2016-02-05 Freedom & Possibilities with Paul Hutchings.wav

Paul Hutchings. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for that. Can you guys hear me OK? Wow.

You know, guys, when I first got in the network marketing profession, one of my very first mentors, he was the owner of the company that I was working with. And I had sacrificed to get to an event. I was living in a single wide trailer house at the time. And I remember sitting in the audience and the company owner said something to me that I've never forgotten. He said, Paul, well, he was speaking to the audience.

But I imagined he said, Paul. And maybe as I'm talking, you can imagine that I'm saying each of your names individually, Aaron, Kareem. He said, if you want to be successful in this business, you want to become a student of human nature. And so for the past 10 years, I've been studying human nature. And one of the things that I love about this business and about getting to events, in fact, I was driving down here from Idaho.

And we just got into Nevada. And we're cruising along the freeway looking at the beautiful desert and cactus. And this thought came to my mind. And the thought was, you know, this is like going to a family reunion. The only difference is all the people here I actually want to see.

You guys feel me on that? I actually missed a family reunion this weekend, this very weekend, to be here. Because you guys are important. And what we're doing here is important. Freedom is important.

But in any case, being a student of human nature, as you study human nature, you'll learn to identify exceptional human beings. And Chris Rushlow, can we all agree, is an exceptional human being. You learn to recognize people with heart and passion and love for others. And then we learn to model that. And I'm so grateful for Chris Rushlow because he's that type of a person.

I'm excited to share a very special message with you guys today. I was excited when I came out. You guys probably know me as like, you know, Mr. Energy. But today's going to be a little bit different.

I want to have a little bit more of a heart to heart with you guys. I want to talk about how I won my freedom. You got anyone here want to be free, financially free? Yeah? Actually, if you could throw up my slides, I want to show you guys something.

This is a picture of my family. I'm married. I've got four little boys. And I call this my freedom family because that's what we are. We're a freedom family.

Funny story, we were getting ready to come to this event. And my four little boys were getting ready to go stay at grandpa and grandma's house. And they had all their bags packed full of stuff. And I go out to my seven-year-old Camden. He's the one on the left there.

And I said, Camden, you guys all packed up and ready to go? He's like, yep. So he got my bag full. I said, what you got in the bag there, son? And he says, well, we got our money.

We got our guns. We got our bullets. And we got our handcuffs. True story. And I was like, wow.

Good luck, grandpa and grandma, for the week while we're gone. So what is that, like $650,000? But you know, it's not the money that I'm grateful for. I am grateful for the money. Let me stop myself there, not give myself a negative suggestion.

I am grateful for the money. But I'm grateful for what the money's been able to do for my family. We've been able to buy our dream home in the country, seven acres, and pay it off debt. No debt. We paid off the mortgage.

We have no debt on our cars. We have no debt. And I'm free. Every morning I wake up, and I do what I want to do. I have breakfast with my kids, like Aaron Rashkin has breakfast with his son, Legend.

I get to live my dream, and that's really important to me. And as we go through my presentation today, what I hope that you'll realize is that money is one form of riches, but it's not the only form. And as you guys study people like Napoleon Hill, W. Clement Stone, great leaders that have lived on this planet and uplifted humanity, you'll realize that there are lots of riches in life. Money is one form.

We need it to be free, and there are other forms of riches. For instance, I was sitting at dinner the other night with some of my team members, and I was talking to a guy named Robert Linden, who traveled to get here and made sacrifices to get here. And I was asking him, you know, Robert, tell me about your wife. And so he's telling me about his wife Renee, how she's a schoolteacher, and I'm watching his eyes light up as he's talking about his wife. Tell me about your kids.

He's telling me about his two boys and how one of them, of his own free will and choice, figured out how to graduate early because he hated school, and how proud Robert was of his son that he'd done that. And that's a form of riches to me, to be here with the people that we get to be here with, to look in their eyes and be impacted by them. So what I want to do today in my time is I want to share with you guys and gals the three biggest lessons that have allowed me to step into freedom. And if you were on Empower Hour call last week, one of the things that I mentioned is I got a Facebook message from someone on Facebook, and he's paid me the biggest compliment I think I could ever get in my entire life. And just out of the blue, he said, Paul, you have the soul of a free man.

