Shane Jacob

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of The Horsemanship Journey Podcast. I'm Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be with us today. Today, I'm excited to present Robert J. Hunt. Robert is the accountability guy, and he's also the co-author of the book Nobody Cares Until You Do. He's a business owner who helps leaders remove the things that keep them from being their best. He's also an executive coach who runs CEO peer groups. He's been married for 25 years to his wife, Kathy, and has two children. He's passionate about his faith, his purpose, his family, and his quest to help people be their best. Robert, thank you so much for taking your time to be with us today.

Robert J. Hunt
Thank you, Shane, for having me on your program.

Shane Jacob
Right on. Well, tell us a little bit more about you. That’s kind of short. Tellus your story, where you came from, and how you got to be doing what you’re doing today.

Robert J. Hunt
I grew up in Southern California and moved to Texas 14 years ago. My whole quest has been to live my life effectively, as best I could, without having a lot of guidance. My parents were divorced when I was a freshman, and we had kind of a rough childhood. So, I think I had to learn the hard way pretty much everything I've learned in life. I think I missed a lot of opportunities because of a lack of vision and purpose in my life when I was young. I was quite lazy. I watched an awful lot of television and didn’t seem to care much about anything. I just did the very least I had to do to get by.

As I got out into my career and life in general, I realized that doesn’t cut it. I had to learn the hard way that people were expecting me to show up and do something—do what was expected of me—but also to give myself the opportunity to be awesome if I really wanted it. I had to learn what that looked like and how to own that. That’s where accountability was at the core of what really drove those decisions over the years.

Shane Jacob
Yeah, tell us about that. How did you get to be the accountability guy?

Robert J. Hunt
I think someone has to be the accountability guy. Someone has to own it. We don’t really do accountability in our world very well. I think everybody would say, "I’m very accountable. I have a job; I have a house." But those are actually just responsible actions. Those are things you do because you’re supposed to. That’s the bare minimum in life. Showing up is often all you’re expected to do. But when it really comes down to the idea of what a great life could be like—whether it’s a great marriage, a great job, or a great company—that’s where accountability is the differentiator.

Over the years, I’ve seen so many people not do accountability well, even my beautiful wife Kathy and I. We made some really bad decisions in our journey, all leading up to 2019, where we really had to realize we needed to take ownership of our lives. We had to stop blaming God, the world, and everyone else for our problems. We needed to own it. And we did. That was a huge turning point for us in our marriage, in our finances, and in my business—everything—when I realized the difference between just showing up and owning it. So, I’m the accountability guy because I want everyone to understand the freedom and power that comes with having a life that is truly accountable.

Shane Jacob
Amen to that. Right on. So, one of our four core principles in the Stable Living Program that we use is personal responsibility. We call it our ‘personal horsepower.’ So, this is a big subject for us. You know, what is a big subject? I’ve been into ownership and responsibility. It seems like I’ve tried to be aware of it for a long period of time. Then, a year or two ago, I ran across a guy giving a speech or a book, and he said, "Well, here’s 16 facets," and it was just like things that I hadn’t even thought of that are related to this subject and are tied to our results. So, tell us about what it means to be accountable in life.

Robert J. Hunt
You know, in the simplest terms, accountability means you own it. What happens in life is when we realize that there’s more to just showing up and that the world expects us to own it, the first thing we do is try to get out of it. We don’t really notice that because that’s just the way the world normally works. But in the simplest terms, if you were alone and there was no one else to do it, you’d figure out it’s yours. But because we live in community and we’ve grown to expect that if I don’t do it, the government will provide. If I don’t do it, someone at my church will step up. If I don’t do it, then my spouse will cover this. As we continue to live this life where we just weasel out of things, we’re actually putting ourselves in a victim mode. And I don’t think anybody wants to be a victim, but in the way that you handle it, you put yourself in a victim mode. And when you do that, life is miserable because everything happens to you and nothing happens because of you.

It’s very much like, "I’m stuck and everything’s bad." Those are people, you know, who are just angry at the world. They’re constantly complaining about something. Nothing ever seems to go right for them. Well, a lot of that is because of how they look at the response to the world that comes to you. We always say life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you respond to it. And I grew up having to make a choice as I got older. I didn’t have a dad who was involved in my life in a good way. We were very poor, and I grew up, I got married, I got divorced, everything fell apart, and I went through a bankruptcy. I could be bitter the rest of my life. But there comes a point in your life when you really step back and you go, "Wait, nobody cares. Nobody cares if I’m broke, fat, miserable, in a horrible marriage, running a crappy business with horrible kids. Nobody cares unless I do."And when I care enough to do something about it, I actually start the journey towards accountability, where I can have the life that I really want. And I am focused on doing that because I’ve made a decision to own it.

