Ep19 - Anthony Trucks

We are going to be with former NFL player Anthony Trucks. He is a professional speaker, he is an author and he is a teacher of life. Anthony just wrote a book called Identity Shift. Anthony, tell us what we are going to learn.

Hey man, you are going to learn how to be able to take life's the crazy things life throws at us and turn them into amazing stuff and what I call making shift happen. No matter what you have gone through, where you are at or what you want to achieve, there is always going to be a gap which is great between who you are and who you want to be. And that is an identity gap. If you don't understand how to change that, how to shift and adjust man, you can do some creative cool things. So we talk about all about that and my story on the show.

What is the roadmap to defeat self sabotage, negative thinking and learned helplessness in these unprecedented times? You must get connected, get growing, get certain and Get Attitude. The Get Attitude Podcast. And welcome to the Gap. The Get Attitude Podcast where you come to listen to find out the secrets about how to get from where you are to how to get to where you're going and how to bridge the gap from who you are to how to bridge the gap to who you want to become. And man oh man, do we have a guest for you. We have a guest that is going to give you the secrets, the tools, the mindset and the identity shift that it is going to take to to help you get from where you are to where you want to go. And I'm so honored to bring into your life, Mr. Anthony Trucks. Jason, let's go ahead and throw up a little something about Anthony right now.

We are all met with moments where we not only get to see who we are, but we get to choose.

Who we will become.

And it's in those moments that we must realize that our new life is going to cost us our old one. But when you decide to pay that price by giving up your your old bad habits, your ego, your excuses, your lack of self belief and your anger from past pain that you decide to experience life at a level so few ever get a chance to experience. A life full of happiness, fulfillment, joy, peace and overwhelming gratitude not only for the good, but also for the bad. Because those times strengthened you to endure. They were the fire that hardened your will and resolve to create a life far bigger than the one you could have ever imagined. A life where you get to finally know who you are, why you're here and and what you're supposed to do. With your life. My name is Anthony Trucks, and I believe we are all on a journey to get the answers to the questions that fuel our dreams and inspire us to create our legacies. You are the most powerful being on this planet, and you were created for a purpose far greater than your eyes could ever see. I know this because you close your eyes and you listen closely. You'll hear your heart whispering. It's time to play bigger. The question you have to ask yourself is, will you?

And we are here with the one and only Anthony Trucks. He is the creator of the Shift method to help people choose the identity gaps that we are responsible for and the shortfalls on their path to success. Anthony is a loving father, husband, and man of faith, as well as a passionate dog dad, and his family lives in Walnut Creek, California. He is a speaker and let me tell you something, I've seen his stuff. He is an excellent speaker. He hosts the AW SHIFT and SHIFT Starter podcast and is a former NFL player and professional athlete with an amazing story. Anthony Trucks, welcome to the Get Attitude podcast.

Hey, man, I'm happy to be here. It's funny, if you ever watch your stuff, you're like, that's a cool guy, man. I like it. I haven't seen that video in so long. But, man, man, I'm excited to be here with you, man. I love your energy. I love what the concept of the podcast is, man. I hope I can leave some gold for people as we talk today.

Yeah, I think you're definitely going to drop some bombs on us and you're going to help people certainly bridge the gap in their life, their business, their relationships, all of that good stuff. So let's just jump right in to, Anthony, your definition of attitude. What do you think? How do you define attitude? How important is attitude? And most importantly, I want to know who you're at, who your first attitude coach might have been.

Oh, man. It's a good question, man. I like when people ask me questions that I have not prepared or have any idea of an answer for because it's going to come right from the heart. Attitudes that I think it's the. Man, it's the game changer. It's the separation between what I know to do, what I know is supposed to do, what someone's told me to do, and whether or not it gets done. I think it's that one. It's that one segmented piece of us that. That if you can tap into it and you can switch it on, man, that's what allows people to make some I say make shift happen, right? That's the thing. And my first coach that was big on attitude was Don Pelham, man. DP When I played with the Bucket or the Bucs with the Organ Ducks, DP was this dude that just. I'm not gonna lie, I hated him when I played for him, man. He was so difficult. He was so hard. He made us. He made us do things that didn't make sense, but it got to the point where you could do it and you had a positive attitude with it and it made life easier, right? So when I got to play with the Buccaneers later with coach John Gruden, like, Gruden was easy for me because I'd already dealt with somebody who taught us kind of that navigating of the personal attitude.

So I don't know.

I hope that answers your question, man. That's my perspective on attitude.

Hey, did you ever play with Casey Cunningham? He was a tight end. He played for Gruden with the Buccaneers and he was on the gap. Or was it Casey Crawford? I can't remember his name. Big, big time mortgage guy now. He's doing some amazing things. So when you talk about Don Pelham making you do things you didn't want to do, give me an example of what that was.

We would always have these, obviously, pre game meetings the day before the game. The whole team has to show up and meetings would be like two o', clock, right? So the whole team shows up at 2 o', clock, but not for the linebackers. We had to be there like 10 o' clock or 10:30. And we watch film for hours. Granted, we just watched film all week. But he'd make us get food and come in there like three hours early. Or, like, when grades were due by Friday, they were due for us by Tuesday. He's like, why? You can get it on Monday and Tuesday, right? Why wait till Friday? He's like, if you don't have a sweat broken by the time practice starts, I'm gonna make you sweat after practice. So, like, the way that he used to make us do things, it's just like always this extra. But I'm telling you, man, at the end of the day, when I look back on it, those little things, they started, like, ingraining in me to where you start showing up in life differently. Because it's not something you have to do, it's just who you are to do those things now. And those intangibles, they apply themselves outside the game of sports and make other cool things happen.

