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Ten Habits for Bouncing Back — with Ralph Watkins (Episode 505)
Introduction
Hey, folks, have you ever been up shit creek? Let me just be real blunt. And, it’s not a matter of if, but when. And that can happen in business. big and small. You might have a partner or a senior leader that lets you down. You trusted him, you believed in him, and all of a sudden it’s not working and you feel you’ve been victimized. Well guess what? There’s a need as a leader to get past all that. My guest today is going to help us with some survival tips for surviving that Shit Creek episode. His name is Ralph Watkins. Ralph, welcome to the show.
Hey. Thanks, Doug. It’s great to be here. It’s a real it’s a privilege. And it’s an honor. So. Thanks.
Yeah. You, let me dive right in. Give me the title of your book. We were talking about it in the green room.
Meet the Guest: Ten Habits of Shit Creek Survivors
So the title of my book is called Ten Habits of Shit Creek Survivors. And, and really what that can we talked about being up that creek and I having been an up at myself way up the creek and come back out of it, I really began to follow other people who had been up there, had their own experiences. So mine was chiefly in business. But I talked to people who had been there personally, health wise, addiction, addiction situations that, that, that threaten their, their very livelihood, their families. What? So there’s all there’s all sorts of different things. Right.
And, and then became a student of looking through history at people that that went through things that that made my ordeal look like a walk in the park. And it’s like, what? What do they have in common? What, what, what commonality? What things do they employ or did they employ to move them through their situation? And honestly, while while some of it is, is is fortune or or luck fortuitous, whatever you want to call it, the rest of it is keeping your head on straight so that you don’t completely come apart mentally while this stuff is going on and you’re in a position to be able to to move forward or take advantage as steps present themselves.
So so that’s the book title. It’s really ten kind of vignettes, if you will. Each each one talks about a different person who, who what they went through, brought to life or illustrated each of these habits. And then there’s a bonus chapter in there on personal faith as well. But the beautiful part is, hey, you can start at the beginning and read it if you want. And I’ve had people do that and say, Holy cow, I couldn’t put it down. Well, that’s that’s a nice compliment. It’s nice to hear. But there’s also, you can you can start at any one of those things. you can look through through the titles of these. Of each of these habits ago. You know, I’ve been really, really hard on myself. I think I need to start with that one on self-compassion.
Yeah, I love it.
That’s it. Yeah.
So go ahead.
Key Discussion Point 1: Radical Acceptance
So give me one of the examples. Pick it. Pick a number out of ten and tell me which one might be a favorite or close to a personal experience.
That’s a great question. And I tell you, what has really emerged for me as the favorite is I had somebody go, what’s what’s the top? Is there one that that’s that’s key to everything. And and interestingly, when I first put the book together I laid them all out. So I came I said yeah, probably probably habit number two which is radical acceptance and habit number nine, which is self-compassion. And then the more I got thinking about that, I went, well, if I would talk about those as my two favorite habits, why? Why not make them habit one in habit two, right? So I’m actually working on a second edition where I sort of reorder these things. And and at each chapter, I talk about the portion of my own story that that is illustrated in that habit. But, I’m expanding on that. So I am working on a on second edition already, although I’ve gotten, you know, proud to say that, the first one’s gotten some good response, but radical acceptance.
So the idea behind that is that when something we come into that situation, we find ourselves up the creek, we’re moving up the creek, or it can it can something that can come on us very quickly. We can spend a lot of time arguing with the reality of the situation. Why did this happen to me? This shouldn’t be happening. That wasn’t fair. You know, and we try to we try to bargain our way out of it. And what we wind up doing is spending a lot of of mental energy, and we and we and we get fatigued with this, with, with, with a pointless discussion that doesn’t serve any purpose. Rather than going. Here’s what happened. Here’s where I am. These are the resources I have. This maybe needs to happen in this time frame. What am I going to do? You go, well, what are you going to do? You’re up the creek. I mean, you don’t you don’t have any reason. Yeah, but the the first part is to stop fighting with the situation.
