Episode#35 - How to Develop a Relentless Mindset for Success with Steve A. Klein

What is the real difference between people who succeed and those who quit? It's not talent, education, or resources. It's the relentless mindset to keep going, even when the results aren't visible yet.

In this episode of The Resilience Catalyst, I'm joined by Steve A. Klein, a 40-year veteran of the success industry and author of Sell When You See the Whites of Their Eyes. Steve shares powerful stories and timeless principles about the mind's power over matter. We discuss why people fail (it's not what you think), the 10th Multiple rule that explains why most people give up too early, and how to stay focused like a laser beam on your goals.

This is a masterclass in mental fortitude for anyone who wants to stop making excuses and start creating results.

In this episode, you will learn:
► The four letters that are the secret to success: CCDA (Correct Consistent Daily Activity).
► Why you might only be at 3.2% of your goal when you're halfway through the timeline (and why you shouldn't quit).
► The story of the carrots and why you can't keep "digging up" your progress.
► How a laser-like focus, like Forrest Gump's, is essential for overcoming any obstacle.
► The power of the Law of Attraction and programming your mind for success.

Connect with Steve A. Klein: https://www.steveaklein.com |  https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveaklein/

#Mindset #Success #Motivation #Resilience #NeverGiveUp #PersonalDevelopment

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you're feeling drained, exhausted, overwhelmed, or burnt out, this show is for you. And I want you to know that you're not alone. Millions of professionals are operating in a resilience deficit. On the Resilience Catalyst Show, you'll learn how to understand, rebuild, and grow the currency of resilience so you can restore your energy, think clearly under pressure, navigate conflict with confidence, and sustain your performance without burning out. I'm Joyce the Didison, your host, friend, and resilience catalyst. Let's get started. Welcome to the Resilience Catalyst Podcast. My name is Joyce the Didison, your host, where we make resilience practical. We make it easy to understand, and we make it applicable by showing you how to measure, map, and build your resilience so you can be able to sustain your success, your focus, and achieve what you want in your career, in your life, and in your relationship. So today we're going to talk about mind over matters. This is the topic we're going to focus on, and we're going to look at how our mind can control the things that we see, the things we do, the things we actually hear, and how we develop and grow as humans. And I have a guest today who is going to help us to get a little bit deeper into the topic. So I have my guest with me today is Steve. And Steve is a 40-year veteran in the field. He brings amazing years of experience of applying with leaders, with organizations, with individuals, and he's going to share with us some of the strategies he's been using with his clients so we can become just as excellent as they are. Steve, welcome.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Welcome to you too, Joyce. Thank you for uh having me as a guest.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

My pleasure. Tell us, tell the audience a little bit about your journey and what you've been doing over the last 40 years. We're all gone.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Well, I did to go back even farther than about 40 years, I was uh I worked for a radio station as a uh news director, and um my boss fired me after six weeks. It was a small town in Nebraska, and he rehired me as a salesperson, and I had no idea how to sell. And I had to self-train myself and uh teach myself how to be successful. And I was reading books about sales. I read books about how to be successful, and that led into working with a company that marketed uh success information. So it became my passion to understand what it takes to be successful and to help other people move to a point where they could be as successful as they wanted to be.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Hmm. That's amazing. So if you're thinking of becoming successful, or you are successful and you're thinking you want to be more successful, you definitely want to listen to this podcast. 40 plus years of experience, and this is why Steve is dropping here for us. So keep on listening because I have some amazing questions and I know he had lots of pieces for us. So, Steve, one of the things that you talked about is teaching yourself how to become a salesperson. And that is something because as an entrepreneur, as I meet other entrepreneurs, a lot of them struggle with the whole sales and marketing thing. I mean, frankly, I struggled with it too for years and years until you start to realize you're not just a I'm not just a resilient scatterless or expert or conflict analyst. I'm also a sales and marketing person. So what was your biggest struggle learning that and becoming successful at it?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

