J.R. Martinez - Bestselling Author, Speaker, Veteran & Actor | How to Adapt and Overcome

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network, which has other amazing podcasts like Entrepreneurs on Fire hosted by John Lee Dumas. Entrepreneurs on Fire, Stokes Inspiration, and Share strategies to fire up your entrepreneurial journey and create the life you've always dreamed of. Check out some of the recent episodes, eight tools of improv comedy that you can use in work and life, how to turn your Instagram into a money-making machine, how to build a seven-figure side hustle without quitting your full-time day job, and overcoming the beast of depression as an entrepreneurial leader. If these topics are interesting for you, you definitely have to check that Entrepreneurs on Fire wherever you download your podcast. Today, my guest is JR Martinez. He is an army veteran, burn survivor, actor, motivational speaker, New York Times best-selling author, and dancing with the star's winner. He travels the world speaking with troops at various bases, as well as serving as a keynote speaker for numerous major corporate events, nonprofits, universities, and Fortune 500s. On top of that, he is a husband and father who devotes himself to spreading his message of resilience and optimism and does it all with a smile. He hosts his own podcast, Rebirth, where he has conversations with guests on life, new beginnings, and overcoming adversity. We spoke about his origin story, which was tumultuous to say the least. I'll let him get into it, but ultimately it was a tough 19 years during his youth, and then his time in the army was not great either, which has led him to speak about some of the traumatic experiences, one major traumatic experience that left him as a burn survivor in the army, but he parlayed that into a career, teaching, motivating, and inspiring people from all walks of life based on the events and circumstances that he's experienced. We spoke about leadership, we spoke about grief, we spoke about resilience, we spoke about family, we spoke about breaking cycles, we spoke about mental health, physical health, everything that he has overcome in his life, then now he teaches over to everyone who listens to him. So let's jump right into it. This is JR Martinez. He is a US Army veteran speaker, author, podcaster, and survivor. Oh man, there's so many places that we can start from. I think one of the misconceptions when people have a tendency to reach out to me, to ask me to come into their organization, to their conference and to speak, they always ask me to start at the most obvious thing, obvious trauma that I experienced, which was at the age of 19 years old when I was injured in the military overseas in Iraq, and I always have to pause and say, hold on, no, we got to back up because there was 19 years of life that took place prior to that moment that actually prepared me to be able to overcome the major city that I experienced in my life, and see there's this misconception that people believe that resiliency is something that just all of a sudden was instilled in me and that I just inherited and I just decided to have and I was going to be resilient and to be able to overcome the traumatizing event that took place in my life at 19. But what I always like to do is take people back for the first 19 years of life and let people understand that resiliency is something that I have been working on, that I have been building and that I have been preparing and armoring myself with, so I was able to persevere through that major traumatic event in my life, and the reason why I do that is because after I got some notoriety and got some good exposure and was all over the place and people came to familiarize themselves with my story, it became uncomfortable for me when people would elevate me and put me on a pedestal and say, wow, look at everything that you've done, and I understand there's an element of that of where like, wow, hey, you want to applaud someone's efforts, but at the same time, what I kept hearing was you have done, you have, look, look at you, look at you, and it made me uncomfortable getting myself, wait a minute, when I got injured, I was 19 years old, what makes you think that I was actually prepared to be able to like overcome the way that I was able to, and the reason I say that is because all of us have these experiences that I had, all of us have these tools and these opportunities available to us in order to be able to overcome whatever adversity is and whatever bro block that we're facing, so let's go back to, you know, the first, the first nine years of my life, honestly, so I was born in Shrewport, Louisiana, my father left when I was 9 months old, it was just my mother and I, I wouldn't as my mother be a victim of domestic abuse, my mother was just trying to get into some relationships and it just wasn't the healthiest relationships, and then of course, if it wasn't happening in our house, I saw it happening in our apartment complex, it was happening to somebody else down the hall, so it was something that I was exposed to quite a bit, and I mean, I could tell you that at six years old, I was in a bar singing and dancing because my mom's boyfriend played the piano, I mean, I had a very, you know, you would look at it and say that, that's a very challenging and difficult lifestyle for a young child, for a young boy, especially, and for me, I just found myself just kind of content and happy because I was with my mom, that's all that mattered to me, but I love to, you know, just kind of looking at the platform that we're using right now and like you're in a box and I'm in a box and it's, the listener right now can just visualize different boxes and I'm just asking you to visualize, so there's one box, that's the first nine years of my life, that's where I lived in Louisiana, what I refer to that is that's my comfort zone, that's my bubble, and even though there were a lot of challenging things that were happening within the first nine years of my life that I was exposed to, nonetheless, I was with my mother and I was content and I was happy, and I had this, I went to a certain school, I had my friends, so there was a lot of things that were sort of familiar to me and normal, and so as other people looked inside my box, they would think, oh, that's a reckless box to be in, but me being in it, I was like, hey, this is, this is good, this is a good box, well at the age of nine, my mom came up to me, she said, we're going to move, and I say, where are we going to move to, she said, we're going to move out of state, and we're going to move to a state called Arkansas, and I was like, Arkansas, like where in Arkansas, she's like a small town called Hope, and I could tell you that, you know, here I was at the age of nine forced out of that box, comfort zone that I'd created for myself, and I was placed in this new box, and essentially being in this new box within the first group, being in this new environment, I hated it, I hated it, man, like I, I was a new kid, I had a little bit of an accent, like kids picked on me because my middle name is Renee, and they would say that's a girl's name, I mean, just, you know, kids, any reason that they can pick on you, they were just picking on me, and I found myself getting into a lot of trouble, I got into a lot of fights, I got into, you know, just a way to feeling like I needed to defend myself, and what that led to was suspension, what that led to was just more trouble, and it was a struggle for me within the first, you know, a few months of being in this new environment, and I remember telling my mother, I was like, yeah, but I'm getting picked on, I'm getting pushed to this point where I feel like I had to defend myself, and my mom said, listen, all you got to do is focus on you, focus on what you can control, ignore those kids, and be yourself, and I was like, well, you know, that's not easy, and it's easier said than done, and you know, we've heard that before, and now when my daughter, for example, says that to me, I said, I say to her, I was like, yeah, but it's been said because it's been done, so you got to focus on that, and my mother told me this, and I just decided, you know what, in that moment, I was like, you're right, she's right, so what I started to do was I just started to just focus on being me, I'm this big personality, I love to talk to people, I love to joke with people, like, I don't care who you are, where you're from, what you got, what you don't got, it's irrelevant to me, what matters is how you show up as a person, that's always been the thing that I've sort of gauged people and who I want to be surrounded by, and I just started focusing on being that person, and that box that I was in, that I didn't like being in, that was unfamiliar to me, that was uncomfortable to me, all of a sudden turned into a little bit of a comfort zone, but it was a challenge, man, and I believe that from now, I lived there from nine years old all the way up until I was 17, almost 18, and those nine years, almost nine years of living there, were so critical and crucial, and they shaped me, because in those nine years, I moved around to six different homes, that I can remember, I lived in six different homes, now a lot of psychologists and therapists and counselors will tell you that's not the healthiest thing for a child, and I agree, as a parent now, that's the last thing I wouldn't want to do to my children, I don't want to give them stability, but now, but there was something in that, that I didn't realize in the moment when I was going through it, that later in life, I realized the value and what it gave to me, but when I moved to this community, I was one of the first Hispanic kids there, it was predominantly white and black, I was picked on, I was hazed, man, I was, I had to learn how to, at the age of nine years old, how to be independent, my mother worked the graveyard shift, I had to get myself to bed, I had to get myself up in the morning, I had to get myself to school, I had to get myself home from school, because at three o'clock, three thirty, my mother was napping still, and I had to get myself to school, so I had a lot of responsibility at a young age, and of course, there were plenty of times as a kid, I was just like, God, I just want to be a kid, I just want to be a kid, I just want to be a kid, I just want to be a kid, I don't want to have all this responsibility, but nonetheless, I had it, and there's just the way the life life was, and I learned very early on that just because it isn't what you want, it's what's needed to do, this is what you need to do right now, this is the role that you need to play and we got to make it work, and so I just learned to kind of roll with that, and I could tell you that I struggled, man, I still struggled for a very long time, that by the time I was 16 years old, I just felt incredibly isolated and at a place, and I told my mother that I feel like sometimes I want to get into a car accident, just because I want to see how many people would show up at the hospital. That's a dark thought for someone there. That, I mean, exactly, it's 2022, if you heard a 16-year-old say that, I think a lot of us will respond differently now, now that we have more awareness and knowledge around mental health, and suicide, I mean, it's just, and I never felt like I would do anything myself, I just kind of had that thought, I want something to happen to me because I just felt so isolated, and outside of my mother, like, who else cares about me? And because that's all it was, it was just my mom and I, my mother's from a small country in Central America called it, it's all about all my family, it was there, I had nobody, my father left when I was nine months old, his family, we had no connection with, so it was just my mother and I, and I just felt completely out of place, and I just always had this, when I watch TV or movies, and I love sports, I'm watching sports, and I would always see and hear about this world that was out there, this grand world that was out there, and I always remember thinking to myself, I want to be a part of that world, I want to experience that world, but here I was in a small town of 6,000 people, you know, like, it was just like, it feels like there's no way I'm going to be able to have access to that world, and that's all I wanted, I just wanted to be a part of that world, and I can tell you that, there was so many, again, so many, so many nuggets within these, this period of my life, that I could tell you that when I was a sophomore in high school, I asked my mother if we can move away from Arkansas, go back to Louisiana, because that's all I knew, and she said, no, she said, I have a great job, this is where home is, we got to make it work, and I revisited that conversation at the end of my junior year, but this time my mother presented