Lost in Your Journey of Self-Discovery? Uncover Your True Identity Ep28

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In this enlightening episode, Eddie Isin sits down with leadership expert and executive coach Robert White to explore the journey of self-discovery and uncovering one's true identity. They discuss the challenges of finding authenticity in a fast-paced world and provide actionable strategies for aligning with your true self and purpose. Robert shares his personal stories of overcoming adversity and offers deep insights into living a life of meaning and integrity.

00:00 - 02:00 – Introduction

• Eddie Isin welcomes listeners to the episode and introduces the theme of self-discovery and authenticity.

02:01 - 06:00 – Meet Robert White

• Robert White's background and his journey from adversity to leadership expertise.

06:01 - 12:00 – Leadership in the 21st Century

• Discussion on the shift from management to leadership.
• The importance of adaptability, empowering employees, and fostering leadership at all levels within organizations.

12:01 - 18:00 – Personal Resilience and Overcoming Adversity

• Robert shares his experiences with early heart attacks, a failed early marriage, and professional setbacks.

18:01 - 24:00 – Discovering Your Authentic Self

• Exploring what it means to live authentically.
• Robert discusses how to connect with your unique purpose and align your life with your core values.

24:01 - 30:00 – The Role of Support Systems

• The importance of having a strong support network in overcoming personal struggles.
• Robert’s story of adopting special needs children and the impact of effective therapy on his son Levi’s transformation.

30:01 - 36:00 – Taking Responsibility

• The concept of taking 100% responsibility for one’s life and choices.
• Robert’s pivotal moment with his friend Stuart Esposito, which led to a major shift in his mindset from victim to accountable leader.

36:01 - 42:00 – Building Mental Strength and Resilience

• Practical tips for building mental resilience and coping with stress and anxiety.

42:01 - 48:00 – Navigating Identity Issues

• How to navigate the complex journey of self-discovery and find your true identity.

48:01 - 54:00 – Final Reflections and Takeaways

• Robert’s final thoughts on the importance of authenticity, resilience, and personal responsibility.

54:01 - 56:00 – Closing Remarks

• Eddie thanks Robert for sharing his insights and experiences.

Resources Mentioned:

• TransformYourFuture.com
• Robert White’s website and weekly e-zine: ExtraordinaryPeople.com

Detailed article on Searching For Leadership which includes the lyrics to John Denver’s song "The Gift You Are."

