Creating Resilient Teammates: A Recipe For Success With Thom King

 

To achieve success, you need strong, motivated, and resilient teammates. But of course, the same attitude must be seen in yourself as well. Going deep into this topic with Rodney Flowers is the founder of Stevia brands, Thom King. They talk about the importance of going after a legacy for the greater good, how to rise to the challenges of life, the values deeply rooted in their very person, the positive aspects of honing a rewarding habit, and how to find pleasure in pain. If everyone will focus on doing good and being good themselves, then forging effective and lasting teamwork is never impossible.

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Creating Resilient Teammates: A Recipe For Success With Thom King

I am excited about our show. I’m with the Founder of Stevia brands, also known as Icon Foods. Mr. Thom King is with me. I’m excited to talk about the success that this brother has experienced in his life. What motivates him? What keeps him going and thriving and changing the game in his life? If you’re out there and you’re wondering how to be successful, maybe you’re wondering how to develop a multimillion-dollar brand or you’re looking for some motivation to get over your challenge or to get to the next milestone that you’re reaching for. I advise you to read up as we explore the journey of Stevia Brands as we understand Thom King and his recipe for success. Without further ado, Mr. Thom King, welcome to the show.

Rodney, thank you so much. That was an amazing introduction. I’m looking forward to digging in. Let’s do it.

When your name came across my desk, I was like, “We’re changing the game. I get to talk to Mr. Stevia himself.” I’m excited to have you here with us and learn from you about how you were able to get Stevia Brands where it is. What were the mindset and the motivation behind all of the success that you’ve experienced?

It’s been a journey. My journey started in 1993 or 1994 when I ran into this gentleman who had come back from Paraguay. His name is Jim May. He had a jar of this green paste that he had brought back with him and he said, “Give this a try.” I dipped my finger into it and tasted it and I was amazed. It was about 25 times sweeter than sugar. It had all these herbals, bitter after notes. I saw the potential in it. I was like, “If there is a way that we could unlock those sweet constituents from the leaves in a natural process as using water and whatever, this could be the natural replacement for aspartame.” That was my goal. It’s aspartame. It’s used in Diet Coke. It had been linked to Parkinson’s. When it comes in contact with heat, it can turn into formaldehyde. I saw that I could make a difference. I saw that that little leaf could be the pathway to making that difference.

Stevia was created from you wanting to make a difference. Who knew that? You hear these big brands and the thought behind them in the world is it’s all about money. I’ve grown to know that when you see a lot of people that are successful, like yourself, a lot of us would think, “They did it for the money. It’s all about the money.” You can make a lot of money. What I’ve learned is when you peel that onion back a few layers, you see that the common thread is many of these people, they had a goal and a vision and it wasn’t about the money. The money was a byproduct of making a difference or creating a large impact that would benefit a lot of people.

Unless you’re doing good, you can’t do well. I’m not saying that I’m perfect. I’m an absolute work in progress. I have failed more than I’ve succeeded. I can honestly tell you that the times that I’ve failed and failed the hardest were times that I did things purely for money. I avoid that now. I’ve gained a certain level of wealth. I have a lot of people come to me and they’re like, “How is this business idea? We’re going to make millions of dollars.”

 

The latest one that somebody came to me with is hand sanitizer. They’re like, “We can capitalize on the ethanol market. We can make millions making hand sanitizers. We can mark it up 400%.” I was uninterested in that. I would rather make hand sanitizers and give it away to people. To me, it feels more genuine. As I get older and more mature, hopefully, I do less for money and do more contribution and legacy because that’s where real satisfaction comes from because money will come and go. If you have principles, values, self-respect, and self-expense, that carries way more value than money ever will.

You have the motto that you live by called do the right thing. Talk to us a little bit about that. What’s the energy behind do the right thing?

