EP21 Keith’s Story: Hitting Rock Bottom in the Big Easy

"That big, beautiful, bold dream that you've have tucked away for all these years is possible for you." -Keith

Links from the Show

• Website
• Ask Keith
• Therapist, Shiva Lucido
• Podcast, All About Beachbody Coaching
• 4Ts by Stretton Smith
• AA Big Blue Book

You’re listening to The Business of Life podcast. Practical advice for creating the life you love to live. Here’s your host, Keith Callahan.

KC: Welcome to The Business of Life Episode number 21. Keith Callahan here and my job with this podcast is really two-fold, it’s interviewing life experts, people that I admire and extracting their success tips. And then, also deconstructing my own personal success and failures really in all areas of life and then sharing both what has worked and what hasn’t worked for me. And, you know all these interviews and my teachings are based off of building a life of freedom, freedom to do what you want when you want with who you want. And, today we’ve really got a special episode. It’s an episode that’s near and dear to my heart because it’s my story. It’s the story of where I came from and how I got to where I am right now and it’s not necessarily the prettiest story. But, I really want to share that with you. I want to share the things that I’ve had to overcome, the obstacles that I’ve had to overcome and the reason I want to share it is because a lot of times people have excuses in their life and they look at things in our life and we don’t necessarily believe that we can do things because of, you know, whatever you’re excuse maybe. So, I want to really be bold, be open and be courageously forthright in this episode and really share a lot about my past and a lot of stuff that I’m not necessarily proud off but it’s stuff that I know sharing this will be able to help you potentially get over some of your own hurdles. Before we dive into that story though, I really want to share something else. So, one of the goals that I put together for this podcast is I wanted to start giving some type of free content away each episode and you’ve probably seen that over the course of our previous 20 episodes. So, I wanted to be able to give away free content and I kind of made the commitment to myself that I wanted to do a free giveaway each episode and it was sort of two-fold. The first piece was to be able to really take, for those who wanted, to be able to get more information from what I was teaching in the episode and the second part and this was really the main part was to be able to stay in communication with you. So, one of the reasons that I wanted to put together free giveaways each episode was to continue to build our e-mail list because I feel that sometimes I have so much that I want to share with you but if I don’t have your e-mail address, you may miss it. You know, with social media and all the different ways that I put stuff out there, a lot of people don’t necessarily see it but when I have your e-mail address, whenever I have something super important to share, like I have these times where I’m like “Oh my God, everybody’s got to see this.” and I share that with my insider group. Those are the people who have given their e-mail address and I’m able to get that out there to them. But, for the people that haven’t subscribed yet, you’re not able to get that information and this is only the best of the best. So, this is often times above and beyond what we talked about in the podcast or what I talk about in social media and it’s not, you know, some people call this a newsletter or something like that. It’s nothing like that. I only message you when I have something super important that I want to get out there, something that’s going to add value to your life. So, today I was thinking about it and I was like “Alright, what do I want to put together for a free download for this?” And, I really couldn’t come up with anything that was going to add more value. So, I said, “Well, why don’t I just share this message and if you want to join the list and be notified whenever I have something of value to share with you, super simple, so if you want to join that list, send a text message to 33444 and within the body of that message just type in PLEASEADD, with two Ds and no spaces. So, PLEASEADD with two Ds on add and then no spaces. So, 334444, PLEASEADD and go ahead, like if you’re driving right now put this on pause or you’re working out, send that text message, super simple and that way whenever I have something of value, I’m going to be able to make sure that I get it to you.

[05:16]

Alright, second announcement today before we get into my story. I’m a little bit nervous to share this story with you too because it’s kind of very personal. It really it is. Like, I’m going to share it all. So, I have a new app on the website and it’s called Speak Pipe and I really would love to hear from you. I want to hear what are you liking about the show, what are you not liking about the show. Are there specific guests that you think I should have on? Are there, you know, I just really want you to get involved if there are questions that you have for me, we’re going to start fielding questions in the show and specifically about today’s episode. I’d love to hear from you if this touches you and if it’s something that really hits home for you. And, don’t worry, if it’s something that you don’t want me to share, I’m not going to share any type of personal information. But yeah, I’d really love to hear from you. So, how do we use Speak Pipe? If you just go over to KeithCallahan.com, that’s KEITHCALLAHAN.COM, under the podcast section there’s a little, so there’s the podcast dropdown, then there’s an Ask Keith section. There’re really simple instructions on how to do it. Also, if you’re in a mobile device, they have a really cool little app that you download and you can just connect right through that.

