I relate to it a lot because, for one, with all the mud, and people, places,
and things we carry around with us.
Until we become aware and conscious of it, we are just muddying
up everything in our life.
Think of it like.
Today, we're speaking with Lawrence Harris.
He is a youth empowerment speaker and an author.
Lawrence, could you please introduce yourself and let people know just
a little more about you, please?
Well, firstly, it's fantastic to be here.
And a little bit about me is, first of all, I got into speaking when I was
fifteen years old, and now I'm nineteen.
So got into it very young simply because I realized that after overcoming my
struggles with things like childhood abuse and complex post-traumatic stress
disorder, which it's a bit more nuanced than typical PTSD as people are used to
hearing it, after overcoming that through years of therapy, journaling, and having
to build up that self-worth and self-love for myself, I realized I can now help
and inspire other people with this.
And help them learn what I had to figure out the hard way,
but they get the easy way.
And that's what I've been doing for the last four years and
it's truly been a blessing.
Well, you are very impressive, Lawrence.
After doing some research on you, being where you are at the age of
nineteen, uh, I, I gotta applaud you and, and good job for taking the
right steps to get where you are.
A lot of us, I didn't get that till I was fifty.
So you're well advanced in being good in mindset, and that's what it's about
is overcoming those past traumas.
And my first question is, How did you achieve it so young?
Well, the way I achieved it so young was all the stuff we're about to go into.
It began when I was twelve.
So prior to that, my childhood was pretty, pretty standard.
Um, wasn't in adverse poverty, but I wasn't in luxury.
I was in the middle area.
You know, two parent household for most of my childhood, even though my mom and
dad would get into a lot of arguments.
Up until the age of twelve, everything seemed pretty normal.
You know, I got bullied a lot in school because I was different, but that's,
that's something that, um, definitely left an impact too, because I didn't really
have friends until I was about eleven.
So most of my formative years, it was just me and my family.
Now at the age of twelve though, I'm sitting on this black couch, and my
dad would usually make us leave our phones in his car because at this time
him and my mom are completely separate,
he goes off lives his life with his wife, my mom goes off and lives her life.
And they have shared custody so me and my younger siblings are going back and forth.
But I needed to have my phone in the house to work on a school
project, and it's October 13th, 2019.
I can remember it that specific because it's my little sister's birthday.
My mom called my phone to wish my sister a happy birthday, and his wife sees that
she's calling and says to my dad, Are you going to let him talk to her in my house?
I guess it set something off in him, and he just looks at me with this look of
rage, like a frustration, like as if I'm doing something wrong.
And then he punched me in my left eye.
And at first I think this is just a mistake.
Is this some sort of frustration?
Did he not mean to do this?
Then he does it again, and at that moment a switch goes off.
And I was this twelve-year-old with all these hopes, and ambitions, and dreams
for the future, and now I am just frozen.
And it set into me that I have to protect my younger siblings now.
Everything related to me and my wellbeing, out the door.
Now my number one priority is, keep my little sister and my little brother safe.
And through that, it led on to years of me having to box away my own emotions
and my own thoughts about myself, to the point where I just became absolutely numb.
After about a year, he kicked me out of his house, but my little siblings
have to go there because custody laws are, they're just weird like that.
Even though the court, I showed them evidence, I had photo, video, everything.
Only after a year did they actually do something.
And when I was looking into my bathroom mirror, I started just asking myself, Why?
Because now me and my siblings were out of his house, we're living with our mom
full time, and I'm fifteen at this point.
And I just looked in my mirror and I asked myself why?
Why did he do this?
Why is it that the person who's supposed to be there and protect you
is the same one who hurt you the most?
Why don't I have that connection with my dad?
Why do I feel as if everyone's out to get me?
Why does it feel like I am unworthy and unlovable?
Just why?
And my therapist helped me work through it.
So the person you see in front of you now, I had to build this brick by brick.
And it wasn't just me, it took a, it took a team of people.
Because had it not been for my mom getting me into therapy, had it not
been for my therapist guiding me, had it not been for me taking the actions
I needed, and had it not been for all the people involved in keeping me
on a good path, I wouldn't be here.
So it really came down to, I got into everything young and got sick and
tired of being so sick and tired.
Yeah.
