Anthony Trucks’ Journey of Resilience and Building Dark Work

Pamela Bardhi: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Underdog Podcast. Today I have an incredible guest here with me, Anthony. How are you, my friend?

Anthony Trucks: I’m, well, just hanging out here, I’m enjoying my day. No complaints on this. I think we was Wednesday. It’s Wednesday hump day right now and we’re recording this.

Pamela Bardhi: Yeah, we’re enjoy. So it’s, happy hump day to you.

Anthony Trucks: There you go.

Pamela Bardhi: It’s a great day, and I’m just, I’m so excited. We were just talking about right before we jumped on the call. Just like how amazing, like, your story and all the work that you’re up to. And just all the magic that you’re creating in your world and I’m like reading up on you. I’m like, man and an FL athlete. He’s a top 1% speaker in the world, like, best selling author. He makes shifts happen, which I love. The play on words, they’re like all amazing things. I just can’t wait to really dive in and hear your story in detail, Anthony. Like, one of the things that I love is I love to reel it all the way back. Right. So as a kid growing up, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Anthony Trucks: I just want to be happy, to be honest, I grew up in a funny stage of life. So I was giving away at three years old in foster care. So I didn’t have much of like, life’s gonna be grand mentality. It was more of, like, I just want to be happy, I wanted to know that I had my parents. Or some family in the house would took care of me. There’s that, I think at some point in time, probably around in high school. It was like, I’d like to play sports, so I progressed onto that, which I guess we’ll cover in time. But he has a kid, I was just like, ma, I wanna be happy. It’s really that simple for me, I love that.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that.

Anthony grew up in California in a town called Antioch

And where did you grow up, Anthony?

Anthony Trucks: Where?

Pamela Bardhi: Like which state? Which state?

Anthony Trucks: So I grew up in California. I’m actually, so I live in California, I grew up in a town called Antioch. And Antioch. I just watched a little video on TikTok, it was at the 20 worst cities in California and mine’s number six. So I was like, oh, well, hey, look at that. But now, I grew up in Antioch The East Bay area. It was very, at the time, non diverse.

So just me. As the only black kid in my elementary school and had a lot of interesting things to deal with. Race. I was in at that time, my sixth foster home and it was an all white family. We’re really poor, didn’t have much and so I kind of just had this weird dynamic of life growing up. But yeah, I was a California guy and born and raised and then left. And eventually made my way back here with my family.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that, I love that.

Growing up in foster care, you weren’t allowed to play sports

And you mentioned growing up you got into ##orts as a kid. What around, what age did you jump into that world?

Anthony Trucks: I wasn’t able to play Sports, I was 14. At the time I’ve grown up when most kids play sports like 5, 6, 7. Being in foster care, you have a different kind of experience. So I wasn’t in a position where, biological mom would give me clearance to in fact go out. You know, play sports. She’d made these crazy things up but she had parental rights. Which if she could control my life even though she wasn’t in the household. So I didn’t play Sports, I was 14. Like it wasn’t until I was much older than I had the opportunity to actually go out there. And try something where I gave myself some self worth.

So yeah, 14, I tried sports and I was horrible. I was real bad at it. It wasn’t something I was actually at the time in any way good at. Ca because most of my peers, if you think about it, they’ve all been around. You know, the block and then been situations of actually we’ll call it playing sports and say were five or six or seven sometimes. I get into this thing, I have physical athletic ability. But no, like you know, honed skill sets, I was pretty far behind the ball, but yeah, that was it. California kid, a lot of sports and athletics and I sucked when I first.

Pamela Bardhi: Got started and what great. So 14, that’s what freshman year in.

Anthony Trucks: High school year before, so for me I was a little bit. I might have started a little bit earlier, young I’m sure. But no, for me it was my eighth grade year. So right before high school, freshman year.

Pamela Bardhi: Wow, so, eighth year. So middle school is really when you.

Anthony Trucks: Really got pretty much yeah first try and that’s like the weird time to try it too. So yeah, I remember finding myself in a situation going not only do I suck at the game and it emotionally sucks. It physically hurts too because the little kids hit you as hard as they can. You know, so you’re out there running around trying not to get hit and trying to hit somebody. And it was weird. But I figured it out one way, another actually figured itself out.

Going from no athlete to tria athlete was a hell of an experience

Pamela Bardhi: So what sport did you start with? I was a triathlete in high school, so I have immigrant parents. I came to Albania from all, I was five years old. And so, like, growing up, my parents were always working, so I didn’t know, to, like, go after school. Like, my parents were always like, in the neighborhood that I lived in growing up, it was. You didn’t want to be outside after school. Pretty much, like, my parents would just rush me home.

Anthony Trucks: And that was.

Pamela Bardhi: And so for me, like, I never got a chance to. To play sports, you know, throughout my childhood, you know how most kids do. So when I got into high school, I was like, I’m gonna play everything. And so going from no athlete to tria athlete was a hell of an experience. Softball, I ran from the ball so many times.

Anthony Trucks: Yeah, my wife played softball. She was definitely a softball player.

Pamela Bardhi: Soccer. I slide tackled. Everyone didn’t even know I was doing it. And then in basketball, I was a monster and twisted my ankle like 17 times and filed out, every game. So I’m curious to hear how your experience was when you, what sports were you playing? Were you only playing one sport?

