May 9, 2020
What scars do you have? Some people see a scar as an imperfection on your skin, but there could be an amazing story behind that. Trophies come in a variety of forms. And they can be anything from medals and status to scars on your body. So, what trophies do you have that you have a story around?
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Automated Transcript Below
Dean Soto 0:00:00
Hey, this is Dean Soto, founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com and we're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode. Today's topic is this: Trophies Come in Many Forms When You Work Hard for Them. That and more coming up.
Dean Soto 0:00:35
Good morning. Daylight Savings Time. At least as of recording. So this might actually be a little while because I pretty much record every day —+ just about every day and my guys are amazing and they do a lot of actual content around these podcasts. Often, they are delayed quite a bit so if you're wondering, “Why the heck is he talking about daylight savings and it's closer to Easter.” Don't worry about it. Just go with it.
Dean Soto 0:01:06
It's more about the story anyway, right? It's more about the story. All right. So, it is a beautiful morning today. It is still having all these amazing yellow wildflowers and everything is blooming. We have our lupines. If you’ve ever seen lupines, they’re like lavender — I don't even know if it might even be the same thing as lavender. I'm not sure. But it's just a beautiful purple flower all over the place and I see the new lupine bushes like that have been planted that are kind of wild and all over the place popping up and everything absolutely amazing — even got a small little manzanita doing its thing that'll have some berries later on yeah it's just absolutely amazing so so yeah
Dean Soto 0:02:00
Oh before I get into this why don't you go to Google. Type in Freedom In Five Minutes podcast and subscribe via Apple iTunes. Won't you go do that? Do it. Do it. You can subscribe to iHeartRadio. You can subscribe to Spotify. If you go to Spotify and you type in Freedom In Five Minutes, you'll find the Freedom In Five Minutes podcast. It'll be up there, alright. So, it's not the five minutes to freedom album or whatever yeah.
Dean Soto 0:02:36
I actually was like oh man I'm not gonna actually name this podcast freedom — I can't name it five minutes of freedom because somebody else already made an album. It keeps on popping up and everything. But it's Freedom In Five Minutes. Complete opposite. Five Minutes comes later. I was recently on a podcast where the podcaster kept saying five minutes to freedom and I'm like...god alright
Dean Soto 0:03:10
So. Jiu-Jitsu. Let's talk about this a little bit. I started Jiu-Jitsu about a year ago. I've talked about this in another episode. I started in February of 2019. The whole idea was I needed a 90-day target. I was part of the Wake Up Warrior community. We were in the Kings’ 90-Day Challenge. It's the way that they do things in the Wake Up Warrior. Every 90 days you create a target for your body, for your spirituality, for your business, as well as your family. Something that you're gonna do with your family and something that I still do today.
Dean Soto 0:04:08
I do it off and on. I need to be much much better about it but something that I still do to this very day and during that time I knew that you're not supposed to create targets that are like, “I want to get to a hundred and eighty pounds.” because weight is not really something that you can truly be accountable.
Dean Soto 0:04:36
If you sign up for an Ironman or for a Jiu-Jitsu tournament or something where you've paid money, you've gone into it. you have to actually do it. It becomes much much harder to say, “Yeah I'm good. I don't need to do it.”
Dean Soto 0:04:50
Especially when it's something that you really truly want to do. So that was my body goal for that time and it was interesting because I had always wanted to do Jiu-Jitsu. But there were two things stopping me. One I wasn’t sure about rolling with the opposite sex which I think I talked about in previous episodes. I always just felt uncomfortable. I don't know, it was just something that was kind of odd to me. I definitely got over that. It's cool because my Warrior Brothers were really helping especially with Jiu-Jitsu. it's a great equalizer of martial arts. You're helping them if they were ever in a really bad situation. To be able to at least have some sort of self-defense.
Dean Soto 0:05:49
So, that was cool. The other thing was I just actually didn't believe that I would be that good at it — that I would be able to even compete. I was relatively out of shape. I just was not in the greatest shape at that time. I was about 215 pounds going on 220. It didn't seem like it was gonna be in the cards. The cool thing was — the really interesting thing was that I did it anyway. I did my first tournament about two months later.
