September 12, 2024 • 49 mins
In today's episode: Power of Words (01:27), Words Can Build Someone Up or Tear Them Down (07:52), Ray Coaching High School Football at Lake Washington (11:52), Mindful Therapy Group (21:30), Self-Talk (22:58), Ripple Effect (31:25), and Ray’s Challenge (44:15).
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Big Raise Garage Grind.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I want to bring awareness and my voice to something
that's meaningful and purposeful more than just who's the best
football player, who's the best football team? The intersection between life,
football and mental health. When you need help and you
ask for help, you're operating from a position of power.
When you need help and you don't ask for help,
that's the weakness.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Now here's your host, Seahawk's legend, Ray Roberts, Big fam Like.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It's been a minute of going through the preseason and
trying to find some time to get back on the mic,
but this is Big Raise Garage Grind, where we try
to always focus on leveling up our mental health game.
In today's episode, just like the previous episodes, are brought
to you by the Mindful Therapy Group, And I just
want to send a big shout out to Dereka and Jessica,
(00:51):
the founders who came down with like some pneumonia the
last few weeks and have been battling all of that.
So hopefully you guys are feeling good and healthy now.
Today I wanted to take some time to kind of
dig into a little bit about this thing that's always
(01:13):
around us. We're always UH in relationship with it, and
sometimes and a lot of times most times, we're unhealthy
with it.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And what I'm talking about, UH is the power of words.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
You know, whether you're speaking them, or you're hearing them,
or if you're just thinking them. What we hear in
the words we use shape our reality. And if it
shapes our reality, then it's also shaping UH and forming
and impacting our mental health. And so I just want
to talk a little bit about that today. And just
(01:50):
like any other time, we try to bring you know,
current topics and stories into the into the podcast, so
it's just not my story, you know, all the time.
And so a couple of weeks ago, on the Dan
Labratard Show, the Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tager lawa, that's
how you said tagle, We're gonna say tongue tongue by
(02:14):
law I practiced that like all night and I could
not make it. The Southern drawl makes it hard with
those with those words. So we're gonna call him toua
moving forward. But on the Dan Labratard Show, he was
asked by Dan what's the difference between his current coach
Mike McDonald and his former coach Brian Flores, and to
(02:36):
I think everybody's surprised, Tua gave the shockingly blunt quote
comparing the two his his experience on both of those coaches,
and just to kind of uh, you know, I'll read
from you what he said, and this is what this
(02:56):
is what Tua said. And he said, to put in
in simplest terms, if you woke up every morning and
I told you that you suck at what you did,
that you don't belong doing what you do, that you
shouldn't be here, that this guy should be here, that
you haven't earned this right, and then you have somebody else,
(03:17):
new coach, Mike McDonald. So that was talking about Brian Flores,
and you have somebody else, new coach, Mike McDonald come
in and tell you do you're the best fit for this,
You're accurate, you're the best whatever you are, this you
are that. How would that make you feel? Listen to
one or the other. So you see what I'm saying.
(03:39):
And so that just got me to thinking about this
whole idea around the power of words, and like, hopefully
we can have an understanding of just how powerful they are.
Some of the reactions to it was interesting to me
because some former players we are saying like, oh, man,
you have to like have belief in yourself and it's
what you tell yourself that matters and let the coach
(04:00):
do this, that and the other thing. And to some
of that I agree with. You know, obviously, like our
self talk is important, and we'll get to that a
little bit. But I think the thing that they were missing,
the dynamic that they were missing, and that relationship is
the power dynamic. And when there's when power is involved,
authority is involved, that someone has leverage over another person. Man,
(04:24):
that kind of that skews a lot of that, you know,
self talk or confidence or whatever you want to call it.
Because here's a guy who can bench, you can request
another quarterback, can draft another quarterback, can possibly impact you've
been traded to another team. And that's the dude that
has who's preaching this negativity into your life. And I
(04:46):
don't care who you are. And there's there's been great
athletes that talk about, you know, whether doubt is in
their life or not or whatever. But the fact that
you considered out even if you try to say, like, man,
I just never doubt myself, the fact that you even
cansiderate that you talk about it, that you have a
plan for it means that doubt is part of who
you are.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It's part of who we are.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
We're a relational people, and so when you're in relation
with other people, what they say and their and their
president stuff does have an impact on you. Whether it's
big or small, whether it's right or wrong, it does,
you know. And so I just thought it was important
today to kind of talk a little bit about some
of those things, because you know, we hear all this
stuff about I remember when I was a kid, I
(05:28):
used to say this, you know all the time. Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but words will never
hurt me. But words hurt. They do hurt. If you're
a spiritual person, you know, the Bible mentions the tongue
and the and words you know all the time, and
the impact that they can have, you know, in your life.
(05:50):
You know, and then you know, the Bible talks about
the power that life and death is in the power
of the tongue. And it's not just talking about a
physical death and life if it's talking about a spiritual
one one that as you're living like so, so you
have a choice to speak either life or death into people.
And so when I when I saw that, that was
(06:11):
the first thing that kind of came to my mind.
And so it's really hard. You know, I've been in
situations where, uh, I didn't feel like the person who
had the power and the relationship, whether it's a working
relationship or friendship or whatever, the way that they were
speaking to me and the way they thought of me
and the and the words that they used really impacted
(06:33):
how I responded and then and it kind of impacted
how I saw myself. And so I would always consider
myself a pretty confident dude.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You know, I try to speak life into myself as
much as I can, but it doesn't always. It doesn't
always happen. And if you're if you're so perfect that
what people say doesn't impact it in men, uh, great
for you. But I guarantee you there's not there's not
many people that are that way. And if the words
(07:02):
weren't impactful, then if someone said something negative to you
and you responded in an aggressive, negative way, then it's
still impacting you. Even the positive words. When you respond
to the positive words, then you're you're responding to what
people think or say about you. And so the idea
that like other people's words shouldn't have any impact on
(07:24):
you is kind of a dream state to be in.
It's not reality because it does have.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
An impact on you.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And so I just kind of wanted to dive a
little bit into this idea around the power that words have.
And I'd like to ask a question, you know, for
you guys to consider as we're thinking through this portion
of it. Think about how words you use can build
(07:55):
someone up or tear them down. And you know, like
I said, we tossed around these phrases around words whenever hurt,
but they do. And like we've already talked about some
of the stuff in scripture about the power of words.
And then think about the last time that someone spoke
to you in a way that moved you in either direction,
you know, positively or negatively. And you know, it's interesting
(08:19):
that this is the conversation because this past weekend an
old teammate of mine from Virginia, Matt Quickley, who was
a defensive lineman from Florida that played with me and
we entered Uva at the same time, had a lot
of battles in practice. Sorry, Matt, I had to put
it on you from time to time. But we were
talking about our defensive line coach, Danny Wilmer, and Danny
(08:42):
Wilmer can be kind of a conundrum, so to speak.
But that dude sat in front of my mom on
a recruiting trip when he came to see us, and
he looked my mom right in the eye and he said,
I will take care of your son when he leaves Virginia.
He will be a man. And my mom believed him
(09:04):
because she liked the positivity that he was speaking into
my life. And my dad was just like, hey, man,
go hit somebody, you know. But my mom was really
worried about how her son was going to be raised
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And so I can remember as a six foot five, two.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Hundred and fifty pounds defensive end walking around grounds and
through our facilities and things. And you know, when you're
an older kid and you're I mean, when you're a
taller kid and most of your friends are shorter, you
tend to kind of walk kind of bent over, crouched
down a little bit because you want to feel like
you're short, you know, down at their level. It's kind
of a subconscious thing, but it happens. And so one
(09:42):
day I was walking through the hallways and Coach Wilmer, uh,
this is my first year of Virginia came up behind me,
grabbed me by the shoulders and he pulled my shoulders
back and he lifted my head up and he said,
you belong here. So I want you to walk around
here like you own this place. This is your this
is your weight room, this is your gym, this is
(10:02):
your field, this is your helmet, this is your locker room,
this is your team. You belong here, and I will
I'm not gonna lie, like honestly, the very next day
I was a different dude. I just my approach to
what I was doing. I was doubting, you know, not
that I could play on that level, But man, I
(10:23):
came from like really like limited means and resources, And
all of a sudden, you're at UVA and kids are
driving BMW's and Mercedes, and you're going to class with
two hundred people, and you're trying to figure out, like, man,
am I smart enough to like hang in here with
all these folks. So there's a lot of other doubt
around my existence at the university that I needed somebody
(10:44):
to speak that life into me, and so Coach Wimmer
was able to do that. And so in that instance,
he chose to speak positivity and life into this guy
who from nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, and was at
this place where all the world was in front of me,
(11:07):
and he could see something in myself that I hadn't
couldn't see at the time, but he spoke to it,
and when he spoke to it, it woke up inside
of me and I just became a different dude. So, like,
the power of what we say and what we do
absolutely one hundred one thousand percent matters. And so think about,
(11:29):
you know, some of the words that you say to people,
think about how you interact with people, think about how
you engage with people, think about some of the words
that we choose to use. And then started to think, like,
how does that impact the people around me? And how
does it impact the people that are receiving and hearing this.
(11:50):
Another example is when I started coaching at Lake Washington
High School, which is an interesting story because I was
an assistant coach at in a Lake High school at
Luke and Sheldon Cross and I decided, like, you know what,
I think I want to be a head coach, and
so I kept I went online, I applied for the
Lake Washington job, and then I get halfway through the application.
