Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn

When your adult son or daughter is diagnosed with a serious mental illness, everything changes. Suddenly, all of your financial planning is thrown into turmoil as you’re focus turns from your needs to the immediate and long term care of your child. The cost of diagnosis and treatments can derail your retirement unless you develop a financial strategy that provides for your child’s future while safeguarding your own. That’s what Allen Giese, author of When Mental Illness Strikes, is going to talk with us about. Allen is the founder of Northstar Financial Planners and he’s also the father of an adult son who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late teens. Allen and his wife are both deeply involved in mental health advocacy. He has been where you are. And in this episode, he’s going to give you his advice and solutions on how to invest efficiently, how to apply for and keep government benefits even if you’re resistant to that idea. How to build a real systemic financial plan for your family, how to avoid crucial mistakes, and a whole lot more. When mental illness strikes, you don’t have to sacrifice your financial security. This episode could be your lifeline to the best possible future for yourself and your children.   Get Allen’s new book When Mental Illness Strikes on Amazon. Find out more at Northstar.   Allen Giese: In my son’s case, there was one night that was pivotal that we knew we were in serious trouble. We had been invited to my business partner’s mother’s home to help them celebrate Yom Kippur, to break the fast. It was a big event ,and we understood that this was an important event. My wife and my two kids and piled in the car and drove half hour north to their house and my son was—he was agitated. He hadn’t been right for a little while. He had been very agitated and stressed about things. On that car ride up there, he became more and more agitated, and by the time we got there, he was really having a hard time, he couldn’t sit still, he kept having to leave the house, go outside, walk around, he’d come in. We were keeping an eye on him and realized he’s really uncomfortable and something’s wrong here. We left early and drove back down to our house. By the time we had gotten home, reality had basically left him. It was such an emotionally charged event that I only remember scenes from the night but not the whole thing pieced together. It was so strange, where he was frantically pacing around our backyard pool area, I thought he was going to explode. He had so much tension in his body and at the time I thought he was like yelling at the pool. This went on for hour, and we realized there’s something seriously wrong here. That was kind of the pivotal night. We didn’t know at the time it was a disease, but whatever it was, it was coming to a head and boiling over. That’s when we sort of put in the super charge to focus on finding out what this problem was. Eventually, we learned our son had a serious mental illness. When Mental Illness Strikes Charlie Hoehn: Wow. Thank you for sharing that Allen. I’m excited to talk about your book, When Mental Illness Strikes because you talk about the unique position that families are put in and I just want to dive right in. Tell me first off, why did you decide to write this book? Why did you feel this book was necessary?

Have you’ve ever wanted to start a YouTube channel? Or maybe you’ve tried in the past and it hasn’t quite worked out for you. Have you wondered, how are people making a living doing this, how can I make a living doing what I’m passionate about, what I love? Sean Cannell and Benji Travis, authors of YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer have broken it down in their book, and it’s awesome. They break down the strategy and the tactics that successful YouTube channels follow to make a full time living and in some cases, millions of dollars and it’s such a cool interview because I’ve been doing video for a long time and this is something that has always kind of felt elusive to me. YouTube just felt like this big blank canvas that it seems possible. I just didn’t know the code, I didn’t know the secrets to this stuff. Well how are they doing this? Sean and Benji explain it beautifully. I want to dive right into this interview. Stick around for the whole thing because they give away a lot of the best content in their book.   Get Sean and Benji’s new book YouTube Secrets on Amazon. Find out more at TubeSecretsBook.com.   Sean Cannell: You know, both of us have had individual paths and then we’ve crossed paths on the journey. We both have started online video and video years ago. In 2003, I was actually volunteering at my local church in the youth ministry, and that’s when I got my first camera to use and some video editing software. The youth pastor said, “Start making videos.” This was a big advantage, because social media wasn’t even out yet. YouTube started in 2005, Facebook started in 2007. So it was a couple of years head start where I was making videos. But I’ll tell you what, your first videos are always your worst videos. That’s what entrepreneurs need to know that are listening. You’ve got to start somewhere, and I was starting even before digital started. So then eventually, I started a media business helping small businesses with YouTube and with creating content, and that’s actually right at the same time I met Benji. Benji Travis: I really started on YouTube as a consumer, watching videos. I didn’t even know that YouTube could be used to build your personal brand. I did upload a few videos, I used to put on breakdancing battles back in the day, so I would use YouTube as a video platform to promote my battles or just put the recap video on there. It wasn’t until my wife, Judy, better known on YouTube as itsjudytime started making videos about making videos about makeup and hair from the corner of our bedroom, and I was literally her first hater. I would say that she was wasting her time, like why are you spending so many hours watching other people and then uploading videos and all the different things that went along with it. Now, I always tell people, she’s got the last laugh, because a decade later, she’s basically my boss. She’s literally defined my life, and I’m so grateful for it. That’s how I started. But ironically, the way Sean and I met was because of my wife, I wanted to propose to her and Sean was literally a guy I met a few days before the proposal and I called him up saying, hey, I know I don’t know you very well but I’m about to propose, I’d like to capture it to put it on YouTube. And he’s like, yeah, I guess I’ll do it. Literally not knowing Sean at all, and he taped it and I was just so blown away but like his instinct not just as a photographer...

