They say the only thing that is constant is change. A lot of things in our lives change constantly – things like relationships, career, goals, and even family. Along with those changes, our self-image or identity can also shift. Anthony Trucks is a serial entrepreneur with one serious superpower – the power to navigate life’s shifts, good and bad, with grace and optimism. He joins us to talk about the identity shifts he had to make that brought him from former foster child to pro athlete to now one of the most highly regarded speakers and trainers in his industry. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Big Shift with Anthony Trucks

On this episode, I’ve invited my great friend, Anthony Trucks, to the show to talk about the identity shifts he had to make that brought him from former foster child to pro athlete to one of the most highly regarded speakers and trainers in his industry. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

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I have a great show in store for you. I am excited about this conversation I had with my friend, Anthony Trucks. We talk about everything from his childhood to his marriage breaking up to getting remarried to the same woman. Something I admire about what he does and who he is in the world is his ability to go after the things he wants. He’s willing to fail in public and I appreciate that. It’s taken me a long time to get to where I am now as far as failing in public and I’m nowhere near where he is. His confidence is contagious. You’re going to love this episode.

I want to reiterate a couple of things that are on my mind. The first one is to congratulate our entire community for being picked up by the radio. We are nationally syndicated across sixteen different FM radio stations. Thank you for spreading the word. I’m grateful and happy that you’re a part of this conversation of this community. If you are not yet in our Unbecoming Community, please jump over there, it’s UnbecomingPodcast.com/Community. I would love to have you join us in the behind the scenes conversations, the more vulnerable conversations this show warrants and this show invites. It’s a place unlike any other place, any other community in the online industry. I’m proud of that community and we’re doing some big things in there. For those of you who have left reviews, I can’t tell you how much those mean to me.

More than that, The Unbecoming Success Series has been an absolute hit. It is a six-part audio series where I break down the entire unbecoming process to help you create better results in your life and business. They are short little audios. I have extracted the most impactful exercises and prompts that work when you do. You will read a lot in this episode in this conversation with Anthony when we talk about doing the work. If you do the work in these audios, you will get the results that you’re after. That you can find at UnbecomingPodcast.com/Success.

As I’ve primed you for this amazing conversation we have here, I want to get into who Anthony is as a human being and as a business owner, as a successful person and somebody I look up to. Anthony is a serial entrepreneur with one serious superpower, the power to navigate life’s shifts, good and bad, with grace and optimism. You’ll hear that optimism come through big time, which is why he created Modifidentity, a company focused on helping people find out who they are and develop into who they want to be through the modifications of our identity or identities throughout our lives.

He’s a gym owner, international speaker, a former NFL athlete, is on NBC’s American Ninja Warrior and most importantly a loving father and husband. He does it all after being given away at three years old and fighting his entire life to find out who he is like many of us do. He has overcome many challenges to find out who he is and what he has created to do on the planet. A gift he now gives to others through fitness and coaching the fundamentals of life. I could not be more excited about this conversation. He and I are big supporters or advocates for finding out who you are. That is a big passion of mine is this concept of identity and unbecoming the identities. This conversation is in alignment.

We didn’t have time to talk much about his professional success, his career and how he’s achieved this. What I did is I asked him to stay around after the show so I can ask him a couple of questions about his business specifically. It’s a rapid-fire after hour session. We talked about the greatest strategy he’s implemented in his business in the few years that have had a significant impact on the quality of his business and his life. I asked him, which I’ve never asked anybody, but it felt appropriate, “What is the biggest indicator of a champion either in sports or business?” There are more questions, but it was one of the best after hour sessions we’ve had on this show. If you’re interested in reading more about that, you can go over to UnbecomingPodcast.com/Anthony to know all about how he’s built this monstrosity of a business in a good way, this huge platform where he is performing on stage and talking to people. You can find him on Instagram. Let’s go ahead and jump into the conversation I had with Anthony Trucks.

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I am excited to bring on and welcome a good friend of mine to the show, Anthony Trucks. Anthony, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Your brain actually can't differentiate completely between emotional pain and physical pain at times. Click To Tweet

I’m happy to be a great friend instead of a good friend, but I’ll take good.

I want to start off with a little context for the people. You and I met on a bus headed to Costa Rica. It was a few years ago. I moved to San Francisco. When I was staying in the Piedmont area outside of San Francisco, you and I met for breakfast one morning. It was nice because you were one of the first people I knew that I was meeting up with. I sent you a text right after that and I was like, “Thank you for doing that. I hope everyone feels about me leaving me the same way I feel about leaving you.” You came in with such power. It was such great energy and so much enthusiasm for life. I remember leaving that being like, “I want to be his friend and I’m excited.” Since then we’ve been at different conferences together and become great friends. I’m grateful that you have taken the time to be here. For people who know you or maybe they don’t know you, who is the real Anthony Trucks?

The real Anthony Trucks is a regular dude who gets yelled at by his wife for not doing stuff like fixing a fence or taking care of the kids. I used to play in the NFL. I grew up in foster care. I have a crazy backstory. I’ve been on American Ninja Warrior three times. I have this name that precedes me, but at the end of the day, I don’t believe that I am some different superhuman person. Genuinely, I’m the guy that when I’m at the table, my wife and my son make fun of the way I eat my food. My daughter hangs on me because she thinks I’m a clothes hanger. I’m a regular guy, but the heart of me is as regular as I am. I have an irregular desire to help people. I have a lot that I’ve experienced in life that for me, it’s not stuff. I realized that for me a lot of things I’ve gone through most but don’t get through. On top of that, I have such a vast appreciation of humanity, good and bad. There’s this irregular desire to say, “This is me. This is what I’ve experienced,” but I want to take everything I’ve learned, patch it up and teach people how to navigate the crazy pitfalls in life.

