Many people live their lives by the rules of society, but this is not what will make you happy. Your soul is waiting for you to find it, and when you do, it will lead you on a fulfilling journey. It’s up to you to make that journey happen. In this episode, Anna Sun Choi, Energy Coach, TEDx Speaker, and Forbes Author, shares how our lives should be guided by our soul rather than society or even our own ego! Anna shares her journey of personal enlightenment and growth, and how she earned being holistically happy and stable in life. Tune in now and learn how you can achieve it too!Â
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A Soul-Led Journey To Personal Enlightenment And Growth With Anna Sun Choi
YOUR SOUL SHOULD BE YOUR LIFE GUIDE, NOT SOCIETY AND YOUR EGO
I can’t wait for you to meet Anna Choi who is our guest for this episode. She’s based out in the very northwest corner of the United States, in that great city of Seattle, Washington. I’ve been to it many times being my expoing background and so forth. You can take all the clouds and the rain, throw them out the window, and leave the rest of Seattle because it’s a beautiful place to be. It encourages you to go see it if you haven’t from that perspective.
I love Anna’s bio because she wrote it like a story. It’s about her life story. I’m going to read about 80% or 90% of it as the introduction to her, and then we are going to bring her in and expand that story, stretch it out, and get deep into it. She’s a living example of things I have talked about on this show. I want her to take us through that journey. Maybe you are in the middle of this journey and her story could be an inspiration for you to move along little doggie as we say, and get yourself to a spot of joy, happiness, and success in your life. I can’t wait for her to share it. Let’s start with her story here.
Anna is committed to elevating humanity’s consciousness by empowering high-achieving conscious coaches, consultants, advisors, healers, and business leaders to find peace in chaos while energetically aligning their life and business with their true selves. As a broke Art major with zero experience or connections, she started and sold her first business as an impact-investing financial planner grossing six figures by the age of 25. At 25, she was kicking butt.
Two businesses later, while working as a faculty for a leading multimillion-dollar global enterprise in personal growth, she became a burned-out do-gooder. On the outside, she had it all with a loving family, marriage, kids, traveling the world, and grossing six figures while taking nine weeks vacation. On the inside, she struggled while feeling empty. She lost her mojo. Some days she wanted to leave this earth to return home to the cosmos. That’s a feeling I can greatly relate to. I’m looking forward to talking about that piece.
She hit her explosive temper and unhappiness from chronic stress from many responsibilities and feeling like she lost her spark day to day. What used to matter success-wise no longer did. While her purpose was clear, how to best express that was not. That’s another item I want to pull apart in pieces in our conversation here. Simply having fun was not at the top of her list. It’s only allowed on vacations, and she resented her husband who seemed to put that first.
She discovered her passion for singing, dancing, and being creative. There were hobbies she never made time for since they were perceived to have no return on investment from them. As soon as she invested in what made her happy, the inner joy of simply being alive returned in full throttle. She healed an estranged relationship with her dad, put her son back in private school, and got signed with a book publisher. She began singing and dancing, and I can’t wait to talk to her about being a singer myself. She’s working daily with professional musicians to produce her original song.
Using art and energy in her coaching sessions with clients, she became turned on with life once more. Her self-worth is no longer tied to revenue, Rolodex, and reputation. Her soul is taking the full lead with her ego following with more freedom to be her true self. She is here to serve you in creating peace in chaos, distilling over 10,000 hours of transformation and energy coaching in the last two decades into simple and practical tiny steps you can take to master your energy, embody your brilliance, and live a life true to yourself. With that being said in that story, Anna, thank you so much for taking your valuable time to spend with myself and my audience. I can’t wait for us to take those 3 to 4 paragraphs to stretch that out and get deep into it. First of all, welcome.
It’s so great to be here. Thanks for having me.
When you are in your twenties and set your course, did you end up doing what you thought you wanted to do when you were a teenager and so forth? Did you happen to fall into those things or was that very premeditated in what you set out to do with your life?
I had no idea because I was one of those multi-passionate and multi-talented people. I was extensively a competitive violinist from 6 to 18. I didn’t want to go to Juilliard. I could have. I had spent four years as an Art major. I could have become a professional artist. I was told by well-off artists that I could make it. It is a hard profession with the whole starving artist thing.
