As the popular saying goes, “No man is an island.” In our chaotic world today, having a teamwork mindset has never been more important than ever before. Rodney Flowers talks with coach Wayne Herring about the importance of connecting with people around you to overcome your challenges in life, be it going beyond the obstacles of your career, getting rid of vices, or searching for a better outlook in life. They also share their thoughts about being authentic with oneself to set better goals, the power of mastermind groups, and how chasing after seemingly impossible tasks can still cause significant growth.
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Overcoming Challenges Through Teamwork Mindset With Wayne Herring
I am excited about this show. I have a gentleman here who is focused on helping business owners grow their business while living the lives they love and making a positive impact on their families and the world. I have Wayne Herring with me. He has helped men across the country grow their businesses into successful and thriving enterprises. However, there is so much more to his story than simply him being a coach or a consultant. We’re going to learn about that. Without further ado, Wayne, welcome to the show.
Rodney, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Teamwork Mindset: If they don’t have something new and exciting to work on, leaders tend to go back into some old thing, causing chaos.
I’m glad that you’re here. I want to jump into your story a little bit because I know there’s some good juice, information and experiences that we can pull out of your story that would help people in their business and their lives. I understand that you worked as a specialty drilling and blasting contractor on an organic farm and you’ve helped your father double the revenue of his company. You helped sell it as an industry giant. You also run marathons and you’re like the jack of all trades. You’re an amazing dude doing a lot of great things in the world. How did you get to be a coach? Why are you in this business? How did you get there?
I love the title of your show, Game Changer Mentality. It implies to me that the words change and mentality makes me feel like I can change my mentality. It’s not a fixed state, it’s something moveable. Some of the things that you talked about in the intro that I’ve had the opportunity to do or be a part of, every time I go through one of those situations, there’s certainly been a change in what I see in the world or what I see as a possibility. I think that coaching and being on a journey with another human whether it’s individual one-on-one coaching that I’m doing or group coaching are all about a shared experience, changing our mentality, seeing the possibility, working with another human and seeing more in them than they might see in themselves.
I came to this journey of coaching through the experience of multiple mentors who showed me different things and possibilities. I like to share that with the clients that I work with. As I work with them, the gift or the blessing that comes out of the work is I’m constantly learning and exposed to new ways of thinking and possibility from them. That’s part of the journey. There’s more to it. I have more paths that I have gone down and side roads, etc. Coaching has come by being on the journey myself and having coaches and wanting to share that with clients and other people.
Thank you for acknowledging the title of the brand and the show. I created the Game Changer Mentality concept through experiences of my own. When we are in places of challenge, adversity, tribulation, or whatever you want to call it, we have the responsibility and the privilege to come out of those things. If you plan the game of life, you’re on the field of adversity. There are a lot of things that are attempting to stop you from progressing towards whatever goal, idea, and purpose that you have in life. Sometimes we get hit and fall down and it seems like we can’t get back up. However, with the right mentality, you can change the game, the landscape of the game, and how things look on the field for you. A game-changer mentality was born.
Life is a big game played by everybody with their own different roles. Click To TweetIt’s about what type of mentality do I have or need in order to change the game in my life? For me, that’s a critical part of not only being a coach, author, and speaker but being a person or a player in the game of life. When I think about scoring, achieving a goal, or overcoming an obstacle, it requires a lot out of you. A lot of times we make the obstacle or the thing more important. It’s the big rock that’s in the way but my game-changer mentality is the rock is not the important thing. Rock is a rock. COVID is COVID. An accident is an accident. It’s all opposition. The question is who do I need to be in order to overcome? It may not have to be different people but I may have to learn different things or be a certain way in order to navigate the variation of challenges and obstacles that may come my way by the nature of whatever the challenge is. I have the ability to do that through my thinking. What are some of the experiences that have caused you to think the way you think to develop a game-changer mentality or whatever mentality you call it in order to overcome it and be where you are?
