Why Relationships Are So Important | Journey Principles Podcast 021

Welcome to the Journey Principles where we show you how to go from stuck to unstoppable with life strategies that work. Now here's your host and creator of the Transform youm Framework, Stephen Scoggins.

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Journey Principles. I'm so glad you're here. As you know, we're here to make take you from stuck to unstoppable, giving you life mastery strategies at work. They're simple, they're easy to follow, and our goal is to give you actual progress day after day after day. As you also know, we've got Connor Crafton here, Director of Connections. He's always my little co host in here, trying to make sure that little. Yeah, he. Well, I say little. He's much taller than me. But my biceps are bigger. I'm just kidding.

Yeah, right. You got one of those things right. I'm still working on the biceps for sure.

No, in all seriousness, you know, we're here to hopefully help you continue on your journey and help you actually make progress. So much of doing this and doing it well is actually taking the time to just take the next step day after day after day after day. And lo and behold, you look back 12 months, 24 months, 18 months from now, and you'll be like, holy cow. I have actually come a really long way. Which is kind of how you got started with us back in the day, obviously is met me for four hours and went toe to toe with me for a while. We've shared that story before.

Oh, yeah.

You know, but ever since then, you've kind of been attached the hip to a certain degree.

I try to be.

Yeah.

I heard get a mentor for so long. And I was struggling. You know, I had studied every personal development book under the sun. I mean, obviously not all of them, but like I was just a complete personal development junkie. And I think there's a lot of people out there who are like that.

Why do you think that is?

I don't. I don't know. I think it's enticing for ambitious people to want to learn as much as they can, but it can also become something that is, I think, I mean, it became somewhat of an addiction for me to where instead of taking action, I wanted to learn more information. And a lot of it was tied to fear of failure and basically fear that I didn't have the right information. So I spent a lot of time just studying stuff because after my first few years of trying to figure out this entrepreneurship thing by myself, I was like, okay, I think I'm missing some stuff. I'm not making much progress or I'll make a little bit of progress and then I'll lose it all very quickly. And I was just getting frustrated, so I always heard.

So since you've been doing consistent steps, what, what. What kind of fruit is that beard?

Well, I've only been really, really, really implementing the things that you teach. And with the consistency for really, I'd say. I'd say close to a year now. And. And in that year, though, I just sent you a text message, like, a little. I think it was like a week ago. And I was like, dude, I'm amazed with how much progress you can make when you just focus on every day, like, individually. Like, I wake up every day now and I try to say, okay, how can I make as much progress towards my goals?

I use.

I used to just.

But I've been in your life for almost, what, almost four or five years now.

It took me forever to really grab it.

Why did it take you three years to take action on what I've been teaching or been sharing with you?

I don't know. That's the mystery.

The reason I'm even asking, because I'm wondering if, you know, our audience and our tribe that we've been hopefully pouring into for so long, if they're just digesting information right now and they're not taking action.

And I did that for years. So I would say that if that is you, you know, don't. Don't lose hope and think that that's gonna be you forever, because I have had that struggle and I'm slowly coming out of it. I still have some ways to go. You know, I'm not quite as effective as you are. I still love to read a good book and watch a good YouTube video, listen to a podcast. But whereas you seem to just be action, action, action, action.

I do all my studying in the car.

Well, there you go. So I guess you have a routine, right?

I absolutely have a routine.

So I've been working on putting all that stuff together, but there's a lot of people out there who just feel like they've been study, personal development and all these gurus for several years. And I think it's probably common to feel frustrated because when you've been studying all these things, you have all this conflicting information. One guy says, morning routine is the way to go. Another person's like, no, no, no, no routine. Just give yourself freedom. And there's all this conflicting information. So what I like about what we're doing is we're trying to provide as much additional context. Sorry. To that noise. As possible so that maybe we can go a little bit deeper on some of those things.

Well, think about it. One of the things that I was incredibly pass. When you were begging me to start a YouTube channel, get back on doing podcasts and put myself back out there, which I totally did not want to do, but much I was more. I was just as happy writing books and writing blogs and not being on camera and not like, none of that.

Which is common from what I've read, for influencers.

