Christian Ray Flores on Freedom, Resilience, and Living Your Brand

Judy Oskam: 0:02

What does freedom really mean? Well, welcome to Stories of Change and Creativity, and on this episode, I'm joined by Ray Flores. He's a high-performance coach and entrepreneur.. he's the author of The Little Book of Big Reasons to Love America: A Love Letter from an Immigrant. Christian has lived through revolutions and the fall of the Soviet Union. He's seen firsthand that freedom is more than politics. It's about personal power the ability to use our expertise to shape our future. In this episode, he shares his take on the American spirit and I think you'll get some takeaways about how to live your brand so you can have maximum impact and create your own legacy. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

I wrote the book because I moved to the States, let's say 21 years ago, something like that, and I was a frequent visitor, et cetera, for a long time. But I married an American. She actually moved out of the States to be with me in Russia and we lived there and then we moved for all kinds of different reasons and when I arrived I kept saying to Deb, my wife look, this is special about America, this is special about America, and it was not just sort of these superficial things, it's sort of the thing behind the thing, right, the culture, the economic sort of backbone, the political system, things like that, and I would geek out on that and I would be so excited about it that eventually she would go well, you have to write these things down. And eventually she sort of made me write it.

When there was this very notable turn I think noticeable turn towards the negative right In the public discourse we felt, I felt for sure that there was sort of this rise of self-loathing in the country. You know, not healthy criticism, but just almost like everything American is bad, and to someone like myself and I'm sure if you have people in the audience who come from the third world, they're immigrants. It's actually almost offensive to hear that we go, you have no idea, you have no perspective. Get a life, go outside, live for six months a year, three years, in a place where there's no freedom and then tell me about all the things that are wrong with this place. So it's an optimistic book. It's 10 chapters, 10 reasons to love America. There's all kinds of illustrations, from personal archives, ai-created illustrations, qr codes to video, so it's a very interactive multimedia kind of thing. But it's an optimistic book in essence, for people who perhaps have just felt that self-loathing in the cultural discourse and want to just remind themselves hey, there's some good here. That's basically it.

Well, and what I like about the book is you can take any chapter and start there.

You can really take each.

Each is a passage. They're not necessarily in order, but I kind of like that because you can pick it up and read it for two or three minutes. Five minutes read a chapter and then really get the essence and the feel and then follow up with some of the research.

It's a quick read. Yeah, it's a quick read. It was meant almost like a coffee table kind of read Three and a half hours. You can read the whole thing Right right right.

Well, I think what's interesting is your perspective on what which caused you to write the book and your background coming from just such a worldview. What is it to you and you touched on it earlier what is it about the spirit of America? What is it to you that really makes it so?

And because I because.

I feel that too, I really do.

I, I, you know, I've, I've thought about it a lot. And the reason I thought about it a lot is because I have quite literally had immersive experiences in all kinds of cultures, right, so, this is quite literally my sixth country in my fourth continent. And when you have not just sort of like visiting as a tourist for a week, or inside knowledge, right of the, almost like the texture of the place, that, the taste of the place, it it does, america does stand out as almost. I think I ended up calling it like an, a cultural stack. It's not one thing, it's a cultural stack. It's not one thing, it's a combination of things. It's sort of the stars aligning at the same time. And to me it's this profound treasuring of individual freedoms that's at the core of it. And the thing is, you'll find that in constitutions all over the world, because what they copied and pasted American text, or sort of the broad strokes of it. But it's, and the thing is, you'll find that in constitutions all over the world, because that what they they copied and pasted the american text, or sort of the the broad strokes of it, but it's not deep in the culture. And there's a difference between what's on paper and what's culturally and a baseline, and in america individual freedoms are a base, a cultural in the texture, in the very texture of the culture.