it to me, she said, hey, I have a friend that lives in a small town in Georgia, why don't we go for like a little vacation, just to see her hang out with her kids, you know, and I was like, all right, let's do it, well, we were hanging out, well, my mom was hanging out with her friend catching up, having a good time, I had my mom's friends kids drive me around town, and I was scouting, I was literally like checking out the community, I was looking at all the schools, I was looking at the community, I was checking out everything, man, and so I always just kind of had this like alternative motive, because I just knew that opportunity, it was on, being in Hope, Arkansas was only going to take me so far, and I asked my mother, I was like, hey, after the trip, I was like, I loved it here, can we move, and she said, no, she's like, I have a great job, you're going into your senior high school, no, we can't move, and I was like, just devastated, man, devastated, and I just thought to myself like, oh, like, so then what, well, we get home, my mom goes, and you know, she's tired from the drive, and she goes and lays down for a little bit, she wakes up, and she wakes up, and she sees me taking some stuff off of the wall, and she's like, what are you doing? And I said, I'm packing, she says, what do you mean you're packing? Where are you going? I said, we're moving to Georgia, I didn't say, I, I said, we are, and she's like, we talked about, I said, hold on, mom, I got a plan, this is what I thought of, and literally, this is all I can muster up in that time, man, was I mustered up this, I said, it is the summertime, why don't I go to Georgia for two weeks, and see if I can get a job, if I can get a job within those two weeks, and let's say I'm doing well in a month from that point, well then you have to move to Georgia, and she's like, what happens if you don't get a job, or what happens if you get a job, but you're not doing well in a month, and I said, well, then I'll move back to Arkansas, and then I'll talk about moving until I'm done with high school, and the reason I tell that story, there's two things for me that are important, one for parents, one for people that are leadership positions, then management positions, and then the other one for people that are anxious to kind of get outside of this box that they're in, and know that there's another box that they want to be a part of, but can't figure out how to get access to that other boxes that exist in a world. So the two things in this is one, my mother is the leader of the family, right? She is the matriarch, she's the patriarch, she's everything, she is the leader of our family, she clearly told me, no, you cannot move, no, we cannot move, I came home, I put a plan together, I was, you know, in that sense is where I followed my mother's footsteps, where I was a little stubborn, but I was also like ambitious and driven, and I proposed something, very basic, but I proposed something. In that moment, my mother was willing to give me an incredible gift that I think a lot of people aren't willing to give other people, which is the willingness to sit down and listen, listen to understand you, even though I may not agree with what it is that you want or what you're trying to propose, because are we already talked about it? I'm still willing to listen down, listen down and listen to your pitch, and my mother was willing to sit down and listen to my pitch, about me moving to Georgia for the summer for two weeks and trying to see if I can make it in a month, and nonetheless, at the end of that conversation, she agreed to say, okay, if that's what you want to do, all right, cool, let's see, let's see what happens. There was no reason for her to do that, but she was willing to trust me. Well, I go, she empowered me, I get to Georgia, I apply for a job, a month later, I saved enough money to secure an apartment, so the deal was she would have to move, and she did how many parents would give their children that type of just just just just lead way to be able to decide, no, I know I get it changes when you have multiple kids, and there's there's other components involved, right, I get it, but the principles are there. The principles are there. Yeah, yeah. And how many of us in leadership positions and manage positions would give that same opportunity to people on our team, because we're the ones that are supposed to be the leaders, we're the ones who are supposed to come up with the ideas, but if somebody on our team has something valuable to contribute, how many of us would sit down and actually say, okay, listen, I know I probably don't agree or don't get it or don't think it's the right, but all right, let's sit down and let's talk about it. Let me listen to you. And the second thing, man, and that is the simple fact that, you know, so many of us are find ourselves stuck in a certain box, stuck stuck in a bubble, and yet we know that this is the best, isn't the best box for us. This is, we know this, this situation that we're currently in, isn't the best situation for us, but yet none, we still find ourselves too afraid or too hesitant to essentially take that lead. We know we're supposed to get out of this space that we're in, but we're not willing to essentially take that challenge. We're not willing to trust that something else is potentially waiting on the other side of this hill. We just got to find our way to climb up that hill. I get to Georgia. I'm able to folk bring the same principle that allowed me to adapt in the previous box. I'm just going to go with this box analogy. I'm going to, with the previous box and essentially just being myself and just focusing on who I am as a person, not focusing on other external stuff and just focusing on myself, because I brought that same attitude to Georgia, because I already done it before. All of a sudden, within a matter of weeks, now this new box that I was in was a comfort zone. It was literally like, this is my, this is my joint. This is my people. I feel comfortable here. I feel happy here. I was embraced by the community. I didn't necessarily feel isolated. There were a lot more kids that that looked like me, spoke like me. So I felt like, okay, there's some more diversity here. There's more culture here. I just felt incredibly embraced, man. Now, and then we'll get into the meat of it. So then I approach graduation. The military presents itself as an option for me. My mother, when I presented a tour, she said no. I mean, it was a hard no. And the reason why is because my mother being from Central America and El Salvador, in the early 80s, there was a civil war that was taking place there. So my mother understood what war does to people. That was one of the reasons my mother left the country because of the war. Also, at the same time, my mother had lost a child due to the illness that she was born with when I was three years old. So I had lost a sister. I graduated high school in 2002. We as the United States of America, 9-11 happened just a few months before and we were currently at war. So my mother understood that us being at war, that if I joined the military, I too would go to war, which would then increase her chances of losing another child. So she was like, hard, no. No way that's happening. Here's that gift again, man. I said, I get it. But can we talk about it? And we literally sat down. She listened to my pitch. She listened to what the reasons why I believed the military was the right decision for me at that time. It was an opportunity for me to get back to the country. It was an opportunity for me to travel and see the world, which is something I'd always wanted to do since I was a kid. It gave me the opportunity to get money for college. It was the total package for me at that time. And even though my mother's fears were still there and present, she was willing to trust me and say, okay, if that's what you want to do. How many of us would do that? There was a point where my daughter, my daughter's going to be 10 years old. But I remember when she was like four or five years old, people would, you know, we do that thing with kids where, you know, kids don't even know what color they like today and what food they like today. And yet we come up to kids and we're like, what do you want to be when you go out? We put pressure on them from such a young age. We already do that, right? So then when happens, you are now inherent this belief in this mindset that you always have to have it figured out. You always have to have something. I've always have to have, you always have to know what the next thing is. And for me, a lot of my life is ingrained in. I had no idea what my next move was. And that's, and in the mix of me not knowing and the mix of being content and okay and complacent with that space of not knowing, that's when the magic happened. That's when I discovered so much about myself. So to those listening, it's okay. If you got a period right now where there's a lot of silence, there isn't a lot of noise. There isn't a lot of like obvious of like, this is where I'm going with my life. This is what I want to be. This is what I want to do. It's okay if you don't have that quite figured out. There's a reason there's silence. There's a reason why there's no noise right now. It's an opportunity for you to focus on layers and components and ways that you can continue to affect people and prepare yourself for when the moment does present itself. You're ready. My mom literally said, all right. So I joined the military man. I grew off to basic training. I'm there for three months and then I graduate. I go to my unit. I get to my unit. I'm 19 years old and I'm just going through the motions and one of my sergeants one day said, hey man, I just want you to know you got to be prepared or mentally you need to be prepared because we're going to deploy. We're going to go to war. It's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. And sure enough, two months later, I was on a plane going to war at the age of 19 years old. Six months after I signed the dotted line, man. Everything happened so fast for me, Scott. I was only in country three weeks before I was injured, but those three weeks that I was in country, I learned so much more about leadership. I learned so much more about service, purpose, teamwork. I was introduced to my why. I was starting to create an identity for myself. The identity was being in this uniform, being within this institution, being of service, being a part of a team. That was my purpose. That was my why. And then the world decided, well, we're going to pivot a little bit because this isn't intended to be your thing in the long term. I think the world decided, I think the world decided that everything you've learned up until this point, whatever, whatever happens, we have to find a way to amplify this voice. And that's what the world decided because I don't think your life would have been even remotely the same if what had happened hadn't happened. Who don't you agree? I agree. I completely agree. I mean, I think what I have had the opportunity to have reached as many people as I've had the opportunity to reach over the last 19 years, absolutely not. What I have necessarily really connected with what I believe my purpose is on this earth to do. You know, so I was a kid that when I was an Arkansas in that period, I talked a lot. I talked a lot. And as you can, for the listener right now, you're like, dude, this dude came out the gate talking for 20 straight minutes. I can talk, right? So, you know, but I got in trouble for it because I didn't know when to talk and when not to talk, right? But I remember being a senior senior in high school and one day, now this is I'm living in Georgia, one day I was leaving class where we were dismissed and ready to go to the next class. And the teacher said, hey, JR, can I talk to you for a second? I said, yeah, sure. So I stayed behind and he said, he said, I just want you to know something that when you speak people listen. And I 18 years old, I'm standing there. I'm like, so you want me to stop talking? That's what I said. I was like, I don't know what, what does that mean? He's like, no, I'm not telling you to stop talking. I'm just telling you that when you speak people listen. And I was like, okay, cool. I mean, I don't know what to do with this information. Yeah, like, what does that mean? Like, I don't know what that means. And he was like, it's all good. He's like, you know, all right, you had to class. And I turn around and I left the class room. And yet to think all the things that I've been able to do over the last 19 years, I discovered my voice. I discovered that I had the ability to communicate. That communication was key for me. Communication was so important to me. And to your point, man, like had I not went through all of the things that I'd gone through for the first 