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From the CarGuru/Life coach: My secret to a fulfilling life (that really isn't a secret)....this is how I found it, and you can too.
From the CarGuru/Life coach: My secret to a fulfilling life (that really isn't a secret)....this is how I found it, and you can too.
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About this episode
Attitude isn’t treated like a mystery—it's framed as a practical choice that shapes how you handle criticism, work, and even driving stress. The host ties “thermostat vs. thermometer” to responding instead of reacting, then connects it to real moments: being called out for talking over people and learning about undiagnosed ADD at 68. Along the way, they share a 1% vs 10% mindset, mentor questions, and coaching advice like avoiding car purchases based only on monthly payments.
Topics:
monthly payment
Email Lennie at [email protected]
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monthly payment
"They might be driving the wrong car and they may have paid too much. They might have bought a car just based on the monthly payment, which is the worst thing in the world."
The “monthly payment” is what you pay every month to pay off the car. The point here is that buying based only on that number can make you spend more overall or end up with a bad choice.
“Monthly payment” is the amount you pay each month to finance a car purchase. The host argues that focusing on monthly payment instead of the total cost can lead people to overpay or choose the wrong car.
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Hey folks, welcome to another edition of my CarGurus slash, now this is a new one, Life
Coach.
Well, I say it's new, it's not new.
I've had people, well mostly employees, but okay, especially since I've gotten gray hair,
a lot of people come in and say, can I ask your business advice?
And I love doing that.
You know, I certainly don't have all the answers, but I sure like listening to their
issues and seeing if somewhere back in the recesses of my memory, I can pull up some
analogy, something that will help them.
Because I have been to so many schools and training sessions, motivation sessions over
my life.
And you know, if you really analyze all of those, they have a lot of commonalities.
And so much of it is about attitude.
Do you know that if you take the word attitude, this is one of those little trick things I
thought was cute.
If you take the word attitude, and A is the first letter of the alphabet, so it's a one.
T is, and I just checked this, the 20th letter, then another T, and so forth through the entire
word of attitude.
Take all the numbers that they are in the alphabet and add it together.
Do you know what that adds up to?
100.
So what does that mean?
Absolutely nothing, but it's an incredible coincidence.
Well maybe it's not.
Maybe the person who coined the word attitude knew that in order to get 100% effort out
of somebody, they had to have the right attitude.
So let's make this, let's make this work out from a numerical standpoint.
And it does, 100.
Attitude is very important.
But you know, when somebody comes in and asks me for business advice, lots of times it's
a situational thing, like they're trying to buy a piece of property.
Or maybe even they're thinking about changing jobs, or careers, I like that word better.
So if somebody's coming at me with those kind of questions, first thing I want to know is,
do you like what you do?
What you're doing now?
Sometimes, oh yeah, I really love my job, or no, I hate my job.
And I say, well why are you still doing it?
And lots of times it's just for economic reasons.
They don't feel like they have any other choices or whatever.
Another thing that I like to ask them is, okay, if you like your job, does it ever feel like
work?
You know, because there were times in my life when my job felt like a whole lot worse than
work, especially when I had to fire somebody and then I had to do their job too.
It was terrible, especially when I wasn't able to put my kids to bed at night, or even
have supper with them.
I mean, it was a family business.
There were times I hated my job, but I felt like I was stuck.
So I had to seek out that word attitude.
I had to figure out how to get my head in another place.
I also asked people, are you rewarded for what you do?
Now, in my case, you know, I'm a sole proprietor, entrepreneur, and sometimes I am not rewarded
for my effort because it was the wrong effort.
I was going in the wrong direction.
And since for the last, I would say, 40 years, I've not had a boss.
I had coworkers and I had my dad that worked with me for a while, but, you know, I was
really my own boss.
He would criticize me sometimes.
He said, I don't think I would do it that way.
And I loved his advice, but it was my show to run.
Well, I say I loved his advice.
Sometimes I didn't.
Sometimes I resented it.
I didn't want to hear it, but, you know, since he's gone, very few of the things that he
told me were wrong, were not accurate, matter of fact, right on the money.
Sometimes it is the spirit with which we receive criticism that is the problem, again, goes
back to that word attitude.
So I ask people if they are rewarded for what they do.
Oh, yeah, I make good money.