So was he picking on the linebackers. Was he only doing this to the linebackers or was it everybody?

No, he was the linebacker coach, man. We had D coordinator. He was the linebacker coach. So only the LBs, man. And it's funny cause all the other guys used to be like, dude, man, I couldn't handle dp. We're like, we can't either. Can somebody come save us, man?

Now let's talk about in your personal life, maybe who was the biggest attitude influencer before you became who you became as a football player.

And that would be my adoptive mom. So I was given away at three years old. I experienced a whole lot of craziness growing up. And at about six years old, after three years in the system, I land into family, which is my family now and kind of uniqueness. I'm the only black person in an all white family. And we grew up in really, really poor situation. However, I was a hardened little kid. I was a very unhappy, very closed off. And it happens in foster care. Like, if you look at any prison in America, 75% of our inmates are former foster kids. Half the homeless population. Less than 1% of us go to college because I believe we get walled off and we just get shut down. We don't trust people. Our own moms and dads didn't love us or they did some heinous things to us. And so this woman, man, she came in and she. I tell people she loved me out of my shell, like love that she loved me to a level that didn't make logical sense. And when it goes past logic, the only place it can go is the heart. Right? Your brain can't handle it. The heart finds a way to. I was like, man, this woman really loves me. And so she, she helped me change the attitude I had around being this foster kid who didn't fit in, who wasn't accepted to where I had this attitude of man, like, I can actually probably do some great things. And it set me up in a trajectory that is vastly different than other. My other counterparts of mine from the same situation.

Well, and certainly, and I think you would know better than me, there's not a lot of success stories out of the foster care system. Right. Like you, you may be. I don't know what it is if 75%, it doesn't go well and 25% are fortunate enough to have the experience. Do you have any statistics or any generalities of what it's. What the results are of foster care? I'd love to know the attitude it takes of a successful foster Care parent. Because you know what? We may have some foster kids listening right now.

Yeah, I mean, we definitely do. I mean, there's 400,000 foster kids. I want to say, just instead of California, when you get to the rest of the country, it gets more. I think the interesting part of it is there's not some statistic. I wish there was. I do know there are phenomenal organizations, some I sit on the board of, where the idea is, like, finally go back and be a voice that these kids can see. Because growing up, I had no shining. I didn't know of anybody that was doing anything great. And most of the time, foster kids were ashamed of it. I don't want the world to know that I, you know, I had this situation. So it tucks itself away. We could be watching people right now. I want to say, like, Simone Biles might have been in foster care. I may be wrong with that. But I found out recently some Olympian like, was. But you don't know about it. You know, it's kind of. It's like a dark closet thing. And I think if you look at some of the best foster parents that I have noticed, because there is a high rate of turnover with foster kids and houses because they come in and what most people don't know is our attitudes, those MOS situations as these kids, it's like, man, I. I want to go to my real parents. Granted, they may not be good people for me. I want to go to them. So how do I. How do I get kicked out of this house to go with them? Because maybe the next house, they'll drop me back off at home because the world doesn't want me. We don't know. It doesn't work that way. So it's such a high turnover because we just. We're just bad, you know? And so what ends up happening is you got these parents. The ones that actually make the change for us are the ones that, like I said, man, they love us in ways that don't make sense. And to be honest, it takes a while to actually crack. It takes. So because you don't get realized we've been in different foster homes and said, we're gonna keep you different parents. We love you, and no one's panned out. So we don't have a reason to trust anybody. And it's just. It's the world. And so the parents that do well are the ones that can seriously show up in ways that are beyond what anybody else has done in our past.

And so I just want to understand this you were with your folks from 1 to 3, and then they turned you over?

Yeah, at 3. And then I bounced around. I think I might have been in about five houses before landing in my sixth house, which has been the house my family ever since.

I mean, that is amazing. I can't imagine the trauma that can cause just to a kid. Do you remember being three and making that transition? I mean, do you remember it that far or did you have. No idea.

So I guess, and this is what I've come to find is whenever you have, like, traumatic moments, your brain kind of kicks on and it starts to start. You just start remembering things. So I can actually tell you the layout of the apartment of the house that my mom gave me away. I remember being given away. I remember getting in the car, driving out. I remember the lab of the first house I went to. Holy. We're gonna go to the, you know, the end of the rainbow to see the leprechaun. So it's there. I mean, it's locked in. So it's. As much as I'd like to not remember a lot of it, man, it is most definitely all there.

Well, yeah, it gets into that concept of effective blaming, that, you know what? You would not be the Anthony Trucks you were today if you didn't go through what was done. And maybe the voice that you share with people in your audiences and with the gappers here on the Gap, that voice, that message, that ability to overcome is real in your life. And so whatever our podcast listeners are thinking, that was tough in their childhood. We have somebody that we can. That we can relate to or listen to today to see how he got past that last question. Are your birth mother and father in your life or are they not?

No, my birth mother, she is what's called a pathological liar. She's kind of a. She's a loopy bird, man. I haven't talked to her since I was about 20, after I had my son in college.

Right.