Anthony Trucks: Like, I only played football, so I was one of the black guys. God didn’t gift, with basketball skills. So I tried. Basketball sucked. I had my coach, one time, cuss me out because I was so bad in my freshman year of high school. Then I did track. I was actually decent at track, I could run pretty fast, I could do some long jump kind of stuff. And so I eventually got pretty good at that, I stopped doing basketball. But it was just all my high school years was track and football was. It had no coaches, had no guidance. I kind of just went out there and did whatever needed to be done. And be honest, a lot of, like, my brand of dark work came from that window.

Like when I first kind of tried my hand in football and I wasn’t good, I did give up. Actually, I quit football. Thankfully I quit it, but only for like a few, like months, if that makes sense. So I was like, I’m done playing this game, I suck thr it away, right? And then I found myself tucked away, kind of hanging out. Then I had this moment that kind of woke me up and I go, I don’t want to be a statistic. I don’t want to suck at something the rest of my life. So I want to get great at this football thing, I started doing things that were out of my normalcy. They weren’t part of my current, like, called identities. The work I do, and I leaned in and eventually got, like.

I didn’t just think, I didn’t get physically much bigger or skill wise, way, way better. The beginning of it was I just, I got a hungrier dog. I had this mentality of I’ve done too much work in the dark to los in the light like I’m about to win. And so that fed into me preparing and training and I dovetailed into how I performed in everything I did. Sports, academics. Definitely was kind of the way I showed up as a human. That fed into my ability to kind of go beyond that. But in the beginning it was just tracking football, but I gave my all to that. At one point I broke my wrist.

I broke my missist in a fistfight actually in the basketball court, but I wasn’t gonna let that stop me. So I just kept playing football, I was a receiver catching footballs with one hand the entire time. Eventually I’d reset the pinky that I broke. And then, during the football stuff I had apparently unset it and it started healing funny. They had to break it, put it back in place. They’re like, dude, stop playing football for like give us three weeks. I was like, all right, so eventually healed in place and it’s good now. But yeah, that was a weird little stretch of life right there.

How did Anthony go from not good at football to being in the NFL

Pamela Bardhi: Wow. You just had a mic drop moment where you said I did too much work in the dark. To not be in the light and that powerful and wow, wow, wow, wow. That’s exactly what I was going to ask you, was. How did you go from the kid that was not good at football to then getting. Doing, getting good enough to basically be in the NFL? I mean the mindset shifts, I mean I’m so curious about that journey. And I’m sure a lot will tie in with the childhood traumas and shadow work.

Anthony Trucks: It feels, it all windows in a.

Pamela Bardhi: Lot of that will be coming into play. But would love to like, you know, how did you walk through that journey? What are some of the things that you implemented to make that happen and make it a reality?

Anthony Trucks: Yeah, realistically it’s a, I ended up setting new, a new standard for who I was, which really is identity. Mindset’s an interesting kind of thing because mindset is a piece of an identity, but it’s not the whole burrito. Right? It’s the meat inside. And so there is a big, heavy lean of that. Obviously great work, done around the mindset. But I’ve noticed that individuals at certain levels, when you look at them and you ask, how are you successful? They just go, I did this, I did this and I did this. We describe that externally as their mindset. I go, man, you get a great mindset, but they didn’t tell you, I have a great mindset. They listed off to you things that they do consistently that are part of their personal standards. So much so that it might be hard for you. 

And at one point it was hard for them to do in the first place. It’s now hard for them not to do it, it’s hard for them to skip a workout. It is hard for them to eat crappy food, it’s hard for them to not send the email. It’s hard for them not to show up and do the work that has to be done. Because it’s who they are to do it now, and so back in that window of time. What I was doing was just, honestly, without clear intention, I was developing any standard for myself. The thing for me is, like, every day I was gonna throw in the ball in the air 500 times and catch it. I was gonna run routes every day, I was gonna lift weights every day.

And it wasn’t so much that I did it because somebody said I had to. They said, it’s the path to success. I just knew that if I wanted to be a great football player, that’s what great football players do. It wasn’t who I was to do those things, so better become who I am. The way I do that is by doing it, you suck at first, get good in time. That is the stretch for everybody, you want to be a great writer, you write. Your first sheets are going to be horrible, right? Want to be a great singer, you sing. You’re not going to want to have anybody hear your first music. You want to be, I don’t know it, a great race car driver, you’re going to crash some cars, right?

The nature of life, in my opinion, is you find something that you are willing to suck at in the beginning. Eventually when you get great at it, you don’t just get to this point of I’m going. Oh, man, I can now do this without feeling bad. It is replaced with an absolute overwhelming joy. This thing that you couldn’t do when you sucked at it first you can’t imagine, not doing it. Part of it is because you’ve gone through the journey, there’s so much depth of respect and appreciation. It’s who you are to do it now. And so we have human beings that we don’t think or actually don’t think, pay attention. But there’s this deep sense of alignment for all of us. Which is you will live your life in a way aligned with who you see yourself to be.

Your habits, your patterns, your perspectives, your optimism, pessimism. That’s how you do things, and you will fight to stay in alignment regardless of what’s going on. The problem is a lot of us are aligned in a direction that’s not going where our dream is we’re going. But if we look down the extrapolation of this path, we don’t want it to go there. We want to be in a better place. I’m not saying this place you’re going sucks. It might be I, make a million dollars a year, but you want to make 20, right? You can keep going here, but you’re gonna wake your head up, so one day and go. Man, I’m not where I wanted to be, and so what I look at is, I go. Well, if you want to be a $20 million a year person, well, who or is that person?