You may not realize it, but you were given a gift that you need to be sharing with the world. The experiences you’ve accumulated throughout your life can turn into a potential business. You have knowledge that other people need, and they’re willing to pay for it. That’s what this episode is all about. Travis Rosser, author of You Inc., is the cofounder of Kajabi, which is an online knowledge platform that’s helped more than 10,000 people launch their own small businesses. To this day, these knowledge entrepreneurs have generated more than $600 million dollars in sales. Knowledge capital is a new reality that offers amazing opportunities for success, and in this episode, Travis brings together all of the insights and lessons and strategies that can help launch you into an exciting opportunity of turning what you know into a business. If you’re tired of working in a traditional job or a business environment and you want to become your own boss, by the end of this episode, you’ll know what’s inside your brain that’s a special gift and your best business asset, and how you can share that gift to not only change your life but the lives of everyone that you reach.   Get Travis Rosser’s new book You, Inc. on Amazon. Find out more at TravisRosser.com.   Travis Rosser: As a kid, I actually stuttered my entire childhood until I was eighteen. I think the first story I would start with was being in that situation where I couldn’t talk. I wanted to talk, I didn’t know how, or if ever, I was going to stop stuttering. So, during that childhood, I became very internal. I just thought a lot. I was very creative—I was always outside on our farm with my dog and just thinking and inventing. As I look back on that now, that was very formative of how I work, how I believe, how I think. It’s like I’m stuck in a situation and I know it’s never going to change. I remember back then, I was just quiet, I just waited. It was like I was waiting for god or the universe to be like, “Here’s what you should do, Travis, here’s what you should do.” In the book, I talk about that a lot. I talk about times in my life, times at customer’s lives where they weren’t sure what to do or they have this thing, they have this feeling, and they didn’t know how they were going to get there. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just be still and know that it’s going to work out. Know that you’re going to overcome this, and know that you’re going to finish this, because that’s the one thing that you have control over—how you feel about whatever situation. Back then, I didn’t know that. That’s the crazy thing. Whenever I’m stuck and I know something’s hard and difficult but I know I have to do it, I know that eventually I will get through it. I just always have, even if I completely fail. That’s what this book is about, is looking at all parts of your life. The good, the bad, your talents, your passions. Really it’s like, what if things happen to you for a reason? They happen to you on purpose, and then you realize that actually gives your life purpose when you accept that. Knowledge Capital Charlie Hoehn: You say that you are the hero of your story, but even before that, you talk about the story of knowledge capital. Break this down for me. Travis Rosser: It’s important for the people reading this book to start thinking about their story and realizing: What have I been through? What have I overcome? What am I really good at? What do I love?

Creating a financially secure future today is harder than ever before. Student loans and high costs of living prevent young professionals from building a nest egg, while their parents struggle to help without limiting their child’s ability to be self-sustaining. If you’re a young professional or a parent of one that’s stuck in a financial rut, you need the right tools to manage your money. Financial advisors Terry Lineberger and Kelly Lauterjung, the coauthors of Hey, I Forgot to Tell You: What Your Parents Wished They’d Taught You About Money, are a father/daughter team introducing simple techniques for creating healthy, enduring financial habits. By the end of this conversation, you’ll have learned how to save money without feeling deprived, how to pay off seemingly infinite debt, how to initiate honest conversations with family members about money, and a whole lot more. If you and your loved ones are digging yourselves into a hole, put down the shovel. Kelly and Terry will show you the way out and up.   Get Kelly and Terry’s new book Hey, I Forgot to Tell You on Amazon. Find out more at The Lineberger Group.   Terry Lineberger: It really started when Kelly was a senior in high school and she had been accepted to the university of Oregon, so she’s my oldest daughter, she’s getting ready to go away to college, it was spring time of her senior year of high school. I was that panicked father that was getting ready to send my daughter out into the world and there was a tremendous amount of things that I had forgotten to teach her. I put together a list of all the things that I thought she needed to know in life and made a Saturday morning commitment and got her to do it, I’m not sure she was extremely excited about the list but Saturday morning started with things like “Okay, you got to learn to change the tire of a car, we’ve got to learn to change the oil in a car.” I made her rewire the outlets in our house. Kelly Lauterjung: Because every senior in high school needs to learn how to do that. Terry Lineberger: My feeling was, she needed to understand electricity, not be afraid of electricity. There’s a process of turning breakers on and off and checking and doing it. I just panicked about those things. I never really panicked about finances with her because I work in this field, it was something that was dinner conversation, it was open air conversation throughout our life and Kelly had begun working when she was young, she was a lifeguard I think when she was 14 or 15. Then she got older, she had other jobs and she had worked all through and in high school into college. She took a little bit of time off her first semester but then she got a job in college as well. We always had conversations, so I wasn’t really worried about that but that was the starting of making sure that as a parent, that I’m teaching my kids the things that I felt were important in life. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that I had forgotten to teach her things. Not because I didn’t know, but time passed by and then, as we started getting in to thinking about a book much later, it occurred to me that most parents probably forget to teach their kids a lot of things that they wish they would have but they just didn’t get the time and didn’t think of it at an appropriate time where their kid would listen. I was lucky. Kelly was a very compliant teenager in the sense that if I said, “Hey, can you spend an hour with me on Saturday going to the auto store to pick up an oil filter so you c...

