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Running to Happiness

/ Justin Beeman / Leave a comment

It wasn’t long after I started making all those horrible choices, that I about made the worst one. I was ready to quit my marriage, I didn’t care who got hurt. I was so angry at everything that none of it mattered anymore. My employees were dropping like flys because of my weakness, my kids saw and heard me at my worst and my wife got a monster at home.

I’m sure some people probably will make excuses for me, others will say I probably haven’t gotten any better. But the truth is I was weak and I was angry. Mostly I was angry at myself.

To her credit my wife never gave up on me. She had every right to, but she didn’t. And it was her faith in me that ultimately brought me back. I realized that things weren’t perfect, and that maybe they never would be, but she loved me enough to try and help me after all of that and she deserved better. Everyone deserved better.

I started with fitness. Mostly at home workouts. Heather supported me and the kids loved joining me. Then it was a random day in April that my growth would really take off.

I randomly looked at my Instagram account and saw a post from Kevin Hart about going out for a Sunday runday. I thought to myself that it was crazy that this guy was going out for a run. But it motivated me.

I slapped on my shoes and I hit the streets. I don’t remember the run that much, but there was a part of me that was unlocked that day. Some part of me that had lay dormant for most of my life that knew that I wanted challenge in my life. My first fun run in my life and I ran 5 miles. I was exhilarated, I was full of pride, I also couldn’t walk right and it took another week before I ran again. But that day changed the entire course of my life and lead me to the next two steps in the evolution of my life and to finding my own grit.

Losing it

/ Justin Beeman / Leave a comment

So I keep talking about grit, but what is it. There’s many ways to define it, but to me, it’s our ability to deal with tough situations and keep moving forward. It’s our ability to not quit when it looks hard or even impossible. In a word, it’s stubbornness.

Some people would say that how much grit we have is decided by the conditions we were raised in our even our genetics. But I fully believe that regardless of our parents or our past circumstances, we are fully capable of growing our grit and hardening ourselves to be able to endure anything.

But you’ve got to want it…

You’ve got to take a cold hard look at yourself and say that the easy path isn’t the right one for you. You’ve got to embrace the fact that if you want to grow, you’ve got to embrace and love the nasty challenges that life throws your way. In 2016 I had no grit, and was ready to give up on everything in my daily life.

I went to work each day, and I was just angry with my crew. Nothing they did was ever good enough, and I became a “I’ll do it myself” man. The job would get done, but I wasn’t helping my crew members grow, I was actually setting them up for failure. All I could see were people that weren’t doing anything for me. So I’d over caffeinate with soda all day long to get the job done myself.

Then I’d go home and keep that same mentality with my wife, Heather.  I’d let me frustrations with work out when I got home and I’d snap at her over the smallest things. I just wanted to be left alone so I could block out reality with video games and junk food. So she’d take the kids to my in-laws every night so they didn’t have to see hear me yell at her.

Of course they would hear me yell later those nights anyways, because I blamed her for our hardships at home as much as I blamed my crew for them at work. I couldn’t understand why nobody cared about me and what I wanted. I couldn’t understand why nobody would just give me what I wanted. That Christmas was hard. I remember sitting there on Christmas morning and opening presents and she and I tried to act like everything was great for them, but presents of love to each other just seemed to incite sadness.

There were also nights when I would go out to karaoke with friends as a way to feel “like I still could do fun things”. This would also make me angry because Heather never wanted to go with me, and I said it was just because she didn’t want to have fun. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have a sitter for the kids, I blamed her regardless. Then I would come home drunk because I found alcohol was an even better escape from reality than video games. I still remember, snippets of a conversation she had with my buddy as he dropped me off one night. Remember him telling her that he definitely thought I was trying to get away from something. Then I blacked out as she closed the bathroom door so the kids didn’t see me covered in vomit the next morning.

I had no grit. I didn’t care about life’s challenges. I wanted things to be easy. I wanted everyone to just do what I wanted and felt I didn’t owe them anything. I didn’t know what I know now, that if you really want to enrich your life, you had to enrich the lives of others and have the grit and strength to be better for them.

In the Trenches

/ Justin Beeman / Leave a comment

One of my favorite philosophies for getting through things comes from my time in the fast food industry. I learned a lot during that time, probably more than I learned at any of my past jobs. I definitely started to realize what hard work really took.

