Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Unraveling the Warrior's Life Code: A Conversation with Martin Salama
Ever felt like life's challenges have knocked you down and left you stranded? You're not alone. Our guest today, Martin Salama, architect of Warriors Life Code, is here to share his transformative journey, from the fallout of a failed business venture during the 2008 financial crisis to overcoming personal turmoil. Martin opens up about his journey, revealing the power of resilience, determination, and self-awareness in facing life's adversities.
In a world shaped by social media and external validation, Martin helps us understand the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness, and how the latter can lead to a fulfilling life. He shares his transformation—shedding 65 pounds, developing a self-control mindset, and overcoming the need to please others. We also delve into Martin's creation of the Warriors Life Code, an acronym from his meditative practice, signifying the necessity of understanding personal values to ward off codependent relationships.
Martin's life story serves as a beacon of hope and a testament to the strength of the human spirit, particularly when overcoming childhood trauma and negative influences. He underscores the importance of self-awareness, accountability, and how a coach can help break down goals and instigate positive changes. Don’t miss this enlightening conversation with Martin Salama as we explore the importance of self-belief, self-accountability, and understanding our values to live a fulfilling and meaningful life.
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Ryan DeMint from Chasing Financial Freedom podcast. I hope you guys are having a great day. This is episode or take two with Martin Salama, and yesterday we had a little bit of a downside for me here in Phoenix. We had the power go out of us, out on us while we were just getting into some great conversation, but we wanted to record from scratch. So let's do the intro again for Martin Martin's known as the architect of Warriors Life Code. He specializes in helping people frustrated in their life quickly shift their mindset to uncover their greatness so they can live their true potential in joy life. Martin, thanks for coming back on. I know this has been a this is round two, but thank you again for coming back.
Speaker 2:Oh, Ryan, my pleasure. I'm so glad that everything worked out OK for you. You only were out of power for a couple of hours Thank goodness it wasn't anything terrible and that you were able to move forward and we were able to find the time so quickly that we connect.
Speaker 1:Thank you, that's good. I just didn't want to roast in my dog and I get a little hot, so we'd have to go somewhere. But that was good. So let's jump right in and let's get going who is Martin? And talk about your backstory, and then we'll get into what you're doing, because I think there's some really great points we can talk about.
Speaker 2:Great. Thank you so much. So, as you said, I'm Martin Salama, I'm known as the architect of the Warriors Life Code and for me, life is really everything that I'm about these days and I took that word life and turned it into an acronym Live incredibly full every day. And for me that encompasses two things having a happy life and having a meaningful life, and I honestly believe there's a big difference between the two. When you have a happy life, it's self love, self care, even selfish, and that's a good thing. It's OK to be selfish. If people think it is a negative connotation, it is if it's taken in the wrong context. But it's OK to put yourself first and that's part of being selfish. Self love, self care, and that's the happy part. The meaningful part is the self less part. What are you doing for others? What are you contributing to the world? How are you showing up in the world so that you can be that better for everybody else as you are for yourself? So that's where living incredibly full every day comes in.
Speaker 1:So that's all going to be part of our second part of our conversation. So a little bit, can you share your story again? I know you did on our last version, but your story is powerful and a lot of people can relate to it and I want the listeners to be able to hear what you went through and then where you've taken yourself today.
Speaker 2:OK, cool. In 2008, you guys might remember, there was some kind of turmoil that went on in the world. We seem to get these turmoil every once in a while, so there was one in 2008. But my wife and I were working on a project for about five years before that to build a multi-million dollar health club in tennis center in New Jersey by the Jersey Shore. And that came about because the one day my wife was, I had just closed the business and I had residual income coming in, so it wasn't as if I had to just drop everything and find something else to do. Thank God that was what was my life was back then. It was real estate, income and some other things. So she said, I just started playing tennis and I can never find anywhere to play. There's always no courts available, so that might be a niche that we could look into. I said, ok, that sounds interesting. Now you got to understand something about me, ryan. I only learned this years later, as I was going through some other problems after 2008.
