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Picture this: you're stuck in a rut, feeling like you're going around in circles and not progressing in life. You know you need a change, but you don't know where to start. Enter Jerry Duggan, CEO and Senior Consultant of PTR Impact LLC, who shares his powerful framework, 'Beyond the Rut', to guide you towards a more fulfilling life. His riveting journey from a combat medic in the US Army to empowering individuals with his faith-based approach leaves no stone unturned. We traverse Jerry's life - the personal trials, the transformative conversations, and the daring decisions - all contributing to the man he is today.
Does faith play a role in your life? For Jerry, his faith journey has been a transformative one. Raised in a religious family, his experiences in the Army took him down a different path, only to embrace the Christian faith at the age of 28 driven by his wife's desire to raise their family in a Christian home. His deployment in Iraq further tested and strengthened his faith, with life-changing decisions that reverberate to this day. Jerry's experiences provide a fascinating insight into the power of faith and its role in shaping our lives.
Finally, Jerry's Podcast 'Beyond the Rut' takes center stage. The five Fs to recognizing a rut and breaking free from it - faith, family, fitness, finances, and future - form the crux of his life philosophy. A courageous decision to leave his six-figure income job to focus on his family and these five Fs sets the stage for an inspiring chapter. From his journey of self-publishing his book, 'Beyond the Rut: Create a Life Worth Living in Your Faith, Family, and Career', to using finances as a tool to support his other life pillars, Gary's wisdom is enlightening. Tune in for a conversation that promises to inspire and challenge you in your quest for a fulfilling life.
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00:00 - Gary Durgan's Inspiring Journey
08:06 - Faith Journey and Impact on Life
18:09 - Prayer, Promise, and Going to Church
28:24 - Living Beyond the Rut
40:25 - The Five F's
43:42 - Finding Success and Overcoming Challenges
WEBVTT
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Hello everyone, thank you again for joining me on another episode of the Dorsurus show.
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Today we have a special guest with us.
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His name is Gary Durgan.
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He is the CEO and Senior Consultant of PTR Impact LLC, which is a consulting and training company focused on helping leaders define who has on their terms, who they can live fulfilled, meaningful lives with impact and not lose their faith, their family or their health.
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His work experience includes serving in the US Army as a combat medic, corporate training and fulfilled data and organizational development leader.
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He has led in combat guns and corporate officers learning the in and out of the building teams and trust through servant leadership 2015.
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Gary has been the host and producer of Beyond the Rock podcast, a short, shared, encouraging stories and practical advice to help pull listeners out of their rock and into the life worth living.
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If man loves to get out of a rut, he wants you to live beyond the rut.
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Gary, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
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Dorsey, I'm glad to be here.
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Thanks for having me on.
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Absolutely Well.
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First of all, thank you so much for your service in the Army and the military.
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Great.
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We appreciate you doing that.
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Hey, my pleasure.
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It was the one thing my dad told me not to do with my life, which was to follow his footsteps and join the Army.
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And he said and if you do, you better go in as an officer.
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I was like okay, dad.
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And then you fast forward.
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Eight years later I'm like dad, I joined the Army.
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And he's like hey, okay, did you at least sign up as an officer?
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No, dad, I'm going in enlisted as a combat medic and silence.
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It's probably one of the few times in his life I've made him go speechless, because he's a very down to earth.
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You know, go with the flow, I'll support you and your decisions kind of guy.
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And I got a feeling this is the one decision he didn't fully support.
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I did not go in as an officer, I went in as an enlisted man.
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He was enlisted for 20 years, so he knew firsthand the hardship I was going to take on.
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I mean, being an officer isn't that much easier.
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They just get paid a little bit more, but they have a lot more responsibility on their shoulders as well.
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Right, I usually start to show with a couple of easy questions.
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You know a bigger type questions, and my first one is what did you want to be when you were a kid, and why?
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Oh man.
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Well, being an Army brat growing up.
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So an Army brat born, raised and trained is what it stands for.
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So my dad was in the Army.
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All I knew was the Army growing up from when I was born until he retired, when I was about 15, 16 years old.
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That's all I knew.
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And so what did I think I wanted to be when I grew up was a soldier.
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I saw my dad get up in the morning with his uniform on, going off to physical fitness training and then coming home in his battle dress uniform and I thought, man, it's so cool when he comes into that door, gets greeted by the family and then when there's like an emergency, he's got to gear up and get out that door and get to work.
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I want to be like that.
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And so, even though after high school I told myself I was, there was like a four year window when I told myself I would not join the Army.
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Deep down the side it was ingrained in me the army life, the army culture, the inclusiveness, inclusiveness of the army.