The concept of unbecoming, I define it as the practice of releasing judgments, beliefs and conditioning, holding you back from living a more meaningful life. I would love to toss it over to you and ask you what does unbecoming mean to you? What’s the most significant thing you feel you’ve had to unbecome to get to where you are?

The majority of my work is in the realm of identity. That’s a big piece of me and who I am. It’s what I help people navigate through for a professional game. The unbecoming for me has happened many times and it does for all of us. You spend a lot of time working into something and typically we don’t know what we’re working into. We’re doing things, chasing some arbitrary next level and we don’t realize we’re becoming someone in the process almost unintentionally. We wake up one day and we’re like, “This isn’t what I want to be. It’s not where I want to be. It’s not what I wanted to do.” It’s like a question of like, “Is this even the right place for me?” The first stages took place for me in my adult life was I played professional sports. I went from this foster kid who was adopted by an all-white family. I was horrible at sports and I shifted. I was able to figure out how to be good at sports. I played football. I got a college football scholarship for four years. I became this father at nineteen years old.

I got a chance to play in the NFL. When I came home and the first unbecoming was unraveling twelve years of my identity being completely anchored down into being a professional athlete. That’s all that gave me self-worth from a little kid when I was not even loved enough by my own mom to keep me. The one thing that gave me a sense of being was this game. For years, that was what I anchored myself. I’m Anthony Trucks the football player. I’m Anthony Trucks the guy who plays for the Steelers. I’m Anthony Trucks the guy that has this wife and these kids and it’s all amazing and then it’s gone. I tear my shoulder. It tears open this huge hole in my heart because now I don’t have me. I had to figure out who Anthony was outside of that. I had to unravel this massive ego that comes with being this big guy. Everybody wants to see him, hang out with him and then nobody wants to. It’s like, “What in the world just happened?” The unraveling was realizing first off I came home and I want to find out how to find self-worth again.

I have a degree in Kinesiology. I opened a gym. A novel idea for an athlete, let’s do fitness. I did that thing everybody does. Inside of that, I neglected my family. I neglected my wife and I neglected my health. I got to a point where the business I was in was doing horribly because I’d obviously been removed from understanding any professional world besides sports for so long. I dove in this thing head first but I was wrong. I ended up neglecting my wife and she ended up taking some steps and we ended up getting a divorce. My kids did not have a great dad. When I would have my kids, they’d come to the gym and I’d be there until 8:00 at night yelling at them to stay in the office, “Don’t come on here. I’m training my clients. Stay in the office. Do your homework.” We’d get home. We eat food, take them to school the next day and then they go with their mom. It was not dad. I had unraveled this massive ego for a long time. The painful part for me was because in our society, typically men aren’t allowed to share their feelings, especially big, strong former athletes.

 

What ends up happening is you feel like you’re alone. You’re gliding by and then all of a sudden you have this complete emotional breakdown, which I did. I remember I drove off one night. I legitimately texted my friend and family and said, “Please tell my children who their father was.” It was a moment of weakness and darkness of this overwhelming pain because I wasn’t prepared to unbecome. I wasn’t in a space too. I didn’t know how to. Nobody taught me to. There was this forceful nature of doing so. Thankfully, nothing happened. I was found by GPS before I took any actions and the police brought me home. Everything was square and I woke myself back like, “You’ve got to this place because who you think you are is not who you are.” That was a big realization for me. It started an unraveling process of reading and doing personal development. Being honest with the man I was and the actions I’d taken, the inactions I’d taken. That for me was the first pivotal moment in my life to be able to get me to the point I’m at.

That’s hard for me to hear it. I’m now excited that you are where you are, but take me back to that place when you sent that text, when you said, “Tell my kids who their father was.” What was going through your head? You said you weren’t ready to unbecome. What had gotten you to that place that you weren’t ready to do anything else or that you were ready to take such a serious action?

I was rooted as a football player. That was my thing. I started to become the dad, husband and then I have this gym. When the football player is gone, a piece of me is gone. Not that I lost that thing, but I lost part of me. For me growing up in foster care, a connection with my wife is big and that was gone. I’m sitting like, “I don’t have that.” This gym I was trying to build was doing poorly. It almost went bankrupt. That was gone. That sense of self was gone. At the same time, my health is gone. As a father, I’m not there. I remember I went to a UFC fight at a buddy’s house, we’re watching it. I remember I was in this fog. After this is all going on, I was legitimately in a deep fog. I couldn’t emotionally connect to anything. I would show up to work as a trainer and put a face on. I would be a clown out there dancing around happy. I’d get in my car and I would be drained. I’d fall asleep before I could even leave the parking lot because I was pouring from a completely empty cup.

At this time at this UFC fight, I remember watching it. I don’t think I moved for the whole three hours and I didn’t say a word. I was there. I remember I got up to walk out. I don’t even think I said bye to anybody. My best friend comes out of the house and follows me down the driveway to my car. He sits and says, “This isn’t you.” He said, “I know you got a lot going on, but I need you to realize this is your reality.” It was these simplistic powerful words. When you’re in a fog it’s because you don’t want to accept this as real. Your mind’s in a process like, “How is this going on? This isn’t real?”

