E116 Building self-confidence through failure and responsibility with Travis Chappell

Hey! What's up, Unbroken Nation! Hope that you're doing well, wherever you are in the world today. Super excited to be joined by my guest, Travis Chappell, who is the CEO of guest co-host of top-rated show, build your network, and as an entrepreneur. Travis my friend, how are you today? What is going on in your world?

Travis: Doing well, men. Doing pretty well. How are you?

Michael: Good, brother. I'm super excited to have you on. To create a little context here, before we jump in and talk a little bit about your story and your history. Can you tell a little bit about your journey, and what's led you to where you are today?

Travis: Yeah, man. So just kind of quick 30,000-foot view grew up in an extremely religious household, call it a bubble, don't refer to it as a cult, even though I think it has a lot of those tendencies, but that's kind of how I grew up very good one track-minded. I ended up going to a ministerial college that happened to be on the same campus that I also went to kindergarten and high school and Junior High, elementary, everything all the way through, and the same campus and also went to church. So quite literally the first, you know, 20 years of my life were lived on this 140-acre campus. And by the time I graduated college, I realized I didn't want to be a Ministry, but at that point, I had a degree and Bible in Church Ministries, and to add salt to the wound, it was an accredited degree in Bible Church Ministries, which doesn't really, there are no people, there are not big companies laying out the red carpet for you when you're coming out of a college like that for you to go work.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do at the time, which is door-to-door sales, and then set a goal to make six figures doing that, did that my first year, and at the end of the year instead of being happy about it, I found myself just kind of wondering what I was going to do next because I realized I didn't want to do that for a long period of time, dope into personal development back against the wall. Just trying to figure out what and one of the world I was going to tackle, what I was going to do, was going to do with, not even in just the next couple years ago, you know, what am I do with my career? What do I do with my life?

And podcasting was one of those things that I try and ended up coming in that. I think I kept going down that direction and Ellen Show a few years ago, letting coaching and court work teaching entrepreneurs, how to build off of a podcast and then also led to creating the software company that dime now, the foundation called guess Tio. So yeah, that's kind of a quick synopsis bringing us up to this point.

Michael: Yeah, man, you've had quite the journey. You know, what I think is really fascinating, is the impact that our past often has on us and the trajectory for our future, you're growing up in that capacity, how much of your childhood experiences do you think have actually impacted or shaped whether good or bad who you are today?

Travis: It's everything man, both good and bad in that sense. You know, there's a lot, I think there's pros and cons to how everybody grew up, everybody's got stories he's in there certainly good things that came out of it and they're certainly bad things that came out of it. I try to focus on the good things and I think some of those things are reasons, why I at least had some sort of a natural proclivity toward podcasting or content creation in general because I was speaking on stage when I was 12 years old and I was in front of people all the time doing preaching contest and reciting, comedy, sketches, and doing just always in front of people, always learning how to be a better communicator. I was forced to grow up really quickly. I was forced to retire really quickly and that type of culture, they encourage you to get married extremely young because there's no like in-between phase between like teenager and adulthood, and that culture it's just very much like you're done being a teenager now, it's time to become an adult.

So I was married at 21. I had a mortgage when I was 21 and I was paying my own bills at all, everything was in my name, I was a responsible adult, I didn't have to grow up really, really fast because of that and I think that has some that by itself has cons but that by itself also has pros, you know what I mean?

So, you know, that he's got to come and take the good with the bad and focus on the good parts in the positives. And, I'm certainly thankful now for a lot of the strong moral convictions I was raised with. I'm certainly thankful for the value systems that I'm able to put into place and for the responsibility that I took from a young age to continue building on things. So, you know, there's like I said, I've had to work through a lot of some of the negative things like bad mindsets and poor mindsets, money mindset there's a lot of those types of things, certainly wish that I would have been able to set myself up for an easier or more at least more clear or direct path to a career rather than having to try to figure out what I want to do with my life when I was 23. I probably should have been thinking more about that when I was fifteen and not just being forced into a, you know as a square peg, being forced into a round hole. So, there's certainly a lot of those things that have impacted the way that I live my life now.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the case center for all of us. And one of the things I'm really interested in here with your story, in your journey is finding success, especially at a young age and looking at that, of course, this idea, you know, you had to go in the field, you had to pull weeds as a kid to get the things that you wanted in your life and a literal sense growing up in the environment that you did. And you ask, Tom bill this question that I'm really fascinated with that, I actually want to ask you and it was this. Do you think that the potential of rising to your own potential is built within being in mediocrity?