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At the time I was growing up, I grew up in a diverse community my whole life without realizing that that wasn't normal, until I went off to college and found out that normal for a lot of folks who were my classmates was not having 30% of your community being black, 30% being Latino and 30% white, and then all kinds of other mixes in there as well, and so that that was alien to me, that there were people that lived in communities that were not like that, and so, yeah, that was that's what I wanted to be was to be a soldier.
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When I grew up, even though I didn't know there were other options, and even when I told myself there were other options, I still gravitated towards being a soldier.
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Right.
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Why are you passionate about what you do?
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A lot of it has to do with when I was growing up.
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My parents divorced when I was 11 years old and in that time I mean my brother and I we lived with my dad and the short version is during that divorce my dad became suicidal and attempted suicide right there in front of us, behind our backs.
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All those things and between 11, fortunately he failed at suicide.
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He got the help he needed.
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We stayed in foster care for a little bit.
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We got reunited with my dad and then we moved back to California where my extended family was Well, a lot of my uncles were also going through divorce and seeing the impact their divorce has had on my cousins on myself, my brother, and even being bullied by a couple of my uncles and some of my cousins, I just thought there's got to be a better way to do this.
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And my dad's not a bad guy.
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He's not one of these guys picking on people.
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If anything, he's just trying to heal, he's trying to make do, but he doesn't know how.
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And as I got older through the years, I started to realize that there are men out there who go through their entire lives just emulating what examples are around them, and for some of us those examples are very positive, very enriching.
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They encourage us to grow and be the best, well-balanced person we can be.
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And for others it's a caricature of what manhood should be.
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You gotta be a tough guy, manhood's about fixing cars and drinking beer and having lots of ladies, and you know.
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And then the unspoken messages are you're not really committed to your family, you're not really committed to your spouse, and I thought those aren't healthy messages either for men.
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And I want to draw a line and start a new direction for this family.
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And so, at 14 years old, I cast a new vision for myself, wrote it down.
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I just write it down for myself.
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I wrote it on a Christmas cards and I gave it out to everybody in the family and just said I want to be the first in my family to go to college and graduate.
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I want to be the first to be like our grandparents, who've been married their entire adult lives, and stay faithful to my spouse and be the kind of husband where she wants to stay with me and then want to raise my kids in a way that they grow to be the best versions of themselves, the way they are meant to be grown, not the way I want them to look or feel or be and all those things.
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And so that was at 14 years old, and just all throughout my life since then I've had iterations and updates to that vision.
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But that has always been that passion on my heart really to focus on myself first, to be that husband and father my family needs, and then, beyond that, how can I help my fellow man around me?
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And no matter how often I've tried to avoid it, it just keeps coming back.
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This is the thing people want to see and hear from you.
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And I'm not like.
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I'm definitely not perfect, no way.
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I make a ton of mistakes.
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You can just ask my wife.
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She'll tell you how many times a day she has to forgive me.
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But it's that attempt to be better than I was yesterday, and I love doing that.
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I love sharing it.
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I'm often surprised when a man reaches out to me and says I needed to hear that message.
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Thank you for having the courage to share your story, to share your struggle in that area.
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I didn't know, I thought I was the only one and so I was embarrassed.
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Now I can go get the help I need, and hearing feedback like that over the years has just been uplifting for me to let me know I'm on the right path, I'm doing the right thing.
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How did your faith grow up?
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I mean, I don't know when you get saved, and you can go deeper into that as well how did your faith gain you in your life and when did you get saved, and how has that had an impact on your life?
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Yeah, oh man.
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I mean, a lot of people would think I got saved at a young age or grew up in the church and the reality is I did not receive Jesus as my savior until I was about 28, 29 years old, somewhere in that ballpark.
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So up until then I had friends who took me to church.
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My grandparents would take us to church when we visited them and to me, growing up, church was really about two things Donuts after service and playing on the playground, and that was it, like that's.
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All I went to church to do was hang out with my friends to eat those donuts afterwards and play on the playground until my parents said it was time to go.
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And if I didn't go with my parents, it was just until I got on my bike and rode home or rode back with the family.
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That brought me to church.
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For a little while I did do Bible study with some Jehovah's Witnesses for a couple years.
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That was probably the deepest I ever delved into the Bible, from, of course, their perspective.
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And then I got away from that.
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You know, I think that would be like the spark that changed me, but I kind of leveraged.
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This is in high school and I leveraged a lot of what I learned from them.
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To just mess with the minds of my friends who are avid Catholics or Christians or Mormons and and just ask them questions from scripture that would get them to challenge their own faith.
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And now I just get a kick out of that and it was horrible.