And I read that, and I was like, wow, how powerful is that? And I believe it. I have the soul of a free man, but you know what? I believe we all have souls of free men and free women. And I believe that's why we're here.

We're here to learn how to take what's on the inside and bring it on the outside, and have the results in our world match up to the true potential and power we have on the inside, like Chris Rushlow was talking about. So today I want to share with you the three biggest lessons I've learned on my road to freedom. The first lesson I want to share with you in the form of a story. And I want to share with you guys, this is my dad. I've never shared this story from stage before.

This is my dad. That's me as a baby, Christmas of 1979. And I love my dad, even though he was an alcoholic, even though he was addicted to drugs, even though he left my family when I was eight years old. I love my dad. I remember loving him as a kid.

I remember looking up to him. I remember wanting to be like him. In fact, I remember drinking some of my first beers, thinking, this is making me like my dad. For some strange reason, I felt this connection. But my dad, when I was eight years old, he decided to, there's another picture of my sister and I, he decided to leave my family.

And I remember I was eight years old. And I remember the day watching him pull out of the driveway in his white Chevy pickup truck with all his stuff loaded up in the back. And the story was he was going to move to California to get a job so that he could send money back to our family and better be able to provide for us. And so I watched him leave the driveway with tears in my eyes, you know, thinking it'll be okay. You know, my dad will be back.

And within a relatively short amount of time, it was like a couple of months after he left or so, I remember my mom one day, she says, hey, Paul, can you call your dad? Because my mom, when she was eight years old, she got scarlet fever and lost her hearing. So I was responsible for making the phone calls for my family. And she says, Paul, can you call your dad? I said, yeah, I was eight years old.

That's about how old I was in that picture there. So I remember going in the back room of this double-eyed trailer house. That's actually the room we were in. And I remember picking up the phone. I remember dialing the numbers and I remember thinking, I'm gonna ask for the manager of the hotel because that was a story about what my dad had gone to be, the manager of this hotel.

So I'm feeling a little proud of my dad. So I pick up the phone, dial the numbers. I said, hey, can I please speak with the manager? Eight-year-old kid, right? And the voice on the other end of the line says, well, she's not here right now.

And I said, well, no, the manager, my dad, his name's Frank Hutchings. And the voice comes back, no, the manager of our hotel is a girl, a gal by the name of Kimberly. And when I heard that name and that response, my heart sank to the floor because that was the name of the lady that my dad had been having an affair with, cheating on my mom before he left my family. And as an eight-year-old kid, I realized that maybe my dad wasn't coming back. He'd left to go live with this other woman.

So what do you do with that information as an eight-year-old kid? I don't remember all the details, but I must've told my mom because we lost contact with my dad. He stopped calling us and just totally cut off contact. And it was tough, right? Growing up without a dad, as Aaron was talking about, similar story in his life.

I remember going to scouting events where all the kids would have their dads there and there I would be dadless. And all the other dads would try to do a good job of making me feel welcome. And hey, we're so glad you're here and stuff like that. But I just, I never felt like I fit in. So it was a little bit tough.

And people look at, you can look at that situation and say, you know what? That was a tough situation. And maybe it was. I want to fast forward and tell you guys a story about a month or so ago. I'm working from home, doing what I love to do.

And I get a phone call from one of my best friends. And he says, Paul, he goes, I want to talk to you about some stuff. I was like, okay, what do you want to talk about? He wanted to talk about life and ideas and philosophy. And I love talking about that stuff.

Cause you guys know what a philosopher is? Philosopher, the definition is a lover of wisdom. I believe you guys are all philosophers. We're all here seeking and finding wisdom so we can apply it in our life. So anyway, any case, I get on the phone, I'm walking around in my front yard, talking to my best friend for like an hour or two hours.

