Become A Powerful Leader In Your Life (Celebrating Black History Month) EP 1388

If.

You feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the greatness mindset, and I think you're going to love this. Through powerful stories, science back strategies, and step-by-step guidance, the greatness mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link in the description to get your copy today.

Stories is what moves the world, whether it's an inspirational story, it's an informational one, nothing that we have moves without story. And so I think that is the root of everything. And if we're gonna try to make the world a better place, story's the right place to start.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. The School of Greatness is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. As Amica says, Empathy is our best policy. That's why they'll go above and beyond to tailor your insurance coverage to best fit your needs. Whether you're on the road, at home, or traveling along life's journey, their friendly and knowledgeable representatives will work with you to ensure you have the right coverage in place. Amica will provide you with peace of mind. Go to Amica.com and get a quote today.

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It's probably the most important thing. You know, when you're in this culture in our society, you can do some phenomenal things individually. but they'll never reach their full potential unless you do them collectively. And you have to figure out how to do that. And, you know, Phil Jackson was great at that. Phil, you know, he wouldn't just coach the team or coach the game, but he'd read everything about every single player. He learned about your history, how you grew up, how you were raised, where were you raised, you know, he'll read every interview and he'll learn about you and gives him a better understanding of what's motivating you, or what your insecurities are, right? And then it just helps him communicate with you better or even push a button here if he needs to.

When did you learn that it was important to understand who your teammates are, what their likes or dislikes are? Was that in high school for you or more?

No, I learned it from Phil. There was a stretch. In '03, where Shaq was out with an injury, and Phil called me up to his office and said, okay, we need you to really turn on the afterburners and start scoring the ball if you have to win. So I did, and I wound up scoring, I think it was nine straight games with 40 plus points.

Nine straight.

Nine straight games. And then Shaq comes back second to last game of that. And then Phil calls me up to his office and says, Coach, okay, I need you to dial it back. I'm like, why? Like, we're winning. I don't understand. It's because our goal is to win a championship, and we can get through the Western Conference with you playing this way. But in the East, you know, we can dominate them inside with Shaq in the post. But if you continue to do this, we'll lose Shaq. We'll lose him.

His motivation, his excitement, what triggers him. Right? So.

I need you to pull back so we can pull Shaq forward for June. And I just looked at him like, this is one smart dude.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's one smart dude, man. So I pulled it back.

Wow. Yeah. What do you think has been the greatest challenge you've had since leaving the game?

The greatest challenge. I think it's, you know, I mean.

You won an Oscar, you're launching podcasts and shows, and you got a book coming out.

Yeah, but it's, it's, it's different, though. Like, you know, we were just talking about it here in the office the other day. You know, when you play the game, you hit a game winning shot, you miss a shot, the reaction's there. You can see how people responding to it, right? You can feel it. the energy is there. The energy is there. What I do now, you don't. Like, I don't see how people are affected by your basketball or, you know, creating the punies and you put it out there. Like, I wish I could see a car ride of a family the first time their daughter hears Lily's Lemonade and what she's doing, you know, she's singing along to it. That's not there, right? So that's the, the challenge. That's the one thing that I miss is being able to feed off of the energy.

The instant feedback that you get from shoot missing or scoring a shot, winning or losing a game. It's like either way, getting a result, right?

Yes, yes, yes. That's the one thing. And I went to, because I spent a lot of time with mentors as well. I've been Pixar and Disney Studios. They've been absolutely wonderful animation, Disney animation. And I talked to them about Frozen and Moana and how our kids love them. And they're always like, oh, that's awesome. And they want to hear it because.

They don't ever get a chance to truly see it.

Like, they're not sitting in a movie theater. Like, oh, no. And they don't have time to go.

To Disneyland and walk around the park.

And see how many families are enjoying the content that they've created because they're.

Busy making the next-- Creating.

Yes, yes. So that's the one thing.

What do you think the biggest challenge is for most athletes after they retire?

I think it's the fear of starting anew. And that was certainly present for me as well. Really?

Yeah, like identity, you mean, or-- well.

It'S starting from scratch, right? Because when you play for 20 years, I played for 20 years, you reach a certain level, you're like, okay, wait a minute, I have to start again at the base of a mountain. It's very scary. It's very scary.

Even for you.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And the thing that helped me actually was hurting my Achilles because that forced me to sit there and say, okay, the day could be today that your career is over.

At any time when you were playing, I mean, yeah.

Now what do you do? You have these ideas about doing something with your life after basketball. But what if today is the day that you, that's it. Now what do you do? So I had all this time sitting there with my Achilles injury and contemplating and thinking and I said, I better get to work.

Wow.

That was that.

What was the vision for you afterwards then? Was it to do what you're doing now or did you have other ideas? Or what is, what's the vision for you?

I struggled with it at first. 'Cause the first question I asked, which is the wrong question, is what's the biggest industry I can get into?

Was it more money thinking or money.

Thinking saying, okay, athletes are saying you can't make more revenue when you retire. This is your source of your income is here. Saying, okay, that's a challenge. What can I do? And I remember going, Didn't you launch a fund or something? I did.

I did.

And so I started, I went for a ride and I said, okay, stop thinking of it that way. You're thinking of it the wrong way. Why did you start playing basketball? Because I loved it. All right, what do you love to do? Well, I love to tell stories. All right, let's do that. And then that's where it started for me. And then on top of that, it became things like, you know, we started learning more about the financial industry and about players going broke once they retire and saying, okay, how can I minimize the chances of that happening? What are things that I can do to invest my money smartly? also helped control some of that outcome to a certain extent.

Right.

And that's when I called Mike Repole, who Mike Repole was an entrepreneur who built Vitamin Water, Pirates Booty and some other companies and started learning from him. And then from that came the opportunity to invest in BodyArmor.

Yeah.

And which, yeah, which we're getting now.

It's delicious.

But all that came from the injury and really having to self-assess and face that really dark room of what comes next.

Storytelling is something you're really passionate about. What's a story over your life that's been a constant theme that you go back to? Is there something you heard as a kid that really resonates with you? Or a book? Or a movie that just feels like, this is me.

