007: Overcoming Adversity with Brian Raymond King

00:01 Beau Henderson: Welcome to the RichLife Show, the one place committed to helping you live your definition of a rich life. That’s a healthy, wealthy, fulfilled life on purpose. This is where, I do believe we can have it all. We can have a successful business, we can have success with life, we can have success with money, but we also don’t say it’s easy here. But the one thing I’m committed to doing is being with you every step of the journey and providing tools, resources, experts, and just good information to help you on that journey.

00:36 Beau Henderson: I’m your host Beau Henderson, and I’m excited today because a guest I’ve befriended and we’ve had a couple of interactions… I know this is gonna be good because I’m gonna introduce him as the guy that can help you be unstoppable, in both your business and your life. And how many of us know that we’d be successful if we just kept showing up and we’re unstoppable? So, Brian King:, welcome to the RichLife show.

01:02 Brian Raymond King: It’s a sincere pleasure to be here, Beau, thanks for having me.

01:04 Beau Henderson: Yes. Now, one of the things we do, it’s almost backwards. Instead of at the end of the show, asking: you to give me a takeaway, we’re gonna dig into the business in a minute, but if you had 60 seconds and you were gonna share the mission behind what you do and why you do it, because what I find on this show, both our listeners and our participants, our experts that share, they both have a mission behind what they do and I don’t see that you’re gonna be any different there. So, what is the mission? It was a Mission Minute, but I changed it to your RichLife Minute. But what is the minute that you would give me about, what’s your “about” when it comes to your mission and your business?

01:44 Brian Raymond King: My about is to create a path that my children and other people with challenges can follow, so that they are not defined or limited by any label or any circumstance, that tends to befall them, because one thing my life has demonstrated is that, once you learn how to be resourceful, you can overcome anything, period.

02:09 Beau Henderson: And that is for anybody. And it’s funny sometimes, we’ll hear some excuses, and, I know internal dialog or rationalization, but your message is pretty strong, so I know there’s a story behind this mission there.

02:21 Brian Raymond King: There’s one heck of a story.

02:23 Beau Henderson: Let’s hear it.

02:24 Brian Raymond King: Well, I grew up with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia. My school career was hell. I felt stupid all the time. I was, you know… My kindergarten teacher asked if I was retarded because I wasn’t catching onto things. I was bullied mercilessly from kindergarten up through sophomore year of high school. I had a lot of body pain back then, I was very clumsy, my body pain was attributed to growth pains. Well, after I stopped growing the pain didn’t go away. My graduation present from high school was stage three testicular cancer. So I lost the testicle, then I spent the summer in chemotherapy and my friends didn’t know how to deal with it so they stopped talking: to me. And the school, college, blah, blah, blah… Got married impulsively, to the wrong woman as a life partner, okay, but the right woman in terms of the three boys that I now have. They’re just amazing young gentlemen.

03:33 Beau Henderson: Excellent.

03:34 Brian Raymond King: And I discovered that they all fall on the autism spectrum and they also have ADHD. So, I’ve been a fighter, an advocate for the past… My oldest is 17, when he started school he was about seven years old, and that’s when his problems came to light. So about 10 years I’ve been a totally sleepless advocate for what’s best for my boys. And it was through their challenges and their testing that ADHD and dyslexia kind of got on my radar to explain some of my challenges.

04:12 Beau Henderson: Right.

04:14 Brian Raymond King: And their mother subsequently left us because she didn’t wanna be a wife, she didn’t wanna be a mother. She had the princess fantasy of how her life was supposed to be. And three special needs boys and a high maintenance, scatterbrained husband did not fit that fantasy. So, she bailed.

[chuckle]

04:32 Brian Raymond King: Yeah, she bailed. And about a year and a half ago, all these body pains that I’ve been having my entire life were finally given a label. And that label is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. And what it is, is an inherited connective tissue disorder, which basically means that the collagen that strengthens my ligaments and my tendons is faulty. So, as time goes on, my joints are getting looser and looser, more and more unstable. When I walk now, I need to hang onto things. My joints are in, some degree of pain, depending on the day. I’m on a butt load of pain medication. And if I wasn’t on it I’d be bedridden. When I have to go long distances outside the house, I need a wheelchair, and that’s just the latest opportunity, is what I have learned to call it…

05:32 Beau Henderson: Well…

05:32 Brian Raymond King: Every time Yeah. Go ahead. You wanna say something?

05:35 Beau Henderson: No, no. I was just saying, so I was just… This is fascinating to me. It looks like there’s a couple of levels here of what you’ve… The fight for what you’ve learned about yourself and the boys, this has given you a skill set, that it looks like you’re able to help other people that, they may not have those same exact things but we all have our things, right?

