Questions I will start to ask myself are, how do you feel about this? Why do you feel that way about this? Should you feel that way? What's a different way that you might think? That's the first layer.

The second one is, how do they feel?

Welcome back to beyond the default. I'm Liz Morehead, and as always, I'm joined by George b Thomas. And this week, we're talking about starting lines. Now before I get too deeply into this topic, George, why don't you tell everyone what it is that we're talking about when we say starting lines, particularly in our lives?

It's a larger conversation than I think people give it. I think there's a way that most people think about starting lines. There's a way that I've learned to think about starting lines, and I think there are other people that have caught this little tangent that I'm gonna go on today, but usually people they'll think about starting lines as something at the beginning of their life. It could be something good. It could be something bad, but it is a moment in time that they have cemented in their brain that they'll remember forever.

And what's interesting is in this conversation that we're gonna have, when you think about starting lines, many times, people correlate to where they began has something to do with where they'll end or the finish line. So that's kind of where we're headed today in that conversation.

Well, let's dig right in. George, I know that there's a particular starting line in your life that you really wanted to delve into. Can you take us there?

I actually have 2 that I wanna kind of unpack, and the reason I wanna share these is because, again, there's 2 things that, hopefully, we get through on this episode. 1 is that you don't only have one starting line, you have multiple starting lines. We'll dive into that later. I have found personally with talking with others and also seeing this in myself that many times our starting lines that we point to have some type of negative connotation, which, again, I hope that we can get to the point where we talk about there's actually two sides of that starting line. There's where you're setting up and there's the step that you took after and just like that.

There's actually a positive and a negative side to every starting line. You just have to take time to find those. Let me explain. The first starting line that I wanna talk about for my life was living in a little tiny town called Lincoln, Montana, and when we lived in Lincoln, Montana, we lived in a one room log cabin, and we're talking about the type of log cabin that is no running water, one room, super old. We're talking about in the mountains, very small beginning.

We used to bathe in the river beside the cabin. And here's the thing, there can be a negative side to that, which is man started out small. My life is destined to be small. That just doesn't have to be the whole story, but I will tell you, like, for many years of my life, I did feel like, who am I gonna become? Like, I'm the son of a logger living in a one room log cabin with no running water.

However, if you flip that coin and you look at the other side, man, there are pictures of me riding the crap out of my big wheel. There are pictures of me, like, standing beside trees with the biggest smile ever. So while my older self, when I say older, I mean 9, 10, 13, 14 was looking at that as a negative as I was going through it. You can fully tell looking back now that I was enjoying the crap out of it. I didn't care if it was half of a room.

I didn't care if we didn't have hot water. And so this idea of if your starting line if you're listening this in the starting line that you have perceived for most of your life makes you feel small, please do me a favor and take a minute and think about that starting line and look for the positives of that potential negative place that you've cemented in your brain. Now I believe that I don't have to be small. I can be larger than life if I so choose to because that starting line has nothing. It's not dictating one thing of where I'm headed today for my finish line.

The second starting line that I want to unpack because I think it's a really interesting story of just the polar opposites of how you can believe about something that happened, and that's that at about age 17, I was a freshman in high school, and I went to school one day and my math teacher in front of everybody and, of course, I was hey. Hindsight's 2020. I was being a little bit of a class clown. I like to have fun and make people laugh now. Go figure that I like to do it at the beginning of my life too.

But I was in class, and this math teacher's name was, well, I'll leave his name out just because there might be family members that might bump against this podcast at some point. But there was this math teacher, and he told me in front of the class that I would never amount to anything. And what's crazy is I believed him, and within 6 months, I was a high school dropout. Sign myself into the Navy or my parents signed me into the Navy and the rest is history in life, but there was always this negative starting line of, you must be stupid. You can't conform.

You aren't gonna be anything. And again, this was like a double tap on the small beginnings, you know, you need to be small. You can't be great. The whole time, like, I was kind of trying to live life. I kept having this feeling, like, I was supposed to do something special.

I was, you know, destined for greatness, but there was these two starting lines that were just heavyweights mentally for me to try to get past, and what's crazy is again hindsight being 2020. I've realized that both of those starting lines have positioned me for success. Let me explain. There was a time that if you ask me if I wanted to go see my math teacher, it would have been because I wanted to go punch him in the face. But if you ask me now if I would wanna go back and see my math teacher, I would say absolutely because I wanna thank them.