So now we can focus whatever energy mentally we have on coming up with a solution, even if it’s temporary or as a fix that gets us to tomorrow. And then that may open up another opportunity. Or we. In other words, it helps us move a step at a time. And we don’t have to see the the whole path out of the situation. Right. But it can help us go. What is my next step? That’s all I can see. Well, the next step is right here. Good. Let’s take that one. Now we took that step and and we never know what’s going to happen when we take that step. It may be more of the same. Or we may go, oh, wow, that just opened up an opportunity here. Or that helped me. That helped me keep my head on straight long enough to to have this opportunity that comes by me over here and, and and to do that as a pivot. But you know what? There’s nothing left for me where that was.
That’s another key point here. This isn’t about getting it back or returning to where you were or fixing it, making it like it was in my situation and in the situation of so many people, hey, what happened, happened. And now we’re actually start on a, on a, on a journey that’s an evolution. And we and we become something perhaps many times more effective or, or better than we were by, by simply moving forward in, in, in we become a different person.
Pivoting Forward: Lessons from Covid
I can’t tell you how many stories like that came out of the Covid experience. so many people I met and talked to. I think of everything from a restaurant owner who, you know, couldn’t have any foot traffic inside his restaurant, but he started making, boiling crawfish down here in the Gulf Coast. And, you know, you could people could call in and order them by the pound, you know, and he would do bags of crawfish. And pretty soon he just he was able to exit his lease, get rid of all that square footage overhead he was paying.
He just built a slightly bigger kitchen and boil crawfish for the rest of his life. And people really liked what he was doing. And, you know, that was his new business model. Yeah. Crawfish gravy had better profit margin, less sweat and less hassle. You know, and, I mean, the stories go on and on. But it’s to your point, they’re you’re not going to get to go back where you were. It’s it’s over. It’s gone. That that part’s done. And, you know, those who can make a healthy pivot often come out better than they were. Not. Because particularly for the entrepreneur, there’s a thing that happens where you get so locked in on your vision, you really don’t see what the market is telling you or what reality is telling you about the viability of your idea. You’ve you’ve birthed this thing and you might have had a little bit of success, but it’s not really scaling. It’s not really going where you want it to go. You feel defeated, but the radical acceptance is maybe your idea wasn’t that great.
Maybe you need to try something else. Go. Go do something else.
I was I was going to bring up just another point, which is we long for where what we had or what we lost or where we were, because that seemed so much better than the crisis we find ourselves in. However, if we were interviewed right before that crisis hit, we probably could have come up with a list of things that weren’t ideal, even about the situation where we were. So now it’s like it’s a chance for a reset, if you will. You know.
Right.
Behind the Scenes: Doug’s Banking Story
I love that. And, you know, the radical acceptance I think is an interesting there’s there’s a story that I’m not ashamed to tell. I’ve shared it with clients and many others. And in my banking days, I had a long run of of leading teams and lines of business, and it thought I was riding the wave. You know, I was getting nice bonus checks every year. I was getting kudos from everybody. And that thought I was on a run.
And all of a sudden one day my boss walked in and said, you’re not going to lead this unit anymore. We’re going to make some changes. And I went. What did I do? You know, and he said, it’s just a business shift. Nothing personal. We’re, we’re we’re going to redeploy some other people. And and I’m like, Holy cow. Well, what I did, I guess in the vein of radical acceptance and in like in, I guess you call it great HR form. They told me that news on a Friday afternoon. So I had all weekend to stew about it with.
No one we talked to.
And I went home, and I vividly remember sitting on the edge of my pool with my feet dangling in the water, just having the biggest pity party you could ever have. And then all of a sudden, like a bolt of lightning, it hit me. I went, wait a minute, I’ve had a 15 year run, and it’s kind of like a a hit streak in the major leagues.
You know how many games you get in 15 years. I’ve had a hit in every one of those games, you know. And now all of a sudden I’m going to get traded somewhere. And it the revelation I had was. Dude, you’re in the big league. This is going to happen. You just haven’t had it happen yet. You need to embrace it and accept it.
