Chris Ruden: Access Granted Episode 23

Access Granted: Chris Ruden Transcript. Tune in wherever you listen to podcasts 

Mike: Welcome back to Access Granted, a podcast powered by Ablr. I’m your host, Mike Iannelli. Today, I’m excited to introduce you to our guest, Chris Ruden. Chris is a keynote speaker, having worked with world class organizations like Facebook, Nike, and Zappos, and not to mention a world record holding power lifter, entrepreneur, author, and advocate for disability inclusion and mental health awareness.

A core part of his message is to help others get unstuck. And I know you’ll enjoy hearing from Chris today. Welcome to the show.

Well, I gotta see it before we get started. So you got a little keypad on the side?

Chris: So that’s just to turn it on and off. I always turn it off because I don’t want it just like randomly going on, you know, and then I’m like.

Mike: So you, it feels the muscles flexing in your…

Chris: There’s a sensor on the top and bottom of the forearm. So when I basically flex my wrist down, it will close. And when I flex my wrist up, it’ll open. And then I can switch gestures eventually if I hold open so I can cycle through some of the gestures I have. Right now, I’m on limited gestures with this new hand, but can I,

Mike: Can I touch the finger?

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: Can you make a fist?

Chris: Now when I do… like little kids, I was just at a children’s hospital. I’m like, little kids were like, Oh my God, iron man. They love it. And it’s so cool. Cause they see someone like me that I’m leaning into it. And they’re like, Oh, I can lean into it too. That took me like 20 years to lean into it.

So. It’s nice to be able to show out now.

Mike: Yeah, learning to embrace it. And you actually are open about it and you share your thoughts and feelings and you show people that it is normal and it’s okay, that’s when the world changes. It’s when people, it’s, you know, even with John, similar, it’s like John hid from his disability, hid from his disability, and then he kind of accepted it.

And then the world, the world needs more people that are willing to accept it and talk about it. Because when you don’t talk about it, that creates that like, awkwardness and that weirdness. But when you do talk about it, it opens up this opportunity to communicate and learn. And that’s a thing that I love.

Because that’s, to me, when we talk about inclusion. Which I always say universal inclusion, but I always, we’ve had this conversation before and we were talking about like it goes both ways, right? Because if I’m, if I’m struggling trying to be authentic in my way in communicating with you. And if this was an awkward situation and I was like, “hey can I touch the hand” or “can you tell me about that?”

And if you were defensive about it, it would, I would naturally retract. And then I would feel, not punished, but feel a little bit of shame. And I wouldn’t feel comfortable. And that would shape me in terms of how I communicate with all people with disabilities because I would feel like I wasn’t either good enough, or I wasn’t capable enough, or I didn’t have the right language, or I didn’t have the right etiquette.

But when you’re open about it, and you let people have a little bit of grace, that to me is where things start to change. And that’s like the whole, when you say, you said earlier, like, you know, we can talk about inclusion, we can’t, but to me, that is the game changer right there. When you’re open about it, you talk about it, you share your, your, your fun with people that transforms the entire community.

Chris: It’s funny. You said a few things that I, I just immediately want to go into. We don’t always owe people an explanation, you know, and I think some people. I’ll explain it this way…

Mike: Say anything you want to say, how you want to say it. And if I messed up, just repeat it and tell me what I can learn.

Chris: On my last flight to D.C. I’m walking in the aisle to get to my seat and there’s a flight attendant there. She is an older lady. And she says hi to me. And as I’m passing by, she goes like this… to my fingers.

Mike: She hit your fingers?

Chris: No, she, she played with them.

Mike: Wait, without even talking to you or asking you or anything, she just started playing with your fingers?

Chris: She started playing with my fingers. And I just looked at her. And she’s like, that’s cool. And then went back up for… I couldn’t even process what just happened.

Mike: Wow.

Chris: And it made me think, imagine if I went up to your Gam Gam, and Gam Gam is 400 pounds, and I grabbed her neck, and I was like, “wow, you eat a lot.” No one in society would ever be okay with that.

If you went up to a kid in a wheelchair, and you grabbed their wheel, and you moved their wheelchair really fast, and you’re like, “wow, that thing really goes.” No one in society would ever be okay with that. You could do that around race, you could do that around anything. But for some reason, people see my arm, and they treat it as an object.

So it’s my job to educate, but is it?

Mike: No, not, not, no.

Chris: It’s not. And that, and that’s the thing. I think we should educate as much as we can. We should educate as much as we can. But if you lost a loved one. And a million people lined up to ask you about that. One of those numbers would exhaust you. Is it your job to educate everyone who wants to ask?

Because your curiosity is not my job, but I take it, I take it as a personal responsibility. We’ll break up that word into ability to respond. I have the ability to respond and change your perception, right?

Mike: Well assuming I have a perception.

Chris: Or, you have some sort of perception. You see it, it’s new, it’s different.

Mike: Well, one, I’m still, I’m still thrown back by somebody had the balls to walk up and flick your hand. Did they think it was a toy? Did they think it was fake?

Chris: No, no. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I, we were reviewing, last night, the company that I was with, we were reviewing those kind of moments.

A few months ago, I was in TSA, and I put my arm through the scanner because I don’t want to deal with it. The guy grabbed it and said, “whose is this?” And raised it above. There’s 40 people there. That could be humiliating. If you went back to what my life was before now, that could be humiliating. But I, being the petty person that I am, raised my residual limb, and I was like, “Me.” He yanked it down and the other guy hit him.

He’s like, “bro, you’re stupid. What are you doing?” And it’s those moments of like, is it ignorance? Is it just unknowing? Is it, I don’t know. And I try and teach. I try and teach, you know?

Mike: But you made a good point there. And so you said it’s not my job, and it’s not your job. No, and I didn’t mean, and I didn’t mean it to come across like it is your job. But what, what, what, where, I guess my broader point is, inclusion to me is a is a phenomenon that is lacking substantially.

Chris: They’re not kind about it, and that’s the thing, you don’t need to tear someone’s head off, ever. There is never a time for brutal honesty. Honesty doesn’t need brutality. It doesn’t. You don’t need brutality in your response, even with that situation. If I did respond, I could say, “Hey, I’m not really okay with that” versus like, “Hey, you’re stupid.” I think we take it too far all the time. And it’s out of that emotional knee jerk reaction instead of choosing a response. And there’s a space between a reaction and a response. It’s intention. And the bigger the space is the better, because then you have time to control it. I try and educate as much as I can.

There are days where I educate much less, and days where I educate much more, and that’s okay. That’s okay. But it is really up to us and everyone to be a little bit kinder in our approach. Willingness to learn, curiosity, but understanding your curiosity doesn’t guarantee a response. It’s never a wrong versus right thing, and my perspective is always this.

It’s never you versus me. It’s us versus the problem. So we are at this table to solve the problem of lack of inclusion. We are at this table to talk about perspectives. Your perspective is not wrong. My perspective is not wrong. But can we put our perspectives on the table and say, “I can see your point and I can see yours.”

Mike: That’s the whole point.

Chris: That is where the world, I would hope, is going. And I’ve seen a huge shift with Ablr, with, with anywhere we’re going, I see us shifting there. And there’s always going to be little outliers and little things like, oh, that doesn’t really make sense. Let’s talk about it. Let’s have those uncomfortable conversations to make change.

Because at the end of the day, we’re sitting across from each other, but we’re looking in the same direction.

Mike: Absolutely.

Chris: You know, so I care about my community and the community of people who are still hurting like I used to. I will do whatever I can to help them, you know? And let’s be real. People with disabilities can still be dicks. They can still be assholes. They can be great people and they can be bad people. Disability is not synonymous with hero.

Mike: True.

Chris: Character is. Yep. Your character will determine that. So, I am not here to stand up for people just because they have a disability. But I’m here to stand up for disability because of the barriers, you know, adapted by society for us and it’s conditions we never asked for.

Mike: And that’s a tough line though too, because in a lot of ways, as you’re trying to evolve and especially what you do, I mean, you’re out there speaking. And you’re not speaking about your disability. You’re speaking about, I mean, maybe a little bit, but you’re also talking about moving forward and change and all that stuff. This is really interesting because with the visually impaired groups that we have, you know, people will walk up and grab them and pull, touch their cane or put their arm around them and they can’t see.

So that’s like a startle. They get startled. And so it’s like, but how do you, and this is what we do. It’s like, how do you train people on etiquette and inclusive language to help them understand? So we’re trying to take the proactive approach of saying, “hey, let’s tell everybody how this works,” but I also believe that not that it’s your responsibility because you’re just a human being, but I feel like it’s an opportunity.

Chris: It definitely is an opportunity.

Mike: To say hey like change mindsets. Okay, and honestly if somebody did that to me I don’t know what I would have done. I would have been so pissed. I’m pissed off now.

Chris: Like, I wouldn’t do anything. I wasn’t even mad though. And this is what I was talking about.

Mike: I can’t even believe that.

Chris: This kind of stuff has happened so much. And if you ask any person with a disability, this is the unspoken stories of people with disabilities. The amount of, there’s no way that just happened. That could be a book. There’s no way that just happened. I’m numb to it. I’m so disassociated from it. Unless I’m in a like really bad state and I really like, you know, check it, a lot of times it just happens.

And I almost feel like sometimes powerless to it. Not that I can’t respond, because trust me, I have enough petty comebacks.

Mike: That’s power not responding.

Chris: It is. It is. And it’s, it’s choosing to keep my power within me. And I’m like, I can’t fix all of the ignorance in the world. It’s my job to go around and speak to companies and people about change and inclusion, you know? And when I’m willing to, I will. But when I’m, I’m walking to the back of the plane, cause yes, I was in the back of the plane on this one.

Mike: I thought you were a high roller, bro.

Chris: I was not on this flight. That’s for sure. It wouldn’t have happened in first class, but, You’re just exhausted.

Mike: It’s like reverse empathy. It’s like you have to have empathy for the ignorance.

Chris: That’s a, that’s a good point.

Mike: And, and that’s messed up. Cause, cause again, you’re, you know, again, if you think about the, if you think about the dichotomy of it, Again, these are all sensitive things to talk about, so I’m not…

Chris: But we’re not disregarding experience.

Mike: And you, you have a, you have a physical disability. You have a cool ass hand though. I mean, it’s a cool hand and I can see wanting to touch it because I mean, I wouldn’t walk up and flick your fingers.

Chris: It’s more so permission and consent. That’s kind of important. I mean, that’s so talk about like consent being a thing.

Yeah. Don’t I mean,

Mike: Technically that’s, technically that’s harassment.

Chris: It is technically. Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, I think we got a new, we got a new business opportunity here.

Chris: I think there’s something.

Mike: We got an attorney on the line here? Come on, let’s get a name on this woman.

Chris: Could we do Harasser, like Ablr? But on the end it’s just a R.

Yeah, Harassr.

Mike: That’s actually not a bad idea.

Chris: That’s a good idea. TM, TM, trademark. Trademark.

Mike: Trademark.

I like this idea of this reverse empathy because now you’re carrying two burdens. So not only carrying the burden of, Hey, what you, how you were raised and what you grew up with and this in the struggles that you dealt with, now you have to have reverse empathy for the assholes that don’t understand it, for the people that don’t understand it, because they’re incapable or have no desire or the, or the energy or the whatever, the empathy to actually learn.

So now you’ve got to carry your own burdens and now you’ve got to carry the burdens of these, these people. So that’s an interesting play, because now you’re, you’re, you’re carrying double burdens. And then, and then to where does that responsibility fall? Because then it creates another pressure. You’re like, am I, am I a hero?

Is it my job to change the world and tell everybody how to treat me? Or should they know better initially?

Chris: The answer is yes to both of those and yes to none of them. Because we’re dynamic people and there’s no universal fix to an individual problem. There’s not, there is no universal fix. The question is what can you do, in your capacity, what can you do today to make it a little bit better in your personal life? And then in the outward, like internal and external, and that’s change in general. There’s external changes and internal changes. Externally, I deliver talks around the country, around the world. Internally, I still have to manage all those burdens that are placed on me, whether the conditions that I never asked for or the barriers created in society systemically, not against me, but against me, you know, so.

Those are all things I have to deal with. But when people say, you know, you’re a hero, you’re so inspiring, you’re, you’re so good at adapting. I get that all the time, from lifting weights, everything I do. It’s not insulting, but what I remind people of is I adapt by force, not by choice. That’s the difference.

I adapt by force because I have to. I have to adapt around society.

Mike: But that’s another burden.

Chris: It is. There’s, and I am not in the business of counting my burdens. I don’t have enough fingers.

Mike: So that’s not cool at all.

Chris: There’s lots of those moments. And like, it’s, it’s hard because we do have to almost become numb to deal with the shit that happens in society and it’s something I just started talking about where I’m like, Oh my God, there’s a lot of stuff that like I wouldn’t, I can’t even believe it’s real.

You’re like I am so, I don’t know if I want to say stoic or disassociated when I talk with people. Some of the stuff they say, I almost have to be stoned faced because they’ll say things that are so out of pocket or so inappropriate that I don’t give them the satisfaction of a response.

Mike: Just give me just a little, little synopsis on your background because you’ve got a pretty amazing journey and we all have interesting journeys, but your journey has been pretty cool. Like I was looking back at all your old pictures in high school, like tell me, like kind of give me a little background on this whole thing.

Chris: Yeah, so, I mean, I grew up with a congenital birth defect. I hid that disability for almost 20 years.

Mike: With gloves and stuff.

