Robbie Vorhaus

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Robbie Voorhaus, widely recognized as one of the top three reputation and crisis experts in the world. Robbie's path is fascinating. On

the outside, his life appeared to be ideal. A Park Avenue apartment home in the Hampton's to adoring children in world class private schools and a thriving pr agency representing world leaders, celebrities and sports stars privately, though his life was falling apart. A marriage and trouble jeopardize health and financial pressures culminated on vacation when his family asked, Dad,

are you really happy? Realizing he was in peril of losing everything he held dear, Robbie followed the advice he had given clients for decades, follow your heart, choose to be happy. The result four house closed, his agency, moved his family to their small Sag Harbor home, and began anew Now transformed, healthy, happy, and celebrating a marriage with

more than twenty five years. Robbie drew on his life's work and experience to write a column for his local newspaper, The sag Harbor Express, outlining a step by step plan for following your heart and being happy, which led to his book One Less One More, Follow your Heart, Be Happy. Changed slowly and here's a quick message from Eric, followed by the interview. Hey everybody, you might have heard last week that I announced that we have opened the second

round of the one You Feed coaching program. We had a great first round and a lot of success, and I got to work with a lot of people that I'm now happy to call friends. We've incorporated their feedback into the program and now it's evolved into an even stronger offering. It is available now, but only until May. We've limited the enrollment window to allow me to be more focused on who we work with and to make

sure we deliver an optimum experience. You can go to one you feed dot net Slash Coaching program M, or you can text Wolf to six six eight six six to sign up for more information, and when you do that, you'll get a free download of the top five mistakes people make when they're trying to change their behavior. If you're interested, don't put off looking into it. You can make the changes to your life that you've been considering.

I'd love for you to be one of the success stories here, so go to one you feed dot net Slash Coaching program or text Wolf to six six eight six. That'll get you signed up. On the emails, you'll get the download guide and you'll get more information about the coaching. So I'd love to talk with you. And now here's the interview. Hi, Robbie, welcome to the show. I am doing very good. I'm happy to have you on your book is called one less, one more, follow your heart,

be happy, change slowly. And if there's anything that I strongly believe in with change, it's that doing it in smaller, slower doses. So I think we're gonna have a lot to cover there that we definitely agree on. But before we jump into that, let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of

us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. I love that parable, and that's what actually brought me to you, is because it's something that I followed my whole life. And what I discovered is is that if we follow our ego which the purpose of the ego is to separate us, to of us identity. But what it does is is that it sets up us being alone in the universe because with the ego, there's always more. And I'm rich, I'm poor, I'm white and black, I'm Jewish, I'm Catholic, male, I'm female.

There's something that always separates us. So there has to be varying degrees of which is better and not. And if you keep feeding the ego, if you keep giving into that separateness, you will always feel alone. On the other hand, as I've discovered, is that we all are born with a purpose. We all are born with a song in our heart, and are I believe and and over the course of my life and advising a lot of famous people and sports people and people who run governments,

it's the ones who feed their heart. It's the one who give credence of that song, that unique song that um their place in the universe, universe one tune. And that when we feed our heart, we make everything better around us. We connect to the universe, and we find ourselves drawing to us that which we were born to experience. So that parable means to me that when you feed your ego, you will always be alone. When you feed

your heart, you will always be fulfilled. Excellent. Well, let's talk first about the title of the book, one Less, one More? What does that mean? But what it essentially means is is that in every moment we have a choice, and especially as we become more conscious, and people who want to discover what their purpose in life is, how they can be happy, how to get through a crisis, what they were born to do, if if if in fact, we were really born with a purpose, and what I discovered.

