Brad Miller 0:00
pathway to promise podcast with Dr. Brad Miller Episode Number 89. Total Life freedom with the author of Freelancer freedom, Vincent pick Lacey.

Jeff Sanders 0:14
This is Jeff Sanders, author of the free time formula, helping busy people find happiness, focus and productivity. My friend Dr. Brad Miller will help you find your promise life of peace, prosperity and purpose. Right here on the pathway to promise podcast.

Brad Miller 0:32
You're on the pathway to promise with Dr. Brad Miller. Brad leaves every person has a god given promised life of peace, prosperity and purpose, and that you must have a plan and a guide to get there. The pathway to promise podcast Not only is your guide through the wilderness of depression and disappointment that stand between you and your promise life, but also brings you insights and direction from inspiring successful thought leaders who have transformed their lives. Welcome to the path Wait a promise. Now here's Brad. Hello Good people. Welcome to pathway to promise podcast with Dr. Brad Miller. It's awesome to have you here with me today as we talk about things that matter. Something that matters a lot is having fulfillment and freedom in your life. And what if you don't have that? What if your job isn't fulfilling? What if you're financially stressed? What if there are stresses in your family relationships and your marriage and in your with your children and with your parents, with her stress everywhere that's causing you to feel compressed and stressed? Or all through today Vincent Lacey is going to be sharing with us freedom is the author of freelance to freedom and he's going to be sharing with us what what he what he did in his life when he thought constricted and all these areas. Great the pathway to promise podcast we are all about helping you to overcome stresses in your Life, whether it's the pressure of debt that's crushing you, or maybe you are not fulfilled in the workplace, maybe you've got depression. Or maybe you've experienced a death in the family or perhaps you've had a diagnosis of some something bad like a disease, cancer or something. Maybe relationship is messed up divorce. Whatever it is, we're here to be helpful to you on the pathway to promise podcast, we teach and we lead about a process to help you discover your God given promise, life of peace, prosperity, and purpose. And we do so by teaching about that and also by sharing with great guests like we have today. You can always go to our website pathway a promise com, find out more about us find back issues of the podcast, and also some other helpful tools for you there to help you overcome adversity and achieve your life a peace, prosperity, and purpose. When the ways we do that is talking to great people like Vincent pick Lacey. Listen, I have to things in common. We both spent some time living in Evansville, Indiana. We had different paths there. He was a photographer for the local newspaper, and award winning photographer. And I was a pastor of a church there. And, but he also found himself in a situation where he was winning awards for his photography. He was successful in his career. But it wasn't working and other aspects of his life, including financially. And he didn't feel like he had the flexibility in the freedom that he really wanted to have to spend time with his children, to be involved with his spouse, and to have freedom in his life to have what he really wanted to do to have quality in his life. So that's what I wanted to talk to you today. What we want to talk about today, here is having quality comes in your life and doing whatever it takes to break some patterns to have freedom. You're gonna love this interview we have here today with Lacey from the total life of Freedom podcast and the author of freelance to freedom. And our guest today is an author and a podcaster bits of big Lacey. He is all about people who desire freedom in their life, to do the work, they love to thrive financially, to control your time, to own your own business to own your own life. And he has several methods and things that he's done in his life. To help him do that. He has a free he has a book called freelance to freedom. We'll say more about that in a little bit and a podcast called the total life freedom podcast. It's all about freedom with Vincent. Vincent, welcome to pathway to promise. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here. It's awesome to have you here. Vance. love what you have to share about heavy freedom in your life and I've seen your work and other aspects of we'll talk about what you're doing now. But I first got acquainted with you as a photographer in my hometown newspaper of Evansville, Indiana, and I saw your work then So what I'd like to hear a little bit about you is just little bit about your life kind of got you from a small city photographer and you can say more about that to what you are now a leader of a dynamic business and author of podcaster Tim a little bit about your story my friend

