John Murphy shares ten principles from his book Stepping Up, grounded in his recovery from a severe lawn-mower accident at 17 that nearly ended his football career. The takeaways—from taking ownership to taking a knee—shaped his return to play at Notre Dame and his approach to building a champion mindset.
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Well, hello everybody and welcome to Fearless. Uh, Fearless, this is our 26th episode, and I was going to have Brian Byro, America's Breakthrough Speaker, as a guest today. And Brian had an issue, an urgent issue. So, he is now rescheduled for 2 weeks out from now. And so, I'm going to take today's episode solo. And I'm going to be referencing one of my books called Stepping Up: 10 Takeaways for Advancing Your Career. And I wrote Stepping Up because over 30-plus years in consulting, I'd frequently hear leaders around the world say, we need people to step up. And I heard it as an athlete growing up. You need to step up. So, what does that actually mean? And how can we apply that in life today? Think about something going on in your own life. How could I step up, especially when it's some form of setback or adversity? And I think, actually, the way we handle setbacks fearlessly to the extent that we can, the more we learn, the more we grow, the wiser we get, and really the more successful we become. So, what are these 10 takeaways? And this is what I want to leave you with today is just what are these 10 takeaways and how can I use them in my life both personally and professionally? So, takeaway number 1, take ownership. Take ownership. When something happens, one of the first instincts a lot of people have is to blame. Well, it wasn't me. It was, you know, it was this other person. It was the situation. It couldn't be my fault. And I'm going to put this in perspective with a very difficult time in my life. And that was when I was 17 years old. I had a terrible accident with a lawnmower, actually. And I I ran my foot through a lawnmower and it was pretty devastating. And now I could have blamed the lawnmower, you know, that there weren't enough safety features on it. I could have blamed my shoes. I could have blamed the woman who asked me to cut down a bunch of tall grass along the back of her house where she was going to throw a party. It was not a normal part of of our mowing scheme, if you will. This was a landscaping company that I started when I was actually 15, and we had up to 40 yards that we would cut. And on this particular day, this was about the 2nd or 3rd lawn that we had to cut. I went back and I was, I was, I was mowing, and this tall grass had rocks in it. And so, uh, essentially I tripped over a rock and pulled the mower up over my foot. And, uh, you know, so I could have blamed her. I could have blamed the doctors who operated on me and said, you know what, you're, you're gonna be lucky to walk again without a limp, and, um, your football days are completely over. So I, I was brokenhearted, not just brokenfooted. You know, I broke my— several places I broke my foot. I had to have it operated on a couple of times. I think it was a 10-hour, a couple of 10-hour surgeries. Wow. So, takeaway number 1, take ownership. I opened the book Stepping Up with a quote from Robert Frost who said, 2 roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled and that has made all the difference. I want you to think about that. The road less traveled. What is that? Well, instead of the blame game and instead of feeling like a complete idiot, complete, oh my gosh, how could I be so stupid? How could I ruin my football career? How could I ruin my family's vacation? We were scheduled to go on vacation later that day and I ended up in the hospital for a week. So, I mean, I really could have felt that way and I could have listened to the doctor and believed the doctor and accepted the fact that this expert Is telling me, wow, game over. I didn't. I took the road less traveled. And so what, what does that translate into? I took ownership. I said, John, this is your foot. This is your responsibility. This is your life. What are you going to do, play victim or play like a champion? What does that look like? So I chose to take ownership. And the next takeaway, the second takeaway is take notes. What do I mean by take notes? It means open up your mind and learn. Look around, take note of things, take note of other people doing what it is you want to do successfully. How are they doing it? What are they thinking? What's their mindset look like? How have they prepared themselves? So I took note. In fact, I read a book, and the book was about courage. So take note of courage, and what does that look like? And I've spoken about this before, but I learned— I read a chapter about Rocky Bleier, who had ruined his foot, so to speak, in Vietnam, but came back and won 4 Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers as a starting running back. faster than he was before. And it was mindset. And I took note in the hospital of that story. Okay? And this was a gift my grandfather gave me. He gave me the book. So I stopped and think about that. If I hadn't gotten the book and I hadn't read about Rocky Bleier, what would I have done? All right. I'll tell you what, I didn't feel sorry for myself. If anything, I was angry with myself. But I took note. So stop and think about this now. You've got a setback, you've got something going on in your life. Take ownership, own it, take responsibility, and take note. What can you learn from it? What can you learn from others who've dealt with something similar? And this leads us to the 3rd takeaway in the book, which is take a good look in the mirror. Take ownership, take notes, And take a good look in the mirror. What does that mean? It means really search inside yourself, not just physically. And yes, look at yourself physically in the mirror because your face can tell a story. Is your face like lined with scowl type of look? What does your face look like? How do you face the world? Okay, what's your body language look like? Do you walk like a champion? Do you look like a champion? And I'm not talking about bodybuilding and things like that, but you look like you've got spirit, you've got charisma, you've got an attitude of joy, you've got a positive can-do attitude. Look in the mirror and remind yourself that you have enormous potential, enormous potential. Tap it. It's yours for tapping. Seize it. So I'm looking now in the mirror, so to speak, at my situation. And this leads us to the next takeaway: take measure. Take measure. What do you— what have you got right now? Take inventory. What skills do you have? that you can leverage? What about that mindset? Okay, take measure of your attitude, your mindset. Okay, are you upbeat? Are you creative? Are you going to find a way? Are you going to find a solution, a win-win solution to whatever your setback is? Or are you going to coward and just disappear and, and, and end up the rest of your life in a very negative state? I've spoken a lot about energy and David Hawkins' The Map of Consciousness. If you stay down in those low-frequency energies of shame and guilt and grief and, oh man, how could I be so stupid? Okay, you're just asking for more of that. Like energy attracts like energy. Misery loves company. You're going to end up with miserable people commiserating about, oh, the good old days, you know, the glory days back when you were, you know, You know, a kid or whatever it might be when the real glory days are still in front of you. Okay, that's the mind of a champion. You know what, I just keep getting better and better and better at whatever it is I'm doing. Why? Because I take ownership. Okay, I take measure, I take note, and I take a good look in the mirror. I'm very honest with myself, very authentic, very genuine. The real deal. Okay, and I own that. And I own that I have tremendous potential that I can use to benefit the world in some way. All right, so we take measure. We take time. What do I mean by take time? Well, sometimes it takes time to heal. Certainly took time for me to heal. I had to— I had to Let my body recover. Let my foot recover. You know, I'm walking around, I got wires coming out of my toe and a cast up to my knee, and that takes a while to heal. But not just the foot, but the mind. Okay, take some time to just step back, reflect, learn. Again, take note. These takeaways all essentially are integrated. Right? They're all important. So if I'm going to step up, I've got to take time to prepare and to practice. Okay, so what could I do to accelerate my healing? And here's the deal. Because I was elected captain prior to the football season, and we just won the state championship the prior year in Michigan, and I was elected a captain of the upcoming team and season. And this accident happened just about 6 weeks before the season started. So it was game over, sadly. But I'll tell you what, I took ownership, I took measure, took a good look in the mirror, took time, took notes, and I suited up for every game. I went to every practice, and I did what I could from the sidelines to to coach, to help coach, to help my teammates. During every game, I would suit up, and I had basically a club shoe on my foot. I'd go out there onto the field, and I'd lead the team in calisthenics. In fact, when I was originally putting this episode together, I was thinking about calling it Calisthenics in a Cast. Not sure anybody would know exactly what that means, but I'm out there on the field in a cast, leading my team and in calisthenics. And now I could have just said game over, season over, just, you know, go, I don't know, watch TV, go do something, you feel sorry for yourself. No, I