Chasing The UnAmerican Dream With Carlos Hidalgo
Most people strive to live the American dream—with high-paying jobs, beautiful families, and big houses. Well, Carlos Hidalgo thinks otherwise. Living the American dream can seriously mess you up as a person. Whether it's your ego or your personality, those things will be your downfall. Carlos believes in The UnAmerican Dream, which is also the title of his newest book. Join Chad Burmeister as he sits down with life design coach and founder of Carlos and Susanne to chat about Carlos' life pursuing the opposite of what people are going for. From his story, get inspired to find your true purpose in life. Even if you strayed off the right path, Carlos believes that there is still hope because, at the end of the day, God created everyone for a purpose, and it is your job to find it.
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Chasing The UnAmerican Dream With Carlos Hidalgo
I've got a special friend with me. I met this person years ago when he was Principal and CEO of ANNUITAS. If you've heard of ANNUITAS, it's one of the big ones that are out there that did a lot around marketing, and put marketing and digital transformation on the map. He spent eleven-plus years there. Before that, he’s with BMC and McAfee. After that, he's been with CaliberMind and DemandGen where he's the Chief Strategy Officer.
He's here because he woke up and discovered, “Life has more to offer than the job that I'm in and in chasing my tail trying to be something that God doesn't necessarily want me to be.” He discovered some things. He wrote a book called The UnAmerican Dream, and it’s awesome because the American Dream is, “Go make a bunch of money, get the white picket fence, and end up with two cars and two kids.” The unAmerican dream is what we should be after and that's what we're going to dive into. Carlos, you're coming from Virginia and then headed to New York. You're living the unAmerican dream. Welcome to the show.
Chad, thanks. Our relationship goes back quite a way. I can honestly say I am living my best life and I'm extremely grateful for it.
The quote that you said that I thought was perfect for living a better story is, “Even the ugliest part of your story is not your story because it's still being written.” If you think of any book or movie that you've seen, you start going through the chapters and you go, “This is terrible.” Flip the next page and the hero comes out. That quote is amazing.
It's something that I've held on to because I have some dark, ugly parts of my story. God is still in the business of redemption and grace. Even if we look at what people claim as the heroes of the faith, David, could you imagine if his story was Bathsheba? Jacob, could you imagine if his story was he's a liar? Peter, could you imagine if his story was he denied Jesus? Those weren't their stories. They were part of their stories, but their stories were these were men who were devoted to their faith. Look at their lives and how God used them. Shame tells us, “The worst part of you is your story, but God tells us your story is still being written.”
Let's go back. I'd like to get our audience to understand who you are from a young age. A lot of times, if we look at the filters through a lens of a six-year-old and then we compare that to now, you're the same person you were when you were six, that you are when you're 50, that you are when you're 100. When you woke up in the morning and walked out the door, what would you say were you passionate about at some of the early things that you can remember?
First of all, I love this question because I speak about the fact that we all have our inner child. While I love Simon Sinek, starting with why is the wrong thing. We need to start with who. I keep a picture of my seven-year-old self in my office to remember, “This is who you are.” To answer your question, which I love, I was someone who loves people when I was six years old, and that has not changed. I loved to help people.
We lived in a small town. I lived in the Adirondack Mountains, but as a little kid when I was six, we lived in a small town in North Jersey. I would ride my bike up this little country road and I had a number of houses that I got to know. Most of these people had no children. They were retired so they were older. When you're sick, you don't sit there and go, “You're old.” For all I knew, they were in their 70s or 80s. I would help them. I would pull weeds and I would mow lawns, and then sometimes, I would stop and have milk and cookies with them because I love to be around and help people. You're exactly right, that's what I love to do today.
A lot of people disconnect that because they have their parents tell them to do one thing and their teachers tell them another thing. Whether they go to church or not, a pastor influences them or a friend. By the time they know it, they're living in a lane that's not their own lane. I look at it like each of us has a fingerprint or there are billions of snowflakes that have ever existed and none of them are alike. Figuring out what fingerprint you are or what snowflake you are, and then aligning that up to what you're doing in the world. The ultimate destination is getting to that place.
