Harvie Harrington - Pro Football / Motivational Speaker

This is episode 120 of the Empowered Team podcast. Today on the Empowered Team Podcast, your host, Kari Schneider welcomes none other than Harvey Harrington to the show. Now, Harvey made a name for himself on the gridiron. He played football throughout his life, going through NFL camps, playing in arena football, playing overseas in Europe, a journeyman in the sport, and continued on coaching at all levels. Harry Harvey's been involved in the sport throughout his entire life and is passionate about it, but what he's more passionate about is inspiring people. He is a motivational speaker, he has a book, and he is just a force to be reckoned with if you want to get on with your life and take it to the next level. You know, Harvey teaches his athletes. Go all in in your sport to find out who you truly are. It's something he teaches and helps people find out who they are and their purpose. And what a perfect fit to chat with Kari as she's into the same thing, motivating you and everyone out there to be in their lives. So sit back, crank it up, and enjoy this interview with Harvey Harrington. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport, and life. And now your host, vitality and peak performance coach Kari Schneider.

Hello, and welcome to the Empowered Team podcast. I am so, so excited to be here with Harvey Harrington. Harvey's got this amazing background in the NFL and arena ball and being a gym owner, so I can really relate to that. And now you are an author, a public speaker, you've been a mentor and a coach, and you really are inspiring a lot of youth, but inspiring a whole bunch of people right now. So, Harvey, welcome. Thank you for being with us, and great to have you here.

Kerry, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me to speak on your show. Greatly appreciate it.

No problem, no problem. So if we. I always like to do this at the beginning just to kind of backtrack, because I think this is especially pertinent for you. You started going into football because you had an idea in your head. You had an idea that this would be something for you. And really without that idea, there was no reason for you to have pursued that?

No, not at all. Because I am the only athlete in my bloodline, and I say my bloodline, I mean, beyond my mom and my dad, I guess I can say my cousin played a little bit, you know, in high school. But no, it was a seed. It was a dream to play high school football.

Do you think it came from that? Like, literally an idea you had at a really young age. And it just kept spurring you on.

Oh, absolutely. After processing it for all the years, wondering, how did I make it? How did I get all the way to get. To get. I played professional football until I was 32. So how did that all happen? And it all comes from a seed that was planted by my mom. I want my dad. Mom and dad were divorced. Typical world story now. And I didn't have him in my life, but my mom used to share the story about my dad. Dad all the time. This great high school football player, this amazing dude. So I didn't have him, didn't know him, didn't see him. He. We even lived in the same town, but there's no connection. So as this little kid wanted to be like his dad, and only great thing he knew about his dad was he was a high school football player. So from a little bitty kid, that's what I wanted to be. And that's. It was. It was my dream, it was my goal. It was. It was my driving force throughout my life. And I only wanted to play high school. I had no idea about college or professional. So it was a little seed.

That was the idea. It was. But then once you get to that point, you learn that there's something beyond that, and it just keeps going. It's funny, in a way, we have that in common in that I wanted. I was with my dad, but my parents were divorced. But I got to see my dad every couple weeks. And that man watched every sport that I could. I'm talking like. I'm talking flyweight boxing to golf, to every bowl game that existed. And I saw it all. And so I thought that that would be, you know, an amazing thing, because somewhere in there, you figure that that's the route to maybe acceptance from that person or who knows what sort of. What. What did it lead for to you. Did your dad actually ever come and see you play a high school game or.

No, because we moved away. He didn't. When I was. When I was playing professionally and we started to build a relationship, I flew him out to watch me play a couple of times when I was out in New Jersey. So that's when he got to see me play. And interesting story. He. We're driving. I don't remember where we were driving, but he looked over and said, how did you. How did this. You know, just like, how. And I shared the story with them. And here's the crazy thing about it all. This is how important it is to have a dream after sharing the story with him, he says to me, I was never a good football player. And the story that my mom kept telling, that I heard, he's like, I remember the game. I remember her coming up and all of this. But he was like, I wasn't good, man. He's like. So in my mind, I'm sitting there thinking, oh, dear, you know, look at how powerful that is, how powerful the dream is, when I'm thinking, this dude was the stud and he tells me he was a dude. So, yeah, no, he. He got to see me playing. I'm, you know, pretty proud of me, of the accomplishments and things like that. But for me, that just gives you even more strength to know that you really did this on your own, doesn't it?

So anchor just how powerful. Like, nothing is really real unless our mind believes that it's real. And that's what creates whatever is going to come. Because it happens here first. It doesn't. Other than in your own mind.

Absolutely. No, it's. It just, it just shows the power of. My keynote is the power of a Dream. That is the title of my keynote. There's. For me, there was. There, of course, there's many things that comes along with it, but there's nothing more important than your dream.

Yeah.

And to buy in all the way, no matter what anybody says. And that's what happened to me.

