E278: From Zero to Hero (PART 1) | Trauma Healing Coach

What is Up, Unbroken Nation! It is Tuesday and you know what that means. I'm very excited to be here with you guys, Tuesday night coaching. You know what it is we come here every Tuesday night to spend some time with you guys, to help us learn, grow, change and overcome and ultimately do that hardest thing that we do in our life and that is become the hero of our own story.

I'm very excited to be here with you guys on this amazing, amazing Tuesday night. Do me a favor wherever you are let us know, leave a comment in the chat, let us know where you are, what you have going on tonight and we're gonna pop in with no delay. You may notice I am moderately sweaty at the moment if you're watching online and the reason behind that is I just got done running, if you didn't know I am training for Denver Marathon called Colfax Marathon very excited about.

And you know, today was one of those really weird days where just things just kept happening and happening and happening and I went to get in my truck. And I started it, I rolled down the windows because it just happens be a beautiful day out and I heard this clink, clink, clink, click, as I was driving and I pulled over on the side of the road and I was like maybe there's, I don't know if something stuck underneath the truck and there is a giant lake three-inch bolt hanging out of the side of my tire. And so, as I'm driving to the gym to go and get this run so I can get back here on time, to do Tuesday night coaching live, I had to go to the mechanic and dropped my truck off and so I dropped the truck off. Guys like, we'll get it back to you he literally goes eventually, I was like oh, shit, so it might be a few days, I have no idea and so, I was looking at the clock, I was like fuck, I gotta get this workout in, it's Tuesday night, we gotta get coaching going. And the truth about it is in moments like this in the past what would have happened in my life is that I would have made a major fucking excuse for not being here with you guys on Tuesday night.

I would’ve broke my promise, I would have said, you know what? Well, car broke down, everything was five minutes behind, I didn't get a chance to eat lunch, it was super busy, we had problems with the team, internet connection like, I could always find an excuse and that's why tonight's topic is from zero to hero because I recognize a really important truth about myself and that is when I found myself at my lowest, I was an absolute loser, I was the biggest victim you've ever met in your life, I blamed everybody. It was your fault, my family's fault, communities’ fault, Obama's fault, like, you know it was everybody's fault that my life sucked. And it wasn't that long ago that tonight getting in the truck, to drive to the gym, to get the workout, for the training, for the marathon that's a month away that I would have been like, you know what, screw it I'm gonna go home and get stone play video games and eat gummy bears. And broke my promise to be here with you guys on Tuesday night and I said to myself while ago I said, you follow through on your commitment, you do the thing that you say you're going to do.

And you know the time for your life is now. The things that you want in your life they're happening right now, they're not happening tomorrow, they're not happening next week, they're not happening a year from now, they're happening right now. And so, if you're in this place in your life and you're like, yow, I'm ready to take ownership over my life, I'm ready to stop being a loser, I'm ready to stop being a zero it's time for me to be the hero of my own story then I want you to hang out with us a little bit here tonight and I wanna talk to you about something really important and that is the truth about the reality of this journey. I don't know anyone successful and I know a lot of very, very successful people, I don't know one of them who on planet earth has not hit rock bottom, who has not been a zero, who is not fail, who has not felt like a loser, who has not had this moment of being like, what is my life? And the thing that all of those people who are incredibly successful have in common is that they made a choice and a decision to follow through on the promises that they made to themselves.

And so, tonight if you're watching whether you're watching live or you're listening this on the Think Unbroken Podcast or you're gonna watch this on a replay, whenever you're watching this in your life it doesn't matter. What I want you to think about as you are watching this, is what are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have? That is the question that you're gonna have to ask yourself, to be able to go from where you are today to where you want to be, you are going to have to ask yourself what am I willing to do?

Well, what are you willing to do?

What are you willing to do to have the life that you want to have?

For many people myself included it was not that long ago where my favorite thing to do was to blame everyone else. You know, I'd sign up for something, I sign up for an event, I'd sign up for a conference, I'd sign up to go to therapy, I'd sign up for gym, I'd sign up to do anything and I put it there on paper and I'd stared it, I'd look at it and there was no follow through.

Ask yourself…

are there moments in your life where you have not followed through?

The answer is yes!

Look we all are guilty of this, there's no shame in it like, I promise you.

The greatest people that I know I promise you at one point in their life they did not follow through on the promise of themselves. I'm one of those people, I'm the first one to admit. I'm sitting here looking at my life real time in this moment on Tuesday night coaching and thank you all for being here it's incredible, I'm so proud of you for being here on Tuesday night. And I'm thinking to myself wasn't that long ago that I would not be here, I'd find any excuse in the book, I'd find a way to be like man, look I'm sweaty, I didn't get take a shower, I'm dehydrated, I just ran five miles and then I lifted and the car broke down and they wanna charge me ten thousand dollars of you know, whatever it was, there's always a way to find the excuse for not showing up. And the thing about that is when you don't show up for yourself people notice. Think about this, how many times in your life has somebody called you out? Probably not as often as they should to keep it real.

