Pearls of Wisdom from Author & Prosperity Activist Pat Mesiti

Felicity Cohen: Hello, I’m Felicity Cohen. I’m so excited to introduce you to my wellness warriors podcast. For over 20 years, I’ve been a passionate advocate for helping thousands of Australians find solutions to treating obesity and health-related complications through surgical intervention and holistic managed care.

My podcast is dedicated to all the people. Past, present and future who has helped shape my journey and continue to inspire me to work consistently to achieve a healthier Australia in both adults and future generations. I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to my wellness warriors podcast today. I have the absolute pleasure of introducing you to Pat Mersiti who is a prosperity activist. What an incredible title. I’m very excited because this is something really new for me on the wellness warriors podcast and a completely different new conversation. I grew up myself with a family of accountants and they were all kind of connected to world of finance. My father was the president of the Australian society of accountants for many years and worked in a public company as a finance director. And brother, who’s also been involved in that sector and I am absolutely hopeless. I think, I think I am.

Pat Mesiti: I think you’re doing quite well. I think you’re doing quite well. It’s great to be here and absolutely amazing what you’re doing in the lives of people.

And cause prosperity is all areas of life, not just money, but.their health, their inner world, their outer world, their mental health. And so thanks for having me on.

Felicity Cohen: Absolutely. And I think there’s a lot of crossover and cross-pollination between some of the messages that I’m sharing with patients on a daily basis and what you’re sharing with your clients also.

Pat Mesiti: It’s a lot of it’s to do with mindset with people, but in Australia and the Western world, we’re not taught to think prosperity. We’re taught to think handout, bottom of the pile, you know, who can support me. We’re not taught to be self-sufficient and self-reliant, and that’s one of the things that I’m advocating to people is that every one of you listening to this has the recipe.

You have knowledge, you have information that you could help others with. I mean, you know what you’re doing with wellness it’s information, that’s helping people get better. And why shouldn’t you be financially rewarded by that and for that. And I’m Dr. John Demartini a good friend of mine said those of us that are solving the biggest pains of humanity, whether it’s physical, emotional, spiritual, we should be the most highly rewarded. And I tend to agree with that. So congratulations for what you’re doing, Felicity.

Felicity Cohen: Thank you so much. I want to start with a quote that I read it on your Instagram page this morning, that really resonated with me.

And that is that generosity breeds abundance. And if you want to try and encourage others, or you’re looking for financial abundance and you need to give it abundantly. And I actually really loved that quote on your page. And I’d like to ask you a little bit more about that, that kind of thought process, first of all.

Pat Mesiti: If you give, you get. It’s the law of reciprocity, that’s a big word from a boy from Bankstown. It’s a lot of sewing and reaping. A farmer gives into the earth and reaps the harvest. It’s a universal law. Back the ancients used to call it seed time and harvest. And something has to leave from your hand to return back into your life.

And you see that with people that are generous and they give, they’re the most happiest people. Over the years I’ve been speaking out 43 years and I’ve traveled to some of the most impoverished countries where people are giving and, and they’re doing things. I went to the Philippines and they bought me a thing called balut, which was, I couldn’t eat it, but the villages went and bought that.

And, and you could see there was a joy in giving, but the other side of it is when we open up. We open up, what I call, we open up heaven over us. And, and I, I believe it’s, it’s a material thing, it’s a spiritual thing, but it’s also something that builds us up on the inside. I’ve never met a happy stingy person yet.

And, and I would encourage people, whatever you want in life, give it away. You want love to give it away. You want peace, give it away. you want money, give it away and it will come back to you. And there are many people go, oh, you know, I can’t afford to give, I can’t afford not to give. And as I teach my students you don’t want to be living on what you’re earning.

You want to be living on what you’re giving. And and there’s interesting story for this. If I may share, it’s one of the story, a little boy, he’s sitting downstairs at an apartment and, and this guy drives up in this brand new red Ferrari, and a little boy goes, wow, you must be so rich. And the guy has got his jewelry in his suit.