See. Now, did you ever have this feeling like you had to prove something and that you were almost compelled to keep going forward? The reason I ask this is because there's a lot of kids now, and I think, especially in this pandemic, who don't feel as motivated, inspired, or don't have a seed of a dream. And there's a lot of things that might be maybe easier for them in their lives. So what, What's. What do you think in terms of, you know, for those kids who don't necessarily have something that is driving them? Because for you, it was your dad, it was this dream of, you know, well, if he was this, then maybe I meant to. Or maybe I'm. Maybe I'm going to be that, too, or. I don't know exactly what your version was, unfortunately.

Here's the bad, sad part of this with kids today and yesterday, and that's why I speak. I didn't, I didn't want to be a speaker. I was. I was thrusted into it. And I, I, It's. I believe it's a religious thing that kind of happened to me, so I won't talk about that on here, but I was thrusted into it. I was living the perfect life where my wife and I were raising our children. We had our kids in private school. I was the fitness guru of our little community. I was the coach Harrington just doing the thing, you know, and, and then that just drive to go out and do this because I realized through years of coaching that I'll give you this example. So me, my two siblings, my brother and my sister, I'm the oldest, I go all the way through graduate, high school, community college, college, professional marriage, business, all of that great life. My siblings didn't have that. My brother just got out of prison after 29 years. My sister's been in and out of jail most of her life and she's better now because she's aged. But if kids have to, there's very few people that are blessed to know what they want. Very few. And those that are have to be careful because people try and tear it away from them. But at the more and more I do this, I begin to really realize that so many of us kids, adults, more mature people, they still don't know you. People have to be told the power of their dreams and their wants. And they got to be told what's coming, what can stop them, what, what can keep them, you know. Les Brown is speaker tonight. Listen to all the time. One of the things he. I remember him saying, you pass by a graveyard and look at all those dead dreams, you know?

Yeah.

All those dead dreams that no one ever went along and and, and, and grew those dreams, give them sunshine and water and, and, and talk to him and grew them. So that's the bad part about the world that we live in all the time. It's not just today that a lot of dreams are killed before they ever get growing, before there's ever a root that comes out of that dream.

So what do you think is the difference between you and your brother and you and your sister? Why? I know, I know it has to do. I think I know that it has to do with your dream. But personal missing or what was present or what was.

Personally, we all have had different dads. My brother had his dad in his life. My brother was very spoiled. I. We're going, going off track on here, but I'll share the story with you. I took the brunt of our life, so that's all I had. Being poor, being the oldest child, that's all I had. I had nothing else. My brother had other options. My sister, as the baby of the family had other opt. So they just didn't All I had was that little bitty dream that, you know, if you ever heard my whole story, that'll explain to you. I had to go back and process my life of being physically abused in and out of different homes. Just all the little things that I went through that could have thrown me off the cliff of life, and it didn't just because of that one thing. And then when I got a hold of that one thing and then I just. I fell in love with that one thing, and I let it consume me. See, a lot of people don't get those things. You. You got to let it consume you. You got to let it get rid of things. I remember when I started, oh, six. So my sophomore year, football was over. I wasn't a wrestler or anything else in my. I met my best friend, and he was like, dude, come out for wrestling. So I went out for wrestling because I knew it, making me a better football player. Wrestling's over, dude, come out for track. I went out for track because I wanted to get faster to be a better football player. I had no idea that that dream was doing all of that. Now kids can have a formula, a book that people write stories, YouTube videos that you hear that there was no formula for me. That's how I know how powerful it was. My formula was my dreams to play high school football freshman year was out there in front of me, and that's all I worked towards. That's what I got up for every day. That's what I went to sleep thinking about every night. And when I got there, it just consumed me. It consumed me to get a high school diploma. I'm the only one in my family to have a high school diploma. It consumed me to get an associate's degree. Why I didn't go to college to get an education. I went to college to play football. Education. I got my education, my degrees, because I refused to let that get in the way of me playing football. So I was a C student all the way through because I was not going to allow football to be taken away from me. And then you get a letter. Oh, you can get scholarships. Oh, so I can work a little harder. Then you get your first NFL letter as a junior. Wait a minute. Bing, bing, bang. And. And, and you have to go back and process that. Then you're with the Indianapolis Colts and you have a career ending injury. Your back is almost broken. You can't walk for three weeks. You think your life is over, and you get up and, well, I don't know. I laid on the ground for three weeks. Then I start doing things. I walk back into the gym and that smells. Oh, you're not going to get a shot at the NFL. You got lucky. You got one shot. Well, I'll play arena football. You mentioned that. Three years, arena football, I get another shot in the NFL. It's just. It just kept going. And I didn't think about it. I just kept following it. That's all I had. You know, it's. It trained me. It saved my life in so many ways. My wife and my kids are all over this cabin. All of our kids. My kids have the same last name. They got one dad, one father. I'm married to one woman for. From then till for death do me, do us part. And that was all due to football because I didn't get that from my upbringing. So again, when you process that, you. I have to share this story. And I always tell people it's not about me. My life is good. You know, I'm. My life is great. But you had cancer. It does matter, you know, you've had. I had histoplasmosis 12 years ago where one of my lungs shut down. So I'm one of those people that cannot get Covid. I don't care. My life is good. All due to that little seed. So I go and tell kids this, or even adults this, because a lot of people don't. They just don't know, you know, it's you.

