[00:00:00] Gino Wickman: Welcome to the Shed and Shine podcast. I am Gino Wickman. This is where Rob Dube and I help driven entrepreneurs shed their shit, free their true selves, unlock true entrepreneurial freedom, and shine. We truly appreciate you taking the time to spend with us and we hope to make a huge impact on you.
Hi, I'm Gino Wickman, and I'd like to welcome you to my first ever Shed and Shine podcast riff. This inaugural riff is going to be all about creating context. And in future riffs, I will go much deeper. Let's start with what is a riff? It is where I simply share a 10 to 20 minute thought with you about shedding and shining. I started doing these riffs in our True Self Mastermind and they had an impact.
It's also one of my favorite ways to communicate a concept or a message. Next, let's address why I am doing this. Simply put, I am called to. It is to help. Frankly, I don't want to share my shit. It's very uncomfortable for me. However, every time I do, I grow and grow. And others grow. So how can I not? Now let's talk about where this content and the desire to do this podcast stems from.
I am a guy who is incredibly passionate about helping entrepreneurs. For the last three decades, thirty years of my life, I have obsessed about helping entrepreneurs become successful. And in those thirty years, I have created five pieces of content that I have put out to the world to help them.
The first piece of content is called Entrepreneurial Leap. And I created that to help anyone who thinks they're an entrepreneur help determine and discover if they are. And if they are, it shows them how to start a business and how to greatly increase their odds of startup success.
The second piece of content is called Rocket Fuel. Rocket Fuel is to help that visionary entrepreneur find their integrator counterpart and join forces to help take the company to the next level.
The third piece of content I created is called EOS, or Traction. EOS is the Entrepreneurial Operating System and that helps that entrepreneur run their business like a Swiss watch.
The fourth piece of content is the EOS Life, helping that entrepreneur and all of their leaders live their ideal life.
And the fifth piece of content is 10 Disciplines, the content and the foundation of this podcast.
Well, if I'm making sense and I'm communicating well, if you look at those first four pieces of content, what it is illustrating and helping an entrepreneur do is climb the mountain. It's helping the entrepreneur get to the top of the mountain and succeed by every outer world metric. They have the stuff, they have the business, they have the people, they have the accolades.
And so they get to the top of the mountain. They've succeeded by every outer world metric. But what happens at that point for most entrepreneurs is they get there, they ring the bell, they spent decades climbing that mountain, and they feel empty. The words I hear are, “Is this all there is?” And so when they get to the top of the mountain and they're feeling that way, the aha is that it's time to now go into their inner world and look inside to find that fulfillment.
And that's what takes us to that fifth piece of content, the 10 Disciplines for Maximizing Your Impact and Inner Peace. The 10 Disciplines are all about helping you feel that fulfillment on the inside, while making an even bigger impact on the outside. And with all five pieces of content, it's just simply me teaching what I needed the most.
I have been the eye of the storm and here I am doing it again with this fifth piece of content. The purpose of this podcast is to help you free your True Self, to show that it is possible to be driven and have peace and to make an even bigger impact with that inner peace. Rob and I have experienced these benefits firsthand and want you to experience them.
We want you to join us on this journey as we are learning and growing every day. Just like you. It's important to know that this is not an EOS podcast. If you came here looking for EOS content, please go to eosworldwide.com to find a wealth of information on EOS. This content is from our book Shine, which we urge you to read.
It will really help increase your learning and growing process. So who is this podcast for? This podcast is for driven entrepreneurs who are ready to go inside to that scary place where the magic happens, where you will experience true entrepreneurial freedom. We, the driven entrepreneurs, we are all the same.
We have the same souls and it's time for us to be free. There's a movement going on out there and I want you to know you are not alone. You deserve this. What I will give you in these riffs is a very practical, simple approach to doing this kind of work. I want to start by challenging you to really understand, and then someday, share your inner world story with someone you love. I will start by sharing mine in the hopes that it will motivate you to do the same.
I'm first going to share my outer world story, then I'm going to share my inner world story. And so my outer world story is that of being a young entrepreneur-in-the- making. I was a mislabeled derelict. I barely graduated high school with a solid 2.3 GPA. I could not wait to get out of academia. I did not go to college.
I just wanted to go to work and make money. And so I went to work. I set a goal for myself to make $50,000 a year by the time I was 25 years old. That was a lot in the mid eighties. I ended up making a hundred grand. I doubled my goal, I hit my goal, and I doubled it. I then took over a family business at 25 years old.
I took on a big turnaround, which I didn't realize needed a turnaround, but once I did, I really felt I could save it. And in three years I turned that business around. I ran it for a total of seven years and then we decided it was time to sell. We successfully sold the business. I stayed on for a year and a half to transition in the new leadership team out of Virginia.