What do they do? How do they wake up? What do they think, what are their patterns, what is their personal standard, what is their identity? And when you look at that and you have this comparison to yourself. You should be met with a reality which is, I don’t do those things, and then you start doing them. The more you do them, the more it becomes who you are to do it. Now you have this thing you wanted, but even more so, you’re the kind of person that has that thing. It actually doesn’t, it’s not as hard to keep it as you think it is. It’s hard to get there, to climb but then you get to a kind of flat level. That the way you emotionally feel your drain every day now, it’s the same, emotional drain. But you’re at a higher level.

Quantum jumping involves rewiring your brain based on experiences in life

Pamela Bardhi: You know what’s coming to mind, which is really fascinating? As you were speaking, I’m like, man, am. Do you study quantum physics at all?

Anthony Trucks: I do not. Should I?

Pamela Bardhi: Oh, yeah. Because of that, this is exactly what you’re doing. Your quantum jumping timelines by embodying the thing that you want to be.

Anthony Trucks: To what extent? Yeah, I mean, for me, I like a Lot of it. I guess I’m not that far into it. I’ll have to look into this stuff I look at as rewiring. Like there’s a tangible brain in our head, that it’s wired neurologically, we have a psychological patterning. The truth is, a lot of us, we don’t realize that the way you have your habits and patterns and actions. Which are your identity, just you brought to life, those are because of wiring from experiences in life. You know, what we’ve seen, how we’ve shown up, what we’ve tried, what we’ve failed at, we’ve succeeded at. And it wires us a certain way, and when I say wiring, I mean, it just.

It makes you do things in a way that is different from somebody else based on some sort of trigger. Whatever it may be. Now you could say trigger, it could be something that becomes, you know, I know, something that gets you moving. It could be an email that pops up or, you know, all of a sudden a gun goes off in the distance. Right? Some stimulus creates this moment, now, once that stimulus goes, we are then going to run a path. And that path is based on the wiring, which is based in our experiences of life. So for me and you, if, like, for me, I’ve never been bitten by a dog. You know, so maybe you have. I’m assuming, let’s just say maybe you have, have you been bit by dog before?

Pamela Bardhi: No.

Anthony Trucks: Okay, we’ve both never been bitten by a dog, but let’s say that I got bitten by a dog. You didn’t get bitten by a dog, if we were in the same room and a dog walked in. There’s a great possibility that you would be like, oh, look, a cute puppy. And I would be already out the door, you know, and the only difference of that stimulus is my experience. Prior to which wired me to where I don’t even consciously think, I just respond and I do something. That’s how we love our lives, and we think it’s just like that big moment. But it’s also when something shows up on your calendar or a crazy email comes in. Or somebody says something to you, or they look at you funny. The reality is, that that wiring, it was done in an unintentional way.

But you can actually intentionally rewire that, all of it. That’s, I guess you can call it your, quantum physics or quantum jumping. It’s like me going, hey, who do I see that has what I want? Cool. What do they do that I don’t do? Okay, great, do I want to do it? Absolutely not. Do you have to do it? Absolutely do, all right, let’s start putting that in. Little by little by little by little, day after day after day. Not big, but small in a really big way, and you do it. The more you do it, the better you get, the less pain you have. It still sucks along the journey, but eventually you get damn good at it. All of a sudden you’ve rewired yourself towards who you are to do it. Even better, you get that thing you wanted in the first place.

Anthony says he spends a lot of time thinking about the subconscious mind

Pamela Bardhi: I love that. Anthony. Yes. That’s all neuro, linguistics, programming, all nlp, the subconscious mind.

Anthony Trucks: I had no idea, I gotta figure stuff out, I hear about these things all the time. But I don’t spend time, like I don’t know about the quantum phase, I do know of nlp. There it is, I find that for me, like I did this presentation one time to a local sports psychology mastery program. And I just started talking, doing the same thing I’m doing. I spend a lot of time thinking if that makes sense, I found my ADHD years ago. That if I wanted to not be an attention seeking human and always be bothering people, I have to spend time inside. So I spend a lot of time inside to not distract everybody outside.

So while you may see me sitting there, I’m usually going a mile a minute in my head. And so I’ve come to find that I have weird realizations, and so I said that to go. When I was with this master’s program, after the program, after I got a presentation. She came in and she sat me down, her office, she goes, I gotta tell you, she’s like, I love your presentation. Was but like 90% of what you just covered, it’s like it is exactly what our program is all about. We just use different words. It’s like, I’d love for you to come here and like to really unpack it. And I go, I respect that, I really do appreciate it. But if I accidentally happened upon this realization, I don’t want to break something that seems to be in some way working.

And I really don’t want to be put into a box. That makes me have to look at somebody with a process or a filter. I love the free flow of it. So it’s one of those things where like, I am not, I think I’m not special like an alien. But I do have this weird honed process of how I see the world differently. It gives me some perspective, just baseline logic, I just look at things and go, that doesn’t make any sense. Or it doesn’t make sense, and I think through it and this stuff comes out. And then people say this to me, like, oh, it’s nlp. You did that? No, haven’t done that, I just think about things.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that. Yeah, I mean, it’s like you can say the cool thing is, like you can make it your own. It’s just so fascinating because a lot of it is rooted in, like, the scientific versions of things. I’m very much of the logical brain as well. And so for me, I need to know how things operate, how it’s all. Like, how it all calculates in my brain and how it all makes sense. Right. So like quantum physics, I mean, that’s the things that we can’t see. That’s energy.

