How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:00:00]:
Because these packages land in these baseball fields. These kids open these packages, and they just start freaking out because literally, joy, it's new baseball, new gloves, nets, bats, so on and so forth. But since then, he's been doing that for so much, for himself. And I was like, man, if you really want to change the world, you got to figure out a way to pay for that.

Kenny Lange [00:00:23]:
Welcome to the how Lead think podcast, a show that transforms your mind by giving you new ways to think. I am your host, Kenny Lange, and with me today is the Sammy Torres, Jr. He is the co founder of Baseball Face Cares, which I'm sure we'll end up talking about. But he is also a former United States Coast Guard rescue helicopter hoist operator. That is as important as it sounds. And he is a visionary entrepreneur, and he's known for founding the Guardian land group alongside baseball face cares. That nonprofit is aimed at furnishing baseball equipment to underprivileged children worldwide. And I love sports and what it can do.

Kenny Lange [00:01:05]:
So that's awesome. Raised in Texas. Amen. With a passion for baseball and a dedication to service, he transitioned from a 13 year military career. Think you, sir. And into full time entrepreneurship. What is that? Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Balancing a professional life with a deep commitment to his family and his community, Sammy enjoys triathlons, family time, and making a positive impact in both business and humanitarian efforts.

Kenny Lange [00:01:34]:
Welcome to the.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:01:36]:
Whoa. Whoa, man. Thank you so much. Super fired up to be here. Anytime I get an invitation for something like this, I get giddy. I get the little giddy bumps. So here I am. Let's roll.

Kenny Lange [00:01:47]:
Getting the giddy bumps. I think during your bio, like the caffeine, just hit all the neurons in my brain, so it was perfect timing. Well, Sammy, I'm excited to have you here and talk with you and love the work that you're doing, that you have done for our country, but love the work that you're doing with kids. It's obviously a big purpose and part of my mission with my practice. So I love what you're doing there with your dad. But tell me what today is on your mind.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:02:20]:
Today is the day. I think that probably for the past week, what's been on my mind is how I have been defining what is successful. Like you said, jumping out of the frying pan, coming out of something very structured, something that I was very passionate about, didn't take a whole lot of thought, lots of camaraderie to going into the full entrepreneurial world and spirit. The past two years have been very revealing as to what I had in mind and my expectation for what success was to where we are today in that definition of that. So that is what's on my mind.

Kenny Lange [00:02:58]:
There's a lot to unpack there, my friend. Talk to me a little bit about what, because you're talking about the two years, like, just moving from that military service based, like tons of structure, and you hear that from servicemen and women that they come out of the structure. And then obviously, sometimes the workforce is not as put together and clear and orderly as they were accustomed to, but you sort of jumped into the other ditch of becoming an entrepreneur, which is a bit like outback steakhouse. No rules, just right. Nobody's going to remember anything else that I've ever said, and they're going to be like he said, entrepreneurship is like Outback Steakhouse.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:03:46]:
Hey, yeah, that's exactly.

Kenny Lange [00:03:47]:
We'll have a coffee cup and a t shirt and a merch store for that. But what's been the most shocking in terms of how you were defining success initially and then what are some of the confrontations to those ideals over the last couple of years?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:04:06]:
Sure, the military brings, at least for me, I was in Coast Guard aviation. It was always a goal of mine to be there. It was really an outstanding cares. I loved what I did. It was like a firehouse feel, but when the alarm went off, you just hop in a helo with your crew and you just go do the mission. So super rewarding work, and again, very structured. So I've always been the kind of person that if you put structure in front of me, I'll eat it up. In fact, I'll try and see how I can one up it.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:04:40]:
Not in an egotistical sense, but just I love the challenge and my drive and my energy is something that fuels me and a big part of me. So kind of like you said, a lot of people, when they separate from the military, are faced with a different system, if you will. And we're programmed in a way to follow direction and follow structure and worry about what happens when you don't follow those things or you don't have structure. Right. I got out of the military in 2021, but in 2018 with my wife and I, we started really going into real estate and entrepreneurship, land investing and land acquisition and so on and so forth. And we had some wins in that department, quite frankly. We were tired of being broke. Right.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:05:27]:
Single military income, tired of being broke. Let's test the waters. Let's do it. And it worked. And we had some processes there. But everything was a side gig, at least for myself, right?