You. You sound like the. The epitome of a real, true, authentic example of life, of the view that life is happening for you, not to you. And the real understanding that, you know, if you. If somebody. If you take abusive situations and you take just being shuffled around. I was shuffled around from family to family and, you know, lived with aunt and uncle, lived with mom, dad.

Wow, you and I got a lot of commonalities.

But what comes from this, for myself, anyway? What comes from it is that I didn't know what a functional family scenario looked like. And so when I was trying to create my family and create my business and create my life, I'm setting it to a standard that I'm creating in my mind instead of. And I'm completely rejecting the things that I experienced and saw, except for maybe the few seeds of someone nurturing you or caring for you, you really remember the people who are caring to you. And other than those, you know, you go and reject it all in your head and you decide, I'm going to try and create what I think it's supposed to be like. And it Almost seems like for so many other people, if their life was pretty good or mediocre or average, then it's almost like they embrace that and they carry average forward in the same or less or some form of average. And it's. I call it the walking dead, personally. But my point here is that, is that you've been dealt a hand of cards and you have a whole bunch of cards in there that would be real losing cards, per se. And yet the analogy of if someone said, would you like someone else's deck of cards? It's the answer of an automatic no. No. Because whether it's an abusive situation, whether it's not having your father, whether it's cancer, whether it's, you know, going off of a team or being cut or an awful career ending injury, you've discovered the incredible gift and skill of learning from those scenarios and learning the gifts that they brought to you and the other steps and avenues and doors that they opened that would never have been there had that thing not happened.

Right.

That not sparked the fire, or had that not had you seek something else. And, you know, it's this pursuit I think of. I don't believe that you can teach desire. I believe that you can inspire. I really, I intend to inspire. I think you are incredibly inspirational. But then at the same time there's something that, you know, you can show people some things, but there's got to be something that sparks within themselves, keep them going, otherwise they're going to be dragged or led. And what you've described is, I think in a way, by sharing your story or giving people examples or showing what you've gone through, or perhaps some of your teachings as well. It's the kind of thing that then someone at least has a glimmer of what to look for instead of maybe some of the examples that are around them day in and day out. What do you look for? You mentioned Les Brown like he came from next to nothing and is incredibly inspirational and so connected and so, you know, wise at the same time. He's had his own health problems as well on giving. Because that, that's one of those secrets to your best life, just continuing to give forward.

Yep. Always give more than expected of you. I mean, he's in my head. I'm an old school, I've studied. People say, well, who's your dad? I say, well, my dad's name is Zig Ziglar. You don't know him, he's passed away. Les Brown's my dad. Guy by the name of Jody Victor Is my dad guys on I'm dating? Yeah. You know, just those people that exist up here that I've studied and researched and learned from. So, yeah, no, the, the whole goal is to you hit the nail on the head. All we can do is inspire people. All we can do is hopefully, that's my prayer every time, is that I just get the turn on the light, you know, in the world we live in. So in the fitness world, one of the biggest heartbreaking things I discovered, I, I kid you not. I opened my gym, our gym, my wife and I, and I thought I was going to be rich. I opened the doors and people flooded in. It was small town, 20, 25,000 people at the time. And I, because I ran the special. We opened up April 1, I ran the special and they all came in. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got this thing, you know, I'm still playing football at. When we opened the business and after the special ended, I probably lost 90% of them. And then the battle started, then the journey started. And then they come and I, they go. And then I remember one day thinking, 99 of the people that's coming in here are going to quit at some point in time. And it was depressing, heartbreaking. Now, never once thought about quitting. And then I had to go on another journey. And here's how I work now that I've studied, I've learned to look at. I call it plan, do, check and adjust now. But now I just, I just throw as much mud on the wall and whatever sticks works and I figure it out. But it started to stick. And I began to realize that it wasn't about the exercise. It was never about that, especially for my audience. I had my students, I had my athletes. But that's not where it's going to make my money. My money came from the adults, the moms, the dads of these athletes. I created an environment of happiness, success. I created an environment where people could come up, left from work and came to my place because they were going to feel better when they left. The first sign you see when you walked in was, how do you defeat a person that won't quit? And after they worked out, the last sign they saw when they leave, it says, you can't. So it's that environment. And, and when I figured that out, it exploded. They still quit. But here's the thing. They never felt like when they quit, they couldn't come back. That was the environment I accreted. They, they knew. When do most people quit? When they take A vacation, and then they come back and they don't go right back and they take too much time off and then they don't come back. So, you know, that's kind of how I've had to learn until I figured out, dude, you got, you got success patterns in here. You need to write them down and figure them out and stop making so many mistakes.

And it's those, I mean, it's those mistakes you learn from.

Yeah.