I could have made it but I didn’t feel the right pull. It was difficult to discern what I was passionate about because it was not being multi-passionate. I was looking for a spark. When I lived in Rome for three months in college on an Art scholarship to study abroad, I talked to other people there. I felt like they were people that woke up in the morning and had to do art to express themselves. I didn’t have that.
All I knew is I wanted to make a deep global impact. That’s about it. I didn’t know how to express it and that was the big search for most of my 20s or maybe even early-30s. it’s trying different things out seeing what fit. There was a turning point when I was graduating. I had ten interviews lined up with totally different industries that were going to determine my future path for a while. I had an offer to work with a very renowned glass blower artist named Chihuly in the Guggenheim to be a project manager. I get to go to Paris.
It was this crazy amazing thing and there’s this choice point. I was in the car and the whole inside of me was happy. My logical ego brain came in and it was like, “You need to settle down. Plant roots and be serious.” I don’t know what that was but I listened to it. That was the moment when I went down a whole different path of what society tells me what success is than following my joy.
I’m grateful for that moment because I got to experience both sides. From that moment, I chose to go with financial planning. It’s where I learned everything about entrepreneurship. It was brutal. In the first two weeks of work, you have to pass your Series 6 and 63, and I have no financial background. Not only do you have to pass it, but you also have to recruit people. It’s insane what they make you do. It’s a very sink or swim. Most people don’t last two weeks, let alone a year. Maybe 1% make it in a year.
I was one of those people that made it. I did what I was told, but I overrode my intuition a ton. It’s not that I became all about money because I cared about my clients and their financial futures. I was driven at the time subconsciously by proving my worth through money. I was going to show that I could make a lot of money at that time, and I did for my age.
Who were you trying to prove your worth to?
I could say my dad, but I would say myself and my ego because I didn’t feel self-worth inside. This was very subconscious so I wouldn’t say that.
You probably weren’t consciously aware of that.
I was aware. It was just a blind spot. I was going to be number one. I was competitive but I also had a huge heart. There was this “I’m going to save the world” mission. I’m going to save the middle of America from being destitute.
As you said in your story, that was the do-gooder part.
It’s great to know the people I met too. That chapter came in next after I sold my business, and then I was going to be a single mom for a while. I birthed my son and then after two years I was like, “This is not the dream.” I was like, “I’m going to talk to an adult. I don’t want to clean up pee and poo all day and get no sleep.”
I remember the first two years. We had this tiny house. This was when we were at our very low. We were on food stamps and my husband’s landscaping job is getting $18 an hour. I wasn’t working anymore, and I had sold my business. I had been on sabbatical for a while. It wasn’t working. Those were hard times. We had such a tiny house. It was a 600-square-foot house. It wasn’t a house. It was a one-bedroom, but it was a studio.
The bedroom was the bed and the kitchen was in the corner. Unbeknownst to me, I think he would sleep in the night, but we were in a room. Every little sound we made could wake him up. If we were in our house now, I could plop him on one side of the house and it’d be all clear of noise. I remember two years in and thinking, “If I could sleep four hours in a row, I’d be happy as a camper.” I need four hours in a row, just one cycle. That’s how we were living.
Did you ever attempt to buy a set of headphones to be able to put over your son’s ears so that they wouldn’t hear anything that you and your husband were doing to wake him up?
That’s a good idea. We had no family around. It was rough to have no one to help watch. It’s just us, but I have very fond memories of that time too. There are always both sides to everything.
Whenever I run into somebody that’s engaged and about to get married, I say, “Embrace the things that go wrong because that’s what you are going to be talking and laughing about for years to come. Not the fact that the caterer did their job or the wedding cake was baked correctly.” If everything goes right, then you might be sitting around in 40 years going, “It was a good day,” and that’s it. You don’t have any of the challenges or the things that go wrong to laugh and talk about and be a mark in the memories. I’m sure that’s what that time period was for you. It was a challenge to go through and so forth, but we sit back and laugh about it now. Take the lessons learned and moved on.
Yes and no. I got so many friends right now in that period and it’s hard. I have my whole loan, that’s another tangent. I won’t go down about having kids and how our society is like 2 or 3, or 0 or 1 is fine too. It’s a big responsibility to carry a soul into the world, but people don’t think of it like that. They think, “I just want kids. I want to give them a sibling,” which is totally valid.
It’s a big responsibility to carry a soul into the world.