Yeah, that's funny. Movies, there are plenty, but there's a quote from one of my English teachers at Lower Merion named Mr. Fisk. He had a great quote that said, rest at the end, not in the middle. And that's something I always live by. I'm not going to rest. I'm going to keep on pushing now. There are a lot of answers that I don't have, even questions that I don't have. But I'm just going to keep going. I'm just going to keep going and I'll figure these things out as we go, right? And you just continue to build that way. So I try to live by that all the time.

Rest at the end.

Rest at the end.

What's the question that eats you alive the most that you haven't answered yet?

The question that eats me alive that I haven't answered yet.

That you're still looking for the answer.

I'm still looking for the answer. How to tell a good story. I don't think anybody has that answer. You know, like when I sat down to write Dear Basketball, I was like, okay, what do I want to say? And you have certain acts in how you can structure certain things, the ebbs and flows of story, certain formulas that have been there since the beginning of time. But it's such an exact science.

So challenging, yeah.

Right?

And so that one question is really interesting.

Why do you want to tell a great story?

I think stories is what moves the world. whether it's an inspirational story, it's an informational one, nothing in this world moves without story. You know, being from the political world, sports world, nothing that we have moves without story. And so I think that is the root of everything. And if we're going to try to make the world a better place, story is the right place to start.

I agree.

Most people understand, like my last year, people were coming me and say, okay.

What are you gonna do?

I said, I'm gonna be a storyteller. Really? And they go, they're like, what are you talking about? All right, man. So. So what are you really gonna do?

Yeah.

Like, what's gonna happen when you retire is you're gonna go through, like, a week of depression. Yeah. Then the second week is gonna be, like, denial and also. Right. I'm like, dude, seriously, I'm good.

So after a while, I just got sick of it, and I just. Just said, I don't know.

I'll go play golf or something, right?

Just tell them a lie.

I'm not gonna do anything. I'll best real estate.

Yeah, whatever. I'm not gonna I'm just gonna sit around. What does losing feel like to you?

It's exciting.

Why is it exciting?

Because it means you have different ways to get better. There's certain things that you can figure out that you can take advantage of, right? Certain weaknesses that were exposed that you need to shore up, right? So it was exciting. I mean, it sucks to lose, right? But at the same time, their answer is there. If you just look at them.

Because you get the information from losing more than from winning probably.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the answers are there when you win too. You just have to look at them.

Yeah, right?

So it's a constant process. It's exciting when you win, it's exciting when you lose because the process should be exactly the same. Whether you win or you lose, as you go back and you look and you find things that you could have done better, you find things that you've done well that worked, figure out how did they work, why did they work, how can you make them work again? Yeah. And, but the hardest thing is to face that stuff. That's a really, really tough challenge. You mean face it, you mean look yourself in the mirror and say, okay.

This is how I showed up or this is what happened. I'll give you an example.

So Katie Lou Samuelson is one of the best college basketball players in the country. She plays at UConn. She's gonna be a senior.

Right now.

Right now.

Yeah.

And she's from Huntington Beach out here by us. And so she comes down and she works with some of my girls on the team and she helps coach. Yeah. And they just had a really tough season last year where they lost to Notre Dame in the final.

That's right.

Really tough. First loss in like- First loss. Years, right? Yeah. And so I asked her, I said, have you watched the Notre Dame game? She was like, no. Well, why not? I said, I don't want to watch that. I said, I know you don't, but you're gonna play Notre Dame this year, yeah? Yeah. Was it chances you see him again in the final? Well, you probably see him again. I said, well, you can't show up and play them without knowing why you lost that one. Right, so the mistakes that you've made in that game, you have to do the hard stuff and watch that game and study that game to not make those mistakes over and over again just because you weren't brave enough to face it. So she came down to the office. I brought her down to the office and we sat down, we watched that game together. Wow. Right, and you gotta deal with it.

Face it.

Gotta deal with it, face it, learn from it.

Wow, it must have been cringing for her to be like, oh replaying like we could have won, all these things.

That's exactly it, isn't it?

I just did that one thing.

Exactly.

I didn't get that foul if I was scoring that layup.

Exactly right. You're looking at it and say, oh, there's the mismatch. Oh, there's the gap, you know, and all those little things and it sucks. But you don't want to have that feeling again, do you? Right? So you gotta really study it, face it. And not to say you'll win the next time you face it, but at least you'll give yourself a better chance. Yeah.

And did you, what was your routine and ritual like after every game? Almost every game over or certain games.

All of them.

Every game you watch.

Every game.

The whole game back.

The whole game.

No way.

Yeah, so it started with me when I was a, when Phil Jackson's, his first year here with the Lakers, one of assistant coaches, his name was Tex Winter, and I call him Yoda. I mean, he was like 82 when he got here. And he was responsible for teaching me the triangle offense.

How old were you then?

I was 21. so three years, four.

Years in the league?

Yeah, so about my fourth year in the league. Okay. And so I go up to his room and this is when there were no iPads, anything like that, right? So when you're on the road, you have to call down to the front desk and they have to bring up the TV, but the whole, you know, the rollie thing and the VHS and the cassette tape, you pop it in. And I thought we were gonna watch what we call touches. So watch all your touches when you have the ball, all the decisions you made, good ones and bad. No, we're watching the start of the game.

Oh my gosh.

To the end of the game. And not like the TV feed. Watching the in arena feed. The layup line, the timeouts.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, rewinding, stopping, fast forward, rewinding, slow motion, every little thing, every game of that season. With the 82 year old Yoda.

Oh my gosh.

Who is as brutally honest as you can get.

What did that teach you that season?

It taught me to look at detail. Look at things at their smallest. Look at body language. Look at the energy between players. Our team and the other team. Look at the tactics. Look at the overall strategy and look at how tactically things are manifesting themselves. And because I watched so much film, then it gave me the ability to see game in real time as if I was watching film. where I can see ' pop upp, up po pu up, po, up, ' because a of times the game starts moving really fast. But if you train yourself to watch hours and hours of film, the game's not moving that fast anymo. you can really recognize who's doing what and why.

