The Mindset Behind Entrepreneurial Resilience w/Anson Roberts Ep 38

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In this episode of Transform Your Future, Eddie Isin sits down with Anson Roberts to explore the critical mindset shifts necessary for cultivating entrepreneurial resilience. Anson, a seasoned entrepreneur, shares his journey of building and rebuilding businesses, emphasizing the importance of internal work, mindset development, and the power of small, consistent actions.

Key Discussion Points:

• [00:00] - Introduction to Entrepreneurial Resilience: Eddie introduces the episode's theme, highlighting the importance of resilience and mindset in entrepreneurship.
• [02:17] - Anson's Journey: Anson discusses his entrepreneurial journey, including his successes and monumental failures, which shaped his understanding of resilience.
• [05:42] - Internal Work for External Success: The conversation delves into the significance of internal work—how addressing deep-seated beliefs and emotional challenges can transform one's external reality.
• [10:01] - From Passion to Dread: Anson reflects on a period in his entrepreneurial journey where he felt disconnected from his business, leading to significant internal exploration and a pivot in his career.
• [15:03] - Morning Routines as a Lifeline: Anson shares how developing a morning routine was a life-saving practice during his darkest times, helping him transition from a reactive to a proactive mindset.
• [18:14] - The Power of Storytelling: Anson explains the concept of the "story model," which involves reframing personal narratives to align actions with desired outcomes.
• [25:34] - Overcoming Depression and Anxiety: Anson opens up about his struggle with depression after losing his wealth and how he rebuilt his life through small, intentional actions.
• [36:29] - Gratitude and Small Wins: Anson discusses the role of gratitude and the importance of small wins in creating momentum and building resilience.
• [45:48] - The Self-Coaching Project: Anson introduces his coaching program, designed to help leaders and entrepreneurs become the conscious architects of their stories and align their lives with their values.
• [49:14] - Final Thoughts: Anson encourages listeners who are struggling to take small steps toward a brighter future, emphasizing that no one is alone in their challenges.

Key Quotes:

• "I had to completely rebuild myself in the most humble way from the ground up. It doesn’t matter if you think you should already know it or not. You have to start back at ground zero." — Anson Roberts [39:06]
• "The greatest lie you can ever believe is that you are alone in it." — Anson Roberts [49:14]

Anson Roberts website Self Coaching Project

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Transcript

0:00

And it's understandable. If we think about even from our wiring from just a human psychology standpoint, it's baked in for us to try to mitigate any additional suffering at all costs. That's our default. I wish my default was just expansive, thriving, but I have to work at that every day because I can feel this gravity of parts of my psychology and my own nervous system wanting to keep me from some pain that I felt in the past. And so the brain is doing that out of service to our whole makeup to try and keep us from experiencing the loss or the traumas that we have in the past, but it's the very thing that keeps us from something more beautiful and bigger in the future. Papaya. Hello all, and welcome to another episode of Transform Your Future with me, Eddie Isin where I sit down with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers as they identify areas I can improve on and guide me to further my self-improvement practice. For more information and insights, join my newsletter@transformyourfuture.com where I write about reinvention, personal growth, and entrepreneurship. If you like the show, you'll love the content on my site. We want to hear from you. Let us know how we can improve your listening and viewing experience. Suggest upcoming topics or a great guest for the show. Please reach out to us through our website, your podcast app comment, or just text me directly at 3 7 2 2 1 4 1 7. We want to hear from you. We are diving deep into a topic that lies at the heart of every successful entrepreneur's journey, resilience and a growth mindset. In this episode, the Mindset Behind Entrepreneurial Resilience, I sit down with Anson Roberts for an insightful conversation. Anson is a seasoned entrepreneur who has not only built successful businesses, but has also faced and overcome significant challenges along the way. Anson's story is one of perseverance, growth, and the relentless pursuit of self-improvement from rebuilding his life and business. Anson has learned firsthand that success is not a straight line. It requires a mindset that can weather the inevitable storms of entrepreneurship, turning setbacks into opportunities for growth. In our conversation, Anson and I share key mindset shifts that help cultivate resilience in the face of adversity. We talk about the importance of internal work, how looking inward and addressing deep-seated beliefs can transform our external reality. Anson emphasizes that while society often focuses on external achievement, true success starts with internal processes that shape our actions, decisions, and ultimately our outcomes. We'll also explore practical strategies that you can implement to build your own resilience from developing a morning routine that sets the tone for your day to the power of small, consistent wins that lead to significant long-term results. In this episode, you'll find actionable advice that can help you navigate the ups and downs of your entrepreneurial journey. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, this episode is packed with valuable insights that will your mindset and embrace the challenges that come your way. Join us as we uncover the mindset behind entrepreneurial resilience and learn how you too can cultivate the mental toughness needed to succeed in today's fast-paced, ever-changing business world. So Anson, welcome to Transform Your Future podcast. I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me and let's talk about mindset and let's talk about entrepreneurship. Let's jump right in. Tell me a little bit about how you ended up here in this space where you've got a successful investment business and you're also coaching people about mindset resilience and crushing it. Absolutely. Yeah. So my entire story, my entire adult life has been in the entrepreneurial space, so it's really the only thing that I know, it feels pretty baked into my DNA. And so since early twenties gone down this path and it has not been always a story of a graph that's up and to the right, and so I have had some amazing successes and I've also had some pretty monumental failures and we can get into that, but even down to losing just about everything twice. And so now having built a couple of different businesses in completely different industries and having to go back and tend to the aspects that make me into the person that I am and not just the doing of the work, that process has led me to a place of feeling passionate about supporting others because some of this stuff can get missed in the process of building businesses and we can lose sight on the things that actually create a soil where things can grow. And so that's led me to this place now of having a business out in the market that's doing things normally in the world. And then the other side of things that's looking to support other leaders and entrepreneurs in their internal spaces. I deeply identify with that, that basically I found myself in a similar situation where I had to look inside, I had to work on the insides in order to make the outsides. And I think that's for some reason as a society, as a culture, often people want to work on external things, but really the internal is so integral to making the external things actually work function and fit into my life and is something that I enjoy. There's a lot of choices and options that go to, but if I'm not working on my insights, then I don't make those kinds of decisions. Totally right. Yeah. Absolutely. It's interesting to actually dig a little bit into one's own relationship to that and try to explore why that is, because I think you're a hundred percent correct that it's easier to try and focus on the external components, and then we keep getting the same results because we're doing the same things. But going into those more personal spaces that are maybe a little bit harder to define, actually force us to look in the mirror in a way that if we are not accustomed to it, can actually be quite unsettling. And I think many of us don't have not been guided into building the skillsets and the frameworks that actually support a process in there. So it just feels overwhelming. And looking inside and seeing some things. I mean, when I was in my twenties, there was a whole lot of things I saw in there I didn't like. It was uncomfortable and I didn't want it to be true. And it was much better at some points of my life there that I was just in denial about it. And I just said, no, this is not affecting me. This is not happening. I'm not looking at this. But at some point you realize you have to do the work, you have to do it. I believe that there's some kind of force for good in the universe that I have connected with in my twenties, a god of my understanding, right? I'm not really very religious, but I'm certainly very spiritual, and I believe my talents, my skills and my awareness and everything inside of me, it comes from that force for good in the universe. It's connected to that, to all living things, and I need to listen to it. And many times when I don't listen to it, that's often when I have the most problems and struggles in my life. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So what was going on for you when you started this journey of entrepreneurship? What got you into that? You said you've been eat, sleep and drinking entrepreneurship for a very long time, and I assume that means you were mostly working on your own business, making your own incomes with nobody capping you and nobody giving you permission, but that you went out there and you built it. How did that journey start for you really? Yeah, so my first business I kind of stumbled into it was in the automotive body space, interestingly enough, and I was not someone who was already inclined to that. I didn't have some intentional or specific passion around it, but I started working with a friend who I apprenticed under, and then I ended up moving my family, well at that point, just my wife and I to Colorado. And at that point I launched a business around that and did that for almost a decade. And that went well. We scaled that to several brick and mortar locations around Denver. But I also found through that process that there was something lacking in the process for me and for a while and a while, meaning years, I was able to convince myself that what I was passionate about was just building a business. And that whether it aligned or I felt passionate about it was incidental until it wasn't. And that all came to a head where I was at a point in that business where I dreaded every morning of driving in every single morning and whenever I had the thought, if I showed up and there happened to be a fire and this place wasn't standing, I wouldn't be sad. I was like, this is not a good sign. So it caused me to enforce me to take some deeper looks internally to figure out what actually drives me and what is that intersection point between what makes me tick, what am I good at, and what is the world actually valued? Yes, very worthwhile questions to ask oneself. So what did you find out after those 10 years? And did you just close it and walk away? Did you sell it? Did it end up going through its course and dying? Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, so the business still exists. I did have someone come in and purchase the business, so I was able to exit that business, and I spent a couple of years in the real estate space flipping homes, which felt like a break to me because we had this business with a pretty decent size W2 workforce. So everything that comes along with that and taking on flipping homes felt like a break because I could just work on a project. I hired 10 99 labor and it created space for me to actually begin asking some of the more probing questions internally and taking the pressure off for a period of time. And through that, I ended up finding myself into a fairly intuitive process of considering, okay, what are the aspects of the business that I did enjoy? What are the skills that I've developed intentionally or unintentionally through this process? And are there any industries that naturally and intrinsically actually benefit from that intersection point of those elements? And that's how I found myself into the space of the short-term rental Airbnb world, because I'd experience in a service-based business, I had some experience in real estate, both acquisitions and the design and the flipping components. And I had a property with my wife here in Denver that we've operated as an Airbnb for now seven years. And so all those things intersected with actually the investing and managing area of the short-term rental space. And so we've been building that business for going on two years now. We have properties across Colorado and in a market in Texas that we manage. And simultaneously running parallel to that process was the ongoing personal development focus of cultivating and rowing the framework internally for myself that would allow me to continue with momentum into the future in a way that felt aligned. And I found myself increasingly in conversations with friends, acquaintances, other participants and masterminds where aspects of my own story and practices or routines or frameworks that it supported me. I found myself supporting and guiding others in that. And at a certain point with a friend and now partner who we were having increasing conversations, we found ourselves for hours on the phone talking about this stuff, we're like, maybe we should actually put something around this because people are finding true value in it and it doesn't feel like something that's being forced, but rather the market's asking for more of what we're already doing. What were some of those things that you mentioned? So let's dig a little bit deeper on that and unpack that. So you're building the business and now working a lot on self development. At the same time you're going to masterminds, you're talking to like-minded people, you're building your community of people that you're going to surround yourself with that's going to help inform you that you can share with what are some of the actual things that you looked at to move the needle. For me, for example, I like to wake up in the morning and own my morning for an hour and a half, two hours every day to plan out my day, organize my day, do my rituals that I do in my morning rituals to get myself ready to be at that peak performance level, to stay in the zone, to have the right kind of emotional intensity that I day and work 14, 16 hours. So tell me a little bit about some of those things that are like that you are like, I need to move this needle over here, I need to get this at this level over here, those types of things. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, just to piggyback on what you're missioning about morning routines, I mean the engagement and the development of a morning routine, not to say it in an overly dramatic way, but it did save my life. I mean, I was at a really dark place at one point, and only in retrospect I realized, oh, I was like, dude, you were depressed. And it was intense. And in the midst of it, I couldn't see it with the clarity that I do now, but being able to start the day on my terms with stacking some wins coming out of the gate and being able to demonstrate to myself that I can trust myself to do the things I say I'm going to do is life-changing because it sounds simple, but many of us can start our day, which bleeds into the way we lead our lives as being highly reactive. And so if we can change from a reactive approach to being in the driver's seat of the experience that then permeates everything else we do. But if we can't even be proactive in the early stages of the day, good luck with the rest of it. So for myself and with clients, we've put together a program called Craft Your Ideal Day, and it does start with everything for the morning routines to how to effectively time block, how to properly assess qualitatively and quantitatively