What if You Lost Everything?

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

We need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

Hey. What's going on, guys? Welcome to the Warrior Soul Podcast. Today, wanna talk to you about something that I think is something that everybody should should think about at some point in their lives. And that is what are you going to do if you lose everything?

If you lost everything today, what would be your plan to come back? What would be your plan to get things back together and to move forward? And this is an important topic to me because it's happened to me before. About six, seven years ago, I literally lost everything I had. I was living out of my car.

Well, I'll give you the lead up to it. I had been going through a lot of business troubles. I was the owner of Metroflex Gym Long Beach at the time, the co owner of Metroflex Gym Long Beach. And I've been going through a lot of financial troubles because up until I opened up that business, I had been a couple of things. I'd been a marine.

I'd been a student. I'd had other jobs, but I didn't have a whole heck of a lot of savings. And that was a really dumb move on my part to jump into that business without having saved much of anything to live off of. And so, you know, the first three years of of opening that gym really took its toll. I was literally living off of, you know, $500, $600, $700 a month, Didn't have a whole lot to bring back to the table.

And I was married at the time. And, you know, relationships as they go, financial problems, they don't help relationships at all. And so the marriage was a mess. My financial situation was a mess. I ended up get...

Going through a divorce and ended up, you know, basically with nothing except for my car, some clothes that I had, and and my dog. Those are the the three things that I had. And it was a really, really tough situation. Now I don't wanna make it look like it was tougher than it really was. You know, I had people who I could call, right?

So I had friends, I didn't have a lot of family out here where I live, you know, my family's across the country. But I had people who helped me out, people who let me stay on their couch, people who opened up their homes to me, and I am so forever grateful to those people. I had a friend of mine give me a computer to help me to start my next business, which was my training business. I was given so much. And I knew that there's a lot of people out there who have a lot less than that.

And so I don't want to make it look like I was suffering any more than I actually was. But it was one of the hardest situations that I'd ever had to deal with in my life. And I know that there are a lot of people out there in the veteran community. Number one, there's a lot of homeless veterans who don't have a support system. And number two, I know that there's a lot of veterans out there who are teetering on the edge.

And so if anything I can say today gives you anything to move forward, I always consider it my goal to serve this community first and foremost above anything else. If if anything I say today can help you to move out of this horrible situation that you might be in, then then my goal is accomplished for the day. I I really, really hope that that you get something out of this that will help you if you're in a bad situation to move forward. So let's get into it. What would I do if once again, had lost absolutely everything?

And it starts with something that you're gonna say, Chris, you're out of your freaking mind. And it's gratitude. Gratitude. Now, when I think back to that first day when I'd finally been kicked out of my apartment and I'd finally, you know, was at a point where I had no shelter, nothing, you know, I I might have had 40, 50 dollars on me, and I had no understanding of of where I was gonna go or what I was gonna do. The the amazing thing is this, I automatically got a sense of calm.

And the reason why I got a sense of calm was because the the time period leading up to that point was one of the darkest times of my life. You know, my marriage, like I said, was horrible. We were constantly fighting, constantly coming at each other. I would come home at night and I would literally hide from my ex wife. I I would go to the bathroom and I would just hide in there.

And when it finally came down to the point where I knew we were gonna split up and I knew that we, you know, I I wasn't gonna stay in that apartment any longer, an automatic sense of relief came over me because even though I didn't have anything to my name and or any plan to move forward, I knew at that point a couple of things. Number one, anything was better than than the darkness that I was in up to that point. And number two, I also knew that I had nothing to lose. And so in that moment, I was able to find gratitude for what I did have. And what it did have was a car to get me around, clothes, and I had friends who were willing to help me out.

Alright? So no matter what, no matter what state you're in, you could always find something to be grateful for. And that gratitude is a platform that you get to push yourself off of and and get to to push up from. Right? So you want to find that gratitude, you want to find that thing that you could be grateful for in the moment, you want to focus on that, and you want to utilize it.

You want to utilize it as much as possible. Right? You might be in a horrible state, but there's always something that you can use. Alright? So number two, here's the other thing. There was a moment where there was a panic inside of me and saying, oh my god, I gotta go get a job. I gotta go do this. I gotta do go do that. Right?

I gotta I gotta go find the nearest job I can make minimum wage at. Right? That was one thing that crossed my mind. And then I said, you know what? Hold on a second.

Let's think about something here. Where do I wanna go? Literally, my life couldn't get any worse than what it was at that point. Yeah. Probably could.

I probably... The car could have broken down and things like that. But literally, was down to a point where I had nothing to lose. And so if from that point, I went and I decided to to just take some minimum wage job and start start working my butt off, where was I gonna go from there? Was I gonna be motivated to to get up to do that every single day?

Or was I gonna be able to put myself in the position to do something else? So when I checked in with myself, I had really came to the conclusion that I wasn't going to rush to do something that was gonna trap me into to to trying to work a a job that I didn't wanna do every single day. I had not gone through the struggle that I had gone through up up to that point to do that. Now a lot of you might be thinking, well, Chris, that's dumb. Why would you ever put yourself in that position?

Anything you can get at that point is going to be... Is is gonna help you. And again, the answer is this. I realized that I could make a lot more than minimum wage if I had just focused myself onto building out my business at that point. I knew that I could make a lot more than $8.5 an hour, which I think was the minimum wage at the time, if I just focused on my business.

And that would get me out of that position a lot quicker. And it would also lead to a greater sense of fulfillment on my part. And so I put my mind, I put my focus onto figuring out what else I could do. And this is where a stroke of luck came in because, like I said, a friend of mine gave me an old laptop computer, and then I was able to use that computer to build that business. So I literally would take that computer to Starbucks.

I would sit there, put some work in. I would use the camera on that computer to record videos, and put them out there into the world. And that's how my online fitness business started. Right? And then I literally...

I remember because I didn't have a good cell phone at the time. I would take that computer to the gym with me, and I would literally record myself because luckily, the the the remaining owner of Metroflex Gym still allowed me to train there for a while after after I went through that incident. I would take my computer to the gym, I would set it up, I would prop it up, and I would record myself doing training sessions and things like that, putting those out there. So that's another big thing. When you check-in with yourself, again, ask yourself, what do I have in my corner to take advantage of?

Right? So I knew that I could I didn't have to worry about bathing because I use the showers at the gym. I knew that I couldn't I didn't have to worry about finding an office or finding going and paying for Internet because I could literally just go to Starbucks, had free Wi Fi and use that. And then I literally took advantage of those things and use those as a launching point for my business. Right?

Now, the next thing I would do is this, and this is a really important one, particularly if you're going to go down the road that I took, which is to ask yourself, despite the position I'm in, how can I serve others? What kind of value can I give to the world? What types of problems can I solve for them? And here's the thing, a lot of you are out there, you're thinking that opening up a business means, hey, I gotta pay for overhead, I gotta buy a website, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And the reality is, you don't need any of that stuff.

What you need is an ability, the ability to understand what other people's problems are, and the ability to come up with a solution to those problems. Right? Now that that solution could come in the form of a hard product, but that's going to cost you money to produce. But if that solution comes in the form of knowledge, it's not gonna cost you much money at all to produce. And that's where my fitness business came in.

I was literally selling my knowledge, selling my knowledge about nutrition, selling my knowledge about training. Right? And so if you have something, and a lot of you out there do, that you could teach, that that you could give other people that would solve one of their major pain points, one of their major problems, then that can definitely help you to build a business right then and there, and help you to pull yourself out of any hole that you might be in. Right? So you want to continually ask yourself, what can I do to help others?

And if you're wondering what you can do, look back at your story. Look back at where you've come from, what your life's been like up to this point. And maybe, you know, eventually, one of the themes of this podcast here is is, you know, in the way that I serve you guys is I'm often talking about the mistakes I've made in the past. I'm often talking about how much I screwed up. I'm often trying to give you guys lessons so that you don't have to go through that.

So at the end of the day, you don't have to be somebody who's a superman or perfect or anything like that. You could just be somebody who has a past, who has some lessons from their past, and you're trying to teach people these things. Right? Now, that's not always gonna automatically start as a business, but at least it will get you to a place where you can start to figure out more about other people's problems and start to use some of your intellectual property to be able to apply your knowledge to other people's problems, and then potentially eventually create a product. And then finally, here's the biggest thing.

Once you find what that thing is, and once you find where your your your knowledge lies, where where you're gonna be serving other people, and and you've checked in with yourself and determined where you wanna go, I would start to create systems for moving forward. So what are these systems? These systems entail how the the actual implementation of how you're gonna serve others. So what are you going to do? Right?

Are you going to utilize free resources like Google Spreadsheets or or Google Docs to disseminate information? Are you gonna use a YouTube channel? Are you gonna set up an online course? Right? Because you could use platforms like Thinkific for free, right?

Are you going to to, you know, basically just start something else? Maybe you could start a print on demand T shirt company, right? A whole host of different things that you could do out there that aren't going to cost you a lot of money that you could set up systems around. And the way you set up these systems, you want to set them up in a way that it's going to allow you to help people on a repeated effort, a system that you can duplicate and translate between different people you help, and those people will be called your clients. Alright?

So that's a big, big thing that I want you to understand here. If you're at a position where you feel like you're lose... You've lost everything and you feel like there's no way out of it, I want you to understand that there always is a way out. Usually the fear just grips us so hard, and grips us to such a point that we just can't figure out exactly where to go next. And so a lot of times we get paralysis, right?

But a lot of times, it just comes back to trying to figure out what to be grateful for. And if you could figure out what to be grateful for, then you have a platform to work from. And it's the greatest platform in the world because that allows you to start to think in terms of what you can control, and it keeps you away from the fear of the things that you can't. That's all I got for this week, guys. I hope this all makes sense.

Please ask me questions. Send me questions on the Warrior Soul Agoge Instagram account or on the Warrior Soul Agoge Facebook page. A couple of things. If you haven't been here before, this is the Warrior Soul Podcast. What we do here is we try to put pieces of information out there that US military veterans can use to push their lives forward.

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You can just listen to this for free as much as you want. I do want to put a shout out there to our good friends at F Bomb Nutrition. Without them, this show really wouldn't happen. You know, it's... It gets expensive to to run these shows, and F Bomb has been an amazing sponsor to to us so that we could keep things going.

They make amazing delicious packages of fats, and their macadamia nut butters are off the hook. In addition to that, they're great people. They're sending boxes of their product overseas to the troops in the front lines, and I really appreciate them for that. If you want to get your first order of F bombs for 20% off, head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and you'll get 20% off of your first order when you could use the code Warrior Soul at checkout. With that, guys, we'll see you next week, and I wanna thank you so much for listening.

Talk to y'all soon. Peace.