You keep finding ways to tuck yourself out as being the legitimate life you’re living and in that moment, it hit me. Your brain can’t differentiate completely between emotional pain and physical pain at times. I remember having this wave of emotion that hit and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t take a full breath. I remember I legitimately could not stop crying and it hurt. There’s a weight on my chest and I started the car. All I could think of was I want this pain to stop. That was where the text came from. I got to do something to end this is. I can’t fathom logically how to get out of this hole I’m in. That was the precipice of the complete unraveling of my entire self and my life in a positive way. Oddly, it started negatively but ended up positively.

The police intercepted you and then what? You started down this road of personal development and personal growth. I’m trying to relate it to people that might not be in that dire situation, but let’s say the feeling is similar in terms of their business or in terms of where they are personally. They feel like they’re at the bottom. What was the next step for you to get that momentum moving?

I drove off. I was looking for rat poison. Thankfully, no stores were open. It was too late. I parked my car. The GPS got the cops to me and I went home. I remember showing up at home and I snapped out of it for a moment. I got literally 30 people in front of my house all there waiting for me to make sure I get back safely. That was the love I had. I didn’t know what to do with it. I got out of my car. I remember my dad was talking to me. I couldn’t tell you what he said. I had so much shame. I had my head down to the ground. Some people are in that place in life. They haven’t reached the level that the people who love them have expected them to. Whether it’s your business isn’t doing what it’s supposed to because you promised your wife or husband it would or your friends and family are relying upon you, your kids, or whoever it is and you haven’t met that. That’s the feeling. It’s like, “How can I let these people down? How have I done this?”

We hyper-focus on the negative, but we're not aware that the unknown big, dark, black space inside is also where all of the positive sits. Click To Tweet

The big thing for me was a couple of days after. I need to go back to the gym and go to work. I had to pay the bills. I remember one of my buddies who had worked with me at the gym. He took me to the back room and was like, “I don’t know if it’s the right time to talk to you about this, but I’ve got to share this with you.” He says, “When I heard that you drove off and everyone was looking for you, I physically threw up in the toilet. I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but the reason I did because I thought I lost a hero.” Hearing one of my good friends say hero to me, I was like, “What do you mean by that?”

He’s like, “I’ve watched your life. We played high school football together. I watched what you’ve done and to see what you came from as a kid, what you have accomplished now. What you’re doing with your life, people don’t do that. I don’t know if you know it, but you affect a lot of people how you lived your life.” That was one of those moments that woke my brain up. I realized, for me at least, that I had been living a life without even knowing it. I was accidentally impacting other people’s lives. The question was what if I tried to do it on purpose? What if I tried to dig in a little bit, try to purposely take this craziness that is my life and turn into a positive light in some way? That the whole transition to what I’m doing.

For anybody that’s in a place like that, it’s super dark and it’s bottomless. It feels like you’re never going to climb out of it. The biggest thing I can take from those moments was I was really transparent about the man I was. I had to open up and own my faults, own the things I had not taken a great stance with. At this point, I can say I neglected my wife and my kids. Back then, I couldn’t say that. I neglected my health. I couldn’t say that back then. We tried to cover it up because our ego doesn’t want to have this chink in the armor. The first part of it for me was open up and say, “I’m not perfect. I’m not the greatest. I need help.” That was the catalyst for making things change, getting a coach, getting a therapist and getting people I could talk to that come from outside perspectives and provide insight that you can’t see about yourself or that you don’t want to face.

I love the way you are able to get open and honest with yourself and that you wouldn’t have been able to do that back then. We can look at it and say, “Here are all the things I wish I had done or whatever but you are where you are.” I want to bring people to the present. Talk to us a little bit more about what happened from that moment. What changed?

Whenever we go to these places, it’s not always the best for me but at the same time I know that if I don’t go there, it doesn’t help people out of those places they’re in. In my life, a lot of shift is taking place professionally and personally. A few years after that moment in time, I built my gym up. I was able to get it to make some great money. I started consulting and making good income and I had some freedom. At that moment in my life, I didn’t tell many people about my life. Most people didn’t know about my foster care story. I started sharing it. I started talking and speaking more. I got out of that realm and fast forward, I am now back together with my wife. We have a phenomenal relationship. It’s creepy good.

I was in foster care for several years. As life got good, it was scary to me because it could always be taken away because I wasn’t adopted. When I say creepy good, I’m always fearful of things leaving me. It’s a weird thing that I battle with of, “It’s good, but what’s going to happen next?” It’s weird. It’s acceptance for me in my heart. I’m aware of it and I work towards it. I’m not naive to it, but I’m aware it exists. When I say creepy good, it’s like, “This is better than I thought it would be.” It’s almost scary.

I’ve got these three amazing, awesome kids. I had my son. We were at nineteen in college. He’s a freshman in high school. I got this freshman and I’m only 35. He’s a great kid. He gets straight A’s. He’s a solid track athlete. I’ve got a daughter who’s a weird fish. She can swim like no other. She’s killing it in our county. She’s one of the best in our county. I’ve got another son that’s amazing in soccer and football. He’s like me. He’s angry inside for absolutely no reason at all. My businesses are going well. I gave a speech at Dean Graziosi’s EDGE Event. I was at an HPA event with Brendon Burchard and had an amazing presentation that people generally loved because it was around a new topic.

