Don't Quit Page 9
With my hope for an exit dashed once again, this time I was truly deflated. The holiday season was not very festive for me. Now that deal #2 had blown up, I barely left my apartment all through Christmas and New Year’s 2017. While trying to figure out what to do next on both sides of the ocean, the daily videoconferences continued. I struggled each and every day to exude a positive image. After being blindsided, both teams were pretty despondent and seemed to have lost hope. I reminded everyone our company’s services were essential to the customer’s operations and it would take some time to replace us. This resonated with them, and in spite of the uncertain future, the development team continued to build out the infrastructure for combined operations.
Our UK partner took the lead in researching data and service requirements that the new director had provided while building rapport with him and demonstrating their specialized marine expertise and IT development capabilities. Slowly, the new director came around to view them as allies, and as that relationship developed, tensions began to ease. Once it seemed that our companies could likely retain the customer, we resumed our regular communications and put the deal back together again.
The pace of the new negotiations quickened over the next couple of months and we agreed to be in contract in May and to close the transaction by September 1st. After executing the contract in mid-May, we jumped into long days of working through the details and complications of reconciling international corporate structures, tax law, labor rules, and coordinating both operations. One lesson I have taken to heart over the years is to hire the best people available to work through important deals. The legal professionals on both sides were top-notch, and as a result, the process could not have gone smoother.
Each time I got knocked down when a deal blew up, I got back up, displayed a positive attitude, rallied the team, kept urging everyone forward, and created a new vision as to how we were going to ultimately succeed. “It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count, it’s how many times you get back up.”
Don’t quit!
---------------
TWEETABLE
“I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed, and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times that I can fail and keep on trying.” – Tom Hopkins
---------------
Jeff Wimmer is a highly respected serial entrepreneur leading multiple companies to success as an innovator, visionary, disruptor, and master negotiator.
Jeff is a 25-year member of the Entrepreneurs Organization, and has served on the board of the New York Chapter. He is passionate about learning all things business and constantly encourages his teams to learn and grow. Jeff serves on the boards of his companies, is an active investor in start-ups, and shares his experience to mentor others in achieving their goals.
Jeff has boundless curiosity and is an adventurer, world traveler, pilot, and Argentine tango dancer. Contact Jeff Wimmer at jeffwimmer@gmail.com
CHAPTER 12
Fighting Demons
A Simple Way to Help Anyone With Chronic
Pain, Stress, and Anxiety
by Dr. Amy Novotny
S ometimes we are our own worst enemies. The demons we have inside us are often worse than the ones we face on the outside. It can take a fortunate encounter with someone famous like Robert Kiyosaki and receiving his approval in order for us to believe in ourselves.
Imagine someone told you that breathing through a straw or into a balloon could help you get out of stress and pain. You would think that person is crazy, right? Well, I used to think that, and now I tell all my friends, family, and acquaintances those very words―this can help you. Let me explain….
I graduated from the University of Delaware with a doctorate in physical therapy in January 2009, valedictorian of my class and having never received a grade lower than an A in all of my schooling since elementary school. It was a huge accomplishment for me, not the perfect grades, but knowing that I worked hard to absorb and learn as much information as I was given. I was the classic perfectionist and hated making mistakes.
I had many job offers when I returned to Arizona to start my new career, and I was excited to begin making an impact. I slowly developed a name for myself in Chandler, Arizona as a good, solid physical therapist. I applied all of my schooling and did a pretty good job, except for one patient population―the dreaded chronic pain patient. I had decent success with this patient, but like many physical therapists, I preferred the relatively uncomplicated cases of post-surgery, sports injuries, weekend warrior injuries, overuse injuries, etc. Coming from a perfectionist mindset, it bothered me that I couldn’t completely heal people in chronic pain. I had aced all my courses and thought I had good information about the body, but it wasn’t enough.
After five years at that job, my life changed with one conversation. I was recruited to become the physical therapy director of another clinic in town. I had felt stagnant and wasn’t learning and progressing as much as I had hoped, so I jumped ship. I left my job and took the new position, but the caveat was that I had to begin learning about the diaphragm and breathing. I began taking courses through the Postural Restoration Institute and learned a whole new way of thinking about the body. I learned about the diaphragm and how the muscles inside our trunk attach differently on each side, which affects our body position. I began to study and see that breathing, and specifically how we breathe, affects our body in more ways than just providing us with oxygen to survive. There was a connection between the technique of breathing and movement, pain, stress, and more. I could see potential in how it could help many of the complaints and symptoms my patients faced daily. While I understood the concepts intellectually, I didn’t have the knowledge, methodology, and confidence to apply them to my patients at that time.