Of course, I've advised people who are in crisis. I advise leaders, um people who want to get themselves out of a tough situation, or people who want to avoid getting into a tough situation, or people who want to articulate what they really stand for. And there was always the question of I can tell you what I do, but I don't know what I stand for. And I've

heard this again and again and again. And one of the things that I discovered was in my practice in helping people to discover how to be happy, how to feel relaxed, how to experience joy, how to be a better lover, how to be a better friend, how to truly follow their heart. And what it was was a very simple path, and that was one you have to start now. You can't start tomorrow, you you can't start later. You have to make the decision to start now. The second thing is is that what you have to do

is you have to eliminate something. You have to stop doing something that's no longer working for you. That could be an addiction, It could be gossiping, it could be a negative thought. It doesn't have to be grand eric, it can just be very simple. But you stop doing it one time today. So if you catch yourself worrying, you can catch yourself and say, excuse me, I'm not

going to worry at this moment. On the other hand, you have to in doing the math of one less one more is you have to be conscious about your experience in wanting to be happy, in wanting to be joyful, in wanting to be sensual, and wanting to be enthusiastic, and wanting to be passionate, in wanting to be courageous, and you have to make a step a choice of doing something more that takes you out of your circle, takes you out of your habit takes you out of

your everyday life so that you can experience something new, and when you do the math of one less and one more and then stop and become aware of what your experiences now and recognize that, and again going back to changing slowly, that if you just do that every day, one less thing that no longer feels good or works for you, and that you choose to do one more thing in the direction of your heart's dream or desire, your life will change measurably and you will begin to

experience the life that you were born to live. Yeah. I talked on the show about the idea that it's amazing what a series of small steps adds up to if you do them consistently over a period of time. Right, you know, Eric, My uncle who is now the part of was Martin David Crustell, Huse Einstein's protege, and then went on to run his department at Princeton Applied Mathematics. His son is a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

And I called my cousin Clyde, and I asked him, I said, Clyde, is it possible to write a mathematical formula for one less and one more? And he said, well, what's the intention. I said, well, my belief is is that based on my experience that one less, one more changes when a person practices, that they changed the future, and that intentionally their life becomes better. So he called me back and he said, look, I really you know, we try to do this and there's nothing here. It's

there's no math to it. I said, well, thank you very much. About two weeks later, I get an email and then a call saying can I talk to you? I have to talk to you. I said, okay. He calls me, he says, you know my colleagues. And I started getting into this and realizing that when you do math, if you're taking things away, you eliminate things. When you add things in, then you become their their greater mass.

But when there's a formula that in that one formula that the intention is to discover or to do something, and that is part of that formula is elimination and addition, you absolutely change the future. And he was very excited and I said, well, is there a formula to that? He said no, because what you're doing is you're actually changing. It's like quantum physics. You're making the decision to become conscious, you're choosing less of what's no longer working, which is math,

and you're choosing more of what could work. And by doing that you absolutely exponentially change the future in ways that can't be distinguished at this point. And that's when I knew, in my heart of hearts, hearing his excitement, that that this was in fact ancient math. Because if you look eric at almost any philosopher, any religion, they all say the same thing, that you have to believe

that we're here for a purpose. We're here for a reason, that our reason is unique, and that happiness is a choice, and that's ultimately the purpose of our life. Let's talk a little bit about the idea that we fail at major life transformation usually because we try and do too much too quickly. Why is that a recipe for failure? Well, because what grows quickly in nature fire, cancer, weeds. We don't give ourselves the opportunity to transform. Because every system

is built to follow a specific path. It's very hard. It's like riding a bicycle. I grew up in an area where when you there were like gutters for in the road where where the water went down, and if you got your bike in that gutter. To try to get out required more force and you had to be more focused otherwise something would happen. It's the same thing as when your scheme or you're doing anything, when when you get into a rut, when you get into a specific field to try to get out of that, if

you do it too quickly, it's disruptive. So it's like no acorn would try to become an oak overnight. Nobody would try I to meet somebody and marry them and have a child within a couple of days. It's not natural. You set yourself up to fail if you want to become the boss on your first day on the job, unless you're you're a leader and that's your job supposedly.

