In this episode of The Good News, Angie Austin is joined by the ever-insightful Jim Stovall to discuss the profound wisdom in setting boundaries to achieve true freedom. They traverse some personal anecdotes about life lessons learned through sports, teamwork, and the wisdom imparted by legends like John Wooden. Jim provides a deeper understanding of balancing leisure with responsibility and how setting personal goals can lead to a fulfilled life. Later, Dr. Lanisha T. Adams joins the conversation, discussing her book ‘Me Power’ and outlining the five principled actions to take control of one’s life. Angie and Lanisha delve
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SPEAKER 01 :
welcome to the good news with angie austin now with the good news here’s angie
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin and Jim Stovall with The Good News talking about his weekly Winner’s Wisdom column, Freedom and Boundaries, this week. Hey, Jim. Hey, it is always great to be with you. Great to be with you. We’ve got so many sports. Sometimes I send you pictures of my kids. My daughter’s a junior, and she went to a small Christian university this weekend, and she said that the coach stopped the game because she was playing with the actual team. She stopped the game to come over and high five my daughter because, you know, she’s very powerful. So when she does a kill, it’s hard to stop the ball, you know, and it’ll either like deflect off into the stands or they can’t even like get to it because it’s so fast. So she’s like, Mom, they stopped the game so the coach could come high five me. I’m like, well, that’s a good sign. So I thought you’d get a kick out of that.
SPEAKER 06 :
Right. Even people that don’t know a lot about volleyball know that’s a good thing.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes. Yes, that’s a good thing. Oh, and they changed her. Her club team changed her position. As a junior, they moved her from outside to middle because they were having some middle issues. And so she was like, wow, that’s weird. I don’t know this position. But, you know, I was proud of her, Jim. She just kept a smile on her face and got in there. And I could see her talking to other middles like, where do I do that? And I was like, Do I do that? Not asking questions. And so, yeah, by the time she was done, she looked pretty good. I mean, by the time the whole day was done, she’d really started to catch on. So I was proud of her for not. You see a lot of sulkers. You know, you played sports. You see a lot of sulkers on the bench. A lot of sulkers.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, and people have to understand being on the bench is a great role. And, you know, a lot of times coaches will put some of their best players on there. It’s not a matter of who gets to start or who doesn’t, who gets to play. And a lot of the players that are on the bench are people that can come off the bench and be ready to go right into a game and play. And that’s a different skill. Some people can’t do that. So I think it’s great. And, you know, life lessons. You know, there’s nowhere else you can learn some of the life lessons you learn in sports.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I would say, and I know that for you, you know, being a football player and then Olympic weightlifter, that I just think it teaches you so much, you know, in terms of teamwork. And I know John Wooden, who I think has the best quotes in like the United States of America from his time as a coach and, you know, all of his winning years coaching college basketball and everything. so many of the lessons that he taught that still, you know, resonate today have to do with how you grow as an athlete and the things you learn and the maturity that you get. But I see a lot of kids crying on the sidelines. And my daughter, I have to say, that’s one thing they always credit her with is that she is the biggest cheerleader. She’s very loud. She’s very encouraging. And I saw one girl crying and my daughter went over, they were at other ends of the You know, they don’t sit, by the way, on the bench. They stand on the bench. So there are either opposite ends of the line. And so there’s six girls standing and six girls playing and the volleyball. Anyway, she went to the far end and I saw her holding like her arms and staring at her eyes, showing her deep breathing methods to try to come out of this situation. funk that she was in with crying and kind of having a lot of anxiety because she got pulled, obviously, from mistakes. And that freaks a lot of kids out. But I have to say, of all the kids that get pulled, I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of her for, that she does not feel sorry for herself, that she really encourages the other girls.
SPEAKER 06 :
That is a great thing. And, you know, whether you learn how to spike or serve or do all the other things you do in volleyball, you know, 20, 30 years from now, that won’t matter in her life. But learning how to be a great teammate and a team player, that will matter.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes, I agree. And I know you teach a lot about that in your Winner’s Wisdom columns. And today we are talking about your column titled Freedom and Boundaries. Oh, that sounds good. What’s this all about?
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, a lot of people think freedom is not having anything to do and financial freedom is having enough money to where you never have to worry about it again. In reality, freedom is a matter of setting boundaries that you can control yourself and you can control your life, your time, your finances, and all the things that matter. And when I was a kid, we moved into a new neighborhood of little tiny houses in this new neighborhood. And there were no fences. There were no grass or trees. And people were just moving in and starting. And because there were no fences, people kind of stayed away from the boundary. And they wouldn’t put their garden in all the way to the boundary. Or they were careful that they didn’t get to the boundary.
