Burn the Boats

Welcome to Stan Short Coaching. This is the first live that I've ever done. I am battling my way through rush hour traffic right now. I'm trying not to get frustrated. One of the things that I find that really frustrates me is when you have people that are parked over in the left-hand lane, they're doing like either like right at the speed limit or just below, and they're blocking everybody up. I mean, and traffic's just Backed up for miles because of one person, and it's totally clear in front of them, right? And it really makes me think about how in life, you know, like in business, right? I mean, I work with people who clog up that left-hand lane. I am around people in my social life, or have been around people in my social life, they clog up that left-hand lane. And they would rather just kind of sit there and do their own thing rather than look back and say, hey, by the way, I'm holding other people up. Let me adjust what I'm doing. Let me move over in the lane so I can, um, so everybody else can go do what they need to do. So that kind of frustrates me a little bit. I think the other thing is that when you have rubberneckers, you know, people who, you know, they'll be on the far opposite side of the freeway, nothing restricting them, but there's a cop that has somebody pulled over on the left-hand side, or there's an accident, you know, a little fender bender or something And they have to slow down and they have to look. And again, they slow everybody up. And so it's just one of the things I'm dealing with this morning. But I think a lot of it is that God is trying to teach me patience through all this with those kinds of people. I, I'm not a patient person. I'll admit that. And that's one of the things I'm gonna talk about today as I talk about Burn the Boats. Again, this is the first time I've done YouTube Live on this channel. Um, I guess I should talk a little bit about what this channel is about. It's about offering encouragement. And I've been a coach since 1999, doing business coaching, life coaching, leadership coaching. And I've done it for other businesses in and out of different types of environments. And this last August— I'm sorry, I keep saying August. This last March, I realized it was time to burn the boats, and it was time to get into something else, and it was a time to change my life and what I was doing. Yet at the same time, it was chosen for me. I'm gonna get into that in just a second here, but I wanted to create a channel that was uplifting and was— it provided not, you know, not just foo-foo advice. I wanted something that was Practical, something that was real, something that was uplifting, something that would make you think, something that would make the listener naturally curious about themselves. And so if you look at my dailies, I try to post up at least once a day something motivational, something that is uplifting, something that is, you know, can help somebody out. And we live We live in this day and age where literally anybody can be a coach. Anybody can get a business card, put out a Google ad, and suddenly they're a coach. And there's a couple of things I want you to really understand. Number one, coaching is not counseling. It's not therapy. When coaches get into the realm and start consulting someone or diagnosing someone, you know, telling someone, well, you know, you're bipolar or whatever, you know, all these other things. things. Or, hey, you know, you have problems with your, with your wife, or, you know, if they're telling you things, that's, that's not a coach. They may have the business card that says it is, but they're not a coach. A coach should be naturally curious. A coach should be asking you questions to get you to really self-discover and discover with guidance, right? I'm an ICF member. ICF is International Coaching Federation. ICF certification is the gold standard of coaching, and at some point, you know, states are already pushing for coaches to be board certified, and right now ICF is on the track to be the one, be that entity, or at least whose values would be there. But anyway, I've wanted to be a coach since 1999 and have done that in different capacities. My last gig, my last full-time gig, was I was a contractor for the government, working for the Treasury Department in the areas of cybersecurity. This last March, it was time for me to burn the boats, and that, and that came by their choice and not mine, because the government cut contracts, even the ones that they said were going to be essential. I mean, I was working on a contract that helps to protect people's data anytime they, they work with the Treasury Department, and our specific threats were Pakistan, So that's where it was time for me to burn the boats. And what do I mean by burn the boats? This is a concept I've been really, really mulling over in my mind on how to help my clients. Burn the boats means that there's no path backwards. You're moving forwards. So I took 30 years of what I had been doing as a career, that career ladder that I was climbing, the wall that that ladder was leaning against, it crumbled. It fell down and it's time to start a whole new ladder for the bottom rung. So I got doged on a Sunday night at 10 o'clock. Monday morning, you know, I laid awake that night trying to figure out what I was going to do next. Fortunately, I had a little bit of savings in, uh, in the bank that I could get by on. It was time to burn the boats. And what I mean by burn the boats is that there's no path backwards. It is only forwards. And this can be in relationships. It can be toxic friends. In my case, it was with a career. It can be with a habit. When you burn the boats, there is no retreat. And that was exactly what I had to do. On Monday morning, I filed paperwork with the Secretary of State office to develop Stand Sure Coaching. I've seen other people have to do this with relationships. They're in a toxic relationship. And, uh, there's another person in the left-hand lane that's driving me crazy. They're holding up progress. And I have to learn patience with that. But when you burn the boats, there's no retreat. You give up everything from the past. And you move forward. And that's tough. It's, you know, since I've been talking about people driving and holding me up in lanes, it's almost like when you're driving, you have to be looking through that front, you know, through the front windshield to see where you're going. Especially like when you get into a situation and you're trying to change lanes and traffic is backed up, you have to be looking in front, but you have to glance back to see if you can even hop into the next lane, right? And That could be, uh, that could be a little dangerous when you look back because the car in front of you suddenly stopped. You know, it