Hope as a Daily Choice, with Scott Lackey

In this lively interview, Scott Lackey shares his personal experiences with chaos, resilience, and hope. He illustrates how chaos can be a catalyst for growth, makes a distinction between power and control and outlines practical lessons for navigating through life's lightning-strikes and storms. 

Topics

• Chaos as a catalyst for growth
• Resilience and bouncing back from setbacks
• Stewardship- versus ownership- mindset
• "Lightning strikes change us instantaneously"
• Choosing hope rather than finding hope: a daily choice
• Turning Storms into Growth Opportunities
• The Power of Resilience

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Chaos and Hope
01:44 Personal Experiences of Chaos
04:31 Understanding Lightning Strikes in Life
06:35 The Impact of Chaos on Self-Identity
10:06 Stewardship vs. Ownership
13:32 Lessons Learned from Chaos
16:03 Resilience in the Face of Chaos
18:31 Choosing Hope Amidst Chaos

Keywords

chaos, resilience, hope, leadership, personal growth, control vs stewardship, lightning strikes, adaptability, mental toughness, life lessons

Guest Contact Details:
For more information about Scott Lackey, see his website https://www.scottlackey.com. Scott’s book “Wake Up to Die Again” is available from Amazon. 

Thanks to Jacopo Lazzaretti for the intro/outro music:  https://jacopolazzaretti.bandcamp.com/album/secret-love

For all contact details (including our Associates) and useful self-worth resources, see www.SelfWorthAcademy.com

Transcript

John Niland (00:00)

Welcome to Self Worth in Times of Chaos. My guest today is Scott Lackey. Scott has been an Ironman athlete. He is a business change agent. He is an author. He is a speaker. And a whole load of other things I can hardly remember. The the phrase I remember most about Scott is in one of his talks, for he says, Hope is not found. It's chosen every day amid the chaos. Welcome, Scott.

Scott Lackey (00:28)

John, thank you for that gracious introduction. And I appreciate your remembrance of that statement over the other topics, because I think that's something important for the listeners today. And it's something I certainly deeply believe in and I know you care about as well. And I look forward to our talk today. So thank you.

John Niland (00:44)

Let's get stuck into the chaos, shall we? What's what's your experience of chaos?

Scott Lackey (00:50)

Yeah. Chaos

has been honestly a consistent part of my life. And I say some of it in my latter part of my life where I live today, chaos is intentionally created. We can talk more about that later. But it's also been involuntarily created. And that's part of what is, or I should say much of what is in my newly released book, the title of which is Wake Up to Die Again. That speaks of chaos. So

That is fundamentally, again, what's been a part of my life is chaos and learning how to cope with that and how it changed me as a human being. And that's why I speak about it all the time because chaos actually created a better version of me. And I also learned and teach lessons on how to use chaos as a tool with yourself and also how to use chaos as a tool to get out of it.

John Niland (01:39)

Before we

Before we come to the lessons, let's let's dig into the chaos a little bit. What would some of the examples of that chaos be in your life?

Scott Lackey (01:53)

Absolutely. One I've been recently talking about in some of my speaking engagements was about my second invention that was patented by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It was a product called a childhood health passport. It was a small document that contained the information, everything that a mom or dad or child would need from the time they're born until they're 18 years of age.

My family was involved in the business. My wife deeply loved the business because of the name Childhood Health Passport. And it ultimately morphed into, because we learned from our customers, into other products: one for adults, one for senior citizens, one for pets, one for your financial health. So it became a product line and a business plan developed out of that. And I set that context to share with the audience that.

That business plan was just good enough, and we had just enough business that a private equity firm took interest in the business plan and they funded the business plan for $3 million US dollars. And I'll never forget, I tell this story all the time, I'll never forget that day after the agreements were signed and the wire transfers took place. That I picked up the phone and called my bank and told them who I was. This is back, John, when you could call the bank and told them who I was. And I asked, what's the balance on my account? And she told me.

And I hung up the phone without saying goodbye and it made me cry because I had hit the American lottery, the American dream. But the chaos didn't arrive until six months later. And that chaos arrived when that private equity firm told me and the management team that the business needed to take a right turn. And we as the management team, we had the power to tell the investors we're not going to do that. We're going to continue forward.