You see, just because somebody says something to you and it might not be in a positive light, doesn't mean that it won't equal positive reactions. It's his words that actually forced me to pick up this mindset of always be learning. I would even say that it's probably his words and this always be learning that has taught me to be a transition specialist or to be so willing to pivot from one thing to another. It's interesting that what was a negative starting line has become such a positive force of fuel, if you will, the fire that burns in my belly at first to prove somebody wrong, but now just the belief in that I can do that. So, again, I hope people realize that if it's something when you're a young child or something that when you're a teen, it's something that you've historically perceived as negative.

I hope you realize that it might actually be the tools that were given to you to actually survive and thrive in the world that you'll head towards once you start to get towards your finish line. Let me tie back to the one room log cabin. I am so thankful that I started out in a 1 room log cabin with no running water because I know what humble beginnings are. I know what salt of the earth truly means. I can tie back to those moments and as big as the brand gets as boisterous as I choose to be, it's very easy for me to draw myself back into a very humble, quiet, salt of the earth type human, and it really is one of the things I've learned that helps me keep ego at bay, but that's probably a whole another episode.

It's interesting to hear you talk in particular about that second starting line because here's where my mind goes when I hear you describing that situation. And it goes in 2 directions. 1, I could see being in that position and recognizing that not in fact as a starting line, but an ending. Rather than the beginning of something great, it's an ending of sorts. You are being told that you would never amount to anything.

You were being told before you get out of the starting gate, hey, man. Game over. So how do you resolve that in your head? How long did it take you to see that ending as a beginning?

Yeah. It's an interesting question because what's funny is I think it took me years to simply answer your question. It took me years to realize the words that are gonna just kind of flow out of my mouth, and that is I realized that every ending is a new beginning, and I don't mean to sound trite when I say that, but if you truly pay attention to every decision that you make, it is ending something and beginning something else. That was the end of high school for me. Yes.

Would I never be prom king my senior year? Would I never walk across, you know, and get the diploma? Yeah. The the it was endings to a lot of things, but it was the immediate beginning of who I would become. It was the immediate beginning of having stories to tell around almost dying in the navy, of almost dying in a motorcycle accident at Faith Ranch.

It was the beginning to the story that God has given me for thus far the 51 years that I've been on this planet, and it's funny because we've tried to, as humans, kind of simplify this thing. You know, when one door shuts, another one opens. You've heard your mother, your father, your grandma, somebody say that in the past, and you're like, yeah. Nice saying. But here's the thing.

To me, if you can embrace this thought of it feels like something's ending. Oh, sad. And realize this actually isn't a sad moment. Sure. You can have sadness.

You can mourn a moment, but what's fun is that if you really have this understanding that every end is a new beginning, there should be a time of mourning and then an immediate surge of excitement for what is about to happen. And it's interesting, Liz, as we're having this conversation because this thing of starting lines and finish lines and finishing points and starting points in life, I'm realizing that I am also very tied close into my same methodology or thoughts of getting excited when life gets rough. Again, probably a totally other episode of why I get excited when life gets rough and what's happened over the time to program that, but this whole thing of being able to mourn quickly, be sad in the moment, but then get excited for what's next. When you can train your brain or start to think about your day ins and day outs in that way, I think it dramatically changes the amount of time that you might be stuck. And, again, we can talk about stuck in another episode, but stuck is dangerous.

Stuck is, well, stuck is the default.

It's fascinating to have this conversation about starting lines because the first example you gave is clearly, it's the genesis of George. It is very clearly a marked beginning in your life. Whereas the second one you pointed out is something you may not have recognized and did not recognize as a starting line at first. And I've noticed that often the most profound starting lines in our lives are the ones that aren't the literal beginning of George waking up in that log cabin. So what I'm curious about here is when we have this conversation about starting lines, is it merely this retroactive, reflective, contextualizing exercise, or is it something that we can and should train ourselves and be able to recognize in the moment when they are happening?

So I love this question. I think that most mere mortals, me included, it is very much a retrospective. Oh, that was a moment in time. Another example, when we won tickets in 2012 to inbound and I learned about HubSpot, did I realize that was gonna be the starting point, The precipice, if you will, for, like, a major segment of my life and who I would become and how the universe God would unlock blessings and being able to add value. 0 clue in the moment.

