Art Costello | Living in Faith with Purpose, Learning from Life, & The Art of Expectations

Living with faith and purpose, learning from life and the art of expectations. All this and more in today’s episode of the podcast.

Hello friends. Welcome to this week’s Remarkable episode of the Remarkable People Podcast. Before I introduce today’s guest, I wanted to remind you about the Remarkable People Volume One book. It is incredible, not because I was blessed to be part of this project, [00:01:00] but because just developing the book, reading the author’s, contributions, God used it to help me grow and change my life for the better.

So, what is the book? It’s how our guest overcame adversity achieved success. So you can too. And just like our podcast, it’s not only the Remarkable story, but it’s broken down the practical steps of how they achieve this greatness. So you can do apply. And have the same results. So check it out. You can go to our website, Remarkable People Podcast dot com, but then look for the Remarkable people book.

You can go to Amazon and just type in Remarkable people, volume one, and look for our logo. You know the cartoon heroes, because all of us have greatness inside. And seriously, check out the book, buy it, read it, buy extra copies, give him his [00:02:00] gifts because I want to sell a ton of copies. But why do I want to sell a ton of copies?

It’s not about the sales, it’s about the souls. First off, all the money that goes to the book, any profit goes to the podcast, which goes right into reaching more people with great episodes like you’re about to hear. Then on top of it, it really is going to help you. It’s going to help people who read it. So the more books we sell, the more people read it, the more souls are changed, the better the world becomes, and more than anything, the more eternity’s going to be greater.

So I can’t change eternity, but there’s two options when we die. Eternity without God or eternity with God, and I don’t know about you. I want to be an eternity with God. And when I’m there, I want to rejoice with you and have an exuberant, wonderful, Remarkable existence for all eternity. But what this book does is it [00:03:00] takes the things you’re struggling with, takes the issues you’ve been.

Wrestling with, it’s been holding you back in life. And it’s 12 authors, 12 chapters. 12 labors are focused topics. So you pick the chapters that you’re struggling with, hopefully it helps you unlock that inner hero inside, and then you apply it and your life’s changed and the world’s changed. So again, that’s why we want you to buy the book.

That’s why I want you to tell people the book. But today, Is a man who wrote his own book. It’s called The Art of Expectation, and his website is the Art of Expectation and Expectation Therapy. What does that mean? Well, you’re going to hear the Remarkable story of Art Costello. Art was a young man who lived in a great, comfortable life.

Then his parents pick up and move to Northern New York where it is cold. He was isolated, and you’re going to hear all [00:04:00] about his transition and what happened in his family and life. But you’re also going to see how he joined the United States Marine Corps, how he. On orphanage in Vietnam and how his whole life changed, how his wife struggled and died from cancer.

And then that was a further catalyst. But what you’re going to get out of this episode for you to take home. Is the expectations. How to properly look at and set our expectations so we don’t struggle with a bunch of depression and anger and all these different feelings. So art’s going to take us through the journey of his life.

He’s going to drop golden nuggets all along the way. But the core is just like the title says, it’s about expectations, faith, living with purpose, and how all of. Can be developed and you can live the victorious Christian life. So this is probably the longest intro I’ve [00:05:00] ever given. Thank you for your patience.

And now get your pen and paper ready unless you’re driving. And let’s listen to our friend Art Costello.

The Art of Expectation: Hey Art, how are you today, brother? I am awesome. God is good. Always good. Always good, always. So, I just told our listeners a little bit about you and your story and they’re pumped to hear more. So we’re going to go through your life from birth through today. The highs, the lows, the pretty, the ugly, the pretty ugly, everything in between.

But before we get started, I always like to ask my guest one question. The listeners may be community members who’ve listened to all 150 episodes so far, or they might be brand new to the show. So if they’re going to listen to your one episode today, they’re going to get tons of gold to apply to their life to grow and be a better person.

But if there was one message you’re going to communicate today, what is that? [00:06:00] That one message would be that their expectations matter. and it’s not the expectations of others that dictate them, but their own faith in themselves and what God has done in our lives to to trigger expectations how he meant them for y mankind.

Awesome. So ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to get a ton of quality content to hear what Art was able to overcome in life, what he was able to achieve in life, but you’re going to hear in the practical steps so you can too, and that’s just one of the main takeaways. So art at this time, let’s get started, brother.

Tell us about your life. Where were you born? What we are upbringing. What was your upbringing like? Brothers, sisters, were you born in Quebec? Were you born in Israel? Were you born in the usa? Just start from the beginning. I was born in Teaneck, New Jersey on August 26th, 1947, which [00:07:00] makes me 75 years old.

So my life started out really great. We lived in New Jersey. My dad was a printer, my mom was an entrepreneur. She she owned her own advertising agency. And it was good. We lived in a beautiful home. Everything was good. I I was indoctrinated into the Brooklyn Dodgers, so I was a baseball player from the time I was three.

I’ve got photographs of me in my my uniform with my mitten ball in my hand. And you, I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Nice. Went to a paro, went to a parochial school in my elementary years. And then in 1959 we moved for some unexplained reason. To upstate New [00:08:00] York to this little bitty farm with a rundown house.