Speaker 2:Then I was a people pleaser and my need to please my wife was probably the number one priority in my life at that time. It was I had to make sure she was happy, no matter what. So she heard this. My mind went OK, if she wants this, let me figure out how to get it done. And the business side of me was I said to her we got to make sure that this works financially as well. So we started down this path and we started by doing a feasibility study. Is it worth it to do it?
Speaker 2:Then, once we had that, we went to look for the land, found land.
Speaker 2:Then we had to say, ok, now that we found this land, we've got to make sure that we find an architect and engineer and everything that goes along with that.
Speaker 2:And along the way, as we're doing all this stuff and I'm funding it and I'm finding investors, and the one that did the feasibility study also did a whole spreadsheet of what the profit would look like, what the cost of running the place. So we're doing all this. We're looking for the best architects out there, the best engineers. We get the city involved and they're like oh, this is a great idea, but you need to go out and go. You got to go get hire a civil engineer Because we want to make sure how it's going to affect the traffic, do you have enough parking and all that. Now, if we had been approved by the state and the city in 2006 or 2007, I would have walked into the bank and they would have handed me the money like I was going to Costco. You know how you go to Costco and there's these women at the end of the oil handing you samples.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That was what the bank was like back then. They were giving money like crazy. So I walk into the bank in 2008 and they go yeah, we're not lending. I'm like, but let's say, you told me we can't wait. Well, you waited to look. The market returned. I'm like, what the heck are you talking about? Things are slowing down. Little did I know what was coming up in September, the next month of 2008.
Speaker 2:Bernie Madoff, the subprime loans. The financial world crashed like a house of cards and I was one of the cards in the deck. I was on the bottom of the deck of this crash housing core deck and everything that was out there in the world and I was. That was it? Overnight, I was wiped out. I stopped paying my mortgage, I stopped paying my car payments and I remember my son coming to me a few months later. He says dad, dad, look outside, they're towing your car. That never happened to me before I was repossessed. My car was repossessed Now we've touched on this in the last time but I was lucky.
Speaker 2:I was living in a state that had so many foreclosures that they handed me the foreclosure in 2009. And the house stayed in that position for seven, eight, nine years before they finally did the full, full closure, but some of the things started to happen a little while. Let me fill that in before we get to that part. Is that OK, ryan? Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 2:No matter where I am, this is all falling apart around me. I go into a situational depression. It's understandable. I invested three and a half million dollars of my money and other people's money and borrowed money to get there, to get to this $15 million, $100,000 project that look, I took a risk Business people take risks but to me I felt like it was a calculated risk, me says, who knew that the world was going to fall apart and part of that would be me. So I took that risk and I lost it all and it took me over a year about a year, a little more than a year to get through that and come through the other side, through some coaching, some therapy, some deep thinking inside myself and saying, ok, where do I go from here?
Speaker 2:And when I did that, I thought about it and I said I've been a businessman my whole life. I don't know if I want to continue doing this. The ups and downs were just too much for me emotionally and that last one was just the deepest of downs. So I looked into it and I said you know what I've always loved being involved in community events. And why did I like that? Because I was a leader. And as a leader people would come in and say, ah, I don't know how much time I can give. I'd say, if you give me a couple of hours a week, I'll show you how you could be very helpful to the organization. I realized I was a life coach. I was a coach. I was coaching these people to show them their potential in the little time they gave me.
Speaker 2:So I decided to become a life coach and about two months before I was starting coach training, my 24th wedding anniversary and my wife said I'm done, I want a divorce. And I was like, oh my God, what else can happen to me? And I thought about it. I was like I should have said something, like I didn't get you anything like that for our anniversary. What I did?
Speaker 2:But I felt like every emotion you could think was coming down on me, like I felt like a failure. I felt angry, sad, abandoned, everything. So I said what am I going to do now? I said you know what? I'm still going to go through with life coach training. And I think it was God tapping me on the shoulder, telling me Martin, you want to go to life coach training, maybe you think about changing yourself and then you could help others. And I was like okay. And before I went they sent me some books to read, and one of them, or a list of books. One of them was the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. I love this book. And the second agreement was don't take anything personally. I was like what, wait a minute? What do you mean? I don't have to have the world on my shoulders. And that is where the shift started to change.
