Phillip Hatfield On Hope And Change

Podcast Transcript

PC: So, did you put the coffee on?

KM: I did.

PC: Because do you know what time it is?

KM: I know what time it is. It’s Just Coffee today.

PC: It’s time for It’s Just Coffee.

KM: Except Amy I think brought her sweet tea.

AC: Sweet tea.

PC: Sweet tea. Y’all want sweet tea?

KM: It’s a sweet tea girl girl. Showcase day.

PC: Tell us who we have with us here today, miss Kathleen.

KM: Yes, well we have one in the studio and one on the phone. Amy Cole, my deal colleague who’s on fire and I love her energy.

AC: Thank you, Kathleen. It’s a pleasure to be here and I’m so honored.

KM: Well, I’m honored more.

PC: Good morning, Amy.

KM: Good morning, Amy.

AC: Good morning, Phillip.

PC: All’s well with you?

AC: Um, yes all is well with me.

PC: Now, it’s even better.

AC: It’s even better. But all is well with me.

PC: Good, so you know this character Phillip Hatfield, don’t you?

AC: I do. I know Phillip Hatfield and he is the quote, “Real McCoy” as he calls himself.

PC: And who does Phillip Hatfield work for?

AC: He works for the Ziglar Corporation. He is a motivational speaker.

PC: And would you like to introduce him?

AC: Yes.

Amy Cole: All right, Phillip. I am so honored to get to introduce you. Today, folks, we have Phillip Hatfield, a Zig Ziglar motivational speaker and life coach in some ways. And, Phillip, I’ve enjoyed reading your book Carried By Angels and I love to hear people’s stories. So can you share just a little bit about your book and your story in that book?

Phillip Hatfield: Oh, Amy, absolutely I’d love to. You know, I named the book Carried By Angels, and the reason why: when I first wrote the book, my subtitle was actually my title and the subtitle is, “My greatest tragedy is my greatest blessing.” But when I get the book ready, everybody says, “Phillip, people don’t want to buy a book about that. They want to buy a better book.” So I had written about angels in my life, so then I began to really look at what are my blessings? I may have had tragedies. I may have had problems in my life, but it’s the blessings that come through those, so that’s pretty well what the book is all about.

AC: Tell me a little bit about your accident and what happened to you.

PH: Well, I had an accident November 9th, 2008. I was riding a motorcycle. I had a young lady who decided to make a turn. I’m heading north. She’s coming south. She decided to make a turn, and when she did, she tried to come across three lanes of traffic – all of us going north – to get on the highway. Well, when she tried to accelerate, and she really never paid attention because she was texting and driving, and then the phone rang and she answered it. When she slid the phone up to her ear, she made that left hand turn. And when she did, literally I got hit by the car in my left side. And you know, when you’re on a motorcycle, Amy, you’ve got a steel frame between your legs, but that’s not all. You’ve got a hot motorcycle engine and exhaust. So literally when I got hit, it just totally destroyed my body. It just shoved my body into that hot, burning engine and the car, between the steel frame and 250 ft. later, after tossing and turning, I would up on an ice cold, concrete pavement way down the way.

AC: Wow. I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through with that. And subsequently, you went through hospitalization and then ended up with amputation, correct?

PH: Yes. Yes.

AC: And with that, did you suffer depression, sadness... I mean, how did you maintain your sanity?

PH: Amy, I get that question quite a bit about the depression. And no, I did not have any depression, because for me, I knew that I was blessed just to be alive. I knew I should not have even lived. Now I will tell you there was one point after I had got out of the hospital, I began to drive. It was many months later I was driving myself. I didn’t have a leg and this amputated thing was just dangling and all of a sudden it was like I was driving and I remembered the spot where I was. And I had a little about 45 second pity party. And it was like, “Oh my God, I can’t get into that spiral. It will suck me down.” So basically it’s kind of like, what am I grateful for? I’m happy to be alive. I’m grateful for the people in my life and that’s what carried me.

AC: You know, that’s such an interesting thing. Working in the field of counseling, we talk about spirals and we talk about trying to find the attitude of gratitude so much. What keeps you motivated to do what you do?