(12:13):
I go like, eh, I don't think I want to
do this, so I kept hitting the counsel button. Well,
then a couple of weeks later, I get this call
from like Washington School DIFFERCT, Hey like, we want to
set up this interview, and I'm like, well, I didn't
apply for the job, and they're like, well, and here
on our thing, you submitted the application four times. That's
because I thought I was canceling the application, but I
was submitting it every time, and so I filled it
(12:35):
out four different times. Thought I was canceling it four
different times, and I ended up submitting it four different times,
and so they're thinking, like this dude really wants the job. Well,
then once I applied for the job and got it,
I just decided, well, I'm just going to do this
the way I want to do it, and it may
look different and the outcomes might be different, but there's
something bigger to me than just the score on the
(12:57):
board and winning and losing football games. That can be
important and it has its place, but for me, that's
not where I was, and so I came across this
book called The Season of Life, and it was about
this former Indianapolis colch player joe Er Ermin and he
was a team captain like in the seventies or something,
and he was coaching at a high school in Baltimore
(13:21):
and he decided to run a program that he called
building Men for Others. And so the way they went
about their work and the things they did, and the
way they treated the players, the words that they use,
all those different things I tried to mimic at Lake Washington.
So the first three words that we learned as a
team was I love you. And so our team looked
(13:41):
at me like, what like at the time, I'm like
three hundred and thirty five pounds. You know, they know
me from you know, playing for the Seahawks and Detroit
Lions and all this other kind of stuff. And this
big old dude is standing in front of the team
saying we need to learn these three words I love you.
And so it was a really interesting thing. But I
had all of our our assistant coaches read this book
(14:02):
because the cool thing about the book is it wasn't sandy.
You can't get after players and things like that. But
it was like the difference was between being firm and
fair versus being shaming and blaming and screaming and yelling
just for the sake of screaming and yelling and calling
it coaching, because we were trying to do something bigger.
Even in Kirkland, Washington, where you know, you go over
(14:23):
there and you see the big houses in the water
and all this other kind of stuff, kids still need to.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Know that they're loved.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Kids still need to have a hug, Kids still need
to know that they're enough. And so we would like
you know, routinely line up as coaches and as the
players are walking off the fields after practice, we give
them hugs, tell them that they're enough. Sometimes that's the
only place that they hear it. And so my intentions
at that school wasn't necessarily to win football games. It
(14:50):
was to win hearts and minds and to build men
that were good citizens in the school, good citizens in
the community, and that they were good brother and sons
and husbands and friends and colleagues or partners.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Or whatever it was going to be. That's what we
try to do.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
So we try to speak, you know, positivity into what
they were doing. And if you if you're ever coaching,
or you want to, or you're working with young young guys.
Uh Man, The Season of Life is a very good
book to read. There's some very you know, he was
at a private school, so there's some things that he
was able to do that you maybe can't do at
public schools. But there are some things that you can do.
(15:30):
There's some things that you can duplicate, you know, so
like for instance, like our coaches, you can be firm
and fair, like I said, But if you're coaching a
player to take a certain step or make a certain
throw and they can't make it, the response isn't to
keep yelling. The response is to figure out another way
to coach it. Or this person just isn't a guy
for the job, and so then we find somebody else,
(15:51):
and then we keep coaching that kid up. And so
it wasn't an atmosphere of screaming and yelling and in
your face and grabbing face mask and grabbing jerseys and
challenging people's man's manhood and all that kind of stuff.
It was a it was a culture of trying to
build men so that they were so that they lifted
up the community. So in that sense, we kind of
flipped this whole word power word thing on his head.
(16:15):
And one of the stories that was really cool from
that was there's this one player that just always seemed
to be in trouble. And when I took the job
at Washington, I went and talked to to the school
teachers because I just wanted to make sure that they
were on my team and understanding what we're trying to
get done. And they say, hey, this particular guy shouldn't
be on the football team, and I said, well why,
(16:37):
And they were giving me all these reasons why, all
the acting out and stuff, and I said, well, you
know what, that's the one player I came here. That's
the one player I came here for. And if we
can make his life better in some form of fashion,
no matter how big or small, then my job is
done here. And so we let the guy on the
team found out what was going on in this life,
the things that were triggering triggering the acting out, and
(16:59):
then we started as our staff speaking life into this
kid and speaking positivity into this kid and helping him
figure out how to how to manage what was going
on at his home and with the school stuff. And
then about halfway through the season, some of our team
leaders came and said, hey, man, we think this guy
should be a captain on our football team. And so
halfway through the season we made him a captain on
(17:19):
our football team. All of a sudden, his grades were better.
He wasn't acted out in school, he was trying to
do the right thing. And then the crazy story is
a few years later, after I moved on from coaching
and had gone to Virginia, moved to Virginia for four
or five years, came back and I saw this. Someone
sent me a text, and I didn't recognize the number.
(17:42):
And then they sent me a picture. I didn't recognize
the picture because there was a young dude with this big,
huge beard and you could barely see his face, and
and all he said was coach Roberts. I finally get it,
and it was the same kid. And he had taken
some time off and went Europe, hiking back through the
backwoods and all this other kind of stuff, standing at
(18:03):
other people's farms and stuff to to get rest and sleep.
But he had come back to Seattle and was applying
for med school because he had figured out who he
was and what he wanted to do in his life.
And I feel like, you know, he was trying to
tell me that I had impact.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
And uh.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
And so that is the power of words. That is
what words at its best can be, is that you
can change someone's life. And part of it is listening.
And you have to either listen through their actions and
you know, if you're if you're not close enough, you
have to listen to the words that they're saying, that
they're telling themselves, that they're how they're explaining their lives,
(18:39):
how they're reasoning what they're doing or not doing. And
then you can use your words and actions to speak
life and to this person. And so this idea around
the power of words, man like you have no idea.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Who is going to say it?
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Uh, you have no idea of when the words you
choose to use is going to land on a person
a certain way. And so I would challenge you to
always choose as best you can be, not to not
to lie about things and not to be you know,
not telling people the truth, but you can tell the
truth and be firm and fair about it without being
(19:18):
shaming and demeaning and beating people down. I would imagine
that Tua probably had unbelievable anxiety coming to board, coming
to work. Every day I dealt with anxiety, not from
the way people are talking to me, but just anxiety
in general, but the fear of what is going to
come next, the fear of what this coach was going
(19:41):
to say to him, the fear of, like, man, am
I going to be able to do enough today to
keep this dude off of me? Am I gonna be
able to show him that I can do?
Speaker 1 (19:48):
This? Is what I if.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
What I'm putting on tape is what he wants to
see like that that. It has to be hard to
show up to work like that. It has to be
hard to show up in any relationship like that, whether
it's friends or romantic relationship where you're showing up going like, man, like,
what do I have to do today to prove myself?
Speaker 1 (20:07):
You know?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
And not in a positive way, but in like I
have to figure out how to change this person's mind
about me, How to change this person's opinion about me,
how to how to break this this cycle of negativity
because it's impacted in such a negative way, and so
I can't imagine how it must felt. But then also
I can imagine how it felt when Mike McDaniel comes
(20:28):
and goes like, Yo, man, you're my guy. You're you're
the only guy in the league that fits what we're
trying to do. You're perfect at it, You're the right
person for it. And then all of a sudden, you see,
you know what he's what he's been able to do,
And people can say, yeah, well, he got fast receivers,
he has this, that, and you still got to throw
it to him, Like you can't throw it ten yards
behind him and be like, yeah, we got fast receivers.
(20:49):
You can't throw it overthrow them by ten yards and
be like yeah, we got You got to put the
ball on them. And he's been able to do that.
And from what I can tell, he seems like a
pretty good leader on the team and people respect and
he goes about his work and he works really hard
at it. So, man, the words that we speak to
people are so powerful, Uh that you can, like I said,
(21:11):
you can either speak life into someone.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Uh. You know, the words can kill other words can
give life.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
And uh, they're either poison or they're fruit. And you
get to choose. So, so what what are you choosing
when you're communicating with other people? The Mindful Therapy Group,
based in the Pacific Northwest, is a diverse group of
qualified mental health providers offering both in person and virtual care,
(21:39):
whether it's talk therapy or medication management. You can book
your first visit within one week. Visit Mindful Therapygroup dot
com to start your journey to better mental health today.
And I will say again, uh, the mental health the
Mindful Therapy Group have been amazing friends. Outside of this podcast,
(22:00):
Derek and Jessica are probably two of my best friends,
and we get to have great conversations, we get to
have difficult conversations, we get to have a lot of
fun together and do a lot of cool things together.
So if you're facing any type of mental health challenge,
the Mindful Therapy Group is a great group to reach
out to. They have they represent thousands of therapists for
like for telehealth, but they also have physical buildings here
(22:22):
in Seattle, in Arizona and Denver. I think they just
open up a place in Vegas. So they have places
all over the place where where you can where you
can get assistance. The other part about the our words,
and we talked about this a little bit, is the
self talk, and this is the part that's important, that's
really really interesting.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And this is kind of.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Where I kind of do agree with some of the
players that were kind of pushing back at to a
given power to someone else's words so much, even though
that's really difficult to do when you think about the
power dynamic in that relationship. But the self talk, ourself
talk is powerful. I think there are studies that say,
(23:04):
like eighty percent of all of our communication is what
we say to ourselves. So eighty percent of your conversation
throughout the day is you talking to yourself. And we
usually use somewhere between seven thousand and ten thousand words
(23:24):
a day. So if you think at the low end,
eighty percent of that seven thousand is roughly fifty six
hundred words that we're using, that we're saying to ourselves.
So then what of those words and those phrases are
positive and what of them are negative? And if you're
like me, and this is a place where I struggle,
(23:47):
I tend to be my own worst critic. When I
was a player, I could have a great game and
I have two bad plays, and I would score my
whole game on those two bad plays. Oh man, I
didn't play, didn't play good enough. I need to be better.
And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be better, but
(24:08):
to look at too bad plays and use that to
characterize your whole practice or your whole game, that's not
the way to go about it either. Even the work.