I get to listen and read to some things about your story and watch your speaker reel to prepare for this. I know your readers have either heard the story or pieces of it or how you did it many times. Your story of overcoming the injury you had and being determined to walk and finding somebody to help you. Your 2nd acts and 3rd acts like this speaking, coaching, and writing that you do is another example of, “I know it’s not easy to put yourself out there and see that your story is powerful.” Every time I meet somebody like you and I get to interact with them, you become a piece that I carry with me that will always be there somewhere when I run into the next circumstance where I fall down.
Things will happen. There will be adversity and we don’t know what it is. It’s good sometimes that we don’t know what’s coming next can be both good and bad. It’s constant. That’s life. You talk about being on the playing field and away we go. We maybe don’t want to know but I’ve got these people behind me that have been through things. I remember that guy I interviewed with Rodney who had the story where he had a football injury and then he overcame it. I don’t know how he did that every day but if I can take a little piece of that and use that in the next adverse scenario then things are to turn out well.
I thought right away of some big things that have happened in my life and this was building for a long time. In 2007, I had my last drink of alcohol. I’m not a prohibitionist or a teetotaler saying other people shouldn’t drink because for some people they can use it responsibly and it’s not going to hurt them or their family. Microbrewing industry and all that is cool. I love the different flavors of alcohol or beer. I get that from coffee. It turns out coffee has a lot of the same flavors if you start into fine coffees. In June 2007, I hit a bottom point. I knew that alcohol was having an impact on my life. I knew that it was causing problems and keeping me from being my best.
I didn’t know the full depth of how it was affecting me inside, sickening me and that I had a spiritual disease. I didn’t know all that but I knew that it was bad. I wasn’t quite ready to admit that I was powerless and that I needed help. I had an experience where I said my first real prayer about the whole thing and said, “God, please help me.” I went to the great resource of the internet that we have. I found some phone numbers and I called some people and got some help. I also talked to my dad who had a similar experience in life, met him, and got on that path.
That’s the big thing that happened. Sometimes I’ll talk to people and like, “That’s a big deal,” but it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal to me. It’s something I walked through. It was a journey and it’s been a blessing. That is something that was a major shift. The recovery from that, the work that I did and working with some mentors who I sat with and talked about feelings for the first time in my life. I’m talking about feelings with a dude in Dunkin’ Donuts. There are other guys sitting around and if they hear what we’re talking about, they’re going to come over and whoop our butts. That’s one of the things that I have been through.
When you first started talking about you hear my story and then maybe somewhere along your path or journey, you may run into something. You can take a little piece of that with you. That’s critical because we all have a contribution to give to life. We’re here to serve others and to evolve. We express our purpose and our gifts to the world and we’re all connected in some way. It’s important that we do not allow the adversity that shows up on the field to stop us because you never know who you’re going to affect down the road.
When I talk affect, I mean directly or indirectly. You never know. If you don’t make it to the 30-yard line, 20 or 40 then there are people who are not going to get what you would give them had you made it. What you gain as you march down that field is what the people need. That makes the opposition necessary because someone needs to hear your story. Someone needs to know you’ve gone through something and that you’ve overcome it. “What did you do? I need that little piece of information because what I’m doing may not be the same thing. I might not go through what you went through but I may go through something.”
That piece of information that you share with me about your experience could be the only thing that gets me through and that I need to take me over the edge. That’s important. Given what you’ve shared with us, there are a lot of people that have dealt and are still dealing or maybe even struggling with that. First of all, thank you for sharing that because people need to hear. You never know who’s reading to know that you’ve gotten over it or maybe the way you’ve gotten over that. I’m not in Dunkin’ Donuts but I’m in McDonald’s. I’m feeling a little vulnerable because I’m sharing my feeling and you never know who’s reading. One of the privileges that we have is that we have the ability to share those stories.
