Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] A new year has come. 2024 was a year of growth and learning. And if I learned anything valuable from 2024, it's the importance of setting boundaries and moving in silence. That's what we're talking about today on the Warrior Kings podcast. Stick around. Hello and welcome to the Warrior Kings podcast. I'm your host, Michael Riggs, here to assist you on your journey to living a fully optimized, leveled up life as a man. So again, welcome. Welcome to the Warrior Kings podcast. If it's your first time here, my name is Michael Riggs. I'm a full time author, artist and entrepreneur, husb father of five and I teach men all over the world how to live fully optimized, leveled up lives. So if that's something you're into, definitely subscribe to this podcast. Stick around because that's what we do here every week. Teach men all over the world how to level up every aspect of their lives. How to level up every aspect of your life. And it's awesome to have you here as part of this community. So yeah, Happy New Year. We made it. There's this huge stigma around New Year's resolutions that they're kind of stupid or dumb or a waste of time. A lot of guys say if you wanted to do something, you would be doing it anyways. But the the truth is the new year is a time to reset. It's the start of a new cycle. It's a time to set new goals, have new visions. And the idea is to not allow yourself to be the same person you were last year, but to transcend yourself and move towards your dream life and everything that you know you should be and can be and reach your full potential. And one way that we are leveling up this year is in our marriages. And my brand new book, Warrior Husband how to be a better husband and save your marriage is out right now. If you want to level up every aspect of your marriage and your life. I put everything, everything that I know about being a badass husband in this one book. And I want to get it in your hands to kick off this new year. Right? And it's not your average self help marriage book. It's a kick in the teeth, it's raw, it's real, it's barely edited. And it will teach you how to really become the best husband that you can be and how to cultivate a real connection with your wife to have a happy, thriving marriage. There's a link to that book in the description of this podcast episode. And for those of you who pre ordered the ebook. Thanks so much for that. There was a little bit of a delay because we had some technical difficulties in the publishing process, but the book should be delivered to your Kindle app now if you're listening to this on the 4th or after. So again, I apologize for that delay. I know I told you guys that it would be out on the first, but sometimes things happen. So I'm really excited for you to dive into this one and I'm really glad that you made that pre order. And the paperback version of the book is available to order now if you prefer a physical book, like a real bookie book. And make sure you have a highlighter or two because you're definitely going to need them. Again, that book is Warrior Husband by Michael Riggs to my regular listeners. You haven't seen me on here in a couple of weeks. That's because I took a little bit of time to reflect and reset before going into the new year. Like I tell you guys all the time, I'm on this self improvement journey myself. We're in this together and sometimes a reset is necessary in order to move forward. So I took some time to wrap up the book and and the book publishing process and I took some time to really reflect and then look towards the future and everything that is to come. I have a lot of big plans, big dreams, big visions for the future, so I really wanted to lock in on that for a little while before going into the New year and going in hard. So I appreciate your patience waiting new episode and I'm really looking forward to going hard with this work in the New year. And with all of that being said, let's dive right into the topic of the day. Setting boundaries and moving in silence. The most important lesson I learned in 2024 throughout 2024, me and my wife talked a lot about wanting to set boundaries with friends and family and how we wanted to start moving in silence as they say. And the holidays really confirmed this idea to us. Me and my wife have lived a very unconventional lifestyle the past few years and one of those years we lived in a school bus conversion in the middle of Florida like the middle of nowhere. And we have made many short term sacrifices with the belief for long term gains. We're the type of people that go all in on a dream and there's no turning back and because we live so unconventionally it's really strange for a lot of people and they don't get it and so they have very strong opinions about it. Spending time with family over the holidays, we started to realize that people were making a lot of jabs and a lot of comments. And it became more and more evident to us that there was sort of a universal opinion about our situation and our lifestyle and sort of a universal narrative about it. Have you ever been in a room full of people before and you realize suddenly, oh, everyone's been talking about me. If not good, but that's what it felt like. And I sort of started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. I would have conversations with people, and this whole narrative about my life would come out in the form of prying questions, and I would realize, wow, they've been talking about me and my situation in my life a lot. If you know me, you know that I don't care