Travis: Do I think the potential of reaching my own potential you're saying?

Michael: Yeah, the mediocrity. I think the way that you had the conversation with him was very much in looking at and creating a measurement for his rock bottom like this moment in which, you create massive change in your life.

Travis: Yeah, you know, I've asked that question a lot of people actually now. That I'm understanding that what the question was. I find so often that to be the case, especially for people that have extreme success and in some sort of capacity in their life, it's usually triggered by some sort of a rock bottom. And I find that people who are constantly in the middle, who are constantly mediocre, don't have as much of that chip on their shoulder or that kick in the pants to motivate them to go out there and go tackle something. And so my question is always, okay, well, if you find yourself in that situation, what can you do to motivate yourself to get to that point without hitting rock bottom? And you know, I look back to in my past and I don't really look at any of the moments as rock bottom and I think that a lot of times that by itself can be the trap for some people is that they're waiting for this moment that's probably we never going to come or they're too scared of rock bottom to take big risks and excel in life but to answer your question, man. I just have found that more often than not, here is a rock bottom associated with it, or at least some sort of a base level understanding of what it means to have nothing or to be in poverty or something but definitely don't think that I ever looking back hit rock bottom, especially with the stories, and things that I've uncovered in my own podcast and journey I wouldn't look back in my past and think a rock bottom moment.

You know, is a pretty big bummer, sometimes, like when I was sitting there trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life at 23, and I had a mortgage to pay, and I knew that my youth, my degree was useless and I knew that my only skill set which was door-to-door sales wasn't translating to the real sales world, I couldn't get a job anywhere, doing sales for an actual organization, nobody would hire me. I felt unhireable felt like a failure and I know that was only 23 at the time but you know, I grew up really quickly and expected to be further along in a career at that point I wasn't and that was back against the wall moment, for sure, but I wouldn't necessarily say that it was rock bottom I just think that I had other motivations and I was able to look at enough people and figure out what I wanted out of life enough to dig in and find some real motivation to start climbing the mountain, I guess.

Michael: Yeah, and I think that first off, it's incredible and part of that might be your mindset already coming into this like, looking at this idea of failure, perhaps, not even labeling that in your own experience like, I gotta pay this mortgage, I can't get the career, I got the degree, that's seemingly useless, even though I've done all this work. Okay, I'm not going to let that stop me. And what I hear in this is this idea of taking like radical acceptance and responsibility for you, right? Why does that actually matter Travis? Because people hear this, but they don't listen like, why does radical acceptance and responsibility actually matter?

