Episode 16: When Your Past Shapes But Doesn't Define You

Brandon reflects on his life journey, sharing how past mistakes and difficult experiences have shaped him into the person he is today while emphasizing his commitment to growth and learning from both his own errors and those of others.

Please start with Episode 1. Go to my site BrandonHeld.com

• Growing up surrounded by alcohol abuse, physical violence, and poor role models taught Brandon to learn from others' mistakes
• Every experience, good or bad, offers lessons that can help you become a better person
• The importance of surrounding yourself with good people who positively impact your daily life
• Meeting his best friend Blair at DSI despite initial disappointment about a position
• Reflections on his third marriage's breakdown and the painful reality of not being with his children daily
• Understanding that asking for help isn't weakness but necessary for personal growth
• Commitment to being better each day: "Your goal should be to wake up and work to be a better person that day than you were the day before"

Intro

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:25

hi welcome back to brandon held life is crazy this is episode 16. and i just wanted to start off this episode by saying there are a lot of things that have happened in between the time that has passed and now in this point of the podcast that i haven't discussed things that i leave out maybe intentionally because I think later on down the line, if these discussions expand and I need to give more details on things, then I have more details to give. There's no way I could possibly discuss all the major points in my life in every single thing that happened along the way because multiple reasons. One, I just forget. Sometimes I don't think about it. I need something to jar my memory and help me. And two, some things out of the respect for my wife now, or maybe the people that I was with at the time, I don't want to air all that dirty laundry because it isn't just me. It's them. It's their life too. And I want to respect that to as much high degree as I can while still being true to myself and telling my story. And again, I want to reiterate that my story is exactly that. It's my story. So everything I'm telling you is from my point of view and it's the way I recall it and see it in my memory. And that's the position I'm telling it from. So anyone else that has anything to do with me in life. Maybe they have a different point of view or they have a different story for our relationship or the same incident or whatever the case may be. That's their story to tell. That's the way they see it. So I'm not going to say anything is wrong with anyone else's story or anyone else's point of view, but I'm also going to defend mine. I'm going to defend my own because I'm being 100% honest here as I try to be mostly in life. And I am telling the story the best that I can in my memory with 100% honesty. So let me just give you an example. Like I forgot to tell when I got that first job with accounting sales a few episodes back. that my boss flew me to Miami and let me stay in a hotel in Boca Raton and hang out with him for a few days. He took me to a Miami Heat versus Phoenix Suns game and we had second row tickets to the game. I got to go to the beach. Those are the kind of things that I could tell you that happened at that point, which is significant. It was the first time I ever got to go to that part of florida when i was married to ethan's mom my first wife we went to disney world together in orlando florida i didn't tell that part there are just things i just haven't told because i don't think about it and i just forget which i guess is the same thing and i just some things just want to i feel it's not my story to tell i wouldn't mind Telling everything. My life would be an open book. I don't plan on putting a podcast out about my life if it wouldn't be an open book because I don't claim to be a perfect man. Not even close. I've made mistakes. I've made bad decisions and bad choices. And they helped shaped me into the man that I am today, which I am proud to say I think is a pretty good man. Am I perfect? No, but I don't know anyone that is. Do you? All in all, I'm a good man and the people that I love and the people that I care about know that and they're taken care of by me and they're loved by me. The friends that I have, which are few, they're very good friends and we have great relationships. And I would be none of these things without the mistakes in the life that I have lived and the choices I have made. So I can't really regret my mistakes and regret my choices. All I can do is learn from them. And that's all you or anyone can do, right? The idea in life is to not make the same mistakes repeatedly. You should be able to learn. from other people's mistakes. You should be able to look at other people and say, oh, I see how they're living or how they're doing that. Or even if you just take one incident and say, oh, I see what they did there in that incident, I would make a different choice. And you remember that and you stick true to those choices and you stick true to those ideas and you try to be better than what you're seeing going on and happening around you. And that's what I've done. I've told you that I grew up with alcohol abuse, physical abuse, not for me personally, but for my mother, drug abuse, uneducated, no emphasis on