 

I get to work in this realm of identity. I’m heading to Puerto Rico to hang out with some awesome dudes at a mastermind like Lewis Howes, Trent Shelton, Dean, Brendon, Russell Brunson and all these amazing people in our industry. I don’t say that to be like, “Look at me,” but it’s more of like, “How did I go from where I was at as this little foster kid or years ago driving off in a car to sitting with these incredible hearts and minds.” I’m incredibly grateful and appreciative of all of it. I’m a normal dude, but somehow this awkward, weird, normal dude has accomplished some cool things and I’m excited to see what else I can do for people.

I’ve seen you online and it’s awesome to see your friends are doing such big things. You are always trying new things and challenging yourself. I see you on American Ninja Warrior and I’m like, “What is going on?” More than that has been your ability or your willingness to step into new phases of your life with such confidence. Based on your story and where you were, at that deep dark place, where does that confidence come from?

It’s because I didn’t die through all of it. As odd as it sounds, a lot of us are afraid of these situations. If you think about it, you’re not going to die. The most that is going to happen is you’re going to feel bad for a little bit and then it’s going to figure itself out. Every time I can think back to when I was incredibly unhappy or sad, I can always fast pace and find a moment when I was truly, genuinely happy. My thing is like, “Why do I want to sit and stew about this hard stuff going on?” I want to figure out what great stuff can go on because what we are afraid of when we venture new stuff is we’re always scared of the unknown. “What could go wrong?” We hyperfocus in the negative, but we’re not aware of that unknown, this big, dark, black space. Inside that dark, black space is also all of the positive. It all sits there.

When I look at stuff, I’m like, “It’s Ninja Warrior.” I’m about 60 pounds way too big to be able to do this. Most of these guys are 150-pound rock climbers. I’m about 230. I’m a former NFL linebacker. I’m not supposed to hang by my hands and throw my body across the bars, but I go, “If I can figure this out and approach it with a positive mindset, I can fall off and look stupid on TV, but what if I don’t? What if I go up there and kill it?” That’s been my perspective on stuff. For the Ninja Warrior, I’m not the first NFL athlete to have hit a buzzer on the TV show in several years. It’s an abnormal thing and it’s cool and I love that stuff.

I had this company called Trust Your Hustle and I was challenged to shift it all towards this identity shift concept. It sounds great this whole Trust Your Hustle thing but people question, “Where do I see myself in that?” I was challenged by these guys to take it a level up and say, “All this stuff’s great and well, but one thing you do well is you navigate these transitions of life so much better than other people.” If I can unpack that and teach people to be a way better area, because with society having this crazy separation between whom I am in real life and who I am on my social media, it’s a vast difference. It affects us internally if we don’t have a congruency there. I’ve embraced this whole room. I threw away thirteen courses. I had this course I built up for Trust Your Hustle, threw them all away and started again. People were like, “What are you doing?” It’s like, “It could go wrong but what if it goes right? What if it goes amazing and it’s going amazing?”

The reason it did go amazing is that when I step into what you call confidence, I call the feeling of fraud. It’s super odd, but I think it’s fundamental to success because I approach these things and I had this feeling of, “Are you the guy for this? Can you do this?” I always say in my head the question I can answer with one of two questions of, “No, you’re not getting away or I don’t know, let’s figure this out.” What are we going to do to make sure we can be that guy? The only thing I can do is put a ton of effort and invest my time. We as people have this natural running thing called investment bias. In relationships, we’re invested in a relationship. It could be going wrong but because you’ve been in it for so long, we’ve got to stay in it or a job. I’ve been in this job for ten years, I can’t leave because then what? It’s about waste.

For me, I look at it as if I can come in this thing and say, “I have a passion for it. I don’t know how to do it. What do I have to do to make myself believe that I’m the worst at this?” What it is simply is a time investment. I got to get that investment bias to work for me instead of against me. I research. I read. I trial and I error. I am honest about something. I’m not going to come out and say, “I’m the greatest at this. I started yesterday.” A lot of it for me is like, “I want to be the greatest at this. Watch my journey. I’m going to tell you what I messed up. I’m going to tell you what I do well. When I feel confident in working with you, I’m going to work with you and teach you something. The process rolls. We figure it all out together.” Whether it’s in my relationship, my parenting or my businesses, I always look at these things like, “I can go in there and be completely hyper-focused on all the bad stuff or I can be super hyper-focused on what can I do to get rid of the feeling of fraud and get that level of confidence.” The only separation is how much time I spend on it.

The ego doesn’t serve anybody in a positive way. Click To Tweet

The thing I see so much of what you do, which I encourage my clients to do it all the time brings the audience along for the ride, which is what you’re talking about. Bring them along. You’re not the expert yet, but with enough time and getting your reps in. How do you get your reps in a way that brings you to a level of mastery or even a little bit below that where you feel you could teach somebody? Your approach to that has always been great. The other thing too, what you’re saying about if you do fail, especially in something like on TV, American Ninja Warrior, it’s public what you’re doing. You have such a public platform. You are public and visible. Do you feel that pushes you more to put in the time to get the reps in?

No one ever wants to go up and look like a fool. I don’t have this desire or this fear of feedback. I need someone to say, “I love you.” I need someone to say, “You’re great.” I also don’t fear when it comes in because I realize not everybody’s going to like me. What allows me to do these things is I’m not anchored down to needing the verification from everybody else. I need the verification of the people I’m helping, not the rest of them. I put stuff out there and there are going to be a lot of people that are like, “It’s stupid. I hate it. It looks dumb.” I’m like, “It’s not for you.”