Then you can position guys in the.

Right places in real time.

H Seeing it before it happened, Yes.

Ye.

We in on football, we'd watch it once a week, game film, but not, you know, after every game it was.

Only one game a week.

You got like three three weeks. Yeah, you gotta you gotta go. It know what I know Tom Brady' is obsessive over game him as well in watching his show that came out, Tom Hanks at Time, was all about him just in there studying. Even months after the game, he's studying to prepare, right?

It's just like he's a stop.

And that's one of the keys, you think? It's like if you're not watching film, whether it be as a speaker on stage or a performer and a musician, if you're not watching yourself back.

You gotta learn, man. I mean, Beyonce's same thing.

Really?

After a performance. She's immediately on her laptop rewatching the performance.

No way.

Yes, seeing how to do things better. What could we have done differently? Right? I mean, it's just, it's an obsessiveness that comes along with it. You want things to be as perfect as they can be. Understanding that nothing is ever perfect. But the challenge is try to get them as perfect as they can be. And what can you do? It's in your control. So control what you can. I can watch film all day long. It's gonna help me get better.

Yes.

Yes.

Now, did you have your teammates also follow on this obsessiveness that you had as well, or did you just encourage them or what was the.

No, you can't push somebody to do that, right? But what you can do is. Is alter behavior and also change the vernacular of how they speak about the game. So on team buses, team planes, in a locker room after practice, I would look at the film. I'd pull pal, Lamar. D fish, pull them aside and say, let's look at this.

Right?

We probably should have done this, that and the other.

So you'll show them the game from.

A little bit here and there. Yeah. And then you speak to them in, in executional terms. It's never, come on, guys, we can do better. Come on, guys, we can do better. That's rah, rah stuff, right? Leader must give very tactical, you know, things that we can do adjustments. Okay. The defense is doing this, that and the other. That means we should probably do this, this, this, this. By midway through the season, through that behavior, you start seeing them communicating the same way back to you, right? And it's like, okay, Kobe, they're doing this, that, and the other to you. Maybe we should do this and that.

And you're like, okay, yeah, awesome, great. Let's do it. Yeah, yeah. What about season 16, 17, 18? Are you still watching every game film.

As obsessively as the first 10 years? Not now, no. Well, when I was playing. When you were playing. Yeah, so when I was playing, what I would do is, study the film, but study our younger players and see what areas do they need to develop in and how can I help them develop? I mean, that was the big challenge, as you move from, you know.

Being.

The single dominant player to understanding, okay, I have to help these other guys.

How do I lift everyone else up?

It's tough.

I mean, you were so dominant in your whole career, one of the greatest of all time, was there a weakness that you had? Or did you, 'cause obviously you're always trying to master your weaknesses so they became strengths, but did you at the end or towards the end, did you ever feel like, gosh, I still haven't mastered this one part of the game?

The challenge for me was always compassion and empathy.

'Cause you're like, guys, let's go. Get results. Shut up.

Don't complain, right? I don't want to hear your whining. I don't want to hear it. No excuses. Don't tell me how rough the water is. Just bring the boat in. You know, I don't want to hear it, you know? It's understanding like, okay, these guys have lives outside of here. They have other things happening to them that may be affecting the way that they're practicing or the way that they're performing. And it was hard for me to understand that because nothing bothered me. Anything personally that never phased me.

You compartmentalized it.

Very well. So I couldn't understand how my teammates couldn't do that either. until I, you know, so I had to really work on that aspect of it.

That's hard.

Yeah.

Did you feel like you never really had the compassion you wish you would have had, like, until the last maybe couple of years? Yeah.

So I think about 09 things started changing. Okay. I started really making a conscious effort to better understand, and that doesn't mean, I mean, you have compassion and empathy, so you go soft on them. It's more like you, you put you put yourself to the side and you put yourself in their shoes and understand what they're feeling. And then you have to make certain decisions of, okay, what buttons do I need to push for this player to get them to the next level? So it's never, it's not sit around and all, it's all happy-go-lucky type of thing. Your leader, your job is to get the best out of them, even if, you know, they may not like it at that time.

Yeah.

Wow.

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Honestly, it was sounds may sound a little shallow, but I gotta say, beating the Celtics in game seven. That's what I'm most proud of because it was the hardest. You know, they were playing with Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, All-Stars, Ray Allen. And, you know, it was myself, Powell, and players that other teams didn't want. And, you know, how do we figure out as a group what to do? And the reason why I love that series so much is that we went down three games to two against Boston. and now you got two games coming home. I remember sitting in the locker room and they beat the crap out of us, too, that game. So we're sitting in the locker room and it's really, really quiet. I'm sitting there looking around and we just lost to Celtics in '08. So this is like revenge, right? And they're kicking our butt again, right? So I sit around and I just started laughing. I started laughing and then I remember Derek Fisher looked at me like, and Lamar looked at me and goes, what is funny? I said, Dude, they beat the crap out of us. They just beat the crap out of us. I said, I'm missing the part where that's funny. I said, man, listen, if you start this season and they say, you know, all you have to do is win two games at home and you're an NBA champ, would you take that?

Yeah.

They're like, right. That's all we got to do. Yeah. Go home, win two. We're NBA champions. All we gotta do is win two games in a row. That's it. We'll take care of the first game, and I promise you, they're not winning game seven on our home floor. It's not happening. So we all just laughed about it. and then we went out and we figured it out. But that game seven was, we're down 15 points in the fourth quarter, right? And that's when you have to collectively look at each other and say, you know, the spirit of your team must be good because at that moment is when teams fracture. If the energy amongst each other isn't there, that trust isn't there, you're done.

How important is visualization in abundance? but then also how important it is taking action.

Right. So I have five visualization exercises in that book, just because it's so important. Visualization is a gift to your heart and your soul. It's a gift. Because if the idea is the seed, visualization is the fertilizer. It's the fertilizer. Because when your thoughts are connected with an emotion. See, you would visualize yourself winning and you would feel all the emotion that came with that. And all you're doing now is you're not chasing a foreign emotion. You know the feeling and now you're just doing what's necessary to get back to that feeling in real time. Exactly. And so what a good friend of mine, Vishen, the CEO of Mindvalley, who you know, I did a visualization with him. We were in Bali and He said to me afterwards, I never get emotional.