I knew something special was happening, but zero clue of how deeply defined a starting line that was, but to answer your question, I do believe that we can start to train ourselves. Sure. Default state retrospective beyond the default being able to train yourself to look for the cues that actually point to this might be something that is going to be big in your life. And what's fun is when I say cues they can get real touchy feely, like, there's gonna be a gut. There's gonna be a voice.

There's gonna just be a feeling. Think of, like, the photons, electrons, the protons, all of those tons are just doing something in your body, and sometimes we just ignore all of that because we're so inundated with music all the time or city noise. It's very hard for us to quiet ourselves and actually pay attention, but if we can quiet ourselves and pay attention and really look for these feelings, these cues, what's fun about that, and I believe that I'm to the point in my life where I'm trying to find those before I'm looking back at them, but find them because then I can drive harder, faster, more strategized into them when I get that gut, when I get that voice, when I get I mean, let's be honest. A starting line that I knew definitively that I was creating was starting my own business. I couldn't look retrospective at that.

I had to be aggressively, like, this is what I'm going to do because I got the gut, got the voice, all the tons, protons, electrons, neutrons, whatever are telling me that this is the line I'm supposed to draw and where I'm supposed to run.

But why should we care about starting lines? I'm sitting here thinking about what it is that you're saying to me, and I'm hearing all of it. And I'm loving this idea of taking that moment where you realize, at least in the retrospective instances, wow. This is where I'm standing, and taking that moment to look back and see how far you've come. But aside from that reflective moment, why should we even care or bother to give gratitude or reverence to these starting moments in our lives?

Why does it even matter?

Well, so I want us to be careful though because and I do wanna answer your question, but I want us to be careful because being a retrospective or paying homage to the past is something that for years I sucked at, and my worry is that a lot of the listeners aren't taking time to look down the mountain. Liz, one of the things that I have in my office that when I walk in and out of my office on a daily basis is a whiteboard, and it says these words, you've come a long way since 2013, and it makes me stop, and it makes me think of the journey. And so the starting line, one of the important pieces I wanna unpack here is if you have those defined starting lines, it makes it way easier to look at your midpoint, your milestone that you're at in life right now and go, jeez. Remember that guy? Remember that girl?

Like, holy mackerel. They had no clue, which should give you great joy, by the way, because now you have more than a clue. You have probably have many clues that that human of 2013 or, you know, 1970 or whatever that point for you is, but literally looking at that, you've come a long way since 2013 is very, very important to me and gives me the fuel to continue every day to try to live this life that is 1% better each and every day. But here's the thing, and I think this ties into a greater story, which I think again is something that we'll unpack, but I just wish everybody listening to this knew how important their story is. And I mean that's one of the largest precipice for this podcast is I wanna get some of the stories that I've been blessed with out to a larger audience so that the lessons that I've learned, they can learn.

If you really understand how powerful your story can be, whether it be for the people that you live with, whether it be the people that you live by, whether it be the people that you end up meeting along the way, You have been given a set of stories that when told at the right time in the right way will impact those around you. It's your way of putting a little dent in the universe. And the funny thing is every story has a beginning and every story has an end. And if you can pay attention to the beginnings and endings of the micro stories that you're given and the power and the lessons and learnings that are in those, you will do amazing things. By the way, when you do amazing things that is living a life beyond your default because now it's not just the typical what's in it for me.

It's no how can I make the lives of those around me better by the stories I have been given, by taking time to be retrospective of the starting lines, and being able to tell the story from there?

What are some of the questions you like to ask yourself when you've noticed or become aware of an important starting line in your rearview mirror? What are the types of ways in which you like to challenge yourself to look at those moments in order to get the most out of it?

Perspective is what we're talking about here. It's again, I'm preaching to the choir. I'm preaching to myself many times with things that I'm gonna talk about on this podcast. If you're with me, you'll understand, but it's very easy for me as a human to get laser focused on one direction of how something happened. But if you do start to ask yourself certain questions, what it allows you to do mentally in your brain is almost go outside of the situation and start to rotate around it in a 360 degree fashion, and when you rotate around something in a 300 60 degree fashion, you realize more about it than you once did.

