G.R.O.W. from Homeless to 9 Figures - Stephen Scoggins

Welcome back to The Proving Podcast. On this episode, Steven walks us through exactly how he went from homeless to running a nine figure business. An individual who teaches you how to grow, which will make a whole lot more sense in the episode. It's a step-by-step process to get realigned and to break through all the limitations you have. I can honestly tell you this might be my favorite episode I've ever recorded. The show starts now. Everybody, welcome back to the show. Steven, I'm excited to have you on, man. Bro, I'm so excited to be hanging out with you, man. It's crazy. I know we're traveling like crazy. We're both in different states and all kinds of stuff outside of our normal studios and stuff, but great conversations just need to be had. Yeah, it's fun. I remember our first intro call. We just kept going and going. I was like, this is a no-brainer. This is easy. So for the four or five people out there in the world who actually don't know who you are, Gary, what have you done? What is your success? What's your story? Well, you know, what's crazy is I'm probably most notably at this stage game, known for being a bit of a life and business strategist, but more than anything else is kind of the story behind the story, right? The origin story, if you will, and grew up in a traditionally dysfunctional environment, which created dysfunctional Steven along the way. Found myself later on in a homeless journey for about 60 to 90 days, and that is actually a real homeless journey. Met my eyes in a mirror, remembered some key things that a mentor said, and that kind of, we were talking about all fair, about got me unlocked, and got me reawakened as kind of on a journey, and then went on to build a nine figure business that had 400 team members across three states, been very fortunate and very blessed to exit that company in late 2023. And now I get to do what I love, which is hang out with amazing people and teach them amazing things. So that's kind of my heart behind everything else. So you went really quickly over some of that, and I'm going to make sure the audience caught that. You went from homeless to nine figure company. Most people go, don't have it that bad. Most people are like, hey, you know what, I'm doing okay. I did the normal route. I went to college, may or may not have gone to class. What? I don't know. And I'm through that. Now you're completely went from shameless to sitting there having to focus on that. So now you're running, and we were talking to all the camera that when you're running those environments and you create that type of environment, there are some insecurities that come into play. There are some dysfunction that comes into play. There are some huge things. One of the reasons I want to talk to you is because you are as vulnerable as you are. You show up authentically, like, hey, this is the truth. So you talked about dysfunction. You talked about vulnerabilities. I want to kind of get into some of those. As you're building towards a nine figure business, what does that take? To go from homeless to nine figures, what does that take for you to pull yourself out of that? Well, you know, it's funny. One of the things I tell entrepreneurs all the time is presence is important. So a lot of times, it's funny, I did this on a stage not that long ago. We probably had, I don't know, a thousand entrepreneurs or whatever it was. And I was like, hey, by show of hands, raise your hand right now if you think you should be further ahead than you actually are. And without question, 100% of the hands go up. 100% of the hands go up. Yeah. Right? So you very quickly realized that we're actually not that unique. Our circumstances are really not that unique. You might have a situational environment like I did that was unique from, you know, someone that maybe went to college, you had a four year degree or an eight year degree or whatever. So different starting points. But at the end of the day, we're all facing what I've described as the five constraints, you know, history or statistics would tell you that lack of funding, lack of sales pipeline, lack of poor market penetration, poor leadership, which is important. But, you know, there's all these external tangible things that they say the top five or seven things that a business fails for on a regular basis. And when I went back and looked at my journey, right? So the only place I can I can offer any insight from is my own journey, where I've been, where I've come from, the experiences I've had, which include the homelessness, it includes the suspected embezzlement, losing seven plus figures, being poor leadership, leading by insecurity, leading by fear, simply and honestly, like, because I didn't know any better. One of the things I realized very early on is I really only faced really what I refer to as five like major life dates, right? And at the element of each of these five major life gates are really five constraints. So if you can imagine one of our good buddies, E.T. Eric Thomas says, you got to want it as bad as you want to breathe, right? What we don't realize is what's actually constricting our airway, right? So we go ahead. So I was gonna say, what are those five constraints that most people are running into when it comes to the restrict the air because it's nice to say you wanted as bad as you breathe. It's fun to say that's cute and E.T. does a great job with, you know, has condense it into, you know, you want to have something as bad as you want to breathe, but no one gets that level. I talked to people all day long, I'm like, you know, do you what do you want to make? How much you want to do? And they're like, hey, I want to make a million dollars, whatever. Am I cool? I go on a scale from one to 10, how likely is you're going to get to that? And they give some random, ridiculous number. Am I cool? I put a shotgun in the face of your mother. How bad are you going to do it now? They're like, oh my God. And they stop thinking of the number and they start thinking of ways to do it. So we can sit down, we can trigger it, but most people don't have that proverbial shotgun in the back of the head of the lung. So when we talk about Eric Thomas and what he's done about you, how bad did you want to breathe? It's cute to say it. It's adorable, but it doesn't get us there. So there's no way people said, there's five things that are in the way. What are the five things that you've experienced that are constraining us? Yeah, so we'll run through them real fast and we can come back and touch on it because any one of them we could spend a lot of time on. So I would say that the five constraints are arrogance, ignorance, impatience, fear, and insecurity. And it doesn't matter where you've come from, where you've been. I mean, literally I see these same five things over and over and over. And I first, again, I first learned them myself. So let's talk about the polar opposite. So the opposite of arrogance is teachability. Okay. I'm sorry, the opposite of arrogance is humility. Opposite of ignorance is teachability. Opposite of impatience is not patience, it's actually presence. Okay. The opposite of fear historically is some form of faith, no matter what that means to you, right? It's a resilience piece, right? And the opposite of insecurity is authenticity. Very few of us will actually or have done the work to date to discover what makes us tick. Which of those things that makes us tick? Can we lovingly respect, even though we may not like it very much and bring into our full integrated self, to create an authentic self, to then begin to build the other five areas? And leaders specifically, again, I've worked with eight, nine, ten figure earners, and they all, all of us have struggled with each of those. And honestly, I would say that you, it's kind of like, you know, from zero to a million dollars, there's one form of battling those. From the million to 10 million, there's another form of battling. You know, when I got to about $30 million in top line revenue, I really, really battled arrogance. I really did. And it's truest form, meaning I thought I was all that in the bag of chips. And that's when I politely went through my little embezzlement struggle and realized that I wasn't