Faust Ruggiero is a published research author, clinical trainer, and therapist whose professional career spans almost 40 years. He has been in private practice at the Community Psychological Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania for over thirty years, specializing in individual, family, substance abuse, women’s issues, and marital/couples counseling. Faust has practiced his highly successful counseling program, called the Process Way of Life, with over 2000 of his clients. It consists of over fifty internal human processes which can be accessed and developed to help clients address the various conditions that are affecting their lives, and it was recently developed into the award-winning The Fix Yourself Handbook. Faust has appeared on television shows, radio shows, podcasts, and his radio show “Fix It with Faust” debuted in June of 2021.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Who we are is the product of the interplay between our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual attributes.
- We can dress ourselves up on the outside, but it’s what we are on the inside that tells the world who we are.
- The Process Way of Life and its 52 internal processes
- Why you shouldn’t constantly compare yourself to other people
- The importance of healing
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS FAUST:
- What does it mean to understand how to love?
- How do we live without envy?
- How do we apply forgiveness in our lives?
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Listen to the podcast here
Faust Ruggiero: Transform Your Life Into A Happy, Healthy, And Productive Journey By Unleashing The Power That’s Been Inside You All Your Life!
Hi, everyone, I hope this finds each of you so very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I’m happy to have this opportunity to interview published research author, clinical trainer, and therapist Faust Ruggiero, whose professional career spans many years. Faust has worked in settings that include clinics for death, children, prisons, nursing homes, substance abuse centers, in-patient facilities, and both national and international corporations. He also provides counseling services for first responders, law enforcement, and other emergency personnel.
Faust has been in private practice at the Community Psychological Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania for many years, specializing in individual family, substance abuse, women’s issues, and marital couples counseling. He has used his highly successful counseling program called The Process Way of Life with over 2,000 clients. It consists of over 50 internal human processes, which can be accessed and developed to help clients address the various conditions that are affecting their lives.
In the summer of 2016, Faust decided to develop his Process Way of Life program into the award-winning, The Fix Yourself Handbook, which was completed in December 2019. He has appeared on television shows, radio shows, and podcasts, including this interview. His radio show, Fix It with Faust, debuted in June of 2021, and The Fix Yourself Handbook 2: The Journey Continues is in development. I’m looking forward to interviewing Faust about his Process Way of Life, The Fix Yourself Handbook, and more for what is sure to be a healing, transformative interview with a remarkable man.
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Faust, a warm welcome to the show.
Irene, thanks so much for inviting me. I’m thrilled to be able to spend some time with you.
Thank you. How could anyone not benefit from this interview with you? Let’s start with my first question. What transpired during your childhood that inspired you to help others and continues to be at the heart of everything you do now?
I’m that kid who was destined to do what I’m doing. Every now and then, as you told your story, there’s that one little piece that comes in and says, “Let me turn your world upside down for you and we’re going to jumpstart this whole process.” I was about nine years old, and my father at that time, who was 42, had a massive stroke. It didn’t tell him but rendered him to be a shell of what he was. Family life changed completely.
At nine years old, I decided that I was going to step in and somehow fill some shoes that I didn’t belong in. Talk about learning lessons. When that went off track, then it was jumping into all the wrong decisions. It gets me completely upside down, which I guess is right where my Lord wanted me. “Let me get you upside down so you understand that this world isn’t where you’re going to get what you want. I am.” It started there, and fortunately, I grabbed the life preserver that was being thrown at me.
What was that life preserver?
That was the dysfunction. That was the Lord saying, “I’m going to weave this right in there, and there’s going to be something for you to hold onto. If you want to do that, that’s great. If you’re not, I assume you have all the answers.”
A lot of kids have trauma. They go through that and go down the tubes.
That could have happened. Fortunately, before that, we were a family of faith. It was there, but I was too busy being angry and saying, “I’m not grabbing anything. I know how to do this.” Adolescence reared its ugly head. All the hormones that come along with it decided to come along with me. You get through high school, and I was fortunate to have one teacher who saw that this rebel who was running around trying to control the world had a little more going on. He was a journalism teacher, of all things.