05:57 Brian Raymond King: Oh, absolutely. And the skills that I had to acquire just to keep my boys from being eaten alive by the public school system has turned me into somebody who can advise on both sides of the fence. It began with me advising families on how to articulate the experience of their children, so they can educate the school staff. Then as my reputation got out there, the schools began asking: me to come in and do trainings for their staff. And I just did one last week for one of the larger school districts in my area, and I did a workshop for every teacher’s assistant in the district. So, that was a fun time.

06:41 Beau Henderson: Wow. And so many times, whatever the issue is, the thing that will make it better is if there’s really good education out there…

06:51 Brian Raymond King: Mm-hmm.

06:52 Beau Henderson: About that topic.

06:53 Brian Raymond King: Not really good education, but people that are not resistant to doing something new.

06:58 Beau Henderson: Right.

07:00 Brian Raymond King: When they’re eager to take those new tools and apply them, miracles can happen in people’s lives.

07:07 Beau Henderson: Let’s talk… So, you’ve already hit one of our top criteria here. You’re a man on a mission. I love that. You’ve got a bigger ‘why’ that you’re getting up every day to do what you do, Brian. Now…

07:16 Brian Raymond King: Oh, you bet.

07:18 Beau Henderson: Yeah. And tell us a little about… Now, let’s shift gears a little bit into this second role you have as a business or a coach, right?

07:27 Brian Raymond King: Right. That’s how I make my living.

07:32 Beau Henderson: Yeah. So, how does… Tell me a little bit about your coaching practice. Who is that person you help, and how do you help them?

07:38 Brian Raymond King: Oh, it was really an evolution. I’ll keep the first half of it kind of short. But I am a social worker by profession. That’s what my degree is in, that’s what my licensure is in. So when I became a single dad I couldn’t work 15 hours at the office anymore. I needed to be there for my boys.

07:55 Beau Henderson: Right.

07:56 Brian Raymond King: So, in looking: for a way that I could work from home, I discovered the coaching model. So, I got a lot of training there to reframe my thinking:, to make sure I was doing it correctly, ethically and legally. And then I made that shift so I could be there for my boys. And [08:14] ____ spreading my wings, meeting new people on the internet, talking: to more business people, I realized that my skill set, when it came to helping understand different learning styles, different communication styles, really lent itself well to repairing communication breakdowns no matter who you were. ‘Cause a lot of that was very generalizable.

08:39 Brian Raymond King: And within the past couple of years, as people got to know me and know my story, they started saying, “Man, you’re so resilient. How do you just keep bouncing back from this stuff?”. And it was recently that someone says, “Resilience is what you need to be teaching. There is more to what you know than just how to prevent misunderstandings and hurt feelings and things like that. You need to teach people how to take hits like you do.” So, I started thinking:, where does my passion lie? Who needs to be able to take the hits and keep going? People that are in a position to really make an impact in this world. And I started thinking:, well, people like me. People that are entrepreneurs that wear all the hats themselves.

09:24 Brian Raymond King: That they really have a lot inside them and that they knew how to keep going and not be discouraged. They could take their art, that unique thing that they are brought in this world to do, and they could absolutely kill it. But they’ve got to prevent themselves from being defeated first. So, I’m focusing on that entrepreneur who has a vision, wants to make things happen, but doesn’t know that an obstacle doesn’t mean it’s a sign from above saying, “You should quit while you’re ahead.” And I wanna… And I do teach people how to keep going.

10:01 Beau Henderson: So, does this entrepreneur, are they to the point to where they say, “You know what? I’ve done this. I’ve beat my head against the wall long enough. I’m aware that there’s probably something about me that’s the problem”, or are they just kind of still just searching there? Or it could be both?

10:16 Brian Raymond King: Some of them know that they are self-saboteurs. They know they get in their own way. And some of them know that they just don’t know how to be resourceful enough. And it can be as simple as, they have those limiting beliefs around asking: for help, because they’ve been taught “I’m a failure if I can’t do it alone”. And so, we have to question those beliefs and rework them and make them… Change their definition of success from a ‘me’ to a ‘we’. So, it can be around shifting one belief, or it can be around reorganizing your world view.