all that in the bag of chips. And even the, even the most unlikely of us can easily be humbled really quickly, which is the, in turn, be a blessing. I say that to say that each entrepreneur, each achiever, each person who's stepping out in faith to build something largely from scratch, needs to focus on the inside. I like to say you can't scale dysfunction, right? And the problem with scaling dysfunction is a lot of times the dysfunction that's actually happening inside of our business is a byproduct of what's happening inside of us. Right. So there's a lot of things that you went over there. I wanted to try and tap into it. One of you said, join the work. We talk about this all the time. This has become a placeholder. It's become almost a platitude. Go do the work. When you're scaling all those, because as you were going through the five, I was like, yep, yep, yep, I was like, score. I have a perfect score. Even though you see success, and I think everyone that I've ever worked with, ever, the high achievers that are out there, they all check all five boxes at some point. And how we deal with those, because I think everyone has them. How we deal with them, how we show it, how we pivot when that happens, be it through life plenchonous in the face and us really, dramatically hurting people in our lives or embezzlement or whatever you run into. We all talk about doing the work. Now, I know what doing the work means for me, and it's an ongoing process, and it'll probably be something I do actually after I'm dead. That's how intense we'll go beyond the beat. So when you talk about doing the work, what is the tangibles of that? Because we hear it all the time. It's like, okay, high achievers have done the work. What does that mean? It is very abstract, because I feel like a lot of times doing the work is very specialized. So for example, if I'm someone who will say struggles with impatience quite a bit, right, which is honestly me. I'm still to this day, I'm very impatient with business practices and stuff like that. I'm patient with people, but not business. I like to see things happen quickly. So the opposite of understanding that is the first of all, I had to figure out what the root cause was. What is the root desire? What is the root of why I feel the need to get things done quickly? What is my nervous system trying to say about that? And for me, it was a matter of safety. So if you go back a little bit of my past, there was always an urgency to getting food, getting shelter. There was always an urgency to getting safety. And because it was always an urgency, it became a pattern that became a subconscious pattern that kept running and running and running and running. Where it affected me in business and relationship specifically is it would cause me to rush ahead and actually respond, I'm sorry, react to situations rather respond to situations or create emotional, in fact, I would say it this way. It's probably easiest way to say it. Almost every major decision or major result that I get that I didn't want, bad decision, bad result that I had, came at a moment of the emotional dysregulation. 100%. When there was so much anxiousness inside of me that I was just like, this is a temporary, okay, just do that. Right? Thinking I can, and that one decision, ironically, from coming from that place would cause five more problems. Had I slowed down, developed some presence, sat in it, actually just got my breathing under control, making sure I was regulated, had I done that, then what would have happened is I would have been able to make a data driven decision. And I don't care who you are, you hear all the time that if you can make a data driven decision from a strategic vision mindset, then all of a sudden the decision starts to make for themselves and you start to grow in prospering scale. Problem is, nine, what is it, nine out of 10 entrepreneurs never break seven figures in top line revenue, or maybe say that 10. But it's a vast majority of us. Historically, with the folks that I've worked with, in almost every case, there's a resistance, a complete resistance to going inside to figure out what makes us tick. So I had to stop what I was doing. I had to go and actually do some research. I started a journal practice a long time ago. I call what I hear you say is, whether or not you believe in God is irrelevant, it's a practice of listening rather than speaking. So I've discovered that starting your day with presence will help you end the day with presence. If you start the day with erratic behavior and anxious energy and just running out the door and just jumping everywhere, you're going to cause yourself problems. So I feel like the starting point is radical honesty. Can you be radically honest about guilt, shame, or condemnation? Right. I think a simple example is when people are driving and I lived in South Florida and the drivers are the best in the world, I swear. It's not my experience. And I would sit there and I'd be driving back from work or going to the store or whatever I was doing and listening to things like Ramstein or Metallica and all that. And all of a sudden, I'm just like, I'm going to drive. I'm going to follow you home. You cut me off. I'm delighted to fish on fire. That's it. Everybody dies. And I remember at one point, it got to, it was so bad that I was shaking where I couldn't control the vehicle. So I physically pulled over, I pulled over and I saw the hazards on. I'm like, okay, what's actually going on? I was like, what is actually going on? Stopping it and going, okay, I don't feel safe. And then having to go through is okay. Because I'm a scuba diver and I've done this enough when I've had just freaked out underwater when you're 80 feet underwater. Like I'm going to drown. You're like, wait, time out. Is your regulator working? Yes. Is your first thing working? Do you have air? What are you talking about? Just be careful. Do we have time for a safety stop? Exactly. And also, the worst case scenario, can you spit and do an emergency ascent? If you can do that, can you spit out your rag and do an emergency ascent? Which please don't do that. They're not fun. I've had to do it. Not fun. So being able to pull over and to stop and run through the checklist and go to that root cause of, okay, am I actually in danger? When I'm on the road, am I in danger? Am I not safe? No. Okay. So is this a perceived reality or an actual reality? Being able to stop that. And to your point, every time I've run into problems with bad decisions, it's always driven by fear or emotional response. Some of the most accessible people I know are absolutely on spectrum. They're being autistic or anything else because they have this disconnect between emotions and not. Everyone else I know, the high-end sheavers out there who are not on spectrum, have learned how to disconnect the emotional response to the logical response. So since we've already discussed it, I check all five. Go me. When you're running... Me too, buddy. We've been there, you know exactly how it's like a mirror. It's awesome. So when you're running into these and you have these and you're working through these, how do you deal with the arrogance? How do you deal with that next one? You know, so here's crazy part is if it's deeply rooted, so you have to realize the arrogance is deeply rooted ironically in the common denominator of the other constraint called insecurity. 