We're just having a great conversation. I'm walking around in circles and my eyes are closed cause I'm really like digging into it, open up every once in a while. And then all of a sudden I feel this little tug on my hand and I look down and it's my little boy, Cashton, who is grabbing my hand and he just wanted to hold dad's hand. So I grab his hand and we just walk around the yard. He didn't want me to go do anything.

He didn't want to talk to me. He just wanted to hold my hand. So we walk for a little while and then a little while later I look down and he's holding this little dandelion in his hand and he's just looking at the beauty of that flower. And I remember just being in that moment thinking, I'm so grateful to be a dad and I'm so grateful to have my freedom. Later on that day, my nine-year-old Caden, he wanted to go get this, his uncle gave him this pink Mickey Mouse guitar, not a Mickey Mouse phone.

I don't know if you guys heard that story from Aaron. If you haven't, you'll have to come to the next event. Maybe he'll tell it'll crack you guys up to call him prospects on this like literal Mickey Mouse phone but my nine-year-old son had this guitar that his uncle gave him and it was a pink Mickey Mouse guitar, no strings. And he wanted to learn how to play. And he's like, dad, can we go to the guitar store?

I'm like, okay, okay, okay. So like after this experience, a few hours later, it's like 11 o'clock. I'm like, let's go son, get your guitar. Let's go to the guitar store. So he grabs his Mickey Mouse guitar.

We go into the guitar store and I'm asking the guy behind the counter, I was like, is this guitar any good? Is it worth putting strings on? And the guy's like, you know, I'm not a big fan. It probably won't hold a tune, it's plastic. And I said, well, show us what you got.

So we walked to the back of the store and there are all these beautiful, shiny guitars along the wall. And my nine-year-old son Caden's looking at those and they sit him down and they start putting different ones in his hand. And he's just got this like look of like a kid on Christmas morning, a little bit excited, but also a little bit unsure. Like, is dad really gonna spend this money? Because there's price tags, you know, 250, $300.

And we finally find the guitar and I say, is this the one? And he's like, do you like that? And Caden's like, yeah. So I said, let's get it. So we grab it.

We grab the tuner. We grab the strap. We grab a stand. We go to the counter, slap down the card, pay for it. And we walk out.

And the second we walk out of that store, I feel these arms wrap around my body. And he says, dad, thank you. And he was so grateful that his dad was there helping him do something that he wanted to do. And I took a picture of him in front of the guitar store because I wanted to remember that moment. I had these two moments because of this business, because I've won my freedom.

And there's a great lesson in these two stories that I've just told you guys between my dad leaving me when I was eight years old and then fast forward having these experiences later on in my life. Napoleon Hill teaches, I don't know if you can see that. He teaches that in every apparent setback lies the seed of an equal or greater advantage. And I don't know how or why my dad left when I was eight years old, but I do know for some strange reason, there was a seed planted in my heart to do the best that I could to be a good dad to my future kids and to be a good husband to my future wife. So I believe this, in every apparent setback lies the seed of an equal or greater advantage.

And the other lesson that ties right into that is you get to choose, we get to choose how our past defines and refines our future. One of my old mentors used to say, all events are equal. And it baffled me when he'd say this. Like, what is he talking about all events are equal? There's great things that happen, there's bad things that, they're not all equal.

And the more I thought about it over the years, the more I've come to realize that we get to assign meaning to the events that happen in our lives. So if we've struggled in the past, we can choose to say, that means that I'm not gonna have success in the future, or we can choose to say, all the leaders struggled. Mike Hobbs' story yesterday and Christie, was that awesome or what? Struggle, right? Failure after failure after failure.

So if we've experienced some of that, my friends, we can simply assign the meaning that just means we're on the right path. And I believe that's the truth. So great lesson number one to get to freedom. Now, my freedom story. You know, I mentioned I started in a single wide trailer house.

