#3: About Me and My "Be, Do, Have" Journey

In this special episode, I share a little bit about my story, where my accent is from, some curiosities, and my "Be Do Have" journey. Many people believe that acquiring material possessions is the key to fulfillment. However, true fulfillment comes from elsewhere. Join me to explore the concept of long-lasting happiness.

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Credits: 

Song: Green Lights
Performed By: DLP
Written by: Daniel Labate (BMI 100%)
Published by: Boss Soundstripe Productions (BMI 100%)

Song (Trailer): Epic Hybrid Trailer Music
Performed by: by 2CoolFire
Licensed by: Envato Market

Cover Photo: Angela Clifton Photography
Hair and Make-up: Casey J. Cheek

Transcript

Welcome to The Neat Lifestyle Podcast. My name is Katia Mesquita. I'm a personal organization expert, an online business entrepreneur, and your host on this weekly variety show. I'm excited to bring you an extra dose of inspiration to become more organized, stay organized, and make things work better for you. My goal in this podcast is to help you achieve a more functional, harmonious, and meaningful life. I can't wait to connect with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and now let's begin. Hello and welcome to episode number three of The Neat Lifestyle Podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I am your host, Katia Mesquita, and after episode number two, people started to reach out to me and ask where my accent is from. I was like, okay, maybe it's time to talk about me a little bit, but also, I wanted to leave you at least one takeaway and what I chose to share with you is a big one.

It's a principle that I adopted to guide my actions and lifestyle, and it's one of the greatest principles I have ever learned. It was a game changer for me because it helped me become a better and happier person, also build stronger connections and friendships and, to increase significantly my income. So, today we are going to talk about me and my Be, Do, Have journey. Okay, answering one of my listeners questions, my accent is from Brazil. I am originally Brazilian and I live in Florida. I love Florida. The weather here is very similar to the weather in Brazil, and I love the US and people here. I feel very welcome. I really love. The first time I came here was in 2001 for an international student exchange program in Tarrytown, New York. Then I came to Florida. My son was born here a little bit after, but at that time, his father and I decided to go back to Brazil to raise him with his family around, grandmothers, cousins, etc.

But I kept coming back and forth for visiting occasionally. Anyway, back in Brazil, I started my law degree in college. It was not my passion, it was not my dream, but it was something that was recommended to me as a good, you know, graduation for me to have. So, I graduated. I spent 10 years practicing law in Brazil as an attorney, but something was off. I was feeling unhappy with some areas of my life, especially with my career, and when my son was about 14 years old, he asked me to come to the USA to do his high school here in Florida, so he did. I brought him here. I left him under the care of a special friend of mine who became formally his caregiver, and I went back to Brazil, Rio de Janeiro specifically.

Then, in 2019, I came back to visit my son and kind of supervise things when COVID hit. Things started to shut down, things that you already know. So my work over there somehow closed, and my clients in Brazil couldn't keep up with the payments because they were experiencing, like most of us, experiencing some tough times, and their payment was in Brazilian currency, which by the way, is worth five times less in its exchange rate to dollar. It's like this: to buy $1, we would have to spend approximately five Brazilian currency money, but I still had to pay my expenses here in the US five times more. So I was like, I gotta do something. I gotta work here. So I asked formally permission to work in the us but I still couldn't practice law here because I could not just transfer my degree. I still need to take the Bar Association exam first, but I need to work immediately. So as soon as I got my permission, I decided to work with what I could do at the time, which was organizing and cleaning homes and offices. I started working for cleaning and organization companies that didn't work so well, so I decided to open my own business in that segment and decided to offer the best home cleaning and organization services ever.

It was very interesting. It was really challenging to me at the time. Sometimes I felt like being reborn in another country, but with no parents, taking care of myself, taking care of my son, still struggling with the language. Then I started to advertise my services as a house cleaner and organizer, and people started to reach out to me saying that what I was offering was exactly what they were looking for, and I was really happy. I did the best I could. Some clients, and I became very close friends and they started to become like a family to me here. Anyway, I was happy because I would have, you know, some way to survive, but to make it work in a way that I could still feel happy, despite doing something that didn't require me to apply my intellectualism, I decided to integrate work with personal growth, especially in the area of behavior, because once I was inside people's house, I noticed that some of them needed help with something else.

Some of them needed help with personal organization. Then I started to study behavior, diving deep into a variety of audiobooks, life coach training programs based on Jim Rohn's philosophy, audiobooks on behavioral patterns, time management, coaching techniques, life improvement to be able to help some clients. So I started to coach them, and as a result, seeing their happiness with the positive changes in their lives lighted me up. Teaching and coaching was the most incredible thing that was, like, making me feel alive, and when I look back, I realize it that no matter what type of work I did before, even with law, I would always find a way to teach someone something and find joy when I was teaching and coaching people. I found my purpose in life. At least I believe I found my purpose. It fuels me, and now, after helping hundreds of American families in their homes, I have created my own website, my online business, and this podcast here, where I share my experiences and things that I have learned in my journey.

It feels great to the opportunity to give my best to add value to society. It really feels like I'm alive, but there is one thing that was a game-changer for me. In 2018, I was introduced to a principle called Be, Do, Have by Stephen Covey in his book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It's one of the secrets of successful people and one of the principles I have been using to succeed in my projects. This principle was my guidance to improve myself as a person in my social relationships, my professional relationships, to be able to refine my communication and prepare myself to work for the wealthy and successful people who happened to have the financial resources to pay what I was asking for to do my services. So, this principle started to help me changing my perspective. I started to formulate my lifestyle with a vision, picturing first how I wanted my life to look like and then fitting the work into it.

I believe many of you are already familiar with the principle Be, Do, Have, but anyway, just for those who are not very familiar with, it starts with this framework. Who would I be, what would I do, and how would I feel if I already had what I really wanted in life? I started to picture myself in that framework to start behaving as such, right now. It is a guidance system to focus my attention. I realized that back in time, when I had failed to achieve my goals, it was because I was working like most of the people I knew: from what I was to what I wanted to be. And it's a backward strategy. I discovered that I had to work from the strategy as if it was already done for me. This means I had to dive in to personal growth, also called self-improvement, to be a better person than I was before and do what I had to do to behave now as a successful person in order to have the outcome wanted.

As Stephen Covey says, "start with the end in mind." To have a clear picture of the destination I want to get. It doesn't mean live like spending money irresponsibly. It's more related to behavior in a sense of state of being. It's like setting a GPS. When we need to get to a place where we are not familiar with, we first have to set the destination on the GPS, and then we start driving our car in that direction so we can successfully arrive. People usually think that the first thing we do is to acquire things, have something to become a better person, and then to be happy. But true happiness is attracted by being, not by having. Long-lasting happiness is a state of being, not a state of having. We do experience some happiness when we acquire things, of course, but this is the kind of happiness that usually lasts just a couple of days.

That's why some people keep shopping, and that's why we see so many rich people with plenty of money and properties feeling miserable. So, who we are being and how we are being will affect what we do and how we do will affect what we will have, which is our outcome. Thanks for listening to this episode. Let me know a little bit more about you, about your accent. Where are you listening to this episode from? Send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to know. I'm Katia Mesquita, and I'll see you in the next episode of The Neat Lifestyle Podcast. Bye! Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you like it what you heard today, be sure to share it with those you care about so they can also benefit from it. If you aren't already following me on social media, do so by clicking on the link on the show notes or simply by visiting my website at neatlifestyle.com. I appreciate you so much. I hope you have an amazing day. I'll see you in the next episode of The Neat Lifestyle Podcast.