10:54 Beau Henderson: Well, Brian, how do you make that connection between, kind of the tag line that I threw out there, that you’re the guy that’s gonna help people be unstoppable in both their business and their life? Is it that they’re so integrated that one’s gonna bring up the other or…

11:09 Brian Raymond King: Oh, absolutely. Our entire belief set, it’s a spider web. Everything is interconnected. And once you apply the core belief… A core belief is like an anchor, that a lot of other things are connected to. When you shift that core belief, all of a sudden it’s like knocking over a domino. And other things begin to shift as well. So, it isn’t a matter of saying to somebody, “Everything you believe is garbage and you need to get rid of it.” It’s, “Let’s find one thing that’s causing you an issue. Let’s shift that, and see what else starts to tumble as well”.

11:46 Beau Henderson: As I say, you never know what might be that domino that sets a big following to go down after it, if that makes sense.

11:54 Brian Raymond King: Absolutely. But you can tell that you found the right domino because a person starts making shift after shift after shift, all kinds of a-has and they report back, “Oh my goodness. I’m seeing this so much more clearly now. This is one thing I’d always had a problem doing but I suddenly did it”. And we didn’t even talk about that. So, there are these changes that are happening almost peripherally from what we initially discussed.

12:22 Beau Henderson: Yeah. No. That’s powerful. So, if somebody’s out there and this… The RichLife Show audience are mission-based entrepreneurs. So, this is perfect conversation to be having. So, if I’m an entrepreneur out there and I know I need to have probably some mind shifts in my beliefs, I need to probably re-work something or like you said, I think that’s… I need to start finding the right dominoes to push over. Or it might even be somebody that really resonates with your story. Maybe they have a… Something that’s limited them to feel like they just can’t do it or they don’t have a coach that understands them or something like that. How could they find out more, Brian, about what you do, or how maybe to just have a conversation with you?

13:06 Brian Raymond King: Well, the best thing to do is just go straight to my website, which is brianraymondking.com. There’s a full description there of everything that I offer, as well as how to contact me.

13:18 Beau Henderson: Excellent. So, that’s the business and I get the business and it’s a strong story and it’s obvious, in talking to you, that you’re on a mission and you’re gonna do this and it’s one of those things… I can tell when somebody’s on a mission ’cause you do it no matter what. You do it regardless.

13:32 Brian Raymond King: Oh, yeah. And you’re not gonna talk me out of it. You’re not gonna get me to back down. It’s just…

[overlapping conversation]

13:38 Beau Henderson: It’s who you are.

13:39 Brian Raymond King: Yeah.

13:39 Beau Henderson: Well, so one of the things I like to talk about, a segment here on the show, is this idea of life school. A very wise teacher, a while back shared with me this idea of looking at life like a school and in life’s school, if you kind of compare it to a curriculum, we’ve got to pass one course to graduate and go to the next. We’ve gotta graduate from high school before we go to college, etcetera. And then some of the tenets in that were, there’s no mistakes in life, just lessons we need to learn.

14:11 Beau Henderson: A lesson is gonna be repeated until it’s learned. The third was that each time it’s repeated, it’s more painful. Just to get the gist of that. But my question, Brian is, is there something that life school has taught you that, might’ve been at the time seemed like the absolute worst thing or something you never would have wished for, that turned out to be the curriculum, to make you who you are today, and more powerful in the mission you have today?

14:38 Brian Raymond King: Oh man, which one do I choose?

14:40 Beau Henderson: Yeah. Pick your favorite and you can come back next time. That’s funny. Sometimes people are like “I’ve got 20.”

14:45 Brian Raymond King: You know, one was letting go of my first marriage.

14:48 Beau Henderson: Oh.

14:49 Brian Raymond King: Yes, even though I knew… And denial is a wonderful place to live [chuckle] when you don’t wanna grow. And when I was able to look back in retrospect, I realize that I was bored in that marriage. She wasn’t helping me grow. She was sabotaging me. But there was just so much that would need to change if I decided to leave that marriage. So, I kept making excuses for her. I stuck with it and even though it wasn’t really good for me, and then I caught her in an affair and confronted her and then she turned into the world’s worst beast.

15:28 Beau Henderson: Right.

15:29 Brian Raymond King: She turned really ugly. I kind of have fun telling this story but [chuckle] the sage for me, in that moment, came in the form of a used car salesman.

15:45 Beau Henderson: You know, this is gonna be good.

15:46 Brian Raymond King: Yeah. My car at the time, ironically, the morning of the day that I discovered she was having an affair, somebody ran a red light and totaled my car. So, after everything came to light, a couple of days later, I took my boys and moved in with my parents and my mom told me to go get a new car. So, I’m sitting across, waiting for the paperwork to get processed and I tell the used car salesman my story, about how she left me, and how can anybody treat me like that? I gave her everything that I could think of. I was the best husband and so on. He said, “I want you to look at me right now. I’m gonna tell you something.” He said, “She did not leave you. She got out of your way.”

