Patrick Donohoe

Primal Instinct & Gratitude

TWS 30 | Primal Instinct

 

Every human being has this primal instinct that awakens whenever we need to protect our loved ones. But on the other side of this survival nature is the far opposite: the expression of gratitude. In this Thanksgiving message, Patrick Donohoe looks back on how he protected his wife and kids from a possible assault by tapping into his primal instinct in just a split second. He explains how this opened his eyes that there is more to life than simply fighting to live, but also mindfulness and vulnerability.

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Primal Instinct & Gratitude

This episode is sponsored by the new and improved Financial Independence Calculator found at TheWealthStandard.com/calculator. One of the driving forces of human beings is freedom, which infers financial freedom too. Several years ago, I set out to discover how any individual, regardless of their financial situation, could evaluate their finances in five minutes or less, and have a firm date when they could achieve financial independence. The latest version of this calculator is free for the audience. The calculator is going to take you a few minutes to complete. It’s going to provide you with a specific financial independence date, so go check it out.

My wife and I went out to breakfast at a place that’s a mile from our house. The food was awesome. It was later in the morning, so there weren’t many people there for breakfast. I had this incredible plate. It had this thick piece of homemade bread with breakfast potatoes and scrambled eggs, and this gravy that they make which is incredible, and then this man walks in. He’s bigger. He’s was probably pushing 300 pounds. His pants and shirt were noticeably dirty and he had this facial expression. When I saw it, I knew instantly that something wasn’t right. Let me pause for a second.

TWS 30 | Primal Instinct

When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake

I’m going to take you back to 2019. I attended this personal development event in Maui. The focus of the event was relationships, and my wife went with me. Part of the event had this self-defense component and it was conducted by a former Navy Seal and author of many books. He’s been in this space of hand-to-hand combat and self-defense. His name’s Tim Larkin. He wrote a couple of books. One is called When Violence Is the Answer. This part of the conference appealed to me as it would with most guys but specific to me, I realized that I didn’t have any formal fighting experience outside of my ice hockey days and the occasional brawl, which I wouldn’t consider self-defense.

I have three kids. Two of which are teenage girls. Outside of the guns that I own, I realized that I did not have the hand-to-hand combat skills to adequately protect my family. Now, the training wasn’t self-defense. It was ways to incapacitate someone, rupture their groin, pop out an eyeball, break an ankle or a knee, the trachea, and ways to hit a neck. In most cases, to make a person’s violent act completely halted or to also potentially kill someone. It was training so that if a violent situation was your fate or your family’s fate, that you at a minimum had a fighting chance. Most don’t.

These sessions are part of this conference. There are multi-hour sessions that strategically began with these disturbing video clips of violent crimes. It was intended to shock our nervous system to get us to realize that these things really happen. We got into partnerships and we sparred up for hours, but we sparred in slow motion. This slow-motion, the idea was to program our subconscious so that our bodies and our nervous system did not forget what we were learning. If we ever had to use it, it was one strike, then another, then another, then another.

Each partner took their turns and we went back and forth multiple times. A couple of months ago, I went to another event. Part of the event included similar training. This was an event that was put on by one of the show’s guests, Tim Reynolds. It was incredible to go through that because it had been a couple of years since I went through the initial training. It was like my mind knew what the stakes were, and my body almost innately knew what to do.

Wealth is experiencing life fully. You don't have any idea what's going to happen from one day to the next. Click To Tweet

Now, let’s get back to the story. This guy sat down and my wife was closer to him than I was. I slowly moved her to the other side of the table. It happened to be right by an exit door. We inconspicuously shifted around so we wouldn’t notice it, then it happened. It was like those fighting movies, I think Sherlock Holmes is one of them, when they see what happens in advance of it happening. In my mind, this guy stood up. He began assaulting one of the servers. I told my wife, “Get out to the exit.” I rushed her out. I then took a glass ketchup bottle that was next to me and I hurled it, hitting him square in the face. I took another ketchup bottle, went around the corner, and hit him again. I blindsided him, took him to the ground, hit his groin, hit his neck, and broke his ankle. This played out in my mind in a matter of seconds. It was crazy. This is in my mind. This is not what happened but I sat there and I stared at him.

There was a level of intensity that I hadn’t experienced often, but that intensity existed when we made eye contact. He stared back at me. It’s like he knew what I was thinking. I didn’t break eye contact. I leaned in and he checked his surroundings. He looked back at me, then he slowly got up and left. Why do I share this with you? I’ve talked a lot about all of us human beings are part animals, especially men. We’re part primal. Our limbic system is pure survival for ourselves and it’s protecting those that we love.

TWS 30 | Primal Instinct

Primal Instinct: All human beings are part animal. The limbic system is about pure survival. It’s to protect those that you love.

 

I believe that this vital part of us or one of the oldest parts of us is essential. It has a role. However, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, this primal part of us is the enemy. I say that because the expression of gratitude is the diametric opposite. Gratitude requires mindfulness, centeredness, vulnerability, and presence. Gratitude leads us to what I believe are the experiences that we are ultimately striving for, which is connection.

This show covers all aspects of wealth. It’s important to define wealth. To me, wealth is experiencing life fully. We don’t have any idea what’s going to happen to us from one day to the next. We never have. This experience led me to re-evaluate who I am for my wife and my children. Although experiencing how primal I got, it was awesome at the moment but it caused me to reflect on the subtle ways I was going primal when the situation didn’t warrant that part of me. I’d like to share that with you and I’m going to share it on the next episode because what happened was humbling, to say the least. Until then, experience wealth with those that you love. Be present, be mindful and be grateful.

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Life is Calling

TWS 29 | Life Is Calling

 

Life is calling, and it calls for us to grow in the form of obstacles, problems, and challenges. In this episode, Patrick Donohoe shares an entry in his journal coming from his own personal experiences, friends, and work associates. It says the lessons life teaches us about marriage, parenthood, friendship, leadership, business, and investing are not meant to teach us a skill, fact, tactic, or strategy. They are to help us discover the multiple facets of who we are and use them strategically to show up to life. Life is calling. Answer the call.