Chris: With gloves, with anything I could, long sleeve gloves, I hid for so long. But in hiding, I still found a way to hide in plain sight. So I played drums, I did martial arts, I ended up finding fitness, built a successful fitness business and went to school for exercise science. Found a true passion in mental health. Started speaking in the diabetes space when I was diagnosed at 19.

That speaking led to where I’m at today, getting me on a TV show with The Rock, to speaking for major corporations all around the world. And I wrote books, and everything just kind of aligned with, —what hurt me the most in my life ended up leading to my career.

Mike: Isn’t that amazing? How the, the biggest challenges in life, well, they’re intentional, but I guess we, again, we all go through them. And I’ll probably say this a bunch, but when you look at life and you’re like, “I can’t overcome this” or “I can’t do this,” or “what is the purpose?” “What is the meaning?”

And then after they always say, “Oh, it’s hindsight,” right? But after you get through it, you’re like, man, this was an intentional path. So this whole journey, so you were 19, you were diagnosed

Chris: with type 1 diabetes.

Mike: But you were, but you were athletic, you were healthy, you were lifting in the gym.

Chris: Yeah, still, I just started lifting in the gym. I never really did sports. I wasn’t really into sports, but I was always like relatively healthy, a skateboarder, and like I was, I was active.

Mike: You said martial arts?

Chris: Yeah, I did martial arts for a long time.

Mike: What kind, what kind of martial arts?

Chris: All kinds. I started in goju karate, and then I did Brazilian jiu jitsu, mixed martial arts, MMA.

Okay, and a little bit of Krav Maga and Muay Thai, so, been all around for about six years.

Mike: I’m sorry, is that a type of tea that we’re talking.

Yeah. So you get, so, so what drove you, like do you think being born with a, what did you call it, a degenerative?

Chris: A congenital birth defect, but I refer to it as disability.

Mike: Disability, okay. Yeah. So, being born with a birth, a disability. Do you feel like that was like an a motive for you to kind of just dive yourself into all these areas just explore? Did you feel it was an intentional? Is this something you wanted to do? Did you how did you feel you feel like I’m just like everybody else because obviously you didn’t feel that way. So, you’re into all, even now in your career, it’s like you’re, I can’t even believe all the stuff you’re doing.

Where do you think that comes from? Is that just like parental motivation? Is that just internal drive? Like, what was the, what was the motivation to kind of say, I’m going to take this thing and I’m going to live the crap out of my life?

Chris: If you asked me a few years ago, I would have said my disability drove that. But my disability is inanimate. My disability drives nothing. The reaction to my disability, the reaction of others to my disability, the experiences I’ve had around my disability drove that. I refuse to accept the labels that were put on me because of something I never asked for. Society labeled me some of the synonyms of disability: weak, broken, useless, helpless, less than. We still almost go by that, whether it’s a bias or like outwardly, so I [00:17:00] refuse to accept that. Like, I didn’t want that life. That’s so unfair to me. So I was like, I became competitive. And that competitiveness, it drove me because I was like, I don’t want to be this broken kid for the rest of my life. There has to be more to that. But that’s where I talk about in my book. I talk about going from certain to curious. And you said that, like, I’m just so sure this isn’t going to work out. Or like, I used to think that. I used to truly believe in certainty. Things are never going to get better. That’s a language barrier. That’s not, that’s not, that’s, there’s no honesty in that.

Because that is, things could get better, but if you say there’s no way things are going to get better, confirmation bias, you’re going to find ways to prove that.

Mike: That’s right.

Chris: So I started moving away from certainty and moving towards curiosity, like how could things get better? Well, I can’t follow your track because your track isn’t made for me.

I’m a one-handed guy living in a two-handed world. What do I need to do differently to get the experience I want? I don’t know. So I got to start trying stuff. I had to fail at a lot more things than most people will ever try to find one way that potentially worked in everything I’ve ever done. But I kept doing it. And my version of success isn’t the Disney’s like sexy version. It’s the, I’m the last guy in the race.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: I’m the last guy in the race cause I didn’t quit. So I won by default. I started speaking eight years ago. The first three years were horrendous.

Mike: Just in terms of you’re uncomfortable

Chris: Did events for free, got paid no money, pretty much lived on my brother’s couch.

People don’t just give people with disabilities money. It doesn’t automatically equate to that. You know, they’re quick to use them as inspiration porn, but they’re much less quick to pay them.

Mike: Yeah, but in the reality, though, you’re good, though. There’s a big difference. So that’s the beauty of equality.

Chris: Yes.

Mike: Because if you were crap at what you did,

Chris: I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Mike: You would not be. And whether disability or not, and that’s the beauty because, and that to me, that’s a caller

Chris: Really important part: it’s not just given. Nothing is just given. It has to be earned. And I put in the work that I needed to put in to be able to say, I charge what I charge, or to have the, most of my business is inbound. People come to me because of what I’ve done in my career, despite the barriers that were set up against me. You know that’s, it’s not, I’m not trying to create this hero moment because anyone can do this. It’s just really hard. Obviously, there’s different privileges, people are at different starting points with different burdens and different barriers. But we all have the same story, you, me, you, everyone. We went through some shit, we got over some shit, and more shit’s coming

At the end of the day what are you going to do with that? And part of it’s on you. Part of it’s on society to break those barriers down. But I’m not going to wait for society because they’ve let me down way too many times. So I’m gonna start doing what I can with what I’ve got right now. And right now I’ve got seven real fingers, 10, five fake ones.

And a really hard passion to make this work.

Mike: So technically you have more fingers than everyone else. So you’re technically privileged.

Chris: I am privileged. I’m definitely, I can’t get them to work quite all the time, but like.

Mike: So you’re, you have, wait, you have, I can’t do math, 13 fingers.

Chris: Yeah, technically.

Mike: Okay, so in reality you’re better off than most of us.

Chris: But sometimes more is less, you know, so.

Mike: Alright, here’s a quote you said, I was reading it. “Self acceptance is not earned from others, but it’s learned by you.”

Chris: That’s a good one. I said that?

Mike: You did say that.

Chris: That’s fantastic.

Mike: And I want to hear, and I wasn’t, because you, you write all the time, you’ve got books, you’re talking all the time.

I know that some of these things just come up and you’re probably like, I don’t remember them, but I like that quote. I’ll say it again, self-acceptance is not earned from others, but it’s learned. So it’s not earned. It’s learned by you.

Chris: The reason I said that is because for the majority of my life, I was trying to earn respect of other people. And the respect of other people is not my business.

Mike: Yeah. Cause you can only control yourself.

Chris: I can only control myself. I cannot control what you think of me. Even if you tell me that you think highly of me, you could be lying. What you think about me is not my business and it’s, it’s not.

Mike: How did you learn that?

Chris: Through so much pain, man, through so much pain of just wanting to feel what I wasn’t willing to give myself. I wasn’t willing to give myself any grace. I wasn’t willing to give myself any love or any appreciation or any time. I wouldn’t look at myself in any mirror. So physically, I wouldn’t even look at myself.

Mike: I don’t, I don’t get that.

Chris: And we’ll go there. But imagine me sitting here refusing to look at you. You’d be like, dude, like, why don’t you just look at me? I couldn’t, I couldn’t stand the sight of myself.

Mike: Shame?

Chris: That, and we’ll get to that too. Like the, the deep levels were shame. I saw myself like what I feared people might see me. What I truly was afraid of was how I actually thought about myself, which is I’m broken. I’m disgusting. Like I’m a monster.

Mike: It wasn’t the rest. It was, it was in your internal.

Chris: And I projected that onto the world. I was an angry, angry kid, but that anger carried me into fake confidence where I looked the part, you know, once I got the swoopy hair and I started getting the muscles, like no one wanted to mess with me, you know?

But like, why was I so afraid of everyone else when I was doing the most amount of damage to myself? I was so afraid of what other people could do to me that I was actively doing to myself.

Mike: You must have been in a tough place.

Chris: No one could have hurt me more than I hurt myself because I was so hard on what I couldn’t control, and I completely ignored what I could. Until I like had a few moments where I was like, I got to do something different, you know. I, when I started to accept that I had a disability, accept that this is a part of me, that I didn’t need to overcompensate for it, that’s when I started living my life at 27 years old, dude. I didn’t start living my life until 27 years old and I’m 34. I can’t do math really either, but I know that’s only,

Mike: Is that seven?

Chris: Yeah. Something like that.

Mike: Well, John, John went through a similar thing. He, you know, and that’s sad where the world. So in some ways you guys, I’m not saying heroes, it’s like you have to lay the, you have a responsibility, we all have a responsibility to help the folks before us. As much as we can. I even said to my father like you, you can’t change your environment, you can only change yourself.

So, for the longest time, you know, we all, we go through these deep, deep depressions or sufferings, a series of suffering or seasons of suffering and we’re like, I just want, I want, I just, I want a different life or I want a different job or I want to, I want a different group of friends and, but you don’t do anything.

You just sit there and this, and I wouldn’t even call it paralysis because I think it’s just a proactive choice not to do anything over laziness or just, or, or not believing. But if you want this environment to change, you have to like step out of it. And introduce yourself to new people, and take risks you’ve never done, and go to places you’ve never been before, and read books you’ve never been before, and go to do acts of service, or go to church.

And so for me, part of changing, which is leading to this next question for you, is it takes a lot to change. It takes a lot. You know what I mean?

Chris: I’m going to ask you a question.

Mike: You want to ask me a question?

Chris: Does it?

Mike: Well no, in theory it probably doesn’t. But it takes a lot to recognize that you have the ability to change yourself.

Chris: I think that’s the hardest part, is recognizing that it’s possible. Could you run a marathon right now?

Mike: The athlete in me says, hell yeah. No.

Chris: Okay. Could you get up? Can I stand up?

Mike: Yep. Could you take a single step? Sure.

Chris: That’s the problem. So many people equate change to the end result. Yeah. And not today’s process.

Mike: Yeah, it’s like, what do they call that? Trying to eat the entire, not eat the elephant or whatever. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. So everyone wants to hang out at the finish line without running the race. We all want the benefit without doing this stuff. What I teach people to do is stack their wins, you know, and I teach people to like, stop focusing on society is just like killing you and doing it’s happening.

I respect it and I recognize it. And I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Cause you’re different than me. But what I can say is this, what can you do right now to make it a little bit better or to make it suck a little bit less? Those are my two questions. If there is something you can do, chances are there is.

You know, I hate to say it and I, I talk about a lot about mental health too, but if we move a little bit more, if we do the cliche stuff, it does help a little bit. But here’s the thing, no amount of thinking will fix overthinking.

Mike: Okay.

Chris: No amount of thinking will get you out of the problem of overthinking.

Mike: You’re talking about action.

Chris: There has to be something different. Get out of the space, you know. But take a single step. You don’t have to do everything. You listed a bunch of options. You know, like whether it’s church or lifting or eating or so many. You don’t have to do all of that. Do something. Do one thing, you know.

To change, you have to make a single choice. That’s it. And then do that. Another single choice again. Let’s stop getting obsessed with all of the steps and just focus on one. If we stack our wins, we can create confidence to take another step. But if you say let’s, I do weight loss because that’s what my past career was, my whole degree in exercise science. If someone wants to lose 50 pounds, when they go to the gym, do they lose 50 pounds?

Mike: No.

Chris: No. What about a week later? No. A month later. So that every day fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. How depressing is that?

Mike: Horrible.

Chris: Versus if your goal is no longer losing 50 pounds, but going to the gym today. Win, win, win, stack your wins.

Mike: Compounding interest.

Chris: Create an environment to do better. Create an environment to win, and that can happen with disability, too. Is maybe it’s getting up today instead of staying In bed all day. Maybe it’s reading one page of a book. I used to have my clients who didn’t want to go to the gym I’d say, “go to the gym, do one exercise, one rep, and then you can go home.”

And they’re like, “I can go home?” They get there, they’re like, hey, I’m already here, I might as well, like, do the rest.

Mike: That’s a great tip.

Chris: Tell your kids, brush one tooth. They already got the toothbrush out. They’re gonna finish.

Mike: What if they just do one, though?

Chris: You’re going to know in a few weeks, you’ll definitely know. But that’s, that’s my point is like, set yourself up to win. Society’s already setting you up to fail.

Mike: It’s bite size.

Chris: Yeah. Society is already like setting you up to fail.

Mike: Society is because they show us the prize. The, I’m the anti culture man, because culture, yeah, culture is a killer. It’s, it’s like it does everything that we’re not supposed to do. It feeds us wrong, it teaches us wrong, it guides us wrong, it gives us the wrong messages, it chases after material items, it’s a show, it’s a game. And you lose your entire core and your entire soul. You were born, right? And it’s like, oh, we’re born into a life that was already, or your grandparents and your parents and everything they learned from culture, and we don’t have a choice because we don’t know any better.

So we get, we get forced to learn the way that they lived. And I’d live that, I’d live my whole life pretty much an unhappy person. An angry, unhappy, depressed, over thinker.

Chris: I definitely get that.

Mike: Awful. Until I was, you know, 45.

Chris: That has to be exhausting.

Mike: It was exhausting. Absolutely exhausting. Until you start to learn things like, gratitude. Which is the biggest lesson.

Being humbled, especially when you have an ego, it’s like being broken and humbled and saying, wow, it’s, it’s painful. It’s painful. It’s like when you get down to the base and it makes me feel bad in some ways because you know, I talk about God a lot and not in, in a, in a weird sort of church religion ways, but in a spiritual, faithful recognition and respect way.