Travis: If you can't take responsibility for anything, then how do you improve? How do you change? How do you grow? How do you get better? If nothing's ever your fault and everything out of your control? Then I guess we should just keep blowing through life and hope that the universe does us, right, and puts good opportunities in front of us and sets us up for success. And to me, that's just a really disempowering way of moving throughout life. If nothing's up to you, then how do you make it better? Do you know what I mean? And a lot of times what you see is people who love to take responsibility when things are going well but hate taking responsibility when things are going poorly. And I think also people get the notion that if they take responsibility, that means it's their fault, and that's not what it means. It's like, well, you people come up with these crazy extenuating circumstances like, well, about this crazy situation of abuse that happened to me when I was a kid I was complete, I'm responsible for that and it's like, well, you mean you're responsible for that going forward. Yes, but was that your fault? No, like you don't have to take fault for that, that was not your fault. But now you do have the responsibility to decide. What are you going to do about it moving forward? Meaning that if you look back to my story in particular, you know, was it my fault that I was pushed into this career path and into a college that provided me with a useless degree upon leaving that I would never be able to use in real life, and I had to figure out my career after being in a position where I was married and had a mortgage to pay like, is that my fault that I was in that situation? Probably not, you might be able to argue that I was because I was an adult when I was made those decisions, but I mean, literally my entire life, my brain was programmed to think a certain way and that's the actions that I took were based on the thoughts and behaviors in the mindset that I was taught growing up. But regardless of whose fault, it was at that point in time, it was a hundred percent my responsibility to figure out what I was going to do about it because what's the alternative? The alternative is to sit there whine and complain about the fact that poor me because I grew up this way and this weird culture that nobody really understands or gets or under or can empathize with. And so now, you know, I'm not set up for life, like my friend that I met last week who was raised in this other household in a different part of the country and got into this, Ivy League school and became a lawyer and has a great, career on Wall Street I wasn't set up for that. So may as well just sit here and feel sorry for myself. I just don't understand what the alternative to taking responsibility is like what where do you think that's going to land you? It's only going to land you in a worse situation where you're feeling even worse for yourself and you end up not doing anything within life and then you end up being that person full of regret, full of remorse, and sitting there still blaming all of the other things and people and circumstances, and events, and everything that happened in your life, for your lack of success, and your lack of happiness, and your lack of fulfillment.

And to me, like it doesn't matter what situation you're born into, you can sit there and wish all day that you were born into a different situation or that you had different opportunities or whatever the case may be but at the end of the day, you're the only one that has to wake up in the morning and look yourself in the mirror and be you. So you better figure it out and start thinking about the solution to the problem and not just continuing to stew on the problem because it just doesn't do anything, doesn't help anybody.

Michael: Yeah, it's powerful. And I've raised my hand first as being guilty of playing the victim role finding myself at this complete utter rock-bottom, blaming the world, blaming homelessness as a child, the circumstance of been through all of the worlds because it's your fault, your fault, your fault. And then I started taking responsibility and the truth of it is like, we're not culpable for the things that happen to us, as we're in developmental or and even sometimes in life, you know what I mean? But there's a point where you do have to say, I'm going to be the hero of my own story because guess what? There's no Disney moment, nobody's coming to save you, your life isn't magically going to be different, and if I had a fucking magic pill, dude, that's what it would be because that's the key, right there what you just said, like you got to take responsibility.

I was listening to having a conversation about listening to Guy Raz and talking about this idea of dealing with and handling rejection. I have a theory that one of the reasons that people have such a difficult time with taking responsibility, is this idea of rejection and embarrassment. And I know that in your own personal journey like building businesses, trying things knocking on doors at someone who's so Cutco, I know that you have probably dealt with a litany of rejection and potential embarrassment. How do you deal with that in your life to catapult yourself forward?

Travis: That's a good question man. I think success in business and sales and making money in general, has to do with your ability to get rejected and then move on and try it again and continue to persist. And so the biggest in a short period of time, the best way that I can help anybody listening to this handle rejection a little better is that the pain of rejection is really just a symptom of a greater problem. If you're getting rejected and it hurts, you to the point where you're like quitting things or you're almost quitting things or you're constantly thinking about quitting things because the rejection hurts too bad that's just a symptom of the greater problem is your lack of self-confidence. Self-confidence is the root of the rejection problem, and so it's your responsibility to realize that this is why this rejection is hurting me because my confidence level is just too low to be able to read to recoup from. So I look at it as kind of like a bank account every time you get rejected, it's like a withdrawal, all from your bank account, it's something debited from your account. But you can make deposits into that account, just like you can make withdrawals from that account and so a few ways to do that is to start depositing more until your self-confidence. So listening to a podcast like you're listening to right now can help increase your self-confidence because you're learning something, you're increasing your knowledge, the more knowledge you gained an industry or field that you're not familiar with the more confident you'll be to navigate that field or that industry.

