How to Get Unstuck in Life: The ROUTES Method to Rebuild and Start Winning Again

The Scoreboard Mistake

Hey, hey, hey, how you doing today? Welcome to the Running Routes Podcast with Alan de Grafenreed. I'm your host, Alan DeGraffenreid.

Today what we're going to talk about is how to stop looking at the scoreboard after playing a game of football and seeing runs batted in. How so many of us as overachievers tend to score ourselves by the wrong scoreboard and we're keeping track of the wrong things. We're going to talk about that here on the episode today.

But before we get into that, I wanted to talk a little bit to our overachievers about why do we think we're doing that with looking at the scoreboard? What is the mistake that we think we're making? How can we make those corrections?

The Importance of Your Life Playbook

Before I get into that though, I want to talk about three things we all might need to consider. Number one, is the playbook I'm using to run my life strong enough? Is it the right playbook that fits for me?

Or number two, is my playbook maybe outdated? Maybe I'm using old planning from maybe back when I was younger, maybe in a little bit better shape? Perhaps?

Or number three, do I not have a playbook at all? And I'm just shooting from the hip, going by the seat of my pants, flying through this life, not making any good decisions based on anything, but just what happens today. Carpe diem, live for today, for whatever happens tomorrow, blah blah de blah, blah, blah.

Is that where we're at or not? So today we're going talk about winning versus losing. So before that, I want to tell a story. And then I want you to think about this story. And then we'll get into me actually telling you about my framework.

A Story About Winning: The Game Night Lesson

The way I go about making corrections, getting people to the next level in their lives. So we're gonna talk about the framework here in a minute, but I want to tell a story first. And this story is about winning.

About winning. I am a winner. I win at everything. And I like to let people know that whenever they're going against me, you are going to lose. I don't care if I'm coaching eighth-grade football, the other team is going to lose because I am a winner.

I'm not sure if everyone out there feels that way. But I feel that way about myself. I am going to win.

So years ago, I was working at Grand Canyon University. I think I've told GCU stories before. And I had this guy sat next to me named Kramer. And Kramer was a fun guy, good guy, real big Buckeyes fan, which is weird because he lives in Arizona.

Anyway, Kramer and Vic were the two guys I ran with there. And there's another lady that was having a party, a like a party where you just played like a game day party or whatever you call it, like a party. A game party, I guess you'd call it, right?

So he's having this party and and Kramer and Vic come and say, "Hey Alan, you know, you should really come to this party. It's gonna be a great time. You're gonna have a good time, you could bring your wife." And I said, "Well, what kind of game? What kind of party is it?"

And he said, "Well, it's like a game night. We're gonna play a bunch of games." I said, "It's best if you don't invite me to things like that." And he says, "Well, why shouldn't we invite you?"

I said, "Because I'm going to win every single game. I mean, there's no mercy. I don't take breaks. I don't take it easy on people. I'm going to win every single game. If I beat my kids in games, no one beat you in games."

And they're like, "Are you just kidding?" I was like, "No, no, I'm serious. If I come to this party, I will win every single game. At some point in time, some man usually will try and get mad and want to fight me, or a woman will throw a fit and they'll just storm off. So if you want to have a good time, you might not want to invite me."

They're, "No, no, no, no, man. It's just gonna be a great time. Come on out anyway." I said, "You have been warned."

And no, so I go to game night and I'm at game night and they have the nerve to pull out apples to apples. Can you can I say I annihilated people on apples and apples? No one won a, I think maybe four or five, like the overall game you had to win six or seven to win the game.

And I won six or seven before anybody else could win. Most people didn't win seven all night, but I won six or seven, probably, probably five or six different games. And I won every single one.

It got to the point one lady thought she won. She, "I got seven." And somebody said, "Alan won a while ago." It was it was really bad. And I beat him and I beat him bad.

And then they went to another game and I beat him in the I can't remember the next game. I beat him in that game. And the next game was a team game. And I said, "Who wants to be on my team?" Lady says, "I want to be on your team because I want to win."

