My team and I are passionate about connecting people to their passion, for a purpose and creating fulfillment in their lives. I, personally am so passionate about this because I walked through a stage in my life where I stopped dreaming. Though that season was scary and unknown, it was the start of The Winning Network. Check out the story below!
I remember the moment very clearly. I was 1.5 years away from being done with my 12 year Pilot commitment with the United States Air Force. It was at this point in my career that my peers, Commanders, and friends began to ask you the same question: are you staying in for 20, or are you getting out? I remember it so vividly because the question hit me like a brick to the chest. If it is possible for 1000 epiphanies to hit you in a single millisecond, that would have been my moment.
I realized in that instant, I didn’t know what was next in my life. I was a man with no plan, no goal, no aspiration, no dream. I remember standing there dumbfounded with these life-altering thoughts storming my mind. Somewhere along the way, I had become so focused on accomplishing the “here and now” and the Air Forces approved “next steps to success” that I had stopped listening to the dreams that dwelt in my own heart. I had allowed those visions for the future to be silenced by the well-intended advice of what I “should be doing” to “stay the course for Command.” It was at this moment I realized, I had stopped dreaming years ago. I was a man who had accomplished all I had set out to do and had nowhere else to go. I lacked vision, expectation, and even a single goal. In my own rush to accomplish the day-to-day, I forgot where I was going in my life.
As terrifying as this moment was for me, I have grown to realize, I am not the only one to have experienced such a life-changing moment. As I have shared my experience with friends, family members, and co-workers, I have grown to see that this significant emotional event or one like it has impacted almost everyone I have come across. All of us who have been speechless in its wake have unfortunately suffered these mind-melting realizations seemingly alone with few places to turn for help, but not anymore!
That is where The Winning Network was created. What started as a need I longed for in a season that I was so lost, turned into a business to help others facing similar struggles plus so much more. At The Winning Network, our focus is not to help our family reach a peak of accomplishment, raise a victory flag and walk off the field of life, but instead to redefine what it means to “Win” altogether. At The Winning Network, “Winning” is not about reaching a desired state of being or result, but instead establishing a continued process of personal improvement and growth in which there is never an end state of success, however a continued state of fulfillment throughout the iterative process of constant growth. Those who merely desire to wage the war of goal setting, defeat the objective and raise their personal banner of “Mission Accomplished” will find no satisfaction, nor fulfillment in the grassroots of The Winning Network. Victory is not found in a result, but instead, in the process.
