Meet Phillip Cingolani

We recently connected with Phillip Cingolani and have shared our conversation below.

Phillip, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

Growing up in a farm on a small town, I was fortunate enough to witness families communing with the land, drawing a symbiotic relationship that mutually nourished all involved. As most know, farming can be arduous labor. With each generation before me relying solely on farming for their resources and well-being, my childhood was filled with manual labor in fields, gardens, ponds, and everything in between. There were times when I felt I couldn’t give one more breath of effort. After finishing a school day, and 2 hours of football practice in the southern Arkansas heat, going to do farm chores at times felt like the end of the world. During those time, my father guided me the best he knew how on the value of “getting the job done, and done right.” At the time, I didn’t fully resonate with the message. Many years later, with the benefit of hindsight and perspective, I now see that those grueling times raking water-soaked moss from a pond with a spindly leaf rake or climbing a pond hill with a 40LB bucket of minnows in each hand while sinking each foot 18″ into black muck each step of the way provided a highly contrasting texture through which my spirit gained strength and resilience. Since those times, my adult life has been filled with experiences of powerful creating through “getting the job done, and done right.” Throughout all stages of my adulthood whether in an academic, military, or professional setting, my peers have always admired me for my work ethic, and have experienced an expanded version of themselves by following my example, just like my dad illustrated to me so palpably during my childhood.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I moved my family to a 4 acre property in the Ozarks of Arkansas last year. For the better part of the last decade, most of the guiding force for my has been my intuition, especially big decisions. So I placed myself in a nature-filled landscape, opened and aligned my mind and heart, and allowed the Universe to show me each next step. Fast-forward 16 months later, and I spend mornings growing client assets, afternoons growing nourishment for my family and the land, and the evenings growing my ability to express through movement, voice, and bonding with my wife and 6-year-old daughter. Put simply, I live a MAGICAL life.

First, My investment advisory firm, Holy City Prosperity, allows me a medium through which not only I offer a service to the world, but one that satiates a childhood desire of offering financial service and thus relief to my parents as this was my only perceived source of their unhappiness as a child, finances. Watching the relief and ease wash over a client’s aura when I let them know they have enough financial resources for retirement or other goals becomes a very satisfying feeling after yearning to help my parents financially throughout childhood. Currently, Holy City Prosperity provides the financial support for my family and all other ventures. I purposefully keep a much lower than average number of clients for 2 reasons: offering unparalleled attention to clients, and a balanced lifestyle that allows me the greatest Fulfillment, thus my greatest contributions to the Whole.

Second, over the last year I’ve not only rekindled that practice of communing with the land, but taken it to the next level. Each day, one of the most exciting parts of my day, is when I get to walk outside the first time, feel the sunlight kiss my face, and listen and watch for the next step in the molding of this landscape. Over the last year, my connection with the land and all the elements has grown to where not only does it let me know what it wants, but I regularly have intimate energy exchanges with members of the plant kingdom that leave me with tears of joy on my cheeks. It’s come to my realization that I am blessed to be LIVING inside of one my my primary artistic creations, my homestead! Like a never-ending sculpture, this land canvas invites me to exercise my artistic flair, nature wisdom, and pragmatic side all in one. I feel a little bit like Willy Wonka in that I get to create this little world around me just as whimsically-perfect for me as it could possibly be. The results of this are an organically-nourished family, happy well-fed local wildlife, an enchanting living space, and a system to help pass the Wholesome living to the next generation. I’ve encompassed this aspect of my experience under the farming business, Honey Hous3. The intention of Honey Hous3 is 3-fold: 1) Grow organic produce and honey to share with the local community. 2) Provide a family business through which I educate my daughter on nature, growing your own food, and economics. 3) Provide a supportive habitat for local wildlife through cultivating symbiotic relationships with our surroundings.

