"'When Was the Lowest Point In Your Life and How Did You Change Your Life Path To One of Victory Over the Obstacles You Were Facing At That Time?' by the Butterfly Marketing Team, Mike Filsaime, Paulie Sabol, Donna Fox and Tom Beal"
Click Here to listen to Donna Fox's heroes interview and read the entire transcript.
Click Here to listen to Mike Filsaime's heroes interview and read the entire transcript.
Click Here to listen to Paulie Sabol's heroes interview and read the entire transcript
Click Here to listen to Tom Beal's heroes interview and read the entire transcript
25. When was the lowest point in your life and how did you change your life path to one of victory over the obstacles you were facing at that time?
Mike Filsaime: I’ve been fortunate Ralph that I haven’t had, knock wood of course, and I will (Knock, knock), any deaths in my immediate family. My parents got divorced when I was in my mid-twenties so that didn’t affect me the way it could have.
Maybe it would have affected someone who was 8 years old. I lost my grandfather. We knew each other but we didn’t know each other well. So “knock wood” again there hasn’t been any type of tragedy or anything like that.
However, I had financial tragedy and stress back in 1998. I was in the car business. I left the car business for 6 months to get involved with a real estate investor who turned out to be nothing more than a con man. He took me and about six other people in on this con. It was a con by driving a Mercedes and having a house that wasn’t his and all these other things that we believed were his.
His intentions were good. His intentions were to use our credit and our money to buy houses and repair them and flip them. What ended up happening, remember what we said about taking on too many projects, he was trying to buy too many houses at a time.
While he was trying to put all this construction in and collecting the mortgage payments and when the cash flow went negative he started keeping the mortgage payments and putting it in his own pocket.
Several months later we found out that the whole project went bankrupt. Since it was our credit and our money he lost nothing. We had him arrested and we filed charges and put all that stuff behind us.
What it left me in 1998 was $70,000 in debt and 3 foreclosures and 3 repossessions. One was for a Mercedes Benz and one for a Ford Exhibition and a Harley Davidson. I had signed for all these things for him under the business name.
Also the credit card machine and three foreclosures were in my name so I had no choice at that time but to file bankruptcy. They were coming after everything I owned. If you look at all these successful people out there like Stephen Pierce, Mark Victor Hansen, Armand Moran and Joe Vitalie there’s one thing you can be comfortable in knowing.
The school of hard knocks happens to all of us. So we must stop with the self-pity. Everybody’s got their own story. I heard recently that everybody is going to tell you “My parents left me when I was three years old and I was put up for adoption.” Ok, well so what, everybody’s got a story.
Let it go. Stop holding on to it and let that be an inspiration to people when you’ve overcome it. Start thinking positive and stop dwelling on it on that. Eighty-five percent of the people in the US have grown up in a dysfunctional family.
You are not alone. So stop thinking about that you were given these bad things. I think that 9 out of 10 successful people that are multi-millionaires in this world have gone through major tragedies or bankruptcy or financial tragedy.
It’s ok to let those things happen. You can’t be embarrassed and say “Oh I don’t want anybody to know that I went bankrupt.” Hey, it happens. We’ve made mistakes in our life. We have to learn from them and move on.
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Paulie Sabol: I was an active member of a church at a point and time. I began to read and understand different truths from our common sacred text, our common basis of our seemingly shared belief systems.
My views changed very, very dramatically in those periods of time. Even though I could make my case of where I felt like this was my inspiration, where I felt like it was soundly based doctrinally, that group of people rejected me.
They rejected me in a very formal way. There is actually this kind of secret language within this worldview. Basically the language is that they cast me out of the church in the name of Jesus.
What that was communicating to me and to every other member of that community that was full of friends and people that I cared about, is that they were basically saying and treating me like I was in their mind, an evil, malevolent spirit, just because I saw things differently.
Just because I believed, for example, that from my reading of their text, there was no eternal hell that anyone went to, because I didn’t see any reason that somebody could not be a person who expresses their sexual orientation as a same-sex orientation and be a servant to many, and in this case, at that time I would have said a child of God.
It was a very, very difficult time because at that point in my life, that was about 70 or 80 percent of all my social relationships, all my contacts, all of my sense of identity and importance and self-worth, not to mention all the residual fears I had at that time, because it was a place that really saw the universe and God as an angry, spiteful, demanding authoritarian, patriarchal, sort of character.
So it was very, very difficult. It thrust me into a lot of uncertainty. The way that I was able to turn it around was simply through time. I found new relationships. I found other people had believed the same thing I had at other points and time.
I found out that some of the others were treated much worse than me. Jacques DeMolay, the head of the Knights Templar, was burned at the stake for similar beliefs. So the first thing I started to realize was that I didn’t quite have it as bad as some others had had. I wasn’t alone, and it was huge to realize I was not, in fact, alone.
Then finally I was really able to turn it around because of something that happened very recently. I was very resentful. I was very oppositional. I had a lot of struggles with people who were members of organized religion.
One day, a person who was actually a minister of a church, we’ve had discussions, and he certainly challenged and took some exceptions, and had some questions about what the role of homosexuality is as it relates to spirituality, as it relates to blessings, and all of these things.