Entrepreneurship, I would say it's another one, um a really interesting the differentiator between western countries that are really, because they're secular, they're, they're rich, the texture of family has been eroded and so it has. It has been eroded in america as and I would say, in the third world, family is much stronger on some level, but in general authority hierarchy, things like that, and then you have family as part of this, almost like a rigid skeleton of a nation In America. When people came here, they left all of these things behind and there was no such thing here. The main thing was the family. So my theory is that family, although it has eroded quite a bit in the 20th, 21st century, it still has a very profound place in American culture that is not even found, not in the West, in other places, but also not even found in the global South. Let's call it. People just rely on family quite a bit and I think that's really healthy, very important.

I think that a culture of experimentation, entrepreneurship and, almost like this, anti-fragility I call it right, there's a term anti-fragility, that's another thing right. In very traditional, very old cultures, saving face is super important and failure is frowned upon. In America, failure is like a badge of honor, which is a big deal. Actually, I think it's also a very charitable culture. Americans are very generous. Per capita, they give a lot, you know, to charities, nonprofits, things like that, and the role of faith on almost like this cultural level is a big deal as well. So it's a country that does believe in God and it's also eroded, but I think it's also still deep in the texture of the American culture. Western Europe, for example, has lost that part quite a long time ago part quite a long time ago.

Well, and I think too, if you take all of that and that becomes the fabric of who you are, and now you're turning towards others and you're helping them develop their businesses, develop your coaching practice, how do you use those values? How?

do you use those values? I'm teaching Americans to be more American.

Okay, I love that. That's what I'm doing. I love that and pulling from what the founders started, right?

Yes, exactly, because it's fascinating how, in a free country, how unfree people can be. You know they have the choices, but they become sort of prisoners, captives of status, of decreasing risk, increasing certainty. So they trade freedom for certainty.

Right.

You have the paycheck, you have the career path, you want the certainty, you have the mortgage and you have the spouse and the kids and the Labrador and you don't take risks anymore.

Yeah, I love that.

That's so true, and so you're not necessarily in an oppressive environment, but you create your own prison by not trying new things, by not risking and why do you think people do that?

Because I deal with students a lot too at the university and I'm always telling them, giving them permission to just go forward and create their own life. To me, it's about permission for some reason and I use that in my coaching a little bit too is why don't people feel like they have permission to do that?

I think it's. I think it's sort of this multi-generational flow, that cycle I would say right, you know, they say that strong people create good times, good times create weak people, weak people create bad times, and then bad times create strong people, and so it goes right and and that's. I think that's actually true. Now you, now I think you, can break that cycle by creating hard times on purpose, which is the essence of entrepreneurship.

Exactly.

When you start something new, you are literally creating chaos and challenges for yourself and a source of stress and anxiety and creating hard times in creating hard times. So if you start hard times on your own, rather than forced to endure hard times from the outside in, you started from the inside out, you will create a stronger person in yourself and then your kids as well. So you can break that cycle. But the natural cycle, I think it's true, that's how it goes. That's why a lot of immigrants that come from hard times they do so well here and then they look around and you know, and look at all these complaining Americans and go what is wrong with you guys? Right, this is a land of opportunity. No one's trying to arrest you in the middle of the night. You can speak your mind, you can start a company. No one's going to take your business away just because what is wrong with you guys? Like, please be grateful. And you know it's not personal.

I think people are not trying to be ungrateful. I think it's just, you know, good times create weak people and then weak people complain and create hard times. So, yeah, so, but you can break that cycle conscientiously and I think that's sort of the, the, the coaching that I do, which is personal branding and high performance, is that it's helping Americans create hard times so they can create a future that is completely different from their own, rather than going with the rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat of where they are, which can be comfortable, but it's utterly uninspiring because you're sort of on that lane of autopilot living and you're hoping for better times. You're hoping for more income, for more impact, more fulfillment, more freedom, but if you do the same thing, you're not going to get it. It's just not how life works.

Right, well, and are you seeing that in your coaching at all levels, it's not just the high executive, it's the mid-range? Yeah, absolutely. What are you seeing?