But chaos has a way of teaching you a lesson. Chaos can be control, not power. And so they fired me and the management team and they stole the company in six months and left me with all the debt and completely eviscerated, you know, my life and my wife's life and other our family's life, our investors' life, just completely eviscerated. So chaos, while we contributed to that, chaos came to pay a visit. And

John Niland (04:08)

Hmm.

Yeah. And reflecting and and linking that to some of the other episodes in this series, ⁓ one of the things that ⁓ many people comment on is that fact chaos doesn't just pay a visit once, you know, it's not a single piece of chaos, but often it's multiple bits of disruption at the same time.

Scott Lackey (04:31)

It is and I refer to those in my book specific. I use the metaphor of lightning strikes.

And I use that metaphor because we've all experienced lightning strikes in our life. And we've, I'm sorry, we've experienced lightning strikes and we we realize how violent and scary they are, how bright they are, how instantaneous in milliseconds they are, and they can cover the sky. They they jolt us. And and so I'm gonna rephrase for just a moment for the audience is I categorize them in my book as lightning strikes because a lightning strike, by my definition, is an event that happens in your life, like the health passport.

Where I'm a s I'm a I'm a person of many things in a moment until the lightning strike. And then I become instantaneously another version of myself and I can never return to who I was because of the lightning strike. And yes, they do happen ⁓ multiple times, you know, as we know in life. And if I may just take one second for the audience, right? A lightning strike in your life doesn't doesn't arrive politely. It rips through your plans.

Breaks your definitions and rewrites what you thought mattered. It shows up when life looks tidy, when you think you're safe. It always comes to take something from you, something you've placed your faith in. And as we get older, we keep losing things little by little. We start to question what we're living for. Is this all there is? Yet we are busier than ever trying to fill the hollow space inside us, secretly wrestling.

With the thoughts like, How did I get here? And this wasn't what I dreamed of. All from lightning strikes, John.

John Niland (06:11)

Hmm.

All from lightning strikes. So when the lightning struck for you, and the private equity company said bye bye and left you with enough debt to ⁓ counteract the millions they had ⁓ previously paid you, how did it impact your relationship with yourself?

Scott Lackey (06:35)

Yeah, I love that question because it all starts with the self. I wish I had understood philosophically that it is never about the event. It is always about how you respond. I wish I understood that when this happened, but I didn't. All I understood were were the range of emotions that I think most human beings would have, which is rage, anger, fear, pain, emotional suffering, hate, dislike.

All of it wrapped up in a ball. Panic. Just the list goes on of what happened. Sh well, first of all, the first feeling was shock. Shock more than anything. I wasn't even angry when it happened. I in shock. Because I had to drive home that day and eventually tell my wife, who was pregnant, and my two with and we had a two and a half-year-old son that this home you're standing in.

It's not ours anymore. Right? So how I felt is not unusual that anybody would not understand how I felt. And but I think we also know you can't live there. That's the kind of stuff that will eat you alive. You can't stay there. You can anger can be a wonderful tool if used in the right way. You just can't stay there.

John Niland (07:57)

Right. So what did you do? How did you respond rather than react in that situation?

Scott Lackey (08:04)

Well, I did react to be truthful, right, John? I I did react. And what do I mean by react? Here in the the United States, we're a very litigious society. You can sue for anything. Now, not that I didn't have the right to do this, but that was my immediate response is burn the house down for everybody. If you're gonna burn it down for me, then I'm gonna burn it down for you. That was my reaction. And that went on for a long time.

And even that wasn't successfully, you know, resolved. And that's really where the big lessons came from me is burning things down inside ourselves or burning things down in relationships. It's really not the answer. I'm not saying that we aren't justified to do certain things in life. I'm not referring to that. But for me, what I the great lessons that I learned out of this was that.

The anger, I got no value out of the anger. I got no value out of the fear. I got no value out of the retaliation. That's not where the value came from. Where the value came from me, John. And I hope the listeners hear this loud and clear for those struggling with something like this. The value came to me when I when I look back at how I actually invented the product, how it came to me, this thought being placed in my mind is that I should have been thinking about it all along as stewardship, not ownership.

And when you treat your health and your friendships and your relationships under this mindset of stewardship versus ownership, it changes everything. So that that ultimately was the place that I landed, is that I look back on that and I said, Wow, Scott, everything could have been different. There you might have had the same outcome, but if you treated that investment from a stewardship perspective, yes, you would have still been upset. You would have handled this an entirely different way.

