Expect To Be Something More! with Christine Agro

 

“Develop that inner GPS that you have. Listen to the messages that come. Don’t be afraid to say, “yes” to the things that call you because those are the things that are guiding you to something more.” -Christine Agro

 

Listen to the podcast here:

Highlights:

01:08 Turning On The Internal GPS
09:31 3 Core Life Lessons; 2 Basic Emotional Needs
15:02 How To Manage Your Expectations
20:46 The Awakened Method- Your Daily Practice Of Consciousness
28:38 Out of Norm Is Good!
34:44 Teach Your Children Awareness
40:02 Mindfulness vs Mindset

 

Resources:

Book

• Expectation Therapy: Mastering Your Expectations by Art Costello 
• Awaken and Grow: A Practical Guide For Your Spiritual Journey by Christine Agro 

App

• The Awaken and Grow Flow App by Christine Agro

 

 

Yearning for love and validation? Tune in as @myexpectation and @christineagro teaches how to D-I-Y! #expectations #epiphanies #selfvalidation #livinglife #consciousawareness #perceptionvsperspective #mindfulnessmindset Click To Tweet

 

Quotes:

“You cannot apply conscious awareness to unconscious space. So once you step into consciousness, you can’t apply what you know now to what was.” -Christine Agro  

“Typically, we give parts of ourselves away to [validate ourselves]. If we learn to validate ourselves, we can create a sense of freedom in our space.” -Christine Agro

“Live every day the way it’s supposed to be lived.” -Art Costello

“When we collect ourselves up, it brings us together and makes us complete and whole.” -Christine Agro

“Consciousness is this space where we recognize there’s so much more to our life and our world than we ever even imagined.” -Christine Agro

“Develop that inner GPS that you have. Listen to the messages that come. Don’t be afraid to say, “yes” to the things that call you because those are the things that are guiding you to something more.” -Christine Agro

Meet Christine:

Christine is a Conscious Living and Meditation, Mindfulness, and Mindset Expert. She is the #1 International Best Selling Author of the book, Awaken and Grow.  Christine also serves as a TEDx speaker and guest to various shows and has been featured and quoted in a variety of publications for her unique insights and wisdom. For almost 20 years, Christine has been helping people understand their own life journey. She believes that we are all here to learn, heal, and grow as a collective.

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Transcription:

Art Costello: Welcome to the Shower Epiphanies Podcast, today, Christine Agro is on the show. Christine is a conscious living, meditation, mindfulness and mindset expert. She’s the #1 International Best Selling Author of Awaken and Grow, a practical guide for your spiritual journey. Christine contributes meditation content to the Simple Habit App, and she is also a TEDx speaker. She’s been seen on Good Morning Connecticut, Good Day Fox, Late Night with Seth Meyers, featured in The New York Times and quoted in a variety of publications including AskMen, VICE, Elite Daily, Ladders and HuffPost .

Welcome to the show, Christine. It is a pleasure to have you.

Christine Agro: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Art Costello: Can you tell us your story, how it all started?

Christine Agro: Alright. Oh, my goodness. I have several sections of my story, briefly who I was when I was very young with this connection to a deeper awareness of something more. One of the most powerful moments was when I was 12 and I realized that if I didn’t love myself, no one else was gonna love me. So I devised a tool, this was back in the 70’s, early 70’s I guess. I sat on my bedroom floor, I looked in my mirror and I told myself that I love myself over and over again until I was comfortable with it. This was at 12 years old, pre-Dr. Phil, pre-Oprah, no even inkling of self-help in my family. And I look at that and I just think, I mean, it’s just not an indicator for me of this internal GPS that has always guided me in terms of being conscious and aware of something more than our physical existence. We can skip over a whole lot of time, I was living in Denver, I was 34 I think, and I was walking to work one day, and it was funny, I don’t know if it was Robert Guillaume who instigated it, but he was walking towards me. He was on soap and he was a Broadway actor, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but he was walking, but for anybody who’s not way younger than I am. Anyway, he was really young. This is who this man is. So he was toward me and I was going to work, and I had that moment where we caught each other’s eye and he knew that I recognized him. I knew that he knew that I recognized him. My mind was going like, should I acknowledge him? Is this a private moment for him? This is running through my head. And as I got up to him, and we were passing, I just said, good morning sir. And he said, good morning, and we passed. And I swear it was a few steps after that I had this epiphany which was, it was really an awakening. It was how did I get here? How did I get to this place in my life where I’m living in Denver, I’m doing the work that I’m doing. What led me to this? And it felt like every step had been unconscious. It all worked, I had a great life. It wasn’t like it was a bad life, but it was just an interesting moment of really just the layers peeling off and having this awareness of, Oh, I’ve been unconscious and now I’m not. And then everything just rolled from there. I started exploring different things that were important to me and developing my clairvoyance, and I did a naturopathic training program and just really figuring out what was relevant and important for me, and it led me to where I am today.

