The Near-Drowning Story Dave Wood’s Brother Told Before He Ever Took the Stage

Before Dave Wood ever walks onstage at Generation Hero, someone else takes the mic first. His older brother. Six years older, to be exact, and the first thing he tells the room is that he has a lot of dirt on Dave and he’s not making any promises about keeping it to himself. It’s a strange way to open a mastermind built around breakthroughs, obstacles, and a firewalk later that night. But it works, because before anyone in that room takes advice from a man who built a company out of nothing, they get to hear what nothing actually looked like.

William Wood is not a hype man reading a script. He is an international trainer of NLP and hypnosis who has worked with more than five thousand people across several countries, and he tells the crowd flatly that his job this weekend is the mindset piece underneath everything else on the agenda. Before he gets to any of that, though, he wants the room to understand who is about to walk down those stairs.

What does the room actually know about the man they came to learn from?

Most of what a crowd like this has seen is the finished version. The stage, the mansion, the company with his name attached to it. William watched the part nobody films. He watched his brother flunk out of college, come back from a mission with nowhere to live, and move into William’s own living room with William’s wife and three kids already there. He watched him get a job that finally paid enough to rent an apartment of his own, then walk away from it anyway because his heart wasn’t in it, then move back in with their parents after that fell apart too. William isn’t telling this story to make Dave look good. He’s telling it so the next two days land differently, and he tells it right after describing a brother who lost jobs, lost housing, and kept starting over anyway.

Why does a near-drowning matter more than a resume?

The story William tells next isn’t about business at all. It’s about a hot day at Lake Powell, William holding his two small children in his arms while wading into the water, the ground disappearing under him without warning, and going under with a child in each arm. What happened next is the part he wants the room to actually sit with.

without a hesitation it was Dave who went into the water and grabbed ahold of me and swam, helped me swim my babies out of the deep.

That’s not a metaphor William is stretching to fit the moment. It’s the literal thing that happened, and he says it plainly: a man who has more than once, without thinking twice, put himself in the way of danger for the people around him. It’s also, not incidentally, the exact posture Dave is about to ask this entire room to trust for a weekend built around breakthroughs neither William nor Dave can guarantee will be comfortable.

What’s the actual reason any of this works on people who’ve heard pitches before?

Every person in that room has been sold something before. Most of them can smell a performance from across a hotel ballroom. What William offers instead is the thing a performance can’t fake: specific, uncomfortable detail about a real person’s real collapse and real recovery, told by someone who was there for the whole thing, not the highlight reel. He admits there have been rough patches along the way inside the company itself, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. What he insists on is the part underneath the rough patches. William says it plainly: “I know that his heart is for the new person.” He means the person sitting in that room right now, wondering if any of this is going to work for them the way it apparently worked for him.

That’s the real setup for everything else this weekend. Not a resume. Not a highlight reel. A brother standing at the bottom of a staircase, telling a room full of strangers exactly what he watched happen to the person about to walk down it, so that when the breakthroughs and the fire and the boards show up later, nobody in the room has to take any of it on faith. They’ve already heard what the man leading them through it has actually survived.

You don’t have to take William’s word for how it all played out from here. Watch the full introduction, and everything Dave says once he takes the stage, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Hey everybody, they forced me to get on camera again real quick. Last time you guys are going to have to see me, I promise. Right now, I'm going to go upstairs to where Dave Wood and William Wood, his brother, are. And I'm not sure who's coming down first, actually, but we're actually going to officially get started, so come on, follow me.

Hey, can I get by? Okay, security, I have clearance, I swear to God I do. Okay, so, obviously, very long stairs. This is for visual effect.

Extremely long walk. I'm already out of breath. All right, we're going to go up here and see what kind of magic Mr. Wood, well, Mr.'s Wood, I guess.

Which way am I going, Justin? I actually don't know. This way? All right, so I've got people telling me where to go, because I can't be relied on to figure that kind of thing out for myself.

This way? This is it? Ah, the room that says, but I'm terrible with directions. That's the truth of the matter.

So let me make sure they're closed. This is what I'm dealing with, all right? So, William Wood, I'm going to hand this mic over to you. We're going to follow you down.

We're going to go down the stairs. Oh, they don't need a mic. I might, yeah. Wow, all right.

So here's the deal. We were just meditating together. We were doing group balance. It was very holistic.

I expected them to not have clothes on, to be honest with you. We quickly put the clothes back on before you were in here. We did, we did, yeah. So Will's going to start it up, because Dave needs a little bit of time to center himself.

Yeah, I'm going to continue standing on one leg for a while. So we're going to go down and let Will crank it up, and then we'll hear from Dave in maybe 10, 15 minutes. And you're already going into a trance. 24-7.