He lost his luggage on a plane, and we were at the same place. He asked me if I would pray with him? I will, but you’ve got to know I’m not really a prayer person, I don’t really believe the same things you do, I would actually consider myself an atheist, an agnostic, but I can certainly call upon my overall belief systems and your language patterns and pray.
I sat down and prayed for him. I prayed what I knew were some of his scriptures. I prayed that he would have a peace that passed all understandings, and keep his heart and his mind through these tribulations. I did the whole thing.
Afterwards he came up and talked to me. The cool thing was that he hadn’t been able to get through, he couldn’t even talk to anybody who could find his bag, or would even acknowledge that it had been on the plane. Right after our prayer, he picked up the phone, he got through to the airport, and one hour later he had his bag.
But even before he had his bag, he told me he had a lot of rethinking to do because your prayer bore witness to my spirit. For me, that was like coming full circle. You have to understand what it was like to be in this environment that you considered your social and protective cocoon of making it as a young adolescent.
Here they are basically saying you are a child of Satan, not a child of God, and sending you away so that at the end you might be saved as though by fire. Now here we have this person who is a religious leader, and he’s saying, “Your prayer bore witness to my spirit.”
May I share one other down time with you, too?
Ralph Zuranski: You bet.
Paulie Sabol: Because this is another one where it shows that sometimes the way you overcome takes a little bit of time. That story took a little bit of time. That closure story really only happened two years ago.
Here’s another case. My best friend when I was a youngster died way too early in his life. He died when he was 18 or 19 years of age. He was coming home from college for Thanksgiving, and as you can probably guess, in all the cliché ways, got hit by a drunk driver and he died.
It was interesting because he was my best friend when I was a little kid, from four to eight. When I got the news, I hadn’t really seen him any other times than that. We both moved, but I got this news that he had died because his parents were in the same community that I had grown up with, and my grandfather was in this community.
I was invited to the funeral. I want to tell you, Ralph, I couldn’t go. I couldn’t bring myself to go because in my mind, as I was even envisioning what the funeral would be like, I mean I had this little child’s casket, and I realized this was really emotional for me right now.
I would go there and what I would see would be out of alignment with what I was experiencing inside. I was losing my little buddy. So I couldn’t go. But then another thing happened. About one year later, two of my other friends were actually murdered by a third friend. We used to get together and play cards and play other games. We were in this gaming group together.
This one friend actually murdered two of my other friends. Now if you can imagine something putting you into turmoil, that’s going to do it. That really does it. You’ve got murder cases going on. You’ve got funerals. You’ve got friends not knowing what they’re going to do.
Again, I was invited to the funeral. I talked to another friend of mine and let me tell you this story about when my friend Johnny died. And I explained why I didn’t go. Now I’m feeling even more like I’m uncertain. I had never gone to a funeral yet by this time, by the way.
She worked in hospice, so she was actually around people who were dying of terminal illnesses all the time. So I thought she would have some good advice. That is definitely one of the things I’ve found out in my life that help you, is to find a coach or a mentor who can give you some guidance because they have specialized knowledge.
So I asked her about it. She said something to me that totally changed my life. This is a case of where a message did it. She said, “Paulie, you don’t go to the funeral as much for you, but you go to the funeral for the survivors, for the people who are remaining who have lost something.”
So I went. Now, remember, we had a Saturday gaming clique. We got together once or twice a month, pretty much did only one thing. I don’t want to suggest it was an insignificant relationship, but it only was what it was.
I go to the funeral. I introduce myself to the father of the husband (these two got married at a young age together – and they were both killed). He says that he remembered one time when you guys first met. We had first met when I 16 or 17 and didn’t even drive yet.
So this dad had driven the son over to my house when we had one of our first gaming experiences. He said, “I just want to thank you. You were such a good friend to my son.” He gave me this big hug and he started crying and I started crying. I totally got it.
For awhile I was actually feeling depressed again about not having gone to Johnny’s funeral, because of me. But I realized, Johnny was the one in this case who died. He was the one who I wasn’t going to have another chance with. But I was able to go to his parents and go another time and connect with them and say, “You know, Johnny and I had such a good time. I’m so disappointed that he was taken from you and the rest of the world so soon.”
Again, able to come back and make up for it and give them that acknowledgment that he was special and important to me. Even after I had seemed to miss the first opportunity. But it is because I had additional learning.
Ralph Zuranski: One of my dear friends that was on the frontline of alternative medicine just died last week of an unexpected heart attack. I just wrote his eulogy today. You think about how powerful it is, the people that have impact on your life, and how life and death can make such a big difference in your perspective on what’s going on in your life at this moment and particular time.
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Donna Fox: There have been quite a few low points in my life. I’ll just work reverse chronologically until you decide to stop me because it’s too depressing.
As early as two years ago I had just published a book From Credit Repair to Credit Millionaire and I was broke. I had left my job in 2001 to start a business and I had some savings.
My ultimate goal was to start a business and go back to work but then September 11th happened, the marketplace changed, and when it was time for me to go back to work there were just no jobs available in my field.