Shane Jacob
Right on. Do you think—now, you touched on this—but do you think that we’re just not accountable? You said that, you know, it’s not a big thing in our world. Do you think that the reason people, and that we, are just—we’re not really aware of it? I mean, we really haven’t been taught to take ownership, and it’s not necessary to survive in this world. Is that what you think?

Robert J. Hunt
Well, certainly, the world has created a lot of outs. At school, we start with our kids when they’re young. When they’re very young, we say, "Put away your toys, eat your dinner, it’s time to go to bed." We tell them what todo, and we show them that if they obey, then life is good. And if they don’t obey, we spank them or we put them in time-out or we take away a toy. There’s some responsibility, there’s some action there. But as you get older and you get more freedom, you figure out very quickly that you can weasel out of a lot of stuff.

You can come home and tell your parents, "My teacher’s a jerk. He doesn’t communicate well. I have this boss, they’re horrible. I have this neighbor, he’s a jerk." And we can have all these reasons and excuses forwhy life isn’t going the way we want it. The whole world goes, "Yeah, yeah, you’re right. That’s horrible, that’s frustrating." And if you’ve got a buddy who’s got a horrible marriage, it’s rare that people go, "Dude, that’s because you’re a jerk." They go, "Yeah, your spouse is a jerk." They’re very quick to play along with whatever you say. And all that does is keep us as a victim and make us helpless.

So, I think that’s kind of the way our world is these days. Look at all the angry people pointing fingers: "Did you vote for Trump? Did you not vote for Trump? Do you wear a mask? Do you not wear a mask?" Whatever side you’re on, "I hate you." And we’ve come to this place where all we’re doing is being angry at everybody and nobody’s showing up and owning it. We used to turn to the church. We used to turn to friends, but they’re not therefor us anymore. They can’t make us behave anyway. So, at some point, you have to own your own junk, and that’s what accountability is.

Shane Jacob
Right on. So, it sounds like there are benefits, but before you tell us all the benefits of being accountable, what are the steps? How do you go about making a change? If you can recognize that maybe I’m blaming or making excuses, or I can see that I’m not fully taking responsibility or being accountable, how do you go about getting it done?

Robert J. Hunt
Yeah, we outline this in our book Nobody Cares, Until You Do. The book really tells all the stories of the things that we went through that helped us learn this and to model it in our lives. But we say that when someone realizes they’re accountable, the first thing you do is blame. Blame doesn’t really fix anything; it just makes us mad. Now I’m mad at the government, mad at my teachers, mad at God, mad at everybody. And nothing is getting me better; I’m just mad.

If that doesn’t work, then we make excuses. We make excuses for the journey we’ve had and excuses for why we didn’t do something because we didn’t know, or it wasn’t fair. And all these little excuses just take away the initiative to do anything about it because we have some excuse. “You’re late for this meeting?” “ Yeah, traffic was really bad.”  I mean, it’s the simplest things. We’re quick to make an excuse.  

And so, if blame and excuse don’t work, then we just say, "I can’t." "I can’t do that. That’s too hard. That’s too awkward. That’s too uncomfortable. That’s outside my comfort zone," which is another word for fear. And so, we just say we can’t, but what we really mean is we won’t. If we had to actually say, "No, I don’t want to do that, I won’t do that," then people would look at us like we’re being stubborn or foolish. But when we say we can’t, they go, "Yeah, yeah, that’s hard for you. I can see why you can’t." And again, it gives us the out to not own it. And if all those three things don’t work, then we just wait and hope.

That’s where my beautiful wife and I were in 2019. We owed $90,000 in credit card debt. That doesn’t count the house or the cars. And we were miserable. It was affecting the way we looked at the world. We were blaming God, blaming each other. We were angry at the business, angry at the economy. And it wasn’t until September of 2019 that we finally said, "Enough." Nobody cares if we’re miserable in our lives unless we care enough to do something about it. And so we did. We put our house up on the market and decided to sell it. We had a lovely home here in North Texas, and we ended up selling the house, taking all the money and equity, paying off all our debt, and downsizing to this rental that we live in now—this lovely little home—and we started over. By March of 2020, we had paid off all our debt, and we were on a new journey. The freedom and peace we had at that moment was remarkable. But it wasn’t until we owned it that we saw the power of accountability.

