Latest / Stream of Consciousness with Dan: Stories from the Midwest / Friday's w/ Dan #10

Transcript

Friday's w/ Dan #10 · Stream of Consciousness with Dan: Stories from the Midwest

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, we are live, everyone, with Fridays with Dan.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll be honest, today's episode surprised me.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I started the week listening to Augie Nieto by the band Five for Fighting, and it hit me harder than I expected.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then I had this great conversation with Kurt Busch, the certified internal family systems practitioner and leadership coach, not the NASCAR driver.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly everything connected.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Augie's story, Kurt's words, and then my fraternity's ALS work, it all pointed me in one direction, and I want to walk through that with you today.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to start with Augie Nieto.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't know who he was, you can't understand why this hit me the way it did.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Augie Nieto was one of the strongest people you'll ever read about.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean physically, although he built his entire career on strength.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: He founded Life Fitness.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: He helped shape the modern fitness industry.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was humble, a leader, and a guy who lived his whole life in motion.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then at the age of 47, he was diagnosed with ALS.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: A disease that takes your muscles, your voice, your independence, piece by piece.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Most people get three to five years with that diagnosis.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Agi lived 18.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: 18 years of fighting, advocating, showing up, and refusing to disappear.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't just survive ALS.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: He led through it.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: He created Agi's Quest, which has raised tens of millions of dollars for ALS research.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: He became the face of the fight.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: He pushed for treatments.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: He pushed for awareness.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: He pushed for hope.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he did all of that by losing the thing he built his identity on, his physical strength.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what gets me.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because leadership is easy when life is easy, but Augie led when life was cruel.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: He led when his body betrayed him.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: He led when every day took something from him.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't choose the breaths he had left.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: He chose how he breathed.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why this story matters.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's why that song hit me.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we're starting here.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't heard the song Augie Nieto by Pfeiffer Fighting, I really encourage you to take a few minutes after this episode and listen to it.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I could play it.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have the rights to do so.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the song captures something about Augie that's hard to put into words.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: The strength, the fight, the humanity, the way he kept showing up, even as ALS took more and more from him.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those songs that doesn't just tell a story.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: It makes you feel the weight of the person behind it.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if hearing about Augie moves you the way that it moved me, I'd encourage you to go a step further.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Look up his story.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Learn about ALS.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Support the organizations doing the work, talk about it, share it, and keep these names alive because ALS is brutal.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the people fighting it, patients, families, caregivers, they deserve to be seen.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Augie was a leader in every sense of the word, even when his body wouldn't let him move.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where all of this started this week.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so talking about ALS brings me back to something a little closer to home for me.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was in Phi Delta Theta in college, and our national philanthropy was ALS.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Every year, our chapter hosted a golf tournament to raise money for the cause.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And look, we we weren't raising millions, we weren't running national foundations, we were just a couple dozen of 18 to 22-year-old kids trying to figure out life, school, friendships, and who are we who we were becoming.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: But every single year we raised over$20,000.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: $20,000 from a bunch of college kids who barely had 20 bucks to their name.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time it felt pretty freaking cool, and it still does.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you're at that age, you don't always feel like you have that much to offer to the world.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for one weekend every year, we got to show up for something bigger than ourselves.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: We got to help families dealing with ALS breathe a little easier.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, it's even more personal than that.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've lost fraternity brothers to ALS.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched what this disease does.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen the strength it takes from them, from their families, from everyone around them.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's brutal, it's unforgiving, and it makes you realize just how much support, awareness, and research matter.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So when I think about Augie's story now, it hits different.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because we weren't raising money for a charity in the abstract.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: We were raising money for the people like him, people like my brothers, people fighting a brutal disease with everything they had.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: People who needed support, hope, and community.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why all this connected for me this week.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so while while we're on the train of ALS, I wanted to take a quick aside because if if you've never watched Lou Gehrig's Luckiest Man speech, you need to.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Standing in Yankee Stadium, knowing he has a fatal disease, knowing what's coming, and he calls himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's two minutes long, no music, no production, just honesty, gratitude, and courage in the face of something unimaginable.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when you've seen what ALS does, when you've lost people to it, when you've watched families fight through it, that speech hits in a completely different way.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a sports moment, it's a human moment, a leadership moment, a reminder of what strength really looks like.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So all of that aside, Augie's strength, my fraternity's connection to ALS, the brothers we've lost, it set me up for a conversation I had with Kurt Busch earlier this week.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the NASCAR driver.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about Kurt Busch, the leadership coach, the certified internal family systems practitioner, the guy who spends his life helping people understand why they show up the way they do.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: What struck me in our conversation is that Kurt talks about leadership in a completely different way.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Not as a title, not as a role, not as something you earn after a promotion.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: For him, leadership is internal.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's emotional.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's about presence and honesty.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about the parts of yourself you've ignored or pushed down or tried to outrun.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things he's known for, and something I really wanted to make sure we touched on, is his framework he uses at his company, Brimstone Coaching Group.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: E plus R equals T.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that stands for encounter plus reflection equals transformation.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the way he explained it to me was so simple and so true.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Every leader, every person really goes through those encounters, hard moments, unexpected moments, moments that challenge who you think you are.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: The encounter alone doesn't change you.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's the reflection.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's about what you do with it.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's how you sit with it, learn from it, and let it shape you.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when you put those two together, the encounter and the reflection, that's where transformation happens.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: And as he was talking, all I could think about was Augie, my fraternity brothers, and the families fighting ALS, and how leadership shows up in ways we don't always recognize at the time.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because Augie had the encounter, he had the reflection, and he became the transformation.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what Kurt is trying to teach.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: That leadership isn't about being in charge, it's about being awake to your own life.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to share our Bible verse of the week.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: It is from Matthew chapter 20, verse 26.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means to me is that's leadership, not the spotlight, not the title, not the power.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's showing up, carrying what you can't, and choosing presence over ego.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Augie lived that.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Kurt teaches that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, it's the kind of leadership I want to grow into.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: The kind that's measured not by how loud you are, but how you breathe through the moments that matter.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: So let us pray.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: God, today we lift up Augie Nieto and his family.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for his strength, his courage, and the way he chose to live, even when life was unbearably hard.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: We ask you that you continue to bring comfort, peace, and healing to everyone who loved him and everyone still fighting the same fight.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: We also pray for every person living with ALS right now, and for every family walking that road with them.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Give them strength for the hard days, rest for the exhausting ones, and hope that carries them through uncertainty.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And God, I also want to lift up my fraternity brothers, the guys who showed up year after year to support ALS through our golf tournament.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we didn't have much as college kids, but we worked hard to find sponsors, alumni, and community members willing to give.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the impact that made and for the heart behind it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we pray especially for the brothers we've lost to ALS.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Be with their families, be with the people who miss them, hold them close.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, we pray for Kurt, for the work he's doing, for the people he's guiding, and for the way he teaches leadership from a place of honesty and presence.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Give him clarity, strength, and the ability to keep helping people grow into who they're meant to be.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for the examples of leadership you put in front of us.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: The loud ones, the quiet ones, and the unexpected ones.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Help us learn from them, help us reflect, and help us transform.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So again, thanks everyone for spending some time with me today.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: As always, hold your people close, breathe with purpose, and I'll see you next Friday on Fridays with Dan.