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Rock Thomas is the CVO and founder of Rock Thomas International.
He is the host of the top-rated #IAmMovement Podcast, a bestselling author, and motivational speaker with over 30 years of experience in personal development and coaching.
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Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, Founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. Stick around to the end of the show; we'll reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go.
All right with us right now. We've got Rock Thomas and Rock you're the founder and chief visionary Officer of Rock Thomas International. And the M1 Mastermind you've actually you actually worked for Tony Robbins for 20 years when when did that start and what was that journey like?
0:54
It was a love affair went to the first event January 2001 went to 19 of In 19 months totally immersion I believe that you know Grant Cardone be obsessed or be average. And when I do something I go all in immersive and then became a trainer and did you know two or three events a year just to stay in the environment contribute stay fresh. Tony's one of the greatest coaches on the planet I believe a thought leader in a man with incredible energy and I thought it's not going to hurt me being around him a couple of times a year
1:24
now, no kidding. So what do you remember what the first event was and and what the focus was?
1:31
I remember everything about it. Date with destiny, January 24th 2001. Yeah, the focus was on aligning your values. And the value I didn't have at the time was extreme health. I was successful in business but abusing my body with you know, partying and drugs and alcohol and fine I was a rock star and couldn't be stopped and and then I got a checkup from the neck up and it was like this is leading me to nowhere. It's leading me to you know, big partying, but long term, I'm gonna just destroy myself. And he gave me some new precise, I think a great coach Josh gives you a new perspective. And he gave me a new perspective, a new way of seeing life. And I thought, if that's available, what else do I not know that I don't know. And I became massively curious and started to absorb books and going to events and shifted everything how I was operating.
2:23
Yeah. So you were what was your background in real estate?
2:26
Yeah. I mean, I grew up on a farm, and I learned how to work hard. And part of what I learned in the process of evolution and personal development is that you don't have to be your labels from the past. And my father kept on telling us, you know, you're gonna have to work hard for the rest of your life. So I drove taxis and I worked in airline businesses, and I worked 12 1416 hours a day because that's what I was programmed to do. And then when I met Tony and a couple of other people that influenced me, I realized I could go from working hard to working smart. And then I got into real estate and I was terrible. The first year working with with goats and two by fours. And eventually with the right modeling and training from successful people. I went up to 100 sales a year then bought the company and took it from 300 million to over a billion in sales and wrote a book and started coaching and just was very blessed to be around a lot of thoughtful power. Yeah.
3:23
So it wasn't it wasn't that you were just working other people. It was I mean, obviously, in order to outwork people, I mean, that's going to come down to your psychology.
3:36
Yeah, I think, you know, nature versus nurture. I'm not I still don't know how much you're born with innately as a passion and drive for life. I think I did get at least my fair share. But growing up and being bullied by six older brothers and sisters. I responded by fighting back I responded by finding a part of myself that I didn't know existed. That served me as an entrepreneur in my life. But I would say that being around successful people is going to nourish that. And that's what I sought out. And then I was able to, you know, evoke that into a successful career. But I always wanted to help people. And so it was natural for me to take what I learned in the business and go, Hey, Did you know Did you know? And then people go, No, I didn't know. And then people start to do really well around me. And they start to tell other people, and then people started to come to our place of business. And that's kind of been the purpose of my life is to share what I learned and, and I don't have all the answers. I have a few that worked. And that's all I say to people is, look, try this. See if it works for you. And work ethic. Definitely Josh is incredibly important. But I would say equally important, is an attitude of curiosity, and willingness to see things differently, a willingness to not be stuck and say, I know no dangerous words in English language are I know that oh, I have Yeah, I know that. No, you you knew that even with what's going on in the world today. You know, I bought some stock this morning and I'm up $20,000 people are like, Yeah, but that's risky. Yeah. But I learned so much from 2008 other things. I was like, if it ever happens again, here's what I'm gonna do. And now I'm doing it and I'm excited about it.
5:21
So, in terms of mindset, then this was something that you'd been cultivating, you're working professionally, at some point, then you decide, you know what, I'm going to start not just, you know, my professional services and real estate, but I'm actually going to become the teacher. Did you have any Did you have any hang ups over that or where you're like, Nah, I'm gonna go all in and, and start telling people what how they should be, you know, or how they can improve their mindset.
5:54
Listen, I was doing drugs, hardcore and alcohol and I quit cold turkey just based on Tony, and I thought if if his his perspective, good, allow me to do that, and go from an unhealthy person to a healthy person. And then I started to help people at a real estate office and I started to help people quit smoking lose weight, just because I was like, hey, try this. I tried to read this, I read that. And people start to get these results. their income went from 80,000 to 140 to 250, in two or three years, and we start to get such great results. I became addicted to helping people because it was so fulfilling. And I just continue to look for different strategies to help people get the results that they wanted. That's really what happened.