Speaker 1:But that whole program, if I remember right is, was a year long.
Speaker 2:The program, the coaching program, that I went to.
Speaker 1:Yes, A year long. So before we get into that and what you're doing, let's back up and talk about what you went through and what that did is you got hit. You got, yeah, in the 2008,. You got caught in that downside and I get that yeah. How did that change your mindset when it came to being a business owner, an entrepreneur? Once you got through that time of that year afterwards of understanding what was going on and trying to get a hold of yourself, did you have time to think about what that was and impact for you as a business owner and what it would look like going forward? I did.
Speaker 2:And I think in the beginning it made me gun-shy, it made me afraid to do it again. I had just lost three and a half million dollars of my money's and other people money and I was like I'm starting from scratch, because when I finally got out of that and the people that I owed money to, I took me a while to pay them back. And part of that was I had borrowed money from my family and they're like okay, we got to find something to pay you back, so we're going to take your residual income. So nothing, that residual income, that was like my safety net. My easy pillow was gone, so I was a little afraid to go out there and just do another business as well. But, as I said, I didn't enjoy being a salesman, as it were, because that's all I ever was in my businesses. So we're trying to sell something and I looked at this whole thing of doing the health club as a new way of selling something. But it was still something different than material, because that's what I had done most of my life.
Speaker 2:I was in costume jewelry. When I was a kid, my father had a tablecloth factory. Those are the kinds of things we did. So I was like, okay, I'm moving into real estate, I'm moving into services like tennis and health club. It was a different world. But once that happened, I was like, okay, I don't know if I want to go forward in that capacity. Looking back now, that's how I felt at the time. Now I look back and I'm a great entrepreneur. I've had many successes, but that failure hurt me so bad in the moment that it scarred me for a while.
Speaker 1:What? How did you get through that time? It sounds like you were doing some type of work. What we didn't talk about that in the first time. What type of work were you doing?
Speaker 2:You mean to live?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as a livelihood? That's a great question. Here's the problem. I'm close to 50 years old. At this point the world is falling apart and people are firing like crazy. All right, and I happen to come from a small Jewish community that has services that help people get jobs in our community Damn, it's career services and stuff like that and they were running into. A problem was because my and Salama, his family's got a ton of money. Why would I hire him? So he could learn my business and become my competitor? I was unemployable for a long time that's how crazy it was and I found the job with a guy for $500 a week. That's all it was getting $500 a week to basically sit in his MMA studio during the day when there was nobody there, to take calls and to work on his website and stuff like that. That's the kind of job I was doing. I was not hireable.
Speaker 1:So how did you get over that? We're going down a different path, but I'll circle back on.
Speaker 2:I never talked about this before. No, that's good.
Speaker 1:No it's good, but how? This is the resilience and the persistency that we look for. I know you didn't stay there forever, so how did you work your way out of that?
Speaker 2:So after a while my wife asked for the divorce and I had to move back out of my house that I was living in. By the way, I did get divorced and my wife did not have to move out of that house until eight or nine years later. That's how backed up they were. She didn't have to pay mortgage, she didn't have to pay anything. She just had to maintain the house as best as she could Imagine if she took the money she was getting for alimony in that time, what she could have done. I don't have to give kudos to my family because, even though I had lost everything, they had taken my shares of things that were income reducing and they paid my ex the alimony while I was getting my life back together. I had a fantastic support system with my family. So that's a nice thing to acknowledge as well that I have a wonderful, beautiful family that support me. So I moved back to New York and I moved into my mom's house. Thank God she was married and lived in a different house, so I had my mom's house to house I grew up living in. I was rent free and I would go.
Speaker 2:For about a year I worked in a job in New York City in a retail store where we were selling objects to art which in back in the 70s and 80s my father it was one of my father's old partners, my father passed away already who had this store, and my mother still had a small ownership in the store.
