The Rise & Fall Of Self-Reliance In America with Jim Cathcart

 

I. Introduction & Definition of Self-Reliance

Ray Stendall: Hello, this is Ray Stendall, publisher of Customer Engagement Magazine. I'm so happy you are with us for this very important series on self-reliance. Today, my guest is a good friend and an expert on the subject. He is the author of 16 books, two of which are international bestsellers, Relationship Selling and The Acorn Principle. He has given over 3,000 talks and is the recipient of multiple awards in the public speaking industry. My guest is none other than the one, the only, Mr. Jim Cathcart. Welcome to the program.

Jim Cathcart: Thank you, Ray. This is exciting. I’m looking forward to this.

Ray: Jim and I have been talking about this now for a few months and think it is absolutely vitally important to look at this topic and see how you can apply it in your own life and in your own business. Before we get started, Jim, please say a few words about some of the work you have been doing, for those who may not know a lot about you.

Jim: I’ve been a professional speaker since 1977. As you mentioned, I’ve done about 3,000 presentations all over the world and been president of the National Speakers Association. But I started out as a government clerk, an overweight, out-of-shape guy in Little Rock, Arkansas with no college degree and no money in the bank. I heard Earl Nightingale on the radio and got inspired.

Earl had a program called “Our Changing World,” a motivational radio show about five minutes long. I heard it one day and it inspired me to change my own life, because I never expected to do much in the world; I never expected to matter. I figured I’d have a decent life, I’d be a good person, a nice guy, a good neighbor, but I didn’t expect to make my mark in the world. Earl said that day, “If you spend an extra hour each day studying your chosen field, five years later you’ll be a national expert in that field.”

I thought: “Wow! If that formula actually works and it doesn’t require me to be a gifted prodigy in order to work it, wow! I don’t have to have a Ph.D. going in. I’ve got an hour a day, I can do that.”

Ray: Thank you, Jim. This is a great case study for what we’re talking about today, because we have created a blueprint that we'll share with our audience to help each member become a more self-reliant individual to contribute within their own family and also within their own business.

First, let's talk about what it really means to be self-reliant. Please share your thoughts and I’ll add mine of how self-reliance has changed. The subject of our interview and the magazine is the “Rise and Fall of Self-reliance in America,” and quite frankly, I would extend that to the rest of the world in many ways. So, let’s define the subject.

Jim: Self-reliance means that when the challenges come, I don't have to find somebody else to rescue me. I can handle it. It means I'm self-reliant on many, many levels. I can handle my own finances. I can handle my own health. I can handle my own education. I can determine how I want my life to be and change it from what it has been into what I'd like it to be. The trouble is that so much of the world encourages us to be dependent on somebody else or some other thing, especially government or especially the educational institutions, or dependent on some savior somewhere to swoop in and rescue us from ourselves.
Now, is there a limit to what you could commit to like that? Of course! Some things would be an outrageously big or wrong goal. But for what you genuinely want, what you truly dream about, you need to be the one who decides, “I’m going to make it happen.”

Ray: It's also about having accountability and responsibility in your own life for your life and being willing to work diligently to realize the goals you set for yourself. We believe that there is a shift between the way individuals conducted themselves in times past and the way things are happening in today's society and culture. What did self-reliance really mean when the country was formed?

Jim: Let me add something before you start that. One thing self-reliance is absolutely not is blaming. It's not about accusing your circumstances, it's not about accusing another person, and it's not about saying, “Well, if only I had two arms and two feet.” I know successful, wealthy people who were born without arms and feet. It’s not about saying, “Well, look at you, you’re an articulate adult." I know people who started out as very non-articulate adults and became articulate. You can overcome almost anything if you decide to do it, but the commitment has to start with you.

Ray: I agree. Sometimes I hear, “Well, you started off with all these extra privileges,” or all these extra opportunities, or, “You had a great family and a great education,” and a great this and a great that. And in some cases, obviously, one must be very grateful for the good things in their life. But many people start off with great things and don't leverage and use them to make something of themselves, and they end up dying in the ditch as a drug addict or something equivalent. They’re not using what they had. And there are other people who came to the country with nothing, or were born here with nothing, and were able to accomplish so much. A lot of what we’re talking about is not just about what you started with. It's really what you choose to make of yourself, based on what you have available.

Jim: Exactly. Look at Helen Keller, a woman who couldn't speak, couldn't hear and couldn't see. Well, good heavens! That’s a formula for complete disaster; and yet, she was able to become a substantial person and really make a difference in the world. Look at people like Glenn Cunningham. He suffered severe burns, and they were thinking about amputating his legs because of the burns. And yet, through iron will and discipline he developed over time, he not only got back to normal health, but he became an Olympic runner and broke the four-minute mile barrier. Wow!

There is example after example, like a recent book about Louis Zamperini. Louis Zamperini was captured in World War II. He survived 40- some odd days in the Pacific in a life raft just catching whatever food he could. He was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned, beaten and tortured for years. Finally, he came back to United States and today is a well-adjusted, healthy man. Oh my gosh! How is that possible?

Whatever you have been whining about, ask yourself: “What about the guy who was born blind or the one who has no arms; what about the person who was abused throughout their childhood or the one born into abject poverty, and they made it? What are you whining about?”

Ray: Look at our circumstances right now. Right now, we are communicating through technology in front of a computer. We're living in an age where people are watching us at this very moment, creating a video, which could never have been possible just a short period ago. Compare that to somebody who doesn't have any food or any water and is living in a little hut somewhere on the other end of the world, how many advantages we have in front of us to be able to take us to the next level.

Jim: Precisely. Why did the Founding Fathers come here? To escape oppression because they couldn't be self-reliant where they were living. They needed a place where they could be free, to make their own way, pay their own dues, suffer their own consequences of bad choices, to be free from oppressive, overbearing control from outside of themselves.

Ray: Absolutely. That’s actually one of my favorite words in the whole English language; freedom. It’s what freedom really means, in terms of a free society, free will, the ability to exist and grow and develop as you want to without harming others in the process.

Jim: Freedom of choice, freedom of thought.

Ray: Freedom of beliefs, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. That's what this country is really based on. If we go back and think about it, what did self-reliance really mean when the country was formed? Go back to the basics of food. You had to hunt for your food, to farm your food, and you had to be in charge of your own nutritional plan; otherwise; you weren't going to eat.

Jim: And we didn’t just eat for today or hunt for today, because if you did that, on a day when you couldn't hunt or find anything to eat, you would have starved. So you had to plan as well as act for the “now.”

Ray: Just a few generations ago, it was common practice for a family to can food and store it for a day when they didn't have food. Now that's a lost art. Most people don't know how to can food or preserve it. Back then, you had to create your shelter. There wasn't a development where you could just move in and pay rent to somebody.

Jim: Yeah. You built your own house and took a lot of pride in that. People would join together in communities and help each other out on the big parts, like a barn raising; where heavy lifting required a lot of people, the neighbors would pitch in. When people are self-reliant, as opposed to being dependent on other people, then others are more willing to help. If you're okay without me, then I'm happy to pitch in, because I know you're not going to be on my doorstep every other week saying: “Hey, Jim, could I have another handout? Hey, Jim, can you help me do such and such? Hey, can I borrow those tools once again?” If that happens, my reply is going to be, “No, Ray, I loaned you the tools the first time; it's your job to get the tools you need ongoing.”

Ray: Yes, very true. Our audience might be wondering, “Why are Ray and Jim talking about what life was like back when this country was formed?” You’ll see this very clearly, because we're in a society where life is far different now than it was back then. Some of that is positive, but some of that is also negative.

Jim, what was life like back when we started the country, from a communications standpoint?

Jim: If you couldn’t walk to where the person was or ride your horse there, pretty much, you were stuck, And if you didn't know how to read and write, which many people didn't, then your communication ability was restricted to the face-to-face circumstances you could create. Within a community, the people who could read and write had to teach the others, so that everyone had the ability to be independent. Some people looked at the ability to read and write only as something that people ought to do. No.

Ray: Very well said. What you said about communication skills feeds right into thinking about education. How did people educate their children? What were the values, the morals, and the infrastructure they put in place to be able to pass on a skill set and knowledge so that they could thrive in their next generations?

Jim: Yeah, let’s think about that. If you're teaching kids and you're in a survival community, like they were back in Plymouth Rock, what do the kids need to know so that they don't remain dependent on the adults? And by the way, by the time those kids were old enough to walk and talk, they had jobs to do. They didn't have little token chores. At an early age, they had jobs that others depended on them for. You could say, “Oh, that’s child slavery.” Well, no. Everybody was enslaved to themselves and each other just to stay alive.

What do you teach kids? First, you teach them fundamental skills: How do you not do harm? How do you not set the house on fire? How do you not let the cow go? How do you not spoil the crops? How do you not ruin the resources we need to protect ourselves from the elements? That's number one. Next, you teach them how to feed themselves: what to eat and what not to eat, what's dangerous or poisonous and what’s just fine. Next, you teach them how to do work; you teach them the use of tools.

Then you teach them how to relate to other people, so that they don't alienate other people and they get their cooperation. And then you teach each new thing progressively. You teach them words; you teach them meanings. You teach them mathematics; the basics of this plus this equals that and will never equal more than that, so they understand how to calculate how much do we have and how much will we need and how long will it be, and so forth. You teach the thinking that causes the person to become self-reliant.