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Life is Calling

This episode is sponsored by the new and improved Financial Independence Calculator found at TheWealthStandard.com/calculator. One of the driving forces of human beings is freedom, which infers financial freedom too. Several years ago, I set out to discover how any individual regardless of their financial situation could evaluate their finances in five minutes or less and have a firm date when they could achieve financial independence. The latest version of this calculator, which is free for readers can be found at TheWealthStandard.com/calculator. The calculator is going to take you a few minutes to complete and it’s going to provide you with a specific financial independence date. Check it out.

In this week’s show, I’m going to share something I wrote in my journal. I associate what I’m about to share with you like something that’s come from my personal experiences, present and in the past as well as some individuals who are going through some rough patches in their lives some childhood friends and work associates. A flood of information came to me.

I feel that it was in part influenced by those who have inspired me in the past. I can name them but I won’t do that. I’m going to quote a few of them. I feel that this is right for the readers, especially given the current time that we find ourselves in whether it’s society or the time and place or the world as a whole but I felt it would be appropriate to share.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine. Click To Tweet

I’ve come to realize that the lessons of life, marriage, parenthood, friendship, leadership, business and investing were not meant to teach me a skill, a fact, tactic or strategy. The lessons were to help me discover the multiple facets of who I am and then use them strategically to show up to life. Science shows that stagnation does not exist in the universe. In everything, there is constant motion. A motion toward growth or death.

The nature of being alive presupposes that life calls to you. It calls for you to grow. Silencing the call is a death sentence. The call is in the form of obstacles, problems and challenges. Answer the call is met with a corresponding degree of pain amplifying with each failure. Life rarely calls to the whole of who you are but to specific parts of your personality, not the typical defaults that always show up but those parts that have been underutilized, sidelined, suppressed and even forgotten.

The breadth of our personality distinguishes the human being from the animal and plant kingdom. We can nurture a child one day and fight tooth and nail to defend our home the next. We can laugh until we cry and feel deep love and compassion. We can follow. We can lead and inspire. We can follow a trodden path. We can create a new one. We can breakthrough. We can back down and let go. We can direct. We can listen. We can smile. We can intensely stand.

TWS 29 | Life Is Calling

Life Is Calling: It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be?

 

We can graciously take credit. We can experience greatness as a team or together. We can be present. I’m saying this to myself. Until you reclaim those other parts of you, you will live in fear because deep inside, you know that the default of your personality has limits and will not successfully conquer the myriad of problems life throws at you. Tony Robbins says, “Fear is nothing but the uncertainty that comes from living in a place where you are not using all of your resources, what’s inside you because you think you’re something you’re not or it’s wrong.”

What you’re equally afraid of is not that you have what it takes but the fear of what it will mean to the image of who you think you are. Marianne Williamson said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” This goes to the parts that don’t typically arise or show up to life. Who are you not to be? You’re a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Click To Tweet

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” These are quotes that you may have heard before. The quotes that I’ve read before. Understanding them from the perspective I set, in the beginning, made them so much clearer to me.

Finally, another quote, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” As you learn about these different parts of you and how incredible they are in certain circumstances and then show up that way, life becomes an adventure because you know that any obstacle, challenge, anything that’s put in your way is conquerable. You have the power within to do that. What part of you is life-calling? The compassionate and forgiving? The witty, creative thinker and problem solver? The let loose, the life of the party? The stoic, temperate or poise of your internal king or queen? The fearless, breakdown walls, stop at nothing but victory part of you? Life is calling. Answer the call.

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Physically Mastering Wealth Series

TWS 27 | Physically Mastering Wealth

Is it possible to physically master wealth? For the first part of the Physically Mastering Wealth Series, Patrick Donohoe discusses why understanding how habits are formed and how behavior is conditioned helps in creating more wealth. It’s all about figuring out what works best and leveraging your resources to produce optimal results. And then doing it again and again. Want to learn more? Tune in for more insight on how you can make creating wealth a habit!

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Physically Mastering Wealth Series

Part 1

One of the driving forces of human beings is freedom, which infers financial freedom too. Several years ago, I set out to discover how any individual, regardless of their financial situation, could evaluate their finances in five minutes or less and have a firm date when they could achieve financial independence. The latest version of this calculator, which is free for readers, can be found at TheWealthStandard.com/calculator. The calculator is going to take you just a few minutes to complete, and it’s going to provide you with a specific financial independence date. Go check it out.

This episode is picking up on something I discussed last time, which is the idea of physical mastery. We show up to life doing pretty much the same thing day in and day out. It’s how we’re biologically wired. There’s so much going on in society now. Information, ideas, opinions, stimuli from every different angle. Look at our phones and how distracting with all the things that we can do. If you want to make progress when it comes to your wealth, you have to understand how habits are formed and how behavior is conditioned.

Without that, it’s going to be a challenge. Ultimately, that leads to taking excessive risks and risks always end in failure usually, especially if you’re taking consistent risks like that, and ultimately will lead to new condition behavior. Hopefully, if you’re learning those lessons, but taking proactive actions will allow you to start to pick up on other people’s failures and discoveries so that you don’t have to necessarily take too much risk and put failure on the line and obviously unintended consequences of that failure.

We’re going to get into 1 of the 2 primary ways in which Wealth Building occurs. I want you to consider this as a possibility for yourself. This is based on my experience. I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to meet lots of different people, experience a busy business, and see not just my own myriad of failures but also those of others in different businesses and industries, etc. These are the conclusions that I’ve come to. They’re not necessarily these absolute conclusions that will not evolve. Of course, they’re going to evolve, but I wanted to talk about the first, which is leadership and operational leverage.