school, just bad choices being made in life from cheating spouses to just all the things that have happened. in life and I've made some mistakes of my own along the way. And so the point is you look at those things, your mistakes and other people's mistakes, and you bank that in your memory. You use those as learning moments and you don't make those mistakes. You have to be able to adjust and make decisions based off of what you've seen in life and what you know. And sometimes until you make a mistake or you make a bad choice, you genuinely, truly didn't know any better. But once you did it and you know better, if you do it again, that's on you. That's totally on you. And you have no one to blame at that point but yourself. And hopefully, you're working hard to be a better person. Always. It's never too late for that. Never. I'm 51. I always continue to try to learn, not just in my personal life and not just how to be a better man, but also emotionally and educationally. You can never stop learning and stop growing and stop being better. You can by not doing it, but you shouldn't. Your goal should be to constantly be a better person, whether you're a man or a woman. To be a better person should be your goal. Every day you should wake up and you should work to be a better person that day than you were the day before. Does it always work out that way? No. Do we hit bumps along the road that really hurt? make us feel like we've grabbed a cinder block and we're sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool and we need help getting our head back up out of water? Absolutely. It always happens. But it's not the be-all that ends all, right? Everything I've gone through in life, good and bad, which I'm not finished talking about. I haven't completed my life story, but I'm just off on a tangent here. Everything that I've gone through in life, I have gotten through. The good times don't last forever. They just don't. I wish they did. And I heard a great quote the other day. There's no such thing as a love that doesn't hurt. And that's true. There isn't. No relationship have I ever been in, no one have I ever been in love with that hasn't hurt me at some point. It's just the level of hurt in what's been done that is a factor that decides if you continue. So everything that's both positive and negative doesn't last forever. And that's what you have to remember. And sometimes those negative things require you making the effort to make that change, right? Maybe you're stuck. in a dead end job and you feel like this is my life, I don't make enough money. I'm just going to struggle my entire life. Guess what? Unless you get incredibly lucky and play the lottery and win the lottery, that's not going to change. It's just not going to change. You have to make that change. You have to say, all right, this is my of action forward to get me out of this position. And that's what I have been doing my entire life. My entire life has been a plan of action to be better going forward in the future. And that's the plan you need to have. That's the life you should be striving for. And trust me, if you do, you'll be better for it. You'll be happier. You'll be more proud of yourself. Other people, you know, will love you and care about you more because you're a good person who doesn't love good. Good people are worth loving. Good people are worth keeping in your life and taking care of. And that's why I said I only have a few good friends because the few good friends that I have are really good people. And they're worth loving. calling my friend. Outside of that, I've had a lot of people that maybe in the past I would have called friend or acquaintance, and they never escalated above that level for whatever reason. Maybe they've betrayed me. Maybe I've seen signs in them as a person. This includes women I've dated that huge red flags. You can't just ignore what people say to you just because it's not about you. If someone comes to you and they talk shit to you about this person or that person or do something in front of you that is all good and funny because it's you but it doesn't affect you or hurt you, guess what they're doing when they're not with you? They're doing the same thing to you. They're talking shit about you. They're doing shit behind your back that negatively affects you. And you can't overlook those things. You can't ignore those things. So these are all things you got to think about in life. Surrounding yourself with good people is incredibly valuable. It's incredibly important. Because if you're a good, caring person, like I believe that I am, the people that you are surrounded by that you love and care about are going to have an effect on how you feel. day to day. They just are. Unless you're some type of sociopath that can just ignore how your loved ones feel, how the people you care about feel, it's going to affect you one way or another. It can be a good effect. It can be a great effect. If you're married to someone who is really good to you or your kids are really happy with you and they show you love and they show you caring and they Lift you up. It makes your day better. It makes your life better, right? But if you marry someone who's just shitting on you or beating you down or calling you this and that and the other, or it's a very rollercoaster, very high or very low relationship, it's going to affect you in your everyday life, in your everyday decisions. It's going