At the same time, someone comes back and says, “That was incredible. It changed my life.” I know who I’m creating it for. I can either spend my time trying to make the person it’s not for like it, which is going to change me and who I am or find out how to double down on the people who are in the box of people who love my stuff already. When I’m publicly out there doing my thing and sharing, I don’t mind being completely wide open heart-wise. I say dumb things, I make weird statements, but I know at the end of the day, the person who hears it and he’s like, “This guy’s retarded. There’s something wrong with him. He’s stupid.” They’re not for me. I’m not going to spend my energy on that person. The person who sends me a DM like, “Thank you so much. It helped me.” I’m going to give you all my soul, all my energy and that’s where I keep moving.

It’s such a good reminder to move in the direction of helping people. Business needs to get back to that because there is this fame associated with building a business. There are so much that we could go into. I do want to go back to something you were talking about when you said you were doing this Trust Your Hustle, and then you decided to shift into the identity area you’re great at. If you were talking to somebody who has a project maybe on the back burner or maybe it’s a passion thing they know that they’re great at. They want to move it to the front burner or the front burner is the one making money, what would you say to somebody who’s in that situation?

If somebody is trying to create something new, that’s not the normal thing they’re doing every day. Everybody wants to get to it because they have this draw of like, “I don’t like this. I would love doing that. I’m going to quit my job and go start this thing.” That’s not smart. Don’t do that. I heard Lisa Nichols one point say, “Your current career, the current job needs to be the investor for your future thing.” I love that concept because what it tells you it’s an investment. It’s not money. It’s also time and energy. You have to put the soul, sweat and tears into. If you can’t do that when you’re tired, when you’ve had a long day at work, but you still got to go home and write a blog post or do some videos. If you can’t pull yourself up, that thing’s not for you because you’re not getting energy you need to pull from it.

What I’d tell people is you build that thing in the background in those quiet hours, the ones where everybody else would go home and binge watch TV or go to sporting events or go drink at the bar. You go home. You spend five more hours until 10:00 at night creating the business. What ends up happening is you can build it until it starts making some money. What you’ll find is there’s always going to be this moment in time. The moment in time is the realization that the only thing this other thing needs for me to grow is my time. That’s it. When you can take a look at, “Maybe I make $6,000 a month in my regular job and this other gig over here is making me maybe $2,000 a month, but I can’t spend time on it anymore. I have too many clients or I can’t spend time blogging, whatever it is.” You realize the system is in place and all you got to do is give it another eight hours.

Now you can say, “I’m going to go ahead.” Maybe I saved up maybe $5,000, $6,000 in the background. I’m going to drop that $6,000, pick the $2,000 a month and give it the time it needs to make it $8,000 or $10,000. It could grow more income than you had in the other job. It’s like, “Let your current job suck for a little bit. Let it invest in your future job. In the background, stop wasting time doing stupid stuff and spend time that you have to pass the pain to earn the right to be able to create this new life for yourself.” Not everybody is entitled to have to be able to have an amazing business. You may want it, everybody wants something, but it’s only for those who are able to sacrifice internally and do the work everybody else won’t do that has a right to earn it and own that.

 

I don’t think that jumping off the ledge and leaping in that will appear yes to a point. There are many people that are strapped for cash at the beginning and it’s stressful. If you can build that in the background. You’re talking about putting in the time to do it. Talk to me about what time well-spent versus wasted time looks like for you and for someone in those shoes of someone who wants to switch it over.

That’s what I call safe work and real work. The safe work is the stuff that is bad for your business. It sounds odd, but it is because here’s what safe work is. Look at this cool website I made. I got this logo designed. Look at my cool little documents and flyers. That’s what they made. “What did you do? “I got business cards. I’ve got a business.” Do you? What’s your lead generation? What are you doing to get people in? How have you been conversationally? Did you put yourself out there? “No, I’m working on that. I’ll get that done later.” When you ask what the time is, the time is I got this 9 to 5 job. I get off at 5:00. I commute home. I get home at 6:00 and then I have time to do whatever I’d like to do. I can pop a TV show on, go to bed at midnight and then wake up morning and say, “I hate my job, but I’d love to have a new business and never do anything about it.”

The person who succeeds and I know succeeds is a person that gets off at 5:00. They commute home while listening to a book or reading a book about the business they want to open or listening to a podcast. They get home at 6:00. They take a quick lunch or a quick dinner and they get down to work. They get in the background. They start creating a website, but then they get the website out there. They start getting business cards. They start handing the business cards out. They start figuring out what they want to create and sell to the world. They start creating it and selling it.

It’s the people who spend those extra hours until midnight, then go to bed, get up and do it all over again. Those are the ones that win at the end. Everybody looks at overnight success, like all of a sudden they got it done. “No.” What they did was they didn’t go home, sit there and waste time all day wishing they had something done. You didn’t hear about them because they weren’t talking about it because they didn’t have time because they were working. You sit back and like, “What is that time?” It’s the time doing the not so safe work internally. The safe work is creating stuff and making cool little flyers. The unsafe, scary work is presenting your stuff to the world and saying, “Pay me for this.” That’s scary work. Those are the people that win.

I want to transition into you being a dad. You are passionate about your kids and you share so much publicly on Instagram about them. I love to talk to people that have kids. I’m not there quite yet, but a lot of people in our audience do have kids. As you look to mentor your children, what are some habits that you hope to instill in them either by telling them or by being who you are?