SPEAKER 02 :
Interesting.
SPEAKER 06 :
But then over the years, they put in fences. And all of a sudden, now people felt the freedom. Okay, now I know where the boundary is. Oh, that’s so true. It’s so true. I’ll do all this stuff. And the same thing is true. I know a lot of people question me. Why, if you don’t have to, do you work so hard and you have a list of things for today and a big calendar and a pending list and a project list and all the things you do? Well, I control those lists. Those lists allow me to do what I want to do in this life. and use them. And it’s not a matter of giving up your will. I mean, one of the most controlling environments you can have is to be in the military. But people take that oath of their own free will, and they submit to that. So in essence, it’s a freedom. They give up that to get something they really want. So, you know, freedom is not… Having nothing to do. Freedom is controlling your life. And my great friend Steve Forbes once said that, you know, people think they want to do nothing. He said, doing nothing is the hardest work you’ll ever do in your life. Now, it’s great for a vacation. It’s great for a couple of days or a few weeks to escape. But it’s a constant way of life. It’s like eating cotton candy all day every day. I mean, if you’re at the fair and you want to enjoy it once a year, great. But, boy, you get a steady diet of that stuff, and it’ll make you crazy.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, my gosh. That is crazy. That is crazy. Okay, so in terms of what you want us to take away, what you want us to learn, obviously that a couple of days of freedom is fine, but living a life like that. But I think a lot of people can’t pull themselves out of the fun to do what’s difficult.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, you’ve got to think about what you want out of your life. Because every day, when you finish your day and you put your head on the pillow, you have to look back at, what did I accomplish today? And am I one day closer or one day farther from my goal? Because it better be worth whatever you got out of today, because you gave up a whole day of your life to get whatever you had today. And there are days where, okay, I need to rest and relax and do those things. That’s very, very important. It’s important annually to do that, you know, with a little bit of vacation time. It’s important periodically to do that with the weekend. It’s very important to do that on Sundays and spend time with your family and worship and, you know, just have downtime. But, you know, the rest of the time, you want to run as fast and as far as you can toward the goals, the things that you’ve determined matter to you. And then when you get there, it’s not all these things controlling you. You’re in control. You know, I’m not controlled by my calendars and all the things I’ve set up to maximize my time. I set them up. You know, I control them. And that’s the most powerful thing you’ll ever do, when you can control your time and focus your energy towards something you really want.
SPEAKER 05 :
I love that. You know, a lot of your advice is about personal responsibility and kind of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and kind of taking life by the horns, which I think I did that, you know, when I was younger. But as I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve gotten a lot more complacent. And yes, I give myself credit for raising really great kids. They are wonderful. And I have a 20-year marriage and everything. And I’m good to my mom. I’m good to my pets. But I feel like professionally that I’ve become a lot more complacent. And I do place value in what I do with the good news. But the drive for financial success and career success, I don’t have that like I used to. And a lot of times I’m kind of like not ashamed of myself, disappointed in myself for not being a little more driven. You’ve been able to keep that drive. But I think as men, there is a financial pressure on you. I mean, Crystal likes to shop. So there’s definitely…
SPEAKER 06 :
Some financial pressure. You know, it’s important that you have the goals that matter to you. And, you know, I don’t have financial goals anymore. I don’t. You know, my money generates more money than I do. All the financial goals we have are giving away more money to our foundation that helps scholarships and the various projects we have around the world. You know, it’s not going to make any difference for me, but that motivates me. You know, one more scholarship, one more thing. You know, that keeps me going. If it was just a matter of me having another house or another car, I don’t care. You know, so, you know, it’s really about focusing on the things that matter. And, you know, when you talk about the things you are doing, your marriage, your kids, the things you do creating a home, there’s no higher goal than those things right there. I mean, if you gain the whole world and you lose your soul or you make a billion dollars, but, you know, you wreck your kids or your health or something else, you have not succeeded in anything.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I would say so. And, you know, and maybe for, you know, personally, maybe that’ll change for me, you know, once my kids are grown, maybe I’ll get that drive again or maybe not. I mean, there does come a time when people retire and, you know, enjoy kind of the fruits of their labor per se. Do you think that’ll ever be you? Because I don’t really see that being you.