where your time's going. Does the things that you do actually support the things that you state are most important, or is there misalignment there? Because if you can actually deliver a day in a repeated fashion to yourself, that is an alignment and you stack those up, extraordinary things can happen in a relatively short amount of time, but it does take some, I had to face it at one point for myself that I had to take myself through a rudimentary relearning of how to navigate my reality. And I like to think that I had things dialed, but I was like, dude, you find it difficult to even log a day where you feel good about the day. Let's start there and then we can think about big dreams and visions, but can you actually do the things you say that you want and need to do? And if you can't, we need to address that. So that's one big area of focus. And then another core area that has been instrumental for me as well as for clients is something that within our program, we call a story model. And it is a framing of our life as everything is a story, and we have our beliefs and our feelings that go into directing everything that we do. And so if we don't, taking the example of a morning routine, if we find that troublesome and challenging to actually do consistently, there's a story around that, and we might not be, and we're likely not conscious of it, but there's a story that's informing that seemingly inability to actually execute on that. And so if we pull back the layers, is it that I have such a low view of my own self-worth that I get up in the morning? And where did that come from? Okay, so what are all the elements of the story that are informing the existing kind of conditions and what could a new story look like to actually be the conditions that would elicit different results? So maybe the story is that I need to go back and look at a young age where feelings of lack of self-worth really originated. How could I rewrite those elements and then bring those into the way I step into a morning? And so if I begin, part of my morning routine is getting in the cold tank where there's many mornings where there's a lot of resistance to that, but there's a mirror that I have right by my back door, and many mornings I am looking into the mirror and having a conversation of today we're showing up for you, man, and you're worth getting in the coal tank. I understand the resistance, I know it's going to hurt all these things, but this is how we show that we believe in the worth that we have in an innate way, and we can demonstrate that And so that active story creation, whenever we can bring that into all areas, including like we said, morning routines, the story that we have with our partners, the way that we relate to our kids, the relationship to have my business, what is the existing story, what story do I want to hold around it? And then allowing our actions to flow out of that. That's great. That's great. And certainly it takes time to do these things. This is just another area that I find is there's not enough talked about is like I can't just go from A to B by snapping my fingers. I can't just go from where I'm at to where I want to go just by doing that. It's not just a couple of days of mindset and talking and setting up some practices. There's a process that I have to go through. Some of it might be trial and error because I fail at things. So maybe just as an example, when you talk about the cold plunge, maybe you didn't just start out just jumping in the cold plunge. Maybe you eased your way into that a little bit, a little bit, a little bit until you're at the level that you're at right now. It could be as simple as you jump in for 10 seconds, then you jump in for 30 seconds, then you jump in for a minute, then you jump in for five minutes, then you're doing whatever. So there's a process that things have to happen. And hopefully during that process, I'm also looking at what that's about, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, why am I thinking that? I know for me, I want to talk a little bit about some of those great challenges you had with the depression and the anxieties and stuff. But I know for me that I have had unrealistic expectations on myself, and I have allowed other people's expectations to affect me. And I have been too hard on myself. I have been too hard on myself for many times. And so today after practicing this stuff for 30 something years, I don't listen to that shit. I get a thought that's being hard on me. I'm not doing enough. I need to do more. I need to push harder. I'm like, I don't ignore that stuff because I have a plan. I'm working the plan. I have put it out on paper. I know where I'm going and what I'm working for, and I just need to let that process happen. I just need to let that process happen and not mess with it so much. Which takes a ton of patience, the patience in that right, and humility to be able to own the fact that you're not at your highest expression today, and that's not a problem. There's beauty in the fact that you're only getting in the tank for 10 seconds. And I know for myself, it was critical that I actually took mental inventory of the small wins because I also was a slave to some vision out there of some great version of Anson that I was not demonstrating. But whenever I was able to begin looking at man, I mean, I was doing it this morning reflecting on a few things that I did today already that are demonstrative of the kind of man I want to be. I got up, I did the morning routine, the things that actually create the person I want to be, I was able