Mike Hobbs on the Foreclosure, the Bell’s Palsy, and the Daily Habit That Followed

You have sat across from your own kids or your own spouse and quietly blamed something else for why the bills weren’t covered again this month. Your sponsor, the market, your job, maybe even your faith. Mike Hobbs stands on stage in front of five thousand people and admits that he did exactly that, for years, until his own body forced the question he had been avoiding, and he tells the room a story he says he has never told anyone but his wife.

An ex-military veteran and a committed Mormon who is upfront that he does not drink, smoke, or touch caffeine, Hobbs opens with his daughter teasing him about his crooked smile before turning the joke into the real story behind it.

What does it actually take to stop blaming everyone else for where you are?

In 2009 Hobbs and his wife were four months behind on their mortgage, borrowing from family they could never repay, and eventually lost the house to foreclosure. They moved into a cheap apartment without enough money for food, and their church ended up covering their utility bills. Hobbs says the stress reached a point where he stopped wanting to live. One morning, after telling his wife he was too angry at God to go to church with her, he woke up with his face completely paralyzed. Bell’s palsy, the doctor called it. Hobbs reads it differently.

I believe it was our God slapped me in the face, and he said, take responsibility for your life. You are responsible for your failures. You are responsible for your success.

That is the pivot the whole session turns on. Not a new tactic, not a new opportunity, but a decision to stop assigning his situation to his sponsor, his wife, or God, and to own it instead. He still smiles slightly crooked today, and he tells the crowd he is grateful he did not get hit any harder than that to learn the lesson.

What happens when you turn a company system into your own daily habit?

Once Hobbs took responsibility for his results, he needed something repeatable to build on, so he took the eight core commitments David Wood and David Sharpe were already teaching and reworded them slightly as his own personal daily assignment, running a webinar for his team every single day for a year. He is candid that in the beginning nobody on his team was succeeding. He kept plugging people back into the same daily action anyway. The people who actually did it, not the ones who asked him to skip straight to a shortcut, are the ones whose incomes he now tells stories about on stage, one sponsoring the next in a chain that started with a single handshake at a low entry level and a look in someone’s eyes that told him they meant it.

What does commitment look like when there is no money and no time to spare?

The detail Hobbs says he has never shared publicly involves his wife, nine and a half months pregnant with their son, thirty minutes from going into labor while he was set to run a webinar just to cover rent. He offered to cancel it. She refused.

As Hobbs tells it, she said, “no, we need to make this money, you do the webinar, I’ll be fine.” He ran it, made just enough to get them through, and they welcomed their son shortly after. He is open that the years of financial strain cost him real time with his children, and that the difference this year was not a new opportunity landing in his lap, it was the daily habit finally compounding into something durable enough to stop missing days with his family altogether.

Whatever your own version of that debt or that doubt looks like right now, whether it is a bank account, a marriage under strain, or a faith you are quietly angry at, Hobbs is not selling a shortcut around any of it. He is describing what happened when he stopped blaming it and started showing up for the same simple habit every day, and let that habit outlast the hardest season of his life.

The full session goes further than what is above, including more of the team stories Hobbs built from that first daily webinar. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Awesome. Thank you to all the plants in the audience. You guys were great too. Give it up for them.

Yeah, they were great. Awesome, man. We're going to continue the show. You guys ready for a couple more?

Yes. Awesome. Your next speaker, inspirational guy. He's an ex-military veteran.

He's been working for himself since 2007. And last month, he banked over $42,000. Let's give a nice warm welcome to Mr. Mike Hobbs, everybody.

Give it up for him. Mike. This is awesome. This is awesome.

I saw Dave say, get money. Everyone say, get money. I want everyone to do that because I just want to see how that feels. So if you're excited about Empower Network, yell, get money.

Awesome. I never would have thought I would be on stage with 5,000 people when I joined Empower Network a year ago. This has definitely been. Yeah.

A blessing to my life. And that brings me, I just want to tell you a little bit about who I am, my background, because I'm a real religious guy. We have the Daves come up here. We have other people, or Tony Rush.

Doesn't believe in that, right? But I am a religious guy. And the cool thing about Empower Network, the cool thing is you can be whoever you want to be. You can be religious.

