Aaron Ash and Tim Brunicardi are committed to improving mental health, personal growth, and resilience via their No Street Lights Podcast. I was privileged to be a guest on the podcast. Here is a summary of my conversation with Aaron:
- Dare to dream and dare to do.
- My 20-year up and down journey to create a global software powerhouse.
- The AHA moment when I realized we would go sailing for two years while home schooling our three children in the Mediterranean.
- Use your breath to calm anxiety.
- To build a great business, slow down once a quarter to plan.
- As entrepreneurs, we sometimes have to let go for a few weeks or months to let things develop.
- All of us struggle at times. It is part of the journey.
- Overcome challenges through community, connection, and being open to help and support.
- I got sober through an amazing coach and 12-step recovery.
Audio
Transcript
David Greer (00:00):
With alcohol, I coped with alcohol. Was rocket fuel work harder? Rocket fuel to make the highs higher? I mean at the end of the day I drank because I’m an alcoholic. My path into recovery is through 12 step recovery. And what we share a lot in the rooms of 12 Step is, well one, look for the similarities, not the differences. And two, listen about the feelings because we all used alcohol to get past certain feelings. And maybe how we coped was slightly different. But again, we were trying to cope with feelings that we couldn’t, didn’t have tools to do …
Aaron Ash (00:45):
Welcome to the No Streetlights podcast. I’m Aaron. And I’m Tim. We’re veterans here to talk about mental health, resilience and the real struggles we face every day. Our goal is to foster kindness through understanding. Let’s take a breath, relax and be welcome
Aaron Ash (01:14):
Everyone back to the No Street Lights podcast today. I’m Aaron. And I’m Tim. Today, me being Aaron and Tim and you at home, I’m sitting down with Coach David J. Greer, and his story is just like ours. It’s not easy, it’s not polished and that’s why we’re sitting down and talking with him even though we had 30 difficulties trying to get here because we’re professional podcasters and David is the captain of his vessel and his ship and he says, let me know if it’s going to happen or I’m not going to be there, which we appreciate because we’ll be there as soon as we can possibly be there. David, welcome to the show and thank you so much.
David Greer (02:03):
Thanks Aaron. It’s great to be here with you today.
Aaron Ash (02:07):
How would you like for the audience to think of you, what do you want them to know about you right out of the gates?
David Greer (02:14):
I am a passionate individual. I’m very focused to giving back. My current mission is to share my experience, strength and hope in business and in recovery. And I’m a really passionate family guy. Family’s super important to me and outdoors. I live in Vancouver, BC Canada and I’m a very, very passionate sailor having sailed in excess of 20,000 nautical miles around the world’s oceans so far.
Aaron Ash (02:46):
Tim and I are pretend sailors by comparison. I was only stationed at bases on the ground as a sailor and Tim was stationed aboard the brand-new Ford carrier that would go out for two weeks and have to come back for them to change some things. He may have 300 yards of sea time. I dunno what that translates to in nautical miles editor, you’ll have to correct me in the edit. Thank you. And I’m sorry David; I want to start by apologizing. Is that okay?
David Greer (03:24):
Yeah, sure. It’s your show. Go for it.
Aaron Ash (03:28):
I am sorry that I am the 3-year-old in the conversation and that I have been so busy and this is how we’re going to do it. This is going to get done and get not being ahead of schedule and sending you the calendar invite more than 10 minutes before we popped on because like I care about my community and giving back. I’m trying to end homelessness. I’m trying to run a fundraiser for the local dojo so the kids can have new mats that aren’t 30 years old and full of holes and blood. I’m stressed out all the time because I’m also trying to love my wife, but she’s there with me and lets me be vulnerable enough to show her that I’m hurt and a wounded animal isn’t fun to be around. I’m very grateful that you’re here to share this story. Thank you for listening and I mean please take it away. I want to hear about your story, David.
David Greer (04:23):
I now live in Vancouver, Canada, but I was actually conceived in Calgary, Alberta in the province over. And I say that I was a teenage pregnancy, and my mom was sent to Edmonton to a home for unwed moms where I was then delivered at the Royal Alex Hospital in Edmonton and was adopted from the hospital. And I grew up in an upper middle-class family. My father was an entrepreneur. He took over the business that my grandfather started in 1923 downtown Edmonton, which eventually my brother took over and which my brother this year transferred to his son. Fourth generation, which less than 1% of family businesses. But around grade nine I really figured out that I wanted to take computers and business and put them together. And the family business was the wholesale sanitary supply business. Cleaning chemicals, cleaning machines, and there would not be a lot of opportunity for combining business and computers in that business. Even though my dad put me under a lot of pressure to take over the family business, I had a different vision, and I left home at 18, went to Vancouver chasing my high school sweetheart who broke up with me nine months later,
Aaron Ash (05:42):
Been there.
