I Think I'm Ready to Pursue My Passion, but I'm Afraid Because I Don't Know Where to Start — The Emotional Healing Needed to Live with Purpose, Discover Meaning, and Become Who I Was Created to Be

We! - Joe Mittiga

Joe Mittiga shares a deeply personal episode about overcoming fear and emotional barriers to pursue one's passion, drawing from his grief af

Key takeaways

• The greatest obstacle to pursuing passion is not lack of ability but fear of taking the first step into the unknown.
• Emotional healing begins when one moves from 'I've got it' to 'I need help,' a pivotal shift in personal transformation.

Main topics

• Emotional healing as a foundation for living with purpose
• The role of silence in self-discovery and spiritual connection

Notable quotes

Your passion isn't waiting for you to have all the answers. It's waiting for you to take the first step.

The gap between 'I've got it' and 'I need help' is eternity—no one can cross it for you.

Conclusion

Joe Mittiga concludes that living with passion and purpose begins not with certainty but with

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) If you felt lonely, isolated, disconnected, with an empty feeling inside and just yearning for more, knowing something is missing, then this podcast is for you. So here's your host, Joe Mitiga. Speaker 2 (0:27) Hello, and welcome to WE. There comes a moment in many of our lives when something begins to change deep within us For years, we're simply trying to survive We're healing old wounds learning to forgive letting go of fear searching for peace then one day Almost without even realizing it we wake up and discover something new has been placed in our hearts a dream purpose a calling and for the first time we find ourselves thinking I believe I might be ready but almost immediately other voices appear where do I begin what if I fail what if I'm not qualified what if I'm too late The greatest obstacle in living our passion is often not the ability, the lack of ability. It is the fear of taking the very first step into an unknown future. I've come to believe that this fear is completely natural. Every meaningful transformation asks us to leave behind the safety of the life we've always known and step towards the future we cannot yet see. We don't receive a complete roadmap. Instead, we're invited to trust that each courageous step will reveal the next one. In this episode, we'll explore why so many people know they're ready for something greater, yet still feel paralyzed by uncertainty. We'll discover how emotional healing prepares us to trust ourselves, trust our higher power, and begin living a life of purpose, even before we know exactly where the journey will lead us. Because your passion isn't waiting for you to have all the answers. It's waiting for you to take the first step. My name is Joe Mitiga, and this is we. I want to welcome everybody here today. And again, I'm just extremely excited to be here. Grateful that all of you are here. And I want to continue to thank everybody for the love and support I've been given over these past couple of weeks. If you've been on the WE Podcast these past couple of weeks, you know, you've heard some pretty challenging emotional times for myself and my family. A couple of weeks ago, I had to... say goodbye to a good friend, my 11-year-old German Shepherd named Zeus. And as all of us know, you know, pets become a part of our family, literally. And for a lot of us, the love of a pet is quite honestly the closest thing to unconditional love we ever get. So when we have to say goodbye and we have to, you know, go through that phase, you know you're doing the right thing. for the person or the i keep calling juice a person he was like a person in my house for my dog zeus but it hurts you know so i explained in that episode it's a couple episodes ago now what i did and i've had just an amazing outcry of love and support and empathy which tells me you know Most of us, most people know what that feeling is like because, you know, having a pet is part of life these days. And as the adult in the family, you know, adults are the ones that have to make those difficult decisions when the time is what it was. And in Zeus's life, he was over 11 years old and it was time. And I explain all that and I did it from a place of the bottoms, literally in the depths of my grief. And I said to people, you know, during that podcast. I could have waited. I could have. I didn't because the WE Podcast is a podcast about experience, strength, and hope. And what better way for me to share my experience and my strength than sharing with all of you, my friends, the experience while I was in the center of it. And again, thank you. Thank you for your patience through that episode. And I am here to say that I feel a lot better. I do. My house is very silent, of course. I lived in this house. Zeus moved in with