You can be not religious. You can do what you want. And that's what I truly feel we should all be like. We should accept everybody.

Because you know, Jesus, you guys always know, he doesn't judge people like David said. But I'm a religious guy. I'm actually Mormon, by the way. And we don't drink.

We don't smoke. We don't commit adultery. We don't sleep before marriage. We don't even drink.

We don't even drink caffeine. So the 9.30 party tonight is probably not for me, right? But we'll be there just to network and hang out with all you guys. It's a wonderful company.

But the reason I tell you that, the reason I tell you this, is because I was actually in the breakout room with my daughter. I don't know if she's in the crowd right there. And she was making fun of my smile. She was like, he smiles crooked.

He smiles crooked. And she was telling everybody this. He has smiles crooked. It's from the military.

And I was like, no, it's actually not from the military. And I'm actually going to share why my smile is crooked here for a second. I've never shared this with anybody. My wife is the only person who knows this story.

Thank you. And I buried her. Hi. Hi.

Hi. And the reason it's crooked is because in 2009, we literally, you know, when you say people struggle, that's, I don't even think that you can explain my situation at that point. You know, we owned a house, we were four months behind on the mortgage, we had to borrow, you know, money from my mother-in-law's mom, she's actually here right now, which we were never able to pay back because she passed away. I feel bad about that, you know, just to catch up on our mortgage.

We lost that house, foreclosure, you know, and we just racked up the debt, we racked up the debt. I was so committed to making the business work, I did not want to work for somebody else. You know, I wanted to be my own boss, people said, go back to school, get a job, and, you know, I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that.

I knew that's not what I wanted to do. I knew that's not what I wanted to do. Not only did we go into debt, you know, we had to move to a crappy apartment, we didn't have money for food, we actually literally had a food order from our church that came over, most embarrassing thing ever, went to our bishop, they had to pay for our utility bills, they had to pay for our Verizon bills. They couldn't pay for our mortgage because, you know, you can't do that.

But it really was a trying time in my life, so we were so stressed out, you know, we were literally stressed to the bone. I mean, you couldn't get more stressed than that. I actually got to the point, and the reason I brought up religion is because one day my wife came up to me, and she's like, let's go to church. And I was so stressed.

Broke, didn't have money, lost our house, and I didn't know who to blame, so I blamed God. I blamed my sponsor. I blamed everybody in my life. I just, I kind of lost all, you know, I really didn't want to live at that point.

I was very, very frustrated, very, very stressed, and I told my wife, I'm not going to church. You go by yourself, I'm not going. If he really loved us, he wouldn't put us in this situation. And that was really hard for me because that's my life.

We were married in the temple, and, you know, that was my life, and I blamed him. And you know what? I woke up the next morning, and my face was completely paralyzed. Bell's palsy.

And because of the stress, you know, the doctor said it was from stress, but you know what I really believe it was? I believe it was our God slapped me in the face, and he said, take responsibility for your life. You are responsible for your failures. You are responsible for your success.

It's not my fault. It's not your wife's fault. It's not. It's not anybody's fault but you.

And when I really realized I needed to take responsibility for my actions, my struggles, where I was, I made it happen, and I'm so glad he didn't punch me in the face. But yeah, I got it back mostly. You know, you can tell I'm smiling sometimes, you know, so I'm not smirking at you, you know, when we're in pictures. But I tell you that.

I tell you that story because it was a real big impact on my life, and I can go on and on about how much money we're making now, and all the success that we're having, but you know what really makes me happy? When I see my team succeed, I've been holding a daily webinar every day for a year, and at first, nobody was succeeding, you know, just like normal. I kept plugging them in. Plugging them in.

Dave and Dave said, do the eight core commitments, guess what I made my daily assignment? The eight core commitments. I just reworded it a little bit different to kind of trick them, but trick them into doing it. But they did it, and you know what?

I had the privilege of sponsoring people like Kevin Souza, I don't know where you're at, where he met his brother that he never knew he had from a blog post. I had the privilege. I had the privilege. I had the privilege of sponsoring someone named Robert Brown, I don't know where you're at Robert.