Art Costello: Wow. It’s really interesting. And really, I always get interested when people’s awakening, when they awaken, for me, it was at nine. I was abandoned and went to a mountain top and just had a conversation with God about what was going to become of me. And after making that trip, I heard a voice that said, your job is just to be and just do. And it really set the tone for the rest of my life because I had to figure out how I needed to get out of the situation I was in and all that. So I’m always interested in people’s awakening and I always tell people, people ask me sometimes, well, how old do you have to be to be awakened? And there is no age.

Christine Agro: No.

Art Costello: Do you think it’s really based on circumstance that there’s just something that triggers it?

Christine Agro: Well, yeah, I mean, my information that I’ve gathered over the years, it’s really about our journey. And our journey starts, for most people, I think there’s a lot of kids that are coming in conscious and they’re retaining it. But around our age, older, a little bit younger, we come in unconscious and we learn in this unconscious space through adversity. There has to be some challenge, there has to be some drama, there has to be some angst that pushes us to seek something more to go beyond whatever we see right in front of us. And once we reach a certain point, we pop through the top into this level of conscious awareness where we recognize that there’s a whole different way. And I try to explain to people that you cannot apply conscious awareness to unconscious space. So once you step into consciousness, you can’t apply what you know now to what was, and I find that as a culture, we’re in that right now. We’ve popped through the top with awareness on a lot of different things in the last four or five years, but we’re trying to apply what we know today to what happened 10 or 12 years ago for people. And you really can’t do that, there are two completely different spaces, and I just find that really interesting.

“You cannot apply conscious awareness to unconscious space. So once you step into consciousness, you can't apply what you know now to what was.” -Christine Agro Click To Tweet

Art Costello: Yeah, that’s an interesting thought because one of the things that I’ve learned through all the trials and tribulations of my 72 years on earth is to live in the here and now, to live in the moment because nothing matters that happened to you before. And when you look ahead, you’re taking up space when you don’t have any control over that. The only thing that you really can control in your life is this moment now. And what I learned as a nine year old was to live in that moment and make the most of it, and be the best that you could be because that’s the voice told me, it’s my job just to be the best version of myself.

Christine Agro: That’s so powerful.

Art Costello: And it really has been throughout my life because I’ve always done everything I’ve wanted. I mean, I’ve been successful, but the adversities have made me grow, and I put them into three major adversities in my life. First, nine when my parents moved to this little farm in Upstate New York from New Jersey, I had the beautiful life as a little boy, and then all of a sudden it was thrown into total chaos and turmoil, and I felt so abandoned and lonely at this farm that they bought, and that neither of them really spent much time at and just left their kids there. And then I figured out that I would go into the Marine Corps at 18 when I graduated from high school and found myself in Vietnam, which was a challenge, so that’s my second challenge. And then my third challenge is when my wife passed away, my wife of 38 years passed away in 2006 of ovarian cancer. And those challenges are what has brought my best awareness mindset. Those challenges have just made me grow really in the past 11, 12 years since she’s been gone. I have probably done more growth between that time period than I did as a nine year old till I was 62 when she passed.

