A (0:03)

Welcome to Create youe Own Light, where we harness our past, we embrace our future, and learn to conquer the roadblocks along the way together. I'm your host, Travis Howes. Let's get on with it. Wherever you are right now, I want you to understand this one thing. Everything can wait. Everything. And I say that because I've come to a realization in my life that nothing could wait. I could never let people wait on me. As far as when people needed my attention, when people needed my focus, when people needed my responses, I gave it to them. I gave it to them immediately. Because in my mind, nothing was more important in my life than the attention other people needed from me in that moment. And I think that's the truth about that, is, is that my life just wasn't that interesting. And my life, I didn't have anything going on in my life that could take precedence over other people's time. And what I mean, my. What I mean by that is I. I single handedly prioritized my life to give other people my time no matter what and no matter, no matter the cost. And I'm changing that right now. I'm telling you. I've always felt if there's a way that I can grow as a human being, if as long as I'm aware of it, I can change it. The problem with a lot of our growth is many times we're just not aware that what we're doing can be changed because we get so set in our ways. And sometimes it takes seeing it in a different light for you to realize that you've been so set in your ways that you didn't even realize there was an opportunity to grow. If my phone rang, if I got a text message, if I got a message, if I got an inbox, if I got an email, if friend needed me, if anybody needed me for anything in my life, I would drop the most important things in my life to accommodate that situation. I didn't know or understand the mindset or the concept behind normal business hours. I prided myself on, you need something from Travis Howells, you got it. Say when I'm there. And I prided myself on that. I actually got into the mindset where I thought people that kept normal business hours were fucked up. And it was, it was my, the pride, I guess. I don't know, I don't know the word that I'm looking for here, but if it was more of a. If you, if you don't operate like me, if you don't work like me, if you Don't. If you're not as attentive to your work and to the detail of your work, like me, then you're wrong. There would be people that would keep normal business hours and they wouldn't answer their phone after 5 o'. Clock. And I would immediately make fun of that. And I would sit there and think, how could somebody be successful in their business if they're not answering their phone after business hours? If they're not giving the attention to the people that are wanting their business at all times of the day, how can they be successful at business? And what I realize is this. They're trying to be successful at both. They're trying to be successful at business and at home. And for far too long, I have failed at home because I was so focused on the success of business. And when I say I failed at home, I mean at catastrophic levels. I'm talking as a father, I'm talking as a husband, I'm talking as a son, I'm talking as a brother, and I'm talking as a friend. I failed every relationship in my life because I was so focused on being business and making the business part. Because my mind always told me, if you're successful with your business and your business is thriving, then your family can thrive. And I couldn't have been any more wrong. The people in your life need you and they need you to be healthy. Of course your business needs to thrive, but so does your family. How much attention are you giving the people you love? How much time are you. Are you actually giving to yourself to see the world around you and to be present in the moments while you have them? We only have so many moments in life and they're gone. And they're gone. And I bet money most of the people listening to this, including me, take advantage of the time that we have. And we don't fully live in the moments we have. We don't fully immerse ourselves in the conversations that we're having with people. We don't fully engage in moments with people when it really matters. And we're being pulled in so many different directions. Our attention spans are so small, and we are. Many of us are living in a virtual world that is stripping us of our fucking reality. Our lives are so boring. Let me tell you, Let me say this again. Our lives are so boring that we have to live in a goddamn virtual reality to make it worthwhile. Meaning our cell phones. Meaning we can't sit at dinner when we can't sit at lunch, and we can't be with loved ones. Enjoy those moments without having our faces glued in a fucking device. Everything can wait. The moments that you have in life cannot. I say this because something without. I'm not even getting into it, but something recently made me truly open my eyes to. To what I want for my life. It truly made me realize how much life I was missing around me and how much. How many moments I was forfeiting to engage in meaningless conversations, to engage in meaningless text message, to engage in just meaningless shit. I've had my phone ring. I've had my phone, I have get text messages. I've walked out on my family saying, I got to take this call. I got to take this text message, only to walk outside and be in