People want so badly to feel good that, you know, and see it all the time in the quick fixes and the, you know, the fast results and all that. I mean, people will buy a fast result, but they don't realize that the greatest feel good is true fulfillment. And that comes from the struggling journey. That comes from the, you know, you might want to keep. You might want to stop making those mistakes. But I'll bet those mistakes created so many scenarios of you overcoming something that felt so bloody good that you finally got through the struggle to triumph at the end. It's the hero's story, right? And that's where you feel the best. Whereas if you never had the mistake in the first place and it stayed, if we look at your scenario and you had the. All the people rushing through the doors and all those people stayed and it was just so easy, you probably would have been out of the business within, you know, maybe a year, maybe two years. Because it's not rewarding. There's no real challenge. The beauty and the feel good truly comes from the challenge. But most young people don't understand that yet. They don't understand how validating and rewarding and fulfilling it is to solve a problem or come through a challenging scenario or find their own autonomy or, you know, any of those scenarios. Even if, even if it's, Even if other people aren't looking or aren't caring or aren't paying attention, they can find what they need from themselves. They just don't know it when they're young. That's the thing, right? They don't know. And so valuable just to know what, you know, if it looks at. I think it's so valuable to know it about who you speak to in terms of a younger audience. But then at the same time, you have audiences that are corporate or in business or what have you. And it's the message that everybody needs to hear. They still need to know how to manage themselves in a way that they find fulfillment in their life versus the quick fix or the buffering behavior or the look for the next distraction because they can't stand being with themselves or can't stand in their own life. And that's. I think that's even more rampant in pandemic scenario because people can't get away from their homes or themselves or they don't have the regular distractions that used to have them feel a little bit better. And they don't know what it's like to step into themselves in a way that really feels good.

No, they don't. That's one of my. I just put together. I put together a. A workshop right when Covet hit. And I didn't do anything with it. I put the files and all that together and I didn't do anything with it. Then I just. When did I do this? I just. First week of January. Superintendent called me. He's heard me speak to his students. He's like, you got to talk to my teachers. He's like, I don't know what you're going to say to him, but you got. I need you to talk to my teacher. So I put together. I went in and revamped this workshop. And as I'm going through it, I'm thinking about all the things that we're dealing with, and we're. We're dealing with it with COVID Here's how the world's gonna look. People. When. When finally, whenever they get this figured out, there's going to be about three or four levels of people. There will be people that are flat out dead on their stomach, head down. There'll be people that are. That are crawling. There'll be walkers, and there'll be sprinters. And the sprinters are going to be successful. The people that. That figured out how to keep their mind focused and on the right things while they're down. You know, there. There's. There's people that are struggling, that are hurting that financially with all the death and pain. And. And so I put together this workshop that I'm. I'm gonna start doing one actually, when we get home from vacation for free. Because there's people that's got to be told. Yeah, to hold on, to hang on to. Here's some things that you need to be doing, things you need to be looking at for yourself so you're not face down on the ground when this is over. You know, Covid is hurting a lot of people in so many ways.

It's so powerful that you say that because you're in the U.S. are you in Iowa? Yep. And we're in Ontario. And I started looking around and realizing that for us, there's there was a major lockdown in the spring. And then in certain areas of the country, there's different lockdowns that have been occurring depending on what's happening with the number of cases. And Canada is so much more conservative than the US So depending on the cases, then everything starts to shut down. Well, personally, we just sold our gym and building right before the pandemic happened. It was coincidental, but I think about this. We have a family of seven, so five kids. And I think about this. If this had been five years ago, and, you know, at that time, I was the primary breadwinner, the gym was our source of income. And if that had happened at that time, I don't know what would have happened to us and our family. Like, I can't even. I can't even imagine the situation. And I just happened to be transitioning to online courses and other things right before the pandemic happened, and go, how are people going through this? And then I started to watch it. And as people didn't know when the end was coming, the depletion was just more and more prevalent. It was just people were just running down and running down and running down. And I started going, okay, I got to get something out there for people as soon as possible. Because as you say, you know, those teachers needed it. And then I started to see some of the leaders. So whether they were police, principals, teachers, business people, lawyers, essential workers, different people who were leaders within their work community or their overall community, parents, there's some level of leaders. They were the one holding everyone else up. And as deplete as they started to really get fatigued overall and not know when the end was coming, then it's like, okay, these leaders need a boost, because if they don't get one, they're the ones that have the ripple effect on the rest of the community.

Everything rises and falls with leadership, right? Exactly.