That’s not going to carry the day when you are in the middle of it. Understand that it’s a big responsibility. If you are someone like me who wants to elevate consciousness in this lifetime and help humanity’s global enlightenment, it’s a twenty-year dent. You are going to take a twenty-year break because it’s going to be all about the kids inevitably. That’s the responsibility you are taking up. To all those light workers and those that are up to that, just understand what you are asking for.
That might be a little rabbit hole to go down for a minute or two here. You are bringing a soul into the world. In some respects, you are connected to that soul. In some respects, you are not. There’s a consciousness coming about now in parenthood. You are bringing a soul into the world and that soul has its own unique why and purpose in the world. That may not be the same as yours. Do you understand that and appreciate it, and direct your parenting style and everything towards that end, as opposed to trying to live your life through your kids’ life?
It is what we end up doing by default or healing ourselves as we go. It’s not like we are using them for they have their own life’s sole purpose. Are we willing to be the guide and not the commander, control something, or whatever reactions we have about it?
That’s how generational problems keep perpetuating themselves down the line. I’m dealing with that at the moment. That’s happening with me and my family. I’m trying to understand if I’m being the so-called martyr to stop that, interrupt the generational cycle, be the disruptor and say, “No longer,” from that perspective. Let’s talk about how you got yourself out of the rut. You sold your business by the age of 25, and then you are in a studio apartment with a child, and so forth.
It was weird because I went from one extreme to the other. You know how the pendulum swings, and you find your balance. I was all about profit for a while there, and that’s what I was helping my clients do as a financial advisor, but it was impact investing. I made sure it was a sustainably good company. You go the other extreme and I was like, “I’m going to do whatever makes my heart happy,” and so I published a children’s book. We traveled the world. We had a lot of fun. The bank account was empty and we were financially not okay. That’s when I was like, “You need both.” I feel like I keep cycling through that every few years to keep finding and it’s going deeper down.
How I got out of the rut is it’s always finding the edge of the fun without money, and then realizing, “What am I going to do instead?” In that period, one of my lowest lows happened. I started a second business of event consulting for social impact. Eventually, I got into the tech industry. I had landed a few large contracts like $7,000 to $8,000 a month plus my other clients. I was doing okay but we were in debt that we were making up from back years, and my husband had quit his job. I was the sole breadwinner. I made him become a nanny because I was like, “We need more money. Here, take our two-year-old and go be a nanny for an Amazon couple in Seattle.”
It was still treading. It was in that crossover period where we had stabilized a little bit, but it was our lowest low and there was a point. His master’s degree was $70,000 and he didn’t have the money to pay for it and that was coming due at 8%. That’s where most of our debt was, but we had credit card debt too. It felt like this. At that low point is when I met my energy masters. When I was desperate, we had to borrow money from my parents at one point. It’s super humiliating at the time for early-30s.
At that moment is when the shift or the be, do and have that you talk about happened. I didn’t shift in the be by any means. What I love about that point is when you go to your lowest low, you are so desperate that you are open to anything. You are like, “I need help,” and you open up wide and then things come. It’s cool.
We want to learn to do it consciously and not have to wait for the lowest low. At the time, I flew across the country to Florida to meet Ma. She’s a living saint an enlightened living master. The first woman in 2,700 years in Vishnu swami lineage to be ordained as the guru of all gurus of the universe. It’s a high title. I met her and I also met my other energy master. He did 21 days of not eating, not lying down, and not sleeping, straight. Right before he almost died at 21 days and he was ready to surrender, he became enlightened. There’s a whole story around that too. That’s beautiful and I got to visit that mountain where that happened on a meditation tour with my son.
I feel like they are my spiritual mom and dad. With one master, I was starting to get my body back on track. At that point, I was so burned out from supporting the family and all the responsibilities. With Ma, she’s more esoteric in nature. I was being infused with a different consciousness at the time too. Doing the work, it’s not like you just receive it. You had to do the work.
With Ma, there’s this journey of profound healing. I went back to this source with my parents. This is how you shift. You have to do the work that’s really hard. I had to cut the cord with my relationship with my dad, which at the time was still ruling me in different ways that I didn’t want it to. When I returned from this five-day thing, I was a woman and not a girl with him. I was able to assert myself and say what I meant lovingly, not in an FU way. It shifted our relationship. Within two weeks, everything turned upside down.
It’s not like it’s all perfect. I got fired basically. I had secured another role at that point. I’m getting all the years a little mixed up. At this point, I was working at a wealth fund compan part-time while having my own business. That wasn’t a fit. I knew it wasn’t. When I come back from these things, everything is clear. I knew it wasn’t a fit but I wanted security for my family.