Business change is often out of our control, and it can be very unsettling, but turmoil also creates opportunity. In this episode, Joanna Martinez, author of A Guide to Positive Disruption, gives us the tips, tricks, and tools to become effective agents of change. She learned this during her career that spanned four decades as a corporate executive who led transformation initiatives of all types within various industries from the pharmaceutical industry to consumer products, financial services, real estate, and many more. Joanna will show you how to roll with the punches and give you the knowledge you need to become a positive disrupter. While no one is immune to disruption, the right process and the lessons from this episode can help you turn it into something positive for yourself and your team.   Get Joanna’s new book A Guide to Positive Disruption on Amazon.   Joanna Martinez: Over the course of my career, I lived through 18 reorganizations; that doesn’t mean I got fired 18 times, it means though that 18 times I was in a situation where my job was changing, going away, my company had been acquired, or I had to compete for a new job because what I had done before was gone. Maybe the second or third, probably the third reorganization along the line, I was doing my accomplishments at the end of the year and I realized that I had accomplished nothing. I was working for a really good company. I had a lot of great opportunities, but I had wasted the entire year worrying about what was going to happen. That was my moment, my aha moment, that made me say, “Wow, I can’t do this. I’m early in my career. I can’t spend the next 35 years trying to duck my head and not make eye contact and hope that no one will notice me so that I make it through the next reorganization.” I had to come to terms with the fact that it looked like it was going to be a way of life. How was I going to adjust? What was I going to do, how was I going to get to the point where I was someone who was making positive change instead of worrying that change was going to happen to me? I’m a pretty good writer, and when it came to putting pen to paper, I stared at that keyboard for a long time trying to say, what am I going to say, what did I do this year? Really, I didn’t have anything to show for it. I had come to work and had managed what I had to manage and basically just stayed with the status quo. I hadn’t made any improvements; I hadn’t dealt with any of the big issues; I hadn’t made waves. I started thinking then about the term disruption. Somebody mentioned something about this disruption or we’re having another reorganization, here comes more disruption. I realized as I pondered that—maybe, it was better to be a disruptor than to be a disruptee. It was better to be someone out there making positive change than it was just someone trying to hold back in the shadows because you’re afraid something’s going to happen to you. When We Don’t Feel Like Disruptors Charlie Hoehn: Can you tell me about a moment where you really felt like you were just kind of ducking your head in the shadows? Joanna Martinez: Well, it was when I was sitting there at the beginning of the year. In a large company, you have to create a set of objectives for the year, here are the things that I’m going to do and it’s not show up every day. It’s, “Here are the changes I’m going to make, here are the cost, numbers that I’m going to achieve or the sales numbers I’m going to achieve,” whatever it is. I just realized I hadn’t done any of them,

We’re all drowning in too much information in this digital age. We often feel trapped or even paralyzed by all these distractions while we let the system control our lives. But if you want to succeed today, you need to stop choking and take action. In this episode, William Treseder, author of Reset, shares his life altering lessons that he learned during a career that took him from the battlefields of Iraq in Afghanistan, to the board rooms of Silicon Valley. We will talk about how you can personally transform and improve your life through determined action. By creating habits that lead to breakthroughs and power you past your choke points. By harnessing your own unique talents, William believes that you can accomplish more than you ever dreamed of. William has educated and mentored thousands of entrepreneurs all around the world through partners such as Stanford University, GE, and Singularity University and has even helped governments and large organizations solve major problems. If you’re ready, it’s time to reset and reconnect with the world.   Get William’s new book Reset on Amazon.   William Treseder: In August of 2012, I was newly fired from a company that had basically imploded, the investors had pulled out and not paid any of the employees for several months of back pay, just broke up with a girl, I didn’t have a place to live, and was kind of in route to crashing in my brother’s apartment in upper haven San Francisco. I was looking back on a military and college career that I thought would have taken me someplace very different. This was about six months after I finished school and I felt like I was flailing and had not had anything figured out. Silicon Valley is a place where everything seems like it’s happening all the time and opportunities are everywhere. I knew that I wasn’t taking advantage of any of the opportunities that were around me—that was quite obvious from my first crash and burn after college, despite the fact that I finished it. I was 29 at the time because I had long six years in the marine corps. It was a very hard thing for me to deal with, the realization that I didn’t really know what I needed to do to succeed, and it felt like there were all these wonderful opportunities passing by all the time constantly and they were all just out of reach. Some helplessness, a lot of anxiety, and soul searching. That took me from 2012 to now, six years later, and my life is different in some ways but more than anything else, I just keep going back to that feeling that there are always opportunities and I’m not taking advantage of any of them. I’m pretty good at the things that I’m supposed to be pretty good at, but there was this feeling of mismatch between the stuff I could do and the stuff that was actually useful. The stuff that people actually wanted to see me do in order to be valuable, to be desired, to be recognized, to be rewarded, incentivized, however you want to think about that. Does that make sense? Charlie Hoehn: To have your place, yeah, to feel a part of society when you’ve done all these things that you were supposed to do to fit in and is that part of it? William Treseder: Absolutely. In the broader sense, I had always been someone who didn’t quite fit in. I grew up with a family that was very conservative in a very liberal town, it is a college town in northern California. That didn’t quite work and then when I was enlisted in the military, I was a very liberal person in a very conservative culture because anybody from Northern California is going to be considered liberal.