Speaker 2:She had nothing to do with it other than a small ownership. They said give Martin a job, let him be a salesman here, and I would go everywhere. And again, it was like 500 dollars a week and it was really a pity job. And it was okay because I was going through the coaching. I was trick-ticking myself out and I had already moved my mindset to say I'm going to accept whatever's coming. And then I was lucky. A friend of mine saw that I didn't love what I was doing and he convinced his bosses to give me a job for a little bit more money and I would go into work every day with him and stuff like that. But still it wasn't a great job but at least I was turning some income, turning some money.
Speaker 1:So you're getting through all that. You're going through the coaching You're finding yourself. When does this all start moving in your favor and start really changing because of your persistency during this time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, as this is going on, I'm building my coaching practice, I'm making a little money here and there on that and I actually have a second job that I do. I'm back in sales. I do freight forwarding and customs broker. I help people bring in merchandise from overseas and it happened to be that I met somebody who thought I was a great salesman, had a great personality and thought it would be great. He said I want to introduce you to my partner. I was like oh, what's the name of your company? It tells me Galaxy. I'm like I never heard of it. I said it sounds familiar. Not that I never heard of it, it sounds familiar. He goes yeah, my partner's name is Ed. I said Ed. When I was an importer, he was my freight forwarder and I've been working with Ed for the last almost eight years. So that gave me the ability to get back into action, get out there and create another income for myself as I was building my coaching practice, which then gave me the ability to do both.
Speaker 1:And I'm guessing the income was tremendously higher there yes, tremendously higher. So you're there, you're working on your coaching, you've got that better job coming in. Where are we at now? What's the next step in this whole evolution?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as I'm doing this, I'm coaching a lot, I'm doing my. I became when I finished coach training which, like we said before, took about a year I became a divorce recovery coach. Okay, what the why? But the best coaches are the ones who coach from experience and that's what I was doing. I was showing people how, by having coaching in my life while I was going through that low period of getting through a divorce, I was also. It helped me get through the divorce. That the new mindset that I created for myself by listening to what I was being coached and now coaching others, helped build my self awareness, my self confidence. So I did that. For a few years I was a divorce recovery coach and what I started to find is then I had to switch my mindset. I thought I was self aware, but when I found out, I was really more self conscious than self aware, and I think we touched on this yesterday the difference between the two.
Speaker 1:Yeah, share the card. Let's talk about that. That'll get us into current day and we'll start going down that path.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I created a card that gets called warrior to warrior, because I was a warrior. All these things that were happening to me just kept me worried all the time and I became a warrior. Somebody who's come through this problems, these issues in my life, recognize that things aren't happening to me, says I'm blaming everybody else. Now you hear some people say it's happening for me. I go to another step. I say it's happening through me because it's my responsibility for the things that are happening in my life to happen.
Speaker 2:As I was saying, one of the cards in the deck is the self aware versus self conscious and most people say, yeah, I'm self aware. I'm like, no, you're aware, but let's see if you're self aware or self conscious. So I'll read some of the card yeah, self consciousness comes from a place of negative energy, guilt, conflict and doubt. Self consciousness is more outward directed. It's being more concerned about what others are thinking of you and how the situation is going to affect you. You probably react to uncomfortable situations instead of respond.
Speaker 2:When you're self conscious, you're questioning your decisions. There's a little more, but that's. I think that gives an idea and that self awareness comes from a place of positive energy acceptance, contentment, self assuredness. Self awareness is more inward facing you have an accurate and realistic understanding of how you are responding to situations and how you feel about things. So, in a nutshell, self consciousness is the negative energy, it's the ego, it's the need to press, it's the need to always be right, all those things. Self awareness is the humility side, it's the self assured and you're doing it because it's right for you and you hope that it's right for everybody as well.