I do the right thing. This is something that I wake up with every single morning. I have this morning ritual that’s intense. The first thing that I do is I read Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic. The Daily Stoic has been one of those books I’ve read for years in a row. You take a daily chapter out of it. That sets the stage. It’s based on stoicism where you focus on being good. That’s your driving point. I start my day that way, reading from The Daily Stoic, and then I immediately start journaling. In my journaling process, I fill up an entire 8.5×11 page. It’s all about answering questions like, “What am I going to do to make an impact? What am I going to do to make the world a better place? What am I grateful for? What am I willing to let go of?”

Letting go is probably the biggest factor for me, like letting go of fear. Where does your fear come in? Do you have a fear of what other people think of you? Do you have a fear of aging, dying, oblivion, or fear of failure? I love to dig deep in my fear and see what I can do to vanquish it. The thing is, fear lives in the future. If you are present with what you’re doing, you won’t experience fear. Fear is when you start thinking about, “What if? What if this person doesn’t call me? What if this deal doesn’t go through?” That journaling process usually takes me a solid 35 or 45 minutes and it’s all based on doing the right thing, “I’m going to do the right thing. I’m going to restrain from doing things that are outside of good character.” That is how I create my daily masterpiece.

That puts you on a trajectory. I’ve heard these things, the rituals. They’re not quite explained the way you’ve done it because that’s a daily commitment that you’re making to yourself.

You have to, as an entrepreneur and a business person. I’ve done a lot of self-help reading. I’ve been to a lot of motivational seminars. Anthony Robbins is one of my favorites. He’s exceptionally inspirational. One thing I took home from that is putting your oxygen mask on unless you’re practicing self-care, taking care of yourself, and other people. When you’re in an airplane and they’re giving you the spiel on what to do in case you start losing pressure and stuff like that. It’s always like, “Put your oxygen mask on first so you can help other people.” That is the whole thing about self-care, getting yourself grounded, setting the stage, planning your trajectory for the day.

 

Why do you hold yourself to that standard? That’s truly a choice. What caused you and what consistently causes you to hold yourself to a standard of doing that every day and doing the right thing every day? What’s the driving force behind that?

That would be my why. Why do I do that? It is because I honestly feel like it’s my duty. I’m the CEO of a company. It’s my duty to be able to inspire and lead people. Unless I do that for myself and I have my mindset in seeking out my own personal excellence, how would I ever get that excellence out of other people? I don’t do this as an ego thing. What I can tell you is that if I practice these things myself and I try to procure my own personal excellence, it rubs off on somebody and I can see that I’ve positively impacted somebody’s life. I’ve seen some of my employees start growing. They ignite. It’s such a sense of satisfaction. I feel like I’m doing good. We all die in the end. I want to leave behind a legacy where people are like, “I’m glad I ran into that guy. He made a positive impact on my life.” What I’m leaving behind, I do it for legacy.

Legacy is a powerful thing. My dad and I were talking about life. We were talking about the fact that one day we’re going to die. As a matter of fact, you may not know, we talked about Bernie Dorman. He’s a good friend of mine and a mentor. He passed away from COVID. We were talking about him. My dad knew him. We were talking about how unfortunate that situation was. We started reflecting on our lives and realizing that you don’t know when you’re going to go. To me, it made it more important to be on your game, to be doing the right thing, to be producing and building the legacy because you and I are going to pass. It’s what you leave behind that makes the difference.

You have a certain amount of time that’s unknown to you. What do you do every single day because of that? You know that you got a set amount of time that is unknown. It could be the next day. Now is important that I produce and I build on this legacy because the next day, I might not be able to build on it. I got to get as much as I can get done as humanly possible now to make sure that if I go the next day, that legacy is left behind, a change or an impact for someone else is left behind. When you live like that, when you wake up, it’s easy to do the right thing because your perspective and your priorities are in check when you’re focused on building that legacy, in my opinion.

That’s powerful. That’s beautiful. You never know when it’s going to happen and that’s part of the beauty of it. A lot of people will run from being present and acknowledging their own mortality. People will run from that stuff and ignore it. It’s like, “It’s not happening to me.” When you embrace it, when you touch it, that’s when your life magically unfolds in front of you. You then realize that your time here is finite and you want to get your crap together. You want to make as much of an impact as you possibly can. You want it to get done as much as you possibly can. You want to take in as much as you can. Take in the beauty.