He saw me as I was skipping class for the third time that week and said, “Get back here.” When I got back in the class, he said, “You’re not getting punished. You’re not getting anything. I’ll tell you what you’re going to get. You’re going to get responsibility. Welcome to the role of my news editor.” I said, “You have to be kidding. You want me there?” Tapping into my intellect was never a weak intellect by any means, so we ran with that. The newspaper won awards nationally that year. It was one of those things where someone said, “I don’t really care what you’re putting out there. I don’t care what this mask you’re putting off of the world is. I’m already on the other side, so let’s go.”
What a blessing he was for you.
Absolutely.
I don’t think that it was an accident that you ended up in his class.
Absolutely not. I’ve never looked at anything in my life and said it’s an accident, a coincidence, perfect timing, or all that stuff that people use. There’s a plan. If you’re willing to invest yourself in it, everything opens up routinely.
Inner Power: Nothing is life is an accident or a coincidence. There is a plan if you are willing to invest yourself in it.
It’s what we were talking about with my story. It’s totally true. You say many things about you that fascinate me, but one of the things is you say that who we are is the product of the interplay between our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual attributes. Could you please explain that to us?
When I started to put the program together, it was part of the counseling environment I was developing. I got through school, and just like all of us, we’re taught all the things we’re going to eventually use and then you get into the environment you’re working in and say, “ Half of this stuff isn’t applying. It belongs back in the book or was taught for some other reason.” I needed to find what I thought was going to be practical for people to hold onto. One of the strengths that I have is that I can take information and move it into practical application.
If you think about it, I wanted the book to be not some newfangled something out there. I wanted it to be basic stuff that is in our life every day. I’m going to say it in a different way so you can see it differently. What I’m saying is we are all human beings. We are a physical. We are all intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Those are four attributes. The key is to be able to work with your life and get them in balance. That’s all.
We are all human beings. Work with your life and get the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual in balance. Click To Tweet
As an example, think of a day when you get up and say, “I really feel so tranquil today. My mind is working well. I have clarity of thought. My emotions are just nice. I feel good physically. Spiritually, I feel connected.” That’s balance. That’s all it is. Again, it’s nothing that anyone in the world can’t do. That was a whole component of going into the development program.
I think a lot of people are not aware of all of the attributes. They see themselves for the physical part of who they are or relate to the emotional part. Spiritual, what the heck is that? You make them aware that there is hope.
That’s what I do. You’re right on the mark. We are taught to be one of those things. We’re going to be an emotional person that helps everyone. We’re going to be an intellectual that is a genius that spurs all these new ideas. We’re going to be the athlete or whatever with the physical part of things. We’re going to go into some form of spiritual awakening, thought, and then application of that.
It’s always one. I always look at that. Every time I meet one of those people, I say, “That’s great, but there has to be more.” We’re taught to be one of those. It’s no wonder why when that one thing gets overused and broken, we don’t know where to go. What do we do? We go right back and try to use the same attribute to move forward, and that’s the one that was broken. In that early story of my life, the emotional was broken. If I kept on going emotional with it, I would have some serious problems. Fortunately, that teacher went to the intellectual. Sports came into the picture. I was able to do some things physically. Spiritually was there and it kept on coming at me. I was opening myself.
Did you get the spiritual part from a religious service or just from a knowing inside of you?
It started that way. I think the typical traditional. I was born Italian-Roman Catholic, but when I got through that, that’s something that pushed it aside. There was no reason. However, this is completely different. I always call it attaching yourself to a power source, the most important power source in the universe. It’s beyond the way we teach it. It gets much more involved than that. Again, it’s something that you develop. All of these things are developed over time. It’s just the ability on a daily basis to apply all your energy there. It’s not rocket science.
It’s not rocket science when you understand it.
We have a tendency to put negative energy into things. We say, “I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that. All the effort involved in that made me uncomfortable,” and then we back away from it. We need to be able to say, “Let me stay focused and apply as much energy as I can now. If I do that and keep on doing that, then I will become familiar with things. It will become something I would like to do, and it feels good. I then start getting some of the benefits and the benefits say to me, “This is great. Let’s keep going.” We develop and create from that.