So let's go down this way, Mr. Wood. Sure. So actually, on the way down, let's just talk a little bit about your Dave's older brother.

I'm Dave's oldest brother. By how many years? Six years. Wow.

So hopefully he got a lot of noogies, shoulder squats, hold downs, you know, where you hold him down, and it's like… He missed out on a lot of that. His older brother, Mark, got a lot of that. All right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Hey, so everybody. We're coming down the stairs right now with William Wood, and since I know you guys can hear me down in the main area, if you'd make a little bit of noise for him, just a little bit of applausing, clapping, nothing, nothing.

Is the sound on here? A little bit of energy in the room? There we go. William Wood doing it all for you.

There you are, sir. Thank you. This is amazing. That's not coming from me, but it's good to see everyone who's excited to be here.

Yeah, we've got people coming in from all over. And I'm excited to be here as well. Now, I see a lot of familiar faces, a lot of you already know me, and then there's some of you who don't know who the heck I am. So I am David's older brother, which means I got a lot of dirt on him, right?

And so over the weekend, maybe we'll even share a little bit. But yeah, share right now. Let's get started, right? Let's not hold back.

But first off, I just wanted to take a minute and just say thank you to all the EN staff. I mean, isn't this place incredible? Yeah, everyone, huge round of applause for the EN staff. And I mean, Dave, look at this man.

Look at this mansion. Isn't this great? Like, who is like just stoked to be here for like a few days? Yeah, huge round of applause.

But more importantly, I also know that at home that all of you have loved ones or family or other people that maybe had to stay behind or are having to take care of pets or people. I have five little ones that are at home. And so I just wanted to say that for all of you and all the people that are supporting you so that you can be here. Let's have a huge round of applause if we could.

Round of applause. Woohoo! Yeah, for all the people supporting us. And then also, I just want to do one last shout out, and that is for everybody, everybody who's at home on the live stream, sincerely, thank you.

It is the reps in the field that make it possible for all of us to be here, and none of us would be here without the support of our team. So huge, huge round of applause for everybody at home. Truly, thank you. Thank you for being here.

Thank you. So this is exciting. Oh my gosh! Like I was looking right over the top of your head there, Mike.

It's good to see you, man. How are you? Good. This is good stuff.

So my name is William Wood, and for those of you who don't know me, I'm Dave's older brother, but not only am I his older brother, I am an international trainer of NLP and hypnosis. In fact, I've just been on an international training tour right now, right before I got here. So I specialize in helping people do individual breakthrough work. Some of you have been able to work with me one-on-one.

Some of you have seen me train in a group. And the reason that I'm here is to bring a mindset component to what we've got here. Because what all of you bring is you bring an incredible expertise. There isn't a person that made it into this room without having a massive expertise already in marketing, and you bring something important to what we have going on here.

What I have to add is I have to add lots of experience. I've worked with more than 5,000 people all over the planet. I've trained in several countries. And all over the United States.

And I'm going to bring my depth of experience into what we have today so that we just have an incredible experience. Because our number one goal is that by the time that we leave, that we all have a breakthrough. Not only in terms of knowledge, not only in terms of connections, but that truly our minds and our hearts change. I measure what I do by one thing.

And that is, are there people involved? And can I help people with their hearts and with their minds? And with their minds. And so truly what I hope to bring to everyone this weekend is a major, major breakthrough.

So raise your hand if you're ready for a breakthrough. Yeah. Woo! Yeah.

That's right. We're all ready to take things to the next level. We're all ready to really take our lives just exactly where we want to go. And the reality is, is that whether you've come here live or whether you are now watching this on the live stream, that each of you has a reason for being here today.

And that's why we're here. We're here. We're here. We're here today.

Each of you has brought your own set of struggles. Each of you has brought your own set of accomplishments. And each of you has really brought your own set of experiences into what is Empower Network. And so we say, welcome, welcome.

Here we are. We are ready to take it to the next level. Now I want to tell you a little bit about Dave. So can I just start by like sharing some like inside scoop?

Is that all right? Yeah. Right. So.

Juicy stuff. Yeah, I know. Like the juicy stuff. Just as we're getting started.

Dave, when Dave talks about being homeless, sometimes I think that there's a, there's a disconnect because people haven't actually seen that. All they see is they see the successful Dave. And because I'm his brother, I saw him go through his own process. I watched him flunk out of college.

I watched him come, come back from an LDS mission and be homeless. In fact. When Dave came back, he lived in my living room for a while because he didn't have a place to live. And so it was me.

And at the time, three kids and Dave hanging out in the living room. Right. And, and my wife still loves him, which is, which is like amazing. Right.

And, um, and of course I am the one that's responsible for recruiting me into Amway. Right. So like, yeah, I just want to say thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And, and that's why they brought a whiteboard out and Dave hasn't come down yet is because we're actually all getting an Amway today.

