Life Lessons after a Near-Death Experience | Danny Bader

You know, when I was 28, almost 29 years of age, I had a tragic accident with a friend of mine. He and his brother owned a roofing company, and at the end of the day, he and I were lowering a metal ladder that we thought we were clear of the electric lines. And as. As fate, tragedy would have it, we hit those lines, and that had about 8 to 10,000 volts of electricity in it, and it came down the ladder and went into both of our bodies.

One of the things I've always loved about you is your zest for life. And, you know, it's interesting because I know that you've learned some interesting things about life. I want to know about the six minutes. What happened during six minutes?

Yeah, yeah, the six minutes. Eight minutes. Somewhere in that neighborhood. I don't know. The time really matters then. You know. When I was 28, almost 29 years of age, I had a tragic accident with a friend of mine. He and his brother owned a roofing company, and at the end of the day, he and I were lowering a metal ladder that we thought we were clear of the electric lines. And as fate, tragedy would have it, we hit those lines only by about 2 inches was the margin of human error. And that had about 8 to 10,000 volts of electricity in it, Steven. And it came down the ladder and went into both of our bodies, and it killed both of us. I was dead, as you said, there, six minutes, eight minutes. My buddy, who was on the scene then and delivered some CPR to me, he just estimated how long I was gone before I came back. My friend tragically died that day.

Yeah.

So, yeah, one of those experiences in life that. That certainly nobody wants. And, you know, we lost a wonderful guy that day. And, you know, I just had to, with the grace of God and a lot of friends, I had to just move through that dark time.

Yeah. What. I mean, you know, there's. There's always a lot of interest in what happens next. Right. So what happens when we leave this planet in that transition? Did you have any experience during that time at all from the. For the six to eight minutes that you were. Had passed away?

Yes, yes, absolutely. And it's. It's etched in my mind as soon as we hit the wire. First of all, I had, like. When we were looking to lower the ladder, I had kind of that. That feeling, that gut, that intuition, you know, that little voice maybe, that said, all right, this. Hold on for a minute, And I didn't pay attention to that. And, you know, we hit the wire and as soon as we did, there was just this tremendous surge in my body. Right. Went in my hands and I'd find out later it went out my feet, my socks and my boots and put holes in all of them. But I had an absolute common. An absolute peace. I knew that I was dying. I was aware of it. I knew that I was dead. And I had an absolute calm and a peace. And I was yelling. I saw the other brother coming down off the roof and I was yelling to him, you know, hey, get your brother. Get your brother. Go to your brother. I wasn't yelling for help or anything for me. So, you know, as I reflect on it, I realize now that I was there, but I really wasn't. I wasn't there in human form anymore. You know, my body is laying on the ground dead. And I'll tell you why we know that. And then my energy, my soul, my spirit, consciousness, life force, whatever somebody wants to call it, you know, based on my belief, I believe it's my soul, which is my divine essence. Right. Connected to God.

Sure.

And it just, you know, it left. It floated through a dark, easy, peaceful place. And it's very difficult to get human words around the experience because it wasn't an experience of this. Of this human world.

Yeah.

And I was joined with God and I knew, you know, that my. My human life was over. And I didn't go through a light, you know, I didn't go through a tunnel or see a light or any of the experience that a lot of other people have. Although I've heard an awful lot of people with similar experiences to me have.

That floating out of body kind of experience.

Yeah. Peaceful, loving. I had a woman once said to me, I was giving a talk, and she's like, you light tunnel. I'm like, no, that wasn't my experience. And she said, are you sure? I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty sure. No light, no tunnel. And she says, oh, I think most people have light tunnel. Yeah. Yo, lady, you know you're near death. I'm having mine. But there's no question in my mind now. I have absolute certainty that when our body stops, there's a part of us that continues on regardless of your religious beliefs. I don't. I don't think the human spirit is hardly human.

Yeah, right.

The human spirit's hardly human. We all have it. And I think, I believe how we live our lives, you know, towards goodness and towards love. I think there's going to be correlation between that and where this energy goes.

Sure.