But the point is is that if you want to change your marriage, or if you want to change your status from single to married or even married to single, you need to give yourself time because we see what happens to anyone in any situation, when something catastrophic or something that just happens, it's so hard to deal with it because it's not natural. I love one of the ideas in the book, which is about not making big

disruptive change. You know, I work with some clients on some things, and a lot of the internet culture today, particularly in the entrepreneurial personal development call it what you want. Space is all about, like, you know, go for it, live your dream, quit your job tomorrow, and you know, abandon everything and follow your passion. And I think for a lot of people that is just not the right approach.

It's not practical. There's a lot of different things. So I love how you talk about you know, you can start to do this whatever your dream is without big disruptive change. So let's just pretend somebody wants to get from where they are, which is stuck in a job they don't like, to owning a business where they get to focus more on things they care about. How does

one less one more work in that scenario. Let's first go back just a little bit further and recognize that scientists tell us that since the beginning of time, there have been if you include the seven plus billion people on the planet today, there have been approximately a hundred billion souls a hundred billion human beings that have been on the planet or that inhabit the planet and have also been on a planet, and that if you ask a scientist or a doctor, or a religious person, or

whoever it is, on any level, will there ever be or has there ever been? Are you being that's remotely like me? The answer is no. We've over trillions living cells in our body, all having the ability to communicate people, and no one ever like us. So the first thing that we have to do is we have to believe that we were born unique and with the purpose. Once you accept that, or at least consider it, then you can start listening to certain signals within our body, within

our experience. It could be curiosity, it could be what makes us enthusiastic. What did we dream about when we were children? What direction do we find ourselves moving in? What would we do if we knew we couldn't fail? Where is our heart? Where? Where are our passions? What do we love to do? So now we're up to the point of your question. We're in a dead end job, or we're in a job that we took because maybe our parents told us if this is the job that we needed to do, or maybe we're involved in a

relationship that we knew we shouldn't be involved in. And that's where one less one more comes into play. Is one is come present, stop regretting, stop blaming, become accountable, and come present and say, Okay, where I am today, this present moment, this moment right here is before in the road. It's the place where I leave my past behind, where the future can be anything that I wanted to be and what makes me passionate? What direction do I want?

Let's say I want to open a bookstore or I want to open a fly fishing touring company, but I'm a teacher. So as part of one less, one more, changing slowly, what we can do is one start to believe that you can have that fly fishing company. Start to believe that there really is a soul made for you. Start to believe that you really can heal. And once

you believe, then you have to start preparing. And part of that slow processes is that instead of thinking I'm going to go from a teacher to becoming a fly fishing tour guy. Is if you just leave your job and try to do it, You've never done it before, so something's going to break. But if you start doing research and saying, Okay, how much money do I need? Where do I need to go, where do I need

to live? Who else has done this? Who else? Can I talk to And you start doing that every single day, and you start doubting less, you stop beating yourself up, you start doing less of what's no longer working for you and more in the areas of preparation. At some point, as I write about in One Less, One More, you're going to have to come to a point where you're going to have to commit. And once you commit, that's scary.

That's going to take courage. And by the way, courage, going back to what we were saying at the beginning, comes from the word core, which is Latin for heart and age at the age of the heart. And at some point you have to consciously make that decision to switch. Going back to the parable, you now have to start feeding your heart and saying, I've got to make this shift. I've got to move to Nashville. Like Taylor Swift said when you went to be a singer, I've got to

quit this job. I've saved up enough money. But at some point you have to make that decision and then to continue to pursue pursue it. But in each moment, if you do it, one day at a time, less of what's no longer working and more of what does you will allow yourself to grow into that job. So it's just natural. Does that answer the question? Yeah, yeah,

it does. What I like about it is, you know, start now as one of my favorite and I'm often asked for for advice if you give one piece of advice, and I'm often like, just start, whatever it is, start because you you will learn more in starting and moving forward than you ever will just thinking about it. And as you go down the path, you know, if you can if you can only see five ft down the path, if you take two steps, now you can see a