You know, when I played football for ten years, started
playing football when I was six years old, and when
I got to the corporate world, man, I had no
experience of like how to run a meeting if any
(24:28):
of my ideas were corporate, you know, ready, And so
this whole idea of like imposter syndrome was sitting in
like I just didn't feel like I belonged, or I
didn't feel like people were going to respect, you know,
what I had to say of what I had to
do because I'm this football player guy. Even though I
felt like, you know, at times like man, yeah, I
(24:49):
fit in here doing what I do, and so I
always felt like I had to prove myself and was
always proving myself. But then allo, sometimes it kind of
hindered me because I was like, man, I'm not sure
that I can do this, That I can do the work,
or I can come up with the idea, or I
can expand the idea, or grow the idea, or you
create processes to produce the ideas that I had. And
(25:11):
so what I had to do is learn how to
lean on my strengths and speak to those and then
lean on other people that were better at processing and
building steps and systems and all that kind of stuff.
But I am my own worst critic that way.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
And so.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
The thing that we tend to do when we're being
super critical of ourselves is the opposite of what we
do to other people. Like if you had a friend
that just expressed to you what I just said. If
you're my friends sitting across the table from me, man,
the amount of kindness and compassion and positivity that you
(25:48):
would speak into my life, I hope so as a
great friend, man, we need to learn to extend those
to ourselves. We don't give ourselves enough grace, we don't
give ourselves enough compassion, we don't show ourselves enough kindness.
We are the hardest on ourselves. Even when people think
that they're being so hard on you, they're not any
They can't be harder on you than you are on yourself.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And so this idea.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Around our self talk is important because it's reflected in
our self esteem. It's reflected in our confidence, it's reflected
in our and our mental health. So when I was
going through and you guys have heard the story before,
when I was going through this whole mental health thing,
and I went to the After the Impact program and
(26:34):
sponsored by the NFL, I got to the point where
every morning I had to wake up and I had
the legal pad of paper, yellow pad, you know, it's
longer than your normal piece of paper, and I would
write down these affirmations every morning as soon as my
feet hit the ground. I was trying to reprogram my
self talk. And so, like I said before, I would
(26:56):
put on there like hey, I'm a great dad, I'm
a great friend, I'm good at my job. You know,
here are the people that I know that love and
care about me. You know I mentioned like my ex wife,
my kids, you know the guys I do to broadcast with,
you know, NASA and Paul and Bumpus and Babinot and Brian,
(27:17):
you know, Dave Wyman, Steve Rabel, all those guys, I
know that they care about me. And so I would
every single morning this whole list of affirmations. I would
write that down. The first thing in the morning, because
that was what I wanted to be fresh on my mind.
I wanted every thought I had to be generated through
those affirmations. And then at night, before I went to bed,
(27:38):
I'd write the same list all over again. I wouldn't
pick up the list and read it through. I would
write it out. There's something about writing that imprints it
on your mind and on your brain, because then when
I went to sleep, whatever I was thinking about when
I was sleeping, I wanted to be generated by these
positive affirmations. And so, you know, I heard this guy
one time say that people don't fail, you always succeed.
(28:05):
And what he was saying is that what you tell
yourself you will tend to accomplish that. So, if you're
constantly telling yourself in a job situation or a performance
situation or what have your relationships that you're not enough,
you will start to do things to prove that right.
So then at the end of the day you can
so see I'm not enough. And so what you tell
(28:27):
yourself really matters. And that happens a lot. You know
in relationships, ro mantic relationships where one of the people
in a relationship have had tough relationships and they've been
in and out of relationships, and they start to tell
themselves that they're not enough, that they're not good enough.
But then the more they tell themselves, the more things
(28:47):
they do that then manifests itself and makes the relationship
fall apart, and so that you can go, see, I'm
not good enough. And so in that situation, just like
this dude says, is that whatever you tell yourself, whatever
you're telling yourself, that is what you're probably going to accomplish.
So you're going to always be succeeding in that. It's
kind of a weird way to look at it, but
(29:08):
you're succeeding and your own negativity because that's what you
keep speaking into your life. So then the challenge is
then the shift that mindset and create a more positive
self talk and to generate conversations with yourself that are
more positive. Doesn't mean that negativity isn't going to creep in.
Doesn't mean that you can't be truthful in knowledge with
yourself saying like, hey man, I'm in over my head,
(29:29):
but you can say I'm in over my head, But
what am I going to do about it?
Speaker 1 (29:32):
I'm in over my head? How can I help?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And The way I went about it was like, man like,
there's some skills that I don't have doing this job
with Special Olympics, and here's the way, here's some people
that can fill the gap.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So I hired a manager who is more of a like.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
I can say, we're at A, but we need to
get to Z, and I know what Z looks like.
And then she would go, well, here's the B, C, D, E, F, G, HIL.
She would build all the little steps into it and
then I could be this visionary, encouraging leader leader that way,
and then she was kind of, you know, maintaining the
day to day stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And it worked.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
I mean, we the two of us, ran this this
work for Special Olympics, for our work in our urban
school districts, and man, we have grown the number quite significantly.
And like right now, I think when I first started
doing it by myself, we're in about seven hundred schools
and now we're in over three thousand city urban schools
doing our work. So that's just a long story to
say that. Man, like, speak positivity into your life, be
(30:30):
honest and truthful about it, and in those places where
you feel like you come up short, instead of thinking
about it as a negative of talking yourself down, come
up with a game plan to fill the gaps, and
sometimes filling those gaps mean that you have to reach
out and lean on other people, or you pick up
a book. You pick up you know, you can get
a free library card and get this. All types of
self help books online that are good. Some of them
(30:52):
are not that great, but some of them are really
good and you can read them and like improve yourself
in different areas. So it's a really import important that
you that your self talk becomes something that's positive and
something that really kind of wakes you up and gets
you going, and it can be challenging at times, but
you know, there's growth in all of that. There's growth
(31:13):
when you find little nuggets in your self talk that
you need to grow, because then you have an opportunity
to grow as a person. And as you grow as
a person, you're actually impacting you know, the other people
around you, which brings me to this other concept around
the ripple effect of how the words you use and
how it impacts the people around you. And so the
(31:35):
best way I can demonstrate this is that I remember
years ago, I had just retired from an NFL and
I wanted to build myself as this keynote speaker, motivational speaker.
And a friend of mine who is a pilot for
Southwest Airlines, was like, hey man, we have this convention
going on with our pilots and with our flight attendants,
and we need just some inspiration, like you'll talk to
(31:58):
us about building relationship and all this other kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
So I'm like, all right, cool, I'm gonna come. I'm
gona They flew me down to Dallas.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
I'd like to go in and hang out with people
before I speak to them, and you know, the day
before and as I'm hanging out these with these folks,
like it wasn't about relationships that these people needed to.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Hear.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
These people needed to hear something that was going to
empower them to be who they are and not be
afraid of what life has given them. And so that
night I went back to my room, and this is
the first time I'd ever done it in my life.
I decided, I'm gonna tell my story. That's that's gonna
be my keynote. I'm gonna tell my story how I
grew up, the things I had to overcome, the things
(32:37):
that were going on in my life because at the
time I was so ashamed to talk to people about that,
because I had become this NFL dude and had done
all these other great things you're on TV and accomplished
all this other kind of stuff, and so I would
always kind of keep that to the side. But that
particular night, I felt like this crowd needed to hear
(32:57):
my story, and so I told it.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And two things happened. One is that it took the
power out of it.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
It took the shame and all that stuff. It took
all of that stuff went out of my life story
and it actually empowered me even more. But the second
thing that happened was when I was done talking, the
line was out the door where people wanted to come
and shake my hand and tell me, like, man, the
fact that you just shared your story in front of
(33:25):
all of us means that I can share my story
to people, so that my story doesn't have power over me.
And so just being able to your words and when
you use them and how you use them and how
you will them, they absolutely one hundred percent matter. Just
recently I was in Denver speaking out of Educator's Conference
(33:47):
for Special Books Colorado, and so I did a couple
different talks, mostly about the work and about how impactful
it is to our athletes and our kids in the schools.
And the overwhelming response that I got from our feedback
was that man Ray has a way of hearing people,
(34:09):
of seeing people and then speaking life into them. And
this just wasn't people that knew me. These were people
I've never met before. And so the thing that's interesting
is that them acknowledging that I'm speaking life into them
and then and then returning it back to me speaks
more life into me. So it makes me feel like
(34:30):
I like my my purpose is greater than I am.
So my words impacted them, but their words and response
to what I said impacts me, and so to me,
that's that's how this whole this how that's how the.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Whole thing works.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
So you have your you have what people are saying
to you, and you know how they're speaking to you,
and and and then whatever dynamic in a relationship is.
Then you have your self talk and then you just
have how your words impact what I want to call
like the ripple effect, how it impacts people around you,
and people are listening all the time.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
I do this keynote.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
About we're all teachers and we're all students at the
same time. We're all leaders, and we're all followers at
the same time and a lot of times, and when
you're in that teacher leader spot, you don't.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Have any clue who's the student and who.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
The follower is because you can be just how you
move through your neighborhood, the way you treat people, the
people you hang out with, the things you do. There's
some kid or some other person that you may not
even know they're watching. They're watching to see how you
do what you do because there's something about you that
they're drawn to. So the key is like, where are
you leading them to? What are you teaching them? You
(35:44):
know what I'm saying, Because you could be teaching them
how to be disrespectful to older to older people in
the community.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
You could be.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Teaching them how to rob, still and destroy, or you
could be teaching them how to build, how to support,
how to encourage, you know, how to be a pillar
in the community or pillar in your family. Uh And
but and the key is that you just don't You
never know who's watching.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
And so if you lived your.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Life thinking having that on your mind, imagine how your
interactions would change. Imagine how your walk through life might change,
and not mean ben that you have to carry that
as a burden, because what you would be doing is
just living life as a good person. Doesn't mean that
you're not gonna have hiccups, doesn't mean you're not gonna
make mistakes. Yep, I've done that, Like I've kind of
(36:30):
come out the side of my mouth and talked to
certain people or you know, made mistakes with my kids
and all that kind of stuff. But you know, been uh,
but been willing to hear the mistake and then learn
from it is key in those situations. Doesn't mean that
you just go out there recklessly and do whatever you
want to do and just like, hey, I'm just gonna
hold myself accountable when when the stuff hits the fan,
(36:51):
that's not it either, you know. But uh, but if
you're going out with good intentions with good purpose, that like,
I'm gonna live this life and speak life into other people.