Hundreds of millions of people have preceded us on earth. Many of them were wise, wonderful people who contributed to the knowledge, the wisdom, and the collective wisdom of humanity. That wisdom was passed along for many generations through stories and parents teaching children and elders teaching youngers. That was the norm in every community in primitive and advanced societies.

Today, television has become the teacher by default. We've been assuming that the schools were teaching the skills kids needed, when, in fact, they have gone off in a much less productive direction teaching many things, like honoring diversity. Well, nice idea, but for heaven’s sake, first teach me how to stay alive! So the schools aren’t providing all of the education that helps us get to the point of self-reliance. What’s the end result? The end result is people are dependent. And when people are dependent, someone else is in control. When someone else is in control, you are, by fact, a victim of whatever they do.

Ray: Very well said. We’re going to talk about how the world is today and how we can start to rectify some of these challenges, because we do not have a school system today that delivers on the skill set that will produce self-reliant, productive individuals.

Jim: Ray, I’ve got a friend from long ago back in the 1970s, Rick Little, not to be confused with the comedian Rich Little. As a teenager, Rick Little founded an organization called Quest. He got together with a lot of educators and world leaders in the field of education and had them co-author a textbook called Skills for Living. Then Rick went around the country and met with superintendents of schools, directors of education, political leaders, even first ladies and people like that in the White House, and got endorsement for his program to teach basic skills for living in public school systems, such as:

How do you manage money? How do you manage a checkbook (a lot of schools don't even approach that subject)? How do you set goals in life? How do you keep yourself healthy and well-nourished (not just P.E., but how do you keep yourself healthy)? How do you get along with people you don't yet know? How do you get along with people you already know but maybe you have conflict with them? How do you do problem solving, identify the need (there are learnable steps in problem solving)? How do you develop the kind of critical thinking that allows you to deal with the real problem and not just address symptoms that may be the apparent problem?

Rick did that, and it’s accepted in a lot of school systems, but not most. I think something like that needs to take place in every household and every school system. First, teach us what we need to get by, and then teach us the higher-level thinking things and the cultural things, like honoring diversity, that sort of thing.

Ray: That type of training would be so valuable if put into our school system, where youngsters would get that as part of their upbringing in a systematic and an organized manner. Then, looking at the root of productivity and growth within an economy, we start thinking about small businesses, about entrepreneurship, about the basics of marketing and sales and how to connect with others in a way that delivers value in the marketplace.

It still boggles my mind how if you ask anybody, “What's driving the economy?” it’s “small business.” Then you ask the question, “What are we doing to create more entrepreneurs in our school system, and how do we produce more entrepreneurs?” The question is not, “How do we produce more people who can follow the same role in society?” There's a difference between what we want to produce and what is actually being done. And that is also a big part of our conversation.

---

II. Why Do We Need to Act Now?

Ray: That being said, let’s talk about the world today and highlight some issues that are vastly different from what the world was like when the country was founded.

Jim: I’m currently in my 60s, and when I was growing up in the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, the things I was learning not only at school but also at home were quite different from what people are getting today. What was expected from our neighbors and in our communities was different then. For example, this is a bit controversial today, but when I was growing up, it was no big deal at all at age probably six through 15.

My dad was a telephone repairman, my mom was a housewife, and I had a little sister. My grandfather was an invalid from a stroke, and he and my grandmother lived in our front bedroom in Little Rock, Arkansas. I grew up with a cabinet above my bed that contained shotguns, rifles, handguns and hunting knives, plus ammunition. It had a lock on it, but the lock was not closed. In other words, I had an arsenal of firearms and weapons in my room at my disposal, should I choose to make a bad choice throughout my entire youth when I was old enough to do harm. Never once, not one time in my entire childhood did I play with the guns. Ever. I was taught from as early as I can remember to respect weapons, to treat them in an appropriate way, to rely on my dad to guide me until I learned how to use a weapon, and whether and when to use a weapon, and how to care for one.

Happily, I never found the need to use a weapon in personal defense, and thank God for that, but I learned to use weapons. If you’d go up and down my street when I was a kid, all the other homes had firearms and ammunition in them. It was not like guns cause crime. No, they don’t. Guns just change the nature of the crime. Criminals cause crime; well, circumstances cause criminals. No, because there are also people in the same circumstances who don’t go into crime.

It’s personal choice, and what I’m exhorting our audience to do is make the personal choice. Make the commitment to become self-reliant, to be the exception to the herd charging off the cliff and to take responsibility first for yourself, and then for your family, and then for your business, and then for your community, and then for your world.

Ray: What you’re saying resonates to the fiber of my being and gets me thinking about my story. Similar to you, I also grew up with guns, and my dad had a simple rule. The rule was that anytime I wanted to go out with my dad and shoot the gun in a safe environment with all the appropriate precautions, we could. I knew where the guns were, I knew where the ammunition was. I never once ventured out on my own to touch it, even though I very well could have. There was an alignment of trust between my dad and me in the same way that you talked about it. I had everything at my disposal, and it’s about making a personal choice. In today’s world, many view guns as the cause of many bad things and many statistics are cited. But the reality is you can kill more people with a car than you can with a gun. And we let people who are 16 years old drive cars.

Jim: Plus, if we’re going to try and control weapons, we’re going to have to control clubs. We’re going to have to control knives and forks. We’re going to have to control ballpoint pens, in the hands of the wrong person. We’re going to have to control pillows as a suffocation instrument. You can’t control weapons.

Ray: These two fists can kill somebody. It’s not about weapons; it’s about personal choice.

Jim: My grandson is currently 13 years old, and last week my wife and I went to his final testing and awarding of his black belt in Tae Kwon Do. My little 13-year-old grandson can kick my ass, but he wouldn’t, thank God. But that’s the point. He has learned to use his body as a weapon, if need be. But more importantly, in going through the Tae Kwon Do training, he has learned the discipline, the respect for his elders, the respect of the process, the knowledge of knowing the limits of what to do and what not to do. Every time they go to one of their trainings, he recites this creed that talks about honor, respect and duty, and that sort of thing. None of it’s about war. None of it’s about hurting. None of it’s about harm. It’s all about being an honorable individual, and that's the whole point. That's what we’ve got to get back to.

Ray: It comes back to the idea, by the people for the people. That’s what government was about back when the country was founded. It’s public servants, right? The whole idea of public servants; government works for the people. That’s who they’re supposed to be accountable to.

Jim, let’s jump into the next part of this blueprint and talk about the world today. When we talk about dependency versus being self-reliant, there are millions of people today who either work for the government or are dependent on the government in one shape way or another. An interesting statistic is that approximately 1/3 of the United States population, about 100 million people today generate income through their work and pay taxes into a system, and the remaining people are positioned to retire and put money into the system. About 100 million people are supporting 313 million total people, including themselves. That is really a big challenge.

Jim: When you look at it historically, the ratio has been vastly different. A small percentage of people are in government, let's use 20%, and 80% of the people are the productive part of society that are creating products, creating resources, providing services and feeding the economy itself. So any entity that is not primarily government employees, that means private enterprise, is squeezed out and everybody is dependent on the people making the policies and the rules. And those are the ones that determine your future, not you. So if I start a lemonade stand and I don’t have the government license to have a lemonade stand, then I end up no longer able to sell lemonade. And if you’re the guy who’s growing lemons, I’m no longer your customer. And if I’m the guy selling fertilizer to the lemon grower, then I’ve no longer got a customer because you’re in trouble. And then it goes all the way back to wherever it starts.

Ray: So you’re the lemonade stand owner and you’re unable to have lemons, and that value chain is impacted. When it comes time to feed your family and you can’t sell lemonade, now we enter this realm of dependence. And now, how are you going to get by when your stomach is rumbling? You’re going to have a challenge.

Jim: Some people would say, “Well hey, just have the government own the lemonade stands.” Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen; and it could happen. But if the government owns the business, its goal is not the same as an individual who owns a business. The government’s goal in this is to sustain the business; that’s it. But an individual’s goal is to grow the business.

Ray: This gets kind of interesting and perhaps a little controversial, because then, you end up having a lemonade stand owner who maybe works with government that decrees some public policies that can benefit the lemonade stand industry. And lo and behold, the government does not become a partner in the lemonade stand business, which hurts perhaps other lemonade stands that don’t have the same level of involvement.

Jim: I might find that my local customer base doesn’t like lemonade, but they love orange juice, and so I make a deal with you to provide oranges. I started making orange juice, and then the government comes back and says, “Hey, you can’t do that.” “Why?” “Because all the people are coming to you for orange juice, you’ve got a monopoly; monopolies are not fair.” “Well, let other people come up with their own orange juice.” “No, no, no; you’ve got to share your technology.” Then all of a sudden, decisions that would’ve been made based on what’s going to work and what’s not are now made based on what’s fair and what’s not. Fairness is a concept that makes everything go in the wrong direction. I’m not saying fairness is a bad idea. I’m saying it is not a good policy.