100%. It's inferior or complex. Yeah, it's literally, I feel like... I'll tell you where it showed up for me. This is probably just a simple phrase. For me, it showed up in the phrase chasing worth. I felt as if I needed to prove my worth in order to feel validated with itself. And because of that, we've been very forced. We've been in beautiful rooms with amazing humans. We're doing amazing things. And you would go into the room and inevitably, what do you do for a living pops up? And then you kind of go down the laundry list of your credibility markers. I just finally decided at one point in time, I finally got to a place where I was like, every time I do that, while I've done pretty cool stuff and been very successful in some elements, what really makes me unique is now my ability to just have my worth based on me. Like, I don't need to prove myself to anybody at this age in the game. I'm out here trying to serve because I think everybody should... If I could help someone understand things earlier at an earlier stage that it took me to, I can help them resist a lot of pain. So I think in the grand scheme of things, it comes a lot to chasing worth. And in many respects, the five constraints in general are all about chasing worth or some form of validation. So you feel like, I'm a nine figure entrepreneur. Look at, I was building up business. I'm just like, no one cares, dude. I'll tell you when entrepreneur cares. When I've come in contact with people when they care. And again, you could be at a school or you could be in a major mastermind or whatever. When people care is when you're real. That's when people care. Like, are you willing to share from your scars? I've got bazillions of them, it seems like. And when I have an entrepreneur in front of me a lot of times and I've had some that are making, had made quite a bit more money than me and they're trying to salvage their marriage. I can talk to them about the difficulty of the relationships and things that I struggle with. A couple of the clients were large, very large earners and they were searching for purpose because they had gotten all the stuff and realized how empty it was. So at the end of the day, I think how quickly can each of us stop and slow down? I call it slow down to speed up. There's another format that I've heard before other people say, but essentially that's what it is. It's like, I woke up this morning and I'll share this with you. Now, granted, I'm a person of faith by nature and people don't have to, obviously, I love everybody in general, but my mantra is this and I say it three times to myself every morning. And this actually was one of the things that helped me slow down. I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I am wise, I'm a steward of the most high and the most important one, which was the hardest one to say, especially staring out of mirror, was I love you, Stephen. And a lot of people can't do that. And it's funny you bring the I love you, Stephen went up because when I do this exercise with the clients that I have very similar where I say, okay, who do you love the most in the world? Who's that one person? If you were going to die and you had to call someone in 10 seconds, who's that person? Okay, they get that person, whoever that is, that space or school. What does that person have to do to be worthy of love? And they'll sit there and they're like, nothing, it's nothing. It's my grandmother, I love them, I call. What do you have to do to be worthy of that person's love? And they're like, and they lock up. I'm like, it's the same answer. And once you get that, because we have this broken equation that we're taught that like, hey, if you achieve these things, especially as high earners and entrepreneurs and achievers, if you achieve this, then I'll be enough. And if I get enough, then I'll be worthy of love. And then it's broken. That it is, or it's broken. Now, it's a great driver. If you had that wall of insecurity coming into you, if you have that subconsciously feeding your patterns, you will get into a situation where you will be radically successful. But I had a client who is nine figures, he's about to be a billionaire, phenomenally working with our clients, they couldn't connect with him because he wasn't showing up authentically. And then his little girl came over and he was just a smelting. Yeah, he just, he stopped there and he held his little girl and she's sitting there and she was talking about her tooth was coming out because she was losing one of her teeth and he's talking and all of a sudden he just turns into it and they stopped and he goes, okay, cool. He goes, okay, I'll talk to you later. Daddy's got to finish this turns around and all the other people that were trying to do a business deal was like, we're not 100%. What do you want? We'll give you everything we have because they saw the version that he was too afraid to show up for ability with to have that type of like, here's who I am. And again, when you're not in that version, you are going to push everybody away. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to do all the things that again, I think it's Sanskrit that word you talked about earlier. Starts with a pay patience. That's Sanskrit. As you're going through those, I think it's fed really high on this subconscious level because everyone comes to coaches like you and I and they say, hey, I don't make my triggers. Yeah, well, this is this way. Go ahead. Sorry. No, no, go for it. I was, so I had this thought as you were sharing with that, that I want to piggyback off of what you shared because what you shared is absolutely true. What I've discovered is whether you call it solar consciousness, it doesn't matter. But if you're chasing worth, it's a commodity. So it becomes a transaction. If you're securing your worth and your alignment and your purpose and your own vision for your life and the love for yourself and your willingness to show up for yourself, I used to self abandon like crazy. I had the caretaker program, I would try to rescue anything and everything out of their own situations because of the pain that I went through, right? So I didn't want people to experience the pain. But is your, is this solar consciousness, is it a commodity or a tool of connection? To your point where you were just sort of just describing that story, I've seen that a lot myself. I was at an event not long ago and a gentleman, massive heart, like I saw him away from the event, massive heart. And obviously he was one of the folks who was presenting. And as soon as he started presenting, it was, you know, I've got this relationship, I've got this thing, I bought three of these, I have four of those, I have, and you just, I watched the entire audience kind of shut down. Yep. Right? And I just felt like I remember being my 11 year old self in a 40 year old body with a similar transaction or a similar mindset. And it just made me want to go embrace this guy and pull him in and say, bro, bro, man, you're amazing without all that stuff. Right. Right. And so is it a commodity, is it a connection point? Is it, is it something you can tie yourself to? Or are you simply, and this is where we get in trouble. And you had asked this earlier when we first started talking, is like, what is that, what is the essential element, the common denominator essentially? And honestly, it's the, it's the child at its most injured state becomes the most anchored adult. Right. So if we're 11 years old when that thing happens to us, we literally carry that 11 year old through 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 30, 35, 40, et cetera, until they meet someone like yourself, Charles, who can, who can like, slow them down and say, Hey, bro, let me help you and let me, let me help you see yourself clearer. Right. The moment you can see yourself clear without shame, blame or condemnation, the moment your awakening actually begins, and that's when the work begins. I will say that one of the reasons I feel like the work is not done was the same reason I avoided it for decades, which is I was scared of it. I mean, you have, it's, it's, they call it shadow work for a reason. You have to confront things and bring things in your environment and kind of like show love to things that maybe you dislike about yourself. Absolutely. And that's a very difficult thing. Yeah, I learned this from the Sioux community. I've been blessed to be around those guys and they say, whatever your fear is, that's your short line. That's the next thing you need to do. That will bring you home. Find your fear. That's your home. But we don't want to do that. I'd love how you brought it up. You're like, Hey, I'm going to go help everybody else because I can avoid then helping myself. And God, I do that more than I could possibly tell you it's something I constantly worked through on this day. I'm like, I know I need to work on this, but I'm going to go do this. And a lot of people manifest, even if you're not working with other people, people like, Oh, I need to go do this project. I'm going to go clean my house because at least that makes me feel like I did something. I checked the box. So