I get emotional.

He doesn't get emotional.

He's like, Right, right, right, right. Well, he was like, I cried. I got emotional. He goes, I figured it out. It's visualization, a good visualization brings an emotion. He was like, that's how you do it. And so I love doing visualizations because, and it's real important in the visualization, you can't see it over there. You have to see it right here. You gotta feel it right here. Like I am, it's all I am. I am, I am in my dream home. I am in my dream relationship. And then unpack what that looks like. But most importantly, unpack what it feels like. And when you have that emotion in this moment, all of a sudden you stir up something that I don't think will ever go back to sleep. It'll go, okay, let's go get that. And what it really does is it sets up a state of, Cognitive dissonance. And cognitive dissonance is when you see something in your mind and you see yourself in a way that your behaviors are not currently leading to. And so your mind becomes disrupted and it goes, okay, can we get there? Because I'm not there right now.

I'm not there right now.

And that's not comfortable. Your mind wants to literally be congruent. What it thinks is what you're doing, what it thinks is what you're doing. And so when you set up a constant and abundant thinkers like you and I, we do it unconsciously. We're constantly keeping ourselves in a state of cognitive dissonance, meaning, okay, what else? And I'm seeing Lisa over there and I'm going, okay, let me go. While being grateful for my now. It's not in that I'm gonna be whole and complete when I get over there. I'm whole and complete now. I just know I'm supposed to be over there. So let me do what's necessary to get over there and let me evict any behaviors or characteristics that are stopping me and let me adopt any new ones that I need.

Right, right. How does someone discover their unique calling? Because you talked about that in the book, Discovering your Unique Calling. What if people are like, I don't even know what I want. I know I want to be out of the place I'm in. I want to be abundant, wealthy, healthy, great relationships.

Right, right. But I don't know what my purpose or calling is right now. I think that people put too big of a notion on purpose in that they think that it has to look like Nelson Mandela or a Mother Teresa or Oprah or a you or I. And a lot of times what you're really good at is right in front of you. What you're really great at is right in front of you. And to recognize that your calling and your purpose can change. That it can change. You have a long lifetime. It's not gonna be the same calling the whole time. And so allow yourself to evolve, allow your purpose to evolve. What's that thing you do effortlessly that you give no credit to? because you're just looking past it. Oh, it can't be that because it's not hard. Well, how about it doesn't have to be difficult? How about the fact that you're a great listener? How can you take that and use that and expand it and don't compare yourself to someone else? Comparison, I think Benjamin Franklin said, comparison is the thief of all joy. It's all when you look left or right, you know, people are always comparing me to Oprah Winfrey or Iyanla Vanzant or Les Brown or Tony Robbins. I said, listen, if you want me to give you Oprah or Iyanla or Tony or Les, I'm always going to 1000% fail you. I do a good Lisa Nichols. And so when you look at what are my gifts, what are my unique gifts, I knew very early on I was a gifted speaker. I wasn't certified as a gifted speaker. I haven't passed any courses as a speaker. Matter of fact, the last time I took a speech class, I got a D minus. And my speech teacher told me, Ms. Nichols, I recommend you never speak in public that you get a desk job. That was in my freshman year of college, the last speech class I took. So a lot of times your gift and your purpose, you've discounted it. Either because someone else discounted it or what's more common is you don't know how to monetize it. And sometimes the greatest gift you have to give is not for fee, it's for free. You watch people like you and I and go, well, why can't I get paid for it? Well, not every gift you're supposed to get paid for. Nelson Mandela did not get paid for leading 27 years when he got out of prison. He got paid after that, but he was a great leader while he was in prison. And Martin Luther King, he got paid from the church, but his fight for civil rights, that was a free one, and he paid the highest cost. And you can go on and on and on to some of the greatest leaders, Mahatma Gandhi. It wasn't a paycheck. Right. And I know we're scaled down to our version, but don't get attached to having to get paid for your gift, right?

Yeah.

I started this podcast as a way of I'm gonna do this for free for a year. I'm not gonna take any sponsors. I'm not gonna do anything. I'm not gonna sell anything. I'm just gonna create and facilitate great conversations. And that's it. And now the money is coming in because of how it's impacted people's lives. And your intention was in the right place. Yeah, but I wasn't like, how can I do this right now to make money? It was, how can I serve the.

Maximum number of people? That right there. that when people live in a place of servant leadership, my grandmother said when I was 24, if you leave and how you can serve the most people, when I sit with my team, I go, how can we serve more people? How can we serve? Last year we were able to touch 30 million people. And that's all our question. Now as we serve, our platform gets broader, but how can we serve? Don't tell me how we can make more money. I'm not interested in that. I'm sure how can we serve more? Because if I do the right thing for the right reasons, everything I need will be a byproduct of that.

Exactly.

So I think we get caught up in, you know, Society allows us to have us. Has us looking at possessions. And so we begin to measure our joy and our abundance on possessions. I. I have a friend who's worth. He's worth 14 billion dollars. How do you even write that? I had to write it down so I could see it. How many zeros is that?

Right.

All right. A lot. He's worth 14 billion dollars. I checked my email on my phone before we started, and he's on my phone asking me, Please come visit me. Because he's lonely. He's rich, but he's not abundant. He flew from Canada to come to my house for New Year's just to be around people who were celebrating and wanted nothing from them. And so don't pursue the things. Pursue the acts of service, and everything you need will come, I promise you.