I remember I was at Deepak Chopra’s place in Del Mar and he was telling a story. He said there was this monk and this monk is being chased by this tiger. He runs to the edge of the cliff and he’s like, “The tiger is going to get me.” He stumbles and he falls up the edge of the cliff and loops his arm around a root. The root starts tearing away from the side of the cliff. He looks at the side of the cliff and he sees a strawberry. He picks it and he eats it and it was the most delicious strawberry he has ever eaten. That’s being present.

If you realize that your days, your moments here are numbered, the beauty that you can see around you completely and starts to unfold. You see how beautiful plants are. You see how beautiful this inner connectedness of us with animals and all living creatures. You start to see that there’s some source behind this all. That source runs through everything, all matter. It runs through us, that same source. It ties us back to the source. When you can live in that and you can be present, it becomes magical.

Unless you're doing good, you can't do well. Click To Tweet

I live this every day. I’m fortunate enough to have a wood facing deck. I get to sit out there and be with nature on a regular basis. I feel that connection. It makes me want to play my role in it. Think about a tree, it does the right thing if you will. It does what it’s supposed to do based on the day of the tree. In its beauty, it provides oxygen. It provides shade. It’s great to look at it. It’s in the right place and doing the right thing. I’m like, “I’m a part of that too. I’m connected to that. As the tree, I have a responsibility.”

The tree stays and it does what it’s supposed to do all the time. It’s supposed to shed its leaves in the fall if it’s not evergreen. It regrows its leaves and then it continues to grow. It reaches for the sun. That’s what it does. You can relate this to the grass, the animals, and all of this stuff, but then there are human beings. We don’t always act accordingly. When we do the right thing, we can contribute back to the universe and express what has been implanted in us. At that point, the way I feel, we embrace the beauty of a flower or a tree or a beautiful animal or what nature. Nature in general. Nature can in turn embrace us because we are contributing and expressing in the order as we have been designed. That’s what’s important.

We revert back to this period of time. Everything has time on it. This tree is going to die one day or get cut down, unfortunately. It’s what you do with that time that is important. Having the right value system within that, because a lot of times we do chase the money, we get caught up in the distractions and it dictates what we do and how we behave, how we think and how we feel. We find ourselves misaligned with our original purpose. When we can get back to that space, realizing that it’s important to stay in that space because we have limited time. We can be productive contributing members of society and of humanity, in my opinion, at a much faster rate than what we’re experiencing.

That is well put. I love the analogy that you used with the tree. The tree is being a tree. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s shedding its leaves, making its roots go deeper, growing taller, honoring the seasons. There’s so much for us to learn in that about what our purpose is and why we’re here. We can choose to be here to do good and to leave a beautiful legacy behind or we can choose to not be good and leave destruction behind. Those are our choices. Those are our freedoms. That’s where you need to make your choice. From my perspective, I believe that we only live one human life. I’m not sure what happens to us. I don’t trust people to tell me what’s going to happen. It’s like, “How do you know that? Did you do that and come back?” If you do that, then you tell me what happens. If you haven’t made that journey, I don’t want to hear it.

The human experience and having this precious gift of human life is rare. If you look at this giant pool of energy and great source, one of us gets plucked out of that pool or that great source of energy and dropped into the human experience. You’re free to do whatever you want. You’re going to experience pain. It’s like, “I don’t want to experience pain.” Pain is good. I love pain. Bring the pain because I’m going to learn from it. I’m not going to curl up. I’m going to learn. I’m going to make that a growth experience. It’s interesting if you can create some values or you can find values.