You know, more and more people dropping. And. And then what? And then what? Then we're dealing with something that is years in the making. And our young people are looking at how their parents handled everything, because that's their example. They're looking at what is their view of the world. Is it. Is it one that. That says, okay, I have to be dependent on whatever other people do or say around me? Am I dependent on them for my future? Am I dependent on them for my income? Am I dependent on them for whatever my next step looks like? So it's something that. It's the thing that you speak to that resonates with me so deeply. About true self leadership, the concept of in order to lead anyone else, you have to lead yourself first. In order to lead yourself first, there has to be that element of self mastery. In order to have that self mastery, you have to be willing to unpack some of the layers and truly understand yourself and where you came from and be able to love and embrace all of that without any of the, you know, I came from an upbringing that as a little kid, I have a journal. As a little, little kid, eight years old, I have been date on, it's in the 80s. I have a journal that I wrote I hate myself. I started I hate myself in that little journal. And the me now can look back at that and see it and just like know that it's not me anymore. But look at it with such utter sadness and compassion for that child because that child truly felt unimportant, unloved. And so what's to love? If those around them don't love, then what's to love? And ultimately everybody, whether it's been a harder upbringing like yourself, everybody has some version of that. Even if it's a lower, less traumatic, or even if it's a seemingly normal household, there's some version of lack of worth that will either, that they either have to grow through or will compromise their ability to lead themselves in the future. And until they understand themselves, it's the question of how do they actually lead themselves to then become leaders in their family, in their community, in their, in their city, in their town, whatever it is.

You have no idea how deeply you, you just touch my soul too. I, I guess there's always things that we don't share. That's who I speak to from stage. So when I'm, When I'm in front of hundreds of kids and before I go on and I pray or I go through whatever my, my pregame warm up, you know, I'm looking for me in the crowd because if I journal the way you did, I'd probably go back and do a lot of crying reading what I would have read. I was broken as a kid and in so many ways. And I think, and I think about this too, a lot of kids don't know that they're broken. A lot. A lot of people in this world just continue to, to. I call it the circle of their life from their environment. They just continue to live in the circle. Here was a big difference for me. I knew I didn't belong in that circle. So with that dream and the fact that I always said I was a black sheep of the family I knew I didn't belong. And when you feel that way, you feel like an outcast and things don't feel right. You just hit, hit a chord with me there. I was in a bad place as a child. I was this happy little kid. I see my son all the time running around. He's. He's eight. And. Excuse me a second here. And it's my whole purpose is to not have him have that pain I went through. And he's got it. He's going to be okay. His life will be in a position where he, he'll be. When he reaches the right age, he'll be able to make his own decisions. Whatever he does, if he gets himself in trouble, that's on him. Nothing will have affected him negatively. And I go and I speak to these kids and I remember a little girl. Good gravy. All right. This is how I'll get past this. I think about pizza. So if I ordered a pizza, it's okay. The deep, deep dish pizza with pepperoni would get me right. Okay. So there's this little girl, I'm speaking from stage and she's bawling, bawling. And, and I couldn't, I just lost my whole train of thought with, with where I was on stage and I had to stop and I said, I can feel it. I looked at her and I said, I can feel it. I know. And I said, life is going to get better from you. You mentioned cards. I talk to kids about that all the time. We're all dealt a certain deck of cards, certain hand. You play your best with that hand until you can get your own cards, you know, but that is my. It ain't about sports. I wrote this book 8020 rule because that was the easiest book for me. I actually wrote a book before that and it's still in my computer that I haven't put out. But I wrote this book first because it was the easiest for me to go back through my life and pull out some things. But there's a book in me that I have not taken out yet. That's for that kid. For you, that little girl that says she hate herself because people may have told her some stupid things that they should have never said to her, you know, and, and that's what we've got to inspire. And we can, we can mold kids so much better than we can old hard hit mold hard headed adults. I still want to attack that. But you know, it's the kids that we can get them while there's not too Many things on their whiteboard of their life before it's full of junk. But I. You got me with that one.

They just need one. One person to really believe in them. Think that one person believes in them. That's all. That's all that matters. No matter how many other people are crapping on them, they just need that one person.

Even if it's some guy that they've never met before standing on stage that'll spend as much time as he can all stage with them. That, that story was amazing with that little girl, but even more happened afterwards. But that's my whole purpose in life, you know, it's.

Can you share?

Well, yeah, we were. I was leaving because I had to get. I had to go to another school. So normally I hang around and I'm going down the hallway and this little girl and the teacher, she was in junior high, so seventh or eighth grade. And they're running at the. And I'm. I'm almost at the door and you could just feel it. And they're running at me. And she said she just wants to say hi. And I, you know, you have to be careful. You can't hug me. But I, I just gave her the biggest. I'm a big man. I just gave her the biggest hug. And I'd say, God loves you. You're beautifully and wonderfully made. And no matter how hard it. Something's hard, I, you know, I don't. I'm not a counselor, so I don't dig into people's stories, but I said, you're going to make it through this. And, you know, just. I've never heard from her. And this school's not too far from where I live, but I never heard from her since. But I know there was work done there, you know, and there's. There's many stories. There's many. I don't share them. I'm not one of those people that share. There's. I can't say that. There's. Very rarely I have. I've gone somewhere and I've spoken to a group of students or adults and haven't received. Amazing. It's what fills my tank. Because just like you, like you. You and I know this is not easy, what we do to. To give up my life of what I was doing. This has not been easy to reach people, to send out thousands and thousands of emails and, and, and pray that you get money.