Christine Agro: Yeah. In a lot of ways. I think that’s common for humans. The older we get, we just have greater clarity, and I think we have a broader perspective that we can look at life and circumstances in different ways. But I mentioned kids, I have a 15 year old, and of course, he’s been raised conscious because that’s who I am. He’s fascinating to me because we talk about, I believe that there’s three core life lessons that we work on unconsciously. One is learning to validate ourselves when we’re standing in our truth and when we’re standing in our power. So ever since he’s been little, we’ve talked about this, when things come up I’ll be like, so what do you think you’re working on here? And then we have these conversations and he’s at the point now where he looks at his friends and he’ll be like, Oh, they’re working on self validation. He’s so clear about what’s going on that it’s just really great. And again, going back to this notion that when we step into this awareness, really the adversity pieces stop because we can just learn by experiencing, we can learn by watching what’s going on, we can have this awareness in our own space of, again, what we’re working on, so we don’t need that pressure cooker to get us to make something different, to do something different.

Art Costello: Yeah, I agree. I agree. You mentioned two really important things that I talk about. I think that man has two basic needs. One is validation, and then the other is love. Other than the sustenance, we need sustenance, water, food and all that. But emotionally, the two things that men need the most are validation and love.

Christine Agro: Yeah. So for me, I think it’s important that we validate ourselves because this is how I see it. If we need validation from somebody else at any exchange needs, there needs to be an exchange of energy. So if I need validation from you, I actually have to give you something in order to receive that validation. So typically, we give parts of ourselves away to do that. So if we learn to validate ourselves, we actually create a sense of freedom in our space. I do think that we need recognition, it’s nice to be acknowledged or recognized, but if we need that validation and we don’t know how to do it ourselves, we typically are giving away something in order to know that we’re okay. So I don’t disagree with you, I just think there’s another step. There’s another step in the process of where the validation comes from.

”“Typically, Click To Tweet. If we learn to validate ourselves, we can create a sense of freedom in our space.” -Christine Agro” username=””]

Art Costello: Well, let me explain how I think and then maybe that will give you, because we actually agree.

Christine Agro: Okay, great.

Art Costello: Because my area of expertise and research has been in expectations and that’s why I wrote the book Expectation Therapy. What I learned as a nine year old is that I do not need to rely on other people.

Christine Agro: Yes.

Art Costello: That everything I need is within myself if I apply it and use it. And it all starts with how you expect and how you manage your expectations because life never goes the way you want it to. There’s always challenges and adversities that you have to get through. But if you have integrity and all these core values in you, and you live to those core values and not to the expectations of the world around you, and that’s basically the way that I’ve lived my life and have been able to do all the things I have because I don’t need anybody else’s validation. My validation comes from within me, my expectation for excellence of myself, my management of those expectations knowing that at least I’ve tried things, I may not have been successful or I may have failed, but I don’t look at anything as a failure. Because everything becomes a learning experience when you expect it to be.

Christine Agro: I love this. Yeah, we’re on the same page. Absolutely. I mean, expectations are interesting because they are where so much of our dissatisfaction and unhappiness comes from. I mean, if I expect my husband or my son to do something and they don’t do it right, it’s that expectation that actually causes most of the problems.

Art Costello: Let me address this because I gotta address this, don’t expect your husband to do anything you want. I mean, it’s alright to ask them to do something, and hopefully they will make it happen.

Christine Agro: Yes. The expectation that causes the problem, totally.

Art Costello: I’m gonna try to do a little education right here and get you to shift your thought process on expectations. Because once you start thinking of expectations in a positive light and take that negative away from them, it’s amazing what it does. It’s amazing what it does to your family, to your friends, to the people around you, but more so, it’s amazing what it does to you. Because people used to say, why do you always go, Oh, you glow all the time, and everything you touch turns to gold and all that. I said, it doesn’t, my expectation is always, everything’s going to work out. It’s going to be the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t fight life and I don’t pull it, I don’t tug it, I don’t try to jump it, I just live everyday, every moment the way it’s supposed to be lived according to what I think.

“Live every day the way it's supposed to be lived.” -Art Costello Click To Tweet

Christine Agro: Well, I think what you think is great.

Art Costello: I mean, it’s a very nice way to live, it’s happy. I mean, because we do, we let the expectations of others destroy the joy, but more so what it does is it gives your power away, because the power lies within you. Each and everyone of us have these gifts that we’ve been granted. I’m on my podium here preaching, I think it’s important–

Christine Agro: You’re preaching to the converted.