19, 19 years of my life, for those three weeks in the military, I wouldn't have had the voice and be able to talk about the things that I've been able to talk about in the last 19 years. And what I learned, and I'll just kind of hopefully summarize this quickly for people in the three weeks that I was in the military or overseas in Iraq before I was injured. I was exposed to two different types of leadership. And there was one type of leader that was my direct, you know, supervisor, I guess you would call him. And he would constantly have to give us briefings. I just got out of basically training a few months ago. Like, I have gotten very little training in regards to combat and war. I don't know what to do. So he's explaining different situations. If we encounter this, this is how we respond. If we encounter this, this is how we respond. And I would ask a lot of questions. That curious kid, I would ask a lot of questions, raise my hand now. I was a private in the army. So you're not supposed to ask questions. You're supposed to just nod your head and just carry on the mission. But I wanted to understand, because I understood the severity of it like I'm at war. And if God forbid something happened to Scott, I want to know and have some understanding of how I get Scott out of that situation and get him home. And I hope that Scott would do the same for me. Well, I started noticing that the more that I asked questions, just for clarity, just, hey, sir, so wait, just want to touch on this again. So you mean if this happens, we're supposed to do this and this. And this is what I started noticing. And I hope that for if you're able to watch this, great, if you're not, just use your imagination. But he would essentially his body language, he would just sort of throw his head back and kind of look up at the ceiling and just kind of you throw his hands up and be like, off there, got another question. Roll his eyes, he'd point at me and be like, yeah, go ahead, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. And what that did and only took a few times for me to experience this. And what that did is that immediately in a young 19 year old, it made me realize, I'm just not going to speak then. I'm just not going to talk. Okay, fine. Apparently I'm inconveniencing you. So I'm just not going to open my mouth. How about that? I'll just keep it there. And that's what I did. I just stop talking. I stop asking questions. Well, then fast forward about a week or so later, that we get a briefing from another supervisor, like this is a colonel now, a higher rank in individual. And he literally stood on the small little makeshift podium that they can create in Iraq. And he stood on that podium and he looked out at every single one of us and he talked about how incredibly important every single one of us worked to the mission. He talked about, I don't care what it is that you do, you're valuable to the team. And he said, in order for you to do your job, you need me to do my job. In order for me to do my job, I need you to do your job. He talked about accountability, right? He like all of a sudden, I left that briefing, having this new sense of like purpose. And I was like, okay, I matter in this. Forget that other guy. This guy tells me there's a bigger calling. There's a bigger purpose. I went on a mission the next day. And I was a part of a convoy that helped people get from where we were to another destination. And when we got them there safely, we stayed the night there. And I can tell you, Scott, I vividly remember sitting in my home V looking out to the desert sky, dark, no lights. And just thinking about that colonel and what he said. And thinking about the mission that I was just a part of, all of a sudden, man, that one individual changed, changed everything. I suddenly now wasn't ready to get out of the military. Now I wanted to do this for 20 years. Now I wanted to go to this school and that school and be this highly decorated troop. I had all these ambitions. I was now repliting essentially my time in the military because of one person, one person gave me the purpose. He introduced the service concept to him. He introduced purpose and my identity. He did that one individual. So that's to say to everyone listening right now, whether you have a title of being in a leadership position, the most basic form of leadership is modeling the way. How do you move through the spaces that you navigate? Even in your home, how do you move your living room? Through your bedroom? Through your community? Through your kids school? How do you move through the office? Like it's not just about leadership is for people that have a title and have a pay grade and have an office and have a parking spot. No, every single one of us, LBWA, lead by walking around. It's simple, but we make it so complicated because it's easier for us to put it on somebody else instead of accepting the opportunity that we ourselves are the ones that can be the difference and the change that we actually want to see, which is we know that quote very well. But it's funny how it's funny how we always say that we want better leadership, we want to serve, but nobody actually does it. Nobody actually wants to make the effort. It's always well, you know, we know what good leadership is, but then the second you're actually in that position for some reason, a lot of people just turn to shit and I don't know why that is. I don't know everybody. You never going to talk to a manager or boss or a community leader and ask in the definition of leadership and they're just going to say, well, I'm going to shit on people left, right and center and I'm going to micromanage and I'm going to be an asshole day in day out. But I think that you have to be, I think it's self-awareness. I think it's just being cognizant of the energy that you bring into the room and that you have to be aware of how, you know, if your life isn't going a hundred percent, you can impose that and impart that on the people that are looking up to you. And I think we make a big mistake. It's very easy to do that. It's very easy to do it incorrectly. Yeah. And honestly, how many of us, I mean, listen, one of the, I normally tell people like I normally start conversations when I'm telling a little bit about my story and I say that I was blessed to have had the experience that I had where I was injured and my life was forever changed. Because of that situation, it gave me something that I think a lot of people feel like they don't have enough of, which is time. And it gave me a lot of time to sit down and have that self-awareness. It gave me a lot of time to sit down and realize the things that I did not like, the things that I did like, which is why I'm able to tell a story about my mother giving me such an opportunity to vent and to share and to, you know, come up with an concept and idea that I felt was right for me and us. I mean, I'm able to reflect on those things. And the problem, I believe, sits in the fact that so many of us don't spend a lot of time with ourselves. We don't spend a lot of time with our experiences with our feelings with our thoughts. We don't do that. That's not what we're conditioned to do. And so here I am on the 5th of April of 2003. And I racked driving a Humvee, boom, runs over a bomb, explodes. I'm trapped inside for five minutes, completely conscious. And I'm literally fighting for my life, man. And I can give you details of those five minutes. I can see my hands changing. I knew my hands were going to be normal again. I can tell you the gasp, the way that I gasp and screamed, you know, for someone to pull me out while I was literally burning alive. I could tell you the times that my eyes got really heavy and were on the verge of closing. And then they would close. And when they closed, it felt so good. It felt so good to keep my eyes closed and just let go. But then I quickly realized in that moment, wait, if my key my eyes closed, I'm giving up. I'm going to die. And I would think to myself, no, I got to open my eyes. I got to continue to fight. And I would just open my eyes and just continue to scream and yell and just hang on as much as I possibly could. I had this belief that something was going to work out. Now, that's just not something that just all of a sudden happens, right? That's 19 years of stuff that I've been exposed to that I remember my mother telling me when I was around five, six years old. This was the day after the boyfriend at the time, you know, decided to put his hands on her. I called the cops, which is normally what I did was my role in this. He gets taken away. The next morning, I remember my mother and I being out and she's just smiling like everything's good in life. But she just won the lotto. And I remember asking her, why you smile so much? Like, you're smiling like everything's good. And she said, I smile to invite the blessings. If I'm not smiling, all the good energy and good things that are supposed to come to us, I'm not going to be able to receive it and pay attention to it. So I smile to invite the blessings. And I remember it, as you can imagine at that age, I'm like, okay, mom's lost it. She's lost her shit. Like, I don't know what she's talking about right now. Now, fast forward, here I am 19 years old, trephing his humvee. And I'm like, I'm, I'm, I just got a fight to invite something good to come, something good is coming. It's 19 years of life that prepared me for this very moment to not just give up and close my eyes and surrender to what was happening and say, you know what? They'll remember me. I'll be, I'll be a hero, I guess. I don't know. No. Instead, I was like, it's not over. And five minutes later, two of my sergeants pulled me out of the humvee man started the Medevac process. I was put into a medical induced coma. And I was taken to law school Germany. And then I was brought to the United States. And three weeks later, I came out of my coma. And that's, as I tell people, that's when the real war began. That's when the real struggle began for me because that's when I realized that like, oh my god, like, one, I don't look the same. I've lost that identity that I don't look like the person that I knew for 19 years of my life. And then I was immediately told that I was not going to be able to stay in the army. I was going to be medically discharged. So now you're taking away the identity that I started to create for myself in the military, in the uniform, being of service. 19 years old, I'm thinking to myself, you're just going to throw me out into this superficial world with no tools. I just want to take a second to thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now, when was the last time you heard someone say it's almost too easy when they were talking about a piece of tech, probably never, right? Because tech is usually not easy. It's usually way too complicated, too busy, too frustrating when it should be plain easy. HubSpot CRM platform is ridiculously easy to learn, use, and love. That's because a tancrafted sophisticated system designed for the way teams actually work. 