a lot of people were listening to this room. We get it, the two of you little high achievers, fruity little they're going to say it. I'm going to get the lengths. It is what it is. I want to get them also something tactical. We're like this. I know I need to do the work, but right now, I need to feed my kids. I've got some business problems. How does this guy do this? Because I tell people all the time, you can probably sing happy birthday, please don't really easily. But if I put a grenade in your hand and take the pin out, you're not going to sing happy birthday so well. So there's a lot of people listening to this and listen, I want what's proven. Give me something strategic. Give me that pin that I can put back in the grenade. So then I can then I can go do this personal work and do the shadow work. But right now, you know, I can't pay my bills, the economy is collapsing, we've got chaos right now going on. When someone's sitting there going, Hey, you were homeless, nine figures, homeless, there's a lot of steps in between like, because if I tell someone, Hey, go do the work and go hug a tree and go do the shadow work and get into it and really face your fears and your doubts. That's great. If they can't eat, they're like, I got a business that's collapsing, dude. What are the things that in your experience? Because again, you and I both know that I'll just say it for myself. When people do the work, the answers that they're looking for the tacticals, they already know it comes out because they're already inside. Yeah, they already know. So for those of you who are listening, I'm doing this for you guys because I know you want something tactical and I'm asking them to get out and say, here you go, this is the tactical part of it. But I can tell you if you do the work, these tacticals that you already know will already be implemented on your own if you do the work. But the tacticals, if someone is sitting there and they're stuck and they need to start changing things because you've been in rooms and you've been very blessed to be in rooms with amazing people, people who far outranked you education wise and you still found a way to succeed, what are some of the tactical things in business that people do right now that have a proven success? You know, it's really funny. I think they say ignorance was bliss, but it's not true. So step one, I think, is understanding are you in fact misaligned? Right? So because, you know, we could be talking right now and people are like, well, okay, it's a great conversation. It's wonderful at all. But I think I'm good. So the symptoms of misalignment are burnout, overwhelm, and insecurity. Now, it's interesting how insecurity keeps popping up, right? So step one is like, just am I actually misaligned? Because when you're not misaligned, you're in a steady state of flow, right? You're very clear on your objectives. You're very clear with your relationships. You're showing up for yourself. You're not self-abandoning, right? So how do we go from misalignment to essentially a steady state of flow? So step one is first of all, identifying am I misaligned? Okay. I think step two is like, okay, what area am I misaligned in? So I like to break things down in domains of life. Because I'll find that, and I'm sure you found this as well, you'll have several folks that are really strong in their relationships, but their business is really struggling. Or they're very good in business, but their relationship or their health is struggling, right? So I used to draw out a quadrant. I used to call it the quadrants of conflict. So emotional, physical, financial, and spiritual. And you can just literally scale one to 10. One to 10, where would I rank myself right now? In my emotional well-being. So emotional a lot of time, obviously, is how you feel about yourself, how you feel emotionally. Do I feel out burned out, overwhelmed? Do I feel like I'm in a steady state of authenticity? And just kind of use a rank and you say scale one to 10. 10 being the highest. Am I a seven, an eight, a three? And what will happen is, is you'll all of a sudden get clarity on where you need to focus first. You mentioned to it just a second ago, with your SEAL clients and the people we work with, the SEALs in that community, is the greatest place of fear, right? Historically, the greatest place of fear will show up as the most common lowest number on that quadrant, right? Once you identify that, I think the next step is to actually go and get some help. When I say help, I mean, find someone who's really strong in that category, who can give you best practices to begin to work on that, while simultaneously actually beginning to make the backtrack a little bit. So I like to say it like this. One of the tools that I use to identify my roadblocks. So I used to use a framework called grow. So gain perspective, recognize slash remove roadblocks, organize a plan and work the plan. That's literally step one, two, three, four. So gain perspective is where am I shortcoming? Where am I not being honest with myself? Where do I need coaching? Where do I need mentorship? Where do I need training? Where do I need information? And where do I just need to sit with myself? So many times, the gaining perspective is just sitting in quiet. So many of us can't even go to the bathroom without taking a phone with us. Right? So that means you need a study. That means you're are your nervous system is already looking for a steady state of distraction. Right? Once you can get some perspective on what areas need to be focused on, then it comes just to ask one question. Where are the potential roadblocks? I guarantee your brain and your nervous system will put them in front of you. Well, you know what, these three relationships over here, they're actually are probably not that healthy. They're actually pulling me away from my partner. They're operating in this environment a life. My partner is operating in this environment of life. Right? And then you organize a plan. You get the key people around you that you need around you. You get the key information inside of you. And then you have to apply it, which may require prayer, meditation, mindset, shifting, belief management, you know, because limiting beliefs at the subconscious level are essentially guiding 90, was 95% of your behavior patterns. So I believe in focusing on subconscious matters more than conscious matters first, because I want to bring the subconscious to the conscious so I can address it. Right? So a lot of times the step by step framework is obviously step one, am I misaligned? Step two, where am I misaligned? Step three, what resources can I bring in to get aligned? And step four, how can I measure my overall alignment? And step five, how can I continue the process in the simplest form? Right. So when you're going through this, we talked about purpose a lot. And I think it's people are going and they gain awareness. So they get to the G, which is, you know, gaining the awareness. A lot of people are going to realize some of their patterns that may have not been the best. It's the nicest way to say this. You know, maybe you've done some stupid, maybe you've drunk laws, maybe you've betrayed yourself, maybe you've betrayed your partner, maybe you've done these things and really gotten lost along the way. A lot of people get stuck there. And they don't understand that their path, their past is not who they are. Their past was a lesson. And you can be beyond that. How do you get your clients to walk through that once you gain that awareness, because that will lock them up. And again, I agree with you 100%. Silence is a gift. When you know, there's I've done silence retreats, I've done completely quiet for a week, I've done the ones where it's complete blackout. You ever all the answers you're looking for are internal. Period. So getting that silence. But when you get that awareness, you're like, Oh, I'm whatever, I haven't worked out enough. I haven't done what I needed to do. I've lied about this. I've betrayed these people. I've failed here. And you have all of this and this wall of just shame, which will feed the insecurity bug. How do you get people past that? Because I mean, again, we all have this insecurity. We all have this, I'm not enough. Everybody I