He goes, look, I’m not rich. My brother is rich. He said, my brother bought me this Ferrari and all these clothes for my 60th birthday. And a little boy looks at me. He goes, I wish. I wish I wish I could be a brother like that.

Felicity Cohen: Oh, that’s so beautiful.

Pat Mesiti: But that’s the power, the power isn’t in you getting. The power. is in the capacity to be able to do that. So that’s how my worldview in that perspective.

Felicity Cohen: I’m totally on the same page as you. And I love that. And I think it’s a really beautiful, it’s a beautiful message, but I feel that that’s the way I live. And I thought it was really nice to read that quote from you and how that equates to wealth and abundance. Yeah. Because it’s not something that I’d thought about in those terms.

Pat Mesiti: And people I showed have. You never possess which you’re unwilling to pursue. And there’s a sense of being content with what you have while pursuing what you want. And people fall in love with the end result, like here, with what you’ve got going.

They want to be fit and they want to be healthy and they want to lose weight. And they fall in love with the golden pot at the end of the rainbow. I encourage people. If you fall in love with the process, the results guaranteed. But if you fall in love with the end result and I’m talking about vision casting or anything like that, falling in love with the process that we were talking before off camera, you know, I know what I’ve got to do to, you know, get myself down my seven kgs.

And you said Pat, did you run this morning? And I went hm. But the process, and it’s the same with creating wealth. I was asked on a television show, how do you get rich quick? I said, slowly. Because I don’t believe in get rich quick schemes. I don’t believe they work. I believe they’re totally unsustainable.

And when people get rich quick, what happens is their income level generally shrinks the level of their mindset. You look at Mike Tyson, $400 million in boxing, ended up broke. So many people that win these huge pots of gold. Andrew jet would have got $318 million and lost it in three years. The money shrunk to the level of their thinking. Your income, your business, your life, your health, your relationships. Our future prosperity is in the confines of our mind and our mind either build us a prison or a palace, just depends what material you use.

And if I can encourage everyone to work on their mindset. Every 60 seconds someone becomes a millionaire. Why not you? And if not, why not? Stop disqualifying yourself. Stop trivialising yourself, stop comparing yourself. If you want to be miserable, just compare yourself to other people, you know. And I think these are vital keys to creating wealth and prosperity in all aspects of life.

Felicity Cohen: ‘I’m fascinated to learn a little bit about your background and how you actually got into this space and what led you here? So you’re a boy from Bankstown. Okay.

Pat Mesiti: Well, I was raised about you. I call it parents. and I, I didn’t do too well at school. I was kicked out of school in year 10 and then went to another school with the same Catholic colleges.

My journey became really real to me when I became a person of faith and I don’t, I don’t shove that down anyone’s throat. And, and I ended up being a youth leader and was trying to raise money for this youth program that we had. And we were, we grew from a hundred, 120 to over 12 to 15,000 young people at rallies.

And I had no money and I decided to just study prosperity and, and of course I opened up doors for me to speak in, in the corporate world because in church world, I mean, you know, unless you’re one of the mega preachers and then you get paid well, I will leave that one line. but but I was working with young people and then I, I started a drug or didn’t start.

I took over a drug rehabilitation center called teen challenge. It was $276,000 in debt losing $27,000 a month with four boys in the program. And when I took it out of the facility, when the boys had a choice between prison and that facility. They chose prison. That’s bad. And, and they were running the facility the way they were running their finances.

Now I’m not the accountant. me, every time I hear the word budget, I feel like I’m getting a wedgie and maybe your family didn’t want to hear that. But to me, I started off applying principles. And I cleared that debt in three months and, and I, you know, went through a terrible divorce in 2001 through my own stupidity.

And that caused a lot of trauma, a lot of a lot of mental health challenges. So I had to rebuild again and I just applied what I knew. Many of us discount what we know and on you. Okay. Well, I’ve got to be careful of who I’m hanging around with. Like, I got to be careful what input comes into my eyes and my ears.