The company that I, well, I'll go back to when I was uh I was fired and rehired as a salesperson with the same company. I began reading a lot of books, and um, I had one particular uh potential customer that when I went to beat him, he told me he would never buy advertising from me. And I asked him why. And he said, one of the salespeople from the radio station before, two people before me, he got in a verbal fight with, and he said, I will never buy advertising from your radio station again. And he and I became very good friends. He um had some things to sell when I would do business with him, but he wouldn't do business with me. And I had I heard a gentleman speak at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in the small town I was in, and he must have been a uh a preacher at some point. He was running for governor of the state of uh Nebraska, but he was so enthusiastic, so motivating, that he had people jumping up and down in their chairs excited about what he was doing. Well, I left that meeting and went to this man who wouldn't buy from me, and he bought. And I asked him a few um uh weeks later why he actually bought after telling me he'd never buy from me. He said, You didn't see the look in your eyes. He said, I was afraid to not buy from you. Now, that's what he told me, but I really believe that the reason he bought was over time we got to know each other better. He began to trust me, and this was the um this was the one day that he knew that he was going to buy from me. And that's where I realized that you really need to get to know the people that you're selling to. And it may not be a quick sale, it may take a long time as it was for him, but it's a matter of understanding, and and rather than talking and telling them about what you sell, it's a matter of asking questions to find out where they are, what they want to help provide them with what they're looking for.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

So powerful, right? And and it it really does go back to that. People buy from those they know, trust, and like, and we know they have to be seeing you, they have to be hearing from you, and you have to add value. You can be seen and and hear nonsense, so you can be seen and get value, and that's when people truly buy for you. So that makes perfect sense that he was ready because you had already developed that trust and like with him. So, yeah, so tell us what do you think is your greatest secret to success over the last 40 years? What kept you going? What kept you coming? Because I'm I'm hit, I hit 29 years this year with my consulting practice. And um, every once in a while I feel like oh, maybe I should just sleep today. And then I was like, I remember someone's like, oh no, I can't sleep. Yeah, I got I gotta get going. I have this to do. So what is uh what keeps you going? Tell us.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

I'll give you four letters C, C, D, A. And what that stands for is correct, consistent, daily activity. And I learned that I I wrote a book called Sell When You See the Whites of Their Eyes, and that's the major element in that book. And the reason I call it Sell When You See the Whites of Their Eyes is because if you're gonna sell somebody, you need to get close enough to them to see the whites in their eyes. And when you're close to a person, not necessarily physically, but but emotionally and mentally, you can sell to them. But when I went to work for this company selling products that help people become successful, the president of the company took me aside and he said, Do what I tell you to do. Now I believed him because he was one of the first people in the insurance business to become a million-dollar uh roundtable member. He was 29 years old and he was the first uh young person to do that. And he said, if you do what I tell you to do, you'll be successful. So he had a complete manual that taught us what to do, and I studied that over and over and did exactly what he said to do. Then what I developed was a process of activity that I had to do on a daily basis, and that's where the correct, consistent uh daily activity comes from. Yeah, I had a certain amount of phone calls, a certain amount of uh dials, this is prior to the internet, uh, a certain amount of presentations, uh, received a certain amount of referrals, but I had to get those numbers every single day, or I wouldn't go home.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Exactly. Exactly. It's it's uh I'm making 10 calls today, I'm doing 10 emails today, I'm doing 10 follow-ups today, and it's true, it's getting your pipeline, it's having your CRM, it's having your strategy in place, it's not just randomly sending messages that make no I I get so many of those uh emails that's nothing to do with me. I'm like, I don't have a factory. Uh no, I I I don't have a hospital. Right? And I think a lot of people get confused about what that is. So thank you for sharing that for us. You know, one of the things that really like I like about your story is that you you talk about the consistency and you are you've lived the consistency, you've practiced it, and you've had to get over the mindset that that trips a lot of people and make a lot of people burn out and um shorten their journey. So let's talk a little bit about that mindset because I think it's so important for young entrepreneurs, for a lot of people who are, you know, I train and certified coaches who just wanting to get that mindset on so they can stay consistent, stay focused, and do the daily action. That is the hardest part, I think.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

