Speaking and Communicating Podcast

I struggle with my identity, I struggle with my confidence, but once I went on that road to discovery, understand what are my values, understand what are my standards, things that makes my character who I am, and I could believe there's nothing that could shatter that.

That's what helped me gain and define the identity of the person that I wanted to be and the person that I am now today.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert Angela.

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Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Michael W.

Allison, who is a military veteran, is an author, podcast host, and entrepreneur.

Michael has had such a transformational journey, which we are all looking forward to hearing about on this show.

So before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Michael.

Hey Roberta, thanks so much for having me on your show.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome.

Where in the US are you?

I'm in Florida.

You're down below me.

I'm in Georgia.

Welcome to the show.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure.

No doubt.

I'm obviously Michael Allison.

I'm the founder and CEO for the Adversity Academy and a kid that was born in Jamaica, raised in South Florida, spent some time in the military.

Then from there, I got into corporate.

So work on the railroad for a little bit, work for the government for several years, and then work for Florida Atlantic University to work with veteran students.

And then eventually, I said I wanted to have a change of shift, change of career.

So I got into entrepreneurship.

So I bought a franchise, run a construction company for a couple of years.

And then after selling that company, I decided to start the Adversity Academy, where I could take all of my life experiences that I faced, to go back out and just help some people get on that path of transformation, to help them develop some clarity and to help them just discover that blueprint and that purpose and mission that they're trying to create for themselves.

When you talk about adversity and founding the Adversity Academy, which is something that I think all of us go through obviously different levels, but are there adversities or experiences that you are free, you feel okay to share with us today?

Sure, no problem.

You know, adversity, I would say that I'm no stranger to it as things are happening in my life, and I was just going through it, and I was one to bottle those emotions and those thoughts and those feelings in to not actually talk about them.

But it was not until as of late or recently that I felt much more comfortable, vulnerable to be transparent about my story.

And my story was one that started in Jamaica.

We went through a flood, we went through a hurricane, left us homeless.

And I saw how my mom and dad handled those situations, and they didn't complain about it.

They just became adaptable and flexible in regards to figuring things out.

And I say that as in like, obviously they've built a house, they've built and created things for their kids.

And to see a flood and hurricane take it in matter of a couple of hours, and now you have to rebuild and start over, they did that.

And without a wink, they've put together whatever they had to do, and they figured it out.

So I came to the United States in 1988, and the first night that I came to America, I was molested by a family member.

Furthermore, I joined the Boy Scouts a couple of years later, took a trip to Washington, DC and we all, all of the boys and I stayed in a hotel with our scout masters, and the same thing took place inside of a hotel room in Washington, DC.

A couple of years later, I was playing high school football, had hopes and dreams of going to the NFL, had an offer from the University of Wisconsin.

I tore my ACL and MCL in back-to-back years.

Coincidentally, I lost those opportunities to go to the University of Wisconsin.

Due to some of the financial restraints that was within my family, I decided that the next option, instead of putting a burden or a strain on my family, was for me to figure out a way to do something else with my life or with my career at that time.

And the option for me was the United States Marine Corps.

So I joined the military.

I served for eight years.

What I would say for those eight years, I was in during the time of 9-11.

And after 9-11 hit, I knew that I may go to war.

And going to war, I experienced the worst of the worst, seen the worst of the worst.

And I quickly learned that complacency will kill you, and you have to be vigilant, and have to always be prepared.

The first night that I was there, we had incoming.

The first mission that I went on, I was shot at and seen bullets landing behind me, and seeing, you could see the dust and the sparks from bullets landing.

And then the last mission that I was on, I was delivering supplies to my unit.

And as soon as I finished delivering the supplies, a car bomb, a VBID car bomb comes up.

It hits the Humvee next to me.

My tank gets hit and gets tilted.

I get jolted as half of my body is outside of my tank.

Shrapnel hit me above the eye, injured my shoulder, and knocked me out inside of the tank.

Obviously, I came back too from there, but the worst part of it all from that car bomb explosion, my gunny was covered up in smoke.