Yeah. And it's not even about the. You know, there was a time in my life where I had the. What do they call it? The imposter syndrome. But I had to work through that. Now I know that what I have to share is valuable for a lot of people because I've had a lot of people that have benefited from some of the things that I've learned and shared with them and my experience and all that stuff. But one of the things that held me back and jumping back on camera and stuff like that was because I felt like the influencer space was so just convoluted. Like, it. Like what. I think I was even sharing this with you yesterday, you know, because a lot of the subjects we talk about, others have talked about before, and I was like, look, I don't want to be an echo of people's voices. Well, right.

I mean, I want to.

I want to. If I'm going to do this, I want to be a voice. And I have my own thoughts, concerns, ideas, concepts that I. That I think actually work because I've applied them and they work for me. Whereas I feel like a lot of other strategists or quasi strategists come at it from a place of just trying to get. Get famous or get known or whatever. And, you know, I feel like that that's a disservice to the audience. I feel like you're not actually adding value to the audience. It's. There's no reason to be doing this.

Yeah. And I mean, that's a real possibility. And there's also a possibility that, you know, a lot of them like to keep it high level for other reasons. I've noticed that when I was going through and studying all these things, the big thing that I always wanted more of was step by step, practical advice.

And that's what we decided we were going to do. So at the end of each podcast, there should be a minimum of three to five steps you take at the end of each YouTube video, three to five steps you can take.

We're trying to go practical and provide that addition because we might talk about mindset and the biggest difference between success and failure and all the things that everyone else talks about. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who do break it down.

I really don't want to talk about that stuff.

I know, I know, I know everyone talks about it, but we really want to try to provide just some additional context and dive a little bit deeper. Because I think that at least for me, you know, we're literally creating what I always wanted to study. And that's what I love about our dynamic as well, is you have the master and the apprentice. You know, I am the learner and the student.

Every master is still an apprentice to somebody.

Yeah, I mean, we should quote that.

Every master.

That's a very good quote. I see you go into your mentors all the time like, like Ramsey and, you know, a number of other people that just.

Great. So, yeah, Rory and all his team, aj, all those guys.

Oh, yeah.

You know, I think it's interesting that, you know, we brought that up because, you know, one of the top. Today's topic we're going to talk about is why relationships are so important to life. Mastery.

Right.

In this entire time while we've been chatting, first to get to the point, and I think it. I wanted to give, make, take, open it up with dialogue because I felt like we needed to give context to how powerful relationship can be. You know, I just said that, you know, every, every master is an apprentice of someone. Right. So that by definition means there's a relationship in place, whether it's a virtual relationship, whether it's a face to face relationship, whether it's a relationship that's formed just by listening to podcasts and ebooks and all this kind of stuff, it's still a relationship. And one of the biggest things that I've understood a long time ago is.

Everyone has a boardroom of their mind, their heart, and their spirit. So there's a boardroom in our brain or. And a lot of times these people that are in our brain, people that are sitting at our. In fact, let's make an analogy like this, rather than me try to share it the way I've understood it. So I did a lot of keynote speaking for a long time with the US Air Force down in Seymour Johnson Air Force Base and a couple other places, National Day of Prayer and a few other things. One of the things that they did when they heard about what I was doing and how I was going about doing it. This is pushing five years ago was I said, hey, look, we've got a resiliency program, and we think you should come check it out. We actually think you'll really like the content. And the resiliency program came out of a need of the military for having suicides. Suicides run rampant through the military. And I have my own thoughts of why that's occurring and how to combat it. Some of my ideas have been implemented, others have not. But that's okay. You know, being someone who had a suicide attempt myself, it's much easier for me to have greater perspective than someone who is sitting behind a computer reading articles.

Sure.

So that being said, one of the things that they had was they had something called the boardroom. So envision a boardroom. You can envision for just a minute you're on the Apprentice show or some other business savvy show where at this table, you've got chairs of your key leaders.

It's like the round table.

It's like the round table Camelot. You can look at it that way. But essentially it's a. It's a table of counselors and coaches, mentors, if you will. Okay. What people don't realize is they get to choose who sits at that table.

So you get to choose who your inner circle is that you take life advice, strategies. And.

And most people aren't aware of that alone, which is why they typically just keep relationships.

Why aren't they aware of that?

I think it comes down to self awareness. I mean, the average person, you know, we've talked about overset. What? Close to 70% of the population doesn't really spend time getting to know themselves.