For me, I didn’t grow up in an environment that fostered good values. My dad was a turbulent person. He wasn’t a good role model for me. My grandfather was probably the best human being I’ve ever met in my life. I chose to try to procure some of my value systems and my beliefs from him. You can only go so far. Part of it is you have to develop character. Be a good person. Make those hard choices. Practice restraint where you need to practice restraint. That philosophy led me to the most unusual thing and it was the Serenity Prayer. I didn’t know too much about Alcoholics Anonymous or anything like that for that matter.

 

I was reading a book that referenced the Serenity Prayer and I’m like, “What is this Serenity Prayer? I need to find out.” The first time I read it, it’s like, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” It’s like, “What are those things I can’t change?” You can’t change other people. You can’t change time. You can’t change laws. You can’t change the fact that you’re going to die someday. God gives me the courage to change the things that I can. It’s like, “What can I change?” I can change my attitude, behaviors, habits, how I spend my time and with whom I spend my time with.

The last part of it is, “God, grant me the wisdom to know the difference between the two.” That altered the course of my life. I was like, “Interesting.” If I lived firmly in the present and I have the wisdom to understand the things that I can change and the things that I can’t and I take action on those things that I can change, that’s going to help propel me into being a better person. If I can lead by example and have a little bit of influence over people that see that, it shifts the world in a more positive way. I know that, but the Serenity Prayer was one of those things that I stumbled upon that I was like, “This is small, three stanzas of absolute 100% brilliance.”

How do you deal with it as you go about living out that prayer? I can imagine, as a CEO, the challenges and the levels of discomfort that you have experienced. You mentioned, “Bring the pain. I love the pain. I’ll make it a growth experience out of it.” Often, as you know, we run from pain. We don’t like discomfort. We try to avoid that, which in my opinion, I feel that’s a necessary part of life. I want to hear from you. How do you embrace the challenges or approach them in a way that allows you to overcome them?

The first thing I can tell you is I try to refrain from taking anything personally because that’s where things can get dicey. If you’re always taking things personally, you are no longer in control of your life. You’re allowing your life to be guided by other situations, other people, circumstances, and stuff like that. I don’t take anything personally. I also ask a lot of questions. I ask a lot of questions of myself, like, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I being true to my values? Am I coming from a place of contribution and respect?” When I’m engaging in a conversation with somebody, I work on actively listening. Not waiting for my turn to talk, but actively listening to what they have to say. I then ask the questions.

If somebody comes to me with a problem, I’m like, “Do you feel like you might have a solution for this problem that you’d like to share with me?” I find that that creates collaboration. I also find that when you’re building collaboration with a person who’s within your organization, that creates ownership. If you have a staff of people or you surround yourself with people, it doesn’t matter if it’s a company, group or friends, when you have people that you’ve surrounded yourself with that and take ownership in what they’re doing, lives can be changed. The mountains can be moved. For me, that is all rooted in never taking anything personally. It’s always being comfortable with being a little uncomfortable.

A necessary trait and a powerful trait to have. It’s the second time you’ve mentioned values in this conversation, if not the third. How important are values to you?

From my perspective and for me, personally, my values define me. Those are things that I work on daily. It’s being honest, being open, being accepting, being respectful of other people’s opinions, and being open. Those are values that I work on a daily basis and I put myself in check. If I find myself veering outside of what I believe are my values, it can cause me a little bit of pain. I learn my lesson from it. I feel uncomfortable in the situation and feeling a twinge of pain, I say, “What do I need to do to course-correct this? What have I done to go outside of my value system?” I would say values define who we are as human being.

Have you had to challenge your values throughout the course of your life? You distinguished between your father and your grandfather who was a not so good person versus the greatest person that you ever met. I’m imagining there were different values that these people had and perhaps instilled in you at some point in time and maybe you had to challenge those. Have you had to challenge your values? If so, what was that experience like for you?

I would say that 100%, I have challenged my values. I would say I’ve even compromised my values in life. I compromised my values less and less. Challenging my values, I could say that that would be a daily event for me. Within my values, I have a certain set of disciplines that I follow and a lot of them have to do with restraint. That restraint has to do with my actions. The things that threw me off the rails are if I eat something that I know that I shouldn’t be eating, something that’s carby or if I have too many drinks. I always limit myself to two drinks and that’s it. There might be that time when I have three drinks or if I don’t drink enough water.

