What To Do When Your Family Doesn't Support Your Vision

0:08

To Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman. [Your family,] no matter what you are trying to do to convince them, just says you are not doing anything worthwhile. Maybe they don't explicitly say it to your face, but you can sense it. You can tell it in their voice. Or maybe you can tell that they would have rather you went to college, or they would have rather you chose a different career path. Or they would have rather you took a different position in a different place. I want to be empathetic in this episode. I want to have a degree of empathy for all of you, because at the end of the day, I've been in this situation before.

But I also have to be 100% honest, and sometimes that honesty has to come across with a sense of ruthlessness, with the sense of the opposite of empathy.

1:35

No empathy. Look, I get it. It sucks. Your family doesn't believe in you. You don't have things going on. You're like, man, this is rough. This is horrible. It really is. It really is. I'm not here telling you to dismiss your emotions, but I am here to tell you that at the end of the day, you're the person who is living your life. No matter what situation you are in currently, you're in that situation because of you. So whenever your family is telling you that you are a complete failure, you need to examine your life and say, hey, am I in a situation that could be better?

Am I not doing the things that I know I should be doing? You need to be aware of where you are at all times and whether or not you are performing optimally.

2:19

But if you are pursuing something that you are 100% certain about, that you absolutely know that you are going to succeed, that's the kind of energy, that's the kind of mentality that you really have to have pursuing anything in life. This aggressive, psychotic idea that I will become successful. This is going to work. Then you take that feeling, you take that emotion, you harness it, and then you run after it, and you attack that goal. There isn't any of this, you're dipping your toes in the water. It's like you're jumping right in. That's the mentality that it takes. Whenever you share that mentality with your family, you're going to get backlash.

This isn't just about family, but it could be about friends. But I do want to keep the conversation specific towards family because I would tell you to handle friends a lot differently.

3:09

Friends you can cut off, friends you can completely remove from your life. But family, there's something about it in our human nature that makes it a little bit more difficult to handle. It makes it a little bit more difficult to kind of deal with because they're blood or they're people that you've shared decades of life experience with. Your parents raised you from infancy. From the moment you were born, you have this connection with your mom. You have this connection with your father. You have this connection with your grandparents or with your aunts and uncles and cousins. It's just this inherent human nature and this human connection that is inexplicable.

So it is very thin ice whenever you're having this conversation, whenever you're like, look, mom, dad, this is what I've got going on. I really want to do this. They're like, why would you do that? There's no money to be made here. It just, it's depressing. It's earth-shattering, it crushes your dreams, it crushes your vision, it crushes the motivation that you had at that moment. It really creates the sense of, wow, I have to do this knowing that my family doesn't believe in me or they don't believe in what I have going on.

4:24

Although they do believe in you, you're going to automatically take it, in the heat of the moment, and assume that they don't believe in you, when in actuality, they might not believe in what you are pursuing. Yes, your family [may be] really rough. There are families like that. I can think of people that I've met and people that I know whose families would just completely be so biased, so cold to external opinions and so set in their stubborn ways that no matter what you say or what you do, [you] can never convince them to think otherwise. The people who you could literally come to and say, mom, I made a million dollars, and she'd be like, I still wish you went to college. Some situations and some families are like that.

5:07

It's unfortunate. But that's why you have to be certain in your own vision and certain in what you are doing. Have this level of belief, have this degree of understanding that, hey, it doesn't matter if my parents don't support me. Yeah, sure, it sucks. It's horrible. But I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to do it because I want to do it. I'm going to do it not necessarily out of spite. I'm not here to say to completely walk away from that feeling of spite and almost a sense of, like, anger, because I think that there can be strength in that emotion. But I'm also not here to tell you to lean into it and be like, oh, I'm dismissing this emotion and all this other stuff.

Like, there isn't really a healthy ground here. That's the ironic thing. I truthfully do not believe that there is any way to healthily address the situation.

5:56

You have the one area that's leaning into this anger and being motivated by spite, and you have the other emotion that's leaning into what they want and not even doing it. Or there's this third, this so-called middle ground where you're like, it's okay, mom. It's okay, dad. You guys can completely shit on my dreams and it's okay. I'm still going to pursue it. Right? Is that really going to work? Is that really going to be an emotion that's going through your head? You're either going to say, I'm going to give in to you, or I'm going to do the opposite because I have faith in myself.