Yeah, that's powerful. Let's talk about the four E's. What is this principle of the four E's that you talk about in your book?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I like to break up my life in quadrants and I help my students. I do a lot of coaching. I do personal development and professional development coaching. And no matter where you come to me, whether you come to me for personal development or whether you want to turn your passion into profit and this professional development and business development, For entrepreneurs, we go over the four E's because abundance is holistic. It's a holistic experience. So the first is enrichment of self, that you are only going to go as far as you think you're worthy. I can push, you can push, you can have the greatest product, but if you don't feel worthy, you will work hard to sabotage that relationship. You don't know you're doing. You don't know you're doing. You think these are the things I need, and you're driving that guy away. you're driving that woman away because your self-worth says they weren't going to stay forever anyway. Or self-worth around money. You have a cap that you feel like you're worthy of a million dollars. You will always get to 999, 000 and you will stop because your self-worth says it. So enrichment is number one.

What's a good exercise or process that we can follow on a daily basis, maybe something simple to enhance our enrichment. Absolutely. Worthiness.

Absolutely. I did for six months, every single day, right after I brush my teeth. And it's the I see you exercise. And you get in the mirror now, it's not necessarily simple, 'cause you're dealing with yourself. Of course. And as complicated as you are, will be the determination. Well, the mechanics of it is-- the mechanics are very simple. Yes, I appreciate that distinction. You get in the mirror and you complete three different sentences. You want to write this down. The first sentence, you look at yourself and you say your name. So you say, Louis. and you complete this, it says, I'm proud that you. And find seven different things every day to celebrate yourself for. Seven different. Each day you can do the same thing you did the day before, but each day do seven different things to be proud of. The second sentence is going to knock you down a little bit. It's going to come from your gut. Louis, I forgive you for. And cut the shackles to blame, shame, guilt, regret, and anger. In that sentence, you cut those five shackles. not the first day, maybe not the third day, but by the 21st day, by the 13th day, you'll feel some relief. So, Louis, I forgive you for and go back five years, 15 years, 20 years.

Do that.

Forgive you for that thing. Don't nobody know about. But you go ahead and cut those shackles. Because if you can still think about it, it's still in your energy space. Yeah. And then the third sentence is, Louis, I commit to you that before you make a commitment to anybody else throughout your day, You make seven commitments to you. So the first sentence is, I'm proud that you, you're celebrating yourself first. We are under-celebrated as a society. We look for acknowledgement. They interviewed 100 executives that all made over a quarter of a million dollars and said, Would you like a 5% raise next year? Or would you rather be told, Thank you more often? 100%. 100% said, Keep your money. I'd rather hear thank you. So we're under-celebrated. But first, celebrate you.

Be the example.

When I was on Oprah, when she said, what do you do? I said, I recognize that I'm the example of how the rest of the world is supposed to treat me. And it's my job to give the world the best example of how I like to be treated. So celebrate yourself, forgive yourself, cut the shackles, and then commit to yourself before.

You commit to anyone else.

That right there, powerful. That right there will begin to fill.

Your cup up to get to your saucy. I love that. Where did you start to learn that process? Was that something you just started to practice yourself and started and looking in the mirror and trying different things.

You, boy, you asked the question. I was in a relationship engaged to be married and it became abusive. I was emotionally abused and then he picked me up and threw me three feet across the room and choked me until I passed out. I don't tell a lot of people that. And I was suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder. And my mother asked me to go to the doctor. strongly recommended I go to the doctor, drug me to the doctor. And after the assessment of me in Manhattan Beach, my doctor said that I was clinically depressed. And I said, How did I get here? Me? That don't even fit with my name. I was head cheerleader at my high school. I was the captain of the track team. I was, I'm always the person to get people going. It didn't fit. How did I get here? I don't know if you've ever found yourself saying, how did I get here? I was sitting on the table in the doctor's office saying, how did I get here? And when she wrote me the prescription, she handed me the prescription and I read the prescription and it said, Lisa Nichols Prozac. It was like I was looking at a foreign statement, my name and Prozac. And I asked her, I said, Can I try something for 30 days? Because I realized I was just sad. I lost me. I had lost me in him. I had lost me in being a mother. I had lost me in being the mother of a son whose father was in prison and trying to hide that shame and then trying to make this man happy and then beginning to fend for my life. I lost me. So I needed to discover me. I needed to remind myself who I was. and so I just realized I didn't celebrate me. I was beating myself up. I was really mad at me and I was showing up for everyone else. So I just made up these sentences and I did it to rescue myself, to turn my crawl into a walk. And I ultimately was able to turn my crawl into a walk and my walk into a run and my run into a sore. But it started out as a crawl. So I don't offer the how I got to that exercise often unless someone asks. Thank you very much.

You're welcome, darling. Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, I'm glad you opened up. I've long since learned four things. To me, this is the road to true freedom. I have nothing to prove. I have nothing to protect. I have nothing to hide. And I have nothing to defend. that your perception of me after I tell my truth is actually none of my business. My perception of me that I go to bed as whole and complete as I woke up before I check how many likes I have on Facebook that I like me first and every other like is bonus.

There you go.

Like it. That was a long road to get to long road.

That's fair.

Long road.

Yeah.

We probably have to constantly be reminded of it, you know?

And then when I get in that place. And then when I live like I'm forgetting, you have to have accountability partners stashed in the corners of your life. And you have to give them an assignment on your high day. You have to give them an assignment on your high day. If I look like I'm slipping.

Well, my ego's in the way.

Get in my face. Get in my face. Right. Get in my face and remind me of the man, of the woman I said I wanted to be. Don't let me off the hook for the 2020 version of me.

Because we're humans, it's gonna happen. As long as we're breathing, we're gonna.

Be out of integrity at some point. Come on. Your humanity's gonna get in the way.

Your ego or ladies, your she-go is gonna get hooked.

Exactly. Absolutely. Your resentment, your smallness, your smallness. It all fits in smallness. I'm human. And so the best thing I did was to keep people around me to hold me accountable to the woman I said I want to become. Sure.

That's great. I love that. That's why I have a lot of people from the Midwest who work with me on my team, support me, keep me grounded.

Right, right, right, right, right. Like, don't get too Hollywood. Exactly.

Don't get caught up in the lights and the cameras and the daggon headset. Exactly. Exactly. Absolutely.