Kenneth Castiel is the author of The Hero and the Villain Within. He is a businessman, based in Gibraltar, who began his career selling books door to door. He then went on to found a multimillion dollar financial services corporation that held 50% of Gibraltar’s citizens as their customers. In this episode, you’ll learn: * How to connect with your subconscious * How to discover your big ‘Why’ * Simple exercises that will help you live a fuller, happier life. Look for Kenneth’s new book The Hero and the Villain Within on Amazon. Charlie Hoehn: If you had to pick a meal or a drink to couple with your book, what would you pick? Kenneth Castiel: I would pick split pea soup, pepper tender tuna steak with fresh vegetables and for dessert, apple crumble with warm custard. Charlie Hoehn: What would you say is the big idea in the book? Kenneth Castiel: First of all, to expose social conditioning. It’s really, “Are you ready to wake up?” Are you really ready to realize that there’s what I call the hypnosis of social conditioning? You’re living a life that is invented. You put two people at the top of the building and they jump off, and one is a saint and one is not a saint. They’re both going to end up with the same fate: they’re going to die. That’s a universal truth, gravity. But everything that we do, everything that we do that we don’t even realize comes from social conditioning. It’s almost like a hypnosis. We think that we have to do things in a particular way. My book explains this with stories and situations to make you realize and to capture the hypnosis of social conditioning in your life. The Things We’ve Always Done Charlie Hoehn: What’s your favorite story or example from your book? Kenneth Castiel: There was a girl called Jane, and she used to watch her mother, every Sunday, prepare the roast. The mother used to cut off both ends of the roast, put that extra meat in the fridge, and put a much smaller piece of meat in the oven. She used to ask her mother, “Why do you cut off the end pieces? Why don’t you put in the whole piece of meat in the oven?” Her mother used to say, “Well I don’t know, that’s how your grandmother taught me.” Christmas came along, and grandmother was with them, and Jane asked her grandmother, “Why did you teach my mother to do it that way, why not keep the whole thing?” Her grandmother said, “I didn’t teach your mother to do that, when your mother was growing up, we didn’t have lots of money. We had a tiny oven, and the piece of meat didn’t fit in the oven. So I used to cut off the bits at the end and put them in the fridge so that it would fit in the oven.” The mother thought that this was the correct way to prepare Sunday roast. But there’s no reason she shouldn’t put the whole roast in the oven. We just do things. People live by the way the guy looks that is driving the car in the advert or the way the girl looks that is going into a store to buy some clothes. A lot of the time, people are unhappy because they’re unhappy with the mirror that they’re using to look at themselves.