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

We better get to know who in the hell are we? What is our authentic self? Not our image, not what we portray to others or what others tell us. We're supposed to think about ourselves, but rather, what is it that occurs to me in quiet moments? What is the gift that I have to share? We're one of one. We're approaching 8 billion people on the planet, Eddie. There's 8 billion individual fingerprints as a metaphor for our uniqueness, the gift, the gift we have to offer in the world. And Arjun says we're one of one. The job is to find out what that's about. What is the unique purpose? And you can say that God gave us, or the stars gave us, or the Ouija board gave us, what's our unique purpose, vision, and values, and are we expressing that into the world? Papaya. Hello all and welcome to another episode of Transform Your Future with me, Eddie Isin, where I sit down with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers as they identify areas I can improve on and guide me to further my self-improvement practice. For more information and insights, join my newsletter@transformyourfuture.com where I write about reinvention, personal growth, and identity. If you like the show, you'll love the content on my site. We want to hear from you. Let us know how we can improve your listening experience. Please reach out to us through our website, your podcast app comment, or just text me directly atat 813- 7 2 2 - 1 4 1 7. I really like to hear from you. Have you ever felt lost in your journey of self-discovery? Unsure of who you really are or what your true purpose is? You're not alone in our fast-paced, ever-changing world. It's easy to lose sight of our authentic selves. But today we're here to help you navigate through that confusion and emerge with a clear sense of who you are and what you're meant to do. In this episode, titled, lost in Your Journey of Self-Discovery, uncover Your True Identity. My guest is Robert White, a seasoned leadership expert and executive coach whose own journey from adversity to triumph is nothing short of inspiring. Robert has faced immense challenges from personal health crisises to professional setbacks, relationship issues, yet he has emerged stronger, wiser, and deeply committed to helping others find their true paths. Robert shares his profound insights on authenticity and purpose. We'll explore what it means to live an authentic life, how to connect with your unique purpose and why understanding your core values is crucial for personal growth. Robert's experiences and wisdom will provide you with actionable strategies to uncover your true identity and live a life aligned with your deepest values. Remember, discovering who you truly are is not just about looking within, but also about seeking inspiration and guidance from those who have walked the past before us. So get ready to take some notes, reflect deeply, and embark on a journey of self-discovery with Robert and I as we transform our futures together. So Robert, welcome to Transform Your Future podcast. How are you doing today? I'm great, Addie, and it's wonderful to be with you and with your listeners and viewers. Absolutely. We've going to jump right in here. I got a lot of stuff lined up to talk about. I guess we should start by talking about leadership in the 20th century. Tell me a little bit about that. Well. There's a real distinction between the 20th and the 21st, I believe since we're now in the 21st, we're looking back a little bit. I think when we look back, the emphasis really for the last 30 or 40 years has not been on leadership. It's been on management, the classic plan, organized control, and our culture, our society responded well to planning and to organizing and even to control. I'd say in the last five years or so, the control piece, particularly with the younger workforce, has not been successful. And there's been a lot of books written on it and a lot of seminars done on it and scholarly papers and all that stuff Because the distinction with leadership is that you're creating something new. When times were changing slowly, management was enough, and I'm talking macro here. There's certainly exceptions to that, but in a bigger sense. But when change is happening at the pace that is happening today, planning, organizing and controlling doesn't work as well because we have to respond to new challenges, new methodologies, new people. I'm particularly talking about that younger cohort. And so what gets rewarded is forcing leadership down from the top. Throughout organizations, throughout families, I've had to learn that the hard way with my young adult children. By the way, what dad says doesn't go quite often. I identify. So I think that leadership in the 21st century is calling for being light on your feet, being a better listener, as an example, learning to engage people in a different way, in a more powerful way, and also sharing leadership throughout an organization. I had a recent customer service experience with a very large company, which will go remain nameless even though I'm complimenting them, I don't feel comfortable naming them. But the person on the phone was, I think the average 2025, maybe even 30 an hour customer service person. But they took responsibility the way the CEO should, they solved my problem right there, right then. They didn't have to check with anybody and it was slightly expensive solution, but somehow they had been empowered to make that decision and they were clear about it, unclear about the need for it. The questions they asked me were excellent. I got off the phone. I thought, this is almost spiritual. They have that kind of an experience with a large company customer service person. So that company kind of gets it about moving leadership down to the front lines. A number of years ago, one of our big clients was Duke Energy, and this has been