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So one of the biggest things that I do, you know, I have a, like I said, I have a 10, she's going to be 10, but I have a 10-year-old daughter, a muzzle, say she's 10, it's like two weeks away. I have a 10-year-old daughter, and one of the things, I mean, listen, we've created a good life for her, right? She loves a very good, you know, life. And one of the things that I've done immediately as a parent is as a parent, not a parent, but as a parent is I try to expose her. I try to get her outside of her bubble. I try to, like I've taken her to El Salvador, I've taken her to where, you know, to different parts of the country where people don't have a lot. Like I want her to understand that the life that she lives is not only the life that exists for everybody and different people have different realities. So for me, I think it's important to start there. Again, when I was six, when I was living in Arkansas, man, I told you I lived in six homes in nine years. I told you, I had a lot of responsibility and I had to be independent because that's what life required of me at that time. I had to pull, this is what my portion and my bargain of it was going to be, I had to show up in that way, and I was able to do that. I know we'll get into this a little bit, but the last 19 years when opportunities presented this self and they called for me to move either across the country or to another part of the world, I was quick to be like, let's go. I'm out. All right, we got to go. Why? Because that was shaped in me because of those six homes that I lived in nine years, I exercised that muscle. So when it came time for me to get up and uproot and go somewhere else, when I moved to Georgia, when I moved to Arkansas, those six homes, no big deal for me to be able to do that. That's something I had been working, conditioning. It's not a traumatic thing for me. The ability to have that much responsibility. So like at 10 years old now, my daughter has responsibility. It's like, hey, you got to get yourself up in the morning. You have to get yourself dressed. You have to make your lunch. I'll get you to the bus stop. I'll drive you to school. If that's the week we got to do it, whatever, but this is what you have to do. Your response and the thing is is I want her to be able to exercise that part of her brain. So that way when she gets older and life gets a little complicated, because it will, that's just the way life is, it's going to challenge you that I want her to be like, oh, I've exercised this muscle before. I'm not to say that it's not going to be difficult, not to say that I'm not going to be frustrated and pissed off that I'm in it. But nonetheless, I'm able to kind of work navigated a little bit. I'm going to move at a little faster pace than maybe somebody else that hasn't been exposed and exercised that part of their brain and that muscle. And so for me, I think the biggest thing is that we tend to overlook it and there has to be there has to be this grand thing where people are like, these are the steps. That's fine. That's cool. The biggest thing I'll say to people, there has been a situation in your life that has given you a pit in your stomach that has made you feel uncomfortable that has made you not want to pick up the phone when somebody calls that has made you not want to walk into a space because somebody's there that has made you want to avoid that part of town because it gives you a memory that once makes you avoid looking at certain social media accounts because it triggers you and it reminds you of something in your life. That feeling that you get to me, that's how you build resiliency. Is your willingness to lean into that? Is your willingness to pay attention to, why do I have that feeling? Why am I triggered every time, you know, I hear somebody say this or somebody do that or something pops up in my email or something pops up in my memories? Why do I have this feeling? That in itself, I think is the reason is how you build resiliency. I think being able to lean in a little bit more, allowing yourself to just be uncomfortable, living that space, living that moment, but they don't just be trying it like quickly when you're in it, trying to get out of that space and get out of that moment. No, like really look around, absorb, sponge it all up, man, take all of it in. I think that's one of the biggest things is that, you know, listen, my wife, love her to death. My wife had a very different upbringing than I did. My wife had the middle class upbringing, went to Disney every year, parents had a time share, never saw her parents argue, get into a fight, not to say that they probably didn't, they just never did it in front of the kids. I mean, two siblings, all the friends, played sports and everybody hung out at her house, she had everything she ever wanted, right? Great upbringing. I can tell you that my wife, there have been certain things that have, she's been faced with, that she struggles, that she struggles on finding a way to, you know, to persevere through it. Why? Because she hasn't exercised that part of her muscle. She hasn't, she hasn't been exposed. She hasn't, when, when things get uncomfortable, she tends to like, I want to run away from that. I want to avoid that. And I tell you, it's, I mean, we've been together almost 12 years and she's now at the point where something gets uncomfortable. It used to be, it used to frustrate me, man. At the early stages of our relationship, there would be something that I would be like, no, let's talk about this. She'd be like, I don't want to talk about anything. And it would just drive me nuts. I'm like, no, we got to talk. We got to figure this out. No, I don't want to talk about anything. And she would, and if, and of course, her to stay in that space, her energy, you can see her getting fidgety. You can see her want to move around. You can see her like eager to leave. Now, now she's the one that actually will reproach me and say, all right, let's talk. What's going on? Because she's now done that work. And it's literally just goes down to that place of, I feel this. Why do I feel that? I know what I don't like. I don't like this feeling. I don't like what someone says this or does this. I don't like when this, when I'm in the situation. What do I need to change? And now she's, she's realized, oh, wait. When I was a kid and I played basketball and I was really good, but then I tried out for this one team and I didn't make it. Oh, wait, I was disappointed. I gave up. I quit when my biological father would tell me he was going to show up and he never did. Oh, that was disappointment. So I'm now disappointment, disappointment, disappointment. Oh, when I tried out for this other thing and I didn't get it, oh, that's more disappointment. So every time now it came to her trying to take a leap and try something new, she never did. Why? Because she was afraid of the disappointment. And I had to finally like say, hey, condition harder to be like, no, like what would your life have been? And what opportunities would have presented? And now life worked out the way it was supposed to. We're together. We were here. Like it is what it is. But now moving forward. Now when you start to feel that, how do you lean in a little bit more? So I just ask people to say, hey, listen, you can, I think you can simply build resiliency by your willingness to just be uncomfortable. Just just get uncomfortable. Whatever it is in your life, you know what it is. I don't know what it is. Just sit down and think about it. What's uncomfortable to you? And if it's uncomfortable, that's the thing you should pay attention to. And if you're willing to sit in that space for a little bit, oh, you'll marinate some really cool stuff, man. Some good things will start to happen for you. I love it. I want to go back to your story. I want to, I want to understand that pointing your life, your, your physical identity, your personal identity, your professional identity, all of that in five minutes was virtually destroyed. How did you not give up? Well, I definitely wanted to and I definitely did mentally and emotionally. I was in this space where I just, I would tell everybody that I would have been better off had they just, you know, I'm being a die. I mean, what's the point of living in this world like this? It was also my identity also too was growing up. No one ever came up to me and said, you have an amazing personality. People came up to me and said, you're handsome. You're handsome. So that was my identity as well. And I could tell you that, you know, after a few weeks of being in the space one day, my mother came into my room and, you know, we ended up having a really intense conversation and, you know, a lot of tears and a lot of yelling and the question why being thrown around quite a bit. And, you know, at the conclusion, you know, my mother just went back to the basics. She said, listen, I don't know why this happened to you. I don't know why this happened to us. All I'm asking you to do is every morning when you wake up, just try to be that kid, just try to be that positive kid. Try to, try to be positive. Try to, you know, just, just be that kid. She said, I ask you to, to try to believe that something good will come from this. I ask you to have faith. That was it. And in that moment, man, I was willing to like listen to her not just hear her and there's a difference between listening and hearing. Hearing is, you know, there's background noise right now and I hear it, but I'm not really paying attention to it. I couldn't, you know, and there's a conversation happening behind me and I hear it, but I couldn't tell you, Scott, what they're talking about because it's just noise. I hear it. It's like the TV background noise. I hear it. No, I'm listening to you right now. I'm listening to a conversation that I'm having. So, okay, I can really recite back to you what you just said to me. Okay, I'm listening. And in that moment, I was willing to listen to my mom and I was like, what else do I got? What else? I might as well. And that's literally what I did. I just started trying to, you know, just to be a beat at every morning when I woke up just to try to be this positive kid. And I started to change my perspective, man, and I realized, okay, yeah, I don't have a lot. I get it. I don't. However, I'm alive. I can see. I can speak. I can hear. I'm learning how to move my body again. I had to learn how to walk. I had to learn how to button a button. I had to learn how to go to the restroom by myself, but I'm starting to learn how to do those things. And I started to see a little bit of improvement in my, you know, occupational therapy and it just like my movement in my body. And I was just like, okay, and the thing, let me share this real quick. This is, I refer to the day that I was injured as my rebirth. And I call it that because I believe parts of me died on that day and other parts of me were born. And I believe that all of us experience rebirths over the course of our lives. But we don't want to embrace it because the idea of something dying scares the hell out of us. So what we do is it's not a rebirth. No, no, no, no, because something can't die because something that I know, whether it's good for me or not, dying is not something I'm capable of dealing with. So don't let it die. And let me just continue to stay in it because even as dysfunctional, it's what I know. It's like the first box of my life, which was the first nine years, it was what I knew. But there was a lot of dysfunctionality. There was a lot of challenges with my mother, wouldn't see my mother being hit me getting hit. All of this stuff. This is not healthy. But don't take me out of that because it's all I know. And I don't know if I can, if I'm, if I'm deserving, first and foremost, of another life of alternative. I don't know if I'm capable of creating something else. So let's not even try to find out. Let me stay here. Let me stay in this box. And I can tell you that I call my day that I was injured my rebirth. And I believe that all of us experience rebirths over the course of our lives. There are phases in our lives that have to end in order to make room for the next phase. It's just what it is. You don't, you don't go on vacation and say, I'm going to bring everything from my house on a vacation. No, because the idea is hopefully wherever you're going to your destination that you're going to want to pick up some things there. There's something that you want to bring back with you. Let's get to make your house better, whether it's a piece of clothing or whether it's some sort of art that you find or whatever souvenir that you pick up. It's going to make your house nicer. It's going to look at some character, add something different to it. So why can't we apply that same principle? Right? Like you see it all the time. You see it in parents. Parents are so conditioned that I take care of my kids. I take care of my kids. They hover over their children. I'm just going to take care of you the whole time. And then it gets to a point where their children are like, I don't need you to do that anymore for me. I can do it myself. I can handle it myself. But then the parent struggles because they're like, oh, wait, you don't need me anymore. Instead of evolving and realizing that wait, my role now has shifted. It's not that they don't need me. They need something else for me. When now what they need now more than ever, it's for me to be supportive and listen to them and to guide them and give them feedback when they ask for it, not to make their lunch from them, not to pick them up from where they are. It's not that anymore, right? But that phase had to die and you had to didn't embrace the new phase. Some people aren't willing to do that. So I had to change my perspective. I was in this hospital, man. And I just had to realize that at the end of the day, there was there was a lot for me to be grateful for. And I literally just dove. I just lived on that. That was this I stopped. Oh, and this is another thing to go back to like the children and how we what do you want to be when you grow up and all this other stuff? I immediately was overwhelmed with, oh my god, I'm never going to have a girlfriend. Oh my god, I'm never going to have a wife. Oh, my never going to have kids. What am I going to do for a career? No one's ever going to want to hire me. No one's ever going to want to walk in front of me or walk next to me on a sidewalk in a office, etc, etc, etc, etc. I'm thinking of long term. I'm thinking I'm overwhelming myself with all of that stuff down the road that may or may not happen. And so what