Like to me, that is my whole purpose on this universe.
It's like I've always felt like there's something greater that
I'm that I'm supposed to be here for. And it's
not to play football. It's not to be on the
(37:15):
broadcast team. In some regards, it's not even to be
a parent or a significant other, but it was to
my purpose was greater than that. And I don't know,
you know where it came from. I've never take taken
classes or anything like that, but I just have this
god given ability to see people and to then find
the words that can help them move forward or see
(37:37):
themselves in a different light. And I used to be
afraid of it, but now I just own it. It
is who I am and it's what I do and
it brings me joy. And so this idea around speaking
life and using words and that story just really hit
me in a different way because when I look at
to it, like he seems like a very hard working,
focused dude, And to think that you had to show
(37:59):
up in an environment and a culture like that is
just unbelievable to me. I don't I mean, I know that,
Like there's this whole coach in mantra like Bill Belichick,
you gotta be tough and hard and you know Tom
Izzo at you know, all this other kind of stuff,
and a lot of times coaches, I think we look
at coaches men and women as father figures or mother figures,
(38:22):
and a lot of times the stuff that these coaches
are doing that we're letting them get away with. You
would never let a parent get away with. Like if
you saw an athlete in the parking lot with a
parent and a parent which like just ripping them a
new one because of the way they played or the
turnover they made or whatever, you probably be ready to
turn them into child protected services. But if the coach
(38:42):
did it, you'd be like, oh man, look that's great coaching.
It's like, what's the difference. There's still a young mind,
there's still a young individual that is verbally taking it,
and just because they take it doesn't mean that it's
the right thing to do. I'm not saying though, that
you can't be firm, but you have to be fair
(39:04):
in it. Yes, tell the truth. You can you can
even say the truth with a little bit of like
base in your voice, say it with your chest. But
you can do that and still be fair, fair in it.
And you can do that and still not shame people.
You can do that and still not have such a
negative impact in their life. You can do it in
a way that even in even in their uh in
(39:25):
that in those moments you can speak life and opportunity
and and uh confidence into a inn, into an individual.
And so today that topic just really hit me in
a way that because it's played out so many times
in my life.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
You know, even with my son.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Who's playing football at Portland State, he has a little
bit of meat in him because he tends to like
lean more on ben hard on himself.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
And so just in the last few weeks.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Watching film with him and go like, oh, Dad, I
had a tough practice and I'm like, all right, well,
let's watch the film. And we watched the film, and
practice is designed to be hard, and you're gonna make mistakes,
you're trying different things, you're trying new things, you're saying
new things. And he probably ran twenty five thirty plays
and probably had three or four if you want to
(40:17):
call them bad place. One was maybe like I'm not
sure about the assignment. Another one was that he made
the block, but it didn't look as pretty as he
wanted it to look. So you think about his four
or five bad place was only maybe two or three
bad plays, and he was like framing his whole practice
almost two or three bad plays. And so we've been
(40:38):
working on the self talk. We've been working on how
to speak, you know, how to recognize where the improvement
needs to be, but then not let that be the
message that carries a day. And all of us sometimes
need that reminder. I need it all the time. I
have people in my life that I reach out to
and just like man, I'm struggling with this, that or the
(41:00):
other thing, and a lot of it comes from my
own self talking, my own fears. You know, anxiety is
that anxiety is like holding on to to what happened,
has already happened, and looking forward to what might happen.
And so I get so stuck in those two places.
Sometimes that just creates unbelievable anxiety and doubt in my mind.
And so I need other people to kind of lift
(41:20):
me up with their words and uh. And so that
doesn't mean I'm soft, It doesn't mean I'm weak, It
doesn't mean that that I'm not capable. It just means
I'm human. And uh, you know, we're we're a relational people.
And so even your self affirmation and your and your
self validation, uh is impacted by our relationships because that's
(41:43):
how we like.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
We don't live in a vacuum.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
You don't live by yourself, like if you you know,
I don't want to get too deep into it. But
if you're a spiritual person, if you if you just
read the Bible as a self help book, not as
trying to be a Christian or following God or whatever.
You just read it how to live a better life,
how to do things right. A majority of the Bible
(42:06):
is about maintaining relationships because we are relational beings, and
so the better way to do that is to have
a more positive be more positive with our words, be
more encouraging with our words. Speak to truth, be firm,
and be fair, but don't be shaming and demeaning and
embarrassing and beating people down, basically killing people their spirit
(42:27):
with your words. You literally could be a dead man
walking or dead woman walking because spiritually someone has just
beating you down so much with the words that you
just can't can't keep it moving. Before we finish, I
did want to take this opportunity to this sweatshirt I
have on. It's called let Me Run, and let Me
(42:50):
Run is an organization that they have a boy's chapter
and a girl's chapter, or men's and women's chapter, but
it's boys and girls. These are little boys and girls
between third grade and eighth grade. And it's a running UH.
They'd use running and training for like a five K
on how to be more, how to express yourself better,
(43:10):
how to support people, uh with your words better, how
to maintain relationships. So it's a really big focus on
the mental health part of it. And so here in Seattle,
UH it's called the Seat. If you go to Seattle
dot let Me Run dot org. UH, there are plenty
of opportunities for donations, which they really need don donations
and sponsors. There's plenty of opportunity opportunities to UH coach
(43:32):
one of the teams UH because they're located all over
all over Seattle, the Seattle area.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
And then.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
The regional contact there is Jin Schevitz and UH and
so I've spoken with her quite a few times, and
it's been really difficult gaining momentum for support and especially
financial support for this to help kids with shoes and
uniforms and and uh the you know, you know, leasing
space for them to run and stuff like that. And
they also need need coaches and so it's a place
(44:01):
where they're trying to get to young men early to
kind of help them start to manage a lot of
this stuff that we just talked about, which is how
they talk to others and more importantly, how they talk
to themselves. And so then I want to wrap our
little show up today with a challenge. And the challenge
is for the next week, pay attention to the words
(44:25):
that you use, and pay attention how you talk to
other people and how you talk to yourself. And when
you find yourself being in that negative space, try to
find a way to reframe it. Try to problem solve
it versus making it a statement as to who you are.
So you might say like, hey, here's this thing that
(44:45):
I'm doing and I'm just not enough. I just can't
do it. Another way to reframe that is, how could
I learn to do this? What are the things I
need to.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Do to learn?
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Or who else can I lean on to help me
get this duff, or who else can I lean on
to teach me these different things? Because there's always pep
out there willing to share their knowledge and stuff. And
so it's a slight nuance, but it's a change from
you go to a growth mindset from a fixed mindset,
because in the fixed mindset, you're saying I'm not enough,
I'll never be enough, and there's nothing I can do
(45:17):
to make me enough. And a growth mindset, you're saying, Okay,
this is a problem, let me solve the problem. And
that can be through more education, It can be through
asking for help, it can be through you know, reading books,
it can be through you know, challenge yourself to just
take it one step at a time. But that kind
of reframes the what you're telling yourself and the words
(45:38):
of using it. If you feel like you're about to
say something negative to another person, like I said, if
it's something truthful and you can say it with firmness
and fairness, go ahead. But if you're just being negative
for the sake of being negative, find another way, find
something positive to say to that person you know, and
then you can get to a place where you can
discuss if this is something that's been harmful or hurtful
(46:01):
to an individual, to people, you can get to a
place where you can discuss that. But but be mindful
of the words that you're using. And what I'd like
to do is if you have opportunities or you have
experiences where you've either reframed what you're thinking, or you've
gotten words of affirmation from someone else and it's impacted
you in a certain way, or you've given words to
(46:23):
someone else that you hopefully will have a positive impact
on them in a certain way. Man, post it, post
it to our to to you know, big Ray Roberts
on Twitter. Uh, you know, I'll put a little post
up there on these different social media sites and so
we can kind of get it started, because I just
want to I want people to see the positivity that
(46:43):
exists in the world because at this time, like with
all the words and things that have been thrown around,
with all the politics and the presidential race and all
that from both sides, and it can be freaking toxic
as all get out. And then and then you feel
like you have to choose one of the size and
then you have to then use the same words and
use the same negativity and all those kinds of things.
And these are supposed to be the leaders the leadership
(47:05):
of our country, right Man. You can change the you
can change the narrative to a more positive one. You
can hold on to whatever you believe, You can hold
on to your political views, but you can find a
way to express it in a way that it's uplifting
and not that it's not tearing down, that it's bringing
us together, not pulling us apart, that it's uniting our
country and the people around just uniting your community.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
It can be a.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Conversation in your family. It can be a conversation with
your best friend. You give me a conversation like me
if you sit sitting next to me on a park bench,
I don't care where we are, we're gonna talk. It's
just just who I am. I'm gonna learn out who
you are, what you do, why you do it, how
you do it, and how can I help.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
That's just kind of who I am.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
And so in those situations, man, I just want to
hear what people are saying to each other and how you're,
how you're how you're going to change some of this
negative self talk and some of the negative talk that
we have with other people.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Uh, to be.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Something positive that that we can lean on, that we
can that we can that we can build on, that
they can build their lives on. So, uh, thank you
guys for listening and remember that you have the power
with your words to change your reality. It doesn't have
to be what you say that you think is true
(48:13):
in that moment. Speak positivity, be kind, be compassionate, be
considered of yourself. Extend that stuff to yourself. One word
at a time doesn't mean it's gonna happen overnight. Doesn't
mean you're gonna like spew out this long paragraph, you know,
five page paper, and your life is going to change.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Just one word at a time, one day at a time.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Be more positive with yourself, and be more positive with
the people around you, and so and keep grinding and
keep growing. So as always we always finish up with
doctor three things. It's okay to not be okay. If
you need help, reach out to your medical provider for
medical health and I mean for mental health guidance. And
(48:56):
then lastly, when you need help and you ask for help,
you're operating from a position of power. Be powerful with
your words, Be positive with your words, Spread love and
spread the joy. Big ray, big rais garage grind until
next time, peace and them out
You're listening to Big Raise Garage Grind.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I want to bring awareness and my voice to something
that's meaningful and purposeful more than just who's the best
football player, who's the best football team? The intersection between life,
football and mental health. When you need help and you
ask for help, you're operating from a position of power.