6:37
Yeah. So where does the so you're working as a coach. So one of Tony Robbins coaches for a while, right?
6:45
Yeah, in the field. We call them trainers. We're right. Right. Right. And we help them facilitate some of the events.
6:51
Yeah. And then at what point do you decide that you're going to kind of work on the rock Thomas brand.
6:59
I was a little Tony Robbins copycat for a few years, you know, clapping the way he did saying exactly what he did until I get developed the confidence to tell my own stories. But I started my first seminar I remember I had 13 people show up. It was called inside the millionaire mindset in 2003. And we broke boards on the Friday night. We hung out for Saturday and Sunday and we talked about what's required. And I would say one of the biggest things I teach Josh, is that you're not your labels. When I grew up, my brother called me pizza face because I had so much acne and I learned to change that into ruggedly handsome like Clint Eastwood. And it changed my confidence level and simple programming. If you've heard 10,000 times you're stupid, you're gonna have to at least say 10,000 times that, you know, you're intelligent or you're learning based so you could learn more, you've got the the possibility to counterbalance the files in your brain. So I just, you know, was taught to say your ruggedly handsome many, many times until I believe that And I went from working hard to working smart saying it over and over again because words create your world until I believe that. And then I wrote a book called The power of your identity. And I really did it like this. And I could give a really quick small exercise for your people. If you want Josh, that that was really powerful for me, huh? Yeah, please. So what I say to people in my seminars is write down things that you say to yourself that are in the realm of negative and here's what some A lot of people have said, after years of doing this. I'm not enough. I'm not lovable. I'm not smart at this or that. I'm not good at business. I'm not organized. I'm not a good planner. I don't like to exercise. I'm stupid. I'm slow. I'm fat. I'm skinny. I'm a bad investor. I'm bad at business. And the words that follow I am follow you. So in the exercise, what we say is that I identify The negative words you've said to yourself or the pizza faces, as I like to call it that other people have suggested to you. Maybe they've said you're dyslexic or stupid or bad with numbers, and then simply upgrade them like I did go from I don't have to work hard for the rest of my life. I'm intelligent and I can work smart. I don't have to work with my hands for the entire rest of my life. Because I grew up in a farm, I could learn how to work with my brain and with my mouth, and communicate with people and be in sales. So the exercises, identify the negative ones, and then upgrade them to positive and make them part of your script. Now, you all have an inner narrative script that we live every day, you might as well take one and upgrade it because what we know for a fact is most people beat themselves up more than other people beat them up. Most people if they spoke to their friends like they speak to themselves, wouldn't have any friends.
9:52
Right? You know, and there's something really powerful about the to it tomorrow. powerful words you can utter and that is I am in whatever follows that I am logged out. Yeah, because you are speaking into existence creation. And so you can take kind of a, you know, a biblical religious, you know, view it that just checks out their spiritual, you know, a universal, you know, psychological, you know, just, you know, be very, very sensitive, I've learned, you know, anytime you say I am dot, dot, dot Whatever you say, get ready because that's about what you're about to, I would say, you know, attract from a law of attractions, but we will evoke it we will find a way to give ourselves the evidence, you know, just strictly from a psychological standpoint, we will seek out evidence to support that belief in my kindness in the territory of what you teach.
10:59
Yes. Well said, Do you really word for word almost as we seek out the evidence in order to substantiate it. And the fundamental example is imagine when you were a little kid or something, whatever your favorite sport was, you're like, you know, and it's LeBron James coming down, or it's, you know, it's Wayne Gretzky, or it's Tiger Woods, about the tee off. And we try to embody this person. And when we hit a shot that we think is similar to that we go see, I'm just like Tiger Woods. And we, we want that consistency in our life. So when we project something that is not like, if people are like affirmations, I'm a millionaire. I'm a rich, I'm a millionaire. But if you're not, and you don't feel it, and you don't have any congruency in your body, then you're going to feel uncomfortable and it won't work. So we teach people to say things like, every day in every way, I'm feeling richer and taking better decisions.
11:50
Yeah, you know, remember, personal power going through that and I think Tony talked about something similar and so developing this mantra, and I remember, you know, when I was 60 pounds overweight and out running, and I put on my headphones, and, you know, and I would just kind of play that or I would chant it to myself over and over and over again. You know, my brain knew, okay, we're reprogramming here, you know, so it wasn't completely on board. But the more I said it, the more I said, Well, wait a minute, in what ways? Am I getting fitter and fitter and stronger and stronger and healthier and healthier? No, it's the simple act of you know, creation with with every step and it was becoming more and more real to me.