Well, basically, high executive, it's the mid-range, yeah, absolutely. What are you seeing? Well, basically I work with people who have expertise, right, so they can be, you know, ceos or vps of of companies. But it's not just that. I mean, I work with people who have expertise, who can basically productize their expertise and then create a business out of it. Right, it's a lifestyle business, it's an expertise direct to consumer kind of business, and it doesn't you don't have to be this big, big shot person to do it at all. I'll give you an example.

I was, I'm in, talking about freedom and personal branding. I'm in, I'm spending two months in Mexico right now. Right, so I'm in Playa del Carmen. I go to the beach a lot. We spent four or five days in Cozumel and I went on a dive.

So in between two dives in this beautiful coral reefs, my dive master, the person who sort of guides the group, there's like three or four people in the group. Her name is Lauren, she's French, so we're hanging out right and the front of the of the ship, it's quiet, she's having a smoke, we're talking about life and she's I'm like so what's up? You know, what do you, what do you love about this thing she goes. I love diving, I love protecting the environment, I like educating. I would. This is, this is what I love to do, but I am also not making enough money. I can't keep doing this for a long time because I'm I'm sort of poor right which is true like most scuba instructors are doing this for a long time, because I'm sort of poor right which is true Like most schoolboy instructors are doing it for the lifestyle and they don't get paid well. But I also and she goes I want to travel and explore new places and sort of maybe settle in a place that I like most. And we actually talked about a place that I'm going to next year, mozambique, which we have an afterschool academy there, so I go every two years.

I was like I'm going to Mozambique, she goes, oh, that's exactly where I want to go, and so we started talking about these things. So she asked me about what I do and I said, for example, you can be sort of the classic dive master, right, you take four or five people every single day, but you care about the environment, you want to have impact, you care about education, you have expertise. You can be just that. Or you can be a dive master who publishes bring a camera, turn it on, create some content, educate people about what not to do, what to do about the gear, about places to go. Now you're a dive master with a media component to it, you can actually have a 100%, a thousand percent more impact. You can probably 2x 3x your income If you attach to that educational program we actually train people online. You can 10x your income and your impact and you have choices and you don't have to change your lifestyle. She was looking at me going really, I'm like, yeah, so anybody with expertise can have that and that's essentially what I do.

I love that, and so is she going to do it. Do you think she's going to do it?

By the look on her eyes. I don't think she's going to do it now, but she's going to do it when things get particularly hard, which is sort of the typical thing, right?

You know what?

you ought to do. You know you can do it and you should do it.

But because you know you can do it and you should do it, but because you know it's pain right yeah you have to endure the hard times of building something like that, the when you do it only when the pain of staying the same is more than the pain of building something new. And I think the smartest people and honestly all of us are like that right, but the smartest people I know train themselves to actually not wait for that pain and just endure the pain and build a different future.

Well, and so when you're coaching someone like that, how do you help them embrace the pain? If you will?

Well, first of all, they've already made the decision that they want to build something different, sure, true. So they've already sort of stepped over that line, that threshold. I'm doing this and part of it is actually it's expensive. So they voted, they invested in themselves, they made that investment, and so what happens then is there's a step-by-step, there's a lot of guidance, there's a weekly call with a cohort, there's a group of people who are all building something. They're all super exciting, so that helps right Going.

Oh, I'm not alone and even my struggles are not sort of this unique thing for me and oh, I get advice from this person, this person and my coach. So that's really helpful. Obviously, the program itself is a very structured step-by-step that allows you to sort of make these baby steps and see results, like on week one, when you enter into something that's a little bit scary. You don't know what the outcome is going to be and you feel a difference on week one oh okay, now I'm inspired, right Now I'm all in. So it's sort of structured in a way that helps somebody emotionally sort of catch up with this process and deal with the pain, because they're seeing progress and momentum.

Well, and and I'm sure you have I really enjoy the tiny habits, bj Fogg methods. What habits do you, do you encourage your, your customers or your clients to get involved in?