Well, I heard a quotation a number of years ago, and I use this in the in the talk that I give, because I I talk about being relentless, doing whatever you have to do to be successful. You talk more about resilience, and I think the two of those go together. If you're gonna be relentless, you have to be resilient. But the quotation I heard was people don't fail because they lack knowledge, education, or talents. People fail because of what they do not do. And that comes from the cons goes along with the consistency. You simply have to do the work on a regular basis. You take a look at professional athletes, the ones that are highly successful developed a plan, they did it every single day. Now, they may have had a natural ability to do what they were doing, but that doesn't get you to where you want to be because a lot of uh athletes and also a lot of famous people didn't have the ability, but learn how to develop it. But you have to figure out what your plan is, you have to have a passion for what you want, first of all, figure out that plan and consistently do the activity necessary to get to where you want to go. Now, sometimes that activity is not very fun, especially if you're an athlete and you're working out, uh you know, lifting up weights can uh can hurt you. But over time, you can make that happen. And and I also have a story, I think we had talked about that earlier about uh the 10th multiple, about what it takes to get to where you want to go.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Yes, yes, we talked about that, and and we'll we'll we'll expand. I want you to expand on that before uh uh after this for audience, because if you're doing something and you're asking yourself, I'm doing this, I'm not getting any results, you have to go back and check your action. Where are you where are you shortchanging? What are you not doing? Where are you stopping and starting? And there's nothing wrong with stopping start, but you need a consistency for you to find the results. Because sometimes we need a break. You take a break, but you need to come back and go strong and be consistent because one off here and one off there is not what's going to get you the results you want. It's that consistent action of doing this over and over again, um, doing your outreach, speaking to people, connecting with people, having relationships. That's how you're going to move the needle and get to where you want to go in your in whether it's marketing your business, whether it's becoming a writer. I've written seven books, and people said, Joyce, how do you, how did you get to write? Seven, well, I've been writing for a long, long time. I've been writing. I remember as a kid, I would be reading. You have to read for you to be able to write, first of all. If you can't read, you won't be able to write. I remember as a kid, I would get in trouble because I would have my head in a book and my mom would be calling, yeah, you chose down, put that book down and get your chores down. I loved reading. It was a passion. And I never set out to write a book. But when I start writing, I I write every day. Not I don't write a book every day, but I write, I I've only published seven books, but I've written enough content to have published a hundred books because I write every day. I write courses, I write white paper, I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write, so you're writing all the time, so you become better at it. Right? And it's so looking at what do you need to do to become better? It's like you teach every you teach. I've been teaching for decades. The more you teach, the better you become at it. All of these things are skills. And sometimes people think that, oh, I'm not gifted, I'm not talented, I'll never be good. But we hear of these amazing musicians, what do they do every day? They practice. You're like, why is why does that person need to practice? Because they know if you don't use it, you're going to lose it. They want to keep sharpening the source, sharpening, doing. And so most people think that resilience is, oh, I fall down and I get up. I believe resilience and all my research is showing that resilience is something we measure, we understand where we are, and we we map it and we build it. If you're not building the elements in your life in those nine dimensions to build you up, you're going to fall harder than you ever before. When thing it's not if something