My parents paid $10,000 for it. It had no water, it had no indoor facilities. We had an outhouse and it was in the middle of literally nowhere. And that is when my life changed because I hadn’t lived, like I said, a, a life of abundance and, and really good. Everything was going great and then all of a sudden it literally instantly just changed.

And it didn’t change for the better. It changed for the worse because how would we move at this? I was about 10, 10 or 11. And brothers and sisters or only child? Yeah. No, I had an older brother who’s 10 years older than me, and I had a younger sister who’s two years younger than me. [00:09:00] And that plays into part of it.

My old, my older brother wanted to be a farmer. He was always into horses and, and those kinds of things. So I, I don’t know if that’s why we moved to this this farm or not. But anyway, when we did move there, my brother really didn’t become involved in it. And after we had moved and. In the first week, my dad, who had no farming experience, my dad was a printer all of his life.

He had nowhere to work. And I think it got to him and he had an episode where his peptic ulcer popped and he wouldn’t go to the, to the hospital, wouldn’t go. Finally, we loaded him into the car and he barely was alive. When we got there, doctors said if we hadn’t been there an hour later, he probably wouldn’t have made it because his body would’ve been septic.[00:10:00]

So my dad recovered and he, and this is really where the, I guess, I don’t wanna say hurt, but where the confusion started in my life is because my dad moved up to Rochester, New York to work in the newspaper there. And my mother stayed at the farm with the kids and it got the next few years, just got really confusing.

We eventually got some indoor plumbing and, and, but the house was totally nothing we had ever lived in before. And the main thing that that got to me is that I got so depressed, so despondent that I literally had suicidal thoughts. I had just really negative thoughts. And when we would go to school, we were considered out outsiders in the community.[00:11:00]

So we were really shunned by teachers students. Not all, but some, but a majority. I couldn’t play on the baseball team. The coach of the, of the school didn’t like my, my, our family, so I was not. Couldn’t, even though I was a great baseball player and proven later in my, my, my years I couldn’t play on the high school sports, anything.

So I was totally kind of isolated. And what I would do is I would go up this hill by the side of our rundown house, lay on my back, and I would have conversations with God. And I did this on, on a continuous basis for a long time. And one day I was laying on my back on this hill and I was looking into the sky and I asked God, what is going to become of me?[00:12:00]

And I actually heard something deep inside of me. It said, you’re just to do, you just become a doer. And it really scared me because I had never heard anything. External like that. But I knew it was coming from inside of me, but I knew it was some force outside of it. So I guess my, my faith that I was raised with when I was little came, came roaring back in a big way.

And I began every trip up there to listen to this voice. And finally, in in high school, I decided my way out of this terrible existence that I had lived for probably five or six years, was to join the United States Marine Corp. And I joined the Marines on July 22nd, 1960 6, [00:13:00] 19 65, excuse me, 1965. And went to Paris Island South Carolina and became overnight.

And a man , I learned , the Marine Corps. Had tremendous tremendous to really teach me. And I was eager to learn. I was searching for stability. I was searching for structure. I was searching for discipline because all of those things lacked. After we had moved to the farm, my mom started drinking and running around on my bed, and I was pretty much able to do whatever I wanted to do.

I, I had no structure, no discipline, no expectations were ever set for me. And when you don’t have expectations set for you at that young age, you just can do what you want. You begin to really [00:14:00] do what you want. And that’s what I did. And the Marine Corps provided me with the structure and discipline that I needed to start to become what I call successful.

And. . I spent four years in the Marine Corps. I went to Vietnam. I was a combat veteran combat Marine in Vietnam. Did a lot of great things there. Started one day we were coming out of the village and or coming out of the mountains into a village, and I saw this little girl with her hands through this wire fence and our eyes caught.

I couldn’t say anything to her, but our eyes caught. And I, I thought, God, there’s something. So when I got back to the, to the compound to our main compound, our chaplain was there and I asked him, I said, chaplain. I said, have you ever been to that villages outside the wire [00:15:00] and seen that compound where the kids are in there and you know, they’re in the, in the wire?

And he said, that’s the orphanage. He said, all those children. , he said there’s about 20 children in there that have all lost their parents to assorted, you know, raids and Viet Cong and, you know, different, different war scenarios that had happened. But those were the orphans. And I said, I saw a little girl and I said, she’s about nine years old.

And if you think back on my life when I was nine years old and starting to feel bad, that’s what I think God had in purpose with our eyes meeting. Because I looked at her and thought, I need to help this child. Mm-hmm. . So I wrote home to my, to my parents who who were starting on the path to come back together again after five years of being a part [00:16:00] and my mom not acting so good and my dad working his tail off and all those things.

They started and my mom. Gave the farm to my older brother, or my mom and dad gave the farm to my older brother. My mom moved back to Rochester, but I asked her to send me all of my money. I asked my father to send me all the money I had saved in Vietnam and in the Marines because I wanted to buy this little girl clothes.

I wanted to be able to help provide her an education. I wanted to buy her the, the necessities that she needed to live. When I did that, my parents said, we’re not going to do that, but what we are going to do is we’re going to start a campaign here for all of the children in the in the compound. So in the meantime, I had asked Father Voltz, the chaplain, if we could have the kids in for Thanksgiving and share our Thanksgiving [00:17:00] rations with them.

