My personal experience
"I wanted to be The Jorge Moral, not Jorge Moral the 3rd"
I grew up somewhat spoiled in Peru, under the umbrella of relative financial safety that my grandfather’s success and then my father’s success provided, and one under which I joyfully lounged as I grew up. When you grow up with just enough money that things coming easy is the norm rather than the exception; you borrow its cover of power rather easily, even if that’s not your own money. Like an old coat that is too large for you and clearly tailored for someone else, you still wear it simply because it still makes things easy around you.
You only need to look at any of the spoiled kids of successful, hard-working people to understand what I mean. Generational money brings safety, but it can spoil people who don’t understand how it was built.
Understanding the value of money
They don’t understand the value of that money, just as I didn’t understand the value of the money that my father had. I loved it, till that day I didn’t, because I realized what the cost of borrowing the power of that money was: I was never going to grow beyond it. If I kept hiding behind the money and success of my father, I would only ever be his successor. I would only ever be Jorge Moral, the 3rd. I didn’t want that! I wanted to be The Jorge Moral, not the latest Jorge in the line. That was going to be difficult if I didn’t make my own path, and if I didn’t shed the coat of familiarity and comfort that family had pre-made for me.
My father needed to step away from the business when I was 18 due to some personal reasons, and as the assigned successor, I was asked to step in. I managed to run it well till my father could get back to it, but it made me realize that this was it. This was going to be the extent of my life here in Peru. I would, one day, take over from my father and maybe grow the business, and we’ll always be comfortable and have enough money to have a good life, but I will never be my own person. I understood, in that moment of handing the business back to my father, that I wanted to at least try making an identity for myself—if possible at all.
Striving for my own identity
Soon enough, I left for America with nothing from my family because if I had taken that money, it would mean that the success or failure would not be mine alone. It would always be a by-product of my father’s money, and that was exactly what I didn’t want. As a spoiled kid in Peru, I thought service work and cleaning work to be beneath me, and here in America I was cleaning bathrooms and serving the rich, hoping to afford cable someday. I ate Ramen noodles and spaghetti for more nights than I can remember and dreamt of the food back home.
Because of my job as a server, I heard of the mortgage industry, and I saw that if I were a cut-throat sales person, I could make money. The next stage of my life was just that—chasing money as a mortgage broker, but I realized that this was not the life I wanted. After all, if money is all that I needed to have a good life, I could have had that with my family, and this was still not me. The biggest thing that my family’s money afforded me was the experience of having had it, and the knowledge that money alone isn’t enough. You need more in life. If you keep chasing money, it’ll take over your life, and you’ll still not go as far as you’d like.
Learning about life coaches
In my search for this unexplainable sense of “more”, I found coaching. I consulted a coach who made me recognize that because I had lived a period in my life where I felt the lack of money very acutely, I was currently spending all my time chasing after it. I kept hoping to pad my life with enough money that I’ll never have to feel that way again. Then, it struck me that even though I refused to admit it, I was trapped in a primitive mindset of my own making, and I’d have to break out of it or else I will never take risks again.
This epiphany and the coaching I received freed me from my white padded room of safety and chaos that I had built.
I realized then that I didn’t want to just make money; I wanted to create impact, transform people's lives, and get rewarded financially as a consequence of that. This forced me to take accountability for my own mental health. After all, if I weren’t healthy myself, how could I help people get to a better place?
Building my own coaching business
I took charge of my own life and built my coaching practice with that as one of the cornerstones of its foundation.
I will leave you with the life lesson that I hold most close to me: the difference between those who are successful and fulfilled versus those who aren’t is the very act of taking action.
You see, when you take steps toward leaving your primitive mindset behind and when you act on your dreams, you make the distance between you and your goal smaller, and it will empower you to change the very course of life.
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