Kenny Lange [00:05:36]:
Yeah.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:05:37]:
So when 2021 came around, I had the opportunity to. The cool part of this whole story of my career is that I recruited out of Dallas, Texas, and my last duty station, I was actually able to be a recruiter in Dallas. So full circle in my career. And then there was just the big highway that said, and there was the exit coming up that said opportunity. I knew what I wanted for myself. I knew what I wanted for my family. The retention rate in Coast Guard aviation is really high. So kind of like a Pez dispenser.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:06:08]:
I was just kind of waiting for the person above me to retire, to go away, so that I could fill that seat. And what I realized that maybe my drive wasn't as patient enough to wait for that because there was a lot of opportunity. So I said to myself, well, this was mainly a family decision, but we said to ourself, in a way, it's like, do we really want to wait six or seven more years before we can start taking action that we want to take now? So we made that decision to get out. We had a real estate faucet trickling, if you will. But there was enough there. There was enough faith and there was enough support from the family to say, hey, we're just going to do this full out. So that kind of leads into your question. What did I have in mind that was going to be considered successful? In my mind, I was surrounded by a lot of business professionals that were doing great in business, and they were making a lot of money and they were doing these things.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:07:01]:
So as an entrepreneur, I'm going out into the work life and figuring this thing all out. But what I realized along the way is now I was chasing essentially financial freedom or maybe more financial security, right, in the military. Like a warm blanket, or it's like a blanket with holes in it. It just keeps you just warm enough. It gives you the benefits. You get paid. You show up, you're probably not going to get fired if you just kind of don't. But now I was jumping out into a place, and it was as white as a sheet of paper.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:07:33]:
There was no structure. There was no direction. There was no rules. It was the outback of entrepreneurship, if you will. Right. So what I ended up doing was I defaulted to, I think, my programming. I think I defaulted to my programming of the program that, honestly, a lot of our society is susceptible to and is distracted into. And I started defining success how everyone else was defining success, and a lot of the people at least, I don't want to say people in my circle, but a lot of business professionals, I saw them being successful as they were making money and making their businesses grow and flow, and I wasn't able to produce the income that I thought my value could be in those first couple of years.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:08:19]:
It was a lot of laying seed, understanding where I was going to go, jiggling door handles of opportunity, looking behind that door, walking through that door, figuring out the next one. So really along the way over those two years is when I started to develop what success really is for me and what it means to me. But really, the biggest thing is, like anyone leaving anything that they're really good at or they've been putting so much focus in, when you switch out of that, what is your expectation of that? And maybe that's half the battle is having an expectation in the first place.

Kenny Lange [00:08:57]:
Of what it's supposed to be, right? Like either having the right expectation or maybe just not having any at all of the sort of the detach from the outcome. Just worry about the input and the disciplines that you need to cultivate. I want to go back to something you said about seeing people around you, whether they were close to you or you just kind of met them by chance or saw them from afar. What did you see as the prevailing wisdom about defining success? So you get out of the military, you're going out into the professional world, the entrepreneurial world, and so you're looking around like, okay, well, what is everybody else doing? What are the measuring sticks out there? What stood out to you in terms of the common wisdom?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:09:49]:
Attitude. Attitude, okay, attitude. I think attitude. That could be a pro and a con, right? It just kind of depends on where your attitude lies. And when I kind of got out into, I'm a land investor and we acquire land and we sell land. And when I got into that space, I saw a lot of people that had spent a lot of effort in building their businesses and creating cash flow, just creating a sustainable business. And where I saw was, there is a difference between attitudes in any industry, right? It doesn't really matter. But what I saw, the difference was between where people's values and priorities were.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:10:38]:
I saw a lot of business, what you might see as business success in their businesses. But then I also would look a little bit deeper, and it took me a while to see it this way, but I would look a little bit deeper and I would see, how does their life work? Where are their priorities? What's the relationship with their family? What's the relationship with their spouse? What's the relationship with their kids? What's their work life balance? What are these different critical pieces, and where is their attitude towards those priorities in the first place? Is it business mindset, grind, get it done so that they can provide for their family? Or are they finding ways to balance that right? I had just left a career where I spent a lot of time away from my family, so gaining that time back was extremely important to me. And then the more I started hanging out with people, I was able to just kind of sit back and observe. Now, it took me a while to have that mentality, right. At first, I was just put me in coach, dressing the part, faking it till you make it with the right intentions. But I was really trying to get into that space, speak the liked language. I wanted to be likable. I wanted people to see me as, oh, yeah, this guy definitely is in the land space.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:11:51]:
He looks like it. He's got boots on. He speaks like it. He says all the language. But really deep down inside, I was hiding from what I didn't know was going to be my real pursuit. And along the way, attitude and others showed me how to even prioritize the things in my life, if you will.

