Positive Mindset Strategies For Personal Growth With Rob Smith
Aug 31, 2021
We might be at different stages in our lives, but we all need to be positive despite the challenges we encounter. How do we implement that in our daily lives? Join your host Ryan Weeden as he talks with Rob Smith about instilling a positive mindset to achieve your goals. Our guest has a passion for helping and transforming people’s lives. For him, it’s the true payoff that touches him more than anything being able to shed a few words of experiences and inspiration that leads people to take the right direction. Tune into this episode and enrich your mindset with positivity because it’s contagious!
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Positive Mindset Strategies For Personal Growth With Rob Smith
I'm excited to be back. I feel like I say that a lot but there has been a lot going on in our lives. We had this great event in Clearwater Beach, Florida called HERO, a game-changing and life-changing experience. With me, I have my best friend, Rob Smith, who was one of the biggest helps in putting the show together. He is also the future COO hopefully of Masters of Balayage. Welcome to the show, Rob.
What's up? It's good to be here.
It's funny seeing you now because you've got this gaming headset on. You're going to be playing Call of Duty or something. Your big dog is in the background. What's up, Bo? Dogs are welcome on this show.
Nobody wants to mess with a positive person.
It's my motivation.
Our event wrapped up. We had Saturday and Sunday. This event was incredible. If you saw it on social media, you probably had some serious FOMO. If you were there, you're going into this week with supercharged energy and we hope that it was a life-changing experience. I know on my end and probably for you too, Rob, there's a little bit of a hangover at the end of it where you have all this build-up until the event. It finally happens and then it's over. You're like, "The weight has been lifted now." How do you adjust to going back into like, "What's the next project?"
One of the things about the show that you do is what you pour on. You want to pour everything out and connect with the audience to where everybody feels like it's unity. While you're doing it, you don't realize how much you're exerting from yourself when you're on stage because it's coming from the heart and you're giving it everything you can to the audience. You want them to feel what you feel but you've got to be in touch with them. You got to be in tune and you do that for days straight. When you're done, what also leaves you after you're done since you've poured everything into it is your body takes a toll on you, too.
You need recuperation afterward because you put everything into it. If you ever go on stage, if you don't feel that afterward, you didn't put everything into it. It's a good thing you feel that. That means you gave it all. You wanted everybody to feel what you were trying to say. If you can walk off that stage, knowing that you at least need two days to recuperate, you've done the job.
You'll like this analogy. If you're a sports guy, you took it to a whole different level than I did. I was a sports guy too for most of my adolescence where coaches would tell you, "Go out there and leave it on the field. Leave everything you got on the field." It's like this too you leave it on the stage.
Positivity is powerful and contagious. You can spread it to other people.
I couldn't have said that any better. That's true. That's basically what's going on out there. In the sports world for any of those sports enthusiasts that read here, as soon as those lights come on, you step on the field, you do not want to step off that field knowing that you didn't leave everything out there. That's exactly right. When you leave that stage, that is your field. You left it all on the field and that's all you could do. That's well-said.
This is our second HERO event. The first one was in 2020, two weeks before the world shutdown from COVID and then we had this next one. We leveled up so much to have this experience. We had more people. We doubled everything from capacity to revenue, to the investment into it as well. Instead of having one person doing all of the AV and the lights, only one person could do so much. We needed a team in 2020 and 2021. We had a team in 2021. We didn't in 2020. Leaps and bounds, it was better in 2021 that we learned from 2020.
You and I have both grown so much since then. We were both on stage in 2020. Although we went out there and did the best we knew how to do it, we went out there and left it all on the stage. In 2021, I feel like we had evolved so much even in just a year. We're watching you on stage and even me going out on stage in 2020 versus going into 2021, I feel like we crushed it. I feel good about it. We felt more free and comfortable. In our audience, we were focused on changing their lives and giving them an experience.
In the first year, we went out there and did it, we had this vision of what we wanted it to be and what we wanted to send us a message but we hadn't experienced it yet. We saw it in our minds. We saw what we wanted to do. In our minds we knew how we wanted the crowd to receive it but we weren’t quite sure how the crowd would receive it because nobody has done that in this industry if you think about it. We wanted to take them on an inspirational path. It has a little bit of technical with hair and stuff but it was more getting in touch with your inner hero and becoming inspired.