I'll tell you that.

Right. So. But that's what refills your tank. Yeah. And that's what life Means you gotta. You gotta love something enough that it refills your tank. One of the things I teach kids, you' school to find a flipping job. Job stands for just over broke. Job stands for misery. I want to help you figure out your career, your purpose, your why, your reason. And if you can do that, you'll never work again in your life. I don't work. This ain't work. How could this possibly be work when I know somebody's going to hear this video, this recording someday? I know it could be 50 years from now. That's the amazing thing we got now. It'll be out there.

Yeah. This is your legacy.

Yeah.

You said something earlier about. The reason I remember it so clearly is because I felt this exact same thing. And so I'm just. I'm curious about what you think it was for you, but it's that, you know, when you were young, you. You felt like you. You weren't. You weren't in a place that you belonged. You weren't. Were different. There was something different. And I felt very much that way, too. It's just this something. It's something I knew that I didn't know where, I didn't know how, I didn't know. But. But. And there's no, I don't personally, for me, I don't have any explanation for it because I don't have someone who said something to me like, oh, you'll never stay here very long. No one said those words that I recall in any form. But I always remember that feeling. I would be, you know, I'd be going from one place to another, often traveling, and I'd be looking out the window as a kid as somebody was carting me to some other house where I was staying. I might have been staying at a friend's house for a month. I might have been staying at my grandparents for six weeks, going to four different grandparents from week after week in the summer. I might be going to, you know, the other country to live in the States with my aunt and uncle, you know, whatever it was. And there'd be long trips. And I remember I'd be looking at different houses and being really curious about the people who lived in that house, because that house looked like it must be. It must be a happy family or it must be a. Must be an incredible home. And it looks like they, you know, like, it's really nice there. And I would. I would just imagine and I would start to create in my mind and. And I had this feeling, which is what you described, which is that, like, I. This wasn't. This. This was temporary. This wasn't my place. I wasn't. I didn't belong here. And so I'm curious about what that was for you or where you think that came from.

You. You can't. You don't know. Like you said, there's no way, you know. And I don't want to take your show too long here, but I'll give you an example. So I was born in Mississippi. I was born in Natchez, Mississippi, less than a mile away from the port where they brought slaves in back in the 18, 1600s. And I lived there before we moved to the Chicago area. I lived there until the end of second grade, but I lived in the South. And it was divided. It just is. I'm sure it's less today than it was then, but it was divided. So growing up in a. Living in that time, because I didn't grow up there, living in that time in a black community, I heard things that I knew were wrong on both sides, black and white. But I was in. It was a black community. So I heard things that weren't. Weren't right. I said, that's not right. Why are we talking like that? And I. I saw things that weren't right, and then I heard the stories from the other side that I knew things weren't right. And it just never gelled. It didn't feel right. It didn't feel comfortable. It didn't feel like it was supposed to be, because it wasn't supposed to be that way. So I. I was. I. I was all. I called myself the black cheap. I just. I didn't talk with. I didn't speak the way. I didn't act the way they did. It was not me. I used to think that my deep into high school, I thought my mom would come to me one day and tell me I was adopted. I didn't fit. I thought she said, you're not really my child, especially being that I didn't know my dad. So I. For. For the longest time, I was like. And I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't have been hurt if she said, we adopted you, which I know they didn't. You know, that's how much I did not fit. I've never fit, to be honest. I've never fit. That's how I kept myself out of trouble growing up in Chicago. I knew I knew right from wrong when I shouldn't have. So it's just different.

Do you think that enabled you to create your path better than you would have otherwise more creative thing instead of a consumptive thing around those who you think you're supposed to belong to.

Yep, I lived in some sort of. This first time I've ever said this like this. But I lived in survival mode until I left my home. It was survival mode.

I understand.

That's what I was. I was in survival mode all, all through all of that. Just get not knowing something's holding me, something's keeping me accountable. I gotta go to practice, I gotta work out, I gotta get on this field. That's the, that's my only. There was not a parent, not a mentor that kept me accountable. It was that leather pig skin that I never touched because I was on defense, you know, but it was that and then the ability or the weirdness of being different. I always tell people, weird pays better. Whether it's financially, mentally, emotionally, socially, it pays better.