Kenny Lange [00:12:14]:
How prevalent do you think that is? Because I can't imagine you're the only person who's stepped out into a new arena. Whether it was going from military like, highly structured to highly unstructured. It could even just be jumping industries or something like that. How common do you believe it is, or have you observed it is for people to look around and think, oh, I've got to be this kind of person to make it here, sort of the same thing you went through?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:12:53]:
Yeah, it's a good question. I think so many of us can get caught in comparison. I think for me, comparison, I've heard it before. This is not me. But comparison truly is a thief of joy. It takes away what you have, and you're putting yourself into a superficial, preconserved perspective that you have of your own with really no tangible evidence to exactly what they're going through or how their life actually looks behind the scenes. So you have to be very careful. And I think, for me, leadership really isn't complex, but it does require an understanding of yourself.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:13:33]:
Right. You got to have understanding of oneself so that you can be driven by the passion that's going to fuel you in that sense. So that's the biggest thing I would say in that department, essentially.

Kenny Lange [00:13:49]:
That's really good. And I think everybody hit that 32nd rewind on the episode right there and let that replay, because really understanding yourself, like you said, is so critical. It's funny the timing of us recording this. In about three weeks, I'm going to be going through an accreditation course to bring the Enneagram to my clients, which highly focused on self awareness. And within that, there's a Cornell University study on a survey or research project that they did about what's the greatest predictor of individual leadership success. Self awareness came out on top. Obviously. You need to be competent, you need to have morals, you need to operate ethically.

Kenny Lange [00:14:46]:
There's all these good things. It doesn't mean that all those other things are bad. But the greatest predictor of success was that self awareness that you're talking about. And it sounds like that's part of the journey you've had over the last couple of years of seeing what everybody else is doing, but then trying to pay attention to the signal of your soul amongst the noise of everyone else around you. Is that an accurate representation?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:15:15]:
Yeah, I would definitely say so. I mean, I think that we underestimate the power that we all have, right? We truly underestimate the power that we have to initiate change. We underestimate the power for us to question, to speak up. There's plenty of situations that we probably find ourselves in that we wish that we had maybe said something or we had spoken up. And so much of that is, at least for me, what I found, is that so much of that came from maybe the misguided self awareness that I had of myself at the time.

Kenny Lange [00:15:49]:
But essentially, I think that's really interesting, is we underestimate the power that we have to question in particular, and I say this as somebody that we were joking before we turned on the mics and everything. I feel like I get paid to do what got me in trouble in school, which was question and argue with everything. But even as bold and often in younger days brash that I soul be about my questioning. Even if somebody hasn't served in the military, right, where like you described, that you are programmed sort of to take orders like they're handed down, you have to trust. And obviously trust is important in all realms of life. But for maybe those people who haven't served in a structure like that, what's keeping people from embracing the power, the agency? They have to question the way things are, or maybe even question whether the way things are are right for them or their approach to it. What are your thoughts on that?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:17:09]:
Yeah, I had written something down earlier and it was along the lines that a leader removes ego to see the bigger picture. How?