to prevent you from the growth Allowing you to be the person you want to be. And you just, you have to cut that out of your life as hard as it may be. Sometimes you have to cut that out of your life. And so here I am now at this stage of the podcast, I'm in my third marriage and it's just not in a good place. It's in a difficult place. I am now being someone that I. didn't really want to be which is the sole provider to a wife and two children that live with me and also I have a son that doesn't live with me that I get in the summers and it's just all on me to take care of everything right financially obviously as a stay-at-home mom she gets them to school she dresses them she feeds them she does those things but As great as those things are, and they are great, don't get me wrong, someone has to do them, they all can't be done if I can't give the financial means to allow that life to be lived. So it's a lot of pressure and it's a lot of stress. And when you're doing that in a relationship that is broken, it's hard and it makes you question, why am I doing this? You got two little kids, so yeah, that helps. But it feels a little empty, like something's missing. And so that's where I was at this stage in my marriage. And so I started my new job at DSI and I got the position and I got there. And I started my first day. It was a little fuzzy. It was a little very quick, like very quick interview, very quick turnaround, very quick two weeks notice to NCI and just taking a job that I was excited to take because I liked the idea of the role, which was building a supply chain management tool for Raytheon. And I liked that. The fact that it was going to be close to home again and it was good pay, good hours. It was exciting, the new position. And I get there and I start my job and I'm going to be working with two other people. I meet a guy named Mark and then later another newcomer comes on and his name is Blair. Now, I find out. which I didn't know at the time, but I find out Blair was given the operations manager position when I thought I was going to be given that position. So it was a little bit of a surprise to me, but I was in such a good mood about the prospects of everything. I didn't want to let that affect anything. It just so happened it turns out that Blair just ends up being an incredible human being, and he is now my best friend. And I didn't know this at that time. I didn't know this at that day. I didn't know who he was, but immediately we connected. We're both from Ohio, huge Ohio State Buckeye fans, which is something we're still super connected about now. And he was just cool. He was easy going. He's a good guy, easy to get along with. And as you get older in life, And you worry less about being cool and what's cool. You just start to appreciate good quality people, right? And he just had a positive attitude and just a good dude. And so I was happy to be working with him. Now, Mark, on the other hand, he was a little bit of a different story. Didn't feel so great about him. We don't always get great coworkers, right? I believe every job I've ever had, I have a coworker or two that just gets under my skin and I don't really care for. Not because I'm hard to get along with and I'm easy to dislike people. I just don't dislike good people or I just don't like good people. What am I saying? I don't like bad people. That's what I'm trying to say. And I don't like people that are selfish and it's pretty clear that they care about one person and that's number one. Even in a work setting, you know, you should care about your coworkers. You should strive to get along with your coworkers and it's another place where you have to compromise in life, right? You can't just be you and think about you and only worry about you. because people aren't going to like you. And while being liked by people isn't necessarily the goal in life, getting along with people is because it just makes your life easier in many ways. Being stressed and arguing and just bad emotions, bad feelings because you're around someone you don't really care for and you don't like, that's tense. That sucks. But if it's people you can get along with and just be cool with and amicable with and exist together that's so much easier it's such a better environment and then if you can even grow into some type of decent friendship even better because you do things for each other you help each other out and that's really what we need in this world is helping each other out nobody can do everything on their own As much as I tried, right, I hit a point, I hit a wall where I needed help and I had to turn to someone to help me because I can't do everything on my own. And that's one of the lessons I took away. One of the things I learned, I can't do everything on my own and I don't have to do everything on my own. If I have the right people around me, I can get help and I can help them too. And these were some big takeaways and some big lessons that took me till my mid to late thirties to learn. And it sucks that it took me that long, but I didn't have that guidance in my life. I didn't have someone showing me this path and lighting this path for me and allowing me to take life with that point of view. Instinctively, I knew. At a young age, I could learn from other people's mistakes. I didn't have to make the same mistakes everyone else did. I could look at alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse. I