Life becomes so much fun when we get back to who we were created to be. You talked about the fingerprint. Most of us have indelible prints put on us as children where it's not only, “Go do this,” but, “This is who you are.” It's a lie that we embrace. I can pinpoint some of the ones that I embraced, especially when I was thirteen. That caused me to start to pursue a false purpose because I believed a false identity and a false narrative. That's why it's so firmly important for us to get back to who we were created to be, so then we can just go and discover why we are here. When we align that then with our gifts and talents that God gave us, the opportunities are endless and life becomes a blast.
I went to my folk’s house one time and my dad said, “We've got some old hockey sticks in the garage.” I didn't play professional hockey or anything. I did play lacrosse in college. These are two plastic sticks, one with the blue blade on it and one with the yellow one. The blue blade has a lot more wear and tear than the yellow one because that was mine. I remember playing it at skate city and the one word I would use to describe myself is competitive. Whenever I've been in situations where I can be competitive, it's so thrilling for me.
The desire to help people, I know that's inside of me. That's probably part two, but one is I've got to be competing and leaning into that and saying, “Competing in what?” That's the part where I continue to move 0.5 to 1 degree over. Now that we've opened the foundation called Living A Better Story, we get to compete, help people discover their talents, and connect with their Creator so that they can understand how they could live a frictionless life. Get beyond the ugly part of the story so they can tell the best part of their story.
That's when the world starts to open up.
Let's dig into one or a few of the challenges that you faced. I know you've got some background that you're not afraid to share and you've shared it. I went to see you speak one time in Colorado. I've seen you share it on videos and you share it in your book. What's something that's painful that you look back and you say, “That was okay. It ended up working out.”
I don't know that I'll ever say it's okay. I'm thankful that God is still in the business of redemption. It's definitely made me who I am now. I cofounded ANNUITAS because I was on the road about 250,000 miles a year. I had four small children and I wanted to be home. As ANNUITAS grew, so did my ego. I started to pursue a false purpose, make money, and get notoriety. My ego couldn't get enough. I wrote my first book in 2015 about marketing. When people would come up to me at a trade show and say, “Carlos, can you sign my book?” My ego soaked it up.
In the book, The UnAmerican Dream, I became quite unfulfilled and quite narcissistic in the process. When you become a narcissist, you also believe that you can do anything and rules don't apply to you. I cloaked it well. I kept people at a distance, but that led to some personal choices of me walking out of my marriage, neglecting my family, and pursuing relationships I had no business to pursue. It ruined me. I became a shell of myself. I told God, “Sit here on the park bench. I'll take care of this.”
At the end of 2015 in October, it all came crashing down around me and I was exposed. I had a dear friend who was also our corporate attorney at the time call me and said, “I'm not calling you as your attorney. I'm calling you as your friend. You have 1 or 2 choices. Either fall on your knees and ask God for forgiveness and your family, or go live the life that you've been living that you've been keeping a secret for so long.” It was a gut punch, but it was a loving gut punch and I'm so glad John made that call.
From there, I started the long, hard process of shedding all of the false identity that I had embraced on who I thought I was and who I thought people wanted me to be. I had no idea. My wife and I separated. My children at that point didn't want a whole lot to do with me. I lived in Colorado Springs at the time and I remember there were days I drove down I-25. I look at Pikes Peak and I would say, “God, I don't know how you are going to redeem this, but if you put Pikes Peak there, you can do something awesome here.”
Most days, that was the only prayer I had, and then I would pray, “Give me the strength to believe that.” It was hard and brutal. I decided to leave that agency in 2016. At that point, Susanne and I were still separated. I didn't do it as a way to try to get her back. I did it because I knew if I wasn't who God wanted me to be, who created me to be, and not my healthiest, I wasn't going to be good for anybody else. Thankfully, He’s restored our marriage. We talked about that in our second marriage, but two different people. I've got a great relationship with my children. Here I sit years later absolutely in awe at His grace.
I can relate to that. When you get working hard as a CEO, you're running on the treadmill as fast as you can, finances move up and down, there are risks, and you're juggling it all. We've been married for years. Especially through COVID, a lot of people have probably had a, “You think that way? I think over here and you think over there.” For us, we started to fade apart a little bit. It never got to the point where we said, “Let's move into a different house,” or anything like that. We never got separated. Certainly, there was a little bit of that struggle.