But most people only find God, at least, not most people, I shouldn’t say that, that’s generalization. A lot of people I’ve met have only found God when they’ve been broken down to nothing. And it’s just interesting to me that we can’t believe in something bigger than ourselves unless we’re so broken we’ve got nothing left.

That’s sort of an interesting thought. But when I was two, there was nothing left. And yeah, people would look at me from the outside and go, what are you talking about nothing left? Dude, you have a home, you have a car, you have healthy kids, you have food to eat. But that was all a cloud. There was, it was literally a cloud.

And then when you, you get down to the baseline and you’re like, I have nothing left. And then the magic to me starts to happen. And I tell people jokingly, like, be careful. Like, I’m very careful. I think I might even say this to you, what I pray for. Because I, it’s, it’s going to be answered. It’s just, it’s going to be delivered in a series of suffering.

And every single time over the last five years that I’ve dropped to my knees and I’ve said a prayer, It comes, but it comes, there’s at least a full season, if not three to six months of suffering, severe suffering, pain. And that’s the only way you change. So a lot of times in your book, you talk about change, change, change, change.

So moving forward, you know, thinking differently, all these things. I’m totally in all this stuff, man. I’m on Instagram on it. I’m a positive affirmations. I’m, I always tell my kids, you know, you become who you spend your time with. Choose those people wisely, because you will naturally become them. So if you’re hanging out with people that you don’t necessarily want to be like, then change that.

And I started changing the, again, one of these examples of change, changing the people you spend your time with. John is my partner. What a life changing experience it has been to be part of this company. This guy over here, mediocre, doesn’t pay attention much, he’s on his cell phone looking for hunting stuff.

But long story short, Chris Hendricks, you, like all my neighbors, If you want change, you have to change. Right? So in your book, well, I don’t want to jump into the book right now. I just want to talk about it right now. Well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to stop and let you respond to that. Do you agree with that?

That when, if you make a commitment to change, because you talk to people all around the world and there’s a lot of people in there and we all go through the same stuff, man. We’re all suffering. We’re all struggling. We’ve all lost people, lost friends, lost jobs, feel like crap about ourselves. Look at culture and realize we’re not good enough.

Carry that shame. Carry that guilt. When was a moment in your life when you said, that’s it? I’m not dealing with that nonsense anymore. The new Chris Ruden has been awakened.

Chris: I think as much as I want there to be this Disneyfication moment of like, aha, it was more a series of small moments, but specifically, I was still hiding my hand when I started speaking and for the first two and a half, three years, maybe four years of my speaking career, I was still hiding my hand under a glove.

I still spoke on stage, especially at diabetes events. That was my main thing in the beginning. No one asked you about that? I had such a persona of confidence, no one said anything. And I leaned into it. It was like, you know, I have a disability. It’s something that I still struggle with every day. And everyone’s like, oh, we get it.

Next. Taboo. No one talked about it, you know? I can’t believe that. So, and I’ve talked with hundreds if not thousands of people on those stages, you know? I was at a Disney Coronado Springs walking down this long hallway. There was like a thousand people there to see me speak that night. And this little girl who got diagnosed with diabetes spent the whole day with me.

She was like 8 years old, she was wrapped around my finger, I bought her a hat, like she loved me, you know, she was so cool. And she was standing on my left side where I usually wore the glove, and I had a glove on, but for some reason I allowed her to be on that side, I don’t know why. She grabbed my damn hand, over my glove.

And she just swung it. Like a kid would. And I froze, and I looked at her. And she smiled, and she was like, It’s okay. You don’t have to hide around me.

Mike: Wow.

Chris: Eight years old. A thousand people were there to hear me speak and she’s the only one who saw me.

Mike: Hmm.

Chris: I was like what does this little girl see in me that I don’t see in myself?

Why is she okay and I’m not? I was like, maybe, maybe there’s something. So that kind of led to this, this whole thing of if I ever got approved for a prosthetic arm, I’d stop hiding my hand because I thought I’d never get approved. You know, in the United States, really tough. I got that approval letter and I was like, oh shit.

It’s all, I’m a man of my word. I committed. I was, at the time I was with a girl for four and a half years, I made a video taking my glove off. She edited that video for me. In those four and a half years, that was the first time she saw my hand.

Mike: Really?

Chris: We had been together for four and a half years and she had never seen my hand until she edited that video.

Mike: And this is your ex?

Chris: That’s my ex. That would make sense. That would make perfect sense. But seriously, everyone I was with prior to that.

Mike: How are you, how is that even possible?

Chris: I wore a glove 24/7. All I cared about was hiding. And as long as people knew I wore the glove and they didn’t ask me about it, I was fine.

Mike: So, do you think people were aware subliminally that there was something going on?

Chris: Everyone knew. Okay. So people, people didn’t. My arm is four inches shorter. Like everyone knew, but they knew I was hiding and they kind of left me alone because I also had this confident aura about me. They’re like, oh, he must do that for whatever reason he does that so we’re just won’t ask about it.

Mike: I mean, that’s kind of cool in a lot of ways.

Chris: It is. But it’s almost like I wish people would have, but it’s not their job. It’s not their job to ask me about my stuff, but it would have been cool for someone to be like, hey man, you know, like, like that little girl. Kids have no filters.

Mike: Nope.

Chris: She felt what she felt. She didn’t plan to say that. She just said it.

Mike: She felt your energy. Yeah, and she just and she fed it, it was beautifully done.

Chris: It was the best moment. It was the best moment. You know, so like that led to me like opening up, which led to this huge opening on like YouTube, viral 7 million views on YouTube, and like this moment of just like, so much outpouring of like love and support and realizing I wasn’t alone. All these people, people like I’ve been hiding my disability from my wife for 15 years and I’m like…

Mike: I don’t, I don’t, I can’t even, I just still, I’m still stuck on. I’ve been with somebody for four and a half years and they never saw your hand, but that was intent. It was intentional and she never questioned it or asked you just recognize it was respectful.

Chris: Yep. It was even in high school. I would miss days of school if I couldn’t find my glove.

Mike: Wow.

Chris: I wouldn’t go. My parents had to like stockpile gloves for me.

Mike: You should get a, get some sort of kickback on that from Gold’s Gym.

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: Are they still around by the way? Gold’s Gym?

Chris: I hope not, they ruined my life. Nah, I love it, Gold’s Gym is cool.

Mike: Yeah, looks like it dude, those pipes you got rocking. By the way, I want to talk about tattoos in a minute too, but God, that’s a cool story with an eight year old girl.

Chris: Almost every story I have around like People, I do so many podcasts and people ask me like, Oh, who inspires you? No, it was like Elon Musk, like some sort of like business mogul. I’m like, it’s always kids. And like every story I have, that’s like my most impactful stories are all kids. And maybe that’s because of, like, what I didn’t get to experience as a kid.

Mike: Yeah, I was going to say, maybe it’s your inner child kind of thing.

Chris: I didn’t get to experience peace. I didn’t get to experience confidence. I see these kids light up when I go to these events, like, disability based events or diabetes based events, and I’m almost jealous, to be honest, because I see how hopeful they are, and how unbroken they look and talk and interact, and I wasn’t that way.

Mike: Well, the world’s changed too a little bit.

Chris: The world has. It’s definitely opened up. And we’re more exposed to it. So I can’t say what they’re struggling with. I can’t do that. But from my perception.

Mike: No, I agree with you a hundred percent. I mean, look, you, and that, that’s got to suck for you, and for John too. And for everyone with a disability who had to struggle hardcore in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s to now all of a sudden everything’s everybody’s going to treat a… DEI comes along and it’s like, well, treat everybody wonderfully. And I’m like, well, that should be how we’re treating people wonderfully anyway, why do we need to have a DEI initiative to do that? Why do we have to force people to actually treat each other kindly? Yeah, to be humans. And so when I was like, Oh, what about DEI? I’m like, dude, it’s sermon on the mount, man. Like, this is the way you’re supposed to treat people. We don’t need to, you know, so I look at it and go, I don’t, that’s why I struggle with DEI sometimes because I go back to inclusion.

I always say, and again, I, I don’t even know why I’m in this, I, I, sometimes I quite, I feel like a fraud or an imposter or whatever. It’s like, how did I find myself in this environment? I don’t really know. I’m very grateful for it. But at the same time, I’m, I’m very outspoken about things. And it’s always a risk about what you say, what you feel. Cause everyone has their own beliefs. Everyone has their own feelings. But I also feel that sometimes, and I get a little, little semi defensive about it. It’s like we sit in the corner and we talk about race and we talk about religion and we talk about gender. And yet, The disability community covers all that and yet we still don’t include folks with disabilities.

It’s like, and to me, it’s like I get, I’m just tired of talking about what media drives over here. This whole media engine of creating chaos in our environment and getting us all to turn on each other and fight on each other. It’s like, but yeah, folks with disabilities are still like treated awfully.

Chris: I think it’s important to note that what you were mad with just explaining that was not race or religion or gender, but the media spinning it. It’s not the marginalized groups that are genuinely hurting in their own way. One thing we share with every other group is that hurt. That conceptually, the hurt from society for something we can’t control. We all share that. And I was speaking to a DEI leader last night and we were talking about the, the political climate.

We’re talking about all this stuff. And I was like, what are your thoughts on that? She’s like, I don’t care what we call it. She’s like, I’m not tied to DEI. We can call it culture. We can call it inclusion. We can call it strategic planning for humans. She’s like, I don’t care about the name. I care about the initiative.

And I love that because so many people have either lifted up DEI or demonized it. Now they’re focused on the wrong things. Include people. Shut up with the labels. I’m not saying DEI is bad. I’m not saying DEI is good. I’m saying treat humans as humans. That’s where I am. That’s it. Include people. DEI is not bad. Bad DEI is bad. Inclusion is good. Bad inclusion is bad. It’s not hard. It’s not hard.

Mike: But it is.

Chris: We make it hard.

Mike: Why do we make it hard?

Chris: We overcomplicate everything we tell.

Mike: Is it fear?

Chris: How heavy is this?

Mike: 16 ounces.

Chris: Okay. I can hold this. Yeah. I can hold this for probably an hour. I’m strong enough where I wear small shirts to make me look big.

Mike: I mean, I do agree with that. I agree.

Chris: If I hold this…

Mike: I think he’s wearing a medium, right?

Chris: You know, it’s probably a medium, medium, shmedium. So unfortunately I don’t shop at baby gap like you, but what I do, I lift weights.

Mike: So, you know, you don’t want me to take this jacket off, dude. You don’t want to see that.

Chris: Oh, it’s pretty skin tight. I don’t think you could, if you tried. So. If I held this water bottle

Mike: I was so proud of myself, because this is a medium. No, this is a large. Dude, I lost like 70 pounds in the last two years, man.

Chris: Congrats, though, that’s honestly…

Mike: So now you’re criticizing my clothing? Now I feel excluded.

Chris: The dichotomy is it’s amazing and I’m criticizing you. I just want you to know that.

Mike: I’m wearing straps under here because I hurt my arm, so I probably couldn’t pick that up. And I want to talk to you about that.

Chris: Imagine having an arm to hurt, that’s crazy. So, if I held this water bottle out for 17 years.

Mike: Oh, you’re funny dude. I love this.

Chris: If I held this water bottle out for 17 years, my entire life would revolve around this water bottle.

Mike: True.

Chris: You would say water is good. I would say water is bad.

Mike: Because of your own experience.

Chris: Because of the way we tell stories, and the way we interpret information, and the perspectives and points that we interpret things, DEI is bad, DEI is good.

It’s you on the side of a six, and me on the other side of a six saying it’s a nine. It’s a constant battle for who’s right and who’s wrong when in reality, if we both just step to the side, we could see it for what it is. Let’s stop spinning stories and talk facts. Should people feel equal or have equity? Should people be included? Let’s go to negative. Who deserves to be excluded?

Mike: No one.

Chris: No one, done. Conversation is over. Now, how do we make that true that it’s, it’s, it should be, it should be that simple.

Mike: We age out of it. That’s the only way.

Chris: I always like to ask people what group deserves to be excluded and everyone says no. So I’m like, wow, the one thing we all agree on.

Mike: Well, why don’t we do, but why, why is it so hard for people? And I can answer the question too, because it’s like, to me, it goes back to fear. It goes back. Everything goes back to fear or uncomfortableness or your own self esteem issues or your own trauma or your own child. You know, your old, your old child, you know, whatever you’re being at, what do you call it? The inner child.

Chris: Yeah. We don’t have a clean slate.

Mike: We don’t. And so that’s the beauty of life in a lot of ways. That is life. But it’s like we have all these millions and millions of people that were grown up in millions and millions of different environment and we’re all stuck in this planet going, get along.

Chris: Yep.

Mike: And it’s hard because for centuries it was so separated, so separate. And now we’re all coming together in this new environment. I just hope and believe like, and I think, I think the DEI environment is a good environment. But now, because it’s opened up an opportunity. It kind of came in and opened up opportunities for so many people, so many organizations.

And now it’s under this attack. Why do you think it’s under an attack?

Chris: Because the narrative and unfortunately we’ve politicized so many things like the amount of division in our country is really unfortunate And I’ll never speak specifically to politics, but I’ll speak to division. Yeah Division creates narratives that doesn’t even give you a chance to hear someone else’s side. I will say bloods or crips. Are you blue or red, you know? And then it’s just like a gang battle of like, “Oh, you’re red. You’re this.” Oh, you’re blue. You’re this.” You don’t even know my name. Like, you don’t know anything about me. You hear DEI and you’re like, Oh, that’s stupid. It’s like the blue haired or you, you tell yourself this narrative, you know, yeah.