We went through our first year and the results were phenomenal. It's nowhere near what we were able to do in the second year but what changed in the second year as we took everything we learned from the first year and how the crowd reacted. We took that and made it even better. We knew that there was a place for this message. Now that we figured it out that this is great for the industry and people who are going through some challenging times or maybe they had gone through challenging times, the message was set in and that's what we wanted.
A business model or whatever you might want to call it, our intentions were pure and they always remain pure. That is to take that humble approach you talked about and instill it in others. We might all be at different salons or stages in our life. If you bring a group of people together, what power and energy was in that room and they all connect at the same level, it's a revival. You could go out and take on the world after you lived there. That's what it needs more of. I'm looking forward to 2022.
I was thinking too we needed that first one though in order to have this event in 2021. If we had tried to plan to have this event first, we probably would have waited until it was perfect. It might have kept pushing it off procrastinated and we wouldn't have learned from those initial mistakes. It could have potentially been a big bust if we had tried to go too big and fast. There are a couple of lessons here. One, you always say, "Grow methodically, not radically," which is great. You learn as you go and then two, progress over perfection. Get started. How many gems are we throwing out here now?
Welcome to the gem show.
It's glittering. There are gems everywhere.
I hope every time that people see me and you together, we're involved in something or wherever they see our faces, they know there's the inspiration behind it. There's this humbleness of inspiration because we truly want to be different. We're not out to have everybody stare at us. Everybody goes left as you say but we want to go right. That's what we want to do. We want to pioneer this.
I had an idea for a podcast name, R-Squared. You put me and you together just like two people find each other and together they create magic, exponential growth and change. That's R-Squared. For those readers out there, what we're trying to do is we want to have our own show aside from The Hairprenuer Show here because this is geared toward hairdressers but we also want to have one that helps non-industry-specific people achieve their dreams, follow their dreams and their own soul's path. We're coming up with trying to find the direction to go with that. We could be onto something there.
It's genius and that's it. That also means double the energy. Before you start putting that show you listen to, you better be prepared for energy because that's exactly what's going to come from it.
One of the ways we tap into that is Celsius, which we're not quite sponsored by them yet but hopefully we'll be sponsored by them soon because it's a delicious energy drink.
That's true, people gravitate. I learned from these HERO events when they see that somebody else is doing it then they feel even more compelled to say, "I can do it, too." They want to be like that person. If somebody is elevated and the next person isn't quite as elevated as that person, you'll suddenly watch them a little bit and then they'll bring their elevation up to that level because they say, "I can be like that. Let me go ahead and do that because I'm going to fit right in. That's what I want to do." It was the same thing when we were drinking this Celsius. They saw me and you drinking them. They go, "What happened to us? Where can I get one of those?" We were out of them and then we were freaking out so we didn't have enough.
We sent somebody out to find something and they came back with about fourteen.
Somebody can be the most talented individual globally, but they still need an action plan to achieve their goals.
They were pretty much all gone in two days. It's true, the humbleness of this event, the people reading some of the feedback and these wonderful people that attended, I always say it doesn't matter if we have 700 people. If we can walk away and just touch one person, we've done our job. In this case, it seems like we touched many.
It's a great feeling to know that we can go out there and spread a different type of word that this industry so desperately needs in a time like this that's inspiring and showing the light. We're in it with them together. If you keep this unity and that wood on the fire, you're going to make it through this strong and powerful. Don't allow your fire to burn out. This isn't forever.
The hardest thing to do is get started. Once you get that momentum going, a body in motion stays in motion. It's Newton's Law. It's a lot easier to keep something in motion when it's going but it's a lot harder to start from nothing and then get started again. A lot of people in their lives and I've done this in my life. I'm sure you have it sometimes, too. We start and stop until we find that fire that's going to keep us going and then we don't stop anymore. We keep going, even if it's a baby step here and there. You keep that motion moving forward and then the world starts to open up for you. New opportunities open up for you. That's when the magic happens.