It all boils down to leverage. I want you to consider the possibility that making more money, being wealthier as far as producing income is in proportion to the leverage of your time, number one, and then also relationships with other people. In other words, the idea that sentence is making a bigger impact with the time that you have. The biggest challenge is that 99.9% of us have been conditioned to do the opposite.

If you want to make progress when it comes to your wealth, you have to understand how habits are formed and how behavior is conditioned. Click To Tweet

Let me give you a story. This is a conversation I had with a younger guy, cool guy, good energy, lots of ambition, but he made a comment which points to what I’m trying to get across in this episode. He said first off, he managed a small supplement store of a bigger conglomerate. They were growing successful. He loved his job. He loved being healthy, working out and physical conditioning. He made a comment which he told me everything. We had a longer discussion and went into the details of it.

He said that he couldn’t leave his store for long to go to an event, be away for the weekend and take a day off. He can’t leave because the employees are or assistant managers will mess it up. They’ll screw it up. They won’t do it the way that he does it. In that, this is how most of us are conditioned because we’re raised in the US school system wishes, which is based in the Prussian system.

The Prussian system was designed to train factory workers as well as military soldiers. It’s for us to just follow orders or tasks. We’re not taught to necessarily be a leader. We’re taught to we’re a manager and tell people what to do. This is a huge example between the idea of management and leadership managers manage tasks and tell people what to do they usually use the tactic of fear to do it. That’s what society continues to condition in the political realm, in the school educational system, as well as in Corporate America.

That’s a big difference because that’s not leadership. Leadership initiated more training and conditioning then instead of disciplining somebody, it’s coaching them and continuing to train them until proven processes and principles gave become part of their makeup. It’s been conditioned into them where they would do what you would do. They would do what has been proven to be done. In this case, in this story, processes weren’t documented, training did not revolve around proven and successful processes or principles.

That’s why it led to this very awkward manager-employee relationship, which usually never progresses. This is where I want to highlight how valuable it is to understand the idea of leadership because if this manager of one store, he understands why his store was one of the most successful ones in the territory. He knew what it took to run a successful business.

Those processes, he held them close to the trust because there was so much meaning there. It was him. He was validated. He felt important because he was successful. The idea of leadership is not keeping that to yourself. The idea of leadership is training others to do exactly what you would do to get that success.

TWS 27 | Physically Mastering Wealth

Physically Mastering Wealth: Consider the possibility that making more money, being wealthier as far as producing income is in proportion to the leverage of your time relationships with other people.

 

What does that have to do with leverage? If you have one store that’s successful, that’s being run by somebody doing things the way that you would do them, then two stores are possible, then 3, 4, and 5. Let’s say that a district is comprised of five stores. If you’ve done five stores, now you can do a district. If you can do one district, you can do 2, 3, 4, 5, or 10. Now you’re upwards of dozens of different shops that you as a leader are able to have stewardship over it because you have conditioned into employees, proven processes and proven systems.

This obviously supplement stores, but this applies to all industries. The technology industry has mastered this just because of how complex that world in that industry is. The more you understand leadership and how much you can leverage time by employing proven tactics, proven strategies, now you can control a host of resources and subsequently make a lot more money.

I’m going to keep going with this idea of operational leverage because our world is evolving rapidly and people are looking for ways in which they can be more efficient all the time. You don’t have to go out and necessarily invent it. I looked at really two things in the business world that create an immense amount of leverage. The first is the media. The second is technology. It’s the same idea as you’re looking for ways in which you can do more with the time that you have.

Let’s use an example of a story. We’re doing a live event. Zoom-wise, there are a couple of people that are doing the event. It’s basically training that I do a couple of times a year for other financial advisors. I have done this with a partner of mine for years. First off, the business that I run is very different than the typical financial services, financial planning practice because we’ve done it for many years virtually through webinars. This was before webinars even popularized. Before video webinars, we used to go to a meeting.

Adobe Connect is another one that we used way back in the day. It’s super clunky software, but we didn’t have people come into our office, but the typical financial practice is that they went to people’s houses. They had people come into their office. It’s inefficient in my perspective. We were always told, “You can’t do that.”

People will never do that. They’ll never do business with you unless you build that face-to-face relationship. Even early on, we had compliance departments flying out to our office gate because they were like, “No way you can’t build a relationship with somebody. You can’t do business with people without seeing them face to face.” It was a very challenging time.

Obviously, it’s been adopted by a lot of different businesses these days, but my point is it’s very difficult to go from what you’ve been doing to something that’s new. This is why conditioning is so important. Physical mastery requires repetition, but even during COVID, because with this advisor group, I had been talking to them for years about virtual business and meeting with clients over webinars, the technology was easier. Conditioned behavior is like, “No. I can’t do that.”

COVID forced it. This is usually how behavior changes. Either it’s a conditioned change, very strategic we condition change or there’s a massive disruption that forces change. If you think you need to change something, it’s going to continue to compound, grow and fester until you’re forced to change. Might as well rip the Band-Aid off right now.

There’s two things in the business world that create an immense amount of leverage. The first is the media. The second is technology. Click To Tweet

COVID comes on and people start to see, “I can do Zoom webinars. I can do this and that,” before they had to conduct a conditioned behavior to do things a certain way because that’s where they found success. Obviously, it makes sense, but at the same time, this is the idea behind Zoom being hugely beneficial because now you can have 5 meetings a day instead of 2. You can meet with dozens of more people who don’t necessarily have to come to your office in coordinating schedules, getting time off, getting a babysitter and the list goes on.

The idea of just having technology of being able to communicate with somebody face to face across the internet, massive leverage is possible because of that and lots of businesses experience it. That’s just an example because there are technologies everywhere. They are essentially finding ways to replace predictable things that you are currently doing manually. I’m not saying that you replace people as a whole. There are theories around AI and robotics doing that.

I don’t want to go that far. What I’m saying is that there are inefficiencies in how you manage your time. The most valuable time that anybody has is spent in front of other people, like engaging in meaningful conversation, but there’s lots of other stuff that takes away from that, whether it’s paperwork, documentation, appointment reminders, how you do the actual meetings or taking notes.