You Know, and thankfully, mine was, you know, a wonderful experience. You know, the hard thing coming back was I had that experience, you know, and then you come back to this world, the pain and suffering and the anger and everything else. So I had, you know, when I was there conversing with God, I expressed concern for my mom and my girlfriend at the time, who's my wife now, for almost 30 years. And as soon as I expressed that love for them, I was right back in my body. That's when I was. I was alive again. I came back to life. And then I crawled over to my buddy who had been coming down the ladder. He was working on his brother. I started to work with him. He looked at me and said, how are you here? And I had really no idea what he was talking about. The paramedics came, the police, they moved us away. I went and sat against the fence. My feet are killing me. I looked down. My work boots have holes. I take them off. My socks have holes, I take them off. My feet have holes. A hole on each side. No blood coming out, though, Stephen, because it was cauterized.

Cauterized, probably. Yeah.

Yeah. So then the interesting thing is this. My. My other buddy comes over to me and he says, you know what happened? With a lot more language and concern than that. And I said, I guess we hit the wires. And he said, yeah, I know. I heard it. And here's the interesting part. I said, I know. I saw you coming down the ladder. I was yelling, do you get your brother? And he looks at me, said, what? I said, I was yelling to you, get your brother. He said, no, you didn't say anything. He said, I came to you first and rolled you over from fetal position, and your eyes are all rolled back, foam all over your mouth, no heart rate, no respiration. He said, you were dead. And I tried CPR for a couple of minutes, gave you up, ran across the street, called 91 1, ran back past you, still dead. And then he went to work on his brother. And then that's when I crawled up a few minutes later. So he would always estimate. I would always say, how long was I dead? And he would say, I don't know, man. Eight. Eight minutes, you know, but there's no question. He said, there's no question you were dead.

One of the. One of the interesting things about the story that I think is. Is so powerful, you know, you go through a process of experiencing an insurmountable love, okay? An insurmountable level of peace about your own journey. And obviously, when you're thrust back into your body. I know that the road ahead was actually fairly difficult in dealing with the loss of your friend and kind of rebuilding your life from there. I'm interested to know that, you know, obviously, after experiencing that level of love and concern and all of that on the other side, so to speak, why was it so hard? And this. This is just more of an inquisitive question. Why was it so hard to then maybe understand that maybe your. Your friend had been through that and it was a peaceful journey there.

Yeah. So when I. When I thought about him, you know, and his spirit showed up for me millions of times, and it still does to this day, because there's a fine line between here and there. You know, when I think about the peace that he experienced. Yeah, it's fine. What I was focused on was the loss for his three children. One was two months old, you know, for his wonderful wife, who is now widow. You know, I was focused on all the pain and the suffering there. So you're dealing with those human emotions, you know, and it was the same for me. It was the guilt and it was the, I don't deserve to be happy. It should have been me. I'm not married. I don't have any kids. You know, God screwed this one up. So it was so difficult for me to exist in this world because I was letting the struggles of this world kind of be the foundation of my day. Right. It was just like I'm just kind of walking on big chunks of ice, and I'm slipping and falling into the water. I didn't let the foundation of my faith. Right. I didn't let my faith be the foundation. And you still got to deal with those struggles. You know, it's not unicorns and rainbows when we got to deal with some crap in life, you know, it doesn't go away. It's just when you have a good, strong foundation of faith, you know, vision of the other side, of moving through the difficult times, then I believe we're much more effective in dealing with all those challenges and struggles, whatever they are. You know, you come back from a death experience, you're going through a divorce. You know, you lose a loved one, you got some financial situations, you lose a job, any of those struggles, you got to have a foundation, faith, family. Right. Friends. And I think it's also important to see yourself on the other side of this and say, that was tough, and now I'm through it.

Yeah. Let me ask you this. I mean, the subject of guilt is a very deep well, right. So a lot of folks, I would dare say that most of us, especially as we are even trying to transition in different levels in this, in this physical life, so to speak, are constantly, if not continually being held back by, by emotions like guilt and shame and judgment. What did this, in this experience teach you about guilt specifically? How have you been able to work through the guilt and kind of rebuild your life is not even a word like just transition, so to speak.

Sure. Yeah. I think it's just important to really understand that we're not perfect, you know, and guilt comes from a reflection of saying, wait a minute, I screwed up, I did something wrong. So if that's the case, you know, your belief is that you shouldn't do things wrong. You should never screw up your perfect. So if that's your belief, right. You violate it. That's where the guilt comes from. When we understand that the majority of us don't get out of bed in the morning and say, okay, I'm going to go make mistakes today and I'm going to be, you know, an asshole and I'll have all the guilt that comes with that. I think it's that understanding that things are going to happen. You're not perfect. And it's the awareness that comes along with that. Steven, as you and I have talked about before, that, okay, we're not perfect, so let's just heighten our awareness a little bit and really be a little more attentive to the choices that we're making, you know, whether we're, whether we're driving a car or whether we're engaged in a relationship with somebody that we love, you know, or in business dealings, you know, my, those really strong choices that I would make over and over again, not that I'd make one, and then a week later go, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. I should never have done that. So I think it's really foundation that, hey, this is life. There's going to be struggle. You're not perfect, I'm not perfect. You know, let's strive for perfection.