Ray: You must have an objective way of measuring success, and when private industry is punished for being successful, there’s a problem. Many in our audience are very well informed and know that the dollar is the international reserve currency that all other currencies tie their value to, and that right now we have a monetary system that is expanding our increasing debt. It’s a fancy way of saying we’re printing digital money. The very real impact to our audience is that the costs of production are going up because of inflation. That means it’s going to be harder for you to generate a profit in the future with this expanding debt.

Number two is the taxation factor and the bureaucracy that big businesses is; an upward trend where it becomes more difficult to do business. Ultimately, this results in having to do more with less and do so with less staff. And that’s where this big challenge continues to erupt, because as a society we are not acting in a self-reliant way. We are trying to paper over all of our expenses, which isn’t going to last forever.

Jim: Every time you put a government in charge of an enterprise, the enterprise becomes less efficient over time. One of the classic examples is Rich DeVos, one of the founders of Amway, who told about this in a speech. In Russia 20 years ago, as an experiment the USSR allowed a few farms to have private ownership, but the government owned all of them; it owned almost everything. They found that productivity coming out of private farms was like ten times greater than the productivity coming out of the government farms, and yet, it was the same farms that had previously been owned by the government, and they asked why. On the government farms at dark, the farmers would park the tractor and go back to the house, and on the private farms at dark, the farmers would put lights on the tractors and drive them on into the night to get the job done. They were committed to the outcome, not committed to the process.

That’s the definition of a bureaucrat: someone who is more committed to their process, their procedure, than they are to the effect that it has to go to a government agency. It’s not uncommon to encounter someone who says, “You should’ve been here yesterday,” and that’s somehow supposed to make you go away. “Well, I couldn’t have gotten here yesterday, so what can I do now?” “Well, I’m sorry, but you know the rule says you should’ve been here yesterday; yesterday was the deadline.” In a government agency, that makes perfect sense. In a private business you say: “Okay, I understand maybe there’s a penalty. Let’s make it right. What do I need to do?”

In a bureaucracy it’s all about: “Did you complete these steps in this order using these forms? Do you have these stamps and these signatures?” Not, “Is this going to work?” In a private enterprise it’s always: “Is this going to work? If so, then we’ll do all these other things; but if it’s not going to work, let’s just don’t do this.”

Ray: My family came from a communist country, and what you said about the farm in the private sector and the farm in the government sector rang true, from some of the stories I heard about my ancestors and what they went through; like the huge, huge, huge penalties they paid essentially for trying to exist in a happy and productive manner.

I want to circle back to what self-reliance meant when this country was formed. Think about food; today, we are completely dependent on a just-in-time food system. Oil prices go up, and if trucks don’t arrive to the supermarket, you’re not going to have food five days from now. The average person does not have more than five days of food to exist on.

Jim: Look at fuel, gasoline. How many people have any reserved gasoline at all? They got what’s left in the tank, and they’re dependent on their local service stations to have fuel when they go there. I remember in 1974 that dried up for a while.

Ray: In today’s education system, you can go all the way through grade school, high school and college and not know how to balance a checkbook or how to relate to somebody in a sales process, which is fundamental in any business. What about defense? We talked about our stories with guns, and how every time something bad happens or somebody takes a bad action, they go after the tool, not the psychotropic drugs that most of these kids are on who commit these crimes. The point is that the role of government has changed, the role of education has changed, the idea of how you exist, and with food and shelter and defense. Everything has changed.

Jim: The role of representation has changed, like the legal system. Now you can sue somebody for almost anything. You can sue somebody for looking at you in a disrespectful manner. Imagine that, looking at you in a disrespectful manner.

Ray: Jim and I want you, our audience members, to understand that the idea of self-reliance is so core to who we are as people; to have the freedom to pursue your dreams and make life better for yourself or your family. This presentation series is really for people who are looking to be problem solvers and to understand the truth and embrace objective reality to better themselves and the people they care about. We think you’re going to see this is in our blueprint. We want you to emerge from this with a new sense of awareness, to be more confident about who you are and what you can contribute in society, to be more competent, and to really live your best life. That’s one of the goals. Jim, anything else you’d like to say about whom this series is for and some of its goals?

Jim: A good parallel to this is looking at the role of a manager. I look at the role of a manager of people as being to become progressively less necessary. If I’m the manager of a team of people, my job is to help them develop the skills of self-reliance that allow them to do their work well, and even do it better than I was teaching them to do it, without my presence or my involvement. The more I teach them to become self-reliant, the less they need that level of me, and the more I can progress to something else and bring even greater value. But if I don’t teach them to be self-reliant, then I teach them by default to become dependent on me. “Well, we can’t do this, Jim’s not here; he makes those decisions. I’m sorry, I don’t have the authority or wisdom to make this choice; you’re going to have to wait until the boss gets back.” So the role of a boss is to become less necessary.

 

The role of a parent is to become less necessary. Let your children need you for the love you show them, not for the skills you possess because you want to impart everything you know to them in the best possible way, with the goal of them being less dependent. When my son, Jim Jr., was young, he asked me, “Can I go to Jason’s house to play?” and I said, “No.” He asked, “Why not?” I said, “Because three nights this week out of these four, you’ve been to Jason’s house, and you need to give it a rest.” He said, “Well, Dad, there’s no real reason for me not go to Jason’s house to play.” I said, “Jim, you’re going to have to trust me on this, I know when enough is enough; you don’t.”

He said, “I don’t understand.” I said: “I totally get that, because you’re only a few years old, so you’ve got to trust the fact that I love you and I will make good decisions on your behalf. I’m guiding you wisely. I’m not doing it selfishly to make me feel good. So, no, you can’t go to Jason’s tonight.” He said, “Well, I don’t understand.”

I said: “Well, let me put it a different way. When you were a little baby, if I wanted you to go across the street, I would pick you up in my arms and carry you. As you got older and you could walk, I realized you had a new skill, so I would let you walk beside me, and I would hold your wrist with a death clamp that you could never get away from me to keep you safe as we went across the street. When you got a little older, I’d say, ‘Hold my hand,’ and now it’s you holding me instead of me holding you. And then I said, ‘Okay, walk right beside me.’ And we didn’t have to hold hands ‘because you’re getting older, you’re getting more capable, you’re learning more.’ Finally, I got to the point where I said, ‘Be careful, look both ways before you cross street.’ And then, as you developed the ability to make better decisions and the physical ability to do the things that were needed, you could say to me, ‘I’m going out to play.’ And I could say, ‘Fine; be careful; have fun.’ You had total freedom because you had been through the steps of acquiring the skills for self-reliance. Without that, I would still be carrying you across the street at your current age in your forties.”

That story really shows the process of development and learning. From a business standpoint looking at a first-line person who is working with a customer, how many times have you gone into a business with a problem you wanted to get solved, and someone told you, “I can’t do that … I’m not allowed to do that … I can’t make that kind of decision?” It just turns you off as a customer. In other organizations, you see the line person as being a problem solver, taking a shot at accountability and responsibility for that customer as well as for his/her action.

Ray: You want to hire him/her right away.

Jim: Exactly! You want to hire those individuals, because they basically solved the customer’s problem and asked for forgiveness later, as opposed to asking permission to begin solving the customer’s problem. This idea of self-reliance is in the individual world, as a parent, as a business owner, as an employee in the business world. It’s needed everywhere.

---

III. Myths People Today Believe about Self-Reliance

Ray: Let’s now talk about some of the myths so predominant in today’s world. The first one is that today’s world is very advanced, and because it’s so advanced, it’s not necessary to be that self-reliant, because we have other safety nets in place that take care of us. What’s your reaction to that one?

 

Jim: That’s a victim’s rationalization. A victim is a person who is totally subjective to and dependent on other people. They tend to rationalize their situation. “Well, what Jim and Ray are talking about is a bunch of hard work; plus, I don’t have permission to do that and I’d get in trouble. What if times got tough?” Their mind throws up all these potential obstacles, which is natural, but instead of doing the problem solving when the obstacle comes up, they choose the obstacle as permanent. So they put it down as part of their defense that becomes a wall between them and what they want; to live a rewarding and meaningful and free life.

They’re constantly saying: “Well, no, it’s okay. I mean, other people have our back. They’ve got our best interest in mind. They’re not going to come up with rules that are going to hurt us. Our government’s not going to do what governments throughout history have done and intrude into our lives and take away our weapons and seize our bank accounts, and make us move from here to there and stop us from practicing the businesses we’re in, and dry up our resources and refuse to have a pipeline of new supplies coming to us. They’re not going to do that.” It’s a rationalization that victims use to make them momentarily feel better.

Ray: The next myth is that self-reliant people are isolationists and survivalists. What’s your reaction to that?

Jim: Actually, it’s the other way around. Isolationists and survivalists tend to be self-reliant people because they have to be, but everybody can become a self-reliant person. It starts in little increments, where you learn to manage your own money, your time better, your own attitude or your emotions, so that you’re not subject to emotional outbursts based on whatever is the stimulus. The more you learn those little things, the more you take care of your own circumstances and the more self-reliant you become.