a conversation with somebody where the conversation didn't even fucking matter. And I knew that. I've walked out on playing board games with my kids because of that. I've walked out on moments where I'm teaching my kids and I'm in the middle of something and I drop my phone, I drop everything to accommodate somebody on the other end of a fucking phone. And I'm not doing that anymore. I have realized that my time is so limited with my people that I care about, and that is the only thing that matters to me anymore. It's not me getting on a plane and going to work. I love what I do, but I'm not putting that above family. And I used to put everything I do above my family. My problem is that I worked very hard in my early years and got to a place now that where I am, wherever that is, I'm here. And I have programmed myself to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. Because it's all I've ever known. And the mentality behind that is this. I thought when I was younger, the harder I grind when I was younger, the more I could relax when I'm older. But what I've realized is all I've done is condition myself to grind. And when I'm not grinding, I'm miserable. I don't know relaxation. I don't know how to sit on a porch with my wife, how to sit on a porch with my children and watch my phone ring and let it go to voicemail. I don't know how to sit on a porch with my wife. I don't know how to sit on a porch with my children and watch somebody text my phone and not pick it up and reply back instantly. I don't know how to give myself the moments in life that I need to feel whole. I'm not going to find that in a meaningless text message. I'm not going to find it in a meaningless phone call. I'm not going to find it in any other place in this world. You're only going to find that fulfillment truly immersing yourself in moments. Everything can wait. These moments in your life and these opportunities that you have in life to spend with people and have experiences cannot. I'm beyond proud of the growth that I'm making as a man. I am not perfect, but I am constantly trying to grow. And I just went to therapy the other day and had one of the best sessions I think I've ever had with my therapist. And we sat there and we answered some extremely hard questions. And what I found about myself, without getting too in depth, is that my loyalty ran greater than my willingness to grow beyond. And what I mean by that is, if you are so loyal to people in your life that you will stunt your own growth to appease them and to gain their approval, then what does that say about you? What does it say about you willing to sacrifice your own growth, which if you have a family, stunts their growth too? That robs their chances of happiness. It robs you of happiness if your loyalty to other people and other organizations and other groups run so deep that you will not allow yourself to grow beyond what you're capable of growing to accommodate other people and organizations, et cetera. And that's what I found in that one session. Going to therapy now for 16 years, I realized something about myself that was hard pill to swallow, and it was that I'm stunning my own growth through my loyalty to external forces. And I don't need to get into what those forces are. I don't need to get into any of that. But I think there's a lot. I think there's a message here, and I think that message will resonate with a lot of people listening. I want you to think about what you're giving your life to, what you're giving your time to, what you're giving your happiness to, how you're allowing that to stunt your growth and how you're allowing that to rob you of moments in life that honestly, the clock's ticking. So if you were handed two decisions in life and somebody were standing in front of you with your time clock of your life, and you're watching your time two tick away, and they say, here's a text message coming through, or here's a phone call coming through where it's completely meaningless, but you also have have this time to devote it to Your family, which one are you going to go? Which. Which route are you going to go right now? And I guarantee you, if somebody put it that way, you'd make the right choice every single time. Because we take our time for granted and we take our family's time for grand. If you're in a. You know, I think one of the hard things about loyalty is the inability to do what's right for yourself in certain moments, because that loyalty runs so deep that you're willing to sacrifice your own self to honor that loyalty. I just want you all to think about that and I want you to think about what that whole message means right there is take advantage of your time and the time that you have with people and you spend it wisely and. And invest in yourself and invest in your people. Put down your fucking phones and invest in the moments that you have while you have them and get as much out of this life as you can. Because that little device sitting in your hand, it's only going to make you more empty and more hollow inside. You're only going to see the fakest of the fake. You're only going to see things that make you desire things that you're never going to have, which is happiness. Many of us are seeking happiness, so we find happiness in the virtual world of our phone. And then when we don't have that, we realize we don't have happiness in our own world. So what we do is we go right