Ratchet+Wrench Radio Apr 24, 2026

Give Up What You Don’t Need

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29:10

Car

Audi 100

The Audi 100 is a car that Audi made as a comfortable, mid-size sedan. It was designed for everyday driving and a smooth ride. People mention it because it’s a well-known older model that many drivers recognize.

Concept

front end damage

“Front end damage” means the crash hit the front of the car. That can mess up how the car lines up and steers, so repairs may involve more than just replacing the visible parts.

Concept

backed it into the back end

If someone backs into the back of another car, it can damage the rear bumper and the parts behind it. Sometimes it also affects safety sensors, and the shop has to make sure everything is working correctly after repairs.

Concept

park

Putting the truck into “park” is how you stop it. The story uses it to show how fast things went wrong—one moment it’s moving, the next it’s stopped after hitting another car.

Concept

$14,000, $15,000

That $14k–$15k number shows how expensive body work can get fast. Once you include labor and parts (and sometimes checks to make sure the car is straight), the cost climbs quickly.

Term

control

They’re talking about control as a mindset. It’s like realizing you can’t control everything that happens—only what you do. In driving, you can steer and brake, but the road and grip still decide a lot.

Term

bus

They’re using “bus” as a metaphor for the people and systems that make things happen. In cars, a “bus” is like a communication network that different parts of the car use to share information.

LIVE

Welcome to Ratchet and Wrench Radio,

produced by Endeavor Business Media,

a division of Endeavor B2B,

bringing you strategies and inspiration for auto care success.

What if the biggest thing holding you back

isn't your competition, your market, or your team,

but the baggage you refuse to release?

In this powerful episode of the Endeavor to Discover series

titled Give Up What You Don't Need,

Chris Messer and Mike Jones sit down with Louis Sharp,

owner of Sharp Auto Body, entrepreneur,

author, musician, and lifelong mentor.

With more than 45 years in business,

Louis brings raw honesty and hard-earned wisdom

about leadership, personal growth,

and the emotional weight many shop owners quietly carry.

From childhood trauma and military service

to building a thriving collision repair business

in Chicago, Louis shares why success isn't about adding more.

It's about subtracting what no longer serves you.

Anger, revenge, control, old stories, even past success.

Together, the trio explores how shop owners can respond,

not react to challenges inside their businesses,

why curiosity beats confrontation,

and how giving up punishment and pride

can unlock loyalty, performance,

and trust in your team.

Let's listen in.

Well, friends, thanks again for joining.

This is Chris Messer, Executive Vice President

at Endeavor Business Media's

Vehicle Repair and Commercial Vehicle Group.

Today, once again, as always, I'm here with my friend,

the one and only Mike Jones of Discover Leadership.

How you doing today, Mike?

I'm incredible, Chris.

Good to be here.

Absolutely.

Awesome, awesome.

Thank you once again.

And we are joined today, Mike,

by somebody we both have a great deal of admiration

and respect for, the one and only Louis Sharp,

of Sharp Auto Body out of Chicago.

That's one of his hats, anyways.

He's also a podcaster himself, a musician,

a business coach, a consultant,

and many, many other things.

Louis, thank you so much for being here.

How are you, sir?

I'm blessed to be alive, excited to be here.

Very good, very good.

Louis, why don't you briefly just tell our audience,

I know a number of people are aware or familiar with you,

but why don't you tell them a little bit about yourself here?

Sure, I started in my own business at the age of 23.

I broke out at the age of 23.

Sharp Auto Body is gonna be 45 years old in May.

I've bought and sold some companies since then.

I've started four different companies from scratch.

I've written a book, much like Mike.

I really am proudest of my philanthropic work.

I mentor high school kids and homeless shelters.

I go in and do some things there.

And then one of my other real passions is music.

I love playing music and just giving back in any way I can.

Very good, and Louis, it's a shame on me.

I was gonna ask you to bring the guitar here today.

Give us a little solo acoustic riff,

but I neglected to do that.

We'll have to save it for a future episode.

Friends here, title of today's episode is

Give Up What You Don't Need.