I’ve got to be careful what comes out of my mouth and, and I want to tell everyone out there. Everyone has had failure in their life. I don’t care who you are. You’ve all had failures. And I say to people, I’ve got no rocks to throw at anyone. and I’m here to tell you that you’ll find these don’t need to be fatal and your mistakes are not a permanent condition.

You are not a mistake. You are a human being and my encouragement is pick yourself up wherever you’re from and build on what you know, you know,

Felicity Cohen: you’ve absolutely led me into the question that I was just had on the tip of my tongue. And I was going to ask you next about your, how you feel about failure, because so many people who work in a similar space as you talk about how our failures also shape us.

Yeah. a lot of people when they’re in that space and before they get to that point of recovering from failure, they find it hard to see that failure is real. It is important. And I think for me personally, as well, if you haven’t been there, you don’t actually get that. That is part of loving the process.

It’s part of the journey and it is, I believe part of that journey to success.

Pat Mesiti: Failure doesn’t have to be fetal if you own your stuff. And, you know, I owned my stuff and I, you know, I went and got help for my stuff, my issues. Most people go for help far too late, whether it’s weight, mindset, money, relationships. You know, I should’ve gone for help before.

And you know, if your marriage is in trouble, go and get some help, you know you’re not responsible for what the other person does or doesn’t do. You’re responsible for what you do. And then of course, you know, I, I was falsely accused of, of stuff, you know, in 2015, which was thrown out of court, but the media, you know, especially if your personality, they love to create stories in the narratives.

And we know that media, they lie. they, if there was a, if there was a, a I’ll use it, I’ll use you as an illustration. If there was a sandwich board out there that said Felicity gives $1 million to kids, right?. Alright. Then another one Felicity caught with three hunks in a bedroom. Which one? Which one do you think people are gonna read?

And what’s going to sell the papers?

Felicity Cohen: The scandal. What is it about human nature?

Pat Mesiti: That to that bottom and tell her that people want. And that’s, that’s, that’s, what’s built empires. it’s like the rolling stones once said, and they call him the bad boys, he said, well, you don’t hear about the good kids all that much.

And, and, and see failure. A couple of things on how to handle failure. Number one, own it. Number two, get help. Number three, make sure that you don’t internalise it. And if you’re going to fail, fail forward. Every failure has a disappointment. If all you take out of that is disappointment, you’re really going to be a depleted individual.

So what can I learn from this failure? And the next thing is, here’s what I tell people. Look best way to learn is through other people’s mistakes. The hardest way to learn this through your mistakes. But the insane thing is some people never learn from either of those two. And if you’ve made mistakes, you’ve made errors in your life, own it.

And don’t worry about the trolls and the nitpicking, you know, thumb sucking whingers. They’re going to be there anyway. And I say to people, Felicity, you may want to use this. My friends don’t need an explanation and my enemies aren’t going to believe me anyway. Why am I going to spend my life, explaining myself to people who help bend on my dimise.

You gotta be your own champion. You’ve gotta be your own master to your life. I’m sorry. I’ll give long answers to short question.

Felicity Cohen: I’m loving it. That’s fabulous. There’s so many pearls of wisdom in there. So I really appreciate you sharing all of this. And I think for anyone who’s watching this or listening to the wellness warriors podcast, there are so many takeaways already, and we’ve only just got started.

So I’m absolutely loving listening to it. Thank you so much.

Do you think that there’s been in terms of your mindset and shift in terms of what you’re teaching your students? What have you seen that’s changed about what you’re impressing on people over the last 12, 18 months?

Pat Mesiti: Look, there’s a lot of fear out there at the moment and fear is a disempowering, I call, well, forgive me if I use a strong answer, demonic entity. It’s an evil thing and it, it can cause you to be depleted, disempowered, give up, throw hands, or it could drive you. When COVID hit. I had hundreds of thousand dollars invested in events, flights, and it just got wiped off the planet. And I got so discouraged.

I went through a walk, the golf course. I saw the buildings where I have my meetings empty and we quickly swung our business into an online model. Well, our business grew by 40%. And what I want to tell people is this you all have information inside of you. This is an information age. Whether it be wellness, spirituality, function-wise, law, accounting.