That’s all of that. But that’s the sixth world. So when you were talking about identity, I’m like, oh, my God. I’m like, that’s so similar to when, like, they say that when you can become the version of you. That you want to become if you embody what that version does, is like. You have to live it, breathe it, like, visualize all of it, so it’s super cool. Super cool. How that ties in, and then NLP is all about the subconscious mind. Right. Which is all about how we’ve been programmed.

Anthony Trucks: Right.

Pamela Bardhi: Because our brain’s like a processor. So I love hearing your perspective and, like, your flow of it and how you’ve created your own framework. I think that’s absolutely magical, so I totally want to go through. Like, maybe don’t want to spoil and then not spoil.

Anthony Trucks: There’s no spoil. Let’s go to work.

You mentioned developing dark work while playing football as a teen

Pamela Bardhi: But like, the dark work.

Anthony Trucks: I’m an abundance. You.

Pamela Bardhi: It’s such a cool, like, I would love to kind of hear more about, that, was developed. You mentioned that it was really developed during that time when you were actually playing football as a teen. Which is really fascinating. So we would love to hear, really all of.

Anthony Trucks: Well, then I did it then, but didn’t know what it was. Again in college, I did it again as an ad. So I’ll say the language of dark work did not, in fact, actually come to fruition. Until maybe when I was 37, 38, something like that, so it wasn’t actually, like, early on. It was just I’d been living my life doing this thing and came to find that for me. This is something I grew up in a space where I had to bet on me, that was it. Meaning While I had people around me, I learned to not trust that they were gonna be the thing. That got me where I wanted to go. I learned that I was the guy that if I just went internal and I went dark to the world. Like, dark isn’t like, so it’s differing.

Dominic Soden talks about shadow work and dark work

You mentioned earlier shadow work and dark work. Shadow work is what you do to find out what’s hidden in the background that’s affecting you. Dark work is what you do once you know. So a lot of people find out what’s going on and they go. I don’t want to work on this. Or in order to work on it, we really got to have a whole community. And I gotta get a group of people, and I go, yeah, that does help to an extent. But they’re not gonna be the ones sitting there making you get the workout in or making you write that thing. Or making you respond to the message or making you show up properly in your work or anything. That’s all stuff that happens when you have this depth of connection to yourself that happens behind closed doors.

Which is what I call the dark. The world ain’t watching you. And so, realistically, the dark work came to be from me paying attention to what I’d naturally kind of floated into. So what it is, it’s that unseen, unsexy, difficult, misunderstood, ridiculed thing. That you do when no one’s cheering you on but you, that does two things. One, it does all the stuff that you need to do to achieve. It’s the learning, it’s the trial, it’s the failure, it’s, the getting back on the horse. It’s all these efforts you do that get you to have the achievement, it’s usually done when no one’s watching. A great statement that says champions aren’t made on the track. Or they aren’t made in the arena, they’re made before it. Right? They’re just seen there, and so the idea is, if you want to become that, that moment.

It’s everything you’ve done before. I tell my son, you’re in Steak at Houston, the University of Houston. And I go, su Soden, you’re going to win the Big 12 championship based on what you did a month ago. This is we’re, like six months out ago, that race isn’t won that day. That racist won the year before, like, just, you know, and so it’s the progression leading into it. So for all of us, when you do the things, like you learn the reps. You find out how to work harder, you hit your max, you push your max. That’s the stuff it takes to call it, you know, Lego block wise, strategically structuralured to get something done. The other thing it does is when you’ve gone through this, I call a, we’ll call it a catalyst moment. Really, it’s like.

It’s a crucible when you’ve gone through, like a hard crucible that you subjected yourself to intentionally. You show up and you lean in when you don’t want to, and you know, everybody else didn’t. What happens is you build this step by step, day by day. Hardening of your ego in a positive way to where your soul will not let you take anything. Less than what you believe you deserve. That’s why people have this imposter syndrome. The only reason you have imposter syndrome is because you aren’t doing dark work. There’s no preparation, I don’t see guys like, you never seen Tom Brady show up to a game day and go. I don’t know, guys, if we’re gonna do this, like, no. He’s like, let’s go to work. Your bosson. So I figuredure you get that, and the idea is he has a dog in him.

When that moment comes, somebody else, like, I don’t know if I can. He’s like, let me loose. These guys messed up. You know who I am. Like, there’s a different vah. That didn’t come because he sat in a room and watched a film one time. It’s because he did everything he knew you weren’t doing and on the game day, he knew you didn’t do it. So now what happens is, not only have I got this. This strategic tactical skill set stuff that I need to succeed. I have this Dominator’s identity behind the scenes that has a mentality of. I’ve done way too much in the dark to lose in the light. You don’t get it. And so whatever you put yourself in front of when you’ve done that dark work, you will dominate it. And dominate means to govern and exert control.

And it doesn’t mean over other people, it could mean over yourself, over your fears. It could be over anything, but when you have a sense of governance, I can exert control over something. You show up differently. So we really do. Like, while a brand is called dark work, I help people develop Dominator Identities. It’s different for everybody, it’s a different sense of how you show up. But the core foundation is the same, it’s rooted in your sense of personal. I call limitless, ridiculous power, and so when you lean into that, you come out differently. It’s impossible for you to go through that crazy crucible and come out the exact same person. But what’s even better is why you’re a better person. You’re probably in a better life now also.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that, I love that Anthony, that was so powerful. And I love that the description that you put in there, about the dominant thought, I’m just, this is amazing stuff. So I’m like, wait, wait, so say somebody really is looking to make a change, right? Because we see this all the time, and I’m sure you see this all the time at your event too. Like, what are some of the practices that you have to be relentless to do? Because to actually, like, have the discipline, because this happens all the time. Right. Let’s use lose. Use a perfect example. When the new year comes, everyone’s like, I’m going to lose £20.