Right. Yeah. It's going to be awesome. Right.

I'll be spinning circles. Right. So a little SAA. Yeah.

Isn't that awesome? Yeah. So it's going to be, it's going to be a good time. But Dave and I would actually, we'd get together, we'd put on the suits and like, I was doing like the Walmart training.

I'm like, all right, you see that guy over there? He's like super sharp. You know, together. I mean, just, we do stupid stuff together.

Really. Neither of us knew what we were doing, but we were both really excited. And one thing led to another. But, um, but truly there's a reason.

There's a reason that I'm here. If I didn't believe in this, I wouldn't be here. If I didn't believe in the mission of Empower Network, I couldn't be here. It's the way I work.

I'm a mission driven guy. I was a corporate guy. I have an MBA. I worked in the corporate world in marketing for a long time.

I did well. I was good at what I did. I hated it. Right.

And I liked the company. I liked the people I worked with. It just, my heart was in it. It was like part of me felt like it was dying as I was there.

And so for me today, if my heart's not there, I can't go there. And so the very fact that I'm standing here, I'm just telling you that my heart's in it. And the reason that my heart's in it. My heart can be in it is because I know my brother as well as I know any other living human being.

And this is a true story. I know Dave very, very well. And I've seen him through his downs and through his ups. I saw him when he was literally penniless and I was providing for his shelter and for his food.

And I also saw him go through the ups and downs struggles of getting a job and losing a job. I remember when he was hired. Finally. Finally.

In a job that like, you know, paid him enough that he could get his own apartment. And there was this little job, there's a couple of them. One was with the USAA, one was with this mortgage lending place. And I remember I helped him get the job at the mortgage lending place.

I opened a door for him that led to one contact to another and he got this job and it was like finally he was making like $35,000 a year, right? And then he came to me and he's like, Will, I think I'm going to quit. I can't do this. I'm like, Dave, you're never going to make it, man.

You flunked out of college, you know. And, and, you know, I was worried about it. I was worried about him. And so I watched him go through all those developmental stages and then get his job, you know, working just barely making enough money to survive in Hawaii, lose that job and have to move back in at my, at my parents' house.

And I watched him move out of that into his first real big breakthrough. And so I want to say that the transformation is real, the stories are real and there's more to his character than that. Can I tell you just a little about his character? Yeah.

When, when he was in this stage when he was living in Arizona. Yeah. And I think he had just moved out of our house into an apartment. He'd gotten some job that he hated that was paying, barely paying the bills.

And I brought him up to Lake Powell. It was my mom, my brother Dave, I think, I think my brother Mark Aki may have been there as well. Like, I honestly can't remember. But I do remember that Dave was there.

And the reason that I remember Dave was there is that I, my, my, my babies were all small. Now my oldest is 18 years old and she's getting ready to, she's applying to college. I can't even believe that. But no.

And those times I could hold my little ones in my arms and some of you know what that's like to have little ones that you still hold in your arms, right? And so I had, I had my daughter Hannah, now 18, but then itty bitty in my right arm and I had my son Andrew in my left arm and we had waded out in, into the lake and it was a hot summer's day, it must have been 100 degrees plus outside. And I was walking along with Dave and my mom and all of a sudden the, the ground just cut away from me. And I had a child.

In each arm. And I went under the water. And and without a hesitation it was Dave who went into the water and grabbed ahold of me and swam, helped me swim my babies out of the deep. And so literally we're talking about a man who not only metaphorically but literally not only saved my life but my baby's life.

Because I couldn't swim with a child in each arm. And so he's responsible for saving my life. Now. And this is quite as near death as, as Justin's story.

But this is a man who on more than one occasion has without thought risked his life to, to save those around him. And we come, we come from a family that has a strong, strong ethic and value. I also get to watch a lot of what happens behind the scenes. I see a lot of things that other people don't see.

I don't see everything, but I see how he literally is constantly working to improve the processes, and the internal strategies of the company to make sure that things work. There have been a few speed bumps, right? Can we be honest about that? Like right away?

Okay, raise your hand if you've noticed that there's been a few speed bumps. Come on. Like we are in a no BS zone right here, right? It's like there have been a few speed bumps along the way and some of the processes haven't always worked right.

And yet I know that his heart is for the new person. His heart is to reach down and to pull us out of the deep. And to, and to bring us to safety. Because there's a reason.

That this company was formed and there's a reason that we're all here. And the reality is we could all be somewhere else, right? This is a successful room. And so my brother is the man of the hour.

He is the one who launched the vision of the company. And he's the man who not only, not only is responsible for Empower Network, but he's responsible for the vision that's going to pull us forward to the next level. So. Let's give him a big round of applause.

Let's welcome up Dave.