Making Shift Happen With Anthony Trucks

Welcome to True Grit and Grace, a podcast designed to empower you to claim your resilience and thrive through life's challenges. I am Amberly Lago, a mindset coach, fitness expert, and best selling author. Each week, I'll dive deep with the world's brightest leaders and elite performers to share tangible tools and practical advice to inspire you to keep your eyes on the prize and forge ahead. So get ready to conquer your fears, heal any trauma, lead with your heart, and elevate your life with grit and grace.

Hi and welcome to another episode of True Grit and Grace. I'm Amberly Lago, your host, and I'm so excited about today's show because he is making shift happen. He is an author, speaker. He was a former NFL player and an American ninja warrior. He is a badass. He is making shift happen. So if you're feeling stuck, challenged, you definitely are in the right place because he can tell you and teach you how to turn those challenges into your success and really accelerate your success. I'm so excited you're here. Thank you, Anthony Trucks, for being here on the show.

Yeah, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to unpacking whatever God has me to unpack today to help somebody to walk away from our time together better.

Yeah. Well, if you're listening, I'm sitting here. I get to see his beautiful smile. He's sitting in his new truck. Made the time to talk with me today. When I first met you and learned about your story, I was blown away from the very beginning just reading about your journey and it all started. You had a lot of adversity from a very young age. Like by age 3. Can you tell us, like, what happened when you were growing up? Because, you know, a lot of people would maybe give up or go in a different direction. And you've really chosen to become. Like I said before our interview, you're an angel. You're like a superhero angel in this world. How did you grow up?

I grew up differently than many people, but at the same time, I realized that what I experienced is relatively difficult to me. But other people have had stuff that may not look on paper as worse, but it could be relatively emotionally just as hard. But for me, my first memories of life were being given away into foster care, into a system that didn't really take care of you back in the day. I say back in 1986, I was considered a paycheck, which means as long as I don't die, the family taking care of me would get a paycheck for Me being there and they didn't take very good care of me. There were a lot of kids in the system. A lot of us statistically end up in prison or in jail or homeless. Literally. If you look at any prison in America, 75% of the population are former foster kids.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah. The homeless population, 51%, I want to say America's homeless population of former foster kids. 1% of us will ever graduate from college so early on without knowing it set up to fail. It sucks. But that was the reality of it. Night on top. I was dealing with a lot of different emotional distress. And people can't connect always with foster care system. But just imagine not feeling like you matter at all, like no one cares about you. Feeling like you have no reason for being at the people you want to love. My own mom didn't love me enough to keep me. And so I was subjected to these different types of like heinous torture and weird starvings. Awkward stuff before the age of six. But then by six I had to.

That was before the age of six. Dealing with all those emotions and those developmental years.

Yeah, put in shopping carts, pushed down hills, forced to lick the bottom of kids shoes, beat randomly, wouldn't allow to eat. I had to chase chickens to catch chickens to earn meals. Like really weird things. When you look back on it, it's like why would human beings do that? And then of course the I've made sense. Like some people just aren't good people. Doesn't mean I have to carry the anger as much. And a lot of people, we do carry this anger. But I think for me, I've always tried to decide who was Anthony. And we're always gonna figure out like who am I, who is Susan, who is Nick, who is Sean, who was Amberly, like who are we? And these questions were never like answered for a lot of years. And for me, like I went to this foster kid to then I was putting this family, still a foster kid at six, but now I'm the only black person in an all white family. So I have this interesting dynamic. My first foster dad would beat my mom, beat me, this bad guy. And then I'm this guy that has this real mom who's not in the picture, but she's in the picture, kind of puppet stringing my life in a negative way. And then at 14, finally got adopted. I stood up in front of court, severed my mom's parental rights by looking at her and saying like, I don't want you to be my mom anymore. I can Be adopted. So now I'm this, you know, adopted kid, which is a unique thing because at 14, first time in my life I knew that the pillow I woke up on, I go to sleep on that was. You don't have that kind of. Yeah, there was no stability prior to that. And then now my mom gets diagnosed with Ms. So now I'm the son of a sick mom. So I'm this, you know, black kid, all with family, former foster kid, adopted kid, mom sick. Just all these weird dynamics of my identity are just kind of all over the place.

Wow.

This was like 14, so yeah, I got a lot of craziness.

Yeah, that's so much emotion and to deal with. And then to be adopted into an all white family and have a mother that was ill. Did you become a caretaker of your.