If you’re dealing with unmotivated employees, performance or high turnover, these problems need to be the highest priority of your HR managers. But the challenge is, they don’t have time because they spend most of their day dealing with paperwork. In order for you to do right by the people who work for you, and the clients that they serve, you need to free up HR from the burden of repetitive, soul-draining procedures, and that’s what this episode is all about. In this conversation, Rhamy Alejeal, author of People Processes, reveals how you can streamline your personnel operations. He takes you through all the components of HR workflow and lays out the steps for you to optimize procedures like onboarding, scheduling, payroll, reporting and communication. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to boost your ability to attract and retain the best people in your industry.   Get Rhamy’s new book People Processes on Amazon. Find out more at PeopleProcesses.com.   Rhamy Alejeal: I’ve been in this limited world of employee benefits for almost 10 years now. Over time, I got to know my clients better and better and the issue became less about finding this product that their employees needed and more and more about the systems and communications surrounding it. One of our long time clients is this nonprofit, it’s been in business like 60 years. They had been very, let’s just say, stable. Not much happening, they’ve had the same number of employees, they’re doing the same thing, the executive director had been in the role for 20 years. Before that, the person had been in that role for 25 years. A new executive director came in to this organization, her name was Christy. Christy was ecstatic, she had a great background, incredibly well educated, well-traveled, she wanted to run this nonprofit. It was really close to home in terms of what they did, it was her life. They helped disabled children, and she just thought she had found her dream job. When she came in, it was a stagnant mess, all the top positions were filled, turnover was extremely low, which was great, but the organization wasn’t growing. It couldn’t retain smart, young people. They had nowhere to go. The operational budget had been basically the same for 15 years. Christy just wasn’t having any of those. She was dynamic, aggressive—she was going to go in there and make changes. And she did. She changed that organization. In six months, with her at the helm, that nonprofit increased their revenue 15%, reduced overhead by 10%, existing community partnerships got deeper, and new ones came together and formed. A few of the people had been there forever, and some of them found new jobs, some of them adapted. By doing what she did, she was able to completely change the spirit of that organization and hugely accomplish their mission better. The main way she did that was by focusing not necessarily on the mission, what they did in the community, but focusing internally. That has been the recurring story of what our organization does and what I deal with every day. Discovering People Processes Rhamy Alejeal: I had the same thing, my company grew hugely, we doubled in size, and at some point, I realized I was just completely stressed and worried about the ability of my team to do the things that I promised we coul...

You want your children to be successful, and you’ve always worked hard to raise them with strong values. Mark Aho, author of Building Wealth and Living in Faith, believes that you can help the people you love achieve financial security without compromising your religious and moral principles. As a father, financial planner and a person of deep spiritual convictions, Mark believes that faith should be the center of everything in life, including money matters. In this episode, Mark offers his lessons on life, grace and money that you can pass along to the next generation. This is a plan for your loved one’s financial future and a meditation on faith, wealth and family.   Get Steve’s new book Building Wealth and Living in Faith on Amazon. Find out more at Mark Aho Official.   Mark Aho: I came into this world in a unfavorable situation. I had a birth mother that was pregnant with me, she was extremely poor, she was living on bread and lard—and I had a birth father who didn’t want anything to do with her. So I ended up in a goodwill farm, or basically an orphanage. When I go back and think about this very deeply, the one thing that’s just an absolute big occupier of my heart and my mind too—and it’s never changed and I’ve always known it—is that God is a big part of my life. I think it’s a little bit of a miracle that I was able to have a life and to be given a life. Not only, not to be aborted, which may have been convenient thing to do, but I was guided into a family that cared for me and loved me and gave me the necessities of life to grow. My faith has always been a strong part of my life, and in that process as I grew up and learned a number of things. In that process, I got married, I had some children. When my children were young, I wanted to find out some medical information about them or about myself, so that they would have the right information for themselves as they grow. It’s a long story about finding out more about my birth roots and so forth. In that process of looking out for health issues and things for my children, it sort of invigorated my mindset about a lot of life experiences as my children grew and grew up and as I had the richness of those experiences to pass along to them Everybody has a rich life story and things they’ve learned, maybe some dos and don’ts in life. Every parent wants to share those with their children. As I was going along, I was trying to explain things along the way, but there was more. There was always more. Then as my children got older and they got busier, it seemed like it was harder to tell them more. That’s one of the reasons why I kept thinking about this book. It’s sad to say that sometimes in some lives, you never get a chance to physically sit down and tell your children the things you want to tell them. As part of that realization, it came into my mind and that if that did occur, I would like to put something on paper. Maybe they’re too busy right now, but maybe if something did happen to their mom or their dad and they had something on paper, they might read it and read it intensely. Then I will feel that part of my mission is completed, to get to what I wanted to tell them in paper. That’s part of it. Faith and Miracles Charlie Hoehn: Maybe the best place for us to start is with the introduction in your book.