When you need help and you don't ask for help,
that's the weakness.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Now here's your host, Seahawk's legend, Ray Roberts, Big fam Like.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
It's been a minute of going through the preseason and
trying to find some time to get back on the mic,
but this is Big Raise Garage Grind, where we try
to always focus on leveling up our mental health game.
In today's episode, just like the previous episodes, are brought
to you by the Mindful Therapy Group, And I just
want to send a big shout out to Dereka and Jessica,
(00:51):
the founders who came down with like some pneumonia the
last few weeks and have been battling all of that.
So hopefully you guys are feeling good and healthy now.
Today I wanted to take some time to kind of
dig into a little bit about this thing that's always
(01:13):
around us. We're always UH in relationship with it, and
sometimes and a lot of times most times, we're unhealthy
with it.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And what I'm talking about, UH is the power of words.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
You know, whether you're speaking them, or you're hearing them,
or if you're just thinking them. What we hear in
the words we use shape our reality. And if it
shapes our reality, then it's also shaping UH and forming
and impacting our mental health. And so I just want
to talk a little bit about that today. And just
(01:50):
like any other time, we try to bring you know,
current topics and stories into the into the podcast, so
it's just not my story, you know, all the time.
And so a couple of weeks ago, on the Dan
Labratard Show, the Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tager lawa, that's
how you said tagle, We're gonna say tongue tongue by
(02:14):
law I practiced that like all night and I could
not make it. The Southern drawl makes it hard with
those with those words. So we're gonna call him toua
moving forward. But on the Dan Labratard Show, he was
asked by Dan what's the difference between his current coach
Mike McDonald and his former coach Brian Flores, and to
(02:36):
I think everybody's surprised, Tua gave the shockingly blunt quote
comparing the two his his experience on both of those coaches,
and just to kind of uh, you know, I'll read
from you what he said, and this is what this
(02:56):
is what Tua said. And he said, to put in
in simplest terms, if you woke up every morning and
I told you that you suck at what you did,
that you don't belong doing what you do, that you
shouldn't be here, that this guy should be here, that
you haven't earned this right, and then you have somebody else,
(03:17):
new coach, Mike McDonald. So that was talking about Brian Flores,
and you have somebody else, new coach, Mike McDonald come
in and tell you do you're the best fit for this,
You're accurate, you're the best whatever you are, this you
are that. How would that make you feel? Listen to
one or the other. So you see what I'm saying.
(03:39):
And so that just got me to thinking about this
whole idea around the power of words, and like, hopefully
we can have an understanding of just how powerful they are.
Some of the reactions to it was interesting to me
because some former players we are saying like, oh, man,
you have to like have belief in yourself and it's
what you tell yourself that matters and let the coach
(04:00):
do this, that and the other thing. And to some
of that I agree with. You know, obviously, like our
self talk is important, and we'll get to that a
little bit. But I think the thing that they were missing,
the dynamic that they were missing, and that relationship is
the power dynamic. And when there's when power is involved,
authority is involved, that someone has leverage over another person. Man,
(04:24):
that kind of that skews a lot of that, you know,
self talk or confidence or whatever you want to call it.
Because here's a guy who can bench, you can request
another quarterback, can draft another quarterback, can possibly impact you've
been traded to another team. And that's the dude that
has who's preaching this negativity into your life. And I
(04:46):
don't care who you are. And there's there's been great
athletes that talk about, you know, whether doubt is in
their life or not or whatever. But the fact that
you considered out even if you try to say, like, man,
I just never doubt myself, the fact that you even
cansiderate that you talk about it, that you have a
plan for it means that doubt is part of who
you are.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
It's part of who we are.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
We're a relational people, and so when you're in relation
with other people, what they say and their and their
president stuff does have an impact on you. Whether it's
big or small, whether it's right or wrong, it does,
you know. And so I just thought it was important
today to kind of talk a little bit about some
of those things, because you know, we hear all this
stuff about I remember when I was a kid, I
(05:28):
used to say this, you know all the time. Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but words will never
hurt me. But words hurt. They do hurt. If you're
a spiritual person, you know, the Bible mentions the tongue
and the and words you know all the time, and
the impact that they can have, you know, in your life.
(05:50):
You know, and then you know, the Bible talks about
the power that life and death is in the power
of the tongue. And it's not just talking about a
physical death and life if it's talking about a spiritual
one one that as you're living like so, so you
have a choice to speak either life or death into people.
And so when I when I saw that, that was
(06:11):
the first thing that kind of came to my mind.
And so it's really hard. You know, I've been in
situations where, uh, I didn't feel like the person who
had the power and the relationship, whether it's a working
relationship or friendship or whatever, the way that they were
speaking to me and the way they thought of me
and the and the words that they used really impacted
(06:33):
how I responded and then and it kind of impacted
how I saw myself. And so I would always consider
myself a pretty confident dude.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You know, I try to speak life into myself as
much as I can, but it doesn't always. It doesn't
always happen. And if you're if you're so perfect that
what people say doesn't impact it in men, uh, great
for you. But I guarantee you there's not there's not
many people that are that way. And if the words
(07:02):
weren't impactful, then if someone said something negative to you
and you responded in an aggressive, negative way, then it's
still impacting you. Even the positive words. When you respond
to the positive words, then you're you're responding to what
people think or say about you. And so the idea
that like other people's words shouldn't have any impact on
(07:24):
you is kind of a dream state to be in.
It's not reality because it does have.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
An impact on you.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And so I just kind of wanted to dive a
little bit into this idea around the power that words have.
And I'd like to ask a question, you know, for
you guys to consider as we're thinking through this portion
of it. Think about how words you use can build
(07:55):
someone up or tear them down. And you know, like
I said, we tossed around these phrases around words whenever hurt,
but they do. And like we've already talked about some
of the stuff in scripture about the power of words.
And then think about the last time that someone spoke
to you in a way that moved you in either direction,
you know, positively or negatively. And you know, it's interesting
(08:19):
that this is the conversation because this past weekend an
old teammate of mine from Virginia, Matt Quickley, who was
a defensive lineman from Florida that played with me and
we entered Uva at the same time, had a lot
of battles in practice. Sorry, Matt, I had to put
it on you from time to time. But we were
talking about our defensive line coach, Danny Wilmer, and Danny
(08:42):
Wilmer can be kind of a conundrum, so to speak.
But that dude sat in front of my mom on
a recruiting trip when he came to see us, and
he looked my mom right in the eye and he said,
I will take care of your son when he leaves Virginia.
He will be a man. And my mom believed him
(09:04):
because she liked the positivity that he was speaking into
my life. And my dad was just like, hey, man,
go hit somebody, you know. But my mom was really
worried about how her son was going to be raised
and stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And so I can remember as a six foot five, two.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Hundred and fifty pounds defensive end walking around grounds and
through our facilities and things. And you know, when you're
an older kid and you're I mean, when you're a
taller kid and most of your friends are shorter, you
tend to kind of walk kind of bent over, crouched
down a little bit because you want to feel like
you're short, you know, down at their level. It's kind
of a subconscious thing, but it happens. And so one
(09:42):
day I was walking through the hallways and Coach Wilmer, uh,
this is my first year of Virginia came up behind me,
grabbed me by the shoulders and he pulled my shoulders
back and he lifted my head up and he said,
you belong here. So I want you to walk around
here like you own this place. This is your this
is your weight room, this is your gym, this is
(10:02):
your field, this is your helmet, this is your locker room,
this is your team. You belong here, and I will
I'm not gonna lie, like honestly, the very next day
I was a different dude. I just my approach to
what I was doing. I was doubting, you know, not
that I could play on that level, But man, I
(10:23):
came from like really like limited means and resources, And
all of a sudden, you're at UVA and kids are
driving BMW's and Mercedes, and you're going to class with
two hundred people, and you're trying to figure out, like, man,
am I smart enough to like hang in here with
all these folks. So there's a lot of other doubt
around my existence at the university that I needed somebody
(10:44):
to speak that life into me, and so Coach Wimmer
was able to do that. And so in that instance,
he chose to speak positivity and life into this guy
who from nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, and was at
this place where all the world was in front of me,
(11:07):
and he could see something in myself that I hadn't
couldn't see at the time, but he spoke to it,
and when he spoke to it, it woke up inside
of me and I just became a different dude. So, like,
the power of what we say and what we do
absolutely one hundred one thousand percent matters. And so think about,
(11:29):
you know, some of the words that you say to people,
think about how you interact with people, think about how
you engage with people, think about some of the words
that we choose to use. And then started to think, like,
how does that impact the people around me? And how
does it impact the people that are receiving and hearing this.
(11:50):
Another example is when I started coaching at Lake Washington
High School, which is an interesting story because I was
an assistant coach at in a Lake High school at
Luke and Sheldon Cross and I decided, like, you know what,
I think I want to be a head coach, and
so I kept I went online, I applied for the
Lake Washington job, and then I get halfway through the application.
(12:13):
I go like, eh, I don't think I want to
do this, so I kept hitting the counsel button. Well,
then a couple of weeks later, I get this call
from like Washington School DIFFERCT, Hey like, we want to
set up this interview, and I'm like, well, I didn't
apply for the job, and they're like, well, and here
on our thing, you submitted the application four times. That's
because I thought I was canceling the application, but I
was submitting it every time, and so I filled it
(12:35):
out four different times. Thought I was canceling it four
different times, and I ended up submitting it four different times,
and so they're thinking, like this dude really wants the job. Well,
then once I applied for the job and got it,
I just decided, well, I'm just going to do this
the way I want to do it, and it may
look different and the outcomes might be different, but there's
something bigger to me than just the score on the
(12:57):
board and winning and losing football games. That can be
important and it has its place, but for me, that's
not where I was, and so I came across this
book called The Season of Life, and it was about
this former Indianapolis colch player joe Er Ermin and he
was a team captain like in the seventies or something,
and he was coaching at a high school in Baltimore
(13:21):
and he decided to run a program that he called
building Men for Others. And so the way they went
about their work and the things they did, and the
way they treated the players, the words that they use,
all those different things I tried to mimic at Lake Washington.