You know, one of the things that I always wished that people would have done when I was younger like, hey, you're acting like a moron, do something about it. And you know that was probably in my drug phase and in my party phase and in my alcohol phase, I acted like complete. And the truth about is, I just thought that's what you did, I thought that's what life was you parted, you got drunk, you had sex of strangers and boom that was life and I was a loser. I was a loser, drive an eighty-thousand-dollar car, weighing three hundred and fifty pounds, right? Like, it takes a lot of work to destroy your life like that.

Today, I was thinking as I was running, I was like you know, we have so much opportunity in our lives to be the hero, it's right here waiting for us, the ability to be the hero is right here in the choices and then the decisions that we make. But we have to be willing to get the fuck out of our own way and push ourself into massive, massive discomfort. And I know that's not what people want to hear when they come into Tuesday night coaching but I promised you, when I started this, I was only gonna give you the truth. And the truth about this; is that in place of massive discomfort is this place in which you have to force yourself into doing things that you don't want to do because you know that you need to do them, right? That's a mind trick. You have to play on yourself.

And so, when I signed up for this Denver Marathon, you know, I thought about myself at rock bottom. I sat here at this computer, I pulled it up and I said to myself the old Michael would never have done this, that person who played the victim, that person who blamed the world, that person who wanted everyone else to feel sorry for him would never have sat here and signed up for this. And in signing up for it it's not even necessarily about doing anything other than one thing. Proving to myself that I am capable of doing something incredibly difficult.

Somebody asked me recently, how do you build confidence?

And it's through continually doing incredibly difficult things with consistency, that's the only way you grow. And look, I think about that in personal development, I mean it's getting up in the morning and making your bed like, seriously at one point of my life that was probably the most difficult thing I did, it's about getting yourself in this position where you sit down every day and you read and you learn and you come to Tuesday night coaching like, it's uncomfortable, there's a million things you could be doing right now, right? But you said, I'm gonna come to Tuesday night coaching because I know that it's important to create change in my life and I said to myself, I'm gonna coach on Tuesday nights even though it's difficult and its extra work and it's more time out of my day and I already have the podcast, the book and the coaching and I said you know what? How do I keep giving value to people?

It's difficult to show up with all the other things in life when you wanna create massive change in the world. But it always comes down to that question like, what are you willing to do? And so, if my goal you know is looking at my life and I wanna be the hero of my own story then I have to define that for myself and you guys have got to start thinking about what does it mean to be the hero of my own story? Like you've got to get crystal clear on who you are, you've gotta to make massive, massive decisions about this. There's one of the reasons I created the Think Unbroken app, you can download that app for free in the app store on apple or iTunes and it has programs in it, you can start for free that you can go into this, start creating the framework for this. Same reason I made the podcast, same reason we have the books is because I wanna be able to give the people the tools that I wish I would have at the beginning of this journey. What I'm trying to do with Think Unbroken is to circumvent the chaos of figuring this shit out on your own.

And so, when I'm sitting here looking at my life and I'm like, okay, cool, what does it mean to be the hero? For me, it's very simple, moving towards discomfort every single day in a way that I know will make my life better and that doesn't mean that there aren't days that I don't wanna do this, that doesn't mean they aren't days I don't wanna work out and I don't wanna run and I don't wanna write and I don't want to podcast because I promise you, there are, but how do you build confidence? By continually doing incredibly difficult things with consistency. And so, I say to myself no excuses just result, show up and do it anyway.

There’s a space in this where it's uncomfortable for a lot of people to acknowledge but in my journey, I had to look at myself and be like you are a loser, I had to and I know the place for negative self-talk exists in and it can be very dangerous and so I wanna first preface what I'm about to say with recognizing that when I speak to myself. And I wrote about this and Think Unbroken in the first book because I think it's really important the way that I was speaking to myself in regard to not doing the things I needed to do was because that's the way that I get motivated.

So, you have to figure out the way that you get motivated, that you build yourself to do the thing that you need to do. For some people it's massive radical kindness but for me it's massive radical unfiltered candor. Get your fucking shit together dude, take care of your life, stop being a fucking baby, stop blaming the world, stop being the victim, get it together, right? (You read that in my book) Thank you, I appreciate you for reading and I'm pointing this to let people know the truth about this like, there may be this space in which you've gotta get completely in utterly, kind with yourself. I mean kinda in this way where you need to hug yourself and hold yourself and build kindness in yourself because maybe that's never been allotted to you. But if you're like me, tell you this, some of you it's gonna be hard to hear, you're not gonna like this, I don't give a shit, I've told you before, I'm not here to be your friend, I'm here to be your coach.

What I discovered about the truth about myself was when I looked at my life in the moments in which I was not showing up it was because I was making fucking excuses, I was blaming the world, it was everybody else's fault and when I was at my rock bottom and I was a loser guys, I'm telling you like, I wish you could understand this like, and this is not me shitting on myself, I promise you it's not but I was a loser. Three hundred and fifty pounds, I was smoking two packs a day, drinking myself to sleep, getting high from the moment I woke up to the moment I went back to bed and I was massively in debt, massively in debt, I was a loser. Guys look, I recognized this and I knew that I was at zero. Oh, that zero but the best part about being at ZERO as you can be a HERO.