And he said he’d have to get it approved by the colonel. But he got it approved. And through the grace of God, we, those kids came into our compound. And this is 1966 in Vietnam, which was pretty much a transition time. It hadn’t really, the North Vietnamese hadn’t really invaded as much, can’t come in, but it was mostly Viet Cong, so they, the Marine Corps was interested in ation.

So having these kids come in was a good way to get some good community relations going, which we did. And we, my mom and dad started providing all the necessities. We had Thanksgiving dinner and when they brought the kids in on the, the six fives the first little child off saw me standing there and it was the little girl and she came running to me and it’s going to make me [00:18:00] emotional.

She came running, jumped in my arms and just hugged me. And it was just an incredible feeling. You know, when you’re in a place like that and you’re not, you’re not sure of why we’re there, we’re not sure of, we just had so many mixed emotions. It gave me a purpose. This little girl gave me a purpose. So my parents continued sending sending rations and stuff over for the children in the orphanage.

I got transferred further up north to dong ha and father Voltz and I kept in contact. But I came home and before I came home, I tried to, Which is the little girl. Yn is her name, and I tried to adopt her, but being an 18 year old unmarried Marine, the Marine Corps said no way that [00:19:00] this isn’t going to happen.

So I made arrangements with Father Bolts to continue sending Yune money so she could go to school, so she could have clothes. And my parents kept sending things for the orphanages. But I supported Yoon. I came home 1968. I got outta the Marine Corps started getting prepared to go to college. I wanted to get a degree in psychology and become a psychologist and follow that dream that I had to help people.

And in February in 1968, father Volt sent a letter to me that said you can, you don’t have to send money anymore. And I thought, okay, you know, what’s, what’s going on? And the further I read into the letter, as many of us that Vietnam veterans know, and people who have followed the history [00:20:00] know that January of 68 was Ted.

Well, what happened was is the Vietnamese, north Vietnamese overran the village, and in the process they killed all the children in the orphanage. They did not want anybody to survive that had any contact with Americans or was indoctrinated to the good that we could do. I only know, I do not know if I is still alive to this day.

This is only what Father Volz told me. I have no reason to doubt what he said, but he said, oh, the children were lost. So I was heartbroken. . But life goes on and I had to continue. So I continued my education and did everything, did everything I wanted to ever do. I, I, I just my life has been [00:21:00] really very great.

I mean, I, I went to college. I, I played baseball at college. I played baseball on a semi-pro dodger organization. I wanted to prove to myself that I could still do it. The Dodgers told me that I was too old , because I was already 26, 24, 25 years old and had gone to four years of the Marine Corps, four years of college.

They weren’t interested. Went to work in the entertainment industry because I, I really enjoyed working with entertainers and, and that just followed the path that I felt God had laid out for me, doing the things. always to the best of my ability, always to, with the highest of expectations. Had met a beautiful blonde woman, in 19 1972 [00:22:00] at in San Diego.

Married her. We went on to have two children boy and a girl love ’em dearly. Life went great. I I, I ended up starting my own construction business in 1975 after I left the entertainment business. Vicky said she wouldn’t marry me if I was in the entertainment business. She said it just wasn’t good.

So I just up and quit, just walked in one day. I worked for Jose’s Felicianos management company who, who wrote Felic Navida and sang Light My Fire and had a couple hits in in the. Early seventies. So I had a great, great time working with them, but I wa I knew that God wanted me to marry Vicky and I married her and I quit the, the Amgen business, married her, and [00:23:00] started a construction company, became very successful and it kept it for 35 years.

Vicky and I just, we traveled, we did a lot of great things. We enjoyed ourselves, but again, life threw a curve at me in 2003, September 23rd, 2003. I know the date specifically because it was my sister’s birthday, but Vicky was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and we were told that it was survivable that it was stage one that we had a really good shot at surviving it.

And so we went on the battle. We fought it for three years, and on September 16th, 2006, she lost the battle. And this is where my life gets interesting again, because in 2006 when I lost her [00:24:00] I, I lost me. I went and I started drinking, started doing stuff that I shouldn’t be doing. And she had told the kids, don’t, don’t, don’t let dad be alone.

Don’t let ’em get crazy. I know I’m well. And 2009, the kids came to me and said, dad, you promised mom you weren’t going to act like this. And I looked at him and I shook my head. That night I went, we had a, a small ranch outside of Austin, Texas that night. I went and laid on my back on the lawn of that ranch and I again asked God what was going to become of me and God said to me again, he said, I’ve given you all the tools that you need.[00:25:00]

You just need to apply ’em. That night I got up and I went back into the house and I started, got on my computer and I started writing and outta my writing came the book Expectation Therapy because all my life I’ve always had, ever since I was that little nine year old boy laying up on that hill, I’ve had this expectation that I’m to do that, I’m to be, and I’m to be the best that I can be.