I can keep going on with examples, but there are technologies that are coming out that allow you to spend more time in the most meaningful things, begin to look for it, and incorporate it into your system and your rhythm. Technology is the first thing. Media is the second thing, whether it’s video or podcasts. When you do a video, you do it once you spend an hour doing it, “I’m going to do this podcast for 15 or 20 minutes.” It can be listened to by one million people, but I only spent 15 to 20 minutes on it. That is leverage.

I have another story. I have a good buddy who is successful in a specific construction niche because he was able to find a foundation raising. When a foundation settles and cracks, he found a very efficient process that was developed in the Midwest that he went out and learned and then brought to Utah. Now he has locations in Northern and Southern Utah where he has these systems that he’s used to raising the foundation and do it inexpensively as well as efficiently quick.

It’s what he’s done to train his staff. He started to use media. He’ll record how this machine is operated, how you do a phone call, how you go out and do a bid. He found all the different successful ways in which he did it, and then he’d created media that trained staff in order to do it. That’s another form of media being an ideal way to leverage the most predictable things because he found that time and energy were being spent in training. Leaves doing it manually every single time. There were certain things in training that were predictable that he had to do over and over again.

He started to use media as leverage so that he could spend his time doing more meaningful things. There are lots to unpack here. I’m not going to do it in this show because there are so many different examples, but building physical mastery around the idea of leadership is for you to constantly be finding ways in which you can be more valuable with the time that you have.

It creates massive wealth for people you look at, whether it’s district managers or executive-level positions. They understand operations and leadership of people, so that with the time that you have, you’re able to have stewardship over lots of different production because you understand the dynamics of leadership people, relationships as well as proven and successful processes.

TWS 27 | Physically Mastering Wealth

Physically Mastering Wealth: Building physical mastery around the idea of leadership is for you to constantly be finding ways in which you can be more valuable with the time that you have.

 

I’m going to give you some books. You guys can go check out the show notes on TheWealthStandard.com for some of the best books that are out there. I mentioned a lot of this stuff in my book, which is Heads I Win Tails You Lose and get a free copy by just going to the website under the resources tab. There’s a couple of other Cameron Herold. I’ve known Cameron for several years. He has several books on this. One of the first ones was Double Double, but he has other ones called Meetings Suck. He has a Vivid Vision. He’s a great author. It’s very easy to read books and understand. They have actionable things that you can do.

Another one, a couple of books by Jocko Willink, Dichotomy of Leadership. It is an awesome book. He also has Leadership Strategy and Tactics, which is a field manual that gives you playbooks of how to find opportunities to better lead your team instead of just managing them. There’s Traction by Gino Wickman. This is a way in which you can incorporate processes into your business and find successful processes and have your team replicate those processes.

The CEO within another great book that I’ve come across, and then most of the stuff by John Maxwell is absolutely incredible. That’s part two, which is production leverage. You are producing wealth which I believe is the one you have the greatest return and there are infinite possibilities, but you have to understand the ideas of leverage.

Find ways in which you ingrain that in your mind because your body and mindset is pretty much influenced to do the exact opposite because that’s how we have been raised in this United States society, under this hierarchical management-driven, fear-driven, whiplash-driven society, and that’s not the way to lead. That’s not how you create leverage. Next episode, we’re going to talk about financial habits, some of the few things you can do to institute financial habits that will create wealth. Thanks for reading. We’ll see you back next episode. Bye.

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Mastering Wealth By Developing New Habits

TWS 26 | Master Wealth

In order to master wealth, you need to master your habits. You need to develop new habits so that you don’t just do the same thing over and over. Wealth is a direct result of habits. Join your host Patrick Donohoe as he talks about the different levels of masteries and why habits are crucial to life. Replace your existing habits with new ones today!

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Listen to the podcast here:

Mastering Wealth By Developing New Habits

Can you learn how to be wealthy? In my experience, wealth is a direct result of habits. You don’t simply read a book, go to a conference, watch a YouTube video and end up being wealthy. At least, that’s my experience. There are some who roll the dice and hit seven. They play Blackjack, bet everything and hit 21. To me, that’s not wealth. That’s a risk. If that’s a strategy or a pattern you want to develop, that doesn’t usually end up producing good results. I believe that wealth is when principled ideas are baked into our nervous system. Our actions to the dynamic or the ever-changing experiences of life are more automatic or unconscious.

How do you get to that point when these principled ideas are baked into your nervous system? First, it’s understanding that ideas and information must travel through three levels particularly. The first level is Cognitive Mastery, which is understanding the ideas and information rationally, and how they apply to the circumstances of your life and what you want.

The second level is Emotional Mastery. This is where you understand that emotions are simply signaling something and they’re there to serve you. They’re there usually to protect you. It’s understanding the nature and the purpose of those emotions, and then figuring out a way to get them to serve you as opposed to how most people treat their emotions where they want to suppress, not embrace.

TWS 26 | Master Wealth

Master Wealth: Wealth is when principled ideas are baked into your nervous system. That your actions to the ever-changing experiences of life are more automatic.

 

The third is Physical Mastery. Physical mastery is when you don’t even think about your actions or reactions, or your decisions. They’re part of you. An easy example of physical mastery is sports. I played ice hockey growing up. I’m in my 40s but with the experience I had growing up playing over and over again street hockey, pond hockey, youth hockey in high school and then college, my body understands how to play hockey. I don’t have to think about it now. Now I’m older, slower, weigh a little bit more than I did when I was younger. At the same time, my body remembers how to skate, pass and shoot. When I played during the summers in a men’s league, I don’t have to think about it. That is physical mastery.