I live in this world where I’m at a blue-collar town in the East San Francisco Bay area. I love the people around me. The thing is at the end of the day, I’ve never been a fan of hearing people say, “I work hard. I put endless nights of work in so my kids have opportunities to do whatever they want to do.” What ends up happening is in doing that, in the world you live in, you’re going to make your thing you do look incredibly awesome that your kid’s going to see what you do and not hear what you’re telling them to do. For example, let’s say I’m a pipe fitter and I want my kid to be whatever he wants. My kid opportunistically could be a speaker or could be an entrepreneur. If all they’ve ever seen you do his work early, get home late and you make that amazing and cool that you can sleep better at night. What happens is your kid wants to be cool like dad or like mom.

What they do is they do what you did and the journey continues. They get a job. They do the same thing you did. They said the same thing, “I work hard so my kids can do whatever they want to do.” The thing keeps rolling and rolling. I said, “My kids are going to listen to what I do, not what I say. If I want my kids to do something amazing, I got to do something amazing too. It’s not that I’m saying people’s jobs aren’t amazing, but my version of amazing. If I want to live this crazy, out of the box life I want my kids at some point live and experience at a different level, I got to do it myself. I balance a lot. I am also a dad who coaches football, who is a taxi dad who carpools kids in the morning because that’s part of our process. They see me doing that stuff, but they also see me hopping on stages. They see me speaking to people and coaching people on podcasts, on Ninja Warrior on TV.

Choose your battles. You can easily find a ton of battles all day long that are not going to make your relationship better. Click To Tweet

That is a way better example for my kids to see to do whatever they want than me saying, “Go do whatever you want, son.” They’ve got to be able to see these things. My daughter, she is the weirdest little crafting thing in the world. She’ll seriously get a paperclip off the floor and turn it into a hippo for no reason. It’s what she does. For my wife and me we’re like, “What can we do to get her out of the box and do what she wants? How do we play into that strength of hers?” We’re like, “Do you want to make clothes or something? Do you want to do a YouTube show, because you’re weird and people laugh at you? Maybe we do that.” The thing is if I was grinding away and getting home late and saying, “Tatum, do whatever you want with your life.” There’s no real connection to the feeling of that. It’s not perfectly put as an example in front of them. The things I want to instill in them are, “Do craziness. Do things that are outside the box and get made fun of. It’s totally fine.”

From a relationship standpoint, my wife and I don’t argue much. When we do, we don’t hide it. I want my kids to realize that we got divorced, and then got back together. That in of itself is a crazy journey, but I need my kids to experience in our home what it should be like when a man treats a woman right. What it should be like when a woman respects a man and not the alpha male type world. We wear the same pants relationship and they see that. When we argue, they see us argue and see us make up. They understand that it’s possible. I don’t want to be something more like later on they don’t see that. When they’re in relationships, they want to run from the pain and then they find some new person and it creates a cycle for them of a bad relationship structure in life. I want to instill in my kids professionally what to do, but also personally what to do. All of it comes down to the actions I take.

What you said that you struggle with this fear of something else is going to happen. The other shoe’s going to drop. Maybe they’re going to leave. How do you overcome that in a family situation? How do you instill that you’re not going anywhere or do you? Is that something that you’re consciously thinking about?

It’s more of a feeling than a conscious thing. It’s more of like, “This is awesome,” and then for example, it’s a weird way to explain it. Every night we set the tables at dinner like a family for dinner. Every night it’s a constant thing. Growing up, I never had that. It feels good. In fact, it feels so good that I’ll catch myself getting up and walking around the room and standing on the other side of the table because it’s hard for me to sit inside that joy. I don’t know how to explain it, but we’ll have our moments. They’ll all be sitting down still. I won’t even think about it, but I’ll emotionally get up and move around the room because it’s awkward to sit in that level of happy. I have to force myself to sit down and it’s more so a thing for me going back to childhood. I don’t know how to handle this much happiness. The best way I can deal with it is in the moment of noticing it, settle myself back into it. Accept it all. People talk about abundance a lot and when you haven’t felt abundance, you don’t even comprehend what that means.

When do you get to the place where you don’t have to worry about the same things like, “Am I going to eat? Do I have enough money? Are the bills going to be paid?” You get to a place of abundance of not financial but joy. It’s almost overwhelming for me at times. That’s what scares me. I don’t know what to with all this good stuff. What if I lose it? As opposed to acting with that emotional stance of, “If I’m going to lose this, then I don’t want more of this. Let me sabotage it.” That’s what most people will do, “I’ll sabotage this because I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want to get good to lose it.” I say, “Let the right wheel fall off. Let me see how much of this I can create before it goes away.” I’m like Mad Max. I’m rolling crazy, trying to create as much as I can. If it falls apart, it falls apart. Like they say, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.” It’s better to have joy than never have joy at all.

I love your awareness and your presence towards those feelings that you have. Those are real things, real feelings, real emotions and it’s nice to hear. You’re the third male on the show I’ve had and it’s nice to hear a man talk about things like this. I want to talk to you about the different seasons of love in your life. You’ve mentioned about your wife and then you guys get a divorce. You’re in a single phase and then you guys are happily married or happily in love. What do you feel like you both had to, but more so you, had to unbecome in that department to create the relationship you both have?

I had to unbecome the guy that thought he was perfect like, “I’m a good-looking black guy. I played in the NFL and I got this business. Look at me.” That’s my thoughts back in the day and the reality is like, “I’m a dude. I’m a regular guy.” When I can settle myself back into that, the ego pulls itself down a little bit. I realized the problem with that ego is that ego won’t serve anybody. It won’t serve me in a positive way, but I won’t serve anybody in my life. I won’t serve the relationships. Everybody should be happy to be around me. Look at me, how could you not be happy? You get a chance to be around this guy. It’s tough because they instill that in football, that’s instilled in the NFL because everybody wants to be around you. For me relationship-wise, I pulled myself back heavily and it’s easier to do it, but I’m not any different than any other guy.

