Finding My Future Self: Reclaiming My Purpose After a Fatal Event | Michael Clegg | TEDxUNCPembroke

Now picture this. I'm an 8-year-old little boy standing at the top of a bunk bed, holding a small Bible, pretending to preach to the congregation below. But in reality, the only member of the congregation was my 3-year-old little brother. But I was a pretty happy kid, full of ambition, tons of purpose in life that I wanted to achieve. And I had dreams of speaking in front of large audiences one day. But I also wanted to play in the NFL too, so I guess achieving one out of two isn't bad. Now, I had a lifetime of dreams ahead of me. And limitations— for those of us that are parents, we understand that kids do not know limitations. Limitations are actually reserved for us as adults to use as excuses for reasons for why we cannot achieve the things we want in life. Now, as you can tell from the picture of my childhood home, my family didn't come from a lot of money. My dad worked and retired from the National Guard. My mom cleaned houses for extra cash on the side. And they were practically kids themselves. They were only 20 years older than me. And unfortunately, 4 years later, when I was 12, they divorced. And upon reflection, that was when I realized that I stopped focusing on my dreams and instead started reacting to the things that happened in life. But isn't that a trap that we all fall into? Reacting to the day-to-day. Now— Ultimately, both of my parents remarried. My new stepdad, he was abusive. You know, one night we were preparing for Taco Tuesday, and he was picking on me. That was not unusual. But this particular night, something was different. You know, the next thing I recall was laying on my back, looking up at my stepdad beating on me, and seeing my mom pulling him up off of me. About a year later, my little sister was born. And it wasn't long after that my mom kicked my stepdad out for good. But regardless of the things that happen to you in life, whether you're a kid or as an adult, we all have a purpose to fulfill. And I truly believe that. Mm-hmm. Now, today I'm going to share with you how you can transform your life by adding a little bit of purpose and meaning into it. I'm the CEO of a professional staffing firm, but I also coach high school football. That is as close as I got to the NFL, by the way. And this is a picture of my boys. This particular weekend, we were playing in the Southeast Championship Tournament, and we made it to the final game. Which was awesome. What was not so awesome is that we actually had to play our crosstown rivals, a team that we hadn't beaten in almost 7 years. And as usual, this was a very close, hard-fought game, but we came out on top. It was so awesome. I mean, the kids were fired up, the parents were off the charts excited, as you can imagine. And I just remember walking back to the truck, thinking about how proud of these boys that I was, not only about how hard they competed, but that they believed that they could win. And so I hop in my truck, and I've got about a 45-minute trip home, this long, dark countryside highway. And I'm telling you, it was dark. It was so dark that I could barely see the bridge up ahead. [SPEAKING CHINESE] It was so dark that I had zero chance of seeing that person standing on top of the bridge about to jump off in front of my truck. I didn't see him. I didn't see him until it was too late. And it happened so fast, I didn't have a chance to stop or to stir to avoid running over top of him. I can still hear the sound and feel the impact. It was absolutely gut-wrenching. Sheer tears ripping through my body, and all I could think of was pulling off the side of the road as quickly as I could so I could run back and help. So I jump out of the truck and I'm running. I'm sprinting up the shoulder, and I can still hear the cars on the opposite side of the highway swishing by full speed, and images of the headlights of oncoming traffic. And as I'm running, I'm thinking, "Maybe it's not that bad. Maybe they're okay." But as I get closer, reality started to set in. He didn't make it. He was dead. And these are no images that any human being should ever have to see. Whew. What laid here was a lifeless shell of a man. That was somebody's son, maybe a dad, a brother, someone's best friend. But now what lays is a lifeless shell of a human being that's a middle-aged man wearing a gray hooded tracksuit with shoes scattered across the road, one sock half on, the other sock is missing. And I couldn't stop thinking, why did he jump? Did he ever consider? Did he ever consider the danger that he was going to put us in? If I would have arrived a split second sooner— and I stopped myself and I go, Clegg, how awful of me to think about something like that in a moment like this. It was a long night. The next day I wake up to hundreds of messages, kind messages, but I didn't want to get out of bed. But I knew I needed to see a therapist later that day. I felt judged, I felt so helpless. I don't know, maybe I was just having a pity party for one. But there's an awesome quote by Dr. Peter Levine that says, "Trauma is not what happens to you, but it's what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness." I spent hours later that day with a