know, I don't care who you are. I've dealt with people who are literally on covers of magazines, feeling insecure that they weren't attractive enough. I'm like, when you hear the magazine cover, okay, awesome. So when you're going through that, how do you get past that initial, you know what? Yeah, I could have done ABC. And I am lying to myself and I'm not doing what I need to do, or I have done these horrible things in the past. How do you get them past that? I think the key aspect is understanding you will always be limited by your labels. Okay, so I'll give you an example. So labels, we are, we talk in forms of labels. So I've been divorced, I've been cheated on, I've been addicted, I've lost my kid to suicide. I've like all these, these are all labels. These are all things we take on ironically that are actually experiences and lessons, but we take them on as identity. Right. And because once we understand that we're limited by our labels, we become objective to our label. So I'll give you an example. So a quick reframe. I can either say I am divorced, meaning I've been through a divorce, and that essentially in subconsciously will can placate in my potential for future relationships, or I can say I have experienced divorce. I have experienced embezzlement. I have experienced homelessness. I'm not, you know, I am not the homeless high school dropout that I was when that experience happened. I'm a very different person now. And there's a 25 year window from that moment to when I exited the company, right, with lots of things in here. And essentially, one of the exercises you can do is you can go ahead and list the top 10 labels that you've been living by. And what that does is that'll bring awareness to that. And then the next part of the exercise would be to take those 10 things and reframe them, reframe them as experiential error elements that taught you valuable lessons. And then just like Victor Frankel says, a man search for meetings, like once you have the lesson, once you have the meaning behind the lessons, the pain, the discomfort, the shame, the guilt, everything associated with that lesson dissipates because now you have the meaning of why that lesson was so important. And when it comes to purpose, it ties directly to purpose because I believe that the reason humanity is so connection oriented is because we can all learn something from each other on a consistent basis. That means that by definition, whatever experience you've been through, whatever lessons that you've learned that offer value to someone else becomes a portion of your purpose. So on stage a long time ago, and Rory Vade and I used to pick on each other all the time because we have similar quotes that have now been talked about, I used to say the greatest purpose in life you'll ever have is serving the person you used to be. But it's not just serving the person used to be now, it's serving the 13 year old version of yourself, the 18, the 19, the 22, the 30, the whatever age group. But you don't do that. Like you can't do that until you've identified the labels, remove the limitation off the label via the lesson, and then begin to use that lesson to empower and encourage other people, whether that's in your family, whether that's in your business, whether that's in your community, whether that's at scale like we do. It's the same tool. Yeah, I think there's some magic in that moment where like I'm not that 13 year old anymore. Everything I do is always trying to help by that 13 year old version of me. I'm like, okay, he was scared, he knew there was a way and the running joke is Jesus didn't walk on water, he knew where the rocks are. I knew that there were rocks out there. I was like, where the hell are the rocks? And that 13 year old me was like, I knew there's rocks, I knew there's way to do this, no one's going to tell me how to do that. And that fear and that pain and that belief system, I had to break, but I can consciously understand I'm not that 13 year old. Just like I'm not the person I was five months ago, or three days ago, or six years ago, or two years ago, we were on some world. So I think there's magic in that moment there to kind of pivot out. And whenever someone comes to me and they say, Hey, I just got divorced, I always say congratulations. And they're like, what? I'm like, congratulations. Like, I don't understand. I was like, there's never been a couple that's been like, you know what? Oh my God, I love you so much. Oh my God, I love you too. You know what we should do today? Yes, we should get divorced. There's never been a couple that's ever said that in the dawn of time ever, ever, ever, ever. So if you had two people that are no longer compatible, Mazel Tov, congratulations. Otherwise, it's great. So you get that awareness, and you pivot, you separate yourself from that. Now we go into the R. When someone gets trapped in the R section of growth, because I love this idea of growing, I'm just going to double down on this because this is magical stuff. I use it last to leave my life with it. So it makes it makes it makes it makes it. It's phenomenal. I think we can just do a master class just on a growth. We could probably do a couple hours on this. So you gained awareness, you disconnected and understood, Hey, I am no longer that person. I get that. Now let's get to the R. How do we go through that process? Well, first of all, you need to understand you cannot remove a roadblock that you won't that you refuse to recognize. This is where your ego and your arrogance can get in the way in a big way. The ego side of us statistically is essentially its core design is to keep us safe. Now it does not have a barometer in many cases on what safe is outside of not reliving pain, whether that's being eaten by a lion or being avoiding a divorce or whatever. The ego and forcefully a lot of times will let the intellect get in get in your head such mind lent to like whatever get in your head in such a way that you will talk yourself out of the very thing you should focus on. Like I can come up with this and you see this happen a lot. You pay attention to the words that are actually coming out of your mouth. You'll see this happen a lot. I know what happened for me. Well, if she'd have done blank, blank, blank, blank, or if they'd have done blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, or if that had done it. What I thought was so interesting about what you just shared a minute ago, and I think it's powerful, is people fully understanding that the only person that is going to rescue you is you. It's you. 100%. All right. The only way you rescue yourself is to recognize the radical honesty, what roadblocks are there, and then begin a progress or moving it. Now, the removing of the roadblocks in many cases could take a year. It could take a week. It could take an hour, depending on how strong the radical honesty gives you kind of like the radical awareness, because sometimes radical awareness by itself was enough to shift. Absolutely. Right? So, I would say that the recognition piece is take a result, a negative result that you got. Take that negative result, follow back to the action in which recreated that result, whether that's in my case, I made it a point to apologize to my kids if I was wrong, rather than I'm the parent. So, no matter what I do, I'm not wrong. As an example, take the result, take the action, and then take the mindset, like what was going on internally and emotionally that made this the choice or this the core action. That will give you a little insight and then say, okay, well, where did this thought, this belief or whatever come from? And then sit with it in silence for, I don't know, for me on average, you can be anywhere from probably 10 minutes to about two hours before I'm like, and you'll have little flashes of your past that'll pop up. Okay? And then when those little flashes of your past pop up, then inevitably what you're looking for now as you're looking for, what did that version of me really need? What was he or she really looking for in that moment? Right? For me, for example, growing up early on as a father who came back in my life around 12 or 13 years old, but was still very much a drill sergeant early on, like, why did I feel like I didn't want to speak up? Because