The mental struggle set in, big time. The traditional physical therapy I had learned in school was what was accepted not only in the medical community but also in society. I felt in my heart that I had stumbled onto something very big, but I didn’t yet know how to communicate it effectively nor did I have the confidence. I decided to begin practicing breathing daily. I knew that in order to be a true teacher, I needed to be practicing what I was teaching.
At first, I continued my same daily strengthening regimen, but I threw in some breathing practice and figured out ways to make it more effective with the use of the diaphragm. At the time, I had just run my fastest marathon to date, 3 hours and 33 minutes on a flat, downhill course. I barely skimmed past the qualifying time for the Boston marathon and wasn’t sure I would get into the race. I kept practicing the breathing and struggled daily as I studied this new way of thinking about the body.
A couple months later, I ran a hilly marathon in Duluth, Minnesota in 3 hours and 26 minutes! I felt fabulous during the race and pushed it at the end. I had dropped seven minutes off my marathon training with no other changes except the breathing. Then, three and a half months later, I ran another hilly but downhill course in St. George, Utah and had my greatest race to date: 3 hours and 19 minutes! I was high as a kite after that race. I had no pain and went hiking in the mountains of Snow Canyon State Park for a couple hours that same afternoon. I owed it all to the breathing practice, and I knew it. I was beginning to fight my demons of self-doubt. The issue then became how to put the breathing into a process, learn how to communicate it, and become effective at using it to help someone in pain.
I began implementing the breathing technique with a few patients. I was slowly realizing that what I had learned in PT school was not the complete picture, and that some of the teachings were not consistent with what I was seeing in my patients. I learned a lot from my patients over the next three years, but I faced an uphill battle in my community. I became very passionate about the breathing, but others were not on the same page. I was putting myself out there with this new treatment and was getting rejected by patients, friends, and even some of my favored physicians. I explaine
d why it was important to learn, and half of my patients were willing to give it a chance, but the other half wanted nothing to do with it. Some never came back. Some told their physician that I was wasting their time. Some plainly said they didn’t want to learn it and only wanted traditional PT. For those who communicated with me directly, I quickly changed back to traditional PT. The negative reviews always came back to haunt me whether it was a stern warning from my boss or hearing from a physician that he would not send me patients if I did the breathing. I took those cases hard and personally because I had felt that I didn’t know how to communicate effectively enough to prove myself. Many days I went home crying, full of self-doubt. I was in constant turmoil, fighting society’s vision of what physical therapy should look like and knowing internally that I was finally understanding how the body worked and could get pain relief, sometimes very quickly, for all patient types, even for the dreaded chronic pain.
I had one bright star and believer. One of Barrow Neurological Institute’s top neurologists saw what I had done with one of his patients who had a nerve injury. He saw me help this patient restore muscles and sensory function faster and more completely than any of his other patients with similar nerve injuries who had taken the traditional PT route. He began sending me his most complicated patient cases―people who had had multiple surgeries and no relief, people who had chronic pain but had nothing showing up on X-ray or MRI, people who desperately wanted to avoid surgery, etc. He sent a steady stream of patients monthly that helped me gain some self- confidence back. I still based my self-worth on the success of my patients and took it to heart when they didn’t get better immediately, even if they weren’t doing what I had asked. Over time, I took note of what worked with patients, what was the best progression of treatment, what cues worked and didn’t work, and what specifics of breathing produced the results I was looking for. I then began studying the nervous system and realized how breathing and our nerves are closely related in how they impact our muscles, joints, and movement. I started developing my own process for a breathing technique and body position training. I practiced this procedure over and over with patients, seeing faster and faster results.
I still didn’t fully believe in myself. I knew I was onto something, but I figured I would be a clinic physical therapist for the rest of my life. The idea of starting my own practice and branching out with my own business and healthcare approach never crossed my mind. I was starting to gain a lot of momentum in my community as physicians started to come see me for their own ailments. The mentality had shifted just a bit.
I also began to be known for helping people with bone-on-bone knee osteoarthritis avoid knee replacement surgery. I had met a local photographer and psychologist who had tried injections, Synvisc shots, anti-inflammatories, and other therapies and was scheduled for a knee replacement surgery a few months out. She agreed to give my treatment a shot, and within a couple visits, she was pain-free in her knee, not needing any more injections or Advil, even for rugged activities like climbing in and out of zodiacs in Antarctica.
These cases gave me more confidence, but I was still scared―scared of change, scared of failure, scared of potential success.