Vincent Pugliese 5:16
Yeah, there's there's a lot of layers to it in terms of like, you know, what adversity there's, it seems like it happened in every every stage. That's why some people aspect what is the How did you get through it? It depends on which part of the story you ask, right? For me, in the beginning, I was a terrible student. I was lost. So the people that didn't do well in school and wanted to do something later on in life. I'm kind of, you know, something that went through that because I just learned on the day before graduation, that I was even graduated from high school. I was arrested when I was 18 years old for stealing. I had no moral compass, really rough time in my life. And that went on till I was 22 years old when really I had a nightmare that I got caught stealing again. I was living with my parents again, and I went downstairs to just kind of comment contemplate was the first time I ever said to myself, like, what are you doing with your life? And I, you know, my dad came downstairs and me my dad didn't get along, as you could imagine, because I wouldn't get along with me at that point. But he said to me goes, What's wrong? And I said, I don't know what I'm doing with my life. And he very simply was just your two o'clock in the morning. Well, you like taking pictures, you like sports, that's all I did was watch sports or, or listen to music. It's like, why don't you take a photography class, you could maybe be a sports photographer. And, you know, a couple years earlier, I just realized, you know, I have nothing to lose anymore. Because I had nothing to gain. There was no, no, there was no expectations. So I thought, I'm going to go all in and that's when I just I decided I bought a camera. The next day, I signed up to community college, to learn, you know, something about photography, which I didn't know much about. And I said, for the first time, like, I am dedicated, I'm going to do this. And a year later, I was shooting professional sports. I wasn't making much money, but I was doing what I love to do for the first time. And that's what led to a 20 something year career in that.

Brad Miller 6:58
Yeah, it's so you found you're passionate about and love to do. And that led you to a career in sports photography. And but there's somewhere along the line, things didn't quite work out in that part of your life in your professional life as a photographer, and that led you to go some different directions. You ran into some adversity, the theme of what our podcast is about is helping people overcome adversity. So share a little bit of that part of the story where you run into some blocks and some things you had to overcome.

Vincent Pugliese 7:24
Yeah, we were kind of normally I'd gotten out of it. You know, my school days were behind me. I was. I was named William Randolph Hearst national photographer the year out of college. So I was the top college student, which is the opposite when I was in high school, met my awesome wife at college at Ohio University and got jobs in Evansville. So but we became normal. We both got staff jobs right out of college. And unlike before now, I got complacent. We, we got a mortgage. I got a car payment. We had student loans. We started buying stuff on credit card, we became just like everybody else. We became real my real life. He did that. Yo, it didn't hit as much as I went after it. Yeah, okay, gotcha. Nobody made me do it. I just basically decided to be like everybody else, which is not me. And so what happened was, I was, you know, shooting post pro sports. So from Evansville, I was going to St. Louis to shoot the Rams games back when they were the best team and football and the Titans and, you know, I really aggressive in terms of shooting these things. And I won international sports photographer the year, which is the biggest award, you could win in my field. And at the same time, I want it Elizabeth won a major award, the same competition. And we got flown to Washington, DC to National Geographic for the award ceremony. Really big deal. At the same time, Elizabeth got pregnant with our first son, we were married a year, two years earlier. So it all came down. Andrew is now 14. He's one month from being born. I just win this award. And everybody's like, Oh, this is when you get your raise because I was only making $32,000 a year. But I was you know, considered one of the top so I'll went to my boss for the for the interview in terms of what, in terms of the rays. And he said to me, You know you had your best year ever. I know you have the baby coming blah, blah, blah, but the best we could do is give you 3%.

Brad Miller 9:12
You know, that's,

Vincent Pugliese 9:13
that's things. And it's one of those things where you just go. And I said to him, I said no matter what I do, because I work 20 hours overtime every week to make sure that photography was fantastic. We all did, we went above and beyond. I said to him, no matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, no matter how many awards, I win, I just stopped myself. And this is my dream career. Now this is like this is the thing I've been fighting for for 10 years. And I remember just sitting there and saying it's over. I can't do this, because I've got a baby on the way. And I looked out into the newsroom I saw and it just hit me how disgruntled so many people were.

Brad Miller 9:50
You had an aha moment in you

Vincent Pugliese 9:52
total aha moment where you realize all the stuff that you've been hearing now it makes sense. Now it makes sense. It's like I don't want to be 65 complaining about my job and struggling with money. And so I went home, I was really, you know, supposed to be working. I just left. And I called my dad to see if I could do some work for him. And he said, No. See my dad.

Brad Miller 10:14
That hurts to desert. My goodness. It so

Vincent Pugliese 10:16
that's that moment I still remember like was yesterday but he said something that changed my life. He said, I've been trying to tell you this for years, you haven't listened. Maybe you listen this time. He said, You have a skill, but you're not using it correctly. And I'm listening. I'm like, What do you mean? you're settling for 30 years, you become a really good photographer you didn't used to be, but you worked really hard. You became that but you're settling for $32,000 a year and benefits. Where you can go shoot sports, you can go shoot weddings, you can go shoot commercial work, you can make as much money as you want to make and control your schedule. But you're settling for this and hear your dad say that well, usually your parents push you towards something more safe. Right? And that was the way my mom was very, you know You had a government job slow and steady. And we decided that day to start a business. And it was also though

Brad Miller 11:05
he's telling you not settle. That's awesome. That's an awesome thing. And, and you heard it and you get something about it. Did you? What were some of the actions that you took to not settle?

