Jon Gordon’s Comeback Story - The Power of Positivity

Jon Gordon, best selling author and motivational speaker, shares his hard-won insights into happiness and fulfillment, and talks about the power of positivity in transforming your life. Learn how Jon escaped a life of misery and depression and turned his life around, by pursuing service instead of his ego and focusing on encouraging and inspiring one person at a time.  

• Jon grew up on Long Island New York in a Jewish-Italian family. It was not a very positive household overall and he often got into fights with other neighborhood kids. It often felt like he was battling for survival.
• He played lacrosse at Cornell University, where he learned about culture, leadership, and teamwork. He didn’t originally plan on playing lacrosse but an instrumental high school coach convinced him to stick with it and showed him that coaches can change your life forever.
• Basketball was always Jon’s favorite game, so the transition from lacrosse wasn’t the worst. The real challenge was when Jon’s wife almost left him when he was 31. He had experienced a rollercoaster of bouncing around between law school and a dot-com job and blamed her for the circumstances for his life. It wasn’t until she said she was leaving that he started to question why he was so miserable.
• He was addicted to trying to prove himself and earning the validity of someone successful. The more he chased that idea, the more miserable he became. Jon started taking walks of gratitude, praying, and meditation, and those things helped him escape the rut he was in.
• We are all addicted to something, and it’s not always the usual substances. Many people are addicted to their work, or their smartphone, or social media.
• Your past is a part of who you are and your soul has wounds that define you. For Jon, his biological father leaving was deeply impactful on him and shaped his attitude on life. A major life-changing moment for Jon was forgiving his biological father and letting go of the past.
• We all have wounds, and we all try to fill those wounds. Your wounds are your constraints and you can either heal them and rise above them or the wound can become infected.
• We are not strong enough on our own. That’s why every addiction program includes a higher power. 
• The most important first step in Jon’s turn around from misery was in committing to serving others instead of just building up his ego. You become a person of significance when you make others significant. This became the foundation for Jon’s future work writing books, speaking, and sending out his weekly newsletter.
• Ironically, the greatest self growth strategy of all is to help others grow. When you are focused on yourself, you don’t grow very much but when you become a conduit for others, your growth rises to a whole other level.
• Jon wasn’t successful right away. His first book was rejected by 30 publishers and not one book store in the US would carry the book. He decided to go on a 20-city tour that he paid for himself to promote the book and even when there were only five people in the crowd he knew his mission was to encourage and inspire as many people as possible, one person at a time.
• When Covid hit, Jon went back to the rookie mindset and continued to push his vision, even though his talks were being cancelled left and right. 
• When he got started, selling five million books was never the goal. It all comes back to what your intention is, where your heart is, and what you focus on.
• Don’t chase things to build up your ego.
• So many people struggle with feeling unworthy. People aren’t afraid of success, they feel like they are unworthy of success. When we forget who we are, we forget the power we have inside us.
• Would you choose to have a negative thought? Ideas and thoughts emerge from your subconscious all the time and some of them will discourage, distract, and divide you. Recognize those thoughts as lies and speak truth to them. Greatness and potential are within you and once you start speaking that to yourself, you will start walking with power.
• The key is to unite the self. This can be done with meditation, prayer, and mindfulness.
• Success is doing what you love and loving how you do it. Success doesn’t have to be tied to your performance, that’s the mistake that many athletes and professionals make. The fear of underperforming will drain you.
• Perform for an audience of one.
• The narrative of the universe is a battle of good versus evil. We are spiritual beings on a human journey and we each experience this epic struggle in our lives every day.
• We can always change our story. As a coach, you have to know the story someone tells themselves so that you can help them tell a better story.
• So often, our minds don’t need fixing, it’s our souls that need healing. No matter what is happening outside of us,  it’s always about what is happening on the inside.
• Talk to yourself, but don’t always listen to yourself. Write down all the negative thoughts that come into your mind and then flip the paper over and write down words of encouragement. Make refuting your negative thoughts into a daily practice. Take small action steps each day to feed your positivity and at the end of the day think about what went right. What you look for you will find.

Mentioned in this Episode:

jongordon.com