Why are we so bought into that? Unfortunately, media is great. Media is great at what it does. Marketing is great at what they do. And I have my own reasons, marketing, I have my own reasons and potential thoughts. And I don’t want to go into that, but I do want to say, let’s, let’s step away from the predetermined narratives and ask yourself.

Is what you’re thinking, what you want to be thinking, or is just, or is it just systemic repetition?

Mike: Most of the time it’s systemic repetition. I would have to think.

Chris: We don’t wanna admit, we don’t wanna admit that we might be doing things just because we’re doing things. ’cause we feel like we should. But I remember talking to my fiance and I was asking her like, what’s your ideal proposal?

You know, I was like, trying to get her feedback and she’s like, I want it to be like on a mountain and I want it to be like, and then she stopped and she was like, wait a minute, I don’t actually want that. I was like, what do you mean? She’s like, that’s what I, I thought I was supposed to want. And she caught herself, and it was so impressive because she caught herself regurgitating that systemic repetition from what maybe people or girls were specifically taught about proposals.

And she’s like, that doesn’t matter. I don’t want that.

Mike: Disney, the Disney world.

Chris: But we, we cling to that kind of stuff. Oh, you have to have to.

Mike: Because we’ve been brainwashed.

Chris: Yeah. You have to go to school. You have to get a job, white pick events like all.

Mike: Nonsense.

Chris: When I stepped outside of that and I was like, I don’t have to hide anymore. I don’t have to fit into the narrative. I don’t have to do all these things. And I stepped outside of that. I was like, what do I want to do? I was like, I want to speak. I want to speak for the rest of my life. And I love speaking. I don’t. My story is a vessel for my message. I don’t just regurgitate my story.

You can only climb Mount Everest so many times before, like people are tired of hearing your shit, you know, what are you truly teaching? And I, I feel like what I teach and what I help people with can impact their lives and it’s something that I wish I would have learned. If best advice I could ever give to anyone who wants to be a speaker wants to do anything like this is your expertise is what you needed five to 10 years ago and what you now do you are an expert in what you needed that you’ve eventually given yourself. You’re an expert in that.

Mike: So was the rest of it coming from confidence?

Chris: Confidence, skill, building up your skill. You have to get better. You obviously have to build your preparation, but your expertise is in your tried and true experiences. Not BS, not saying I’ll help you make a million dollars in 10 minutes. Like none of that stuff.

Like what have you truly done in your career, in your life, personal life, professional life? What have you truly done for yourself? That’s where you can start to find your expertise. Then you build on that. You build the skills and you, you get better every day. As much as you can read a book, read a blog, like however you can, whatever you have access to continually do that daily, get better daily, but also you have a starting point already.

So don’t say, “oh, I can’t do anything.” That’s a lie. Can’t do anything.

Mike: Yeah, it is a lie.

Chris: It’s a language thing. And I talk about it in my book too. Like how many times. Have you caught yourself saying like, “Oh, I can’t do this. This will never work. Or I never finish anything.” That’s one of my favorites: “I just never finish anything.”

Mike: Yeah. Your words matter, man.

So I like having the conversation, which is fun. The… you’ve had a pretty awesome life, like again, challenging life, but from the outside perspective you’ve achieved, and I don’t know how you view achievements, but you’ve, you’ve really, really had a really amazing run these last seven years, at least from when you started.

So one thing is this power lifting situation. Like, I, I gotta know, so world record holder. Powerlifting and you have one good hand. So talk to me a little bit of like one, when did you get into powerlifting? What was the motivation? Was this something you were doing in high school and you just became strong as an ox?

And, or was it like a motivation to say, I’m going to be a world record holder? Like what, what drove that? Which is amazing because you’re, you need both freaking hands, dude, to do powerlifting.

Chris: So I have always been super petty and super competitive. So any competition that I’ve done, I’ve never. I’ve always competed against, I guess, able-body competitors just out of spite.

I was like, I want to show you that I can do it too. You know? At 18, 19, I remember seeing a magazine at, at Publix down by us and it was a bodybuilding magazine and I saw the body. I was like, I want that. You know, I started going to the gym. I realized the gym wasn’t made for me. Yeah. Muscle and fitness.

Mike: Great magazine.

Chris: I remember, seeing all of that. And I was like, I want to find a way to do that. So I was going to the gym and like the machines didn’t really work for me. So I had to find ways to adapt. And, I did that for a few years trying to, I wanted to be a bodybuilder. I didn’t realize that bodybuilding takes a long time when you’re 110 pound kid, you’re tiny, you know?

So, as I was building my body, I knew it was going to take a long time. I’m like, Oh, this is going to happen anytime soon. I was getting strong. A buddy of mine who was down here. He was like, dude, I love powerlifting. I’m gonna do a powerlifting meet. Do you want to prep for one with me? I was like, what do you do? He’s like squat bench and deadlift. I was like, I love those, that’s great. I did my first powerlifting meet and I won my class.

Mike: Did anyone know you had a disability?

Chris: Yeah, they saw because I had the glove and like shorter, but I used a hook on my left hand.

Mike: So it was leveled down.

Chris: So it would level it, you know, and so I could grab the bar. I ended up doing like 500 pounds and I was like, oh, that was so cool.

Maybe we could keep doing, you know more. I won the next five meets. Every meet I did I was getting stronger and every meet I won. And it was funny because everyone was inspired by me until I started to beat them, and then they said I was cheating.

Mike: Well, because of the hook.

Chris: Because I was using a hook.

Mike: What else are you supposed to do?

Chris: Exactly, exactly.

Mike: I mean, jeez.

Chris: It’s crazy. Everyone wants to see you win until you start to win more than them.

Mike: I can’t, I just…

Chris: I know. So, regardless of that, that was like dumb stuff.

Mike: So, power, so you went world record though.

Chris: I ended up doing a world record, which I deadlifted 675 pounds, at the Arnold Sports Festival.

So in front of 20, 000 people, I got invited to lift. And I remember going out there, I have my insulin pump hanging off my power lifting singlet. And people are like, what is that? Like, what is this guy a machine? I was like the smallest guy there, you know.

Mike: What’re you like 5’4?

Chris: Yeah, something like that.

Mike: 5’3, 5’4? I have to make fun of you now because I feel inferior ’cause your biceps.

Chris: It’s okay. It’s okay.

Mike: Come on bro.

Chris: Don’t rip the medium. So…

Mike: It’s too late.

Chris: I remember lifting that and when I locked that out and I was like, oh my God. Like I, I did that and they were like all celebrated. It was like such a cool moment.

But before then I had got four state records in Texas.

Mike: Was this in high school or right out of high school?

Chris: No, this was in college.

Mike: College.

Chris: It was in college.

Mike: Where’d you go to school?

Chris: Down in Florida, FAU. Florida Atlantic? Florida Atlantic University, yeah.

Mike: They have a decent baseball program.

Chris: That was about the only thing they… I started lifting there and I met some professors who helped me like, learn to lift and stuff. It was just, it was a really cool experience. I got those records, got that world record and like, it was so sick. But then I was like, what next? And I went to bodybuilding. And as a type 1 diabetic, it’s really hard to control your nutrition to get to that level.

So it was very tough.

Mike: Jackified.

Chris: Yeah. It was pretty crazy.

Mike: So how do you I gotta ask you though, from lifting weights, it can be a pain in the ass to lift weights with two hands.

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: What were the, how did you, how are you using the cables? How are you doing bench? How are you doing dumbbells? Did everything have a, like a, like a mechanism that helps you? That had to be hard to hold on is because everything, you know, form, right? It’s all balanced. So all of a sudden you got to like, how does that work?

Chris: So I do want to preface this with, I ended up getting my degree in exercise science and I pursued a lot of specializations and certifications around understanding biomechanics, kinesiology and therapy.

Because my arm is shorter, like, I’m always technically leaning, which means my back was always over engaged. And when I, when you lift that heavy and you build that strength, you build improper muscle balance and improper muscle balance leads to weakness, which inevitably leans to pain. You know? So, with my residual limb, I, for any pulling motion, I used a hook. That would grab onto the bar or I could do pull ups. I could do anything any pulling motion

Mike: A hook?

Chris: A hook that would wrap around my wrist. Okay, and it tightens.

Mike: Does that pull on your fingers?

Chris: So I’m gonna hurt that probably hurt over time, but I had to get used to the pressure. So the most people’s limiting factor is strength. Mine was twofold strength and pressure I had to get used to the pressure. So like I don’t really grow hair in certain areas because of the years of doing that. So I would have to wait and accommodate, accommodate, accommodate to the pressure. Then I would go up in strength and I’d already be strong enough when I accommodate to the new pressure. And that’s my process, you know? So for pulling motions, I use the hook for pressing motions. When I did a bench, 385 bench, I balanced the bar on my residual limb and the bar was crooked. Judges at the competition were terrified. They’re like, are you sure you’re good?

Mike: Wait, so you’re telling me you pull down a bar and you’re like…

Chris: I’m crooked. And, and it’s open handed pretty much, just no thumb, hoping for the best.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Chris: The heavier, the weight, the better it was though, because stability sit more into it, the lighter warmups were risky, you know? But the bar was crooked because my back was straight.

Mike: Wow, that’s kind of risky.

Chris: If I straightened the bar, my back would be crooked. So I had no stability with a prosthetic.

Mike: So you didn’t use a prosthesis at all. You were just going…

Chris: I didn’t get a prosthetic arm until I was 27.

Mike: So you’re bodybuilding in the gym…

Chris: Covering my hand with a glove.

Mike: With a four foot, a four inch difference in length.

Chris: Yep. And I learned how to make that work because the hook I designed hung down three extra inches.

Mike: You’re very lucky to be able to do that. No, very blessed. Fortunate, not lucky because lucky to, you’re right, correction that. But it’s funny because I, I, one of the things I have in here is like this fulfillment, like what, and I don’t need to look at it. But like how amazing it is, is it like to go from this kid to being picked on or, or, or, or not even picked on, but just actually in some ways you were just, it was unknown, but either way you knew there was an uncomfortableness to it. You’ve come to terms with it. You worked hard through it. You went through the suffering, the pain, the challenges, all that. You’ve come out on the other side and now you’re doing something with purpose, with fulfillment, with meaning, and you’re helping other people find their way. Like that.

Chris: That is the way.

Mike: That is the way. I heard a quote saying, this wasn’t a quote, it was one of the books I read. I think I just got big, big into reading, but I do this thing with Michael Beckwith. It’s a soul feast journey. And at one point it says our, our purpose in life is to help others find their purpose in life. And to me, Like, one, that’s a very selfless position because oftentimes you’re like, well, what is my journey? What is my purpose? What’s, what’s in it for me? And it looks, I still, sometimes I’m like, Oh God, it’d be nice to not be struggling so much. Sometimes it would be nice if I just could just.

Chris: And you, you have the right to feel that way. Yeah.

Mike: But, but, but compartmentalize it. And just recognize how wonderful the big picture is.

Like at the end of the day I get to walk in, well I don’t get to walk in to work, I sit in my office in my house all day so I gotta walk from my bedroom to my office, but get to do things every day that help people. Help myself by the way. This company that John and I and Kim and the whole team created, it’s helped me evolve into the person that I ‘m becoming.

Chris: I love that.

Mike: And it’s beautiful because you, you, and that’s what my question is like, how amazing is it like every day, like, and even when you wake up in bad days, I still say to myself, I wake up, I’m like, it’s raining. I don’t feel good. I’m like, it’s going to be a good day. It’s going to be a good day. I keep telling myself that because it always becomes a good day, but what a privilege and what an honor and what a blessing it is to wake up every morning and know that you’re doing something for someone else. Like talk to how cool is that? Tell me about that.

Chris: I think I forgot who was talking about this, but yeah. One of the best ways to help kind of like pull yourself out of those like funks is just go help someone else. You know, like helping someone else makes you feel good in my book. I talk about it’s called pro social behavior when you give, you get. Whether it’s the initial feeling, my kind of cynical take on it is there’s no such thing as altruism. And a lot of people like what do you mean?

I’ve donated all of my time and I’m like didn’t that make you feel good? You got something out of it. You got a good feeling out of it. When we give, we get. And that, it’s not a bad thing. Cause some, for some reason we think it’s with the right intention though. And even that right intention is good.

Mike: With authenticity of saying, not saying, I’m going to go do all this stuff and I better wait till when I get home. I better have a new car and a driveway and I better get a new.

Chris: And that expectation is the problem.

Mike: Yeah. That, that’s a wrong giving.

Chris: And we’ll have a deeper conversation about that. Cause like, I would rather a million people help a million other people with the wrong one person helping one person with the right intention. So that’s it’s a, it’s a very…

Mike: It’s a numbers game. I get the point though.

Chris: Yeah. When people say like, Oh, you know, you shouldn’t do that with the wrong intention. I’m like, I agree you shouldn’t, but I’d still rather you help them.

Mike: Yeah, exactly.

Chris: And like, again, in a perfect world, we know it’s not, the conversation stops right there. In a perfect world, we shouldn’t even continue that conversation because it’s a fake situation. It’s not a perfect world. What I can control is me, and I know where my intentions are, and my intentions are to help other people. And I really love that it. When I help someone I get a good feeling.

Mike: Do you do it for the good feeling?

Chris: No, no, no, no, no, but no.

Mike: I know you don’t but I think ’cause that’s kind of the crux of what I mean.