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, as long as I have books I want to write and movies I want to make and things I want to do, and then when I look at the kids at the Stovall Center at the university, you know, that gives me a lot to do that matters to me. And not to say it won’t change or evolve or do different things, but… No, I just don’t see happy people as being people who’ve retired. I just turned 65 years old, which is a fascinating experience. But when I look at my mentors, my late great father, and three of my biggest mentors, Paul Harvey, Art Linkletter, and, of course, Coach John Wooden, all did some of their best work in their 90s.
SPEAKER 04 :
Really?
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah. So, you know, and my dad ran a retirement center for about 35 years. And, you know, the people around there that were happiest were the people that were still doing things, still active. And, you know, we only need three things to be happy, Angie. You and I have talked about it before. We’ve got to have something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. And a lot of people, wow, they lose a lot of that when they slow down because they no longer have something to do and they don’t have much to look forward to. And you’ve got to have all three things, something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, I think about my friend’s dad. He’s passed away and the mom and my girlfriend. But I loved I’d see them out for dinner like once a week. They went, you know, and they were in their 90s, the parents. And she said her dad, when he retired from engineering, that then he started his own business. And it had to do with like building highways or something like that. And they need these studs. So he named his name was Royal. So his business was called Royal Studs. And so Royal Studs, he started after retirement, and he became even way more successful after his retirement from his regular job to start his own business. And when you say that people do some of their best work in their 90s, I remember talking to his wife. I’m like, so why did he start working again? What was the impetus for that? And she said, oh, well, I told him, I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch every day. Yeah. She wanted to do her own thing, so he had to go out and start working again.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, we just lost my great friend, Tony Bennett, and we shared a birthday and stayed in touch for all those years. And, you know, he was coming up on his 97th birthday, I think it was, and passed away. But a lot of people don’t know. I mean, he slowed down on his… his singing and his performances, but he became a painter and some of his paintings have become extremely valuable and very well acclaimed critically. And, you know, he was working right up until the end. And, you know, I think that’s what keeps people young and keeps them going.
SPEAKER 05 :
I love that. Well, if people want to find you, where do they go to find you?
SPEAKER 06 :
Jim Stovall, S-T-O-V-A-L-L, jimstovall.com.
SPEAKER 05 :
And, you know, for a guy, I know you’re a guy who reads a book every day. So if you’re reading a book every day, you want to continue to grow and learn. So you inspire me. I’ll have to think about what my next chapter will be, Jim Stovall. Thank you for that.
SPEAKER 06 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
Northland is listening to the mighty 670 KLT.
SPEAKER 05 :
Hey there, friend. Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Joining us is author Dr. Lanisha T. Adams discussing her seven-time award-winning book, Me Power. Welcome, Dr. Adams.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hi there. So happy to be here this morning.
SPEAKER 05 :
Me too. I’m looking forward to this. All right. So kind of give me a little overview of Me Power if you were giving your elevator speech on, hey, this book is all about this.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. This book is all about how we think about empowerment differently and putting you as an individual at the center of it. And it has to do with defining who you are and knowing that that’s going to change over time and that I’m calling self-knowledge and combining that with principled action that we can take in five key ways to create change when the odds are stacked against us.
SPEAKER 05 :
And isn’t that the case oftentimes, like, in the world, like, as a woman sometimes? I mean, I know things have changed, but we still do face some different obstacles than others. So let’s talk about some of those. Can we go through the five things?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
All right.
SPEAKER 03 :
Let’s do it. Okay. So I agree 1,000% with you. Like, it doesn’t matter who you are. I think for some people, we have more obstacles than others. But then each of us, it’s the human experience, right? Right. There’s no way… get through life without encountering them and so i think this is a good way to talk about how you can have these five principled actions to navigate a way through the first is embrace your barriers the second is focus on your strength the third is speak for your life the fourth is choose your guide and the fifth is ritualize your reflection and um each of these you know their principles as a call to action, but then there are also practices that you do for each one of them. and we can talk a little bit about that.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, let’s start with number one, embracing things. I think so. I don’t like victim mentality, and I hate to be this blunt, but my mom has it. I had a very difficult upbringing with a lot of alcoholism, murder, drug addiction, low-income housing, all of that jive, right? Okay, so then I get an education. I work full-time. I graduate with honors. I start working for NBC News. Then I have my mom move in with me, and I’m like, our new start. No, she’s still back in low income housing. She’s still back in a bad marriage. She’s still back with drug addict kids, you know, like, no, no, no, we have this new life. We aren’t victims. We are victors. Like, let’s move. She can’t let it go. So what do you mean by embracing things that maybe cause us difficulty?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. We always think if something bad is happening, we want to get rid of it. We don’t want to deal with it.