That’s right. And.
part of the discussion I’d had on Friday was I was asking about options and they said, well, you’ve always got about needing a sales person in this unit. You can stay in the unit. Why don’t you become the sales person and you’ll report to the new manager we’re putting in here and I. So I thought about that over the weekend and I said, all right I’m in. And I dusted myself off. Went in on Sunday, cleared out my office, moved down the hall to a smaller, you know, office and set up shop. And on Monday morning I was ready to go, you know.
And people couldn’t believe it. They thought, wow, you know. How in the world did you do that? And I thought, well, you know, it’s it’s kind of an instant flash of that radical acceptance. It is what it is. I’m not embarrassed by it. It was a business decision. I’m in. I’m. I still believe in this organization. And I’m going to do what I can in a new role.
Yep.
Key Discussion Point 2: Self-Compassion and the Old Tapes
Excellent. So, another way that, that sort of stated this is like, if you’re, you’re in a burning building, right? Or whatever this, this crisis that’s happening before you can find your way out of this place, maybe, you know, you’ve got to you’ve got to find the floor. You’ve got to know what you’re we gotta we find a foundation we can stand on. And from there we can assess things and take a look at what our options are. So, so so that would probably be I think I think that that radical acceptance that may be the kingpin.
Because whatever crisis somebody is in, I think without that radical acceptance, they’ll. They’ll constantly be struggling, spinning their wheels, you know, arguing with the situation. for me, the next, the next, most important one. As I thought through this was, self-compassion. Self-compassion? in my situations. I went through this. And just for the quick synopsis. Ours was a was was a business collapse. You know, I thought we were, well, diversified. We had our own mortgage company. We had our own title company. We had our own, construction company. We had a real estate holding company. And thank God we’re spread across all these things. No, they’re all plugged into the real estate outlet. And when that when that outlet got unplugged, this house of cards just all came tumbling down, right? Yeah. And so, you know, we went from honestly, we were having conversations. Well, what do we want to do with, like, the second half of our lives now that we don’t have to worry about money anymore.
We went from that to. I literally sat on a couch, stunned while my while my buddy, who had been my partner in the construction company, signed me up for unemployment because I couldn’t make myself do it. I’m like, Holy cow. Like, like what is going on here? He’s like, you’ve earned this. You’ve paid into it. This is an insurance policy that insures against the very situation you’re in right now. And for you not to take it is foolhardy and prideful. Give me that computer. Boom. I mean, he didn’t didn’t mince any words, you know, but even after that I had I had these I had these tapes playing in my head and they were not kind, you know, they were this I didn’t want to do the unemployment thing because I that’s like a final nail in the coffin that I’m a failure. Right. well, you know what? That stuff brought groceries.
Yeah.
Actually served the purpose. It actually, there was a reason for that. but, you know, I would meet people.
hey. I’m Ralph. Hey, Ralph. How are you? Good. Yeah. And in my mind, I’m Ralph. I’m the guy that that had a $43 million bankruptcy petition. Personally. Lost 4.5 million. Yeah, I’m that guy. and this is this is what I would. I wouldn’t say this out loud, but that’s in my mind his time. Because I need to remind myself, you know, this is. Dude, you you you you blew this, right? and, it wasn’t until I could stop listening to those old tapes. I literally found myself listening to new ones, like in the CD player. Right. And it was this sort of came about because, a friend that I had helped through his own creek. He had been way up a creek in a situation that was different than mine. Years earlier, I helped him out. I didn’t realize how bad the situation was. He’s just the guy I knew from church and I helped them get in the mortgage business, you know, and and turned out to be an absolute beast.
Well, you know, he got whacked, too in 2008, differently than I did. and, he decided he wanted to start a coaching program for mortgage loan officers, and he wanted me to do it with him. And he said, dude, you got to do this with me. And I’m like, that’s just another reason for someone to be mad at me. You know, I was having, like, PTSD from my 341 bankruptcy hearing, which usually nobody comes to those. Oh, no, I had a whole room full. I had dozens of people who had been my clients who had thought I was awesome, and now they’re all there with pitchforks and, you know, like in nooses and looking for a tree, like to hang me up. Right. And so, yeah, that was that wasn’t a fun day. And so this, this is like what I flashed back to and he said, he said, brother, you’re listening to old tapes. That’s all I got right now.