That was a massive lesson for me, John. And it's changed the way I handle things moving forward in my entire life.

John Niland (10:02)

Mm. ⁓

What a great distinction. Stewardship versus ownership. Let's just go into that a little bit more. Taking the example you gave of the private equity company, how might stewardship have been different to ownership?

Scott Lackey (10:10)

Yes, sir.

Well, let's just take the ending. When the when the ⁓ investor said we're going to take you know a right turn or the business needs to take a right turn, some significant changes need to be made. If you have a stewardship mindset side mindset, then the response would have been something along the lines of let's pretend you're the investor, John, and we're on a video conference. And you've just told me I'm the president of the company, you are the number one investor in the company.

And you just told me that we need to take a right turn. Then a stewardship response would have been, John, I appreciate that you're trying to explain something to me that you see as an imperative for the company. I don't see the same thing that you see. And so what I'd like for us to do is if today's the right time, let's start digging into this today because clearly we have a disconnect. And how can we, how can I understand what it is that you believe we need to accomplish, why you feel that way? What are you looking at that I don't see?

So I'd like to go through this reconciliation process to try to come to that understanding because I don't see what you see, John. So just that alone, but that's not how it was, how it was. Right? The way it was was, John, we're going straight because I understand where we're supposed to go. I admitted this product. I know the customers. I know the pipeline. This is where we're going. That's power. That's that's pushing power onto John. But what I didn't understand.

John Niland (11:44)

Right.

Scott Lackey (11:47)

Was there's a difference between power and control. John, you had control in this in this example. And I had so I had the power to make this decision, but John the investor had control. And so even though I had the power to make that statement, all John had to do was enact the control mechanism. John the investor, right? Enact the control mechanism and say, I'm sorry, you have the power to say that. I have the control, you're fired.

John Niland (12:09)

My head is spinning with all the applications of that distinction into politics, into relationships, into homes, into f into personal relationships. We're gonna need we're gonna need several episodes to unpack all of that.

Scott Lackey (12:15)

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

But can I can I can I just segue on that? Everything you just said. Again, I'm not trying to just plug the book here. This is really important. I spend twenty-four chapters talking about that. Everything you just said, because guess what? If in fact I'm right from a from a way of life, if in fact I'm right, power versus control, stewardship versus ownership, the first person that gets fixed in this equation, John, is me. I become in alignment.

as a human being. And then ancillarily, the gift that is given is now my relationship with John, my wife, my son, my daughter, my neighbor, my coworkers, my community, my all of that changes because of my behavior.

John Niland (13:10)

Well, ⁓ by all means put a link to the book in the show notes or send it to me and I'll put it in the show notes. let's come back to the ⁓ to the chaos a little bit. ⁓ because that's well, that that's how we got to this distinction. ⁓ what lessons did you learn from that?

Scott Lackey (13:25)

Yes, sir.

Well, certainly I want to expand on power versus control and stewardship versus ownership. Those weren't the only lessons. So let's let's expand on that because that's what we're talking about, right? What okay.

John Niland (13:43)

Yeah, exactly.

Scott Lackey (13:45)

The expansion on that, you know, a really popular word that seems to be floating around on social media these days is, you know, you gotta be disciplined. You know, you you you gotta be disciplined. This I if I hear it one more time, my head's gonna explode about being disciplined. Chaos doesn't care about discipline.

Chaos is, chaos is chaos. It doesn't care. But where chaos as a concept becomes worried, if I may, if I treat chaos as a person, place, or thing, where chaos gets concerned is not so much in discipline, but it's in the word resilience. We don't talk about resilience anymore. Okay? And one of my, I'm gonna use one of your country's stories that I deeply love because I've read about it a lot.

Is during World War II, when the British were trapped on the beaches of Europe and the citizens rallied together in boats to go over and pick those soldiers up and get as many as back as possible. Your countrymen know the story better than I do. But the resilience of that day, if I may use one of your your country stories, the resilience of that day of the human spirit was immeasurable.

But when we boil that down to ourselves, why do we find it so hard to be resilient personally? But we can read about what a group of people did throughout generations. That's just one of a million stories. Why can we read about those things and we struggle with that all the way down to our personal self? So another lesson that was extraordinary for me coming out of that.

was learning about myself, even though I'd been in the military before and been over in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and all that stuff, I just did not fully immerse myself in the power of resilience. And and and what does that really mean? The ability to get back up. That's in essence what it means. And and and what is made up, yeah, but what it what it the the word discipline is an is a is a vertical structure of resilience. The word execution

John Niland (15:52)

Indeed. Well looks like

Scott Lackey (16:03)

The art of getting things done is a vertical of the word resilience. The willingness to make a decision, because it is a decision, to get back up, is a vertical to the word resilience. I think that is a beautiful word. And it's been an important part of my life moving forward from that.