The driver for that Humvee was my best friend, and he died, had to put him in a body bag.

Our doctor lost half of his leg, and the driver lost half of his face.

Obviously, that stuck with me and left a traumatic memory ingrained in my mind as seeing war truly, truly in itself right then and there is something that you can never unsee, unerase, forget about.

I got out of the military after that.

After serving and seeing all of those things and experiencing those things, war affects people in different ways, and it affected me tremendously horrible.

And I got out.

And when I got out, I worked on the railroad, and I thought I was running away from doing that type of job or that experience.

Well, five years later on the railroad, I see two suicides, and it immediately brought me back to that day.

I eventually got out of the railroad because of seeing that type of experience.

But sadly for me, I didn't really handle that situation well.

I was going through divorce at the time, and at the same time I was going through that divorce and seeing those suicides, I got a DUI that night, dealing with those types of things that I was facing.

Nonetheless, I faced what was given to me.

So I was put on probation, license taken away and so many other things, and I had to figure out a way to get myself back up on my feet.

And I did that.

I took what the consequences that took place, and I went back to school, got my bachelor's degree, got my master's degree, and then I took a job in Washington, DC to become a government contractor, and did that for several years.

I kind of was realizing the pattern with my life.

Things would go really, really well for me professionally, but my personal life was not doing the greatest.

So, for that being said, I went through another divorce, and I was probably at the lowest point of my life.

And this is when I tried to commit suicide and take my life.

But thank God that didn't happen, that did not take place.

But it was in that defining moment where I decided to change my life.

And ever since then, my life has been totally transformed.

And it was not until I started working on my personal development, and just working on myself first, and fixing all of the things that was broken within me, it was incumbent on me just to start taking responsibility, having a ton of responsibility, create that identity shift that I wanted to make for myself.

I'm sitting here as an interviewer.

I'm trying to keep up with all the, basically the adversities that you've gone through.

One thing I've noticed is once in a while, not only do you chuckle, but you are not as emotional or torn down by the experience as some of us would be if we recall it.

If we recall what happened, even our face changes and we become emotional, sometimes we cry.

Why is that not your reaction, so to speak?

So it's funny you asked me that several years ago, that was my reaction.

And the thing for me was I learned at a very young age how to compartmentalize and bottle things in.

I will say when I served in the military, it doubled down on that, those types of emotion and feelings as if anything ever happens to you, you have to be able to compartmentalize it, put it in the box and be able to react and move very, very fast.

You don't give yourself a time to think about those things.

I did that for a very long time.

And then it was when I got to my breaking point, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't really know how to deal with that and challenge that.

So I started writing.

I found that writing and sharing my story just through journaling was a bit of a relief for myself.

I started writing and the person that helped me write my book, which was Chris Belber, a good friend of mine with Netflix, he said, hey man, I've read your story and I see that you have quite a few traumatic things in your life.

I think you should expound on this as I think it could be therapy for yourself.

He even told me that it took me a couple years to even write it because as I was writing things and replaying things over and over in my mind, it was harder to just deal with it and accept some of the things that was taking place.

But once I got through that, and so I got through the right counseling, surrounding myself with the right people, and understanding what was all of the seriousness that was tied to either your mental health issues, PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and all of these different topics or labels that come with some of the things that you're experiencing to actually face it and deal with it.

Once I was able to face it and deal with it, understand things that was happening to me, I got past the grief, the unforgiveness, the anxiety, the depression, and all of those things that I had to face and deal with and learn how to handle.

And after that, I was able to start comprehending and start putting things together when you apply all of like the psychological, the cognitive things that are going on within you.

From there on, I was much more at peace when I was able to become much more vulnerable and transparent to share my story.

When I started doing that, I found that there was many other people that was either dealing with some of the same things or bottling some of those things.

And that's why I use the term break the bottle because I bottle those things in.

But once I was able to break the bottle and shatter all of those things that was holding me back, I found that it was much more of a release for me.