Yeah, I, I know the feeling.
You know, uh, about fourteen, fifteen years old, uh, my stepfather,
we, we just always clashed and he used to, uh, beat on me.
And I, I remember, the big one was, we were standing on the dock and
it was on the Clearwater River, and it's moving pretty quick.
It was Joe, myself, and our family friend, Speedy.
And Joe, my stepfather, thought that I had taken his wine bottle and he turned
and asked me, Where did you put my wine?
I want my wine.
And I told him, Joe, I don't have your wine.
And just outta nowhere, bam, into the rib cage, uh, cracked four of
my ribs and I landed in the river and it started taking me away.
You know, you can't breathe because your head's under water
and your ribs are caved in.
And Speedy grabbed me and yanked me out of the river and told Joe, Joe, you left
your wine in the truck, up at the truck.
And those are things I went through too.
So I understand that feeling and, you know, just for nothing.
And so I did not have the team of specialists to help me through all of
these navigable things that we have to go through to overcome what we went through.
Uh, it's, it's all about turning inward and understanding yourself, and who
you are, and why you are lovable.
That's what you outlined so well, and you articulate it so well.
I, I could not even imagine being able to tell people, how you do, at the age
I was, and it, it's just overwhelming.
It, it takes me back and I admire you.
I, I really do admire you for having the strength to do what it takes.
I turned to drugs and alcohol and that's where I found comfort
and that's where so many turn.
So that's why I really was interested when you showed up on the desk.
And wow, this from God right here.
So how, how do we help people understand it's okay to reach out for help?
Well, a big thing for me was, even though when my mom got me into therapy, part of
me, you know, you have this I don't trust anybody mentality because the person that
you trusted the most, hurts you the most.
So you kind of become like a stray cat.
Like, have you ever noticed when there's a stray cat, if you try to feed it,
it'll hiss at you and claw and run away, even though it wants you to feed it?
It's afraid to come close because people have hurt it before.
And it thinks, People hurt me, you're a person, you're going to hurt me,
or you have the capacity to hurt me and I'm going to hurt you before
you get the chance to hurt me.
We have to first off understand that.
If you're trying to help somebody and they're obviously, you know, going
through something major like abuse or drug addiction or a traumatic event in
life, you have to understand most of the time, at first, they're going to be very
resistant to you, and it's not personal.
They're just afraid of what could happen and you can't judge them.
Because when we feel the slightest bit of judgment and we're in that state,
we say, this person is out to get me.
They don't love me, and we create all these things in our head.
So what we first of all need to understand when we help them is that
we can only give as much as they are willing to accept on the first day.
You might only be able to tell them, I hope things get better.
That might be all they're receptive to.
So it just come with time and everyone moves at their own speed
and you cannot force somebody to move at the speed you want them to.
Yeah, that, that's huge.
So, you know, understanding that, you, you have to take time and be willing
to be empathetic with the individual.
And understand you, you have no clue what this person has been through.
Even though you might have been through something very similar to this, we all
react and respond differently based on the surrounding that we were raised in.
And it, it's interesting, you say you were kind of in the middle class
range when you were raised and I, I was below poverty and it's, it's
interesting the directions you take.
So I'm interested in what your support system was like back then
and what is it evolved to now?
Well, back then, so firstly, to chime in on the aspect of like financial class,
I recently read about how, depending on your day-to-day needs, you don't have
the ability to start thinking about how your level, ways of getting help.
Because if your worry is food, water, shelter, if that's where, it's called,
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, if you're focused on survival, your survival, you're
not thinking about psychological, up here.
You're focused on where's your next meal gonna come from.
So the thought of therapy, the thought of, um, self care practices, all the things up
here, it doesn't cross your mind because you're focused on the thing down here.
That's another thing that's important to know when trying to help somebody.
They may not have the ability to think about the higher level ways
of getting help because they're focused on right here, right
now.
Now to answer your question with my support system, back then when
I was twelve, my support system was just my mom, my, some of my
family members, and my therapist.
That was the main people.
Because they were the only ones I either talked to it about or the only
ones who I trusted enough to listen.
Because the trust was a really, really tough thing for me.
It's like you don't want to show people how you really feel, you don't want them
to know because you put on this tough guy mask and this don't get close to me
persona as a way of protecting yourself.