[06:40]

Alright, so I think I have procrastinated enough and I’m going dive into my story, into a lot of people have these, we have these insecurities and we have these doubts and we see other people and we see what they’re doing and we see the success that they’re having and for us we don’t believe that it’s possible for us. We think that because this happened, because that happened, because of you know XYZ that it’s not possible for us to enjoy the levels of success that we see other people that are having and usually it’s because we don’t believe that we’re capable of it. And, I was thinking about, you know, how can I, like what can I do, what could I say, what could I share to help you know that you can do it. Whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish in life, whatever success means for you, whatever definition you have for that, that you can do it, that big beautiful dream life that you’ve always wanted that you know somehow, someway you knew that you were capable of this but then life beat you up and it got tucked away and it got put into a corner, like it got put on a shelf and you walked away from it, right, that you can still have that life, that that life still is available for you very much.

[08:06]

And, I want to share my story, the story of my life because I think that it’s going to be able to help you to realize that “You know what, you can do it.” You know, if we have a mentor or we have someone that we’re listening to and everything’s been handed to them on a silver spoon and they came up in this big huge wealthy family and it’s always been easy. It’s always been good. There’s never been anything that they had to overcome. We don’t really build trust with that person. We don’t necessarily follow that person and we can’t see ourselves becoming what they are because they didn’t have it the same way that we did. You know, for me, I grew up in a family where I had and have an alcoholic father so first time I’ve ever shared this publicly and there’s always been a nervousness to share it because in all honesty I didn’t want to hurt my father’s feelings. I didn’t want to make this a public thing and it’s sort of a, you know, it’s a painful thing to share but it’s also true and it’s also, you know, for anybody that is close to my family, it’s also known. So, really taking a step out on a limb and sharing this and just saying that yeah, like that’s how, like I grew up where it was alcoholic father and enabling mother and I don’t really want to nor am I ready to go into any more detail about my family life than that. But, like my family life growing up but that sort of gives you the picture and it was very functioning. My dad was a white collar worker, very functioning. His work has never been affected but it was definitely heavy, heavy, heavy drinking and by the time I was in the 7th grade, I started drinking. I drank my first 6-pack on beer when I was in the 7th grade and I had stolen it. I don’t know if it was from my dad or from my uncle. My aunt and uncle lived next door and I don’t know who it was that I took it from but I drank my first 6 pack of beer during a week night by myself in my bedroom and I liked it. I really liked it and I started drinking from that point forward and it got to the point by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was drinking, you know, Friday and Saturday night to the point that I was actually blacking out. I was stealing liquor from my parents. I was finding friends who would buy it, just anyway I could get my hands on. I started smoking cigarettes at that time and when I think back about that really that point in my life, I was also very athletic at that point. I had some natural ability but I was also, I was the type that would bust my butt no matter what. I would outwork other people and I really, I thrived on being recognized through athletics. I thrived on, that was how I received loved. If I did good in sports, I felt good about myself and if I didn’t, I didn’t feel good about myself. And, by the time I was a freshman, I had gotten good enough and my main sport was football. I had gotten good enough that I was playing on the varsity football team. So, I was a quarterback and I was actually getting playing time with the varsity football team as a quarterback and I still remember my first practice in high school. It was the big deal, right, like your first practice as a high school football player. I showed up too drunk, like literally drunk and that can sum up what happened to me during high school. So, the drinking continued, still good at sports but I never really progressed between my freshman year and my senior year. I was probably actually better my senior year than I was my freshman year because the lifestyle I was living started to catch up with me and I wasn’t really coachable. I wasn’t teachable. I was drinking a lot. I started blacking out and or continued blacking out and it was like 2 to 3 nights a week that this was happening. By the time I got to my senior year, it was about a week before our thanksgiving day football game and I got really drunk the night before and so drunk that the next morning, you know, I blacked out again and the next morning I showed up to school and was still drunk was in English class. And, I remember the teacher