Okay.

And because they don't spend time getting to know themselves, they're unaware of their blind spots. They're unaware of their strengths. They're unaware of their struggles. They're unaware of their opportunities. They're unaware of their potential. They're unaware of their purpose. They're unaware of their meaning and significance and authenticity. And the list goes on and on and on.

Course.

Right. Which is why we beat on self awareness over and over and over and over again.

That's another one of our three core pillars.

Yeah. I mean, because if you, if, if you're not self aware, you're not gonna know what you're missing. If you don't know what you're missing, how will you ever find it? Yeah. Okay. Which means keeping people stuck. Now we use stuck to unstoppable is like Almost like a buzzword. Okay, but let me. The way I look at stuck means you're unable or unwilling to make progress. Okay. That's the definition.

I like how you said unable or unwilling.

Yeah.

Because I've, I've. I found that most of the time it's the latter. And, and, and you might think that you're unable because you're telling yourself that you're unable. Going back to the LIM discussion. But most people who believe, you know, I can't do it, they're telling themselves that. And really they're unwilling to do it.

Absolutely. Unstoppable, on the other hand, just means you're making consistent progress. Yeah. No matter what life throws at you, it's not that you sidestep it or blindsided or beat through it, but there in my life.

One of the words that just repetitively is, around me is unstoppable. My parents, when I was young, like 2 or 3 years old, used to nickname me Steamboat. And they would say you were Steamboat because you had one switch off and on. And when you were on, stuff like that. When you're on, you're unstoppable. You were relentless. You would not stop.

And when you were off, and when.

I was off, I was sleeping kind of thing. So progress tends to bring purpose alongside of it. Okay. If you're making progress, you feel a sense of purpose, you feel a sense of opportunity, you feel like you're going somewhere. Right. So when we say stuck to unstoppable, we're basically saying taking you from where you are today to where you want to be by helping you make consistent progress. Of course. Right. Well, if you think about this boardroom of the mind, if you're unaware of the people who are whispering in your ear, and I use whispering lightly, it could be whispering, talking, listening, whatever, you know, with the eyes. The eyes and the ears are the windows to the soul, so to speak. Right. The eyes are the windows to the soul. The ears are wisdom to the brain. So you got to take those with a grain of salt. But if you think about your boardroom of the mind, who is sitting at your table will definitely influence how you behave. So in my life right now, for example.

When it comes to financial matters, I have a financial advisor, alright? Based out of Tennessee, David Adams and Raymond James. And so if you need financial advice, he's a good guy. He works with a lot of athletes and entertainers and stuff like that. Obviously, being from Nashville, if I'm looking for financial basics, I'm going to go to my friends at Ramsey Solutions. Right. They're great folks, and they've pretty much mastered the art of helping you get out of debt and stay out of debt.

You're saying you don't just want to have a round table, but you want to fill your round table with people who are specialists in specific areas that you would like to acquire for your own life?

Essentially, yeah. So my personal roundtable has nine chairs.

Wow, you've encountered.

Yes, there is a chair for every single pillar. Okay. And then there's a chair for.

My faith.

Right.

My faith guides me. My faith brought me here. My faith is why I built the Journey Principles Institute. It's what factored in creating trance from.

You to add context. Real quick. What he means by pillar is the eight pillars of life. So we talked about that in one of our early episodes. There's eight core areas of life. Your finances, your.

Yeah. If you're just tuning in now, please go check out one of the previous podcasts or the YouTube.

Yeah, we've tried to do these in a chronological way where if you watch every podcast, you know, if this is your first one you're listening to and you go back, we try to teach you essentially our entire Life Mastery curriculum in the best way that we can.

Well, what we do is we take the Life Mastery curriculum that we've been building, that I've been building over the last 20 years, testing it like I've been testing this stuff and see what works. What.

Always refining it.

Yeah, always refining it. But in doing so, what we've been doing is we. We can't teach you everything in a podcast episode or every YouTube video. There's. There's a whole lot more. You can each. Each one of the concepts we teach.

That's why we have books, YouTube videos.

There's going to be a lot of events, a whole great way to stay engaged and to get where you're trying to go. Right.