Yeah.

And we're never going to get there, but let's keep that as our, you know, our goal in the distance.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've heard people say that have had massive transitions, not necessarily a near death experience or, or even a death experience and come back to life experience. Right. That's, you know, kind of what we're, that's where we started out at, but just the transitions from different levels of overcoming various levels of Adversity is the ability to recognize the pattern or the previous patterns and even be able to set up, you know, recognizing a previous pattern versus now setting up a future pattern. Right. Have you found it easier in the last several years, last decade or so to kind of recognize patterns of behavior or patterns of thought that you can manipulate and change?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think you touched on it there. Patterns of behavior, Patterns of thought. It's more the patterns of thought. You know, this from your struggles. You and I chatted a little bit in Nashville. It's the patterns of our thoughts. Right. Because the behaviors are going to come from that. Right. We're going to think a certain way. That little voice or voices in our head is going to start rattling around, you know, and it's going to be feeding us our narrative and that's going to put us into an emotional state and then it's from the emotional state that we act. That's what I believe and most people research would support that. So it's really pay attention to what you're thinking. And I have an acronym I use H U T HUT which means hold useful thoughts. Hold useful thoughts. Now, it's not to say that you're going to wake up every day and it's going to be useful or you're going to engage in a conversation with somebody. It's the awareness, the self coaching to go, wait a minute, these thoughts aren't going to serve me well. Okay, I got them, I put them away. Now what's my strategy to get more into more useful thinking. You know, and I always tell people I worked with a young lacrosse high school team back here a couple of weeks ago. And when you think about the word hut, I said, what does that mean? Almost everybody says it's what the quarterback says before they snap the ball. Right now they say Omaha and a whole bunch of other things, but. Right. Peyton Manning. But really, you know, hut is a military term and they use it to snap the ball. So it's like all of that happens before the action. So if we can hold useful thoughts. Hut. Before the action, we're going to take. More likely we'll take the ones that, that we want to want to take. And even if that doesn't turn out the way we want, it's okay because we go, hey, you know what? I acted from my values and a source of goodness and I would do it again. So I can't really have guilt about that.

Yeah, for sure. Well, it's interesting, you know, it's one of the things I Mentioned to you, we were. We were catching up in Nashville, which, you know, I think I felt like we were brothers from another mother. I was just a little shorter, that's all.

And, you know, one of the things that I told you, I was recently on the. I've been on this journey, like, for me, Jesus is truth. He's the, you know, he's. He's the way, the truth and the life kind of scenario. But I've also had this real instant realization.

That there is certain spiritual energetic tones, if you will. As I've been getting to beginning to meditate more often, I'm beginning to strive less and acquire more, which is kind of a weird vibe, you know, having faith in all things that they're going to work out in my favor, all this kind of stuff, you know. So I've been in this interesting journey of trying to translate the two languages together because I know they fit and they overlap to a certain degree, right? Without. Without necessarily diluting my faith. In fact, I'm actually trying to intensify my faith through the process of understanding these other things that, you know, in a human form. Robbie, I don't understand it. You talked about, obviously, experiencing a vast amount of peace and joy and love all at the same time that human words really can't put together, which tells me that that's available to us at any given moment as long as we're kind of open and receptive to it to a degree. How has this shaped your faith? Because I know we share a similar Christian faith for the most part. And. And that experience, have you found yourself trying to. In the same transition of trying to translate certain aspects?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I was raised Catholic, and I still practice Catholicism. That's. It works for me. And, you know, it's not perfect. I don't believe any religious organization is perfect because it's made up of people. And as we get back to what we.

Water bottle down, Stephen, it's all good. We keep that in, right?

Because I'm.

We keep it in.

It's real time.

We do the authenticity perfect, and I spill my water bottle. So. So, yeah, I think because we talk about. About not being perfect.

You know, we got to understand in our faith. You know, you asked me about how does it impact my faith? You know, none of the organizations in which we're involved are really perfect because they're made up of people. Right.