Speaker 1:Exactly and I think this is where we went down a left turning bright at Albuquerque, as I say is we talked about social media and how social media has created this consciousness society that we're so worried about likes and shares and all this other stuff, and it truly the best way I know how to describe it is this If you're and I think you touched on it yesterday and we'll talk about it is, if you're so worried about what everybody thinks about what you're doing and how you're doing it, you gotta back up and have that inside reflection to say this is a moment to where I need to figure out what I truly wanna do to make me happy, so I can be happy with the people that support me.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and a quote that just came into my mind that I can't remember who said it is what you think about me is none of my business.
Speaker 1:I like that. We gotta figure out who said that. I haven't heard that, so I like that.
Speaker 2:That's a great one, but yesterday, when we were talking about this, we were touched on some of the things that were going on at the time and it really made me reflect a little more and I realized that I was a people pleaser, as I mentioned earlier. But with that came other things, and those were that I had a short temper, to the point that I reacted to everything, that I took everything personally and I was a control freak and I needed the recognition for the things that I was trying to please everybody about. And what I've come to learn is I was a people pleaser, pleasing no one, and that, well, what good is that?
Speaker 1:And that, and that's how do I describe this. I too struggled that in life, but once I fell enough times I realized that it really needs to be pleasing for me and the ones that support me. But until I've got that, I call it mindset, internal mindset. For myself. It doesn't change and some people view that as being cold, but it's not because at the end of the day, they can't live my life, I can't live yours, and I have to respect what you're wanting to do in life. Don't have to agree with it, but I truly wanna respect what they're doing. But it comes down to is I love? What you said earlier at the beginning is are you truly happy? Are you going after your passion and you're really doing what you wanna do or take out of life? Because in the end you cannot. You can't really I can't change somebody else's life for them. They have to be able to do it for themselves.
Speaker 2:Exactly right, exactly right. And when I was gone, when I decided to go to live coach training and do that change on myself, and when I was going through the therapy and the coaching before every kid decided to become a live coach, a lot of that was a part of me hoping it would save my marriage, hoping that I wouldn't lose my kids, hoping that by doing it I would keep them in my life. Now I'm very happy. My children are in my life and I'm happy to say that my ex-wife is married. I'm married again to different people and we have a great relationship. Now we really do, because we're always connected.
Speaker 1:Your kids are all grown up now, yes, they're all grown up.
Speaker 2:two are single, two are married, and I have eight grandchildren.
Speaker 1:Oh, awesome congratulations. So we will always be interconnected. It is what it is, but you're happy with yourself. I mean, that just is part of your life.
Speaker 2:Exactly right, exactly right.
Speaker 1:So you're walking down and we're going further. So let's talk about what you're doing coaching-wise and how it's evolved since we've spoken on our pre-call. So you're there, you're doing your coaching, you're working with divorce individuals and going through the grief. How has your coaching now moved to the next level and what have you done?
Speaker 2:Okay, as I was doing this, as I was working in that job that my friend helped me get not the one that I'm doing now, not the freight voting I was working for a company that was doing Amazon sales and it was really dead-end job is even though I showed them that I can show them how they can do so much more. That's another story for another day. But I wasn't as much, as I was coaching a little bit here and there I was allowing myself to use the I can't phrase and blame other people. And one day I looked in the mirror and I was the heaviest I ever was in my life. I was almost 230 pounds. For me that's a lot of weight, the most I've ever carried and I made a decision that I need to change that. I need to change it because not only for the weight part of it, but for the health and for the stress that it was creating on myself.
Speaker 2:Our friend of mine was talking on Facebook. We talked about Facebook, but he was talking about Facebook, of how he found a workout for 25 minutes a day that he can do from his house in a video. I'm like, oh cool, I don't have to go to a gym. I can't afford a gym anyway. It hit up in my mind at the time. I don't have the time to go to the gym, I'm working, leaving the house at 7 am, I'm coming home at 7 pm, I can do this from home. So I switched it and I started waking up a little earlier, doing a half hour video, and started eating better, reading better, and I had been in a mindset of I can't afford to be coached. And this guy coached me through the health part of it for free. And then I started to realize that the coaching is what had gotten me moving forward in my life. Now I look back and I realize I can't afford not to be coached. I always have coaches in my life now because they're that important.