Trying to focus on the things that are important.

Trying to make sure that we get rid of that noise,

that peripheral vision that isn't moving us forward

into the realm of the goal that we're trying to achieve.

And Mike, why don't you tell me a little bit about that

and what it means to you

and how you coach and consult with your clients?

Yeah, you know, it's such an incredibly powerful topic.

And to be here with Louis today talking about this,

I am incredibly excited about the benefit

that I know other people are gonna get

from this, just based upon who he is

and what he brings to the party.

But I really wanna open this by saying,

Chris, quite often there have been things

that have occurred in our lives that we hold on to

that will not benefit us moving forward.

I know that people who know me have heard me say many times

that it is so important to take down the rear view mirror.

You know, as I was kind of working

in one of my books this morning,

I thought about all of the stories that I've heard.

And I know Louis have heard these stories as well,

where somebody told you that you couldn't do something

or that you were never gonna amount to something.

And then you took that negative energy

and you became something.

However, you then plateaued out

because the thing that motivated you to the success

no longer exists.

That person is not still there negatively motivating you,

but you're still holding onto that as the thing

that you need to motivate you further,

but it no longer has the energy

that it had to get you where you are now.

And that's what we talk about today when we talk about,

you know, giving up the stuff that I don't need.

Now, I applaud people who have had some success

because they had to prove somebody wrong.

But at some point you gotta stop proving somebody else wrong

and prove yourself right.

That you are worthy,

that you deserve the success that you're having

and that you are capable of getting to a next level.

Yeah, you know, so Mike,

I wanna piggyback on something you just said.

I think there's two things really important

to what Mike was just talking about.

The first one is the word story.

One of the things I challenge people to do is stop it.

Mike, so Mike Jones coaching, but stop it for 30 days.

Don't tell your sad story for 30 days.

Break the habit.

I don't care whether you're complaining about the economy,

your parents, your spouse, your kids, stop it.

For 30 days, just stop talking about it.

The other thing that I think is really important

that Mike touched on, there's a very powerful tool

and I'd be happy to share it with you guys

if you wanna share it with your audience.

It's called the mirror exercise.

And what you do is you literally stand in front of a mirror

at the end of the day and you appreciate yourself

for the things that you did that day.

And the last thing you say to yourself,

looking into your own eyes in the mirrors, I love you.

And to Mike's point,

most of us don't think that we're worthy or deserving

to have the things that we want in life.

And so to Mike's point, then we hold ourselves back

because that story is running in our head.

You gotta start telling yourself a different story

and it's gotta be a positive story.

We control that narrative, right?

We handle that, we have power over that.

Louie, is there anything in your 45 years of business,

by the way, congratulations on the upcoming anniversary,

sharp auto body?

Is there anything that you can relate directly to

in the context of what we're talking about now?

There's no way that you've been able to be as successful

as you are if you were paying attention to the peripheral,

if you weren't telling yourself the right story.

So was there a moment in your career and your life

in the growth of your business

that you had a pivotal moment

that you could share with the audience here?

Yeah, I think that the,

I saw Lisa Nichols speak at a Jack Canfield event

and she told us her story.

She had us laughing, she had us crying,

she had us laughing, she had us crying.

And at the end, she said, your story matters.

And I wanna put that in context

of what Mike and I are talking about.

Your story matters because it happened to create

and form you into who you are today.

But it does not have any determination

on who you're gonna become in the future.

I think one of the things that's really important

is who are you gonna be?

Who are you being?

Mike mentioned a couple of things

before we started the recording

about people carrying around anger, hatred, greed, jealousy,

all that negative stuff.

That's not being positive.

That's not being who you want to be in the world.

That's not who you want to be as a leader.

And you're not gonna get the results that you want

being negative stuff.

I've come to understand life's not that hard.

Life's like a boomerang.

Whatever you're busy putting out in the world

is coming back at you at breakneck speed.

It might not be from the same person or the same source,

but whatever you're putting out is coming back to you.

So let that stuff go.