And that’s what I’ve chosen to do. , I’ve chosen to be the best that I can be. E everything. I am never, whether I was going to be a, a, a nurse, a garbageman, it didn’t matter, whatever. I was going to do it to the best of my God-given abilities and do it with the highest of expectations. So I wrote this book called Expectation Therapy, and it started helping a lot of people.

It teaches people how to manage their expectations because I believe it’s one of the most [00:26:00] important things that we can do is manage our expectations. Because there are, I always say to people, everything that we do is based on an expectation, and everything we don’t do is based on an expectation we have in our head.

So learning to manage your expectations becomes paramount to really being happy, to being content, to being successful. It is. Really, really the most important innate element that we have in our, our our, in our psychology. So that’s, that’s how I’ve gotten here and how it’s come about. All right. Well, let’s talk about two main points I’d like to discuss with you then for the listeners.

I’m like you, I trust God, I believe [00:27:00] him, the Bible, even without the Bible, everything I see in just life and creation, it all points to God and everything in the Bible is true and there’s no flaw. And I’ve seen it in my own life. I’ve observed it in other people’s lives. But you’ve mentioned several times how you just knew.

What you had to do, you heard the voice of God, you’re listening to him. You know, a lot of people struggle with how do I know what to do next? So how do you go through a decision making process? Like what are some steps that you can share with the listeners? Like, Hey, we believe in God, but even if you don’t believe in God yet, here’s some good solid decision making steps to take, to put you on the right path.

You know, it’s, it might break things down into simp simplistic steps and I tell my clients and, and I tell people when I speak, you know, [00:28:00] you have to learn to trust your gut. That, because I believe that that’s, God speaks to us through our, through our inner being, and it just manifests itself in our. In our inner being and I, I don’t know what, for me it’s my gut for somebody else that could be different, but learn to trust that.

And then, well the Bible says when you trust God as your savior, you have, you have the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, and in dwells in you and it says you have anion from the holy one and you know all things. So that’s what you’re referring to. Correct. Correct, correct. So for me, what I do after I trust my gut is I start, my faith is so strong that I follow, just follow the steps that lead that I’m led to.

I can’t say that, you know, let me give you an instance. When, when I [00:29:00] left Jose and his management company, I had no job. . I had no income coming in. I had no, I had some savings, but I had to trust myself that I was going to find something. And I started looking and I started being aware. So I had a friend who said to me, Hey, art, my dad has a a roofing company.

He needs some guys. How’d you like to go to work for him? And I said, sure, I’ll go to work for him. I went to work for him and I started learning. And that’s what I think the, the first step is being open to every possibility That is, because when you become open to possibility, everything becomes possible.

I followed that step. I went and worked up on hot roofs. Not fun, not [00:30:00] glamorous. Nothing like working for for entertainers. , but I, I, I did it with purpose. I wanted to learn, and out of that came an opportunity to start my own company in construction. So I started learning all the different phases of construction, started learning all that.

And in doing so, it led me into a profession that I never dreamed I would be in. It didn’t, it did not count, did not work on my, my psychology degrees or anything. It was a whole different thing. It provided a great income for my family, for my wife and my children. It afforded us a beautiful home.

Everything I wanted to do, everything she wanted to do, our kids didn’t lack for anything. And it provided, and I was always, I’m always looking for what opportunities [00:31:00] that God presents and then looking at how. I can fit those into what I believe is his plan for me. So the important thing is to, for your audience to understand, is to be open to the possibility of everything.

Because as I said, once you’re open to the possibility of everything, everything becomes possible. As long as you work at it, learn all the intricacies of what it is as long as you keep on moving forward and keep doing. That’s, that’s what’s important. And then just follow it. Yeah. I think that’s, oh, go ahead.

I’m sorry. Where was a delay hit? The, we’re all different. We’re all different. And in doing so, I can say that for me, I’m always looking for more, I’m always looking for, because I believe that God wants us to be the best that [00:32:00] we can be. So for me, it’s, it’s, always looking to learn more, to do more, to help more people to do that next.

So what what becomes important is moving forward. Keep moving forward. I, I’m not a person that looks to my past. I couldn’t wallow in all the things that happened to me, losing a wife, losing, literally losing a child in Vietnam, because I lost June there. I mean, I could have I could let all that hold me back.

I’m always, I know that God has a plan for me and I know that it’s for my betterment and for the betterment of mankind. And that’s what I, I’m always striving for. I hope that makes sense to everybody. Yeah, it makes sense to me. It’s. [00:33:00] Biblical advice. You know, the Bible says, do all things is unto the Lord, not unto men.

And you, you mentioned since the very beginning, God told you specifically to do, and that’s be doers of the word and not hearers only. Right? Mm-hmm. , you can have all the knowledge in the world, all the degrees in the world, all the tools in the world, but if you don’t do something with them, they’re useless.

So, no, I think that’s spot on. And I love how, brings, brings another point that I, that I wanna bring up for, for us, that believe and, and use prayer and all that. Prayer is great. God wants us to pray, but he also wants us to become doers. He wants us to become active. I have been in churches and, and groups where everybody prays a.

but they don’t do anything . And it’s always something. I don’t believe that God just wants us to pray. I [00:34:00] believe that God wants us to be active. He wants us to go out. He did. He sent Jesus to move out amongst the, the thieves and the robbers and everybody else, you know? And that’s what he wants us to do.