And I said, "Join my team then, lady." And we just proceeded to whoop up on the whole room all night long. It got it got really, really bad.

And then one guy just stopped talking altogether because he couldn't believe I was winning all the time. And then another guy, well, his wife, another lady, was like, "I don't want to do this anymore."

So we the games kind of ended and we kind of had a little bit of a hangout a little bit. And I was the first person to leave, let's just say. And there's no telling what they said after I left. But that's that's winning. That's what I do. I win.

The Bowling Alley Challenge

All right, so here's the story. So I'm living in West Virginia. I owned at one at this point in time a FedEx business. I had six routes that ran every day, five, six days a week in central like Clarksburg, based out of Clarksburg.

And so I walk into the office one day and there's a bunch of the guys in there that actually work for FedEx. I own a business. I'm I'm like a I'm outside, but I don't work for FedEx. I work for myself.

These guys work for FedEx, and they're sitting there talking about their bowling balls and their bowling shoes and they got the wrist thing and all this different stuff. They're talking about how great they are at bowling. I immediately walk in the door and say, "I will whoop every single one of y'all in bowling. If I show up, I'm going to win. Just know that."

And they're like, "Well, what kind of ball do you have?" I said, "Whatever balls on the rack over there that weighs whatever weight I want it to weigh." They said, "You're going to get a ball from the alley." I said, "Correct."

"What kind of shoes are you going to wear?" "The ones they rent to me, those are the ones I'm gonna wear. You got a wrist, I don't got no wrist brace, I need a wrist brace to whoop y'all. I'm gonna whoop y'all in bowling."

And they're like, "Come on out, come on out, come on out." I was like, "Yeah, sure, I'll come out, I'll come out." Then they had the mistake, the mistake of saying, "Bring your wife." I said, "That's a bad idea. If I bring my wife, there's no way I'm losing in front of my wife. She might think I'm a loser if I lose in front of her. That ain't gonna happen. So the last thing you want me to do is bring my wife."

They said, "Well, bring your wife," because they think they're gonna win. I was like, "That's a bad idea. I'll bring my wife." So me and my wife show up.

We're we're not quite late, but we're borderline extremely on time. We get there, and these guys have all got their fancy balls out, and all this different, they're doing all their fancy thing. And I walk in and I said, "How much your ball weight?"

And they say, "Whatever weight." I don't know. I don't know about bowling ball weights at all. So I go over to the rack and I bring like two or three balls back and I'm slinging them down through there.

And the one I bowl it really super hard just to make it make a lot of noise. And then the next one I kind of bowl down through there. And the third time I bowl down through there to strike, I said, "I'll use that ball. That ball seems to be a good one."

So the ball, we start the game and we're going, you know, frame one, frame two, frame three. I hit a strike in frame three. And like, here we go, here we go. Frame four, frame five, frame six.

And I'm not, I'm in like last place. Of five people, I'm in last place at frame five. I'm losing. I don't know how bad it is. I don't really pick keep score. I don't know how to keep score, whatever. So I'm down.

Five, we're frame five, then fake frame six comes and goes, and they just start talking trash. Like, "You're nothing. You're nothing. We're destroying you. We're destroying you."

I was like, "10 frames in a bowl of match. Ten frames. Ten frames, my friend. There's ten frames." So we get to like frame eight and I bowl a strike. So it's only like my second strike. And I'm like, "Y'all better get nervous."

They're like, "Man, we're destroying you. There's no way you're gonna win this." I was like, "Okay, I got what? Four or five more shots. I don't know about this."

So I get to number nine and I bowl and I get like nine of them that fall, but nine of them don't fall. And then I miss the spare. I think it's called a spare. I miss the spare. And they're like, "This guy can't win. This guy can't win."

And one of the guys is like one of those expert scorer type dudes. And he says, "He could still win. There's a chance that he could win, but it's pretty slim." And I was like, "Don't need to be fat, baby. It's slim. I'm about to win this thing. Just know that."