What I started to do was I downloaded an app called Habits and I said, “I'm going to pray in the morning.” I do it most of the time anyway but sometimes, we're not as accountable as we should be to that. It’s like your prayer when you saw the mountain. Pray in the morning, act throughout the day according to the message you got, and then pray at night and then read a Bible verse. I started religiously doing that every day.
What happened is the guy who introduced me to my wife years ago shows up in Colorado and I don't remember that he's ever been here. He says, “I'm here with my wife. We'd like to take you out to dinner.” I'm like, “Cool.” That was a God thing, the fact that he was here at that time. Everything came rushing back. I was like, “Wait a second.” I looked my whole life for the perfect person, and then Tracey came along. I was like, “This is a 97%. There's an A-plus in everyone's book.”
Some guys that were married were like, “You should settle if it's 80% or 85%. That's good enough.” I was like, “No. I found 97% to 100%.” That reminder of all of the time that it took me to get to there, and then my two beautiful children, it was like, “Thanks for the reminder.” Connecting and having that dialogue, “I'm not a bad person. Why am I even thinking of any kind of strife between us?” That level of, “If you built Pikes Peak, intervene here,” and He did.
He has restored that connection. When I hear people talk about intimacy with their spouse, they usually relate it back to sex and I'm like, “That intimacy is emotional, mental and spiritual.” Marriage is hard. It takes hard work. There are going to be friction points and we're going to think differently. I don't want my wife to think and agree with everything that I agree with because she can challenge me, get me to think, and get me to learn. I learned so much from her. If anybody who's reading this is like, “You don't understand,” I do understand, but it's going to take work. God brought you together for a reason. I can tell you, you can have a thriving, vibrant marriage. You’ve just got to be willing to work at it. Like you're doing, you decided, “What can I do?” I had a therapist who said to me, “You're 100% responsible for 50% of this equation. What can you do to make this relationship better?” That's what I focus on each and every day.
Even different perspectives on raising your children. I tended to want to be a friend and Tracey tended to want to be the mother who held accountability. We had those conversations and then we made it work. There were a couple of times where you got into a situation that’s like, “Chad, I need you to be the dad here.” I'm like, “We agreed I'm the friend.” You work through all that and you become one person when you've got the thread of God running in between you. You've had a hugely successful business life and you've made this pivot. You're remarried to the same person, which is fabulous. I sometimes think about that. That'd be fun to go, “Let's go to a beach and retie the vows.” I've heard of people doing that at 25 years and whatnot. What's next? You're doing some coaching for folks. How does that work? What happens in those sessions?
My whole hope is that I get to spend the rest of my career helping people live the life and design the life that they love to live every day. I find that most people don't. When I say to people, “How are you doing?” They go, “Okay.” Okay is not good. We only go around this once, so we ought to live our best life possible. What we do is we have people come to us from all walks of life. Many of them from the sales and marketing arena have an inkling that life can be better and they feel stuck, which you and I play in. I've been there for more than 25 years. I've been there and I felt stuck. Rather than staying stuck, what I say is, “Let's manage 2 to 3 measurable outcomes that we can get to that are going to make this worthwhile for you.”
One of the first things we do is we do an Enneagram assessment. I want to understand your motivations. What motivates you? Where do you come from? What does that look like when you're at your healthiest? What does that look like when you're at your most unhealthy? We start to work through those outcomes. My process is let's get back to who you were created to be so we can align to your true purpose, align that with your gifts and talents, and then start to identify opportunities for the world to open up and realize that anything's possible.
On the other side of that is, are you aligned with yourself and your partner on what you want from your life? Trust me, if you want to go with your partner and say, “We both want to work 50 hours a week, make as much money as possible, and live for Sunday.” As long as you're aligned to that, who am I to say you're doing it wrong? Most people don't want that, so we align and then we say, “Based on those alignments, what agreements are we going to put in place first with myself and then with my partner to say, ‘In order to realize what we aligned on, these are some of the things we're going to do.’”
My wife and I, when our youngest son was a junior, agreed that when he got settled in college, we were going to sell the house. That was an agreement we made. We didn't need the house anymore. My kids are all over the country and they were like, “Go ahead and sell the house.” We put those alignments into an agreement then we started to plan out. What does that look like? We agreed to sell the house then we started putting in place a plan on timing. We chose a realtor and we started to then execute that plan.