We kind of all did. My dad, you know, he was really heavily focused on taking my mom and it declined slowly. So when she got diagnosed, I was a high school freshman. And by the time I left for college, I ended up, you know, starting football and was horrible at it at first, but loved this thing that gave me self worth. And I also kind of wanted to, like, want to show up in a certain way to say thanks to my mom. She's like, I'm going to be great at something. And you know, when I was in high school, she was wheelchair, but I wasn't bedridden. By the time I went to college, however, you know, she was unable to like, you know, walk and be out very long and so it was difficult to watch her kind of decline with

Ms. Well, it was interesting though that your default was to do something to make you feel good and to. I mean, I did the same thing and the struggles I had. I went to run track and so that made me feel good. I became the fastest runner and my brothers who grew up in the same situation went on the different path and they ended up doing drugs and alcohol. What do you think it was in you that chose to go to football because you said you weren't very good at it at first and then you ended up keep on. You were doing it and we're in the NFL, so what do you think it was in you that made you go, okay, I'm not very good at this, but I'm going to keep trying.

Can you like unpack what it is? I think over the years I've figured out little pieces of it because we all have these things that really what it was is a passion. I wanted to venture into what we usually do as human Beings, we have this thing I want to try, and I go try this thing, and I don't succeed at it very well. And it gives me the sense of, like, pain or I have to feel the sense of failure. And I just. It gives me a negative feeling. And so we don't, as human beings enjoy these feelings typically, like, I don't want to experience that again. So this thing I tried and failed at, if I avoid it, I don't have to experience that again. And so for me, at a young age, like, I had that, and I did at one point, I chalked the game up, and I'm like, I'm done playing. I'm just gonna go in, you know, and sit and sleep in class and check out. And my family, we were very poor. Like, I'm the only one in my family of that adoptive family. I'm one of six kids only wanted to graduate from the high school with, like, actual graduation and go to college. So it's like there's. They weren't set up for that. But for me, it was like I just desired to see what I could do. And that was the biggest switch, right? And so what I found was, at a certain level, like I had checked out was like, you know what? I want to be great. There was a moment in time for me that I was gifted with this opportunity that a lot of people don't get. That really switched it over, right? Because at first I chased this thing. I wasn't great. I felt the pain. I don't want to feel that anymore. I'm going to make a cool excuse up for why I'm going to do something else. And for me, it was, you're a foster kid if you're not supposed to do anything. But for, you know, a mom at home, it could be, oh, I'm just a mom, or I'm just a PTA lady, or I'm just a wife, or, you know, I just work at a secretary job or. No, I'm a guy. I'm just working a steel mill.

Yeah.

And we find ways to make ourselves small. And so what I realized was I had this moment. This was the moment that really shook it for me. I was sitting in a class, Mr. Howell's English class. Two girls sitting aside to me, like, it was like this little love cdh let people sit on in between class. I'm there with a park over my head. I'm eating a bag of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. They think I'm sleeping. And one girl says to the other girl, well, the reason I'M so bad because I'm in foster care. And for anybody hearing that, it's kind of like this. Okay, Ann, here was the beautiful part. She said out loud the excuse that I was using to make myself small, and I got to hear how stupid it sounded. Wow. That's the gift.

Yeah.

And you know what? For me, I use moments like that. They become my biggest motivating moments for me. Like, I remember being in the hospital and I was so excited to finally get out of the hospital and I couldn't wait to get back to training clients and just get my life back. And the doctor told me, oh, well, you'll never train clients again, you'll never run again, and you'll probably never wear shorts again. And I could have taken that moment and been like, yeah, you're right, I'm a victim. I'm going to play small. And I didn't. I used that moment to motivate me and prove to myself that I would be active, I would get to do the things that I loved again. And I think that's a lot of what comes in our mind, that we can have that negative self talk or those limiting beliefs. Do you ever get limiting beliefs? Now, I know you speak on some huge stages. You are all over the place and nationally recognized as one of the top motivational speakers. Do you ever have a job that you're going to do and you're about to go out and speak and you kind of get in your head and go, oh my gosh, this is so big. There's so many people here. Do you ever have any limiting beliefs?

Like, I don't know, they always float around. I mean, I played in the NFL and I was a massive stage. And you all, you go at every game like, do I belong here? You know, and into this day, I. Just before our call, I had one of my keynote prep. Before I do a keynote, a half hour to an hour talk with the organizers and the head CEOs really want to get a really good feel for exactly what they need. But every time you go up, like, who knows? I wouldn't call it limiting beliefs, but I do have the dark moments of, are you good enough? Can you do that? And I find those moments, they're always led in with the same thoughts we always have as the unknown. I don't know what's going to happen. Therefore, I think about the bad that can happen. And then I always think, like, where your focus goes, energy flows, focus on. When I was in football, I used to visualize my coach said you should never step on that football field. And then when you take that first play, have it be your first play. And what he meant was walk through beforehand, think through it in a positive. Going out there, making the tackle, making the sack. That was part of it. But then what I really learned at 15, which I now apply to my life at this point, that takes me out of that space. I found that action ends suffering.