 

I got the same duties as a human being. I have to serve my wife. For example, we got up and she had to go get her hair done at 8:30. I’m like, “Cool.” She’s like, “It’s going to be an 8:00 and 9:30 appointment, one hour and then we can go get some breakfast.” In my head I’m like, “I’m going to go there for an hour.” Apparently, hair appointments are lies. They don’t last an hour. Two hours and fifteen minutes later we’re walking out of there and I’m like, “I could be mad right now.” I could be pissed because we missed the minute and the hours, whatever was going to be. I was like, “If I choose to do that, it’s not going to make our breakfast any better. It’s going to make my day worse. Let me go ahead and realize that it’s an hour. It is not the end of the world. I’m going to serve my wife as a great husband. Let’s go get some breakfast.”

My ego can subside. I’m not this perfect human because I make mistakes too. As I look at what I serve, I serve my wife and she serves me in the same way, but it’s not this like servant. It’s serving with love, serving with care, being the person they need at that moment. When I was young, I was 25 or 26 when we got married, I didn’t have that perspective. I’m like “I’m this NFL guy. I’m going to be the greatest and be amazing. This is a perfect world.” The reality is relationship-wise, you have to learn what it means to let your ego subside, to serve that moment. The way the moment needs for the relationship, not just for you. Compromise is a big part of it. I also realized that for me I have to choose battles. I could easily fight a ton of battles all day long, but they’re not going to make our relationship better. At the end of the day, I can easily get over it myself without her involvement and we’ll both be the better one for it. A lot of the time is looking at something with some frustration, but realizing, “Do I want to fight about that. Is that going to make dinner tonight?”

Keep in mind, I don’t bottle things up. That’s one thing to bottle something up. Why are we going to argue because she left her shoes downstairs and she didn’t bring them to the room? I hate people leaving shoes at the foot of the stairs. Is that an argument we’re going to have? “Leave them there. We’ll get them at the end of the night and no big deal.” All those little decisions, if they add up you feel like you’re mad. If I look at the negative, I also am going to look at the positive. If I’m always looking at negative stuff, I start seeking that out and I stop giving appreciation. I stop giving love. I stop looking at the positives. If I could bring it all into one point, for me I serve my relationship by realizing that the relationship needs a different Anthony than what Anthony wants to be in the emotional moment of it. If I serve a relationship, my actions follow suit the right way.

What would you say if you overheard your wife talking to one of her friends about you and you’re over the moon excited about whatever she said? What would it be that you hope she would say about you?

I get some insights because we have a circle and it’s tight. We went through a situation where she had an affair. That was the thing that broke us. Most people cannot comprehend how I got over it, which is a whole different conversation in and of itself. I wouldn’t say I got over, but I realized situations in her brain and what’s going on in mine. I’m patient. I’m trusting. I don’t have any trust issues. She’ll call it putting up with me, but at the same time I always find the things you love about a person are also the things you hate. I don’t put up with certain things, I wouldn’t call it, from her perspective it is. The biggest thing is what she sees is putting up with her is love. She’s strong and opinionated about stuff that doesn’t make any damn sense. At the end of the day, she likes to pick a lot of battles that I sit back. I’m like, “I don’t know why we’re arguing about this, but when you’re done let me know.” That’s how we figure things out sometimes, but at the same time as much as it bothers me, I love that she’s strong and opinionated. I don’t have to baby her.

I don’t have to be responsible for emotions every single day. I don’t have to make her happy. She makes herself happy to things she does and brings to the relationship. When she says putting up with her, I don’t see it as putting up with somebody. I see it as realizing cognitively that thing I’m bothered by about her is the exact same thing I love her for. She used to say, “My husband supports me. He loves me. He puts up with me. He takes care of the kids. He’s present. He’s there. That’s why she loves being with me. Those are the things that would make me happy.” It’s not a matter of the money I’ve made or the stage I got on because it genuinely is the great part. She does not care what stage I go on, what income is being made, none of it matters as long as the bills are paid seriously. I know the person she loves is Anthony and that’s the best thing for our relationship is I don’t have to worry about the rest of what I did or didn’t do. Even if I don’t get certain things done, she’s still going to love me.

How important has that been in your success, in your trajectory as an entrepreneur?

It’s huge. If you aren’t settled at home, you can’t settle anything outside. It’s hard to be around people who are not settled inside and you know these people. They are always trying to do something new and it’s like the next big movement in the trying to find this new thing. They’re not calming to be around. I got to be around people who are settled inside and have a feeling of you can sense that they know who they are. They’re not trying to impress you. They’re not trying to gloat about stuff. They’re who they are. I think that for me is a cool space to be able to hold your people.

Where can people find out about you if they want to learn more? How do they get into the Anthony Trucks’ world?

The fastest way to reach me is Instagram. I personally man that inbox. I am rarely on Facebook, but if you go to email it’s usually my team. Instagram is where I hang out. That’s my personal space. If you go to AnthonyTrucks.com, if you take what’s called an Income Identity Quiz, it determines what your income identity is based on the questions I asked. That’s a cool place to find me, my website or on Instagram.

Let’s say this episode was broadcasted to the whole world for the next 30 seconds. What would you say? What message would you have?