It was paying the bills at the time.
I wasn’t going to quit. I negotiated to go full-time but I will still do my business. I’m such a bad employee. I have always been an entrepreneur. I don’t know how else to be. It wasn’t a fit. Bless the boss. Long story short, I got laid off unexpectedly but I knew it was coming. I was working in a place downtown in Pioneer Square where there are tons of homeless people. There’s defecation on the streets. The energy that I could feel when I got back was not right. We were in a nice office but in the middle of that.
Within two weeks and that same day I got laid off, I got an offer for a job that was paying way more. I could take three weeks off and start. That was the contract I had with a nonprofit. I worked with all the tech companies like Google and so forth. That was $6,000 to $7,000 a month. Everything turned and then we ended up selling our house and moving to a waterfront property, and it was very fast. We paid off all our debt in one go. We set up all of our college accounts and maxed out our retirement. At this point, I had my husband go to a code school.
He spent $70,000 on a Master’s that he doesn’t use and has a minimum wage manual labor job, then he does $6,000 in a coding school. I convinced him, “You would be great at coding.” I realized I’m going to be the volatile one. I was like, “You need to be steady. We are a team. It’s your turn.” He did that for a night school as he was a stay-at-home dad.
I took everything off of my impact consulting business for a couple of months. I became his career coach. I worked all my connections in the tech industry. I got him a six-year job 30 days out of his school ending. I was like, “You are stabilized now. I need you to go over here. Let me put my passion hat on.” I aligned my mind, body, heart, soul, and spirit. I aligned my industry, making money, and everything so that one thing wasn’t off. In the past, I was happy but had no money, or I had lots of money but had no soul. Something like that.
I brought it all together, and lo and behold, it worked. I was like, “Can this work? Does this work?” It worked. I started consciousness coaching. That was what I was sharing about, nine weeks in vacation and six-figure a year in two years. That was the journey. It was very fast. I attribute it to my energy masters for their guidance because that broke me open, but I had to do the work, which was facing and saying things I would never say to my parents or myself. It’s clearing the energy from past abuse, things that had happened, and all that stuff. You go deep in there.
It’s the sense of healing like doing the work to get the healing, which then allows the alignment.
Your consciousness was raised. Things don’t fit when you go back into your life and it’s natural. Now it’s not hard to move on. That cycle repeats over and over. It was another cycle in the pandemic, coming out of it too. I’m in the middle of another upswell. That year was the best year of my life.
Let’s talk about that a little bit because I’m in the middle of writing a book. I’m a big love versus fear person. You were talking about the swinging and the pendulum thing. Part of what I’m writing in my book is this pendulum swinging between love and fear. In order to get to that next level of consciousness or enlightenment as you are trying to go up another level of the energetic plane relative to love, you almost have to dip down into the fear bucket again to do some more clearing and pushing out fear in your life in that storm. That then enables you to make that jump because you’ve cleared the fear out of your life or a portion of the fear that’s been holding you stuck. That then enables you to get up to that next energetic level of love, consciousness, peace, and everything else.
Fear is an illusion and it’s how the ego plays with you. One of the things we teach my clients are these five points called ALIVE. The V of ALIVE is Valuing your fears constantly. It’s not like you can sit back, but I’m constantly looking for it. It’s like getting my black belt was total fear. There’s so much fear of I’m going to get injured and all this stuff.
Fear is an illusion and it’s how the ego plays with you.
I’m older. I’m not fifteen like these guys in my class who are a bunch of high schoolers. I’m the old one. Valuing fear is a constant practice from moment to moment. That is a choice of choosing love over fear. You could call that pendulum. I think of it more like both are always there and you are either feeding one or the other, and that’s it. The game is to feed what you want, but also recognize the gift of fear. There’s a lot that you can learn to enjoy fear.
Embrace it and make friends with it.
I like to bring it under my wings as my mentor said.
I’m the same way. It’s recognizing that energetic fear just walked into the room. It’s like, “Hi, I see you. I recognize that you came in. How are you doing today?” It’s easier said than done.
The amygdala sends the body sensations. It’s a practice of being with the reaction of the body.
That’s what I was about to say. It takes work and it’s practice. It’s a confidence level of dealing with it. Recognizing that it showed up and it’s of the mind and body. I’m feeding it right now and I need to stop feeding it. I’m okay with it being in the room as opposed to running away and staying in my comfort zone and not doing anything about it.