So the way that my faith really evolved was from that, you know, growing up where God's an old dude with a big gray beard sitting up on a chair and he's saying, yeah, kind of like Gandalf. Yeah, don't steal M and Ms. From your mom and dad. You know, and don't call your sister a bad name. You know, it's evolved to, you know, God is not up there so much judging me. God is loving me and continuing to put me on the path. And if I am sincerely sorry, you know, for times that I've come up short and I haven't lived into the teachings that you and I believe, then that's okay, get back onto it, you know, here's how you know you want to live. So my faith has evolved where Jesus is my guy too. I believe he is who he is. And, you know, I believe that that spirit. Right. The Holy Spirit, is in all of us. And it is a tremendous source of living a good life and moving through difficulties. It is. It all begins with spirit. You know, in my mind.

Yeah.

No meditations like you and I talked about. You know, I meditated this morning, almost meditate every morning. And, and in the day as well.

You know, when we meditate, there's. There's a gland and there's a part of our brain. I had a guy on my podcast, Dr. Andrew Newberg out of Pennsylvania, that talked about this meditation. And. And there's. There's a part of our brain that is connected to our self identity. You're Stephen, I'm Danny. You know, I'm a human. And that. That begins to. It's parietal lobe. Parietal lobe. It's called when you go into a deep meditation. Right. Monks or whatever, when they study their brain and hook it up, that part of the brain that gives me an awareness of being Danny or you being Stephen, that starts to go kind of black. Activity ceases in there.

Yeah.

So it's when you get into that deep meditation, that's where I believe. I always say spirit resides in stillness. That's it. The spirit resides in stillness.

Yeah. My grandfather told me all the time, he's like, be still.

Yeah.

Which is kind of hard for me. You've seen me walk around places, right. I walk at lightning, lightning speed and pace, you know. But yeah, no, I'm always interested. I'm always curious about the various levels of journeys because, you know, as I was growing up.

Faith wasn't really faith, it was more religion.

Right.

It was a lot of do this, don't do that. If you do this, you're going like straight up going to hell, fire and brimstone, kind of a Baptist, kind of Environment and.

Right.

You know, and. But the more I've developed and meditated and prayed and kind of spent time alone and tried to be still, the more I'm seeing a greater influence on the reason that, you know, in theory, God hates sin is because sin hurts us.

Right?

It prevents us from being all that we were kind of like, really created to kind of be. And I do believe. I don't know. I don't know if you share this belief or not, but I do believe we are all put here, come here, with a destiny or a purpose in mind. And I feel like life is all about discovering what that thing is and then operating in that thing.

Yeah, I think it is, for sure. And for me, it always comes back to love, right? Because when I expressed. When I was dead and I was joined with God, when I express love for my. Because I had that, you know, that proverbial choice, stay or go. You heard many people say they felt like they could stay or go back to this human existence. And I expressed love and that. That's what brought me back, you know, I didn't say, oh, no, I never got that Porsche convertible. I never got the, you know, the house on the beach. It was just all about love. And that's the key. When you talk about our purpose, I believe it's that it's to get to the highest point where we operate from love. And then, you know, we do other things to make money. And, you know, we use our talents in life, whether we're a speaker, a writer, a doctor, an accountant, you know, whatever, you know, you know, roofer, bricklayer, you know, we got to make money. And I believe that it all just comes back to that, you know, how much can we operate from that place of love? When you talk about faith, I think it's really cool. Faith is defined as belief without proof, right?

So I've never heard that definition, but I like it.

Yeah, I love it, too. That's what works for me. Faith, you know, have faith. Right? Well, give me proof, you know, and that's. That's what Thomas asked, right? Jesus. They said, hey, we saw Jesus. And he's like, I don't believe you. Give me proof. You know, faith would have been him to say, oh, my gosh, cool. How was it? Where, you know, I'll trust that he comes back. So for me, people, you know, they'll often ask me and say, hey, you know, do you wish it never happened? And I say, no. And they look at me like I said, I wish my friend didn't die. But in terms of the experience that I had.

You know, it's really provided an awful lot of growth for me. And now I know when my body stops again, that that part of me is going to continue on. You know, I'm in no hurry to die. I love my life. I love my family. You know, I love, you know, people like you and everything else. I just, I have that trust.

Yeah, right.