And then I retired from the company. I then set off to pursue my passion that I realized was helping entrepreneurs. And over a five year period, I created what is now EOS. I then took EOS to the world with my partner Don Tinney, and at 50 years old we decided it was time to sell. We successfully sold the business, and I sit here today with EOS now being used by over 250,000 companies all over the world.
I've sold over two and a half million copies of my books. EOS has made a huge impact. In addition to that, I have family and friends who I love deeply and who I believe love me. It's been a pretty good outer world story.
Now let me share with you my inner world story, which is very, very different. My inner world story is made up of a lot of pain and trauma. I moved nine times by the time I was ten. I always wore that as a badge of honor, but I realize how I always felt unsettled as a result of that. I was sexually abused at age six and seven by two older boys in the neighborhood and I always felt such shame my whole life around those experiences.
I was a tiny, creative, highly sensitive kid. As a result, I was picked on and bullied a lot, and so I always felt unsafe. Well, at 15 years old, when alcohol touched my lips for the first time, and thank God it was never a problem for me, but what alcohol did at that point is it numbed me. It numbed my pain.
And at that point, when I learned how to numb my pain, my ego and I joined forces to create the perfect persona and package to protect me from ever feeling that pain again. And at that moment I set out with the tough guy image that I created, just basically working my butt off to prove that I was okay to the world.
And so for the next 35 years, that persona served me well. At ages 21, 25, 33, however, I lost all of my money. Age 33 was the worst of it, when I had achieved my goal of becoming a millionaire at 31 years old, and unfortunately I was flat broke and $200,000 in debt at 33 years old with a five year old, an eight year old, and a half a million dollar house.
With that said, shoot forward in time. I sold EOS Worldwide. I was about 52 years old at the time, so this is about four years ago. I was sitting there, looking back, and kind of celebrating my life and my successes. And it was that moment that I got to the top of the mountain. I rang the bell that I can only describe as an awakening where all of that pain and trauma that I had buried for so long just came rushing up.
There's a great quote by Dr. Douglas Brackmann, the author of Driven, who says,”The trauma comes up when we are safe.” And that makes so much sense. It made so much sense because at that moment I felt safe and it came rushing up. Dr. Doug Brackmann works with Navy SEALs and he talks about how the Navy SEAL doesn't experience the trauma on the battlefield.
They experience the trauma when they come home and they're sitting on their couch and they're safe. And I realized I was at home, I was on my couch, and I was safe. And I realized that I have been fighting a war, a battle, for 35 years. And it all came rushing up. The universe basically just hit me over the head with a 2x4 and said, It's time to go inside.
And that's what I've been doing for the last 4 years. So I have been on this journey for the last four years of going inside and shedding my shit and finding incredible inner peace. I urge you to tell your inner story someday to someone who you trust and love to release it. I share my inner story to release it, to let it go so that it no longer has a hold on me.
And I urge the same for you. I will do a much deeper dive into telling your inner story in a future episode but this is just the jumping off point. In future podcast episodes, we will go deep into the 3 Discoveries for Freeing Your True Self and the 10 Disciplines for Maximizing Your Impact and Inner Peace.
The 3 Discoveries are the what, they’re going to help illustrate the what, the end game. And the 10 Disciplines are the how to free your True Self. I'm looking so forward to diving into that with you. What we offer here is a safe space to go deep because there aren't too many of those out there. What I can tell you is that this content works.
Here's what this journey has done for me. And so ironically, Rob and I just did a long form interview for our book Shine for the audio version of the book. And as part of the interview, Rob does a lot of research and he reached out to my family, both my wife and both kids, my daughter and my son. And he simply asked them what's different about Gino in the last four years.
And here are the words they used. They said that I am more calm, more patient, loving, open, that I'm freer, happier, more present. I receive love now. I'm more inspirational and I'm less judgmental. Wow. Be still my heart. I feel more human than ever. I look back and I realize I was a machine for those 35 years.
I believe that I'm making a bigger impact. And I'm more peaceful. My central nervous system is a lot less amped up. And this is my wish for you. I welcome you to this journey. I look forward to growing with you and I'll see you on the next episode.
Thank you for listening in today. We truly appreciate you taking the time to spend with us and please tune in for the next episode. Until then, if you'd like to see where you are on your True Self journey, go to shedandshinepodcast.com to take the True Self Assessment and receive personalized guidance. If you're all ready to begin your inner world journey with Rob and myself, please join us for the next round of the 10 Disciplines Group Coaching Program. We wish you all the best in freeing your True Self. Stay focused and much love.