Once you decide all those things, you’re aware of it, and you realize it’s yours to own, then it’s easy. Acknowledge the reality of where you are. Embrace the suck. It’s going to suck, because life is a challenge either way, but I’d rather have a challenging journey fixing my problems than a challenging journey staying as a victim. So embrace the suck, find a solution, and make it happen. Those solutions appear almost magically when your head is free from all the junk that holds us back and confuses us. When you can get clarity and confidence, because you’ve kicked something’s butt and you’re willing to go out and try, now I’ll go to marriage counseling, now I’ll lose weight, now I’ll work on my faith. All these things that you were angry about or didn’t want to work on—now you have the taste of success, and it fuels more and more accountability in your life.

Shane Jacob
Yeah, right on. And there are more benefits. I mean, if I’m not totally sold on this idea of accountability, because it sounds kind of hard, what’s the gain? I mean, you’ve talked about it, but I’m just saying, is there anything else to gain here? What’s the total benefit?

Robert J. Hunt
Yeah, sure. I think the best core benefit I could ever mention is freedom. Because when you’re a prisoner to your circumstances, it’s miserable, and you can’t go do anything. You have no hope and no future. But when you realize that you have the power to change everything because you own everything, we say in the book, “When you take accountability for everything in your life, you have the opportunity to change anything in your life.”  

So, if you’re not happy with your marriage, if you’re not happy with your relationships or your weight or your finances or your business, whatever it is, that’s why in the book we put these satisfaction assessments. Where we ask people, "Fill out here honestly, how satisfied are you in your life?" If you say, "I’m not happy in this area," then the question is, "Okay, what are you going to do about it?" And we want you to be honest in that area, because if you’re not honest, you’re just lying to yourself, and you’re not going to do anything about it. But if you really are honest and you say, "I don’t like this," great. Now, what are you going to do about it? Don’t blame, don’t make excuses, don’t say "I can’t," and don’t wait and hope. You own it and say, "Okay, what am I going to do here?"

And I’m telling you that the joy and peace you have in your life when you truly own it is incredible. I own every bit of my life. I don’t control it all. There’s an awful lot that happens to me that I have to constantly deal with. I didn’t plan for COVID. I didn’t plan for people to quit their jobs. I didn’t plan for things to go south, but I can respond to it and own it. And when I do that, I still remain powerful and in charge of everything going on in my world.

Shane Jacob
Right on. Right on. That is empowering. Robert, a lot of us can see that, but it seems like this is a learned thing. Because it doesn’t seem like you automatically come by it as your default. I think our default is just to make excuses because it appears to be easier to have a way out of accountability. How do we get our children, how do we get our employees, who are constantly coming up with excuses, how do we help them understand this and be accountable themselves?

Robert J. Hunt
Yeah, whether it’s your children or your employees, the same rule applies. Nobody can hold anyone accountable. All you can do is try and create a world where they want to be accountable. Because if you say, "I’m going to hold you accountable for this," and they don’t do it, what are you going to do? Fire them? They’re your kids. You’re stuck with them. So you have to think, "Am I going to take away all their privileges and punish them constantly?" At some point, they’ve got to own it. Then, when they get older and they’re old enough to move away from you, all they’ve done is left you. They’re still not accountable.

So what you want to do is help them by the example you set in how you own it, to see the power, freedom, and joy that come with a life that is accountable. If your children watch you and if your employees watch you and they look at you rocking it because you own it—not that everything’s perfect, not that everything’s easy, and not that everything goes the way we planned it to go—but that whatever comes our way, we’re going to own it. We’re also going to acknowledge that all our actions have consequences.

Today’s world, you can do whatever you want, and it seems you can get away with it. You can go on social media and just light someone up, say all these horrible things, and get away with it. Maybe they don’t come over to your house and punch you in the face, or if they do, you can say, "I’m really sorry, I didn’t know." We just live in a world where our words don’t matter anymore. So, if we’re going to really teach our kids or our employees that there’s a level of accountability, we have to model it. But it’s so powerful, and it’s so freeing. When you’re truly accountable, life is way better. It’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. It’s freedom, it’s peace, it’s power. And if you can own it and you can model it, other people will follow you. They’ll want to be like you.

Shane Jacob
Right on. Model it. Perfect. So, you deal a lot with business leaders and thought leaders. You have these CEO peer groups. Tell us a little bit about that and tell us about the people that are in these groups with you and how they go about life—the traits of the leaders, if you will.

Robert J. Hunt
Yeah, a lot of the book came from all these years of being in peer groups and leading peer groups. I bring business owners and CEOs together every month and we create the opportunity for accountability. Nobody can hold anyone accountable, so when some CEOs are in the room with another CEO and they say, "I’m having this cashflow issue, and I’m looking at this issue," they don’t tell them what to do, and they don’t make sure they’re doing it. They share what they’ve done so the other person can see an example. Like I was saying before, we model the behavior.

