Value, Belief, and overcoming Fear with Carol and Carl

Folks, obviously the income examples discussed are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document.

If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. I'm Carol, and obviously this is Carl, and I'm going to start us out here in just a minute. And I want to talk about value for just a couple minutes before Carl takes over. We were married when we were 18. We were high school sweethearts.

And we had this dream that love was going to pay the bills, and we could go to college, finish college, and everything would be great. Well, it only took us about a couple months, our freshman year of college, to figure out that we had to have a job. So we dropped out of college, and he dropped out first. I finished my freshman year, and we both got jobs.

And being the starry-eyed 18-year-old that I was, about eight months into our marriage, I looked at Carl. I said, let's have a baby. We're married. We love each other. We have jobs.

Let's have a baby. We're 18. So after we'd been married about a year and a half, we had a baby. And all I had ever wanted to do was be a wife and a mom. Well, I still had to have this job that I went to 40 hours a week and took our son to daycare.

Carl was working 40 to 60, depending on the week, trying to figure out what he wanted to do. I think in our first two years of marriage, he probably had 10, 12 different jobs, because he just didn't know what he wanted to do. I have ADD. He sold encyclopedias. He sold water softeners.

Worked for a rent-to-own company. Finally landed on becoming a police officer. So we moved to Fort Worth, Texas, because in Kansas, where we lived at the time, you couldn't join the police academy until you were 21, and we were still 20.

19, I think. So brand-new baby, huge move. I had never, I went from living at home to my first semester of college before we got married. I lived with friends so I wouldn't have to pay room and board to getting married. So I have never, ever lived on my own, never lived very far away from home.

So here we go, brand-new three-week-old baby, we moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and I hated it. I didn't want to go. I told him, I said, I can't believe you're moving us this far away, you know, six hours, this far away from family. And I began to embrace, I embraced motherhood. I loved being a mother.

I loved being a wife. And I really began to embrace it. But as I've been looking back lately, I can tell over the years, we have three kids now. I can tell over the years from being a mom, finally, when our second child was born, I was able to start working part-time. And then when our second was two, our oldest two are seven years apart.

And when our second one was two and our oldest was nine, I was finally able to stay home full-time and be the wife and mom that I had always dreamed of being. I never had wanted to work. So, reached that point. Two years after that, we had our surprise, our little girl, and still was able to stay at home. She was the first one that I was able to stay at home full-time with and not have to worry about getting up, finding the daycare to go to, taking the kids or any of that.

But I noticed over the years, I began to lose myself. And we noticed it last year when we were, I was, around my birthday, we were going to have a party. We had just started. We had just moved again. And so, we were going to have a party to start making some friends.

And a friend of ours called Carl and said, I want to make her a birthday cake. What's her favorite color? And Carl and our daughter looked at each other and said, I don't know. We'll have to ask her. So, I get home and Carl looks at me and he says, what's your favorite color?

And I looked at Carl and I said, I have no idea. I don't know. And it was at that point that I began to realize, I had placed all of my value in being a wife and a mom and I had forgotten Carol. And I was happy, our marriage is great.

You know, it wasn't one of those Carl was smothering me and keeping me down. It was my choice. I had just become so comfortable with being his wife, being a pastor's wife, being Christopher, Colin and Caitlin's mom, that I had forgotten to be Carol. So I started this journey and started this process of really finding out who Carol was.

And that led me through a process of learning my value. I had never really valued the things that I have to say, you know, if you'll ask him and I'm getting a lot better. If you'll ask him, it's very hard for me to tell him my opinion and it's not because he doesn't want to hear it. It's because I don't value it.

Through this process of just all of a sudden realizing, I don't know who Carol is, 42 years old. I have no idea. I began to realize that I really needed to value myself and my opinions and my thoughts and the direction that I want for my part of our life. So the question that I want to leave you with, and this is, I think mainly for women, because I think we, as women probably struggle with this.

A lot more than men do. Men have their own issues. And I, but I think this is one of ours is what is your value. Our job in Empower Network, our job as team leaders, is to show people their value and their worth. It's not about promoting our product. It's not about, you know, promoting our lifestyle. It's about promoting the value in others, but how can you teach someone to have something you don't think you have?

