130: Anthony Trucks: Retired NFL Player for the Buccaneers, Redskins, and Steelers, President & CEO of Anthony Trucks Industries, Author, Speaker, Coach, and Current American Ninja Warrior on NBC.

Anthony Trucks

Anthony Trucks talks about overcoming foster care and then coping with having to transition after having a short professional NFL football career. “I came out of the NFL and I toured shorter. So it ended before I wanted it to, which is even worse, because I didn’t go out of my own doing. And then I tried to find myself again and unfortunately in doing so, I found that I lost a lot. Because for me it’s like I knew what I had to put in. I earned my keep in football, right? Then all of a sudden I’m in this realm where it’s like…the real world.” 

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Anthony Trucks, Retired NFL Player for the Buccaneers, Redskins, and Steelers, President & CEO of Anthony Trucks Industries, Author, Speaker, Coach, and Current American Ninja Warrior on NBC. Anthony Trucks started his own businesses and become a motivational speaker for others to benefit from. “I think a lot of people think it has to be sports or military. It could be a mom. All of a sudden your kids go to college. Who are you without driving people around all day? Maybe if you are a dad and all of a sudden you retire. Or you are a dad and your kid doesn’t need you to coach anymore. We always have these shifts and people attribute them to just the sports world. But its humanity.” 

Listen to “Anthony Trucks: Retired NFL Player for the Buccaneers, Redskins, and Steelers, President & CEO of Anthony Trucks Industries, Author, Speaker” on Spreaker.

What You Will Learn:

Anthony Trucks shares the physical, mental, and emotional hardships of his early life in foster care. “It was just a level of not feeling secure, not feeling stable, not feeling loved. I bounced around from house to house for three years, six different homes I was in. A lot of them were just bad people. Be starved, torchered me, like weird stuff as a kid. At six years old I got put in my family, which is my family to this day. I was not adopted until I was 14 though. So everyday you have no idea. ‘Am I going to go back to foster care, in a different house?’”

Why did it take eight years for Anthony Trucks to get fully adopted by his current foster family? “For eight years I was in that house but my real mom had what’s called parental rights. Which means that she can control what I can and can’t do. Couldn’t play sports. Couldn’t take trips. Couldn’t get adopted. And so at 14, I finally let the family love me. Because for a lot of years I always wanted to go back to my real mom and I think we don’t realise that sometimes the thing you want so bad is not the greatest for you.”

Anthony Trucks talks about getting arrested as a kid after hanging out with the wrong crowd and breaking into cars, which he still regrets to this day. He shares how his mindstate at that time shifted between the feeling that being a foster kid set up his life for failure and having doubt that he deserved the chance to have a good life. “‘You’re a foster kid Ant and what do foster kids do?’ You look at any prison in American, 75% of the inmates are former foster kids. Like 50% of the homeless population…foster kids. Less than 1% of us ever graduate college. So I’m not numerically set up to do anything well.”

How does Anthony define real love? “I think real love has to be tough because everybody can give you false love which makes you feel good all the time. But love is like, ‘I want you to be better,’ and usually it means breaking you from the direction you feel comfortable going because that is not taking you where you want to go.”

Anthony Trucks shares an touching story about the impact that his potential suicide attempt had on one of his close friends who told Anthony, “‘When I found out what was going on, I legitimately threw up. I was sick and it scared the crap out of me.’ I’m like, I’m sorry man. And he is like, ‘No, I don’t think you grasp.’ He says, ‘There is a reason, because I thought I lost a hero.’ It was really weird to hear like a friend of yours say something like that. Because I’m just like a guy, I know. He says,  ‘At the end of the day you don’t know this but, everybody in your community, we know what you went through, from a kid on up. To see what you accomplished, dude, you are an inspiration to everybody.’”

‘Shift Happens’

Anthony talks in depth about the work he does in helping others go through their own identify shifts in their lives. “Identity Shift, the way I look at it, the idea is to have success on autopilot. There are certain parts of who we are that people just have the midas touch. Like, why does that guy always win? Like, what’s so great about him? It is just who that person is. So when they run into problems, they have what’s called a ‘slow or go identity.’ Difficulty slows me. I procrastinate. I find ways to avoid it and distance myself or I go full board and figure it out.” 

See. Sacrifice. Sustain. 

During this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast with Anthony Trucks, he also talks about the three stages you have to go through to make a change, which is to see, to sacrifice, and to sustain. These include seeing things that have got to be changed that you don’t want to see right now, making the sacrifices to make these changes your new normal, and to sustain these changes so that you don’t revert back to old habits. “When you can get to an effortless effort level for what you put into your life, but the outcome is higher because it is who you are? You are golden, man.”

Links to Additional Resources:

• Anthony Trucks: Linkedin Instagram YouTube Twitter 
• Anthony Trucks’ Website: anthonytrucks.com
• Slow or Go Identity Test: SlowOrGo.co