little bit further and a little bit further. And so to your point, if you just believe you can get there and start taking the steps, then like you said, you arrive at a place where it's not this huge crazy thing. It's the next step. It's the next logical step. You know. There's a wonderful parable that we all know as a Confucius said that the beginning of the longest

journey starts with one step. My daughter who we live out by the ocean and the eastern end of Long Island, and my daughter is a sailor, and there was a you know, a lot of wind and a lot of waves and it was cold. And I said to her one day and I said, you know, Molly, wouldn't it be more comfortable if you if you, you know, if you just went out to the you know where this you know, you're not going to take your sailboat out

in this weather, are you. And she looked at me and she said, Dad, sailboats are meant to sail, and it's not a sailboat if it's if you're just sitting there looking at it. We've got to go out there. And if I'm going to sail around the world, if I'm going to be a better sailor in inclement conditions, I need to get an understanding of how to sail

in high seas, how to sail in high winds. And it was so interesting to me because it's true, unless you start, unless you start moving down your path, unless you start preparing, you'll never have any idea. I mean,

my wife's a yoga teacher. And one of the things that she was talking to another yoga teacher who had a has a yoga studio, and this woman was saying that she never realized how much went into being a yoga teacher and a businesswoman and owning a yoga studio until she started doing it, because now she learned that there's marketing involved, accounting involved, it's not just helping people

with yoga, it's being a businesswoman. But she never learned it, she never realized it, and had she known it even ahead of time, she may not have even done it. So part of starting is the realization and that you have to follow your dreams. But you're always going to come up against some kind of resistance. There's always going to be some learning which will send you off in another direction, and then another direction and another direction. That's

what life is. It's a constant exploration. It's a constant choice of who we are and what's going to allow us to become who we are. It's that process of becoming happy, fulfilled, joyful, enthusiastic. I mean the word enthusiasm comes from in theos in God. Look, Eric, we all want to be happy, we all want to feel peaceful, We don't want to feel afraid, But then we're not alive. That's not life. So as with your parable, what do we feed? When we feed our heart? At least then

we can claim authenticity. At least then we can claim that what we're doing is worth it. And anyone who is following their heart, anyone who's choosing to be happy, joyful, anyone who's choosing to heal, anyone who's choosing to be authentic, will tell you that despite all of the storms, all of the resistance, all of the pressures, all of the problems, and however many times you feel like giving up, you don't, and even if you do, you still come back to

it because it's worth it. Because now you're singing your song, now you're dancing your dance, now you're living your life, and it feels on purpose. The question that gets asked an awful lot is well, I don't know what my passion is, I don't know what my heart says, I don't know what I want to do. Um you know I've got I've got I know teenagers who are saying that very thing right now. So where do you start

with this process? You start today, and you start by committing to the experience of the exploration of who you truly are. If you truly want to discover why you were born, why you were here, what's going to make you happy, fulfill you, what's going to expand you, you have to make the commitment to come present and to listen to the voices of your heart. Not to listen to what people are saying on Facebook, not listen to what people are saying on the media, not listening to

what even what teachers are saying. But you have to come present and say what makes my heart race faster? What is it that I find myself drawn to? What am I curious about? Maybe it's magic, maybe it's pecans, maybe it's blankets, Maybe it's traveling, maybe it's exploring another form of sexuality or another place on the planet. But there's something that all of us are drawn to. I

can tell you that I can't. There are so many people who say that when they were eight years old and they went to visit Sea World, they knew that's what they wanted to do. Or friends of mine who are pilots who said, I knew when I was ten or eleven, they even though my father was an engine mechanic, that I wanted to fly airplanes. And I was giving

a speech up in up in Boston. I was speaking at a school, and I was talking to the college students about following your heart, being happy and changing slowly walking them through the book, and this kid came up to me and he said, Mr. Warhouse, my parents are going to hate you. And I said, well, I'm sorry. Why you know? He said, because they spend a lot of money to send me to this school. And you know my parents because my dad's a very successful hedge