Speaker 2:And what happened was, over nine months I lost 65 pounds, but along with that whole switch from self-conference to self-aware, because I was allowing myself to realize that I'm in control of my life. And one day I was doing something that I'm not very good at because I'm ADHD, I was meditating. Oh Boy, I have that struggle. It's real, the struggle is real and it was a that even the meditation I was doing was guided meditation, headspace. That guy, the English guy with the task. The boys yes, I.
Speaker 2:Still ten minutes was like an hour yeah.
Speaker 2:I Do. Is it like what is this going to be over? I Don't know how people settle their mind to do that. I to hold you out there to do Congratulations go nose you. I can't do it. But one of these days I had this download of information that I loved my life and Everything I was doing and I wanted to show other people how to do it. So after that I finished that meditation. I wrote for over two hours and out of that I came up with the acronym for life that I wanted to show people how they could live incredibly full every day, no matter how much money they have in their life. It's about changing that mindset and I even started good dating. I Said you know what? I'm loving everything. I'm gonna start dating now and I'd go out on these dates and I would interview the women About their, about their values, without I'm even realizing it was an interview, it's just a conversation.
Speaker 2:But I learned from coaching house important values were and if I knew it when I was 23, I might not have gotten married. Not that I had 25 years. It was wonderful. I have four beautiful children, but I realized my values and hers were never an alignment and we were in a codependent relationship and I was never gonna do that again. And that was a lot of things that I would teach. Coach my clients you want to go get married again. You got to figure out who you are so that you don't marry the same person in a different body.
Speaker 1:That's what ends up happening yeah, I Laugh because that it does happen a lot of but how we could get into that piece of the relationship. How would you best describe? I don't want to say avoiding, but it's where I'm at. How does one do with everything going on in today's society? How does one effectively find a partner Without falling into that trap?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So for me, that's what the divorce recovery coach was all about was understanding what worked for you in your first relationships with your other relationship, that and what did, and you taking ownership of both of those. Okay, ownership of who you are and who you want to show up with is an important part, but the ownership of who you don't want to be that's been holding you back. Like for me, people, please, are short temper, taking everything personally, control freak and realizing, yeah, if I don't change these things, I'm just gonna keep finding the same type of people in my life. And Then what I did was, like I said, I would interview these women to see if our values were aligned. And and one day I got a call from a woman who, like I said, I come from a small Jewish community and she calls me up, she goes. And she had called me up a few years earlier and said this to me because, martin I, now that she divorced, are you ready to start dating? I'm like, kelly, you're married. She was no, not me, I'm your matchmaker. I'm like what is this fiddler on the roof? She goes no, in our community, someone single? They want to get married. We help them find somebody, alright.
Speaker 2:So one day she calls her up, she goes I've got this great woman. She just came into our system so we know she was willing to date. You should take her out Okay, great, and go out. And she's checking every box on my values list, everything. Go out again, still checking it, and I'm seeing the differences in her and who I had before and Recognizing what worked and what wasn't working. I gotta tell you, ryan, a month into it I turned her. I said I gotta tell you something and I don't need to hear it from you, but I need to tell it to you. I'm falling in love with you because I love who you are and that you're not trying to change who I am.
Speaker 1:Amen.
Speaker 2:A month later, she told me she loved me and we've been married for five years.
Speaker 1:There you go, and you're probably the happiest you've ever been.
Speaker 2:I'm the happiest I've ever been.
Speaker 1:Isn't it amazing when you can find somebody that compliments who you are and they don't try to change you and it just, it totally changes your world, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and honestly, I was trying to change my wife too. It's not that I was, I'm not saying she was just trying to change me. I was trying to change her too. Yeah.