It's funny, you know, in high school I started reading a fitness magazine and I went and started lifting weights in grade 10. This tiny town, little gym, rec center kind of thing. First of all, nobody lifted weights. No females were lifting weights back then or barely any. None that I knew anyway. And it's just so. It's just these weird decisions and weird drives that no one else was doing. But it literally, those were some of the actions that were saving my life because I was either gonna head down to. And I was heavy drinking or, you know, but it was, it was deciding to go to the gym, deciding to play soccer in high school, deciding to do those things that ultimately ended up leading to so many things that happen in the future. And being able to work with national level athletes and Olympians and pro athletes. And it just, I still couldn't understand. By the time I was. I was working with the men's and women's national volleyball teams in Canada and these athletes were coming to me and I was their strength coach. And I thought that because they were national level that they were going to come in and they're going to be highly motivated, very disciplined, and they're going to have some level of foundation. This is the thing, you know where I'm going with this because you know what this. But that's what I thought. This is the top level in sport. So I'm like, they're gonna be disciplined, motivated, they've got the foundation. So I can just work on performance enhancement. Performance enhancement. And boy was I like. It was such a smack in the face. I was like, holy cow. So not only am I doing the hurdles of being a Small female strength coach in a, you know, male dominated scenario. But also I'm like, nobody's even close to the standard that I had set in my mind or where everybody's supposed to be. And. But it, it's that belief of. It's the belief of what people are capable of. And the thing that I've said so many different times is that you don't. And I said this to so many of these athletes too. You don't have to believe that. You can. You just have to believe that it's possible. If you can believe that it's possible, then why not have that be possible for you? Why can't it be you that can take that next step? And that's such a seed in the direction of what you're speaking to in that dream. Just being able to just nudge, just say, like, what if, what if, what if?

I'm smiling so much because you're hitting on so many wonderful points. I wrote about this guy in my book. The problem with a lot of people is they don't look at the secrets that are laying around them successfully. We just had a guy two days ago win a game that's going to his 10th Super Bowl.

Yep, 10.

Which is insane. Yes.

In the world. What's possible. And you change teams. So.

And we live in a world where. And what people want to do is, is criticize and find something wrong versus looking at all the things that are right. We will never witness this again in our lives. Tom Brady and then on with the rest of them have given us an unbelievable pattern as athletes to the secret of success. And on every aspect. I was just trying to share with some people online about. You guys don't get it. Tom Brady was like Mike Tyson. He won. He has won games before he ever walked on the field because of who he is. And people. People know who he is. Yeah, he's. He's beaten people. And then he. So he scores on Green Bay the first round and said, think about the psyche of that. That quarterback over there says, oh, my goodness. He's. He's on his game. And that's Tom Brady. Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback. He's got the greatest mindset. He's got. It's. And we choose to not look at that. We want to go find all of the negatives, you know, and just. That kills me when it comes to. That's. That's due to the age we're in right now. Well, it's a whole different subject.

No, no, it's a quick fix. That People are looking for because if it comes to a Tom Brady, they don't want to know all the things he's doing because that's not the answer that they're looking for. They don't want to know that he sleeps a certain amount, gets this much vitamin D, that he meditates, that he eats these types of food, that he shifted and shifted and shifted his nutrition to figure out, figure out his training plan, to find what his body needs more, his movement prep, his mobility. Like that's a different conversation that people don't want to have because they would rather say, oh, and obviously people know this about Tom Brady now, but see, an earlier Tom Brady, someone would rather say he's talented and just throw it into the talent bucket. And then when you realize that, okay, it's not just talent, it's not like a swimmer with long arms and having the leverage or something like that, a genetic thing, then they don't necessarily want to hear all of the things because they don't want to know what it really takes and have to be held to a standard like that. That's the thing that even just striving for a different standard, that's where you learn so much more about yourself and you grow so much more. And that's why the mindset that he has, like there's just been so much trial and error and failure and failing forward and failure and trying this and failure and trying that and trying this and trying that and trying that. And then your mindset's like, well, I'm not afraid of failure anymore. I'm not afraid of anything.

Nope. And that's him. He's. He's gonna have the greatest book ever when it comes out. I know he's got stuff out now, but he, if any, every athlete wants to hear and sound like I'm advertising for him, but it's just true, you know, it's that he figured some things out on the emotional, social, psychological, physical, Every level possible at 43 years of age. And the kid he's playing across the field from was 6 years old when he won his first Super Bowl.

Isn't that fantastic?

Explain that.

So well, those are the, I mean those are the real human performance measures domain. So speaking of books, what's the name of your book? So that people have a chance to read what you've put out there? Because it's so powerful in really serving young athletes and being able to speak to self leadership. What's your book?

It's called 8020 Rule Remove the friction from your life so you can perform at a higher level. It's all about the mental part of the game, nothing about the physical. I think I put a little bit of blurb in there about something, but I didn't put any workouts, anything like that in there because there's so much of that out there. You just got to go through the filter to figure out what's right. Like you said, tweak and move. But this is all about the mentality. Like I'll give you an example. I, I do the four personalities I put in there. This chapter one, chapter two in the book, I teach you about your personality. Why you do think, say, act, feel and even hear things the way you do. Because if you don't get that and you don't understand the other three personalities out there, it screws you up. If I this kid we've been talking about, that you and I talked about when we were younger, that kid couldn't have been a professional athlete. I don't care how big his dream was, he couldn't have made it in the world of a violin. My daughters look at footballers like, oh, it's just so violent. He couldn't have made it. My, my 8 year old son, if he chooses to play, he's a loving, caring human being. You can't play this sport that way. So he already knows about his personality and he knows about the other four. So I teach you about those because you got to know what yours is and you got to know when to use the other three. I was a shy, loving kid. I used to play football like patty cake. Until one day some guy taught me and it wasn't this. He just told me I wasn't tough enough, I wasn't hard enough, I didn't have the it factor and beat me up pretty bad about it. But that love, like he told me, it's like, dude, you'll finish high school but you won't go any further. I don't know if he was being mean, if he was trying to help me, but he didn't know the desire of that little dream. Because I remember walking off the field from him that day saying, you don't know me. You don't know I will be playing football next year. As much as you just told me, I suck mentally, I'm still going to be playing. But he taught me something. And then when I read about it, disc, I don't do the other profiles. It's. The disc is very simple. And I read Dr. Robert Rome's book.