Art Costello: I love preaching to the choir. But I want people to understand, one of the things I get asked often is, isn’t that being really selfish? No, it’s not. It’s self caring.

Christine Agro: Yeah. It’s interesting how we experience the notion of selfishness. Even the aspect of self validation, to not need that from somebody else. People feel that they’re being self centered or selfish. And in my perspective it isn’t. I mean, I think about when we’re putting information out there to the world, if you need people to appreciate it or approve it, then you’re not going to be able to do what it is that you are meant to do in the world because that is going to stop you. And the way I always look at it is, if it resonates, great, that’s fabulous for you. If it doesn’t resonate, I think that’s great too, because it allows people to further define what isn’t their truth. So I don’t need you to like it or not, it’s whatever it is for you. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t work for you, I think that’s great too. And that comes from being in that space of not needing somebody to approve of what it is that I’m saying for me to think that it is a value. I believe that it is a value and that’s what matters.

Art Costello: I agree. I mean, it really is but it’s so hard for people to digest and practice it.

Christine Agro: Yeah. Well, we’re conditioned and programmed. Let’s say that self validation as, you’re working on self validation and you’re three years old, you run up to your parents or your mother and you’re super excited about something and the reaction is, I’m really busy, corrupted me, like I’m in the middle of something. So this core wound starts at that point for people where, instead of validating themselves, they get wounded, they get whacked for looking for validation, and that’s the unconscious lesson. The message there is do it yourself, but because we don’t know that and we’re not taught that, we go through life searching for, first of all, this healing of the wound that gets created then gets piled on everytime we reach out for validation that we don’t get it. It’s such a powerful tool to be able to validate yourself. It’s amazing. I say it creates freedom because you’re not, you aren’t beholden to anybody at that point.

Art Costello: Boy, amen to that. I mean, I’m living proof of that because when I was nine, the only recognition I got wasn’t, I didn’t get it from teachers, I didn’t get it from parents, it was from myself and that was when I look back on my life, I think what a gift it was because it’s made me so aware now. It’s a great conversation. Can you tell us about your Awaken Method?

Christine Agro: Sure. It’s basically a daily practice that is based in meditation but it’s not, it’s not a meditation with the purpose of stilling your mind or quieting your mind, it’s a meditation with the intention of bringing ourselves into our body because we tend to live slightly separate spirit and body we don’t fully connect. So by grounding, by aligning, by pulling ourselves back in, we tend to send our energy and focus out into the past, into the future, into other people’s business. So when we collect ourselves up, it just brings us together and makes us complete and whole. So the Awaken Method process is really about applying this daily practice that clears the way for you to live. Really, in this conscious state of being.

“When we collect ourselves up, it brings us together and makes us complete and whole.” -Christine Agro Click To Tweet

Art Costello: Would you call, I mean, a lot of people here, they don’t understand what consciousness is because we have this idea of our eyes are open, our brains functioning and our bodies functioning so we’re conscious. Being conscious as much deeper than that. Can you fill us in?

Christine Agro: It really is. And I’ve been thinking about this because, so it’s interesting that you ask because I have been, it’s been in my mind for the last, I think month or so. I’ve been looking at people, so we can have people who have an awareness of the environment, or an awareness of whether they’re vegans or they’re vegetarian. So they have awareness at a level of empathy and connection, cause and effect connection that if I do this, then this happens and I don’t want that to happen so I’m not going to do it. So that’s a level of consciousness, but it isn’t this place of where we shift into recognizing that we have the power to create our reality, that we have the power to manifest the things that we want in our life as a spiritual being if we’re fully connected to the body, we have the ability to instantaneously manifest to self heal, to heal others, to transmute time and space, we just gathered these incredible powers that we’re not able to utilize until we step into this space of awareness. So we can look at consciousness all along our journey at different levels. But this space of awakening, or consciousness, or awareness that I’m talking about is this space where we recognize there’s so much more to our life and our world than we ever even imagined. And again, if we’re unconscious, we can’t understand it, we just can’t. We’re like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And you have to come into this space to be like, Oh, there it is.