Kenny Lange [00:17:18]:
Say that again.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:17:19]:
A leader removes ego to see the bigger picture. Now, ego can show up in different ways. Ego could be like, well, most people probably think of ego, they think of outward egowness. But ego could also be just the way that your own mind is defining yourself and how you're coming and seeing yourself. Whereas when you're able to remove that ego, you see the bigger picture. You're able to maintain clear communication and you maintain confidence. And when you do that, you give the ability as a leaders to help others and motivate others, learn more, do more and see more. So it really has a lot to go.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:18:00]:
Kind of going back to that self awareness that you were speaking to earlier.

Kenny Lange [00:18:04]:
Yeah. Given what you just shared, which I can't imagine a leader alive, I say, or listening like, there's dead leaders listening to this podcast. Maybe they're just playing it at a cemetery, but I can't imagine anybody hearing that and going, well, that's terrible. Who on God's green earth would want to do any of those things? Yet that's the exception and not the rule. Which I think, again, goes back to your statement about which I really love, is leadership is not complex. Right. But it's not easy. So people don't do things over and over again unless they get something from it, right?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:18:53]:
Sure.

Kenny Lange [00:18:54]:
So even in the face of a statement like that, where they can agree with all the benefits, what's the unproductive thinking behind not making a move towards ridding yourself of ego? And I also would love to explore that sort of like inward ego point that you made. But what do you think is going on there? And what have you noticed? Because obviously you've served with a ton of different leaders at different levels. What's your observation, man?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:19:30]:
Honestly, I think everyone has their own journey and they'll arrive to a moment of clarity on their own. But so much, it's a really good question. So much is just your okay. For me, so much is the way the noise in my mind, if you will, and what I found is that it's very difficult if you have so much noise in your mind. And that comes through the consumption that we have here in America, whether it's through the food sources that we eat, whether it's through the entertainment that we take down, whether it's how the time we spend or however those come to be. But as the noise comes into your mind, then what you're faced with is using your mind to undo your mind. And that was very difficult for me because it wouldn't prove much consistency, if you ask me. I'm a man of cycles.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:20:36]:
I experience highs and I experience low lows. I go to the peak, into the valley. And the mind has always been difficult for me to undo my mind. When I put that together, I came across a book. It's called the Art of embodiment by GS Youngblood. And the concept is that we use our body to settle our mind, where we go back into the heart to speak its more true self to the distracted mind, if you will. So that's been helping me. And just having certain rituals or embodiment practices that give you the ability to kind of get out of your own mind for a little bit.

Kenny Lange [00:21:20]:
That's really good. And I know that well, certainly we want to link that book in the show notes. There's another book that talks not exactly about that. It's related, called the Body keeps the score. And it's a lot about how we may mentally have blocked out past trauma and situations, but our bodies are expressing the damage of that and holding it in there is this knowing that goes beyond just your mind you can get into again, because I have all my books for the Enneagram preparation stuff. So it's just stop a mind. But it makes me think of the three centers of intelligence. Like, you do have your mind and you have your heart, your emotions, right? And then you have your body.

Kenny Lange [00:22:15]:
They can all three. And there's even, I think, some science now that's starting to show neurological patterns in the gut and in your heart. So it goes beyond just your brain. And I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm not going to try to speak about that. You can go listen to like Huberman lab podcasts if you want some of that. But it is interesting that we can have these different ways of knowing because I don't know who's credited as saying is, but you can't think yourself out of a situation or a belief you thought yourself into.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:22:55]:
Good.

Kenny Lange [00:22:55]:
Now you and I might say, well, that's a core component of our faith, right? Our christian faith allows us access to higher power, and that can help shift the perspective that we may have in our mind. But we can also have a way of knowing that if we. Sounds like the embodiment practices you have allow you time to get still to really process. Hey, there's more going on here. A lot of noise up here, a lot of signal here in who my truest, most authentic self is. Is that an accurate description of sort of how that's flowing.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:23:33]:
Absolutely.