So gaining knowledge, learning getting new information, reading a book, listening to a podcast that's going to be a deposit in your self-confidence bank. There's the consistency that's going to be a depositor self-confidence bank, you have done this a bunch of times, you know, and I'm still alive. I didn't get hurt like thinking about the worst-case scenario a lot, which helps me deposit into my self-confidence back, what's the absolute worst-case scenario. Even I was knocking on doors, the absolute worst-case scenarios are not going to store and they tell me to get the fuck off their porch, like, is that really that big of a deal? No, because the next guy probably isn't going to be that mean the odds of that happening twice in a row are pretty low. So now I'm going to just go to the next house and see you know what it is like it just imagining the worst-case scenario to me and then like putting myself in that scenario and then understanding that, you know what? I think I'm going to be okay if that happens, if this person says no, that's the worst-case scenario, they said no, okay, who cares? Move on to the next person. Somebody's going to say yes, you know what I mean?

So, I think the worst-case scenario is a deposit, but hands down the best way to deposit into your self-confidence account are to keep the promises that you make to yourself. And this is why I think people have a huge problem with rejection and with confidence, in general, is that they don't even like themselves.

If you don't like yourself because you don't trust yourself, then how can you convince other people to like you and trust you? And that's the crux, that's the crux of all business, that's where business happens is when people know like or trust you or know like and trust you.

So if you don't even like trust yourself, because you subconsciously know that you keep breaking promises to yourself over and over again, then you're going to portray or display that energy to other people and they're going to pick up on that like something's not trustworthy about this guy. I do not trust me about this girl because you don't even trust yourself because you said that you were going to, name it right? At you said you were going to read a book this month and you got to the first chapter and you never do thing else and then you gave up on you were going to wake up at 6 o'clock for the next week and then you didn't do it on day two of you said that you were going to, go to the gym, whatever it is fill in the blank even if it's the smallest possible thing.

If you didn't keep that promise that you made to yourself because your over-committing all the time to these, all these promises and all these commitments, and all these goals that you're setting because you hear these are good things to do but you never follow through on any of them. You are consistently telling yourself that you are not trustworthy, and that's why you don't like yourself, that's why you don't trust yourself and that's why you don't have any self-confidence and that's why it hurts so bad when other people reject you, because every time someone rejects you, is just a validation of your subconscious thoughts about your own self, which is I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy of somebody's trust because if you don't even do, believe those things about yourself, somebody else like confirms that when that's a big pain like that's a big withdrawal from that self-confidence account. All you can do is try to mitigate those withdrawals. It's always going to hurt to be rejected, but if you can your self-confidence and you can build on promises that you made yourself, that's why I don't make a lot of promises to myself. I used to do that. I'll use to be that guy that would be like because it sounds awesome. You know, I'm gonna wake up at this time. I'm going to do this and I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this and then like your six days into it and you forgot half the things because you have a list of 38 things to do like I started making fewer commitments and then I kept every single one of them and then that starts to build on itself over time, you start to create habits and those habits start to stack and then, when you look back over the course of time like I was always somebody that went to bed late. I was I never read anything. I don't always the person that skipped out on the reading, you know project in school and then wrote to synopsis based on the back cover. You know, I hated reading. I hated getting up early. I was always late to school, all that stuff.

Today, I was up at 4:00 A.M. I was at the gym at 5:00 A.M. I am on a detox right now. So I've only taken a shake it's three o'clock in the afternoon, my time. I've only taken shakes today and had a couple of cups of coffee and I read like 15 pages of the book that I'm going through right now; this is my fifth podcast interview today like that didn't just happen overnight, it was a result of a bunch of micro-commitments that I kept keeping those promises that I made to myself and over time that confidence starts to build and you start going like hey last month when I said that I was going to not watch TV for the next seven days. I did it. So now that I'm not watching TV, what can I do with that time? Oh, I'm going to start reading. Okay. Let me just read five pages a day. That's it. Five pages a day for a week. Oh, I kept that promise to myself. You start to believe that you can do whatever you put your mind to because you're seeing physical evidence of that progress in front of you on a daily basis.