Speaker 1:My first wife and we fall into that. That's in every aspect of our lives. I guess we can go down this rabbit hole for a little bit before we wrap. This sucker up is how do we get out of that trap? How do we? I know you say we have to find who we are, but I think there's deeper. There's deeper items in there that would have to be brought out. Maybe it's past history, childhood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's childhood trauma. I had childhood trauma myself, I. When I was 10 years old, I had a tragedy that has affected me my entire life. For most of that life it was in a negative way. Okay, I was 10 years old and my five year old brother was killed by a school bus oh, I'm sorry. And I had four older sisters. So for me the tragedy was one losing a brother, two, realizing that I'm the only one to carry on the name, carry on the legacy, and at 10 years old, I told myself that it's now my job to make sure that my parents are always happy. So that was a tough thing for me to do and I really I smile now because I look back as to who I was and to who I am now, and for years that people pleaser, that need to make everybody else happy, held me back. It really did. Now I call myself a recovering people pleaser, but it's a full back into that. It's like an addiction.
Speaker 1:How through your coaching. Let's talk a little bit about that, because I know there's a lot of people out there that are people pleasers and I was in that camp before and people say I've gone extreme. The other side, I just tune out, I call it a rabbit hole and that's truly where I'm at is, if you are in a position in life and that's where you want to be, I respect it, but I also ask you to not cross that line and try to drag me into that aspect of your life because that's.
Speaker 1:We all have our own issues to deal with, but why put your issues on somebody else? Does that make you feel better? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know why they do it because it makes them feel better about themselves that you are mucked down in the mire and the misery with them and you have to just say screw you, I don't want to be down there with you. But you've got to find the people around you who make you feel good about yourself. And if they're not around you, even if they're close family, you've got to distance yourself from them.
Speaker 1:I joke about it, but it's all true is people that sit at my table have to be people that have the same qualities that I have and I look for in others, and that table unfortunately does not have the same people on it at all times. Right, and that table is different than my professional table and sometimes they interchange and sometimes people leave. I'll give you an example. I had a gentleman at my professional table for probably about a year and a half and we were going to do another deal.
Speaker 1:We've had done several deals and it ended up being there was some stuff that came out that I wasn't able to catch in time to do this deal but luckily, whether you guys believe there's a God or not or a universe, stop the deal and I was able to catch it and just say I can't do this anymore. You slid something in that was never in these agreements and now they're there and something told me to look and it's no, sorry, I can't do it and it's a season, I get it and it happens, but we don't want to hold. I guess this is where I'm going with this. If we don't hold ourselves accountable, how are we holding anybody else accountable? And then it becomes very easy to slide on everything in life.
Speaker 2:Yes, 100%. And that's exactly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about taking ownership of who you are plus and minus. And for me, it's the first step in what I'm meeting with a client. It's admission Admit what's not working in your life, what's keeping you from being happy. Okay, now that you're admitted, what are you going to do about it? Correct, that's the accountability part, and that's what I love about being a coach, because, ryan, it's easy to be accountable to your bosses, to your family, to your wife, to your children, to everybody else. The hardest person it is to be accountable to, to be accountable to is yourself, because you'll rationalize all the reasons why you can't do what you think you want to do, because, oh, I don't have the time or I'm taking care of this and taking care of that. And that's where a coach comes in, because they become your accountability product. And, by the way, to me, the word rationalize is two words rationalize. I like that.
Speaker 1:I like that. That's another card in my deck. I love it, I love it. But this is where I kind of circle back and we're back to that, unfortunately. Social media, but also I didn't grow up with a helicopter parents. They didn't hover over me. I'm at that age where we'd go out and ride bikes and do all that stuff and come back when it's dark. And then you've got these parents that are coddling their kids and really not giving them much in the way of skills and ability to cope and get through change and it just seems like that's a never ending battle and that's one of the biggest battles out there is our next generations coming up have no coping mechanisms.