You hit the nail on the head. These analogies we throw out of sports variations or something totally different are true because I was thinking the same thing. If you push a big boulder and start to push it down a hill, it's tough to push at first. It's heavy. You're pushing it. You put all your effort into it but you know if you could get it to where that hill goes downhill, that thing is going to take off and it's not going to stop. What happens when that big boulder gets rolled down the hill? You're like, "Look at it go."
What happens? Everybody gets out of their way because it's coming down hard, "Don't get in my way." It's like positivity. Once it starts, nobody wants to mess with a positive person. Let me tell you why. It’s because that positive person is going to go up to a negative person and they're going to eat their lunch. Positivity is powerful. If somebody says, "You're so positive versus negative," it's because positivity is powerful.
I got another analogy here. This is a real-life analogy for people that might not exactly understand the whole rock pushing thing. It's obvious in our heads what it means. I thought this is funny. It's like pushing furniture. You're pushing a heavy desk or dresser. You got all the clothes in it. It's heavy but you got to move it or pull it out. You're rearranging the room. You put all of your might into getting it moving.
Once you start to move it, it starts to go. It takes a lot less effort to keep pushing that giant dresser to where you want it to go. I feel like a friend like you or a coach is taking those furniture-moving pads and putting them underneath. You slide it and get success a lot faster. I've moved a lot of furniture in my life.
You need that extra help. Don't be afraid to go get it or ask for it. Don't be afraid to use those sliders. It's more simple-smart if you think about it. Utilize what's given to you. Run and feed off of that. Sometimes there's an easier method to get where we need to get. We just don't see it. Pushing that furniture sometimes for some people can be so heavy and hard. What do they do? They quit along the way when the sliders were sitting right there on the mantle. All you had to do was to grab them. You could have been there. I like it. That's well-said.
Let's take some steps back here because we jumped in all this. It has been great, spitting gems left and right. Rob Smith. Who the heck are you? I know that's like, "Where do you start with that question?" You have been a semi-professional football player and baseball player. It used to define you and then you got injured. You found yourself in the hair and distribution world. It's probably something that you've never ever thought you would see yourself doing. Tell us a bit about that.
I'm going to take it further back to define how I became this person that's always chasing after something because it might help a little bit understand my story even better. I remember back when I used to live with my mom. This goes all the way back to high school. It was her dream for me to buy her a mansion someday because she thought I was going to be this professional baseball player. That was heavy on my shoulders. Everybody, my coach used to call me the million-dollar arm. All these expectations were so heavy upon me that I felt like I must succeed in that. That's going to be my calling.
I love the sport. Don't get me wrong. I love baseball and football and all of that but I also come from a very humble beginning. A lot of people want to step on stage and realize it. I grew up working on a farm, baling hay, moving cattle and getting kicked by cows. That's how I grew up. That's all I was from. It was a small town in London, Ohio. That's all it was known for. I needed to earn money as a kid. We didn't live in the nicest area by far.
When it comes time for sports, my mom would work so hard to support me. She worked two jobs. I won't forget. She would work one job and then she would go at night and she would work at the grocery store, packaging fish. She would do whatever it took to take it. When it comes time for me to need cleats, I'll never forget the story. This is where my humbleness sat in. My mom didn't have enough money because she had to pay to play a sport back then, too. You had to pay all these things for equipment rentals and stuff like that but I didn't have cleats.
I only had a set of cleats that were in my closet. Our team is required to have all-white cleats. I didn't have white cleats. All I had was black and my mom could not afford it. These guys would come out in their cleats. This is where I had that I spoke on stage a transitional challenge in my life that changed me. I couldn't quit because of being embarrassed that I didn't have any white cleats but I was a great athlete. I knew we would figure out something eventually. I could have gone and asked people for help but I didn't do any of that. I said, "I'm going to make this happen."
The funny story about this is I found a white shoe polish. It's a true story. I sent you a picture of it when you get time to look at my cleats. I took a white shoe polish and painted my entire cleats with white shoe polish white. It worked and I played. They looked not the most fabulous white but for what I could do to get by with the time, it did the job. If you ever want to look back and get a good little laugh, you'll see me standing with my mom and there are my white shoe-polished cleats. If you zoom in, you'll see the shoe polish.