took the road less traveled. And that's the whole message of this podcast today is think very carefully about the choices you make and the path you choose to take because every choice has consequence. It's karmic law. Every choice we make has consequence. Every cause has an effect, and every effect has a cause. Cause and effect, karmic law. So what am I going to choose? And the consequences follow. So if I choose to play like a champion, and I'm not going to give up, and I'm going to challenge assumptions, because long story short, this world-renowned orthopedic surgeon involved early on in the invention of artificial joints. This— he was remarkable. Well, I just happened to be in the same city with and get to operate on my foot a couple of times. And he was convinced, you know, John, your football days are over. I'm sorry. You know, we do the best we can. But that was an assumption. It wasn't a fact. So when I say take measure, get the facts, check your assumptions, challenge your assumptions, and not just yours, but the assumptions of anyone else. Because clearly, the surgeon, with all due respect, was stating an assumption because 2 years later, I was actually playing football again as a walk-on. Ironically, I could barely walk, but I walked on the Notre Dame football team and made it and, uh, lettered in 2 years. Now, how did I do that? It started with mindset. Okay, when the mind heals, uh, the body heals. It's got to start with mindset. So you've got to visualize yourself, uh, healing, your body repairing itself, your mind learning. and growing wiser from whatever experiences we have. So we've got to take measure and we've got to take time. And another one of the takeaways now is take advice. Take advice. And what do I mean by that? This goes back to assumptions. We have to challenge assumptions because a lot of people who mean well, parents who mean well, siblings, friends, advisors, Teachers mean well, but they don't always give you the best advice. They just—they don't know any better. It's not like it's malintent. It's just that they—they're giving you advice that isn't the wisest in some cases. So we want to be very careful who we pay attention to. I like to say, pay attention to who you pay attention to, and be aware that you know a lot of people. Could be giving you very negative, damaging advice. So take advice. Who can you take advice from? Guess what? People you don't even know in person. That's why I love Fuel, and I love these. I love these podcasts. I love the courses that Fuel offers. I love the fact that we now have AI twins. John AI can answer. Um, all kinds of questions you have and role-play with you about scenarios, um, 24/7 in multiple languages. I was recently testing my John AI in German and in Japanese, and, um, it's more— it's absolutely remarkable. So you can get advice from some of the wisest, most intelligent people on the planet, people who aren't even on the planet anymore. And a critical success factor in my career has been learning from the very best, reading the books, listening to the podcasts, listening to the interviews, going to the conferences, learning like a sponge everything I could. And I did the same thing back when I was in that hospital, learning from Rocky Blyer, a true champion. And in fact, coincidentally, we both ended up He played for Notre Dame before he went to the Steelers, and I played for Notre Dame after my foot accident. And so we both tapped that infamous sign on the wall on the way to the field, play like a champion today. So play like a champion, not like a victim. All right, so we've got to take advice and really surround ourselves with, with brilliance, with people who are doing what we want to do. You know, and and then we have to take a chance. So the next takeaway is take a chance. Okay, essentially take a risk, take a chance, step up. So I I did that. I I got a special shoe. Essentially, it was like a kicker's shoe with a great big square toe. And when I got my cast off, I. I could put this shoe on. It was extra large. Put this shoe on. I looked like Quasimodo maybe for a while, but I'd get out there and I would work at it. I would walk, then I would limp and jog a little bit. And here's the punchline. Even though I wasn't supposed to, the final game of the year, the coaches Let me start the game, and just to just to get out there and take a few snaps. The risk was great, but I did. We got out there, and and guess what? I managed to play the entire game. We won 26 to nothing, and I I left my what I thought was my football career as a champion, so to speak. That Took a risk. There was one play where I—it was actually—they gave me a chance to run the ball, if you can believe that. You know, normally it was just hand off the ball and you know drop back and throw throw a few passes, things like that. But this was an end around sweep. But I came