The fun part of all of it is we constantly have alignment discussions because as we age, we're now empty nesters, things change and we experience new things. We have talked about everything from moving to Costa Rica for six months out of the year to when COVID opens up, we’d go to Europe and work from there. Everything is open to discussion. 98% of it doesn't stick but the 2% that does leads to more. That's what we do with coaching. We work with individuals and couples.
There's a book I read and I remember it's by Gay Hendricks. It shows a picture of a fishbowl and another fishbowl and the fish is jumping from one to the other. The book talks about how we, as humans, generally have this thermostat level of the certain level of happiness that we're used to and believe we deserve. Let's say in our house, the temperature is set at 72 degrees with the air. It's probably the same in the heat in winter and summer. If it gets a little too much, it kicks in and it drops back down to 72. I've seen a lot of people self-sabotage themselves in life. When things start getting amazing, the house temperature kicks on. All of a sudden, it's like, “No. You're destined for that certain level.” Have you been able to help people figure that viscosity line out of how you pull that away when you're putting in these goals and alignment between the two significant others?
What I find is that often the root cause of that is the lies that we've chosen to believe about ourselves. That voice of shame that whispers, “You don't deserve this. You're so in over your head.” The reality is that happiness is a choice. My wife does a lot of nonprofit work in Uganda, and I've spent time in villages where there's no running water and mud hut and thatched roofs. I have experienced joy and happiness like I've never seen in Western culture in my entire life. These are women who don't even know if they're going to eat tomorrow. Our happiness is a choice.
When I hear somebody say, “If I get this, then I'll be happy,” no, you won't because I lived that, “If I had the next big client, I'd be happy. If we crested X million in revenue, I'd be happy.” I wasn't. I was miserable. We start to unpack what are the lies we've believed and what is preventing us from choosing happiness? That doesn't mean you're going to become a multimillionaire. It doesn't mean you're going to become the CEO of your company. Those things are not directly proportional to happiness. What's interesting is when I talk to people about success, not one person ever talks to me about the monetary. I say, “How do you define that success? What would happiness look like?” Nobody says, “If I just had $1 million, I'd be successful.” They never say that. They talk about relationships, intimacy, community and connection. I'm sure you guys are seeing that with what you're doing.
I went skiing. It was New Year's or sometime around there. We were in a steamboat and we went to this local restaurant bar where they're playing live music. We were early, so we're standing at the bar having a glass of wine or something. The owner was standing there and we got to know her. She's like, “I won the lottery in 1985,” or something like that. She said, “It was the best thing that happened to me and the worst thing that happened. I lost my husband and all my friends came to me asking me for money. The biggest thing I learned to say is no.”
We got to talk for 10 or 15 minutes and I said, “I'll bet you, you've learned how to just be. I can see it right now. We're communicating in a way that's different than most people. You're here, in this moment.” She's like, “How do you know?” Now, there are more people coming in. Let's say there are 100 people in the bar. I looked around and there's me who knows that secret to being. She knows it. Now, this other friend of ours was there and I'm like, “Now he knows it.” It's like COVID. We need to spread the virus that you need to understand that the gift is this second. Enjoy it, take a breath and be like, “This is awesome.”
We introduce and keep noise in our lives through our phones, devices, social media and music. We are so uncomfortable as a society of being by ourselves and being in the quiet of ourselves. To me, that's the signal of their stuff I don't want to deal with. A lot of us choose work, “I'll work 50 to 60 hours a week so I don't have to deal with a broken relationship, a fracture somewhere, with my children or my wife or my husband or my partner.” It's this constant, “I'm just going to run from it.” It comes out sideways somewhere, usually in destructive behavior. Addiction comes in all forms. It can be to our phones, television, apps or work. Addiction is always used to cover up some pain or discomfort that you don't want to deal with.
It took me a four-day workshop. There were 150 life coaches, so they were learning how to be life coaches. The instructor’s name is Rich Litvin and he would say, “Stand up. How do you want to be coached by me?” In his London accent. It was the same thing every time, “Tell me about when you were six. Tell me about your teenage years.” Usually, somewhere between there is when they get the baggage, but that's also where the gift was of what they love to do.