And before that. Here's the interesting thing is when we were growing up, like my. I say we, all my siblings, we had these visitations we were allowed to do in this town called Martinez. It was like this, you know, building. You go there, mom and dad show up, and you get to hang out. Well, I didn't have the same dad as all three of my siblings. So we'd go to show up, and it was always them and their dad and me with nobody because mom wouldn't show up, but never failed. Every single time, she would call afterwards and give me Some crazy excuse as to why she wasn't there. She's like, ah, you know, I. She at one point told me she owned Apple. She was with NASA, she was a Mensa member. She. All these crazy stories because I'd eat them up. And she believed them like it was crazy. She believed all of them. And so it took me a lot of years, but eventually I severed rights and got adopted. And I had to go to court to actually sever rights. And so she kind of left. My life had a weird reconnection at a point when I was in college, after I had my son, because I'm now on national television playing sports, like with the last name Trucks. And I'm, you know, most structures don't look like me. So I'm like, all right. Well, she knew I was, you know, and so that was the last time my biological dad, oddly, I met him. It was after. Shoot, it was weird. So after I had my son, my mom, I connected with my real grandma somehow. I kind of coaxed her into giving my biological dad's real name. I'd never known it. Found his name, looked it up. There were three in the country, last name ASAI Babo. And come to find I lived in Marietta, Georgia. My first game the next season, my true sophomore year was going to be at Mississippi State, five away. And. And the problem was I was looking at. I wanted to start if I'm gonna meet my dad, like, I'd like to start, but I got a fifth year senior in front of me. So how do I beat out this guy that's been there five years at the University of Oregon, right? And I'm sitting there, right? So, man, I'm telling you, I buckled down, I got the job. It was. That's a different story. But like, what I did, I just pretty much showed up in ways that didn't make sense. Beyond. Beyond logic, man. And I got the job. So I got to have my first college start on national television. Won the game, I got a game ball, met my dad. It' this ball you see right there.

Oh, my gosh. How cool is that? Well, and you and I both know because we've been around when a coach is invested in a fifth year senior to let him go for a freshman, that's hard to do. So my guess is that you were taking some anger out on some people as you were going to get that spot. Would that be accurate?

It would be inaccurate, to be honest. You'd be surprised. I wasn't, dude, you know what? I'm a guy I've never been an angry football player. I've never been like the, you know, Ray Lewis, spit in your mouth, like the program. I've never been that dude. You know, it's a different. But here's the thing though. When I want something, I will find a way. Like my brain goes like my, you.

Want to call it attitude.

It goes to this different switch that is like an out of body experience. There's a different level of where I lean into and I can do it to this day in work capacity. I do it when I get on stage. It's like I am out of body and I just roll. And so I call it that zone. Like that's what it is. It's the zone, man. You can click into and dude, I clicked into it. I was, I read the plays, I was learning everything in the weight room. I was, I was out working. Every single time I touched that field, it was like a full, it was 11 out of 10, man. You could not slow me down. And it turned into something. I made plays and yeah, it turned to me starting.

And so to bring this to our listeners is some of our gappers are starting at a company, starting in a relationship, building something and find themselves standing at the front of the bridge just like you did as a freshman, going, how am I going to get and bridge that gap to where I want to be. Can you give me two or three words? When you think about yourself, as you said, I need to start, I need to be out this fifth year player. What was the secret formula? I mean, I know you said I outworked them all, but what else comes to your mind?

Well, you know, we'll call it.

In hindsight, I call it this. The whole concept of making shift happen. That's, that's why that's my thing, man. It's really. Here's the thing. If you think about making shift happen, remove the F. You get what it means, right?

Yep.

But it's, it's like in order to do that, the concept of what you're trying to create has to be out of bounds, out of normalcy, out of what makes sense. Right. That's the whole idea. Or else it wouldn't be a special word. It'd be like, oh, I make normalcy happen. I'm making some crazy stuff happen.

Right.

And I think what has to happen at that moment is first you have to realize that the person you are right now, like that's not the person that's gonna get the thing done or.

You'D already have it logic Tells you, if I was that person, I'd already have it. Now, it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you, but in comparison to the goal you got, you gotta level up a little bit. There's nothing wrong. It's not that tier. So for me, what I did back then that I've now understood and kind of codified is I gotta figure out, well, who do I gotta be and how do I become that person? And as much as you can, I'd like to say you decide. I wanna be this person. You sit back and wake up one day and your eyes open, your feet touch the ground, and you're that person. That's not how it happens. It happens because you make investments. And if you want to ask the key, like, it's an investment, if you think about investments, man, I want a return, man. I'm putting something in. I want the return. If I put some money in you, I want my money back. You know, and then some. The return comes in this world from actions, and it's the actions that create the outcome and achievement. But big part of it is the actions. Investment return is a transformation or a shift into that human being. If I've spent a year, let's say I start whittling a chair right now. I'm not a chair whittler, right, Glenn? I'm not a chair whittler, but you give me a year, bro. I'm making chairs. You better not challenge my chair whittling ability. I've taken. I've got the cuts, the scrapes, I've got the chairs sitting there. I've done the work, and it sucked to build up to it, but I got there. So when you ask, like, what do you do with that precipice, that moment there, it's got to make shift happen. And the goal's got to be wrapped around what actions must I take beyond who I see myself as right now. Long enough and hard enough to where at some point, that's who I am.

When you look at the actions you've taken to get from the little boy who you were, we didn't even talk about high school. But we will later into Division one athlete into professional athlete, what would you say are the one or two most important actions that you took? Whatever that story may be, where you said, man, I've just made a jump. But what were the actions that you took?

The biggest one was to convince myself I belong there, right?

Being honest, man, because when you're leaving high school, going to college, like, you got to, like, do the question, it's inevitable. Do I belong here? Like, am I supposed to? When I was in the NFL, I questioned like, am I supposed to be here? I don't know, man. Is this an accident? You know, I don't. Although you're there and somebody chose you to be there, right? And they're telling you, yeah, it's difficult sometimes for us to go, yeah, yeah, I belong here. So that was the first one making sure that I belong there. And then a second part of it was convincing myself. And you convince yourself by showing up and doing small things every day to where you go, yeah, yeah, I belong here.