So the first three words that we learned as a
team was I love you. And so our team looked
(13:41):
at me like, what like at the time, I'm like
three hundred and thirty five pounds. You know, they know
me from you know, playing for the Seahawks and Detroit
Lions and all this other kind of stuff. And this
big old dude is standing in front of the team
saying we need to learn these three words I love you.
And so it was a really interesting thing. But I
had all of our our assistant coaches read this book
(14:02):
because the cool thing about the book is it wasn't sandy.
You can't get after players and things like that. But
it was like the difference was between being firm and
fair versus being shaming and blaming and screaming and yelling
just for the sake of screaming and yelling and calling
it coaching, because we were trying to do something bigger.
Even in Kirkland, Washington, where you know, you go over
(14:23):
there and you see the big houses in the water
and all this other kind of stuff, kids still need to.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Know that they're loved.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Kids still need to have a hug, Kids still need
to know that they're enough. And so we would like
you know, routinely line up as coaches and as the
players are walking off the fields after practice, we give
them hugs, tell them that they're enough. Sometimes that's the
only place that they hear it. And so my intentions
at that school wasn't necessarily to win football games. It
(14:50):
was to win hearts and minds and to build men
that were good citizens in the school, good citizens in
the community, and that they were good brother and sons
and husbands and friends and colleagues or partners.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Or whatever it was going to be. That's what we
try to do.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
So we try to speak, you know, positivity into what
they were doing. And if you if you're ever coaching,
or you want to, or you're working with young young guys.
Uh Man, The Season of Life is a very good
book to read. There's some very you know, he was
at a private school, so there's some things that he
was able to do that you maybe can't do at
public schools. But there are some things that you can do.
(15:30):
There's some things that you can duplicate, you know, so
like for instance, like our coaches, you can be firm
and fair, like I said, But if you're coaching a
player to take a certain step or make a certain
throw and they can't make it, the response isn't to
keep yelling. The response is to figure out another way
to coach it. Or this person just isn't a guy
for the job, and so then we find somebody else,
(15:51):
and then we keep coaching that kid up. And so
it wasn't an atmosphere of screaming and yelling and in
your face and grabbing face mask and grabbing jerseys and
challenging people's man's manhood and all that kind of stuff.
It was a it was a culture of trying to
build men so that they were so that they lifted
up the community. So in that sense, we kind of
flipped this whole word power word thing on his head.
(16:15):
And one of the stories that was really cool from
that was there's this one player that just always seemed
to be in trouble. And when I took the job
at Washington, I went and talked to to the school
teachers because I just wanted to make sure that they
were on my team and understanding what we're trying to
get done. And they say, hey, this particular guy shouldn't
be on the football team, and I said, well why,
(16:37):
And they were giving me all these reasons why, all
the acting out and stuff, and I said, well, you
know what, that's the one player I came here. That's
the one player I came here for. And if we
can make his life better in some form of fashion,
no matter how big or small, then my job is
done here. And so we let the guy on the
team found out what was going on in this life,
the things that were triggering triggering the acting out, and
(16:59):
then we started as our staff speaking life into this
kid and speaking positivity into this kid and helping him
figure out how to how to manage what was going
on at his home and with the school stuff. And
then about halfway through the season, some of our team
leaders came and said, hey, man, we think this guy
should be a captain on our football team. And so
halfway through the season we made him a captain on
(17:19):
our football team. All of a sudden, his grades were better.
He wasn't acted out in school, he was trying to
do the right thing. And then the crazy story is
a few years later, after I moved on from coaching
and had gone to Virginia, moved to Virginia for four
or five years, came back and I saw this. Someone
sent me a text, and I didn't recognize the number.
(17:42):
And then they sent me a picture. I didn't recognize
the picture because there was a young dude with this big,
huge beard and you could barely see his face, and
and all he said was coach Roberts. I finally get it,
and it was the same kid. And he had taken
some time off and went Europe, hiking back through the
backwoods and all this other kind of stuff, standing at
(18:03):
other people's farms and stuff to to get rest and sleep.
But he had come back to Seattle and was applying
for med school because he had figured out who he
was and what he wanted to do in his life.
And I feel like, you know, he was trying to
tell me that I had impact.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
And uh.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
And so that is the power of words. That is
what words at its best can be, is that you
can change someone's life. And part of it is listening.
And you have to either listen through their actions and
you know, if you're if you're not close enough, you
have to listen to the words that they're saying, that
they're telling themselves, that they're how they're explaining their lives,
(18:39):
how they're reasoning what they're doing or not doing. And
then you can use your words and actions to speak
life and to this person. And so this idea around
the power of words, man like you have no idea.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Who is going to say it?
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Uh, you have no idea of when the words you
choose to use is going to land on a person
a certain way. And so I would challenge you to
always choose as best you can be, not to not
to lie about things and not to be you know,
not telling people the truth, but you can tell the
truth and be firm and fair about it without being
(19:18):
shaming and demeaning and beating people down. I would imagine
that Tua probably had unbelievable anxiety coming to board, coming
to work. Every day I dealt with anxiety, not from
the way people are talking to me, but just anxiety
in general, but the fear of what is going to
come next, the fear of what this coach was going
(19:41):
to say to him, the fear of, like, man, am
I going to be able to do enough today to
keep this dude off of me? Am I gonna be
able to show him that I can do?
Speaker 1 (19:48):
This? Is what I if.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
What I'm putting on tape is what he wants to
see like that that. It has to be hard to
show up to work like that. It has to be
hard to show up in any relationship like that, whether
it's friends or romantic relationship where you're showing up going like, man, like,
what do I have to do today to prove myself?
Speaker 1 (20:07):
You know?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
And not in a positive way, but in like I
have to figure out how to change this person's mind
about me, How to change this person's opinion about me,
how to how to break this this cycle of negativity
because it's impacted in such a negative way, and so
I can't imagine how it must felt. But then also
I can imagine how it felt when Mike McDaniel comes
(20:28):
and goes like, Yo, man, you're my guy. You're you're
the only guy in the league that fits what we're
trying to do. You're perfect at it, You're the right
person for it. And then all of a sudden, you see,
you know what he's what he's been able to do,
And people can say, yeah, well, he got fast receivers,
he has this, that, and you still got to throw
it to him, Like you can't throw it ten yards
behind him and be like, yeah, we got fast receivers.
(20:49):
You can't throw it overthrow them by ten yards and
be like yeah, we got You got to put the
ball on them. And he's been able to do that.
And from what I can tell, he seems like a
pretty good leader on the team and people respect and
he goes about his work and he works really hard
at it. So, man, the words that we speak to
people are so powerful, Uh that you can, like I said,
(21:11):
you can either speak life into someone.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Uh. You know, the words can kill other words can
give life.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
And uh, they're either poison or they're fruit. And you
get to choose. So, so what what are you choosing
when you're communicating with other people? The Mindful Therapy Group,
based in the Pacific Northwest, is a diverse group of
qualified mental health providers offering both in person and virtual care,
(21:39):
whether it's talk therapy or medication management. You can book
your first visit within one week. Visit Mindful Therapygroup dot
com to start your journey to better mental health today.
And I will say again, uh, the mental health the
Mindful Therapy Group have been amazing friends. Outside of this podcast,
(22:00):
Derek and Jessica are probably two of my best friends,
and we get to have great conversations, we get to
have difficult conversations, we get to have a lot of
fun together and do a lot of cool things together.
So if you're facing any type of mental health challenge,
the Mindful Therapy Group is a great group to reach
out to. They have they represent thousands of therapists for
like for telehealth, but they also have physical buildings here
(22:22):
in Seattle, in Arizona and Denver. I think they just
open up a place in Vegas. So they have places
all over the place where where you can where you
can get assistance. The other part about the our words,
and we talked about this a little bit, is the
self talk, and this is the part that's important, that's
really really interesting.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And this is kind of.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Where I kind of do agree with some of the
players that were kind of pushing back at to a
given power to someone else's words so much, even though
that's really difficult to do when you think about the
power dynamic in that relationship. But the self talk, ourself
talk is powerful. I think there are studies that say,
(23:04):
like eighty percent of all of our communication is what
we say to ourselves. So eighty percent of your conversation
throughout the day is you talking to yourself. And we
usually use somewhere between seven thousand and ten thousand words
(23:24):
a day. So if you think at the low end,
eighty percent of that seven thousand is roughly fifty six
hundred words that we're using, that we're saying to ourselves.
So then what of those words and those phrases are
positive and what of them are negative? And if you're
like me, and this is a place where I struggle,
(23:47):
I tend to be my own worst critic. When I
was a player, I could have a great game and
I have two bad plays, and I would score my
whole game on those two bad plays. Oh man, I
didn't play, didn't play good enough. I need to be better.
And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be better, but
(24:08):
to look at too bad plays and use that to
characterize your whole practice or your whole game, that's not
the way to go about it either. Even the work.
You know, when I played football for ten years, started
playing football when I was six years old, and when
I got to the corporate world, man, I had no
experience of like how to run a meeting if any
(24:28):
of my ideas were corporate, you know, ready, And so
this whole idea of like imposter syndrome was sitting in
like I just didn't feel like I belonged, or I
didn't feel like people were going to respect, you know,
what I had to say of what I had to
do because I'm this football player guy. Even though I
felt like, you know, at times like man, yeah, I
(24:49):
fit in here doing what I do, and so I
always felt like I had to prove myself and was
always proving myself. But then allo, sometimes it kind of
hindered me because I was like, man, I'm not sure
that I can do this, That I can do the work,
or I can come up with the idea, or I
can expand the idea, or grow the idea, or you
create processes to produce the ideas that I had. And
(25:11):
so what I had to do is learn how to
lean on my strengths and speak to those and then
lean on other people that were better at processing and
building steps and systems and all that kind of stuff.