a drill sergeant, when you speak up with a drill sergeant, you know, it comes, you know, this kind of things. So then you end up chasing your voice. See, these different elements will begin to show you where you're not showing up for yourself. And I'm a big believer that most of us who are struggling in life, essentially aren't showing up for ourselves. Let me finish with this one, this one thought and then I'll hear yours as well. About seven years ago, Harris, Time Magazine, with a Harris poll, did a survey about 400,000 Americans. And they were specifically researching essentially a joy fulfillment, you know, kind of like feeling like you're living your best life. Over 70% of all Americans that responded to that survey said they were not living that. Now, when you go through the article, you'll very quickly realize that the core reason that these folks feel like they're not living their best life is because they're not living their authentic life. They're living the life that someone told them they should live. 100%. So if you take that, you understand, okay, these are the elements in which I felt unsafe. These are the belief mechanisms that were shaped by that. And this is how I changed my authentic self to conform to this version of my, this identity. When you can come in just, and again, I wish I could say it's like crazy easy. Everybody can do it like overnight, right? It may be a process depending on how sensitive the issue is. But if you can do that journey, and a lot of times you can do it with a notepad and a pen and a good friend, right? Do that journey together. And now you can say, okay, this is where the roadblock is. I'll give you a perfect example. One of my most recent roadblocks that I would do, and I'm 40, at the time I was 48 years old. I'm 49 now, about turn 15 this coming year. At 48 years old, I had a relationship end unexpectedly for me. They were together for about 10 months. It ended unexpectedly. I'm like, what the F just happened? And that began the journal. And I did that same exercise with some, some key coaches of mine. And when I did that exercise, I very realized, dude, I've been trying to save people since I was nine years old. So some would call that the caretaker program. That's a major roadblock given the fact that I'm trying to serve at scale. I literally did this three years ago. And instead of focusing on my own bullshit and being present with it and so on, I was like, I'm going to save all these other people. And then if I save these people, I'll then be enough, which all I think was betrayed everyone, which was all driven by this. Including ourselves. Oh, 1000%, which was all driven by this desire, this insecurity that I had that overcompensated with this level of arrogance, because all the ways was deep down in security. I mean, I've been up all day, well, if you don't think I'm enough, you're right. I'm better than you. So it was hyper secure, which was all depends on the score. So if just the opposite loop, which has ended up betraying everybody in there to myself. And I think people don't understand when we say sit in silence, the biggest thing I would tell people is sit in silence, obviously, don't have your phone. Don't be stupid. But to sit down without judgment. That's to me when sitting silence means sit down. And if you're going to have things pop up, understand that what's going to come out of your head, some of it's going to be fear. A lot of it's going to be untrue. It's okay. You're not a five-foot headed flingo. It's okay. Going through that and just listening and say, okay, what does this mean? And just writing it all out and sitting with science, because what'll happen is different versions of yourself. Because to your point, you're just trying to stay alive. You're trying to avoid pain. And it'll give you these false flags. It's like, Oh, you didn't do this, you're never going to do this, you're never enough, blah, blah, blah, cool. And then you just write it down. And then every time it says it again, you just put a little mark next to it. Okay, you've said that nine times. Awesome. And just, you know, this is where I don't get into pronouns normally, understanding that there are multiple versions of yourself and say, Okay, this is what you did. This is what you did. The world is fine. We all have multiple versions. Sitting down with it and saying, Okay, this is what it is. So silence means sitting without judgment and just being present in the process. And the, again, I've done silence retreats. It will fundamentally change who you are as a human being, sitting down and going through it. But having that awareness that you did, which would happen at you at 48, mine was a couple years ago, where I went through going, Oh, wow, I'm trying to save others to avoid doing the work on my own. Huge leap for feeling. Huge leap. Yeah. I want to add one thing if I can to that, because that's that's genius and absolutely true. I want to invite people to give themselves, and I can't think of any other word than grace. Grace to experience the journey, right? So when you sit down that first time to do the silence, the silence tool, you may nine things may pop up. Okay, so and yeah, so you got these, these things that pop up and you're like, Holy shit, not even more overwhelmed than I was before, because now I got to do all nine of these things. Right. Right. And my experience has been is like, give yourself in grace, snag one, work on one at a time. That will create a bit of a snowball, snowball piece, right? I'm convinced that people who are living a fulfilled life are not living a life of constant over functioning. And the only way you avoid over functioning and trying to overcompensate and over deliver and just is you have to figure out why you're chasing it. Right. And then once you figure out why you're chasing it, you have to say, is this an authentic chase? Because I believe, in fact, that this is something I learned during that season. When I first realized that I was in this again, we're talking about not having no bullshit about yourself anymore. Like, dude, I would come up with like, no, I mean, she had three kids, she had this, you know, I was trying to serve, I was trying to help. 100%. You know, all the, you come up with all this, all this BS, right? And the reality is, the truth is, is I was over functioning. Yeah, I was pursuing worth through. Yeah, exactly. I started with a selfish desire of I, it's I want to help her, this person's father's dying, I want to help her, she just got through a bad relationship, I want to help her, she's never had I, it all starts with I, and it's a selfish act. And you think, Oh, well, no, I'm helping someone else, it's that, you know, I'm proud to be modest. It's like, wait, what? What did you say? So being able to have that awareness. And I think, you know, something you said earlier, how fast these things could change. And you know, there's people who, you know, I spent eight years in a hospital watching people die. When you're faced with that, things change immediately. Boom. People have these life or death experience and they change immediately. If you're in a situation where you're not seeing radical changes, if you're going through this and you're listening to this, you're like, dude, I thought I was going to learn about how to make nine figures. And I thought this is what he was going to share with me. This is going to be amazing. And now you're, you know, whatever 30 minutes into this podcast, and you're like, what the hell are they talking about? This is totally different. If you're, if you've gotten this far and like, oh, well, you know, there's a lot and I don't know how long it's going to take and it's going to take a couple of weeks, please, and you might disagree with this, please understand you're completely full of shit. You are one decision away from a completely different life. And I tell people all the time, go, go get an Uber 15, 20 minutes to an airport, 15, 20 minutes to a bus stop, 15, 20 minutes to a, you know, a train, get on it, let go of everything else. You will have a completely different life in 24 hours. So this is because they're sitting there and they're holding on, I can't make these changes. What will my wife think? What will my husband think? I don't care. Like the