And it was helpful for me to even get out of that mindset because I'm not one to have pity parties or feel sorry for me or anything like that.

And doing that, by the way, encouraging pity parties and for people to just sit in sorrow and feel sorry for themselves.

But I just made that observation that you actually can now talk about it.

As you said, we will talk about the transformation you've gone through.

And then after those experiences, what decision did you make that led you to now having The Adversity Academy?

Yeah, so the decision that led me to this was seeing the difference that I was making from sharing my story.

I initially started off with just writing my book because that was the outlet for me.

When I had a book release, I got so many emails, letters, that whenever I was being called to go speak at different events, how many moms or many guys that pulled me to the side and was like, keep going.

This happened to me.

I know this is happening to somebody else.

And to hear that you're up here and brave enough to talk about this right here is truly very, very helpful.

Initially was just for me to work on me, and that was benefiting me.

But then from me adopting that and acknowledging this is like my assigned mission, my assigned purpose of me giving back and helping people, it took me on the path of creating The Adversity Academy.

When I look back at my life of where it was going, I started understanding the direction of where I was going.

I understood the destination of where I was going, and it was on the road to destruction of all of these things, if they kept happening in these patterns, in these cycles that I kept putting myself in.

And once I started figuring out those things to get aligned, but then I said I would like to start helping people get aligned, get some clarity, get some blueprint in their lives, and understand some of the same things that I've been through because I've lived it, I've been through it, and I figured out how to get out of it.

So I felt like my experience was to be totally, truly authentic to myself, but help guide people that are maybe stuck or have been through some things in their lives that I could help them get through.

Here's my question.

When you go through all those experiences and you mentioned identity shift earlier, how do you feel about yourself?

How do you see yourself?

I see myself as someone that is now a change agent.

I felt that I'm someone that could help lead people, help guide people that may be broken, because before I struggled with my identity, I struggled with my confidence, I struggled with all of the things that I wanted to get accomplished in life.

But once I went on that road to discovery and understand all the things that make me up, understand what are my values, understand what are my standards, understand the things that makes my character who I am, and I could believe that I could stand on that, and there's nothing that could shatter that.

That's what helped me gain and define the identity of the person that I wanted to be and the person that I am now today.

When you go through adversity, do you feel unseen?

Because now that you share your story, people who go through the same experiences are feeling seen by you.

Did you feel unseen?

Did you feel like no one understands what I'm going through internally when you were speaking to yourself?

Internal dialogue, as we say.

You know what?

It is kind of like that, because what we kind of think about with people that have been through trauma and are going through things, we feel like we're the only one that is in that space.

When truly, I obviously discovered this, there's so many people that are suffering.

There's so many people that are hurting.

That's why people lead to the roads of depression and anxiety and suicide and all of these things, because they think that there's no help.

They think that they're there by themselves.

But truly, if you actually seek the road of trying to better yourself, there's actually people out there willing to help you just like me.

Right.

And now that you have this academy, when people come to you, obviously, they said, you know, I've been through this, keep doing what you're doing.

But what are some of the other benefits of sharing their story when they come to your academy?

Well, when you come to the academy, we're going to go through the three Ds.

We're going to identify some of the decisions you're making, some of the direction your life is going and destination.

And then we're going to get you realigned.

And we're going to start aligning some of the things through that self-discovery phase of where you're trying to go, where you're trying to be.

So we give you some clarity.

We're going to give you a clear blueprint of some of the things that you need to be doing in your life.

But ultimately, you're going to have a community.

People that's going to be around you, that's going to support you, that's going to love you, going to be your biggest cheerleader.

And that's also going to be there to understand like what you've been through is some stuff that we've either been through, but we have that compassion.

We have that empathy in regards to knowing that this is a safe space.

And the accountability factor as well.

Because I know sometimes as we were mentioning a pity party earlier is that sometimes we think, oh, but I can't do this because I've been through this, or I'm still emotional about this experience.

Can you just hold on?

You know what I mean?

Sometimes we use that as a crutch in order to not take the next step.