This is a great time where crisis can meet unbelievable opportunity. And if you get the right knowledge, I mean, every month we do webinars and seminars to people why don’t I teach how to monetise your knowledge? two people want to learn how to, they can invest in a, in a, in a, in this new economy and and, and get information and then apply it.

Don’t let these things disempower you. I should, to my daughters, he’s a teenager and, and in, in lockdown Sydney. And and I said, all right, straight up, what you need to do is don’t worry about just doing, do your schoolwork, but normally it’s Tanya go and find a course or beauty or eyelashes or whatever, and she’s, she’s into it right now, you know?

And then once she gets that skill, we get a market. It we’re going to promote it. It’s a great time for people to flip the narrative in our head. I hope that answers the question.

Felicity Cohen: Oh, absolutely. And I hear often people talking, you know, using the word pivot and I definitely think that, you know, having that space, that time to focus on innovation.

I think that we can be more innovative than ever before, because we’ve been thrown into that crisis point in time, where for many businesses that’s been a need. And if you don’t, that’s when things are going to get difficult. And I think coming back to some of your earlier responses, if you focus on. the disappointment then maybe you’re not going to have the energy or the foresight to focus on what could be

Pat Mesiti: one of my students Rachel with it, I’ll give it to students, both in the UK, Rachel and Paul, Paul won’t even let me use this in him.

He’s so introverted. But Paul was a sign writer. I shall give you three stories. Paul’s assigned writer. And he said, well, how am I going to get, how can I monetise this? I said, kit online. It’s a great niche. It’s a niche that is an inch wide and a mile. Well, he launched using our system 75,000 pounds in his first webinar, Rachel, with us, another young lady, she launched a business called Fitpreneur and it’s like dive fitness.

I mean, I don’t know if that leaves me cold. I mean, can you make your main, a two, two for a start, but don’t do that. Please. Don’t do that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for hurting people’s mind, but that. She’s seven figures. And the other one is a lady that I’m featuring in October. her name is Elizabeth Hughes.

She was a single mom. She lost her job June COVID because she was an event coordinator and went home crying, got an email of a database of. Joined our 30 K 30 day challenge. And the concept was if we can help you make $30,000 in 30 days, we’ll give you the $30,000. So we had to, we, we, we taught people for 30 days.

The last week we chose one person randomly out. We chose her. She’d never spoken online before never had a webinar before all she had was a little e-commerce idea. Well, her first webinar, 128,000, her second one generate another 196. She would have done probably about seven to $800,000 in the last 12 months.

Wow. All because she had a little idea in her head and she didn’t think, but every people want to know, well, how do I, how do I turn myself into an, an e-commerce business from home and, and her story I’m featuring her in October. Amazing. And none of these people are great speakers. They’ve just got information and I want to encourage everyone out there. You are a cash making machine. You are asset rich with knowledge, use it. Don’t stick it under a carpet somewhere, you know, and yep.

Felicity Cohen: Self-belief and having a positive mindset, is everything.

Pat Mesiti: Correct correct. And thinking. But we’re not taught to think like millionaires, Felicity in Australia and New Zealand, come on Australia.

We want everybody to rise to the middle. And what are we going to do? If you’re successful, we’re going to tear you down. We’re going to tear down that we’re not teaching people. How do you prosper? How do you create a, a prosperous mentality? How did you create life? that, that is one of abundance and one of giving, we’re not taught that in our culture soundly in Australia.

We’re like, just take while the government look after you. The pension is below the poverty line and they have no capacity to be able to do that. We need to encourage free thinking in all areas of life, but particularly in the area of creating wealth because what worked yesterday is not going to work today.

Look, I’m 62 years of age. This year. I’ve been speaking now for 44 years. I have never seen such dress. Violent quick, oppressive change so quickly in my entire life, on this planet in a short period of time and it’s getting worse. So we can either cower under that or we can rise up and I can assure you if you cower, you’re gonna hurt yourself financially.

But if you rise up and use what you know, you, you can actually create financial freedom for you.