Well, the first one I have these sort of three major pillars in the core, which is sort of the initial three months. This is where you establish sort of the foundations of what will propel you forward in the future. And, by the way, in nine to 12 weeks we'll get you a business model and a brand concept by in nine to 12 weeks. That's the promise, Right? So people go really yeah, absolutely, and we're. I mean, if we're not confident, we're not going to offer it to you. Sure, you know what you know. It's probably not a good fit, that kind of thing. So, but basically, the three main steps in the initial three months is we work on the fuel.

We all are fueled by something right, and we're all fueled. We all have light fuel and dark fuel, right. We want a better life. That's light fuel, right. All this stuff. That is good. But most of us who are propelled into excellence and ambition, we also have some dark fuel. It's the hurts, the pains, the. I'll show you. You know you didn't think I was good enough, but I'll show you whoever it was.

I see the real emotional.

Yeah, the trauma.

That's dark fuel. Now it's not necessarily a bad thing because you can basically redeem that dark fuel into good fuel. So we talk about the fuel and how to get access to it, how to turn it into rocket fuel and how to anxious or scared or worried every single day into creative, excited, clear. You know, when you're energized, when you have the state of flow, you can learn that as a skill. You know you might not even experience it every day, because, but everybody knows how, how it feels and everybody knows you can like quadruple your productivity and your opportunity. If you're like in that place as a normal place, well, we can totally teach you how to get there on demand every day and that alone it's worth the price of admission, if I may say yeah, because it will change your life forever and that's and that's uh productivity hacks.

Is it habits, or what are we talking about?

It's a whole range of things, but the core thing is this sort of cluster of activities that we call win the day right, which is basically you meditate because you don't think about your thinking every day. Naturally, and you train yourself to do that, so it's all kinds of contemplative things, meditate, move, so it's physical activity and master a new skill. You do those three things every single day. You will be unstoppable.

Love that.

I love that, completely unstoppable. And people feel the difference on week one, like it's instant. It's not this sort of obscure thing that we no, no, no. You will feel the difference week one, like it's instant. It's not this sort of obscure thing that we probably no, no, no. You will feel the difference If you do the work. You'll feel the difference on week one you know so, and there's a lot to it and to master it it takes longer, but you will absolutely feel this incredible sort of leap forward.

Power, you feel power. Right, that's exactly it. Power, yeah.

So that's one. The other one is sort of understanding your edge and basically what happens is we are naturally sort of conformed to being a cognitive machine. It could be a societal machine, you know, family of origin.

Family structure, whatever Family structure.

Your school teaches you that. Your university teaches you that Any institution will sort of chop off the edges so we fit better into a particular spot. It's not personal, it's not a conspiracy, it just is right. Well, what happens? And that's actually good, because you can conform until you learn a level of reach, a level of mastery, where you should not conform anymore. You should actually shape others right.

So there's a transition. When it's seasonal, when you're starting up, when you're just a student in a thing, yeah, be a cognitive machine, learn the skill, learn the craft, because you know no one cares about your personality, just get the coffee, do the mechanical stuff, do the job right and then, when you reach mastery, then you can be a creator of something. So most of the people that I work with don't have mastery. They do, so now they need to. They need to sort of uncog themselves.

You know I love that they have to unlearn that conformism is the the way forward. So they have to learn actually who they truly are and find their edge and then they can structure that believe, first of all, that their edge is valuable. We do not believe the things that make us us are valuable. We just don't. They're so familiar and we've been trained to do that and it's so familiar, it's so easy for us. That's another reason we just don't believe it's valuable.

So we, we work on finding the value and then marrying that to your actual expertise and that, my friends, is explosive value. That's the personal brand right there. So now you can take that and you can productize it and create a intellectual property around it. Right, and I'm telling you, these are people, I talk to, people like that all week long. Right, not only in the program but outside of it, when I go. You are like this CMO of this insanely massive corporation like billions of dollars. I talked to somebody yesterday, right, and you quit that job for whatever reason, right into going to a new season or a new company. You have a reputation, but you have nothing formalized, nothing structured, nothing productized from 30 years of extraordinary work.