It’s a cycle. At the end of all these wonderful things that happened is where the bio that you read comes in. I had everything and then I hit another low point, but this time it was spiritual and emotional, not physical or financial. It was weird because it was right before the pandemic hit. The timing was perfect. I remember being at this conference with my mentor at the time. I spent three months honing my business plan and sharing it in front of the whole room of all these other successful business people. He’s like, “Are you inspired by this?” I wanted to say yes because it looks bad not to, but I knew I wasn’t so I was like, “No.”
He is like, “Are any of you?” They are like, “No.” I was like, “Crap.” It happened in my twenties too with financial advising when I knew I want to keep going, but it’s not that you know what’s the next thing. I was like, “Conscious business coach.” There wasn’t anything else, but I couldn’t fake it and do my normal numbers game and just go out there. It’s what I called yangyinfy. The first part of ALIVE is allowing yin to yang.
The pandemic hit and it was a perfect three-year yin time to go within and hit that another low point of what you see here. I’m answering the question from before of what had you shift or what had you go to be, do and have. Sharing that it’s non-ending the cycle of different layers that go deeper. What I had to do is discover what lit me up. I did it when I was on a sixteen-day road trip with my family.
That’s what makes it a journey as opposed to an event to go through all these cycles and so forth. You have to see it as a journey. Enjoy it as you are going along. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on the piece of your story that I read. You had hobbies that you never made time for because there was no ROI. As soon as you invested in what made you happy, the inner enjoy of simply being alive returned in full throttle. Let’s talk about that piece a little bit. We talked about violin, art, singing, and dancing. How does that all play in your life now as well as the journey of coming out of the burned-out do-gooder and thriving? What role did it play?
I was on that sixteen-day road trip with my family homeschooling on the road. Life as we all know it dramatically shifted during that point. A lot of clients had gone belly up. People were in pain emotionally, and that’s where I wanted to serve people. We were homeschooling. My husband and I were all remote working suddenly, and we still are and we probably will be forever.
We decided to go on the sixteen-day road trip. When the boys were gone, my husband and I were in the car in silence. The song flowed out in layers and I had never written a song ever because I was scared to. I started looking on YouTube and talking to someone else who had written one like, “How do you do it?” “Fine the tune. Make a chorus. You can add words or whatever.” I was like, “Okay.” I have a ukulele and have been playing. I have been building up to this point. It wasn’t from nowhere.
After that, it unleashed something inside. I got this joy. A week later, I was sharing with a high-level copywriter and she shared. She was asking about my business, “What do you do?” I share about this song like, “It’s so awesome. The energy was great. I posted it online and so many people would respond. It was so effortless, but that’s just a side note.” She’s like, “No, that’s the note.” As I sat with it, she’s like, “Bring that to the forefront.”
That was the first, “What? Bring music and song into energy coaching?” I kept following and feeding it and meeting people. A great friend of mine, Amy and I were having lunch. I just met her but we just hit it off. She’s like, “You light up when you talk about music.” You can’t fake the light-up if you don’t know where to look. You just have to wander around. You feel it. I always thought it was just a hobby like, “I’m not going to go pro. I have no desire to go pro. If it’s a hobby, why would I focus on that? I have such little time. I need to be efficient with my time to accomplish all these things.”
That was the slow inkling. I don’t know if that answered your question, but I began to focus on it and grew. I signed up with The Brothers Koren. They have a songwriter’s journey, in which you go from zero to writing your first song with them. I wrote my second song with them and that journey was wonderful. On my YouTube, I have the journey of what happened.
What I found is that as I sang more, it was totally separate from business, and it lit me up in business more. As I dance or did whatever else, that lit me up more. I start incorporating it naturally into my qigong and tai chi classes. We’ll dance or chant or sing at the beginning. I started integrating it. It has been starting to be infused now. My whole life goal has always been, “I don’t have compartmental life. I am one being who gets to show up and be me in all areas of life.”
It’s not this hidden musician. I’m a musician at work with my son. That’s what has been happening. I’m still on the journey of it. What was interesting is I wanted to see if it could translate to results and it did because I still had this great launch. It was this $30,000 launch that we did to launch a new membership course and it was very effortless.