Chris: Like I love helping people AND I love that I get a good feeling. It’s not I love helping people because I get a good feeling. I love helping people and I love what I feel as a byproduct of that. And I think that’s the best thing ever to be okay with that. Like, you shouldn’t feel good about what you do. I’m like, damn. Like, really? You hear yourself? Like, I bet you’re fun at parties.

Mike: That’s totally true.

Chris: Dude, I absolutely love what I do. Getting on stage, just trusting myself to speak a message that truly I feel can impact people. I now do these surveys and I surveyed over 300 people at these two events that I just did.

And one person put probably not in terms of wanting to hear me speak again. 99 percent of people put definitely yes, can’t wait to hear him speak again, I need to hear him speak again. And in my former life, I would have focused on that one person, probably not, and that’s what we usually do. Yeah, that’s what we usually do.

We’re so drawn. I posted it on Instagram and everyone’s like, who’s that one person, that one person, that one person. I was like, isn’t that crazy that almost 287 people said they loved me, but everyone chose to focus on the one.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: And that’s why we’re so upset.

Mike: But that’s culture.

Chris: That’s why we’re so upset.

Mike: That’s life.

Chris: Because we’re so fixated on the one thing that went not as good as it could be and we ignored all of the stuff that we could find gratitude in, that we could appreciate. And like, I’m not saying to…

Mike: That’s a mindset.

Chris: It is.

Mike: That’s your mindset.

Chris: I do want to make a note. Like I’m not going to negate the disability experience. We’re specifically talking about disability, but I’m not going to negate the disability experience when you have those bad days. It’s not like, oh, feel better, like, you should be grateful. Like, I’m not going to say that. You, when you have pain, you can respect and honor the pain.

Mike: Oh, you have to. That’s the only way to get over it.

Chris: That’s real. That’s real.

Mike: That’s right.

Chris: You know, and there’s some things like, I can’t take away the fact that if I walked outside right now, and there are people here, more than likely, when I pass them, their necks are going to turn. They’re going to stare at me.

Mike: How’s that make you feel right now?

Chris: Now I’m okay with it, but it still can be exhausting. Some days on a, on a bad day for me. And I see that I’m like, God, again, that’s so annoying. Like it’s really annoying. Back when I was 14, 15, that would break me. I would hide my hand in a backpack to make sure no one even knew. I look like I pretended I was looking for things all the time. I’ve made that journey. I’ve made that journey. No, but I’ve had to deal with those so many things. And so many people in the disability space have to, we have to remember that. We do have to find gratitude for our own sake and for our own peace. For our own peace, you deserve it. It’s not me telling you like, positivity, hippie, positive aspirations when you’re in a burning building. Get the hell out. You know, I’m a, I’m a realist. The reality is: pessimism won’t help you.

Mike: That’s true.

Chris: Steven Pritchett, I think is the person, he said, Being less negative is more beneficial than being more positive.

Mike: I agree with that completely.

Chris: You know, another funny way to put it is like, If someone pisses in your drink, no amount of water will take the piss out.

You know, like, you can add all the good you want, but there’s something bad in there.

Mike: Well, it happened. And it might overflow and get out, but it still occurred.

Chris: Yeah, absolutely not going near that glass. You have to take the bad out. No amount of good will replace taking the bad away. You have to take the bad out.

And the bad is this. What can I control? What can’t I control? The situation is the situation and it sucks. I hate this. But what can I do now? In my first book, I have this problem solving technique where it’s like, Do you have a problem? Yes or no? Yes. Can you do something about it? Yes or no? No. Okay, then it’s not your problem to solve.

Mike: It’s the serenity prayer.

Chris: Can you do something about it? Yes. Then you don’t have a problem. Because you can solve it.

Mike: Man, you’re direct with that. There’s just no, there’s no like, but I want to, there’s no pity here. It’s just, but that, so let’s talk about, let’s talk about that because…

Chris: That’s a good one. It’s it’s, that’ll be interesting to see where I go with it. Cause I’m not sure.

Mike: Well, I, there’s look, I agree with you a hundred percent. One of the things I learned, like most of the time in my life growing up is like, if there was something wrong in my life, I went down a different direction to avoid it. And all that did was lead to more bad decisions and more more heartache and more pain and it frankly it took me farther and farther away from who God created me to be. And that’s what culture does. And so when you say, you know, everyone has issues, everyone has problems, everyone suffers. Yeah, but I think that the thing that’s critical is sitting with it. Because if you if you and it’s painful.

Chris: It’s hard.

Mike: It’s painful to sit by yourself and go, “okay, well, I don’t want to feel these feelings.” I feel awful. I feel like an imposter. I feel like a fraud. I feel like I’m a phony. I feel like people hate me. I feel like I’m sad. I feel like I want to cry. I feel depressed. All these things. And instead of saying, I’m going to go out and go do something else.

Chris: Not run from it.

Mike: Yeah. And you sit there and you go, okay, why do I feel this way? And you’re right. I spent a lot of time by myself. Why do I feel this way? And I start mapping it back to, okay, dissecting it. And, and every, every book, everything you read, everything you read in spirituality, everything you learn and people that have gone there, like you have gone there, you said the same thing. You’ve got to work through it. You got to live with it because you can’t get past it until you work through it. And by working through it, it’s almost like it’s another chapter closed. So now you can move on to the next level with that next level of existence that’s that next level of life. But sitting with the crap is, in my opinion, is the only way to be. Peel off the dead layer of skin to become the newer version of yourself, that is growth. And if you if you if you abandon that and just decide, I’m just going to, I’m going to go do something. I’m going to go drink alcohol. I’m going to go smoke. I’m going to go run. I used to run like crazy, blew my knees out. I’m going to go drive fast cars. I’m going to go do bad things. I shouldn’t do all that. I mean, those are fun things too.

Chris: And you use other responsibilities to get away from thinking, to get away from feeling. I am going to parallel what you’re saying, but have a slightly different approach too. It’s so important to sit with it. But it’s so important to not just live in it.

Mike: Live in it. Correct.

Chris: That’s so vital.

Mike: Gotta work through it.

Chris: Yeah, and I do want to add to this a lot of people like how did you overcome your disability? How did you overcome your mental health struggles? Because I went down the mental health road, diagnosed in everything you could think. I was like, I didn’t, what do you mean “overcome”?

Mike: It’s a journey

Chris: Still two fingers on my left hand. I didn’t overcome this. I live with it. And that’s something I have to live with.

Mike: Is that, does that frustrate you?

Chris: No, not at all. And I think maybe that’s what I, I overcome is the frustration, but I still get frustrated from time to time. There’s not this moment of like, “I won.” There’s no finish line to mental health.

Mike: True.

Chris: There’s no finish line to life. There’s no, like, “made it” moment.

Mike: Yeah. You’re in the process of learning.

Chris: Why are we  so obsessed with needing a finish line. Like, Oh, how did you overcome? Like, stop trying to turn everything into like a 2008 rom com, like where there’s, stop! There is no finish line to mental health. It’s a, it’s a daily thing that we, we deal with. We make decisions, we make better choices. It’s not one big finish line, but a thousand little choices. That’s what it is. So when we talk about like dealing with this stuff, I, I feel like an impostor. I feel like a failure. I feel like this. I feel like that. For me, what I have to do is not let my mind catastrophize so much into a spiral where I say, “Hey, listen, I know you feel that that’s real, but we also know feelings are not facts.”

So just because I feel that way doesn’t mean it’s true. And oftentimes I always remind myself and when I went to therapy and my therapist gave me a great… it’s like anytime you start to spiral out of control, picture you stepped on almost like a rake but it’s a stop sign right in your face. And just picture the stop sign and ask, like, “is this true? Or do I just feel that way?” Because the feeling is real, but the fact isn’t. And that helps make, alright, now how might I spin this curiosity? How might I spin this to be a little bit more true? I feel like an imposter. Why well Because everyone seems like they’re doing so good. Are they? I don’t know, but it seems like it. So are they doing good?

Mike: It’s an assumption.

Chris: It’s an assumption. Is that a fact?

Mike: No. And you’re wrong 90 percent of the time.

Chris: So you’re telling yourself a story based on not facts.

Mike: I know! I live there every day, man!

Chris: And then you’re dealing with the pain from the story from the lack of facts. Yes. How are you?

Mike: Welcome to my world.

Chris: Welcome to all of our worlds. And it’s what we do. Yes. What we do. So just because it’s what we’ve done, it doesn’t mean it’s what we have to continue doing.

Mike: That’s the journey I’m on to stop that. That’s change. And I think the takeaway here, well, there’s a lot of takeaways, but. For me, the takeaway is the fact that you’re in the journey. Cause there’s so many people, I often talk to certain people that have gone through certain things like this, transformational changes, or at least the desire to transform. The desire to have the courage to say, God, I don’t like who I am or who I’ve become. Like, I’d like to be reprogrammed. I want to commit myself to being somebody different cause I see the better side of life.

I don’t want to feel the pain every day. I don’t want my brain to play tricks on me every day. I want to stop that, this colossal chaotic nonsense that exists in there. The fact that we’re on the journey, I think, and, and that, that’s the, that’s the benefit. So, so many people don’t ever get on the journey. They just sit there in the same place, they don’t change, they deal with the pain, they struggle emotionally.

Chris: I did that for a long time.

Mike: Same.

Chris: 17 years.

Mike: 45 years, you know and…

Chris: It’s hard, it’s hard, don’t get me wrong. But I will I help anyone I can and I, I don’t try and be like a hard ass, but at the same time, I like to be like real and straightforward.

Like, if you need pity, I might not be the person to go to, you know, and I’ll just be super honest and I’m not going to be a dick about it, but I will help you position yourself to change. When people say, I really want to change, I really want to change. And I’m like, okay, what are you willing to do?

Like, no, no, nothing. I’m like, okay. When I speak to leaders, this is what I say. Everyone talks about their priorities. You know, my priorities are this, my priorities are that. I’m like, your priorities are not what you say they are, they’re what you do. If you want to lose 50 pounds, like I was talking earlier, but you sit at home and watch Netflix every night instead of like going for a walk with your dog, your priority is not losing 50 pounds, your priority is Netflix.

Mike: But that also ties into mental health and depression. And all that. So talk about that.

Chris: We can talk about that, so.

Mike: Because, because you got to, because that’s the hard part. You get stuck in the grind, right? It’s easy. It is easy. One of the things that I was, I was, I had in there too, was I asked you earlier, when did it, I was like, when did it click for you? And like, it wasn’t really click. It was compounding things. Like for me, there’s like a moment of clarity that kind of happens and you’re like, you know, I can do this, or I’m committed, or you start changing like for the longest time I had an issue with sustainability.

Chris: Okay.

Mike: It was like, it was like I was those guys. I would go to the gym. I would do it six weeks. I would start eating out and then I would, I would go up and then I’d peak and I, you know, heavy, a little bit lighter, heavy, a little bit. And the only way to really change anything is to change, period. Everything. Habits, food, people you spend time with

Chris: Action.

Mike: Absolutely action. But to the point of. I’m just, I’m just taking it just to me, it’s like, you know, the grownups, like someone will say, so don’t touch that. It’s hot. Don’t touch it. That’s hot. And you keep touching it. The point is you have to learn on your own. The crappy thing, not the crappy thing, the beautiful thing about this journey, which is amazing, is that we all learn at our own time.

For me, it took me 45 years and there’s no end line. I completely agree. Like I’m a much better person than I was two years ago. I’m a very different person. I was four years ago, but I still struggle every single day, but I have the coping skills, the tools, the resources, the people, the mentality, the wherewithal to actually deal with it and then work through it and then get to another day. It’s like the same idea. It’s like you have to be willing.

Chris: The willingness is the determining factor for change.

Mike: Absolutely.

Chris: Willingness is the determining factor. I’m going to tell, again, being straightforward, you don’t need any more information. Whoever’s listening to this, you don’t need any more information.

You have enough information. There is no information that you are missing. None. You know what you need to do. You know what you need to stop doing.

Mike: Precisely.

Chris: You don’t need to learn. You don’t need another book. You don’t need another course. You don’t need that. Chances are you don’t need that. Chances are you need to do something.

You, and you know what it is. When I say that, and your mind goes to it, and then you throw it in the back of your mind, pick it back up. Because you know, I knew the whole time. I knew I needed to take my glove off. I knew I needed to face myself. But you can’t fix what you’re not willing to face. I was not willing to face myself.

I knew what I needed to do. I didn’t need to learn what I needed to do. I needed to do what I needed to do. There was no, it wasn’t a learning deficiency. And it rarely is. When I work with people, it rarely is. I ask people, I don’t need to know anything about you. I can ask you, like, What are you really struggling with right now?

Why do you think that is? What do you think you need to do? Why do you think you’re not ready? They have an answer for every single one of those questions.

Mike: Mm hmm.

Chris: I didn’t need to tell you what to do. I’m just facilitating the conversation you’ve been pushing off having with yourself. That applies to leadership too and all the other stuff.

Mike: Oh, absolutely.

Chris: But it takes a moment. It’s a hard choice. It’s pain, but the pain is not the choice, but the fear of what the choice will be. The fear of what the choice will feel like, the fear of the, the fear of all the other stuff. And we, we, we tell ourselves. Language is such a huge beast. And I don’t know if you remember me, did I do the silk thing with you, like showing you like what that is?

Mike: No, go for it.

Chris: Perfect. So we condition ourselves and we believe things. And when you said I have, I had a sustainability issue. That’s a language that creates a habit.