David Greer (05:43):
And yeah, I was really, really heart broken. However, I was also incredibly driven, and I was not going to go back to Edmonton with my tail between the legs. I was massively driven to find jobs, find a way to support myself. There’s nothing really, really being clear. I hear you.
(06:07):
Okay. Eventually, and my parents of course thought I’d never go back to school, but I did go to computer science at the University of British Columbia, which is one of Canada’s major universities. I got a part-time job with the cable company working with their management information system department. A friend of mine met the MIS manager at a party and called me. And at that time, Premier Cable Systems was the largest cable company in North America, had higher density than New York in Vancouver’s West End. These computer systems, they bought a very new minicomputer system from Hewlett Packard, which was not scaling. They brought in this brilliant consultant to rewrite it who I worked with. And in fourth year I was hired by that consultant as the first employee after the two founders of their software company, which at that point was two years old.
(07:03):
That was Bob Green and otherwise known as Robert. And the couple was Robert and Annabelle, and the company was Robelle, which is a concatenation of their two names, which still Googles very well today. And as a condition of my employment, I had to write an abstract for a paper and send it off to the 1980 Hewlett Packard International User Group convention. It was accepted. Then I had to write the paper and when I was in fourth year at UBC, I had to go to my profs and let them know I was going to be gone for a week. I flew to San Jose, and I attended the convention and I gave my first technical presentation. I can remember even today I can remember standing at the side of the stage being introduced and visibly shaking.
(07:51):
And there was probably 60, 70 people in the audience. And Bob and I were standing on the San Jose convention floor. We had a booth telling a bunch of other computer geeks about this cool software and what it could do for them. And it literally was probably 15 or more years before I really understood that that was the essence of marketing and sales. We were just these two computer geeks who were in this particular market. We specialized in this platform from Hewlett Packard. It was one of the longest running minicomputers of any manufacturer in the world. It ran for 27 years, and we were global leaders and experts in that particular platform. Our marketing strategy was Bob and I wrote a new paper every year for 20 years, and then we traveled the planet giving both technical and management presentations to people. They believe in this obscure Vancouver based software company. They were going to trust their whole company to. And companies that bought this computer system were typically divisions of Fortune 500, a hundred, 200 million a year parts supplier in the auto sector. And the computer was used for really boring things, keeping track of customers, keeping track of what you needed to build today, keeping track of invoices.
(09:14):
And our products kind of ran behind the scenes. They’re like the plumbing, but when you need a plumber, you really need a plumber. I had more than a half a dozen products over 20 years and two of them were hit it out of the park home run successes. Ten years in, I bought out Annabelle, became partners with Bob. That was I was around 34. I had two kids, four and two. And I remember standing at the KPMG accountant’s office outside the elevator with tears running down my face at the fear, at the risk of the deal that I was agreeing to. People listening to my story, Robelle sounds like an overnight success story, but no business. It takes years of work, it takes years of work and it has tons of ups and downs. You’re hearing the positive high. It turned out buying at Annabelle worked out really, really well and I did financially really well. It all worked out, but the decision was still a really hard one. As a young person taking on a lot of additional risks,
Aaron Ash (10:22):
I am two years away from being 34. You can see very clearly I pulled all of my hair out hair very clearly. Thank you for sharing that. That is an incredible insight into your story. And it’s astounding how radically different every aspect of our lives have been. And yet we both had the same experiences. We both felt the same feelings. You took a risk doing something that you know needed done, but no one knew it needed done. And then you kept saying, I’m the guy for the job. And that’s what I’m doing right now. We’re taking a chance on this nonprofit podcast. Can we market everyone to care enough about each other that we live in a compassionate place where everyone is taking care of. And a child born to a teenage mother in the states where I am in Ohio can be cared for and loved.