Kenny Lange [00:23:38]:
You're helping lead a nonprofit organization right now. Baseball face cares, number one. I'd love for you to just share a little bit about that work and its mission beyond the snippet I had in your bio. But what has leadership in that realm been teaching you in terms of the conversation we're having right now? Because military leaders versus for profit leadership versus nonprofit leadership certainly have some through lines. But I do think that the circumstances can teach us wildly different things. I know that that's been the case for me and my differences in for profit and church ministry leadership.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:24:22]:
Sure. And it kind of speaks to, I think, history's greatest leaders demonstrated courage and they empowered their teams. Everything is perspective based. Leadership is going to speak differently to others. Leaving the military and being under. The cool thing about the military is you have your authority above you and then you have your subordinates below you. And there's never really a time, and especially in the aviation community, where safety is so much a part of it, where the culture has evolved through time, to speak up. Right.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:25:06]:
There's been a lot of circumstances that could have been avoided and a lot of mishaps that could have been avoided if it was just for the people, let's call it in the back, to feel that they had the same authority to speak up as the pilots. Right. So when you're put in into a culture where the culture is when we are in go mode, when we are in flight mode, everyone has an equal say, and you're expected to speak to what you see. So that kind of mentality coming outward put me in a position where when I am in the entrepreneur world and I am going through these networking events, and you can kind of see the people that people attract to because of their knowledge or maybe how successful their business is, people would gravitate to want to know those. But then there's this realm of, like, man, we're all the same. We put on our pants the same way. And for how we take that into the nonprofit world is the same concept is what I realized very quickly about the nonprofit world. It's a business.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:26:10]:
It's a business.

Kenny Lange [00:26:12]:
Say that again for the people in the back.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:26:13]:
It's a business. We need money to survive. If you want to survive, you need money. And it's so funny, because when I came into this nonprofit, I had never run a nonprofit before. And I can't say that I'm really good at running a nonprofit, but I have so much passion about what we do to speak quickly about what we do. I co founded a nonprofit called Baseball Face Cares. My father, for the past 30 years, he played pro ball back in the day with the Mets, Twins, and the Indians in the really? Since then, he never went that far in the baseball leagues with that. But what he did end up becoming was a baseball coach.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:26:53]:
And so my whole entire life, I got to ride along the seat with a baseball coach. But his gift was always in the empowerment of youth. He could capture 100 kids at a camp solo and really empower them to see more of themselves. And where baseball face came from. The name is kind of the attitude that you have when you approach the plate and you're looking at that pitcher and you kind of give the pitcher that serious look at the plate, like, hey, I'm here to battle you. I'm going to take everything that I've ever owned. I'm going to affirm it to myself that I'm here to show you everything that I have. All right? You're not showing that weakness.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:27:37]:
So that's where his baseball face concept came from a few years ago. This guy's probably throwing over a million baseball. He's in his 60s now. I've finished my career, and he's still doing baseball. And I was like, dad, we got to figure out a way to harness your legacy, because I'm not you. So what do we do? Because along that time, I'd been out of the military for a while, kind of shared you with them, starting businesses. But really what I had was I was really seeking impact. In my previous career.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:28:07]:
There was impact every single day in my new career. I'm a business owner, and I'm making money. But where's the juice? Where's the impact? I'm not here to just make money. I'm here to make change and impact. And when I started looking at my father, unbeknownst to me, this guy, a venezuelan baseball team, reached out to him. My father's from Puerto Rico, so he has that connection, that spanish connection. He grew up playing with broomsticks and bottle caps, right all the way to now, where he has five acres, his own baseball field, and people come to him. So he's made that.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:28:41]:
But there was a van and swinging coach that reached out to him and said, sam, we really need help. I need equipment for my boys. And what we realized was, it's not a money problem, it's an inventory problem, because they don't have the equipment over there. So my father went to the sports know with his big heart, put a bunch of equipment in boxes and started sending these soul packages is what we call them, because these packages land in these baseball fields. These kids open these packages and they just start freaking out because it's literally joy. It's new baseballs, new gloves, nets, bats, so on and so forth. But since then, he's been doing that for so much for himself. And I was like, man, if you really want to change the world, we got to figure out a way to pay for this.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:29:23]:
So that's where our nonprofit started from. And since then, we sent hundreds of pounds of equipment to Uganda, to Cuba, to Venezuela, here in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic. So it's been a phenomenal thing. It's so cool. At the end of the day, we give kids baseball, and they love it.