I had to do was say, no, stop overwhelming yourself with the things that you think will happen because at this point, you think they will. What I had to do is go back to the basics. What my mother told me when I moved to Arkansas and the kids were picking on me. And I said, how do I adapt? How do I make this a comfort zone? How do I make this a box that I can live in? And she said, you just focus on what you can control. And in that moment, man, in the first couple of months of being in that hospital, all I can control is the way that I woke up every morning. It's the way that I showed up every day. But when I went to bed, finding something positive that happened in the day, something that that I could be grateful for, some sort of progress. I didn't overwhelm myself with the girlfriend, with the wife, with the career. I just focused on surviving today. And so if you keep finding yourself spinning your wills, I invite you to maybe stop overwhelming yourself with what society tells you you should have figured out right now. Instead, pause, go back to the basics and just look at today. I'm not telling you that once I implemented this idea that all of a sudden my life was, you know, peanut butter and jelly, baby, no, no, it was, it was challenging. It was difficult. Of course, it was a roller coaster. But every time that I managed to find myself in this dark space, man, I would always find myself, I would pull myself out of it simply because I would think to myself, this isn't it. I would always go back to the first 19 years and the challenges that I experienced. I would always go back to when I was trapped inside of that Humvee for five minutes. And whatever it was that I was going through in that moment, I was felt overwhelming. I would always remember the adversity that I previously experienced and say, no, JR, remember, it's been hard before. It's been uncomfortable before. All you gotta do is just continue to hang on, man, continue to fight. And what I would do is I would allow myself to just feel that energy. If I felt like I wanted to cry, if I felt like I wanted to scream, if I felt like I wanted to punch the air because I was in this moment mad at the world because of what I was having to live through, that's what I did. I closed myself off in my room, I cried, I screamed, I punched the air. I mean, I did, I journaled and I just wrote, wrote, wrote recklessly and just like cried and listened to Metallica while I was doing it. Oh my God, it was like the worst thing I could have done, right? Like a love Metallica, man. But the great thing about it, it was getting, that was part of my healing process. I needed to get all of this stuff out of me. And so many of us, especially as as male as men were taught, you're not supposed to cry. You're not supposed to be vulnerable. In the military, you're taught, you're taught not to be those things. And yet here I am just allowing myself to feel these things, man. And I could tell you that I would fill them, I would write pages and pages, I would cry, I would scream, I would yell and then I would say, okay, the answer is not in this space. I need to walk out of my room. And I would walk out of my room and I would go to the world. And I would just literally understand that I needed the world to give me something that I couldn't give myself in that moment. And literally it didn't have to be this big major traumatic thing that happened. There were someone who walked up to me and said, you're amazing. No, it wasn't that. It had to be literally a simple thing where someone just comes out and says, hey, man, you want to go, hey, I was looking for you, want to go grab a bite to eat. And then you realize, oh yeah, somebody does, somebody is okay with being seen in public with me. Someone is okay, which is riding in the same car. Oh, the sun is out today. Look at those trees, how they move and how they get life from the air, the wind that blows and how they create it as well. Like I just, I stopped overwhelming myself, man. And that is literally a thing that every time in the last 19 years, from a career standpoint, from a personal standpoint, when I find myself, when things get complicated, what I realize is I got away from that. And I sort of overwhelming myself. I don't want to get too, jump too far ahead, man. I know you're leading this thing. But I just, no, I was just, I was going to say, dude, I was going to actually ask him, like, are you good to keep going? Like, yeah, I got, I got time. Yeah, we can make it happen. No worries. Yeah, we're good on time, man. This is, no, it's amazing. You can, you're an exceptional storyteller. Like, you really, really are an exceptional storyteller. Like, you can, you can tell that you have a way with words and you, and not only that, but the way that you, the way that you walk people through experiences and the way that you teach over while you're walking people through your story, I think it's a, it's, it's, it's why you're doing what you're meant to be doing. Thank you, man. I appreciate that, man. Thank you so much. I mean, it's, you know, I think that's, and why you're, well, let's unpack what you just said right now too. I think so many of us are, find ourselves in positions where whatever it is that we're doing, you know, when we don't get, we don't get that enough, right? We don't get somebody to say, hey, you're doing a great job. Thank you, or I like what you do, or this was great, or whatever. And it took me a long time, man. We're hearing you say what you just said about me. I would, I could just look at you and just take you for what it is and say, thank you, man, I really appreciate that. In the past, I'd be like, oh, stop it. Oh, stop it. No, no, oh, stop. It made me feel uncomfortable. And then now I'm just kind of like, okay, thank you. Thank you. It lets me know I'm on the right path because see now I'm able, that's energy. You're giving me energy. But what you just said, you're giving me energy. You're giving me life because I'd like to believe in the last 45-ish minutes that I've been running my mouth is that I have been giving a lot of my energy to you and to your listeners. I'm giving. I'm giving. I'm giving. You can tell I'm passionate about this. And so I'm giving you so much. I can tell you that if you didn't say that to me and we logged off, if you can see me right now or if you can just visualize this, I would sit back in my chair and be like, oh, boy, that took a lot out of me. And it did. But you saying what you said and me growing, I'm able to understand that that's the opportunity where I have to invite and allow the world to give me what it is that I need. So thank you for giving me some energy and replenishing me because that's exactly what you just did. But what I was going to say, it's the truth. That's what you say like it is. And I actually think that you know, you mentioned that you're almost like at one point you were shy to people saying positive things and I feel the same way sometimes I don't love it. But I feel like this because it's so uncommon and we don't say nice things enough to people to recognize little wins and the small wins and give those small pieces of encouragement. But if we just normalize that, then not the world would just be a better place. Boom. That's it, man. That's it. Like seriously, we don't do that enough. You know, another thing we don't do enough of? We don't apologize enough. We don't say I'm sorry. Right? My mom is the greatest she was and she gave me so much. My mom never apologized. My mom could be completely wrong about something. And she told me one time when I was a kid, this is the one thing my wife always says. The great thing about me and one of the worst things about me is that I remember everything. It's a horrible thing when I'm like, no babe, you told me 17 years ago. And she's like, we didn't even know each other and I was like, yeah, but I heard it somewhere or whatever. I mean, I just, it's great thing that I remember a lot, but it's also a horrible thing. So in a sense of my mom, I remember her telling me one time, I was like, you're wrong. Why don't you just apologize? She says a parent should never apologize to their child because the minute you apologize to your child, you now, you have no power over that child. That's so we're just going to take a degree out of mill. Oh, I completely disagree with that. And I just remember like, what? So here I am now as a father. I can't tell you how many times I go to my daughter. I'm like, I'm sorry. I was wrong. Daddy, daddy dropped the ball. Daddy made a mistake. Daddy doesn't have this figured out. I'm okay with that. Right. I want my daughter to know that it's okay to apologize. She comes up to us now and she'll say, mom, dad, I'm sorry. Okay. Cool. But it's not only just getting people conditioned to to give an apology, but it's also conditioning people to receive the apology. Right. Once someone comes to you and says, I'm sorry. Hey, stop holding it over their head. Receive that and be like, thank you. I appreciate the apology. I receive it. Thank you very much. You know, you could talk a little bit about it, but don't just continue to stay in that space and harp on it because then what's going to happen? It's going to condition that person to believe that well, what's the point of an apology then? I'm not going to come to you with an apology. Just forget about it. I'm never going to apologize again. So there's so much that we have to exercise, man. But what I was, what the hell was I saying earlier? But what I was saying earlier, um, what this is what happens in my brain. This is what happens in my brain, man, in post production, you're going to be like, oh, that's the thing he was talking about. No, no, I got you. You're good. You're good. You're good. You know, but like, I think the, the biggest thing, man, for me is that I, I have, oh, I know what I was going to touch on. So what I have over the last 19 years as a, as I've built a career for myself as a speaker, as someone who's crossed into the entertainment space and has had some success there, I found myself all of a sudden being sucked into now. Oh, I got to do X amount of dates a year. I got to do, I got to make X amount of money every single year. Everything I do, Scott, everything I do, when I left the hospital after almost three years of being there, everything I do is about people. It operates from a place of people. It's all about people. It's all about impacting people. It's about connecting with people. It's about listening to people. It's all about service to people. That's always the place that I operate from. But there have been these instances over the course of my, the last 19 years since I was injured, where I've got, I became successful. And then all of a sudden, there's these little, there's noise in my ear and my shoulder that are telling me you got to make this much. You got to do this amount of events a year. You got it. And so now I'm overwhelming myself, overwhelming myself, overwhelming myself, because I've been sucked into what we're conditioned to believe is successful, the interpretation, the definition of success. What happens? Now all of a sudden, JR's authentic self, you're not getting JR. You're getting, you're not getting a hundred percent of him. You're getting maybe 60 percent of him. Why? Because I just flew in late last night. I'm exhausted. And so when I show up at eight o'clock in the morning, kick off your event, you're getting 60 percent of me, because I am exhausted. In some cases, maybe it's less than that. Maybe you get one where you're getting 85, 95 percent of me, 100 percent of me. And I found myself getting sucked into this trend. And what that up happening was opportunities weren't presenting themselves anymore. It was like, God, the universe was like, Oh, wait a minute. You forgot why? Why you were doing this in the first place? We're going to take this stuff away from you. We're going to give you some time to sort of think about this for a second and realize why you do what you do, because you clearly are forgotten. And so when I started all of a sudden reconnecting with why, why, then the opportunity started to present themselves again. And so the key is what I want people to understand that what that you want to do, whatever it is that you do, is always operate from the place of why are you doing it? And never lose sight of that. Don't find yourself chasing money. Don't find yourself chasing sort of paths on the back, because then you're going to lose those opportunities. I've seen it happen to me. I've seen it happen to people that I know. And so for me, everything that I do, man, even till this day, and listen, we're human, man, we forget. I guess I'm saying or talking, talking about this, and I'm passionate about it. But I forgot. Right before that whole COVID thing happened, I was on the road, not stop busy, busy, busy, busy. And