The only way that life changes when we shift something inside to create the world inside first before we create the world outside. The three steps to do that is first to own your shift. Own the fact that’s going to be up to you. It’s got to be done by you. Two, take shifts seriously. If you don’t take shifts seriously, it’s never going to happen. Your world’s not going to happen if you dabble in it. Take it seriously, take it important. Third, make some shift happen. You have to go, mold, create and craft stuff from your own hard work. All of us, we think about the next level of more for our lives. It’s all from what we create and what we make. Go out and make shift happen.

I do want to say thank you. I know you are busy and you have such amazing things going on. I am grateful for your friendship, for who you are in the world, what you’re doing, all the shift you’re creating and how you’re helping people do that. You are making a real difference in the world. I genuinely mean that as your friend and as someone who looks up to you, looks to you as someone who is that congruent person. Thank you for being here. I am grateful for your time and for being a part of the show.

Thank you for having me. I genuinely appreciate it.

He is an absolute powerhouse. I love this conversation and I hope that you did as well. As a reminder, if you want to read more from him about how he’s built his business, the strategies, the tools. What he’s used to capitalize on his strengths as a human being, as a successful business owner and leverage all of the things that he’s been doing for the past decade of his life to reach amazing success, to achieve all the things that he’s achieved. Head over to UnbecomingPodcast.com/Anthony where we dig deeper into his business. I ask him a bunch of questions, how he’s created this because it’s appropriate to have that in another place. Go ahead and download that. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you so much.

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The first question I have for you is what is the greatest strategy, tool or resource you’ve integrated in the last few years that’s had the most significant impact on the growth of your business?

The best thing I could do was find a coach to guide me. I don’t know if it’s called a strategy, if you want to call it that. For a lot of times, I would get a bunch of courses, bunch information and tried to do it all myself but it never worked. The biggest thing for me has somebody be able to sift through and tell me what not to do and then from there I don’t do a bunch of convoluted stuff. I start simple. I let things grow and I build as the business needs. I don’t do a bunch of automation until the business needs automation. I’d do a lot of it manually to learn my audience, learn my systems, and then from there I plug things in that need to go in as opposed to hoping to find some new shiny object.

What is the biggest mistake that you see entrepreneurs making in the early stages of their business?

They don’t look at it as a business. They think that if they post a bunch of social media stuff, people are going to reach out to their inbox and say, “Can I pay you money for stuff?” That’s got to be an actual business, which means you have to have a way to get people’s information, to follow up and establish a relationship, to get into a conversion conversation whether it’s a webinar, a phone call, or a sales video. You have to deliver something, an amazing value to get testimonials to then create new leads and new customers from their social proof.

If you lost everything in your business and had to start over, where would you start and what would you do?

I would start doing live streams or I will start doing something that could get me in front of people consistently. I would start listening and asking questions. I would wait until the questions came in enough and that would hop on phone calls with the people to be able to see if I could solve the problem. I would figure out what that would look like. I would create a solution. I would share that solution the same exact form and then get into personal conversations, phone calls to talk to people and ask questions, see what they want and then sell people into a program. Little by little, I would automate that. Eventually, I would get to the point where I would automate the sales conversation because I know what they want. I would automate to deliver the program because I know what they want and what they need. I would go in and start talking to people. Legitimately, have a conversation with the people you want to help and let it organically flow.

What is the biggest indicator of a champion in your mind, be it in sports or in business?

They are attracted because they don’t want you around them. When people could think of the people you want to be around, we don’t always want to be around the boisterous, loud, crazy people. Most people I want to be around, I wouldn’t be able to sit, chill and have a calm conversation. Those people only get there because they’ve had great success. When I say don’t want to be around you, it’s because everybody wants a tug at them. If they became a champion in something, they don’t want to be with a lot of people because everybody wants to be around them.

I like to find the people who have succeeded, done something great, almost trying to pull out of the social aspect and the eye because too many people want them for the wrong reason. Those are the people I like to be around because it means they’ve won in some areas. They’ve championed something. Think about your professional athletes or your business owners or anything, those people aren’t typically in the public eye because they’ve done so much great stuff. They’ve had to pull away from many people who want a piece of them.

The final one is what one thing that my community can do to help you spread your messages?

Share something. I do a whole bunch of weird videos in this podcast. Share it because I don’t know who’s going to listen to it. I don’t think nowadays there’s a specific niche. Aspirations are what I like to target. People who have a desire to be a different level. What I see as a next level work for them, if you could share it, that would be great because they can find out that I exist.

Important Links:

• Anthony Trucks
• UnbecomingPodcast.com/Community – Facebook page
• UnbecomingPodcast.com/Success
• Modifidentity
• UnbecomingPodcast.com/Anthony
• Instagram – Anthony’s page
• EDGE Event
• HPA
• Lisa Nichols
• Facebook – Anthony’s page
• AnthonyTrucks.com

About Anthony Trucks

Anthony Trucks is a serial entrepreneur with one serious superpower. The power to navigate life’s shifts, good and bad, with grace and optimism. Which is why he created Modifidentity. A company focused on helping people find out who they and develop into who they want to be through the modifications of our identity(ies) throughout our lives. He is a gym owner, an international speaker, shift coach, former NFL athlete, is on NBC’s American Ninja Warrior, and loving father & husband. He does it all after being given away at 3 years old and fighting his entire life to find out who he is like many of us do. He has overcome many challenges to truly find out who he is and what he was created to do on the planet. A gift he now gives to others through fitness and coaching the fundamentals of life.