I get good bonuses or other people say, heck no, I'm not rewarded.
I work my tail off and I don't get anything.
I just get my regular wage.
It doesn't matter how hard I work or how successful we are, I make the same thing.
I've heard that as well.
And I ask people, well, is that acceptable to you?
No, it's not.
Then what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to change the circumstances?
You know, are you a, and I like this analogy, are you a thermostat or are you a thermometer?
What do you mean?
Well, if you're a thermometer and the temperature changes in the room, then you have no control
over that.
You just go up.
However, if you are a thermostat, you are controlling the temperature in the room.
All you have to do is walk over to it and turn it, drop the temperature or raise the
temperature as the case may be.
So most people that I've found are thermometers.
They react to things.
Zig Ziglar used to talk about the difference between a reaction and a response.
A reaction is what happens when you go to the doctor, get a shot and you break out in
hives.
A response is when you go to the doctor and get a shot and you get better.
So a lot of people just react.
I saw it at a baseball game the other night.
You know, this is, we're talking, let's see, four and five year olds.
You would have thought it was a major league baseball game, the way the parents were reacting
to a call that happened on the field.
I was embarrassed to be sitting with them.
They were reacting rather than responding.
You know, how do you respond to a bad call?
Well, if you don't understand it, you wait till the game's over, especially in a situation
like this and go over and speak to the referee and say, or the umpire and say, would you
just explain to me what happened in that call?
I really don't understand where you were coming from on that.
Not accusing you of anything, but I just, for my edification, I'd like to know.
Wouldn't that be a nicer way than say, you are crazy.
He was safe.
You know, that kind of stuff.
If more people would respond rather than react, there would be a whole lot less road rage.
Okay.
Back on track.
Like another thing that I asked people, and these are people that work for me as well,
but this is kind of reserved for folks who come in and ask for business advice or job
advice.
Does what you do challenge you and they'll respond, Oh yeah, I mean, it's just a hard
job and I have to get up early.
Sometimes I don't get home until late and I said, no, that's not what I'm talking about.
Does it challenge you in these three areas, your knowledge, your skills and your habits?
Because those, the three things that drive most people's success other than that word
called attitude, if you don't have the knowledge to do your job or to advance, if you don't
have the skill set, and those are two totally different things, you know, knowledge is what
you know skills are how you apply that knowledge.
If you don't have the skill set to properly apply the knowledge that you have, and most
importantly, you don't have good habits, personal habits, study habits, concentration
habits, that could be a problem for me.
My daughters say I'm ADD.
I was undiagnosed ADD.
I'm 69 years old.
They told me this when I was 68.
Why didn't I learn that a long time ago?
But you know, I look back at my life, and based on what I understand as far as attention
deficit disorder, I probably had that, and to a certain degree, still do.
But yeah, there's all kinds of different habits, and they either hold us down or lift us up.
Habits can kind of put us in ruts, right?
But you know the difference between a rut and a grave?
You can get out of a rut.
I'll be back in just a minute.
OK, I am back.
We were with a couple.
I'm trying to remember who it was, but it doesn't come to mind.
It's probably because I wasn't paying attention, my ADD again.
But yeah, my wife, we got in the car, we're driving back to the house.
And she said, can I tell you something?
Well, whenever she starts a sentence like that, I began to prepare myself.
Here it comes.
What did I do?
She said, you were talking over them.
And I said, tell me what you mean.
She said, well, I mean, you didn't let him finish a sentence.
I mean, just there on this one sentence and you just jump right on it.
And when I thought about it, rather than react to what she was saying
and getting all defensive, I sit there and thought about it.
And, you know, she was right.
And there are some times that I do that.
I get so focused on what I want to say.
That I just can't wait, you know, and I'm not really listening the way I should.
It's something that I have to really work at.
That is the habit.
It is also a habit that could get you fired.
You know, if you didn't own your own business.
And I just think we have to be sensitive.
Well, first we have to be made aware of these idiosyncrasies in our own personalities.
But too often we become defensive, especially when it's somebody close to us
that is criticizing us.
Isn't that funny how the closer the person is to us, the worse we respond
or we react when they criticize us?
I don't understand why that is, but it's true for me too.
You know, I should have taken my dad's advice more openly.
He was, he was a, what we call a passive manipulator.