So that's my question to you before Carl starts is what is your value and what do you need to do to find your value? She's awesome. We've been married 25 years, almost be 25 years in January. She should have taken off a long time ago and she stuck around. So, you know, I'm excited to see what's happening in her life and it goes to show you're never too old to learn new things.

You're never too old to find yourself. You're never too old to rediscover what God has stuck inside of you. I want to talk for just a few minutes about our journey, but then I want to talk about you more importantly. And what I want to get into is setting your intentions, no matter where you find yourself. You know, a circumstance is nothing more than a moment in time. And I'm going to hand Carol my camera, you know, cause I have to prove to my mom and people who say, are you still in that Empower thing that we're still here?

So I'm going to let her shoot some, some videos. And by the way, I'm here to prove that you can be a Christian, even a pastor, and have a platform in the Empower Network. That's one of the things I love about this community is it gives me the opportunity to travel the world and tell people about Jesus Christ, which is what I love. But you know what? I realize not everybody feels the same way and that's cool because there's freedom here.

I love what Dave and Dave. I love the experience here. Let me just take you through some quick slides here. If I can figure out how to make this run, I think I got it set. Oh, there we go.

Carl and Carol Willis. We've been married almost 25 years. We have three children, Christopher, age 23. He's in the Navy. He's a submarine guy.

Got Colin who's 16. He plays football. And Caitlin, of course, she's my pride and joy. We're going to let her get married when she's 35.

Here's the deal. I have two loves in life and I may have missed my slide here. Let me back up just a second. No, I didn't miss it. Let's go forward.

I started a ministry in 2008 called Simplicity Church Network. It was a giant leap of faith for me. I had spent the last roughly 10 years turning around dysfunctional churches. So what I mean by that is when they would argue over what color the carpet was and then split, I was the guy that came in behind that to put the church back together.

In 2008, I took on a church that had once run about 1,500 people. It was down to 120. They owned a 15 acre campus, $3 million in property, and they were horribly dysfunctional. They had been sued multiple times over things. They had lost all of those lawsuits.

It was the kind of place that when they hired me, they said, why would you come here? And I said, because it's what I do. Other than that, I wouldn't want to come here to be real honest. Well, I couldn't get that church turned around and it ultimately cost my staff, and our livelihoods. We found ourselves unemployed.

We found ourselves saying, what do we do now? 38 years old. What's the next step. So there's really a couple of loves that I have in life, entrepreneurship and ministry. But as I went through this process, God said, I want you to start this simplistic ministry.

Part of what I love doing is teaching church leaders in places like Uganda, Kenya. So I'm thrilled about being a part of Lawrence's school because I spend months on the ground in Uganda. I was there most of January this year.

I hope I get to see that school up close and personal. That's what I love. But God said, he asked me a question one day, Carl, if it means losing everything, will you still follow me? And here's what I want to say to you. There's a plan for your life, whether you know it or not.

Whether you've seen it fulfilled or not, there is a plan for your life that God has stuck deep within you. Let me say this to you again. I'm going to use Lawrence as an example because I just love Lawrence. Lawrence has been life-changing to me more than he'll ever know. Lawrence, when he was sitting in that cubicle, working away on mechanical engineering, and what's fun, those of you that haven't known Lawrence a long time, he would call me on his lunch hours.

Sneaking out. And he'd tell me, I'm afraid they're going to call me in because I'm using too much internet, you know, while I'm supposed to be working. He was already a millionaire sitting in that cubicle. Do you realize that?

The money simply had not been deposited in his bank account. But it doesn't change who he was. Those of you who have not yet made a sale here, you're successful already. Absolutely.

You just haven't gotten your speaking invitation yet. You haven't held your big check yet. It's coming. You have to believe that. You have to know that.

But see, there's a cost to success because you've got to be the kind of person who can handle what God is going to put in your hands. Let me say that again. You have to be a person capable of handling what God has put in your hands. Years ago, I was a financial advisor. In my clientele, I had a lot of resources.