Oh, yeah.

And if I do something to get out of this space, it works. And so for me, I do like this meeting and I do research. So the action I take helps me relieve all the pain. But here's the big thing. We're talking right now about the us, right? Like the person inside, the mindset, the mentality, the sense of confidence, self esteem, the self belief, the, you know, lack thereof. And what I found when I was 15 is the separation between being this kid that sucked at the game to this guy that was dominating people. The next year. I spent this off season just eating every weight I could find, lifting all of them, obviously. I call it eating weights, running, catching footballs, all these things I could do. And what I was doing is I was creating by rep, every single rep, every single day. I was building this guy that was stronger and faster. And I would show up at a football field, I found these moments would take place. It would be me and the guy across, and he would challenge rights. Me and him, I got to win it. And when I would go in there, I'd be like, to the root of the core of my soul, you didn't deserve to beat me today. I did the work like, I'm the guy that you don't get to beat me. And then I realized later was what we create creates us. So what you create, like, literally will create who you are. So, like, I had created a stronger, faster, more powerful body, which created stronger, more powerful Anthony inside, who showed up for Anthony in moments when Anthony needed him to show up for himself. That would fight through the little curbs and overcome the little obstacles. And so I developed this internal sense, and people call it cocky. It's difficult because it's not a cockiness. It's a sense of confidence in a way, but also a sense of not letting yourself settle for anything less than what you know you deserve. It's a sense of love. I love myself.

But that takes action. You know, that took you really working for it. And I think that you really are willing. What you're showing is you have to be willing to work for it. And it's not just that Suck at first. Yep. And it's a mind body transformation. And that's the thing people ask me all the time, well, how did you learn to walk again? How did you start to train clients again? When I was, you know, bedridden for so long and I was like, it was one step, step at a time, one dumbbell at a time. And it was just doing the work,

doing the work for me. I call it the. It's like your identity. Like, I think a lot of the time people fail to grasp. But there's the mindset, but there's also the commitments and habits. There's also the sense of character and pride. The chip and all that stuff, when you pull them together, creates who you see yourself to be. And if you look at the way you live your life, like every day, we have things materialistically, we have relationships that we keep in place because it's what we deserve. Like your partner, whoever you have in your life, it's a barometer for how you hold yourself, where you're with a person that's just not a very solid human. Like, for some reason you believe it's what you deserve.

Yes.

If you have a crappy house, live in a crappy home, or you drive a crappy car, it's not just because you're broke and you don't have any money, but like, you may think you don't deserve more, therefore you don't push to make enough money to get out of the broke level, to have these things because you think people might look at you and say, they're bad, they don't deserve that. So we don't fight that thing that may expose us to the world. And so our insecurities and lack of belief in who we are to our core diminish our ability to show up, not only show up in life, but show up for ourselves behind the scenes. We negative self talk, we have limited self beliefs. And so like I do the work and people who are successful, they do this behind the scenes dark work that nobody sees.

That's the thing. I think that's, you know, like challenging nowadays. And that is one of the main reasons I wanted to start this podcast is I wanted to share people's struggles to success. Because nowadays, you know, on social media it looks like it's easy. And I have people ask me all the time, they'll DM me on Instagram, hey, I want to be a speaker like you, or I want to write a book. And they don't realize that it took me two years to write that Book that I spoke on stages for three years before I started getting paid as a speaker. And, you know, they don't sit, see, like when they first look at you, they see this big strong guy and successful guy and they don't realize how far and how hard you had to work to overcome, you know, that darkness, your mindset, your everything. Because it could have easily gone another way.

And what a lot of people do, it does. Unfortunately, a lot of people do fall to the wayside. And it does suck. The world we have nowadays, so much opportunity. It literally is a matter of you choosing what you'll stand for for yourself.

Yeah.

And you fight for that and you get it.