I’ll give you another example as it relates to the new circumstances of our life because that’s an existing circumstance of life. Playing a new game but it’s still the same game. A few months ago, my wife was somewhat critical of how I was acting and she’s usually right. I brought some challenges from work home and it was impacting how present I was for her as well as my kids. She said to me, “With everything you read, all these conferences that you go to, and all the money you’re spending to improve yourself as a human being, our family, the business, you think you’ve figured out a way to show up better when you come home.”

My initial response, you can imagine, the emotional triggers were going off. Many years ago, I would have responded completely differently than I did, but I understood how those responses would serve me or not serve me. They would not serve me. It would have been a rocky road if I responded the way I did many years ago. At that moment, I swore to myself a few times in my head, and then snapped out of it and figured out a way to be present with my family. I fell into those old patterns. We all do. It’s how long we spend suffering in those old patterns if they’re patterns that do not serve us.

Wealth is a direct result of habits. Click To Tweet

A famous quote that I love is, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, it’s a habit.” This is usually accredited to Aristotle. It was a guy in the early 1900s named Will Durant who took two of Aristotle’s quotes and summarize them within that quote. This is the lesson from these experiences that I’ve been talking about. We have the illusion that we are consciously in control of our day-to-day experiences. I want you to consider just for a moment the possibility that you have zero control. Your responses to the daily circumstances of life are automatic. They are already baked in.

I don’t believe in absolutes but I want you to consider for a moment that how you are going to show up is already baked into your body or your nervous system. If you are happy with the results that you want in life, great. At the same time, we’re wired to grow. There is a paradox there because if you’re wired to grow, it means that you need to have different results than you have now. Trying to look at the same patterns and habits as before producing new results leads to the definition of insanity.

It’s not going to come from our patterns and habits of the past. We want new results. We first have to understand how patterns and habits are developed, and then strategically design some situations and strategies to get rid of or reprogram our old habits and patterns and replace them with new ones. I believe that there are a few primary variables in developing new habits. Number one that’s counterintuitive to how society operates, we’re used to information at our disposal immediately. We’re used to instant food, instant entertainment, everything’s instant.

TWS 26 | Master Wealth

Master Wealth: Replace your existing patterns and habits with new ones. You have to really understand some psychology, but also that it takes a bit of time to develop new habits.

 

I believe that patterns and habits are the opposite. It takes a while, especially as we get older. Replacing existing patterns and habits with new ones. We have to understand some psychology. We have to understand that it takes a bit of time to develop these habits but they’re worth it. Here are a couple of variables. The first variable is designing the pattern or the habit or actions. We want to design them after what’s proven to work. We have lots of examples of the different patterns as it relates to wealth and finance that work.

The second is designing a strategy that either forces us to do it or a strategy that allows repetition over and over again to build into our nervous system these habits. A great example that I love to use is CrossFit. It’s a different workout every single day. It’s hard. I don’t have to think about that. The pattern that I developed was getting up at a certain hour and showing up every single day. That’s a strategic design to get a good workout every single day.

The final variable is establishing stakes, where you recognize that if you don’t change or grow, what’s going to happen? That’s a negative state but you also start to identify the positives. What you’re going to gain? What your experience of life is going to be like if you develop these habits? Over the next two episodes of the show, I’m going to talk about the two primary areas of wealth building. I would say the best habits in those areas. The first area is going to be how you produce income. The second area is what you do with your money.

You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act. It's a habit. Click To Tweet

I’m going to talk about the habits that I have seen serve people. I’ve seen these habits produce millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions for people that I know. From a production standpoint, how you make money, and then also investing habits, saving habits, spending habits. Ways in which you can develop these habits and patterns that will ultimately serve you.

Next two episodes, make sure you check back. It’s going to be a fun little series here. Thanks for reading. You got the website for more information about the show and other resources. We’ve updated the resource page and lots of cool stuff are on there. Go check that out. We will talk to you next time, where we will get into the first area of wealth building, which is making money.

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A Fulfilling Life Will Never Come From Achieving Goals With Tim Reynolds

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

What are the things you need to do to live a fulfilling life? Does it come from achieving goals? Dr. Tim Reynolds, author and creator of Living Every Minute, doesn’t think that’s always the case, and in this interview with host Patrick Donohoe, we learn where fulfillment comes from. We listen to Tim’s recollections about family and a story about a medical emergency he had worked on that showed him why the goal isn’t all there is, and that sometimes, the journey is just as important. Be inspired by Tim’s words and be ready to live a greater life.

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A Fulfilling Life Will Never Come From Achieving Goals With Tim Reynolds

The following five episodes are with businessman, investor, doctor, and now author, Tim Reynolds. The interview was in-person in my office. If you’re reading the episodes and want to watch the videos, just go head over to TheWealthStandard.com, and it’ll have a link there. When the five segments are complete, we’re going to post the entire interview on our YouTube channel. Make sure you check that out.

A little bit about Tim. He is a former Green Beret in the Special Forces. He was a medic and also a battalion surgeon. He graduated from Texas A&M with his Medical degree and his specialization was Emergency Medicine. He was an emergency room doctor for several years, and then co-started a company called HealthCARE Express.

He has 15 or 16 locations throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He has his book. You can check it out on Amazon. It’s called Living Every Minute. It’s also on Audible. He reads the Audible audio book. Tim is an amazing guy. He is one of the first original platinum partners with Tony Robbins. He has love and zest for life. It’s throughout his book. It’s going to be throughout this interview.

You can imagine that in the roles that he’s played, he has experienced firsthand the fragility of life. He’s going to share some of those experiences throughout these five segments. I want to forewarn you. This is a PG thirteen-ish interview. There’s some colorful language. There are also some relatively graphic stories that Tim tells, but you are going to experience him, his heart, and his passion for life. You can check his website out. It’s LivingEveryMinute.com. He has some personal development programs, courses, and a lot of other resources that you want to check out. Go head over there. Without further delay, let’s start episode one with my dear friend, Tim Reynolds.