But when it comes down to the boardroom of the mind, I got nine chairs. I got the eight pillars of life, a chair for each one of them. Now I got some mentors that will technically sit in two chairs.

Okay.

You know, and I. It's important to know this because you have to ask yourself right now. In fact, we'll do a. We'll do a fun one. I'll rattle off a couple of my chairs. Okay. All right. So one is my grandfather Stallings. Okay. Who was instrumental in my faith when I spent five years as a practicing non Bible toting atheist. He loved me and never condemned me while I was figuring stuff out. And all he would say is, you're not digging far enough. Just keep digging. Like, he encouraged me to keep going.

So in your spiritual pillar, he was instrumental.

Exactly right.

So what you've done is you've surrounded yourself by it with people in each area of life who are essentially where you want to be so that you.

Could look up to them.

So this is a circle of mentors.

Steve. Business.

Yeah.

Finance.

Same with Ramsey.

Relationships. Ramsey. Yeah. Leadership. How to cultivate healthy leadership. You know, there's. There's people in each of these. Karen, my wife, is in my boardroom. She's really good about being my gatekeeper. She has a sixth sense, if you will, to sniff out when people aren't going to be good to me.

I like how you just used the word gatekeeper, because that's actually one of our seven relationships. You need to win at life.

Oh, don't worry, we're gonna get there.

Oh, I know. Stay tuned, guys, for the next podcast. That's gonna be great as well. Yeah.

So, you know, but you have to think about who's at your support room table. Long before I was aware of this concept. So before. Before I heard this concept with. Through the Air Force.

I would position it with our relationship circle. Right. We have a. We have a. Maybe we'll do a pod, a video on this in the near future. But we have a relationship circle that says who's in, who's out. Right. And that relationship circle is all forever moving. So if someone betrays you, they move far out. If someone is increasingly earning your trust, they get to move in.

I make a really good whiteboard lesson.

Yeah, for sure.

Put that on my list.

So, you know, those are. Those are concepts that I've got. But if you think about it right now, if you don't know who. Who's sitting at this table, you may have empty chairs. In other words, you don't have a mentor to talk to, discuss financial matters with or learn financial stuff or spiritual stuff or emotional stuff or occupational stuff. Right. You may have.

Yeah, yeah. What would you say to people who are saying, I don't know anybody that really serves my life right? What would you say to that person that's listening this? And they're like, okay, I want a circle of experts around me, but I don't know how to find those people?

Well, so for the. So for step one, obviously, we're welcome to follow us and go through, because we will cover eight pillars of life over and over.

That's true. Essentially, we can deep Dive as at.

Least an introductory version of that. Exactly. Totally can. And even a deep dive if they want to stay partnered up, for sure.

The other thing you can do is you can go ahead and look at. And I'm going to be very cautious how I say this. There are influencers in the market that are very beneficial to helping you move forward. Okay, sure. All right. I would say that there's digital mentors, meaning through YouTube, through podcasts, through a variety of things. Instagram. Instagram and Facebook and this. And then the social channels are nothing more than tools to help you attract to some of those people that. That may be good influences. Now, some of them may not be.

Yeah, I mean, there's. There's plenty of voices, so you've got to do your diligence is there's gonna be some good ones and some bad ones.

Yeah. So you. And I'm glad you mentioned that, because I actually found that there's five foundational principles, or five foundational filters, if you will, that I use to pull down people that could go in my boardroom. Right. The first. The first filter or principle I would use is do they have a high level of trust?

Like, can you trust them?

Can you trust them? Can you trust what they're giving you? And I. And I like to rate. You know me, I love one to ten scales because it helps you pinpoint where you're really at with something. Yeah. Right.

It's funny, I never really used those until I came here again, but I was really, really surprised at how that. How much that helped with me gaining perspective. Yeah. Which is obviously one of the parts of grow, our grow framework that I ignored for so long.

Phases of transformation. Yep. For sure.

Right.

The next one is high levels of character.

Yeah.

Now, trust is different than character. Okay. Okay. Character will encompass emotional attitudes. It will cover techniques. It'll cover tactical measures. It covers strategy.

I'm a little confused by that. So character. How does character fall into those things?

So people with hips, historically, with high levels of character will not only live their life well, they'll also do the things around them well. Okay.