Right around, I struggled for like four or five years, trying different network marketing opportunities, you know, going to meetings, doing what they told me to do. I was making like 300 bucks a month. So there I was jobless, living in a trailer, 300 bucks a month coming in. And my wife comes home one day from taking our new baby, who was born in December. She took him to his two week checkup and she comes home and she's just in tears.

I'll never forget the day I'm in my little teeny office with the brown paneled walls of this trailer house, trying to figure out how to generate leads. And my wife comes home with our new baby and I walk out in the living room and she's crying. And I'm like, what's wrong, honey? And she says, Kyson has a condition called craniosynostosis, which means the bones in his head are fused together, which means it's gonna require a $50,000 surgery down at primary children's hospital. Wow.

Living in a trailer, a couple of hundred bucks a month, coming in. Now my son has this thing that he's got to deal with. And I grabbed my wife and I hugged her and I said, everything's gonna be okay, honey. And then, but I didn't know if it was, right? So later on in my story, within about two weeks or so of this experience, I put my kids to bed in the back room of this single white trailer house.

And I'm tucking them in. I'd read them their bedtime stories. They'd fallen asleep. And I'm looking at these two little boys. There's one on one side of the bed, one on the other.

And they're just angelic. This is a picture, this wasn't a picture of the experience, but that's what I was looking at. That's my son, Caden. And they drifted off to sleep. And I remember tears coming to my eyes and I just broke down on my knees and started to cry.

And I prayed to God to help me find a way out of my situation. And long story short, a couple of things came to me. One thing that I wanna share with you guys is, oh, actually, let me back up here. I got an impression to start studying the book, Thinkinger Rich. Any fans of Thinkinger Rich, Napoleon Hill?

So I had been given this challenge my first year in network marketing to study the book, Thinkinger Rich. And what I'd done is I read it. And I said, that's a great book. Threw it up to the shelf, grabbed another one, read that one, grabbed another one. And so I went five years of struggling because I was reading things and not understanding them and not applying them.

Well, back when I got this prompting, I began a serious study of the book, Thinkinger Rich. And long story short, I started making money. It was like six months. I started making three grand a month. Then it went to five and 10 and 15 and 20.

But one of the things that I got out of that book was to have a vision. Napoleon Hill calls it a definite major purpose. And we've heard a lot about vision this weekend. Actually, kind of an interesting story. We have a guy on our team that sponsored 55 people in the last 45 days.

And we had him on a hangout last week because everyone wants to know what is the secret. Would you guys wanna know what he said? He got on the hangout and he said, the first thing is you guys gotta have a vision. And he said, I wanna share my vision with you. And he read his vision to the whole team and he read it with passion and enthusiasm.

And he was like, I'm gonna be a millionaire and I'm gonna be on the stage at Empower Network and I'm gonna be hugging the leaders, Dave Wood and Aaron Rashkind and Justin DiVorengi and Mike Hobbs and Paul Hutchings. And I'm gonna be flying around the world and I'm gonna be lifting people and inspiring people. When I speak, there's gonna be life breathed into them. And we were just like, wow. And he said, that was step one of how to sponsor lots of people.

And Napoleon Hill teaches this in the book, Think and Grow Rich, have a definite major purpose. And that's what I did. I started with a little goal, three grand a month. And I'm walking beneath the stars and I'm praying and I'm speaking my vision, living in a trailer house. Stuff works, guys.

Stuff really works. But here's the thing that I wanted to share that came to me. This is a quote that I wanna share with you guys. Ignorance and freedom go together like oil and water. The higher your level of ignorance, the lower your level of choice.

Many people are enslaved to the ideas of others because they refuse to put forth the mental effort that personal knowledge requires. As long as the soul of our ideas lives in the mind of another, we are not free. Why do we say we should read books and listen to audios? Part of the reason is because there is wisdom of the ages in these books. And we can read these books and we can take the soul of the ideas in those books and we can plant them in our own hearts so we can go forth and be the people that we were destined to be.