If you took the pillar of relationships in the book, we talked about the 30-second make-out session. I’ll give this as an example. I invented this thing called the 30-second make-out session. It’s a crazy, simple idea. If you’re the guy, you walk into your wife, she’s in the kitchen, or she’s at work, even better. Wherever you find her, you throw her up against the wall, make out, hair grab, and whatever it is that she likes like two rowdy kids. If you’ve been married for a long time, that doesn’t happen very often. What if you did that for 30 seconds and then you walk away? Don’t say a damn word, especially if you don’t tell her that you’ve read the book. You walk away.

What if she slaps you?

She would be like, “Wait.” I’ll grab her harder. She’d be like, “Wow.” It would make her all day. It would be like, she’d want more maybe, but you don’t give it to her and make her beg for it. You would walk away. What if you did that? It’s 30 seconds. For reasons we don’t, we create all these rules about why I wouldn’t do, she shouldn’t do. Fuck all that. Go do it.

If you did that once a day, it would change your entire marriage. That one thing. What I tried to do in the book is not just good philosophy. You go do this. I have five kids. They’ve very successful, great and wonderful. They’re not kids anymore. They’re all adults. Three doctors, one got a business degree, the other one got a brand-new degree. They’ll all come back to work in our companies.

We want the world better for our offspring than it was for us. We want to leave a better place. Click To Tweet

People say, “How are your kids so successful?” I said, “We were blessed.” Obviously, we don’t take credit for all of it. Second thing is, every week, I interview them. They remember this. I would sit in my office and they would have to come in and they’d have to have an interview with Dad. I might’ve sat on the other side of the desk.

It was like a formal interview. “How’s school? How are your friends? What are you doing with so-and-so? What are you thinking about football next year?” We have this interview. I don’t know why I started doing it. I don’t remember. They still say, “I wish we still did those interviews. I love that time.” That’s in the book. Why wouldn’t you do that? Do that. That’s not hard. It’s very simple. They treasure that time. That’s what I’ll do.

Drive up the presence.

Knowing that dad was there. Now that they’re adults, they still want me to do it. I’ll give you one more example. You’ve read this, about the family mission statement. We do what we call the Reynolds family retreats. Once a year, we go somewhere. We went to South Africa. It’s been as simple as going to up to lake camping and it doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, it was. We were reading a book called The Traveler’s Gift. The book has an adult version and the kids’ version. The kids read the kid’s version, the adults read the adult version.

We’d sit around the table and I’d talk about the book. “What did you learn about it? What did you think about this?” I said, “What do you think our families should be about? What’s our family going to be about? What are our rules?” All the kids would comment. We’d write all these notes about what would make us feel special in our house. We wrote all of these things down. My daughter, Natalie, who’s now an emergency physician, took that. She was twelve at the time. She created a paragraph and we labeled it, The Reynolds Family Mission Statement. We blew it up, framed it, painted in our kitchen.

Every week when we’d have a family night and a game night, we’d stand up and we’d do like this pledge of allegiance, put our hands over our hearts. We would read the family mission statement. The kids are all 12 to 5, 9 to 14 at that time. They are now adults. Every one of my kids carries a laminated card of our family mission statement. That’s the power. Easy to do, easy not to do. That’s the difference between intentionally creating a life that’s worth creating spectacular for, or just letting the kids go to school and don’t do anything.

I want to put a stake in the ground here because there’s a couple of points in the book where it tugs on the heartstrings. What is about that guy that came into the emergency room who poured gasoline on himself to commit suicide? Wasn’t it because he was clinically depressed? Why don’t you tell that story? An unintentional life leads to this point.

They called in and said that they were bringing this guy into the hospital. I was the doctor that was on that day. He had sat in his car in a parking lot at a mall, poured a gallon of gasoline on himself and lit a match. He comes in and they had a hard time getting him out of the car. They called in and said he had 90% third-degree burns. Third-degree burns are full thickness.

The worst kind, looks like charcoal. He comes in. Weirdly, people with third-degree burns aren’t in pain. They burned through the pain receptors. They’re weirdly not look like they should be, but they’re not in much pain. That’s what his situation. The very unique situation of being an emergency physician with this guy is, after I examined him, I knew he was dead, but he didn’t know he was dead.

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

Fulfilling Life: The problem is that there are no rules. Somebody made that up for you. Somebody created all of that for you and then told you, that’s what it should be.

He was still awake and talking, but this is an unsurvivable injury. There’s no way you survive 90% surgery burns. I’d get to have a twenty-minute conversation with a guy who I knew was not going to survive. I asked him, “What caused this?” He said, “It’s just every day’s the same.” He had no history of depression. He wasn’t on antidepressants.

Yet, it got to the point where it was the zombie life. We talked about everything. He had a wife. They didn’t have a passionate relationship. He had some kids who didn’t have much to do with him. It wasn’t worth living anymore. It wasn’t worth doing it. People who commit suicide are always in a horrible situation. They can’t see the way to a great situation.

If you listen to the Audible part of that book. Billy and I talk about it. The thing that’s crazy about that is in order for him to get out of that situation, what do you have to do? You had to take tons of courage, more courage than I would have, because I couldn’t do that. I’d take massive action to do that. What if you use that same courage of massive action to fix his life?

That was the point. I didn’t even think about when I wrote the book and when Billy brought it up, he’s like, “What happened is this guy had a tremendous amount of courage and took massive action in order to kill himself.” If he had taken that same amount of courage, massive action, and done something different, how would things have turned out?

I often thought about society, in a sense, creates this unwritten checklist that we have to follow. You go to school, get good grades, get married, have kids, get a job, have a 401(k), and have health benefits. It’s like we’ve been programmed that if we check boxes, we’re going to have a fulfilling life. The same thing happens in religion where it’s like, “You got to do these things. Check these boxes.” Is there anything wrong with that philosophy?

The problem is that there are no rules. Somebody made that up for you. Somebody created all of that for you and then told you that’s what it should be, but they don’t know. They’re miserable. They’re beating their wife. They’re telling you what you should do. Meanwhile, they’re sitting at home addicted to porn or whatever the situation is. You have to be careful who you’re listening to. We all have faults. Be careful when you listen to me, everybody. If you think I’m perfect, you don’t know.