Yeah, and you know, I think that's really beautiful, Chris,

in that where I really wanted to tag in

on what Louis is putting out there

because he's spot on, first of all.

But there's gotta be awareness to our listeners today

that failure is the absolute refusal

to give up the stuff that you don't need.

So, you know, whatever happened to you happened to you.

However, it doesn't have to continue to happen to you

unless you keep repeating the story

over and over and over again.

Man, I'm coaching this dude right now, Louis.

And man, every time I talk to him,

we go back to how the stories that his dad told him

about how he wasn't good enough.

And he's incredibly successful now, Louis.

So he's allowed himself to be able to get very skilled

at what he's doing and become one of the best technicians

in the industry.

However, he keeps getting in his own way

because every time there is an opportunity for him

to take one more step forward,

something like his past or these things

that he's holding on to, punch him in the face,

knock him down again, and he's gotta work his way

through all of that minutiae all over again

just to get back to a good place.

And what I said to him, Louis,

and I know you can relate to this,

is he is doing a whole lot of damage,

creating a whole lot of distrust in the relationship

because he's such a pendulum that swings from one end

to another and people don't know what to expect from him.

So failure is a refusal to give that stuff up

that will not benefit you, that you do not need

because you've now used the negative energy

in a positive way.

Now move on and now capitalize on all of the positive things

that you've created and that you've become.

Yeah, right on, brother.

And I can tell you one of the things, Mike,

that you and I both agree upon is the simple fact that,

and here's what people, I want people to grasp in this.

Your story has emotion tied to it

and that emotion is triggered,

that emotion is triggered, that emotion is triggered.

And so like this technician that you're busy coaching,

I've got a client I'm working with now

that's growing a landscaping business

and I can tell you that he gets angry,

he gets angry, he gets angry and it's that same trigger.

And what I want the listeners to know, Chris,

and Mike, both of you, is that,

so there's the thing, I'm a certified Sedona method trainer

and there's a lot of things out there

that you can do to drop your emotional baggage

without years of therapy.

And there's also a great book I'd recommend to the listeners,

The Body Keeps the Score.

Spent 20 years in the Marines.

I was badly abused as a child.

I could be dragging that stuff around, I'm not.

And if I can drop it, so can everybody else.

I don't have a big S on my T-shirt,

put my pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.

But, and Mike, you said something else

that I want to grasp here for the listeners before

we move on and that is aware.

I share with people, if you're aware,

you're 65% of the way home.

If you're aware that somebody just triggered you

and you go to the angry or you go to the crazy

or you go wherever you go,

then you're now aware to make a different choice

in that moment.

And there's a thing I'll share with the listeners.

I learned this from Jack Canfield,

it's called E plus R equals O.

The event plus your response equals the outcome.

And the real secret in that is the plus sign.

If one of you were to say to me,

hey, you know, bald guys are really stupid.

And I believe that, and that's a trigger for me,

we're off to the races.

And if I really believe that,

and it's something I know as a trigger,

I have that awareness,

the event is you tell me bald guys are really stupid.

My response is I go high into the right,

and the outcome is we're off to the races

and we might even end up at Fifth City going at it.

But in that event, if I use the plus sign,

the event plus the response,

in that plus, if I take a breath and decide who I wanna be,

I wanna be calm, I wanna be loving,

I wanna be kind, I wanna be patient,

whoever I wanna be,

I can choose differently by taking one breath.

Now, Mike, you and I were both in helicopters

and I survived the helicopter crash.

One of the reasons why I did was because

before that event happened,

I had practiced my crash procedures

over and over and over again.

And so when that day came, myself,

the co-pilot, we knew exactly what to do

and we lived the tale of the tale,

which is rare for helicopter crashes.

My point to this is, is that for listeners,

you've got, before the proverbial stuff hits the fan,

you gotta decide who you wanna be.

So that when somebody says,

ball guys are stupid, I've already decided,

well, I'm gonna be calm, I'm gonna be patient.

You can't, in the moment, it's too late, the ship sailed.

Yeah, yeah, cause you're gonna be triggered by that

if you wait for the moment.