So it's the way that they live their lives. With character, it's not only can you trust the information that they're giving you, but also, are they a person of character?

Exactly.

Makes sense.

Do they have integrity? You know, are they. This actually, this hurt me really bad growing up to this influencer stuff, when I was trying to figure this out on my own, I had a lot of influencers that I used to follow considerable amount of Them. Some of the influencer influencers I chose not to follow. I'm not going to name them because that's not who we are as a company, but I chose to follow, went to follow them, went to certain events, had backstage access to a lot of these folks, and saw that they were not the same person.

You were very disappointed.

I was very disappointed. Broken heart even a couple times they.

Say never meet your heroes type of thing. Kind of.

Yeah. I mean, I guess so.

Yeah.

I mean, that's one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about being authentic and why I don't want to be an echo. Like, I just want to be me.

Yeah, Right.

So that way, whoever you see on camera, if you like me, great. If you don't, it's okay.

Well, and actually, that's part of it. I mean, we're going to have haters. We're going to have people that are like, you know, saying that we're cringy or whatever. I mean, that. That naturally is going to happen. But, you know, there's going to be certain people who are attracted to our message and appreciate that.

Yeah. So trust character. So attributes of character. When you think of a person, a character, what attributes do you think of and how do they apply those attributes to the world? Okay, that's kind of where I'm coming from. There. The next was a high level of competency. Okay. The reason I put competency there is because I have made the mistake before of having people that I entrusted as mentors only to find out they weren't actually competent in what they were trying to teach me.

So this is all the influencers that haven't actually done it. So now here's a question.

Yeah, sure.

I know that I'm just a co host, but I kind of fit into that category. I guess that's part of the dynamic, though, because you've done it. Right. Like, I am the voice of essentially the people. And I want to clarify that, because if anyone sees me and they're like, dude, this kid's way too young to be. Not trying to be a guru. I'm just trying to provide context to what Steven is teaching. Because Steven has been there and done that, I'm still on the journey. And I think that listening to both of our perspective could potentially be helpful in bridging that gap.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when it comes to competency, like I said, I've made the mistake of following people who were not competent in their skill set, what they were teaching. And you've Got to be very careful, especially with influencers or people who. Because they're called influencers for a reason, because they influence your thoughts, your actions, and your behaviors. Well, technically, actions and behaviors are the same thing or tied together. Right.

If they're not competent. In other words, if they have. Not. If they don't have proof in the pudding, so to speak. And yes, I said pudding like a country boy. Right. I did grow up in North Carolina. I have it in me. I'm not. I know I talk fast and don't sound like I'm from North Carolina all the time, but I do have a little Southern in me when I want to.

Right.

So proof in the pudding. In other words, do they have the proof? Like, we had somebody reach out to us on Instagram not long ago. He's like, man, I'm so tired of these you guys. You influencers out there. Half you guys have never actually done it.

It's crazy. That's actually been the biggest level of haters that we've gotten, besides people that are just making fun of really superficial, lame things like, you guys look weird and stuff like that. But.

But you got a bald head.

Yeah, that's gonna happen. But. But, yeah, for sure.

Right? So. And then I was playing. I was. But, see, the one thing I guess is different about us is we actually care about you. Whether you hate on us or not. We could care less. You could hate on me. I'm not gonna hurt my feelings.

And there are people there, obviously.

But we're. I'm gonna do care. I'm sure I'm going. Well, in this particular case, I chose to respond on Instagram and say, hey, man, I totally get it. I understand it. I've been in places and behind the scenes before and been shocked myself. Here's what I invite you to do. I invite you to go check. Just Google my name, check me out, and if you still think I'm crazy.

Lo and behold, you've actually built companies. You've actually built people you've helped.

Yeah. And that was. That's what he came back to, and he became a follower. So very cool, you know, and we view every follower that we get, no matter. And what you engage with us is incredibly important and vital to not our success as a company, but our success towards transforming lives.

Absolutely. So we've got trust, character, and competency.

The next one is a big one and technically could fit in the character bucket, which is a little bit while I bumbled earlier, but it's so. It's so important that it Needs to be separated out of character, which is honesty.

I can almost see, like, what's the difference between that and trust as well.

Honesty builds trust. You can't have trust without honesty. Honesty is a character trait, but it's such an important character trait that it should be so top of mind.