I know these sounds probably trite, but they’re all these things, these disciplines and these rules, if you will, that I’ve set up for myself, these bright lines that define who I am. They’re challenged all the time when somebody is like, “Try this cookie.” “I’m not going to eat that cookie. You can eat it. You can be my food taster. I’ll live vicariously through you. You tell me what that cookie tastes like and I’ll enjoy it through you.” There are bigger things, bigger parts of my values that get tested. I don’t lie and I’m not dishonest about things, that’s a big thing for me. I love punctuality. Punctuality is probably one of the greatest pieces of respect that you can give to somebody.

I also think being not being punctual causes me a great amount of stress. Even our podcasts, I’m like, “What time was I supposed to be on there?” It can throw me in the same anxiety. In the end, it’s about forgiveness. If you can learn to forgive yourself and you can learn to forgive yourself for screwing up and not staying 100% true to your values at all times but you course-correct it and you make commitments to not do that again and then you forgive yourself. The beauty of being able to forgive yourself is the pathway to being able to forgive other people.

I love the way you captured those little things, drinking the water, or not eating the right thing. It’s the little things that add up to the big things. You’ve heard this analogy before, you take a ship and you tweak the direction a little bit but over time, it ends up in a completely different location than it would have if you wouldn’t have made that little small change. These little things that are seemingly insignificant over time, causes drastic change. They shouldn’t be belittled or go unnoticed because it’s the little things. A lot of times, when we’re looking for change, we’re looking to make the big change. What’s the big thing I need to make? We sabotage ourselves because, in my opinion, it is not healthy to make a big change quickly. You want to do small things to allow the big change to happen.

With COVID and all of the things that are happening in the world, it was like, “What do you do with this? How do you handle this?” For me, go back to the fundamentals. Go back to the things that you know that you can do on a consistent basis and experience success and allow that to snowball. If you focus on those things, you put the blinders up to all of the big things that are happening because you’re focusing on the small things. Over time, you’ll find yourself in a completely different state of mind, emotionally stronger than you were before. I wanted to say that because when you talk about these rituals and you talk about your value systems in doing these things, these are simple things to do. They’re not difficult to do. There’s a common theme with these rituals, behaviors, habits, values in every successful person that I know. The key or the blueprint is practicing these things. It’s simple and it’s easy to do.

If you are present with what you're doing, you won't experience fear. Click To Tweet

It’s simple, but not easy. It’s creating the habit and that’s where the discipline comes in. There are days when I get up and it’s like, “I don’t want to journal now. I don’t have time to journal.” I’ll get that pen in my hand and I’ll have a blank sheet of paper and I got nothing up here. It’s like, “I don’t feel like talking. I don’t feel like writing this,” but I still do it. I won’t get up from that table until that entire sheet of paper is full. It’s having the discipline. It’s having the discipline to create good habits. A habit can be created within 21 days. If you do the same thing over and over for 21 days, you got a habit and that goes for the good and the bad. If you drink six packs of beer every day for 21 days, you got a problem. You adopt a plant-based diet for 21 days. In 21 days, you’ve got an amazing habit that will serve you well with health and information and stuff like that.

How do we get to the stick-to-itiveness? I feel, sometimes, we run out of steam. You don’t have the endurance to go the distance. We don’t have the resilience to bounce back whenever we don’t fill up the page or we don’t stick to a habit. We do it for 21 days and on the 22nd day we don’t do it and then we don’t do it again. We don’t want to go through the 21 days over again because that was too hard. What’s your response to that for people?