For everyone out there, you have to have so much faith that it’s going to work because you are going against all your patterns. My pattern was this numbers game and business. You work the numbers and hustle. You still flow because I practiced what I preach. I’m not saying any of that is not true. You still can do that but it’s coming from a different place of trust, faith, fun, and flow. You can only feel it when you are cultivating a relationship with that part of you.
The world gets to see that and is attracted to that, and things start flowing in.
I don’t think it’s a formula. Everyone got their own journey of what that looks like.
That’s what makes everybody unique. A topic that I talk a lot about when I go on other shows to be interviewed is creativity. The flow that you are talking about is creativity and how it’s fueled by love. It’s mostly self-love, an understanding of your soul, who you are, and what makes you passionate and exciting about yourself.
For me, it’s music. I’m a singer, guitar player, and photographer. I have done it since I was a teenager and I get into that flow. I do those things as hobbies so I don’t make any money off of it. People encourage me to put my photography on a website and sell it, which I may do someday. It gets me into a flow. I then can take that flow into the business world. We can get innovative in business and we can get creative.
My strength is business strategies which you need to be creative with. I found that I was better at it when I was doing my hobbies, and bringing joy and happiness to myself. That flow from that perspective enabled me to be a better leader, creator, and so forth in the business world because I was doing that for myself, not on the clock.
Once again, life overlaps business quite a bit. You can find these things for yourself. I had one gentleman who fishing and hunting was that for him. He and his wife would go to Alaska for 10 days or 2 weeks in the middle of the summer. They go hunt, fish, and so forth. It got him into the flow. I can always tell it when he came back from that trip. He had a bigger smile on his face. He does better at his job.
He was more creative working with clients, customers, and governments that we worked with because he got himself into that flow on his vacation, not in the business world. Slowly, he went on that, kept wearing off, and became a grumpy old man as we called him. It’s like, “It’s time for you to go back to Alaska and regenerate yourself.” Get in that flow, joy, and passion to get more creative because you are in it.
I also think, at least for myself, that this is my path. It’s not everybody’s, but I had to test the extremes. I’m forgetting a very important critical part of how this shifted. In 2021, I decided to let all my clients go. I wanted the business to be not a distraction at all. I essentially put the business on hold, and then I decided to full-time homeschool because, in 2020, it was more unschooling. I was like, “Let’s give you an hour of school this week,” with my son because I was focused on the business.
He had a brilliant third-grade year because we taught him about real life like money. We taught him how to cook. We had to teach him to be self-sufficient so it was brilliant, and I knew we needed a little bit more. I wanted to do that when he turned to fourth grade. I put the business aside. I was like, “I don’t think I can do both.”
It’s that choice and then I did this 90-day period where I gave myself another one of the extremes. That’s when I detox for 30 days with no sugar. I’m already vegan but no garlic and onion. I did at the same time a detox in emotions. I did this liberation experience course on racism and ending it, how to confront myself, and get all my crap and stuff up.
I did 100 hours of meditation straight for ten days. It’s called Vipassana. You meditate for 12 hours from 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM with an hour-and-a-half break for two meals. That cleared my mind, and then I did the Enlightened You program. After that 90-day period, that’s when I severed all my ego ties to my worth being tied up with revenue, my Rolodex, and my reputation. I didn’t care anymore.
What did you tie it to? You cut it from the ego and everything that the ego brings. You attached it to what?
There’s no attachment, even the good stuff. I became soul-led instead of ego-led.
Become soul-led instead of ego-led.
That’s what I’m trying to get to. You attached it to your soul.
Yes. It’s funny because we can say that and then it’s like, “What does that mean?” That’s what we help people do. It’s how you continually discern because it’s tricky. Sometimes that ego gets tricky. It can say things like, “You need to help all those people.” Therefore, you need to work yourself and be a burned-out do-gooder or that person you got to rescue, which sounds nice and loving. Discerning the voices inside the committee of who’s talking to you and surrender to that. That’s what that time was of doing things.
I have often talked to my clients about this. Whatever it is in life, whether it’s a personal or business thing, when you are at point A, there are a thousand or a million different paths you can take and still get to point B. Some paths are better than others, depending on what outcome you want along that journey.
The ego is saying, “Be a do-gooder and do this for other people.” That’s one path to get to point B, which I did. I helped and did well for other people. You have to ask yourself, “What about the path we took to that?” If it was ego-based, is it the right path to get yourself there? You can still get yourself there on a more soul-based path. Maybe a little bit more work or a little bit longer of a journey. You still get yourself there, but the journey is somewhat sweeter in doing it that way than doing it ego-based. You are in a better emotional and spiritual place when you get to point B by having to choose that journey, as opposed to maybe that straight line which is the shortest path and it’s ego-based. You got yourself there, but you feel crap when you arrived.