Yeah. And it makes me think that I learned so much from my children. And the other day we were driving down the road and there was a homeless person laying on the ground. And I was like, oh, that's so sad. I feel sorry for them. And my daughter, who's 11, she said something shocking. She said, I don't feel sorry for them, mom. That's their choice. And I was like, wow, okay. She goes, they could have made different decisions. And look, yes, I know we always have a choice. I was just shocked to hear an 11 year old say that I don't know their circumstances. And so it was just interesting. But it was good to know that my daughter knows, okay, if I go to school, if I work hard, if I make the right decisions, and those are all these tiny little decisions along the way, then maybe I won't end up on the streets. And look, for me, I've got a brother on death row in Texas. And at first I held a. Carried a lot of shame about that. And then I thought, you know what? That could have easily been me if I would have made the choices that he made. You know, it's all about choices. In my dance career, I had a fear of hurting myself because I knew if I got hurt, I couldn't perform, I couldn't dance, I couldn't make money. And then I hurt myself. But it led me on a different path. For your NFL career, you ended up getting a shoulder injury, right? Was it a shoulder injury?

Yeah, left shoulder.

And then how did that affect you? Like, what happened when it happened? Because I'm sure that wasn't just like. For me, it was very emotional. When I got hurt, I was devastated.

Your roots fly away.

Yeah. What did you do to get out of those feelings, to move past that?

I think the thing was, you get stuck in them for a while. I think we all get stuck in them. And this is to be. I think sometimes people think I gotta be in the military, NFL or like you're talking about, you know, this arom dance and have it pulled away. You could just be a mom who sent your kids off to college and now all of a sudden you're not the mom who takes toting kids back and forth and soccer mom anymore, going to games. Like everything changes. And so there's a lot of different things that I look at. Really what it was, was all the work that I put into making this person, Anthony, football player, it was all gone. Like I couldn't use that guy anymore. And I couldn't go out and, you know, be on TV and run around in a football helmet and have self worth there. And because I'd rooted a lot of my self worth there, I didn't know who Anthony was without the game. And a lot of people, in any aspect of life, when you get something you've worked for, it's part of who you are. And you almost put all of who you are into it and it's taken away. You didn't just lose that thing, you lost a part of yourself and you're lost. And so unfortunately for me at that time, I guess, and fortunately I went and I said I got to refine myself. And I didn't really say those words. I was taking the actions without knowing it. But I opened this gym, I started running this gym, and then I was there from 6:00am to 10:00 clock at night because I wanted to make this thing amazing because I want to be the guy again. And doing so neglected my wife, neglected my kids, neglected my health. I wasn't good any business. I was horrible at it. So fast forward nine months for me to open this thing. I'm now sitting here with a letter in my hand for an eviction notice. I have no money to pay it, My wife is pissed, their house about to go in, I'm all over the place, everything. And then fast forward from there maybe another two months and I found out my wife's having an affair. My life was gone, ripped, and I hadn't really hung up football yet. And I was trying to take some trips and it was a moment in time where my agent was like, hey, you got an offer, but it's a horrible offer and every team's gonna do this. So either you take this offer, which I think is stupid, or you just hang it up, man. I was like, all right, I'm hanging it up. And like I remember crying after that. Like, so now within a Year and a half, all my life has been building this moment. Like, 13 years of me playing football. It's all gone to that point where now I'm no longer a football player. I'm not a successful business person. I have no ownership for Anthony to be great about this. I've lost my wife. I've lost my health. I've lost my family, in a sense. And I, like. I gave my kids this environment that I didn't want them ever to have. Was no dad in the house. Like, it's all gone. I was gutted. Everything that was the base of me was now gone. I drove off one night. I text my friends and family, please tell my kids who their father was. And I was done. I was looking for rec boys. I can't. I just couldn't do it. And I think I got to the extreme of it. Unfortunately, thankfully, I snapped out of it. The police found me just sitting in my car, just hanging out because all the stores were closed. I couldn't find what I was looking for. And I, like, woke back up. And I was like, this is ridiculous. I can't do this. I can't be this guy.

Thank God the police found you.

You know, I mean, I wasn't. I didn't take any action, thankfully. I was just sitting in the car. I drove home. And I remember, like, I gotta figure a way, like, out of this hole. Cause it was embarrassing. Like, I go. I show up in my house, all these people out front, like, 50 people looking for me. It just was nuts. And I had this buddy later on come to me, like, four or five days later and say, you know, no, don't wanna bring up too much, because I just wanna let you know, whenever you drove off and they found out we're looking for, he's like, I actually threw up. And he goes, well, I just thought I lost a hero. This is a guy I played high school football with. A guy that I knew was a buddy for a lot of years. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, well, end of the day, he says, you may not hear, but we all this town, like, we know what you went through, we know where you came from, we know who you are, and we love how you show up. He's like, we just wish we knew more about what was going on. He says, but you inspire a lot of people.

Wow. And here I introduced you on the show as a superhero Angel.