asking me to come forward and sort of pulling me to the side of the room and she asked me if I had been drinking and next thing I remember was being in the principal’s office. The next thing I remember, I was expelled from school for 2 weeks, expelled from school for 2 weeks, kicked off the football team for the Thanksgiving Day football game, like the final football game of you high school career and actually I had nightmares about that for probably 10 years. Like, just the embarrassment, the shame that came with that and, you know, barely graduated high school but that can sum up my high school career. It was embarrassing. It was painful. It was shameful and I went on to college barely, you know, got into college and the drinking continued. The drinking got heavier and heavier. Now, it was 4 or 5 nights a week I was blacking out and, you know, I’m sort of skimming over a lot of the details here but there’s a lot of stuff that I did that I wasn’t proud of. There’s a lot of stuff that I did that I regretted. There’s a lot of stuff that I did that I had to make amends with. And, by the time I was 22 years old, I went down to Mardi Gras with a group of guy friends and at this point I had been drinking for 10 years, drinking very heavy for 10 years from the time I was like 12 in the seventh grade ‘til now being 22 and down to Mardi Gras and hit rock bottom. Really hit rock bottom in my life and got extremely drunk, got alcohol poisoning and for 3 straight days I was sick with throwing up and it’s just everything else. I thought I was going to die. I had drank so much and gotten myself so sick that I couldn’t stop shaking. I couldn’t stop getting sick. I couldn’t stop sweating. I couldn’t stop crying and I did. I hit rock bottom down there and that was the last time I ever got drunk. So, I came back and it’s scared me so much and I really felt like, I had no idea how I made it through those 10 years. There were times that I would drive drunk and not remember driving home the next morning. Somehow, someway I literally was still alive. And, I was so scared that I was never going to do that again. I was never going to get drunk like that again and I never did. And, it’s interesting because you would think with the amount of drinking I was doing that it would be hard to stop but it wasn’t. There wasn’t like this physical dependence on it. What there was, was a now 22 year old man that has the emotional body, has the emotional stability of a 12-year old. Because, for anyone that knows addiction, understands addiction especially with alcohol or drugs, when you start you stump you stump your emotional growth. So, it really was, it was a by the time I sobered up, there was a scared 12 year old boy inside of a 22 year old body and I really realized, I started to realize that I had no idea how to receive love. I had no idea how to give love. I had no idea how to have a conversation without being in alcoholic. I had no idea. I couldn’t look somebody in the eyes and it really got deep and dark and scary for about 5 years. So, I got really depressed, started having a ton anxiety, started having panic attacks, it got to the point that I could not drive down the highway. It got to the point that I couldn’t go to a party. It was really a, it was sad. And, you know, one of the things that I got from my father, he always had this like, it didn’t matter how bad things got, my father has this determination and this will that he’s never going to give up. He’s never going to quit and somehow, someway that got passed on to me and during those dark times, I knew that it could get better, I don’t know how I knew but I knew somehow, someway it has to get better and, for me, I found refuge in yoga.

[17:25]

So, I found Power Yoga and for the first time, it was like I could breathe. I could just breathe and I could just be and I wasn’t running and I wasn’t scared and my mind wasn’t racing and I could actually feel some sort of calmness, some sort of peace that would come over me and I really I dove headfirst into yoga and, you know, that was sort of the beginning of the beginning, the beginning of my healing, the beginning of the life that I really live now. And then, I went in and I did 2 years of intense, intense therapy. So, I did therapy with a woman named Sheila Lucido and I’ll leave her contact information and her e-mail in the show notes. But, I did therapy with her and it was intense. It was like intense, intense therapy but it was like peeling layers away from an onion. It was just peeling things back, peeling things back one layer then the next, then the next and really got to know my true self, got to understand my true self and then I got involved with the spiritual path that I’ve been on for over 10 years now and really got like just little by little, deeper and deeper, deeper healings, deeper understandings, deeper trust and started to learn how to love, started to be able to receive love, started to be able to care for others and not act and in selfish ways. And, you know, it really was, it was this the journey that I went through and then eventually was able to get involved with business and take that same heart-centered holistic approach into my business and my business is, you know, a large portion of my business is really about helping others.