Okay, enrichment. That's the first part. The second part is enchantment. Relationships are going to define the quality of your life. When you're on your bed, on your last days, you're going to want to know who's going to be around you. Bottom line, you're not gonna care about another podcast. You're not gonna care about another sponsor. I'm not gonna care about another book or the freaking New York Times bestseller. It matters to us now. But the relationships in your life are going to determine the quality of your life. And so mind your relationships. And so in the book Abundance Now, I teach you how to heal broken relationships that matter to you, how to get back level set. I give you this great tool called, it's a, it's a, it's a, a conversation to heal a broken experience. So it's called a communication charter. I use it in my company. I use it at my house. And so just is about how do I keep great relationships? And then the third area is engagement, work engagement. You're gonna spend so much time in work, and we're so emotionally attached to our work. And most of the time, people are attached in such a dismal way that why would you have that dismal energy around something you're going to so many hours in. So I teach you how to shift your energy towards your work so that you no longer look at it as your work. Now it's no longer your JLB. Like everyone in my community, everyone in my tribe, they no longer say they have a job. They say, I have an investor. And when you look at your job as your investor and you really rename it as your investor, and it's investing in your breathtaking future, it has the capacity to buy anything you want for your future. if you mind your money, right?

Right.

It can buy your freedom. And all of a sudden, you start treating your investor better and you're more excited about going. Matter of fact, you're grateful for your investment. I feel like work. Man, my investor was LA Unified School District. That was a hard place to be when it was a job. I'm just telling you. But as an investor, for three and a half years, I wrote myself a check and I put in the memo line, funding my dream. I didn't even know what the dream was. I wasn't even clear. I just knew whatever my dream was, it was gonna cost some money. Mm-. And I needed to pay. And I need to have some money to pay. And that if I was gonna ask other people to invest in me, I had to be my first investor. Who am I to ask someone to put money my way when I didn't put money my way? Right. So I wanted someone for them to match. Just match my investment in me. I got 10 in. Can you put 10 in? I got 20 in. Can you put 20 in? And so when you look at your job, your work engagement as an investor into your breathtaking life, all of a sudden there's a different energy around it. And then the last one is money endowment. and to recognize more than the Dr. Seuss family and the Disney family and the McDonald's family and the Lawrence Welk family has a right to an endowment. When you get the understanding, and I really unpack it here where you kind of go, what? Like, I'll make you do a couple of Scooby-Doo looks in the book. Like, when you look and go, I can do an endowment. Like, I, like, because we think it's for them. Remember, I started this conversation with, Abundance is for those people over there, especially when it comes to an endowment or a living legacy, like in your book and the creating a legacy to recognize that, wait a minute, there's a Lewis endowment and a Lisa endowment and a Don and John and Italian endowment and fill in the blank here endowment. And I need to live my life to set up my endowment. All of a sudden, you become responsible for generations to come, responsible for changing the trajectory of your family's life.

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What was the fear or insecurity you had to overcome?

Man, I would say it's layered. So I wanna touch on it. It was extremely difficult when I first started going out with my arm. It was extremely difficult, you know, because--.

Were you single at the time or did you have a girl at the.

Time or-- you- know, me and my wife, you know, we've been on and off, you know. She's had more patience yeah, yeah.

But at the time you were with her or on and off with her?

Yeah, on and off. But she was always there, man. It was my immaturity.

Sure.

But, you know, my arm, you know, it's just naturally, you know, smaller. And so when I first started going out sleeve and I would go out and either people would shy away, which would hurt. you know, in the early years or a person would just look, right? Like, man, what is that? You know, and very few people would ask, right, when I started going out with my sleeve, very few people would say just in terms of if I'm out in the area, like, if I'm at Habitat for Humanity, I'm there with the football team. So it's all good. People are gonna come over, boom. But if I'm out, like, solo walking through the mall, very few people would just come up and be like, Hey man, what happened? They would just look, right, and just stare. And that was extremely difficult for me for a long time, right? Just thinking about, okay man, what are they thinking? Or it really hurt when people would just look and they would think I'm looking and they would shy away. Like that hurt early on. But I would say the biggest thing that I've had to overcome, like public speaking, I was fearful of that. But the biggest thing, man, was running from poverty. You know, what I considered to be poverty, man, because I thought football was gonna help my family. And so when I started speaking, I started doing extremely well. You know, I have been for a while with speaking to where I would just go. And I was just trying to accept gigs, gigs, gigs.

Make as much as you can.

I was just running, right? Just trying to speak. Because I grew up a certain way and I was like, man, I don't.

Want-- you- don't want to go back to that family?

Yeah, to have to grow up the way I grew up, my kids, or go back to that environment. And I loved every element of it, right? I loved the encounters with the people. I loved the impact that it gives you. I was just running from my past. And I'll never forget, I was in a small group and a gentleman was walking around in a circle and he was like, what's something that You know, you guys feel like in your childhood you're still dealing with or you're running from. And you know, everybody would raise their hand and say something. And he got to me and I was like, Poverty. And he was like, Are you in poverty? I was like, no. He was like, well, stop running. And in its simplicity it was yet profound, but it was simple, right? And I thought about it when I got to my room. And I'll never forget, Louis, I got a gig. and it was one of the biggest gigs I had gotten to date. And they were about to pay me more money.

How old are you? How old are you?

I was 36 now. I was probably 30.

Okay, six years ago.

Yeah.

They're about to pay your biggest check ever.

Yeah, biggest check ever. And I was stoked. And the challenge was it fell on my wife's birthday. Right? And so I'm like, man. And so, you know, you start working.

It out in your mind.

Oh, man, my wife's birthday.

I start negotiating with her.

I'm negotiating with her, right?

My birthday week before, week after.

All right, I'm working it out. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I bring it to her, I already done worked it out. Hey, babe, this gig, you know, like, I can send you and Grandma to the spa. I can come back right after that. We can work, I got it all figured out. I got it all figured out. and she could see how excited I was. So she was like, oh, yeah, yeah, go, sure, go. And my wife, man, my wife been at it since fifth grade. So she knows me. You go. So I go, it works out, do the gig, I send them to the spa, fly back the same day, pick her up. Everything goes great on the birthday. Two days later, I think it was something about, might have been some socks or something at the house, something small. Wife blew up.