Felicity Cohen: I want to share with you something that I learnt working with bariatric or weight loss surgical patients when I’d been working in this industry for about 10 years. And it took me 10 years to learn the correlation between achieving greater health and wellbeing to financial health and wellbeing.

And that happened one day when a patient came to see me and this particular lady, she was well over 200 kilos before she had surgery. Her parents came with her. To an information session. And they were worried that she was not going to survive. She had surgery, she is living the dream. I still keep in touch with this particular lady.

And this is going back to 2004. When I met her. A few years later, she came back to see me and she told me that she had completely changed her financial situation that she was because of her self-confidence and self-esteem her self-confidence. She changed her investment strategy. Everything about her financial health and wellbeing had grown exponentially alongside her health and wellbeing.

And, and that’s when I learned that there’s a massive correlation correlation. And interestingly enough, so many people, when they look at the investment for weight loss and their health, they’re so worried about investing in and making that financial committee. When typically they’re going to totally change the trajectory of their health, but also their financial health.

Yeah. It’s a really fascinating,

Pat Mesiti: yeah, it’s an incredible story because you know how we do some things is how we do all things. You know, for me as a presenter, I want to keep working on my craft. How do I get better? I didn’t speak. And I said that 43, 44 years, I still get nervous. Every time I click on that webinar, you know, and people go, why you’re doing it 44 years.

I don’t want to disappoint. I want to get better at what I do and, and, and, and all of us inside of ourselves, if we can just flip that switch and be on and be aware you know, this lady, obviously the weight loss affected her income.

Once you flip that, magic happens.

Unbelievable. And it’s happened to so many others too.

Felicity Cohen: They tell me with self-confidence they go after other jobs, they go after the promotions. So, yeah, it’s fascinating to see those changes in people. And I love that because I think it’s just so powerful.

Pat Mesiti: Talk to Bob Proctor. Who’s an outstanding w he just did a webinar only a few weeks ago. It just tell me the hugest endorsement.

I mean, I could not believe. Yeah, but he talks about everything starts up here. Everything. You see everything in this room and that camera, that light, those clothes, that, that picture, everything came out of someone’s mind. And, and so often people don’t realise that there is their mind is their greatest asset, and it’s got nothing to do with education, nothing at all, because me, I flunked maths at school.

But I’ve written 10 best sellers. I, English is my second language. My parents were from Columbia. my writing looks like chicken scratch. You know, I don’t, I still don’t know how to use a computer. I barely know how to copy and paste. but I say to people, I never let my education get in the way of my income.

And if people could just remove that and realise of the magnificent inside of them, the goal that’s inside of them, we’re going to mind that just like, just like you go to mind for diamonds and, and those diamonds are found in dark places. They’re not found, you know and I want to encourage people to use what you know, and help other people and, and be rewarded financially.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing. You’ve written 10 books. Tell me, how did you start the first book for someone who felt like, you know, you maybe, did you have, what inspired you? What was it that made you actually your very first one?

Pat Mesiti: Need. To be honest with you, I heard about a friend of mine. speaking and, and those, they speak for Amway.

And he was selling these books by the way. I thought he saw all these books by the thousands. I could tell this, the people that rock up in my meeting, I’d never bought. So I Dictaphone my first book, wake up and drink because for me to write, I don’t, I’m not that that good. And my mind thinks far too fast, you know, so I Dictaphone it, it took me 18 months, and then I had people come in and help me with editing and whatever.

And then my next one, I wrote in four months. And then my next one, now I can write a book in matter of weeks, you know? my wife’s encouraging me to write another one on finances, but we’re so flat out with what we’re doing on webinars and zoom calls, but the process. And here’s what I say to people. If you want to write a book, start like this in the beginning.

Hey, it was a great start for God. You know, I SWAT well, once upon a time that just, just start and don’t worry about getting it right, because you can move things around. Just stop. A book is written one sentence at a time. One word at a time, one paragraph at a time, don’t go to the conclusion. And I say to people this, and I, you know, sometimes people get offended by the statement.