Anthony Trucks: Yeah.

Pamela Bardhi: Right. But then they don’t go to the gym. That they do the things they want to. What are some of the steps and what are some of the things that you do? Or that you train others to do so that they don’t lose that, you know, the accountability, whatever it is.

Anthony Trucks: Yeah.

Pamela Bardhi: Commit to the goal in order to get there. Because once you get in the groove, you know, 21 days, it becomes a habit, in that process.

Anthony Trucks: No, it’s not that hard.

Most people want to go big and it’s the wrong way to lose weight

First thing is most people want to go big and it’s the wrong way to go about it. You should go very small in the biggest way possible. The goals are, so I want to lose 20 pounds. Cool, I get that. You do not wake up every day and go, I’m gonn go big and I’m gonna get £20. No, your jobs to go. What’s the small thing that I can do that most won’t do? It’s gonna be hard for you. But you can do it in the biggest, most committed way possible, you choose a small thing. So it might just be. I’m going walk right now, I just lost. Today is my lightest weight I’ve been since I was, I think, 18 years old.

I’ve been working with a trainer for six months. Today is six months, I’ve lost 36 pounds, I was not fat prior to this. I had a little extra fat on me, I want to get in stupid good shape. Like I wanted people to be like this mother, how old is, I want that. Right, I would tell this, my massage therapist, she reminded me, I said it to her, and was in a fun mood. And I was telling her I was losing weight. She’s like, but you don’t have weight to lose, she was, why are you losing weight? I go to be sexy as fuck. That’s it. Like, I just, that’s what I want to do. She reminded me, I was like, I was in a good mood then, wasn’t I?

I forgot that I’d said that, but the idea is this, I wanted to lose weight. Here’s when I got this thing going. I didn’t know what I wanted to lose, but I knew that if I did small things over time. I’d get there. So it was s like, all right, I’m gonna walk, I’m gonna lift. And I have a coach that guides me, so I’ve walked every day for the last six months, five miles. You, ever take maybe three days, within, thereof like traveling. It was hard to get it done or hurt my back or something. Five miles, we’re talking almost 900 miles. I’ve walked in six months. On top of that, I’ve been at 2,000 calories or 1,750 calories for six months.

I’ve had between 180 and 200 grams of protein every day for six months. My thing wasn’t getting up, going, I gotta get to this weight, my simple thing was this. All I wanna do is gonna find out what are the simple small things that if I did them every day. And did them consistently, would get me there. I found out what they were. That’s my focus, and here’s what it is, I don’t do it emotionally. Most people go, I want, you said, I want to be ruthlessly committed. Commitment, good, it’s an emotion. It’s not that it’s a full emotion, but I feel committed. Right. To be committed is different. Commit. When you say someone’s committed, it’s based on you, given a statement based on what you’ve seen them do.

When somebody’s doing something because they’ve been actively, actionably or habitually doing it. The way you do it is by removing your feelings. Be disciplined, the problem is most people are disciplined to the emotion. They go, I can’t wait to get in shape. I’m a D and get through £20. Ah, right. Willpower. And what happens is the day you wake up and the emotion is no longer there. It’s absent. Well, now the action stops, and so the discipline goes out the window because there’s nothing driving you. I am disciplined to a plan, and here’s how it works, I am a slave to my calendar. My calendars are a slave to my dreams. That’s it, I know the goal I want.

And when I make that thing, I don’t sit down and go, right. I want to lose 20 pounds, what do I want to do? No, I go, what does it take to have that? What are the steps and actions? Because if you plan something with a mentality of, do I want to do that? You won’t do it. That’s why it’s bad to write your own workouts, because, you know. Like, you won’t make them as hard as they probably should be because you’re thinking about, what do I want to do? Right? So the idea is, that’s why I have somebody do them for me, I look at what does a person have?

More money, hired job, bear podcast, what are they doing? Right? I go, okay, great. If that’s what it is. What has to happen every day to get there? Do I do skills set work, business work? What does that look like? And I put it into a structured calendar, and that calendar is now a slave to the dream I have. I then have to show up to that calendar, and whether I want to do it or not, I get it done. Part of it might be pulling teeth to have it get done, but if it says 12 o’clock. You better get done at 12 o’clock or you’re gonna have a big problem later.

Kobe Bryant says he made a contract with himself about weight loss

You’re gonna look yourself in a mirror. Not like you, and so when someone says, the beginning of the year, I want to lose 20 pounds. That’s cool, I get youn to do that. What does that look like daily? Then I go, okay, great. Where will you do that? Like, literally exactly what time will take place, how much this takes place. Numerics as, the best you can, plug them in. And when you do it now, your job is to say. How do I show up to that moment in time and not talk myself out of it? This is where Kobe Bryant said it very well. He says, I made a contract with myself. I will not break the contract with myself. Most people hear that is, like a personal commitment. He’s mentioning something that is deeper than that in a great way.

He’s mentioning it as a sense of, like, a personal connection. It’s also a personal standard. It’s his identity. He has an identity that even before it’s all the things in front of that. That says I don’t break promises to myself. That’s a humongously beneficial identity trait, but here’s where it gets even deeper. When I look at the person who has this commitment, this identity trait, a lot of us don’t realize. But what you’re going to be doing when it comes time to, if we’re talking about losing weight. I’m not going to eat that, that feels like a sacrifice. If I have to get up and go work out, when I don’t want to do it, it’s a sacrifice. I have to sacrifice my relaxation time, if it’s like my friends are all drinking, I don’t want to drink.