And when you start to know yourself and like yourself and trust yourself because you're actually keeping all the promises that you make to yourself, then people start to pick up on that energy as well, and that's how that confidence gets portrayed. And to me a big difference between people who are really, really get sales and people who think they're really good at sales, but aren't really that great at sales, is the fact that those people who are really, really good, they're extremely confident because they have a fantastic impeccable relationship with themselves and other people really pick up on that, it's that subconscious stuff that you can't really portray in a conversation, but people get that sense from you because you've put in the work to be able to deserve the results that you're asking the universe for. Do you know what I'm saying? So yeah, man, you got to keep the promises that you made to yourself or you're always going to portray yourself as that person other people.

It's crazy to me that people will like, people hold other relationships to a higher standard than they hold their relationship to themselves, it that make sense? I was outside. I was giving this talk the other day and I got the audience comment to me go, man. I never really thought about it that way, but I definitely do that. Like, if I commit to somebody in my life, if I make a promise to somebody my life, I keep it a hundred percent of the time. I do not break my promises but I always break my promises to myself, and it's like, why do we do this? Why do we allow ourselves to introduce this negative self-talk? Do you know what I mean? The where you sit there when you're in one of those bad moods and you're just like, oh, you're such a piece of shit and you start talking all this crap, about yourself to yourself, and it's like, man, if any single one of my friends talked to me the way that I'm thinking about myself right now, I would be like, yeah, I go fuck yourself. Why we're not friends anymore. Do you know what I mean? Like, but up for some reason, we allow ourselves to treat ourselves like shit, sometimes and then we wonder why nobody likes us and nobody trusts us, it's like, you don't even like yourself, man but how do you expect all these other people to pick up on the good qualities in you when you don't even see them in because you don't believe that they're there because you're not even trustworthy to you.  How are we going to keep a commitment to somebody else if he can't even keep that commitment, to ourselves? So I know that was a long kind of long-winded answer, but a lot of it, man.

Michael: I love it. Because what, you're speaking my language, and I know that The Unbroken Nation listening right now, they've heard me say this before. You know, what you think becomes what you speak, what you speak, become your actions, and your actions, become your reality, and it all starts with the way that you talk to yourself. The first thing I teach my clients is to take out a pen and a piece of paper and write them down. I am the kind of person who is kind to myself and then to leverage that, tell you, fucking believe it because at the beginning you don't and it takes work and effort and you build this thing called momentum, right? This micro wins the small adjustments you make every single day, that create a trajectory in which you go and look at your life in seven years, not tomorrow, and you go. Oh! awesome. I've been able to build this thing. So, you know long-winded or not, man. I think you're spot on and I love that.

One of the things, I think that interrupts people in this as they start to head into it is the fact that they're going to fail. You said something that really stuck with me, and I wrote it down, and remember it coming back to me again and again, and again, and you said that. You believe that people have to fail to reach the next success. What does that mean?

Travis: You have to be willing to risk a lot in order to be able to reach the next level of success. If you've never done something, how do you expect to be immediately successful at it? When you're trying it out for the first time I did it, it doesn't even make sense but people all the time prevent themselves from getting to the next level of success in life because they're looking at it as they're looking at it and completely wrong light. Do you know what I mean? Like you have to be able to come to terms with the fact that look if I'm trying this new thing, you know, just because we're talking our podcast here, let's use that as an example. I'm going to start this podcast and then they start a podcast and then six months later, it didn't take off. And didn't have 10 million downloads, imagine that and it's like, oh, well, I tried it and it didn't work.