You are.

You are. You're a superhero. Because, you know, there's a lot of people out there. That want to, you know, try to tell you how to do stuff. And they haven't really gone through a lot themselves. Really respect when somebody has gone through so much. And really, when you hear about the dark place that they were in, it gives others hope to know that they too can get through those challenging times. And you have gotten through that. You have beautiful kids, your business, you've got an online coaching, you're speaking all over the place. I went online and I took your slow or go identity, which is so much fun because it really gives you an idea of where you are and it gets you safe on what your goals are and how much more you want to accomplish. And I loved being a guest on your podcast, which is amazing. You do so much and you're impacting so many lives by sharing your story. But then you coach people and you have this online program, too, that shows people exactly what to do when their challenges come their way and how to turn that into their success. What is the best way for people to get a hold of you or get involved if they're struggling right now and they're like, oh, my God, this guy's amazing. I want what he has. I need to turn my life around. What is the best way for people to reach you?

There's always two levels of people, right? So one person is here and it's like, ah, that's cool, right? Because not everybody's like, I gotta turn my life around right now. And for those people, I think it just come hang out with me on social Instagram at Anthony Trucks. Just come hang out, ask questions, get involved with the conversations, follow my stories to see who I am as a human being. Those people who are like, I'm really in that dark time and I needed to hear this podcast right now. Or maybe somebody listening, you share it with that person. They need to hear it. Just go. If you can find a way to get to my website at Anthony Trucks and just send a message, can also DM me. The big thing that I look at is I have, you know, done all. I've experienced all this craziness in life. I've since rectified and fixed my marriage. We have an amazing marriage now. We're divorced for three years. And all the craziness you can imagine in between custody battles. I hate you. She hates me. Back and forth. I had a girlfriend, lived with you, with her boyfriend. Everything I think of, like, should have gone separate ways, but God brought us back together. Kids are happy and healthy. She has a business helping people with special needs. I Get to coach and travel and talk and share. And so, like you said, when I do what I do, I don't talk about things from like, hey, this is what I think should be. Like, I've lived this stuff, and then I've spent time researching psychology and neuroscience in my own life and the clients I work with. And so I coach people through a process called the shift schematic. And what I do is called identity shift. We close what I call identity gaps, which is a gap between who I am and what I have and the person who has a life that I really want to be living. When we help you close those gaps, you make the identity shift. You can actually make success your second nature. Like, that's my goal. And whatever your version of success is. Right? Success could be have millions of dollars. Success could be, I just want to be having a happy household. Like, whatever you choose. But the root of humanity, we're based in, like, just a core belief in who we are and how we show up for ourselves. And when I work people through that process that are back at everything from Amazon executives to, you know, Susan, who's a soccer mom, like, literally in between such a cool grass of just life, I get to ebb and flow through. But, yeah, the first place is there. Or if someone's like, yeah, I'm curious of what you just talked about. Slower Go co. Take the slower go identity quiz, and it'll give you a feel for whether you're a slow identity or a go, which really boils down to in the moments when life kicks up hard, like, do you sit back like, oh, I don't like this? And you sit back and wait for it to calm down, and that could be good and bad. Like, it could be something bad. You pull away. You don't face it. It lingers. Or it could be something good that scares you and you're like, oh, I don't know. I slow down. Or my goal identity. Do I see this challenge? I'm like, all right, I don't want this thing to linger. Let me knock it out now. Or opportunity. It's scary. I don't know if it's for me, but let me go and trudge it and see if I can handle it. You just. So those two identities create completely different outcomes for their lives. When people can get a chance to understand which one they are and how to either go from a slow to go or level up in the go, it opens amazing doors and amazing opportunities, and it makes it feel a lot more clear, a lot more powerful, and Then you can create this person that creates a life you want to live well.

And I have to say, I did that challenge. It doesn't take long to take and it's really fun. You make it fun, fun. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much fun. I love how you just break it down and you really get to the solution. But I respect you so much and like I said, it's because you have lived through these challenges and you know what it's like to be in a place where you're struggling and just thank you for everything that you're doing for others. You guys go check them out. I love seeing your post on Instagram. I'm a big fan. You have some great guests on your podcast.

You're one of them.

Oh, thank you. And like I said, you are amazing. Just when you talk, I calm down. I'm laser focused on you and I'm just amazed at all the good you're doing in the world. It's such an honor to have you here. So again, anthonytrucks.com check them out. Send a message to him. And thank you so much for being here.

So very welcome.

Thanks so much for joining us this week on True Britain Grace Podcast. If you like it, please rate it or share it with your friends.

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