That was a moment that I said, "I'm not going to put this burden on my mom. She is doing everything she can do. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to fight through it and make this happen." I did and it worked for me. That took me on to know that I can do anything if you put your mind to it. It doesn't necessarily require money. It just requires you to constantly be thinking of, "How can I do something?" Don't shut your mind down. If somebody tells you no, "I'm going to go around." That was my mentality at a very young age, "I'm not going to be stopped."
Moving into the whole who is Rob Smith story, I went all in. I played college baseball. I ended up playing semi-professional and the same thing in football but then I got on stage in this hair industry. Never once in my entire life did I ever think that I would be in this industry but it fell on me. I had a business background going into that. My first job was leading me up to this industry. After college, I was playing baseball at the same time, I need a little extra cash. I was going door-to-door selling alarm systems, knocking on people's doors. That's where I learned to talk to people and I would hear all kinds of their stories. I did what I had to do but I wasn't going to quit.
Negativity is easier to attack than positivity. Positivity is a beast.
I would work sometimes until 8:00 at night. I'll never forget my saying, "This is Midnight Madness. We're out here now, protecting the community because it's dark and crime is out," but little did I know I'm out at nighttime too, knocking on people's doors because I had a drive. I wasn't going to quit. It was built in my blood because I knew if I quit, I could go the wrong way. That's how I decided that I'll never quit no matter what I'll do. I got into a few other business opportunities and I worked myself from the ground all the way up.
Eventually, one day, I was looking for a career change. I wanted to get into an industry that felt would never be touched. I thought of the healthcare industry but then I saw this job position opening that was for hair. I thought, "That's something that people are always going to need and are always going to want it too." I read the qualifications. I had the business aspects of the position that I wanted to apply for. I said, "I'm a long shot. I'll put it in."It's a true story.
I'll never forget the day I got a call to show up for that interview. It was at a hotel here in Orlando. I showed up in my suit and everything, business type, ready to go. This was my first time being around hairstylists. There must have been a line of probably about eight people in front of me, waiting to get interviewed. They were all dressed in T-shirts and jeans and I was in a suit. I was thinking, "I'm way overdressed. What's going on? Did I read this description wrong?" Finally, it came up to my turn for the interview and I will never forget this. I won't mention any names.
The gentleman who interviewed sat across from me. I said this and these were my opening words, " I sat here all day. I don't want to waste your time. I'm not a hairstylist. To be quite honest with you, I buy my shampoo at the grocery store. I don't know anything about it but if you want to talk business and you need me to understand business principles, P&Ls and things like that, I'm your guy." He sat there for a moment and stared at me. He pulled out this packet and it was wrapped in plastic. He ripped open this plastic and handed me this brochure. He said, "I've been waiting to hear that all day." Literally that day, I got offered the job to come into this industry and that's when everything opened up.
I was in management regionally in the US for a company and handled all of that. I became to know distributors who provide all the products to all these stylists and salons and their consultants. I would travel all around the US, doing meeting after meeting, meeting these people, walking into salons and talking to stylists. I thought, "These people are so cool, just hearing their stories." I would have never thought that I would have gone from catching a fly ball at centerfield or taking a snap up at the line of scrimmage to being in the hair industry. I wouldn't trade it for the world. This was my path and journey. It's not done yet.
Now, it's even continuing because I feel like your best days are ahead of you. You've done and accomplished so much in your life already. I know you always think about that, too. We're optimistic people. We think like our best days are yet to come because we have to think that way. If we think that it would have already passed then what's the point? What are we fighting for if our best days are ahead, our journey continues and the next chapter is starting?
You're a speaker now. You didn't even probably see yourself doing it in 2021. You lit up that stage and now you're part of a mastermind with myself and our friend, John Russo, who is a high-performance coach. We're going to change millions of lives. That's our path. That's what we love to do, being in service to others to help them succeed and see their own path so they can find success and richness in their own lives.