us. And those first days of silence, which I'm practicing a different level of silence these days. And now it's silence and stillness because literally it's just me in the house most of the time. And I have to tell you, it's been different. And it's been very rewarding. And I'm going to share some of those rewards as we go along in this particular podcast today. I'm going to ask you, have you started your practice of silence yet? It's a powerful thing to get practiced at. It isn't meditation. Meditation is when you're in the conscious quest to calm the voices. I'm not telling you to calm your voices. I'm saying sit there and be an observer to your voices. Sit there with no external stimulus. for an extended period of time. In other words, no music, no phones, no TV, no radio, that type of stuff. And observe your thoughts, which is fine. And if the thoughts get aggressive or abusive or hateful or hurtful or whatever, write them down. Keep practicing the first step. And the more you're a witness to your own voices, the more you're going to hear a softer voice. The more you're a witness of the big. bold. I got to get back to work. I can't do this that long. Jesus, Joe must be nuts. Why would I want to be in the sun? Whatever your voices are saying, right? The more you listen to them and not follow them, the more you're going to hear a quieter voice, which is truly your higher power. and the Higher Power Voice is important because this particular episode, we're going to talk about how do we move forward and actually have a successful experience in living our purpose and living our passion, in living why you were literally born in the next generation. And that's what today's episode is all about. You know, for myself, I can tell you, I'm living a passion right here with the We Podcast. I'm living it now. And I can't explain the hows or the whys my path was so aggressive. February the 16th, 1990, when I was 27 years old at the time, I was an active drinker. I was an active pot smoker. You name it. I was doing it addictively. Thank God the drugs of today didn't exist back then because I would have been doing them too. I would have been. That was just my personality. I worked hard, big personality in the work world, entrepreneur, but I reached that spot where nothing I was doing literally in the human sense was causing any relief anymore. I couldn't drink enough. I couldn't smoke enough. I couldn't sex enough. I couldn't work enough. There wasn't enough. And the pain was just there. And that's when I reached that spot where I said, I need help. And when I said that, my whole world changed. Physically, no. Spiritually, yes. Physically, did anything literally change? Did I stop drinking, drugging, sexing, working out, working all the time? No, I didn't. But emotionally, everything changed in that moment. Not healed, but it was the largest gap in the entire... human transformation process, the spot of I've got it, I'm doing it, I can do it. If it's to be, it's up to me. I can handle this. No one can make me. I'm okay. That spot of strength, you just literally believe that you know that you can handle it to the gap and then the space that says, I need help. And the gap between I've got it and I need help is eternity, quite honestly. It's the cavern that people have to travel across in their own time. Speaker 2 (9:16) Nobody can make that decision on when that time is for you. And nobody can make that decision for when that time is for a loved one, for your kids, for your partner, for your parents, for whoever. That gap. between I've got it, I can handle it, and I need help. The space between those two places of consciousness is eternity because a lot of people never transform it, never shift into the next place. They just don't. And for a lot of people, though, it doesn't have to be so overwhelmingly dramatic. For the masses out there, You don't have to hit a hard bottom to go into the transformation of your emotional sense of self and your spiritual sense of self. You just don't. And especially in this day and age, in this era of time where humanity is growing so fast. that more and more people are just waking up and they're just knowing that they're different. They just knowing they're in a different spot. They just know that something is crazy inside and they don't know what the knowing is. They don't know how to act on the knowing. They don't know what to do. And for many of you, that experience happened many years ago and you sought therapy or you sought. 