Right?

She showed a side to me that I hadn't even seen yet, right? And I knew exactly what it was. Like it clicked immediately. I was like, that was the gig. I was like, she's blowing up. Not because she's blowing up about the gig. She felt as if I value the opportunity, the engagement, and the money over her and her birthday. That was the damage, right? Over the kids, over the family, over that moment.

Right?

And so what I had to do was realize that man, you got renewable and you got non-renewable moments in life, right? Renewable, you can always make some more money, right? Non-renewable, my wife would never get another 30th birthday. My son would never have another 10th birthday. My daughter never have another 11th birthday, right? And so my biggest thing that I had to overcome and destroy and grow through was that spirit and that thought process of running from poverty. Something I encountered as a kid. And once I got to a solid space as an adult, you know, every next level of our lives demand a new version of us, right? Taking that toolkit, yeah. Reconstructing it, growing to another level. So I didn't do damage, but having the right intentions while doing damage, the right intention. I want my family to have a better way of life. But I'm doing damage with the right intention because I'm not growing beyond that level and that thought process.

So how do you negotiate? What if you got a $100,000 gig on her birthday?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I used to say, Nah, sorry, sorry. Nike, man, I can't come to the shoe store.

Nah, we good, go, go, right?

We good.

Yeah, but man, just trying to communicate, you know, that's a skill that I don't think is men we always get. or cultivate, you know, so. But, yeah, it worked out.

Why do you think so many people hold on to their tragedies or traumas so intently in their present from something that happened two, five, 10, 20 years ago? Why do you think people hold on to it so long?

I think just the nature of the impact when it happens.

Right.

And how it stuns their life.

Right.

Like, I had one of my friends who is a high level coach, division one coach that ended up getting fired. And great coach, man, just had a bad run, bad couple of years, and hit me up and was like, hey, ink, man, I need you to help me with something. He said, why am I resisting opportunities to get another head gig? It's like, I love ball. Like, why am I resisting the opportunity? Why am I fearful? And I was like, I'm not saying this is for certain, but I think for one, maybe the embarrassment of being fired and how that made you feel, how that impacted your children, how that impacted your family. Because I think painful experiences, they always come with a lot of different emotions, right? Like me talking about going out and it was hard for me with my arm when people would look at me, right? That was a bit embarrassing at first, right? And so sometimes we hold on to these different emotions that attach to the experiences that we have. So I think you got the experience and then you got the collateral damage of the experience. How it affects our mindset, how it affects the way we see people, how it affects our emotions. And I think sometimes it's challenging to separate the two and deconstruct the two. And so therefore we hold on to the feelings that the trauma may have given us, right? The feelings that the adversity and the opposition may have given us. And so I think the moment that we can grow through it and figure out a way to use it, I think the quicker we get through it. Because I think it's a powerful thing, Louis, and I think you probably know this to be true. When we use what happens to us and it creates a light bulb moment for another person, that's a great feeling. It's like when you get something for yourself for Christmas, that's awesome. It feels great, but when you do something for another person that you know is in need, like that feels 10 times better for some reason. And so, I take adversity and opposition and I interconnect it the same way.

Yeah.

When we go through things it hurts or we figure out a way to get through it, but when we share something and we identify with another person to let them know that, because oftentimes when people go through stuff, you feel alone, you feel isolated and you feel like man, like is something wrong with me? and I think what happens when we go through and we create a level of empathy, we show them that, no, man, you're human. Like, we all go through things. Like, nobody is perfect. Like, I told a guy that had a brachial plexus injury. He's like, man, I see how you got through it. Like, it hasn't been that easy for me. I was like, no, bro, it took work. It took years. Like, this was painful. I went through every emotion that you're probably going through, and I had a.

Lot of people that helped me.

What's the difference between the traumas that happened to us and the generational trauma that happened to our ancestors?

The major difference is placed in biology. So there's a genetic component to intergenerational trauma. And so intergenerational trauma has this way in which there is a genetic transmission that happens from parent to child.

Really.

And so it creates a predisposition to vulnerability to stress.

Give me an example. What's a common example you see in your practice that is a generational story?

Well, I mean, you know, there are people that will come in and say, you know, ever since I was a child, it was like difficult to soothe. And I was, you know, I had like this hyperactivity. There's a lot of trauma survivors that also like believe that their symptoms are coincide with ADHD because there's a lot of overlap in the experience experience in the, in the symptomatology. So there's a, there's a lot of that. There's, like, people that, you know, reflect back to their childhood, and they say, like, I've always had, like, this experience that felt like I was always anxious. When we dig into the layers and we dig deep, we start noticing, okay, especially because I do a lot of, like, family tree work and, like, really going down the lineage to know, like, well, what are some of the trauma responses or what are some of the responses around also, like, inflammatory responses, like depression or anxiety? or other kind of like mental illness, you know, kind of experiences that were held in the family. And when we start going down the family line and we start exploring not only their childhood and how they responded in their childhood, what their attachment patterns were in their childhood, but also how perhaps like their mother had an inner child wound and their mother's mother had an inner child wound.

And they never healed it.

Never healed it. Express it as a trauma response. yelled and screamed in the home, you know, had like emotional outbursts. What did that do? That actually created a disruption in the attachment that you could have had, like in your childhood. It created an insecure attachment. You then went out into the world and experienced bullying, a pandemic, like all kinds of things. And then that trauma, that trauma, you know, propensity or vulnerability got triggered out. And so now you are a continuing the cycle of intergenerational trauma because it was modeled to you genetically, it was passed down, and then, you know.

Now, is it genetic or is it, let's say, the mother breaks the cycle before she heals her trauma, the generational trauma, before she has her child? She can. And she creates an environment of peace. you know? Is it the environment or is it the biology, the genetic code that is passed down? Because it's like these environments are kind of passed down. You witness your parents doing it, you just follow the pattern and you follow the environment pattern. Is that genetic? Is that environment? What is both?