It’s like choosing to be more instead of one-dimensional. I love this statement that you say, “We can dress ourselves up on the outside, but it’s what we are on the inside that really tells the world who we are.” Tell us about that, Faust.
That’s a real important point for me. I look at the world we live in now, and almost all of it, our development of ourselves, comes from the outside. We look to define who we are from what’s trending. We look at solving our problems. I looked at the pandemic and all it said is you had to stay home. It didn’t say anything else. We were saying, “I’m losing my mind here. I’m disconnected from what’s out there.” Everything we need is already inside us. It’s already there but we stopped using it. That’s the problem. We stopped going inside. Some of it is good and some of it has to be repaired. That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. Be willing to go inside yourself. That’s where you’re going to find the beauty. All the gifts that you want for yourself are not out there. They’re inside.
A lot of people are not friends with who they are inside. At least, in my opinion, they get a lot of their stimulation and definition, as you say, from the outside. I have a few friends who are in the social services. They say they’ve never been busier. People had to live with themselves during this pandemic, and some of them didn’t like who they were discovering. They were reaching out for help, which I thought was a wonderful thing.
It is a wonderful thing. What it said is, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to realize this isn’t working. I don’t like the way I’m feeling. There may be a few other ways I can do this.” I keep telling people your best friend is always going to be yourself. Once you define that person, you can have best friends everywhere, but you can’t love anyone until you cannot love yourself or go in and get yourself.
Your best friend is always yourself. Once you define that person, you can have best friends everywhere. But you can’t love anyone until you love yourself. Click To Tweet
We hear this all the time, “Love yourself.” I always say, “How?” You’ve got to go define it. You got to go inside and get yourself. There’s a person in there, but you stop knowing and put it aside. Go back in and find it. I’m giving people a roadmap to do it, one step after the other. You can go in and get yourself. If you do all the things I’m saying, you will find you. You’ll find peace and love that person inside you. Why would you not?
That leads me to the question of what does it mean to understand how to love?
Now we’re back to that question of internal balance. The internal balance is a culmination of a process. It’s working the program, which allows you to get into internal balance. A little disclaimer here. Internal balance on a scale of 1 to 10 isn’t arriving at a 10. You can have balance at a 2. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be enlightened, super intelligent, or emotionally high IQ person. All they have to do is get those four attributes in balance. That happens at any level of your life. It doesn’t matter if you’re a simple person who spent their life doing mundane chores or a rocket scientist too.
In fact, the rocket scientist is going to have more problems than the simple person. I’ll guarantee it. It’s about getting your life in balance, then you feel good. You’ll like your world. Once you like your world and you are in it, now you can say, “I’m starting to love this person inside.” You’re kinder to yourself. You’re willing to do the work that has to go into this. You’re willing to share all your gifts. You define all your gifts. That’s another thing with so many people. I realize they come in, and I can look at them just like that teacher looked at me and said, “You’ve got tremendous gifts.” They look at me like I have two heads because they don’t have any idea how much they have inside them or how powerful they can be.
Inner Power: Once you like the world you are in, you can start to love the person inside and be kinder to yourself.
What a blessing to go to you for help and have you unleashed that for someone and how you point that out for someone. I think a lot of people grow up without validation, and their whole lens is through what other people think of them or what they’ve been taught that they should be. Tell us about The Process Way of Life and it’s 52 internal processes. What would you like to tell us that creates this internal balance and transform lives, and how it transforms lives?
The easiest way is to go practical and start talking about some of those processes. Without saying what the first process, and we’ve talked about it briefly, is to get your life off autopilot. Stop doing all the things you’re doing that are causing you trouble. When they come into my office, I will say, “Let’s get a starting spot and let’s look at where you are. Here are all those things you’re doing. If you keep doing those, you’re going to keep on having problems. Let’s stop following the crowd and doing things without thinking about it. Let’s establish the point we’re going to move forward with, and then we start working on those processes. The first one is the toughest one. If you can master this, it is your greatest ally all your life. That’s being honest to yourself.”