And Louie, I just wanna add this,

and then Chris, please jump in here.

Let me just add this.

Every one of our listeners have got to understand

that the plus response is 100% in your control.

Nobody, nobody is making you mad.

Nobody is making you trigger

to certain things, behaviors, activities.

The plus response is one of the greatest gifts that you have

and that gift is a gift of choice.

So you can choose a response,

which means that you're now choosing a reality

that you are about to experience.

Mike, give yourself a high five, brother.

That's smoking hot.

And the listeners, I wanna reiterate what he said.

What I tell people all the time, nobody takes your peace.

You give it away.

The peace that passes all understanding is ever present.

It's always underneath everything.

You give it away, nobody takes it from you.

To Mike's point, nobody makes you angry.

Nobody makes you anything.

You choose those things.

Absolutely.

So let's bring this into context.

Louie, your shop owner, Mike, you work with thousands,

tens of thousands of shops all across the country

through your time.

Let's bring this home to a level that they can resonate

directly with today that I'm assuming 90,

maybe 100% of our audience is gonna resonate with.

You have an event.

The event is you have a technician

that doesn't show up on time,

doesn't meet their productivity goals,

isn't using drugs and alcohol,

having problems outside of the shop

that are affecting their work inside of the shop.

First step is you have to be aware of that event,

which all the business owners, managers,

are aware of what that event is, right?

How do we retool their response mechanism?

Let's walk through the psyche behind that, Louie.

I'm guessing you have a story.

Maybe you've got one right now

of something that's going on in your shop.

No, you got a great culture, but nobody's perfect.

Talk to me about some experiences you've had

and do you have a man that might be you as well?

Sure, so I think that again,

you wanna have this strategy laid out

before the proverbial stuff hits the fan, right?

And so one of the things that I've learned

that's helped me through this is to be curious,

because part of the challenge that we all have is,

we see the world from our lens, our point of view.

And at that point, what often, almost always,

what I think is going on or what I think happened

is not really at the root of what transpired.

And so my first suggestion to the listeners would be,

first off, get curious and ask questions

and ask questions without your emotional charge.

And this is something very, very powerful.

If you or the person you're in this conversation

or conflict with is emotional, walk away.

When somebody's in their emotional brain,

you cannot reason with them.

It's impossible because they're out of their logical brain.

So you gotta get the emotion out of it.

You take a break, come back the next day,

whatever that's gonna take,

but get the emotion out of it.

And then be Inspector Clusso, be Sherlock Holmes,

be curious, ask them what happened.

I'll tell you a story.

I had a manager that worked me for a very while

that Mike knew, Mike met and I brought Mike

into Sharp Auto Body for some game changer and stuff

and he rocked that.

But I had a female manager and I was crossing the shop

one day and she was chewing on one of my best techs.

And so I kind of stood there for a couple of minutes

and I just got curious and his performance was down.

And so I took the opportunity to do some coaching

on both sides and so I asked the tech.

I said, hey, Mike, what's really bothering you?

And he said, well, now let me back up.

One of the things that I think you should be able to do

is buy a book for everybody on your team.

And I mean, not the same book,

but a specific book that they're interested in.

I learned that from a book called

11 Rings by Phil Jackson.

So this tech, I knew that he had grown up

living in a car homeless with his mother.

So his relationship with his mother,

very, very close, very tight.

And so I said, Mike, what's going on?

He said, well, my mom's been living in a campground

at summertime.

My mom's been living in a campground

and she needs a place to live this winter.

And I don't know what to do.

I said, is that what's been really bothering you?

And he said, yes.

I said, is there anything else?

Because you always want to ask, you know,

say, oh, five wise, is there anything else?

He said, no, you know how close I am to my mom.

It's a really big deal.

I care about her and I want to make sure she's okay.

I said, okay, would you like some help?

And again, don't jump in and be the fix it guy.

I asked him, I asked for permission to be of assistance.

He gave me permission.