So I get up. And I roll strike. It strikes, I said. I'm on the like landing thing, whatever you call it. And I'm yelling like TO, "Who can make a play? I can't!" And everybody in the bowling eye is looking because I'm a nutball, right?

And I'm sober. I haven't had to drink all night. I'm like not drinking for whatever reason at that point in time, trying to change my life or whatever. I don't drink at all, right?

And I, "Who can make a play?" So I get the ball back. Strike. "Who can make a play?" And these boys are starting to sweat. They're like, "My God, is he really about to do that?"

And the one guy looks at me and says, "This is the slim opportunity I thought he would. If he hits this strike, he wins." And I said, I'd sell back to my wife, Darjo, "Hey baby, what do we do?"

And she said, "We win, baby, we win." She's not really loud like me. She quietly says, you know, because she's all pretty and controlled, you know how they are. So she I and I and then she boom, strike, the pins go everywhere to strike.

And I'm telling, "Who can make a play? I can, I can!" And these guys are just destroyed. Half of them go outside to get a smoke in. They're just, "My God, I can't believe this guy beat me."

And I told y'all from the beginning, all I do is win. Win is what I do, and winning is what it's about. There's winners in this world and there's losers in the world. I am a winner. That's what I do.

They should have known that before they asked me to come out there and whoop them boys after it was all said and done. Winning, baby. That's what we're here talk about today. Winning.

Winners vs. Losers: Restoring Your Mindset

Let's let's get to what we're talking about today. Okay. So in life, there are winners and there are losers.

There are people in this world that are winners, and we all know the winners. They win at everything, everything they touch turns to gold. They are winners. And we all know losers. It just seems like Eeyore. Nothing in their life goes right. They're losers, right?

Some people are self-proclaimed losers where they've decided at some point in life, for some reason, I don't know why, that they're losers. Now we also know that just because a person is losing, it doesn't make them a loser. And just because a person is winning, it doesn't make them a winner.

There's a lot of people in this world that think they're winners, but they're losers. They they win every once in a while and they're like, "I'm a winner." But really, they're losers, and they're usually you could tell by their character and the way they are. That guy's really a loser, but boy, it looks like he's winning right now.

That just is what that is. I'm here to talk to people that are winners, they've always been winners. But for some reason in their life right now, it feels like things are just off. And they can't figure out why are things off? Why am I not winning like I'm used to?

When we were younger, we always won. And it seemed like everything came to us so easily. So being in the middle of losing or feeling like a loser is kind of it's really for us. We're like, we can't figure out exactly what this is.

It's like there's something on us that's making us lose, but we can't quite figure out what it is. That's who we're talking to today. People that are winners. Or wanna be winners, but currently feel like they are losing, but they don't want to become losers.

And if you're a winner, it's very tough to become a loser. It takes years and years of losing to become a loser because you have to change your mentality, your mindset, all those things have to change. If we can snap your mindset back to where it needs to be, get you thinking like the winner you are, you'll be just fine. We'll get you where you want to be.

Understanding the ROUTES Framework

All right. So the next thing we will talk about is I'm gonna go into my framework. My framework is routes. R O U T E S.

I played wide receiver, as many of you know at Ohio State as well as throughout the NFL, CFL, and World League. So I bounced around and played football. I played wide receiver, so I like to talk about routes. R-O-U-T-E-S.

Before I get into it, I want to explain kind of the overview of what it is I'm talking about. So in football, when the quarterback snapped the ball snapped to the quarterback, the receivers, tight end, running backs can go out for routes, right? So there's a guy running a hook, there's a guy running a post, there's a guy running a go route.

They're running these routes, and all those routes together form a pattern, right? So the quarterback reads the defense versus the pattern that's being run, and that lets him know where to throw the ball. Okay, so a bunch of routes make up a pattern, like our lives have a pattern to them, where sometimes we're in a pattern of losing.