what people think about me or the way that I live. But there's one very big problem with this that I want to talk about today, and it could be affecting you as your path to success and optimization. And it's the negative energy that is flowing our direction constantly from these people, from the story that they have made up in their heads about us, and they have obviously dwelled on it for a while. It is my belief that our thoughts and our beliefs shape our individual reality, but I also believe that our thoughts and our beliefs have an effect on the collective consciousness as well. If that sounds confusing, what I mean is other people's beliefs about us influence our reality on a certain level as well, especially if their reality about us is based on negative emotions and feelings like envy, jealousy, worry, concern, things like that. That's negative energy that's being put on our lives and our situations. Their beliefs have some sort of impact on our reality as well. That negative energy. Right. It was a few years ago, about 2020, that I did construction, building custom homes. And I quickly realized that I was underpaid, being that I was one of the major players and hardest workers on the team. And at that time, I signed up for DoorDash because I needed a little bit of extra money. You know, I wasn't getting paid that much for the job that I had. So I started going out in the even doordash delivering food. It was like the second or third day doing DoorDash that in just a couple hours, I made more money than I would make in an entire day at my job doing construction, you know, killing myself in the Florida sun for definitely not enough money. And there were a lot of other reasons that I wanted to leave that job that I won't talk about here on the podcast. But basically, I Had to get out of there. So that day I was driving around and my thoughts were spinning and I suddenly had an idea of vision entered my brain, right? I had all of these skills in video production and photography. I just wasn't using them. I also had a book that I had written, a full no that was just sitting in a binder in the closet that I never did anything with. And I started thinking about how I wanted a better future for my family. I wanted more for my family, you know. So I parsed the car and I called my wife. I told her that it was my idea to door dash a few hours out of the day. And the rest of the day I was going to spend building a videography and media production company also while going after the author thing. And to my surprise, she said, go for it. That's one of the things that I find so amazing about my wife. One of the things that I love about her the most is that she has always supported me and any idea that I've ever had, no matter how crazy that idea was, she's always just on board with it. Very, very supportive. And so I put in my notice to quit my construction job. Now, being that the pandemic was just ramping up, the media production company thing didn't work out. And that's because it was supposed to start with doing videography for weddings and events and stuff like that. And nobody was having events suddenly. So really bad timing on that one. But that's okay because the author thing started to work out. And in entrepreneurship, many failures can lead to one big success. The idea is to keep going, keep evolving, keep having new ideas and never give up and settle for an average life. I wrote and published, I think five books my first year being an author. And I was making pretty good money with visions and beliefs for making even more money. We traveled around doing book signing, sci fi conventions, staying in luxury hotels, having the time of our life. This sounds like a really cool story and it makes total sense if you understand entrepreneurship. Take big risks for a big dream and in the end it'll pay off, right? You would think that people would be very supportive of this and excited about it, but I quickly learned the hard way that that is not the case. I thought my friends and family would support me. They didn't. That was very confusing for me in the beginning. It wasn't that I was going after a dream and that I was going to be mega successful in the end. It was that I was the guy who doesn't work and my family probably needed help. That was the perception of other people. And then started the constant backhanded comments. Every time that we were around people, people would constantly try to give me job ideas, which was very confusing for me and my wife since I was well on my way to doing way better than anybody was doing anyways, and I working literally constantly. But the thing is, it's so far outside of the norm that people don't get it. They don't understand it. The problem here is that if it's everyone's belief that I won't be successful, my endeavors won't be successful, and that I'm the poor loser who doesn't work, and if that actually angers and bothers people, and if they talk about it all the time and if they feed off of each other, that's a lot of negative energy directed at my life. And it's a lot of negative energy directed at my endeavors. That's a lot of negative belief about me and my life. Pair that with me having trouble believing in myself and you have a recipe for disaster. There's also an element of jealousy and envy from old friends, the ones who aren't really doing anything extraordinary with their lives. And that's another layer of negativity. If you post something about your accomplishments or your plans and visions for the future, there's going to be negativity directed towards that. Even if the people who