Listening to New Tapes
And then my wife and I subsequently got involved in an organization, and part of that was a regimen of, of, they, they sent us. It was success magazine, actually. Oh, really? And she said, yeah. And, well, every, every issue each month there was a CD with somebody who overcame something and became successful. And so I began listening to those. And it was, it was it was really cathartic for me. It was like, well, these people all went through rough stuff, right? They didn’t fold their tent. They didn’t wallow in self-pity, as you mentioned before. And. Right. So, so listening to these, I actually called them up. I was driving that particular day. I was listening to Brian Tracy, and he’s real big on, you know, doing the right, the right activities, not just staying busy, but but but doing the right activities that really move the needle, the 20% of activities that produce 80% of the results.
Right. And so so I called up my friend and I said, hey, you remember this conversation we had and you wanted me to help you, and you said I was listening to old tapes. Yeah, man, I remember I said, well, I just want you to know I’m listening to new ones.
Oh.
Dude. That’s awesome. Congratulations. Yeah. Let’s talk again to and we that led to other conversations and what have you. But it literally took listening to new tape to to get rid of that old crap because it would just keep playing and it was it was so destructive. It wasn’t helpful.
Well, and you know, the human mind is, is an amazing instrument if we use it well, but it can be used against us too. And we, we look at situations, maybe even before we go over the cliff into the creek. but we anticipate things that sometimes don’t ever happen. And I always refer to a mark Twain quote that said, as I’ve gotten older and I look back on my life, I realize it’s been a series of horrible tragedy and misadventure, most of which never happened.
And we.
We have a way of spinning ourselves up, and I think it does apply after the fact. You know those tapes that say, oh, you had a bankruptcy? Dude. You’re terrible. You think you’re a businessman? Forget about it. You know, go get a job. Just don’t do that again. Don’t try that again. And it. You know, depending on how you’re wired, you know, those are horrible messages. And allowing that personal grace to kind of fully and effectively embrace the idea. Nobody’s perfect. And if you’re going to play in the big leagues, you’re going to win some and lose some, and you got to figure out how to take that for sure.
Feeding Your Mind: The Power of the Right Inputs
You know, just what you just said reminded me of that landmark book. It was written by Doctor Malts back in the 60s and updated some 40 years later by Dan Kennedy in the book. I think the title scares people away. It’s called Psycho Cybernetics. I don’t know familiar with it, but but really the key takeaway there is that it’s what goes into your mind is critically important.
What happens, what you know, when, when when we input goes into our mind, our subconscious receives it and immediately starts working on it. Except for all is magically as it works with our subconscious. It’s really dumb because it cannot tell fact from fiction, right? So if you’re feeding your mind with I’m a failure, I blew it. I’ll never get out of this. That’s going to follow me forever, you know, why don’t I go get all that? The things you just mentioned there, your your subconscious goes to work immediately on it. Because. Because it believes it. But if you fill your mind, as the late, great Zig Ziglar said, with the good, the clean, the pure, the powerful, the positive, it goes to work on that. It’s like. It’s like it’s like the AI engines that are out here. Well, the things they can do are remarkable, but in a way they’re dumb because they’ll they’ll take whatever you put in there and start working on it.
And our subconscious is a lot the same way. So critically, critically important to feed our mind with the right things.
Personal Stories: The Crash of 2008 and Finding New Purpose
Well, you know, we’ve talked about the great crash of 2008, which did send a whole lot of people. And by the way, I too had a mortgage related entity. It was a it was a very extreme tangent, but it was going well. I had built the company and we were in our fifth year when 2008 happened, and we were ground zero for the crash. You know, everything we were doing went away Overnight. And, I had to deal likewise with taking a company through bankruptcy and dealing with all that. And, you know, it does play with your mind. What I ended up doing, I came out on the other side of that, having gotten exposed to a, a ministry that was helping job seekers, but, nice. The location of it was about 55 miles away from my house, and that summer of oh eight and gas got up to $4 a gallon.