And I'm like, oh, Makes sense now.

That's. That's what happened to me. I started using my D mentality versus my S because my S was getting his butt kicked. So I put that in there, and then I just go through other things. We talked about a failing. You can't be afraid to fail. There's, there's, there's. Tom Brady and Michael Jordan are the only two people you'll be able to say that learn from their successes. Most people learn from their failures. I mean, they learn from their failures to get there. Took Michael eight years to get his first ring, but they, they. You have to have those failures and go back and process them. I go through rules of leadership, and it's all about sports in this book. And, and there's very few stories in here. So this is a book that you, you go back to. You don't read it once. It doesn't work to read. Once you go back to it, you study a chapter, you apply it to your life, and you go back again and you check it and you learn. Yes. That's what this is. It's not a story. There are stories in there. Talk about Tom. I talk about Mike. I'm talking. Talk about the people that I watched, as you know. But I, I put information in there for that little boy when I started lifting weights in seventh grade, not having any idea and no one to tell me about sports. If I can get that book into that little boy's hand, perhaps he plays professional and he becomes. I didn't know I was gonna, like I said, go to the pros, but I know that little boy could have been better if he had read this book. That little girl can be better if she'd read this book. So that's what I wrote it for all the way through.

I love it. Well, I want to be respectful of your time and make sure that our listeners have the ability to reach out to you. Just a couple more questions here for you. Where can people reach you? You're on LinkedIn. What are some other platforms that you like to be on?

My Facebook platform, and that's. I'm aging myself here with it is Harvey's positive self Talk. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Instagram. I have Snap, but I only communicate with my girls on Snap. What others? Twitter.

Instagram. Just your name for Instagram?

Yeah. Harvey Harrington. They just have to make sure they spell it right. Harvey is H A R, B I E. Harrington is H E, R, R I N, G, T O N I. I do a little bit of Twitter I don't have an audience there, so I just don't. I, I might, I let my Instagram post in the Twitter for me most of the time. But a lot of my content is Harvey's positive self. Talk LinkedIn now. But I don't. That audience is probably not here. And Instagram. Yeah.

If you have one message that you want to share with young athletes, what do you think that would be?

Go all in on your sport. Because here's the cool thing about it. And I'll start with the hard part. You may not become a professional athlete. There's a very little chance that you will. But I'm not telling you that you can't. But what, what sports teaches you. This is the best opportunity you have and in junior high, high school and colleges to find out what type of young man or young woman you are. Sports teaches you who you are and how you're going to respond to the, to the real world. And this, it can train you. You can figure out. I tell a lot of my former athletes, I talk to a lot of my kids. This talking to one today about how hard we pushed you to work. Derek, this is who you're made of. This is what we did. This is what you did. So I know what you have inside of you. You know, when I get an athlete, former athlete calling because he's lost his business and he's. He's having some alcohol issues, I know what you're made of. Now I can, I'll be honest with you. If you weren't doing much in high school, that tells me why you are where you are. But we all have problems. But I know what's inside of you. And you know, it's what's inside of you. So the greatest thing about sports is I believe it teaches you what type of man or woman you're going to be, who you are and make as many mistakes as you can at this level because there's no consequences for these mistakes versus when you get out in the real world. So that's the biggest thing. Don't let anybody tell you you can't. I've never told an athlete you can't play pro. I told them that you've got to. You've got to do everything possible, and then you make the decision that you can or can't. Now, if they're not athletic enough, I'll be honest with them. But I want them to get there and fail.

Yeah.

And. But I'll be there beside them to say, okay, but look at what all you did on the way there. Look at the sacrifices you made. Look at what you were willing to do. Now go apply that to something else. If you still love this sport, go coach it.

Yeah.

You know, there's secrets to success in our everyday activity. It's in there. You just got to go back and look at it.

I love it. I love it. Wow. Harvey, it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for your insights. Thank you for your words of wisdom. I'm so grateful that we've been able to connect and have you on here. So thank you. And I can't wait for our listeners to be able to connect with you.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me, Carrie. I appreciate it.

No problem. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team podcast, you'll love being on the team. The Empowered Team runs year round. It is our group coaching and accountability program where we take mindset and physical performance concepts and break them down to usable action steps that optimize results. To join, email us@info powerconditioning.com with subject line team. That's info power powerconditioning.com we can't wait for you to be on the team.