back to our phone. And even when we have those moments of true happiness and we have those abilities to have happy moments, we go right back to our phone and we keep looking for anything that will spike those endorphins in us, anything that will draw us in, anything that will take us out of the world that we live in, to hopefully send us into some magical virtual world that's not even in the realm of possibilities for us. Just think about that. Think about the next time you pick up your phone when you're around the people that you care about. Have that cognitive thought and put it down. I have made that decision that I'm not picking my phone up after 5 o' clock at night unless nothing's going on with my family. If my family's sitting around, my phone's either in my pocket or on my desk. I'm not looking at it. I'm not pulling it out at dinner anymore. I'm not pulling it out during my morning coffee when I'm sitting there and the birds are chirping and I got all this wildlife and watching the sun come up and I'm missing it because I'm glued to Facebook or I'm glued to Instagram. I'm not fucking doing it. I've refused to become a statistic. I'm watching people around us, it's so goddamn sickening. I'm watching everybody around us just become pre programmed robots. And I refuse to live my life that way. I refuse. I can't do it. And watching kids walk into walls, I'm watching other people not engage in conversations. I'm watching people just checking out of things and it's goddamn downright insulting. Yeah, I'm talking about this because something happened recently in my life, but this is how, you know, when I record podcasts, it's about real stuff and this isn't about throwing anybody under buses, but this is about a learning experience in life and it's called growth. And it's about change in my life and it's about growing beyond who I am. And I realized that my real life, not my virtual life, but my real life, is more important than the virtual fantasy of what's going on in the world for me. And I'm going to start living in my real world and I'm going to start experiencing things and I'm gonna start going out and doing things I've never done and I'm gonna stop being comfortable and actually go out and live my life and enjoy my life. I want to talk about something that's hard to talk about and it's about hurting those you love on purpose. And what I mean by that. I think I've covered this in other podcasts. I certainly talk about this in post traumatic purpose when I teach it. It's. I don't think there's a person listening to this episode that would intentionally ever go out and harm their family. If you knew you were sick, like really sick, like, and you were contagious, I don't think you'd walk up and hug and kiss your children and your wife and your mother and your father and your brothers and sisters. I don't think you'd intentionally put them in harm's way. But what we're doing, when you're in a mental health crisis and you're not taking care of yourself, you're unintentionally exposing them to secondary traumatic exposure. So you're unintentionally harming them. And the reason I tell you this is is because now that you've heard this, the next time you go to explode and the next time you go straight to gorilla mode, in front of your family. Now it's intentional. You can't use I couldn't control it any longer as an excuse. You can't use that to abuse them. They are not responsible for whatever happened in your life. And for whatever reason, you can't control your emotions and your rage. They're not responsible for that. They didn't sign up for that. Only thing they signed up with was to support and love you. And you make that harder every time you go gorilla mode on them. You make it harder every time you go to explode. And when you speak with. With the. The aggression in your voice and the tone and the words that you use, it's not what you said, it's how you said it kind of thing. And when they start having heart palpitations because of the way that you react and the way that you speak, and their anticipation of you speaking that way is so high that they walk on eggshells around you when they haven't even done anything wrong, you're intentionally them up. Now, if you've been made aware of this and you heard this and this, this glove fits or this shoe fits, right now, the next time you explode on your family, you're choosing to do that, you're intentionally hurting them. And what does that say about you? And I wish somebody would have put it that way to me years ago when I was really struggling with that. All the explosions I had on people around me that I cared about could have been prevented had I just. Someone would have just taught it to me and shot it to me straight like that. I would have been able to stop every time I was about to react and say, I. I'm about to intentionally fuck them up, and I would never, never do it. And I know that's true because that's how I look at it now. Every time I go to lose my shit, I stop. And I think about that. I'm like, what is the consequence of what I'm about to say or do? Does it make it better for them or does it make it worse? And right there, I answer my own fucking question right there. So what's gonna be your excuse next time you lose your shit? If you've heard this, there's no unhearing it. I'm giving you the responsibility of that now. I'm putting that weight on your shoulders. I want you to think about