So is honesty more like, are they going to tell you the truth whether they think it'll hurt your feelings or not?

Well, it could be. I mean, honesty is just being honest. It's, you know, our goal, even. You've seen me do this with teams, with people, with staff members, even do it with you. I'm honest. Yeah. Oh, yeah, right. I'm. I have no problem holding people accountable. I've got no problem doing it in a loving manner.

I have.

I haven't. It's not like I'm perfect. I'm sure have done it wrong before a couple of times. But I'm always honest. Right. I always want them to know where they stand with me. I always want them to know where they stand with what we're doing. Right. So that's on the correction side. However.

I view honesty as something that is so important that it is a make or break value for me in.

Someone that you're looking to have a.

Relationship with, relationship with or learn from, grow from. Right. If you lie to me, you move out of my circle.

I almost made that mistake not too long ago.

You made the mistake.

I did make that mistake. I'm saying I almost made it catastrophically, and then I was able to essentially repair it. And you said, never again. So.

Well, yeah, you basically got one warning. Right? And, you know, but honesty is. Honesty is a pivot. All right? And here's part of the reason I say that. The vast majority of where I've come from in my life and my experiences is I've had people very close to me, even people that I've paid incredibly well, betray me and lie directly in my face. I'm a very giving person by nature. I don't really know how to. If I have one fault in business is I'm overly generous.

You are right. I can actually attest to that. It's actually. It's weird because early on.

Four years ago when we met, you know, I was apprehensive even about you. Like, which was interesting because it was in my own arrogance and cockiness. And I was like, yeah, I don't need to learn from this guy. Like, I was like. But the thing that drew me to you was.

That.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Thank you for saying that. That really means a lot. Seriously, I don't even know how to take it, to be honest. I'm not good at taking compliments either.

Wow. Let's go on to the next one.

Yeah.

High levels of responsibility.

They are responsible of their own actions, of their own thoughts, of their own deeds. I'll be happy to share with you. Since you just shared a very vulnerable moment with the audience. I will share with you that I have not always. In fact, yesterday. I really, really, really want to be so mad at Connor.

That's true.

Because I have to do a lot of. I have to do a lot of content prep for a lot of the content that we put out, and I'm very intentional about how I do it. And I got a content schedule, and that content schedule was not the content schedule we're doing next week. So I spent two days working on content only to set it to the side to start over. Yeah.

I basically called, say, hey, man, that's not what you were supposed to be working on. And it was my fault. I miscommunicated. But, yeah, well, so.

But here's the. Here's the crappy part is I wanted to be mad. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to, like, to pull out my lion, you know, because I'm. I guess I'm. I'm all the attributes of a lion. And. And then he's like, what's. Look, man, it's my fault. I should have done this. I didn't send the right thing. I should have had this done in time. I'm like, I hate it when you're mature. I can't be mad at you.

He literally said that. I like, sorry. I learned it from you.

Yeah, we know. Which is, I guess, is a good thing. But, you know, I want people to. Here's another big mistake that I see people make. People see relationships, in many cases, as a missionary field. They are attracted to people they can help and. Or attempt to save. And a lot of times they can get so accustomed to that that a boundary gets crossed where all of a sudden they become that person's savior or they perceive themselves of being that savior. The worst thing you can do is being a relationship of any kind because you're trying to fix it or fix them right. That's not the type of relationship you're looking for. When you're talking about the boardroom of the mind. You're talking about people who can help. You're talking about people who you can learn from and grow from and be mentored from, and that kind of thing. And the way I look at it is close relationships are not meant to be a missionary field. So they're meant.

What do you mean by. What do you mean by a missionary feel? Because I've never heard that term before.

So if you think about what a missionary does, a missionary will leave everything behind and they go out in the service of others. Okay.

Okay.

Historically.

Right. So you're saying you want to surround yourself who are at or above your.

Level, not for your inner circle. Yes. For your inner.

So when you get to the point of mastery, then you can mentor others.

Yeah. There is a season when. When now you have. You're equipped enough to hold the. Hold healthy boundaries in place, to have the knowledge and experience in order to actually influence someone. For example, over the last four years, you've tried to get me to concede on several things. I'm like, no, if you do that, it's not going to fan. It's not going to fare well. Don't do that. Right. Over and over again.