it was so cool to say I was busy, busy, busy. And then COVID happens. And then I was just like, oh, wait, I was, oh, wait, I was, oh, I got, I became disconnected again. And it's okay. It's part of being a human being. But it's also part of being a human being, a part of life where you pause and you rely yourself to sort of kind of recharge, reconnect, figure this thing out. And then you, you prepare yourself for the next phase that's going to come because it's going to come. It's just the way life is. Life is better. It's going to be bigger and better because you were willing to do the work. I can tell you this. So because I have done, I have implemented this and I have exercised this part of my brain and my heart and my mind that when COVID happened, all of a sudden, May 2020 events were canceled, July 2020 events were canceled, October canceled. I'm like, the rest of the year, like, oh, I, okay, I guess I didn't, I mean, nobody knew at that point. Everybody on my team, including my wife, we're freaking out. What's going to happen? What are we going to do? And I was like, it's fine. It's all good. Because I can't control this virus and what's happening in the world. I can't control that. I can control how I respond to it. So I'm not going to panic. I'm not going to freak out. I'm going to look at it and I don't want to seem tone deaf to people that have really been affected either they lost somebody or financially, I mean, I get it. I know that it was a reality for a lot of people. So I don't want to seem tone deaf. But in my particular circle where I am, I was like, I got something that I always talk about. I don't have enough of, which is time. So what am I going to do? I'm going to figure out how to use this thing right here. And if you can't see me, I'm tapping on the camera. I'm going to figure out how to use this thing right here, which is a microphone. I'm going to figure out how to lighting. I'm going to figure out internet connection. I'm going to get ahead of it a little bit. I'm not going to panic. I'm just going to figure out all this stuff. How can I still connect with people? Because it's the thing that I love to do. I love talking and connecting with people. So how can I leverage all of this to do the very thing that I love? And guess what? About four or five months later, people that my agent started calling saying, hey, people are asking about virtual. Can you do virtual? I'm saying, you kidding me? I've troubleshooted all this stuff already. Let's go send me the link. I know how to click it. I know how to log on. And here's the thing. There are people that booked me to do virtuals that have booked me for in person. And they said when I was done with my virtual, my god, JR, it's like the same person. How did you bring the same energy? We felt the same energy virtually that we have in person. I said because my why has not changed. My why is about impacting people, being in front of people, being able to connect with people. The difference is how I connect with those people. But nonetheless, I know on the other side of this camera, I know on the other side of this, this, this microphone, there's people. So as long as I'm always operating, it's about people, man, then guess what? I'm going to impact, I'm going to do the work that I believe I'm in this world to do. And so you always have to have those moments where you reconnect as to your why because society in the world is going to pull you away from that. That's just what they do. It challenges you. It's overwhelming you. Are you going to stay grounded? So I like to believe that now is the world's opening up, which is another thing. I fell into a trap, man. In the 2021, the world started opening up a little bit. I started traveling for events. I started traveling in person and virtuals doing both balancing balance. Yeah, yeah, I'm making up for lost time. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I spread myself to them. I was overwhelmed. Do when it came to December, I was like, what did I do? I fell into the trap again. So this year, I've made a conscious effort. I am not going to overwhelm myself. I am not going to take on too much because why? Because what matters more is my health, my mental health, my emotional health, my physical health. I got to spend more time taking care of me. I got to understand this energy thing. I can't just be given energy, given energy, given energy and never putting myself on a position where I can actually receive and replenish myself. So be careful, my friends. Be careful that when opportunity presents itself, it also can be perceived as a threat. It's called a SWOT analysis, SWOT. What's your strength? What's your weaknesses? What's opportunities? And what are your threats? And opportunities can also be perceived as threats. Strengths can be perceived as threats. So it's important to maybe try to do a SWOT analysis pretty often. Find out what are your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities, and what are some threats? The more you actually have this conversation with yourself, it doesn't take a lot of time. You don't have to go to staples or anybody and buy this huge notepad and this whiteboard and start doing all this analytical stuff. No, you're driving. You're on a train. You're riding your bike. You're going for a run. Spend 15 minutes just thinking about where you are in life right now. Think about the people in your life right now. Think about the career standpoint. Man, I love life is hard. Life is challenging. But I could tell you that life is easier when you are able to implement these things. When you're able to essentially, when you're self-aware, when you're willing to sit down and do the work yourself and stop putting it on everybody else in the world, do it for you. Because you have everything you're looking for and that you need is in you. But we're so conditioned that someone else has to fix it for us. And it's like you can fix it. Start realizing that right now. It's not putting it on someone else. So then that way, if it doesn't happen, it's an easy out for you to blame somebody else versus if you procrastinate, when you know what you're supposed to be doing, but you've been procrastinating, well, then then you have to blame yourself. Well, I don't want to do that. Well, shit, well, then you're going to be stuck in the same thing. Like you look at a clock and not a digital clock, but if you look at a traditional clock, 12 is at the top, six is at the bottom. I always like to tell people I'm living at 12, always at 12. 12 being the top symbolizing all the good things, six at the bottom, symbolizing all the bad things, but a clock, a hand constantly moves around, right? Only if it has batteries, if it has enough power. So the point is, if you find yourself in sort of that vicinity of six, you have to be willing to give it some batteries. You have to be willing to find new batteries to put into this clock in order to get that hand moving to get back to 12. And if you get to 12, because we all have 12s, when you get to 12 and you're enjoying that moment, you have to know that six is coming. It doesn't mean you live in fear. It simply means you know, okay, I know this is the circle of life. I know it's going to happen, but it's okay. I was able to get through it once. I can get through it again. And by that time, for the fourth or fifth time, it comes around to six. You're like, I'm good. All right. Cool. What do I need to learn? I now get adversity. And I'm literally like this guy. I'm like, all right. What am I supposed to be learning right now? What am I learning? What's the lesson? What's the lesson? I don't panic. I don't freak out. I don't be like, oh my god. I'm broke. Oh my god. I lost this. Oh my god. This event didn't happen. Oh my god. Nope. What am I supposed to be learning? I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, NordVPN. 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Don't forget, if you're trying NordVPN, there is literally no risk to you. They have a 30-day money back guarantee. Give it a try. If you like it, great. If you don't, unless you are refunded, you can pretend it never happened. They gave a special discount for success story podcasts. Listeners, they gave a special offer. So go to my link at nordvpn.com slash success story to get your subscription started today. Great. It goes straight to opportunity. So when you have diversity, it goes straight to opportunity in your mind. That's like your de facto reaction to it. Absolutely. I love it. Yeah. Okay. So there's one last thing I wanted to touch on that I thought was very interesting and entirely relevant to this audience too. And then I want to do a couple of rapid fire. And then also, if there's other stuff you want to go into, be my guest, I'm never going to, I'm never going to ever cut you off. I just want to like, you know, you have other stuff to do today. But so the last thing I actually really wanted to get your feedback and your perspective on is reinventing professional identity because people struggle with this at all stages in their career. You were forced to do it, but a lot of people aren't forced to do it, but they're just hating their life. And they don't know where to go. They hate the job that they're in. You literally had to, because you were never allowed to go into the military ever again. And you created the life of speaking motivational speaker. Now you sort of spread the message. You help people sort of upscale themselves, understand how to deal with adversity, all these different leadership topics that are great, but obviously that's not what you thought you were going to be doing when you were young. So you come out of the, you know, you come out of the hospital. How do you, how do you find out where you want to spend your time? How do you reinvent this professional identity that was taken away from you? So I follow my passion. That's for me, what's my passion? So six months after I was injured, I was going through the motions, appointments every day, you know, doctors, therapy, all that stuff. One of the nurses asked me, Hey, will you go in and talk to this patient that six months ago was injured and is now in a horrible place? Will you go in and talk to him? And I said, no, she said, why not? I said, because I'm 20 years old. What am I going to offer to him? And she said, just go in and talk to him about how things have gotten better for you. I was like, no freaking way. And she kept insisting, insisting, insisting, and finally I was like, okay, fine, I'll do it, right? Now hindsight, looking back at it, that was the universe telling me, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, so I finally, I'm like, fine, I'll do it. Just to get her off my back, that was really the one reason I decided to do it. I opened the door to this hospital room. It's completely dark in this guy's room. And I'm like, it gives me that pit in my stomach. Oh, he's not in a good place. And I was like, I can't leave. I'm I open the door. He knows I'm standing there. What would that look like if I just walked out? So I walked them to his bed. And I introduced myself. And it was in that moment, man, that my definition of a conversation was redefined. I asked him about four or five questions, right? Sort of the general stuff. Where you from? How old are you? What unit were you in? What happened to you? What do you like to do? Stuff like that, you know, surface stuff. And also to do took it from there and just started talking. Then 45 minutes later, I was like, Hey, man, cool. It's good talking to you. Hey, I'm going to come back tomorrow. Are you okay with that? He's like, yeah, man, I'd love that. And I started the walk out of his room. But before I could exit the room, I noticed something. Remember, when I told you when I walked in the room, it was completely dark. As I was starting to exit the room, he turned the light on. And then when I looked back into the room, he actually was out of his bed opening the curtain. He was letting some light in the room. Again, it's not always these big reveals and signs that we should be paying attention to looking for. It's the simple things. That's a simple sign. What I did is not ignore it. And I said, huh, that was interesting. But I like the feeling that I got. And so what I mean, real quick, my definition of a conversation was redefined. I learned in that moment that a conversation does not consist of you speaking for 50% and me speaking for 50%. It means that if Scott's going to talk for 75% of the time, then I'm going to spend 75% of the conversation listening. And if I only speak 25%, that's okay. I spent 75 listening. So I exit the room. Instead of ignoring that, I go up, find the head doctor. I ask him if I can visit patients every day between my appointments. He says, of course, that'd be great. You have something that we don't have experience. You're