written about, so I'm not sharing a secret. We had 18,000 graduates at Duke Energy in a 21,000 person company. Only 3000 people didn't make it to our training, and it's relatively expensive high impact training. I mean, we had people in the training that climb poles and do all that high risk balancing act that they do. It looks like Cirque Soleil sometimes what they do. So they took the ideas that we promote around awareness, responsibility, and communication right down to the bottom level of, and you could argue the most important people in the company, if you're living in the southeast and those storms come, you certainly know the linemen are the ones that are important. And I think they were enlightened then they're, they're enlightened today in pushing that long before many other corporations did. But I think that's the imperative in the 21st century is can we have leadership show up at all levels of organizations? Can we have it show up in parenting? Can we have it show up in community development develop? And almost, I'm waiting for lightning to strike when I say this next thing, which is it should show up in politics. I don't see a lot of it frankly today, but I think that's the shift that everyone at all levels needs to look at. How could I lead? How could I participate in a way that's really going to have an impact? I'm sure that from your customer service experience, when that person handled your situation, was able to take care of it and you felt like this is a miracle that it was able to, you're going to use that service again. You're going to talk about that experience, you're going to share that with other people, and that's what we really need. We need that kind of experience for our customers and our clients to have that kind of experience in the delivery. That's what we need to strive for. A number of years ago, one of my clients, my executive coaching clients called me one day and he said, I have an extra ticket for this big event where there's a number of different famous speakers. And one of them was the late Colin Powell, former four star general Secretary of State, incredible man talking on leadership. And I've got this free ticket, plus I've got an hour and a half in the car car with my client. So both ways. So that's three hours I'm going to say yes to that. So I went to hear Colin Val, he was great. He very graciously gave me permission to use his PowerPoint deck, which I did use. Went is a little treasure, but the big surprise was on that same program was a guy that I only knew of slightly. I often refer to him as the guy with the big ears, Seth Godin. That's like a brand for him. I think that bald head and those ears sticking out, he and Barack Obama must be having a competition for years. I hear so many of these talks probably like you. I'm a constant learner. I go listen to people, watch people, and I remember Seth Godin's talk more than anything that happened like that year because what he did was he took one word and he deconstructed it, and the word was remarkable. And I've done that with the word responsible Abel. He did remark Abel, and he said that the challenge for marketers today is and hopefully in a positive way, right? Yeah. That what you do in the way you communicate about it And Eddie, I don't remember the statistics, maybe you do, but when something bad happens in customer service, there's a certain number of people people talk to, and it's just really damaging and it really argues for paying those people more and training them better. And living your values suggest a naughty thing to suggest. But when something good happens, people also talk to a lot of people, I'm going to think about how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to talk about that customer service experience. It was that good. And today, especially with social media, that's more and more important. Yes, worthy of a remark. You want to be worthy of a remark and worthy of a good remark, not a bad remark. So tell me a little bit about your journey, how you got into leadership and executive coaching. I'll kind of start at the end. I lived abroad for 23 years of my working life. And when I came back to kind of an expensive older person, neighborhood, a gated community, and in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, and I only knew three people in Denver. I mean, I chose it frankly because low humidity and the weather ethos, I'd had some experience. And of course, living in Asia with all that humidity, low humidity became a deciding factor for me. I only knew three people, and I'm in this beautiful neighborhood, and they did the old fashioned thing of Friday night, five o'clock in somebody's house was a cocktail party, kind of like a days gone by thing. But I saw it and my former wife and I saw it as a way to connect with people. So we went and there was a conversation about my life going on because what I realized, and first of all, I'm a severe introvert, so in those kinds of settings, I'm uncomfortable. She was not. And I kind of depended on her to handle the conversation. So these people are confused because I've been all over the world and I've had this crazy life. And most of them worked somewhere for 2030 or owned the business 20, 30, 40 years and lived in one city, many of them very little international travel. So I'm this confusing person to them, but I realize that realized that after the fact. And so in the confusion, they were trying to figure me out, and suddenly my former wife piped up and said, well, he didn't get a job at JCPenney. And I thought about that conversation. She has a kind of wisdom and is witty and comes up with stuff like that quite often. But I thought that kind of explained my life. Look, turning points are that, look, I grew up in poverty and abuse, pretty violent abuse. So I carry the physical scars and the mental and emotional scars of that. And that's been a lifelong