“Consciousness is this space where we recognize there's so much more to our life and our world than we ever even imagined.” -Christine Agro Click To Tweet

Art Costello: I’ve been harping on this on my show now for about the last three weeks, and it’s something that has been instilled in me at nine years old, but I’m going to tell you something. I believe in the possibility of everything. Everything is possible, everything that comes possible. And that is probably the one key element to my growth because I see everything is possible.

Christine Agro: Yeah.

Art Costello: Impossible only is a word in our mind that shuts and stops. It’s can’t, won’t, don’t, those are words. I’ve tried to eliminate that in my vocabulary for a long time, but it’s become such a part of my mindset from the beginning. And that’s why I do and try everything. Somebody asks me: “Well, isn’t that being like fearless?” And I said: “Well, I am fearless.” And then somebody else said to me: “Okay, if you’re fearless, would you walk a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net?” I said: “No, I have fear.” I didn’t say I was not smart, I said: “We have to put it in context.” I’m open and like to try everything. I mean, I’m open to trying everything.

Christine Agro: Well, and I think it’s the things that interests and intrigued you. And some of those things probably come with a level of fear that you have to overcome and step beyond. But if walking across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope doesn’t interest you, you’re not going to do it. But if you were interested, you might do it. You might be like, yeah, I’ll give this a try.

Art Costello: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I mean, the wall builders had to overcome whatever it was they did to get up there and stack themselves, bodies upon bodies. I mean, they’ve had to overcome it, and they had to have the mindset that they could, everything on that rope is actually possible to them. Impossible, it becomes possible.

Christine Agro: And the desire to do it. People post this photo of this tiny wall of a walkway in China where they walk, and I look at it and I’m like, no, I don’t know, I am not doing, I know that that’s not a fear I need to overcome. I have no desire to, I have no need to, but getting up on a stage and talking to people, the energy that brings up for me, that’s something I want to overcome because it’s important to me, that has value to me.

Art Costello: Yeah, it is all about the perspective. I talk a lot about perception versus perspective, and what we perceive in our eye, and in our mind, people confuse perspective and perception quite a lot of the time.

Christine Agro: Don’t you love words? I love looking at how people use words, picking it apart and making sense of like, well, this is actually not the right word. If we use this word, it changes everything. I just think words are so powerful.

Art Costello: Well, yeah, and I believe that it’s really the tool that we have that communicates as writers, and as people that talk from the stage, we never know what someone else’s perception is of the words that we’re using. I get really interested in it and try to pick and choose so it works, so people understand what I’m trying to say because expectations, I think expectation is the most misunderstood word in our vocabulary.

Christine Agro: Yeah. I’m thinking of, I had this guy sort of parachute into my life that was, he was a capitalist. He was one of those people that shook things up for you. And he called me degenerative one day and I was so offended. I was like, Oh. And he looked at me and he laughed and said: “Look it up.” And I looked it up and I was like, Oh, I am a degenerative. It’s the connotation that we put on it, but the word itself, I was like, Oh, yeah, I am a degenerative, it’s like somebody who lives against the norms or lives outside of the rules of society, or something like that. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that’s me. Exactly.

Art Costello: And one thing that I’ve known all my life about me is that I don’t think like other people, people that know me. I mean, just say you don’t think like normal people? I could get offended by that, but I’m not. I mean, because I know I don’t, and I’m glad I don’t because that makes me a catalyst for all of the millions of people that are out there that are normal. And that there’s nothing wrong with being abnormal in your thinking. That we put this connotation like you said to it, that if you don’t live within the norm, you know why people want to be like everybody else? It’s safe. It’s safe, it’s easy.

Christine Agro: Yeah, it’s easy. That’s a good one.

Art Costello: And you don’t have to worry about–

Christine Agro: So the people, the students that I work with, they step into this conscious awareness space and there’s always a moment where they’re like, Oh, what have any of that I went through this? Oh, it would’ve been so much easier if I hadn’t stepped into this awareness, if I just was going along in this unconscious space. And what I always point out is that all of this stuff would still be happening, you just wouldn’t know how to handle it, you just wouldn’t know what to do with it. And now you actually have tools and ways that you can navigate these things that come up in your life and move beyond them.

Art Costello: Their expectations shift.