I say, look, God sent his son, but he left his book. That’s that? That should tell you something about how important books are. all of the greats have written books and no one ever thought of themselves as great writers. See this, you can be a great writer. Forget. You want to be a bestseller and bestsellers don’t necessarily mean the best written you look at Robert Kiyosaki’s books.

They are not the best written books, but they appeal. They touch a human need. And if you’re going to write a book appeal to the, do one letter at a time, one word at a time, one paragraph at a time, a number to speak to human need. If you deal with human need, you’ll always be. So I write books that appeal to human need.

what do people leave right now? is it weight loss? Is it how to raise kids is how to raise your grandkids? How to, you know, have your own organic vegetable garden. All of these things unleashes that sell, and that’s what I would encourage people to do. Get out there, write your books or contact us.

We’re happy to help you. I’m not a publisher, but we certainly do help. Put the legs on what, on what they know in the last three years, three or four years, I’ve had 39 of my students got bestseller from a standing start, 39. And I say to people, you don’t want to write a book to make money, forget it, Alicia, JK Rowling’s or you know Jeffery Archer, you know, Kiyosaki or something like that.

Figured it. Look, you got to use that for your brain. Your book is the best business card you’ll ever have. You’re positioning yourself as an expert. Why don’t feel like an expert? No one who’s an expert feels like an expert. You’re positioning yourself and it gives you an automatic leg up of authority. If someone gives you a business card and someone gives you a book, which one’s most impressive.

Felicity Cohen: I mean, I’m going to go for the book

Pat Mesiti: every single time and they can lose a business card, but highly unlikely, they’re going to lose. And

Felicity Cohen: I love audio books now, too, as well.

Pat Mesiti: My latest book called unbreakable I went to studio and did a audio, nothing. I was like, Ugh, it took me so long to get it right.

Cause sometimes I say, you know everything rather than everything, you know, and also I was going to I’m still a Bankstown boy. so we did that and the audio books are great and people . Give a voice or the person,

Felicity Cohen: oh, I’d much rather hear the author read it themselves. So I love that you’ve done that yourself.

Tell us about unbreakable, what is it about?

Pat Mesiti: It was about the pivoting that we had to do over our either this time and if people want it, look, I’ll send you a link. You can give it away as a freebie to all your, your your, your customers and clients. it’s my gift. So we wrote about that. How to capitalise on the oncoming biggest transfer of wealth online.

And if you’re not online, you’re going to be off track, but you don’t want to be online and off track. So it’s getting back together. So unbreakable is about mindset and then about how to establish yourself in the online business, a niche that’s, that’s the core of it.

Felicity Cohen: You’ve obviously had a very strong connection with youth, you know, from your role in Bankstown, as a father, what do you think is some of the most significant challenges that youth are facing now and how do they perceive that big question around creating wealth for themselves in the future?

Pat Mesiti: Are we talking in wealth or life or both?

Felicity Cohen: Both, both. Prosperity in general.

Pat Mesiti: I’m glad you’re asking this, Felicity, because this has been weighing on my heart for the last 48 hours. Our young people today are so fearful. They are scared to go for a walk. They’re scared. Melbourne, Victoria suicide rates gone up 194% in the last 12 months. The sexual abuse hotlines are ringing off the Richter scale, and this is not political.

This is fact. There’s an 80% or 40 to 80% increase right now. They are feeling completely overwhelmed. Secondly, they’re not trusting a lot right now. Because contrary to popular belief, young people research. They can get a TikTok. They can go to Instagram and they can, they are the most researched generation in history because of social media, online, YouTube, you name it.

There is a feeling of overwhelm, a feeling of depression out there. And I unlike, say the baby boomers who were like, right, we’re going to rally together and we’re going to, they’re feeling disempowered.

And my advice to any parent out there is as much as you can, fill them with hope, help them create a vision for where they’re going.

Look, take them out to nice places and see nice things. Oh, Pat that’s giving false hope. No, it’s not. It’s creating a picture in their mind, you know, of what they can do and what they can achieve. Because they are very creative. I mean, you look at them, they got out there, they’ve got these selfies. And how do you do that, and they’ve got words and they got all kinds of stuff.