(11:30):
If that county votes pro-life, that means that county needs to care for every life in it. And I’m the guy who keeps shouting that this is true, but no one believes me. I’m the cleaning lady’s son. No one knows that. She’s also gone through hell for 50 years before she found five years of purgatory and now she’s been in heaven for five years. We’ve done the same learning, but along such radically different paths, the way I coped with alcohol and women and pain was due from my depression and that made me feel like I wasn’t enough. But you felt like you weren’t enough. You had so much pressure on you.
David Greer (12:14):
Yeah, even if a lot of it was self-induced, right? But I mean,
Aaron Ash (12:19):
I’m working six jobs. I hear you brother.
David Greer (12:21):
Pressure nonetheless. And where I’m pretty certain we will get to is we continue the conversation. One of my coping mechanisms was alcohol. I coped with not feeling enough with alcohol, I coped with alcohol. Was rocket fuel work harder, rocket fuels to make the highs higher? I mean at the end of the day I drank because I’m an alcoholic. When you boil it all away, people like, why did you drink? Because I’m an alcoholic.
Aaron Ash (12:55):
I was addicted, becoming my pain.
David Greer (12:58):
And what’s interesting about what you shared and what we share a lot, my path into recovery is through 12 step recovery. And what we share a lot in the rooms of 12 step is well one, look for the similarities, not the differences. And two listen about the feelings because we all used alcohol to get past certain feelings. Now the circumstances that created them, as you just pointed out, our circumstances were different. The feelings were very, very similar and maybe how we cope was slightly different. But again, we were trying to cope with feelings that we didn’t have tools to deal with.
Aaron Ash (13:42):
You know what, David, you’re hired, thank you for being here with us. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this hour that we’re going to spend together. Wow. Yeah. Since I am awestruck and I just have forgot what I was supposed to say, please tell me more about this journey and whatever you want to tell me about next while I compose myself.
David Greer (14:10):
I buy out Annabelle, we go another 10 years and Bob and I had a 20 year relationship. And in that time we only had one major disagreement and it was a doozy and it ended in divorce. We came to 20 years. We knew the HP 3000 lifespan was going to end sooner or later it hadn’t. I brought in some outside strategy and marketing people to reflect back into better understand the business. Bob wanted to take the business and milk the market for what it was until it was all gone and turn out the lights. And I’m like, we built this extraordinary team. We’ve got a lot of outside data that says that it’s pretty extraordinary at what we can do. And I wanted to take a little bit more risk and I’ll just finish my thought a little bit more risk and money and move it into new direction. And those two strategies were both viable strategies. They were not complimentary strategies. And it ended up after a lot of acrimony and very, very painful kind of three to six months that Bob bought me out.
Aaron Ash (15:26):
I want to ask you a very strange on the spot question and then I want to share something and then I want to let you proceed wherever you’re going. Okay. Weird off the wall question for my just six people listening. Who are day traders trying to make a living? Do you think it’s a good time or a bad time to buy Nvidia? Disclaimer, this is your personal opinion and your gut feeling. I guess I don’t know.
David Greer (15:53):
For the last 15 years, my wife and I have an investment strategy, which is to very, with a lot of forethought and we’re with a certain advisor in certain funds, we spread our risk and absolutely never ever try and pick a winner. Our goal is to get the returns. The market has averaged 6% returns more or less since the depression, since the depression in 1930.
(16:23):
And our goal is to match that growth year over year plus or minus 10%. Some years We look like we’re losing and some years we’re way over. But that is our goal. And because of that, I have no opinion on exchange rates on individual stocks. We also diversified, even if you invest in the Canadian stock exchange, since much of that exchange is still natural resources based, because that’s the primary economy in Canada, you’re still taking a lot of risk on commodity prices changing for natural resources.
Aaron Ash (17:06):
Or random s[hit] being implemented by …
David Greer (17:09):
In fact, a significant amount of our investments are not in Canada, some it is global. A lot of it’s in the US. And again, I delegate all of that. This is the long-winded answer to say I have no idea how to answer your question and I have zero opinion. And I worked very, very hard to, this actually frees me. I do want to share with listeners, this frees a lot of bandwidths as my financial advisor and Karalee and I, and we have an annual general meeting every year. We review everything,
Aaron Ash (17:46):
Everything,
David Greer (17:47):
Everything. And Ray says David and Karalee, you’re responsible for staying within the budget that we agreed to. And we’ve actually been exceeding that staying under budget. And Frank and I, his partner, are responsible for delivering your returns and they’ve been over-delivering on the returns. Guess what? We’re in a pretty good place and then all the rest. Financially the market’s go up, the market’s down, a certain leader of the world says something and markets change dramatically.