I have that trust that that's where we're going and we have to stay engaged in this life right now. You know, we're going to go when it's our time. After the accident, I had. Gosh, I had suicidal thoughts. It was probably a day or two away when I went to the Outer Banks. I write about it in that book, Back to Life. But, yeah.

We just have to, you know, we just have to play it out, you know, taking your own life is not the answer at all.

Yeah. Let me ask you this, obviously, and I'm going to jump in the Back to life for sure, because, you know, your work is just awesome. You're a great writer, great storyteller. Real, real, real authentic. Right. You're not trying to sell or kind of, you know, push people in a certain direction. It's more along the lines of, let me. I just want to love you. Ironically, it's kind of how it comes across. And I feel like that's one of the reasons that you and I connected when we were over in Nashville at that event is because I think I can pick up. I don't know about you, but I can pick up in the room when other people are already operating, at least at a bare bones, or if not a greater state of love. I see you. They carry themselves a specific way. They love a specific way. They carry a certain countenance about them, a certain brightness to them kind of thing. Are you able to sense things like that as well? I mean, did you end up picking up a spiritual gift? I picked up one with an almost suicide attempt. Have you picked up any spiritual gifts or any. Anything that you're able to operate in now that you didn't have before?

Yeah, you know, I think. I think what I've probably picked up, and I'll say this humbly, and I, you know, I thank God and spirit for it. I think what I've picked up is the ability to talk to people about what you and I are talking about and about this, this. This spirit, this divine energy that makes our body go. You know, we got our heart and our brains and our lungs and, yeah, they contribute to our body going, yeah, it's the other energy. It's the divine energy. It's your soul. It's your spirit, consciousness, universe. That's what really makes us go. And when it's time for that to go back to source, right, to God, that's when the body, you know, it's over here.

So I think what I've picked up is my ability through spirit, just to talk about that and to put people at ease and not to preach at them, but just to say, hey, here's what I experienced. I kind of think you got the same thing going on. So if you need to pay attention to that, you feel on that, I would highly recommend it. It's funny, you talk about this. Did you pick up something from this accident trauma? There was a guy, and I tell the story sometimes. There was a guy in Colorado Springs years ago. I was doing a workshop. I was working for another company, and I kind of weaved my story in a little bit. He came up to me at lunch and he said, I had a similar experience. And he goes on to tell me about. He was in a horrific car accident on a motor or motorcycle car. Didn't see him. He flew like 50 in a coma for a long time and flatlined a few times. And he asked me the same question. He said, did you pick up anything? Are you different or anything? And I explained to him how I thought I was. And then I said, what about you? And he said it was funny, Steven, because you talked about the energy around people. Yeah, he said, I can see people's energy. I can see their aura. And he went on to explain it, and he talked about this one woman that was just the brightest white ever. It's the only person he ever saw that was this bright, bright white. And he just said, oh, my gosh, I just wanted to stay with her forever. And then he talked about a guy who walked into a party that was just evil black around. He said, man, away from that dude. And so I'm looking at him, and I don't know why I ever did this, but I look and I said, well, what about me?

Yeah.

No sooner was that question out than I'm thinking, that's the dumbest thing in the world. Away from this dude. And he looked at me and he smiled. He said, it's light gray.

And I said.

Light gray.

Light gray. I said, I'll take it. I'll take it.

That's hilarious. Oh, my gosh. Oh, man. Well, let me ask you this.

You know, we. We talked about the. The Experience. We talked about the guilt. We talked about the shame. We talked about the loss. What we haven't really talked about is how did you get from loss into life? How do you know? How did you, you know, get yourself out of that area? Was there a certain level of forgiveness that you had to find within yourself? Like. Like, kind of what's at the heart of it? Because I think a lot of people are struggling to kind of get past certain levels of various levels of adversity. And I feel like sometimes we can give them the tools or the keys to begin to take that journey for themselves.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really important. You know, a couple things for me, it was to come back to my faith in God and to realize and let my narrative say, hey, God didn't make this happen. God didn't make you guys lower the ladder in there. You know, he or she could have prevented it. And that's not how life unfolds. So life is going to unfold, and it's human nature of accidents and, you know, making progress, poor choices, and God's there to support you moving through that. Yeah, so that was the key for me to get back and say, okay, put me on your shoulders, man. You know, get, you know, the old two sets of footprints and then ones away. God said, that's when I'm carrying it. So it was that and it was to let my friends and family back in. You know, I had so many beautiful people I do, that wanted to help me, and I would let them in, but only on a kind of periphery. You know, my mind was, they don't know what happened. They don't know what I'm going through. They don't understand all of those things. So nothing really, you know, happened in a day where you get better. Yeah, it's just that journey to say, I'm going to get through this. How? Now is the best way. And again, you got to surround yourself with people that bring you joy, that bring you faith, that bring you good energy, you know, that bring you resilience. Because there is a transfer of energy through us as people. You know, the one thing that clicked, you know, and I wrote, when I wrote the book Back to Life, Steven, as you and I have talked about, I started to write it like first person, here's what happened to Danny Bader, and it just didn't feel right. And somebody said, why don't you make up a story, you know, fictionalize this, base it on what happened, and then, you know, put story in there to get the point across to people, to the reader. So I did. But the one thing, many things in there are still truthful. The one is when I was in the Outer Banks, I was in a really bad place and I was looking at a hose because I was going to buy it and put it in my tailpipe. I didn't buy it. And I went out and got drunk and I'm walking back to my motel room and there's a phone booth. And I went into the phone booth.