happens, it's when something happens. What do you have? If you're not building financial resilience, you're not saving, you're not putting any, or you're not working towards a pension so you could retire. You're not, you're not doing those things when you're you get sick and you all of a sudden you have no work, you have no income, you did not build, you didn't buy an insurance. Those are the things we do so we can be financially resilient. But we have eight other dimensions of our lives that we need to work on, builders. So we got a few right, and not everybody gets it right, but we've lost, we've left a lot of. And you know, I was talking to uh a coach on Friday, and he was saying that you know, I went to book sleep with Napoleon Hill's book, and he was thinking, and Napoleon Hill was saying that if you have res if you don't have resilience, you have nothing. Like it's you need it, you need to be able to pick yourself back up, reimagine who you are, because life is gonna come at you so heavy, and you have to be able to understand, oh, this is who I am. Let me get back on the horse and keep going. So, talk to us about that piece you you shared with me earlier because I think that's really important for our audience.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Back to what you're talking about, let me preface this first. Uh, being a writer is all about resilience, uh, because a lot of writers will write something and it doesn't get accepted. But the way, the path to become a great writer is to write over and over and over again. And I'm willing to bet, Joyce, that if I took a look at your early writings from years ago, that it wouldn't compare to the writings you have right now. And that's what happens to everybody. Just because you are not good now doesn't mean you can be good. So let me talk about that tenth multiple that I mentioned uh earlier. And this comes from the financial industry, but you can apply it to almost anything. If you take a thousand dollars and double it ten times, you'll have one million dollars. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one twenty-eight, two fifty-six, five, twelve, and million twenty-four. Everybody understands that keeps doubling. But what people don't realize at the fifth multiple, well, you're halfway there, all you have is thirty-two thousand dollars. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. It's the fifth multiple. So let's say you saw a friend of yours five years ago and you told your friend you're gonna have a million dollars in ten years, and you haven't seen your friend for five years, and the friend says, Well, how are you doing towards your million dollars? And you say, Great, I have thirty-two thousand dollars. Well, your friend's gonna laugh at you because it's only 3.2% of a million. As a matter of fact, when you're at the ninth multiple, you have$512,000, which is still only half of where you want to go. This is why people quit and give up. Because it's a scale that goes like this, and you don't have success until the last time. I'll tell you a quick personal story. When I was a kid, uh my mother suggested I uh grow vegetables in the garden in the backyard. So I started with carrots, and I planted carrots, and every couple of weeks I would dig it up to see how the pl the carrots were doing. And I put the back uh the dirt back on. When it came to harvest the carrots, the carrots were this big because I kept messing up with the formula. And this is what people don't understand. You develop your process, and then you become consistent with what you're doing, and as you hit a wall, as you hit resistance, you become resilient and keep going back again, and that's how you gain success.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Yes, because the wall is there to move us to a next level. It's it's about and and I love this mindset over matter because the wall is there to to it's like sharpening that sword. The the wall is there. You don't get gold just from going in the dirt. You have to put it through the fire for you to get the pure, beautiful gold. The wall is there to test you, to move you further, to help you to re-examine, reconnect with your passion. Think about do I really want to do this? And how much better do I want to be? And what is this telling me? But most people see the wall like I guess I should not be doing that. And internal way.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

