior is a concept in which you take control of your mind in that moment where you recognize, yeah, I know my body doesn't feel like it. My brain's gonna tell me I don't wanna, but you say, no, this is happening. I am doing this. And you're creating this energy behind the next step you're going to take to be impeccable with your word. You're generating this energy within yourself. You're telling yourself, I am doing this. And you take the steps necessary to get it done. You are not being tossed around like a leaf in the wind. You have the power to take control of your mind and do what you said you were going to do.

And notice in this conversation that I've been having with you about using death as your advisor and the mood of a warrior, I haven't brought up anything about guilt or shame or feeling bad about yourself because a warrior does not linger in guilt or shame. They have incredible compassion for the human condition because they know they too are human. And they recognize that if they want to achieve what they want to achieve in their life using death as their advisor, then they must take action. They must do the thing that they said they would do.

And it's an interesting concept to me because what drives you? What really drives you? And I can tell you in my mind, I, I'll use the example of the gym. I've been going to the gym, working out all that good stuff. I have my personal trainer love her. And I can tell you, every time the gym is on my calendar, my brain says, I don't feel like it. And I say, no, you're going. And I do what I need to do. Take a step at a time, one moment at a time in the present moment to get my booty out the door and into the car so I can drive to the gym.

But what drives me in that moment is not thinking, oh, I'm gonna feel so healthy. It's gonna feel so good after I go to the gym. That doesn't drive me. It also doesn't drive me that I'm gonna look good. That doesn't drive me either. If it does drive you, fabulous. Everybody has their own drivers. But that doesn't drive me. You know what drives me? The fact that I'm gonna do what I said I was gonna do, 'cause that feels good, that feels amazing to me. When I put something on my calendar and I say I'm doing it, and then I follow through on it, oh my gosh, I feel so good because I've reestablished trust in that moment with myself. I trust myself to get things done because I reestablished trust with myself over and over and over and over again. This was not always the case.

This took a lots of practice for me. I remember when I first started using a calendar, it felt so foreign to me. I basically ignored it completely. I put in a few notes, some to-do lists. I kind of used it in a very passive kind of way as if it didn't matter. But when I started looking at the words I use as being important, when I tell myself to do something and I put it on my calendar that I'm going to do it, and then I do it, oh my gosh, it's like fireworks in my brain. That is what drives me. Now, I know logically when I'm doing the calendar that when I place working out on the calendar, the reason I'm doing it is because I wanna feel strong. I like feeling healthy. I'm doing that in the moment when I'm creating the calendar.

But in that moment when I'm actually, when looking at the gym, it's four o'clock, you better start getting ready to go, then my brain is gonna say, I don't feel like it and I don't listen to it. That's the key. I don't believe my brain. My brain says, oh, you know, I don't feel like it. And it seems like the truth because honestly, I don't feel motivated, I don't feel inspired. But you don't need to feel motivated, you don't need to feel inspired. This is what it means to me to be in the mood of a warrior. As if you're taking on a battle with yourself, right? You're saying, ah, yes, this is the battle. This is the worthy battle for me. I get to my calendar, my calendar says do this thing. I don't wanna do it. And I could choose not to do it, but I choose to do it.

And when I choose to do it, I'm putting myself in that position of power. I'm saying that yes, I will do it even if I don't feel like doing it because this is something I promise to myself and I want to teach my brain that I follow through on my promises to myself. So often I'll hear lawyers say, you know, it's so easy for me to follow through on other people's work. You know, someone will make an appointment with me and I will definitely make the appointment. I'll always be there on time. But they find it so difficult to be on time for themselves to treat the time that they put on their calendar for themselves as important, as important as anyone else. And I was having this conversation with a client today. I have this conversation pretty often, especially with female clients. Um, but it's not exclusive to female clients by any means.

It's just that as women, we're socialized to believe that everybody else is more important than us. Everybody else's time is more important than ours, that we need to take care of everyone. We're the caretakers, right? We've gotta really care about everybody and make sure everybody's feelings are okay. And you know, everybody's doing all right and we're really going and make sure everybody feels good about themselves. Like that's what we are trained to do. But in the process, what happens is, is we've totally filtered ourselves out of that equation where we're not asking ourselves what do we need and then giving it to ourselves. We are not placing ourselves on the calendar as important as anyone else that we would put on that calendar. I would argue that you placing time for yourself on your calendar is the most important appointment that you could make for the week, because that is going to fuel you.

It is going to recharge your batteries, it's gonna give you the ability. When you come across these moments, like I was sharing with you, when you come to the calendar and it's you brain says, I don't feel like doing that. You are gonna have the energy to say, brain, I hear you and I'm not listening to you. We are going to the gym. But unless you are fueling yourself, it's going to be so easy to say, oh, you know what? Forget it. I'm just gonna lay on the couch and eat some bombon. Because it's comfy, it's comfortable, way more comfortable than going to the gym.

If you are not giving yourself what you need, you're not going to have the energy to come to that battle of wills. I don't even like using the word battle because it just sets ourselves up for a struggle. And it doesn't have to be a struggle. It can be as simple as saying, Nope, I'm going. But I say that using terminology from the books. And I want you to recognize only that these concepts are useful in understanding yourself and how you approach your life. If you are making decisions from a place of caring what other people think, I guarantee you you're not using death as your advisor in that moment. Because what you're using as your advisor in that moment is what other people think of you. I looked this up online, you can look it up yourself, but there's a book out there. It's like the Top Five Regrets of the Dying or something like that.

This was somebody I think who worked in hospice, but I wrote them down at the top five. Number one is I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself. Number two is I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number three is I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Number four is I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. And number five, I wish I had let myself be happier. Now, how do you let yourself be happier? Well, my mentor says that happiness, there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way that you must find that within yourself and create that within yourself. And and to do that, you are living the life of a warrior who isn't following what everybody else has said is the right path. You're following a path with heart. You're following the path that you know inside yourself is the right path. And that is never an easy path. And those uneasy paths are where the learning is just like where all the failures, that's where the learnings are.

The harder the path, often the more the gainings. And that's not a fun thing. I think we are brought up in a world where we're taught that what we should truly want is an easy life. A life full of beautiful things and beautiful experiences all the time. And we see all of these different celebrities in the world and they seem to have it all, and they seem so happy. That's marketing my friend, just so you know. That's just marketing, but <laugh>. But they seem to have it all. And we think we're supposed to have a smile on our face all of the time, and we're supposed to have just beautiful experiences, but that's simply not the way of life in this human form. We come here to this planet to learn things and the learnings are going to depend on the path you choose and you get to choose an infinite number of paths.

But the phrase that's used in these books, I'm, I'm gonna blunder it a bit, but the most important thing is to choose that path with heart. The one that lights you up, the one that feels the best to you, not the one where you think you're gonna have the villa and you know, the private jet or whatever else you think you might supposed to have. It's the one where you know that you're being true to yourself. It's the one for me where I put going to the gym at four o'clock on the calendar and I follow through on it. That to me is part of my path of heart. It's doing what I say I am going to do and then not beating myself up into despair if something doesn't go according to plan. To recognize that I create happiness within myself and that I need to be aware of my mind.

Like that's part of this concept of the mood of a warrior, is awareness of yourself. This deep self-awareness of what drives you moment to moment and how you can redirect your mind so that you can fulfill what you need to fulfill on your path with heart. This was the experience I had when I was leaving the law is it felt really hard because everything was a struggle at that time because I was learning these skills of time management. I was learning the skills of business. I was learning how to be a coach. I was learning so much that was part of the path. There was a steep learning curve and that included lots of, that included lots of failures. But I needed to fail so I could learn. I had to be really bad at my calendar before I could be good at it. Just like I had to be a really bad trial attorney before I could be a really good trial attorney.