They still had them then.

Yeah. Well, when I talk to young kids, they're like, what is that? I'm like, we go in and talk to people and they're like, FaceTime. I'm like, no, not FaceTime. You got to spend money. And they're talking about Venmo and everything else. Oh, my God. Anyhow, the moment that kind of was the foundation for me to think a little bit differently. My mom said to me, when are you coming home? We can't wait to see you. And I had a big lump in my throat thinking about what I'm thinking about. And I said, I love you, Mom. I'll be home soon. And I hung up and I walked out of that phone booth and the little voice in my head said, I wonder what it's going to be like when I get better. And that's that vision. Right. So that was kind of the moment that said, all right, you're not going that direction. We're going this direction.

Yeah.

And you got a hell of a lot of work to do. And that's where we're headed.

That is such a powerful question, because I think you're right. I think we all think no one knows what we're going through. No one can support us. I think we all go through that. I call it a negativity cycle. Right. It's that kind of woe is me kind of thing. Even though. And it's. And I say that in a non judgmental way for all of us because, Lord know, I've done it many times myself, but from a place of, you know, being able to change the quality of the question always changes the quality of the answer kind of scenario.

Right.

You know, and I think that was really powerful. Ironically, I was able to escape a near suicide attempt with a woman by the name of Susan Batts, AKA Mama Wama was her nickname. And I had a very similar experience. The only difference was she was on the phone with me.

Mm.

And then she said something very. After fighting back and forth for a while, she. She made me repeat 11 words after her and had me screaming at the top of my lungs atop of this bridge like a crazy person. And, you know, and the words were, this too shall pass, and what comes next will be greater. And I had to promise her that I would call her at 9am the next morning. But I was really curious about, well, what comes next will be greater. What is that?

Yeah, sure.

You know, so I find there's some similarities there, which I think is really cool, which is what is the next step? You know, what, what is what. What would life look like if. If or. Or when? Because I think you use the word when. When I'm better. Yeah, I think that's a powerful statement.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great story. You two, you tell two with those questions because, you know, that's the vision piece. You know, the model that I have in the book is called Jackrabbit. And at the core of that model, what the main principle is develop vision.

Yeah.

Because I think what happens is when we have the ability to see something that's not real. So it's you seeing yourself calling her at 9am in the morning, which means you didn't. You didn't jump off the bridge.

Yeah.

When we see something that's not real, our brain loves completion. Right. It loves to close the loop. So that's the power of vision. Right. Whether you're hitting a golf shot and you've seen it first, and the brain goes, okay, now let's do that.

Yeah.

When it sees you going, get off the bridge, call this woman tomorrow. Okay, let's do that. Danny, get in the car and drive home and put your life back together. Okay, let's do that. That's the power of vision. I mean, it's not. There's not bullshit there, man. This is how your brain works. Sit there and imagine what needs to be real and then let that emotionally charge you to say, okay, now what are the actions I need to take to produce that? I think that's just a core principle of life and serves us well.

Oh, absolutely. Well, I'm curious. So why Back to Life? Why did you decide to write it in a now environment? What do you think the world is needing? You know, I know the way you write is the books call themselves to you and you write the books that calls itself to you. What made about this particular book? Called it. Called it to you?