He wants us to be out doing because we’re a better testament to his world, to his faith and to his belief in mankind when we’re out showing other people how to, how to, how to live. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, you have the people that are, especially when they’re new, when they become a Christian or they get involved in a church and the thing that matters, our relationship with God, but why we go to church is because.

As iron, sharpen iron, so amend accountants of his friend. It’s so when we’re in church, we’re hearing hopefully the truth and we’re growing and we have people to support one another and, and more than anything to glorify God. But when you’re talking and you’re talking [00:35:00] about, you know, decision making and prayer, I mean, that’s all spot on.

And there’s so many people who are especially new Christians that do until they’re exhausted and they get burnt out. Then you get these other people who’ve been Christian for 30 years and they do nothing. They’re lazy and they’re useless. You know, talks about that in the Bible too. So the balance of false balance is abomination to the Lord, but just balances his delight.

I, I think you’re spot on. I’m so thankful you’re sharing this because you’ve led your life by this successfully and that’s something we can all learn from. So now when you’re taking all of these. Different parts of your life, and sadly, you know, you, you lost your wife, but you’ll see her again in eternity.

But you kind of get to a bad place. You start self-medicating with alcohol. Your kids come to you and they’re like, dad, you’re not doing what you promised. You’re not living the right life. Where does your life go from there? [00:36:00] Art? Well, I followed the how does it change is, is, let me rephrase that. How does it change?

How does it come about? Then we’re getting into the book you wrote in the therapy and, and what you developed. How it changed is when I laid down my back and had that conversation with God again and I heard that deep inside voice say to me, I’ve given you all the tools it triggered in me. That is correct.

I have been given all the tools that I need to be successful. I just need to follow the path. Getting up and starting writing the book was the path that I believe that God has wanted for me. He’s led me to, to a, another marriage that is, is great to a, to a woman who was 55 years old when I met her, had never been married, did not really need a man.

Great Christian woman. Super loves my [00:37:00] children. Couldn’t ask for a better, better, better mate than I have. And God always leads us to the better things when we’re faithful and we work hard and we, we do that. But that’s what I think. I just keep following the path and I’ve doing this podcast is, is following the path of what God has for me.

You know, he wants me to share my story and the book was sharing my story, sta sharing how I. How I overcame things and why I overcame them. The book has a lot of the psychological aspects of, of what’s going on. You know, to give you a little bit of a hint in it expectation therapy is based on, on three principles, identification, clarification and solidification.

And those three principles come out of physics [00:38:00] and you have to identify a problem. You have to clarify that it’s a problem, and, and you have to clarify how you want to go about solving it. The third solidification is actually coming up with a written plan on how you are going to achieve it and different levels and steps to get to success.

It’s very simple formula, but it, it, it creates success. So, It’s a process. Everything’s a process. Yes. And I’m grinning a little because No joke. We have never talked about your steps before. And the id, identification, clarification, solidification. I just had that conversation with one of my clients today about, Hey, we need to address this.

We need to take these steps. And I’m so if you see me smiling, that’s why I’m smiling. Now you [00:39:00] mentioned this, I forget the words you used, but you said how not everybody’s journey is the. . And that is so true. I mean, throughout the Bible, old Testament, new God speaks to us differently. There’s never an other than God loving us.

And salvation is, you know, grace through faith. There’s no consistent way in the Bible for, you know, like someone will always do this or someone will never do that. I mean, you got people that God loved and you know, they were some of his favorites and they committed what we’d consider gross sin, right?

Mm-hmm. . But I like how you talked about how sometimes people have the whole vision and they can reverse engineer their steps, but for your life mainly, it sounds like it was mostly, I’m just taking the next step. Is that, is that a fair evaluation? Yeah. I, I very much live in the moment because I believe that that’s how God wants us to live.

If we’re lived and focused on the moment, then we can be the best we [00:40:00] can for that moment. , and then you just take the moments and they, they kick adding up into hours, minutes, , minutes, seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. And it just, it just moved. But living in the here and now is very important to me because you can’t change the past and you can only control what’s happening right now, and you can only be your best self right now, which creates that beautiful future that we often expect in our lives.

So what do you start, I mean, we can cover so much, but let’s do this. Between your birth and today, is there anything significant we missed or that you want to go over before we get to a couple more questions? Not really. I think I’ve covered most everything. I mean all the strong points and low points and high points in my [00:41:00] life, I think I’ve covered.

Oh, okay. I don’t think there’s, there’s anything that I’ve just, I’ve just lived so well, it’s not just living. Sometimes things come easy and other people are confounded by ’em, and a lot of times things are hard for us. It’s so easy for an outsider. So that’s cause that’s, can I say something right?

Yeah. You bring up, you bring up a great point. You know why it’s difficult for some people and it’s some easy for some, some people have learned how to expect and they, they go with the flow of things. And that’s why learning to manage your expectations and learning about how to, how to navigate through situations.

Is so important because how you expect, we only expect through two lenses, either negative or positive. And I have chosen always to be [00:42:00] positive. I don’t focus on the negative. I don’t bring it up unless I’m talking briefly about my story. It’s always about being positive because I believe that that’s what God wants us to be.