PH: You hit the nail on the head, and that come from Zig Ziglar many, many years ago. It is the attitude of gratitude. Every morning when your feet hit the carpet in the morning time, and you’re going to the bathroom to get ready for the day, what are you thankful for today? Number one: I’m grateful I woke up. It’s a blessing to have the day. So you start looking for those things. What am I grateful for when you first get up? And, Amy, if you look at three things today that you’re grateful for and then you make that a habit the next day when you get up – what three things are you grateful for then? Don’t let them be the same things they were the day before. And then the next day – what three things that day? But that’s not all. When you get ready to go bed at night after you’ve found that attitude of gratitude in the morning time and you started that way, at the end of the day what have you done? What have you accomplished? And when you look at your accomplishments of what you’ve done throughout the day, and you’re thankful for those things and the opportunities that came your way, you go to bed with a sense of just gratitude again so you’re able to sleep and rest well that night.

AC: You know, that sounds so much like what we do as far as, with therapy and in counseling. We try to help people with positive affirmations and help them fill themselves up and believe in themselves. How do you get teams of people to believe in a cause?

PH: Can you repeat that question? I didn’t quite understand it.

AC: How can you get a team of people, like when you go out and you do your motivational speaking, how can you get them fired up to believe in a cause?

PH: Number one: I show them. Amy, when I get on the stage, I’m usually wearing a suit pants. People have no idea I’m an amputee. And about 25% of the way of my talk that I’ll bend down. I’ll talk about the hard things we go through in life. And then I’ll unzip the leg, because I’ve got a zipper that goes from the bottom of the hem all the way up to the very top of the leg on the inside, and I’ll unzip that pants leg and I’ll raise it up. Then I explain to people, “We all have obstacles. We all have struggles. We all hit barriers. Those things come, but what do we do with them?” Now, let me tell you real quickly – if we look at it this way, we look at how we can help other people with what we have gone through. When we take the vision off of ourselves and what can we do to help other people, that gives us more of a sense of purpose. Now, there’s a famous guy – his name is Alexander Graham Bell. You know who he is, right?

AC: Yeah, I sure do.

PH: So when my mom used all three of my names, Phillip Porter Hatfield, I knew I was in trouble. But when you hear Alexander Graham Bell, what do you think of? You think of the telephone. But you know what – he failed in life miserably. Alexander Graham Bell had a mom who could not hear and he subsequently wound up finding a woman he fell in love with who was deaf as well. She could not hear. Alexander Graham Bell wanted them to hear so he could communicate with them. He wouldn’t live to experience that. So he set out to make a hearing aid but he failed. He made a telephone. So in those problems that we have, and in trying to help other people overcome their obstacles and those barriers, we not only can create new inventions but we can create an invention of ourselves. We reinvent who we are. What are our purpose? What do we see that we can do? But it all goes back to giving. The more we give, that’s when we really receive. When we are selfish and we try to do everything for our self – if you can just imagine I’m sitting here talking to you now, but if I was out live with you I would just have you open your arms out wide, straight across, reach around, cross around and just hug yourself. When you’ve got yourself hugged, you can’t help no one else and no one else can get close to you because your elbows are between you and them. When we stop looking at our self so much and we open the arms up and allow people in, when we allow them in then we’re doing more for them and that just creates connection.

Kathleen Mills: And I think that’s how – this is Kathleen, Phillip – but I think that’s how you find the silver linings in tragedies, whether it be physical injury and loss of limbs to feeling persecuted on other things that just happen. And finding those silver linings as you’re going through it is incredibly important. I think a lot of times people just dwell on the tragedy itself.

AC: Michael J. Fox actually – it’s kind of funny that we’re all talking about this – but I get quotes sent to me via email and his quote was, “Acceptance does not mean resignation. It means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.” And you know... that is so important because accepting it doesn’t mean, “Okay, I just give up.” It just means, “Okay, this is what it is. How can I get through it? How can I just keep on going?”

KM: And keep your focus on the prize and being aware of the blessings that you’re receiving as you’re going through it.

