20 Years Later, We Finally Went Head to Head

This was a biggg moment!

And... this one was a big session.

After a recent trip down to Melbourne, I flew back into Sydney and then had the drive south towards Albury to be the keynote speaker at the Anchor Safe Height Safety crew’s conference. I was supposed to head straight down but made a little detour first to see my beautiful wife and daughter. It meant getting to my accommodation in Gundagai at about 11pm, but it was worth it to see my girls.

After the flight and long drive I didn’t really decompress, had a pretty crappy sleep and woke up at 4:40am. I wasn’t speaking until 10:45, but the organisers had asked me to come along from the start of the conference at 8am while they went through the previous year’s numbers, growth, projections and where the business was heading next. I love that stuff. I love business and getting a look behind the scenes of companies before I speak, so even on a crappy sleep I wanted to get amongst it.

There were a couple of things that made this event extra special though, and I have to go back a bit to explain it.

A few months earlier I jumped on a call with the Anchor Safe's leadership team to talk about the event. They told me that just before the call, one of their people, Michael, had recommended a speaker he thought they should bring in for the conference.

Me.

He had no idea they were literally about to jump on a meeting with me.

Gotta love that.

Michael is a bro from my younger years when we were kicking around the streets together. Then not long after, another one of their workers, Spark, messaged me saying he couldn’t believe it was all happening.

This is where the story gets a little deeper.

If you’ve read my book Stabbed Ego or heard me speak, you’d know about my pretty heavy and colourful past. Spark was close friends with the guy who stabbed me over 20 years ago and punctured my lung. Back then we were on very different sides of things and it’s probably a good thing we never actually crossed paths.

The crazy part is that more recently Spark and I had connected online, but the conversations weren’t about any of that rubbish. We were talking about faith, being fathers, life and how much things had changed.

So the meeting with Anchor Safe leadership went well and next thing I know I’m in Albury giving a big bro hug to a bloke who 20 years earlier I probably would have considered an enemy. Then Michael comes over and the three of us are standing there talking deeply, laughing and carrying on like we’ve been mates forever.

What a trip.

And all of this happened before I’d even presented my keynote.

The leadership team had organised an arm wrestling competition to get everyone fired up. Being a construction crowd, the fellas were obviously keen. They had a proper arm wrestling table set up and everyone was getting amongst it.

I’m standing there with Michael and Spark watching it all and you could feel that little inner competitive battle starting.

We didn’t exactly get to where we did in our younger years by shying away from competition.

Then one of the leaders asked who was next.

Spark and I looked at each other.

More than 20 years later, it looked like we were finally going head to head.

Except this time it was completely different.

Two blokes who once came from opposing sides of a pretty dark world were standing there as fathers, talking about faith, laughing together and putting our hands together in competition rather than anger.

Brothers in arms.

That moment honestly hit me harder than I expected. It was funny, emotional and pretty bloody significant. After the wrestle we gave each other a massive hug and even now writing about it gets me a little emotional.

I’m not someone who spends a heap of time looking backwards. I’ve spoken about my past thousands of times over the years and I don’t carry it around with me. But every now and then something happens that really makes you realise how much life can change.

Twenty years ago the three of us were kicking around in a completely different world.

Now Michael was helping organise a corporate conference, Spark and I were talking about faith and fatherhood, and I was about to walk onto a stage and speak to their workplace about ownership, mindset, resilience, leadership and changing the direction of your life.

You couldn’t script it.

Then it was time to actually speak.

I got introduced, jumped on stage and did my thing. We went deep, had some big laughs, plenty of cheekiness and a really strong connection with the crew. Afterwards there were some great conversations before I had to hit the road again.

The whole day was a pretty powerful reminder of something I talk about all the time.

Your past can explain parts of you, but it doesn’t have to define where you go next.

People change. Relationships change. Perspectives change. But at some point you have to take ownership of the direction you’re heading and decide whether you’re going to keep dragging the old version of yourself forward or finally leave some of it behind.

To everyone else in the room, that arm wrestle probably just looked like a couple of blokes having a crack.

For me, it meant a lot more than that.

Then it was back in the car for the drive north, onto another plane and off to Brisbane for the next conference with NAK Hair (bit different from a construction crew).

Let’s go.