12:40
It's so simplistic that the fear I have with a lot of people is they don't do it.
12:45
Yes, of course,
12:46
right. I got to work and to say say I'm getting fitter and fitter at whatever you know, I'm just says workout tomorrow. So you this needs to be a component of hunger, to live a great life. And people some people struggle with that. They just wanted they Go into survival like this whole Coronavirus thing, people are just trying to stay alive. And meanwhile I'm looking how do I come through this like a champion? How do I survive? How do I contribute? How do I thrive? How do I be a leader? And how do I impact people? How do I come out? And like I'm cleaning out my garage, I'm doing things that I've put off for a while, so that when I get to go back out into the world full bore, I have none of that hanging off in the back of my mind, and I'm going to be totally efficiently productive in the world.
13:29
Yeah, can I ask you rock just because you have a background in this? You know what your opinion of drugs and alcohol are today?
13:38
Well, I think that every person is looking for a way to not feel pain. Mm hmm. The amygdala in our brain is working over time to do that. And people just have different devices. And the media is really good at saying hey, I have this chocolate bar in the middle of the afternoon. If you're tired and have this glass of wine if you you know, to celebrate or you feel like you need to relax Take this pill, or if you're bored, go gambling. I mean, there's just all these devices that are offered for us. And in my case, drugs and alcohol made me feel like a rockstar. I grew up on a farm. She was not a very good social person, I was introverted. I was shy, and have the confidence there. And lo and behold, liquid courage made me feel much more social. I am like, Yeah, wow, this, we had no alcohol growing up in our house, my parents didn't drink. We didn't have a TV. So this was new, a new toy for me. So I just didn't know how to how to manage it very well. And it became a device and it is a device for a lot of people that are looking for a way out of pain. Sadly, about 80% of the population are not living meaningful lives. They're not doing things they love that light them up, and therefore they will go to remove pain from their life. And drugs and alcohol are convenient way to do that.
14:57
Now. Yeah, I'm just wondering, you know, I've heard you No, I've had I've listened to some people just made the decision to say, you know, I'm just going to go ahead and remove that from my life entirely for a season and see how it goes. And they are actually pretty happy with with the results of that. And there are other people that are like, Man, you know, I really just love that, you know, getting done with work five, six o'clock, having a, you know, glass of wine or beer or whatever, or, you know, whatever their drink of choice is, and really look forward to that. What, like, if someone were saying, Well, you know, I currently do this. I don't know, am I am I holding myself back? Because I'm relying upon that alcohol like, again, I don't I I don't mean to focus on this. But I'm actually just I've been processing this a lot in my own mind, about you know, some of these things that we do, like and it sounds again, because you have a background. I hope you don't mind me asking about this. You know, when you have this conversation with Those that you coach, like, where do you? Like where does the right conversation typically go?
16:07
So there's a model that I learned I think it was NLP or Tony Robbins is that you can do things that are good for you Good for others good for the environment, such as working out. You can do things that are good for the environment Good for you, but are not good for others. For instance, something like let's say, gossiping or something like that makes you feel better, but it's not good for other people. Drugs and alcohol fall into the category of it feels good at the time. Yeah, but it's not good for you and it's not good for others and it's not good for the environment. So initially, you get drawn into it because it feels good, but long term, it creates pain for everybody. So when I work with people and coach them I just illustrate this chart and I go on the chart, you have options. You can get home and relax with a glass of wine or whatever Or you can go for a run, take a bath, you can you can meditate, you can do yoga, and what options you want to do what's available here on the palette of possibility. So I'm on to my 71st day of yoga in a row, wow shifted, you know, the choices that I make. And therefore you you don't remove a habit you replace one. And that's what I do with people. It's just let's replace it, let's upgrade it, you know, you used to gossip, but now you could actually change that and you can be complimentary. And if you're gossiping, it's usually because you criticize yourself. So let's work on that as well. Let me just go through that process of giving people choice.
17:40
You know, in the year 2020, obviously, you know, we've been, you know, we're in a new era. And I believe, you know, just like 911 2008 You know, there's kind of the pre 911 world and then there's the post 911 world and our culture changed. So similarly, I think we all agree our culture is changing. And so I'm curious As What are you advising during this time? For people who are leaders within their organization? Or, you know, they are looking for? Oh my gosh, rock, what do I do? Like I just lost my job or our sales are down. There's all this going on, you know, I'm seeing all these horrible headlines. Walk us through this. What do you what do you teach?