fund manager. He's always on the news. My mother is very successful also, And I was always told and I always thought that I was going to go into finance. But I'm listening to you, and I'm realizing that that's not what makes my heart sore. That's not what I'm curious about. That's not what I dream about. What I dream about is being in music. And my parents, as I said, are not going to like you because I realized today that I don't want to be a finance

major anymore. And he listened to his heart. He listened. In that short period of when we talked, I have a friend who was an entrepreneur who said, you know, I always wanted to go to divinity school, and is he's now a divinity candidate at Yale. So Eric, again, you have to be willing to come present, to start today, to listen to your heart, to listen to the feedback that you have of of saying what am I? What

am I curious about? One of the one of the exercises that I do with adults, as I asked him, when you were young, what is it that you want wanted to do that your parents told you you could never make a living doing. And I hear everything from I wanted to be an elevator operator, so I wanted to ride horses too. I wanted to do this, And I say to them, well when did that dream die?

And say it never died, I just never pursued it. So, in my belief, if, as with the parable, if you continue to feed your heart and recognize that you were born or at least consider that you were born with a unique purpose, that you're song, that your dance, that your purpose is to be experienced and expressed, and you take the time to do less of what's no longer working and more of what is, and that if you do that once a day, you become conscious, you start

moving in the direction of your dreams and desires, and you will you will find that your life becomes more authentic. You talk about the fact that pretty much every moment we choose whether we feel good or we feel bad, and that has not been my experience or the experience of a lot of people I know, particularly people who have dealt with depression or other things that were that they're just able to change from I don't feel good, right, don't I feel bad to feeling good by just making

that decision? What do you mean when you say that? Well, in fairness, I have suffered from depression over the course of my life at different points in my life. I also know there are times when I'm in a bad mood and my wife Canis will say to me, well, you're not acting very spiritual, and I feel stuck. And I know that, as I say, happiness is a choice

and we have the ability to choose. My point is is that as we become conscious, as we become more aware, as we take responsibility for our own dance, for our own life, for our own future, that in each moment

we become conscious of that. I mean, in any religion or spiritual practice, the purpose of meditation is to quiet thought and to allow ourselves to become so what I mean by it is is that if we choose to truly live the life that we were born to live, if we truly choose to be happy if we want to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to allow ourselves to transform, to allow ourselves to experience the ecstasy of those moments of perfection when we feel and know that we're really

here for a reason and that we're loved and that our lives matter. It means that we have to choose as often as we can, and it's not a perfect existence, but as often as we can to choose to feel better, to choose a thought that if every every time that we keep thinking about what it is that we don't have, we'll feel bad. If you start to think about what it is that we do have, you'll feel better. So the process eric is not that there is perfection, not

that in every moment we should be happy. But what one less one more is about is the process of coming and allowing ourselves to at least see, well, Okay, I'm acting like a butt head here, or I allowed my anger to get in the way. I mean, I have a short fuse. I'm not very patient, but I'm better at it. And again, I don't think that it's important that we're better than anyone else. It's just that what I try to do is be better than I

was yesterday. Yeah, I love that. I think what you're you know, really what you're getting at there, And what I believe is that our moods are moods, and there's sometimes and emotions are very difficult to sort of directly move there. They're not a lever that you can grab very easily. But our thoughts and our actions, those are levers that we can move. And if if we do, you know, if we move those in the direction that you're talking about, then we give ourselves the best chance

for our moods to follow suit. Yeah, I mean, one last one more. My book it is not it is not meant. It's not a bible, it's not, it's not a perfect formula. It's it's it's a primer for anyone whether they want to, you know, if you want to change jobs, change marriage, does be better in your meditation, um, you know, just even to explore the possibility of being happy.