We're in a pattern of doing things that are frustrating. We're in a pattern of doing the wrong things and we get comfortable sometimes in them and they seem easy. And the next thing you know, we are in the middle of loserdom, right?

We don't want to be in loserdom. We got to get out of loserdom because right now we're running the wrong routes. Quarterback's trying to throw us the ball, but we're not open because we ran the wrong routes.

Okay, so now let's go through routes. R-O-U-T-E-S.

R: Relationships

The R is for relationships. And we always think about the relationship with our significant other. Maybe you have a boyfriend, girlfriend, but we also think of relationships with our kids, whether they're with us, older, younger. How's our relationship with our children?

Also, we have to think of a relationship with our siblings, our brothers and sisters. Do we get along? Don't we get along? How are our parents? We have to keep along, get along with them as well.

How is our relationship? Is it a strained relationship? Is it something we really need to work on? Is it something that's just too far to be helped? We really need to work on those relationships, right? Those are our family relationships.

We also consider our work relationships. Do you love your boss? Do you love the people that work for you? Do you disagree with your teammates all the time? Is there a lot of frustration there?

We need to identify if there's any challenges there. And then of course we have our friends, the people we run the streets with, people we hang out with, our neighbors. Are those people we have good relationships with or bad relationships with? If those are not good relationships or any of those are strained, it could be a cause us a challenge in our overall life, right?

O: Occupation

After R goes, we come to O, occupation. Again, the people we work with. Do we get along with them? Are relationships good?

Do we have a job or do we have a career? Are we working for hourly wages or do we have a salary? Are we making the money we should be making?

Are we not making the money we should be making? Are we still climbing the corporate ladder? Looking to elevate our business and get ourselves further, further in our company, or have we given up on that and we're looking for a way out?

When you think about your occupation, the stress and strain, the amount of hours you spend in your occupation, we've got to make sure things are dialed in there to make sure our overall pattern in our life is going the way we want it to, right?

U: Upkeep

That brings us to U which is for upkeep. Upkeep talks about our physical health as well as our mental health. When you think about our physical health, do we know our numbers?

Do you know what your blood pressure is? Do you know what your weight is? Do you know what your PSA is if you're a man? Do you know what your A1C is or your sugar is?

If you're either way, right? Are you getting annual physicals for women? Are you getting your annuals? Are you taking care of yourself physically?

Also, are you lifting weights? Are you working on your flexibility? Working on your balance? Are you eating right? Are you not eating right? All those things tie into your physical health or your upkeep, right?

The other side of that coin is your mental health. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you always super stressed out? Do you have anxiety attacks?

All those breathe, are you having child is breathing? Are you taking the time to take a belly breath every once in a while? Are you breathing with your belly, then out through your nose?

Are you taking time to do those things to make sure that your mental health stays in line? And also, again, it ties into your relationships. How is your overall mental health? That's very important, right? So that's upkeep.

T: Training

That takes me to training. Training is what are you putting into your mind on a daily and weekly basis? Are you taking the time to read positive uplifting books?

Are you listening to positive podcasts like this one that are educating you? Are you taking any kind of coursework? Maybe you're taking an online course, maybe you're taking some course at community college.

Are you doing things to help yourself that way? Or are you sitting on a toilet desk scrolling, looking at women fighting in parking lots? Are you playing video games till way too late in the morning, way out at two or three o'clock in the morning and not getting enough rest so you're not, so you're dead tired going to work the next day?

Which which one is it? Are you doing things that are helping you get better? Are you doing things that are actually tearing you down? Right? Eating really bad diet, you know, all those types of things that you could be doing differently, but you're not, right?

E: Enterprise

That takes us to E, which is enterprise. Enterprise is when you think about your paycheck. What are you doing in addition to your paycheck?

Are you doing anything to make additional dollars? Do you have a side hustle? Do you have a side business? Are you considering or putting together side hustle as you work your regular job in an effort to get out of your job?