And that's why we read and that's why we listen to audios. So a great lesson, freedom is an inside job. I love listening to Aaron Rashkind. I get all kinds of nuggets from him. And he said yesterday, he said it before, the longest journey is the journey inward.

And it's true. inside job. The journey to freedom is a one-way street through your very soul. That's how we find freedom. We dig deep.

We eliminate fears. We do things that scare us, like get on stage and speak to hundreds of people. But freedom is definitely an inside job. The last lesson I want to share with you guys that has really impacted my journey to freedom is kind of a crazy story. When we were living in a single-wide trailer house, my wife, Corrine, was out mowing the lawn one day, and she got this impression that she should start researching our family line.

My family line. You know, my grandpas and my great-grandpas. There was a story in my family that my father's father had been killed in a knife fight in prison. And so I always thought, no grandpa, right? What a great genealogy, right?

My dad leaves when I'm eight. His dad killed in a knife fight in prison. But anyway, my wife's like, we need to research this. And so my wife's like, just all of a sudden she's on the Internet looking stuff up, trying to figure stuff out, and I was like, wow, what's gotten into my wife? And one night I'm laying in bed in the back room of this single-wide trailer house, and my wife comes back.

She's like, Paul, get up, you've got to come look at this. And I'm like, huh, what? So I get out of bed and I go back, and on the computer she's got this obituary pulled up of a guy by the name of Gerald Fitzin. And Fitzin would have been my biological grandfather's last name. And what's interesting about the obituary is it says, Gerald Fitzin's passed away, and he was survived by Frank Fitzin.

And she said, Paul, I think your grandfather's alive. And I was like, you are kidding me. She's like, no, I think he is. And so the next couple of days she is trying to find a phone number for him. She locates this phone number for this guy, Frank Fitzin, in California.

She gets the number for me, and so Saturday morning I pick up the phone, I dial the numbers, and I hear this voice on the other end, hello? I said, hello, is this Frank Fitzin? He said, yes. I said, is this the same Frank Fitzin that was stationed in Fort Ord, California in 1952? He said, who is this?

And I was like, oh my gosh, this is my grandpa. And so my wife and I and my kids, we got an opportunity to travel to California and meet my long lost grandfather. We got to know him. We got to love him. He got to meet his great-grandchildren that he didn't even know he had.

And I got to spend the last few years of his life bringing joy to his life and also having him bring joy to our lives. And I remember it was towards the end of his life, he'd actually moved into a nursing home, and I was over in California visiting him. And we went to his apartment to get some things for his new room at the nursing home. And I remember going into his apartment, and I remember walking in and just feeling this feeling of loneliness. There wasn't much.

There was a bed, closet, some clothes, just very lonely, like a little bit of a cold feeling. And then I look over on his nightstand next to his bed, and I see a picture of my wife and me and our four little boys. And I realized how much joy we'd brought to his life. And I think about that story, and what I've come to believe is that there is a higher purpose in what we're doing. There's a higher purpose to what we're doing in life.

There's a higher purpose to what we're doing here in this business. And what I want to encourage everyone to do is to find the higher purpose of your business. Find the higher purpose of why you're here. And I want to share with you guys, this is our team, Pipeline Prosperity Alliance. Who's into PPA?

Okay, we got some good numbers here. We're growing. But we have a higher purpose on our team. And this tree, we call it the Destiny Tree. I don't know if you guys can see, it's got like little dollar symbols all around for the leaves, because money's important, right?

Freedom's important. This tree was inspired by a book called Atlas Shrugged. Has anyone read that book? Ayn Rand? Of course.

Of course. In the beginning part of this book, there's a story of an oak tree that had fallen over and the core was rotten. Just a rotted out core. And it was a metaphor to set the story up, and the story is about how America loses its values and how people stop believing they can do great things. And people start to believe that it's everyone else's job to provide a living for me.