Kenny Lange [00:29:46]:
I love that. As somebody who grew up playing, I didn't play baseball, but played soccer, but just that team sport. I think there's so much that team sports can teach kids, and it really is a level playing field, pun maybe intended. I don't know that kids who we're in, the one percenters here just by virtue of being in America, right? But kids here can be playing the same sport, same equipment or something like that, have the same passion that kids in Uganda or Venezuela or somewhere else that maybe doesn't have all the affluent opportunities that we here in the states have. And it brings people together. It really speaks to that impact. And I can't think of a better, bigger impact than doing that for children. So I'm grateful for the work you and your dad are doing.

Kenny Lange [00:30:46]:
I still think it's awesome. Like, your dad's just like, out there. He's like, whatever. We're throwing baseballs, we're doing stuff. Like, he's still getting after it. So I hope I have his sort of enthusiasm when I reach his age. So with leading, like you said, it is a business. You might have some different people, you might have some different motivations as you've been on sort of this journey of developing your own expectations.

Kenny Lange [00:31:17]:
Like you said, your expectations were one thing when you got out, which is, what do these other people that I perceive outwardly seem successful? But maybe if you took a larger view of their life, it probably wouldn't mean success for you or something that's appealing to you now that you're a few years in. What has helped you? Maybe it's the embodiment, practices or other things to get more clarity on what success means for Sammy Torres Jr.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:31:53]:
Very good question. I would have to attribute it to proximity. And what I mean by that is, I truly believe proximity is power, and that means who you are close with is extremely powerful. We've heard it in different ways where the circle of your friends are ultimately going to influence where your life goes. And I think it was, first of all, getting into rooms that I'm not the smartest person in the room, getting into rooms that I just don't know what I'm doing. But I'm open enough to learning right now. That takes a little bit of having the personality to be outward, introverted personality. It might not be the same because it might be kind of daunting, but I anchored myself to people that were making impact in my own life, and then I could see in their own lives.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:32:51]:
But I will say that it's very difficult to go and just seek that there is a big piece and there's a big element to all this, to leadership, to business success, to life. The life secret is that we have to have an ability to trust the process to just like, one more good play, trust the process. Because there have been so many times where I have literally turned around. I've been digging a hole looking for gold, and I turn around and I just get out of the hole because I'm like, you know what? Not going to work. And little did I know, I was literally inches away from just knock, just crushing the gold. Then I got to a point where it's like, I'm going to do a little bit of everything. And I started digging a lot of shallow holes, but then I didn't have the focus or the bandwidth to dig them deep enough to really do anything with them. So being guided, having trust, and then really leaning into who I was spending my time with and then letting that work itself out, if you will.

Kenny Lange [00:33:57]:
I love that. Yeah. You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. You see different versions of that. If you hang out with five fit people, you're going to be the 6th. If you hang out with five wealthy people, you'll be the 6th. But it goes the other direction as well, right?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:34:16]:
Yeah.

Kenny Lange [00:34:20]:
I love the part you said about not being the smartest person in the room and taking that a step further, because a lot of people will say that, and I want to believe that. Most people believe that. They believe their own words when they say, yeah, I'm just trying to not be the smartest person in the room. It's like your actions would indicate otherwise, but taking it to the place to where it's like, I know it's a room, I want to be in, but I have no clue what's going on in here. That can be really intimidating. But it's sort of the thought that something great is typically on the other side of something that makes you really uncomfortable in a good way. Right?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:35:08]:
Yes.