So then what I did was, and by the way,

for those of you listening, your spouse,

especially us guys, that's a very powerful question to ask

is most of the time the ladies don't want help.

They just want to be heard.

So then what I did was I got on the phone.

I used my network.

I called a realtor by the end of the day.

His mom was out looking at places.

By the end of the week, she had someplace to rent.

And so I didn't jump in and yell at the manager

for being inappropriate or not asking questions.

I was just calm and I was curious

about what the real root of the problem was.

The issue wasn't with his work.

The issue was his mind was someplace else

caring about his mother's safety and wellbeing

in the very near future.

Yeah, and what I would add to that, Louie,

to all of the people who are listening,

this can work in your professional life as well

as your personal life.

And Louie's reference was Inspector Crusoe.

Mine is Socrates, okay?

So Socrates never answered a question with an answer.

He always answered with a question.

And when you can become like Socrates or like Louie Sharp,

where you are now asking questions,

what you're gonna find is that you're going to hear

the conversation that the individual is having with themselves.

There is no way for me to sit back and assume

that I know what somebody is thinking

or what their intentions are by watching their actions,

because it may be driven by anything

and I may never know what it is

unless I can get curious, like Louie said,

and extract that conversation from their head

into open air so that I know that I am addressing

the actual issue that's happening

and I'm not applying something that happened

to somebody else that this must be

what this person is dealing with too,

based upon past experiences.

That will always get you in trouble.

I also think when you ask those questions, Mike,

sometimes you uncover things

that they didn't even know consciously, right?

You start asking those questions

that they're subconscious things

that'll come out of the woodwork.

When you show that care, that tender love that you showed,

Louie, I know you're a prime example about that.

I know how you treat your employees, your team,

your family, right?

At the end of the day, that's in many ways what they are.

I'm really, really curious

because your story that you're telling

is a very linear thing, it's not subconscious.

That employee knew exactly what he was focused on,

where his headspace was.

It was outside of the shop.

I want to, I'd like to know what the outcome is, Louie.

What happened after that?

Well, so this is really interesting

because this same employee started with me as a detailer

who's now, he's now my production manager.

I can tell you, basically,

and I don't mean this from a place of arrogance.

I mean it from a place of caring and love.

We're glued to each other.

He knows I've got his back and I know he's got mine.

And that's the kind of stuff you can't buy.

And I'd like to touch on what Mike said,

something that's very interesting.

So this, when he was a detailer for me,

and Mike, I love this, what you brought up,

and I want to share it with a story with the audience

so they really get what Mike's talking about.

He backed, he had just cleaned up a pickup truck.

He backed it out of the shop.

It's ready to go.

And he's in a hurry, not paying attention,

and he backs it into an Audi.

That's out on the lot that we're gonna fix.

That's got front end damage.

He backs it into the back end.

He throws the truck in park,

literally in a mad dash, runs through his car,

and drives home.

And so I'm in the front end of the building,

and so I don't know any of this goes on.

And so I call him up and I said,

hey, the guys tell me he went home.

And I call him up, I said, hey, Mike, what's going on?

He said, well, I backed that truck out.

And between the two, we probably did about $14,000, $15,000

with the damage between the two vehicles.

And so he said, well, I ran home

because I thought you were gonna kill me.

I said, I'm not gonna kill you, come back.

And to Mike's point, we don't know what the story is,

but this is very, very important.

If you're playing with the right people on your team,

when they do something wrong,

nobody's beating them up worse than themselves.

You do not have to ice that cake for them.

The other part of it is,

I looked at that $14,000 with the damage as an investment.

I knew he was never ever gonna do that again.

And like I said, today he's my production manager.

So, but again, to Mike's point,

you don't know what they're feeling.

You don't know what those emotions are

until you get curious and be Socrates.

That's why you gotta ask the questions, right?

So let's come full circle here.

Give up on what you don't need.

Well, how does that play into effect?

We've used this most recent story, Louis,

and Mike weigh in on this as well.

Like, what did you have to give up?

Or what did your manager have to give up?

And that's an error.

I'm sorry, Mike was his name, your production manager.