12 Steps. Are you sought influencers online? Some of these amazing new thought movement people. I see a lot of these people out there that have millions of followers. And for decades, they have been voices of hope, voices of support, voices of a possibility to have. And I applaud them. I do. Is the We Podcast about changing your mind? No, it's not. The We Podcast is about healing the reason your mind is wacky in the first place. The We Podcast is about healing the reason why you need to change your mind. Because quite honestly, folks, if your mind was just full of I'm love and I'm wonderful and I make a million dollars and everything is bliss, you wouldn't need to change it, right? That's what I was saying when I was talking about Zeus and Zeus's last days, last hours. He wouldn't eat. From July the 28th, he stopped eating. Now, this is a hundred and plus pound German shepherd who ate 50 pounds of food a month. I use the example of a salad bowl. I don't care who you are. If you're making a salad for your Thanksgiving dinner, you know the bowl I'm talking about. That was the size of bowl that Zeus would eat of food every day. And he stopped. And, you know, I did everything I knew to do. But I knew that was because, you know, Zeus had been going through the challenge and I knew he was coming closer to the end of his days. And I said, I wasn't going to confuse hope with allowance. Hope would have been Joe putting Joe's emotional desires and needs in front of Zeus's needs. Zeus was on his own path. I was a witness to a spiritual being called my dog Zeus, my hundred pound German shepherd. I was a witness to his spiritual exiting. I was. Now, It's easy to say after the fact, right? I only grieved every day at the core of my depths for three solid days. And that was the end of it. For weeks before I knew it was coming. And I grieved a lot. And I say all that because hope... is one of those experiences where you're trying to give comfort to your now moment because your now moment is uncomfortable. That's what hope is. Anything wrong with that? No. But hope is one of those experiences that it's a human experience. It's not a spiritual experience. And is there anything wrong? No. It's all part of the transformation that we're going through. And the world is really changing. It is. And on the WE Podcast. I have certain passions that if you really, if you went back through all 46 of my episodes, 47, whatever it is now, you'll see that I've got certain themes that I talk about all the time. And I talk about all those themes because they are deep passions for me. Why? Because by sharing it now, it makes sense for me of the misery I lived through. If I wasn't able to give a reason now, my whole life meant nothing. The seven years of darkness, the grief I went through after my past wife left, the grief I grieved when Zeus transcended, the pain I felt when my oldest son was grieving the death of his second mom, as he calls her, my mother, his grandmother. You know, we go through life's difficulties and... A lot of times we don't know why we have to go through it. We say, I used to say all the time, if God loved me, I wouldn't be in so much pain. That's where I came up with the F you God, literally. Prior to being in pain, I wasn't that. I didn't have vulgar adjectives prior to a spiritual essence. I didn't. I just couldn't believe, I didn't believe the religious perspective that I was taught my whole life. I didn't believe it. I said, if that's what God's all about, burning in hell and all that, I don't believe it. So I just said, you know, God, you leave me alone. I'll leave you alone and we're good. I didn't have a, I hate God concept prior to all my pain, but I had night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night of misery. And I said, there's no way there could be a God because a human shouldn't have to go through this. And. Speaker 2 (15:38) Many years later, I heard a voice said, God didn't create your pain. You did. God wasn't the source of your pain. Your environment was. And it took me many years to realize why did I have to go through that? Well, literally, over the past 10 years, 15 years, I've been able to support men especially. And I have to say, I've been sober for 30 plus years, 94. And I've never sponsored a female alcoholic, so I don't have any perspective of the female behavior patterns of the alcoholic. But I have plenty of perspective of the male alcoholic, plenty. And men have a challenging time with emotions anyways. One of my passions is to help men stop taking their rage out on the women around them. It's a passion of mine. Why? Because it's a way we heal humanity. If we can't help men feel the reason they are so rageful, humanity cannot heal. Period. If men keep taking their rage out on their female partners, humanity can't heal. Well, my goal here at the We Podcast is to give a voice. Guys, I get it. Have you started your 15 minutes of getting the anger out? I'm giving a voice. I was a rageful, rageful human. Now, I didn't take my rage out. Now, of course, I never had a wife at the time. I didn't have a female that was close to me all the time. My favorite girlfriend ever had. We were such great friends because we smoked marijuana together. And when I smoked marijuana, I wasn't rageful