[19:29]

So, I partnered with Beachbody. They’re the makers of P90X, Insanity, The 21-Day Fix, you know, all the in-home fitness programs and what I learned with that company was, it was really about just helping other people, like getting them involved with either a program or the business opportunity and loving them, helping them, nurturing them, supporting them and I did and have done really well with that because it was all about helping other people become more and, you know, just a side note, we do have my sister podcast is All About Beachbody Coaching. So, if it’s something you’ve ever been interested in getting involved in or just kind of want to learn more about, like how I use that as a vehicle to mentor people, you can swing over, just in your podcast app, search All About Beachbody Coaching. But, so now I live this life where literally I wake up every single morning happy. I wake up every single morning excited for the day. I wake up every single morning with a light heart and ready to just enjoy life and it was not that way for me. It wasn’t like that’s not, that wasn’t in the cards for me. That wasn’t how things were supposed to be. Growing up how I grew up, it just wasn’t supposed to be this way, right? And, the reason that I am sharing all of this with you, the reason that I wanted to do this episode today was really, it was to let you know that it doesn’t matter where you are, it doesn’t matter what your history is, it doesn’t matter where you’ve come from it doesn’t matter. It does not matter. All that matters is that wherever you’re at right now, you can make the decision to change. You can make the decision to start living life totally different than what you have been living it. Like, whatever level you’ve been living life up to, up to this point you’re now at the point where you can make a change. So, so many of us, we want this big beautiful life and we’ve had these dreams for this beautiful life. But again, whatever has happened, maybe it was in high school, maybe it was college, we got beat up, we got pushed down and that dream that we had for our life, that big beautiful life that we envisioned for our self, we no longer believe it’s possible. We no longer believe it’s true. We no longer believe that it’s within our grasps and the reason is, is that the message in our minds that we’re not good enough, that we can’t follow through, that we’re going to fail has been reinforced over and over and over again. And, the reason I wanted to share this episode, the reason I wanted to share just a little bit about my story is because you have the ability to create that big beautiful life for yourself. Maybe your past isn’t as bad as mine is. Maybe it’s worse than mine is. Maybe you’re at your rock bottom point. Maybe you’re already, you know, started your climb up, your ascend up, whatever it may be, wherever you’re at on this journey, you have the ability to change. You have the ability to live that life that you’ve always thought that was possible.

[22:58]

The next piece that I want to share with you and I think it’s, you know, it’s a piece that most people don’t get. Here’re a couple of really cool resources that I want you to check out. So, I’m going to list 3 of them. Two of them should be available to you. One of them might not be. So, the big book, I think that’s what it’s called for AA or the big blue book. The second resource is the 12 Steps and the 12 Traditions from AA and the third resource, you might be able to find this online, it’s a book by the name, the guy’s name is Stretton Smith and it’s called the 4Ts, Tithing for Time, Talent and Treasure. And, all 3 of those books, all 3 of those resources, they’re really based of off the middle one, the 12 Steps and here’s what I love about the 12 Steps is for anybody that has continued to struggle and continued to fail, that is your solution. I’ve helped so many people with this and like this is the piece that they get and, you know, not many people understand what the 12 Steps is about. What it’s really about is saying that whatever I’ve been doing up to this point is not working in my life. It’s not working, right? And, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to change but I do know that I want to change.