And you have to see beyond the wall to where you want to be. Uh I'll I'll give you an example. Let's say you want to um uh uh do high jumps. You've never high jumped before. Well, I think the most successful high jumpers uh get toward four or five, six feet they can jump. But when you're beginning, you put the bar about three inches above the ground and you jump over it. Then when you get good at that, you put it up about six inches, then you put it about about uh uh twelve inches. But there's always that wall there, and once you hit the wall, you know you're now beginning to gain acceptance in what you want to do. I'll tell you a quick story about myself. The only skill that I was ever, or rather talent that I was ever born with was running. I was a sprinter, I could I couldn't run long distances, but I could run 100 yards in 10 seconds, which is pretty fast. Here's what happened. I knew I was good, and every time I went to the track practice, I didn't work very hard. Because all the I was better than anybody else on the team. But here's what happened. Because I didn't work hard, every time we had a track meet, kids that were nowhere near as good as me beat me because they worked harder, they were consistent, they were resilient, and they didn't stop and quit. Or I just fooled around every time I went to the uh uh practice and did nothing. And as a result, I didn't win very many races.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

It's true, it's not just talent. Talent is just a part of it. You've got to do the work, and that's what gets you to the beyond. So you have to have the vision because one of the things we teach in our in our pillars, the first anchor, the first pillar is the resilience anchors. And India is vision, India is passion, India is purpose. If we truly understand what those are, and then we align values to it, then we put faith and hope. When we start building those anchors, when you have that, you can you can do anything. But most people never really learn to understand and how that maps with your self-esteem, how that maps with your personality style, understanding yourself and putting all of that together. Now you have a foundation. You can build anything on it. But if you don't have a foundation or you have half a foundation, you put something on it, it'll wobble. And you know, you know, we talk about the how the house on the rock and the house on the sand. The rain comes, it washes the one and the sand away. The one bill on the rock, the rain will come and everything, even as little kids. I think we have to go back and listen to those. I don't know if they still teach those things. I don't have grandchildren. There's a little rhyme that goes, little piggy on the wall, and and he huff and he puff and he blow the house down and he huff and he puff and the house to that. I mean, those things teach as small little kids. You remember, as three, four, five year olds, they're teaching us those things. I think we need to start teaching our kids these things because we're seeing the next. Generation are so emotionally fragile. So emotionally fragile. Brilliant, but very emotionally fragile and unable to deal with the challenges that just this sense that everything is going to be perfect. Well, except you're living in utopia, things are gonna happen. But so you need to develop, and we love woechir and we want to protect them, but we're not we're we've lost some element of it going down in society, and we come to this generation, and we're not preparing them for life. We feel that we can protect them from life, but that that's not possible. We cannot.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

No, not failure. You see them learning how to walk and they keep falling down. It doesn't bother them. They get back up and keep doing it and falling down, and they realize that they're gonna get to where they want to be, and they see that it it's our creator basically said to us, you can do anything you want to do. But you have to want to do it. There's a lot of things that I have not been successful at, but I didn't have the passion to follow through on that to get to where you want to be. But my favorite movie is Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump was a fun movie to watch, but if you if you pay attention to Forrest Gump, he was not born with the natural uh brain that most people had, and he had to work very hard, but his mother basically told him, you can do anything you want. And he believed that. And he was focused on that, where people are letting all the outside stuff interfere with what they're doing. You're too young, you're too old, you're not smart enough. But he did he was so focused, a laser focus on what he wanted. Now, again, this is a movie, this wasn't real life, but if you go back and take a look at successful people, I've read about college, high school, and college football players that played with one leg. That's absolutely amazing. I have a hard time with two legs. And these kids learn how to do it. I've also heard of um football players, and football's my favorite sport, but football players that were blind or um uh couldn't hear. And they still played successfully as football players because their focus was a laser focus. The example I give to people, if you take a magnifying glass and hold it over a piece of paper on a hot day, 100 degree day, if you hold it there, we all know the paper will burn. But if you keep moving the paper or the paper around or the magnifying glass around, nothing's going to happen. That's the focus, and the resilience keeps bringing you back to that focus.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

100%. 100%. And I think it's so important for us to share this message of resilience, because most people don't fully understand what resilience is. Because our dictionary does, it says it's to bounce back. No, we just bounce back. Okay, I'll bounce back. But what do you have to bounce with? You need something to bounce with, and you gotta build that and you gotta keep refining it so you can bounce back because things are gonna happen. Life is gonna happen. It's it's it's it happened from the creation of the world. It's gonna continue to happen. It's not we can't change as much as we want to protect our children, we cannot. And what I see over the time, over the years, um even in society, where we've we are no longer building resilience. Uh, you know, my niece was telling me, oh, there is no fail in in, there is no loser and and winner in football, in children's soccer anymore. Everybody wins, everybody gets a ribbon. Everybody is happy. They don't know there's winner and loser in life. What are you what are you teaching them that? You have to teach them now while mom and dad can still give them the hug and rub their back and tell them they're still good. But you can try and you can be better. We're like, we're just recreating the universe without looking at the principles of life. That never changes. These are things that would never change.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