God doesn’t want us to dwell in the negative because we can’t go back and change something. If you’ve done something bad, you learn to, you know, you need to learn to forgive yourself because we are forgiven and forgiving yourself and moving forward is, is the most important thing you can do if you’ve, if you’ve found something in your background that you’re not happy with or give yourself.

Yeah. That. So that is amazing advice. And let’s go into the expectation therapy. So someone’s listening, they’re like, I am connecting with what art’s saying. It makes so much sense. How do I get started? Like, what are some of the practical ways, like, because we’re at the end, we’re [00:43:00] going to transition to where you are today and where you’re heading and how can people get ahold of you.

But if someone listening right now isn’t at that point, but they want to try something to start moving, to start the process, what’s a great foundation for them to work from? Start with the foundation to start with is start grab yourself a paper, piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. We’ve all heard this before.

Draw a line down the middle, put on there the things that you, you want to identify, that you wanna change. , all the the things that you wanna change, that you don’t, don’t like, and just pick one of them. It can be complicated or it can be the most simple. I’d like people to start on the most simple because if you can change something simple, it gives you faith that you can change something bigger down the road.

So take that one thing on there, [00:44:00] that list that you really wanna change, and start identifying all the things about it that you don’t like and you do like,

and then start changing the things that you don’t. It’s very simple. It’s, it’s, it’s about changing, but make sure that when you change that you’re rewarding yourself. Because that’s the important part. That’s the behavioral side of my psychology coming in, is that once we get those small rewards, they big, they build into bigger rewards.

So that, that is the fundamental thing that, that we have to do. Every, every, every client that I work with, sometimes some clients when, if they’re local, will go to some of the local places. Here there’s a place called Mount Bonnell and Austin that’s up on top of a hill. It brings me back to my childhood.

We’ll go sit [00:45:00] up on top of a hill and lay back on a bench or on, on a, on a piece of St. Rock that’s up there, and I’ll tell them, close everything out. Close everything out that’s surrounding you. Just close it out and get inside yourself and listen to what your gut wants to tell you about change and what you wanna change

in one state. Some people have can do it rapidly. Some people it takes. Several times doing, some people can’t do it when somebody else is around. Some people have such trauma in their life that they don’t want to share that yet. So they know it’s there, so they wanna be alone. It’s a choice. I let people have choices because if it doesn’t come from within them and it’s not their choice, I, I can’t fix anybody.

[00:46:00] I tell everybody this all the time, I cannot fix you. You have to fix yourself. And it starts with identifying what you don’t want in your life, what you don’t, what’s not serving you. I hear people say that, get rid of what’s not serving you, but really focus it even further. Narrow it down to the, to the specific thing that you don’t want.

I mean, there’s lots of things that don’t service, but focus on that one thing that really gets, gets in there and, and, and get rid of it. Work through it. So if someone was, I’m not happy with how I look, then the one thing they don’t, you know, they want is to be fit and healthy. So then you can say, these are the steps I’m going to take.

And then reward yourself. But what if, what they don’t want a relationship, like they have a poor relationship with another human. What steps would they take on their side? And then [00:47:00] what kind of rewards would you have for that? Like, you know, if you go running for 30 days, the rewards, I buy myself a pair of new running shoes.

But if you have a terrible relationship with your blank and you, you’re doing your part to restore it, what kind of reward would you recommend for that? I’m going to give you an answer, but it’s going to come in a roundabout unexpected way. get this question asked all the time by men and women who are in bad relationships all the time.

What do I do? Well, sometimes, even though I, I do not promote or want people to get out of relationships, but sometimes relationships are so bad or so abusive that they need to get out of them. And if you start focusing on what you really don’t want and you’re in a bad relationship [00:48:00] and you know that that relationship is bad for you, once you make that decision that you are going to get out of that relat.

and you get through the process of of, of getting out of a relationship. And it’s different for every single human being on the face of this earth how we get outta relationships. But I specifically try to help people with the steps sometimes, but it’s, like I said, it’s gotta come from them. But what you, once you’re outta that re relationship, what the reward is for you is you start to feel less stress.

You start to feel better. Not always. It takes time. It’s not immediate. We’re a society that wants immediate gratification on things. For some people, it is immediate gratification. I, I worked with a young 28 year old [00:49:00] woman that was in an extremely abusive situation. We literally had to take her and get her into a.

In with law enforcement to extricate her outta the relationship to get her outta the state. But we took, I worked with law enforcement on this. We actually worked with law enforcement to get her almost a whole new identity. And man, I’m going to get teary because this young lady in a matter of a year changed her life so drastically.

She’s now doing everything that she wants to do. And I can’t be real specific because I don’t know who listens and, and who could hear it, but she’s living in another state, she’s. Living the life that she dreamt she could have. She’s working in a profession. We helped her get into her. I had [00:50:00] worked with her on choosing a profession, what she wanted, what was her dream job, and we helped her into that field.

And she is in that field now, and so happy. I, I hear from her and I just hear how, how I’ve changed her life, you know? And that’s so gratifying because I’ve always said, if God put me on earth to change one person’s life, I did it. And I keep changing lives through that. And I, I’m not saying it as a, as a boast.