second person I ever coached, he wanted to exit early. It's the nicest way I'm going to say it. He decided he didn't want to be here anymore. And when he came to me and I was like, congratulations, that's awesome. Let's do it. He's like, excuse me. Let's do it. He's like, what are you talking about? I was like, congratulations, you're dead. And he's like, wait, what? I said, all right, what do you want to do now? He's like, huh? I said, do you want to still be married to your wife? He's like, I love my wife with everything I have. It's cool. What about your kids? He's, well, I said, oh, you don't like both your kids. He's like, yeah, one of my really fucking kids, man. I was like, cool. I can't get rid of the kids, chief. He goes, I go, what about your job? He goes, man, but I have to do it. And I go, you're dead. You've already exited early. It's over. What about your job? He's like, I hate my company. I was like, cool. Then our job right now is to get you realigned to your point. In the next six months, what can we do to realign with your truth, whatever that is, and exit you out. And we exited out of the company in 90 days and he went and they changed all the things. But this idea that your months, weeks, years away from a radical change, complete change. Complete BS. You know, we were talking about before we started recording, I recently found black mold in the kitchen in my property. Yeah. I, it's gone. I now am in a different environment and things are radically changing. Now, whatever you want to call it, God Buddha, Allah, the big bang, the magic chicken came in and magic chicken. I had it in there for you. If you're coming in and you're in an environment and that change, the magic chicken made that happen, it forced all these other changes. So please understand the people who are stuck as you're going through that process thinking, oh, this is going to take so long. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. It's directly correlated to how much you're willing to lean in. In fact, the note I jotted down that was as you were sharing that I thought would piggyback really well with what you shared is I use a, I did this in fact, as I was coming out the other end, I've called a read, a bit of a rebirth, right? So I realized I was over functioning. I realized I was over giving. I was self abandoning. I wasn't taking care of self. I wasn't showing it for myself. I wasn't loving on myself properly. I was giving all of that stuff away to other people, right? I go through a radical transformation myself. And then anytime I go through a radical life change, I always do what most people commonly call sabbatical. Sabbatical is just leaving your, is nothing more than leaving your environment with no agenda, going to a different environment and just being present with self. That's step one, two, three of a sabbatical. What are you doing? Who are you doing it with? If anybody, and where are you going? Essentially. So I went to New Zealand for three weeks. Now, yeah, I love these. It's amazing. Now, most people, and I'm being honest, right? So I've been very fortunate now. I can take a sabbatical for that extended period of time and go to an exotic destination in some cases to experience that. There's a magic in that. Okay, great. What's most important is I went for three weeks to be with Steven. Steven, right? Not Steven, the business owner, not Steven, the author, not Steven to speak, like just Steven. The Steven that, and I got to know Steven so good. I'm like, I like this guy. He actually generally cares about people, but he also has now learned to, it's not my responsibility. Right. Like I'll brush it off in a heartbeat. The reason I say that is because most of us will never stop long enough to actually get the perspective we really need to shift. So again, we've said that numerous times in different ways. Step one is stop. Just stop. So I discovered I've been doing the sabbatical approach for a decade. It started with an hour. Like I'd go away for an hour and just... Absolutely. Because we always tell ourselves, well, the business or the family is going to fall apart in the 30 minutes I'm going to the bathroom. It's all BS. Again, it's the ego trying to put a quote, keep you safe. So maybe you go take a weekend for yourself, especially before you make a major life decision. Like before you, as you exit early or choose or desire to exit early or choose to leave a relationship or choose to shut down your business or like it may, it's some of the exception of exiting early, but some of those other things may be more, maybe what needs to happen. But at the end of the day, how sure are you? How do you know that you're making those decisions from the ground in place? So the bigger the decision, the more grounded I feel like I have to be. If I need to put my feet on the grass and sit there for 30 minutes or stand there for 30 minutes, take a breathe and just get centered. I do that now where I did not do that little a year ago. I love that you didn't say the right decision. You said the grounded decision because there is no right or wrong. There's just grounded decisions. And one of the things they teach a friend of mine who's part of the IDF, people are like, I can't find a moment. I can't find 30 minutes. They'll teach individuals who are inactive combat engagements to disconnect, to completely detach from the environment while they're currently being shot. Find the seconds, get the clarity, move forward. So if you're sitting at home going, oh, I can't do that. I can't find 30 minutes. These guys are fighting it while in combat. So yeah, you're lying to yourself, have that awareness and understand that there is a ballgame changing and how we do it. So if they're going through and they're getting this awareness and when it comes to sabbatical, you know, one of the sabbaticals that I had, literally, it was a one one efficiency in what was going to be a retirement home that wasn't opened up yet. And I just spent a week in this environment in this not nice place. But it was arguably the greatest gift I've ever had compared to when I was in Galapagos right now. So the environment doesn't matter as much as being present and letting go and being in silence as much as you can. And I tell people all the time, you should do silent weeks. You absolutely once a year do a silent week. So if you can't do a silent week, just sit around. I started with a day. Thursdays used to be my silence day. My whole team would know it. Recenter, we get there. We've gone through G. We've gone through R. So we're getting there. We've identified some obstacles. We've gone through my sitting in silence and going there. I think people get stuck with working the plant. They get overwhelmed or like, Oh, well, is this the right thing I'm going to do? Or this is not the right thing going to do? Or what's the next? When you walk people through working the plan, whatever that is, how do you get them unstuck? How do you keep that momentum? Because motivations are durable. It's ineffective. It's adorable. Discipline and consistency is going to win all day long. But that's a hard thing to get because it's a muscle you have to develop. People are like, Oh, I know I need to do 100 pushups. I know I need to do 100 squats. I know I need to go for a walk. Yada, yada, yada. How do you get people to rock and roll and start working that plan? I think the easiest thing for people to understand is, and again, this is for personal experience, I discovered I either would not take action or would not take efficient action if I was trying to do it all at one time. Rory, mutual friend, Vaden says diluted focus equals diluted results. So I started thinking in terms of dominos, one of the core attributes that I look at when I go to working at this, it comes part of organizing a plan. It's like, okay, what are my top three major initiatives? And on top of that, what is the number one of those top three that if I got that thing moving progress got knocked down, that could essentially knock down the other ones behind this. Biggest effect. Exactly. So it's momentum. It's nothing more than it's, yeah, it's nothing more than momentum, honestly. How do I create momentum? One of the most recent, well, not a recent example, but a number of years ago when I was