I’m thinking of you had your injury and then recovery. I had this particular situation, which was more self-inflicted, and then had a recovery. I got help from other people who at the moment were good. You have in your story, Pearl was well and good and helped you at that time. Fortunately, we’re not all down at the same time. When we’re up, that’s when it’s good to tell other people about when we were down and help pull them along and pull them through. That’s what you’re doing when you share your story. I had something where we had one of our daughters hospitalized for nine days. She was hurting and in a rough spot. She’s doing well now. I left the hospital when we admitted her and drove home from Philadelphia at 2:30 in the morning. It feels like my life is ending. This is a nightmare that I’m not going to get out of.
I have a friend Jared Buckley who is a coach and has two children who both have had open heart surgery and he had a daughter who has Down syndrome. She’s beautiful. She had been in the hospital with open-heart surgery, for the second time doing a valve replacement. I remember her being in the hospital. I’m reaching out to Jared at that time to be there and talk with him. The gifts that I carried with me from that experience was then when I was driving home from the hospital that night at 2:30 in the morning with my daughter in the hospital, I was thinking about Jared and his children and the fact that they had gotten through that.
I couldn’t imagine at the time, “How do parents get through something like that, and now I’m in the middle of it?” The next day, he’s the guy that I called to say, “Would you talk to me about this and what that’s like?” He did and gave me an hour at the time. He helped me try to take a look at my emotions, flip them and look inside. I wish for everybody that they have Rodney and your show. It’s good to have people in our life like that that we carry with us because we’re not all hurting at the same time.
This is beautiful because we’re all playing this game and we’re all on the same team. We have different roles. Let’s think about a football team. I’m biased because I play football. When you think about a football team, it takes everyone on the team to score. It looks like to run a backward, a wide receiver and quarterback on this may be crossing the line with the ball or passing the ball and your wife, she was catching the ball. Without everyone else on the team and even some of those on the sidelines, they are all necessary in order to win. They don’t win as individuals. They win as a team. I view human society as a team. We’re all on the same team.
I have a lot of people that follow me and those are my direct team. I’m leading them. I want to be the quarterback for them. We all have different roles. Whatever you’re dealing with in life, your journey, that’s your role. I need you to play your role because I’ve got to play my role. There’s going to be something about what you’re dealing with. I don’t know what you’re dealing with on your route personally. When you’re running your route, you’re doing your thing. There are things that are going on with you that may not be going on with me. I may be the running back or the quarterback. I’m focused on looking down the field to make sure that no one is going to hit me on my blind side.
I stand within the pocket. You’re focused on running a route, stay and crisp. Making sure that you’re in the right place when the ball is thrown. You have to focus on what you’re doing though. The thing about it is we’re all teammates in this. As the quarterback, I may need you to come back and say, “Rodney, when I ran the route, the quarterback is either tired. He’s not able to keep up with me when I run this particular route or when you throw the ball on my left shoulder, he doesn’t always turn around. He doesn’t look up or something.” That’s information for me to help us win as a team.
When we’re going through trials and tribulations, it’s the same thing. We’re going through challenges. Having the ability to tell those stories, being able to listen to what’s going on in someone else’s world, and provide your experience for them keeps us connected and engaged with each other because collectively we can win. We have to be able to work together. Being able to share those experiences and help one another, that’s the name of the game. You’ve seen in sports where you have this one person who thinks, “Without me, the team can’t win. I’m a star. I’m this, I’m that.” You get individualized. That’s not how we play. That’s not good sportsmanship.
Teamwork Mindset: You don’t choose your desires, as these are innate. You like what you like, you want what you want.
This is good. We’re on a good energy flow because you’re saying things and it’s helping me see a connection. If you’re the quarterback and I’m a receiver, you may not know everything that’s going on in my route. That is true in life where I don’t know everything that’s going on with you and you don’t know everything that’s going on with me. We have all these fate constructs. Rodney is a guy who had an injury but now he has got everything together because that’s what it looks like. For most of us, that’s not true from day-to-day. We don’t have everything together by any means. We don’t know what’s going on in each other’s route.