That's it.

And it's, as much as it sounds simple, it's very difficult to do that. Whether it's navigating the like for me, you got to realize I had a lot of baggage from this foster care world of my mom didn't think I mattered. She gave me away. So why should I believe I do? Whether or not anybody says, there's that little voice in the back of my head. And then when you do show up, we are human beings that you ever been like riding a bike or driving and you stare at something and next thing you know you've drifted off towards it, you're like in the lane. And so what I noticed is if we focus on that thing, somehow we'll drift off. So if I don't have a thought that I belong, then I don't take actions. I'll look at and go, I don't belong here. And I'll drift off towards that. I don't belong here without my actions. I'll show up late, I'll self sabotage, I'll get a bad ad attitude. I won't do things, I'll blame it on coaches. I won't take ownership. And next thing I'm out and I can go, see, I knew it. I knew it's who I was, right? Or you go, know what are the things I got to do? And it's got turn that wheel. But then little by little, I start seeing that thing. And sure enough, the same thing happens in a positive direction. I do show up. I am on time. I do. The small little actions lead me to a point where I wake up one day and I couldn't tell you it's gonna happen Wednesday at 5:00 on the 5th. Like, you just wake up one day and you look back and go, man, I did it. Like, I feel like, ah, I like this guy. I know who I am. Like, I am this person. But it's a process.

Certainly in life and certainly in your life, everything's not, you know, peaches and cream and strawberries and Rosemary's. Right. And so we focus on the Get Attitude podcast. Our season one. We have 10 attitude boosters. 10 things that actually boost your attitude. If you participate, participate in them daily. And when I read your story and have researched you, you've dealt with adversity. And I know that you were in the NFL and you ended that career with an injury. And so what I would love to hear from you is, how do you view adversity? I love adversity. It makes me alive. I eat adversity for breakfast. That's just my deal. But I want to know what's your process on dealing with adversity that helped you overcome? Because, man, you've. You've been through some stuff.

Yeah, I. You know, I think the thing with people is we don't like it, but we appreciate it. Like it. I don't know if that makes sense. Maybe you get it. Like, I love puzzles, man. I love. I love puzzles. Like, actual puzzles. The weird little block things you get from, like, the kid, the store, and they have, like, metal bars, those things. I love puzzles. I thoroughly enjoy the challenge because I think you get to find out more of who you are. There's something special that happens once you realize, like, for the first time, possibly, that you got vastly more in you than you comprehend, and the only thing that extracts it is adversity. In fact, at, like, a neuroscience level, when you are met with crisis or adversity or difficulty, your brain actually releases different proteins. And when those proteins are released, they actually wire some of the synapse. They also help, like, adjust part of your genetic code a little bit. So adversity actually releases, at a genetic level, more of who you are. It's a weird concept. So for me, knowing that, logically, I'm like, dude, give it to me. I want to find out who I am. Like, I got this far off of things. I shouldn't have been this far. So I'm in bonus rounds. I think that's the way I explain it. You play video games probably. Maybe growing up, you know, you beat the level, and then now, like, I got to get more mushrooms or got to find a way to shoot more ducks. It's a bonus rounds. I lose nothing, but I have everything to gain. I'm in the bonus rounds of life. Statistically, I'm in the bonus rounds. And the best way for me to continue to keep getting more bonuses is to keep Challenging myself and finding adversity. So I'm like you, man. I have a palpable. Like, I can taste. I can taste the adversity, you know? Like, it tastes good in a weird way. Like, I salivate at it. I love it now. It feels hard, but it's more of like, let's see what you got. Life. You've been trying to get me the whole time, but I got this. So I'm in that same ballpark of I love. Helps me find out who I am. And at the end of it, I'm batting 10 for 10. You know, like, I figured it out day to day.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're with Anthony Trucks. He just gave you some seriously good stuff about adversity. I've always said that adversity is the mother of perseverance. We all want to consider ourselves as people who persevere. And I think what Anthony just said about his view of adversity is that, look, it. I'm growing. It creates growth in me. It makes me smarter. It makes me work harder. There's so much benefit when adversity comes. So if you're somebody that's dealing with adversity now, I hope you hit replay on that, because we all need to know that, you know what? We're not the people we are unless we go through some adversity, which is really, really cool. Now, I'm pretty sure I saw that you were on American Gladiator. Is that true or not?

That is false. I was an American ninja warrior.

American Ninja warrior.

All right, well, Gladiator would have been a fun one. I'm not gonna lie. That would have been a blast.

What was Ninja Warrior before Gladiator?

It was after. So Gladiator, they stopped a few years back. Like 15 years back. They stopped later. But American Ninja warriors, that one where you have to hang and swing from your hands and hit buzzers and stuff.

Yeah. Well, is that where they do the wall? Like, what. What is it now? You run up the wallet.

That's it?

Yeah. So you have to go through these obstacles.

I love that. I love it. All right, well, it is cool. And it's killing it. And I can't stop watching it. So, number one, tell me, what made you do it? What was the process? How hard was it? What was the hardest obstacle? Just give us that story real quick.