are envious and jealous of you don't even realize that they are. And even if they don't even know or realize that their negative energy has an impact on your life. And that's why so many successful people give the advice. Move in silence. Don't share anything with anyone until you have the results and that dream has come true. Now imagine if I had moved in silence. What if nobody ever knew that I quit my construction job to chase a dream? What if I never posted about it on social media? What if my friends and family didn't even know that I was publishing my first book? What if they only found out about it in the end, when I was mega successful, all of that negative energy and belief about me and my life and my circumstances and my pursuits wouldn't even exist. Because the truth is their thoughts and their opinions about me and the story that they made up about me and my wife's situation wasn't even true. It was made up in their own heads and it was based on their own perception. Because to them, extraordinary things don't happen for regular people. Successful people might as well be fictional characters to them. And that's why they live such average lives and never actually go after anything. It was one of me and my wife's biggest dreams, to live in a school bus conversion. Since before we were even married. We talked about it every day. We watched YouTube videos about it, and we were really, really into the schoolie lifestyle. Like, that was a huge dream for us to be able to do that. But when we actually made that dream come true and we poured thousands upon thousands of dollars into that school bus conversion, in the end it was like, oh, poor Michael and Carly. They have to live in a school bus because they have nowhere else to live. Oh, they're so unfortunate. I'm so worried and concerned about them. You see, it's perception. What was one of our biggest dreams, something that seemed unattainable to us was an unfortunate situation for us in other people's eyes. But it was one of the greatest eras of our life together. It was a dream come true. And I wrote three books in the year that we lived in that bus. It was a super amazing time in life and something that we'll be able to say that we did for the rest of our lives. Something extraordinary that nobody we know has ever done before. And this is why it's so important not to give a what other people think judgments and opinions will come, but the idea is to minimize them and to minimize the negativity by making the decision not to share everything with everyone. And that's where boundaries come in. Early on in our journey together, me and my wife made the mistake of telling everyone everything. We shared everything because, like I said before, we made the mistake of thinking that everyone would be very supportive of us and that everyone would be happy for us. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. We also allowed people to comment on our life and try to give us advice without saying anything about it. We would just take the negativity, accept it, and then talk to each other about it later. This gave people the permission to get more and more involved in our life. And they thought that they had the right to comment on it whenever they wanted. They could just say whatever they wanted. Flash forward to today, and there's more negativity focused on my life and what I'm doing than ever before. And people on both. Both sides of our family think that they can comment on it and give their opinions. And this causes a lot of stress and anger and resentment. That's completely unnecessary. And so we have made the decision to start setting boundaries. Unfortunately, now I have to be more direct and firm about it when, if I had set boundaries early on. In the beginning, those boundaries would have been set in place and people would know not to cross that line. But I let it happen too much. That gives them permission, right? So my best advice is to just keep your mouth shut to other people about your life and what you're doing and where you're going, because it's none of their business. When people used to ask me prying questions about my life, I'd answer them. And this gave them the permission to get involved and give their crooked guidance and opinions. What I should have done when people would ask those prying questions about my life is I should have given a minimal answer that communicated to them that it was none of their business and that I didn't want to talk about it. Another thing is people will always try to downplay and minimize your accomplishments because it makes them feel better for their own sense of lack. For example, I'm the only person in my family or my wife's family who has ever written and published a book. And I've done that now multiple times, times. But to them, it must be easy. He must not be a real author. There's no way he's actually selling books. I remember one time, a long time ago, when I first started putting out books, my wife was telling her sister on the phone very enthusiastically that it was going really well and that I was publishing books online. And her sister said, can't anybody do that now? You know, it has to be minimized. It has to be made stupid. It has to be easy. It couldn't be that I did an extraordinary thing. It couldn't be congratulations. It was, can't anybody do that now? And most people cave to the thoughts, opinions and judgments of other people. And people know that, and they'll use it against you. It's just a hard fact. People don't want you to surpass them. They don't want you to get better than them. You just have to overcome