Yeah, you know, it was. I was out there and I was telling the story. I didn't write the book until 2012. So it was 20 years after the accident, and I Would, you know, as I got into coaching and training, and I would tell the story. And then I was on a plane back from Chicago one night, Thursday night, and met this young professional woman next to me, and we entered in a conversation, and I kind of shared my story because she had a good energy. And I thought, all right, cool, let me just chat with this woman. And she looked at me and she said, you have to write that book. You have to write that book. I never saw her again. I never texted, emailed anything. She just looked at me with such an intensity in her eyes and a commitment and a love. And I thought, man, I got to write this. So I wrote it, and it was called Back From Heaven's Front Porch when it was initially published. And then a few years ago, I got the rights back, and I thought, you know, my brand and all is really back to life.

Yeah.

So I thought, all right, let me just put this story out here and see how it might be able to support people on their journey. And the majority of people aren't going to lower ladder and get electrocuted, and that's okay. Our struggles are similar in that, you know, they're struggles.

Yeah, well, yeah, because we're talking about guilt and shame, and we're talking about all the same emotional baggage that I think holds most of us back. You know, it's. I was. I was reading a book last night with my wife that we just. We're doing one together now. It's one of the things that we do to kind of, you know, connect. And there was. This term is like, you know, a baby doesn't know that it's had guilt and shame and kind, because it hasn't had it. It's. It's already in its perfect lovingness, if you will. And then along the way, we learned that, you know, we. Or we learn or we tell ourselves, well, we're not lovable, we're not worthy of this. You know, we're. We're the essence of our past. We're this, that, and the other thing, and we never let go of it. And I find it interesting that the. All the work that you've done is about helping people let go of that. Even creating the jackrabbit methodology, like, it's a way to help people kind of break that. That loop or that cycle. What is your favorite part about the jackrabbit theology?

Well, you know, I kind of like them all. It's develop vision, be still, know thyself, seek support, and evolve. They're the five principles that I Kind of. And they've been around forever. It's just Danny Bader's spin on them. Right. I didn't invent anything. I think vision's powerful. The other side, though, is knowing yourself. Because, you know, I've failed, I guess, by judgment. I've had a good vision for my year, right. With my health and my wealth and my relationships and everything else. If you don't know yourself and pay attention to the thoughts and beliefs in there, they're all supported, right. If I put this bold vision out here of getting the book made into a movie with screenplay or healing this relationship, if my thoughts and my story don't accompany that, it's not going to happen. So they're all kind of connected. So for me, I think, develop a vision, see where you're going, and then monitor your thoughts. That's the best way for progress. Now, being still, meditation, right, is connected to helping you monitor your thoughts. So all the principles kind of go together. You might have to put a little bit more emphasis on one or the other, depending on where you are.

Yeah, well, let me ask you this. I mean, because there I agree with you about knowing thyself, right? Or no, I heard somebody say it's knowing thyself is knowing the self or something like that, which is kind of a play on words. But I am curious, what does it mean to you to know thyself? Like, what does it mean? Because I think a lot of people was like, yeah, they keep telling me I'm supposed to know thyself. What does that mean?

Yeah, I think that one has, you know, an awful lot of layers and an awful lot of strings to it. So I think it's your spiritual relationship, number one. You got to know yourself connected to the divine. Then you got to look and say, okay, what are the values, the human values that I want to build my life around? Right? And then we have the vision around that. And then knowing yourself is always, what's my thinking? What is my thinking right now? So it's kind of the, you know, the vision, the values, your faith in something bigger, and then really watching what you're saying to yourself. And, you know, you have to look at yourself in the past. How do I know myself about my past? Where do I still need to do some work? Not that you're going back there. You're doing the work in the here and now. You're just making sure that there's no residue from the past. And then, you know, you're in the now, and then you know yourself as okay, who do I want to be, you know, in the next month or two months? How do I want to continue to evolve into what I believe to be the most loving version of Danny Bader that I can be?

How can I get there? And then, oh, yeah, you got to make money and you got to build business and you got things to take care of. And then you look at your roles as well. Father, husband, son, brother, friend. So knowing thyself, I would say for me, of the five principles is the one where I spend an awful lot of time with people when we're coaching. And it's really good to do that first before you write your vision. Because if you write your vision and say, here's my year, and I go, wait, you said you value this, and it really is not your vision all that much. So unless this value is absolutely on automatic pilot, which some are, you might want to get a little something in your vision here about how you lived into that value more.