I have no clue how to do that. They are creative. I have my grandchildren, when I have problems with my television or my computer, I call my 10 year old grandson and he knows exactly what to do. So that they’re already intuned in that way. So if we can encourage them to start building. Maybe an online business, moving products, and teaching them to become financially independent within the culture in which they live in. And rather than becoming victims of the culture, they become responders to the culture and they attack it.

It’s like Picasso said, they asked him once, what do you do with the canvas? He said, I attack the canvas. And teach them to not going on the back foot, teach them to be free thinkers, teach them to follow their own narrative, not what they’re dished out. And, you know, the world is always afraid of free thinkers, but the world’s always been empowered and liberated and energised by free thinkers and encourage them to do that in.

Look, I hope that answers the question, but I am concerned for our youth. I’m concerned about things like terminology; party, drugs, recreational drugs, stop that language.

Felicity Cohen: There’s been some stories recently, not just about mental health and obviously the equation we have suicide rates increasing, but also students being caught with actually taking drugs while they’ve been in an online classes.

Pat Mesiti: Absolutely. And it’s more prevalent. And of course today, parents say, ‘well, what I was your age?’ Can I just assure every parent, listen to me, I’m gonna look in that camera. You were never their age. You lived in a completely different world. Our dynamic was a fax machine. You know, these kids at the click of a button have an entire universe open to them.

That’s not even filtered. And I will encourage parents. You have a right to monitor what your child is watching. You have a right to inquire. And as much as you can, and to steer them in the right direction. Young people today need a compass. Our compass that is like a spinning clock. And again, I’m not here to be a moral policeman or anything like that.

We have got what I would call, a moral vacuum that there’s no campuses in life. We have an ethics system, which is moveable. There’s no north. And so kids go, well, you know, I’ll give you an example. I was at a high school seminars, and the young man stood up and was just so angry. I said to him, why are you so angry?

He says, why won’t anybody tell me what’s right and wrong anymore. He was angry. He said, I want to know. And therein lies the problem. People don’t know what they believe anymore.

And so how can we pass it onto our kids? My encouragement to parents is have some absolutes in your life, have some traditions in your life.

It may be like Sunday afternoon is pasta day. We have pasta every Sunday. Sunday afternoons roast lunch, create those traditions, give them a north. Give them things that they can go, yeah, I can build on that.

Like for me, all my daughters, I love cooking. My mom never taught me how to cook. I just watched, you know, I love cooking.

They love cooking. It’s these traditions that we can pass down to our children and it helps them stay connected to us and disconnected with what’s going on out there in the world.

Felicity Cohen: Really great advice. And I think it’s so important for, for us at a stage of life where we can empower our youth as well.

It’s something that I think has to be part of how we’re, what we’re doing every day needs to be connected to how we’re supporting future generations. I think it’s so, so important. No matter what we do now, we need to be empowering generations of the future.

Pat Mesiti: A hundred percent. Steering them north, help them find their north.

And that to a child can be so different. My father, when I was a kid used to go, when you get the bigger you’re going to be a doctor. So I just never got bigger. I stayed at five foot three. I don’t want to be a doctor. I thought I had no intention of being a doctor. Well, you’re going to be a lawyer. And with my family was involved in they needed some good lawyers.

I don’t want to be a lawyer, you know, and, but obviously my father saw something there. Something there that, you know, that was different and he was right. It’s just that I didn’t want to go in that direction. I was too much of a free thinker. I never named my kids after my parents, as most of Italians, Greeks and Lebanese do. I went against my cultural, religious, traditional beliefs.

And I was incredibly stubborn and a fighter. And I think that’s kind of stood me well in life, that stubbornness and the fighter. And as well as that freethinker because I really believe we need to help out kids think. And how do I believe that very passionately. And our education system is not helping them to think. It’s helping them become robots.

And I want to challenge every parent out there, teach your kids not what to think, how to think. Two very different things.

A hundred percent

Teach them how to think.

Amazing. Teaching children to think, but also teaching young you know, all of our youth to think more for themselves use these moments in life to be empowered. And giving them the mental fitness and the capacity to still remain as free thinkers and to focus on what they can achieve in life.

You see, parent goes, well, life will teach them. That’s a very slow and cruel teacher. Give them the tools they need now to think about prosperity, about abundance, about entrepreneurs.

But say something about kids. I used to do these parenting seminars and I’d have the parents on one side of the things on the other. And I’d say, all right, I’m going to ask you a question.

parents, what is it? The number one thing that you think kids want and parents were yelling out loud. I say kids money,

they parents, what do you think they need? they they’d say blah, blah, blah responsibility. They’d say freedom. It’s okay. All right. And merging those two was, was something we would do. And I had the kids debate with the parents. Oh, And what they really thought, you know, you, you say, I want love. Oh, oh dad, you know, you’re worried that you, you work eight, 10 hours a day and I don’t see you.

They don’t care. Let me tell you what they care. Just don’t come home in a bad mood. Just like give me leftovers. When you come home, dad, mom, I don’t want you working 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day. Just don’t come home in a bad mood. Don’t pick on me and don’t take it out.

Felicity Cohen: Great advice. I love that. That’s beautiful. Pearl, you mentioned earlier a little bit about being a man of faith and that, that was something that obviously there was a moment there in, in life when you became involved back in Bankstown, do you think that faith in general, is that something that is, is a lacking? How do we, how do we find that, that piece of the puzzle to give back to children so that they do have an youth so that they do have.

Pat Mesiti: Yeah, look, mine was spiritual faith, and then there’s also faith in general that we need to have. And I don’t think that those two two separate issues mine was, I was brought up in a religious system. It didn’t work for me, but when I had my own choice to me, I was a pretty hard nut. And and I was tough.

I tell you, I was, I w I was tough and. No shrink was going to change me. No, it was a divine encounter that changed my life too, which I still feel it today. I even, when I talk about it, I still feel that it’s powerfully today. Sod when I was 15, 16 years of age. Cause I know what I was like, and I know, and it’s likely we see no one with a theory can take away your experience. And so that’s what I found. And then of course I had to build on that. That was, that was the, the moment, but then there was the process and, and faith is a moment and then involves a process. Because there’s things out there that can steal your faith and you get disillusioned and you throw on the telephone to two of my greatest friends, two great examples of amazing faith Denny and Layla Abdullah, beautiful couple last year. Drunk driver killed their three children in Sydney and and, and, and there, and then nieces, well, it was all over the news and she got on.

But she forgave them and that did that to them. Touch the nation. And they started, I forgive day that’s faith. And I’m here to tell people I’m not asking you to believe what I believe, but whatever you believe just believe it.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing. I love that you’ve had so many years of opportunity to empower and to help so many people inspire them and create their own opportunities through everything that you do. So thank you for everything that you share. I think it’s incredible. And I’m looking forward to learning more myself. It’s been fabulous talking to you.

I think I could sit and ask you a billion questions. I’d love to. But I’m going to finish with one question. And this is something that I love to ask everybody on the podcast who comes onto my wellness warriors podcast. What does wellness mean to you?

Pat Mesiti: Wellness to me means wholeness in my soul first. Wholeness in my mind, wholeness in my body.

Although right now my little temple is looking a bit like a tabernacle. And wholeness in my relationship because I, I think they all work together if my body is fit and healthy, but my relationships are depleted. Really. If I’ve got great relationship in my body’s depleted sick, it’s that holistic approach.

And that’s what it means to me. And thank you for helping people find that zone.

Felicity Cohen: Thank you for saying that. It’s been a pleasure having you here today, and I’m really looking forward to the next opportunity. Please thank Pat Mesiti and I can’t wait to actually also give away that opportunity to cast readings, to listeners, to tap into your book too.

That sounds like a lot of fun.

Pat Mesiti: Absolutely. And we’ll probably give them the audio version as well.

Felicity Cohen: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining the wellness warriors podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you online with us. If you enjoy the series, please leave your review, subscribe and follow it. And we look forward to sharing many more stories with you in the future.