It's like a treasure that is buried you know, and there's no value in the treasure because somewhere in the ground no one knows how to get it right. So we get that treasure and that's sort of the edge part, and then only do we talk about a brand and we can get from step one, step two, step three in about nine to twelve weeks well, because you're talking about a brand.

I'm hearing life. I'm hearing a whole life. Focus here yes, absolutely I'm hearing that you're helping someone kind of accept who they are and then transcend to the next level. That's exactly it. Yeah, it's legacy.

It's legacy, it's why you're here, yeah, and then creating sort of an environment and also a business model, which is really important because it serves nobody. If you have sort of a general concept, then you don't know how to deliver that value and get something that allows you to serve them perpetually, pay the bills, all those things right. So it's not just impact, it's also income. So, yes, yes, that's the brand.

Wow, I love that. I love that. Wow, and I'm thinking of, you know, our students at the university and people that just get out and have a career and they're starting their career and and why brand is so important. We talk so much about personal branding, but to start with someone, to start with them, to see that and build that, working with a team like yours or or just starting, I mean, I think that's very impactful.

It really is. It really is absolutely life changing.

Yeah, I love that Well, well, and I'm a gallup strengths coach, so I always have to ask people about their natural talents and strengths. What would you say your natural talents are?

I don't know if you've done the assessment or not, but I think I have, and uh, look I, my natural talents are, and natural I do it in quotes because I don't think they're truly natural. I think it's nurture plus nature. You know it's back. It's all the origin story stuff, right?

Right.

I think it's. I know people, I can read people, I can feel people, I can speak into somebody's life on like a level that most people can't.

Empathy, high empathy.

And also figuring out what makes them tick. I can take them from point A to point B. I mean, that's why I coach. It's a gift. Yeah, I would say that I would say brand as creating something that sticks in the collective consciousness and culture in greater groups of people. That's a gift as well, and it's also, I think, not only nature, but it is nurture. You know, I was a refugee at age five. I was poor, I went through all kinds of drama and everything, and then in my early twenties I decided to be a performer and in a year I was on national television in Eastern Europe. When you learn these things at this high of a level, which means everything from image to stage performance to signature, sound, all of these things, the breadth of it in your literally mid-20s, there's a gift there, right, yeah?

for sure.

And you only perfect it from there.

A real talent.

Yeah, that is absolute. You know, I can feel it. It's easy for me to see a brand in sort of a raw, sort of a blob of a collection of expertise and people and context and markets. So I can dig around and go, oh, this is the brand right here. You know, this is how you shape it, you know. So that's another one. And I think culture creation, culture creation is a big deal.

You know, I had to learn culture so fast when I was a kid because I was you had to survive, I had to survive.

yeah, so for survival, I moved from four countries by age seven, so like it almost like accelerates, your almost, like you're a sponge of culture. You understand culture at such a deeper level so I can shape culture right. I know how to create an environment like my cohorts. When people come together in these up to 10 people groups online, it's like effervescent with energy and creativity and mutual support and people just love it. So I know how to create that environment and that's a gift as well.

I think, yeah, yeah, I love that and your love of America and how you integrate the spirit of America and freedom and freedom.

Oh my gosh, that's. You're absolutely right. The you know when I am, I, I grew up in environments that are so unfree. So unfree, you know, like entrepreneurship is illegal, for example. That's how it was in the Soviet Union. Speech is completely not free. Like you watch what you think, not just what you say. It's so toxic, it's so toxic. So that gives me this like I have an allergic reaction to any environment that is oppressive, institutionalized sort of restrictions. I just cannot stand those things right. So I'm not a very good corporate employee, for example. So I discovered that very quickly that I just can't because of the background. I discovered that very quickly that, oh, I, just, I just I just can't, you know, because of the background. On the, on the bright side, I, I can see. I can see that people's desires to be truly, truly free and I can. I have the ability to say, hey, I know how you feel. You're unfree in a free country. You're still unfree, let's get you free, but it's self-imposed.

