Strength Through The Struggle

If you could be a Superhero, who would you be? I’m not a huge comic book person so I don’t even know all the different superheroes. But if I could be any superhero that I know of, I would be Super Man. Yes, he has all those cool super powers but the most important thing I see in his comic book life, he clearly knows who he is. He uses his powers for good. I imagine, with a different upbringing by different people he could have been an evil Superman. But when his spaceship landed on earth, he had the good fortune of having good people raise him the right way. In turn, he put his super powers to good use. The influence our parents/ caretakers have over us in our developing years, along with the residual effect of our shaped identity can and will last a lifetime. If we are raised with fear or confidence, a positive or negative attitude mindset, or optimism over pessimism we will behave in completely different ways. We will actually become very different people as adults. That being said, it’s very important for

So often we don’t do things in life because we think, we don’t know how to do it. Which may be right, but after you do it the first time, we do something new the first time, we have a chance to keep getting better at it. One day I was playing with my son Joshua on the floor in our living room. I don’t recall exactly what it was. Could have been cars, action figures or maybe Lego’s. He was about two-years-old. My mother was visiting us from Ohio. She was sitting on the couch watching and at one point remarked, “I couldn’t do that.” My mother at this point was in her sixties. I thought she was speaking about how it would be uncomfortable for her to get down on the wood floor and play with Josh. For some reason, I decided to ask her what she meant by, “I couldn’t do that.” She said to me, “I wouldn’t know what to do to play with him.” I thought for a moment and said to her, “I don’t know what to do either Ma’. I just get down here and try to figure it out.” My mother had five children. When the last one of my si

Being a parent is tough. It’s just challenging try to meet the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual needs of our children. We have an idea of how to raise our kids based on how we were brought up. Then there are our friends and family who have opinions. Lastly, there is the endless list of bloggers, authors and “professionals” telling us what works and what doesn’t. It’s not easy to know where all the boundaries are drawn let alone do I have too many or too few? One thing that is hard to argue with is the need for a child to be resilient. Someone who when knocked down don’t get stuck with disappointment but can get back up and move on. The child who when they fail at something doesn’t see it as a failure but as another step on the road to get to where they want to go. Arguably, resilience is the one thing that allows all other good qualities and values to not get swallowed up by failure and disappointment but to actually flourish in a person’s life. What if there is a roadmap showing us not just what Res

The Face of Incarceration The movie Trading Places is a comedy that stars Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd as a homeless man and a wealthy cultured man respectively. Being a comedy there are multiple instances for laughing, however, it was thought-provoking for me the first time I saw it. The two men are unwittingly transposed into each other’s lives. They in turn start to make different types of decisions that reinforce their new circumstances. The poor man who is now in a wealthy lifestyle grew in self-respect and higher expectations of himself. The wealthy man who found all his resources taken away turned to anger and feeling sorry for himself and indulging in petty crime. Was it Nature, their personality or Nurture, their surroundings. I interviewed a man last week, Quan Huynh (pronounced-Hhhhwen). Quan experienced a pivotal event in his life at the age of 13. A painful event. The hurt and the resulting anger from it stayed with him. And over time it grew into rage and violence. It climaxed in a violent night

Mark speaks to Rome Za, a Brazilian Ju Jitsu Practitioner, Life Coach, and Entrepreneur. Rome speaks about his childhood, including immigrating to the US from Chechnya, not being able to speak the language, dropping out of high school, going back to school to become a doctor only to drop out again before graduating as an undergraduate. 

The idea of having a baby can be joy-filled with the idea of how wonderful life will be. The arrival is anticipated and celebrated. The pure love we feel holding the child and the smell of a new baby’s skin can make the world feel right again. As it well should. Then reality sets in for many. Sleepless nights and fatigue start to be the order of the day. The demands of what seems like never-ending attention for the child’s needs. And then the constantly changing personality of the new baby starts to show up. And more and more of that personality shows up as they get older and there isn’t a manual to decipher that personality or tell us how to deal with it. Most of us who become parents tend to follow the examples of the parents we grew up with. I mean if it was good enough for me then it’s good enough for my kids. But sometimes, “good enough,” isn’t really good enough. What if there is a better way? What if I could do some things differently that make raising a child better than what I experienced. What if we

There have been times I felt like I was ten feet tall and bulletproof. And for a period of time, it felt very much real. Some of those times, shortly after I had the thought of being ten feet tall and bulletproof, I was given a reminder that I wasn’t. Other times, it took a while for the lesson to catch up to me. Unfortunately for me, I had a high level of pain tolerance, an equally high level of being comfortable with ignorance and a fair amount of emotional hard headedness. Not learning very quickly from good information when I got it, I would ignore the obvious, which was to change direction. There have been times when my gut told me to go one way and my mind talked me out of it with a mental follow up a statement like, “What the hell, why not?” I’m here to tell, if you choose to act on the “What the hell, why not?” thought, after your gut, or your conscience, told you to do something else, you will find out “Why Not!” And you won’t like it. My wife, on the other hand, has lived a life for the most part, t

It’s easy to get our lives focused on keeping ourselves entertained. There is a massive marketing machine out there everywhere you turn not to mention how the human mind is so willing to cooperate. Buy this and you will feel great! Go on this vacation and your kids will have memories for a lifetime! Drive this car and people will know you are somebody! Own this, buy that. It never stops. And it is all too easy to be sucked into its energy to consume, consume, consume. But life wasn’t really meant for us to be constantly entertained or on a quest of consumption. There is no lasting value or meaning there for us to build a fulfilling life. Damion Lupo is a guy who took consumption to an extreme for the average person. He regularly spent $75,000 dollars a month on fun, food, housing. Can you imagine that? He spent more money in a month, every month than most individuals make in a year. Eventually, his life bottomed out though. His fortune was lost and his family was gone. Once the ability to consume and be enter