SPEAKER 05 :
Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it’s really a A shift in the thinking like, hey, maybe this thing is happening to teach you something. And maybe if I look at it differently, like I’m not trying to go around it, I got to go through it. And it’s that that is total difference between victim mentality, as you mentioned, because so many people are thinking the locus of control is on the outsides. I don’t have any control over this situation. I was born poor. I was born with a mom who was 16. This is my story. I was born with people in my family who didn’t go to college. So therefore, I cannot go outside of that because what do I know about it? What do they know about it? No one’s there to help me. No one’s there to hold my hand through the whole thing. And I think this kind of idea that the power and the idea of change is on the outside is is really within us. And there are things that happen to us we have no control over. There are terrible oppressions that occur for people, and I’m not discounting that. However, we can only control what we what we do in response to what happens to us.
SPEAKER 05 :
I love that you say that about you’re not discounting those things. You’re embracing. They’re not discounting them. So you’re not saying to somebody that had a similar circumstance maybe to ours, like you’re not discounting it, saying like, get over it, you know, just deal with it and move on and pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You’re saying… embrace it to make yourself better my mom started at 17 too having kids so they weren’t in a great position to empower us like they did the best that they could with the tools they had at least in my mom’s case I just don’t think she was capable of really empowering me in her state that she was left in after all of that stuff went down
SPEAKER 03 :
No, but you’re not sitting waiting on the sidelines for her to do that. Right. No, you’re right.
SPEAKER 1 :
You’re right.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, because you would still be waiting on the sidelines for it and it would never come. So I think there is something to be said about this internal piece, which I’m calling me power, which is not waiting and looking because, I mean, sometimes nobody shows up.
SPEAKER 05 :
Right.
SPEAKER 03 :
And there is a piece here that is kind of ironic. So much of this personal agency is based on our internal feelings. compass like what’s driving us what’s motivating us but we cannot do it alone so we have to have people but it might not be the people you think right may not be the folks that you know and we have to talk about that in our social world like it’s a very individual experience and yet we show up in the world and we have to relate to it somehow i mean this is so important
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, and I think it’s interesting too, like if someone listened to you and listened to me, we didn’t, it doesn’t sound like to me, I’m jumping to conclusions, but we didn’t embrace like where we came from. Like if you hear us, we sound like highly educated women and we are very articulate, right? But if I think back to where I grew up, I wasn’t growing up around people like that. And I saw many of the girls in my circumstance gravitating towards men like the men that had already ruined their lives. And I’m like, I wanted the antithesis of that, you know. So I wasn’t gravitating towards anything that was in, you know, my world. And so I want to make sure, because I’m enjoying our conversation, that I let you get through more of the five principles of action. Do you want to do number two?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. So I’m going to, you know, it’s funny. Focusing your strengths is probably my favorite one because I think it gets at this idea, right? So much of us as humans, and this is not specific to any group, it’s in our nature, like it’s in our DNA, where we’re looking for what’s wrong. Because if we focus on what’s wrong, then it can save us. You know, think cavemen, like think, you know, back to prehistoric times. We got to find out, we got to be looking on the lookout. What’s going to happen? And then prepare for it and take action. And so focus on your strengths is the flip side of that, where if you want to make change, we’re often thinking about what we don’t have, which is from a negative space, you know, like I’m lacking this or I have this weakness. I want to shift. And I think we’re often trying to accomplish things and go after something. And the best place to do that is from our strengths. So first you have to identify what those strengths are. And you can take a test. It’s called the Values in Action Survey. That’s probably my favorite one because it’s free. It’s research validated. And it will rank order your strengths on a list of 25 things. And then the top five strengths are what are called your signature strengths. And they’re things that you may not think about, like humor and appreciation for beauty. And, you know, you just see yourself differently thinking, huh, these are my strengths and how can I use them to go after what I’m trying to get instead of I lack in these ways and I need to make change. I mean, we all have something to bear that, that, that is positive to bear to any situation to bring to any situation. So why not start there? And so focusing on your strengths is really about that.