Then, you know, if you’re unemployed, closing out of bankruptcy and you want to drive 110 miles round trip, not a not a strategic move, you know.
So, right.
I talked to the leaders in that organization and I said, can I franchise can I start one down in my area. And they said, no, we don’t want to expose our church that way, but Godspeed. You know, if you want to do it, go, go for it. Go set something up. So I did. And we threw some good friends. We funded and established a nonprofit. And over the course of months and in the years we coached over 4500 people through the job.
Wow.
Transition process. And, you know, the number one thing we discovered early on in the process is for men. They lost their sense of identity by losing the job. So they were people were walking in our door as zombies. You could see it in their face. They just. They were unsettled.
They couldn’t find the floor. You know, like you said a moment ago, for women, they were radically insecure. They had lost whatever financial resources they had in the job they had, and they were in a panic. And that was a not an exclusive statement of condition, but a very broad generalization of what we were dealing with. So I started formulating a plan to help people reconnect with their identity and their true sense of God given purpose in life. And forget the job for a minute. Let’s let’s just talk about who do you believe you are? Who do you think you are? And we have some tools and methods for helping people get there. It wasn’t all woo woo and meditation kind of stuff, although that helps. But it was it was practical ways to kind of get back and reconnect with your own sense of purpose and being. And then people were ready to start leaning into the job hunt. And it was it was an amazing experience. And frankly, that’s what got me into coaching.
I realized the power of really sitting with somebody and having a deep discussion about where they are and what they want to do and need to do, and help them get there.
Yep.
Outstanding. And and good news is you’ve got great job security with that.
Yeah. Well, like you’ll.
Never reach a point where where everybody’s comfy and nobody needs help.
Right. Right. Right.
Well, we, I have subsequently wound that down. We got to a place the market seemed to have stabilized, and, no real disrespect to anybody, but this is going to sound disrespectful. I started I got to a season in the life of that organization where the only people we were seeing was what we affectionately called chronically unemployed. People that had serious mental, emotional challenges. They they weren’t allowing any of this heal, self-healing, the self-talk. They really needed therapists. And that’s.
Not.
What we did. So we had to we were referring people a lot of places, but we said, wait a minute.
We’re you know, our market has shifted now and we don’t we don’t have the demand we had before. So we made an orderly winding down of that organization. But, it served a purpose and served a season. And, really did help. But it taught me a whole lot about much of what it sounds like you’re talking about in the book. The the, the the power of overcoming a bad situation.
Gratitude: Thank God for the Fleas
Yes. And you know what? I think a critical distinction here. People go, oh, yeah, you just get up and you and you, you tell yourself everything’s all right. Or you’re like, this is the process of going through these ten habits. Or some of them, like probably most people don’t need to go through all of them, but you’ll latch on to the ones that are most important. This is not a. what they call, you know, a toxic positivity or a or make a fake smile pretending everything is is right when it’s not. And there’s some things that need to be addressed.
That’s not what this is about at all. But, you know, if we can what one of the, elements that helped us in our, in our process. And my wife was great with this talk about being blessed with a great relationship. So this year we’ve been married, you know, 43 years, and she’s, she’s a a smart, incredibly capable, godly woman and a fountain, an artesian well of great insight and wisdom. So even going through all this, you know, she was able to go, you know what, we’re healthy. We’ve still got a roof over our head. Our kids are healthy. We have food on the table for tonight. There’s a lot of people. Can’t say that. So in the midst of everything that that’s something that that’s that’s a starting point. In the in in the book, there’s actually a chapter on gratitude. And I talk about the remarkable, Corrie ten boom, the hiding place in her book. And one of the things she talked about that just really jumped out and slapped me was that, these barracks where they were housed were horrible.