I had a lottery winner who told me the worst thing that ever happened to him was winning the lottery. The reason why: he did not know how to manage resources. So when he ended up with a million dollars in his hands, he squandered it, because he didn't have the capacity to handle wealth. And that's what the journey is all about.

That's what my journey was all about. God was saying, Carl, I need to break you to build you. And see, none of us like to be broken. None of us want to go into our deepest fears. And yet, where you become the most powerful version of you is when you step directly into those fears.

So for me, my greatest fear in 2008 was what if I don't have a job? What if I don't have an income? That was fear number one. So what does God tell me when I'm planning Simplicity? Live by faith.

Now, I kept trying to send out job applications and resumes. I'm like, I'm a corporate guy. I can do this. I'm skilled.

And my lovely wife says, why do you keep sending those out? You already know the answer. Well, okay. You sure? I'm sure.

Let's do it. So we're living by faith. Now, what I didn't tell you, we still had a home that had been for sale in Pittsburgh for nearly four years. The plumbing had been stolen out of it twice while it was for sale. The roof was now leaking.

And I was liquidating. I was liquidating all of my retirement assets to try and keep that thing afloat. Didn't work. Fear number two. What if I lose everything?

The reason I have this picture here, this is where my business started. But let me tell you something. That's not my house. Okay? Hear me out very closely.

Carol and I spent our 21st wedding anniversary packing. Packing a U-Haul truck, with everything we owned, to become homeless, January 7th, 2010. This is the spare bedroom at my co-pastor's house. There's a curtain you'll notice, because the first week we were there, his three-year-old daughter pulled the door off the hinges. It was a track door and destroyed it.

That was our home. Now at 38, 39, no, almost 40. 39 years of age, living behind a curtain in a friend's spare bedroom was not the bargain I had asked for. Yes, God, I will follow you anywhere.

I wasn't thinking that far. So let's be honest for a minute, you know. We're still a loving couple, wouldn't you say? Isn't she hot? She's just hot at 43 years old.

I definitely got the better end of that deal. So, you're having to even decide things. Hey, if we want to get a little romantic, what's the sign? Is this like college? Do you hang a tie on the door?

And just for those of you who are wondering and curious, you threw a towel at the end of the hallway. That was the sign. So one night, I'm awakened with, what am I going to do? I am losing everything, I'm homeless, and I have a picture of an Amway meeting in my head. Now, let me tell you a story.

Twenty-five years ago, when we first got married, some friends invited us over for dinner. And I said, what's the sign? Some of you have some of those friends. In fact, I got a little nervous. We were up in Wood Suite the other night, and the first thing in there was a whiteboard.

I said, oh man, this is a setup. I've been here before. So I said, I will never, ever, ever, ever do that kind of business. And God said, that's your business. But it made sense, because what he began to show me is you build churches the same way.

You build churches the same way. It's all about relationships. Dave Wood and I were talking about that last night. As a pastor, I don't have any reason for you to stay other than you resonate with what I say. You just know that's where you need to be.

And if I do a bad job of leading, you're going to leave. It's a volunteer force. So there's a lot of similarities. So I began to learn a new skill set. I realized if I could take the internet and harness it up to this network marketing thing, I can probably make this work.

The problem is I knew enough to be dangerous. Anybody relate to that? You know just enough to be dangerous. I mean, my goodness, turn you loose and whew, it's frightening. So here's the thing.

I made a lot of mistakes. I was telling somebody the other night, I spent six months, and if you're a traffic exchange person, I don't mean to offend you, but I spent six months clicking for people to look at my site for six seconds hoping they'd buy something. What I didn't realize is they're all broke. That's why they're there, just like you. They're probably living behind a curtain too.

So I'm on a webinar one night, and I hear this guy, Dave Wood, talking about how he'd been in a van, talking about how he'd used content marketing to turn his life around. And so I said, you know what? I can do that. I've written two books. I know how to write.

I blog all the time. I make notes. I just don't know what to do with it. So I begin building my business from blogging. Along the way, I met Lawrence Tam as well.