this. For every reaction, there's a greater or an equal or greater reaction. Think about that. For every action, there's an equal or greater reaction. So think about when you feel like A monster inside. When you're about to really explode on your family and come unglued, how that makes you feel. Think about what it makes them feel. Think about that fear inside of them after the umpteenth time you've done this. Think about what those little kids are going through. Think how that changes their body chemistry. Think about what you're teaching them and what you're showing them through those actions. You're teaching them that this is okay. You're teaching them it's okay to talk to their mother like that. You're teaching them that it's okay to talk to them that way. So when they grow up and they're yelling and they're fucking screaming at everybody when things don't go their way, that's because of you. And you can sit here all day and say, well, it was done to me. And I. Look at me. Yeah, look at you, motherfucker. Look at you. And look what you're doing to people around you. You're fucking them up. This is the most passionate. This is the thing I'm the most passionate about with the emergency services personnel. It ain't just about suicides, man. This is more than suicides. This is the behavior in our homes. You know, the domestic violence rate in the police department is one of the highest domestic violence rates there are, yet we're out there locking people up for domestic violence. What the fuck is this? This job changes us. And we have the highest domestic violence rate there is. And we're so ashamed of it, we don't arrest ourselves for it. We hide from it. And then we go to work and we lock other people up for it. And we tell them how. What a bad. What a bad, bad thing they did. And then we prosecute them and we press charges, and then we go home and do the same exact shit. And a big part of that is that we don't want to dress. Whatever we're going through, we don't want to address that. We may have issues associated with the work that we do and the childhood that we had and the experiences in life that we had before we came in to this line of work. Because we're superheroes, because we handle our own problems. And we see how that's working out for us. We see how not getting help is working out for us. So why do we continue to do that? You know, we've made it. We've come so far in just a few short years that I've been teaching post traumatic purpose. We've come so far as a culture to shift that line of thinking. But man, we're still so far behind it because we still have all these problems going on and we have all these problems going on even with the resources that we have. So what is it? What is going on out there? And I tell people like this, I think a lot of times we don't trust our resources. Many of us, they don't trust walking into an office and talking to someone that doesn't understand life the way that we as first responders understand life. So we don't, we don't go and talk to them. We do the check in the box stuff. I'll just go say what I need to say, get it out and I'm done. But we don't, we're not willing to put the work in. We're not willing to say, hey, look, I'm fucking up my friendships, I'm fucking up my family, and what is it about me that's doing that and how do I, how do I fix that? That I'm going to tell you firsthand how you have to knock off everything negative in your life and you got to start addressing the issues. You can't just say, this is the way I am. And people are just going to have to adjust. Because if you were like that, I'm promise you, I'm going to tell you right where your life is going to be. If you're the kind of person that says, fuck everybody else, this is who I am. And they either like it or they don't. I promise you they're not going to like it. And you're going to be alone at the end of this life. You, you're going to be fucking divorced. Your kids are going to fucking hate you. You're not going to have any goddamn friends. And your pension that maybe you have, maybe if you last that long, your pension is going to be divided with however many spouses you have and that's that. Think I'm bullshitting? There's years of research that shows all this stuff. You can look at these half of these retirees out there. Retirement is not what it's cracked up to be. I speak to a lot of retirees around the country and they are in horrible, horrible places because they had no resources, they had no mental health awareness training. They fucked up their families. Like I'm telling you right now, they dealt with 30 plus years of stuff from the job and they've never processed that. And it leaves them alone in a fucking hole somewhere. You don't want that for your life. Nobody Sits back and says, that, man, I hope, I hope at the end of this life, I'm retired with a great pension and I'm all alone and I'm miserable and nobody to share my life and experiences with. That's not realistic, but that is reality. If you let it be and you don't start taking care of your damn self. I think as we talk about happiness and the reason I'm so passionate about this is I've been on a mission for a long time to try to discover what true happiness is. And what I've recently realized is you got to diversify it. I don't think happiness is ever going to come in the true form of any one thing. I don't think your life, one thing is going to define