Right.

It's the same kind of concept. I see a lot of people who will have a moderate level of life skills and they'll immediately try and go help somebody.

It's because they're caring people. Well, they're caring people.

There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah.

These are the people who, like, read one book and then they're going and trying to tell everyone advice and that's okay. It's just what we're saying is part of the process.

What I'm saying is if you're going to set out to have quality relationships to bring your life mastery into fruition.

Right.

Your core audience, if you will, of your boardroom table needs to be people who can mentor you and take you further. I think it's best not someone you need to go out and run and save.

Yeah. The first thing that went to my mind is a drowning person can't save another drowning person.

That's right. That's very true. And I think that's what I'm going with is you need to. There's a certain level of experience and equipping that you need in order to really go and truly be in the service of others.

Right.

We've said before we think there are three greatest purposes in life. Serving the person you once were, serving the person you couldn't save, and then serving the person you once loved. Right. All of that is built from getting equipped and prepared. First.

Yeah. First you need to serve yourself in order to get to that greater purpose.

I mean, some of the so when I first looked at my boardroom, in my mind, if you will, for these relationships that I had to have, I had people sitting in seats that really should have no authority whatsoever in teaching me about a specific area. In other words, the fruit that they had in their life at the time.

Would lead me astray.

Right.

They weren't financially savvy or stable. They weren't doing really well with their overall emotional intelligence and self awareness. They had repetitive broken relationships of their own. How were they going to mentor me in the right way of doing things? It's kind of like, I think Dave says it this way, it's like getting financial advice from your broke brother in law.

Okay, yeah, I see. So these aren't necessarily even people who you had identified as mentors. They're just people who you had around you in life. And per the law of, you know, show me your five friends and I'll show you your future. If you surround yourself with people who always have bad relationships, even if they're, they've been your friends since childhood, even if they have all these things and I'm not saying just dump them, but I'm saying you need to be careful.

I call it distance. You know, you don't dump it, you don't dump, but you distance.

Because if you, if you put yourself in that environment consistently, it's just something about the way humans are wired. You are going to rise or sink to their level.

It just is. I mean, it is what it is. Which is why if you want to, if you like, if you have a burning desire in your heart to actually go out and help people and serve people in whatever capacity, homeless shelter, food shelter, business librarian, whatever level of service that you have, make sure you've got a mastery level in that area or.

At least a firm, firm foundation.

Yeah. I've got a brand new keynote that we're doing for an event we're going to be doing in September with John Maxwell. And I'm really excited about it because it's going to be the. Well, I can't, I can't give it away. But there's, let's put it this way, I've identified how you actually make mast. How do you take mastery and turn it into legacy? Let's put it that way.

Yeah, it's a legacy talk.

Yeah.

I've only seen a sneak peek and I've seen a lot of people who you've given that sneak peek to be.

Like, whoa, I'm actually really excited about it. But in order to do that, which is A greater level of service. We're talking legacy. Means it's your thing. Is outliving you.

Yeah. Legacy is beyond, like, what you've already kind of built. Like, you're at that stage where you've.

Already kind of trying really hard to build a legacy now. All right, so let's hit this one more time. So we're coming, wrapping up the show here on why relationships are so important. Life mastery, hopefully. We've given you a huge why, Right? The people that are sitting. The boredom of your mind and your heart and your soul. Right. These people need to have these five things in order to be able to take ownership of one of those chairs. Okay. They have to have high levels of trust. They have to have the high level of character. They have to have a high level of competency. They've got to have a high level of honesty, and they also have to have a high level of personal responsibility.

I can't remember if we actually named that before. I could be wrong. I'm so add. I don't know if you actually said responsibility or not, but if we didn't. That's the fifth one.

Yeah, we did, but. But we're coming back to it because sometimes it's great. Because we'll run off on a brief tangent. We're both a little adhd.

We do our best to keep it real.

We have papers.

I had a close friend say, you know, this podcast is really, really great. You guys are both a bit of a mess, but. But we like it.

Yeah. Well, me, because we're. It's real. It's real life for sure. Right?

We're not scripting this. We're not trying to.

Not even close. Yeah. I mean, you see, I got a brief outline here for those of you watching on YouTube. Right. Just to make sure that I don't go off on too deep of an end.