We began to talk about things like search engine optimization. And my skill sets began to improve, and I began to make money. But here's what I want to say to you. You're here today, and I want you to stand up because, you know, it's kind of mid-morning. Stand up.

I want you to turn to the person on your right and make this statement. I am here for a reason. Turn to the person on the other side of you and say, you are here for a reason. All right, have a seat. I went to my first live event two years ago this month in Orlando, Florida.

Dave Wood pulls me aside and says, hey, come up to my room. We're having a little meeting this evening. Now, I get caught up. I don't get to make that meeting. Fortunately, Lawrence Tam, he's a conniver too.

He catches me and says, you didn't sign Wood's NDA, did you? I said, well, no, not yet. He says, oh, well, have breakfast with me in the morning, and you can sign on with me. Fortunately, the way karma works, you know, I got passed up to Dave on two of the products. So, you know, it all comes around.

But here's the thing. Point of opportunity. That's what Empower Network became. See, what was cool, I told Dave this last night. The cool thing for me, I remember when there were 60 of us.

I've been here since the beginning, and I've seen it go to 160,000. I watched Lawrence Tam, my friend, become a millionaire. That's awesome. Give it up.

So here's where I want to get at with that. You are at a point of opportunity, but you're also at a crisis of belief. So for me, two years ago, the crisis of belief was this. We had been homeless for nearly 20 months.

In August of 2011, a friend of ours said, hey, I've got a beachfront condo that's not rented out. Do you want to stay in it? Sure, we'd love to. My business wasn't to the point that I could really support us yet. Carol was still working.

She, you know, I love this woman to death. She has sacrificed so much to help us get our business off the ground. And let me say this. Most of all, she would never let me quit.

She's yelled at me twice in 25 years. One of those was a day I was going to quit. And she squared off with me and said, you know better. If you do this, everything we've been through is for nothing. And oh, you know, we could become homeless.

I know. And I'm willing to take that journey with you. Go, Carol. Now, I realize not everybody has a spouse that is that supportive. I understand that.

I'm blessed. But what I want to get at with you is you come to these moments of opportunity, but they're also a crisis of belief. So for us, as I was leaving for Orlando, the owner of the condo said, I've got it rented out, and I'm going to need you guys to move. So I flew home to be homeless again. Carol and the kids were at a hotel.

Tam told me I needed $625, and that's all we had left. Carol had been laid off from her job. That was all we had left of her retirement. What do we do? So we prayed.

We prayed. And I just said, you know, God, what do you want me to do? And he reminded me of one thing. Everything you've learned from David Wood has made you money. Everything you've learned from Lawrence Tam has made you money.

Go for it. So we did. What ended up happening, that first week we were open, our new rent was fully covered by Empower Network. There's one thing that will prevent you from becoming the person you want to be, and that's the fears that are within you. The only way you can deal with those is you have to face them.

Like I said, for me, being homeless was a fear. The cool thing now is, you want to take my home? Go for it. I've already been there. You know, my ministry, I go to places in Africa and India.

I don't even know where I am. I've had, you know, people rioting outside the door. I've been in places that I couldn't have gotten home if I wanted to. Part of what allows me to do that is I learned to walk around the city. I learned to walk into my fears and just simply say, I'm not going to let you conquer me.

And that's really the commitment you need to make today. What I want you to do is just be honest. If you've got a little bit of a fear, stick your hand up. Be honest. Look around.

I want you to have victory in that today. You know, there's a scripture that says, perfect love casts out all fear. When you realize there's something greater than your fear, it's easy to walk through it. For me, it was God saying, do you trust me enough?

Really, what he was saying was, preacher boy, put your money where your mouth is. You can talk a good talk, but can you walk it? Do you really believe I'll take care of everything if you trust me? He's always been faithful to me. But he's not interested in my comfort either.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you're going to get uncomfortable. You're going to do things that cause you to feel uncomfortable. You're going to do things that cause fear. And the only way you can get by that is you just have to look that fear in the face and say, you know what?