could look at all those things and I could see that's not right. That's not a way you want to be. That stuff was easy and it was instinctive to not be like that and to not do those things. But not everything in life was that way. Some things in life, I had learned the hard way. I had to travel the long, hard road to figure some things out. And if I had guidance and I had someone there for me to lean on and show me the right path, then maybe it wouldn't have taken me so long to learn some of the things I learned. I was still learning. Selfish in some ways at that point. I still was begrudging my wife a little bit because she just wanted to be a stay at home mom that I had never agreed to. And that was not the life that I had planned out for us because I didn't want that stress. I didn't want it all alone. I didn't want to have it to myself. At least that's where I was at that time. I have a different point of view today. That's where I was at that time. And so we were just struggling to get along when some personality clashes. I liked alone time. I like to play video games. I like to watch TV. And she liked to be on the go. And she liked to be out and about doing things. That just wasn't me and it wasn't who I was. We had reached a point where while I had been working at DSI for a couple years, she decided that we had some pretty bad fights during that time. Even in our attempts to rekindle our marriage, I think it led to even more difficult times in the fact that we were trying so hard to open up and be open and give more. that it was still failing, that it was still not working out. We were still fighting. From my perspective, she was very immature. She had a very immature thought process. She had a very immature view of the world. I met her when she was 19 and now she was in her early 30s and she hadn't grown maturity-wise, in my opinion. She was the same girl that I had met 12 years before. And it was tough. It's tough dealing with that. It's tough coming to that realization of something that you think is just naturally going to happen, right? You meet someone when they're young and you think they're naturally going to mature. They're naturally going to become a more evolved, better person. And they just don't. They just don't. So it's hard to respect them. It's hard to see them as an equal, right? And that's how you should see your spouse as an equal. I just didn't see her as an equal. I just didn't. I couldn't. The way she thought, the way her brain works, the way she behaved and acted and the things that she talked about and her jealousy and her insecurity and And just everything that she was, I just couldn't see her as an equal and I couldn't respect her. Because of those things, we couldn't get along. We had some bad fights towards the end of our marriage. And I had never wanted to give up because even though it wasn't great, and a lot of this stuff, that I'm telling you is hindsight being 20-20, right? When you're on the outside looking in. But when I was on the inside, even I didn't realize all this stuff at that time. I had never wanted to give up because we had kids together and I felt it was our duty as parents, as two people that brought boys into this world, that we needed to work through whatever issues we were having And we needed to deal with it. And we needed to be mom and dad for those little boys that we brought into this world. And that was my approach. And I was not going to waver from that. We had some ugly fights. We called each other some nasty names. Never physical. She tried to push me. She would get in my face, nose to nose, and tell me she dares me to hit her. She really tried. Really tried to push my buttons and get me in a bad place, but it never happened. I never did that stuff. I moved. I lived, went and lived in a hotel for a week at one point just to get away from it and calm down and let things cool because it just wasn't going well at all. And then finally, one day we got in a fight and I said, I want a divorce. And I didn't really mean it. I had said it before. She had said it before. It never happened. But I was so angry with her and I wanted the fight to end. I said that to stop the fight. And that's where the divorce started. That's where it happened. And not because I led the charge, because I had said it one too many times to her. And for her, that was enough. She had heard it for the last time that she wanted to hear it. She wasn't going to hear it anymore. And so she decided, you know what? I want a divorce. And even though I had backtracked and said, no, I don't want to do that. This will tear our kids apart. They won't be able to handle this. Especially Maximus, the oldest one. She didn't care. She didn't care. She was like, no, that's it. We're getting a divorce. And so that's how my third marriage came to an end is that What started off as a fight that I was trying to end by saying something to stop the fight, not in a good way, but just because I didn't want to fight anymore, ended the marriage and ended my being a father to my kids every day. And that's a tough pill to swallow. That's a tough life to live. I don't enjoy that. I don't wish that on anyone. And so then now I had three sons that I wasn't going to be their father every day. And that was going to be my life going forward. And this was back in 2016. And so on that note, I'm going to stop here and I'll pick up from there next time. Thanks for joining.