Ray: Well said. Another myth is that homeschooling is a radical concept. Before you give your thoughts, I’ll throw in a couple on this. The school system has its various plusses and minuses, but one thing is pretty clear; they have your children for a good chunk of the day for many years, and what’s being said and taught to them has a significant impact on their development. So when a parent decides to be self-reliant and take on the responsibility of educating their own children, it’s not a radical concept. It’s actually a…

Jim: It’s a fundamental concept. It’s about who taught the child how to hold his spoon, how to be clean and how to use the bathroom; who taught them what’s appropriate to say and not to say, where to go or not to go. Those are universal homeschooling concepts. All homes have homeschooling. It’s just that some of them stop earlier than others in the child’s development. In the United States, we’ve become accustomed to abdicating our responsibility and saying it’s okay that the public school teachers are now in charge.

Ray: That got me thinking. When I would come home from school throughout all the time prior to and even through university, it was almost a regular habit to discuss what I was being taught. It was almost like a cleansing process.

Jim: A cementing process that would seat the ideas more firmly into you.

Ray: That’s true. There was a cleansing component and a cementing component to it. The process of discussing what I was being taught and challenging some of those ideas really helped reinforce critical thinking in me at an early age. It also helped to eradicate theological ideas that were presented to me as the truth. I understand the difference between the truth and reality.

Jim: Yeah, and it wouldn’t necessarily be something you learned from a teacher. It could be from a classmate. Our classmates are so often the ones who pass along the wrong ideas. They say to us, “Here’s what sex is about,” or here’s what this or that is about, and you take it as truth. “Well, Johnny said so.” No. “I know this is so because Johnny said so, and he learned from his big brother; let’s filter this through our family and then see whether it floats.”

Ray: Another myth is that we’re alarmists; “Ray and Jim, you guys are overreacting.” If anyone thinks we’re overreacting, I urge them to look at some objective statistics that explain how the economy is behaving and how it has shifted over the last few decades. This has been an ongoing trend for a long time. We didn’t get where we are today overnight; and, no, it’s not our current president’s fault or the previous guy’s fault. It is a cumulative effect of bad decisions over a period of time.

Jim: That’s for sure. Just look at what it takes to buy a home today. Almost everything we do today that involves the passage of money or authority or commitment has a legal dimension to it that it used to not have. When I bought my first home, the number of papers I had to sign was about a dozen. Today, the stack of papers is hundreds high. When I bought a house in San Diego, I remember signing a form that said I claim to be me. The essence of the form was, “I, Jim Cathcart, declare that I claim to be Jim Cathcart.” How absurd, how patently insane is that statement? My signature is a claim to be me, right? Now they’re saying, “Well, a signature…you never know.”

Kids aren’t learning cursive writing anymore and are making an X. We’ve got to have thumbprints. The process of living in this country has become so complex because of the legal fears that we have multiple forms and multiple can’t dos that have nothing to do with productivity or getting the right result. They all have to do with ‘what will so-and-so think’ or ‘people like so-and-so might be offended.’ First, people like so-and-so? Let’s find actual individuals we’re talking about, not crowds of possible people.

Second, offended? When did being offended become such a tragedy? Getting shot in the face is a big tragedy. Having your house burn to the ground with all your belongings is a big tragedy. Having somebody dis you is nothing. If somebody disrespects me or puts up a cross in their yard, and I’m a Jew or a Muslim or a whatever, their cross isn’t changing my world. It’s changing the decorations of it, but nobody’s in my front room saying ‘you must believe like I believe.’ They simply put up a cross. I don’t have anything to put up right now, but someday, I could probably put up something, too. I’m using that as an illustration. My own personal beliefs are Christian, but I’m not trying to sell anybody on it. I just think we need less ‘must do’ and more ‘what works’ in our world.

 

Ray: Well said. We’ve been painting a picture of what has happened in the past and what is present today; how the philosophy of our day, the political decisions and economic realities impact us socially, and how all of this is shifting. And because of this shift, we have a much more dependent society, as opposed to a self-reliant society, a society that embraces more of the ‘something for nothing’ mentality, as opposed to the ‘something for something’ mentality. It’s like six people pulling a wagon and six million people are riding in it. This is causing a major problem for future generations, and unless we wake up to the fact that the answer to this is self-reliance, this domino effect is going to get worse and worse. Some people might believe that the United States is so big and strong that it can never be unseated as a World Power. That may or may not be true, but looking at some economic statistics, which is the driving force behind any government, it’s getting weaker and weaker, and the only way we can turn this around is through a more self-reliant mindset.

Jim: Yeah, it’s the whole concept of self-reliance. I’m not just talking about you, the audience, becoming more self-reliant; I’m talking about you and me and Ray and the rest of the people we know collectively committing to becoming more self-reliant, and together, we will spread the effect so that we can get more, more, and more people to be self-reliant.

Ray: That explains the situation so well. Today, there are about 100 million people working and about 215 million that are not working for a variety of reasons. If we think about the role of our monetary system and how we are expanding it through printing money, we are doing this to cover an ever-increasing debt because we have so many programs. And I’m not against necessary programs for an individual. There’s corporate welfare, individual welfare, welfare for everybody of any size, shape and form, and at the end of the day, we can’t afford it.

Jim: In our society, some people say, “Well, what about the poor people?” Throughout our American society, you find that the vast majority of the private sector – private, free individuals working for themselves or for companies not owned by the government – are more generous, more compassionate and more helpful than any non-profit agencies put in place by the government to try and do the same thing. By far, individuals are more generous than forced generosity that comes through a government program.

Ray: I want to highlight that this conversation is not about pushing one group down or pulling one group up. It’s about pulling everybody up. I want everybody to understand that.

The second point I want to highlight is the importance of gold. Jim, 2,000 plus years ago, an ounce of gold could buy a man a toga, a belt and a pair of sandals. Today, with nothing having changed, the same ounce of gold can buy a man a half-decent suit, a belt, and a pair of shoes because that gold held value. In 1971, one ounce of gold was about $30. Would you prefer to have that same $30 you had in 1971 that could buy one ounce of gold, or would you prefer to have the $30 today? Will it buy you one ounce of gold, or will it cover a half-decent lunch?

Jim: That’s not just to sell people on investing in gold. The reason gold is used as the example is because gold was a constant that had limited supply. There’s only so much gold known to exist, and that determined how much money could exist by using gold as the underlying valuation of the currency. Then they took away the gold standard and it became free-flowing, based on government policy. Now, all of a sudden, we’ve got a very, very different animal, when it comes to money. A car and a house are still worth basically the same amount in actual trade, but when it comes to reducing it to a monetary equivalent, that’s way, way different, and it’s affected by so many strange variables.

Ray: I’m not trying to give financial advice, but it’s important to realize there’s a difference between money and currency. Currency doesn’t hold value. Money holds value, and the only way money can hold value is by having a finite amount of quantity. If you can create currency on your printing press, you’re not going to hold value. And, to Jim’s point, you’re going to need a wheelbarrow to buy bread one day in the future, if we keep printing more and more money.

Jim: The same could be said for diamonds and other things like that, although that’s a whole separate discussion. But whatever the underlying thing is, it determines how much equivalent value is available.

Ray: If you look at durables, like gold and silver and other things that historically have been used as money, you can go to almost any financial advisor or talk to almost anybody in the Federal Reserve system, and they will think you are a kook to even talk about this as a way to represent money. They tell us we have an advanced society and it’s not feasible and practical. And in some ways, carrying gold with you might not be so feasible. That’s why they went to a paper system, but it was backed by gold. The reason for this is because if you tie it to gold, you bring together the notion of accountability and responsibility and you start to go toward a self-reliant society. If you take it away, you have a dependent society, because you can produce currency.

Jim: Yes. So, what will people do? I’m assuming some in our audience have said: “Wow, you guys are scaring the daylights out of me! I’m in. I want to become more self-reliant, because I realize I don’t have to buy a bunch of things from you and Ray in order to do it. I can start doing it right now, today, in my own home, and nobody else is involved and it doesn’t use up something else I’ve got. So, what do I do?”

---

IV. The 5CR Model Part 1

Ray: Now we want you to get a pen and paper ready, because we’re going to give you some really awesome content, specifically on how to get out of this mess we have talked about. We call it the 5CR Model, because it’s going to make it easier for you to remember the five Cs and the R needed to get out of this mess. The first C is Competence. Jim, why don’t we talk a little bit about why having an important skill base is so important in order to be self-reliant?

 

Jim: Let’s say our neighborhood, or whatever neighborhood you live in, is all of a sudden the only part of the world you’ve got to worry about. In your neighborhood, let’s say somehow you’re protected from all the rest of the world for the short term, and all you’ve got to do is worry about the welfare of the people within one mile of your own front door. They know that, too, so all of you look to each other now as the only society you have to deal with for the moment, and you have a community meeting. All these people get together, and you say, “What’s our goal?”

Someone speaks up and says, “Our goal is to be able to survive and do well and live pleasant lives for the indefinite future for long as we can.” Great! What are we going to need? Food, shelter, defense; we’re going to need all the fundamentals of human existence. What do we do for food? I don’t know. Who’s good at food? Ray says, “Well I got a garden. I can not only produce from my garden, I can show you how to do a garden in your own yard.” Cool. Ray’s the food chairman for the moment, not forever. He’s not the connoisseur of food. Ray’s the food chairman for the moment.

We need defense, because there are wild animals and scary things out there. Okay, Jim’s got weapons and knows how to use them. Good. He’s in charge of teaching us all how to use weapons wisely and defend ourselves. Paula is good with money; she knows how to teach us how to record what we have that’s valuable, how to manage it and share it and circulate it in the ways that make sense. Okay, who’s in charge of water, who’s in charge of buildings, and who’s in charge of building supplies?

And should we agree not to do certain types of activities, because that would diminish the resources for the other people; like, you don’t pee in the water supply, things like that? What are we going to do about this? What are we going to do about nutrition? How about educating our kids; who’s good at that? Okay, I can teach them how to make their bed, I can teach them how to add and subtract, I can teach them how to communicate and how to write and read.

Become skilled. Yeah, but at what? At as many things as are reasonable. Become good with money, nutrition, health and fitness, with healthcare. Be able to fix injuries and illnesses and things like that without having to go to a doctor or a hospital. Become good with basic supplies for daily living. That’s the whole point of competence as number one, and without number one, never mind the rest of them. Would you agree with that part, Ray?

Ray: I absolutely agree. If you don't have a skill set that you can leverage to be able to take care of yourself and those you care about, you're basically a sitting duck in the water and you're not going anywhere, because competence is the starting point for everything.

I really encourage you, our audience, to add some of the items Jim has mentioned to those areas of your life and in your business where you have determined you need to increase your skill set, and objectively evaluate where you are right now. What’s the gap from where you need to go, so that you do not feel you are dependent to a large degree on others? I’m not saying you need to be a master of everything and can’t barter and connect with others. But you need to pick what you want to be amazing at and figure out what you’re willing to trade to benefit from other people’s specialties.

Jim: And learn critical thinking, learn basic math, basic science and physics and biology. Learn the fundamentals they used as an important part of the school curriculum, so that you know enough of how to solve a problem, fix a broken tool, and take the appropriate action in an emergency.

Ray: I would add about critical thinking that any time you hear somebody say something to you, whether it’s via television, the newspaper, popular media or videos, stop first and analyze it to understand the basis of what is truth versus reality. Verify and fact-check, because many times we tend to believe what we’re told, and that can have a cascading domino effect that takes you down different roads you may not want to go down.

Jim: You need to ask questions like, “Is what they just said fact, or opinion?” If it’s opinion, that may be fine, but who’s shaping their opinion? What resources, sources or mentors are they turning to for the guidance that causes them to form that opinion? You need to learn independent thinking and then find mentors, but for heaven sakes, have more than one input. If everything you get is from NBC News, shame on you. If everything you get is from Fox News, shame on you. If everything you get is from the national association for the non-victimization of people that we don’t agree with, shame on you. Get multiple sources of input, and then make decisions based on what in your heart and soul you believe is right and true. Not what mom or dad told you was right or true, but after analysis and critical thought the conclusion you’ve been able to arrive at on your own.

It’s like in a religion. If you go to, let’s say, the Baptist Church and all your life you hear the Baptist Church point of view, that’s fine and may be right for you. But what if years later somebody says ‘why do you believe this?’ all you can do is quote the other people? If you didn’t go through the thought process on your own, you didn’t go back and read the gospel they’re preaching from on your own and do your own thought and prayer about it and come to your own conclusions, you don’t have a belief. You’ve got a memorization. You’re reciting their point of view instead of stating your beliefs.

Ray: That’s being an independent and active thinker in your life for interpreting the world around you. Also, learn to understand motive. What’s the motive of the person behind the message? What motivates them, and where does that motive come from? Trace motive. In many cases, you’ll be able to separate what is factual and can benefit you from what is not and has an angle as it is presented to you.

Jim: I think you’re right. Number two in our formula is Confidence. How does one build confidence?

 

Ray: One of the big ways in which we build confidence is directly related to building competence. Once we are competent and know that we’re competent and know a lot about a subject, it really helps us to be confident. Having great public speaking and communication skills, being able to stand up and articulate yourself on what you’re passionate and competent about really can help with confidence. What do you think, Jim?

Jim: A perfect example of that is the Dale Carnegie Institution. At the end of the depression, Dale Carnegie was teaching public speaking skills at YMCAs. People were flocking there because it had such a powerful impact on their ability to do what they did day-to-day. Their confidence ended up being the greater output, not their public speaking. Public speaking was simply a process through which they developed the underlying strength, which is confidence in their ability to stand and communicate and deal with things.

When you learn to speak effectively to other people, there’s a lot going on besides just the speaking. First, you have to have a thinking or a belief or something that you’re trying to express. Then you’ve got to turn that into words. Then you’ve got to figure out how to get those words across to other people in a way that they hear it and understand it and are affected by it in the right way. It’s not just about articulating it; it’s about interpreting it in a way that your listeners will be affected in the appropriate way, whether they’re motivated, moved, touched, reminded or educated, or whatever it happens to be.

Using public speaking as a medium to develop personal confidence to deal with the world is a very, very, very good tool. I mentioned earlier that my 13 year-old grandson has acquired black belt status in Taekwondo, a martial art. He had to go through so many steps awkwardly, poorly, making mistakes, getting injured occasionally; not in big ways, but dealing with all of that to get to the point where he qualified for a higher belt, to where his confidence is huge compared to what it used to be. Plus, he doesn’t feel as afraid when there are threatening-looking people around him. He knows he can handle himself. The same thing is true for the public speaking, when it comes to handling yourself communication wise.

Ray: Public speaking is not just what you say, but how you say it and being able to communicate a point of view that holds your audience’s attention. Ultimately, it’s the end result of a lot of other preparation work that has gone into being able to deliver that message.

Jim: It can only be understood independent of the action, but it can only be learned through actually doing it in front of people, like Taekwondo. Another good example is karate or any of the other disciplines; they can only be learned through the doing of it, not the study of it. The study of it precedes the doing.

Years ago in San Diego, Steve Lewandowski, a friend and colleague, was an announcer for polo matches. He said, “Have you ever been to a polo match?” Never have. He said: “Well come to Del Mar to the polo grounds. We’re having a match and I’m announcing, and you can come as my guest.” Cool! So Paula and I went, and he even acknowledged me over the loudspeaker, which was kind of cool. We watched this wonderful polo match, and later he said, “Have you ever taken a polo lesson?” I said, “Heavens, no.” He said, “Well, take one.” I said, “Well, I….” He said, “No, Jim, take one.” I said, “Okay.”

So I go to the corral where the horses are and meet the instructor, and he says, “Okay, get on the horse.” I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about polo; are we going to go over the basics?” He said, “Get on the horse.” I said, “But I need to learn the fundamentals.” He said, “Get on the horse.” Okay. So I get on the horse. He said, “Here’s a helmet; put it on. Here’s a mallet,” or whatever they call that. He said, “Now ride your horse out into the arena.” I said, “But wait, I don’t know anything.” He said: “Jim, you learn polo by doing. Let me explain. Here’s what you’re going to do; now come this way and do it.”

Within like five minutes I was riding the horse and actually hitting whatever they call a polo ball. I was actually doing that within five minutes of arrival. Good heavens! I went on for an hour and learned many things in that hour. Then we gave the horse a rest and I got my little annoying self-off his back, and I stood there bowlegged. Wow! That was amazing. But the point is there’s no way to learn polo without being on a horse in a polo match.

Ray: The key point we’re driving home here, one, is to have the competence of what to do. The second part is to use the competence and actually do it. And the third thing we talked about in one of our examples was public speaking. I actually used to be a Taekwondo student, as well, and there’s a very big difference between learning your katas and your patterns and how you fight in the dojo, and actually going into a sparring match, where you have to apply it with somebody using the same technologies against you. It’s a totally different game. So the key takeaway is about competence and confidence, and getting confidence comes from doing.

---

V. The 5CR Model Part 2

Ray: Jim, what's the next part of our model?

 

Jim: It’s courage. Courage is not something you do when you're not afraid. Courage is acting despite being afraid. If you weren’t afraid, you couldn’t be courageous. Courage doesn't exist with the absence of fear. There must be some unknown, some challenge or resistance for courage to emerge in a person. Courage comes from knowing the natural laws, like we see in your competence and your confidence. By doing it through your own experience, you’ve proven this law to be so. You can be courageous going into the unknown, because at least you know what fundamental laws make things work or not work.

Ray: It’s taking rational action in spite of fear. By understanding the natural laws that surround us, we can look at the situation and decide, ‘Is this something I want to do or something I don't want to do?’ Because we're dealing with conquering irrational fears, not logical fears, we take a rational action and end up finding out that the outcome may have been not as bad as we initially thought. For example, if we are in a perfectly good airplane, there’s nothing wrong with this airplane, and you say to me, “Hey, Ray, let’s jump out of the airplane, it will be great; it will conquer your fear of jumping out of an airplane.” A couple of things jump out in my mind. Number one is, do I have a rational fear or a logical fear or an illogical fear of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane? I would say that that's a pretty logical fear of jumping out of perfectly good plane.

Jim: Yes, that’s a reasonable, rational fear. By the way, I did it at age 62; it’s a fresh memory for me. The fear was absolutely rational. We’re 13,000 feet above the ground. Without the airplane, I'm 100% dependent on the parachute. And since I’ve never jumped before, I'm also 100% dependent on the guy on my back who’s wearing the parachute; I’m strapped to him.

Ray: In a scenario where we have a perfectly good airplane, one might elect to not jump out of the airplane, and that would be a fine decision, because there is a chance that the parachute won’t open. Let's suppose we take the same airplane, and this airplane is going down. You know that if you don’t jump, you have no chance of survival. All of a sudden, jumping out of the airplane becomes a very rational decision with a parachute. We’re talking about being able to understand the natural laws around you, to take rational actions based on the circumstances you're in, and operating in spite of fear that exists; because that’s the only way you’re going to grow.

Jim: It also applies in seemingly benign situations, like being in a meeting and being afraid to speak up, afraid that you’ll be judged or criticized by others; being in a job interview and being intimidated by the person interviewing you; going into a courtroom and stating your case and defending your cause against an adversarial attorney, or in front of a jury of people who are going to judge you; talking with a policeman when you've been pulled over for a ticket; day-to-day situations where many times people are intimidated into not acting, those types of things. And it’s not because they’re not right, it’s not because they weren’t doing what they should have been doing; it’s because they didn’t have the courage to speak up. Courage comes from competence built into confidence through practice, then applied in a threatening situation, which stimulates courage.

Ray: A few years ago, I had this opportunity to speak to a thousand people, and this was the first time I was facing a large group. It was an interesting experience, in that I had prepared a lot for it, so I had the competency of what I was going to talk about and I was fairly confident. I still had those butterfly feelings inside, which is irrational fear. I mean, here I am only giving a talk. It wasn’t like I was going to war with guns and people shooting bullets at me, but I had this emotional, physiological reaction to being on stage. I remember that when I cut through that fear and went on stage and talked and let the passion erupt from me to communicate a message, it dissipated and went away. I was in the element of enjoying that moment in time and to speak.

Our audience can apply this in their own life. Many times when you take that action and go forward with courage, you enter into a new position where you realize it’s going to be all right, and you’re going to do fine, and you’re going to grow and expand from it. Sometimes our imagination might be worse than the reality.

Jim: Almost every time; the trouble is, our mind is so well built. When we go into an unknown situation, our mind fabricates potential obstacles. It’s part of a problem solving process. But people abandon the intellect and go into the emotional side only, and that’s where they run into trouble. What’s going on is all these fears are simply your mind saying: “What if there are wolves? What if the sky is falling? What if you run out of food? What if nobody likes you?” Okay, fine. Those are the problems to solve. Do not stop there. Take each one and say, “Okay, if there are wolves, I’ll do this; if there’s famine, I’ll do this; if people don’t like me, I’ll do this.” Because you’ve thought it through, you’re able to be courageous; whereas previously you had gone from obstacle default to the emotional side, which is the ‘feel good at all costs’ side. Instead, learn to reflect on what’s going on, to be objective about it separately enough that you can think about it wisely, critically. And that’s a big thing.

My friend, Kevin Buck, who’s a philosopher, says, “Without reflection, there’s no true learning.” We don’t learn when we hear information. We don’t learn when we read information. We learn when we reflect on what it means and put it into our knowledge base in the appropriate ways. But without that reflection, no learning is taking place.

You could say, “I’ve read 75 books this year.” How many did you understand? “Seventy-five.” How many did you apply? “Well, I read 75.” It’s not about what you take in; it’s what you process effectively so that it shows up in your life. And then you can be in our next competence; Congruent in the ethical strength of everything that you do and are. You become a person who’s the same person on stage and off stage, the same behind the scenes as out front, the same person sitting at the dinner table as you are leading a big meeting in front of powerful people.

Ray: Absolutely; congruent with a strong set of ethics that are used to help you formulate how you behave with yourself and with others. Some sources I think can benefit our audience on this subject are Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Napoleon Hill, and, of course, Buckminster Fuller.

Jim: All of this boils down to: know what you believe. Know what you believe is right and what you believe is so and not so, and let that be the foundation of your ethical base, so that everything you do that grows out of that is consistent with it. If you hold yourself to certain standards; and by the way, that’s the only way you’re ever held to standards, except as a victim. You could say, “In a prison, you’re held to certain standards or they’ll hurt you or kill you.” Yeah, but that’s at a very primitive animal level. We’re talking about the human thought level.

If you know what you believe is so, if you know what you believe is right and wrong and you set that down in writing and live your life according to that, you can be an ethical person, a congruent, moral person. You can do what is right and what will show in your heart is right, and live a life of meaning. You’re much more likely to be a compassionate, giving, helping person if you do so, than if you don’t go through that process.

Ray: When you meet somebody, the most common question asked is, “What do you do?” For me, it’s the most boring question. I like to ask: “Who are you? What do you stand for? What’s important to you?" If you come from that perspective and have thought about the answers to those very valid questions, you will start to operate at a higher level, to be much more of a self-reliant individual, and you know what you stand for, what your backbone is all about. We all need to continuously hold ourselves accountable to that set of beliefs we hold true and live that every day.

Jim: Some people say the worst subjects in the world to get into a conversation with others are politics and religion, because most people have not thought through what their belief system is and have not tested their beliefs against criticism to see if they will hold up. If you believe something and someone criticizes it and it doesn’t stand up to that criticism, you don’t believe it, you just memorized it. Your beliefs are the things you’ve proven to be so, at least from your point of view. And that needs to be an enlightened point of view, not just a selfish ‘I’m going to come to this conclusion’ point of view.

If a person is to have a congruent life, it must start with them knowing what they think is so, and then structuring their life around that and living that way day to day, which leads to our next “C” – Criticism. It makes you impervious to criticism, because you’re not worried that someone disagrees with you. You don’t mind getting into a discussion of philosophy or religion or politics, or whatever it happens to be, because you know what you believe, and you can say it and talk about it without getting angry.

 

Someone can disagree with you and you can say, “Well, I don’t see how you came to that conclusion,” or “I see how you came to that conclusion; that makes sense, too.” It’s like Socrates said, “Life unexamined is not worth living.” That’s pretty profound, but let’s look at it in a little milder context. If you don’t hold up your belief system to criticism, to other points of view, other examples, other applications, then you never really know whether it’s true. You’re just saying, “I hope it’s true, I hope it’s true, I hope it’s true, I hope it’s true.” It’s like you believe there is a heaven, and then you die and look around, assuming that’s possible, and say, “Oops, there’s not one; dang, I wish I’d checked out other alternatives before it was too late.”

Ray: I think our audience can understand that being impervious to criticism is really about being authentic to yourself and trying to find the truth, to evaluate and seek the truth, and understand reality and perceive it correctly. That involves critical thinking. Critical thinking goes through this whole process.

Jim: Not only critical thinking, but the willingness to be wrong. If you’re not willing to be wrong, then you don’t have a belief; you have a shield. You’re using a defense to protect yourself from whatever the reality is, because the reality might hurt. I outsource now, but I used to have a full-time staff for many, many years. I told them one of the rules when they went to work with me was: “The truth is not only okay, it is absolutely mandatory. If you ever lie to me in a small way or a large way, I will consider that a retroactive two-week notice of termination, and you can leave my office and office building that moment.”

A lot of people say, “Yeah, I get it; the truth is important.” I say: “No, no, I am serious as cancer; this will happen; please don’t take it there. If the truth is bad news, you made a mistake, lost money or damaged something or you were negligent, I can handle that. But if the truth is you lied, you’re gone. I have to trust what you tell me and make my decisions based on that.”

How do you get a society where people tell the truth? Make it okay to tell the truth. Never kill the messenger; just deal with the circumstance and handle things appropriately. It’s like our prison system. What’s the prison system based on? It’s not based on making things right, it’s based on punishing those who were wrong. What a stupid idea that is! “No, that will stop them from…” No, it won’t, never has. It just grows the size of the prison system. So we need to rethink a lot of the ways that we’re doing things and figure out better ways. Yes, there are people who need to be put in storage to keep everyone else safe from them, but there are an awful lot of people who did something wrong, and we’d be better off having them make it right again than putting them in storage and feeding them for the rest of their lives.

Ray: That’s probably a conversation for another day, but it’s amazing how many people are in the American prison system relative to our overall population. Coming back to our model, we’ve talked about being impervious to criticism. The last piece to this model is all about Relationship Intelligence. How do you take all of these aspects of being a self-reliant individual and interact and connect with others in a meaningful way that leads to harmony and positive output for everybody involved? Jim, tell us more about that.

Jim: That’s my company trademark, Relationship Intelligence, which means being intelligent about relationships; having a direct connection between people in which value is exchanged. That’s the way I define it; looking at relationships as assets or potential liabilities. If your life is filled with interactions with other people, some of those are actually relationships. Many of them are just transactions: “Hello,” “Hello,” “How are you?” “Fine, how are you?” That’s a transaction. “I need to buy this, here’s my money; thank you very much.” “Thank you, thanks for your business.” That’s a transaction, not a relationship.

A relationship is where value is exchanged between the people, and it’s an ongoing connection. If your life is filled with relationships and you tend to be the common denominator of the five people you spend the most time with, then who you choose to spend your time with most determines the quality or nature of your life at that particular point in time.

We can be more reflective, more objective in backing off and looking at our relationships intelligently and thinking: “Who do I need more time with? Who do I need to get closer to? Who’s missing? What kind of people are not in my life that I really ought to find? Which people are affecting my life negatively, and how could I reduce the percentage of my time I spend with them or change the nature of my relationship with them so that it’s less impactful?” We can think intelligently about all of this.

When you come back to the fundamentals of why does it exist and what makes it work, you’re going to come back to the same conclusions: for the perpetuation of life, for the enhancement of life. And self-reliance is at the core. It all comes full circle, because we’re actually not going around a circle. We’re drilling down to the bedrock that’s under everything else: What’s the purpose of life? Living fully, giving all that you can give and contribute, getting all that you can, enjoy and savor, and making that experience better for the world because you were here, instead of simply taking up your space until you get off at the next stop.

Ray: Thank you for that. Let’s do a quick recap and make sure everybody was able to take down the key components of this blueprint. We started with a really honest and truthful conversation about the state of the world relative to where it once was, at least in terms of the U.S. We’ve gone through this blueprint we call the 5CR Model:

1. Competency
2. Confidence
3. Courage
4. Congruent with strong ethics
5. Impervious to Criticism and
6. Relationship Intelligence

We’ve talked about the importance of being a truth seeker to understand the world around us, so that we can make informed and smart decisions that move us forward, so we can expand and experience more of what life has to offer.

We’re not done yet, but we hope everyone in our audience can appreciate that we’re providing a perspective that goes right to the core of what the problem is and the prescription and the solution to start making things better; something you won’t find on the television news network. You won’t find it easily accessible, because there is a predominant culture in place today that is taking us down one road. But we’re trying to show you there is an avenue, an alternative to take you down another road.

---

VI. The Emotional Payoff and Roadblocks

Ray: Let’s talk about this emotional payoff; what’s possible for our audience if they really take this blueprint to heart.

Jim: It all starts with making an absolute commitment to do it. When you do that, the payoffs are that you start feeling safe, you start finding more meaning in your life. You get up in the morning excited about things because you know you’re making a difference. And your life grows, it becomes more abundant. If the purpose of life is to live fully and abundantly, to contribute through all of your gifts, then this is a way that guides you toward a fuller expression of who you are. If you’re constantly growing, learning and achieving, and you talk about something that builds charisma, you will be irresistible. When you’re bringing that much positive energy and value to the world, other people want to be around you and grow up to be like you.

I admire my son very much; he’s my best friend in the entire world. I’ve said this to him for 30 years, “I want to grow up to be like you.” How many people have ever had their dad sincerely say to them, “I want to grow up to be like you.” And I meant it sincerely. He is a good person, a person I admire, and if I became more and more like him as I go through my own life, that would be an absolutely fabulous thing.

The payoff of being self-reliant is that nobody sees you as needy. Nobody says, “Uh-oh, brace yourself, here comes Jim.” They all say, “Hey look, it’s Jim!” You look like good news wherever you show up. So the payoffs are huge for becoming more self-reliant.

What’s the quickest way to get a new job? Be worth something. I don’t mean just net worth, I mean bring value. Bring the ability to come into a company and solve problems instead of just working on them. Give new ways to reach out to new customers, and come up with better ideas that save money, time and effort. When you come into a company and say, “I’ve been looking at your company and I see several things that could be done better,” or cheaper or faster or easier, the company’s not saying, "We’re not hiring right now.” They’re saying, “Tell me more about that. What can you do?”

They might also say, “But we don’t have any openings.” If you say, “Well, I’m not worried about openings; I just see some need and I’ve got some ideas,” their reply may be, “Well, we could make an opening. We don’t have a title for you, but let’s just call you a helper, a problem solver. How much money do you need? Okay, that’s enough, we’ll do that.”

Being self-reliant makes the world want more of you, but what are the roadblocks that keep people from it? It’s like Thomas Edison said, “The reason most people don’t recognize opportunity is it comes dressed in overalls and looks like hard work.” It is hard work, but so is dealing with things from a victim point of view.

Ray: That’s very well said. As an individual, you’re first able to take care of yourself; to take care of your direct family and your friends, if you choose to; to be in relationships where you want others to do well. You are more a pillar of society, as opposed to being something society is banking on or dependent on others. You can advance in the workplace irrespective of your level, from being the lowest level in the company all the way up to the highest level, where you come with renewed vigor, energy, excitement, a new approach to looking at opportunities to make things better. As an entrepreneur, you are able to offer those talents for your customers.

Being more self-reliant equals living life more fully, more openly, and being a magnet for all good things in this world. But roadblocks are there and it’s not going to be easy. As Jim said, it’s going to take work. It takes work to build competency, to be courageous, to have confidence, to be able to develop emotional and relationship intelligence. It takes time and it takes energy. Jim, what’s the alternative? Are we going to live a life of dependency and be cowered into a little corner and call that living? That’s not living.

Jim: No, it’s not. I remember when I used to be that way. I started off working for other people all the time. I was working as a government clerk for a while and remember hating my work. I remember just dreading going to work in the morning. I remember working as a bill collector for a while in a bank and I hated that job. I remember going to the restroom and just sitting there. Didn’t have to use the facility; just sitting in the restroom just to be away from my work because I hated my work so much. So I’d take 10 or 15 minutes just sitting in the restroom, just not being a bill collector. I did that for two or three years, working as a bill collector and such.

Then I went into sales and took a job selling motorcycles for a friend who had a little dealership. Then I took other jobs. I sacked groceries for a while, I ended up in a government agency for a while. Then I got inspired by Earl Nightingale and decided to go into the field of personal development, but I didn't have any experience. I wasn’t an accomplished person. I had to start from the ground level, talking about what other people were saying, and build my own beliefs, my own skills, my own competence, my own confidence, and become a person who had something to say that was worth listening to. But for the first few years, I wasn’t worth listening to unless I was quoting somebody, which is fine when you’re starting.

People are way too willing to say, “Well, so and so won’t like it; my husband or wife will disapprove; I’ll get resistance; other people will judge me; they’ll think I’m a loser; they’ll think I’m a jerk.” Well, get over it. I get all that. I had people say, “Really? I mean, Jim, why? It’s not that big a deal.” And that’s what I heard often; “What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is the little things that over time determine what kind of person you become. The big deal about smoking is not one cigarette; it’s one cigarette again. I stopped smoking after smoking two packs a day for a decade or longer. I stopped smoking in 1974 on January 25th. “Well, how do you know?” Because that day, I decided to stop smoking for life. I didn’t decide to try to quit. Actually, I didn’t quit smoking, I became a non-smoker, and non-smokers don’t smoke.

I made a decision, so I gave away my engraved cigarette lighters, I gave away my designer ashtrays. I told my friends and family: “I am a non-smoker. Please don’t offer me a cigarette; I’ll turn you down, but I might be rude at first. So just don’t even offer, because I’m a non-smoker now.” It took me three months of withdrawal to get over the physical problems of stopping smoking, and after that, it took me probably two years to overcome the habitual tendencies. But on January 25th 1974, I became a non-smoker for eternity and I’ve never smoked since. “Have you ever had the urge?” Absolutely! But I made the commitment that’s forever.

In November 1976, I weighed 200 lbs. on a 5’9” frame. After 28 years of being overweight and out of shape, I decided not to go on a diet and lose weight again. I’d done that lots of times. I decided to become, for the rest of my life, slender. What does that mean? Is that just a play on words? No, it’s a completely different mindset and habit set. I had to become self-reliant on being a slender person, just like being self-reliant and not dependent on cigarettes to make it through a day.

To become slender, I had to change my eating habits, not change my diet, which is my forever diet. I had to change my exercise and fitness habits and my attitudes. But I also had to change the behaviors first and commit to those behavioral changes. Then I had to change my knowledge, so that I learned more about health and fitness and well-being. Then I had to change the day-to-day behaviors that would lead me into a situation where I would abuse food, or cigarettes or whatever the thing had been. It’s the same process that an alcoholic has to go through to disengage from alcohol or a drug addict to free himself from drugs. Those are all dependencies. That’s all victimhood. It is not self-reliance.

Self-reliance in all those contexts is achieved in the same sequence of steps which we’re representing here as the 5Cs with an R. The fundamental underlying steps are the same, but it all begins with one thing that’s nonnegotiable: the absolute, permanent commitment to do it. No matter how difficult it is, you find a way to make it easier. No matter how painful, you find a way to make it hurt less, and no matter how complex, you find a way to simplify it. You commit to Do it, it happens. You commit to Try it, it absolutely will fall apart.

Ray: As I wrote about in my book, it was an emotionally committed decision. You made an emotionally committed decision in each of your examples, and then followed many of the things we’ve talked about today in our program to get from where you are to where you want to be.

---

VII. Effective Strategies & First Physical Action Step

Ray: Let’s talk about strategies to deal with roadblocks. Start by surrounding yourself with the right people; a mastermind of individuals committed to and interested in your success, as well as in your ability to contribute to the success of the other mastermind members. Jim, what are some other ideas?

Jim: If you want to be a long-distance runner, start hanging out with people who run. If you want to be an Olympian, don’t hang out with occasional joggers. Hang out with people who are committed to the higher levels. Choose your level, but associate with like-minded people. If it’s a rock collector, find other people who are gemologists. You can find a community of people, especially with the internet, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all those resources, communities of people with similar interests. Get other people around you, and then increase the percentage of mentors in your life.

I got Earl Nightingale’s recordings on audiocassettes back in those days. I had 48 audiocassettes, each about 20 minutes long, and a little portable cassette player in my car, and I played that all day, every day whenever I was in the car. On weekends, I would set it next to me, if I was working in the yard, barbecuing, or just sitting around the house doing other things. I would play those recordings to reprogram my own attitude, my own knowledge base and point of view toward the world. I had a point of view that I was going to be ordinary and insignificant. I wanted to be someone who mattered, so I had to gather and commit to using the influences, the books, the recordings, and the people who would bring to me that healthier, bigger, more abundant point of view.

And everyone can do that. You can certainly do it online, through resources like Customer Engagement Magazine, and you can do it through Cathcart.com and get my company resources. There are a myriad of resources now compared to what there were 20 years ago. But surround yourself with inputs. Shape your own environment intentionally to give you the inputs, because success in any venture is M-A-D-E:

M – You’ve got to have the mindset that fits the goal you’re going after.

A – You’ve got to have affirmations. You’ve got to talk in terms of the new You; not the way you used to talk. “Well, I’ll try… Gee, I hope it works…Well, what if…I hope we don’t have any problems.” All that’s loser mentality coming up in articulation, so change the way you articulate and affirm.

D - Daily habits that lead you on a new path.

E - Environmental influences, people and things that reinforce your new point of view.

Ray: In 1987, I was on the couch with my dad in Toronto, Canada reading Think and Grow Rich, page by page. It was the first time I was introduced to that book. I was basically a 12-year-old kid being introduced to this book. It became an important book for me, and I began to take little actions to get me on the road to where I wanted to go.

A couple years ago, I was invited to speak at the International Napoleon Hill Convention in Kuala Lumpur, and there I was, speaking on stage with Napoleon Hill’s grandson to my right, the CEO of Napoleon Hill Foundation to my left. All of that was created as a result of being able to leverage this body of work and interacting with like-minded people to get me to where I wanted to be, which was to be on stage communicating and sharing this message with others. So anybody in our audience can apply what we’re talking about. It’s right there for you to grab and take.

Jim: The odds of that happening were a zillion to one against it, until you decided to commit to that path. Once you made the commitment to follow that new path and stayed the course, then that became a very logical and ultimately predictable outcome. Of course, that would ultimately happen because you took the time to transform you. Let’s talk about first steps, first physical action steps that people can take to get this whole thing rolling. What do we do?

Ray: We have five key points to talk about. Number one, and there’s a metaphor in this scenario, is declare your personal independence from others. What does that mean, Jim?

Jim: That means you write your own Declaration of Independence, like Og Mandino in his book, The Greatest Salesman in the World. He had the scrolls, “From this day I will…” You just write down what you’re personally committing to and say: “No matter who disapproves of me, no matter what obstacles come up, no matter how long it takes, I am committed to this new, better path and I’ll find a way. It may not be anything like what I think it is going into it, but I’m willing to go in this new direction, because I believe what Ray and Jim have been saying is based in truth. So I’ll find what’s right for me and I will stay this path because, clearly, it makes so much more sense than doing what all the thundering herd is doing.” So first, you declare your personal independence from criticism and other things. It’s going to come. Just say, “Okay, I get it that that’s going to happen, but I’m independent of that; I’m going to become self-reliant.”

Ray: Number two is define your personal constitution, in terms of your values, your morals, and your character traits. Who is it that makes you who you are? Tell us more about this, Jim.

Jim: If you’ve declared independence, you got to have a constitution; your statement of: “This constitutes my beliefs and my intentions toward the world. This is the way I see life, this is the way I see me, this is the way I see the world, and this is what I’m going to do.” We, the people. You just let it know; 'I, the person, declare these truths to be self-evident.’

Ray: I, the individual, declare that this is my personal constitution and how I’ll conduct myself.

Jim: You declare. You come up with your own constitution or statement of a manifesto or set of beliefs. Next, you establish your own personal Bill of Rights. So you’ve got a Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, and a Bill of Rights. You define what you believe your rights and responsibilities are in the context of the society you choose to live in, like freedom of speech. What does that mean? It means that you’re going to become confident and competent at speaking your mind in appropriate ways, and you’re not going to diminish yourself and hide your light under a bush, as so many people do, because they don’t feel the freedom to speak up for what is right and what is so.

Next, that you’re going to declare your freedom to believe whatever you want to believe, no matter whether Aunt Edna disapproves of it or Uncle John believes that that’s absolutely wrong and doesn’t like people like that. Your beliefs are your beliefs, and that’s between you and your God. Go for it and find a way to make peace with the rest of the world as a result of your beliefs. None of this is about believing anything that is antagonistic to other people. It’s all about making life more abundant for everybody.

Next is personal defense. Declare your own right to defend yourself verbally. Defend yourself ethically. Defend yourself physically, whatever happens; that you have the right to bear arms, whatever those arms would be for you to defend yourself against aggressors, against crooks, against corruption, whatever it happens to be.

Another one is your right to private property. That’s one of the things that makes a free enterprise system work; emphasis on the word “free.” If people don’t have the right to create something and own it, then everything is part of the collective and we’re a communist society. What makes freedom possible is the right to ownership. If you write a book, that’s your book; you own the copyright to that book. You can register the copyright if you want to, but you own the right to it. Even if you don’t register it, it’s yours. If you build a house, that’s your house, assuming you built it with materials you own on property you own.

So declare your right to have your own personal belongings, your own personal, private property, be it intellectual or physical. You say, “In a marriage it’s a total blending.” Yeah, I get that, but even with that, there’s your private space and his or her private space. Certain things still need to be within the control of that individual, even though many things are shared.

Ray: Our next one is define the laws you will live by, which is really about the ethics you hold yourself accountable to and the rules you will use for daily living and how you conduct yourself.

Jim: Plenty of laws are imposed on us externally, but we need laws that are created and applied internally on ourselves. It could be something simple and trivial for daily living or something profound, like making a commitment never to do harm to another person except in self-defense.

I have more of a codicil than a law. When I find it tough to get up in a morning, my agreement with myself is, if I move my foot past the edge of the bed, I’m committed and I’m going to go ahead and get up. I may lay there for 15 minutes before I do that little action, but I know that once I do that little action, I’m in and it’s time to get up and greet the day. It could be silly, little simple things like that, or it could be profound things; like, in this business we tell the truth, and if you don’t, you’re fired right now. That applies to me as the boss, as well as to you the employee. If I’m the one who’s lying, then I need to be called to account for it, and there needs to be some compensation I have to make that makes me not want to do that. So find the laws that you feel you should and could live by and make them a big deal to you, because they’re not going to matter to somebody else. They only need to matter to you.

Ray: Combining that with the ethics you hold yourself to and who you are as a person will allow you to be a person of integrity, confident and assertive, vis-à-vis the world you engage with, and that can only happen if you rest against a strong bedrock. And that is your ethics.

The last piece of our action plan is to implement the action plan we’ve given here with the 5CR Model. Start with looking at your skill set to build those competencies.

Jim, this has been an amazing conversation and we have covered so much. We have gone from one end of the spectrum all the way through to coming out the other end. We hope that you, our audience, realize that we have done this to help motivate, instruct and inspire you to take hold of life and your role in it to be the best you can be and to have the most life that you can have. It is a necessary requirement to deal with some of the objective reality and challenges around us.

Jim, what’s the last word or phrase you would use to sum up everything we’ve talked about?

Jim: A phrase I live by is from the Bible. It’s John 10:10 that says, “I’ve come that they would have life and have it more abundantly.” I want to boil it down to an application phrase for our audience; you’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again and again. I’d love for you to live by this: If it is to be, it’s up to me.

Ray: That's a powerful phrase that encapsulates everything we’ve been talking about. My phrase is similar to yours, but I’m going to go with the word, “individualism.” Individualism is an important word that sometimes gets cast aside in today’s society as being something that is not what we want; it’s not even ideal. But it is imperative that we recapture the essence of who we are and apply the 5CR Model to be more self-reliant, and to be able to take care of ourselves the way we need to. And that starts with having full respect for who you are as an individual and the role of an individual in society at large.

Jim: I agree. Ray, this has been tremendously stimulating and way longer than either of us thought it was going to be. But as we cut this into pieces for people to consume more efficiently, we’re going to really serve people well. I feel very good about this dialogue. I appreciate you making it happen, and I look forward to both of us hearing a lot from the people in our audience today and in the future, so that we can feed this self-reliance movement and make it something that profoundly improves the world.

Ray: Thank you so much, Jim. I’d also like to make sure everybody knows how they can get back in touch with you. Please share your website, and we’ll make sure it’s placed in the magazine.

Jim: It’s my last name, Cathcart.com. You can also find me on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter: Jim Cathcart. I’m pretty much everywhere.

Ray: For everybody receiving this, wherever you may find it, on the Internet or in the magazine, know that we create content like this on a regular basis as part of Customer Engagement Magazine. If you’re new to our publication, go to customerengagementmagazine.com. Put in your name and email address and we’ll share some great content with you that can help move you from where you are to where you want to be. This is Ray Stendall signing off, together with Jim Cathcart, wishing you the very best.

 

Download This Post on Self-Reliance With Video In a PDF File

To get the show notes on “The Rise & Fall Of Self-Reliance In America” (with all of the above videos and text so you can easily refer back) just click the big yellow button and let us know where to send it.

Click Here to Get Notes