journey to deal with that and get past it. But when I was 17 years old, I had converted a control engineer job at a radio station into nights and weekends on the air, the old top 40 format. And I was very successful. I was number one rated show in Wisconsin in those time periods because I was talking to my friends, I was talking to my age group At that time, radio was, there's no streaming services and no iPods and all that. And kids listened to the radio. And I was a kid, and I think God gifted me a bit, and I loved it. I loved it a lot more than my home life and a lot more than school. So in that year, when I was 17, I got that award. I made a lot of money for a kid. I made more money than my father had ever made in his life and supported my family. My father had died when I was just 15 years old, a week after that. And I was chosen by my graduating class in high school as most likely to succeed. Wow. And by the way, I called my mother. I graduated number six out of 300. I called my mother to brag. I was not living at home at that time. After my father's death, my family moved back to the south. I lived with friends and I called her to brag a little bit. As I looked back on it, I probably didn't have that awareness of what I was doing at the time. And I said, I graduated number six. And the first words out of her mouth were, why weren't you number one? So that's the atmosphere I grew up in. But in the 10 years after all of that good stuff happened, I made my classmates wrong for selecting me as most likely to succeed. I had an early marriage which failed, and I felt horribly guilty about it. I had three heart attacks, one at 19, one at one, at 23, and my little sales business was failing. So my life was a mess. I was a mess. But I was going around telling people how great everything was and how great I was. The turning point for me was that a friend went out to California and went to one of the early human potential movement trainings, called My Dynamics, MDI. And he came back and I watched him, his life change. He had a health problem also. He had adult onset acne, which I didn't even know existed. Now we all know about being 13 and you get a pimple and you life. You want life to end before anybody sees you for an adult. It's a handicap. And he was in sales like I was, and he tried all kinds of things. I remember he had some kind of a grinding thing that he had done to his face, and it turned his face brilliant red, those monkeys you see at the zoo with the brilliant red butts. He looked like that. So he struggled with that. It really bothered him. It cleared up after he did the seminar and his business got better. And also he was in a failing marriage and suddenly they're in love again and they're creating a marriage instead of enduring one. And even me with kind of a lack of awareness, could see all of that. So I reluctantly went to the seminar. What helped was also was they brought it. He brought it to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where we both lived. Eddie, I went to that seminar the way I was showing up in life, cynical, negative being my mom, really, right? Right. Arms crossed, legs crossed, maybe i's crossed looking for what's wrong. And it's a cliche all these years later. But those four days changed my life for the better. Now, it wasn't instant, but in the next year, my income tripled. I met a woman who became my wife for 17 years. Life just worked better. I got out of my own way. And I mean, I've spent some time thinking about the process. We don't have time for that now, but within a year, my life was really radically different with the tools. And in that training, they don't talk about money. They didn't at all. They didn't talk about business. They talk about me and what I needed to do in terms of looking within and making better choices. So that was a turning point. I later put about 400 people in that training. I was in sales. I was in front of people a lot. And I found that when I enrolled my family, my friends, my life got better. So it was totally selfish. I wasn't yet in a place of contribution. I was in a place of what could I get out of this? And what I was getting was better friendships, better employees, better family. So that was the next turning point. And because of putting all those people in the training, one day I got a phone call from someone. I didn't even know who he was. He had to introduce himself. He was the founder and chairman of my dynamics, and he's calling to say thank you and that he wanted to meet me. So he sent me a ticket. By that time I was in New York City and first time that I had the opportunity to fly, first class flew out to San Francisco, and 10 days later I was president of Mind Dynamics running the business side of this amazing training company, which was kind of a mess. But the training was not a mess. It was perfect. So Alexander Everett, the chairman and founder, he trained trainers. He wrote material. He was the spiritual source of the organization. And I ran the business for four years. So I worked for someone else for four years. The ownership changed and I was no longer working for Alexander. Actually, I was working for a probate judge because one of the senior partners had died with no will, and that was a nightmare. So I quit and I founded a company called lifespring, which went on after I left. Went on to open 17 training centers in the US to do over a half a million graduates of these high impact experiential leadership trainings. But it didn't work for me. I made a bunch of mistakes setting up the company. I made some assumptions that turned out to just not be true. And I found out later I did spend a lot of time in Japan. I studied Zen a little bit. I did a zen training once, which it just make you laugh about my experience. I've said training. Somebody asked me once, what did you learn? And I answered quickly without thinking. I said,

