Unleashing Your Hero

Rise Above Any Challenge, Expand Your Impact, and Be the Hero the World Needs

Kevin D. Brown

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781400228775
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Leadership

Develop, expand, and share your gifts as a leader to inspire others to use their own individual talents in extraordinary ways—from one of the country’s most sought-after motivational speakers with a 30+ year career in franchise development.

In Unleashing Your Hero, renowned speaker Kevin Brown shares how the heroes who transformed his life are people just like you. People who stepped up and used their talents to make a positive difference within the hectic moments of everyday life. The same person your employees are looking to and trusting in for guidance and support.

Through his real-life examples and stories, Kevin will: 

• Provide you with a new definition of what it means to be a hero who inspires others to rise above and beyond in extraordinary ways.
• Unpack the four characteristics of a hero, based on the entertaining and enlightening true stories of heroes who entered and forever enriched his life.
•  Help you recognize the extraordinary gifts within you and learn how to share those gifts to make life better for yourself and those you influence. 

The unconventional yet probable path to business and personal success outlined in Unleashing Your Hero will help you and those you lead build extraordinary, fulfilling, impactful lives—at a time when your employees and your organization need the hero within you more than ever.

1

RUNNING FROM DEMONS

ON A FRIGID MICHIGAN NIGHT, clear skies gave way to clouds hanging over me. It seemed unusually cold. Perhaps that was the hopelessness setting in.

I wanted to die.

There was nothing left in this life for me. I had reached bottom—drowning in the deep end, filled with self-destruction, self-loathing, and my own stupidity. Demons that had chased me since I was a teenager now had a death grip on me. I was living in my car. There was no place left to turn.

The only question on that night was whether to steal some food or just end things once and for all.

I wanted to end the pain. But the coward in me couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the courage to take my own life. I prayed a killer might come along in the darkness and do it for me. Those prayers went unanswered.

If I couldn’t end my life, I had to figure out how to change it. To stick around, I had to stop the downward spiral. But how? I wanted to believe a better life was possible for me. I just didn’t know where or how to turn it around.

As I drifted into an uneasy sleep, my mind went back to better days, before I’d lost my way. When I was a boy, my family went on vacations that were only a few miles from home because we didn’t have any money to go farther away. Today, they’d probably be considered “staycations.”

Often, my dad would rent a friend’s cottage on a lake near Fremont, less than thirty miles from our home in Muskegon. My dad and my older brother were more into fishing than I was, but I always wanted to go out on the water with them.

They thought I was too much of a pain in the butt because I couldn’t swim and had a serious fear of falling into the lake and drowning.

“You talk too much and it scares the fish,” my father often said. “You can fish off the dock while we go out. It’s safer there, anyway.”

So one morning when I was seven years old, I went out to the dock by myself after my dad and brother had rowed out on the lake. I had a junior-size rod and reel, a tiny tackle box, and a Styrofoam cup full of slimy, smelly worms.

I wore a bucket hat and, because I was Mr. Safety First, an orange life vest. I pretended to be a serious fisherman, casting and reeling like I was using a lure instead of letting my poor worm just sink to the bottom.

I liked casting. It made me feel like a pro. I thought my dad and brother might be impressed enough to one day let me in the boat with them.

After a few warmups, I decided to see how far I could cast. I raised the pole over my head and kept pushing it back until the rod was parallel to the ground, and then I whipped that worm way out into the lake.

To my shock, I hooked something. At first it felt like a major lunker, a mighty whopper that would feed my family for a week or take up a huge space over the fireplace, if we had a fireplace.

But then, as I yanked the line and found myself going headfirst off the dock, I realized I had taken my pole so far back that I’d hooked the back of my own life preserver and had whipped myself into the lake.

My dad and my brother heard the splash and began rowing, but they were a long way out.

“Hang on, Kevin, we’re coming!” Dad yelled.

I was flailing and screaming, terrified of drowning.

My grandma and grandpa were with us that year, and grandma came a-running out of the cabin as fast as her ol’ legs could go.

Once she reached the dock, she sprawled on her belly trying to grab me, but I was just out of her reach.

Then, suddenly, she sprang to her feet, cupped her hands around her mouth, and said, “Kevin, listen to me. Just stand up. It’s not that deep, honey. Get your feet under you and stand up, boy!”

Turns out, she was right.

I squirmed in the water, got my legs down, and my feet hit the bottom. I stood up and the water was barely above my waist.

If my grandma hadn’t come running, I might still be out there, terrified and treading water, totally unaware that my fear was far greater than the depth of my problem.

My heart warmed a bit with memories of those simpler times as a seven-year-old boy. This story serves as a reminder that there are times when we just need to take a stand and rise above our fears and our past. You and I have the power to overcome our challenges, whether in work or in life.

As my grandma taught me, when we dare to stand tall, we often discover our challenges are not as great as the fear surrounding them.

Your Master of Disaster

That fish tale is a true story, a real-life parable. All of the stories in this book are drawn from my life and the lives of those I’ve known. For better or worse, I have a vast collection of stories, some good and some bad. Many I’ve never shared in my talks around the world.

You may have heard one of my speeches delivered to a wide range of corporate clients, conventions, and groups. Speaking is my second career, which grew out of my previous position as a corporate marketing executive.