Get your life off autopilot. Stop doing the things that are causing you trouble. Click To Tweet
I call it brutal honesty. I teach people how to do that. People think, “When I get honest with myself, I’m going to go inside me and find this broken-down person who needs so much work.” You’re going to find a lot of things that need to change, but you’re going to find so much beauty in there when you get honest with yourself. That’s the part you want to look at. You’re not going to find negative things all over the place. You’ll find real things.
If they’re real, then it’s part of you. Why in the world would you not want to embrace that? That’s another part of loving yourself. Be willing to embrace everything. All the stuff that’s happening is just events on your timeline. It’s this person inside that’s receiving all of that. That’s the one we’re changing. When I say changing, it’s up to the person. I don’t tell people how to change. I teach them skills to change then they define where they want to go because they’re here for their own purpose, not for mine.
They have choices to make, so you help them to decide how they’re going to make their choices and what they’re going to do.
It’s like you and I have talked about the various ways we got here. We need to make choices because we are part of a plan. If I’m going to change the plan along the way and pull these people out of that plan, that’s not doing anybody any service. My goal is only to teach things that help people move forward and then they create who they want to be. They define their own plan. That’s the beauty in all of this.
How about giving us your inspiring story about the young girl who lost both of her parents within one week? Heal through that and then, after several years of counseling, became a healer herself. That’s some story.
When you do what I do for a living and you’ve done it as long as I have, the stories unfold and you get a chance to see how they have unfolded. This girl was very young, a teenager. Now she’s approaching 50 so it’s about 30 years. Her Aunt brought her to my office and said she was depressed. She was acting out and angry. They couldn’t control her in school.
How did she lose her parents?
A car accident. Both at one time and the horror of this was that she was in the backseat, so they had to extricate her from the vehicle. She didn’t know what was happening with her parents. Of course, rescue people came and they were talking. There was a lot to process. She stayed with me for five years and intermittently came back. The fun part was when she got to the point of being in graduate school. She was going into Psychology and I said, “That’s wonderful. I always thought you had that gift.” Interestingly, she hadn’t connected with the fact that she was that good. She thought she was doing it to be like me.
We do have that effect on people, but now that she’s practicing, she came back one day and said, “I’m going to change your world a little.” I said, “Tell me.” She says, “I don’t think I did this because of you. I think I did it because I was supposed to.” I said, “If you think you hurt my feelings, forget it. You just made my day because that’s what we’re doing here.” She went through a lot of things like difficult relationships, a divorce, some substance abuse, all of it. By the time she hit her 30s, things had started to straighten out a little bit, so she’s almost 20 years in and doing some really great work. She does a lot of work for abused women. It’s her specialty and I’m thrilled for that.
Look at how you affected her. You brought another healer into the world. You really helped her to see her gifts. That’s wonderful. You developed your Process Way of Life program into The Fix Yourself Handbook. Each chapter targets a specific human issue. To help members of our Grief and Rebirth audience better understand what the handbook can do for them, please speak to the following four topics that I lifted from your handbook. Let’s start with Dealing Better with Change.
The Fix Yourself Handbook: Using the Process Way of Life to Transform Your Life into a Happy, Healthy Journey
I call it The Change Monster. That’s the thing we all don’t like. Interestingly, in defensive people, the human mind is designed physically and intellectually. The way it works is designed to keep us comfortable and happy. That’s what it does, and it will do that regardless of how many times we change things and how challenging things get. It will work to get us into a comfort zone. That comfort zone becomes a routine. We love it. We exploit it. We develop it. We do all the things that make it as comfortable as possible.
Something comes along, either rocks our world or at least suggests the need for change, and we do everything in our power to resist it. All I tell people is, “Take it one step at a time. Don’t wait for the life-changing events,” like you and I were talking about. Change it up every day. Do things out of sequence. Put a little thing on a scale of 1 to 10 that’s a 1 or a 2, and throw that change in it. Keep yourself constantly adapting to little changes. If you do that, when big ones come along, you’re much more capable of dealing with them.