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Looking back on it, I was yeah, and fortunately they all stayed with their faith.
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So I do feel better about that.
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I go through college and typical college kid, you know there's no one way to know who God is.
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You know there's more than one book out there.
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Read them and you know like I'm fine without God.
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Those are all the things I told myself.
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Join the army.
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I kind of just felt lost at that point.
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After a deployment to Kosovo I met the lady who would eventually become my wife and she's been my wife for the last 22 years and in the first year of our marriage she wanted to go back to church.
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She felt it was important for her that we raised our children up in the church, in the Bible and and design our home around those principles of Jesus Christ.
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Now that was kind of a sticker shock to me, but at the same time it wasn't that foreign of an idea, because I mentioned earlier that I stayed in a foster home for a little bit with my brother, and that family was a Christian family, you know.
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They prayed before meals, they prayed together in the morning, they went to church.
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They didn't just do these things, they lived them out.
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And so I knew when my wife wanted our children to grow up through the church even though I wasn't a believer yet, I knew that at least the foundation would be there for them to be that kind of family.
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That was our foster family and that was really the model I was going for.
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I want my family to be close.
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I want them to resolve conflict in a way that isn't violent.
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I want the husband and wife to just be on the same page all the time, willfully, not because the man pressured the woman to get in line or else, but because they both genuinely worked together to come to an agreement and execute the agreement together.
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So the O'Neill family was that model for us, the foster family.
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And so when my wife said I want to take our kids to church, let's do this.
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So we started shopping for churches and then this deployment came that sent me to Kuwait.
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This was in now, early 2003.
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I wind up going to war as we invade Iraq and by July 2003, I'm coming home Now.
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Some of the things that unpack what happened during then was that March 19th is the day we kick off the offensive going into Iraq.
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So the Air Force has started their bombing runs of Baghdad.
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The Marines they claimed the army jumped the gun first, but the report we got was the Marines went into Basra first.
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So I think to this day both the army and the Marines still blame each other about who crossed the border first.
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But it doesn't matter, because the bottom line is we all crossed the border eventually and I remember we were told to go ahead and suit up in your chemical suits, get ready.
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We're going to take off and do this thing at this time as soon as it's dark.
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So I'm putting on my chemical suit.
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I noticed a couple of my friends in the unit are writing those like just in case letters, you know, in case I die, send this to my wife, send this to my family, send this to my mom.
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And as a sergeant and as the medic I'm kind of a symbol for immortality in the army to that unit.
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So the last thing they need to see is that Doc is also afraid to die or thinking about death, because Doc is the guy who's going to be the angel of life and bring you back to life if you get hurt.
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So I needed to send my letter home just so I had that peace of mind as well, and I knew I couldn't hand it to anybody because the word would get out it'll freak them out.
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So I just wrote mine to my wife, but I had to write it in a way that did not freak her out either, so I couldn't use language like if you're reading this letter that means this is my goodbye, this is what I've done with my life.
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This is what I've always envisioned our life to be.
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I couldn't write any of those things.
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I could just let her know how much I love her.
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And I had like a little message in that letter for our son and then our daughter who was on the way, and so I said my goodbyes without them really knowing that could be the goodbye letter.
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And other than that, and besides handing it off to a friend, just in case, I put it in an envelope.
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I put the address on there.
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I wrote free mail on the envelope because we didn't have to use stamps if you're deployed.
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And I mailed it.
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I gave it to the first sergeant who was doing one final mail run and that letter went.
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And so I get my suit on my chemical suit, I get my body armor on and we're still two or three hours away.
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And I'm looking around still at all the other guys and they're younger than me.
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I was like 27 at the time and the guys around me are, you know, 18, 19 years old, mostly, some of them in their early 20s, and you can just see the fear in their faces and I don't know why, but for some reason I just started going through a checklist.
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Do I have everything covered?
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My will was taken care of before I deployed.
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I just wrote my letter just in case.
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I've got the life insurance already taken care of.
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That's automatic.
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I don't get a choice.
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So if I die, my wife's getting a payout.
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What else is there?
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My gear is ready, my weapon is clean, I've got all the bullets they're going to give me, because on the medic there was a limit and there was a little bit of a shortage too.
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I was supposed to have 210 bullets, they gave me 150.
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So I wasn't expected to shoot.
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They basically say, doc, if you're shooting, that means we're all dead, just surrender.
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I was like what so?
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But anyway, I covered all those bases.
00:15:48.913 --> 00:15:51.243
But then there was just one that felt like I was missing.
00:15:51.243 --> 00:15:55.488
And I was like just in case, because, again, I was not a believer at this time.