to spend a few minutes connecting with my way. Okay, I've already logged a few wins in the day and these are evidence, and I will actually visualize placing flags in the ground of these moments that are the evidence of the person that I claim to be and want to be. But for so long, all the flags I put in the ground were of the negative evidence. And there was plenty, and there's still plenty of evidence around ways that I missed the mark every single day, but it doesn't serve me to focus on this like, yes, general awareness, being able to assess and pivot when I need to, but the conscious planting of the flags of the areas where you are executing in a way with a good trajectory only serves the furtherment of what you actually desire. And certainly I understand that what we measure and what we track is what we can grow. We can't grow in different areas if we don't measure and track things. But the measuring and the tracking has nothing to do with my identity. My identity is something that is not going to change, that is always going to be there, but the measuring and tracking are there just to inform me, what can I do about that? If your goal is to make $4,000 worth of income a day, if that's your goal to do that five days a week to make the impact that you want in life and to take care of the things that are important to you that you're responsible for, and you don't make that, then maybe you can ask yourself, is this just an unrealistic goal? Is that what it is? Or do I not have the right systems in place to make that happen? Is there something that I'm doing that's not causing that to happen? Am I somehow interfering with that? But not really to beat yourself up and say, I'm no good. Recently I had another car accident. I have this weird history of having these crazy accidents. I'd like to say I don't really understand why, but three of the accidents all happened on the same road. So there's something about the highway and the driving there, but the last time it happened to me last year, the recovery was really hard and I had to go through a lot of stuff and getting back to the right physical state that I could maintain a 14 hour, 16 hour day and really get a lot of things done and feel that I'm in the right zone. It took me months to get back there. And sometimes the feelings that I have about not being able to perform like I did before, not being able to push the needle like I have before, made me feel depressed. And then the feedback from the world around me, my world, not necessarily the world, but my immediate word, immediate people in my life, and the feedback coming back from that and me wanting to step up to do things like I did things before, caused some conflict with me, but I had to work through that and just keep focusing on Zig Ziglar, talks about a block and a mailbox, and then a block and two mailboxes, and then a block and three mailboxes. And by doing that, I got myself back into shape, went through what I had to go through to get on the other side, and I'm still in it right now and building it, but I, I'm back at that peak performance that I need to feel like I'm engaged and things are happening and we're moving the needle. So I don't let those things defeat me. And I am somewhat saddened when I see other people allow a setback or an obstacle kind of just defeat them. And they decide that the thing is maybe they should just want less out of life. And maybe if I just, instead of me trying to produce more and make and be more, I'm just going to accept less. And then it's not too much challenge in my life and I don't have to be uncomfortable. And yes, please jump in any anytime. Interrupt me. Bro. Yeah, and it's understandable. If we think about even from our wiring from just a human psychology standpoint, it's baked in for us to try to mitigate any additional suffering at all costs. That's our default. I wish my default was just expansive, thriving, but I have to work at that every day because I can feel this gravity of parts of my psychology and my own nervous system wanting to keep me from some pain that I felt in the past. And so the brain is doing that out of service to our whole makeup to try and keep us from experiencing the loss or the traumas that we have in the past, but it's the very thing that keeps us from something more beautiful and bigger in the future. And so it takes a high level of conscious engagement to say to oneself, it's, I understand ans and I understand why you have this aversion to this thing. Y you are wanting to play small. It makes sense because of this experience and the results were XI get it, but you also are not the same man that you were at that point either. Here are the skills you've developed since then or here's the skills you could develop that would produce a different result and a different future is possible. And so having that awareness that we're not doing something inherently wrong whenever we try and operate from loss aversion, our system's trying to protect us, but also it's limited. It's limited in what it can produce. And so if we can keep that in mind and pull back the judgment from it and just the recognition and then be able to choose what do I want to do? What do I actually want to willfully and consciously decide are my next steps, then we can actually begin to produce a different future. But if we don't do that, of course we're going to go back to this baseline of loss aversion. Yeah, yeah, I get that. And I think that in some ways what we're talking about really has a lot to do for me about this idea of identity of who I am and what's really important