Are you doing things in your community? Do you volunteer your time to help your community get better? What are you doing that's enterprising that's going to help your family continue on further and further into the future?

S: Spirit

And that brings us finally to S. S is our spirit, spirituality. For many people, that is their religion belief, their religious belief.

And the question is, are you reading your Quran? Are you reading your Bible? Are you reading your testament, your Book of Mormon? Are you reading some kind of a book that's helping you stay spiritually connected to where you want to be connected?

Or are you also you may want to consider the East Asian religions and faiths as well? And there's other people that believe in the universe and earth and Mother Earth and those types of things. Whatever it is that connects you to whatever you want to be connected to, how are you doing in that area?

Or are you just all by yourself all the time, lonely and lonesome? What do we need to do to get that fixed? So that's routes. R-O-U-T-E-S. Those are the different areas.

And what we need to do with that is we need to get to studying. We need to find out where you are so that we can move you forward to success.

The Paul Brown Philosophy of Learning

All right, so now I'm going to talk about the running routes method, the methodology I put together to assist individuals from coming here in their life to rising up here in their life. For a lot of us, it's getting back to where we used to be. For some of us, it'll maybe be the first time being up there.

The goal is to get you back where you want to be, living the life you want to live. So before I get into the actual system, I want to talk about Paul Brown. Paul Brown is the greatest football coach of all time.

He's the greatest innovator in all of football ever. He started out in Massland, Ohio as a high school coach. Became the head coach at the Ohio State University, won a national championship with Ohio State.

After winning national championship with Ohio State, he became the ownerslash head coach of the Cleveland Browns. The Cleveland Browns are actually named after Paul Brown. He was that big a figure in the world of football.

The reason I bring up Paul Brown is because he was the innovator that figured out that athletes all learn different ways. Must the way all of you learn differently. Athletes don't all learn the same way, right?

Essentially five different ways that an athlete learns. There are some athletes, like you think of a Peyton Manning. He got drafted first. The Colts sent him the playbook in the mail or overnight or whatever.

He, by the time he showed up for camp two weeks later, he knew the entire playbook because that's what he is. He's a studious guy that likes to read and research and do all those different things. Taking all the information into his brain was something that was very simple for him.

And it is like that probably for most quarterbacks. But the that's just a famous story about the fact that Peyton Manning actually absorbed that book. So number one is some people just want to read the information, take the information in for the from reading the information, they move forward.

The second kind of person is an athlete that needs a coach to draw it up on the board. This is what I was. I was a guy that I could read the playbook all I wanted to, but if coach stood in front of me and said, "Hey, we're gonna run Hank, this is Hank. This guy runs a pivot, this guy runs out here, this guy's over the ball. We're forming this triangle to put this linebacker on an island. Whichever way he goes, we throw the opposite way."

To explain it to me that way, why I looked at on the board was perfection. I could take a for me, I took a mental picture of that, and that was what I knew, and that was how I learned offenses so quickly, actually, was because I had that piece locked in. So for a lot of people, it's the same thing. If someone just stands there and explains to them, they've got it unlocked, they're ready to go.

The third way is to watch film. In football, you're filming yourself, you're filming the other team, and they'll have footage of the play being run the last season, the last week, the other team running it. And you watch your position and what your guy does on the film.

And by watching that film, you some people's brains, not mine, are able to see, that, that's what it looks like. Okay, that's how I run that route. That's how I get open. That's how I the whole, how the hole opens up in a running back. I can run through it.

So that's the third way, right? So the fourth way is walk through. A lot of athletes need the spatial aspect of it around them. So we go out on the field, they line us up, and the coach says, "Hike," calls a play, and they say, "Hike."

And this guy steps here, that guy steps there. It's like choreography, but for a lot of guys, that's really what they need to really figure it out spatially. Especially I imagine offensive lineman, they've got to see, okay, that guy's gonna step there, I'm gonna step here. I've got that guy, I've got the other guy. And for a lot of guys, that's really how they learn the game of football, right?