Another thing is, in the book, I talk about autopilot. It’s just what it sounds like. The airplane pilot takes his plane and puts it on autopilot. What he did is he disengaged his brain from the plane and everything that’s going on. Re-engage your brain. Don’t go on autopilot. Don’t stay in a comfort zone and be routine every day. Get up and change the way things are going. I don’t care what you do. Maybe it’s mid-afternoon. Go for a walk instead of staying in front of the television set. That’s a huge change. You don’t realize that. Those little bitty things we do can be huge changes once we spring them all together, and once they help us become a little bit of a different person in the way we do things.
I think it also helps with longevity and processing as you get older. You’re challenging your brain and working with different parts of your body that haven’t been before.
I have an Aunt that turned 102. Of course, everyone gives her the same question, “What’s your secret?” She says, “Don’t stop moving forward.” She wrote her first book when she was in her 80s and 2 followed. Now she’s still painting. She still does a little bit of gardening here and there. She gets up and keeps herself busy and intellectually stimulated at all times. You don’t start that when you get to 100. You start that when you’re young. You keep on changing up and keep that brain working on something.
That’s a wonderful role model for all of us. Here’s another one for you, Faust. How do we live without envy?
I always call envy slow suicide. First of all, if we’re going to be envying someone, we’re already insecure. A secure person who loves himself, who feels good about their world, who doesn’t have all these needs for outside things that we don’t need, they don’t envy. The insecure people do. What we do then is we take our insecurity and focus it somewhere outside of ourselves like we’re going to fix our world out there. It’s not going to happen.
Inner Power: Take away your insecurity and focus it somewhere outside yourself. Use it to fix the world out there instead.
When we envy, it’s negative energy, so we will behave in a negative fashion. We will maybe talk about people. We’ll try to do whatever we can to even that playing field, and it never gets even because that person doesn’t know what you’re doing. What you’re doing isn’t moving you ahead at all. It’s just making you feel as though you got even somehow. All I’m telling people is,“Forget about the envy. Forget about who lives next door and what they’re doing, the girl down the road, or whatever it is. Go back inside, have fun with yourself, and recreate. If you need help, go get a counselor. Get what you need to make that happen. Love yourself enough and feel worthy enough to put the time into you, not to them.”
Does that have to do with when people are constantly comparing themselves to other people? Its like, “I’m in this career, and so and so is making so much more money. I’m doing this and I must be failing. What’s he doing better than I’m doing?”
That’s what it’s all about. There’s also a chapter in the book that I wrote on creativity. Everyone thinks that the guy who hits the home runs or the great dancer, singer, actress, or politician are the creative people. They got to a point where they made a creative statement. The creativity either lives inside you all the time or doesn’t, like what we’re talking about. All the good feelings that are in there, develop those. Be creative in everything that you do. Change all those little things constantly. Keep the mind, the body, the emotions, and the spirit working all the time. Everything changes. Make you your own most important project. That’s what I’m talking about.
Keep the mind, body, emotions, and spirit working all the time. Everything changes make your own most important project. Click To Tweet
That’s fantastic. I love that. Now how do we confront others peacefully? I’ve actually heard it called a care confrontation instead of a confrontation. Teach us.
Let me answer that first by telling you in my mind what gets in the way of that. We have a tendency that our mind doesn’t always stay in the moment. It goes forward or backward. When we’re going to confront, we go forward and say, “I’m going to say this, but then that person is going to come back with this. By the time we were done, we played the whole conversation out in our minds. We’re already angry, insecure, or fearful, and that’s how we’ll approach the situation.”
What I say is simply to get a plan, know what you want to say, and then there are some simple rules to follow. Don’t say it in front of other people. Don’t burst in and say it to a person. Ask the person’s permission to speak. “I’ve got something I want to talk about with you. Do you mind spending a few moments with me?” Keep it low-key and slow. Focus on only the details. Do not have an agenda when you go in because that person doesn’t know what your agenda is. It’s not like you’re walking in and saying, “Here’s my agenda and this is the conclusion I need you to make.”