Setting a goal and reaching it are easier said than done. A lot of the times, we don’t get anywhere, no matter how much we feel that we’re applying ourselves. That’s where Peter Sasin. Author of Waves of Magic, comes in. Peter draws on his experience as a trainer of neurolinguistic programming. In this episode, he’s also going to share some exercises to teach you how to better define your goals and how to examine your core values and ultimately discover your natural talents so you can be closer and closer to the success that you envision. Peter believes you don’t need to struggle so much to live your dreams. You just need a little bit of magic.   Get Peter’s new book Waves of magic on Amazon. Find out more at Waves Of Magic.   Peter Sasin: Somebody asked me, if you could choose, what would you choose for yourself? What would you do? My first response was—I don’t know, never thought about that. No, really, what would you do? I said, what would I do? I think I will play ice hockey. Then he asked me a different question—where can I apply for ice hockey? It came out that university in Munich has a beautiful ice hockey courses or ice hockey training for students. I came and I did this trainings. It was the first time in my life I fulfilled a conscious dream. Because somebody asked me “what would you do.” I went to the first training—listeners maybe need to know that I’m from Slovakia, and Slovakia is like hockey crazy country. Although we are only five million, we produced some great hockey players for the planet, for example Zdeno Chára or Stan Mikita later. Many others. We were playing as children on the street almost every day, hockey. Then I went to the first training and my thoughts were like, come on, I’m from Slovakia. These Germans, they cannot play ice hockey. Germany is not hockey country. I’m going to show them what real hockey is, right? I came to my first training, and I was so happy I’m there. The first exercise, a puck goes towards to me and the task was to do something with the puck and pass it on. I try to receive the puck, and then something happened. But I was like ‘voom’ and lying on my back, on the ice. What was that? I was falling. So I stand up and again, again, puck comes towards me, I try to stop it and do something with it and ‘boom’, again, what the hell is it? One more time, and then coach comes to me and asks me, “Hey, what’s your name?” It was my first training, he didn’t know me. I said, Peter. “Okay,” he says, “Peter, when you fall the next time, release that stick because you could hurt somebody,” because when I was falling, I was making a huge bow with my ice hockey stick like ‘voom’. My God, I wanted to show up to make a huge impact here, and they are telling me I’m going to kill them. I stayed and I trained and got better and better, and I can remember using for the first time in my life, something that I later on in my career named ‘magic reality creator’ because I was really rapidly up and up. I was better and better. Not only my dream was fulfilled, but I was the part of the university team. I later on, I became a coach of a team, it was in my 30s and the guys playing with me were at least 10 years younger. To make it really short, now I am a trainer and a mental coach to many professionals like business people,

In this episode, Steele Kelly, author of When Sinners Like Me Come Home, tells the story of a soldier who risked his life countless times in battle. But like so many others, he couldn’t cope with the day to day existence once he returned home. After losing everything he loved to depression, anger, and PTSD, Steele traveled alone to the Himalayas to find the pieces of himself that he’d left on the front. This episode is important because so many former soldiers never speak about their emotional turmoil. Steele’s account gives us an insider’s view into why veterans are different after war. This episode is not safe for listening around children or young ears or anybody who is really uneasy or unsettled by descriptions of violence or just difficult topics. You’ve bene warned, this episode is challenging to listen to at certain points but again, it’s an important topic. It’s a miracle that Steele is alive today and you’ll see, by the end, why. It’s also a very humanizing one in that soldiers as tough and capable and as much respect as we have for them in their abilities, they are still human beings and they deserve to be able to express what they’ve been through. The more people like Steele who lead and actually have the courage to talk about their emotional turmoil, the better things are going to be for everyone. Now, here is our conversation with Steele Kelly.   Get Steele’s new book When Sinners Like Me Come Home on Amazon.   Steele Kelly: I didn’t really believe in the white picket fence, a dog, a wife, some kids. I was like, that’s just some Hollywood fable. That doesn’t really exist in the real world. Then I met this girl Payton and I immediately was like, no, this is a real thing. This just isn’t a fable. I fell so head over heels for her, I could have married her the first month and been totally okay with it. I met her about a month after I got home from Afghanistan. For the first six months, I’m in this honeymoon phase of not only a new relationship but just being back home from war. I can get in my truck, I can drive somewhere, I’ve got freedom, I can just go to a coffee shop if I want to. This whole thing was a honeymoon phase on top of the new relationship. So, one day, we’re driving my truck and we’re going somewhere, I was like, let’s go to dinner. She was like, okay, yeah and then we’re just kind of driving, I make some sarcastic joke, I always call her unicorn because of the hot, crazy girl matrix, and he says unicorns don’t exist. I was like, you’re such a unicorn. She turns around and she goes, “No, you’re the real unicorn. You’re just so loving, kind, gentle and caring, you wouldn’t hurt a fly. You’re the real unicorn.” I kind of smile and hold her hand really tight. Then, my mind just starts like flashing back through different things in Afghanistan and I’m questioning. Like, if you only knew that other side of me, what would you think? Would you still love me, would you still think of me this way? What are you basing your opinion on? A New Future Charlie Hoehn: I want to talk about the emotional journey you had when you got back? The heart of your story, the challenges you faced. Steele Kelly: Yeah, it’s weird. You have this honeymoon phase like I explained, and everything’s so great. You don’t even care, your coffee may suck and you’re like, it’s from America. All right, works for me. I say that the honeymoon phase usually lasts anywhere from six months to a year of getting back to the States,