Mike: So real quick, I had, I did say had.

Chris: And I appreciate that you’re going to be involved in this too, so. Both of you guys real quick, say silk five times fast. Go ahead.

Mike: Silk, silk, silk, silk, silk

Chris: What do cows drink?

Mike: Milk.

Chris: Water. They drink water. Yeah. So, that’s a. Yeah. So, I want to talk about that though.

Mike: Yo, that’s great though.

Chris: I want to talk about that. Because, and that’s just a simple conditioning trick. It’s a simple conditioning trick.

Mike: Why’d you have to do that to me on camera?

Chris: I had to. So. When we say things like, I have a sustainability issue, sustainability issue, we repeat that, repeat that, we create it, we create a habit of a sustainability issue. When we say things like, are you a morning person or a night person?

Mike: I’m an every second person, man.

Chris: Okay, that’s cool, but are you a morning person?

Mike: No, I prefer to sleep a little bit later than more.

Chris: So would you say I’m a gym person?

Mike: Probably not.

Chris: Okay cool.

Mike: You look like you run more. Do a lot of dieting. A lot of people assume. A little too thin. A little thin. A little thin. Yeah. 5’3 125.

Chris: I could almost fit in your jacket. So, a lot of people apparently.

Mike: You’re not supposed to be funnier than me, bro.

Chris: I’m not. You’re just projecting. That’s okay. If you believe that, I appreciate it. I’ll take it. I’ll take it. A lot of people are like, I’m a gym person. They’ll call me a gym person.

And I’m like, yeah, I was actually born out of the womb with a dumbbell. Like, no, I’m not a gym person. You’re not a morning person.

Mike: It’s choice.

Chris: It’s choice. You are not a gym person, you’re a person who decides to go to the gym. You’re not a morning person, you’re a person who likes or chooses to wake up early.

You could change at any time. We have to separate identity from habit.

Mike: Mm-hmm .

Chris: Because habit can change at any time. But if you establish identity based on your current habits, you are limiting yourself to your choices right now.

Mike: That’s your belief system.

Chris: That’s your belief system. And you now believe you have a sustainability issue.

You now believe you’re a morning person. You now believe you can’t be a night person, which is good and I appreciate that. ’cause language matters so much to me.

Mike: It does your words. I agree.

Chris: I can’t go to the gym. No, no. Fix that. You won’t. And that’s okay. You won’t. It’s not that you can’t, ’cause you have the ability. You won’t. I appreciate honesty because from honesty, change can happen. But from self deception, no change is possible.

Mike: Self-deception and self-destruction. That’s good, man. You mentioned the first book. We talked a little bit about it before we got on.

The Art of Changing Course.

Chris: Yep.

Mike: So, So I love the cover. I love the content around the book. I want to know what’s the inspiration for it. And then how did you do it because writing a book is not easy to do, man. And based on you looking like a like a meathead, how did you write a book?

Chris: It’s so funny.

Mike: I’m impressed.

Chris: It’s so funny that like you can still see, like that’s wild, that’s so wild.

Mike: Sorry, man. I just kid.

Chris: This is so good. We’re going to have to bleep this whole episode.

Mike: How did someone that looks like you?

Sorry. Seriously though.

I can’t believe I said that, but it was, I had to, I had to get you back for a couple of other ones.

Chris: I’ll take it. It’s good.

Mike: Alright. Sorry.  

Chris: The first response is like, I don’t know because I’m definitely a speaker first. Writer is, I guess I want to feel like a writer, but I know I’m not.

I’m not going to be a famous writer because that’s not what I want to be. You know, I’m a speaker first. The ideas I believe in, it took me a long time to change myself and I was really passive with that process. But I think because of that in fitness, in mindset and mental health and starting to speak, I had to find a process that helped people change faster.

I was like, what are the roadblocks to change that most people get stuck in? Where did I get stuck? The first one was honesty and my rule was like going from subconscious to conscious, from conscious to communicated, and then from communicated to broadcast. That’s my rules on change. But you can’t fix what you’re not willing to face. You have to make it conscious to yourself first. You could write it down, whatever, but you have to go through this process of like root cause analysis. What’s the real issue here? My issue was I, I was hiding my hand and most people like, yeah, that’s the issue. That’s not the issue.

If a person came to me wanting to lose 50 pounds. I would say, you don’t want to lose 50 pounds. They’re like, yes I do, what do you mean? I was like, so if you lost 50 pounds and you looked the exact same, would you be happy? And they’re like, well no. So I was like, it’s not the 50 pounds, it’s the looking like you lost 50 pounds. And they’re like, yes, I’m like, that’s also not true.

And they’re like, what the f.

Mike: How did you learn all this like, like Jedi sort of language tricks, dude?

Chris: Reverse engineering the bullshit that I was telling myself for 20 years. I was like, what was I doing? What kind of mental gymnastics was I doing to avoid the work that I needed to do and working with other people and hearing people say things to me.

And I was like, that doesn’t sound right. I would hear language and I’m like, that’s not true, but you’re saying it like it’s true. You know, when we speak in concrete, we speak so like absolute. And I’m like, that’s not true. You know, like creatine is bad. I’m like for kidney failure. Yes. But for other people, no.

So like, why are you speaking in absolute when it’s not? Creatine is good. Well, not for kidney failure. Like, I have to always add that because I’m like…

Mike: Did you train yourself to do that? Were you born like that?

Chris: I think it just drives me nuts. It drives me nuts to hear certainty when it doesn’t apply. And I think, I love philosophy too. So the idea of, let’s stop speaking and like.

Mike: Yeah.

Chris: And like, start like, let’s just, let’s just talk about it. You know? There are so many situations that negate your belief. So how can you say with a hundred percent certainty that something “is”? You can’t. And I think I’ve allowed myself to do that.

Mike: I used to speak like that all the time and I still do sometimes it’s…

Chris: I catch myself like I’m like, that’s not true.

Mike: That’s insulting.

Chris: Yeah, it’s insulting to your potential. Yes, insulting to your what you’re putting out in the world to me.

Mike: I agree.

Chris: So I’d like to call people on that, not to be a dick, but like, hey, let’s make sure what we’re putting out there. Yeah in some of my talks, I like pointed a random person, like, when did you decide to become a mentor? I’m like, I’m not a mentor. I’m like, the day you were born, the day you were born, you decided to become a mentor. Whether you believe it or not, he looks at you, everyone looks at you and they see how you react and respond and manage life. And they’re either inspired by you or they’re deflected from you or something happens, but you are putting out into the world.

But being a mentor, you are a lighthouse for people. Are you leading them to the shore of the rocks? And I always position people to think about that. The actions you’re putting out in the world are inspiring people to do something. What is it? Is it good or bad? That’s on you. You know? So I, I wanted to help people change that process.

And I wanted people to be honest with themselves. But then the next step is going from conscious to communicated, communicate your problems to someone else, someone you care about, someone you love. That makes it real as hell. When you tell someone, I’m struggling with hiding my hand.

Mike: That’s, that’s raw, that’s radical.

Chris: I’m struggling with, I don’t think I’m worthy of love because of the way I was born. That’s tough. And then they’re obviously going to talk with you about this, and that’s real. That’s, we have the accountability to manage yourself, which I have in my book, self accountability and then outward accountability.

That’s the communicated piece. Then the broadcast piece is living up to those changes that you need and holding yourself accountable, not by leading by example, but by living by example, leading stops when you go home, living never stops. So I live by example. Every day. What is the best version of me? What would the best version of me choose?

Mike: Where does that come from though?

Chris: Because I lived the other life and it was miserable, man. I lived the other life and it wasn’t good. What I put out into the world wasn’t good. What I felt every day wasn’t good. What I saw my parents go through wasn’t good. What I saw everyone else in my life. My relationships had glass ceilings on them. Everything was so limited. And I think everyone deserves the opportunity to be honest. But sometimes we don’t know how to get there.

Mike: So when you say honest, do you mean speak their truth or being honest?

Chris: I have a weird relationship with the speak your truth thing because like there’s truth and then there’s your version. Truth is truth. And that’s, that’s a tough, that’s more of a philosophical thing.

Mike: No, no, I get, but, but there’s like, okay, like you should tell a story like Jeb, I went out and he went hunting and he’s like, “oh, I saw this big 10 point.” Like he, you know, like you, when you were fishing, like I caught this 10 pound bass. It was, you know,

Chris: I don’t catch that small of a fish ever, but yeah.

Mike: I mean, where does this guy, where’d you pull this guy in from? Jesus. Yeah. Did I didn’t even get a chance to screen this guy and you just throw him in front of me with these wisecracks? God.

Chris: We planned this. We planned this. We planned this in the last two days. We were just going back and forth.

Mike: Dude, that’s good. That was, that was witty and quick. I’m impressed. What the hell were we talking about? Oh, you know how you stretch a truth.

Chris: Yeah. A lot of people do.

Mike: I used to like storytelling. I’m like, ah. And I, and I learned as part of the things I’ve been going through is like, that’s not good either. And it, and it is sometimes it is hard to be honest.

Chris: It’s very hard and I will not deny that it took me a long time…

Mike: with yourself and with others…

Chris: Yeah, with yourself is probably the hardest, to be honest. That’s why when I hear people say “communication is key,” I’m like, stop. That’s, that’s the second. The first is self-communication is key. Because if you can’t communicate with yourself, how the hell are you gonna communicate with someone else?

Mike: Mm hmm.

Chris: You know and my big issue was I wanted from everyone else what I wasn’t willing to give myself Honesty communication all of this stuff. So I had to say like, is this true? I use that and like the founder of Toyota created this root cause analysis called the five Y’s. And it can be as many Y’s as you need, but using a Y and a Y and a Y to get to the true issue, which is usually an emotional

Mike: Someone just did that to me. Very good friend of mine.

Chris: It’s deep.

Mike: She, well, I’ll just call her my girlfriend. She did the five questions why we were, I was walking her, we were walking her dogs one night and she, she, I said something and she goes, why? And I go, she took me back and I was like, and she kind of, not got in my face, but kind of was like, well, why?

And I’m like, probably because of this. Well, why? Probably because of that. And it just, and it literally in five questions, drastically dissected the entire issue in five, one minute.

Chris: That wasn’t the issue at all.

Mike: It was, it was my perspective of it. It was my fear of it. It was my inability, well, my, my desire to not communicate it. Cause it’s like we all feel judged and it’s this weird journey of like we all, like, do you know anybody? Have you ever met anybody? It’s like, Oh, I’m amazing. I feel like it’s perfect. Everything’s good. I got this. I got that. I got that. I’m happy. I’m grateful. I’m supportive. I love, I give the people, I give money to families. I help people on the street. I feel so good inside. I don’t have any injuries. I don’t have any pain. Like I’m just happy. Does anybody exist that doesn’t go through this craziness that we call life? Have you met anybody?

Chris: We all do.

Mike: It’s exhausting, man.

Chris: It is. And that’s the beauty of life, is to feel pleasure, you have to know pain. There would be no pleasure without pain, there would be no light without darkness. And the reality is, like, life is full of suffering, and life is full of beauty. And, unfortunately, you can’t have one without the other. Like it would be nice to have some less suffering for sure. And I definitely agree with that.

Mike: Maybe the severity of the suffering.

Chris: I would love for that to change or be spread out longer. Yeah, exactly. You know, we can’t pick and choose. And sometimes we can, we can, okay. We can sometimes pick and choose in terms of like, if we’re self sabotaging, we can make less. But the external factors that we can’t control, we can only control our response.

So there are days where our response sucks because we’re not in the headspace. We don’t have the energy to give, but my thing is effort. And whether it’s personal relationships or anything with yourself, you can always give the effort that you can give. If you have 80 percent to give today, and you choose to give 80%, you gave 100%.

I respect the person who gives 30 out of 30 much more than the person who gives 80 out of 100. That’s a choice. That’s a choice. You can only give your capacity, but if you give less than your capacity, that is a choice.

Mike: Okay. I like the way you framed that better. The book all, I wanna talk about this book a little bit. So what’s, so I, we kind of derailed a little bit, but like, you, you did this for a purpose.

Chris: Mm-hmm

Mike: It’s working, right? You’re you’re selling a lot of books. People are giving a lot of great feedback on the books. I mean your website is thriving right now. I mean you got a lot of traffic going on your own social media. You just got back from speaking up in Ohio with Victoria’s Secret then… it just seems like it’s all kind of just coming to fruition for you and and it’s like Is that was that part of just like letting go the outcome was that like sort of surrendering the outcome of the journey and just saying, you know what I’m going to, I’ve come to terms with me, Chris, and I like who I am. I’m comfortable with who I am and I’m going to do what I can do and let the rest figure itself out.

Chris: Yeah. I think the big surrender piece is like, stop trying to control the end outcome and more-so like do what you can now.

I fell into speaking, but I also had a passion for it quickly. So I wanted to do it. And now I. I’m getting the rewards of those seeds that I planted a long time ago. So people see like days like I just had where it’s like a three event thing and like really cool. That didn’t happen overnight. You know that happened over years of building my speech and my recognition and everything.

Those days I didn’t want to post on social media that I still posted. The days that I didn’t want to study speaking I still did. The days where I spoke at events where everyone’s back was to me. Like I’ve had some terrible situations that I’ve gone through that made me want to quit so damn bad, but I kept going and it’s, this is not a like rah rah motivational story. It’s more-so like I had more belief in what I could eventually build than what was happening at the worst times. I believe that the worst times weren’t going to stay like that forever. I didn’t know what it would look like. I didn’t know I would be on a TV show. I didn’t know I would have a book. I didn’t know I would be speaking at these companies or be here.