Third, the discovery of my performer side in adulthood has given me creative fonts through which newfound forms of expression integrate in other areas of my life, thereby making me a more effective father, husband, advisor, and overall human. Having been a part of a number of community plays, musicals, sketch and improv comedy acts led me down a path of discovering and filling in more of my Self. With each new and more involved role, I could feel more of “me” being filled in like a coloring book as I developed the characters. This ever-expanding me increasingly brings more to the table in life for his family, friends, and the planet as a whole. Nowadays, my intuitive movement sessions and vocal lessons have become my church in a way, highlighting areas of resistance that in releasing and allowing free flow, enhance Wholesomeness that reverberates throughout everything I create.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Good question. Generally speaking, between the three categories of qualities, skills, and knowledge, qualities will almost always cut deeper and have more impact than the others. We live in a time where knowledge is at our fingertips, if we don’t know something already it can be integrated into our awareness through convenient means. Similarly, skills can also be learned. Albeit, skills take longer to develop than knowledge, but for the most part attainable through repetition following instruction. Qualities, however, are the inherent nature of someone. Of course qualities can be cultivated, but the qualities that we come into these lives with, the natural aspects of our energy, are the ones we can capitalize on the most pertaining to fulfillment, professional success, sharing our strengths with the world.

In my own experience, undoubtedly, the most impactful quality I’ve witnessed in myself, is my natural tendency to listen to my inner voice. Looking back, my entire life, especially bigger decisions, have always been made intuitively. I was doing it early in my teens and early adulthood before I even realized what I was doing. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago when I started intentionally developing and listening to my intuition that more of my journey’s inner workings became colored in to me. Boldly stated, I believe this has the potential to be everyone’s #1. That inner voice has much more perspective, through more dimensions, than the mind we use for weighing pros and cons. Listen to it. In order to be seamlessly guided by intuition instead of logi-sizing one’s way through life, trusting it is the first step, it can be heard whether you admit it’s there or not. From there, taking action on any guidance. It could be as small as a traffic turn, or as large as a move across the country. Of course small things are easy to start with, and the confirmation you receive from them comes more quickly when you realize it come to form. This helps build trust in your own inner voice, and you increasingly calibrate it from there using your experience and the props that present themselves.

Resourcefulness is the next quality that comes to mind. I believe another way this is said in personality tests is being a maximizer or an optimizer. Throughout my life I can trace a continuous string of actions and exceeding results all containing the common thread of doing a lot with a little. So often, I see people stop a process or plan because this one element didn’t fall into place or wasn’t there when expected. There will always be things come up in creating our vision that we can call issues, these are the seasoning of the process that bring us to a deeper understanding of the overall picture. With issues, comes a more contrasting experience, comes a more textured experience, comes a more felt experience, comes a more impactful understanding of the experience.

The bright and constructive approach I take to life would be the other quality that comes to mind. An oversimplified way of saying this is I’m a glass-half-full-er. Whatever anyone yearns to create or achieve, a positive attitude is a must to fully enjoy the overall experience. Grinding it out in an overly rigid manner, even if a person is meeting the goals they’ve set for themselves, is not nearly fulfilling as appreciated flow. Letting loose on the reins a bit, allowing the Universe to support your vision, comes with a much greater feeling of satisfaction when milestones are met. I’ve done it both ways, and once I saw behind the curtain of how much easier things can be, there was no going back. Personally, I haven’t set traditional “goals” for many years now. It’s too suffocating, too concrete, too inflexible. Instead of goals, I use active imagination. As everything we create in form is sourced from mind, I enjoy guiding my vision as it percolates and bubbles into existence in my mind first. The most effective way I’ve found to do this is going right into active imagination after my morning meditation, after my mind is awake and clear, this is where the most creative power can be delivered to the vision. Something to note is that when it does come to form, it may not look exactly like it did in the mind. Quite often, the elements observed in active imagination can be more symbolic than literal.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