So it wasn't. It wasn't a what. It was a who. So my. My. My wife, who was my ex wife. And at this time, we had just gotten back and remarried after three years Divorced, she decided she was going to throw my hat in the ring without really telling me and enter me into this application online for his TV show for Ninja Warrior. Now granted, at the time, about 6:1, and I'm £240 that time. And most of the people on that show are about 5, 8, 5 9, a buck 60. They're like, all the big guys come up at 180 pounds. And I'm like, I still got 60 pounds on that dude. I don't have rock climber legs. I got football legs, you know. And so I get this call one day. It was. I might have been like, February. They're like, hey, Anthony Trucks. Like, yeah, like, hey, this is the producer from American Ninja Warrior. You're going to be on TV in 30 days. And I look at my belly, I'm like, not this belly. This one ain't going to be on tv. So I had to figure out how to get myself one to lose some weight quickly. Like that day I was on a diet. And then I had to figure out how to train. I'd never even seen an obstacle. I've never even trained. I've done monkey bars. As a kid, I hadn't done that kind of stuff. But here's the thing. In college, we had this crazy cool strength coach named Jim Rad, who was phenomenal at making sure he had great grip strength and just natural control. So I had this weird body control and grip strength that it was actually useful. And so, man, I trained for about, man, a whole month. To be honest, though, because I was so heavy, my elbows would hurt. I got about seven hours of time in. And. And so, like, you don't. That's not a lot when it comes to these things. So I show up in Los Angeles. We're filming on the Universal Studios, the lot where they film like Bruce Almighty and all these different cool movies. You know, in the back. You know the tour. They give you a tour in the back lot. Oh, yeah, we're filming. We're filming down there. So we go down there, we're filming, and I get up and it's three in the morning, by the way. You get there, like noon. It's like, it's like three in the morning by the time you actually go live. And it's like this whole thing, it's like, all right, go. And then you try not to fall in the water. And so my very first time through, there's six obstacles. The last one is that warped wall. And dude, I'd watched guys that I was training with Both of them fall. One of the dudes was like, a vet. Eight years in. One guy had been on every show. They fall in all these obstacles. I'm like, well, what am I about to go out here and get wet in the first one? What are we doing? And I also come to find no football player that had ever got through. They told me, like, no football players ever gotten past, like, two obstacles. I'm like, oh, well, that makes it even more fun, guys. So, dude, I went out there, and it was just. It was obstacle one after the other. And methodically I pressed through. The hardest one was one called battering Ram. It's these poles that have, like, these kind of imagine toilet paper rolls on poles. You gotta jump off a trampoline, wrap your arms around it, and then shimmy your body and slide down.

It's a.

Then transition to the next one. You swing your body, release, and grab and slide again. And I'm so heavy like that. I'm trying to, like, not to fall off. And so this one they all fell on, I got. I do. I get from one to the next one. Grab it. And when I would land, I'd slide three feet because I'm so heavy, right? Then I do it again. I got boom to boom and then landed next. You know, it's like, I just gotta get up a wall. And I remember my wife and kids on the side watching me, and I got up the wall, and I became the first former NFL athlete to hit a buzzer. And so it's the only thing. It's not that it's difficult. It's just technically scary. And you can't make a mistake. And if you do, you're done. But that was my experience of Ninja War. So it was a blast. Got to be on tv, My family got to hang out. It was a really, really, really cool thing to do. That on paper, I absolutely should not have been able to do.

Possibly the most important piece of that story is you were divorced and you managed to make things come back together.

Yeah.

What was the attitude it took to be in love, get married, get divorced, and then find your way back with your soulmate or your twin flame or whatever?

Tell us that attitude.

Yeah, I do, too.

Yeah.

Well, I'll call it.

I'll give you the quick. We'll call it the brief story. So we were high school sweethearts. In fact, in the yearbook, we are the cutest couple. In the yearbook, I'm the homecoming king. She's like. She's just been around all this. She's been There and we got to college. And then in college we went different ways. So I went to college at Oregon, she went to UC Davis, we got engaged. Cause I was like, I want to marry you. The long distance thing was difficult. So eventually she came up to school with me at Oregon, but they had her major she wanted to do. Her family's like, just go up there, just, you know, don't get pregnant. Go, you know, do school stuff. And so six months later, she's pregnant. And so me too.

Just so you know.

Huh?

Same story right here. Go ahead.

Isn't it right? So sophomore year, we have a kid, man. This kid's actually is about to go to college next year. Super weird, but. But no, like we have this kid and I love being a dad because I now got to give back to a life in a way that wasn't given to me. I've always loved being a dad. Never had a problem with it, great joy within it, honestly. And then so a couple years go by and we're doing college, no problem, get to the pros, we're good. Then I tear my shoulder, I come home, and all of a sudden, man, life hits a complete different switch on me. So I'm like, I lose a sense of self because I've lost football. I've got this crisis of identity going on. You know, she's kind of curious of like other men out there that could be the guy. And also I'm neglecting. We have two brand new twins. So she's at home every day while I'm at this gym trying to build a business. She had a four year old and newborn twins and no husband around. And so statistically, already in America is a 50% chance of divorce. You add multiples to it, it ticks up by 25%.

Sure.