And I'll tell you one of my favorite parables. There's a zen monk who's on a hill and he's crying, and one of the students comes up to him and says, Master, you're crying. You you preach detachment, you preach happiness. You preach joy, You preach us to be unaffected by life, and you're crying, why is that? And he said, because

my son died and I'm sad. And it's like that's always struck me because as much as we would like to be on that path, as much as we would like to consider ourselves to be elevated on any level, the reality is is that we're still human beings, and we still have bad days, and we still get piste off, and we still allow people to rattle us. And someone once said, if you really, if you really really think

you're enlightened, spend a weekend with your family exactly. One of the things in the book that you talk about that I think is interesting and worth exploring is you say that sometimes when we go to make these changes, you know we've made all you know, one less one more, we do this for a while, we've really sort of changed a lot of things about ourselves, that a lot of times those changes are either not noticed or often not even appreciated by those around us, and that that

can be a trap we fall into. And that's what we're looking for. So why is that and how do we work with that? Well, that's a fabulous question, because it's something that in my practice and advising people every day is people will say, well, I'm a better person, but people still call me an asshole or or I was you know, even though I was the class slot and I know that I screwed around and I did

terrible things. I'm not that person today. And that's part of the problem is that in our society we seem to judge people either worst possible bull moment, I mean, whatever is their worst moment, that's the label that we give them, which is why I say and again, even in the Bible, it says that Jesus said that you can't be a prophet in your own town. You know what do they say a consultant is someone who has to travel in over a hundred miles before they can

give any advice. I mean, the reality is is that you can't allow anyone to define who you are. You can't allow anyone to say I knew you when you were this, and you're still this. That's why you have to recognize that in following your heart, in pursuing your path, in singing your song, in in in in dancing your own dance, you have to be committed to that quiet voice inside that's moving you in that direction. And it's

some point. I mean, we all change, Eric. I mean I started I was a newspaper photographer and writer, and then I went into radio, and then I went into television. And every step along the way, people always remembered me by what I was prior to that. And you know, someone people would always say, you know, this is my first book, and they would say, oh, well, this is your first book. And there's always some label, but you

can't allow it to define you. What you have to do is you have to believe in your heart of hearts. If you're an electrician and you want to act, then you need to start preparing to do that. But what's more important is is that you can't be looking to other people two validate you until you start to do it, and then you have to recognize it. Even those people who validate you only know you from the outside anyway. And that's one of the things I think that's really

important in our life. We have to decide are we going to be dust at the end of the day. Are we going to be ash? Dust is an accumulation of waste. It's something that you've sweep into a corner and throw away, and so many people at the end of their life. I can't tell you how many people who I've advised, who are fabulously wealthy, fabulously famous, fabulously well known. They go into any restaurant, people see them and say, come this way, and they say, I am

a shell. I don't know who I am. My kids don't know me. I have all the money in the world, I don't even know what to do with it. I am an accumulation of everyone else's crap, and what do I do now? Versus saying I want to be ash when I die, and Eric, I think that's probably you two knowing how you know. If I'm a fan and I love your work and I hear what you have to say, I think you feel the same way. We want to be ash. We want to be all burned up. We don't want there to be anything left to us.

We don't want to die with the music in us. But in order to do that, you have to commit to being your own person, regardless of what anyone else

says about you. You have to be authentic, but at the same time, and at the same time, you also have to in follow in your heart recognize that we are all part of this universe is one tune, and that we're all connected the same energy that beats your heart beats my heart, and that in order for us to make this planet better, to make the world better, to make our lives better, our families better, we have to give more than we take. We have to offer more.

We have to be authentic. We can't we can't allow ourselves to be reactive. We have to be responsive. We have to be open, caring, loving. Going right back to the parable again, what are you going to feed exactly? Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. But this has been a great conversation. I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of it. We will definitely have links to your book in our show notes. And it was really a pleasure having you on.

It was my pleasure in my honor. And again, um, follow your heart, be happy and change slowly. Great advice. Thanks so much, Robbie, Thank you, Eric. Okay, take care Bye, Hey everybody, it's Chris. As a quick reminder, go to www dot one, you feed dot net, slash coaching program, or text Wolf to six six eight six to learn more about the coaching program. There's just over a week left until the window closes. Thanks. You can learn more about Robbie Vorhaus and this podcast at one you Feed

dot net slash Robbie. That's r O B B I E. Thanks