Vincent Pugliese 11:15
Immediately? I started calling photographers in the phone book. You remember the phone book? I Oh, yeah. That Susan got the phone. And every one of them turned me down. Can I be an assistant? Can I be a second shooter? They all turned me down. They knew I was they'd seen me in the newspaper. I've been there for five years, four years. And finally, I just took the phone book and I threw it against the wall. And I was like, you know, you always hear like, if you can't beat them, join them. I was like, Well, you can't join them. We're gonna beat them. So that's literally how it started not knowing anything about business. So whenever people say like, I don't know anything about business. I'm not a business person. I'm not not. Neither were we. We were employees. And but we had to if we wanted the life of freedom that we wanted, we need to get uncomfortable and do that. Yeah.

Brad Miller 11:56
So what were somebody So you started this business? So we're doing like wedding. So this type of thing. Yeah, we start with the weddings, because

Vincent Pugliese 12:03
we figured we can get the Saturdays. We can make more money in short amount of time. And we can take our journalism background and just bring that to weddings. So everybody like

Brad Miller 12:14
your wife was with you on the Yeah, she's a

Vincent Pugliese 12:17
better photographer than I am. Yeah. So I just downplayed the story so much, because we just keep talking about these things. But she's a phenomenal photographer, but she also wasn't into the business idea. So we need to go into this with a with a baby on the way, by the way, right? She's about to birth. And we booked our first wedding a week before Andrew was born. We didn't know at

Brad Miller 12:37
the end, you had to have a transformation of your mindset that didn't events, you had to transform from a kind of a corporate gig type of thing to business and entrepreneurial type of thing immediately from employee to entrepreneur. And now what do I read? What do I study? Did you leave your job immediately?

Vincent Pugliese 12:54
No, we weren't that bold. Looking back. As soon as everything what would you do different And I would have invested in myself more, instead of being so scarce with our money, even though we paid out our debt in three years, but I would have, I would have quit sooner knowing what the potential was, but we didn't know. So I was scared.

Brad Miller 13:17
You know, there's that unknown factor. And, you know, as such, there's such a tug. Also, when you're in the corporate world, when you're in the world, when most of us are there's such that tug, almost that magnetic thing to keep you there in that world. Oh, including,

Vincent Pugliese 13:34
including your co workers were crazy to go start a business. They're all not doing it. Why would you? Why wouldn't you just be happy with what you have? Right? Just be happy you have a job. And, and I didn't want that. Oh,

Brad Miller 13:45
that sounds like settling, doesn't it?

Vincent Pugliese 13:47
It absolutely sounds like that's what everybody wants you to do. Because I think if you go and do it, it shines a light on them that they didn't do it.

Brad Miller 13:55
Sure. Sure. And the with the with the risk does come The possibility of failure, but also comes the possibility of success and reward. So, tell me a little bit about some of the processes that you did kind of on the, I want to delve a little bit further with you that's on this area of this inner work of mindset change that you had and what, what happened to what kind of work did you have to do in this mindset change? I know you said you had to take action immediately. But what kind of inner work did you do? Did you look for books? Did you look for tapes? Did you look for a any kind of spiritual insight? Did you? Where did you go to feed yourself in this area?

Vincent Pugliese 14:42
Yeah, it's a great question. Because, you know, we were talking earlier about masterminds like that wasn't around in 2005 the way it is today, there wasn't the online community that you can just go I want to be a part of a group of people doing what I want. I'm doing what I want to be doing. So we relied on books a lot, you know, money wise it was Dave Ramsey. He's the one that guided us through. But I mean, mindset wise in terms of business, it was people like Seth Godin. I found his books within two months of doing this, and I just consume them. Dan Miller, just people, people that were just thinking differently about this world differently about what the possibilities were, and how to get over the limiting beliefs that we have. And for me, and I'm not sure if there's anybody for me, it was very much getting going from being selfish to being generous. Because I went from a phase where not faze but a life where, you know, you got to get what you got to get right. You've got to do what's best for you. Sure. And that's the way the world works. And then you meet somebody like Seth, where it's just like, generosity will get everybody with Ben Ziegler. You know, you have anything in life you want. If you just help enough other people get what they want.

Brad Miller 15:54
Sure. And that that message of how you become fed and how you receive Abundance at a generosity is such an anathema to as a lot of the thinking we have, which is geared around lack and needy what you can and it just, you know that consumption type mentality. So they had to break some patterns for you. They're

Vincent Pugliese 16:14
totally you know, and I came from a doggy dog world of New York, you know, in terms of what you're shooting, I was a photographer there and it was no, it...