Yeah, it's totally self-imposed. Yeah, yeah, so you accept conformity for relative stability.

Or comfort for basic comfort, maybe For basic comfort, yeah, for predictability, for certainty, you accept it and you become unfree in all kinds of ways, and that is a disservice to the world. Because your talent is unique, your treasure is unique and if we can mine it, we can find it. We can mine it, we can combine it, integrate it with your skill set and then we can create a product, intellectual property that you can actually serve the world in a way that is so unique and so special. And so you, that will elevate first of all how you serve, your impact, the outcomes you provide for people. It will definitely impact your income, because now you're either an entrepreneur, you start a new thing, or you're an entrepreneur you started within your organization, which is totally fine.

Or you're a social entrepreneur, you can be a charity leader, a pastor, but you use the same essentially muscles, the same skill sets in any of those environments and your level of contribution just skyrockets right. And maybe one environment offers less of a financial sort of leap, but it gives you more impact, which is totally fine. Another environment, the corporate, it could be financial Plus. You become valued. You understand how to exchange value for money money, not your time and your hustle for money, and especially that applies to women.

Actually sure yeah, there's a lot of gendered things.

Oh my gosh yeah, I mean women in in in sort of high-powered positions, they compromise. They compromise their family, which is so natural for them, so vital for them. They compromise parenting to stay on. And if they learn, hey, this is not a weakness, this is actually a strength, right, and if I can sort of understand how to present myself in and provide value, rather than saying, yeah, I'm going to stand, I'm going to work for 80 hours a week just for the privilege of being in this position. It's so unnatural and unhealthy and you can be so miserable, you know.

So, you can actually learn how to not compromise those things and you will not lose position and impact.

And you will gain personal power.

Exactly, Isn't. What we're talking about is personal power on the inside and the outside right.

Internally and impact and you will gain personal power. Exactly Isn't? What we're talking about is personal power on the inside and the outside right.

Internally and externally. Yeah, there's nothing more American than that right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love that and, and I think I think you've you've, you've got a great formula and I think, because of your background, you really are tapping into something here that is really valuable for us.

Yeah, yeah, I think so too, and that's sort of why I'm so excited to teach it to others, because all of us have this untapped value that we're not even, most of the time, we're not even aware that this is actually valuable. It's so familiar that it's not valuable, that this is actually valuable. It's so familiar that it's not valuable. So what we're doing is we're integrating your actual hard skills, with the value that is absolutely unique, into something that is very unique. You can't compete. There's nothing, there's no competition because there's only one of you.

Yeah. So, so someone's seeing. Well, there's already experts in diving, to use your example earlier. Well, but there's not that one person who wants to go to Mozambique and teach, educate.

With a charming French accent, with a particular set of preferences and insights into diving into corals, into gear, into locations, into hacks of how to do that better, there's only one, Loren right. And there's either a Loren that doesn't share, that doesn't structure it, or it's a Loren who publishes, or there's a Loren who publishes and creates an educational path for other people to benefit from her skills.

Same person same passions, very different outcomes. Yeah, yeah, I love that.

Christian. Thank you so much. Outcomes yeah, yeah.

I love that, Christian. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time.

Judy, thank you. Thanks for having me.

And I want to thank you, the listener, for sharing your time with us. The takeaways for me Christian reminds us that freedom isn't only about where you live. It's also about how you live, choosing risk over comfort and choosing power over fear, and I like how we really dove in and explained about. It's important to use our expertise, the skills and the experiences that are truly our own Well. Maybe those can become the foundation for a future that we create on our own terms. Well, if this conversation inspired you or you just enjoyed listening, hit, follow and share the show with a friend and leave a positive review. It really helps more people find the show and remember if you've got a story to share or know someone who does reach out to me at judyoskam.com. Thanks for listening.