What a gift about having something obvious and easily seen like your injury and then you talking through the recovery process. For me, I can share with people that alcohol was ruining my life and we can get that because we know we’ve met or seen somebody. They may not have known me at that time in my life and it might surprise them to hear that but they can get it. They can understand that. Those things are visible but there are many things that are inside and that people try to keep tucked inside. It’s how do we get together to be on the same team to talk to each other about the route we’re on, what’s going on and be able to share that part.
The connection I made was I have a group of men that I’m coaching through the Business Builder Camp program that we have. We were on a call and we try to talk about our routes. That’s what it is. Sometimes I struggle to explain why I am enrolled in different things or how it works when I get these guys together. What we were talking about was the intersection of business and marriage. Somebody said to the other guys, “How do you talk to your wife about you’re going to take a free day to think and not be at the office during the workweek? For most of us, we have children and our spouses at home are taking care of the kids. How are you going to bring that up? Are you going to tell her that you’re taking a day off?”
That’s talking about life on the route. That’s opening up and saying, “Let’s throw that on the table and let’s mess with that. Let’s talk about what we feel, not what we put on Facebook, Instagram or whatever.” Thanks for that. Thinking through, we do want people in our lives. It’s not always as big as being able to walk again or getting your daughter out of the hospital for my friend, Jared. It’s not always that obvious. There’s a lot going on inside all the time.
Make sure you are in the right place when the ball is thrown. Click To TweetThe opposition is opposition and it comes in different forms. It could be a spinal cord injury, cancer, mental illness, alcoholism, anger, resentment and the inability to forgive. It could be a number of those things in different colors and flavors. I want to go back to the discussion about we’re all connected and run into a route. What makes the best team member, in this case, is authenticity. When we talk about authenticity, a lot of times we think of it as being your real self. I want to challenge everyone on that. It’s not being your real self, it’s being real with yourself. When we are our real selves, we accept certain things as they are about us as if it’s okay because that’s how I am but when you’re real with yourself, you recognize your flaws and then you take action to improve them for the sake of the team. That’s being real.
If the quarterback goes and says, “You’re running a sucky route.” You look at the film and you see, “I am running a sucky route. I need to fix that.” That’s real. Authenticity or being your real self could be, “That’s the way I do it.” You could have that attitude, “I’ve been running that route for years. That’s the way I run.” That’s how you are in reality but that’s not authentic. That’s what we need within each other to number one, tell the story. Number two, to be able to hear from our other teammates on ways that we can improve and get further down the field in this game and then be able to accept it and take action on that. That’s being real in my mind. When we have that, that pushes the ball further down the field collectively as a team.
I was looking around for my phone because I’m tempted to Google it. That’s what we do. We Google everything but I’m going to be okay with not knowing and then you’ll be able to put in the show notes or whatever. It’s somebody that eludes me right now who said, “The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” Maybe that’s heavy that it’s not worth living but it points to this about it’s good to examine my life, take inventory and get around other people who love me that aren’t judgmental. We can talk about it and put it out on the table and say, “This is what’s going on for me. This is how I’m living.” It’s good to have people in our life. I have some friends in my life who I’ve allowed and given permission to say to me like, “What is up with you? Something is going on. Something you’d want to tell me about that you’re keeping as a secret?” It will be that pointed and I’m like, “Well,” and then it comes out. Whatever it could be going on or ways I’m playing small or ways I’m not being the guy that I want to be in some way, shape or form.
Our peak performance is hindered by blockages that we hold on to ideas and thoughts about ourselves that we feel, limiting beliefs and all things that we hold inside. One of the things I love about being able to talk about those things and get it out is that it opens up the flow. When you can be your authentic self which is being real with yourself, you can flow because you’re not hiding anything. This is what it is and you don’t have that stress of covering up. I was talking to a lady. She has been married. She’s been with her significant other for 38 years.