What did he have to give up in that scenario

to move forward and focus on the things that he needed?

Well, there was a number of things

that were that had to be given up.

So for me, I was, it's a long story,

but because of my childhood,

one of the things I had to give up

was the idea of revenge and punishment, right?

When I thought somebody wronged me

because of the way I was raised,

I thought, you know what, I'm gonna get even at all costs.

You know, in the Marines,

we call it the scorched earth mentality, right?

At all costs, even if I have to throw myself on the grade,

I'm gonna get even.

And then the next piece of it was wanting to punish them.

Like I said, when I realized nobody's beaten them up

more than he is, I don't need to punish them.

Again, this is if you have to write people.

If you've got a chucklehead on your team,

then you need to get rid of them.

That's its own conversation.

And then the next piece of it,

what Mike needed to get rid of was the fear

that he was gonna be punished.

Because he grew up in an environment

where he thought if he did something

that wasn't approved of, there was gonna be punishment.

And everybody in your life will change when you change.

This is what Mike said before a couple minutes ago.

If you wanna change the world, you have to change you.

And when you give up things like punishment

and revenge and anger and those kinds of things,

everybody in your life's gonna change.

And the magical part of it is

they're not gonna do anything different.

They're not gonna be anybody different.

You're gonna be different.

It's amazing that impact we can have on people.

Yeah, and Chris, I just gotta throw this in too

because just in case we miss somebody in this conversation,

let's make sure that we can get everybody included

in this conversation.

Some of y'all need to give up success

because it's not benefiting you now.

You're still at the party celebrating past successes

when there is still more successes to be had.

So you may need to give up comparing yourself

to somebody else and now that you're doing better

than somebody else, you feel like you have arrived.

Y'all gotta understand something.

There ain't no destination here.

You ain't gonna never arrive.

There's an opportunity for you to keep growing

and besting your best.

So some people really gotta give up success

in order to be more successful.

So every last one of us has something

that we need to give up.

In my life, Chris, I've had to give up control, bro,

thinking that I was the only one that had the answers

and recognizing that when I created some space

for other people to bring some answers,

we got even better and I created more trust

in those relationships so that we can get even better.

I mean, it's a beautiful thing when you stop and realize

as my boy, Louis said, what's holding you back?

What's in your gap?

What are the things that you need to give up

in order for you to become a better version of yourself?

And so, Mike, I love you, brother.

And so here's one of the things,

for everybody listening,

Mike just hit the flipping thing out of the park.

This is a lifelong endeavor.

You are a lifelong work on yourself.

And Mike, I'm with you.

Once I gave up punishment and revenge,

guess what popped up?

Control.

I still live in that same boat, right?

But don't think that once you get rid of your anger

or your fear that there's nothing left

because we got, it's like an onion, right?

There's layers and layers of our stuff

that's been piled on us through the years

that we need to let go of.

So you hit that nail on the head, Mike.

It's an endeavor that's lifelong

until you take your last breath.

I think we're all cut from the same cloth.

We all probably look in the mirror at some point

in the day and tell ourselves, I am trusting,

don't we, gentlemen?

We have to let go of that control.

We have to have the right people in the right spots,

within the right bus to make things happen.

I'm gonna close with this, Mike,

because you said some stuff that's pretty powerful.

You can't still stay at the party, right?

You can't just celebrate all those successes.

And a famous quote from none other than Babe Ruth is,

yesterday's home runs don't win tomorrow's games.

And that can't be more true 50 hundred years ago

than it is today, and it'll be true tomorrow as well.

So, Louie, always a pleasure, my friend, Mike Jones.

I appreciate your time as always.

This has been the endeavor to discover podcasts,

and we will see everybody next episode.

Thank you much.

That's going to do it for us today at Ratchet and Wrench Radio.

Be sure to check out other episodes

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Thanks for listening, and may the rest of today

be the greatest day of your life.

0:00

29:10

Give Up What You Don’t Need

Audi 100

front end damage

backed it into the back end

park

$14,000, $15,000

control

bus

About this episode

Original notes