I could tell you about the day I worked through lunch serving everyone with only myself, and three other people. Or I could tell you about the Cinco de Mayo from hell. But one of the hardest days came when a water main broke for half the city.

One of our businesses had to close for the two days that the water main was broke. It also happened to be our busiest location in town and due to a lack of critical thinking, they told their whole staff to take the day off. So you can imagine that when all of their business came flooding into my location with half the staff, it was a shit show for a lack of better terminology.

We had a great crew, but it was a lot. Wait times were thirty minutes and we were mean mugged and harassed all day long, while we sweat our asses off online. But this is a fine example of what I call “in the trenches”.

One of my favorite people that motivates me, David Goggins, has spoke about building mental toughness, and it goes hand in hand with this. I’m paraphrasing his words, but you’ve got to block out all external factors, find the greatness that exists in each of us, and use that to fuel you through life’s challenges.

It’s not always going to be pretty. It’s almost never going to be perfect. But sometimes the only way out is through. You’ve got to remind yourself, that you just have to keep trudging forward through the trenches, no matter how slow or long it takes. And you’ve got to remind yourself that no matter what challenge you are facing, it will, one way or another, come to an end. The day is only twenty-four hours long, your shift may only be eight hours long, or in my case at that time twelve to fifteen, and that if you keep pushing you’ll make it to the end.

The last lesson I learned that day came towards the end of the day. I finished an order for one of my regular customers, and he looked at me and then his watch, and says, “Thirty minutes? Really?”

I just looked at him, tried to explain that we were busy and unstaffed, and asked what he wanted me to say. He said maybe just apologize. So I took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, is there anything else you need?” He said thank you and that he was good. To his credit he came back the next day and apologized to me and said that he didn’t realize the water main broke and that the other location had closed.

So my second point is this: do your best to get through the trenches as fast as you can, and when it isn’t enough, apologize and keep moving forward. Apologize to yourself, your partner, your family, whoever needs to hear it and try to be better in the future. Use moments like those to remind you why you need to keep striving to be better.

Grit and love

/ Justin Beeman / 1 Comment

That’s me. Tail end of 2016. Overweight and extremely bitter at the world. I was four years into what would be an almost ten year career with a fast food chain. I had become a man that blamed all of my employees, my wife, my kids and anyone else that pissed me off each day, for every bad thing that happened to me.

I would spend nine to ten hours a day working in the restaurant, verbally abusing my employees for not meeting goals and expectations and wetting my vocal chords, caffeinating my body and broadening my waistline with one cup of sugary soda after another.

Home life wasn’t much better. I’d come home, beyond frustrated from work, and start snapping at my family. I would blame my wife nothing being how I wanted it to be and get mad at the kids because I deserved some time to myself, until they were forced to leave for my in-law’s, and then I’d dive head first into the mindless escape from reality that only video games could provide me. Shortly there after I almost pushed them all away forever. I made a lot of poor choices, and made life unbearable for all of us.

Fast forward almost 4 years and I’m halfway through a local obstacle course race. I’m tired, I’m covered in sweat, mud and rain and I’m staring down an obstacle that needs my mind sharp and my grip solid.

I reach up grab the holds and let my feet swing out into open air. My hands begin to move forward, one hand at a time, but my grip strength is gone and I drop back to the ground. I try again and again and I fall, again and again. Every attempt steals more and more of my strength, but I’m stubborn and refuse to give up. I step back up to the obstacle for what feels like the tenth time, but this time I hear a voice call out to me, “You got this baby!”

It’s my wife. Her words fill me with new hope and strength. I grab hold and proceed forward. The edges of the grips dig into my fingers and I feel them sliding off. I reach out for the last grip, my arms like lead, and I know when I let go with the other hand it’s all or nothing. I dig my nails into my hands as I hold for dear life swing out with my left hand and feel the cold metal of the bell at end before I hear it ring out my completion of the obstacle. I start running forward, eyes straight ahead but the world is blurry as I fight back the tears of love I feel for my wife and all of her support.

What happens in the rest of the race is inconsequential compared to that moment. So how did I go from the overweight, angry guy ready to give up on everything and everyone, to this guy running races with the support and love of a woman he didn’t deserve four years earlier?