I asked her the question, “What’s the key to success? You’ve been married that long. That’s a significant amount of time. How did you last that long?” She said, “You have to communicate and open yourself up to the core. You have to get raw. You have to take everything off. Your spouse needs to know everything about you. You need to be able to speak and talk to them about anything without having anything in here.” I was like, “That’s pure and clean when you’re able to go open and naked.” When you’re in that space, what allows success is the flow because there are no blockages. That’s true in life when it comes to overcoming challenges, reaching goals or playing on the field of adversity when we can be real with ourselves because a lot of times, it’s not.
It’s not the oppositionist that stops us. We have to look at who we are. The opposition is opposition. That’s all it is. You’ve heard several times, we’re bigger than the opposition. We can overcome anything. All things are possible. Anything is possible. All of those cliché sayings worth it and they’re all true. Those are the facts. However, we don’t experience that every day. If the opposition is opposition then the only variation is how we show up, how we play the game, what type of player are we going to be? Who are we going to be today?
Who are we going to be when we do get hit? Who are we going to be when we drop the ball? Who are we going to be when we fail? That’s why it takes me back to the authenticity because you have to go back and look in the mirror after the game and say to yourself, “Did you play your best game? Did you get everything that you had? Did you even prepare for the game at 100%? Did you leave anything on a turn?” People can come and talk to you all day but no one is going to know but you. That’s between you and you.
That’s easy to say when we’re thinking about a big game and a big event that I’m going to look in the mirror or I’m going to watch the game film afterward. Day by day, things are a little bit more ordinary. We’re going along and it’s a marathon or an ultra marathon. It’s a little bit harder to take a look in the mirror or you could be numbed into going through the days. How do you do that? How do you stop and when?
For number one, we need those pattern interrupts. When opposition shows up, that is that pattern interrupt. It’s like, “Life is not normal now. It’s a shakeup.” When I get shook up, that means I need to wake up. I may need to get up because I’ve been sleeping and I’ve been in a space of, “I’m not aware, I’ve gotten into this routine, I’m not growing, I’ve gotten comfortable and I’ve gotten complacent.” I relate a lot of things to sports but you’ve seen this in games where these teams are on a roll, they’ve been winning, they’d come up with the same game plan, they do the same thing over and over and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work and they’re like, “Oh my God.”
They can’t recover from that because they’ve been dependent on that way for so long but this is a blessing because it opens them up to something new. A new way of being, planning, action plan and game plan. That is what I call growth. If we don’t put that type of pressure on ourselves at times then that’s where we are. We fall into this circle of mediocrity. That’s why I feel like we never arrive. I love the idea of the process because the process is more important than the destination. Think about it. Remember when you were a kid, you wanted to go to the beach and throughout the entire trip to the beach, you were excited. You were like, “Oh my God.” It’s the idea of going to the beach is tripping you out. You get to the beach, you experience the beach and there is no more excitement. The excitement is done. You’re asleep in the car on the way back.
You’re not even excited about going home because you’ve reached the destination. The process of getting there is the most exciting time and everything is the detours, valleys and all of those things. Your excitement has you to a place where you want to get to that destination and you will do anything you need to do to feel and get to that destination. In the process of that, you are growing and you are getting better. It’s pushing you to a limit that you may not go if you weren’t that excited about that destination.
That’s a great example of the journey to the beach. This hasn’t been a sudden change and some things are sudden. A lot of times our sudden changes are brought about by those big opposition events and big things that happened on the field. Some changes are more gradual. When you talk about the beach and the destination, it is about the journey. It’s also good to not be on the journey and not in that field all the time. I have learned how to enjoy moments on the beach or how to enjoy moments on the front porch of our farmhouse in the country.
That was something my wife and I had this dream that we wanted. She would always talk about her childhood and going to the farm. I had grown up on this big property where we were caretakers with my grandparents. We wanted this farm and this front porch and that was like going to the beach. We would never sit on the darn thing and look at the sunset and look around. Through some new coaches and mentors that I’ve been around like Rich Litvin and Steve Chandler, these guys have helped me to enjoy the journey a little bit more. They like to say, “Slow down to speed up.”