SPEAKER 05 :
I like that as well. Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
Number three, speak for your life. Another fun one has to do with just making sure you get to set the tone. You, You know, we control the narrative. And in our mind, there’s a lot of chatter that may not be in what we think, you know, it’s unconscious or it’s just running in the backdrop. It may not be like we’re in control of it, but we do. And so Speak for Your Life is really calling out, I’m encouraging folks to call out into existence what they want and then go after it. And then you can do that not just by vocalizing, but also expressing yourself. who you are in the world. And the expression of who you are is in many ways. It’s what you wear. You can dance. You can have all kinds of forms of expression. And then my favorite practical way to bring this to life is to identify a weird thing about you, probably the weirdest thing about you, an unusual skill or talent that could also benefit somebody else. And then you share it in a way only you can. And so this is really interesting because we often think, Well, what’s weird about me makes me different from the crowd and then that is why people ridicule me or that’s what – it’s something that’s not good because I want to change it. But that is like your – I mean that uniqueness is something only you have. So why not treat it in a way that is like a superpower? Yeah, I like that. I like that.
SPEAKER 05 :
I like that. My daughter has, one of my kids, Hope, she has ADHD, and it’s become this superpower in that she can hyper-focus, but also she’s so exuberant and boisterous that kids and parents love her, unlike her teams, and they vote her captain. So this thing that was so annoying in elementary and middle school, now people admire that she’s so over-the-top and excited to see you and hugging you, and so many people have boundaries that don’t allow them to be so So excited to see you. But she doesn’t, like, stop. So it’s made her, like, it’s become her superpower, her friendliness and her energy. I love that. And when you talk about gifts, I interviewed this comedian I love. His name is Michael Jr. And he was doing comedy in, like, homeless shelters. And he said, Angie, you have this gift, right? But it’s not a gift until you give it away. That’s when it really becomes a gift. It’s not a gift when you just keep it for yourself.
SPEAKER 03 :
Mm-hmm. 100%. And I love that about your daughter. That’s beautiful. And I hope she hangs on to that and even amplifies it even more as she keeps going.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I do too. Because the siblings used to say, when everybody comes up to me and says, Hope’s annoying. And now the siblings are like, wow, Hope’s really popular now. I’m like, because she just embraced who she was. It’s like, take it or leave it, you know? All right, we have three minutes left. I want to get through the last two. We’re on four, right? Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
So choose your guides. That really has to do with looking at who you can choose to guide you in some way. It could be a coach, a mentor, somebody you respect, someone you want to emulate. And just knowing that you’re not forced to just go with people that you know. Because oftentimes, sometimes depending on where you are, where you’re coming from, the people that you know aren’t going to help you get to your next level. And then the last one is ritualize your reflection. And that has to do with looking at points in your life at specific times, dedicated times, to see how you may have grown and changed over time. And one exercise I have for this is create a list of 10 defining moments in your life and include a picture of yourself at each of those moments. And then start asking, and a defining moment is like, you had a baby, someone died, you graduated, you moved to another country, you paid off debt, something like this, significant. And how did you feel at the time? What were your goals? How have they changed? And what ways have you changed? And what ways have you stayed the same? You’ll start looking at yourself and your life very differently.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, I love that. Okay, last but not least. No, that was the fifth one. Oh, that was last but not least. Oh my God, I want to have you back. I know we’re really about out of time. So I want to make sure people know how to get in touch with you. And I know you suffered a cardiac arrest and we were going to talk about that as well because I know you were in ICU two weeks. So I would say in one minute, how did that change your life?
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, it changed everything. But the main change was that it really brought to life this idea that I have to have personal agency to get the hell out of that hospital. And then I also had to have help order to do it because I couldn’t do it alone. And that’s the main message of MePower is that there’s an individual component and it’s all inside. And then there’s a component that is about our social world. So we can make change together. And that’s what I’d say about that. And folks can find me on My website, Lanisha.com. They can read a free chapter of the book. And I also want to extend a special offer to your listeners to enjoy a 25% discount using the code audio because I’m coming out with an audio book. And ask the libraries to get the book. I mean, our taxpayer dollars pay for this public institution. So go after it. You can get free chapters, reading, and then also audio book on the website. Check it out. Thank you so much for having me here today.
SPEAKER 05 :
And Lanisha.com. And, yes, I’d love to have you back. I feel like we fit about an hour interview into 15 minutes. So thank you so much. A real blessing to have you on the program.
SPEAKER 03 :
So honored to be with you, and I will come back. Take care.
SPEAKER 05 :
Take care. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