I don’t have a solution for other people. I only have the solution that I would use on myself. I use pain and pleasure. If I do not stick with a habit or I break a good habit, if I’m trying to develop a good habit, if I break that habit, I will cause myself pain for that. I will cause myself pain. I will cause myself punishment. There are a lot of people that are not down with that method. I’ve been asked this question before and I’ve had some psychologists tell me, “That’s a bad habit.” I’m like, “It’s one that works for me.” What I have found is that if the pain you experience from a particular habit exceeds the pleasure that you’re deriving from it, you’ll stop that habit right in its tracks. I use the pain method to associate so much pain with that particular habit that it outweighs any pleasure that I’ll ever get from it and that is how I stick to my path. Is that right for everybody? I don’t know. Is it right for me? I’ve been told not, but it works for me and it’s something that I will always continue to do.

Pain drives a lot of pain and so does pleasure. The two most powerful driving forces on the planet are pain and pleasure. I feel that once you have a certain level of maturity, you could leverage these powerful drivers to accomplish what you want. It shows me that you’re mature in being able to play with these modalities to get to the place of success and knowing yourself, knowing what drives you, knowing what’s going to trigger you and move you into action or not. We talked about pain and whether or not it’s a good tool to use. A lot of us are in pain. We act the way we act and we do what we do because we are in pain. We would like to get out of pain. We’re acting in a way because of the pain, but it’s producing more pain. It’s not producing the pleasure that we want. It’s understanding the right task to complete and then be willing to go through the pain to get those tasks completed. That’s another driver.

Sometimes the pain is great, we don’t want to go through it in order to get to the other side. The only way you’re going to get on the other side of the mountain is climbing and that’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be painful. Interestingly, you put yourself through that experience in order to stay on course. I wouldn’t advise everyone to do that. You got to figure out what works for you. The fact that you’re willing to put yourself in pain in order to stay on course says a lot about how important it is for you to stay on course. You’re inflicting the pain on yourself. Most of us need someone else to inflict pain on us in order to stay on course. To do it yourself, that’s on a whole another level to punish yourself and to discipline yourself.

Discipline is an important part of success. You hear a lot of people and they say, “I believe in self-care,” and all of that. They’re trying to take the discipline out of it. It doesn’t take that much. I believe in balance and all of that, but I still believe that there’s a level of discipline that is required and it’s the hard stuff and we’re trying to make it sometimes too soft to cater to people. People don’t want to hear that anymore. They don’t want to hear it, “It’s easy.” The fact of the matter is, it’s not always easy. Growth is challenging. Expressing your true purpose is challenging. It’s challenging because there are many things in the world that exists that’s trying to hinder it. There’s opposition.

 

I use the analogy of football. You got eleven guys that’s trying to stop you from scoring, that could be quite challenging because there’s opposition. We have to navigate that. If you’re not experienced, if you’ve not developed this habit before, you’ve not experienced what it feels like to fall off the wagon or build a team and deal with people with different personalities, build a business, and everything that comes with scaling and branding and all of that, it can be daunting and challenging. The discipline is working with you on the field, behind the driver’s seat. If you’re not on the field, you don’t have the opportunity to score. If you don’t discipline yourself to be a major player, then you can’t be a major score. If you don’t score, you can’t win.

You have to be on the field if you’re going to play the game. Rodney, you brought something up that’s firmly wedged in my brain. I was telling you about how I leverage pain and you brought up about what happens if you’re in that pain. If somebody is experiencing pain and can’t find a way out, I’m stuck thinking about that because that’s a beautifully, compassionate thing to say. I don’t have the answer to that. I can tell you that I’m going to be thinking about it. What about those people that are in such a high degree of pain that they’re stuck that they can’t move? I live in Portland, Oregon. We have the highest amount of people that are living on the streets. It’s easy to take a look at that lifestyle. I’m sure there’s a ton of mental illness, drugs, and alcohol involved in it. It creates this dichotomy.

These people are living on the street, does that make them people with a poor character? These are vast generalizations. Does it make people that are in such a level of pain that they have a hard time functioning in a less chaotic world? That’s something I see every single day. It creates a lot of feelings of compassion inside of me. I’ve always believed that I’m only one bad decision from being on the streets myself and people get all weird about that because they’re like, “No. You have a house. You have a car. You have all these things.” It’s like, “What happens if I do something stupid and I run somebody over or something happens and I make a bad decision and I lose everything I have?”