18:24
Yeah, so heroes are developed through adversity, not through easy times. So find the hero inside of yourself. And this is a great opportunity for you to step up and do something amazing. The first thing to do is put the oxygen mask on yourself, take care of yourself, do everything that the doctors and the government is recommending wash your hands, yada, yada, yada. But the second thing then is to take your strength and help the people around you the people you love and the people you care about and make sure that they're safe and well, and then expand that to your team. We have have mobilized our organizations to a lot of zoom calls and the media You know, constructing meeting protocols and things like that. So he who is most nimble wins, right? He was most adaptable survives. So we have a culture of what's great about this, how do we utilize this? What do we focus on that we can learn from this? How grateful are we that we get to work from our homes and be around loved ones and we're not sick? You know, what you focus on you feel. So I focus on what I'm grateful for what's working down here in Phoenix, Arizona, I spent a couple of days picking oranges off the trees in my backyard, because add some additional time, squeezed some freshly squeezed juice fro some, like to me life is a blessing. It's not happening to you, it's happening for you. And therefore when when you're sent that curveball, it's up to you how to handle it, stimulus, pause response, what do you want to do and how do you want to respond during this adversity and for me, I want to respond in the best possible way. I can Come out a champion on the other end. So I look at, you know, and ask myself better quality questions, encourage others to do the same thing.
20:09
So rock as a, you know, again, I know you have a thriving mastermind you do a lot of coaching, can you kind of explain the some of the work that you do the outcome that you work with the clients you work with? Whether your services that you offer,
20:26
when when I was working with Tony Robbins people would come to you've been to his events, you know how fantastic they are. And then a couple of months later, you know, you drift off back in your environment. Yeah. And I would see people come back after years with not a lot of change. And this frustrated me. So I thought, What's the missing component and the missing component is a peer group of people that you get to hang out with week in week out, yeah, that know what your goals are, and they're going to hold you accountable to execute on them. So eight years ago, I got together with a group of mostly real estate guys and we created a group called go abundance. And we soon had friends join, we started to do trips around the world where we could all hang out with high minded conversations around how to be better husbands and brothers business people more, more healthy and live fuller lives. And what we noticed was there's a group of people that, you know, there's a group of millionaires we own. So it's also a group of people that weren't at that stage where they have the time freedom to travel. So we created a group for that, where we could help mentor those people. And we could give them some of the tools and connection and resources we had. So that we have a series of different mastermind groups, but the essence is be with like minded people. Find out where you are on the path, whether it be that you want to run an Iron Man from a triathlon, or you're just looking to lose some weight, or whether it be that you want to now start to get your budget under control and you want to start moving forward there, or you want to go from 10 million to 100 million and hanging out with Richard Branson. We've done all of that stuff. And we just continue to put people in the right room so they can have the right high minded conversation.
22:05
Yeah. And you're the host of the I am hashtag I am movement. And you've had some pretty phenomenal guests. Can you give me kind of a preview of of? So if someone's listening to our podcast conversation right now, they can find the podcast, what are they going to hear?
22:23
We're going to talk a lot about the power of their identity and the fact that we all want to remain consistent with how we've described ourselves, and sadly how other people that we love and we want their love have described us. So if your mother said to you, hey, you'll never amount to much, or you know, eat your broccoli. So you get dessert. Oh, you're a good boy, Josh. Aren't you a good boy, you ate your broccoli. And now, you may have an event where you want to be a good boy for the rest of your life and you become a people pleaser from this one. Person portion of feedback. So we help people identify where the labels that they've overcome through stories like with Robert herjavec, coming from Eastern Europe and coming here and becoming hugely successful on Shark Tank, he had to overcome some limiting thoughts about himself. So we talked some of the ways that they've done that so that people can go Oh, well, Brock went from you know, pizza face to ruggedly handsome became a model and became a great businessman and has 35 streams of income even though he was dyslexic can't spell and grew up on a farm and thought he was skinny bone dog pizza face, then maybe I can make some upgrades to my identity. So it's a movement around changing the labels, so you can live your best life.
23:37
Yeah, that's terrific. Well rock what is the best way? We've talked about your services and your podcasts? Are there any things that people could say, you know, I really like this rock Thomas, guys guys making a lot of sense. What would be a great way to kind of great start to kind of get into your world a little bit. Is there something that people enjoy a great piece of content that you'd recommend?
24:00
Of course, they can go to the I am movement podcast, and those are on all of the platforms and get that for free. But a great start is to go to my website, rock Thomas calm and right when it will be a little pop up where they can get my free book, the book, I wrote the power of your identity. And there's a five step process in there that you can go through work on your own if you have the discipline, and you can start to upgrade some of the labels that aren't serving you. And that's a really great way for people just to get access to it. And if they like that, and I'm on all the social media and platforms, they can check me out.
24:32
That's great. All right, Rock Thomas. Again, you are the website is RockThomas.com. You're the founder and chief visionary officer and founder and again of that Rock Thomas International and the M1 Mastermind, Rock, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure, Josh. Thank you.
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