But I am my own worst critic that way.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
And so.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
The thing that we tend to do when we're being
super critical of ourselves is the opposite of what we
do to other people. Like if you had a friend
that just expressed to you what I just said. If
you're my friends sitting across the table from me, man,
the amount of kindness and compassion and positivity that you
(25:48):
would speak into my life, I hope so as a
great friend, man, we need to learn to extend those
to ourselves. We don't give ourselves enough grace, we don't
give ourselves enough compassion, we don't show ourselves enough kindness.
We are the hardest on ourselves. Even when people think
that they're being so hard on you, they're not any
They can't be harder on you than you are on yourself.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And so this idea.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Around our self talk is important because it's reflected in
our self esteem. It's reflected in our confidence, it's reflected
in our and our mental health. So when I was
going through and you guys have heard the story before,
when I was going through this whole mental health thing,
and I went to the After the Impact program and
(26:34):
sponsored by the NFL, I got to the point where
every morning I had to wake up and I had
the legal pad of paper, yellow pad, you know, it's
longer than your normal piece of paper, and I would
write down these affirmations every morning as soon as my
feet hit the ground. I was trying to reprogram my
self talk. And so, like I said before, I would
(26:56):
put on there like hey, I'm a great dad, I'm
a great friend, I'm good at my job. You know,
here are the people that I know that love and
care about me. You know I mentioned like my ex wife,
my kids, you know the guys I do to broadcast with,
you know, NASA and Paul and Bumpus and Babinot and Brian,
(27:17):
you know, Dave Wyman, Steve Rabel, all those guys, I
know that they care about me. And so I would
every single morning this whole list of affirmations. I would
write that down. The first thing in the morning, because
that was what I wanted to be fresh on my mind.
I wanted every thought I had to be generated through
those affirmations. And then at night, before I went to bed,
(27:38):
I'd write the same list all over again. I wouldn't
pick up the list and read it through. I would
write it out. There's something about writing that imprints it
on your mind and on your brain, because then when
I went to sleep, whatever I was thinking about when
I was sleeping, I wanted to be generated by these
positive affirmations. And so, you know, I heard this guy
one time say that people don't fail, you always succeed.
(28:05):
And what he was saying is that what you tell
yourself you will tend to accomplish that. So, if you're
constantly telling yourself in a job situation or a performance
situation or what have your relationships that you're not enough,
you will start to do things to prove that right.
So then at the end of the day you can
so see I'm not enough. And so what you tell
(28:27):
yourself really matters. And that happens a lot. You know
in relationships, ro mantic relationships where one of the people
in a relationship have had tough relationships and they've been
in and out of relationships, and they start to tell
themselves that they're not enough, that they're not good enough.
But then the more they tell themselves, the more things
(28:47):
they do that then manifests itself and makes the relationship
fall apart, and so that you can go, see, I'm
not good enough. And so in that situation, just like
this dude says, is that whatever you tell yourself, whatever
you're telling yourself, that is what you're probably going to accomplish.
So you're going to always be succeeding in that. It's
kind of a weird way to look at it, but
(29:08):
you're succeeding and your own negativity because that's what you
keep speaking into your life. So then the challenge is
then the shift that mindset and create a more positive
self talk and to generate conversations with yourself that are
more positive. Doesn't mean that negativity isn't going to creep in.
Doesn't mean that you can't be truthful in knowledge with
yourself saying like, hey man, I'm in over my head,
(29:29):
but you can say I'm in over my head, But
what am I going to do about it?
Speaker 1 (29:32):
I'm in over my head? How can I help?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And The way I went about it was like, man like,
there's some skills that I don't have doing this job
with Special Olympics, and here's the way, here's some people
that can fill the gap.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
So I hired a manager who is more of a like.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
I can say, we're at A, but we need to
get to Z, and I know what Z looks like.
And then she would go, well, here's the B, C, D, E, F, G, HIL.
She would build all the little steps into it and
then I could be this visionary, encouraging leader leader that way,
and then she was kind of, you know, maintaining the
day to day stuff.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And it worked.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
I mean, we the two of us, ran this this
work for Special Olympics, for our work in our urban
school districts, and man, we have grown the number quite significantly.
And like right now, I think when I first started
doing it by myself, we're in about seven hundred schools
and now we're in over three thousand city urban schools
doing our work. So that's just a long story to
say that. Man, like, speak positivity into your life, be
(30:30):
honest and truthful about it, and in those places where
you feel like you come up short, instead of thinking
about it as a negative of talking yourself down, come
up with a game plan to fill the gaps, and
sometimes filling those gaps mean that you have to reach
out and lean on other people, or you pick up
a book. You pick up you know, you can get
a free library card and get this. All types of
self help books online that are good. Some of them
(30:52):
are not that great, but some of them are really
good and you can read them and like improve yourself
in different areas. So it's a really import important that
you that your self talk becomes something that's positive and
something that really kind of wakes you up and gets
you going, and it can be challenging at times, but
you know, there's growth in all of that. There's growth
(31:13):
when you find little nuggets in your self talk that
you need to grow, because then you have an opportunity
to grow as a person. And as you grow as
a person, you're actually impacting you know, the other people
around you, which brings me to this other concept around
the ripple effect of how the words you use and
how it impacts the people around you. And so the
(31:35):
best way I can demonstrate this is that I remember
years ago, I had just retired from an NFL and
I wanted to build myself as this keynote speaker, motivational speaker.
And a friend of mine who is a pilot for
Southwest Airlines, was like, hey man, we have this convention
going on with our pilots and with our flight attendants,
and we need just some inspiration, like you'll talk to
(31:58):
us about building relationship and all this other kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
So I'm like, all right, cool, I'm gonna come. I'm
gona They flew me down to Dallas.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
I'd like to go in and hang out with people
before I speak to them, and you know, the day
before and as I'm hanging out these with these folks,
like it wasn't about relationships that these people needed to.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Hear.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
These people needed to hear something that was going to
empower them to be who they are and not be
afraid of what life has given them. And so that
night I went back to my room, and this is
the first time I'd ever done it in my life.
I decided, I'm gonna tell my story. That's that's gonna
be my keynote. I'm gonna tell my story how I
grew up, the things I had to overcome, the things
(32:37):
that were going on in my life because at the
time I was so ashamed to talk to people about that,
because I had become this NFL dude and had done
all these other great things you're on TV and accomplished
all this other kind of stuff, and so I would
always kind of keep that to the side. But that
particular night, I felt like this crowd needed to hear
(32:57):
my story, and so I told it.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And two things happened. One is that it took the
power out of it.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
It took the shame and all that stuff. It took
all of that stuff went out of my life story
and it actually empowered me even more. But the second
thing that happened was when I was done talking, the
line was out the door where people wanted to come
and shake my hand and tell me, like, man, the
fact that you just shared your story in front of
(33:25):
all of us means that I can share my story
to people, so that my story doesn't have power over me.
And so just being able to your words and when
you use them and how you use them and how
you will them, they absolutely one hundred percent matter. Just
recently I was in Denver speaking out of Educator's Conference
(33:47):
for Special Books Colorado, and so I did a couple
different talks, mostly about the work and about how impactful
it is to our athletes and our kids in the schools.
And the overwhelming response that I got from our feedback
was that man Ray has a way of hearing people,
(34:09):
of seeing people and then speaking life into them. And
this just wasn't people that knew me. These were people
I've never met before. And so the thing that's interesting
is that them acknowledging that I'm speaking life into them
and then and then returning it back to me speaks
more life into me. So it makes me feel like
(34:30):
I like my my purpose is greater than I am.
So my words impacted them, but their words and response
to what I said impacts me, and so to me,
that's that's how this whole this how that's how the.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Whole thing works.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
So you have your you have what people are saying
to you, and you know how they're speaking to you,
and and and then whatever dynamic in a relationship is.
Then you have your self talk and then you just
have how your words impact what I want to call
like the ripple effect, how it impacts people around you,
and people are listening all the time.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
I do this keynote.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
About we're all teachers and we're all students at the
same time. We're all leaders, and we're all followers at
the same time and a lot of times, and when
you're in that teacher leader spot, you don't.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Have any clue who's the student and who.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
The follower is because you can be just how you
move through your neighborhood, the way you treat people, the
people you hang out with, the things you do. There's
some kid or some other person that you may not
even know they're watching. They're watching to see how you
do what you do because there's something about you that
they're drawn to. So the key is like, where are
you leading them to? What are you teaching them? You
(35:44):
know what I'm saying, Because you could be teaching them
how to be disrespectful to older to older people in
the community.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
You could be.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Teaching them how to rob, still and destroy, or you
could be teaching them how to build, how to support,
how to encourage, you know, how to be a pillar
in the community or pillar in your family. Uh And
but and the key is that you just don't You
never know who's watching.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
And so if you lived your.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Life thinking having that on your mind, imagine how your
interactions would change. Imagine how your walk through life might change,
and not mean ben that you have to carry that
as a burden, because what you would be doing is
just living life as a good person. Doesn't mean that
you're not gonna have hiccups, doesn't mean you're not gonna
make mistakes. Yep, I've done that, Like I've kind of
(36:30):
come out the side of my mouth and talked to
certain people or you know, made mistakes with my kids
and all that kind of stuff. But you know, been uh,
but been willing to hear the mistake and then learn
from it is key in those situations. Doesn't mean that
you just go out there recklessly and do whatever you
want to do and just like, hey, I'm just gonna
hold myself accountable when when the stuff hits the fan,
(36:51):
that's not it either, you know. But uh, but if
you're going out with good intentions with good purpose, that like,
I'm gonna live this life and speak life into other people.
Like to me, that is my whole purpose on this universe.