When your family has been divorced like her family was and mine was, it adds on to it, right? So all these statistics of divorce, it's almost like we were careening down that hill. And next, you know, like it comes to pass, we're like, our marriage isn't working out. To be quite honest. She ends up stepping out. It just breaks my soul. And so we go our separate ways. And like everybody else, like you when you're in the separation department, I hate her guts. I. I didn't want her to die, but like, if she never comes around again, like, I'm cool. Like if I ever see her face in my lifetime, I'm good again. But I got these kids with her, so I got it. And so three years go by of anger and spats and those long, argumentative text messages, poking holes. Just all the stuff, man. Just. It was what you would imagine it to be. And then after three years, I happened across the moment where my mom passed away, my adoptive mom passed from Ms. 17 year battle. And it just. My brain started kicking into like, I don't like this life. I don't like this guy. And I started personally doing work on Anthony. I started making my, I would believe, my most pivotal, proactive identity shift ever. And I started to see who I was in ways I didn't really appreciate and like. And it made me make some real big decisions on who I wanted to be. And those decisions led to me understanding that she made a horrible choice. And I take nothing from her on that. However, she didn't get to that place by herself of even thinking she needed to make a choice. I should have been a good present husband. That doesn't mean that she should have came and said, hey, you're not being what I need in that conversation. But I got to take my ownership of my part in the process. That's all I can do, right? And so in doing that, I forgave her for the concept of the process, what she did, because she wasn't doing it to hurt me, she was doing it to help her. I think when people do things and they have these problems, how could you do this to me? And I think from my childhood, my parents and my mom and, you know, clients and colleagues, people stealing money from me, people weren't doing stuff to maliciously try to damage me. They were doing them for themselves and it hurt me. And so a concept and understanding of that. And then also on her side, she'd always been Catholic, I'd been Christian. She never went to church. I would go to church by myself with the kids. Her brother gave her this book by Joyce Meyers. And it's like, I don't know what the book is called, Be honest. But she. The way it's funny, her brother's not the kind of guy that's a faith guy. Part of the joke is like, he must have found it while breaking into a car or something, you know, Like, I don't know where he got the book, but she put it next to her bed stand and said one day she woke up on a Sunday, no family, no friends, hungover, and the book was there and she picked it up and she came to faith in a way that is powerful and amazing. I grew. And so we reconnected accidentally later on, like in 2016.

Wow.

And, man, God put a marriage back together. Now we have this super cool bonded deep. Like, I would go back through what we went through 70 times over to get what I have right now. Right? But, yeah, that was. That was the kind of the precursor to this, this new brand new relationship, and an amazing one at that.

Anthony, I honestly, we've. You're about our 79th interview, and I just can't say enough how your story and what you're sharing with us today aligns with exactly what we're trying to do for people. And when I think about what you've been talking about, I keep saying this in order to bridge the gap from who you are to who you want to be, you got to go through some. You got to go through some shit when it's all said and done right a lot. And you're just so relatable. And I just. I know that that story you just shared with us and. Thank you. Is a story that many people are living. And it wouldn't surprise me if there's people going, you know what if I become a better me? Maybe I could rekindle that. I think there's a message of hope in that story. Who did you lean on to rebuild? Anthony Trucks. Who was your attitude coach? Who was your personal development guys? Who were you jumping all into going, I need to change? So who did you seek out and who really helped you recreate yourself first?

It was me. It was looking in the mirror and hating who I was. Right? Because I think there's. I'm being honest, like, I didn't like the guy looking back at me. And most of the time, people realize they're like, we're never alone. We're always with ourselves. And if you are finding yourself in conversation with other people, time out, drinking, partying, hanging out, find this just a moment to look in and go, is it because you don't like being alone? Because you don't realize you don't like who you're alone with? Like, that's kind of that thing. And so that was the first person that showed, like, all right, I don't like this dude. When I started going out and seeking ways to improve myself, we'll call it, because, let's be honest, I got to improve myself. It's sports. What do we do? We improve ourselves. I improve my knowledge, I improve my body. Same thing. It's no different in this world. So the first book I picked up was one by Stephen Covey called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Now, while it's, I think, a Book that has to do with, you know, professional aspects. It helped me really decode how to deal with humans. Right. You know, put first what's first. I hadn't done that in the marriage. Right. Seek first understand, then be understood. I'd spent a lot of years blaming, but I really. I couldn't get my words in because the person opposite of me knew I didn't understand their position. Right. It's just these. These things. So all these little. These ideas is like, you know, be proactive. Like, there's.

I wasn't doing it.

So that book was really good at giving me the ability to understand. Like, oh, this is how I'm operating as a human. I'm not being very effective. And then I read books like, was it Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl? Which is about mega therapy, and under the concepts of the pain the guy went through, you know, I think it might have been the Holocaust, like he. But he had this kind of book, and he tried to hold onto it, but it's like making meaning of things. We're humans as meaning, making machines. And the problem is, unfortunately, no moment has a meaning but the one we give to it. And I was giving things the wrong meaning, wrong reasoning. And so that book was really good to be like, oh, that's where the meeting should be. And it made me perceive life in a different way, in a sense of, like, the things that had gone on in my life, if I'm honestly a man of faith, that at the end of the day, they weren't meant to break me, but to build me, Boom.

If I let them build me.

Holly, put that on our square. That was unreal. Go ahead. That was really good.

They were the things. And so I let them build me to a better guy. And then I showed up differently. And I have since, man, to the point where I now talk about it openly. And I find that it helps other people.

I love it. So what we're going to do now is finish our interview, and we've created this thing called knowledge through the decades. And you're not 40, are you?

Not yet, man. One day.

Well, we're only going to do a few of these then. So what we want you to do is just kind of walk through your life and give us what you think the attitude lesson is of each day, decade, of your life. But you may not remember when you were born, but you know what? You've seen three children come into this world. And I always like to ask our guests, what do you think the attitude lesson is? Of birth. Of birth. Of coming into the world of a newborn baby. What's the attitude lesson of a newborn baby when you had those kids? What attitude shift? Whether it was the first one of those twins. I got twin grandbabies. What was the attitude lesson for you when you saw those. When you saw the. That life creation hit you?

