Everyone lives in their own story. They are a character in their story. If you want to offer them something, a product, a service, a message, your influence, a helping hand…whatever, you want to enter their story. The master of this is Donald Miller. I first met Don through his spiritually based memoirs. Don was a writer. An artist. Over time he sold zillions of books to people like me and along the way learned how to translate his gift of storywriting to the world of business. He started a company called Storyline and I attended his very first conference in Portland, OR with my Dad, brother, and uncle. Following is a conversation I had when Don had just released his book, Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen. In it he flips our perspective of how to promote what we have to offer to the public. It’s not about our product or service, it is about the customer. Don takes us through the structure of a good storyline and how we can, and must apply it to our offerings in this format; “A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives, gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in SUCCESS.” You can find Don at storybrand.com

I have a powerful story of drive for you. One that starts with tears and today is an impressive lists of stats. Let’s start with the impressive list. Talia Fox is a leadership strategist. She holds an M.Ed. in counseling psychology from Howard University and she is a Harvard University Fellow. With her extensive background in psychology and education she assists leaders in developing successful strategies for complex missions, ranging from defense systems to healthcare initiatives. As CEO of KUSI Global, Inc., Talia helps organizations like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Harvard University, Transunion, the National Institutes of Health, Howard University, and the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs maximize human potential by leveraging strategic intelligence and helps individuals and organizations foster connected cultures and promote conscious equity. Now Talia has a new book titled, The Power of Conscious Connection: 4 Habits To Transform How You Live And Lead. But where we start in our conversation is Talia as a single mom, holding onto her baby and crying in a stairwell in her apartment building. At the end of her rope. And that is where she resolved to not let her circumstances decide her fate and to quit identifying as a lacking and struggling young woman. Here is what Talia says, “I decided to choose a different way of existing in the world. People can often be completely absorbed by their problems, she said. They don’t jump out of bed, they drag themselves through feeling sad, tired, broken and disappointed. I started asking myself, what does this situation need from me today to be most successful? I became conscious how my choices impacted my outcomes. I became obsessed with human and social behavior and how our identities shape our choices and our lives. I was struck by how the seemingly small choices I made had the biggest impact on my mental well being. Sometimes veering off the well-trodden path of others and choosing a different path can lead to life-altering decisions. This is the story friends. This will be a good ride.

This is a story of drive. How a guy found his and how he helps others find theirs. Tom Bilyeu describes himself as a scared kid who worked his way out of his fear and ultimately co-founded Quest Nutrition. You’ve likely seen or bought Quest bars from the grocery store wherever you live. In 2017 he started Impact Theory, a media company focused on human potential to address as Tom says, the pandemic of body and mind. Today his Impact Theory podcast is one of the top shows in the self-improvement category and one you’ve likely heard or seen on YouTube. I sat down with Tom in 2017 not long after he started Impact Theory, and before he sold Quest Nutrition in 2019 for a tidy billion dollars. I was host of The Ziglar Show at the time and wanted to dig into a guy who really came from nothing to find success for himself and then devote himself to helping others achieve success, and what he felt the pillars were to increase human potential. You won’t find him touting hacks, but instead looking to just doing the work. Which I appreciate. It’s not a mystery, and it’s something we can all do.

On September 9, 2024 we published a show titled, Your Nervous System Is Controlling You & How To Master It. My guests were Jennifer Mann and Karden Rabin and my muse was their new book, The Secret Language of The Body. In our long conversation, Karden brought up his “Emotional Cold Plunge” exercise and I was incredibly intrigued. He gave me access to his community at somiainternational.com/ which I joined and went through the exercise. I ended up engaging more and just felt really attracted to Kardin’s guidance and spirit and found myself wondering how he had ended up where he is today. HIs bio says, Karden is a nervous system medicine practitioner and an expert in the fields of trauma and psychophysiological disorders. Over the last fifteen years he has combined principles of bodywork, brain retraining, and somatic trauma therapies and helped thousands of clients across the globe heal from chronic pain and illness. Karden is the Co-Founder of SOMIA and a regular contributor to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s Trauma Research Foundation and has led programming for The Wounded Warrior Project and Starbucks. But what you are about to hear is that Karden had severe asthma and almost died. He was very neglected as a child and often in tears, bored, and alone in his pain. From this, up to age 19, Karden says he became, an asshole. A bully. He was mean and used cleverness and criticism like a sword.Being a poser was identity and he worked to get tablescraps of validation from cool kids. He was good at making fun of people to get a laugh. But then…something happened. Something that drove him to become obsessed with uncovering the physics of what drives people and discovering the laws that no one is immune to. Today his ambition is to help as many people as possible. I bring you this story because I think you will resonate and it will help you see and understand yourself better, and how you can take your pain and heal it as you help relieve people of theirs. Find him at @KardenRabin