Dean Soto 0:06:33
I called the gym — I was looking at all these different gyms and it was kind of a good thing because there were all these gyms that were only open in the evenings. I got into Google. Being an entrepreneur, I can go anytime. I don't want to go in the evenings. I want to be able to go whenever I want. So I go on Google and I see one.
Dean Soto 0:06:58
Jim says that they open at 8 o'clock in the morning well they do open at 8 o'clock in the morning but I'm guessing Google got it wrong they only opened on 8 o'clock in the mornings on Saturday so anyway I call this guy I think they had a ClickFunnels little funnel I put in my name and everything like that and then
Dean Soto 0:07:22
Rudy calls me back. It's Fresno Ultimate Martial Arts. Rudy calls me back and I'm like, “Yeah. You know I really want to do a Jiu-Jitsu tournament.”
Dean Soto 0:07:35
It was part of my business things. In about two months. And he's like, “Oh, Whoa. Yeah. I think we'd get you ready by then. That'll be really tough but you're gonna have to really work at it.”
Dean Soto 0:07:48
I was like yeah I have to. I'll just keep calling around to anybody who will take me and help me to do that.
Dean Soto 0:08:07
He's like, “Yeah. No problem. We'll try and make it happen.”
Dean Soto 0:08:11
So I went over there, signed up, and then realized that it was Tuesdays and Thursdays in the evening. And I'm like, “What?!”
Dean Soto 0:08:20
And then on Saturdays, you can roll at around 7:30 in the morning but it ended up being a really really cool thing because the community and the instructor were just so welcoming and so awesome.
Dean Soto 0:08:36
Everyone's so positive and in fact, it was neat because I went to my first Jiu-Jitsu tournament in April or May of 2019 and ended up getting third place in No-Gi and got a little trophy — that was my first trophy in Jiu-Jitsu.
Dean Soto 0:09:01
I was like wow that's really really cool and for a while, nobody was doing much in the way of tournaments and the next tournament that came up with it was a few months later after that and because of that, the whole tournament thing of me doing that, we ended up having five or six people do a tournament. Out of those five or six people, I want to say five of them ended up placing and actually getting medals which was awesome. The pictures that came from it and everything was just really really cool.
Dean Soto 0:09:42
To see that it went from nobody competing to one person competing to five people competing and now in April I'll be doing another tournament and we'll have multiple people doing the tournament over here in central California. I might even do one down in Southern California a few weeks after that.
Dean Soto 0:10:13
That was trophy number one. Trophy number two was not exactly a trophy I expected and wanted. Trophy number two is on my right ear. If you were me, at least. But if you were looking at me it would be my left ear. It is becoming a cauliflower ear.
Dean Soto 0:10:41
I went for a full year doing jiu-jitsu and nothing like that happened at all. Nothing like that happened at all. All of a sudden, I actually don't even know when it happened or how it happened or whatever. But my ear started to swell up and it's been this way for about two weeks now.
Dean Soto 0:11:06
I get a lot of people saying, “Hey are you gonna drain it? Are you gonna do this, you're gonna do that?”
Dean Soto 0:11:10
It's annoying and it's kind of slowed my roll which I think I needed to do anyway. I think I was doing a little bit too much.
Dean Soto 0:11:24
There is someone shooting right now. We’re living in the country so people shoot quite often.
Dean Soto 0:11:39
All that being said — it sounded like an AR15. Anyway, all that being said I have people who say “don't worry about it” as people say “drain it”
Dean Soto 0:11:57
People are like, “Oh my gosh that looks so bad.”
Dean Soto 0:11:59
All in all, I'm like, “I like it.” It's definitely not aesthetically pleasing but it is a trophy. It took me a year to get that thing. It's something that wouldn't have been there had it not been for me doing Jiu-Jitsu and you might be thinking, “Well that's really dumb. Why would you want to have that as a trophy or whatever.”