It's interesting. I can't remember the. I remember, like, watching them come out, to be honest. I was standing there. I think the funny thing is it expands upon the perspective of self, you know, like, because in the beginning it's just you. And now I am more deathly afraid of my kids out in the world than I am of myself. You know, it's. It's now an extension beyond me, that is me, if that makes sense. The attitude is like, I gotta do a couple things.

One, I gotta be dialed, right.

Because at the end of the day, if whatever I do, this is gonna affect another human being that I gotta, you know, I can't be in the world living their life, so I gotta be dialed personally. And then two, I think for me, the big thing was like, I had to now realize, like, there's this human that whatever I do, even if it's not directly, it will always indirectly affect them. So, like, how I treated mom, how I. How I'd show up in my life, what they see matters. And at those moments when I was. I mean, I was 19, I was 20 years old when my kid came out. Sure. So I'm like, figuring out my attitude was like, all right, I gotta be dope. And it's not just for me, man. I gotta be dope for this guy and everybody else he'll meet and everything. So, like, I think that was the biggest thing for me, attitude wise. Like, it's time to switch it on.

And then.

Last piece, dude. I think you never really grasp the kind of love a parent has until you have a kid.

Yes.

I wish.

This is gonna be weird when I wish my real mom had the same love. Somehow she didn't have it, but, like, there's a different kind of depth of love and understanding. Like when it's my. It's my kid. Like, the people talk about late nights. You don't get any sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then I get to be up and spend time with this person I love.

Yeah.

Like, it's a different tick, man. So I just. My attitude was always. I've always been in joy as a parent. I love it. I have, like a weird. Every morning, man. I get to walk in my house and through it and see my own children in their bed and go, like, yeah, those are my people, man.

That's so cool. Is your son gonna play college football and tell me about your twins? What? Tell me the gift that each three of them have.

Yeah. My oldest son, he is. He is vastly wise beyond his years. He's a. He's a track guy. He's not a football guy, but it's.

He's.

He's. He's just a really good human. Last night, my wife and I took my. My youngest son. We were. He's doing boxing in the city with grandma. So we went out to the city to go eat dinner with him. And it was just him and his sister here, right? His younger sister. He's 16, she's 11. Just the two of them. And he has a car. He can go places. And so we're eating dinner, and we get a notification, a little app that says that, you know, hey, so and so just returned home, and my wife looked, oh, he went to Chipotle. She goes, do you think he got Tatum some food? Because we didn't tell him to, and he didn't have to. Right? And I'm like, I think he did. She goes, no, he wouldn't do. He's about his money. He wouldn't do that. That guy, he thinks about what's right, and he doesn't question. He just does what's right. And we look at his bank account, because my wife can still do that. And sure enough, 20 bucks was out, which means he got her food.

Aw, that's awesome.

You know what I mean? Like, that little thing, like, he didn't have to do it. No one would have known. But, like, the dude went and bought his sister dinner.

Yeah.

And that's the kind of. That's just the kind of guy. But he also.4.2 GPA. He's going to state. He goes to school out here called De La Salle. He's one of two athletes going to run state. He'll be in Oregon, running for the nationals two weeks from now.

Sweet.

He's an amazing gift of a human dude. I am proud to be his father. My daughter Tatum, she's a swimmer, which is not what any of us did growing up. But she is the most creative, bubbly, random, just. She's a weird personality. And it's a great weird personality. Like, you put her in front of a math book and she's struggling. You put her in front of crayon. She's, you know, big pictures that'll make you want to like actually put them on your refrigerator. But then just. She's cool, she does her thing. Like, she's, she's very. Dude, she just does what's right and follows through. So the gift of her is like love, right? Just not that any of them are, but like, that's her. My youngest son is more like me. He is a football player. He's like, he'll like, he'll poke you with weird little jokes, you know, he's. He's the guy that we just had a football team and the coach was like, his statement was, every once in a while you get a guy in your team that becomes the individual that makes you a contender. And that's him. He's got that motor, he has that, that knack for the ball in a sports way. But he also, in life, he's got a different way of seeing things and like at a level that I see it. And it was just very odd to see 11 year old think the way he does. He's just a damn tornado. And I love it. I tell him all the time, like, you're gonna be a phenomenal adult, but we gotta get you to adulthood without letting you get in jail or get in trouble for doing stupid stuff, you know?

Right.

But dude, he's gonna be a killer in life.

That's cool. Congratulations to you and your wife. I want to continue on knowledge through the decades and as painful and as tough as it may have been for when you were 10, third and fourth grade, what was the attitude lesson from young Anthony Trucks? When he was 10 years old, what was your attitude lesson that you learned?

Yeah, I don't know if I.

So I would say I have to go way back. In hindsight, I wouldn't say I was learning a lesson back then, but in hindsight, the lessons I could share forward to now is honestly, there's a couple things. In school, I was always the bad kid. At home, I never had like this sense of anchor. But I do realize that if I would have had confidence and strength and self, I could have accomplished vastly more.

Wow.

I was a kid on that verge of going like in the gate program. I've always been pretty intelligent, but never really good on like school. I never did the homework. I just was that guy who's smart but didn't follow through in some ways. But I think, man, going back, it's like I didn't really have the confidence to think I deserved much. The lesson for me is that we create these weird worlds of what we believe we deserve and don't deserve off of two things. One, how the people we respect frame it for us, like, how they treat us. And then two, based on what we think we should have, based on what we've already had.

Yeah.

And that's the problem. Right. It's because just because I've had something doesn't mean anything more than, like, then I've had this thing. And doesn't also mean I can't have more. But if I gauge it and I measure off that, that I'm like, well, this is what I got. This must be all I deserve.