Christine Agro: Exactly. Funny how we think like, Oh, it was easier. I was way Upstate, I was living just outside Saranac Lake, and I had this moment where I was like, it would have been so much easier if I hadn’t awakened. So the whole day, what I love about this, the whole day I was shown why, where I was at made my life better. So rather than getting whacked and being shown in a negative way, like, well, as I was leaving the door, I heard, don’t forget your keys because the door locks behind you. And I went back and I got my keys or I would’ve been locked out. I’m driving down the road and I work with energy so I always put like a bubble around my car so that it’s protected and I’m protected. I’m driving behind this beet truck and beets are flying off of it. They’re hitting cars and like just, bam, smashing, and I had the bubble around the car and they never hit me. I was draped behind it, they were hitting to the left and right, and they never hit me. And I was like, Oh. And then I was in the parking lot and I had parked, and something said, move your car, don’t park here. So I moved and somebody came in right after me and parked there, and this car came flying down and just smashed straight, and I was like, Oh, my gosh. And the whole day was like that. The whole day was this beautiful example of how my connection, my willingness to listen to the messages that come, how that supported me in my life. And I was like, okay, yeah, I don’t wish that, I don’t wish that. I’m happy that I am where I am. But it’s funny, you know?

Art Costello: That’s a good point. And I think that we ought to try to expound on it a little bit because people don’t understand that when we can manifest stuff and we can really use our mind to protect ourselves. I mean, think of all the times that you’re out there, and if you would have turned right something, a car would have hit you, but you turned left instead, something told you and you did that. Listening to your gut, I’m a big believer and people need to trust and listen to their inner self, what it’s telling them, and learn how to have an inner dialogue with yourself. I’m constantly talking to myself in this inner dialogue that I have, and I mean, it’s continuous with me. It just goes all the time, and people just need to know that it’s okay and really encourage it, and encourage your children to start trusting their gut because kids have so many, many influences on them today. You have a 15 year old, I’ve got teenage grandkids, so I see these things that they’re bombarded with today that we had no clue about. We had no clue about it, but that’s the way the world’s moving and we’ve got to learn to adapt with it.

Christine Agro: Absolutely. I agree. We have conversations in our house about how much time between my husband and I, how much time he spends on this or that, and I’m always in the space of, is he balanced? Is he doing okay? Is he okay as a whole? And if he’s okay as a whole, just let him be, let him navigate the world that he’s in, in the way that he needs to navigate it because that’s the world that he has. We can’t change it for him. We can’t go back in time and take these technologies and things away. He needs to learn how to now, he needs to learn that the moderate is time. It’s sort of this ongoing conversation that comes up, and I always go back to, is he okay? If he’s okay, I’m okay.

Art Costello: What you’re teaching him to trust himself and his journey. And that’s the real beauty in it, because we have so many parents today that tried to navigate for their children. My daughter and I just had this conversation about, they had a science fair at my granddaughter’s school and not some of the projects. I mean, you just flat out knew the kids didn’t do it. I mean, you hear the parents say, I worked down there so hard–

Christine Agro: Yeah. I know.

Art Costello: Is that fair to the other kids, where the parents said, no, that’s your project. You’re going to do it. Figure it out yourself.

Christine Agro: Yeah. He was in fourth grade where I learned that lesson in just a very quick and funny way. He had this online math software that he had to use, and he was supposed to get to a certain percentage, and when he got to the percentage, he could stop and the teacher could look and see that. They got there and it was late, he was tired and he was at like 85 and I said to him, you know what? Go get ready for bed, I’ll just do the last three, and that’ll be it. So he goes to get ready for bed and I start to get them wrong. He came back and he said 35. Freaks out, and I’m like, Oh, my God. I had to go into school and tell the teacher that I was doing it. And he looked at me and I said, you don’t have to say another word to me at all. And even him, he’s like, don’t touch my homework. It was just the funniest.

Art Costello: But the beauty of it is, we both learned the other part of it. He learned that you took responsibility.

Christine Agro: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I have always been really honest with him. If I make a decision, and then he’s a good debater, he’ll come back and talk to me about it. I have apologized to him, I’ve acknowledged being wrong and he, I love him so much. So his dad got him this credit card because he was going to Washington or something, so it was a debit card and had some money on it. So we let him keep it, but he was supposed to let us know if he was gonna use it, that was the rule. So there was $75 I think. And he was playing Fortnite, this was probably about four years ago. He’s playing Fortnite, he just got like, it was impulse and he started buying skins, he didn’t tell us, and he spent $75 on skins and then he sat like, I guess terrified. He didn’t know what to do, eventually his father saw what happened. So there’s this big conversation, and then at some point he walks into my office and he sits down, he’s in tears and he looks at me and he goes: I don’t know what happened. I just didn’t even think about it. I just started using it.” So we had this really great conversation about impulses, and desire, and how we react and respond to things, and responsibility with money. It was just this beautiful moment, but he was so sincere and then he punished himself. He’s like, Hey, he’s like, I can’t use my computer for like, I think it was like a month or something. And I was like, well, that was a lot harder than I would have been. So, okay. So yeah, I just love him. I love watching how he navigates the world and how he applies these pieces of awareness to it. Anyway, those are life experiences that really teach children and ourselves lessons that are just invaluable because kids, I mean, think about it, it’s a credit card, it doesn’t look like money to them. And they even at that age, have a full understanding of money.

Art Costello: Unfortunately, the schools don’t teach about money.

Christine Agro: No.

Art Costello: We have college kids that go into their freshman year and have credit cards and their parents all of a sudden you’re choking because they just go put things on them and don’t think about the consequences of it. And somebody pays it, one man. One of the things that I wanted to ask you, if you could give me a definition between mindfulness and mindset.

Christine Agro: Yeah. So mindfulness is the awareness of what’s going on within us and around us. How we know it as our reaction to things or our thought process without judging ourselves. I mean, even in the meditation space, let’s say you’re meditating and thoughts are coming in instead of being like, Oh, my gosh, I can’t stop myself from not thinking. It’s just noticing it like, Oh, there’s a thought, there’s a thought. It’s an awareness of the breath and the body, like the tensions and how we hold ourselves, so that’s what mindfulness is. And then all of the tools that go with it help shift whatever we’re aware of where mindset is really, it’s really about how we think about things, how we perceive things, what we believe, what we think we believe. Because oftentimes what we think we believe, it’s not actually what the truth is, and it’s recognizing that we can what I call retrain the brain. If we think a certain way, we can train ourselves to think differently, to experience something differently. So that’s how I see the difference between the two.

Art Costello: Yeah. And I think those are good explanations because I like to ask my guests that because it just enlightens people to the difference between mindfulness and mindset. I know we all talk about setting our minds on a goal, or setting our mind to do something, or that it actually works with expectations too. Because, one, we have the mindset about managing our expectations and not letting others control us through expectations. The reason that advertisers, and churches, and schools, and all that use expectations, it’s a tool to control the public. It’s controlling people, and they take our power away. And I think that’s why it’s so important to have a mindset on your expectations at the core of who you are. And once you know who you are, life unfolds a beautiful flower because everything just starts going the way it’s supposed to. There’s none of that tugging and pulling in the other part of it is you take full responsibility for who you are and what you do. You can’t point a finger that somebody else, when you live to your expectations, you can’t go and say, well, you made me do that because it causes you to actually take full responsibility for your thoughts, needs, and actions. And that’s what I love about it. Any parting thoughts you had for us today?

Christine Agro: I don’t know. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I feel like little things shifting around in me, which I always love. I was thinking we’re from the same soul, clan, or something

Art Costello: Not going to fight it. But that’s the beauty of it. Because when you open up the lines of communication, and you do it so authentically, and you do it from the heart and from your gut, I mean, we couldn’t have a bad conversation, could we?

Christine Agro: No.

Art Costello: I often get told, after the show’s over, people say to me, I said things to you that I never would have said to anyone else, and I just did it publicly.

Christine Agro: I had my parents come up to me at school and told me the most personal thing. And then looked at me and said: “I don’t know why I just told you that.” I was like: “It’s okay, it’s in the vault. Don’t worry about it.”

Art Costello: Well, I think when you have this consciousness, it really does put a glow or an aura around you, and it’s one of authenticity, and people know that what they tell you, you can be trusted with it and they feel comfortable with it and all that.