Aaron Ash (18:21):
Five years it’ll normalize.
David Greer (18:22):
Yeah, exactly. And we got enough money for the next five years. Yeah, we do. We have a plan out to Karalee, but age 91 and me age 89 and what happened when or if we sell our house. And actually we can summarize the whole budget summary is like two pages and that’s another beauty just working with a great financial advisor. We’re just able to simplify things a lot. It’s a very, very long-winded answer to your question, but it’s the
Aaron Ash (18:57):
Best answer.
David Greer (18:58):
It gets to the core of what we believe about our finances and how we run our financial life.
Aaron Ash (19:07):
Just for fun, I’m going to be open with you and share a hilarious, I think it might only be funny to me, David, I don’t have enough money for the last five years, let alone today or the next five years. Well, and
David Greer (19:23):
Again, I’m more than double your age. I’m also at a different stage status of life
Aaron Ash (19:29):
And I am learning how to maximize. And that’s really what Tim does in our relationship. He is the one who, this is how we have to maximize profit. This is how we have to find profit. And then I shoot holes in it and then I tell him how much money I want to give away and how I plan on giving it away. And then he shoots holes in it. We’re really trying to get to the same place, but it’s very difficult learning right now. But I understand that when I’m 67, I’ll be having a blast. And now I’m preparing myself by doing 18 hour days every day with one rest day a month because I know in 10 years I can quit because I’ll have this person who’s taking care of all the homelessness in Parkersburg have this person taking care of all the homelessness in Athens. I’ll have this person. I hear you. And then the vulnerable share that I want to help segue into the next part of your story is I was raised in AA and tangentially in NA, and one of my first foundational memories is being a child who felt alone, unseen, unworthy of anything at an AA meeting. And they asked me how I felt in the circle and I stood up and I shared, “Thank you for saving my dad’s life. My life is better with my dad in it. And if you weren’t in my dad’s life, my dad wouldn’t be in my life.” And I sat down before I cried my eyes out and everyone was silent for about two minutes. Please tell me more.
David Greer (21:17):
There I am in 2001 on the street not noticing this thing called the dot com meltdown. We’d been in this little insulated environment, I wasn’t paying total attention and I’m busy trying to meet up with other entrepreneur friends of mine and find my next deal, my next gig, until someone way smarter than me sat me down. And actually I can remember being in her office, I can remember sitting across from her and she looked me in the eye and she said, “David, do you need to work right away?” And I’m like, no. I got a pretty good check in my, I’m not done for life, but I got a pretty good check on my jeans. I definitely don’t need to work right away. And then this was the bombshell, “David, your kids will never be 11, nine and five.”
(22:10):
I had the absolute proverbial AHA moment in that moment. I completely got it. And my wife and I hatched this plan to commission a sailboat in the south of France and to take our three children and to homeschool them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 nautical miles. It’s about 10,000 kilometers for my non-American and Canadian listeners in the Mediterranean basin. And if this was the Disney movie, I’d probably get sober while we were out there. But this is real life. And I tell you, if you’re an alcoholic on a sailboat in the Mediterranean, what a great place to drink. Every place you pull into there, there’s restaurants along the waterfronts. They’ve got draft cold, draft beer, wine is really cheap, way cheaper than Canada. The drinking continued with one exception, which I’ve come to really appreciate as I got sober. We did over 20 overnight passages, like 24 hours, 36 hours, 48, 72, some pretty long multi-day passages. I had no desire to drink during those passages when the life of my family was strictly on the line and we were in the middle of the sea far away from anything. I didn’t even think about it. I just did not drink in those passages. And our second overnight was in the Western Mediterranean Sea and there was a super high pressure system, which meant it was crystal clear. There also was no wind. We were motoring through the night and my son and I were on watch about three o’clock in the morning and overhead as far as we could see was the Milky Way. And the stars were so bright on the horizon, we kept mistaking the stars as actual lights of boats.
(24:17):
But they weren’t boats, they were just stars in the horizon. And I think that was the universe trying to touch me. I’ve really come to appreciate and as part of my coming to an understanding of a power greater than myself is I go back to that experience and I,
Aaron Ash (24:36):
It’s much easier to be grateful than it is to be scared or afraid.