Kenny Lange [00:35:08]:
Like, there can be something that makes you feel uncomfortable in a bad sense, but being in a room where you not just not the smartest person, but you don't even know how to hold a conversation about the topics yet, that's a difficult place to put yourself in. And one that, as I'm thinking about whoever's listening to this, maybe they're not the senior most leader. Maybe they're coming up. Maybe they're fresh into their entrepreneurial or leadership journey. They just got their first promotion. Right. I think it's natural for us to want to feel safe, secure, and smart. Nobody likes feeling dumb.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:35:51]:
Right.

Kenny Lange [00:35:52]:
But I think that there's a difference between stupidity and ignorance. Right. I don't know if you can fix stupid, but you can fix ignorance through education and conversations and things like that. So what helped you find the courage, you mentioned courage. What helped you find and hold on to the courage to be around people and be in rooms and be in conversations where you may not even know how to start weighing in?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:36:25]:
I get excited thinking about this.

Kenny Lange [00:36:29]:
I might have to stand up. I got a standing desk. I'll hit this button over here.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:36:33]:
Prepare for this. Answer what it was, and it's all trial and error, right? Everything is trial and error for me. It was the idea that I never knew that in my pursuit of trying to find something for myself that I was actually imprinting on others. Right. In a leadership role, you got to be bold. You have to be bold. You have to take risks, and you have to understand that there's room for honest mistakes. When you're bold like that, you allow yourself to have those honest mistakes.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:37:07]:
So what am I saying? Let's say you are interested in a particular industry, but you don't have any knowledge in that. So how do you carry a conversation? Simple. Be more interested than interesting. Right. So when you go to a networking event, it's almost like so many people want to talk about what they're doing and how they're doing and think, how do you even. And when you start a conversation like that, how do you know when to shut up? How do you know where you're supposed to, like, how do you know when Susie checked out? So when you're going into an environment, especially where you want to learn, be vulnerable, be honest. Hey, this is something I've always wanted to do. I'm new to this game.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:37:50]:
I've seen that you do this. Can you tell me a little bit about what excites you in this? And you start asking the questions and have them speak about themselves. Now, two things happen. One, you're going to be downloading the information. You're going to be affirming to yourself and your subconscious that you're doing something that you haven't done before. So it's going to kind of give you the credibility in the background to say who that kind of felt good. Maybe on the drive home, you're like, whoa, I talked to way more people than I thought. Or it could be the other way where you just had your hands in your pockets the whole time.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:38:16]:
Right. But what I mean by that is there might be people in your circle, there might be people in your family that want something very similar to you, and you're out there going and doing it, and unbeknownst to you, you'll never know. You will never know the imprint that you're putting on these people. And that's exactly how it is. Like leaders, it's the same thing I was telling, like, you're going to influence people to do more, to see more, to be more. And when you're actively going out there, you got to see it as two ways. Not only am I doing this for myself, I'm radiating this energy of the doing to people that are in my influence that see me. And it might encourage them to go do something that they want to go do.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:38:57]:
And you might never even known that it's come from you. But that's kind of the point, right?

Kenny Lange [00:39:00]:
Right. Yeah. It's not about who gets credit ultimately. Right? Especially if you take a longer view of time and history. Yeah. And sometimes you do get to find out and you're like, wait, what? I had no idea that doing this had influenced you to do that, and you were just trying to make moves. So if somebody listening to this says, this sounds great, I feel like I've been imitating a lot of people around me because it seemed from the outside like they were getting all the attention I wish I was getting or want to at some point get right. We're in an attention economy, but the way they're living, the way they're leading and going about things, doesn't resonate with what feels true for me.