Yeah.

And I thought it's kid. Like, well, to be beaten, to be, you know, like, to not be taken care to be made fun of. I thought that's what I deserve. Right. I never thought past that. And then I was also gauging my. My strength of self off of the people that I held rapport with, which was my real mom. And as far as I knew to her I was worthless. She never showed up. So I did not have an anchored sense of belief in myself for any reason at those times.

That's awesome. Now I want to go to Oregon. You're 20. You're having your kid. Maybe you've already touched on this, but the attitude lesson for you turning 20.

Yeah, man. Anything's possible. Anything. And this is the problem. Anything in a good, anything in a bad way. Because between the age of 20 to 30, dude, I'd gone through. I'd had a kid. I played the NFL. I'd open a jib business. I'd made a quarter million dollars in a single contract consulting. I'd also lost my marriage. I'd fallen apart. I'd wanted to take my life at one point. Anything in life is possible if you don't control. Like, if you don't lean in and grab the wheel, man, like, a lot of us are leafs in the wind. We're just kind of running through life and surviving each day. And if you let your life, just let it go, man, it'll careen in direction. Doesn't need to go. And so for me, like, the 20s were 20 to 30. I'd say that that bubble there was for sure, like, hey, dude, if you don't handle this, anything's possible. Good and bad.

As far as professional teammates, who had the best attitude that you were ever around as a pro teammate. And I'll take a college teammate, too, if somebody really had an impact on you, you know what?

I think there's a couple guys. Anthony Madison was a guy, played for Bama, played cornerback. With the. With the Steelers. He was a guy, we went to church together. Just a good dude, man. He's a guy that, like, I wouldn't meet his wife and then his girlfriend the next day, you know, like, he was just a solid human being. And he probably doesn't even know that I respect him at that level. I haven't talked to him in years.

But he may be listening.

Great personality, right?

That's cool. That's so nice that you honor the people like that. Maybe he's listening. You just don't know. So let's go. Let's go to 30 years old, right?

Yeah.

You remember turning 30, you remember where you were, and when you look at your 30th birthday or turning 30, what do you think the attitude lesson is there?

That was. That's actually around the time when I kind of. I turned my head back on and I actually got. I got dialed again. My mom had passed away. I think 30 years old was like, it's more of like, this is gonna be a long ride if you don't figure it out. And so that was my like, let's figure this thing out. Because the direction I was going was not the direction that was headed in, like an end result that I wanted to be in. So I think that 30 year old was like, all right, you've done the things, You've learned some stuff. Start taking the lessons and applying them.

I love it. Anthony Trucks, you've been so good. I think there's some really, really beautiful lessons. Thank you for being so open with our gappers today. Thanks for being so personal with us. Because really, I find power is really in the bellies of each of us in our truth. And I think you've been great from the time when you talk about childbirth of that ultimate love, that depth of joy, to being that young kid who maybe doesn't have the confidence or the strength of confidence that you need, or an anchor of confidence, which I thought was a beautiful saying to that 20 year old that said, man, there's anything possible, good or bad, if you don't. Number six on the attitude boosters, control your emotions to saying, at 30, you know what, it's time to figure it out. Gappers. If you're trying to figure it out, I hope you share this podcast with people that you care about because there are answers on how you can bridge the gap from who you are to who you want to be. And Anthony, what I'd like you to do at this point, now, look at times are tough for some times aren't tough for others, but the world is a crazy ass place right now and I would love for you to just give our gappers one final message of hope, one final message of what you would do to help them bridge the gap from where they are to where they want to go, from who they are to who they want to become. And I, and I will say that Anthony has a brand new book coming out called Identity Shift that you can get on Amazon, you can Google it as well. And, and if you want to just even share a little bit about the book and the message of the book to help us with one last final attitude message of hope, we'd love to do it and we'll close it up from there, man.

So the statement I tell people is you got to own your shift, right? Own your shift at face values. Like all right, I got all my stuff but there's actually three little segments there. One is own own that there is something you got to work on. If you do not own, you got something to work on, you'll never give yourself permission to improve. So first thing is own that there's something to work on your.

Although it may not be your fault.

It is your responsibility to fix things in my life, a lot of things that were not my fault. But no one's going to come in a big cape to come save me. So it's your responsibility to fix what's going on in your life and then shift. Now that you know there's something going on, you give yourself permission. You got to do the work. You have to shift your perspective on the effort. You have to give what you're already given and what you want to have. And if you do that, you will then be able to make shift happen like I talk about. And the book, it uncovers how to do this. It's not just me telling stories, it's actually this frameworks and process and it's me walking people through exactly how to think through and actionably apply my shift method to their life and how to.

How to bridge that identity gap that, that self identity gap which is so big. Well, Anthony, thank you so much. This is going to be a wrap. It was an honor to talk to you. I can't wait to see you on stage. Please go to Anthony Anthony's website. I believe it's anthonytrucks.com correct?

Well, yeah, you can go there. If you go to identityshiftbook.com and use the word, use the code gap and then go in there actually get a free audiobook, a workbook and actually a digital copy of the book.

But.

Yeah, but my website's anthonytrucks.com yes.

Okay. Identity shift.com Identity shiftbook.com Identityshiftbook.com Put in the gap is the promo code. And you will get.

You'll get an audiobook, you'll get a workbook that goes along with it, and you'll get a digital copy of the book, too.

My man. Okay. Anthony Trucks, this is Glenn Bill signing off for the Get Attitude podcast. We appreciate you, and God bless you, and it was just such an honor to have you. Thank you very much. This podcast is a part of the C Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.