They were just disgusting. And they had a bunch of people all crammed in these bunks, and it wasn’t comfortable. the guards were unbearable, but they realized that the guards never came in. They’re in their bed, and they went into other barracks, but they didn’t come in theirs, and they would brutalize them and all sorts of horrible things. But they didn’t come in their barracks, and they discovered the reason for that was it was full of fleas, and the fleas were disgusting, and they couldn’t stand the fleas, but it kept the guards out of the barracks. And as a result, they were able to get together. They actually held Bible studies. They, you know, they worked together, able to support each other. And it became a safe haven where they could get away from the guards because, you know. Well, so we had a and it was our sister said, we need to thank God for the fleet. Are you out of your mind? Well, it it allows us this, this, this and this.
Wow. Okay. Yeah, I guess I guess when you look at it that way, they’re a good thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and I think that speaks to, you know, certainly the travesty of that experience pales. Everything else pales in comparison. But, you know, for those of us who have gone into bad situations, there inevitably is something good to be learned from it. And, you know, to to the point I made a moment ago, you know, getting involved in that nonprofit work, coaching people has opened a door for me that I loved and I cherish, you know, the opportunity to work with people at that level and you know it. I probably never would have thought about going that direction because I was I was somebody involved in execution and delivery. You know, I was an operations guy and, you know, it was about getting things done. And, you know, when you get into the coaching work where you’re actually dealing with people and meeting them where they are in their personal journey, it’s it’s a whole different ballgame.
So.
Betrayal, Vulnerability, and Putting Down the Armor
You know, one of the things you mentioned at the very beginning, we started the conversation when you touched on, on on betrayal and, how it’s, you know, I guess there’s degrees of betrayal, right? But but there’s at some point you’re going to have faith in a person and it’s going to it’s going to come up short. Very rarely does that person not ever disappoint you or make you question the relationship or whatever, you know? and, in our situation, we had a person who was a, we met him at church. He was actually a church elder who was a close friend. And I, we would, bounce business ideas off of each other’s heads. He was a, you know, a he was a CPA. He was a, a not a certified investor, but a, you know, he, he, he, he ran a company. He was, he, he did big, investing amounts and whatever. He, he wound up coming to work for us as our in-house CPA, and, he loved our model so much.
And at that time, what we were doing was we moved into private lending. So we were financing, flippers of real estate, small contractors that couldn’t get bank financing. We would do hard money loans. Personally, I have good credit, I don’t care, I don’t care what your credit is. We simply look at the numbers, we’ll lend this percentage on what the property will be worth, will you know. So we had a whole formula that we used and and then we financed it with, with Joe Blow and Susie Q and and this person or that person, it’s all financed with private funds. And this guy loved them, loved the, the vision so much. you know, he bought some of the mortgages himself, which is cool, right? Well, when all the wheels came off, we were trying to find the floor. So we had a chart and we were going, okay, what is going on? Because we went from probably actual foreclosures, less than 1%. We had maybe 5% default, but 80% of those, we could step in and and help them resolve it in some way.
You know, connecting with the realtors so they could sell it. We’ll put some people together. About 1% actually went into foreclosure. Well, we went from that low default rate in the space of 90 or 120 days to about a 75% or 80% default rate. So Everything went bad. It’s like the kid who stuck his finger in the in the dam trying to keep the water from blowing. Except boom boom boom boom. There’s just holes everywhere. And you can’t. You can’t stop it. Right, right. And, so as we’re going through, we got we got this big whiteboard and we got all these properties listed. Okay. How much do we have in this one? Okay. How much is is lent against it? What what are the mortgages against this one? What’s the value? How far? Upside is not. Are we upside down? It’s. How far upside down are we? Right. And, so he comes in, he’s looking at this, he goes, oh, yeah.
And then the first one he says, I got, I got 40 grand out of that one. What do you mean? He got 40 grand in that one? Oh, well, you know, the construction guy said he was short of that, so. So I, you know, I chipped in 40 grand so he could finish it. And I’ll just get paid when it sells. We’ve done this lots of times before and it always works out. Yeah, well, that was before. Everything’s upside down. So what you’re telling me is. So we’ve got, I don’t know. Between a first and second, we’ve got 120,000 on this property. On a good day, it’s going to sell for 90 or 95 in this market and you got $40,000 additionally on there that’s not secured in any way. There’s not a shred of paperwork. There’s no lien, there’s no nothing. Yeah, well, you seem awfully relaxed. Well, I figured you’d take care of it. How? Right. So.