That’s beautiful. It’s not about the efficiency of your getting there. We all die. We are not going to take anything we have with us. For me, it’s all about consciousness. That’s the only thing you are going to take with you. It is the energy and the soul so you might as well grow that. That was beautifully said.
Maya Angelou said, “What people remember about you is how you made them feel when you leave the earth.” How you made them feel is part of the journey. You understood the value that you are bringing in that journey with them. You understand that value comes in different shapes, sizes, and colors.
You are paying attention to all of that while you are going on your journey, as opposed to just trying to get to point B and trying to do it in the most efficient way. The only thing of value I’m thinking about is my time, and then it’s just nipping the butt of how we get ourselves there. You may be walking over other people and so forth in that journey to be so efficient in that straight line of point B that people feel like dirt whenever your name is mentioned. You weren’t paying attention to the other ways that value can show up in that journey.
If we could summarize our conversation, we have your life story, a burned-out do-gooder that then became soul-centered instead of ego-centered, and understands the role of consciousness and energy, and finding the passions in life that serve your soul. You’re taking all those and making that a discipline and a practice in your life to get the flow going so that you have more creativity, and then you are bringing that into your daily life to include your business life. Would that be a good summary?
That’s beautiful. Great work.
I’m trying to give our audience some tools and things to think about in their own life. We could take the last 45 minutes that we have been talking and summarize it or the cliff notes, so to speak. What we are hoping you take away from it is you may have a good destination in mind. It’s great being a do-gooder, but at what cost is the path that you are taking to get yourself there? If it’s world-based, ego-based, and financially-based, then you are starting to practice the do, have, and be model. When you get to point B, you are not going to be happy because you didn’t pay attention to other value markers in life.
Now, you have an opportunity to say, “I’m still going to get to point B. It may take longer, but I’m going to do it from the perspective of serving my soul and happiness, and aligning what I do with those pieces. It’s maybe a longer path but when I get to point B, I’m so much happier, joyful, and made a bigger impact on other people’s lives in doing so, as opposed to just running over the top of them.”
My energy masters say that she helps people go to the other side or transition from the body as a soul and go to the light. Whether you believe this or not is irrelevant. The idea is that when you pass, your soul looks back at your life and you see all the pain you caused, and all the joy. You are in the light at that point and you are like, “I never wanted to hurt them. I don’t want them to be left like that. Let me go back.” It’s that kind of energy.
That’s soul growth. A big part of what I’m writing in my book is about soul growth and the journey. I call this earth school. You are in earth school and you are here to school your soul. Your mind is of the body. Your mind helps you to be on the earth physically, and the ego helps you with that, but the reality is it’s a casing for your soul. The school here is about your soul, not about your body because your soul keeps existing beyond the earth.
That’s the question I leave with everyone. If you were at that point and you transitioned from the body and you are looking back, the question is how did you serve our people? How did you serve your soul?
First and foremost, how did you serve yourself, and then how did you serve others?
Yes.
I was so appreciative of you coming to the show. If people wanted to engage with you, be in your aura or energy, and learn from you, what’s the best way they could reach out and connect with you?
Go to my website, Soljoy.life. There are a lot of different resources. We have a Soljoy Masterclass that you can take any time, as well as you can set up a one-on-one with me. We call it a Cut The Chaos Consult. If you want to see where you are now on your energy level, what is the future you to create energetically, and what is the gap, I can help you determine that. There’s normally a fee but I will waive that if you are tuning in and say, “I was on Andrew’s show.” I’d be happy to connect with you.
I’d be curious how many of those you get to help me bring the right topics to the table for the audience. One last question. I swear. I have prepared you for this in the green room. We ask every guest that comes on the show the same question because we like to collect the answers. We like to see where the world is at relative to this piece. The question to you is, what do the words “generate your value” mean to you?
For me, it means you are enough. It’s understanding your inherent worth just by being alive. If you can experience the joy, gratitude, and aliveness of simply being alive, you have become enlightened. That is bliss. What else is there? You get to enjoy life.
Generating your value is understanding your inherent worth just by being alive.
That enables you to then generate value in other people’s lives.