Being in a group like that, where people are being open and transparent, vulnerability is required for true accountability. You have to be willing to be honest and say, "I don’t know what I’m doing here. I have all these problems." How can a CEO ever know everything? The world is constantly changing. If you’re a business owner and you’ve got dozens of employees, every year there’s a new tax law, there’s a new HR law, there’s a new cybersecurity threat. There are all these problems with banking regulations. You have to know everything. And whatever you did on top of that is the normal thing you did to make money. You’ve got to know all this stuff, and you have to be so smart. It’s exhausting.

So having these CEOs in these groups gives them a place to get encouragement, support, help, wisdom, and accountability—if they want it. If they’re radically transparent and open with each other, they can say, "Hey, I’ve got a problem, and here’s what I’m working on." Everyone can share and help them, but they still own it. It’s still their journey. We’re just there to support them in the process.

Shane Jacob
I don’t know. In dealing with a lot of us, when we look to business leaders and these CEOs, are there any other traits that they have that have put them at the top of their game?

Robert J. Hunt
Yeah, I would say for the CEOs that I work with, there’s a common thread of five things. There are a lot of traits, but the top five that I’ve narrowed down are:

1. Great CEOs are always learning. Like I mentioned, the world is constantly changing. If you’re not keeping up with what’s going on, then you’re falling behind. You don’t have to know everything. That’s why you hire employees and let them do the work they’re supposed to do. But you’ve got to know whether or not they’re snowing you. If they’re just coming in and telling you nonsense, you’ve got to say, "Wait, wait, that’s not right."
2. They’re constantly making decisions. These leaders don’t always make the perfect decision, but they make a decision. Making decisions, especially the hard     ones, is part of the responsibility.
3. They own it. When they make a decision, it’s their decision. They take accountability. They don’t pass the buck. And because they own it, they have the power to     change it if it doesn’t work. A lot of times, it doesn’t work. We learn by experience. Sometimes we make a decision with the limited information we had, think, "This is what I know," and make a decision. It doesn’t work? Fine, here’s a different decision.
4. They’re constantly pouring into others. When I meet a business owner who is the busiest employee in the company, they’re capped. They’re the bottleneck. They can only get as much done as can pass through their hands, and they’re holding the company back. If they have a heart attack and die, the company’s screwed, and all those people lose their jobs. You’ve got to step back enough from the workings of your business to look around and see who’s struggling. "She’s really struggling; I need to pour into her." "He’s really having a hard time; I need to help him." You pour into people so they can do their job better.
5. CEOs drive results. They’re not doing the work; they’re driving the results by pouring into their team, creating strategies, and planning. If you step back far enough from your business to not be in the weeds all the time, you can look around at the horizon and go, "We need to go there next." You drive the team toward where you see the vision going, but you can never get there if you’re busy doing all the work. If you want to create a company that can scale and sustain, you’ve got to stop being the busiest employee on the team. Step back, pour into your team, and let them get the work done while you drive the results by encouraging and     challenging them.

Shane Jacob
That’s great advice. Those are good observations. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about decision-making, because the things you just said—the five traits of CEOs—those are things that we can all do, whether it's for cooperation in our homes, in the people we work with, or whatever. But as far as making decisions, it seems like making a decision is often what holds us back. Why do you think we don’t just go ahead and do it? It seems like people who are really successful make decisions pretty hastily.

Robert J. Hunt
Well, they make them timely. They make them with confidence, but they don’t know if it’s going to work. I mean, they don’t. I guarantee you, everyone in February of 2020 had a plan for what the year was going to look like. I know so many people who started a business the month the world shut down. There are so many variables outside our control. More things are out of our control than we really recognize.

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What causes leaders stress is the desire to control everything. You can’t control most things. The reality is you have to make the best decision you can in a timely manner. As long as you have a vision of where you’re going and you’re willing to take a risk, you’ll make good decisions most of the time. But they make a lot of bad decisions, too. They’ll tell you in our group that they’ve blown it. I have one client who’s shared all the millions of dollar she’s lost because of bad decisions he made. He talks about it to encourage others to take risks. He’s also made a lot of millions by making good decisions.

What’s the batting average of a great baseball player? Like 300, right? So, if you’re batting .300, you’re a hero. That means 70% of the time, you strike out. We forget that we’re going to strike out. Don’t be afraid to take a risk. Successful leaders are confident enough to take the risk and then own it when it doesn’t work out, because we’ll come up with a better plan.