limping along full speed as fast as I could, and I don't know how many yards I gained. I gained some, but it was—I ended up getting tackled right in front of our our sideline, and the coaches were right there. They're going, "Are you okay? Okay." It's like, "Yeah, I'll be all right." Get me back out there. And, but that's the mind, if you will, of what I consider a true champion. Heart and soul and willing to take a chance, willing to really go all out. And you know what? We all make mistakes. I've made countless mistakes over the years. But when you go all in and you just put your mind to whatever it is that you're all in about, could be a relationship, could be a job, a career, it could be a hobby that you just absolutely love. I'm going all in. It's absolutely amazing what we can do as human beings, spirited human beings. I always like to say that we're not a human being with occasional spiritual experiences. It's just the opposite. We are spiritual, fearless beings in human form temporarily. So that's a big difference. Am I a human with a limited lifespan and that's it? And I have occasionally a spiritual moment, or am I spirit? Fearless. In spirit is inspirational, fearless. If I'm truly spirit, I'm energy. I'm a form of energy and light. If that's me, true me, capital S Self, wow, imagine. What we can do. Imagine what we could do. And even the greatest physicists, you know, the Einsteins and Teslas, Nikola Tesla, speak in terms of, if you want to understand the secrets of the universe, this is a quote from Tesla, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. That's energy, frequency, and vibration. So we're vibrational beings. 50 trillion cells. All somehow getting along inside each cell, molecules inside molecules, atoms inside atoms, photons. Essentially, we're 99% space, even though it's— it doesn't seem that way. So when you really start to look in the mirror, one of the takeaways, and you really start to take measure, and you really start to challenge conventional thinking that I'm not just a body I'm much, I'm much more than that. This is mind over matter. This is, this is miraculous. These are the miracles that are happening every day. The fact that we even have a body is a miracle. Right? So next is take action. So we have to take a chance, take a risk. But at the end of the day, we got to get in the game. We got to take action. We got to do something. So this is about execution. I've given it a lot of thought. You know, I've weighed my options. I've evaluated the risks. And now it's time to step up. Now it's time. It's game time. It's time to step up and go all out. Do whatever it is we can to go for it. The next takeaway then is what I call take another look. The 9th takeaway, take another look. What does that mean? Well, in the military, there's a tool, and I use this in Kaizen events, change events with clients called AAR, after-action review. AAR. In sports, this would be like game films. All right? So following the game, we're going to watch game films and we're going to learn from our performance. A typical AAR is, what did I plan to do? What did I actually do? What worked and didn't work, and what can I learn from it? What adjustments can I make next time? So we're constantly reviewing our performance. You know, I rewatch these podcasts. I, you know, before this year, I was a guest on all kinds of podcasts and TV interviews, things like that, but I never hosted one. I didn't know what I was doing. So I want to learn. So I watch other podcasts. I take a look. Okay? And I apply these stepping up takeaways every day of my life. Every single day, I think about what can I do to improve my performance? What can I do to step up and learn and grow and help more people around the world? So, taking another look is reflecting, reflecting on things. And I would do that. I continue to do that all the time. What can I learn from this experience? It's contemplation. I speak a lot about contemplation as a complement to meditation. And meditation is an opportunity to pause, to get still, to go inward and reflect. And really, so this is an inward look in the mirror, if you will. All right, so what's really going on in my heart? What's really going on in my soul? And this is where passion comes from. If you're truly passionate about something, you're all in. Whether it's a relationship, it's a career, it's a job, you're all in and you really connect your heart with your mission. It's amazing what you can do. It's just absolutely amazing what you can do. So, and I did this with my career 38 years ago when I started my company. It's like, I'm all in. I'm gonna take a look in the mirror and find out where I need help, where I need to learn and grow. gain credibility. And that led me into writing books, giving seminars locally, and then later around the world, and just continuing to grow and evolve. And I