to me and what can I really change about myself. And I think when I work with other people, a lot of times it's like some kind of human tendency that we think we could really just remove something from inside of us. And I find it, it's not so much removing those feelings and impulses inside of me, but just not allowing that to drive the bus. That is not my focus. It's true that I might have feelings of, I dunno, distrust for somebody, and this may be a pattern in my life that I have difficulty trusting and letting go. And maybe that in the past has made me want to control and micromanage shit and get up people's asses, and that's not functional. So I had to address that in myself. I don't want to work with somebody who's always up my ass and trying to micromanage me and understand me. I want to be free to do what I do because I have expertise in a certain areas is right. So I maybe don't lose that thought and that feeling like I need to control this, but I don't have to act out in that way. I could just leave it alone. I'm a big proponent of allowing my thoughts to just die a natural death. And one of my mantras all the time is my feelings are not facts. My feelings are not facts. My feelings are not facts. They're not facts. They're just feelings. And they come and go, and five minutes from now I'm going to feel something else. So I just don't let those kinds of things inform me in moving forward is what I try to do anyway. What I strive to do. A hundred percent. And a similar take on that with a little bit of a different framing is it's helpful for me to observe those feelings and the thoughts that arise as simply as information versus identity as you're saying. And information doesn't need to be a threat to me. It can be a flashlight on something that needs attention. It can be something where it could prompt some deeper reflection in a particular area, but being able to be in the driver's seat of our thoughts and feelings, imagine if we're all operating from that place. That's a very different world. And I think that's so much of my internal work is that I'm staying in the driver's seat of that, the conversation that's happening internally, because I recognize that at a previous point, I gave way more space and way more weight to the things that felt that they were naturally arising within me. Because if there's not a high level of awareness around it, it's easy to interpret that as being what's true because it's what arises. And so we take it as fact and as someone who I've always placed such a high priority on authenticity for years, I found myself in this inescapable whirlpool of negative authenticity where I seem to have evidence for why I was a screw up in whatever arena, why I wasn't capable of something, why I wasn't worth this. And the feelings felt true to me. And because I wanted to continue prioritizing authenticity, I couldn't find my way out of it. And it wasn't until the point of recognizing that while the feelings are true, it's not true from a definition of myself and the things that I desire to be true and to feel true, only feel inauthentic because they're unfamiliar. And that framing of the feeling of inauthenticity being actually unfamiliarity really changed things for me because okay, if that's the case, then if something becomes more familiar to me and feels less of a one-off experience feels more common in my felt experience in navigating the world, there's a possibility that it starts to feel authentic. But that's going to take a period of time of engaging in a way that feels foreign. And my system's going to scream that this isn't true. This isn't who you are. But again, that is unfamiliarity, not actually in authenticity. And I agree with that. I mean, we look at our beliefs, we look at our actions. We want to have congruency in those two things. And if our beliefs are negative beliefs about ourself or about other things, is that real? Is that real? Is that the truth or is that just fear really? And understanding that and then working to replace that with something else. So when the mind says, this is not, I can't do it, I can't do it, we turned it around and said, of course I can do it. One area I've worked on quite a bit is I have a tendency to think of things in black and white or wrong, left or right, and it's not really true. It's a lie that I tell myself. So just for example, I told myself, I am not able to do this and work this at the same time. I need to do either or. So I need to stop doing this so I could focus on this, or I need to stop doing that and just focus on this. And where that lie came from, I don't really care where it came from, it doesn't matter. But when I recognize, wait a minute, that's bullshit. Of course I have a life. I have 24 hours in a day. I can do more than one thing in a day. I can focus on several different things. I just have to make it part of my life. I have to make it important. And so it's those kinds of self-development and seeing those things and then saying, okay, of course I can do it. Of course I can do it. Yes, let me plan it out. Let me write it out. Let me look at my day. I have this many hours. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. I'm going to focus on this. I'm going to focus here these hours, I'm going to do this. And you can actually incorporate everything that you want into your day to the best of your ability. Again, little wins, little wins, little wins lead to big wins, right? Move the needle to two mailboxes, three mailboxes, five mailboxes. Then you're walking three miles, four miles a day, whatever. So I love it. I love it. Tell me a little bit about, because we've talked about a lot of great stuff right now, we've unpacked quite a bit. What was going on for you with how you overcame the depression and the anxiety and all that? Yeah, so a little bit of context and how I found myself in that place. I was in a season of exiting this business. I sold some real estate and I'd been grinding for a decade, and I was finally at a point where I wasn't going to be retiring and living large, but our quality of life could change pretty dramatically, and I could begin choosing what I did, where I did it, how I did it, all of those things that so many of us desire. And in the matter of a few short months, I lost every bit of it, every bit of it from seeing seven figures in account to seeing zero. And it's not an exaggeration. And that rocked my world from an identity perspective in a way that I could never have imagined and fears that I did not realize were present became all I could see fears of that I may not amount to much that negative stories from my past or family or things that people have said, look, these are being validated. Look, your best efforts, your best efforts, even whenever you were on the precipice of really being able to create a life for your family, you don't have it. And the evidence was there. And so I did not seem to be able to talk myself out of it. And that led into a pretty extended period of, I mean, I did not leave my basement a dark room in my basement for days and weeks at a time while my wife, I mean, we have two kids, my wife's having to keep the family together. And I was at a point where I did not want to be alive. For me, I remember there was a specific moment where I was like, I felt trapped in my own lived experience because I wanted out of life, but I have two kids. And I was like, I can't do something in the way that so much of me was screaming for. I couldn't do something drastic. And so there was a pretty intense period of having, I mean, literally looking in the mirror and being like, here are your options. If you're not going to take the ripcord on life entirely, you and your current trajectory, you are giving yourselves, sorry, you're giving your kids a story that they are going to have to work through probably for the rest of their life, if not generations because of the way you're doing this right now. So that's one option. And you kick the can down the road for your kids and your grandkids, or you have to completely rebuild yourself in the most humble way from the ground up. It doesn't matter if you think you should already know it or not, you have to start back at ground zero. And at that moment, it was like all I could do was simply say, I'm going to get up I eight o'clock when my alarm goes off. I couldn't muster anything more than that. But I began doing that, and over a couple of weeks prove to myself that I could actually get out bed and get out of the house. And it was like I had to go somewhere. I didn't know where I was going to go. I would go walk in the park, I would do something, but I had to actually do something. I said I was going to do action. So I began taking these long walks at a park that's close to our house and hearing multiple teachers and gurus talk about the importance of gratitude and how so much of their ability to navigate life is grounded in that. And I remember walking through the park and feeling, I want to feel grateful, but if I'm honest, I don't. So how do I muster gratefulness? Is it like 1, 2, 3, okay, now I'm grateful. Now I'm grateful. And it seemed quite elusive to me. And again, I had to start on a very simple level. And I remember laying down at the park, looking up at the trees and saying, okay, I can in the moment as that sunshine comes through the leaves and shines on my face, I think I can feel grateful for this. Okay, I can start here. And then playing Legos with my son. I think I can feel grateful for that. I'll start there. And it began with these really small elements of gratitude that began, I didn't feel the evidence of any massive shifts happening, but beginning to bring as many of those moments into the day as I could did begin to shift things. And then it was the cultivation and the growing of the morning routine. It was like, okay, can I get up at seven 30? Okay, okay, we can do that. Can I get up at seven? Okay, how about when I get up? Can I bring a little bit of intentionality to what I do? Can I write three sentences of some kind of reflection? It could even be that today sucks. I don't want to live anything. Could I get something on paper? And that began just snowballing from there, because I then had not only had evidence, but I had trust with myself that things actually could change because that was, I think that common in the experience of depression is that not only things are hard and seemingly unbearable, unbearably hard, but that things can't change. And so there's this learned helplessness that one can find themselves in that where it seems that it doesn't matter what you do, things are not going to change and things can't get better until something does. And I cannot overstate how life-changing it is to find even the most minuscule grain of evidence that you can affect your life. Because if you can affect one small thing, maybe you can affect one thing that's slightly more significant. And then as that progresses, that can exponentially increase in ways that whenever you are in that dark place, you cannot even fathom. You can't imagine it. But simply getting up when you say you're going to could be the thing that starts the domino effect