There really isn't room for that middle ground in that conversation. I remember when I was getting going and I literally was one SAT test away from a full-ride scholarship to Florida State and to University of Central Florida, and Florida State really doesn't have a super high acceptance rate. I think it was like 33 percent whereas a lot of the colleges other people in my school were going to had like a 70 or 80 percent. Like, I got accepted to Florida State. I could have gotten a full-ride scholarship through the Bright Futures program.

6:57

I was an excellent student. I had all straight A's pretty much my entire academic career, minus a B on very, very rare occasions and a C once in my life. It was the end of the world [when I] had to go get tutoring. I'm not saying this to brag, but I'm saying this to say, hey, look, I turned down going to college and getting a degree to say, hey, I'm jumping straight into business. Now, what worked for me might not work for you. What worked for me might work for you. For you to find out or not find out. But I remember going to my guidance counselor and I said, hey, I'm not going to college, and he looked at me. He's kind of like, what, what do you mean? You're not going to college. I'm like, I'm not going. I'm pursuing business.

7:41

I didn't necessarily see disappointment in his face. I just saw, like, this blink of expression.

8:50

That is when you can be motivated by this in a healthy way, saying, look, I'm going to prove it to you anyway and say that your faith was not misplaced. Right? Again, going back to, they didn't have a lack of faith in you. They had a lack of faith in what you were doing. You make up for that lack of faith by having your faith in what you are pursuing and in your own vision. You can't always get that same emotion across to the person who is sitting across from you.

9:13

You can't always have that same vision. Now, great leaders and organizations can get this vision adopted by an entire organization. But this isn't business, this is life, this is family, this is relationships, this is blood, this is a lot deeper than a business organization and growing a business and offering solutions and whatnot. So I knew that I needed to go all in and I needed to make this work. I didn't know when it was going to work. I had the idea and the assumption that it would work immediately, within the first 12 months of me graduating. Is that how it worked out? No. Did my vision ever change?

Absolutely not. I still knew that I was going to do it. That I was going to continue on this path no matter the sacrifice, no matter what.

10:00

That was it. That was it. It wasn't me going to give up after a couple of years and say, I'm going to college, and me sacrificing that scholarship. Now not only did my mom sacrifice things to give me that time as a single mom until the point that she remarried, but now I had something on the table that I was sacrificing. I was sacrificing my academic career and performance up until that point and I was walking away from that degree. That was how deep I had to believe in what I was doing. I really want you to understand that you have to have that same level of belief and commitment to what you are pursuing as well.

Now, that doesn't mean that your belief can never be misplaced and maybe you change visions, you pivot a little bit, you go from one business to another business. But at the end, that idea of financial freedom or independence, that idea of being wealthy, that idea of traveling private, that idea of owning the Rolex, that idea of speaking on stages and helping people from all around the world, that never changes. But the vehicle in order to pursue and achieve that, that can very well change throughout your life and throughout your own progressive journey.

11:09

As you're growing, you're going to be changing. As you change, you need to keep up with your current idea and what you really know you should be doing. So if you're in a place right now to where your family is saying, hey, I think that this is the wrong decision, the best thing you can do is to keep that relationship alive in a modest way. You can't expect [that], anytime you talk to them about your business, they're going to be like, that's a great job, Johnny, because they don't understand it. They don't understand what's going on in your head. They don't understand your vision. Chances are that they are the ones who pursued college, or maybe they're the ones who worked in a job for 20 or 30 or 40 years, or maybe you're coming from an immigrant family and the only way for you to become successful in your parents' eyes at this current moment in time is by pursuing college, by pursuing that higher education.

12:07

What many people don't understand and what many parents fail to realize is that you can pursue a higher degree of education by being in the real world than by ever going to college. You could put me in a room with anybody who went to college for public relations or for marketing or for branding and chances are I could probably rip every single one of them apart because I have real world experience. I've closed clients. I've seen results. I've gotten results. It's not textbook. It's real. It's real world experience. So the best thing that you can do is to keep your relationship with your family in a very cordial way of saying, hey, I respect that you don't respect me and don't understand it.