Kenny Lange [00:39:52]:
Maybe not to dismiss their success or their definition, but it's not mine. So if somebody wanted to get started on really defining success for themselves, getting that level of clarity, finding that courage. What's a step, a first step somebody could take in the next 24 hours to start walking down that road and getting to the signal and getting out of the noise.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:40:18]:
Yeah, that's a good question. And I know that's to answer that question. To have some kind of tangible action is going to depend on who the person is. Right? Like, what are their interests? I think that I got asked a question a while ago. It's like, what is the importance of investing in yourself? Right. And I would probably say so much of the advice that it sounds weird saying I'm giving advice, but I just share what's worked for me, because the reality of it is to answer that question is one of the first things I did was I looked at who was in my circle, I looked at who was in my influence. And that means maybe something I'm inspiring to be. And then I try to understand the template of which they operate in, because when you understand a template of which they operate in, then you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:41:08]:
But everyone has some component of investing in themselves. That could be as much as taking the time to wake up 20 minutes earlier and write down in your write down to start writing to begin with and affirming to yourself, I am capable, I am worthy, I am these things. And now those are the typical affirmations that you hear. But one thing that I will say that I always offer anybody, and I use it as a benchmark of where someone is at their point in their life, I ask them one question. I was like, do you have an audible account? Can you listen to audiobooks? Because if you don't, there is so much information and so much inspiration that happens in those moments where I don't listen to the radio or the commercials that come with the radio any longer. I'm literally a university on wheels. If I'm on a car, I'm listening to an audiobook, I'm listening to this, something that's going to be putting myself there. Now, the cool thing about that is it's not free.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:42:09]:
The audible subscription is not free. I think it's $15 a month, and it comes with a credit for a book each month. But you have to commit to it. And you're like, kind of like, well, I don't necessarily know, but there's just something about taking an action into something that you want to do. And it doesn't really necessarily mean that the action that you're going to take is going to be what unlocks it. It's just the act of doing. So if it's something that you want to do, any kind of piece that you can do towards that will open. It's kind of like the jiggling the door handles opens the door, and then there's five more behind it.

Kenny Lange [00:42:43]:
Yeah. Sometimes taking that first step or action unlocks and makes available the opportunity that would never have presented itself prior to you taking that action. So it's almost like a step of blind faith. You just got to take the next step and the next step. This last year upped my audible subscription to get the two credits because I just kept getting book recommendations that were from people. I was like, you know what? And this book influenced. Okay, cool. I want to go straight to a horse's mouth, so to speak.

Kenny Lange [00:43:19]:
We'll link up audible. It's fantastic. And like you said, it's like ten to 15 or $20 a month, depending on the type of subscription that you want to have. But you have all, most of the world's recorded knowledge right there at your fingertips that you can listen to in the car. You can start getting fun with it. I listened to a book called the ruthless elimination of hurry, but I listened to it at, like, 1.7 speed. I was reading it with a group of other business owners, and I said, hey, asking for a friend. Is this contradictory, to listen to this book this fast? This was a phenomenal conversation.

Kenny Lange [00:44:05]:
I hope it's not going to be our last. I'd love to have you back, but this was super helpful. We're definitely going to link up some of the books that you mentioned and baseball face cares. But if somebody wanted to know more about you and your work or get in touch with you to ask you some follow up questions, where would you send them?

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:44:23]:
Yeah, everyone has Instagram. I'm on Instagram at Sammy Torres. S a m m y t o r r e s. I'm also on LinkedIn. Sammy Torres Jr. You can find us@baseballface.org it's literally baseballface.org altogether. That kind of shows a little bit about what we're doing on the baseball side, and that's how you get in touch with me. I'm always available.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:44:48]:
One last kind of thought, I was thinking when you were asking that last question was, I think the most important thing is recognizing our ability. And once you recognize your ability, then you're on fire. But that's the hardest part. The hardest part is recognizing your ability because there's so much self doubt that creeps in. There's so much impostor syndrome analysis, all these big keywords, right? But I would just say that everyone somewhere, if you're deep enough and intentional enough, someone recognizes your full ability. So that is where I would start. I would lean into someone that sees you for who you are so that you can get out of your own.

Kenny Lange [00:45:30]:
All right, Mike, I would drop the mic, but they're expensive. Sammy, thank you so much for being on the show and thank you to all of you listeners. I wouldn't keep doing this if it weren't for you. So I hope that this was helpful if you did find something of note and something that was helpful here. I deeply appreciate a like a subscribe a share, help more people find the benefits that you have found and I would be eternally grateful. But until next time, remember, change the way you think. You'll change the way you lead. We'll see you.

Sammy Torres Jr. [00:46:15]:
Bam. Close.