Ahh the generation old question, do I allocate more energy to perceived strengths or perceived weaknesses? In general, I am a supporter of giving energy to the things that are working, flowing along even, rather than choosing to give a lot of attention to a rocky road. To be any more specific, would be case-dependent. Sharing from my own life an approach I’ve adopted pertaining to this idea. It involves a little linguistic substitution……

Instead of strengths, let’s call it fulfillment, because any activity someone does that is fulfilling, will inherently contain a strength of theirs. Regarding Holy City Prosperity, there is a great deal of regulatory oversight, and rightfully so as people entrust their savings with another with the intent of freedom-giving growth of assets. As the business owner, I choose how to allocate 100% of my attention. There are many facets to running an investment advisory firm. I choose to give my attention to the facets that offer me the greatest feelings of fulfillment: investment management and providing insights to clients. Facets that offer me the least amount of fulfillment include administration, regulation, compliance. With these facets, I minimize my exposure to them by outsourcing the task up until the point of my review and approval, and not engaging in business activities that require greater degrees of regulation and compliance work, such as advertising, social media, and the like. I understand that some may say this is much to my demise, as I am potentially crippling my ability to grow as a business by not engaging in these rivers of information that pour out to the masses. Consider the time I would have spent developing pages, sites, ads, keeping up with them, ensuring they have the appropriate oversight software, continuously update them to be in compliance, answer questions about them every year from different people……you get the idea. Instead, I choose to spend all that time on things that are fulfilling. And there exists a law of diminishing returns on most activities available to a business owner, thus there’s only so much caressing of investments and minds and hearts I can do before I’m spinning my wheels. As a result, over the years I’ve efficiently honed the time it takes to run my primary business to less than 6-10 hours per week, depending on economic activity. The other 30-40 hours per week that have traditionally been spent on working, I spend on activities that offer Self-fulfillment: family, nature, music, metaphysics, astrology, acting, singing, writing, and gardening. Maybe if I carved out 10 hours a week to do activities that aren’t fulfilling for the purposes of growing my business I could see some explosive growth in revenue! Then what, I’m left with more cash and less fulfillment. No thanks. I suppose I should insert here that I’ve been fortunate enough to realize that more money does not equal more fulfillment. There have been studies that show this relating money to happiness but living it really grounds it in. Money only operates in a singular dimension, plane of existence if you will, whereas Fulfillment is threaded throughout the multidimensional framework of Creation. I’ll go with the one that cuts deeper.

In the process of allocating increasing portions of attention to the above activities that offer fulfillment, I’ve observed the wholesome benefits this offers all aspects of my experience. Holy City Prosperity shines when I come to the table enthusiastic and knowing the actions I take are in resonance with their intended purpose. The expression of my voice and body sings and dances beyond yesterday’s limits when I know the business that supports my family is organically blossoming. The love I have for my daughter and wife is more intimately laced with texture they can feel when my voice, body, and heart are at the top of their game. The garden delivers an abundance of nourishment with healthy hands to tend it and eager mouths to accepts its gifts. I can push the limits diving into my physical, metaphysical, and artistic interests knowing all the vibrant life-giving elements of a human form are there to support me. All of these things feed into one another for the synergistic creating of a highly-satisfying human experience.

Pertaining to your question, it seems as though I’ve blown it up a bit. As I’ve responded, I would be saying go all in on strengths (fulfillment) to be a more well-rounded person. This contradicts the way it was delivered, being a more well-rounded person by improving areas lacking strength. Without going into another linguistic proof, this tells me that the term “weakness” is a self-assigned term that only has meaning to the one giving it. Taking a more wholistic perspective, there’s resonance and absence of it. We resonate with activities that are signature to our frequency and don’t with others. It’s not weakness, just dissonance. You wouldn’t call a laptop weak because it doesn’t dig a hole as effectively as a shovel. It’s simply not a frequency at which a laptop resonates well, Whole-digging. Pun. 🙂

Contact Info:

• Website: https://holycityprosperity.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phillipcingolani