David Greer (24:41):
And we had some really, in the middle of the, in the middle of the night, we had a 75 mile wide thunderstorm that we had to navigate around and we were like 10 hours sailing from any safe harbor. I’m really glad I was sober. And my son and I came and watched at 2:00 AM and we kept feeling like we were getting closer to the center of the storm and we did a maneuver called heaving to, which parks the boat essentially, it doesn’t move forward or backwards, it just kind of sits there and it also pointed the stern towards the storm. Kevin and I just sat in the cockpit facing the storm and we watched and after an hour we figured out that it was actually going from left to, and we thought it was going the other way and we were in fact driving right into the middle of the storm, which is why one of my words from my book, Wind In Your Sails is Slow Down To Speed Up. And that’s actually the opening story of my book. I think it illustrates in life sometimes we really have to slow down before we have the opportunity to speed up.
Aaron Ash (25:47):
I could not agree with you more and thank you much for making that point. Tim and I on this platform, we were stuck with our views. We were stuck with our subscribers. We’d been, as Tim said in our initial conversation, we had been smashing our head against the wall until we saw cracks. And I was getting a little dizzy, I have to be honest here. And we took a month off, we still did some reporting, we still collaborated and worked together every day or nearly every day. And after that we went from 4,000 subscribers to 11 or twelves in a month. We were like, holy canola, we have to keep doing what we’re doing, but if we keep doing what we were doing, we’ll keep getting that result. We have to keep innovating and every conversation we have to approach differently. I can’t talk to you the way I’m going to talk to Micah who I record with at one o’clock. It’s mental gymnastics and the load isn’t insane. And if you don’t have healthy outlets, you’ll have unhealthy outlets. It’s good to pause and see which way the storm is actually blowing.
David Greer (26:53):
And sometimes I think we forget that sometimes you just have to wait and let things develop, especially in business and in life, but especially in business because we do have to drive to goals and outcomes that we’re trying to achieve. Otherwise we’d lose money and run out of cash and go out of business. But on the other hand, sometimes things that we put out there, we sometimes just need to give it time to develop or people who work for us, time to figure things out and to come together and pushing on it won’t actually make it go better or faster.
Aaron Ash (27:34):
This is a gardener’s lesson
David Greer (27:36):
And sometimes you just need to tend the garden.
Aaron Ash (27:40):
That means you have to water it, and that sometimes means you have to wait a week until you water it again
David Greer (27:44):
And to be patient, which as a hard driven entrepreneur, patience is definitely, oh, well, lack of patience is definitely one of my defects of character. Let me just,
Aaron Ash (27:54):
Hello me, I’m you, God, David, help coach, help.
David Greer (28:03):
Breathe. It’s amazing. Five breaths. Five breaths are like, we go everywhere with our lungs and our breaths. It never leaves us.
Aaron Ash (28:15):
I say your breath is your power to the people I’m teaching kung fu,
I take probably 500 conscious breaths today, which means I’ve panicked probably a hundred times today
David Greer (28:26):
And I noticed you doing some breathing to just stay grounded and congratulations and good for you to know that and do it.
Aaron Ash (28:34):
We’re here.
David Greer (28:36):
We come back from the Mediterranean and I start reestablishing my career. I become an angel investor. I did it for about three or four years. I was looking at a hundred deals a year, picked about one deal a year, talk about cognitive switching, and I do that obviously as a coach now. Anyways, I did this and being on board of directors and working for options and three or four years in all my entrepreneur friends in Vancouver, my tech entrepreneur, friends swore by this thing called this one page strategic plan, which was invented by Verne Harnish and his book is Scaling Up and his first book was The Rockefeller Habits. And Verne was coming to town to teach about the Rockefeller habits and the one page plan. And I took one of the young CEOs in one of the companies I was invested in and on the board on the two of us went to this session to help her to understand the one page plan and also I could learn more and we could see if we wanted to use it in the strategic planning for the business.
(29:47):
I don’t know how many, Verne now doesn’t do many training sessions. It was a bit of a blessing that I got to experience him firsthand. We grew Robelle the way I think most traditional entrepreneurs, especially first time entrepreneurs grow businesses, which is kind of look at the business and say, we’ll do 5% better than the last year. And hey, we built a massively successful business with that approach. I’m not knocking it, but Verne’s approach was take a spot three to five years out and where are you going to be then? And this blew my mind.