PH: Exactly, and when you look at it, what do you do? When you accept it, then you’re knowing exactly where you are. You say, “Here is who I am. I accept this.” But then, what do you do? You got to find out what is my new dream of where I am now? What’s my new goal? And when you think of that, you find a dream and you find a goal. You don’t just make a goal. You have to make a goals plan. And in that plan – there’s a system I like to teach when you’re doing that – you’ve got to be ready for what obstacles may pop up. What special skills will I need? Sometimes we have to go back and do some new reeducation of ourselves. What do you got to do to reeducated us to move there? I’m not disabled. I’m an amputee. I couldn’t do what I was doing before. But it’s amazing because retooling, finding a vision of my life, is not over. I still have things to say, things I want to do. So when you really look at that, you come out with a new goal plan. When you start working that plan, you can’t get nowhere if you don’t have a plan. You can’t get from here to Los Angeles and just get in the car and drive any which way you want to go. You got to have a plan. You got to have a destination.

PC: Now, I’m going to call you on that disabled thing because you are not disabled. You may not qualify for the 100-yard dash, but you’re not disabled. You know what I’d like to hear is the story of how did a one-armed motorcycle rider, or a one-legged motorcycle rider, end up being a speaker for the Zig Ziglar institute, if you’re willing to share that.

PH: I’ll tell you what: that’s a neat story and a lot of times – I don’t know how your program is, but – it come back to my fate, if you want to know the honest truth. I met Zig in 1993. I was 33 years old. I was a very successful young businessman. At 26 years old, I’d already become the youngest vice president of a major hotel chain in the company – first ever in the country. And then at 33 years old I met Zig as a very successful businessman, but I learned then through Zig that things weren’t exactly right. And he began to speak some – let me put it this way – some spiritual truths into my life. But it took five years for those to take root. I began to look and pay attention to those things, because I was doing all the successful things. As I say, let me put it this way: You know how we get all the head knowledge? But it really doesn’t hit, we say, until it goes down six inches and it comes down to my heart. And that’s what I was missing – I was missing that six-inch gap and Zig helped that to come in. Long story short, I had a spiritual transformation in my life when I was 39 years old. After that, I wind up moving from Shreveport, Louisiana, over here to Dallas. And so I asked my new pastor, I said, “Okay. So where do I find a church to go to?” He said, “Go to this church.” So I go to that church, I’m walking through the hall. Let me remind you: I’ve known Zig for a lot of years. I’m walking down the hall of this church and then I have this voice coming behind me. He said, “Young man, what are you doing here?” And I turn around and it was Zig! He’s like, “Wow!”

So then I wind up here and he said, “My Sunday school class is right over here.” So then I go in there... Long story short, it wasn’t long. I got to be Zig’s bible Sunday school teacher. Now our Sunday school class was bigger than most people’s churches. It would be anywhere from 300 to 700 people.

PC: Wow. No pressure.

PH: So, after my accident, after being in business, I came and talked to Tom Ziglar. He’s been the president of Ziglar for years. I said, “Tom, I can’t do that and I would like to be a business coach. Do you have something I can buy so I can go out and teach people, and do you have a program?” And he said, “Well, why don’t you just go to work for me?” I said, “Okay. When?” He said, “How about tomorrow? 8:30?” I said, “I’ll be there!” So I’ve been here.

KM: That’s awesome.

AC: You know, in reading your book, I remember your first meeting with Zig and you write about speaking truth because he said, he goes, “It is really way deep down inside where change happens.”

PH: Yes.

AC: And that’s what he was getting at. It’s all about changing the heart and love. That is pretty cool and it’s pretty cool that you knew Zig and the changes that you’ve went through since then. Can you tell us a little bit about just what you’ve got coming up in the next month or so?