But if you keep your hand closed and tight, you can't receive any help.
And over the years that support system has evolved into multiple family
members who I've opened up to, myself, friends, relationships, even people
who I do, um, you know, speaking events with, or business, or people
in my close circle in that sense too.
Sometimes I'll let them know that, Hey, I need to reschedule
because I genuinely just don't have the energy for it right now.
That, that particular aspect of things right there is very huge, Lawrence.
Because if you're not thinking about yourself first, you
can't think about others.
And, and that's very hard for people to get.
I didn't mean to interrupt you, sorry.
Yeah.
And um, oh, no worries.
That actually just brought up another great point.
In that journey, you know, throughout what was actually seven years,
even though I'm nineteen, in that process, I had to learn that
self-care and self respect, self-love.
These things, they're not selfish.
It's, if you're not full of you, if you're not full of love for yourself,
if you're not full of care, if you're not full of energy in here,
you can't pour from an empty cup.
And I had spent years trying to pour from this empty cup.
In trying to be, you know, the big brother hero who keeps his siblings safe.
It led me to losing me.
It led me to this feeling that, I describe it to people like, imagine
if you're taking a really hot shower with no skin, or you're running on a
treadmill and the treadmill is made of sandpaper, but you can't get off of it.
Or you're stuck on, you're stuck in the desert.
And every time you get water, it feels good, but then you
immediately go back to being thirsty.
Um, and I had to essentially learn to love myself again.
But in the process of doing that, I can reflect and go, I can reflect back on
and realize that a lot of what I did in order to learn to love myself was selfish.
I wouldn't spend time with people, I wouldn't go hang out with anybody, I
wouldn't go to parties because I was trying to figure out what do I like?
What makes me happy?
What makes Lawrence feel good?
But I learned to find more healthier ways of doing that, I learned to
better integrate myself into community.
Because I had to take such a massive step back in order to take a step
forward and actually appreciate who I am.
Yeah, that, that's huge.
You know, a couple things come to mind with that.
Have you heard of the crab in the bucket syndrome?
Yeah, where people try to hold you back down.
That's right.
That, I, I encourage people to look that up if you don't understand
what that is, because that will help you understand my, my own
personal theory that I came up with.
And I call it the Muddy Shoe Life Theory.
And life is like you're a muddy shoe, and you're being trekked down a muddy trail.
This muddy trail are people, places, and things.
That mud gets very heavy.
You've walked down a muddy trail and that mud just cakes onto your feet.
Well, it gets heavy, so you have to find a rock and wipe the mud off.
And that allows you to be lighter and that allows you to keep traveling
down this muddy road of life.
So I, I like to share that with people because people, places,
and things get very heavy.
And if we learn to just stop and take a moment and wipe it off, the good mud,
you know, the people that really wanna be there with us, it's gonna be up in
the tread and it'll keep coming with us, but all that heavy mud is gone.
And you, you control that by controlling who you're around, what you put yourself
in, and just a little forethought about planning your life to what you
want, not what others expect out of it.
What's your thought on that, Lawrence?
I relate to it a lot.
Because for one, with all the mud, and people, places, and things we
carry around with us, until we become aware and conscious of it, we are just
muddying up everything in our life.
Think of it like you're carrying around dirt and you're carrying around
this baggage and luggage with you.
And everywhere you go, you're bringing that with you.
Into your new friendships, relationships, um, family dynamics, jobs, everything.
You're bringing you and everything you're holding onto with you.
And in that process you have to be willing to let it go, easier said than done.
Because sometimes those people or family members, you need, you
might need to cut off Aunts, uncle, nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters,
that might be what you need to do.
Those places could be clubs, it could be bars, it could
be people's birthday parties,
you might need to stop going to certain people's birthdays.
It might be a restaurant you like going to, because the people
that you know you shouldn't be around, they be hanging there.
You need to stop going to your favorite restaurant.
The things you need to stop doing.
For me, I used to obsessively play video games as a way of stress relief.
Like it was just a way to distract myself.
And eventually I realized this, so what I had to do was take the TV out of my room.
For the last two years, I have not had a TV.