What he would do if he had an issue with you, he would find
a newspaper article, he'd be reading an article in a newspaper or magazine or
whatever that applied to his, well, applied to the change that he thought needed
to be made in me.
And then he would give me that article and he would underline a bunch of things in
it, or he would actually give me a book and again, underline it.
One day I walked into his office, I said, dad, can you for once give me an article
or give me a book or a magazine that doesn't have, that hasn't been
dog-eared and doesn't have all the highlights and markings in it?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I just, there were things that I thought that you would be interested in.
But he tried to change people by suggesting, you know, kind of going in
the back door rather than going into front door.
Well, what I learned in life and really, since he's been gone really before
that was that sometimes when you go through the front door with guns blaring,
then the people who you're trying to convince of something or to get the
message, they immediately put up a wall and they're not having it.
So sometimes subtlety is what's called for.
I think we have to pray about it also.
I think before we go after an issue that we have with a person, whether it's
in our family, in our business, you know, somebody out in public, you know,
we just, we need to pray about it and say, God, lead me down the path that I need
to go with this person, help me to say the right things and just ponder it.
We've got to get ourselves out of the way first in a lot of situations.
What got me thinking about this was this person that came in to ask me for
some business advice and I was honored, you know, to be able for them to look
at me in that way, that I would be a person worthy of asking.
That's one of the things I really try to do with this podcast slash radio
program is to, you know, talk about cars mostly and managing your car life.
That's the way I frame it.
You know, it's funny how things come to me like that car life.
I was just going down the road and I was behind a Jeep and I remember
exactly where I was.
I don't remember the day or the year for that matter, but I was behind a Jeep
and it said salt life.
And I know what that means.
They really like salt.
They must know that they like being at the ocean, right?
At least I believe that's what it means.
Maybe it is salt, but I saw another one that said camping life.
And so that was a big thing there for a while.
People expressing their favorite activities by saying it was a part of their life.
So I just thought, what about their car life?
They're driving a car.
You know, they really depend on that car.
They might be driving the wrong car and they may have paid too much.
They might have bought a car just based on the monthly payment, which is the
worst thing in the world.
So what I decided to do was to coach people.
You know, I use seminars occasionally, but yeah, it's just really hard to do.
And when this is a worldwide podcast and a localized radio show, but we did do
a seminar for teens not too long ago and I came up with a guidebook to
help teen drivers and I have made that available to my listeners so that they
can review it with their teen drivers.
You know, I've had a lot of people and I've sent hundreds of these out and
PDF form when people send me their email address.
But what I hope is that they don't just print it out, staple it together and
hand it to their teenager and say, read this because the teenagers won't do it.
Because that's just being a teenager.
But it has a lot of good talking points in it.
And if they would just sit down with the teenager or sit down with a group of
teenagers that are getting ready to get their driver's license or whatever and
say, I know you guys don't want to listen to this, but you're going to have to.
So what I've done is I've prepared some pizza for you, the compliments of little
Caesars and we're going to talk about some of this stuff because I think it's
really important for you to know.
And I hope that's happening around the country in different ways of people who
have taken or have received the guidebook and how do you get it?
You just text me your email address to 423-552-2020.
And if you can get past the attitude of a teenager, which is really hard
sometimes, there's going to be some things in there that could save their
lives and could make their car ownership experience a whole lot better.
We're going to do another teen driver experience here at Gateway Ford and
Gateway Nissan in the not too distant future.
I'm going to wait probably till school starts up again.
But I don't know.
I may not wait that long.
I got a lot of parents saying, when you're going to do another one?
And I, I don't want to put it off too much because, you know, every month
there's new kids that are turning 16.
And too many of them, you know, you hand them the keys.
You've, they've not even gone through driver's ed because they don't do that
anymore and you've spent a little bit of time with them on the road and kind of
halfway observed them.
I'm sorry.
I'm not being accusatory.
Yes, I am.
You know, your kids watch you.
They watch how you behave in the car and they've been watching you all along
from the back seat.
They see how fast you drive.
They look at the speed limit sign and then they look how fast you're driving.
And those two aren't in sync.
And you're telling them, don't use your cell phone when you're driving.
Don't text.
There you are in the front seat doing exactly that.