As a child, I hear you had gone to the beach and you get there for an hour at the beach. As an adult, that’s some good inner work to do and at least it’s been beneficial for me to how to sit on the porch, look around, enjoy it and not be constantly hustling, growing, going onto the next thing. Working on meditation using the Headspace app, going to yoga and sitting in the park which is not normal for a guy that grew up around farming, tractors, trucks, guns, hunting and all that. Those have been things that have changed my mentality and have been a blessing. I can sit on the beach now and I can enjoy it. Sometimes they’re getting into it. There’s a transition there but that’s been a growth too.
I believe that it is your responsibility when you plan the game, you end the game, to know when to come out of the game and sit on the bench. There’s a lot of work that goes on and off the field. That’s part of resilience. When you want to be a resilient player, you want to be able to bounce back. Think about it like sports. Let’s take basketball, they play 70 plus games a season before the playoffs or maybe even 80 games. How do you maintain that level of play for that many games? There’s a lot of rest and a lot of recoveries. Recovery is what allows you to bounce back. If you look at every great player, they have a good recovery routine and recovery program.
Teamwork Mindset: If you can think back in life to where you felt passionate and know that you pushed through it, then you could do it again.
When you talk about life and playing on the field of adversity in life, it is sitting on that beach, sitting on that porch and the absence of a bath. It’s the massage, quiet time, meditation and time alone on a drive on a Sunday evening with the rooftop back. You’re hanging out, listening to your favorite music, not thinking about what work is going to be. It’s having that downtime. You have to think about how you play on and off the field. I’m 110% agree with you that, “You can’t go and be in the rate 100% of the time,” because you’re going to burn out. It’s not logical. It doesn’t make sense. You have to have balance. Balance is critical to success, overcoming and being a great player.
Balance for me is a verb, it’s not a noun and it’s not one state to be achieved. My feeling of balance being whole comes from a mix of all the things we’ve been talking about overcoming work and sometimes going around the obstacle that’s there. It comes from that, from the normal stuff and from having people around us who help pick us up. You said you have to have events, stimulus, reasons to look and audit and seeing what you’re doing. It comes from a habit and a practice. It’s like the music is coming all together with all those different pieces.
Opposition is opposition. The only variation is how you show up. Click To TweetHow can people connect with you if they wanted to learn more about you, hire you as a coach, maybe even a speaker or whatever?
The primary thing that I’m doing and that I’m excited about is building these mastermind groups of men who own businesses. I’m helping anybody and talking with them about experiences in life but building these groups where it’s guys that care about being a dad, husband and are willing to share openly what’s going on in the route. That’s what I’m passionate about. It’s what I’ve been enjoying watching happen as these guys come together and speak in that way, not in the way that we’re seen as a persona on Facebook or LinkedIn but the real stuff and doing life together.
People can connect with me at BusinessBuilderCamp.com, that’s our website. We set up a link and a page for your readers at BusinessBuilderCamp.com/gamechangermentality. On that page, I have a free resource so that people can take inventory in the context of some of the things that I’m talking about. We have a short course there with the tools we use in our rhythm and our way of taking an inventory at Business Builder Camp where they can sign up for those emails and there’s a place to book a time in my calendar. I’d love to have conversations with you and anybody on the field playing the game of life. People can grab a time in my calendar there too.
Thank you for doing that. I appreciate you setting it up for your audience. What are some of the common obstacles they face that block them from getting where they want to go in life?
It’s an obstacle that blocks their ultimate happiness. It’s something that we’ve talked about and that is the desire to always be on the journey on the way to the beach and always running to get there. I tend to work in this Business Builder Camp with men who have been in business for a number of years. They’ve gotten over some of the initial startup things, which are fun and scary all at the same time. There’s a lot of emotion going on. The guys that are in the mastermind group and that I’m coaching one-on-one have often gotten through the earliest stage. They have employees and they have cashflow. Sometimes the business has even gotten to the point where they’re almost not needed or they’re not needed much.