John Niland (16:19)

So getting back up and bouncing back from that setback and and from that chaos. ⁓ let's go to today. ⁓ tell me a little about the work you're doing today, ⁓ and and with ⁓ what type of people or organizations as the case may be.

Scott Lackey (16:22)

Okay.

Thank you. ⁓ so I do have a ⁓ job that I work at every day as the chief sales officer for a large ⁓ globally global leader, German manufacturer of a product. And I represent the United States of all of the locations in the world. We're the largest of all the subsidiaries in the world. So I do that during the day, but I spend a an equal amount of time as much as I can do things like this and speaking to others ⁓ about these topics, whether it be over a video conference through a podcast or physically on the stage with small groups or very large groups.

This is a this is, you know, dealing with chaos, learning how to be a resilient human human being, learning how to get back up again, learning how to recover when when lightning strikes in our life is a powerful topic these days. Just how we ought to open up the conversation with you and I. We're not living in what was the word you said? We're not living in change. We're living in

John Niland (17:28)

With quoting Mark Carney, we're not living through times of transition, we're living through times of disruption.

Scott Lackey (17:33)

Yep. And I love that. I loved how we started that out because as a human being, it's very, it's relatively easy for us to adapt our lives to incremental change. The government loves, our governments, world governments love incremental change because they can lead us right through the fire with incremental change.

But when but chaos has a different plan. Chaos is a 90 degree turn. It's a 180 degree turn. It's violent. And so when chaos occurs, that's why the panic comes in, the fear, because we can't incrementally adapt. It requires an immediate answer. That's what I love about the word chaos. Chaos, there are gifts. There are there are internal gifts to chaos, but there are also external tragedies to the word chaos. Chaos can be a gift or it can be.

An enormous tragedy, a lightning strike.

John Niland (18:29)

Absolutely.

Scott Lackey (18:31)

So go ahead.

John Niland (18:33)

I love one of the quotes that I saw on on one of your speaking topics, and I think I mentioned it on the way in today, is ⁓ hope is not found, it's chosen day to day or moment to moment during chaos. As as we close, can you say a little bit about that?

Scott Lackey (18:52)

Yes.

I again did not read that from someone in order to come to believe it. I've read many things, many inspirational things. But while they were inspiring, it did not make me believe it, even though I know it to be true. It was through my experiences in life that I come to understand those personal truths. So I wanted to set that foundation to say this directly to the audience.

That if you are dealing with chaos, or you feel like you're approaching chaos, or you're absolutely in the middle of chaos. The way out of chaos to me, because it's what I lived, is one lily pad at a time. It is not some grand scheme, it's not some grand plan. It's not some massive sunshine breakthrough. I'm not saying they don't happen, they're just very, very, very, very rare. The most common exit path.

For those of you living in chaos, is the very choice you make to take steps forward to be a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday. So, so one of the things I say in my book is how do you find hope in the chaos? It's an exact quote from the book. And some of that, finding hope in the chaos, is looking to yourself as the solution versus all these external things that nobody trusts anymore. Looking to yourself being the solution.

I don't walk around anymore in my life. I preach this all the time. I never measure myself anymore and have it for a long time over how far I have advanced. It's not about, it's not about that anymore. It's always about direction for me. Am I moving the right direction? Because chaos is going to come. Lightning strikes are going to come. Disappointments. All that's going to come because I'm human.

But it but but I'm going to respond appropriately at this point in my life, and I have for the last twelve or so, thirteen years. I'm going to respond differently than everybody else. I'm going to make wise decisions. I'm going to be teachable. I'm going to go lily pad to lily pad. And I'm going to be happy about that. I'm going be thankful about that. I'm going to have gratitude because it's my choice to do that. There is hope in the chaos, but it is an absolute choice. And I hope you'll choose that as a listener.

John Niland (21:14)

Fantastic. What a wonderful note to finish on today. Scott, thank you very much for joining me.

Scott Lackey (21:19)

Thank you, John. All the best.