So first, I guess before you start, you need to climb into the booth and have
a confession with them and say, listen, I know that I've broken the rules.
I'm going to do better, but I want you guys to get started off on the right foot.
You know, see, this is what I like to do.
Also the, the my car guru guidebook, which is for adults who have been buying and
selling and trading cars and getting them service for years, doing it the wrong way,
paying too much, paying too much in the service department, taking on the wrong
body shop to fix their wreck vehicle.
All of this stuff can be avoided.
Of course, you can go to Google and I mean, you watch a YouTube video or
something like that.
I've consolidated that information into very simple formats called the my car
guru guidebook.
You can get that as well by texting your email address to that same number.
423552 20, 20.
So I still work, I still come to work.
Well, you know, I get here about 10, leave at about four.
I mean, it's not like it used to be when I was the first person here and the last
one to leave and it was dark when I left six days a week.
And that, and that was a period of time where I could say, I hate my job because
of what it was doing to me.
That's when I first started taking anti-anxiety medicine.
That's when I was having heart palpitations.
I mean, here I am 35 to in the early 40s.
And I didn't know if I was going to live another five years.
I know I couldn't if something, unless something changed.
So there was only one person that could change it.
And that was me.
And then I knew that I didn't have the strength on my own.
So I prayed a lot.
I seek God and he came to me in a very powerful way and changed my life.
I'll be back in just a minute.
You know, I've never really thought about this until just now.
But I remember when I played basketball for my high school and we would have
these pep talk from the head coach and he wasn't real good at it.
But he would always say, you guys got to give 110% and we'd say, okay, coach.
And then I would, I just wonder how many of us were thinking, what's
the other 10% where's that come from?
And now I know where it comes from.
It comes from our head.
It's between our ears.
That's where the extra percentages are.
It's attitude, it's effort, it's knowledge, it's skills and it's habits.
That's the extra 10%.
I can't remember the exact name of the title of this book, but I believe
it was the 212th degree.
You know, water boils at 212 degrees, right?
Fahrenheit.
What happens at 211?
Nothing.
Nothing happens.
It's hot, but it's not hot enough.
But at 212, magic happens, bubbles and steam and all the difference in the world.
That 1% made all the difference in the world, but the coach is asking for 10%.
That's just the saying.
That's just what, what coaches say.
But too many people, they never experienced that additional 1%.
They don't have the mindset or the attitude to give it.
They have the skills.
They might even have the knowledge, but they have terrible habits.
And those habits hold them back, but they blame everybody else.
Don't be that person.
Go out and find you somebody who can be a mentor.
I mean, if you've graduated high school and you're going to a technical field or
just looking for a job, or if you're going into college or just out of college,
find somebody who can help you, somebody that's already successful.
Ask them, what did it take?
How did you do it?
How many times did you fail?
And what did you do when you did fail?
Cause everybody has, at some point, I've failed so many times.
I can't even keep track of them, but I never let it defeat me.
Oh, I felt down.
I mean, I was depressed.
Well, I wouldn't say depressed.
I was just upset at myself and feeling very unsuccessful, but I had to get myself
out of that.
I didn't have anybody that could get me out of it.
I didn't have some, some boss over me saying, you better straighten up.
You know, I didn't have that.
I had to do it.
And I'm just glad I had the kind of personality type that would allow me to,
to do that, but a lot of people don't have that.
They need somebody else.
They need external motivation to get them going.
Find that it may be some motivational speaker like I've used so many times.
Lou Holtz was one of the best great football coach and an amazing motivational
speaker who had a speech impediment.
He spoke with a lisp and he'd talk about it in his speeches and how he wouldn't,
wasn't going to let that or any other deficiency that he felt like he had.
Hold him back.
He became the head coach of Notre Dame was very successful there and then went
on to a career in broadcast sports as a commentator.
Wonderful man.
Find somebody like that.
Zig Ziglar is another one.
These are all people who have long since died, but the message still resonates,
but you have to open yourself to it.
You're not going to find it on.
Well, you might find it on tech talk.
If you look for them, you can find it on YouTube as well.
Oh, and don't forget this guy, Billy Graham.
I listen to him every day.
My morning devotion is with Reverend Billy Graham.
And it's made a big difference in my life.
Well, thanks for listening to this edition of my car guru and the life coach.
I'll see you next time.
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