But I knew if I kept going, something would happen. I didn’t know what that something was, and I was okay with not knowing. I just knew it would be better than the shit that was going on at that time. That belief in yourself is so, it’s priceless. And I think you owe it to yourself because the one thing you have is capacity. You have the capacity to adapt as a human being, and everyone’s situation is different, but everyone has the potential to do a little bit more, and I think we all know that.

Mike: Oh, of course.

Chris: I’ve never met, maybe like one person in my life and he was wild. I’ve never met someone who truly gives what they can all the time. What they can. I’m not saying a hundred percent all the time. There are days where you have 80 and you can only give 80, but there’s many days where I have 80 and I choose to give like 50 or 60. Like I could give more and I chose…

Mike: rest matters.

Chris: Rest matters. Rest matters. But you know when you could have done more and you just not sure and I I know I know that so.

Mike: I mean I go to sleep every night thinking I could have done more.

Chris: Now there has to be a relative like balance. Yeah, but when you were in that like grinding phase of wanting to make something work or wanting to change, I don’t know why we always assume that change is linear or progress is linear.

Like if I did good today, I should do better tomorrow. And if I did better tomorrow, then one day at a time. And I explained to people like getting stronger in the gym, like, Oh, I should get strong every, every week. I’m like, okay, let’s add 10 pounds to your bicep curl every week. So in five years, you’ll be curling 2 million pounds.

You’ll be the world’s strongest curler. And that’s normal. Second world’s strongest curler. That’s what I’m saying like we…

Mike: Incremental. Yeah. I like the compounding interest that you’ve talked about. It’s like the micro, micro pieces that over time created larger snowball effect.

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: Instead of saying, I’m going to boil the ocean. I’m going to go after all. Cause I, that’s what I would do. I’m going to do it all.

Chris: I tried that so many times and then you’re so frustrated and all I felt was failure. I’ll never forget. I was in some random class and some guest speaker came into like high school and he was like, ask some dumb questions. And he’s like, would you rather $100,000 or a penny a day doubled for 30 days. I was like, $100,000? I’m not stupid. And he, on the board, on the board he did the math. He’s like, penny, two pennies, four pennies, eight pennies. I’m like, stupid! He gets to like, day 26, it’s like, one million. $1,400,000. And I’m like, how the did that just happen? Compound effect. And it’s in my book too, but like up until like day 21, it makes no money until it starts to, and then the compound just goes. So you just see this; and it skyrockets. And I’m like, “Oh,” which led to my other point. If you took a plane from LAX to Milan, Italy, and it changed one degree, the path flight path, one degree, you could end up in Tunisia, in Africa, or in Austria by the flight changing one degree difference over that length of time. So it’s not that you need to do a lot more right now. It’s that you need that one degree shift. What are you doing that you need a one degree shift to start doing more of or a one degree shift to start doing less of.

Mike: Hmm

Chris: Don’t obsess with everything. Choose one thing and do it.

Mike: That’s the path. It’s, it’s, it’s course correction.

Chris: Easier said than done.

Mike: It is way easier said than done, but it can be done and change is possible and it does work. And all the things that you’re saying and all the, it’s just, there’s, it’s, it’s weird. It’s like if you don’t touch it, it’s like you can’t, you don’t believe it.

Chris: Yep.

Mike: It’s like, there’s no way it can happen. And yeah, I don’t know what it is, something sort of genetic thing or it’s brain matter or whatever makeup. It’s like, it’s not hard. It’s not hard.

Chris: We complicate it. We definitely complicate it. And why, what I always follow when someone says easier said than done, something sales taught me. I did sales for a long time before I got into speaking in the fitness industry. Break objections before they happen. So, I always bring up easier said than done. I was like, yeah, and I’m like, but better done than said. And they’re like, oh shit. It’s not easy.

Mike: Break objections before they happen. Before they happen. Yeah, that’s just, to me, that’s a lot of, that’s preparation. It’s almost expecting what they’re going to say and being prepared for it.

Chris: Realize what the smokescreens are and then break that before. And that’s what I do in my book is I walk people through exactly what I thought that you’re probably thinking too. This is BS, this will never work. Like, did you do this yet? Yes or no? Did you try this? Did that work? Yes or no? Were you honest with yourself? Yes or no? If no, go back to the start. Like, there is a system. There is a framework. But you have to do it. And if you are committed to making sure it doesn’t work, don’t do it.

Because guess what? You’re right. No one is People act like I’m trying to take their excuses away from them. I’m not fighting for them. I have my own. I have to battle through my own. I don’t need yours. I shouldn’t have to make you do what you should do to live a better life. You owe it to yourself and your family though, so.

Mike: And that’s their choice.

Chris: It is a choice.

Mike: And they can live, like, you know, going down the path of just, yeah, bad path. Just this, this, this emptiness of just, there’s this, this emptiness. It’s their choice. But you, how do you, but wouldn’t it be amazing if you could find a way to strike somebody off the path where it stayed?

Chris: That’s where those disruptors come in. That’s where pain usually does that. Pain is a good disruptor, but also, I hope that maybe a book, or a story, or a quote, or a message, maybe from this podcast, something that resonates. We need to disrupt patterns. If you don’t disrupt patterns, it’s really hard, because we stay in this purgatory of it’s not as good as we want it to be, but it’s not bad enough to change. So that buffer zone is just kind of like existing. It’s really tough.

Mike: It’s… God, what do they call it? The waiting place in Oh, The Places You Will Go by Dr. Seuss, which is, that’s my kind of reading.

Chris: It’s really what it is though.

Mike: Yeah. But you sit there and you’re just waiting, waiting for this, waiting for that, waiting for this. And you never actually take a step forward and you can die in that place.

Chris: The reality is a lack of a choice is still a choice.

Mike: That is true. Do something.

Chris: And what we don’t understand is the inflation of time, the cost of time. So if you’re at a fork in the road and you’re stating here, and I’m like, I don’t know which one to go down, so I’m just going to not make a decision as if that’s safe. Over time, you’re now behind. That position you didn’t move from, time kept going. So now you’re, you’re back there. You didn’t go down the wrong path. You just stayed there and over time you got left behind. The inflation of time costs something.

Mike: Oh, God, does it. It costs a lot. It costs a lot of relationships, which is what I find.

Chris: It costs something you can’t get back.

Mike: Yeah, and that’s a pill, that’s a difficult pill to swallow.

Chris: It’s hard. And if I told my 14 year old self that, he’d probably punch me in the face. For real. Like, it’s one of those, like, I don’t say that to cast stones from where I am, like down to you. I speak to people at like, at I’m a peer and I struggle with this stuff too. I’m not perfect. I still have my struggles. You know, I’m not perfect. I teach systems that I still actively use and have to use. It’s almost like if I sold tires, you would assume that I never get a flat tire.

Like, why would you assume that we’re all could potentially get the flat tire? Even if you sell tires, even if you have the best tires in the world, you can still get a flat. Even if I speak on mental health all around the country, I can still have mental health issues.

All of this stuff is a skill. Even choosing is a skill. If you want to get better at a skill, you practice it.

Mike: Amen, brother.

Chris: Practice choosing. Practice acting. And I remember one of my first talks, I had this like stupid little drawing. I draw a wire and like three birds on a wire and I’m like three birds on a wire to decided to leave. How many are left? And everyone’s like one. And I’m like, no, all three are still there. They’re like, what do you mean? They decided. I’m like, everyone decides every year to lose weight. Everyone decides every year to quit smoking. Everyone decides every year to start a podcast, deciding something and doing something are completely different. How many decisions have you made that you didn’t act on?

Mike: That’s an interesting perspective. Very different perspective. You know, it’s funny. I have a, a, a little painting in my living room that has three birds on a wire. So that’s funny. Usually it’s for Bob Marley.

Chris: Did you steal it?

Mike: No, but it’s literally, I’ll send you a picture of it later. No, it’s cool. It’s three little birds. It’s supposed to represent my kids and then.

Chris: Well, that’s awesome. Like, what’s the luck of that?

Mike: I haven’t gotten enough for you from the book, man. People are buying it. It’s changing people’s lives. Like that has to feel amazing. So like, give me two sentences of like, what am I going to get out of it? And then tell me where I can get it.

Chris: The book is the tagline is three steps to get unstuck and solve your real problems. So many of us are attempting to solve the wrong problems. I needed to show my hand. No, I needed to get more comfortable with who I was. We have to get to the real problems before we could ever solve them.

If you’re solving the wrong problem, you’re never going to solve the right one. And this book is for anyone who might feel stuck. They have felt stuck. They are stuck. They’re currently stuck. They feel like they need some sort of change in their life and they’re just not sure. Not sure what to do. Not sure how to do it. Scared to do it. They think, but they’re not sure they’re on the fence. Anyone who has felt that there are tactics in this book, you can flip to any page and grab something that’s valuable. But if you follow the system like to a T, which is very simple, it’s not easy, but it’s simple. It can help you be honest enough to make the change you need, which creates a life that you’re proud of.

And that impacts other people too. If you’re willing, willing to make a change and you need the know-how, this book will walk you through that.

Mike: That’s perfect. So we were talking about this earlier too with Jeb, about Ablr Works and our Workforce Development Program. And we are, I don’t know how much you know about this or not, but it’s pretty cool. We’re working with the state governments and we’re actually helping individuals with disabilities find meaningful career paths. So we have multiple different training verticals that we go down, whether it’s cybersecurity, whether it’s digital marketing, whether it’s Salesforce, whether it’s, and it’s amazing.

But one of the things that, and I’ve talked about this a few times in this chair is, you know, we, we make assumptions because we take folks that have been sort of ostracized forever and now all of a sudden we’ve given them 16 weeks of training and we’ve given them a mentorship program and they’ve paid internships and they get real life experience and it’s like, it’s amazing.

It really is amazing. And I love what we do. Like, I just, and I, this is just the beginning. I’m just so excited about what we’re doing and where we’re going. But one of the things that’s a challenge that I, and we might grow out of this challenge in time, but currently there’s, there’s folks that haven’t been in those environments.

And all of a sudden, no matter what 16 weeks are, they get dumped into an environment of working. So you go from being on disability to, you know, and you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on disability. Okay, but when you’re on disability, I guess I don’t know the whole ins and outs of it. But basically, you can only work a certain amount of time.

And you have limitations of what you can do and limitations on how much money you can make. And so in theory, you’re kind of, you’re kind of under the poverty line forever.

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: Because you can’t do more, because if you do more, you lose your disability. So that kind of keeps people…

Chris: Wow.

Mike: … in this level, and so for them to make a jump into removing that huge chunk of compensation and now being out on their own in a real world environment, having that self esteem and that confidence and that not necessarily the motivation or the loyalty, but the self esteem, the confidence, the believing in themselves. That they belong there and they, and they, and they’ve earned that position, that meaningful job, not just, “Hey, you have a disability. Go sit in a corner, push a button all day or go work in fast food.” But no, “you can be a project manager, sales rep. You can be an executive. You can do anything you want to do.” it’s your opportunity. We’re going to give you the opportunity. You’re going to take it.

But oftentimes there’s that fear that like they feel incapable still, because if they just got into it. They spent the most of their life feeling excluded.

Chris: They have no proof yet.

Mike: No, they have no proof yet. So this to me I think the book like when like to me and one of the things I will talk about is possibly coming In and doing them like even possibly mentoring some of these folks. We have like a little mentor thing we’re trying to do about, we’ll talk about all that later. But I think you’re, I think there’s something there because our students come out and they get a large percentage of getting jobs. But then how do we keep that sustainability, that retention to keep them moving in that path? Because you can get stuck pretty quick.

Chris: It’s, and that’s where I talk about stacking the wins, like giving yourself proof. If, if you start giving yourself proof that you can do today and you can do tomorrow and you can do this moment and you can do this job. You start to believe that. And when you believe that, you start to prove that belief, and it’s just this pro social, like, loop that helps you keep going.

But if you say, I don’t know if I can do it, so you stop doing it, and you create this negative feedback loop of like, oh, see, I can’t do it, we have to create better loops. And that comes from stacking small wins, repeated over time, compound effect of completing tasks and showing yourself that you can.

Mike: But people give up. By choice.

Chris: All people?

Mike: No, that’s what separates us.

Chris: So these people, let’s put them in a position to win. By teaching them how to create small wins instead of big wins. Let’s create small wins repeated over time.

Mike: So, I passed my, I got through the course.

Chris: Win. Celebrate.

Mike: I got my CPACC.

Chris: Win. Celebrate.

Mike: I got a job interview.

Chris: Win. We just celebrated three times.

Mike: I got my resume.

Chris: We don’t celebrate little wins.

Mike: Amen.

Chris: We only celebrate the finish line moments.

Mike: Okay.

Chris: And that’s on us as leaders, as managers, and as people, we don’t celebrate things. I don’t need to throw a party because they did a bicep curl, but I do need to recognize there was a lot of stuff that I could have done.

Mike: You do have good biceps.

Chris: Thank you so much. There is a lot of other stuff I could have done today instead of go to the gym, but I’m like, damn, I did that. I did that. That little celebration is a reminder that I won. I won today. How can you win today?

Mike: And that rewrites the neurological…

Chris: it creates new pathways and in my book I talk about the neuroplasticity and science of like rewiring your brain to make wins and changes.

Mike: It’s all real and it all matters.