starting the company, the first thing I wanted to do was obviously get shelter, achieve that, okay, get consistent food, achieve that, buy some new equipment so I could keep building the company, did that. And then the next major one was dig myself out of about $70,000 in debt at the time, which is a lot of money in the late 90s. Right? It's a lot of money now. Yeah. And the only, and when I started tackling that, this is before I knew about Dave and Sharon Ramsey and all that stuff, who are great people in their own right. I actually went to, and I was like, okay, literally, I think I remember one of my bills, like I had a bunch of them, right? But one of the bills was like $30 a month, but like the whole balance was like $500. So I said, okay, cool, I'm going to attack that $500. Right? I'm going to have some delayed gratification for a hot minute. I'm going to save up, essentially say I'll keep making the minimum, and then I'm going to chunk $500. Well, that released, that gave me like $100 a month now that I could then go after the $1,000 thing, then I saved up for the $1,000 thing. Long and behold, I was able to pay that debt off in a very short timeframe in the grand scheme of things. But it was because I got singularly focused on the main thing. Financial stability was a big thing for me. It was one of the things that generationally my family has never been really good at. And I wanted it to change with me. And all I had to do was change my behavior with money, how I thought about money, how I, and a lot of times relationships, your life, all these things are the core elements, which is why by understanding the area that you're most unsuccessful, I'm trying to be careful with my words, the area that needs the most attention. By understanding the areas that needs the most attention, you could come up with three strategic steps to attack that one thing until you've achieved a certain level of success based on whatever your parameters are. So I believe that if the number one thing is this preventing from actually taking action is trying to take action at too many things that once the brain can't handle it. The brain loves clarity. If it has to spend a bunch of mental energy and firing neuropowers and creatine it creates and all this kind of stuff to like to chase all these things, it's going to just stall. Yeah. Right. However, if you can get singularly focused on one core objectives that then becomes the pivot point. So if I have three objectives I'm trying to create, I'm going to say which one of these will support the other two and I focus right there. Right. I always think that like at the fair that when you have the little bottles that are on top of each other, the stack and pyramid, and which bottle should I try and knock down? Well, if you knock down the top one, it's not going to be effective. Aim at the bottom and the rest of them will fall. It's this idea of how do you eat an elephant? The common thing is one bite at a time, like yeah, but first you have to stop the elephant. You got to cook the elephant from moving. So what is the one tactical thing you can do that will have the greatest impact and start that domino chain? Because there always a good way to get stuck. Well, like only to this only have so much time. Knock down the one pin that's going to knock everything else or at least start the momentum. And in front of mine, we were at, it's called the Renaissance fair down here in Florida and we were trying to knock down the pins and we found out later that the pins were actually had bungees in them so they wouldn't knock over. But he sat there and he was like, what's the goal of the game? And he's like, I got to knock down the pins and he's like, okay, he took his shoe off and he threw it at the base and he knocked the whole base. Technically, yes. So for me, it's knocking over that base and really getting into and moving forward in that way. So as you go through this grow process and you're going through it and you're gaining awareness and you're identifying the rotor blocks and you're going through each and every one of these steps, I think a lot of people are going to be like, okay, this is amazing. What's next? So if people want to track you down and say, is this stuff in a book? Do you have this written down in a course? Is it in a, how do people get more of this? Because this is arguably my favorite podcast that I've done and I could talk for another three hours. I love you, bro, man. Yeah, you and I could jam all the time. In fact, as soon as we have safe haven done, you have to come out to save even hang out with me. I'll do it. Absolutely. After this, as soon as we stop recording, we're gonna knock it down. But it's only want to track you down and have more intel and to do this, where can they find your info? How do they track you down? How do they get more of this? Because I think if people came in and it was the rope dope, which was the distraction of homeless to nine figures, all of a sudden, oh wait, now I have a tactical plan to make changes in any part of my life. Be it my relationship, be it spiritual or anything. Now they have this growth plan. That's only at the tip of the iceberg for what you offer. How do people track you down? What books? How do we do this? Yeah, well, if you think about the terms of clarity, right? So one of the things I've realized is people consume and change your lives for three different types of modalities. So visual, so some people like videos, some people like kinesthetic, so putting their hands on things, some people like audio or listening, right? Everything that we've done is that it can be a gain or access at some point in time in any modality they choose. I think the simplest thing where there's no major ask is we build a tool that we call the integrated alignment method. And it's a quiz. It's something about seven or eight questions. It takes about six or seven minutes. That gives you a detailed report when you're done kind of taking the quiz. And the best part is, as we don't sell you, we're not trying to sell you anything. So it's just, this is a tool that I wish that I had for myself back in the day that would have gotten me started sooner and got me on my path sooner. And your audience, if they want to, can find that at Stephen with a PH, so stphen, scoggins, scogigins.com, backslash, alignment. So stevensscoggins.com, backslash, alignment. It comes, like I said, it comes with a workbook at the end of its 30 pages or so that you can really, it's how it's basically, it takes all the things that we've talked about as concrete as we could in a very, in a podcast format and makes a lot more concrete. And you can go step by step at your speed and your level. And if you want to partner in different ways after that, that's more, that's cool. But I mean, my heart right now is to just serve at scale and help as many people kind of get awakened and kind of shook and loose. So I would just start there. You can obviously find me on all the social platforms as well. And I'd love to connect with you guys. I'm probably, I'm personally probably most active on Instagram myself, which is Stephen underscore scoggins. Yeah. So I appreciate you actually asking. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on and having this real conversation that most people aren't ready for and actually giving a proven framework like, Hey, do this. Don't worry about the other stuff today. Just do go, go grow. That's all I need you to do. Just go grow. Go grow. Go grow. Go spend, you know, the next 20, 30 minutes, go grow and get quiet, turn your phone off. Just tell everybody you have a belly ache. Tell them you have food poisoning. You got to sit on the toilet, whatever you need to do. Go grow. Just go sit there and do it. And I appreciate you so much for coming on. Bro, I can't think for the opportunity to hang out with you and your audience man. I love you to death and I hope we had some value today. Absolutely. Many founders chase revenue, but Stephen showed that real growth comes from aligning identity, strategy, and mindset. Stop focusing only on external tactics. Start building the inner foundation that makes every decision, every pitch and every partnership more powerful. Success isn't just what you build. It's who you become in the process.