And then after that, there's number five, which is practice. We go out on the field, we practice the thing we learned, whichever way we learned it, early and often. You run the same play over and over against different coverages, against different fronts, and different downs and distances. And that's how you learn how to play football.

My principles behind what I'm doing is the same thing. To have a cookie cutter format for everyone to read through some kind of boilerplate type of thing and fill in blanks doesn't make sense for everybody. There's some people that are gonna want to have a video of me telling them exactly what it is.

Some people want the boilerplate thing that explains them what it is. And then other people need to have a conversation with me or someone else to make sure we're walking them through what their next steps need to be, right? And then ultimately we'll all go out and we practice.

We actually don't practice, we play the game. And after we play the game, the iron sky don't lie. We come back, we watch the film of what we done, and we decide if what we made, decisions we made in our lives were good, bad, or ugly, and then we make adjustments and then we move forward. That's the principle.

Everything I do is basically based on football. What I learned as a football player, which was the greatest sport ever, is are the things that I'm sharing with you in my different ways. All right. So as we get into the steps of the system, I want to talk you through the steps of the system.

Step 1: The Routes Index

So number one, the number one thing we do is we have what we call the routes index. It's the first step. We have both a 60 question routes index, we have a 18 question routes index.

And what it does is ask you questions on the different areas of routes, and you scale yourself based on how you feel about those different things, right? So understand this is not like a grade, like, "I got a 50, I failed." This has nothing to do with the school system, nothing to do with 100%, none of those things.

It's just giving you a number that you can gauge versus the other numbers in your life. There's no trying to get a perfect score. There is no, I've got to get the best score. I've got to get really high or really high in this level or that level.

It's just an honest interpretation of what's going on with you in your current route situation. That's all we're trying to do is get a baseline for where you are so that we can start moving you in the directions in the areas you need help in. That's really all it is.

After this, and the bot down below in this below the the episode this week, we're gonna offer the 60 question routes index for free. The 18 question index is always for you, but today for the listening to this podcast, you're gonna get the 60 question index to do for free. All right, so that's gonna be something that's offered to you today. Take advantage of that, identify where you are, find out where you might have a situation. And then from there we can see how we're gonna go about fixing it.

Step 2: Win the Week Habit Transformation

All right, so that is the routes index. Like I said, it's gonna be free. So the next thing we're going to touch on after we get done with the index, we're going to talk about habits. Are your habits hurting you? Are your habits helping you?

We've got to find a way to make sure that your habits are helping you. For me, in my life, the last 15, 20 years, when I go into what I call a rut, where my life isn't right, this is off, that's off, doing the wrong kind of work, not getting enough sleep, those types of things. I do what I call hitting the switch, like this old Sean Merrimer, the Chargers guy. Hit the switch.

When I hit the switch, I've got to change what I'm doing to get where I want to be. And I simply hit the switch. And for years, hitting a switch for me went, I'm gonna get up in the morning, I'm gonna read my Bible. I'm gonna get up in the morning, I'm gonna go jogging.

I'm gonna get up in the morning, I'm gonna go run sprints. I'm gonna get up in the morning, I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm gonna lift weights. I'm gonna start going on date nights with my wife. I'm gonna start going to church on Sundays, Bible study on Wednesday, I'm gonna start making sure that I'm cooking healthy meals at home and not eating fast food.

I'm gonna stop drinking soda, I'm jump stop drinking beer, I'm gonna stop drinking wine, I'm gonna start eating healthy. Everything's gonna be all protein. Everything's gonna be all carbs. Everything it was maniacal the thing I would go through in an effort to make myself better.

And I would last what, two, three, maybe four weeks doing some of those things, and then it would all fall apart. Because if you think about waking up earlier than you've ever woken up awaken lately, and then you're also looking at the fact that you're lifting weights so you're sore and you're tired and all those different things. It's just not a good mix.