So I decided to keep working on my business a little big more and that is actually when I started and got involved in the internet and got involved in speaking and training and found that I loved it.
But at that time, right when I had published that book, I hadn’t had income for two and a half years. Not a dime in income for two and a half years. I was living on credit cards, Ralph.
I was literally living on cash advances on credit cards and shuffling them around, and almost ironically practicing my credit millionaire strategies to keep my head above water while I’m trying to build a business teaching other people how to make millions of dollars by borrowing money.
So there is just this very interesting time in my life where I struggled with feelings that I was a fraud. Who was I to tell people about wealth building when I have $40,000 in credit card debt because I’ve been living off them for years?
Then I realized that is exactly why I am the right person because I’m teaching people about how to use credit. I may have $40,000 in credit card debt but it’s basically business debt because it’s money that I was essentially paying to myself as a salary.
I could have loaned it to my business and then paid myself a salary if I wanted to do it that way.
It’s kind of hard to think about the low points because after you get over them you tend to find the positive in them. Another low point in my life was right after I graduated from law school. I was also getting a divorce.
It was just a terrible time in my life. My husband and I loved each other so much but we just could not be married. It turns out we never really should have been married. We should have just been friends.
Now he is a great friend of mine. We are practically best friends. But at that time it was so low and I felt scared because I had just gotten out of law school, I didn’t have a job so I was job hunting, I was going to be alone, I had tremendous debt over my head from my student loans, and yea, there were days when I hid under the covers.
It was just a tremendous low point, but it passed. If it doesn’t kill you it will make you stronger. It made me stronger.
The last one I want to talk about is not something I have ever said publicly before, ever. So this is a first. It’s a first for In Search of Heroes.
I got pregnant when I was 16 and in high school. I first thought about an abortion but that didn’t feel right. Remember I said I like to check my decisions based on my feelings. Nothing felt good about that.
But I had plans in life and a baby was not part of the plans. So I made the decision to give the baby up for adoption. I’m not going to get through this without crying. I went through an open adoption so I actually interviewed and picked the parents for my daughter.
Probably the lowest point in my life, and the hardest thing I have ever done, was actually handing my daughter over into the arms of her new mom. I just thought the world was going to end. Nothing could be good after doing something like that.
I remember it was really the way to give her the best life I possibly could and also give me a chance, because I was still a baby, too, and I needed to give myself a chance. So yea, it was a tremendously low time.
As this knocked-up teenager I felt like a screw-up. You would not believe, but now because I did an open adoption and actually my daughter turns 18 this year, so there is a chance she might come back into my life.
Because I’ve done an open adoption, every year I get pictures. Every year I saw this wonderful little thing that cost me so much pain, grow into this amazing individual. And I think that is what adversity in life is about.
Real change doesn’t happen until there is adversity and real growth. She could go on to change the world. Maybe it’s not my job to end poverty. Maybe it’s her’s.
If I hadn’t experienced that adversity, that amazing life wouldn’t have happened and I wouldn’t be who I am now. I got so much growth and so much strength from that experience. If I had just kind of skated through my high school years I don’t know if I would be here today.
So gosh, yes, adversity sucks when you are in it. There is nothing worse than when you are at the life lows. But when you can look back and realize how far you have come, and you will come far because you can’t stay low. The human spirit is too strong to stay low.
When you look back and think about the amazing things that have happened you just have to embrace those adversities, you have to embrace the low times in your life.
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TOM BEAL: Wow, the lowest point. That’s a good question. Here’s one and it’s a weird one. I was the number one honor graduate in boot camp and had three merit choice promotions in 4 years, I was the man. I was like the kid on the block. I was like the epitome of a marine.
I was up for MECP, Marine Enlistment Commissioning Program. They were going to take me out of the enlistment and put me in college and have me come back as an officer. At the same time we had just been transferred from Cherry Point, North Carolina to Yuma, Arizona.
Little did we know there had been a circumstance there with hazing. This was right around the time of the movie with Tom Cruise called “A Few Good Men”. So hazing is like what fraternities do and all that fun stuff. But we didn’t know that since that event occurred they said the next time something occurs like this we are going to set a precedent.
We didn’t know that. We picked up a couple of dead beats that got passed over to our platoon and everyone wanted to get this one kid. I didn’t and wasn’t for that stuff. Basically I was there to make sure it didn’t get out of hand.
To make a long story short, I made sure it didn’t get out of hand but everybody that was there was busted including me. So I went in the matter of one sentence from being the top person in that whole base basically to being demoted.
Internally to be at the top of your game and have the carpet pulled out from under you and have the package ripped up was probably the toughest point in my life.
Because, I knew that I had done good and physically stopped this from getting where it shouldn’t have been. But I also chose to be there. I own the fact that I was there and also own the fact that I did make sure this kid didn’t get harmed in any way.
But, I chose to be there. By choosing to be there I chose to be demoted. It took me a long time to own that. So that was the lowest point. I was able to overcome it and getting meritorially promoted once again.
It took me a couple of months to work through that. I had to learn it is what it is. I was worrying about it but knew there was nothing I could do about it other than be the best that I can today. I decided to be the best that I could and I ended up getting promoted again after that.
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