(30:25):
This was a radically different idea than kind of yearly planning, quarterly planning. Start with the future vision and what are the key capabilities or products or geographies or markets like you need to enter or enhance by that deadline, whatever that is, and then work backwards through what you need to get done this year with crystal clear goals and then what you need to get done this quarter. And it’s based on a quarterly planning rhythm, but with an overreaching three to five year vision. And it looks like he wanted me to ask a question of me about that. The back of the room was a coach, Kevin Lawrence. I talked to him. He made me more uncomfortable than I’d been in a number of years. I had tears in the corner of my eyes. I hired Kevin. It took a while, but I ended up hiring him. That was on August 9th, 2007.
(31:23):
We worked together for nine years in total, but after 18 months we had got my career reestablished, which is why I hired him. We got all the clutter cleared off and the elephant in the room was the only thing left. And on January 27th, 2009, he was the first person I admitted I had a drinking problem to. And Kevin, in his personal life at a summer place for many years had a friend who had 20 years and 12 step recovery. He’d had many conversations without person and his journey. Kevin knew what to do. He coached me and got me to commit to go to a 12 step meeting. That was a Tuesday, and I committed to go by that Friday being the overachiever that I am. I had a networking event downtown that day and I knew it ended at eight o’clock. I went online, looked up meetings.
(32:14):
Lo and behold, a quarter of a block off the road, I would be driving home at eight o’clock. At 8:30 there was going to be a 12 step meeting. And I went. And at that time, at that meeting, about three quarters of the way through, they asked, was there anyone new to the program? I’d like to introduce themselves. And I sat on my hands and I sat on my hands. And then finally after about 20 seconds, I stood up and I said, “I’m David, I’m an alcoholic.” And about a month later I made up my home group and last night now 16 years and I forget three or four months and some odd days, I’m just coming up to 6,000 days of sobriety. I was at my home group and last night two people were there who were there the night that I walked in.
(33:03):
Being part of my sobriety, and I have a few other people that have been part of my sobriety literally since the first 10 or 15 days, my current sponsor I met for the first time, probably 10 days in at a meeting. He wasn’t my sponsor right away, but I’ve known Barry, I talked to Barry literally just before our recording here today. And I want to circle back because you raised something really important that your young self went into a 12 step recovery meeting and you were asked to share and you stood up and you shared your truth about your dad and you were able to do so completely emotionally because I believe it’s not every single 12 step meeting, but at 12 step meetings, we create the safety and almost every AA meeting I done to in my almost 6,000 days of recovery, when someone is sharing, you can hear a pin drop and there is much respect for the person that is sharing.
(34:08):
You don’t have to agree with it, you don’t have to have had that experience, but you have utmost respect for the person who’s sharing and for holding space. Just as you shared that group, you were in that day held space for you. And when you burst into tears and shared your truth for two minutes, you said they were silent because they held the space for your little boy self. And to me, that story to me is precious because it really, really, to me is the essence of what 12-step recovery is not about putting the plug in the jug. It’s about learning how to live life without my solution, alcohol and to being there. One of the biggest acts of service I can do is to take a chair in a room and hold space for someone else. And I’m very glad that you were able to have that experience. And obviously I still go to three meetings a week in my primary recovery program, and then I have one for adult children and dysfunctional families, which I do once a week. It’s been a phenomenal part of my personal growth.
Aaron Ash (35:23):
It sounds disingenuous because people say it often, but I truly lament that we’ve only had 30 minutes to sit down and because scheduling, I truly hope that we talk again because if you’re comfortable holding this very large space, I’m about to thank you for saving yourself as a father. Recently we had Father’s Day and you’re there for your kids. Now you’ve made a legacy, and it is true that part of that is the legacy that was passed to you, but that was all hard work and your whole life has been hard work, and now your kids are going to have a whole bunch of hard work. And me, even though we started at zero and we literally walked on the poverty line, and that’s still where we are. But I’m much happier. I’m much better at it. I know that if I need wealth, I can reach out to people who are willing to coach me on how to get there. David, again, thank you. Thank you for the healing you’ve done. Thank you for being tolerant and patient with me in this conversation. I know it hasn’t been easy because I know I’m a hundred grit sandpaper, but thank you.