Dean Soto 0:12:41
Well, I don't know why quite either. But I have this thought that this type of stuff doesn't happen quite often. As I said, it took a year to get this. It took a lot of hard work. It took a tournament and it took a lot of learning. It took a lot of different things. It took a lot of things that people could say, “Oh well, you should drain it because you're gonna be stuck with it for life or whatever.”
Dean Soto 0:13:26
it took a lot of hard work. It took a whole bunch of different things. And to me, if it stays, it stays. If it goes, it goes. I have a scar! I have scars all over my body from different things throughout my life and each scar has a story and those are physical scars and even emotional scars. Things that I do without even knowing that also have a whole reason. And a whole story behind them.
Dean Soto 0:14:00.929,0:14:07.619
I don't want to let those go because those give me power and this gives me power as well. This gives me a powerful story that I want to be able to share with other people. I want my kids to look at my ear and say, “Hey, Dad! How did you get that ear?” and be able to tell them the whole story of how hard I worked to get this thing.
Dean Soto 0:14:34
Trophies come in a variety. They come in a variety of different types. What's the whole purpose of this? Why is this so important? Well, it's important because you have things in your life, you have things in your business, you have things in your family. You have scars. You have things that you work for. Trophies that you worked for, have a huge story around them. It's conventional wisdom — it's the conventional type of people who say “Whitewash it over.” “Don't forget about it.” Yet you get rid of that scar because it looks ugly.
Dean Soto 0:15:32
A scar is a blemish on your body. A scar is a blemish on your soul. That scar is a blemish on your character as scores of lemon. But there are things in that scar that are priceless. There are things in that trophy that are priceless that nobody except you and God knows.
Dean Soto 0:15:52
Nobody except you and God knows. There's a thing in the Bible where it says — I believe it's in Revelation — that God will give you a stone and on that stone is written something that only you and God know. Out of all the billions of people and quadrillions of angels and whatever else is out there. Only you and God know. And guess what? That's the same thing as the trophies that you have won. The trophies that you have earned whether it's a scar. Whether it's a literal trophy. Whether it is a congratulation. Whether it's your marriage and your wife giving you a love note or your husband giving you a love note or whatever it is that is a trophy of hard work that only you know the value of truly know the value of.
Dean Soto 0:17:15
You can communicate that to the other person but only you know the true value of that trophy. So what scars do you have? What trophies do you have that you have a story around? I challenge you this week to at least document or share a story just like this with somebody.
Dean Soto 0:17:44
I never used to be good at stories and I'm still getting better at stories. In fact, it was only about two years ago that I learned a really good structure for telling stories. That's really helped me to be able to do podcasts like this. To be able to share in a way that's cohesive. That structure goes: What, Why, Lesson, & Apply. I learned this from Garrett J White from Wake Up Warrior.
Dean Soto 0:18:18
What, Why, Lesson, & Apply. So, what do you want to talk about? So, like today, it was on trophies and the story behind my cauliflower ear and how that's a trophy.
Dean Soto 0:18:31
Why is that important? Why is that important to me? Why is it important to you? What are the lesson that you're going to get from it and the lesson that this story is trying to explain? And then, how do you apply it in your life? Hence, the challenge to actually document or share that trophy this week. All right. What, Why, Lesson, & Apply. It's very powerful.
Dean Soto 0:19:02
Okay. So what trophy are you going to share? What scars are you gonna share that only you know and only you have learned? Because these scars that I have are what brought Pro Sulum to where it is right now P R O S U L U M .com
Dean Soto 0:19:23
It's why I can work five minutes and have a process be created and boom it's done. It's why I'm able to have a wonderful staff that has an amazing culture who write this content when you look at the blog who are just absolutely amazing people. It came from a lot of this work.
Dean Soto 0:19:56
What, Why, Lesson, Apply. What, Why, Lesson, Apply. Go and do that. What is your scar? What's your trophy? Go check out ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com as well as Freedom In Five Minutes. It got me all sentimental...
Dean Soto 0:20:16
I will see you in the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode