Episode 14 - Mentoring - Special Guest - Curt Mercadante

The DCF Experience

Curt is a marketeer, business man, self described Freedom Club Owner and successful mentor and coach.

Based out of the US, Curt has created a Freedom movement of people who want to change their life through a number of core ways

1. Identifying the individuals super powers

2. Aligning a vision

3. Creating the structure around you for alignment of the above

4. Identifying 3 outcomes to persue - daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly and so on

5. Flow

Background and Experience

He was in the midst of running an extremely successful public relations/advertising agency and landing one big client after another. You move around a lot in that walk of life. Regular flights to catch meetings…conference calls and follow-ups…managing the collective anxieties of a demanding clientele base.

His family was growing and so was his bank account. Mercadante did what he could to embrace the little moments that matter whenever they cascaded into view, but he also had to contend with the next thing: the next meeting, the next fire to put out, the next brand to promote. A carousel ride that continued in seeming perpetuity, Mercadante was satisfied with the growth of his business — because, why wouldn’t he have been? — though he couldn’t help but feel that there was something missing from the rush a surging career is supposed to offer.

Then he remembered what a superhero looks like.

Nicholas Mercadante, Curt’s father, was that superhero, almost quite literally. After graduating with an engineering degree from the University of Notre Dame, the elder Mercadante embarked on a career path that would be tough for any child to live up to. When your dad helps design electronic systems on space craft and fighter jets — you needn’t pine for comic book characters to save the day. All you have to do is look across the dining room table if you want to catch a glimpse of someone who boasts actual interstellar superpowers.

But that wasn’t the primary reason why Mercadante’s father set such a high standard. What it really came down to was work ethic. Doing what needed to be done. When Nick Mercadante found himself facing a career switch later in life, he got a paper route. A paper route! Why?

Simple: income was necessary. If there was going to be a gap in employment, that gap had to be filled. There wasn’t time for the ego to obstruct necessity, especially when there were mouths to feed. The only problem was time. There just never seemed to be enough of it.

His father was a superhero, a man who literally helped change the world. Curt, for all of his strides made professionally, did not feel as though he was contributing to the verifiable betterment of anyone’s lives. He was a skilled distributor of information, sure. But just because he was successful did not mean he was particularly proud. Or fulfilled.

A change was coming. Not right away, not in one fell swoop. Time, precious and fleeting, you could watch the seconds fall from the clock all while wishing you were doing something else somewhere else. Curt needed some of that time to reestablish his direction without letting too much of it go to waste. He began by informally coaching clients, friends, and colleagues.

It was a natural fit. Curt had a snowglobe perspective of what his charges were dealing with. He could see the avenues in which they were misdirecting their energy, the biggest hurdle that causes most professionals to stumble. Indecision is another trap most fall victim to, be it due to a lack of confidence or woeful procrastination. Curt cut through the noise and guided his fledgling clientele away from their self-destructive habits and watched as they reached new heights at a pace so rapid, even he was surprised.