I then befriended someone who introduced me to Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad and Cashflow Quadrant books. Around that same time, I had been given the opportunity to travel the world with a photographer to keep him pain-free, and I decided to change up my life. I made sure I could come back to that same exact life after the contract was over because I still craved stability. However, during that time away, I read Kiyosaki’s books. I knew then that I couldn’t go back to my old life. I had been stagnant even though I was gaining traction in the community. I wasn’t making the impact I wanted to make. In my heart, I kept thinking that there were so many people out there whose lives would change forever if they knew this technique. They could de-stress; they could stop taking their anti-inflammatories and pain pills; they could sleep throughout the night; they could increase their focus; they could walk pain free; they could increase their flexibility and mobility; they could increase their strength and power, and much, much more.
I ended the travels after six months and decided to start my life over. I was absolutely terrified. I sold my house and decided to start my own business with my own healthcare approach. The friend who introduced me to Robert Kiyosaki’s books also invited me to one of The Real Estate Guys’ seminars in Dallas. It opened a new world to me: one of sharing and developing relationships, one of personal development and mindset changes, one of openness to new ideas and building each other up. I had never been exposed to such an accomplished group of people who welcomed new thoughts and ideas. I decided to jump all-in and go on The Real Estate Guys Investor Summit at Sea cruise in March 2019. My old, shy ways came to the forefront initially, but on the first day, I sat down with Russell Grey and told him what I did. He was interested and wanted more. He pointed out Robert Kiyosaki in one of the elevators and said there was a man who could use my help. I said I would love to help him. Little did I know, four days later, I would have my chance.
I approached Robert at a book signing to get his autograph and knelt down to thank him for his books and all his teachings. He kindly asked me what I did, and I told him I help people get out of pain using a special breathing technique. That piqued his interest, and he told me about his hand pain that had been present for over a year from a fall. I said I would love to help him, and he readily agreed to that. I left the room on a high from that interaction. The next evening, he found me after dinner, and we went to a quiet area of the ship. I gave him 15 minutes of breathing instruction with some cueing on his ribcage position, and he was hooked. Shocked, he said the pain was no longer sharp and was going away.
We set up another breathing session in the gym, and I soon heard from other passengers that Robert Kiyosaki was looking for his “body healer.” Robert told me after two sessions that he slept throughout the night without pain for the first time in over a year and he began sharing this with other passengers. I had provided great value to him, and he began opening new doors for me.
I also met Kyle Wilson on the cruise and later joined his Inner Circle Mastermind. He hired me to treat him, and he was so impacted by the technique and the relief he felt that he has had me lead his Mastermind group through the breathing technique in locations all over the country. Multiple members have since requested one-on-one sessions virtually and have even flown to Phoenix for in-person sessions to learn and apply the breathing and body repositioning techniques that have helped so many people with chronic pain, sleep disorders, poor focus, digestive issues, chronic stress, mobility issues, and more. I am now sharing to larger groups in the form of presentations, podcast interviews, YouTube interviews, workshops, and corporate trainings as well as continuing one-on-one consultations and treatments.
That trip was a life-changing experience for me, not just because I met and was Robert Kiyosaki’s “body healer.” I gained something else, something inside of me that gave me the confidence to know that I was on the right path. I finally conquered some inner demons and enemies of self-doubt that were holding me back from sharing what I know. I learned that my purpose, or my “why,” in this world is to give others pain and stress relief. Robert Kiyosaki told me several times, “You have a gift.” Now it’s up to me to keep persisting, fight my fears and self-doubt, and have the courage to share this gift with others so they can make their impact on the world with peace in their physical bodies.
---------------
TWEETABLE
All of us have trauma and fears in our lives. This builds up inside us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Face your fears. On the other side, there is a life full of opportunity waiting for you. Remember, changing how you breathe can change your entire life.
---------------
Dr. Amy Novotny founded the PABR (Pain Awareness Breathing Relief) Institute to provide stress and pain relief to those who seek a naturalistic form of
treatment when other treatment methods have fallen short. Her unique approach involving breathing and body position training comes from her experience treating a variety of conditions over the past 10 years in orthopedics, sports, geriatrics, balance disorders, nerve injuries, and chronic pain. She helps clients gain control over their bodies by teaching them the tools of how to calm their nervous system and adjust their body position. She has used this method for most of her endurance career: now at 40 marathons, two 100-mile ultra marathons, and an Ironman triathlon.
Please visit www.pabrinstitute.com to sign up for free pain relief tips. Contact Dr. Amy at amy@pabrinstitute.com
CHAPTER 13
The Five Reasons People Quit
(And What to Do About It)
by Tom Krol
T here are five reasons people end a journey.
At 33 years old, I was completey broken. I had been fired from every job I ever held and had gone through a difficult bankruptcy. A few short years later, I was a millionaire and owner of multiple businesses that were running without me, I had acquired a massive free and clear rental portfolio, and I was honored to have mentored more successful real estate investing students than any other coach in the country.