Yeah. And on this one, I have this much, and I have that much, and I have that much. And so we go down the list. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars completely unsecured on properties that are already upside down. Right. So when he sees all like, our blank stares, like, like all of a sudden this dawns on him, oh my gosh, like you didn’t you didn’t even mention it to me. This is the first I’m learning about this, right? Well, when all came into focus, he didn’t he didn’t cope well with it. And frankly, he just kind of snapped. And so we went through a period where we were working very closely with state investigators and auditors, because they wanted to make sure that nothing untoward and illegal had happened. I mean, we could see that things were flaming as a rolling dumpster fire. But did we start the fire or what? You know, how did this and, he began sharing bad information and and what, you know, and so a bankruptcy should normally take about 90 days.
Ours took five years. Well, it was five years. Right. So. I looked at this and go, wow, that guy really threw us under the bus. I go, well, wait a minute, he did. What would I have done in his situation? I mean, it wasn’t the right thing to do, but it it it. This was smash and grab. It was like survival of the fittest. Right. So it’s easy to be upset. Well, you know, he was upset with me. With us. So rather than that, that comes back to fighting the situation. Right. Rather that I’m going. You know what? That is what it is. Our instinct is really to. When when you feel like you’re betrayed by somebody, you build armor around you, like everybody out. Well, I’m not going to let that happen to me again. The problem is that when we do that now, that just creates isolation from people. And that starts you on a, like on a, on a relational death spiral.
So I mean, the true leadership, if you will. I mean, requires you to put the armor down, put put down the armor. And we need to show people our scars instead of our highlight reel.
Yeah.
Right. And so that’s another that that was one of the habits embracing vulnerability. Right. When people see that they don’t want to see you at your best. They want to see how you how you coped and how you managed, frankly, at your worst.
Right? Right.
How did you move through that?
Closing Thoughts
So totally, directly related to character and integrity. You know how you get through again. And it’s it’s the idea if you’re going to be out there on the street in in the game, you’re going to have to take a few losses with the winds along the way. And nobody has a perfect record for that. Well, Ralph, I think we’re about up on time today, my friend. Thank you so much for sharing. Tell people the best way to get in touch with you if they’re interested in knowing more.
I appreciate that, thanks. So, I was able to find the domain that worked well, and I actually spawned a little organization, so I, I started I found a little organization called the National Association of Shit Creek Survivors. It’s the NASCS.org. So if you’d like more information on that, you can visit the website at npr.org. you have the opportunity there to actually become a certified Creek survivor.
Print out a little thing. You can stick it on your wall if you want, but the whole idea is that that everybody goes up. As we were talking about, people spend some time at some point up the creek, and this is the way what you’re going through right now and what you’re that’s that’s what or you’ve just come through it. Somebody else is headed into it. Right? So, everything that we can always we’re we’re not a vacuum. We’re not the only person this has happened to. We all go through it. And if we’re willing to be vulnerable and share with people Our situation.
What happened, what we did, how we connected. It helps other people to get through it more easily. So visit now. If you want the book, you can get the book there. At the site you’ll see a little button. You can do that. If you want to write to me directly, you can write to Ralph at a.
Well, once again, Ralph, thank you so much for sitting in. I do like to remind everybody we have a video version of this show over on YouTube channel by the same name. It’s called Leadership Empowered by Common Sense. Check us out over there. Join the channel. Leave us a comment. We’d love to hear from you. But for now I’m going to sign off. Say goodbye. Go out there. Make it a great day.
Meet Our Guest – Ralph Watkins
Ralph Watkins is the author of 10 Habits of Shit Creek Survivors: Lessons from Hell to Hope and the founder of the National Association of Shit Creek Survivors (NASCS). After a $10M financial collapse and a five-year bankruptcy journey, Ralph developed a research-backed framework to help others navigate life’s “Category 5” storms.
https://nascs.org
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