at anything. Speaker 2 (17:31) So it's one of my passions. It is to help heal that whole concept. Men taking their anger out on women. It's a passion of mine. Why? Because it's one of the ways we heal humanity. Why is Joe created the We Podcast? Simple. Heal humanity. That's my goal. Heal humanity. Another one of my passions is this whole concept of substance abuse. Why? Well, because I lived it, right? It was me. I drank and drugged every day until I was 31 years old. 15 to 31, count the days. I don't even know how many days there is in there. And I say it like that because... Speaker 2 (18:14) until February 13th, 1994, I never, ever, not once did I ever think about the thought of not drinking and drugging. It was never in my mind, ever. So I'm hoping here on the WE Podcast, somebody's listening right now, and I ask you the question, I'm gonna ask you right now, every listener out there, when was the last time you went 30 days? 90 days? Six months? When? And if you're going, um, well, then it's time. If you're the person on the other side that says, nope, Joe, sorry, I gave that up long time ago. No, Joe, I'm 20 years sober. Congratulations. I think that's fabulous. But how do we truly heal the rest of us? There has to be somebody. Putting a challenge back in people's face. Now, for the percentage on here that says, well, Joe, it's Friday night, Joe. I'm going out with my friends. I have to drink. No, you don't. No, you don't. It's a chicken shit answer. Joe, you don't get it. Football with no beer? Really, Joe? Speaker 2 (19:25) Yeah, how about no football? How would that be? Maybe do something else this fall than football. I don't own a television, so I get to say it. I don't own a television. My sisters. I've got three older sisters. I love them. Talk about a quad. My three sisters all have personalities like mine. They just come out in different ways. I've had it, and they like watching TV. Great. I love it for them. I don't. They would come over to my house. My house has kind of been the center place of my family here for the past decade or so. They'd come over to my house and they unmercifully would make fun of my TV. Now, my TV, I don't know how big it was, a 50-inch, 60-inch. To me, it's freaking huge because I never turn it on. They'd make fun of it. Postage stamp. I was like, you know what? My son Ryan down in his apartment has a 75-incher on the wall. go down there, go down with your nephew and watch TV. Well, when they came over this time, they're like, where's your TV? What TV? The postage stamp. I don't have a TV anymore. So if nothing else, I won't get ridiculed, made fun of jokingly. It's very pleasant fun because I don't own a TV. I don't. So since I don't own a TV, I get to ask people. When was the last time you went on a Saturday and didn't drink and watched the football game? It's coming up. And if it's been since you were 16, it's time. Why? Because if you're constantly putting alcohol in your body, you're abandoning a part of yourself. How do we heal if you're abandoning a part of yourself? You can't. You cannot do it. You can't. The passion of mine. You're going to hear it. You'll hear my themes. Speaker 2 (21:20) It's another one. Can I make anybody stop drinking? No. But can I ask the question? So maybe you start asking yourself the question. Yes. Another question I ask, and that's why I promote this website. It came across Divorce Post. Do I know these people? No. I was feeling bad because I didn't ask their permission. Have you ever literally tried to go to a random ass website and find out who owns the thing? It's literally almost impossible. And I said to myself, you know what? I looked, I tried. So I'm done trying. I said, I'm typically the guy, my personality is so big. I step on people different times in the past. I try not to. But in this particular case, I'm going to beg for forgiveness. If the people at this divorce post, which there's no way they're going to be mad at me for telling a million people about their website. Why? Because why do I have such a passion for it? that concept and if i find others i will because you know what it wasn't until literally i'm telling zeus's story in one of the most painful 80 minutes of my life i'm sharing it with the world i'm sharing with all of you because i consider all of you my friends and in that time i'm telling zeus's story And Zeus was purchased after my divorce. And I'm telling the story and I say it all the time. Like right now in this particular podcast, I've written down about six or seven sentences and then I just talk. I just share from the heart. Well, that particular episode. I needed to tell Zeus's story to put the context of how important Zeus was in my life. Well, as I'm telling the story, I remember and it just comes out of me. And after I say it, I remember thinking, I haven't thought, remembered that in forever. And what happened