And I remember that tree over on the ground with a rotten core, and I remember reading that and I'm like, no, that's not going to be the America that I live in. That's not going to be the world that I live in. And so what we do on our team is we stand that tree back up and we plant the roots of our souls down deep in the earth on true values. Jim Rohn was asked at the end of his life, or not at the end of his life, but maybe towards the end of his life, Darren Hardy was interviewing him and he said, he says, Jim, you've traveled the world, you've met all these thousands of people, what's the greatest thing that you've learned? Would you guys like to know what Jim Rohn said?

He said that true values really matter. What true values might he have been talking about? I believe he might have been talking about freedom, self-reliance, having a dream, having a vision, waking up in the morning and knowing why you're here on this planet, initiative, leadership, plowing through adversity, getting knocked down and getting up again and continuing to fight instead of just going down for the count like so many people do. These are true values. And so part of the purpose in our team is to help people discover these true values, plant the roots of their soul down deep so that they can grow into the people that they're meant to be and so that they can make the money they want to make so they can have the freedom that they want to have.

That's one of the meanings of this tree. Now, another meaning that I want to pass on to you guys, because it's been a huge, huge, huge shift for me in my life. And the way I look at the world and the way I look at people, I was on a hangout with Mars Burden. Anyone else love Mars? I love that guy.

So much heart. He said something that I'll never forget. He said David Wood, when he looks at the world and when he looks at the future and when he looks at people, all he sees are possibilities. All he sees are possibilities. And that struck me.

And I thought about this oak tree and I thought about how an oak tree never falls out of the sky and just stands there fully grown, does it? Never does. It always starts as an acorn, a seed. And so when we look at people, when we look at our teams, when we look at our prospects, when we look at our friends, our spouses, our family members, maybe we can remember that every single one of them has a tree inside that's coming out that we cannot see. All we can see is the seed, the seed of what's possible.

And so if we remember this, at least for me, it's helped me tremendously to believe in people. Like Aaron said the other night, he said, he said, you got to believe that people have got a shot, right? Because if you don't believe that people have got a shot, they're not going to want to be around you. And isn't it true that we all have a shot? Isn't it true?

We can all make a new decision, chart a new course, make it, take a new action, do something different, right? So that we can go forth and be free. We all have a shot. So all we have to do is just believe in that for people. Believe that all things, well, the line from the Bible, all things are possible to them that believe, right?

Jesus said that. I think that's a great belief to adopt. So find the higher purpose in your business. Lesson number three. Lesson number one, remember that in the seed of, in every apparent setback lies the seed of an equal or greater advantage.

As Aaron said one time at an event, I'm quoting you a lot, man. You've really impacted my life. He said, when you lose, make sure you don't lose the lesson too, because there's a lesson in every setback that happens. So those are a couple of lessons that I wanted to share with you guys. And the last thing that I wanted to share is I wanted to let you guys know how much you inspire me, how much you lift me, how much I love being around you guys.

This business is about people and we get to be in a room with people who we want, who we can model to become better human beings. Last night when Silvio was talking on stage and he brought his wife up and he sat here and humbly translated for his wife. And then he told his wife when he was done and told us that he wouldn't be where he was without his wife. That was so powerful to me. What a great man.

What a great leader. Silvio knows that it's not all about him. If you want, if you watch Silvio, watch this man. He knows it's not all about him. He lifts his team.

He works in the backgrounds, making sure everyone's getting what they need and working the way they're supposed to do. So I wanted to bring my wife up on stage. I'm sorry to surprise you. Come on up. And Mike inspired me and Christy inspired me yesterday.

This woman, this woman. Thank you guys. She deserves every bit of that. There are things that happen in all of our stories that nobody sees, that nobody knows, but she sees all of it. And behind all of it, she supported me.

From we were living in a trailer, being a dreamer, she supported me every step along the way. And I wouldn't be where I'm at, no way, without her. And none of us would be where we're at without the great people that are here supporting us in our lives. So let's let them know that we love them. I love you.

I appreciate you. I believe in you. Let's get out there and win our freedom, my friends. Thank you.