I would say the common thread that exists there, between me and the people that are living on the street, is that it was the decisions that I made. I could equally make another decision that’s poor that would land me on the street as well. How would I navigate that? How would I get off the street? Would I be consumed with my own pain and being a victim? It’s like, “This is what happened to me. I destroyed my own life.” How do you get out of that? Even a bigger question as you and I are compassionate thought leaders, how do we make a difference in helping those people that are in that level of pain? How do we help those people up?

To me, Thom, it’s all about navigating. I feel pain in life is unavoidable. You’re going to get hit. You’re going to fall down. You may even hurt yourself. It’s the nature of the game. We have to learn how to navigate all of those things in order to score. Scoring could be, even the legacy, it could be fully expressing yourself. It could be contributing. It can be loving the world or making an impact on the world. It has to be something and I don’t think money is the answer.

We started this conversation about leaving something that’s going to bring about change or cause a positive impact on another person, whether it’s someone that’s present with you right now or someone that’s going to come in the future. That’s a scoring. There’s a lot of opposition in life in itself that we have to navigate in order to do that. Number one, it’s a responsibility and a privilege to play that game to have life. As teammates, we have to have the character and the traits, the know-how, and the experience to play the game. We’re responsible for making those better around us so our teammates can play.

The better leaders and players and students that we are of the game, the more that we can help others play as well. We have a responsibility not only to play well, but to reach out to those folks and lead the way, show them the way. A lot of times we don’t because we feel like they are not our responsibility. In this game, everyone is your teammate. We all have to win here. It’s not okay for me to win and you lose because you’re my teammate. I’m not scoring to score for me. I’m scoring to score for you, to show you how I navigate, to show you how I do it. I have to be able to come back and tell you, “This is how you navigate that. This is not going to kill you. It’s not over. I know it hurts but you got to get up. We got to do this.”

The beauty of being able to forgive yourself is the pathway to being able to forgive other people. Click To Tweet

Rodney, those are some powerful words. You moved me on that. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. That was good. It’s something to reflect on.

Thom, to hear you say that and to experience this with you, I’m reflecting back on my life. There’s a point in time where you talk about decisions and choices. If I wouldn’t have made certain decisions and choices, I wouldn’t even be here with you to make those comments, to have this conversation. Sometimes the choice is not an easy choice. It’s a difficult road at times. It’s the most uncomfortable road at times. It’s the road that requires the most sacrifice at times. It goes back to what you say, what is life about? What’s your value? If we live in by our values, then that’s what should dictate the decisions that we make.

Beautiful words. I got nothing to add to that. That’s perfect.

Thanks for coming on the show, Thom. That’s something for all of us, me included, to meditate on. When we wake up, we go back to do the right thing. What is the right thing? You’re going to live by doing the right thing. What is that? What does that mean for all of us?

Contribution. This is the most beautiful moment of stillness while everything settles in. It’s like me falling to the ground. This is hands down the most informative and moving interview that I’ve ever had. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. There was no BS. We went right into the things that are important. Keep doing what you’re doing because it spreads good. Thank you for having me on.

Thank you, Thom.

You’re welcome.

Important Links:

• Stevia
• Icon Foods
• The Daily Stoic
• http://www.GuyGoneKeto.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/steviva/
• https://www.Instagram.com/guygoneketo/
• https://www.Instagram.com/stevivabrands/
• https://www.Instagram.com/thomkingpdx/
• https://Twitter.com/steviva
• https://Twitter.com/thomking
• https://www.Facebook.com/guygoneketo/
• http://www.ThomKing.com
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/get-up-book/
• http://RodneyFlowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• https://RodneyFlowers.us9.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=01f76a038256f77a6fbc93590&id=307d726734

About Thom King

 

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