He had, I met him in San Diego, he was at the $25 level, the $25 level, I shook his hand and he just had this passion, he had this belief in his eyes, and I believed in him that he can make it happen, and not only is he all in now, he had $11,000 a month four months later. He had $10,000 in his business. He sponsored a guy named Travis Holder, who had an $8,000 a month just last month, and he quit his job. Travis sponsored a guy five months ago, John Penberthy, $35,000 in February.

And these are short periods of time. This is four or five months into the business. So, I had the privilege of sponsoring a guy named Travis Holder, who had an $8,000 a month just last month, and he quit his job. He's a very successful businessman.

Now, when he said he wanted to leave, he said he wanted to leave, and he said he wanted to leave, and he said he thought he was ahead of time. Now, he's in his second phase of the business. He's just like, okay, I'm leaving the business. I'm going to become a businessman, so that was the idea.

Now, he's gone. He's the head of his business. And so, he has all of these customers, all of his friends, all of his friends who are trying to do something for him, and since they see that there's no way out of their business, they're going to leave this business and stay in the business. What did they do?

They plugged into our daily action plan, which I got from Dave. They plugged in. They followed it. I told them exactly to blog daily.

Paul does, you know, we teach them exactly what Empower Network does, some people ask for the secret, we just take daily action, daily action on our, on the eight core commitments, and some people are like, I actually had the email, you know, oh, do, tell me what to do, just don't tell me the eight core commitments, I'm sure all of you, but, and I was like, well, if you're asking that question, you're not going to succeed, you know, but, but the bottom line is, I love what I do now, you know, we had a, I was calculating our income for last month, and it's kind of hard, because I have, like, because we actually formed a partnership, and we had a four, four-person partnership later, so we had to calculate, like, two accounts, or whatever, but we actually made $42,000 in Empower Network last month, and, and our life's never been better than that, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, but I really, truly love what I do, I love what I do, I do what I love with Empower Network, because we've been in a lot of things, you know, we, we actually promote a lot of things, we, we have lots of different affiliate stuff, you know, but, you know, the heart, the core of Empower Network, that is where my heart is at, because, you know, this year, I realized in 2012, this is the first year, I've been full-time since 2007, quit our job in 2007, this year was the first year we ever had to write a check for our tax, taxes, and I don't know about you, but some people think that's bad, but if you get a refund every year that you're in business, you're probably not making any money, so, so 2012 was our first year, and you know, the only difference in 2012 than everything that we've done, for five, six years, the only difference is Empower Network, the only difference, and I didn't tell him I wanted to do this, but Christy, can you bring the kids up, and and bring little Luke, too, I want to tell you a quick, bring him up, I saw Lawrence Tam do this, and I really want to do this, I want to tell a quick story about my wife, and her dedication, I don't know how this is going to go, turn out now, but, but her dedication to this business, her dedication to us, give him a hand, you know, even, even through all the hard times, even to losing our house, going in debt, not being able to pay anything off, she was there every step of the way, and one of the stories that can really, reiterate why this is, is because there was a one day, that we were literally $500 for a name, she was nine months pregnant with Owen, our two and a half year old son, she's nine and a half months pregnant, I didn't know how we're going to make the rent, or the, you know, I didn't know how to make, we're going to make the mortgage, and what happened was, I planned a webinar, and I said, okay, I'm going to sell this Facebook product, it's just going to pay me PayPal, I need to do this webinar to pay our bills, to pay for our boy, and she was so determined, like 30 minutes before the webinar, she literally went into contractions, she was ready to give birth to this, this wonderful baby boy, and we didn't have any money, no money, this webinar would pay us money, and I said, you know what, let's just forget the webinar, let's go, we'll make it happen, she's like, no, we need to make this money, you do the webinar, I'll be fine.

We did the webinar, made $750 or so, just enough to get us by, and then we went and, had our boy Owen and I'm so proud that I have a supporting wife someone that's there for me even through the hard times all through the successes that we've had you know we I missed a lot of my my child's life I missed probably three years of my daughter's life I missed almost a year of Owen's life I missed years of my wife marriage and because of Empower Network because of our focus because of this business we will never miss another day of our kids lives especially our new kid six months old thank you everybody I just want to say one last thing my prosperity prospers all 5,000 of you your prosperity prospers us have a great day have a great night