Shane Jacob
Awesome. Right on. Right on. The last trait you mentioned was kind of the vision and guiding the vision. Even when we look at that from an individual perspective, I was wondering if you could comment on defining our purpose for ourselves and also defining a purpose for the people that we lead. How do we go about defining our purpose in life?

Robert J. Hunt
I think the number one responsibility of a CEO or business owner is to create a clear and compelling vision that the rest of the team will get excited about. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs talks about, at the very bottom, we need food and shelter. As we move up, we need affirmation and positive contributions to our psyche. But at the top is self-actualization. We want people to stay with our company because they feel needed, important, and fulfilled through their work.

So, you have to create an environment where people can self-actualize in the company. It really comes down to your vision—creating a place where people want to do work they’re passionate about, with people they enjoy working with. If you don’t have at least two of those elements, you’ll always be spending more money to keep people or dealing with high turnover.

If you don’t know the vision for why you’re even there, how are your employees going to get excited about the job they have? I could go make money over here. There’s always another job that pays more, usually. So, it comes down to you owning a vision for your life.

My purpose in life, at the core, is to honor God through the life He’s given me and the blessings He’s poured out to me. Second to that is my personal purpose, where I help people remove the obstacles that keep them from being their best. A level below that is the day-to-day activities of loving my wife, serving her, raising my kids, and being a good neighbor and friend. And then comes the work I do. Those are the opportunities that drive my behavior, but it really starts with honoring God through what I do.

You have to find your own purpose. There’s a great book called Dare to Serve Leadership, written by Cheryl Batchelder, the former CEO of Popeyes Chicken. She turned that company around by practicing servant leadership. In the back of her book, she outlines how to define your personal purpose in life. It’s a combination of the journey you’ve been on, the values you have, the skills and strengths you’ve developed through tools like the Strengths Finder Survey, and the journey you’re on now.

Whatever way you go about doing it, you need to know why you’re here and what’s going to get you out of bed every day. If you’re not excited about it, don’t count on your employees to be excited about it.

Shane Jacob

Yeah, that’s great. That’s true. It’s true. Robert, just wondering, I don’t know if you want to leave us with a little bit more about your book or what would you like to leave us with? Any last thoughts for The Horsemanship Journey today?

Robert J. Hunt

I think I wasted a lot of years of my life telling myself I couldn’t do something. And I think a lot of people, after COVID and all the beatdowns we’ve had the last few years, have kind of resolved that they’re not going to be able to live the life they really want. They’re just trying to optimize the crappy life they ended up with. I don’t believe that’s really living. I certainly think that we’ve been blessed to be in America. And right now, if you’re watching this podcast, you’re richer than most of the people on the planet.

You probably have some really high-tech computer in your pocket and the ability to stop and watch a video, whereas most people out there are just looking for food and a safe place to sleep. So we’re very blessed. And I think we need to own that. We need to look at the things we’ve been blessed with and be fired up to do something with them. You have the opportunity and the ability to live the life you really want. Take the satisfaction assessment.

You can go to my website. You don’t have to give me your information at all. Go to NobodyCaresBook.com and take the satisfaction assessment online. Be honest with yourself. Are you living the life you really want? The marriage, the relationship with God and friends, your finances, your health—are you really living the life you want?

As you score that, step back and ask yourself, "Okay, I’m not in these areas. Now what are you going to do about it?" Know that you have the ability to pursue that. Even if it’s been a beatdown, there is still hope if you own it.

So, I just want to encourage people: Don’t give up. Don’t live a mediocre life. Live one that’s full of purpose, where you find joy and value in everything you’re chasing, because it’s way better—way better—when you own it.

Shane Jacob

One more time, how do people reach you and find out more about you?

Robert J. Hunt

Yeah, you can go to our website, NobodyCaresBook.com, and you can buy the book there. You can talk to me, you can send me a message on there. I’d love to hear from people if they’ve heard this message.

I’ve also created a unique website landing page, NobodyCaresPod.com for podcasts (P-O-D). If you go there, there’s a contact form. And if you fill out the contact form with the code word ‘horseman,’ I will mail you a copy of my book for free. As long as you’ll read it and you really want it, I’d be glad to give you a copy of the book. I’ll send it to the first two people who fill out that form and send it to me. I’ll mail you a copy of the book at no cost.

Shane Jacob

Right on. That’s a great offer. Ready, go, guys—get your free copy! Robert, thank you so much for taking your time to be with us today. We appreciate your time, your thoughts, your advice, and your wisdom. We wish you continued success.

Robert J. Hunt

Thank you so much, Shane. This was a great, great, great show.