Those are exciting times. I didn't see myself coming down in this direction. I always knew I love to talk but I didn't know it would have the impact maybe that it helped others to see something different. I'm so humbled and grateful for that. It is my goal now to help others transform. I don't care about monetary things. My payoff is when I get to talk to somebody and see them transform. I help them as much as I can along the way. To me, that's truly the payoff and I want to hear their story afterward.
That's where it touches me more than anything. It's being able to shed a few words of experiences and inspiration that touches and transitions them in a direction they need to go. If somebody can be the most talented individual in the world but yet when they need that little bit to put an action plan into place, that's what I'm stoked about with this whole venture that we're on this mastermind and so forth. Share my energy because that's what it's going to be about. Don't listen to me because I'm warning you now, it's going to be energy. That's who I am.
Isn’t energy such a big part of success?
Yes, it’s a major part of success. To be honest with you, it gets me going every day. I've put a lot of thought into this. It's a funny point you talked about. The energy comes from positivity. Again, like I told you, the negative and positive. If you take the positive and you say, "Where did you get all the energy?" It's because the positivity is so tremendous. You keep stacking it and it exudes energy. It comes out all the time.
At a moment's notice, when something is down you can tell yourself, "I got to let all my energy." It comes right back to that positive state. You have so much control. Once you go into that positive direction, you surround yourself with those positive people. People might make fun of me sometimes because of my energy. If they do, I know why because they want it too.
It's a jealous thing, "I have my own energy but I want your energy." You're bubbling with energy all the time and confidence as well.
You don't walk around and say, "I'm so-and-so." It comes with it because I go with all the positivity. The train of thought of positivity exudes energy, which exemplifies confidence but it also attracts that circle of people. Don't go looking for it. It will find you just like we met each other. Positivity is like a magnet. When you put two positive people, they connect together. Before you know it, you have other positive magnets connecting too with you. Don't worry about like, "I've got to find somebody else who is positive." You keep on being yourself. They'll find you. Trust me.
It starts in our minds. It starts with what we tell ourselves and how we talk to ourselves. If we're negative in our self-talk, we're going to surround ourselves with negative things. We have to be positive in our self-talk. We have to observe our thoughts and make sure that what we are saying is thoughtful, optimistic, caring and kind.
Don’t judge yourself. You’re doing the best you can.
Confidence, positivity and good things to say reward each other. What I mean by that is, for every good thing you say, something good comes back to you. You may not see it but it does. You keep stacking those along the way. When somebody says something negative to you, you have a choice to make. You have a choice to say something negative back or take a positive approach to it. I guarantee you if you say something negative back then the negativity level is going to set with you onto the next place you go. You might spread negativity to somebody else but if you take that positive approach, nobody can do anything to attack positive.
It's too hard to attack positive. Attacking negative is easy. Attacking positive is a beast. Nobody wants to take that on. Remember that when you come to your next battle because you will. People do. You're going to run into somebody negative. If you go back with something positive, they don't know what to say, just sit back and watch it. They want you to say something negative because they want to continue that negative. When you kill with positive, you pour water over that inferno that they're wanting to throw all over you.
Let's wrap this up. There's so much more I want to talk to you about but we can do this on the next episode or the episode after that. You're going to come back regularly and we're going to get to know you a lot better. It's cool too because I'm getting to know you even more. We talked about a lot of business, personal growth, strategies and things but diving in even deeper are so cool. I want to ask you to give some motivation and inspiration to somebody that might be reading and thinking, maybe they just woke up, it was a real crap day and it's starting to feed into everything that they do. How can somebody quickly turn that around?
Remember this and this is what I say to myself. I don't mind sharing it, I wake up every morning and if I do feel that way, I look in the mirror and make sure that I don't judge myself. I say that a lot, "Don't judge yourself," but I always tell myself this one thing, "I have a choice. Nobody can take away my choice." I have a choice to say, "I'm going to let this affect me all day, which is going to do nothing but hurt me all day and probably others or I have a choice to look at the positive side of things, which is going to do nothing but help me all day and help others." It's as simple as that and that's all I say.
For the readers, I can't tell you how many times I've had a bad day, called Rob and he has flipped my day on a dime to like, "I feel better now. Thanks, Rob."
Anytime, that's why I'm here.
I love you. It's a great chat. Until next time.