that, minimize that by moving in silence and by not sharing too much. Believe in yourself, believe in the vision, and in the end they will see it. Trust me. And what a lot of people don't realize is that entrepreneurs are constantly building their team in their mind. We analyze who is with us and who is against us because we believe so strongly that we will be mega successful in the end. And we don't want to share that success with the wrong people, with the people who were against us, who didn't support us. I have a job idea for most people in our life based on their talents and their gifts. But I would never hire a single one of them because they weren't loyal to me from the start and I think they're horrible people. See, that's their fault. Who watches someone build an empire right in front of them and treat that person like an enemy? Not anyone Smart. Here's another thing, man. You will never be judged or hated on by anybody doing better than you are. And if people are judging you and hating on you, that's a very good sign that you are on the right track and that you're doing something extraordinary and they feel threatened by that. So there are a few things that you need to do if you want to live an extraordinary life that is full of abundance and success. Number one, move in silence until you have those big results because it's nobody's business. 2. Stop sharing the details of your life with people. It's none of their business. 3. Stop sharing your goals and plans with people. It's nobody's business. 4. Set boundaries with people who try to get involved with your life and be very firm about it. It's nobody's business. Business. And five, don't give a what anyone thinks about where you're going, what your plans are, what your visions are, what you're doing, how you're living your life. Do not give a what anyone thinks about you. It's nobody's business. You don't need anyone's negativity sabotaging your success in life. This podcast is one of the only endeavors that I've ever had where I didn't tell anyone about it until it started growing. I didn't announce it, I didn't share it with friends, I didn't share with family. I just started doing it. I moved in silence. And it's also one of the most successful things that I have ever done. It's one of the top men's lifestyle podcast podcasts in the world with thousands of listeners every week. And it's also opened up limitless opportunities to me. So trust me, bro, move in silence. It really works. There wasn't an opportunity for anyone's negative energy to sabotage this endeavor. So that was the most important lesson that I learned in 2024. And in 2025, we're not sharing anything. If we get something like a brand new house, nobody's gonna know about it until we're moved in. If we get a new car, for example, nobody's gonna know that we have it until it's in the driveway of their house at a get together and they say whose Car is this that Nothing. Share nothing. This year, we're leveling up so hard, it's going to be ridiculous, and nobody will even see it coming. And I want that for you as well. 2025 is the year for growth. It's time to turn it all around. It's time to go after your goals and your dreams and absolutely crush them. I want. All right, so it's January now. By December, I want you to be absolutely unrecognizable to anyone in your life. Level up every aspect of your life. Level up so hard that people ask how you did it. They ask for the secret. They tell you, oh, you got lucky. It was easy. You must be on stero droids, all that stuff. I want people to think that you were casting magical spells or something, bro. They're gonna be like, oh, my God, how did he. That's not even possible. It's not even possible. There must be some sort of trick here, right? That's. That's how hard I want you to level up, bro. And it's only up from here. Like I said, a new year is an opportunity for change. It's a new cycle. It's a new beginning. You should have some New Year's resolutions. You should have the intention to turn your life around, to make it better, to be better than you were last year. Not even to be better than you were last year, to be a completely different person than you were last year. Now is the time. 20, that there's something so special about this year. I can't describe it. I felt it since, like, October 2024. I was like. I felt it coming. I'm like, this is different. Something feels different. This is a big year. This is a big year of change. And I believe that for everybody, like, something is changing in the air. I don't know if you can feel it, too, but there's been some sort of shift, and things are about to get really, really good, man. And I just want you to know that. But the Warrior Kings podcast is back. I'm back better than ever. You're going to see new episodes of this every week this year. I don't plan on taking another break anytime soon. That break to Reset was exactly what I needed to really go hard. So, again, thank you for your patience. If you want to level up every aspect of your marriage, grab Warrior Husband. It's available now. Link in the description of this episode. And I haven't talked this much in a while, so I kind of feel raspy, like I'm going to lose my voice a little bit, but I'm going to let you guys go. Get out there. There are great things in store for you in this life. A life of overflowing abundance awaits you on the other side of you deciding to change and level up every aspect of your life. I love you, I'm proud of you, and I can't wait to talk to you again. Have a good week and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Bye.