Yeah, we can't use those types of mindsets in regards to getting out of where you're at.

I think adversity is one of the greatest lessons to show you truly who you are.

And build that character.

And I think whenever you hear that type of rhetoric or conversation, it's truly operating out of fear.

And whenever you're operating out of fear, you will never get to your destination of where you're trying to be.

I wish while going through an adverse experience, that's how you would see it.

And think, you know what?

Yeah, this is helping me.

Because it doesn't feel that way at the time, does it?

It doesn't, it doesn't.

And that's the thing, and that's the beat of a community, because even when people are within a community, even if they do not even say anything, what I've found is to, whenever you get on these calls, or you get in these groups, and for them to even hear your story, or hear what somebody else is doing, it does sometimes encourage them, it does motivate them in regards to seeing what somebody else is doing.

Okay, so part of your transformation, you wrote the book, what is the title of the book?

Yes, my book is called Overcoming Adversity, Getting Your Life Back On Track.

Where you tell the story that you, part of what you shared with us today.

And then what else, you were talking about self-development, what did you do exactly?

And how did you come to the decision to say, something has to be different in my life now?

Sure, so I got off that bridge, and I thought that I was the worst husband in the world.

I thought that I was the worst dad in the world.

I was on 13 different medications and not really caring anything about life or anything to care about.

When I sat back and I said, you need to start taking responsibility and accountability and fix your life and make things right.

From there, I started identifying what am I doing?

What led me to where I'm at now today?

And once I started identifying what is it that I was doing in my life that got me to this point in my life, then I started saying, all right, these things need to be removed.

These things need to be fixed.

And once I started extracting all of these things, where there was the places I was going, the people that I was around, the things that I was watching, the things that I was listening to, all of these different things, all of these different factors that was affecting all of the things that meant the most to me.

For me, I had to start identifying, where is it that I wanna be in life?

And who is it that I want around me?

It was to get my family back.

It was to surround myself with the right mentors, the right coaches, the right accountability partners, be in the right environment and stop doing some of the things that I was doing.

I started doing that.

So then I went to get counseling and I found the right counselor that was gonna help me gain some of these things that I needed to do.

Then I went to Rush University.

You know, PTSD is a serious thing and it was something that I bottled in and did not talk about for close to 10 years when I got out of the military.

So me seeing my best friend die, me getting shot at and those types of things, I've never disclosed those things, talked about those things for close to 10 years and I just stayed in here.

So after working through counselors and then for me, I went to Rush University, learned all about PTSD, all about neuro-linguistic programming.

Then I went to Emory Hospital there in Atlanta, Georgia.

And I went through their veterans program that work with veterans on the PTSD symptoms and things like that.

I furthermore went to join a men's group.

And I started working with these men that were struggling with some of the same things that I was at work dealing with.

But now it's more so on a family level, much more maturity type of level and started facing dealing with some of these things that men struggle with.

And a good bit of that was men of color that struggle with too as well.

So I talked about some of those things and worked through some of those things and figure some things out about myself.

And once I got on that path, then I got into identifying someone that could help me on a personal development level.

I started finding someone that I could trust and talk with that could hold me accountable when it comes to an accountability partner.

And I did that.

And once I started making some changes around some of these things that I knew that I needed to fix, my life changed.

My life changed.

And what these people did was they asked me all of the right questions.

They challenged me.

They pushed me.

They encouraged me.

They motivated me.

It allowed me to start cognitively start thinking and processing things.

They helped me become much more resilient.

It helped me to change the way I was processing things and thinking about myself for me to change my life.

It's interesting when you talk about the things and the people you surround yourself with.

Before the age of social media and the internet, we used to just think physically people, the best five people you surround yourself with, check your friends.

But now, it also includes what you watch on the internet, YouTube, what you focus on in the media and social media and those kinds of things.

Would you say that you also had to re-evaluate your internet activity as part of what you surround yourself with?

Without a doubt, Roberta, I was one that was watching things on the internet that I probably should not be watching.