I learned I don't like to get up at 3: 22:49

00 AM I learned that I don't like eating macrobiotic meals. And I learned that I don't like getting hit on the back with a stick. But actually I did learn some things. But one of the Zen Cohen is that fish don't describe water very well. Fish do not describe water very well. Whatever we are swimming in, we don't see it. And I was like that about business in some ways. What I didn't realize during those four years at my dynamics was that Alexander paid attention to some things I learned about later, but I'm that fish swimming in water that somebody else's maintaining. I didn't understand the importance of knowing your purpose, knowing your vision, knowing your values and living them. He handled all of that without a word about it. It was like second nature to him, but not to me. I was just the beneficiary of that kind of culture. So all that went wrong for me when I started lifespring. So six months after I started it, I quit again and it was the best decision, but it was painful. I had put all the money that I had into lifespring. I was the sole funder of the startup, and I sold it to my staff for nothing down and forever to pay. And the old joke came true. They took longer than forever to pay. So I was broke. I had a family, I had children, I had a mortgage and no job, and no prospects of a job And the piece that I left out is that during the four years with mind dynamics, I set up a seven foreign subsidiaries of mind dynamics. And I was gone all the time. I traveled so much, I learned so much. It was wonderful experience overall. The one country I said no to was Japan. And they had pursued me from that moment right through life spring through everything, at least once a month, they called me, faxed me, got reached out to me saying, please come. And I kept saying, no. Well now I'm unemployed, I'm broke. And they call and they say, we're changing the offer. Come for only 90 days. Set up a program and you can leave. We will pay you for one year. So much later, we were hugely successful. And people would say, did you have this vision of making this contribution in Japan? Is that why you came? I had to answer, honestly, no. I was broke and I needed a job. And they made the perfect offer. Yes, they took all the risk out of it. Yes, exactly. So I went to Japan to stay for 90 days. My first day was 12 years, formed a company called Arc International, and we ended up in seven countries, 15 training centers, 240 full-time people, another 50 to 60 contract trainers, and became the largest training organization in Asia, the second largest in the world doing our kind of work and had a lot of fun, lots of failure, no typical startup, but much more success than failure. Lifelong friendships, terrific exposure to cultures that were totally foreign to me and just an incredible experience. Next turning point was I kind of retired at 46. I moved to Aspen, Colorado, built the big house, bought a jet, played Novo Re for the poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. It's kind of embarrassing today to look back on it. Had a lot of fun. Skied 80 days a year, had two birth remarried, had two birth children, two adopted special needs kids met some of the most amazing people. Traveled with the late John Denver for six months doing an environmental stability program. We wrote for him. I co-led those programs and traveled with them, incredible, wonderful experiences. And in doing all of that, the final turning point is the failure of that company because I was not paying attention. I was visiting Asia maybe three times a year in these carefully stage managed visits. And one thing about that industry is that all of your assets go home every night at five or six o'clock. And what happened with me was that by that time, I also had this culture change company in the us, the one with clients like Duke Energy and Chase Manhattan and those kind of companies. And then in Asia, 80% of the business was personal growth, personal leadership, but everybody knew everybody because of meetings that we had and so on. And in a coordinated fashion, the key people in both of those organizations left, took my clients, took my best people, and set up a competitive companies. So I lost 30 million. The love of my life left me and I started over. So that's me today. I'm blessed to have written a bestselling book. I have a bestselling audio program on night. I do some public speaking. I go back, I'm going back to Asia in two weeks for a three week stay. That's crazy. I'm not moving again. I have decided not to move again. What's. The title of the book? Living an Extraordinary Life Looks like this. Also available in simplified Chinese, actually a bestseller in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese. And we're working on Spanish, the Spanish translation right now. So for an introvert, it's brought me into the public world. It's why I'm here with you. And one of my daughters who's like her mother, quite witty and wise, says, dad, you're just book salesman. You've got all these experiences. You've appeared before thousands. You're a book salesman. I'm really enjoying my life. I'm back in the training room working with executive teams, but directly I do have a support team around me. Frankly, people that worked for me in the past come back as independent contractors and help me with these projects. So life is good and I get to meet you, find out more about you and what you're doing, which is inspiring. Quite frankly. It's like for me, and I don't want to play the old guy's card, but it's like the next generation of superstars. And so if I can support you in any way, that's why I'm here. Thank you so much, Robert. You said a whole lot there, and I'm just wondering if we could just go in there, when people have these challenges that come up in their life, these obstacles, how they respond to that dictates what happens next. In many ways, and I think men, I don't know about women, but I could just say as a man, I know a lot of the men blame themselves for things and they beat themselves up for things. I'm just wondering, in some of these situations that happened, how did you deal with that and deal with that kind of loss and still be able to move forward and move ahead and try something else? Eddie, I'm tempted to say, oh, it was nothing. That's