on the rest of the equation. Yeah, I identify a lot about what you're talking about, but 36 years ago, I had a great miracle really happen to me. I was on a path that definitely I was going to either kill a bunch of people or kill myself. It was very self-destructive my life. And by some miracle, somebody in my family who cared about me, introduced me to somebody else, who introduced me to the fact that I didn't have to live that way anymore. That was possible for me not to live like that. I wasn't crazy that I wasn't clinical. There's a reason why this is happening to me. And there's other people who were like me, who lived the crazy life I lived, who now are not living like that anymore. And they found a new purpose in each other and sharing with each other. And so that opened up everything for me. And I believe that happened because people cared about me, and my family prayed for me and wanted to see me, could see that I was suffering and didn't want me to suffer anymore. And that opened up the door for me to find out that there's all this stuff that I was missing I didn't see. And it was a process, of course, but what I'm trying to say is that I find that just the action of me talking to people, getting up, walking, engaging, these are the things that start moving it forward. This is how you start getting out of it, even if it's just you get up and just start walking in the sunlight and you can't walk. I can't do it. I feel too, I don't want to do anything, but let me just do 10 steps. And then you do 10 and you're like, okay, maybe I could do five more. Okay, maybe I can go a block. Maybe I can go two blocks. But it's just getting into the movement and the action that everything starts to come to me really. Right. It's when I stay trapped and I just want to pull the covers over my head. That's when I'm in danger. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your coaching program. Again, I know you've talked about some of it, and is there some more you want to share about that? Yeah, I'd love to. So that coaching program is called the Self-Coaching Project, and that name was born out of, in part from the experience I had of having to get into the driver's seat and begin taking complete responsibility and ownership for my own process. And in that there is a way to develop the skills that not only help me solve one specific problem, but can operate from a first principle basis and can allow me to actually navigate and build anything that I want. And so the desire and the mission behind that is to support leaders and entrepreneurs into becoming the conscious architects of their story. And so a lot of times the individuals we work with already are experiencing some level of success, at least on a balance sheet, but they are sensing that there's something either just inherently off and painful about their internal experience with that. And for those that can recognize that early, I mean, the hope is that we can support individuals before they get to the depths of the places that I was speaking to. And we truly believe that's possible. And so if we're able to actually tend to the mental and emotional game of what it means to be a human, is it possible that we can actually write a story of our life that we would want to read? That's not because we all know that no one gets to their deathbed applauding themselves on what they did last in revenue. Now, that doesn't mean it's not important, it is important, and those are worthwhile goals and all the endeavors we have around business, but it has to be accompanied by a well aligned and intentional experience of a life that is directed with purpose, that it feels in alignment with actually what is most important to us. And so as I mentioned before, we have both programs that work with small groups. So it could be the craft your ideal day, how do you construct a day that not only feels good, but actually moves you towards meaningful goals? It could be like we have a client who was CFO of a company moved into a CEO role, and now he's like, I don't know. Am I even the right person for this? I don't know if I can do this. I don't know why I'm here. And being able to actually pull back the layers and help individuals get clarity around who they are, why they do what they do, and being able to bring that into the work that they do so that the stuff that they are engaging in is sustainable, where they can see a path where eight years from now, not only have they survived it, but they're thriving in the midst of it. And so that's the focus of the work and is it empowering the individuals to actually become their own coach in the process. Fantastic. We've talked about a lot of stuff and I really have enjoyed our time together. Before we close everything out, Anson, is there anything that I haven't asked you or we haven't talked about that you want to talk about? The only thing I would mention is if there is someone listening who is in it at the moment, if you are in the depths of it, all I want to say is that you're not alone in that. And that's one of the greatest lies you can ever believe is that you are alone in it. And I understand from my own angle what that experience is like. And so whatever it's worth, take the next, no matter how small of a step, take a small step in service of yourself and hold just even one granular of beliefs that a more expansive and more beautiful future is possible. If you even hold the smallest piece of that, you can build off of that. For more information and monthly topics of interest, please go to transform Your future.com and join the newsletter.