It's both. It's like, you know, for as long as psychology has existed, we've had like theories on nature nurture. Darwinism also kind of just started that way back when. so nature being like the biological aspects of our experiences and then nurture being like the social aspects of our experiences and intergenerational trauma is really the only trauma that is situated at the intersection of both. So we have the nature side.

Yeah.

So, you know, on the nature side, the genetic expression, like we're getting a lot of information from like the field of epigenetics, which helps us understand how behavior like impacts genes. And so basically what happens is that, let's say a mother, a mother has stress and depression in her life. Let's say that this mother is actually pregnant at five months gestation. So she's pregnant, she has a baby in utero. And because she's at five months gestation, that baby also has all the precursors sex cells that they're gonna have for their lifetime, regardless of whether it's male or female. they already have those. So the mother, she experienced chronic trauma her entire life. And so because that became the status quo, her genes re-expressed. So her genes said, okay, this is the way that things are. We are a stressed body. And so because her genes are now saying we are predisposed to stress, that's being handed down to the baby in utero, actually at conception. So the baby is conceived into genes. that are predisposed to stress. And because she is already still stressed while she's having this baby, all those stress hormones, namely cortisol, those are being passed down to the baby in utero. And what's happening to the precursor cells, those are also ingesting a lot of that stress environment. So you have three generations in one body genetically being passed down the stress vulnerability, but also the social piece, the mother's stress, you know, it's like she has all her things going on, she's predisposed to trauma. She's got all these things going while she's still pregnant.

Her environment is still stressful, yeah.

Yeah.

And so everybody in that lineage of three generations in one body is experiencing stress.

Is it just three generations or is it like every generation that's had it?

Well, you know, like, I mean, I think it's a little bit of a chicken and egg kind of phenomenon when it comes to intergenerational trauma, right? Like, it's like, Who started it, right? But I think I illustrate that because it's, I think, a little bit easier to see like, oh, well, maybe it started with mom. Maybe she was, you know, the person.

That- maybe she had an extreme trauma.

And there was a reaction response. Exactly, right? And so- that's interesting. Now we at least get to see.

Where the genetic line started from the trauma perspective. When you think about it that way, you're like, Man, I'm carrying the weight of, you know, multiple generations of trauma in my genes. Physical weight, actual weight, that could get a little dark and heavy if you really put the emphasis on that. So how do we actually break that cycle once and for all where none of that trauma stays with us and we don't pass it down to our kids?

It definitely has to be a very like whole system overhaul for most folks. Like it has to be, you know, an integration of holistic practices in our day to day lives. Every single day.

Like a daily practice.

Every day. Can't waiver on it because we got to think about what we're undoing. We're not just undoing the decades of trauma that you experience.

Yeah.

You're doing, you're undoing all the trauma.

You really need to have a rebirth. It's like a spiritual, psychological, emotional, nervous system rebirth, in my opinion. I feel like I've had a couple of them in the last decade. 10 years ago, kind of opening up about my sexual abuse trauma. And then in the last few years, just dealing with all relationships in general, like all intimate relationships that I've had. I've never really faced them until a couple years ago. And I feel like I had to re, I had to emotionally, spiritually die in a sense. Yeah. Psychologically, I guess.

Absolutely, yeah.

Allow it to burn and then build from the ashes kind of psychologically. And it's a process, I'm not saying I finished it or whatever, but it's like a constant journey of going back to the different stages of childhood, healing each stage and integrating that age with my current self. So there's full integration and healing of every different memory from my life that was a traumatic response.

Yeah.

And it's been a beautiful beautiful journey that has allowed me to have peace and harmony on the inside, which I never had that until really 10 years ago, I didn't start feeling it. But until a couple years ago, when I started feeling more and more peace on the inside, and it allows me to, again, see the world differently. I'm not saying I'm, like, not triggered by things, but allows me to see it and say, okay, this sucks. How can I consciously communicate what I want? to change, not from a reactive, overwhelmed, stressed, traumatic state, which I feel like you can't really get much done from that state.

No, I mean, you can push things down and numb and still operate fairly well, but you can survive. All of that will come back because you're in survival mode still, because numbing is still survival mode.

But you're not thriving, you're not creating an abundance life for yourself when you're in a traumatic response, are we?

No, not at all. I mean, I think, you know, abundance comes from being able to get into the depths of your soul, right? So I love that you're talking about the more like psycho-spiritual angle because that is definitely, I operate from a holistic angle. And so like a lot of the work that I do is very mind-body-spirit and the spiritual piece is really essential because it's not, you know, just your connection to higher power is really just also your connection to yourself. When you're really disconnected from your true authentic self, you're not living abundantly. And if we want generational abundance, then we have to get into the depths of everything that's there, into the mud, if you may. Yeah, and I think if you're triggered.

Or have a nervous system response to a lot of things, you're constantly in a survival mode, right? And it's hard to create an abundance, it's hard to dream, from a place of survival. It's hard to create something beautiful from that place.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense even from a biological perspective. When we're in a nervous system response and that's survival mode, you're in a chronic nervous system overhaul, right? So our nervous system is designed to actually make it so that whenever we are in a fight, flight, freeze or fawn, any non-essential functions any non-essential, like organ functions, bodily functions, our brain even, like the cortical region of our brain, all of that is mildly shut down. So if you're talking about like alchemizing and creativity and like all these things, those things require a lot of cortical, you know, structure, like manifestation of like, you know, all the things that you want, like really requires for you to get into your creative mind and if your cortical brain is not fully functioning in the ways that it, because it's in survival mode, then you're not really.

Going to get to that actualization. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

What's up, podcast listeners? It's tanks, host of the it's me, tanks podcast. Join me weekly on it's me, tanks as I dive into topics like relationships, why it's okay to feel lonely, fighting summer comparison, and pop culture's hottest takes. I don't shy away from getting candid about my personal experiences, and I want to share all the advice I have learned with you. I'm even joined by some of my friends like Claudia Oshry, Connor Wood and Amanda Hirsch each Friday for our new office hours episodes. You can listen to it's me, tanks every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to follow the show.

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