I still want you to be my father. I want you to be my mom. I want this relationship to really not change. Now understand that your relationship will change, because now the things that you were previously discussing in your college aspirations are probably not going to be received in the same manner. They're not. That has to be okay with you deep down. It probably won't be. But on the surface, and what you are going and doing, you have to be okay with it. You have to try to convince yourself that it's okay and that you're still focused on your own journey, because if you really go and dive deep into that emotion and say, I know they don't believe me,

13:24

You're going to be so unmotivated every single day. I'm not telling you to dismiss your emotions or to mask yourself, to wear this little mask, but there is no denying that you were built for something different. That what you were built for, you are growing and you are chasing and you are really getting after. So at the dinner table, instead of bringing up your business, bring up something else in conversation, although it's extremely difficult, to have that small talk and talk about the weather and talk about what's going on and how the friends are and how the family is and everything that's going on. I would really recommend that you do that, because if not you're going to be that outsider, and now it's going to come across as braggadocious and it's going to create this animosity and this drama.

Now once you get to a point of success and to where you're doing great things, you're going to notice that when you do bring up your successes in one-on-one conversations, let's say with a parent or a grandparent or a cousin or something like that, it can become difficult to actually have that talk and to say, hey, I've been doing X, Y, and Z. You're just going to come across, and you're going to think to yourself, wow, maybe I have done a lot. Maybe I have done a lot, and you're not going to say this, but these are the thoughts that you're thinking, you're going to say, wow, now, I know I'm not bragging. But it sounds like I'm bragging because I'm just listing off my accomplishments.

14:49

You're going to say, wow, I'm not trying to do this, but the facts speak for themselves. Then at that point, you're going to realize that what you have been telling your family has come to fruition, that although you might not be flying private yet or you might not be wearing that Rolex or speaking on stages in front of, in a stadium setting, you've still accomplished a lot of what you were originally pursuing. A lot of what you made those sacrifices for has now become your reality. That's a great feeling because that increases your faith.

16:13

Look, as much as you want their situation to change because you love them, you also have to realize that you cannot get them to change. The best thing you can do is to be a positive influence from a distance, from a healthy, medium distance.

17:48

But that's the thing. Their vision and what they are comfortable with is nothing comparable to your own vision and to what you are comfortable with. You have to be okay with sharing a different vision as difficult as it might be. But that's the brilliant thing about this life. Imagine if you had to share that vision. See, you are the person who is breaking those generational curses and doing something different. You are thinking differently. Therefore, by thinking differently, you will get different results. You are not going to be the same as your family. Therefore, you will be growing. Whereas everybody else will be staying stagnant. You are going to be that oddball who is evolving and becoming better each and every freaking day and your family won't understand you.

They never will understand you. But what I can say is by going up to your family and saying, hey, I'm buying something as simple as, I'm buying the gas. Hey, can you pick me up from the airport and [I] buy lunch? Hey, can you go and do this? You ask them to do something small for you. From there, you do something big for them. Being able to come home and say, hey, I got the bills. Don't worry about it. Hey, I got this, or hand your family a check or hand your family a hundred bucks or be that uncle who comes back on Christmas or, you know, on holidays or birthdays and brings a cool gift and shows up at reunions and says, hey, I can treat you guys out.

I'm not saying to be this materialistic family member that only shows up on the holidays and when there is an exchange of goods, don't be like that. But I'm just saying that throughout your life and as you're building up your relationship, just like you would be building your relationship if you would have pursued what your family thought was ideal for you.

19:30

You're still going to be building that relationship. But now you have the benefit of having wealth or having fulfillment or having your desires met. There's nothing wrong with chasing desires that are healthy that do not trample on other people around you. Now, you are very simply doing something that you are excited about, doing something that you really enjoy. When I think about my business, I'm like, wow, like this is cool. That motivation isn't consistent. It's not 24/7. There are moments where it disappears. But I do know that when I come home and I visit family, I'm like, I did a lot of what I'm telling you to do.

Then you'll come and reconnect with somebody from your past, maybe a friend that you haven't talked to, that you dropped contact with, or somebody that was an acquaintance or knew you back in the day.

20:15

They're going to be like, man, every single thing that you told me you were going to do, you did. Even if they didn't believe in you, they can't deny the facts that you said, I was going to do it, and then you pursued it and you did it and you accomplished it. Then as time goes on and as, you know, things really progress, you're going to continue developing this belief and this idea that what you did was worth it, that that sacrifice was worth it. Then there might come a point where your mom or your family member comes to terms with what you have done.

[They] say, you know what, I might not have believed in him back then, but I'm glad he believed in himself, and my sacrifices were worth it, because now he's at this point.

20:58

Now he is at this point.