There are people who are standing up answering the questions and all of a sudden, they break down and gush. This one person was like, “That's why I'm the chief administrative officer at AT&T because I loved to do that as a kid.” Her whole purpose of being there was, “I have a big presentation. I'm going for this job. There are 50 other people that are interviewing for it.” She’s proper. That moment of ten-minute conversation was the best chiropractic of the mind you could ever get. She was like, “I've arrived. Now I'm back in my body. I understand what my purpose is.”
I wish I could have gone through a four-day workshop. It took me a number of years to get good therapy and some brain works. Neurotherapy is a modality, which was helpful. A lot of us need that moment. Having that mindset of, “I can find my way back.” On our podcast, we interviewed a friend, Joey Dumont, and he talked about coming home. When he talked about coming home, it was coming back to himself, to who he was as a kid.
I'm at a point where I say this is a journey because I still have that voice of shame that will tell me, “You're not going to be any good at this. This isn't who you are.” I still have those clients who talk about, “You just want to make a ton of money.” Those are things that I have to get back and say, “Is this who I was created to be?” Not that money is bad and not that success is bad. I'm not saying that at all. I feel grateful for my career in many ways, but does it align with who I am, who I'm created to be, who God created me to be, who God put into that six-year-old that He created? If I'm doing things in a way that doesn’t align with that, I'm doing them wrong.
I'm going to add another question. This one's fun. Imagine you walk outside into a green field and there's this big huge bird that you can get on the back of and it flies you twenty years into the future. You knock on the door and meet your future self. You look around in the room, take inventory of what's there, shake your hand, and take it all in for a minute. Right now, you can picture that. That future self gives you one piece of advice for now. You're able to get back on the bird and come back to now. A lot of times, people go back and say, “What would you tell your twenty-year-old self?” We can't do that, but I can go into the future, see where I'm living and go, “I like that,” or I don't. I can tell myself the tricks on, “Here's what you need to do to get there.” If you run that quick mental exercise, what did you take inventory of and what did you tell yourself that you can bring back to right now to get you there in twenty years?
I took inventory of the simplicity of my life. I didn't have a lot of stuff because I want experience and I don't want stuff. What I mean by that is, the simplicity and the authenticity of my relationships and my marriage. I took note of a lot of laughter and joy. What I told myself in that setting was, “Forgive quickly because holding on to it does no good.”
Mine was I ended up someplace in the Mediterranean. I had a full beard and I lost about twenty pounds. I was like, “Where's Tracey?” She wasn't in the room looking down on this thing and that bothered the crud out of me. I was like, “Is she shopping in the Square? Where is she?” It was beneficial to go through that mental exercise because your unconscious is running games in the background that you need to tap into. Those kinds of mental exercises are so fun. I play that one frequently and think about, “Twenty years out, what do I tell myself today to do at this moment?” Last question and you've already answered this but I'd like to connect the dots. What role does faith play in your journey? Were you raised with faith? Did you start with it and you strayed? Did it come later in life? How did faith enter your life?
The God I was raised with is not the God that I worship today. I was raised in a staunch, evangelical fundamental, and it's interesting they call it fundamental because there's nothing fun about it. It’s a legalistic environment where my picture of God as a kid, even into my teens and early twenties, was this cranky old man who was waiting for you to screw up so he could bring down the hammer. Through my journey, faith has played a huge role. I did walk away from it for a long time. I’m definitely not a religious guy but I'm a spiritual person. I'm one who holds fast to his faith in God and in Jesus.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son is similar, except that I tell my Earthly father to go pound sand, I wished he was dead. I want to get out of my life and it became hell on Earth for me. My view of God has changed and my relationship with God has changed. It's so much deeper. I feel like He's my dad. When I'm in trouble, I can go to Him. When I'm excited, He's excited with me. When He needs to pull me aside and have a stern talking, we do that too. It has been something that I've returned to, but it looks vastly different for me.
The biggest thing that I hold fast to is I don't think God looks at us and says, “How could you do these things?” God looks and says, “Who wounded you in the past to make you believe this was your only choice?” He gently restores us in a way that only a preeminent loving, perfect, and just God can. That is the guy that I relish. I remember in my darkest days, I used to think, “The Prodigal Son must have felt like an idiot.” After he did everything he did, squandered every last penny, and his dad threw him a party. He had to be sitting there going, “I can't wait to get out of here.” I don't believe that anymore. I think he wept.
I think he said, “I'm happy he's home.”