I am not a natural extrovert, by any means. My boss had to push me out in front of my first audiences. Looking back, I think it was entirely appropriate that my first speaking engagements were for a company that specialized in disaster recovery and restoration.

Before I joined what would become a multibillion-dollar company and rose to an executive leadership position, my life had been pretty much a disaster. I might never have recovered and restored it on my own had not my bosses and other heroes shown up to support and encourage me.

My story is about recovery and restoration for those of us who somehow fell off track or screwed up royally somewhere along the way. Maybe you have been in the same situation, or maybe you simply are still looking for a bigger opportunity, a better quality of life, or a more fulfilling existence.

I can help you with all of the above, I believe. Not because I consider myself a self-help guru or a life coach or any of that. I come from a blue-collar background. I have been homeless more than once, living in my car or mooching off friends and family.

My story is filled with lessons that changed me in profound ways. Lessons that continue to forge the steely and stubborn parts of me that apparently needed extra time in the fire. In my teens and early twenties, there were many times when I was in over my depth. I couldn’t seem to catch a break or my breath. Unable to stand up on my own.

The lessons and examples I offer in these pages are from my own hard-earned, and gritty experiences. And I use gritty because I don’t want to hit you with the other __itty word that might be more accurate.

This isn’t about some generic system with ten or twelve or twenty-seven steps to success. This is about what worked for me in turning my life around. It’s about making changes to become a better person so I could build the better life I so desperately wanted.

I will not give you a list of things to do. The truth is most of us already know what we need to do more of, and less of. The question is, “Why aren’t you doing what you know needs to be done?”

It is my belief that people don’t fail in life because they don’t know what to do. People fail in life because they don’t know how to be. Once you understand who you need to become, the how will reveal itself to you, as it did for me.

I will introduce you to some of the leaders and mentors who helped me turn my life around personally and professionally. These heroes saved me. In sharing my own story of recovery, restoration, and resilience, my hope is that you will learn from my mistakes, as well as from the few successful personal and professional moves I’ve made in my fifty-some years.

Roughly half of those years were a struggle. I will explain more later, but because of a horrific experience, I quit high school and ran away from home. I was homeless off and on through the rest of my teen years and even into my twenties.

I was lost. I made terrible decisions, hung out with bad people, and to put it concisely, I went the wrong way for a long way.

Strangely enough, I did not begin to turn my life around until I landed a job with a leading disaster recovery and restoration company. I was newly remarried with an infant son. Up to that point, I’d had a hardscrabble life scarred by experiences that I would not wish on anyone.

Marrying Lisa, a beautiful, smart, patient—and apparently extremely near-sighted—woman marked the beginning of a remarkable turnaround in my life. Around the same time, I became blessed by a support team of men and women who showed up at key moments to help me transform my life for the better.

For the way, way, way, WAY better.

One of my goals with this book is to encourage you by offering you hope. If you are struggling, in a rut, and desperate to break self-destructive patterns, I am here to tell you that it is possible to do just that.

Too often, we go through life accepting a storyline written by others. But we have the power to write our own stories. I was slow to get that. I spent too many years accepting life as it came instead of creating the life I wanted. Think about the storyline you’ve been living out. Did you write that story? Or was it written by someone else?

Critics and controllers will try to do that for their own selfish reasons. But you have the power to reject their lies and write your own story.

I encourage you throughout this book to take the pen firmly in hand. Envision the life you want, and create it. Not just on paper, in reality. You have that power. It is yours for the taking.

Take charge of your life, but listen to those who have your best interests in mind. My life began to turn around when positive, but often demanding, people stepped up, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “No, not that way, Kevin; this way.”

Muskegon, Michigan

To help you understand my journey, and why I might have something to say that could help you on your own path, I want to share a little of my background. Not too much, just a little, because as you will discover a little of my history is usually more than enough for most people.

Including me!

I grew up in a Rust Belt blue-collar home. My father was a Navy man, a ship’s cook with Popeye forearms and a strong back bent from heavy burdens.

I tried not to add to them, but failed miserably.

When I was born, my dad was in his tenth year of service and stationed in Long Beach, California. Upon my arrival, he abandoned ship, honorably, and we moved to Muskegon where he took a job in a piston ring factory.

It sounds like the setup for a Bruce Springsteen song, I know.

My mom stayed home and took care of me and my older brother, and our sister who came along later. Mom was an unhappy person. She struggled with health problems that were both real and imagined. She wrestled with anxiety and depression. Some said she was a hypochondriac. She self-diagnosed and self-medicated, often demanding treatments and operations that her doctors insisted she didn’t need.

Mom had demons that haunted her. She wasn’t unloving or uncaring, but she was often unavailable. As a parent, she called in sick, a lot.

As ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The World Needs Heroes
• Chapter 1: Running from Demons
• Chapter 2: Running Toward a Purpose
• Chapter 3: Mutual Healing
• Chapter 4: Wonder Woman to the Rescue
• Chapter 5: Disaster Recovery and Restoration
• Chapter 6: Searching for Heroes
• Chapter 7: The Everyday Heroes Among Us
• Chapter 8: Josh-Brown and “Aunt Bea”
• Chapter 9: A Lasting Impression
• Chapter 10: A Big Bold Leap
• Chapter 11: Putting On the Cape
• Chapter 12: A Heroic Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author