My wife’s right here, she can tell you. I’m open to that. I agree. This version two is going to be much better because I got a lot more mistakes to make. You don’t have to dig very deep to find some dirt on me, as the country song says. It’s true. This book says that. This isn’t coming from a guy who knows everything. This is coming from a guy who have been in a lot of weird situations. Sixty-five countries. The treatment to this whole thing that you talked about, about everybody sees the world like this, to fix that is travel. See what the rest of the world’s doing. Mark Twain said that, not Tim Reynolds, but he was right.

The more places you go, the more kinds of people you meet, the more people you live with, because when we go somewhere, we don’t like to stay in the American place. We like to be in the environment. Eat the food, do the things. We’ve been so blessed. We’ve been at the Achuar Indians in the rainforest in Ecuador, ten days from civilization. They’ve never seen civilization.

We’ve done things with them. Funny story in the book about that. We’ve been at the Achuar Indians in Africa. We’ve delved in the mosques in Egypt and Istanbul. We’ve been in almost every Buddhist temple in Thailand, funny story. In every place you go, people are the same. I feel like there’s this core base that our spirits are very similar.

It's not the goal. It's the living every minute. It's a journey to get to the goal. Click To Tweet

Our energies are very similar. We want the world better for our offsprings than it was for us. We want to leave a better place. We want to have a spectacular life. For some reason, we started to put on all these layers of society, religion, whatever it is that take us away from this core base of who we are. If you can get rid of all that and get down to who we all are, it’s amazing how much more we’re alike than we’re different. We all have these kinds of conversations and sit around and have fulfilled lives. That’s the basis of the whole philosophy.

One of those checklists is you have these end points, where you accomplish this thing and that should be, “I graduated college. I’m good. I don’t have to read again and study. I got married. I don’t feel like dating again or take care of myself.” You need to manipulate your body.

Free sex thing. It can happen if you’re not married.

For long.

You’re going to have to work harder.

That’s the point in this life. Life isn’t these end points. Life is to continue a set of milestones. Once you achieve a certain level, the next level of weights, and there’s no end to those levels.

I was talking to John about this. He knows somebody who’s super successful, who he got within Hawaii. He didn’t tell me the guy’s name, but he said the guy on the boat was still with him. He says he’s somebody he’s always to looked up to. He said, “I feel like I’ve achieved everything. I don’t have anything else to look for.”

The problem with thinking that the goal is the thing, that’s the problem. It’s not the goal. It’s the living every minute to get to the goal. In fact, the goal sometimes is a disappointment, like, “This is it? I worked so hard to get here.” It’s because you fell in love with the goal instead of falling in love with the process that gets you there.

I’m in love with going to the gym. I have some goals. I want to bench press 400 pounds. Whatever my goals are for that year, but that’s not it. I’m in love with the gym. I like the smell of the iron, putting on the gloves, making my drink, and lifting those weights. I don’t need any goals. I’ll accomplish the goals because I fell in love with the process.

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

Living Every Minute: Dr. Tim’s Pillars for Creating a Spectacular Life

In my business, I’m in love with waking up every morning and going, “What problems have we got to solve today? What issues are they? What trainings are we going to do? Do we have some business goals?” Yes, but that’s not the important part. You can’t fall in love with that because it may or may not happen. What will happen is every day, we get to do this thing that we get to do. If you fall in love with that, fall in love with the right thing, you still set goals, but they have a different reason. They’d have a different thing.

You did an amazing job of setting the theory, setting some frameworks, but you also have some tools for execution. Obviously, you have the book, workbooks, some material online, then you have Gladiator, and you have some other things that you’re doing. Maybe speak to those as we conclude.

We’re putting this all together. We have the Living Every Minute book. We have Living Every MinuteWorkbook. Those are available LivingEveryMinute.com or on Amazon. It’s also on Audible. I finished it. It’s weird listening to yourself read a book.

It’s awesome. You make these little side comments and interviews.

We did the Audible. There’s that, the workbook. We have the journal planner. I talked about that. It’s on LivingEveryMinute.com, all this. Our blog is there as well. We started a course. These didn’t have anything to do with each other. This was happening. I started this course called Gladiator. It’s called Reclaim Your Gladiator. The reason it’s called Reclaim Your Gladiator is because it’s a men’s course and men are already gladiators, they just forgot. For three days, I remind them of who they are, what they were born to do, and what they’re here for. It came with this whole idea of toxic masculinity, this whole idea, this bullshit concept, that masculinity is toxic.

Masculinity is protective and helpful and all of the good things. What you see negative that men do is not masculinity. That’s called being an asshole. The sideways hat and the big truck are not masculinity. Don’t mistake the two things. That’s what I literally said in the back room and designed the course. Everything from Special Forces days to Tony, to Keith, everybody I’ve learned from and said, “How can we create this into a course?” We started running this gladiator course and it’s been amazing.

We’ve put 100 men through it. We only do 12 at a time. We only do it twice a year. It’s on my ranch in Texas. Three days. There’s a physical component to it, but it’s not about physical. It’s about mental spiritual. What happens in the classroom and in the conversations is way more important than the physical part. I knew for my Special Forces days, and you did a thing, so you appreciate this, men don’t open up without a physical component. You get them to be physical, get them tired. Now I can get them to open up and I can teach them. That’s why there’s a physical component, it’s part of it. It’s become awesome. That’s at the same website, there are videos and stuff. I did that for a few years.

Everybody said, “You need a woman’s course.” I said, “I don’t know how to do a women’s course. I was in Special Forces. There were no women.” No offense to women, but all my companies are run by women, but I don’t know how to train women. It’s not my thing. I have my wife do it. She’s like, “I’m not doing it. You’re the trainer guy.” We kept going back and forth. Finally, I said, “I’ll do it.” I sat for an entire summer and I planned out what would a woman’s course be. I want them to be just as bad-ass as Gladiators, but not turn them into men.