You’re going to bring something out. They’re going to respond. If you’re talking warmly, they give them a chance to talk warmly backward and then you go back and forth with your conversation. You may leave there getting what you want or you may not. That’s not even the point. The point is that you learn how to confront. That’s all it is. You don’t keep all that negative energy inside you. I always call it Ghost Screaming as you’re screaming these conversations out to no one.
Be able to say, “I’ve got this on my mind. It needs to be addressed. I need to say it, and it gets said.” If the person agrees with you, wonderful. We have this thing about confrontation where it needs to be some ugly, horrible monster that we go in and fight a little bit verbally. That’s not what it is. To confront is to take something from the inside and bring it out. It’s an exchange of information. That’s all. Be able to exchange your information warmly. If it goes in your direction, great. If the person doesn’t want to, maybe they’re not far enough in their own abilities to communicate, or they disagree. You have no control over that. You only have control over whether or not you organize it and put it out there.
How do we apply forgiveness in our lives, Faust?
Everyone talks about that and they’ll tell you all the gifts.
You hear it all the time.
You hear, “If you do this, this will happen. If you forgive this person, you’ll let go of the negative energy.” It’s all wonderful. The only problem is we never talk about forgiving ourselves. Again, if you think about everything I’m teaching and talking about here, everything starts from the inside. Why would forgiveness violate that rule? Look at what we’ve done in our lives and say, “I can work through this. I can identify what I’ve done wrong. I can take some steps to help people that I’ve hurt. I can do that. I can take the steps to make sure it never happens again.”
I should make a statement here. All my processes continually interweave with each other. In order to do this, I got to get brutally honest with myself. I got to say, “That was me that did that. I don’t like that but I can fix it.” There are lots of other processes that help you do that but you got to get in and learn to forgive yourself. Once you learn to forgive yourself, you can learn to forgive anyone.
Once you learn to forgive yourself, you can learn to forgive anyone. Click To Tweet
It’s basically letting it go.
If I was trying to forgive you for something and I didn’t forgive me, I’m going to take what I’m trying to forgive you with and bring it right back to myself into the land of unforgiven. It’s not going to work. If I can bring it back to an internal source that says, “I am forgiving myself.” Forgive yourself doesn’t mean, “I did that wrong. I forgive myself for that.” There’s a process that I teach associated with it. You’ve got to go through that process. You can’t just say, “I’m going to forgive myself.”
There are steps that you have in that forgiveness process. I got your handbook and it’s a really wonderful guide if something is happening in your life. Open it up and see what’s a better way to handle it, not just coming from whatever your inclinations are.
When I wrote it, I wanted it to be able to not only teach the process. I wanted it to be a reference book. A year later, you’ve read the book and say, “There I am. I’m not forgiving. I can go right back to the chapter of forgiveness.” I wrote them all very small. I condense a lot of information in 3 to 5 pages. You don’t have to read a lot because people won’t do it. At the end of every chapter, I say, “Now do these things, 4, 5, 6, 7 steps, whatever they may be. If you do them, it’ll work.”
You can go back as a reference book if you slip, and we all will. That’s not an if. Sometimes you’re slipping, and sometimes life goes to a higher level. Now you’ve got to apply all the principles in new territory. Life is dynamic. It never changes so having a reference book to go back and say, “I can apply that here too and it’ll work.”
Life is dynamic. It never changes but the thing is, in life, everything changes. You’re right. It helps you to handle those things. You, of all people, Faust, what is your all-important message for everyone in our audience about the importance of healing? Why should they go to all this trouble to see inside themselves and fix what’s up or down?
It’s an entirely different way to live life. When you get up in the morning, and you say, “I’ve got a purpose. I’m going to like the purpose. I may not like everything that goes on now, but I will like the purpose. When I look at myself, I like the person I am. I’m not envying. The negative energy is almost diminished.” I talk about language and talking to yourself the way you should. If your language is negative, it makes you feel horrible.