I often have conversations with these guys and I’m like, “This is like you are on a mountain, you’re sitting on a rock, you’re in the sun looking down in the Valley and down in the Valley is this thing that you created. For a long time, when you first started, you were inseparable from it. The business was you and you were the business.” Now you’re like, “Great. This is the destination. This is like the beach.” You’ve gotten to that place where you always said you wanted to get to, now you’re up here and bored. That place of being bored has two paths that guys tend to follow in those cases. If you don’t have a business, we’ll do the same thing in our personal life.
It could be our family. You’re like, “I have a family and everything’s great.” They’ve got two choices when they’re up on the hill, looking down at this little business they built, they could keep going to work every day for 40 or 50 hours or whatever out of obligation. They view that as being what guys do. It’s like, “I go to work every day and I’ve got to put my time in.” If they don’t have something new and exciting to work on, they have a tendency to go back into that thing they created. They sometimes screw it up, create chaos, fire somebody and get in a fight with a key employee so that they can feel needed again.
That’s a choice or the business builder sits on the hill and then they have a couple of choices. They could work on creating other things like free time. They could work on pursuing a new hobby or passion, become a speaker and share it with other people or they may up there in their head start to realize they’ve got money and cash that they never had before. They know things and know people. I’ve got a client who’s not as a result of my coaching, he did this way before I met him and now, we’re working on other big things. He sat on the hill one day and said, “I am going to start a nonprofit that is going to create mentorships, men to men and I’m going to put energy into that.”
In his case, he felt called by God to create that. He still works hard in the business as the CEO and as the leader. He also has this nonprofit called Men of Iron that is created to bring men together in a mentoring relationship. The obstacle that I see a whole lot is people have to decide, are they going to work to play a bigger game? They can, it’s cool and great or are they going to go back and stay in that thing that they’d built? Try to find something to do or create chaos so they have something to do.
The human spirit needs work in some sort. We all think that we want a life where we don’t have to work and when we get to the point where we don’t have to work, it’s like, “What am I supposed to do with myself?” I love the way things are set up where you’ve been given desires. You don’t choose your desires, your desires are innate. You like what you like, you want what you want. There’s the pursuit of that, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the juice because of the pursuit of a thing. That’s where happiness lies is in the pursuit. The pursuit makes you happy. The challenges that you think is the perception of the challenge. A challenge is a challenge. The perception of the challenge that causes people to feel uncomfortable, blocked, sabotaged, decreased or stocked, that’s part of the process.
Sometimes we feel that challenge or that block. If we can think back in life to where we felt something like that before and know that we pushed through it then we could do it again. It’s good to recall stories like that. My son and I built a 45-foot long suspension bridge over our creek. That came about as a result of him saying, “Dad, could we build a bridge across that creek?” The first thing that came up my brain was like, “It’s 45 feet, dude.” It’s wide but I was like, “We could build a bridge.” He goes, “Could we build one of those that is like hanging on cables?” I’m like, “Yes, probably.” There was initial resistance but then it became fun and it became the thing to build. There’s always something to build. To your point, we need work.
That initial thought of resistance stops 90% of people. How did you get to that place where you were like, “This is possible. Not only is it possible but it’s something that I’m going to pursue?”
I’ve been there before. My grandfather was a coal miner. I grew up with my grandfather. I didn’t grow up with my mom and dad because they weren’t in a spot where they were able to take care of me so I grew up with my grandparents. He was an independent coal miner in Pennsylvania. He and another couple of guys went out in the woods, they dug a hole, got an old car and turned that into a hoist, to hoist their little buggy up out of the ground. They dug a hole in the ground, dug coal out and they would sell it. The money they got from selling the coal was more than what they had paid in expenses for diesel, fuel, lumber and all the things that they did then we had money and we could have food on the table, which wasn’t always a lobster and steak or something.