It’s a sacrifice, I can no longer do this thing that I wanted to do. I’m giving something up and I feel the pain of that. That’s a sacrifice. Now, here’s the thing, I will sacrifice for people that I love, I will take a bullet for anybody in my family. I will sacrifice my feelings to make sure someone is taken care of in my vicinity. Right? There’s certain things I’ll do, I will sacrifice something that I love. But there’s a step, before the love, there’s a depth of respect. There’s people in this world that I love because I respect them. Now, humanly, I don’t know if you have this, I don’t know anybody that I love that I don’t respect. Just personal. So when I look at it, respect is a precursor to love, now let’s track this all together.

When I look at myself, I love myself. I’ll sacrifice for myself, if I respect myself. If I know that I had something on my calendar and I didn’t do it, I lose respect. I lose respect, I lose love, I lose love, I don’t sacrifice, I don’t sacrifice, I don’t get what I wanted. So when Kobe Bryant’s talking about this, I made a contract with myself. It’s a personal depth of connection to himself, to where he knows who he is, and the alignment comes into play. And so for a lot of us, the biggest issue we have is not that we don’t know how. There is way too much information to not know how, it’s the dumbest when people say to me. I wanna punch them in the back of their face. Like, what are you doing? You know what to do.

The reality is you don’t love yourself, you don’t love yourself cause you don’t respect yourself. And you do not respect yourself, use you don’t follow through in the words you say to yourself, start there. So if people start there, we’re different, and a cool thing is that’s dark work. It’s not somebody else, it’s not, you know, having to have this person nudge me. Keep me accountable all the time, it’s how you show up for you. And the most dangerous people I’m talking, positively dangerous. Dangerous in a sense of like when your feet hit the ground, the devil says oh ah, damn right that dangerous. Those are the people that think this way. I don’t know a single person that functions in my realm and my world as a leader as well. That also talks and speaks that doesn’t have this.

Now, it may not be in every single place, right? Some people might be phenomenal online marketing and funnel bills but they, it doesn’t show up in their fitness, right? But in that area there they have that, they show up different, they have this. They sacrifice to make sure that they show up and to do the right thing. And when you find people like that, you got to study them, pay attention to them. Listen to them, especially if they have something you want. Because while it may not be you within a matter of months, it 100% can be you. If you can learn to do what they do in the dark to eventually you have those traits, you embody the same identity. That is what gives them what they have successfully vastly more than some luck or some book they read.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that Anthony, I absolutely love that because, you know. Everyone’s always searching for what are the tools that I can do and do this. And what hack can I do here and what can, how can I hack this and blah blah, blah. The how is not the problem. It starts with you first, right?

Anthony Trucks: O yeah, it’s tough, to it, this means a lot more depthters. We have a whole curriculum, we do a whole coaching company on doing this and walking people through things. The truth is there’s like some internal work you gotta take a look at. You can call it shadow work. I don’t really call it that, we just call it. Like a self assessment, but it’s based on this roots and fruits process, but you get to see who you are. It ain’t always pretty, but now you can go, oh damn, that’s what I got to work on. And then we call it design your dark.

Design this process 

You must actually design this processus if you don’t, you’re going to go. Like, oh, Don, I want to work on my marriage. Okay, cool, do that. What Are you gonna do tomorrow at 7 o’clock to work on your marriage? I don’t know. Well, let’s think about that. Let’s design that portion. Right, I want to make more money.

Pamela Bardhi: Cool.

Anthony Trucks: What are you gonna do? I’m going to push hard and hustle. That’s not how you make more money, like, you got to think about it. You should design that process and done right, you’ll then know, okay, great, this is the design. And then I’m going to get started because there’s the other part of it. Some people will get going on something. They’ll wake up six months later and go, why am I so drained emotionally with no progress? Because you didn’t do what you were supposed to do for you. Like, you have issues you never focused on. Also, the stuff you started doing, you didn’t have the right plan in place, you just started doing things right.

So the truth is you should structurally figure out what to do so that when you start doing it. One, it’s gonna be successful, but two, you won’t do what most folks do. Which is, hop on the first shiny object that distracts you. A lot of folks, they make these plans that they don’t even buy into. Because they don’t know if it’s the right stuff, and they didn’t figure out if it’s the right stuff. They just started doing things, and so it’s easy to pull you off. But when you spent a period of time really unpacking what to do. You have such a buy into it that you follow it.

So when you’re in the middle of starting and you’re like a month in and something new pops up. You go, no, I got faith in this. That’ll be there in a month or two months, and if it’s not, it wasn’t for me. I’m gonna stay in my path and you stay in the path. Lo and beholds, you get to an outcome that’s way farther ahead. Then the cool thing is usually when you get to that point and you look back, you go. I’m so glad I did not take that left turn because it wouldn’t have gotten me where I’m at now. And where I’m at now, I realize how many more options I have than I had back then.

Pamela Bardhi: Amen. I love that.

What advice Anthony have for people running from themselves and issues within

And you touched on something that I definitely want to dig into for a second here. But people running, from themselves and issues within. What is your advice on tackling that right cause maybe someone’s going through something. They’re designing their plan. Right to be this person but they, something seems to just be holding them back, like how do you break. Break through that, right? Like some of the releases work like, or whatever, you know. I’m just curious to see how that goes into place because I know that that happens a lot where it’s like. You know, they’re ready, they’re committed, they create the plan. OO and then all of a sudden something happens.