That’s the thing. You automatically generate value in your presence. Your job is to continue up-leveling your consciousness such that you are light. You’ve been in those rooms. You walk into a room and you feel someone. You feel good energy or bad energy. You don’t have to say anything. The biggest masters say nothing. You just feel them. You do nothing. They just show up. That’s what we all have the power to do.
We get focused on the givers’ gain. We give and receive and all that, which is valid. It can distract from the purpose of you being enough as you are. If you came from that place, then how do you serve? You are already cooked. How do you then generate value for others from there, as opposed to “I got to generate value in order to feel worthy? I got to generate the value of whatever metrics so I feel valued.” It’s still coming from lack. It’s not what you are doing. As my mentor was saying, “It’s how you show up and flow through what you do.” You are already enough and inherent as you are.
The visual I use for my clients is climbing the mountain as you are doing the work to understand who you are at a soul level and perspective. When you understand that about yourself, you can then stand on the mountaintop with a big light that shines who you are, “This is who I am and I’m going to stand here and be.” You wait for the world to read and see that. Those that resonate or are passionate about what you have to say about who you are will show up. You’ve shown that to the world and they are looking through the binoculars going, “I like that one. I want to see what that’s all about,” and they start showing up in your life.
If you don’t do that hard work of climbing the mountain and understanding who you are to clear out that bad energy, do the healing, the traumas from your life, and so forth to start working at a soul level and understanding the why of your soul, you’ll never get to that mountaintop. You’ll never be able to turn on the light. You’ll be down stuck in the valley. You can still survive in the valley, but it’s not going to be as exciting, joyful, and happy as it is to be on the mountaintop and going, “Here I am and this is who I am, and I’m going to be. Who wants to join me in that effort?” They start showing up.
That’s enlightenment right there.
I hope a bunch of people is taking notes on this one. A lot of good juicy stuff in here. I hope you got a lot out of it from Anna. We call it golden nuggets on this show that people can take away and integrate into their personal life, business life, and leadership life to find that joy, happiness, and success in their lives. Thank you for joining us on this episode where we try to bring people like Anna to the table to tell their stories that you might find to be worthy.
We do bring people in the hopes that you can figure out where you fit within their story, and how you are walking alongside this person in the journey of life. You might be able to take things that happened in their life, integrate them, and get inspired by them to live your best life. That’s what we are all about on this show. With that being said, have a great day and week. Keep doing the hard work. Keep climbing that mountain and shine your light at the top. We will see you next time with another great episode here on the show. Take care.
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ABOUT ANNA CHOI
As a broke art major with zero experience or connections, I started and sold my first business as a impact investing financial planner–grossing six figures by age 25. Two businesses later while working on faculty for a leading multimillion dollar global enterprise in personal growth, I became a burned out “do-gooder.” I met my enlightened teachers, spiritual guides, and renowned energy masters, Sai Maa and Ilchi Lee. They set me on a path of self-healing and energy mastery becoming a certified Dahn Energy Master, Qigong yoga instructor, Brain Power Wellness trainer, and martial arts student.
On the outside, I had it all with a loving family, marriage, kids, traveling the world, grossing six figures while taking 9 weeks of vacation–but on the inside, I struggled with feeling empty. I’d lost my mojo. Some days I just wanted to leave this earth to return home in the cosmos. I hid my explosive temper, unhappiness from chronic stress of many responsibilities, and feeling like I lost my spark day to day. What used to matter success was no longer did–and while my purpose was clear, how to best express that was not. Simply having fun was not at the top of my list (only allowed on vacations) and I resented my husband who seemed to put that first.
Then I discovered my passion to sing, dance, and be creative. Always there as hobbies I never made time for since there was no ROI, as soon as I invested in what made me happy the inner joy of simply being alive returned in full throttle. I healed an estranged relationship with my dad, I put my son back in private school, I got signed on with a book publisher, I began singing and dancing daily working with professional musicians to produce my first album, I began using art and energy in my coaching sessions with clients. I became turned on with life once more! I went from not being willing to spare 5 minutes a day for self care because “I had no time” to meditating one hour a day LOVING and prioritizing time with my soul first.
My self worth was no longer tied to my revenue, rolodex, or reputation. My soul is taking full lead with my ego following with more freedom to be my True Self. I’m here to serve you in creating peace in chaos, distilling over 10,000 hours of transformation and energy coaching the last two decades into simple, practical tiny steps you can take to master your energy, embody your brilliance, and live a life true to your Self.