living this. So yeah. So I went every day and in the afternoon into the evening and visited patients, I went knock on doors, I went walk in, I'd introduce myself, we'd start wrapping. And literally, I was just, I always just thought of like a walking, talking guy to this recovery process. This is what I've experienced. This is what this is what's going to happen. This is what you have to do. That's all I did. But the thing, as much as I felt like I was giving them something, the thing that I discovered, they were giving me a few weeks into doing this. I discovered one evening when I was walking back to my room. I had this really good feeling in my heart. And I just I just remember smiling. And when I got to my room, I sat down, I just started thinking about, you know, the visits and the conversations and the feeling and I just thought they gave me the thing that I thought I lost. The ability to serve. They gave me my purpose back. It's going to look completely different, right? I'm not in the military anymore, but I don't need to be in the military to serve people, to be of service. Okay, cool. So for me, it literally came down to my why is service to people. I like to serve people. I like to give back to people. So when I got into a nonprofit sector and I became a spokesman for a nonprofit to raise awareness for troops, it was about I'm serving people. This is an opportunity for me to serve when I got into the speaking space. It's about my way of serving people. When I got, became an actor on a soap opera called on my children, it was an opportunity for me to serve people. I was always operating from I'm serving people. When I got on dance with the stars, it was my way to serve people. When I wrote a book, it was my way to continue to serve people with more of my story. As I've continued to speak virtual, I'm still serving people. So for me, it always goes back to for people that are like looking for I'm not happy or this is a dreamy joy. Well, what does make you happy? And when you identify the thing that makes you happy, also identify why does that make you happy? Because it's not to say that you can't work in this job. It's just maybe you have to then realize that this job gives you the opportunity to, for example, if I'm all about people, this is no knock on accountants. I'm just going to throw something random out. But if I'm an accountant, right? And I talk to accounts and a lot, some of them will say, like, oh, I just kind of mundane, just going to, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I answer a question. It's the same thing, right? There's some of her people say there's no adventure. Yeah. But for me, I love serving people. So if I was an accountant or if I'm a teacher, or if I, the barista, or the cashier, I know everything that I do is about people. It's about serving people, impacting people. So you could take JR, log me off right now, drop me in the middle of a coffee shop and say, that's your job now. And even though I don't like the barista part of it, even though I don't like pushing buttons on the, on the register, whatever, I love the interaction with people. And so for me, by me showing up in that way, it's going to allow everything else to just essentially just take off. It's going to sort of paint this picture that, hey, what you're doing is clearly right. So what is your passion as the biggest than I ask people? Stop waiting around for this, like, for, for, you know, for, for this big reveal of the sign, it's like, what do you enjoy doing? What do you love doing? And maybe your career doesn't give you the opportunity to fulfill that thing. But in most cases, it does. You just have to identify what it is that you actually love to do. And so that's why people have said from a virtual standpoint, they feel the same energy that they would feel if I was in person. You and I meet man and person, you're going to, you're going to get the same dude, the same dude. I'm the same guy. Which by the way, we got to do some time when you come to Florida. That's a whole hey, I'll do it. Let's do it, man. Let's go. Um, you got all the spots now that you've been there for a little bit. So, you know, you know, all the spots where I got all the, I got the studio. I got the studio Miami. I got all the food. Dude, you're going to have a good trip. I'm a good trip. So you know what I'm saying? Like, it's just, so for me, it's about, you got to understand what it is that you're, what is that you do? Why do you do it? What do you love to do? And then from there, you just got to trust. You know, you just got to be willing to trust. I mean, you know, you just got to be willing to trust man. Trust yourself and trust at the universe and be willing to try something because you're never going to be able to get where you want to go and identify some things about yourself. If you're not willing to exercise a certain part of that muscle and the biggest thing is I would just tell people, leave people with this is, you know, as you move through life, you just, if there's one thing you remember from from my story is that I was willing to always lean in. That I was always willing to listen whether someone who was listening to me or I was listening to the universe and paying attention to what signs were being presented to me. I was always paying attention. And so, but all of us have the ability to do it. All of us, I've told you my life, like there's nothing so it's not like I was born to these really scholarly parents and, you know, influential academia is like, no, like I'm just kind of a normal kid, you know, you know, just love sports and goofing around and being silly, but also I had to do some work. And I still have to do some work in order for my relationship with my wife to evolve and for it to be what it has become and for hopefully to be what it's going to be, I have to also be willing to do some work. So I have to identify there's things that she says or does that trigger me. Why do they trigger me? Maybe it's more about me unless about her, but I can't communicate that to her if I'm not willing to find out why that triggers me. Why that bothers me? I have to be willing to do the work myself and then I can convey that to her. If she then does does nothing with it and doesn't care, well, that's a separate conversation, but I first have to be willing to do the work. I can't just tell her, stop doing that. Well, why? We'll find the why. When you're when you're dead and gone in 150, 200 years from now, when maybe you live a long time hopefully, but 200 years from now, we'll play it, say, what's the one lesson that you want people to remember you for? They even parted on the world. God is such a such a loaded question. It's a great super loaded question. I don't I don't make this easy. I think I think probably again, there's a lot of things that I was successful and I was able to create it, but I think the biggest thing man that I was willing to break generational cycles and create new ones. I don't mean that like in the world. I told you my father left when I was nine months old. My mother's father left her. My wife's biological father left her. I'm a father. I was able to break that cycle. I was able to redefine what the story is and what I want it to be. I now have two beautiful children. Like my mother got married a couple of times and got divorced a couple of times and she never got into it for the right reasons and here I am. I'm married. I'm happy. A beautiful wife that pushes me and challenges me every day as well listens to me. Yeah, I think for me, man, it's just the fact that I was just willing to break cycles and and generational cycles and curses, whatever you may perceive them as and was willing to create new ones. I think that's the thing that we're all capable of. If we really wanted enough, we're capable of doing that. The most important thing is if people want to reach out to you and connect with you, where do they go? I think the thing that people say all the time is like, my Instagram is I am JR Martinez. That's the world we live in today, man. It's so crazy. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I am 38 years old and I have been doing this speaking thing for a while. I did it the old school way, man. You put a print out all these testimonials and references and headshots and you put them in a little folder binder and you send them off to people and you're like, hopefully you read this. Hopefully there's my contact information at the bottom. Now we've progressed and the thing that I keep hearing from everybody on my team is you need to be more, have more of a presence on social media. You have to build up your social media following blah blah. That's the world we live in today. It took me a while to get that, man. Talk about innovation, talk about your willingness to pivot and say, okay, cool. I realized I got to catch up where the world is. It took me a while and I lost some opportunities. I'll just tell you that real quick. I've lost a couple of opportunities. Now, my engineering grand scheme of things that weren't meant to happen, but I've lost some opportunities that I was that they said I was I was the person for it. They went with somebody else because they had a bigger social media following and what that did as much as that would piss me off and as much as they would, you know, give me all better and upset what I realized, wait, wait, no chair. This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to realize what it is that I need to work on. So here is me working on that aspect. So I will, because normally I would just tell people, I'd go to jrmortinas.com, my website, yeah, check it out. Well, how many people are going to do that? And if they do that, are they going to click on your social icons on your page? So now I have to say on Instagram at I am jrmortinas on TikTok. I am jrmortinas on Facebook. I have jrmortine. I got to go social first. Then we can talk about jrmortinas the website. So this this me trying to be innovative. Figuring out figuring out social is probably the least complicated thing that you've done in your life. I'm sure you'll be just fine. I'm trying, dude. I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm 38 years old. And I'm like, we're trying to figure this thing out. You're saying 38 like it's like eight, eight, like you're not. But dude, 38 for social is like, you're old for social. You are, right? Like you're old. If you wait six months on a platform, it like it flies. It flies. It's tough. Like I live in marketing. So it's I'm used to it. But I see people that don't live in marketing that are between 30 and 40 and they think they're technically savvy. And like they just get, they just get blown away by the different strategies you got to use to grow this channel versus that channel and all the different, you know, algorithm updates. You got to keep track. It's a pain in the ass. But ultimately, ultimately, it just comes down to, okay, so anything in life, it's consistency, but also quality. If you put enough quality out there, you'll find your tribe, you'll find your community. And maybe if you don't hack the algorithm, it won't be as quick, but ultimately you'll get there. That's really all right. And what I had to learn about too. And for me, from a social standpoint is, you know, whatever my follower count is like on Instagram, for example, I had to stop again, thinking about the thousands of people that are out there that don't follow me that I'm trying to reach and I'm trying so hard to reach them. And what I had to realize is like, wait, by me focusing on the others, I'm dismissing the ones that actually have hit that blue button and followed me. So let me just more focus on them. And then because I serve them in some way enough for them, it'll somehow reach the people that need it. And so for me, I'm sort of content in the space of even those, you know, the industry says you got to have a bigger follower count. I'm sort of content with the idea of like, hey, it's all right, like I'm serving who I'm serving right now. And it'll organically grow. And I'm just going to be authentic and raw and just real. And it'll happen and it'll reach who it's supposed to reach. But it doesn't mean that I'm not willing to learn and figure out how this works and how that works. No, I'm going to continue to learn. But I'm always going to operate again from that place of just focus on the people you actually do have in front of you. Yeah, no, that's good. Okay, let's do a couple rapid part of closes. Let's go. Oh, and by the way, I have to mention because you didn't mention it, you have a podcast too that people have to go check out called rebirth. So please check that out. Thank you. Thank you, man. Hopefully you listen to this. You are. No, obviously. Okay, a couple quick rapid fight. Well, you can take as long as you want. It doesn't matter to me. I was going to say like