just how I'm wired. But that would be untrue. After the failure of Ark International and the Simultaneous Divorce, one of my former employees, a guy named Stuart Esposito, who unfortunately is no longer with us, Stuart had been a regional vice president reporting to me at Mind Dynamics. He then went to our competitor, my good friend Werner Earhart and the EST ESC organization, it's now called Landmark, and became one of their first trainers and an outstanding trainer. Then he became CEO, which he was terrible at actually. And then he went out on his own and we always stayed in touch. I had very few friends in my company. I found that friendships didn't work very well. Sometimes you had to make really hard decisions. My friendships were outside of my company mostly, but sometimes when people left, we became close friends and Stuart's one of those. So I'm in the middle of what one of my friends described as the divorce from hell, my former wife left me for a lawyer. Oh wow. If you're going to have a divorce, that's the one I don't recommend, by the way, if you have any influence at all. And so it was bad and it had a big negative effect on me and on my children, and I could see that. And in the middle of all of that, I reached out to Stuart because I loved and trusted him and respected him and asked him to help me. I mean, I knew I was off center. Are you familiar with that term? Yes. It's simple words, but it's actually pretty deep. Yeah. I use the term a lot of times with the people on the beam, off the beam. Are you on the beam or are you off the beam? Yep. The late Stephen Covey talks about true north is your compass set to true north. Different ways of saying the same thing. And I had enough awareness, and I'm the guy that teaches accountability and wrote a book about it. So it's really embarrassing when I'm being a victim and I was just being a victim. But again, fish don't describe water very well. I'm just being a victim. So I get on the phone with Stewart once or twice a week for about three months and he doesn't say anything. I get that sound. Yeah, I see. Yes, I understand. Stuff like that. It was starting to drive me crazy. And then one evening, I know where I was sitting. I know the angle of the sun, the late day sun coming through the window. I mean, I have that kind of a memory. And Stuart starts to talk like I'm shocked. And he said, Robert, I have a question for you. I said, oh great. What's the question? He said, wouldn't it be useful to take 100% responsibility for all of this? And he shut up and my life changed once again. Mic drop. Mic drop. Yeah, because what I realized is the guy wrote the book and did all these trainings about personal responsibility wasn't living it. If you know as much as I know about responsibility, accountability, whatever you want to call it, you also know how to artfully avoid it. So. You don't sound like a victim at first, but your inner dialogue and your decisions get made out of victim. Interesting. And you mentioned earlier about executives and people that we work with, that imposter syndrome is a very real thing. And if you think about it, that imposter, I'm fooling everyone. I've made these promotions or I have this success, but I'm really undisciplined or I'm weak or I'm not educated. Right? I've just been lucky. You hear that expression, this is all an accident and especially inner dialogue. Well, you pretend to be a captain of the universe. If you think about it, that's actually a victim's statement. You're a victim of yourself. And that was me. And in that moment sitting there in my little study in Aspen, I got it that my solution is the same one that came to me in the mind dynamics training all those years before, and that is take 100% personal responsibility for my life, my choices and what's my vision, what's my purpose? And what are my values? Yes. So if I'm talking about my word for this year is resilience, and at first I thought it was about I'm living in a chaotic world, chaotic environment, as are you, as all of us are. If we're 50, 51% awake, we got to admit this is a mess. So I thought resilience was about that. That's a good word for me for 2024. Well, it still is, but it's also a good word for me personally that I take some of what I've learned about coming back off the ground, off the floor, off the whatever, and really internalize it in a way where I can model it for other people and teach it. But I think that that's what we have to pay attention to is there's the old expression, I heard this from some motivational speaker years ago, that it all turns out in the end we're just not at the end yet, which is a little bit like bumper sticker wisdom, but there's a lot of value in it. We're not at the end yet. Things tend to work out if we stay in the game, if we start read that book that somebody suggested to you, if we go to maybe a therapist, but make sure you find a good one, one that's results oriented, or that seminar that your wife said you should or your husband said, you should. You get a coach, you get a mentor, you change something because whatever's happened to you happened out of your choices, your patterns, the way you always thought, the way you always did, maybe even things that you were very successful at, but they no longer work. Well, welcome to 2024. Everything is changing and where all of the stories we tell ourselves we're the common factor. It's our story. So if you want to change the story, start with me. Exactly. I think that's the key to resilience. That's the key to coming back from disappointment, betrayal, failure. I spent 2015 through 20, 26 years in China. I went back. I mean, that's where I've had a lot of success and I have a reputation, so there's a lot of demand for me as a trainer, as a coach, as a mentor, as an experienced business person who also understands our training. And I did something there because there was a demand for it, not because I'm brilliant, which was a lot of public speaking. In the six years I went in front of more than a hundred thousand people, I started, I don't use a script. I mean, I do have an outline and I have probably like you a few tried and tested stories that make a point that I can kind of pull from depending on the audience. In doing that, I found myself doing two things that were, I thought unusual. One was I found