I was one that was on social media, looking at things that I should not be looking at.

So I did a complete audit and an overhaul of people I was following, things that I was watching, and removing all of those things.

I had to extract all of those things and put myself in much more engaging, meaningful activities.

Even the music that I was listening to, I had to change those things too as well.

And that was an influence for me.

Yesterday, I watched a video clip of a teacher who goes around schools talking to teenagers in schools about the music they listen to.

One thing I remember, she said to them, you listen to Cardi B, somebody red, and something like that.

But I think they are rappers or singers.

And then she asked them, who do you respect?

And they said they are mom.

And then she asked, if you respect your mom, but you listen to people who are nothing like your mom, how do you then perceive girls who are your peers?

Because this music you listen to, the thing they say about women, what they call women, that's nothing like your mom.

And that your mom is the one that you respect.

Do you see the contradiction?

Yeah, I do see the contradiction.

And sadly, in this day and age, I think the social media is a contributor to that right there, that what you just spoke about.

I think it's imperative that we as parents actually play a role in that part too, as well though, because kids are around their friends, they're around their peers, and these are the people that are influencing them.

And I think you as a parent may have to start intervening in regards to what your kids are listening to, what they're paying attention to.

And the thing with that is, when I was growing up, I didn't see a cell phone until I was about 18, 19.

So, yeah, I'm that old as well.

I finished high school in 92.

That's the first time I saw a cell phone.

Now, I mean, kids are having cell phones at three, four, five years old, and it's just taken over.

So, that's just parents has to try to govern some of these things accordingly as much as we can or as much as possible.

And trying to create a foundation for your kids is probably the biggest key.

Because we can never underestimate the influence that these things have on our thoughts, our actions, how we view life, how we view other people as well.

Without a doubt, without a doubt at all.

Now, please tell us about your podcast, Michael.

Yeah, so the podcast Overcoming Adversity, it's an extension of the Academy itself.

But what I love about it is, I believe that personal development and business development, as that's the space that I'm in, do align.

So what I do, I interview people that come on the podcast.

They may have faced some personal adversities in their lives, and they talk about what they've been through, but they also share some of the key steps and some of the key elements that, through that process, as we unpack their story to share how they overcame those adversities, and they leave our listeners to some great words of wisdom, some lessons, some tidbits and things like that, that could help our listeners.

And for the business owners, we have business owners that come through, but they talk about adversities, the challenge that they face in their business, could be communications, could be marketing, could be HR, could be leadership, those types of topics.

And then we kind of navigate through that type of conversation, and helping them see some different areas, some different problem solving techniques within that.

And then from them to go ahead and share some lessons, some stories from their experiences, from their stories, they could leave with our audience too as well.

Absolutely wonderful work that you do, because the thing about transformation is that it's an ongoing process.

It never ends.

You don't say, oh, I've arrived, I'm healed, I'm good now.

No.

Yes, the Overcoming Adversity Podcast.

Michael, first of all, I want to honor you and thank you for sharing your very powerful story.

As I said earlier, you make others who sometimes haven't gathered up the courage to share their story, their traumatic experiences on a public platform, you make those people feel seen.

So thank you for that.

Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

And before you go, where can we find you online?

So online, you can find me www.michaelwallison.com if you just want to find me directly for The Adversity Academy.

It's www.theadversityacademy.

And if you want, I could also offer your guests a free download of resources as well too.

So they could-

Please tell us where to find it.

They could go to www.breakthebottle.org, resource list.

Okay, so Michael W.

Allison and the Allison is two L's, right?

That's correct.

michaelwallison.com to directly connect with you.

theadversityacademy.com.

So it's theadversityacademy.com.

We can find out more about all of our programs, our workshops, all of the different mentorships services that we do have to offer.

theadversityacademy.com.

And then breakthebottle.org, the free resources.

Thank you very much.

We love free gifts on this show.

Free resources from Michael W.

Allison.

This has been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much, Michael, for being on our show today.

Absolutely, it's been a blessing.

Excellent stuff.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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