I’m saying it as if you’ll do the things necessary to change your life, you can change and you can live the life you want. Just gotta reach out sometimes and get the help that, that you need in doing it. I hope I answered your question. No, you did. There’s so many variables in so many different scenarios, but no, you answered that.

So sometimes the rewards are intrinsic and they’ll just naturally [00:51:00] grow from the actions we’re taking that it doesn’t always have to be like, I’m going on a vacation or I’m going to eat a donut, or, you know, it doesn’t have to always be a physical thing, is what you’re saying. Yeah. I think the intrinsically rewards sometimes are more gratifying than, than the, the external rewards that we could, that we garner sometimes.

Oh, yeah, a hundred percent. I agree with you completely. Yeah. I, I don’t doubt that at all, or question that I was just saying like, I wanted to make sure when you say this, I understand measuring these. Okay. So now let me ask you the next step. There’s times where you have every effort and desire to fix a scenario and the situation, it’s like, Almost outta your control.

I think about a lot of stuff that’s happened in my life, I think in my friend’s lives, like people I personally know. And like one of my friend’s, great guy, married a psycho wife. Not all women are psycho or all men are psycho, but in his situation, great guy married a [00:52:00] psycho wife. She messed with the kid’s heads.

He had three kids, two older, one younger. And what happened was when he left, because he was going like he was losing his mind, being tormented by this woman behind closed doors, where the kids, they hated him for years. They treated him bad. They had a terrible relationship, so he wanted to be close. The kids were like, we hate you.

And then when they finally opened up, literally like 15 years later, they’re like, we felt like you abandoned us. And then in one conversation, now that they were adults, he explained what happened. All the walls broke down. So that was a miracle and thank God. Right? But for the people in those 15 years at Desert, what do you recommend to do?

How can we apply your technique, your expectation, technique, to those type of situations that are until somebody’s willing to sit down, it’s outta your control. I, I call this [00:53:00] how I like to call it, how do we expect the unexpected when unexpected things happens in our lives? Like the loss of my wife the loss of you.

I mean, those kinds of, how do you expect the unexpected? The thing that I’ve learned through this, and the thing that I teach is that if we can look at everything that goes on, gone, goes on around us as a learning experience. , we’re never losers. We’re never, we’re never alone. We’re always, when you’re learning something, there’s value in learning.

So when you learn something, that’s, that’s what, that’s why God puts us through these situations. He, if you, if you go through 15 years of a bad marriage and you haven’t learned anything, [00:54:00] it’s lost. But if you look at it and look back of all the lessons you learned in those 15 years, there becomes an intrinsic value to that, that we can look and say, it wasn’t all lost.

It wasn’t all worthless. You put some value to it, and I know that people will find that rather hard, but it’s the only thing that I’ve been able to come up with that makes sense out of bad things happening. in our lives is what did we learn at it? I, I go to the VA all the time and I, I get around veterans who are so buried in the still, almost 50 years later, still buried in the war, and they stay there and their lives don’t progress.

They, they just, they come in in fatigues. They come in with all kinds of, their patches and everything, all over ’em. And they’re, [00:55:00] they’re stuck in that, that war, they didn’t learn anything by it. That war taught us a lot, and our history teaches us a lot. And that’s the intrinsic value in it. What do we learn from these situations that we’re in?

I have friends and I have clients that have lost children in car accidents, and they, they question, why? Why did this happen? We never know the why’s of. why something happens, but it’s what can we learn from it? What c, how we can make this world better? How can we make our lives better? How could we make the lives of people around us better from this terrible situation?

And when you do that, you start to put value in that loss. You start putting a value to it, a positive value to it. It wasn’t for, not that your child died or was murdered, or your spouse was murdered there, there’s [00:56:00] no, there never can be value in that. What can the value comes is from what we learn, what we can teach others from that learning.

That’s why you, you’ll see people who have lost children. They go and they get in groups and they help other parents that le lose children. It’s, that’s that process working. They’ve learned something from their child’s death. They wanna help someone else get through it and become better and more fruitful.

That’s the way God wants it. God, that may be God’s purpose in, in that, in, in taking somebody out of our lives. We never know. I learned it in Vietnam. You know, we never know when somebody’s going to go. I, I, I wondered for years, why me? Why am I, why am I walking, walking the earth? And I always go back to, God has a purpose for me.

God’s purpose for me was to help people and, [00:57:00] and to be the best that I could be. That’s the only value I could get out of, out of all that. . Yeah. And at the end of the day, I mean our relationship with God is all that matters. And he’s the one that is the king, the only one we answer to. . Yeah. I mean he’s, the only thing that really matters and why we’re here is to glorify God.

And it’s hard we lose sight of that, especially with the world telling us such a different story all the time. So always to comfort those though who are on like, like this gentleman for instance, he’s in the middle. He got divorced, he’s going through, you know, he is 10 years in and his kids won’t talk to him.

That just hurts. So do you tell him to lower his expectation? Or how do you counsel somebody through that kind of pain? . Well, first of all, I, I never have people lower their expectations. I, I, it just, it, there’s no benefit in it. And, and [00:58:00] expectation has so many different meanings to so many different people because my interpretation and of an expectation is different because of the research and everything that I’ve done with expectations.