Christine Agro: I think there’s like this container and when they step through it, they step into that moment of awareness that they’re not usually in and they’re just like — and then they step back out and they’re like, Oh, it’s like walking into a confessional.

Art Costello: Okay. I know that the audience cannot see this or not see us, but I’m going to ask you a question. I see a guitar and a cello behind you.

Christine Agro: Yes. Yes. So I played the violin when I was in third grade, yeah, it was third grade. I really wanted to play the cello and my mother said, no, you’ll play the violin. So I played the violin until I was in ninth grade and I hated every minute of it. I hated the violin, just hated the violin. And I didn’t like how we had to hold it. I didn’t like the sound of it. And then when my grandmother passed away, she left me a little bit of money and I was doing my MBA and I bought a cello. And then I started taking lessons, the woman, she was with the Philharmonic in town, she’s like, you’ve never played before. And I was like, no. And I was just like, it was just in me, it was so in me. And then the guitar is something that I like to challenge myself and learn new things. So the guitar is something that I’m picking away and trying to learn.

Art Costello: When I was in college, I had a roommate, his name was Guy Harris, he actually built harpsichords and he wrote classical music. He literally could pick up any instrument there was, and this is back in the late 60’s and we’d have all kinds of people. He was a music major at San Diego State and I was a psychology major, I ended up managing his rock and roll band. They wrote some great music, I mean, way, way before their time. Anyway, he picked up a flute. I had never played it before and did Jethro Tull, kind of Ian Anderson kind of stuff. Picked it up and blew everybody away. But he could do that with any instrument. He would just pick it up and start playing it like he had been there all of his life. And then it was such a talented gift. But in the band that I managed for him, we had guitar, we had harpsichord, we had cello, we had violin and played rock music. So it was before its time, and they just wrote such great music, and I always had a love for music. I ended up working for about seven years in the music management business with José Feliciano. I always had this pension and I saw your cello. I had to ask, but anyway, we’re nearing our end of our time together and I wanted to give you an opportunity, you can tell people where to get a hold of you, anything you’ve got coming up, any little tidbits that you want to leave us with. And after you do that, I’ll take us out of here and we’ll be done.

Christine Agro: Okay. So just a couple of things. I have an app, it’s called Awaken & Grow Flow, and you can get it for Apple or Android. If you go to awakenandgrowflow.com, you can type in your phone number and it’ll send you the link. But what the app is, it’s a collection of all the work that I do and I do some many courses, many challenges in it that are live, I do a daily message and they range from mindset to conscious awareness, and it’s just a nice little reminder of like to be present and things to focus on. And then there’s some meditations in there, and it’s just a whole collection of things. I’ve got moochers and mantras in there. All of my work is in this app. So if you’re interested in exploring your own awareness and what I’ve been saying today peaks your interest, it’s a good place to check it out. I have two separate websites, I have christineagro.com, which is all about mindset, mindfulness and meditation. And then I have Awaken & Grow, which is really the deeper work where you go deeper. My book, Awaken & Grow, a practical side for your spiritual journey. I am so excited to say it was awarded the New York City Big Book Award this past Friday in spirituality so that just blew me away, and you can get that on Amazon and I think those are just sort of highlights. I’m on all social media at Christine Agro, mostly active on Instagram, and Facebook, and a little bit on Twitter, but you can find me anywhere. I’ve got a YouTube channel, I’m all over the place. And I think that’s it, I think just parting words is to develop that inner GPS that you have, listen to the messages that come, don’t be afraid to say yes to the things that really call you because those are the things that are guiding you to something more.

“Develop that inner GPS that you have. Listen to the messages that come. Don't be afraid to say, “yes” to the things that call you because those are the things that are guiding you to something more.” -Christine Agro Click To Tweet

Art Costello: Wise words from my new friend, wise, wise words. It’s been a pleasure, I really want to thank you for being on the show, and I’m going to encourage everybody to follow you and look into your work, and become aware and really start learning how to live the life that they were meant to live. And thank you, and I’m going to let Heather White take us out of here. Everybody knows where they can get a hold of me, expectationtherapy.com. And audience, thank you. And I’m gonna encourage you again, get after Christine. This has really been fun, Christine. Thank you very much.

Christine Agro: Thank you. 

 

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