Anthony Trucks: Nothing happens, they just the moment it came up, my son will say the light’s got too bright. There’s like. So folks, it’s like when people get to the moment and it’s there. They get all like oh, they tense up, you know. And the reason they tense up is they question can I do this? Am I okay? It’s that whole imposter syndrome is a word for it that I’m sure, it was a better word. I don’t have a special like let’s sit down and hum about it. You I’m not against that stuff, the woo woo world has a definitive benefit. The way I look at it is, it’s a way to try to find an avenue to make the hard work easier. That’s it.

Like most of the things like how to make the hard work easier. Once you know what to do, you gotta do it, I can butter it up and I can. I can take a piece of dookie out of the toilet right now. And put sugar on it and put butter on it, it’s still a piece of dookie dog. You know, like I don’t know what to tell you. It’s gonna suck eating that, no matter what you do to make it nicer, you know. So for me I go, well if you are a crappy husband. You’re always talking negatively to your wife, like stop it. If you’re not used to being joyous and positive. Start being joyous and positive, I don’t know how I got to go unpack my trauma.

Yeah, you can or you can just be nice and then figure out how to deal with the thing, like them. Sure there’s ways and I’ve gone through my own journey of like, therapy and having conversations. But at the same time I go. A lot of this can be done without words and a lot of it sticks better with actions. It just does. Because you now have proof. Like that’s the thing most people realize is you need to create proof. The whole, the secret book and that whole thing, the law of Attraction. It’s good when you’re doing something with it, sitting in your chair. Going like, I want to have a million dollars and I can’t wait for it to come to me. I’m gonna get it.

It’s, you know, it’s mine yet. Not if you sit in the chair all day. You gotta go do something, right? So for me, people ask, like, what’s the way to do it? You set a plan, you structure it, and you lean into it uncomfortably, and here’s another reason as to why. The brain, the body, the soul knows when you’ve done something that is so hard. And accomplished it and how proud you are of yourself. I usually mention the concept of, like, the number one unwritten rule of CrossFit, which is always talk about CrossFit. Right? Everybody, you know doing CrossFit. Oh, you know, they do CrossFit, right? And it’s a jokey, laughy thing. But I actually started like, why? Why is that, why do they always talk about CrossFit?

And I go. Oh, for a lot of folks, it’s the hardest thing they’re doing when you’ve done it, and it’s hard. Your pride blossoms. You’re so confident in yourself, you feel good. You start changing up how you function, how you talk. Hey, what’s everybody, let’s go to work. There’s a whole different light to you and that confidence oozes. It doesn’t come because you thought about CrossFit or you thought about, you know, things that were problematic. A lot of folks will tell you. Like, they work, through the depression, at a neurological level is actually science that talks about, you can work through the pressure. These things by moving your body, like the brain chemicals that come out from movement are big.

And it’s even better when you get yourself to a wall that you don’t think you can climb. Then you metaphorically and literally climb the wall and you stand up and you go, oh, myd. This is who, I, Oh my, look at me. It’s all always like you’re processing who you are and what you did, and it wells up and it’s different. That is a gift I can’t give you, I can’t sell it to you, I can’t put it on layaway. I can’t give you a discount, you gotta earn that. My blood, sweat and tears. But when you do that, that’s the thing that releases you from all the trauma, all the crazy. Because that stuff is just proof of things that happened to you that you didn’t come out of Just yet. You have no proof of being better.

Beyond those moments when you give yourself this earned experience, beyond those moments. Now you see yourself as somebody different. I have dealt with being beaten and starved and tortured, my wife cheating on me, people stealing money from me. Like all these crazy things that have happened. I’ve gone to dark places. The solution wasn’t to sit in a room with somebody and try to, like, have a smoke bath or a sound bath. And like, make myself feel better. I’m sure there’s some benefit to that in some place or the world. But in the world that I live in, in my day to day, I needed to be a better husband.

A better father, a better business owner, a better leader. That took very actionable traits and steps in directions that felt super uncomfortable. But the more I did them, the better I got, the better my skills. The better I have, a respect and then a love for myself. And I show up differently in the world. This is stuff that every and anybody can do on this, this planet. Like if you have a brain and you can operate and you can hear me. These are things we can all do, and it’s the fastest path. It is the hardest path but to be honest, like they say, the long path is a short path. You could try to find a shortcut. It’s go gonna take you longer to find the shortcut than it is to go through it.

But once you commit to going through it and you come out. I don’t know people that have ever accomplished something that was hard and got through it. And go, okay, got this but I really, really am so mad I did that hard stuff. Like, I don’t know anybody did that, they may tell you, hey, listen. Just, you know, it’s difficult but they don’t go, I really wish I never would have, did. That hard thing to get what I want, like, no, they, they’re like, I got this thing. I’m so proud of who I am and so proud of what I did to accomplish this, this goal. That’s the common conversation. Why rob yourself of that? Doesn’t it make sense to me?

Pamela Bardhi: Amen, I absolutely love everything you just mentioned, Anthony. I love that, and I love the different ways that it resonates too. Like all this, the different tactics and like, your approach on it is absolutely amazing.

What would Anthony older self tell your younger self based on what he know now

And you, this is leading into my favorite question. You pretty much teed it up beautifully, and I always save the best question for last for this exact reason. But out of your whole life experience, this can be business. This can be personal, this can be whatever comes to your heart. What would your older self tell your younger self based on what you know?