You’re getting a dog, but will it be obedient or nothing but trouble? Whether it’s a puppy from a breeder or the shelter or an adult dog, Tom Roderick, author of A Little a Day Keeps the Dog Trainer Away, is going to show you the secrets to raising a puppy from day one so that it will bring you joy and companionship. In this episode, you’ll learn how to select your new companion and how to prepare your home for your puppy and why crate training is so important. We’re also going to talk about what are some of the best foods for your dog and how to socialize them properly. By the end of this episode, you will know how to raise and train your puppy more effectively. From the moment that you bring it home, up to a year later and beyond. Your dog and everyone it comes into contact with, will thank you.   Get Tom’s new book A Little a Day Keeps the Dog Trainer Away on Amazon. Find out more at Walky Walk. Tom Roderick: I never really aspired as a young kid to be a dog trainer, but it just happened to work out that way because of my passion for dogs, and one thing led to another. I worked at a small dog boutique in middle school and a vet clean up in high school, and then I started doing training at Petco. I slowly but surely worked my work up to where I am now. Charlie Hoehn: Roughly, how many dogs have you trained over the course of your career? Tom Roderick: That’s a tough one, I’d say thousands. The meat of my training experience came after college where I work at a kennel called CPI, it’s Canine Protection International. They get a stock of dogs delivered from Europe and you’re just shredding and pulling your skills training anywhere from 15 to 25 dogs a day. You do that for five, six, seven years, and it really adds up. In terms of doing my own thing, it’s a much slower pace because it’s not a kennel like scenario. It’s more tailored to the owners, which just takes a little bit more time and everyone. These aren’t professional dogs that come. It’s not a German shepherd that is delivered from Europe that has a foundation and training. These are just people’s pets, kind of dealing with a little bit more complicated issues. Researching to Pick the Right Dog for You Charlie Hoehn: Let’s start with prep, what do we need to do to prepare ourselves in our homes before we bring home the puppy? Tom Roderick: Even before that, if I catch wind of somebody preparing to get a dog, I really recommend taking the time to do research on the breed selection. 99% of the behaviors that owners come across can be negated or eliminated or just overall just nonexistent if you do the proper research and select a breed that’s appropriate for your family, your lifestyle, your environment. If they have a big yard, a small yard, all those sorts of things. A lot of people will get a dog because they think it looks cool, or they saw it in the movies or they had one growing up but that’s not a great way to select a dog that’s going to be with you for 8, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years of your life. Before you even get into any sort of prep in terms of bringing a crate or a leash or food dishes and things like that, doing a little bit of research on is a pit bull really a good choice for me or is a Great Dane or Australian Shepherd a good choice for me in a small Boston apartment? I really recommend starting there. Charlie Hoehn: How do you go about the process of r...

In today’s society, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of do-it-yourself advice. While the self-help gurus claim that you can and should manage every aspect of your career, personal matters, and finances, the truly successful people know that they need a partner to handle all the details. In this episode, Kyle Walters, author of The Personal CFO, shows you how to collaborate with a new kind of advisor who can free up your busy life so you can focus on what really matters. Kyle is the founder of Atlas Wealth Advisors and L&H CPA’s and Advisors, which specializes in helping entrepreneurs, physicians, executives, and retirees simplify their financial lives. By developing a key relationship, you can become the CEO of your life so you could put time and energy into what is most important to you while letting a trusted partner handle the moving parts. By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to reclaim the one thing that money can’t buy.   Get Kyle’s new book The Personal CFO on Amazon. Find out more at ThePersonalCFO.com. Kyle Walters: For the last 15 years and thousands of meetings, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time where I thought was teaching clients or educating clients on the intricacies of financial advice. Taxes, estate planning, insurance, investments, all of these different things. I get very excited about these subjects, because I am passionate about them, I love it. This is what I would read on the beach. I came to the conclusion probably a year or two ago after I sat in several back to back meetings. It really became clear that clients just weren’t really engaged with what I was saying. I started asking them “What’s most useful for us to talk about in these meetings,” assuming that they would tell me like, “I want you to talk about the stuff you normally talk about.” That wasn’t it at all. They really didn’t want to learn about these subjects as much as I thought they wanted to. They just wanted to have everything taken care of for them and handled for them. So that really led me to the build out of our tax and accounting side, which we really needed in order to be able to handle everything for clients. But it led me to I guess my internal mindset shift, which was I need to stop “empowering and educating” these really successful, extremely smart people on things they don’t care about. That made me pull back and look at our industry and the way advisors act. So much of it is talking to people and trying to explain things to them that most of the time, they really don’t care about. I know most of my clients are smarter than I am. The assumption is that they cared about these things, and they just really didn’t. So what I wanted to do was talk about a different kind of role. Can take care all of these things for you, and what are the moving parts in order to get that done? After the Paradigm Shift Charlie Hoehn: What did your business look like before and after, or was it just the way you communicated? Kyle Walters: I think it was both. A lot of it was having conversations with staff. A lot of it was having conversations with myself and rebuilding what we discussed on twice a year, four times a year, however often we are having those client meetings. It was going back to the drawing board or whatever you want to call it, asking the clients, “What do you want to talk about?”