Speaker 2:So true, so true, and I can say I was guilty of that with my kids as well. And now I was a control freak. I had to know everything that was going on, where they were going, what they were doing. If they got had problems, I'd be the one to fix them for them, and apparently it's that so eventually, they've got to figure it out themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they've got to figure it out for themselves, but how do you tie that into your coaching and how do you work with individuals? Because there's got to be more individuals you deal with on a daily basis that are in that situation than not.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and breaking it down and coming up with goals and with ideas. And as a coach, it's my job to ask questions so that when the client figures it out, they're brought in, because it's something that really mostly came from them, with my help, but it's really something that they created and that they can buy into better than me saying why don't you do this and wanted to do that? Because now they're not really buying in, because I'm giving them advice, because with coaching, I'm asking the question so that they can figure out themselves and by doing that they're starting to take that ownership of it because they're recognizing it in themselves.
Speaker 1:Would you say majority of the clients that come to you have hit that point in their life where they want change, or do you see a 50-50 mix, 60-40? What do you typically see?
Speaker 2:I'd say it's 80-20. Really.
Speaker 1:That high.
Speaker 2:That people want to change, because why are they coming to coaches in the first place? The 20% usually come kicking and screaming.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I didn't think it would be that high. Just from my experience that we do with our non-profit and what we're doing. Most of these individuals that come to us want us to do the work for their financial literacy and it's like within two minutes I could tell you whether they're going to do it or not and I just say you know what Sounds like you're not ready. We'll be here when you are Right and we'll give you the tools, but you're going to have to work through the system and be able to do it yourself Because it's your life and your rules. It's not ours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's not possible, but some people just like. Thank you for being honest. I need to get in a better place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I've had that too. I've had it. But I think most of the people that come to me have already recognized that they're not happy in their life and they don't know why. Many of them don't know why they're not happy, but they're willing to explore it. And then, of course, there's a certain amount of those once they come into the program, they're like I feel like I'm doing therapy with them. I go look, I'm not a therapist. You know they're going to come to these meetings every week and you're not doing your homework.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the money, but I don't want it. I don't want the money. I want you to change. The money's great, don't get me wrong, but that's not the motivation for it. I've fired a few clients because I'm like hey, man, I could keep taking your money, but it's not worth it, it's not worth my time, it's not worth my headache of coming back and banging my head against the wall. But they do recognize that they have issues that have to change and the ones that are in that 20% that they don't think so it's usually because somebody told them they think they should talk. I'm like so what are you doing here? I want to make my wife happy Sorry, don't work that way.
Speaker 1:Wow, we're going to wrap this up, we're coming to the end here. But before we do any of that, you didn't share your book, so let's talk about your book and kind of work our way into that, because I know that's something new. So give us a little background on that.
Speaker 2:So it's also called Warrior to Warrior and you can see my warrior face to my warrior face and basically it's. The cards came from my course, the book comes from my course, okay, and the cards are something that you can carry around in a tangible way and get a little snippet of the things. The book goes deep because it tells you that you look into it and, first thing is, it's got a lot of my stories, a lot of my client stories. So it's not like I'm just throwing out advice and saying, try that whatever, I believe the concepts have to be there as well as the practical side of it. So that's what you get when you read this book. You're going to learn more about me, you're going to learn more about my clients and you're going to get practical steps that you can put into action to move the needle. If that's what you want to do, then this is the book for you.
Speaker 2:If you're just looking for a nice coffee table coffee table book, this isn't it, because it's got some good stuff in there. It's not like that. In the front of the book there's a QR code that I advise to people either read the whole book and come back to it or get it right in the beginning to download the success activities that I go to in the book, so that you could do the work for you, not for me. It's not even to me, it ain't good. So, yeah, so it's called Warrior to Warrior and you can get it on Amazon, but I also have a link, connectwithmartincom, and you can get free stuff there. You can get the book, you can get the cards in a couple of other things as well.
Speaker 1:Is that going to be the best link people can get a hold of you if they want to connect with you, work with you, the book, everything to that extent. Yep ConnectwithMartincom. I will make sure that is in the show notes so they can get a hold of you, sir. Thank you again for the wonderful conversation. Act two I think act two is even better Act one yeah, it was very good and I appreciate you coming on in short notice.
Speaker 2:Yep.