Because I realized that nothing's wrong with the TV, but it's like the,
it's like the, uh, trigger point to doing a really bad habit.
And you have to be willing to leave it in the past.
Some people, they can just like do a little bit and they're fine.
Some people, they can do that.
I'm not.
I'm very, like, I dive headfirst into things.
Which is really good in terms of business if I dive head first into
outreaching to people and promoting myself and doing what I need to do.
But it also can be really bad if I get into a bad habit.
It's why I don't go to parties or hang out with certain people.
Because I know if I go to this place or I do something I know I'm not
supposed to, I'm diving head in.
So that mud analogy is really great for it because you have to know, what
are you about to stick onto yourself?
That's right.
And, and I love how you added to that, it, it was great.
Uh, discipline, you know, self-discipline, it really is the key, moderation.
And if you have that discipline value, it's easy.
But sometimes it's not easy for people to have that discipline and changing
habits can be very difficult to do.
So do you have any ideas on how we can ease that burden of stepping into the
discipline to help gain trust in yourself?
Well, the first thing I would say is make the barrier to success very, very small.
Because, let's say somebody wanted to quit drinking, for example.
And every single day, they drink an entire bottle.
They should set the bar for success at, how about instead, I only drink half?
Because they know that going from zero to a hundred percent perfect, people
do it, it's possible, but if you don't hit that zero to a hundred immediately,
you set the bar so high that you're going to fail and end up right back,
and now you're back in the cycle.
So what I did was in order to stop playing so much video games, in order to stop
hanging around people I know I shouldn't be, in order to improve the habit that
I have, I set the barrier pretty low.
And once I hit the low barrier, you extend it a little bit more and a
little bit more, and a little bit more.
And
no matter what, there's going to be times when the thing that you know you shouldn't
do is gonna start calling your name.
It's like a little whisper in the back of your head.
It's been two years since you did the thing you know you shouldn't have.
And it just whispers, you know, like, Hey, a little bit won't hurt.
Come back, you know how much you enjoyed it.
And you have to run from that thing.
You gotta run.
After a certain point, it gets easier.
After a certain point you can hear the whisper and you're just like, I'm
not gonna do it, and you won't do it.
That comes once you've already built a discipline.
But starting out, you have to stop setting the expectation all the way up here.
Just set it a little bit further than you were yesterday, and then
a little bit further the next day, and a little bit further.
Because if you never ran a mile a day in your life and somebody tells you
that, okay, tomorrow you have to run a mile, you're going to fail doing it.
But instead, if they say you have to run a hundred feet, you're like,
Oh, I could run a hundred feet, or I could run up the staircase, or I
could run to the end of the street.
So stop setting the bar so high.
I know that we all want to transform overnight, and we just wanna wake
up tomorrow and be David Goggins.
No, you gotta start step by step.
That's right.
Yeah, I, I agree a hundred percent.
I, I, I call it baby stepping, you know, but it's that incremental growth.
And, and then you, you have to reflect on that growth too.
When you have a win, cheer yourself.
I mean, big time.
And make sure you understand, I did that.
Because I think that's very important to help productivity in our life.
What do you think?
Yeah, very.
Because, uh, our brains are, we have like a negativity bias, it's just
born in there as a survival mechanism.
Because we still have the same brains that we had when we
were running around in caves.
Back then, a bad thing was a lot more important than a good thing.
The bad thing is don't eat those berries because you're going to die,
a good thing is eat these berries.
Our brains care a lot more about the bad thing than it does the good thing, because
it's still running on the same hardware as when doing the bad thing led to immediate
death and the good thing led to tomorrow.
So we have to, first off, become mindful of that and like you said, reflect on it.
Celebrate the good, find ways to remind yourself you achieved that
and be proud of what you've done.
I think journaling is a really great way people can do that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Learning to do that, uh, it's hard to write for some people.
And if, if you don't like to write, get an audio, uh, dictator.
You know, and dictate your thoughts to release your thoughts.
Get 'em, get 'em out so you're not holding on to 'em.
And, uh, find a good friend to talk it out with just as long as you
can, you know, look back and get accountability for what you've done.
Yes.
Um, and with that too, I would say for people that find it hard to write,
assuming that you are physically and mentally capable of writing,
set a timer for three minutes.