Part of our problem in our society is we’ve mistaken equality of pay and how we’re treated for sameness. We’re not the same. There are men and women. There’s feminine energy, masculine energy. They’re not the same. That has nothing to do with equality. Sometimes we confuse the two things. Inequality means sameness. I didn’t want to make them the same. I debated how to do it. I took the whole summer. The whole name Valkyrie, if you know what Valkyrie is, they come from the Viking days of Nordic people. I originally named the course, Ninja Princess Warrior.

I was told by the other women, “That would not be the name of the course. The name of the course would be Valkyrie.” We’ve done two. We got two coming up. It blew me away. It ended up being cooler than Gladiator. Women have this unique problem that men don’t have, that we don’t think about. Women have to do everything a man has to do. I’m thinking of a single mom. Go to work, provide, be all of the things that she has to be and then go in and take a shower, put on high heels and a dress and become super feminine. We don’t have to make that choice.

Part of our problem in our society is we've mistaken equality of pay and equality of how we're treated for sameness. Click To Tweet

We just stay in that one state all the time. They have to do all the thing we have to do and then also be super feminine. The whole course is going back and forth to a masculine, feminine energy. Tony says, “How do you make your dog, your dog? You give it a name and you teach it to come on your call.” I said, “Which part of your personality do you need to teach?” You don’t talk to your child the same way you talk to your colleague, the same way you talk to your buddy at the bar.

You have to know which dog to bring to which bite. It’s about that. We ended up with Gladiator and Valkyrie and then that led into a couple’s courses. We have a couple of courses that we do. We talked about these, because it’s not Gladiator. It’s not a physical course, but it’s about strengthening people’s marriages. The 30-second make-out session, a bunch of other things we go into.

A few years into it, the Gladiators came to me and said, “What about advance? What’s the next thing? We want to advance Gladiators.” We’ve been 60 men or so at that time. I said, “You be careful what you ask for.” They’re like, “No, we want it.” I created advanced, which we call Ragtag Bastards. I created the Ragtag Bastards course, but that’s for people who’ve already done the first course. We hold that once a year. Now they’re talking to me about that Valkyrie.

We’ll see how that goes. One thing’s leading to another. Rather than me pushing what’s happening, I’m feeling the pull of what’s happening now. It’s fun. I like it. We have those tools that are available. We’re also going to do our first ever Living Every Minute Summit. We’re going to take probably three days and teach everything in the book over a three-day process and have a summit where people can come and learn.

Talk about the website.

LivingEveryMinute.com is where all this is housed. It’s where the events are. It’s where the book is. You can get books, workbooks, the planner. Everything’s on that site. That’s where we’ll announce when we go inside to do the summit where, and when that’s going to be. We’re talking about doing a podcast, we love the idea of doing it. We just haven’t got to that point yet, but eventually, we’ll do that. We’ll put all that on there as well.

Tim, it’s been awesome.

Let me put a plugin for you. I’ve been watching you over the last few years. As I’ve known you and watch you move from one office to the other, watch what you’re doing and your personal growth and path. I’ve been watching from a distance and through John and see what’s going on. I’m proud of where you are headed. This is awesome. Good job.

That means a lot. We’ve discovered similar principles. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. That’s what we have in common. The wheel has been invented. We just couldn’t figure it out and execute.

TWS 25 | Fulfilling Life

Fulfilling Life: Masculinity is protective and helpful and all of the good things. What you see negative that men do is not masculinity. That’s just called being an asshole.

Take what other people have taught and just execute it.

It’s a game where it’s not all success. You hit the nail on the head, 80% failure, 20% success. That 20%, it makes it like that. It’s totally worth all the 80% and maybe even a little bit more, honestly. I don’t think we value the success if we don’t get punched in the face every now and then.

If you are always successful, you wouldn’t know any different.

Tim, you’re awesome. Thank you. Everyone, thank you for reading. See you next time.

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About Dr. Tim Reynolds

Dr. Timothy Reynolds is the founder of Dr. Tim international Inc., a company he established in 2009 to allow him to share his passion for Living Every Minute™ with others. He dedicates countless hours each week to helping others transform their lives through mentoring, life building, inspirational talks, and writing his motivational blogs.

Dr. Tim was the first member of his family to graduate high school. He joined the military shortly after graduation and graduated from the Special Forces Q-course in July of 1982. He served as a Green Beret on an A-Team as the Battalion medic and eventually as a Special Forces Battalion Surgeon for the 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne). He served both enlisted and as an officer for 17 years.

After getting out of the military, Dr. Tim graduated college with honors. His passion for helping people inspired him to become a medical doctor, and in 1993 he graduated Summa Cum Laude with an MD degree from the University of Utah. He completed his Emergency Medicine residency at Texas A&M Scott and White in 1996 and is board certified in emergency medicine.

Dr. Tim is the managing partner for HealthCARE Express, a group of urgent care clinics rapidly expanding across the United States. Prior to starting HealthCARE Express in 2006, Dr. Tim held numerous positions in the medical field, including: medical director of the Wadley Regional Medical Center Emergency Department and level II trauma center; president of E-Med Services, LLP and of E-Med Billing Solutions, LLP; associate clinical professor for the Area Health Education Center at the University of Arkansas; and founding member of the Greater People’s Clinic of Texarkana Board of Directors.

Dr. Tim is also an entrepreneur and successful businessman. He is currently the chief executive officer of TL Reynolds Properties, LLP, a real estate investment company; and he is a managing partner of JJET Developments Ltd., a real estate development company.

Dr. Tim enjoys spending time on his Ranch in Atlanta, Texas, where he lives with his wife, Pam, and their five amazing children. He holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, is a SCUBA rescue diver, and a pilot. He also enjoys body building, golf, and hiking.

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