So questions I will start to ask myself are, how do you feel about this? Why do you feel that way about this? Should you feel that way? What's a different way that you might think? That's the first layer.

The second one is, how do they feel? What caused this? Is there something going on in their life? And, of course, I'm talking about a starting line that deals with multiple people in this moment, which many times it does. Like, even if I go back to my log cabin situation, it was my mom and my dad.

They made a decision. They were part of the story. So why did they move to Lincoln, Montana? How did they feel about Ohio? What were they running from?

What were they trying to build? Where were they trying to go? How do I feel about that? Not just about living in a one room log cabin, but the broader perspective of now I'm having empathy. Now I'm asking questions.

Now I'm starting to think about the full picture instead of just the part that I played. It's interesting. My mind right now is actually going to, like, if you've ever been part of a play or, like, if you watch a movie or a TV show, all the actors have to almost understand a very large portion of the parts that the other people are gonna play so that they know when to say their lines or play their part. But so many times in life, we get in this role of, like, I just know my lines, and my lines really pissed me off. Instead of, like, oh, well, I have these lines because these people were doing or saying these things.

So I'm sure there are more questions that I ask myself, but, really, the lesson that I would hope that people would take away is if you're diagnosing these starting lines and you do wanna dig deeper and you wanna do kind of that 360 degree, it's what questions could I be asking myself about myself, and what questions could I be asking about the people that were part of that starting line or even the larger starting line itself. And one of the things I'll have to figure out what book I read it in, but one of the things that really helped me too was the 7 whys and being able to actually ask why you gave the answer to the question that you just gave to the question previously. Because when you ask why 7 times, it gets you down to a deeper rooted actual real reason of something. And so warning warning, don't be afraid to dig, but also realize that when you start to dig, it gets uncomfortable. And so you have to get real comfortable with being uncomfortable if you wanna unlock some of these lessons that you're gonna get out of your starting lines and your story and where you're trying to head.

Well, you just left that opening wide open for me, George, so I have to ask. What's the most uncomfortable but powerful learning you forced yourself to look at through the evaluation of one of your own starting lines? Because I think it's one thing to say, like, hoo, boy. Buckle in. Let's get uncomfortable.

But I'd love to hear from you a perspective or a nugget of wisdom you learned by allowing yourself to really be uncomfortable with this introspection.

Yeah. So listen. I'm a be honest. There's a lot of years that I thought I was stupid, that I was a simpleton, that I couldn't learn, that I would forever be a lower class citizen doing a lower class job because that's where I belonged. When I started to ask why, and I started to try to get a 360 degree view of these at the time, what I will say, poisonous words, but powerful from the math teacher.

One of the lessons I had to teach myself was, well, first of all, not all words are true, but the larger lesson that I had to teach myself and unlock with this 360 degree view was that I can learn anything. And what's funny when I was growing up, like, younger younger, I used to hear people talk about me, grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, whatever. Move that boy's like a sponge. He just gets around something. He soaks it up, but I didn't really remember those sayings.

Like, I had blocked them out of my brain until I actually went down this aggressive, I'm gonna prove to myself that I can learn anything. What's fun is that came out of a moment of need. I was in a church as a youth pastor, eventually associate pastor, but we needed to do graphics on the screen for our worship songs, and the church needed a website, and there was really nobody else to do it. I was like, okay. I can figure that out, which by the way, when you feel like you're stupid and the words I can figure that out come out of your mouth is kinda scary, but this is when I started to, like, teach myself HTML and CSS.

And this is back in the GeoCities day, by the way. This is like old school, And I started to teach myself how to do graphics in this old program by Microsoft called photo draw. This was, like, pre Photoshop. I started to get involved in a website back in the day, lynda.com, which is now LinkedIn Learning, but I just got real aggressive, and I got real hungry. And I started watching a bunch of videos and learning a bunch of things.

As I would unlock each kind of new lesson and new thing, and I would start to build a web site or design a slide. There were these little elements that kept coming into my brain of, like, see? See? You're not stupid. You're not stupid.

Let's see how smart you can be. Hey. How far can you take this? What can you learn? And it's one of the most important things that I was able to unlock is that you don't have to feel like you're stupid.