I had a friend of mine who uh played basketball in uh in high school, but he was only 5'3, and he didn't make the team because he was shorter, and that all bothered him his entire life. When his son was five or six years old, he put a basketball hoop on the garage in the backyard so his son could uh shoot baskets, but it was way too high for him. Then he realized if he lowered the basketball net, his son could have success. So his son was dunking the basket when it was only about three feet high. And then he would raise it a little bit more and raised a little bit more. Well, eventually he coached his son's and his daughter's basketball team. They both became the best players on the team because he just helped them move up a little bit at a time. They weren't able to compete with everybody, but the more they did that, they became the best players on the team. And they fell and they hurt themselves, and that's where resilience comes from. You become you become strong when you fall down. And if you don't go through that, you can't be successful. You gotta have that resilience.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Exactly. If you don't learn how to fall, every time you fall, you're gonna break something. I mean, they teach you how there's a place you can go learn how to fall. Right? There is a way to fall that you don't shatter. And and so we it's it's me, it's a mental, it's a mental thing. It's mind over matter, and we need to really put bring that link into what it is that we do. Be optimistic about life. Nothing is gonna be perfect, but everything can be better.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

That's right. That's right. There's a commercial on TV for wounded warriors.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Warriors that went into battle, most of them in the Middle East, and uh now they're confined to a wheelchair, or sometimes worse. And in one of the commercials I saw, the uh the mother said of her son, who was the wounded warrior and it was in a um wheelchair, every time they the American flag comes by or they play the national anthem, he stands up. He said, He needs help standing up, and it takes a while to get him up, but he will not sit down, he will stand up and he will salute the American flag, not giving up at all. And and occasionally when I watch these things, I have tears in my eyes because I realize I've I've had a lot of struggles, as most people have, but nowhere near that kind of struggle. And if people can have that kind of mental ability, that mindset, even when they've gone through all that, I highly respect those people. And those are the biggest winners to me.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Oh, absolutely. I mean, winning is about being able, and I think we have to do that cognitive framing for people to start seeing resilience as a tool to live your life the best way possible, to live the best life. Because if we become good at building resilience, when life happens, we don't become we don't become victims of life. We just become overcomers. We just overcome one thing happened, I overcome it. We just keep moving on, or we become a victim where we're just depressed. We can't move forward, we can't see the light, we can get over what hit us, and and so so it's it's that mentality of becoming a victim or an overcomer, and you choose, right? Victor victory of a victim of victimhood. Which do you want to be? Where do you want to sit? And that's why we build resilience because it's a tools for life, it's a tool for life. Without resilience, you can't live this life. It's coming too hard, too fast, too hard. You just you can't, you you need to be able to roll with the punches, to be able to say, Okay, that was one, I got this one, I'm I'm ready. Let's keep going. And it's having that mentality. And before, I think we we sort of assume that people either had it or they didn't. And we never thought that resilience was something you could build. It's like, oh, I'm not as strong as that person. Oh, you can be stronger, but you need the right tools, you need the right foundation, you need the right anchors, you need the right mindsets. And once we put those together, you're gonna be strong because your challenges are gonna be different from mine. My challenges are gonna be different from yours. And the things you need to overcome to get to your next level are might be very easy for me. Whereas mine could be like, what is she crying about? That's nothing, right? Our challenges are gonna be different. So we each need to build our resilience tool and sharpen it based on our own personal preferences and the things that are important to us. So when life happens, we can overcome, we can be victorious and just keep moving on because it doesn't come once and stop, something else will come up, right? All these analogies and all these myths of life, it's just like life is a it's a it's a challenge. We have to earn being here, we have to earn the breath that we breathe. Like we pay a price for being on this planet, and that we need resilience for us to keep paying that toll.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Well, you use the word victim, and you've talked about mentality. There is a victim mentality. Yes, and they think they're a victim, so everybody's against them. Uh, and yes, you can't be good at everything. I mean, you're we're a matter of fact, we're not good at a lot of things. There's just a uh a few things that we're really exceptional at, and that's what you have to focus on. But but what bothers me is that people are not willing to stay with it. There are things I would love to be good at, but I've decided that I'm not going to put the effort into it. As an example, art. I I love art, but I'm not an artist. I kept telling myself, and I never learned how to draw. If I wanted to, I could probably be a great artist. Yes. Um I played musical instruments in um in school, and I was so-so, but I never had the passion for being real good at it. And that passion combined with resilience makes you relentless, so you don't stop. You keep going no matter what happens. And that's where successful people you look at any successful person in their stories, and that's what they do.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