Anthony Trucks: Now my younger self needs to hear. I’ve had this question pop up and I feel like every time I answer something different. But I am going to say at this moment, what I would tell my younger self is, no one’s opinion matters. Like there’s always like I was a kid that wanted to be accepted by my mom and the families. And so I had this desire to be liked and appreciated. What I’ve come to find over a lifetime is like, I’m a man of faith. Not everybody loved Jesus, man, like so everybody gonna love me. The reality is if I bottle myself up to try and please everybody, two things problematically happen.

I never fully get to see what my potential is ‘cause I never fully let myself out of the box. The second thing is in the position I am, the way I lead and what I do. I would rob the world of the gift of me. And what happens is I wouldn’t be clear to other people as the person they need. Here’s what I mean by this, I find that in the world of the people we see. That is very unsettling to some people and very accepting to others, right? You go, like for example, Trump, we’ll just use as example, some people vehemently hate this man, want to kill him. Some people are getting him tattooed on their forehead. What is the difference?

I look at that and I go, the separation is clear. Here’s what it is. He is so, transparently, him that he’s made it clear enough to where you know him enough. To where either if you love him or like him, here’s what it is. It’s not until someone knows you enough to hate you that they can know you enough to love you. It’s the knowing you enough that’s the key. If you don’t put yourself out there, no one’s gonna know who you really are. People need someone, they go, this person is two things. They are for what I am for and against what I’m against, and that’s what people need from you.

I could be for certain things in my life as a husband and a father. In a way I function and against certain things. Like for me, I’m a very dialed in man, I have a wife, I have kids. I’m locked in my family, my priority with my time, with my words, with my actions, everything. I love my wife beyond everything. There’s an Anchored Ness, I hate when people come around and go. All the old balls and chains at home, I go, that’s not my wife. Like, go, that’s cool, that’s you, that’s not how I talked about my wife. Sorry, and they’ll know quickly, like, oh, like, what do you mean?

That’s just who I am, so now you can dislike me. Cause I don’t like it. You’re saying it, but the guy who’s like that as well, he goes, trucks is my dude. So it’s, the, knowing me enough that matters. Most people don’t put themselves out enough to be known. And that’s what I would tell my younger self is don’t worry about everybody else. What they’re talking about. Don’t try, and make people happy. Just do what you do. If they don’t like you, they’re not for you. But I’m telling you, when they find out what the thing is they don’t. Like, somebody else is going, I like this guy.

Pamela Bardhi: I love that. What a powerful message, Anthony, I love that so much. Oh, my goodness. Authenticity and all of that. Which is amazing.

Anthony Trucks runs dark work through his company Speak to Freedom

And now in your world, like, what’s up in, like, the next few months? What are you working on? Any events coming up? Like, what are all the things?

Anthony Trucks: Oh, man.

Pamela Bardhi: World.

Anthony Trucks: Yeah, we got a live event. So I have. This is my brand, dark work, I talk about their in dark, win in the light, all that fun stuff. But then I speak on stages in front of thousands of people. It’s a great business, and I love doing it. In fact, I leave tomorrow morning to go to North Carolina for a speech. Then I teach people in a company called Speak to Freedom how I do this and the promise is in the name. I have a very free life, but I’m not in a stage. I’m just hanging out. Be honestly, before I got on this, the reason I was delayed by five minutes. And I was hanging out in the sauna. Just like, I’m just chilling, I was like, I lost track of time, you know, like, that’s part of my day.

And it’s in my house. Like, I have a fool of everything, and I have a very beautiful life of freedom that is delivered to me. Because of the way I’ve run my business of speaking. So I teach people how that business runs, and I literally unpack everything and they get the systems and run. The next few months, I have a live event for that company in January. Just next month, we Just had a whole team meeting for like two hours of going through all the planning. Of what we’re gonna be doing, some new funnels and structure to launch some stuff. So like, for me it’s just building cool things and serving people heavily. I love the idea of what I do because my thing is like I’m in this space now.

Where I realize that making money is based on trading value. If I can give as much value to the world to make as much money as I want. And I can have more freedom to give back. Then the at risk youth I want to serve, that are foster kids like me do with my family. What I want to do with my family, invest in things. So I want to make a ton of money knowing that that money is made by serving. My goal is to say, how can I serve as many people as possible in my company? As many speakers who wanna speak, as many people that want to develop a dominator’s identity in that realm. That’s the next, years of my life. There’s minuscule things, but all of it has that.

Pamela Bardhi: As a North Star, that’s amazing, and today I love that. I’m so excited to see what comes next with everything that you’re doing. So, so powerful. Oh my goodness. And for everyone that’s been listening and I’m sure everyone’s like, where can I find Anthony, where can I connect? Where can I learn more about dark work, where can we find you, my friend? What of the best ways to reach you?

Anthony Trucks: Go to Instagram at anthonyrucks or darkwork.com. I think that’s the two places you want to go. It’s all straightforward and there.

Pamela Bardhi: I love it so much. Anthony, I want to honor you. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. All of the magic, all the nuggets you drop, the mic drops you had throughout the whole interview, you are my friend. Thank you for being a light to this world. And I’m so excited to see what you build next and how you serve next.

Anthony Trucks: Welcome, welcome. Thank you for having me.

Pamela Bardhi: Thank you.

Underdog always dropping on Thursdays. 

So that’s it for today’s episode of Underdog. Catch us next week. Always dropping on Thursdays. And remember, if you’re interested in real estate or want to learn how to create more money and magic in your life. Check out meetwithpamela.com and let’s chat. Sending you so, so much love.