I will not allow you to control me anymore. So what I want you to do is stand up. I want you to just close your eyes for a minute. And I want you to picture whatever that fear is right now. And for some of you, as you picture it, you may get goosebumps.

You may get a little nauseated. Now, I want you to picture a big balloon in your hand. And I want you to write with a magic marker. Maybe you even want to mime that out as you do it, what that fear is. And just look at it.

And as you look at it, that fear is going to try and intimidate you. That balloon is going to grow. It's going to puff up. Now, I want you to picture you've got a long, straight needle in your left hand. And as that fear puffs up, I just want you to turn that needle into that balloon and smash it.

Now, cement that picture in your mind and let it lock in. Go ahead and have a seat. A couple of things that I want to say to you as we get ready to move forward. You're going to get all excited here. You're going to be ready to take on the world here.

But you're going to go back home this week. And you're going to have to decide, am I going to face my fear and start those conversations on Facebook? Am I going to face my fear and spend money I don't think I have to build out my business? Am I going to face my fear and talk to the person? Am I going to face the person that I really want on my team, but I'm afraid they'll laugh at me?

Anytime you see that, blow that balloon up again and write that fear out and pop it. And then go do it. The cool thing is once you face the fear, there is no fear. You know, that's one of the things that I used to do as a police officer. I was a field training officer.

And anytime I had a new rookie, I always made sure to get him into a good fist fight early on. That's awful nice of me, isn't it? What's even better is I would lean back on the car with my arms crossed, and I'd just watch him. And I'd either let him get his clock cleaned, or I'd let him take care of business.

And then I'd jump in and finish up what needed to be done. But the reason I did that is I needed to get him over the fear of conflict. Conflict's natural. Somebody out here is probably going to try and punch you in the mouth. Somebody may pull a knife or a gun on you.

You need to be okay with that. Face your fear. I've got to get you over that. That's what I want you to commit to do this week.

Whatever that fear is in your business, write it down. Write it down right now. And make a commitment. The first thing I'm going to do when I get home is face that fear.

I'm just going to get it out of the way. Be done with it. Because what happens is it gets exciting after that point. Second thing I want to speak to you about is setting your intention. You'll hear a lot about that.

At Denver, I wrote out on a piece of paper, I will speak at the Fight the Forces of Evil event in Dallas, Texas on October 19th, 2010. That has been my focus for the last 90 days. Because this is where I'm most natural. Dave's talking about your sweet spot.

We've had fun talking with some of the speakers. Some of them are like, I'm terrified to speak. I'm like, man, this is my sweet spot. I can't wait to be up here. I was telling Paul today, it's the one-on-one conversations that bother you.

I actually need a laptop. I need a laptop in front of me to talk to you. Maybe if we could Skype, that'd be easier. That's where I'm more comfortable. But the reality is the intention was set.

A specific date was set. I will make it happen. Not, I hope to make it happen. I'm going to try to make it happen. I will be on stage at this date.

I'm going to make it happen. You need to do that. Remember, you're already successful. You just haven't gotten your speaking invitation yet. You're already a millionaire.

The money's just not in the bank account yet. But you need to start acting, operating, and thinking like a millionaire. Right now, I'm trying to schmooze Lawrence to take a trip with me. You got to see if he can clear his calendar. You need to start thinking that way.

Think like a business person, not like a hobbyist. Think like somebody who's going the distance. You know, for me, my why is I want to get dropped off in Africa and India all the time and go work with pastors and orphans. People who need clean drinking water and education. I love that.

I chose a business that doesn't require me to be at home in front of my computer for a reason. You have a why that's big. You need to pursue it with reckless abandon. Be passionate about what you do. Talk about it all the time.

Tell your story. Don't be ashamed of where you came from. The biggest mistake for me, and I got to wrap it up, is that I didn't want to talk about my failure. But my failures were the building blocks of my success.

Dave Sharpe says, there is no failure, there's only feedback. I am a much better entrepreneur because I was homeless for 20 months, because I was willing to lose everything. You've been great. Thank you for your time.

Folks, obviously the income examples discussed in this video are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible. Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document.

If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.