So they just keep staying at the level that they're currently at, they never level up because every time you try to level up, like failure is going to happen because you're doing something you've never done before. You can't expect us to pick up on something and be successful at it immediately that's called being a genius or savant which there are very few of them as world and odds are, you're not one of them and neither am I? But the cool thing about it is that if you adopt that growth mindset, at that you can learn and grow into any role that you want to learn and grow into, then, then you can become that if you're willing to take the failure if you're willing to take the L and most people aren't, and if there is a lack of this fear of embarrassment from failing, that's what gets me even worse than the failing part like, fearing failure is one thing but most people fear failure, because it's really a fear of embarrassment, they're fearing the fact that other people we'll see them fail. If you're sitting there listening and you could guarantee that if you took this big risk, they were thinking about taking and if you failed at that, nobody would find out about it, I guarantee a large percentage of you would take that opportunity to go ahead and try the thing that you're thinking about trying, go ahead and risk the thing that you're thinking about risking, but nobody would ever find out about it and you're just like, man I would do it that in that sense, but it's the fact that you don't really, it's not even fearing of the failure itself, it's fearing what other people are going to think about the fact that you failed and you're letting that prevent you from ultimately reaching some level of success and in just the way I want to live my life man. It's too short-term thinking, you got to think about like well what is ten years from now, Travis going to be thanking me for and what actions can I take now to get to that point in my life? Where 39, Travis is looking back at me going like, man. I'm really glad that you took those risks. I'm really glad that you didn't like that. You took that L for us because there's no way we'd be where we are now if you didn't do that, you know what I'm saying? Like, you have to be willing to fail to reach that next level, because, by definition, you're doing something you've never done before, you can't expect to be immediately successful something you've never done before, it's madness, doesn't make any sense, but people do it all the time.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, you're spot-on ultimately. At the end of the day, the difference between success and failure in life is action, and on that pathway, you're going to fail and you can use as data or you can use it as something that stops you dead in your tracks. Travis, my friend that's been amazing conversation before I ask you my last question. Can you tell everybody where they can find and connect with you?

 Travis: Yeah. I was really quick to just to kind of use it, as an illustration, to bring that last point home if that's okay.

Michael: Absolutely!

Travis: I try to look at it as in baseball. How many at-bats do you get, right? Everybody wants to look at the one person in their life that they know that tried one thing, one time and they were immediately successful at it. They look at the one example of a Founder that started their very first company and exited for a billion dollars and it's like, well and then they compare their lives to that and like that's why I like to liken it to the at-bats thing because like can you get lucky and step up to the plate and hit the first one out of the park? Sure. Is it likely to happen? No, it is absolutely not likely to happen. In fact, the majority the vast majority of people, will not happen too. So if you want to guarantee that, you're going to be successful and eventually hit one out of the park, you're gonna have to step up to bat again, after you strike out the first time. And then after that, you're going to have to step up to bat again, and then you have to step up the bat again, there you have stepped a bat again, like, the more swings you take, though what starts to happen over time. You get better at it, you start figuring out the like, oh, if I stand this way, or if I swing this way, or if I keep my eye on, on the picture, the way he's throwing all like I can tweak and I can put my weight behind the bat here and then I can crank it this wet, you start to figure things out and you learn throughout the process, every time you're striking out but you're learning something new every time.

So when you step up to at-bat, number 38, or at-bat number 72, your odds of hitting that home, run, significantly, go up, and that's the problem is that people give up like they take 5 or 10 swings and then they're like that, right? I'm done. I tried it and it's just like, well, you didn't want the end result bad enough, you didn't want to hit it out of the park bad enough, or else you'd still be stepping up and having more of those at-bats was only a matter of time. If you keep swinging, you keep learning to keep putting in the work, you're going to be able to hit it out of the park eventually. So I appreciate you for having me on the show, man. Thanks for doing some research, and some preparation for this. Always makes for a better conversation.

You guys can find me over at travischappell.com we're in the middle of redoing the side. So, depending on, when you go, give us a visit, you might be seeing a little bit of outdated information, but all of my social links are up-to-date, my email up-to-date. So if you want to contact me travischappell.com is a great place to find everywhere that I'm hanging out.

Michael: Brilliant! Thank you, my friend, and my last question for you today is what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

 Travis: What does it mean to me to be unbroken? I think that it comes directly back to the confidence conversation that we had because you're the only person that can look at yourself as being broken or unbroken, and if you allow yourself to go there, mentally, because you don't view yourself as being worthy then is going to be a lot easier for you to identify as someone that is broken but if you can build up that self-confidence muscle, if you can continue to keep those promises that you're making yourself and add your self-worth, then doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. It literally doesn't matter what anybody else thinks it only matters what you think. So put some time, effort, energy, money, investment, whatever you can into building up, that self-confidence and of, always come back.

Michael: I love it. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for being here.

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