myself quoting Steven Covey and his book The Seven Habits, a couple of things from it. I'm saddened that he's no longer with us because I've learned so much and so many people have learned so much from his work. But I was also jealous. He sold 25 million copies, and I haven't that kind of author tell us. And the other person quoting was my former wife, the one with all the wisdom and the wit. But she did have the wisdom and the wit because I found myself quoting her in these speeches. But the other thing that happened, because of some things happening in my life, I was asking these audiences two questions and I would wait until some trust got built 30, 40 minutes into the speech. The first one was, how many of you have been betrayed in life personally or in business? What do you think? These are audiences of two, three, 5,000 people. How many hands went up? A hundred percent. Very good. There may have been a few down, but they got lost in the four or 5,000, right? The other question I ask because of something happening in my own life, how many of you are estranged from a family member who is important to you? And the answer there was 70%. Again, my estimation, and I don't know exactly how to describe the moment I asked that question, a great sadness overcame the group. Now, in most public speaking, you don't want to make people sad. You want to make them happy and excited, motivated. The feedback that I received and that led to more public speaking requests was that single question and then talking about it, that's what people resonated most with. Are those two questions? Betrayal and being disconnected from people you love. I think that we are facing some personal issues that only have personal solutions. They're not going to be external. They're going to be internal that we better get to know who in the hell are we? What is our authentic self? Not our image, not what we portray to others or what others tell us. We're supposed to think about ourselves, but rather, what is it that occurs to me in quiet moments? What is the gift that I have to share? Have you ever heard of a guy named Arjun, SEN? No. Arjun is Indian by birth, but he's lived in US many years, lives down in Texas, former senior vice president of marketing for Papa John's back when their heyday. And a really brilliant guy, and he's now a fixer of personal issues. He's got a number of clients and he's the person you call when you're in trouble. If you're CEO and something, you said something, you did something that happened in your company, just kneecaps you. He's the first guy, you call it a brilliant guy. And he came and was a student in a four day executive retreat that I conducted, and he taught me this. And actually we videoed this and we now use it in our training with his permission. Merchant says this very simple expression, we're one of one. We're one, one. We're approaching 8 billion people on the planet at there's 8 billion individual fingerprints as a metaphor for our uniqueness, the gift we have to offer in the world. And Arjun says, we're one of one. The job is to find out what that's about. What is the unique purpose? And you can say that God gave us or the stars gave us, or the Ouija board gave us, or it was just an accident. I don't care where it came from. What's our unique purpose, vision, and values, and are we expressing that into the world? Yes. Going back to, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, that's the key to resilience from my point of view. Going back to what you said earlier, I think talking to your friend, him having the willingness to listen to you and then interjecting when he thought it was the actual right time, I guess I think that's important though because we need people in our lives. We don't live in a vacuum and we need each other. If it's some people call it community, some people call it your social support network. I mean, there's many different names for it, but you need to have people in your life who care about you that you could trust, that you believe they have my wellbeing at heart or whatever. So you could talk about things because as you said, I really like that zen teaching of a fish, doesn't know how to describe water very much because you can't see what you're in and you need that person on the outside looking in who has a different kind of vision for things. So it's very important. And I identify with that. I mean, that's how I have been able to, when I have these challenges in my life, when I have these upsets, it's only been through stopping, retreating, looking at myself, looking at what I can learn from this, talking to others to see what did they get out of it. I mean, am I being a victim? Like you said, is there something I need to do or do I have no responsibility? So it is very valuable and very important. I encourage everybody to have support systems like that. And to be honest, I mean one thing for sure is you're very honest. You're very candid about things, and I think that's also very important. Maybe a final thought as we draw near the end of this session, Eddie, is that I mentioned that I have two adopted children. So-called special needs kids, and my son Levi came into our family at three and a half years old. Levi has six cigarette burns on his back in a pattern at three and a half years old. He had already been anally raped. He had been abandoned. I mean, horrible, horrible things that happened to him. We didn't know all of that When we brought him into our home, we were just rescuing a kid who was about to go into permanent foster care. And my former wife had been in that program and it's almost always a horrible experience. So it was our little rescue effort, and then all of his dysfunction came out. Of course, I have this belief, and it's probably negative and cynical, but I'll own it. I'll own it. It is my belief. I've had a lot of experience with therapists because they cluster around our business. We use a lot of volunteer help, and they come because they're not usually not very good at getting business, getting clients, and we're very good at getting clients that are interested in personal growth. And so they would come and volunteer, but was they wanted a codependent relationship that we were depending on them for volunteer help and they were gaining prospects. So that gave me a certain belief about