When you talk to yourself in good positive terms, everything is there. The reason to do this first is the personal. I will feel better about myself. The second is whether or not we want to choose to be part of the master plan. When you get to the point that you really work with who you are inside, the master plan becomes connectable.
You have to talk about the master plan. Explain that to people too.
Master plan is the person’s master plan. I always say there are two master plans. The universe or God is the master plan, but there is a master plan for all of us. I was never a person that would buy into the notion that somehow randomly, we ended up on the planet. I was born here to watch TV, have snacks, and whatever. I have a purpose. My master plan, for me, defined is to be in service of other people and to help other people create their lives in the way they want to so that they can eventually develop that master plan for themselves like that girl in the accident.
I’ve been forged to have many people. I’ll see out and about these days, and they’ll say, “I remember when you did that.” Someone will yell, “I haven’t seen you in twenty years. Guess what I did and guess what I’m doing.” I have probably 30 or 40 young people that I know of who have gone into what I do for a living. They’re out there doing it again. Not that they’re my proteges or anything. They’re doing their own thing. They got the spark.
I think that’s wonderful. They’re helping so many people. You were the spark, and you motivated them. You were a role model. That’s great. Tell everyone the best ways for the members of our audience to connect with you and find The Fix Yourself Handbook.
I can’t walk away from this. We were talking about this before we started the interview. This is what I’ve always done. It’s what I’ll continue to do. If you want to contact me, my website is my name, FaustRuggiero.com. You can type that in or type The Fix Yourself Handbook and it’ll bring it to the website. When you get there, besides having everything about me, all the media interviews, and things like that, it has a lot about the book. I wanted to open that up. You’ll see some excerpts from the book and some chapters where you can look at and see how they’re laid out. It’s a reference book, but the way I did every chapter is to present a problem and give you a quote that you can remember about the chapter.
I go into the processes and tell you which ones apply in that chapter and how to use them. There are 3, 4, and sometimes 5 pages of information about the problem we’re talking about. At the end, I give you the exact steps that are designed to help you with that problem. I found that severely lacking in self-help. I often find it lacking in people who do like what I do for a living. I can’t make you do something, but I can surely lay the roadmap out for you. That’s what we want to do. That’s all presented on the website. Contact me on the website. I’m real good about getting back to people. If you contact me now, there’s a good chance I’m going to get back to you now, at the latest tomorrow. If you want to spend some time with me, want to counsel, or whatever you want to do, there’s a page to help you set that up.
Of all people in the whole universe, what is your tip for finding joy in life?
It stays the same. I can have the greatest day in the world, but somewhere along the line, the day gets passed and I say, “I don’t know what I did for anybody.” That’s me. At the end of the day, I appraise my day by how many people I helped or at least I was able to help one person. One of the most important things I’ll say is you can gain everything in the world and make yourself as happy as can be and rich and everything else. However, if you don’t possess the ability to give it away and be in service of other people, you’ve wasted your life.
Inner Power: You can gain everything in the world, but if you don’t possess the ability to give it away or serve others, you are only wasting your life.
Very profound. I have to say I really resonate with this great quote from The Fix Yourself Handbook because it speaks to the healing mission of this show, “Suffering and loss are often life’s way of stripping away what causes us our pain. This difficult as it may be, allows us to rebuild without the weight of what has been holding us back.” Faust, thank you for the incredible healing work you are contributing to our world through The Process Way of Life and The Fix Yourself Handbook.
They’re helping people to understand themselves better so that they can transform and rebirth their lives into happy, healthy, and productive journeys with enhanced purpose. My heartfelt thanks to you for such a wise and enlightened interview. Make sure to follow us and like us on social at @IreneSWeinberg on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. As I like to say, to be continued, many blessings, and bye for now.
Guest Links:
- Faust’s website
- Faust’s book: The Fix Yourself Handbook
- Faust’s Radio Show: Fix It with Faust
Host Links:
- Irene Weinberg on Instagram
- Irene Weinberg on Facebook
- Irene Weinberg on Twitter
- Irene Weinberg – Grief, Rebirth + Healing Podcast on YouTube
- Grief and Rebirth Podcast on Spotify