If you’re married, you can probably agree with me, there are going to be problems. I’m not negative on marriage. Quite the opposite. But with expectations of each other, the addition of children, money issues, different sexual needs and levels of desire, there is no shortage of challenges once we have tied the knot. I’ve found nobody is immune to the Class 4 rapids, whitewater river raft ride we call marriage. Many, if not most of us, buy into the American Dream of the big house, the job with the big paycheck and the big life of vacations and the perfect home. Because we can’t help but drag our own baggage into this big new married life, all of the above eventually leads to big problems, big fights and the day when we ask ourselves, “How did I get here?” and “How do I now get out?” Yet we got into this marriage for a reason… “I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this person.” For those of us who don’t want to give up on the commitment we already made, it frequently makes sense to get help. Help with cla

For the most part, if we get those positive experiences early in life, we can better learn how to handle the negative moments and experiences later in life. But what happens if early in life you have experiences that teach you insecurity, that the world isn’t a safe place or that you aren’t loved? You can spend a lifetime feeling like you don’t fit in or you can never have what you want or measure up to those around you. The negative self-talk from those experiences can create handicaps in our lives keeping us away from much of the best parts of life. Fear, while frequently seen as a negative can actually work to our advantage if used correctly. Fear, when worked in the positive, can be used to drive us and our lives, away from the negative or harmful and to the positive and helpful. In my own experience, not wanting to be the type of father I had in my youth drove me to make different choices than my father. Choices that helped me to make an experience in my son’s life very different than the one I had growi

It can be a challenge figuring out business and life. We are all on a Hero’s Journey as we walk this earth although sometimes it seems as if we are just stumbling along. With ever changing roles and responsibilities in our modern culture here in the United States, transforming ourselves has become a necessity. With technology changes and expectations in a state of flux, it feels like a full-time job just keeping up. As we change and grow into different roles at work and at home, we have to become a new, upgraded version of ourselves. We literally have to become a new person, leaving behind the older model that can no longer support the latest version of who we are. I ignored that idea years ago and it turned around and bit me. I accomplished a major goal but didn’t upgrade my skillsets to grow more. I got stuck at that spot and stayed there for years. Eventually I got back on track and the new goals and skills I pursued gave new meaning to my life and what I do each day. Even if we are conscious about what we

What if you could develop a Navy Seal Mindset? Who wouldn’t want that? This week we dive into a SEAL mindset with Larry Yatch. Larry is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who served ten years as a Navy Seal officer. He was medically retired due to battle incurred injuries and is now helping others outside the military to develop a SEAL Mindset in life in order to overcome challenges and succeed in business and life. Larry offered up amazing ways to get more out of life and about learning how to overcome obstacles, challenges and failures. One of the powerful distinctions Larry made was to consider the words we use can help us or hinder us. That applied to our self-talk or when speaking with another person. That was really just the tip of the iceberg. The entire episode is filled with useful, actionable tools to help you and I become the best version of ourselves. This episode it helped me to see the idea of persevering so much more clearly and usefully in my own life. Persevering frequently felt like a load I was

Philip McKernan joins Mark on the podcast today to discuss his latest book called "One Last Talk." This episode showed a more personal side of Mark and encourage you to listen all of the way through to get the full perspective of this powerful episode. Join the Facebook Group to discuss Finding Your Strength Through Your Struggle.  

If you’ve ever been married, you know it can be a challenge. From miscommunication to misunderstandings. From unfulfilled needs to disregarded opinions. It can be a jungle out there. Our guest this week, Larry Bilotta, is here to tell us why the problems exist and it isn’t what you may be thinking. Larry takes us all the way back into the past to enlighten us as to why the dynamics in marriage are playing out the way they do. I like how he put the root of the problems into three separate categories with two types of problems in each category.

Traver Boehm had a great life: a wife, a kid and a great job until he lost it all. He tried to heal himself by going into isolation for 28 days without contact from the outside world and no electricity.  Traver discusses his journey with me during this episode.  Enjoy the Podcast!!!

Steve Roy joins me on the podcast today to discuss how he got himself out of a bad state in life after realizing his marriage was not what he initially expected. He gained weight which led to a loss of confidence.  He didn't get out this losing himself until a friend of his sat him down and told him the truth. This interview is his journey to finding himself after being lost.

This episode was fun for me in that I was familiar with the culture of the Philippines as I served there for 3 years in the Air Force. I was also married to a Filipino woman for seven years. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. This weeks guest is Philip Lomboy who grew up in a home that I would say was culturally intact. Both parents were born and raised in the Philippines. However, Philip grew up here in the United States as a military dependent once his father joined the US military. There were challenges of being from a different culture and having to navigate life here in the US. Additionally, from the age of two, Philipp also had to deal with frequently moving which led to a great deal of insecurity. Can you imagine moving every six months to 4 years of your life? I can’t. I grew up in the same town for the first 20 years of my life and it was a small town to boot. There were aunts and uncles and cousins within blocks or just a few miles of my house. It takes a lot to feel rooted physically o

Phil Randazzo joins me on the podcast today to discuss the way he had to rebuild his life after burning out at work. He succeeded and shares his process with me and you in this interview.  Phil works with military veterans to get back on their feet after they return from active duty. 

I found my next guest by watching a Tedx Talk entitled Because I Said I Would. I immediately went to his website to get his promise cards about which he discussed in his talk.  I was very impressed by what Alex had to say and you will be as well.

Today on the podcast, I interview Chris Natzke, a speaker, coach and corporate leadership trainer who has extensive experience is corporate sales and owning multiple martial arts businesses.  Chris has had a tough past, but tells me he focuses on the future instead of dwelling on the past to give his kids the best life they could have.