Our understanding of pain has improved significantly in recent years but our treatment of pain for the most part really hasn’t. The opioid addiction epidemic has proven that a better, safer solution for chronic pain management is needed right now. Thankfully, there is one. In this episode, Brendon Lundberg, author of Radiant Relief and one of the cofounders of radiant pain relief centers, presents a revolutionary pain management method. It doesn’t include drugs, or needles, or surgery, or side effects. He and his cofounder have combined recent science, innovative thinking, and business disruption. They’re ready to transform the way that chronic pain is understood and treated with the safest, most effective therapy targeted to elevate complicated conditions. Brendan should know. He’s a previous chronic pain sufferer himself with deep experience in healthcare management, marketing, business development, and sales. By the end of this episode, you’ll have both a method for chronic pain management and you’ll have a vision for the future.   Get Brendon’s new book Radiant Relief on Amazon. Find out more at Radiant Relief. Brendon Lundberg: You know, I spent my career in healthcare related business. I grew up in and around healthcare. My dad was the CEO of hospitals growing up, and I had an uncle there who was a chiropractor. So I was kind of was exposed to those two different types of camps, alternative and the allopathic communities. And then began my career to finishing my MBA and spent my career in healthcare. I worked with hospital administrators, practice owners and operators, clinicians of all different types, medical doctors, and a gamut of alternative care physicians. The hearing aid industry for about a decade, which is kind of surprising in some ways, really was a predicate experience for the business. I was head of sales and marketing for a breath test to measure free radical damage, which is very eye-opening experience and exposed me to a much deeper range of alternative care. Charlie Hoehn: Free radical damage? Brendon Lundberg: Yeah, free radical damage. So you know why we eat antioxidants is to reduce oxidation or oxidative damage, like rusting of the cells. So when we had a technology that would measure the efficacy of taking supplements or eating better, making lifestyle changes to see if your free radical damage levels were being reduced and thereby theoretically getting healthier. The Journey to Radiant Relief Brendon Lundberg: All along my professional journey, my wife went through a pretty challenging health journey, For many years, she sought solutions, but unfortunately didn’t find answers to those solutions or didn’t find answers to those questions. Eventually, did find relief in a process of brain retraining too, which is kind of the underlying modality of what we do for our therapy for resolving pain. It really created a level of understanding of what our clients go through when they have years or decades seeking answers for why they hurt and why their bodies are betraying them and why their doctors can’t find that answer for them. I think it was a culmination of all those things. I worked in two companies when I was in the hearing aid industry. I joined the team in their early days, one of the first 10 or 15 or so employees, and both became Inc. magazine’s Top 500 Fastest Growers,

“It’s not personal, it’s just business.” That has become a mantra for leaders—a call to put shareholders first, managing employees like machines and protecting the organization from its people. Guy Bell, author of Unlearning Leadership, believes that this way of thinking is driving mediocre results. In order to become a transformative leader, he believes you need to let go of what you know so that you can unleash the power of human potential. For more than 20 years, Guy has been successful in business, despite his unconventional approach. He knew early on in his career that his brand of leadership created momentum by connecting with people to reach their full potential. In this episode, he draws on his experiences in startups, publicly traded companies and privately-owned companies to give you a new manifesto for business leadership. By the end of this episode, you’ll know what the future holds for more sustainable business and what can happen when we change our initiatives to be human centric and we dismantle the systemic norms and tap into our whole-body wisdom.   Get Guy’s new book Unlearning Leadership on Amazon. Find out more at GuyPierceBell.com.   Guy Bell: I had started small businesses in my 20s. I really never had an official process of learning by going to school, or whatever people do when they learn how to run a business the “right” way. When I first took a job with someone else to manage another person’s business, I’d already had a very personal experience with what it meant to me. As I sat down for my first annual review with my boss, who I got along great with, had a great first year, had a really fun run in the business—it was enjoyable. He essentially gave me the advice of “You need to learn to toughen up, you need to be harder on people, you need to care less”—those kinds of lessons that I learned over and over again in that early stage. But then again, in the next 30 years, they were beliefs and ideas that were very dehumanizing. When he was giving me this advice on what I needed to do, I was dumbfounded, I was thinking, “Gosh, how in the world do you come to that conclusion—and why is that what you consider to be wise counsel?” Like I mentioned, 30 years later, I’m running companies that are publicly traded, privately held, equity backed, and I’m hearing the same kind of crap. You know, everywhere I turn, I’m getting the same limiting school of thought that says, “Hey guys, it’s just business, it’s not personal.” I never bought that. I actually learned really quickly that I’m not going to be taking—they’re good people by the way—but I’m not going to be taking that school of thought on. I questioned this intuition I had that said, man, this experience called business is wildly personal. In fact, it’s the only reason we’re in business at all—it’s because of each other. We’re spreading as much time with these people we call our work partners as we are with our wives and husbands and partners. We spend more time with these people than probably any other human beings on this earth in our time here. Why not make it really fantastic—the best possible experience, lived experience, human experience that we can? A New Ambition Guy Bell: I went against the grain. I’ve spent a career really being involved in the room because of that.