PH: Well, I’m busy as I can be. I’ve got speaking engagements. A matter of fact, I’m here at the Ziglar office now. I’m taking a break. We have a Ziglar-certified legs in training class. We’re certifying trainers today so today is my day I get to speak for this group late this afternoon. I’m speaking next week for a, it’s the Austin Pregnancy Resource Center – because to me, that’s just life. We’re talking about people and I’m just busy speaking. I’m writing books. Matter of fact, I do have a new co-author. I don’t know if she’s close by, but I have a new co-author of a book that we’re writing together. Is she on the phone?

AC: Yeah, I’m here. I’m working on my end of it. We need to sit down and talk about that, too. But yeah, we’re working on it.

PH: Absolutely. I’ve got two new books coming out. One will be out in about another three weeks. Another will be out in about six weeks. After that, I’ve got projects I’m working on with several co-authors. Matter of fact, Amy Cole is one of my co-authors and I’m excited about that. Because you know, Amy, when you sit and wrote me down a few parts of my talk, and you put it down into the terminology of a professional, it’s like, “Wow!” I showed that to my wife and said, “Look at this. This lady’s got some talent.” But I know it’s your education, but it’s not just your education, Amy, it’s your heart. And it shows through so I am excited about that book.

AC: I’m excited to be working with you, too. I mean, I’ve known Erica for a couple years. I know you through her and I’m excited about all of this. This is just really, really cool. And so it will be a pleasure to be working with you and alongside you. Is there any… what advice would you give to keep counselors pumped up? What would you tell us counselors who are in the trenchers who are working with people who are showing love, who are looking for this helping people try to find their silver linings through life?

PC: Practical advice.

AC: Yeah. Practical advice for us counselors.

PH: You know, I’m glad you brought that up because you guys are out serving so much and you go through all these years of education, but what people don’t realize – when you’re working with them, you’re investing your heart. You’re not just giving them just advice from your education, you’re really thinking. You’re really digging deep. And what a lot… sometimes people don’t understand, your clients may not understand, is you’re investing a part of your heart and your soul in them. You’re really trying to find the betterment for them. But for you professionals, you guys have to. You’ve got to sit there and keep regrouping. You’ve got to start motivating yourself. You got to encourage yourself. You know the best thing you can do in the morning time – we look up your attitude of gratitude – is your self-talk. Now people say, “Well, I don’t talk to myself,” or, “I don’t know anybody that don’t talk to themselves. Matter of fact, we have conversations with people all day long!” But it’s never that positive self-talk of pumping yourself up, and then when you get to the office or if you’re not going to be in the office with other people, call other people where you get that hope and that encouragement. Now, I call it automobile university and I have mine where every day in my car, I’m not listening to some of the junk on the radio. Now, there’s some good things on the radio. I love listening to the news. I listen to it once I’m done with it. I know what’s going on. Then you can flip it over to something else. But what is inspiring or what can lift you up? Sometimes it’s just finding a good – now I just happen to be a Christian but I like listening to a good Christian comedian. This has some good things there to just kind of pump you up. And then just listen to maybe to a great sermon. But just communicating with each other and build that circle around yourself because if you’re going to keep pouring out, you’ve got to put things in. So you can’t put out if you don’t put in.

AC: You’re right about that. That is very true and that’s good, practical advice. Does anybody else have any questions?

PC: Well, actually we’re about out of time. So Phillip, if you’ll hang on for just a minute, to the listeners out there. If you would like to hear, got a little treat, if you would like to hear Phillip Hatfield’s secret to life, his thoughts on education to be specific, the type of education you need to have a good life, then all you need to do is text the word, “Grateful” to 442-333-7363 and we’ll send you a link and you can listen to that. It’s short and sweet, but it’s good stuff. Well, Amy, this has been quite interesting. Do you know anybody else that talks more than I do?

AC: Phillip Hatfield does. He’s got you beat.

PC: I know that. We figured that out. I want to know, do you got any more of them in your back pocket. So, Phillip, this has been fun.

KM: Phillip, thank you so much.

PH: Thank you. I just know we had lots of ground to cover in a short time, and thank you for having me, guys. And if I can ever serve you guys in any way, that’s my heart.

PC: Well, I appreciate it very much.

AC: Well, we appreciate you.

KM: We’ll be in touch, Phillip.

PC: Let’s do it again.