Yeah. Consistency. Consistency, consistency. It's what you do every day, you become better. You become, you excel at. Uh, you do a little bit, you do a little bit, you just keep refining, you just keep going, you just keep managing, and you keep your mindset knowing that this is the prize I'm working towards. It's not now, and you know what? Some people get there before me. A lot of people start off after me and they'll get there before me, but I will get there if I stay consistent. I can jump off the boat anytime and say, Oh, look at this, everybody else on the planet got there. I never got there. Pull me, woe me, I'll just go do something else, right? It's a choice. But if you truly have the passion and you focus and you're committed, and you have faith and you hope and you believe and you have those structures and you consistently sharpen them, learn more. Oh, I need to be better at this. Where can I, what book can I read? Who can teach me? Where can I take a course? Who is a coach I can work with? And you just keep sharpening, sharpening, you will get there.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

And along with that, there's something called the law of attraction, which I'm sure you're very familiar with. We our mind is attracting things to us all the time. And we we need to program our mind with what we want to attract to ourselves. What's interesting, I I um I carry two dollar bills with me. And when I go to the bank, I ask them if they have any, I get all their$2 bills. And most people don't see those on a regular basis. And when I'm giving a tip to somebody or someone needs something, I give them a$2 bill. Most cases they think it's a dollar bill. They don't look at it closely. So I tell them to pay attention to it, and they're all excited because they got a$2 bill. It's the law of attraction is is all about seeing in advance where you are not right where you're not right now. And you have to be able to close your eyes and see that picture in front of you of where you want to be, because then your mind pulls you toward that picture. Now, the converse of that is when people believe they can't do something, I'm too old, I'm too uh I'm too young, I'm not the right color, I'm not the right religion, um, I don't have the right background. Well, when you see that, you keep attracting that to yourself. Negative people attract negative outcomes to themselves, and that's where they make excuses. Positive people don't always attract positive things to themselves, but they are attracting more positive things than most people because they have a direction.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

Exactly. Most of the time they will attract positive things that will fuel them further, so that when the next thing comes that's not negative, they're already fueled. And they can overcome it. And that's that's what most people miss. It's what you bring into your life will either feed you or deplete you. And if you're bringing things into your life that's depleting you, then you're you're losing resilience because everything is energy. When you were born on this planet, you're given this little vial of energy, and it says, Joyce, when your time is done, when you used up this energy, you're done. Bye-bye from the planet, right? And how you use that energy is what's going to keep you here. You can manage it well by understanding resilience, understanding how to manage, bill, and multiply it, or you can run through that energy and voila, you didn't get things done, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:36

And I really believe that we can build on that energy. There's a story I heard about a man in Russia a long time ago. He was locked in a um in a uh refrigerated train car, and he couldn't get out. And it was cold, and he believed that it was getting colder and colder and colder, and he wrote on the side of the wall that it's so cold in here, I'm dying. And when they open it up, he was dead. They come to find out that it never got lower than 50 degrees in there. But he thought it was getting colder and colder, and he basically gave up. So he had that energy too, but he wasn't making use of it. He wasn't getting to that, which is what successful people do. They have that, if it's a little bit, you need to find a way to access that energy. Otherwise, you're just not going to have anything happen.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

And that's where it's really important with your social network and your interpersonal, because when you bring the right people around you, it can fuel your energy. Right? And when you're doing work you love, you can go into that flow and it conserves your energy because you're in flow, it doesn't take as much energy. So it's really important for us to get smart on how to be resilient so we can live compelling, long, successful lives. It it's it's just it's the currency for life. We call it, yeah, I call it you know, the currency of resilience. It we don't we don't teach that enough. It's it's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

And when we are resilient, what happens when things go wrong, because they always will. Matter of fact, more things go wrong to successful people than unsuccessful people. But when you're successful and things go wrong, what you begin to do is look for how you can change that or make sure it doesn't happen again. Whereas the person's not successful, they're thinking, well, you know, I I'm not meant to do that. Uh, it's not right for me. I'll stop right here.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

But people say that's lack of resilient thinking.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Yes, it is. That's correct. And resilience is is basically, as you talked about, it's bouncing back. I I have a talk I be I talk of being relentless. It's called Never Give Up Secrets of Relentless Champions. And I have five different elements I talk about. The last of those five is to bounce back. After all those things, you learn everything. You need to realize that you are going to have setbacks. Not failures, but you're going to have setbacks. Sometimes you go one step forward and two or three steps back.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Three steps back. Yeah.

unknown 39:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

You got to keep going. And slowly you're moving along there. The the I think the most successful insect is the ant. If you've the we've heard the story about the ant and the rubber tree, the song about that. But if you take a look at ants and you put your finger in there and you move them around, they'll come right back again. They are probably the most resilient animal on the planet. They won't stop unless they're killed.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

They're not small. They're so tiny and they create these big antils.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

It's just on the ear, just like and they carry weight heavier than their body. But they're willing to do it. They do whatever they have to do. They're told what to do, they believe in it, and they go to where they want it to be. But people need to understand that they need to tell themselves where they want to be. Now, as a as a young person growing up, you may not know where you want to be. I didn't know where I want to be until I was in my uh late 20s, early 30s. And I still don't really know where I want to be, because I'm still adding more to it. But we need to tell ourselves what we want and then begin to develop a plan. One of the things I recommend to people is writing, as you talked about writing earlier. Writing crystallizes thought, and thought motivates action. The more we write down, the more ideas it gives us, whether we're a good writer or not. But we become better by doing those things. I finally figured out because I don't write very well, I transfer all my notes to uh to digital so I can I can look at those and develop plans. And that's what it's all about developing a plan to where we want to go. If you don't have a plan, there's no way you're gonna be resilient.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

100% true. Wow. Steve, this is a great conversation. Where can the audience get a hold of you? Well, there's where we can find you.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

A couple of ways they can do that. They can go to uh LinkedIn and they can put my name in there. My name on LinkedIn is Steve A Relentless Klein. Relentless. They can also go to my website, which is also steveacline.com. Uh they can also uh contact me. It's Steve at steveaclein.com. I'll be more than happy to uh respond to anybody. I'll be more than happy to give them as much as I can. My whole belief that I learned from a number of people is you need to give, give, give to get, get, get. And the more you give, the more the the universe will just send things to you on a regular basis. So I implore anybody that has interest in anything that we've talked about, or anything you ever hear when uh Joyce has another guest, is to contact that person and ask them for help, ask them for ideas, ask them for ways to become more successful, and a highly successful person will give you as much as you want to help you get to where you want to go.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

100% true. So well said, Steve. Thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you. This was a fabulous podcast. Go ahead, listen, share with your network, tell those you know. We know so many people who are struggling and they think it's the world is against them, but the world isn't against them. This is Joyce Edison here on the Resilience Catalyst podcast, reminding us that resilience is a currency for life, living that fulfilling, successful life. So, once again, thank you for being here, and we'll catch you on the next episode. And if you want to hear more, you can go to our website at interpersonalwellness.com and listen to more episodes. Steve, thanks again for being here, and we'll see you next time. As you go back into your work and life, remember that success and sustainable performance don't come from pushing harder, it comes from building capacity. Your resilience can be rebuilt, strengthened, and sustained, but it takes one intentional step at a time. Thank you for spending this time with me on the Resilience Catalyst Show. I'm Joyce the Didison, your host, your friend. Until next time, take care of your energy and your resilience.