00:15:55.488 --> 00:16:03.105
But I remember saying God, if you're real, when I die you're going to replace me with somebody who is better than me.
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So somebody's going to love my wife better than I did and cherish her and just be her life partner for the rest of her life and be there by her side.
00:16:11.527 --> 00:16:18.444
And that same person's going to raise my two children as if they were his own children, raising them up the way they should go.
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And that's all I got for you, god.
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And that was it.
00:16:21.301 --> 00:16:22.927
I didn't even say amen at the end or anything.
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I was just like God, if you're real, you will do this.
00:16:24.905 --> 00:16:28.003
And then you fast forward.
00:16:28.003 --> 00:16:28.906
We're in Baghdad.
00:16:29.360 --> 00:16:37.059
I remember chasing some looters around our compound on a hot summer day in June, late June, no-transcript.
00:16:37.059 --> 00:16:46.284
You know, part of this was I mean, we were seeing the same looters come into our compound, breaking walls, breaking our walls down and trying to loot the metal inside our compound, which we really didn't care about.
00:16:46.284 --> 00:16:51.567
Like you can have the metal, but we didn't get to that common ground yet, and you know.
00:16:51.567 --> 00:16:57.831
So part of my deterrence was to strip the men of their clothing, set their clothing on fire, set their money on fire.
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Just tell them it's not worth coming in here.
00:16:59.755 --> 00:17:05.793
And we even had these little cards written in an airbreak that said we are authorized to shoot you and kill you, Please don't come in.
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We didn't count on you know only half the country being able to read, so those cards were almost useless half the time.
00:17:11.891 --> 00:17:14.813
So we'd see the same guys come in.
00:17:15.324 --> 00:17:23.483
But at one point a new soldier had walked up to me and he just asked Sergeant Dugan what's up with their clothes?
00:17:23.483 --> 00:17:26.273
And I looked at him like why is he questioning me?
00:17:26.273 --> 00:17:31.587
I thought he was coming here to help me pull security, like it's just me and I'm outnumbered Seven to one.
00:17:31.587 --> 00:17:39.011
It's just a matter of time before those seven guys realize they can overpower me, take my weapon and do a lot of damage to my buddies inside this compound.
00:17:39.011 --> 00:17:41.857
So I was like hurt.
00:17:41.857 --> 00:17:52.152
This guy wasn't offering any assistance with security, but instead it's questioning me about how I'm treating these men, these Iraqi civilians and he asks again what's up with their clothes?
00:17:52.152 --> 00:17:53.567
What are you doing?
00:17:53.567 --> 00:18:03.997
And again I'm dumbfounded and I turned it this private and I say, look, you can either help me pull security or can help them rebuild this wall.
00:18:03.997 --> 00:18:04.748
Which one do you want to do?
00:18:04.748 --> 00:18:12.270
And he just went to pray, rest at that point, which is, you know, almost like the position of attention, but different.
00:18:12.270 --> 00:18:14.211
It's what we do with senior enlisted people.
00:18:14.904 --> 00:18:18.892
Since I was a sergeant, he was a private and he just said I'll just go back to my unit, sergeant.
00:18:18.892 --> 00:18:25.048
And he turned around and he walked away and I'm sitting there thinking, wait, I didn't dismiss this guy, who is this guy?
00:18:25.048 --> 00:18:37.789
But you know that's going on in my head At the same time, like there was this like release, like let him go, and you know the look on his face I thought was him surrendering to me, like I can't convince him, I'm disappointed in him.
00:18:37.789 --> 00:18:38.888
Away, I go.
00:18:38.888 --> 00:18:51.757
Now, what he did not see was after he rounded the corner and went back to his guys, I looked at these six guys on the ground with the pile of clothes on fire and I just let them go.
00:18:51.757 --> 00:18:53.591
I told him to stand up.
00:18:53.591 --> 00:18:55.432
My voice, my tone had changed.
00:18:55.432 --> 00:18:59.495
Of course I'm seeing it in English, but I'm using hand gestures and like stand up.
00:18:59.495 --> 00:19:01.890
I saw my hand on my weapon just in case.
00:19:01.890 --> 00:19:03.595
But I told him go ahead and stand up.
00:19:04.125 --> 00:19:08.894
And I point to the wall where I had one person rebuilding while the other six watched.
00:19:08.894 --> 00:19:18.173
And that was kind of what I did, like I'm going to punish one of you and make the other six watch, and it didn't matter what size group, and sometimes that would work, but with this group it wasn't.
00:19:18.173 --> 00:19:31.254
This was like the third time I'd seen these guys in the week, but I just kind of slumped and I just told them to stand up, pointed at the wall, told them to go and she grew and they left.