happiness in your life. Not one thing is going to give you all the happiness that you crave. You have to find happiness in multiple outlets, no differently than they encourage you to diversify your portfolio, your financial portfolio. We need to diversify our happiness portfolio, as silly as it sounds. Think about it. If you put all your happiness into one thing, and in some one day, like in the financial world, if the market crashes, if all your finances are tied up in real estate and there's this, this, this big crash, boom, you lose all your real estate value, right? Or most of it, you lose a significant portion of it, okay? Same with happiness. If you put all your happiness just into fishing in your boat and all of a sudden you can no longer go fishing for whatever reason, how are you going to find happiness outside of that? You know what I mean? And if you put your happiness just into people, well, people fucking go away, too. And then what? Then what? I think you have to learn happiness through gratitude, through gratefulness, knowing that we wake up every morning and we get an opportunity to go out and be happy, we get an opportunity, we have the say so how we perceive the day. So the old me, when I would wake up in the morning, I go straight to the telephone. I make, and I've said this in other podcasts, I make a couple of calls, I have negative conversations with people. And it starts my day fucked up. And I start building a negative day. I start on a negative platform, I start on a negative foot, and of course my day starts unraveling negatively. I thought about that the other day and I was like, what if I surrounded myself with extreme positivity first thing in the morning? I'm talking so extreme that it's fucking ridiculous. So extreme that other people would see it and question it. Good. What If I turn on Yanni's greatest hits in the morning, just listen to some ridiculously happy music while I drink coffee and watch birds, versus have negative conversations with people and fuck this, and fuck that, and screw this and screw that, how do you think my day is going to start? Make fun of my happy shit all you want, but that's what I'm doing. Not Yanni's greatest hits. But I'm surrounding myself in the morning with positive thoughts because I've been on this train for 16 years. I've been fighting this thing. And there's a couple of things in my life that I refused to change over those 16 years, and I'm still battling it. I've changed everything else in my life except a few things. And a few things goes back to loyalty. And when I look at that loyalty, I look at what I'm doing to myself because of it. And it's not fair to me and it's not fair to my family. So I have to change that and I have to do something that's uncomfortable, but that is where we grow. The uncomfortable moments in your life is what makes you grow as a human being. I've talked about this from episode one. Go get uncomfortable. Go stand in the rain, go sit in the cold, Go do some work outside in the extreme heat and get your ass humbled real quickly. That's where you grow as a person. Have hard conversations with people. I'm not saying fight, get in fights with them, but have difficult conversations and learn how to communicate throughout the process. Address the bullshit you're going through in your life. Sit down with your family and admit and acknowledge that you have fucked them up on catastrophic scales. If that. If that is you, admit it, own it, and move past it and learn from it and let them help you. Let them work with you. They're still with you. They're still there beside you. If they haven't left you, that's for a reason, that's because they love you. Let them help you start diversifying your happiness. Start finding. I tell people this that are still out there working, you know, trying to get to that retirement age. Do not let that job define you. Don't let that career that you do define who you are as a human being. And that's also diversification. You have to understand that you're more than what you do for a profession. And you have to be willing to accept that. And you have to be willing to accept sometime at some point in your life, this profession that we do the thing that you love it will come to an end. And if you don't prepare yourself for that, I'm raising my hand high here. I've been in that situation. I was told, you're done after ten and a half years of service. And I fully intended on doing 30. And they made that decision for me. And you don't want to be in that position. Fortunately for me, I already had something I could fall back on and that I was actually pretty good at and that I hit the ground running with it. But for many of us, if you don't have something like that, because all you do is do police work or all you do is you're a fireman and you don't know anything else, if that axe ever gets dropped on you and you're told you're done, now what you don't want, that I was already good at something else and I went to it. And it still sucked for me because I wanted to still be a fireman. I didn't want to be done. And I can't tell you how mentally how. How tough that was for me mentally, to accept that I'll never get to be a fireman again. It took years of me pushing and fighting and drinking that away and what if. Ing my life and feeling sorry for myself and all these things. Oh, poor, poor me. Now I can't do what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and I'm out here doing what I have to do now. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That's why a lot of us, when those things happen, we go away, and not in a good way. And I'm trying to help prevent that in any way, shape or form that I can, you know, because I've experienced that and I know how difficult that is. But I also know. I also know the power of human beings and what we're truly capable of. It's. We can do anything. So you can recreate yourself and you can find that passion in your life and you can find that purpose in your life that gives you that, that reason for being up and doing, doing something else in life. But if all you do is go to work to be the police, and then every day that you have off, you're trying to do an off duty, duty gig, because that's what you do, man, when that career is over, you're going to spend a lot of time policing and not a lot of time living. You know what I mean? Same with fire department, same with dispatcher, same with health care. That's the same with any profession. If that's all you do in life, and that's all you got when the ride is over. Now what? I said something in therapy the other day, and it really made me proud of just how far I've come in life. And I don't mean. I mean strictly from the standpoint of mentally how far I've come in life. And as I was talking to my therapist, the words. These words came out of my mouth. The monster that I became is not the man that I am today. And I truly mean that. The reason I'm proud is this. I addressed the monster that I became. I faced that person every day for well over a decade. I didn't avoid that. I mean, I tried to run from that person, and that didn't work. But it's when I face myself and when I laid all the excuses and when I let them go and when I started asking myself the hard questions, the embarrassing questions, and when I really started working on the hardest things in my life, which were ruining my life and ruining other people's lives, that's when the growth started. And it wasn't easy. It still isn't easy. I still have. I still work on these things daily. But it's my refusal to just become who I am that allows me to be proud of who I am today. Because if I would have just allowed myself to be comfortable with who I became, I'd still be a fucking monster. I'd be a monster that's alone and miserable. That's who I would be. I was. I refused to listen to people when I was younger. I refused to accept the fact that, you know what? Maybe I don't have any friends because I'm the way that I am. Maybe. Maybe people fucking hate being around me because of the reason, the way that I am. And when I said, I don't have to be this way anymore, and I let my pride go, that's when I was truly proud to become the man that I am today. Far from perfect, very battered and bruised, but on a path to a better place, on a path to a healing place, on a path to a more grateful place, and hopefully on a path to be surrounded once again by people that do care about me and do love me. I went to a funeral service the other day. It was to a celebration of life for a young lady. And there were 150 to 200 people there. People were getting up and saying all these nice things about what a wonderful woman this was and how many. She died at 30 years old, and she touched so many lives at 30 years old. Everybody that spoke about this woman, spoke so highly of her. And you could feel was tangible. It was in the air like you could. You could feel the presence and the power of what a wonderful person this was. And while I was standing there, it made me think about this. When I die, how many people would come to my celebration of life? How many people would have positive things to say about me? And how did I truly impact people on this earth? And did I really make a difference? Or was I just a miserable, selfish fuck and nobody would be there to show up and say one positive thing on my behalf? That's the measurement of a human being's life right there. The shitty part is when we die, we don't get to be at our service. So we don't get to see the true impact or know the true impact we really ever had. What's your legacy going to say about you when your eyes close for the last time? The world's going to keep turning regardless. But is your legacy going to live on? And the way that it lives on is by doing good things. It's by being positive. It's by loving. It's not the other one. I actually care about my legacy because I feel like it's important. Not that my name's on billboards when I go, but my name and my presence is in people's hearts. And as they go on to touch the world in different ways. Maybe I played a small piece in that, Paid a. Played a small part that. In 25, 30, 35, 40, 50 years from now, maybe nobody is saying my name again, but they'll just never know that a piece of me is inside of them because of the relationships that I formed and the people that I touched throughout my life. And maybe some of the lessons that other people learned from me, somehow they'll pass those lessons on to other people. And so in those other people, your spirit lives on. But if you're just a miserable fuck and you don't have anything to do with people and you ice everybody out of your life and you end up dying alone, what did you really do for people? What does your legacy say? And some people may not give a shit about that, but that's not me. I care about it. Do you.