That's a path. And on any path, there's going to be a learning curve. But are you choosing a path that you feel really good about? I felt really good about my path leaving the law. I knew that there was something else for me. And that criminal law was not where I wanted to spend my time or my energy because my time, my energy on this planet is finite. And I knew I would regret it if I stayed in that office. And I know that there's so many clients, so many lawyers that I talked to that have these ideas for their practice. They wanna change something, they wanna do something different, but they stay stuck. They trap themselves where they are because they have a fear of something different. They're afraid that their world's gonna fall apart if they do something different, if they step out of the box that they've created for themselves. So if you find yourself in that position right now, I want to offer to you that you use death as your advisor. If you were to die tomorrow, would you feel good about your decision to stay where you are? If you knew that in six months you were gonna leave this planet, would you make different choices than you're making right now?

Would you do things differently in your life, spend your time differently in this life, focus your attention differently in this life if you knew, if you really knew, knew if you really sat with the truth that you have a limited time in this body. And this might feel a little dark for some of you listening, but that's only because our society has really not let us look at this. Clearly. They've put up a lot of fear, smoke screens around it so that we don't just look head on at the truth. But the truth is, is we're not gonna be here forever.

And that's okay. We're meant to come here to have a short-lived experience. And I believe that that short-lived experience is so that we appreciate this experience. All the more that we begin to get into the awareness of being present and enjoying the water that pours over our head when we shower, and the appreciation of the clean drinking water that we have and the appreciation of the present moment when there's a a snowstorm or there's wind rustling through the leaves. We only appreciate those things when we know they're gonna end. So I wanna leave you with this question for yourself this week, which is, how often are you driven by the fear of what other people think of you? How often are you driven by these fears that are not gonna matter to you? When you are gone, when you're on your deathbed, you're not gonna care what Bob or Sue down the street was thinking of you.

When you're ready to leave this earth, you are not gonna care what somebody said about you or did. All you're going to be caring about is well, that's for you to answer. What will you be thinking about? What will you care most about? For me, I think it's, I wanna leave some sort of impact. It might not be a big impact. It might be a a small impact in my corner of the world, and I'm incredibly happy for that. I wanna have an impact where I make the planet better in some way. And I think I'm doing that right now.

So that's part of my question for you this week is what do you want? What do you think you might regret on your last day on this planet? Maybe it's something you're not doing right now, something that you've been thinking about for a while. Maybe it's something that you've been pushing off to the side because you're afraid of what other people are gonna think about you if you do it, maybe it's something that you put off to the side because you tell yourself, you know, I don't know how I'm gonna do it. There's no point in thinking about it if I don't know how to do it. I guarantee you that you will figure out the how. You can absolutely figure out the how, but don't say no to yourself because you don't know the how. Because we never know the how. I didn't know how to do a jury trial until I did a jury trial and I messed things up. Then you know how to do a jury trial a little bit better, and then you do it a little bit better the next time and the next time and the next time. And that is how we live our lives.

But recognizing that our death is a gift in so many ways, and it's not easy to think about it that way, right? Because we want the continuity. We love our lives. Most of us really love our lives. We love the people in our lives. We wanna enjoy our life. I want you to live for a very, very long time. I want to live for a very, very, very long time. And when we think about our lives as short-lived, it really puts things into focus. So what might that put into focus for you, my friend? Alright, I appreciate you. I thank you for being here and hearing these words and I hope that you got something from it today. I'll talk to you next week and if you have anything you wanna share with me, if you're watching this on YouTube, share it in the comments. And if you're listening on the podcast app of your choice, well, you can always DM me on Instagram and let me know your thoughts. I'll write my friend. Talk to you soon. Bye.

If you love what you're learning on the podcast, join me inside one of my coaching programs. There will take what you're learning here, put it into practice, and take your life and law practice two levels you didn't know possible. You can work with me one-on-one or inside of Timepiece for Lawyers, my signature group coaching program by going to dina cataldo.com. There you can sign up for a complimentary strategy session and sign up for the wait list for the next enrollment period for timepiece for lawyers. Now is the time to take charge of your life and your law practice. I will help you every step of the way. Let's go.