I feel blessed and fortunate. I’ve thought back as I’ve done these podcast interviews, I grew up in a world where my pop went to the lumber mill down the road, bought boards, they went and they built this thing. My upbringing was watching people get ideas in their heads and then do it. He didn’t build a multimillion-dollar coal mining enterprise or something like that. He’s still alive and he was working up until a couple of years ago. The best I can tell is he has lived a full life and he has kids that have all gone out into the world and worked hard.
It was by watching him do that. This is the part where I wish I had a more noble reason for it. The other thing about my pops was when I said, “I want to have a little thing at the dirt pile. I want to have a wood structure to load my Tonka trucks with dirt to pretend I’m like you at the coal mine. Could you build this thing for me?” He would generally grumble a little bit and then he’d say yes. He’d get out tools and build something for me. When my son asks, “Can we build a bridge?” It always echoes in my head, my grandfather, who was already done raising kids and didn’t have to take on one more young guy to support when I was a baby.
Do dangerous things, but always do it with some sense. Click To TweetThat was the biggest thing he did. When I would ask him to build things like that, he would do it. It always echoes in my head out of obligation with my son. That’s part of it and part of it is watching him and growing up in that world where he can do whatever he wants within the boundaries of the law. I’m like, “Sure we could do that. Why not? We could build a bridge.” YouTube is there anyway. We’ve got some tools and a tractor. We did a test bridge with a rope first and it was not easy. Hopefully, I’m showing my son some of the same things like, “We can do that.” I hope someday that when his son asks him to do something like that, he remembers that his dad said yes and we did it.
In a lot of ways, we need to say yes to life and realize that we’re only taking an action on an idea away from producing that bridge that we want across or getting to that next level, promotion, challenge, reaching that goal and crossing the finish line. It’s that idea of taking action on that.
We’re making this up all the time, aren’t we? I was on a call in my mastermind group where I’m a member, it’s been such a gift to be with those guys and this was good. The guy said, “Look around the room, car, library or wherever it is you’re sitting, look at an object that’s interesting and cool and remember that that object started out as an idea and nothing else. It did not exist in the world and it was just an idea.” That’s inspiring. The stuff that comes up in my head or the stuff my son asks to do, I’m like, “Why not?” The first bridge we built fell down, we crack the board and we were like, “We’ll redo it again. Pull it again with the chain of the tractor,” and hope nothing breaks. I didn’t shove the slammer. Do it at home but be careful and it would be all right. I was telling him, “Do dangerous things but do it with some sense. Wear a helmet, do it with an instructor, have a guide and don’t be completely ridiculous and without protection.”
Teamwork Mindset: Reach out to people. Make a list of those you can call, and do it when you are in the middle of good times.
This has been a great conversation. Before we wrap this up, there’s a question that we always ask our guests and that is how can people bounce back from adversity, dominate the challenges and consistently win at the game of life?
Times are probably good and you’re not in the middle of adversity right now but make a list of the three people that you could call when things like that hit because we all need each other. We’re all on the same team. It’s better to reach out. Make that list when times are good and you’re not in the middle of it, rather than when you are in the middle of it. You could do that proactively.
Networking is everything. Thank you, Wayne, for coming on the show. This has been a pleasure.
Important Links:
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- http://RodneyFlowers.com/get-up-book/
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About Wayne Herring
As the founder of Business Builder Camp, Wayne Herring has helped men across the country grow their businesses into successful and thriving enterprises. However, there is so much more to his story than simply “coach” or “consultant.” Wayne has worked as a specialty drilling and blasting contractor and built an organic farm. He doubled the revenue of the company his father started and then helped sell it to an industry giant. He has run ultra marathons, gone on epic road trips, and is a 1997 Montana state arm wrestling champion. Wayne is a father of four and a recovered alcoholic. He loves to hunt and farm, but he also enjoys yoga and meditation. Some have described Wayne as a renaissance man, but he thinks that is a strange term for the son of a coal miner.
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