After that three minute timer goes off, you're going to wanna keep doing it
'cause you don't wanna stop mid-sentence.
You'll think, at least let me finish this sentence.
And before you know it, you'll do a bit more.
And after doing it for a long enough time, it becomes like a rhythm.
Like for me, I've been journaling since I was fifteen.
And I do miss some days here and there, but about ninety-eight percent
of the time I do it because after, I believe it's ninety days of doing
something every single day, it just becomes a part of the rhythm.
When you wake up, you tie the, your shoes the same way every single
time without even thinking about it.
You brush your teeth with the same hand.
When you see a pencil, you reach with it, with the same hand.
You drink cups with the same hand, you cook food the same way.
It's stuff you don't think about because you've done it so
much that it's just the rhythm.
Wake up, brush teeth, get dressed, shower, leave, you don't think about it.
So making it easier to do the good thing and harder to do the bad thing, after
a long enough time, you just think a whole lot less about the bad thing and
you think more about the good thing.
And you do more what you should do and less of what you shouldn't do.
That's right.
Lawrence, you, you are incredible.
So tell us, what is your plans?
Are, are you attending college?
What, what is your future for you?
Well, the future is just continuing to do what I already have been.
Now far as college goes, I thought about getting a degree.
Like, I thought about a psychology degree or something that could be
beneficial in my, uh, speaking, and my books, and things of that sort.
But after doing some deep thinking on it, I realized that it really wouldn't
be that beneficial to me specifically.
Since, if I'm in college for four years, that's four years I
can't be on the road speaking.
And I like to learn best through experiencing things rather than
sitting there and just having it told to me from a textbook.
Now as far as my, uh, speaking career, I've got, uh, great news on that.
Tomorrow, I'm actually speaking at a conference.
It's called the Northeastern Pennsylvania, yeah, Northeastern
Pennsylvania Youth Led Conference.
So for three days I'll be out traveling, speaking at an audience of about a hundred
people, which is the largest I've ever spoken to, and that'll be fantastic.
And before you know it, you're gonna see me on, maybe I'll do a TEDx.
So it's big things on the horizon.
Yeah, big things on the horizon.
But at the same time, I just enjoy each day.
That's a good way to look at it.
You know, life, life can be very difficult or very simple.
And the simpler we keep our life, it, it's, it's just easier to live with.
And it's really not about impressing people, it's about helping yourself first.
And then hopefully along the way, you're helping millions.
So what, what you're doing is, uh, pretty, pretty big, and that's self-empowerment.
So we have to be able to love ourself enough to empower ourself.
And if, if we have a plan and just tick the boxes as we go, the plan might
not always go as we write it down, but that's where you learn to adjust
for the hiccups and revise your plan.
So revisement, again, is very, very productive in a life.
What do you think about revising your plans if they don't work?
Oh, that's been huge.
Because, uh, when I was younger, I wanted to be a paleontologist.
I wanted to go dig up dinosaur bones, I absolutely loved dinosaur terrain.
Then I wanted to be a jeweler, then, well, technically I am an author, but at
a point in my life I wanted to be, like, think of Stephen King, Robert Green, that
kind of author where you are an author.
Yeah, you go on stages and speak from time to time, but your main title is author.
We don't know Stephen King as a speaker, even though he does do public speaking.
We don't know Robert Green as he's such a fantastic public speaker,
no, we know him as he writes books.
That's what I would have wanted to do at a point in my life.
There was another point in my life where I wanted to be like a fashion designer,
I wanted to make a clothing brand.
And throughout all of those things, every time I would sit back and
revise it and go, What did this have in common with everything else?
The underlying theme was I wanted to create something
that people will benefit from.
And the one thing I've always loved doing throughout my entire life, from
even being a baby, I started speaking full sentences at eighteen months.
Not like goo-goo, ga-ga, feed me, I'm hungry, mom sentences,
no fully articulate sentences,
um, since I was eighteen months.
And as I got older, I just fell in love with the idea of putting myself
out there, making YouTube videos, and TikTok clips, and all of that.
And that's where after revising, and revising, and revising,
I found what I truly love.
I love talking, I love helping people.
And as an empowerment speaker, I get to do both.
Because people often ask me about the difference between empowerment
speaker and motivational speaker.