therapist, and she became that empathetic witness. I don't remember much of the conversation. I remember there were long periods of silence. I was staring up at the ceiling, looking down at my shoes, looking out the window. But she never judged. She just gave me space. Space to just be. And isn't that what an empathetic witness is supposed to do? You know, months following the accident, I was still struggling. I was suffering silently inside. I really struggled. As time continued to move on, I knew that things had to change. Because I was negatively reacting to so many things in life. I wasn't being present in the most important areas of my life, like family and business. And so that's when the transformation began. And I discovered a concept by Dr. Benjamin Hardy called "Being Your Future Self Now." And I watched videos of transformation, read books about purpose and meaning. Something inside of me started to stir, man. It was like this magnetic pull that I couldn't resist. Yeah, so I joined this mastermind group where I started doing some deep work. Started journaling. I never journaled. Started deeply reflecting on my past. Inspecting all of the key areas of my life. The things that I was doing prior to the accident, I would have considered as being too woo-woo or fluffy. But in reality, those were the tools that I used to stop dwelling on the accident and what happened to me. And instead, I started focusing on being my future self and what I was going to be. Everything started to change. I mean, it was magic. I started thinking like that little 8-year-old boy again with ambition and purpose. And I want this for you guys too, because we all are going to experience some level of trauma somewhere in our lives. But before we become our future self, we have to understand what are the limitations that we have? What are the excuses that we use? What are the lies that we tell ourselves? My favorite: I don't have time. How many of us use that every single day? I don't have time. I tell my kids, you're the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with. Because we become our environment. And I was very blessed to have an environment that helped me through my recovery, helped me take the beginning steps of becoming my future self. I mean, when I started journaling, I realized that I had lost a decade of my life. 10 years I was no longer thinking of future success. I was living what I call the default future, which is living in the day-to-day. How many of us live in the day-to-day, into that default future? It's impactful. But some of the things that we have to understand is that change is inevitable. And I want you to understand a few things. That we can't live that default future because if patients that are on their deathbed, the number one regret that they have is that they did not have the courage to live lives true to themselves but instead by the expectation of others. If you don't make changes today, what regrets are you gonna have on your deathbed? And I hate to tell you, we're all gonna be there at one point. But I can promise that if you start searching for purpose and meaning in your life, you won't have those regrets. Now there are 3 questions that I want you to pay close attention to. Take home to your family and your friends and ask yourself these 3 questions. The first question is, who is your future self? Now, if you were to have fun and write a letter from 5 years into your future to your current self today, what advice would you give yourself? Number 2. Where are you living a default future? Right? If you don't make changes today to the things that are going on in the day-to-day to life, what does your future self look like? And number 3, if you don't remove those limitations, those excuses, those lies that we tell ourselves, if you don't remove those, What's your future self look like? I mean, think about it. If you had the courage and the resources and you knew you couldn't fail, what would you pursue in life? Now, this journey of becoming my future self started almost 6 months ago. And I have started dreaming big. One of my visions is to humanize 100,000 conscious leaders in corporate America. I want to expand and become a professional speaker to share this message and others. And my favorite vision was, within 5 years, I wanted to get on a TEDx stage and tell this story. But because I was taking steps of becoming my future self, it happened in 5 months. The power of your future self is real. Embrace it. Now, I wish I could go back to that fateful night and find that gentleman on the bridge before he jumped. And I would speak to him. Like I'm speaking to you. I would ask him the same questions that I ask you. No judgment. I'd just listen. I would help him find that empathetic witness, help him identify the steps of becoming his future self before it was too late. But we know that is not possible. I can't go speak to him. But what is possible is that we can share this message of hope to millions around the world. You know, that night of the accident, I thought that my rival was that crosstown football team. But as I started taking the steps on this journey of becoming my future self, I realized that the real rival was me. Thank you. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE]