Ep. 95 You Can Lift Heavy Things – Overcoming Life Challenges

You Can Lift Heavy Things – Overcoming Life Challenges

Life is full of challenges, especially when you are a parent, a business owner, or an athlete…and in those cases, it’s pretty much the name of the game. Yet, many of us feel resistance and think that means we aren’t up to the task.

In this episode, Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean talk about how to push through any challenges and breakthrough any setbacks in business and in life, even when you feel the weight of the challenge is too much to handle.

Listen or watch the full episode below:

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF 95

Sean: [00:00:00] No, man, we lost three yards. That’s it. 

Torie: [00:00:03] We’re done. I’m outta here. 

Sean: [00:00:05] They’ll never win ever.

Torie: [00:00:18] Hey guys, what’s up? It’s Torie Mathis, your host, and with the one and only Sean Mathis, founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. 

Sean: [00:00:27] What’s Happening

Torie: [00:00:27] So Sean and I talk a lot on the show about the fact that we go to the gym quite a bit, and before, especially after hurting my hip, when I was in the army, I didn’t do a lot of like really hardcore gym work because it seemed like I was always.

Hurting myself again or bringing my injury back. And so this, when we moved to this area, we started a new gym, and I actually went and found a personal trainer there in hopes that I could get myself back into the gym and not hurt myself and go through this wave of I work out really good for a couple of months and then I’d hurt myself and then I’d be out for a while.

And then it would just be this whole entire. And I did a lot of yoga and things like that, but I never really worked out. So my whole entire gym experience has completely changed since I started working out with the trainer. And so this trainer does a lot of CrossFit and Olympic lifting.

So I have really gotten into that, and I really like it. I never expected myself to be a weightlifter type of person, but I have a really awesome group of people that I work out with. Ladies that are my age. And we all really go for it and want to improve and track how well we’re doing and really awesome.

And one thing I’ve noticed is that especially with my squad or my deadlift I when I was, you’ll probably. Probably this change happened maybe a year ago I would get underneath the bar, and I would start to lift it. And I would feel the weight on my shoulder, the first squat. And I would be like, Ooh, this is heavy.

I can’t do this. And what I’ve realized. And the craziest thing is that once I felt that heavy and pushed through it, I realized that it wasn’t that bad once I got it up. It was initially. But I have gotten so much stronger that I can lift heavy things. Do you have this with your weightlifting too?

Sean: [00:02:16] Yeah, a little bit. There’s definitely a mental thing there. And I should I don’t work out with the trainer. I go and do my own thing. And that’s kinda like how it’s exactly the opposite of what Torie likes. I want to go do my own thing and at my own pace and just do whatever pops in my mind of what it is I want to do next.

That is how I like it. Again, the exact opposite of what Torie likes, but one of the things I need help with is when it comes to benching, as I can only get so much weight up there with it risking the bar smashing me because I, in order to be able to try to get to that next level, I have to put more weight on there than I’ve ever done before.

And when that happens, there is a balance there that I am very well aware of that is partially psychological. And some of it is weight ability. But the thing is, you don’t know what that wait for ability. Until you get past the psychological part, if I’m open, I can totally do this.

Especially when we’re talking five more pounds like theoretically, you should be able to do it. Unless that five pounds previously, there’s no way. But I had this goal of wanting to be able to do 2 25, but 2 25 is It’s at the max. I definitely cannot do more than that.

And even to get the one, to get that bar with that much weight off the rack to even attempt to do it, there’s some intimidation there. And I have smashed myself with the bar already once before it has been over a year. But just trying to lift weight where I’m like, I got it. I got it. I got it.

I don’t got it. Now I’m dealing with this bar. That’s laying on my chest because I didn’t get this spotter. And so the long story, sir, I tried it a couple of weeks ago, and I asked a guy that was just in there. Hey, will you spot me for this? I’ve never done it before. And right out the gate, and I’ve seen this guy he’s, he is benched more than the weight I was trying to go for.

So as it’s obvious, he knew I was a little bit smaller than him and inexperienced, but he’s capable of doing it and the stuff that came out of his mouth. You can do it. It’s a psychological thing. And so exactly what you were saying, Torie, it was the exact same thing he was saying that it’s just one of those things that you have to do it because it’s, it is such an, a massive amount of weight, especially considering when we first started working.

I’ve had a couple of back surgeries. I stuck with the machines where I was planted in a seat and secure, and I didn’t even touch the free weights yet alone, try to bench anything. So by the time I finally got over to the bench and put a 45 pound weight on it, you started it up.

Was difficult for me. So now I’m at the point where I’ve got 2 45 pound weights on each side of the bar, and I’m trying to do this thing, and I just wanted to do one. And this guy is Nah, you can, it’s just a mental thing. You just need to be able to do it. And I wound up pumping out two of them.

Because of that. And again, he helped me get it off the rack so I could go up and down. But I went from never being able to do it to this guy that I don’t even really know, Telling me it’s all of my head that I just need to be able to do it. And I wound up pumping out two of them. 

Torie: [00:05:26] It just made me start thinking. I can lift heavy things, which applies to many things because I don’t realize like the stuff we do because it’s just the stuff we do. But we have moved across the country. We have changed careers. We make some bold moves, and I always hear people say, ” Oh, I could never do that. I could never do that. 

Sean: [00:05:48] Oh, yeah. 

Torie: [00:05:48] And you know what? You can do that. There is always, and it’s not like the wait, all of a sudden you’re oh 2 25. I got this. Now it’s no problem. It’s always hard. It’s always heavy. But once you get it up and going, there’s something about that momentum. And like Sean said, getting over that mental thing.

And I would’ve never thought that squatting was this representation of all these things that if I could just get in my head, I can lift heavy things that I just need to get that little momentum going. That’s all you need to get yourself to that next level.

Sean: [00:06:21] And then list. And it’s a metaphor for difficult things. When we moved across the country. We moved to multiple states. When we moved to Georgia, it was the only reason we moved to Georgia was because there was a house that was on a lake, which is what we wanted at that time. It was a rural area. It was a vacation area, but we got exactly what we wanted and it was not an easy move, but we made it happen and enjoyed it because we went through that difficult period of actually going somewhere, a new state, new house, was a couple of hundred miles away. It, by no means, was it easy? But we did it. And we, because of that, we got to enjoy lake life, like legit lake. Until we had our share of it.

Torie: [00:07:06] Waited for things to be easy. We would still be in California, living in the same house, doing the same things. And I think being able to get over that little bit of hard, that little bit of challenge, that little bit of difficulty, that resistance that is there for everything.

It’s made all the difference. And I think about it too with, Sean started Miles Through Time in 2017. So four years ago, Sean didn’t know about being a business owner. I had run my own business, but my business is much different. My business has always been very online. I’ve always been able to work at my laptop, and Sean’s has brick and mortar.

Talk about resistance. Like it was a completely new experience. For me helping Sean to market a brick and mortar business, that was our own. But for Sean starting a business I could give just only so much advice because I’ve never done that either. There was a really big hurdle in that.

And I’m proud of us that we’re, we can lift heavy things. We can push passes because I really believe, and I wish I could get everybody to believe this, my kids, people, I know family that you can do these things. You can figure it out. Anything, especially with the internet, like some of the things I had to figure out before when the internet was newer, might’ve been a little bit more challenging, but right now, anything that you want to figure out that you don’t know how somebody has figured it out already and has probably made a YouTube video about it, or put an article online about it or made a course about it, or there’s a tutorial somewhere every single thing  I have a pool, and it has an older heater on it. And the heater stopped working. And this heater is probably from the original pool, which is what happens. 

Sean: [00:08:51] My guess is it’s 15 year old heater. 

Torie: [00:08:54] It’s a gas heater on the pool. I just typed in the heater not igniting and put the thing right. There were multiple videos of these dudes on there. My heater not working, and this is how I fixed it. And then I go in through all the steps. It’s like some random pool heater, literally. Anything. And we know a lot of people who come across a little bit of a challenge and back up, and I know the kids do the same thing.

It’s like my mom; growing up, I always asked her how to spell a word. And she would tell me to go look it up any more people’s parents need to do that because I’m not afraid to go and try to figure it out. And I will probably get it wrong the first time. And I think that’s okay.

But I’m not afraid of if something doesn’t work out that it doesn’t, it’s not a reflection of my character or anything like that. When you’re a beginner, you’ve got to be expected that you’re going to have challenges, and you’re probably going to screw things up. I try not to get upset about those types of things.

Sean: [00:09:50] In the failure, part of it is completely acceptable, and that’s just another mental thing that you need to be willing to accept that it failed is okay, because I’d rather have tried and failed than to have never tried and wonder if I would have succeeded. And that’s ultimate. That’s the thing that pushed us towards going through with Miles Through Time because, again, I never had any experience with any aspect of creating this thing. And Tori didn’t have any experience with the brick and mortars, but we would have regretted it for the rest of our lives. If we wouldn’t have at least given it a go, something very difficult. But again, we lifted that weight. It, has been difficult, but it keeps getting better and better. And even if it failed tomorrow, I’d be okay with that because we did do. Yeah. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but at least we did it. 

Torie: [00:10:43] Well, and I liked it. We always try to bite off a little bit more because every time we learn something new about whatever it is we always find all these different ways to apply it.

So whether it’s something that we learned, about Miles Through Time with the brick and mortar or, doing something like inventory or selling shirts or whatever, like then we can. Our other business and, or look at our client’s businesses and go, oh, as we could totally work that here and here.

And I think we’re good at spreading those lessons out, whether it’s a failure lesson or a success lesson, because both of those are pretty good lessons. I’ll take them both. I don’t mind. 

Sean: [00:11:18] And I think what happens with a lot of people too is when they feel that weight is so heavy that they don’t want to. But then let’s say they go ahead and take our advice and they’re like, I’m going to, I’m going to lift it anyways. And it winds up being, too heavy. And so there’s a little bit of a setback there where instead of going forward, they actually step back a little bit. And that is where it’s even more important to them lift again and go forward because sometimes, when you try something, it seems backward. 

Torie: [00:11:49] I always think about it as jumping. Like you can’t jump from here, like straight up, you have to go down to get that momentum to bring yourself back up. So that little step back, like I used to bother me before, I’d be like, oh shit, like we’re going backward. And now I’m like, oh, we’re going backward.

You know what that means? Like it’s going to happen. Whatever it is that we’re going to once you take that little bit backwards, big stuff happens after that. 

Sean: [00:12:13] It’s almost like an opportunity to. Evaluate everything that you did on that initial push to try to do something that created this recoil that you had to go backwards. But now. There’s nothing that says that’s it. You didn’t hit a wall. It’s just your back, and now you can look at the whole picture again, take into account what you tried the first time and give it another go. And it’s going to be that much better. And again, like if Miles Through Time would’ve failed initially. But we had an opportunity to do it again. Like I, I like even right now, again, if it failed tomorrow, And yet next week we’re like let’s start another car museum. Like it would be so easy to do. Mentally, at least I knew exactly what we needed to do to get back to where we were. 

Torie: [00:13:05] And then, okay, do this, do this. And it’s almost like you have the shortcut. 

Sean: [00:13:11] It’s really I almost pretty much did that already. When we moved here, 

Torie: [00:13:15] It did feel like we started over. 

Sean: [00:13:18] I started from scratch for three years in one location, offering storage and consignment, all displayed as a car museum and a building too small and an area too rural, and we moved. 

Torie: [00:13:30] It was a full restructure. It will be a little bit more than a move. Like it, it definitely it’s a new business center. 

Sean: [00:13:35] Closed down the business on the back end with the state and all that started a new one as a nonprofit, filed it as a 5 0 1 C3. We only brought over six or seven cars from the original location, which meant all the other cars were new ones that had never been in there before.

Torie: [00:13:55] And the display that was they all stayed at the old location. So everything was, it was an empty slate warehouse. There are pictures online. It’s pretty cool to see the difference. Yeah. 

Sean: [00:14:06] We literally, took the name milestone. And that’s it. Everything else had to be redone.

Torie: [00:14:12] Long time building the brand online and building a community. He built an automotive museum guide, because we noticed a lot of these small museums. They didn’t really know how to mark it. I don’t, I think they’re a little bit nervous about marketing, and they might just be okay. Having it be a hobby. But we wanted to be able to go and visit them and find them.

And so trying to find these smaller museums that are similar to Miles Through Time, that aren’t corporate, that isn’t like some big benefactor that has like millions of dollars to throw at, like whatever they need to. We found all of the museums and built an automotive museum guide as a directory of all museums, big ones and small ones.

And you know that what two years ago maybe. And they’ve they come and go, but at least there’s like someplace now that people could go to find. Every single museum that there is out there, and Sean’s always adding more of them in there. But in doing that, we found that maybe we can help some of those other museums out there.

Sean: [00:15:04] And now hundreds of visitors go to that website on a daily basis. And that’s, so that’s hundreds of people find it. Some sort of automotive museum somewhere in North America. And hopefully, that, get somebody into the door of another museum somewhere and helps keep all this history alive. 

Torie: [00:15:24] What I think about is the new Jumanji, the one that I really like, there’s the map on it. And at first, you only see this little. And the map is just all black. But once they’ve left, done that level, the new part of the map opens up, and you can see a little bit more. That step back or that failing or whatever, the map is already you don’t have to go through that part of it again.

And I don’t know if people don’t realize that, but that’s why millionaires, right? They always say once they made their first million, even if they lost it or their business, They could easily make it back. And now that kind of makes sense because you have the directions you have that already in there. And the time that you went to build up Miles Through Time, the first time I felt was much longer than the second time it happened much quicker. 