00:19:31.254 --> 00:19:33.808
They didn't fix the wall.
00:19:33.808 --> 00:19:53.348
I think one of them gave me like a choice hand gesture, which I was pretty familiar with by then, their version of the middle finger, and off they went and I went ahead and I started rebuilding the wall myself and then, you know, patch that wall up, and it was probably better if I did it myself anyway, because that wall, that section, never came down again.
00:19:54.705 --> 00:19:57.359
And then later on that same guy that the leader of the seven.
00:19:57.359 --> 00:20:00.310
He came back through the front gate with a new, fresh set of clothes.
00:20:00.310 --> 00:20:12.075
But now he brokered a deal with the leadership at the gate and now they're coming through these big giant trucks, they're getting all the aluminum rods out of our compound, we're getting satellite phones that were like we don't even own this stuff.
00:20:12.075 --> 00:20:22.316
But I mean, if you want to work this deal as they did but it was that private that just changed everything and how I conducted myself in Iraq the rest of the time I was there.
00:20:22.316 --> 00:20:25.892
And I remember going back to my room and just crying out.
00:20:25.892 --> 00:20:41.930
You know I thought to myself, but you know in hindsight it was no, that that was not my second prayer in about six months or less let's see, about five months, whatever made of July is, or June, late June, so March to June, somewhere in that window.
00:20:41.930 --> 00:20:48.917
And I'm just saying, when I die, my daughter cannot know that I became a monster.
00:20:48.917 --> 00:20:56.754
I don't want to die as a monster, I cannot be a monster, and so I need to not be a monster.
00:20:56.754 --> 00:21:00.730
I just kept saying that over and over and over again to myself I'm supposed to be a good guy.
00:21:00.730 --> 00:21:01.527
What happened to me?
00:21:03.985 --> 00:21:08.096
And then you fast forward a month later they pull us out of Iraq back into Kuwait.
00:21:08.096 --> 00:21:23.673
They let us diffuse for about a month because my particular brigade of 3,500 soldiers, we were honed into such a razor's edge that violence was like choice number one and all the other things were not.
00:21:23.673 --> 00:21:31.335
They were like secondary to violence first, and we had all the rules of engagement that solidified that.
00:21:31.335 --> 00:21:40.615
So it was just a month of do nothing but write home, call home, spend your money on beef jerky at the PX, read your mail, get caught up, play video games.
00:21:40.615 --> 00:21:46.009
We're not doing anything except resting for a month, and that's what we did.
00:21:46.009 --> 00:21:49.875
And during that time I was just thinking, wow, I'm really going to go home.
00:21:49.875 --> 00:21:50.990
I didn't expect to go home.
00:21:50.990 --> 00:21:59.594
I thought I was going to die out there as the medic, as the short timer, go back to Georgia so that our home station was in Georgia.
00:22:00.085 --> 00:22:01.692
I get reunited with my family.
00:22:01.692 --> 00:22:03.351
I meet my daughter for the first time.
00:22:03.351 --> 00:22:07.132
She's three months old and this is at like two in the morning.
00:22:07.132 --> 00:22:11.850
So the marching band is there, families are there, posters, all that stuff.
00:22:11.850 --> 00:22:19.392
My mom and my stepdad even came in from North Carolina to see us and my brother came out from California as well.
00:22:19.392 --> 00:22:27.413
So my wife and I are in our car and I think we have our son with us.
00:22:27.413 --> 00:22:34.628
If I remember correctly, we had one of the kids and then my mom, brother and stepdad took the other child and we're driving home.
00:22:35.705 --> 00:22:37.191
So the original question how did I get saved?
00:22:37.191 --> 00:22:41.275
This is the start at well, I guess operational knock for you at almost the start of it.
00:22:41.275 --> 00:22:49.892
But on the drive home my wife asks me if she could tell me something and makes me promise I won't get mad when she tells me.
00:22:49.892 --> 00:22:53.076
Now, immediately my head goes to one of two options.
00:22:53.076 --> 00:23:06.353
Because before we came back to the US, our chaplain for the battalion he called himself the people's chaplain, very funny guy I think his name was Captain Greer, and he shared with us when you go home, how many of you guys are married?
00:23:06.353 --> 00:23:06.967
We raised our hands.
00:23:06.967 --> 00:23:07.449
Who were married?
00:23:07.449 --> 00:23:13.190
How many of you are expecting to have all that tax free money saved up in an account waiting for you to spend?
00:23:13.664 --> 00:23:15.712
We always raised our hand and said now, put your hands down.
00:23:15.712 --> 00:23:19.815
So we put our hands down, said if you're married, you've got kids.
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