Okay, so what I've created is called win the week. And what win the week is, is it gives you opportunity to take all the habits that are currently not benefiting you and you can find a way to replace them with habits that do begin to benefit you. So, in an example, if I'm an individual that drinks a two liters of diet Pepsi a day and I want to stop that habit, what I would do is maybe I would swap it with make sure that I eat drink water on a daily basis instead.

So you have the habits that are not benefiting you. And you find ways to swap those with something else you do want to benefit you. In addition to that, you have new habits you also want to add to your life.

In addition to doing the swap with the water, I also want to start to do Tai Chi every night before I go to bed. And that's maybe something that's going to help me with my spirit situation, might help me with my relationship situation, help me with my sleep. So that's another thing I add on.

So when the week is interactive, as I said, comes with a large wall poster. Allows you to put your goals in front of you so that you see them. And maybe you can have people that are that you love, help join in, make the change in your life. Also comes with books. It always it's all printable. You print off the sheets week over week. It's a 30-day, 60-day, 90-day plan to get you where you want to be with your new habits.

Step 3: The Running Routes Community and Coaching

The next tool that I've created is the Running Routes School Community. That's S-K-O-O-L. It's an interactive community where on a daily basis we get together, we talk about different things that are going on.

Every day there'll be a daily prompt based on one of the areas of routes where we'll talk about relationships one day, occupational things the next day. We'll talk about everything about your health, sometimes your mental health, sometimes your physical health, and we'll go through the weeks making sure we have conversations around these different things.

In addition to that, we also have A Friday Lives where we get together, see how the week went, have a little quick conversation about how everybody's doing. If anybody has any questions or any challenges they're faced with, we can help talk you through that. We as a group can talk you through that.

The other thing we talk about is a routes reading room. I love books. I love reading books. Limited. I got all these different books back here. "Who Not How" will talk about reading different books to find different ways to help you in your life. So the reading room is a great opportunity.

Additionally, we have all this trainings that will be in there. Learning more about routes, learning more about the psychology, all the different areas of routes. We're making sure we're all working on one thing for the week or one thing for the month to make sure we're improving in those different areas.

And additionally, we have we'll have some workshops, we'll have some webinars where I'll bring in an expert in one of the different areas. They'll have a workshop webinar. We might have just have special guest star where someone shows up and they talk about their situation.

Maybe it's someone I interviewed on the podcast that you guys would like spend more time with. We'll have them out. Have you come out? You can ask questions of them. It's questions of myself. We can I can kind of interview them again with your questions versus my questions, right?

And then the last thing I talk about that there's a lot of other stuff on there and it'll be growing. But one thing that'll be on there is routes intensive. And routes intensive is if you're really, really struggling and let's say training and you're just not, you're not. You don't have any, you can't figure out what on earth you'd want to what you'd want to train on.

We'll have an intensive and we'll start as a group. We'll individually get together as a group and figure out digging deep in what types of things we need to start training on so that we can find out down the road what it is we want to get better at. So as I said, the routes school community is going to be a great resource for you as far as different things to find to help you dig deeper and what your situation is.

And last thing I offer is one-on-one coaching. You can get one-on-one coaching for me. Six, twelve, eighteen weeks. Just to take you through the system like I talked about.

Some people can have explain on the board. Some people just read it. If you're a person that needs someone to actually walk you through it, I also have coaching with myself that you can go through. It's pretty intense. It's pretty straightforward. I do tell it like it is. So you can't be sensitive up in there. We're gonna talk for real, as I say for real, for real.

The Problem with Cookie-Cutter Systems

Here's a question I have for you. Have you ever gone to a high school football game and you're watching this offense on the field and the quarterback can barely throw the ball 20, 25 yards, right?

And you're looking at them, they're running a spread offense, two receivers on each side, offensive line, single running back, and a quarterback. This kid can't throw the ball, save his life. But you look at this offensive line, and this is high school football, and they're all over 200 pounds.