Every Monday I bring you an author with a new book. But in my personal studies, I’m just as equally reading and rereading books from years past. Classics, in my opinion. In 2010, Greg McKeown published his book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, and it quickly became a classic. He became an instant guru on looking at our lives and our work and asking, “What is really essential?” I sat down with Greg and Tom Ziglar a few years back to understand essentialism better. You will hear, it is not about minimalism. It’s more about making the right and best decisions. Putting decisions to extreme tests. Being in control. Greg says that in an emergency, “Everyone is an essentialist.” We get on task, on target, divest ourselves of non-necessities, and do what is most efficient, effective and successful. So can you really live every moment like that? Let’s see.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. You hit me, I hit you back. You disrespect me, I disrespect you. That would be the opposite of grace. Grace is generally considered offering a kindness, anyways. When it’s undeserved. I don’t feel the culture gives much value to the idea anymore. We are afraid that letting a wrong go unpunished will enable others. But as our mental health continues to decline and we find more people in more relational conflict than ever, I wanted to dig into the lost art of grace. So I sat down with Julia Baird. Julia is an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and internationally bestselling author who contributes to the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald and is a cohost of the Not Stupid podcast. She has a brand new book out, titled bright shining: how grace changes everything. I dug into the hard questions around grace and ultimately came away asking myself, what kind of person do I want to be? What behavior will add the most to my life? One who errors on the side of grace? Or tit for tat?

As a guy, the concept of compassion has little place in my life. Especially as an athlete, there was no value in compassion. You ignore any pain and keep going. It reminds me of the depiction of the army sergeant yelling at the soldier to suck it up and march on. As a culture, I think we still put more value on sucking it up and keeping going and being indifferent to ourselves, than having compassion. Though we miss that we can still keep going when the circumstances demand it, and have some needed compassion. Compassion is having concern for others and ourselves and the opposite of concern is indifference. I can’t find value in indifference to self, in normal life, outside of maybe sports and the battlefield. Seven years ago I sat down and had a conversation with Dr. Kristin Neff about it. Kristin received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, studying moral development. At the time she had done a TED talk with millions of views, and published a book, “Self Compassion”, The Proven Power of Being kind to yourself. I talked with her, as I perceived the value of self-compassion. But in truth, it’s taken me a long time to let it actually integrate into my life. I wish I’d stuck with it then. But, better late than never. I spent some time recently discussing self-compassion with my own therapist, and am bringing this conversation back to benefit us both.

You may well have heard of Upworthy. Upworthy is a media brand that focuses on positive storytelling. They have millions of followers on social media and email subscribers, who tune in to hear good news. Upworthy recently came out with a book, that focused on key areas of human goodness, and it is just stories. Just incredible stories of the best of humanity that people share with them each and every day, at a great amount. The book is called Good People and I was really curious as to what led the authors to sift through the stories and land on certain categories, such as chapter one which is, "The Kindness of Strangers." They shared how many stories came in of what we generally call, random acts of kindness. Following is my conversation with the authors, Lucia Knell who is Vice President of Upworthy, and Gabriel Reilich who is head of content and innovation. I think you'll find a really uplifting, inspiring and honestly, equipping discussion here. It really bolstered my faith, which bolsters...everything.

I think we’re all well aware that our culture has fallen into the idea of being busy is being important. But I’ll admit that even in trying to shed this, I still find myself busy. I just agree to things without counting the cost. But then I find myself struggling mentally with bitterness and burnout and I just want to escape. So when this book, Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More, came across my desk, I was eager to have the author on. Israa Nasir is a New York City-based psychotherapist, writer, and the founder of WellGuide—a digital community for mental health awareness. She has a big following on Instagram at well.guide. In her focus on Toxic Productivity she tries to dismantle the myth that “doing more makes you more worthy,” and this is where I dig in with her in this show. My primary interest was how we associate our identity with what we do, and Israa and I really landed a lot on intention, asking ourselves why we do all we do? What is the outcome we are expecting and what need of our own are we trying to fulfill.