could be one of these people who clog up the left-hand lane, so to speak. And so you always have to glance back just to see where you were or if it's clear to move over, and then you take that path forward. I just want to encourage you Folks on here today that life can—I mean, life could change in the blink of an eye. Things could change like that. One minute, things are steady. You're in your comfort. You're in the groove. And the next, car accident, diagnosis of cancer. Find out that you lost your job. And man, this morning, there are people all over our nation that are stressed out. They don't know if they're going to, you know, when they're going to get paid next. You know, with the government shutdown, no idea of what's going to happen next. And, you know, we're going to have military personnel. I spent 13 years in the military. I've gone through a couple of these. You're going to have military personnel that suddenly they're not getting paid. You're going to have government workers not getting paid. And I don't care whose fault it is, okay? I don't care which side of the aisle that you sit on. What I want you to do is have a little bit of compassion and a little bit of empathy for people that are going through that. And if you're one of those folks, hey man, I'm sorry that you're that you're facing that. The ironic part is that you've got people that are making those decisions and their office staffs that will still get paid. And that's that. Back to this concept of burn the boats. For me, I decided that I was not gonna ever, ever work another federal contract again. My values had changed. And I didn't ever want to be in a position where somebody else was, was controlling that. For me, that was the burning of the boats. I took 30 years of a career and, and did away with it. It can be incredibly stressful when you're going through that, through those times. But you have to go where you're valued. I want you to think about, so when I burned the boats to get off, and this is a light burn the boats, right? Because it wasn't life or death. This was a health decision I made. When I decided to get off sodas, I went to seltzer water, you know, like Pellegrino, Perrier, that type of stuff. Because I like the carbonation, but also I also had this This habit of having to open the bottle, right? And what I found out pretty quickly is if I go to Costco or other, some other kind of discount store, if I go to one of those places, I, when they're on sale, I get those bottles for about 85 cents apiece, somewhere in there, just ballparking it, right? When I take my wife out to a movie during date night, date night is super important for us, right? And even though our budget is super tight, Date night is that one night we can live a little, not a lot. We don't go crazy, but we'll go to a movie, right? When I go to the movie theater, that 85-cent bottle of water is now like $4. I mean, heck, it was, it was $2.50 at the, at the convenience store. I go to a movie theater, now it's $4. If we really splurge, we get a chance to go to a concert or something. What I find out is that that concert, that bottle of Perrier or Pellegrino or whatever kind of seltzer water now runs like $6, maybe even $7.50. Here's the thing. That bottle of water has not changed. It's the same. It's the same brands. It's the same content, but it's where that bottle is at that it's valued more. And that's what you have to do with yourself. You have to figure out, where am I valued? And that's where you go. Do you want to be just a commodity item at 85 cents where there's 23 other bottles just like you in that case? And this, I mean, this is big on relationships, right? Yeah. I've got a client right now that keeps winding up in, you know, just one, you know, one escapade or one-night stand or whatever, time and time and time again. They keep coming back to me saying, hey, you know, this person used me. And yet they wind back up in that same situation with a different person. Doing the same exact thing, and they're not valued. You have to go where you're valued. You have to go where you're not just a commodity. Don't be that 85-cent bottle of water. Be that $7 bottle of water. Because, and it starts, it starts with valuing yourself. You have to value yourself. I'm trying to get parked here. You have to value yourself before anybody else is ever going to value you. Getting back over the theme of burning the boats. Sometimes the only way that you can move is when, is when you move forward. When you burn the boats, you drop everything from the past, whether that is what you did for a living, if it's those toxic relationships. I had to do it with a marriage one time. So I was in a highly toxic marriage. I mean, at the point where— at the point where I was actually fearful for my life. I really felt that my wife— in fact, I didn't feel, I knew my wife was trying to harm me. She'd already stabbed me once with a knife in the kitchen. Um, and then the second time was I was actually asleep and she came into the bedroom Um, I was working night shift at the time. I woke up and she is standing at the foot of the bed walking towards me with a hammer. I asked her what she was doing and she's like, I'm hanging up pictures. And yet there's no pictures in the room, no nails, nothing. All she had was a hammer. I was out of there. I was out of there pretty quick. I went from Abilene, Texas out to go live in South Jersey, following on with a military assignment. I left early because I was really fearful for my life. And when I left, at the time I had a Suzuki Samurai. Think of, think of like a half-size Jeep if you don't know what that is. If it didn't fit In that vehicle, it didn't go with me. I immediately filed for divorce and never looked back. Now, years and years later, as I look back, that was the right path. One, I'm alive, but number two, she's actually in prison today. And this is a person that didn't have any kind of a record. She wasn't sketchy or anything. Things I thought when I first met her were on the up and up, come to find out she had this really dark past. That is burning the boats. Burning the boats is moving forward, not looking back. I never looked back to try to reclaim property. Matter of fact, I let her— I signed over vehicles, I signed over property and walked away clean. And I can tell you the life that I walked into Was so much better. So anyway, the first live I've done on here, and I really appreciate even just the few of you that are watching. It's a way for me to kind of tell my story. It's a way for me to to work my way through. I've got other things I'm going to share. I'm actually a I'm a suicide survivor. And I do want to tell that story at some point. But anyway, thank you so much for, for being part of this. Now if I can figure out how to end it.