It's like I've always felt like there's something greater that
I'm that I'm supposed to be here for. And it's
not to play football. It's not to be on the
(37:15):
broadcast team. In some regards, it's not even to be
a parent or a significant other, but it was to
my purpose was greater than that. And I don't know,
you know where it came from. I've never take taken
classes or anything like that, but I just have this
god given ability to see people and to then find
the words that can help them move forward or see
(37:37):
themselves in a different light. And I used to be
afraid of it, but now I just own it. It
is who I am and it's what I do and
it brings me joy. And so this idea around speaking
life and using words and that story just really hit
me in a different way because when I look at
to it, like he seems like a very hard working,
focused dude, And to think that you had to show
(37:59):
up in an environment and a culture like that is
just unbelievable to me. I don't I mean, I know that,
Like there's this whole coach in mantra like Bill Belichick,
you gotta be tough and hard and you know Tom
Izzo at you know, all this other kind of stuff,
and a lot of times coaches, I think we look
at coaches men and women as father figures or mother figures,
(38:22):
and a lot of times the stuff that these coaches
are doing that we're letting them get away with. You
would never let a parent get away with. Like if
you saw an athlete in the parking lot with a
parent and a parent which like just ripping them a
new one because of the way they played or the
turnover they made or whatever, you probably be ready to
turn them into child protected services. But if the coach
(38:42):
did it, you'd be like, oh man, look that's great coaching.
It's like, what's the difference. There's still a young mind,
there's still a young individual that is verbally taking it,
and just because they take it doesn't mean that it's
the right thing to do. I'm not saying though, that
you can't be firm, but you have to be fair
(39:04):
in it. Yes, tell the truth. You can you can
even say the truth with a little bit of like
base in your voice, say it with your chest. But
you can do that and still be fair, fair in it.
And you can do that and still not shame people.
You can do that and still not have such a
negative impact in their life. You can do it in
a way that even in even in their uh in
(39:25):
that in those moments you can speak life and opportunity
and and uh confidence into a inn, into an individual.
And so today that topic just really hit me in
a way that because it's played out so many times
in my life.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
You know, even with my son.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Who's playing football at Portland State, he has a little
bit of meat in him because he tends to like
lean more on ben hard on himself.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
And so just in the last few weeks.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Watching film with him and go like, oh, Dad, I
had a tough practice and I'm like, all right, well,
let's watch the film. And we watched the film, and
practice is designed to be hard, and you're gonna make mistakes,
you're trying different things, you're trying new things, you're saying
new things. And he probably ran twenty five thirty plays
and probably had three or four if you want to
(40:17):
call them bad place. One was maybe like I'm not
sure about the assignment. Another one was that he made
the block, but it didn't look as pretty as he
wanted it to look. So you think about his four
or five bad place was only maybe two or three
bad plays, and he was like framing his whole practice
almost two or three bad plays. And so we've been
(40:38):
working on the self talk. We've been working on how
to speak, you know, how to recognize where the improvement
needs to be, but then not let that be the
message that carries a day. And all of us sometimes
need that reminder. I need it all the time. I
have people in my life that I reach out to
and just like man, I'm struggling with this, that or the
(41:00):
other thing, and a lot of it comes from my
own self talking, my own fears. You know, anxiety is
that anxiety is like holding on to to what happened,
has already happened, and looking forward to what might happen.
And so I get so stuck in those two places.
Sometimes that just creates unbelievable anxiety and doubt in my mind.
And so I need other people to kind of lift
(41:20):
me up with their words and uh. And so that
doesn't mean I'm soft, It doesn't mean I'm weak, It
doesn't mean that that I'm not capable. It just means
I'm human. And uh, you know, we're we're a relational people.
And so even your self affirmation and your and your
self validation, uh is impacted by our relationships because that's
(41:43):
how we like.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
We don't live in a vacuum.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
You don't live by yourself, like if you you know,
I don't want to get too deep into it. But
if you're a spiritual person, if you if you just
read the Bible as a self help book, not as
trying to be a Christian or following God or whatever.
You just read it how to live a better life,
how to do things right. A majority of the Bible
(42:06):
is about maintaining relationships because we are relational beings, and
so the better way to do that is to have
a more positive be more positive with our words, be
more encouraging with our words. Speak to truth, be firm,
and be fair, but don't be shaming and demeaning and
embarrassing and beating people down, basically killing people their spirit
(42:27):
with your words. You literally could be a dead man
walking or dead woman walking because spiritually someone has just
beating you down so much with the words that you
just can't can't keep it moving. Before we finish, I
did want to take this opportunity to this sweatshirt I
have on. It's called let Me Run, and let Me
(42:50):
Run is an organization that they have a boy's chapter
and a girl's chapter, or men's and women's chapter, but
it's boys and girls. These are little boys and girls
between third grade and eighth grade. And it's a running UH.
They'd use running and training for like a five K
on how to be more, how to express yourself better,
(43:10):
how to support people, uh with your words better, how
to maintain relationships. So it's a really big focus on
the mental health part of it. And so here in Seattle,
UH it's called the Seat. If you go to Seattle
dot let Me Run dot org. UH, there are plenty
of opportunities for donations, which they really need don donations
and sponsors. There's plenty of opportunity opportunities to UH coach
(43:32):
one of the teams UH because they're located all over
all over Seattle, the Seattle area.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
And then.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
The regional contact there is Jin Schevitz and UH and
so I've spoken with her quite a few times, and
it's been really difficult gaining momentum for support and especially
financial support for this to help kids with shoes and
uniforms and and uh the you know, you know, leasing
space for them to run and stuff like that. And
they also need need coaches and so it's a place
(44:01):
where they're trying to get to young men early to
kind of help them start to manage a lot of
this stuff that we just talked about, which is how
they talk to others and more importantly, how they talk
to themselves. And so then I want to wrap our
little show up today with a challenge. And the challenge
is for the next week, pay attention to the words
(44:25):
that you use, and pay attention how you talk to
other people and how you talk to yourself. And when
you find yourself being in that negative space, try to
find a way to reframe it. Try to problem solve
it versus making it a statement as to who you are.
So you might say like, hey, here's this thing that
(44:45):
I'm doing and I'm just not enough. I just can't
do it. Another way to reframe that is, how could
I learn to do this? What are the things I
need to.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Do to learn?
Speaker 2 (44:56):
Or who else can I lean on to help me
get this duff, or who else can I lean on
to teach me these different things? Because there's always pep
out there willing to share their knowledge and stuff. And
so it's a slight nuance, but it's a change from
you go to a growth mindset from a fixed mindset,
because in the fixed mindset, you're saying I'm not enough,
I'll never be enough, and there's nothing I can do
(45:17):
to make me enough. And a growth mindset, you're saying, Okay,
this is a problem, let me solve the problem. And
that can be through more education, It can be through
asking for help, it can be through you know, reading books,
it can be through you know, challenge yourself to just
take it one step at a time. But that kind
of reframes the what you're telling yourself and the words
(45:38):
of using it. If you feel like you're about to
say something negative to another person, like I said, if
it's something truthful and you can say it with firmness
and fairness, go ahead. But if you're just being negative
for the sake of being negative, find another way, find
something positive to say to that person you know, and
then you can get to a place where you can
discuss if this is something that's been harmful or hurtful
(46:01):
to an individual, to people, you can get to a
place where you can discuss that. But but be mindful
of the words that you're using. And what I'd like
to do is if you have opportunities or you have
experiences where you've either reframed what you're thinking, or you've
gotten words of affirmation from someone else and it's impacted
you in a certain way, or you've given words to
(46:23):
someone else that you hopefully will have a positive impact
on them in a certain way. Man, post it, post
it to our to to you know, big Ray Roberts
on Twitter. Uh, you know, I'll put a little post
up there on these different social media sites and so
we can kind of get it started, because I just
want to I want people to see the positivity that
(46:43):
exists in the world because at this time, like with
all the words and things that have been thrown around,
with all the politics and the presidential race and all
that from both sides, and it can be freaking toxic
as all get out. And then and then you feel
like you have to choose one of the size and
then you have to then use the same words and
use the same negativity and all those kinds of things.
And these are supposed to be the leaders the leadership
(47:05):
of our country, right Man. You can change the you
can change the narrative to a more positive one. You
can hold on to whatever you believe, You can hold
on to your political views, but you can find a
way to express it in a way that it's uplifting
and not that it's not tearing down, that it's bringing
us together, not pulling us apart, that it's uniting our
country and the people around just uniting your community.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
It can be a.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Conversation in your family. It can be a conversation with
your best friend. You give me a conversation like me
if you sit sitting next to me on a park bench,
I don't care where we are, we're gonna talk. It's
just just who I am. I'm gonna learn out who
you are, what you do, why you do it, how
you do it, and how can I help.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
That's just kind of who I am.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
And so in those situations, man, I just want to
hear what people are saying to each other and how you're,
how you're how you're going to change some of this
negative self talk and some of the negative talk that
we have with other people.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Uh, to be.
Speaker 2 (47:51):
Something positive that that we can lean on, that we
can that we can that we can build on, that
they can build their lives on. So, uh, thank you
guys for listening and remember that you have the power
with your words to change your reality. It doesn't have
to be what you say that you think is true
(48:13):
in that moment. Speak positivity, be kind, be compassionate, be
considered of yourself. Extend that stuff to yourself. One word
at a time doesn't mean it's gonna happen overnight. Doesn't
mean you're gonna like spew out this long paragraph, you know,
five page paper, and your life is going to change.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Just one word at a time, one day at a time.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Be more positive with yourself, and be more positive with
the people around you, and so and keep grinding and
keep growing. So as always we always finish up with
doctor three things. It's okay to not be okay. If
you need help, reach out to your medical provider for
medical health and I mean for mental health guidance. And
(48:56):
then lastly, when you need help and you ask for help,
you're operating from a position of power. Be powerful with
your words, Be positive with your words, Spread love and
spread the joy. Big ray, big rais garage grind until
next time, peace and them out
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.