don't see any end to it. I'm going to continue to do what I do because my heart is into it, my soul is into it. And if you're watching this podcast, I ask you simply one thing: subscribe, if you haven't already, to Fearless. And share it. Comment, share it. I read all the comments and I'm here to help. That's my mission, if you will, my purpose, and my heart's truly into it. And this leads us to the 10th takeaway, which is take a knee. What do I mean by take a knee? Try humility. Try being humble. You don't need to broadcast all your successes and things like that. Give thanks at the end of the day. Give thanks at the beginning of the day. Take a knee. Now, take a knee can mean all kinds of things, right? You could take a knee to propose for marriage. You could take a knee if you're being knighted in the UK by the Queen or the King, you know, take a knee. In sports, in football and whatnot, we used to say take a knee. That meant the coach had something really important to tell us. So take a knee and listen, listen up. All right, we take a knee in church or you know, in certain celebrations, we give thanks. Take a knee in this context means remain humble, remain open, remain thankful and appreciative for the gifts that you do have. So I took a knee following this incident with my foot with my team. We'd take a knee. And as a leader, I felt compelled to do everything I could to lead. I didn't have to run fast at this point. I didn't even have to be physically out in the game. But I could lead with influence. I could lead with character. I could lead with integrity. The real deal. All right. So Murphy's out here. I could be embarrassed. I mean, who's Quasimodo out there, you know, clunking around? Nope. I put my heart and my soul into it. And to this day, I am so deeply grateful because the lessons I learned from that experience, that injury, I could have said that foolishness, can't undo it. Can't undo all kinds of things that we've all experienced in life. But what we can do is dust ourselves off, learn from it, do that after-action review, You know, take a good look in the mirror. Take note. All right? Take responsibility. Take ownership. Take time. All right? Take advice. These takeaways. So I encourage you to reflect on this episode. Share it if you find it helpful. It's been immensely helpful throughout my life. And guess what? I still do calisthenics, so to speak, every day. Reflecting on just how important it is to take care of the body, take care of the vehicle that you are driving through life with. All right? And when things happen and you hurt yourself, take time and take the mindset of a champion to respond. And however that response way happens to be, with character, with integrity, with humility. With love and compassion for yourself as well as anyone else. Forgive yourself. That's huge. I had to learn to forgive myself and stop beating myself up. And forgiveness is freedom. When you forgive somebody and you forgive yourself, you feel free. So how do you know that you are actually forgiving anyone or anything? You no longer even think about it. It's over. You— it's gone. It's forgiven. So, forgive yourself. So, that is essentially our episode for today, Stepping Up: 10 Takeaways for Advancing Not Just Your Career but Your Life. And try it. Try it. It's absolutely freeing, if you will. Next week, I've got the legendary Gerhard Selling Power coming on. And so, we'll We'll be hosting him and then Brian Byrill would be back the following week. I've also got Chip Bell. He's got an amazing story going back to Vietnam that he will share on an episode in August. We got August starting tomorrow, actually. So, and again, this is our 26th episode. We've got now 100, over 100 videos on Fearless, clips and such. Encourage you to go back and, uh, and watch those. I also strongly advise and invite you to check out myfuel.io. myfuel.io, one of the fastest growing e-learning platforms. I have 3 courses out on Fuel: Beyond Doubt, 4 Steps to Inner Peace, which was a huge tool I use every day in my life, the 4 steps to inner peace, Creative Problem Solving. We've all got problems to solve. The Creative Problem Solving class is ideal for helping really get outside the box and get out of our own way. And then I've got a course called Leading with Wisdom. I've also got my AI twin, John AI. You can chat with me, ask me all kinds of questions 24/7. It's a phenomenal use of AI, I will say that. In fact, I have conversations with myself a lot just to test it. And it's got perfect recall. It's downloaded with 40 years, if you will, of my work, hundreds of articles and videos and such, interviews. It's pretty remarkable. So check that out. That's it for Fearless for today. I hope you got a lot out of this. Those 10 takeaways are just essential. And if you hear the word stepping up, It's time to step up. I'll see you next week.