We want to make sure that, like we said earlier on the podcast, we give you those practical steps. And now we've given you the five foundational filters that you need to use when essentially choosing your inner circle or people you surround yourself with.

Consider this. Make sure that when you're looking at these relationships, these people that are gonna sit in the seat, right, look at where their life is heading, and then ask yourself, do I want to go there?

That's beautiful.

That's perfect. That's all you've got to do. Okay?

And what if you don't?

Then you need to choose somebody else for that chair. It's that simple. Right? We'll take Mr. Ramsey for an example, he's built a wonderful organization.

Dave.

Yeah. Dave has built a great organization. He's got over a thousand employees. I think at this point. Brand new, beautiful building he paid for in cash. Awesome.

You remember me? I was starstruck. I was like, what?

Yeah, and that's another thing. I'm actually glad you mentioned that. Do your best not to get starstruck, even with your mentors. Oops. Right. Yeah, I'm just. I mean, just. Well, what it does is it puts them on a pedestal, so if they have a failure of some kind, it really. It stings worse. Right. So learn. Learn the good things that you can.

Right. We're all human.

Yeah, we're all human. We're all gonna make mistakes. I'm pretty sure Dave puts his pants on like I put my pants on in the morning, probably most likely. You know what I'm saying? I mean, the same thing with any other influencer. They all have dogs and cats and animals and kids and have to deal with high school drama and, you know, all the stuff that comes with living life. The only difference is how you deal with it. And how you deal with it is what creates the master. Right.

And typically, the master has just learned the best way to deal with certain things in that area of mastery. And that's what makes them the master.

That's right. Absolutely.

But they weren't always that way. They weren't just born. Oh, I'm genetically able to be a master at managing finance, or I just have happened to be smarter. So I figured it out. It's. It's quite often a result of, you know, studying over time and failing over and over again and learning those lessons. So if you're failing and you're like, there's no way that Ramsey went through this. There's no way that I heard this on.

Ramsay would tell you differently, dude.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah. Ramsey. One of the. One of the things I've learned from him is to be honest and transparent. I have zero problem telling you my. My stinky stuff.

I try to do that, too.

I told.

I told them I lied to you earlier.

So, yeah.

I mean, and then.

And I hope. And I hope in with the right equipment and the right equipping, people will also be able to be transparent with themselves and then others. Because I think a lot of times what holds us back is we're trying to wear this mask and try to make sure everybody, you know, here's my cute Facebook photo. Here's my. My life is so awesome. I mean, my wife And I are occasionally addicted to this TV show called Botched.

Oh, Lord. I've seen that on E. Network.

Yeah, well, we watch it on Bravo. Yeah, I don't even know we watch it on. When we watch it, we don't watch it all the time. When we do watch it, we watch it on itunes or whatever. And there's. You know, there's always people that come in for cosmetic surgery that genuinely need it. Like, there's a disfigurement, but then there's also the characters, and there's also at least one person on every idiot. Every show that, like, is so way off on their significance that they feel like they have to look a specific way, and they're addicted to cosmetic surgery. And.

And I mean, look. I mean, you have freedom. This is America. You can do whatever you want. You know, if you want to look like a Barbie doll, that's great. That's fine.

Yeah. But what I'm getting at is the. If you're tying your identity to it, then there's. Then there's probably a deeper issue. But anyway, moving on. We don't even need to talk about Botched anymore. But anyway. All right, guys, closing this up, make sure your people sitting at your boardroom table, make sure you take the time to look at your closest relationships you got right now. On a scale of 1 to 10, rank them on how much value and how much learning and mentorship that you can get from them. And then simply ask the question, where they are today? Do I really want to go there? And if the answer is no, you need to change out the chair. Okay, do those things again. Trust, character, competency, honesty, and responsibility. If your relationships have that and these people are the ones that are influencing you and mentoring you, then there's a high likelihood you're going to be incredibly successful in your given trade or area of expertise. Us and we love you. We believe in you. Stay at it. We'll see you again on the next journey Principles. Take care, guys. Bye. I'll see you in the next video. And please, if you don't mind and you enjoyed the life mastery content we're building, consider hitting the subscribe button and also hitting the bell so you'll be the first to get notified anytime we release new content.