They're similar, but motivation is focused on how I make you feel and how you get up.
You lead the event and you're hyped up.
You're like, Yeah, I'm gonna go work out for five hours.
I'm gonna go climb Mount Everest.
That's motivation.
Empowerment is you still get motivated, but the key point
isn't how you feel right now.
It's giving you the mental toolkit for, okay, here's how to feel
better over a long span of time.
And if you follow the recipe, you will bake the cake.
That is your goal.
It might not feel good, but you will love it a lot more than the motivation.
So putting all that together, my life's just helped me to
find a passion that lights me on fire and helps them to grow.
And it is beautiful.
Yeah.
And, and passion is a big part of it.
If, if you have a passion, you're gonna make things happen in your life.
So follow that passion, that, that's good advice for me.
Uh, is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners
before we get finished up here?
I would say one of the best piece of advice I've learned through
my life is, it doesn't have to make sense to everyone else.
We often think of our goals as needing it to make sense to other people.
And here's what I mean.
When I started speaking, I just had a smartphone, no microphone,
no camera, no lighting, I just had my iPhone and I had YouTube.
And I would just put my phone down up against the wall 'cause
I didn't even have a tripod.
I would just set it up against a wall, or a rock, or a water bottle, and
I would record myself talking about what I'm going through in my life.
Giving motivational messages, giving step by step understanding of how
to build self love and confidence.
And if you go back, there's a lot of ah, um, like, yeah, there's
a lot of filler words in there.
But the underlying message is really good.
But it didn't make sense to everybody else because they're like,
Why should I listen to this kid?
What, what does he have to tell me?
But over time, people who understand what I do and the message I'm
trying to give and the mission I'm on, they resonated with it.
So if you're somebody who you wanna start your own business, or you wanna
get into the gym, or even as simple as you wanna quit a bad habit, there's
going to be people who are going to judge and say, why are you doing that?
Why are you changing up?
Why are you not going out with us anymore?
Why are you always making those videos?
Why are you always sending emails?
Why are you doing that?
You have to learn to not listen to the doubt and the naysayers,
but also understand that sometimes they could be giving useful advice.
It's very, it's very case by case there.
But inevitably there are going to be people who understand you
and what you're trying to do.
Not everybody speaks like Tony Robbins, not everybody is Les Brown.
I'm Lars, Lars has his way of doing it.
There are chefs out there who, some people love Jamaican food, other people hate it.
The people who like what you do are going to find you and those are your customers.
The people who don't like you, you don't have to make them like you.
And that applies to friendships, relationships, business
opportunities, jobs, everything.
The people who like you, like you, the ones who don't, don't.
And it, you don't have to make sense to everybody else.
The last thing too is, just remember, always love yourself.
Because it's very easy to lose yourself in comparison on social media.
And this person's car is faster than mine, and this person has more money
than me, and they're taller than me, and their life look so fantastic and amazing.
Nobody shows you the bad parts, nobody showed the bad parts.
So just love yourself and remember you matter.
Even if you don't have the car, or the money, or the height, or the
status, or whatever, you matter because you're human and whatever, you're a
child of whatever God you believe in.
That's right.
And, and you do have something to offer other people, you just have to
be willing to step into that position.
And, and take the baby steps and build it up.
Lawrence, you've been a fantastic guest today.
How can people reach out and get involved with you?
You can get in contact with me through my social media.
All of them are Lawrence C Empowers, L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E, letter C dot
Empowers, E-M-P-W-O, E-M-P-O-W-E-R-S.
Yeah, Empowers.
Okay,
make sure I spelled that right.
You could also find me on my website, lawrencecharris.com,
and my books are available on Amazon under lawrencecharris.com.
You could just Google my name, everything that I have out, Lawrence
C. Harris, or Lawrence C Empowers.
Very easy to find me.
We will collect it all and put it in the show notes.
And I wanna say thank you, Lawrence for a fantastic voyage
in a great conversation today.
Thank you, I appreciate being here.
Thank you for joining us today.
If you found this podcast enlightening, entertaining, educational in any way,
please share, like, subscribe, and join us right back here next week for another
great episode of the Dead America Podcast.
I'm Ed Watters, your host, enjoy your afternoon wherever you might be.