what's the timer? No, there's no timer. It's not that it's not that blended. Okay, so what are what are the things you've had an incredible career? You have a beautiful family. What are the things that now keep you up at night? Oh, that's a great question. The things, well, hey, so something that we didn't touch on because JR is always looking for ways to grow and evolve. And I'm never necessarily just I'm going to complacent. I'm going to stay here. And I'm comfortable here. So I'm currently right now actually completing my undergrad. I decided a few years ago to go to college. So I'm actually about six weeks away from being a college graduate man. So I could tell you that the last few years, that has been a thing that keep me be up as writing papers. Like if you remember those days, I was like literally. I would want to go back and do them at 38. That's for sure. I do. Oh, dude. Oh, dude. I last night, I was up to one o'clock in the morning just like finishing like this, this response paper and like, yeah. So that has been the thing that recently has been keeping me up at night. But I think on another note, I think the other thing is like I'm just always in my mind trying to understand where the world is and where we're moving to, which is essentially social media and sort of digital spaces and figuring out how I can develop and build a team that would help me be able to build that part of my business, I guess you would say. Because the thing that I'm starting to learn too is that I don't have all the answers. Luckily, the one thing I do have is I do have the the ability to have access to people that do have the answers for the most part. And I have to get over this idea that, oh, I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. And it's like, no, I need to, at this point, need to delegate and kind of get some help to come in and sort of guide me and allow me to understand how to be more useful with my time instead of me spending you know, 20 seconds shooting something, but then spending the next three hours editing it, just for it to go up Instagram as a real, right? So I need to be smarter with my time. And if that means that I have to delegate and sort of outsource it to somebody else. So I think that's the biggest thing at this time is like, I'm just trying to figure out how to kind of be where everybody is and how I can show up as my authentic self. Good, good. The biggest challenge, obviously you've had many challenges, but what is the biggest challenge you've overcome in your own personal life? So I've learned how to put up boundaries. I've learned how to put up boundaries and starting with my mother. I, you know, in this conversation, I raved about her and the gifts that she gave me, but, you know, I also told you one story of my mother. I wanted to apologize, but my mother has also experienced a lot of traumas never dealt with it. And unfortunately, I was the punching bag. And, you know, she felt threatened and certain emotions started to surface. I was the punching bag. And so I've learned how to set up boundaries and learn how to protect my mental health and what's best for me and from an extension from that as my family. So I just know how to protect my energy now and protect my, you know, my sanity. And I think that's probably something for a very long time. I didn't know how to do. And I was just a yes man, and I would do anything to make anybody happy. And I realized that that wasn't doing anything for me. So I'd say probably that's one of the biggest things that I've learned how to, that I've overcome and being able to implement in my life. There's obviously been many people that have been impactful in your life. If you had to pick one of them, who is that person and what did they teach you? It's my best friend. He is 17 years older than me. He, we met after I was injured. I was, when I was 22, 23, 24, I was a reckless kid. I was angry at life. I was out of the hospital. I was trying to figure out where I would fit in in the world. And I didn't feel like the world was, was reciprocating that same desire and energy. And I was just floating and angry. And one day, he told me, we worked for the same mountain profit. And he told me, he said, you need to sit in the passenger seat of the car. And he said, and I sat there and he told me I needed to cry. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you need to cry, man, you need to cry. You got all this stuff pinned up. You need to cry. And all of a sudden, man, I just started crying. And I was 24. So he was 41 at the time. And I could tell you how impactful that moment was. Every interaction that we had prior to that, that conversation, he would always end with, I love you. And I would always be like, all right, cool. And I'll talk to you later. I'll see you later. Like, all right, cool. Thanks to whatever. Well, the next day, after he told me to cry, and I just started crying, man, I had all this stuff pinned up inside of me. The next day, I was the first one to tell him I loved him. And he has really challenged me to redefine what manhood looks like. That it's okay to be vulnerable. It's okay to identify that there's things that you still need to heal and work on. It's okay to tell another man you love him. And he has helped me in my relationship with my wife, identifying things that I need to work on, things that trigger me. He has helped me identify things that I thought I worked on. I thought I healed up, but I didn't. And it came out as a father. When I took it out of my daughter, he's really challenged me and forced me to look at life differently. And I owe, honestly, he was the one that sent me the email to audition to become an actor on the soap opera. I owe so much of my life to him, man, because he has just been that person that has challenged me. It has been completely honest with me when I'm being a little bit of an asshole where I'm missing the mark. He's like, hey, we got to pull it back a little bit. What are you doing? What are we doing? What's happening? What do we need to do? And I just always know that I can call him and talk to him. And it's such a blessing to have somebody that loves you unconditionally. And that's the biggest thing that I've discovered for him is that, you know, that unconditional love. That's amazing. And hopefully, hopefully people can obviously look for mentors in their life, but somebody at that level that has that amount of friendship and love for you. I think that's, yes, unfortunately, rare. I think it's a rather rare thing to have. I mean, I don't think I have that in my life with a friend, not a spouse, not a girlfriend, not a wife. You have somebody who is not part of your family who you have that kind of bond with. That's yeah. And he's redefined it for me, man. Like I always thought, family was blood, right? What you're born into. And honestly, he's the godfather to both of my children. He's their uncle. He's their like their grandpa. He's like everything. Like he, I'm closer to him than people in my actual family. I text him every single day. We talk if not every day, every other day. So, you know, he's allowed me to realize that family can mean a lot of different things. Amazing. Okay. If you have to recommend a book or a podcast, something that's been incredibly impactful in your life, what would that book be? What did you learn from it? Or that? I would say I'll show it to you right here. Error where everybody has books and you saw over the alchemist. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one. Alchemist. I've never been recommended on this show, though. I know the book, but why was it? Why was it important? You know, man, the thing, I haven't read this book in about three or four years, but I can tell you that I read it for the first time when I was probably 25. And whatever it was that I was going through at that time, and I read this book, it just, it made so much sense to me. And then I remember picking the book up about four years later, because I was going through like a funky space. And it gave me what I needed in that time. And so, for me, you know, when you think about like alchemy, right, and the ability to, you know, create, and you know, to me, this is a book that is something that no matter what phase you're in in life, there's always a takeaway. There's always something. And so now that I pull it out, it makes me feel like that it's time for me to probably pick it up again. When I'm able to put down, so even on the back it says, every few decades, a book comes along that changes the lives of its readers forever. And I believe that that is so, that encompasses what I think what I was just trying to say is how like, you could pick it up at different stages of your life, and it'll speak to you, and it'll give you what you need. So, when I'm done, when I'm done with the school books, I'm going to pick that one up and read that, and hopefully it'll kind of give me some insight. So it's just a book that is, you know, I'm going to cheat. I'm going to cheat. I'm going to say a second book. Yeah. Go. Right here. Hold on a second. All right. You ready for this one? What's it? Gary Chapman. I don't know. Five love languages. Oh, I think I don't know this book from from me. I think I think I've been told to read this book. But so now, right? Like people will tell you, it's for your partner and your relationships or whatever. But I'm going to tell you the great thing about this book. This book is a great book for leaders to understand. This is a great book for parents to read and understand because it's not the people's different love languages. And so now, when I interact with people, I realize that's your love language. It may not be mine, but I have to meet you there because that's how you communicate. That's how you show love. That's how you receive the gauge personality. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I coach my daughter, softball team. Disregard like the word love in it because some people would be like, oh, love. Like, no, no, the love languages. Like, understanding when I'm coaching these girls, like, I'm realizing this is a kid that thrives more on, you know, positive affirmations. They love that. That's what fuels them. That's just their love language. That's okay. So I give them a little bit more, but this other kid doesn't need that. This other kid needs quality time. Okay. Who I get that? My daughter, my wife, my friends, like, people like coming contact with. So pick this book up. I'm telling you, there'll be people on your team, people in your family that you'll be like, ah, that's that person. And it's okay. They'll have different love languages than you. You're then it's also important for you to know what your love language is, right? Like my love language, man, I love giving gifts to people. It's just what I love to do. I love to give gifts to people. So I'm always going out of my way to give to give to give to give to give to people, right? So it's just my thing. It's what I love to do. I don't need positive affirmations. I don't need you to tell me I'm great. I'm doing an amazing job. That's cool, but that doesn't fuel me. But other things do. So pick up that book. If you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing, what would it be? You will have the thing that you've always wanted. Which is a family, unconditional love, and the opportunity to create the thing that you've always wanted in your childhood. Yeah. That you're going to have it, man. The things that you're worried about as far as a good girlfriend, a family, a kids, and you're going to have it. And it's going to be beautiful. And you're going to be blessed with two amazing kids and amazing wife. You're going to have it. So stay the course. Just continue growing, learning. So that way when your partner presents itself to you, you're ready. You don't blow it. So that's the biggest thing that I would tell myself. And then last question, what does success mean to you? Happiness. It's, it's, are you happy? Are you happy? Yeah. Are you happy? Like, I'm not saying this to boast or anything. I've been very fortunate and blessed in my life. I've made a lot of money and that's cool. I've done a lot of different things and that's cool. The thing that brings me the most happiness, man, is, I mean, the thing that makes me feel like I'm successful is that I'm happy in life. I'm happy with my family. I'm happy with my career. I'm happy with how I'm sort of responding to the different challenges that life presents. I'm just happy. I'm happy with where I'm at. I'm happy with what I'm doing. And it's not about the bank account. It's not about the titles. It's literally that I'm happy that I'm carrying out the very thing that I always love to do, which is impact people and serve people. And that's that's the thing that brings me the most joy and makes me feel if one person feels impacted, and I'm successful.