David Greer (36:46):
I think you’re being a little rough. Personally, I think you’re being pretty rough on yourself, a hundred grit sandpaper. I’m just saying, and you’re welcome to be rough on yourself, but I don’t have that judgment.
Aaron Ash (36:59):
For anyone who’s in a similar place to me who wants to reach out to you or someone like you, what is the final piece of advice that you would call this person to action to go do, to change their life for the better? How do they get a hold of you?
David Greer (37:14):
I’ll try and do three things. First of all, I offer free one hour of coaching to anyone that wants it, type David Greer, coach, into a search engine. You should get my website. Top left corner is my phone number, my email address. All you got to do is reach it. I want to put that offer on the table to anyone who’s listening, who’s struggling today, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in life, whether it’s with alcoholism or addiction or your place in recovery. The second thing is, no matter how dark it seems right now, I want you to know there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’d like a little tiny, tiny piece of you to know that there is hope. A lot of times it’s virtually impossible. The mind that got us to where we are today is not the mind that can get us out. We need someone else’s help to do that. There are people here to help. You just need to reach out, find a mentor, book a call with me, reach out to Aaron, find someone else in your community that you can open up to in safety and get the help you deserve and help out of the darkness. That’s what I’d like to leave with your listeners.
Aaron Ash (38:22):
That is legitimately the entire concept of this show and our nonprofit.
David Greer (38:29):
I’m glad I could summarize it simply.
Aaron Ash (38:32):
Thank you. I hope you don’t mind us plagiarizing and also share, not at all.
David Greer (38:38):
Absolutely.
Aaron Ash (38:39):
I am now going to try and set a record for wrapping up this closing segment. Like David said, if you don’t have a songa, if you don’t have a community that loves and accepts you, come to ours, come to us. Whatever higher power you believe in is calling you to talk to David. He just told you how to get a hold of him. If you are feeling called to reach out to us here at No Street Lights or work with us to affect change, reach out to us. I’ll literally send you my phone number as well. David and I are brave enough. We know we’re doing the right thing. If you already have your songa and you’re also doing the work laying down the path for others like us, bring this healing to them. They might want to reach David for some healing they need that they haven’t shared with you.
(39:30):
I do need to shout out people who are supporting us fiscally on our Patreon, patreon.com/nslp, our top tier. We have Atticus Stacher. He’s an amazing musician. We have Eric Spears who’s doing a lot of great work with us as our director of me Warfare, but that’s only in Minecraft. Jason Grooms, who has an amazing show, he’s been on our show a few times. We’ve been on his, he’s great guy. You know him, you love him, he’s your best friend. Next up, we have our all time great highest giver, Ketia Hausner of the 10 Tier. I can’t say anything that you don’t already know about her. She’s our director of gratitude. Whenever David gets his letter and sticker in the mail, it’s going to be from Ketia. Hyland Markle is the reason this show sounds palatable, and you didn’t turn us off because of the sound of my voice. Thank you Hyland for teaching. Tim everything you needed to do to edit. Thank you, Tim, for editing. Again, thank you, David for your time. Thank all of you for listening. I’ve been Aaron final disclaimer. Our podcast can’t be substituted for professional medical advice. If you need help now, please call nine one or you can call or text nine eight eight for immediate intervention if you’re in the States. David, what number do they need to call if they’re Canadian?
David Greer (40:36):
Well, nine one one and there is another number, but I don’t know it offhand.
Aaron Ash (40:40):
As long as 9 1 1 will help them, if
David Greer (40:42):
9 1 1, they’ll refer you to who you need. Yeah,
Aaron Ash (40:45):
And David already knows that. I’m about to tell him that. If you want protracted support and you don’t have a therapist in your area, you go to better help.com. It’ll get you 10% off your first month and it’s you getting the help you deserve on your terms. Were you not listening to David earlier, go get the help you deserve on your terms. I don’t care if you take your meeting with your therapist in the bathtub with the camera off. Just don’t take a toaster with, just take the iPad or the phone. I know that was dark humor as a firearms instructor, that’s how we make it sometimes. Hold that space for yourself. Be good to yourself and be good to each other. We love you and I want you to believe that your worthy of that loss. Until next time.
Announcer (41:34):
Thank you, David. Thank you, Aaron. We’ve got stories unsold. Come on in. Let the truth unfold. Words might cut some may make you cry.