But for somebody like that you know, if, if your child isn’t talking to you and, and I have some experience with this, and it’s, I understand it, you know, you have to be responsible for what you do. And as long as I’m doing everything I can, and he is doing everything he can to try to open the lines of communication and all that, then you can’t do anymore than that.

So keep again, it goes back to learning from all the different things. You try keep trying to garner things. Learning techniques or [00:59:00] communication techniques that you learn and keep just applying it. And you can’t be responsible for the behavior of someone else. You, it just, you can’t, we’re we’re, it’s, we’re not designed that way.

If we were, we wouldn’t have half the mental illness we have in this country. You know, , I mean, think about it. I mean, we, we have to do what we can control in ourselves, what we can handle, and what we can do. And yet just have to understand that sometimes you can’t change somebody. They have to change themselves.

You can’t make somebody speak to you if they don’t wanna speak to you. You, you just have to have that understanding that those things are there. Is it hurtful? Yes. , can it be managed? Yes. You have to just understand that it’s on them. It’s them. It’s not you. If you are doing everything in your power [01:00:00] to help somebody and they don’t wanna help themselves,

I mean, there’s just nothing, nothing you can do when somebody doesn’t wanna be helped. You know? That’s the bad part about drugs, you know, is that there it is physically addicting and how do you help somebody that’s physically addicted to somebody? The only intervention that you can do with that is to get them into a program, get them clean, and then try to rehabilitate.

You know what I mean? It, it’s just a process. I know and sometimes when you love somebody I mean, to be blunt, you just wanna tie their ass to a bed for three days and let ’em clean their system, but then you’ll go to jail for that. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it’s, you know, and until they want to help themselves, until they make that decision, I’ve worked with enough drug users to know if they don’t want to change themselves, [01:01:00] and I mean, I’ve had friends that have had children that have died, overdosed and everything else.

They did everything. Then they’re humanly possible way to help ’em, including tying them to a bed and resentment built up and they just got back right into the drug scene, you know, can’t change ’em if they don’t want to be changed. Yeah. I think it’s, that is a. Important truth that we just need to accept, do our best.

But in all things, I mean, yeah, we just gotta give it to God and let him do the change. So, man, it’s been deep, it’s been emotional, it’s been real and transparent. So thank you for your time with us today. Art, is there anything between your birth and today that we missed or any other message you want to convey to the listeners before we transition to where art is headed in the future?[01:02:00]

Nope. I think we, I think we’ve covered everything. That, that done a great job. This has been a great conversation. I’ve enjoyed it. Oh yeah. Thank you for being here today. So, where’s Art today and where are you heading? What’s next? Actually, I’m heading to help more people. That’s, that’s my sole purpose in my 75th year of life.

I, my, my goal is to help as many people in this world as I can. And I just rebranded everything from Expectation Therapy to the Art of Expectation. That is our new branding. We have an online course that’s coming out the first of the year. Well, that’s already the first of the year. Coming out in the next couple weeks.

An online course teaches you how to manage your expectations. I’m always available. Go to the art of expectation.com and you can get ahold of me. I’m, I’m always here to help people. I love helping and [01:03:00] I believe that that’s why God put me on this earth and keeps me here. Amen. I love the double play of the name.

That’s great. That’s good marketing. . I was, I was at Harvard University speaking. And one of the PhD physicist came up to me. She said to me afterwards, she said, you need to change your name. And this is like five years ago. She said to me, she said, you need, you are the art of Expectation

And I said, can I use that? And she said, absolutely. I said, I had never thought of it. So when I rebranded this past in August, I said, the art of expectation, , Hey, no, that’s great. Marketing. So the art, the word is in it. Art of expectations, singular.com, and we’ll put links in the show notes. Mm-hmm. are, if someone wants to get ahold of you, they visit their [01:04:00] website.

Is there an email address? What’s the best way to reach you? There’s a, a newsletter that we put out. With helpful hints. There’s you can sign up there you can by email, phone number. Everything’s on ev all any way to get ahold of me. All my social media sites are on there. It’s all there on the website.

Excellent. Well, our, it’s been a true honor to have you here today. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for answering so many questions. I think the art of expectations is something we should all be working towards and developing and doing, not just reading about and listening to, but implementing in our lives.

So thank you very much, sir for being here today. Art. Oh, thank you, David. I’m, I’m thrilled to be here and I’m always here for you and any of your, your listeners that need. Amen. Well, thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, if you wanna reach out to Art again, check out his website. [01:05:00] If you want to hear more great episodes, like what you heard today on different topics, check out our website at Remarkable po podcast.com.

We also have the new Remarkable People book that just came out, and maybe Art will be in a future volume, volume one just released, but we already have volume two in the works, so we love you. And like Art said, and like our logo slogan says, don’t just listen to great information, but do it. Repeat it each day so you can have a great life in this world.

And most importantly, an eternity come. So I’m David Pasqualone. This was our friend, art Costello, and we wish you the best and we’ll see you in the next episode. Cha.

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