You can be as smart as you wanna be, and, Liz, this has been the thing that has allowed me to freely learn how to do podcasting, freely learn how to do video editing, freely learn how to learn HubSpot, and when I say learn HubSpot, I mean, marketing, sales, service, like, all the things they keep throwing at us because my brain is no longer scared of just plugging in new modules of education into it because I realize that the computer system can handle the upgrades, and I just hope that everybody out there realizes that your brain, your computer system can handle the upgrades. You can go ahead and hit the button and you can upgrade your brain, upgrade your life, upgrade your future because for me, it was learning, but whatever it is for you, get a software update, Fix that junk and get it out of the way and unlock whatever it is that needs to be unlocked for you to start to think about building, strategizing, and moving forward to live a life beyond your default.

There is something interesting that you said when you were shifting your perspective and whether or not you were someone who could learn. You said that you had forgotten about how people would say, George, he's such a sponge. And that made me realize, and I'd love to get your take on this, how much our mindset plays a role in terms of what we see in our rearview mirror. And here's what I mean by that. Because you believed you were not capable of learning, that you would always be the lower class citizen with the lower class job, you didn't look for signs or evidence that supported a contrary view.

Right? And this is part of human nature. We have it's called confirmation bias. We look for evidence of the things that we already believe. But if your mindset is in a negative headspace, that can play a huge role in how you perceive your startings and endings in your life.

Right?

Yeah. Without a doubt. And I think, honestly, to me, what's fun or the way that I wrap my brain around this is I realize our brains as humans, they can be our best friend or our worst enemy. For me, I realized that he's like a sponge. My brain thought it was protecting me, but it actually was just hiding little secrets that I really needed to know.

And it wasn't until that I started to believe, which, by the way, our belief structure in the life, in the world, in ourselves is something that is so important, and I know that we're gonna unpack in future episodes. But when I started to believe that I had the potential to become smart, which, by the way, I was smart the entire time. When we get to my Navy story and my GED and almost dying and all that fun stuff, I was smart the entire time. I just had disbelief in myself, but because of that disbelief, my brain had stored away these little nuggets of life wisdom or little sayings or things that I could have actually been, like, leaning in on and leveraging, which, by the way, once I had them, man, I grabbed onto that bad boy, and I would literally tell myself, my boss wants me to learn about podcasting. I'm a sponge.

I will go, and I will soak this up, and I will be the best at podcasting. My boss wants me to learn about HubSpot. I am a sponge. I will go and learn all about HubSpot and soak this up, and then I will execute upon it. Like, I literally started to embrace this sponge mentality, if you will, when it came to education because my belief in what they had said had become to the point where, like, I can do this.

I can do this. What's interesting about that is inside of your brain as you're listening to this, there are nuggets that once you start to transform your belief structure in what your starting line meant to the world that you live right now, you'll start to remember, and I beg you I beg you when you start to remember those things, write them down, claw at them, grab them, hug them, hold them tight because they are going to be the ammo or the energy or the fuel for your brain that you'll bring up over and over and over again as you then use that as your new weapon to becoming the best you ever.

Alright, George. Final question. If you could go back to that classroom in high school and squat down in front of you at that starting line after the teacher had already told you you weren't gonna amount to anything, what would you tell yourself?

Man, are you trying to make me emotional? Like

You know, maybe a little. Maybe a little.

My brain goes in so many different directions when you ask me that question. I'll just unpack a couple. So when you started to ask that question, you know, I literally by the way, I was envisioning oh my god. I was envisioning myself as who I am today, like, kneeling next to that boy, and the first thing that came to mind is it's gonna be okay. That's the first thing.

The second thing that I would probably say to him is that you're gonna do great things, and the third part that I would want him to understand is this is all part of the process. You see, Liz, because one of the things that I've learned as I've gone through this is that we have our plan and then there's the plan And that day in that classroom was the starting line of the plan. It definitely wasn't my plan, but the plan has worked out really, really well. Just like my parents tried to comfort me. Oh, he's a butthead.

They use different words, by the way. I'm trying to keep this PG as possible. You know, he's blah blah blah blah. Just like I didn't believe their words, I don't know if I would believe my own, but that is what I would wanna share with that child is that, look, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna do great things.

This is part of the process. There is a plan, and you are being activated. You are being called into what people are going to need you to be. But, buddy, it's gonna get difficult, but you're gonna be strong enough to make it through it. And one day, you're gonna be able to help so many people through the hard times of their life.

So push forward.