Chris: Absolutely. It is. But those stacking wins is so important. We can choose to celebrate or we can say, Oh, that’s normal. You should do that. Why are you leading like that? Is the goal for your ego to win or for them to win?

Mike: Mm hmm.

Chris: Celebrate those little wins. Create an environment of sustainability through small action. Stop overcomplicating it.

Mike: I like that. The small wins will be good for the team because they’re great people. They’ve worked their tushes off to get to where they are.

Chris: Celebrate them in community.

Mike: Every little thing.

Chris: Look at what CrossFit did. CrossFit took concurrent training, which have been around forever. They used concurrent training, which cardio and weight training, and then they added the community piece, the celebration piece. They took an activity that had no emotion and added the emotion and the celebration into it. They celebrate every workout.

Mike: And that’s CrossFit. I’ve heard some … I got, this has been a fun discussion, man.

I gotta ask you about something. So when you were a model, no, I’m kidding.

So I asked Chris Hendricks a similar question, and I think this is probably more of a leadership question, but like you mentioned this eight year old girl, you know, you mentioned these people you talk to, like there are people out there that may listen to this, may not see this, say it not, cause we’re going to, bottom line is are struggling.

Whether they have a disability or not, whether they have a deformity or not, whether they have an vision impairment, they’re mentally broken. There’s tons of people out there. There’s, they’re struggling. Like, give me some like, Chris Ruden, you know, couple points here. Like, hey y’all, like, life’s tough. It’s hard.

We’re all struggling. We all know that. We all say it. But at the end of the day, when you’re in your own struggle, you don’t feel like you can get out of it. Mm hmm. What would you tell those folks? Because, like, you’ve been through We all have, but your story and how you’ve overcome a lot of things to get yourself on the trajectory that you want to be on, where you can actually service people and help people and do good. You’re achieving that. People are going to look at that and say, how do I get there? How do I become that? What can you give us, give some advice on like how they can start other than the compounding interest of getting going, because it starts someplace, but. You had the opportunity to feed some really positive messages and help people because you, because of your story and hence why you’re doing it every day.

Chris: So it does start with honesty and I would say like, am I being honest with myself using that as a, a guiding metric? You know, is this thought helping me or hurting me using that as a guiding metric? Not once a week, not once a month, literally every day. Every time you have a thought that could potentially be negative or you see it, you’re like, yeah, just, I’m just, no one understands me. I’m like, is that true? Maybe someone understands you. Maybe they don’t. But does that help you? No. Okay, so what might help you? Well, does talking negatively help you? No, but it’s hard! I didn’t say it wasn’t hard. Does talking negatively help you? No. Would it be more helpful to talk a little bit better? Would it be helpful if you treated yourself like someone you care about? Yes. What would that look like? I’m asking these questions to lead you to your better choices. Treat yourself like someone you love. Let’s start there. Would you talk to the way you talk to yourself if that was someone you cared about? If that was your daughter, if that was your spouse, would you talk to them the same way you talk to yourself? Chances are probably not.

Mike: Positive self talk is critical.

Chris: Critical. Critical. Because we’re in our heads all day. All day. And we can talk about AI and all this stuff again more in my book. But like, AI is only good when the inputs are good. AI is bad when the inputs are bad. What do you think happens? In psychology there’s something called the default mode network. It’s the processing center that runs behind the brain like subconsciously. If that is wired for negativity it’s going to stay there. And it’s going to be a lens that you see life. I’m not saying positivity hippie. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is be realistic is what you’re doing, hurting you or helping you. And if it’s not helping you, you need to change that.

And that starts through, I’ll give you one tool specifically, triangle, picture triangle, one corner, catch, top, challenge, bottom, change, catch, challenge, change. You have to catch that feeling. I suck all the time. Like, okay, let’s, let’s, I hear you, but let’s challenge that. Do you suck all the time? You’re not good at anything ever. Well, I’m good at a few things, but not those. Like, so you are good at some things. Yeah, but not those. I’m like, but you’re good at some things.

I’ll bring you back every time. However many times you want to do this. Yeah. Well, I guess I’m good at some stuff. Okay. Let’s change that. I’m good at some stuff. Let’s end the conversation there. I’m good at some things. Now imagine instead of saying I suck at everything, you start saying I’m good at some things.

You’re even trying to be mad. You’re trying to be mad. Like, I’m good at some things. You are. That’s amazing. Yeah, it is kind of cool, but like, I’m not good at everything. True. But you’re good at some things. Yeah. Okay. Now we’re starting to liven up. Now we’re starting to tell the truth. Life grows in truth. So let’s just start being more honest. If you can be honest with yourself, you can give yourself a chance. Just give yourself a chance.

Mike: I love it, man. This has been a good chat, my friend.

Chris: Fantastic.

Mike: I’m really enjoying this and I wanna do more of this. I wish. Well, we’re gonna go talk right after. Yeah, we are. We’re gonna talk real after this. The public speaking, what is it like getting up on that stage when you have the confidence in the know. Like I keep thinking like one of the things I keep saying, God, I would love to, like, I’d love to do like, I love public speaking, but I like to walk up and have complete control and confidence and knowing that your message is, is literally helping people get to a better place in their journey.

Chris: Do I have complete confidence? You think so?

Mike: Well, that’s, fair enough. Although, although I will say quote unquote. When we were that we were talking on the line you’re like, I’m a damn good speaker.

Chris: I know I’m a good speaker. I’m amazing

Mike: good speaker. I’m the best speaker you’ll ever have. That sounds like confidence.

Chris: I’m a great speaker, but I still have nervousness from time to time. I still have that.

Mike: Doesn’t mean you don’t confidence.

Chris: Nope, but there’s times like things could go wrong. I start to get in my head and I have to actively use all these systems.

Mike: Okay, still happens. Okay, okay.

Chris: And that’s but that’s a I think that’s the beautiful part.

Mike: That is kind of the beautiful part.

Chris: It’s not like I’m just great all the time. Like I have to actively put myself there. I’m like, hey, listen I’m nervous a little but I’m excited. I’m really excited to share a message. I care about I’ve put in the time in the work to be confident. I’ve put in the work. Confidence is, is a moment like it’s, it’s momentary, but like it, it builds when you put the effort in.

Mike: True.

Chris: You can be much more confident when you spend effort on something. I can tell you this. When I went to take a test, I didn’t study for, I really wasn’t confident. And when I went to take a test, I studied for, I was damn confident.

Mike: Outcome the same.

Chris: Probably.

So, but, but it feels good. I love public speaking and it’s something that I will do. I will always put myself in a vulnerable position, whether I’m feeling really confident that they are not, because I know that, I want to give my message of what I speak on. So that comes with practice. Yes. That comes with like, if you want to do public speaking, you can, you have to practice and learn. But man, nothing is better to me than stepping on stage and hearing all the clamoring of the audience, you know, and I’m silent.

And in my silence, there’s so much power in silence that the room goes pin drop quiet. And I pause a beat and then I can start. And it’s like a, it’s like an orchestra, like the way you can use word and story to create emotion. And in the first two minutes of one of my main talks, I don’t speak at all and I’m doing something.

And in that moment it is quiet. Then people laugh and then people gasp and then they’re just like tuned in. And the second I start speaking, it goes from laughter to tears, like that. And I know from those two minutes for the next 60 minutes, they’re mine.

Mike: Yeah, I got them.

Chris: I got them. And they’re willing to listen.

I watch, say this was the phone. I watch people like put their phone down and lean in. And it’s the best feeling in the world to see that, to see people, that means you’re ready to learn, resonating, see people ready to learn, willing, willing to listen. That’s part skill, but also part message and I love what I do, man.

I absolutely love what I do.

Mike: And you’re good at it, man. And you, and you are, I mean, just showing up here and just walking. It’s been, it’s been really fun. I, what are some of the, and I’m hoping that you’ll reference the Titan games, but along the way with the modeling and the, and the deadlifting and the weight training and the book and the public speaking and the all these things you’ve done. You’ve done so many fun things and that’s a cool journey. It’s been, a doesn’t take away from the hell that it took you to get there.

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: But you’ve embraced that and you’re living a good life of service and doing good work. What are some of like some neat little behind the scenes memories or moments in time that you’re like, they just kind of jump out in your head and go man It was this was kind of cool, like I really like this. Give me a few if you don’t mind.

Chris: So one of the most impactful was right after I did Titan games I got an invite to go to Uganda to speak in Uganda about diabetes to neighboring countries. So, South Sudan, Congo, and Uganda, and it was a collective of all kids with diabetes. And I got to speak to these different groups of people and it was translated live in three different languages.

And I went from, like, and I did a camp with them. I was there for like 12 days. I did a camp with them and I went from them being terrified of me because I’m like a large white man with a prosthetic arm, you know, and they’re like…

Mike: I was thinking more of the tattoos.

Chris: What’s, that, everything, all of that. To them becoming like best friends with me, we’re playing soccer and like doing all these games, like just feeling I earned their trust and like being able to speak to them about concepts that are universal from different worlds almost.

Coming together, like that was incredible. Absolutely incredible experience. Doing the TV show with The Rock was incredible. I never applied to be on the show, but they reached out to me. I thought they wanted to get on camera and like do an interview.

Mike: How many years ago was that? Five years ago? Six years ago?

Chris: Six years ago now. Yeah. So they wanted to do an interview and it was late at night because of California time. And I was like, I’m not taking no clothes off. I don’t know what this is. Super sketchy. I did that interview and I was like, cool. That was awesome. They called me back. I competed for a spot. So I went out for two days, competed against a bunch of people.

Mike: And so talk about the Titan games real quick.

Chris: Yeah.

Mike: For folks who don’t get it.

Chris: Titan Games is like American Ninja Warrior kind of, but it was like head-to-head battle and it was hosted by Dwayne the Rock Johnson on NBC. And then it was cast across Fox Asia. There was 30 competitors and I was chosen to be one of the 15 guys.

And on top of that, I was chosen to be one of the three guys on all the billboards, buses, magazines, and everything.

Mike: Dang.

Chris: So broadcast on Netflix, NBC and all over the world. I lost my episode, but I got to share a message that went around the world globally. The Rock came down and hugged me. And like, it was such a cool moment. Such a cool experience.

Mike: It was a great message. So do you, do you, I’m sure you kind of remember the gist of it, but I watched it last night and I was like, man, what a, what a moment of, of, of a camera crew walking over to your interviewing with the young lady. And she just says, ask you a question and you’re like, just delivered. Like talk about…

Chris: I think I just felt in that moment. That’s what I, that’s what I felt as I was like hanging down, like coming down. Like, I just felt like for every kid, like, and speaking to myself too, but like for every kid that like, never really thought they could be there, that they could get to that level. Like, I made it. We can make it. Like there, there’s an opportunity there. It’s not… the barriers might exist, yes, but there’s ways around them. There’s ways through them. And like, I was so proud to be that person because I pictured that little girl that, you know, walked with me down the corridor, or my friend Sadie, who’s I think 10 now and she’s missing part of her arm.

There’s a life for them. There’s a world for them. And it’s unlimited because of some of us chose to go through the thick of it. And I was so proud of that moment. Like, yeah, of course, I would have loved to win, but being able to share that message, getting that across, man, that was, that was something.

Mike: It was, it was perfectly timed. I mean, it was just.

Chris: It just came out. It just, it was I’m very thankful that I was able to speak that night because there was so much going on so much, but Someone said on YouTube, they were like, you might’ve lost, but you won the hearts of everyone.

Mike: Oh yeah. It was well done. I mean, it was just, it was great timing.

Chris: It wasn’t planned whatsoever.

Mike: Well, no, you couldn’t.

Chris: I planned on winning so like, yeah.

Mike: No, you could tell it wasn’t planned obviously. You know, but then The Rock, I didn’t even, then I heard The Rock. I’m like, yo, dude, kick his ass for me. Is he like really nine foot tall?

Chris: He’s not as tall as it seems, but he’s really cool. It was like down to earth conversation like us. I, when he left the room, we’re like, that was The Rock and he was just chilling with us like cursing and messing around like, like a normal person. And I’m like, that’s so cool. That’s it.

Mike: Well, that’s, that’s the authenticity. Human beings just makes it so much better. And that’s, and that goes back to the honesty piece. And when you actually become, at least work on becoming the person you are, you have that more of that comfort level of showing the real you. Yeah. And then when you are comfortable with whatever that outcome is, it’s like, ah, I can just be myself.

Chris: And I love that. It’s a, it’s a piece, you know.

Mike: It is an incredible piece. All right, man. So. Listen, here’s the reality. When you and I talked last week. When we hit it all, I thought it was a really cool conversation. And you had cool technology too. But the fact that you got down here, and we did this, and it’s been so much fun.

It was like less than a week. And I was like, it was just, and I think that there’s, again, I’m a big believer in everything happens for a reason. And I’m just I just want to say I’m grateful for you being here, man And this has been this is a nice This is just a nice chat and I’m hopeful that this we continue to do things together find ways to do things together to help other people And I’m just honored man. I really appreciate you being here, brother.

Chris: I appreciate you. Yeah, this has been fun.

Mike: Thanks for tuning in to Access Granted Powered by Ablr. I’m your host, Mike Iannelli, and I hope you took away some valuable insights from today’s conversation with Chris Ruden. His experiences shed light on the everyday realities of disability inclusion, especially the importance of thoughtful etiquette and how small actions can make a big impact.

We can’t wait to have more conversations this year with individuals like Chris. Who make the world a more inclusive, accessible place for all. As we always say at Ablr, nothing about us, without us.