The running back is like almost 200 pounds himself. And you're thinking to yourself, "Why do they ever throw the ball at all? Why don't they just hand it to this kid?" Because this kid is him. You know the kid, him, he, him.

And they're not handing the ball to this kid. They're throwing the ball all over the place. And you think to yourself, "Is this coach an idiot or what?"

The answer is yes, the coach is an idiot because what the coach has done is the coach has said, "This is the system that I run. I run this system. You as an athlete have to fit into this system or we won't have success."

I think that's what a lot of coaches and a lot of people that are out there giving people guidance and advice are doing. They're saying, "Here's my system, fit yourself into my system. And when you get into my system, then you're gonna have all the success you want because everybody's the same, right?"

We're all carbon copies of one another, right? And that's just not the answer. What we're looking to do here with the route system is we're looking to identify where you are with the routes index.

Then from there, we're gonna figure out where you want to sprinkle in. What first off, what areas are you struggling in? Let's identify that. And then once we identify that, we can start to set some new habits.

And after we set some new habits, we can start to set some goals. Notice we didn't start with goals, where goals are way down here because we have to figure out where you are first before we decide what offense to run, right?

And some of you, you should be running spread offense. You can't throw the ball around, but some of you need to get some big hog mollus, get in there run the ball because that's just the way your life is set up. So I'm not here to sell everybody the same offense.

Whatever offense you need to win the game is the offense we're going with. And that's the great thing about the route system is there's so many different aspects to it, different angles, and it melds to you to make sure you get the success you want. So we're not really doing the boilerplate, here it goes.

There'll be some boilerplate stuff in there, don't get me wrong, because we got to start somewhere. But at the same time if you need individualized attention to get out of the rut you're in, to go back to being who you were, or for some of you to get to where you want to be for the first time, the routes index and the routes system, the routes method is really what we're looking for to take advantage of, right?

Taking the First Step to Victory

So that's the routes method. Glad to have gone through it with you. Really looking forward to you guys taking advantage. Let's go through the steps real quick.

Step one: take the routes index down below. Take the 18 question or the 60 question. Here today, it's being offered for free. The 60 question is going to get you deeper into your situation that you better understand where you stand in the R O U T E S.

After that, take advantage of Win the Week. If you want to start building a structure, you've got to start building better habits. If you read any of the habit books, "Atomic Habits," Charles Duhigg's habit book. You know, habits are the backbone of what we do, right? Looking to get you starting some strong habits, starting some strong patterns, right? As we can start to run better patterns.

Next thing is look at joining the school community. School community is gonna be a lot of resources there. Starting out, we're gonna make sure that you're you have the access to the indexes. There'll be some classes, some courses you can take in there to start yourself in the process of identifying. If you identify where a situation is, there's something in there that can start to help you hammer home some things with your situation into with it, whether it's R-O-U-T-E or S, right?

So really briefly, I want to also go my concept of what Paul Brown did. For like I said, for many of you, you're gonna be able to just plug into the community and just boom, it's just there for you, right? You can you're like the person that can read the playbook and figure the playbook out on your own.

Others of you will need to go through a course where I'm actually talking you through the pieces and parts, just like coach did for me up on the board. It's gonna be that type of thing for you. For some of you, you know, you need to watch some film. Take some film, have someone conversate with you about some film of what you've done in the past, and maybe break down maybe some of the holes in your game, identify the steps you should take going forward so that you can win.

And then for others of you, it's just a walkthrough. Let's get together, let's walk through the steps that you need to take, you know, the index, the win the week. Taking those steps as you walk through to get to where you want to be.

And then, like anybody else, starting tomorrow, we're gonna go out practice. You know, just a really quick tip: write down what you want to do tomorrow, today, and it'll make you have a better day tomorrow, right?

So from me to you, I'm glad you joined us today. Looking forward to seeing you next episode. And always remember your legacy is not what you did, it's who you helped along the way. Have a great day. Look forward to seeing you next time. Bye.

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