Yeah. Now, when you're coaching and working with people, do you help them better understand what they really want? Because I find a lot of people are striving after certain things not because they actually want them, because they're trying to please someone else. And either past or present, or even in their future, their parents, their grandparents, or their aunt, their uncle that told them they should do X, Y, and Z, you know, that, you know, maybe they're supposed to be a really talented plumber, but they're saying, no, you have to be an attorney or have to, you know, have to be an artist or whatever. How do you help your clients do that?

Yeah. I think in knowing yourself there, you've got to understand, as you said, what's the motive, Right. What's the motivation for whatever it is that you want? And for me, I always try to bring back. It should bring you a sense of joy. And joy is that internal feeling of pleasure where you're just good with yourself. So if you're looking to make all this money to satisfy somebody else, like I write about in my books, there's a character, Sammy, that went to Wall Street. She just didn't have love of her dad. So she's doing all these things and having massive success to try to say, hey, I'm good. You know, he wanted a son. He didn't get one, he got a daughter.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's just. You really. You gotta take some time and just understand why do I really want to structure my life like this? And then what happens is there you understand more of your personality. To say, oh, I'm more of a pleaser. I really want to be accepted and liked. And if you trace that back, it's probably because at some point you had an experience where you weren't accepted or liked.

Yeah.

Okay, let's leave that in the past and say, do you want people around in your life that accept and love you because of this, or do you want them because they just love you?

Yeah.

That's what you want to get back to. So it's a lot of work, you know, to know ourselves, and it goes on forever.

Yeah.

You never do all the principles.

So, so good.

Engaging with them, right?

Yeah, man. So good. Let me ask you one final question before I let you run. But. Yeah. How has this changed your. Your pursuit of, you know, because I feel like especially until we become spiritually aware or self aware, we end up striving after stuff. Right. How has this shaped your perception of material things as a whole after going through all of this journey and everywhere, everything that you've done up to this date?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I never really had a big focus on money and material things, you know, it was more that pursuit of, you know, living a good life, being a good person and all of that. Early on, you know, I thought, gosh, I get out of college, I go work for a company for 30 or 40 years, I sell my soul to the man, you know, I have my 401k to retire. That was my mindset, you know. Then as I got older and had kids, and I'm like, okay, cool, I got to make some money too, you know, and for. If you, if you acquire things, that's all cool. Why am I acquiring them? Do I want to acquire them? Because it's something that I enjoy. It provides great memories, it serves other people. Or do I want to acquire them? So when I drive down people, oh, my God, look at that guy's car, you know? Or do I just enjoy that car, you know, and I enjoy letting other people drive it who might not be able to drive it. Something like that. And I. I have an old 2007 Jeep with 250,000 miles on it.

Yeah.

You know, the first four door, I put the top down. I'm quite happy in that. I don't need.

You just need to let that hair blow something, right?

Yeah, yeah. I don't need the convertible Range Rover. That's cool. Whoever does.

Yeah. So I think it's just really, you know, again, just getting. Sit in silence, pay attention to who you are, you know, think about what are your beliefs around when the body stops, you know, And I would just offer to you that's, you know, it's a beautiful experience.

Yeah.

But, you know, that's. That's really it. It's okay to engage in this world and make as much and have as much as you want. Just pay attention to the process by which you're. You're generating all that. Yeah, that's what I think I have.

I love hanging out with you. You're always such a. You're always so much light and love all at the same time.

Seriously, where can everybody else find out more about you, more about the books, all that good stuff?

Yeah. Thank you, Stephen. Right back at you, man. I appreciate our friendship and I look forward to it. I look forward to it.

Absolutely.

The best place to go is dannybater.com and from there, you know, you could click on my speaking and my keynotes and workshops, and then you could click on books and see all the books. All my social media connections are there, so you could go out to YouTube and Instagram if you wanted to. Just check me out and see if what I offer you is valuable. Yeah. But I've certainly enjoyed being with you. And I wish everybody listening, all the audience out there, just take one or two things away from our conversation and begin to apply it and experiment with it. And I just wish you all the best. Anybody listening? Just all the best in this life.

Rock on, dude. Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on. Can't wait to do it again.

You got it, Steven. Take care, brother.

All right, see you, buddy. I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

You can't really fight a battle if you don't know what you're dealing with. You pretend that there's no chinks in the armor, that there's no issues, that there's no dragon out there and everything's good. And you put up these, these rose colored glasses, man, you're really in for some hurt. Because that enemy, it's there in a lot of different forms. And the sooner you recognize it, the sooner you can formulate a strategy to deal with it.