The prodigal himself wept. He’s overwhelmed with grace from his dad, and that's the God that I follow.
I'm going to tell you something here and I haven't shared this on the show. I was in Washington, DC and the fake news media blasted me, called me names, hammered me, and put me in a bucket of a bad person. You know me. My friends and my family know me. I came home from my trip there after this fake post. It's a 90-second hit piece and I was like, “What the heck?” I went to my parents’ house for eight days in the basement and every day, they came down with a Bible verse and breakfast, the best food you can imagine. It was like, “We're here. We’ve got you. God's got you.” At age 48, what chance do you have to go stay with your parents in the basement for a week?
This connected me back to my faith in humanity and my faith in God. When you said forgive fast, the one thing that came to mind during that event was, “Forgive them for they know not what they do because all they see is a 90-second clip.” The news media played some things. That forgiveness there might take a little longer. People who see the news clip are like, “That's not cool.” Yeah, because it's not real. It's made up.
The next month, my son got in a grease fire where he wrestled a pan and it caused 2nd and 3rd degree burns on his face and hands. All you can do is faith. I posted on Linked, “I'm at the hospital. It's 11:00 at night. Please pray for my son.” There were tens of thousands of people praying. He went from bad to worse, but then he went from worse to healed. My prayer was, “God, I've never asked for a miracle. I've asked for a lot of things but never a miracle. If you could give me a miracle, I want to use my phone-a-friend right now and this is it.” Seven days later, they take the gauze off and you're like, “You're healed.” It was like, “Wow.” There's no other way to describe it.
Thankfully, we have a God who does more than just phone-a-friend. My wife and I talk about it all the time. According to many therapists, we are a statistical anomaly with what we've been through and what we've come through. To anybody who's out there saying, “You don't understand my story,” I would say you don't understand the depths of my story. God can redeem anything. The key is if we're going to be open to it.
That prayer for your son, you were open to, “I don't know how you're going to do it but I know you can.” Whether God decided to heal him fully or leave him with scars and those burns, he would have worked a miracle somewhere else because all of us, in his redemption, are walking miracles. When we can embrace that, it changes how we view life and changes the things that we do, how we do it, how we react and more importantly, how we see people.
I'm excited because everything you've been talking about, elves are busy building 77Pray.com. The app is going to be, “First thing in the morning, did you pray? Did you read a Bible verse that gets served up? Did you pray at night?” The three basic things that you do. It doesn't take more than five minutes. You don't need to get on a treadmill and go running. You just have to be open to getting the plan, connecting, hitting up the telephone line, and being able to listen. It's amazing what happens when you start saying, “I'll move over into the shotgun. You drive the car. I'm going to get off the park bench. You go ahead and lead and I'll follow where it takes you.” It's taken you to Virginia in a cool little house on wheels. I bet you're going to meet a lot of interesting people there and continue to change the world.
Thanks, Chad. We're loving life. Thank you for the opportunity to be on the show.
Carlos, it’s great to have you as always. Carlos Hidalgo, author of The UnAmerican Dream and a great friend. If you haven't read his story, check it out. He also has a podcast. Where can they find your podcast, Carlos?
The Life Design Podcast. We’re on everything from Apple to Amazon, iHeartRadio and Spotify. You can also check us out on Facebook. We have a Life Design page. If you want to be part of our close community which we're trying to build, it is The Life Design Community. We would love to see you there.
Carlos Hidalgo, I appreciate you and I wish you a wonderful year.
Thanks. You, too. Good seeing you.
Good to see you.
Important Links:
Joey Dumont - past episode on The Life Design Podcast
Apple - The Life Design Podcast
Amazon - The Life Design Podcast
iHeartRadio - The Life Design Podcast
Spotify - The Life Design Podcast
Life Design - Facebook page
The Life Design Community - Facebook community
About Carlos Hidalgo
Personal and professional coach. Helping people (and their teams) establish healthy boundaries so they can achieve balance and thrive in their relationships and their work
Executive Guidance & Advisory: Bringing real-life experience and mentorship to executives who strive to get the most from themselves and their teams
Organizational Change Management: Transforming organizations to realize their growth potential, their brand promise and maximize sales by delivering customer experience to their clients
Brand development: Understanding your brand mission and promise
Demand Generation Strategy: Develop and execute demand generation programs that align to customers and buyers