Sean: [00:16:07] The first time, it took us three years. It was that last year that we were even open that it finally started to feel like a real museum.

It was that last year that we had the station that was built. And then everything in the new location has, it’s only been a year, by far leap years ahead of what it was and the old location. 

Torie: [00:16:25] And we’ve talked about tracking the things that you do in other episodes. And so Sean’s really great at tracking numbers. How many people come in. And since he had that past data from the first location, he had a general idea per month who was coming in, how many, which times were slow, and which times were a little bit busier. And so every time the numbers come out for the month, it’s crazy, comparing that to the other location and just how much better and just how much we’re even with the Coronavirus type stuff, which probably did damp in possibly, some of the traffic that we would have got in the last year. Still, it’s a way that we can measure it against the other thing. And that’s the same with my weightlifting. I know how much I can squat. I know how much I can deadlift. And the last time that I actually tried to squat, I got five pounds less than I did the time before I was a little bit tired.

There were all kinds of things going on, but it wasn’t like I suck because I got five pounds less. I knew that. Okay. Now, I gotta, maybe I need to rest a little bit more of the day before maybe eat something different in the morning. And maybe that just wasn’t the right time. Like it’s fun. But that step back, I know you’ll work a little bit harder next time, prepare a little bit differently. And I have no problem thinking that I’m gonna break my personal best again. A little bit of time may need to.

Sean: [00:17:37] And even when you know you can lift a heavy weight, there are those days that shit that’s much lighter that you can easily do. It’s difficult, and that’s the same with your business? Anything in life? 

Torie: [00:17:51] I get down on myself for stuff like that. That step back scared me. And I think maybe that’s how it, lots of new business owners are. I don’t know. Maybe that’s more like a new parent type thing too. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at being able to see the big picture and realize that just because something goes back, it doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong or that I’m a failure. Maybe there are things I need to adjust. And then that is a good time to take a look at everything and how things are going. But it doesn’t mean that I failed. That makes sense. Yeah. 

Sean: [00:18:20] You look at the NFL, and you’ve got star quarterbacks, and then you got somebody like Brett Farve or patient eating Peyton Manning. They have four downs. Every time they have the ball to try a touchdown, they could get past it and get four yards. They’d pass it again. And they’ve got three yards on the third down. They lose three yards, that. If you think of them, the mental game that they have to play, that could completely screw them for getting that next first down to keep going where, they lose those yards right there, and mentally they could be just done.

They’re like, Nope, we went backward. It’s over. In reality, you have a whole nother opportunity to give them four more opportunities to keep going. Life is like that. Like you have to if you can look for things that correlate with how you should be thinking, as the football had in yards.

Like it’s okay. You’re, when you lose a few yards, because you can gain them back and then many more, the very next play could be all the way to the end zone and they get 63 yards, and it’s a touchdown, but if they would, oh man, we lost three yards, that’s it.

We’re done. I’m outta here whenever, but you should be able to win. And just because you go backward, doesn’t mean it’s over. If anything that, that should light a fire under your butt, and really that next place should be the. And I think that’s what separates the greatest teams from the worst.

Torie: [00:19:56] You got to get fired up when you go back a few yards. 

Sean: [00:19:59] And the thing is that the defense could be nothing. The offense did wrong, but the defense was so good. So you’ve got your business, you didn’t do anything wrong, but maybe it was COVID, nothing you could do, and COVID happens.

And now you can’t open your business to say we have a client right now that I talked to him last year he owns a bar and this whole time, and we talked to him, and he’s just riding out the wave. He’s he realizes that everything’s going to suck. His business took a major dip.

He went backward, but he realized all he had to do was outlast everyone else around him. And he did. And now he’s super busy, like way busier than ever. It needs to be to the point to where he told us to turn it off as Facebook messaging. Cause he doesn’t want to deal with that aspect. He just doesn’t have time to deal with that on top of everything else because of how busy he is, so going backward, he was able to hold on, not lose faith, and he’s killing it now. And a bunch of businesses that’s how they succeed. You just, you hold on and eventually, shit will take off. 

Torie: [00:21:08] Whether it’s parenting or your business or lifting weights or football, like going back is okay, because you can lift heavy things.

I can lift heavy things. Sean can lift heavy things. And the crazy thing is you can probably lift heavier things than you even think. So if you liked this episode, We have new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. And we would love it. If you would join us, if you want to go to Toriemathis.com, you can sign up for updates so that you never miss an episode, or you can subscribe wherever you are listening to or watching this episode.

And we will see you on the next one. Thanks.