therapists. And then in my divorce from hell, we ran through therapists every 90 days for three years if they were effective, quite frankly, my former wife and the lawyer or boyfriend would get rid of them, go to the court and get rid of them. And if they were not effective, I'd get rid of them. So I went through a lot of them and it was supercharged because they were for my kids' wellbeing. And so I came to this belief that 19 out of 20 are in the profession to get their own product wholesale. They're a little bit nuts or maybe a lot nuts. One out of 20 can save your life, really. So the challenge, especially for executives to find the one, if you've got something, a pattern that's getting in your way and you really do need therapeutic help, I'm not that person. And most coaches are not that person. Or if you're clinically depressed, if you're really clinically depressed, can't get out of bed. All of that. But work hard to find that one out of 20. And the reason I share all of that is that the one out of 20 in my life has recently retired. His name is Jim Janelle, Dr. Janelle, he was my son, Levi's therapist and Eddie. These are just words, but I can't tell you the emotion that comes up for me when I think about them. He saved my son's life. Levi was headed for a life where he would take other people's life. He was that angry. The HBO special on what's called attachment disorder. The title of that is Child of Rage Age. Levi Badly injured. My two birth daughters, he showed up at my bedside with a 14 inch knife at 3:00 AM bad stuff. And today he's a college graduate. He is a great husband and father. He's a supervisor on one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, which is wildland fire suppression. He's a firefighter in the wilderness with a crew of 30, amazing man. And so during Covid, this is like looking for the good things in the covid lockdown. One of the things I did was that Dr. Janelle has a vacation home in Estes Park, Colorado. That's one of the entry towns for Rocky Mountain National Park. It's charming, it's beautiful, stunningly, environmentally beautiful, wonderful people up there. And he says that I paid for the house, and that might be true, and if it's true, I would buy him three more. But during Covid, he and his wife went and lived there and again retired so he can be a little bit away from civilization as we know it. I went up to Estes Park and I sat at his feet for an entire day and I asked him at some point, what is it that made you so successful as a child psychologist as opposed to the 19 out 20? Now, he had a long answer to it. My answer for you and for our listeners maybe is one word, readiness. He said that if a patient or a patient, and more importantly with children, patient's, parents, if there's a readiness, if they're ready to rock and roll, if they're ready to tell the truth, if they're ready to do the hard things, he can help. And if they're not ready, you're wasting your money with him. And I thought back to the first day that I met him and what he said was, here's the deal. If you like the deal, great. If you don't like it, I'll refer you to someone else. And he was not trying to sell us anything. He was telling us what the rules of the game are. And the rule was basically that I spent one hour with you, Mrs. White. I spent one hour with Mr. White a week, 10 minutes with Levi each time just to observe him in a playroom because I only spend that time with him. And you cannot do cognitive therapy with a child. You're with him 24 7. He's going to exploit or gain from you. They're going to exploit you because that's what he's wired to do for survival. Or he's going to learn from you about being loved, about being supported, about being safe, something he has never been in his short life. So that one word has made a real difference in my business. And personally, if I talk about change, am I ready as life conspired to give me enough evidence that some significant change is needed for me starting with me and I can work with you, or I can work with an executive team? Am I ready? And when you can answer that question, yes, most of the time, I think that's a very high level of awareness, very high level of functioning in neurolinguistic programming they call, there's kind of an expression I like a lot. Are you functioning from an ideal resource state? Is. Everything that you have to offer ready. And when you're at that place, it's magical. Whether you're front of a room or one-on-one with an executive or working in your church group or wherever you show up, if you're in an ideal resource state, and that means no or very little self-doubt, no distractions, no worries, no chaos in your life where you can really give, I wear this sweatshirt today on purpose. So that's my ending. Love like crazy and love some more. And you can only do that when you're in that ideal resource state. Right? I love it. I love it. What a great talk. Thank you for being so honest and open and vulnerable about everything. Well, I figure that that's what God put me here to do, so I'm just following instructions. Yeah. Exactly. We have our gifts and our talents, and it's our job to share that with the world. When John Denver went through our training, which is how the friendship got created, as a result of that and an exercise that we do, we do an exercise where people share with each other the gift I see in you. And it is profound. It was profound for John. He wrote a song about it, and I encourage people to go on YouTube and search for John Denver. The Gift You Are, anytime you're not in that ideal resource state, that's a great song to listen to. It's like getting our training for free. That's fantastic. I'm going to do that. Robert, listen, I appreciate all your time. I know we've got to go back and do some other things right now, but I'm going to be in touch with you and we'll get back together again. It will be my pleasure. The small gift I offer is if people go to extraordinary people.com, they can sign up for my weekly easing. I've been doing it for 15 years. It's free. It's a little nugget of wisdom that you can read in one minute or less once a week, and urge people to do that. It's a good way for us to be in relationship. For more information and monthly topics of interest, please go to Transform Your future.com and join our newsletter.