16:29 Beau Henderson: Oh.

16:31 Brian Raymond King: “She got out of your way, because the woman that’s gonna love you the way you deserve to be loved, and the woman that’s gonna love your kids, like they were her own is waiting out there and when you are ready to let her into your life, she will show up.” And, probably about nine months later, I got on Facebook for the first time and started thinking about, “Man, who haven’t I talked to in a long time and I would want to reconnect with?” And there was this childhood friend of mine that I haven’t seen since 6th grade. So, about 35 years and no contact. I looked her up and there she was, one town over.

17:09 Beau Henderson: Wow!

17:10 Brian Raymond King: And we started communicating and she didn’t have any kids, she’d never been married, just her and her dog and she started hanging out with me and the kids fell in love with her, and the more her and I spent together, the more we realized that we clicked, in the most idiosyncratic way. All the weird stuff that nobody else gets, we understood about each other. We fell in love and now, next month we’re celebrating our sixth anniversary.

17:37 Beau Henderson: Sixth anniversary. Congratulations.

17:39 Brian Raymond King: Yeah. She is the woman that the used car salesman described.

17:44 Beau Henderson: Well, there you go. And the ex-wife, there’s a positive spin. She got out of your way to find that, huh?

17:49 Brian Raymond King: Yeah. And she got out of her way and she is reaping a big dump truck full of karma.

[chuckle].0;

17:55 Brian Raymond King: But that’s an entirely different…

17:57 Beau Henderson: That’s a different… We’ll do that on the next show, Brian. So, let’s do a little bit of a lightning round, as we kind of wind this up because I’m just interested in knowing you better because I get the business and people get what you do. Success with money in life, that’s an area we talk about, we’ve talked about for six years on the RichLife Show. So, best money advice you’ve ever received and who gave it to you?

18:18 Brian Raymond King: The best money advice I ever received is that, money… The measure of your… Well, it’s not how much money you have, it’s what you do with it.

18:29 Beau Henderson: Perfect.

18:29 Brian Raymond King: It’s, do you use it to open doors for people? Do you use it to create opportunities? Or do you just use it to be flashy? Now, so whenever I get extra money some place, one of the first things is, “Who can we help with this?”. Because one thing that I know and I always make sure I emphasize it with my boys, all the success I have is by virtually being helped by somebody else. So, money is just another form of energy. Now, I gave a service to somebody else and they reciprocated monetarily with that energy. Money is a form of gratitude. So when they say “Here”, says, “My friend, I’m grateful to you for a wonderful service”. So, I can take that gratitude and I could think to myself, “I’m grateful to have this, because I was able to provide a service. Let me give it you so that you can have that same appreciation that I’ve given to you and you can pay the gratitude forward”. So, that’s how I see money.

19:30 Beau Henderson: Perfect. And the idea that comes up and I’ve seen in doing financial work for 15 years now, is that money is dead presidents on paper. Money is coin shells, whatever you wanna call it, it’s us humans that give a context to whether it’s good or bad.

19:48 Brian Raymond King: Right.

19:48 Beau Henderson: And so, great advice. Last piece, and we’re gonna call it a day and I hope you’ll come back and join us and share more this journey, more these stories, because I love the work you’re doing, I love the bigger mission behind, why you do what you’re doing, Brian. But imagine this, a world with no boundaries, no limits, no constraints, and this is just like a 30 second version of what would your definition of a rich life look like?

20:14 Brian Raymond King: My definition of a rich life is being able to sit around with a bunch of people that embrace the idea that we’re in it together, that we take care of one another. It’s not competitive, it’s just generosity. I know it seems a little Shangri-La, but so what? Because I think it’s doable. You know, you see it the most when I’m sitting around with my wife and my boys. And we’re just enjoying each other’s company. So, if we can do that in a family, we can do it in a community. And that’s what I envision.

20:47 Beau Henderson: Brian, that sounds like a rich life to me, and I appreciate you for sharing with us and giving us some context and… Some content and a mission, that I think made us all a little richer today, and I hope you’ll join us in the future. And anybody that needs to reach out, has some ideas, wanna interact, have a question for Brian, brianraymondking.com, correct?

21:10 Brian Raymond King: That’s correct.

21:11 Beau Henderson: Alright, my friend. Hope to see you soon.

21:13 Brian Raymond King: I look forward to it.

21:14 Beau Henderson: Alright, RichLifers, for more on Brian’s story, for updates, summaries, more tools, resources and tips to help you live your definition of a rich life, go to richlifeshow.com and we’ll see you next week.