[24:31]

And then, the beginning of the 12 Steps talks about the first step. The first step in the 12 steps is admitting that what we’re doing isn’t working and that we don’t have the ability to change it. The second step is admitting that we need help and they talk about God. I talk about it as like whether it’s God or spirit or universal energy or Allah, Buddha, like whatever you want to call, intuition, there’s something that’s bigger than you that you can surrender to. So, admitting that you can’t do and then admitting that you need to surrender to something that is bigger than you. And then, the third step really surrendering to that, right? So, so many of us want to create certain levels of success in our life but we don’t believe we can. My goal with this podcast is to be able to help in any way that I can, to be able to provide value for you. So, the third piece that I mentioned was the 4Ts, Tithing of Time, Talent and Treasure. So, a lot of times we want to get into certain, we want to do certain things with our life but deep down inside we really don’t believe we can. That course is about changing your consciousness. So, it’s about changing your consciousness from “my consciousness of poverty and lack to a consciousness of prosperity” and not just in a financial sense like that’s the smallest piece to it in an abundance sense. It’s changing your consciousness from believing that there’s not enough out there for all of us to there’s an abundance and really these riches, these gifts, these beauties can reign down upon us. So, whatever it is that you are looking to do in your life, whatever it is that has, you know, that you struggled with in the past, I want you to know that there’s opportunity out there for you to change. All you need to do is draw the line in the sand and then step over it, take the first step.

[26:47]

So yeah, that’s my story. It’s a story of where I came from and, you know, now we’re blessed. My family’s blessed. We have literally lived a life of financial freedom. We don’t have to go to work anymore. We’re able to wake up and create a life doing what we want when we want with who we want and for me that’s spending time with my spiritual community. For me, that’s spending time with my family. It’s driving my kids to school in the morning. It’s picking them up in the afternoon. It’s being present and it’s not being chained to a 9 to 5 job. You know, the income, a lot of people think that if they made money, if like, if they got to a certain amount of income that everything’s going to be okay and the only benefit to all of that the income’s great, the stuff is cool. You can buy cool stuff. Being able to do what you want when you want with who you want is cool but the number one thing is creating a life that you have the freedom of time. Because, the number one commodity in life is time and you can have all the money in the world, you can have all the riches in the world but if you don’t have time to spend it with other people, if you’re tied down all the time, if you’re, you know, suffocated by this job that you’re not happy in, freedom of time is what it’s all about. So, I went through this journey, this journey of healing, this journey of really overcoming I would say addiction, addiction to alcohol, addiction to thoughts, addiction to money and when I say addiction, it was sort of the, those were the focal pieces of my life and really settled into becoming addicted to being the best husband, father, mentor, leader, you know, being the best that I can be and through all this growth, one of the things that I’ve really come to realize that the most important thing in life is time and what we do with our time and how we spend our time. So, no matter where you are in life, no matter where you are in your life’s journey and again I just want to let you know that whatever it is that you want to accomplish, you have the ability to do it. Human beings have the ability to do, to be, to become so much more than we even realize.

[29:31]

Alright so, little bit of a different episode today like I said we we’re going to mix it up. And again, I would love to hear from you. I’d love to hear if this type of episode was something that you’re interested in, if it brought any value to you and easiest way to do that is by swinging over to the website, scrolling over the podcast section and then clicking on the Ask Keith part. So again, it’s a little app we have called Speak Pipe, really simple directions on how to go ahead and leave me a voice message. And then, the second thing, I just want to mention one more time is to get added to our list. When you get added, you only receive the best of the best. There’s no filler. I’m not just trying to e-mail you to e-mail you. When I have something important to share with you, something that has impacted or influenced my life, something that I know is going to be of value to you, that’s when I e-mail you. So, if you want, just send a text message to 33444 and in the body of that just type in PLEASEADD, with two Ds on the ADD and no spaces, so PLEASEADD. And again, that’s 33444. Alright, I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you listening. As always, this podcast would be nothing without you and I really appreciate you letting me share this story. So, it’s not the most comfortable thing to do but I really hope that if it’s something that you’re struggling with, with getting to the point of really living life, really doing what you’re capable of doing, hope that this may have inspired you to do that. Alright, see you on the next episode. Peace.

Thank you for listening to The Business of Life podcast. Apply what you learned today and you’ll be one step closer to creating the life you love to live.